“It’s an important book. But reading it doesn’t make me a Nazi, any more than reading Marx makes me a communist. Although, as it happens, I do consider myself to be a communist. Does that surprise you?”

“That you think you’re a communist? No, not particularly. The best people are these days. George Bernard Shaw. Even Trotsky, I hear. I like to consider myself a Social Democrat, but since democracy no longer exists in this country, that would be naive.”

“I’m glad you’re a democrat. That it’s something that is still important to you. The fact is, I wouldn’t have slept with you if you’d been a Nazi, Gunther.”

“Like a lot of people, I might like them a bit more if it was me who was in charge and not Hitler.”

“I’m trying to get an interview with him. That’s one of the reasons I’m reading Hitler’s book. Not that I think he will agree to meet me. Most likely I’ll have to make do with seeing the sports minister. I’m meeting him tomorrow afternoon.”

“You won’t mention our friend Zak Deutsch, will you, Noreen? Or me, for that matter.”

“No, of course I won’t. Tell me something. Do you think he was murdered?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll have a much better idea after we’ve spoken to Stefan Blitz. He’s that geologist I was telling you about. I’m hoping he can shed some light on how a man can drown in salt water in the center of Berlin. You see, it’s one thing when it happens off the coast of Ireland, in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s quite another when it happens in the local canal.”

UNTIL THE SPRING OF 1934,Stefan Blitz had been a teacher of geology at Frederick William University, in Berlin. I knew him because sometimes he had helped KRIPO to identify the clay found on the shoes of murder suspects or their victims. He lived in Zehlendorf, in Berlin’s southwest, in a modern housing development called Uncle Tom’s Hut, named after a local tavern and subway shop that were themselves named after the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Noreen was intrigued.

“I can’t believe they called it that,” she said. “In the States, people would never have dared give it a name like that in case people thought the houses were fit only for Negroes.”