“You’re well informed, Herr Gunther,” she said. “And right, of course. As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about just such a lynching I saw in Georgia, in 1930. But I’m here and I’m Jewish, and my newspaper wants me to write about what’s happening in this country, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“Well, good for you,” I said. “I hope you can change the AOC’s mind. I’d like to see the Nazis take a blow to their prestige. Especially now that we’ve started spending money on it. And I’d love it, of course, if that Austrian clown got some egg on his face. But I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. I’m a hotel detective, not a press attaché.”

Hedda Adlon opened a silver cigarette box the size of a small mausoleum and pushed it toward me. There were English cigarettes on one side of the box and Turkish on the other. It looked like Gallipoli in there. I chose the winning side—at least in the Dardanelles—and let her light me. The cigarette, just like the service, was better than I was used to. I looked hopefully at the decanters on the sideboard, but Hedda Adlon didn’t drink much herself and probably thought I felt the same way about the stuff. Apart from that, she was doing a fine job of making me look nice. After all, she’d had plenty of practice doing it.

“Herr Behlert told me what happened when you went to the Alex,” said Hedda. “About that poor Jewish man and how the police are refusing to investigate his death. Because of his race.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Apparently you thought he might have been a boxer.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Neither of them was smoking. Not yet. Perhaps they hoped to make me light-headed. The Turkish cigarette in my mouth was strong enough, but I had the feeling I was going to need more than one to go along with whatever it was they wanted from me.

Noreen Charalambides said, “I was thinking that the dead man’s story might be the basis of an interesting article in my newspaper. In the same way I wrote about that lynching in Georgia. It occurred to me that the dead man might have been murdered by the Nazis because he was Jewish. It also occurred to me that there might be an important sports angle that could tie his story in with the Olympics. Did you know that the German Boxing Federation was the first German sports organization to exclude Jews?”

“It doesn’t surprise me. Boxing’s always been an important sport to the Nazis.”

“Oh? I didn’t know that.”