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Page 26.

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I was a middle-aged woman by the time I came to that same dock, north of Hunter’s Point, inside San Francisco Bay, with four companions. We stopped at the point where Howard Lemon, on orders from above, nearly half a century earlier, had delivered my mother to be taken away by the NKVD.

I helped my father out of the car. Viktor’s American counterpart drove us there. With us were the two women my father married, in spirit if not on paper. He was a duogamist molded, golem-like, though very handsome, amid war’s strange beauty and wonder. That was in the exceptional plasma forge of those momentous months in 1945, when anything was possible. San Francisco, in the summer of that year, was the intersection point of two vast wars—the final moments of World War II, and the true beginning of the Cold War. If that was Iliad, the rest was Odyssey, though all metaphors are imperfect by definition. Those months also saw the founding, in that place, of the United Nations—the martialing point for history’s first atomic war—and the full orchestra of Stalin’s nightmare symphony. San Francisco might be a city of love during those final wartime months, but it was also a glistening and dangerous place of car chases in the night, of flying bullets, and of terrified eyes hovering in the shelter of rainy doorways.