“The party distanced itself from Kuhn years ago. That meant no more parades and rallies in America, no swastikas, no Kuhn. But Kuhn is still at it. He actually thinks Hitler is going to name him top Nazi in charge of all of America someday.”

“What about the photo that shows Kuhn and Hitler together?” he asked in spite of himself.

“The photo is from the Olympics in Berlin. That day Hitler was taking photos with anybody who asked.”

Josef looked at him, thinking. They shared a sense of outrage about Kuhn, but for completely different reasons. Josef waited till Max had lit his next cigarette and taken a drag.

“Why did you go back to Germany two years ago?”

“Oh, I’d seen the ads. The Reich pays for your passage. Very enticing.”

Josef had seen the ads too. Everyone saw them. Including Mrs. Dollings. Somehow he didn’t feel like it was him the ads were trying to reach.

“So why are you back, then?”

“I’ll tell you some other time.”

That night he took the dog for a walk in the darkness on 125th Street. The rain had stopped, but the power had gone out. A woman was holding on to a streetlamp. She bent over and spit blood.

He walked past the auto repair shops, the scrap heap, and the collection facilities for bottles and paper. A cold wind blew in from the river. A man stood motionless, looking at the dark sky and talking to himself. Josef was seeing people like him, disturbed people, more and more often. They seemed like a foretaste or an aftereffect of the street orators, who had taken the idea of talking quietly to oneself a step further, gathering other people around them and shouting the words “world domination” and “injustice” into their faces.

Max had told him that he spent the worst years of the Depression as a window washer. He came in the twenties, with the last big wave of immigrants, and he only ever found bad jobs. Delivery driver, elevator boy, dishwasher. And even these jobs he ended up losing.

Window washer was a job you could always get—nobody wanted it. They would let him out the window twenty floors up with some ropes around him, while the office workers at their desks tried hard not to notice him. He’d dip the window brush in soapy water and wipe it across the glass, and the whole time he felt like he was fighting for his life. A dollar a day. They were the same windows, on Wall Street, that the stockbrokers had jumped out of. He, on the other hand, had survived the big crisis. “If you don’t have much, you can’t lose much either.”