“An investigation often proves to be an expensive inconvenience,” said Flesch. “Even for a truly German business. And mistakes are sometimes made. It might be months before things returned to normal.”

I nodded, recognizing the truth in what he had said. No one turned the Gestapo down. Not without some serious consequences. My only choice was between the disastrous and the unpalatable. A very German choice. We both knew I had little alternative but to agree to what they wanted. At the same time, it left me in an awkward position, to put it mildly. After all, I already had a very strong suspicion that Franz Six was lining his pockets with Paul Begelmann’s shekels. But I had no wish to be caught up in the middle of a power struggle between the SD and the Gestapo. On the other hand, there was nothing to say that the two SD men I was accompanying to Palestine were dishonest. As a matter of course, they would surely suspect that I was a spy, and, accordingly, treat me with caution. The chances were strong that I would discover absolutely nothing. But would nothing satisfy the Gestapo? There was only one way to find out.

“All right,” I said. “But I won’t be a mouth for you people and say a lot of stuff that isn’t true. I can’t. I won’t even try. If they’re bent then I’ll tell you they’re bent and I’ll tell myself that that’s just what detectives do. Maybe I’ll lose some sleep about it and maybe I won’t. But if they are straight, that’s an end of it, see? I won’t frame someone just to give you and the other hammerheads at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse an edge. I won’t do it, not even if you and your best brass knuckles tell me I have to. You can keep your sugarloaf, too. I wouldn’t like to get a taste for it. I’ll do your dirty little job, Gerhard. But we let the cards fall where they fall. No stacked decks. Clear?”

“Clear.” Flesch stood up, buttoned his coat, and put on his hat. “Enjoy your trip, Gunther. I’ve never been to Palestine. But I’m told it’s very beautiful.”

“Maybe you should go yourself,” I said brightly. “I bet you’d love it down there. Fit right in, in no time. Everyone in Palestine has a Jewish Department.”

I left Berlin sometime during the last week of September and traveled by train through Poland to the port of Constanţa, in Romania. It was there, boarding the steamer Romania, that I finally met the two SD men who were also traveling to Palestine. Both were noncommissioned officers—sergeants in the SD—and both were posing as journalists working for the Berliner Tageblatt, a newspaper that had been Jewish-owned until 1933, when the Nazis had confiscated it.