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voluptuous curves only intensified his erection, even once they had disappeared under her chemise. He turned over on his back.
    ‘I’ll make breakfast,’ she said and left the room.
    He lay in bed thinking. Elisabeth Behnke was almost ten years older than him. Her husband had fallen at the Second Battle of the Aisne in 1917. Rath remembered, back in the summer of 1918, after they had completed their basic training and awaited the call to the front, how they had felt that they were entering the final days of their lives. In the delirium of that time a zest for life was borne out of the fear of death. Sweating bodies writhed in bed with women who had all been older by ten years or more. Most had been married, their husbands either fighting on the front or already fallen.
    Rath had just turned eighteen when he was called up by the Prussians and the draft had felt like a death sentence. He couldn’t help thinking about Anno. He couldn’t know that the war had entered its final year. His mother had cried, not wanting to lose another son. Her oldest had fallen during the first days of war. Anno the infallible, the eternal role model, but on this score Gereon had no desire to emulate him.
    At the garrison they had felt like prisoners awaiting execution, and then all of a sudden the war was over. Before they fired a single shot in anger news of the mutiny at Kiel spread through the ranks and soldiers’ councils were formed. As soon as it had become clear that no-one would arrest him as a deserter, Rath simply removed his uniform and went home to Cologne. Some of his comrades continued to play at war, joining the Freikorps as they crossed the country fighting communists. Private Gereon Rath listened to his father and joined the police. They too had given him a gun, as well as the desk that Anno Rath had occupied before the war.
    He banished the memories and gazed out of the window where the sun was shining: the first day of spring to merit the name.
     
    Rath’s hangover finally dissipated in the fresh air. He took a deep breath and dug out the sheet of paper Elisabeth Behnke had given him. Luisenufer. Alexej Ivanovitsch Kardakov’s new address was in Kreuzberg.
    The street name had endured down the ages. Only a few years before, the Luisenstadt Canal had flowed between Urbanhafen and the Spree. Now there were children playing in the massive expanse of sand that the city had used to fill the harbour basin. Their shouts and laughter filled the clear skies. After the endless winter, spring had finally arrived. Rath had hated the Berlin winter, ever since he had stepped off the long-distance train at Potsdamer station to be greeted by a flurry of snow and traffic at Potsdamer Platz. The cold was entrenched in the streets until well into April.
    His gaze wandered along the house façades to a pub, a hair salon, a dairy. He glanced at the sheet of paper again to check the number.
    Breakfast with Elisabeth Behnke hadn’t gone as badly as he’d feared. Neither of them breathed a word about what had happened, what could have happened, or what might have happened afterwards, but he had promised to take Kardakov to task over the outstanding final rent payment, over the junk in the cellar and the wardrobe.
    The house he was looking for was beside the dairy. A train rattled across the elevated railway at Wassertorplatz as he entered the main house. He checked the mailboxes, including out back, but couldn’t find the name Kardakov anywhere, or any name that sounded even vaguely Russian. He glanced again at the piece of paper. The address was correct, as was the house number.
    He checked the mailboxes of the two neighbouring houses, but there were no Russians there either. Had he gone to ground to avoid paying his rent? Perhaps he simply hadn’t changed the nameplate on the door. Rath went back to the first house. Before he could get there, the front door opened to reveal a face that was as surprised as it was mistrustful.
    ‘Looking