I turned back to address the monk. “But as it is, I fell for her even though I always suspected she was ideologically unsound. Perhaps because she was ideologically unsound. I don’t know. And not that it really matters now. We’re all for the high jump, I expect. Even you, Anne. I can’t imagine what kind of deal you think you’ve cut with them, but you’re quite deluded if you think you’re just going to walk away scot-free from this room. That there aren’t going to be any consequences for you back in London.”

“Never mind that now,” said the monk. “Tell us about Harold Hennig.”

I was enjoying myself now and plowed on. I was sure that if my story had sounded completely implausible to anyone except Anne, by now they’d have silenced me the way they’d already silenced Harold Hennig.

“Harold Hennig I’ve known since before the war, when I was working as a policeman at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz and he was working for the Gestapo in Berlin. He was attached to the Queer Squad. He had a very profitable sideline in blackmail even then. The master blackmailer, we used to call him on the police force. I mean, what better cover for a blackmailer than being a policeman? It was Hennig who was behind the scheme to blackmail General von Fritsch into resigning from the Wehrmacht in nineteen thirty-eight. That was on Hitler’s orders. And no one understood blackmail better than Adolf Hitler. I was the one who brought Hennig into the Stasi in the first place. That was one of my major functions in the beginning; to track down men from the RSHA and cajole or pressure them into working for the Stasi. Anne is quite right, again: Half of the Stasi has some sort of background in the old Reich Main Security Office. Most of us cut our teeth in the RSHA. That’s what younger ideologues like her can never understand. That the dictatorship of the proletariat requires the working class to be even more ruthless in the administration of that dictatorship than the Fascists. No one is forbidden to join the organs of the state merely by virtue of their former political allegiance. Men were Nazis. Men are reeducated in socialism. I was. Anne was wrong that I told her that I thought this was funny. My English always lets me down when I try to make a joke. Just ask my employers at the hotel.”

Anne was still shaking her head. If she’d had a gun she’d probably have shot me.

“You’d thought it all out, hadn’t you?” said the monk. “This scheme to sell us the idea that Hollis was a mole.”