"How long have we been down here tonight?" I asked Poppy in a whisper.

"Only two or three hours probably. Are you getting tired?"

"No. I'm fine. I feel good. I've never shared most of these facts before. It's rather cathartic." She winked at me.

Nadya leaned over and whispered to the old man. They conferred for a minute before she straightened and fixed her pale eyes on me. "Mr. Michaels, I'd like to go back and cover the time you said you spent in the Bulgarian Army during the Great War. Please be as specific and detailed as possible," she said in that familiar Slavic accent. "When were you pressed into service?"

"1915, right after the attack on Rumania. I was a stocky young man and was assigned to an artillery company as an ordnance handler."

"Did your unit ever see any action?" Nadya asked.

"Yes but not until the last week of the war. But I saw enough in one night to last me a lifetime."

"Where did you see action?"

I was about to respond when I felt Poppy place her hand on my arm. She leaned over and whispered close to my ear. "That one that is asking about the war,"

"Nadya, you mean?" I whispered back.

"No." She shook her head. "Not Nadya. That's Ramsay, the one I told you about in France. I think Ramsay was very active in that war so answer carefully. Part of the trick to being verifiable is your ability to tell the stories of your lives with uncanny detail and accuracy down to the slightest point."

I turned back to the panel. She was still looking at me, waiting for a response. "I fought against the French and the Serbs in the Vardar River valley in the autumn of 1918, but only for a short time, as I said earlier. The entire front collapsed very quickly for us. I was only involved in one battle."

"Who was your commanding officer?"

"Captain Eumen Hoxa."

A look of astonishment came over her face. "Tell me about Hoxa, tell me about the battle, tell me everything."

"It was a fluke. We shouldn't even have been there, which is probably the only reason why we surprised them and why we survived. When it happened, on September 18th and 19th, 1918, the whole of the Bulgarian front had been in full retreat for three weeks...

1 Evan probably refers to the modern town of Vodica (also called Vodista), Bulgaria.

2 Mithraic temples, or Mithraeum, were common in all corners of the Roman Empire and were normally constructed in grottoes or caves to imitate the location where Mithra slew the sacred bull. James, E.O. The Ancient Gods (1960)

3 Bulgaria entered the first World War in October 1915, with mass conscription and mobilization. November 1918 by Gordon Brooks-Shepard p. 116