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myself. If anybody could, I could do it.
    I told myself I would tell the police that it had seemed to me (and it had seemed to me) that the fact of there being a secret place ready to receive the body was a manifestation of fate’s apology for having slipped up when that boy slipped. (It had certainly seemed that way.) Because how many small houses have a secret burial ground handy? Only Felix’s house, and it had been there handy to make up for what had happened. Bomb shelters there were in houses, alas! There must be many houses now with bomb shelters, but Felix’s funk hole was not a bomb shelter.
    When you build a bomb shelter, you get plans from the government. You call in a contractor. You take it off your taxes. Felix’s funk hole was not like that at all.
    He had remembered, he remembered now, Felix showing it to him on his first visit to Bradley. He remembered Felix taking the spade from the gardening shed and with its edge lifting up the wooden tray with the plantings in it, the wooden tray which was also the door of the funk hole.
    â€œA what?” he had asked Felix.
    â€œEnglish expression, Hanno. It means a place you can hide when you are frightened. I know that this is Bradley, Connecticut, and not Wien, Austria, Hanno. You don’t have to tell me this is 1954 and not 1939, but,” Felix had said, “even if you got me away from them, Hanno … even if they didn’t tattoo their mark on my right arm, it is tattooed inside. I am still not at ease all the way down, Hanno. To be comfortable all the way down, I still need to make certain that if these good kind people here turn into beasts as so many of our good kind people did in Wien, that, until they recover themselves, I will have somewhere to hide. An old man’s foolishness, my dear,” Felix had said, “but for me this is the most important room in my house; this one I am rationally sure I will never have to use.”
    Because Felix’s funk hole had been against the enemy at home, the potential neighbor-enemy, Felix had kept it secret. Do-it-yourself, it had been. Felix had done-it-himself, and in the whole world only he and Anni knew about the funk hole, and therefore it had been irresistible to hide the body in it.
    Yes, he had told himself that if he ever had to explain it to the police, he would ask them whether they could, with all the means of hiding the body handy, have passed up the opportunity. “I couldn’t undo what had happened. The boy was dead … I couldn’t change that.” He would make a Hanno face, shrug a Hanno shrug. “I couldn’t pass it up that night,” he would say. “Be honest, be honest now, gentlemen, could you?”
    He had told himself that if he changed his mind in the morning, the beauty of the funk hole included being able to change his mind. Irresistible!
    He had moved away from the telephone and opened the front door carefully and closed it softly after him, then had needed to return for his flashlight because, although the terrace light, still on, showed the body, it did not extend to the end of the grounds where the funk hole was.
    But if someone should come along when nobody ever did and see him? Well, he had decided, that was up to the Fates. Shading the light, he had gone down the path to the gardener’s shed. (“Cultivate your garden,” Voltaire said.) He had taken the spade Felix had used. He had pried up the edge of the wooden tray-door, seeing the plants black and burned by the first frosts. (This had been much easier for him than for the frail Felix. Easy had done it.)
    He had laid the door lid back on the ground carefully, with as little damage as possible to the dead autumnal plants, and had then let himself into the vault. Felix had showed him how it was stocked with supplies. Felix, breathless, had sat on that army cot in the corner and exhibited the periscope he had arranged to let in sufficient air. (That, though,