6

Claire found the curved wooden gates in the fine stone house of the Rectory locked. She knocked. Birds called wildly in the trees behind her in the rain. It was twilight now. Lilac bushes on each side of the gates were filled with heady drooping blossoms. She gave the rusted bell a good push, then again another. She turned and watched the path. An oboe-like sweetness drenched the very green and empty pasture with glistening rain. After a while she could hear footsteps down a staircase within. The door. There was old Father Metz himself just as the rain let go and came down cats and dogs.

“Hi!” she cried.

“Ja so was!” He took her hand in his fat one and shook it heartily. “Komm! Kommen Sie ’rein!” He invited her in, practically pulling her across the threshold. They went together up the curving wrought-iron stairway to his chambers. “I am so happy to see you,” he told her again and again. “Kaffee oder Tee?”

“Hmmm,” Claire deliberated. In the last few days she had consumed more caffeine and alcohol than she would normally in months. Never mind. She’d been through the mill, ha-ha, she’d have yet another coffee.

Father rang a little communion bell. He had been busy, she noticed, cutting out Christmas-card fronts for bookmarks. A stout, aproned lady with water in her legs and a furry mole on her cheek appeared at the door and was told to prepare “einen schönen Kaffee und etwas kleines Süsses, bitte schön.” She was gone and they were left alone. It was a nice big room. Too big, probably, when winter came and you had to heat it. Tall ceilings and too loosely lead-paned glass diamonds. Charming but drafty.

“Did you know,” he chatted as he straightened the room, looking for papers she would need, “the car was made after the war, but from prewar materials? That’s why the running boards. It was the Bishop’s car. I inherited it from his chauffeur. So you know the car’s lineage,” he said.

“Did you come from Munich, Father?”

“Me? Ach, nein. I come from Warteweil. Ja, ja. Das schöne Warteweil. It’s quite near Aidenried.” He peered at her over his glasses. “You’ve been to Aidenried, I hear.”

She shivered. He put another log on the fire and it blazed cheerfully up.

Father had a nice lumpy sofa and an even lumpier easy chair. There was a good bronze standing lamp beside it and a table overflowing with books and missals and parish information. There was a worn leather hassock with a pouchy groove for his slippered feet. He’d been listening to Mendelssohn. He turned it off.

“I’m glad to find you home,” she said. “I was afraid I might have missed you in the crowd at the wedding.”

“That I couldn’t do, nein.” He sucked in his breath. “I wish them very well, but until the new Frau von Osterwald gets an annulment from her first marriage, I cannot sanction the union, na?”

“That’s right.” Claire remembered. “Isolde’s first marriage was Catholic, wasn’t it.”

A gargantuan television was placed dead in front of his space, and a hefty volume of Lives of the Saints had its place in the crook of the arm of the chair. There was a pastel, hand-crocheted shawl cast discreetly behind the chair but sticking out by its few giveaway tassels.

“Also denn.” He snuggled into his spot. Claire sat on the sofa. “For what can I do you?” he asked politely, looking to see if she had brought her purse. It took Father a while to get into the gear of speaking English. Once he got going he did very well, but the getting there was a bumpy road.

“I’ve come to give you your money.” She smiled.

Father Metz was so delighted with this news, she had a sudden realistic doubt as to what she’d done, but at last she remembered the dashboard and was happy again.

After they completed their paperwork, they exchanged pleasantries for a while until the housekeeper came and went, leaving them with roasted coffee and a Bienenstich, a sticky conglomeration of honey-toasted almond clusters atop a custard-filled, sliced yellow layer cake.

“I couldn’t,” she vowed.

“Ach, komm!” Father Metz became so childishly deflated at the prospect of having to wait till she left to enjoy it, she let herself be coerced.

“Oh, all right,” she said.

They sat dividing their sweets.

Claire cleared her throat. “You know,” she said, “I feel a little guilty.”

Father stopped his eating, fork midair. He was used to this and good at it. He waited.

“I found, well, stole would be the more appropriate word here, something from Hans’s room.”

“Is this, as you Americans say, ‘off from the record’?”

“You mean am I asking you to hear my confession?”

“Ja.”

“Okay. If we can do this like this. In here. I mean I haven’t been to confession for a while.”

“Just say what is in your heart, my child.”

“Well, here I was, snooping around Hans von Grünwald’s room, and I came across this.” She handed the priest the old list of names and addresses.

Father took it from her. He readjusted his glasses and read it carefully. “Tya,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t—”

“I think it’s a list of old clients from the Mill. People who used to stay there years ago. I believe someone, Hans probably, hid this, well, stuck it under his desk blotter; and when I came across it, I found something someone, maybe the murderer, was looking for.”

“Nana, na, na, na!” Father held up his hand to put a stop to this. “First let us get one very thing straightened! Hans did not was murdered! For heaven’s sake. No wonder you are all upset. This all happening just when you first arrived! Mein Gott! Alles auf einmal! Everything at once. Everyone upset at one time! Cosimo and Stella Gabriella don’t know what to do about the Mill! There are bills. Fräulein Wintner complaining why all the bills? Money going out to England, to the Church, for fuel to heat. What does she think, the Mill owes no money to the Church? A tenth of the income should go automatically to the Church! This is something every civilized person knows. The minute a person starts tithing his income with the poor, his luck will change. This is known fact. The most successful people in the world will tell you this. You have to give to get!” He was out of breath. He sat back with a whoosh. He remembered Claire. “And you, poor little Amerikanerin, coming into the middle of this. Of course you are feeling upset! No wonder!”

And so she told him briefly about Iris and the diamonds story in New York, and then her abrupt denial they’d ever existed.

“First, I don’t know of any treasure.” This almost burst out of him, as though he couldn’t wait to get that off his chest. “You know,” he then said more kindly, “lots of people come back here to Germany. It is not only because what they lived through here was so terrible but because it was so intense. People have, how can I put this, people have a hard time feeling anything as they go along in life. That is the terrible thing. Oh, I’m not talking about people who have grave, painful illnesses. That is different, of course. No, I mean, sometimes, when people have lived through a war, nothing else in their life can compare with its intensity, and they spend great amounts of time reliving that. Going over and over the terrible and wonderful moments. When, perhaps, they should be moving on. You know, getting on and enjoying what it is, what is happening now. You get what I mean?”

Claire moved in her chair. “Yeah, well, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I just can’t come to terms with what the Germans did to all those Jews, you know? I mean, I lived here ten years, and I never met anyone who admitted to being a Nazi.”

“Well, what did you think? Someone would come and tell you, exactly you, what it was happened to them back then? I mean you think it was only the Jews went through the hell? Lost their whole families? Nein, nein. Everybody lost their families, my Fräulein. It was easier to watch it happen to the Jews, perhaps, because the Jews had so much before the trouble started. It’s easier to see someone destroyed if they have everything you want and cannot get your hands on. For example, if you wanted to have a university career before the war, it was hardly possible if you weren’t a Jew. So people resented that they could not become a doctor in their own country when the Jews could. Never mind that the Jews might have been more clever and earned that privilege and were Germans since hundreds of years. What I am meaning to say is that people let terrible things happen to people they are jealous of more easily.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, Father. I just wasn’t really talking about that, I mean, we could go on and on about this for days. I was thinking of the treasure.”

“All this talk of treasure. I, myself, was in Italy during the war. But of course, over the years, I too have heard the stories, the dreams of finding a treasure at the Mill. But it all always comes to nothing. Nothing but frust.”

“Frustration.”

“Yes, frustration.” He laughed at his faulty English.

“But there are stories,” Claire went on. “I mean, everyone believes them. Or part of them. And what about the haunting? Some people say the Mill is haunted because of the treasure. Stella Gabriella says her grandmother, Kunigunde, won’t rest until the treasure goes where it belongs. She says she’s the ghost.”

“Was? Nein. That comes from the child that was killed.”

“Child? What child?”

“Well.” Father snuggled into his chair. “I will tell you what I know.” The rain continued to beat down outside. “There was a woman kept secretly at the Mill. She was a Jew. She was the mistress of old Adam von Grünwald.” He noticed the sudden flush on Claire’s pale cheeks. “Oh yes, it’s true. Enough people knew about her after she was discovered. But for a long while, she was kept secretly in the attic over there. She became pregnant. But because the woman was a Jew, it was said that Adam’s mother gave her something, made her so sick that the baby died. It was something a woman could take to abort. Only the fetus was almost full term.”

“What! You mean the woman who was Adam von Grünwald’s mistress years ago almost had his child?”

“That is the story.” Father Metz shook his head sadly. Human nature could do very little to shock this old fellow.

Claire clapped one hand over her mouth. She was stunned. So Iris had lost a child! How horrible. And she had never told her! Never told anyone, probably. That explained so much. People her age didn’t go about telling stories of their lost children the way they did nowadays. She would have held on to that grief all these years. She closed her eyes in silent mourning for Iris’s grief. No wonder she drank. Poor thing. Everyone she’d loved around her killed. Murdered. All except for Adam. And she’d lost him as well. No wonder she had never returned. After his mother had murdered her child! And he continued to live with the mother. That must have been the most unforgivable part.

Claire shivered. Temple was right. This was a horrible place. With the ghosts of children murdered.

“You know, Father,” she said, “I really am beginning to wonder if Hans was murdered. I am. I can’t prove it and I don’t even know who to suspect, but I believe he could have been murdered.”

Father shook his head sadly. “If he was murdered,” he whispered, “it could have been almost anyone who did it.”

“You’re right. It seems everyone had a reason, didn’t they?”

“He was not an easy man.” Father Metz removed his spectacles and rubbed his tired eyes. He remembered his own feelings of dislike for von Grünwald. He was a man devoid of faith. But more than that, he’d despised those who had it. Father Metz wished, at times, the world would leave the past alone.

“I was wondering if you knew of some private greed that would make someone hate him enough to kill him,” Claire pursued.

“No.” Father shook his head. “Not greed. No, it must have been love. Love is far more treacherous than greed, farther-reaching.”

Claire watched him, her mouth open. She realized he was right. “There’s something else I’d sort of like to talk to you about, if you have another minute.”

“Of course, of course.” He knew this was what was really on her mind.

Claire took a deep breath. “Well. I’m married. I’m a married woman. And there’s this man, this man I see—” The room went white with sudden lightning.

“You have been intimate with this man?” Father got right to the point.

“No. Not yet. I mean, no. I’m not going to be intimate with him, either. It’s just that I feel… my feelings for him are so strong, so real.” She got up and walked across to the window. Rain poured down. “I’m almost afraid,” she said, laughing, “of myself. My weakness. I almost know that, given the chance, I would do anything, anything with him.” They both jumped at the clap of thunder.

“That is not a given.” Father came over and put a hefty hand on her shoulder. “If that were so, you would not be telling me all this now. Is that not right?”

Claire shook her head, not knowing anything right now.

“Fräulein Claire.” He called her “Fräulein” as he would a child, not out of disrespect. He clasped her hands in his. “Do not be so hard to judge yourself before you’ve done the deed. Your strength and goodness might surprise you.”

“But if I have sinned already in my heart, I have already sinned,” she said. “Isn’t that the way it goes?”

“The way it goes is that that is the way the world gets by, living from one harmless imagined episode to the next.” He shrugged. “So long as nothing happens.”

But it wasn’t so. He was wrong, she knew. Ideas and imaginings were real, existing forever in some underlying dimension, permanent, changing everything. How had he forgotten? He couldn’t have become a priest and not known it once. It was getting dark. She wanted to get back to the Mill.

“Father”—she collected her camera from the floor and shook hands—“thank you so much for everything. Will I see you in the morning? May I pick up the car then?”

“And I will have the papers ready for you,” he promised. Come anytime, ja?”

“Okay.” She stood before him while he gave her his blessing. She started to leave.

“Oh, and Fräulein,” he called her back. “It wasn’t ‘they’ that crucified Him. It was us. And if He could forgive us; so”—he extended his hands as if to say Voilà!—“then why can’t we?”

“Why”—she looked into his knowing eyes—“indeed.”

As she began her descent on the curving wrought-iron stairway, she was attacked by a dog. With no regard for its own safety on the stairs, the small dog herded her with snaps and snarls until she was forced back up.

“Hier! Komm!” Father Metz stood behind her, doing no good whatsoever, blocking her ascent and not being able to get his hands on the dog. It was, Claire saw, Hans’s old dog. She took her mesh bag of films from her vest pocket and smacked the animal lightly on the nose with it. He got the message all right and hightailed it down the rest of the staircase, yelping dramatically. By the time he got to the kitchen, Claire could hear his barks had regained their pepper.

“I thought you were going to let someone else take that dog.” She grinned.

Father shrugged. “Some things,” he admitted sheepishly, “Nature decides for us. It’s not forever, I know, but how long is forever anyway? Eh? Was?”

The rain had stopped. Claire crossed the meadow. She hadn’t even mentioned Johnny to the priest. She hadn’t even thought of him, if she were honest, since she’d landed in Germany, except as a sort of necessary encumbrance. The muddy ground was rutted, and she was far from the path. She turned her ankle twice and was grateful when she saw a car coming toward her to light her way. To her surprise, Otto von Auto came rolling along. Whoever’s driving will surely give me a ride, she thought, and then realized they well might, as it was her own car. And something else occurred to her. If the dog always hacked a bark at anyone who left, and he hadn’t barked at the time of the murder, then the murderer had never left the Mill.

She tried to peer behind the windshield. It was Cosimo. She had such a concentrated image of him at the Mill that it was almost a shock to see him like this behind the wheel, tooling about the countryside willy-nilly on his fine day out. He opened the door to her by leaning over and stretching his long self across the passenger seat. She had a moment of stark warning and then, looking into the liquid eyes beneath ferocious brows, this evaporated and she felt quite safe. She climbed irrevocably in.

He drove a little way before either of them said anything. She felt the car slide graciously back onto the road and said, “Thank you. I was turning my ankle left and right out there.”

“Hedgehog,” he explained. “Bad gullies.”

“It’s so dark so quickly,” she marveled. “It never gets really dark in Queens. Between the lights from the city and the airports.”

The car still smelled of Father Metz. Incense and dandruff and leathery age. The Saint Christopher medal, worn but still recognizable, remained on the glove box. She touched it fondly.

“Watch,” Cosimo said, and turned the headlights off by pulling out the ivory knob on the dash. He was still heading in the direction he’d been driving when he’d picked her up, away from the Mill.

They left the Rectory and Saint Hildegard’s off to their right. There was nothing here, only fields and rolling hills with dark orchards. The stars were fierce and close. She felt the car axle bump down onto the field again. He’d taken it off the road. “What are you doing?” she cried. “We’re going the wrong way! The tires!”

“Look!” His eyes glittered. She forced herself to look away from him and into the night. It was clean with the rain and puddles everywhere. The clouds, moving swiftly, pulled apart. A hauntingly beautiful full moon rose up before them.

“The moon to plant,” Cosimo said. He stopped the car.

They looked together at the suddenly luminous pitch of the world.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you.” He said it as a fact, not a question.

“No,” she said, surprised at the truth of it. “I’m not.”

“Almost everyone is, you know. The whole village of Saint Hildegard’s. They even cross themselves when I walk by. They call me a changeling. Left by fairies.”

“What nonsense,” Claire said. “Your mother was one of them.”

“Oh, she was the one who started that rumor.”

Claire tilted her head at him curiously. Was he putting her on? Well, if he was, he was still a frightened and disturbed boy to confide such thoughts to a relative stranger like herself. “You know what you are?” She smiled gently. “One of those rare persons, sensitive to every vibration. The world is just more cruel and unevolved than the likes of you, Cosimo.”

“You don’t think I killed my father, do you?”

“I must admit, the thought did occur to me, but I dismissed the idea just as quickly.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Why that?”

She sighed and dropped her head back on the worn gray-brown upholstery. “Instinct, I guess. I can’t imagine it. Don’t forget, I was there when you saw your father … there. It didn’t seem to me as though you were acting.”

They remembered, together, that terrible sight. Whoever had done that, she realized, was capable of anything. She shuddered. “It must be awful for you,” she said. “All this. Just awful.”

“It’s not as if we were orphans,” he said with childlike optimism. “Fräulein Wintner always takes care of us. She looks after all our finances, so we need not be troubled by that.” He said this with relief. Whew. Not having to pay the bills. Claire almost laughed.

“I quite like Fräulein Wintner,” Cosimo said, defending her from Claire’s obvious skepticism. “She’s different from other girls.”

“Really?”

“Mmm. Sometimes she lets me—” He looked shrewdly at Claire. “We won’t bother about that, though.”

“No,” Claire agreed, imagining all the same what Fräulein Wintner let him do.

“You know, she had a rough time of it, as a child. Have you ever seen her thumb? No? It’s like a ball. A globe. She sucked it into a ball when she was a little girl. She used to worry so. Her parents would fight terribly. She would suck it with great force.” Cosimo stuck his thumb into his mouth and gobbled it with such rigorous noises, Claire was taken aback. They both laughed.

“And of course, there’s Evangelika.” Cosimo stopped laughing. “She won’t leave. She raised us, after all. She’ll stay and always give me my meals. That’s sure. She’s been here forever. Well. Since the war. And she does the wash when the girl doesn’t come. She doesn’t mind too much. Well, she yells a bit.”

“Really. And Fräulein Wintner too? She won’t leave either?”

“Stella says she won’t want to now. Now Father’s gone and she’s had a setback of her plans and will have to regroup. Like in a game of chess, when it’s ‘Check!’”

“Plans?”

“You didn’t know? Wanting to marry Father.”

“I’m shocked. Your father wanted to marry Bibi Wintner?”

“Let’s put it this way, he let her believe he did. Stella says Father thought he could use everyone.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s an illusion to imagine ourselves in charge.” He raised his chin to the magnificent moon. “I mean, in charge of what? Confusion?” They were silent for a bit, transfixed by the Bavarian stars and the black Alps in the south. Then he said, “Bibi—Fräulein Wintner—she’s always trying to drum up business so Father would want to sell. She wants to live where it is warm. Where there are palm trees and wild beasts. Heard too many of my father’s adventure tales, I think, from trips to Kenya and Thailand and all. Oh, she is a keen little thing. You have to give her that. Wait!” He reached his long fingers across the dash. With the other hand he fiddled with the radio.

“What is it?” Claire cried, concerned.

“It’s Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata.’” He shushed her.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought something must have happened.”

He managed to get the station in tune. It was no chore to sit and listen. It really was splendid. They sat religiously and heard it the rest of the way through.

“Perhaps, before I leave, you will play the whole thing through for me,” Claire said.

He hung his beautiful head. “I’m afraid I never could. It was the piece I played always for my mother, you see. I could never play it for anyone else. Never.”

“What a pity.”

He turned on her, startling her. “What do you mean?” He loomed, hostilely, above her.

“All that beauty bottled up and put away on a shelf for no one to enjoy. Just that you are fortunate, Cosimo, to have access to such beauty. And I am sorry for whoever won’t hear you play it.”

“Oy. Beauty, beauty, beauty.” He made a goony face. “You’re like Stella. Loving things just because they’re beautiful.”

“I love beauty for beauty’s sake, yes,” she defended herself, stung.

“You love it for its meaning. Everything with you has to mean something. Be so profound.”

“Yes,” Claire said. “Otherwise I might as well be a piece of fluff spinning in the wind, being everywhere but never knowing it. So in that sense I suppose you’re right.”

“Ach! You need not be so arbitrary. At least not with me. You see, I know your secret.”

“Do you really? So, you’re good at other people’s business, eh? And I had you pegged for being oblivious.”

He opened the car door, the hinges squeaking, and he pulled up a handful of green.

“What secret do you know?” She smiled carefully.

He held the stuff up to his nose and sniffed it like a dog at a bush. “Engelwurz,” he pronounced, ignoring her question and handing it over for her to inspect with her nose. “Angelica archangelica. Used to expel evil and disease. Contaminated air won’t infect you if you have it in your mouth.”

“Hmmm. Sounds good.”

“The Archangel drove the Devil from Paradise with its help.”

“No fooling.”

“Good for toothaches, poisoning, and rabies bite as well.”

“Wow.”

“The birds go wild for it. That’s what spreads the seeds. Usually it’s happier in shady spots.”

“Cosimo, what about these birds around the Mill? The magpie. You know. What’s the name?”

Cosimo looked at her suspiciously. “Elster. Raubvogel.”

“That’s it. Magpie is ‘robber bird.’ I found one in the attic.”

“You didn’t hurt it?”

“I let him out.”

Cosimo smiled. “He just comes back because when he was young, he had some trouble with his wing, and I kept him up there till he could fly again. I used to feed him Bauernschinken. You know, meat. He loved it so.” His face relaxed as he remembered and he looked really beautiful, his long black eyelashes sweeping his cheek.

How tragic, all that had happened to these two beautiful children.

“Does that bird you took care of ever, sort of, I don’t know, take things?”

“Only shiny little things. You know, soda-tin tops. Pop tops. Like that. Harmless things.” He looked, worried, at Claire. “He’s mad for shiny things.”

“Cosimo, is there a treasure at the Mill?”

His face changed to one of elaborate scorn. “If there was, my father used it up.”

“No, I don’t mean like a fountain of youth or a grotto of faith or anything like that. I mean something tangible.” She knitted her brows and tried to peer more closely into his face. “Something, perhaps, your mother might have told you about?”

A large, great teardrop traveled down his cheek. “My mother was the treasure,” he said. He turned and grabbed hold of Claire’s shoulders. He shook them back and forth.

“You can’t imagine what it’s like if your mother shouts at you. If she shouts she doesn’t understand you, could never understand you! Ooh! I hate so much that we must die,” he cried. “I hate it so!” He shook her again and again.

Claire held on to the edge of her seat, trying not to scream. No one would hear them here. Then suddenly he stopped. He let her go and he slumped back into his seat. “We’d better go back,” he said, waking up. “Stella won’t like it.”

“Shall I drive, Cosimo?”

“That’s a good idea.” He shrugged. “I stole the car.”

Temple Fortune was the first person she saw when they drove up the gravel path. Their eyes locked and the feeling of dizzy levitation she was beginning to recognize as what accompanied his being near took over. Then he noticed Cosimo. Disappointment flashed across his face. She had an urge to push Cosimo from the car. Fortunately, presence of mind prevailed, and she managed to sit still and let him leave. Nothing seemed to have calmed down since she’d left. If anything, the decibel level had been revved up. The strolling musicians had been let go or had cleared out at the first drops of rain, and rock music from tapes was blaring. Claire looked around for the police and saw none. Cosimo skulked away into the house, as was his way. She could hear Evangelika squawking at him, furious about the mud on his Sunday shoes. She noticed Mara sidle up to Temple Fortune and push up against him in her devotional and sultry way. Claire slammed the car door, feeling it shut with her own possessive finality. Try as she might, though, there was no comfort there. At least she hadn’t made a fool of herself. He didn’t know, he would never know the extent of her feelings. She would stay right here and watch him with his Mara. She would swallow the truth whole, let it sink in so she could grieve and get over it.

She locked the car door with her own set of keys. And just let Fräulein Bibi Wintner try to have her arrested! She would make such a stink they would hear her in Toledo. Or at least in Queens. She reminded herself, if doubtfully, that she was, by gum, an American citizen.

The girls in their yellow organza gowns danced in swirls around her. She held her breath until they passed, knowing she looked neither graceful nor lovely. Her hair was frizzed, her boots muddy, her forehead shiny. Blacky waved to her from across the garden. He had a great bandage across his nose. At least he was enjoying his wedding. Isolde was nowhere to be seen, and Claire decided, this once, to stay away. She looked for Puffin but couldn’t find him either for the throng. Discouragement overtook her. She sat down on the nearest bench. Puffin appeared, wizard-like, and handed her a stein of Spaten beer. She took a grateful, huge draft. She was going to go home with no cache of diamonds as she had imagined. She might as well admit it.

“What’s up?” He joined her on the bench.

“Oh, you know, nothing. I was just feeling a little low.”

“Weddings,” Puffin sympathized.

“No, not that. Well, maybe partly that. Also, I guess it bothers me that someone is probably going to get away with murder.” She didn’t give a hoot who got away with murder till now, but as she heard herself say it, she did care.

Puffin made a face. “If there was a murder. Personally, I’m beginning to think we’ve got a couple of overactive imaginations here. And after the first twenty-four hours, if no one is arrested, the chances are slim anyone will ever be.”

“I don’t know where you heard that.” Claire frowned. “My sister is a detective on the New York City Police Department, and she says ninety-five percent of all murder cases are solved.” And, she did not add, her sister also said it was most often someone in the victim’s own family who’d done it.

“Well, if someone did kill him, love, I say let’s run him for office.”

“No.” Claire had another delicious slurp. “There I can’t agree with you, Puffin. Nobody has a right to kill another human being. No matter what he’s done.”

“So they shouldn’t have stopped Hitler in Munich before he got started. That’s what you mean?”

“You’ve got me there.”

Mara Morgen was dancing with Blacky. Her eyes flashed, and she pressed provocatively against him. Blacky twirled her romantically into a dip and leaned, apache-like, above her.

Temple Fortune sat down on the bench beside Puffin. “Shall I remove her for you, darling?” Puffin asked him sweetly.

Temple sighed good-naturedly. “Let her be. She hasn’t had the easiest time of it.”

They sat there watching the party, watching Mara, really, for Isolde was nowhere to be seen. They watched her do her belle-of-the-ball until it became uncomfortable. She was a mite overdoing the sultry vamp, Claire decided, feeling Temple’s self-consciousness, feeling sorry for him.

“Mara looks great,” Claire remarked.

“She doesn’t, really,” Puffin said. “She just never took her film makeup off. She’ll be broken out tomorrow. I told her to take it off but she would insist on running to see an old friend in Schwabing. She wanted to do it intact.”

“That’s all right,” Temple said, tapping his foot, listening with one ear higher than the other. He’s probably a little deaf in that ear, Claire thought indulgently. That’s why the right side of his forehead wrinkles like that. “I got the last close-ups today,” Temple added. “Let her have fun. Whoever you got to do her face today was brilliant.”

“Yes, brilliant,” Puffin nodded, pleased.

They watched Mara from their professional, sophisticated stances, but even then there was something a little sordid about a grown woman acting so silly about a man just married. Even if it was just for the benefit of Temple Fortune, it had the ring of desperation about it for a woman who, Puffin had been so quick to point out, had just been satisfied. Perhaps Mara and Temple hadn’t been together after all. But then where had they been?

“What’s that you’re eating, Claire?” Puffin leaned over and picked from her plate.

“Radi,” she said and handed him the dish of sweltering, salted radish, long and fat and white.

“Mmmm. Delicious.” He licked his fingers.

“Keep it. Keep it,” she insisted. She didn’t want it now.

Mara came tottering over, just in time, too, because Isolde was making her way back on the scene, heading for Blacky, rolling her broad runway shoulders. Mara was flushed and excited. Her flimsy dress outlined her flesh. She didn’t look quite so good up close. It didn’t matter now. The night was almost over.

“Enjoying yourself, Mara?” Puffin inquired.

“Oh, oh, oh. That sounds like a reprimand! I am neglecting my sweetie, aren’t I?” She pressed Temple’s ears into his head. “Jealous, darling?” Her words came out too loud and slurred. He flinched. She jackknifed her body over and pulled up her stockings in three different places. People turned to look. Claire could almost feel Temple’s dismay. “Come.” Mara yanked Temple to his feet.

“I don’t want to dance with you,” he told her firmly. Then, more politely, “Thank you.”

“Then dance with our poor Claire.” She jostled him away as though she’d meant this from the start. “She has nobody, do you, Claire? Come on, up with both of you. No more sticking in the mud!” She practically shoved them together. She wasn’t worried about competition from Claire. Claire was older and heavier than she was. And from what Isolde had told her, poor as a church mouse. So what was to worry?

It took Claire and Temple a few clumsy steps to get into position. Then the music stopped, and they had to wait foolishly for a new song to start up. Mara winked at Puffin. He went to get her a fresh glass of champagne, but when he came back, she was already passed out, dead drunk, on two chairs. He’d have to call Friedel the gardener to help carry her to bed.

The song started up. It was Elvis singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

“You see that?” Puffin said to a woozy Friedel. “Not one of you can speak a word of English. But just put on old Elvis and you all know the words. Go figure.” It was true. The entire German festivity had turned into a quite hearty Elvis sing-along. Entire tables of guests swayed back and forth. “You can really just imagine the war,” he remarked to Friedel. “All this sentimental, euphoric camaraderie.”

Friedel slapped his thigh with buffoon-like glee.

Puffin looked worriedly at Temple and Claire out on the dance floor. Temple had one hand on the small of Claire’s back and the other wrapped lightly around her fingers. They stayed in one spot and rocked very slightly back and forth. Claire could hardly breathe. She wouldn’t look at him. He wouldn’t look at her. They were both so happy that what they suspected was true: they fit. They moved in sync. When the music came to the hook, he put his cheek a little closer to hers and pressed her lower back in toward him. Here’s where I pass out, she thought, but she didn’t. He carried her through it, lifting her with his intoxicating scent. And then it was over, the longest and the shortest dance she’d ever done. She blinked as though she’d been dreaming. He cupped her elbow with his hand in the old-fashioned way and escorted her back to the bench. He sat her down, bowed almost imperceptibly, then took his spot up on the other side of Puffin.

“Well,” Puffin sniffed. “I’m glad that’s over. You had me worried there for a minute, dears.” He fanned his face with one of those cardboard beer-stein coasters. “The whole yard was warming up. Well, well, I suppose it was bound to happen. Still, I’m glad it’s over now. No harm done, what? Sounds like the American hour, doesn’t it? First the Viennese hour and then a little limber-them-up with the Yanks. Let them think they know how to dance by putting in a couple of black-and-blues.”

“Out of the night the light is shining, it’s twilight time.” The song filled the garden. Claire and Temple sat like book-ends, trembling, as Puffin chatted gaily on.

Claire, oblivious to Puffin, was thinking. Temple made her realize she was more given to wondering than other people, maybe, but it was okay, he wanted her that way. She even, if she wasn’t mistaken, cheered him up.

Temple thought, she likes me because I am Irish, something no one ever did. Her I could handle, he thought. This one I could persuade to the point of not minding a thing.

So they sat, Puffin between them, unsure, waiting for a chance, fearing what would happen only a little more than what wouldn’t. Finally, Claire thought, this is silly. I’m a married woman. She didn’t think about Johnny, just that she was married to him. She stood up abruptly, and Temple stood at the same time.

Propriety! she berated herself as she walked away with finality. Oh, you fool. You’ll never have the chance again. You fool!

Halfway across the dance floor, Fräulein Bibi Wintner in her snazzy glamour jacket harrumphed onto the scene. “Uh-oh,” Claire said and turned and bumped into the very arms she would have gone upstairs to dream about.

“You won’t get away this time.” His lips touched her ear.

“Okay,” she said, and he danced her away.