As usual, the main entrance hall smelled of cigarettes, cheap coffee, unwashed bodies, and sausage. I was arriving just as the local wurst seller had turned up to sell boiled sausage to those cops who were lunching at their desks. The Max—they were always known as Max—wore a white coat, a top hat, and, as was traditional, a little mustache he’d drawn onto his face with an eyebrow pencil. His mustaches were longer than I remembered and probably would continue to be that way while Hitler continued with a postage stamp on his own upper lip. But I often wondered if anyone had ever dared ask Hitler if he could smell gas, because that was what he looked like: a gas sniffer. Sometimes you saw these men fitting long pipes into holes in the road and then sniffing the open ends for escaping gas. It always gave them the same telltale smudge on the upper lip.

“Haven’t seen you in a while, Herr Commissar,” said the Max. The large square metal boiler hanging from a strap around his neck looked like a steam-powered accordion.

“I’ve been away for a while. It must have been something I ate.”

“Very amusing, sir, I’m sure.”

“You tell him, Bernie,” said a voice. “We’ve got more than enough sausage at the Alex, but not nearly enough laughs.”

I looked around and saw Otto Trettin coming through the entrance hall.

“What the hell are you doing back here?” he asked. “Don’t say you’re another March violet.”

“I came to report a crime at the Adlon.”

“The biggest crime at the Adlon is what they charge for a plate of sausage, eh, Max?”

“Too right, Herr Trettin.”

“But after that,” I said, “I was planning to buy you a beer.”

“Beer first,” said Otto. “Then report the crime.”

Otto and I went across the road to the Zum, in the arches of the local S-Bahn station. Cops liked it there because with a train passing overhead every few minutes it was hard to be overheard. And I imagined this was especially important in Otto Trettin’s case, since it was generally known that he fiddled his expenses and, probably, was not averse to having his bread spread with some very dodgy butter. He was still a good cop, however, one of the Alex’s best from the days before the police purge, and although he wasn’t a Party member, the Nazis seemed to like him. Otto had always been a bit heavy-handed: he had famously handed out a beating to the Sass brothers, which, at that time, was a serious breach of police ethics, although they had certainly deserved it, and, doubtless, this was one of the reasons that had helped him to find favor with the new government. The Nazis liked a bit of rough justice. To that extent it was perhaps surprising I wasn’t working there myself.

“I’ll have a Landwehr Top,” said Trettin.

“Make that two,” I told the barman.

Named after Berlin’s famous canal in which the water’s surface was often polluted with a layer of oil or gasoline, a Landwehr Top was a beer with a brandy in it. We hurried them down and ordered two more.