She’d come to work that morning in high spirits, never suspecting what he had in mind or that this day would be any different from any other. Because the weather was so fine she’d bicycled to work rather than take the tram, and the fresh air and sunshine had made her feel as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Good morning to you, Fräulein Ramstein,” Herr H. had called out cheerily when she came through the door after hanging her jacket in the closet and slipping into her lab coat. He was at his desk, peering up from his notebook, grinning at her. “Did you see the way the daffodils are pushing up everywhere? I thought somebody’d smeared the whole landscape with butter while we were asleep.”

“Yes,” she murmured, “yes, it’s all so beautiful—summer will be here before we know it,” and if it was a banal exchange, so much the better, because everything was ordinary, business as usual, and nothing was going to happen to her or her boss, not now, not ever.

But then, grinning still, he gave her a long look and said, “Didn’t you find it unusual when I went home early Friday afternoon?”

She had, but she hadn’t said anything then and didn’t say anything now either—she just stood there at the doorway, waiting.

“Of course, you know it’s not like me—I don’t think I’ve missed more than maybe two days in all the”—he paused, counting up the years—“fourteen years I’ve been at the company, but I felt so strange, or disoriented, I guess, I was sure I had a touch of the flu or a fever or something.” He paused, held her with his eyes. “But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all. You know what it was?”

She didn’t have a clue, but it was then, at that precise moment, that the anxiety began ticking away inside her like one of the time bombs the partisans were using against the occupiers in Vichy and the Netherlands.

“The chemical, the synthesis. You know how careful I am, how rigorous—especially with toxic compounds—but nobody can be perfect a hundred percent of the time and I realized the next morning I must have got a trace of the solution somewhere on my skin during recrystallization, on my wrist or forearm, I suppose—or even my fingertips when I pulled the gloves off. A trace. That’s all. And I tell you, I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was as if I were intoxicated—drunk suddenly, right here in the laboratory, in the middle of the day. But more than that, and stranger, when I got home all sorts of fantastic shapes and images kept spinning in front of my eyes, even with my eyelids closed.”