The Lady from Zagreb Read Online Free

make more money.” He laughed. “Well, don’t you see? I’m trying to make you respectable again, my friend. Semi-respectable, anyway. Who knows, you might even make enough to afford a new suit.”
    “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
    “Of course. You don’t think I’d waste my time lunching you without a damn good reason. I’d have brought a nice girl here, or even a girl who isn’t so nice, not a stinger like you. You can say thank you now.”
    “Thank you.”
    “So, now that I’ve done you a favor, I want you to do something for me in return.”
    “In return? Perhaps you’ve forgotten our dirty weekend in Prague, Arthur. It was you who asked me to investigate Heydrich’s death, wasn’t it? Less than a month ago? You didn’t like my conclusions. When we met and had a conversation at the Esplanade Hotel, you told me we never had that conversation. I never did collect on that favor.”
    “That was a favor to us both, Bernie. You and me.” Nebe started to scratch the eczema on the backs of his hands; it was a sign he was beginning to get irritable. “This is different. This is something that even you can do without causing trouble.”
    “Which makes me wonder if I’m the right person to do it.”
    He put the cigar in his mouth and scratched some more, as if there might be a better solution to his problem under the skin. The boat turned slowly in a circle so that we were pointing in the direction we had just come; I was used to that feeling. My whole life had been going in a circle since 1939.
    “Is this something personal, Arthur? Or is this what we detectives laughingly call ‘work’?”
    “I’ll tell you if you’ll just shut your beer hole for a minute. I don’t know. How did someone with a mouth like yours manage to stay alive for so long?”
    “I’ve asked myself the same question.”
    “It’s work, all right? Something for which you’re uniquely qualified, as it happens.”
    “You know me, I’m uniquely qualified for all sorts of jobs it seems most other men wouldn’t touch with a pair of oily pliers.”
    “You’ll remember the International Criminal Police Commission,” he said.
    “You don’t mean to say that it still exists?”
    “I’m the acting president,” Nebe said bitterly. “And if you make a joke about making a gardener out of a billy goat, I will shoot you.”
    “I’m just a little surprised, that’s all.”
    “As you may know, it was based in Vienna until 1940, when Heydrich decided that it should be headquartered here, in Berlin.”
    Nebe pointed west, across the lake to a bridge across the Havel that was just a little way south of the Swedish Pavilion.
    “Over there, as a matter of fact. With him in charge, of course. It was just another neon-lit showcase for the Reinhard Heydrich Show, and I had hoped that now the bastard’s dead, we might use that as an excuse to wind up the IKPK, which has outlived any usefulness it ever might have had. But Himmler is of a different opinion and wants the conference to go ahead. Yes, that’s right—there’s a conference in a week or two’s time. The invitations to all the various European police chiefs had already gone out before Heydrich was murdered. So we’re stuck with it.”
    “But there’s a war on,” I objected. “Who the hell is going to come, Arthur?”
    “You’d be surprised. The French Sûreté, of course. They love a good feast and any chance to air their opinions. The Swedes. The Danes. The Spanish. The Italians. The Romanians. Even the Swiss are coming. And the Gestapo, of course. We mustn’t forget them. Frankly, it’s almost everyone except the British. Oh, there’s no shortage of delegates, I can assure you. The trouble is that I’ve been given the task of organizing a program of speakers. And I’m scratching around for some names.”
    “Oh, no. You don’t mean—”
    “I do mean. It’s all hands on deck for this one, I’m afraid. I thought you might talk about how you caught