I went up a curving cast-iron staircase and found myself in a tall, elegant room with a chandelier as big as the underside of an iceberg, and several rococo murals that might have been painted by Fragonard if ever he’d been asked to illustrate the memoirs of Casanova with extreme obscenity. The vaulted gilt ceiling looked like the inside of a Fabergé egg. There were plenty of chairs and sofas that had been upholstered with the aid of an air compressor; they had long legs and narrow ankles with ball-and-claw feet. The girls seated on the chairs and sofas had long legs and narrow ankles and, for all I knew, ball-and-claw feet as well, only I wasn’t paying that much attention to their feet because there were other details of their appearance that commanded my attention first. All of them were naked. The angle of this gold-plated puff house was that every man with a red stripe on his trouser leg might sit in leisurely judgment of these Olympian beauties, like Paris with his specially inscribed apple. There was even a bowl of fruit on the table.

These were attractive thoughts, but I was in a hurry, and before the temps-perdu patronne could give me her couple-mother spiel, I had grabbed a natural blonde and herded her toward a bedroom with a couple of well-placed slaps on her well-placed derriere. It wasn’t that I was interested in having her, but I was in urgent need of a door to lock and wait behind while the general’s aide set about raising the alarm. Already I could hear him warning other officers that the police were on their way to raid the place. And it wasn’t very long before the sound of many boots was heard on the stairs as the maison’s exclusive clientele left the building hurriedly. Meanwhile, I tried to reassure my beautiful naked companion that there was nothing at all to worry about and asked her questions about Willms, Kestner, and Schaumberg. Her name was Yvette and she spoke excellent German, as did nearly all of the girls at number twenty-two. Probably that was why they’d been selected to work there in the first place.