I got up and went to the window. Looking out at the street, I tried to imagine all those murdered Polish officers lying in a mass grave somewhere near Smolensk. I drained the last of the whiskey from my glass. In the moonlight the lawn in front of my house was the color of blood and the restless silver sky had a spectral look, as if death itself had its great white whale of an eye upon me. Not that it mattered much who killed you. The Germans or the Russians, the British or the Americans, your own side or the enemy. Once you were dead you were dead, and nothing, not even a presidential inquiry, could change that fact. But I was one of the lucky ones, and upstairs, life’s affirmative act beckoned my attendance.
I switched off the lights and went to find Diana.
II
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1943,BERLIN
Standing up, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, came around his huge marble-topped desk and crossed the thickly carpeted room to face the two men seated on an ornate Biedermeier salon set upholstered in striped green-and-white silk. On the table in front of them lay a pile of curling photographs, each the size of a magazine, each the facsimile of a document that had been removed, covertly, from the safe of the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. Von Ribbentrop sat down, and, trying to ignore the stalactite of rainwater dripping off the Maria Theresa crystal chandelier and collecting, noisily, in a metal bucket, he studied each picture, and then the swarthy-looking thug who had brought them to Berlin, with a show of weary disdain.