I didn’t pay much attention to that and made my way along the path to the pool, which was surrounded with royal palms, flamboyán trees, and several almond trees as well as flower beds filled with ixora—a hardy red Indian flower better known as jungle flame. It was a nice-looking pool, but even with all that water it was easy to see how any jungle might have caught fire. My own eyeballs felt scorched just looking at it. Dinah was doing a graceful, leisurely backstroke up and down the steaming water. I supposed it was steaming for the same reason my eyeballs were scorched and the jungle was in flames. Her bathing suit was an appropriate-looking leopard print, only at that particular moment it seemed slightly less appropriate, given that she wasn’t actually wearing it. The suit lay on the path to the pool alongside my jaw.

She had a beautiful body: long, athletic, shapely. In the water her nude figure was the color of honey. Being German, I wasn’t exactly shocked by her nakedness. Naked culture societies had existed in Berlin since before the Great War, and until the Nazis, it had been impossible to visit certain Berlin parks and swimming pools without seeing lots of nudists. Besides, Dinah herself hardly seemed to mind. She even managed to perform a couple of tumble turns that left little to my imagination.

“Come on in,” she said. “The water’s lovely.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Besides, I hardly think your mother would approve.”

“Maybe not, but she’s drunk. Or at least she’s sleeping it off. She was drinking all last night. Noreen always drinks too much after we’ve had an argument.”

“What was it about?”

“What do you think it was about?”

“Max, I suppose.”

“Check. So how did you and he get along?”

“We got along just fine, he and I.”

Dinah executed another perfect tumble turn. By now I was beginning to know her better than her doctor. I might even have enjoyed the show but for the fact of who she was and why I was there. Turning my back on the pool, I said, “Perhaps I’d better wait in the house.”

“Do I embarrass you, Señor Gunther? I’m sorry. I mean Señor Hausner.” She stopped swimming, and I heard her climb out of the pool behind me.

“You’re nice to look at, but I’m your mother’s friend, remember? And there are certain things that men don’t do to the daughters of their friends. I imagine she sort of trusts me not to press my nose up against your windowpane.”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

I could hear the water dripping off her naked body. If I had licked her from top to bottom, she wouldn’t have sounded any different.