Herr Hofmann wasn’t like that. He followed safety procedures to the letter, always, whether it was eight in the morning or five in the afternoon, whether they were preparing the chemicals for the first process of the day or the last. She admired his efficiency, his attention to detail, his professionalism, but there was so much more to him than that. For one thing, he’d had no qualms about taking on a female assistant, the only one in the whole company, and for another he was no cold fish, but a man with red blood in his veins. He was unfailingly pleasant, even on the off days, always with a sympathetic look or a smile for her, and under his lab coat you could see the effects of his bodybuilding and the hours he spent training with the boxing club. His hair might have been thinning and he wore spectacles in the lab, but he swept his hair back like Adolphe Menjou so you hardly noticed, and the spectacles only made him look distinguished. Maybe she was in love with him, maybe that was it, which of course she would never have admitted to anyone on this earth, not even her best friend, Dorothea Meier, and certainly not her mother, who if she had even an inkling that her daughter had a romantic fixation on an older man—a married man, no less, with children—would have marched right up the steps of the building and dragged her home by the scruff of her neck.

It was April. The day was bright beyond the windows, spring in the air, the whole world singing, and she was in a state. So what if there was a long and honored tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves—August Bier opening a hole in his own spine to discover if injecting cocaine directly into the cerebrospinal fluid would prove an effective anesthetic; Werner Forssmann running a catheter from an incision in his forearm up a vein to his heart to see if it could be done; Jesse Lazear purposely allowing an infected mosquito to bite him in order to prove the insect was the vector of yellow fever—there were as many failures as there were successes. Lazear had his proof, but died seventeen days later, so what good did it do him? Or his wife, if he had one? But that wasn’t going to happen to her boss, she told herself—nothing was going to happen to him. He was taking so small a dose of the compound, a mere 250 micrograms, it couldn’t possibly have any adverse effect, and if it did, she would be there at his side to see him through it.