In the end, and as always with the course of justice, this business lasted for many more months. I won’t go into it in detail. I had several more confrontations with von Rabingen and the two investigators; my sister, in Pomerania, had to testify: she was on her guard, she never revealed that I had informed her of the murders; she just claimed that she had received a telegram from Antibes, from an associate of Moreau’s. Clemens and Weser were forced to acknowledge that they had never seen the famous clothes: all their information came from letters from the French criminal police, which had little legal value, especially now. What’s more, since the murders had been committed in France, an indictment could only have led to my extradition, which had obviously become impossible—although one lawyer did suggest to me, not at all unpleasantly, that before an SS court I could risk being sentenced to death for breach of honor, without any reference to the civil criminal code.

These considerations did not seem to shake the favor the Reichsführer was showing me. During one of his lightning visits to Berlin, he had me come on board his train, and after a ceremony where I received my new decoration in the company of a dozen other officers, most of them from the Waffen-SS, he invited me into his private office to discuss my memorandum, whose ideas, according to him, were sound but required a more thorough examination. “For example, there’s the Catholic Church. If we impose a celibacy tax, they’ll certainly require an exemption for the clergy. And if we grant it to them, that will be another victory for them, another demonstration of their strength. Therefore, I think that a precondition for any positive development, after the war, will be to settle the Kirchenfrage, the question of the two Churches. Radically, if necessary: those Pfaffen, those little monks, are almost worse than the Jews. Don’t you think so? I’m in complete agreement with the Führer about this: the Christian religion is a Jewish religion, founded by a Jewish rabbi, Saul, as a vehicle to bear Judaism to another level, the most dangerous of all, together with Bolshevism. Eliminating the Jews and keeping the Christians would be like stopping halfway.” I listened gravely to all this, taking notes. Only at the end of the interview did the Reichsführer mention my case: “They haven’t produced any evidence, isn’t that right?”—“No, my Reichsführer. There is none.”—“That’s very good. I saw right away it was all nonsense. But it’s better that they convince themselves of that on their own, isn’t that right?” He accompanied me to the door and shook my hand after I had saluted him: “I’m very happy with your work, Obersturmbannführer. You are an officer with a bright future ahead.”

A bright future? The future seemed to me rather to be growing narrower every day, mine as well as Germany’s. When I turned around, I contemplated with horror the long dark corridor, the tunnel leading from the depths of the past to the present moment. What had become of the infinite plains that opened up before us when, just out of childhood, we approached the future with energy and confidence? All that energy seemed to have served only to build ourselves a prison, a gallows, even. Ever since my illness, I had stopped seeing people; sports I had left to others. Most of the time I ate alone at my place, the French windows wide open, taking advantage of the gentle end-of-summer air, of the last green leaves that, slowly, in the midst of the ruins of the city, were preparing their final blaze of color. From time to time, I went out with Helene, but a painful embarrassment colored these meetings; we both must have been seeking the gentleness, the intense sweetness of those first months, but it had disappeared and we didn’t know how to find it again, while at the same time we tried to pretend nothing had changed, it was strange. I didn’t understand why she persisted in staying in Berlin: her parents had gone to a cousin’s house near Baden, but when—with sincerity and not with that inexplicable cruelty I had shown while sick—I urged her to join them, she gave laughable excuses, her work, looking after the apartment. In my moments of lucidity I told myself that she was staying because of me, and I wondered if, precisely, the horror my words must have aroused in her didn’t actually encourage her, if she weren’t hoping, perhaps, to save me from myself, a ridiculous idea if ever there was one, but who knows what goes on in a woman’s head? There must have been something else besides, and I glimpsed it sometimes. One day, we were walking in the street when a car drove through a puddle next to us: the stream of water gushed under Helene’s skirt, spattering her up to her thigh. She let out an incongruous, almost harsh burst of laughter. “Why are you laughing so hard, what’s so funny?”—“You, it’s you,” she let out through her laughter. “You’ve never touched me so far up.” I didn’t say anything, what could I have said? I could have had her read the memo I had sent to the Reichsführer, to put her in her place; but I felt that neither that nor even a frank explanation of my tastes would have discouraged her, she was like that, stubborn, she had made her choice almost at random and now she was obstinately sticking to it, as if the choice itself counted more than the person who had been the object of it. Why didn’t I send her packing? I don’t know. I didn’t have many people to talk to. Thomas was working fourteen, sixteen hours a day, I hardly ever saw him. Most of my colleagues had been relocated. Hohenegg, I learned when I called the OKW, had been sent to the front in July, and was still in Königsberg with part of the OKHG Center. Professionally, and despite the Reichsführer’s encouragements, I had reached a dead end: Speer had nothing more to do with me, I had contact only with subalterns, and my office, which was no longer asked to do anything, served almost solely as a mailbox for the complaints of numerous enterprises, agencies, or ministries. Every now and then, Asbach and the other members of the team would churn out some report that I sent out right and left; I would receive polite responses, or none at all. But I hadn’t fully understood the extent to which I was on the wrong track until the day Herr Leland invited me to tea. It was at the bar of the Adlon, one of the only good restaurants still open, a veritable Tower of Babel, where a dozen languages were spoken; all the members of the foreign diplomatic corps seemed to meet there. I found Herr Leland at a table set a little apart. A maître d’hôtel came over and served me tea with precise gestures, and Leland waited until he had moved away to talk to me. “How is your health?” he enquired.—“Fine, mein Herr. I’m all better.”—“And your work?”—“It’s going well, mein Herr. The Reichsführer seems satisfied. I was recently decorated.” He didn’t say anything, but drank a little tea. “But it’s been several months since I last saw Reichsminister Speer,” I went on. He made an abrupt sign with his hand: “That’s not important. Speer has disappointed us very much. We have to move on now.”—“Toward what, mein Herr?”—“It’s still being worked out,” he said slowly, with his slight, somewhat peculiar accent. “And how is Dr. Mandelbrod, mein Herr?” He stared at me with his cold, severe gaze. As always I was incapable of distinguishing his glass eye from the other one. “Mandelbrod is doing fine. But I should tell you that you disappointed him a little.” I didn’t say anything. Leland drank a little more tea before continuing: “I must say that you haven’t satisfied all our expectations. You haven’t shown much initiative, these past few months. Your performance in Hungary was disappointing.”—“Mein Herr…I did my best. And the Reichsführer congratulated me on my work. But there’s so much interdepartmental rivalry, everyone makes obstructions…” Leland didn’t seem to be paying any attention to my words. “We have the impression,” he said finally, “that you haven’t understood what we expect of you.”—“What do you expect of me, mein Herr?”—“More energy. More creativity. You should produce solutions, not create obstacles. And also, allow me to say, you’re letting yourself go. The Reichsführer forwarded your recent memorandum to us: instead of wasting your time with childish pranks, you should think about Germany’s salvation.” I felt my cheeks burning and made an effort to control my voice. “I am thinking of nothing else, mein Herr. But, as you know, I was very sick. I also had…other problems.” Two days before I had had a difficult interview with von Rabingen. Leland didn’t say anything; he made a sign, and the maître d’hôtel reappeared to serve him. At the bar, a young man with wavy hair, in a plaid suit with a bow tie, was laughing too loudly. A brief look was enough for me to size him up: it had been a long time since I had thought about that. Leland spoke: “We are aware of your problems. It is inadmissible that things have gone this far. If you needed to kill that woman, fine, but you should have done it properly.” The blood had drained from my face: “Mein Herr…,” I managed to articulate in a strangled voice. “I didn’t kill her. It wasn’t me.” He contemplated me calmly: “Very well,” he said. “You should know that it’s all the same to us. If you did it, it was your right, your sovereign right. As old friends of your father, we completely understand it. But what you didn’t have a right to do was compromise yourself. That greatly reduces your usefulness to us.” I was going to protest again, but he cut me off with a gesture. “Let’s wait and see how things develop. We hope you’ll get hold of yourself.” I didn’t say anything and he raised a finger. The maître d’hôtel reappeared; Leland whispered a few words to him and got up. I got up too. “See you soon,” he said in his monotone voice. “If you need something, get in touch with us.” He left without shaking my hand, followed by the maître d’hôtel. I hadn’t touched my tea. I went to the bar and ordered a Cognac, which I drained in one swallow. A pleasant, drawling, strongly accented voice spoke next to me: “It’s a little early in the day to drink like that. You want another one?” It was the young man with the bow tie. I accepted; he ordered two and introduced himself: Mihaï I., third secretary in the Romanian legation. “How are things going, at the SS?” he asked after clinking glasses. “At the SS? All right. And the diplomatic corps?” He shrugged: “Glum. Now there are only”—he made a wide gesture at the room—“the last of the Mohicans left. We can’t really organize cocktail parties, because of the restrictions, so we meet each other here at least once a day. Anyway I don’t even have a government to represent anymore.” Romania, after having declared war on Germany at the end of August, had just capitulated to the Soviets. “That’s true. What does your legation represent, then?”—“In principle, Horia Sima. But that’s a fiction, Herr Sima can represent himself very well on his own. Whatever the case”—he pointed again at several people—“we’re all pretty much in the same bag. Especially my French and Bulgarian colleagues. The Finns have almost all gone. The Swiss and the Swedes are the only real diplomats left.” He looked at me, smiling: “Come have dinner with us, I’ll introduce you to some other ghosts of my friends.”