I glanced around the office, which was a good size for just one desk. It would have been a good size for a sawmill. In the corner of the room was a fitted cupboard with its own little sink, where another man was washing his half-naked torso. In the opposite corner was a safe. An SS sergeant was listening to it like it was a radio and trying, without success, to persuade the thing to open. On top of the desk was a trio of different-colored telephones that might have been left there by three wise men from the East; behind the desk was another SS officer in a chair; and behind the officer was a large wall map of Minsk. On the floor lay a Russian soldier, and if this had ever been his office it wasn’t anymore; the bullet hole behind his left ear and the blood on the linoleum seemed to indicate he would soon be relocated to a much smaller and more permanent earthly space.

“Besides, Captain Gunther,” added Mundt, “it may have escaped you but the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention.”

“Then I guess it’s fine to shoot them all, sir.”

The officer behind the desk stood up. “Did you say Captain Gunther?”

He was a Standartenführer, too, a colonel, the same as Mundt, which meant that as he came around the desk and placed himself in front of me I was obliged to come to attention again. He had been spawned in the same Aryan pond as Mundt and was no less arrogant.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you the Captain Gunther who telephoned to question my orders to shoot those Jews on the road to Minsk this morning?”

“Yes, sir. That was me. You must be Colonel Blume.”

“What the devil do you mean by questioning an order?” he shouted. “You’re an SS officer, pledged to the Führer. That order was issued to ensure security in the rear for our combat forces. Those Jews set their houses on fire after having been ordered to make them available as billets for our troops. I can’t think of a better reason for a reprisal action than the burning of those houses.”

“I didn’t see any burning houses in that area, sir. And Sturmbannführer Weis was under the impression that those old women were being shot only because they were Jews.”