I stepped out of the car and went into the tobacconist’s. I bought some cigarettes and then walked several times around the shop, enjoying the sensation of behaving like a normal person again. The shopkeeper eyed me suspiciously.

“Was there something else?” he asked, pointing at me with the stem of his meerschaum.

“No, I was just looking,” I said.

He pushed the pipe back in his smug little face and rocked on a pair of shoes that were decorated with edelweiss, oak leaves, and Bavarian blue-and-white ribbons. They lacked only a Blue Max or an Iron Cross to be the most German-looking shoes I had ever seen. He said, “This is a shop, not a museum.”

“Not so as you’d notice,” I said, and went out quickly, the shop bell ringing in my ear.

“I bet this place is real cozy in winter,” I said to Henkell when I was back in the car. “The locals are about as affable as a cold pitchfork.”

“They’re really quite friendly when you get to know them,” he said.

“Funny. That’s the same thing people say after their dog has bitten you.”

We drove on toward the southwest of Partenkirchen, toward the foot of the Zugspitze, past the Post Hotel, the American Officers’ Club, the General Patton Hotel, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Southeastern Area Command, and the Green Arrow Ski Lodge. I might as well have been in Denver, Colorado. I had never been in Denver, Colorado, but I imagined it probably looked a lot like Partenkirchen. Patriotic, affected, overornamented, unfriendly in a friendly kind of way, and, ultimately, more than a little absurd.

Henkell drove down a street of typical old Alpine houses and pulled into the driveway of a two-story white stucco villa with a wraparound wooden balcony and an overhanging roof that was as big as the deck on an aircraft carrier. On the wall was a fresco of a German Olympic skier. I knew he was German because his right arm appeared to be reaching for something, but just what this might be there was no way of telling, as someone had painted over his hand and wrist. And perhaps only a German would now have realized what the skier’s right hand had really been up to. Everything in Garmisch-Partenkirchen looked so committed to Uncle Sam and his welfare that it was hard to believe Uncle Adolf had ever been here.

I stepped out of the Mercedes and glanced up at the Zugspitze that hung over the houses like a petrified wave of gray seawater. It was a hell of a lot of geology.