Even this seemed ridiculous, but he didn’t feel like laughing. Lauren leaned over and whispered, “He should just go to the FBI.”

“They’d arrest him immediately.”

“Not if he testifies against the others.”

What did she know about it?

“Ze Tcherman desstiny off Amerika,” said someone on-screen. The chuckling in the theatre was getting more and more on his nerves, the cozy comfort of shared feeling. Even Lauren was laughing quietly, and when he turned to her she said, “No, it’s just funny is all. The way you talk is different. You can barely tell that you’re . . .” She didn’t say anything more. Only when Hitler appeared did the giggling in the theatre cease. Not an actor, the real thing. Hitler raving before the Reichstag, Hitler proudly surveying a regiment. The silence in the theatre was more frightening than everything that came before, which of course had merely been ridiculous.

Lauren leaned over again and whispered, “They couldn’t find an actor who was willing to play Hitler. They were all too afraid. There were death threats against the director! That’s why they’re using original footage.”

“I know.”

His voice sounded icy. Lauren’s hands now lay folded together in her lap. A German immigrant by the name of Kurt Schneider tried to procure blank passports for the spy ring. He went about it so ineptly that the FBI was soon on his trail. While Kurt Schneider raced through the streets, running straight into the hands of his pursuers, Josef took a sip of soda and looked over at Lauren, her face lit up in the silver glow, working hard to glean some valuable bit of insight from the movie.

He thought of his own stupid behavior at the radio store a few days ago. But no one had explained anything to him. No one had given him instructions. They just told him to go ahead.

On the screen Germany was busy preparing the way for the global Germanic empire. With wax writing. With disappearing ink. With hollow walking sticks. They had only sent twenty lines of code to Hamburg in the last week. Max complained that there was barely any information coming in of late. Ships’ cooks, housemaids, factory workers—they weren’t delivering. He asked Max if these kinds of people were the only ones working for German intelligence but got no answer.

Kurt Schneider was arrested. A confession was easy to coax out of him; he’d been so pleased to have spent time running around as a Nazi.

Lauren whispered, “Hard to believe they’d recruit such saps.”

“Oh, they do,” he said quietly.

Lauren gave him a searching look. He felt her eyes on him but said nothing.

“The movie is so contradictory, Joe. The Germans are presented as dopes, and yet we’re supposed to believe that they’re about to reduce New York to rubble and ash.”