The baron got up. His guest got up also.

“Ye-e-s,” Munchausen drawled, “they have stripped me of my waistcoat and cut off my pigtail. So be it. Only remember, my friend, the day will come when this frippery”—a long finger, moonstone oval gleaming, pointed prophetically at the open wardrobe—“when these moldering castoffs will be taken from their pegs, placed on cushions of brocade, and carried in solemn procession, like holy relics, to Westminster Abbey.”

But Ernst Unding was looking away.

“You have out-Munchausened Munchausen. I give you credit—as a poet.”

The moonstone dropped down. To Unding’s surprise, the baron’s face now crinkled into countless laughing creases, aging him at least a hundred years; his eyes narrowed to sly slits, while his thin lips unpursed to reveal long yellow teeth.

“Indeed. Back in the days when I lived in Russia, they invented a saying about me: Every baron has his flights of fancy. The ‘every’ was added later—names, you see, like anything else, become forgotten. In any case, I flatter myself with the hope that I have made better and wider use than other barons of my right to flights of fancy. I thank you, and also as one poet to another.”

A withered but tenacious palm grasped Unding’s fingers.

“Do as you please, my friend: You may believe or not believe Munchausen and . . . in Munchausen. But if you should doubt my handshake, you will deeply offend an old man. Goodbye. And one more bit of advice: Do not bore into all and sundry with your eyes. If you bore through a barrel the wine will run out and inside the hoops will remain only a foolish and booming hollowness.”

Unding smiled from the doorway and was gone. The baron was helped into his coat. Then an elegant secretary whisked into the room, clicked his heels, and handed the baron a heavy briefcase. Having straightened the lapels of his dress coat, Munchausen ran his left thumb and forefinger over the edges of the folders poking out of the briefcase. He riffled past: protocols from the League of Nations;* original documents to do with the Brest peace;* verbatim reports from sessions of the Amsterdam conference;* numerous pacts and treaties,* including Washington, Versailles, and Sèvres.

Eyeing these with fastidious distaste, Munchausen picked the briefcase up by its two bottom corners and shook the entire contents out on the floor. While secretary and manservant gathered up the paper piles, the baron went back to the morocco-bound tomelet patiently waiting on the arm of his chair; the tomelet dove inside the disencumbered briefcase, which shut over it with a loud click.

2. SMOKE THAT ROARS

STAIRS scurried under Unding’s feet and then, damply through his worn-out soles, sidewalk asphalt. The baron’s motorcar blared up from behind, spattering the pedestrian with mud as its yellow lamp-eyes rushed through the brumous spring gloaming.

Turning up his coat collar, Unding strode through a droning archway under four parallel rails suspended in air,* then down the broad straight course of the king’s quondam street.* Looming up on his right were the stone cubes, arcs, and cornices of the palace.* Down the asphalt’s glassy tire-smoothed glair there stretched—like a string of violet beads—the reflections of streetlights; from the eaves of the dusk-enshrouded palace drooped rain-soaked flags of revolution.* Farther on, right and left, the cast-iron benches of Unter den Linden went past Unding’s eyes, which now descried—pounding the air with bronze hooves—the black quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate.

He still had a way to go. Through the long Tiergarten and then down Bismarckstrasse, past ten crossroads to the far edge of Charlottenburg. The air, moist and smoky, seemed like a cheap and crude counterfeit air; the streetlamps’ glass globes seemed like light bubbles of foam about to fly up into the sky, while down onto roofs and pavements in a soundless avalanche darkness tumbled. The bare Tiergarten trees flickering past his footsteps reminded the poet of thickets butchered by missiles, but then his associations came closer than his eyes, came inside his skull, a web of fantastical trench-like streets. Unding stopped, listened for a moment, and decided that the thrum of the city, over there, beyond the Tiergarten, sounded like the receding rumble of an artillery battle. Under the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, which still recalled the recent pressure of Munchausen’s palm, he suddenly distinctly felt, almost burning his skin, the incandescent steel of a musket lock that had just fired.

“Phantasmagoria,” Unding muttered, looking around at the stars, lamps, trees, and scatter of paths.

Someone’s unsteady shadow, as if called by name, moved half-heartedly toward the poet. Under the soggy shell of a hat he saw cheekbones etched with hunger and rouge: a prostitute. Unding looked away and walked on. First he tried to think of a diminutive suffix for the name Phantasmagoria.