He didn’t know what to watch out for. All he knew was that Max was a blowhard. Big things were in the works behind the scenes, he whispered, only unfortunately he wasn’t allowed to say anything just yet. The boasting didn’t suit him. Sometimes he looked at Max’s hands with pity, the wide fingertips and light skin. At these times he felt like he understood something about him, saw him dangling outside the twentieth story of some building washing windows.

“How did you get roped into this thing, anyway?”

“Roped into it?” Max balked. “It’s an honor to be permitted to serve the fatherland!”

And then Max told him the real version. In response to the German Reich’s advertising campaign intended to bring back German emigrants, he had set out for Germany in 1937. When he got off the ship, two men took him aside and suggested he go through training in Germany so he could travel back to the US as an agent. He was excited by the idea, he said, because actually he really liked it in America, it was just that he was barely able to make any money here.

When traveling back to the US two years later, he cited disappointment with the new Germany as his reason for returning, which the American authorities were happy to hear. He had been trained on an estate in Brandenburg, all very secretive. From the outside no one could tell what was going on there. He even saw the head of military intelligence once, Canaris. It was only briefly, Max said. He had come from Berlin with General Lahousen, the head of the sabotage division. And then he stopped in mid-sentence. He couldn’t say anything more. “By the way, though, Canaris is as short as you, Josef.”

On another occasion Max made a point of saying how much more colossal everything was in Germany, and how in comparison the German American Bund was just a parody. He made fun of Camp Siegfried on Long Island, where young German Americans imitated the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, the girls getting pregnant one after the other. His scorn was often directed at Schmuederrich, who kept up a whole string of love affairs, even though he was a fat ass and was also married to a woman named Else, who was an American by birth—but there were probably women who felt sorry for soft men like him and couldn’t bring themselves to turn him down. Still, he said, it was good for espionage. Schmuederrich had already provided valuable information he’d picked up in hotel bars that served an international clientele.