It was my job to keep an eye on the guests, and whenever I saw Mrs. Charalambides in and around the hotel, I kept all eight of them on her, waiting for her to brush against the silken thread that marked the outer limits of my darker, spidery world. Not that I would ever have tried to “fraternize” with a guest, if that was what you called it. That was what Hedda Adlon and Georg Behlert called it, but something as brotherly as fraternity was a very long way from what I wanted to do with Noreen Charalambides. Whatever you called it, the hotel took a dim view of that kind of thing. It did happen, of course, and several chambermaids were not above selling it for the right price. When Erich von Stroheim or Emil Jannings were staying at the hotel, the chief reception clerk was always careful to have them attended by a rather elderly chambermaid named Bella. Then again, Stroheim wasn’t that particular. He liked them young. But he liked them old, too.

It sounds ridiculous, and of course it is—love is ridiculous, that’s what makes it fun—but I suppose I was a little in love with Noreen Charalambides before I even met her. Like some schoolgirl with a Ross postcard of Max Hansen in her satchel. I looked at her the way I sometimes look at an SSK in the window of the Mercedes-Benz showroom on Potsdamer Platz: I don’t ever expect to drive that car, let alone own one, but a man can dream. While she was there, Mrs. Charalambides looked like the fastest and most beautiful car in the hotel.

She was tall, an impression enhanced by her choice of hat. The weather had cooled of late. She wore a gray Astrakhan shako that she may have bought in Moscow, her previous port of call, although she was in fact an American who lived in New York. An American who was on her way back home from some kind of literary or theatrical festival in Russia. Maybe she had bought the sable coat in Moscow, too. I’m sure the sable didn’t mind. Mrs. Charalambides looked better in it than any sable I’d ever seen.

Her hair, which she wore in a bun, was also sable-colored and, I imagined, every bit as nice to stroke. Nicer, probably, as it wasn’t likely to bite. All the same, I wouldn’t have minded being bitten by Noreen Charalambides. Any proximity to her pouting, cherry-red Fokker Albatross of a mouth would have been worth losing a fingertip or a piece of my ear. Vincent van Gogh wasn’t the only fellow who could make that kind of heady, romantic sacrificial gesture.

I took to hanging around in the entrance hall like a page boy in the hope of laying eyes on her. Even Hedda Adlon remarked on the similarity.