“Perhaps just cosmetics,” he said, taking his eyes off the road, raking them over her face and then her body and grinning at her as if she’d appreciate the joke. “I believe it’s your area of expertise.”

He knew who she was. She gritted her teeth. “I’m here because I possess other kinds of expertise as well.”

“We can definitely talk about that over a drink.”

“I just want to do my job,” Jess said formally, as if it wasn’t a personal rejection; it wasn’t a good idea to get the PRO offside although she had no idea if she still had work, if she even wanted to do the work or if this uncomfortable meeting in a car was the end of it all.

“Women don’t belong in the European Theater.” His tone was harder now and his eyes carried a warning: she should back off and accept his interest, his veiled offer of, not a date, but an assignation. She imagined that the women he allowed into the cosmetic arena of the European Theater must fall for his smile and his offers—or at least pretend to do so in order to keep the peace. But she had never been very good at pretending. The jeep pulled to a stop outside the Dorchester Hotel.

“Why not?” She wished she could just walk away, certain his answer wouldn’t make her feel any better.

“Well,” he smiled again, “there’s the latrine business. Where would you—”

“Don’t,” she interrupted, unable to listen anymore. Men were losing their limbs and their lives and the PROs were worried about where a woman might empty her bladder. She climbed out of the jeep.

As she did, Warren said, “You’re confined to your room until the penalty for disobeying your orders is decided by the Public Relations Office.”

* * *

Jailed. She was, she realized over the next week, effectively jailed. She’d been given a chance to scramble out of this mess, to go back to New York, or to write filler pieces about frivolities but instead she’d antagonized someone she would have to work with, if she stayed. If.

For days she stared out the window at London, a dismal, bombed-up mess of rubble and dismembered buildings. How would the world ever be put back together again? There was hardly food enough to eat in the city, cigarettes and toothbrushes were nonexistent or worth a small fortune, all of which would make replacing the things she’d lost in the jeep explosion more difficult. London felt trapped in an eternal night; no sooner had the sun struggled to rise than it was dark by four in the afternoon, a darkness unrelieved by blackout conditions. Outside, along the street at the back of the hotel, she watched two girls dressed in homemade nurses’ uniforms bury their dolls in the crumbled brick and concrete remains of a house and then dig them out, put them in prams and administer to their wounds. They were playing at war, as if it were a game, as if it were the only reality they knew how to mimic. What happened to children who’d been born while the fighting was on, who didn’t understand that it wasn’t normal for bombs to fall from the sky like Chicken Little’s acorns, who believed that streets were comprised of both intact buildings and desecrated ones, who had never seen a night alight with electricity?