Back in Beirut a few hours later, Jeanne and I stopped by the hospital to see Louise. Having just come out of a drug-induced sleep, she was beginning to remember things and get nervous. We were able to assure her that everything was all right. It was what she'd been waiting to hear. Meanwhile her husband had been notified and was arriving that evening from Paris.

As Jeanne was feeling very tired, we decided to stay overnight in the hospital ourselves so that she could be examined by a doctor. We were told, however, that several emergency cases had been brought in, more were expected, and that no beds would be available except for these.

In the near distance we'd heard a lot of gunfire and asked what was happening. They told us that a busload of Palestinians returning from a rally in a refugee camp called Tal al Zaatar had entered a Christian sector of Beirut and had opened fire on a church. In retaliation several persons in the bus had been killed or wounded by the Falangists.

It wasn't our war. We took a room in a hotel by the seafront and went to bed early. Sporadic firing continued throughout the night. We didn't know it then – no one did – but it was the beginning of a civil war that within a year would turn this city into a burnt-out shell.

The next day we were stopped by three roadblocks on the way to the airport. I'd wanted Jeanne to fly back to France in an airliner but found all the flights were booked by tourists wanting to flee the country. I was told not to wait, to get my aircraft away from Beirut Airport as soon as possible.

So Jeanne came with me in the Helio. That night we lay in each others' arms in a hotel in Athens.

There were so many questions to ask her. She explained how she'd gotten involved, or reinvolved, in the problems of the Middle East. Until her father’s death she'd lived her whole life there. It was while on her way back to Europe that she'd met me. Our marriage had given her the opportunity of blotting out all the past, of beginning a new life far from the pressures of living in countries always at war or on the brink of war.

Only it hadn't worked. Shortly after we'd moved to Paris the past caught up with her. "Would you believe I'm the half sister of one of the PLO leaders?" She laughed ruefully. "My father ..." But she didn't tell me the story.

Jeanne was still feeling tired so we spent another day in Athens hoping her strength would return. It had been exhausting, she told me, working for Palestinians with their adolescent love of guns and helicopters, terror and intrigue. Ali was a case in point. He'd met Mrs. Koundiotes, had become her lover on her lonely Greek island, and had radicalized her. Unknown to her husband she began supporting the Palestinian cause with money and everything else at her disposal, including her husband's helicopters and their house in Othe, which she'd had him buy purely as a center of intrigue, then had ordered destroyed when it became infiltrated by the enemy.

"Ali blames you for her death," Jeanne told me.

"Then Mueller did kill her?"

"Yes. It changed something in Ali. Thinking back, I suppose it was at that moment he decided to blow up the whole thing. He wasn't normal when he picked me up in Cyprus. He pretended to ditch at sea because he wanted to keep the helicopter and never go back to Io Sirena. We heard you join the search, but we never knew what happened after that."

"I think Beirut never took the distress signal seriously. They couldn’t have been very upset thinking Ali lost at sea. Besides, they have other problems these days."

Although we’d never been in Athens together before, except for our bizarre encounter at the airport a few days earlier, unsurprisingly neither Jeanne nor I felt like doing any sightseeing. We spent the days in our room or lying by the hotel swimming pool. Once or twice I considered looking up Koundiotes and giving him my condolences and an explanation of what had happened. But probably he'd been able to piece things together for himself by that time.

I had an idea of the part my wife and Louise had played in the Baalbek drama, but I still wasn't clear about Heidi.

"Poor Heidi." Jeanne sighed. "She never did know what was going on. I think Ali got carried away by his role and told her some stories to have her come along. Then she came down with the flu so it was a good reason to leave her behind. Heidi’s husband was a businessman who neglected her. She loved him and hoped to do something to get his attention."

"She almost succeeded," I said. "But the way it turned out, he'll probably never even know what happened to her."

"People disappear all the time." Jeanne shrugged.

Which brought us to the question I'd wanted to ask from the beginning but didn't dare. "Jeanne?"

"What?"

I hesitated. I dreaded hearing the answer – whatever it was. My heart beating, I forced myself to ask. "Why did you disappear? Why did you let me believe you were dead?"

She didn’t reply. I watched her face, but she wasn't looking at me. Suddenly I realized that it didn’t matter. Nothing in the past mattered. We had the future ahead of us and that was all that was important. "Never mind," I told her. "Tomorrow we'll be back home, and everything will be like before. Only better, because now I have this fantastic job."

But still she didn't took at me or say anything.

After that Jeanne seemed to fall into a kind of mood. I could have kicked myself for saying anything. We ate dinner in silence. That night in bed when I took her in my arms she was listless and unresponsive.

We left the next day for Bari and the following one for Nice. But the closer I brought her toward home, the farther from me she seemed to drift in spirit. After crossing Italy, storms obliged us to spend the night in Bastia on the island of Corsica. It was there she told me the truth.

What the bogus Doctor Kentnor had told me that day in the "morgue" had been correct. It was the real Dr. Kentnor at the American Hospital who had told Jeanne that she had leukemia, the same disease that had killed her father. The malady was nearly always fatal, the treatment brutal and terribly expensive. As we had no medical insurance, she knew that for her to go into the hospital would put me in debt for the rest of my life. And for what? To reprieve her for a few months from the early death she knew awaited her.

"If the Baalbek thing hadn’t come up just then, she admitted to me, "I don't know what I'd have done. I hoped that by the time it was over the choices open to me would be clearer. Or narrower."

I told her that the minute we got to Paris she'd go into the hospital. Or I'd take her for treatment to the United States. She was younger than her father. Perhaps she could be cured. She'd have the best treatment available. She'd fight it and win.

But Jeanne refused. She didn't want to end her days having radiation treatment and chemical therapy. She didn't want to spend her last few months in a hospital fighting a losing battle.

We flew to Nice where we found a little house up in the mountains overlooking the sea. She refused all medication with the exception of blood transfusions. Her life would be so short. With my help she wanted to live it to the very end.

In that way we passed the summer. I had stopped working to be with her and although Richards offered to lend me money, I didn't accept. I didn't want Jeanne to die on borrowed money.

In September I sold the Helio without telling her. There was no regret. Somewhere along the line I had stopped loving the plane. I knew that when she died I'd never want to fly again.

My wife lived through the autumn and most of the winter. It was in a hospital room in Nice, with the Mardi Gras carnival filling the streets outside, when, holding my hand, Jeanne left me for the last time.

THE END