These are ugly times and you will have to go to ugly places and deal with people who have made themselves ugly, but you are my knight of heaven, my Galahad, and I feel certain you can endure all these tests without becoming ugly yourself. And you must always tell yourself that you are not just sweeping leaves on a windy day, although there will be times when that is what it will feel like.

I kiss you. Noreen. xx

WÜRZBURG WASN’T AN UGLY PLACE, although the Franconians had done their best to make their state capital a virtual shrine to Nazism and had effectively uglified what was a pleasantly situated medieval red-roofed town in an open part of a river valley. In almost every shop window there was a photograph of Hitler or a sign advising Jews to keep out or risk the consequences—sometimes both. The town made Berlin look like a model of true representative democracy.

Dominating the landscape from the left bank of the river was the old castle of Marienberg, built by the prince-bishops of Würzburg who had been champions of the Counter-Reformation during another ugly time in German history. But it was just as easy to imagine the imposing white castle inhabited by some evil scientist who exercised a powerful and malign influence on Würzburg, unleashing an elemental force to make monsters of the town’s unsuspecting peasants. These were mostly ordinary-looking folk, although there were one or two with boxy foreheads, vivid surgical scars, and ill-fitting coats who might have given even the most committed galvanist some pause for thought. I felt kind of inhuman myself and walked south from the railway station and onto Adolf-Hitler-Strasse with awkward, stiff legs, which might easily have belonged to a dead man, although that might have been the lingering effect of Noreen’s letter.

Checking into the Palace Hotel Russia House helped to lift my spirits a little. After a week in police custody, I had the taste for a good hotel. Then again, I had the taste anyway, and now that I’d decided to overcome my scruples and cash Noreen’s check, I also had the money. After a light supper in the hotel’s Königs Café, I walked three quarters of a kilometer east, on Rottendorfer Strasse, to a quiet suburb near a reservoir to see the widow Rubusch.