I looked a moment as she walked away, more delicately made than her sister but no weakling. That feeling of regret returned. The New Year's dinner, the great dark house with its brilliantly lit dining hall, the moldy relatives, the flame-shadowed crests around the fireplace, the stag antlers like gigantic thorns, the beautiful sisters, the snowbound estate, all seemed to be passing away. Altenburg was a painting lost in an attic corner among piles of junk slowly being covered by the breath of ghosts.

A foreign correspondent encounters four intriguing women during World War II. In Paris in 1940 he and another American, a concert violinist, have an affair. The fall of France is background to their volatile relationship. That autumn his news agency transfers him to Berlin, where the sputtering affair will reignite. His boss, the only woman head of a press bureau, has him help her gather data on the secret Nazi euthanasia program. That takes him to an estate in East Prussia, where two sisters provide him with coded information. They are members of a distinguished Junker family that will not survive the war. In a couple of visits the correspondent learns about the sisters from servants and from manuscripts left by two dead men. By now his boss has been expelled for spying, the United States has entered the war and the violinist is playing for the enemy. To avoid internment he escapes to Switzerland with the sisters' help. He works in Berne, exchanging letters with them. They are involved with anti-Nazi plotters. In late 1944 one of them is killed in a shootout with the Gestapo. In January 1945, aided by the Czech resistance and Polish partisans, the correspondent returns to help the surviving sister ecape from the Soviet Army. They become part of the chaotic flight west of German refugees that winter. Back in Paris after the war he thinks he has seen the last of these intriguing women. He's wrong.