48.

“You thought you were a Jew,” Albert Speer says to me in a dream. “It never occurred to you that you might be a Nazi.”

He’s standing there in a high-collared gray overcoat. He wears the peaked hat of a German officer. The wind howls. Snow swirls around us. All the color of the scene is washed out except the pale flesh of Albert Speer’s face.

“So romantic, the Nazis chasing you. Just like in the movies.” He smiles.

“How could I be a Jew?” I say. “I’m Scotch-Irish. A Methodist from Wisconsin.”

“Ach, ja,” he says and shakes his right index finger at me. “I know what happens. The American tourists arrive at Dachau. A short drive from Munich. An afternoon’s—how do you say?—getaway. They stand in the one barrack that’s left and pronounce it all ‘Unbelievable. Cruel—how could they.’ Ja, ja. I know. They, of course, would never do anything like this. As they sit down for dinner, they can almost feel the starvation—feel how the Jews must have felt.”

His voice trails off.

“But we know,” he says. “We know about the Indians. We know about the Vietnamese. Now the Iraqis. Who’s next? Millions and millions dead. We’re watching. You’re catching up with us. If I am guilty, you are guilty, too.”

He shakes his index finger in the wind. In the snow.

“Ja, ja, you think you’re innocent. We’ll see, Herr Ryan. We’ll see.”

He pulls the tall collar of his gray coat up around his ears to protect them from the snow, which the wind is driving faster and faster.

“Herr Ryan, you must know the novel Herz der Finsternis, yes. By Joseph Conrad. How do you say in English: Heart of Darkness? A novel about evil. In that book, the people go upriver in Africa and find evil. That is the story. Well, in my story, we were the evil. We were the evil people journeyed to, Herr Ryan. People came to us. We were the heart of darkness. People like you, Herr Ryan, came to Adolf and Hermann and me and the others. We were already there, waiting, and now perhaps you’ve joined us, yes, in the heart of darkness.”

He grabbed my hand. His touch felt cold, like refrigeration piping. So cold. Sticky cold. He held my hand to his heart. I could feel it. Beating cold sludge. A heart of slurried ice.