‘We’ll have to find you some sort of lodgings – pension or small hotel on the outskirts, well away from the Palace of Justice because that place will be crawling with people who could recognise you. Then I’ll call Philip Eaton. He can arrange to come to Nuremberg or fix transport for you to Bad Oeynhausen. By the way, when you said you were being followed and watched last night I thought I saw your shadow – it turned out he was shadowing me. What would you know about that?’

‘A man, you say?’

‘Small, slender, like a dancer, but with a hint of Goebbels.’

Minsky shrugged. ‘My shadow was a woman. She was blonde, easily identifiable for those with eyes to see. I knew she was there, but of course most men would have noticed only her breasts and her legs and would have offered her a drink.’

Wilde wasn’t totally convinced. ‘If you say so, Minsky, or Borisov or whatever you wish me to call you.’

‘Borisov. From now on call me Sergei Borisov. Let’s make it English – Mr Borisov.’

*

Heck woke up a lot later than Wilde and after a good breakfast made his way from Foehrenweg to the British zone, and from there on to the district of Wedding in the French sector. The sight that greeted him on the corner of Exerzierstrasse and Schulstrasse astonished him. Somehow the magnificent Jewish Hospital, three miles directly north of the Brandenburg Gate, had escaped the bombing almost intact. The only damage seemed to be the windows, which had gone the way of almost all glass in Berlin, such was the shuddering power of the blast waves released by thousands of tons of high explosives.

A religious man might have taken the survival of the Jewish Hospital as a sign from God, but Heck knew there was no God. Auschwitz was the proof of that.

He had come here at the suggestion of Richard Helms after mentioning his search for Miriam. ‘I think that’s probably as good a place as any if you’re looking to find out what happened to your friend. Anyway, it must be worth a shot. Good luck finding your young lady.’

Helms’s indication that the hospital was still standing did not tell the half of it. Amid the wreckage of central Berlin, Heck had not expected to find a building in such good condition, and still operating as a hospital, as it had done throughout the war.

It was a remarkable neoclassical structure built just before the First World War and its wide imposing facade spoke volumes about the high status of Jews in those long-gone days. Heck felt nauseous.

He thought of all the people whose lives had been saved by this place over so many years.