Having no wish to be intercepted by anyone, let alone someone as large as this fellow, I turned immediately north, in the direction of St. Anna’s and found a second man coming my way down Seitz-strasse. He wore a leather coat, a bowler hat, and carried a walking-stick. There was something in his face I didn’t like. Mostly it was just his face. His eyes were the color of concrete and the smile on his cracked lips reminded me of a length of barbed wire. The two men broke into a run as I turned quickly on my heel and sprinted back up Maximilianstrasse and straight into the path of a third man advancing on me from the corner of Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse. He didn’t look like he was collecting for charity either.

I reached for the gun in my pocket about five seconds too late. I hadn’t taken Stuber’s advice and left one in the barrel, and I would have had to work the slide to put one up the spout and make it ready to fire. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. No sooner was it in my fist than the man with the stick caught up with me and hit my wrist with it. For a moment I thought he’d broken my arm. The little gun clattered harmlessly onto the road and I almost went down with it, such was the pain in my forearm. Fortunately I have two arms, and the other drove my elbow back into his stomach. It was a hard, solid blow and sufficiently well delivered to knock some of my bowler-hatted attacker’s breath from his body. I smelled it whistle past my ear, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it to put him down on the ground.

The other two were on me by now. I lifted my paws, squared up to them, jabbed hard into the face of one and connected a decent right hook with the chin of the other. I felt his head shift against my knuckles like a balloon on a stick and ducked a fist the size of a small Alp. But it was no use. The walking stick hit me hard across the shoulders, and my hands dropped like a drummer’s arms. One hauled my jacket down over my shoulders so that my arms were pinned by my sides, and then another delivered a punch to my stomach that scraped against my backbone and left me on my knees, throwing up the remains of my cocktail-onion dinner onto the little Beretta.

“Aw, look at his little gun,” said one of my new friends, and he kicked it away, just in case I felt stupid enough to try to pick it up. I didn’t.

“Get him on his feet,” said the one with the bowler.