Joe “Wilderness” Holderness has a well-earned reputation for going rogue, particularly when he’s bored. We catch a glimpse of him in East Berlin, in the summer of 1948, “trading coffee, butter and anything else the Russians had on their shopping list.” Through the prism of Wilderness’s black market activities, clues are dropped about his nature and future. Wilderness is not your standard Kim Philby-like, Oxbridge spy; “raised by thieves and whores back in London’s East End, he had come to regard honesty as aberrant.” Lying is second nature to Wilderness, as it would be to any “good Schieber.” It’s hard to exactly translate Schieber into English but a few synonyms are pusher, dealer, racketeer, gangster. You get the drift. In Wilderness’s world, “You lied and you were lied to.”