I let him go. “I mean, I’m a fair man. I would offer to pay you, but what would be the point? You could probably print more in ten minutes than I could earn in a year.”

Emil Linthe grinned, sheepishly. “You know about printing presses?”

“Not really. But I know what one looks like when I see it.”

“Actually it’s a Kluge. Better than a platen. The Kluge is the best for running any type of job work, including die cutting, foil stamping, and embossing.” He lit a cigarette. “Look, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. Any friend of Otto’s, yes? I just said it was amusing, that’s all.”

“Not to me, Emil. Not to me.”

“Well, then you’re in luck. I happen to know what the hell I’m doing. Unlike most of the people Otto could have recommended. You say your maternal grandmother, surname—?”

“Adler.”

“Right. She was Jewish by birth? But was brought up as a Roman Catholic?”

“Yes.”

“In the parish of?”

“Neukölln.”

“I’ll have to fix it in the church registry and in the town hall. Neukölln’s good. A lot of officials there are old lefties and very easily corrupted. If it was more than two grandparents I probably couldn’t help you. But one is relatively straightforward, if you know what you’re doing. Which I do. But I’ll need birth certificates, death certificates, all you’ve got.”

I handed him an envelope from my coat pocket.

“It’s probably best I redo everything from scratch. All records fixed.”

“How much will it cost me?”

Linthe shook his head. “Like you said. In ten minutes I can print more than you can make in a year. So. We’ll call it a favor to you and Otto, all right?” He shook his head. “It’s no sweat. Adler easily becomes Kugler, or Ebner, or Fendler, or Kepler, or Muller, see?”

“Not Muller,” I said.

“It’s a good German name.”

“I don’t like it.”

“All right. And just to make things that little bit more plausible, we’ll turn your grandmother into your great-grandmother. Just put the Jew in you back a generation so that it becomes inconsequential. By the time I’ve finished, you’ll look more German than the Kaiser.”

“He was half English, wasn’t he? His grandmother was Queen Victoria.”

“True. But she was half German. And so was the Kaiser’s mother.” Linthe shook his head. “No one is ever one hundred percent anything. That’s what’s so stupid about this Aryan paragraph. We’re all of us a mixture. You, me, the Kaiser, Hitler. Hitler, most of all, I shouldn’t wonder. They say Hitler is one-quarter Jewish. What do you think of that?”

“Maybe he and I have something in common after all.”

For his sake I just hoped Hitler had a friend on the Jew Desk in the Gestapo, like I did.

13

HEDDA ADLON HAD A FRIEND, TOO, but not the kind you find anywhere south of paradise. Her name was Mrs. Noreen Charalambides and, a couple of days before I was introduced to her, I had already committed her face and her backside and her calves and her bosom to a space in the flask of my Faustian memory previously reserved for Helen of Troy.