Well, lately I’ve begun to feel much the same way about women. Only I’m not on a diet, so much as simply finding myself ignored by the waitress. There are so many pretty ones about too. Women, I mean, although I could as easily fuck a waitress as any other kind of female. There was one woman a couple of years ago. I was in love with her, only she disappeared. Well, that happens to a lot of people in this city. But since then it’s just been casual affairs. And now, to see me on Unter den Linden, head one way and then the other, you would think that I was watching a hypnotist’s pendulum. I don’t know, maybe it’s the heat. This summer, Berlin’s as hot as a baker’s armpit. Or maybe it’s just me, turning forty and going a bit coochie-coo near babies. Whatever the reason, my urge to procreate is nothing short of bestial, which of course women see in your eyes, and then leave you well alone.

Despite that, in the long hot summer of 1938, bestiality was callously enjoying something of an Aryan renaissance.

1

Friday, 26 August

‘Just like a fucking cuckoo.’

‘What is?’

Bruno Stahlecker looked up from his newspaper.

‘Hitler, who else?’

My stomach sank as it sensed another of my partner’s profound analogies to do with the Nazis. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said firmly, hoping that my show of total comprehension would deter him from a more detailed explanation. But it was not to be.

‘No sooner has he got rid of the Austrian fledgling from the European nest than the Czechoslovakian one starts to look precarious.’ He smacked the newspaper with the back of his hand. ‘Have you seen this, Bernie? German troop movements on the border of the Sudetenland.’

‘Yes, I guessed that’s what you were talking about.’ I picked up the morning mail and, sitting down, started to sort through it. There were several cheques, which helped to take the edge off my irritation with Bruno. It was hard to believe, but clearly he’d already had a drink. Normally a couple of stops away from being monosyllabic (which I prefer being a shade taciturn myself) booze always made Bruno chattier than an Italian waiter.

‘The odd thing is that the parents don’t notice. The cuckoo keeps throwing out the other chicks, and the foster parents keep on feeding it.’

‘Maybe they hope that he’ll shut up and go away,’ I said pointedly, but Bruno’s fur was too thick for him to notice. I glanced over the contents of one of the letters and then read it again, more slowly.

‘They just don’t want to notice. What’s in the post?’

‘Hmm? Oh, some cheques.’

‘Bless the day that brings a cheque. Anything else?’

‘A letter. The anonymous kind. Someone wants me to meet him in the Reichstag at midnight.’

‘Does he say why?’