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'Such a waste,' I said. 'Of good men.'

'I know. They were all that. Not Strasser, of course. He was the devil walking, but Jack Howard, Ritter, Sorsa and those Finns ...'

'But why?' I asked. 'Why did they persist in going through with it? Why didn't they simply tell Strasser or Bormann or whoever to go to hell?'

'Well, Sorsa and his Finns are possibly the easiest to understand. As he said, they were fighting for wages. They'd taken the gold, if you like to look at it that way, pledged their word and stuck to it - until the final carnage, anyway.'

'And Ritter?'

'He was like a man in deep water, swept along by the current, able to go only one way. He and Jack Howard were a lot alike - opposite sides of the same coin. At the end of things, I believe now that they'd both had enough. After what they'd been through, the things they'd done for their separate countries, the future held nothing. Didn't exist, if you like.'

'You mean they were looking for death, both of them?'

'I'm certain of it.'

'And Strasser, or should I say Bormann?'

'That's the terrible thing - not being sure. Remember Berger, the pilot who brought them out of Berlin? The guy who flew the Dakota out of Arnheim in the end? I found him in Italy fifteen or sixteen years ago. Dying of cancer. He was in the kind of state where a man just doesn't give a damn.'

'And?'

'Oh, he thought Strasser was Bormann all right. Last saw him in Bilbao in June of forty-five. In the ensuing years they gave him plenty of work to do, the Comrades. They looked after him.'

'I'm surprised he didn't get a bullet like the rest.'

'Well, he was something special. A pilot of genius. He could fly anything anywhere. I suppose that had its uses.'

'But all those facts,' I said, 'about what took place in the bunker. Where did they come from?'

'Erich Hoffer,' he said simply. 'He's still alive. Runs a hotel in Bad Harzberg, and when a Russian infantry unit checked out Eichmann's hideout they found one of the assistants still alive, a man called Walter Konig. He pulled through after hospital treatment and spent twenty years in the Ukraine. When he was finally returned to West Germany he wasn't too strong in the head so they didn't take much notice of his story at his interrogation. I heard about it from a contact in German Intelligence.'

'Did you go to see this Konig?'

'Tried to, but I was just too late. He committed suicide. Drowned himself in the Elbe. But I managed to get a look at the report. The rest, of course, is intelligent guesswork.'

'So, where does it all leave us?' I asked.

'I don't know. Was it Strasser at Arlberg and Bormann in the bunker or the other way round? That's what's plagued me all these years. Oh, I told it all to the Intelligence people immediately after the events.'

'And what did they say?'

'I think they thought I'd been locked up too long. As far as they were concerned, Bormann was in Berlin right to the bitter end. Strasser was something else again.'

'And what did happen to Bormann then, according to history?'

'He left the bunker at 1.30 a.m. on May 2nd. As far as we know, he didn't attempt to disguise himself. It seems he wore a leather greatcoat over the uniform of a lieutenant-general in the SS. He met his secretary, Frau Kruger, by sheer chance on his way out. He told her there wasn't much sense in any of it now, but that he'd try to get through.'

'And from that moment the myth began?'

'Exactly. Was he killed on the Weidendammer Bridge as Kempka, the Fuhrer's chauffeur, said...?'

'Or later, near Lehrter Station, where Axmann said he saw him lying next to Stumpfegger? Those two bodies, as I recall, were buried near the Invalidenstrasse by post-office workers.'

'That's right, and in 1972, during building work, they found a skeleton which the German authorities insist is Bormann's.'

'But wasn't that refuted by experts?'

'One of the greatest of them put it perfectly in perspective. He pointed out that Bormann couldn't be in two places at once. Dead in Berlin and alive and well in South America.'