The Master of the Carnival is ‘Prinz Karneval’. He is also known as ‘seine Tollität’ – His Craziness. Prinz Karneval is protected by the Prinzengarde. His personal bodyguard.

The German word ‘Karneval’ comes from the Latin ‘Carne Vale’:

‘Farewell to Flesh’.

Prologue

Weiberfastnacht – Women’s Karneval Night. Cologne. January, 1999.

Madness. Everywhere she looked was insanity. She ran through crowds of the demented. She stared around wildly, seeking an asylum: somewhere she could find refuge amongst the sane. The music thudded and screamed mercilessly, filling the night with terrifying cheerfulness. The crowd was denser now. More people, more madness. She pushed through them. Always away from the two massive spires that thrust up from the mayhem of the streets, black and menacing into the night. Always away from the clown.

She stumbled as she ran down the steps. Past the main railway station. Through a square. On and on. Still surrounded by the shouting, grinning, laughing faces of the insane.

She collided with a knot of figures gathered in front of a stand selling Currywurst and beer. The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl stood in a nappy stuffed with Deutschmarks, laughing and joking with three Elvis Presleys. A medieval knight struggled to eat his hot dog through a visor that would not stay up. There was a dinosaur. A cowboy. Louis the Fourteenth. But no clown.

She spun around. Scanned the throng of bodies that now closed in her wake. No clown. One of the beer-stand Elvises staggered towards her. Blocked her path and circled her waist with his arm; said something lewd and latex-muffled. She pushed Elvis away and he collided with the dinosaur.

‘You’re mad!’ she screamed at them. ‘You’re all mad!’ They laughed. She ran on through a part of the city she didn’t know. Fewer people now. The streets narrowed and closed in on her. Then she was alone in a narrow cobbled street, dark and tightly lined with four-storey-high buildings with black windows. She pressed into a shadow and tried to get her breathing under control. The sound from the distant city centre was still loud: madly cheerful music mingled with the raucous cries of the deranged. She tried to listen through it for the sound of footsteps. Nothing. She stayed pressed into the shadow, the reassuring solidity of the apartment building at her back.

Still no clown. No nightmare clown from her childhood dreams. She had lost him.

She had no idea where she was: one direction looked the same as the other. But she would keep heading away from the maniac sounds of the city, from the looming black spires. Her heart continued to pound but her breathing was now under control. She hugged the wall as she moved along the street. The raucous music and laughter faded further but suddenly there was a new blast as a door opened and yellow light sliced across the street. She shrank back again into shadow. Three cavemen and a female flamenco dancer burst out of the apartment house, two of the Neanderthals carrying a crate of beer between them. They staggered off in the direction of the other lunatics. She started to cry. To sob. There was no escape from it.