Probably an overdose of sleeping pills. Let’s try to see what we can get out of her. Listen, are you Frau Rosenthal?”

She nods. “That’s right, gentlemen, Lore, or strictly speaking Sara Rosenthal. My husband’s in prison in Moabit, I have two sons in the U.S.A., a daughter in Denmark, and another in England…”

“And how much money have you sent them?” Detective Inspector Rusch asks quickly.

“Money? Why money? They all have plenty of money! Why would I send them money?”

She nods seriously. Her children are all comfortably off. They could quite easily take responsibility for their parents as well. Suddenly she remembers something she has to say to these gentlemen. “It’s my fault,” she says with a clumsy tongue that feels heavier and heavier in her mouth, and starts to babble, “it’s all my fault. Siegfried wanted to flee Germany long ago. But I said to him, ‘Why leave all the lovely things behind, why sell the good business here for a pittance? We’ve done nothing to hurt anyone, they won’t do anything to us.’ I persuaded him, otherwise we would have been long gone!”

“And what have you done with the money?” the inspector asks, a little more impatiently.

“The money?” She tries to think. There was some left somewhere. Where did it get to? But concentrating is a strain for her, so she thinks of something else. She holds out the sapphire bracelet to the Inspector. “There!” she says simply. “There!”

Inspector Rusch casts a swift look at it, then looks round at his two companions, the alert Hitler Youth leader and his own regular number two, that sluggish lump Friedrich. He sees the two of them are watching him tensely. So he knocks the hand with the bracelet impatiently aside, takes the heavy woman by the shoulders, and shakes her hard. “Wake up, Frau Rosenthal!” he shouts. “That’s an order! I’m telling you to wake up!”

He lets her go, and her head lolls against the back of the sofa, her body sags—her tongue lisps something incomprehensible. This method of bringing her round seems not to have been the right one. For a while the three men look silently at the old woman slumped on the sofa, not recovering her consciousness.

The inspector suddenly whispers very quietly, “Why don’t you take her back to the kitchen with you, and wake her up!”

The assistant executioner Friedrich merely nods. He picks the heavy woman up with one arm and carefully clambers with her over the obstacles on the floor.

When he reaches the door, the inspector calls after him, “And keep it quiet, will you! I don’t want any noise on Sunday morning in a tenement. Otherwise we’ll do it in Prinz Albrecht Strasse.* I’ll be taking her back there later anyway.”

The door shuts behind them, and the inspector and Hitler Youth leader are alone.

Inspector Rusch stands by the window and looks down at the street below. “Quiet street, this,” he says. “A real play street, eh?”

Baldur Persicke affirms that it is indeed a quiet street.

The inspector is a little nervous, but not because of the business involving Friedrich and the old Jewess in the kitchen. Pah, worse things happen every day of the week. Rusch is a lawyer manqué, who made his way into the police service. Later, he graduated to the Gestapo. He likes his work.