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Halstead’s journey from the dining room of Berlin’s Kaiserhof Hotel, where he had enjoyed a breakfast of potatoes fried with turnips until he had tasted the cup of turnip coffee made a reality by years of an Allied blockade, was a sad affair. Just down the street from his hotel, a truckload of young men wearing bright Communist red were shouting at those who still had jobs to make morning walks to, shouting at them to join the weeks-old revolution. The foreigner, much like the natives who seemed used to the current state of affairs, kept close to the peeling walls and broken windows of the buildings lining the sidewalks. He watched with grim fascination and hurried steps as more than one house was ransacked by Karl Liebknicht’s “shock troops” to the distant and unseen background of occasional gunshots. Often Halstead and his fellow pedestrians had to step over homeless persons sleeping against the walls, including many men in tattered uniforms newly-arrived from the Western front.
Halstead arrived early for his appointment at Charité Hospital, in a small reception room staffed by an unnaturally thin secretary in a threadbare blouse who expressed no sympathy in her dead eyes for a man whose head was completely wrapped in bandages. She merely asked if she could help him.
“Certainly,” Halstead replied in crisp German learned from his immigrant mother, refined during a five-year stint in West Germany with the U.S. Army, and matched to the vernacular and accent of Nineteen Eighteen with casual conversations and casual readings of the local papers since his arrival. “Herr Kirchner here to see Doctor Joseph.”
“Very good. Please be seated, and he will be with you shortly.”
“Herr Kirchner” smiled and took the chair nearest the receptionist, a leather-and-wood affair with a straight back and another newspaper on the table beside it. Halstead picked up the paper and pretended to begin to read.
The door to the doctor’s office opened, and one of Germany’s most eminent plastic surgeons entered the reception area. “Herr Kirchner, I presume?”
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