I took to hanging around in the entrance hall like a page boy in the hope of laying eyes on her. Even Hedda Adlon remarked on the similarity.

“I’m thinking of asking you to read Lorenz Adlon’s rulebook for page boys,” she joked.

“I read that. It’ll never sell. For one thing, there are too many rules. And for another, most of these page boys are too busy running errands to have the time to read anything longer than War and Peace.”

She laughed at that. Hedda Adlon usually liked my jokes. “It’s not that long,” she said.

“Try telling that to a page boy. Anyway, the jokes in War and Peace are better.”

“Have you read it? War and Peace?”

“I’ve started it several times, but after four years of war I usually declare an armistice and then sell the book down the river.”

“There’s someone who’d like to meet you. And it so happens she’s a writer.”

Naturally, I knew exactly whom Hedda was talking about. Writers, especially lady writers from New York, were thin on the ground at the Adlon that month. It probably had a lot to do with the fifteen-mark-a-night room rate. This was slightly cheaper if you didn’t have a bath, and a lot of writers don’t, but the last American writer who’d stayed at the Adlon had been Sinclair Lewis, and that was in 1930. The Depression hit everyone, of course. But no one gets depressed quite like a writer.

We went upstairs to the little apartment the Adlons kept in the hotel. I say “little,” but only by the standards of the large hunting estate they also kept in the countryside, away from Berlin. The apartment was nicely decorated-a fine example of late Wilhelmine wealth. The carpets were thick, the curtains heavy, the bronze hulking, the gilt abundant, and the silver solid; even the water in the carafe looked like it had extra lead in it.

Mrs. Charalambides was seated on a little birch-wood sofa with white cushions and a music-stand back. She was wearing a dark blue wraparound dress, a triple string of good pearls, diamond clip earrings, and immediately below her cleavage, a matching sapphire brooch that must have fallen off a maharajah’s best turban. She hardly looked like a writer-that is, unless she’d been a queen who’d given up her throne to write novels about the grand hotels of Europe. She spoke German well, which was fine with me since, for several minutes after shaking her gloved hand, I could hardly speak German myself and I was more or less obliged to let these two women talk across me like a Ping-Pong table.

“Mrs. Charalambides-”

“Noreen, please.”

“Is a playwright and journalist.”

“Freelance.”

“For the Herald Tribune.”

“In New York.”

“She’s just returned from Moscow, where one of her plays-”

“My only play, so far.”

“Was being produced by the famous Moscow Art Theater, after a very successful run on Broadway.”

“You should be my agent, Hedda.”

“Noreen and I were at school together. In America.”

“Hedda used to help me with my German. Still does.”

“Your German is perfect, Noreen. Don’t you agree, Herr Gunther?”

“Yes. Perfect.” But I was looking at Mrs. Charalambides’ legs. And her eyes. And her beautiful mouth. Now, that was what I called perfect.

“Anyway, her newspaper has asked her to write an article about the forthcoming Berlin Olympiad.”

“There’s been a lot of opposition in America to the idea of our taking part in these Olympics, given your government’s racial policies. The AOC president, Avery Brundage, was over here in Germany just a few weeks ago. On a fact-finding mission. To see if Jews are being discriminated against. And, incredibly, he reported back to the AOC that they were not. As a result of which the AOC has now voted, unanimously, to accept Germany ’s invitation and to attend the Berlin Olympiad in 1936.”

“Any Olympiad that doesn’t include the United States,” said Hedda, “would be completely meaningless.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “Since the AOC president returned to the U.S., the boycott movement has collapsed. But my newspaper is puzzled. No, it’s astonished that Brundage could have arrived at the conclusions he did. The American ambassador, Mr. Dodd; the chief consul, Mr. Messersmith; and the vice consul, Mr. Geist, have all written to my government expressing their utter dismay at the president’s report. And reminding it of their own report, sent to the State Department last year, which highlighted the systematic exclusion of Jews from German sports clubs. Brundage-”

“He’s the president of the American Olympic Committee,” said Hedda, interrupting, redundantly.

“He’s a bigot,” said Mrs. Charalambides, becoming angrier. “And an anti-Semite. You’d have to be, to ignore what’s happening in this country. The many instances of open racial discrimination. The signs in the parks. In the public baths. The pogroms.”

“Pogroms?” I frowned. “Surely that’s an exaggeration. I haven’t heard of any pogroms. This is Berlin, not Odessa.”

“In July, four Jews were murdered by SS men, in Hirschberg.”

“Hirschberg?” I sneered. “That’s in Czechoslovakia. Or Poland. I forget which. It’s troll country. Not Germany.”

“It’s the Sudetenland,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “The people there are ethnic Germans.”

“Well, don’t tell Hitler,” I said. “Or he’ll want them back. Look, Mrs. Charalambides, I don’t agree with what’s happening in Germany. But is it really any worse than what’s happening in your own country? The signs in the parks? In the public baths? The lynchings? And I hear it’s not just Negroes who get strung up by white people. Mexicans and Italians also go carefully in certain parts of the United States. And I don’t recall anyone suggesting a boycott of the Los Angeles Games, in 1932.”

“You’re well informed, Herr Gunther,” she said. “And right, of course. As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about just such a lynching I saw in Georgia, in 1930. But I’m here and I’m Jewish, and my newspaper wants me to write about what’s happening in this country, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“Well, good for you,” I said. “I hope you can change the AOC’s mind. I’d like to see the Nazis take a blow to their prestige. Especially now that we’ve started spending money on it. And I’d love it, of course, if that Austrian clown got some egg on his face. But I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. I’m a hotel detective, not a press attaché.”

Hedda Adlon opened a silver cigarette box the size of a small mausoleum and pushed it toward me. There were English cigarettes on one side of the box and Turkish on the other. It looked like Gallipoli in there. I chose the winning side-at least in the Dardanelles -and let her light me. The cigarette, just like the service, was better than I was used to. I looked hopefully at the decanters on the sideboard, but Hedda Adlon didn’t drink much herself and probably thought I felt the same way about the stuff. Apart from that, she was doing a fine job of making me look nice. After all, she’d had plenty of practice doing it.

“Herr Behlert told me what happened when you went to the Alex,” said Hedda. “About that poor Jewish man and how the police are refusing to investigate his death. Because of his race.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Apparently you thought he might have been a boxer.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Neither of them was smoking. Not yet. Perhaps they hoped to make me light-headed. The Turkish cigarette in my mouth was strong enough, but I had the feeling I was going to need more than one to go along with whatever it was they wanted from me.

Noreen Charalambides said, “I was thinking that the dead man’s story might be the basis of an interesting article in my newspaper. In the same way I wrote about that lynching in Georgia. It occurred to me that the dead man might have been murdered by the Nazis because he was Jewish. It also occurred to me that there might be an important sports angle that could tie his story in with the Olympics. Did you know that the German Boxing Federation was the first German sports organization to exclude Jews?”