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Rosen.’
    ‘If the producer chooses to turn up,’ smiled Clara, deprecatingly.
    ‘You speak excellent German for an Englishwoman.’
    ‘My late mother was German. She came from Hamburg.’
    His eyebrows rose in polite surprise. ‘So your father?’
    ‘He’s English. He’s a politician.’
    Clara saw a flicker of interest cross his face.
    ‘Not Sir Ronald Vine?’
    ‘You’ve heard of him?’
    ‘But of course.’
    From across the lobby, the voice of Dr Goebbels rose. ‘The German film has reached the point where it must fulfil its duty to the nation. It must exercise international influence and become a spiritual world power.’
    He seemed likely to go on for some time.
    In a low voice Müller interrupted. ‘I’m afraid, ladies, we have business to get on with. But I wonder whether you two would care to join us this evening. For a drink at the Kaiserhof. Shall we say seven o’clock?’
    Clara was about to refuse politely. Everything she knew about National Socialists suggested they were not the kind of people to sip cocktails with. Besides, in England you would never accept an invitation from a man to whom you had not properly been introduced, even if he did profess to know your father. But before she could say anything Helga had spoken up.
    ‘We’d love to!’

Chapter Four
    He liked it here. Most of his colleagues had places out in the west of the city, comfortable villas in Dahlem or Wilmersdorf, where they could shield themselves behind high walls from the turbulence around them. But Leo Quinn had looked east and found a place in Oranienburger Strasse, on the top floor of an apartment block. It was only ten minutes’ walk from Unter den Linden, but its proximity to the poorer districts, where the tenements housed families of Jews and immigrants from the east, made it an unusual choice for an employee of His Majesty’s Foreign Office. Day and night there was the smell of frying and the sound of arguments. The back alleys were cobwebbed with clothes lines and the balconies hung with sheets like flags of surrender. Though his street might not be smart, the shabbiness suited the sombre buildings with their subdued stucco and nineteenth-century stolidity. You passed through an arched gateway into a dark, cobbled courtyard where the odd stray cat lurked, probably someone’s pet in better times, and then you walked up three flights of dim stairway to find a room that was big enough only for that same cat to be swung, were it not for the piles of books that stood around the single bed and armchair. There was nowhere to cook, but Leo took his breakfast and supper in the café next door, a place of faded, high-ceilinged splendour. Breakfast was always the same, a roll and coffee, and supper tended towards the unimaginative too: pork of some description, and dumplings, best not described. But the portions were hearty, the waitress was friendly and the café, especially in the bitter winter months, much warmer than his apartment, with its cracked gas fire.
    The saving grace of his room, and the part that allowed his landlady to charge a few marks more a week, was that its tall windows looked out onto the street rather than the dank courtyard, so that in the afternoon the room was saturated with a flood of golden light that lit up every dusty corner. When he returned from work Leo would put a record on his gramophone, smoke one of his Salem Aleikum Turkish cigarettes, look out on the broad street lined with plane trees, and think it was possible to feel at peace. Almost.
    He knew barely anyone here. His neighbours were mostly Jewish, due to the proximity of the grand New Synagogue along the street, a russet brick building with Moorish towers and a fretted golden dome. This gloriously exotic building was flanked on each side by leaden-faced apartment blocks like stolid German sentries in field grey. It was the largest synagogue in Berlin and seated three thousand people in a hall the size of a football pitch,