"Respectable" society is murderous, but when the protagonist starts digging deeper into the underworld, he discovers, hidden but still there, (what we would call) decent or even heroic people: first, old men still playing chess at the tables in Washington Square; a former Roman Catholic priest who had once broken under Gestapo interrogation and who dreams of a second chance to die as a martyr (the detective protagonist grants him his wish); a member of the underground, known as "Patties" (from George S. Patton, who together with Douglas MacArthur was executed in the "St. Louis Trials") still carrying on a desperate anti-German fight against all odds; finally the hunted Jew himself (who turns out to be from our own world, having fallen into this world by the worst of bad fortune). The protagonist finally kills him—not out of anti-Semitism which he does not really feel (he was born when Jews had already become a literally dead issue) but in a sort of "kindness" since sending him on to Berlin would have only exposed him to some torture before being killed.