I kept some working clothes in my office. As soon as I had changed, I went out into the predawn darkness and walked to Potsdamer Station. About forty-five minutes after that, I was walking up the steps to the Schildhorn monument with several other men, most of them Jewish-looking types with brown hair, dark melancholy eyes, bat ears, and beaks that made you wonder if God had chosen his people on the basis of their having noses they might not have chosen for themselves. This generalization was made easier by the certain knowledge that all these men shared a bloodline that was probably purer than my own. In the moonlight, one or two of them shot me a questioning look, as if wondering what the Nazis could possibly have against a tall, burly man with blond hair, blue eyes, and a nose like a baker’s thumb. I didn’t blame them. In that particular company I stuck out like Rameses II.

There were about 150 men gathered in the darkness under the invisible pine trees, which whispered their presence in an early-morning breeze. The monument itself was supposed to be a stylized tree crowned by a cross from which a shield was hanging. It probably meant something to someone who had a taste for unsightly religious monuments. To me it looked like a lamppost without a much-needed lamp. Or, perhaps, a stone stake for burning city architects. That would have been a worthwhile monument. Especially in Berlin.

I walked around this economy-sized obelisk, eavesdropping on a few conversations. Mostly they were to do with how many days each man had worked in the recent past. Or not worked, as seemed rather more common.

“I got one day last week,” said a man. “And two the week before. I need to work today, or my family won’t eat.”

Another started to excoriate Goerz but was quickly silenced by someone else.

“Blame the Nazis, not Goerz. But for him none of us would work. He’s risking as much as us. Maybe more.”

“If you ask me, he gets well paid for the risk.”

“It’s my first time,” I told the man standing next to me. “How do you get yourself picked?”

I offered him a cigarette, and he looked at me and my cigarettes strangely, as if suspecting that no one who really needed to work had money for such sensuous and expensive luxuries. He took it anyway and put it behind his ear.

“There’s no method in it,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for six months, and still it seems arbitrary. There are some days when he likes your face, and others when he doesn’t even meet your eye.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to spread the work around,” I said. “For the sake of fairness.”

“Fairness?” The man snorted his derision. “Fairness has absolutely nothing to do with it. One day he’ll take a hundred men. Another day he’ll take seventy-five. It’s a kind of fascism, I think. Goerz reminding us all of the power he wields.”

Shorter than me by a head, the man was red-haired and sharply featured, with a face like a heavily rusted hatchet. He wore a thick pea jacket and a worker’s cap, and around his neck was tied a bright green handkerchief that matched the color of the eyes behind his wire-framed glasses. Jutting out of his coat pocket was a book by Dostoevsky, and it was almost as if this young and studious-looking Jew had emerged, fully formed, from a space between the pages: neurotic, poor, undernourished, desperate. His name was Solomon Feigenbaum, which, to my mostly Aryan ears, was about as Jewish as a ghetto full of tailors.

“Anyway, if it’s your first time, you almost always get picked,” said Feigenbaum. “Goerz likes to give the new man a day, so that they get the taste.”

“That’s a relief.”

“If you say so. Only you don’t look like you’re in desperate need of work. Matter of fact, you don’t even look Jewish.”

“That’s what my mother said to my father. I always figured that’s why she married him. It takes more than a hooked nose and a yarmulke to make a Jew, friend. What about Helene Mayer?”

“Who’s she?”

“A Jewish fencer on the German Olympic team in 1932. Looks like Hitler’s wet dream. She’s got more blond hair than the floor in a Swedish barbershop. And what about Leni Riefenstahl? Surely you’ve heard the rumors.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. Her mother was a Polish Jew.”

Feigenbaum seemed vaguely amused by that.

“Listen,” I said. “I haven’t worked in weeks. A friend of mine told me about this Plage. As a matter of fact, I thought I’d see him here.” As if hoping to see Isaac Deutsch, I looked around the crowd of men standing near the monument, and shook my head with disappointment.

“Did your friend tell you about the work?”

“Only that it’s no questions asked.”

“That all?”

“What else is there?”

“Like they use Jewish labor for work that maybe so-called German workers don’t want to do because it’s dangerous. On account of how they’re cutting corners on safety so they can finish the stadium on time. Did your friend tell you that?”

“Are you trying to put me off?”

“I’m just telling you how it is. It seems to me that if your friend was really your friend, he might have mentioned that much. That you’ve got to be a bit desperate maybe to take some of the risks they expect you to take. It’s not like anyone’s gonna give you a hard hat, my friend. A rock falls on your head or you get buried in a cave-in, there isn’t going to be anyone looking surprised or grief-stricken. There’s no social welfare for illegally employed Jews. Maybe not even a headstone. Understand?”

“I understand that maybe you’re trying to put me off. Increase your own chances of getting work.”

“What I’m trying to say is we look after each other, see? If we don’t, nobody else will. When we go down the pit, we’re like the three musketeers.”

“The pit? I thought we were on the stadium site.”

“That’s up top, for German workers. Nothing to it. Most of us here are working on the tunnel for a new S-Bahn that’s going to run from the stadium all the way to Königgratzer Strasse. If you work today, you’ll find out what it’s like to be a mole.” He glanced up at the still-dark sky. “We go down in the dark, we work in the dark, and we come up in the dark.”

“You’re right, my friend didn’t tell me any of this,” I said. “You would think he’d have mentioned it. Then again, it’s been a while since I’ve seen him. Or his uncle. Hey, maybe you know them. Isaac and Joey Deutsch?”

“I don’t know them,” said Feigenbaum, but behind his glasses, his eyes had narrowed and were studying me carefully, as if maybe he had heard of them, after all. I didn’t spend ten years at the Alex without getting an itch for when a man is lying. He pulled on his earlobe a couple of times and then glanced away, nervously. That was the clincher.

“But you must,” I said firmly. “Isaac used to be a boxer. He was a real prospect until the Nazis excluded Jews from the fights and took away his license. Joey was his trainer. Surely you know them?”

“I tell you I don’t know them.” Feigenbaum spoke firmly.

I shrugged and lit a cigarette. “If you say so. I mean, it’s nothing to me.” I puffed the cigarette to let him get a whiff of it. I could tell he was desperate for a smoke, even though he still had the one I’d given him behind his ear. “I guess all that talk about the three musketeers and looking out for each other was just that. Talk.”

“What do you mean?” His nostrils flared in front of the tobacco smoke and he licked his lips.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I took another drag and dried his face with it. “Here. Finish it. You know you want one.”

Feigenbaum took the cigarette from my fingers and went to work on it as if I’d offered him an opium pipe. Some people are just like that with a nail: they make you think that maybe there’s something really harmful about a little thing like a cigarette. It’s a little unnerving to watch an addiction at work like that sometimes.