“I’m sure I speak for us all when I say how grateful I am to Professor Nahimana for hosting us, here in the belly of the beast. I know we’ve all been waiting for this day for a very long time.”

A little ripple of applause.

“It is an honor to follow such an important talk by Dr. Baker, whose new work on Haus Wachenfeld is, I think we can all agree, really very exciting. I wonder, Jim”—he appeared to address someone in the front row—“I could not help recalling a line that has always struck me as a lovely turn of phrase, despite the context.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering.

“‘Along the road of the Teutonic knights of old, the Reich must again set itself, to obtain,’”—here he paused again—“‘um mit dem deutschen Schwert, dem deutschen Pflug die Scholle’—by the German sword, sod for the German plow.”

This little recitation, incomprehensible to me, was met with a murmur of appreciation from the audience. He paused to sip primly from a glass of water and, shading his eyes with his hands, looked to the back of the room and said, “First slide, please, Melissa.”

The hum of a slide projector, a whir, and click.

“I’d like to begin,” he said, as the image behind him—a map, I now saw—expanded and contracted and now came decisively into focus, “on the island of Hispaniola.”

He went on, but his voice faded from me as I became increasingly aware of my neighbor, who, in doing something with her handbag, had caused a thick bundle of folded papers to fall from the arm of her chair into my lap.

“Oh, I’m sorry—” I whispered, and in the midst of returning it saw that it was not, as I had thought, some type of elderly person’s brochure, but a stack of small and poorly copied little texts, bound together with a dirty rubber band.

A chill, premonitory shiver passed through me. What, I thought, was that?

“So, as you can see, as the Spanish began to build their empire in the New World,” the man at the lectern was saying, “they looked to Rome’s expansion to justify their own.”

I had seen such sheets of paper before, I thought. THE MISSIONS—I could have sworn I’d seen those grainy black letters, before she’d snatched the bundle, clawlike, back.

“In a letter home from Hispaniola, Álvarez Chanca quoted Cato: ‘Delenda est Carthago.’ Carthage must be destroyed.”

He turned to the map behind him now, as if to explain some of its various features, but I found it difficult to follow, and I heard my own racing thoughts instead.