The women asked the pilot to fly low over Klee’s lawn, then they tipped the angel from the plane, watching it break on the grass. Gift upon gift had been delivered from the air, because, as Otti had said, Paul Klee was not of the earth, but of the cosmos. Klee stood, astonished, tears streaming. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ After the flight Charlotte’s eyes had been so bright: as if she too were one of the firmament; one of the sky.

After Walter brought his cocaine to Dessau, this was how she looked almost all of the time. Her eyes always gave her away; their moving glitter, their liquid brightness. It didn’t matter whether it was night or day: Charlotte wasn’t awake, that February, without something in her system.

Had I not been high myself I might have intervened, but when Walter brought back an even bigger stash from the post office I decided to help myself, just as she did, to Mr Steiner’s pavilions of cocaine. It was done before I had much time to think about it – and it would happen again and again as the nights grew colder – that I’d snort several lines up my nose. I had learnt my lesson from Weimar: one had to be part of the trouble or else be left out. There was no other way.

In the time before the Metal Ball the cocaine was never-ending. Mr Steiner, it turned out, had a connection to a Weimar dealer who supplied the entire corps of the National Theatre, the staff at Schiller and Goethe’s houses, and the classical art school that was now housed in the old Bauhaus building. Walter said that around the studio cocaine could be had in abundance; it was the way Ernst got his men to work later and more efficiently. I wondered how long Walter had had access to it: whether, when I’d seen him at the river in January, it hadn’t been rocks in his pockets to sink himself, but all these parcels to lift him into ascendancy. Maybe that’s why he and Franz had become friends in the first place.

Because there was no new snow Walter’s bloody-brandy bowl stayed like that for a while. After a heavy night I’d regard the rubied snow, and I knew it meant something more than I could construe, but what, I didn’t know, and soon enough the early light would send me clasping my roaring head, a hangover dawning. It was the memory of Walter’s eyes before the thrown glass. What was it? A sense of pleasure, maybe, or prophecy? But that look was gone just as soon as it had appeared; and in any case it had been moments away from my vision shutting down, and I couldn’t safely say what I had seen; at least, not with any certainty.