“I KEPT THE LETTER to myself,” Gurley said, rising from his perch to pace. “I took leave. I didn't want to be mocked once again for pursuing folly, and, should anything come of the hermit's claims, I didn't want anyone barging in to steal credit. It took more than a week to get there. Or, rather, to get close. I found myself in a tiny Native village at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River.” Gurley went to the map to show me. “Look, Father Ioasaph's island isn't even on this map.” He studied the spot for a moment. “I don't think it was on anyone's map. But Father Ioasaph was well known in the area. The Russians had set up missions throughout this part of Alaska in the days of the Russian American Trading Company. And Father Ioasaph occasionally journeyed to the mainland to say Mass. In return, the villagers supplied his meager needs. It took some doing to find someone who would take me out to him-they were fiercely protective of their local loon-but I finally prevailed. I paid a generous fare, and promised even more should the boatman return promptly the following day to collect me.”

Ioasaph's island was barren and wet. His hermitage was wedged into the rear of a small ravine and looked as though it had been constructed by an animal. And what with his beard and hair forming a wild corona around his face, he might well have been an animal. He welcomed Gurley gravely, and took him on a five-minute scramble across the island to where God's messenger had landed.

Even someone not in the throes of religious devotion might have ascribed a divine nature to the scene, Gurley said. The earth was scorched; a circle of blackened grass and trees perhaps twenty feet in diameter marked the spot where the “angel” had alighted.

There was a small chance Father Ioasaph had lit this fire himself in a desperate ploy to attract a visitor, Gurley thought, but that seemed unlikely. The devastation was too complete. Gurley pressed him: What do you mean, “angel”? A man with wings? Really now.

Father Ioasaph sighed as though Gurley were hopelessly simple-minded. “No, sir,” he said. “The ways of God are mysterious to us, and this time, his messenger arrived by balloon.”

“Balloon?” Gurley asked. Father Ioasaph described a giant balloon, as big as his hermitage, dirty white in color, plummeting from the sky.

“And the angel was in the balloon? A man, you saw a man-a soldier-in the balloon?” This was the crucial question, Gurley said, and he watched as Father Ioasaph considered his answer.

“No,” Father Ioasaph said. “Not a man like men we know.” He went on to describe what would soon become a familiar sight to Gurley: the multilayered payload, the rings of cylinders and the tangle of wires. But Gurley had never heard of such a thing then, and thus could offer little to counter Father Ioasaph's assertion that this was the being's strange skeleton; whatever corporeal elements might have existed would have been consumed in the fire.

“But you said it spoke Japanese,” Gurley said. Father Ioasaph nodded and led Gurley around a small rise.

Here lay the being's skeleton, or what remained of it, twisted and charred. For all the damage the payload had done, Gurley said, it was surprisingly intact. Dangerously intact, but he didn't know that. Father Ioasaph drew him close and pointed to various elements in the wreckage. Indeed, to judge from the markings, the being did “speak” Japanese.

A sense of wonder, and then, an even greater sense of greed, consumed Gurley. He had found his prize, his ticket back into the OSS 's front ranks. Not even Bob Hope could dismiss this discovery.

Father Ioasaph had a hand at his elbow. “I do not know what this means,” Father Ioasaph said. “Through prayer, I hope to come to know, and I will let you know when I do. But now, we must leave it be.”

“Yes, Father,” Gurley said. “Leave it be. Leave it to me.” Father Ioasaph looked confused.

Gurley said he barked at the man: Leave. And the change in Gurley's demeanor must have been so sudden, so sharp, that the priest did immediately as he was told. Gurley had frightened him. Still, Father Ioasaph pleaded with him even as he moved away. “Pray with me,” he said. “We must leave to God what is His and His alone…”

But Gurley did not. He turned his back on Father Ioasaph, smiled, and began to lift a piece of the wreckage with his foot. “Speak to me, O Lord,” he muttered.

Whereupon, Gurley said, He did.

The blast was not deafening, not blinding. But it was sudden. One moment his lower left leg and foot were there, the next moment they were not. One moment Gurley was there, on Father Ioasaph's island, the next moment he was not.

He was, instead, lying down, in a hospital, eyes closed, listening to two men talk about him.

Incredible he survived.

That priest saved his life.

Not his leg.

Nothing to save, I'd imagine. Unless you wanted a souvenir.

How many days did it take to get him here?

Three.

A miracle, indeed. He should thank that priest.

Convert.

Then Gurley felt a surge of pain in his left foot. Pain, and then an equal surge of relief. He hadn't lost the foot, the leg. They were talking about someone else. He opened his eyes. The two men, doctors, it seemed, were standing beside him.

“He's awake,” one said.

The other turned to Gurley. “You made it,” he said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.” Gurley said nothing, just looked at him. “How do you feel?”

Gurley told me it took him a moment to decide he was awake and not dreaming. Then he answered the doctor's question, as truthfully as he could. He told the man he felt okay. Weak, but okay.

Then, without looking anywhere except into the doctor's eyes, he said, accurately, “My left foot's a little sore, though. Really sore, kind of a sharp, shooting sore.” The two doctors looked at each other, then they looked at his left foot, or where it should have been. Then Gurley looked as well.

“That'll happen,” said the doctor who'd first spoken to him. “Usually it's an itch, and your brain is telling you it's there. But, in your case, it's not. Nor much of anything below the knee. Now, your brain's also going to tell you the other leg hurts, and it'll be right about that. Kind of unbelievable it's still there. Or that you're here. But you are. And you'll walk, eventually. Couple weeks, they'll be by to fit a prosthetic. Two, three weeks. They've been busy, of course.”

Gurley finished his story, looked at me. “ ‘Busy,’” he repeated. “It took three months.” He looked down at his leg and shook it gently. “Then again, it took more than a quarter century to grow the one I'd had.”

GURLEY RETREATED behind the desk. “Let's finish.” He dropped into his chair, pulled forward, and then folded his hands over the small book that he'd pulled out when I'd first arrived.

“Exhibit C,” Gurley said. He opened the book, riffled through its pages, closed it, and then slid it across the desk to me with both hands. I didn't pick it up. He took it back.

The leather cover had been dyed a dark green and was well worn. There were brown smudges in several places.

“Blood,” he said. I just looked at him. “Old blood,” he added, and smiled. He flipped it over. On the back was more blood, and you could almost see, or imagine, where a bloody hand had raked across it. If Gurley hadn't said anything, though, I would have taken it for mud or grease. But that was one of his talents: to make everything sinister.

“That's what I'm told, anyway, and I choose to believe it. It makes for more of a fair trade. A bloodied book for a bloodied leg.” He considered this and then continued. “I was convalescing when this book was-acquired, let us say, by my former colleagues. As you'll see once you open it, it is a kind of atlas. A book of maps and drawings. And like Father Ioasaph's avenging angel, the book also ‘speaks’ Japanese. Certainly not Chinese, as the imbeciles who first showed it to me insisted.” He opened it, found a page. “Japanese.” Another page. “Japanese.” He looked at me. “Seven semesters of Japanese at Princeton, I know Japanese. I am, as they say, something of an Orientalist.”