“Yes. Alexander Kipnis is singing Gurnemanz in Parsifal. The tickets were hard to get, even for me. Kipnis is a Jew, you see. These days it’s not often you can hear a Jew singing Wagner.”

“I imagine Kipnis has one of the least disagreeable voices to be heard in German right now.”

“They say Hitler doesn’t approve.”

“Where is this opera?”

“The German Opera House. On Bismarckstrasse.”

“Can you remember the seat numbers? Only, I need to find Herr Reles and give him a message.”

“The curtain goes up in an hour. He has a box on the grand tier, stage left.”

“You make that sound like a big deal, Franz.”

“It is. It’s the same box Hitler has when he goes to the opera.”

“But not tonight.”

“Obviously.”

I walked back into the entrance hall. Behlert was speaking to two men. I hadn’t ever seen them before, but I knew they were cops. For a start there was Behlert’s manner to identify them: he looked like he was speaking to two of the most interesting men in the world; and then there was theirs: they looked indifferent to almost everything he was saying, except the part about me. And I knew that much because Behlert pointed my way. Another reason I knew they were cops was their thick coats and their heavy boots and their body odor. During the winter, Berlin cops always dressed and smelled as if they were in the trenches. Backed by Behlert’s rolling eyeballs, they came toward me, flashing their warrant discs and sizing me up with narrowed eyes—almost as if they hoped I was going to make their day and run for it; that way they could have had a little fun trying to shoot me. I could hardly blame them. A lot of Berlin crime gets cleaned up that way.

“Bernhard Gunther?”

“Yes.”

“Inspectors Rust and Brandt, from the Alex.”

“Sure, I remember. You two were the detectives Liebermann von Sonnenberg assigned to investigate the death of Herr Rubusch, in 210, weren’t you? Say, what did he die of anyway? I never did find out.”

“Cerebral aneurysm,” said one.

“Aneurysm, eh? Never can tell with that kind of thing, can you? One minute you’re hopping around like a flea, and the next you’re lying on the floor of the trench looking up at the sky.”

“We’d like to ask you a few questions down at the Alex.”

“Sure.”

I followed them outside into the cold night air.

“Is that what this is about?”

“You’ll find out when we get to the Alex,” said Rust.