The Reckoning

July 1944. The war that began in 1939 has entered its sixth year, and in no capital of Europe does anyone any longer pretend to know how it will end. In Berlin, a regime that has run out of victories is running, now, out of time. In Moscow, a General Secretary who has waited twenty years for his moment begins at last to move. In Washington, a new President — the old one lately dead — inherits a file he has not read. And in a small room in Broadway Buildings, an English service begins, quietly, to draft the terms of a peace it does not yet know how to win.

Across the twenty months that follow, the long arrangement collapses by the degrees by which such arrangements collapse: through a channel closed, a conference convened, a colonel's report filed in a language no Western clerk will read for forty years. A German diplomat returns, by a road he did not choose, to the city he left in 1933. A Red Army officer, now in uniform again, stands at a map table in the Kremlin and does not speak. An English agent, surviving where so many did not, comes home to a country she no longer recognizes. And in a hotel room in Vienna, in the last weeks of the war, two men agree — by a handshake unrecorded in any minute — to what will be remembered, afterward, as the Vienna Settlement.

The Reckoning is the fifth and final volume of The Rapallo Line. It is a book about endings — of a war, of an arrangement, of a generation of men and women who carried a thin wire between two empires through nine dark years and, at the last, laid it down.