“I need a holiday, Gerhard. I need to get away and eat some oranges. Apparently sunlight and oranges are very good for the skin.” I shrugged. “Then again, I’m thinking of converting. I’m told they give a pretty good circumcision in Jaffa, if you get them before lunchtime.” I shook my head. “Come on, Gerhard. It’s an intelligence matter. You know I can’t talk about it with anyone outside of the department. If you don’t like that, then take it up with Heydrich. He makes the rules, not me.”

“The two men you’re traveling with,” he said, hardly batting an eye. “We would like you to keep an eye on them. To see that they don’t abuse the position of trust in which they find themselves. I’m even authorized to offer you some expenses. A thousand marks.”

Everyone was throwing money at me. A thousand pounds here. A thousand marks there. I felt like an official in the Reich Ministry of Justice.

“That’s very handsome of you, Gerhard,” I said. “A thousand marks is quite a slice of sugarloaf. Of course, you wouldn’t be the Gestapo if you didn’t also have a taste of the whip you’re offering me in the event I don’t have the sweet tooth you were counting on.”

Flesch smiled his toothless smile. “It would be unfortunate if your racial origins were made the subject of an inquiry,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette in my ashtray. As he leaned forward and then back again in the chair, his leather coat creaked loudly, like the sound of heavy raindrops, as if he had just bought it from the Gestapo gift shop.

“Both my parents were churchgoing folk,” I said. “I don’t see that you’ve got anything like that to throw at me.”

“Your maternal great-grandmother,” he said. “There’s a possibility she might have been Jewish.”

“Read your Bible, Gerhard,” I said. “We’re all Jewish if you want to go back far enough. But as it happens, you’re wrong. She was a Roman Catholic. Quite a devout one, I believe.”

“And yet her name was Adler, was it not? Anna Adler?”

“It was Adler, yes, I believe that’s correct. What of it?”

“Adler is a Jewish name. If she were alive today she would probably have to add Sarah to her name, so that we could recognize her for what she was. A Jewess.”

“Even if it was true, Gerhard. That Adler is a Jewish name? And, to be honest, I have no idea if it is or not. That would only make me one-eighth Jewish. And under section two, article five of the Nuremberg Laws, I am not, therefore, a Jew.” I grinned. “Your whip lacks a proper sting, Gerhard.”