Johannes walked through a doorway. The adjoining room was darker, cooler. Cabinet cases, apothecary shelves, books to the ceiling. The smell of leather, tobacco, dust, something acidic.

In pale honey-coloured box frames on the walls, leaves, pressed flowers, butterflies and beetles, and gruesome fine-haired spiders with black marble eyes, all set in scrupulous rows, pinned and named. In specimen drawers with thin brass handles and Latin designations on yellow card, fossils and rocks and molten drops of amber, perfect mosquitoes and muscle-legged grasshoppers entombed inside, waiting. In glass cabinet displays, gleaming river stones and shards of crystal, everything arranged in perfect themes of shading, lightest to darkest, pastel pinks and watery blues, dusty reds and creamy greens; and birds’ eggs too, smallest to largest, grey and black-speckled, blue, pink and white.

Johannes Meyer went from one display to the other. Opened drawers and closed them. With his fingertips traced the corrugated coils of baby snakes in jars of yellow liquid. For the second time today, he experienced the feeling of having been somewhere before.

On a mahogany side table he found a large seashell. It was smooth and polished, white orange and bright, even there in the dimness of the room, as though sunlight and the shimmering of tropical waters were stored in its curled, half-closed porcelain flower. He picked it up, and just as he pressed the rounded lips of the shell to his ear, exactly then, he heard the front door snap its latch and creak open.

Beatrice coming back? He listened.

On Unter den Linden, the Emperor waved to the crowd and there was a cheer that spread out into the surrounding streets and entered the front door of Claus von Rolt’s house, even reached into the room where Johannes Meyer stood. He held his breath while his old life overlapped with the new, the seams stitched by the hoof-taps of Bonaparte’s horse.

‘Life is an uncertain navigation of transcendent uncertainty,’ Krüger had said. ‘It begs only a scrutiny of the heart.’

Not Beatrice, but three men walked into Claus von Rolt’s house.

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE

Wesley Lewis Jr was small and slightly built, as though the designation at the end of his name had manifested itself physically.

His father was taller and broader and closer to God, too, a preacher in South Carolina with flagellatory tendencies towards his son (switches, belts, whips, riding crops). He daily cleansed the boy of sin on behalf of the mother, who’d long abandoned them to whore out her comforts for corn liquor in Georgia, in Alabama, in Louisiana last they heard. Still, Wesley Lewis Jr hated neither mother nor father as much as he hated the Surinamese Negro, his companion, Mr Hendrik.