“Drunk, he says.” Muller picked up the bottle and then drained it. “What do you expect, in a job like this, with so much hanging around? What’s a man to do with himself all day if he doesn’t drink?”

I was almost ready to agree with him there. The job was boring. I was bored myself. I felt like a calf’s foot in aspic jelly.

Muller looked at the empty bottle and grinned. “Looks like I need another leg to stand on.” Then he looked at me. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you, Gunther?”

“With the intellectual equipment you have, Muller, I can see that it might seem that way. But there’s still a lot I don’t know. Take that joy girl. Did you bring her into the hotel, or did Rubusch?”

“He’s dead, you say?”

I nodded.

“I ain’t surprised. Big fat man, right?”

I nodded again.

“I saw the girl on the stairs and reckoned I could tap the tree for a little trickle-down, you know?” He shrugged. “Who can live on twenty-five marks a week? She said her name was Angela. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I didn’t ask to see her papers. Twenty marks was good enough ID as far as I was concerned.” He grinned. “She was pretty good, too. You don’t see many snappers as good-looking as that one. A real peach, so she was. So, like I said, I ain’t surprised the fat man is dead. I felt my arteries tighten like clams just looking at her.”

“Was that when you saw him? When you saw her?”

“No. I saw him earlier on that evening. In the bar. And then in the Raphael Room.”

“He was one of the Olympic Committee’s party?”

“Yes.”

“And where were you? You were supposed to be keeping an eye on them?”

“What can I tell you?” he said irritably. “They were businessmen, not students. I left them to get on with it. I went to that beer house on the corner of Behrenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse—Pschorr Haus—and got soaked. How was I to know there was going to be trouble?”

“Hope for the best but expect the worst. That’s the job, pal.” I took out my cigarette case and flicked it open in front of his ugly face. “So. What’s it to be? A letter of resignation or Louis Adlon’s Oxford toe cap buried up your arse?”

He took a cigarette. I even lit it for him, just to be sociable.

“All right, you win. I’ll resign. But we ain’t friends.”

“That’s okay. I’ll probably cry a little when I get home tonight, but I think I can live with it.”

I WAS HALFWAY ACROSS THE ENTRANCE HALL when Hedda Adlon winged me with a tilt of her jaw and the sound of my name in full. Hedda Adlon was the only person who ever pronounced my first name as if it really meant what it means: brave bear, although actually there’s some debate that the “hard” part actually means “foolhardy.”