‘For your sake, swanktail, you’d better be right,’ he said. ‘It’d be a pleasure to throw you out.’ Swearing under his breath he wobbled back to his desk and dialled furiously.

‘Is Fraulein Rudel expecting someone?’ he said, moderating his tone. ‘Only, she never told me.’ His face fell as my story checked out. He put the phone down and swung his head at the lift door.

‘Third floor,’ he hissed.

There were only two doors, at opposite ends of the third. There was a velodrome of parquet-floor between them and, as if I was expected, one of the doors was ajar. The maid ushered me into the drawing room.

‘You’d better take a seat,’ she said grumpily. ‘She’s still dressing and there’s no telling how long she’ll be. Fix yourself a drink if you want.’ Then she disappeared and I examined my surroundings.

The apartment was no larger than a private airfield and looked about as cheap a set as something out of Cecil B. de Mille, of whom there was a photograph jostling for pride of place with all the others on the grand piano. Compared with the person who had decorated and furnished the place, the Archduke Ferdinand had been blessed with the taste of a troupe of Turkish circus dwarves. I looked at some of the other photographs. Mostly they were stills of Ilse Rudel taken from her various films. In a lot of them she wasn’t wearing very much - swimming nude or peering coyly from behind a tree which hid the more interesting parts. Rudel was famous for her scantily clad roles. In another photograph she was sitting at a table in a smart restaurant with the good Dr Goebbels; and in another, she was sparring with Max Schmelling. Then there was one in which she was being carried in a workman’s arms, only the ‘workman’ just happened to be Emil Jannings, the famous actor. I recognized it as a still from The Builder’s Hut. I like the book a lot better than I had liked the film.

At the hint of 4711 turned around, and found myself shaking the beautiful film star by the hand.

‘I see you’ve been looking at my little gallery,’ she said, rearranging the photographs I had picked up and examined. ‘You must think it terribly vain of me to have so many pictures of myself on display, but I simply can’t abide albums.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s very interesting.’ She flashed me the smile that made thousands of German men, myself included, go weak at the chin.