“We’ll leave water for him. I’m sure this fellow will be back in a jiffy. Won’t you, Velázquez?”

Raoul was checking Irene’s bandage and didn’t answer.

“George, you should stay. You’re not hurt. Sam—”

“Damn Mallory! That—that bastard there, he’s the reason you’re dying in this godforsaken desert in the first place! The reason you’re not safe on an ocean liner heading back to America. He’s going to kill you one of these days, don’t you realize?”

Sam spoke up. “Irene flew to Spain on her own, Morrow. She flew here to escape you, as a matter of fact. You and that prison you’ve built around her—”

“Prison? You’ve got a nerve, you son of a bitch. I’ve set her free! Free to fly on her own, instead of second best to the goddamn magnificent flying ego of Sam Mallory! Do you know how frantic I’ve been? Held back the damned press, chartered a flight to Alicante, bribed a dozen officials to track her down on the crazy chance that—”

“Gentlemen,” said Raoul, “I’m afraid Miss Foster has fainted.”

Raoul carried Irene aboard the airplane they had flown from Valencia. Mallory watched them go, watched Morrow jump down from the broken Potez and into the sunlight. He dusted off his hands and stuck his head back inside.

“I imagine you already know this, Mallory,” he said, in a kind voice, “but there will be no airplane sent back to rescue you. You’re on your own. And if you do survive, by some miracle, you stay the hell away from my wife from now on. Is that clear?”

Mallory spoke through cracked lips. “Go to hell, Morrow.”

Morrow shook his head and turned away. As he walked across the sand, he called back, over his shoulder, “Just remember, this was your doing, Mallory.”

Hanalei, Hawai’i

November 1947

In the summer of 1946, I was in Nuremberg, that half-ruined city of ghosts and lawyers. My hotel was lousy; the food was worse. The daily evidence of man’s perfidy accumulated in what I had begun to imagine as sedimentary layers, grotesque upon grotesque, and I meanwhile suffered from some stubborn, unspecific gastric illness that was melting the flesh from my bones.

Miserable and starved, I sat at the bar of my hotel one evening in July, enduring the heat through a succession of whiskey sours and American cigarettes, when a fellow showed up and asked if I could possibly direct him to Miss Eugenia Everett, the photographer. He wore the uniform of an RAF squadron commander, the same uniform Velázquez had worn, so I told him I was Miss Everett, who wanted to know?