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Chapters (22)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Chapter 1
  5. Chapter 2
  6. Chapter 3
  7. Chapter 4
  8. Chapter 5
  9. Chapter 6
  10. Chapter 7
  11. Chapter 8
  12. Chapter 9
  13. Chapter 10
  14. Chapter 11
  15. Chapter 12
  16. Chapter 13
  17. Chapter 14
  18. Chapter 15
  19. Chapter 16
  20. Chapter 17
  21. Chapter 18
  22. Chapter 19

The filing cabinet wasn’t locked either, but again I drew a blank; plenty of catalogues of gems and semi-precious stones, a Lufthansa flight table, a lot of papers to do with currency exchange, some invoices and some life assurance policies, one of which was with the Germania Life.

Meanwhile, the big safe sat in the corner, impregnable, and mocking my rather feeble attempts to uncover Jeschonnek’s secrets, if he had any. It wasn’t difficult to see why the place wasn’t fitted with an alarm. You couldn’t have opened that box if you’d had a truck-load of dynamite. There wasn’t much left, apart from the waste-paper basket. I emptied the contents on the desk, and started to poke through the scraps of paper: a Wrigley’s chewing-gum wrapper, the morning’s Beobachter, two ticket-halves from the Lessing Theater, a till receipt from the KDW department store and some rolled-up balls of paper. I smoothed them out. On one of these was the Adlon’s telephone number, and underneath the name ‘Princess Mushmi’, which had been question-marked and then crossed out several times; next to it was written my own name. There was another telephone number written next to my name, and this had been doodled around so that it looked like an illumination from a page in a medieval Bible. The number was a mystery to me, although I recognized it was Berlin West. I picked up the receiver and waited for the operator.

‘Number please?’ she said.

‘J1 — 90 — 33.’

‘Trying to connect you.’ There was a brief silence on the line, and then it started ringing.

I have an excellent memory when it comes to recognizing a face, or a voice, but it might have taken me several minutes to place the cultured voice with its light Frankfurt accent that answered the telephone. As it was, the man identified himself immediately he had finished confirming the number.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I mumbled indistinctly. ‘I have the wrong number.’ But as I replaced the receiver I knew that it was anything but.

Chapter 9

9

It was in a grave close to the north wall of the Nikolai Cemetery on Prenzlauer Allee, and only a short distance away from the memorial to National Socialism’s most venerated martyr, Horst Wessel, that the bodies were buried, one on top of the other, following a short service at Nikolai Kirche on nearby Molken Market.