I LIE IN BED for a bit, staring at the ceiling, while the early summer dawn colors the air. Until I realize I’m not going to fall asleep, not now. I rise and pad down the gray hallway to the foyer, where my pocketbook lies on the hall table on which I tossed it a few hours ago.

I open up the pocketbook and rattle around in there until I discover what I’m looking for—not the postcard or the tissue-thin airmail envelope, but the small, rectangular ecru card with the raised black type that said simply C. SUMNER FOX, and beneath it a telephone number from a Washington exchange. Underneath that, in precise letters, Fox had written Empire Hotel, room 808.

I carry the card to the telephone in the kitchen and lift the receiver. At twenty-six minutes past five o’clock, I dial up the Empire Hotel and ask the switchboard operator for room 808.

He answers on the second ring. “Fox,” he says, like a voice you hear on the radio.

“Mr. Fox, it’s Ruth Macallister. I’m so sorry to bother you at such a disagreeable hour.”

“Not at all. Is something the matter?”

“Not as such. It’s just that I’ve got a little confession to make.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says.

Iris

MAY 1940

Rome, Italy

The first thing Harry did when he got his posting to Rome, he bought a three-year-old Ford Cabriolet convertible cheap from some young widow in Hemel Hempstead and had it shipped across the ocean. The car had belonged to her husband before he’d succumbed to sepsis acquired from a mosquito bite—just like President Coolidge’s poor son, except that was a blister—and Iris thought the deceased must have been an interesting fellow, because the car was bright red like a candy apple and had an engine Harry described as souped up. Iris wasn’t sure of the particulars, but souped up apparently meant loud and fast, such that you couldn’t fail to notice this machine, whether it was parked along the street or zipping past you on some highway. It was a swell car, all right.

Iris loved going for drives in Harry’s convertible. She loved the wind in her hair and the sensation of speed, and the snug, fateful feeling of hurtling down some stretch of highway in a vehicle beyond your control. She loved it more than ever now that Sasha was at the wheel, and she sat next to him, and somewhere ahead lay a crumbling house on a sunbaked hillside where she and Sasha would spend the weekend.