She looked down at her latest client. He seemed to be enjoying himself, not that she could really feel anything. He was overweight like many of them, but she had been with fatter. In his day, this one might have been good-looking, but those looks had gone with the ravages of staff-officer indulgence and war. His hands shot up to grip her breasts, and she reminded herself to give out a little moan of appreciation, watching as his mouth contorted into a moistly lecherous grin. She grinned back, willing him to hurry up. She leaned down to whisper into his ear.

“Look in the mirror, look in the mirror.”

They both turned their heads to the wall near the bed, upon which hung a large gilt-framed mirror. Seeing the reflection usually brought matters to a close, and this occasion was to prove no exception. She found that soldiers, accustomed to a visual diet of violence, when faced with the sight of a twenty-two-year-old woman straddling their bodies, would climax within several seconds. And if that didn’t work, then she would use the oldest trick in the prostitute’s book—for which her leather opera gloves were a hygienic boom. It was repellent, but less so than going on for hours.

As the general grunted and shuddered, she stared at herself in the mirror. This time last year she had been at Dresden, studying law. And now she was a prostitute in Berlin, a stooge for the SD—the internal security service. Her job was to wheedle indiscretions out of her clients, which she would then have to type up by the next morning. Throwaway remarks about how badly the war was going; comments against the Führer (which were getting more frequent); military gossip—all these were precious nuggets to those back at SD headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse.

And talk they did. Brimming with an expensive potion of champagne, brandy and sex, the officers blurted out the type of secrets that caused some of them to lose their heads. Hitler had reinstated the axe as the Reich’s preferred means of capital punishment, and Leni knew, even as they spoke, that some of her clients would be enjoying their last bout of sex before the chop. She had felt sorry for one of them—a junior officer who had told her how much he hated the Nazis, how he had half a mind to shoot “good old Adolf” the next time he was near him.