As Joey helped me walk to the door, I got a better look at him and saw a man who didn’t look much more Jewish than I did. The hair on the side of a head as big as a watermelon was gray, but on top it was blond, and as curly as an Astrakhan coat. The huge face was both florid and pasty, like old bacon. Small brown eyes sat on either side of a broken nose that was sharp and pointy. The eyebrows were almost invisible, as were the teeth in his gaping mouth. Somehow he put me in mind of a man-sized baby.

We went downstairs, and I recognized that we were in the Albert the Bear. There was no sign of a proprietor, and I didn’t ask. Outside, the fresh morning air helped revive me a little. I got into the passenger seat of the Hanomag and, almost destroying the gears, Deutsch quickly drove us away. He was a terrible driver and narrowly missed colliding with a water trough on the corner.

It turned out that he lived not so very far away from me in the south-eastern part of the city. We dumped what was left of the Hanomag in the car park of the cemetery on Baruther Strasse. Joey wanted to take me to a hospital, but I told him I thought I’d probably be all right.

“How about you?” I asked him.

“Me? I’m all right. You don’t have to worry about me, son.”

“I just cost you a job.”

Joey shook his head. “I shouldn’t ever have taken it.”

I lit us both a cigarette. “Feel up to talking about it?”

“How do you mean?”

“My Ami friend. The journalist. Noreen Charalambides. She’s the one writing about Isaac. I imagine she’d like to speak to you. To get your story and Isaac’s.”

Joey grunted without much enthusiasm for the idea.

“Given that he’s got no actual grave, it could be like a kind of memorial,” I said. “To his memory.”

While Joey considered this idea, he puffed at the cigarette. In his mallet-sized fist it looked more like a safety match.

“Not a bad idea at that,” he said finally. “Bring her around this evening. She can get the whole story. If she doesn’t mind slumming it.”

He gave me an address in Britz, near the meat-canning factory. I jotted it down on the inside of my cigarette pack.

“Does Erich Goerz know this address?” I asked.

“Nobody does. There’s just me that lives there now. If you can call it living. Since Isaac died I’ve let myself go a bit, you know? There doesn’t seem to be much point in looking after the place now that he’s gone. Not much point in anything at all, really.”

“I know what that’s like,” I said.