“Maybe you heard about what was happening there and mentioned it in passing to Nebe. As a little thank-you for getting you out of Minsk.”

“In case you’ve forgotten,” I said, “Nebe was head of Kripo and, before that, a general in the Gestapo. It’s quite likely he knew Wildmann and Schmidt for the same reason I did. And I daresay he would have known all about this place in Tiergartenstrasse as well. But I never did.”

“Your relationship with Waldemar Klingelhöfer,” said Silverman. “You were quite helpful to him. With advice.”

“Yes. I tried to be.”

“Were you helpful in any other ways?”

I shook my head.

“Did you accompany him to Moscow, for example?”

“No, I’ve never been in Moscow.”

“And yet you speak Russian almost as well as he does.”

“That was later, when I learned. In the labor camp, mostly.”

“So between September 28 and October 26, 1941, you say you were not with Klingelhöfer’s Vorkommando Moscow, but in Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“And that you had nothing to do with the murders of five hundred and seventy-two Jews during that time?”

“Nothing to do with it, no.”

“Several of them were Jewish mink ranchers who failed to provide the prescribed quota of furs for Klingelhöfer.”

“Never shot a Jewish mink rancher, Gunther?”

“Or blown one up in a pillbox?”

“No.”

The two lawyers were quiet for a moment, as if they’d run out of questions. The silence didn’t last long.

“So,” said Silverman. “You’re not in Moscow, you’re back on the plane to Berlin. A Junkers 52, you said. Any witnesses?”

I thought for a moment. “Fellow named Schulz. Erwin Schulz.”

“Go on.”

“He was SS, too. A Sturmbannführer, I think. But before, he’d been a cop in Berlin. And then an instructor at the police academy in Bremen. After that, something in the Gestapo, maybe in Bremen, too. I don’t remember. But we hadn’t seen each other in more than ten years when we both got on that plane out of Baranowicze.

“He was a few years younger than me, I think. Not much. I think he’d been in the army during the last months of the Great War. And then the Freikorps while he was at university, in Berlin. Law, I think. Tallish, fair-haired, with a mustache a bit like Hitler’s, and quite tanned. Not that he looked well when he was on that plane. There were huge bags under his eyes that were more like bruises, almost as if someone had punched him.