As if reading her thoughts, he turned his face to her again—black eyed, his features slack and distorted—and murmured, “It’s all right, Susi, I’m fine, everything’s fine, it’s just that—well, let’s see, let’s give it a . . . bit more time.” He glanced at the clock, let out another laugh. “It’s only five. We wouldn’t want to . . . to cheat . . . the, the company out of our last hour’s work of the day, would . . . we?”

Everything stopped right there, right in that instant: he’d called her Susi. Never before, never once, had he let slip the formal bonds of their relationship, under which, rigorously, unfailingly, she was Fräulein Ramstein and he Herr Hofmann. As upset as she was, as frightened, she was rocked by it: he’d called her by her first name, almost as if they were on an equal footing—almost as if they were friends, very close friends, male and female, as if she really was more to him than a starched lab coat and a pair of willing hands. She didn’t know what to say. Cheat the company? No, was the proper response, but then he clearly wasn’t in his right mind and to expect him to continue work—or her to—was absurd.

He abruptly turned back round in his chair, the four legs grating on the floor so that the sudden noise startled her, and he began paging through his notes as if he were riffling a deck of cards. The pages hissed under the pressure of his fingertips, a noise that struck her as frivolous, and beyond that, wrong: this was the official record, not a plaything. He released the pages, took them up, riffled them again. Then again. “Please, Susi, dear Susi, give me, give us,” he said, and here came the laugh, “give us a few minutes . . . and we’ll . . . we’ll see, because when you examine it, really examine it, time has no meaning, whether it’s company time or free time or the, the . . . time . . . they clock at the Greenwich Observatory. Nicht wahr?”

She was still floating on that Susi, dear Susi, when things became complicated (or more complicated, that is, considering that her boss was self-poisoned and acting as if he were a slurring drunkard in the back room of a whiskey bar). Suddenly he jumped up from the desk as if he’d been stung, as if the desk itself had come to life and attacked him, and when he swung round on her she saw that all the color had drained from his face. He wasn’t laughing now. Now he looked ill, seriously ill, the knowledge of what he’d done to himself rising up to infest the swollen black pupils of his eyes. He looked to the ceiling, looked to the walls. “The light,” he said. “The light.”