“Thank goodness you’re here, Herr Gunther,” said Pieck.

“Where’s Stahlecker?” I asked. “The guy who’s supposed to be filling in for me?”

“There was an incident in the kitchens earlier. Two members of the Brigade were involved in a fight. The rotisseur tried to stab the pastry chef. Herr Stahlecker went to break it up.”

The Brigade was what we called the kitchen staff at the Adlon.

“He’ll live,” I said, letting go of the drunk’s neck. “Passed out is all. He smells like the schnapps academy in Oberkirch. That’s probably what stopped him from hurting himself when he fell. You could stick a hat pin in this rumrunner, and he wouldn’t feel a thing. Here, give me some space here, and I’ll take him back to his room and let him sleep it off.”

I grabbed the man by the back of his coat collar and dragged him to the elevator.

“Don’t you think you should take the service elevator?” protested Pieck. “One of the guests might see you.”

“You want to carry him there?”

“Er . . . no. Perhaps not.”

A page boy came after me with the guest’s room key. In return I handed him the letter I’d written on the train.

“Post that, will you, kid? And not in the hotel. Use the box at the post office around the corner on Dorotheenstrasse.” I reached into my pocket and gave him fifty pfennigs. “Here. You’d better take this. It’s raining.”

I dragged the still-unconscious man into the elevator car and glanced at the number on the key fob. “Three twenty,” I told Wolfgang.

“Yes sir,” he said, and closed the door.

I bent down, pulled the man forward onto my shoulder, and then lifted him up.

A few minutes later the guest was lying on his bed, and I was wiping the sweat off my face and then helping myself from an open bottle of good Korn that was standing on the floor. It didn’t burn, didn’t even catch my collar stud. It was the smooth, expensive stuff that you drank to savor while reading a good book or listening to an impromptu by Schubert, not to help you handle an unhappy love affair. But it got the job done all the same. It went down like a clear conscience, or as near to the feeling of a clear conscience as I was going to get after posting that letter.

I picked up the telephone and, disguising my voice, asked one of the hello girls to connect me with suite 114. She let it ring for a while before coming back on the line to tell me what I now knew, that there was no reply. I asked her to put me through to the concierge, and Franz Joseph came on the line.

“Hey, Franz, it’s me, Gunther.”

“Hey. I heard you were back. I thought you were on holiday.”