“We’ll join you in ten or so, darling,” Eady said, accepting the snack plate.

Ruth looked from Eady to Klay and then down at the glass of scotch beside each man. She picked up Eady’s glass, took a sip, and placed the glass back on the counter beside him. “I’ll wait ’til I see the whites of your eyes.” She smiled and picked up the dish with Eady’s trout. “Come on, dogs.”

“Find yourself a good woman, Tom,” Eady said, topping off their glasses. “I could start with that. Or end there. Have you?”

Klay thought of Erin. “Not sure,” he said.

“To the chase, then,” Eady said, and clinked Klay’s glass. “Where was I?”

“Hitler,” Klay said.

Eady put his nose in his glass and inhaled his whiskey before resuming. “Hitler took the American eugenics effort further in every way, of course. Crucially, he extended his theories on the Aryan individual to the state. Germany made ill by her ‘lesser races.’ Jews, a disease; gypsies, an infestation. He used language to justify his savagery. It wasn’t murder, it was cleansing. Immigrants weren’t human beings, they were invasive species. Words made all the difference. Which is where we came in.

“The Sovereign had been reporting favorably on the American eugenics movement. ‘Why should Hereford bulls and Rhode Island Reds benefit more from selective breeding than we humans?’—that kind of thing. Then an American intelligence officer discovered a reference to The Sovereign in a German eugenics journal. The Nazis’ top scientists were reading us.

“That’s when Bill Donovan came to us with a special request. You recognize that name?”

“Father of the CIA. They called him Wild Bill.”

“Donovan’s request was simple: double down. We agreed. We ran a feature on European architecture, praising Berlin. We followed up with a piece celebrating Germany’s youth movement, those flaxen-haired scouts charging up the Zugspitze in short pants and brown shirts.” Eady sipped his whiskey. “Mind you”—Eady took a square of cheese with a toothpick—“all along the Allies are using our maps to fight the war. We printed half a million for the War Department. Every soldier carried a map with our emblem on it. The Nazis considered it a victory to have the same Sovereign writing such positive things about their country. Goebbels especially loved it, praised The Sovereign publicly. That is when we dropped our bomb.”

Eady opened a drawer, withdrew a magazine wrapped in cellophane, and handed it to Klay. The date on the cover was March 1942. It was the old format. No glossy cover photograph, just a silver atlas on a blue background in the upper left corner, and below it a table of contents. Eady pointed to an article halfway down the list. Klay read the title aloud, “‘Fallacies in Racial Hygiene.’”