One

I

It was there when he woke up. Presumably also when he slept. The blot. Standing alone at the back of the sparsely populated ferry to Kladow, mercifully sheltered behind safety glass against the chill of the lake at evening, Alexander Bruno could no longer deny the blot that had swollen in his vision and was with him always, the vacancy now deforming his view of the receding shore. It forced him to peer around its edges for glimpses of the mansions and biergartens, the strip of sand at the century-old lido, the tarpaulined sailboats. He’d come to Berlin, half the circumference of the world, two weeks ago, whether to elude his fate or to embrace it he couldn’t know.

He’d been biding his time in Charlottenburg, breakfasting at the quiet cafés, watching the days grow steadily longer, overhearing more spoken English than he’d have preferred, running through his last funds. His tuxedo had remained in its hanging bag, his backgammon case latched. All the while the blot had been with him, unacknowledged. Bruno its carrier, its host. He’d passed through customs with the innocence of the accidental smuggler: Nothing to declare. It was only after having at last called the number provided him by Edgar Falk and consenting to visit the rich man’s house in Kladow, only upon his waking, this very day on which he’d dusted off tuxedo and backgammon case, that the blot had insisted he grant its existence. An old friend he’d never met but recognized nevertheless.

Why get too fancy about it? He might be dying.

Under the circumstances of Bruno’s dread, the slide of the S-Bahn through the endless roster of stations from Westend to Wannsee had seemed as long as his voyage from Singapore to Berlin. The German city, with its graffiti and construction sites, its desultory strips of parkland and naked pink water pipes, had its own sprawl and circumference. Berlin wended through time. On the S-Bahn toward Wannsee the tall girls in black leggings with bicycles and earbuds, so prevalent in Charlottenburg and Mitte, had thinned out, replaced by dour Prussian businessmen and staring grandmother types, slouching home with briefcases and shopping bags. By the time of the ferry there was little to defeat the irresistible illusion that the city was newly vanquished and carved into sectors, that the prevailing silence and gloom derived from remorse and privations not seventy years past but fresh as smoldering rubble.

When Bruno had called to ask his host for directions to Kladow, the rich man told him that the ferry across the lake at evening was an experience he shouldn’t miss. Bruno, the German had said, should keep his eye out on the right for the famous Strandbad Wannsee, Berlin’s traditional resort beach, and, on the left, for the Wannsee-Konferenz villa. The site of the Final Solution’s planning, though Bruno had needed this legacy explained by his hotel’s concierge. Of course, scanning for it now, Bruno had no way of distinguishing the site from other mansions arrayed on the western shore, each of which heaved into the void at the center of his sight.

For how long had Bruno considered the blot nothing but a retinal floater grown mad or the looming ghost of his inattention? Only a fool wouldn’t connect it to the perennial headache that had caused him, as he’d walked from the Wannsee S-Bahnhof through the steep park leading to the boarding dock, to shuffle his fingers into his tuxedo jacket’s interior pocket in search of his packet of paracetamol, that incomparable British aspirin on which he’d grown dependent. Then to gulp down two pills, with only the shimmering lake before him for water. He’d accept the verdict of fool if it meant the paracetamol repaired his sight. Made a full cake of that which was presently a doughnut: the world. He raised his hand. The blot obscured his palm as it had the shore. Bruno noticed he’d lost a cuff link.

“Excuse me,” he said. He said it to a tall girl in black tights, one of those who’d journeyed in his car of the S-Bahn, all the way from the fashionable Mitte, to board the ferry. She’d maneuvered her bicycle into the ferry’s rack before joining him at the back windows. Bruno spoke to excuse crouching at her knees to feel on the floor, on the chance that the cuff link had only tumbled down at his feet. A hopeless impulse, like the drunkard in the joke who, wandering at night on a side street, and discovering he has lost his key, searches not in the place he believes it was lost but instead beneath a lamppost, simply because the light is better there.

The joke came to mind because the girl crouched to help, without knowing what she was looking for. In the joke, the drunk was aided by a policeman, who searches for a while beneath the streetlamp too. Now, as she bent to join him, Bruno saw that girl wasn’t actually the right word. Her lined face was both severe and attractive. So many women in Berlin, athletically slim, dressed in a universal costume and couldn’t be judged for age by their outlines.

“Kontaktlinsen?”

“No … no …” The Berliners all spoke English, and even when they didn’t, the meanings bled through. In Singapore the alien tongues of Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil had left him happily sealed in his cone of incomprehension. Did she guess that the problem was with his eyes because he groped like a blind man?

“Kuffenlinksen …” he bluffed, pinching his loose sleeve. He doubted it was a word in any language. Additionally I am probably also soon losing my life, he added in pidgin telepathy, just to see if she was listening.

She showed no sign of having read his thoughts. He was relieved. Alexander Bruno had forsaken thought transference years ago, at the start of puberty. Yet he remained vigilant.

“English?” she asked.

Bruno enjoyed being mistaken for British. With his height and high cheekbones, he’d been told he resembled Roger Moore, or the bass player from Duran Duran. More likely, however, she only meant the English language.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve dropped a piece of jewelry. I’m sorry, I don’t know the word in German. Man jewelry.” He displayed his cuff, which was slightly foxed, scorched by hotel-room ironings. Let her see it. Bruno was aware that his appeal was that of a ruined glamour. His neck and jaw, considered in the mirror lately, were those of the father he’d never known. The flesh only tightened over Bruno’s chin in the old familiar way if he thrust his jaw forward and tilted his head back slightly, a pose he’d recognized as definitive of middle-aged vanity. He caught himself at it frequently.

Now he looked not into the mirror but into the face of the would-be rescuer of his nonexistent contact lens. White hair interspersed with the blond. Enticing lips framed by deep lines—to Bruno, expressive, though they must have bothered her. Two humans beyond their prime, but hanging in. He had to deflect his glance in order to see her at all, likely making him appear more bashful than he felt. “Never mind,” he told her. “I’m sure I lost it on the train.”

Flirtation, so effortlessly accomplished. Mention of the train had done it. Train unspecified; they both knew which. They’d ridden together and now shared the ferry, and though a thousand identical to her might have strolled past his Charlottenburg café window in two weeks, the shared destination worked its paltry magic. And both tall. This little was enough to excuse lust as destiny.

Bruno had imagined a day when he’d outgrow distractibility. Instead, approaching fifty, the window of his interest had widened. Women once invisible to his younger self were now etched in flame in his imagination. This wasn’t erotic propriety. Bruno was still capable of desiring the younger women who no longer—mostly—returned his glances. But those his own age, their continuing fitness for the animal game newly visible to him, these he found more arresting, for their air of either desperation or total denial. Would he eventually crave the grandmothers too? Perhaps by that time the blot in his sight would have expanded to a general blindness, and so have freed him.

They stood. “I’m Alexander,” he said, and offered his hand. She took it.

“Madchen.”

The question was in what language they’d extend their special destiny. English, or …? Not German, since Bruno had none. English or the language of no language, which he preferred. He began slowly and deliberately, but with care not to suggest idiocy on either of their parts. “I have an appointment in Kladow. It is at a private home. I am expected alone, but it would surely delight my host if I arrived with you as a guest.”

“I’m sorry?” She smiled. “You would like—?”

“I’m hoping you’ll join me, Madchen.”

“To a dinner, ja? Sorry for my not-good English.”

“I should be the one to apologize. I’m the visitor in your country. It’s not a dinner exactly. An … appointment.” He raised his backgammon case slightly. If she took it for a briefcase, she wasn’t precisely wrong. The tools of his trade. “But there’s sure to be something to eat, if you’re hungry. Or we can go out after.”

I will never lie to you, he promised silently, again just in case she could hear. Bruno had only encountered a small scattering of those in whom he observed the gift of telepathy he himself had renounced. But you never knew.

“It is very nice, what you ask, but I think I can’t.”

“You’d be completely welcome.”

“If it is your work?”

“I’m a gambler,” he said. “You would be my good-luck charm.” Steadiness and poise, these were Bruno’s old methods. He wasn’t going to let the blot make him squirrelly.

She didn’t speak but smiled again, confused.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

They should have had a bar on this ferry, and an ocean for the ferry to cross. Instead the voyage was concluding. The boat had curled around a small island, into the landing at Kladow. The passengers bunched at the doors.

“Or, afterward,” he conceded. “I could call you when I’m finished.” He gestured at the twilit town beyond the ferry dock. “Have you a favorite place for a late drink?”

“In Kladow?” Madchen seemed to find this funny. She raised her bicycle’s front wheel to free it from the rack.

He drew his phone from his tux’s interior breast pocket. “Will you give me your number?”

She raised her eyebrows, glanced to one side. Then took his phone from him and, scowling intently, keyed a string of numbers into the device and returned it to him. The ferry emptied quickly. They brought up the rear, shuffling out along the short pier where others now queued for the return crossing. Under the Kladow docks, a family of swans bobbed together. Farther from the boats, he saw a diving cormorant. The bird called Bruno to some memory he couldn’t quite retrieve …

He scanned the near shore for the car the rich man had promised to send. The view confirmed the ferry’s power as a time machine, one which had transported them from the fashionable Mitte, the urbane international Berlin of present reputation. Alt-Kladow stood clustered uphill, a sleepy nineteenth-century village. Perhaps it was here German life truly resided, fires banked against history. Bruno might understand Madchen’s amusement at the suggestion of a late drink now. Though the shorefront was strewn with cozy biergartens, he’d be surprised if they remained open much past sundown on a Wednesday. The crowd from the ferry lowered their heads and trudged past the biergartens’ wooden-bower entrances, hell-bent for domestic finish lines.

“Do you live here?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I come to do … kindersitting. For my sister’s girl.”

“Your niece.”

“Yes.”

They crossed the street, Madchen wheeling her bicycle by her side. They passed a workman who knelt in a scattering of loose squarish stones, which he pounded with a large block hammer into the familiar grid pattern that made up Berlin’s sidewalks. Bruno had never seen the stones dislodged from the ground until now. They seemed a reminder to him of his trade, his purpose here. Berlin was paved with unnumbered dice, smashed flush to the ground with wooden mallets.

As the few vehicles meeting the ferry departed, and the crowd of walkers filtered up the hill, Bruno spotted the car he’d expected, the car the rich man had sent for him. A Mercedes-Benz, two decades old but impeccable. Another output of the time machine. The driver, crew cut and thick of neck, examined Bruno, who would have fit the description he’d provided the rich man, except for the presence of his companion. Bruno held up one finger, and the driver nodded and rolled up his window. Madchen followed his glance.

“Madchen—” He took the tip of her chin gently between his thumb and forefinger, as if adjusting a framed picture slightly skewed on a wall. The nearer he brought her face to his, the less the blot mattered. As if he’d invited her in, behind its curtain. “One kiss, for luck.”

Her eyes closed as he leaned in and brushed her lips with his. Bruno felt a surprising numbness in his lips. He hadn’t noticed feeling cold. You have been kissed, Madchen, by a vision in a tuxedo. Albeit one not so well preserved as the car that had come to collect him.

“I’ll call when I’m done.” He thought of his earlier promise. One enforced the other.

Madchen drew back and shed a last curious smile, then slid onto her bicycle and was gone, into the center of his blot and up the hill. By the time Bruno entered the backseat of the waiting car, she wasn’t to be seen. He glanced once more shoreward, at the jostling swans, the bobbing fearless cormorant, then nodded to the driver. The Benz crawled up the same road she’d taken, the only route into Alt-Kladow.

 

II

Wolf-Dirk Köhler, the rich man, opened the door to his study himself. The driver of the car had led Alexander Bruno inside, to the plush darkened foyer, and rapped lightly on the door that now opened, casting out light and warmth and wood smoke. Flames lapped in the fireplace.

Köhler, advertised by Edgar Falk as “a potentially historic whale,” barely came up to Bruno’s chin. Nothing could have surprised Bruno. Marks, hemophiliac free spenders, gamblers of miscalibrated vanity: These appeared before him in an assortment of human containers. A whale might resemble a whale, or a minnow. Köhler’s big swank house was his true body. His money his true clothes. Bruno was here to bare him of what he could in an evening. Money ennobled nothing, except when you needed to have it. After what had happened in Singapore, and his flight to this city of dubious refuge, Bruno needed it very badly.

“Edgar’s man of mystery,” said Köhler in perfect English. He held out his hand and grinned, a balding sprite in a blue velvet dinner jacket. “How I’ve been wishing to meet you. The veritable prince of the checkers, Edgar told me. Please come in.”

“Luck is the prince,” said Bruno. “I am its servant.” It wasn’t the first time he’d used the line, or some variant: luck the master, luck the sorcerer, luck the caliph or samurai or Brahmin, Bruno merely footman, apprentice, pilgrim …

“Hah! Very good! You have just won a first point, I think. Come in, come in.”

The room was insulated with leather volumes, plush furniture, oak paneling, all burnished in age and redolent of cigar. A pewter tray atop a wheeled cart displayed crystal decanters of amber drink, glasses, a bowl of ice. Bruno’s glance went to the table, where a felt-and-leather backgammon set lay open between two comfortable chairs.

“You brought your set,” said Köhler, arching his eyebrows. “How charming.”

“I carry it. You never know. I’m happy to use yours.”

“To insist on your own, that would be superstitious indeed!”

“It would be useless,” said Bruno ambivalently. He did prefer his set, its smoothly inlaid points, its simple wood checkers, stained light and dark. No ivory or porcelain, no stitched felt or leather points to cushion the play in false glamour or comfort. The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice. Bruno had for his entire life associated backgammon with candor, the dice not determining fate so much as revealing character.

Bruno’s wooden set was the baseline, the pure enclosure. Any other, like the German businessman’s felt-muffled luxury item, was a euphemism for the true reality. Having his own in the room with him was touchstone enough.

“I can no longer get into a game with any of my acquaintances,” said Köhler. His voice was lascivious. It was this greed that would kill him tonight. “Not for stakes—and yet we all quickly lose interest in their absence.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Bruno, as if in sympathy. “This is typically when my services are needed.” He failed to add that he’d known several gentlemen of leisure who, on blundering into the gulf between the level of play they’d attained in topping their club companions and that required to persist through an evening with a player like Alexander Bruno, quit backgammon entirely. Relieving such men of their pretensions: Those were Bruno’s services.

At Köhler’s predictability, Bruno’s confidence grew. Never mind the blot. “What stakes interest you?” Bruno spoke in a humdrum way. It was his own fervor he had to keep in check, the smell of blood.

“Shall we begin at one hundred euros a point?”

Bruno had no bankroll, less than sixty in his pocket. He’d need to win the first game in any event, and on from there. “Better a thousand, if you don’t mind.” Stakes to sting the rich man, if not bleed him, not yet.

“You are in a hurry!” But Köhler was only delighted. “Would you care for a drink? I can pour you one of several excellent scotches, or you may prepare your own.”

“What you’re having will be fine.”

“Sit, then.” Köhler indicated the chair facing the fire. So, Köhler preferred the black checkers, moving clockwise. Every such preference was another vulnerability revealed. Apart from his wooden set, which he placed on the floor to one side of his chair, Bruno was careful to have no preferences at all.

The scotch was good. Bruno nursed it, not asking its name or year. He won the first three games leaning back from the board, letting the hearth’s flames caress the edges of his vision’s blot, watching them gleam off the shined curve of his opponent’s bent head. Bruno mostly blitzed, making points with no concern for building primes, and beat the rich man three times in a row not on the board itself but with the doubling cube. Bruno offered increased stakes when his own position looked least promising, and “beavered”—instantly redoubling, to seize control—each time Köhler dared touch the cube himself.

Köhler was a “pure player.” He slotted checkers and tried to cover them, working to build primes with the monolithic purposefulness afflicting those who believe they’ve discovered a system or cracked a code. Bruno might have guessed this from the air of ritual and fetish in the rich man’s study, books pedantically flush to each shelf’s lip, dustless crystal decanters of ancient scotches, heavy curtains making the room a womb of comfort. He might even have guessed it from Köhler’s automobile, if he’d been paying attention instead of trying to catch one last glimpse of his ferry companion.

The pure style had peaked sometime in the 1970s. Bruno relinquished it himself at seventeen. Maybe pure play was good enough for Köhler to routinely fleece his wealthy compatriots at club evenings fogged by cigars and scotch. Perhaps in this very room. Bruno would be surprised, but he’d been surprised before. The level of play in Berlin might not be equal to that in Singapore, or London, or Dubai, though Bruno couldn’t imagine a reason why that should be so. Possibly Köhler had stupid compatriots, or had seized up at the prospect of sitting across from a player like Bruno. Possibly Köhler was a masochist. To this point, anyway, he played like a fish. Bruno didn’t have enough of Köhler in his pocket yet to declare the German a whale.

“The boys!” Köhler chortled, when he rolled double sixes, though in fact they’d come for him at an inopportune time. Then, “The girls!” when it was double fives. “I’m dancing,” he said sadly, when he failed to reenter his checker from the bar. The rich man was a fiend for jargon; he must have been, to know it all in English as well as German. He jabbered through the first two games. He knew the difference between a “back game,” with multiple points covered in the opponent’s inner board, and a “holding game,” which spread the held points into the outfield—not that this knowledge had gained him anything against Bruno. An unprotected checker, sitting singly on a point, Köhler called a “blot.” The term was universal in backgammon, and Bruno had heard it spoken by sheikhs and Panamanian capos de la droga, by men who didn’t know the English term for “thank you” or “motherfucker.” Of course, for Bruno, blot had taken on a new meaning. Bruno, for his part, never decorated his play with either tournament or club argot. The game’s language had, with the advent of online gambling sites, become common coin. It told you nothing about the real experience of the player before you.

By the end of the third game, in any case, the German had fallen silent. In the fourth, he disconcerted Bruno by refusing logical surrender. Bruno doubled him up to eight on the cube, then played it out, the rich man apparently believing he was in a legitimate race to bear his checkers off. He wasn’t within reach. Either Köhler was praying for a run of doubles to validate his decision, or he simply wasn’t good at counting pips on the dice. Not that Bruno counted pips anymore. A glance was enough. Still, after Köhler’s acceptance of the redouble, Bruno had to turn his head from side to side slightly, to examine the whole board around the blot. He needed to be certain he hadn’t missed something, so poor was Köhler’s decision. He’d missed nothing.

As Bruno threw the numbers that bore off the last of his men—of course he’ d drawn the doubles, his opponent’s misplay earning its typical reward—Köhler grunted and abruptly stood. His small head almost seemed too narrow, as if in a vise at the temples. “How much do I owe to you now?”

“Twenty-eight thousand euros.” Bruno knew better than to insult him by softening the blow. “Edgar mentioned, I hope, that I need to have cash tonight. I’m only in Berlin briefly.” Bruno had in fact no idea where he’d travel next, or how soon. “I’d prefer not to have to cash a large check.”

“I cover my losses.”

“I’m sorry to mention it.”

“Oh, no!” said Köhler, in another of his bursts of exultation. “You have me in a pretty spot! Let’s find out what we can do about it!” He poured himself another scotch and topped Bruno’s glass. “Would you mind music?” The German stepped over to an ornate cabinet and lifted its top, revealing an antique phonograph.

“Not at all.”

“Shellac 78s,” said Köhler. “I collect them. Nothing sounds the same.”

“Any type of music in particular? Or just shellac 78s?”

“It is my belief that jazz died with Charlie Parker. He was a revolutionary whose innovations ought to have been firmly refused.”

“Where would that leave us?”

“Ah! A believer in progress!”

Bruno had only been flippant. He had no knowledge of how Charlie Parker had changed jazz, nor any interest in learning. If Köhler had proposed the music as a stratagem, intending it, with the scotch, as a distraction to his opponent’s play, Bruno was indifferent. Since his discovery of backgammon at age sixteen, the game had acted as a funnel on Bruno’s attention, excluding the bafflement and seduction of a universe beyond the checkers and points. More likely, anyway, playing the record was for Köhler another expression, like the scotch, the whiskey, and the jargon, of his preference for a thickened atmosphere.

Bruno sought to lose the next game. It served two purposes: to delay while he determined how far he wanted to push Köhler, and to soften the German up for the push when it came. Bruno played a reckless trapping game, his preferred form of intentional error. Tonight, however, he was luck’s prince. The dice simply disfavored Köhler, and he missed every one of Bruno’s naked checkers, his blots. Soon enough Bruno had three of Köhler’s checkers on the bar and had built a prime. The doubling cube had lain untouched during Bruno’s blitz, and now Bruno offered it, intending a merciful finish. But Köhler accepted and played on.

Bruno’s next roll, double fours, closed the last point on his inner board. To decline doing so would have been conspicuous, a display of something much worse than pity. Contempt. Bruno brought in half his men before opening an escape for Köhler’s captured checker. The jazz had long since squealed to its conclusion, the 78 clicking and popping under the needle at its inner groove. Against that backdrop Köhler’s grunts were audible each time he rolled his dice, waiting for the miracle. None came. Bruno finished bearing off before Köhler’s last man limped into his home board.

I am aware I have been playing like a complete asshole. Bruno beamed this thought at Köhler, though there was no less likely candidate for susceptibility to Bruno’s old telepathic gift, which was anyhow abandoned. Köhler was immaculate in his shrine of self. In fact, I tried to throw the game your way. The dice wouldn’t permit it. They don’t like you very much.

The gammon brought Köhler’s debt to thirty-six thousand. Bruno didn’t imagine he’d inflicted hurt. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that prize items in Köhler’s shellac 78 collection had cost the German half that sum. Still, it made Bruno’s first good night in two months. If he walked out now he’d be in a position to repair his debt to Edgar Falk and pay his hotel bill. Enough would remain for Bruno to ponder his next move, and the prospects for true independence from Falk, at leisure.

The result was too good—too much too soon. For the price he’d extract here tonight he owed Köhler an evening’s entertainment, some back and forth, a shred of hope, not this catastrophe. The situation exposed Bruno’s least favorite aspect of his profession. At such times he became a courtesan of sorts. A geisha boy massaging the customer’s vanity until he could make off with the loot. Backgammon’s beauty was its candidness. In contrast to poker, there were no hidden cards, no bluff. Yet because of the dice, it was also unlike chess: No genius could foresee twelve or thirty moves in advance. Each backgammon position was its own absolute and present circumstance, fated to be revised, impossible to falsify. Each roll of the dice created a new such circumstance. The game’s only true gambling device, the doubling cube, served an expression of pure will. Yet now, having to pull the German businessman back into the game to protract the evening, Bruno would be required to make a piece of theater.

“You’ve lost a cuff link!” said Köhler.

“I dropped it on the ferry … or the train …”

Bruno felt overwhelming weariness. He’d arrived with what should have been sufficient handicaps: losing streak, near-empty pockets, an occlusion to his vision like a tunnel of dark he approached and might soon enter. What more must he offer in order to throw the rich man a game? Play with his eyes closed? If he could only throw the dice in his sleep, Bruno would have gladly let his head slump on the chair’s high cushioned back. Winning again, after passing through the vale of misfortune in Singapore, ought to revive him. Instead it seemed to have released Bruno into the clutches of a fatigue that resembled despair. He took a drink, fantasizing that the scotch could enter his head and dissolve the blot, like a solvent for stains on furniture.

“Fletcher Henderson,” said Köhler, his back to Bruno as he changed the record.

“Uh-huh.” Bruno pushed the checkers back onto their starting points.

“Should we raise the stakes?”

Bruno shrugged, covering surprise. He shouldn’t be so naïve. If the German truly wasn’t feeling any pain yet, it was only a reminder that real money, the kind Bruno would never know, was bottomless. Since Bruno couldn’t excuse himself from this room, he could perhaps at least wake himself up by seeking out Köhler’s threshold, to wipe away the rich man’s tiny lizard smile.

“Two? Three?”

“Five.”

Bruno nodded. At that, the air in the room was slightly electrified.

“Mr. Köhler, may I ask your business? Edgar didn’t mention it when he sent me to you.” Bruno guessed that old money, at least some element of family fortune, lay behind the combination of splendor, complacency, and passivity on display. Entirely self-made fortunes were typically compiled by aggressive men, even feral ones. Not that Bruno expected a confession. Old fortunes were usually given some industrious-sounding veneer.

“Call me Dirk, please. And may I call you …”

“Alexander.”

“Alexander. Were you watching on television in 1989, when the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall was breached?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Berliner Mauer,” said Köhler, showing his teeth to his bottom gums. “The Wall.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well, you should not feel embarrassed, those Germans who were not in the streets with a pickax or a blowtorch were also sitting watching on television, apart from me. I was on the telephone.” Köhler reseated himself and rolled his single die, to win the opening with a six-four. He began as usual, dropping builders into his outer board. “I was part of a consortium of interests that had been for some time acquiring what many believed entirely without value—the land deeds beneath various parts of the Wall.”

“Real estate. You’re a developer.” Bruno rolled his dice, missing Köhler’s exposed checkers. He split his own back men, figuring to run for a change. Perhaps this was the game to lose, though conceding the first contest at the raised stakes would be irritating.

“A developer of sorts.”

“So you built a lot of, what, really thin apartment buildings?”

“Funny! But between the eastern perimeter and the famous Wall of the Western imagination, covered with graffiti and celebrants, lay thousands of square meters.”

Bruno had intended a mild flattery, inviting Köhler to talk about himself and about his money, of which he’d concede some share tonight. Köhler seemed reanimated, however. He soliloquized as if from some interior script. “These blasted lands consisted of demolished buildings and filled-in canals, laid with traps, watched over by guard towers—the so-called no-man’s-land. All on the eastern side, of course, and claimed by that government for the People. But in the background lurked various private owners, families not even any longer in Berlin, quite willing to sell … we required the services of a great many lawyers! I built nothing myself, I haven’t the appetite for it, but anyone who tried was forced eventually to negotiate with me and my partners.”

“A onetime killing, then.”

“The Wall? Yes. How dare I hope for a second such windfall? But I find ways to carry on. This city puts a great emphasis on the rights of tenants and squatters, and on the privilege of sites to remain in a state of commemorative ruin. Few have the patience for the art of speculation, it is a very slow game. But you know, even the graves themselves must eventually give way …”

“Urban renewal.”

“Yes, you Americans have this admirable name for it. Urban renewal. Everything in its right place!” Köhler rolled a six-four a second time, and closed a three-prime in front of Bruno’s split runners. After Bruno’s next roll didn’t clear this hurdle, the German reached for the doubling cube.

Bruno accepted, putting them in a ten-thousand-euro game, one in which Bruno controlled the cube. He’d break Köhler badly now, or let him come back, then settle in for the longer and likely bigger kill. Let the dice decide. Bruno would run his back checkers unless the pips commanded otherwise.

But first, Köhler rolled to hit Bruno’s two unprotected checkers, and Bruno found himself unable to reenter from the bar.

“You’re dancing now!” said Köhler, childishly. “Have I got you in a spot?”

Bruno, annoyed, replied with the doubling cube. Twenty thousand. Losing, he’d cough up half his winning streak, a phenomenon he knew better than to credit exclusively to talent. Bruno’d had the dice on his side to this point. No matter. Köhler had proved himself beatable. Bruno rotated his head to study the entire position. Leave the blot alone, he counseled himself, as if like a pimple or a wart he could worry at the thing with his fingertips. Really, the blot was less important even than a pimple, since no one could see it beyond Bruno himself.

“Speaking of appetite,” said Köhler, “I’ve asked my kitchen to prepare some delicious dinner sandwiches. We’ll have them brought in, so as not to interrupt our wonderful game.”

“Thank you.”

“Alexander, do you like women?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have another delightful surprise prepared for you!”

It’s your turn. Köhler annoyed Bruno now by not playing. At the current price, Bruno wanted to climb back in. It would be a matter of orchestrating a dogged holding game, and he wanted to get on with it. Or had he blundered? Köhler reached not for his dice but for the cube. A blunder, yes. Bruno conceded, reminding himself he’d intended to bring the German back, though that had presupposed the rich man needed encouragement to continue playing; Köhler now seemed more than game. Bruno’s bigger kill felt remoter than he preferred. His temples throbbed.

They were halfway into Bruno’s second defeat when the woman entered the study. She wore a trim leather mask, with tight-stitched apertures for her eyes and nostrils, and an impassive zipper muting her lips. Otherwise, a black shirt, a man’s collared shirt, buttoned to the top, and nothing on beneath it apart from low black heels. Her legs were elegantly long and smooth, twitching through the gloom as though spotlit. The hair between her legs was fawn-colored, trimmed close. As the woman lowered a silver tray heaped with tiny sandwiches to the level of the board, Bruno glimpsed the hearth’s orange glow between her knees. Thanks to the blot, his gaze averted itself.

Two of Bruno’s checkers sat on the bar, a gamble annihilated. “After you,” said Köhler. Bruno’s host held the dice, keeping the game hostage in favor of his splendid presentation.

Bruno lifted a triangle from the tray. Tiny shrimp curled in cream, and lettuce, on crustless toast. “Thank you,” he said to no one in particular, splitting the difference between addressing the midsection of the woman who’d served him and the rich man’s grin. His own backgammon set caught his attention, where it leaned untouched against a chair’s leg. He bit a corner of the sandwich, tasting not the shrimp but the tart cream. He pushed the remainder into his mouth and rinsed it down with the scotch. His lips were again strangely numb, though the room was hot.

“You see, it is a question of where one’s attention falls,” said Köhler.

“Excuse me?”

The rich man gestured at the woman, unabashed. “With the face and the breasts concealed, there is nowhere else to look. The astounding mystery is right before you.”

Bruno believed he understood. If Köhler could have had the woman’s body borne in headless on a silver tray, the German might have done so. Bruno wondered if it qualified as an act of solidarity to look upward instead, to try and make contact with the tall woman’s eyes through her mask, or whether this would only add to her shame. There was nothing Bruno could look at directly anyhow. The headache that had begun in his temples now pulsed precisely between his eyebrows, as if a third eye—one capable, as the others were not, of penetrating to the reality behind the blot—sought to force itself to the surface.

“You may touch her, if you like.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Bruno.

“Yes, yes, there’s no hurry …”

“Are we playing?” Bruno asked with irritation. Köhler had risen to the phonograph again, and he dropped the needle now on an even scratchier recording. The woman stood silent to one side, the tray dividing her at the waist, the shirttail concealing nothing. In his mind Bruno rearranged the silver platter into a game board, the triangular sandwiches into points. There was no appeal in any of Köhler’s offerings, Bruno wished only to play, to return to the points and checkers, his urgent business. This was ungracious, he knew. Köhler was providing for his own evening’s entertainment, in order that Bruno could be relieved of any duty except taking the German’s money. Yet the night was going wrong.

The jazz shrieked and cackled. Köhler dived in like a fiend and grabbed the dice, shook them excessively, and rolled double sixes. His checkers swept past Bruno’s feeble broken prime. When Köhler offered a double, Bruno conceded.

“Bix Beiderbecke!” Köhler shouted, the rich man apparently reverting to some arcane taunt in his mother tongue.

“Play again,” muttered Bruno.

“Of course,” said Köhler. Bizarrely, he stood and placed the needle at the record’s start, leaving Bruno to sort the checkers onto their points. The woman stood with her tray, legs goose-pimpled as the flames waned to orange shards of coal. Though Bruno felt warm. Köhler returned, threw a die to open the game, and then called to her: “Come closer!”

She stepped up again, her puzzle of sandwiches intact apart from the sole triangle Bruno had lifted out. Bruno felt he could retch it out exactly into position if she brought the scent of dill any nearer. He won the opening with a weak four-one and used it to split his runners. Köhler began immediately to smash at them with an anarchic blitzing game. His and Bruno’s positions were reversed now. Köhler had become unpredictable.

Bruno, not even conscious he’d turned to look, was suddenly aware of the woman’s lips moving beneath the tight-zippered leather. Was Bruno supposed to be able to lip-read under these conditions? A cry for help? No. He shouldn’t be naïve, she was a professional, as much as Bruno. This was Berlin. Traditions existed which Bruno ought to be able to take for granted. A warning, then? His host still hadn’t reached for one of the sandwiches. Had Bruno been poisoned?

Köhler gammoned. It was Bruno’s luck that had been poisoned. His money, which had never been his, and had never been money, was gone. He owed some amount, was losing track. It was only numbers in his head, not so much as a dime had been laid on the table. A gentlemanly game, on friendly terms Bruno knew well: one shark, one whale. Bruno would have to steel himself, play it out. This couldn’t be Singapore, he couldn’t allow it. He’d rebelled against Falk, run to Europe, and now he had to make it good, had to persist with the evening, build his bankroll again. At such stakes it shouldn’t take long. He rolled a single die to start the game and turned his head to read it: three.

Köhler reached out, as if for a sandwich, but bypassed the tray. He rubbed his palm talismanically on the server’s buttocks and scatted along with the trumpeter’s hectic solo. Then he threw a four to win the opening and dropped his builders. Bruno, snakebit, failed to hit. Köhler cocked his head as Bruno faltered at choosing a play for his roll, a useless four-one. Was the German about to reach for the doubling cube again? Was he turning bully?

Instead, Köhler asked, “Alexander, are you completely well?”

“Why?”

“I wondered if something was wrong with your eyesight.”

“No.”

“You appear to be … listening to the actions of the backgammon pieces. Perhaps it is common among players of your caliber? I admit the method is unfamiliar.”

Bruno caught himself. His head was inches from the board. He’d imagined that his tilt, if it had been noticed at all, would be taken for leering. Stolen glances at that cosmic mystery between the masked woman’s legs. Now, understanding fell on him: his denial of the blot. For how many weeks had he been managing this affliction? It had been with him in Singapore as well, even if it was worse now. It was certainly worse now.

Bruno had been giving lessons without knowing. If a fish like the German could absorb and mimic Bruno’s practice by studying him, what might the sharper gamblers in Singapore have taken away? Though perhaps Köhler wasn’t so daft. He was looking sharkish, for a whale. Bruno had lost everything, including the stake he didn’t have in his pocket when he entered the room. He tried to tally his debt here and in Singapore cumulatively, but couldn’t. But, Bruno reminded himself, Falk had promised to make his stain in Singapore evaporate; tonight was all that mattered.

“When I listen to them I can hear the sea,” said Bruno flippantly. If you’d just turn down this damn music.

“Ich habe die Meerjungfrauen einander zusingen hören,” said Köhler. He turned his wrist, dropped a perfect number. The German closed his primes like clockwork now.

“Sorry?” said Bruno. He answered with another calamitous roll. A universe of misfortune was at Bruno’s fingertips, he only had to touch the dice. Usually just single games of backgammon were prone to such abrupt reversal. Here the whole evening had hinged irreversibly, into defeat.

“The mermaids singing, one after the next, of course. T. S. Eliot!” And now the German proffered the doubling cube.

“Each to each,” Bruno corrected, the line recalled from some memory swamp. He waved off the double, having had enough. A further five thousand down, but it expunged the game in favor of a fresh one. Bruno reached into his tuxedo’s inner breast pocket, hooked another paracetamol with a finger, and pushed it quietly into his mouth. To swig it down he gulped scotch across his numb tongue. “Another game.”

The woman in the mask had turned to Bruno. She rubbed one finger above her zipper, beneath her cipher nostrils. A further signal? Or was she about to sneeze? How would that work, behind the mask? In place of either beauty or a hideous disfigurement beneath the leather disguise, Bruno now conjured eyes grown puffy and watery, sinuses draining down the throat, a coughing spasm suppressed. The life of a professional half-nude masked housemaid; just another day at the office.

But no. The issue wasn’t the woman’s nose, but Bruno’s own. He sensed the trickle, the coolness across his lip, at the exact moment Köhler spoke.

“Your nose, Alexander. It is bleeding.”

“It’s nothing,” Bruno said, his fingers trailing away crimson. There was the problem of where to wipe them. Then, without transition, Bruno found himself looking at Köhler and the masked woman from below, from the carpet. He raised himself on his elbows—where was his chair? Gone. Some interval had passed, and when his elbows failed to support him he discovered that a large cushion waited beneath his head. Köhler stood above, holding a smartphone. The phonograph was mercifully silenced. Instead, Köhler and the woman spoke German, in tones of argument—or was it only that German always sounded argumentative?

“Ich kenne ihn. Ich kann ihm helfen.”

“Halt dich zurück, Schlampe. Bitte!”

“Lass mich ihm doch—”

“Ich lass ihn in die Charité einweisen. Da wird man sich um ihn kümmern.”

“Ich fahre mit ihm—”

“Das wirst du nicht tun! Ich werde mich nicht noch einmal wiederholen.”

The blood on Bruno’s fingers had crusted. When he touched them to his nose again it was repainted fresh. The blood had stained his white shirt, perhaps also the black tuxedo, though that had been laid open and so possibly spared. The woman stood quite near, all legs and mystery. She should have seemed absurd now, but what embarrassed Bruno most was her lack of embarrassment, as though his nosebleed had unmanned him.

Noticing Bruno lifting his head again from the cushion, Köhler knelt and spoke to him in painstaking English.

“Listen, Alexander. You’ve suffered some kind of seizure. Do you remember where you are?”

“Yes.”

“The same driver who fetched you at the ferry is bringing the car around.”

“I’ll be fine—we can play again—” It was only that music, he wanted to say.

Köhler ignored him. “He’ll bring you to the emergency room, at this time of night the journey by car won’t be at all long. The hospital is called Charité, there you’ll be cared for—”

“I’m not some charity case.”

“No, no, that’s only its name. Charité is one of the most important hospitals in Europe.”

By all means, then, thought Bruno in his despair. Nothing less than an important hospital.

•

Through blinding confusion Bruno nevertheless grasped that he’d been returned to the backseat of the limousine and was being driven the long way off Kladow, in avoidance of the ferry. Light flashed across the car’s interior roof as he lay on the seat. It was then that he recognized the tug of memory represented by the shorebird, the cormorant.

At age six Bruno had moved, with his mother, June, from her guru’s cultish compound in Marin County to Berkeley. He remembered little before Berkeley, which suited his preference—if he could, he’d forget Berkeley too, all his California life. The commune itself, in San Rafael, he recalled only in flashes of gabbling confusion, hippies at vast smoky spaghetti dinners, their voices and wide-open minds seeming to overrun his boundaries, and communal outdoor showers where women other than his mother herded him with gangs of muddy children for scrubbing. Bruno’s clearest recollection, before June had rescued him from that place, was of a visit he’d taken alone, with his mother’s bearded guru, to Stinson Beach on a cold morning when they had it to themselves. If there had been an explanation or reason for this special attention it was never offered, then or after.

There in Köhler’s car, Bruno remembered it: The guru had pointed out the cormorants, where the rocky cliffs met the infinite basin of the Pacific.

“You’re some kind of a kid, Alexander,” the guru had said to him, trying to lock on his gaze while Bruno remained focused on the water’s lapping, and the black diving crow-ducks that rode the waves. “I can see you watching June, I see you watching everyone. You’re deep.”

I don’t want to be deep, the child had thought. I want to quiet the voices, the crazy shrieking voices of all of you, June included. I want to be like that bird.

 

III

Long past his fifth, then sixth hour in the emergency-room waiting area, seated clutching his wooden backgammon set to his dried-bloody shirtfront, head against the chair’s stiff, sleep-defeating back, Alexander Bruno had been reduced to wondering: What were the red footprints for? These were painted, or stickered, across the floor. He sat contemplating them, under garish fluorescents, at a Formica table, in a room of false-wood paneling, beneath a flat-screen flaring muted German newscasts, with the unused trauma doors to his back. Minutes died serially into hours.

Bruno shared this zone, for whatever reason, primarily with not quite elderly women, four or five at a given time. He should have been able to tabulate their comings and goings, to fathom who among them was sick and who waited on some other family member’s sickness, to discern fine differences, but no. They melted into a drab resemblance: Older Woman in Waiting Room, a series. The blot didn’t help, of course, remaining centered in his vision, obliterating their faces.

For brief variation, a young couple with a shrouded baby had appeared and been ushered inside, not to return. One or two policemen had ambled through, and plenty of weary orderlies, but never with any urgency, never appearing less than explicitly bored. They merely paced out the night’s smallest hours. No one in Berlin, apparently, was ever shot or stabbed or crushed in a vehicle. Or at least not tonight. Bruno’s bloodstain was anomalous. If he’d memorized one useful phrase in German, which of course he hadn’t, it should have been, It’s only a nosebleed.

Bruno’s quarantine from the intrusion of human language was as total as he could ever have wished. No one spoke. When they did, it was inaudible. When audible, it was German. Bruno’d had his flash in the pan of relevance here, but it seemed years ago. They’d been excited about him, once; he clung to the memory. When Köhler’s driver had dropped him off, they thought he’d had a stroke. The triage nurse had shown him to a doctor, and the doctor had spoken to him in coldly accented English, with simple questions, ones Bruno could answer with relative confidence. The blot itself had caused the excitement—that and his brief passage of unconsciousness or seizure. Though of course Bruno had only Köhler’s testimony to suggest a seizure. The rich man wasn’t available now to explain, and when they asked Bruno what he meant by the word he realized he had no idea.

The doctor tested his visual field. What had been Bruno’s private meditation upon the blot, his own small esoteric mystery, was now common currency—but at least it was currency. In everything else, he felt he’d only disappointed the doctor. Numbness or tingling in his limbs? No. Difficulties recalling words? Sorry, no. Inability performing a series of routine movements, walking, raising his arms, following the doctor’s commands? No. Bruno was, sadly, capable of performing each simple action. As he performed them, giving the doctor little or nothing to inscribe on his clipboard chart, Bruno felt the energy drain from the examination room. He further disappointed by confessing to the headache, the drinking of undiluted scotch, and the use—overuse, frankly—of paracetamol. At the last moment, before dismissal, Bruno mentioned the sensation of numbness in his lips. The doctor raised one eyebrow. Nearly of interest but, alas, no. Bruno fulfilled far too few of the assessment criteria for stroke, and so it was as if he did not exist. He’d been returned to the waiting area.

The question of how to interpret the trail of red footprints—which ran from the entry doors through the waiting area and down one corridor of the hospital—was now Bruno’s sole preoccupation and solace. He had nothing else to contemplate. Nothing, that was, apart from the blot, or the course his evening at Köhler’s home had taken—the result, even if the reasons remained puzzling.

The sudden change of fortunes, timed to Köhler’s raising the stakes: Could Köhler have hustled Bruno? It should be impossible. Yet Bruno was haunted by the irrational certainty that Köhler had been the shark. He wondered now if the German had come to the encounter with as little ready cash in his pocket as had Bruno. Perhaps the mansion in Kladow wasn’t really even Köhler’s. Perhaps the person Bruno had met wasn’t named Köhler. It was madness, thinking this way; better to consider the red footprints. The waiting-room floor featured yellow footprints too, actually, leading in another direction. Bruno would get to the bottom of it. Why not? He had time enough, and the talent, apparently, for finding the bottom of any circumstance, of his own life.

The ER entrance doors lay under a pedestrian bridge, and little natural light reached the antiseptic purgatory of the waiting room. Still, signs of dawn crept in. The clock read 4:45. If Bruno strained, he thought he heard a bird twittering. The older women were unmoving, though they’d slept as little as Bruno. When a young doctor in mint-green scrubs emerged and stood with a clipboard in front of his chair, it took Bruno a long moment to understand he’d been drawn back into the realm of the visible. The young man was skinny, with blond curls. He appeared untroubled by the long night, perhaps had just signed in or woken from a refreshing nap on a surgical table. Did the word intern apply in Germany? Bruno couldn’t know.

“Mr. Bruno?” The doctor held out his hand.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry you had to wait so long. It might have been preferable to dismiss you.”

“Are you—American?”

The young doctor smiled. “No, I’m German, but thank you. I studied in Columbus, Ohio, and for a while in Scotland.”

“Ah.” Looking up from his seat, Bruno’s blot made the young doctor with the perfect English a faceless Aryan angel, his curls a blond halo.

“You must be exhausted. Let’s talk about your results so you can go—I see you’ve listed a hotel.”

“Yes.”

The doctor sat across the circular Formica table and lifted the clipboard’s covering sheet. Nothing he saw there required more than a glance. “Your blood glucose levels are normal. The examining doctor was confident in ruling out stroke.”

“Yes …” he said.

“And no history of migraine with visual field distortion?”

“I’ve never been diagnosed. I have been suffering from headaches.”

“Migraine onset can be possible in later life.”

Later life—so that was what had come to Bruno. Next, a discount on movie tickets.

“Okay, but also, the visual disturbance you detailed, there is a chance of temporal arteritis—an inflammation of small vessels of the eye. However, this would be premature. I’ve prepared information on two specialists you might wish to visit immediately, an Augenarzt—an eye doctor. And as well a neurologist.”

“But … I did suffer the seizure.”

“So, but, reflex analysis indicates not.” The doctor glanced again at the page. “Is this correct, that you fainted upon sight of the blood from your nose?”

“Yes.”

“And not again after?”

“No … no.”

“I see a suggestion from the doctor you saw: vasovagal syncope response. Did he discuss this with you?”

“No.”

“Are you familiar with this term?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“Ah. With vasovagal, one loses consciousness at the sight of one’s own blood. An autonomic response, impossible to regulate with the will. It can be highly inconvenient for routine procedures—we are often having patients fall unconscious upon having their blood drawn, for instance. But it is a silly abnormality, of no consequence.”

A silly abnormality? Bruno would trade it for a death sentence. The young doctor’s smile was evident, even at the edges of the blot. Was his unusual kindness merely an impression given by his unaccented English? Possibly Bruno’s spell here had softened him up, like Patty Hearst in her closet.

“Please don’t misunderstand. The migraine diagnosis is a speculation, we really recommend you visit the specialists noted here, okay? But—headache and nosebleed, a single episode of fainting. One thing is clear, you needn’t be here any longer.”

“Okay.”

“You’re a visitor to Germany, Mr. Bruno?”

“Yes.”

“You have no insurance of any kind?”

“No.”

“Please do not let that keep you from making these appointments. Or if you are leaving, see your doctor in the States.”

“I … have no plan to return.” Bruno was self-conscious again of his worn tuxedo, his brown-crusted shirtfront, his lost cuff link, and the mysterious wooden case he still clutched, white-knuckled, in his lap. If only it contained radioactive isotopes or microfilm. Or stacks of cold currency, unmarked. He’d purchased the inlaid wooden set at a games shop in Zurich, with a fresh check for thirteen thousand Swiss francs in his breast pocket. From Bruno’s present juncture, such triumph seemed as exotic as microfilm or isotopes.

“Do you know the way home from here to your hotel?” Perhaps the angelic doctor had been inspecting Bruno too. After all, they’d tested his blood and had surely noted the presence of paracetamol and Wolf-Dirk Köhler’s scotch. The intern’s diagnosis, unspoken behind vasovagal and migraine, might have simply been alcoholic bender. Given the plentiful men wandering Berlin’s streets at midday with unconcealed liters of beer, the emergency room likely knew this type of patient.

“If you can direct me to the S-Bahn, I’ll be okay.”

“We’re just across the river here from the Hauptbanhof. It’s a very pleasant walk across the old section of the hospital—come, I’ll point you in the right direction.” Another angelic service? Perhaps the young doctor wished to observe Bruno placing one foot in front of the other before releasing him to his fate. Moving together to the sliding entry doors, they stepped across the red footprints.

“What are these for?”

“Excuse me?”

Bruno pointed. “They seem to lead nowhere.”

“Oh, those! The red lead to the red zone, the yellow to the yellow zone. For when it is needed.”

“I don’t understand.” Outdoors, Bruno was overwhelmed by the world’s resumption: the smell of exhaust and rotting grass clippings, the angled light, humans with a purpose on earth, with paper cups of coffee in their hands. He and the doctor walked together across the endless cobblestones, the cobble-dice, and out from under the pedestrian bridge.

“Yes, it’s odd, but no one ever thinks of it. It’s a plan for some catastrophe greater than the system can handle. The footpaths show where the more badly injured should congregate, as opposed to those with minor injuries.” Under the effort of this explanation, the young doctor’s accent began to revert. “There’s a green zone too, for those not requiring a doctor, but who have come to the hospital because of losing their homes, or to donate blood, or so forth.”

They’d crossed out of the grimly utilitarian modern complex into another, more serene century. The old hospital was a grassy campus of red-brick buildings, each with Shakespearean alcoves and porticoes. Dawn had broken out on the wide paths, a pale-pink sky visible through the greenery, and impossible numbers of birds twittering overhead. But when Bruno raised his eyes to the branches, the blot intruded. It dominated the upper half of his field of vision more than the lower. No wonder he’d become so concerned with what lay underfoot.

His escort had stopped on the path, to fish in his scrubs and come out with a pack of smokes, likely his real motive for stepping outside the ER. “You’re well on your way,” the young doctor said, lighting a cigarette. “Just follow the main road here through the old Charité, and you’ll hit the river. You’ll then see the train station. Just cross the river and you’re there.”

“How charming it is here.”

“Charité was first built as a plague sanitarium, so it’s a city within the city.”

“It makes a pleasant sort of preserve.”

“Yes,” said the doctor, assuming a wry look, “with a great number of buildings and streets named for famous Nazi physicians.”

Berlin, tomb city. Everywhere you walked on graves or bunkers, or the ghostly signature of the Wall. And so the red footprints: Why shouldn’t future catastrophes be legible too, trudging columns of dirty-bomb refugees or zombie-plague survivors traced in advance? Between cigarette and cheap Teutonic irony, the blond doctor had surrendered his angelic aspect, but no matter. He’d delivered Bruno from the terminal sector to this little paradise of birdsong. Bruno was ready to part with him.

“I’ll be fine.”

“I’m sure you will.”

Alone, Bruno settled into a false exultation. His condition could as easily have been the result of an all-night fleecing of some puffed-up financial wizard or real-estate baron much like Wolf-Dirk Köhler (who Bruno now understood could only have been sincere in his pomposity and his fortune, and the beneficiary of an ordinary lucky streak). It wouldn’t make the first time he’d wandered the dawn streets of a foreign town looking like a daylight vampire. The only difference was the absence of the money he should have had to show for it. And what was money?

Bruno smiled greetings in passing, swinging his backgammon case as he walked. The medical students, one younger than the next, answered with their eyebrows, beguiled from their Prussian reserve. One or two even gave forth with an awkward “Morgen!” Armed with a fresh shirt and a double espresso Bruno might not even need sleep, though nothing stood between him and eight or fifteen hours dozing in a curtained room except the brief journey back to Charlottenburg and his hotel. He might even sleep away the blot, he felt now. Why not? Though he had no way of paying the bill, he assumed the keycard in his pocket still worked.

Crossing out of Charité and over the river, the Hauptbanhof in sight, Bruno’s spirit only soared higher. Berlin’s sprawling indifference, its ungainly, crane-pierced grandeur, liberated him. Perhaps he’d only needed to blow the Kladow opportunity Edgar Falk had flung his way, and his subsequent vigil in the ER, to understand. He’d wanted to dissolve his tie to Falk, not reconstitute it. Let the whole absurd episode—his being gammoned, his nosebleed—be taken as a departing fuck-you.

As he slid into the morning crowds approaching the sun-twinkling central glass atrium at the Hauptbanhof—the train station another city unto itself, more chilly and anonymous than the medieval campus of Charité but also, therefore, more familiar, with its Sushi Express and Burger King and international newsstand, its dozens of tracks leading anywhere he might wish to escape to—Bruno had in his giddy escapes from death and from his former profession concluded he needed only a new name. Mr. Blot. Blotstein. Blottenburg. It was there he fell. Not across the Hauptbanhof’s threshold but before it, just past a construction barricade at the river side of the station entrance.

He fell into a shallow rupture in the walkway, a section where the cobblestones had been disrupted, the earth below laid bare. A small pile of the granite paving cubes lay to one side, at a point now level to his view. Bruno’s legs had gone. He didn’t try to stand again. The blot made everything confusing. His backgammon set was clutched to his chest still, or again. He saw the station looming, a Zeno’s paradox target now. He’d been nearer to it standing on the other side of the river. The front of his face bled again. He moved his legs now, but only swam in the dirt and the rubble of stones. No one paid attention. He smelled dust, mud, sunlight, and grilling sausages, nauseating so early in the morning.

If only he had a wooden mallet, Bruno could pretend to be working. Did a vast supply of older cobblestones circulate throughout Berlin, endlessly repurposed, or did fresh ones need to be quarried and shaped? What would happen if he kidnapped a stone, took it out of circulation? Would the system collapse? Bruno could enjoy contemplating the rough cubes forever, now that they’d captivated his imagination, if he weren’t lying sideways, watching blood from his nose drip into the dusty soil, if he weren’t embarrassed to be seen here. Forever had become a squishy concept, anyway. Time slipped from him in blacked-out instants, like a film in which one blotted passerby was replaced by the next—a jump cut. How ironic, he thought, that behind him, across the river, on the idyllic campus, a crumpled figure would surely find himself swarmed by compassionate attention, the medical students competing to show off their training. On this side of the bridge, below the edifice of the Hauptbanhof, he lay beneath consideration, resembling as he did the contemptible derelicts and drifters accumulating at major train stations all over the universe.

He’d met a just reward for flirtation with the wish to disappear.

For amusement, Bruno reached out for one of the squarish stones. The result was more than he could have hoped for. He’d unknowingly been touching at his nose or lip; the fingers that seized up the stone dotted it with brash bloody fingerprints. Three fingertip prints on one face of the stone, a thumbprint on another. Three-one, always a pleasant roll at the start of a game. Just close up the so-called golden point on one’s own inner board, though this term had later been disputed, once computer algorithms confirmed it wasn’t as valuable as the bar-point. But Bruno had decided to give up backgammon, so never mind. He brought the bloodstained cobblestone nearer. Touching his nose again—there was plenty of blood!—he carefully daubed the remaining faces, making a two, a four, a five, and a six. Between glaring sun and absorbent stone, the dots of fresh blood dried almost instantly. The challenge was to keep from staining it further. Bruno wiped his fingers on his shirt, which had been sacrificed hours ago. The task was amusing enough to distract him from the matter of the opinions of passersby, or even whether they glanced his way or not. When the rough granite die was complete, he rotated it in all directions to confirm, around the obstacle of the blot, that he’d made no error. No. It was perfect. Bruno grunted in satisfaction. Then he opened his set, which was itself printed with flurries of reddish fingerprints. There, to accompany the two sets of wooden dice, the blond and the ebony, and his doubling cube, he pushed the giant die inside. He was just able to clasp the set around it, then let the entirety slip from his arms, into the sidewalk’s seam, into the dust. That the blunt object would damage the smooth inlaid wood of his board, Bruno was certain. He didn’t care. The cobblestone die might be the most valuable thing he owned. It was proof, at least, of what Berlin otherwise denied: that he existed, here, now.

 

IV

Bruno awakened inside the hospital. He needed to be roused intermittently for the X-rays, the CT scan, and the MRI, so woke to discover himself an object in custody of German orderlies and technicians scarcely interested in consoling him in English, or even explaining their purposes in composing this escalating series of deep inner portraits of Bruno’s face and head. In between, he slumbered, slurped broth and tested bites of flavorless meat and vegetables on bedside trays whose arrival and departure usually eluded him, and learned to use the bedpan.

Had he succumbed to a sleeping sickness or been tranquilized? He supposed he was exhausted by his ordeal, his all-nighter. In fact the illusion of days slipping past was only that, an illusion, brought on by the timeless vacuity of the windowless room, and by the frequent wakings by nurses to check his vital signs, a routine punctuated by those more dramatic sequences when he was wheeled up to and engulfed by the gigantic thrumming machines.

When Bruno recovered consciousness more completely, only a day and a night had passed. His backgammon case had been placed into the cabinet section of his bedside table. He opened it to discover the blood-dotted cobblestone. It took this evidence to persuade him he’d ever departed the hospital, so nearly had his brief sojourn across the river resembled a dream or hallucination. He found his wallet and passport in the table’s drawer, along with his cell phone, gone dead. Its battery life had been a shrinking hourglass, one he should have heeded. Also in the drawer, the slip of paper naming the two specialists he’d been commended to visit. Bruno showed this to the doctor on rounds, but he seemed unimpressed. Bruno’s emergency-room diagnosis might only have been a poor hasty guess, the bum’s rush. He’d entered some other situation entirely, he only didn’t know what it was.

This second, more lucid phase of his hospitalization had begun on a Thursday evening. Bruno was informed it would be Monday morning before he was visited by der Onkologe—the oncologist. He had a weekend to kill. The second bed in the room remained, mercifully, empty. Bruno asked the nurses to switch off the babbling German television, the soap operas and soccer, the dubbed Mel Gibson revenge stories. The barrage of incomprehension seemed to taunt him; Bruno wanted only silence. He took the cobblestone into his sheets, nestling it under his right hand, refusing all petition of the nurses to take it away and wash it for him.

The blot was with him, invisible to others. Or not: Maybe the machines had taken its portrait from the inside. Bruno waited to know. In the meantime, the stone was its crooked, obtrusive twin. With these sole companions, Bruno spent two days contemplating the mystery of his changed relationship to luck. From the vantage of a hospital ward the lows of Singapore and Kladow were magnificent attainments, sacred stations of a vanished existence. He’d gladly lose a thousand games to Köhler, gladly go back and spend an eternity prone on Köhler’s carpet, even, basking in hideous jazz on crackly records. If granted an eternity, Bruno might spend it regretting he’d failed to caress the bottom of the masked woman, a chance that had at the time seemed squalid and negligible but now might be a shrine he’d failed to honor. He should have eaten his share of shrimp and dill sandwiches, manna beside the hospital fare. It was as though Bruno had rolled a die and revealed some previously unknown face: zero. Perhaps that was the cobblestone’s significance. In Germany, dice roll you!

•

Was it only Bruno’s imagination that the nurses put an extra effort into neatening him up, tightening the sheets of his bed, straightening his little tabletop’s possessions, like realtors prepping a house? No accident, anyway, that they wheeled him to a sink with a mirror low enough so he could shave, and provided a clean disposable razor. The nurses wished to sell him to the oncologist. For his part, Bruno eschewed the bedpan, insisted on his own toilet. At this minor attainment, his own sense of excitement was wakened. In this slough of time, everything ached for some major happening, even if it was death. Perhaps the nurses were more like nuns, then, preparing themselves or him to see God.

At midmorning his visitor was ready. In fact it was two visitors. Der Onkologe, Dr. Scheel, was attractive, tense-jawed, with salt-and-pepper brush-cut hair but younger than Bruno, and impatient from the moment he came through the door. His suit, three-piece brown flannel, was the nicest thing Bruno had laid eyes on since entering the hospital. He carried a large flat envelope. Its contents, perhaps, Bruno’s fate.

Dr. Scheel possessed, or anyway revealed, no English. To translate on his behalf had come Bruno’s second bedside visitor, Claudia Benedict. She was older, quite tall, with owlish glasses beneath her platinum bangs, and craggy, sunken cheeks, severe in aspect. Yet she offered Bruno the solace of his mother tongue. “Dr. Scheel asked me to be present to avoid any potential misunderstandings,” she explained. “I’m an Englishwoman actually, though I’ve been in Berlin for more than twenty years.”

“I’m awfully glad to meet you, Dr. Benedict,” said Bruno. Dr. Scheel, for his part, had shaken Bruno’s hand, then stood aside, waiting for the cessation of niceties. “Pardon my appearance. These hospital pajamas aren’t too flattering.” Bruno gestured at the narrow wardrobe closet, behind which hung his tuxedo, invoking other options. He’d checked: The shirt had been laundered. He supposed the hospital had a special aptitude for bloodstains.

“I actually am a physician,” said Benedict, “though I’ve never been licensed here in Germany. Please understand that I’m not your doctor.”

Then can you be my mommy? Bruno beamed at her, his rote test. If Claudia Benedict read his thoughts, she didn’t show it, in either warmth or disdain.

“Dr. Scheel wants you to understand that he’s examined your case carefully, and he regards it as a highly serious one. I’ve made myself familiar with his written reports, and I’ll try to answer any questions you may have, but I’m primarily here to function as a translator.” Was Benedict’s slightly shocked look that of meeting a dead man who didn’t know it? She turned now to Scheel. The oncologist nodded brusquely, and they conducted a rapid exchange in German.

“… Frag ihn, ob er die radiologischen Befunde selbst sehen möchte, oder ob die mündliche Diagnose ausreicht. In solchen Fällen irritieren die Aufnahmen einen Patienten oft …” At these words from Scheel, Benedict paused, then turned back to Bruno.

“Yes, um, Dr. Scheel asks whether you would like to see the images yourself, or only have the situation described. He’s afraid you may be disturbed by them.”

“You mean … all the CAT scans and so forth?”

“Yes.”

He smiled in a way he hoped was courageous. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

The joke was lost on her, and on the German. It occurred to Bruno that he was being readied for that moment when anything endearing about you was revealed as etched in dust, then swept over a cliff. This would be doubly true if one were without family or other social bonds—if one were largely endeared only by, and to, oneself.

Dr. Scheel slid the transparencies from the folder and laid them out over Bruno’s bedsheeted knees. Bruno saw amorphous ghostly gray-and-black mud puddles, veins of white mineral running through a rock, nothing he’d identify with himself or any other human being. The images were peppered with tiny arrows and brackets and miniature handwriting in red ballpoint. While Bruno avoided seeing more, Scheel spoke softly and steadily in German, then waited for Benedict to render the sentences in English.

“Dr. Scheel believes you are suffering from a meningioma—a tumor of the central nervous system. Are you at all familiar with that term?”

“No.”

“Meningiomas are commonly associated with the brain, but not exclusively, they’re—excuse me, this is far from my specialty. They frequently occur along the central brain stem, intracranially, I mean, inside.” She put a knuckle to her forehead. “Yours is in an unusual but not unknown position, an anterior cranial fossa filling the olfactory groove. It has also inserted itself … behind your eyes, the cause of the optical dysfunction you’ve reported.”

“The blot.”

“Yes—excuse me.” She turned and resumed in rapid-fire German. Then back. “He says it’s likely you’ve also lost your sense of smell, though patients are frequently unaware of this until it’s pointed out to them.”

“Tell him he’s wrong. I smell things especially vividly, in fact. For instance, the lunch they’re preparing for us now—I can tell they’re grilling sausages.”

Benedict and Scheel exchanged a look, and then another string of irritated-sounding phrases. “Neither of us smells sausages grilling, I’m afraid.”

“Well, there you go!” said Bruno. “My groove is wide open and ready for business.” It was as if he’d disproved the new word, meningioma, without having even once said it aloud.

“Olfactory hallucinations are not excluded,” said Benedict, with as much sympathy as could be imparted to these words. “Though such presentations are a great deal less common …”

At this Benedict stalled. Scheel had stepped nearer to the bed and was putting his finger to one of the transparencies, meanwhile filling her ear with German that might be industrial or military jargon. The oncologist tapped again at the page, never glancing, however, at Bruno himself. Having the benefit of a translator, Scheel appeared to feel no need to grant Bruno’s existence. This affair was strictly between Scheel and blot.

“He’s keen that you understand the severity of your case,” said Benedict, when she was allowed to resume. “Many such growths are nonmalignant and respond to resection—to surgical removal. Dr. Scheel regrets to say that the placement and size are in your case utterly prohibitive. He says it’s extraordinary to discover one so developed. He’s surprised you’ve reported no symptoms before now.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Bruno. Giddiness overtook him, unleashed by this triangular arrangement and the prospect of death by blot. “I’ve been neglecting to apprise Dr. Scheel of the symptoms of my giant fucking outlandish and unprecedented nose cancer, is that right?”

“Mr. Bruno.”

“Pardon my awkwardness with the medical terminology, but that’s what I’ve got, yes?”

“Herr Bruno!” It was Scheel this time.

“Because, tell fucking Dr. Scheel I’m sorry I didn’t notice, it’s just that I’ve never had a giant nose cancer before, so I didn’t recognize the symptoms.”

“Herr Bruno.” Scheel stepped between Benedict and the bed, and tapped with the point of his pen at the images strewn across Bruno’s knees. “It is not that I cannot understand English at all,” Scheel said.

“Ah!” said Bruno, unashamed. The nurses had vaporized. Bruno felt their absence as a pulsation. They might have fled the ward, the entire hospital building.

“You are misinformed when you say nose,” said Scheel. “Nose is incorrect.”

“You’re saying it’s not my nose but some other olfactory part of me.”

“Nein. Here. You asked to look, but you have not chosen to see.” With the plastic cap of his pen, Scheel circled again and again the black blotch dominating one of the images. “Here, bitte. You see this shape?”

“Paging Dr. Rorschach! It looks like a horseshoe crab. Is that the right answer?”

“It is not your nose. It is between the casing of your brain, you see, and your face. It is pressuring behind your face, from underneath. Behind your eyes and the flesh of your entire Antlitz—your countenance.”

“How unfortunate.”

“Very much so.”

“Because if it were just a fucking nose cancer, you could probably just take off my nose and be done with it, but this, it’s not so simple.”

“Nein, it is not simple at all.”

Scheel appeared suddenly to tire, as if it had cost him too much, after all, to meet Bruno’s outburst in its own tongue. He muttered in German. “Er kann den Rat eines Chirurgen einholen, wenn er möchte, aber das ändert auch nichts. Es gibt jedoch verschiedene Palliativtherapien, die unmittelbaren Symptome lindern können …”

Benedict spoke again, without moving nearer to the bed this time, as if Scheel’s role here needed to be honored by her deference. Her voice was muted and distant, like that of a translator on a radio broadcast, flattening the rhetoric of some terrorist or despot. “Dr. Scheel wishes you to know you have the option of meeting with a surgeon, but he doubts anyone would seriously consider such a procedure. His recommendation is for … palliative care. He believes your immediate symptoms can be managed, at least for the time being.” She paused. When she spoke again, it was clearly on her own behalf, or of that humane part of herself that had been present when she’d first entered the room. “I understand you have no insurance, Mr. Bruno. Nor relatives in Germany.”

“No.”

“Do you have friends here?”

He thought of the woman on the ferry. Hello, Madchen, I have cancer. “Not apart from you beautiful people right in front of me.”

Scheel forced more English out of himself. “What is the reason?”

The question was bewildering. The reason for cancer? “I’m sorry?”

“The reason that are you here. Was it business that brought you?”

“It was this that brought me!” Bruno pulled the stone die from beneath his sheets and thrust it at Scheel. Letting evidence of the open gravesite that was Berlin be his reply to the martinet doctor. Now, as if according to some prearranged signal, the nurses flooded back in. Bruno was wrong, they’d been close by, concealed just outside his door, waiting to reclaim command of his temperature and blood pressure, to resume plying him with regular and unexplained medications. Probably they’d try again to take his stone from him and wash it, too.

Scheel, in his distaste, was the one who was a million miles away, even before he’d passed through the door. He spoke only through Benedict, who absorbed the brunt of his crisp German, then turned to Bruno and said, “Your attending physician will be given Dr. Scheel’s recommendations. The treatment is in any event quite minimal, since it seeks merely to … abate your discomfort. He says he’s sorry.” Scheel gave Benedict a glance of reproach, as if she’d improvised this flourish.

“May I keep these?” asked Bruno, placing his free hand on the printed-out images scattered over his legs.

“Ja.” Scheel moved his hand dismissively. Of course they had their proof locked deep in the machines, engraved on hard drives …

Bruno shoved the pages, with the stone, into the drawer of his bedside table.

At that, Scheel was gone. Bruno found himself ministered by three sets of hands, as the nurses performed their trick of changing the sheets beneath him without moving him from the bed. They’d enfeebled him by design, it was a lie, he could still walk, talk, probably fuck. He receded behind the blot, into his sorrow. Claudia Benedict spoke some slight words of departure herself, took his hand for an instant, and then she too vanished into the corridor.

He refused lunch and possibly dozed. Before long the nurses brought the artificial night, which might have no relation to the world beyond these walls. He sought consolation in the idea that he would die within the ancient preserve of Charité, the plague asylum, but in this antiseptic modern wing it was no good. Perhaps they would release him to the streets, and he could expire on the lawn before some nineteenth-century brickwork renamed for a Nazi doctor, or atop a cairn of paving stones. He wanted to imagine that Berlin had cast him as Hamlet, vital in the dirt, contemplating skulls, but it was the other way. He’d be Yorick, tossed aside.

•

The next morning, Claudia Benedict reappeared. She was alone.

“Mr. Bruno, I wonder if I could have a word with you?”

“I thought you weren’t a doctor here, only a ventriloquist’s dummy.” He was startled by his own uncontrollable bitterness.

“It’s true that I have no jurisdiction in this hospital. I only thought I might offer you some advice.”

“Things to do in Berlin before you’re dead?”

“I’m not certain you should stay in Berlin.”

So this was the reward for his imperial stubbornness in not attempting to speak German. A higher class of pity was the best he could expect now. Maybe she’d glimpsed the pressed tuxedo in the wardrobe and been somehow impressed, poor old bird. Maybe she was lonely. “See the world?” he said. “No, Berlin seems like a good place to die.”

“Mr. Bruno, you’ve lived a long while with this disease to this point, and you might live a while yet. I spent last night browsing the current research on meningiomas, and speaking with a surgeon I know in London.”

“He’ll take my case?”

“No. But there is someone who might, who would at least be worth your meeting.” She unfolded from her jacket pocket a medical article, “A Surgical Approach to Complex Intraorbital Meningioma,” five or six stapled pages printed from a PDF copy of The Journal of Head and Neck Surgery, volume XXI, April 2011. Beyond the title page lay columns of dull text ruptured by black-and-white surgery photos so much worse, so much more literal than the modernist scans of his blot that Bruno had to flip the pages shut.

Benedict pointed to the name at the top, Noah R. Behringer, MD, FACS. “He’s a senior fellow in surgery at a hospital on the West Coast of America, a very long way from here. I’d never heard his name, but he’s created a bit of a stir with several quite radical resections in deep areas of the face. I think there’s a chance you’d be able to interest him in your situation, precisely for the reasons most other doctors, like Scheel here, will regard you as beyond surgical treatment.”

“The West Coast?”

“A very fine hospital in San Francisco. I’ve never been there myself.”

Northern California, where Bruno least wished to return. He gave no indication it had special importance. “Does Charité have a working relationship with this hospital?”

“Charité isn’t likely to be tremendously helpful to you, Mr. Bruno. You’re an American, and, excuse me for this, but, unless I’m mistaken, an impoverished one. A derelict.”

“I prefer the terms lush or rake.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Berlin is tolerant of the tide of young expatriates and backpackers arriving here on a daily basis, but they’re relied upon to tend to themselves.”

“I’m almost fifty.”

“Your behavior yesterday morning didn’t reflect it. The attitude of the oncologist will not have been a unique one, I’m afraid. Have you heard of the German concept of therapie hoheit—therapeutic sovereignty?”

“No.”

“Essentially, the physician’s right to be unquestioned. You’ll not find anyone here necessarily keen to defer to a California surgeon, especially one with a beard and ponytail.”

“Can you help me?”

“Apart from the fact that I’m overstepping my bounds even now, I think a … personal appeal to your countryman would be better, frankly.”

“Throw my derelict American self on the mercy of Dr. Beardinger, you mean.”

She carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. “May I suggest one more thing? If you are discharged from here, be certain you request a CD with a full set of your radiological images. They can’t deny you that in any event, but it may be subject to certain bureaucratic delays if you don’t leave here with it on your person.”

Bruno experienced a flood of mute feeling toward Benedict, precisely at the instant she was bound to refuse him anything further. He’d been ungrateful. But he’d been speaking as a dead man. Now she’d enriched and burdened him with the return of his human hopes, his credentials for species participation. Benedict had no way of knowing how little he’d tended to these before his death sentence.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

“If I may say, it’s perfectly human to look for someone to blame, or to blame yourself—essentially, to make a story, or a moral, out of what has befallen you.”

“I … wouldn’t. I won’t.”

“The temptation will be strong, but far better if you accept that it is quite random.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Mr. Bruno, I’ll leave you now. Do you possess means for traveling to America?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Is there someone who might assist you on your return? Have you friends in the San Francisco area?”

For decades now, Bruno would have replied, I’ve made certain not to. That was before Singapore.