In the Garden of Beasts

bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt,” he wrote. “The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women’s faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle.” Berlin was, he wrote, a “stone desert” filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace “borne to the grave with a smile.”
    The young protocol officer pointed out various landmarks. Martha asked question after question, oblivious to the fact that she was trying the officer’s patience. Early in their drive, they came to an open plaza dominated by an immense building of Silesian sandstone, with two-hundred-foot towers at each of its four corners, built in what one of Karl Baedeker’s famous guidebooks described as “florid Italian Renaissance style.” This was the Reichstagsgebäude, in which Germany’s legislative body, the Reichstag, had convened until the building was set afire four months earlier. A young Dutchman—a lapsed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe—was arrested and charged with the arson, along with four other suspects named as accomplices, though a widely endorsed rumor held that the Nazi regime itself had orchestrated the fire to stir fears of a Bolshevik uprising and thereby gain popular support for the suspension of civil liberties and the destruction of the Communist Party in Germany. The upcoming trial was the talk of Berlin.
    But Martha was perplexed. Contrary to what news reports had led her to expect, the building seemed intact. The towers still stood and the facades appeared unmarked. “Oh, I thought it was burned down!” she exclaimed as the car passed the building. “It looks all right to me. Tell me what happened.”
    After this and several other outbursts that Martha conceded were imprudent, the protocol officer leaned toward her and hissed, “Sssh! Young lady, you must learn to be seen and not heard. You mustn’t say so much and ask so many questions. This isn’t America and you can’t say all the things you think.”
    She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.
    UPON REACHING THEIR HOTEL , the Esplanade, on the well-shaded and lovely Bellevuestrasse, Martha and her parents were shown the accommodations that Messersmith himself had arranged.
    Dodd was appalled, Martha enchanted.
    The hotel was one of Berlin’s finest, with gigantic chandeliers and fireplaces and two glass-roofed courtyards, one of which—the Palm Courtyard—was famous for its tea dances and as the place where Berliners had gotten their first opportunity to dance the Charleston. Greta Garbo had once been a guest, as had Charlie Chaplin. Messersmith had bookedthe Imperial Suite, a collection of rooms that included a large double-bedded room with private bath, two single bedrooms also with private baths, one drawing room, and one conference room, all arrayed along the even-numbered side of a hall, from room 116 through room 124. Two reception rooms had walls covered with satin brocade. The suite was suffused with a springlike scent imparted by flowers sent by well-wishers, so many flowers, Martha recalled, “that there was scarcely space to move in—orchids and rare scented lilies, flowers of all colors and descriptions.” Upon entering the suite, she wrote, “we gasped at its magnificence.”
    But such opulence abraded every principle of the Jeffersonian ideal that Dodd had embraced throughout his life. Dodd had made it known before his arrival that he wanted “modest quarters in a modest hotel,” Messersmith wrote. While Messersmith understoodDodd’s desire to live “most inconspicuously and modestly,” he also knew “that the German officials and German people would not understand it.”
    There was another factor. U.S. diplomats and State Department officials had always stayed at the Esplanade. To do otherwise would have constituted an egregious breach of protocol and tradition.
    THE FAMILY SETTLED IN . Bill Jr. and the Chevrolet were not expected to arrive for a while yet. Dodd retired to a bedroom with a book. Martha found it all hard to grasp. Cards from well-wishers continued to arrive, accompanied by still more flowers. She and her mother sat in awe of the luxury around them, “wondering desperately how all this was to be paid for without mortgaging our souls.”
    Later that evening