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assassination squad in the woods. That was his seed-time, his bohème (Youth, sweet youth, said the song), and he never got another. In Hitler's service Judejahn became respectable, he made it, he put on weight, he got fancy-sounding titles, he married and acquired a brother-in-law: that opportunist Kapp comrade-in-arms, camp follower and carpetbagger, the Oberpresident and Oberbürgermeister, the Führers money man, denazified and now once again top dog, the old mayor re-elected by the people, by strictly democratic procedures. That was his way of doing things, that was his brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, who in his opinion was an asshole, and to whom, in a weak moment, he had written a letter: they weren't to shed any tears over him, he had landed on his feet. And then he had agreed to this idiotic reunion in Rome. His brother-in-law wrote that he'd fix everything. Fix what? His return, his decriminalization, his pardon, and then a little job at the end of it? The man was a windbag. Did Judejahn even want to go home? Did he require a certificate of acquittal, the freedom of a pardon? He was free anyway, here was his shopping list to prove it. He had weapons to buy, tanks, guns, aeroplanes: leftover gear that was no longer suitable for the next global dust-up, but pretty handy for a little desert fighting, for use against palace coup or popular uprising. Judejahn was accredited with banks, he had powers of attorney. He was meeting arms dealers from two hemispheres. There were old pals to try to recruit. He was in play. He enjoyed it. What did family matter against that? Shitty lot. You had to tough it out. Eva had been faithful to him, a faithful German woman, the type of womanhood one said one lived and fought for; and sometimes one even believed it. He was afraid. He was afraid of Eva, her unmade-up face and her hair-knot, the SA woman, the believer in Final Victory: she was all right, certainly, but nothing drew him to her. Besides, she was probably spent. And his son? That rat. What was going on behind that weird dumbshow? The letters he got hinted at changes.
    He couldn't fathom them. He spread out a map of Rome in front of him, like a general-staff map. He had to go up the Via Ludovisi, then down the Spanish Steps, from whose height he could control the city with a single cannon, yes, and then to the Via Condotti, to the middle-class hotel where they were all staying, waiting for him. They had supposed he would be staying there too, in the German auberge, as the guide books called it, with its cosy atmosphere of back home. And Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, the sensible advocate of sensible and realistic national policies, Pfaffrath who had made a comeback, and maybe even thought he was the cleverer of the two, because he was back at the tiller, and was in position for a new career in the new Germany, brother-in-law Pfaffrath, Oberbürgermeister and respected West German citizen, had wanted to take him under his wing, him, the supposed fugitive. That was probably how he'd sketched it out, he wanted to hold the vagabond in his arms, with all his past misdeeds and evasions forgiven him. But Judejahn would tell him where he could stick it, he'd been through too much for this idyll to charm him: dead or presumed dead, the bombed-out Berliner, the man who went missing in the cleaning-up operation, condemned at Nuremberg in contumaciam . But the High Court that passed judgments on fate, human destiny and the blind actions of history, was itself reeling about in a maze of its own, was not a Justice with blindfolded eyes, just a silly woman playing blind man's buff, who, since she administered justice where there was no justice, had herself sunk in the morass of events that were without moral. The High Court had no evidence as to whether Judejahn was alive or dead, and so the High Judge had carefully donned the black cap and condemned to death Judejahn, accused before all the world as a monster, in absentia, with the