I found Father Gotovina under what remained of the organ loft, next to the bronze tomb-slab of Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria. I followed him to a wooden confessional that looked more like an ornate photo booth. He swept aside a gray curtain and stepped inside. I did the same on the other side, sat down and knelt beside the screen, the way God liked it I presumed. There was just enough light in the confessional to see the top of the priest’s billiard-ball head. Or at least a patch of it—a small, shiny square of skin that looked like the lid on a copper kettle. In the half darkness and close confines of the confessional his voice sounded particularly infernal. He probably laid it on a greased rack and left it to smoke over a hickory-wood fire when he went to bed at night.

“Tell me a little about you, Herr Gunther?” he said.

“Before the war I was a Kommissar in KRIPO,” I told him. “Which is how I came to join the SS. I went to Minsk as a member of the special action group commanded by Arthur Nebe.” I left out my service with the War Crimes Bureau and my time as an intelligence officer with the Abwehr. The SS had never liked the Abwehr. “I held the rank of SS Oberleutnant.”

“There was a lot of good work done in Minsk,” said Father Gotovina. “How many did you liquidate?”

“I was part of a police battalion,” I said. “Our responsibility was dealing with NKVD murder squads.”

Gotovina chuckled. “There’s no reason to be coy with me, Oberleutnant. I’m on your side. And it makes no difference to me whether you killed five or five thousand. Either way, you were about God’s work. The Jew and the Bolshevik will always be synonymous. It’s only the Americans who are too stupid to see that.”

Outside the booth, in the church, the choir started to sing. I’d judged them too harshly. They were much sweeter on the ear than Father Gotovina.

“I need your help, Father,” I said.

“Naturally. That’s why you’re here. But we have to walk before we can run. I have to be satisfied that you are what you say you are, Herr Gunther. A few simple questions should suffice. Just to put my mind at rest. For example, can you tell me your oath of loyalty, as an SS man?”

“I can tell you it,” I said. “But I never had to take it. As a member of KRIPO my membership in the SS was more or less automatic.”

“Let me hear you say it, anyway.”

“All right.” The words almost stuck in my throat. “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.”