I turned away and walked quickly down Hedemann Strasse. It was a warm day, almost the end of September, when a word like “summer” made me think of something precious that was soon to be forgotten. Like freedom and justice. “Germany awake” was the slogan on everyone’s lips, only it appeared to me that we were clock-stepping in our sleep toward some terrible but as yet unknown disaster. This didn’t mean I was ever going to be foolish enough to say so in public, and certainly not when strangers were listening. I had principles, sure, but I also had all my own teeth.

“Hey you,” said a voice behind me. “Stop a minute. I want to talk to you.”

I kept on walking, and it was not until Saarland Strasse—formerly Königgrätzer Strasse, until the Nazis decided we all needed to be reminded about the Treaty of Versailles and the injustice of the League of Nations—that the owner of the voice caught up with me.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. Taking hold of my shoulder, he pushed me up against an advertising column and showed me a bronze warrant disc on the palm of his hand. From this it was hard to tell if he was local or state criminal police, but from what I knew about Hermann Goering’s new Prussian police, only the lower ranks carried bronze beer tokens. No one else was on the pavement, and the advertising column shielded us from the view of anyone on the road. Not that there was much real advertising pasted on it. These days, advertising was just a sign telling a Jew to keep off the grass.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“The man who spoke treasonably about the Leader. You must have heard what he said. You were standing right next to him.”

“I don’t remember hearing anything treasonable about the Leader,” I said. “I was listening to the band.”

“So why did you suddenly walk away?”

“I remembered that I had an appointment.”

The cop’s cheeks flushed a little. It wasn’t a pleasant face. He had dark, shadowy eyes; a rigid, sneering mouth; and a rather salient jaw. It was a face that had nothing to fear from death since it already looked like a skull. If Goebbels had a taller, more rabidly Nazi brother, then this man might have been him.

“I don’t believe you,” the cop said, and, snapping his fingers impatiently, added, “Identification card, please.”

The “please” was nice, but I still hardly wanted to let him see my identification. Section eight of page two detailed my profession by training and in fact. And since I was no longer a policeman but a hotel employee, it was as good as telling him I wasn’t a Nazi. Worse than that. A man who had been obliged to leave the Berlin detective force because of his allegiance to the old Weimar Republic might be just the type to ignore someone speaking treason about the Leader. If treason was what that was. But I knew the cop would probably arrest me just to spoil my day, and arrest would very likely mean two weeks in a concentration camp.