“Back end of ’17? Early ’18? In the black days, certainly. I was moving from cellar to cellar. Now, those were rum times.” He looks at her. “It’s been in my storeroom for a long time, but it’s where your Saint Christopher came from, and so I figured it might have some significance to you. That it might have some emotional value, I mean.”

She looks at Dillon and realizes that he means her to give him money for it. She looks at the bag on the floor, at Francis’s bag, and is not certain that she wants to possess it.

“Nineteen-eighteen? Are you sure of that?”

“There or thereabouts. It gives me satisfaction to return a treasure to its owner,” he says.

“Did you see him again? The man who gave you the pack, I mean. Have you seen him since?”

“Not that I can recall, but a lot of faces have passed through.”

“Do you know where he went after?”

“Where did any of them go?”

She knows that he won’t tell her more, and she wants Dillon to be gone, then. She hears Harry’s recalled voice saying scrit-scrat and knows this man is a rat. “Please. Do have this. For your trouble.” She takes a note from her purse and puts it in his outstretched palm.

“No trouble at all, dear lady. It’s my pleasure to reunite you with it. I do like to see a lost thing found.”

He grins as he bends into a bow, and then winks at her as he straightens.

For a moment the winking eye is Francis’s black-and-white eye in that photograph, and then a blue eye that had once watched her through a library bookcase. Has Francis been watching her all along? Is he still out there watching her now? She looks at his bag on the floor and suddenly it all seems so much more plausible.

With the close of the door, she stands alone again in her hotel room, and stares at the bag on the worn-down rug. She wants both to tear into its contents, to know what those papers say, and to never have to touch the thing; she is at the same time compelled and repelled by it. She slides down onto the floor and covers her face with her hands until the walls stop moving around her.

Chapter Forty-Eight: Harry

Chapter Forty-Eight

Harry

Ypres, September 1921