But I don’t hit the sack right away. Instead I light a cigarette and dig out the leather diary from its hiding place—I won’t tell you where—and flip to the last few pages. I should explain that this is not some ordinary diary. More like a journal, a bewildering mishmash of jottings and engine diagrams, telephone numbers and map directions, which takes on narrative form only at the end, in which Mallory writes of his ordeal in the Spanish badlands, the anguish of his own injuries and the infinitely worse anguish of watching Irene suffer, while helpless to save her. His devastation that he will never see his daughter again. It’s not something I enjoy reading, and yet since I first discovered the diary, these harrowing words have drawn me back to read them, over and over, until they’ve scored themselves upon my skin. I seem convinced of something essential inside them, some secret to life itself; that if I experience Mallory’s agony often enough, I’ll discover what it is he’s trying to tell me.

I come to the last line:

GM to rescue at last thank God She will live

Every story has a hero and a villain, doesn’t it, and if it doesn’t—why, we fashion them ourselves. We want to take sides. We want to pledge our allegiance to one person or the other, one cause or another; to atone for our own thousand failings by planting ourselves on the high ground of righteousness, so we can crush some other poor schmuck beneath our heels and feel we are not simply right, but good.

All along, I have figured this story has one villain, and I thought I knew who it was. But maybe I was wrong, all along. Maybe I should have learned by now that nobody is all good or all bad; that hardly any battles are fought between good and evil. There is more good and less evil, or more evil and less good, but the only time I’ve ever felt the presence of absolute evil was when we opened the gates at Dachau and saw what men had wrought. And I’ll bet even those SS guards thought they were doing the right thing at the time. The human brain is capable of all kinds of contortions, all kinds of earnest and precise blindnesses, in order to protect itself from the idea that it might have made a mistake. That it might have taken the wrong side.

That final line, the last words Sam Mallory ever wrote, as he lay injured in his airplane and waited to die: what if I’m wrong about that?

I run my fingers along the ink, where Mallory’s fingers left their mark, and tap some ash into the dish beside me.