The next day, when I walked down to Paradeplatz as usual, I found myself tailed by a black Audi. With so few cars on the snow-covered, cratered roads it was easily noticed, like a large and shiny spot of ink on a white sheet of paper. It stayed about ten meters behind me, which was another reason to notice it. I’m a fast walker. There were three men in it I didn’t recognize, but I knew that wouldn’t last. An introduction was coming whether I wanted one or not. I just hoped the freemason’s handshake wouldn’t be too painful. I kept walking in the hope that the longer I kept walking the farther away I was taking them from Irmela’s building but after another hundred meters I saw the futility of it, turned, slipped on the ice, almost falling over, and walked back to the car with as much dignity as I could muster. When I leaned down to the driver’s window I almost fell again. One of the men in the car sniggered. I knew they were Gestapo even before he flashed his brass identity disk in the palm of his hand. Only the friends of Koch and the Gestapo could get that kind of joke or, for that matter, the petrol.

“You Gunther?”

“Yes.”

“Get in,” said the man with the disk.

I didn’t argue. His wooden face had been argued with many times before, to no avail, and at least it was just me they were arresting. So I sat in the back of the Audi, lit a cigarette, listened patiently as their leather coats creaked against the car seats, and tried to think of all the other times I’d been picked up by the Gestapo and managed to talk my way out of it. Of course, things were very different now the war was almost lost. The Gestapo had always been good listeners but since July ’44 and Count Stauffenberg, they’d stopped listening to anything very much except the sound of tightly strung piano wire.