At Grolmanstrasse Police Station, the car stopped, and one of the gargoyles dragged the prisoner out from under our feet. I didn’t think much for his chances. If ever I saw a man destined for a late-night swimming lesson in the Landwehr, it was him. Then we drove east on Berlinerstrasse and Charlottenburg-chaussee, Berlin’s east-west axis, which was decorated with a lot of black, white and red bunting in celebration of the forthcoming Olympiad. Rienacker eyed it grimly.

‘Fucking Olympic Games,’ he sneered. ‘Waste of fucking money.’

‘I’m forced to agree with you,’ I said.

‘What’s it all for, that’s what I’d like to know. We are what we are, so why pretend we’re not? All this pretence really pisses me off. You know, they’re even drafting in snappers from Munich and Hamburg because Berlin trade in female flesh has been so hard hit by the Emergency Powers. And nigger jazz is legal again. What do you make of that, Gunther?’

‘Say one thing, do another. That’s this Government all over.’

He looked at me narrowly. ‘I wouldn’t go around saying that sort of thing, if I were you,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter what I say, Rienacker, you know that. Just as long as I can be of service to your boss. He wouldn’t care if I were Karl Marx and Moses in one, if he thought I could be of use to him.’

‘Then you’d better make the most of it. You’ll never get another client as important as this one.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

Just short of the Brandenburger Tor, the car turned south onto Hermann Goering Strasse. At the British Embassy all the lights were burning and there were several dozen limousines drawn up out front. As the car slowed and turned into the driveway of the big building next door, the driver wound down the window to let the storm-trooper on guard identify us, and we heard the sound of a big party drifting across the lawn.

We waited, Rienacker and I, in a room the size of a tennis court. After a short while a tall thin man wearing the uniform of an officer in the Luftwaffe told us that Goering was changing, and that he would see us in ten minutes.

It was a gloomy palace: overbearing, grandiose and affecting a bucolic air that belied its urban location. Rienacker sat down in a medieval-looking chair, saying nothing as I took a look around, but watching me closely.