The ox-blood in my veins left me feeling like it was my twenty-first birthday. It was plain to see why they’d given the stuff to Luftwaffe pilots. With enough of that whiz-juice in your blood you wouldn’t have thought twice about landing a Messerschmitt on the roof of the Reichstag. I felt better than I looked, of course. And I knew I wasn’t nearly as vigorous as the dope told me I was. I walked like someone learning to walk again. My legs and hands felt as if I had borrowed them from one of Geppetto’s rejected puppets. With my pale face, dirty ill-fitting black overalls, sweaty hair, and unaccountably heavy shoes, I told myself I lacked only a bolt through my neck to make the final casting in a Frankenstein movie. It was worse when I spoke. My voice made the monster sound like Marlene Dietrich.

I walked as far as the elevator and then sat in a wheelchair. The hospital was full of visitors and no one paid me or Stuber any attention, least of all the doctors and nurses who commonly took advantage of visiting time to have a break or catch up with some paperwork. All of them were overworked and underpaid.

Stuber wheeled me quickly to his Volkswagen taxi. I got into the passenger seat and, conserving my energy, let him close the door. He ran around the front, jumped inside, and was already revving the garden-mower engine before I had told him where we were going. He lit two cigarettes, fed one between my lips, let out the clutch, and then drove quickly onto the Maximilianstrasse roundabout, from where we could have gone in any direction. “So where to?” he asked, holding the steering wheel hard to the left so that we kept on going round and round.

“Across the bridge,” I said. “West along Maximilianstrasse and then down Hildegard Strasse, onto Hochbruchen.”

“Just tell me where we’re going,” he growled. “I’m a taxi driver, remember? That little license you see there from the Municipal Transport Office means I know this city like I know your wife’s pussy.”

My ox-blood let that one go. Besides, I preferred him like this. An apology or embarrassment might have slowed him down. Speed and efficiency were what was required, before the whizz-juice and my malice gave out. “The Holy Ghost Church, on Tal,” I said.

“A church?” he exclaimed. “What do you want to go to a church for?” He thought about that for a moment as we raced across the bridge. “Or are you having second thoughts about this? Is that it? Because if you are, then Saint Anna’s is nearer.”