“Six days later the German Boxing Federation stripped the kid of the title and his license on the grounds that his style of hit-and-run boxing, and his ‘unmanly’ tears, made him unfit to hold the belt.”

By now her neat shorthand covered several pages of her notebook. She sipped her drink and shook her head. “They took it off him because he cried?”

“It gets worse,” I said. “This is a very German story. As you might expect, the kid gets death threats. Poison-pen letters. Shit in his mailbox. You name it. His wife and kids are intimidated. It gets so bad he makes her ask him for a divorce and change her name so that she and the kids can live in peace. Because Trollmann’s not beaten yet. He still thinks he can box his way out of trouble. Reluctantly, the German federation gives him a license to fight again on two conditions: One is that he gives up the hit-and-run style that made him such a great fighter—I mean he was fast, no one could lay a glove on him. And the other condition was that his first fight would be against a much heavier opponent, Gustav Eder.”

“They wanted to see the kid humiliated,” she said.

“They wanted to see the kid get killed is what,” I said. “The two meet in July 1933, at the Bock Brewery, here in Berlin. In order to send up the new racial restrictions, Trollmann turns up for the fight looking like a caricature of an Aryan man, with his body whitened with flour and his hair dyed blond.”

“Oh, Lord. You mean like some poor Negro trying to disguise himself in order to escape a lynching?”

“Kind of, I suppose. Anyway, the fight takes place, and forced to abandon the style that had made him a champion, Trollmann stands toe-to-toe with Eder and trades the heavier man punch for punch. He takes a terrible beating until, in round five, he’s battered into submission and loses the fight on a knockout. After which he’s never the same fighter again. Last I heard, he was taking monthly fights against bigger, stronger fellows and taking regular beatings just to make the payments to his wife.”

She shook her head. “It’s a modern Greek tragedy,” she said.

“If you mean that there are not many laughs in it, then you’re right. And for sure, the gods deserve a kick in the ass, or worse, for letting shit like that happen to someone.”

“From what I’ve seen so far, they’ve got their work cut out in Germany.”

“Isn’t that the point? If they’re not there for us now, then maybe they’re just not there at all.”