The next day, Paul Kestner was waiting for me in the Lutetia lobby, as arranged. We shook hands like old friends and admired each other’s tailoring. German officers did a lot of that in 1940, especially in Paris, where fine clothes seemed to matter more.

Kestner was tall and thin and round-shouldered like someone who had spent a lot of time behind a desk. His head was almost completely hairless apart from the dark eyebrows that softened his solidly cut features. It was a face engraved with integrity, and it was hard to believe that a man with a jaw as square as the Brandenburg Gate could have betrayed the police service and then me with such impunity. Kestner’s was a head that belonged on a Swiss banknote, only I’d spent a large part of the rail journey from Berlin considering the idea of putting a bullet in it. Heydrich’s myrmidons had done their homework well. The file he’d handed me in his car contained a copy of the anonymous letter Kestner had sent to the Jew desk denouncing me as a mischling, as well as a sample of Kestner’s own identical handwriting, which, conveniently, he had also signed. There was even a photograph taken in March 1925—before he’d joined the Berlin police—of Kestner wearing the uniform of a Communist Party cadre and aboard a KPD election bus, with a placard over his shoulder on which was printed “You Must Elect Thalmann.” At the very same moment I smiled and shook Kestner’s hand and talked about the old times we shared, I wanted to punch his teeth in, and the only thing that seemed likely to stop me from doing it was the affection I still held for his little sister.

“How’s Traudl?” I asked. “Has she finished medical school?”

“Yes. She’s a doctor now. Working for something called the Charitable Foundation for Health and Institutional Care. Some government-funded clinic in Austria.”

“You’ll have to give me the address,” I said. “So that I can send her a postcard from Paris.”

“It’s the Schloss Hartheim,” he explained. “In Alkoven, near Linz.”

“Not too near Linz, I hope. Hitler’s from Linz.”

“Same old Bernie Gunther.”

“Not quite. You’re forgetting this pirate hat I’m wearing now.” I tapped the silver skull and crossbones on my gray officer’s cap.

“That reminds me.” Kestner glanced at his wristwatch. “We have an eleven-o’clock appointment with Colonel Knochen at the Hôtel du Louvre.”

“He’s not here at the Lutetia?”

“No. Colonel Rudolf of the Abwehr is in charge here. Knochen likes to run his own show. The SD is mostly at the Hôtel du Louvre, on the other side of the river.”

“I wonder why they put me here.”