“Everyone guessed they’d had an affair when Nathan was in Bratislava. If Magda had asked me before making that dramatic escape out of Belgrade and so on, if she really did escape and wasn’t just planted on us by the Russians, I would have told her he wasn’t the kind of man who liked scandal. What he did on his trips never came home with him, at least not until she arrived.” She stood and said brusquely, “I’m cold. We’ll go into the house.”

I was cold, too. I was glad to follow her inside to the kitchen, where she put on a kettle for tea and then disappeared up the stairs. The water came to a boil. I turned it off. I don’t like tea—she could fix her own when she returned.

The kitchen overlooked the back garden, where birds were fighting over space at the two feeders Perec had set up. Birds covered the kitchen, too, painted on the stripes in the wallpaper around the breakfast nook, cut out of wood on the clock above the sink, even in the shape of the napkin and spoon holders.

Perec was gone long enough that I wondered if she was on the phone with Kiel. However, she finally returned, her hair damp from the shower, fresh makeup covering any remaining ravages of her weeping.

I seated myself in the breakfast alcove. “Did Magda come here for Kiel or because she was fleeing Communism—or both?”

Perec made herself a mug of tea and sat across from me. “With her you could never be sure about anything. She claimed she came here for freedom, but I think she wanted to live in the West, she wanted the kind of life you can live here if you have money and status. The army was glad she was here, I can tell you that much.”

“Because she brought her special knowledge of biological weapons with her?”

Perec scowled. It annoyed her when I knew something she thought belonged to her as an insider. I wanted her annoyed—it would make her likely to tell me more.

“The army was funding Dr. Kiel’s research,” I prodded. “When the big mistake happened—when the plague bacillus was switched with Y. enterocolitica—he had to go to Washington to explain what had gone wrong. That was because people at the missile silo died. Including Lucinda Ferring.”

I’d practiced saying “enterocolitica” in the car driving over and was pleased I could bring it out so fluently.