“So?” Bodine’s laughing. “Maybe I was a Melvin Purvis Junior G-Man.”

“A what?”

“For Post Toasties.”

“For whom?” The German actually thinks Post Toasties is the name of some American Führer, looking vaguely like Tom Mix or some other such longlip bridlejaw cowboy.

The last black butler opens the last door to the outside, and escape. Escape tonight. “Pimple pie with filth frosting, gentlemen,” he nods. And just at the other side of dawning, you can see a smile.

□□□□□□□

In her pack, Geli Tripping brings along a few of Tchitcherine’s toenail clippings, a graying hair, a piece of bedsheet with a trace of his sperm, all tied in a white silk kerchief, next to a bit of Adam and Eve root and a loaf of bread baked from wheat she has rolled naked in and ground against the sun. She has left off tending her herd of toads on the witches’ hillsides, and has passed her white wand to another apprentice. She is off to find her gallant Attila. Now there are a good few hundred of these young women in the Zone who’re smitten with love for Tchitcherine, all of them sharp as foxes, but none quite as stubborn as Geli—and none are witches.

At noon she comes to a farmhouse with a floor of blue and white tiles in the kitchen, elaborate old china plates hung like pictures, and a rocking-chair. “Do you have a photo of him?” the old woman handing her a tin army plate with the remains of her morning’s Bauernfrühstuck. “I can give you a spell.”

“Sometimes I can call up his face in a cup of tea. But the herbs have to be gathered carefully. I’m not that good at it yet.”

“But you’re in love. Technique is just a substitute for when you get older.”

“Why not stay in love always?”

The two women watch each other across the sunny kitchen. Cabinets with glass panes shine from the walls. Bees buzz outside the windows. Geli goes and pumps water from the well, and they brew some strawberry-leaf tea. But Tchitcherine’s face doesn’t appear.

The night the blacks started off on their great trek, Nordhausen felt like a city in a myth, under the threat of some special destruction—en-gulfment by a crystal lake, lava from the sky… for an evening, the sense of preservation there was lost. The blacks, like the rockets in the Mittelwerke, had given Nordhausen continuity. Now the blacks are gone: Geli knows they are on collision course with Tchitcherine. She doesn’t want duels. Let the university boys duel. She wants her graying steel barbarian alive. She can’t bear to think that she may already have touched him, felt his scarred and historied hands, for the last time.