Текст книги "The Second Son"

Автор книги: Jonathan Rabb

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

We’ve heard of churches pillaged, priests beaten (or worse). I saw something I couldn’t understand. A man next to me explained. Nuns, he said. Mummified corpses of nuns dragged out onto the streets. You could see the ripped cloth around the bodies, the bones. They were thrown across the steps to the church. I wanted to look away, but there’s no doing that through the viewfinder. My hand cranks and it all happens. I’ll burn the film.

We’ve just heard there’s a battalion of Falangist rebels getting ready to take the Diagonal (they’ll cut the city in half if they do). There’s also an artillery regiment of fascist rebels marching from the Sant Andreu barracks-90,000 rifles inside. Whoever gets the Diagonal takes Barcelona. My hotel is under rebel control. I suppose I won’t have time for a nap.

While Georg found another safe nook, a General Goded was arriving by seaplane from Majorca. He had been told to take the city for the rebels. He wasn’t counting on the Guardia Civil joining the workers, a column of four thousand men, eight hundred of whom were climbing the Via Laietana toward the Commission of Public Order. The crowds roared, rifles and fists reached to the skies, and the Republican fighters-with some crack sniper fire-retook the Ritz and the Colon, while the anarchists overran the telephone exchange. And all this by 2 p.m. It was now just a matter of time before the fascists were done for.

4 p.m. Only a few pockets left. Hard to think I would have been up in the stadium right now, seeing flowers and doves and hearing anthems for the games. It’s unimaginable.

I’m in the Avenida Icaria, down near the water. They’ve turned huge rolls of newsprint into barricades. It’s keeping the fascist regiment from the Sant Andreu barracks back. The other rebel soldiers are cut off.

There was a moment of remarkable bravery a few minutes ago. A rebel machine gun was wreaking havoc. Two workers stepped out from behind the barricade and, raising their rifles over their heads, began to walk toward it. It was startling to watch from the barricade. It must have been even more so at the machine gun, because the firing stopped. The two workers shouted to the rebels that they were firing on their brothers.

“Your officers have tricked you!” one of them shouted. “You must fight forSpain, not against her.”

They continued walking, rifles over their heads. A minute later, the rebel soldiers turned their machine gun around and began to fire on the fascists. It was-I don’t know what it was. The rebels surrendered a minute later.

It gives me hope.

Two hours later, General Goded admitted defeat on the radio and was promptly shipped off to face court-martial. So ended the first full day of civil war in Barcelona. Six hundred lay dead, four thousand wounded.

As for the People’s Games, Spain was well beyond games.

After that, there were no more letters from Georg. There was nothing more from Georg. Nothing.

And his silence headed east.

2

Berlin

“You’re a Jew, then?”

Pimm was dead. It was six months since they had pulled the body from the water, a single shot to the back of the head. Several of his boys had been posted to the usual spots where things tended to float up-down by the grain mills, or along the little inlet just beyond the Oberbaum Bridge-but it had taken almost a week before one of them had spotted him.

Not that it should have come as a shock. Run with the syndicates, swim in the Spree. That was the old line, and even bosses weren’t immune. Tach and Wetzmann had been idiots back in 1916, trying to horn in on Pimm’s hold on the Turkish sugar market. What had they expected? Both had ended up bobbing against the rocks. Still, the Spree was usually reserved for ratchet-and-pick men or a sloppy garrote. Bosses usually got better.

Things had changed, though. They had changed, and the world had watched and applauded or turned away, or whatever the world does when these things happen. The new boys wanted things cleaned up-they were very keen on cleaning-and criminals were an easy target.

“Herr Hoffner?”

Kriminal-Oberkommissar Nikolai Hoffner looked back across the desk. He was finding his mind wandering these days-to Pimm, to Martha, even to Sascha-especially when the windows were so tall and the sky beyond such a nice clean gray. The office was a throwback to the Kaiser’s Berlin, a vast hall with two-story drapes held tightly among the rococo swirls of gold inlay that followed the moldings up and around. Above, someone’s idea of an Arcadian romp filled the ceiling and spilled down onto the upper reaches of the walls, although even the little cherubs seemed smart enough not to stray too far down. A portrait of Hitler hung behind the desk: best to remain out of the Fuhrer’s gaze.

Hoffner refused to look at the file on the desk. Not that he was much on reading things upside down, but he knew it was the expected response. Why give this Herr Steckler the pleasure?

Hoffner corrected him. “It’s Chief Inspector Hoffner.”

Steckler continued to scan the pages. “Yes.” He looked up. “So you’re a Jew?”

It was impressive how Steckler had waited this long to ask, the small spectacled face doing its best at indifference, though mocking it all the same. These days it was where things always began or ended: Jew, the calling card of bureaucracy. This one, however, was shaking things up, slipping the question in at the middle.

“Technically,” said Hoffner. “Yes.”

Steckler returned to the pages. “It’s a world of technicalities now, isn’t it?”

Hoffner said nothing.

“And to have it go unnoticed for over three years,” Steckler added. “Remarkable.”

The Nazis had passed the Berufsbeamtengesetzin April of 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service-a clever little piece of legislation to weed out the Jews and the Communists.

Steckler continued to read. “Your mother. She was a Jewess. Ukrainian.”

“She converted,” said Hoffner. “To Lutheranism.” It might have been Methodism-Hoffner had never known which-but why burden Steckler with the details.

“But not before you were born,” said Steckler.

“No.” Hoffner was no less offhand.

“And then she converted back. In 1924. She became a Jew again.”

“She was very persistent.”

Steckler looked up. Moments of uncertainty always brought a tight smile with men like this. He went back to the file. “Probably why there was the confusion.”

“Probably.”

“She died in 1929?”

“She did.”

Steckler turned the page. “You could retire now, you know.” He seemed to be warming a bit. “Take your pension.”

“Not my full pension,” said Hoffner. It was going to be a morning of corrections.

Steckler glanced down to the bottom of the page and then closed the file. He looked up. “I’m sure we could work something out.” A chumminess seemed to be struggling to find its way through. “Only a few years left, Herr Chief Inspector. What are you-fifty-five, fifty-six?”

“Sixty-two,” said Hoffner.

“Really? Even better.” Steckler had no reason to push too hard on this one; time was on his side. “It’s a new generation, Herr Chief Inspector. New direction. New methods. Alexanderplatz isn’t the place you once knew.”

“No,” said Hoffner. “It isn’t.”

“And you’ve had such a very nice career. Impressive, even. Why muddy it now?”

It was uncanny how the Nazis always tossed everything onto everyone else’s lap: Hoffner was the one now muddying things.

“It’s been a good career, yes,” he said.

He wondered if Pimm had sat in a chair like this, commended for his estimable career marks-the takeover of the five territories, the boy and heroin trade north of the Hallesches Gate, his work in rooting out “undesirables” during the Red scare. Probably not. And probably no mention of his help in the Luxemburg and Ufa episodes, not that those were something to crow about these days. In the end, it had come down to Pimm the Jew. Pimm the crime-boss Jew. A bullet to the skull had been more than sufficient.

Hoffner reached into his jacket pocket. “But if you think we can work something out,” he said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and matches, “I’d be happy to leave the murder and mayhem to you and your new generation, Herr Steckler.”

Steckler’s smile returned. “Undersecretary Steckler,” he corrected.

Hoffner nodded, lit up, and said, “Now-about my son.”

Berlin had never looked so red.

Hoffner gazed through the tram window and doubted whether the Nazis recognized the irony. Little Rosa Luxemburg had been dead almost twenty years and yet the streets bled-red with black, of course (who could miss the black at the center), but it was the red that flapped in the air: flags, pennants, flowers. The scarves that hung around the children’s necks were particularly fetching, as if even their little throats were soaked in it. It might have been the rain-this had been a particularly wet, cold July-but why reduce it to weather?

Irony, though, was for those on the outside, those with something still to gain, although surely this bunch had been on the fringes long enough to appreciate it just a bit. Wasn’t there an irony in their having been elected at all, in their claims to victimization by the Bolsheviks, Versailles, the Jews? Fascinating to see earnestness wash away even the most stubborn traces of the truth.

The tram stopped, and Hoffner stepped off to a nice dowsing of his trousers from a passing truck. The lettering on its side had it heading west to Doberitz. Everything was heading west these days-food, horses, prostitutes-all of it to keep the Olympic athletes happy. Most were already settled in; the last few stragglers would be setting up digs in the next day or so, with their sauna and chefs and shooting ranges and private showers. Hoffner tried to picture the genius who had seen fit to call such lush accommodations a village.

But for those who had invaded to cheer the athletes on, Berlin was determined to quell any lingering doubts. Thoughts of Olympic boycotts might be long forgotten: everyone who had threatened not to come was already here. Even so, the Jew-baiting signs that had so troubled the French and the English and, of course, the Americans (would they be bringing their Negroes?) had been pulled from shop windows, stripped from the Litfassaulen, and replaced with odes to sport and camaraderie and international friendship. Not that the Greeks had been much on mutual friendships or protecting their weak-mountainsides and babies came to mind-but they had come up with the ideal, and wasn’t that what the new Germany was all about?

It was a cloud of gentle denial-ataraxia for the modern world-that had brought this cleansing rain, and Hoffner wondered if he was the only one to feel the damp in his legs.

He turned onto Alexanderplatz and saw the giant swastika draped across the front of police headquarters. It billowed momentarily. He imagined it was waving to him, a gesture of farewell, good luck, “It was swell, Isabel, swell.” The telephone call from the ministry had no doubt preceded him. The paperwork would follow, but he was out. There was no need for the flag to be anything but gracious in victory.

The look on the sergeant’s face at the security desk confirmed it. The usual nod of deference was now an officious bob of courtesy.

“Ah, Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar,” he said. At least the man continued to refer to him by his title. Hoffner had been one of the very few to insist on his old rank after the SS had absorbed the Kripo and the Gestapo into what was now known as the Sipo. He had never considered himself a major or a captain, or whatever rank they had tried to foist on him. Inside the Alex, “detective” would have suited him just fine, but even the Kripo had its standards. So “chief inspector” it remained, if only for a few more days.

“Herr Scharfuhrer,” Hoffner answered.

“Will you be needing help with any more boxes, Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar?”

Hoffner had anticipated the ministry’s response. He knew the letter he had sent them a few weeks back would bring his file into play. He knew it would mark the beginning of the end-of everything. The rest was academic. Most of his office was already packed up and gone, thirty-five years neatly stacked in boxes across town in his rooms on Droysenstrasse.

“I think I can manage it, Herr Scharfuhrer,” Hoffner said. He nodded, then pushed through the oak doors and stepped out into the Alex’s vast glassed-over courtyard. The smell of ammonia, with a nice lingering of mildew, pricked at his nose as he headed for the far corner.

The rote quality of the walk to his office had taken on an unwelcome nostalgia in the last weeks: Why should he care that the once-familiar cobblestones now lay buried beneath a smooth flooring of cement? Had he really spent that much time in the subbasement morgue to mourn its dismantling? Was there anything truly lost by riding an elevator up to the third floor rather than taking the stairs? There was a sentimentality here that troubled him, and Hoffner wondered if it would be this way from now on, even beyond the Alex? Was it possible to be disgusted by a self not yet inhabited?

At least he could still take one last stroll past the offices on the floor, stop into the kitchen for a cup of bad coffee, or hear the general incompetence spilling from the desks and telephone conversations. There had been a distinct drop in the quality of police work since the politics of crime had superseded the crimes themselves. The newest officers were hacks and morons, and their brand of policing was growing ever more contagious. Why make the effort when dismissals and convictions rested on political affiliations, even for the most despicable of rapists, murderers, and thieves? At least Hoffner was on his way out. For those with five or ten years left, the Alex had become a cesspool filled with nouveau petty posturing or, worse, old-guard yearning for invisibility until their pensions came due. Either way it was an abyss.

“Nikolai.”

The voice came from the largest office on the floor. Hoffner had long given up trying to figure out how Kriminaldirektor Edmund Prager knew when someone was walking past. There was nothing for it but to pop his head through the doorway.

“Herr Gruppenfuhrer,” Hoffner said. Prager had been given no choice but to take on the new rank.

“Have a seat, Nikolai.”

Prager was pulling two glasses and a bottle from his desk drawer. Over the last few months it appeared as if the desk had been moving ever closer to the window, as if Prager might be planning a jump, albeit a gradual one.

Prager said, “I just got the call.” He poured two glasses while Hoffner sat. “So it’s finally done. I can’t say I’ll miss you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

Prager allowed himself a half smile. “The Kripo might be filled with thugs and idiots now, but at least they do what they’re told. It’s a different sort of babysitting with them, and for another four months I can manage that.” He raised his glass and they both drank.

“And then?” said Hoffner.

“We’ve a place outside Braunschweig. My wife’s family. We’ll go there and wait for this nonsense to pass while they pay me my pension.”

Prager poured out two more and Hoffner said, “Sounds very nice.” He took his glass. “So-how many Gypsies do you have locked up out in Marzahn now? Four hundred? Five?”

Prager had the whiskey to his lips. He held it there another moment before bringing the glass down. “Just once, Nikolai, I’d like to have a drink, a chat, and then see you go. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“You still think it’s nonsense?”

Prager drank and Hoffner asked again, “How many?”

Prager thought a moment, shook his head, and said, “What difference does it make?” He set the glass on the desk. “There’s something wrong with having just one of them out at that camp, isn’t there?”

Hoffner appreciated Prager’s decency, even if it always surfaced despite itself. Hoffner took a sip. “Good for you,” he said, and tossed back the rest.

“Yah,” said Prager. “Good for me.” He thought about pouring out two more but instead put the bottle away. “The camp can house up to a thousand,” he said. “It’s around eight hundred now. Until the games are over. Then we’ll set the Gypsies free. Happy?”

“Not that you’re keeping count.”

“You know what it’s like with these people. The SS likes its papers in triplicate. I’ve no choice.” Prager lapped at the last bit of booze in his glass and then placed it back in the drawer. “You’ll stay in Berlin, of course. Can’t imagine you anywhere else.”

“I hear there’s some nice farmland outside Braunschweig.”

“My relatives know how to use an ax, Nikolai. I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

“It’s been guns and rifles for a while, now.”

“Has it?”

Prager sat back. In twenty years peering across a desk at the man, Hoffner had never seen him strike so casual a pose.

“You and I are too old to be concerned with any of this,” Prager said. “Take your pension, join a bird or card club, learn how to make a few friends, and wait to die. I think even you can manage that.”

Hoffner pushed his glass across the desk for a refill. “But not outside Braunschweig.”

Reluctantly, Prager opened the drawer and pulled out the bottle. “It’s the walking dead in Braunschweig, Nikolai,” he said, as he poured Hoffner a half-glass and returned the bottle to the drawer. “How would you learn to make a friend?”

Hoffner smiled and then drank. “I’ve managed this long.” He set the glass down and stood.

“You should take in some of the games,” said Prager, retrieving the glass and filing it. “You like sport.”

“I prefer my chest-thumping in private.”

“Then you won’t be disappointed.” Prager closed the drawer. “It’s no uniforms at the stadium. The memo just came down. Supposedly they had a rough go of it last winter for the skiing. All those foreigners outside Munich thinking they were in a police state. Imagine that? Even the SS will be in mufti.”

Hoffner took a momentary pleasure in picturing the discomfort that would cause. “So how much of it are they having you attend?”

“It’s not all that bad,” said Prager. “The opening thing tomorrow and then some of the running events. I’m in a box next to Nebe, who’s in a box next to Heydrich. And next week I’ve been invited to give an address to a contingent of Dutch, French, and American policemen. ‘The City and the Law.’ Very exciting.”

“I’ll be sorry to miss it.”

“Yes, I’m sure you will. I’ll pass on your regrets to the Obergruppenfuhrer.”

At the door, Hoffner fought back the urge at sentimentality. Even so he heard himself say, “Be well, Edmund.”

The gesture caught Prager by surprise. He nodded uncomfortably, pulled a file from his stack, and began to read. For some reason, Hoffner nodded as well before heading off.

His office was unbearably neat. There were scuff marks along the walls where books and jars and shelves-now gone-had rested for too many years without the least disturbance. The bare desktop was an odd assortment of stained coffee rings and divots, the grain of the wood showing a neat progression from healthy brown-where the blotter had sat-to a tarlike black at the edges: it made Hoffner wonder what his lungs might be looking like. And along the floor, imprints from file books-either thrown away or shipped off to central archives-created a jigsawlike collection of misaligned rectangles. Someone would have a nice job of scrubbing those away.

There was nothing else except for a single empty crate that sat in the corner under the coatrack. It had the word “desk” scrawled on it in black ink.

Hoffner stepped over, tossed his hat onto the rack, and set the crate on his chair. He had left the drawers for last. He imagined there was some reason for it, but why bother plumbing any of that now. He pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the desk. Tipping over the middle drawer onto the desktop-a few dozen business cards, along with a string of pencils, spilled out to the edges-he then did the same with the side drawers, the last of them leaving several pads of paper on top. He placed the cards, pencils, and pads inside the crate and began to sift through the rest.

Most of it was completely foreign to him. There were various scrawled notes-some dating as far back as twenty years-which had somehow eluded filing and now lay crumpled in balls to be opened and tossed away: a list of streets-Munz, Oranienburger, Bulowplatz-several telephone exchanges underneath the word “Oldenburg”; the beginning of a letter to a Herr Engl, where the ink had run out; and endless names he had long forgotten. The usual assortment of Gern clips and pencil shavings fell to the desk with each new handful of paper, but it was the smell of tobacco-laced formaldehyde that was most annoying.

The only thing worthy of any real attention was the neatly rubber-banded stack of folded maps. There was no point in opening any of them: Hoffner knew exactly what each would show: a pristine view of Berlin, although probably no more recent than 1925 or 1926. He had stopped using them around then.

For twenty-five years, though, maps like these had been a mainstay in the Hoffner Approach to Detective Work. They had made him famous, albeit in rather limited circles. Young Kriminal-Assistents-now far higher up on the rungs than he-would stand at the doorway and watch as he traced his fingers along the streets and parks and canals in search of the variations. That was always the trick with Berlin. She was a city of deviation, not patterning, each district with its own temper and personality. It was always just a matter of keeping an eye out for what didn’t belong and allowing those idiosyncrasies to guide him.

These days, however, she was too sharply drawn, too meticulous, and too exquisitely certain of herself to make the subtleties of genuine crime appear in bas-relief. Those idiosyncrasies were no longer the results of human error: a miscalculation in the timing of a bread delivery truck, or the unfamiliarity with the newspapers most likely to be left on a bench after four in the afternoon (years ago, Hoffner had caught two very clever second-story men on just such slipups). Instead, the deviations were now self-constructed, printed in laws inspired by Munich and Nuremberg. They left Berlin no room for shading and made her no more impenetrable than the most insignificant little town on the distant fringes of the Reich. Why seek out differences when impurity was the only crime that mattered? Flossenburg, Berlin-to Hoffner’s way of thinking, the two might just as well have been the same place.

He tossed the maps into the crate as a head appeared around the side of his door. “No one’s going to want it, you know.”

Hoffner looked over to see Gert Henkel stepping into the office. Henkel was fortyish and rather dapper in his Hauptsturmfuhrer uniform, the double chevron and braided circle making him someone to be taken seriously, willingly or not. The insignia placed him somewhere between the old Kriminal-Kommissar and Kriminal-Oberkommissar designations-or maybe somewhere above them both; Hoffner had given up trying to follow it all. Oddly enough, for all his Nazi trappings, Henkel was a decent fellow. It was still unclear how much of the party line he swallowed: too good a cop not to see it for what it was, but too ambitious not to keep his mouth shut. Hoffner wondered how long that would last.

Henkel said with a smile, “When was the last time you cleaned the place?”

If not for the glaring shine on Henkel’s boots, Hoffner might even have called him friend. “How old are you, Henkel?”

Henkel kept his smile. “A good deal younger than you.” When Hoffner continued to wait, Henkel offered, “Forty-two.”

Hoffner nodded and went back to the crate. “Then I’d say the last cleaning was just before you set off for Gymnasium.” Hoffner tossed several more scrawled-on pads onto the pile. “You did go to Gymnasium, didn’t you, Henkel? Or are you one of those uneducated but terribly hardworking little butcher’s sons who caught the eye of some well-meaning cop and so forth?”

Henkel’s smile grew. “Never took you for an elitist, Nikolai.”

Hoffner picked up the last of the pads. “I’m not. I just like a bit of schooling. Your uniform can be rather misleading on that.”

Henkel snorted a quiet laugh and stepped farther into the office. “My God, you’re getting out just in time, aren’t you?”

“Too late to turn me in, then?”

“Not my style.” Henkel settled in one of the chairs along the wall.

Hoffner continued to flip through his pad. A photograph of Martha with Sascha at five or six years of age had somehow wedged itself into the pages. It was a dour-looking thing, mother and son both moodily sunburnt, probably taken at the beach one of those summers before Georg had come along. Still, she had been pretty.

Hoffner slid the photo back in and placed the pad in the crate. He looked over at Henkel. “Not your style? You might want to ask yourself why sometime.”

Henkel spoke easily. “That was your generation, Nikolai. It’s answers now, not questions.”

Again Hoffner bobbed a nod. “Is that meant to be clever or charming? I’m never quite sure with all these new rules.”

Henkel looked momentarily less charmed before the smile returned. “I’d never really taken you for a Jew.”

How quickly word traveled, thought Hoffner. “Neither had I,” he said. “But that’s just it. Your boys have left me no choice.”

“Early pension, and at full pay? They’re actually doing you a favor at the moment.”

“It’s not this moment that worries me.”

Henkel snorted another laugh. “Gloom and doom. I was wrong. You really are a Jew.” When Hoffner said nothing, Henkel pressed. “Oh, come on, Nikolai, don’t take it so personally. No one’s going to let an old bull cop like you get caught up in any of this.” The humane Henkel was making an appearance. “It’s just putting things in order. They make a show with a few of the more arrogant types, and then everyone settles in. Better for the Jews to live their own lives, anyway. Probably what they want themselves.” He smiled. “Now, if you happened to own a shop or, God forbid, actually had a little money, then…”

Hoffner tossed another handful of scraps into the wastebasket. “I might need to take it a bit more personally?”

“No, Nikolai, you wouldn’t.” Henkel leaned forward. “This is politics. They’re saying what they know people want to hear. So they’ve taken it a bit far. They’ll pull back. Trust me, six months from now, no one will be talking about any of this.”

Hoffner swept the remaining clips into his hand and deposited them in his pocket. “They,” he said, as he brushed the grit from his palms. “Your friends might not like hearing that from someone wearing their uniform.”

Hoffner thought he might have overstepped the line but Henkel was in too good a mood. “It’s me, Nikolai,” Henkel said, sitting back again. “I’m the one who’s getting it. I’ll probably have to bring in a fumigator, but who wouldn’t want the great Nikolai Hoffner’s office? There was quite a pool for it. Somehow I won.”

For the first time, Hoffner smiled. “Somehow,” he said. He took his hat from the rack. “Then I suppose it’s yours to enjoy.”

He started for the door, and Henkel said, “You’re forgetting your crate, Nikolai.”

Hoffner stopped and looked back. He stepped over and pulled out a pen. Scratching out the word “desk,” he wrote “trash” below it. He then pocketed the pen and moved out into the hall.

Mendel

It had taken some getting used to, living among the refined. Even now, Hoffner could feel the eyes from across the street with their tidy disdain-sneering at the brown suit, brown hat, brown shoes. Brown was not a shade for the rich, at least not the brown Hoffner was sporting. Still, it was good to have a successful son. Georg’s house was large, his lawn well-kept, and his flowers always a jaunty yellow or maroon, even after too much rain: remarkable how wealth could absorb even the dullest of colors.

The one blemish on the otherwise flawless facade was a tiny streak of fresh paint on the doorjamb. Hoffner stepped up to the veranda, lowered his umbrella, and stared at the spot where the mezuzah had hung. Not that Georg had grown up with anything remotely Jewish-he had grown up with nothing-but the boy had fallen in love with a girl, and such girls demanded these things. She had even gone so far as to demand (ask, hope) that Georg might move himself up on the Judaic ledger from quarter Jew to full-fledged. Only twenty at the time, Georg had submitted without a blink, a year’s worth of preparation happily weathered to make him fit for marriage. Hoffner was now sandwiched between a dead mother and a practicing son, both of whom had returned to their roots without a single thought to the living family tree. Odd how, thus far, Hoffner was the only one to have paid for his lineage.

The mezuzah had come down after the latest spate of street beatings. Until recently, the punch-ups had always taken place in the seedier parts of town or outside synagogues. Even so, all but a few of the houses along the street were now festooned in swastika flags: national pride, they said, the German Olympic spirit on display. Those conspicuously unadorned-the Nazis had forbidden Jews from flying the Reich colors-drew stares enough. Why advertise beyond the obvious?

Hoffner pushed through the front door and into the foyer. He slid his umbrella into the stand and then opened the door to the house. Almost at once the smell of boiled chicken and potatoes wafted out to meet him.

Luckily, Georg’s Lotte was an excellent cook. Hoffner followed the smell past the sitting and dining rooms (too much velvet and suede), along the carpeted corridor (very Chinese), and into the white-white tile of the kitchen. At least here there was something of the familiar. Lotte was at the stove, standing beyond the large wooden table and leaning over a pot that seemed to be sending up smoke signals. Very quietly, Hoffner said, “Hello.”

She was known to jump. Several meals during his early days in the house had spilled to the floor with the simplest of greetings. Hoffner cleared his throat and again spoke in a calming tone. “Smells very nice.”

“I heard the door,” she said, without turning. She continued to stir. “A messenger came with another note. That makes three. It’s on the table.”