Trying to find out about past wars is hellish – a series of dead ends, of paths that disappear into darkness, suppurating cesspits shrouded in mist, dust rising like curtains of smoke as you grope your way through the void. I’m beginning to understand the problems faced by people responsible for investigating war crimes that are inevitably shrouded in silence, amnesia and collusion. It’s impossible, the truth is always buried, mislaid in a pile of dossiers and reports, hushed up, covered up, doctored. Then there is the silence, the selective amnesia, the half-truths, the carefully rehearsed lines, the pleas by devil’s advocates, speech after speech, the worm-eaten papers. And above the chatter howls the wind of shame, sweeping aside our best intentions, and so we close our eyes, we lower our heads. Victims always die twice. And their executioners always outlive them.

‘Papa never did tell me what 92 meant . . .’

‘That was the code name for the organisation the old man set up. Unit 92, everyone in the unit had an alias, Jean 92, François 92, Gustave 92. We had to watch our backs, we had the French authorities on our backs, the Yids, the . . .’

‘But why 92?’

‘It was . . . Hitler came to power in ’33, Pétain signed the armistice in 1940, the same year my father joined the Gestapo, he was 19 . . . if you add them up, you get 92. Clever bastard, the old man. That’s what the unit meant, loyalty to the Third Reich.’

‘Mein Ehre Heißt Treue –.’

‘Exactly! So anyway, when the old man died in 1969, I took over and renamed it Unit 134 . . . I was born in ’42, you see, 92 plus 42 equals 134, get it? But by that time there wasn’t much to do, by then most of the Kameraden were living it up in Santiago, Chile and in Bangkok somewhere over in China . . . you know?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know . . . it’s near Thailand somewhere . . . So it was Unit 92 who that managed to get my father . . . ?’

‘Absolutely. At the end of the war, when Kameraden were forced to go to ground, the old man and a bunch of his friends set up Unit 92 to help get them out of Germany to friendly countries. Later on, he hooked up with ODESSA, you heard of them?

‘Sure . . . ODESSA, the Franciscan network, the Vatican Refugee Organisation, the phony papers supplied by fellow travellers in the Red Cross, the Ethiopian line, the Turco-Arab escape routes, and the rest.’

‘Anyway, the 92, we mostly looked out for the SS officers who ran the death camps. They were the elite, you see, the guys that had to be saved for the future. You’ve got to put all this in the book, the old man did good work, he saved dozens of officers from those bastards. You can see all the names there in the little black book. Your father must be in there somewhere . . . What was his name again?’

‘Schiller . . . what bastards?’