'But you didn't stay.'

'In Hamburg? No, I didn't stay in Hamburg. Berlin is my town, mister. I just went to Hamburg long enough to work my way through my resignation and then I got out. Bret Rensselaer had got what he wanted.'

'What was that?'

'He'd showed us what a big shot he was. He'd denazified the Berlin office and wrecked our best networks. "Denazified", that's what he called it. Who the hell did he think we could find who would risk their necks prying secrets from the Russkies – Socialists, Communists, left-wing liberals? We had to use ex-Nazis; they were the only pros we had. By the time your dad came back and tried to pick up the pieces, Bret was reading philosophy at some fancy college. Your dad wanted me to work with him again. But I said, "No dice." I didn't want to work for London Central, not if I was going to be looking over my shoulder in case Bret came back to breathe fire all over me again. No, sir.'

'It was my fault, Bernard,' said Mrs Koby. Again she spoke my name as if it was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps she always felt self-conscious as a German amongst Lange's American and British friends.

'No, no, no,' said Lange.

'It was my brother,' she persisted. 'He came back from the war so sick. He was injured in Hungary just before the end. He had nowhere to go. Lange let him stay with us.'

'Nah!' said Lange angrily. 'It was nothing to do with Stefan.'

'Stefan was a wonderful boy.' She said it with heartfelt earnestness as if she was pleading for him.

'Stefan was a bastard,' said Lange.

'You didn't know him until afterwards… It was the pain, the constant pain that made him so ill-natured. But before he went off to the war he was a kind and gentle boy. Hitler destroyed him.'

'Oh, sure, blame Hitler,' said Lange. That's the style nowadays. Everything was Hitler's fault. How would Germans manage without the Nazis to blame everything on?'

'He was a sweet boy,' said Mrs Koby. 'You never knew him.'

Lange gave a sardonic laugh that ended as a snort. 'No, I never knew any sweet boy named Stefan, and that's for sure.'

Mrs Koby turned all her attention to me and said, 'Lange gave him a bedroom. At that time Lange was working for your people. We had a big apartment in Tegel, near the water.'

'He came there,' said Lange. 'Bernie came there many times.'

'Of course you did,' said Mrs Koby. 'And you never met my brother Stefan?'

'I'm not sure,' I said.

'Bernie wouldn't remember Stefan,' said Lange. 'Bernie was just a kid when Stefan died. And for years Stefan hardly ever left that damned bedroom!'

'Yes, poor Stefan. His life was so short and time passes so quickly,' said Mrs Koby.

Lange explained to me. 'My wife thinks that everybody cut her dead because Stefan had been a Waffen-SS officer. But in those days most Germans were too damned busy trying to find a handful of potatoes to feed their families. No one cared about their neighbours' 'regimental histories'.'

'They cared,' said Mrs Koby feelingly. 'I am a German. People said things to me that they wouldn't have said to you or to any American or British officer. And there were looks and murmurs that only a German would understand.'

'Stefan was in the SS,' said Lange contemptuously. 'He was a major… what did they call SS majors – Obergruppenführer …?'

'Sturmbannführer,' supplied Mrs Koby wearily. Lange knew what an SS major was called, but he preferred a word that sounded cumbersome and comical to his ears. 'They picked on Stefan because he was once an adjutant at Sepp Dietrich's headquarters.'

'Nah!' said Lange. 'He was only there a couple of weeks. He was an artillery man.'

'They wanted Stefan to give evidence at the trial of General Dietrich, but he was too sick to go.' It had become an argument now, the sort of quiet ritualistic dispute that couples indulge in only when visitors are there to sit in judgement.

'Your brother had the bad luck to be in a division that bore the name of Adolf Hitler. Had he been in some other SS division, such as Prinz Eugen or the SS cavalry division Maria Theresa, he wouldn't have attracted any comment at all.' He smiled and drank some more of his blood-red wine. 'Have a glass of wine, Bernie. Plum wine; Gerda makes it. It's delicious.'

'People can be so cruel,' said Mrs Koby.

'She means all those wonderful "liberals" who crawled out of the woodwork when Germany lost the war.'

'It hurt Lange too,' said Mrs Koby. 'Bret Rensselaer came to the apartment one day and told him to get rid of Stefan. But Lange was brave; he told Rensselaer to go to hell. I loved him for that.' She turned to her husband. 'I loved you for that, Lange.' I had the feeling that in all the years that had passed, she'd never told him before.

'I don't have creeps like Bret Rensselaer telling me who I can have in my apartment,' growled Lange. 'And where would Stefan have gone? He needed attention all the time. Sometimes Gerda was up all night with him.'

Mrs Koby said, 'It was a terrible row… shouting. I thought Lange would hit him. Bret Rensselaer never forgave Lange after the argument. He said that Allied officers shouldn't be sheltering SS war criminals. But Stefan wasn't a criminal, he was just a soldier, a brave soldier who'd fought for his country.'

'Bret loses his temper sometimes, Mrs Koby,' I said. 'He says things he doesn't really mean.'

'He was just a kid,' said Lange again. Bret's youthfulness had obviously added to Lange's humiliation. 'Having a rich father got junior a fancy intelligence assignment.'

'It was the Russian woman,' said Mrs Koby. 'I always said she was behind it.'

'Nah,' said Lange.

'What Russian woman?' I said.

'She called herself a princess,' said Lange. Tall, dark… she'd obviously been a great-looking doll when she was young. She was much older than Bret, but he was the sort of American who goes for all that aristocracy junk. She knew everyone in the city and Bret liked that. He moved her into the apartment he grabbed for himself and lived with her all the time he was here. They had two servants and gave smart little dinner parties and Frank Harrington and Silas Gaunt and the D-G were entertained there. She spoke perfect English, and a dozen more languages. Her father had been a Russian general killed in the Revolution. Or so the story went.'

'And she was a Nazi,' Mrs Koby prompted.

'That's the real joke,' said Lange. 'His White Russian 'princess' was a well-known figure in Berlin. She was always being photographed at the night spots and the parties. She was someone the top Nazis always invited along to their parties and balls. Yeah, it was Bret who was really getting close to the Nazis, not me.'

'Is any of this stuff on Bret's file?' I said.

With a flash of the insight for which he was famous, Lange said, 'Are you vetting Rensselaer? Are you checking the bastard out for some new job?'

'No,' I said truthfully.

'This goddamned conversation always seems to get back to Rensselaer, the way conversations do when people from London Central call here.'

I got to my feet. 'And a Merry Christmas to you both,' I said acidly.

'Sit down, kid, for Christ's sake. You're like your dad; too damned prickly for your own good.' He finished his wine and gave his wife the empty glass. 'Have a glass of wine, Bernie. No one can make it like Gerda. I didn't mean you, kid. Shit, you were with Max when he died. Max was one of my best guys. Now was he a Nazi?'

'Max was one of the best,' I said.

'I never heard how it happened,' said Lange.

For a moment or more I hesitated. Then I said, 'We'd been in the East nearly three weeks. It was at the time when a lot of things were going wrong for us. A KGB arrest team came for him in a safe house we used in Stendal. I was there with him. It was about nine o'clock in the evening. Max got a car; God knows where he found it. Neither of us had papers; they were in a suitcase at the station.'