Morgan stepped out of the café and gestured.

“I must go,” Paul said to the man. “A pleasure meeting a fellow veteran and sharing these words.”

“Yes.”

“Good day, sir. Hail Hitler.”

“Ach, yes. Hail Hitler.”

Paul joined Morgan, who said, “He can meet us now.”

“You didn’t tell him anything about why I need the gun?”

“No, not the truth, at least. He thinks you’re German and you want it to kill a crime boss in Frankfurt who cheated you.”

The two men continued up the street for six or seven blocks, the neighborhood growing even shabbier, until they came to a pawnbroker’s shop. Musical instruments, suitcases, razors, jewelry, dolls, hundreds of other items filled the grimy, iron-barred windows. A “Closed” sign was on the door. They waited only a few minutes in the vestibule before a short, balding man showed up. He nodded to Morgan, ignored Paul, looked around then let them inside. He glanced back, closed and locked the door, then pulled the shade.

They walked farther into the musty, dust-filled shop. “Come this way.” The shopkeeper led them through two thick doors, which he closed and bolted, then down a long stairway into a damp basement, lit only by two small yellow bulbs. When his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light Paul noted that there were two dozen rifles in racks against the wall.

He handed Paul a rifle with a telescopic sight on it. “It’s a Mauser Karabiner. A 7.92-millimeter. This one breaks down easily so you can carry it in a suitcase. Look at the scope. The best optics in the world.”

The man clicked a switch and lights illuminated a tunnel, perhaps one hundred feet long, at the end of which were sandbags and, pinned to one, a paper target.

“This is completely soundproofed. It is a supply tunnel that was dug through the ground years ago.”

Paul took the rifle in his hands. Felt the smooth wood of the sanded and varnished stock. Smelled the aroma of oil and creosote and the leather of the sling. He rarely used rifles in his job and the combination of sweet scents and solid wood and metal took him back in time. He could smell the mud of the trenches, the shit, kerosene fumes. And the stink of death, like wet, rotting cardboard.

“These are special bullets too, which are hollowed out at the tip, as you can see. They are more likely to cause death than standard cartridges.”

Paul dry-fired the gun several times to get a feel for the trigger. He pressed bullets into the magazine then sat down at a bench, resting the rifle on a block of wood covered with cloth. He began to fire. The report was earsplitting but he hardly noticed. Paul just stared through the scope, concentrating on the black dots of the target. He made a few adjustments to the scope and then slowly fired the remaining twenty rounds in the box of ammunition.

“Good,” he said, shouting because his hearing was numb. “A good weapon.” Nodding, he handed the rifle back to the pawnbroker, who took it apart, cleaned it and packed the gun and ammunition into a battered fiber-board suitcase.

Morgan took the case and handed an envelope to the shopkeeper, who shut the lights out in the range and led them upstairs. A look out the door, a nod that all was clear and soon they were outside again, strolling down the street. Paul heard a metallic voice filling the street. He laughed. “You can’t escape it.” Across the street, at a tram stop, was a speaker, from which a man’s voice droned on and on – yet more information about public health. “Don’t they ever stop?”

“No, they don’t,” Morgan said. “When we look back, that will be the National Socialist contribution to culture: ugly buildings, bad bronze sculpture and endless speeches…” He nodded at the suitcase holding the Mauser. “Now let’s go back to the square and call my contact. See if he’s found enough information to let you put this fine piece of German machinery to use.”

The dusty DKW turned onto November 1923 Square and, unable to find a place to park on the hectic street, narrowly avoided a vendor selling questionable fruit as it drove halfway over the curb.

“Ach, here we are, Janssen,” Willi Kohl said, wiping his face. “Your pistol is convenient.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then let’s go hunting.”

They climbed out.

The purpose of the inspector’s diversion after they left the U.S. dormitory was to interview the taxi drivers stationed outside the Olympic Village. With typical National Socialist foresight, only cabdrivers who were multilingual were allowed to serve the village, which meant both that there was a limited number of them and that they would return to the village after dropping off fares. This, in turn, Kohl reasoned, meant that one of them might have driven their suspect somewhere.

After dividing the taxis up between them, and speaking to two dozen drivers, Janssen found one who’d had a story that did indeed interest Kohl. The fare had left the Olympics not long before with a suitcase and an old brown satchel. He was a burly man with a faint accent. His hair did not seem on the long side or to have a red tint but it was slicked straight back and dark, though that, Kohl reasoned, might have been due to oil or lotion. He said he had been wearing not a suit but light-colored casual clothing, though the driver couldn’t describe it in detail.

The man had got out at Lützow Plaza and vanished into the crowds. This was one of the busiest, most congested intersections in the city; there were few hopes of picking up the suspect’s trail there. However, the cabdriver added that the man had asked directions to November 1923 Square and wondered if he could walk to it from Lützow Plaza.

“Did he ask anything more about the square? Anything specific? His business? Comrades he was hoping to meet? Anything?”

“No, Inspector. Nothing. I told him that it would be a long, long hike to the square. And he thanked me and got out. That was all. I was not looking at his face,” he explained. “Only at the road.”

Blindness, of course, Kohl had thought sourly.

They had returned to headquarters and picked up printed handbills of the Dresden Alley victim. They then had raced here, to the monument in honor of the failed putsch in 1923 (only the National Socialists could turn such an embarrassing defeat into an unqualified victory). While Lützow Plaza was too large to search effectively, this was a far smaller square and could be more easily canvassed.

Kohl now looked over the people here: beggars, vendors, hookers, shoppers, unemployed men and women in small cafés. He inhaled the air, pungent, ripe with the scent of trash, and asked, “Do you sense our quarry nearby, Janssen?”

“I…” The assistant seemed uncomfortable with this comment.

“It’s a feeling,” Kohl said, scanning the street as he stood in the shadow of a courageous, defiant bronze Hitler. “I myself don’t believe in the occult. Do you?”

“Not really, sir. I’m not religious, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, I haven’t given up on religion completely. Heidi would not approve. But what I’m speaking of is the illusion of the spiritual based on our perceptions and experience. And I have such a feeling now. He’s near.”

“Yes, sir,” the inspector candidate said. “Why do you think so?”

An appropriate query, Kohl thought. He believed young detectives should always question their mentors. He explained: because this neighborhood was part of Berlin North. Here you could find large numbers of War wounded and poor and unemployed and closet Communists and Socis and anti-Party Edelweiss Pirate gangs, petty thieves and supporters of labor who’d gone to ground after the unions were outlawed. It was populated by those Germans who sorely missed the early days: not Weimar, of course (no one liked the Republic), but the glory of Prussia, of Bismarck, of Wilhelm, of the Second Empire. Which meant few members of the Party and its sympathizers. Few denouncers, therefore, ready to run squealing to the Gestapo or the local Stormtrooper garrison.