Berlin was a hard town, designed with cold stone tools and a mason’s cautious hand, its low buildings in rigid symmetry. It was said that on each Saturnalia the Goddess of Victory drove her chariot from the Brandenburg Gate down Unter den Linden, to hesitate beseechingly before Frederick’s statue, which smacked her stone cheek to bring tears to her eyes.

There were first-aid drills in the streets. The sound of a car backfiring caused pigeons on the Ku’dammstrasse to bolt into the sky, then scream back to earth, ready to peck at schoolgirls. On July 27, the Café Kranzler, the only café with ice cream acceptable to Berlin dinner parties, was alarmingly out of ice cream, and that evening, families began sewing diamonds into the hems of their servants’ frocks.

“And such a dark country, if you think about it, is desperate for entertainment,” chirped Cody to his troupe as they waved at the crowds of Berlin.

This was their promenade and ballyhoo, five covered wagons rolling through the center of the city. Normally the sight of such rolling anachronisms brought automobiles and pedestrians to a halt, especially since one wagon was asprawl with Onondaga Indians, the women in beaded finery reminiscent of wampum, and the men in full but ragged ceremonial headdresses won in poker games from ruined members of various Plains tribes.

Duncan winked at two spotless little boys, who stared at him frostily. He stood to take a bow, because a bow was known to generate applause. There were, at the street corner fronting the grand Tietz department store, three nannies with strollers, and upon seeing the hanging fringe of his buckskin jacket, his downswept Stetson, his long salt-and-pepper hair tossing in the wind, and, above all, his wink as he returned upright, they lit up like houses on fire.

But then, on the sidewalk, a man with muttonchops flanking his florid face held a hand out to stop the women from clapping.

“Er ist nicht Buffalo Bill,” he explained.

Duncan returned to the reins grimly, shaking hands with an undertaker. Buffalo Goddamned Bill played for kings and queens and came away each time with jeweled cigarette cases, high tea, engraved silver-stocked imperial rifles. Buffalo Bill was so confident, he stopped advertising exactly who he was—his posters showed a buffalo charging toward the west, with Buffalo Bill’s iconic visage—the whiskers, the hat, the braided leather vest—branded upon its side, and below it the phrase “I’m coming,” or, as when he played Germany, “Ich komme.” The world bent to Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody. Unlike Duncan, he really was a colonel, for instance.