Tables and chairs have been set out under orange-and-red-stripe awnings on the fantail. Slothrop and Morituri have got the place almost to themselves, except for some girls in two-piece swimsuits out to catch some sun before it goes away. Cumulonimbus are building up dead ahead. You can hear thunder in the distance. The air is coming awake.

A steward brings coffee, cream, porridge and fresh oranges. Slothrop looks at the porridge, doubtful. “I’ll take it,” Ensign Morituri grabbing the bowl.

“Oh, sure.” Slothrop notices now how this Nip also has this wide handle-bar mustache. “Aha, aha. I’m hep to you. A porridge fan! Shameful. A latent Anglophile—yeah, you’re blushing.” Pointing and hollering ha, ha, ha.

“You’ve found me out. Yes, yes. I’ve been on the wrong side for six years.”

“Ever try to get away?”

“And find out what you people are really like? Oh, my golly. What if phile changes then to phobe? Where would I be?” He giggles, spits an orange pit over the side. Seems he put in a few weeks’ training on that Formosa, in Kamikaze school, but they washed him out. No one ever told him why, exactly. Something to do with his attitude. “I just didn’t have a good attitude,” he sighs. “So they sent me back here again, by way of Russia and Switzerland. This time with the Propaganda Ministry.” He would sit most of the day watching Allied footage for what could be pulled and worked into newsreels to make the Axis look good and the other side look bad. “All I know about Great Britain

comes from that raw material.”

“Looks like German movies have warped other outlooks around here too.”

“You mean Margherita’s. Did you know, that’s how we met! A mutual friend at Ufa. I was on holiday at Bad Karma—just before the Polish invasion. The little town where you joined us. It was a spa. I watched you fall in the water. Then you climbed aboard. I also watched Margherita watching you. Please don’t be offended, Slothrop, but it might be better to stay away from her right now.”

“Not at all. I know something creepy is going on.” He tells Morituri about the incident in the Sprudelhof, and Margherita’s flight from the apparition in black.

The Ensign nods, grim, twisting half his mustache up so it points in a saber at one eye. “She didn’t tell you what happened there? Golly, Jack, you had better know….”

ENSIGN MORITURI’S STORY

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still… isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited… and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to….