“Shh, shhh,” Chaplin said. He patted her wrist from a great distance. Hannah buried her face in Mildred’s mink. Mildred held her. Chaplin didn’t understand how someone knew at sixteen, seventeen to offer a shoulder.

“We should get you home,” Mildred said.

Hannah sniffled. “I don’t want that.”

“It’s a large house, very comfortable.”

Hannah, who was shorter than Mildred, poked her head up. Her neck was surrounded by the mink sleeve. Charlie touched his fingers against the backs of her hands, which she didn’t move. She had ruined them long ago when she had threaded needles by lamplight. “I must look a fright,” she said to Mildred. “I’m sorry. I just want to be helpful.”

“We’d like you to stay with us,” Mildred said.

“I’m hopeless,” Hannah whispered.

“You’re not hopeless,” Mildred said.

The three of them walked toward the car. Hannah clutched Mildred, stroking the mink, and Charlie walked next to them, his hand extended toward his mother as if he were blessing her. Now he considered the fourth kind of fade, one he never used: the chemical method. Potash of cyanide and tincture of iodine, combined. Fade out, he was thinking. Fade out. Fade out, fade out, fade out. And yet he was still there, awkward, walking near but not with his mother and wife, realizing he would need to give directions to Kono, and perhaps a truck-driving member of the crew, on how to take all of his mother’s luggage to his house. Cyanide and iodine. How perfect that the chemical method of fading was half poison, half cure.

36

Aarne invited Hugo down the stairs, explaining in a voice that rang with increasing excitement that he had watched the attempted siege—he called it a siege—and Hugo’s tremendous defense, and really, Aarne said, Hugo was quite marvelous.

Hugo left the rifle on the floor. He picked up the crossbow and padded, step by hopeless step, down the spiral stairs. He hiked his trousers—the months in Russia had left him thinner. There were many compliments awaiting him. That Hugo had chosen to shoot a gun, then use the crossbow, had been a special kind of genius, Aarne cried out, for it had obviously confused the Bolshevik into thinking there were many defenders. Further, using one shot each time—Aarne made a noise, zuhp, zuhp—fantastic restraint. Hugo wasn’t just a soldier, he was quite the sniper.

“Are you sure that was a Bolo?”

“Sure? Pwfff.” Aarne made a petulant, avuncular exhalation through his nose. He was speaking rapidly, recounting Hugo’s heroism from different angles, and then Hugo heard Aarne say something odd.

“Monsieur Aarne, what was that?”

“Nothing, Private Hugo.”

Aarne had said the evening had been very surprising, for he hadn’t even known a Bolo was actually coming, and then, zuhp, there one was.

To stay was a mistake.