He  sighed  and put down the paper distastefully.
    'This time, everybody's going to  fight.  The 
point is,  what can I do  about it?'  
   What he really meant was,  'What  can  I do to 
get out of it?'
   'I  think there's going to be a war this time,  
Herr Schulz,'  his  landlady said as she put down 
his morning cup of ersatz coffee,  'and personal-
ly, I would welcome it. It will clear the air.'
   'It will certainly do  that,'  Schulz  agreed, 
picking up the paper once more and turning to the  
situations-vacant  column. 'It may clear a lot of 
other things too.'
   'It's what we've all been  waiting  for,'  she 
went on, 'and to tell you the truth, I'll be glad 
to get it over with.  It's  like that operation I 
had done last year.  It wasn't nearly as bad hav-
ing it done as thinking about it.'
   Schulz  tried  not  to  think  about  it.  The 
thought of Frau Nusbaum's  hysterectomy  held  no 
pleasure for him,  but it seemed to give her end-
less satisfaction, for she went on:
   '"Now, don't worry, Frau Nusbaum,"  that young 
doctor said,  "I'm  removing  the nursery not the
playroom."' She smiled coyly at Schulz whose eyes 
flicked dutifully up over the top of  his  paper. 
'Herr Nusbaum would have approved of  that.  Herr 
Nusbaum had such a sense of humour.  He was quite  
noted for it. What a pity you never met him.'
   Schulz smiled  weakly.  Herr  Nusbaum's  image 
stood on the mantelpiece.  If  the  eyes had ever 
twinkled they didn't now.
   'Playroom!'  She  laughed what she imagined to 
be her high,  tinkling laugh and no doubt thought  
of as the sound of a thousand tiny silver  bells. 
'Playroom. What a thing to say!'
   'Anyway,' said Schulz dutifully. 'I'm sure you 
feel better for it.'
   'Well, of course, I do,' Frau Nusbaum replied. 
'Wouldn't you?  And anyway,' she added,  'it does 
remove a lot of problems.  After  all, even at my 
age - well, you never can tell.'
   Schulz said nothing.  He  couldn't  afford  to 
offend Frau Nusbaum.  Times  had  been  difficult 
since he had come out of  prison.  His  room  was 
very cheap and comfortable  and there were little 
things on the side that he appreciated.
   One of the little things on the side  that  he 
did not appreciate was  Frau  Nusbaum's  playroom
which he felt obliged  to  enter  every  Saturday 
night. It was excessively roomy. He felt that his 
presence  went  unnoticed and that vast barn of a 
place would have  accommodated  Herr  Nusbaum  as 
well without seeming overcrowded.  If  the  truth 
were known,  he  would  have  preferred the small 
attic room at the back,  but when he once tentat-
ively approached her on this subject she had been 
shocked and replied, firmly,  that  that  had be-
longed exclusively to Herr Nusbaum  and she could 
not think of its use by a mere guest.
   Fortunately, he was expected in only on Satur-
day nights after they had both  consumed  several 
bottles of dark brown  beer,  purchased  by  Frau 
Nusbaum as her small treat:  a  ritual,  she  ex-
plained,  initiated  by her husband which she was 
now happy to carry  on  with  Herr  Schulz.  What 
pleasure  she  derived from those little Saturday 
night escapades Schulz couldn't  imagine.  If  it 
meant so little to him what  on  earth  could  it 
mean to her?
   Yet as each  Saturday  night  approached,  her 
eyes sparkled more brightly, the laughter tinkled 
more bells, her soft, quivering flesh would some-
how contrive to brush against him  as they passed 
on the stairs or in  the  kitchen,  and  by  four 
o'clock on a Saturday afternoon she was locked in 
the bathroom singing gaily  and  splashing  water 
and he knew in his sinking heart that  the  play-
room was being thoroughly done out again.
   'And what will you do  when  war  breaks  out, 
Herr Schulz? You're not too old to fight.'
   Schulz had been thinking much the same. He had 
escaped the carnage of the first insanity by  the 
skin of his milk teeth and was hoping to  do  the 
same with the second.  But  it  was now touch and 
go.  He was thirty, and while he knew he wouldn't 
be the first to go,  if  it  lasted  long enough, 
which he was  certain it  would,  the  war  would 
catch up with him.
   'I'm ready to do whatever the country  and the 
Führer require of  me,'  he  said  imperturbably,  
reciting  the standard formula  of  the  sane  in 
these circumstances.
   'I'm glad to see you're not one of those rush-
ing for reserved occupations,' Frau  Nusbaum  ob-
served.  'We  had a lot of those in the last war,  
though Jews mainly,  and a very hard time we gave 
them, I can tell you.  I  simply  cannot be doing 
with people who use every trick  to  dodge  their 
duty to the government.'
   'But wasn't it  the  government  who  reserved 
them for essential work?'
   'Well,  that  may  be,'  replied Frau Nusbaum,
'but that doesn't  make  it  any  better.  A  man 
should be prepared to fight for his country what-
ever the government says, just as a woman is pre-
pared to bear children. Will you join up straight 
away?'
   'I think,' said Schulz,  'we must avoid clogg-
ing up the machinery.  Too  many people of my age 
rushing to join the  army  would  create  bottle-
necks, you know.'  He lifted his head aggressive-
ly.  'We  have  a patriotic duty to avoid bottle-
necks in time of war.'
   'That's  true,'  she  agreed, impressed at his 
stirring rhetoric.  'Still, I suppose it won't be 
long before you receive the call.  Mind you, Herr  
Schulz, I should miss you. The playroom will seem 
- empty.'
   Impulsively,  she stretched out a plump little 
hand and covered his.  The  jellied touch of that 
soft white flesh produced, as always,  an intense 
urge to tear himself away, which,  as always,  he 
resisted. It was not entirely out of  self-inter-
est.  He  hated to wound  anyone's feelings, even 
Frau Nusbaum's.  So, instead, he patted the jelly 
with his free hand and gently slid his other hand 
from beneath hers.
   'Ah, well,'  she sighed,  'perhaps it will all 
be over in a few weeks and you won't need to go.'
   Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't, but I can't 
afford to take chances, Schulz thought.
   Frau Nusbaum rose to get on with  her  morning 
work while Schulz quickly scanned the  situations 
vacant.  Some situations were clearly going to be 
reserved; they always were.  What was certain was  
that selling ladies' underwear would merit  scant 
consideration.

sequence of lunatic events that came after.  They 
were not the first  to  suggest  to  Schulz  that 
there were several screws loose in the collective 
human head.  He  laughed out loud when he thought 
of them.
   That great cataclysm had ended with 50 million 
dead  and  the victors had promptly demanded that 
Germany pay for the war damage.  This  was called 
reparations. Germany's economy, however, had been 
smashed to smithereens.  How  could  it  make war 
reparations when it  had  nothing  to  make  them 
with?
   Solemnly, the victors provided the losers with 
money to restart their economy and pay the repar-
ations.  The losers then worked very  hard to pay 
off this immense debt.  Millions of tons of goods 
began flowing out of the  country and the victors 
were delighted.  But not for long.
   The German workers,  who had been paid to make  
them, now had virtually  no  goods  left  in  the 
country to spend their wages on.  Naturally,  the 
price of what was left began to rise and went  on 
rising until  their money brought nothing at all.  
The value of the mark was annihilated.  Once more 
the economy lay shattered,  and  victor and loser 
gaped at each  other  across  the  ruins  brought 
about in the great inflation of 1923.
   The victors began again.  They lent the losers 
more money, this time to stabilize the  mark  and  
get the economy going again in order to send more 
goods to the victors to  pay not only for the war 
damage but also, now, for  the  further huge sums 
of money that they had lent the losers to stabil-
ize the mark.  It was insane,  but not yet as in-
sane as what was to follow.
   The losers restarted their economy once  more,  
but as soon as the goods began  flowing  off  the 
assembly lines and on to the ships bound for  the 
ports of their victors, the victors began to com-
plain bitterly  that  these  goods  were  hurting 
their economies by depressing their home  markets 
and creating unemployment.
   Many conferences were  called  to  solve  this 
problem but by the time the  victors  had  worked 
out how best to  receive  these  goods  with  the 
smallest damage to themselves, everyone was prod-
ucing so many goods that the victors decided they 
were better off without them.  This,  of  course,  
threw even more people out of  work,  not only in 
Germany but everywhere  else.  When  the  victors 
finally admitted defeat and decided that the los-
ers need pay no more war reparations,  the losers 
complained bitterly about it, adding one more in-
justice to their collection.

it properly, he had entered a university on leav-
ing school and acquired a sound knowledge of fin-
ance, though he was compelled to leave after  two 
years through lack of it.
   The years that followed were  very   hard  for 
Schulz, as they were for  millions of others.  He 
had had no proper training but  by  the  time  he 
went to prison for the first time in 1931, he had 
gained a qualification that would impress  Unter-
meyer and Beck and which was eventually  to  pre-
cipitate him into the most amazing events of  his 
life.
   He had acquired this knowledge by an  accident 
of birth and through an exceptionally  good  ear. 
His grandmother had been English, a governess who 
had settled and married in Germany in the  1870s.  
At the age  of sixteen,  he had been sent to stay 
with relatives in  Kent where  he  also  went  to 
school. He never forgot that  time.  The  village 
girls were  extraordinarily  free  compared  with 
their German cousins. Schulz was, by nature,  shy 
and not overtly attractive in appearance but  be-
cause he was foreign,  and  therefore  different, 
the girls were more generous than he had a  right  
to expect.  He  remained forever grateful for the  
way and the frequency with which they brought him  
out and brought him on.  He  returned home to all 
intents and purposes English, too English for his 
grandmother who must have imagined England,  when 
she sent him, to be in the same high,  moral cli-
mate she had left it in.
   After  being  compelled  to  leave university, 
Schulz had been unemployed for some  time.  Then, 
in 1928,  he  had taken a post offered by a weal-
thy family,  the  head of whom was a Dutch-Jewish 
banker. He was engaged to teach the children Ger-
man and English.  He hoped,  in the mean time, to 
learn something of the world of  banking.  Close-
ness to money always warmed him.
   After two years in Amsterdam,  the  family had 
moved to Zurich and later to Zagreb where  Schulz 
stayed with them for another year or so. In Amst-
erdam he acquired a fluency in  Dutch,  in Zurich 
he acquired a great knowledge  of  street  names, 
and in Zagreb a fluency in Serbo-Croat.  All this 
time Schulz lived a life of  comparative  luxury, 
acquiring not  only  a  knowledge  of  the  finer 
things in life but a taste for them. But all this 
would end when the world economy turned round  in  
one more circle and fell over again.

now out of work because of too little.  There  is 
something crazy about this system, Schulz rememb-
ered thinking. The working man cannot win. 
   Early in 1931  he found work as a messenger in 
a small printing firm and had taken lodgings with 
a middle-aged widow who,  like Frau Nusbaum,  had 
become very affectionate.  She  had a fair amount 
of money saved and Schulz spent hours  explaining 
to her what a fine printer he was and  how,  with 
her money and his skill, they could set themselv-
es up in business.  Neither  was  he  backward in 
pressing her hand often while he spoke.
   He had borrowed a little money to buy machine-
ry, refusing to take more than  the  deposit  and 
taking her with him to select it. Instead, howev-
er, of paying the deposit on  the  machinery,  he 
had used it to set up a delinquent youth  he  had 
met at the labour exchange as a  solicitor  in  a 
small office.
   The youth, having been  a  solicitor's  clerk, 
knew something of the law  of  conveyancing,  and 
when Schulz found the  premises he wanted to buy,  
or told the widow he wanted to buy, the youth re-
presented with some skill  both  parties  to  the 
transaction, the widow and the mythical owner.
   By an extraordinary coincidence the widow met, 
at the house of a relative,  the  real  owner  of 
the empty premises who declared  himself  totally 
ignorant of any such impending sale.  Investigat-
ions followed and, unfortunately for Schulz,  the  
widow was persuaded to allow the negotiations  to 
proceed to their completion.  At  the very moment 
that the large  sum  of  money  passed  from  the 
lady's hands into that  of  the delinquent youth, 
a police officer stepped into the room and arest-
ed both him and  Schulz.  The  widow  burst  into 
tears.
   The court had been severe. It was a wicked and 
despicable thing to deceive a widow in that  way.  
Such confidence tricks struck  at  the  roots  of 
German society, destroying people's faith in  one 
another and leading,  in  the  end,  to  anarchy. 
Schulz did not dispute this,  yet it seemed small 
as confidence tricks went,  compared with the one 
that had  been  played  on him during  the  great 
inflation,  when  a little inheritance  from  his 
father had been wiped  out  overnight.  He  could 
never work out where it had gone or who had it.

two armed camps, reflected in frequent clashes on 
the  streets,  public marches and public demonst-
rations.  Adolf Hitler,  a little man in a light-
brown trench-coat and a lock of  hair  that  fell 
across his forehead, had become Reich Chancellor.
    Before he went to  prison,  Schulz  had  seen 
Hitler's  photograph  staring out from the  pages 
of  newspapers,  heard his  voice  from  time  to 
time on the wireless, but had taken little inter-
est in him. Now, next to the ageing idiot Hinden-
burg, he had become the most important man in the 
country.
   Everywhere the talk was of the Führer and Ger-
many and of dedicating oneself unselfishly to the 
state. This worried Schulz.  The  capacity of the 
human race periodically to commit acts of unself-
ishness was one of the forms  its  madness  often 
took. It seemed to break out time to  time,  like 
the flu, and Schulz didn't like it.
   A man acting in his own self-interest was  un-
likely to do much damage to the fabric of  human 
society. He was apt to be limited, after all,  by 
the dedication of everyone else to his own  self-
interest. The trouble with this craze for unself-
ishness was  that  people  tended  to forget just 
where their own self-interest lay. Schulz was un-
comfortably aware from  his  reading  of  history 
that people were capable of acting more ruthless-
ly in the unselfish pursuit of a public  interest 
than ever they were in pursuit of their own - and 
it scared the hell out of him.

Albrecht,  who had developed a theory of harmonic 
chemistry and a mathematics to measure  the  sup-
posed related vibrations of the  elements.  As  a 
result he believed that gold  could be made econ-
omically from  iron oxide and quartz  by  heating 
them in an electronic furnace at very high  temp-
eratures.  Schulz understood nothing of the math-
ematics and was certain it was all nonsense,  but 
Albrecht was a well-known and brilliant  chemist.  
What was not so generally well-known was that  he 
was unsound of mind. Schulz had sized that up  at 
the first meeting.
   For centuries people had been trying  to  make 
gold in various scientific ways - and  especially 
in recent times since there was a world  shortage 
- and Schulz saw the  possibility, in the current 
climate of insanity, of making a lot of money for 
himself and clearing out of the country.
   He formed a company with Albrecht  and  raised 
enough money to buy some  rudimentary  equipment.
Albrecht's first experiment was a total  failure, 
which certainly did not surprise Schulz,  who had 
expected nothing less. The object of the experim-
ent for Schulz was to find a way of ensuring that 
a particle of gold was found in the crucible when 
it was withdrawn from the furnace during the pub-
lic demonstration that was  to  be  arranged  for 
prospective  shareholders.
   This he did.  The  demonstration was a success 
and money began flowing into the company, several 
leading Party officials, including  Dr  Ley,  the 
Labour minister, contributing heavily.  Unfortun-
ately,  just as Schulz had accumulated sufficient 
funds in a bank account in  Switzerland, Albrecht  
went completely mad and had to be locked up.
   Investigations were carried out and  questions 
were raised as to how  particles of gold had ever 
found their way into crucibles, since experiments 
carried out with Schulz in custody were never  as 
successful as when he was at large.  In  1936  he 
was sentenced to four years' hard labour  in  the 
Hamburg jail.
   In March 1939 he emerged.

at least four languages.  Now  that  was hearten-
ing. A job in postal censorship could be made  to 
order for him. The German bureaucracy was vast, a 
honeycomb of tiny offices where a man might  live 
out the rest of his life unmolested and untroubl-
ed.
   An endless game could be played.  Simple  laws 
could be found to be  defective  until  they  had 
been sufficiently complicated.  Complicated  laws 
could be found to be unworkable  until  they  had 
been simplified. Simplifications involved compli-
cation,  and  complication  created new posts for 
those needed to deal with the complexities creat-
ed by the defects of the new  simplification.  It 
was never-ending. Jobs spawned jobs.
   Schulz was as aware of this as any other Germ-
an and felt immensely encouraged by it.  Not hav-
ing to leave for the office for  another  ten  or 
fifteen minutes, he went up to his room, took out 
paper and pen and wrote a letter  of  application 
for the post.  He  sealed it carefully and posted 
it on the way to work.