I tipped my hat politely and showed him my warrant disc.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning.”

“I’m Commissar Gunther, from Berlin Alexanderplatz. To see Commissar Herzefelde. I just arrived at the station. I thought he’d be there to meet me.”

“Did you now?” He said it in a way that made me want to punch him in the nose. You get a lot of that in Munich.

“Yes,” I said patiently. “But since he wasn’t, I assumed he’d been delayed and that I’d better come and find him here.”

“Spoken like a Berlin detective,” he said, without a trace of a smile.

I nodded patiently and waited for some good manners to kick in. They didn’t.

“Spare me the sweet talk and tell him I’m here.”

The sergeant nodded at a polished wooden bench by the front door. “Have a seat,” he said coolly. “Sir. I’ll deal with you in a minute.”

I went over to the bench and sat down. “I’ll be sure to mention your red-carpet treatment when I see your commissar,” I said.

“You do that, sir,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”

He wrote something on a piece of paper, rubbed his ham hock of a nose, scratched his ass with his pencil, and then used it to pick his ear. Then he got up, slowly, and put something in a filing cabinet. The telephone rang. He let it ring a couple of times before answering it, listened, took down some details, and then put a sheet of paper into a tray. When the call ended, he looked at the clock above the door. Then he yawned.

“If this is how you look after the polenta in this town, I’d hate to be a criminal.” I lit a cigarette.

He didn’t like that. He pointed at a No Smoking sign with his pencil. I stubbed it out. I didn’t want to wait there all morning. After a while, he picked up the phone and spoke, in a lowered voice. Once or twice he flicked his eyes my way, so I got the idea he was probably talking about me. So when he finished the call, I lit another cigarette. He tapped the pencil on the desk in front of his belly and, having received my attention, pointed at the No Smoking sign again. This time I ignored him. He didn’t like that, either.

“No smoking,” he growled.

“No kidding.”

“You know what the trouble is with you Berlin cops?”

“If you could point to Berlin on a map, I might be interested, fat boy.”

“You’re all Jew-lovers.”

“Ah, now we’re getting to it.” I blew some smoke his way and grinned. “We’re not all Jew-lovers, in the Berlin police, as a matter of fact. Some of us are a bit like you, Sergeant. Ignorant. Bigoted. And a disgrace to the uniform.”

He tried to outstare me for minute or two. Then he said, “The Jews are our misfortune. It’s time the polenta in Berlin woke up to that fact.”

“Well, that’s an interesting sentiment. Did you just think of it yourself, or was it written on the skin of the banana you ate for breakfast?”

A detective arrived. I knew he must be a detective because he wasn’t dragging his knuckles on the floor. He glanced at the ape on the desk, who jerked his head my way. The detective came over and stood in front of me, looking sheepish. It might have worked, too, if his face hadn’t looked so peculiarly wolflike. His eyes were blue and his nose was more of a muzzle, but mostly it was because of his eyebrows, which met in the middle, and his canine teeth, which seemed slightly longer than was normal. But you get a lot of that in Munich as well.

“Commissar Gunther?”

“Yes. Is something wrong?”

“I’m Criminal Secretary Christian Schramma.” We shook hands. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Commissar Herzefelde is dead. He was murdered last night. Shot three times in the back as he left a bar in Sendling.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“No, as you may know, he’d had several death threats.”

“Because he was Jewish. Of course.” I glanced the desk sergeant’s way. “There’s hatred and stupidity everywhere. Even in the police force.”

Schramma remained silent.

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know him for very long, but Paul was a good man.”

We went up to the detectives’ room. It was a warm day, and through the open windows you could hear the sound of children playing in the yard of the nearby Gymnasium. Human life never sounded so lively.

“I saw your name in his police diary,” said Schramma. “But he didn’t think to write down a telephone number or where you were from, otherwise I would have called you.”

“That’s all right. He was about to share some information on a murder he’d been working on. Elizabeth Bremer?”

Schramma nodded.

“We had a similar case in Berlin,” I explained. “I came down here to read the files and find out just how similar they were.”

He bit his lip uncomfortably, which did little to alter my first impression of him. He looked like a werewolf.

“Look, I’m really sorry to tell you this after you’ve come all the way from Berlin. But all Paul’s case files have been sent upstairs. To the government counselor’s office. When a police officer gets killed, it’s standard procedure to assume it might have something to do with a case he was working on. I seriously doubt that you’re going to be able to see those files for a while. Maybe as long as a couple of weeks.”

It was my turn to bite my lip. “I see. Tell me, did you work with Paul?”

“A while ago. I’m not up to date with his current cases. Of late, he mostly worked on his own. He preferred it that way.”

“He preferred it or other detectives preferred it?”

“I think that’s a little unfair, sir.”

“Is it?”

Schramma didn’t answer. He lit a cigarette, flicked the match out of the open window, and sat on the corner of a desk that I assumed must be his own. On the opposite side of the big room, a detective with a face like Schmeling’s was questioning a suspect. Every time he got an answer, he looked pained, as if Jack Sharkey had hit him below the belt. It was a nice technique. I felt the cop was going to win on a disqualification, the same way Schmeling did. Other detectives came and went. A few of them had loud laughs, and louder suits. You get a lot of that in Munich. In Berlin, we all wore black armbands when a cop got killed. But not in Munich. A different kind of armband-a red one with a black Sanskrit cross in the middle-looked a lot more probable. It didn’t look like anyone was about to shed any tears over the death of Paul Herzefelde.

“Could I see his desk?”

Schramma got up slowly and we walked over to a gray steel desk in a far-flung corner of the office, which was surrounded with a wall of files and bookcases, like a one-man ghetto. The desktop was clear, but his photographs were still on the wall. I bent over to take a closer look at them. Herzefelde’s wife and family in one. Him wearing a military uniform and decoration in the other. On the wall, next to this photograph, was the faint outline of a graffito that had been rubbed out: the Star of David and the words “Jews Out.” I traced the outline with my finger just to make sure Schramma knew I’d seen it.

“That’s a hell of a way to honor a man who got himself a First Class Iron Cross,” I said loudly, and glanced around the detectives’ room. “Three bullets and some cave art.”

Silence descended on the room. Typing stopped. Voices quietened. Even the children playing outside seemed to cease their noise for a moment. Everyone was now looking at me, like I was the ghost of Walther Rathenau.

“So who did it? Who murdered Paul Herzefelde? Does anyone know?” I paused. “Can anyone guess? After all, you’re supposed to be detectives.” More silence. “Doesn’t anyone care who killed Paul Herzefelde?” I walked over to the center of the room and, facing down Munich’s KRIPO, waited for someone to say something. I looked at my watch. “Hell, I’ve been here for less than half an hour and I could tell you who killed him. It was the Nazis killed him, that’s who. It was the bloody Nazis who shot him in the back. Maybe even the same Nazis who wrote ‘Jews Out’ on the wall beside his desk.”