The house was about a five-minute drive west of the station. A brass plaque on one of the obelisk-shaped gateposts said it was a villa, but probably only because they were a little shy about using a word like “palace.” It took me a whole minute to climb the steps to the front door, where a fellow dressed to go cheek-to-cheek with Ginger Rogers was waiting to take my hat and act as my scout across the marble plains that lay ahead. He stayed with me as far as the library, then wheeled around silently and set off for home again before it started to get dark.

In the library was a small man who turned out to be quite tall by the time I got near enough to hear him shouting an offer of schnapps at me. I said yes and got a better look at him while he fussed with a huge decanter of glass and gold that was so big it looked like it was guarded by seven dwarfs. He wore glasses and an eccentric sort of white beard that made me suspect I might have to drink my schnapps in a test tube.

“The old parish church in our town,” he was saying, in a voice with about a half ton of gravel heaped on top of his larynx, “has a late-rococo high altar by an Ignaz Gunther. Would he be a relation of yours?”

“Ignaz was the black sheep of the family, Herr Baron,” I said brightly. “We never talk about him in polite society.”

The baron chuckled his way up into a cough that lasted only until he had lit a cigarette and got his breath. Along the way he somehow managed to shake my hand with only his fingertips, offer me a nail from a gold box as big as a dictionary on the library table, toast me, sip his schnapps, and draw my attention to the studio photograph of a baby-faced young man in his early thirties. He looked more like a movie star than an SS Sturmbannführer. The smile was pure porcelain. The frame was solid silver, which, next to the gold cigarette box, made me suspect that someone had been forcing some economies on the Starnberg household.

“My son, Vincenz,” said the baron. “In that uniform it would be all too easy to think of him as my own black sheep. But he’s anything but, Herr Gunther. Anything but. Vincenz was always such a gentle boy. In the choir at school. So many pets when he was young you’d have thought his rooms were a zoo.”

I liked that: rooms. It said a lot about the childhood of Vincenz von Starnberg. And I liked the way the baron talked German the way people used to talk German before they started using words like “Lucky Strike,” “Coca-Cola,” “okay,” “jitterbug,” “bubble gum,” and, worst of all, “buddy.”

“Are you a father, Herr Gunther?”

“No, sir.”