Reflecting that it might be a while before I got to smoke again, I took a couple of hurried puffs and then stubbed out my cigarette in a smoked-glass ashtray the same color as von Helldorf’s lying eyes. And this was just enough time for me to remember the day I’d looked in on the Reichstag fire trial and how many Nazi liars I’d seen in court; and how everyone had loudly bravo’d the biggest liar of them all, Hermann Goering. Seldom had I found being a German so unattractive as on that particular day of lies. With all of that in mind, I felt obliged to tell von Helldorf to go to hell. Except that I didn’t, of course. I was rather more polite about it. There’s bravery, after all, and then there’s downright stupidity.

“I’m sorry, General, but I can’t sign that document. It’d be like a goose writing someone a Christmas card. Besides, I happen to know that all of those poor fellows who were in Oranienburg got sent on to a concentration camp in Lichtenberg.”

The general upended the dice box onto the table in front of him and inspected the result, as if it mattered. Maybe it did, and I simply didn’t know it. Maybe if he’d thrown a couple of sixes, that might have been lucky for me—he might have let me go. As it was, he’d thrown only a one and a two. He closed his eyes and sighed.

“Take him away,” he told the man in the leather coat. “We’ll see if a night in the cells can’t change your mind, Herr Gunther.”

His men picked me up by the shoulders on my suit and sleep-walked me out of von Helldorf’s office. To my surprise we went up another floor.

“A room with a view, is that it?”

“All our cells have a nice view of the Havel,” said Leather Coat. “Tomorrow, if you don’t sign that paper, we’ll give you a swimming lesson off the bow of the count’s yacht.”

“That’s all right. I can swim already.”

Leather Coat laughed. “Not off the yacht, you won’t. Not after we tie you to the anchor.”