With the panel removed, I peered into the space underneath the cistern and saw a canvas bag. I picked it up. The bag was heavy. I lifted it out of the cavity, placed it on the lavatory seat, and unlaced the neck.

While the ownership of firearms, especially pistols, was restricted in Germany, people with a legitimate reason to own one were permitted to do so, and for a three-mark fee, a weapons license could easily be obtained from any magistrate. A rifle, a revolver, even an automatic pistol could be owned quite legally by almost anyone. But I didn’t think there was a magistrate anywhere in the country who would have signed a permit for a Thompson submachine gun with a drum magazine. The bag also contained several hundred rounds of ammunition, two Colt semi-automatic pistols with rubberized grips, and a folding switch-blade. Inside the bag was another, smaller leather bag holding five thick bundles of thousand-dollar bills featuring a portrait of President Cleveland, and several thinner packets of German marks. There was also a leather wallet containing about a hundred Swiss gold francs and several dozen benzedrine inhalers still in their Smith Kline & French boxes.

All of it-especially the Chicago typewriter-looked like prima facie evidence that Max Reles was some kind of gangster.

I put everything back in the canvas bag, returned it to the hiding place under the cistern, and then replaced the tiled panel. When everything was exactly as I had found it, I slipped out of the suite and walked back along the corridor, pausing at the foot of the stairs, and wondering if I dared go up to 201 and use the passkey to let myself into Noreen’s suite. For a moment I let my imagination throw me in the back of a fast car and run along the AVUS speedway as far as Potsdam. Then I stared hard at the key for almost ten seconds before dropping it into my jacket pocket and pointing my libido downstairs.

Steady on, Gunther, I told myself. You heard what the lady said. She doesn’t like to be hurried.

But behind the desk there was another message waiting for me. It was from Noreen and more than a couple of hours old. I went back upstairs and pressed my ear to her door. In view of what was in the note, I might legitimately have used the passkey and let myself in. But German good manners got the better of me and I knocked.

A very long minute passed before she opened the door.

“Oh. It’s you.” She sounded almost disappointed.

“Were you expecting someone else?”

Noreen was wearing a brown chiffon peignoir and, underneath, a matching nightgown. She smelled like honeysuckle, and there was enough sleep still in her blue eyes to persuade me that she might want to go back to bed again, only this time with me. Maybe. She hustled me inside and closed the door.

“What I meant was, I left that note for you a couple of hours ago. I thought you’d come straightaway. I must have fallen asleep.”

“I went out for a while. To cool down.”

“Where did you go?”

“Parsifal. The opera.”

“You’re all surprises, you know that? I never figured you for a music lover.”

“I’m not. I stayed for five minutes and then felt an irresistible urge to come here and search for you.”

“Hmm. So what does that make me? A flower maiden? Klingsor’s slave-what’s her name? The one in Parsifal?”

“I haven’t a clue.” I shrugged. “Like I said, I only stayed five minutes.”

Noreen put her arms around my neck. “I hope you brought Parsifal’s holy spear with you, Gunther, because I don’t happen to have one here.” She backed me across the room to the bed. “At least not yet, I don’t.”

“You think I should stay with you tonight?”

“In my humble opinion, yes.” She shrugged off the peignoir and let it fall onto the thick carpet with a whisper of chiffon.

I said, “You never held a humble opinion in your life,” and kissed her. This time she allowed my hands to roam the contours of her body as if they belonged to an impatient masseur. Mostly they stayed on her bottom, my fingers gathering chiffon until I could pull her into my groin. My right hand seemed to be making a miraculous recovery.

“So it’s true,” she said. “Adlon room service is the best in Europe.”

“The key to running a good hotel,” I said, cupping one of her breasts in my hand, “is to eliminate boredom. Nearly all of our problems are caused by the innocent curiosity of our guests.”

“I don’t think I’ve been accused of that,” she said. “Innocence. Not in a long time.” She shook her head. “I’m not the innocent type, Gunther.”

I grinned.

“I guess you don’t believe me,” she said, pulling a length of hair through her mouth. “Because I’m still wearing clothes.”

She pushed me down to sit on the edge of the bed and then stepped back in order to make a performance out of taking off her nightgown. Nude, she was worth a private room in Pompeii, and as far as performances go, it had Parsifal beat by several lewd acts. Looking at Noreen, you wondered why anyone ever bothered to draw or paint anything else but a woman’s naked body. Cubes might have done it for Braque, but I liked curves, and Noreen’s were good enough to satisfy Apollonius of Perga and probably Kepler, too. She drew my head against her belly and, pulling my hair, like the coat on a favorite dog, she teased me with the absence of all that made me a man.

“Why don’t you touch me?” she said softly. “I want you to touch me. Right now.”

She came and sat on my augmented lap and patiently permitted my impudent curiosities with eyes that were closed to anything else but her own pleasure. With nostrils flared, she breathed deeply, like a yogi concentrating her breath.

“So what changed your mind?” I asked, bending to kiss her hardening nipple. “About tonight?”

“Who says I changed my mind?” she said. “Maybe I planned this all along. Like this is a scene in a play I’ve written.” She pushed off my jacket and started to undo my tie. “This is just what I want your character to do. Maybe you’ve got very little choice in the matter. Do you really feel you have a choice here, Gunther?”

“No.” I bit her nipple. “Not now. But I got the impression earlier on that you were playing a little hard to get.”

“I am hard to get. Only not to you. You’re the first in a long time.”

“I could say the same.”

“You could. But it would be a lie. You’re one of the principal characters in my play, remember? I know all about you, Gunther.” She started to unbutton my shirt.

“Is Max Reles another character? You do know him, don’t you?”

“Do we have to talk about him now?”

“It can wait.”

“Good. Because I can’t wait. I never could, not since I was a little girl. Ask me about him later, when the waiting is over.”

18

THE CEILINGS IN THE SUITES at the Adlon were just the right distance from the floor. When you lay on the bed and blew a column of cigarette smoke straight up, the crystal chandelier looked like a remote and icy mountaintop surrounded with an ermine collar of cloud. I’d never paid the ceilings much attention before. Previous erotic encounters with Frieda Bamberger had been furtive, hurried affairs, conducted with one eye on the clock and the other on the door handle, and certainly I’d never felt sufficiently relaxed to fall asleep afterward. But now that I was looking at the lofty heights of this room, I found my soul climbing up the silky walls to sit on the picture rail, like some invisible gargoyle, and then to stare down with forensic fascination on the naked aftermath of what had gone before.

Our bare limbs still entwined, Noreen and Gunther lay side by sweating side, like Eros and Psyche fallen from some other, more heavenlike ceiling-although it was hard to imagine anything much more heavenly than what had just occurred. I felt like Saint Peter taking vacant possession of a smart new basilica.