“Well, now I have a use for one. It’s as simple as that, pal. I need a man of character. Pure and simple.”

A person of character, he said. A mensch, he said. I had my doubts. Would a mensch have helped Max Reles to silence Othman Weinberger by handing the American the means to destroy Weinberger’s career, and possibly his life, too? After all, it was I who had told Reles about Weinberger’s Achilles’ heel: that the little Gestapo man from Würzburg was suspected, wrongly, of being a Jew. And it was I who had told Max Reles about Emil Linthe, the forger, and how a man like Linthe might bribe his way in the public records office and give another man like Weinberger a Jewish transfusion just as easily as he’d given me an Aryan one. In my own defense, I could argue that I’d done all of that to protect Noreen Charalambides from being murdered by Max’s brother. But what character was left to a man who’d done something like that? A mensch? No, I was anything but that.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take the job.”

“You will?” Max Reles sounded surprised. He stared at me for a while with narrowing eyes. “So now I’m curious. What was it persuaded you?”

“Maybe we’re more alike than I care to admit. Maybe it was the thought of that brother of yours and what he might do to me with an ice pick if I said no. How is the kid?”

“Dead.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. The kid turned rat on some friends of mine to save his own skin. He sent six guys to the electric chair. Including someone I went to school with. But he was a canary who couldn’t fly. Abe was about to finger a boss when he got himself thrown out of a high window of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island in November 1941.”

“You know who did it?”

“He was in protective custody at the time, so, sure, I know. And one day I’ll take my revenge on these guys. Blood is blood, after all, and there never was any permission asked or given. But right now it wouldn’t be good for business.”

“Sorry I asked.”

Reles nodded grimly. “And I’d appreciate it if you never asked me about it again.”

“I already forgot the question. Listen, we Germans are good at forgetting all kinds of things. We’ve spent the last nine years trying to forget there ever was a man called Adolf Hitler. Believe me, if you can forget him, you can forget anything.”

Reles grunted.

“One name I do remember,” I said. “Avery Brundage. What ever happened to him?”