She smiled. “Hedda said you had to leave the police because you were a well-known Social Democrat.”

“I don’t know about well known. If I had been well known, things would be different for me now, I guess. These days you recognize a man who was a prominent Social Democrat by the arrows on his pajamas.”

“Do you miss being a policeman?”

I shook my head.

“But you were a policeman for more than ten years. Did you always want to be a policeman?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. When I was a little boy I used to play cops and robbers on the green outside our apartment building, and I wasn’t sure which I enjoyed being most: a cop or a robber. Anyway, I told my father that when I grew up I was probably going to be a cop or a robber, and he said, ‘Why not be like most cops and do both?’ ” I grinned. “He was a respectable man, but he didn’t much like the police. No one did. I wouldn’t say we lived in a tough neighborhood, but when I was growing up we still called a story with a happy ending an alibi.”

FOR SEVERAL DAYS WE DOODLED our way across a street map of Berlin with me telling her jokes and keeping her amused while we went visiting the city’s gyms and sporting clubs, and I showed around the photograph of “Fritz” from the police file Richard Bömer had left with me. It’s true Fritz wasn’t looking his best, on account of the fact that he was dead, but no one seemed to recognize him. Maybe they didn’t at that, but it was hard to tell, given their greater interest in Mrs. Charalambides. A well-dressed, beautiful woman visiting a Berlin gym wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. I tried to tell her that I might get more out of the men in these places if she stayed in the car, but she wasn’t having it. Mrs. Charalambides wasn’t the kind of woman you told to do anything very much.

“If I do what you say,” she said, “how am I going to get my story?”

I might have agreed with her except for the fact that it was always the same three-word story we came upon: NO JEWS ALLOWED. I felt sorry for Mrs. Charalambides seeing that kind of thing whenever we went inside a gym. She didn’t show it, but I guessed it might be upsetting for her.

The T-gym was the last place on my list. With the benefit of hindsight it ought to have been the first.