I was already reaching for Gruen’s passport. Lawyers, underneath their library-pale skins, are all the same. They cast no shadows and they sleep in coffins. I handed it over without a word.

He opened the passport and scrutinized it, turning every page before coming back to the photograph and the description of the bearer. I let him roll his eyes across my face and then the photograph without comment. To have said anything at all might have invited suspicion. People always get gabby when they’re pulling a stroke and start to lose their nerve. I held my breath, enjoyed feeling the fumes of the cognac still inside my tubes, and waited. Eventually he nodded, and handed the passport back to me.

“Is that it?” I asked. “Formal identification of the body and all that?”

“Not quite.” He opened a file on his desktop, consulted something typewritten on the top sheet of paper and then closed the file again. “According to my information, Eric Gruen suffered an accident to his left hand, in 1938. He lost the two upper joints of his little finger. May I please see your left hand, Herr Doktor?”

I leaned forward and laid my left hand on his blotter. There was a smile on my face where, perhaps, there ought to have been a frown, for it now struck me as odd that the injury to Gruen’s hand should have occurred so long ago, and that he hadn’t made more of it in connection with the whole procedure of my identification as him. Somehow I had formed the now apparently incorrect impression that he had lost his little finger during the war, at the same time he had lost his spleen and the use of his legs. There was also the fact that the lawyer, Dr. Bekemeier, had been so very precise about the injury to Gruen’s little finger. And it occurred to me now that but for this detail there could have been no positive identification of myself as Eric Gruen. In other words, my finger, or lack of it, had been much more important than I could have known.

“Everything seems to be in order,” he said, smiling at last. Which was the first time I noticed that he had no eyebrows. And that the hair on his head appeared to be a wig. “There are of course some papers for you to sign, as the next of kin, Herr Gruen. And also so that you can establish the line of credit with the bank until the will has been administered. Not that I expect there will be any problems. I drew the will up myself. As you may know, your mother banked with Spaengler’s all her life, and naturally they will be expecting you to come in and attend to the withdrawals you specified in your telegram. You’ll find the manager, Herr Trenner, to be most helpful.”

“I’m sure I will,” I said.