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“What do you mean?”

“American law explicitly prohibits any convicted or even suspected Nazi officials from emigrating to the United States.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Truman brought it in. You went to America when Truman was president. You must have known.”

“As I said—”

“Dr. Fischer, right now, we’re having a chat in a restaurant. We can easily take ourselves somewhere less convivial; somewhere where I can be sure of making you miss your plane back to America tomorrow, even assuming that the fog lifts.”

“But this is nothing to do with the boy in the park.”

“I don’t know that.”

Fischer was silent for a few moments, evidently weighing up his options.

“Have you ever heard of Operation Paperclip?” he asked eventually.

*  *  *

Operation Paperclip sounded like a bad spy novel, but was gospel truth, sickening or pragmatic, depending on which side of the fence one sat.

What did Herbert think had happened to all the Nazi scientists? Did he think that the Americans had let them stay in Germany to help rebuild the country? Or, God forbid, skip the border and go to work for the Russians?

Of course not. That would have presented a far greater security threat than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had, or even any Nazi sympathies they might continue to maintain.

So the Americans had taken the scientists. In fact, they had gone after the scientists with at least as much zeal as they had the war criminals.

Not that the two were necessarily mutually exclusive, Herbert said.

Fischer clicked his tongue and chose to ignore this last comment.

To get round Truman’s ban on Nazis entering or working in America, the CIA had found ways to whitewash their war records:

Operation Paperclip, because the relevant files were marked with a paperclip; nothing more than that, all very low-key. It had originally been sold to the American people as a temporary measure, six months only. Like many such “temporary measures,” it had never been rescinded or superseded.

Were the Germans willing to comply?

Of course. Not only would they escape punishment, but they were as ardent an enemy of communism as the Americans were.

America and the Soviet Union against the Germans; America and Germany against the Soviet Union. One day, the Reds and the Boche would gang up on the Yanks, and the circle would be complete.

It was like
1984
, Herbert reflected, where Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania were always at war, two against one, but the alliances were always shifting, and the past was always being rewritten. There was no such thing as history.

And if that was the case, Herbert thought, then what the hell had he and the millions of others been fighting for in the war?

He remembered what he had told Hannah the first night he met her; that if he had ever doubted the justness of the cause against Nazism, then with one look at Belsen, he doubted no more.

And now that struggle counted for nothing, because everyone needed scientists, no matter where they had come from and what they had done.

It did not altogether surprise Herbert that governments continued to place expediency above ideology, but he was gratified to find that it still had the power to revolt him.

He turned his attention back to Fischer.

Had people protested? Of course. But what good had that done? The public was tired of atrocity stories. It was long ago, and they wanted to forget all about such unspeakable happenings.

Or rather, Herbert thought, the public reckoned that what had been done was so horrific that there was no punishment on earth suitable; so when the law was violated and justice perverted, they just shrugged and said, ah well, told you so.

Herbert did not add the rider: America’s war had been primarily in the Pacific, and so what the Nazis had done resonated less, at least on an emotional level, with them than with the Europeans.

But surely, Herbert asked, surely the scientists screened by the U.S. to prove that they were untainted must also have been screened in Germany to prove their loyalty to Hitler?

Of course, said Fischer.

Then the whole thing was a farce.

Of course. Fischer called it
Persilschein.
Bogus certificates could wash off even the brownest stains.

Despite himself, Herbert laughed.

Herbert took Fischer back to the Embassy, again going the long way round via the main thoroughfares—Shaftesbury
Avenue, Regent Street, Oxford Street—rather than risk getting lost in the back streets.

Papworth looked relieved to have his charge back. Herbert imagined that losing Fischer to the Metropolitan Police, if only for a night, would probably not have done the CIA man’s career prospects much good.

Herbert wondered how much Papworth knew of Fischer and Operation Paperclip.

Probably most, if not all of it. Papworth seemed the kind of man keen to equalize quantities of pies and fingers.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Herbert asked.

“Down the hall, first right,” Papworth said. Herbert had already taken a step when he realized his mistake.

“Sorry; I meant the
bathroom.
As in the English definition. With a bath. And Dr. Fischer’s ring.”

Papworth laughed. “Two nations divided by a common language, huh? Upstairs. I’ll show you.”

He led the way, Herbert following, Fischer bringing up the rear.

The ring was on the side of the bath. It was silver, it was engraved in willowy swirls, and it fitted Fischer’s little finger perfectly.

Y
ou hear that?” Hannah whispered.

Herbert was so deeply asleep that Hannah had to repeat herself twice, shaking him from side to side, before he realized that her voice was not part of his dream.

“Hear what?” he said, struggling awake.

“That.” She paused. “There.”

“I can’t hear a thing.”

“Footsteps.”

“You’re imagining it.”

“I know every sound in this building, Herbert. I know noise of plumbing, windows opening, people downstairs, all. And that is not sound that should be here.”

“How do you know?”

“They footsteps. The stairs wooden. Footsteps quiet. Means that someone walk with much care.”

Herbert understood now. “Which means they don’t want to be heard.”

He got out of bed, rubbed his eyes, and walked out of the bedroom. The light switch for the living room was by the front door; he would turn it on and investigate.

He never got there.

A quick, expert clicking of the locks from outside, and the door was open.

In an imperfectly darkened flat—the dull orange glow of the fading fire gave glimmers of ambient light—a man loomed from the shadows.

He dived at Herbert.

It was like a rugby tackle, shoulder slamming into Herbert’s midriff, head tight against Herbert’s hip and arms wrapped round the backs of Herbert’s thighs. Herbert went down hard onto his backside, the impact zagging stingers up his spine.

“Herbert?” Hannah shouted. “What happen?”

“Where’s Stensness’ stuff?” the man whispered.

His voice was too low for Herbert to identify—was it Papworth, was it Kazantsev, was it Fischer?—and, since his head was pressed up close against Herbert’s, Herbert could feel from the rough scratch of wool against his cheek that the man was wearing a balaclava.

“I’ve no idea,” Herbert said, more calmly than he felt.

The punch came out of nowhere—at least, out of the darkness, which equated to more or less the same thing.

With no time to anticipate, prepare himself, flinch, or try to duck the blow, Herbert was left only with an explosion of light behind his eyes and, after a second, a wave of pain radiating out from the bridge of his nose.

“Herbert!” Hannah’s voice was louder this time, more urgent.

Herbert heard her get out of bed; and the man did, too.

He hit Herbert again, more to keep him quiet than anything else; then he pushed himself to his feet and ran over to the fireplace, too fast for Herbert to tell whether his gait was recognizable.

Hannah’s fire tools were laid out in neat rows, the easier for her to find them: a poker, a shovel, and a pair of bellows.

The man picked up the poker, turned around, and saw Hannah advancing blindly across the room toward him, her screams edged hard with the righteous outrage of one who has suffered more than her share of violations.

Herbert saw what was going to happen, and was already shouting, but to no avail.

The intruder swung the poker in a wide arc, from far behind his shoulders to maximize the speed, and then flatstick through the air.

Hannah must have felt the wind as the poker came toward her, for she tried to turn away at the last minute, but too late.

The poker reached the end of its considerable and rapid travel pretty much dead center on her forehead. She collapsed as though someone had cut her strings.

The man did not wait to see her hit the ground. He turned back toward Herbert.

“Where?” he hissed, again too low for Herbert to identify his voice.

Herbert shook his head.

Someone else, in his shoes at this moment, might have simply capitulated, but Herbert had come too far just to give in, even at the risk of further stoking the rage which pulsed from behind the balaclava.

The intruder shifted his grip on the poker, and placed the end into the pile of coal still burning gently in the fireplace.

He left it there for a few moments, twirling it from one side to the other as though participating in an elaborate glass-blowing process.

When he took it out, the end shimmered orange.

He advanced toward Herbert again, shrugging
his shoulders. What did Herbert expect, the gesture intimated, if he wouldn’t be reasonable and give up the secret?

Herbert tried to get up, but he was still groggy from the punches.

The man put his foot on Herbert’s breastbone, pushed him back prone, stepped onto his chest. Then, placing his feet apart the better to balance himself and keep Herbert flat, he held the poker so that the end was hovering a few inches from Herbert’s right eye.

Blind, Herbert thought,
blind.
This man would blind him, just as Mengele had blinded Hannah in Auschwitz.

Herbert’s mind simply would not compute the terror.

He wanted to answer, but he could not; it seemed that he had lost not only the power of speech, but the very memory of what speech was.

The poker came nearer; close enough for Herbert to feel the heat on his cheek.

Would one eye be enough, or would the intruder want both?

“Hannah? Are you all right?”

It took Herbert a second or two to work out that the voice had come not from within himself, or indeed from the man standing over him with a poker, but from the direction of the front door.

“I heard shouting through my ceiling; it woke me up. Is everything all right?”

It must be the downstairs neighbor, Herbert thought; and at that moment the neighbor turned the overhead light on, summed up the situation in short order, and launched himself at the man with the poker,
knocking him off Herbert and back against the low wooden table by the sofa. Herbert heard a sharp crack as one, maybe more, of the table legs gave way.

The neighbor was quick, but not quite quick enough. Though he had taken the poker man off balance, he had not managed to pin his arms.

The intruder shook his head, smiled beneath the balaclava as though he were an uncle ragging with his eager nephews, and then swung the poker twice.

The first blow knocked the wind from the neighbor, the second jerked his head upward as he fell to the floor.

The intruder’s eyes never blinked; not once, not even at the moments of impact.

Lights on, one neighbor already alerted; both Herbert and the intruder were making very much the same calculations.

Herbert saw the final swing of the poker, but he was too groggy to do anything about it.

His arm was still coming up to block a blow that would surely have broken his hand had he got there in time; but he was half a second too slow, and the impact of metal on the side of his head was enough.

Oblivion.

Herbert came round with several sensations competing for his attention: a pain at the front of his head which suggested that someone was sledgehammering a drill bit into his skull; shrieks in a voice which he identified as Hannah’s; a warmth on his cheek that graduated to an uncomfortable heat even in the few moments he lay still trying to work out what it was; and a tart choking in his throat that was harsher than anything the smog had managed to cause.

He processed all these disparate pieces of information through the sludge of his poker-battered mind, and came to a conclusion that a fully sentient human would have reached long before: the flat was on fire.

It was Hannah’s screams that had Herbert opening his eyes and pushing himself upright. Her howls were yelps of terror, atavistic and visceral, and he understood why.

For a blind person, there could surely be few fears greater than that of fire. But for a blind woman who had also, as a teenager, played in the lee of the Auschwitz crematorium as it spewed tongues of flame through spiraling smoke and turned the air leaden with the crisp stench of burning bodies … well, one could imagine.