We drove down Hochbruchen in sight of the Hofbrauhaus, which, unusually for that time of day, was doing brisk business. A man wearing lederhosen staggered drunkenly along the pavement and narrowly avoided colliding with a pretzel cart. The smell of beer was in the air—more so than seemed normal, even for Munich. A posse of American soldiers ambled along Brauhstrasse with a proprietorial swagger, turning the air blue with their sweet Virginia tobacco. They looked too large for their uniforms, and their boozy laughter echoed down the street like small-arms fire. One of them started to dance a buck-and-wing as, somewhere, a brass band began to play “The Old Comrades March.” The tune seemed appropriate for what I had in mind. “What’s all the fuss about?” I growled.

“It’s the first day of Oktoberfest,” said Stuber. “Lots of Amis wanting taxis and here I am driving you around.”

“You’ve been paid very handsomely for the privilege.”

“I’m not complaining,” he said. “It just sounded that way. Me using the wrong tense to tell you what I was thinking. The present progressive, I think.”

“When I want you to tell me what you’re thinking, sonny, I’ll twist your ear. Future conditional.” We reached the church. “Turn left toward Viktualienmarkt and pull up at the side door. Then you can help me get out of this walnut shell. I feel like a pea in a street game of three-card monte.”

“That’s the sucker move you’re describing, Gunther,” he said. “Where I get the pea out and nobody notices me doing it.”

“Shut up and get the door, beetle jockey.”

Stuber stopped the car, jumped out, ran around the front, and threw open the door. It exhausted me just watching him.

“Thanks.”

I sniffed the air like a hungry dog. Down on the market square they were roasting almonds and warming pretzels. Another brass band was launching into “The Clarinet Polka.” If I’d had one leg I couldn’t have felt less like dancing a polka. Listening to it made me want to sit down and take a breather. Over at the festival meadow on Theresienwiese, the revels would be in full swing. Big-breasted girls in dirndls would be demonstrating the Charles Atlas course by lifting four beer steins in each hand. Brewers would be parading with their usual mix of bombast and vulgarity. Small children would be eating their way through gingerbread hearts. Fat stomachs would be filling up with beer as people tried to forget all about the war and others tried, sentimentally, to remember it.