overlooking the U-Bahn station on Alexanderplatz. The view out of the window on a late summer evening was the best thing about it. Life didn’t look quite so dismal at that kind of altitude. I couldn’t smell the people or see their pale, undernourished and sometimes just plain hopeless faces. All the streets came together in one big square just the same as they had done before the war, with trams clanging and taxis honking their horns and the city growling in the distance the way it always did. Sitting on the windowsill with my face in the sun, it was easy to pretend there was no war, no front, no Hitler and that none of it had anything to do with me. Outside there wasn’t a swastika in sight, just the many varieties of specimen in my own favourite game of girl spotting. It was a sport I was always passionate about and at which I excelled. I liked the way it helped me tune in to the natural world, and because girls in Berlin are visible in a way that other Berlin wildlife is not, I never seemed to grow tired of it. There are so many different girls out there. Mostly I was on the lookout for the rarer varieties: exotic blondes that hadn’t been seen since 1938 and fabulous redheads wearing summer plumage that was very nearly transparent. I’dthought about putting a feeder on my windowsill but I knew it was hopeless. The climb up to the third floor was simply too much for them.
The only creatures that ever made it up to my office were the rats. Somehow they never run out of energy, and when I turned back to face the room with its awful portrait of the Leader and the SD uniform that was hanging in an open closet, like a terrible reminder of the other man I’d been for much of the summer, there were two of them coming through the glass door. Neither of them said anything until they were seated with their hats in their hands and had stared at me for several seconds with preternatural calm, as if I were some lesser being, which of course I was, because these rats were from the Gestapo.
One of the men wore a double-breasted navy chalk-stripe, and the other, a dark grey three-piece suit with a watch-chain that glittered like his eyes. The one wearing the chalk-stripe had a full head of short, fair hair that was as carefully arranged as the lines on a sheet of writing paper; the other was even fairer but losing it on the front almost as if his forehead had been plucked like one of those medieval ladies in a rather dull oil painting. On their faces were smiles that were insolent or self-satisfied or cynical but mostly all three at the same time and they regarded me and my office and probably my very existence with some amusement. But that was okay because I felt much the same way myself.
‘You’re Bernhard Gunther?’
I nodded.
The man with the chalk-stripe suit checked his neatly combed hair fastidiously, as if he had just stepped out of the barber’s chair at the KaDeWe. A decent haircut was about the only thing in Berlin that was not in short supply.
‘With a reputation like yours I was expecting a pair of Persian slippers and a calabash.’ He smiled. ‘Like Sherlock Holmes.’
I sat down behind my desk facing the pair and smiled back. ‘These days I find that a three-pipe problem’s just the same as a one-pipe problem. I can’t find the tobacco to smoke in it. So I keep the calabash hidden in the drawer alongside my gold-plated syringe and some orange pips.’
They kept on looking, saying nothing, just sizing me up.
‘You fellows should have brought along a blackjack if you were expecting me to talk first.’
‘Is that what you think of us?’
‘I’m not the only one with a colourful reputation.’
‘True.’
‘Are you here to ask questions or for a favour?’
‘We don’t need to ask favours,’ said the one with the basilica skull designed by Brunelleschi. ‘Usually we get all the cooperation we require without having to ask anyone a
The only creatures that ever made it up to my office were the rats. Somehow they never run out of energy, and when I turned back to face the room with its awful portrait of the Leader and the SD uniform that was hanging in an open closet, like a terrible reminder of the other man I’d been for much of the summer, there were two of them coming through the glass door. Neither of them said anything until they were seated with their hats in their hands and had stared at me for several seconds with preternatural calm, as if I were some lesser being, which of course I was, because these rats were from the Gestapo.
One of the men wore a double-breasted navy chalk-stripe, and the other, a dark grey three-piece suit with a watch-chain that glittered like his eyes. The one wearing the chalk-stripe had a full head of short, fair hair that was as carefully arranged as the lines on a sheet of writing paper; the other was even fairer but losing it on the front almost as if his forehead had been plucked like one of those medieval ladies in a rather dull oil painting. On their faces were smiles that were insolent or self-satisfied or cynical but mostly all three at the same time and they regarded me and my office and probably my very existence with some amusement. But that was okay because I felt much the same way myself.
‘You’re Bernhard Gunther?’
I nodded.
The man with the chalk-stripe suit checked his neatly combed hair fastidiously, as if he had just stepped out of the barber’s chair at the KaDeWe. A decent haircut was about the only thing in Berlin that was not in short supply.
‘With a reputation like yours I was expecting a pair of Persian slippers and a calabash.’ He smiled. ‘Like Sherlock Holmes.’
I sat down behind my desk facing the pair and smiled back. ‘These days I find that a three-pipe problem’s just the same as a one-pipe problem. I can’t find the tobacco to smoke in it. So I keep the calabash hidden in the drawer alongside my gold-plated syringe and some orange pips.’
They kept on looking, saying nothing, just sizing me up.
‘You fellows should have brought along a blackjack if you were expecting me to talk first.’
‘Is that what you think of us?’
‘I’m not the only one with a colourful reputation.’
‘True.’
‘Are you here to ask questions or for a favour?’
‘We don’t need to ask favours,’ said the one with the basilica skull designed by Brunelleschi. ‘Usually we get all the cooperation we require without having to ask anyone a
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