With World War II finally coming to an ending, Jake Geismar, former Berlin correspondent for CBS, has wangled one of the coveted press slots for the Potsdam Conference. His assignment: a series of articles on the Allied occupation. His personal agenda: to find Lena, the German mistress he left behind at the outbreak of the war. When he stumbles onto a murder - an American soldier has washed up on a lakeshore on the conference grounds - he thinks he has found the key that will unlock his Berlin story.What Jake finds instead is a larger story of corruption and intrigue reaching deep into the heart of the occupation. After twelve years of Nazi rule, six years of war, and months of brutal treatment by the Russians, Berlin has finally arrived at zero hour, a city not only physically but morally devastated. Children scavenge for food in the rubble, sex can be had for a cigarette, and heirlooms are traded for cans of PX rations. American GIs, flush with black market money, live in requisitioned villas and fraternize in underground jazz clubs; meanwhile, the air remains thick with mortar dust, and corpses still float in the canals. Berlin in July 1945 is like nowhere else - a tragedy, and a feverish party after the end of the world.And nothing is simple. As Jake searches the ruins for Lena, he discovers that years of war have led to unimaginable displacement and degradation. As he hunts for the soldier's killer, he learns that Berlin has become a city of secrets, a lunar landscape that seethes with social and political tension. When the two searches become entangled, Jake comes to understand that the American Military Government is already fighting a new enemy in the east, busily identifying the "good Germans" who can help with the next war. And hanging over everything is the larger crime, a crime so huge that it seems - the worst irony - beyond punishment. Read Less