The doorman, Carl, saw me getting out of a taxi and came forward with an umbrella. He was pretty good with an umbrella and a smile and the door and not much else. It wasn’t what I’d have called a career, but with tips, he made more than I did. A lot more. Frieda had strongly suspected Carl was in the habit of taking tips from joy girls to let them into the hotel, but neither of us had ever been able to catch him or prove it. Flanked by two stone columns each bearing a lantern as big as a forty-two-centimeter howitzer shell, Carl and I remained on the pavement for a moment to smoke a cigarette and generally exercise our lungs. Above the door was a laughing stone face. No doubt the face had seen the hotel room rate. At fifteen marks a night, it was almost a third of what I made in a week.

I went inside the entrance hall, tipped my damp hat to the new desk clerk, and winked at the page boys. There were about eight of them. They sat yawning on a polished wooden bench like a colony of bored apes, waiting for a light that would summon them to duty. In the Adlon there were no bells. The hotel was always as quiet as the great reading room in the Prussian State Library. I expected the guests liked it that way, but I preferred a bit more action and vulgarity. The bronze bust of the Kaiser on top of a sienna marble chimney piece as big as the nearby Brandenburg Gate seemed to recognize as much.

“Hey.”

“Who? Me, sir?”

“What are you doing here, Gunther?” said the Kaiser, tweaking the end of a mustache shaped like a flying albatross. “You should be in business for yourself. The times we’re living in were made for scum like you. With all the people who go missing in this city, an enterprising fellow like you could make an excellent living as a private investigator. And the sooner the better, I’d say. After all, you’re hardly cut out to work in a place like this, are you? Not with those feet. To say nothing of your manners.”

“What’s wrong with my manners, sir?”

The Kaiser laughed. “Listen to yourself. That accent, for one thing. It’s terrible. What’s more, you can’t even say ‘sir’ with any proper conviction. You have absolutely no sense of servility. Which makes you more or less useless in the hotel business. I can’t imagine why Louis Adlon employed you. You’re a thug. Always will be. Why else would you have murdered that poor fellow, Krichbaum? Take my word for it. You don’t belong here.”

I glanced around the sumptuously appointed entrance hall. At the square pillars of marble the color of clarified butter. There was even more marble on the floors and on the walls, as if a quarry had been running a sale of the stuff. The Kaiser had a point. If I stayed there much longer I might turn to marble myself, like some muscle-bound, trouser-less Greek hero.