I think she meant it as a joke, but it didn’t feel good hearing her say it. At the same time, I knew of course that she was right. I was a cynic. In my defense I might have told her I was an ex-cop and that being a cop is to know but one truth, which is that everything you’re told is a lie, but that wouldn’t have sounded good, either. She was right, and it was no good brushing it off with another cynical remark about how the Nazis probably put something in the water, like bromide, that made all of us Germans believe the worst about everyone. I was a cynic. Who wasn’t that lived in Germany?

Not that I could have believed anything bad about Noreen Charalambides. And I certainly didn’t want her to think anything bad about me. There wasn’t a dog muzzle handy, so I folded one lip under another to keep my mouth under control for a while, and then pushed the throttle forward. It’s one thing biting your enemies. It’s quite another when it looks like you might bite your friends. To say nothing of the woman you are falling for.

Chapter 16

16

WE RETURNED THE BOAT and got back into the car. We drove east, into Berlin, along streets full of silent people who probably wanted nothing to do with one another. It had never been a particularly friendly city. Berliners are not known for their great hospitality. But now it was like the town of Hamelin after the children had left. We still had the rats, of course.

Respectable men in well-brushed felt hats and cake-box collars were scurrying home after yet another day spent trying, respectably, to ignore the uniformed and licensed louts who persisted in resting their dirty boots on the country’s best furniture. Bus conductors leaned precariously off their platforms so as to avoid any possibility of conversation with their passengers. These days nobody wanted to speak his mind. They didn’t put that in Baedeker.

At the taxi rank on the corner of Leibnizstrasse, the cabbies were putting up their checkered hoods—a sure sign that the weather was getting cooler. It wasn’t yet cold enough, however, to deter the trio of SA men bravely continuing with their vigilant boycott of a Jewish-owned jewelry store next to the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.

Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don’t Buy from Jews! Buy Only from German Shops!

With their brown leather boots, brown leather cross belts, and brown leather faces, and lit up by the green neon of the Kurfürstendamm, the three Nazis looked prehistoric, reptilian, dangerous, like a bask of hungry crocodiles that had escaped from the aquarium in the Zoological Gardens.

I felt vaguely cold-blooded myself. Like I needed a drink.

“Are you sulking?” she asked.

“Sulking?”

“As in silent protest.”