I nodded. “It’s true. He was everyone’s idea of what a Nazi should look like. Especially now that he’s dead.”

“Why do I get the feeling that you weren’t a party member yourself?”

“Does it really matter now? If I was or I wasn’t?” I shook my head. “As far as our new friends are concerned—the French, the Amis, the Tommies—we were all fucking Nazis. So it doesn’t matter who was and who wasn’t. They look at all those old Leni Riefenstahl movies, and who can blame them?”

“There was never a moment when you believed in Hitler, like the rest of us?”

“Oh yes. There was. For about a month in the summer of 1940. After we licked the French in six weeks. I believed in him then. Who didn’t?”

“Yes. That was the best time for me, too.”

After a while we heard raised voices, and a few minutes later, Vigée came into the room. He looked cross and out of breath, and there was blood on the back of one hand, as if he’d hit someone.

“He’s not Richard Kettenacher,” he said. “That much is certain. But he swears he’s not Edgard de Boudel. So. It’s up to you now, Gunther.”

I shrugged. “All right.”

I followed the Frenchman down to the wine cellar where Wenger and Moeller were guarding our prisoner. The photographs the Amis had shown me had been black-and-white, of course, and blown up after being shot from a distance so that they were a little blurred and grainy. Doubtless the real de Boudel would have gone to great lengths to disguise himself. He would have lost some weight, dyed his hair, grown a mustache perhaps. When I’d been a uniformed policeman in the twenties, I’d arrested many suspects on the basis of a photograph or a police description; but this was the first time I’d been obliged to do it in order to save my own neck.

The man was sitting in a chair. He was wearing handcuffs and his cheeks were red, as if he’d been struck several times. He looked about sixty, but he was probably younger. In fact, I was certain of it. As soon as he saw me, the man smiled.

“Bernie Gunther,” he said. “I never thought I’d be pleased to see you again. Tell this French idiot I’m not the man he’s looking for. This Edgar Boudel he keeps asking me about.” He spat on the floor.

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” I said. “Tell him your real name and then perhaps he’ll believe you.”

The man frowned and said nothing.

“Do you recognize this man?” Vigée asked me.

“Yes, I recognize him.”

“And is it him? Is it de Boudel?”

“Who is this Boudel fellow, anyway?” said the prisoner. “And what’s he supposed to have done?”