The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft. Her hair was every bit as natural as parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she’d evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she’d applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth. Her breasts were like the rear ends of a pair of dray horses at the end of a long hard day. Maybe she still had a few clients, but I thought it was a better bet that I’d see a Jew at the front of a Nuremberg pork-butcher’s queue. She stood in the doorway to her apartment, naked under the grubby towelling robe which she left open, and lit a half-smoked cigarette.

‘I’m looking for Neumann,’ I said, doing my level best to ignore the two coat-pegs and the Russian boyar’s beard that were being displayed for my benefit. You felt the twang and itch of syphilis in your tail just looking at her. ‘I’m a friend of his.’ The snapper yawned cheesily and, deciding that I’d seen enough for free, she closed her robe and tied the cord.

‘You a bull?’ she sniffed.

‘Like I said, I’m a friend.’ She folded her arms and leaned on the doorway.

‘Neumann doesn’t have any friends,’ she said, looking at her dirty fingernails and then back at my face. I had to give her that one. ‘Except for me, maybe, and that’s only because I feel sorry for the little twitcher. If you were a friend of his you’d tell him to see a doctor. He isn’t right in the head, you know.’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and then flicked the butt past my shoulder.

‘He’s not tapped,’ I said. ‘He just has a tendency to talk to himself. A bit strange, that’s all.’

‘If that’s not tapped then I don’t know what the hell is,’ she said. There was something in that too.

‘You know when he’ll be back?’

The snapper shrugged. A hand that was all blue veins and knuckle-duster rings took hold of my tie; she tried to smile coyly, only it came out as a grimace. ‘Maybe you’d care to wait for him,’ she said. ‘You know, twenty marks buys an awful lot of time.’

Retrieving my tie I took out my wallet and thumbed her a five. ‘I’d like to. Really I would. But I must be getting on my way. Perhaps you’d tell Neumann that I was looking for him. The name is Gunther. Bernhard Gunther.’

‘Thank you, Bernhard. You’re a real gentleman.’

‘Do you have any idea where he might be?’