Behlert followed me through the doors and, as my eyes caught those of Max Reles, I heard him say something about Laurel and Hardy before his tough face opened into a smile and his thick body took on an apologetic, placating, almost diplomatic aspect that would hardly have disgraced Prince Metternich himself.

“It was all a big misunderstanding,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree, gentlemen?”

But for the fact that his hair was messed up and there was some blood on his mouth, I might have believed him.

Reles looked around the dinner table for support. Somewhere under a cumulonimbus cloud of cigar smoke, several voices murmured wearily like a papal conclave that had neglected to pay the Sistine Chapel’s chimney sweep.

“You see?” Reles lifted his big hands in the air, as if I’d pointed a gun at him, and for some reason I got the feeling that if I had, he’d hardly have reacted differently. He’d have kept his nerve under the drill of a drunken dentist. “Storm in a teacup.” It didn’t sound right in German and, snapping his thick, stubby fingers, he added, “I mean, a storm in a water glass. Right?”

Behlert nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s right, Herr Reles,” he said. “And may I say, your German is excellent.”

Reles looked uncharacteristically sheepish. “Well, it’s a hell of a language to speak well,” he said. “Considering it must have been invented to let trains know when it’s time to leave a station.”

Behlert smiled unctuously.

“All the same,” I said, picking one of several broken wineglasses off the tablecloth, “it does look like there was a storm. A Bohemian one, I think. This stuff is fifty pfennigs a time.”

“Naturally I’ll pay for any breakages.” Reles pointed at me and grinned at his complacent-looking guests. “Can you believe this guy? He wants me to pay for the breakages.”

There’s nothing that looks as pleased with itself as a German businessman with a cigar.

“Oh, there’s no question of that, Herr Reles,” Behlert said, and looked at me critically as if I had mud on my shoes, or something worse. “Gunther. If Herr Reles says it was an accident, then there’s no need to take this any further.”

“He didn’t say it was an accident. He said it was a misunderstanding. Which is how a mistake often falls just short of being a crime.”

“Is that out of this week’s Berlin Police Gazette?” Reles found a cigar and lit up.

“Maybe it ought to be. Then again, if it was, I might still be a Berlin policeman.”

“But you’re not. You’re working here in this hotel, in which I am a guest. And, I might add, a big-spending guest. Herr Behlert, tell the sommelier to bring us six bottles of your finest champagne.”

Around the table there was a loud murmur of approval. But none of them wanted to meet my eye. Just a lot of well-fed and -watered faces intent on getting back to the trough. A Rembrandt group portrait with everyone looking the other way: The Syndics of the Clothmakers Guild. It was then that I saw him, seated at the far end of the room, like Mephisto waiting patiently for a quiet word with Faust. Like the others, he was wearing a tuxedo and, but for his satirically grotesque saddlebag of a face, and the fact that he was cleaning his fingernails with a switch-blade, he looked almost respectable. Like the wolf dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.