The Summons

First published in Australia by Random House Australia in 2006

ISBN 978-1-4657-3597-3

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1

EVEN IN THE HEART OF the city, the Royal Library seemed remote, an island of silence in the great noise and bustle, like a monastery or prison. If from the distance it resembled the bony cupola of an old skull, from up close the dome was clearly transparent, a vaulted eye gazing upon the city at work.

The library was in silence as Dr Paul Mobius came directly from the acquisitions counter, whose staff he had been bothering now for years. He climbed the stairs until he reached the uppermost tier, where he found his reflection in the black marble at his feet. His eyes sparkled in the reflected light, restoring to his face its old ceramic glimmer.

The twelve other scholars who shared the uppermost tier were the most diligent, and they needed to be – from the top floor the great sweep of Berlin lay beneath them. Beards of cloud approached the glass, polishing the dome before drifting away.

As though punching in his timecard, Mobius coughed to signal his return. None of the scholars acknowledged this strange call, although all had heard him. The men at their desks merely hunkered deeper into thought. From behind, each had that posture peculiar to the scholar; head bowed over deeply hunched shoulders. To Mobius they resembled grounded kites, able to fly only upon the wildest gusts of inspiration.

Mobius approached his desk, hidden by a dogleg left. It was then that he noticed Esser, the philologist, turning to make eye contact with him. Everybody knew that Esser was a police spy, tasked to monitor those who might be working on subjects unwholesome to the government. On several occasions, Mobius had arrived at his desk to find his notes in disarray, and his files in disorder. He had threatened to throw Esser down the stairs if he kept at it, and this appeared to have worked. One could never tell with a veteran, after all.

Yet there was Esser, pursing his lips towards Mobius’s desk. He immediately repeated the action, eyes enlarged to capitalise his meaning. Fearing that Esser was about to begin again, Mobius hurried past and turned the corner.

What he saw there stopped him in his tracks. Leaning over his desk, brazenly reading his notes, his back to Mobius, was a tall man in the black uniform of an SS officer.

Mobius paused with one foot raised, like a horse on parade. He didn’t know about the uniforms of the New Army and had no idea how senior this man might be. The runic symbols on the officer’s shoulders meant nothing to him. But looking closely, he began to suspect that the man’s posture wasn’t that of a soldier. He was tall, but as stooped as any scholar – and he was reading Latin. He seemed to be of a similar age to Mobius, in his late forties, if the ash-blond hair beneath the high black hat were anything to go by. Mobius watched the long fingers expertly restrain the pages of his notebook from rearing up and turning. This was a hand that Mobius vaguely recognised, except for the death’s-head ring on a delicate finger. The finger that now deftly flipped another page.

The officer turned slightly, and sniffed. Mobius gave an involuntary croak of horror.

‘Flade!’

‘My dear Mobius...I have found you.’

Mobius took a step back, as if to make way for the full force of the image of Flade, his oldest friend, reborn into the black chrysalis of the New Army. The same griping mouth, the same beak nose and smug eyes, clearly delighted by the impression he had made.

‘Mobius, you look awful. And I see your nerves haven’t improved.’

Mobius forgot himself and thrust out a hand. There was something about Flade’s voice when he spoke, simultaneously sharp with ridicule and heavy with reproach, wielded in the manner of a broadsword, merely one among his armoury of cutting edges.

‘After twenty years, you don’t look very pleased to see me!’

Mobius shrugged. ‘Of course I am! It’s just –’

‘I know, I’ve surprised and... interrupted you.’ Flade released Mobius’s hand and looked down to examine his own, as though Mobius’s touch might have stained him.

‘Flade, it’s just that . . . I’ve only gained access to these notes today.’

Flade smiled and closed his eyes in what was really a prolonged blink, his tactic whenever he wished to savour a secret knowledge.

‘You know?’ Mobius asked.

‘There are certain advantages to this...’ Flade touched the death’s-head ring on his finger and bowed slightly.

‘You had something to do with the notes?’

Flade bowed deeper and his eyes glinted with crystal tears, as they always did when he commended another, or gave another charity, or imagined himself good. It was almost as though a chilly current flowed there beneath the glaze of blue ice, punctured only by acts of redeeming kindness.

‘At your service.’

Mobius had been trying to convince the poet’s estate to release his notes and letters for over a year, without any success. That morning, the acquisitions librarian had handed him the first folio, without explanation, and couldn’t be pressed upon to reveal why the sudden change of heart. Since then, Mobius had been studying feverishly, afraid that his good fortune might be reversed.

‘However, I am surprised to find you amongst the minor poets of the seventeenth century. He was an influence on our Novalis, I suppose.’

‘He was, yes.’

‘Actually, makes perfect sense. Your approach to history was always rather literary...’

‘You are testing me, I see.’

‘I rather thought I was making conversation.’

‘As you are no doubt aware from your... inquiries, I have been out of the veterans’ home for ten years. My memory of the time before that is largely intact, so there is no need to condescend.’

Flade nodded appreciatively, reminded of where they had left off those twenty years ago – at the Alexanderplatz train station, minutes before Mobius was taken away to the front. How comical his friend had looked in the ill-fitting uniform, bent beneath a heavy rucksack, with the same look of weary impatience.

‘What exactly do you want from me?’

Flade didn’t get a chance to answer because, at that moment, Esser fell from his stepladder, behind the denuded shelves once dedicated to modernist literature. He scrambled to his feet and limped away, having learnt more about Mobius in the brief exchange than he had managed in a year of snooping.

Flade grimaced with disapproval. ‘You should be careful in this place. I happen to know that that man is a police spy. And he is not the only one.’ Flade held out his hand to Mobius. ‘As for your poet’s scribblings, good luck to you. I merely impressed upon his estate how important these documents were to the intellectual vitality of the Reich. Nothing more . . . Come, let me take them.’

Flade reached across and took the folio. He turned and laid it respectfully beside Mobius’s notebooks.

‘Let’s eat together. You look just as impoverished as you did when we were students.’

Flade examined his glass for smudges, and dabbed a toast at

Mobius.

‘Heil Hitler.’

‘Indeed,’ replied Mobius sarcastically.

A cruel smile spread across Flade’s face. The sound of the Fuhrer’s name always had this effect upon him, and particularly there in the Pasternak.

‘Here’s to our old haunt.’

Mobius grunted at the appropriateness of the word. He and Flade had indeed haunted the Pasternak when they were students at Humboldt. Flade had found the café and its inhabitants, Russian and Jewish émigrés in the main, colourful. The air was filled around the clock with veils of smoke, maudlin Eastern music and conspiratorial whispering. Flade had talked at length while eavesdropping on the conversations of the surrounding tables. He spoke Russian fluently, and was always eager for political gossip, no matter what the persuasion.

Although Flade considered himself a natural conservative, then as now, precisely because he was from money he could afford to be pragmatic. He had been taught that conservatism was a necessary rear-guard action that must remain as such, for the health of society in general. He had been taught this by his own father, an arch-conservative and absentee landlord, who had left the running of his affairs to others while legislating to protect his privileges from the margins. The only real difference then, Flade knew, between himself and the revolutionary malcontents who had plotted in the Pasternak over vodka and summer wine was that Flade looked to the Right rather than the Left, to the West rather than the East. As a historian, it was clear to him that whatever the machinery of control, whatever the nature of the body politic, self-interest and character saw to it that certain types of people would always succeed. Flade counted himself among this type, although the same couldn’t be said for his friend.

Flade regarded Mobius as an eternal Simplicius Simplicissimus, both a simpleton and a scholar, the former contributing, unusually to the latter. His type was all too common in general society, although rare in intellectual circles. Mobius’s ability to exist in a vacuum of devotion to his labour reminded Flade of the peasants where his family had their estate. If a cooper made a barrel for Flade’s father, it was as if the barrel was made not for his father but for the sake of the barrel itself. Contained in the barrel’s hoops and struts was something that could never be bought: the invisible signature of concentration and intent, and more – of love and craft, and love of craft. Despite the vagaries of fortune on which the small businesses depended, those strange but plucky people had about them the same pious single-mindedness as Mobius.

Flade knew no other scholar like Mobius. While the rest of their peers had struggled to make a career out of history, or had been diverted elsewhere by the grim and banal need to survive, Mobius had left a celebrated career to enlist as a private in a patriotic war, and, as a result, had lost his mind. Yet here he was, still at work, though lately unacknowledged and unknown. Flade’s admiration for Mobius was therefore personal, and so constituted, he felt, no doubt mistakenly, a sound enough basis for friendship.

‘Why is your uniform black?’ Mobius asked.

‘Black is the colour of death, of course.’

Flade grinned, and deliberately eyed Mobius’s punched-up brown suit, too short for him in the legs, as always. And those grimy boots.

‘You look like a strong-arm in a girdle.’

Flade raised his eyebrows and smiled. ‘I have always believed such considerations to be secondary to those of ambition.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Mobius scowled and drank another glass. The drinks were on Flade, and the absinthe was top shelf. He should, he realised too late as he consumed another, savour it before swilling it down. A drink with a bite but no bark was a rare treat, yet habit was stronger, and it was Mobius’s habit to pour his liquor under and past the tongue, so cheap was his usual schnapps. He watched Flade submerge the blazing sugar cube then guzzle expertly.

Mobius sneered. ‘One gets so tired of the taste of champagne.’

‘Indeed!’ Flade grinned and swallowed the contents of his glass. There was another reason why he had always sought out Mobius’s company when they were students, despite the bemusement of his better friends. It wasn’t only that he – the Mephisto of their relationship, who had introduced Mobius to all of the pleasures the city could afford – had always enjoyed goading the youthful Mobius with curious temptations. It was more that this wholly private man, of all the people he had ever known, was the only one who somehow saw through him, the widely admired charmer, the cocktail-party charismatic, with his effortless talent for creating exactly the right impression. Flade might enjoy every manner of stimulation, but, in Mobius’s eyes at least, his motivations began with something else altogether, and not something deep but something right there on the surface, like a rich man living on credit. It was a paradox how they complemented one another. Flade, who was rarely alone, who needed company, and particularly intimate company, was in fact selfish to his core, his charm merely a useful substitute for goodness, whereas Mobius, who was a loner, was by nature quite the opposite. Flade was therefore generous only towards Mobius, and Mobius, who would be grateful to any other, was unkindly dismissive of these gestures.

Flade poured Mobius another drink. If he had thrived of late, how pleasing it was that his friend had survived! Occasionally he had made an inquiry of a mutual acquaintance, but nobody knew anything. Mobius had disappeared.

He had reappeared a month ago as a person of special interest in the reports of a police informer at the Royal Library, discovered quite by accident. Tailed by an investigator, it was then found that Mobius hadn’t left the city in a decade. This was unusual because Mobius had always spent as much time in the field as possible. Mobius had lived for years in the Alpine communities, investigating witchcraft folklore, while also following in the footsteps of his vagabond hero and intellectual mentor, Johannes Kepler.

The incuriosity that had kept Mobius in a single place seemed curious indeed, until Flade realised that it was actually an incapacity, and that he had been damaged in the war and wasn’t fully well yet. The fire in the belly was still there, quite obviously, as determined by their exchange in the library, but the laughter in the eyes was missing. There was something unformed about the new Mobius, something of the cipher, which meant only that more was hidden from view. The desperation with which Mobius smoked and drank, his bitterness towards Flade’s success and every mention of the recent elections, these were natural responses to his being a veteran. So many had come back to find that they didn’t belong. But the handsome face with its strong jaw and broad cheekbones, its large nose and heavy brows, that reminded one of a bone mask, except for the thoughtful lips and eyes – this hadn’t been diminished by a natural attrition, rather the growth of some strange atmosphere borne of absence and silence. It gave Flade cause for hope, because absences and silences could at least be filled. He turned to the bar, elbow up and pointing to their glasses. The Frauerlin, a painted woman in her fifties, wheezed and scratched at a rash on her wrist.

‘You know, I don’t think she likes you.’

‘Quite. Although there was a time... She even looks familiar.’ Flade smirked like a wanton schoolboy. It was true that he had often bought himself a Frauerlin, or a cigarette girl, simply because he could. In fact, it was due to Flade and his pocket book that Mobius had lost his virginity, an example of his friend’s charity that Mobius would never be allowed to forget.

Flade had introduced Mobius to Hannah after much solicitation. Mobius had been suspicious, but his suspicions evaporated at his first sight of her. She was short and thin and her dark eyes were too close together, curious eyes that peered from above her nose like a child spying over a fence. Mobius desired her instantly. She was a Prenzlauerberg barmaid, a young girl with all the coquettish tools necessary to her survival in that area of the city, charms that were harmlessly transparent to all but Mobius. At that time, his lack of experience with the opposite sex meant that he was vulnerable to the clumsiest of charades, and therefore to a desire as emotional as it was physical. They sat together in the darkened cinema, her shoulder pressed to his, and every time she twitched in response to the film, Mobius fell deeper in love. She smelt somehow of milk, and the mints she chewed never quite overcame the bitter tang of coffee and cigarettes on her breath. The film was a popular vampire story, and towards the end, when the ghoul was active, she took to squeezing his arm at the biceps, and grunting and whimpering at the screen.

It was she who suggested they rent a room for the night, somewhere off the Kurfurstendamm. In the nicotine light of an ancient lantern she undressed them wordlessly and without eye contact, but gently, almost consolingly, as if she knew it was his first time. Her manner was maternal, although she was eighteen years old, the same age as Mobius. As she leant over to unbuckle his belt, her breasts fell against his face, and a creamy warmth rose from his groin to emerge as a moan of pleasure. He was amazed to find his body suddenly relaxed, as though he had been all his life a sail full of icy northern wind, becalmed now in tropical seas. She had begun her ministrations, and he his fumbling. The sensation as he entered a woman for the first time was a startling culmination of this new experience of heat: first the warmth of her in the cinema; then her lamplight fingers upon his body; now this impossible scald, tugging at him where they were joined. Or so he thought, until, without warning, there burst from him a new and immaculate heat. He realised only a minute had passed, it seemed like hours, and he covered her with kisses. She drew him into her arms and fell promptly asleep, snoring a little while he puzzled himself a place on her shoulder. Mobius closed his eyes but couldn’t sleep. He was eager again but his heart’s desire was stronger. It tossed and turned inside his chest, awoken out of its lifelong hibernation, drumming out a happily narcotic code that made him believe that there might exist within him a soul, a soul not individual in nature but one shared between two.

For once, Mobius gave himself over to immediate sensation, letting the orbiting impressions of warmth and desire align with the more precise observations of his immediate senses: her moon-coloured skin and dawn-blue eyelids, the wavelike rocking of her breath on his ear, her briny oil still warm on his stomach.

Mobius had felt love before, but that was like steam off a damp sock compared to this sudden combustion of feelings. Yes, this young woman was different. His newest organ, his soul, could tell. She was gentle and caring and affectionate. He believed that somehow she knew him, and her understanding of his need for sensual delicacy was all the evidence he desired. He allowed himself to drift towards sleep, as one who succumbs not to pleasure but to an absence of pain.

He awoke during the night, not knowing whether he had slept a little or a great deal. The lamp remained on his face, and his eyes suffered because of it. Hannah continued to sleep beside him in the shade he offered her. As the harsh light forced upon him a greater clarity, he began to notice dampness across his chest and arm. He touched himself with the cautious fingers of his free hand, and found himself wet. He tried to manoeuvre away from her, fearing a nosebleed or something more sinister, because where her breasts had previously been soft were now two unyielding lumps. He jerked his head upright, and in so doing, exposed her face to the light. Her eyelids quivered and then she too was awake, recognising immediately the quantity of milk she had issued over their bodies. She leapt to her feet and began to dress, whimpering and scolding herself. Then she was gone, without a backward glance, forever. He sat on the bed and smoked, shaking and dazed, half covered by the sheet she had flung at him.

Flade was still awake, as if expecting his call. But as soon as Mobius began to confess his love for Hannah, Flade interrupted. ‘My dear Mobius, you think too much for someone like her. She’s young; she wants to have fun, she wants to dance, to laugh, and besides...’

Mobius begged Flade to give him her address, confiding his intention to take her away to the coast, precisely for the purpose of fun, if Flade would lend him the money.

‘Mobius, I’m afraid that won’t be possible. You see, she is already married, to a policeman, and with children, too...I know, don’t interrupt, I know what she told you, whatever it was, was simply what you wanted to hear. And what you see in her is simply what you desire to see –’

Mobius hung up the earphone, not wishing for a lecture, not in that mock compassionate voice. He lit another cigarette and tried hard to concentrate upon the whorls of rising smoke, in an effort to clear his heart of panic; but no, his anxiety, like his cigarette, was a controlled fire set to burn itself out in the emptiness of the lobby. With the rest of Flade’s money, he caught a taxi home.

Mobius didn’t speak to anyone for a month. He remained alone in his room struggling mightily against self-pity and resentment, seeking to keep bitterness at bay. Above all, he realised, his heart must be kept open. If there was something fragile about him, something that made him different to the hateful Flade, then that fragility must be preserved. He had always felt a stranger in this world, and his separation from the others wasn’t so much a matter of the tongue but a distance in the eyes. He kept returning to the image of Hannah’s eyes, just before she had fallen asleep. He had sensed the distance then, it was his one intimation that his woozy love had been false and oblivious. She had been bought by Flade, a pet to caress and hold, and he had created her in his love’s own image.

Mobius drank heavily in an effort to understand the mystery of his premature love. He had the persistent suspicion that what to him was a mystery was to everyone else a matter of the so-called ‘facts of life’. He tried to quarantine his feelings and clear his mind but his thoughts were consumed with the memory of Hannah, her curious nose and clandestine smell. Eventually, it was his returning time and again to the same ground that made him realise he shouldn’t look upon the symptoms but upon the desire. He took to his books and began to read.

When a month of research and feverish writing had passed and he had understood his love, he emerged from his incarceration and began to walk. He walked all day and night, pausing only to rest his aching shins and heels, continuing along the canals and back streets and out into the minor suburbs, seeking to lose himself in observation and the rhythm of his feet. His voice had been whittled down by pain to an almost inaudible mumble. Fortunately for him, the barfrauen and wurst-sellers who operated under the noisy S-Bahn tracks were expert at lip-reading. Yet it was while eating a bratwurst bun on the street, paused amidst a pungent mustard rush, that the realisation occurred that was to make his name as a historian. The mustard cloud subsided as the clarity came upon him – that while thinking might generally be said to impair one’s perception of the real, to empathise with another required thinking of a wholly imaginative type. It took imagination, after all, to put oneself in another’s place. His problem with the policeman’s wife, whatever her real name was, had been the result of a surfeit of imagination, and therefore a surfeit of feeling for her, impeding his perception of the real. He had no reason to doubt that he had created her in his love’s own image. Empathy was a result of direct knowledge, or else the result of an imaginative act. It could not be any other way.

Mobius was able to resume his meandering, thinking as he walked, grateful that he had managed some further use of his heartbreak. Wasn’t this use, in any case, the real purpose of the life of the mind?

The problem was that the real and useful knowledge to be gained from reading history depended upon one’s ability to imagine oneself as another. What was useful in reading history was what Mobius craved above all else – a cultivation of understanding involving a contemporary, sideways perspective rather than the current walking-backwards-into-the-future approach.

It was then that Mobius bumped into Flade, who was on his way back from a gaming club and wearing the kind of smile suggesting he had won yet again. Because of what he had suffered, Mobius was immediately aroused to such a tirade of anger that he was cured of silence properly. Despite the fact that he had Flade to thank for his barely articulated discovery, however indirectly, for the first and last time Mobius insulted him, shaking him by the lapels there in the public street. Flade apologised unconditionally, for what he couldn’t remember but with an earnestness that further wore on Mobius’s anger and left him feeling foolish and exposed. Mobius let himself be led into the nearest bar, where he drank a tumbler of apfelschnapps and fell instantly asleep.

The new round of drinks came and Mobius allowed the liquid to drain over his tongue and down his throat. Flade was still watching the Frauerlin and flicking through the faces of all the girls seduced by his wallet – he would be at it some time. Mobius rubbed his finger around the rim of his glass, trying to summon a demon spirit to get him out of this. Flade always succeeded in making him feel worn out, poor and shabby. It didn’t matter that he looked worn out, poor and shabby; where he lived he didn’t seem out of place. Neither was it because he had learnt to wear his poverty as a badge of pride. He wasn’t an artist. It was of no consequence to Mobius if poverty was regarded as a vice by some and unmanly by others; it simply didn’t matter, not when he had his work to attend to.

This had always been the case, but especially since his release from the veterans’ home. The fragility of his nerves demanded exactly the type of quiet routine that his daily study provided. He was rebuilding himself from the ground up, and every calendar day was a brick in the foundation. This was a matter of doctor’s orders being best, as if he had a choice. It was being with Flade that was making him uneasy – he hadn’t thought about the policeman’s wife for many years, nor any of the other memories that Flade was deliberately trying to provoke. Flade was studiously and politely avoiding the war, yet how was he to know that precisely because it was the war that had broken his mind, Mobius’s memories from before that time were even more painful?

As though he had guessed, Flade was now talking heartily about Mobius’s ‘somewhat baroque style' as a student. Naturally, Mobius would have described it quite differently – more as an immunity to the necessity of presenting himself well. Flade continued reminiscing about the nightly ritual before Mobius and his friends ventured out, they circling him and removing his scarves, his gloves, tucking this in and pulling at that, opening this out and packing that away, taking their time while Mobius smiled grimly, allowing them their affectionate entertainment.

Far the greatest curse was Flade’s similar physique. Flade took pleasure in passing on to Mobius the many items he had worn once or not at all, suits he had ordered from Paris and London, or shirts and shoes from Italy that failed inspection. At the commencement of each season, Flade paraded his new costumes before Mobius, who swore at length how well he looked, only to have Flade smirk at his reflection and shake his head. Knowing that because of his pitiful stipend Mobius derived a considerable portion of his income from the selling-on of Flade’s rejected fashions, he then demanded of Mobius, as comic reward for his expense, that he now confront the mirror and prove to Flade that the fault lay in the cut and cloth, rather than in his own person. Flade could choose and choose wrongly, but he could never excuse displaying his mistakes. Without remorse, he aborted himself of his failed acquisitions, forcing them upon the hapless Mobius, who generally resembled a convict in a gentleman’s stolen clothes.

That Flade now wore the uniform of the New Army was evidence that he had tapped his way into some important vein of power. It was hard to believe that the pompous and eerily lewd man would ever be allowed to work for the State. It was clear in both Flade’s expression and history that he aspired to nothing other than self-enrichment.

‘Have you heard of Karl Maria Wiligut?’

Mobius awoke from his reverie to find Flade’s querulously raised nose, clearly asking a question he would have to answer himself.

‘He’s possibly the most influential historian in the country at the moment. They call him Himmler’s Rasputin.’

‘Never heard of him. What’s his field? Christ the German? The Plague and the Perfidious Jew?’

‘Not too far from the truth, I’m afraid. Apart from designing this ring...’ Flade showed Mobius the ring again, and this time Mobius couldn’t help noticing the badly drawn skull, exactly the kind boys create in their pirate fantasies. ‘He’s an Austrian, a retired and much decorated colonel, who claims to have been chosen by an ancient Aryan god to reinvigorate the spiritual life of the German people.’ Mobius laughed automatically, the same clipped laugh reserved for the bad-taste jokes that circulated nightly around the bar where he drank. But Flade wasn’t joking. ‘I’m afraid it’s true. And yes, there’s no need to say it.’

‘On the contrary...’

‘I would advise against that. He has great influence over Reichsfuhrer Himmler.’

Mobius shrugged. ‘That says a great deal about your superior officer but nothing about why you’ve brought me here. Flade, I appreciate the drinks... But after all these years?’

‘I’m getting to it. But I see you lack the patience, as ever...’

‘If you put yourself in my position –’

‘In your position I would be immensely curious, not to say... grateful.’

Mobius smiled bitterly, as one whose low opinion of people is constantly confirmed. It had been a matter of time, after all.

‘You do realise we’re headed for another war.’

Mobius sneered. ‘Come on. How long can this last? These people... your buffoonish friends!’

‘Precisely my point. That is why, not tomorrow, or even next year, but... There will be war.’

‘Rubbish.’ Mobius gave up and filled his glass. He was beginning to overheat. Talk of war always had this effect on him.

‘Don’t be a fool, Mobius. My point is this – for us scholars there will soon be certain opportunities. That is why I have been of late in Paris. That is why I have also been in Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, London ...even Moscow. What I am talking about is an intellectual lebensraum, an opening-up of the intellectual field. A wave is soon to break over Europe and we scholars should be at its forefront. I’m part of a Special Research Unit whose task is to document the crimes of the two confessions against German womanhood, under cover of the witchcraft persecutions. To this end, I have been cataloguing tens of thousands of texts in both private and public collections, on the personal order of Reichsfuhrer Himmler, so that once the war is underway there should be no loss of material.’

‘What kind of material?’

‘Material, for example, that coincides with your life’s labour. Kepler was a German, wasn’t he? Then why was your research stymied at every turn? Because all that you needed was in Milan, in London, in Paris and Prague.’

‘It was my fellow Germans who proved most unhelpful.’

‘Regardless, that too has already changed, and you have benefited. Correct?’

Mobius shrugged and topped up his glass. He could already feel the deep pulse in his ears, and his face was hot with blood.

‘Kepler’s mother and her aunt were witches, were they not?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Yes, I know how you feel about that.’

‘Diabolical witchcraft, as anyone who has looked at the matter in detail can tell you, and as you well know, is a crime that never happened.’

‘Perhaps, but it is my field, and the necessary . . . resources are being made available.’

‘So they wish to examine the atrocities perpetrated by those who resemble themselves, against those charged with imaginary crimes, and so learn more about what never was.’

‘There’s no need to raise your voice.’ Flade spoke through gritted teeth, and his knuckles were white around his glass. Not that it mattered. Every customer who had entered the bar in the previous half-hour had made sure to sit well away.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t wish to compromise your... project.’

‘Things are changing quickly, Mobius, and while you have managed, so far, to isolate yourself from the facts of life, that will soon be impossible.’ Flade closed his eyes, and in an effort to attain the appropriate gravitas even allowed himself a weary sigh. ‘Mobius, I came to you as a friend. The Special Research Unit I’m part of, our offices are on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Number eight.’

Mobius lit another of Flade’s cigarettes, the last in the packet. There was a growing unease in his chest that could only be stifled by smoke. He had drunk enough, and had reached that plateau where whatever happened next wouldn’t matter, not tonight at least, and yet there remained within him a strange anxiety. He was aware that Flade was offering him a deal of some kind, and felt sure that he would refuse it. Nevertheless, the uniform before him was so steeped in blackness, so magnificently and hideously black that it dominated both the room and the man within it. Mobius had always believed that evil existed in the world solely as an aspect of human agency, but now found himself frightened of a uniform, that most commonplace feature of Prussian life. It was almost as if the uniform were imbued with a purer and more powerful fear than his own, the one infecting the other, awakening a dormant recognition and anxiety.

‘Number eight is now the headquarters of the SS, the SD and the Gestapo.’

Flade waited for Mobius’s indignation to grow, and yet Mobius said nothing, appeared paralysed of speech, and was instead staring strangely at his sleeve.

‘Mobius! The nail that sticks out will get hammered back in. Homosexuals, the deformed, the unemployable, the criminal, the dissolute, the ...intellectual. All will be put to work, in camps or elsewhere. They mean to take a broom to this country and sweep it clean! I’m gathering a team of researchers together, and I can promise that you’ll be allowed to continue your studies in peace. Everything you need will be provided. All the fruits of the coming windfall will be brought to you. You will be safe.’

Mobius appeared dazed, and unable to reply. He stared intensely at Flade’s sleeve, which stretched now across the white tablecloth, vivid and shimmeringly black, foregrounding the open palm of the hand extended towards him, beseeching. The hand appeared to float there on the table, a hairless white spider turned upon its back, and quivering.

‘Mobius? I thought you’d be pleased. I’m trying to help you, after all. Mobius? Answer me!’

Mobius attempted to stand, pushing down upon the flimsy table, thrashing the legs of his chair. Glasses fell to the floor in a storm of cinder and ash. The white spider scuttled back into its sleeve. Mobius lumbered away, swimming through the crowd with rapid parting strokes.