She sauteed squid in olive oil for supper, a meal the Romans would also have enjoyed. Then she went through the papers as fast as she could. As usual, Dieter Kuhn’s-he went by the name of Laforce in her classes-was very good. She snarled something under her breath. He never gave her any excuse to fail him, or even to give him less than a superior mark.

After recording the grades, she got out her photographs and photostats and copies of drawings made and published by classicists over the previous three centuries. If she ever finished her monograph on Isis-worship in this part of the world during Roman times, she could publish it without too much fear. Unlike remarks on Romano-German relations, the cult of Isis held few modern political overtones.

At about eleven, her yawns made her realize she wouldn’t get anything more done that night. She put away the inscriptions and her notes, got into a nightgown, and went to bed. She’d sometimes thought her life would be easier had Dieter Kuhn wanted nothing more than her body. Even so, she was delighted to sleep alone.

The peremptory knock on her door came, in the best cinematic style, a few minutes past midnight.

Too logy with sleep to be as frightened as she should, she staggered out of bed and went to the door. “Go away,” she said, as she had to the Lizard. “You damned drunk, you’re trying to get into the wrong apartment.”

“You will open at once, in the name of the Security Service of the Greater German Reich,” a cold voice from the hall replied. After that, she wasn’t sleepy any more, and was as frightened as anyone could reasonably have expected her to be.

Numbly, she opened the door. One of the Germans standing in the hall aimed a pistol at her. Another one shone a bright flashlight in her face. Two more stepped forward and grabbed her by the arms. They hustled her down the stairs and into their waiting van. She hoped they’d closed the door after her, but didn’t get the chance to look back and see. If they hadn’t, her apartment would be picked clean by the time she got back.



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