of Etzenhausen. There, on a desolate hill known at the Leitenberg, was a graveyard, lonely and utterly deserted. They got out of the car, walked past the stone stela with the sculpted Star of David. The stone was scarred, furry with blue lichen; the overhanging firs and hemlocks blocked out the sky even on such a bright midwinter afternoon.
As they walked slowly among the gravestones, she said, "This is the KZ-Friedhof, the concentration camp cemetery. Through most of Dachau's life, the corpses of the Jews were piled up and burned in ovens, but toward the end when the camp ran out of coal, the Nazis had to do something with the corpses, so they brought them up here." She spread her arms wide. "This is all the memorial the Jewish victims got."
Bourne had been in many cemeteries before, and had found them peculiarly peaceful. Not KZ-Friedhof, where a sensation of constant movement, ceaseless murmuring made his skin crawl. The place was alive, howling in its restless silence. He paused, squatted down, and ran his fingertips over the words engraved on a headstone. They were so eroded it was impossible to read them.
"Did you ever think that the man you shot today might have been a Jew?" he said.
She turned on him sharply. "I told you I needed the money. I did it out of necessity."
Bourne looked around them. "That's what the Nazis said when they buried their last victims here."
A flash of anger momentarily burned away the sadness in her eyes. "I hate you."
"Not nearly as much as you hate yourself." He rose, handed her back her gun. "Here, why don't you shoot yourself and end it all?"
She took the gun, aimed it at him. "Why don't I just shoot you?"
"Killing me will only make matters worse for you. Besides..." Bourne opened up one palm to show her the bullets he'd taken out of her weapon.
With a disgusted sound, Petra holstered her gun. Her face and hands looked greenish in what light filtered through the evergreens.
"You can make amends for what you did today," Bourne said. "Tell me who hired you."
Petra eyed him skeptically. "I won't give you the money, if that's what you're angling for."
"I have no interest in your money," Bourne said. "But I think the man you shot was going to tell me something I needed to know. I suspect that's why you were hired to kill him."
Some of the skepticism leached out of her face. "Really?"
Bourne nodded.
"I didn't want to kill him," she said. "You understand that."
"You walked up to him, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger."
Petra looked away, at nothing in particular. "I don't want to think about it."
"Then you're no better than anyone else in Dachau."
Tears spilled over, she covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. The sounds she made were like those Bourne had heard on Leitenberg.
At length, Petra's crying jag was spent. Wiping her reddened eyes with the backs of her hands, she said, "I wanted to be a poet, you know? I always equated being a poet with being a revolutionary. I, a German, wanted to change the world or, at least, do something to change the way the world saw us, to do something to scoop that core of guilt out of us."
"You should have become an exorcist."
It was a joke, but such was her mood that she found nothing funny in it. "That would be perfect, wouldn't it?" She looked at him with eyes still filled with tears. "Is it so naive to want to change the world?"
"Impractical might be a better word."
She cocked her head. "You're a cynic, aren't you?" When he didn't answer, she went on. "I don't think it's naive to believe that words-that what you write-can change things."
"Why aren't you writing then," he said, "instead of shooting people for money? That's no way to earn a living."
She was silent for so long, he wondered whether she'd heard him.
At last, she said, "Fuck it, I was hired by a man named Spangler Wald-he's just past being a boy, really, no more than twenty-one or two. I'd seen him around the pubs; we had coffee together once or twice. He said he was attending the university, majoring in entropic economics, whatever that is."
"I don't think anyone can major in entropic economics," Bourne said.
"Figures." Petra was still sniffling. "I have to get my bullshit meter recalibrated." She shrugged. "I never was good with people; I'm better off communing with the dead."