“I was well behind our lines and quite safe in Berlin. A man without honor, I’m afraid. Too old for all that. I was a captain in the Intendant General’s Office. The Catering Corps.”

“Ah. I begin to see a pattern.”

I nodded. “Before the war I worked at the Hotel Adlon.”

“Right. Everyone stays at the Adlon. Grand Hotel. The film, I mean. Vicki Baum, wasn’t it? The Austrian writer.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Thought so. I’m a writer myself. Books, plays. Working on a play right now. A comedy that’s based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. It’s about a man who has three daughters.”

“There’s a coincidence.”

Maugham laughed. “Quite.”

“I suppose it would be too much of a coincidence if you were not related to the other Maugham who lives around here.”

“He’s my uncle. Matter of fact, he used to know Vicki Baum, when he was living in Berlin before the first war.”

The drinks arrived and Robin Maugham grabbed his glass of white wine off the waiter’s tin tray with the impatience of the true drunk. I should know; my own greenish glass had taken on the aura of the holy grail.

“He likes Germans, too. Willie. That’s what we call the old man. Speaks it fluently. On account of the fact that before med school he spent a year at the University of Heidelberg. Uncle Willie loves Germany. He’s particularly fond of Goethe. Still reads it in German. Which is saying something for an Englishman, I can tell you.”

“Then we have something in common.”

“You too, eh? Jolly good.”

It was easy to see that Robin Maugham was a playwright. He had an easy way of speech about him, a talky, bantering sort of chat that concealed as much as it revealed, like a character you knew was going to prove much more consequential than he seemed if only by virtue of his prominence on the theater bill.

“You know, what with the bridge and the German, perhaps you’d like to make up a four at the Villa Mauresque one night. The old man is always keen to meet interesting new people. Of course, he’s notoriously private, but I’ll hazard a guess that the concierge at the Grand Hôtel—not to mention someone who worked at the famous Adlon—well, that person must be used to keeping a few confidences, what?”

“I’d be delighted to come,” I said. “And you needn’t worry about my mouth.”