A Curable Romantic (89 page)

“No, well, why would you have? He’d only have bitten your hand.”

“Listen to me, Doctor,”
said.
was no neophyte. She’d been through the whirling vortex of lives nearly a hundred times before. She understood exactly what she was agreeing to.”

“Oh, yes! This was hardly
first time at the ball.”

“And though she agreed to our request, it wasn’t without asking for a favor of her own in return.”

“One can
do
that?” I exclaimed.

shrugged unhappily. “Regrettably, things have loosened up over the course of the last five hundred years or so.”

“Not one of my favorite topics,”
growled.

“Nor mine.”

“And this favor?” I said. “What exactly was it?”

“Oh, no, you don’t want to know that, Dr. Sammelsohn, believe me.”

“But I do!”

“I don’t think you do, Dr. Sammelsohn,”
said, and he began to beat his truncheon against the meat of his palm and became so menacing, I had no choice but to drop the matter.

“In any case,”
said, trying to put a good face on things, “we’re not at liberty to reveal it to you.”

“And yet,”
lifted his two arms in the air, “is our being here not miracle enough for you, Dr. Sammelsohn? I mean, here we all are again!”

“Yes! All of us together again!”

“Take me to her,” I said.

“Naturally,”
said.

“Actually,”
purred, “we assumed that would have been your first request.”

“I’M TELLING YOU,
Dr. Sammelsohn,”
peered at me through his thick glasses, “you won’t even recognize her.”

“But of course, he wouldn’t recognize her anyway, would he?”
said.

“No, that’s true. Physically, she’s nothing like herself, but internally, she’s also changed.”

We were sitting on a park bench in a square near the corner of Leszno and Karmelicka,
keeping track of the time on his watch. “Any minute now, any minute now,” he said.