It was a cold autumn evening with a clear sky and a full moon, and people were already wearing their warmest winter coats. I sat well away from the rest of my SS colleagues but I had a good view of all of them in the front row of seats and I confess I paid more attention to Mr and Mrs Heydrich and Mr and Mrs Frank than I did to the clowns and the animals.

I hadn’t seen Lina Heydrich before. She was handsome rather than beautiful. She wore black with a thick fur stole and a little black pillbox hat. Mrs Frank wore a wool overcoat with wide lapels and a brown fedora. The two wives sat beside each other and next to them sat their husbands, who were wearing civilian clothes, like everyone else in the SD and Gestapo who was at the circus that night. Frank wore a plain gaberdine coat with a white shirt and a patterned silk tie. Heydrich wore a thick double-breasted overcoat and held a black trilby on his lap. And he also wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that I’d never seen on him before.

Like anyone else, these four marvelled at the trapeze and laughed at the clowns and they appeared to enjoy themselves. Like anyone else. That was what struck me most of all. Out of uniform, Heydrich and Frank looked just like anyone else, although even as they sat there a security crackdown was already under way in the city. Later on, I learned that the mayor of Prague, Otokar Klapha, had been executed and on the very same day that Arianne was arrested. Hundreds of UVOD collaborators were being rounded up and buildings right across the city were covered with posters listing the names of many others sentenced to death. You wouldn’t have known any of that if you’d watched Heydrich at the circus, shaking with laughter as three clowns behaving like the sort of simpletons the Nazis would probably have murdered for reasons of racial purity fell off chairs and soaked each other with buckets full of water.

Two days later, Heydrich announced that the deportation of all the Jews in the Protectorate – some ninety thousand of them – was to begin at the end of the year. To where, he didn’t say. Nobody did. Me, I had a pretty good idea, but by then I was back in Berlin.

CHAPTER 15

It felt good to be in Berlin again. At least it felt good for an hour or two. Soon after arriving back at my apartment in Fasanenstrasse I discovered to my disappointment that the two Fridmann sisters from downstairs had been deported to some shithole in Poland. Behnke, the block warden, who knew these things, insisted that it was a nice town called Lodz and that they’d be happier there ‘living with their own’, instead of with ‘decent Germans’. I told him I had my doubts about this but Behnke didn’t want to hear them. He was more interested in learning Russian so that he would be able to speak to his peasants when eventually he met them. He really thought he was going to get some of that living space in Russia and the Ukraine that Goebbels was forever ranting about. I had my doubts about that, too.

It grew cold. Wind tore the leaves off the trees and hurried them east in their thousands. The water on the Spree looked like corrugated iron. The cold felt like barbed wire. There was one thing to be done before the snows arrived, a sentimental gesture that meant nothing to anyone I had ever met; but I suppose I wanted to feel better about myself. I organized the release of Geert Vranken’s remains from Berlin’s Charité Hospital and paid for them to be buried in a zinclined wooden crate – just in case, after the war, his family wanted to dig it up and take his remains home to the Netherlands.

There was one other person at the funeral: Werner Sachse from the Gestapo. With his black leather coat, his black hat and black tie, he looked like a proper mourner. The short service was conducted by the pastor of St John’s Church, in Plotzensee, and when it was over Sachse told me he admired the thought if not the practice.

‘Where would we be if policemen paid for every foreign worker who gets killed in an accident?’ he asked.

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I reminded him.

Sachse shrugged as if the correction I’d offered hardly mattered. The fact remained that the dead man wasn’t German and therefore his death was of little or no account.

For a moment I wondered if telling him why I was doing it was a mistake; and then I told him anyway.

‘I’m doing it so that somewhere, someone who isn’t German will have a better opinion of us than we deserve.’

Sachse pretended to be surprised about that, but before we parted we shook hands, so I knew he wasn’t.

CHAPTER 16