Detective work is a little like walking into a movie that’s already started. You don’t know what’s happened already and, as you try to find your way in the dark, it’s inevitable that you’re going to stand on someone’s toes, or get in their way. Sometimes people curse you, but mostly they just sigh or tut loudly and move their legs and their coats, and then do their best to pretend you’re not there. Asking questions of the person seated next to you can result in anything from a full plot and cast list to a slap in the mouth with a rolled-up program. You pay your money and you take your chances.

Chance was one thing. Pushing my luck was quite another. I wasn’t about to go asking questions about old comrades without a friend to keep me company. Men who are facing the gallows are apt to be a little jealous about their privacy. I hadn’t owned a gun since leaving Vienna. I decided that it was time I started to dress for all occasions.

Under National Socialism’s law of 1938, handguns could be purchased only on submission of a Weapons Acquisitions Permit, and most men of my acquaintance had owned some kind of firearm. But at the end of the war General Eisenhower had ordered all privately owned firearms in the American Zone to be confiscated. In the Soviet Zone things were even stricter: A German in possession of so much as a single cartridge was likely to be summarily shot. A gun was as difficult to get hold of in Germany as a banana.

I knew a fellow named Stuber—Faxon Stuber—who drove an export taxi, who could get hold of all kinds of things, mostly from American GIs. Marked with the initials E.T., export taxis were reserved for the exclusive use of people in possession of foreign exchange coupons, or FECs. I wasn’t sure how he had got hold of them, but I had found some FECs in the glove box of Kirsten’s father’s Hansa. I supposed he had been saving them to buy gasoline on the black market. I used some of them to pay Stuber for a gun.