Martha and her mother met them. Martha, bright-eyed and smiling, was smartly dressed in a pale mauve suit with white satin trim and a flared skirt. Beside her, white-haired Mrs. Dodd seemed small, wan, and very tired, but she was unfailingly gracious as she greeted each new arrival.
“I’m counting on you to help loosen up some of the tension around here,” Martha confided to Greta. “I asked Mildred to invite interesting and intriguing people, but I haven’t seen a grimmer bunch of Germans gathered in one place since the Night of the Long Knives.”
Greta glanced around the room. “I’m sure everyone’s just anxious for Thomas Wolfe to arrive.”
“I hope you’re right. I wanted amusing conversation, an exchange of stimulating views, not miserable scowls better suited for a funeral.”
As Martha turned to welcome another guest, Adam and Greta moved on. “Something tells me Martha doesn’t know how interesting and intriguing these particular guests are,” he said in a wry undertone as they joined the crowd.
“That’s because Mildred and I didn’t explain our criteria for choosing them,” said Greta. “Mildred wanted to, but Arvid and I thought she would be a more convincing hostess if she had nothing to hide.”
She exchanged a smile across the ballroom with Bella Fromm, formerly the diplomatic reporter for the Vossische Zeitung, now with the Continental Post. Glancing to her right, Greta nodded discreetly to Max Tau, the renowned German-Norwegian editor and author. As a Jew, he had taken to prefacing his job titles with “erstwhile” whenever he was obliged to mention them in mixed company. She hoped he continued to work in secret.
Greta and Adam separated to mingle through the crowd, the better to gather more impressions to compare later. Adam immediately went to his friend John Sieg, the former editor of the Rote Fahne, a Communist newspaper officially forbidden by the Nazis but still published clandestinely by the Communist underground. In 1933, Sieg had been caught up in a wave of Nazi arrests and had spent four months in an SA prison, but that had not deterred him. With his connections to the underground, he would be a valuable ally.
Wandering the rooms, Greta soon found Mildred, radiant in her blue crepe de Chine dress, her golden hair woven into a bun. They conferred quietly before parting to work the crowd. Everything was in place. All around them, Germans and Americans chatted in lively groups or in somber pairs while liveried footmen circulated with trays of hors d’oeuvres and cocktails for those who craved something stronger than tea.
An hour passed as Greta wandered through the ballroom, the dining room, the Wintergarten, and the terrace, slipping easily into some conversations, eavesdropping on others as she accepted a cup of tea or nibbled on a canapé. Some guests revealed themselves less averse to the Reich than Greta and Mildred had believed. Others, though more circumspect, were unquestionably opposed, although whether they would be brave enough to join the burgeoning resistance was more difficult to ascertain. A few were so guarded and noncommittal that Greta could only guess where they truly stood. She imagined Arvid nodding approval and declaring that they should all be so careful and stoic, even among those they believed to be sympathetic to their cause. Studying them, marveling at how little they revealed of themselves, she wondered if they were more cautious because they already belonged to resistance circles and had more to lose if they were discovered.
Suddenly, a commotion near the top of the grand staircase heralded the arrival of the guest of honor. From across the hall Greta watched as the towering, dark-haired American shook hands with the Dodds. As his German publisher guided him through a swiftly gathering crowd of admirers, Thomas Wolfe tried to shake all the hands thrust at him, smiling and thanking his well-wishers, appearing somewhat embarrassed and yet still enjoying the attention. He had to be around six feet five inches tall, with rich, alert brown eyes, a boyish mouth, a small nose, and rounded cheeks. A moment later, Martha was at his side, her head barely reaching his shoulder as she tilted her face quite far back in order to grin up at him. Something in the proprietorial way she rested her hand upon his arm told Greta that Wolfe was yet another one of Martha’s conquests, or soon would be.
Only after observing the author from a distance for a while did Greta give in to the intrigue of his celebrity and introduce herself. She had read