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Chapters (62)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Epigraph
  4. Dedication
  5. PART ONE - Berlin, 1934
  6. Chapter 1
  7. Chapter 2
  8. Chapter 3
  9. Chapter 4
  10. Chapter 5
  11. Chapter 6
  12. Chapter 7
  13. Chapter 8
  14. Chapter 9
  15. Chapter 10
  16. Chapter 11
  17. Chapter 12
  18. Chapter 13
  19. Chapter 14
  20. Chapter 15
  21. Chapter 16
  22. Chapter 17
  23. Chapter 18
  24. Chapter 19
  25. Chapter 20
  26. Chapter 21
  27. Chapter 22
  28. Chapter 23
  29. Chapter 24
  30. Chapter 25
  31. Chapter 26
  32. Chapter 27
  33. Chapter 28
  34. Chapter 29
  35. Chapter 30
  36. Chapter 31
  37. Chapter 32
  38. PART TWO - Havana, February 1954
  39. Chapter 1
  40. Chapter 2
  41. Chapter 3
  42. Chapter 4
  43. Chapter 5
  44. Chapter 6
  45. Chapter 7
  46. Chapter 8
  47. Chapter 9
  48. Chapter 10
  49. Chapter 11
  50. Chapter 12
  51. Chapter 13
  52. Chapter 14
  53. Chapter 15
  54. Chapter 16
  55. Chapter 17
  56. Chapter 18
  57. Chapter 19
  58. Chapter 20
  59. Chapter 21
  60. Chapter 22
  61. Chapter 23
  62. Chapter 24

“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.

Chapter 13

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.