“Maybe I didn’t mention it before, but I’ve been in their sights for quite a while. Ever since I quit the force, as a matter of fact. There are several good reasons I can think of why the Gestapo or for that matter KRIPO could arrest me if they wanted to. It’s the reasons I can’t think of that are the ones I worry about most.”

Chapter 20

20

NOREEN WANTED TO SPEND THE NIGHT with me at my apartment, but I couldn’t bring myself to bring her to what was little more than a room with a tiny kitchen and an even tinier bathroom. Calling it an apartment at all was a bit like describing a mustard seed as a vegetable. There were smaller apartments in Berlin, but mostly it was the families of mice that got them first.

It was embarrassment that prevented me from showing her how I lived. But it was shame that prevented me from telling her that I was one-eighth Jewish. It’s true I had been discomfited at the discovery my so-called mixed blood had been denounced to the Gestapo, but I felt no shame in being who and what I was. How could I? It seemed so insignificant. No, the shame I felt related to my having asked Emil Linthe to airbrush from the official record the very blood that connected me with Noreen, albeit in a small way. How could I tell her that? And, still nursing my secret, I spent another blissful night with Noreen in her suite at the Adlo.n.

Lying between her thighs, I slept only a little. We had better things to do. And early in the morning, when I made my nefarious exit from her room, I told her only that I was going home and that I would see her later that day, and nothing at all about catching the S-Bahn to Grunewald and Schildhorn.

I kept some working clothes in my office. As soon as I had changed, I went out into the predawn darkness and walked to Potsdamer Station. About forty-five minutes after that, I was walking up the steps to the Schildhorn monument with several other men, most of them Jewish-looking types with brown hair, dark melancholy eyes, bat ears, and beaks that made you wonder if God had chosen his people on the basis of their having noses they might not have chosen for themselves. This generalization was made easier by the certain knowledge that all these men shared a bloodline that was probably purer than my own. In the moonlight, one or two of them shot me a questioning look, as if wondering what the Nazis could possibly have against a tall, burly man with blond hair, blue eyes, and a nose like a baker’s thumb. I didn’t blame them. In that particular company I stuck out like Rameses II.