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blue valleys,’ the Legionnaire said and piously bowed his head to the southeast.
    ‘Money can buy any amount of female meat,’ Bauer said.
    ‘Money can buy a whorehouse,’ Tiny said. With his glance he undressed a girl preening herself on a tall bar stool.
    ‘Money will admit you to Aunt Dora’s.’ I laughed and blew her a kiss.
    ‘And allow you to get cuckoo on stuff you can get nowhere else in the Third Reich,’ Stein grinned. He flushed down a large glass of gin and ordered a refill.
    ‘You’re a herd of dirty pigs,’ Aunt Dora insisted, ‘but as long as you can pay you’re welcome in Wind Force 11.’
    We had plenty of money. We had been away at the front for very long. Most of us had a knack for business and knew how to procure merchandise. The black market in Hamburg was the best in the world, the little Legionnaire declared. Anything could be bought and sold there, even a corpse.
    The light in Aunt Dora’s saloon was red, very soft. There was a law against dancing, in force now for almost three years. But at Aunt Dora’s they danced anyway. The police and their stooges came around frequently, but Aunt Dora, a demon in petticoats, said: ‘The best way to keep your friends is to know something about them.’ And she always managed to find out something about them, enough to make them close their eyes to anything unlawful in Wind Force 11. In the reports on public sentiment filed at the Secret Police, Wind Force 11 figured as a nice place with a regular clientele and without political significance.
    In Wind Force 11 more rules and regulations were broken than anywhere else. Ladies would come there to experience the forbidden, though at the last minute they might chicken out. Other people would come there to get drunk and then shoot themselves – or they’d get their throats cut and be thrown into the Elbe. By and by they would be hauled in with a boathook by a revenue vessel at Landungsbrücke.
    A girl in a knee-length dress asked the Legionnaire for a dance. He didn’t even bother to look at her. He sipped his vodka and took a long drag at his cigarette, then slowly let out the smoke through his nose.
    ‘Would you like to dance, little one?’ the girl asked a second time. With greedy glances she surveyed the stringy figure with the brutal face, its long knife-wound gleaming fiery red.
    ‘Go to hell,’ the Legionnaire snarled through the corner of his mouth.
    The girl exploded. She was terribly offended. A lanky young fellow came sliding up to the Legionnaire’s stool. He reached out for the throat of the little soldier, but in the next instant he found himself on the floor. A kick in the face and a murderous blow at the larynx. Then quiet once more. The Legionnaire sat down again and ordered another vodka. Aunt Dora gave a sign to the doorman, a big Belgian. He grabbed the lifeless figure like a big bag of flour and chucked him through a doorway. From there others continued the transport to some place sufficiently distant from Wind Force 11.
    The girl was soundly whipped in a little room behind the kitchen. She didn’t cry. A soiled quilt covered up her head, as with so many other women who’d been brutally punished in that room behind the kitchen. The quilt choked her cry. The person in charge of this business was Aunt Dora’s right-hand man, a former pimp. He had placed the girl on a table specially made for the purpose. He beat her with a short Cossack whip he’d bought a long time ago from an SS man who had two of them to sell. Ewald, Aunt Dora’s executioner, bought one, a police detective the second. The detective thought it might help get confessions.
    In all other respects this criminal detective had been very correct in his work. But he didn’t produce enough confessions. Among themselves his superiors had a kind of saying, that he would profit greatly from a trip to Russia. That was the reason he bought the Cossack whip. He immediately became a police sergeant; some said he even