“Not much. Until a few minutes ago I didn’t know how much there was to tell. All you said to me this morning—and, by the way, you were speaking not directly to me, but to the book clerk in La Moderna Poesia—was that your name was Carlos Hausner. And why the hell did you pick Carlos as your nom de plume? Carlos is a name for a fat Mexican peasant in a John Wayne movie. No, I don’t see you as a Carlos at all. I expect that’s why I used your real name, Bernie—well, it just sort of slipped out when I was telling her about Berlin in 1934.”

“That’s unfortunate, given how much trouble I went to in order to get a new name. To be quite frank with you, if the authorities found out about me, Noreen, I could be deported back to Germany, which would be awkward, to say the least. Like I told you. There are people—Russian people—who’d probably like to hold a knot under my ear.”

She gave me a look that was full of suspicion. “Maybe that’s what you deserve.”

“Maybe.” I put my drink down on a glass table and weighed her remark in my mind for a moment. “Then again, in most cases it’s only in books that people get what’s coming to them. But if you really think that’s what I deserve, then perhaps I’ll be running along.”

I went into the house and then out again through the front door. She was standing by the railing on the terrace above the steps that led down to my car.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think you deserve it at all, okay? I was just teasing you. Please come back.”

I stood there and looked up at her without much pleasure. I was angry and I didn’t care that she knew it. And not just about the remark she’d made about me deserving to hang. I was angry with her and with myself that I’d not made it clearer that Bernie Gunther no longer existed, and that Carlos Hausner had taken his place.

“I was so excited to see you again, after all these years—” Her voice seemed to catch on something like a cashmere sweater snagging on a nail. “I’m sorry I let your secret out of the bag. I’ll speak to Dinah when she gets home and tell her to keep what I told her in confidence, okay? I’m afraid I didn’t think about the possible implications of telling her about you. But you see, she and I have been very close since Nick, her father, died. We always tell each other everything.”