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expensive.’ I frowned. ‘What I mean to say is, I doubt there are many people in here who get fresh flowers from Hübner’s. In here or anywhere else for that matter.’
    Dobberke shrugged. ‘His family must have sent them. The Jews still have plenty of money hidden under their mattresses. Everyone knows that. I was out East, in Riga, and you should have seen what these bastards had in their underwear. Gold, silver, diamonds, you name it.’
    I smiled patiently, avoiding the obvious question of exactly how it was that Dobberke came to be looking for valuables in someone else’s underwear.
    ‘Meyer’s family were Germans,’ I said. ‘And besides, they’re all dead. Killed by the same bomb that gave him the centre parting in his hair. No, it must have been someone else who sent these flowers. Someone German, someone with money and taste. Someone who only has the best.’
    ‘Well, he’s not saying who they’re from,’ observed Dobberke.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s not saying anything, is he? Doctor Lustig was right about that, at least.’
    ‘I could look into it if you thought it was important. Perhaps one of the nurses could tell you who sent them.’
    ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Forget about it. It’s an old habit of mine, being a detective. Some people collect stamps, others like postcards or autographs; me I collect trivial questions. Why this, why that? Of course any fool can start a collection like that, and it goes without saying that it’s the answers to the questions that are really valuable, because the answers are a lot harder to track down.’
    I took another long hard look at Franz Meyer and realized it could just as easily have been me lying in that bed with half a head, and for the first time in a long time I suppose I felt lucky. I don’t know what else you call it when an RAF bomb kills four, maims one, and leaves you with nothing more than a bump on the head. But just the idea of me beinglucky again made me smile. Perhaps I’d turned some sort of a corner in my life. It was that and maybe also the apparent success of the women’s protest in Rosenstrasse and the other good luck I’d had not to have been part of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad.
    ‘What’s amusing?’ asked Dobberke.
    I shook my head. ‘I was just thinking that the important thing in life – the really important thing after all is said and done – is just to stay alive.’
    ‘Is that one of the answers?’ asked Dobberke.
    I nodded. ‘I think perhaps it’s the most important answer of all, wouldn’t you say?’

CHAPTER 4
    Monday, March 8th 1943
    It was a twelve-minute walk to work, depending on the weather. When it was cold, the streets froze hard and you had to walk slowly or risk a broken arm. When it thawed, you only had to beware of falling icicles. By the end of March it was still very cold at night but getting warmer during the day, and at last I felt able to remove the layers of newspaper that had helped to insulate the inside of my boots against a freezing Berlin winter. That made walking easier, too.
    The Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) was housed in perhaps the largest office complex in Berlin: a five-storey building of grey granite on the north side of the Landwehr Canal, it occupied the whole corner of Bendlerstrasse and Tirpitzufer. Formerly the headquarters of the Imperial German Navy, it was better known as the Bendlerblock. The Bureau’s offices, at Blumeshof 17, looked onto the back of this building and a rose garden that, in summer, filled the air with such a strong smell of roses some of us who worked there called it the flower house. In my office under the eaves of the high red saddle roof, I had a desk, a filing cabinet, a rug on the wooden floor, and an armchair – I even had a painting anda little piece of bronze from the government’s own collection of art. I did not have a portrait of the leader. Few people who worked at the OKW did.
    Usually I got to work early and stayed late, but this