“All of it,” said the other. “We want all of it. Every detail. We’ll get to why later.”

“You want the whole of Leviticus? Or just Mielke?”

“Let’s go back to the beginning.”

“Genesis, then. Sure. Darkness was upon the face of Berlin. For me, at any rate. And Walter Ulbricht said let there be some communist thugs; and Adolf Hitler said let there be some Nazi thugs, too. And Chancellor Brüning said let the cops try to keep these two sides apart. And God said why don’t you give the cops something a little easier than that to do? Because the evening and the morning were just one thing after another. Trouble. And the name of the river was the Spree and we were fishing bodies out of it every day. One day a communist and the next day a Nazi. And some men looked at that and said that it was good. As long as they’re killing each other, then that’s fine, isn’t it? Me, I believed in the Republic and in the rule of law. But a lot of cops were Nazis and were not ashamed. From that moment on, you might say, Berlin and Germany were finished and all the host of them.” I sighed. “I forget. Didn’t you know? That’s our national pastime in Germany.”

“So remember.”

“Give me a minute here. This is twenty-three years ago we’re talking about now. You just don’t cough that up like a fur ball.”

“Nineteen thirty-one.”

“An unlucky year for Germany. There were, let’s see, how many? Four million unemployed in Germany? And a banking crisis. Austrian Kreditanstalt had collapsed, what, yes, a couple of weeks before. I remember now. That was May eleventh. We were staring ruin in the face. Which is all the Nazis were waiting for, I suppose. To take advantage of that. Yes, things were bad. But not for Mielke. His luck was about to take a turn for the better. Got your notebooks handy?”

“Like I was your girl Friday.”

11

GERMANY, 1931