There was a large, barricaded gate, which Aarne opened, and then Hugo’s pony left the compound. The gate slid shut behind him. The groom flicked his whip, and the pony began to trot, but almost immediately Hugo asked him to stop.

They were in the clearing where he had shot Wodziczko. “Hold, stop, stop!” he cried. The groom understood only when Hugo grabbed him. Hugo left the cradle of the sleigh, crunching across the hardpack until he found the area most trampled and soiled. But there was no body. He could see marks in the snow. Wodziczko had been dragged away. He would be stripped, just like the bodies Hugo had seen in the river. There was nothing from him except a single sheet of paper, its red borders glowing under the wicked moon.

ALLIES AND AMERICANS: WHO IS YOUR ENEMY?
THE WAR MONGERING BUSINESSMAN? OR THE
RUSSIAN WORKING MAN?

With both hands, Hugo scooped it up as if it were bound for a reliquary. He squared its edges as he trudged back to the sleigh. A perfect gift from Russia.

The bells on the reins jingled, and the pony went back to its trot. As the monastery was pulled back into the forest, it felt less and less real to Hugo. Had he actually killed Wodziczko? Had there really been women there? Had he broken their hearts? Over the long minutes when the sleigh slid over the snow, Hugo felt growing an anger that had no specific source that he could trace. It was a simple stone-cold sense that he had always hated the world. And that he hadn’t honestly known this until now.

The motion of the sleigh was gentle. The horse occasionally snorted, and the bells on the reins sometimes shook, but the rhythm hardly distracted Hugo. The shadows on his face were flinty, as the moonlight that night was brilliant. As the peasants would say, it was as bright and cruel as the awful eye of St. Cassian, whose glare turns the flour bitter in its sack. And under this moon, Hugo began to read the broadside, first aloud and in a mocking voice, and then silently, with a curiosity formerly reserved for the rules of high society.

41

February 1919 in France. The rain changed to sleet. Lee Duncan spent hours insulating his shed, where he now lived with his puppies, with newspaper and leftover canvas. He brought in a stove, and at night he heated up bricks and put them under the dogs’ bed. One night he accidentally set fire to his finger puppets, which was all right, in that he’d had two furloughs, so he already had a second pair, and a third.

The puppies were now five months old. Boy was wild, and had steadfastly refused to learn anything more complex than housetraining. But his sister was different.

“Thomas,” Lee said to the man who had once fed Boy some ham fat. “Watch.”

Thomas wiped his hands on his apron.