When he caught sight of their flashlights dancing up from the road he knew in an instant that the fire had been a mistake. And yet he did not flee but waited there, for in some lit part of his mind he still wondered if it would be Helen come to see him as she had those years before during the course of nights cool and dry and beautiful, her hair in his hands like gold thread in the moonlight and her body warm under his own. It was not until those distant lights flickered off, first one, then the other three, that he felt real fear. He removed the little locket from where he kept it in the front pocket of his uniform trousers and felt its hard, scalloped shape in his hand. He had held it in his palm at Anzio and Cassino and in the Vosges Mountains, held it when the blood and entrails of his companions rained down upon him in the shrapnel hell of those days.

They did not creep in the outer darkness beyond the firelight as he thought they would but came upon him without delay or preamble, their faces drifting before their bodies in the pale, reflected light. He waited, hands at his sides.

Later they would wonder why he had not hunted for a weapon in those moments.

“You know why we come?” one of them said, the sound of his voice dry and lilting with an accent Ray could not identify.

He could see them more clearly now. Three men. They held rifles and he assumed, of course, that the one of their number he could not see, the one who yet crept in the darkness, was similarly armed, and yet he stood with his empty hands by his sides, dirty uniform untucked, frame lit by the fire, watching them impassively as if he had expected them all the while.

“I don’t know you,” he said simply.

“Damn right you don’t,” one of the men said. This one was taller than the others, his neck long and the head above it small and compact, the first of the rain pattering against his hat brim.

“You don’t know us fer shit,” another said, shorter, barrel-shaped, hatless, thin hair already plastered down from the weight of the water. The third was a nondescript figure, plain and frightened-looking in the shadowy night.

“We’re just here on account of we got a job to do,” the taller said.

“What job?” Ray said.

“I think you know,” the taller said.

For a moment Ray did not speak. Then he said, “Who?”

“I think you know that too,” the taller said. “If you don’t, you’re even dumber than I thought.”

“Mrs. Wilson,” Ray said.

The man did not respond to this, aside from shifting slightly in his stance. “You shoulda shoved off when you was told,” he said.