“It is. But believe me, there’s nothing quite like flying down on an enemy city at two hundred miles an hour with an MG 17 in your hands. I wanted to show some of these bureaucratic soldiers what the SS is made of. That we’re not just a bunch of asphalt soldiers.”

I assumed he was referring to Himmler.

“Very commendable, sir. Is that how you injured your arm?”

“No. No, that was an accident,” he said. “I’ve also been training as a fighter pilot. I crashed during takeoff. My own stupid fault.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Heydrich’s self-satisfied smile stalled midflight, and for a moment I wondered if I’d gone too far.

“Meaning what?” he said. “That it wasn’t an accident?”

I shrugged. “Meaning only that I imagine you would want to find out everything that went wrong before flying again.” I was trying to back up a little from what, unwisely perhaps, I’d already put in his mind. “What kind of plane was it, sir?”

Heydrich hesitated, as if debating the idea in his own mind. “A Messerschmitt,” he said quietly. “The Bf 110. It’s not considered a very agile plane.”

“Well, there are you. I can’t think why I mentioned such a thing. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t a good pilot, General. I’m sure they wouldn’t let you get in the cockpit unless they were quite satisfied the airplane was airworthy. Me, I’ve never even been off the ground, but I should still want to be quite sure it wasn’t anything mechanical before I went up again.”

“Yes, perhaps you’re right.”

Schellenberg was nodding now. “It certainly couldn’t do any harm, Herr General. Gunther’s right.”

He had a curious, high-pitched voice with a slight accent I found hard to place; and there was something very neat and dapper about him that reminded me of a butler, or a menswear salesman.

An attractive-looking SS secretary—what we used to call a gray mouse—came in carrying a tray with three coffee cups and three glasses of water, just like we were in a café on the Ku-damm, and thankfully we were distracted from the subject of Heydrich’s accident—Schellenberg by the woman herself and Heydrich by the sound of the gramophone that was coming through the open door. For a moment he stamped his boots on the floor in time with the song and grinned happily.

“That’s a marvelous sound, isn’t it?”

“Wonderful, Herr General,” said Schellenberg, who was still eyeing Heydrich’s secretary, and the comment might just as easily have been about her as the music.

I could see his point. Her name was Bettina and she seemed too nice by half to be working for a devil like Heydrich.