Himmler nodded, jaw clenched.

"And you," Hitler said to Ribbentrop, "will write me a note I do not need to sign. A sentence to carry in a coat pocket. Nothing that smells of paper. A phrase to be dropped at the right table."

Ribbentrop bowed his head, relief uncoiling in him like a rope loosening. "Yes, mein Führer."

Hitler's eyes returned to the map.

He touched Danzig with a fingertip, as if to steady the city so it would not slide in the rain.

"We will dine with the devil," he said, almost conversationally, "but we will keep the table knife in our hand."

Keitel exhaled.

Himmler's mouth twitched in distaste, but he added nothing.

The meeting broke into its usual smaller motions.

Keitel murmuring dates, Himmler whispering about lists.

Ribbentrop sketching a sentence with the butt of a pencil on the edge of a blotter borders as instruments, instruments as guarantees, guarantees as weather.

When he left, the rain had eased.

Schmundt walked him to the stairs. "How did he take it?" the adjutant whispered.

"Like a man tasting something sour and finding it nourishing," Ribbentrop said.

"Göring," he said abruptly, as if the man were in the room. "Göring will approve the numbers. If this corridor of yours gives him fuel and iron while the west looks at its fingernails, he will make approving noises. I care less about noises than about steel. But steel makes noises when it is made."

He looked at Himmler. "You will watch our men who watch their men. I will not have seeds planted in Berlin soil."

He went back to the Ministry and called for Keller thin, polite Keller, who traveled with "cultural exchanges" and collected intonations like stamps.

Keller arrived just after midnight, eyes full with fatigue, hat dripping.

"You will go to Riga again," Ribbentrop told him. "You will sit with the same faces in the same smoke and you will say, very softly, that Europe is a symphony and some instruments must be in tune before others can play. You will mention that the east can be quiet if the west is loud. Do not say Poland. Let them say it."

Keller nodded once. "And if they ask what we want?"

Ribbentrop considered. "Tell them we want respect for realities. That we understand the geography of history."

Keller smiled without warmth. "They will like that sentence. It tastes like nothing and smells like everything."

"Go," Ribbentrop said.

When the door had shut, he sat for a long time with his hands folded, not touching the lamp, not touching the map.

His secretary brought coffee and set it down as if it were medicine.

"Draft," Ribbentrop said, without looking up. "One sentence, unsigned. 'Germany recognizes the natural tendency of borders to reflect realities, and expects that great powers can assure their mutual interests without the noise of public declarations.'" He paused. "No adjectives. Adjectives belong to sermons."

The secretary scratched, nodded, vanished.

Ribbentrop rose and walked to the window.

The rain had thinned to a mist.

He thought of Goebbels and his stories, of Göring counting barrels and tons, of Keitel's careful calendar, of Himmler's pallid contempt.

He thought of the one pair of eyes that mattered, glowing at a map, narrowing at a word.

Moscow.

He saw, for a heartbeat, a man in another city drawing a red line on a map and locking it in a drawer.

"Spheres," he murmured, as if saying it might make the invisible orbs hang in the air.

"Corridors. Instruments. Weather."

He did not say "pact."

The word felt like a final step on a staircase he was not yet ready to believe he had climbed.

The secretary returned with the sentence typed on a small card.

The paper was good German stock, crisp and obedient.

Ribbentrop read it once.

It was empty and full at once, exactly as he wished.

He slipped it into his pocket and patted it like a promise.

On his way out, he passed two junior clerks in wet coats, laughing about a football match that would never be played if the calendar turned the way the map demanded.

He envied them for one step, then did not.

In a Mercedes on the way home, he closed his eyes and saw Poland as a house with rotten wood, as a chorus screaming in Polish, in German, in Russian, in prayers.

He did not see faces.

He did not allow them.

Faces made arithmetic untidy.

At the Chancellery, Hitler stood alone again, after the others had gone, the lamps still burning in their golden bowls.

He stared at the map as if it were a mirror.

He tried to see France in it, not France now, but the France of a century ago, men in blue marching into German fields.

He tried to see England, but England was fog and distant bleating, ships like gray stones.

He tried to see Moscow and saw, instead, a long road of mud with horse bones sunk in it.

He put a hand flat on the paper, palm over Warsaw.

In the quiet, he could hear the rain settling into the seams of the city, the way water always found its way down.

"Devils," he said, not loudly. "We dine. And then we eat each other."

When he left, he did not turn off the lamps.

The light burned over the pins and the strings, over Danzig and Breslau and Vilnius, over a red thread that had not yet been tied to anything, waiting like a vein under pale skin.

In Moscow, the same rain, days later, would fall blacker, heavier.

In Warsaw, it would smell like coal and horse sweat.

In Riga, it would fall softly on a café while a thin German spoke in euphonies to a Soviet with tired eyes.

But for now, Berlin slept badly and pretended it slept well.

And in a pocket, close against a minister's chest, a sentence with no author warmed itself and dreamed of becoming history.