Sandberger grinned. Probably he meant it well, but it felt like seeing something unpleasant and atavistic toward the end of a séance. Evil flickering on and off like a faulty lightbulb.

“Well,” he said, full of patient menace. “Let me know if I can help. My father is a friend of President Heuss.”

“And he’s trying to help free you?” I tried to contain the surprise in my voice. “To get you a parole?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.” I walked away before he could see the look of horror on my face. It was beginning to look as if the only way I was ever going to have any friends in the new Germany was to have friends I really didn’t like.

My American friends, both of them, were in cell seven when, after breakfast, I was returned there by one of the guards. This time they’d brought a little tape recorder in a leather case with a microphone not much bigger than a Norelco shaver. One was filling his pipe from a pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh; the other was adjusting his clip-on bow tie against his reflection in my cell window. There was a short-brimmed Stetson on my bed and both men smelled lightly of Vaseline hair tonic.

“Make yourself at home,” I said.

“Thanks, we already did.”

“If you’re here to record my singing voice, I should warn you fellows I already made a deal with Parlophone.”

“This is for our listening pleasure,” said the one puffing some heat into his Sir Walter Raleigh. “We’re not planning on a general release. Not this Christmas.”

“We think we’re getting to the interesting part,” said the other. “About Erich Mielke. At long last. The part that affects us now.” He snapped on the machine and the spools began to turn. “Say something for recording level.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. But let’s just hope that the oral tradition is not yet dead in Germany.”

“If it isn’t, it must be the only thing in Germany that’s not dead.”

A few seconds later, I heard for the first time the sound of my own voice uttered by someone other than myself. There was something about it I didn’t like. Mostly it was the laconic way I had of speaking. It was five years since I’d seen my home city, but I still sounded as unhelpful as a Berlin grave digger. It was easy to see why people didn’t like me very much. If ever I was going to make a useful contribution to society I was going to have to fix that. Maybe take some lessons in courtesy and charm.

“Think of us like the Brothers Grimm,” said the Ami smoking the pipe. “Gathering material for a story.”