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Center Party. He has to say that. But he’s blind. With all due regard for friendship, he’s been reported several times already, for things he’s said. I think he should be a little more careful.”
    “But,” she insisted, knowing herself to be safe among friends, “Father says Hitler is a warmonger.”
    Alwine looked at her with her large, imploring eyes. “Oh, Therese, do we really have to spoil this lovely day with something like that?”
    Leonard jumped up. “Let’s forget about politics. Today might be the last time we’re all together, and I was going to suggest that we promise, here and now, never to lose sight of one another, and always to be there for the others, as we have been for the last few years.”
    It was not a solemn moment. They laughed with relief and the release of tension, and loudly sealed the promise.
    The cheerfulness of the day had been like a finely spun thread. The arguments at dusk had almost snapped it. But they still managed the balancing act. They still knew how to place their friendship at the center of things and cling to it.
    Therese Mende tried to call up a memory of the sky, of what it was like in those days. Had it really been as infinitely high as she now thought? So high that the naive optimism of six young people had found space beneath it? And a few weeks later, as she well knew, the sky had been a different one. When they said good-bye to Jacob and Leonard at the station early one morning, and the word war stood up from the tables and went on the march, the sky hung low and was like the inside of an oyster shell. In with the silver and steel gray, there shimmered antique rose and violet.

Chapter 9

    April 21, 1998
    In the afternoon, Rita Albers had tried to reach Robert Lubisch on his cell phone and, after the fifth unsuccessful attempt, left him a message on his voice mail. To distract herself, she went out into the vegetable garden and watered the rows of seeds and new growth. She carried the green watering can back and forth to the cellar door to fill it, and each round trip made her decision firmer. Once all the rows had been watered, she called Schoofs, the landscape gardeners, and requested a quote for a well.
    After a cup of coffee in the kitchen, with her notes and the various photocopies spread out in front of her, she considered her next steps. She definitely had to get busy with the municipal archives. And she would talk to that Karl van den Boom again and find out about Sergeant Gerhard (retired). She should visit Heuer and perhaps . . . Pohl? The woman would have had to identify herself somewhere, to get work or lodging. Perhaps she had used her maiden name. She dialed the number of her journalist friend Köbler, who had a good track record of finding people. The word was that he had good contacts in the Land and federal police. They chatted about old times, and then she gave him an outline of the salient facts. Köbler promised to try. “Don’t expect too much, Rita,” he said at the end. “Much of the data from that time hasn’t been digitized yet. If you’re unlucky, the reports you’re after are lying in some archive somewhere. You don’t even have a location, and what if she’s gone abroad?”
    Rita shared his reservations. “But you’ll try, won’t you?” she pressed him.
    Robert Lubisch did not call back until late that evening, when she was sitting at her computer, writing up the results of her research so far.
    Rita told him what she had found out and heard his yesses and uh-huhs getting quieter and quieter, then finally disappearing altogether.
    “Are you still there?” she asked when she had finished and she could not even hear him breathing.
    “Yes,” he said, and there was amazement in his voice, as if he did not believe his own yes.
    Then she heard him ask quietly, “You mean, you think the man was still alive when my father took the papers?”
    Rita considered this. She had not thought about it, but it was of course a