'With important people on it?'

'Yes, I think. She-'

'Or just one important person?'

'No.' He looked up at me. There was no name mentioned.'

'Did she talk about a day operation, a night operation, the weather conditions -'

'I don't remember -'

'The plane's destination, the distance involved?'

'I don't remember,' shaking his head all the time.

'She talk about warning a particular airline, a particular nation?'

'America. An American airline.'

I gave it another ten minutes, another twenty or thirty questions, and got a little bit more but not much: this was Dieter Klaus' personal pride and joy, something he'd set his heart on, he had a lot of rage in him because they'd been making so many arrests within the Faktion, he needed a really important coup to re-establish the group as a major organisation, things like that.

Willi got himself another schnapps and put it away in one go. 'I'm glad,' he said in a moment, I'm very glad you obliged me to tell you about this, about Nemesis, and what they want to do. Perhaps you can stop them. That would be good. Very good.'

'There's a chance.'

A girl came through the velvet curtains and dropped a short black whip onto one of the little tables and laughed to someone, another girl at the bar, her lipstick bright and her teeth flashing. The man hadn't followed her out, the man who'd gone in there with her.

Then Helen said, 'I think I'd like a drink now, Willi.'

'Of course.'

'Cognac.' She pulled her coat closer as Willi looked round for the waitress. 'Did George know all this, about Nemesis? Did you tell him?'

She'd been listening more than I'd thought.

'Yes. I told him.' Tilting his head, 'If I had known…'

'If we all knew the future, Willi. Don't have it on your mind.' She turned to look at me. 'Do you think you'll be able to do something to stop this awful thing from happening?'

'It'll be a question of how much time we've got.'

'And it's so very difficult,' Willi said. 'I telephoned all the major US airlines, do you know that? But they all said the same thing – thank you very much, we'll certainly take this seriously, but we get these threats every day, and we're operating with the best security we can.'

'Was mochten Sie trinken, darling?'

Willi looked at me, but I shook my head.

'EinCognac.'

When the girl had gone, Helen said, They had people watching my house, do you know that, Willi? It's not only you.'

'Then you must be careful.'

'Yes. And Victor's looking after me.'

'He came from East Germany,' Willi said, I've just remembered. Dieter Klaus. He came across just after unification. He's a rabid communist, of course.'

'Then he would have trained there.' It wasn't anything new. When the East German secret police had started to do their laundry it had brought a whole army of villains into the open and running for cover.

'Cognac schwenker.'

'Danke.'

Helen cupped her hands round the balloon glass.

'Do you think he killed George, this man Dieter Klaus? I mean personally?'

'Does it make any difference?' Willi said. 'Maybe we shouldn't be morbid.'

'It'd be interesting to know,' she said, 'that's all.' I think she shivered, under the thick coat.

I gave her time to finish the cognac.

'Willi,' I said, 'can I do this?'

'No, thank you.' He got the girl over. 'We are going?'

'Yes. And I need your address.' He hesitated, and I said, 'They know it already. You're not giving anything away. And where do I find Inge?'

'She's moved. She's met someone else, and she lives with him. I don't know where.'

I let it go. Perhaps he was trying to protect her, from a belated sense of chivalry. 'I'd find her anyway.

'Willi, we're going to leave here first, Helen and I. Then you wait five minutes and go outside and get a taxi. You'll be perfectly safe. Go and buy a toothbrush at an all-night pharmacy and then book in at one of the big hotels, make it the Ambassador or the Kempinski, take a room on the top floor and use room-service for whatever you need.' I wrote a number for him on the back of his receipt. 'Call this number at ten tomorrow morning; be as punctual as you can. By that time I'll have arranged for you to go and take whatever you need from your flat. No one from the Rote Armee Faktion will see you there – no one, do you understand?'

There was fear in his eyes but he said, 'Very well.'

'Then do the other things I told you about, give the security guard a very good tip, then go and hole up somewhere quiet.'

'For how long?'

'I can't tell you. Phone the security guard every week, in case I've left a message for you. And watch the newspapers. Now wait here for five minutes, and trust me: there'll be no trouble.'

The rain had almost stopped when Helen and I went out to the street, and the air was cool and fresh after the smoke we'd been breathing. We walked half a block and crossed the street and came back on the far side and I saw Willi come out of Die Zwanziger and flag a taxi down and there was no one behind him when it drove away. Then I found one for ourselves.

'Hotel Steglitz.'

'Jawohl.'

She sat close to me again, Helen, huddled in her coat, the scent of the cognac on her breath. 'Poor Willi,' she said. 'I think he feels responsible for what happened to George.'

We turned into Birkbuschstrasse. The wet streets shimmered under the lights. 'I think George was going to hell in his own handcart anyway, wasn't he?'

'That could be. He wanted so desperately to make an impression, on himself more than other people.

He was quite a short man, did you know? Almost as short as Willi, but not quite. I think that was partly why he liked him – in Willi's company he looked a little taller, or thought he did.' I felt her shiver against me. 'It's suddenly begun to hit me, all this. In England the shock was distanced for me, but now I'm back here it's come into sort of close focus. And there's this terrible thing about what they're planning to do, those people.'

Along Sedan-strasse the leaves were spilled across the pavement from the park, yellow and red and gold in the lamplight. I didn't say anything. I didn't think she wanted me to. I had something to ask her but it could wait.

'I have a friend,' she said, 'who lost her husband in the Lockerbie crash. I mean they loved each other; he wasn't just her husband. She cried for days. It was all that stuff in the papers, all the beastly details they love to put in, bodies strewn all over the place. She still doesn't read a paper; she cancelled it.' In a moment, 'Is there something you can do to stop those people?'

She'd asked me that before. I said I could only try. And then I asked her, Who was the man in the night-club?'

I was watching her reflection in the glass of the division. She looked at me and then away. 'What man?'

'The one you recognised. The one who recognised you.'

'Oh,' with a soft laugh. She hadn't hesitated, or at least not for very long. 'It was rather embarrassing. He was just someone I knew, a friend of George's at the embassy. I met him a few times at parties.'

A BMW cut across our bows, swung in too soon, and our driver got the window down and shouted something, Schweinehundt, I think. 'What is his name?'

Helen turned her head against my shoulder. 'Kurt He's -'

'What's his surname?'

'Oh. Muller, I think. I'm not sure. I mean it was embarrassing because neither of us expected to see the other one in a place like that.'

I let it go. We'd come away absolutely clean from the night-club. The taxi turned east along Steglitzer Damm and I said, 'You'll be home by this time tomorrow, and you can leave Berlin behind.'

In a moment she said, 'You still don't want me to see Gerda, or any of my friends?'