He was angry with himself, which was an unfamiliar sensation. Angry that he had somehow attracted Martin Bormann’s displeasure. In all the years they had worked together, he had never once let his master down. How had it come to this? The fucking dog, of course, barking its warning in the night. It had been a pleasure to shoot the bastard animal, but the pleasure had been short-lived.

Kalt stopped outside a large, busy cafe on the corner of Friedrichstrasse. He hesitated, as though wondering what to do next, then pushed open the door, releasing a gust of warm, steamy air, and quickly found a small table by the window where his pursuer could easily see him. Kalt ordered a coffee, drank it slowly as he read a discarded copy of the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, then summoned the waitress and paid her.

He headed for the front door, then stopped, called the waitress back and loudly asked her if they had a toilet. She pointed to a passageway at the rear of the large room. He nodded, thanked her and set off in the direction indicated. The toilet was down a short corridor at the back of the restaurant close to the kitchens, which he entered instead.

A chef with a large belly and a walrus moustache put up a hand to stop him.

‘Whoa, where do you think you’re going, little man?’

‘Do you have a rear exit?’

‘Yes, but not for you. Off you go. Out of here.’

Kalt removed his pistol from his pocket and stuck it in the chef’s face.

‘Want to taste this?’

The chef backed away, pointing nervously towards a door along another narrow passage at the rear of the kitchen.

Kalt thanked him and took the exit into a maze of backyards, with horses and carts and vans being unloaded, supplies for all the thriving commercial enterprises in this part of the city. Two Hitler Youth boys were scrubbing graffiti from a long high wall which had been smeared with the slogan of the Red Front – Rotfront siegt! Victory to the Reds! Kalt put the gun back in his pocket and broke into a loping run, threading his way through the back streets, always in a vaguely southerly direction. To a pursuer, his path would probably have seemed haphazard, but he knew where he was going. Apart from the building works around the new Chancellery, Berlin hadn’t changed much in the years he had spent out of town on his beautiful farm.

Within five minutes, he arrived at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse just as the black-coated figure of Horst Spahn and another, younger, officer were tripping down the two exit steps of the baleful headquarters of the SD and Gestapo. Well, well, that was convenient. He had expected a long wait, perhaps until the end of the day.

*