“So who the hell are you? Really?” It was Carlos Fuldner, and he sounded annoyed.

“My real name is Bernhard Gunther. I was in the SD. Working for intelligence. I was captured by the Russians and was interned in a camp before escaping. But before the war I was a policeman. A detective with the Berlin police force.”

“Did you say a detective?” This was the man with the small beard and the tinted glasses. The one I’d marked down as a cop. “What kind of a detective?”

“I worked in Homicide, mostly.”

“What was your rank?” asked the cop.

“When war was declared in 1939, I was a KOK. A Kriminal Oberkommissar. A chief inspector.”

“Then you’ll remember Ernst Gennat.”

“Of course. He was my mentor. Taught me everything I know.”

“What was it that the newspapers used to call him?”

“The Full Ernst. On account of his bulk and fondness for cakes.”

“What happened to him? Do you know?”

“He was deputy chief of the criminal police until his death in 1939. He had a heart attack.”

“Too bad.”

“Too many cakes.”

“Gunther, Gunther,” he said, as though trying to shake a thought like an apple from a tree growing in the back of his head. “Yes, of course. I know you.”

“You do?”

“I was in Berlin. Before the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Studying jurisprudence at the university.”

The cop came closer, close enough for me to smell the coffee and the cigarettes on his breath, and took off his glasses. I guessed he smoked a lot. For one thing, there was a cigarette in his mouth, and for another, his voice sounded like a smoked herring. There were laugh lines around the gray iron filings that constituted his mustache and his beard, but the walnut of a frown knotted between his bloodshot blue eyes told me that maybe he’d got out of the habit of smiling. His eyes narrowed as he searched my face for more answers.