She seemed to be waiting for some gesture of affection, but he didn’t move. She took her handbag, tossed her reading glasses into it, gave a quick look around the room, making sure not to meet his eye, and walked resolutely to the door. He saw that when she got there she hesitated once more—his last chance. Then the door opened. He heard the rustle of her clothing.

He rushed over to the telephone, called Max, and asked to meet.

“Sure. We have something to celebrate.”

“Down by the riverbank, right now.”

He found him next to a bridge abutment, legs planted wide, hat pulled down over his forehead, a cigarette in his mouth. Princess merrily jumped up on him. Josef called her back with a stern shout.

“So now you know what Operation Sonnenstaub is.”

“You and the others are behind this?”

“I don’t owe you any information. You’re just a radioman.”

A thought flashed up in his mind: he would tell him if he could.

“This attack took you completely by surprise. Admit it.”

Max tossed his cigarette butt away. “Whose side are you on, anyway, Josef? I’d watch what you say. You wouldn’t want it to get around to the others.”

Down on the southern tip of Manhattan, smoke, dust, and ash hung in the air. At the print shop the explosion was all anyone talked about. The radio was reporting that the death toll had risen to fifty. By now it seemed an established fact that the Germans were behind it.

He heard his name, then Arthur tapped him on the shoulder. “Call for you. Unknown.”

In Arthur’s office he nodded along to Ettinger’s instructions: “Three o’clock on the Hudson.”

He hung up, and Arthur stood in his way.

“Now I know what’s going on here. I’ve always said there was something fishy about the whole thing.”

“Don’t worry so much, Arthur.” He had no interest whatsoever in hearing any of Arthur’s theories and slipped past him, his hand already on the doorknob. But Arthur kept talking, caught up in the dangerous excitement of revelation; nothing would stand in its way.

“The idea was to fool everybody. To distract everybody with amateurs. Secretly everybody figures the German agents are a bunch of chumps and the situation is under control. Meanwhile, in the background, attacks are being planned, this time by the real agents. You and your buddies’ job was always just to distract the FBI. And you don’t know it yourselves; that’s part of the plan. I mean, who would willingly say to them, ‘Sure, I’ll play the Nazi sap for you.’ No, they want real commitment. Pretty ingenious. Seems like the Nazis.”

“That’s absurd.”

He knew it wasn’t absurd. And if Arthur could come to that conclusion, then so could Ettinger, who wanted to meet with him on the Hudson in an hour.