“I guess you’re right,” I said. “But it makes me worry if there’s another war. I worry what will happen to all these poor bastards the Nazis don’t like.”

MOST OF THE WAY BACK to the Adlon, I was thinking about what we had learned. Gypsy Trollmann had promised to mail me the Sparta Club photograph, but I didn’t doubt his identification of the dead man found floating in Mühlendamm Lock or his information about Isaac Deutsch’s having been a construction worker on the Olympic Stadium site. Say one thing, do another, that was typical of the Nazis. All the same, Pichelsberg was a long way from Mühlendamm; the opposite end of the city. And nothing I had yet learned explained how Deutsch had drowned in salt water.

“You talk too much, Gunther.”

“I was thinking, Mrs. Charalambides. What you must think of us? We seem to be the only people in the world who are actively trying to live up to everyone else’s worst impression of us.”

“Please call me Noreen. Charalambides is such a long name, even in Germany.”

“I don’t know if I can do that now that you’re my employer. Ten marks a day demands a certain amount of professional courtesy.”

“You can hardly go on calling me Mrs. Charalambides if you’re going to kiss me.”

“Am I going to kiss you?”

“This morning you mentioned something about Isaac Newton. Which certainly encourages me to think you are.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Newton came up with three laws to describe the relationships between two bodies. I’d say he might also have come up with a fourth if he’d ever met me and you, Gunther. You’re going to kiss me, all right. There’s absolutely no doubt about it.”

“You mean there’s algebra and stuff to prove it?”

“Pages of it. Impulse, unbalanced force, equal and opposite reaction. Between us, we’ve got almost enough equations to cover a bedsheet.”

“Then I guess there’s no point in my trying to resist the laws of planetary motion, Noreen.”

“Absolutely none at all. In fact, it would be best if you gave in to the impulse right now, in case you put the whole damned universe out of joint.”

I stopped the car, pulled on the hand brake, and leaned toward her. For a moment she turned away.

“Hermann-Goering-Strasse,” she said. “Didn’t it used to be called something else?”

“Budapester Strasse.”

“That’s better. I want to remember where it was you first kissed me. I don’t want that memory to include Hermann Goering.”

She turned toward me expectantly, and I kissed her hard. Her breath was charged with cigarettes and ice-cold liquor and lipstick and a little something special from inside her pants. She tasted better than lightly salted butter on freshly baked bread. I felt her eyelashes brush my cheeks like the wings of tiny hummingbirds, and after a minute or so she began to breathe like a medium who was trying to get in touch with the spirit world. Maybe she did at that. And, keen to possess her whole body, I pushed my left hand underneath her fur coat and let it slide awhile up and down her thigh and torso, as if I’d been trying to generate static electricity. Noreen Charalambides wasn’t the only one who knew physics. There was a thud as her handbag slid off her lap and hit the floor of the car. I opened my eyes and drew away from her mouth.

“Gravity still works, then,” I said. “The way my head feels, I was beginning to wonder. I guess Newton knew a thing or two, after all.”

“He didn’t know everything. I bet he didn’t know how to kiss a girl like that.”

“That’s because he never met a girl such as you, Noreen. If he had, he might have done something useful with his life. Like this.”

I kissed her again, only this time I put my whole back into it, like I really meant what I was doing. And maybe I did. A lot of time had passed since I’d felt this way about a woman. I glanced out of the window and, seeing the name of the street, I was reminded of what I had told myself the first time I’d talked to Noreen back in Hedda Adlon’s apartment at the hotel: that Noreen was my employer’s oldest friend, and that I was going to sleep with Hermann Goering before I ever laid a finger on her. The way things were going, it looked as if the Prussian prime minister was in for a Hermann-sized surprise.

Her tongue was in my mouth now, alongside my heart and the misgivings I kept trying to swallow. I was losing control, but mostly of my left hand, which was now under her dress and making itself familiar with her garter and the cool thigh it was stretched across. Only when the hand slipped into the secret space between her thighs did she move to arrest the wrist commanding it. I let her move my hand away and then brought my fingers up to my mouth and licked them.

“This hand. I don’t know what gets into it sometimes.”

“You’re a man, Gunther. That’s what gets into it.” She took my fingers and brushed them with her lips. “I like you kissing me. You’re a good kisser. If kissing was in the Olympics, you’d be a medal prospect. But I don’t like to be hurried. I like to be walked around the ring for a while before being mounted. And don’t even think of using the whip if you want to stay in the saddle. I’m the independent sort, Gunther. When I run it’ll be because my eyes are open and because I want to. And I won’t be wearing any blinkers if and when we reach the wire. I might not be wearing anything at all.”

“Sure,” I said. “I never figured you any other way. No blinkers. Not even a tongue strap. How do you feel about me giving you an apple sometimes?”

“I like apples,” she said. “Just watch out you don’t get your fingers bitten.”

I let her bite me, hard. It was painful, but I enjoyed it. Pain from her felt good, like something primordial, something that was always meant to be. Besides, we both knew that when our clothes were lying on the floor beside our sweating, naked bodies, I was going to pay her back in kind. That’s always how it is between a man and a woman. A man takes a woman. A woman gets taken. It isn’t always marked by a due consideration of what is fair and decent and well mannered. Sometimes human nature can leave you looking just a little shamefaced.

I DROVE US BACK to the hotel and parked the car. As we went through the door and into the entrance hall, we met Max Reles, who was on his way out somewhere. He was accompanied by Gerhard Krempel and Dora Bauer, and they were all wearing evening clothes. Reles spoke to Noreen first and in English, which left me with the opportunity to say something to Dora.

“Good evening, Fräulein Bauer,” I said politely.

“Herr Gunther.”

“You look lovely.”

“Thank you.” She smiled warmly. “And I really mean that. I’m very grateful to you for helping me to get this job.”

“It was my pleasure, Fräulein. Behlert tells me you’re now working almost exclusively for Herr Reles.”

“Max keeps me very busy, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever done so much typing. Not even when I was at Odol. But right now, we’re off to the opera.”

“To see what?”

She smiled ingenuously. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know anything about opera.”

“Me neither.”

“I expect I shall hate it. But Max wants me to take some dictation during the interval.”

“And what about you, Herr Krempel? What do you do during the interval? Murder a good tune? In the absence of anything else.”

“Do I know you?” he asked, hardly looking at me. His whispered growl of a voice sounded as if it had been rubbed down with sandpaper and then marinated in burning kerosene.

“No, you don’t. But I know you.”

Krempel was tall, with flying-buttress shoulders and dead black eyes. Thick yellow hair grew on top of a head that was as big as a Galápagos tortoise and probably about as quick. His mouth resembled an ancient scar on a footballer’s knees. Fingers like scrap-yard grapples were already bunching into fists the size of wrecking balls. He looked like a real thug’s thug, and if the German Labor Front included a section for employees in the field of intimidation and coercion, then Gerhard Krempel might reasonably have expected to be elected as a workers’ representative.