“You do realize you’re going to have to sleep with me again,” I said. “To guarantee my silence.”

“Of course. In fact, as your banker, I was banking on it. With interest.”

Chapter 19

19

I DROPPED NOREEN OFF at the Ministry of the Interior for her interview with von Tschammer und Osten, and drove back to the hotel and then kept on driving, west, again. Now that she was out of the way, I wanted to nose around the Olympic site at Pichelsberg on my own. The fact was I had only the one pair of gum boots; and then there was the fact that I didn’t want to draw any attention while I was doing the nosing, which was almost impossible when Noreen was on my arm. She commanded attention like a nudist playing the trombone.

Pichelsberg Racecourse was at the north end of the Grunewald. In the center of the racecourse was the stadium, laid out from a design by Otto March and opened in 1913. Encircling the course were running and cycling tracks, while to the north was a swimming pool—all built for the canceled Berlin Olympiad of 1916. In stands that could accommodate almost forty thousand people were sculptures, including a goddess of victory and a Neptune group. Except that none of them were there anymore. Nothing was. Everything—the racecourse, the stadium, and the pool—had been demolished and replaced by an enormous earthwork: a huge mass of soil had been created from the excavation of a vaguely circular pit, where I assumed the new stadium was going to be built. As assumptions go, this one seemed unlikely. The Berlin Olympics were less than two years away and nothing had been built. Indeed, a perfectly serviceable and recently constructed stadium had been knocked down to make way for the Battle of Verdun as imagined by D. W. Griffith. As I got out of the car I half expected to see the French front lines, our own line, and heavy shell bursts in the air.

For a moment I was back in uniform and feeling fairly sick with fear at the sudden recollection of that earlier dun-colored wilderness. And then the shakes were on me, as if I had just woken up from the same nightmare I always had, which was about being back there . . .

. . . carrying a box of ammunition through the mud and clay while shells were falling all around. It took me two hours to move 150 meters up to our front line. I kept throwing myself on the ground or simply falling over until I was soaked to the skin and caked with earth, like a man made of mud.