He gave up waiting for me to help him along, and this was a danger I didn't see until it was much too late. By refusing to answer him even by a grunt I was letting him keep up a monologue in that soft and modulated tone that never gave pause. And it was hypnotic.

"Of the fifteen war-criminals you have indirectly arrested, five as you know were of major status, and we believe that the recent suicides of General Vogler, ' General Muntz and Baron von Taube were provoked by pressure from their own group rather than by the dictates of conscience."

He talked about the three prosecution witnesses found shot dead and facially mutilated. "They were not removed in order to decrease the number of witnesses at the Hanover Trials because there are as you know nearly one thousand of them, and the mass of evidence is such that one could remove ninety per cent of them and still remain certain of conviction. Those three were murdered in reprisal and we believe that there will, follow twelve more unless the Federal police can protect them. In all, fifteen. One for every war-criminal convicted. Further, the intention is to dissuade new witnesses from coming forward at the successor trials in Bonn and Nurnberg. They intend by terror tactics to ensure that the Hanover Trial shall be the last of its kind ever held."

I had his accent now, from the ` ur ' in ` Nurnberg '. He was a Rhinelander.

He talked about the seventy thousand Nazi refugees and self-exiles living in the German colony in San Caterina, Argentine, among them the Hitler deputy Bormann. "As you know, their Tacuara organisation carried out reprisals against the Jewish population following the Eichmann abduction."

I wished he would stop saying 'As you know,' or better, tell me something I didn't.