It was raining from a bucket when finally I arrived back in Berlin, and with a hole in the sole of my shoe, I had to wait awhile for a taxi at the rank in front of the station. The rain hit the big glass roof like stair rods and leaked onto the head of the line. The cabdrivers couldn’t see it, which meant they always pulled up to exactly the same spot so that the next in line would have to take a shower before he or she could climb inside, like something out of a Fat and Stupid movie. When it was my turn I pulled my coat over my head and ducked into the cab; I was able to wash one whole sleeve of my shirt without a trip to the laundry. But at least it was too early in the winter for snow. Whenever it snows in Berlin, it reminds you that it’s nearer to Moscow than Madrid by more than two hundred kilometers.

The shops were closed. There was no booze at home, and I didn’t want to go to a bar. I told the driver to take me to the Adlon, remembering that there was half a bottle of Bismarck in my desk at work—the same bottle I’d confiscated from Fritz Muller. I figured I’d use just enough of it to warm myself up and, if Max Reles was out somewhere, to put enough blood and iron in my belly to check out my own typing skills on the Torpedo in his suite.

The hotel was busy. There was a party in the Raphael Room, and undoubtedly the many patrons in the dining room were staring up at the Tiepolo panegyric ceiling, if only to remind themselves of what a blue and cloudless sky actually looks like. Pouches of thick white tobacco smoke gently rolled out of the door of the reading room like a quilt from Freyja’s bed in Asgard. A drunk wearing a white tie and tails was holding on to the front desk while he complained loudly to Pieck, the assistant manager, that the phonograph in his suite wasn’t working. I could taste his breath from the other side of the entrance hall. But even as I went to lend a hand, the man fell backward, as if he’d been sawn off at the ankles. Luckily for him, he hit a carpet that was even thicker than his head. His head bounced a bit, and then he lay still. It was a near-perfect impersonation of a fight I’d seen on the newsreels, when Mad-cap Maxie Baer laid out Frankie Campbell one night in San Francisco.

Pieck rushed around the desk to help. So did a couple of bellboys, and in the confusion, I managed to lift the key for 114 and drop it into my pocket before kneeling down by the unconscious man. I checked his pulse.