I waited for twenty minutes while he rocked heavily in his chair reading my files. The evidence against these three men had been gathered during the last week and I'd meant to hand it over to my successor to give him a good start. Now I would use it myself.

"This is very detailed, Herr Quiller."

"Yes."

"Your sources are obviously authentic. You must have worked very hard." He gazed at me from beneath pink-and-blond eyebrows. He wanted to know how I'd dug up all this without his ever having heard of me.

"You set a good example, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."

His face remained bland. He let it go. Neither of us had time to play poker. "These are cases for immediate arrest."

"Yes."

"You'll perhaps give me the addresses where these men can be found."

"If you'll signal the Z polizei I'll go with them."

"That isn't necessary."

"No."

"But you wish to be in at the kill."

"Put it that way."

"I will arrange it." He lifted a phone.

It's always rather cosy when you are forced to do something you want to do but shouldn't. I shouldn't have allowed myself to be present at the coming arrests, because it was an indulgence: it would be a sadistic pleasure to watch the faces of these three men in their moment of Nemesis, because I had last seen one of them – Rauschnig – inspecting a parade of young Jewish girls sent to him for ‘special treatment’ at Dachau. They had been lined up naked against the wall of a corridor and he had selected ten of them for medical experimentation. I didn't know what had happened to them but I knew that their death wouldn't have been easy.

I had never met the other two – Foegl and Schrader – but from the evidence in the file they had excelled Dr. Rauschnig in acts of inhumanity. Therefore I would take pleasure in seeing their faces on this, the last day of their freedom.

This corrosive emotion would be out of place in the pursuit of an intellectual exercise; it wouldn't do me or anyone any good; but it would be incidental to my main purpose in going along with the Z-polizei. By the time the third arrest had been made, at my instigation and in my presence, Phoenix would be on my track. That was the end of the means.

"A car will collect you in fifteen minutes, Herr Quiller." He gave me a signature for the receipt of the files. "Perhaps I shall have the pleasure of seeing you here again?"

"All going well, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt, I guarantee it.

The scbonheitssalon was in the Marienfelder-platz and the three of us went through the doors together. The police-captain and his sergeant were both armed but in civilian clothes. A screen of wrought filigree-work intertwined with climbing flowers divided the little individual cubicles from the waiting-room. We were invited to sit and remained standing. A fountain played in a pink marble basin the shape of a shell and there were tiny tropical fish gliding in it. Pink gossamer curtains draped the walls and the lighting was shed from the centres of gilt sunbursts in the ceiling. The air was perfumed. A slender Venus stood in a softly-illuminated niche, girdled with the gold riband of the Herr-direktor's diploma from the 1964 Exposition de Paris des Arts Esthitiques.

The receptionist came back: a heavy-bodied young madchen with jungle eyes. The Herr-direktor must oblige us to await him a further half an hour, since he was in the middle of a delicate treatment and (the eyes dilated) the client was a baroness. The hem of her pink Grecian tunic swung as she turned away.

The police-captain knew better than to trump this by presenting his credentials. The place would have more than one exit. I followed him with the sergeant through the low gilded gate.

Dr. Rauschnig was in the first cubicle. His face was plumper than when I'd last seen it but I recognised him and nodded to the captain.

"Your name is Julius Rauschnig?"

Shocked at the intrusion, he declared his name to be Dr. Liebenfels. He had never heard of Rauschnig. The captain produced a photograph taken of Rauschnig in 1945 in the U.S. Army liberation sector, Dutch frontier. The photograph had been nameless-on-file in the Z Commission archives and I had picked it out for them this morning before corning here.

The woman on the treatment-couch bent her neck and peered at us with two affronted eyes in a half-applied mud-pack. Then I turned my back because I didn't want to look any more at the face of Rauschnig. Corrosive emotions no go.

His voice was bad enough to listen to. The harder it pretended indignation the more it shook.

"I assure you that you are mistaken!" So on. "It is very harmful to the delicate facial tissues of the baroness if the treatment is interrupted!" So forth. But I caught sight of one of his hands as it gesticulated, and the corrosion set in. Because a face is not active: it is only the shape of a name. It is the hand that acts. And these soft white hands that had been tenderly ministering to this woman's vanity, touching her withered face as if it were a flower in pretence that he could restore the bloom of youth, had once been laid upon the faces and the bodies of girls in Dachau as urgently as a beast claws meat.

His soft hands flew in the perfumed air. His voice bubbled in denial, more shrilly now. The woman, alarmed, called out, and the madchen in the Grecian tunic came trotting, to stand confused.

"You will please accompany me," the captain told him.

"I must telephone my lawyer!"

"We will telephone him from the gendarmerie."

"But I have no shoes for the snow! My chauffeur is not here with the car!"

"We have a car waiting.

"You cannot just take me like this from my work! This lady -"

"Herr Rauschnig, if you'll come with me peaceably there will be no inconvenience for anyone."

He began blubbering now and I concentrated on the young receptionist's face to take my mind from the sound; but her face was horrified and the light of the lamp was reflected in her eyes; and I'd noticed the lamp before I had turned my back. It had a small pink shade and I remembered the white shade of the lamp that had been in Haptsturmfiihrer Rauschnig's private quarters at the camp. The white shade, and a pair of gloves, and a book-cover had been made by the deft fingers of his mistress who lived with him; by grace of a technique he had perfected, they were made of human skin.

"You cannot take me like this!" And the woman screamed as he lurched past the girl. The sergeant tripped him automatically and he grabbed at the pink curtain, his shoulder smashing the thin partition of the cubicle as he fell and lay awkwardly, swathed in gossamer. The jar of mud-pack mousse toppled from the treatment-table and spattered his legs. He lay babbling. I stepped over him and went out through the waiting-room and into the street and the sudden burst of a flashlight.

"Wait," I told them. "They're bringing him out." I'd phoned Federal Associated Press from the offices of the Z-polizei, tipping them off.

When Rauschnig was led out I moved to stand beside him as the flashes came again. By this evening my picture would be in several papers where Phoenix could see it.