“Let me see.” Blask dropped the sledgehammer and stroked his anvil-sized chin. “For one thing, he smokes Russian cigarettes. I think they’re Russian, anyway. Flat ones that smell like a nest of burning weasels. So when he’s in the room, you’ll know about it. Otherwise he’s a pretty regular guy, at least to look at. Aged about thirty, thirty-five, pimp mustache, bit swarthy—looks like he should be wearing a fez. Owns a new Hanomag with a Brandenburg license plate. Matter of fact, that might be where he’s from, originally. The driver’s from somewhere south of there. Wittenberg, I think. He’s a slugger, too, with a reach like the Palace Bridge, so mind you watch out for him as well.”

TO THE SOUTH OF PICHELSBERG, a high road affording pretty views but now much used by construction traffic skirted the Havel River and led to Beelitzhof and the two-kilometer peninsula of Schildhorn. Close to the riverbank were a little group of bars and ivy-covered restaurants, and a series of stone steps that rose steeply up to a group of pine trees that hid the Schildhorn monument and whatever else went on there at six o’clock in the morning. The monument was well chosen as a place for picking up illegal workers. From the road it was impossible to see anything that happened around the monument.

Albert the Bear was shaped a bit like a boot or a shoe and was of such an age that it looked as if the shoe might have an old woman who lived in it with so many children she didn’t know what to do. Outside the door was a new Hanomag with an IE license plate. It looked as if I’d arrived at the right time.

I drove on for about three or four hundred meters and parked. In the trunk of Behlert’s car was a pair of overalls. Behlert was always messing around under the hood of the W. I put on the overalls and walked back into the village, stopping only to push my hands into some damp soil to give myself a workingman’s manicure. A cold easterly wind was blowing off the river and carried a strong hint of the coming winter, not to mention a whiff of something chemical from the Hohenzollerndamm Gasworks on the edge of Wilmersdorf.

Outside the Albert, a tall man with a courtroom artist’s idea of a face was leaning on the Hanomag reading the Zeitung. He was smoking a Tom Thumb and probably keeping an eye on the car. As I pushed open the door, a little bell rang above my head. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but I went inside anyway.