‘The Survey was meant to get rid of me. The cocaine was meant to split us all apart. Now this! Don’t you see? Every time he’s been in my life he’s tried to ruin what I have. Getting me to England – that’s just the newest stratagem. He wants to ruin what we have, and the way he’ll do that is through you. He’ll make everything rotten between us. He’ll plant suspicion where he can. Making everything obscene. Don’t you know by now, Pauli? Walter König cannot be trusted. Not with secrets; not with our lives; not with anything. Who’s to say Ernst Steiner and his lackeys won’t be waiting at the airport to arrest me? It’s just another treachery, Paul. And that makes it number three. It’s his last move.’

48

Berlin

On the windows the next morning there was a pattern of scalloped ice. I kissed Charlotte, waking her; she told me she loved me, and in her eyes there was something like a promise.

All night Walter’s words had roiled my brain. You must persuade her to go with him. In my dreams I had been again behind the Japanese screen, near the painted woman and sparrow; and there had been Walter, in his dressing gown, shaking, hectoring me for action.

‘Stop worrying, Paul,’ she said. ‘Please. We’ll be fine.’

Soon the sun fell to the bed, a gate of pale orange in which she slept, then, as it rose higher, it lit the tram wires and melted the iced windows. Between us I felt a renewal, and in the hour or so in which we drowsed, I knew it had been a bad idea to see Walter yesterday. Charlotte was right: we had no reason to trust him; his past behaviour had proved this. That this was a final flare in his perversity was entirely credible. He wouldn’t want to see Charlotte happy. He’d want to see us split. When Jenö had proposed the English plan, he’d have thought – even if it was unconsciously – here’s a way to deny her what she has.

Like this I put Walter’s proposal away.

We slept all morning, and I remembered the happiness of that frosted-up weekend, when danger was at the periphery of Berlin, but we were safe together.

Later I brought her coffee and we watched the street. A waiter in a bow tie and waistcoat threw a bucket of water into the stream of a busted pipe. At the cobbler’s a mechanised doll hammered a boot. A woman passed with flowers; a man with an Alsatian. Jets of U-bahn steam. A boy in a sailor’s outfit ran after another kid. ‘He looks like you,’ Charlotte said, and she ran her mouth up my neck. ‘A bit furious.’