The plan was simple: that I, being a Berliner, would contact the owner of the building on Schulzendorfer Strasse and offer to rent one of several empty apartments using my wife’s maiden name. The owner, a retired lawyer from Wilmersdorf, showed me around the apartment—which he’d furnished himself—and it was much better on the inside than it looked from the outside. He explained that the building had been owned and administered by his wife, Martha, until she had been killed by a bomb the previous year while visiting her mother’s grave in Oranienburg.

“They said she never knew a thing,” said Herr Schurz. “A two-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram American aerial bomb had lain there for almost ten years without anyone noticing. A grave digger twenty meters away was digging, and he must have hit the thing with his pickax.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“They say Oranienburg is full of unexploded ordnance. The soil is soft there, you see, with a hard layer of gravel underneath. The bombs would penetrate the earth but not the gravel.” He shrugged and then shook his head. “Apparently, there were a lot of targets in Oranienburg.”

I nodded. “The Heinkel factory. And a pharmaceutical plant. Not to mention a suspected atomic bomb research plant.”

“Are you married, Herr Handlöser?”

“No, my wife also is dead. She got pneumonia. But she’d been ill for a while, so it wasn’t as unexpected as what happened to your wife.”

I went to the window and looked down onto the street.

“This is a big apartment for someone living by himself,” said Schurz.

“I’m planning to take in a couple of tenants to help me with the rent,” I said. “If that’s all right with you. Some gentlemen from an American Bible school.”

“I’m pleased to hear it,” said Schurz. “That’s what the whole French sector needs now. More Americans. They’re the only ones with any money. Talking of which.”

I counted some banknotes into his eager hand. He gave me a set of keys, and then I returned to the safe house on Dreyse Strasse.

“As far as the landlord is concerned,” I said, “we can move in tomorrow.”

“You said nothing to him about Stahl or Stellmacher,” said Scheuer.

“I did exactly as you told me. I didn’t even ask about the neighbors. So what happens now?”

“We move in and keep the place under close surveillance,” said Scheuer. “Wait for Erich Mielke to visit his dad and then go upstairs to introduce ourselves.”

Frei laughed. “Hello, we’re your new neighbors. Can we interest you in defecting to the West? You and your old man.”

“What happened to the idea of making him into your spy?”