“You’re right. I should have made sure I was born somewhere other than Germany in 1896. That way maybe I could have ended up on the winning side. Twice. How does it feel, boys? To sit in judgment on someone else’s mistakes? Pretty good, I imagine. The way you two act, anyone might think you Americans really do believe that you’re better than anyone else.”

“Not everyone else,” snarled Earp. “Just you and your Nazi pals.”

“You can keep telling yourself that, if you like. But we both know it’s not true. Or is it that occupying the moral high ground is more than an aspiration for you Amis? Perhaps it’s also a constitutional necessity. Only, I suspect that underneath all that sanctimony you’re just like us Germans. You really do believe that might is right.”

“At this moment,” said Silverman, “all that really matters is what we believe about you.”

“He tells a good story.” Earl was speaking to Silverman. “A regular Jakob Grimm, this guy. All it lacked was the ‘once upon a time’ and the ‘happily ever after.’ We should get him some heated iron shoes and make him dance around the room in them like Snow White’s stepmother until he’s straight with us.”

“You’re quite correct,” said Silverman. “And you know? Only a German could have thought of a punishment like that.”

“Didn’t you say you had German parents?” I said. “Just a mother you’re sure about, I presume.”

“Neither of us feels very proud of our German background,” said Earp. “Thanks to people like you.”

For a while the three of us were silent. Then Silverman said:

“There was a Gunther we heard about in that town you mentioned. Baranowicze. He was an SS-Sturmbannführer with one of the small killing units belonging to Arthur Nebe’s Task Group B. A Sonderkommando. He organized one of the early gassings. Everyone in a mental hospital at Mogilev was killed. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”

“No,” I said. But seeing that they were hardly likely to be satisfied with a straight denial, I lifted my finger to indicate that I was trying to remember something. And then I did. “I think there was an SS-Sturmbannführer called Günther Rausch. Attached to Task Group B in the summer of 1941. It must be him you’re thinking of. I never gassed anyone. Not even the fleas in my bed.”

“But it was you who suggested to Arthur Nebe the idea of mass killings using explosives, wasn’t it? You admitted as much yourself.”

“That was a joke.”

“Not a very funny joke.”