TWO

FEBRUARY 3, 1941

It was winter, dead winter, the very core of the coldest time, and Caitlin was on a slippery, snow-packed path, guiding a man named Joe Rose and Joe’s friend Gordon Jaffrey. The three of them moved swiftly because the cold came up through the soles of their shoes and entered their bones. The winter sun was a circular smudge in the white sky, a fingerprint on a pane of glass.

They’d hidden Joe’s car, a black Ford with runningboards and a back seat filled with books and film cans and blankets. The car was left behind a billboard on County Road 30, right at the turnoff to Camp Sunrise. The billboard showed a happy American family eating their steaming-hot farina— though this family was now peeling, torn in long strips by the clawing cold winds of winter.

The path they walked on was narrow. Frozen treadmarks went down the middle of it. The hemlocks stood in a line like the pattern on a sweater.

Caitlin walked behind Joe and Gordon. They were both city boys and their tread was at once arrogant and awkward; they walked too quickly and lost their balance. Their feet shimmied; they grabbed onto each other to keep from falling.

“Will it be too cold for that camera to work?” Joe Rose asked. His eyes scanned the horizon and he patted his breast pocket, feeling for his notebook and pen. He was handsome, right up to the edge of beauty, without being precisely attractive. He had the air of a man who was always thinking too many things simultaneously, trying to balance too many conflicting ideas, and for whom things could not quite come together. Caitlin considered him a victim of his own intelligence.

“How many times are you going to ask me that?” Gordon said.

Gordon and Joe had been friends for a couple of years. They worked at Fortune together. Gordon looked up to Joe and they both had secrets, complicated memories, and a day-to-day life that for the most part excluded Caitlin. Yet today they needed her.

“I don’t know,” Joe Rose said. “Maybe if you put the camera under your coat, gave it a little protection anyhow.”

Joe and Gordon were not a natural pair. Joe was from Philadelphia; he was Jewish, the son of a successful lawyer. He was an edgy man and there was, even at the age of twentyfour, something mournful, wounded in his expression. He was pale, thin, and until recently he had had dark, wavy hair. Now he had had it cut short, straightened, and dyed light brown, to support the necessary fiction that he was a Gentile.

Gordon was large, broad, with reddish skin, freckles, and dark yellow hair he combed back in a single, good-natured wave. He had been raised in Chicago—his father was a cop, and Gordon was one of nine children. He had learned photography from a mail-order course and now made a living out of sheer energy and a willingness to go anywhere or do anything to get a photograph. He had sold pictures of a walrus giving birth, of slag being dumped; he had followed a cop onto a ledge where a mother with a child in her arms was threatening to jump—and indeed she did jump, and that last image of her sailing toward the street with the amazed child looking up at the camera made Gordon’s reputation.

Caitlin, Joe, and Gordon came to a thick, icy chain strung up between two giant hemlocks. On one tree a sign said, “CAMP SUNRISE—PRIVATE.” On the other tree the sign said, “BEWARE—AREA PATROLLED BY DOGS.” Beneath the sign, someone had drawn a cartoonish picture of a dog licking its chops, with exclamation points of saliva flying all around it.

Joe gestured at the chain across the road, the signs on the trees, and Gordon took his Leica out from beneath his overcoat and took two quick photographs.

“We never would have found this place without you,” Joe said to Caitlin. He patted her on the shoulder, and his eyes for a moment stopped wandering, stopped calculating, and he looked at her, showed himself, his frailty, his gratitude.

She breathed in deeply. Joe was the bravest man she knew, had ever known, and it made her weak with happiness to have his praise.

“What time does it get dark around here?” Gordon wanted to know.

“Same time as it does in New York City,” said Caitlin. And she thought to herself: If these guys are going to save the Republic they ought to know what time it is.

She was the local. It was her spotting the man named John Coleman that had brought Joe and Gordon up here. They thought they could force Coleman to answer questions, to admit he was a German agent, or to perhaps deny it in a way that would reveal something more, perhaps something they hadn’t even considered. And now it was Caitlin’s job to guide them around over the frozen back roads. Gordon and Joe were nervous in the countryside. The barns and silos and knots of cattle melting the snow with their body heat while they chewed on bales of hay seemed exotic and unsettling to the men. To Caitlin, these were merely oppressive sights. She enjoyed having Joe depend on her, but she wished it was about something else. Being the one who feels most comfortable in the sticks was winning a game she would rather not have played, like winning at who is the poorest, the most naïve.

Caitlin had worked for Congressman Stowe after leaving Windsor County and now Stowe was dead and she was back where she had begun. Joe Rose was keen to prove that Stowe’s death was not an accident but that he had been killed by the man calling himself John Coleman. Joe had come to her, had not even asked her to help, but had just begun giving her assignments—asking her for names, papers from Stowe’s files, phone numbers. He assumed her cooperation. It was not in his nature to court and woo. In that way, the times were perfect for him. When you are enlisting someone to help win a war, all you have to say is what you want done, you don’t have to say please and you do not have to be charming.

And she had lost someone she had loved when Stowe’s plane turned into a throbbing, smoking ball of flame in a Virginia pasture. Her best friend, a woman named Betty Sinclair, had been on that plane, too.

They walked in single file and the soles of their shoes made a noise like a dog chewing a chunk of charcoal. Dense pine groves stood on either side of the path. An occasional blue jay flitted between the snowy boughs. The snowdrifts were marked with a latticework of fallen pine needles.

“Are you absolutely sure you saw Coleman in town?” Joe asked Caitlin. Furls of steam poured from his nose and mouth as he spoke.

“He was sick,” said Caitlin. “Coughing. He walked around with a handkerchief rolled up in his hand.”

Gordon suddenly stopped and aimed his camera at the tops of the trees, snapped a picture.

“Now what?” Joe asked. His voice was irritated, raw. Caitlin wondered if impersonating an Aryan had affected his character, spoiled his gentleness.

“The way the light was coming through the branches,” Gordon said, shrugging. He seemed to be used to Joe and all his permutations.

“We didn’t come for that,” Joe said.

“I’m an artist, a terribly sensitive artist,” Gordon said, putting his hand on his massive chest.

“We just have to save film, is all,” said Joe.

“Over that hill,” said Caitlin, pointing to a piny rise a quarter mile away, “there’s an estate called Locust Manor. My father knows the man who runs it.”

“I always figured,” said Joe, “that everybody knows everyone in a place like this.”

“There’s two kinds of people around here,” Caitlin said. Joe was at her side. They were the same height and now they had the same-color hair, too. “There’s the rich who live on the estates and then there’s us. And what we do is wait on them or make things for them or look after their children or milk their cows. But we’re fascinated by them. We think of them as gods. And we talk about them all the time. Gossip is what we do for mythology.”

Joe smiled. “You’ve given this a lot of thought,” he said.

Caitlin was a water witch when it came to the hidden springs of snobbery, and she realized that it was not an altogether good sign that Joe was impressed—it meant he had assumed she was dull. But still she could not resist feeling a little jolt of pleasure, an internal rise and fall such as she would feel going over a bump in the road.

Her heart already knew that its destiny involved loving men who would not really see her very clearly.

“Hey,” said Gordon. “We’re here.” He took the lens cap off his camera with the gravity of a man taking the safety off a gun.

They had come to a trio of empty flagpoles. In the summer, when the camp was going full tilt and the outdoor fireplaces were pouring fragrant smoke, and large, seriouslooking men in khaki shorts were cooking meat on the grill, and the lake was filled with the sharp laughter of Die Mädchenschaft, which was the affectionate name given to the youngest and fairest of the camp’s women, in the summer when the parade grounds were full of good earnest, hearty, Sieg-heiling marchers, these three flagpoles flew three banners—the orange-and-yellow flag of Camp Sunrise, the beleaguered flag of the United States, and the proud banner of the new Germany. But now the flagpoles were empty, skinned over with ice, and they stood in a perfect white field of snow.

On the eastern rim of the parade grounds was the main house of the camp, which also served as a restaurant and an inn. It was an old Victorian house painted brown and white. It had a wide, circular porch, whose roof sagged beneath the weight of the snow. The shades were drawn, turning each of the windows into a mirror, most of them reflecting only snow and trees but those on the west catching the first rays of the sunset in the rippled glass.

Two upward-angled, empty flagpoles were above the doorway of the main house, and beyond the main house were rows of modest, prim, well-kept cabins, each one sprouting an empty flagpole.

“Must be like the World’s Fair when all the flags are up,” Gordon said.

“The World’s Fair if all that was invited was Germany,” said Joe.

The house looked deserted. It had seemed unlikely that they would find John Coleman but there had been something compelling about the possibility. Coleman was in trouble in New York, in Pittsburgh, in Minneapolis—his name had come up during investigations of a bombing in a Brooklyn shipyard, an explosion in a steel mill, a fire in the offices of a small Farmer-Labor newspaper. Perhaps he did need a place to recover from some illness, a place where no one would look. Perhaps in this frozen landscape hid the man who killed with fire. Yet why would he be here? Why would he stay?

“When you thought you saw him …” Joe said to Caitlin.

“I did see him,” said Caitlin. She was looking at the house, seeing there were no lights burning, no car nearby, feeling certain it was empty and wondering if Joe would now think she had concocted the sighting to bring him up to Leyden, to make her life important again, as it had been when she lived in Washington.

On the broad, circular porch there were two pairs of skis and a small stack of white-birch logs—enough for only a fire or two. Tacked to the door was a sign lettered in fierce Teutonic characters, red on black: SEE YOU IN APRIL.

“Friendly,” said Gordon.

“Photo,” said Joe.

“Right,” said Gordon. He focused his Leica on the sign and photographed it.

“Often,” Caitlin said, “caretakers leave an extra key above the door frame.” She got up on her toes and felt above the door. She found the key, long and cold. Its teeth were barely ridged; it looked like an equals sign. She held it proudly for Joe and Gordon to see but they didn’t seem impressed. They seemed to have expected as much from her.

Joe took the key from Caitlin and tried to fit it into the lock. But his hands shook from the cold and nerves, and he kept missing the hole.

“Reminds me of the night I lost my virginity,” said Gordon.

Joe gave him what looked like a disapproving grimace but Caitlin was quite sure his frown expressed shyness. When she loved somebody she made up reasons for them.

There was a high, raw noise. They all turned, alarmed. Blue jays. Five of them, squawking over husks.

Joe got the door open. The darkness of the house was waiting for them, ever so patiently.

It was not much warmer inside and the foyer smelled of cleaning solvent and disinfectant. They stood before the beginnings of an elaborately curved staircase, and on either side were closed French doors leading to dark, wooden-beamed rooms.

“Oh, look,” said Caitlin, pointing up.

Joe took a flashlight out of his overcoat and pointed it at the ceiling. There was a map of the stars painted on, with the stars of the constellations connected.

“Hitler believes in astrology,” Joe said. “Astrology, mythology, bonfires, mass arrests. An interesting mixture.”

“I’ll bet you Frank de Cisto did it,” said Caitlin. An image of de Cisto presented itself to Caitlin—a man on a motorcycle wearing dark-tinted goggles. He had been the muralist of choice for the better households. He had painted an arbor in the foyer of one of the Vanderbilt cottages, a view of the Parthenon for the Delanos, and the Flemings had asked him for a scene of New York Harbor.

At the foot of the staircase was a small mahogany table upon which lay a neatly folded newspaper. Caitlin picked it up but Joe took it from her. It was the Deutsche Weckruf und Beobachter, in German but printed locally.

“Well, well, well,” said Joe, with the pleasure of a boy who has found a nest of snakes beneath a rock. “The good old German Awakener and Observer.” He opened it with a flourish and showed it to Caitlin.

Wedged between long columns of German text were advertisements in English, boxed off and strangely innocent, like uncomprehending children at a funeral. The ads were for Windsor Coal and Lumber, the New Harmony Restaurant, Sunnyside Duck Farm, Rankin’s Pond Rowboat Rentals. Caitlin felt queasy, but she would not say that she knew every business that had placed an ad in the paper.

“I would say that amongst the locals the goals of the Bund are not exactly reprehensible,” Joe said.

They were whispering.

Joe turned the pages of the paper. They sounded like fire in the stillness of the house. “Here’s something about Grosser Filmabend,”Joe said. “Translation—Big Film Night.” He read rapidly in German to himself.

Caitlin could feel his mind working. She liked the expression of his face when he concentrated: his eyes seemed to darken, his lips pursed with solemnity, and the overall effect was one that combined selflessness with virtuosity, like the expression of a great violinist.

“OK,” said Joe, “listen to this shit. ‘It was with hearts full of pride that we watched the great German martyr Horst Wessel, who died by the hands of a Jew while fighting the Communists of 1930.’I presume she means in 1930.”

“Who’s the writer?” asked Gordon.

“Some living doll named Henrietta Smith.”

Caitlin had that feeling you get when you drop a dish.

Joe continued to read, now in a high, absurdly proper, sentimental voice. “ ‘Who of us will ever forget the pictures of his saddened family, his brave brother in the SA—’ ”

“Jesus,” said Gordon. “Let’s find her.” He glanced at Caitlin; he seemed to sense she knew Miss Smith.

“ ‘This is a film reported to be Herr Goebbels’s personal favorite and it is no wonder,’ ” Joe continued. “ ‘It is also a film which the anti-Aryan forces in Hollywood have sought to suppress, and those of us who braved the bad weather last week to attend Big Film Night now know why.’ ”

He put the paper down and grinned at Caitlin. Their friendship had begun with his constantly proving to her that people and life itself were far worse than she realized, and he kept at it. Yet most of his life had been much more comfortable than Caitlin’s. What gave him the right to treat her as if she were naive? Even his bravery was hitched to inchoate notions of career—one day soon he would reveal to America what he had learned about the groups he had penetrated.

“I know Henrietta Smith,” Caitlin forced herself to say. “She taught me in high school.”

“And just what did she teach you?” asked Joe.

“Fascism 101,” said Gordon.

“English,” said Caitlin. And she let it go at that. She didn’t tell them it was Miss Smith who urged Caitlin to go to college, who had brought her brochures from nearby schools where the tuition wasn’t overwhelmingly high, who had urged her to take summer jobs, apply for scholarships, and do anything but waste the talent for learning that Miss Smith saw in Caitlin. She was a bosomy woman, with curly auburn hair and round, surprised eyes. Her voice was a wavering contralto, and when she turned her back on the class they waved their arms, made faces. It used to break Caitlin’s heart. Miss Smith hadn’t seemed as if she hated anyone. Her scorn was saved for split infinitives, illegible handwriting, and, in some general way, the twentieth century.

“Are you all right?” Joe asked Caitlin. He touched her arm, furrowed his silky eyebrows.

She put her hand on her stomach. She felt within her a hollow, churning dankness. Nerves? It was a pressure within, starting at her navel, radiating out toward her hips, sending a hard, corroded taste of itself up to the back of her throat.

“I don’t feel well,” Caitlin said.

Gordon was shining his flashlight through the french doors into the cavernous meeting room to the left. The long tables were pushed together and the chairs were stacked on top of them. Hanging from one of the exposed oak beams was a large full-color portrait of Hitler.

“What a face,” said Gordon.

“A headwaiter in a place where you’d never want to eat,” said Joe.

“And the pictures along the walls,” Gordon said. He shone the beam at a line of eight-by-ten framed photographs: here and there, from beneath the burst of reflection on the glass, showed the face of a jowly man, a formally dressed crowd, someone coming smartly down a ski slope.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Joe murmured to Caitlin.

“I’m OK,” said Caitlin. “I just need to go to the bathroom, if you must know the awful truth.”

Joe blushed. “Then go,” he said.

“Gordon,” said Caitlin, “can I use the flashlight?”

Gordon clicked it off and handed it to her. In the sudden darkness she could not see their faces and it was like dying.

Through the window, however, she saw the field of snow, blue in the twilight, and along the horizon a long flaming crack of orange, over which a rubble of clouds lay like a field of broken stones. The darkness was moving in, faster and faster, like an old workhorse hurrying those last hundred yards back to the barn.

She turned the flashlight on again. It extended a long silver arm of light up the stairs, and she followed it, leaving the men in the darkness below.

On the wall leading up the stairs were framed photographs, and purely on impulse Caitlin anointed each of them with the soft, fuzzy beam of light. There were more pictures of skiers, a photo of a sleek wolverine of a man in a tuxedo exhorting an audience, a portrait of a smiling woman with marceled hair and a diamond necklace, a jowly, small-town-looking man wearing one of those little caps worn by boy scouts and soda jerks.

And then a familiar face. Congressman Stowe sitting at his desk in Washington, the same desk upon which Caitlin had once placed the morning mail, the day’s typing, cups of coffee. He was dressed in a suit and a dignified striped tie, and for the purposes of this portrait the desk was empty, save for a bright wedge of sunlight. Stowe was smiling; his little cheeks looked as hard as crab apples. The bottom of the picture was signed with a flourish—“Best regards from the Hon. Elias J. Stowe, U.S. Congressman, New York”—as if it had been sent to a fan, some earnest boy who would put it between pictures of Lou Gehrig and Dizzy Dean.

She experienced a rush of rhapsodic malice, glad that Stowe was dead, forgetting for a moment there had been others on the plane when it had skidded across that Virginia pasture, scorching the earth, and that next to Stowe, screaming as he screamed, surrendering her mortal soul as his was snatched, was her friend Betty Sinclair, whom Caitlin had cherished and loved, and whose death was for Caitlin the true beginning of human knowledge, which is sorrow.

The bathroom was just to the right of the top of the steps. It was the only door that was open in a line of ten rooms on either side of a narrow corridor. The flashlight revealed the checkerboard black-and-white tiles, the claws of a tub. And then she moved the beam across the smooth cryptic surfaces of all those closed doors; they were painted white, or pale green, or perhaps sky blue—impossible to say in that light.

The bathroom was particularly cold. The copper towel racks were empty. Opposite the toilet was a framed painting of two little boys in short pants urinating into a pond while a family of mallards looked on. Caitlin went to the iced-over window and pressed her hand against it until some of the frost melted away and she could see outside. The snow was iron gray; the last of the sunset was being sucked into the night like a strand of spaghetti. She stood there until her handprint filled with ice again and the world outside disappeared.

But it was only after her skirt was hiked, only after her skin adjusted to the icy toilet seat, the still, dark air, with its faint scent of oatmeal soap, only then with the pressure within her beginning to subside and a smile of true human relief spreading over her face that she processed what she had seen in the corridor. Beneath the fifth door to the right, between the bottom of the door and the floor, was a narrow ribbon of pale light—not really bright enough to be immediately noticeable, but brilliant now in memory, like a gold coin on a field of dark velvet.

Caitlin got up to flush the toilet. She pulled down on the chain but the only sound was a hollow metallic rattle—the tank was empty, the pipes had long been drained. Her urine lay in a little golden puddle at the bottom of a commode that was as steep as a shot glass.

Caitlin’s heart beat swiftly, shallowly. She pictured that light coming from beneath the door and she reread the memory, frantically, doubting it and finding new things in it at the same time—the light suddenly appearing, as if a lamp were being switched on, a moving darkness fluttering across that four-foot line of light, evidence of someone pacing back and forth.

She stood there wondering and then it wasn’t necessary to wonder at all because she heard footsteps—feeble, shuffling. And then a low phlegmy moan, the despairing song of a man who believes himself to be utterly alone.

She reached for the door, as if there were still time to flee. And the sufferer, who himself was an inflictor of suffering, had his hand on the door handle, too, and as Caitlin turned it to the left he was turning it to her right and they stymied each other mid-arc.

Fear went off in her like a flashbulb, illuminating an internal structure of rigid nerves.

She let go of the door, stepped back. She looked around the room for something with which to defend herself. There was a wooden cross, the size of a hammer, on the wall, and Caitlin reached for it. But it was fastened tightly to the clammy plaster. Her cold fingers ached from the effort of trying to wrench the cross free. She brought her hand to her mouth, blew on it. And as she did so the door slowly opened.

It was John Coleman, his brow wrinkled with confusion, his lips pursed, his head jutting forward. Caitlin was shining the flashlight directly into his face and he slowly, with every evidence of confusion, brought his hand up to shield his eyes. In his other hand he carried a candle in a porcelain candlestick; the wick was off center and a huge tumor of wax had congealed on one side of the slim, tapered candle.

“Who is it?” he said. His voice was webbed and unstable. Not at all the piercing drone Caitlin remembered from her first meeting with him, at lunch in Washington with Stowe and Betty Sinclair. Caitlin was still quite new to Washington that afternoon and she still could remember Coleman’s unashamedly appraising stare, as he blatantly judged if she was someone who could be trusted, and then if she was someone who needed to be taken seriously. He had been all sharp angles and immense sensitivity that day in his dark blue suit and long dark hair, parted up the middle, as if he were an emissary from a previous, finer era.

But now his hair was not pomaded, it was disheveled, and his eyes, which had once seemed to register impressions with the cold crunch of an adding machine, were watery and timid. The hand he used to shield his eyes from the flashlight held a handkerchief, and just as it had been when Caitlin had seen Coleman in town, the handkerchief was pink and brown from the blood he was apparently coughing up.

“Who is it?” Coleman said. “What are you doing here?”

Strange then to think of a man who served Adolf Hitler, who had sabotaged factories, and had, if Joe was to be believed, killed Congressman Stowe and Betty Sinclair, as a lonely soul in his thirties, a man with a frail constitution and no one to look after him, someone pathetic, who convalesced like an animal in a cold, deserted house.

He thrust the candle toward Caitlin, hoping to see her face. If he was frightened, he seemed now to be recovering his bravery.

She stepped back. She thought she could hit him with her flashlight and she arced it back. The light moved, swinging the room with it.

“I am a sick man. How dare you intrude on me.”

“Get away from me,” she said, horrified at the note of sheer pleading in her voice.

Her fear gave Coleman confidence. He moved quickly toward her now. His breath churned in his chest like the blades of a flour sifter. He dropped the candlestick. It shattered on the cold tiles, and the candle, severed from its waxy tumor, rolled toward the sink; the room shuddered and jerked, drawings in a flip book.

She wanted to call for help but she didn’t want to show Coleman any more of her fear than she already had. She hit him with the flashlight. The blow shook the batteries, extinguished the bulb. The candle went out and they were in darkness. She raised the flashlight to strike him again but, sensing her movements, he grabbed her wrist hard. She tried to wrest herself free, but his grip was powerful. It seemed as if he could hold two or three of her.

He held her close to him. She felt his breath, reptile cool but ripe with the rot of his disease—he smelled like fermenting apricots, and curled within that sick sweetness was a scent of something fecal. “You have come here to my aid?” he asked her and then he repeated the question in German, this time filling his voice with mockery and then with malice. His fingers were steely, uncompromising.

Caitlin called out Joe’s name. She shouted it, with the consonant barely pronounced and the vowel a long and frightened wail.

“So you’re not alone,” Coleman said. He gripped her all the tighter, with a desire now not only to keep her but to hurt her. Yet his voice sounded less masterful. He was turning away from her a little, wondering what would happen next.

They heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Where are you?” It was Gordon.

“In here!” she called.

Coleman slapped her across the face, incredibly hard. It made her cry out, and then he shoved her back. Caitlin slipped on the tiles, fell against the tub. She hit it in stages, first her shoulders, then her neck, finally the back of her head. She tasted blood on her lip where her mouth had snapped shut.

A moment later she could vaguely see Gordon’s massive silhouette in the doorway.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“It was Coleman,” she said, pointing to the left.

“Where’s the flashlight?”

Caitlin, still sitting, felt along the tiles and found it. Gordon was at her side, twenty degrees warmer than the room. He took the flashlight from her, whacked it against his large, hard palm a couple of times and the bulb lit again. He shined the light in Caitlin’s face.

“Go on, he’s getting away,” she said.

Caitlin slowly made her way out of the bathroom, into the corridor, and, holding on to the banister, down the staircase. She could hear Gordon charging from room to room, throwing doors open, heedless of any danger. “Come on out, you son of a bitch!” he shouted into one empty room, and “I see you, shit face!” he shouted into another.

When she made it to the bottom of the stairs, Joe was waiting in the darkness, more or less hidden in a dark corner beneath the steps.

“Joe?” she said, only able to see his faint outline, a certain residual spark in the whites of his eyes.

“Shhh,” he whispered. “Come here.”

She walked toward him, hitting with her hip the table where they had found the German Awakener and Observer.

“Was it him? Was it Coleman?” Joe asked her.

“Yes,” she whispered. Upstairs, the noise of Gordon’s slamming the doors grew more distant, fainter.

“I’m sorry, Caitlin,” Joe whispered, and the words, and the way he said them, held some rare perfume of intimacy that even in the frightful frigid darkness of that house struck her as an exaltation. “I wanted to help, but if he saw me …”

“I know, I know. It’s OK, really it is.”

“It’s just that if he saw me then I’d lose all my effectiveness.”

“I wouldn’t want that, Joe.”

“I wanted to go up there. I mean especially when I thought you might be in danger.”

“I was only scared.”

He was silent for a few moments. Caitlin stood close to him, yet in some strange way his body did not acknowledge her presence. It was not as though he avoided her, stepped away; it was just a failure to register. And then at last he said, “Thank you.”

Gordon came pounding down the stairs, the beam of the flashlight sweeping in front of him.

“I can’t find him. Anywhere. There’s probably rooms in this place … tunnels, I don’t know.”

“We’d better get out of here,” said Joe.

“Then he’s still in this house,” Caitlin said.

“We’ll lock the place up and set it on fire,” said Gordon. He shined the light on their faces, saw the shock. “I’m from Chicago,” he said, by way of explanation.

Yet Caitlin and Joe had no arguments against burning Coleman alive. He had killed many and would kill more.

“Are you serious?” Caitlin asked. “You’d really do that?”

“What do you mean, would I do that?” said Gordon.

“We’ll all do it,” said Joe. “He deserves to die. He must die. If we don’t do it then we’ll be murdering the next people the Germans send him out to kill.”

Caitlin felt a tumult of anticipation in her stomach. She knew it was a trivial comparison but it reminded her of how she felt only once before in her life: in Washington when Betty Sinclair clicked cocktail glasses with her and then kissed her full on the mouth.

In the corner where Joe had retreated there was a door, locked with a dead bolt. Gordon asked Joe to move and he opened the door and there was a steep wooden staircase going down to what was surely the cellar.

“Keep an eye out for him,” Gordon instructed, the brusqueness of his voice announcing the fact that he felt himself in control now. He disappeared down the stairs. A cold humid air rose from the cellar.

“They’ll find our footprints in the snow,” Caitlin said to Joe.

“They won’t be able to make anything out of it. Anyhow, they’ll find three sets. So they’d be looking for three people who work together and Gordon and I will be out of here. They’ll never figure it out.”

“Have you ever done this before, Joe? Or anything like it?”

“I know what you’re thinking. But it’s our morals and theirs, don’t you understand? A gun has no morality. In the hands of a fascist it’s evil, in the hands of a freedom fighter it’s good.”

“Well, I always thought it was hard for anyone to know for sure what they were.”

“I sure as hell know I’m not a fascist,” said Joe.

The face of Gordon’s flashlight appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “I found what we need,” he called up in a passionate whisper. He came quickly up the stairs, holding an oblong gasoline can. When he was next to Caitlin and Joe he shook the can back and forth. A frothy slosh of fuel echoed inside of it.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They made their way to the door, leaving the nearly unanimous darkness of the house. The moon had risen and cast its pale light on the snowy field. Gordon shook the gasoline onto the porch, along the outer windowsills. Joe found the key above the door frame and locked the door and then replaced the key.

Caitlin noticed the cross-country skis. They were no longer propped against the house but were strewn over the porch.

“We better take the can along with us,” said Gordon.

“We’ll wait right here until he comes running out,” said Joe.

“But you just locked the door,” said Caitlin. “He couldn’t get out if he tried.”

He glanced at her. There seemed to be scorn in his eyes. But he retrieved the key and unlocked the door. “There,” he said. “Feel better?”

Gordon took a box of matches out of his coat pocket. He held them up. “Who would like to do the honors?”

“I will,” said Joe, grabbing the matches. Caitlin was certain he was making himself hard because he hadn’t run up the stairs when she had cried for help.

He struck the match so violently it snapped in two. “Step back,” he said to Caitlin and Gordon, as if everything were going according to plan.

They stood on the edge of the porch and Joe struck another match and threw it at the spot Gordon had soaked with gasoline. It burst into flames with the startled, hollow sound of a man who’s had the wind knocked out of him. A chaotic bloom of bright orange. They jumped off the porch and watched. The flames raced across the porch, as if to get a closer look at the ones who had given them life, and then they seemed to turn and head back toward the house.

Caitlin stepped further back to see the windows on the second floor, to see if Coleman’s face would appear, or the shadow of his racing form as he frantically tried to rescue himself. She saw nothing.

She stumbled over a ridge in the snow and looked down. There were ski tracks.

“Joe!” she called out. “Gordon. He’s already gone. He took a pair of skis and just—” She moved her hand in a smooth arc to describe an escape.

They didn’t answer. She was pointing now to the ski tracks and they came to see for themselves.

“There must be another way out,” she said. “All these old houses are full of secret passages.” Her voice sounded high, excited; she forced herself to calm down.

The flames that had so rapidly crawled up the side of the house were now suddenly losing intensity, growing smaller. It seemed that not even that would work out.

Joe shook his head. He squeezed his hands together and seemed to want to appear distraught, but there was something in his eyes that Caitlin recognized: a shimmer of sheer relief. It was not really in him to kill a man, or even a monster.

Gordon took pictures of the burning house that was no longer a burning house.

Caitlin turned away, first toward the moonlight and then toward a distant rise in the snowy field. And there she saw a figure, perhaps three hundred yards away, a man on skis. He seemed to be looking at them, but when she stepped forward to get a better view of him, he quickly turned, stuck his poles into the snow, and with a heave propelled himself forward, up over the rise, down again, and out of sight.

FEBRUARY 3, 1952

Caitlin was sitting in the living room-dining room-bedroom of her apartment on Barrow Street, New York City. It was snowing outside; the city was quiet, even beautiful. Now and then the sun would appear, and the ground, the automobile windshields, and the windows of all the apartment houses would vibrate with light.

She was being interviewed by two FBI agents, one of them with a pocked, vaguely Mexican-looking face, but who spoke with no accent, and the other a tall redhead with a small Band-Aid on his massive chin—a chin as blunt as a knee.

She was not in grave trouble herself; it was all about other people. She had been working in an organization that had helped refugees come to this country, and now some of the refugees and anyone who had helped them were under suspicion. Some of them were Communists, some of them were not anti-Communist enough for this particular era.

Caitlin was, in her own estimation, handling the two agents beautifully. She was wearing a woolen skirt, a sweater, nylon hosiery, black pumps. She gave every appearance of someone who was in a hurry to get to work, though the truth was that the baby sitter had been stranded in the Bronx by the snowstorm and Caitlin was going to take this day off anyhow, to be with her little boy. She was acting vague, formal, slow; she was boring them to death, making them restless. She could remember no one, nothing. She pretended to be the sort of person to whom specifics are an anathema.

Then the red-headed agent pulled one in from left field. All of the questions had to that point been about the Combined Emergency European Relief Committee, but then he asked, quite casually on the surface, but with a glance at his partner, “How about Gordon Jaffrey. Ever see much of him?”

“Who?” asked Caitlin. She smiled when she felt the slightest fear and that usually seemed to work.

“Gordon Jaffrey, the photographer. He used to be quite a good friend of yours.”

“He was?” asked Caitlin, indicating confusion, and a willingness to be let in on an absurd joke.

“It would be really a shame if you held the truth back from us,” said the Mexican-looking agent.

“Shame?” said Caitlin. “I used to feel shame all the time, now I never do, practically never.”

And that was exactly when the kid waddled in. He was four years old but not terribly coordinated. Poor thing, he already wore eyeglasses. He had been going through his mother’s dresser drawers and found, hidden away in one of those accordion files made of brown cardboard, a cache of photographs. Gordon’s photographs, taken at Camp Sunrise, exactly eleven years ago. The Fee-bees never guessed but the pictures were all there, right under their noses—the empty flagpoles, the zodiac ceiling, the last of that day’s sunlight making a Bethlehem-star pattern in the tangle of empty branches.

“Mama,” the child said, holding the pictures before him, his belly showing beneath the hem of the blue flannel shirt he had outgrown, the sunlight flashing in his glasses, his roseate mouth in its characteristic querulous pucker. “Can I have these pictures to keep?”