‘What time does the bar open?’ I said. Her sense of humour was no less pleasing than her beauty.

‘There’s no alcohol allowed in here,’ she said, snatching the unlit cigarette from my lips. ‘And strictly no smoking. Dr Meyer will be along to see you presently.’

‘So what’s he, the second-class deck? Where’s Dr Kindermann?’

‘The doctor is at a conference in Bad Neuheim.’

‘What’s he doing there, staying at a sanitarium? When does he come back here?’

‘The end of the week. Are you a patient of Dr Kindermann, Herr Strauss?’

‘No, no I’m not. But for eighty marks a day I had hoped I would be.’

‘Dr Meyer is a very capable physician, I can assure you.’ She frowned at me impatiently, as she realized that I hadn’t yet made a move to get undressed, and started to make a tutting noise that sounded like she was trying to be nice to a cockatoo. Clapping her hands sharply, she told me to hurry up and get into bed as Dr Meyer would wish to examine me. Judging that she was quite capable of doing it for me, I decided not to resist. Not only was my nurse ugly, but she was also possessed of a bedside manner that must have been acquired in a market garden.

When she’d gone I settled down to read in bed. Not the kind of read you would describe as gripping, so much as incredible. Yes, that was the word: incredible. There had always been weird, occult magazines in Berlin, like Zenit and Hagal, but from the shores of the Maas to the banks of the Memel there was nothing to compare with the grabbers that were writing for Reinhard Lange’s magazine, Urania. Leafing through it for just fifteen minutes was enough to convince me that Lange was probably a complete spinner. There were articles entitled ‘Wotanism and the Real Origins of Christianity’, ‘The Superhuman Powers of the Lost Citizens of Atlantis’, ‘The World Ice Theory Explained’, ‘Esoteric Breathing Exercises for Beginners’, ‘Spiritualism and Race Memory’, ‘The Hollow-Earth Doctrine’, ‘Anti-Semitism as Theocratic Legacy’, etc. For a man who could publish this sort of nonsense, the blackmail of a parent, I thought, was probably the sort of mundane activity that occupied him between ario-sophical revelations.

Even Dr Meyer, himself no obvious testament to the ordinary, was moved to remark upon my choice of reading matter.

‘Do you often read this kind of thing?’ he asked, turning the magazine over in his hands as if it had been a variety of curious artefact dug from some Trojan ruin by Heinrich Schliemann.

‘No, not really. It was curiosity that made me buy it.’

‘Good. An abnormal interest in the occult is often an indication of an unstable personality.’

‘You know, I was just thinking the same thing myself.’