“Gold, huh? A jeweler, maybe? That might also be evidence that the man was a Jew.”

“I told you, Richard. This man was a boxer. Most likely he was working on a building site. That would account for the dirt under the nails.”

“And the gold?”

“Generally speaking, outside of a goldsmith’s, the best place to look for gold is in the dirt.”

I opened the cardboard box and found myself looking through the clothes of a workingman. At a pair of strong boots. At a thick leather belt. At a leather cap. The cheap flannel shirt interested me more, as there were no buttons on it, and there were small tears on the material where they should have been.

“Someone tore this man’s shirt open in a hurry,” I said. “Most likely when his heart stopped beating. It looks as though someone tried to revive him after he drowned. That would certainly explain the shirt. It was ripped open so that an attempt could be made to start his heart again. With a hot iron. It’s an old boxing trainer’s trick. Something about the heat and the shock, I think. Anyway, that explains the burn.”

“Are you saying someone threw this man in the water and then tried to revive him?”

“Well, it wasn’t the Spree. You told me that yourself. He drowned somewhere else. Then someone tried to revive him. Then they dumped him in the river. That’s the chain of causation, but I can’t attach any whys to that. Not yet.”

“Interesting.”

I looked at the man’s jacket. It was a cheap corduroy from C&A. Except the lining had been opened and then restitched, and, squeezing the material under the breast pocket, I felt something crumple in my fingers. I took out my knife again, cut away some of the stitches on the lining, and picked out a folded piece of paper. Carefully I unfolded it until I was able to spread a strip of paper about the size of a schoolboy’s ruler on the bench beside the microscope. After being in the waters of the River Spree, whatever it was that had been printed on the strip of paper was gone forever. The paper was quite blank. But there was no mistaking its meaning.

Bömer’s face was equally blank. “Could this have been his name and address?”

“It might have been, if he was a ten-year-old boy and his mother worried about him getting lost.”

“Well, then. What does it mean?”

“It means that what you first suspected is now confirmed. I believe this strip of paper was probably a fragment from the Torah.”

“The what?”

“If God is German, I for one won’t be at all surprised. Apparently he enjoys being worshipped, issuing people with ten commandments at a time, and has even written his own unreadable book. But the God that this man worshipped was the Hebrew God. Jews sometimes sew a piece of the word of God into their clothes, next to their heart. Yes, that’s right, Richard. He was a Jew.”