“I’m sorry,” Abendsen said, “I can’t answer right away. You’ll have to accept that.”
“Then why did you write the book?” Juliana said.
Indicating with his drink glass, Abendsen said, “What’s that pin on your dress do? Ward off dangerous anima-spirits of the immutable world? Or does it just hold everything together?”
“Why do you change the subject?” Juliana said. “Evading what I asked you, and making a pointless remark like that? It’s childish.”
Hawthorne Abendsen said, “Everyone has—technical secrets. You have yours; I have mine. You should read my book and accept it on face value, just as I accept what I see—” Again he pointed at her with his glass. “Without inquiring if it’s genuine underneath, there, or done with wires and staves and foam-rubber padding. Isn’t that part of trusting in the nature of people and what you see in general?” He seemed, she thought, irritable and flustered now, no longer polite, no longer a host. And Caroline, she noticed out of the corner of her eye, had an expression of tense exasperation; her lips were pressed together and she had stopped smiling entirely.
“In your book,” Juliana said, “you showed that there’s a way out. Isn’t that what you meant?”
“Out,” he echoed ironically.
Juliana said, “You’ve done a lot for me; now I can see there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to want or hate or avoid, here, or run from. Or pursue.”
He faced her, jiggling his glass, studying her. “There’s a great deal in this world worth the candle, in my opinion.”
“I understand what’s going on in your mind,” Juliana said. To her it was the old and familiar expression on a man’s face, but it did not upset her to see it here. She no longer felt as she once had. “The Gestapo file said you’re attracted to women like me.”
Abendsen, with only the slightest change of expression, said, “There hasn’t been a Gestapo since 1947.”
“The SD, then, or whatever it is.”
“Would you explain?” Caroline said in a brisk voice.
“I want to,” Juliana said. “I drove up to Denver with one of them. They’re going to show up here eventually. You should go some place they can’t find you, instead of holding open house here like this, letting anyone walk in, the way I did. The next one who rides up here—there won’t be anyone like me to put a stop to him.”
“You say ‘the next one,’ “ Abendsen said, after a pause. “What became of the one you rode up to Denver with? Why won’t he show up here?”
She said, “I cut his throat.”
“That’s quite something.” Hawthorne said. “To have a girl tell you that, a girl you never saw before in your life.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
He nodded. “Sure.” He smiled at her in a shy, gentle, forlorn way. Apparently it did not even occur to him not to believe her. “Thanks,” he said.
“Please hide from them,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “we did try that, as you know. As you read on the cover of the book… about all the weapons and charged wire. And we had it written so it would seem we’re still taking great precautions.” His voice had a weary, dry tone.
“You could at least carry a weapon,” his wife said. “I know someday someone you invite in and converse with will shoot you down, some Nazi expert paying you back; and you’ll be philosophizing just this way. I forsee it.”
“They can get you,” Hawthorne said, “if they want to. Charged wire and High Castle or not.”
You’re so fatalistic, Juliana thought. Resigned to your own destruction. Do you know that, too, the way you knew the world in your book?
Juliana said, “The oracle wrote your book. Didn’t it?”