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due, like the narrowed ribs of Victorian women, to continual wearing from an early age of very tight miniskirts and hip-huggers? So that the body mass was shot, like toothpaste from a tube, upwards into the breast area, giving Polish women those very good figures. Of course, their long legs were natural from birth.
    So let's see, motives: physical attraction…and she was rather lively, talkative...like the pianist girl; that one was talkative too. She babbled away at him and he was close to a complete stranger. Konstanty rarely laughed, but a corner of his lip lifted as he remembered some of her expressions.
    He tucked his tie back and went on with his typing.
     
    In the apartment below, the day was waning. Hania was counting the hours till she could sleep. The previous hours had passed somehow. Maks had brooded. Kalina had again woken late and again claimed to feel unwell. Hania hoped she wasn't going to fall ill for real and need to be taken to a doctor or anything like that. There was Konstanty Radzimoyski upstairs, of course, but somehow she doubted that he was a pediatrician. Or was Kalina too old for a pediatrician? Here she'd been a teenager just a short while ago and already she felt as if she knew nothing about them. This one was a closed book anyway.
    "Kalina, do you know where your parents went?" She didn't like prying for information from the children, or letting on how helpless she was, but she was beginning to be a little desperate. Somehow, she had this feeling that Wiktor and Ania might not be back on Thursday––or Friday. Nothing definite. Just twenty-some years as a member of the Lanski family.
    "To the sea, I think," Kalina spoke in that dead voice. Really, the girl looked very unhappy. Or maybe she really was unwell.
    "Where on the sea?"
    "I dunno. Sometimes they go to this posh hotel in Gdansk or Sopot or someplace. It's called the Neptune or the Royal or something. It's where all the rich people go."
    "What do they do there?"
    "Well, what do you think a man and a woman do in a hotel?"
    She should have had an answer to that, Hania thought later. She shouldn't have let herself be put off so easily. There should have been some way of getting around it without discussing Kalina's parents' sex life with her. Still, she hadn't been able to think of any at once. All that had come to mind was "Oh, not Wiktor, surely," and she could hardly have said that.
     
    And then later Kalina had disappeared again and she'd had no one to question at all. Maks certainly wasn't going to tell her anything. So she cooked, and cleaned, and played scales, and ran through, in her mind, one piece of music after another. She was very gifted this way; she could turn on the music like switching on a radio, and it accompanied her through the hours, when her only other comfort was food. So Tuesday had passed.
    Wednesday had started as a repeat of the day before. Some time in the afternoon Kalina got up off the sofa, put on a skirt that was an eight-inch band of cloth, a halter that didn't begin to reach the band, and four-inch platform sandals, and headed for the door. She wasn't pretty enough to make such exposure attractive or anything but a lurid come-on.
    "Where are you going?" Hania asked anxiously, surging out of a chair as if to stop her, as she saw her pass.
    "Just out." Kalina was already at the door, already through and banging it a little behind her.
    She could hardly run after the girl and stop her, Hania thought with exasperation, but what if Kalina didn't come back till late, what if she got into trouble? She stood still in the middle of the room.
    Maks was watching. He said, "She's going to church."
    "To church?"
    "To see someone."
    "Oh." Hania was taken aback. Was that really what one wore to church in Poland? "Oh, that's all right then."
    "No, it's not all right. It's a sin."
    "A sin?" How could going to church be a sin?
    "That's what Kalina says. Kalina's a sinner." Maks went back to his lego blocks, his face