Stahlecker grabbed his coat off the hat stand and, still smoking his foul-smelling pipe, he went out into the bitter January cold.

When he’d gone, I lit my last cigarette, stoked the fire, tidied my paper clips, polished my fingernails, and waited patiently for Captain von Frisch to come to the point. Patience is the key with every client who is being blackmailed. They’re so used to paying someone to keep their dirty little secret that it’s almost unthinkable they should just break the silence and start talking about it, and to someone they haven’t seen since the war.

“I don’t mind telling you that the last five years have been hell,” he said, and, taking out a handkerchief, he pressed it to the corner of his eye. “Often I have considered ending my life. But my old mother would be dreadfully upset if I did something like that. She’s ninety. And I am forced to employ a nurse to look after me, such has been the decline in my health. It’s my heart, you see. In time the worry of all this will certainly kill me. I just hope I don’t die before she does. That would break her heart.”

In his large gray military coat, which so far he had refused to remove—it wasn’t a great fire, and he’d said he felt the cold, abnormally so—von Frisch resembled an old and venerable German battleship about to be scuttled at Scapa Flow and even now he let out such a profound and hopeless sigh that it was as if this badly damaged ship were already plunging through the depths to a watery grave on the bottom of the freezing North Sea.

“You should have telephoned, sir. Or written. I’d have been glad to come to your house. Where are you living these days?” I picked up my pen and prepared to write down a few details.

“Southwest Berlin. Ferdinandstrasse, twenty-six, in East Lichterfelde. Just around the corner from the S-Bahn station. Thank you, it’s kind of you to say so, but the nurse is a sweet girl and I’d hate her to overhear anything of my own sordid past. A good nurse is hard to find these days. Although she is becoming rather expensive.”

“Surely the baron is still a rich man.”

“Not anymore. These terrible people have all but bled me dry.”

“I see. Then perhaps you’d better just tell me about it.”

He unbuttoned his coat and started to relax a little.