‘How about the Künstler Eck, on Alt Kölln. It’s quiet there and we won’t be disturbed.’

‘The Künstler Eck,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll find it.’ I turned back towards the glass doors.

‘Oh, and Bernie. Make sure you bring a little something for my expenses?’

The independent township of Alt Kölln, long since absorbed by the capital, is a small island on the River Spree. Largely given up to museums, it has thus earned itself the sobriquet ‘Museum Island’. But I have to confess that I have never seen the inside of one of them. I’m not much interested in The Past and, if you ask me, it is this country’s obsession with its history that has partly put us where we are now: in the shit. You can’t go into a bar without some arsehole going on about our pre-1918 borders, or harking back to Bismarck and when we kicked the stuffing out of the French. These are old sores, and to my mind it doesn’t do any good to keep picking at them.

From the outside, there was nothing about the place that would have attracted the passer-by to drop in for a casual drink: not the door’s scruffy paintwork, nor the dried-up flowers in the windowbox; and certainly not the poorly handwritten sign in the dirty window which read: ‘Tonight’s speech can be heard here.’ I cursed, for this meant that Joey the Cripp was addressing a Party rally that evening, and as a result there would be the usual traffic chaos. I went down the steps and opened the door.

There was even less about the inside of the Künstler Eck that would have persuaded the casual drinker to stay awhile. The walls were covered with gloomy wood carvings - tiny models of cannons, death’s heads, coffins and skeletons. Against the far wall was a large pump-organ painted to look like a graveyard, with crypts and graves yielding up their dead, at which a hunchback was playing a piece by Haydn. This was as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s, since a group of storm-troopers were singing ‘My Prussia Stands So Proud and Great’ with sufficient gusto as to almost completely drown the hunchback’s playing. I’ve seen some odd things in Berlin in my time, but this was like something from a Conrad Veidt film, and not a very good one at that. I expected the one-armed police-captain to come in at any moment.

Instead I found Illmann sitting alone in a corner, nursing a bottle of Engelhardt. I ordered two more of the same and sat down as the storm-troopers finished their song and the hunchback commenced a massacre of one of my favourite Schubert sonatas.

‘This is a hell of a place to choose,’ I said grimly.

‘I’m afraid that I find it curiously quaint.’