Bodine watches him leave, unaware of what’s inside that valise. Albert Krypton has drunken himself unconscious. Shirley comes wandering in, bright-eyed and restless, wearing a black garter belt and stockings. “Hmm,” she sez, with a certain look.

“Hmm,” sez Seaman Bodine.

“And anyway, it was only ten cents at the Battle of the Bulge.”

□□□□□□□

So: he has traced Weissmann’s battery from Holland, across the salt marshes and lupine and bones of cows, to find this. Lucky he’s not superstitious. He’d be taking it for a prophetic vision. There is of course a perfectly rational explanation, but Tchitcherine has never read Martín Fierro.

He watches from his temporary command post in a copse of junipers on a low hill. Through the binoculars he sees two men, one white, one black, holding guitars. Townspeople are gathered in a circle, but these Tchitcherine can crop out, leaving in his elliptical field a scene with the same structure as the male-female singing contest in the middle of a flat grassland in Central Asia well over a decade ago—a coming-together of opposites that signaled then his own approach to the Kirghiz Light. What does it signal this time?

Over his head, the sky is streaked and hard as marble. He knows. Weissmann installed the S-Gerät and fired the 00000 somewhere close by. Enzian can’t be far behind. It will be here.

But he has to wait. Once that would have been unbearable. But since Major Marvy dropped out of sight, Tchitcherine has been a little more cautious. Marvy was a key man. There is a counterforce in the Zone. Who was the Soviet intelligence man who showed up just before the fiasco in the clearing? Who tipped the Schwarzkommando off to the raid? Who got rid of Marvy?

He’s been trying hard not to believe too much in the Rocket-cartel. Since his illumination that night, Marvy drunk, Bloody Chiclitz declaiming on the virtues of Herbert Hoover, Tchitcherine has been watching for evidence. Gerhardt von Göll, with his corporate octopus wrapping every last negotiable item in the Zone, must be in it, consciously or otherwise. Tchitcherine last week was on the point of flying back to Moscow. He’d seen Mravenko, one of the VIAM people, briefly in Berlin. They met in the Tiergarten, two officers ostensibly strolling in the sun. Work crews shoveled cold patch into holes in the pavement, banging it flat with shovels. Bicycle riders ratcheted by, skeleton-functional as their machines. Small clusters of civilians and military were back under the trees, sitting on fallen trunks or lorry wheels, stirring through bags and valises, dealing. “You’re in trouble,” Mravenko said.