I tried it on. The hat was too big, so I handed it back to him. “Keep it,” I said. “I’ll stand in a doorway on the opposite side of the road and watch from there.”

Scheuer cleaned a patch of condensation from the window. “And we’ll watch you from here.”

Hamer looked at my half-eaten food. “You Germans eat too much anyway,” he observed.

Ignoring him, I said, “I follow him. Not you. If you think I’ve lost him, don’t panic. Just keep your distance. And don’t try to find him again for me. I know what I’m doing. Try to remember that. I used to do this kind of thing for a living. If he goes in another building, then wait outside, don’t follow me in. He might have friends looking out of a window.”

“Good luck,” said Scheuer.

“Good luck to us all,” I said, and drained the contents of my wineglass. Then I went outside.

For the first time in a while, I felt a spring in my step. Things were starting to work out nicely. I didn’t mind the rain in the least. It felt good on my face. Refreshing. I took up a position in the doorway of the soot-blackened building opposite. A cold doorway. A policeman’s true station, and blowing on my fingernails for want of gloves, I settled in against the inside wall. Once, a long time ago, I’d lived not fifty or sixty meters from where I was standing, in an apartment on Fasanenstrasse. The long, hot summer of 1938, when the whole of Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief because the threat of war had been averted. So we had thought, anyway. When Henry Ford had finished saying history is bunk, he also said that most of us preferred to live in the present and not to think about the past. Or words to that effect. But in Berlin the past was rather harder to avoid.

A man came down the stairs of the building and asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one and for a moment or two we talked, but all the time I kept one eye on the two doors of the Am Steinplatz. At the opposite end of Uhlandstrasse, near the eponymous square, was a hotel called the Steinplatz. The two establishments were owned by the same people; to the confusion of all Americans, they even shared the same telephone number. The confusion of all Americans was just fine by me.

It stopped raining and the sun came out, and a few minutes later so did my quarry. He paused, looked up at the clearing sky, and lit a pipe, which was my chance to get another good look at him.