“Flirt if you want,” Enzian now just as smooth as that Cary Grant, “but expect to be taken seriously.” Oh, ho. Here’s whatcha came for, folks.

Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German archives which may, however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her, really. He must have learned a thousand masks (as the City will continue to mask itself against invasions we often do not see, whose outcomes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the warehouse districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds grow thick), and this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them.

“I don’t know what to do.” She gets up in a long, long shrug and begins to stalk gracefully in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who thinks everyone is staring at her. Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms often touch.

“You don’t have to come into this any further than locating Slothrop,” he finally gets around to telling her. “All you have to do is tag along with us, and wait till he shows up again. Why bother yourself with the rest?”

“Because I feel,” her voice, perhaps by design, very small, “that ‘the rest’ is exactly what I ought to be doing. I don’t want to get away with some shallow win. I don’t just want to—I don’t know, pay him back for the octopus, or something. Don’t I have to know why he’s out here, what I did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn’t I be going all the way in?”

Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her. That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how terrible that must be… . So, she needs the whip. She raises her ass not in surrender, but in despair—like your fears of impotence, and mine: can it still… will it fail… . But of true submission, of letting go the self and passing into the All, there is nothing, not with Katje. She is not the victim I would have chosen to end this with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be another. Perhaps I dream… . I am not here, am I, to devote myself to her fantasies!

“You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it for yourself, still you’re always going to come through. You’re free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it’s given as a reward. I won’t ask for what. I’m sorry, but you seem really not to know. That’s why your story is saddest of all.”

“Reward—” she’s getting mad. “It’s a life-sentence. If you call that a reward, then what are you calling me?”

“Nothing political.”

“You black bastard.”

“Exactly.” He has allowed her to speak the truth. A clock chimes in the stone corner. “We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just before the end. You don’t have to—”