Character Analysis
Mr. Perls is a friend and neighbor of Dr. Adler; he lives on the fifteenth floor of the Hotel Gloriana. When Wilhelm first meets him, he sees that he "carried a heavy cane with a crutch tip," and has "[d]yed hair and a skinny forehead" (1.29). In a moment of unkindness, Wilhelm thinks to himself:
Who is this damn frazzle-faced herring with his dyed hair and his fish teeth and this drippy mustache? Another one of Dad's German friends. Where does he collect all these guys? What is the stuff on his teeth? I never saw such pointed crowns. Are they stainless steel, or a kind of silver? How can a human face get into this condition. Uch! (1.29).
Luckily, Wilhelm's conscience kicks in pretty quickly once he realizes that the man is probably a Holocaust survivor:
Each of those crowns represented a tooth ground to the quick, and estimating a man's grief with his teeth as two per cent of the total, and adding that to his flight from Germany and the probable origin of his wincing wrinkles, not to be confused with the wrinkles of his smile, it came to a sizable load. (1.29)
Mr. Perls's presence at breakfast means that there's another person there to gossip with Dr. Adler about Dr. Tamkin's shady ways—a conversation that makes Wilhelm plenty anxious, seeing as how he's just given Tamkin a power of attorney over the last of his money.