Tommy watched the game for a moment, up until the point the mouse made its futile break, then he hurried on as the game dissolved into loud laughter and counterfeit arguments.

When he arrived at the door to the bunk room, he saw there was a third man sitting in the room alongside Pryce and Renaday, who looked up quickly as Tommy entered. The stranger was a dark-haired but fair-complected young man, very thin, like Pryce, with narrow wrists and a sunken chest, which gave him an oddly birdlike appearance behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. His smile was cocked slightly to the left, almost as if his entire body were leaning in that direction.

All three men rose, as Tommy stepped forward.

"Tommy, this is a friend of mine," Hugh said briskly.

"Colin Sullivan. From the Emerald Isle."

Tommy shook hands.

"Irish?" he asked.

"I am, indeed," Sullivan replied.

"Irish and Spitfires," he added. Tommy had difficulty imagining the slight young man wrestling with the controls of a fighter plane, but did not say this out loud.

"Colin most generously has offered to help out," Phillip Pryce said.

"Show him, my boy."

The Irishman reached down and Tommy saw that he had a large sketch pad half-stuck under the bed.

"Actually," Sullivan said to Tommy, "Irish, Spitfires, and three boring years at the London School of Design before getting involved in all the patriotic foolishness that seems to have landed me here."

Sullivan opened the sketch pad, and handed Tommy the first drawing. It was a dark vision of Trader Vic's body, stuffed into the Abort stall, rendered mainly in the gradations of gray created by a charcoal pencil.

"I had to work with Hugh's recollections," Sullivan said, smiling.

"And surely you know that the Canadians, being a hairy and rough-hewn people as wild as Indians and with the imaginations of buffalo, have no natural gifts for the poetry of description, like my countrymen and myself," he said, tossing a quick smile at a grimacing, but obviously pleased, Hugh Renaday.

"So it's the very best I could do, allowing for my limited resources…"

Tommy thought the sketch caught the murdered man's figure perfectly. It was both nightmarish and brutal, in the same space. Sullivan had used some precious paints to display the modest blood streaks on the American's body. They stood out sharply, in dramatic contrast to the darker, somber tones of the pencil's shadings.

"This is fantastic," Tommy said.

"That's exactly what Vic looked like. Are there more?"

"Aye, absolutely," Sullivan said, with a quick grin.

"Not precisely what my old life-drawing professor probably had in mind back in my school days, but he did always rather tediously lecture us to employ that which is at hand, and though I might prefer some naked fraulein posing provocatively with a thank-you-very-much smile…"

He handed a second drawing to Tommy. This showed the critical neck wound on Trader Vic's body.

"I worked with him on that one," Hugh said.

"Now what we'll need to do is take it and show it to the Yank who examined the body, just to make certain it's accurate."

Tommy flipped to another sketch, this a drawing of the interior of the Abort displaying distances and locations. An ornate, feathered arrow pointed toward the bloody footprint on the floor. A final sketch was a redoing of the tracing of the boot print that Hugh had done on the scene.

"A damn sight better than my clumsy efforts," Renaday said, grinning.

"Like usual, all this was Phillip's idea. He knew Colin was my friend, but of course, I hadn't thought of putting him on the case."

"It was fun," Colin Sullivan said.

"Far more intriguing than yet another bloody drawing of the northeast guard tower.

That's the one that gets the best afternoon light, you know, and the one we in the camp art classes all dutifully troop out and draw every day that it's not raining."

"I'm impressed," Tommy said.

"These will help. I can't thank you enough."

Sullivan shrugged.

"Back home in Belfast," he said, now speaking slowly, "well, let me put it to you this way, Mr. Hart: I'm Irish and I'm a Catholic, and that fact alone should tell you that I've been treated like a nigger probably every bit as often as your Lincoln Scott has been in the

States. So, there you have it. I'm more than pleased to help out."

Tommy was slightly taken aback by the forcefulness of the slight

Irishman's sudden vehemence.

"These are excellent," he said again. He was about to continue with praise, when he was interrupted by a cold and quiet voice from behind him.

"But there is an error," the voice said.

The Allied fliers pivoted, and saw Hauptmann Heinrich Visser standing in the doorway, staring across the room directly at the drawing in

Tommy's hands.

None of the three men responded, letting silence swirl through the small space, filling the room like a bad scent on a weak wind. Visser stepped forward, still regarding the drawing with a studious and intent look. In his only hand, he carried a small, brown leather portfolio, which he set down on the floor at his feet, as he leaned forward and jabbed an index finger at the drawing that mapped the scene.

"Right here," he said, turning to Renaday and Sullivan.

"This is mistaken. The boot print was another few feet over, closer to the Abort stall. I measured this distance myself."

Sullivan nodded.

"I can make that change," he said in an even voice.

"Yes, make that change, flying officer," Visser said, lifting his eyes from the drawing, and staring narrow and hard at Sullivan.

"A Spitfire pilot, you said."

"Yes."

Visser coughed once.

"A Spitfire is an excellent machine.

Quite a match even for a 109."

"That is true," Sullivan said.

"The Hauptmann has personal experience with Spitfires, I would imagine." The Irishman then pointed directly at the German officer's missing arm.

"Not the best of experiences, too, I'll wager," Sullivan added coldly.

Visser nodded. He did not reply, but his face had paled slightly and Tommy saw his upper lip quiver.

Sullivan took a deep breath, which did nothing to change his own slight and sallow appearance.

"I am sorry for your wound, Hauptmann," he said, his voice taking on even thicker inflections and accents from his native country.

"But I think that you are among the truly fortunate. None of the men piloting 109s that I shot down ever managed to bail out. They are all up in Valhalla, or wherever it is that you Nazis think you go when you pull a cropper for the fatherland."

The words from the Irishman were like blows in the small room. The German straightened his shoulders as he stared at the young artist with unbridled anger. But his voice did not betray the rage that the Hauptmann must have felt, for his words remained even, icy, and flat.

"This is perhaps true, Mr. Sullivan." Visser spoke slowly.

"But still, you are here in Stalag Luft Thirteen. And no one knows for certain whether you will ever see the streets of Belfast again, do they?"

Sullivan did not answer. The two men eyed each other hard, without compromise, and then Visser turned back to the drawing and said, "And there is another detail that you have gotten wrong in the drawing, Mr. Sullivan…"

The German pivoted slightly, looking at Tommy Hart.

"The boot print It was facing the other direction."

Visser took his finger and pointed down at the sketch.

"It was heading in this direction."

He motioned toward the back of the Abort to where the body was discovered.

"This," Visser continued, coldly, "I think you will find, is an important fact."

Again, none of the Allied fliers spoke. And in this second silence, Visser turned again, so that now he was facing Phillip Pryce.