mass of contradictions. As soon as I think I have it figured out, he throws me a curve.”

“A what?” Philip asked.

“Baseball terminology. You wouldn’t understand. Speak the Queen’s English to our foreign friend, Mia.”

“You’re the foreigners.”

Again they laughed.

“I’m serious!”

Philip started for me. “She wants to go bathing again.”

Ethan rose. “I’ll get her feet, you take her arms.”

“Stop it! You’re like two little boys! Don’t I have any say?”

Ethan folded his hands under his chin, leaning back in the chair. “I’d think my ideas would appeal to you.”

“Women always do the opposite of what you’d think,” Philip commented.

I glared at him and he mugged at me, putting a finger to his lips.

“It’s an impossible dream, Ethan.”

“Our very existence challenges the notion of impossibility.”

“Even if we could be cured of this thing, and give the best of it to humanity— who gets the gift?”

“Again I must chide you for your naivete. Nature decides who wins and who loses, not us. They’re not all worthy.”

“In your eyes I’m a princess, to Dirk what am I?”

“Dirk is an aberration.”

“Don’t you see? How far is it from you, or I, or Philip, and one like Dirk? Power in the wrong hands is more than regrettable— it’s indefensible. Power corrupts and each one of us has a monster lurking inside. I see nothing but evil if you tamper with this.”

Ethan wrapped his arms about my waist and drew me to him. “That’s why we won’t leave this to the others.”

“The child has pangs of conscience.”

I tore away. “He’s murdered my conscience. There’s nothing left but doubts, second guesses, and philosophies I don’t understand.”

“Strong words Ethan, you should heed her.”

“She’s not yet tapped her potential.”

I shivered. “As I child, I watched newsreels of corpses bulldozed into pits of lime, and why? Because someone decided he was more worthy of life than his fellow men, and infected others with this disease.”

Philip stood up, stretching his long body. “I grow weary of this philosophical and ethical carousel, and beg to be let off before my poor head aches. My advice Ethan is to enjoy her— or I’ll spirit this Psyche off to young Eros, leaving you to brood in silence.”

“She’d never fall for that.”

“You don’t understand women, Ethan.”

Ethan smirked. “No one understands women like I do.”

“Someone needs to teach you humility, and high time.” Philip put his arm about my waist. “Come Mia, let’s dance the night away to the strains of the phonograph and leave poor Byron here to figure out what we already know.”

“And what pray tell would that be?”

He danced me around the terrace madly. “How to live, my pet!”

NINE

* * * *

“Ethan’s bizarre plans for me left me uneasy. I only hoped it was a passing whim and he’d get over it, but somehow I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t bring it up again for the remainder of Philip’s visit. I could only wonder what Brovik would do when he learned.

Philip was just the sort of distraction I needed from Ethan’s constant lessons. He kept us out all night, dancing and haunting nightspots. But I never had a chance to speak with him alone until Ethan was forced to pay a courtesy call on Gaius one early October evening.

“Come to Capri with me,” Ethan urged Philip, as he checked out his appearance in the drawing room mirror.

“I must beg off. I’d much rather stay here with Mia. Gaius’s chamber of horrors holds no charms for me. And those two succubae he keeps— no thank you. I prefer to remain intact.”

“Very well. Behave yourself.”

“I’ll be a good uncle.”

Philip and I went out onto the terrace as Ethan pulled away from the dock in our boat. The garden still dripped with roses, but the air was crisp and cool, with the scent of iron and sugar from the distant slopes of Vesuvius, and the ripened grapes growing there.

“Philip… about Brovik.”

Philip took me by the shoulders, dark eyes fixed on mine. “You’re caught in the middle of a battle that’s been raging for a century. It runs hot and cold with them. Right now is one very cold spell.”

“Yet he still works for him?”

“Brovik looks out for us and we pay tribute to him. It’s the way things are done. It started when Brovik took Kurt… ”

“Kurt?”

“He was just eighteen when Brovik found him. His entire family was transported to Auschwitz to be gassed, but he’d been sent instead to Dauchau to work. One night Brovik was there, doing business with the commandant, when the boy was dragged