“When he went into that bar and saw Tony there with somebody, his head close to a handsome blond one, his hand on the man’s arm, Mac had been so…jealous.”

“So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.”

“Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she bagan to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.”

“...Closing his eyes, he saw every smile that Rebecca had ever directed his way and knew a pang of regret. He would have liked to have held her in his arms one last time before he died.”

“He was doing Tony’s dirty work, in a way—like Tony had done his in New York. One hand washing the other, neither of them getting clean.”

“Mac folded his arms on the bar and looked at me intently and said, in a resonant baritone, "You've got to be very careful, Harry."I looked at him, shocked. He'd...used grammar.”