“Lillian,” he said, chest so tight he wondered if he oughtn’t to have accepted the amyl nitrate his last doctor had suggested. “What have you done?”

“It was Frye,” she said, too quickly. Then, “No, I mean … we were talking and I … it just came out.”

He realized he had stopped breathing, and sucked in air through a dry mouth, triggering a coughing fit.

“You,” he gasped, in between hacking. “You told Emmeline Frye … that Cyril—”

“It’s so much worse than that,” she said, and now she really was laughing. “You haven’t the smallest conception. Aristide, I told her she needed a hook, something to appeal to people’s emotions. In the very same conversation. And she took my rotten advice, and my brother. I didn’t even sell him, Aristide. I gave him away for free.”

Inured as he was to using people as leverage and currency, this should not have struck Aristide so deeply, in such a vulnerable place. Yet he found himself standing, shouting into the telephone, “He isn’t a commodity, Lillian. He’s worth more than whatever you were hoping you would get!”

And she was talking over him, too strident to be shrill, “You can’t have it both ways! You have no idea what I’m going through right now, and if you did you’d—”

The door opened, revealing Daoud draped in a thick muffler and chesterfield, briefcase in one gloved hand and snow melting on his beard. He cocked his head, silently inquiring.

Aristide caught the rest of his rage behind clenched teeth and said, “What exactly did you ring me up for? Just to tear me tips to tail?”

He heard Lillian gather herself similarly, heard the restraint in her voice when she said, “A favor.”

“Oh? What kind?”

“Talk to him.”

Aristide’s bark of laughter made Daoud start, mussing the careful pile of folders he had taken from his briefcase and set at Aristide’s elbow. He raised his eyebrows, but Aristide shook his head. “What would I say?”

“Tell him he’ll be hanged,” she said. “What he did was wrong, but to die for it? He was cornered and coerced. He can’t shoulder the blame for everything that happened after. And what good will it do to let himself be executed? It isn’t as if his death will bring back the old federation.”

It had the rhythm of a litany. “You’ve told him this already. It won’t do any good for him to hear it from me.”

“Then tell him whatever you like. Whatever you think he’ll hear. He might listen to you.”

“I think,” said Aristide, forceful and precise as a nail driven home, “you have greatly misconstrued my relationship with your brother. Good day.”

When he rang off, the force of the receiver into the cradle made the ringer jangle.

“Lillian?” said Daoud.

In answer, Aristide closed his eyes and ground his teeth.

“How is she?”