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Eugenia to have taken this train alone at midnight? To meet a lover? To purchase narcotics? It all seemed so improbable. And what about this sleepwalking business? Could she have really not been awake?It seemed even more absurd. Perhaps she hadn’t come to Spandau at all. Perhaps she only took this line and got off at any of a dozen stops along the way. He was just too tired to think.
    Like a sleepwalker himself.
    Even before dawn his eyes popped open. He’d been dreaming. At the Gloria Palast, Berlin’s most famous movie theater, he’d been watching Marlene Dietrich’s newest Hollywood hit. She was magical as ever, only the audience was horrified. People began running out of the theater, screaming. Willi looked closer and saw the great star’s legs were monstrous. Inside out! Instead of strutting across the screen, she hobbled, her body growing more hideously mutilated every frame.
    He was still in a strange state of wide-awake exhaustion when he arrived at the Police Presidium, surprised to find Gunther already in his office. Ruta, whistling, brought in fresh coffee and
Brötchen
.
    “You look funny, Gunther,” Willi said, the moment he saw the kid’s expression.
    Gunther shot him a troubled glance. “Here.” He slid over a sheet of paper. “The top orthopedic surgeons in Germany.”
    Willi didn’t recognize any of the names, but was glad to see all but a few had Berlin addresses. He folded the paper and slipped it in his jacket pocket.
    “I haven’t found anything yet on bone transplants. It’s a pretty obscure topic.”
    “Try the university medical library. Or Charité Hospital. There’s got to be something.”
    “Yes, sir.” Gunther wrote these down. “Now, as far as missing Americans go, there were three in 1932, but only one was female. Her name, Gina Mancuso, from the State of New York, a little town called Schenectady.”
    Mancuso. Willi recalled those dark, warm eyes.
    “Let’s see her file.”
    “It wasn’t there.”
    “Come now.”
    “Her name and country of origin were on the Central Missing Persons Manifesto, but her file was missing from Archives.”
    “Not only she, but her file missing? That’s very odd.”
    “You know the pretty one down there, Elfrieda?” Gunther added. “She swore she saw it a week ago realphabetizing the
m’s.
But she searched and searched and it sure wasn’t there now.”
    “No one checked it out?”
    “Not officially.”
    “Well, I’m going to have to put you on this, Gunther, while I go chasing after the Bulgarian princess. You’ve got to find out everything you can about Gina Mancuso, and let’s see if we can’t at least make a positive ID.”
    “There’s more, sir. Remember, the Prussian state asylums?”
    “Yes, of course. What did you find? Had this Mancuso been institutionalized?”
    “No record of that. But regarding the shaving of hair—all state institutions abandoned the practice more than four years ago.”
    “I see.” Willi thought about it. On one hand this was good news. On the other, a puzzling bit of information.
    “And would you like to take a guess at the number of inmates who’ve gone missing from only one of those institutions, the Berlin-Charlottenburg Asylum, in the past year?”
    “I imagine there’s always a fair number.”
    “Try two hundred and fifty-five.”
    “Seems high.”
    Gunther slid Willi a typed list several pages long.
    “All these people escaped?”
    “Not a single one. They were removed. Eighty-five at a time. In three evacuations. Months apart.”
    Willi read the top of each page. “What is this, ‘Special Handling’?”
    “No one seems to have any idea.”
    “Well, who removed them?”
    “No one seems to have any idea.”
    “That’s preposterous.” Willi was getting annoyed. Why was Gunther bothering him with this? “Somebody must know who took them. Why do you even say they’re missing?”
    “Because that’s exactly it, sir. They are. There’s no record anywhere of where they