I liked his Buick. The front seat was as big as the bunk in a Pullman sleeping car, with a steering wheel the size of a bicycle tire and a car radio that looked like it had been borrowed from a café jukebox. The speedometer said it went up to one hundred twenty miles per hour, and with its straight eight and Dynaflow transmission, I figured it was good for at least a hundred of that. About a yard away from the speedometer, on the sunny side of the dash, was a matching clock, so you’d know when it was time to go and buy more gas. Below the clock was a glove box for a man with bigger hands than Jacobs had. Actually it looked like a glove box for the goddess Kali with room for a couple of garlands of skulls as well.

I leaned across the seat, thumbed it open, and raked around for a moment. There was a snub-nosed thirty-eight-caliber Smith & Wesson—a J-frame with a nice rubberized grip. The one he had pointed at me in Dachau. A Michelin road map of Germany. A commemorative postcard to celebrate Goethe’s two hundredth anniversary. An American edition of The Goebbels Diaries. A Blue Guide to northern Italy. Inside the Blue Guide, at the pages for Milan, was a receipt from a jeweler’s shop. The jeweler’s name was Primo Ottolenghi, and the receipt was for ten thousand dollars. It seemed reasonable to assume that Milan had been where Jacobs had sold the box of Jewish valuables dug up in my back garden, especially since the receipt was dated a week or so after his stay with us. There was a letter from the Rochester Strong Memorial Hospital, in the State of New York, itemizing some medical equipment delivered to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, via the Rhein-Main Air Base. There was a notepad. The first page was blank, but I could just make out the indentation of what had been written on the previous page. I tore off the first few pages in the hope that later on I might shade up whatever Jacobs had written down.

I returned everything else to the glove box, closed it, and then glanced over my shoulder at the backseat. There were copies of the Paris edition of the Herald and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and a rolled-up umbrella. Nothing else. It wasn’t much, but I knew a little more about Jacobs than before. I knew he was serious about guns. I knew where he was likely to hawk the family heirlooms. And I knew he was interested in Joey the Crip. Maybe that kraut Goethe, too, on a good day. Sometimes knowing only a little is a preface to knowing a lot.