“Like I said, mostly I’ve worked with my knuckles. But I can handle a pick and a shovel. During the war I did my fair share of digging trenches. Quite a few graves, too.”

“Sad.” He put out the cigarette. “Tell me, Stefan, do you know what a tithing is?”

“It’s in the Bible. It means a tenth part, doesn’t it?”

“’Sright. Now, then. I’m just the hiring boss. I get paid by the construction company to find them men. But I also get paid by you, to find you a job, see? A tenth of what you make at the end of the day. You can think of it as being like your union dues.”

“A tenth seems a little high for any union I’ve ever been in.”

“I agree. But then beggars can’t be choosers, now, can they? Jews aren’t allowed to be in German workingmen’s unions. So, under those circumstances, a tenth is what you’re asked to pay. And you can take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I thought you would. Besides, like I said. It’s in your holy book. Genesis, chapter fourteen, verse twenty. ‘And he gave him tithes of all.’ That’s the best way to look at it, I think. As your holy duty. And if you can’t work your head around that, then just remember this: I only pick the men who pay me the tithing. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“Six o’clock sharp, at the monument outside. Maybe you’ll work, maybe you won’t. It all depends on how many are needed.”

“I’ll be here.”

“As if I care.” Goerz looked back down at his newspaper. The interview was over.

I HAD ARRANGED TO MEET NOREEN at the Romanisches Café on Tauentzienstrasse. Formerly popular with Berlin’s literati, the café resembled an airship that had made an unscheduled landing on the pavement in front of a four-story Romanesque building that might have been the sibling of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church opposite. Or perhaps it was the modern equivalent of a Hohenzollern hunting lodge—somewhere for the princes and emperors of the first German empire to get a coffee or a kummel after spending a long morning on their knees to a God who, by comparison with them, must have seemed rather vulgar and ill bred.

Under the glass ceilings of the café she was easy to see, like an exotic species of hothouse flower. But, as with any vivid tropical bloom, something dangerous was close at hand. A young man wearing a smart black uniform was seated at her table, like Miss Muffet’s spider. Less than six months after the demise of the SA as a political force independent of the Nazis, the impeccably dressed SS had already established itself as the most feared uniformed organization in Hitler’s Germany.