They sit listening to gusts of rain that’s nearly sleet. Winter gathers, breathes, deepens. A roulette ball goes rattling, somewhere back in another room. She’s running. Why? Has he come too close again? He tries to remember if she always needed to talk this way, in draw-shots, rebounding first before she could touch him. Fine time to start asking. He’s counter-conspiring in the dark, jimmying doors at random, no telling what’ll come out… .

Dark basalt pushes up out of the sea. A vaporous scrim hangs across the headland and its châteaux, turning it all to a grainy antique postcard. He touches her hand, moves his fingers up her bare arm, reaching… .

“Hm?”

“Come on upstairs,” sez Slothrop.

She may have hesitated, but so briefly that he didn’t notice: “What have we been talking about all this time?”

“That A4 rocket.”

She looks at him for a long time. At first he thinks she’s about to laugh at him. Then it looks like she’ll cry. He doesn’t understand. “Oh, Slothrop. No. You don’t want me. What they’re after may, but you don’t. No more than A4 wants London. But I don’t think they know… about other selves… yours or the Rocket’s… no. No more than you do. If you can’t understand it now, at least remember. That’s all I can do for you.”

They go back up to her room again: cock, cunt, the Monday rain at the windows… . Slothrop spends the rest of the morning and early afternoon studying Professors Schiller on regenerative cooling, Wagner on combustion equations, Pauer and Beck on exhaust gases and burning efficiency. And a pornography of blueprints. At noon the rain stops. Katje is off on chores of her own. Slothrop passes a few hours downstairs in the bar, waiters who catch his eye smiling, holding up bottles of champagne, wiggling them invitingly—“No, merci, non… .” He’s trying to memorize the organization charts at that Peenemünde.

As light begins to spill from the overcast sky, he and Katje are out taking a walk, an end-of-the-day stroll along the esplanade. Her hand is gloveless and icy in his, her narrow black coat making her taller, her long silences helping to thin her for him nearly to fog… . They stop, lean against a railing, he watching the midwinter sea, she the blind and chilly Casino poised behind them. Colorless clouds slide by, endlessly, in the sky.

“I was thinking of the time I came in on you. That afternoon.” He can’t quite bring himself to get specific out loud, but she knows he means the Himmler-Spielsaal.

She has looked around sharply. “So was I.”

Their breaths are torn into phantoms out to sea. She has her hair combed high today in a pompadour, her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings, darkened, eyes rimmed in black, only the outboard few lashes missed and left blonde. Cloudlight comes slanting down across her face, taking away color, leaving little more than a formal snapshot, the kind that might appear on a passport… .