… carrying a box of ammunition through the mud and clay while shells were falling all around. It took me two hours to move 150 meters up to our front line. I kept throwing myself on the ground or simply falling over until I was soaked to the skin and caked with earth, like a man made of mud.

I had almost reached our redoubt when I stepped into a shell hole and found myself waist deep in mud and sinking. I shouted for help, but the noise of the barrage was too loud for anyone to hear. Struggling only seemed to make me sink more quickly, and in less than five minutes I was up to my neck and facing the horrible fate of being drowned in a small sea of brown glue. I’d seen horses stuck in the mud, and nearly always they were shot, such was the effort of pulling one out. I struggled to take hold of my pistol so that I might shoot myself in the head before being drowned, but that was hopeless, too. The mud held me tightly now. I tried to lean back so that I might “float” on the surface, but that was no use, either.

And then, just as the mud was up to my jaw, there was an enormous explosion a few meters away as a shell hit the ground and, miraculously, I was lifted right out of the morass and high into the air to land twenty meters away, winded but uninjured. Had it not been for the mud enveloping me, the shock of the blast would certainly have killed me.

That was my recurring nightmare, and I never had it without waking up, soaked with perspiration and out of breath, as if I had just sprinted across no-man’s-land. Even now, in broad daylight, I had to drop down on my haunches and take several deep breaths in an effort to pull myself together. A few spots of color in the once fertile but now devastated landscape served my mental recovery: some blue thistle at the edge of the distant tree line; red dead nettle close to where I’d left the car; some yellow-flowered tansy ragwort; a robin redbreast picking a juicy pink worm out of the ground; the empty blue sky; and finally an army of workmen and a railway line conveying a small red train of earthmoving wagons from one end of the site to the other.

“Are you all right?”

The man wore a workman’s peaked cap and a quilted jacket as voluminous as a smock. His black trousers ended several centimeters above boots doubled in size by several kilos of clay. Over a shoulder as big as Jutland rested a sledgehammer. His blond hair was almost white, and his eyes were as blue as the thistle flowers. His chin and cheekbones might have been sketched by one of those Nazi artists, like Josef Thorak.

“I’m okay.” I stood up, lit a cigarette, and waved it at the landscape. “When I saw no-man’s-land, I went off a bit like August Stramm, you know? ‘Yielding clod lulls iron off to sleep, Blood clots the patches where they oozed, Rust crumbles, flesh is slime, Sucking lusts around decay.’ ”

To my surprise, he completed the verse: “ ‘Murder on murder blinks in childish eyes.’ Yes, I know that poem. Me, I was Second Royal Württemburg, Twenty-seventh Division. You?”

“Twenty-sixth Div.”

“Then we were in the same battle.”

I nodded. “Amiens. August 1918.”

I offered him a cigarette, and he took a light from my own, trench style, not to waste a match.

“Two graduates of the university of mud,” he said. “Scholars of human evolution.”

“Ah, yes. The ascent of man.” I grinned, remembering the old saying. “When someone kills you not with a bayonet, but with a machine gun; not with a machine gun, but with a flamethrower; not with a flamethrower, but with poison gas.”

“What are you doing here, friend?”

“Just looking around.”

“Well, you’re not allowed. Not anymore. Didn’t you see the sign?”

“No,” I answered truthfully.

“We’re way behind schedule as it is. We’re already working three shifts. So we don’t have time for visitors.”

“It doesn’t look too busy here.”

“Most of the lads are on the other side of that earthwork,” he said, pointing to the west of the site. “You sure you’re not from the ministry?”

“Of the Interior? No. Why do you ask?”

“Because they’ve threatened to replace any construction companies that aren’t pulling their weight, that’s why. I thought you might be spying on us.”

“I’m no spy. Hell, I’m not even a Nazi. The truth is, I came out here to look for someone. A fellow by the name of Joey Deutsch. Maybe you know him.”

“No.”

“Maybe the site foreman’s heard of him.”

“That would be me. The name’s Blask, Heinrich Blask. Why are you looking for this fellow, anyway?”

“It’s not like he’s in trouble or anything. And I’m not about to tell him he’s won a fortune on the lottery.” I was wondering exactly what I was going to tell him, until I remembered the fight tickets in my pocket: the ones we’d bought off Gypsy Trollmann. “The fact is, I manage a couple of fighters, and I want Joey to train them. I don’t know what he’s like with a pick and a shovel, but Joey’s a pretty good trainer. One of the best. He’d be in the game right now, but for the obvious reason.”

“Which is?”

“With a name like Deutsch? He’s a kike. And kikes aren’t allowed in gyms. At least not the gyms that are open to the public. Me, I’ve got my own gym. So no one’s offended, right?”

“Maybe you don’t know, but we’re not allowed to employ non-Aryan labor here,” said Blask.

“Sure I know that. I also know that it happens. And who can blame you with the ministry breathing down your neck about getting this stadium built in time? Pretty tall order if you ask me. Listen, Heinrich, I’m not here to make trouble for you. I just want to find Joey. Maybe his nephew’s working with him. Isaac. He used to be a fighter himself.”

I took two tickets out of my pocket and showed them to the foreman. “Maybe you’d like some tickets to a fight yourself. Scholz versus Witt at the Spichernsaele. How about it, Heinrich? Can you help me here?”

“If there were kikes working on this site,” said Blask, “and I’m not saying that there are, but you would do best to speak to the hiring boss. A man called Erich Goerz. He’s not on site very much. Mostly he works out of a bar on the Schildhorn.” He took one of the tickets. “There’s a monument there.”

“The Schildhorn Column.”

“’Sright. From what I heard, if you want to work, no questions asked, that’s where you go. Every morning around six there’s a whole crowd of illegals that waits there. Jews, gyppos, you name it. Goerz turns up, decides who works and who doesn’t. Mostly on account of how they each pay him a commission. He calls the names, gives them a work tab, they report to wherever they’re needed most.” He shrugged. “They’re good workers, he finds, so what am I going to do, me with my schedule? He doesn’t tell me, and I don’t need to be told, right? I just do what the bosses order me to do.”

“Any idea what the bar’s called?”

“Albert the Bear or something.” He took the other ticket. “But let me give you some free advice, comrade. Be careful. Erich Goerz wasn’t in the Royal Württemburg, like me. His idea of comradeship owes more to Al Capone than the Prussian army. You follow me? He’s not as big as you, but he’s pretty handy with his fists. Maybe you’ll like that. You look like a fellow who can take care of himself. But Erich Goerz also carries a gun. And not where you’d expect him to carry one. It’s strapped to his ankle. If ever he stops to tie up his shoelaces, don’t hesitate. Kick him in the teeth before he shoots you.”

“Thanks for the warning, friend.” I flicked my cigarette into no-man’s-land. “You already said he’s not as big as me. Anything else you can tell me about what he looks like?”

“Let me see.” Blask dropped the sledgehammer and stroked his anvil-sized chin. “For one thing, he smokes Russian cigarettes. I think they’re Russian, anyway. Flat ones that smell like a nest of burning weasels. So when he’s in the room, you’ll know about it. Otherwise he’s a pretty regular guy, at least to look at. Aged about thirty, thirty-five, pimp mustache, bit swarthy-looks like he should be wearing a fez. Owns a new Hanomag with a Brandenburg license plate. Matter of fact, that might be where he’s from, originally. The driver’s from somewhere south of there. Wittenberg, I think. He’s a slugger, too, with a reach like the Palace Bridge, so mind you watch out for him as well.”