Schuchardt was handsome, if you consider men with white-blond hair and pale blue eyes handsome. As a blond-haired, blue-eyed man myself, I thought he looked like a much-improved, more efficient Nazi version of me: a man-god instead of a poor Fritz with a Jewish girlfriend. Then again, I never much wanted to be a god or even to enter heaven, not when all the bad girls like Frieda were back in Weimar Berlin.

He ushered me into his little office and closed a frosted-glass door, which left the two of us alone with a little wooden desk, a whole tank corps of gray metal filing cabinets, and a nice view of the Gestapo’s back garden, where a man was carefully tending the flower beds.

“Coffee?”

“Sure.”

Schuchardt dropped a heating element into a jug of tap water. He seemed amused to see me, which is to say his hawkish face had the look of one who had eaten several sparrows for lunch.

“Well, well,” he said. “Bernie Gunther. It’s been two years, hasn’t it?”

“Must be.”

“Arthur Nebe is here, of course. He’s the assistant commissioner. And I daresay there are many others you’d recognize. Personally, I could never understand why you left KRIPO.”

“I thought it best to leave before I was pushed.”

“You’re quite wrong about that, I think. The Party much prefers pure criminalists such as yourself to a bunch of March violets who have climbed on the Party’s bandwagon for ulterior motives.” His razor-sharp nose wrinkled with displeasure. “And of course there are still a few in KRIPO who have never joined the Party. Indeed, they are respected for it. Ernst Gennat, for example.”

“I daresay you’re right.” I might have mentioned all the good cops who’d been kicked out of KRIPO in the great police purge of 1933: Kopp, Klingelhöller, Rodenberg, and many others. But I wasn’t there to have a political argument. I lit a Muratti, smoked my lungs for a second, and wondered if I dared mention what had brought me to Otto Schuchardt’s desk.