When I stood in the modest hall again, waiting for the butler to turn up with Ulrich, I heard another car draw up outside. This one was too loud to be a limousine, and I guessed that it was some kind of sports job. A door slammed, there were footsteps on the gravel and a key scraped in the lock of the front door. Through it came a woman I recognized immediately as the UFA Film Studio star, Ilse Rudel. She was wearing a dark sable coat and an evening dress of blue satin-organza. She looked at me, puzzled, while I just gawped back at her. She was worth it. She had the kind of body I’d only ever dreamed about, in the sort of dream I’d often dreamed of having again. There wasn’t much I couldn’t imagine it doing, except the ordinary things like work and getting in a man’s way.

‘Good morning,’ I said, but the butler was there with his cat-burglar’s steps to take her mind off me and help her out of the sable.

‘Farraj, where is my husband?’

‘Herr Six is in the library, madam.’ My blue eyes popped a good deal at that, and I felt my jaw slacken. That this goddess should be married to the gnome sitting in the study was the sort of thing that bolsters your faith in Money. I watched her walk towards the library door behind me. Frau Six - I couldn’t get over it - was tall and blonde and as healthy-looking as her husband’s Swiss bank account. There was a sulkiness about her mouth, and my acquaintance with the science of physiognomy told me that she was used to having her own way: in cash. Brilliant clips flashed on her perfect ears, and as she got nearer the air was filled with the scent of 4711 cologne. Just as I thought she was going to ignore me, she glanced in my direction and said coolly: ‘Goodnight, whoever you are.’ Then the library swallowed her whole before I had a chance to do the same. I rolled my tongue up and tucked it back into my mouth. I looked at my watch. It was 3.30. Ulrich reappeared.

‘No wonder he stays up late,’ I said, and followed him through the door.

Chapter 3

3

The following morning was grey and wet. I woke with a whore’s drawers in my mouth, drank a cup of coffee and went through the morning’s Berliner Borsenzeitung, which was even more difficult to understand than usual, with sentences as long and as hard-to-incomprehensible as a speech from Hess.