That night, when Reston had gone, Logan produced a bottle of champagne of his own. Roederer Cristal—a hundred and forty bucks it had cost him.

Yet, though he’d planned this moment for weeks, it was astonishing how soon it began to feel like an anticlimax.

“Is there something wrong?” he asked Sabrina as they sipped their second glass. But, quietly exasperated, within he phrased it differently. What the hell’s wrong now?

“I am just a little tired.”

He slipped his arm around her. “Get used to it. The real work hasn’t even started yet.”

“This Shein,” she said, with a forced smile, “he has the morals of a cabbage. But he is not dull.”

“No—anything but that. Get him an organ grinder and a little suit and he’d do handstands in the street.” He paused. “I only wish he’d stop making nasty cracks all the time.”

She looked at him closely. At the beginning his face had struck her merely as conventionally handsome; now she was equally taken by the deepening worry lines—evidence of what she knew to be character. “He doesn’t mean it. It is a sign he likes you.”

“Right. Much more of his friendship and I’ll put a gun to my head.”

For all his seeming self-assurance, Logan was, she’d come to know, deeply vulnerable; the product of an unsettled homelife she couldn’t pretend to understand. She sympathized with this—but it also left her ill at ease. Every bit as committed to career as he was, she’d long been equally disinclined to waste time and energy on complex romantic entanglements. She cared for this guy—more than for anyone in a long time. But increasingly, she couldn’t help thinking he’d been right from the start: this confusion of the personal and professional could be a terrible mistake.

“I’m sorry, Logan,” she said, “this is a time we should be happy.”

“Who says I’m not happy?” He smiled. “Are you kidding? All I’d need to make my life perfect at this moment is a great Havana cigar!”

She laughed, but he knew he hadn’t begun to bridge the distance between them. “Look at it this way, Shein’s just my cross to bear. You’ve got Reston.”

Reston! He, of course, was the crux of the matter. Could she open up to Logan? More than once she’d come close. But always it came down to the same pragmatic question: What kind of havoc would that wreak? What mattered now—all that mattered—was the well-being of the protocol. And for the foreseeable future, that seemed to mean making the best of life with Reston.

“Well,” he suddenly spoke up, brightly enough that if she demurred it would come off as kidding around, “I think it’s time we did some real celebrating around here.” He nodded toward the bedroom.

“Not yet, Logan. This is so nice.”

Still, she was torn. For it was increasingly apparent the awkward personal situation might itself threaten the work. She simply could not trust Reston. Logan did, absolutely. As a result, she now sometimes found herself hesitant to confide in her lover/colleague even on scientific matters.

She reached for the champagne. “If I show you something,” she spoke up suddenly, “can we keep it just for ourselves?”

What now? “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“I’m serious, Logan. An article I found. About Nakano. Nothing so important—but I do not want John Reston involved.”

“Ahh.” Christ, when’s she gonna get off this obsession with Reston? “What the hell, I guess so. John doesn’t care about any of the background stuff anyway. He thinks it’s all pointless.”

“This is a promise?”

“If you want.”

She rose, crossed the room, and retrieved a sheet of paper from her briefcase. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Not much—but it has some new details.”

It was a Xerox copy of a newspaper clipping, dated August 18, 1924, and a mere three paragraphs in length, from the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Studying it, Logan quickly understood it was a sort of social announcement. Dr. Mikio Nakano, associate director of the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the I. G. Farben Company, was to speak the following day at the Frankfurt League of War Wives. His subject: I. G. Farben Wissenschaftler erzielen Fortschritte im Kampf gegen die Krankheiten der Menschheit (Advances made by I. G. Farben scientists against human disease). The item identified the speaker as a native Japanese, formerly an assistant to the great Paul Ehrlich. His age was listed as thirty-four.

“Where did you get this?” asked Logan, looking up.

“I contacted all the important German chemical firms. I asked if they had any information on this man.”

“But I. G. Farben no longer exists.…”

As they both knew, the lesson left by the giant chemical firm about the potential misuses of science was among the most shockingly savage on record: having enthusiastically participated in the program of genocide instituted by the Third Reich—even to the point of operating a slave labor camp within Auschwitz—the company had been dismantled by the Allies immediately after the war, its directors convicted as war criminals.

“No. It came from one of the successor companies, Hoechst. It was in their files, all they had on this man.” She smiled. “I think the Germans do not throw much away.”

“So we were right about this guy—he was with Ehrlich.”

He looked at her. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”

“No, just curious. Same as you. We still know very little of his work.”

But he could see she was her old self; her sense of intense preoccupation replaced, at least for the moment, by an openness appealing beyond description. “You’re also very beautiful,” he added, spontaneously. “I think you’ve definitely earned some more champagne.”

“No, thank you.” She took his hand and kissed it gently. “I think now is the time to do the rest of our celebrating.”