Dimka was bewildered. Were they talking about getting married? Desperate for something to say, he tried a joke. “If you’re proposing to me, where’s the bread and salt?” The traditional betrothal ceremony required the exchange of gifts of bread and salt.

To his astonishment, she burst into tears.

His heart melted. He put his arms around her. At first she resisted, but after a moment she allowed herself to be hugged. Her tears wet his shirt. He stroked her hair.

She lifted her head to be kissed. After a minute she broke away. “Will you make love to me, before I get too fat and hideous?” Her robe gaped, and he could see one soft breast, charmingly freckled.

“Yes,” he said recklessly, pushing the picture of Natalya even farther back in his mind.

Nina kissed him again. He grasped her breast: it felt even heavier than before.

She pulled away again. “You didn’t mean what you said at the start, did you?”

“What did I say?”

“That you sure as hell didn’t want to get married.”

He smiled, still holding her breast. “No,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.”

• • •

On Thursday afternoon George Jakes felt a faint optimism.

The pot was boiling, but the lid was still on. The quarantine was in force, the Soviet missile ships had turned back, and there had been no showdown on the high seas. The United States had not invaded Cuba and no one had fired any nuclear weapons. Perhaps World War III could be averted after all.

The feeling lasted just a little longer.

Bobby Kennedy’s aides had a television set in their office at the Justice Department, and at five o’clock they watched a broadcast from United Nations headquarters in New York. The Security Council was in session, twenty chairs around a horseshoe table. Inside the horseshoe sat interpreters wearing headphones. The rest of the room was crowded with aides and other observers, watching the head-to-head confrontation between the two superpowers.

The American ambassador to the UN was Adlai Stevenson, a bald intellectual who had sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 and had been defeated by the more telegenic Jack Kennedy.

The Soviet representative, the colorless Valerian Zorin, was speaking in his usual drone, denying that there were any nuclear weapons in Cuba.

Watching on television in Washington, George said in exasperation: “He’s a goddamn liar! Stevenson should just produce the photographs.”

“That’s what the president told him to do.”

“Then why doesn’t he?”

Wilson shrugged. “Men like Stevenson always think they know best.”

On-screen, Stevenson stood up. “Let me ask one simple question,” he said. “Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no?”

George said: “Attaboy, Adlai,” and there was a murmur of agreement from the men watching TV with him.

In New York, Stevenson looked at Zorin, who was sitting just a few seats away from him around the horseshoe. Zorin continued to write notes on his pad.