Like all public buildings in Vienna, the Board of Education had been built at a time when the Emperor Franz Josef had ruled an empire comprising 51 million souls and 675,000 square kilometers. There were just over 6 million people living in Austria in 1949, and the greatest European empire was long gone, but you wouldn’t have known that walking up the stairs of this imposing building. At the top was a wooden fingerpost sign, crudely painted with department names in Cyrillic. I followed the sign around the balustrade to the other side of the building, where I found the office I was looking for. The sign on a little wooden stand beside the door was in German, and it read: “SOVIET WAR CRIMES COMMISSION, AUSTRIA. For the investigation and examination of the misdeeds of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices in the monstrous atrocities and crimes of the German government.” Which seemed to describe it pretty well, all things considered.

I knocked on the door and went into a small outer office. Through a glass wall I could see a large room with several freestanding book-cases and about a dozen filing cabinets. On the wall of the office was a large picture of Stalin, and a smaller one of a plump-looking man in glasses who might have been Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police. A threadbare Soviet flag hung limply from a scout-size flagpole. Arranged along the wall behind the door was a montage of photographs featuring Hitler, a Nazi rally at Nuremberg, liberated concentration camps, piles of dead Jewish bodies, the Nuremberg war trial, and several convicted war criminals actually standing on the trap door of the gallows. It looked as clear a piece of inductive reasoning as you could have found outside a textbook on the general principles of logic. In the outer office, a thin, severe-looking woman wearing a uniform looked up from what she was typing and prepared to treat me like the fascist invader I had of course been. She had sad, hollow eyes, a spectacularly broken nose, a fringe of red hair, a sulky mouth, and cheekbones as high as the zygomatic bones on a Jolly Roger. The shoulder boards on her uniform were blue, which meant she was MVD. I wondered what she would have made of the Federal Republic’s Amnesty Law. Politely, in quite good German, she asked me my business. I handed her Inspector Strauss’s business card and, as if I had been auditioning for a part in a play by Chekhov, spoke to her in my best velikorruskij.

“I apologize for disturbing you, Comrade,” I said. “This is not a formal inquiry. I’m not here on duty.” All of that was to preempt any requests to see my nonexistent warrant disk. “Does the name Poroshin, of the MVD, mean anything to you?”

“I know a General Poroshin,” she said, adjusting her manner very slightly. “In Berlin.”