I turned the half-burned log, heaped some embers next to it, and fetched another log from the basket by the hearth. I even bent down and blew on it for a while. A flame reached around the little pile of wood I’d made and then took hold with a snap as loud as a Christmas cracker.

“You’re good at that.”

I turned to see a small, birdlike woman wearing a shawl, and an uncomfortable smile on a freshly lipsticked mouth.

I stood up, wiped my hands, and made the same lame joke I’d made earlier, about decadent books, which didn’t sound any funnier the second time around. Not in that house. In the corner of the room was a table with a radio and a small photograph of Hitler, and a glass bowl of fruit.

“We’re not really like that around here,” she said with arms folded, watching the fire. “They did burn some books in front of the bishop’s palace about eighteen months ago, but not here. Not in East Würzburg.”

She made it sound like we were in Paris.

“And I suppose that yellow star painted on the house opposite is just mischievous children,” I said.

Frau Rubusch laughed but covered her mouth politely while she did, so that I wouldn’t have to look at her teeth, which were perfect and porcelain white, like a doll’s. And indeed a doll was what she most reminded me of with her penciled eyebrows, her fine features, her dainty red cheeks, and her even finer hair. “That’s not a Star of David,” she said through her fingers. “The man who lives in that house is a director of Würzburger Hofbrau, the town brewery, and that star is the company’s trademark.”

“Maybe he should sue the Nazis for infringing his copyright.”

“Which reminds me. Would you care for some schnapps?”

Next to the table was a three-tier wooden drinks trolley with bottles I was fond of. She poured a couple of large schooners, handed me one with her bony little hand, sat down on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her skinny little backside. I’d seen folded laundry that looked less neat than she did.

“So your telegram said that you wanted to see me about my late husband.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for your loss, Frau Rubusch. It must have been a terrible shock to you.”

“It was.”

I lit a cigarette, double-inhaled the smoke, and then swallowed half of my drink. I was nervous about telling this woman that I believed her husband might have been murdered. Especially when she had only just buried him with the belief that he’d died in his sleep of a cerebral aneurysm. I swallowed the other half.