In the Garden of Beasts

wrote, “I confess I am at a loss to understand your feeling that ‘somebody in the Department is encouraging people in mistaken attitudes and conduct.’ ”
    He cited Dodd’s past observation that there were too many Jews on the embassy’s clerical staff but professed to be “somewhat confused” as to how to resolve the issue. Dodd previously had told him he did not want to transfer anyone out, but now it appeared he did. “Do you desire any transfers?” Phillips asked. He added, “If … the racial question is one that needs correction in view of the special conditions in Germany, it will be perfectly possible for the Department to do this upon definite recommendation from you.”
    THAT SAME WEDNESDAY , in Berlin, Dodd wrote a letter to Roosevelt that he deemed so sensitive he not only wrote it in longhand but also sent it first to his friend Colonel House, so that House could give it to the president in person. Dodd urged that Phillips be removed from his position as undersecretary and given a different sort of posting, perhaps as an ambassador somewhere. He suggested Paris and added that Phillips’s departure from Washington “would limit a little the favoritisms that prevail there.”
    He wrote, “Do not think I have any personal axe to grind or any personal grievances about anything. I hope”—
hope
—“it is the public service alone that motivates [this] letter.”

CHAPTER 30
Premonition
    M artha became consumed with Boris. Her French lover, Armand Berard, upon finding himself consigned to the background, grieved. Diels too receded, though he remained a frequent companion.
    Early in January, Boris arranged a tryst with Martha that yielded one of the most unusual romantic encounters she had ever experienced, though she had no advance warning of what was to occur other than Boris’s plea that she wear his favorite dress—gold silk, off the shoulders, deep and revealing neckline, close fitted at the waist. She added a necklace of amber and a corsage that Boris had provided, of gardenias.
    Fritz, the butler, greeted Boris at the front door, but before he could announce the Russian’s presence, Boris went bounding up the stairway to the main floor. Fritz followed. Martha was just then walking along the hall toward the stairs, as she wrote in a detailed recollection of the evening. Upon seeing her, Boris dropped to one knee.
    “Oh my darling!”
he said, in English. Then, in German: “You look wonderful.”
    She was delighted and mildly embarrassed. Fritz grinned. Boris led her out to his Ford—the top raised, mercifully, against the cold—and drove them to Horcher’s restaurant on Lutherstrasse, a few blocks south of the Tiergarten. It was one of Berlin’s finest restaurants, specializing in game, and was said to be Göring’s favorite place to dine. It was identified also, in a 1929 short story by then-popular writer Gina Kaus, as the place to goif your goal was seduction. You could be seated on one of its leather banquettes and a few tablesover, there would be Göring, resplendent in his uniform of the moment. In another time there might have been famous writers, artists, and musicians and prominent Jewish financiers and scientists, but by this point most had fled or else had found themselves suddenly isolated in circumstances that did not permit costly nights on the town. The restaurant endured, however, as if unmindful that anything had changed in the world outside.
    Boris had reserved a private room, where he and Martha dined lavishly on smoked salmon, caviar, turtle soup, and chicken in the style coming to be known as “Kievsky.” For dessert they had brandied Bavarian cream. They drank champagne and vodka. Martha loved the food, the drink, the lofty setting, but was perplexed. “Why all this, Boris?” she asked him. “What are we celebrating?”
    In answer he gave only a smile. After dinner, they drove north and turned onto Tiergartenstrasse as if heading for the Dodds’ house, but instead of stopping there, Boris kept driving. They tooled along the darkly forested boundary of the park until they reached the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden, its two-hundred-foot width clogged with automobiles whose headlights transformed it into a sluiceway of platinum. One block east of the gate, Boris pulled to a stop at the Soviet embassy, at Unter den Linden 7. He led Martha into the building and along several corridors, then up a flight of stairs, until they stood before an