“That was before. I can’t help it. I’m modest.” She met his eyes, then started to laugh, a bed laugh, intimate as touch. She turned on her side. “How can you joke?”

He fell down next to her. “It’s supposed to be fun.”

She put her hand along the side of his face. “Fun for you,” she said, but smiling because the sex was playful, part of their other excitement, getting away with something.

The early days, before the guilt.

He walked toward a small pathway in the debris. Maybe someone was still living in the cellar. But the path led nowhere. There was nothing but rubble and the cloying smell. Whose body? A stick with a piece of paper was wedged in the broken bits of plaster like a grave marker. He bent down to read it. Frau Dzuris, the fat woman on the ground floor, evidently still alive, had moved. A street he didn’t recognize in Wilmersdorf. Frau Dzuris is now residing — the quaint, formal language of a receiving card. He took out his notebook and jotted down the address. A nice woman, fond of poppyseed cakes, whose son worked at Siemens and came to lunch every Sunday. The things you remember. He turned back to the jeep.

“Nobody home?” Ron said.

Jake stopped, then let it go and shook his head. “Not here, anyway.” But somewhere. “How do they find anybody? With all this?”

Ron shrugged. “Bush telegraph. Ask the neighbors.” Jake looked at the empty street. “Or message boards. You see them at the corners. ‘Request information on the whereabouts of-you know, like a Miss Lonelyhearts club.” He caught Jake’s expression. “I don’t know,” he said, still airy. “They do, though, somehow. If they’re alive.”

An awkward silence. Liz, who’d been watching Jake, turned to Ron. “Your mother raise you or did you just get this way by yourself?”

“Sorry,” he said to Jake. “I didn’t mean-”

“Skip it,” Jake said wearily.

“Is this what you wanted to see? It’s getting late.”