June met State Department liaison Benjamin Pennybacker’s improvised solution for neutrality: two Swiss musicians, Rudolf Reiff and Felix Rufenacht, who had just completed a crash course in diplomacy. They took up office hours in the Glass Room and arrived with $25,000 to distribute to the Japanese nationals whose accounts were frozen. Pennybacker joked about their scarcity while greeting them.

The other arrivals were Stella Gilfoyle and her younger brother Sandy Gilfoyle. Stella, disheveled and affectionate, pushed Sandy in a wheelchair; Sandy had a shaved, sutured wound and facial abrasions, and he remained unmoving and unresponsive. June read a letter from Dr. Ernest Schwartz explaining Sandy’s shell-shock after a training explosion, failed treatments, and the plan for Sandy to recuperate at the Avallon with Stella as caregiver, with federal permission to be in the hotel’s public spaces.

Shaken, June recalled saving Sandy from drowning as a child at Avallon IV and her mother’s wartime bitterness after her father’s suicide following the Great War. Though anger flared at the sound of German speech, June mastered herself and ordered staff to settle the Gilfoyles. Griff Clemons privately offered condolences.

June immersed herself in work: she forced local ambulance men to transport a German consular secretary with appendicitis to Malden, anticipating press fallout; released hidden sheets to handle suite swaps after senior officials demanded rooms larger than those assigned to some maids and butlers, and sent Grotto mints to displaced staff; handled an Italian diplomat’s accidental bathroom fire from burning a forgotten document, which Agent Hugh Calloway identified as a social host list; deflected Grotto staff, led by Chef Maurice Fortéscue, from pushing Erich von Limburg-Stirum into stunts; and consulted Pennybacker when Angela Bickenbach, an American married to a German attaché, sought to separate and stay in the U.S., which he said would require substantial paperwork.

Despite keeping busy, June could not stop thinking about Sandy’s idealism and his fixation on the lynching of Robert Prager as a lens for justice and collective will, which had driven his determination to serve. Eventually she sought solace alone in the ballroom, placing her hand in the fountain’s sweetwater to soothe herself and reaffirm the hotel’s resilience and her hopes for Sandy’s recovery and her future.

A paper airplane, folded from one of the poems suspended in the ballroom, splashed into the fountain. June looked up to find waiters Sebastian Hepp and Paul Eidenmüller with Erich von Limburg-Stirum on the balcony, surrounded by paper planes and stolen poems. Instead of immediate censure, June joined them, folding a plane and asking Erich about his feelings. Erich expressed love for flying for joy, reluctance to return to Germany where he would be forced to bomb, and worry for his fiancée, who might not know his whereabouts. He said Pennybacker urged patience in contacting her.

Agent Tucker Rye Minnick arrived and ordered the men out, reverting them to formal roles. He confronted June, showing her a nearby room outfitted with listening gear and warning that compromising the space could ruin his surveillance of foreign nationals, noting Erich’s brother was an SS-Gruppenführer. He pressed June on a guest she had hired and questioned a call log entry labeled “6CRW,” which June explained was an unlocked sixth-floor west cloakroom phone for event staff. June insisted her job was guest and staff well-being, while Minnick’s was security; he countered that their responsibilities overlap and told her to remember there was a war on.