She pulled a face. “Don’t ask me to turn him in, Bernie. I’ve known that boy for half his life. I helped bring him up.”

“I am asking it. I give you my word I will do what I said and that I will speak up for him in court. All I’m asking for is an address, Elisabeth.”

She sat down in a chair and clasped her hands tightly and closed her eyes, almost as if she were uttering a silent prayer. Perhaps she was.

“I knew something like this would happen,” she said. “That’s why I’ve never ever told him that you and I have been seeing each other. Because he would have been cross. And I’m beginning to understand why.”

“I won’t tell him that it was you who gave me an address, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” she whispered.

“What, then?”

She stood up abruptly. “I’m worried about Erich, of course,” she said loudly. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen to him.”

I nodded. “Look, forget it. We’ll have to find him some other way. Sorry I bothered you.”

“He lives with his father, Emil,” she said dully. “Stettiner Strasse, number twenty-five. The top flat.”

“Thanks.”

I waited for her to say something else, and when she didn’t I knelt down in front of her and tried to take her hand to give it a comforting squeeze, but she pulled it away. At the same time, she avoided my eye as if it had been hanging out of its socket.

“Just go,” she said. “Go and do your duty.”

It was almost dawn on the street outside Elisabeth’s apartment building, but I felt that something important had happened between us: that something had changed, perhaps forever. I stepped into Heller’s car and told him the address. From my expression I guess he knew better than to ask how I had come by it.

We sped north up Swinemünder Strasse onto Bellermann Strasse and then Christiana Strasse. Twenty-five Stettiner Strasse was a gray tenement building around a central courtyard that would have probably collapsed in on itself but for several large support timbers. Although it could just as easily have been moss or mold, a green rug was hanging out of an open window on one of the upper floors, and it was the only spot of color in that ghastly sarcophagus of raw brick and loose cobblestones. Even though this was fast becoming a bright summer’s morning, no sun ever reached the lower levels of the tenements on Stettiner Strasse: Nosferatu could have spent the whole day quite comfortably in the twilight world of a ground-floor Stettiner Strasse apartment.

We pulled on a bell for several minutes before a gray-haired head appeared out of a dirty window.

“Yes?”

“Police,” said Heller. “Open up.”

“What’s the matter?”