“I don’t smoke myself,” he said. “But I figured your nerves might be gone.”

“Very thoughtful of you.”

“Keep the packet.”

I pulled a little bit of tobacco out of the cigarette’s smoking end and pinched it tight between thumb and forefinger, the way you did when you didn’t really like the taste. I didn’t, but a smoke was a smoke.

“What will happen to them? The three Amis?”

“Do you really care?”

“To my surprise, yes.” I shrugged. “You can call it a guilty conscience, if you like.”

He shrugged. “They’ll have a pretty rough time of it while we find out what they know. But eventually we’ll exchange them for some of our own people. They’re much too valuable to send to the guillotine, if that’s what you were thinking.”

“You don’t still do that, surely?”

“The guillotine? Why not? It’s quick.” He grinned cruelly. “A bullet is a bit of a let-off for our enemies of state. But it’s a lot quicker than the electric chair. Last year, it took Ethel Rosenberg twenty minutes to die. They say her head caught fire before she died. So you tell me, which is more humane? The two seconds it takes for the ax to fall? Or twenty minutes in the Sing Sing chair?” He shook his head again. “But no. Your three Americans. They won’t be waiting for a delivery of bread.”

Seeing my puzzled expression, he added:

“So as not to cause our citizenry undue alarm, we send our falling ax around the DDR in a bread van, from the bakery in Halle. Whole-grain bread. It’s better for you.”

“Same old Erich. You always did have a strange sense of humor. I remember once, on a train to Dresden, I nearly died laughing.”

“I think you had the last laugh on that occasion. I was impressed with the way you handled him. He wasn’t an easy man to kill, that Russian. But I was rather more impressed with the way you handled things afterward. How you gave that money to Elisabeth. To be honest, until I got your letter I had no idea that you and she had ever become that friendly. Either way, I suspect most men would have kept the money for themselves.