Which was how I’d run into that spot of trouble with the policeman in front of the Kaiser Hotel. From the temporary sanctuary of the Excelsior it was only a few steps to Gestapo House at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8-a building that looked less like the headquarters of the new Germany’s secret state police and more like an elegant, Wilhelmine hotel, an effect enhanced by the proximity of the old Hotel Prinz Albrecht, which now accommodated the administrative leadership of the SS. There were few people who walked up Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse unless they really had to. Especially when they had just assaulted a policeman. Perhaps for that reason I figured it was the last place anyone would think of looking for me.

With its marble balustrades, high vaulted ceilings, and a stair as wide as a railway track, Gestapo House was more like a museum than a building owned by the secret police; or perhaps like a monastery-just as long as the order of monks was one that wore black and enjoyed hurting people in order to make them confess their sins. I entered the building and approached a uniformed and not unattractive girl on the front desk, who walked me up a stair and around a corner to Department II.

Catching sight of my old acquaintance, I smiled and waved simultaneously, and a couple of women from the nearby typing pool fixed me with a look of amused surprise, as if my smile and my wave were ridiculously out of place. And of course they were. The Gestapo hadn’t existed for more than eighteen months, but it already enjoyed a fearsome reputation, and this was why I was nervous and why I was smiling and waving at Otto Schuchardt in the first place. He didn’t wave back. He didn’t smile, either. Schuchardt had never been the life and soul of the party exactly, but I was pretty sure I’d heard him laugh when we were both cops at the Alex. Then again, maybe he’d only been laughing because I was his superior, and as we now shook hands I was already telling myself I’d made a mistake and that the tough young cop I remembered was now made of the same stuff as the balustrades and the staircase outside the department door. It was like shaking hands with a deep-frozen undertaker.