“Sir,” she said crisply. “This is the National Library of Vienna. If it’s laughs you want, I suggest you find a cabaret. If it’s a book, then maybe I can help you.”

“Actually, I’m looking for a magazine,” I told her.

“A magazine?” She uttered the word as if it were something venereal.

“Yes. An American magazine. Do you keep American magazines here?”

“Sadly, yes, we do. Which magazine was it that you were looking for?”

“Life magazine,” I said. “The issue for June 4, 1945.”

“Follow me, please,” she said, getting up from behind her woodpaneled redoubt.

“I’d be delighted to.”

“Most of what we have here is from the collection of Eugene of Savoy,” she said. “However, for the benefit of our American visitors, we do keep copies of Life magazine. Frankly, it’s the only thing they ever ask for.”

“Then I guess it’s my lucky day,” I said.

“Isn’t it just?”

Five minutes later I was seated at a refectory table staring at the magazine Major Jacobs had not wanted me to see. And on the face of it, it was hard to see why. On the front was an open letter written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to the American people. And when I turned the pages it was full of patriotic war effort and wholesome American smiles, as well as advertisements for General Electric, Iodent, and Westinghouse. There was a nice picture of Humphrey Bogart getting married to Lauren Bacall, and an even nicer one of Himmler taken minutes after he had poisoned himself. I liked it better than the one of Bogart. I turned some more pages. Pictures of an English seaside resort. And then, on page forty-three, what I presumed I was looking for. A short article about how eight hundred convicts in three American penitentiaries had volunteered to be infected with malaria so that medical men could study the disease. It was easy to see why Jacobs might have been sensitive about such an article. What the American Office of Scientific Research and Development had done in prisons in Georgia, Illinois, and New Jersey looked very much like what SS doctors had done in Dachau. Clearly, the Americans had hanged men for what they themselves had done in their own prisons. It was true that all of these convicts were volunteers, but then Gruen and Henkell might easily have argued the same excuse. Engelbertina, or Albertine, was probably the proof of that. Reading this story in Life and seeing the photographs gave me an itch. Not the kind of itch you get from seeing men with bottles containing infected mosquitoes pressed to their abdomens—a curiously medieval-looking picture, like some ancient bee-sting remedy. But another kind of itch. The kind of itch you get when you start to suspect something unpleasant has been going on. The kind of itch that won’t be satisfied until you have scratched it.