I wasn’t sure if the Ukrainian was dead, but I hardly cared. His NKVD assassin’s badge did not inspire my sympathy. In his pockets I found some money—quite a lot of money—and, more interesting, a piece of paper bearing an address in Cyrillic, and a note in German; it was the same address as on the envelope Mielke had given me for his friend, and I guessed that, my assassin once he had killed me, was detailed to deliver the dollars and the note in the envelope himself. That envelope had been a nice touch, partly allaying any fears of a double cross on Mielke’s part. After all, who would give an envelope full of money to a man he intended to have killed? There was also an identity document that gave the Ukrainian’s name as Vasili Karpovich Lebyediev; he was stationed at MVD headquarters in Berlin, at Karlshorst, which I remembered better as a villa colony with a race-course. He worked not for the MVD but for the Ministry of Military Forces—the MBC—whatever that was. The Nagant revolver in his apparently lifeless hand was dated 1937 and had been well looked after. I wondered how many innocent victims of Stalin it had been used to kill. For that reason, I took a certain pleasure in pushing his naked body out of the carriage window. It felt like a kind of justice.

I used the Ivan’s tunic and my old uniform to mop the floor and wipe the walls of any remaining blood and brain tissue, then threw them out of the window. I put the pieces of glass into the Russian’s cap alongside his decorations and threw that out of the window, too. And when everything apart from me looked almost respectable, I dressed carefully in the lieutenant’s blue breeches—the major’s were too big around the waist—and his spare tunic, and prepared to face down any Ivans who might come aboard at Dresden. I was ready for that.

What I wasn’t ready for was Dresden. The train went straight past the ruins of the city’s eighteenth-century cathedral. I could hardly believe my own eyes. The bell-shaped dome was completely gone. And the rest of the city was no better. Dresden had never seemed like an important town or one with any strategic significance, and I began to worry about what Berlin might look like. Did I even have a hometown that was worth returning to?

The Red Army sergeant who came aboard the carriage at Dresden and asked to see my papers glanced at the broken window with mild surprise.

“What happened in here?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but it must have been some party.”