But tonight, as he looked at Levy’s thin white arm with its line of blue numbers, he remembered that little girls in Belfast made a game of setting fire to their dollies; that when his father was young in North Carolina, he’d ridden the back of the bus, drunk from a special fountain, pissed in a special toilet, and bowed his head in helpless rage and inexplicable guilt when white men called him nigger. And only forty years ago some German with lightning on his collar pulled Jacob Levy off a cattle-­car transport from Poland and tattooed these numbers on his arm . . .

Rachel was watching him. “Do you want a drink?” she asked. He nodded. They put a light blanket over Levy and left him alone with the light on. Hawkins followed her to the dining room. She said, “We’ve got brandy.” She tried to sound normal, but she was getting white. She couldn’t bend over to open the cabinet, so he did it for her; he looked up and saw her swallow hard and put her hand to her mouth. She swayed and he jumped up and grabbed her arms.

“I’m going to be sick.” Then she said, “No, maybe I’ll just faint . . .” Then she started sobbing, with her hands flat on her belly, looking straight at him, her face twisted so it should have been ugly but wasn’t. He led her into the living room, which was dark, and hot, and he opened the windows. The phone rang and he answered it. It was Rose Pinchik calling to find out if it was true. Yes, he said, it was true, and she should get here because Jacob was drugged and Rachel . . . then he heard Rachel dry-­gasping in the living room, and he hung up. But she was still just sobbing, trying now to catch her breath. The sobs turned to hiccups, and he left the lights out and rubbed her back, between the shoulder blades, firmly, steadily, in rhythm, until the little spasms stopped. The phone rang again. This time it was Golda Cohen asking if it was true. He said it was, then he got the bottle of brandy out of the cabinet and two glasses and went back to the living room. She was sitting now, still crying. He poured the brandy and was going to hand it to her, or feed it to her if she couldn’t take it, when the doorbell rang.