‘I’ve had a look at it, and so has Kulenkampff.’ Peter Raabe was tapping the base of his pen against the table, an unconscious movement that signalled nerves. ‘It needs work if it’s going to be playable, because it is a very peculiar piece indeed.’

The assembled men sat along two sides of a vast table at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, under a high ceiling and heavy chandelier. From beneath the trees on Berlin’s Wilhemplatz, the building, a palace once upon a time, had glared out at the Schott’s team, complete with Grecian façade: a relic of the true age of Enlightenment, the concept inverted for the Reich’s purposes.

Ulli had lived in Berlin 15 years ago; each stone had held, for him, an imprint of something he’d heard, someone he’d seen, plans he’d made, somebody he’d kissed. Yet today Berlin felt tense, squeezed by a tourniquet of conformity, crushed beneath monolithic modern architecture. Even this ridiculous table seemed a manifestation of the city’s new and forbidding ambience. Forbidding? Not his Berlin. Not as he remembered it.

He’d contacted Tovey to inform him of the forthcoming meeting, but begged him to say nothing yet to Jelly. Not until he and the Streckers had the outcome they wanted, signed and sealed on Third Reich notepaper.

He was present officially as assistant to Ludwig and Willy, but kept quiet about his reason for wanting to go. If he were there himself, he could raise the issue of Jelly d’Arányi and her moral right to play the piece first, in case the Streckers could not or would not. During the long train journey to Berlin, the brothers had talked little and smoked a great deal. Ulli didn’t like to smoke, but today, beset with nerves worse than any he had experienced since he last gave a concert, he accepted a cigarette from Ludwig.

‘It’s all right, Ulli,’ said his boss. ‘It will soon be over. Nothing to worry about.’

The most alarming moment so far had been just before they were shown up to the meeting room. At that point Ulli would have given several teeth for the good sense never to have involved himself in this crazy project.

It was a comfort, in some ways, to discover that Goebbels was considerably shorter than he was. He, too, had to visit the toilet and brush his teeth and probably woke up his wife snoring. He had a club foot, and one leg an inch or two longer than the other. His polished shoe squealed against the wooden floor as he made his way to the table, cutting a figure that was no prototype of the Aryan master race. Pure fiction, Ulli remembered. There was no such thing. How could anybody look at this man and believe there was?