He didn’t even look at it. He didn’t think perhaps it might be something important, something that should be handed over to someone in authority. He didn’t really care what it was, he just wanted to take something with him as a tangible reminder of this moment. Something that, whenever someone said that Jasper was a good person, he could look at and know they were wrong. Jasper might have started out as a good person, but war had turned him into a monster. That piece of paper would serve as a mirror he could look into if he ever felt the guilt slipping from his shoulders—a mirror that would remind him how he deserved to feel for the rest of his life.

He folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket. It would be years before he unfolded it and wondered what those enigmatic combinations of letters might mean. It would be decades before he read an article about the Enigma Code and began to understand what he had stolen. Then he bought a tract of land with an old barn on it, built a hidden workshop, and tried, without much success, to figure out how to build an Enigma machine. He gave up after a year or two, but then, seventy years after he marched out of Dachau headed for Munich and the next battle, he saw an advertisement for instructions to build your own Enigma machine and wondered if he should try again to decode the message on the paper, if that would somehow honor the memory of the boy he had killed. He went to his workshop often for a month or two and made real progress. But when he spotted a man following him, he stopped going. The Enigma message he pocketed outside Dachau that day would always be a reminder of his darkest secret—a secret he would keep to his grave.

But all that lay in the future. That day he holstered his sidearm and walked back toward the camp, the words of the murdered boy pounding in his head.

Ich wusste es nicht.

I didn’t know.

III

III

“Are you sure there’s nothing in that book?” said Nemo when they had started to drop out of the mountains toward the piedmont on a twisting two-lane road.

“I flipped through it twice,” said Patton. “No bookmarks, no letters or receipts for safe deposit boxes, no circled words or underlined sentences. What makes you so sure it’s even important? And for that matter you never did tell me how you know about Jasper or what you know about Jasper.”

“I guess I don’t know as much as I thought,” said Nemo, “if there’s nothing in that book.”

“When I said back at the house that I wanted to talk to Jasper you said we should assume that’s not a possibility,” said Patton. “What did you mean by that?”