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the bookcase behind him, March could see Artur Nebe's book on criminology, published thirty years ago but still the standard text. Nebe had been head of the Kripo since 1933.
    "Let me see what you've got," said Koth.
    March handed over the cards. Koth glanced at them, nodding.
    "Male," said March. "About sixty. Dead for a day."
    "I know how he feels." Koth took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "All right. They'll go to the top of the pile."
    "How long?"
    "Should have an answer by morning." Koth put his glasses back on. "What I don't understand is how you know this man, whoever he was, had a criminal record."
    March did not know, but he was not going to hand Koth an excuse to wriggle out of his promise. "Trust me," he said.
    March arrived back at his flat at eleven. The ancient cage elevator was out of order. The stairs, with their threadbare brown carpet, smelled of other people's old meals, of boiled cabbage and burned meat. As he passed the second floor he could hear the young couple who lived beneath him quarreling.
    "How can you say that?"
    "You've done nothing! Nothing!"
    A door slammed. A baby cried. Elsewhere, someone turned up the volume of their radio in response. The symphony of apartment life. Once this had been a fashionable block. Now, like many of its tenants, it had fallen on harder times. He continued on up to the next floor and let himself in.
    The rooms were cold, the heating having failed to come on, as usual. He had five rooms: a living room with a good high ceiling, looking out onto Ansbacher-Strasse; a bedroom with an iron bedstead; a small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen; a spare room filled with salvage from his marriage, still packed in boxes five years later. Home. It was bigger than the forty-four square meters that was the standard size of a Volkswohnung —a People's Flat—but not much.
    Before March had moved in it had been occupied by the widow of a Luftwaffe general. She had lived in it since the war and had let it go to ruin. On his second weekend, redecorating the bedroom, he had stripped off the mildewed wallpaper and found tucked behind it a photograph, folded up very small. A sepia portrait, all misty browns and creams, dated 1929, taken by a Berlin studio. A family stood before a painted backdrop of trees and fields. A dark-haired woman gazed at a baby in her arms. Her husband stood proudly behind her, his hand resting on her shoulder. Next to him, a little boy. He had kept it on the mantelpiece ever since.
    The boy was Pili's age, would be March's age today.
    Who were these people? What had happened to the child? For years he had wondered, but hesitated—he always had plenty at the Markt to stretch his mind without finding fresh mysteries to unravel. Then, just before last Christmas, for no reason he could properly define—a vague and growing uneasiness that had happened to coincide with his birthday, no more than that—he had started to seek an answer.
    The landlord's records showed that the apartment had been rented between 1928 and 1942 to one Weiss, Jakob. But there was no police file on any Jakob Weiss. He was not registered as having moved, or fallen sick, or died. Calls to the records bureaus of the army, navy and Luftwaffe confirmed he had not been conscripted to fight. The photographer's studio had become a television rental shop, its records lost. None of the young people in the landlord's office remembered the Weisses. They had vanished. Weiss. White. A blank. By now, in his heart, March knew the truth—perhaps had always known it—but he went around one evening with the photograph even so, like a policeman, seeking witnesses, and the other tenants in the house had looked at him as if he were crazy even for asking. Except one.
    "They were Jews," the crone in the attic had said as she closed the door in his face.
    Of course. The Jews had all been evacuated to the east during the war. Everyone knew that. What had happened
    to them since was not a question anyone