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got the third best public speaker in Germany to teach me.”

Three
    I took the S-Bahn train to Wannsee. The RAF had dropped a few token bombs near the station at Halensee, where there was now a large gang of railwaymen working on the track to keep the west of Berlin moving smoothly. The men stood back as the little red-and-yellow train passed slowly by, and as they did so a small boy in the carriage I was in gravely gave them the Hitler salute. When one of the track workers returned the salute, as if he had been saluting the leader himself, there was much mirth on and off the train. In Berlin a subversive sense of humor was never very far beneath the patriotic sham and counterfeit postures of everyday German life. Especially when there was a child to cover yourself; after all, it was disloyal to the leader not to return the Hitler salute, wasn’t it?
    It was the same journey I’d made when I’d had lunch with Arthur Nebe at the Swedish Pavilion, except that this time I was wearing a uniform. There was a line of cream-colored taxis parked in front of the Märklin train-set station but none of them were doing much business and about the only traffic around was on two wheels. A huge bicycle rack stood next to the entrance looking like a rest stop for the Tour de France. Some of the cabbies and the local florist were staring up at a man on a ladder who was painting one of the station’s church-shaped windows. In Wannsee, where nothing much ever happens, I suppose that was a performance of sorts. Maybe they were waiting for him to fall off.
    I crossed a wide bridge over the Havel onto Königstrasse and, ignoring Am Kleinen Wannsee to the south, which would have taken me to the offices of the International Criminal Police Commission at number 16, I walked along the northwest shore of the largest of Berlin’s lakes, onto Am Grossen Wannsee, past several yacht and boating clubs and elegant villas, to the address of the SS guesthouse Nebe had given me: numbers 56–58. In a road as exclusive as that it was easy enough to find. There was an SS armored car parked in front of a large set of wrought-iron gates and a guardhouse with a flag, otherwise everything was as quiet and respectable as a family of retired honeybees. If there was any trouble around there it certainly wasn’t going to come from the villa’s moss-backed neighbors. Trouble in Wannsee means your lawn mower has stopped working, or the maid didn’t turn up on time. Stationing an armored car in Am Grossen Wannsee was like ensuring a Vienna choirboy to sing Christmas carols.
    Inside a largish landscaped park was a Greek Revival–style villa with thirty or forty windows. It wasn’t the biggest villa on the lake but the bigger houses had bigger walls and were only ever seen by bank presidents and millionaires. The address had seemed familiar to me, and as soon as I saw the place I knew why. I’d been there before. The house had previously belonged to a client of mine. In the mid-thirties, before I got frog-marched back into Kripo by Heydrich, I tried my hand at being a private investigator, and for a while I’d been engaged by a wealthy German industrialist called Friedrich Minoux. A major shareholder in a number of prominent oil and gas companies, Minoux had hired me to subcontract an operative in Garmisch-Partenkirchen—where he owned another equally grand house—to keep an eye on his much younger wife, Lilly, who had chosen to live there, ostensibly for reasons of health. Maybe there was something insalubrious about the entitled air in Wannsee. It was too rich for her, perhaps, or maybe she just didn’t like all that blue sky and water. I didn’t know since I never met her and wasn’t able to ask her, but understandably, perhaps, Herr Minoux doubted the reasons she’d given him for not living in Wannsee, and once a month for most of 1935, I’d driven out to this villa in order to report on his wife’s otherwise blameless conduct. They’re the best kind