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was.”
    “He’s an honorary consul, an Italian banker. A converted Jew, as it happens, and he’s been a help. The nearest consulate is in Bari, on the Adriatic.”
    “Oh, hell.”
    “Anyway, a consulate doesn’t give territorial sanctuary, like an embassy.” His smile broadened. “But you’ve been thinking hard, haven’t you?”
    “Oh, I even had the signal.”
    “Really? What was it?”
    “Well —” with a certain embarrassment she brought it out — “
’Next year in Jerusalem.’
Just the last line of the Passover seder.”
    “I know what it is.” His smile faded to a stern businesslike look. “Listen, Mrs. Henry, the Italians have no use for a lot of hungry stateless Jews. We’ll go. You ought to come, too.”
    “Oh, I should? And why?” The swaying of the smoky little room, with the bumping against the wharf, was making Natalie queazy.
    “Let’s say because your baby’s Jewish, and should go to the Jewish homeland.”
    “He’s only half-Jewish.”
    “Yes? Ask the Germans.”
    “Look, don’t you understand that I feel no emotion about Palestine? None! I’m an American, completely irreligious, married to a Christian naval officer.”
    “Tell me about your husband.”
    The question took her aback. She awkwardly replied, “I haven’t seen him for ages. He’s on a submarine somewhere in the Pacific.”
    He took out a worn wallet and showed her a snap of a big-bosomed dark girl with heavy hair. “That was my wife. She was killed in a bus that the Arabs blew up.”
    “That’s frightful.”
    “It happened eight years ago.”
    “And you want me to take my baby there?”
    “Jews live in danger everywhere.”
    “Not in America.”
    “You’re strangers there, too. In Palestine you’re home.”
    Natalie took from her purse a small colored photograph of Byron in uniform. “Here’s my husband.”
    Byron came alive in her memory as Rabinovitz knotted his brows over the picture. “He looks young. When did you get married?”
    For months she had been shutting her marriage from her thoughts — that hazy tangle of imbecile decisions, leading to delirious labor pains alone in a foreign hospital, surrounded by strange faces and half-understood medicalbabble in Italian. For all the delicious love flooding her at seeing the tiny wrinkled red baby, she had felt then that her life was wrecked. More or less, she still did. But as she sketched the story to the Palestinian, Byron Henry’s charm and dash, his ingenuity, his boyish appeal, all came back to her; also the terrific sweetness, however harebrained the thing had been, of the fleeting honeymoon in Lisbon. She thought — though she did not say this to Rabinovitz — that a crippled lifetime might be fair pay for such joy. Besides, she had Louis.
    Rabinovitz chain-lit a cigarette as he listened. “You never met any Jewish young men like him?”
    “No. The ones I went out with were all determined to be doctors, lawyers, writers, accountants, or college professors.”
    “Bourgeois types.”
    “Yes.”
    “Bring your son to Palestine. He’ll grow up a man of action like his father.”
    “What about the hazards?” Natalie feared she might be getting seasick, here beside the wharf. The motion was really nauseating. She got out of the chair and leaned against the bulkhead. “I hope this ship makes it across the Mediterranean, but then what? End up in a British prison camp? Or take an infant through Arab mountains, to be shot at or captured and butchered?”
    “Mrs. Henry, it’s risky to take him to Siena.”
    “I don’t know about that. My uncle talked by telephone to our chargé d’affaires in Rome, during his lunch with Beck. The chargé advised Aaron to go to Siena. He called this trip an unnecessary hazard for us.”
    “Your chargé d’affaires told him to trust a Hitler bureaucrat?”
    “He said that he knows Beck well. He’s not a Nazi. Our own Foreign Service respects him. Beck has offered to drive us back to Rome tomorrow,