He filled our glasses. “Let me see,” he said, “where was I?”

“Ten days ago…”

“Yes. Ten days ago, agents of the Czechoslovak secret police kidnapped Kotacek from his home in Lisbon and spirited him away. The day before yesterday they landed him in Prague and tucked him into a prison cell. In approximately three weeks he will be brought to public trial, charged with collaboration with the enemy, complicity in the murder of several hundred thousand Slovakian Jews and Gypsies, and a variety of more specific war crimes. He will be found guilty on all counts and will be hanged.”

“Good for him.”

“I think not, Tanner. Not good at all, for him or for us.” He leaned forward. “We’ve known of Kotacek’s whereabouts almost from the day he turned up in Lisbon. And we’ve been very careful to leave him alone. From his base in Portugal, Kotacek has been one of the key figures in the global neo-Nazi movement. As you may know, the orientation of Nazism has changed slightly since Hitler’s death. Germans remain at the helm, but the idée fixe has shifted from Aryan supremacy to general white supremacy. Anti-Semitism is still a chief tenet, but anti-Negro and anti-Oriental policies have come to the fore; integration and the Yellow Peril are evidently more potent scapegoats. The movement aims at developing little Nazi parties throughout the world and making power plays in various countries whenever circumstances seem right.

“Kotacek, as I said, is at the hub of all this activity. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that he is the most influential non-German in the contemporary Nazi movement. He has contacts all over the world. He engages in constant correspondence with open and clandestine Nazi leaders. He’s one of the few men anywhere who know just what’s going on among the leaders of the Fourth Reich – which is what they’re apt to call themselves, incidentally – not just in one country, but everywhere.” He paused, raised his glass, set it down. “He has been extremely useful to us.”