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Mendel didn’t have an answer to that any more than she did, although he offered her a muted, ‘Perhaps.’ Noemi pulled her attention back from him and looked round their silent audience, trying to gauge the wider reaction.

It was mostly shock and shaking heads. Nobody was behaving as if they were on her side.

‘I know I’m not speaking for everyone. I wouldn’t try to. I don’t even have a plan yet. And I don’t expect anyone to follow me if I make one. We all have to follow our own hearts.’

‘I can get guns. At least two, possibly three.’

The room swivelled from Noemi to Vitta.

‘I have a friend who… Well he isn’t Jewish if that matters to you, but he was a communist, and that’s given him as many reasons to hate the Nazis as us.

He’d go after them himself, except they broke his legs in Dachau and left him crippled, but he knows people.

If I ask him, he’ll get what we need, for the right price. And I’m with you, so I’ll ask him.’

‘I’m with you too.’

The room started to argue again as Matthias added his name to the mix, although they stopped when he called for quiet.

‘And I also agree with Noemi: how any of us choose to resist is a personal matter. Even staying free and out of their clutches is powerful. So there’s no pressure on anyone here, and we understand if you don’t want to meet with us again after tonight.

That probably would be the safest choice.

’ He looked across at Rabbi Mendel. ‘And I won’t ask for your blessing – that wouldn’t be fair. But I hope you won’t condemn us.’

Mendel looked at Matthias, then at Vitta and Noemi before he answered.

‘I can’t bless you if you choose violence, that’s true, and I certainly won’t carry a gun.

But I’d never condemn you, and I won’t abandon you either.

Whatever you decide to do, if you need my help when it’s done, you must ask for it. ’

Vitta moved to sit next to Matthias and Noemi and added her thanks to the rabbi. The rest of the room fell into an uncomfortable silence after that; no one else volunteered to get involved.

Mendel gave Matthias the key to the room as he said his goodbyes in case they needed a safe haven at short notice, although he warned them not to use it more than once.

Soon people began slipping away after him into the night until there were only the three of them left.

Watching each other, aware they’d crossed a line which had led them away from the companionship they’d come to rely on and could lead them into terrible danger. Each of them wondering, What now ?

‘I keep going round and round in circles. Hitler or Himmler would be the ideal choice and they visit the city a lot, but they’re both impossible targets.

They’re out of their cars and into their offices in minutes, and surrounded by the SS and the Gestapo at public events.

We’d never get close to either of them.’

Noemi pulled her coat tight against the autumn wind blowing across the empty sweep of Munich’s English Garden and watched the leaves dance in golden coils round her feet.

It had taken three weeks of scraping every available penny together and trusting in Vitta’s mysterious contact to get to this point.

The price had risen twice during the negotiations, and that had turned the deal into two guns not three, but now the weapons had finally appeared.

Luger P08 semi-automatic pistols, with a magazine and eight cartridges each and an accuracy of up to fifty metres.

Noemi, who’d been expecting something far less sophisticated, had weighed her gun in her hand and watched Matthias doing the same, as Vitta outlined how much damage the pistols could do even from further away.

They’d gone through all the mechanics of firing them that day, but they hadn’t – then or since – discussed how it might feel to shoot a bullet into a body.

Because we don’t know. Any more than the soldiers who marched into Poland knew what to expect. And, by the time we do, it will be too late. We’ll be changed whatever the outcome.

She shivered, but she let Matthias think that was the ice nipping through the stiff breeze.

She’d started to study him, which felt a little odd: she’d never had to work hard to understand Pascal.

Matthias was brave, she didn’t doubt that: he’d insisted Vitta had done enough and it should be him not her wielding the second weapon.

He was also guarded, and she didn’t know a lot about him yet.

She was as sure as she could be that Matthias was no more cavalier about the act of killing than she was, but all their conversations had focused on possible targets and the problems of planning and logistics and – now that Noemi had a potentially workable idea, and time was ticking – she needed more surety.

‘You’re right about mounting anything in central Munich being impossible.

The last time Hitler was here, every inch of the route from Karolinenplatz to Konigsplatz was a forest of SS guards.

But we don’t need to carry out an attack there or on him.

As long as we hit at their heart, and do it in the most public way possible, that’s a win, isn’t it? ’

His, ‘Yes, of course,’ was as instant and trusting as she needed it to be, and so was his response to her newly formed plan.

He didn’t interrupt while she outlined it.

He asked carefully considered questions.

He was as methodical as Pascal had been when they were planning a new climb, not that a comparison between the two men was something Noemi wanted to consider or to dwell on, even if it kept happening.

Matthias would hardly thank her for judging him against a Nazi.

‘It will be incredibly dangerous wherever we do it, and there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed. But the targets are good ones and the risks are less than the other options we’ve considered. So…’

If it feels wrong, stop. It doesn’t matter what the reason is – a change in the weather, an unsteady rock face, a partner who’s lost their nerve.

Hauke’s words were suddenly there in her head, and Noemi realised that she couldn’t carry on pretending that the precipice wasn’t dancing in front of them, or only having half the conversation they needed to have.

She wasn’t working in tandem with a man she knew inside out this time, and that was a risk to them both.

‘So the only thing left to think about is us and whether we can actually do this. Take a life, I mean. I know we’ve not talked about it, but it’s not a thing I take lightly, and I don’t imagine you do either.’

Matthias didn’t respond straight away, which was a relief. She needed to know he was a man who carefully assessed not only the plan’s risks but also its wider impact.

‘I don’t. I trained as a doctor; my intention was to save lives, not end them.

If this works and I kill someone, I don’t want that to be an act I’m proud of, whoever it is.

I want to feel it; I want to be changed by it because that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

To feel and to take charge, not to wait and shut down and accept? For as long as we’re able to do it.’

He was a good man. She’d known that since they’d first met, but now Noemi could see it in the time he took to acknowledge the weight in kill . And the bravery in I want to feel it . No matter how much she agreed with him, that remained a daunting thought.

So picture it. Imagine the gun and the magazine heavy with bullets in your hand and your finger squeezing the trigger. Imagine the impact and the blood and the scream.

‘Stop, Noemi. Leave it there. Trying to guess how hard it will be won’t help you to do it.’

She looked up. Matthias was watching her as if he was trying to read her thoughts.

She nodded, but she didn’t reply. Finding herself even partly in tune with someone else again was reassuring, but it stirred up old memories she’d rather not revisit.

And implied a new closeness with Matthias she wasn’t ready to consider.

Despite that, she followed him back through the darkening park with a lighter step.

The connection might be uncomfortable, and unlooked for and unexpected, but if it led to a plan they could execute together, she wouldn’t shy from it.

The ninth of November. It was one of the most sacred days in the National Socialist calendar.

The day on which the Party commemorated its dead comrades from the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch with even more reverence in Munich, where the battle had happened, than anywhere else in Germany.

It was, as Matthias had agreed, the perfect day to mount an attack that would tear at the heart of them.

But there were hours of watching in the cold to get through first.

Noemi and Matthias mingled with the well-padded crowds gathered in front of the sixteen black sarcophagi laid inside the Honour Temples which dominated Konigsplatz, waiting for Hitler to arrive and lay his wreath.

The silence which had to be observed by anyone crossing or standing close to the memorials was in sharp contrast to the hysteria which normally greeted the Führer, or the booming fanfares Noemi would forever associate with Nuremberg.

But, reined in or not, the fervour was there.

Soaked through the faces straining for a glimpse of their leader, quivering through the tightly packed bodies.

Neither of them wanted to be part of that; it was all Noemi could do not to shrink away from the sighs and the shivers.

Unfortunately, they had no choice: they had to be at the memorial, monitoring every minute of the day, alert for even the tiniest change.