I walked south across Karlsplatz and the “Stachus,” which was Munich’s main traffic center, named after an inn that had once stood there. I walked along Neuhauser Strasse to Marienplatz, both of them badly damaged during the war. Special passages had been constructed for pedestrians beneath the scaffolding, and the many gaps between bomb-damaged buildings were filled with one-storied temporary shops. Scaffolding made the Burgersaal as inconspicuous as an empty beer bottle. Like everywhere else in that part of Munich, the chapel was being restored. Every time I walked around the city I congratulated myself for being lucky enough to spend most of 1944 with General Ferdinand Schorner’s army in White Russia. Munich had been hit hard. April 25, 1944, had been one of the worst nights in the city’s history. Most of the chapel had been burned out. The high altar had perished, yet Gunther’s sculptures had survived. But with their pink cheeks and delicate hands these were hardly my idea of guardian angels. They looked like a couple of rent boys from a bathhouse in Bogenhausen. I didn’t think I was descended from Ignaz, but after two hundred years who can be sure of anything like that? My father had never been entirely certain who his mother was, let alone his own father. Either way, I’d have sculpted the group differently. My idea of a guardian angel involved being armed with something more lethal than a supercilious smile, an elegantly cocked little finger, and one eye on the Pearly Gates for backup. But that’s me. Even now, four years after the war ended, my first thought when I wake up is to wonder where I left my KAR 98.