Chris chastised himself as he walked away. Get hold of yourself! You’re jittery as a worm in a hawk’s nest! Louis Mueller would file away that block-blow among all the other scraps of suspicions about him. That sly look Louis had given him that morning to imply some secret knowledge of Herr Bauer worried him. But that could just be Louis Mueller’s mode of operation in keeping an iron grip on his fiefdom—making the staff think he had something on them in case they got out of line. Chris knew the waiting was getting to him. So far not a ripple had disturbed the relatively calm waters of his daily existence or, at last contact, of Limpet’s, even though code marks on their symbols had confirmed the list of German agents as bona fide. Chris had considered that maybe the Abwehr had simply not gotten around to questioning the general’s fishing guide and son’s tutor, since they were on the tail end of the process of elimination.

Chris would find out this afternoon if Limpet was still safe. He had probably been invited to dinner as well. Wilhelm would have insisted on it. This past Friday, Chris had seen a fishing pole propped against the railing of Limpet’s stable apartment when he’d arrived for his session with the boy, the signal Limpet had suggested when they met by chance at the bus stop on Tuesday.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, while Limpet pretended to scan the traffic, he had spoken out of the side of his mouth. “I’ll leave a fishing rod outside my door on the days you come to tutor. If it’s not there, you’ll know I’ve been taken, so run for your life.”

It was with great relief that Chris had seen the rod parked in plain sight against the landing’s railing. The meeting at the bus stop where Limpet had mentioned his concern over the general’s nonappearance on the riverbank Sunday was the only contact he’d been able to have with his teammate.

Chris had his own cause for concern. It was the general’s practice to show up at least twice a week at the end of his son’s math lessons to judge for himself how the boy was getting along, but he had not appeared. At such times, Wilhelm would show off his knowledge to his father and beam from his praise, and Chris thought the boy had missed his presence this past week. So had Chris, in the odd way a human being might miss a tamed and friendly bear he’d become fond of, even knowing that it could revert to its normal nature and turn on him any second.