60.

I was even more nervous the next morning.

I had my wanted poster folded and inside the pocket of my green Harris Tweed jacket. I was wondering whether I should show it to the Germans, but Herr Diener had brought along his own copy.

“Ach, ja,” he said, holding up the wanted poster. “Herr Ryan, der Freund von Albert Speer und berühmte Kriminelle.” He chuckled.

Mr. Ryan, friend of Albert Speer and famous criminal. I tried to laugh, too, but my throat felt dry.

“Ich hab’ gehört, dass diese Leute, die wir heute sehen, etwas mit der Baader-Meinhof Gruppe zu tun haben.”

The people we’re seeing today have something to do with the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

“Was?!?” I say. I am getting more and more nervous. “Was sagst Du?” You must be crazy.

Herr Hellman furtively pulls the handle of his pistol out of his coat pocket and shows it to me as if that will cure my woes.

The apartment was on the top floor. Herr Diener and Goldberg and I, led by Herr Hellman, shuffled up the stairs after someone buzzed us into the building. When, out of breath, we got to the top floor, the door to the apartment was slightly ajar, and a skinny-faced man in a T-shirt leaned against it, looking at us.

“Was geht?” he asked, an American good at German slang. What do you want?

“Customs Police,” I said and held up my credentials. “May we come inside?”

I was following the rule book. If you asked to come in and the people gave you permission, then you could search without a warrant. If you also had a warrant, Lance B. Edwards said we were double covered. No US court could throw out the case.

“Sure. Come on in. I been kinda missing the army. Be a chance to shoot the shit with my buddies.”

“And you are . . . ?” Goldberg asked.

“Wilbur. Russell Wilbur. You know, the famous deserter. The famous accomplice of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Known far and wide by the CID.”

I glanced at Goldberg with a quizzical look. Could this be true?

“You got some kind of identification?” Goldberg asked him.

The door to the apartment opened on a cramped living room combined with both dining room and kitchen. A very pregnant woman was pacing back and forth.

“Russ, why’d you let them in? Fucking Nazis.”

“We won’t be here long,” Goldberg said. “Just want to ask you a few questions, ma’am.”

“Nazis,” she said again and crossed her arms over her chest. “Goddamned Nazis.”

Herr Hellman’s head jerked every time he heard the word “Nazi.”

“Filthy Nazis!”

Goldberg studied the green army ID card Wilbur handed him.

“I don’t want to be rude,” Goldberg said, “but this says you’re fifty-one years old. You look like you’re about twenty-five to me. This wouldn’t be a forgery, would it?”

“Somebody made a mistake,” Wilbur said. “Hey, it’s the army—mistakes happen all the time. People die for no good reason at all.”

“I mean it, Russell, why did you let these Nazis in here?” She turned to Herr Diener. “Haben Sie öffentliche Papiere mitgebracht?”

Did you bring official papers?

Herr Hellman was bringing jars out of the cupboards and setting them on a table. They were jars of Gerber baby food purchased at the PX. If Wilbur wasn’t actually in the military, then these were black-market items.

Diener handed her the warrants. She studied them, but then Herr Hellman caught her attention. He had stacked thirty or forty jars of baby food on the table and was sitting there counting them.

“Hey, was geht’s hier ab?” she yelled at Hellman. She stood in front of where he sat at the table, her enormous belly in his face. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi!” she screamed.

“Ich will Ihnen Nazis zeigen,” he said, and stood up. “Es war überhaupt alles besser in der Nazi Zeit.”

I’ll show you a Nazi. It went a lot better in the time of the Nazis.

“You fuckers. She’s right.” Wilbur began moving away from Goldberg. “We’re just poor people about to have a baby. That’s food for a goddamned baby. What kind of creeps are you? You have no right to be here. You’re stealing our food, motherfuckers.”

Hellman swept the jars of baby food off the table. They clattered and crashed on the floor. Some exploded when they hit like glass artillery shells. I could smell the scent of peas.

I felt sick. I was finally ashamed of myself. I wanted to get out of there. Escape from the web of lies that had trapped me in that apartment.

The woman put her face up close to Hellman’s.

“Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,” she yelled.

Hellman began fumbling in his suit pocket.

“Ich will Ihnen Nazis zeigen.”

I’ll show you a Nazi.

I could see the outline of the pistol.

“No,” I heard myself yell, as if I were another person.

“And what do we have here?” Goldberg held up a pile of my wanted posters. “Doing a little publicity work for the folks over at Baader-Meinhof?”

“They don’t break in to the apartments of poor people. I can tell you that,” Wilbur said and tried to grab the pile of papers. “Give me those. You have no right to my papers.”

“So you do work with the Baader-Meinhof Gang,” Goldberg said.

Then the woman started yelling again.

“Arschloch Nazis. Nazi. Nazi. Nazi.”

Asshole Nazis.

Hellman finally jerked the pistol from the folds of the jacket fabric, pointing it first at the ceiling and then at the ground. I grabbed his arm, trying to stop him, but managing, perversely, to steady it as he fired toward the woman, who was only inches from the barrel.

Blam.

Everything seemed to stop, a frozen moment.

The woman’s mouth formed an O and, in slow motion, she looked at Hellman, at me, and then down at her belly, where a red blotch began to appear.

“O O O O,” she screamed.

The pressure of my hand on Hellman’s arm made him point the gun toward the ceiling, and a couple of more rounds went off. Blam. Blam. I suddenly remembered the smell of gunpowder in the basement of my childhood. Blam. Blam.

The room smelled like gunpowder and peas.

“Hey da, hey da,” Rudi yelled. He was standing at the door, looking like Oliver Hardy in the midst of chaos. He walked over and put his enormous hand around the gun Hellman held. The gun vanished, as if Rudi had performed a magic trick.

The woman sank to the floor, moaning.

“You know what,” Goldberg said. “I think you and I should get the hell out of here. I don’t think this is our problem.”

I knelt down beside the woman.

“Are you all right?”

She seemed to be breathing. I lifted her up. A section of her back stuck to the floor. Yellow and red viscera stretched like partially dried glue. I briefly thought of airplane models I’d glued together as a child. I remembered the doll the sergeant had shot at Fort Gordon during my MP training.

“My God,” Carol says. “You never told me this. Did she die? She must have.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think we should get out of here,” Goldberg says again. “I mean, I’m leaving, and I think you should come, too.”

“What have I done?” I asked.

“Your job, Ryan, your job,” Goldberg said. “Just remember that. You were just doing your job. None of this is your fault. You were just doing what they told you to do.”

The man who wasn’t there arrives.

Boom. Boom. Snare.

Boom. Boom. Snare.