The piano player in the Vienna cabaret played like a man who knew the world was ending and wanted to dance through it anyway.

Laurent Dubois sat in the corner booth with a whiskey he did not want and a map he did not understand. The cabaret smelled of cigarette smoke and perfume and something sweeter, something that made you forget, briefly, that you were alive. Outside, the snow was falling on Ringstrasse, covering the cracks in the pavement, the bullet holes in the buildings, the memory of a war that had eaten an entire generation.

"You look like a man waiting for someone," said the woman at the next table. She was older than him, maybe thirty-five, with sharp eyes and sharper cheekbones. She wore a man's suit jacket and a woman's necklace, and Laurent could not decide which she was more comfortable in.

"I'm waiting for a sign," Laurent said.

"Signs don't come. You have to make them."

The bartender refilled his whiskey. Laurent did not order it. He stared at the amber liquid and thought about his father, who had died in a war that nobody remembered, in a battle that had no name, for a country that no longer existed in the form he had known it.

A man sat down across from him without asking permission. She was thin, wore round glasses, and carried a leather satchel that looked like it contained either books or weapons. Laurent could not tell the difference anymore.

"Captain Dubois," she said. "I am Elena Vasquez. You are waiting for a sign. I have something better."

She opened her satchel and pulled out a photograph. It showed a building in the Carpathian foothills, half-hidden by trees. In the photograph, someone had drawn a circle in red pencil around a single window.

"What is it?" Laurent asked.

"A library. Or what used to be a library before men with guns decided that books were more dangerous than bullets." She tapped the photograph. "Inside that window is a document. It was written three hundred years ago by a philosopher who believed that power should be limited by something older than kings. He called it the Charter of Liberty."

Laurent laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound. "You want me to go into occupied territory to find a piece of paper."

"I want you to go into occupied territory to find out if a piece of paper can still mean anything." She closed the satchel. "Your father died for nothing. This could make it mean something. Or it could prove that nothing ever means anything. Either way, you will have your answer."

Laurent looked at the whiskey. He looked at the photograph. He looked at the piano player, who was now playing something fast and bright and utterly meaningless.

"When?" he asked.

"Tomorrow night," Elena said. "The border crossing is unguarded between midnight and two. I will meet you on the other side."

She stood up, left a coin on the table, and walked out into the snow. Laurent watched her go, then picked up the photograph and put it in his coat pocket, next to his heart, where it pressed against him like a second heartbeat.