Pennies for The Austrian Painter

The great Jonah Goldberg, when talking about Attack of the Clones, once complained about current affairs creeping into the film; cigarettes, campaign finance reform and the like.  He called these 'pennies' from the Christopher Reeve movie, Somewhere in Time.

In this film Reeve puts himself in a trance to travel back to the turn of the 20th century to meet a beautiful woman- ahhhhhh, Jane Seymour. The trance is broken when he reaches into his pocket and takes out a modern penny.

We just found one of Goldberg's pennies in The Austrian Painter.

Our protagonist meets the nice American couple that just moved in down the hall. Turns out our American, Bob Baker, is with the embassy. Before coming to Berlin he was posted to Pyongyang where he dealt with the 'Korean Question'.

Ooops.

We'll have to do a re-write.