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prepared for a much stronger interrogation this evening. One slip and he could well face a death penalty here as would his mother and younger brother in Germany. His hand unconsciously dug into the sand, and when he looked up again he saw a question in her eyes.
    “A girl in every port?” she asked impishly, but with a hint of wistful seriousness in her voice.
    “That’s a slander,” he replied lightly, some of the tension sliding from his body. “There’s never enough time. I seldom left the ship when we docked.”
    “How did you come to my island?”
    “Your island?”
    Meara’s grin flashed with humor and a little embarrassment. “I’ve always thought of it that way…my island of dreams.”
    Michael looked along the beach and toward the great trees hanging with moss. “I can understand why. It’s very lovely. Anything seems possible here.”
    “At night, huge turtles come up and lay their eggs, and deer wander across the paths,” she said. “And the moon paints the water with silver.”
    “Will you show me tonight? After dinner?” He hadn’t intended to ask the question. He had what he wanted from her. He had what he must have. Anything else was reckless and dangerous and stupid. But his heart slowed as he waited anxiously for her reply, half hoping she would refuse.
    “Yes,” she said simply. He had never met a woman with so little guile, with so much openness.
    And obviously one that could be so easily hurt, he told himself. He would, in some way, end this tomorrow. Tomorrow. But tonight, he would enjoy her company, relish the pleasure she created in him.
    “I have one of those strange little cars. Would you like a ride back?”
    Her eyes twinkled. “I don’t think there’s room for all of us,” she said, “but I would like to see you in one.”
    “I feel like an overgrown child.”
    “Don’t.” She chuckled. “I have it on very good authority that the mightiest of the mighty have ridden them.”
    “Not the Goulds, or Joseph Pulitzer or the Rockefellers,” he said in mock horror.
    “Ah, you know our history then.”
    “Some. Not all. Perhaps you’ll tell me more.”
    “Perhaps I will.” She consented with a smile.
    He stood reluctantly, awkwardly, with the help of his cane, his eyes never leaving hers, sketching in his mind that odd combination of intelligent curiosity, humor, and vulnerability. The latter was a strange quality for a journalist, but he suspected she could be very good. She had a way of drawing people out; she had done it very skillfully with him without ever appearing to do so.
    Michael gave her a crooked half smile and waved to the children playing farther down the beach before turning toward the little red bug. His breath caught as he heard the children’s laughter, and he tried to calm the sickness rising in him, even as he wondered at the new, even tender, feelings he was experiencing. He had shut himself off from them for a very long time, since the last violent argument with his father, and the blow that had sent him across the room while his mother had watched. He had run away and hired on the first ship he found, a Canadian freighter. The life of a common seaman was both hard and violent. He had become a violent and ruthless man in order to survive. He had thought nothing could ever really touch him again.
    In the space of a few hours, he was discovering differently, that there was an opening, a vulnerable spot, in the protective shell he’d acquired long ago.
    Duty, he reminded himself. Duty to country. Duty to the only family he had left, to a sick mother and a small brother whose lives he held in his hand.
    Michael Fielding. Eric von Steimen. It was Eric von Steimen who had entered Admiral Canaris’s office months ago; Michael Fielding who left it.
    He’d had a feeling of dread when he was singled out at the military hospital and sent to specialists at an exclusive Berlin hospital, and he knew even more disquiet when an SS colonel and staff car