A groschen bought him a pint Topp of beer and entry to the Kino which showed moving pictures in a long, narrow space formed by three apartment flats strung together. The films on the screen this evening would have not passed the test for a police license. Arthur Curtis had been a detective long enough to have only a passing interest in what in his boyhood would have been called “dirty pictures.” But Hans Reuter, his man inside Krieg’s Berlin office, liked them, and this working-class moving picture theater was a sufficiently long walk from Reuter’s expensive neighborhood that he felt safe frequenting it without the locals telling his wife. So Arthur Curtis sipped his beer and pretended to be engrossed in the goings-on flickering on the screen while he kept an eye on the men drifting in from the beer bar.

Curtis sat for two hours in the dark. The place had emptied out a bit, and he was having trouble staying awake, when, all of a sudden, in walked his man from Krieg, hugging his beer and looking for an empty place on the bench that he favored in the back row. Curtis moved over. Herr Reuter sat, sipped, and stared.

The short, round Van Dorn detective remained as silent as the film until the waiters finally interrupted with loud offers of “Beer?” During the storm of affirmative replies, he leaned closer to Reuter and whispered, “Triple.”

“What?” Reuter turned. His mouth tightened when he realized that the man who had been sitting next to him all along was Arthur Curtis. “I said, no more.”

“I can now pay triple,” whispered Curtis. “Three times as much. If you’re interested, meet me in the bar.”

Reuter kept him waiting, but not for long. Greed, in the immortal words of Chief Investigator Isaac Bell, worked wonders.

“Triple?” Reuter echoed in disbelief.

Arthur Curtis passed him the fresh Topp he had ordered and took a sip from his own. “Triple. But only for something special.”

“Like what?”

“Something unique. You know the situation at your employer. You’re best qualified to suggest something that I would really need. Aren’t you?”

Hans Reuter looked worried. “But how am I to guess?”

Curtis shrugged. “Let me guess for you. How many Krieg company executives and directors are former Army officers?”

“Very few.”

“Do you know any?”

“Not personally. I mean, there are none in the Berlin office.”

“Can you find their names?”

“I would have to think about that.”

“While you’re thinking,” Curtis shot back, “think which of those company directors might travel abroad.”

Reuter looked uncomfortable, and Curtis thought he was touching some sort of a nerve here, as if the man had thought of a name he feared.

“One of your responsibilities is to dispense funds overseas, correct?”

“How do you know?”

Curtis’s casual, “I asked around” did not make Reuter look any more comfortable.

Curtis went for broke. “I need a name.”

“A name?”