So while others sketched or learned lines and hammed it up on stage.

Tommy Hart had studied. He'd envisioned every course in his final year, and had replicated each. He wrote mock papers, submitted mock arguments and legal documents, debated both sides of every point and issue that he could find, creating persuasive claims to buttress either side's position on every fake dispute he could imagine.

And while others planned escape and dreamed of freedom, Tommy learned the law.

Once a week, on Friday mornings, he would bribe one of the Fritzes with a couple of cigarettes to take him to the British compound, where he would be greeted by Wing Commander Phillip Pryce and Flying Officer Hugh Renaday.

Pryce was beyond middle age, one of the oldest men in both camps, white-haired, sallow-chested, and thin, with a reedy voice and flaccid skin that seemed to hang from his arms. He always seemed to be struggling, red-nosed and sniffling, with a cold or a virus that threatened to turn into pneumonia, regardless of what the weather was.

Before the war Pryce had been a prominent London barrister, a member of an ancient and venerated set of chambers.

His Stalag Luft Thirteen roommate, Hugh Renaday, was half his age, only a year or so older than Tommy, and sported a large, bushy mustache. The two men had been captured together when their Blenheim bomber had been shot down over Holland. Pryce often would point out, in his aristocratic, high-pitched tones, that it was all a terrible mistake that he was at Stalag Luft Thirteen at all. It was, he would say, a place for the younger men. He'd only been on that bomber on that particular flight because he'd grown increasingly frustrated with nightly sending men out on dangerous missions that cost them their lives, and so, one night, against express orders, he'd taken the place of a sick turret gunner on the Blenheim.

"Bad choice, that," Pryce would mutter.

Renaday, a thickset tree-stump of a man even though the camp diet melted pounds from his rugger's frame, would counter, "Ah, but who wants to die in bed at home?"

And Pryce would reply: "But, my dear lad we all do. You young men simply need the perspective of age."

Renaday was a rough-edged Canadian. Before the war he had been a criminal investigator for the provincial police in Manitoba. A week after he enlisted in the RCAF, he'd received word of his acceptance into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Faced with the choice of following the career he'd always dreamed of or sticking with the air corps, he'd reluctantly put off his appointment to the Mounties. He would always conclude the conversation with Pryce by saying, "Spoken like an old man."

On Fridays, the three men would regularly meet and discuss the law.

Renaday had a policeman's attitudes, all straightforward, fact-driven, and direct, constantly seeking the narrowest line through any case and argument. Pryce was the precise opposite, a master of subtlety. The older man liked to soliloquize on the aristocracy of conflict, the princeliness of distinctions between the facts and the law. More often than not. Tommy Hart served as the bridge between the two men, charting his course between the older man's nights of intellectualism and the younger man's dogged pragmatism. It was, he thought, a part of his schooling.

He hoped the tunnel collapse would not prevent him from attending their regular weekly session. Sometimes, after discovering a concealed radio or other contraband, the Germans would lock down the camps as punishment, and the men would be forced to spend days indoors. Travel between the two compounds would be curtailed. Once a soccer game between North and South squads was canceled, to the fury of the

British, and relief of the Americans, who'd known they were destined to be slaughtered, and much preferred to play their British counterparts in basketball or baseball.

This week, the three men were scheduled to discuss the Lindbergh kidnapping. Tommy was to argue the carpenter's defense, Renaday taking the part of the state, with Pryce acting as arbiter. He felt unprepared, constricted not merely by the facts but by his position. He had felt much more comfortable the previous month, when they'd argued the details of the Wright-Mills murder case. And he'd been much more confident in the dead of winter, when they'd dissected the legal aspects of Jack the Ripper's Victorian killing spree. To his immense delight, his British friends had been constantly on the defensive during that debate.

Tommy took his copy of Burke's Criminal Procedure from a shelf next to his bunk and exited Hut 101. Early in his stay at Stalag Luft Thirteen he had designed and built himself a chair using the leftover wooden crates in which Red Cross parcels were shipped to the camp. The chair resembled an Adirondack-style chair, and for POW camp furniture was widely admired and immediately and frequently copied. The chair had several important details: it only required a half-dozen nails to hold it together and it was actually fairly comfortable.

He sometimes thought it had been his only real contribution to camp life.

He moved the chair into the midday sun and opened the text. He was, however, hardly a paragraph into his reading before a figure hovered into view, and he looked up at the same moment he heard the familiar Mississippi drawl.

"Hey, Hart, how y'all doin' this fine day?"

"I don't think I'd call it a fine day. Vic. Another day. That's all."

"Well, another day for you and me, maybe. But the last day for a couple of good old boys."

"That's true enough…"

Tommy had to hold his hand up, blocking the sun, in order to clearly see Vincent Bedford.

"Some men, they got the need, you know. Hart? They got the big desire. It pains 'em so much, they got to try anything to get out.

What it amounts to, why, now I got an empty bunk in my room and somebody's writing that big hurt letter to some poor folks back home.

Other men, well, they look at that barbed wire and they figure the best way to get past it is to wait. Be patient. Other men, well, they see something else."

"What is it you see. Vic? When you look at the wire?"

Tommy asked.

The southerner grinned.

"Same thing I always see, wherever I be."

"Which is?"

"Why, lawyer man, I see an opportunity."

Tommy hesitated, then replied, "And what opportunity brings you to me?"

Vincent Bedford knelt down, so that he was on eye level with Tommy. He was carrying two cartons of brand-new American cigarettes. He poked them at Tommy.

"Why, Hart, you know what I'm looking for. I want to make a trade.

Same as always. You got something I want. I got lots that you need.

We're simply trying to reach an accommodation.

A mutual opportunity, I'd say. An arrangement promising satisfaction to all parties."

Tommy shook his head.

"I've told you before, I won't trade it."

Bedford smiled with mock astonishment.

"Everyone and everything has a price. Hart. You know that. I know that. Hell, when you think about it, that's pretty much what those law books of your'n say on each and every page, don't they? And anyways, what y'all think is so important about knowing what time it is? There ain't no special time, here in this place. Wake up the same every day.

Bed at night, jus' the same. Eat. Sleep. Roll call. Every day. Jus’ the same. So, tell me, Hart, why y'all need that watch so damn much?"

Tommy glanced down at the Longines watch on his left wrist. For an instant the steel casing reflected a burst of sunlight.

It was an excellent watch, with a sweep hand and jeweled mechanism. It kept precise time and seemed oblivious to the shocks and batterings of war. But, more important, etched into the back were the words I'll be waiting and the initial L. Tommy merely had to listen to the muffled ticking to be reminded of the young woman who'd given it to him on his last leave home before shipping out. Bedford, of course, knew none of this.