“1914 is a date in history,” Rodger said. “This isn’t gonna be, if it doesn’t stop.”

“Saul,” Kit said. “What happened to Jackie, where is he.”

Saul looked up at her and thought a moment. “He’s gone,” he said. “That’s the short answer. He said he had some emergency business. He threw some clothes and things in his car and left early this morning.”

For a time she only stared at them, at Saul and Rodger and Fran, thinking she could no longer understand what was said to her. The voices of others came to her loud and resonant like noises made underwater but not seeming to be speech. Where had Jackie gone? Why would he go? “Do you have a car, Saul? I need a ride somewhere.”

“Jeez, Kit. I don’t. I came in with Rodger.”

“Rodger,” Kit said. “It isn’t far. Just out West North Street. I just can’t walk, I can’t.”

“Kit what are you doing, what are you doing,” Fran said, clutching her brow.

“I just want to go out and see,” Kit said. “I have to see.”

“I think you should go to the infirmary,” Fran said. “I really think.”

“No.”

“I’ll go there with you.”

“Rodger,” Kit said.

Rodger regarded her, touching the tips of his long fingers together. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I am not ready to go riding a scooter through the west end of town with a white girl on my jumpseat. Arms around my waist. This ain’t Greenwich Village, girl.”

“What if we waited till after dark,” she said.

“Oh,” Rodger said. “Oh sure. After dark is good.”

She looked at them. She wanted to say that if she could get there, she would just wait alone, wait until she learned something, until she knew something. She saw though that they had ceased to look at her or at one another, that their eyes were drawn to something behind and above her, first Rodger’s and then the others’, and the sound on the television above the counter was just then turned up, and the hubbub faded. Kit turned to see what they all saw.

A police car, lights revolving, attended on a truck poised on the bank of a river, its big tires planted like feet. From the truck a cable ran, thrumming with effort as it was winched in; and what it drew up from the river, what it had caught with a heavy hook, was a car: a big new convertible. It was pulled by inches up and out of the river, and water poured from it as it rose, from the insides over the doorsills and out from under the crumpled hood.

11.

It must have been near dawn. The little town where that iron bridge arched the river was a couple of hours to the north, on the way, though not the main way, to the capital. Up there the sudden storm had poured a great slew of rain across a narrow band of prairie, flooding streams and washing out dirt roads. The car in the river had only become visible after floodgates downstream were opened at morning and the river’s level fell. It might have encountered another vehicle on the bridge; police said tire marks and a scattering of broken glass were visible there where the guardrail was depressed, but nothing was certain. There were plans for a full search of the river, but the authorities said that the rapid flow resulting from the downstream gates being opened could have carried a body very far. Police recovered items from the river that they said might have been discarded by a man trying to swim ashore: an overcoat, an empty briefcase, shoes.

That was all that was said in the Sunday-morning papers that Fran brought to Kit in the student infirmary. There was the picture of the convertible being drawn up out of the river, and the picture of Falin when he arrived in West Berlin the year before. One year, almost two.

There was another picture on the front page of the same paper, and on the front page of a Chicago paper that Fran had also brought. The little group of demonstrators, looking not only few but small, surrounded like damned souls in a Brueghel hell by the contorted crowded faces of their tormentors, yelling or laughing or cursing at them. Most of their signs already gone, except for one that read Hands Off and didn’t seem to be about Cuba at all. Pro-Cuba March Meets Massive Opposition. Kit in the front, in her leather jacket: her eyes looking away, as though just then catching sight of something, something not part of this conflict at all.

“He’s not dead,” Kit said. “He isn’t. I know it.”

“Well then why, where,” Fran said. “I mean come on.”

The doctor came down the row of beds to where Kit lay. The infirmary was old and small and strangely smelly, the iron beds in an open row. Only one other was occupied, a boy who seemed to be weeping, weeping, face into his pillow.

“How’s the throat?” the doctor asked.

“Okay,” Kit said. “I guess.”

“Doesn’t hurt to swallow?”

“It never did. It just hurt.”

The doctor put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “The tests are back. You have mononucleosis. You know what that is?”

“The kissing disease,” Kit said. “Mono.”

“Well you get it from more than kissing. I mean you can get it in more ways than one. It’s just an infectious disease.” He bent over her and with warm dry hands felt the underside of her chin, the sides of her throat. “The pain comes from swollen lymph nodes that are producing the white blood cells to fight it off. There’s a number of nodes right along here. They don’t usually get as swollen as yours, though.”

“Is that why she fainted?” Fran asked.

The doctor shrugged, a little shrug, as though he knew no more than anybody. It hadn’t been he who had been here when the University police car brought her; only nurses and a student receptionist. She couldn’t make them leave her alone, they made her answer questions and show her ID card and then undress and put on a cotton robe, they took blood, they put her into a narrow bed and drew the curtains around it. Sleep, they said, but she said she wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, and she started to tremble again as she had before she fell down in the Castle, as though shaking to pieces. She tried to get out of the bed and a nurse held her with a strong hand and another brought a paper cup with a red pill in it, a capsule like a little shiny gout of blood. It was the same pill that the nuns had made her take the first night at Our Lady, when she had not stopped arguing, not stopped shaking. It was like a little death; she knew it, and she took it.

While she slept motionless and dreamless in the University infirmary a message began to be transmitted by cable from General Secretary Khrushchev to the President of the United States. It was broadcast publicly over Moscow Radio at the same time. The weapons which you describe as “offensive” are in fact grim weapons, the message said. Both you and I understand what kind of weapons they are. It went on to say that in order to give encouragement to all those who long for peace, and to calm the American people, who, I am certain, want peace as much as the people of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government had decided to dismantle the weapons that the United States objected to. They would be crated and returned to the Soviet Union. The only condition placed on the offer was that the United States give its solemn pledge not to invade Cuba.

In the Atlantic the Soviet ship Grozny stopped and was reported to be standing still. It was afternoon in Moscow, morning in Washington when the message had been assembled and translated. The generals and the Secretaries of State and Defense gathered to study it. The admirals and generals urged caution and the Air Force Chief of Staff demanded that Cuba be invaded anyway, everything was in readiness: but the President overruled them. He ordered that no air reconnaissance missions be flown that day.