“Yes, this was it,” Jake said, climbing back into the jeep.

“Okay, Dahlem,” Ron said.

Jake took a last look at the rubble. Why had he expected anything to be here? A cemetery. “Is there really hot water? I could use a bath.”

“That’s what everybody says,” Ron said, cheerful again. “After. It’s all the dust.”

Their billet was a large villa in Gelferstrasse, a suburban street behind the Luftwaffe headquarters on Kronprinzenallee that now housed the Military Government. The Luftwaffe buildings were in the same style as Goering’s ministry, gray streamlined masonry, here with decorative eagles jutting out of the cornices, poised for flight, but the compound bristled with American flags, flapping on the roofs and the aerials of cars lining the driveway. There was damage here too, burned-out patches where houses had been, but nothing like what they had just seen, and Gelferstrasse itself was in fairly good shape, almost peaceful, some of it still shaded by trees.

Jake had never spent much time in Dahlem, whose quiet streets, away from the center, reminded him of Hampstead, but the relief of seeing houses standing, with their traditional tile roofs and brass knockers, made it seem more familiar than it was. Most of the win-dowpanes were still missing, but the street had been swept free of glass, tidied up, and the smell that had followed them through the city was finally gone, the bodies swept away too in the general house-cleaning.

The villa was a three-story pile of pale yellow stucco, not as lavish as the millionaire mansions up in Grunewald but substantial, the home probably of a professor from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute a few streets away.

“I had to give the congressman the master bedroom,” Ron said, an innkeeper leading them up the stairs, “but at least you won’t have to double up. I can switch you later,” he said to Liz. “He’s only here a few days.”

“Hit and run, huh?” Liz said.