'I say, that's extraordinary,' said Henry. 'You should have got some sort of medal.'

'He did get a medal,' I said. 'You did get a medal, didn't you, Herr Koch?'

Koch riffled the cards again and murmured assent.

'Mr Koch got the Dienstauszeichnung, didn't you, Mr Koch?'

Mr Koch gave me a fixed mirthless smile. 'Yes, I did, Bernd.' To Henry he said, 'Bernd thinks it amusing that I was given the Nazi long-service award for ten years in the Nazi Party. But as he also knows…' A finger was raised and waggled at me. '…my job and my grade in the Ministry of the Interior made it absolutely necessary that I joined the Party. 1 was never an active Party worker, everyone knows that.'

'Herr Koch was an irreconcilable,' I said.

'You are a trouble-maker, Bernd,' said Mr Koch. 'If I hadn't been such a close friend of your father I would get very angry at some of the things you say.'

'Only kidding, Lothar,' I said. In fact I remained convinced that old Lothar Koch was an irredeemable Nazi who read a chapter from Mein Kampf every night before going to sleep. But he always showed a remarkable amiability in the face of my remarks and I admired him for that.

'What's all this "Bernd" nonsense, Samson?' said Henry with a puzzled frown on his peeling red forehead. 'You're not a German, are you?'

'Sometimes,' I said, 'I feel I almost am.'

'This woman should have a medal,' said Koch suddenly. He indicated Lisl Hennig. 'She hid a family of Jews upstairs. She hid them for three years. Do you know what would have happened if the Gestapo had found them – echhh.' Mr Koch ran his index finger across his throat. 'She would have gone into a concentration camp. You were a mad fool, Lisl, my dear.'

'We were all mad fools in one way or another,' said Lisl. 'It was a time of mad foolishness.'

'Didn't your neighbours know you were hiding them?' asked Tiptree.

The whole street knew,' said Koch. The mother of the hidden family was her cook.'

'Once we had to push her into the refrigerator,' said Lisl. 'She was so frightened that she struggled. I'll suffocate, she shouted, I'll suffocate. But the kitchen maid – a huge woman, long since dead, God bless her – helped me, and we put all the food on the table and pushed Mrs Volkmann inside.'

'The Gestapo men were here, searching the house,' said Mr Koch.

'Just three of them,' said Lisl. 'Jumped-up little men. I took them to the bar. That is as far as they wanted to search.'

'And the woman in the refrigerator?' said Henry.

'When the level of the schnapps went half-way down the bottle we decided it would be safe to get her out. She was all right. We gave her a hot-water bottle and put her to bed.'

That was Werner's mother,' said Lisl to me.

'I know, Lisl,' I said. 'You were very brave.'

Often after such bridge games Lisl had provided a 'nightcap' on the house, but this time she let us pay for our own drinks. I think she was still smarting because my inexpert bridge had won me five marks while she ended up losing three. She was in one of her petulant moods and complained about everything from the pain in her knees to the tax on alcohol. I was thankful that Lisl decided to go early to bed. I knew she wouldn't sleep. She'd read newspapers and perhaps play her old records until the small hours. But we said our goodnights to her and soon after that Lothar Koch phoned for a taxi and departed.

Henry Tiptree seemed anxious to prolong the evening, and with a bottle of brandy on the table in front of us I was happy to answer his questions. 'What an extraordinary old man,' said Henry, after Koch said goodnight and tottered off down the stairs to his waiting taxi.

'He saw it all,' I said.

'Did he really have to become a Nazi because he worked in the Ministry?'

'It was because he was a Nazi that he got a job in the Ministry. Prior to 1933 he was working at the reception desk of the Kaiserhof. That was a hotel that Hitler used a great deal. Lothar knew most of the Nazi big-shots. Some of them came in with their girlfriends, and the word soon went round that if you needed to rent a room by the hour then Lothar – the one with the Party badge on the lapel of his coat – was the right clerk to see.'

'And for that he got a job in the Ministry of the Interior?'

'I don't know that that was the only reason, but he got the job. It wasn't, of course, the high-ranking post that Lothar now likes to remember. But he was there and he kept his ears open. And he closed his eyes to such things as Lisl hiding Werner's parents.'

'And are his stories true?'

'The stories are true. But Lothar is prone to change the cast so that the understudy plays leading man now and again.'

Henry studied me earnestly before deciding to laugh. 'Haw haw,' he said. 'This is the real Berlin. Gosh. The office wanted to put me into the Kempinski or that magnificent new Steigenberger Hotel but your friend Harrington told me to install myself in here. This is the real Berlin, he said. And, by gosh, he's right.'

'Mind if I pour myself a little more of that brandy?' I said.

'Oh, I say. Let me.' He poured me a generous measure while taking only a small tot for himself.

'And I guess you're here for some damned cloak-and-dagger job with Dicky?'

'Wrong twice,' I said. 'Dicky is safely tucked up in bed in London and I am only here to collect a bag of documents to carry back to London. It's a courier's job really, but we're short of people.'

'Damn,' said Henry. 'And I was persuading myself that the worried look on your brow all evening was you fretting about some poor devil out there cutting his way through the barbed wire, what?' He laughed and drank some brandy. From Lisl's room I heard one of her favourite records playing. It was scratchy and muffled.

… No one here can love and understand me,

Oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me…

'I'm sorry to disappoint you,' I said.

'Couldn't we compromise?' said Henry cheerfully. 'Couldn't you tell me that there is at least one James Bond johnny out there risking his neck among the Russkies?'

'There probably is,' I said. 'But no one has told me about him.'

'Haw haw,' said Henry, and drank some brandy. At first he'd been drinking very sparingly but now he abandoned some of that caution.

'Tell me what you're doing here,' I said.

'What am I doing here? Yes, what indeed. It's a long story, my dear chap.'

'Tell me anyway.' I looked at my watch. It was late. I wondered where Werner had phoned from. He was in a car with East German registration. That always made it more complicated; he wouldn't bring that car into the West. He'd planned to return through the Russian Zone and on to the autobahn that comes from Helmstedt. I'd never liked that method; the autobahns were regularly patrolled to prevent East Germans meeting West German transients at the roadside. I'd arranged for someone to be at the right place at the scheduled time this morning. Now I had no idea where he was, and I could do nothing to help him. Lisl's record started again.

Pack up all my cares and woe.

Here I go, singing low,

Bye-bye, blackbird…

'Do you have time to hear my boring life story?' said Henry. He chuckled. We both knew that Henry Tiptree was not the sort of man who confided his life story to anyone. Never complain, never explain, is the public-school canon.

'I have the time,' I said, 'and you have the brandy.'

'I thought you were going to say: I have the time if you have the inclination, as Big Ben said to the leaning tower of Pisa. What? Haw haw,'

'If you're working on something secret…' I said.

He waved away any such suggestion. His hand knocked against his glass and spilled some of his drink, so he poured more. 'My immediate boss is working on one of those interminable reports that will be called something like "Western Negotiating Policy and Soviet Military Power". He will have his name on the front and get promoted on the strength of it. I'm just the chap who, after doing all the legwork, will wind up with my name lost in a long list of acknowledgements.' This thought prompted him to drink more seriously.