“But you don’t think that any longer?” Curt asked. “Even though those big silver tanks were borrowed from a brewery.”

“I don’t know about that,” Connie said. “But those other little glass dishes. The flat ones! I’ve seen them at the hospital clinic. They’re used for bacteria.”

Curt nodded imperceptibly to Steve, who returned the gesture.

“That’s enough,” Curt called over to Yuri.

Yuri tried to shoo his wife back into her bedroom, but she stood her ground. “I ain’t going back until you bring me your TV.”

Yuri hesitated. Then he ducked into his room. He reappeared moments later carrying a small television with an old-fashioned rabbit-ear antenna. Only then did Connie back out of sight.

“Can you believe this?” Curt mumbled.

“Yeah, I can,” Steve said. “And you wondered why I was voicing some concern this morning before we went into the federal building. This guy’s worse than I thought.”

“At least he did build a lab,” Curt said. “Obviously he knows what he’s doing scientifically.”

“That I’ll grant,” Steve said. “And the lab setup is more impressive than I’d imagined.”

Curt exhaled loudly in frustration. In the background the sudden sound of a TV sitcom burst from Connie’s bedroom. The volume was turned down immediately to be barely audible. The next minute Yuri reappeared. He closed the door behind him and came over to the living area. He sat down, took a drink, and eyed his guests self-consciously.

Curt didn’t know what to say. It had been one thing to learn Yuri was married, but quite another to find out he was married to a black woman. It went against everything Curt believed in, and here he was doing business with the man.

Curt had grown up in a tough, blue-collar, white neighborhood with a physically abusive construction-worker father who continually reminded Curt that he wasn’t as good as his popular, football-star brother, Pete. Curt found solace in hatred. He embraced the bigotry so prevalent in his neighborhood. It was comforting and handy to have a readily identifiable group to blame rather than examine his own inadequacies. But it wasn’t until he’d joined the Marines and moved to San Diego that his rather parochial bigotry was transformed into racial hatred with a particular abhorrence of miscegenation.

The transition had not happened overnight. It stemmed from an attitude that had its origins in a chance meeting with a man almost twice Curt’s age. It was 1979. Curt was nineteen. He’d recently finished boot camp, which had provided a dramatic boost to his self-esteem. He and several of his newfound colleagues, which included several African-Americans, had left the base to visit a bar on Point Loma. It was a bar frequented by armed forces personnel, particularly navy divers and Marines.