In the Garden of Beasts

remember our bicycle ride through the park,” he wrote later. “You were friendly, but I sensed a difference between us.”
    To make matters worse, toward the end of his stay Bassett caught a severe cold. It laid him flat, just in time for Martha’s last visit before his departure.
    He knew that his Mission to Berlin had failed the moment Martha arrived in his room. She had brought her brother, Bill.
    It was a moment of casual cruelty. She knew Bassett would interpretit correctly. She was tired. She had loved him once, but their relationship had been too fraught with misunderstandings and conflicting imperatives. Where there had been love, as Martha later put it, there were now only “embers,” and these were not enough.
    Bassett understood. “You had had it,” he wrote. “And who could blame you!”
    He sent her flowers, acknowledging defeat. The card that accompanied them began, “To my charming and lovely ex-wife.”
    He left for America, for Larchmont, New York, and a suburban life of lawn mowing and tending the copper beech in his backyard and evening drinks and potlucks and a train commute to his job at the bank. He wrote later, “I’m not at all sure you would have been happy as the wife of a bank economist, preoccupied with the Bank Letter, bringing up a family of children, PTA, and all that.”
    MARTHA’S CONNECTION WITH Sigrid Schultz soon began to pay off. Schultz threw a welcome party for Martha on July 23, 1933, and invited a number of her closest friends, among them still another correspondent, Quentin Reynolds, who wrote for the Hearst News Service. Martha and Reynolds hit it off instantly. He was big and cheerful, with curly hair and eyes that always seemed to convey a sense of impending laughter—though he had a reputation, as well, for being hard-nosed, skeptical, and smart.
    They met again five days later in the bar at the Esplanade, along with her brother, Bill. Like Schultz, Reynolds knew everyone and had managed to befriend a number of Nazi officials, including a confidant of Hitler with the tongue-twisting name Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl.A Harvard graduate with an American-born mother, Hanfstaengl was known to play piano for Hitler late at night to soothe the dictator’s nerves. No Mozart or Bach. Mostly Wagner and Verdi, Liszt and Grieg, some Strauss and Chopin.
    Martha wanted to meet him; Reynolds knew of a party to be thrown by a fellow correspondent where Hanfstaengl was expected to be a guest and offered to bring her along.

CHAPTER 7
Hidden Conflict
    D odd walked from the Esplanade to his office each morning, a fifteen-minute stroll along Tiergartenstrasse, the street that formed the southern boundary of the park. On the south side stood mansions with lush grounds and wrought-iron fences, many belonging to embassies and consulates; on the north sprawled the park itself, dense with trees and statuary, its paths inked with morning shade. Dodd called it “the most beautiful park I have ever seen,” and the walk quickly became his favorite part of the day. His office was in the embassy chancery on a street just off the park called Bendlerstrasse, which also contained the “Bendler Block,” a collection of squat, pale, rectangular buildings that served as the headquarters of the regular German army, the Reichswehr.
    A photograph of Dodd at work in his office during his first week or so in Berlin shows him seated at a large, elaborately carved desk before a soaring tapestry hung on the wall behind him, with a large and complicated phone to his left at a reach of maybe five feet. There is something comical about the image: Dodd, slight of frame, his collar stiff and white, hair pomaded and severely parted, stares with a stern expression into the camera, utterly dwarfed by the opulence that surrounds him. The photograph caused a good deal of mirth back at the State Department among those who disapproved of Dodd’s appointment. Undersecretary Phillips closed a letter to Dodd: “A photograph of you seated at your desk in front of a gorgeous tapestry has had quite a wide circulation and looks most impressive.”
    At every turn Dodd seemed to violate some aspect of embassycustom, at least in the eyes of his counselor of embassy, George Gordon. Dodd insisted on walking to meetings with government officials. Once, in paying a call on the nearby Spanish embassy, he made Gordon walk with him, both men dressed in morning coats and silk hats. In a letter to Thornton Wilder