He would have liked to say, ‘There are always two knives on Lufthansa, standard or business. Were they short of knives on Interfiug and Aeroflot?’ He had said, ‘Always so much better when you have breakfast inside you. Then you can face the world.’

They were so ignorant, these people, so lacking in sophistica tion. Ernst Raub had a friend in Cologne, Army but on attachment to BfV, who told him that when people like Krause had been inducted to the Bundeswehr Inner Leadership Academy they were so naive that they did not know how to use a bank, how to buy insurance, did not know how to choose a bottle of wine for dinner. In Cologne, over a beer and a barbecue with his family and his friend’s family, he used to shake with laughter when he was told how pathetic were these people.

He had leaned back in his seat, the aircraft was steady and cruising above the storm turbulence, closed his eyes. He had scratched at the sunburn on his face, but the peeling skin on his shoulders was worse, aggravated by the new shirt he wore. Two good weeks with his wife, the boys looked after by her parents, in the Seychelles… but fewer Germans there than when they had holidayed on the islands six years before, because too much money was leaking out of western Germany and into the swamp pit of eastern Germany, too much money going to these people who did not know how to work, and did not know how to use a different knife for their egg and for their roll and marmalade

· · · Ernst Raub could not criticize the man, must only sweeten him. Ernst Raub, sixteen years with the Office for the Protection of the State, had gone too many times into the buildings of the Bonn ministries to seal offices and desks, filing cabinets, computers and bank accounts, to lead away junior officials to the interrogation rooms, to recite the charge of espionage to a grey- faced, trembling wretch. He had heard, too many times, the sobbed and stuttered confessions and the names, too many times, of those who had compromised and ruined those junior officials, the wretches. It demeaned him to escort and mind Doktor Krause, but the man must be sweet-talked, the man was a nugget of gold.