“So we know. Every trial. This is what happened. Now we know. Then another trial. I’m a DA, that’s all. I bring things to trial.”
Jake looked down, fingering the persilscheins on the table. “I still wish I had the files. They weren’t guards-they should have known setter.”
“Geismar,” Bernie said softly, “everybody should have known better.”
“Would it help if I wrote something? Got you some press?”
Bernie smiled and went back to the drawer. “Save your ink. Go home. Look at you, all banged up. Haven’t you had enough?”
“I’d like to know.”
“What?”
“Who the other man is.”
“That? You’re still on that? What’s the point?”
“Well, for one thing, he could still be working for the Russians.” Jake dropped the folder on the table. “Anyway, I’d like to know for Gunther, finish the case for him.”
“I doubt he cares anymore. Or do you have ways of getting messages up there?”
Jake walked over to the map, left in place by the scavengers. The Brandenburg. The wide chausee, where the reviewing stand had been.
“Why would someone working for the Russians tip off the Americans where Emil was going to be? Why would he do that?”
“You got me.”
“Now, see, Gunther would have figured it out. That’s the kind of thing he was good at-things that didn’t add up.”
“Not anymore,” Bernie said. “Hey, look at this.”
He had pulled an old square box from the back of the drawer, velvet or felt, like a jewel case, opened now to a medal. Jake thought of the hundreds lying on the Chancellery floor, not put away like this, treasured.
“Iron Cross, first class,” Bernie said. “Nineteen seventeen. A veteran. He never said.”
Jake looked at the medal, then handed it back. “He was a good German.”
“I wish I knew what that meant.” “It used to mean this,” Jake said. “Almost done?” “Yeah, grab the files. You think there’s anything in the bedroom? Not many effects, are there?”
“Just the books.” He took a Karl May from the shelf, a souvenir, then moved to the table and picked up one of the folders and flipped it open. A Herr Krieger, said to have been in a concentration camp, now Category IV, no evidence of Nazi activity, release advised. He glanced idly down the page, then stopped, staring at it.
Of course. No, not of course. Impossible.
“My god,” he said.
“What?” Bernie said, coming in from the bedroom.
“You know how you said evidence lands on your desk? Some just landed on mine. I think.” Jake scooped up the files. “I need the jeep.”
“The jeep?”
“I have to check something. Another file. It won’t take long.”
“You can’t drive like that. One hand?”
“I’ve done it before.” Bumping through the Tiergarten. “Come on, quick,” he said, his hand out for the keys.
“It’s getting dark,” Bernie said, but tossed them over. “What am I supposed to do here?”
“Read that.” He nodded at the Karl May. “He tells a hell of a story.”
He headed west to Potsdamerstrasse, then south toward Kleist Park. In the dusk only the bulky Council headquarters had shape, lit up by a few offices working late, the car park nearly deserted. Up the opera house staircase, down the hall, the translucent door to Muller’s office dark but not locked. Only the Germans huddled behind locks now.
He flicked on the light. Jeanie’s usual neat desk, every pencil put away. He went over to the filing cabinet and flipped the tabs until he found the right folder, then carried it back to the desk with the per-silscheins. It was only after he’d looked through it, then at the per-silscheins once more, that he sat down, sinking back against the chair, thinking. Follow the points. But he saw, even before he reached the bottom of the column, that Gunther had found it without even knowing. Sitting there all along.
And now what? Could he prove it? He could already see, with the inevitable sinking feeling, that Ron would take care of this too, another story to protect the guilty, in the interests of the Military
Government. Maybe a little quiet justice later, when no one was looking. And why should anyone look? Emil back safe, the Russians foiled-everyone satisfied except Tully, who hadn’t mattered in the first place. The wrong war again. Jake would win and get nothing. Not even reparations. He sat up, staring at Tully’s transfer sheet, the block capitals in fuzzy carbon. Not this time. Not an eye for an eye, but something, a different reparation, one for the innocent.
He leaned over, opened the desk drawers to his side, and rummaged through. Stacks of government forms, printed, second sheets gummed for carbons, arranged in marked piles. He mentally tipped his hat to Jeanie. Everything in its place. He pulled one out, then looked for another, a different pile, and swung around to the typewriter, removing the cover with his good hand and rolling in the first form, aligning it so that the letters would fill the box without hitting the line, official. When he started to type, a one-finger peck, the sound of the keys filled the room and drifted out to the lonely corridor. A guard came by, suspicious, but only nodded when he saw Jake’s uniform.
