“Hedda used to help me with my German. Still does.”

“Your German is perfect, Noreen. Don’t you agree, Herr Gunther?”

“Yes. Perfect.” But I was looking at Mrs. Charalambides’ legs. And her eyes. And her beautiful mouth. Now, that was what I called perfect.

“Anyway, her newspaper has asked her to write an article about the forthcoming Berlin Olympiad.”

“There’s been a lot of opposition in America to the idea of our taking part in these Olympics, given your government’s racial policies. The AOC president, Avery Brundage, was over here in Germany just a few weeks ago. On a fact-finding mission. To see if Jews are being discriminated against. And, incredibly, he reported back to the AOC that they were not. As a result of which the AOC has now voted, unanimously, to accept Germany’s invitation and to attend the Berlin Olympiad in 1936.”

“Any Olympiad that doesn’t include the United States,” said Hedda, “would be completely meaningless.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “Since the AOC president returned to the U.S., the boycott movement has collapsed. But my newspaper is puzzled. No, it’s astonished that Brundage could have arrived at the conclusions he did. The American ambassador, Mr. Dodd; the chief consul, Mr. Messersmith; and the vice consul, Mr. Geist, have all written to my government expressing their utter dismay at the president’s report. And reminding it of their own report, sent to the State Department last year, which highlighted the systematic exclusion of Jews from German sports clubs. Brundage—”

“He’s the president of the American Olympic Committee,” said Hedda, interrupting, redundantly.

“He’s a bigot,” said Mrs. Charalambides, becoming angrier. “And an anti-Semite. You’d have to be, to ignore what’s happening in this country. The many instances of open racial discrimination. The signs in the parks. In the public baths. The pogroms.”

“Pogroms?” I frowned. “Surely that’s an exaggeration. I haven’t heard of any pogroms. This is Berlin, not Odessa.”

“In July, four Jews were murdered by SS men, in Hirschberg.”

“Hirschberg?” I sneered. “That’s in Czechoslovakia. Or Poland. I forget which. It’s troll country. Not Germany.”

“It’s the Sudetenland,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “The people there are ethnic Germans.”

“Well, don’t tell Hitler,” I said. “Or he’ll want them back. Look, Mrs. Charalambides, I don’t agree with what’s happening in Germany. But is it really any worse than what’s happening in your own country? The signs in the parks? In the public baths? The lynchings? And I hear it’s not just Negroes who get strung up by white people. Mexicans and Italians also go carefully in certain parts of the United States. And I don’t recall anyone suggesting a boycott of the Los Angeles Games, in 1932.”