This sense of the unreal flows seamlessly between flashbacks and the present day. In one of Rinaldi's most eloquent passages, Vogel recalls witnessing his superior officer's suicide during the last days of the Reich, and then wanders off into his own thoughts in one of the book's most heartrending (and least Latinate) passages:

Life was so dear, so precious, yet in the end it was so cheap. He left the office and walked out onto the field, into the night, and kept walking, to the end of the field and onto a road. The road let to another road, and still he went, numb, not wanting to think. Hitler was dead, and Sinzer was dead. The war was lost, but it had been lost a long time ago, and now it would go on for a while until someone figured out how to stop it. The moon halfway up the sky, chalky white. A cat crossed the road. A dog howled. The sudden wail of distant sirens, and the long finger of a search beam probing the sky for enemy planes... He was heading home, all the way to Pforzheim, pushing on as if in a dream, and, one way or another, he would get there. There were buildings he remembered, steeples and bridges, the school where he had studied Latin, and he was thinking home, home, and he could taste the memory. But that, he understood, was all it was, a memory, because the house he grew up in had been bombed, and his parents were dead. He knew all of that, but it hadn't yet fully sunk in. He was making his way into a past that no longer existed.

Back in the present day, being interviewed, Vogel finds himself "tired of the war, and tired too of the ones who, so many years later, are still bleeding from it." But Rinaldi's characters can never fully escape from past calamities, and are always staring into the face of time, in some cases literally, as when the dying Harry Falcon regrets having been unable to buy and destroy the giant Colgate clock that glares into his penthouse apartment from across the river in Jersey City: "I hate them all. Clocks are time, and time is death. Who needs it?"