A shirtless boy. Simple brown pants, and tiny sandals on his feet. In his hand was a bottle of Coca-Cola, its foamy contents now seeping to the ground.

He was, perhaps, seven years old. His crime was—what? Playing hide-and-seek? Gamboling with a butterfly?

The boy lay on the ground. A beautiful child, the most beautiful child Janson had ever seen. He appeared oddly peaceful, except for the jagged crimson across his chest, three tightly clustered holes from which his lifeblood pulsed.

He looked up at the gaunt American, his soft brown eyes unblinking.

And he smiled.

The boy smiled.

The images flooded Janson now, flooded him for the first time, because these were the images his mind was to banish—banish utterly—the day that followed, and then all the days that followed. Even unremembered, they had pushed at him, weighed on him, at times immobilized him. He thought of the little boy on the basement stairs in the Stone Palace, of his own hand frozen at the trigger, and he grasped the power of the unremembered.

Yet he remembered now.

He remembered how he sank to the ground and cradled the child in his lap, an embrace between the dead and the almost dead, victim and victimizer.

What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness ? and what communion hath light with darkness?

And he did what he had never done in country. He wept.

The memories that followed were beyond proper retrieval: The child’s parents soon came, having been summoned by the gunfire. He could see their stricken faces, yes—sorrowing, with a sorrow that voided even rage. They took their boy from him, the man and the woman, and the man was keening, keening … and the mother shook her head, shook her head violently, as if to dislodge the reality it contained, and holding the lifeless body of her child in her arms, she turned to the gaunt soldier, as if there were any words she could utter that would make a difference.

But all she said was, You Americans.

Now the faces, all of them, dissolved, and Janson was left with the hard-eyed gaze of Alan Demarest.

Demarest had been talking, was talking now. “The past is another country. A country you never fully left.”

It was true.

“You could never get me out of your head, could you?” Demarest continued.

“No,” Janson said, his voice a broken whisper.

“Why would that be? Because the bond between us was real. It was powerful. ‘Opposition is true friendship, ’ William Blake tells us. Oh, Paul—what a history we shared. Did it haunt you? It haunted me.”

Janson did not reply.