‘I’ll call you back, Rudi.’ He replaced the receiver and looked at me with an expression that was just a few centimetres short of surly.

‘Yes?’ he said. Call me old-fashioned, but I have never liked male secretaries. A man’s vanity gets in the way of serving the needs of another male, and this particular specimen wasn’t about to win me over.

‘When you’ve finished filing your nails, perhaps you’d tell your boss that I’d like to see him. The name’s Gunther.’

‘Do you have an appointment?’ he said archly.

‘Since when does a man who’s looking for some diamonds need to make an appointment? Tell me that, would you?’ I could see that he found me less amusing than a boxful of smoke.

‘Save your breath to cool your soup,’ he said, and came round the desk to go through the only other door. ‘I’ll find out if he can see you.’ While he was out of the room I picked up a recent issue of Der Stürmer from the magazine rack. The front page had a drawing of a man in angel’s robes holding an angel’s mask in front of his face. Behind him was his devil’s tail, sticking out from underneath his surplice, and his ‘angel’s’ shadow, except that this now revealed the profile behind the mask to be unmistakably Jewish. Those Der Stürmer cartoonists love to draw a big nose, and this one was a real pelican’s beak. A strange thing to find in a respectable businessman’s office, I thought. The anaemic young man emerging from the other office provided the simple explanation.

‘He won’t keep you very long,’ he said, adding, ‘He buys that to impress the kikes.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

‘We get a lot of Jewish custom in here,’ he explained. ‘Of course, they only want to sell, never to buy. Herr Jeschonnek thinks that if they see that he subscribes to Der Stürmer, it will help him to drive a harder bargain.’

‘Very shrewd of him,’ I said. ‘Does it work?’

‘I guess so. You’d better ask him.’

‘Maybe I will at that.’

There wasn’t much to see in the boss’s office. Across a couple of acres of carpet was a grey steel safe that had once been a small battleship, and a Panzer-sized desk with a dark leather top. The desk had very little on it except a square of felt, on which lay a ruby that was big enough to decorate a Maharajah’s favourite elephant, and Jeschonnek’s feet, wearing immaculate white spats, and these swung under the table as I came through the door.