He grinned at my discomfiture. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Now why do you say that? The nice man from the Gestapo knocks on my door at midnight, and asks me if I’d like to take a spin in his big shiny-black motor-car. Naturally I just go weak at the knees because I know that you’ve booked us the best table at Horcher’s.’

‘Someone important wants to see you,’ he yawned. ‘Someone very important.’

‘They’ve named me for the Olympic shit-throwing team, right?’ Rienacker’s face changed colour and his nostrils flared and contracted quickly, like two emptying hot-water bottles. He was starting to get impatient.

‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘I suppose I’m going whether I like it or not. I’ll get dressed.’ I went towards the bedroom. ‘And no peeking.’

It was a big black Mercedes, and I climbed in without a word. There were two gargoyles in the front seat, and lying on the floor in the back, his hands cuffed behind him, was the semi-conscious body of a man. It was dark, but from his moans I could tell that he’d taken quite a beating. Rienacker got in behind me. With the movement of the car, the man on the floor stirred and made a half attempt to get up. It earned him the toe of Rienacker’s boot against his ear.

‘What did he do? Leave his fly button undone?’

‘He’s a fucking Kozi,’ said Rienacker, outraged, as if he had arrested an habitual child molester. ‘A midnight fucking postman. We caught him red-handed, pushing Bolshie leaflets for the KPD through letter-boxes in this area.’

I shook my head. ‘I see the job is just as hazardous as it always was.’

He ignored me, and shouted to the driver: ‘We’ll drop this bastard off, and then go straight onto Leipzigerstrasse. Mustn’t keep his majesty waiting.’

‘Drop him off where? Schöneberger Bridge?’

Rienacker laughed. ‘Maybe.’ He produced a hip flask from his coat pocket and took a long pull from it. I’d had just such a leaflet put through my own letter-box the previous evening. It had been devoted largely to ridiculing no less a person than the Prussian Prime Minister. I knew that in the weeks leading up to the Olympiad, the Gestapo were making strenuous efforts to smash the communist underground in Berlin. Thousands of Kozis had been arrested and sent to KZ camps like Oranienburg, Columbia Haus, Dachau and Buchenwald. Putting two and two together, it suddenly came to me with a shock just who it was I was being taken to see.