“All right!” Curt spat, returning from his brief reverie. “It’s time we put the cards on the table.” He looked at Steve. Steve nodded in agreement. Curt looked at Yuri.

“What cards are you talking about?” Yuri questioned. He could tell that his guests were livid, particularly Curt.

Curt rolled his eyes in frustration. “It’s an expression, for crissake. It means explaining everything to everybody so there are no surprises.”

“Okay,” Yuri said agreeably.

“I mean like you’ve shocked us tonight,” Curt snapped. “Not only are you married, but you’re married to a nigger woman. Calling that a surprise is putting it mildly.”

“I needed a green card,” Yuri explained.

“But you should not have married a black woman!” Steve barked.

“What difference does it make?” Yuri asked, although he thought he knew the answer. Over the four years he’d lived in the United States he’d become well aware of social prejudices.

Curt held his tongue despite the foolishness of Yuri’s question. He thought for a moment of explaining the whole issue to Yuri the way Tim Melcher had explained it to him some twenty years earlier. But he decided against it, because looking at Yuri with a more critical eye, Curt couldn’t decide if he was Aryan or not.

“Marrying between the races, particularly when one member is white, is against God’s word,” Steve said.

“I’d never heard that,” Yuri said.

“What’s done is done,” Curt said with a wave of his hand. “More important at the moment is the question of what we are going to do now. Your wife knows you are screwing around with bacteria downstairs and she knows that you worked in the Soviet bioweapons industry. Chances are she knows you’re making a bioweapon.”

“She doesn’t concern herself with what I’m doing,” Yuri said. “Trust me.”

“But she could suddenly change her mind,” Curt said. “And that would be very bad.”

“She could say something to her family,” Steve suggested.

“She doesn’t talk with her family,” Yuri said. “Except for her brother. He’s the only one who cares about her.”

“So, suppose she says something revealing to her brother,” Curt said. “One way or the other, we can’t take the risk. Like we mentioned earlier she might have to go. Do you have a problem with that?”

Yuri shook his head and took a healthy swallow from his tumbler of vodka.

“Okay,” Curt said. “At least we agree on that. The problem is how do we do it without calling attention. I assume she’d be missed if she were just to disappear.”

“She’d be missed at work,” Yuri agreed. “She’s a taxi dispatcher.”

“The key point is that we have to do it so that the police are not involved,” Curt said. “Does she have any medical problems?”

“Something besides obesity,” Steve added.

Yuri shook his head. “She’s pretty healthy.”