The other chap laughed, until he too lapsed into coughing again for a moment. Pneumonia—that’s why he was there. Pneumonia. The same word the doctor had muttered to him as the primary fear after his ordeal.

“You’re right. Hard to say, isn’t it? We’re all good. We’re all bad. The hero in our own stories. The villain in someone else’s.”

It sounded like something Heinrich would say—but his brother had always wanted to be the hero in every story, his own and every other. “I never pretend to be the hero.”

The bloke lifted his water glass in salute. “Smart. Why bother? Sometimes . . .” His gaze went distant, cloudy. As troubled as the waters that sucked down the Boynton. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m even still alive. Maybe I drowned. Maybe I’m just a ghost. Yūrei. Le fantôme. El fantasma. Das Gespenst.”

His lips turned up. Heinrich could keep his heroic tales. “I always liked the ghost stories best.”

His companion took a sip of the water. “They’re the only stories based in reality these days. More men are dead than alive, it seems. Everyone is gone. I’m gone.”

He wasn’t. And yet he had been for years. He reached a shaky hand for his own water glass and lifted it. “The wisest way to be. Already dead. Just a ghost.” He took a sip and then eased the cup back down. “I’ll call you Yūrei.”

Yūrei chuckled. “Suits me well enough. And you? The French or Spanish or German?”

He spoke them all fluently. “Your choice.”

“Hmm.” Yūrei shook the white stones from his own velvet bag into his hand and placed them on the intersections of the lines on his side of the game board. “Das Gespenst. In honor of the U-boats that landed us here.”

Das Gespenst. “That’ll do.” He slipped the last of his game pieces onto the board and made his first move. And tried not to curse the U-boat again. Or the High Command that had first ordered him on the Boynton and then ordered it sunk. Why? Had he lost their trust? Or were they simply incompetent, one department not communicating with another?

His fingers tightened around his black stone. He would have to assume the worst. And then prove to them that he was still useful.

They’d made no more than four moves each when the nurse came in, a clipboard in hand and a smile on her face. “Good news for Mr. Walsh and Mr. Williams. You both get to go home today.”

So much for anonymity. But . . . no. He preferred Das Gespenst, really. He’d do well to remember that a ghost was all he could afford to be. He coughed again into his handkerchief and let all the tasks awaiting him fill his mind.

First and foremost, get in touch with Berlin.