march toward it, searching the path, searching the rocks beneath the esplanade for any sign of human movement. Another figure becomes visible, walking toward us, but it’s only a man with a large, shaggy dog of some mountain breed, I don’t know what. The dog takes a lunge at us as we pass each other, and the man hauls on the leash and doesn’t say a word. There’s the pier, just beyond, empty except for the spray kicking up on all sides. The pretty gazebo at the end, painted in green and white stripes, looks like it might blow away like an umbrella. I am swallowing back panic, clenching my teeth with the effort of keeping myself from shaking to pieces. Over and over, I think, It can’t end like this, he can’t have gone this far and then drowned almost within sight of us.
“Maybe we missed them,” Margaret says.
“Not if they were here, we didn’t.”
“Let’s double back and make another pass.”
I stare another second or two at the pier and start to turn. Margaret tugs on my arm. “Wait a moment,” she whispers.
She squints at the pier, or rather beneath the pier, near the place where the stairs disappear into the rocky base of the esplanade. I follow her gaze. Hold myself still, or so near to still as you can hold yourself when you’re trembling as I’m trembling, when you’re as godawful frightened as I am in that moment.
And then. Something moves.
I make a little cry and dart forward. Margaret’s behind me. We trip down the steps to find a hollow cut into the stone, beneath the wooden pier, in which a man and a woman huddle together, and the man is inspecting the woman’s leg, her ankle. He hears us and looks up, and my heart slams in my throat when I see it’s the wrong man, his hair is dark and wet, his features all wrong.
“Stefan?”
“She came down hard when we landed,” he says, in French. “The ankle’s twisted. She can’t get up the stairs.”
I look down into the face of a woman I’ve never seen, blond, irritated, built like a draft horse. “Ursula?”
“Shh! Get me up.”
Margaret calls down. “Patrol!”
“What about Benedict? What about Benedict?” I cry.
Stefan says, “There was nobody else. Just her.”
I put my arm around Ursula’s ribs and haul her upright, not without effort. Thick bones, thick muscle. She grunts in pain.
“All right?” says Stefan.
“Stay there!” I hiss. “I’ll lead them away!”
And I don’t know how the devil I do it. I guess that kind of necessary strength just arrives in your sinews when you need it. I lift Ursula up those steps somehow, lift her to the esplanade where the guards now run toward us.
“Hilfe!” I scream, in German.
Margaret swoops in to take the weight of Ursula’s limp body. “Help!” she screams. “She’s fallen into the lake!”
In the hotel, we take Ursula upstairs in the elevator. The attendant looks at us strangely, wet and seething as we are, almost bursting. “Fifth floor,” he says dully. He stops the elevator, opens the grille and then the door. We step out, supporting Ursula on each side. At the door, I fumble with the key, drop it, attempt to bend. My mind has gone numb, my fingers and my heart have gone numb.
“I’ll get it,” snaps Margaret. She leans down and snatches up the key, opens the door. We stagger through and ease Ursula on the bed. She’s shivering, nearly blue. I pull the blanket from my bed and wrap it around her.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I say, in French.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“When?”
“At Colditz, a month ago.”
I sink to the rug.
Margaret takes Ursula by the shoulders and screams—first in English, then in French. “Then why are you here? You might have just sent a message. Look at her, my God. How could you get her hopes up?”
“Quiet!” Ursula says. “Listen to me!”
“How did he die?” Margaret yells.
“A fever, that’s what they told me. Listen to me! And then a woman—a woman—”
“My God, what’s the matter?” says Margaret.
I stare at the iron bedpost, the indentation in the rug. Ursula’s brown, wet shoe before my face. She’s sobbing a little in her chest, this woman who’s a hardened operative, for God’s sake, running an escape line through Germany, and I think, I’m the one who’s supposed to be crying. He’s my goddamned husband.
Somewhere above me, Ursula’s speaking. “A woman—a woman came to take possession of the body.”