"It's going to be chilly and wet tonight. I thought I'd change before I went back to the bank. You can take my clothes off for me, Louise. You can undress me."

"Oh, Demps," she whispered. "I love you so."

It was the first time either of them had mentioned the word. He lowered himself slowly down on top of her.

"And I love you," he said softly in her ear.

She rolled him over and unbuttoned his vest, took off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt as he removed her blouse. She toyed with the hair on his chest then kissed his nipples, her tongue circling first one, then moving to the other. He unbuttoned her skirt at the back and when it was loose, slid his hand down the front of it, feeling her cotton panties, then her hair.

"Oh God, yes," she said. He moved his hand lower, felt her grow hard under his touch, began stroking her, lubricating her with her own juices. Finally he put his other hand under the band of the skirt and slipped it off. She unbuttoned his fly and her movements were frantic, her breathing quickening as she tugged at his trousers, then reached up and pulled off his shirt. When they were naked they lay on their sides facing each other, each stroking the other and finally she rolled on top of him, rose up on her arms, squirming until he slipped inside her. She sighed, rising up and down on him, slowly at first, then faster.

"Oh yes," she said, "it comes so quickly now. So easy. Oh . . . faster, faster . . . God, faster . . ."

Her own passion stimulated his climax. He could feel her tightening on him and he reached up and began stroking her shoulders. Her moves grew faster and faster and her words began to blur together and then suddenly she cried out and as she did, he came too. Thrusting deep into her, he moved one hand quickly under her chin and the other to the back of her head and with one hard snap of his wrists, he broke her neck.

Her cry of joy turned to a gasp. The sound of her spine snapping drowned out her cries. Her mouth fell open and she stared down at him in horror and disbelief for just an instant before her bulging eyes went dead. She fell forward on top of him.

He rolled her off on her back and lay for two or three minutes taking deep breaths. His heart was pounding so hard it felt like it would break his ribs. Finally he turned on his side, his back to her, and rising up on one elbow, reached for his cigarette makings.

The phone interrupted his smoke. The phone was on the wall in the kitchen. He wrapped a towel around his waist and took the stairs two at a time.

"Fred, Ben here. Did Weezie come by?"

"She's here now. She's pretty upset, Ben."

"Everybody in town is. Poor Liz Oglesby is in shock. Doc's with her now. Reason I'm calling, the FBI called back. Weather's given them fits. Better make the meeting for seven-thirty. I'll call everybody else."

"Fine. Listen, I might drive Louise over to Shorty's Steak House in Delphi, get her mind off things. We've got plenty of time."

"Good idea," he said. "You always seem to know just the right thing to do, Fred. Don't know what we'd do without you."

"Well, it's a terrible time, Ben, terrible."

"Sure is. I'll have Mrs. Ramsey come over and keep an eye on the boy till after the meeting."

"Good. See you at seven-thirty then."

He went back upstairs, finished rolling the cigarette and lay on his back beside the body of Louise Scoby, smoking. Then almost as an afterthought, he reached over and with a thumb and forefinger closed her eyes.

When he finished his cigarette he went into the bathroom, shaved his mustache and took a shower, using heavy tar soap to wash the dye out of his hair. He towelled off, went back in the bedroom, opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and reaching back, pulled loose the dagger which was taped to the rear of the cabinet. He went back in the bathroom and fixed the Nazi weapon to his calf with adhesive tape. He went to the attic and retrieved the lockbox, emptied it of its contents: the cash, a new passport and birth certificate, bank books from the New York account. He parted his hair in the middle, sweeping it forward over the areas he had kept shaved to add to his age. He put the cash in an envelope and taped it to his stomach. Then he methodically checked every inch of the house. There was nothing else he needed, nothing to reveal his real identity.

He dressed in long johns, cord pants, a heavy sweatshirt and the flannel shirt over it and got his rain slicker. He went back to the bedroom, dressed Louise Scoby's corpse, carried it down to the car and put it in the trunk with the empty lockbox.

Heavy clouds and rain brought darkness early that Friday. Dempsey parked under a bay of trees near the park. The body of Louise Scoby was propped behind the steering wheel, the stiffened fingers of one hand wrapped around the steering wheel, the other arm resting on the seat. He had pried open that hand and wrapped the fingers around the suit coat he was wearing during the robbery. He had torn the sleeve at the shoulder so it would appear that his body had literally been torn from her grasp. When he was sure nobody was watching, he threw the heavy lockbox and glasses into the river. He checked his watch: five forty-five.

It was time. He started the car and sitting close to the body, he shifted into low and pulled out onto Highway 25. There were no cars in sight. He drove toward the bridge over the river. Just before the bridge there was a steep embankment that dropped straightaway into the raging river. He picked up speed until he was fifty feet from the bank. Then he slammed on the brakes and twisted the wheel. The car skidded onto the shoulder, veered back on the road, leaving heavy black skid marks. Then he steered the car toward the embankment, braking it down to ten miles per hour, opened his door, and as the car rumbled onto the shoulder above the river, he jammed his foot on the gas and dove out of the car door.

He rolled as he hit the muddy shoulder of the road, felt the elbow of his jacket tear out and the sharp sting of pebbles burning the skin. As he rolled over on his back, he jammed both heels into the mud and slid to a stop.

The thrust of gas was enough to send the Buick over the bank. It rolled on its side, rocks and small trees tearing at fenders and doors, then hit the bottom of the bank, hung for a moment, and slipped front end first into the turbulent stream. The racing river carried it downstream, bobbing like a fishing cork, and then it twisted a half turn and vanished under the broiling, muddy water.

Dempsey jumped to his feet and swiftly erased his muddy tracks with his hands. He ran back to the train tracks and trotted toward the railroad bridge. The six o'clock freight would slow down as it crossed the span into the west end of town, a perfect place to jump aboard. When he got to the bridge he ducked down beneath the ties and waited. The train was five minutes late. It slowed down as it always did and headed over the bridge. As it rumbled overhead, the engineer blew a single, mournful blast on his whistle. Dempsey clambered up the bank and ran beside the train. He had to gauge his steps so his feet would land on the ties. He was gasping for breath as a boxcar clattered out of the darkness behind him, its door half open. As it passed, he reached inside, feeling desperately for something to grab hold of. As he did, his foot slipped on the wet ties. He gave one desperate shove with his other foot as he began to founder, grabbed the edge of the open door and twisted himself into the car.

BOOK THREE.

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. "

Joseph Conrad.

TWENTY-THREE.

Bert Rudman liked to write in a small reading room off the lobby of the Bristol Hotel, preferring it to his apartment, which was much too quiet and secluded, and his office, which was frenetic and intrusive. The room was subdued and quiet, its floor-to-ceiling brass lamps flared at the top and mounted against the walls, casting soft indirect light off the ceiling on scarlet-and-black-striped silk wallpaper. There were fringed lamps and brass ink wells on the half-dozen mahogany writing desks in the room. The sofas and chairs were leather and the people who sat in them usually whispered as they would in a library.

If he felt the urge for a drink, across the narrow lobby was the hotel bar, a subdued, intimate watering hole with a twenty-foot-long slate bar running the length of one wall, charcoal carpeting, glass-topped pedestal tables and deep-piled chairs. The bartender, Romey, played his favorite records on a Gramophone hidden in a storage closet, his eclectic taste ranging from opera and classics to the latest jazz recordings. Romey was perhaps the rudest bartender in Paris, greeting occasional musical requests from customers with a dour grunt, followed by "non. " He refused to indulge in casual conversation and muttered obscenities to himself when asked to make a drink he personally did not like. But if Romey was less than radiant he made up for it with phenomenal recall, remembering the drink preference of guests he sometimes had not seen for six months or longer.

For two years, Rudman had been keeping a daily journal of his activities, his viewpoints and impressions of the escalating crisis in Europe, a chronicle of his innermost thoughts and fears, an evaluation of the gathering storm.

On this night he was writing an essay about the elan of the French who seemed, on the surface, to ignore the threat to the north and east of them. After all, they had the Maginot Line, a string of vertical, concrete buttresses backed up by bunkers that stretched the entire length of the border. That, with the French Army, was supposed to hold back Hitler's Wehrmacht. Rudman thought it was a joke and had so stated in several of his columns, an observation which had hardly endeared him to the French government or the military.

Each night he sat in the writing room with a glass of absinthe and let his thoughts ramble, stretching his subjective viewpoint, adding unproven rumors and predictions on the future of the continent he could not use in his newspaper articles. He had been using the free time before going to work for the Times to update the journal, which he called Overture to Disaster, and trying to ignore a persistent inner voice that told him he was actually writing a book. Rudman was not ready yet to accept that responsibility as a reality.

The Bristol Hotel was a small but exclusive hotel catering to steady customers and celebrities who sought the kind of anonymity they would not find at the larger and more famous Ritz. Keegan always stayed at the Bristol. It was a comfortable hotel and because he was known there, he was treated especially well by the managers. The lobby was a long, narrow corridor leading to a small registration desk and an elevator, an open brass and ebony cage. The lobby was bracketed by the reading room on the left and the bar on the right. Keegan and Jenny always came by the reading room when they returned from their nightly forays in search of entertainment. That was Rudman's sign to quit for the night. They always had a nightcap together.

But tonight they were running late. As Rudman, tired of his own nitpicking rewriting, decided to have another drink, he looked up to see von Meister, the German Embassy attache, standing across the lobby in the doorway of the bar. Silhouetted by the back-lit glass shelves of liquor behind the bar, he was an intimidating figure, tall and erect, an almost satanic personification of the Third Reich. Von Meister was wearing a dark blue double-breasted suit instead of his uniform, yet Rudman still felt a sudden chill, as if he had walked past an open refrigerator.

"Bon soir, Monsieur Rudman," he said. Then, nodding at the journal, "Letting your imagination run rampant as usual?"

Rudman smiled. "I prefer to call it truth."

"Well, one man's truth is another man's lie, correct? I do not know who said that, certainly some astute poet."

"I'm sure," Rudman answered.

"I understand your American friend-what was his name again?" Rudman didn't answer and von Meister waved his hand, as if forgiving the silence. "Ah, yes. Keegan. I understand he is going to marry that German girl."

"That's the story going around."

"I hope they will be very happy," the German said without conviction.

"I'll tell them you care."

Again von Meister indicated Rudman's journal, this time with a faint smile.

"You hardly have an objective viewpoint," he said. "I thought that was the mark of a good journalist, objectivity."

"That what they taught you at Cambridge?"

"What they taught me at Cambridge is of little use to me. What I learned at Cambridge is that the British Empire is doomed. The strain is weak. Too much inbreeding."

"That's what you thought the last time you took them on and look what happened. You got your ass whipped."

The German's smile faded. The muscles in his jaw tightened.

"You know, it is a privilege for you to work in Germany. We grant you a visa and we can always rescind it. I would not forget that if I were you."

"I don't forget anything," Rudman said.

"How interesting," von Meister answered. "Neither do I."

"Christ, you're an educated man, von Meister. Can't you see what's happening to your country? Don't you have any conscience?"

Von Meister stared at him. "Hitler is my conscience," he said.

He turned to return to the bar. "Bon soir, " he said without turning back. "Give my regards to Herr Keegan and his Deutsche lady friend." He lifted his glass in a mock toast.

Rudman was deeply disturbed by the conversation. His mind was in a perpetual whirl, trying to sort out all the dichotomies of the German situation. He had spent fifteen years off and on in Germany and he thought he knew the people. But the reaction of Germans to the startling rise of Hitler from jailbird to absolute dictator of the country astounded him.

He turned back to his ledger and wrote: "How could the Germans let this happen? How could they simply give up freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom from search and seizure?

"The German people are virtually prisoners in their own country. They are choked by censorship and rampant police excesses. Their literacy and taste are controlled by creative illiterates. Goebbels and his henchmen, supported by religious opportunists, have stripped the libraries of the great books-Kipling, Mark Twain, Dante, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Freud, Proust, Thomas Mann, the list is endless-which they have deemed degenerate, and the museums of the depraved paintings of Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Gauguin, Degas and dozens more.

"How can they abide the destruction of the Constitution by judges who are political henchmen, who make their decisions, not on the basis of morality or justice, but simply to appease Hitler and his mob. Legalize sterilization? Legalize lobotomy? These men are judges! They legalize everything he does. My God, what crimes are justified in the name of Justice!

"How can a whole nation of basically decent people turn its collective face away from the wholesale robbery, assault and murder of Jews and political dissidents? Good God, these things are not subtle! It takes an effort to look the other way!

"How, indeed?

"Perhaps if we learn the answer to that question, we can prevent such a human tragedy from ever happening again.

"But I doubt that we will.

"We never seem to learn."

A few minutes later Keegan and Jenny came in with their arms wrapped around each other, laughing as usual. He closed the ledger.

"What was it tonight?" Rudman asked, gathering up his papers and putting them in a leather portfolio.

"Le Casino de Paris," she said, her words rushing together with excitement. "We saw the Dolly Sisters and the Duke of Windsor and Maurice Chevalier and, who was the fighter, Francis?"

"Jack Sharkey," he answered and rolled his eyes. "He's only the ex-heavyweight champion of the world."

"Another memorable night, eh?" Rudman asked.

"Oh yes," she said, wrapping her arms in Keegan's. "Every night is memorable."

TWENTY-FOUR.

The memory of Wilhelm Vierhaus's first day in school sometimes intruded on his thoughts without warning, subconsciously triggered by some real or imagined look or word. When that happened, Vierhaus was overwhelmed with awesome fury, made more terrifying by his cold control of his emotions. The object of that fury was always David Kravitz.

He had led a rather sheltered life until that day, his deformity accepted and ignored by family and friends. Although he was aware that the ugly lump of muscle on his shoulder made him different from others, he was not yet aware of how cruel children can be.

The initial offender was David Kravitz, whose family was rich and influential, and who was a kind of self-appointed class leader. It became quickly apparent to Kravitz, an excellent student, that Vierhaus represented a threat. The deformed boy was brilliant, quick to raise his hand in class, always prepared. So David Kravitz set out to demean and discredit Vierhaus, whom he called the "new boy with the mountain on his back." He implied that the deformity was really the result of some dark and horrible genetic secret, carefully guarded by the family. He had once spread the story that Vierhaus, actually an only child, had a sister who was so deformed she was kept in a closet. The other children quickly joined in the conspiracy.

Kravitz was the first person Vierhaus had truly hated and that hatred quickly spread to include all Jews. He reveled in the lies and rumors which the racists spread about them and when Vierhaus read Mein Kampf, its racial distortions had fired that hatred. It became his Talmud, his Bible, the Psalms that motivated him. Hitler was God, Jews were the Devil and blood was the holy water of life, to be purified, cleansed, Aryanized for the glory of the Third Reich. He was the perfect Nazi, an intelligent, dedicated man whose blind hatred had replaced moral conviction and whose racism was so vile it was akin to a perverted religious fanaticism in which humiliation, treachery, torture and murder were the rituals.

Vierhaus understood the irony of the fact that he depended so completely on Jews to carry out one of his most important assignments. And so he smiled as he watched through a slit in the door to his sitting room, as Herman Adler was ushered into his office. He checked his watch. He would let him wait for ten minutes. Ten minutes alone in that foreboding room with only paranoia for a companion, what a delicious thought.

Herman Adler sat on the edge of his chair with his satchel clutched against his chest as if he were afraid it would fly away. The room was dark except for two overhead lights, one beaming down on the desk, the other on Adler. The top of the oak desk was empty except for a writing blotter, a telephone and an ashtray. The rest of the office was dark but before Adler's eyes became accustomed to the deep shadows, the door opened and Vierhaus entered the room, walking with a kind of shuffling gait, trying to minimize the hump on his back. He did not look at Adler. He sat down at his desk, slipped on a pair of glasses, opened a drawer and removed a file folder. He took out a pocket watch and put it on the desk, opened the folder and leafed through the contents, stopping occasionally to read something, nodding and murmuring approval to himself as he scanned the contents.

Finally he lit a cigarette and settled back in his chair. His flinty eyes fixed on Adler, who remained seated on the edge of his chair clutching the satchel.

"So . . . may I call you Herman?" he said pleasantly.

"Oh, yes sir, please do."

"You may call me Professor," he said, looking back at the file.

"Thank you, Herr Professor."

"You have been remarkably successful working in our Genealogy Program, Herman. I have been wanting to meet you personally but . . . these are busy times."

"Of course, Herr Professor."

Vierhaus had learned that the more one did, the more Hitler demanded. First it had been the intelligence unit, then the Black Lily and now this Genealogy Program. He was determined to make the experiment work. While Himmler and Heydrich were busy with the major problem of dealing with the Jews, Vierhaus was quietly performing his own service with mixed-blood subjects, half, quarter, and one-eighth Jews. It was difficult to ferret them out. Adler had turned out to be an invaluable ally in this project.

"I see we share a mutual interest in opera," he said without looking up. He was not in the slightest interested in Adler's love of opera; he simply wanted the Jew to know that the SS knew everything about him.

"Yes, it is my first love. When my wife was alive we would take all our holidays in Italy. We went to La Scala every night."

"How nice. Well, as I was saying, yours is a most impressive record."

"Thank you," Adler answered, his head bobbing nervously.

"What is it now, twelve, thirteen families?"