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basement cinema off Leicester Square, until they tore it down in the Sixties. Calamity Jane, in The Paleface . Dorothy in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . The Old Man says, What the hell are you grinning about? Fogg, jolted back into the present, says, Why did you bring me back?
    But the Old Man just wouldn’t start. Fogg knows the game, only it is not a game. His palms itch. Knows everything’s been set up, ever so carefully. Says, at last, the words dragged out of him unwillingly, When we went past the cipher room, earlier … leaves it open, like a question.
    The Old Man, eyes bright and predatory. Yes?
    Fogg says, What happened in the North Sea?
    – That is not your concern, the Old Man says. Waits. Fogg says, I heard them mention a name.
    – Oh?
    – Snow Storm, Fogg says.
    The Old Man sits back. Like he’s been waiting for this moment. Regards Fogg for a long while with those bright eyes. Eyes that saw you, wherever you went. Whatever you tried to hide. Says, at last, softly, But that wasn’t what he called himself, was it, Fogg?
    – No, Fogg says. Thinking, you bastard. Thinking, at least it’s begun.
    – What did he call himself, Fogg? the Old Man says.
    Fogg looks to Oblivion. For help. But there’s nothing there. Oblivion sits like a stone. His angular face pale and beautiful like a Greek statue. Fogg looks away.
    – Schneesturm , he says. He called himself Schneesturm.
    The words, like icicles, hang in the air. The Old Man smiles. Savours the moment. Fogg remembers him interviewing prisoners, after the war. The small, windowless room, breath fogging the air, a succession of German prisoners secured to the chair.

20. BERLIN–MARIENDORF DP CAMP 1945
    A massive place, the throng of humanity is impossible to classify and tag correctly, but has to be, needs to be sorted, filed, questioned. Displaced Persons. DPs. There are similar camps all over Germany, and in neighbouring Austria, in places like Bad Reichenhall and Cornberg and Mittenwald and Pocking. Places no one’s ever heard of, or ever wanted to. Fogg’s never seen anything like it. The women like walking skeletons, skin over protruding ribs, bare feet covered in sores, heads shaved as the head lice crawled away on the cold ground. Men with that look in their eyes that said nothing could touch them any more. A school class where a dark-haired woman he knew slightly, her name was Anda Pinkerfeld, taught the children to sing Hebrew songs. Walking past the window with the singing coming from the inside, his feet leaving bootmarks in the dirty snow.
    – Sorting and classifying, the Old Man says. Fogg nods politely. Sorting is done according to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force guidelines. People from all over Europe are at the camp, sorted and tagged, by SHAEF guidelines, into: evacuees, war or political refugees, political prisoners, forced or voluntary workers, Todt workers, former forces under German command, deportees, intruded persons, extruded persons, civilian internees, ex-prisoners of war, and stateless persons.
    With one category missing from the list altogether.
    Fogg doesn’t like the camp and doesn’t like the work, which has nothing to do with either sorting or tagging where the Bureau is concerned. It’s interrogation, pure and simple, with the solitary object of locating and holding on to any Übermenschen trying to disguise themselves in the civilian population.
    Hence the line of bootmarks in the sludge, past the classroom and the children’s reedy voices in song, past the lines of women and men waiting patiently and the soldiers watching them and smoking and around the back of the long one-storey building, and through an unmarked door (another Old Man favourite).
    Inside, the cold seems worse. Air condenses out of our mouths when we breathe. We know. We’ve seen inside the place before. There is a metal desk and a metal chair nailed to the floor before it. Behind the desk another chair, more comfortable, without the