I rounded the rusticated corner of the building and stopped below what must have been Joey’s bathroom window. It was slightly open. I looked back over my shoulder. The car containing the storm troopers was out of sight. The truck was nowhere to be seen. I glanced back up at the frosted-glass window. If I put my foot on the horizontal joint of the ground floor’s rusticated brickwork, it looked as though it would be just possible to push myself up the side of the building and reach the bottom of the window. I tried it once, just long enough to check that the bathroom was empty, before dropping back down onto the deserted sidewalk. I waited for a moment. No storm troopers came to beat me up. So much for security.

The next time I did it, I pulled myself up the side and slid quickly through the open bathroom window. Breathing heavily, I sat on the toilet, and while I waited to see if my entry would be detected, I took a closer look at the window and saw that the rat’s-tail casement was broken on the sill. Even when the window looked like it was closed, it would have been a relatively simple matter to open it from the outside.

It was a big bathroom, with pink tiles all over and a round pedestal basin. There was a liberal dusting of talcum powder on the bathroom mat. The boxed-in bath was as deep as a car door, with a hand shower, in case Magda wanted to wash her hair. By the wall-mounted soap dish was a small framed picture of Hitler, as if even here, the devoted Joey could keep his beloved leader in mind. At right angles to the bath was a stool on which sat a pile of fluffy towels, and next to this a matching table on which stood a loofah and an antiquarian statue of a naked lady. Above the table was a large, mirrored bathroom cabinet, which, naturally, I opened. Most of the shelves were Magda’s. She used Joy perfume, Kotex, Nivea, Wella shampoo, Wellapon, Kolestral, and Blondor. I remembered her now. I remembered the pictures of the wedding in the magazines. A winter wedding. The happy, smiling couple arm-in-arm in the snow, accompanied by several SA men-probably the same careless louts who were sitting outside in the car-and, of course, Hitler himself. I wonder what Hitler would have said if he’d known that Magda’s beautiful, perfectly Aryan blond hair was dyed?

Joey had only one shelf in the cabinet. And it seemed we had something in common, after all. Joey shaved with a Schick injector razor and Mennen shaving cream, and cleaned his teeth with Colgate toothpaste. A bottle of Anzora hair cream explained Joey’s perfectly brushed head of dark hair. Then, between a packet of Beecham’s laxative pills and some Acqua di Parma cologne, was a bottle containing some blue pills. I opened it and emptied one out in my hand. It was the same pill I had seen in Kassner’s office earlier that morning. Protonsil. I decided that was my cue to leave. But not before using Joey’s toilet. And not flushing it was my way of thanking him for what he’d written about me in his newspaper.

I went out the window, returned to my car, and drove quickly away. In Germany, there were things that it didn’t seem healthy to know about. I didn’t doubt for a minute that Joey’s jelly was one of these.

THERE WERE nine technical inspectorates at the Alex. Inspectorate A dealt with murder, and C dealt with thefts. Gunther Braschwitz was the boss of C and specialized in burglaries. He had a younger brother, Rudolf, who was in the political police, but we didn’t hold that against him. Braschwitz was as elegant as your little finger, and a real champagne-pisser. He wore a bowler hat, carried a stick with a sword in it, which he would sometimes use, and, in winter at least, wore gaiters above his boots. He knew all the screens-the city’s professional burglars-and, it was said, could look at a break-in and tell which of them had probably done it.

“Jewface Klein,” I said. “Seen him lately?”

“Jewface? He claims he’s going straight,” said Braschwitz. “Managed to get himself a job at Heilbronner’s on Mohrenstrasse.”

“The antique shop?”

“That’s right. He always had a very good eye, that Jewface. Why? Has he been up to his old tricks?”

“No. But he knows someone I’m looking for. A friend of that widow he used to partner. Eva Zimmer.” Only half of this was true, but I didn’t want Braschwitz asking too many questions.

“Poor Eva,” he said. “She was a good widow, that girl.”

A widow was someone a screen used to get rid of his ill-gotten goods. Not a real widow. Just someone pretending to be one. Some of them, like Eva Zimmer, were professional actresses. They would dress up in black and, with a well-rehearsed hard-luck story, try to sell stolen gold, silver, or jewelry to the high-street goldsmiths. Until I’d arrested Jewface, he and Eva had had one of the best partnerships in Berlin. I knew he was six months out of Tegel Prison, but there was nothing on file of what he’d been doing since.

After Braschwitz had told me all he knew about Jewface, I telephoned the Adlon and asked Frieda what she could tell me about Josef Goebbels. Goebbels was a regular patron of the Adlon, and Frieda was able to give me some information that I thought I might use to help bait Klein.

I walked to Heilbronner’s, but the manager told me Klein wasn’t there. “It’s his lunch hour,” he said. “You’ll probably find him across the street, at Gsellius. The bookshop. He usually goes in there at lunchtime.”

I crossed the street and peered in the bookshop window. Jewface was in there, all right. I saw him straight away. A little older than I remembered, but a year in the cement can put five on your shine. His face wasn’t particularly Jewish, to be honest. He had the nickname from the jeweler’s eyeglass he used to wear when he was appraising something he’d stolen. But he did have a nose, for cops. I hadn’t been there for more than a few seconds when he looked up from the book he held and met my eye. I nodded at him to come outside and, reluctantly, he did. We weren’t friends exactly. But I was counting on his not having forgotten that it was I who’d found the pimp who’d stabbed Eva Zimmer the previous year. A man named Horst Wessel. And the pity of it was that Wessel, who was also a member of the SA, had then been murdered by another pimp, Ali Hohler, in an argument over some whore before I could make the arrest. Because Hohler happened also to be a Communist, Goebbels had managed to turn these tawdry events into a political melodrama, which was how Horst Wessel had achieved his unlikely immortalization in a song that was now heard all over Berlin when the SA went on one of its provocative marches through a Communist neighborhood. Naturally, Goebbels had left out of the story the underworld connections of these plankton protagonists. Meanwhile, Hohler had been arrested by one of my colleagues and sentenced to life imprisonment. Which left Jewface very much aggrieved with Goebbels for having waxed Eva Zimmer’s sordid murder from the Nazis’ canta storia of Horst Wessel’s heroic past.

We went around the corner to Siechen’s on Friedrichstrasse, where I bought us a couple of Nurembergs and took a closer look at him. His face was all sharp angles, thin and pointed, like something Pythagoras had doodled on the corner of his scroll before getting on with his theorem.

“So what can I do for you, Herr Gunther?”

“I need a favor, Jewface. I want someone to break into a doctor’s office at the state hospital. Someone intelligent, who can read and write and not get greedy. I don’t want anything stolen.”

“That’s good, because I’m retired. I don’t steal. And I don’t go breaking and entering. Not since Eva got stabbed.”

“Look, all I want you to do is open a file and do a bit of copying out. A secretary with a key could do it. But I don’t have a key. For a man of your experience, it couldn’t be simpler.” I sipped my beer and let him blow me off like the froth on top of his own untouched glass.