I'm right here, sir: I wanted Gurley to look up, see me. I wanted to tell Gurley that I was this other person, but more than that, I wanted it to be true.

But when he did look up, all he saw was Saburo. “We have, what? Two days now, less maybe, before that major in Fairbanks sends his dogs out across the tundra in search of plague or spies. I've said I wanted to find the prize before him, and I do. But the reason is not so much for glory but revenge. If the major catches him, this spy becomes a prisoner of war, a resource. If I catch him-and we will, whether it takes forty hours or months-I will finish it. I will find him, remove him, and release Lily, to me.”

And what would happen when we didn't find him? Lily said he was gone. But Gurley was determined to find him-he'd have to find, and kill, someone. Lily hadn't thought through this part of her plan. But then, it hadn't really been a plan.

“Sir,” I said, making one last attempt. “I'm just not sure we will find anyone. It's more than a needle in a haystack, sir, it's-”

“It's a needle in a haystack for the major,” said Gurley. “But we have Lily.” He smiled. “We have you.” He rose.

“I'm just not sure, sir, what we'll find. What if he's dead?”

The color slowly returned to Gurley's cheeks. It was his fury rising in him, but in a way, it was a relief to witness-I'd had plenty of experience dealing with Gurley furious, and could steel myself against it. I'd been frightened, on the other hand, to find myself vulnerable to feeling sympathy when faced with Gurley despondent and brokenhearted.

That danger had passed.

He walked toward me, closer and closer, until he'd backed me up half across the room. “You wish him dead. Fair enough. So do I. But you wish him dead because you wish to be done with this mission, this war, me. You are scared, Sergeant. Both understandable and unattractive.” And closer. “This man is a spy” Gurley continued. “A spy for the enemy. The enemy whose one interest is slaughter. Have you heard what's happening in the South Pacific, Sergeant? Of the bodies of men and women, men like you, missing eyes and hands and whatever they had between their legs, stuffed into their mouths?” Gurley's mouth was now quite close to mine. “This-Saburo- raped a woman that I love, that I hope to spend the rest of a very, very long life caring for. If you need more reasons, God knows they're offering us plenty-from fires to plague to who knows what next-go ahead and do this for your country. But you know what? Our country's got more than ten million in uniform fighting for it.” He stared at me hard. “Lily's only got me.”

I'M NOT SURE IF it was a product of our conversation or his simmering madness or his fear of the major on our heels, but two minutes after he'd left, he returned and declared that we would leave at midnight. We may not have agreed on much about Saburo, but he didn't think Saburo was hiding in town, either. I thought Gurley would sneak off to Lily's “VIP quarters” before our departure, but he had me walk him down to the riverbank, doling out additional instructions all the while. He confirmed the time with me, and then I watched him hire a boat to take him across the Kuskokwim to town, in search of a drink or worse.

I figured I had at least an hour, maybe more.

I walked quickly back to the headquarters building, in search of Lily. When I asked the duty officer about her whereabouts, he gave me a blank look. He was putting on a front, of course; Lily had to be the only woman on the base-perhaps the only woman on the base in six months or more. Finally, he leaned back and said, “Oh, you mean the prisoner.”

Now it was my turn to put on a front, and mask my alarm with a knowing nod. The prisoner. The man said he'd been left instructions that she was not to be disturbed, but I countered that I was under orders from Gurley, and the man accepted my bluff. Gurley had obviously made his usual terrifying impression.

They didn't have cells on the base, so they had put Lily in a signal shed by the airfield with a guard stationed out front “for her protection.” When I entered and the guard closed the door behind me, Lily was sitting perfectly still in the middle of the room, on the only thing in the room, a chair.

Neither of us said anything; we just looked at each other. I'm not sure what my face looked like, but Lily kept hers completely blank. I could have been Gurley I could have been Tojo, I could have been a six-foot raven. She stared.

I looked at her hands; they were cuffed. What had Gurley done?

I knelt beside her and tried to take one hand of hers in mine, but she moved away. “I'm okay,” she said.

“Lily, I'm so sorry,” I said. “Who did this? I'm going to get you out of here. No, I promise. I think-I think Gurley's finally lost it. I mean, completely. I think he's gone, or going. I don't think it will be long now, not at all. Jesus-he wants to leave at midnight. And he's got you locked in a closet. In handcuffs.”

She shook her head, and rolled her eyes-the first I had seen so far of the old Lily. “He has me here for my safety,” she said and smiled. “He told them I was a prisoner of war, someone with information. He told them that so they wouldn't bother me. So no one would wonder why a captain flew an Eskimo girl out to the bush.” She smiled, and I couldn't decide what to do. Was Gurley this crazy? Was she?

I felt bad for her, but now I also felt angry. Part of it was the old anger, jealousy-Gurley held her completely in sway. The new anger was that this growing debacle was all her doing. She'd told Gurley some story about Saburo in order to get herself back to Bethel, and now here she was, cuffed, and here I was, suddenly party to the whole rotten plan. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, but I got up as I said it, and ended up delivering the words more to the room than her.

But she still heard me. “Louis,” she said. “I'm so close now. I'm almost there.”

I turned to look at her and realized that Gurley was with us-or rather, within me. Standing there, eyes cast down at her, chin pointing up, disdain on my face. I was becoming him or had become him. And I couldn't shake it off. Maybe Gurley was a wizard, too. He'd obviously possessed Lily somehow, even though she was a shaman in her own right. Who was I to think I could resist? And when I spoke, it was his words, his tone.

“A rapist?” I said, and everything about her changed. Her face, her hands, her body, flushed and strained against the cuffs. “You told him Saburo was a rapist? To get yourself out here?”

“What?”

“He told me Saburo raped you. Lily, what does he really know about Saburo?” She clasped her hands together until the knuckles went white. “You told him he was Japanese, a spy, but did you tell him everything about that summer, Lily? Did you tell him everything that he'd find out if he'd gone walking around town today, like me?”

I was ready for her to scream, but what came out was more of a groan-“No.” Then she said, “Louis, don't do this.”

“What was the baby's name?” I said.

She looked at me for a long, silent moment, waiting for me to unsay the words, or maybe for history itself to unravel back past the point that there had ever been a war, a Saburo, a long summer under open skies full of light. Then she cried. I closed my eyes, and kept them closed when she finally began to speak.

“He didn't have a name,” she said. Then nothing. When her voice returned, she went on. “I knew it was going to be a girl. I was going to name her Samantha-Sam, for Jap Sam, who'd been so good to me all that time until he was taken away. Introduced me to Saburo.” She stopped. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to open my eyes, but I didn't. I was too frightened of what I'd done or started. “But it wasn't a girl. I should have known then! What woman with the kind of sight I supposedly had wouldn't know what lay inside her, a boy or a girl? Wouldn't know he was dying?” She stopped again, and it was a minute or two before she started once more. “That little boy, inside me, dying, drowning like I'd thrown him into the sea. And then-” Lily stopped, caught her breath and tried again. “And then, he was in my arms, dead. Bella and the other aunties wanted a doctor or a priest.” I could feel her staring at me. “Keep your eyes closed, then,” she said. “That's what I want. What I wanted. No doctor, no priest, nobody. Nobody to come say, Lily the half-breed girl, whose parents ran away!' ‘Lily, who went away last summer with that Jap and came back pregnant!’ ‘Lily who thought she could have a baby on her own, and it came out dead! Look at her! Ha!’” She sniffed and coughed.