Frau Silbermann stood up. “You will excuse me,” she said frostily to Findler. Then she left the room.

“Good God, you are a sensitive bunch.” Findler laughed. “My heavens! Well, honest people like myself have to put up with a lot. Back to business! So what’s the score? Well?”

The phone rang once again.

“Twenty thousand,” Silbermann insisted, “the rest secured by mortgage.”

The door opened, and Frau Silbermann asked her husband to step into the next room. She was apparently still agitated, and he did not appreciate the new disturbance. “Think about it,” he said to Findler as he left the room.

“What is it, Elfriede,” he asked his wife.

She pointed to the telephone. “Your sister’s on the line. Speak to her. She’ll explain everything…”

He reached for the receiver.

“Hilde?”

“Yes, yes?” his sister stammered, clearly upset. “Günther has been arrested!”

Silbermann was so surprised he didn’t know what to say. “How so?” he finally asked. “What happened?”

“Don’t you know—all Jews are being arrested.”

He pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Calm down please, Hilde,” he said. “There must be some mistake. Now tell me everything once more, nice and quietly…”

“There’s no time for that. I only called to warn you. Four men in our building were arrested. If I only knew what was happening to Günther.”

“But it can’t be! People don’t just go hauling off respectable citizens from their homes! They can’t do that!”

He was silent. Yes they can, he then thought, they can.

“Shall I come over?” he asked after a while. “Or do you want to come to our place?”

“No, I’m not leaving the apartment, I’m staying here. And you shouldn’t come, either. That won’t help anything. Good-bye, Otto.” She hung up.

Distraught, he looked at his wife.

“Elfriede,” he whispered, “they’re arresting all the Jews! Maybe it’s just a temporary scare tactic. In any case Günther has been arrested, but you already know that.”

Silbermann paused for a moment.

“What should we do? What do you think is best, Elfriede? Should I stay here? Maybe they’ll forget about me. I’ve never been seriously harassed before. If only Becker were here. He has a whole slew of party connections. He could intervene in an emergency. Of course if the arrests are coming from above, then he can’t do anything, either. And by the time he gets back from Hamburg I could have been beaten to death by mistake. Ach—nonsense! Nothing’s going to happen to me. In the worst case you’ll just ring up Becker and ask him to come back immediately.”

“Six months ago we still could have gotten out of Germany,” his wife said slowly. “We stayed on my account, because I couldn’t bear to leave my family behind. If something happens to you it will be my fault. You wanted to go, but I…”