In this chap­ter, the pro­tag­o­nist recounts a crit­i­cal meet­ing with Colonel Frank Wirta­nen. The nar­ra­tor’s lawyer, Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz, believes that secur­ing a wit­ness who saw the two togeth­er could turn the legal tide in his favor. Their inter­ac­tions unfold­ed dur­ing three sig­nif­i­cant meet­ings, with the first being on a park bench before the war, where casu­al observers wouldn’t have not­ed their sig­nif­i­cance. The sub­se­quent meet­ing occurred in Wies­baden, Ger­many, after the war, in a for­mer offi­cers’ mess hall, a set­ting adorned with a mur­al of war glo­ries over­shad­owed by impend­ing destruc­tion.

After being trans­ferred from a pris­on­er-of-war camp, the pro­tag­o­nist enters the din­ing hall alone, where he sees Wirta­nen, now dressed in an Amer­i­can sol­dier’s uni­form. They exchange for­mal­i­ties, with Wirta­nen com­ment­ing on the war and the narrator’s sur­vival through it, lead­ing to the painful real­iza­tion that his wife, Hel­ga, is like­ly dead. This kind of infor­ma­tion, relayed uncon­scious­ly via a cod­ed broad­cast, dis­tress­es him deeply, as it high­lights a frac­tured sense of self and the trag­ic sep­a­ra­tion from his wife.

Their dia­logue also high­lights the bit­ter real­i­ty of espi­onage, betray­al, and the roles they both played in the war. Wirta­nen can­did­ly notes that the nar­ra­tor was the only agent from his team to sur­vive the war unscathed, recall­ing the sac­ri­fices of sev­en women who helped him. As they pon­der the pro­tag­o­nist’s future and iden­ti­ty, he receives grim news about his par­ents’ pass­ing, a rev­e­la­tion that only adds to his emo­tion­al bur­den.

Wirta­nen sketch­es out the next steps for the pro­tag­o­nist, offer­ing a way to van­ish and assume a new iden­ti­ty, but down­plays the sig­nif­i­cance of such an oppor­tu­ni­ty. The nar­ra­tor bat­tles with feel­ings of worth­less­ness as Wirta­nen acknowl­edges that despite the hor­rors they endured, the past actions must be ratio­nal­ized or dis­card­ed. Towards the end of their meet­ing, an unex­pect­ed twist reveals anoth­er fig­ure from the pro­tag­o­nist’s life: Franklin Delano Rosen­feld, who had lis­tened to his broad­casts with glee—an irony under­scor­ing the com­plex nature of their world and lives inter­twined through deceit and sur­vival.