TO THE SOUTH OF PICHELSBERG, a high road affording pretty views but now much used by construction traffic skirted the Havel River and led to Beelitzhof and the two-kilometer peninsula of Schildhorn. Close to the riverbank were a little group of bars and ivy-covered restaurants, and a series of stone steps that rose steeply up to a group of pine trees that hid the Schildhorn monument and whatever else went on there at six o’clock in the morning. The monument was well chosen as a place for picking up illegal workers. From the road it was impossible to see anything that happened around the monument.

Albert the Bear was shaped a bit like a boot or a shoe and was of such an age that it looked as if the shoe might have an old woman who lived in it with so many children she didn’t know what to do. Outside the door was a new Hanomag with an IE license plate. It looked as if I’d arrived at the right time.

I drove on for about three or four hundred meters and parked. In the trunk of Behlert’s car was a pair of overalls. Behlert was always messing around under the hood of the W. I put on the overalls and walked back into the village, stopping only to push my hands into some damp soil to give myself a workingman’s manicure. A cold easterly wind was blowing off the river and carried a strong hint of the coming winter, not to mention a whiff of something chemical from the Hohenzollerndamm Gasworks on the edge of Wilmersdorf.

Outside the Albert, a tall man with a courtroom artist’s idea of a face was leaning on the Hanomag reading the Zeitung. He was smoking a Tom Thumb and probably keeping an eye on the car. As I pushed open the door, a little bell rang above my head. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but I went inside anyway.

I was greeted by a large stuffed bear. The bear’s jaws were open and its paws were in the air, and I guess a person coming through the door was supposed to feel under attack or something, but to me the bear looked as if he were conducting an ursine choir to sing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” Otherwise the place was almost empty. The floor was a checkerboard of cheap linoleum. Tables with neat yellow cloths were ranged around the orange-colored walls that were a picture gallery of river scenes and characters. In the far corner, underneath a large photograph of the River Spree logjammed with Sunday canoeists, sat a man in a cloud of foul-smelling cigarette smoke. He was reading a newspaper that was spread over the whole table, and he hardly looked up as I came over and stood in front of him.

“Hey,” I said.

“Don’t make the mistake of pulling out that chair,” he murmured. “I’m not the type who likes to jaw with strangers.”

He wore a mid-green suit and a dark green shirt with a brown woolen tie. On the bench next to him were a leather coat and hat and, for no reason I could see, a substantial-looking dog lead. The flat, yellowish cigarettes he was smoking were not Russian, however; they were French.

“I understand. Are you Herr Goerz?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Stefan Blitz. I was told you were the man to speak to about getting work on the Olympic site.”

“Oh? Who told you that?”

“Fellow named Trollmann. Johann Trollmann.”

“Never heard of him. Does he work for me?”

“No, Herr Goerz. He said he heard it from a friend of his. I can’t remember his name. Trollmann and I, we used to box together.” I paused. “I say ‘used to,’ because now we can’t. Not anymore. Not now that there are rules about non-Aryans in sporting contests. Which is how I come to be looking for a job.”

“I’ve never been a sporting man myself,” said Goerz. “I was too busy earning a living.” He looked up from his newspaper. “I can see the boxer in you, maybe. But somehow I can’t see the Jew.”

“I’m a mischling. Half and half. But that doesn’t seem to make much difference to the government.”

Goerz laughed. “No, it certainly doesn’t. Let me see your hands, Stefan Blitz.”

I held them out in front of him, showing off my dirty fingernails.

“Not the backs of your hands. The palms.”

“Are you going to tell my fortune?”

His eyes narrowed as he pulled on the last few centimeters of the foul-smelling cigarette. “Maybe.” Not touching my hands, just looking, he added, “These hands look strong enough. But they don’t look like they’ve done much real work.”

“Like I said, mostly I’ve worked with my knuckles. But I can handle a pick and a shovel. During the war I did my fair share of digging trenches. Quite a few graves, too.”

“Sad.” He put out the cigarette. “Tell me, Stefan, do you know what a tithing is?”

“It’s in the Bible. It means a tenth part, doesn’t it?”

“’Sright. Now, then. I’m just the hiring boss. I get paid by the construction company to find them men. But I also get paid by you, to find you a job, see? A tenth of what you make at the end of the day. You can think of it as being like your union dues.”

“A tenth seems a little high for any union I’ve ever been in.”

“I agree. But then beggars can’t be choosers, now, can they? Jews aren’t allowed to be in German workingmen’s unions. So, under those circumstances, a tenth is what you’re asked to pay. And you can take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I thought you would. Besides, like I said. It’s in your holy book. Genesis, chapter fourteen, verse twenty. ‘And he gave him tithes of all.’ That’s the best way to look at it, I think. As your holy duty. And if you can’t work your head around that, then just remember this: I only pick the men who pay me the tithing. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“Six o’clock sharp, at the monument outside. Maybe you’ll work, maybe you won’t. It all depends on how many are needed.”

“I’ll be here.”

“As if I care.” Goerz looked back down at his newspaper. The interview was over.

I HAD ARRANGED TO MEET NOREEN at the Romanisches Café on Tauentzienstrasse. Formerly popular with Berlin’s literati, the café resembled an airship that had made an unscheduled landing on the pavement in front of a four-story Romanesque building that might have been the sibling of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church opposite. Or perhaps it was the modern equivalent of a Hohenzollern hunting lodge-somewhere for the princes and emperors of the first German empire to get a coffee or a kummel after spending a long morning on their knees to a God who, by comparison with them, must have seemed rather vulgar and ill bred.

Under the glass ceilings of the café she was easy to see, like an exotic species of hothouse flower. But, as with any vivid tropical bloom, something dangerous was close at hand. A young man wearing a smart black uniform was seated at her table, like Miss Muffet’s spider. Less than six months after the demise of the SA as a political force independent of the Nazis, the impeccably dressed SS had already established itself as the most feared uniformed organization in Hitler’s Germany.

I was none too pleased to see him myself. He was tall and blond and handsome with an easy smile and manners as polished as his boots-lighting Noreen’s cigarette as urgently as if her life had depended on it, and standing up with a click of heels that was as loud as a champagne cork when I presented myself at their table. The SS officer’s matching black Labrador shifted uncertainly on his haunches and uttered a low growl. Master and dog looked like a warlock and his familiar, and before Noreen had even begun the introductions, I was hoping he might disappear in a puff of black smoke.

“This is Lieutenant Seetzen,” she said, smiling politely. “He’s been keeping me company and practicing his English.”

I fixed a rictus smile to my jaw, affecting pleasure in our new friend’s company, but I was glad when he finally made his excuses and left.

“That’s a relief,” she said. “I thought he’d never go.”