‘What do the Brits want out of it?’ asked Ben Krupnic, the FBI representative at the far end of the table.

‘Their SIS people are interested in a guy on the coast named Stein and a German-born US citizen named Max Breslow. We’ve had to give them a hands-off undertaking for both. They’ve given us a hands-off undertaking on Kleiber.’

‘Sounds like a fair deal,’ said Krupnic.

‘Yeah,’ said the project chairman. ‘Sounds like a fair bargain. Let’s see if anyone sticks to it.’

The FBI man smiled. He wondered whether that caustic aside was directed at his own bureau.

Westlake Village was a habitat that exactly suited Max Breslow. It was far enough from the smog and noise of Los Angeles, and yet not so far that he could not be in Beverly Hills inside the hour. There was the lake and its sailing dinghies and the heated swimming pool which he shared with a few of his immediate neighbours. And if there was also a measure of pretension and pettiness, then it was no worse than he had known in such small towns in other parts of the world. And here there was the sunshine to compensate for everything.

Max Breslow sat by the pool, watching his daughter swim twenty lengths. She had the same sort of determination that he had found in himself at her age. Sometimes it frightened him to recognize that fixed expression on her face; he could see it now as she touched the edge of the pool and twisted back through the water with hardly a splash or a ripple to mark the place. She swam underwater for a long time. Max could do that when he was young; he remembered the discipline at Bad Tölz. The big new SS training establishment had only been open a few months. He remembered still the sour smell of damp cement mingled with that of the new paint. Day after day of boxing, rowing, running, jumping and swimming. Long days too; awake at four a.m. and falling into bed exhausted. It had been all right for the others-farm boys for the most part, who hardly dared believe that at the end of all this they were going to be able to return to their families and friends wearing the uniform of a German officer. Max sometimes wondered what had happened to them all; dead long since, he supposed. He remembered reading in one of the old comrades’ magazines that none of the men commissioned at the Junkerschule Bad Tölz in 1934 survived through 1942. Did anyone, Max wondered, really and truly regret the passing of the Third Reich? As much as he deplored the stupid self-indulgence of the young, he would not want to expose any of them to what he had gone through. Not even Billy Stein. Max Breslow paused for a moment-perhaps it was going too far to say not even Billy Stein; a few weeks at Bad Tölz might work wonders for that fellow.

‘Wake up, Papa!’

Breslow flinched as the cold water dropped on him, and he felt his daughter’s wet face and wet hair as she bent close and kissed him. ‘The water’s wonderful. How can you not swim?’

Breslow smiled and shook his head. He had left some toes behind in the snowy wastes outside Kharkov. It was ridiculous, but he was self-conscious about the deformity even in front of his own daughter. ‘They are building the sets in the workshops. I’m going downtown to inspect them at three p.m.’

‘I’m going to inspect them at three p.m.,’ she repeated in a funny nasal voice. ‘That all sounds very Teutonic, Papa.’

‘I have to maintain a schedule,’ he said, trying not to sound irritated, although in fact he was. ‘The cost of the workshop space is nothing compared with what we will be paying for studio time once the sets are erected there. I have to make sure they are exactly right.’

‘I read the script, you know.’ She rubbed her hair with a thick towel. ‘Have you found an actor to play the role of Hitler?’ She was very beautiful. Even allowing for his natural paternal pride, there was no denying that.

‘We have about three hundred to choose from,’ said Breslow. ‘Every agent in town seems to have someone he fancies for that part.’

‘It’s not much of a part, is it?’

‘It’s what the industry calls a “cameo”. Whoever plays Hitler will get press attention out of proportion to the importance of his role. All actors thrive on publicity; it could lead to something bigger.’

‘It’s all hokum, the Hitler sequence, isn’t it, Papa?’

‘We have to have some quick way to explain to the audience why all the treasures were taken and hidden in the Kaiseroda mine. The Hitler sequences were the quickest way to achieve this.’

‘And it will get a lot of press coverage,’ said Mary Breslow.

‘And it will get a lot of press coverage.’ They smiled at each other conspiratorially.

‘I’m going into the sauna now. Can I come with you to the workshops?’

‘I thought you weren’t interested in movies.’

She leant down and kissed his cheek. ‘I’m only interested in your movies, Papa,’ she said.

He smiled. He wanted to tell her not to bring Billy Stein, but it would only precipitate an exchange of feelings on a subject which, for the time being, he preferred to avoid. ‘I’d like to leave immediately after lunch.’

‘Yes, Papa,’ she said. In the Breslow house lunch was always served on the dot of one o’clock, and Max Breslow rose from the table at two whether he had finished his coffee or not. The Breslow women had got used to this by now. ‘At two p.m. precisely.’

The set was bigger than Max Breslow expected. He knew that art directors always sketch the human figures out of scale, when they prepare glamorized pastel renderings of their ideas. But this time the reality was even more overwhelming than the perspective drawings had suggested.

Max Breslow stood for a long time without speaking. The workshop was very high; in spite of the big lamps, its ceiling was lost in the darkness. There was a smell of freshly sawn wood, an aroma which took Breslow back to his family’s holiday home in the Eifel. As a small boy he had gone out to watch the foresters felling the huge trees and cutting them into segments. Now he smelt it once more. And here in the studio there was also that acrid smell of fast-drying paint and plastic glues. ‘Can you put the fans on?’ Breslow called. There was a distant rumbling and then the air-conditioning began to clatter. Max Breslow tilted back, his head and tried to see to where the top of the newly built sets disappeared in the darkness, ‘They are big,’ said Breslow. ‘Very big.’

‘You’ve got a lot of height in that studio,’ the art director explained. ‘I talked to the director and he wants to use a big crane and start with a shot that majors on one of those Nazi eagles up there, and then pans round to Hitler’s desk.’

‘The conference shot,’ said Max Breslow. ‘Yes, the conference shot,’ said the art director. ‘Hitler and all his generals crowded round his desk looking at maps. We have built the set with four walls like this so that he can shoot the reverses in any way he wants. The two end walls float, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Max Breslow, although he was not quite sure whether floating a wall was to move it, open it for a camera trolley or dismantle it quickly.

‘It’s quite a place,’ said Breslow’s daughter from the other end of the set. Her voice echoed in the rafters.

‘You’ll have more space than this in the studio,’ said the art director. ‘They’re a bit close together here in the workshop for ease of building.’

‘Was Hitler’s Chancellery really like this?’ called Mary Breslow.

Max Breslow did not answer. Eventually the art director said, ‘We are working from photos of the real thing, Miss Breslow.’ He turned back to her father. ‘There’s all the set dressing to be done yet. This is just the bare essentials, but I think it works OK.’ The art director couldn’t conceal his pride.

Max Breslow walked across to the wall and rapped his knuckles against the marble. It made the unmistakable sound of hollow plastic. The art director smiled. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? You wait until you see the polystyrene bust of Hitler, and the plastic floor. When we put the sound track on the film, so that you hear metal studs striking marble as the actors march about, no one will guess this wasn’t the real place.’