How could he have known, he asked himself. He could barely understand the science and wasn’t interested in the politics. But he could understand, and was interested in, things that, even as he looked out at the sea from a window table in the Right Plaice, were already beginning to change his memory of her.

Halle was in what used to be East Germany. There had been a state recruiting scheme. Girls were picked out when they were as young as eleven — only four years older than that chubby little girl in the photograph. Vernon tried to put together her probable life. Her parents signing a consent form, perhaps a secrecy form as well. Andrea enrolled in the Child and Youth Sports School, then in the Dynamo Sports Club in East Berlin. She had some school lessons, but was mostly trained to swim and swim. It was a great honor to be a member of the Dynamo: that was why she’d had to leave home. Blood was taken from her earlobe to test how fit she was. There were pink pills and blue pills. Vitamins, she was told. Later, there were injections — just more vitamins. Except that they were anabolic steroids and testosterone. It was forbidden to refuse. The training motto was “You eat the pills or you die.” The coaches made sure she swallowed them.

She didn’t die. Other things happened instead. Muscles grew, but tendons didn’t, so tendons snapped. There were sudden bursts of acne, a deepening of the voice, an increase of hair on the face and body; sometimes the pubic hair grew up over the stomach, even above the navel. There was retarded growth and problems with fertility. Vernon had to look up terms like “virilization” and “clitoris hypertrophy,” then wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need to look up heart disease, liver disease, ovarian cysts, deformed children, blind children.