“I try not to think of you at all if I can help it. But the Brothers Grimm works for me. I never liked their stuff very much. I especially hated the story about the village idiot with the pipe and the bow tie and his wicked Uncle Sam.”

“So, then. After Paris. You went home to Berlin.”

“Briefly. I organized Renata a job at the Adlon and lived to regret it. The poor kid was killed in the first big bombing raid on Berlin, in November 1943. Some help I was.”

“And Heydrich?”

“Oh, he was killed much earlier than 1943. Only, he had it coming and on a silver salver. But that’s another story.”

“Did he believe you? About not finding Mielke?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You never knew with Heydrich. We talked it over in his office at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Next thing I knew, I had orders to go to the Ukraine. I might have taken that personally except for the fact that everyone had the same orders.” I shrugged. “Well, I expect your friends Silverman and Earp told you all about that. Then I was in Berlin for a while before going to Prague. That was the summer of 1942. Let’s see, now. A year later, I was in Smolensk with the War Crimes Bureau. As an Oberleutnant. But after the Battle of Kursk we were out of that whole theater pretty quickly. The Red Army was in the driver’s seat, you might say. I got a leave. I got married. To a schoolteacher. Then I was recruited into the Abwehr—military intelligence—and promoted to captain again.”

“Why were you demoted?”

“Because of what happened in Prague. I stepped on someone’s corns, I guess.” I shrugged. “Anyway, February 1944, I joined General Schörner’s Northern Army as an intelligence officer. I spoke a fair bit of Russian by then. And a bit of Polish, too. The work was mostly interpreting. At least it was until the fighting started. Then it was just fighting. Kill or be killed. Tell me something. Did either of the Brothers Grimm see combat?”

“Nope,” said the man with the pipe. “I was flying a desk for the whole of the war.”

“I was too young,” said the man with the bow tie.