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die, to know what it is like to really love somebody.
    He thought about Abrams, quintessentially correct and remote. THta will be me in a few years, if I survive this war. Is that what I want to look like in ten years?
    He thought about Daniela, how she had kissed him in the trasura , felt a stab of guilt for thinking of another woman while his wife lay sleeping beside him.
    At last he saw a leeching of light through the curtains. Almost dawn.
    There had never been a new day when life had seemed so precious, when there had been less time to waste. He hated his life, his secrets, and his detachment from his own longings; once he had calculated the course of his life to the fraction of a degree, but he realized now that he no longer knew his true north.
     
     
     

CHAPTER 10
     
    Everyone in Bucharest was a spy; and if they weren’t spies, they were diplomats and military attachés who wanted everyone to think they were. There were British and French oil engineers on their way out of the country, and German and Italian oil men on their way in; there were mink-wrapped Austrian blondes in the pay of the Gestapo hoping to seduce information from the Romanians, and Romanian girls on the arm of German Legation staff for the same reason.
    The Germans had set up a propaganda office downtown, the German Bureau. For months there had been a map of France in the window showing the pincer arrows of the Wehrmacht advance, its claws converging on Paris. They had now replaced it with a map of the British Isles, its major cities ringed with flame.
    I should be in England, Nick thought. In London they’ll be crowding into tube stations and bomb shelters, while the Luftwaffe turns the city to rubble.
    These bastards are dropping bombs on my sons.
    So long since he had seen the boys; in normal times they would have come out to join them for the summer holidays, but that was not possible now. There were soldiers fighting in Burma and the Malay peninsula who had not seen their families for perhaps as long, but at least they knew what they were doing and why. He was stuck here waging a phony war it seemed no-one in Whitehall wanted him to fight.
    He hurried across the square to the Athenee Palace. The hotel was as much a landmark of the city as the King’s palace; it had been styled after the Maurice and Ritz hotels of Paris, though the original caryatides and turrets had been removed. The façade had faded to a dirty yellow over the years and the shutters painted a bright blue, with unerring tastelessness.
    The statue of Carol I, astride a bronze horse, gestured heroically towards his descendant’s palace on the other side of the square.
    He ran the gauntlet of the beggars camped outside the hotel, most of them professionals, blinded or maimed by their parents in infancy. Opaque eyeballs and stumps were thrust into his face in the manner of street hawkers trying to tempt him with homemade pies.
    ‘ Mi-e foame, foame, foame . . . ’
    But the heat had even dissipated their energies and they did not pursue him with their usual enthusiasm. He pushed gratefully through the revolving door into the cool of the foyer.
    It was gloomy inside even on the brightest summer day and the three rows of paired yellow marble pillars gave the hotel the appearance of a cathedral. The rust-coloured marble walls and the Bordeaux-red carpets added to the wintry atmosphere. The only light came from the electric chandeliers.
    Everyone who worked in the hotel also worked for Moruzov’s secret police; the valets, the porters, the woman in the white apron in the lavatory, even the pink-cheeked pageboys with their little monkey caps strapped around their chins. You went there in the evening and by next morning someone in the palace across the square would know who you dined with and where, what you ate, when you got back to the hotel and who you slept with.
    Nick knew who worked for whom, that was his job: the bearded tobacco merchant in the corner reading a Greek