To my surprise we didn’t go to the Police Praesidium on Stresemannstrasse, behind the North Railway station. Instead we drove a little farther east and stopped in front of the Erich Koch Institute on the corner of Tragheimer and Gartenstrasse, which was one of the last buildings in Königsberg still displaying Nazi flags. It added a nice touch of color to a city that had gone prematurely gray with fear and worry. Absurdly, some bandbox guards came to attention as the car drew up; they must have figured the only cars with petrol contained people who were important. The Gestapo even opened the car door for me and two of them escorted me through the cliff-high doors and up the marble double stairway, where a man was carefully fitting long, brass stair rods. At the top stood a tall plinth with a bronze of Erich Koch staring over the balustrade, like a satrap surveying his empire. Or maybe he was just checking that the stair-rods were being fitted correctly. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling as if in imitation of the freezing weather outside, which made the blasts of warm air blowing from the vents in shiny new ceramic stoves all the more surprising. The institute was noisy with hundreds of foreign workers hammering and painting and redecorating, which seemed a little premature as the Red Army hadn’t yet said which color they’d have preferred for 1945.

I was ushered along a corridor as big as a bowling alley where thick, new blue carpet was being laid and, for a moment, I wondered if I was actually in the East Prussian School for the Blind in Luisenallee. It was the only possible explanation for so little foresight and so much obvious reluctance to face the truth. Amid the ignorant confusion of it all Harold Hennig was standing with his hands in his breeches pockets, his gray tunic open, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and quite probably he didn’t. Every time I saw him I knew he wasn’t ever going to be one of the unlucky ones without a comfortable chair when Ivan stopped the balalaika music. Seeing me he beckoned me forward and led the way into an office already carpeted but without much furniture, just a lot of fluff on the floor, a couple of chairs and a half-size desk on which lay his greatcoat and cap. A large portrait of a very pink-faced Adolf Hitler was hanging on the wall. Wearing a gray greatcoat with the collar turned fashionably up and a peaked hat, the leader was looking off into the middle distance as if trying to decide if the blue of the carpet matched the blue of his eyes. He needn’t have been concerned. It was a cold blue with an affinity for black and a degree of darkness that Goethe understood only too well, and an excellent color match.