He’d turned on his computer after the funeral, and by dinnertime he had uncovered information that would have required a proper detective to burn a lot of shoe leather and cigarettes, waste a lot of time in the records room and the newspaper morgue, and probably bust a few heads as well. I turned up the volume on the television to drown out the self-satisfied little purring noises he was making as he tapped on his keys. Some academic types were talking about old war movies on the History Channel. I liked old war movies, and I wanted to write what they were saying into my memory notebook. “I think the continuing significance of Nazis as mass culture villains is connected to the fact that this is an unambiguous evil that has been essentially defanged,” said a bearded, bespectacled man on the screen. It took me a second to recognize him as the same NYU film professor who had been popping up on every channel the last few weeks, talking about the end of the tough-guy era. “We can hate them,”
