THREE

1

AFTER YET ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE OUTFIT WAS ABDUCTED, drugged, flushed clean, and returned unharmed to his employers, Patchen invited the O. G. to join him for supper at the Club. Patchen himself dined there almost every night, never at the Members’ Table with the divorced, the widowed, the celibate, and the rest of the unwifed, but nearly always alone at a table with only one chair. He consumed half a bottle of wine from the private stock he kept in the Club cellar and swallowed the Club’s soft college dining hall food—overcooked fish or baked macaroni or Salisbury steak—that could be eaten with a fork or spoon without the aid of a knife. The O. G. had put him up for membership twenty years before so that he would have a cheap place to eat during Martha’s long sojourns in Guatemala, and Patchen had always used the Club primarily for that purpose. He liked the dull menu, the convenience of paying for his meals all at once when the bill came in at the end of the month, and, most of all, the freedom from tipping; giving money to waiters had irritated him ever since his honeymoon supper at Maxim’s. At first the other members had tried to make him welcome, but he had shown no interest in playing bridge or attending round table discussions on foreign policy or joining the Friday night Bridge Group, and at length they had given up. Nobody bothered him now; he was left in peace to eat his supper and read his book—or, more lately, to listen to a recorded work over the button earphones of a Sony Walkman, a far more private way of doing things. They liked him in the Club even if they only knew him by sight, a scar-faced figure dressed in black who, like the unhappy bastard Mordred in the King Arthur stories, had reasons for his mournful solitude only half-known even to himself; Patchen brought with him a certain shadowy panache, a hint that everyone who got in here could be trusted with the darkest secrets. They all knew what position he held, of course, and he was pointed out to guests: “That’s David Patchen, the head spy, over there in the corner—looks the part, doesn’t he?”

The O. G. was a different matter. He did not often eat at the Club. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing,” he said, “I’d just as soon go to McDonald’s.” But when he did come into the dining room he was overwhelmed by handshakes and greetings and by smiling old friends dropping by his table to swap yarns or introduce whomever they happened to be dining with. To avoid these interruptions, Patchen booked one of the small private dining rooms for their meeting. The O. G. arrived twenty minutes late, dressed in thick tweeds from the Outer Hebrides that smelled of spaniel and woodsmoke.

“Sorry to be behind time,” he said, accepting a glass of sherry, “I got held up by some fellows on the way in; Old Boys.” He mentioned a string of names and lifted his glass. “Absent friends.”

Plates of Belon oysters had already been served by the impatient waiter and the ice beneath the shells was half-melted. Patchen poured white wine from a half-bottle that also dripped ice water.

“Bâtard-Montrachet,” the O. G. said appreciatively; the Club wine list featured far less distinguished wines than this one. “You must have smuggled this in in your coat sleeve.”

“I keep some here for sentimental occasions.”

The O. G. ate a single oyster, then dropped his fork onto the ice. “These are those fake Nova Scotia Belons. Can’t stomach ’em. I’ll just drink the wine. Have you met Paul’s prodigal daughter?”

“No, I just missed her. I was out of the country, and then she and Paul went away.”

“Charming girl. Strange first name, but that’s her mother’s doing. She’s the spitting image of Paul. Actually, of his mother. She’s got the Christopher brain, too.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Not everybody would say so. High I. Q.’s and loyal hearts have been a mixed blessing to that family. It’s a pity you didn’t meet; she’s first-class material—speaks the languages, remembers the details. She says she spotted you coming out of my house the other day.”

Patchen finished his oysters and rang the bell for the waiter. “I thought that might be her. How did she know who I was?”

“Barney furnished a description. He made quite an impression on her—got to her young; very jesuitical from the sound of it, but of course that was Barney’s M. O.”

“Then I’m lucky to be alive. Does she know what happened to Wolkowicz?”

“Just newspaper stuff. Or so she says. I don’t think she suspects that you and her father were the ones who did poor Barney in. Best to leave that between her and Paul, I’d say. Anyway, they’re off to the races in the Maghrib.”

The upstairs waiter, elderly, black, and footsore, entered carrying a heavy tray bearing their next course. He set it down with a groan. Gazing over the O. G.’s shoulder at the five uneaten oysters on his plate, he nudged him sharply under the right shoulder blade with an index finger.

“Take ‘em away, Albert,” the O. G. said. “I don’t like ’em.”

“What’s the matter with them?”

“Not salty enough; not chewy enough; not real oysters. Tell ‘em downstairs to get the genuine article, will you?”

“I’ll tell them. They won’t listen.”

Albert dropped the main dish onto the bare table and poured more wine, filling the glasses to the rim, then plunged the empty bottle upside down into the ice bucket. “No need to come back, Albert,” Patchen said. “We’ll ring before we leave.” The old man shuffled away.

“We’ve lost another one,” Patchen said, after the door closed.

The O. G. looked up with mild interest from his mushy swordfish steak. “Where from?”

“Headquarters.”

“Headquarters.” The O. G. spoke the word without inflection, but this was a startling turn of events. The other Beautiful Dreamers had been kidnapped on foreign soil, all in the Middle East or in European countries that followed a policy of appeasing Arab terrorists to protect their own citizens from murder and abduction. But Headquarters? That was a different kettle of fish. “Who was it this time?” the O. G. asked.

“A man named Walpole, from counter-intelligence.”

The O. G.’s mental filing system clicked into operation. “I remember him,” he said. “Tall fellow from Rhode Island with a bald head and a Brigade of Guards mustache. Hearty laugh. Good mind for detail. Went to Wesleyan. What happened?”

“He went to the men’s room at the movies last Saturday afternoon and didn’t come back. He reappeared a week later, completely flushed out.”

“Happy as a clam like all the others?”

“Yes. But there was a difference. This time there was no video tape.”

“Then you don’t know what he told them?”

“No, but that doesn’t matter so much. We know what he knew.”

“Which was what?”

“Anti-terrorist ops.”

“Ah. It doesn’t sound like they hit a random target.”

“Why should they? They’ve got a lot of reliable information out of the others. What he told them is not the point.”

“It’s not? Then what is the point?”

“The video tape. They pinned a note to Walpole saying they’re going to hand the tape over to Patrick Graham.”

“Sugar!” said the O. G.

Patrick Graham was a famous television journalist, one of the new breed who were part leading man and part Grand Inquisitor. He had a long history of animosity toward the Outfit. This was partly political, because Graham in his youth had been a campus agitator and still believed that the United States of America was the chief enemy of the masses. But mostly it was personal. Even though he was wealthy and famous now, and married to the daughter of an English earl, his origins were humble, and as a scholarship student at Yale he had suffered rebuffs, real and fancied, from lesser men who had better pedigrees; in his heart he regarded the Outfit as the most exclusive fraternity in American history and he bitterly resented the fact that he had never been tapped for membership. He devoted a considerable share of his great talent and energy to discovering and exposing its secrets. It was Graham who broke the Wolkowicz story ten years before and he was still pursuing it long after the victim was in his grave. He had a particular hatred for Patchen because he believed that he had arranged Wolkowicz’s murder and staged it as a suicide. He was not disturbed by the idea of official murder; it confirmed his dark view of the Outfit’s real, though diabolically concealed, nature and methods.

Until now Patchen had dealt with Graham by ignoring him, a policy that turned him into an even more dangerous enemy.

“Have they actually given Patrick the tape?” the O. G. asked. He called Graham by his first name because, in his day, he had been polite to the announcer (as he called him), even accepting invitations to cocktail parties, though never to dinner, at his elegant house just down O Street from Christopher’s.

“Not yet, as far as I know,” Patchen replied.

“Patrick’ll be in seventh heaven,” the O. G. said, as if genuinely happy for him. “All the rest of them will have a fit because he’s scooped them again. It will be a plague of locusts. It could be the end of the Outfit.”

“No, that won’t be enough to put it out of its misery,” Patchen said. “I wish it were.”

The O. G. frowned. “You do? You’ll have to explain that to me. Why do you wish such a thing?”

“Because in my opinion,” Patchen said, “we’re going to have to destroy the village in order to save it.”

The O. G. had always maintained that any good operation could be described in a single sentence. A single sentence was all Patchen needed to describe his plan, and when he had uttered it the O. G. reached across the table and gripped his forearm in such a way that the enthusiasm and admiration he felt for his protégé ran from one man to another like a current of electricity.

“Bless you,” he said. “That’s brilliant. But you can’t tell anybody who works for you what you’re up to. It would destroy the whole purpose.”

“Exactly,” Patchen said. “But I can’t do it alone.”

“Don’t worry, son,” the O. G. said. “You won’t be alone.” He gave Patchen’s forearm, the dead one, another squeeze. “I’m proud of you.”

2

THE SENTENCE THAT PATCHEN MURMURED TO THE O. G. OVER THEIR inedible supper at the Club was this: “If I were the next Beautiful Dreamer we could start all over again.”

There was no need for him to explain his idea. The O. G. grasped its perfection and its simplicity as soon as the words were spoken. If Patchen’s memory was emptied by an enemy like those of the others who had been kidnapped, the Outfit could not con tinue to exist. There could be no going back to what had existed before; something new would have to be created to take the Outfit’s place—something that would recapture the energy, the patriotism, the audacity, the sheer fun of the Outfit in its youth.

Both Patchen and the O. G. had believed for a long time that a way must be found for American espionage to start over again. The Cold War was over. Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism (always, as the O. G. liked to say, “a lie wrapped up in a sham surrounded by a delusion”) had collapsed under the weight of its own pathology. The old secret alliances against the Russian Communists, built up over half a century by the O. G. and Patchen and their operatives, had outlived their usefulness. A new world was in the making. A new intelligence service was required to study it, to understand it, to discover America’s real enemies and to help her real friends.

The Outfit in its present form could not do the job. Its methods were outdated, its purposes irrelevant. Its best people, the brilliant, intrepid eccentrics recruited by the O. G., were gone, having grown old in the service or been driven out of it by wave after wave of exposés in the press, investigations in Congress, reforms by the Executive, and mutilating internal reorganizations imposed from above. The combined effect of these assaults on the Outfit over many years had been to render it almost incapable of operating as a secret intelligence service. Its agents in the field could no longer behave as spies must behave—with duplicity, ruthlessness, cold logic, and utter unquestioning devotion to their cause (that is to say, like idealists)—without fearing that they might be called home, frog-marched through the media, and indicted on felony charges.

This state of affairs was a triumph for the Outfit’s foes, foreign and domestic. Some of the Outfit’s own former officials had gone so far as to testify before Congress or talk to the press about “legalizing” the Outfit’s activities. This was an absurd notion on the face of it—the very purpose of a secret intelligence service is to carry out illegal actions with the unacknowledged blessing of its government—but it was eagerly taken up by goodhearted, patriotic people as well as by others, like Patrick Graham, who instinctively loved their country’s enemies better than they loved their country. Little by little the Outfit had been robbed of its reputation and its élan, and of all but a few of the tools it needed to carry out its mission. Now, according to the same people who had reduced the Outfit to this feeble condition, even the mission had disappeared.

Patchen and the O. G. did not agree that this was true. The three great ideologies of their lifetime had been capitalism, Communism, and anti-Americanism. Communism had been defeated but the other two remained, and in the years ahead the United States would be faced with far more powerful and intelligent adversaries than totalitarian Russia and China had ever been, peoples who were possessed of a far stronger reason than the Communists had ever had for hating her: she had defeated them utterly in war, compelling their unconditional surrender, and then lifted them up and healed them and given them back their nationhood and their place in history. How could such magnanimity ever be forgiven? How could people laboring under such an unbearable moral debt ever be trusted?

However right they were about this, they knew that there was no point in struggling against the conventional wisdom. In its great, early days under the O. G., the Outfit, manned by the flower of American youth, had been something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth. “If we said that out loud we’d be laughed out of town,” the O. G. had told Patchen soon after he took him into his confidence. “But by George, I know it can be done!”

With the help of Patchen and thousands of others, he had done it. He knew it could be done again—but this time in a way that would put it out of the reach of fools. The Patrick Grahams of this world, who had been tormenting the Outfit for so long, were dying to administer the coup de grace. Well, let them, as long as the Outfit chose the time and place and put the pistol into their hands.

3

PATRICK GRAHAM NEVER BELIEVED OR SAID OR ATE OR DRANK OR wore or displayed anything for any other purpose than to be admired by the best people. By this he meant conscientious objectors to capitalism and liberal democracy like himself who had been made rich by a system they despised. He loved the common people but lived in Georgetown in an imposing Federal house filled with the works of fashionable artists living and dead and owned a weatherbeaten twenty-room summer “cottage” on Chipmunk Island, off the coast of Maine. He played tennis on the White House courts, always using a Head Genesis racquet, and golf at Burning Tree with Ping Eye II clubs. He owned two of the largest and most powerful German automobiles that U. S. dollars could buy, dressed (when not on camera) in three-thousand-dollar suits tailored in Savile Row, ate only organically raised vegetables and meat from animals that had been fed natural fodder and humanely slaughtered, and now that California wines were admired by connoisseurs, drank nothing but undiluted chardonnays and cabernets sauvignons from small coastal vineyards, open to the Pacific winds, whose appellations were known only to the cognoscenti. He liked to see Republicans lose elections and Communist insurgents win wars of liberation; he gave all leftists the benefit of every possible doubt and greeted each new Soviet dictator as a possible messiah. Broadcasting from Moscow after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, he had described his successor, Yuri V. Andropov, the sometime head of the KGB who had been the Kremlin’s ambassador to Hungary during the popular uprising against Communist rule, as “the savior of Budapest.” During the Vietnam War he had escaped the draft by pursuing a graduate degree in political science at Yale University. He joined the antiwar movement, waved a Vietcong flag in marches for peace, and hoped in his heart that the enemy would win and thus demonstrate the hollowness of American ideas and life. He made a name for himself early as a journalist by tracking down the semi-literate black amputee who had been drafted in his place (and blown up by a mine in the Mekong delta) and interviewed him on national television as an example of the injustice imposed upon the wretched by a heartless Establishment. He spent eleven days in Vietnam preparing this broadcast and afterward hung photographs of himself in full war correspondent costume, Army fatigues and Australian bush hat, on the wall of his office; for a year or so after his return from the war zone he habitually shook hands with his left hand and smiled enigmatically when asked what was wrong with his right. Now that the Vietnam War was over he had the same sentimental admiration for terrorists as he had formerly had for Vietcong guerrillas. As intellectual fashion made it desirable to become an “anti-Zionist,” he believed as a matter of faith that Palestinians were helpless in the grip of their history but Jews had no right to mention theirs.

David Patchen thought that Patrick Graham was a fool and an enemy of mankind, a disgusting hypocrite who had volunteered to believe and merchandise the lies the Russian totalitarians told the world about themselves, and was therefore an accessory to millions of political murders and other crimes against humanity. Nevertheless he invited him to his house for supper on the night after he dined at the Club with the O. G.

The invitation came at the last minute. In order to accept it, Graham and his wife, Charlotte, begged off a previous engagement to dine with a member of the Supreme Court. They were surprised to discover, when they arrived, that there were no other guests besides themselves. There was hardly room for any. Patchen and his wife, a mousy little woman with graying hair, lived in a tiny house like a packing box facing an alley off P Street. Graham had never been inside this house before, and he was so surprised by its extreme modesty that he did not, at first, notice the remarkable paintings and antiques that Patchen had collected over the years; his tastes had been formed in New Haven by Europhile professors, and he had no eye for American works of art and craftsmanship. After one glass of very dry manzanilla sherry, drunk in puckered silence in the cramped living room, Patchen led the party into the tiny dining room where they were all seated at a small round table set with plain white china.

A tuxedoed footman from a catering firm poured the wine; Graham knew the man and greeted him by name in Spanish (“¿ Cómo estás, Miguel?”); they had met many times before in other Washington houses.

“I haven’t tasted a drinkable Chateau Margaux in years,” Graham said, reading the label on the bottle in the waiter’s hand. “It was Tom Jefferson’s favorite Bordeaux, as you no doubt know.”

“I didn’t know,” Patchen replied.

“No? He bought some of the 1784 vintage—the best since 1779, Tom said—and wrote home about it from Paris when he was ambassador.” Graham had read this interesting fact a few days before in a popular book on wine and stored it away for conversational use. “The Margaux Jefferson drank was altogether different, of course,” he said. “You can taste the merlot in this. Funny how drinking unblended wine spoils you for these French concoctions.”

Charlotte Graham uttered a one-syllable laugh, “Ha! How about the Petit Verdot and the Cabernet Franc, Patrick? Can your palate detect those, too? Really! Why don’t you hit him over the head with the bottle, Mr. Patchen? That’s what my father would have done in a case like this … What is this, a ’78?”

“Yes,” Patchen replied, impressed.

“Is it good?” Martha Patchen asked. She was dressed as usual in somber homemade clothes. There was no wineglass in front of her, and her plate was heaped with vegetables; everyone else had been given the caterer’s trademark medium-rare beef filet with béarnaise sauce.

“It’s delicious,” Patrick said. “I see you don’t drink alcohol yourself. Very wise; I wish I could kick the habit. And we’d all be better off if we stuck to vegetables for good measure, the way you do. Do you feel better since you gave up meat?”

“I have never eaten the flesh of my fellow creatures,” Martha said.

“Never? Good for you. Why not?”

Martha gave Graham a long faraway look, but did not speak. She never watched television or read newspapers and had no idea who Patrick Graham was. He waited attentively for her reply. None came. Instead, a faint, fond smile spread over Martha’s plain face. Graham watched her in bafflement. She had just got back from Guatemala. Patchen knew that she was thinking of her Indians and very probably had not heard Graham’s question. After a long pause he answered for her.

“My wife is a Quaker,” he said.

“Really?” Graham said. “I didn’t know the Friends were vegetarians. Are you one, too?”

“A Quaker? By birth and upbringing, yes.”

“Amazing.”

“Why is it amazing?”

Graham smiled tolerantly. “Well, you drink wine and eat meat. And throw babies out of helicopters, of course.” This remark was meant, Patchen realized, as a pleasantry; Graham was demonstrating his sophistication, even a kind of wry sympathy, as if to say that he knew exactly what employees of the Outfit were paid to do, and while he could never do that sort of thing himself, he understood that somebody had to, given the nature of the imperialistic state for which Patchen worked.

Charlotte Graham changed the subject. “My, what a lovely lot of pictures you have, Mrs. Patchen,” she said.

Martha had come back to the present and she answered at once. “My name is Martha, please. Yes, aren’t they nice? I like the ones with fruit in them especially. They’re David’s hobby.”

“It must be a very expensive hobby. Isn’t that still life a Raphaelle Peale, and that portrait over there a Thomas Eakins?”

“I’m not sure. Does thee know the painters’ names, David?”

Charlotte did not wait for Patchen’s answer. “You’re not sure!” she said. “That’s wonderful.” She beamed at Martha as if she were a kindred soul. Since coming to Washington she had learned to discuss her hosts’ possessions—the Americans seemed to think it polite to do so—but she had never got used to it. The hired servant left the dining room. “Perhaps you could help me with another question, Martha,” Charlotte said. “Why do menservants in this country always wear dinner jackets? It’s a great puzzlement to me.”

“Do they always? This one is the first one we’ve ever had in the house. I thought he looked nice. Maybe it’s because those suits last such a long time. David has had his for years and years. He got it on sale at Brooks Brothers, so it was a good one, I guess.”

Graham hid a smile. Charlotte avoided his glance. “It would be, coming from there, of course,” she said. “Isn’t Brooks Brothers the shop where President Lincoln bought his Inaugural overcoat, Patrick?”

“Yes,” Graham replied. “I believe Richard Nixon bought his clothes there, too.”

At almost any other table frequented by the Grahams, this sally would have provoked laughter. Here it produced silence.

Graham said, “Are you an acquaintance of Dick Nixon’s, Martha? He was a Quaker, too, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, poor man.”

“You sympathize with him?”

“Yes, of course, they have tormented him so. But I feel even more sorry for his enemies.”

Sorry for his enemies? What was this? Both Grahams were fully alert now.

“You do?” Charlotte said. “Why is that?”

“Because they hate him so that they put their own souls in jeopardy.”

“My dear Martha, what an original way to look at it. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.”

“They have made Mr. Nixon stand for evil and they think that all it takes to be virtuous is to hate him. It is the sin of pride. My husband calls it ‘the politics of self-congratulation.’ Nixon arouses something primitive in people. David says Nixon is a Neanderthal among Cro-Magnons; they thought their ancestors had killed them all, and when they saw him and heard him speak they wanted to kill him without knowing why. It was an instinct, a voice from prehistory; he made them remember their own suppressed guilt. If Nixon had looked and sounded like a Kennedy and committed exactly the same crimes, my husband says, the people who hate him would all love him instead. I don’t know about that, but it’s very sad to hate someone so much that it makes you love all the wrong things.”

Patrick Graham, who had never before been in the same room with someone who was willing to defend Richard Nixon, was visibly shocked and offended by Martha’s words. He turned to Patchen. “Is that what you say?”

“It sounds like me,” Patchen replied, smiling fondly across the table at Martha, who had innocently gone back to her plate of vegetables.

“It’s a good thing you only sound like that in the privacy of your own home,” Graham said. “Unfortunately, you seem to have married a female Candide. I can sympathize.”

His voice was clipped, cold, different from the mellow one Patchen knew from his broadcasts. Off-camera, Graham spoke with a faint upper-class English accent that simulated his wife’s. He had adopted her two-fisted table manners, too, and the overbearing tone of voice in which she asked rude questions of strangers. She was famous for asking such questions, questions that Graham lacked the breeding to put to a guest when he was not looking into a camera. Like his other acquisitions, his titled wife was an asset to him—”the jewel in the crown,” as a witty writer called her in the “Style” section of the Post. Everyone knew she had come down in the world by marrying Graham, but like many before her, had done so at a price she regarded as satisfactory. Although some of the most famous blood in England flowed in her veins (through ancestors bastard and legitimate she was related to four English monarchs in three different dynasties), Lady Charlotte was penniless, the only surviving descendant of an ancient but now extinct line of improvident earls. The Grahams’ marriage was not a romantic one; Charlotte was not so déclassée as that. She and her husband were friends and partners in his career; that was all. It was enough for Graham. She gave honest value in return for his money, tutoring him in the politics of friendship, running an efficient house and filling it with important people who almost invariably went home happy. Sexually they lived their own lives. According to the Outfit’s files, she had conducted at least six brief love affairs in the five years of her marriage to Graham, all with elderly senators and Cabinet members entrusted with sensitive national secrets. Her regular lover was a member of the British secret intelligence ser vice, well known to the Outfit, with whom she had been sleeping since her teens. It was assumed that her Washington adulteries were in aid of her husband’s career. They were always followed by a sensational broadcast embarrassing to the Administration. Graham’s own infidelities were numerous but fleeting, and nearly always involved very small women with long black hair—”spinners,” as one of Patchen’s sources called them. This, Patchen knew, was because Graham, while at Yale, had fallen hopelessly in love with a petite, spirited, dark-haired Viet Cong sympathizer who had later married Horace Hubbard’s younger half-brother, Christopher’s cousin.

All this, and more, passed through Patchen’s mind as he nodded politely at Graham’s last insult. He knew a lot about his guests—not, as Graham suspected and feared, because the Outfit had ever gone to the trouble of investigating either one of them, but because he and his wife kept turning up in cameo roles in the lives of people who were of interest to the many other government security agencies that shared gossip and information with the Outfit as a matter of routine. Graham, of course, had his own files, very like the government’s, filled with gossip, innuendo, meaningless detail, malicious invention by disaffected friends, and the occasional kernel of truth that was most likely of all the items in the dossier to be discounted or overlooked. That was why he was here tonight.

After the exchange about Nixon, Graham fell into a hostile silence. This suited Patchen, who did not want to make small talk with him anyway. Charlotte, having struck gold once, spent the rest of the dinner plying Martha with questions. Martha was glad to answer them, and Charlotte learned about her Indians, the guaro cult, Maximón, and Martha’s hope of rescuing at least some of the children from a life of alcoholism.

“How dreadful,” Charlotte said, on hearing a description of the drinking hut and the ceaseless beat of the marimba.

“I wouldn’t use that word,” Martha said. “Their religion makes them quite happy.”

“I should think it might.” Charlotte’s eyes danced with what Martha mistook for a sympathetic light. “Do they do anything else whilst performing their religious duties besides gargle the guarol”

“They copulate.”

“Copulate? You mean all together?”

“No. They just crawl over to one another as the spirit moves them. No one knows who the children belong to; after they’re born the mothers hand them back and forth to be nursed, so after a while they don’t remember which is theirs and which is somebody else’s. I’ve finally realized that that’s the way they want it to be; it’s part of the cult to obliterate personal identity.”

“It sounds like they’re on to something. If they don’t claim the kids as their own, though, I shouldn’t think they’d mind your taking them away.”

“But they do mind, terribly. Last summer the Maoists came and took some of the boys and girls.”

“Maoists?” Charlotte said. “In Guatemala?”

“That’s what they call themselves. It means they kill more than the other guerrillas do.”

“How dreadful. How did the grown-up Indians feel about the Maoists?”

Graham broke in. “Why would they tell a middle-class American woman that?” he asked.

Martha turned to him. “They don’t tell me anything, but they cried for days. They knew they’d never come back, that the girls would be raped and the boys would be turned into slaves.”

“Is that the Nixonian line this week?” Graham asked. “Have you ever seen the Guatemalan army operate in an Indian village?”

Charlotte said, “Patrick, hush. Go on, Martha.”

“If the children go, the cult dies,” Martha said. “They understand that.”

“What could be sadder?” Charlotte asked. “How many of these sad little creatures have you rescued?”

“None, so far.”

“None? None at all? Haven’t you ever asked if they’d let you take them?”

“There’s nobody to give permission because nobody knows their own child. Besides, what difference does it make if you take them away by force or by lying?”

“And how long have you been working with these people?”

“Well, I’m taking care of the children of the first children I knew.”

“And the originals are in the drinking hut? Blimey, what a book you have!”

“A book?”

“You’ve never thought of writing a book about all this?”

“A book? No, I haven’t. How could I? They trust me.”

“What?” What did trust have to do with anything? Charlotte gave Martha a searching look and saw that she meant what she said. “Never mind. I wonder why you keep on. How long have you been going down there, exactly?”

“Since before David and I were married.”

“And how long is that exactly?”

Martha was beginning to blush under this interrogation. Patchen intervened. “There’s coffee in the other room if anyone wants it,” he said, standing up.

Charlotte said, “I don’t drink the stuff, it keeps me awake, and I can’t think that Martha does, either. Do you, Martha?”

“No.”

“I thought not. You two go away and drink your coffee and tell each other boring stories. Martha and I are quite happy as we are. Aren’t we, Martha?”

As Patchen led him into the living room, Patrick Graham, like a fundamentalist after an argument with a freethinker about the existence of Satan, was still seething. Graham had, in fact, been raised in a strict Christian home in Ohio, and in his mind (though he fought against the imagery) Karl Marx closely resembled Moses, V. I. Lenin played the part of Jesus, and Joseph Stalin and his cohort were the Disciples. Graham believed in some deep recess of his being that the Soviet state was a kind of Kingdom of Heaven made visible on earth. There the secrets of every heart were known to the examining angels, the whole truth about past and future, called “History,” stood revealed, and those who perversely refused to believe in History were remorselessly sent to Purgatory (the Gulag) or Hell (the cellar of Lubiyanka Prison).

To conceal his anger and disgust, Graham examined another still life hanging on Patchen’s wall; it was badly framed in the kind of dark wood that had not been used for such purposes for years. He suddenly remembered that a painting by one of the Peale brothers had recently been auctioned off for a couple of million dollars at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. “Is this a Raphaelle Peale, too?” he asked. Patchen nodded. Graham walked—or, rather, as he later told Charlotte, the room was so small that he leaned closer to the picture, an eerily lifelike rendering of a plate of lemons and a speckled trout. “How,” he asked, with his face very close to the painting, “do you afford these museum pieces on a civil servant’s salary?”

“I bought them a long time ago, when they were cheap and unfashionable.”

“How much did you pay for this one?”

“Four thousand dollars, I think.”

“Jesus!” The word came out of Graham’s mouth as a little yelp of envy. “It must be nice to have inside dope.”

“I’d never heard of the artist. I just liked his pictures.”

Graham, who bought everything on the basis of fashion, did not believe that anyone would invest in a work of art merely for the pleasure of looking at it. He shot a quick skeptical glance toward Patchen and uttered an even quicker snort of laughter. “I see,” he said. “If you say so.” He looked around him at the walls and ceiling. “I don’t suppose you have to worry very much about anyone stealing them, with the kind of electronic security you must have in this place. Are we on camera now?”

In fact Patchen did not even own a burglar alarm, but because he did not want to do anything to erode Graham’s bottomless suspicion of the Outfit and himself, he smiled and said, “It’s always wise to make that assumption.”

Miguel entered with a tray. Graham refused the weak Maxwell House coffee he offered, but accepted a glass of port from a decanter. Patchen sat down on a straight chair. Graham settled onto a sofa opposite him and sat back, crossing one leg over the other, the picture of relaxed self-confidence.

“All right, my friend,” he said. “What is all this in aid of?”

Patchen placed his own glass on the low table between them. “I asked you here to call upon your patriotism,” he said.

“That sounds ominous. You and I have somewhat different ideas of what constitutes patriotism, you know.”

“True. And we’ve certainly had our differences in the past.”

“Like who killed Wolkowicz.”

“Oh, Patrick, that again. Barney Wolkowicz shot himself. Why can’t you accept the simple truth?”

“The answer to that is simple. Because you say it’s the simple truth. Therefore it cannot possibly be the truth.”

“I thought that might have something to do with it. But I asked you here tonight to talk about something else. It involves the most important questions of national security.”

“I can well believe it,” Graham said. “You must be talking about a certain video tape of one of the Outfit’s finest babbling on about your totally illegal operations against the freedom fighters of the world.”

“Ah,” Patchen said, calmly returning Graham’s agitated stare. “Then you’ve already received the package. Was there a return address?”

“Of course there wasn’t.”

“A letter signed by anyone or any organization?”

“Tune in tomorrow. And thanks for confirming the tape’s authenticity.”

“I didn’t realize that I’d done that.”

“You’re denying it?”

“How can I? I haven’t seen or heard what’s on the tape you’ve received, and even if I did you wouldn’t believe me. But if it’s anything like the ones we’ve been receiving through the mail I can understand why you’d be taken in.”

“Taken in? What are you talking about?”

“Well, for openers we don’t have a Harvey P. Walpole on the rolls of the Outfit.”

This was literally true; Walpole was a pseudonym to begin with, and only that morning Patchen had signed an order separating the man known by that false name from the Outfit and transferring him, along with the other Beautiful Dreamers, to cover organizations operated by the Outfit in Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Korea, and Taiwan. There they would live with their families in American compounds, go to work every day, receive full salary and benefits, and retire in due course on pensions equivalent to the ones they would have received if they had gone on working on the inside. This collective transfer had left a broad paper trail, but Patchen had taken that into account.

“I didn’t mention anyone named Walpole,” Graham said.

“Do they call him by some other name in your copy of the tape?”

Graham’s face registered impatience. “What point are you trying to make, exactly?”

“After what you said a moment ago about your opinion of my truthfulness, I’m not sure that it’s worth making.”

“Cut the crap, Patchen. What’s your point?” Graham’s accent was perfectly American now.

Patchen gave him a sardonic smile. “I’m trying to plant the idea that you may be dealing with a hoax.”

“Like hell I am. Everything Walpole says on that tape checks out.”

“Did you say ‘Walpole’? How interesting. How did you check it out, may I ask?”

“We used the network’s files and my personal files.”

“Which are based on what?”

“All kinds of things.”

“Old broadcasts? Transcripts of interviews? Correspondents’ reports? Newspaper clippings?”

“Among other things.”

“Of which how much—eighty percent? ninety percent?—is in the public domain and available to anyone?”

“We don’t compile those percentages.”

“But you know what they are. I think you should consider the possibility that anyone who knows his way around a public library could have come up with the basic facts in that tape—names of terrorist organizations, names of their leaders, dates and circumstances of all the sudden deaths and other misfortunes that are blamed on the Outfit. Inventing the rest—the parts you can’t check out—would be child’s play.”

An expression of stubborn skepticism fixed Graham’s handsome features in place, like a television freeze-frame. “Why exactly would anyone do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know, exactly. But the possibilities are obvious—a fraternity house prank arising from youthful high spirits, dementia arising from political conviction, a black operation by a foreign intelligence service designed to embarrass and discredit the U. S. government.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“That you should consider all the possibilities before you go on the air with this tape that fell into your lap.”

“In other words, you’re asking me to kill the story.”

“I haven’t asked you to do anything. Please remember that. I’ve tried to make you aware, in the friendliest possible way, that there’s a high potential for embarrassment in this situation.”

“For the Outfit.”

“Obviously. Also for the President and the committees on the Hill. They don’t know anything about all this.”

“You haven’t told them?”

“Why would I tell them?”

“Why the hell wouldn’t you? I wish I had a camera running right now.”

“I think the answer to that question is implicit in what I’ve been saying to you.”

Graham was on the attack now. “What the hell have you been saying to me? Just tell me in plain English.”

“I thought that was what I had been doing.”

“Then you’ve got a funny idea of what constitutes plain English, I’ll tell you what I think all this double-talk means. I think you’re trying to get me to kill this story.”

“So you’ve already said, but you misunderstand. I hope you will broadcast the tape.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I hope you go ahead. If you have no interest in covering your own ass, so much the better. I just wanted you to be aware of the pitfalls.”

Graham stood up, a sudden and, as it seemed to Patchen, involuntary movement. The two men could hear the women’s voices in the other room; they were laughing delightedly.

“What are you up to?” Graham said.

“Why do I have to be up to anything? Why are you so paranoid, Patrick?”

“Ha!”

Graham had never before been so close to Patchen in such strong light, and he saw for himself that the stories were true—Patchen’s left eye was made of glass. It was a nearly perfect prosthesis which moved with his other eye and was precisely the same color. But it had no expression, and this created the uncanny illusion that Patchen’s real eye was somehow not natural, either; it crossed Graham’s mind that the false eye might be a demonic, privacy-destroying device—a camera? a listening device? something even worse? —fabricated in the Outfit’s secret laboratories. Nevertheless, he did not flinch or look away.

“Look at it rationally, if such a thing is possible for a man of your convictions,” Patchen said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you’re predisposed to hear, see, and expose evil where the Outfit and the U. S. government are concerned and give our enemies the benefit of every doubt. The whole world knows that, including the person or persons who sent you that tape. You’re eager to be used if the cause is right.”

“Is that so? And what cause is that, exactly?”

“Come off it, Patrick. What I’m saying to you is, ‘Broadcast and be damned.’ You’ll probably get away with it—you’ve gotten away with worse—and it may turn out to be a very good thing for the Outfit and the country.”

“You’re crazy. People believe what they see and hear on my show.”

“That’s why it will be a good thing. If we didn’t do the awful things you say Walpole says we did on that videotape, then we have nothing to lose. No secrets are betrayed and we get credit for dirty tricks and dastardly deeds that will scare the bejesus out of every little Marxist rodent cowering in a hole anywhere in the world.”

Patchen, who had chosen these last, unforgivable words very carefully, winked at Graham. This was a laborious process that slowly covered and uncovered his eerie artificial eye with a lid that was cross-hatched by scar tissue like the scales on a serpent’s skin. “And now I think we should say goodnight,” he said, getting to his feet. “Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.”

In the next room, Martha and Charlotte were still laughing like schoolgirls.

4

YEHO STERN WAS RETIRED NOW, A POLITE WAY OF SAYING THAT HE had outlived his era and been replaced by a younger man who was not burdened by his memories or obligated by his debts. Yeho had always known that this would happen sooner or later—after all, he himself had climbed over an old man to get to the top—and when it did, he accepted it with a shrug and retired to the Negev to grow tangerines.

“The tangerine business is a good business, very interesting,” he told the O. G. “You have to run operations against nature all the time.”

“Is that tea all right?” the O. G. asked.

Yeho had just taken two cubes of sugar out of his pocket and popped them into his mouth; he was now filtering green Japanese tea through them. He made a face, but nodded. “Very bitter,” he said, “but stimulating.”

They were sitting around a marquetry table in Sebastian Laux’s office at D. & D. Laux & Co. Yeho was almost as comfortable here as in a bubble, but he was restless. The room, furnished in the style of Louis XIV, was too luxurious for him. He knew the decor was a kind of cover, that people expected the back offices of private banks to look like this, but he did not like it.

“You’re not really supposed to take sugar with this tea,” Sebastian Laux said. “It comes from Kyushu, and the plant is fertilized with the night soil of people whose diet, apart from rice and a few vegetables, consists entirely of oily fish, such as mackerel. That’s what imparts that bitter tang you noticed. You kill that taste, which is the whole point of the tea, when you put sugar in it. Or right on top of your taste buds, like Yeho’s doing.”

“How can they be sure these people eat only fish and rice?” Yeho asked

“By tasting the tea,” Sebastian answered. “The tea grower provides the fish. After that it’s the honor system, though of course he can tell if he’s got the real thing. Anyway, the Japanese are pretty scrupulous about keeping a bargain, among themselves at least.”

“The stuff makes my ears buzz,” said the O. G. “Have you ever had it analyzed for dope?”

Sebastian, who was a tea snob in the way that the O. G. was a wine snob, paid no attention to the teasing; he was used to it. He lifted a Temmoku tea bowl to his lips and took in a noisy mouthful of air along with the liquid, in the Japanese manner. No other noise intruded, although they could see the glass towers and teeming traffic of New York’s financial district through the windows of one-way glass.

Yeho hoped that the O. G. would come to the point of this meeting soon. Sebastian, not the O. G. or Patchen, had asked him to come to New York for this meeting, and he had flown from Tel Aviv on twenty-four hours’ notice to be present, but the arrangements made him wonder. If Patchen and the O. G. were using a cut-out, even if the man in between was Sebastian Laux, then they must intend to ask him to do them a serious favor. That did not trouble him; he would do for them whatever he could, as they would do for him. That had always been the arrangement. But his power to do favors was greatly diminished. The new boys didn’t like it when he paid visits to his past. New boys didn’t like Old Boys; it was a fact of nature.

Finally Sebastian finished his tea. The O. G. had been holding a plain manila envelope, sealed with Scotch tape, on his lap. He now handed this over to Yeho. “Here,” he sald. “Skim this and tell me what you think.”

Yeho, throwing back his head and holding the papers at arm’s length, read through the file Patchen had handed to him. It was a digest of the Beautiful Dreamers case, badly typed (by the O. G. himself, Yeho assumed) on drugstore foolscap. When he had finished reading, Sebastian switched on a television set and they watched the tape of Harvey P. Walpole’s drugged confession.

“Beautiful,” Yeho said, as the screen went black. “If I didn’t know better, if the target was different, I’d say it had to be us.”

“Do you know better?” the O. G. asked.

“Only on principle; nobody talks to me anymore. But it cannot be. We all know that. So who can it be?”

“David has his suspicions. You remember the Eye of Gaza.”

“Butterfly’s Arabs. Yes, certainly. You suspect the dead?”

“Did you kill them all?”

Yeho paused; this was not the sort of question the Americans usually asked him. “No, not every single one,” he said. “The number one asset, Hassan Abdallah, as Butterfly called him, was very good, very slippery. He got away from us, with two others.”

“You never told us that,” the O. G. said.

“We thought we could deal with him before you knew he was gone, and then it was too late to tell you. He’s never been heard of since.”

“That could mean he’s been sleeping and someone has woken him.”

“I agree. So what do you want me to say?”

“At this late date, what is there to say?” The O. G. went imperturbably on. “One of the things this fellow Harvey P. Walpole was working on before he was kidnapped was the Eye of Gaza. Walpole was a very good man. And just a week or two before they grabbed him, he made Hassan Abdallah.”

“Made him?”

“Identified him. Got him cold. True name Soubhi El-Nazal, born in Jordan of Palestinian parents. He went to Berkeley under a scholarship fund set up by good-hearted citizens for deserving young Palestinians. Got a Ph.D. in chemistry with honors. Brilliant student. When Butterfly picked him up, he was working for Kelch and Kuhns, A. G., a research laboratory in Munich. He specialized in pharmacodynamics, which is the experimental study of the action and fate of drugs in animals. What works with animals, of course, usually works with people.”

Applied research in drugs? Yeho was very interested now. “Did Walpole tell his kidnappers this?”

“If he did, it’s not on the tape. ‘Gee,’ we said to ourselves, ‘That’s funny. Everything else Walpole told them is on this tape. Only the part about Hassan Abdallah is missing.’ That tickled our funny bone.”

“Maybe he didn’t tell them. Under drugs people don’t remember everything, or sometimes even remember what’s true and what isn’t.”

“That’s a possibility. But it was the freshest thing in Walpole’s mind. He ‘d made the discovery only days before. If he was right, and he knew he was, he’d solved the case. He was elated. It was the breakthrough of a lifetime. It was the first thing he would have talked about.”

“You’ve got a point, I admit it,” Yeho said. “So why am I here?”

“I don’t want to embarrass you, Yeho,” Patchen said. “But you questioned Butterfly before you handed him over to the Chinese. As I understand it, you know everything he told us; Horace gave you the transcript of our interrogations. But your methods are sometimes a little more effective than ours. The question is, did Butterfly tell you anything he didn’t tell us?”

Yeho said, “Let me think.” He was not evading the question. He had dealt with hundreds of cases, conducted dozens of interrogations, since the Butterfly operation; the details of this particular case were stored somewhere in his memory, but it would take a moment to search them out. Seated in one of Sebastian’s three-hundred-year-old J. Lepautre armchairs, his sandals dangling a few inches above the magnificent rashan rug that meant nothing to him, he closed his eyes and concentrated.

After a moment he opened them again. “Only one thing that might have been important,” he said. “Butterfly said this man Hassan Abdallah was not a political, even though he said he was. What he was was a true Jew hater, a psychopath, a fellow who carried a picture of Hitler in his wallet. He wanted to finish what the Nazis had started—kill us all. He was particularly obsessed with a tribe of Jews in the Maghrib called the Ja’wabi. He wanted to exterminate them most of all.”

“The Ja’wabi?” Sebastian said, starting a little in his chair.

Yeho noted the involuntary movement. What was this? he wondered, but asked no questions. “The Ja’wabi are anusim, which means that they’re Jews who practice their own religion in secret after a forced conversion to another religion,” he said. “In this case the Ja’wabi have been pretending to be Moslems for more than a thousand years, ever since the Arab conquest of the western Sahara.”

“A thousand years?” the O. G. said.

“There’s nothing so unbelievable about that,” Yeho replied, happy to enlighten these Americans. “At least a hundred thousand Spanish Jews were baptized as Christians in the 1390s. Over the next three centuries the Holy Inquisition burned more than thirty thousand of these converts at the stake on suspicion of insincerity, and tortured another thirty or forty thousand. Nevertheless, secret prayer houses that had been in constant use by Jews since the days of the Inquisition were discovered in Spain as recently as the nineteenth century, and groups of secret Jews, the descendants of these false converts, or ‘Marranos’—the Spanish word means ‘swine’ —were found even later in Portugal and as far away as Mexico.”

“If these people have been doing what they do in secret,” Sebastian asked, “how did Hassan Abdallah find out about them?” His voice was thin and piping; it was even more obvious than before that he was shaken by what Yeho had told them. Still Yeho betrayed no curiosity. He went on with his story.

“The Russians trained the Eye of Gaza in Libya, out in the desert,” he said. “According to Butterfly, one of the trainers was an East German, a former SS man. He and Hassan were kindred spirits, of course. One day the German was telling dirty Jew stories around the campfire, and the subject of the Ja’wabi came up. Hassan was hooked.”

“The SS knew about the Ja’wabi?” Sebastian said.

“Evidently they had a file from before the war. Don’t ask me how—German thoroughness. From the moment he heard the story, the Ja’wabi gave Hassan Abdallah a purpose in life—Jews defiling Allah’s mosque, touching the Holy Koran with infidel fingers. They had to be exterminated. That very night he asked Butterfly for poison gas to do the job.”

“Poison gas?”

“He even specified the kind he wanted. I don’t remember the name, but it produces vomiting, shitting, burning of the eyes, boils on every inch of skin, maximum agony. If he was a chemist, as you say, that explains how he knew what to ask for. Butterfly says he told him he had more important things to do with his time.”

“You let it go at that?”

“No,” Yeho said. “But it wasn’t easy to follow up. Nobody in Israel had ever heard of these people. Finally we found a scrap of information in an old file. In the eyes of the rabbis they weren’t even Jews. The Ja’wabi believe they’re the descendants of Joab, the commander of King David’s army, and that they left Judah in the first year that Solomon was king—that’s 965 B. C., approximately. They’re educated people in most ways, but they’re very primitive Jews, right out of the Torah. They don’t even have the Torah; to them the first five books of the Old Testament are family stories; their ancestors were there when everything happened. They know nothing of synagogues or rabbis or Talmudic law. They live in the mountains because when the Ja’wabi got there three thousand years ago they thought they had found the highest place in the world. In the time of David we talked to God and burned sacrifices to him from the hilltops, which the Torah calls ‘high places’; temples came later, with Solomon. The Ja’wabi still do it the old way, but secretly. To the outside world they pretend to be Moslems, calling the faithful to prayers five times a day, going to the mosque, performing ablutions, making the haj to Mecca, the whole business. Living their cover. And they’ve gotten away with it right under the noses of their Moslem neighbors for ten centuries. No wonder this Hassan Abdallah wanted to gas them. The experts said forget these people, they’re not Jews anymore; after all this time pretending to be Moslems they are Moslems.”

“Did you agree?”

“No. Who listens to experts? I sent a couple of agents, a man and wife, very good people, anthropologists, to visit the Ja’wabi. We offered to transport them to Israel. They said no thank you; it sounded to them like Solomon had ruined the country with temples and idols just as Joab said he would. So we explained the danger from the Eye of Gaza, gave them some weapons and equipment, and helped them train a defense force. They already had one, called the Ibal Iden, made up of teen-age boys. To them it was a strike force; they had no tradition of passive defense. Ever since the time of Joab, if they had an enemy, they sent the Ibal Iden to wipe them out.”

“I see,” the O. G. said. “Most enlightening.”

Sebastian gazed at an invisible object in the middle distance. Yeho looked from one old man’s face to the other. Finally he asked the question. “I’m under the impression,” he said, “that all this about the Ja’wabi means something to you. Am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong,” the O. G. replied. “Paul Christopher and his daughter are with the Ja’wabi at this very moment. And thereby hangs a tale. With Sebastian’s permission, I’ll fill you in. Is it all right, Sebastian?”

“Go ahead.”

In a few sentences, he told Yeho the stories of Sebastian and Meryem, of Cathy and Lla Kahina, of Christopher and Zarah.

“You’re telling me that Sebastian has a wife, and that she’s a Ja’wabi, and that she knew Heydrich?”

“Yes. So did Hubbard Christopher and his wife. You knew Hubbard, of course.”

“And owe him, as you know,” Yeho said. “But Christophers again.” He clutched his head. “Trouble, trouble.”

The O. G. smiled sympathetically. “Three generations of them this time. Plus the Ja’wabi. Which brings us to the point.”

“That makes me glad,” Yeho said. “But also a little nervous.”

“The point is not Christopher or the Ja’wabi. It’s David and the Outfit. He has a situation on his hands that can’t be handled by conventional assets. But Old Boys might be able to do it. Of course nobody in the government except David could be told. It might embarrass them.”

“Old Boys? What Old Boys?”

“Us’ns,” the O. G. said.

Yeho thought for a long moment. “What’s the objective?”

“Flush out this Hassan Abdallah and his wretched crowd. Clean ’em up once and for all. Save the Ja’wabi.”

“Save the Outfit, you mean.”

The O. G. nodded sagely. “That too,” he said. “As a beneficial side-effect. Will you join the club?”

“What you’re talking about would be expensive,” Yeho said. “Where is the money coming from?”

The O. G. gave Yeho Stern one of his merry schoolboy smiles transported across a lifetime from the sunny playing fields of the Old Hundred. “That was why Sebastian asked you to come over. David has sold one of his paintings, got a big price for it from a private buyer. He’s always wanted to invest in the tangerine business.”

“Then he should have his head examined,” Yeho said. “But who am I to say no?”

5

THE HIGHWAY THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS HAD BEEN IMPROVED SINCE Cathy’s day, and it was possible now to go all the way to Tifawt by car, but Zarah wanted Christopher to see the same sights her pregnant mother had seen when she ran away from him a quarter of a century before, and she had arranged for them to cross the Idáren Dráren on horseback. They were met at the airport by a young female dressed in the hooded, all-enveloping chador of a fundamentalist Moslem woman. She and Zarah embraced, then spoke to each other in rapid Berber.

“This is Kbira,” said Zarah to Christopher in English. “She’s going with us over the mountains.”

Kbira peered at Christopher with animated brown eyes through a slit in the headpiece of her costume, but said nothing. She led them outside to a Peugeot, and despite the chador, took the wheel. As they left the airport she pointed at a range of snow-capped russet mountains beyond the pink city.

“The Idáren Dráren.”

Then, resuming her silence, she weaved adroitly through chaotic traffic in which cars, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, camels, and donkeys all moved at their respective maximum speeds. They had arrived at midday, and even at this altitude it was very hot. Everything—vehicles, houses, trees, animals, people in their flowing Islamic robes—was powdered with red dust; a man beating a camel by the side of the road raised little clouds of it every time he struck the animal with his whip. The temperature became noticeably cooler as the car moved higher into the hills, tires shrieking on the switchbacks as Kbira worked the clutch and changed gears, knees pumping inside the chador. Finally she turned into an un-paved road that climbed for several miles through a forest of stunted pines and oaks. At the end of this track, Kbira stopped the car, leaped out, and stripped off her chador. Beneath it she wore faded jeans, scuffed Reebok running shoes, and a burgundy T-shirt that read, in a lighter shade of red, “I .” She peeled the sweat-soaked fabric away from her breasts and stomach, then plunged her hands into a mop of curly dark hair that had been crushed flat by the chador, and shook it loose. Unveiled, she was a merry, sweet-faced girl, somewhat younger than Zarah. She grinned at Christopher and shook his hand with a firm grip.

“I’m glad to meet you at last,” she said in English. “You do look a lot like Zarah.”

She folded the chador and threw it into the trunk of the car, then picked up a hand-held radio and spoke into it in Berber. It crackled in reply. “They’ll be right down,” she said. “Want a Coke?” She opened a cooler and extracted three bottles of soda. Inside the cooler, sealed in transparent plastic bags, Christopher saw an Uzi submachine gun and two heavy semi-automatic pistols. Kbira, without a trace of self-consciousness, removed the bags from the ice and, while continuing to drink her bottle of pop with one hand, wiped them dry on the folds of her discarded chador. She kept the Uzi for herself and handed the pistols to Zarah and Christopher, with two extra clips of ammunition.

“You know how to use this?” she asked.

“Yes,” Christopher said. “But I’d rather not have it.”

Kbira smiled again and closed her fingers over the butt. “Better keep it.”

The radio crackled again. A couple of minutes later four very young men wearing khaki shorts and maroon T-shirts like Kbira’s came into sight on the steep trail above them. They, too, were armed with diminutive Uzi machine pistols slung under their right armpits. One after the other they embraced Zarah, kissing her on both cheeks and gazing into her eyes. Two of them were nearly as fair as Zarah. One of the darker ones had Meryem’s intense green eyes, and these were even more startling in a young face than in an older one. This youth and Kbira were kissing each other fondly and murmuring in dialect. They were about the same size, just over five feet tall, but muscular and quick in their movements. Zarah, a woman of ordinary size for an American, towered above them. She answered the question in Christopher’s mind.

“They’re all quite small,” she said. “No one except Lla Kahina has married outside the tribe for a long time. Maybe it was Sebastian’s size that appealed to her.”

“Is that fellow related to her?” Christopher asked.

“Yes, but I don’t know exactly how. They’re all cousins. Why?”

“He has her eyes.”

“You’re right. So do a lot of the other Ja’wabi.”

She beckoned the green-eyed man closer and introduced him.

“This is Ja’wab, the leader of the Ibal Iden,” Zarah said; Christopher already knew who and what the Ibal Iden were.

Ja’wab shook hands with Christopher. When he spoke, in English, he did so in Zarah’s faint Kentucky accent mingled with echoes of Semitic triple consonants. “Welcome to the Idáren Dráren,” he said.

Without another word, he picked up Christopher’s bag, balanced it on his shoulder, and led the way up the mountain.

“Your friends are well-armed,” Christopher said.

“Yes,” Zarah said. “Ever since the ostrich hunt. I should have warned you.”

“How does it happen that they all speak English with a Bluegrass accent?”

“Mother taught them, so they could understand the tutors.”

“They studied with the tutors, too?”

“We all went to school together and studied the same things.”

“Your mother paid for all that?”

“Ostensibly.”

“Ostensibly?”

“I think the Ja’wabi may have slipped the tutors something extra. She loved to do things for them, but they don’t like charity.”

On the trail above them, Kbira and Ja’wab turned around and watched them. Kbira now carried two Uzis slung around her neck— her own and Ja’wab’s. Christopher said, “Your friend is called Ja’wab, as in Ja’wabi?”

“That’s right,” Zarah said.

“Is that a common name among the Ja’wabi?”

“No. There’s only one man by that name in every generation. He’s the seventy-sixth Ja’wab.”

“Like the Dalai Lama?”

She laughed. “Ja’wab would like that idea. No. It’s just a name that’s handed down. Like Kahina, for females. You aren’t born with the name; it’s given to you if you have some special quality.”

“Like what?”

“In Ja’wab’s case, bravery.”

“In what context?”

“In the context of finding and killing the people who killed our people,” Zarah said. “All of them.”

She broke into a trot, leaving Christopher behind. They had almost reached the top. Christopher smelled smoke and the aroma of roasting meat. Around the next bend in the trail the camp came into view, half a dozen khaki tents pitched in a meadow near a waterfall. The cascade, flowing over henna sandstone, was a shade of red, like nearly everything else in this landscape. Across the rusty brook a dozen horses, neatly made Barbs with large liquid eyes, grazed among sheep and donkeys.

Zarah awaited him. “Our transportation and food,” she said. “Five days on the trail, five sheep. I hope you like roast mutton.”

There were two other women in the party, one middle-aged and the other still a girl, introduced by Zarah as Aziza and her daughter Dimya. They gave the newcomers glasses of sweet mint tea, then went back to tend the cooking fire. The young men, except for Ja’wab, went into separate tents. A silence settled over the camp.

“I’m going to change clothes and help Aziza with the food,” Zarah said. “Do you want a nap? That’s what the others are doing. Ja’wab is on sentry duty.”

“No thanks,” Christopher said. “I think I’ll hang out with the Dalai Lama.”

By now it was late afternoon. A chilly shadow crept across the meadow. Ja’wab had been searching the surrounding heights with binoculars. Now he crossed the brook with a running jump and inspected the horses’ hobbles. Christopher followed him, stepping from stone to stone across the rushing water, and waited quietly for him to finish what he was doing.

Ja’wab approached him. He had exchanged his Uzi for an American M-16 rifle. “Do you like horses?”

“These are very good-looking.”

“The best. Your late wife bred them. If she saw a beautiful horse, no matter where it was or what it cost, she bought it and brought it back to Tifawt.”

Christopher said, “You knew Zarah’s mother well?”

“Nobody knew her well. She never learned to speak Ja’wabi. Only a few words, nearly all nouns.”

“That’s funny, because you all seem to speak English with her accent.”

“She was the one who taught us. We played in English two days a week; Zarah insisted on it, so we’d all speak English when we grew up. Your daughter is a very systematic person.”

“You know her well.”

“Oh, yes. As well as myself.”

“I should thank you for avenging her mother’s death.”

“Is that what Zarah told you?”

“She said you killed the people responsible.”

“Single-handed?”

“I got that impression?”

Ja’wab grinned. “Zarah,” he said. “Look, I’m going to climb up the mountain a little way, where I can see the camp better. Would you like to come with me?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll get another rifle for you.”

They took up a position on a hilltop that commanded a view of the camp and its perimeter. Ja’wab was well equipped; in addition to his American automatic rifle and his Japanese binoculars he carried a hand-held radio. Only a few miles below them in the valley, crops and orchards grew in orderly patterns and sunlight flashed on windshields.

“Is it really so dangerous, this close to civilization?” Christopher asked.

“Civilization has always been the main problem for the Ja’wabi,” Ja’wab replied. He stood up and began pointing out landmarks. Nearly all had to do with the death of Ja’wabi: by this misshapen rock, in the time of the Romans, two of them had killed seventeen legionaries before dying themselves; in that defile, in the time of Oqba ben Nafi, who conquered the Maghrib for Islam, fifty Ja’wabi had fought to the death rather than accept conversion; in the rubble of yonder brick fort a Ja’wabi force had died to the last man against a French detachment equipped with mountain howitzers and Gatling guns.

The Ja’wabi have always been here,” Ja’wab said, “and the others had no right to be. But they kept coming anyway. So it’s best to watch. Think of Zarah’s mother.”

When they returned to the camp, after being relieved just before twilight, they found the women working by the cook fire, all four of them dressed in bright Ja’wabi clothes, purple tassels swinging from the hems. With her bright hair covered by a scarf and a gold piece resting on her forehead, Zarah was all but indistinguishable from the others. Her skin, like Christopher’s, contained a good deal of yellow pigment and she was deeply tanned, but it was not her complexion that created the resemblance; it was the way she moved and spoke. Yet she was a different creature here. Her voice was deeper and somehow more womanly when she spoke the Ja’wabi dialect. The young men had changed into Ja’wabi costumes also; it was clear that there was going to be a feast.

The women placed a platter on which the whole roast mutton was displayed on the ground. The whole party sat down together in a circle on a carpet, men on one side of the platter, women on the other, eating with their fingers. After the mutton came chicken cooked with dates and figs, then a stew with more lamb and hard-boiled duck’s eggs, then a couscous with carrots, turnips, and other root vegetables.

They ate by the light of the full moon. The meal lasted a long time. Around midnight two or three of the young men got out musical instruments—a drum, a flute, and a stringed instrument Christopher did not recognize—and began to play. After a few moments Kbira and Dimya, carrying tambourines, came out of a tent into the moonlight and danced, clapping their hands and singing in a high treble falsetto, one voice singing a long phrase and the other replying, then the two of them singing a refrain in unison. There was no harmony, just the chanted minor-key melody and the counterpoint of clapping hands.

The young men laughed at the songs and looked at Zarah out of the corners of their eyes. She covered her smile with the end of a scarf. Christopher, who had never before observed her in the company of males her own age, broke the silence with a question.

“What are they saying?” he asked.

“They’re singing a song about negotiating a marriage contract,” Zarah said. “They make up the words as they go along, but it’s an old joke about Ja’wab and me. Kbira just sang, ‘She is worth a hundred black she-camels and one bay faâl because of her beautiful silver eyes,’ and Dimya sang back, ‘By the time I dye two hundred camels black I won’t love her anymore and the faâl won’t love the she-camels.’ “

“What’s a faâl?”

“A stud camel, very valuable, very disagreeable.”

“Who are you supposed to be marrying? Ja’wab?”

“That’s the whole point of the song,” Zarah replied. “Our marriage has been prophesied, but they don’t think he needs a new wife.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re both married to him already.”

“In the song?”

Zarah unveiled her face and grinned with unconcealed amusement. “No,” she said. “In real life.”

Three nights later they arrived on the slope of Tinzár. “The highest place in the world,” Zarah said, smiling. Leading him among the rocks, she showed him the place where the birthing tent had been pitched, then pulled up the sleeve of her blouse to show him the red thread tied around her wrist.

“Kbira tied this on me this morning,” she said. “She always does when we come to Tinzár.”

“She knows the story?”

“Everyone does. You mustn’t laugh or think that I’m making this up. The Ja’wabi really think that Mother and I and my twin were the same people as the ones in Genesis, born into another age. According to the way they look at the world, things happen over and over again, with people sort of leapfrogging through history to relive their lives in different times and different places.”

“Then they must know exactly what’s going to happen to you in this life.”

“Lla Kahina knows. I don’t know about the others.” She glanced quickly at Christopher, as if to catch the slightest glint of skepticism in his eye. “Don’t,” she said, “form an opinion about what Lla Kahina knows until you’ve met her again.”

She pointed out the cairn under which her stillborn brother was buried. “Mother made me memorize the location,” she said.

“She visited this place?”

“Every year on our birthday. It nearly always snowed; we’d bring flowers and put them on the grave. Lla Kahina always cleared them away before we left to preserve the secret. It bothered Mother that the grave wasn’t marked. But if she had put up a cross as she wanted to, the poor little fellow would have been dug up and thrown over the cliff. Christians are really hated in this part of the world; worse than Jews, even.”

“Do the Ja’wabi hate them?”

“Christians? They hardly know they exist. The French were their only experience of them, apart from Mother, who didn’t count, and now she and the French have come and gone.”

“What about you?”

She slipped her arm through his and walked with him a few steps before answering. They could hear the wind howling among the red crags and the river brawling through the gorge at the bottom of the precipice. She smiled at him; since leaving America she had a beautiful smile, filled with good-hearted innocence. “I’m a different case,” she said at last.

That evening, in the last light of the day, the whole party climbed to the summit of Tinzár and slept under the shelter of a ledge that had obviously been much used by campers in the past. Tonight there was no singing or merriment or even any food; immediately on arrival the Ibal Iden crawled into sleeping bags and went to sleep.

Christopher was awakened before dawn by the smell and crackle of a huge fire. The Ibal Iden had brought the smallest of the lambs with them, carrying it over rocks that it could not negotiate on its own and tethering it outside the shelter overnight. By the time Christopher woke up it had been slaughtered and bled, but left unskinned. At the moment that the sun came up, Ja’wab, reached into the flames and laid the dismembered carcass on a platform of rocks blackened by many previous fires. The oily wool burned off in moments, sending up an acrid unmistakable stink, and then the flesh began to cook, creating a more familiar and agreeable aroma. Another man threw what looked like a ball of oiled bread dough onto the platform; it was consumed almost at once, after burning with a surprisingly strong, sweetish odor.

All this took place without conversation, much less with prayers. It was obvious, nevertheless, that the burning of the lamb was a solemn ceremony and the Ibal Iden were deeply moved by it. Ja’wab watched the flames with his arms around his wives, the other boys sat close together in a row. By the time the fire died, about three hours later, the lamb was cooked through, and the Ja’wabi ate it. They used no knives or other implements to carve it, but tore bits of it from the bone with their fingers and passed it to each other, eating it under the shelter of the rock with flat bread that the women had baked the day before.

Zarah was included in all this as an equal. So was Christopher. He was not surprised. Zarah had told him what to expect, and why, and in the small Bible that he carried among his books he had looked up the relevant passage in the Book of Numbers: “Yahweh spoke to Moses and said, ‘Whenever [offering] food burnt as a smell pleasing to Yahweh … there will be one law for you, members of the community, and the … alien alike, a law binding your descendants for ever: before Yahweh you and the alien are no different.’ ”

“Yes,” Zarah said when he showed her the passage. “That’s what the Ja’wabi say. That’s how they live.”

6

CHRISTOPHER AND ZARAH AND THE IBALIDEN ARRIVED AT TIFAWT IN darkness—the village had never been electrified—and went to bed immediately. The old woman, Aziza, who had been with them in the mountains, lighted Christopher with a candle down a gloomy corridor to his bedroom. He found it impossible to sleep. Seeing the place on Tinzár where Zarah had been born in secrecy and her twin buried in stealth had made him visualize Cathy again as she had appeared to him during their conception, battered and desperate and afraid to die. Against all odds, she had gotten what she wanted, and it seemed to him that Cathy was still present in this house where she had hidden herself and their children away for almost exactly half her lifetime—not present as a complete ghost, but lingering in some partial form, as if her poor numb heart had escaped from the ectoplasm at the last moment and stayed behind, too difficult a case even for death to cure.

When, at the crack of dawn, Christopher heard the muezzin calling the salat as-subh, he went out into the courtyard, intending to write in his notebook. A dwarfish figure crouched by the fountain and groped in the water. Because the sun was only just beginning to rise, the garden was still filled with shadows, and for an instant Christopher mistook him for a servant performing his ablutions. Then Yeho Stern stood up and spoke to him in German.

“Good morning,” he said, holding up two dripping hands for Christopher to see. “I’ve been playing with the fish; I was told that your daughter Zarah taught them to eat bread crumbs out of a human hand. It’s true. They do.” He wiped his palms on his trousers and shook hands. “Yeho Stern.”

They had never met, but Christopher knew him by reputation and recognized him even before he heard the name. He said, “You’ve been waiting for me?”

“Yes, but you’re an early riser, so not for long,” Yeho replied. “Here—this is for you.”

He handed Christopher an envelope. The letter inside, scribbled in the O. G.’s Palmer Method hand on both sides of a sheet of drugstore paper, was written in German—but in the Greek cipher. This presented certain problems with diphthongs and umlauts, but Christopher read it easily enough. It was a terse but essentially complete account of the latest developments in the Beautiful Dreamers case, omitting any reference to the Eye of Gaza. All proper names were omitted also. The last line read, “Your friend from Okinawa days needs you; the bearer will explain.”

“Are you instructed to wait for a reply?” Christopher asked.

Yeho ignored the other man’s sardonic tone of voice. “I’m here to tell you what the plan is,” he said. “Then if you want to reply, I’ll listen and pass on what you say.”

Christopher handed back the O. G.’s letter. “I don’t need to know any more,” he said, speaking English. “I’m out. Forever. Old times are gone and forgotten. Tell the O. G. that.”

“You don’t want to help David?”

“David has a cast of thousands to help him.”

“But nobody like you anymore, according to him. He thinks you’re the only one who can do the job. You and your daughter.”

Christopher had begun to turn away. He stopped. “My daughter?” he said. “What does she have to do with it?”

“A lot. There’s a connection.”

“A connection to Zarah? Like hell there is. Look around you.”

“Listen,” Yeho said.

“This is where she comes from,” Christopher said. “This is where she’s spent her life. There’s no possible connection.”

Yeho took Christopher’s arm and repeated, “Listen,” he said, “I’m trying to tell you something.” He was standing quite close now, so that the two of them could speak in very low voices. Barely moving his lips, speaking German again, he told Christopher about Hassan Abdallah. Christopher, rigid and cold in manner, but listening at last, stared down at him, eyes glittering. Yeho had seldom seen a trained agent show so much anger. He was surprised by the display. How could Christopher have been as good as everyone said he was if this was how he behaved before strangers? Well, who knew? Maybe he had changed. And if he had changed once, he could change again and go back to being the operator he used to be. Yeho described Hassan Abdallah’s obsession with the Ja’wabi.

“You understand what I’m saying to you?” he said. “This man wants to wipe out the Ja’wabi to the last fetus.”

“Including Zarah,” Christopher said. “Is that the point you’re making?”

“That’s it. She may not look like a Jew, but she thinks like a Jew, feels like a Jew, talks like a Jew, and hangs around with Jews. To this psychopath who wants to kill her, she’s a Jew.”

Christopher said, “Is that all you came here to tell me?”

“Unless it’s not enough,” Yeho replied. “Maybe you have questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like who was this Russian named Butterfly, and why was he talking to us. Does that make you wonder?”

“Not especially.”

In the strengthening light—no more than five minutes had passed— Christopher’s anger was still visible, but he was beginning to control it better. Yeho understood. This was a man who had lost almost everything, and then got some of it back, more than he ever expected. And now he was being asked to gamble it all. No wonder he looked like he might kill Yeho with his bare hands before he remembered that Yeho was not the enemy. Yeho stood his ground; Christopher was not the first man he had ever seen in this condition. Or the first he had cured of it.

“I’m going to tell you, like it or not. Butterfly was the man David gave to the Chinese to get you back. It was a very big price to pay. At the time I thought he was crazy. Why did I think so? Because I knew something like what’s now happening was bound to happen if he traded this Russian before we rolled up his networks. David knew that, too, but he did it anyway. Why? To get you, his friend, out of China. It was a stupid thing to do. They tell me you were a great operator in your day, so maybe you wouldn’t have made the same mistake if you’d been him and he had been the one in chains. But David did it, and I was the go-between because I knew how much value he placed on getting you out. Now this bad deal is coming back to haunt us, even here in this place where your daughter grew up in peace and innocence. So don’t tell me there are no connections, Paul. There are plenty of connections.”

Until this moment Christopher had known nothing about the details of his release from prison; Patchen had never mentioned the negotiations, except to tell him that he owed no debt to the Outfit. On hearing the truth he felt slightly nauseated and lightheaded; turning his back to Yeho, he took several deep breaths to draw oxygen into his lungs and bloodstream—Stephanie’s trick. Because of the altitude, it did not work too well, and when he turned around again, the same lifetime of bad memories that Yeho had detected a moment before still came and went in his eyes. Then his expression changed.

“All right,” Christopher said calmly. “But not with Zarah, and not right now. I need a few days to myself.”

“Zarah may have her own ideas about all this,” Yeho said. “But one thing at a time. Lla Kahina told me what you’re after. I wish you luck. Where I come from, your parents are remembered. One more connection.”

7

THE MYSTERIOUS GREEN EYES AND THE TATTOOED TEARS BENEATH them were the same, but otherwise little was left of the Meryem Christopher had known half a century before in Berlin. As an old woman seated in her garden in Tifawt she was paler, smaller, stiller—a bundle of dark clothes deposited in a wicker chair. The bony hand she held out to him was webbed with blue veins under its desiccated skin. When to his own surprise he kissed it (a Prussian gesture he had not made since boyhood) the hand had no more scent or taste than an object made of wax. Holding it to his lips he understood the reality: his mother, if still alive, would be as old as Lla Kahina; older. In Christopher’s memory Lori had remained as she was when he last saw her in the hands of the Gestapo, a woman of thirty-five who still looked very much like the girl of nineteen captured in Zaentz’s drawing. If Zaentz could paint these two friends together now, would he still suggest they were somehow the same woman inhabiting two bodies?

“Well,” Lla Kahina said. “Paul. At last.”

“It’s been a long time, all right,” Christopher said. “But I understand you’ve been keeping in touch.”

Affection and amusement mingled in her smile. “The same Paul,” she said. “Sit down beside me.”

They talked for three days, always in the cool of the garden. It was October now; the days were mild and bright. It snowed on the mountain peaks almost every night, and during the daylight hours flocks of alabaster birds passed overhead. At night they roosted in the orchards above the village and when Christopher woke up and looked outside at the moonlit panorama of valley and mountains, it seemed that snow had fallen on the trees as well. These birds always flew over Tifawt at this time of the year, Lla Kahina said; she did not know their names. “What would be the point?” she said. “Naturally the French gave them all Latin names. Cataloguing is one of their passions, but no one else was interested.”

“Not even Zarah?”

“No. She’s like her mother in that respect. Cathy never knew the name for anything, or where she was on the surface of the earth. She was quite a young soul, I think. Language was a mystery to her. Do you hear that?” The muezzin was calling the late afternoon prayer. “That was her favorite sound. She could understand it because it’s a kind of music. But she never guessed, even though she lived among the Ja’wabi for twenty-two years, that we weren’t Moslems. Right up to the end she asked me questions about Islam.”

“That’s a tribute to your tradecraft, I guess. But there are other things that could be said about it. Why didn’t you tell her the truth?”

“Because I wasn’t free to do so. Any more than I was free to tell Zarah about you against her mother’s wishes.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“What other reason did I need? Also, she wasn’t Ja’wabi.”

“Neither was Barney Wolkowicz.”

“He found out everything for himself. In a single day.”

“What about Zarah?”

“She took in the truth with the milk she drank.”

“Not Cathy’s milk.”

“No. Ja’wabi milk.”

“Did that make her Ja’wabi?”

“It satisfied a custom that everybody understands. But even before she was born she was already what she was.”

All this was said in a light, even playful tone of voice, as if Lla Kahina believed that she was telling Christopher things that he had long known but may have forgotten—stories about a remote, poor, but interesting branch of the family. He was not diverted from his real line of thought.

“And what was it, exactly, that Zarah already was?” he asked.

“Exactly? No one can say exactly because not everything has happened yet,” she replied. “But she belongs here. She is going to do some great thing in this lifetime.”

“What great thing?”

“She will show us when the time comes. Zarah is not a young soul. I think she may be living her last life. She has some debt to pay the Ja’wabi. That’s why she’s here. Every Ja’wabi feels it. That’s because of the story of her birth. I knew she was someone like that even before she reached out of the womb and touched me.”

“She touched you?”

“Yes. She held on to my finger while I tied the red thread around her wrist, then let go. It was the grip of a person who knew me.”

“But you say you knew even before that she was … whatever you think she is. How long before?”

“Since the first time I saw her in the cards. In Otto Rothchild’s house on the lake of Geneva on the day I met Cathy.”

“What did you see?”

“Will you be able to believe what I tell you?”

“Believe it or understand it?”

“No one can understand it, not even me. I saw her as she is now, but, at the same time, as she was in the past. This often happens. At first I thought I was seeing your mother as she had been in another life a long time ago, but then I realized it was only a resemblance. It was your child I saw.”

Christopher did not ask her how she had known this. He said, “Do you often see my mother in the cards?”

Before answering, Lla Kahina looked up at the patch of cloudless sky above her garden.

“Always,” she said, and when she lowered her eyes to look directly into his face, he saw that she was weeping.

He said, “Tell me about Heydrich.”

“About Heydrich? How much do you know already?”

“What’s in The Rose and the Lotus. And what Zarah overheard you telling Wolkowicz.”

“Then you know almost everything.”

8

SHE TOLD HIM THE REST, AS FAR AS SHE KNEW IT. ONE MORNING IN August 1939, after they had finished their pastries and coffee and Meryem had read the cards, Heydrich suddenly decided that he would keep Meryem.

“Keep her?” Lori said. “What do you mean, ‘keep her’?”

“It is a necessity,” Heydrich replied. “I foresaw that this might occur, so I have arranged to have a special room prepared upstairs.”

He himself marched Meryem upstairs and locked her in a room. It looked like an ordinary bedroom, with dresser, wardrobe, and narrow bed with a gray army blanket folded in regulation manner at the foot. A loaf of black bread, a jug of water, and a pack of cards had been placed on the table. But there was a judas hole in the door and bars on the window; geraniums grew in a flower box.

“She will be treated well, as a prisoner of the Reich,” Heydrich said to Lori, as if Meryem, who stood impassively beside the bed, had been transformed into one of the trophy heads that gazed down upon them with lacquer eyes.

Once outside, he locked the door with a bar and padlock and pocketed the key. “She will be quite comfortable here,” he said, inviting Lori to look through the judas hole. She drew back. “You won’t look?” he said. “Well, tomorrow, perhaps. You can see her through the inspection window every day when you come. That is an irrevocable privilege. But you mustn’t speak to her, and I really can’t permit her to join us for coffee until further notice.”

By now Lori understood the situation. A madman who had the power to do anything he liked was madly in love with her. She no longer treated him like a lunatic; it was too dangerous. She spoke calmly to him now as if imprisoning Meryem in a bedroom decorated with stuffed boar’s heads and the antlers of stags was something that no ignorant woman could understand unless a man explained it.

“Why is this necessary?” she asked.

Heydrich smiled indulgently. “To save Meryem from something far, far worse,” he said. “You must take it from me that every reading of the cards is filled with secrets of the Reich.”

“Really? That part of it escapes me entirely.”

“Of course it would, darling girl. You are perfectly innocent.”

“But I want to understand. What secrets did she reveal this morning, for example?”

That morning in the cards Meryem had seen Heydrich sitting in the dark in an open car, between two stone walls that led to a half-timbered farmhouse with a thatched roof. It was early morning; the darkness around him was filled with soldiers. He was waiting for something to happen. He looked at his watch; it said 4:40. At that moment, just as dawn broke, swarms of airplanes appeared overhead, and all around Heydrich in the lifting darkness thousands of engines stuttered to life.

“She described something that I know is going to happen,” Heydrich said. “More than that I cannot say, even to you. But the detail is so precise that anyone but me who heard it would believe she must be a spy, and a very dangerous one at that. Luckily I know better; I believe in her powers. But what if she blurted this out in the presence of an enemy of the Reich—one of those Jew Communists your husband brings home? The result would be disastrous. No, she must be protected. We will keep her here, in this place that has so many happy memories for all three of us.”

Then, as usual, Heydrich drove Lori into Berlin, gazing worship-fully at her profile while the car rolled through the streets of the northern suburbs. When the driver opened the door to let her out at the end of Goethestrasse, Heydrich put his gloved hand over hers and detained her for a moment. “How much more enjoyable it was to be alone in the car—don’t you agree?” he said. Lori was silent as usual. He kissed her hand. “Until tomorrow!”

This happened on a Monday. Apart from the fact that Meryem was locked in a room in the forest, nothing changed. In the days that followed Lori was “arrested” as usual every morning in the Tiergarten and driven to the hunting lodge. Heydrich insisted that she gaze through the judas hole at Meryem, who was always in the same position, seated at the table, facing the door, with the cards spread out on the polished tabletop. If she had not moved, and sometimes even spoken, Lori would have thought that she was looking not at her living friend, but at some sort of mannikin Heydrich had placed in the room to deceive her.

Their mornings together went on as before, cakes and coffee, music and gallant compliments, except that Meryem was locked away upstairs so there were no readings of the cards. Then, on the Friday, Lori arrived to find Meryem downstairs again. She read the cards as before, this time predicting that Heydrich was going to be decorated by the Führer himself. “Describe the medal,” he said. Meryem did so. “The Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Swords and Diamonds,” Heydrich said, wagging an admonishing finger. “No! Really, you little nigger scamp, this time you’ve gone too far!” But it was obvious that he was very pleased. Lori played a Lehár medley on the piano, which had just been tuned, Heydrich said, by the best expert in Berlin and a party member since beer hall days.

“I have never heard the music sound more glorious,” Heydrich told Lori. “And now I have a little surprise for you. Something has happened that makes it possible for Meryem to leave Germany, and I think she should do so at once, this weekend at the latest. But with the utmost discretion.”

“If you advise it, it shall be done,” Lori said. “But tell us your opinion. By what means should she travel?”

“Oh, no!” said Heydrich playfully. “None of your guessing games! I am not a travel agent. I myself am going sailing this weekend. You’re such a wonderful sailor, I wish we were going out on the water together, but that cannot be. It may be the last chance any of us have to enjoy the Baltic in our innocent little pleasure boats. More than that I cannot say.”

As soon as Heydrich let them out of the car, the two women collected Hubbard, interrupting him at his writing. The three of them took the first train to Rügen, and at midnight that night they sailed for the coast of Denmark in the Christophers’ yawl Mahican. At dawn they put Meryem ashore on the Danish island of Falster.

On the beach, Meryem embraced Lori convulsively. They had swum ashore through the frigid water, and both were shivering.

“Don’t go back,” Meryem said in a shaking voice.

“I must,” Lori replied.

“For God’s sake, why?”

“I feel it. Very strongly. But if you tell me that I’m wrong, that there’s no reason to go back, I’ll believe you.”

They looked at each other for the last time, gray eyes and green. Meryem, knowing that her friend saw the same future for herself as she did, said nothing more. Suddenly Lori began to cry, wildly. She pushed Meryem away, a violent shove into which she put all the strength of her body, then plunged into the water and swam back to the Mahican. The tide was running out, so she covered the distance between the shore and the boat very quickly.

Nine days later, at 4:40 in the morning as Meryem had foretold, the mechanized German army started its motors and invaded Poland under a canopy of hundreds of warplanes.

“What was it that you knew?” Christopher asked Lla Kahina. “What was going to happen that made it impossible for my mother to stay in Denmark?”

“It would be wrong to tell you that,” Lla Kahina said. “Maybe what I saw in the cards never happened. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know.”

“I was.”

“I know you were.”

“Let me judge the right and wrong.”

She held up a wrinkled palm. “No,” she said. “I can’t. Go to England. Talk to Dickie Shaw-Condon. He was there, too.”

9

AT ROSSENARRA HALL, THE DRAUGHTY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HOUSE in the extreme north of England that was the seat of his family, Sir Richard Shaw-Condon, ninth baronet, explained the etymology and history of his title to Paul Christopher.

“ ‘Baronet’ seems originally to have meant ‘young’ or ‘little baron,’ and for a long time it was used in England as a title by the sons of barons,” he said, punctuating his sentences with a phlegmy barking laugh. “Then, in 1611, King James, bless his Scotch soul, needed money to send Protestants to settle in Ulster and keep the papists down, so he created the baronets of England; people bought the dignity, you see. Not that it was much of a bargain, ha-ha. One gets to walk ahead of all the knights except Knights of the Garter on ceremonial occasions. Baronets are commoners, you know. Rank without privilege, that was the royal idea.”

Although a drizzle was falling, the two men were seated outdoors in a gazebo because it was warmer in the open air than in the dank interior of the house. Indoors, Sir Richard had worn a long woolen scarf from his public school, Worksop College, in addition to several layers of sweaters, a greenish tweed jacket thick enough to stand up in the corner by itself, and a French fisherman’s cap. “Do come, always happy to see you,” he had shouted into the telephone when Christopher called from London. “Can’t ask you to stay, though. My American guests always go away with chilblains.” In fact Sir Richard never invited foreigners, especially not Americans, to stay at Rossenarra Hall. He had had enough of them during his long career in the secret service. Like the rabbits and cats and tortoises in Alice in Wonderland dressed up in English clothes and speaking a demented sort of English, people from abroad were dotty impostors. This perception had given him certain advantages in his dealings with British agents of other, expendable nationalities.

Now, unwinding his Worksop scarf and doffing his jacket under the roof of the gazebo, Sir Richard said, “Always used to keep a flat in London in the winter when I was gainfully employed. Can’t manage it now.” As a much younger man he had had flaxen eyebrows that flowed like mustaches and a pink, disdainful face; in those bygone days he had looked fashionably steamed in an upper-class way, as if he had just stepped out of a hot tub. The eyebrows were gray-white now, and so was the petulant face. There were few hot baths at Rossenarra Hall; the water had to be heated in the kitchen and carried upstairs in buckets, and even if Sir Richard had been able to afford the wages, few in Britain would do such work nowadays. He produced a hunting flask and offered it to Christopher.

“Brandy? It’s Spanish, I’m afraid.”

“No thank you.”

“I will, if you don’t mind,” Sir Richard said, tipping the flask. “They say it’s good for the heart. I’ve heard it said that Winston drank a pint of this stuff every day, besides buckets of champagne, when he was running the war. He had the heart of a lion. Do you think there was any connection?”

“I don’t know. What kept you going?”

“During the late war? Not brandy; you never saw spirits unless you happened to be prime minister. Dreams of glory kept me going, I suppose; I was younger in those days. It was all such a long time ago. One hardly remembers. Sorry I can’t offer you luncheon here. But they do a rather good mixed grill at the pub in the village, if you’re up to the local cookery.”

“I don’t think I am, honestly.”

“Oh.” Sir Richard’s tone was resentful. He had hoped for lunch in the village; he lived without servants or wife and ate very little cooked food.

“The last time we met, as I remember,” he said, “I gave you luncheon at my club. We shared a bottle of the ‘71 Riesling. It’s all drunk up now. You were just out of the jug and were looking for the bastard that got you put inside.”

“That’s right. You were very helpful to me.”

“I hope you haven’t told anyone that. It was the hell of a scandal you stirred up afterwards over that man Darby.”

“That was long before.”

“Was it? Well, one bad ‘un is much like another. I suppose you’re on the trail of some new mystery. What do you want this time?”

“Something a bit more personal. I’ve recently learned that you knew my mother in Berlin before the war.”

“Did you indeed? May one ask from what source?”

“From two separate and usually reliable sources, actually—the O. G. and Meryem.”

“Oh, dear,” Sir Richard said.

10

IT DID NOT TAKE UP VERY MUCH OF SIR RICHARD’S MORNING TO report the essentials of Lori Christopher’s fate. Nettled as he was by missing out on lunch, he came straight to the point.

“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “In the summer of 1939 I was sent to Germany under deep cover to meet Nazis and recruit as many of them as possible. Awful job. They were true believers as well as being frightened out of their wits by the Party police, worse than the Russians in your day because the Nazis really were believers, so I got nowhere for weeks. Finally I was reduced to trolling in the nightclubs, and one night I ran into this disgusting Hun in a low dive called Kaminskys Telephonbar. It was just the sort of place the Brownshirts liked. Every table had a telephone, you see, and if one of the tarts, Knabe oder Mädel— they had both sexes—took your fancy you could ring up him or her and arrange the price. Blind drunk this Hun of mine was, ringing up the girls and suggesting the most appalling acts to them, all the while pawing the ones sitting at the bar. He kept on buying me drinks and talking to me between fondlings about Heine; fortunately I’d read German at Oxford so I had the old Jew-baiter by heart. I quoted Die Lorelei and Romanzero by the yard, making a tremendous hit.”

Christopher interrupted. “But Heine was a Jew.”

“A Catholic Jew who despised Jews,” Sir Richard said. “My Hun adored that. It tickled him so that I began to wonder if he didn’t have a Jewish grandmother himself. Anyway, he seemed to have a lot of money and the barmen and the tarts were sucking up to him; I thought the money was why.

“Well, to make a long story short, just as the dawn was breaking he left off kneading one of the tarts, and with lipstick all over his face, turned to me and said, ‘I suppose you think I’m enjoying this.’ He made this woeful Hun Pagliacci face, so of course I said, ‘Certainly not. One can see at once that you’re not enjoying it at all, old boy. Obviously you’re used to the company of a much finer type of woman.’ ‘How right you are,’ the Hun said. ‘Come along and I’ll show you.’ All this was a bit off-putting, as you might imagine, but against my better judgment I went along with him, up the steps of Kaminskys Telephonbar, out into the open air and into this great black Hun motor car awaiting him with purring motor at the curb. It came equipped with a couple of obvious Gestapo thugs—leather coats, gangster hats, stupid eyes, the whole kit. What’s this? I thought, and then I took a closer look at the Hun himself and realized who he was—none other than Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Nazi secret police, first deputy to Himmler, homicidal maniac, the lot, exactly the sort of target I was instructed to attack. It was like winning the sweeps. I’ve often used this episode to illustrate to younger men the importance of seizing the main chance. Serendipity—wonderful Yank word, that—is all. One never knows who anyone is going to turn out to be, don’t you agree?”

“Completely,” Christopher said.

“I knew you would, old boy; so do we all who know the feel of pavement beneath our feet, ha-ha. Not many of us old parties left in the great game.”

“You’re right. Please go on.”

“Yes, of course, mustn’t lose the thread. Well, inside his staff car, Heydrich chatted away as if we’d been at the dear old SS Academy together. It seems he’d found the ideal German woman and fallen madly in love with her. She was beautiful, the blood of Prussian nobility flowed in her veins, she rode like a Valkyrie and played the piano like Clara Schumann used to do. Unfortunately she was married and she was as virtuous as a vestal virgin. Not only that, she loved her husband. None of this discouraged Heydrich. ‘I could take her by force, or have her husband killed, of course,’ he said … those were his exact words, I’ve never forgotten them … ‘but she must make the choice. She must sooner or later realize that my love cannot be denied and come to me of her own free will.’ Calm as you please, old Reinhard was. He was quite mad, you see, born that way probably, and as your father wrote about him, he saw things with the joyful clarity of the incurably insane. In the meantime, he said, he was having this woman arrested by his men two or three times a week and brought to his hunting lodge.

“ ‘My aim is to relieve her of the burden of her scruples by taking the matter right out of her hands,’ he said. ‘She can hardly blame herself for anything if she’s under arrest. Not that she has any reason to do so up to now. I assure you our friendship is perfectly innocent, she always brings along this Gypsy girlfriend of hers as a chaperone and to divert suspicion I pretend to flirt with the friend and have her tell my fortune. Actually the woman disgusts me; she’s as dark as a nigger and I think she may even be a Jew. She’s hinted as much to me. We have coffee together, discuss music and poetry and painting, all the finer things; sometimes I persuade my love to play something restful for me on the piano, and then we go our separate ways—I to my work, she back to her dreary world. These moments are the bright spots of my life. Of hers, too, but of course she’s not yet ready to admit that to me.’ “

Sir Richard had a reputation among his own kind as a storyteller; he had lived as a bachelor in a society that placed considerable value on the extra man’s ability to keep a dinner party interested. He surpassed himself in his description of how he sat with Heydrich in the backseat of his Mercedes and watched through the bulletproof window while the Gestapo thugs arrested Lori and Meryem and loaded them into another car. The women were on horseback and Heydrich instructed his men to let them finish their ride, so that he could watch them canter by for his pleasure, black hair and blond hair flying like the pennons (as Heydrich put it) of Aryan and barbarian womanhood.

“I need hardly tell you,” Sir Richard said, “that the blonde was your mother. Puppy love was written all over Heydrich’s face. I mean to say, if he hadn’t been who he was it would have been quite pathetic. As it was, I knew that I had him, one way or another, if only I could stay in touch with him and get in touch with his lady love.”

It did not take him long to accomplish the latter. One of the first people Sir Richard met after his arrival in Berlin was Otto Rothchild.

“Amazing chap, Otto, the perfect slippery exile, knew absolutely everybody in Berlin, that was his stock in trade,” Sir Richard said. “That included your parents, of course. For a fee of only two hundred American dollars he introduced me to your mother. For obvious reasons I didn’t want to meet your father just yet, so we called at that flat in Charlottenburg with all those marvelous pictures one morning whilst he was writing. Of course I was taking the hell of a chance going there because Heydrich had the place wired and watched round the clock, but there was no means of seeing your mother without being seen by Heydrich’s men in any case, so it had to be done. I went straight to the point, knowing quite well that I might never have another chance. Before coming I had typed out a note; I can still quote it by heart: ‘I AM AN AGENT OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE. IF YOU WILL HELP ME TO KILL REINHARD HEYDRICH PLEASE SAY THE WORDS “GOD SAVE THE KING”. HIS DEMISE WOULD BE A BLESSING TO YOUR COUNTRY AS WELL AS MY OWN. MY COMPANION KNOWS NOTHING OF THIS AND NEITHER MUST ANYONE ELSE. YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I HAVE PUT MY LIFE IN YOUR HANDS ALONG WITH THIS LETTER. IF YOUR ANSWER IS YES YOU WILL FIND FURTHER LETTERS HIDDEN IN YOUR SADDLE IN TIERGARTEN STABLES.’ Your mother was a natural agent. She sent Otto into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water, read the note, handed it back to me, and said, cool as you please, ‘God save the King.’ By the time Otto came back, the deal was done and old Reinhard was a dead man.”

“What deal, precisely?” Christopher asked.

“Well, as I just said, the assassination of Heydrich.”

“What was the point of killing him?”

“The point? The point was that your mother made it possible. Obviously this lunatic couldn’t be recruited. What could we offer him? He thought Germany was going to win the coming war and he was going to be the second Führer after Hitler retired full of honors and much beloved. So did a lot of other people. The only thing to do with him, if we were going to do anything at all, was to kill him and hope for happy results. The trouble was, the war came much sooner than anyone expected. I handed Mrs. Christopher my billet-doux on August tenth. On August twenty-third the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed. On September first Germany invaded Poland. There was no time to lay on the operation.”

“So you abandoned it?”

“Delayed it. It goes without saying that your mother was the key to success. She wanted to get your father and herself out of Germany, having already got you out, and of course she had her opportunities. Heydrich in his loony way encouraged her to sail off to Denmark, smuggling Jews and other enemies of the Reich in that famous sailboat your parents kept in Rügen. Each time she returned he regarded it as a sign of her love for him. He would get quite emotional about it. I’m truly sorry to tell you these sick-making things in such plain language. After all, this woman was your mother, and one can imagine how you feel even after all these years, but these were the facts. Of course he kept a jolly close eye on the Last of the Mohicans … have I got the name right?”

“It was just Mahican, spelled with an ‘a’.”

“Really? Well, I was rather close. Odd how one remembers every detail of the long ago at my age and forgets to button one’s trousers,” Sir Richard said with a smile. “Anyway, Heydrich took the precaution of shadowing the Mahican with a Gestapo E-boat out of Rügen, and I suppose the crew would have intervened in certain circumstances. You may recall that you were always stopped and searched after you came back into harbor; that was Heydrich’s way of saying cheerio. In any case, your mother and father got Meryem out, and I was quite sure that they’d try to do a bolt, too. But Heydrich was much more sure that they wouldn’t. Very serene about it, he was.”

“He talked to you often about my mother?”

“My dear fellow, he talked to me about nothing else. We kept on meeting in the fleshpots. Heydrich would have two or three or four tarts a night; I’ve never known a man with such an enormous appetite for female companionship. He never touched Lori, of course. In his mind she was far above all that; you can be quite at peace on that point. In any case, he wasn’t a bit worried about her coming back from the sail with Meryem. He’d set the whole thing up as a test of her fidelity. The details were appalling.”

“In what way?”

“In what way?”

“I’d really rather not go into it. It’s enough to say he locked Meryem up in a room as a means of tightening his hold on your mother. He was crude, you see. That was why he was so effective. One simply can’t deal with the unthinkable unless one is as mad as Heydrich was. But he knew he held all the aces.”

“Which were what?”

Sir Richard coughed, a sign, Christopher thought, of mild embarrassment, or of the wish to feign it. He pressed him to continue.

“Well, of course he was head of the entire German police apparatus,” Sir Richard said. “So he knew all sorts of things. Things that might influence your mother.”

“What, specifically?”

“Specifically?” Sir Richard said. “I’m awfully sorry to tell you this, my dear fellow, but since you ask, Heydrich knew, on the morning that he let Meryem go, that you yourself had landed in Hamburg on that very day and taken the train for Rügen. Your parents had sent you off to America with the O. G.—or the Y. G. as he then was, ha-ha—but I gather you turned right around and came back on the next ship. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “It’s so.”

Two days after the O. G. delivered him to Elliott Hubbard on the pier in Manhattan, Christopher had used a letter of authorization given to him by his father to draw money from his parents’ account at D. & D. Laux & Co. Then he had bought a third-class ticket on the Bremen and sailed back to Germany. His mother and father were in danger; he wanted to be with them.

“When your parents got back from smuggling Meryem out of the country,” Sir Richard said, “there you were, waiting for them. That changed everything, of course, because it gave Heydrich a rather valuable hostage, your parents’ only son, the last of the line on both sides of the family; Heydrich researched matters of that kind. He still managed the odd charade, of course, just to touch up the parental anxiety—I believe you went along on the last voyage of the Mahican when Otto Rothchild was the only passenger. The E-boat tagged along on that one, too. Heydrich was taking no chances. All the same, he was pleased as punch when your mother turned up back in Rügen. By then it was all over. Whatever arrangements she made for you and your father, your mother had to remain in Germany. Heydrich had won. She knew that quite well. She got you out on the last possible day, of course.”

“Stop,” Christopher said. “Are you telling me that her arrest at the frontier was pre-arranged, that Heydrich let my father and me go in order to keep her? That she agreed to that?”

Sir Richard sighed. “I’m afraid so. But in the end, remember, we did kill the bastard after he became the führer of Czechoslovakia. He took your mother with him to his kingdom in the east, of course, and it was she who made it all possible because she knew what his every move was going to be. She died at the hands of the Gestapo, of course, like all the others who played a part in the operation. I won’t burden you with the details. Of course we hadn’t a hope of getting her out, but she knew that from the start. She was a very, very gallant lady, and I’m glad you know the full particulars at last.”

He looked into Christopher’s ravaged face, then reached out a hand in genuine sympathy. After all, even though Christopher and his people were not English and could never be English no matter how hard they tried, he had known the family for fifty years.

“My dear boy,” he said. “My dear, dear boy.”

11

CHRISTOPHER TREATED SIR RICHARD SHAW-CONDON TO LUNCH AT the local pub after all. To the Englishman’s relief his visitor had quickly regained control of himself—outwardly, at least. He did not touch the food that the waitress, an unkempt trollop who scratched her itching scalp with a ballpoint pen, dropped onto the table before him. While Sir Richard ate his gummy smoked salmon followed by a leathery mixed grill and drank the better part of a bottle of Romanian merlot, they discussed the twentieth-century novel, remembering the names of characters and plot details for each other. Christopher was not saying much, so Sir Richard did most of the talking. He had always been a great reader, he said, passing the time with novels purchased from operational funds while waiting in hotel rooms or train compartments or on windswept park benches for agents to turn up. Spending his service’s money on books had never troubled his conscience. They were very useful as recognition signals: “I shall be reading a novel called Nile Shadows; if the coast is clear I shall close the book and put it into my pocket of my mackintosh. Follow me into the lavatory.” Lately he had been reading these works all over again, revisiting the scenes of his youth, as it were, because he had known most of the originals of the characters. The English novelists of his generation had in many cases spent the whole of their adult lives writing about the adolescents they had met at Oxford. “I seldom bother with books written by Cantabrigians,” he said. “They’re always by and about boring Communists who call themselves Catholics or vice-versa. Not that it matters any longer. I mean to say, it’s all over.”

“What’s all over?” Christopher asked.

“The age of political delusion. Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Gandhism, Nkrumahism, the lot.”

“You think the gods are dying?”

“They’re in their boxes, my dear fellow. Except for the eternal Tories, of course. In their boxes. Seems odd to have one’s own century almost over with and all passions spent and near-forgotten, doesn’t it?”

“A relief,” Christopher said, very softly, even for him.

Sir Richard looked up warily, wondering if this American, if that’s what he was, was actually going to reopen the subject of his mother in the midst of the gang of provincial solicitors and bank clerks who were crowded into what used to be the saloon bar, eating their midday sausages. Well, he was welcome, if that’s what he wanted. Sir Richard fixed Christopher with a bulldog look. He made no apologies for having sent Lori Christopher to her death half a century before; unless he was actually telling the story, he could barely sort out her demise from all the other heroic sacrifices he had made possible during his long career as a handler of agents. But Christopher uttered no reproaches. If he knew anything, he knew that secret agents, like all other members of the human race, did what they wanted in their hearts to do; they were only coerced into destroying themselves in the kind of novels that Sir Richard refused to buy, even with other people’s money.

“What time is your train?” Sir Richard asked.

“One forty-five.”

“Then you’d better be hopping.”

Christopher paid the bill, and as he waited for his change, Sir Richard slid a book across the tabletop. It was a copy of the British first edition of The Rose and the Lotus.

“I bought this long before I knew either of your parents,” he said. “Saw it in Hatchard’s as I was stocking up on reading matter for Germany. On first reading I thought for a few pages that the author must be an Englishman. He certanly wrote like one. But then I realized that he couldn’t be because I didn’t recognize anybody in the book. Wanted to meet them all the same.”

He was an admirer of Hubbard’s work. On his last meeting with Christopher, when the ‘71 Riesling was poured, he had quoted a line of Hubbard’s poetry comparing the taste of hock to hyacinths and honey. Now, with a rueful glance at the empty bottle of Iron Curtain claret before him, he quoted it again. “I’m sure you read all your father’s books as a younger man,” he said. “But if you haven’t read this one for some time, then you ought to try it again in the light of the new knowledge that’s just come your way. Another thing you might like to know. Your father and I used it for a book code when he went into Germany for us in ‘40.”

“Did you tell him about your connection to his wife?”

Sir Richard looked shocked. “Good heavens! No. Nor would you have done. What if the Gestapo had got him?”

On the long train ride from Northumberland to London, Christopher read the book, with its description of the Experiment and its portraits of Lori and Meryem that were more vivid than Zaentz’s painting. It was the first time he had looked into its pages for many, many years, and by the time he reached his destination, he had decided what he was going to do.