“Max keeps me very busy, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever done so much typing. Not even when I was at Odol. But right now, we’re off to the opera.”

“To see what?”

She smiled ingenuously. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know anything about opera.”

“Me neither.”

“I expect I shall hate it. But Max wants me to take some dictation during the interval.”

“And what about you, Herr Krempel? What do you do during the interval? Murder a good tune? In the absence of anything else.”

“Do I know you?” he asked, hardly looking at me. His whispered growl of a voice sounded as if it had been rubbed down with sandpaper and then marinated in burning kerosene.

“No, you don’t. But I know you.”

Krempel was tall, with flying-buttress shoulders and dead black eyes. Thick yellow hair grew on top of a head that was as big as a Galápagos tortoise and probably about as quick. His mouth resembled an ancient scar on a footballer’s knees. Fingers like scrap-yard grapples were already bunching into fists the size of wrecking balls. He looked like a real thug’s thug, and if the German Labor Front included a section for employees in the field of intimidation and coercion, then Gerhard Krempel might reasonably have expected to be elected as a workers’ representative.

“You must be confusing me with someone else,” he said, stifling a yawn.

“My mistake. I expect it’s those evening clothes. I thought you were an SA bullyboy.”

Max Reles must have caught that, because he scowled at me and then at Noreen.

“Is this dishwasher giving you any trouble?” he asked her, speaking German now for my benefit.

“No,” she said. “Herr Gunther’s been very helpful.”

“Really?” Reles chuckled. “Must be his birthday or something. How about it, Gunther? Did you take a bath today?”

Krempel thought that was hilarious.

“Tell me, did you find my Chinese box yet? Or the girl who stole it?”

“The matter is in the hands of the police, sir. I’m sure they’re doing all they can to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.”

“That’s very reassuring. Tell me, Gunther, what kind of a cop were you, anyway, before you started peeping through hotel keyholes? You know, I’ll bet you were one of those cops who wear that stupid leather helmet with the flat top. Is that because all of you kraut cops have flat heads or because some of you do a little moonlighting carrying trays of fish at Friedrichshain Market?”

“I think it’s both,” said Krempel.

“You know, in the States some people call coppers ‘flatfoots’ because a lot of them have flat feet,” said Reles. “But I think I like ‘flatheads’ a whole lot better.”