I dreamed of fat sausages and great barons of beef. Crown roasts of pork. Kids roasted whole on a spit. Meanwhile I grew gaunt and my skin shrank on my bones like leather left to dry in the sun. When the American forces liberated the camps they weighed us. God knows why. Most fat men claim to be large-boned. Doubtless some of them are. I have small bones, Bernard. I tipped the scales, as they say, at ninety-two pounds.

"I left Dachau clinging to one certainty. I was going to eat and grow fat. And then I discovered, to my considerable astonishment, that I had no interest in the meat and potatoes I had grown up on. That SS rifle butts had relieved me of my own teeth was only a partial explanation, for I had for meat itself a positive aversion-I could not eat a sausage without feeling I was biting into a plump Teutonic finger. And yet I had an appetite, a bottomless one, but it was a most selective and specific appetite. I wanted sugar. I craved sweetness. Is there anything half so satisfying as knowing precisely what one wishes and being able to obtain it? If I could afford it, Bernard, I would engage a live-in pastry cook and keep him occupied around the clock."

He'd had a piece of Linzer torte with his coffee and had offered us a choice of half a dozen decadently rich pastries, all of which we'd passed for the time being while we tended to our drinks.

"Ah, Bernard," he said now. "And the lovely Carolyn. It is so very good to see you both. But the night is growing old, isn't it? You have brought me something, Bernard?"

My attaché case was close at hand. I opened it and drew out a compact volume of Spinoza's Ethics, an English edition printed in London in 1707 and bound in blue calf. I passed it to Abel and he turned it over and over in his hands, stroking the smooth old leather with his long and slender fingers, studying the title page at some length, flipping through the pages.