CHAPTER 37
Nightwatch laid stillness on the corridors of Envoy. When Nansen’s door chimed, he looked up in surprise.
He had dimmed illumination in his cabin to a twilight. A stubby candle, one of a number newly made for him by the nanos, burned on his desk below the old crucifix. He sat gazing at the flame, no longer really seeing, though somehow it was like a small sun around which awareness circled through silence, until the door recalled him.
“Come in,” he said. The captain is never free.
For a moment the fluorescence outside dazzled his eyes. He saw the newcomer as a black hole in it. She stepped through, the entrance closed, and the candle cast his shadow vague over Dayan.
She stopped, herself half blinded until vision grew used to the dusk. He rose. “What is the matter?” he asked wearily.
She caught her breath in a gulp. Her words stumbled. “I’m sorry. This is very late. And I knew you’d rather be alone.” As often as possible. “But I thought — at this hour we could talk . . . privately.”
“Yes, of course. Please be seated.” He resumed his chair at the desk and swiveled it around to face hers.
For a while they were mute. She stared down at the hands clenched together in her lap. Finally she got out: “This is … hard to say, but —” She raised her head toward him and finished in a rush. “Are you planning any kind of service, memorial, anything for Jean? And Colin,” she added dutifully.
“No,” he replied.
“Some of us … expected you would.”
“My fault. I should have made an announcement.”
“We’d like to say good-bye to her.”
His flat tone gentled. “I understand. But don’t you see, there’s too much emotion, too much bitterness — in certain of us. It would be disruptive to meet this soon for that purpose.”
She regarded him. With the candle behind, his expression was hard to make out. “Do you truly think so?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I can’t read the souls of people. It is my guess. For most of us, me too, a service would be comforting. But I can’t very well tell those who look on me as a murderer that they mustn’t come.”
“Oh, Rico!” She half rose from her seat, reached toward him, and sank back down.
“That is my guess,” he repeated. “I could be wrong, but I dare not risk it. Thank you, though, for reminding me. I’ll tell them tomorrow, everybody is welcome to … pray for her, wake her, whatever feels right, … by themselves, or with their near friends.”
“You are mourning alone, aren’t you?”
“That seems best.”
“You are always alone. In your heart, since she went away. Unless you are with your God.”
“I am not a very good believer, I fear,” he said regretfully. “But one can try.” In haste, not to reveal more: “Why have you come here, Hanny?”
He could see how his use of her first name helped her gather courage. “I have a great favor to ask of you. Maybe too great.”
“Yes?”
“Let me join in saying good-bye to her. In praying for her.”
His eyes widened with surprise. It took him a brief span to respond, most softly, “May I ask why you wish this?”
Tears caught in eyelashes and captured faint flamelight. Her voice harshened. “I need — I am guilty, Rico. I connived with her. She got me to … seduce Lajos into giving her the flight —” She lowered face into crook-fingered hands.
“I wondered about that.”
“If I hadn’t —”
He squared his shoulders. “Then probably Lajos Ruszek would be dead. You could not have known. I did not.” The calm broke. “Over and over I tell myself I did not.”
She looked anew at him. “And you didn’t, Rico.”
“Nor you.”
“But I — what we feel, what I wish had happened — my horrible thoughts —” She swallowed a breath.
Having regained self-control, he gave her a wry smile. “You’re unjust, Hanny. Well, I’ve heard that Jews are too prone to self-accusation.”
“Were,” she corrected him in a whisper. “I suspect I am the last Jew. And a woman and an unbeliever, but the only vessel the heritage has left.”