In the Garden of Beasts

would have the option of visiting a state farm, though here her itinerary exuded just a whiff of capitalism, for the farm tour would require an “extra fee.” Next, Ordzhonikidze, Tiflis, Batumi, Yalta, Sebastopol, Odessa, Kiev, and, at last, back to Berlin by train, where she was to arrive on August 7, the thirty-third day of her journey, at precisely—if optimistically—7:22 p.m.
    Her relationship with Boris continued to deepen, though with its usual wild swings between passion and anger and the usual cascade of pleading notes and fresh flowers from him. At some point she returned his three “see no evil” ceramic monkeys. He sent them back.
    “Martha!” he wrote, indulging his passion for exclamation:
    “I thank you for your letters and for ‘not forgetfulness.’ Your three monkeys have grown (they have become big) and want to be withyou. I am sending them. I have to tell you very frankly: three monkeys have longed for you. And not only the three monkeys, I know another handsome, blond (aryan!!) young man, who has longed to be with you. This handsome boy (not older than 30)—is
me
.
    “Martha! I want to see you, I need to tell you that I also have not forgotten my little adorable lovely Martha!
    “I love you, Martha! What do I have to do to establish more confidence in you?
    “Yours, Boris.”
    In any era their relationship would have been likely to draw the attention of outsiders, but that June in Berlin everything took on added gravitas. Everyone watched everyone else. At the time, Martha gave little thought to the perceptions of others, but years later, in a letter to Agnes Knickerbocker, the wife of her correspondent friend Knick, she acknowledged how readily perception could distort reality. “I never plotted the overthrow nor even the subversion of the U.S. government, neither in Germany nor in the USA!” she wrote. “I think however that just knowing and loving Boris would be enough for some people to suspect the worst.”
    At the time there was nothing to suspect, she insisted. “Instead it was one of those absorbing things that had no political base at all, except that through him I came to know something about the USSR.”
    FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1934, brought the same atmosphere of impending storm that had marked the preceding weeks. “It was the hottest day we had had that summer,” recalled Elisabetta Cerruti, wife of the Italian ambassador. “The air was so heavy with moisture that we could hardly breathe. Black clouds loomed on the horizon, but a merciless sun burned overhead.”
    That day the Dodds held a lunch at their home, to which they had invited Vice-Chancellor Papen and other diplomatic and government figures, including the Cerrutis and Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, who at the time happened to be in Berlin.
    Martha also attended and watched as her father and Papen stepped away from the other guests for a private conversation in the library, in front of the now-dormant fireplace. Papen, she wrote, “seemed self-confident and as suave as usual.”
    At one point Dodd spotted Papen and Luther edging toward each other with a “rather tense attitude” between them. Dodd moved to intervene and steered them out to the lovely winter garden, where another guest joined them in conversation. Dodd, referring to the press photographs taken during the German Derby, said to Papen, “You and Dr. Goebbels seemed to be quite friendly at Hamburg the other day.”
    Papen laughed.
    At lunch, Mrs. Cerruti sat on Dodd’s right and Papen sat directly opposite, next to Mrs. Dodd. Mrs. Cerruti’s anxiety was palpable, even to Martha, watching from a distance. Martha wrote, “She sat by my father in a state of near-collapse, hardly speaking, pale, preoccupied, and jumpy.”
    Mrs. Cerruti told Dodd, “Mr. Ambassador, something terrible is going to happen in Germany. I feel it in the air.”
    A later rumor held that Mrs. Cerruti somehow knew in advance what was about to happen.She found this astonishing. Her remark to Dodd, she claimed years later, referred only to the weather.
    IN AMERICA THAT FRIDAY the “great heat” worsened. In humid locales like Washington it became nearly impossible to work. Moffat noted in his diary: “Temperature 101 and ½ in the shade today.”
    The heat and humidity were so unbearable that as evening approached Moffat and Phillips and a third official went to the home of a friend of Moffat’s to use his pool. The friend was away at the