“I don’t believe that, Bernie,” she said. “It’s bad for a playwright to believe that man is all there is. No one wants to go to a theater to be told that. Especially now. Maybe now most of all.”

“Could be I should start going to the theater again,” I said. “Who knows, it might restore my faith in human nature. Then again, here comes Trollmann, so I’d best not build up my hopes.”

Even as I spoke, I knew that if my faith in human nature had come with a bookmaker’s ticket, then just laying eyes on Trollmann again would have had me tearing it into pieces. Gypsy Trollmann, once as handsome as any leading man, was now the caricature of a ring-damaged pug. It was like clapping eyes on Mr. Hyde immediately after a home visit from Dr. Jekyll, so grotesquely were his features coarsened by his many beatings. His nose, previously small and combative, was now the size and shape of a sandbag on a poorly built redoubt, and this seemed to have shifted his dark eyes to opposite sides of his head, like something bovine. His much-enlarged ears were entirely without contours and might have fallen onto his head from a pork butcher’s bacon slicer. His mouth now seemed impossibly wide, and when he stretched his scarred lips into a smile to reveal several missing teeth, it was like sharing a joke with King Kong’s little brother. The worst of it was his disposition, which was sunnier than a picture wall in a school kindergarten, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Trollmann picked up a seat as if it were a bread stick and put it down again with its back to our table.

We introduced ourselves. Mrs. Charalambides flashed him a smile that could have lit up a coal mine, and then fixed him with blue eyes a Persian cat would have envied. Trollmann kept on nodding and grinning, as if we were his oldest and dearest friends. Considering the way the world had treated him until now, perhaps we were.

“To tell the truth, I do remember you, Herr Gunther. You’re a cop. Sure, I remember now.”

“Never tell the truth to a policeman, Rukelie. That’s how you get caught. It’s true, I used to be a cop. Only not anymore. These days I’m the carpet creeper at the Adlon Hotel. It seems the Nazis don’t like republican-minded cops any more than they like Gypsy fighters.”

“Hey, you got that right, Herr Gunther. Sure, I remember you now. You came to see me fight. You was with another cop. A cop who could fight a bit, right?”

“Heinrich Grund.”

“Sure, I remember him. He used to work out at the same gym as me. Right.”

“We came to see you fight Paul Vogel, at the Sportpalast, here in Berlin.”