“What are we going to do about Walli? I don’t want him to die.”

“I have an idea about that,” Dave said. “I’ll tell you after the show.”

“Go onstage, they’re waiting for you.”

“I know.” He kissed her mouth softly. She put her arms around him and hugged him. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too, and I was crazy to ever let you go.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“Never.”

Dave went out. He ran across the grass and up the steps to where the rest of the band were waiting in the wings. Then he was struck by a thought. “I forgot something,” he said.

Buzz said irritably: “What? The guitars are onstage.”

Dave did not answer. He ran back to his dressing room. Beep was still there, sitting down, wiping her eyes.

Dave said: “Shall we get married?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Good.”

He ran back to the scaffold.

“Everyone okay?” he said.

Everyone was okay.

Dave led the band onto the stage.

• • •

Claus Krohn asked Rebecca to have a drink after a meeting of the Hamburg parliament.

She was taken aback. It was four years since she had ended their love affair. For the past twelve months, she knew, Claus had been seeing an attractive woman who was the membership officer of a trade union. Claus meanwhile was an increasingly powerful figure in the Free Democratic Party, to which Rebecca also belonged. Claus and his girlfriend were a good match. In fact, Rebecca had heard they were planning to get married.

So she gave him a discouraging look.

“Not at the Yacht Bar,” Claus added hastily. “Somewhere less furtive.”

She laughed, reassured.

They went to a bar in the town center not far from the city hall. For old times’ sake, Rebecca asked for a glass of Sekt. “I’ll come right to the point,” Claus said as soon as they had their drinks. “We want you to stand for election to the national parliament.”

“Oh!” she said. “I would have been less surprised if you’d made a pass at me.”

He smiled. “Don’t be surprised. You’re intelligent and attractive, you speak well, and people like you. You’re respected by men of all parties here in Hamburg. You have almost a decade of experience in politics. You’d be an asset.”

“But it’s so sudden.”

“Elections always seem sudden.”

The chancellor, Willy Brandt, had engineered a snap election, to be held in eight weeks’ time. If Rebecca agreed, she could be a member of parliament before Christmas.

When she got over the surprise, Rebecca felt eager. Her passionate desire was for the reunification of Germany, so that she and thousands more Germans could be reunited with their families. She would never achieve that in local politics—but as a member of the national parliament she might have some influence.

Her party, the FDP, was in a coalition government with the Social Democrats led by Willy Brandt. Rebecca agreed with Brandt’s “Ostpolitik,” trying to have contact with the East despite the Wall. She believed this was the quickest way to undermine the East German regime.