Lilly’s apartment was across the Danube in the Second District, close to the Diana Baths, on Upper Danube Strasse. It was small but comfortable, and I enjoyed a relatively peaceful night’s sleep with Lilly that was broken only by the sound of a barge blowing its horn as it went south along the canal, toward the river. In the morning she seemed both surprised and pleased that she hadn’t had to satisfy anything other than my appetite for breakfast.

“Well, that’s a first,” she said, making us some coffee. “I must be losing my touch. Either that, mister, or you’re keeping it nice and warm for the boys.”

“Neither,” I said. “And how would you like to make another hundred?”

A little less obdurate by day than by night, she agreed with alacrity. She wasn’t a bad sort of girl. Not really. Her parents had been killed in 1944, when she was just fifteen years old, and everything she had she’d worked for herself. It was a common enough story, including her being raped by a couple of Ivans. A good-looking girl, she knew she had been lucky it had been just two Ivans. There were women I knew in Berlin who had been raped as many as fifty or sixty times during the first months of the occupation. I liked her. I liked the way she didn’t complain. And I liked the way she didn’t ask too many questions. She was bright enough to know I was probably hiding from the police, and bright enough not to ask why.