It was October, a rare October for northern Europe, mild and sunny, and the tour had gone splendidly. The days had spun out into an indiscriminate blur of crowded museums, gilt-laden Baroque palaces and soaring Gothic cathedrals still throbbing with the echoes of more than seven centuries of Gregorian chants and Medieval organ concerts. And always the artifacts the churchly Moravian tour group had crossed the Atlantic to see—the old flintlocks, the tapestries, the wooden figurines, the illustrated manuscripts, the frakture, the gaudy ceramics, the painted peasant furniture once common all over Germany, and most of all the Famous Embroidered Towels of Düsseldorf. Artifacts without names or number, gaudy and nondescript, to be stared at long and admiringly from behind ropes and locked glass cages.

Now, after three weeks of one and two-night stands in all kinds of hotels and in all kinds of towns, after traveling back and forth over half a continent, Jason Wycott and his fellow tourists had come at last to Denmark, land of mists and strange nocturnal revels, then finally to the storied city of Copenhagen, where in less than a week they would hop a plane to Amsterdam and there board the overseas flight that was to take them back to the States.

Wycott—Wy to his friends and associates—sat alone at a bar in a cocktail lounge on the lower floor of the hotel where the tour group was making its last stop. In the bar mirror he looked much younger than his forty-one years, his face lean and even a little tan from all the warm October sun he had enjoyed for the last three weeks, not a bald spot anywhere in his full head of darkish hair, no more than a hint of distinguished gray beginning to appear on his sideburns. Yes, and nothing timid or wavering about the riveting gaze that stared back at him out of the mirror with almost mocking irreverence, and would have been the envy no doubt of many a man far younger than he. He laughed out loud as he sipped the dregs of his martini.

“Another, bartender! And please—how’s about a little gin in it this time?”

A real headache this guy. What was he saving his goddamn liquor for—the next war? Or maybe just another lonely old guy in a crowded city.

Wy felt the old, insane laughter coming again. For days now he had been unable to control these great outpourings of mirth. And now more than ever he felt no desire to do so. He laughed so loud and obnoxiously he soon had everyone in the bar staring at him. And why was he laughing?

Ah, yes, the secret! The glorious secret he had withheld from all the others. Well, give them time. All those others, his fellow travelers. Oh, yes, they would know soon enough—and what would be the look on their faces when they learned that he and Valerie Blandworthy—the slithering, fetching strawberry blonde with whom he had fallen violently in love, the wife of his closest friend, a girl who was to join him at any moment in the bar—had chosen to stay on in this historic land and renounce forever their old lives in the States?

How long had he dreaded that flight home! With what dread did he face the prospect of going back to an editorial routine—though successful enough he had been—and to a home-life that had turned more than a little sour in recent years. And now to have all the old dread swept away, to know he need not think of boarding that plane ever again, to know almost in an instant how his life had changed forever.

The Last Plane Home.

Yes. The last. A nice ring to it. Maybe a good title for his first best-selling novel. Could it have been only two nights ago that he and Valerie—wife of his good friend, F. Milhouse Blandworthy, restorationist and internationally known decorative arts aficionado, and a bit of an ass in the bargain—had sat in this same bar talking of their new life together? A long and fateful evening it was as he spoke of the consuming passion he could no longer conceal or deny, of his daring plot, beguilingly imposed on him by his lover, to walk away from the life he had known in the States and spend the rest of his days as an émigré in a land that had haunted him from his youth and was now to transform him into a Child of Destiny, the heir of dark, inexplicable and wondrous mysteries that would at last impel him to complete the great literary work so long simmering within him and now at last beginning to take concrete shape.

The Last Plane Home!

Yes, a good title sure to catch the eye of those infamous New York publishing houses. And there would be others, so many others. Why, he could dash them off almost at will, as fast as he could get them down on paper, and he did so, even now, as he sat waiting for Valerie. A rare compendium of titles and notes for future literary works in a vest-pocket notebook already crammed with such jottings, including a dozen false starts of the letter he would soon be obliged to complete and get in the mail to his wife and children

Was it really possible he was about to embark upon so improbable and fateful an adventure? Throwing over family, career, the life he had built for himself back in Georgia? What was it that had changed him at forty-one into the expatriate he had wanted to be at twenty-five or thirty?

Only the girl?

Yes, certainly the girl, yet much more as well—not passion alone so much as the ennobling and seductive power of the land itself. He had felt as he felt now long before he first began to run his hands over her lovely body, long before she first lay beside him in Cologne, smothering him with French kisses and an exotic scent of seductive perfumes that took their name from the town in which they were spending the night.