Leaving Behlert’s car where I had parked it earlier, I walked south down Hermann-Goering-Strasse to catch a tram on Potsdamer Platz. It was dark and a little windy, and the Nazi banners hanging on the Brandenburg Gate were flapping around like danger flags, as if our imperial past were trying to warn us about something in our Nazi present. Even a stray dog trotting along the pavement ahead of me stopped and turned to look at me dolefully, perhaps to ask if I had a solution to our country’s problems. Then again, he might just have been trying to avoid the open door of the black W that had pulled up a few meters ahead. A man wearing a brown leather coat got out of the car and walked quickly toward me.

Instinctively, I turned to walk in the opposite direction and discovered my retreat blocked by a man wearing a thick, double-breasted overcoat and a low-brimmed hat, although it was the neat little bow tie I noticed most. At least until I noticed the beer token in his paw.

“Come with us, please.”

The other man in the leather coat was right behind me now, so that, sandwiched between them, I couldn’t very well have resisted. Like experienced window dressers moving a tailor’s dummy, they folded me into the car and jumped in the backseat on either side of me. We were moving before they had even slammed the car doors.

“If this is about that cop,” I said. “August Krichbaum, wasn’t it? I thought we’d sorted out that bullshit. I mean, you checked my alibi. I had nothing to do with it. You know that.”

After a few moments I realized we were going west, along Charlottenburger Strasse, in completely the opposite direction from Alexanderplatz. I asked where we were going, but neither of them spoke. The driver’s hat was made of leather. So were his ears, probably. By the time we reached Berlin’s famous radio tower and turned onto the AVUS—Berlin’s fastest road—I had guessed where we were driving. The driver bought a ticket and we sped toward Wannsee Station. A few years before, Fritz von Opel had set a speed record on the AVUS, driving a rocket-powered car at almost 240 kilometers an hour. We weren’t driving anything nearly as fast as that, but neither did I get the impression that we were likely to stop anywhere for coffee and cake. At the end of the AVUS, we drove through some woods onto the Glienecke Bridge and, although it was very dark, I could just make out that we had passed two castles. Shortly after that we entered Potsdam on New Königstrasse.