He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible blow. That took care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged her up on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands already at the buttons of his trousers, her white frock already pulled above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath, nothing all day… how I’ve wanted you, she whispered as paternal plow found its way into filial furrow… and after hours of amazing incest they dressed in silence, and crept out into the leading edge of faintest flesh dawn, everything they would ever need packed inside her flowered bag, past sleeping children doomed to the end of summer, past monitors and railway guards, down at last to the water and the fishing boats, to a fatherly old sea-dog in a braided captain’s hat, who welcomed them aboard and stashed them below decks, where she snuggled down in the bunk as they got under way and sucked him for hours while the engine pounded, till the Captain called, “Come on up, and take a look at your new home!” Gray and green, through the mist, it was Denmark. “Yes, they’re a free people here. Good luck to both of you!” The three of them, there on deck, stood hugging….

No. What Pökler did was choose to believe she wanted comfort that night, wanted not to be alone. Despite Their game, Their palpable evil, though he had no more reason to trust “Ilse” than he trusted Them, by an act not of faith, not of courage but of conservation, he chose to believe that. Even in peacetime, with unlimited resources, he couldn’t have proven her identity, not beyond the knife-edge of zero tolerance his precision eye needed. The years Ilse would have spent between Berlin and Peenemünde were so hopelessly tangled, for all of Germany, that no real chain of events could have been established for sure, not even Pökler’s hunch that somewhere in the State’s oversize paper brain a specific perversity had been assigned him and dutifully stored. For every government agency, the Nazi Party set up a duplicate. Committees fissioned, merged, generated spontaneously, disappeared. No one would show a man his dossier—