Cover

Dedication

Dedication

Ariane Fasquelle,

in memory

Epigraph

Epigraph

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream

It is not dying, it is not dying

—John Lennon–Paul McCartney, “Tomorrow Never Knows”

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

—William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

Prelude

Prelude

Basel, 1943

Was it poison? Was it out of bounds? An unacceptable risk? She couldn’t have said, but she was in a state all day, though she kept telling herself she was being foolish—if anybody in the entire building knew what he was doing, it was her boss. Since she’d come to work for him just over a year ago, she’d never seen him falter—he was precise, cautious, solid, and he didn’t take chances with his own safety or his assistants’ either. Which you couldn’t say for all the chemists who worked here. Some of them—she’d heard the gossip—got sloppy as the day wore on, not bothering with their safety goggles, crossing the floor with pipettes of nitric acid or sodium hydroxide as if they were on their way home with a bag of groceries, even in one case (though this was only rumor), drinking on the job. And who was left to clean up the mess, to accept blame and cover for them if need be—to lie right to the face of the supervisor? Their lab assistants, of course. Who else?