“What are you doing?” Her voice filled the room; it was the way she disciplined Steffie. He turned to her as he put the gun away. She held a towel up to herself.

“I was running a test. I wanted to see what it took.”

“When were you going to stop? Do you have any idea of how close you were?”

“I had stopped. It doesn’t take anything at all.”

“You had the gun pointing toward yourself, Joe. You had your finger on the trigger.” She came toward him, then stopped.

“The safety was on,” he said.

“That’s the way accidents happen. I hate that thing because of that. It’s just waiting to kill somebody.”

“Take it easy, Karen—”

“Don’t tell me that! I want to slap your face, you stupid man! What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m all right,” he said. “What did you want?”

“What do you think?” She stepped back. “Forget it, now. I couldn’t do anything. Let me get something on. Get away from there. I’m not kidding. Sit in the chair until I get back.”

She was going overboard, he thought, but he did what she wanted. She came back wearing her slip. Her face was pale. She sat on his lap. “Give me a cigarette. What were you thinking of?”

He told her to pick up the souvenir book. He put his finger on MacIver’s picture. “The client has a more recent shot of him. The more I look at this, the more incredible the other becomes. Toward the end, he was a handsome man—very handsome.”

“So? We were all on high-starch diets during the war. Everybody looked awful. Some of us—including you and I—had been eating badly for years.”

“How long did it take us to lose that?”

“We’ve always tried to put the best we could on the table. We could look at our pictures and see. A year or so, I suppose.”

“His first wife met him right after the war. She described him as the handsomest man she had ever seen.”

“Who had ever paid attention to her, more likely,” Karen said.

“No, no. She was very emphatic. Handsome. She said it several times.”

Karen looked at the picture again. “Not within a year or two of this. Not possibly.”

“What do you think of him?”

“I think he’s loathsome. He could have been unhappy in the service. That twists a person’s face. You’ve seen it in me—and I’ve seen it in you.”

“He had a fine war record. It was consistent—” He wanted to stop; he felt as if he were knocking on a door. There was something in his mind.

“Why did you run that test?” she asked. “You haven’t answered me.”

“I made several mistakes this week. One was in trying to believe that I was thinking like him. I was living in his car. I even ate his breakfast, bacon and eggs. Betty Kaminsky pointed out that I was probably the only person alive who knew both his wives. I caught myself thinking, ‘Well, he did this, he felt this when he was in this car on days like this.’”