“Perhaps if I knew the reason you feel I need to give a guarantee of my own good behavior,” I said, “then I might be more inclined to sign such a thing.”

Von Helldorf frowned and looked sternly at the three men who had brought me all the way from the Adlon. “Do you mean to tell me he hasn’t been told why he’s been brought here?”

Leather Coat shook his head. His hat was off now, and I had a clearer idea of him as a human being. He looked like a gorilla. “All I was told, sir, was that we should pick him up and bring him here immediately.”

Von Helldorf rattled the dice box irritably, as if he wished it had been Leather Coat’s skull. “It seems I have to do everything myself, Herr Gunther,” he said, and walked toward me.

While I waited for him to arrive, I rolled my eyeballs around the room, which was set up for the playboy prince of Ruritania. On one wall was a geometry set of foils and sabers. Beneath this was an oceangoing sideboard that was home to a radio as big as a tombstone and a silver tray with more bottles and decanters than the cocktail bar at the Adlon. A double-front secretaire was full of leather-bound books, and a few of them were about the laws of criminal evidence and procedure, but mostly they were classics of German literature such as Zane Grey, P. C. Wren, Booth Tarkington, and Anita Loos. Police work never looked so leisured and comfortable.

Von Helldorf drew out one of the heavy dining chairs around the table, sat down, and leaned against a carved back that had more tracery than a window in a Gothic cathedral. Then he laid his hands on the desk as if he had been about to play the piano. Either way, he had my full attention.