It was only the smaller fish I'd netted so far. They'd sent KLJ after the big ones and now he was dead. The big ones were people like the Hitler deputy Bormann, and Mueller, and General von Rittmeister. They'd got out of Berlin under fire from the Russian batteries in ' 45, a whole gang of them running for Obersalzberg and beyond, while their Fuhrer's short round-shouldered carcass was smothered in petrol-soaked rag and set alight. Some of them had taken off in Himmler's four-motor plane from the Flughafen a mile from here through a dawn sky dark with smoke. I could see the runway lights from this window now.

I went across to it. Outside the night was still and the city frozen in sleep. The present and the past lay buried under the snow. What made us rake like this among the ashes of that distant hell after twenty years? They said it was to help a nation to its feet. The new young Germany had heard too many tales of the war that had raged above its unborn head, and wanted to know the truth, and face it and then forget. That was the reason.

It wasn't mine.

'Have we a minute,' they said, 'to chant a prayer?' He shook his head.

My breath made a bloom on the window's glass. The room was too hot and I turned the radiators off, working for another hour. With half the memorandum shuffled, linked and recorded in my mind I left the hotel and walked on the snow to clear my lungs for sleep. The street was empty.

Even in the instant of deciding I'd take over from KLJ the main plan had presented itself to me, just as a player sometimes gets an overall vision of the board before he makes his gambit. Therefore I'd told Pol: 'I'm going in alone.' Because it had to be a fast operation or nothing, a blitzkrieg on their own terms. I could stick this city another month, no more. In a month I'd have to find him or get out.

There were two ways to do it: the slow and the quick. The slow way was to flush those men one by one – Helldorf, Sickert, Kalt and the whole forty-odd of them – in the hope that they'd lead me to Zossen. Pol had played too fair with me, calling Zossen no more than 'a part of the search area'. The first quick reading of the memorandum told me that Zossen was the whole of the area. Knock him down and the rest would skittle over. To get to him by first calling on those forty-odd contacts would bring a great deal into the light, and that was what the Bureau wanted. It was the slow way. But the quick way would get the same result. Go straight to Zossen and strike.

The quick way was to reverse the order of things. To find one man among three and a half million I must let him find me. Let him know I was here and here to get him. Draw his fire, so that he'd show himself. Then try to finish him off before he finished me. Hope for an overkill.

So I'd told Pol I must work alone. The only way was the quick way and I didn't want it cluttered up with a motley crew of cover men who'd trip me and get killed in the process.

The snow lay shimmering under the lamps. There'd been another light fall while I'd been working on the memorandum and the pavement was covered again. It had long gone midnight and the street was empty. After six months of cover protection I was alone; not in any doorway nor in any shadow did a man stand. Control had got my signal and called them off.

As I walked back to the hotel the only tracks in the snow were my own.

"Your occupation, Herr Stroebling?"

"Florist."

He blew his nose, taking his time about it so that we could admire the white silk handkerchief. A flower was in the lapel the dark jacket. His legs were casually crossed in the pinstripe trousers and the shoes shone. "You are a florist?"

"I direct a chain of shops."

'Is that why you wear a flower in your buttonhole?"

"I always wear a flower."

Someone tittered.

The light was bleak in the tall cold windows. The heating was full on but many still wore their overcoats, as if in need comfort.

Another objection: personal comment on appearance of accused. Overruled: not customary to enter this court dressed as if for a festive occasion, therefore reason sought.

I watched the spectators particularly. I knew who the accused were. I didn't know who the spectators were. Some were the wives of the accused and had come here with them, for most of the accused were on bail and free to go home at the end of the session. There were others in the gallery who came and went alone, hunched into their coats and with their eyes for no one. A few were women.

One girl had come in late this morning and I had noticed her. She was good-looking but I hadn't noticed her because of that.

"Usher!"

A man was trying to slip out of the doors and on the presiding judge's cry an usher stopped him.

"Where are you going, counsel?"

"I am expecting a message, Herr Richter."

"You must not leave the court. I've told you before."

"It's a message to do with my clients, Herr -"

"Resume your place."

Both spoke wearily, repeating the formula. It was one of the recognised nuisance-tactics designed to wear down the patience of the court: a defence counsel would try to slip out unnoticed, so that later an appeal could be made under the Federal law on the grounds that some of the accused were technically unrepresented during a part of the hearing, their counsel being absent.

Procedural objections were also frequent. In the streets outside, the tabloids militated against this trial and all war-crime trials, while inside the court there were attempts at every turn to make a farce of the proceedings. They were totally unsuccessful. The presiding judge had the patience of a cat, and the legal and lay panel was disciplined by it.

I watched the spectators, only half-listening to the examination.

"Will you please tell us what your responsibility was at the camp, Herr Stroebling?"

He considered the question. Neat, silver-haired, professional-looking, his eyes calm behind heavy black-framed glasses, you'd take him for a top-ranking medical man and trust him with your life.

"To maintain calm, order and of course cleanliness."

"And your special duties?"

"I had no special duties."

"Evidence has been given that your special duty was select men, women and children for the gas-chambers they were unloaded from the cattle-trucks." It was the counsel for the prosecution speaking now: a young man with a face hollowed by months of sifting the reports whose every sheet recorded the unimaginable. The two counsels for the prosecution had been chosen for their youth, so that the new Germany could demand the account of the old. "It is claimed by an established eye-witness that while ordering the selection of disabled deportees for the gas-chambers you took a crutch from a cripple and beat him to death with it because he wouldn't hurry to the chambers."

"I know nothing of that."

"You cannot claim to know nothing. You can say that you did this thing, or that you didn't. You cannot just forget."

Was it a camellia or a gardenia in the buttonhole? I couldn't see from where I sat.

"It was twenty years ago."

"It was twenty years ago for the witness too, but he hasn't forgotten."

I watched the spectators. The voices droned.

"You say these people went willingly into the gas-chambers on that occasion?"

"Yes. We had told them they were de-lousing rooms."

"So they left all their clothes in the changing-room, hanging on pegs, and followed one another into the gas-chamber, peacefully?"

"Yes. There was no persuasion."

"But the evidence has it that some of them knew they were going to die. Several women left their babies hidden under the clothes in the changing-room, hoping to save them. The evidence has it that you personally, Herr Stroebling, led a hunt for such infants, and that you spitted them on bayonets when they were found."