“I must go.”

He was off the wall and seizing her arm before she had taken two paces.

“What’s the hurry?”

She tried to pull free, but his grip was firm, viselike, painful. She let out a small cry and attempted to twist away. The maneuver failed miserably, and she found herself trapped against him, her back pressed into his chest.

He clamped his free hand over her mouth. “Ssshhhh,” he soothed.

He spat the cigarette away and put his mouth to her ear.

“You want to know who I am? I’m the last living soul you’ll ever set eyes on.”

She didn’t need to know all of the words; she understood their meaning. And now she began to struggle in earnest, her thoughts turning to her home, her parents, her brothers, her dog, all so close, just a short way up the hill.

He repaid her efforts by twisting her left arm up behind her until something gave in her shoulder. The pain ripped through her, carrying her to the brink of unconsciousness, her knees starting to give. In desperation she tried to bite the hand gagging her cries, but he cupped his fingers away from her teeth. His other hand released her now-useless arm and jammed itself between her legs, into the fork of her thighs, pulling her back against him.

His breathing was strangely calm and measured, and there was something in the sound of it that suggested he was smiling.

DAY ONE

“TEA OR COFFEE?”

“Which do you recommend?”

“Well, the first tastes like dishwater, the second like slurry runoff.”

“I’ll try the slurry runoff.”

Max summoned the attention of the waiter hovering nearby. He was new—squat and toadlike—some member of the kitchen staff drafted in to replace Ugo, whose wife had been wounded in a strafing attack over the weekend while out strolling with friends near Rabat. Gratifyingly, the pilot of the Messerschmitt 109 had paid for this outrage with his life, a Spitfire from Ta’ Qali dropping onto his tail moments later and bringing him down in the drink off the Dingli Cliffs.