“I still have nightmares about it,” Emil said. “Not as much as I used to, but they come around occasionally. Most of the time, I’ve made peace with it. Gotten right with it. Other times I think there must be a table waiting for me in hell. Or I think about whoever fired the gun that killed Nalle, and I feel Matthew Lauren was guiding his aim.”

Emil exhaled heavily, then hitched his chair up a little and slid his hand onto the back of Kennet’s neck. “All of which means you can tell me what you did, or not tell me. But I forgive you either way.”

“I killed three kids.”

Emil didn’t move a muscle. “Tell me more. All of it, Nyck. Tell me exactly what happened.”

It came spilling out of Kennet like an evil syrup, puddling on the table and dripping off the sides, pooling around their ankles. All the unforgivable things he’d done mixed with the unforgivable things he’d seen. The grenades he threw into the basement of the house at Chenogne. The three dead bodies handed out to him later. Lining up the German troops with Marco Malinda’s insignia in Kennet’s pocket—Marco who had his head blown off, his teeth scattered into the snow, and his tunic pilfered by a Hitler Youth pissant with a cocky grin on his face. How Kennet looked the young German boy in his eyes and saw bravado turn to terror, right before Kennet killed him. How Kennet then put himself, his old self, his best self, into that field and shot him, too.

“You said war doesn’t turn off like a light switch,” he said. “But I walked into Mauthausen and within minutes I was off, Paps. A dead bulb.”

“Tell me.”

Kennet tried, but no words could wrap around the sheer obscenity of that forsaken place and do it justice. He talked about the filth, the corpses, the conditions. The extrajudicial hangings. He told how Anderson’s faith was shaken to the point he couldn’t find a reason to go on. He spoke of a boy named Fisha, robbed of every reason to go on, yet he went on anyway. Smiling.

At last, exhausted, Kennet told about the warehouses full of confiscated wealth. He reached in his pocket and put the gold tooth by Emil’s plate.