“I’m sorting things out.”

“You don’t look like someone who’s just back from the sun.”

“Like I said. At my age. I was never one for lying around in the sun.”

“Me, I love it. Whenever I can. After all, the winters we get. What sort of things are you sorting out?”

“The Berlin kind.”

“Hmm. That sounds suspicious. This used to be a city of whores. And you don’t look like a whore. Now it’s a city of spies. So—” She shrugged and sipped her coffee.

“I expect that’s why they don’t like joy ladies and sex clubs. Because they want their spies honest. And as for nude sunbathing, well, it’s difficult being something you’re not when you’ve got your clothes off.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. As a matter of fact, we get lots of spies in the club. American spies.”

“How can you tell?”

“They’re the ones not wearing uniforms.”

She was joking, of course. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I glanced over at a radiogram the size of a drinks cabinet from which a low murmur was emanating. “What are we almost listening to?”

“RIAS,” she said.

“I don’t know that station. I don’t know any of the Berlin stations.”

“It stands for ‘Radio in the American Sector.’” She said it in English. Good English, too. “I always listen to RIAS on a Sunday morning. To help my English. No, to improve my English.”

I pulled a face. On the coffee table was a copy of Die Neue Zeitung. “American radio. American newspapers. Sometimes I think we lost a lot more than just a war.”

“They’re not so bad. Who’s paying your rent?”

“The VdH.”

“Of course. You were a prisoner yourself, weren’t you?”

I nodded.

“A couple of years ago, I went to one of those exhibitions put on by the VdH,” she said. “On the POW experience. They had reconstructed a Soviet POW camp, complete with a wooden watchtower and a four-meter-high barbed-wire fence.”

“Was there a gift shop?”

“No. Just a newspaper.”

“Der Heimkehrer.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a rag. Among other things, the VdH leadership believes that a free people cannot renounce in principle the protection of a new German army.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

I shook my head. “It’s not that I don’t think military service is a good idea. In principle.” I lit a cigarette. “It’s just that I don’t trust our Western allies not to use us as cannon fodder in a new war that some lunatic Confederate American general thinks he can safely fight on German soil. Which is to say, a long way from America. But which in reality no one can win. Not us. Not them.”

“Better Red than dead, huh?”