He lifted himself into the back, next to Liz’s cases.

“Where first, the bunker?” Ron said to Liz, who nodded. He turned to Jake. “Which way?”

Not where he wanted to go, but stuck with it now, a favor to Liz. “Turn right at the end.”

Ron let out the clutch. “Don’t bother taking notes. Everybody says the same thing anyway. Lunar landscape. That’s the big one. And teeth. Rows of decayed teeth. AP had rotting molars. But maybe you’ll come up with something original. Be nice, something new.”

“How would you describe it?”

“Can’t,” Ron said, no longer flip. “Maybe nobody can. It’s-well, see for yourself.”

Jake headed them north on the Mehringdamm, but they were forced to detour east and in minutes were lost, streets blocked off or impassable, the whole map redrawn by debris. Five minutes back and already lost. They threaded their way through the ruins, Ron glancing back at him as if he were a broken compass until, luckily, another detour put them on the Mehringdamm again. A cleared stretch this time, which would get them to the Landwehrkanal, an easier route to follow than the unpredictable roads. Only the major streets had passable lanes, the others reduced to winding footpaths, when they were visible at all. Berlin, a flat city, finally had contours, new hills of brick. There was no life. Once he spotted children skittering over the rubble like crickets, and a working detail of women reclaiming bricks, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs against the dust, but otherwise the streets were quiet. The silence unnerved him. Berlin had always been a noisy city, the elevated S-bahn trains roaring across their trestle bridges, radios crackling in the apartment block courtyards, cars screeching at red lights, drunks arguing. Now he could hear the motor of the jeep and the eerie creaking of a single bicycle ahead of them, nothing else. A cemetery quiet. At night it would be pitch dark, the other side of the moon. Ron had been right-the unavoidable cliche.