But Irene got her way. It was her airplane, after all; she could do what she wanted with it. And what she wanted was this: she wanted to fly her airplane for some decent cause, some noble cause like evacuating the Basque children; she needed to work herself almost to death in order to purge this unspoken guilt that she was somehow complicit in the bombing of Guernica because she flew airplanes, because she had, in her naïve enthusiasm, so relentlessly pushed the frontiers of aviation, and it had all led to this, the dropping of bombs, the machine gunning of civilians from the air. Sam threw his fist against the wall of the hangar but Irene crossed her arms and held firm.

“All right,” he said. “But I’m flying too. If we both fly, we can finish sooner. And when these children are safe in Valencia, Irene, you’re done. Is that clear? You stay in Valencia with them.”

“Only if you stay in Valencia too,” she said.

“Irene, I have to go back. I can’t just desert.”

“The only thing left to do is to fight to the death, and you promised you weren’t going to fight. Remember? Back in California, you said you’d had enough of fighting.”

“That was before I saw what happened here.”

“You promised. You swore to God, remember? If you stay here and fight, then I’ll stay here and fight, right beside you, so you can keep your promise to me. You can die in my arms.”

“Jesus, Irene. How do you remember these things?”

“That’s my deal, Sam.”

She stared him down, until she could see him weigh the scales in his head: on the one side, his death wish; on the other side, Irene and the small grasshopper they had made together. Finally he shook his head. The grasshopper won.

Outside, Raoul was readying his airplane to fly, checking the skin for any holes or ruptures, checking the propeller blades and the wheels. Irene noticed that his eyes were red and she stopped to ask him if there was any news, had he heard anything.

“Yes,” he said. “They have found her body at last. She was killed in the first wave. A building collapsed on top of her.”

“Oh, Raoul! I’m so sorry.”

He turned to climb into the cockpit and stopped, with his hand on the edge of the wing. He spoke into space, but just loud enough that Irene could hear him.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why God should have killed her and the child, when the sin was mine. Why he did not just kill me instead.”

“God did not kill them, Raoul. The German bombers did.”

Raoul turned to her and kissed her hand. “Good-bye, Señorita Foster. I fly back to El Carmoli now. May God watch over you and my friend Mallory.”