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yevrey meant Jewish.
    The Rabbit sat on his bench and wondered about the document under his shirt. He did not fully comprehend the meaning of phrases like “total extermination” or “utter annihilation.” The words were too long for him, but he did not think they were good words. He could not understand why Mr. Komarov should want to do that to people like Mrs. Davidova.
    There was a hint of pink in the east. In a big mansion across the river on Sofiskaya Quay a Royal Marine took a flag and began to climb the stairs toward the roof.
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    THE skipper took his daiquiri, rose from the table, and wandered to the wood rail. He looked down at the water, then up across the darkening harbor.
    Forty-nine, he thought, forty-nine and still in hock to the company store. Jason Monk, you’re getting old and past it.
    He took a swig and felt the lime and rum hit the spot.
    What the hell, it’s been a pretty good life. Eventful, anyway.
    It had not started that way. It started in a humble timber-frame house in the tiny town of Crozet in south-central Virginia, just east of the Shenandoah, five miles off the highway from Waynesboro to Charlottesville.
    Albemarle County is farming country, steeped in memorials of the War Between the States, for eighty percent of that war was fought in Virginia and no Virginian ever forgets’ it. At the local county grade school most of his schoolmates had fathers who raised tobacco, soybeans, or hogs, or all three.
    Jason Monk’s father, by contrast, was a forest ranger working in the Shenandoah National Park. No one ever became a millionaire working for the Forestry Service, but it was a good life for a boy, even if dollars were short. Vacations were not for lazing around but for finding opportunities to do extra work to make some money and help out in the home.
    He recalled how his father would take him as a child up into the park that covered the Blue Ridge Mountains to show him the difference between spruce, birch, fir, oak, and loblolly pine. Sometimes they would meet the game wardens and he would listen round-eyed to their tales of black bear and deer, and their hunts for turkey, grouse, and wild pheasant.
    Later he learned to use a gun with unerring accuracy, to track and trail, make camp and hide all traces in the morning, and when he was big and strong enough he got vacation work in the logging camps.
    He attended the county grade school from age five until twelve, and just after his thirteenth birthday enrolled at County High in Charlottesville, rising every morning before dawn to commute from Crozet to the city. It was at the high school that something was to happen that would change his life.
    Back in 1944 a certain GI sergeant had, with thousands of others, hauled himself off Omaha Beach and struck into the hinterland of Normandy. Somewhere outside Saint-Lo, separated from his unit, he had come into the sights of a German sniper. He was lucky; the bullet grazed his upper arm. The twenty-three-year-old American crawled into a nearby farmhouse where the family tended his wound and gave him shelter. When the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house put the cold compress on his wound and he looked into her eyes, he knew he had been struck harder than any German bullet would ever do.
    A year later he returned from Berlin to Normandy, proposed, and married her in the orchard of her father’s farm with a U.S. Army chaplain officiating. Later, because the French do not marry in orchards, the local Catholic priest did the same in the village church. Then he brought his bride back to Virginia.
    Twenty years later he was deputy principal of Charlottesville County High, and his wife, with their children off their hands, suggested she might teach French there. Mrs. Josephine Brady was pretty and glamorous and French, so her classes quickly became very sought after.
    In the fall of 1965 there was a newcomer in her first-year class, a rather shy youth with an untidy shock of blond hair and a fetching