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I stood by the statue of Goethe and waited. After a while I heard a 109 quite low in the sky as it headed south-east toward the airfield at Tempelhof; and then another. For anyone who’d been in Russia, it was an instantly recognizable and reassuring sound, like an enormous but friendly lion yawning in an empty cave and quite different from the noise of the much slower RAF Whitleys that occasionally ploughed through Berlin skies like tractors of death and destruction.

‘Good evening,’ said the man walking toward me. ‘I’m Paul Dickson. The American from the Adlon.’

He hardly needed the introduction. His Old Spice and Virginia tobacco came ahead of him like a motorcycle outrider with a pennant on his mudguard. Solid footsteps bespoke sturdy wing-tip shoes that could have ferried him across the Delaware. The hand that pumped mine was part of a body that still consumed nutritious food. His sweet and minty breath smelled of real toothpaste and testified to his having access to a dentist with teeth in his head who was still a decade off retirement. And while it was dark I could almost feel his tan. As we exchanged cigarettes and conversational bromides, I wondered if the real reason Berliners disliked Americans was less to do with Roosevelt and his anti-German rhetoric and more to do with their better health, their better hair, their better clothes and their altogether better lives.

‘Willy said you’ve just come back from the front,’ he said, speaking German that was also better than I had expected.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Care to talk about it?’

‘Talking about it is about the only means of committing suicide for which I seem to have the nerve,’ I confessed.

‘I can assure you, sir, I am nothing to do with the Gestapo. If that’s what you’re implying. I dare say that’s exactly what someone who was a Gestapo informer would tell you. But to be quite frank with you there’s nothing they have that I want. Except perhaps a good story. I’d kill for a good story.’

‘Have you killed many?’

‘Frankly, I don’t see how I could have done. As soon as they know I’m an American most Berliners seem to want to hit me. They seem to hold me personally responsible for all the ships we’ve been giving to the British.’

‘Don’t worry; Berliners have never been interested in having a navy,’ I said. ‘That kind of thing matters more in Hamburg and Bremen. In Berlin, you can count yourself lucky that Roosevelt never gave the Tommies any beer or sausage, or you’d be dead by now.’ I pointed toward Potsdamer Platz. ‘Come on. Let’s walk.’

‘Sure,’ he said and followed me south out of the park. ‘Anywhere in particular?’

‘No. But I need a few minutes to address the ball, so to speak.’

‘Golfing man, huh?’

‘I used to play a bit. Before the Nazis. But it’s never really caught on since Hitler. It’s too easy to be bad at it, which is not something Nazis can deal with.’

‘I appreciate your talking to me like this.’

‘I haven’t told you anything yet. Right now I’m still wondering how much I can tell you without feeling like – what was his name? The traitor. Benedict—?’

‘Benedict Arnold?’

‘That’s right.’

We crossed Potsdamer onto Leipziger Platz.

‘I hope we’re not headed for the Press Club,’ said Dickson. ‘I’d feel like a bit of a fool if you took me in there to tell me your story.’ He pointed at a door on the other side of the square where several official-looking cars were parked. ‘I hear all kinds of bullshit in that place.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘Doctor Froehlich, the Propaganda Ministry’s liaison officer for the American media, he is always summoning us in there for special press conferences to announce yet another decisive victory for German forces against the Red Army. Him or one of those other doctors. Brauweiler or Dietrich. The doctors of deceit, that’s what we call them.’

‘Not forgetting the biggest deceiver of them all,’ I said. ‘Doctor Goebbels.’

Dickson laughed bitterly. ‘It’s got so bad that when my own doctor says there’s nothing wrong with me I just don’t believe him.’

‘You can believe him. You’re American. Provided you don’t do anything stupid, like declare war on Russia, most of you should live for ever.’

Dickson followed me across to Wertheim’s department store. In the moonlight you could see the huge map of the Soviet Union that occupied the main window, so that any patriotic German might look at it and follow the heroic progress of our brave armed forces. It wasn’t like there was anything else in the store to put in the window. When the place had been owned and run by Jews it had been the best store in Germany. Now it was little better than a warehouse, and an empty one at that. The shop assistants spent most of their time gossiping and ignoring the spectators – you could hardly call them customers – who wandered around the store in search of merchandise that simply wasn’t there. Even the elevators weren’t working.