Heinz Kurschildgen should have known better, thought Helmut. Even before he met Heinrich Himmler he had already languished in prison for defrauding investors who believed his claims to be able to turn sand into gold. He would pay the entire German war reparations with this manufactured gold, he had claimed, the filthy liar. But he had only succeeded in turning a quarter of a million marks of influential people’s money into an eighteen-month stay in a Berlin prison. And then he decided to try convincing Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, that he could manufacture petrol from water. Imagine, Heinz had said, the power of a fighting force with an endless supply of inexpensive fuel. The mere gall of it turned Helmut’s stomach. If he had been there, he thought, he would have put a stop to the whole thing.

But Himmler, in his great open-mindedness, had believed the huckster, had been among those who set him up in a laboratory in Berlin. Helmut had not yet worked his way into Himmler’s inner circle when the great man naturally detected the fraud and sentenced Heinz to three well-deserved years in the Columbia-Haus concentration camp. Heinz had been released after only two. What mercy the Reich shows, thought Helmut.

“What does he have against me?” said Heinz. “So I am a failure as an alchemist. You can’t blame me for trying. I only wanted to help the Reich.”

“You only wanted to help yourself,” said Helmut, jabbing Heinz in the gut with the butt of his rifle. “And now you’ll be helping yourself back in the concentration camp. It’s better than you deserve if you ask me.”

Heinz could not speak for a moment after the blow from the rifle, but as the car raced through the streets of Berlin, he eventually recovered his breath. “I don’t understand,” he said, “what Herr Himmler has against failed alchemists.” This time Helmut aimed the rifle stock at Heinz’s head and put an end to the conversation. Twenty minutes later, he delivered the unconscious vermin to the gate of Columbia-Haus. Riding back to Himmler’s office he thought that he knew the answer to Heinz’s question. Himmler hated failed alchemists because he dreamed of finding a successful one. Failure was a sign of impure blood, thought Helmut. But if ever the Reichsführer could find a pure-blooded alchemist, he might hope for success.

Of course, as he thought this, Helmut had not yet heard of a man named Karl Malchus.