“I don’t think I could have made myself clear,” I said. “Even while I was doing it, even while I was pretending I didn’t recognize him, I regretted it. Captain Anlauf’s murder left three orphaned daughters. You see, what you’ve got to remember is that for a while back there, in the dog days of Weimar, the communists were every bit as loathsome as the Nazis. Maybe more so. After all, it was the Comintern that ordered the German Communist Party to treat the country’s governing SPD as the main enemy, not the Nazis. Can you imagine it? In the Red Referendum of July 1931, the KPD and the Nazis marched together and voted together. That was the nonaggression pact in miniature. I always hated them for that. It was the Reds who really destroyed the Republic, not the Nazis.” I helped myself to another of the Ami’s cigarettes. “And if that wasn’t enough, there’s my own experience of Soviet hospitality to take into account as well. For why I hate the communists.”

“Well, we all hate the Reds,” said the man with the pipe.

“No. You hate the Reds because you’ve been told to hate them. But for five years they were your Allies. Roosevelt and Truman shook hands with Stalin and pretended he was different from Hitler. Which he wasn’t. I hate the Reds because I’ve learned to hate them the way a dog learns to hate the man who beats it regularly. During Weimar. During the war. On the Russian front. But most of the reason I hate them is because I spent almost two years in a Soviet labor camp. And until I met you boys I thought that was about as much hate as I could have for any one race of people.”

“We’re not so bad.” The man with the pipe took it out of his mouth and started to refill it. “When you get to know us.”

“You can get used to anything, it’s true,” I said.

The man with the glasses tutted loudly. By now I vaguely recognized him from seven years earlier, at the Stiftskaserne hospital in Vienna.

“After all the trouble we had getting you this exclusive suite,” he said. He started to clean his glasses with the end of his tie. “I’m hurt.”

“When you’re done cleaning your glasses,” I said, “the windows in here could use a wipe, too. I’m particular about windows. Particularly when I know who’s been breathing on them. There’s nothing about this cell I like, now that I know who was in here last.”

The man with the pipe was finally lighting up. Hitler would have hated his pipe. It looked as if I’d found one reason at last to like Adolf Hitler.