“I’m thinking of asking you to read Lorenz Adlon’s rulebook for page boys,” she joked.

“I read that. It’ll never sell. For one thing, there are too many rules. And for another, most of these page boys are too busy running errands to have the time to read anything longer than War and Peace.”

She laughed at that. Hedda Adlon usually liked my jokes. “It’s not that long,” she said.

“Try telling that to a page boy. Anyway, the jokes in War and Peace are better.”

“Have you read it? War and Peace?”

“I’ve started it several times, but after four years of war I usually declare an armistice and then sell the book down the river.”

“There’s someone who’d like to meet you. And it so happens she’s a writer.”

Naturally, I knew exactly whom Hedda was talking about. Writers, especially lady writers from New York, were thin on the ground at the Adlon that month. It probably had a lot to do with the fifteen-mark-a-night room rate. This was slightly cheaper if you didn’t have a bath, and a lot of writers don’t, but the last American writer who’d stayed at the Adlon had been Sinclair Lewis, and that was in 1930. The Depression hit everyone, of course. But no one gets depressed quite like a writer.

We went upstairs to the little apartment the Adlons kept in the hotel. I say “little,” but only by the standards of the large hunting estate they also kept in the countryside, away from Berlin. The apartment was nicely decorated—a fine example of late Wilhelmine wealth. The carpets were thick, the curtains heavy, the bronze hulking, the gilt abundant, and the silver solid; even the water in the carafe looked like it had extra lead in it.

Mrs. Charalambides was seated on a little birch-wood sofa with white cushions and a music-stand back. She was wearing a dark blue wraparound dress, a triple string of good pearls, diamond clip earrings, and immediately below her cleavage, a matching sapphire brooch that must have fallen off a maharajah’s best turban. She hardly looked like a writer—that is, unless she’d been a queen who’d given up her throne to write novels about the grand hotels of Europe. She spoke German well, which was fine with me since, for several minutes after shaking her gloved hand, I could hardly speak German myself and I was more or less obliged to let these two women talk across me like a Ping-Pong table.

“Mrs. Charalambides—”

“Noreen, please.”

“Is a playwright and journalist.”

“Freelance.”

“For the Herald Tribune.”

“In New York.”

“She’s just returned from Moscow, where one of her plays—”

“My only play, so far.”

“Was being produced by the famous Moscow Art Theater, after a very successful run on Broadway.”

“You should be my agent, Hedda.”

“Noreen and I were at school together. In America.”