The Red Cross building was four stories of yellowish Danubian limestone set between a rather fancy-looking shop selling Nymphenburger porcelain and a private art gallery. Inside, everything was in motion. Typewriters were being punched, filing cabinets opened and closed loudly, forms being filled out, people coming down stairs, and people going up in an open-grille elevator. Four years after the end of the war the Red Cross was still dealing with the human fallout. Just to make things more interesting they had let the painters in, and I didn’t have to look at the ceiling to know they were painting it white—there were spots of it all over the brown linoleum floor. Behind a desk that looked more like a counter in a beer hall, a woman with braids and a face as pink as a ham was brushing off an old man who might or might not have been a Jew. I never could tell the difference.

Most of her problem with him related to the fact that only half of what he was saying to her was in German. The rest, which was mostly spoken at the floor, just in case she understood the swear words, was in Russian. I buckled on my armor, mounted my white horse, and leveled my lance at the ham.

“Perhaps I can be of assistance,” I said to her before speaking to the man in Russian. It turned out that he was looking for his brother who had been in the concentration camp at Treblinka, then Dachau, before finally ending up in one of the Kaufering camps. He’d run out of money. He needed to get to the DP camp at Landsberg. He had been hoping that the Red Cross would help him. The way the ham was looking at him I wasn’t sure they would, so I gave the old man five marks and told him how to get to the railway station on Bayerstrasse. He thanked me profusely and then left me to be eaten by the ham.

“What was all that about?” she demanded.

I told her.

“Since 1945, a total of sixteen million tracing requests have been submitted to the Red Cross,” she said, answering the accusation that lay behind my eyes. “One point nine million returnees have been interviewed about missing persons. We’re still missing sixty-nine thousand prisoners of war, one point one million members of the Wehrmacht, and almost two hundred thousand German civilians. That means there are proper procedures to be observed. If we gave five marks to every heel who walks in off the street with a sob story we’d be broke in no time. You’d be surprised how many walk in here looking for their long-lost brother when what they’re really looking for is just the price of a drink.”