“Trouble?” I smiled ruefully. “Life is trouble. Only the naïve and the young imagine that it’s anything else. It’s only trouble that finds out if we’re up to the task of staying alive.”

“Because if you are in trouble…”

“I hate to ask you another favor….”

She took my hand and kissed the fingers, one by one. “When are you going to get it through your thick Prussian head,” she said. “I’ll help you in any way I can.”

“All right.” I thought for a moment and then, taking her pencil and paper, I started to write. “When you get to the club, I want you to make a call to this number in Munich. Ask for a Mr. Kramden. If Mr. Kramden isn’t there, tell whoever it is that you will call back in two hours. Don’t leave your name and number, just tell them that you want to leave a message from Carlos. When you get to speak to Kramden, tell him I’ll be staying with my uncle François in Göttingen for the next few weeks at the Pension Esebeck, until I’ve met Monsieur Voltaire off the train from the Cherry Orchard. Tell Mr. Kramden that if he and his friends need to contact me I’ll be going to the St. Jacobi Church each day I’m in Göttingen, at around six or seven o’clock in the evening, and to look for a message under the front pew.”

She looked over my notes. “I can do that.” She nodded firmly. “Göttingen’s quaint. Pretty. What Germany used to look like. I’ve often thought it would be nice to live there.”

I shook my head. “You and me, Elisabeth. We’re Berliners. Hardly cut out for fairy-tale living.”

“I suppose you’re right. What will you do after Göttingen?”

“I don’t know, Elisabeth.”

“It seems to me,” she said, “that if there’s no one else in Berlin you know, or who you can trust, then you should think yourself free to come and live here. Like you did before. Remember?”

“Why else do you think I sent you that money from Cuba? I hadn’t forgotten. Lately, I’ve had to do quite a bit of remembering one way or another. Telling my story to—well, it doesn’t matter who. A lot of stuff I’d rather forget. But I don’t forget that. You can depend on it. I never forgot about you.”

Of course, not everything had been told back at Landsberg.

A man should keep some secrets, after all, especially when he’s talking to the CIA.

Special Agents Scheuer and Frei might have opened a file in Elisabeth Dehler’s name if I’d told them every little detail about what happened on the train from the pleni camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt to Dresden, and then Berlin, in 1946.