“Not if there’s no electricity,” she said, “for the light. And I think you will sleep.”

That night they found a room on the Île de la Cité, at the northeastern corner above Notre-Dame Cathedral, in one of the narrow old lanes of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century houses that had escaped Baron Haussmann’s demolitions and street-widenings a hundred years earlier. Since the German officers had apparently not discovered the place, they had dinner at La Colombe by the old pavement that was the remains of a Roman wall; abundant vases of fresh-cut wildflowers and cages of fluttering doves made the restaurant look like one of the lamplit nighttime street markets, and they sat under the low beamed ceiling at a window table overlooking the embankment and the dark river, eating rabbit in mushroom sauce and even sharing a bottle of the fabulous Château d’Yquem with the sentimental owner.

Back in their room, Elena lit the lamp and then began writing on a sheet of blank paper from her skirt pocket. Hale frowned, wishing espionage wouldn’t intrude now, but when he peered over her shoulder he saw that she had simply written Bueno Año, Malo Año, and Medio Año, and now she tore the sheet into three strips, with one of the phrases on each.

She looked up at him with a defensive smile in the flickering amber light. “It’s the only one of my mother’s superstitions I’ve kept.” She folded the paper strips, took off her sweater and then stood up and crossed to the bed. “Tonight is New Year’s Eve. I put these under the pillow, and then sleep on them; and in the morning I draw one out, and it is an omen for the coming year.” After having tucked the papers under the pillow nearest the window, she pulled back the bedspread and began unbuttoning her blouse, though the room was nearly cold enough for Hale to see her breath.

“Is it-ac-accurate?” he stammered. His hands lifted toward the buttons of his shirt, then fell away. He managed to kick off his shoes without too much trouble, and he slid the belt out of his trousers and tossed it to the farthest corner of the room.

“Would you call my mother a fool?” She dropped her blouse and, shivering, quickly began to unfasten her skirt.

Hale glanced at her pale breasts and then away; but he did dare to twist free his cuff and collar buttons. “You’ve f-found it reliable, then,” he said, dizzily wondering which augury she would find in the morning.

“To tell you the truth-” she began as she stepped out of her skirt and slid naked between the sheets. “Oh, it is cold! Take off your clothes and come here!” She pulled the blanket to her chin, visibly shivering. “To tell you the truth,” she went on when the bed at last shifted with Hale’s weight, “I have never dared to unfold the paper and look.”

Hale did eventually sleep, and it was the last night of the year.

In his dream the stars might have been spinning, but thick clouds masked the sky, and rain thrashed so heavily down onto the Île de la Cité that as it hit the pavement clouds of spray were thrown up to surge along the streets like waves.

His viewpoint floated away upward and hovered over the island, and the spires of Sainte-Chapelle stood above the waves like the forecastle of a ship; the river was flowing strongly backward tonight in his dream, and dark water crashed up on the embankment at the Square du Vert-Galant like a bow wave.

In the roaring downpour he could no longer see the city on either side of the island ship-a turbulent sea appeared to extend out past the limits of perception-but he could see a dark square shape wallowing astern, a bargelike vessel apparently being towed by the ship. He didn’t want to look at it, and so he looked ahead.

Dimly through the rain he could see the silhouette of a mountain rising above the sea, with vast columns or towers on the peak-and then he was reminded of the German plane that had flown low over his and Elena’s heads in the Rue de Savoie in the rain forty days ago, for he felt the wind of some massive shape rushing past under the clouds, toward the mountain, and he saw that some sort of aerial dog-fight was going on over the dark mountain castle.

And after a moment his stomach went cold, for a gust in the veils of rain made him revise his perspective, and he realized that the murky mountain was miles farther away than he had at first thought, and the swooping and diving shapes were much bigger than any airplanes.

The combatants seemed not so much to fly through the air as to appear sequentially at a smoothly continuous number of points across the sky-like the moving intersection of closing scissors blades, or the tip of a crack rushing through a pane of glass. In the dream he understood that the battle was fought every year, but that in a bigger sense it was the identically same event each time, since the position of the stars overhead was the same; in a sense the battle only seemed to occur again and again because the night sky kept rotating around to the same position every year.

Hale’s viewpoint was closer to the mountain now, and he could see a white dome amid the turrets at the top; the dome had not been there a few moments ago, and he understood that the dome was…the phrases came into his mind…“the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Companies,” which meant Death.

The sky and the mountain faded then, but the dome was now fully visible as an oval, and there were dozens or hundreds of similar vast eggs around it, light and dark and black, crowded and piled as if on an undulating plain. There must have been thousands of them, perhaps millions. Hale was trying to estimate the scale of them, and the height from which he must be looking down on the plain, when a foamy wave rushed forward from behind him and hid them under bubbles and foam.

The size of the bubbles jolted his perspective, and he lifted his head and saw that he was on his hands and knees in warm surf on a sunlit beach; the egg shapes had been grains of sand in the relative darkness of his shadow.

A middle-aged man in a modern, rumpled sport coat and a cravat was striding toward him down the dazzling sand slope; the man’s face was pouchy and tired, but it creased in a jovial smile as the mouth opened-from the man’s arrogantly casual Marks & Spencer-style clothes Hale almost anticipated a plummy Oxbridge drawl-

But it was a shrill piping like the cries of birds that came skirling out of the open mouth, and Hale flinched at the savage rhythm of the harsh whistling-the mouth opened wider, cleaving the face vertically, and the division quickly extended down through the neck-and then the man had split down the middle, and it was two dressed men standing on the sand facing Hale. One was the middle-aged original; the other appeared younger, but Hale had a sudden conviction that if he were to look into the face of that one, he would die.

He spun away and threw himself toward the surf, but it had receded, and he fell toward the grains of sand; but as they rushed up in his vision, he saw that they were as immense and widely separated as planets or even stars, and then he was simply falling through a black abyss while incomprehensible constellations spun with titanic momentum around him.

When he awoke, Elena was gone, leaving the faint cutgrass smell of her hair on the pillow and half of their money on the table for him. And just as he had begun to worry seriously about Marcel Gruey’s chances of getting a flight to Lisbon, he saw the note she had left:

The stone dog at the north corner-edge of the first house we lived in is a dubok -the head is loose and can be lifted off. The Philippe St.-Simon passport and travel papers are in a hollow inside; the Air France flight is at 1800. I compromise my proper husband to tell you this. Destroy this note, as you value my life. We will not meet again. I love you.-ETC.