“You’re a bastard, Gunther,” said Otto. “Now that you’ve left, I’ve got no one to talk to. No one I can trust, that is.”

“What about your beloved coauthor, Erich?”

Trettin and Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg had published a book together the previous year. Criminal Cases was little more than a series of stories cobbled together from a trawl through KRIPO’s oldest files. But no one doubted that the two had made money from it. Fiddling his expenses, ramping up the overtime, taking the odd back-hander, and now with a book already translated into English, Otto Trettin always seemed to know how to make money.

“Erich? We don’t see much of each other now that he’s head of Berlin KRIPO. Head’s up his arse with his own self-importance these days. You left me sitting in the ink, do you know that?”

“I can’t feel sorry for you. Not after I read your lousy book. You wrote up one of my cases and you didn’t even give me the credit. You gave the bracelets on that one to von Bachman. I could have understood it if he was a Nazi. But he’s not.”

“He paid me to write him up. A hundred marks, to make him look good.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not. Not that it matters now. He’s dead.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Sure you did. You’ve just forgotten, that’s all. Berlin’s like that these days. All sorts of people are dead and we forget about it. Fatty Arbuckle. Stefan George. Hindenburg. The Alex is no different. Take that cop who got murdered the other day. We’ve already forgotten his name.”

“August Krichbaum.”

“Everyone except you.” He shook his head. “See what I mean? You’re a good copper. You shouldn’t ever have left.” He raised his glass. “To the dead. Where would we be without them?”

“Steady on,” I said as he drained his glass a second time.

“I’ve had a hell of a morning. I’ve been to Plötzensee Prison with a load of Berlin’s top polenta, and the Leader. Now ask me why.”

“Why?”

“Because his nibs wanted to see the falling ax in action.”

The falling ax was what we Germans quaintly called the guillotine.

Otto waved the barman back a third time.

“You’ve seen an execution, with Hitler?”

“That’s right.”

“There wasn’t anything about an execution in the newspaper. Who was it?”

“Some poor communist. Just a kid, really. Anyway, Hitler watched it happen and pronounced himself very impressed. So much so that he’s ordered twenty new falling-ax machines from the manufacturer in Tegel. One for every big city in Germany. He was smiling when he left. Which is more than I can say for that poor commie. I’ve never seen it before. Goering’s idea that we should, apparently. Something about us all recognizing the gravity of the historic mission we’ve set ourselves—or some such nonsense. Well, there’s a lot of gravity involved with a falling ax, let me tell you. Have you ever seen one at work?”