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  His office was just across the Isar River, a fifteen-minute stroll over the bomb-battered Luitpoldbrücke. His drab but undamaged three-story building stood one block off the proud Prinzregentenstrasse, on the corner of Geibel and Schumannstrasse. They shared it with struggling German accountants, lawyers, and architects as well as a bustling USO office annex on the ground floor. His second floor had offices for three other liaison officers who, like Harry, had responsibility for Education and Cultural Relations, Property, and Civil Administration divisions. They had a team of German secretaries who acted as translators, confessors, and occasionally intermediaries in black market deals. At the far end of his hallway, a once dormant office now housed someone called the US Trade Council Representative according to the door plaque that was just hung. Harry had only seen whom he assumed to be the new man once, from the back as he stood at his door. He wore a dark overcoat draped over his shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat. No one had seen any staff and no one knew the representative’s name.

  Harry tried to keep his office fairly spartan, to show his visitors he was on the level—what you saw with Captain Kaspar was what you got—but within weeks after arriving it was a lost cause. Soon Germans and refugees were bringing him gifts in thanks for his liaison work and, seeing the gifts already in his office, more of them brought him more presents and increasingly in anticipation of fine liaison work—in their favor, of course. Harry had hand-painted beer steins, embossed glasses, fine porcelain and silver, photos and homey paintings, and all manner of homemade schnapps. He had banners from untold number of small clubs for everything from horse riding to stamp collecting. Not to be outdone, those few Americans who required Harry’s influence over local issues brought him glitzy Nazi regalia, stateside booze, and nifty gadgets. The Nazi kitsch they could keep. He did keep two radios—one a portable, a Zeiss camera, and a few bottles of Johnnie Walker. He welcomed a new Underwood typewriter only because his old Underwood was sounding like a piano. His was a warehouse of good faith and form, he assured himself, and much of his bounty he redeployed to smooth over unhappy parties in his liaison assignments. Sometimes he would even see an item return, which he took as a good sign—the good faith and form having come full circle, something that should happen more here but did not. Headquarters knew all this and didn’t want to know. As long as he got the job done. It wasn’t as if he was negotiating interzonal treaties, allowing the return of major complicit industries, or whitewashing war criminals.

  The folder on Hartmut Dietz arrived with the morning mail. Harry had requested all the records MG had on the detective, but it was only one page. The dates and specifics were vague. Dietz was a beat cop before the war. Raised Catholic, the regular allegiances. He’d belonged to a club that played skat and poker. He had a wife. During the war he ended up in the German Navy (he, a landlocked Bavarian, such was the irony of wartime duty) and had never joined the Nazi party, which might have been a favorable sign a year ago. Since then, though, Harry had seen how the cruel aftermath of the war could change a man more than any party, persecution, or even combat. The hunger alone could twist one’s soul like a pretzel.

  Harry ate a cheese sandwich at his desk and read up on the current pleas he had to manage. A Munich parish hoped to print its own newspaper. A soccer club wanted their field back from the armor regiment using it as a parking lot. A theater group wanted to put on open performances in the English Garden. His job was to shuttle between parties, helping each to reach an agreement, and then report the outcome. It wasn’t horrible work, but it sometimes made him feel less like a spokesman than just a spoke. Before his transfer the previous April, he was heading the whole of Military Government in a small town. Sometimes he wondered if his Munich transfer had amounted to a demotion, or simply velvet handcuffs. Sure, he had pushed for it, but he always suspected someone in MG or even CID or CIC knew about the train job and was happy to install him here until his service ran out, so that he could do no harm. Who was harming who? He had helped them to no end—he’d rid them all of a bad egg that they’d never dared touch. If that was harm, then the Nuremberg Trials were a beauty pageant.

  Concerns about Hartmut Dietz filled his head, displacing daydreams of Sabine Lieser. He lit a Chesterfield and pulled over one of his five keepsake ashtrays. An uneasy heat was rising up from his stomach, and the itching smoke didn’t help at all. It was already Wednesday afternoon. Three o’clock. Almost five days had passed since he’d asked a plainclothes German cop to break major regulations and put a corpse on ice for him.

  Detective Dietz needed to know the score. Harry owed him that. He slid Dietz’s page into the folder, the folder into the outbox. Then he grabbed his coat and headed out, leaving his butt to burn itself out in the ashtray.

  First Harry tried Dietz’s flat. Down in the lobby, he rang and rang the bell but no one answered. An old woman told him that Herr Dietz was not at home. Police headquarters was his next stop, the Polizeipräsidium building pocked with bullet holes and shrapnel and blackened from fires gone mad. In its front courtyard stood the scorched statue of an old general, still riding his horse despite centuries of error and self-destruction. Harry strode inside and passed through an entry with walls still marred by pockmarks and burn smears and the wood trim beat-up, no doubt from the Nazis who had hauled out their goods and burned files and fled back in ’45. He followed a hallway lined with crime scene photos and found an open floor of desks like in an American-style police department. The uniformed police looked the part, too—they were wearing a new American design of royal blue with open collar. Without their Deutsch, it could have been Chicago or the NYPD. Sometimes it seemed that “rebuilding for democracy” was nothing more than stylizing a movie set.

  A young cop at a check-in desk eyed Harry as if trying to identify a plane in the sky by silhouette. Harry said in English, “I’m looking for a detective named Dietz.” Young cop flipped open a directory. At the two nearest desks, two cops chatted. Their German was thick with Bavarian dialect, but Harry got the gist:

  “Who’s this Ami come around?” said one. “Coming to nab the mystery corpse?” said the other and they chuckled. “Well, have at it. Take a good while to defrost, that one.”

  Harry kept his eyes on the kid cop, pretending not to understand.

  A hand pressed on Harry’s shoulder. Hartmut Dietz stood next to him. Without adding a word, he turned Harry back the way he’d come and led him outside.

  They stood out on the little square, on the opposite side of the scorched general. A cold light mist was coming down, forming a wet sheen on Dietz’s thin hair. The detective looked pale in the gray light, his face stretched in a scowl like someone had just kicked him in the shins.

  “Never!” Dietz barked. He had a hand out as if ready to karate chop. “You were never, ever, supposed to come see me at work.”

  Harry felt the same scowl coming on. “Is that right? And you were never supposed to talk about a certain corpse.”

  “Who said I was?”

  “Don’t give me that. I heard those bulls back in there.”

  “Ach, those drunks? They don’t know the score. They shit out their mouths.”

  “Sure, and they were jawing on about that other corpse I lent you. I got a million of them.”

  They were shouting into the mist. Dietz’s voice broke. He buckled over in a nasty, screeching cough. Harry let him, gave him a pat on the back. He walked Dietz down the street, and Dietz pointed to a sign down around the corner where they found a tiny pub with three tables. Harry ordered two schnapps and a bottle of water from the hunchbacked man who shuffled out to them.

  Dietz choked back the booze. He slid a butt in his mouth. Harry yanked it out. “Those things will wreck you when you’re howling like that.”

  “How you think I got wrecked?” Dietz said.

  “Yeah, and the war had nothing to do with it,” Harry said. “You, in the Kriegsmarine? The Navy’s a tough posting for a Bavarian landlubber.”

  Dietz slammed do
wn his glass with a pop. “What, now you’re looking me up when I put so much trust in you?”

  “Relax. Just wanted to make sure you’re who I think you are.”

  “I’m not a Nazi. What are you going to do, sick Sheriff Joyner on me?”

  Harry wondered if Dietz had been following him. Then again, Major Joyner was an easy guess since he was the locals’ preferred example of the relentless Nazi hater. Whenever a Nazi who’d escaped justice was beaten in the night or found dead, people said it was Joyner. They both feared and admired Sheriff Joyner depending on their affiliations. So Harry let it go. He and Dietz had traded enough accusations.

  He gave Dietz another pat, on the forearm. The schnapps had given Dietz’s eyes a soft glaze. “You first,” Harry said. “Okay? I’m listening now.”

  “Okay. I should tell you that I’ve done a little digging of my own. Don’t look at me like that. It was discreet, so don’t worry. Your girl Irina wasn’t telling us everything, it seems.”

  “Go on.”

  “It turns out another shout was heard there. Shouting. A man. Which makes three voices total. That means there were two men and one woman.”

  “Says they.”

  “But I trust them. It was neighborhood people. They confide only in me.”

  Harry sat back, sighed, sipped. “Well, that’s more than I was getting on my end. Thanks.”

  “I don’t know if I can say you’re welcome.”

  Harry tried a laugh. “Hey, you’re the one who came to me.”

  Dietz shrugged at that. They swirled their schnapps. It really wasn’t bad stuff once Harry got into it—straight corn like they drank up north, but smooth. A year ago, they were still drinking potato swill in joints like this.

  “What did you find out about me?” Dietz said.

  Harry related what he knew. Dietz nodded along. He told Harry that his Navy life consisted of land duty along the North Sea, guarding ships in freezing weather and then diving for cover twice a day from Allied bombers. They lost more men than the submariners had lost, he reckoned.

  “And before? You were a cop,” Harry said.

  Dietz nodded. “A very young cop.”

  “Most of the Munich police were Nazis. We allowed few back in. You passed muster.”

  Dietz shrugged again. “I might just as well have joined the party because that’s what you did to advance. But I was too busy having a good time.” He added a laugh.

  Harry lifted his drink and touched it to Dietz’s. They met eyes; Germans always met eyes when they drank. Dietz said, “You’re not a regular Ami, you know. You play by different rules.”

  It was Harry’s turn to shrug. He rotated his schnapps glass with fingertips, two full circles. “I thought about dumping the whole thing. The fact is, my duty might end soon, and I don’t know how far I can get with this—”

  “End when?”

  “A month. Maybe two.”

  Dietz grabbed at Harry’s elbow. “No, Harry. You must follow this, see where it goes.”

  “I was hoping you’d say something like that,” Harry said, though he hadn’t meant the part about giving up. He was only testing Dietz.

  “Can I call you Harry?”

  “Sure you can.”

  Dietz called for two more. They arrived in seconds.

  “They know you here,” Harry said.

  “That they do.”

  Harry lifted his glass. He set it down. “Look, supposing I told you—and I think I owe you this confession—that Irina got away?”

  “No!”

  “Yup. She fled. I can’t find her anywhere.”

  Dietz’s face went slack, but his eyes held their soft glaze. “Well, then, you’ll just have to keep at it. We have some time—not a lot, but some.”

  “Will do. Thanks.”

  “I had to mention it to a couple of my colleagues—about the corpse, I mean. Pay them off. You know how it is. I couldn’t just stash a corpse anywhere. Especially at the morgue.”

  “I understand. It’s all right.”

  “A corpse is quite a burden.”

  “You said it.”

  “What the devil’s wrong with us, huh, me and you?” Dietz said. “We should be working together. Helping people.”

  “Sounds fine to me,” Harry said.

  They raised their glasses again. This time, though, Dietz didn’t look Harry in the eye.

  On his way back, Harry passed the Old Town black markets hoping to spot the man with the beard and Slavic accent. Coming up empty, he returned to his office to find chaos. Three Bavarians from the soccer club had almost come to blows with the German employees in MG Property Control Section, and Harry had to sort it out. He reached home by seven that evening, bone tired. Gerlinde had gone for the day, leaving the mansion in darkness. Harry went to turn on a light. He sensed someone in the house. He stood in the foyer, listening.

  It was Maddy. He could smell the sweet perfume one of her superiors got her on a Paris junket. She knew so many majors, colonels, and generals, all rearguard types who’d never seen combat but rode desks like gladiator chariots except their shields were their puffed-up chests done up with medals of every color, the swords their sharp tongues and stern memos, the feints and thrusts their back-room whispers and leaks applied with extreme prejudice. Opponents cowered, colleagues awed, and mistresses swooned. That was the way Harry saw it, but Maddy had them figured out in her own way.

  She sat in the near dark of the main living room. Harry sighed, laid his overcoat on the foyer table, and walked in to her. The air in there was so stale with tobacco that even her sweet French water wasn’t cutting it. The remains of a once raging fire smoldered in the fireplace and cast Maddy in silhouette, orange on one side and blue gray from the window on the other. The line down her center was as black as the deepest cave.

  Then Harry remembered—the big party. At the castle. Regional Military Government was pulling out all the stops. It hit him low, like a bowel cramp. “Shit,” he muttered. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot.”

  Maddy said nothing. Harry let his hands slap at his sides. He moved to the middle of the room, facing her. Her legs were crossed. Across them lay her coat and her gloves.

  “There was a car here for us?” he said.

  “Was.”

  “I just don’t know what to say. I had a tough afternoon and it was evening before I knew it.”

  “Did you?” Maddy said, but it wasn’t a question she wanted answered. Her voice was cast in iron. Harry expected no less. He felt for a side table and flipped on a desk lamp. He was now standing to her side, but she was still staring at the spot where he’d been standing. She wore a plunging, pale blue dress that elongated her cleavage and made her skin gleam as if powdered. Her eyes were bloodshot, the rims pink. She had wiped her mascara off. She wanted him to see she’d been crying over it. He went over to the buffet and poured himself a whiskey.

  “Don’t worry,” Maddy said. “I’m not going to blow my top this time.”

  “I’d deserve it if you did.”

  Maddy snickered. Her teeth looked yellow in the light. “What’s the big idea, Harry? Huh? Tell me that much.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “What’s your game?”

  “I told you. Hard day. Actually, it was kind of funny—couple soccer players just about clocked our clerks in Prop Con—”

  “Spare me,” Maddy cut in. “I don’t care about that.”

  Harry nodded, sipping his whiskey. “It’s about time we get to the heart of it? Is that what you want?”

  “You don’t have any friends,” Maddy began.

  He knew what she meant. The other three Americans on his floor stuck together with their all-night poker, officer’s club golf, and hunting trips in the Alps. Harry only saw their secretaries these days. He shrugged. “They stopped inviting me.”

  “But you wouldn’t go anyway. Not even if they asked real nice.”

  Harry nodded. “I guess that’s why they
stopped asking.” The fact was, Harry had led her on. He had arrived in Munich telling himself he was ready to relax and play the big city American officer. Blend right in. That was when he met Maddy. But he lost too much at poker, suffered through too many hangovers, and paid the Germans and refugees far too much scratch for their goods. What shook him more was that he feared he could become like the American types he had fought head-on in Heimgau, and even like someone he had always suspected his brother Max might have become in Germany—a decadent hanger-on. What other explanation was there for his lost brother, even if Harry couldn’t find the records for it? Death or imprisonment were too tough to fathom. And if his brother had been a certifiable Nazi, then the world had no hope at all. Harry scaled back his high life before long. Some called him a sucker, a soft touch. Others, practically a heretic. He could say one thing about Maddy—she had judged him in her own way, with her own eyes, and had stuck with him while others left him to play in his one-man band.

  “We’re different, that’s all,” Harry added. “I was on the ground at the end of the war. Ground Zero. Most of these new officers were not.”

  “Tell it to yourself, Harry. What I don’t get? You were a captain then. You’re still two bars.”

  Harry’s skin heated up as if that fire was still blazing in the fireplace. He lifted his glass to hide his scowl. “I told you, didn’t I tell you? They stopped giving out the bars and stars like penny candy once the combat was over. Besides I don’t do this for the silver and gold, some extra fruit salad on my chest.”

  Maddy laughed, a howl from her belly that threw her head back, exposing her throat to him. “You put in all this goddamn duty. You command a town after the surrender. All that swag in your office, and you’re still two bars?”

  “I told you, Madd,” Harry muttered, clenching his glass to his chest.

  “And here’s what I don’t get—what you been up to lately when you’re not in the office. You’re out hitting the locals’ black markets,’ and then the DP camps? You’re not food office or refugee desk, and yet you choose—choose—to visit a DP camp off duty? And all the while, all the while, you’re running around with some shady Munich cop?” Maddy had said all this with her lips curled as if she’d just drank cod liver oil.