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the table in the white-tiled kitchen and stared into a cup of tea, stirring it listlessly. He was exhausted from lack of sleep but dared not close his eyes because every time he did he saw Anna’s face smiling at him. “For the love of Christ,” he said out loud, “what has become of my daughter?”
    There was no one around to hear him. It was Sunday morning, and his housekeeper, Janina, had gone to church. Perhaps her prayers will persuade God to intervene on the side of the Poles, he thought. He got up from the table and wandered through the quiet house, his mind detached, passing from room to room like a visitor in a museum. He shuffl ed through the formal dining room and the stiffl y elegant parlor, pausing at the doorway of his study.
    It was a comfortable room, with oak-paneled walls and a soft, brown leather chair in front of the fi replace. The mail and legal journals he had been reading Thursday night were still on the desk next to the empty brandy snifter. Janina never touched anything on his desk.
    He entered the study, stepped over to the fi replace and picked up a picture of Anna from the mantel. It was one of his favorites, taken in Antwerp, Belgium, at the home of his friend Rene Leffard. Anna had lived with the Leffards during her university years. In the picture, she was laughing and waving her diploma in her hand. If only her mother had lived to see it, he thought every time he looked at it. He set it down and glanced into the mirror above the mantel.
    The refl ection was unfamiliar. It was the same thin face, the same white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. But behind the glasses, the eyes were strange and Night of Flames
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    alien, the eyes of someone who didn’t know what to do, the eyes of someone who was helpless.
    As he stared at the strange image in the mirror, the events of the last two days thundered through Thaddeus’s mind: the air-raid sirens, jarring him awake early Friday morning, Janina screaming from downstairs, the thundering roar of airplane engines and muted thumps off in the distance. He remembered how confused he had been, struggling to clear his mind of the fog of sleep, thinking it was a drill or an exercise of the Polish Air Force.
    The explosions got louder; Janina had screamed again. Thaddeus had grabbed a shirt and pulled on a pair of trousers. The stout, gray-haired housekeeper stood barefoot at the bottom of the staircase, clad only in her nightgown, clutching the banister, her eyes wide with fear. Thaddeus ran down the stairs, out to the front yard and stared up at the sky. Airplanes! Dozens of enormous airplanes were passing overhead, black-and-white crosses on their fuselages and swastikas on their tails.
    The rest of the day had been a blur of madness. Explosions around the city continued for several hours and then stopped. Nothing was damaged in their neighborhood, but the streets were soon fi lled with confused, terrifi ed people.
    Thaddeus had tried to telephone Irene’s mother in Warsaw, but the lines were already down. He could still make calls within Krakow and, with some effort, reached the main offi ce at the university. They couldn’t get through to Warsaw either. Then, in the late afternoon, the air-raid sirens started again, and he and Janina went down to the cellar to wait it out until dark.
    On Saturday, there had been sporadic bombing raids over the city, and radio bulletins reported intense fi ghting as Poland’s Krakow Army clashed with the Germans southwest of the city. Statements from offi cials in the government encouraged Poland’s citizens to be brave and not panic. “Our armed forces are holding off the German onslaught. England and France will be at our side in just a few days.”
    Thaddeus had listened to all this, struggling to remain calm. But the German invasion had taken him completely by surprise. Negotiations between Germany and Poland had just begun. How could they have broken down already? Why had these idiots in the government continued