‘Nein!’ Wesley Lewis Jr’s bladder was tight as a drum, but he wouldn’t get up yet. He had capacity, by God he did, but enough damn coffee.

At Captain van der Velde’s the world stopped spinning. He had capacity! He held on. You couldn’t fall off if you held on. He’d never fallen off.

Everything floated: the food on the plates, the chairs in the room and the candlelight like illuminated smoke. The black beauties in embroidered Indian skirts, wrists tinkling with bracelets of polished stone and shell, blue and red, chains of gold and silver looped over their breasts and honey-yellow flowers in their hair, pollen-dusted. Wesley Lewis Jr would think of his preacher father and laugh. Preaching for pennies in Charleston.

‘Berlin’s a dog!’ he cried out.

A cockroach scampered across the table: gone by the time he smacked his hand down. Wasn’t that his first deal? That Catalan banker, the closet coleopterist, and the fat wife who’d wasted no time cashing in when he died. A priceless collection of six thousand beetles, painstakingly acquired over a lifetime, collected and meticulously organised in beautiful rosewood drawers, every specimen labelled and dated in fine penmanship, every armoured back and helmeted, devil-pronged head shining like polished black onyx. The wife had believed the crusted little bastards carried the plague, and she’d refused to fuck her husband, had denied him the marital bed every night but the first when they were married, that one time enough for twin sons. She’d snatched the purse out of Wesley Lewis Jr’s hands, the first price he’d offered.

‘Berlin’s a dog!’

People turned, looked at him, turned away again. He put his head down to rest on his arm; his other hand still held the mug. He slept, dreamless, until Mr Hendrik came to fetch him.

AN EASY DECISION

It was almost midnight when Krüger rushed downstairs from his room. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes and dreamed that he’d left his notebook on the table, but then woke and realised it was true.

Otto’s coffee house was busy. He asked one of the serving girls but she had no idea, so Krüger went over to the table in the corner where he’d sat earlier.

A man there, his face shadowed by the lamps hanging low from the ceiling beams. He was spooning soup over a piece of bread that stood in the middle of his bowl. Another man too, asleep, stretched out along the bench, snoring. On the table was an empty bottle of schnapps and another bowl of soup.

The first man looked up and it was only now that Krüger noticed he was a Negro.

‘Eat while it is hot,’ the man said and resumed spooning the soup over his bread. He nodded at his snoring companion. ‘He will never get to it.’