“Arlen?”

I stopped and realized that I was so worried, I hadn’t noticed the front door was open.

“Leland? Are you out there?”

“Yes, come quick. Look what we found.”

This is what I saw when I rushed out—but there’s no way in the world I can ever do the picture justice with words. He was sitting on the front step with his back to the house. Exactly where I’d been that morning when he drove up. Minnie was against him with that wonderful full-bodied lean she uses when she loves someone and wants to be as close as she can possibly be. Just the two of them sitting out there on that stone step together, looking like drunken sailors, was enough to make me put a hand over my mouth and almost cry. Then I noticed she was craning her head up as far as it would go to see whatever it was Leland held in his cupped hands. The picture reminded me of a parent and child, or a teacher showing a student something interesting. I walked over and came up right behind him. Before I focused on his hands, Minnie looked at me not with her normal crazy excitement, but with calm love in those golden eyes.

There was a small gray-and-brown fur ball in Leland’s hands and I was about to say something when it slowly uncoiled from its protective tuck and stuck a tiny, shiny black nose off the edge of his fingers. Kilroy was here. That time I couldn’t stop an oh! from jumping out of my throat. It was an igel, Austria’s version of a hedgehog. It’s the cutest animal in the world, and sometimes at night, if you’re lucky, you see one tiptoeing slowly across the ground, stopping here and there to look around arid sniff. Minnie isn’t interested; if she does come across one, she’ll nose it and move on. But when you touch one, it normally tucks itself into a tight ball like a porcupine and stays there till the danger has passed. Here was my dog looking at the adorable thing as if it were a friend. And the igel was unafraid enough to come unwound and snoop around in Leland’s hand.

I asked where he found it and he said it’d been on the step when he came out. I was amazed—who was this guy? Robert Capa, Indiana Jones, and Saint Francis of Assisi? He asked what the creature was called, and I told him and said I’d always wanted one for a pet. Did I want that one, he asked, but I said no; I just liked the picture of the three of them together. He turned around with a beautiful smile, then put the igel down on the ground. The little thing just waddled off in no big hurry. Minnie didn’t move, but looked back at me as if to say, “See? Did you see that?” I asked Leland how he felt and he said fine. He put a hand on Minnie’s head and she leaned into him even more. The sound of a plane swept over us, and a few seconds later its flashing lights and dark shape moved across the sky. Leland took his hand off the dog’s head and reached up. He pretended to grab the fist-sized plane and bring it down slowly. Then he opened his hand to me and said, “It’s for you.”

My second day in Vienna I raised the dead.

Jet lag set in right after Sophie, Caitlin, and I had dinner at a restaurant near our hotel. One minute I felt fine; the next, I was so exhausted that I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to get up from the table and stagger back to the room. I did, but once there I simply dropped my clothes on the floor and fell into bed.

At six-thirty the next morning I was wide awake and on the phone to Jesse Chapman, telling him to come get me in his car because we had to go someplace right away. He didn’t sound surprised. The only thing he asked was if it had to do with what we’d discussed the day before. Yes, it did. Come get me.

I was standing in front of the hotel when he pulled up half an hour later.

“Hi, Wyatt. What’s up?” There was an eagerness on his face and in his voice that hadn’t been there the day before.

“Do you know where the Friedhof der Namenlosen is?”

“Cemetery of the Nameless? No.”

“Do you have a map of the city?”

“Yes, in the glove compartment. What is the place?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been to Vienna before, remember? I just know we have to go there now. Is it this one?”

He looked at me a long second, then nodded. “What’s going on?”

Without knowing anything about the city or this place we had to visit, I looked at the map for no more than a few seconds before finding the cemetery. “Here it is. I don’t know what’s going on. Do you know how to get here?” I pointed. He took the map and looked at it for a moment.

“It’s out by the airport. Yes, I can find it.”

There was a great deal of traffic, so it took us half an hour to get there. The only time he spoke was to point out certain famous sites—the Hofburg, the Prater, a building where Freud had lived early in his career. It was a clean, orderly city that didn’t strike me as very interesting. There were other places I would much rather have visited before I died. I’d always wanted to go to Bruges; always wanted to see that spectacular view of the sea from Santorini.

We rode for a while beside the Danube Canal. The water was brown and slow. There were no boats on it, not one, which I thought strange. Fishermen stood on the bank with their shirts off; bike riders pedaled by. A high summer day in Vienna. Jesse said they were in the middle of a drought—every day at least ninety degrees and no sign of rain. Trees drooped and the grass near the water was spotted with brown. A news broadcast in English came on the car radio and the commentator went into long details about the terrible war in Yugoslavia. Thousands dead, concentration camps; no one had any idea of how to make peace.

Jesse switched off the radio as soon as the report was finished. “Can you tell me anything about this, or do I have to wait till we get there?”

I ignored his question and kept looking out the window. How could I explain? I hardly understood it myself. I did not understand it.

We were on an autobahn a few minutes, then off and winding over back roads that bordered a giant oil refinery and gray block housing. More back roads. Billboards advertised familiar things in an unfamiliar language. Orange soda lived here, as did panty hose and Bic pens. I wanted to be home, seeing these products advertised in my language. I wanted to be home. Warehouses with trailer trucks parked in front with bold Cyrillic writing on their sides. Russian and Bulgarian license plates.

I said, “This really is the East, isn’t it?”

We slowed, bumped across railroad tracks, and stopped. He took the map from me and checked where we were. “We should be almost there. It must be just up the way a little.”

We drove a bit farther and then I knew before he did that we had arrived. “Here, stop the car on the other side of the circle. It’s up that hill.”

He parked and we got out. On our left was a high warehouse with many broken windows and giant cranes in front that leaned out over a spur of the canal. The top of a black barge peeked over the edge of the pavement.

“There. Go up those stairs.”

He didn’t move. “How do you know, Wyatt?”

“Austria’s a Catholic country. If you’re Catholic and kill yourself, church law prohibits your being buried in consecrated ground. City officials put this cemetery here for two reasons. They needed somewhere to bury their suicides, and when they were building the canal, many of the workers drowned or were killed on the site and they needed a nearby place to put them.”

Instead of asking how I knew these facts, he started up the narrow staircase. At the top was a strange building that looked like a stone beehive. It was the chapel for the burial ground. The light switch was on the outside wall. When you pressed it, you could see behind an ornate locked gate a small but gaudy altar loaded with fresh flowers and one lit candle. Whose job was it to come out here first thing every morning to check on the candle and light it?