I nodded. “I got everything.” I brandished the old lady’s envelope. “Everything. Kettenacher’s double couldn’t get past this lot. That’s the great thing about Nazi documentation. For one thing, there was so bloody much of it. And for another, it’s virtually impossible to contradict.”

“Let’s hope it’s not the real one,” said Vigée. “If he was blind, then perhaps he couldn’t see his mother. And perhaps her eyes are not so good and she couldn’t see him.” He looked through the documents. “Let us hope you’re right about this. I don’t like disappointments.”

35

GERMANY, 1954

The following morning, I remained at the pension in Göttingen while Vigée and some of the others went to arrest the man posing as Kettenacher. I asked if I might be allowed to go to church, but Grottsch said that Vigée had given orders that we should remain indoors and await his return. He said, “I hope it’s him so that we can go back to Hannover. I really don’t like Göttingen anymore.”

“Why? It’s a nice enough little town.”

“Too many memories,” said Grottsch. “I went to university here. My wife, too.”

“I didn’t know you were married.”

“She was killed in an air raid,” he said. “In October 1944.”

“Sorry.”

“And you? Were you married before?”

“Yes. She died, too. But much later on. In 1949. We had a small hotel in Dachau.”

He nodded. “Dachau is very lovely,” said Grottsch. “Well, it was, before the war.”

For a moment we shared a silent memory of a Germany that was gone and probably would never be again. Not for us, anyway. And certainly not for our poor wives. Conversations in Germany were often like this: People would just stop in the middle of a sentence and remember a place that was gone or someone who was dead. There were so many dead that sometimes you could actually feel the grief on the streets, even in 1954. The feeling of sadness that afflicted the country was almost as bad as it had been during the Great Depression.

We heard a car draw up outside the pension and Grottsch went to see if they had our man. A few minutes later, he came back looking worried.

“Well,” he said. “They’ve got someone. Yes, they’ve got someone, all right. But if it is Edgard de Boudel, then he speaks German better than any Franzi I ever met.”

“Of course he would,” I said. “He was fluent even when I knew him. His German was better than mine.”

Grottsch shrugged. “Anyway, he insists he’s Kettenacher. Vigée’s confronting him with the real Kettenacher’s documents now. Did you see Kettenacher’s party ID? The man had donation stamps going back to 1934. And did you see those dueling scars on his cheek in the photographs?”