—and I wear his clothes: his shirts, his pants, vests, and sport coats, his tweeds and flannels, he has to hang onto his dark suits for official occasions. He dresses me just as his wife once dressed me a dozen Ice Age years ago, me, a youthful pavement pounder who became a dandy at the hands of a woman of the world—no, not by any means a gigolo, no cold-blooded lounge lizard or gold digger. I was too sentimental for that. I loved Stella and wouldn’t have traded her for Garbo, to say nothing of Dietrich. I didn’t know any other worldly-wise women, my memories of the Côte d’Azur having been buried under twelve years of schooling in the lap of my relatives’ family: Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and Cousin Wolfgang. Even the fashion magazines Aunt Selma bought on the sly didn’t excite my daydreams as much as the movies. The “wide world” was the one on the screen: Adolphe Menjou in a silk suit and Panama hat brings Marlene Dietrich a fresh, dewy bouquet of roses at the edge of the Moroccan desert, but she won’t stay with him. She’ll follow me, the French Foreign Legionnaire Gary Cooper, into an uncertain future. Stella doesn’t give a fig what John, his fellow diplomats, or Viennese or Bucharest high society think or say about her either. Nor does she have to throw away her high heels like Dietrich to walk more easily through the sand (how her tender soles will soon be burning!); she doesn’t have to grab a goat by its horns and drag it along in my wake either. She, Stella, takes me by the hand and leads me to Prix and Knize and has me measured for half a dozen suits. A woman of the world likes to dress up her baby doll—and John grins and bears our game. He grins and bears all the games here in Nuremberg too and assumes—no, uses his grin to force the others to grin and bear his game, for example, the absurdity that he’s brought me here to testify about Stella’s murder. Just imagine testifying about the murder of a single, solitary person when what’s at issue is the murder of millions. Why does he do it? It can’t be for my sake; I’m not important to him. It was purely by accident that our paths crossed again in Hamburg, in front of the Hotel Atlantic. The thing that led me to be walking past was my aimless wandering through Hamburg’s construction sites and the fields of rubble where some testimonies to the city’s proud past were still standing: the town hall and the stock exchange, some luxury hotels, the villas of the moneybags on the banks of the Alster, the dance halls on the Reeperbahn, a few churches, and the gingerbread cottages of Whores’ Alley, all surrounded by ruins, rubble dumps being shoveled out for new foundations. I wandered through this Baalbek with my ribs showing and happened to pass the Atlantic just as he, John, was coming out with a group of resplendent top brass from the occupying army.