Mystery the Best of 2002

Mystery: The Best of 2002 Jon L. Breen

Editor New York www.ibooks.net An Original Publication of ibooks, inc. Copyright © 2003 by ibooks, inc. Introduction copyright © 2003 by Jon L. Breen “To Live and Die in Midland, Texas” copyright © 2002 by Clark Howard. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Set./Oct. 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “The Adventure of the Agitated Actress” copyright © 2002 by Daniel Stashower. First published in Murder, My Dear Watson. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “An Unkindness of Ravens” copyright © 2002 by Donna Andrews. First published in The Mysterious North. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” copyright © 2002 by Michael Collins. First published in Flesh and Blood: Dark Desires. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “A Girl Named Charlie” copyright © 2002 by Adams Round Table. First published in Murder in the Family. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “Bless Me Father, for I Have Sinned” copyright © 2002 by Ed Gorman. First published in Murder Most Catholic. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “War Can Be Murder” copyright © 2002 by Mike Doogan. First published in The Mysterious North. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “The Painted Lady” copyright © 2002 by DeLoris Stanton Forbes. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us” copyright © 2002 by George P. Pelecanos. First published in Measures of Poison. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “Moody’s Blues” copyright © 2002 by Hal Charles. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 2002. Reprinted by permission of the authors. • “Mom Lights a Candle” copyright © 2002 by James Yaffe. First published in a separate chapbook edition published by Crippen & Landru. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “If All is Dark” copyright © 2002 by Mat Coward. First published in Crimewave 6. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “Ukulele and the World’s Pain” copyright © 2002 by James Sallis. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/Aug. 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author. • “The Spy and the Minotaur” copyright © 2002 by Edward D. Hoch. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. ibooks, inc. 24 West 25th Street New York, NY 10010 The ibooks World Wide Web Site Address is: http://www.ibooks.net ISBN 1-5917-6786-5 First ibooks, inc. printing April 2003

CONTENTS Introduction Jon L. Breen To Live and Die in Midland, Texas Clark Howard The Adventure of the Agitated Actress Daniel Stashower An Unkindness of Ravens Donna Andrews Twilight’s Last Gleaming Michael Collins A Girl Named Charlie Stanley Cohen Bless Me Father for I Have Sinned Ed Gorman War Can Be Murder Mike Doogan The Painted Lady DeLoris Stanton Forbes The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us George P. Pelecanos Moody’s Blues Hal Charles Mom Lights A Candle James Yaffe If All is Dark Mat Coward Ukulele and the World’s Pain James Sallis The Spy and the Minotaur Edward D. Hoch

Mystery: The Best of 2002 An Introduction Jon L. Breen A “best” collection usually doesn’t and probably shouldn’t have a theme, apart from quality and variety. But this year’s selection, without conscious intent of the editor, is about longevity. If long-lived orchestra conductors are kept vital by all that arm waving, maybe durable mystery writers owe their extended careers to vigorous mental exercise. Of the writers in the pages to follow, James Yaffe has been active off and on in the mystery and detective genre since emerging as a teenage prodigy in 1943; Edward D. Hoch began his career in the latter-day pulps in 1955; and DeLoris Stanton Forbes and Clark Howard both first appeared in magazines in 1956. Michael Collins’s Dan Fortune, whose first case was the Edgar-winning Act of Fear (1966), is now the longest running continuously active sleuthfor-hire in the business. The other contributors are comparative newcomers. If they follow the example of their colleagues, Mat Coward and Donna Andrews, whose first novels appeared in 1999 and 2000 respectively, may still be a force in mid-21st-century crime fiction. Watch for Mystery: The Best of 2050. Meanwhile, I commend your attention to the stories that follow. Styles range from spare to ornate, moods from very touch to fairly cozy, modes from puzzle to caper to psychological suspense, periods from early 20th century to the computerized present, subject matter from a theatrical rehearsal to a college reunion to a real estate transaction to a musical gig. Locales include at least nine states plus Washington, D.C., London past and present, and Crete. Whether you peruse these stories in 2003 or some date years in the future, at home or on vacation or in transit, I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

“To Live and Die in Midland, Texas” Clark Howard Frank Raine wasn’t supposed to drink alcoholic beverages. He had been out on parole from the Texas penitentiary up in Huntsville for just a week, and he knew full well that the Tanqueray-and-tonic in front of him on the bar could put him back in the place they called The Walls for another two, maybe three, years. He wasn’t supposed to associate with known felons either, but he was about to break that rule too, waiting as he was in a small Houston bar to meet his old cellmate, Jesus Ortega. Because the Spanish pronunciation of Ortega’s given name was Hay-soose, everyone called him “Soose.” Raine had not seen him since Soose made parole some eight months earlier, but when Frank walked out of the joint a week ago, a message from a gate trusty had been passed to him, a phone number on a scrap of paper, and when he called it a couple of days later, Soose answered. Now, as Frank Raine took his first tangy sip of the T-and-T, Soose walked in the door and Frank rose to greet him. The two men embraced and exchanged amigos. Soose was carrying about thirty extra pounds and Frank patted the Latino’s belly. “Who’s the father, man?” “Very funny,” Soose replied, unoffended. “It’s hard not to put on weight living with my mother, man; she never cooks small. Come on, let’s get a booth in the back.” Soose bobbed his chin at the bartender, who was also Hispanic. “Double Jack Daniels, carnal,” he said. Carnal meant street brother; all Hispanic males understood it. The two men sat in a back booth and made small talk until Soose’s drink had been set in front of him. Then Soose got down to business. “Man, you getting out last week was like the answer to a prayer. How’d you like to split a cool two million four ways?” “What kind of cool two million?” Raine asked. “Dollars, baby,” Soose replied with a dazzling smile. “Greenbacks. Currency. And all unmarked.” “If you’re talking an armored truck or something like that, I’m not interested,” Raine told him. “I’m waiting for Stella to get out next week so’s we can get back together. I’m not looking for anything high risk right now—” “It ain’t high risk, Frankie,” his friend assured him. “That’s the beauty of it. The cash ain’t even gonna be in a vault; it’s gonna be in a footlocker, just like one of those you buy at Wal-Mart. Only this one is painted gold. There’ll be maybe two, three, four security guards or local redneck cops looking after it. You, me, and one other guy can take em down with no sweat.” Soose smiled again: two rows of the kind of teeth you see in toothpaste ads. “Interested now, amigo?” “Maybe,” said Raine. “Let’s hear the rest of it.” Soose leaned forward on the table, his dark face becoming grave. “How much you know about Texas, man?” Raine shrugged. “Good cops. Lousy prisons.” “No, I mean about Texas history.” “Not much. My people stole it from your people.” “Yeah, but besides that.” Soose took a sip of his Jack Daniels. “Let me give you a little history lesson. After the gringos stole it from the Mexican people, Texas was annexed as a state in 1845 For a long time, it didn’t have no real borders; it jus’ went on forever. Because of its size, some smart gringos decided to put in the state’s charter that it could be divided into five smaller states if the people living

here voted for it.” Raine frowned. “Five different states?” “Yeah. Think about it. Today it would mean ten U.S. senators instead of two.” “Whoa,” Raine said quietly, pursing his lips in a silent whistle. “Whoa is right,” Sose agreed. “Anyway, when the Civil War came along, Texas went with the Confederacy, so it was no longer part of the United States and its original charter was no good no more. Then, after the war ended, Texas was readmitted to the Union in 1870 under a new state charter. This one left out the right of Texas to divide itself up. But there’s a lot of feeling around that with a vote of the people, it could still be done. Not into five states, but into two: North Texas and South Texas. Just like North and South Carolina, North and South Dakota.” “What’s all this got to do with a two-million-dollar score?” Raine asked. “Im getting to that,” Soose told him. “You ever hear of an oil burg named Midland?” Raine frowned. “Sounds familiar, but I’m not sure why.” “It’s over in West Texas, in the middle of a huge wasteland that just happens to have an ocean of oil under it. Member about twelve, fifteen years ago, a little girl fell in a well? Baby Jessica—” “Yeah, I remember that. It was front page stuff for two or three days. They got her out, right?” “Yeah. Everybody that could read knew about it. Midland is famous for it. That and the fact that President Bush started in the oil business there. He calls it his hometown, says he wants to be buried there.” “You’re not working up to something that involves the President and Secret Service, are you?” Raine asked prudently. “Because if you are—” “No, man, you think I’m crazy?” Soose demurred. “Jus’ listen, okay? There’s this big private building in Midland called the New Petroleum Club. All the big shot oil men are members. They hold private parties there, business meetings, political pow-wows, that kind of stuff. A week from now there’s gonna be a big fund-raising luncheon there to start piling up money to run a slate of independent candidates in the next state election who will support a movement to divide Texas into two states, north and south. They’re gonna call themselves the Partition Party. A hundred of the wealthiest men in the state are behind it. I’m talking oil men from central Texas, cattle men from the Panhandle, telecommunications people from Houston, natural gas pipeliners from El Paso, millionaire cotton farmers from the Rio Grande valley, shipping big shots from Galveston, you name it. There’s money from all over Texas behind this idea. A hundred of the wealthiest men in the state are gonna meet in Midland for this fundraising luncheon and kick in twenty thousand bucks apiece to put the first two million into this new political party’s campaign chest.” “Yeah, but they won’t bring cash,” Raine said, “they’ll bring checks—” “Wrong. They will bring cash. This is all under-the-table money. These guys don’t want any record of their donations. This is how they get around the federal limit on political donations. You’ve heard politicians talking about ‘soft’ money? Well, this is what they call quiet money.” Raine was staring almost in disbelief at his friend. “All one hundred of these guys are bringing twenty grand to this luncheon—in cash?” “You got it. Fresh currency, mixed bills, from different banks all over the state, unmarked, and—” “Untraceable,” Raine finished the sentence for him.

“Right, And it all gets dropped into that Wal-Mart footlocker that’s painted gold and setting in front of the head table. When everybody’s dropped their money in, those hick cops I tol’ you about will put it in the back of a station wagon to drive it to a local bank to be put in a vault. But between the club and the bank—” “It’s exposed,” Frank Raine said quietly. He drummed his fingertips silently on the table. Slowly his expression morphed into the set, steady look of a man who had just established for himself an irrepressible goal. “How’d you hit on this?” he asked. “I worked in the oil fields over in Midland while I was on parole. Me and this gringo kid named Lee Watts worked for an old-timer named J. D. Pike. The guy’s an old wildcatter, been rich three or four times, married three or four times, gone broke three or four times. Right now he’s supposed to have enough money to be on the list of oil men invited to the luncheon, but fact is he’s almost flat busted. He’s got some oil leases over in Louisiana that he’s sure are gonna hit, but he needs a stake. He could go out and borrow the dough, but then he’d have to share the profits if he hit a gusher. So he asked Lee if he knew anybody who might be interested in a quick and easy score for big bucks. Lee came to me with it.” “And now you’re coming to me,” Raine said. “Why?” Soose looked chagrined. “Come on, Frank. I’m small time compared to you. I can go along on a score like this, but I can’t plan it. I can’t pull it all together. It needs a jefe.” Soose pronounced the last word “hef-fey.” It meant chief. “Who all’s in on it?” Raine asked. “Just the guys I tol’ you about: Old man Pike, Lee Watts, an’ me.” “What kind of split you figuring on?” “I already talked that over with the others, without mentioning your name, just your reputation. We agreed to give you forty percent, eight hundred grand, to engineer the whole job. The rest of us would split a million-two even: four hundred grand each.” “What about front money? Guns, getaway car, other expenses?” “Old man Pike said he still has a little cash left for that.” Raine sat back and chewed on a piece of hard, dead skin next to one of his thumbnails. He was an ordinary looking man, some good features, some poor, not the kind that many women looked at twice, but those who did were serious about it. He was graying at the temples and had a not unattractive scar above his right eyebrow where he’d been hit with a bottle once. It was his eyes that told the most about him: they said don’t lie to me and I won’t lie to you. It was best to believe them. “When is this big luncheon planned for?” he asked Soose. “A week from Wednesday.” Today was Tuesday, Raine thought. That gave them seven days before the day of the job. Stella would be getting out on Thursday; that would give Raine enough time to work on her, to give her the “one last job” routine. And it would give him time to check out the others on the job: an old man, a kid from the oil fields—it might be too thin from a personnel aspect. “What about this guy who brought it to you?” “Lee? He’s okay. Texas poor, you know, but not trash. Good kid. Got a steady girl but they ain’t married yet. Wants to buy a motorcycle shop with his end of the take.”

“And the old man?” “A little shaky,” Soose admitted, “but tough. You prob’ly wouldn’t want him in on the actual heist, just before and after.” “Can you set up a meet for Saturday?” “Sure, perfect time. Everybody comes to Midland on Saturdays; nobody’ll notice us.” “Not in Midland. The old man must be known there; the kid too, maybe even you. Make it someplace else.” Soose thought a moment, then said, “We could meet in Odessa, about twenty-five miles away. Just south of town there’s a public park called Comanche Trails. There’s picnic tables around. I could pick up some tostados and salsa and beer; we could eat while we talk.” “Good. Make it this Saturday, three o’clock. Listen, I need a car.” “You can take mine, carnal. It’s a sweet little 91 Chrysler with leather, runs like a dream. I’ll use my mother’s car and she can use my sister’s car. My sister’s expecting; she’s eight months along and don’t drive much anyhow.” Soose’s expression firmed. “So, we’re set for Saturday, camarada?” Partner. “Yeah,” Raine nodded. “We’re set for Saturday. In Odessa.” On Thursday morning, early, Raine got out of bed in a Holiday Inn south of the main drag in Waco. He showered, shaved closer than usual, and dressed in new slacks, a pullover Izod, and new loafers. He had bought some Alberto VO-5 the previous night to color the gray streaking his temples, but decided against using it. He figured what the hell, Stella would be older too; as practical and right-on as she had always been, she would expect him to be different too. At a Denny’s out on the highway, he had a heart-attack-on-a-plate for breakfast—eggs, sausages, biscuits and gravy, and coffee. Then he got into Soose’s car and drove the eighteen miles out to Gatesville, where the women’s prison was. Stella came walking out with two other discharges, both Hispanic, at ten o’clock. She was wearing a plain cotton dress that buttoned up the front, low-heel Oxfords with white socks, and carrying a brown paper bundle with her personal items in it. Raine walked up and took the bundle from her. “I’ve got a car over here,” he said. “And a room for a couple of nights in Waco.” She merely nodded. Raine put an arm around her shoulders and walked her to the car. He could tell she had tears building up in her eyes, but she held them back. In the front seat of the car, she took a tissue from the pocket of her dress and dabbed her eyes dry. Then she forced a smile and brushed two fingertips across the hair at his temples. “You’re getting gray.” Raine smiled self-consciously. “You aren’t.” “I color mine,” she said. “Can you do that in there?” he asked, surprised. Stella threw him a cynical look. “You can do anything you want to on the inside. You should know that.” He shrugged. “I guess I thought things were different in a women’s prison.”

“Inside is inside,” she said quietly. He asked how her mother and sisters were, she asked how his father was. “Dead,” he told her. “Finally drank himself to death. She asked him about his parole, told him about hers. He asked if she wanted to stop and get something to eat; she said no, but asked him to pull over somewhere and park. He turned off on a dirt road. She opened the bundle on her lap and handed him a small school photograph. “She’s fourteen now, Frank. This is her eighth grade graduation picture.” Unlike Stella, Raine could not keep all the tears in; one escaped from each eye and stung his freshly shaved cheeks. “My god, she’s you all over again—” “I think she’s got your eyes,” Stella said. “So direct and serious.” After a while, they drove on. “Mother says she’s a good kid,” Stella told him. “Gets good grades. Bags groceries at a Kroger store on weekends. Runs around with a good crowd.” “That’s important,” Raine said solemnly. “Don’t we know it now,” Stella agreed. “Lord, it seems like a hundred years ago when we left that little Tennessee town on a Greyhound bus to set the world on fire. What a couple of crazy kids we were. I’m glad Lucy’s not like us.” “Yeah, me too,” Raine replied softly. They were silent for the rest of the drive to Waco. When they got to the motel and he unlocked the door for her, Raine said, “You need some clothes. There’s a big mall just down the road—” “Clothes aren’t the only thing I need,” Stella told him, putting down her bundle and unbuttoning her dress. Raine watched her. She was heavier than he remembered, as Soose was, as he knew he himself was; but the thighs had the same roundness, the hips the same sensual jut, the breasts the same buoyancy, the lips the same unspoken invitation and promise. When they got into bed, the familiarity of all the places he began to kiss and lick and bite made him able to ignore the stale prison smell of her. After she shopped for clothes and changed into something new, they went to a steakhouse for dinner. While they ate, Stella said all the things Raine knew she would. “I want to go home, Frankie. I want to go back to that little hick town in Tennessee and get a job in some store uptown and come home every night and fix supper. I want to be a mother to Lucy for these last few years before she’s all the way grown up. I haven’t held her in my arms since she was six years old, Frankie—” Her voice broke and Raine took her hands across the table. “I know, honey, I know—” “Do you, Frank? Do you really?” “Sure I do. But how, Stel? How can we go back? Everybody in town knows us, everybody will remember us. They know what we’ve been, where we’ve been. You might be able to get a job, but what about me? You think anybody would hire me? I’m a two-time loser: the Tennessee reformatory and now the Texas pen. I couldn’t get a job delivering newspapers.”

“There must be some way, Frank.” Stella’s voice had pleading in it, and desperation. “Just because we’ve made mistakes shouldn’t mean we have to pay for them forever. There’s got to be a way to start over.” “There is,” he told her. “Change our names. Get new identities. It’s not hard to do. Then find a place to settle down, buy a home. Florida maybe, or California. Get a little business of some kind. A franchise, maybe. Like a video rental store, something like that.” He paused a beat, then added carefully, “Only to do those things we’d need a stake, money to get us started—” “What if we could both find work somewhere new? We could start saving and—” Her hopeful words stopped suddenly, broken off by the reality of the moment. A knowing look clouded her face. “A stake, you said. You’ve already got something lined up, haven’t you?” “Not exactly lined up, but a good possibility. A guy I celled with in Huntsville brought it to me. It sounds quick and clean, plus the money is serious. But I’d have to take a closer look at it.” “How serious—the money?” “Eight hundred grand. Cash. Untraceable.” “Suppose we get it—what then?” Stella asked. “Head for Mexico? Lease some lavish villa in Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta? Buy a new boat? Clothes, jewelry? Live like rich people for a few months, a year, until we’re broke again? That’s the usual plan, isn’t it, Frank?” “No,” he said quietly, eyes lowered as if the suggestion were shameful. “No, not this time.” He looked up at her. “I’m tired, Stel. I want to go home, too.” “Don’t lie to me about this, Frank.” Anger flashed across his face. “I don’t lie to you about anything, you know that.” Now Stella lowered her own eyes. “I’m sorry.” They finished dinner and walked a pier that bordered Lake Waco until the mosquitos became too much for them so they headed back to the motel. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” Stella said, her arm in his as they walked. “You always told me it was better to talk about serious things in the morning, when your mind was fresh. Remember?” “Yeah, I remember.” On the way they came to a liquor store. “Want me to get us a bottle of Tanqueray?” he asked. “Why not?” Stella said. “Be like old times.” They spent Thursday and Friday nights at the motel in Waco, then got up at dawn on Saturday and started driving west across Texas. At nine o’clock they stopped in San Angelo for gas and breakfast. Then they covered the remaining 130 miles and drove into Odessa from the south just after one o’clock. They checked into another Holiday Inn and Stella went for takeout food while Raine washed up and changed shirts. During the trip, Raine had told Stella all about the job and what he knew about the men involved. “I’ll get a better handle on things after the meet,” he said as they sat on the bed and ate Big Macs and fries. “Then you and I can decide if we think it’s worth the risk. If we decide it isn’t, we’ll back off, just like you want.” They had talked incessantly about their options during their hours in the car: their goal was to make a

life with their daughter Lucy before it was too late; their choices—try it the honest way, tough it out, see if it could be done—or do it the easy way, a quick, clean job, a good take, and this time play it smart, don’t blow all the cash on the good life. No. Instead, use it slowly to build a new life, a respectable life, one they could bring Lucy into. There was now a tacit agreement between them. Frank would not go in on the heist unless it was a sure thing—a really sure thing—or at least as close to one as thieves ever got. It had to be too good to pass up. But if they went for it, and it came off okay, and they were in the clear, they would hole up somewhere —somewhere modestly—and start putting together their new life. There would be no Mexican villa, no high life, no boat—nothing like that. And this would be their last job. Their very last. Raine picked up a city map at the motel desk and located Comanche Trails Park. He got there early and took up a parked position where he could watch the others arrive. It was one of those hot West Texas days where the air was heavy and your lips got puffy and dry if you stayed outside too much. Only about half of the picnic tables were in use, mostly by young Hispanic families. Soose had picked out a good place to meet; Hispanics tended to notice little, mind their own business, and forget everything that did not concern them. The kid, Lee Watts, got there first, driving a beat-up old Dodge Ram pickup. He had a gawky, oil field roustabout look to him: deeply tanned, buzz cut blond hair, tight Wranglers, white shirt with the cuffs rolled up a couple of turns, pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He looked around for the others, didn’t see them, and walked to a picnic table to wait. The table was in the far corner, off to itself. Smart, Raine thought. Next came the old man, J. D. Pike, thin as a whip under a tan Stetson, ancient face as leathery as a work saddle, eyes concealed by mirrored sunglasses, Western shirt closed at the neck with a Bolo tie. As he emerged from his pickup, which was much newer than Lee’s, he saw the younger man at once and ambled over to him. Soose showed up in an older model Chevy sedan and got a large restaurant takeout box from the trunk. Halfway to the table, Lee went out to meet him. “There’s an ice chest of beer in the back seat,” Soose bobbed his chin toward the car, sending Lee to get it. While Soose was opening the box of food and dealing out paper plates, Raine got out of the car and walked casually over to them. Lee and old man Pike turned their attention his way, studying him as he approached. “Hey, carnal!” Soose said when Frank walked up. The two ex-convicts embraced. Soose introduced the others to Raine, then waved his arm over the table. “Tostados, tacos, taquitos, tamales—the works. And some good Cervizo to wash it down.” As they began to eat, Raine said quietly, “Well, it’s your job, Mr. Pike. Why don’t you tell us about it, start to finish, just like we don’t know nothing at all.” Pike laid it out for them, pretty much the same way Soose had laid it out for Raine in the bar. It gave Raine an opportunity to scrutinize and evaluate the old man, to scope him out: the way he talked, how his eyes moved, how steady his hands were while proposing armed robbery. By the time Pike had

finished, Raine was convinced that the old man was solid. Lee he would check out later, with Soose. But for now, when Pike asked, “Well, what do you think?”, Raine nodded approval. “Sounds good. I’ll check the layout this afternoon. If it looks good, we’re on.” Soose and Lee smiled broadly, while Pike pursed his lips and clasped his hands together on the table, relieved. “We’re going to have to work fast,” Raine said. He was eating little, since he had eaten lunch earlier with Stella. The others, appetites apparently whetted by the job looking to be on, were wolfing down the food. “We’ll need front money right away,” he told Pike. “I’ve got five thousand in my pocket right now,” Pike said. “And I can get more, not much, but a little.” The old man was being flat out honest, Raine felt, which was good. “I don’t think we’ll need that much,” Raine said. “I’ll take a grand for personal expenses. Give Soose three grand.” To Soose, he said, “Pick up a couple of good, cold, throwaway pieces for you and Lee. Nothing big and bulky, no long barrels, no automatics. Thirty-eight Specials with four-inch barrels if you can get them. No hollow point cartridges; if we have to shoot anybody, I don’t want them to die. And pick up an AK-47 for me, just for show; I’ll need it to cover the guards while we get the footlocker into our car. Also pick up three big bandanas for masks.” Raine turned to Lee. “I want you to go back to Houston with Soose. He’ll get you a fake driver’s license. Next Tuesday you’ll use it to rent a car at Houston International. Pay cash and get something ordinary looking, four-door sedan, but with a boss engine—a Buick or an Olds. Have it back here by five o’clock Tuesday afternoon. You can follow Soose back and you two can get a motel room somewhere on the other side of Odessa for the night.” Raine drummed his fingertips on the table. “That’s all I can think of right now. Mr. Pike let us have the money and give me a phone number where I can reach you.” While Pike counted out hundred-dollar bills from a roll he took from his pocket, Raine noticed that Lee was cleaning off their picnic bench and taking the refuse to a nearby trash can. When he saw Raine watching him, the younger man grinned sheepishly. “Can’t litter,” he said, almost in embarrassment. “Got to keep Texas beautiful.” Raine gave him a thumbs up in approval. The next day, with Soose driving, he, Raine, and Lee headed for Midland, twenty-five miles north. Stella stayed behind in the Odessa motel. Raine had told her at dinner the previous evening that the job appeared good on the surface, but he wanted to check out every last detail of it before making a final commitment. Stella was pleased that Raine was being so cautious; in the past he had pulled jobs on the spur of the moment if they looked even passably good. That, of course, was what had caused them to draw six-to-ten in the Texas pens. The drive north was along a girder-straight highway across a parched, yellowish-gray land that was the surface of the Permian Basin caprock. It would have looked like some lifeless planet far away except for the skeleton-scaffolded oil well pumps bobbing up and down in endless monotony to suck up some of the millions, perhaps billions, of barrels of crude that had been discovered when the first gusher popped nearly eighty years earlier. When they got to Midland, they drove through Old Town first, then cruised slowly through a mostly deserted downtown section that looked like it was just stoically waiting out the dry, heavy-heated day until closing time. The only activity was in a small plaza where people sat on park benches eating ice cream cones, and young mothers in pairs and trios pushed their toddlers in strollers and gossiped.

“Wasn’t always like this,” Lee said from the back seat. “Time was, when crude was thirty-five dollars a barrel, this ol’ town was jumping seven days and nights a week. People had so much money, they broke sweat trying to think up new ways to spend it. Hell, we used to have a Rolls-Royce dealership right here in town. And just about ever’body who had a producing well owned an airplane.” He grunted softly, remembering.” Fancy country clubs all over the place. Big parties all the time. But not no more. Big things now for most folks is shopping at Wal-Mart and going to the high school football game on Friday night.” “You lived here all your life?” Raine asked. “Yeah, mostly. My old man was a rigger; tried to put together enough money to buy some mineral rights and put in a well of his own, but he never made it. We never was dirt poor, but we was definitely part of the lower class in Midland. In high school I never got invited to no swim parties or dances that the rich kids had at the country clubs. Never wore nothin’ to school but old hand-me-down jeans and work shirts from my old man and brothers. Believe me, it weren’t no fun living like that in Midland, right in the middle of a town full of rich oil people and their kids. We wasn’t but a step up from the Mexicans.” Lee glanced uneasily at Soose. “Nothin’ personal, man.” Soose said nothing, but seated next to him Raine noticed a slight clenching of his jaw. Cellmates learned to recognize little things like that about each other. Soose had not liked the remark, but it was not important enough to make an issue of it. The job came first. “Soose tells me you want to buy a motorcycle shop,” Raine said, changing the subject. “Yeah. I figure a small Suzuki dealership somewheres, not in no big city, and not around Midland for sure, but maybe up in the panhandle. Amarillo or thereabouts.” “And you’ve got a girl, right?” “Yeah. Name’s Wendy. She comes from the same kind of fam’ly I do: got nothin’ and gettin’ nowhere. She works out at the Dairy Queen right now. We plan on gettin’ married soon’s we can get out of this dead-end town.” “What does Wendy think of you being in on a job like this?” Raine asked casually. “She don’t know about it,” Lee replied earnestly. “She wouldn’t put up with nothin’ like that. You don’t think I’d—” Abruptly the younger man stopped talking and, where he had been leaning forward to converse, now sat back and grinned knowingly. “I get it. That was a test, right?” “Sort of,” Raine admitted. “Where you gonna tell her you got the money to buy that shop?” “I figure to find a place for sale and tell her the owner’s bringing me in as a partner to run it and pay for it in, like, five years. She won’t know the difference.” “You won’t be leaving Midland right away, will you?” “No, sir. I figure that might look suspicious. We’ll wait a while. People hereabouts know I been looking for a shop; they won’t think nothin’ of it if we leave in six months or so.” “Good thinking,” Raine told him. “It’s a good plan. Just stick to it. Don’t let the money go to your head.” “I don’t aim to,” Lee Watts assured him. After Lee guided them on a general tour of the area, Raine had him show them the New Petroleum Club. On the way, they passed the original Petroleum Club. “That’s the old place,” Lee said. “Goes back to the days of the wildcatters. Inside, it’s like being on the Titanic. Got this huge grand staircase leading to the dining room. People who belonged there weren’t just worth millions, they was worth

billions. But it’s kind of been going downhill for quite a while now.” “But this isn’t where the big fund-raising luncheon’s being held, right?” asked Raine. “No, sir. That’s at the New Petroleum Club. Hang a right at the next corner, Soose.” The New Petroleum Club set on a low mound of manicured rye grass, a cobblestone drive leading to it from the highway north of town. It was a high-tech building, all glass and chrome and polished tile, valet parking under a modernistic porte cochere, huge U.S. and Texas state flags flying from tall silver poles. “This here was built by the younger crowd that missed the big bonanza,” Lee said. “They come along later: high-level people with Mobil and Conoco and Texaco—the ones that’ve got millions but not billions. There’s a back road over behind it where Mr. Pike says they’ll be bringing the money out—” From a narrow, black-topped farm-to-market road running several hundred yards behind the club grounds, Frank Raine could see the less impressive rear facade of the building. There was a small loading dock off to one side, backed by service doors that he guessed accessed the club’s kitchen, food lockers, and service facilities. The other side of the lower rear was a blank wall. The upper part of the rear wall had cantilevered windows floor to ceiling all the way across the structure. At the moment they were closed by horizontal blinds. “That the dining room?” Raine asked, anxiety rising in him at the thought of a hundred Texans gathered up there watching the robbery. But Lee relieved his mind. “No, sir. Mr. Pike said that was a big conference room that won’t be in use the day of the luncheon. The actual luncheon will be around t’other side where the dining room faces a big duck pond. Mr. Pike says won’t be nobody here cept kitchen help. Mostly, uh—” he nodded toward Soose. “Hispanics,” Soose said. “Yeah,” said Lee. “Mr. Pike figures when all the cash has been tossed in, the footlocker will be closed up and security guards from the Permian Basin Merchant’s Bank will carry it out back to a van or SUV —he don’t think they’ll go to the expense of an armored truck, not for just a two-mile drive. Anyhow, there’ll also be a couple or three local cops out back, maybe city, maybe county, for an escort. The footlocker’s to be driven straight uptown where the president of the bank will be waiting to put it in the vault. Mr. Pike says they’ll prob’ly be extra alert for an ambush tween here and town—but he don’t think they’ll expect nothing right here at the back door.” “He’s right,” Raine agreed. “They’ll be concentrating on loading the locker into whatever kind of transportation they’ve got. This is the place to do it, all right.” Raine’s eyes darted around the back of the building. Two kitchen workers, wearing white culinary coats, came onto the dock and emptied trays into disposal cans. Raine studied them, then turned his attention to two rows of cars between the club and where they were parked. “What are those cars over there?” “That’s club employee parking.” As they were looking, a new Lincoln drove in and parked in a reserved space nearest the club. Two men got out, one short wearing a sport coat, the other tall and lanky, in a red Western shirt. “The short guy is Mr. Sims,” Lee said. “He runs the club. Other fellow’s Ross Tabb. He organizes big hunting trips up to Canada and down to Mexico for the rich men. He’s a professional rifle and pistol shot, too; got lots of trophies and stuff. Ever’body calls him Red’ cause he don’t never wear nothin’ but red shirts.”

“Will he be at the luncheon?” Raine asked. “Oh, hell no. He ain’t in the same league with these oil men; he’s just hired help.” Good, Frank Raine thought. Last person he wanted around during a big heist was some hotshot hipshooter who liked to show off. Soose drove them back to Odessa. On the way, Raine was quiet, contemplative. At one point he said to Soose, “Pick up three of those white coats the kitchen workers wear, one for each of us.” Later he said, “Get a box of surgical gloves, too.” When they got back to Odessa, they dropped Lee at this pickup, then Raine and Soose went to a local bar and had a drink. “Well, what do you think, carnal?” Soose asked. Raine shook his head. “I don’t know. It looks almost too good.” Briefly he bit his lower lip, in thought. “I keep looking for some weak spot, something that can glitch up on us, but I can’t find anything. One thing I’ve learned is that there’s no such thing as a completely perfect heist—but this one sure looks close to it.” “Maybe this is our once-in-a-lifetime shot, carnal. Guys like us don’t get many chances in life. There’s things I want to do for my mother before she dies, you know? Get her a nice house. Take her on a trip back to Mexico to see her sisters and brothers. She’s had a hard life, an’ a lot of it’s been my fault. I want to give her a few good years, you know? Maybe this is my chance to make it.” He paused a beat, then added, “Yours too, amigo.” “Yeah,” Raine agreed quietly. “Maybe this one is it. Maybe this is the one every thief looks for in life. The dream job.” After several moments of silence, Soose said, “So? Do we go?” Frank Raine nodded solemnly. “Yeah. We go.” The next morning, after eating breakfast at a Denny’s, Raine said to Stella, “I want to take you up to Midland, honey. I want you to see where this job is going down, and I want to find a spot where you can hook up with Pike, the old man who’s bankrolling the job. You’ll take him to a place where Soose, Lee, and I will come directly after the job. We’ll dump the getaway car and all five of us will head back to the motel in Odessa in the car you’re driving. That’s where we’ll cut up the take.” “Why not just have the old man come to the motel and wait there with me?” Stella asked. “Because I don’t trust him,” Raine said evenly. “I don’t trust anybody anymore, except you. And I don’t want you trusting anybody either, hear me? Nobody.” “Sure, baby,” Stella replied quietly. “Whatever you say, Frankie.” The tone of his voice had somehow frightened her for a moment. She had never heard him talk like that before a job. He was, she realized for the first time, a lot harder, colder, than before he went to prison. Texas pens, she had heard, did that to a man. After breakfast, they drove up to Midland and cruised around the area for a while. Raine showed Stella the New Petroleum Club and the escape route he had planned. “As soon as we score, we leave the club and hang a left on this farm-to-market road so we can skirt around downtown Midland to pick up Interstate 10 back to Odessa. We’ll find a place uptown for you to meet old man Pike, and someplace to

go on the farm-to-market road for all of us to hook up.” They scouted the farm-to-market road first and located a cornfield about two miles from the robbery site. There was a dirt road that gave tractor access to the field, but fifty yards off the paved road a car could not be seen from there or from the farmhouse far across the field. From the dirt road to the Midland city limits it was exactly four-point-three miles. “Can you remember that?” Raine asked. “Sure,” Stella said quietly. “Four-three. April third. That’s Lucy’s birthday, Frank.” He glanced at her, chagrinned. “Yeah, that’s right. I guess I wasn’t thinking.” Uptown in Midland, they selected Centennial Plaza, a once-popular park for roller-bladers and skateboarders until a city ordinance banned them, and now just a lazy location for people to sit on benches or stroll in the thick summer air. Parking, they got out and entered the plaza, sitting down on the first bench they came to. “How about this spot for picking up the old man?” Raine asked. “Suits me,” Stella agreed, shrugging. As they were sitting there, a bright green, older model pickup truck, gleaming in mint condition, pulled up and parked. A boy and girl about sixteen got out and went across the street to an ice cream parlor. Several minutes later they came back out again with large double-dip cones and walked laughing and teasing into the park, where they sat across from Raine and Stella. They sat there, bumping shoulders, nudging one another, whispering and giggling, catching ice cream drips on their tongues, while Raine and Stella watched them in amusement. The boy’s name, they overheard from the banter between them, was Jerry, and the girl’s name was Sue. After they had been sitting there a short time, the young couple became aware that Raine and Stella were staring at them. Jerry blushed and looked down at the sidewalk, but Sue confronted the situation. “Is there something wrong, ma’am?” she asked, in a not unfriendly tone. Stella smiled and shook her head. “I’m sorry, hon. We didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that you two remind us of ourselves. You know, back when we were your age.” “Oh.” Now Sue blushed as Jerry had. “Well, we’re not really this silly all the time.” “I know. Being silly is just having fun.” Stella squeezed Raine’s knee. “Isn’t that right, hon?” “Yeah, sure, right,” Raine replied appropriately. He patted Stella’s hand. “Well, we’d best be going along,” he added. As they were leaving, Stella threw the young people a parting smile. “You kids have a fun day. Time enough to be serious when you get older.” But when she and Raine were back in their car, Stella’s smile faded and a cheerless expression replaced it. “Where in the hell did our lives go, Frank?” she asked dolefully. Raine did not answer. Late in the morning on the day of the job, Soose pulled up to the motel in his sister’s car, with Lee right behind him in a rented gray Buick Century four-door. As they were parking, Stella was just driving away to go pick up J. D. Pike, whom Raine had called the night before to set up the meeting. Raine watched Stella driving off, then hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and along with Soose got into the Buick with Lee. “Got everything?” Raine asked without preliminary. “All in the trunk,” Soose told him.

“Okay,” Raine said. “Let’s go.” All three men were quiet on the drive north. Getting ready to steal, seriously steal, with guns, was, Frank Raine imagined, a lot like going into ground combat in a war. It was a tight time, a nervous time, a time to be mindful. It was no place for idle conversation. None of the three men said a dozen words the entire trip. When they arrived at the entrance drive to the New Petroleum Club, Raine saw that the member parking lot was filled with Lincolns, Cadillacs, BMWs, and an array of other high-ticket automobiles. “Looks like a nice crowd,” he said evenly. He had Lee drive back to the employee lot and park where they could see the rear loading dock. A station wagon was parked at the dock, its tailgate down. Two overweight men in khaki uniforms, wearing gun belts, were lounging against one fender, smoking and talking. Raine and the two men with him got out of the Buick and opened the trunk. Each of them tied a blueand-white bandana around his neck and tucked it down under the front of their shirts where it could not be seen. Then they slipped into white cotton coats like the club’s culinary workers wore. They pulled on surgical gloves and took rags to wipe down the interior of the car and the guns they would use. Soose and Lee each stuck a pistol in their waistband; Raine, after checking the magazine and safety, slipped the AK-47 under the right side of his white coat and held it in place with the fingertips of his right hand. Then they loitered at the open trunk deck as if engaging in idle conversation before leaving for the day. Inside, they felt like frogs were loose in their stomachs. The footlocker of cash was carried out onto the loading dock by two other men uniformed in khaki, escorted by Mr. Sims, the man whom Lee had pointed out as the manager of the club. The two guards at the station wagon moved toward the loading dock steps to help them. “Let’s go,” Frank Raine said. “Nice and easy.” Raine and Soose began walking toward the loading dock, keeping the station wagon between them and the dock. Lee closed the trunk and got back into the Buick. He swung it around and drove slowly across the lot toward the club. As Raine and Soose got close to the dock, and Lee drove up near the station wagon, all three pulled their bandanas up over their lower faces. Raine and Soose stepped around from opposite sides of the station wagon. It dawned on the guards just a second too late what was happening. As the two nearest the tailgate reached for their holstered pistols, Soose clubbed one of them in the temple with his gun, and Raine butt-stroked the other across the jaw with the AK-47. Both of the men dropped like sandbags. Raine swung the AK-47 around on the other three. “Be smart, boys,” he warned tensely. “Don’t get killed protecting somebody else’s money. “We hear you,” the club manager said, voice wavering. Lee stopped the Buick near them and popped the trunk from inside. “Put that foot locker in the trunk,” Raine gestured with the AK-47. “Put your guns in there too—very carefully.” As the guards were doing what they were told, Lee hurried around and snatched the ignition keys from the station wagon, and Soose relieved the two fallen men of their sidearms. The guards set the foot locker in the trunk, along with their guns, and Soose tossed in the two extra pistols he had. Lee came hurrying back around to get behind the wheel of the Buick. Just as he started to get in, a single rifle shot split the air and a .30-30 slug hit him dead-center in the middle of the forehead. Shocked by the suddenness of it, all five men at the tailgate of the station wagon dropped into a reflexive crouch. Raine’s eyes swung like searchlights, trying to find the source of the shot. Soose

stared in horror at the ugly, walnut-size hole in the fallen Lee’s forehead. Brain matter was already slowly mushrooming out. Then both Raine and Soose detected movement close to them and swung to see Sims, the club manager, pulling a chrome automatic from under his coat. Raine quickly brought the AK-47 around to firing position, but Soose was a split second ahead of him and shot the man twice in the chest. Then there was another single rifle shot and Soose had a hole in his forehead just like Lee did. Now Frank Raine saw a flash of red and knew where the shooter was, and in the same split instant knew what the glitch was in this dream robbery of theirs. Lee’s words came back to him: “…Ross Tabb…organizes big hunting trips…professional rifle and pistol shot…don’t never wear nothin’ but red shirts…” The flash of red Raine had seen was in the cantilevered window on the second floor of the club, above the loading dock. A red shirt. A professional rifleman. The glitch in their dream job. A backup sniper. Raine moved in a crouch behind the station wagon. The faces of both standing guards were paper white, with visible sweat running down from under their hats. “You two drag your friends over there under the loading dock,” Raine ordered. One of them glanced tentatively at the club manager, who was on the ground, clutching at his chest, the heel of one foot digging spastically at the asphalt. “Never mind him!” Raine said harshly. “He chose to die, now let him! Get your friends and move!” Each guard grabbed one of the unconscious men and began dragging him to the shelter of the dock. Raine’s eyes riveted on the second-floor window, waiting for the flash of red he knew would come again. When it did, seconds later, he rose and raked the upstairs with a long burst from the AK-47. The man in the red shirt spun completely around and pitched backwards through the cantilevered window, falling with a heavy thud to the concrete dock, then lying still as a shower of glass rained down on him. A dozen men burst out onto the dock from the kitchen. Raine fired a quick burst of rounds over their heads and they fought like slaughterhouse sheep to get back inside. Suddenly it was very quiet behind the New Petroleum Club. Raine tossed the AK-47 into the trunk of the Buick, grabbed two of the four pistols taken from the guards and stuck them on each side under his belt. Slamming the trunk lid, he stepped over to Lee and took the keys to the station wagon from his lifeless hand. The heavy circulation of gunpowder in the air somehow got under the bandana covering his face and made him sneeze twice, heavily. Behind the wheel of the Buick, engine still running, he threw the car into gear and sped around to the front of the building. It did not surprise him that no one was in sight out front; everyone, even the valet parking attendants, had probably run to the rear of the club to see what all the shooting was about. Heading down the cobblestone drive to the road, Raine pulled down the bandana and exhaled what he was sure was the deepest breath he had ever taken. Maybe, he thought, he had beaten the glitch after all. At the road, he swung right and accelerated. There was a quick catch in his chest, but he ignored it. He checked the odometer as his mind drew up the numbers he needed: two miles to the corn field where Stella waited with old man Pike; change cars; four-point-three miles from there into Midland; then pick up Interstate 10 to Odessa— Another quick catch seized his chest. He frowned. What the hell—? Then he found out. At the two-mile point, there was no cornfield. There was nothing on either side of the highway except flat, gray dirt, parched by an eternity of sunlight, then sucked dry by grasshopper pumps, and finally left to die under patches of scrubby mesquite. Raine’s head began to throb. Wait a minute. Did he have the distances reversed? Was it four-point-three to the field, then two miles to Midland—? Pulling to the side of the road, he shook his head violently.

No. He had the distances correct. Come out of the New Petroleum Club drive, hang a left on the farmto-market road— Hang a left. He had turned right. Son of a bitch! He could not believe it. A stupid wrong turn and now he was in an identifiable car on the wrong side of the meeting place. He couldn’t go back; the law would be coming toward him from Midland. He couldn’t go forward; that would mean leaving Stella behind. Anyway, every little jerkwater town in that direction would soon have its deputies out watching for the Buick. Maybe he could hide the foot locker someplace, ditch the car, and hoof it back to the cornfield; plan things from there— Just then, something caught his eye. Far off across one of the gray flats. It was bright green, like an artificial oasis in a wasteland. Where had he seen it before? As he watched, he could make out two figures moving about— The two kids from town that he and Stella had briefly talked with. The green oasis was the boy’s shiny pickup truck. Jerry, that was his name. The girl was Sue. There was a tractor road leading out to where they were. Putting the Buick in gear, Raine drove up to it and turned in. When he was halfway to them, he heard the crack of a small bore rifle, and made out what they were doing: target practicing at tin cans and bottles. Jerry was probably teaching Sue how to shoot. Memories of himself and Stella from years back flooded his mind. When Raine drove up, the two teenagers walked over to the car. He got out, smiling. “Doing a little shooting, huh?” “Yessir,” Jerry said. He was holding a .22 lever action Winchester. A bird gun. “We ain’t trespassing or nothing,” Jerry assured. “This here’s open land.” “I didn’t stop because I thought you were trespassing,” Raine said easily. “I want to buy your truck.” “Buy my truck?” Jerry and Sue exchanged surprised looks. “Yeah. I’m kind of a collector of old model vehicles. I remembered yours from the other day in town.” “Oh, yeah,” said Sue. “That’s right. In the park.” “Yeah. I’ve been driving around, looking for you. I’ll give you twenty thousand for it. Cash.” “Twenty thousand! Why, mister, the book on this here model ain’t but about six—” “Anyhow, we don’t want to sell it,” Sue said. “This truck is special to us. For a special reason.” Jerry blushed beet red. “What she means,” he quickly amended, “is that her and me’s been restoring this pickup together since we was freshmen in high school. It means a lot to us.” “Fifty thousand,” Raine said. “Fifth thousand! Are you crazy, mister?” Jerry’s mouth was hanging open. “We don’t want to sell it,” Sue said firmly. “At no price.” She linked arms with Jerry. “Like I said, it’s special.” She squeezed his arm. “She’s right, mister,” Jerry said, though a little reluctantly now. “It’s not for sale.” Raine drew one of the pistols from under his coat. “Look, kids, I need that truck and I ain’t got time to argue with you.” He bobbed his chin at Jerry’s rifle. “Lay that bird gun on the ground.” Jerry did as he was told. “Give me the keys.”

“They’re in the ignition,” Jerry said. Raine backed over to the truck and looked inside; the keys were there. Stepping over to the Buick, he removed those keys, put them in his pocket, and popped the trunk with the dashboard button. “Okay, kid,” he said to Jerry, “grab one handle of this footlocker and help me set it in the back of your pickup.” They moved the locker of cash into the truck bed, up close to the cab so it could not easily be seen by oncoming traffic. Raine reached in, flipped up the buckle latches, and opened the lid. Both he and Jerry momentarily stared in awe at the contents: stacks of currency, sheaves of hundred-dollar bills, banded in bundles of fifty. Bank-stamped in red: $5000. Fingering out ten of them, Raine tossed them on the ground at Jerry’s feet. “Fifty thousand dollars, kid, and nobody’ll know you’ve got it. All you’ve got to do is say I stole your truck—” “We don’t want your damned money, mister! And you’re not taking our truck, neither!” It was Sue speaking. She had picked up Jerry’s rifle and had it leveled at Raine, who was still holding the pistol, but had it down at his side. “Look, miss, put the rifle down,” Raine said patiently. “We both know you’re not going to shoot me—” “Oh, no?” the girl said—and squeezed the trigger, exactly as Jerry had taught her. Frank Raine felt a .22 short round rip into his right side. He staggered back two steps but did not fall; the slug had missed his hip bone. “Lord, Susie, you shot him!” Jerry shrieked. Raine stared at the girl. A thought surfaced of his own daughter, Lucy, fourteen, back in Tennessee. This kid couldn’t be more than a year or two older than her— “Oh my God!” Sue bawled. “What did I do? Oh, Lord—!” She threw the rifle away from her like it was a rattlesnake. Turning, she ran crying across the barren flat. Jerry looked apprehensively at Raine, and the gun he held. “Go on,” Raine said, bobbing his chin at the fleeing girl. Jerry bolted and ran after her. Shoving the pistol into his coat pocket, Raine twisted his arm around his back, feeling for blood and an exit wound. He found none. Pulling his coat back, he pulled up his shirt and looked at the hole in his side. It was small, puckered, bleeding slowly. Taking a sheaf of currency from the open foot locker, he pressed it over the wound and hitched up his trousers to tighten his belt and hold it in place. A five thousand dollar pressure bandage. Securing the lid of the foot locker, he got into the green pickup and drove away, leaving the Buick and fifty thousand dollars on the ground behind him. On the way to the meeting place, Raine passed the entrance drive to the New Petroleum Club. He could see two police cruisers with light bars flashing in front of the place. In the next two miles before he got to the cornfield turnoff, a third cruiser, siren wailing, sped past him without a glance. Raine’s side burned like it had a lit highway flare shoved into it. He knew that every bump along the rutted tractor road was pumping an extra spurt of blood out of him, but he was sure he could make it. All he had to do was get to Stella and she would take care of him. When they got back to the motel in Odessa, she could swab it with iodine, pull the slug out with a pair of tweezers, squeeze a tube of antibacterial ointment into the wound, and pack it with gauze pads to stop the bleeding.

He would give old man Pike the green pickup and his share of the take at the cornfield. After Stella cleaned Raine up at the motel, the two of them would head south on some of the hundreds of back roads that covered southwest Texas like dusty veins. Pike was pacing back and forth when Raine drove up. At the sight of the green pickup truck, he pulled a chrome pistol from under his coat; he put it away when he saw that the driver was Frank Raine. Stella blanched at the sight of Raine’s blood as he got out of the truck. “My god, Frankie—!” “Never mind,” he said sharply. Then to Pike, “Get the tailgate down and drag that footlocker back.” “Where’s the other boys?” Pike asked as he did what Raine wanted. “Dead. They had a sniper at the second floor window.” “Son of a bitch,” said Pike. “Was he wearing a red shirt?” “Yeah. And I made it a lot redder.” To Stella, he said, “Open the locker and count out four hundred grand for Mr. Pike.” Raine leaned on the side of the truck and pulled out the other pistol he still had in his waistband, holding it loosely at his side. “What about the eight hundred thousand them other two boys was gonna split?” Pike asked. “I’m taking that,” Raine said flatly. “You get the share that was agreed on. Everything left over is mine.” Pike hooked both thumbs over his belt buckle and nodded thoughtfully. “That slug you take come out the back?” he asked casually. Raine shook his head. No. “Then I’m afraid you ain’t gonna make it, son,” the old man said quietly. Stella stopped counting and stared at him. “Look at the color of that blood you’re losing,” Pike said. “It’s damn near black. If that bullet didn’t go all the way through you, then it’s in your liver. You ain’t gonna live an hour, if that.” As the old man had been speaking, Raine’s vision blurred and his throat went dry and constricted. He lost all feeling is his right arm and hand; the gun he held dropped to the ground. Five seconds later, Raine dropped to the ground too. Stella rushed over and knelt beside him. “Oh, baby—” Pike stepped over and picked up Raine’s pistol. “Sorry, honey,” Raine whispered, and closed his eyes. “Well, little lady, looks like it’s just me and you now,” Pike said. “You know, you ain’t bad looking. There was a time I’d’ve taken you and the money. But at my age, I tend to look less at younger women and more at older whiskey. So I reckon I’ll just have to end it for you like it ended for him.” “Can’t we talk it over?” Stella asked. She was still kneeling beside Raine, her hands on his body, one of them slowly working into his coat pocket for what she felt there. Pike was shaking his head. “Sorry, little lady, but my mind’s made up.” “Have it your own way,” Stella said, and started working the trigger of the pistol in Raine’s coat pocket. She fired four times, right through the pocket, and hit Pike with all four shots, in the chest, every one of them in a six-inch pattern. Just like the young Frank Raine had taught her years ago. Pike was thrown back half a dozen feet and fell like a tree. Stella pulled the bandana from around Raine’s neck, took the gun from his pocket and wiped off her fingerprints, then put it back. She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. “Good-bye, baby,” she said. At the foot locker, she took several bills out of a number of sheaves until she had counted out fifty

thousand dollars. If they thought all the money was still there, they wouldn’t come looking for anybody else. Fifty thousand was enough for her to get home to her mother, and to Lucy; to get settled and start over. In the car she had come in, Stella circled around Midland and got on the interstate back to Odessa. Once there, she would wipe off her prints, abandon the car, and buy herself a Greyhound ticket. She would go back home on the bus. Just like she left.

“The Adventure of the Agitated Actress” Daniel Stashower “We’ve all heard stories of your wonderful methods, Mr. Holmes,” said James Larrabee, drawing a cigarette from a silver box on the table. “There have been countless tales of your marvellous insight, your ingenuity in picking up and following clues, and the astonishing manner in which you gain information from the most trifling details. You and I have never met before today, but I dare say that in this brief moment or two you’ve discovered any number of things about me.” Sherlock Holmes set down the newspaper he had been reading and gazed languidly at the ceiling. “Nothing of consequence, Mr. Larrabee,” he said. “I have scarcely more than asked myself why you rushed off and sent a telegram in such a frightened hurry, what possible excuse you could have had for gulping down a tumbler of raw brandy at the ‘Lion’s Head’ on the way back, why your friend with the auburn hair left so suddenly by the terrace window, and what there can possibly be about the safe in the lower part of that desk to cause you such painful anxiety.” The detective took up the newspaper and idly turned the pages. “Beyond that,” he said, “I know nothing.” “Holmes!” I cried. “This is uncanny! How could you have possibly deduced all of that? We arrived in this room not more than five minutes ago!” My companion glanced at me with an air of strained abstraction, as though he had never seen me before. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, apparently wavering between competing impulses. Then he rose from his chair and crossed down to a row of blazing footlights. “I’m sorry, Frohman,” he called. “This isn’t working out as I’d hoped. We really don’t need Watson in this scene after all.” “Gillette!” came a shout from the darkened space across the bright line of lights. “I do wish you’d make up your mind! Need I remind you that we open tomorrow night?” We heard a brief clatter of footsteps as Charles Frohman—a short, solidly built gentleman in the casual attire of a country squire —came scrambling up the side access stairs. As he crossed the forward lip of the stage, Frohman brandished a printed handbill. It read: “William Gillette in his Smash Play! Sherlock Holmes! Fresh from a Triumphant New York Run!” “He throws off the balance of the scene,” Gillette was saying. “The situation doesn’t call for an admiring Watson.” He turned to me. “No offense, my dear Lyndal. You have clearly immersed yourself in the role. That gesture of yours—with your arm at the side—it suggests a man favoring an old wound. Splendid!” I pressed my lips together and let my hand fall to my side. “Actually, Gillette,” I said, “I am endeavoring to keep my trousers from falling down.” “Pardon?” I opened my jacket and gathered up a fold of loose fabric around my waist. “There hasn’t been time for my final costume fitting,” I explained. “I’m afraid I’m having the same difficulty,” said Arthur Creeson, who had been engaged to play the villainous James Larrabee. “If I’m not careful, I’ll find my trousers down at my ankles.” Gillette gave a heavy sigh. “Quinn!” he called. Young Henry Quinn, the boy playing the role of Billy, the Baker Street page, appeared from the wings. “Yes, Mr. Gillette?” “Would you be so good as to fetch the wardrobe mistress? Or at least bring us some extra straight pins?” The boy nodded and darted backstage.

Mr. Frohman, whose harried expression and lined forehead told of the rigors of his role as Gillette’s producer, folded the handbill and replaced it in his pocket. “I don’t see why you feel the need to tinker with the script at this late stage,” he insisted. “The play was an enormous success in New York. As far as America is concerned, you are Sherlock Holmes. Surely the London audiences will look on the play with equal favor?” Gillette threw himself down in a chair and reached for his prompt book. “The London audience bears little relation to its American counterpart,” he said, flipping rapidly through the pages. “British tastes have been refined over centuries of Shakespeare and Marlowe. America has only lately weaned itself off of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “Gillette,” said Frohman heavily, “you are being ridiculous.” The actor reached for a pen and began scrawling over a page of script. “I am an American actor essaying an English part. I must take every precaution, and make every possible refinement before submitting myself to the fine raking fire of the London critics. They will seize on a single false note as an excuse to send us packing.” He turned back to Arthur Creeson. “Now, then. Let us continue from the point at which Larrabee is endeavoring to cover his deception. Instead of Watson’s expression of incredulity, we shall restore Larrabee’s evasions. Do you recall the speech, Creeson? The actor nodded. “Excellent. Let us resume.” I withdrew to the wings as Gillette and Creeson took their places. A mask of impassive self-possession slipped over Gillette’s features as he stepped back into the character of Sherlock Holmes. “—why your friend with the auburn hair left so suddenly by the terrace window,” he said, picking up the dialogue in mid-sentence, “and what there can possibly be about the safe in the lower part of that desk to cause you such painful anxiety.” “Ha! Very good!” cried Mr. Creeson, taking up his role as the devious James Larrabee. “Very good indeed! If those things were only true, I’d be wonderfully impressed. It would be absolutely marvellous!” Gillette regarded him with an expression of weary impatience. “It won’t do, sir,” said he. “I have come to see Miss Alice Faulkner and will not leave until I have done so. I have reason to believe that the young lady is being held against her will. You shall have to give way, sir, or face the consequences.” Creeson’s hands flew to his chest. “Against her will? This is outrageous! I will not tolerate—” A high, trilling scream from backstage interrupted the line. Creeson held his expression and attempted to continue. “I will not tolerate such an accusation in my own—” A second scream issued from backstage. Gillette gave a heavy sigh and rose from his chair as he reached for the prompt book. “Will that woman never learn her cue?” Shielding his eyes against the glare of the footlights, he stepped again to the lip of the stage and sought out Mr. Frohman. “This is what comes of engaging the company locally,” he said in an exasperated tone. “We have a mob of players in ill-fitting costumes who don’t know their scripts. We should have brought the New York company across, hang the expense.” He turned to the wings. “Quinn!” The young actor stepped forward. “Yes, sir?” “Will you kindly inform—” Gillette’s instructions were cut short by the sudden appearance of Miss Maude Fenton, the actress playing the role of Alice Faulkner, who rushed from the wings in a state of obvious agitation. Her chestnut hair fell loosely about her shoulders and her velvet shirt waist was imperfectly buttoned.

“Gone!” she cried. “Missing! Taken from me!” Gillette drummed his fingers across the prompt book. “My dear Miss Fenton,” he said. “You have dropped approximately seventeen pages from the script.” “Hang the script!” she wailed. “I’m not playing a role! My brooch is missing! My beautiful, beautiful brooch! Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mr. Gillette, someone must have stolen it!” Selma Kendall, the kindly, auburn-haired actress who had been engaged to play Madge Larrabee, hurried to Miss Fenton’s side. “It can’t be!” she cried. “He only just gave it—that is to say, you’ve only just acquired it! Are you certain you haven’t simply mislaid it?” Miss Fenton accepted the linen pocket square I offered and dabbed at her streaming eyes. “I couldn’t possibly have mislaid it,” she said between sobs. “One doesn’t mislay something of that sort! How could such a thing have happened?” Gillette, who had cast an impatient glance at his pocket watch during this exchange, now stepped forward to take command of the situation. “There, there, Miss Fenton” he said, in the cautious, faltering tone of a man not used to dealing with female emotions. “I’m sure this is all very distressing. As soon as we have completed our run-through, we will conduct a most thorough search of the dressing areas. I’m sure your missing bauble will be discovered presently.” “Gillette!” I cried. “You don’t mean to continue with the rehearsal? Can’t you see that Miss Fenton is too distraught to carry on?” “But she must,” the actor declared. “As Mr. Frohman has been at pains to remind us, our little play has its London opening tomorrow evening. We shall complete the rehearsal, and then—after I have given a few notes—we shall locate the missing brooch. Miss Fenton is a fine actress, and I have every confidence in her ability to conceal her distress in the interim.” He patted the weeping actress on the back of her hand. “Will that do, my dear?” At this, Miss Fenton’s distress appeared to gather momentum by steady degrees. First her lips began to tremble, then her shoulders commenced heaving, and lastly a strange caterwauling sound emerged from behind the handkerchief. After a moment or two of this, she threw herself into Gillette’s arms and began sobbing lustily upon his shoulder. “Gillette,” called Mr. Frohman, straining to make himself heard above the lamentations, “perhaps it would be best to take a short pause.” Gillette, seemingly unnerved by the wailing figure in his arms, gave a strained assent. “Very well. We shall repair to the dressing area. No doubt the missing object has simply slipped between the cushions of a settee.” With Mr. Frohman in the lead, our small party made its way through the wings and along the backstage corridors to the ladies’ dressing area. As we wound past the scenery flats and crated property trunks, I found myself reflecting on how little I knew of the other members of our troupe. Although Mr. Gillette’s play had been a great success in America, only a handful of actors and crewmen had transferred to the London production. A great many members of the cast and technical staff, myself included, had been engaged locally after a brief open call. Up to this point, the rehearsals and staging had been a rushed affair, allowing for little of the easy camaraderie that usually develops among actors during the rehearsal period. As a result, I knew little about my fellow players apart from the usual backstage gossip. Miss Fenton, in the role of the young heroine Alice Faulkner, was considered to be a promising ingenue. Reviewers frequently commented on her striking beauty, if not her talent. Selma Kendall, in the role of the

conniving Madge Larrabee, had established herself in the provinces as a dependable support player, and was regarded as something of a mother hen by the younger actresses. Arthur Creeson, as the wicked James Larrabee, had been a promising romantic lead in his day, but excessive drink and gambling had marred his looks and scotched his reputation. William Allerford, whose high, domed forehead and startling white hair helped to make him so effective as the nefarious Professor Moriarty, was in fact the most gentle of men, with a great passion for tending the rose bushes at his cottage in Hove. As for myself, I had set out to become an opera singer in my younger days, but my talent had not matched my ambition, and over time I had evolved into a reliable, if unremarkable second lead. “Here we are,” Mr. Frohman was saying as we arrived at the end of a long corridor. “We shall make a thorough search.” After knocking on the unmarked door, he led us inside. As was the custom of the day, the female members of the cast shared a communal dressing area in a narrow, sparsely appointed chamber illuminated by a long row of electrical lights. Along one wall was a long mirror with a row of wooden make-up tables before it. A random cluster of coat racks, reclining sofas and well-worn armchairs were arrayed along the wall opposite. Needless to say, I had never been in a ladies dressing room before, and I admit that I felt my cheeks redden at the sight of so many underthings and delicates thrown carelessly over the furniture. I turned to avert my eyes from a cambric corset cover thrown across a ladderback chair, only to find myself gazing upon a startling assortment of hosiery and lace-trimmed drawers laid out upon a nearby ottoman. “Gracious, Mr. Lyndal,” said Miss Kendall, taking a certain delight in my discomfiture. “One would almost think you’d never seen linens before.” “Well, I—perhaps not so many at once,” I admitted, gathering my composure. “Dr. Watson is said to have an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents. My own experience, I regret to say, extends no further than Hatton Cross.” Gillette, it appeared, did not share my sense of consternation. No sooner had we entered the dressing area than he began making an energetic and somewhat indiscriminate examination of the premises, darting from one side of the room to the other, opening drawers and tossing aside cushions and pillows with careless abandon. “Well,” he announced, after five minutes’ effort, “I cannot find your brooch. However, in the interests of returning to our rehearsals as quickly as possible, I am prepared to buy you a new one.” Miss Fenton stared at the actor with an expression of disbelief. “I’m afraid you don’t understand, Mr. Gillette. This was not a common piece of rolled plate and crystalline. It was a large, flawless sapphire in a rose gold setting, with a circle of diamond accents.” Gillette’s eyes widened. “Was it, indeed? May I know how you came by such an item?” A flush spread across Miss Fenton’s cheek. “It was—it was a gift from an admirer,” she said, glancing away. “I would prefer to say no more.” “Be that as it may,” I said, “this is no small matter. We must notify the police at once!” Gillette pressed his fingers together. “I’m afraid I must agree. This is most inconvenient.” A look of panic flashed across Miss Fenton’s eyes. “Please, Mr. Gillette! You must not involve the police! That wouldn’t do at all!” “But your sapphire—?” She tugged at the lace trimming of her sleeve. “The gentleman in question—the man who presented me with the brooch—he is of a certain social standing, Mr. Gillette. He—that is to say, I—would prefer to keep the matter private. It would be most embarrassing for him if his—if his attentions to me should

become generally known.” Mr. Frohman gave a sudden cough. “It is not unknown for young actresses to form attachments with certain of their gentlemen admirers,” he said carefully. “Occasionally, however, when these matters become public knowledge, they are attended by a certain whiff of scandal. Especially if the gentleman concerned happens to be married.” He glanced at Miss Fenton, who held his gaze for a moment and then looked away. “Indeed,” said Frohman. “Well, we can’t have those whispers about the production, Gillette. Not before we’ve even opened.” “Quite so,” I ventured, “and there is Miss Fenton’s reputation to consider. We must discover what happened to the brooch without involving the authorities. We shall have to mount a private investigation.” All eyes turned to Gillette as a mood of keen expectation fell across the room. The actor did not appear to notice. Having caught sight of himself in the long mirror behind the dressing tables, he was making a meticulous adjustment to his waistcoat. At length, he became aware that the rest of us were staring intently at him. “What?” he said, turning away from the mirror. “Why is everyone looking at me?” “I am not Sherlock Holmes,” Gillette said several moments later, as we settled ourselves in a pair of armchairs. “I am an actor playing Sherlock Holmes. There is a very considerable difference. If I did a turn as a pantomime horse, Lyndal, I trust you would not expect me to pull a dray wagon and dine on straw?” “But you’ve studied Sherlock Holmes,” I insisted. “You’re examined his methods and turned them to your own purposes. Surely you might be able to do the same in this instance? Surely the author of such a fine detective play is not totally lacking in the powers of perception?” Gillette gave me an appraising look. “Appealing to my vanity, Lyndal? Very shrewd.” We had been arguing back and forth in this vein for some moments, though by this time—detective or no—Gillette had reluctantly agreed to give his attention to the matter of the missing brooch. Frohman had made him see that an extended disruption would place their financial interests in the hazard, and that Gillette, as head of the company, was the logical choice to take command of the situation. Toward that end, it was arranged that Gillette would question each member of the company individually, beginning with myself. Gillette’s stage manager, catching wind of the situation, thought it would be a jolly lark to replace the standing set of James Larrabee’s drawing room with the lodgings of Sherlock Holmes at Baker Street, so that Gillette might have an appropriate setting in which to carry out his investigation. If Gillette noticed, he gave no sign. Stretching his arm toward a side table, he took up an outsize calabash pipe and began filling the meerschaum bowl. “Why do you insist on smoking that ungainly thing?” I asked. “There’s no record whatsoever of Sherlock Holmes having ever touched a calabash. Dr. Watson tells us that he favors an oily black clay pipe as the companion of his deepest meditations, but is wont to replace it with his cherrywood when in a disputatious frame of mind.” Gillette shook his head sadly. “I am not Sherlock Holmes,” he said again. “I am an actor playing Sherlock Holmes.” “Still,” I insisted, “it does no harm to be as faithful to the original as possible.” Gillette touched a flame to the tobacco and took several long draws to be certain the bowl was properly

ignited. For a moment, his eyes were unfocused and dreamy, and I could not be certain that he had heard me. His eyes were fixed upon the fly curtains when he spoke again. “Lyndal,” he said, “turn and face down stage.” “What?” “Humor me. Face down stage.” I rose and looked out across the forward edge of the stage. “What do you see?” Gillette asked. “Empty seats,” I said. “Precisely. It is my ambition to fill those seats. Now, cast your eyes to the rear of the house. I want you to look at the left-hand aisle seat in the very last row.” I stepped forward and narrowed my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “What of it?” “Can you read the number plate upon that seat?” “No,” I said. “Of course not.” “Nor can I. By the same token, the man or woman seated there will not be able to appreciate the difference between a cherrywood pipe and an oily black clay. This is theater, Lyndal. A real detective does not do his work before an audience. I do. Therefore I am obliged to make my movements, speech and stage properties readily discernible.” He held the calabash aloft. “This pipe will be visible from the back row, my friend. An actor must consider even the smallest object from every possible angle. That is the essence of theater.” I considered the point. “I merely thought, in as much as you are attempting to inhabit the role of Sherlock Holmes, that you should wish to strive for authenticity.” Gillette seemed to consider the point. “Well,” he said at length, “let us see how far that takes us. Tell me, Lyndal. Where were you when the robbery occurred?” “Me? But surely you don’t think that I—” “You are not the estimable Dr. Watson, my friend. You are merely an actor, like myself. Since Miss Fenton had her brooch with her when she arrived at the theater this morning, we must assume that the theft occurred shortly after first call. Can you account for your movements in that time?” “Of course I can. You know perfectly well where I was. I was standing stage right, beside you, running through the first act.” “So you were. Strange, my revision of the play has given you a perfect alibi. Had the theft occurred this afternoon, after I had restored the original text of the play, you should have been high on the list of suspects. A narrow escape, my friend.” He smiled and sent up a cloud of pipe smoke. “Since we have established your innocence, however, I wonder if I might trouble you to remain through the rest of the interviews?” “Whatever for?” “Perhaps I am striving for authenticity.” He turned and spotted young Henry Quinn hovering in his accustomed spot in the wings near the scenery cleats. “Quinn!” he called. The boy stepped forward. “Yes, sir?” “Would you ask Miss Fenton if she would be so good as to join us?” “Right away, sir.”

I watched as the boy disappeared down the long corridor. “Gillette,” I said, lowering my voice, “this Baker Street set is quite comfortable in its way, but do you not think a bit of privacy might be indicated? Holmes is accustomed to conducting his interviews in confidence. Anyone might hear what passes between us here at the center of the stage.” Gillette smiled. “I am not Sherlock Holmes,” he repeated. After a moment or two Quinn stepped from the wings with Miss Fenton trailing behind him. Miss Fenton’s eyes and nose were red with weeping, and she was attended by Miss Kendall, who hovered protectively by her side. “May I remain, Mr. Gillette?” asked the older actress. “Miss Fenton is terribly upset by all of this.” “Of course,” said Gillette in a soothing manner. “I shall try to dispense with the questioning as quickly as possible. Please be seated.” He folded his hands and leaned forward in his chair. “Tell me, Miss Fenton, are you quite certain that the brooch was in your possession when you arrived at the theater this morning?” “Of course,” the actress replied. “I had no intention of letting it out of my sight. I placed the pin in my jewelry case as I changed into costume.” “And the jewelry case was on top of your dressing table?” “Yes.” “In plain sight?” “Yes, but I saw no harm in that. I was alone at the time. Besides, Miss Kendall is the only other woman in the company, and I trust her as I would my own sister.” She reached across and took the older woman’s hand. “No doubt,” said Gillette, “but do you mean to say that you intended to leave the gem in the dressing room during the rehearsal? Forgive me, but that seems a bit careless.” “That was not my intention at all, Mr. Gillette. Once in costume, I planned to pin the brooch to my stockings. I should like to have worn it in plain view, but James—that is to say, the gentleman who gave it to me—would not have approved. He does not want anyone—he does not approve of ostentation.” “In any case,” I said, “Alice Faulkner would hardly be likely to own such a splendid jewel.” “Yes,” said Miss Fenton. “Just so.” Gillette steepled his fingers. “How exactly did the jewel come to be stolen? It appears that it never left your sight.” “It was unforgivable of me,” said Miss Fenton. “I arrived late to the theater this morning. In my haste, I overturned an entire pot of facial powder. I favor a particular type, Gervaise Graham’s Satinette, and I wished to see if I could persuade someone to step out and purchase a fresh supply for me. I can only have been gone for a moment. I stepped into the hallway looking for one of the stagehands, but of course they were all in their places in anticipation of the scene three set change. When I found no one close by, I realized that I had better finish getting ready as best I could without the powder.” “So you returned to the dressing area?” “Yes.” “How long would you say that you were out of the room?” “Two or three minutes. No more.”

“And when you returned the brooch was gone?” She nodded. “That was when I screamed.” “Indeed.” Gillette stood and clasped his hands behind his back. “Extraordinary,” he said, pacing a short line before a scenery flat decorated to resemble a bookcase. “Miss Kendall?” “Yes?” “Has anything been stolen from you?” he asked. “No,” she answered. “Well, not this time.” Gillette raised an eyebrow. “Not this time?” The actress hesitated. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. “From time to time I have noticed that one or two small things have gone astray. Nothing of any value. A small mirror, perhaps, or a copper or two.” Miss Fenton nodded. “I’ve noticed that as well. I assumed that I’d simply misplaced the items. It was never anything to trouble over.” Gillette frowned. “Miss Fenton, a moment ago, when the theft became known, it was clear that Miss Kendall was already aware that you had the brooch in your possession. May I ask who else among the company knew of the sapphire?” “No one,” the actress said. “I only received the gift yesterday, but I would have been unlikely to flash it about, in any case. I couldn’t resist showing it to Selma, however.” “No one else knew of it?” “No one.” Gillette turned to Miss Kendall. “Did you mention it to anyone?” “Certainly not, Mr. Gillette.” The actor resumed his pacing. “You’re quite certain? It may have been a perfectly innocent remark.” “Maude asked me not to say anything to anyone,” said Miss Kendall. “We women are rather good with secrets.” Gillette’s mouth pulled up slightly at the corners. “So I gather, Miss Kendall. So I gather.” He turned and studied the false book spines on the painted scenery flat. “Thank you for your time, ladies.” I watched as the two actresses departed. “Gillette,” I said after a moment, “if Miss Kendall did not mention the sapphire to anyone, who else could have known that it existed?” “No one,” he answered. “Are you suggesting—” I leaned forward and lowered my voice, “—are you suggesting that Miss Kendall is the thief? After all, if she was the only one who knew— “No, Lyndal. I do not believe Miss Kendall is the thief.” “Still,” I said, “there is little reason to suppose that she kept her own counsel. A theatrical company is a hotbed of gossip and petty jealousies.” I paused as a new thought struck me. “Miss Fenton seems most concerned with protecting the identify of her gentleman admirer, although this will not be possible if the police have to be summoned. Perhaps the theft was orchestrated to expose him.” I considered the possibility for a moment. “Yes, perhaps the intended victim is really this unknown patron, whomever he might be. He is undoubtedly a man of great wealth and position. Who knows? Perhaps this sinister plot extends all the way to the—”

“I think not,” said Gillette. “No?” “If the intention was nothing more than to expose a dalliance between a young actress and a man of position, one need not have resorted to theft. A word in the ear of certain society matrons would have the same effect, and far more swiftly.” He threw himself back down in his chair. “No, I believe that this was a crime of opportunity, rather than design. Miss Kendall and Miss Fenton both reported having noticed one or two small things missing from their dressing area on previous occasions. It seems that we have a petty thief in our midst, and that this person happened across the sapphire during those few moments when it was left unattended in the dressing room.” “But who could it be? Most of us were either on stage or working behind the scenes, in plain view of at least one other person at all times.” “So it would seem, but I’m not entirely convinced that someone couldn’t have slipped away for a moment or two without being noticed. The crew members are forever darting in and out. It would not have drawn any particular notice if one of them had slipped away for a moment or two.” “Then we shall have to question the suspects,” I said. “We must expose this nefarious blackguard at once.” Gillette regarded me over the bowl of his pipe. “Boucicault?” he asked. “Pardon?” “That line you just quoted. I thought I recognized it from one of Mr. Boucicault’s melodramas.” I flushed. “No,” I said. “It was my own.” “Was it? How remarkably vivid.” He turned to young Henry Quinn, who was awaiting his instructions in the wings. “Quinn,” he called, “might I trouble you to run and fetch Mr. Allerford? I have a question or two I would like to put to him.” “Allerford,” I said, as the boy disappeared into the wings. “So your suspicions have fallen upon the infamous Professor Moriarty, have they? There’s a bit of Holmes in you, after all.” “Scarcely,” said Gillette with a weary sigh. “I am proceeding in alphabetical order.” “Ah.” Young Quinn returned a moment later to conduct Mr. Allerford into our presence. The actor wore a long black frock coat for his impersonation of the evil professor, and his white hair was pomaded into a billowing cloud, exaggerating the size of his head and suggesting the heat of the character’s mental processes. “Do sit down, Allerford,” Gillette said as the actor stepped onto the stage, “and allow me to apologize for subjecting you to this interview. It pains me to suggest that you may in any way have—” The actor held up his hands to break off the apologies. “No need, Gillette. I would do the same in your position. I presume you will wish to know where I was while the rest of you were running through the first act?” Gillette nodded. “If you would be so kind.” “I’m afraid the answer is far from satisfactory. I was in the gentlemen’s dressing area.” “Alone?” “I’m afraid so. All of the others were on stage or in the costume shop for their fittings.” He gathered up

a handful of loose fabric from his waistcoat. “My fitting was delayed until this afternoon. So I imagine I would have to be counted as the principal suspect, Gillette.” He allowed his features to shift and harden as he assumed the character of Professor Moriarty. “You’ll never hang this on me, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” he hissed, as his head oscillated in a reptilian fashion. “I have an ironclad alibi! I was alone in my dressing room reading a magazine!” The actor broke character and held up his palms in a gesture of futility. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything better, Gillette.” “I’m sure nothing more will be required, Allerford. Again, let me apologize for this intrusion.” “Not at all.” “One more thing,” Gillette said as Allerford rose to take his leave. “Yes?” “The magazine you were reading. It wasn’t The Strand, by any chance?” “Why, yes. There was a copy lying about on the table.” “A Sherlock Holmes adventure, was it?” Allerford’s expression turned sheepish. “My tastes don’t run in that direction, I’m afraid. There was an article on the sugar planters of the Yucatan. Quite intriguing, if I may say.” “I see.” Gillette began refilling the bowl of his pipe. “Much obliged, Allerford.” “Gillette!” I said in an urgent whisper, as Allerford retreated into the wings. “What was that all about? Were you trying to catch him out?” “What? No, I was just curious.” The actor’s expression grew unfocused as he touched a match to the tobacco. “Very curious.” He sat quietly for some moments, sending clouds of smoke up into the fly curtains. “Gillette,” I said after a few moments, “shouldn’t we continue? I believe Mr. Creeson is next.” “Creeson?” “Yes. If we are to proceed alphabetically.” “Very good. Creeson. By all means. Quinn! Ask Mr. Creeson to join us, if you would.” With that, Gillette sank into his chair and remained there, scarcely moving, for the better part of two hours as a parade of actors, actresses and stagehands passed before him. His questions and attitude were much the same as they had been with Mr. Allerford, but clearly his attention had wandered to some distant and inaccessible plateau. At times he appeared so preoccupied that I had to prod him to continue with the interviews. At one stage he drew his legs up to his chest and encircled them with his arms, looking for all the world like Sidney Paget’s illustration of Sherlock Holmes in the grip of one of his three-pipe problems. Unlike the great detective, however, Gillette soon gave way to meditations of a different sort. By the time the last of our interviews was completed, a contented snoring could be heard from the actor’s armchair. “Gillette,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder. “I believe we’ve spoken to everyone now.” “Have we? Very good.” He rose from the chair and stretched his long limbs. “Is Mr. Frohman anywhere about?” “Right here, Gillette,” the producer called from the first row of seats. “I must say this appears to have been a colossal waste of time. I don’t see how we can avoid going to the police now.” “I’m afraid I have to agree,” I said. “We are no closer to resolving the matter than we were this

morning.” I glanced at Gillette, who was staring blankly into the footlights. “Gillette? Are you listening?” “I think we may be able to keep the authorities out of the matter,” he answered. “Frohman? Might I trouble you to assemble the company?” “Whatever for?” I asked. “You’ve already spoken to—say! You don’t mean to say that you know who stole Miss Fenton’s brooch?” “I didn’t say that.” “But then why should you—?” He turned and held a finger to his lips. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the final act.” The actor would say nothing more as the members of the cast and crew appeared from their various places and arrayed themselves in the first two rows of seats. Gillette, standing at the lip of the stage, looked over them with an expression of keen interest. “My friends,” he said after a moment, “you have all been very patient during this unpleasantness. I appreciate your indulgence. I’m sure that Sherlock Holmes would have gotten to the bottom of the matter in just a few moments, but as I am not Sherlock Holmes, and it has taken me rather longer.” “Mr. Gillette!” cried Miss Fenton. “Do you mean to say you’ve found my brooch?” “No, dear lady,” he said, “I haven’t. But I trust that it will be back in your possession shortly.” “Gillette,” said Mr. Frohman, “this is all very irregular. Where is the stone? Who is the thief?” “The identity of the thief has been apparent from the beginning,” Gillette said placidly. “What I did not understand was the motivation.” “But that’s nonsense!” cried Arthur Creeson. “The sapphire is extraordinarily valuable! What other motivation could there be?” “I can think of several,” Gillette answered, “and our ‘nefarious blackguard,’ to borrow a colorful phrase, might have succumbed to any one of them.” “You’re talking in circles, Gillette,” said Mr. Frohman. “If you’ve known the identity of the thief from the first, why didn’t you just say so?” “I was anxious to resolve the matter quietly,” the actor answered. “Now, sadly, that is no longer possible.” Gillette stretched his long arms. Moving upstage, he took up his pipe and slowly filled the bowl with tobacco from a ragged Persian slipper. “It was my hope,” he said, “that the villain would come to regret these actions—the rash decision of an instant—and make amends. If the sapphire had simply been replaced on Miss Fenton’s dressing table, I should have put the incident behind and carried on as though I had never discerned the guilty party’s identity. Now, distasteful as it may be, the villain must be unmasked, and I must lose a member of my company on the eve of our London opening. Regrettable, but it can’t be helped.” The members of the company shifted uneasily in their seats. “It’s one of us, then?” asked Mr. Allerford. “Of course. That much should have been obvious to all of you.” He struck a match and ran it over the bowl of his pipe, lingering rather longer than necessary over the process. “The tragedy of the matter is that none of this would have happened if Miss Fenton had not stepped from her dressing room and left the stone unattended.” The actress’ hands flew to her throat. “But I told you, I had spilled a pot of facial powder.” “Precisely so. Gervaise Graham’s Satinette. A very distinctive shade. And so the catalyst of the crime

now becomes the instrument of its solution.” “How do you mean, Gillette?” I asked. Gillette moved off to stand before the fireplace—or rather the canvas-and-wood strutting that had been arranged to resemble a fireplace. The actor spent a moment contemplating the plaster coals that rested upon a balsa grating. “Detective work,” he intoned, “is founded upon the observation of trifles. When Miss Fenton overturned that facial powder she set in motion a chain of events that yielded a clue—a clue as transparent as that of a weaver’s tooth or a compositor’s thumb—and one that made it patently obvious who took the missing stone.” “Gillette!” cried Mr. Frohman. “No more theatrics! Who took Miss Fenton’s sapphire?” “The thief is here among us,” he declared, his voice rising to a vibrant timbre. “And the traces of Satinette facial powder are clearly visible upon—wait! Stop him!” All at once, the theater erupted into pandemonium as young Henry Quinn, who had been watching from his accustomed place in the wings, suddenly darted forward and raced toward the rear exit. “Stop him!” Gillette called to a pair of burly stagehands. “Hendricks! O’Donnell! Don’t let him pass!” The fleeing boy veered away from the stagehands, upsetting a flimsy side table in his flight, and made headlong for the forward edge of the stage. Gathering speed, he attempted to vault over the orchestra pit, and would very likely have cleared the chasm, but for the fact that his ill-fitting trousers suddenly slipped to his ankles, entangling his legs and causing him to land in an awkward heap at the base of the pit. “He’s out cold, Mr. Gillette,” came a voice from the pit. “Nasty bruise on his head.” “Very good, Hendricks. If you would be so good as to carry him into the lobby, we shall decide what to do with him later.” Miss Fenton pressed a linen handkerchief to her face as the unconscious figure was carried past. “I don’t understand, Mr. Gillette. Henry took my sapphire? He’s just a boy! I can’t believe he would do such a thing!” “Strange to say, I believe Quinn’s intentions were relatively benign,” said Gillette. “He presumed, when he came across the stone on your dressing table, that it was nothing more than a piece of costume jewelry. It was only later, after the alarm had been raised, that he realized its value. At that point, he became frightened and could not think of a means to return it without confessing his guilt.” “But what would a boy do with such a valuable stone?” Frohman asked. “I have no idea,” said Gillette. “Indeed, I do not believe that he had any interest whatsoever in the sapphire.” “No interest?” I said. “What other reason could he have had for taking it?” “For the pin.” “What?” Gillette gave a rueful smile. “You are all wearing costumes that are several sizes too large. Our rehearsals have been slowed for want of sewing pins to hold up the men’s trousers and pin back the ladies’ frocks. I myself dispatched Quinn to find a fastener for Mr. Lyndal.” “The essence of theater,” I said, shaking my head with wonder. “Pardon me, Lyndal?”

“As you were saying earlier. An actor must consider even the smallest object from every possible angle. We all assumed that the brooch had been taken for its valuable stone. Only you would have thought to consider it from the back as well as the front.” I paused. “Well done, Gillette.” The actor gave a slight bow as the company burst into spontaneous applause. “That is most kind,” he said, “but now, ladies and gentleman, if there are no further distractions, I should like to continue with our rehearsal. Act one, scene four, I believe…” It was several hours later when I knocked at the door to Gillette’s dressing room. He bade me enter and made me welcome with a glass of excellent port. We settled ourselves on a pair of makeup stools and sat for a few moments in a companionable silence. “I understand that Miss Fenton has elected not to pursue the matter of Quinn’s theft with the authorities,” I said, after a time. “I thought not,” Gillette said. “I doubt if her gentleman friend would appreciate seeing the matter aired in the press. However, we will not be able to keep young Mr. Quinn with the company. He has been dismissed. Frohman has been in touch with another young man I once considered for the role. Charles Chapman.” “Chaplin, I believe.” “That’s it. I’m sure he’ll pick it up soon enough.” “No doubt.” I took a sip of port. “Gillette,” I said, “there is something about the affair that troubles me.” He smiled and reached for a pipe. “I thought there might be,” he said. “You claimed to have spotted Quinn’s guilt by the traces of face powder on his costume.” “Indeed.” I lifted my arm. “There are traces of Miss Fenton’s powder here on my sleeve as well. No doubt I acquired them when I was searching for the missing stone in the dressing area—after the theft had been discovered.” “No doubt,” said Gillette. “The others undoubtedly picked up traces of powder as well.” “That is likely.” “So Quinn himself might well have acquired his telltale dusting of powder after the theft had occurred, in which case it would not have been incriminating at all.” Gillette regarded me with keen amusement. “Perhaps I noticed the powder on Quinn’s sleeve before we searched the dressing area,” he offered. “Did you?” He sighed. “No.” “Then you were bluffing? That fine speech about the observation of trifles was nothing more than vain posturing?” “It lured a confession out of Quinn, my friend, so it was not entirely in vain.” “But you had no idea who the guilty party was! Not until the moment he lost his nerve and ran!”

Gillette leaned back and sent a series of billowy smoke rings toward the ceiling. “That is so,” he admitted, “but then, as I have been at some pains to remind you, I am not Sherlock Holmes.”

“An Unkindness of Ravens” Donna Andrews “You don’t mind if Emmy tags along with you in Ketchikan, do you?” I smoothed away my frown before Emma could see it. “Of course not, Tom.” It wasn’t a lie; I liked Emma. We’d spent a lot of time together since our Alaskan cruise began six days ago. Most of the passengers, from the thirty-somethings like Tom and Emma to the senior citizens like me, launched themselves off the boat at each stop as if competing to see who could squeeze in the most hiking, kayaking, sightseeing, and shopping before the inevitable evening departure. Emma and I called ourselves the cane gang. Hers was metal, well-worn and practical, legacy of an auto accident that permanently damaged her left leg. Mine was newer and more fanciful; I’d chosen the carved wooden falcon’s head with an eye to its other uses, after I got over my hip replacement surgery and could walk unaided. “Think how decorative it will look in my hall umbrella stand,” I told friends who called it impractical. No, I didn’t mind Emma. I minded Tom using me to get Emma out of the way so he could pursue his latest affair without interference. Not that Emma seemed to mind. Or even notice. “I feel so much safer, knowing there’s someone with me to call for help if I fall,” I said. Tom hooted with laughter. “You hear that, Emmy?” he said. “You might even be useful for a change!” I flinched. Not Emma. She accepted his perfunctory kiss on the cheek and watched with her usual steady, untroubled face as Tom, still laughing, trotted down the gangplank, talked with other disembarking passengers, and eventually left in a group that, as always, contained a certain lively redheaded divorcee. I knew Emma would sip her tea and wait, patiently, until I was ready. Whatever agenda I had in mind was always exactly what she wanted to do, and as soon as I noticed that my hip was beginning to ache, I’d hear her apologetic suggestion that perhaps we might sit down somewhere for a time, or perhaps head back to the ship. The perfect companion, at least for something as sedate as this cruise. And I had to admit that my hip wasn’t ready for the kind of energetic outdoor excursions I usually favored. Pretending I was slowing down for Emma helped make our pace tolerable. And yet I had the curious feeling that left to her own devices, she’d sit all day on the deck, feeding the seagulls. Or reading one of the books she’d always stuff into her purse when I came to the table—books on Tarot, astrology, and every other kind of mysticism. I suspected that Tom’s arrangements to keep her out of the way often saddled her with less congenial companions. And that, on their frequent travels, Emma spent a great deal of time enduring the company of strangers. I was pleasantly surprised when she seemed excited about Ketchikan. “You’ll like it,” she said, several times, peering through the window. “It’s really quite beautiful. The way the houses cling to the side of the hill. And you’ll love Creek Street, where they’ve reconstructed a few blocks to show what the town looked like in frontier days. And everywhere you look, you can see ravens, and eagles—”

“You’ve seen pictures, then?” I asked. “Oh, I’ve been here before,” she said. “I—we stayed here for a week, two years ago. I made friends here. It was really quite magical.” I scrubbed the condensation from a patch of window and peered out, trying to catch a glimpse of the magic for myself. But all I could see were sheets of rain. And the occasional raven wheeling outside. Perhaps they were used to being drenched. Well, it made a change, at least; the black ravens instead of the usual seagulls. I wasn’t particularly keen on going out in the downpour, but the sight of Emma actually eager for something touched me. “Just let me go to the cabin for my rain gear,” I said. But I didn’t much need my boots and slicker, as it turned out. A minute or two before we walked down the gangplank, the rain stopped, and by the time we had gone a few blocks, the sun began breaking through the clouds. She was right; I did love the reconstructed Creek Street area. It lay on the banks of a small creek that emptied into the harbor. And since Ketchikan had extreme tides—a difference of as much as thirty feet between high and low tide at the equinox—all the old-fashioned buildings perched on tall wharves and pilings. A wide, weathered boardwalk ran down one side of the creek, then crossed and ran back the other. Occasionally, the walk branched off into alleys, or stairways that angled back and forth across the steep hillside until they reached the top of the cliff. I could see other boardwalks circling the hill at higher levels, and felt a brief pang of regret. Before my surgery, I’d gladly have spent hours climbing up and down the stairs and exploring the walkways on the hillside. “It’s all right,” Emma said. “You can come back again, when your hip is better. Anyway, it’s pretty slippery up there after it rains.” I started; then realized that perhaps it didn’t take a mind reader to guess my thoughts as I stared up at the the hillside, sighed, then frowned at my beautiful falcon cane. And there was plenty to explore at ground level. We strolled up and down the boardwalk, wandering into a shop occasionally, and spending long stretches of time leaning on the railing, watching the creek and the harbor. Emma, of course, fed the birds—not only the perennial seagulls but also the enormous sleek ravens that seemed to follow us everywhere, their bright stares oddly suggestive of unbirdlike intelligence. “Do you know what a group of ravens is called?” Emma asked. “An unkindness of ravens. Isn’t that funny? They’re so clever; I’m sure they must be among the kindest of birds.” I found myself wondering, curiously, if Emma really knew people in Ketchikan. “I made friends here,” she’d said. But so far we hadn’t met any, and it was a small place. Or perhaps we did meet them, everywhere. The nonsense Emma cooed as she fed the birds was starting to sound almost sensible. For that matter, I found myself thinking, absently, that with a little study, I might understand what the ravens croaked back. Eventually, we hooked up with a group from the ship who’d found a guide and were taking a tour of the Creek Street area. A senior citizen’s group, so Emma and I didn’t have too much trouble keeping up. “Dolly’s is the only original structure on Creek Street,” our guide said, pointing to a white Victorian frame house along the wide board sidewalk. “All the rest have been reconstructed. Of course, it’s appropriate that Dolly’s survived, since it was one of the most famous fancy houses.”

“One of them?” a tourist said. “There were more?” “Oh, yes,” the guide exclaimed. “Creek Street was the red light district in those days. Half the buildings were brothels, then.” We all studied Dolly’s, implausibly demure and cheerful for a brothel. “Small town to have such a big red light district,” one tourist remarked. “Ah, but Ketchikan was a major port of call for the fishing fleets that traveled up from the lower fortyeight. And gold miners, coming to town to celebrate their strikes.” I glanced up and down Creek Street, trying to imagine its bawdy heyday by superimposing movie-born images of Storyville, and Gold Rush San Francisco on the scene in front of me and failing, miserably. Everything seemed so wholesome. On the other side of the creek, some boys were jumping into the water, trying to land with a maximum of noise and splashing. Upstream, ducks and seagulls swam among the pilings, only a little way below the railings, since the tide was high. They gathered quickly whenever a pedestrian paused to lean over the railing and stare down at the water. “Of course, it wasn’t just the miners and fishermen who visited Dolly’s and the other houses,” our guide said. “See that path that comes down from the top of the hill?” We glanced up to see another of the boardwalks, hugging the hillside, then, as the slope grew steeper, descending rapidly through several twisting flights of steps until it finally joined the main Creek Street walk a block or so away. “That’s the Married Men’s Path,” our guide said. “Single men came through the front door, of course; but respectable married men would sneak down that path and through the back door to Dolly’s.” I couldn’t help glancing at Emma. She appeared not to be listening. She was staring out over the water with a half smile on her face. Watching the ducks, gulls, and ravens. Or pretending to watch. How did those respectable Victorian wives feel about Dolly’s, I wondered? Did any of them put up a fuss when their straying husbands slunk home, bright-eyed with guilt and drink? Or did they smile and practice the same deliberate ignorance? Or was the ignorance genuine? Not with Emma, anyway. As our guide gathered us up and shooed us on to the next stop, I saw Emma glance at Dolly’s, a short, sharp glance, full of pain and hatred. And then the usual mask descended; the half smile returned, and she followed our guide’s instructions to look toward the harbor. She knew, I decided. About the Married Men’s Path, in all its modern incarnations. The tour ended at the foot of a small cable car that carried pedestrians from the boardwalk up to the hotel and restaurant on the top of the hill. Most of the party went up for a mid-afternoon tea break, but Emma and I headed back to the ship for a rest. “I wouldn’t mind staying here longer,” I said, when we reached the dock. But I knew that by the time I had recovered from our afternoon’s exertions, the ship would be pulling out, and we’d be heading for our next port of call. Emma and I leaned over the ship’s railing, looking back at the town. I was tired and, I’ll admit it, a little cranky. My hip ached, my back ached, my temples throbbed, and I was beginning to realize that my friends had been right—my wonderful walking stick was a little impractical. The handle wasn’t the right shape for my hand; it had rubbed my palm raw in several places. And I was tired of the way the ship’s itinerary dragged me away every time I started to know and like a town. Emma was right; I should come back to Ketchikan when I was better. Laugher interrupted my thoughts. Tom’s braying laugh, and a high whinnying giggle from the redhead. I saw them, coming up the gangplank together, obviously sharing a joke. I glanced at Emma, who

gazed out across the water, imperturbable. I felt a brief, fierce flash of anger at Tom; a sudden wish to see him punished; humiliated, hurt, even dead—and I started as the wooden bird writhed in my hand. “Is something wrong?” I was staring at my stick, I realized. Which didn’t appear to have changed at all. Only my imagination. I must have tightened my hand in anger. Perhaps even had a muscle spasm; I was exhausted enough. “I’m just tired,” I said, looking back at Emma. “Tired, and perhaps a little lightheaded. I need that nap.” Emma, nodded, and turned back to the railing. She didn’t seem terribly upset that our day in her beloved Ketchikan was over. I left her standing on deck, looking up at the birds wheeling overhead. Some of the ravens had followed us back to the ship and were crowding out the gulls as Emma reached into her carryall and pulled out a box of crackers. Back in my cabin, I studied the cane. It didn’t seem to have changed. And yet it had. It no longer chafed my hand. It felt as easy and comfortable as the hand itself. You’re becoming dotty in your old age, I told myself, dropping off to sleep. Talking ravens. Wooden falcons changing shape. To my surprise, when I woke from my nap, the ship’s engines were still quiet. In the lounge, I heard that the ship had a minor mechanical problem. We’d be staying in Ketchikan until a part could be flown up from Seattle. At least overnight. “Come on!” Emma said, almost dancing up to me, despite her cane. “We’re going to eat in the restaurant on the top of the hill. It’s magical, looking down on the lights of the town and the harbor.” My enthusiasm for dining on shore shrank when I realized we would be part of a large, noisy party. But by that time, I was stuck. The restaurant was quite good, but there were too many people, talking too loudly, drinking too much, laughing at Tom’s increasingly cruel jokes. I drank too much myself, far exceeding the modest nightly glass of wine the doctor allowed me while I was still on the painkillers. And instead of damping my irritation, the wine only fed it, and until I felt a sharp stab of pain go through my head each time I heard Tom’s overly hearty voice or the redhead’s shrill giggle. Emma didn’t seem much bothered—I supposed she was used to this kind of party—but as soon as I finished my meal, I said goodnight, pleading a headache. “I’ll go along; you don’t want to be walking around alone, even here,” Emma said. “Good idea, Emmy,” Tom said, patting her arm carelessly. “This way we won’t spoil everyone’s fun, having to haul you back to the ship when the party’s just getting started.” Emma and I rode the tram down in silence, but when we reached Creek Street, as if by some silent agreement, instead of heading back to the ship we turned in the other direction, and strolled up and down the boardwalk in a drizzle so light it was almost a mist, stopping every now and then to gaze over the water. The moon was full, turning the harbor to silver, but the tide was low, reducing the creek to a few small, sluggish channels. Probably a good thing to walk off some of the wine before going to bed, I thought. And I was starting to feel better. Until I heard a familiar voice. A familiar laugh, softer, but still raucous. Or was I imagining it? Emma didn’t react. I left her leaning on the railing and strolled a little further

along the boardwalk, toward the voice, but slowly, as if merely wandering. I turned a corner and realized that I was at the foot of the Married Men’s Path. Glancing up, I saw Tom and the redhead on one of the stair landings, embracing. Then they drew apart and began descending the next to last flight of stairs. Damn the man, I thought. I needed to get Emma away. I turned back, walking as quickly and quietly as I could, feeling the pressure of those footsteps above and behind me. And then I heard voices ahead. A man’s voice and a woman’s. Soft, conspiratorial. At least they seemed to be ahead of me. Had I miscalculated where the Married Men’s Path joined the walkway? No. I glanced back and saw Tom and the redhead, where I expected them to be. He was sitting on the railing, lighting a cigarette. She was walking away from me, giggling and waving as she retraced her way up the stairs. Perhaps the water had somehow amplified their voices while disguising their direction. Or had someone joined Emma? “Emma?” I called, softly. “Over here.” She was still standing where I’d left her, by the railing in the shadow of a building. There was no one with her. Only a raven, perched nearby, watching attentively, as if expecting to be fed. As I approached, the raven took wing, and flew off down the creek, into the deeper shadows. “We should go back to the ship,” I said. I didn’t want Emma to see Tom and the redhead. Never mind how good she was at pretending not to be hurt. Then I heard a startled cry, followed by a splash. A distant splash, from back along the boardwalk, where the shadows were deepest. Distant, but quite distinct. Not the full, exuberant, rolling splash of the children jumping in at high tide, but the small, staccato splash of something falling from the boardwalk and hitting a few inches of water over the solid mud and rock of the creek bed. Something… or someone. And I knew in a few seconds, we’d begin to hear the aftermath. A shout, or perhaps a scream. Hurried footsteps on the boards. Someone would give the alarm; a siren would approach from the distance. Someone would spot us and word would spread. People from the ship would begin to hover nearby, waiting, with an all-too-human mixture of pity and morbid curiosity, to see the moment when a wife learned that she was now a widow. Emma, of course, would carry it off beautifully. Almost overcome with grief, yet holding it together bravely. With the help of her devoted friend. I gripped my cane and turned. Time to take my place at her side, ready to play my role. A raven had landed on the railing near us, and Emma was cooing softly to it, offering it a cracker. As I watched, the raven sidled closer and took the cracker from her hand, then lingered for a few moments as she slowly extended a finger and scratched the side of his head. She turned and smiled at me, brushing a few cracker crumbs from the front of her sweater. I heard the expected scream from the shadows. Emma leaned against the railings, staring out toward the harbor, with her back toward the creek. As I joined her, the raven flew away. I heard the rustle of his wings as he flew into the shadow, and

then the rustle swelled, and he was joined by hundreds of his kind.

“Twilight’s Last Gleaming” Michael Collins The moans and cries of violent passion reached into the dark silence of the storage room where they had me locked. From the bedroom on the far side of the small cabin, intense and urgent. Almost savage. Even huddled under the two blankets in the cold of the cabin, my head on a hard sack of rice, I couldn’t escape the gasps and groans and soft, ecstatic screams. I closed my eyes, but that made it worse. My mind saw the shine of slick bodies, the thrusting and lifting in locked rhythm, the slow and liquid dance of entangled skin and flesh in the night cabin. A heedless and ancient animal intensity in the cries and moans. A long, piercing shriek and guttural cry. Then silence. And after a time the low delight of small laughter, and quiet murmur of far off voices, rising and falling in the silent cabin with only the mountain wind outside. They were not the sounds I had been afraid I would hear in the remote forest cabin. Not the terrible screams of pain and death, but the ecstatic screams of passion. A different violence. A smaller death. The kidnaping had been all over the headlines and TV news. Gretchen Bayer, 19, super athlete, magazine cover model, Olympic skier, and rookie professional soccer player, had been kidnaped in broad daylight from a shopping mall in Carter Creek, Nevada, by two men who had vanished into the Sierras, with her kicking and cursing in the back of their old and battered Ford Bronco. No one in Nevada had a clue who the men were, or why they had kidnaped the young woman. The FBI had taken charge. Klaus Bayer, her distraught father, paced his Los Angeles office in front of walls of framed photos and magazine covers of Gretchen in action. “It’s been twenty-four hours, Mr. Fortune, and neither the FBI nor the cops have a goddamned clue.” “No ransom calls? No note?” “Nothing,” Klaus Bayer raged. “They’re combing the mountains with helicopters and dogs, but so far zilch, nada. If she isn’t dead, she will be soon, unless someone stops those monsters.” I tried to calm him. “The FBI knows its work, Mr. Bayer.” He snorted in derision. “I don’t trust them to think of Gretchen first, or even last. FBI, BATF, state police. You know their record. Waco, Ruby Ridge, Attica.” When he had asked the LAPD if they knew a P.I. experienced in the mountains, a detective who knew me had told him about the time I had to chase a man through the Guatemala mountains, and then make my way out alone. Bayer had immediately summoned me to the L.A. office. “Go up there, Mr. Fortune. Find her first. Make a deal with those criminals. Name your price. Whatever it takes. Spread money around. All expenses. She’s my only daughter.” And, I thought, somewhat unkindly, his only meal ticket. But the money was right, and the location, Carter Creek, made me remember another LAPD detective who knew me: Detective Sergeant Leonard Tucker, who had retired from the Los Angeles Police Department six years ago. He and his wife had moved to Carter Creek to join the growing colony of ex-LAPD officers up there. Tucker and I didn’t think much alike, and he had never been exactly a friend, but we had worked cases together, I had held up my end, and we got along. It gave me an idea of how I could possibly do the job Klaus Bayer wanted. I’ve been in enough small towns to know they tend to be suspicious of strangers, and protective of their

own. Especially Carter Creek-a right-wing bastion highly distrustful of government. They don’t love the FBI or BATF in Carter Creek. If the kidnapers were locals, the Feds weren’t going to get much help. But if they were locals, someone up there would know where they were, or, at least, where to look. Deep among the first row of mountains of the Sierras, Carter Creek was a mining town once, silver and copper, but now lived on tourists who came for the boating and fishing in summer, the skiing and hunting in winter. Klaus Bayer had first taken Gretchen there in the summers for the water sports, then for the winter sports, and finally to protect her from the temptations of Southern California. When you’re nineteen, and earning millions, the temptations are many, but from what I had already heard, and what I read flying up, Gretchen Bayer was all sports and business, day and night. When I drove into Carter Creek there were so many suits, stenciled jackets, and uniforms, it looked like the FBI, BATF, and Idaho police were occupying the town, with the news hounds buzzing around them. The locals were conspicuous by their absence. I checked into a rustic motel and called ex-detective-sergeant Tucker. He agreed to meet me at a roadhouse outside town. “Why do you want to find these guys, Dan?” He’s a big man, Tucker, burly and gruff in the way all cops used to be before the college grads and women moved in. I had bought him a Coors. I took a Red Tail ale. He noticed the difference. “Her father hired me to find them first. He’s frantic about the lack of any word, and he’s worried about the Feds.” “Yeah,” Tucker said. He had had his own problems with the Bureau. “If you found them, then what?” “I try to talk them down. Buy them off. Scare the hell out of them. Make them realize what real deep shit they’re in.” Tucker shook his head. “Not these guys, Dan.” “Then you do know who they are?” It was what I had counted on. Or at least hoped for. Tucker was one of those old cops who made it their business to know everything that happened on their tour. “They’re locals?” “I know about them,” he corrected, “and they’re not exactly locals.” “What the hell does that mean?” “It means they live alone way back in the Sierras, and not many people in town have a clue where, or give a damn. One of them’s pretty much a total nut.” “What kind of nut?” “The father’s a right-wing survivalist, government-hater, and loner. Can’t even get along with the radical anti-government militia types we have here. The son’s only half as nutty.” “Father and son?” It had more than a whiff of the Old West. Tombstone. The Clanton clan. “They have names?” “Carter, that’s the father, and Sepp Mason. They hunt, fish, live off the land, don’t show up in town more than once, twice a year, if that. Sometimes you don’t see them for two or three years.” He drank

his beer. “The Feds’re gonna have their hands full just finding them, and then it’ll really get hard. They’re armed, paranoid, and dangerous as all hell.” The grim possibilities of an almost certain blood bath when the FBI and BATF found the kidnapers lay between us on the scarred tavern table. I ordered another round. The barman who brought our beers watched me stone-faced. He knew I wasn’t any kind of police, not with one arm, but I was a stranger talking to an ex-cop. I waited until the barman left, lowered my voice. “Then I really need to talk them down before the Feds find them. I know how it works in a place like Carter Creek, Lennie. Some people up here have to know where the Masons would hole up.” He rotated his beer glass in his hands, and looked back toward the bartender. Then he stood up. “I’ll see what I can do. Where do I contact you?” I told him the name of my motel. The numbers on the dashboard clock changed from 1:32 to 1:33 A.M. in the dark interior of the mudcaked Jeep Cherokee. The three of them had picked me up at my motel five minutes earlier. I kept my hand on the little Sig-Sauer in my pocket. The tall, wiry man wearing surplus forest camouflage fatigues sat beside me in the gloom of the back seat. The driver, an equally skinny guy, half the size and age of my companion, also wore forest camos, and had trout flies in his floppy hat. The man in the front passenger seat shifted sideways to look back at me. Large and muscular in blue sweat pants and a red sweat shirt with Carter Creek High lettered on it, he was clean-shaven and losing his hair. “Tucker says you want to talk to the kidnappers. Why?” “Because the woman’s father thinks it could get ugly if someone doesn’t find them before the Feds do.” “He doesn’t trust the Feds?” “He doesn’t trust the Feds or the kidnapers.” “What does he expect you to do if you find them?” “Make sure she’s okay.” I repeated what I had told Tucker, even though I was pretty sure Tucker had filled them in on our entire conversation. They were testing me. “Negotiate. Pay them off. Find out what they want, and talk them out of it. Whatever I can. At the very least, her father figures if I’m there the Feds’ll think more about the woman’s safety, and not be so trigger happy.” The two in camos snorted. I took that as anti-Fed encouragement of Klaus Bayer’s point of view, and went on. “If Tucker talked to you folks, I guess that means he thinks you can get me to the kidnapers.” The spokesman said something low to the driver, and the Cherokee pulled off the road into an open field silver in the moonlight. Tall trees rose dense around the clearing, and mountains towered pale blue in the moonlight. All three of them got out, and walked away to confer. When they finally stepped back to the Cherokee, the spokesman said. “We want you to understand something, Fortune. Me, and Ben,” he nodded to the tall, wiry one, “and Samuel,” a nod to the scrawny driver, “we respect the Masons, even honor them. Carter and Sepp live their own lives their own way, and don’t give a damn about what anyone else thinks or does as long they’re left alone.” “Patrick Henry and the anti-federalists,” I said. “What?”

“Back at the time of the Revolution, Patrick Henry and others had the same idea. They hated the Constitution and everything in it. They wanted to live by their own rules, and to hell with everyone else. I guess bad ideas never die.” For the first time the driver spoke, “Shit. This guy’s a goddamn lib—” The spokesman snapped, “Shut up, Sam. This isn’t about philosophy or politics. We agreed on that.” He glanced away toward the shadows of the mountains where one distant peak poked a snow-capped summit above the lower ones. “You better know exactly why we’re going to help you, Fortune.” “Because kidnaping’s a little too much rugged individualism?” The driver growled, but the spokesman ignored him. “Because the Masons have no use for money. The old man says it’s the root of hell. They hate money, and everything it represents. If they need anything they can’t make, grow, or kill, they come down and trade for it or steal it.” “Then why…?” I stopped. All three of them were watching me. I didn’t feel too pleasant. “What do they want with a young woman?” “Yeah,” the tall, wiry one said. “What?” For the first half of the next day, the surly driver bounced and bumped the Cherokee along rutted dirt roads deep into the Sierras. Towards 3:00 P.M. we parked, and the tall, wiry one named Ben, nearly invisible in his forest camos, led me up, down, and around mountain slopes through the thick stands of Ponderosa pines. It was near dusk, a sharp wind rising, when he located what he thought was the Masons’ cabin. In the twilight, an enormous Stars and Stripes whipped at the top of a flagpole, and a Confederate battle flag blew below it. Ben scouted, and when he returned, nodded to the flags. “It’s the place, all right, and they’re here. I didn’t see the woman, but the Bronco is hid in the trees out back. You’re on your own from here, Fortune. Be careful.” He did not shake my hand or wish me luck, we were not on the same side except for this one instance, and I watched him vanish through the Ponderosas in the fading light feeling alone, exposed, and vulnerable. When my nerves had calmed down, and I finally recovered from the long half-day climb, I worked my way cautiously along the edge of the tall pines trying to see if the girl were there too. It had been more than two days now since the kidnaping, and I did not know what I was going to find. I neither saw nor heard the man until he stood behind me like an apparition. “Stand up.” He was not a big man. Youngish, five-eleven, 170 pounds. He looked bigger. It was in the shoulders. In the slim waist, no hips, flat ass. He wore mismatched bits and pieces of surplus German Army uniform from World War Two. Desert boots, field-gray service jacket, khaki drill shorts tight against his powerful thighs, and the 1943 replacement field cap. Afrika Corps. He would be Sepp. He held an M-16, the muzzle pointed at me. I stood up slowly. “FBI?” he snapped. “BATF?” “Private investigator.” He liked that even less. “Bounty hunter?” “Working for her father,” I said. “He’s worried about when the Feds find you. He’s scared. He doesn’t want her dead. He’ll pay-” “They won’t find us.”

“Yes they will,” I said. “I did.” That was when he patted me down, took my little Sig-Sauer and my wallet, and marched me ahead of him into the cabin shadowed deep among the Ponderosas on the slope of the mountain and nearly invisible. Another man, who had to be the father, stood at a front window looking out from the cover of the wall, a big old Colt .45 1911 held like a toy pistol in his enormous hand. He was a big man. Well over six feet tall in his fringed buckskin, and nearly as wide. A full gray beard hid most of his face, and he wore high moccasins. A mountain man with the layers of fat and massive belly to carry him through the winter when there were few animals to kill, and the berries and roots were under the snow. Sepp Mason said, “Name’s Dan Fortune. A private eye.” The whole cabin was one medium-large room, with a kitchen and dining area at the right rear, and an interior door on the left into what was probably a bedroom. Another door in the kitchen had to be a storage room and pantry. There were two front windows, and a single long, narrow window high above the kitchen sink. A scarred and chipped refrigerator stood next to the sink, and a rough-hewn log table took up most of the open space in the kitchen. Gretchen Bayer sat in a straight chair against the rear wall, still wearing the full summer skirt and halter top she had been kidnaped in. Her hands were tied behind the chair back. Her skirt was stained with pine sap, and her short dark hair was tangled. If I had expected a scared, tearful girl filled with gratitude and hope at seeing me, I was wrong. She gave me a baleful glare, and snarled, “You know what these Neanderthal clowns want? A fucking squaw! Can you believe that? They’ll rot in hell first.” It was pretty much what I, and the three militia-types in Carter Creek, had feared. The Masons had not wanted money, they had wanted a woman. Any woman, and probably for both of them. But as near as I could tell, she was unmarked and appeared unharmed. Rape doesn’t show, and few women are going to let a stranger know they’ve been raped, especially by two men. But rape and fear do show in the eyes, and what was in Gretchen Bayer’s eyes was neither rape nor fear. It was anger, hate, and a grim and watchful violence waiting its chance to explode. It was at that moment I saw the two sleeping bags on the floor of the main room, open and slept in. The implication, that the two men had slept alone on the floor of the main cabin while the girl had the bedroom, was a long way from rape. It looked like at least one of the pair was reluctant. I felt a surge of hope that there could be a way out of this for the girl, and for me. I decided to attack them head on. “So what happens now? You kill me?” Carter Mason growled, “What we got to lose, Fortune?” His bearded face was as full of anger as Gretchen Bayer’s, but his was directed at the world in general, at everyone but himself and his son. “You have everything to lose. Kill me, and you have to kill her, and then it’s over. You’re dead too. Both of you. You know the Feds. Even if you keep the girl alive, she’ll probably get killed in the crossfire. They’ll take no chances. You’ve seen them in action. If you murder anyone, it’s all over.” “We can take care of ourselves,” Carter Mason snarled. These first ten minutes were critical. I needed to keep them talking, find out which one was not so sure of what they were doing. “Maybe,” I told the older man, “but I found you, and they will too.” Sepp said, “How did you find us?”

He did not ask how come I let him catch me. He knew why he had caught me—he was a better man. “It wasn’t all that hard.” I told him about Tucker, Ben and the driver, and the spokesman in the sweatshirt. “The high school coach,” Carter Mason said grimly. “Damn. Knew he had the spine of a jackal. Probably told the Feds too. We better get the hell out of here. You grab the woman, Sepp, and I’ll take care of Fortune.” My fate was clear in his voice. Sepp disagreed. “We’ll take him with us, too. He’s right, we kill anyone, and they—” Before he could finish, Gretchen Bayer was all over him. Unseen, she had managed to slip her hands out of the rope, and moved faster than a mountain lion leaping on an unsuspecting mule deer. Her athlete’s muscles coiled and corded, and then she sprang. Her charge knocked Sepp Mason flat on his back, and before he hit the floor she had the M-16. She stepped backward. “Tell your old man to put that cannon on the floor!” Her eyes flickered to me. “You, whatever your name is, get the old man’s gun, and-” In a single fluid motion, Sepp Mason rose to his feet, walked straight toward her and the rifle. I saw her finger tremble on the trigger of the M-16 as if she wanted to squeeze it but couldn’t make her finger move. Her feet tried to move. But his reckless speed paralyzed her mind, or maybe it was that she had never shot anyone before. Whatever it was, he plucked the rifle out of her hands like a feather, and slapped her hard enough to knock her down. Carter Mason’s .45 Colt dug into my back. For a second Gretchen Bayer lay on the floor, shocked. But only for a second. “Son of a bitch!” As fast as he had jumped up to take the rifle from her, she came off the floor swearing and throwing punches at his face. He picked them off effortlessly. She swung a knee up into his crotch. He blocked it with his left hand, and her right fist went in over his lowered left hand and slammed full into his face. Blood spurted from his nose, and he staggered backwards. His back hit the wall, and in the split second his shoulders rested against the wall, his hands lowered in surprise, I saw a light in his eyes. I saw amazement, and…What? Admiration? Revelation? She rushed him to follow her advantage. She aimed another hard right, he stepped inside her punch and his fist hit her flush on the chin. She went down again, her full skirt flying up over her face exposing bare thighs and blue bikini panties. Sheer blue panties with the dark wedge of hair clear under the thin cloth. Sprawled on the hard wooden floor, she wiped a slow trickle of blood from her mouth, and I saw the same light in her eyes. Amazement, admiration, revelation. Sepp reached down, hauled her to her feet, and pushed her back into the chair. “Stay there.” She struggled up again. “Shit I will! You goddamn bast—!” His hand pressed down, squeezed, and forced her back into the chair as their eyes locked. Time stood still. Then he released her shoulder, and stepped away. Blood still trickled from his nose. She made no attempt to get up again. Only stared at his face. “You’re fucking going to rot in prison. They’ll fucking throw away the key. Maybe they’ll fry you. Both of you. I’m going to watch and laugh.”

“Shut your goddamn face. ” Carter Mason strode toward her with the .45 raised to hit her. Sepp stopped him with his hand. “No.” Carter blinked at his son. They stood that way for a moment, then the old man turned away. “It’s damn near dark. We better finish off Fortune and get the hell out of here if we’re going to make—” “Not tonight,” Sepp said. “Tomorrow. ” “Sepp—” “Not tonight,” Sepp said, “and we kill no one. That’s not what this was about.” The old man licked his lips, and stared at his son. So did Gretchen Bayer. “Tomorrow,” Sepp Mason said, stepped to Gretchen Bayer in the chair, and in a quick fluid motion picked her up in his arms. I saw the young athlete’s body stiffen, go rigid, prepared to resist, to fight. Then she let go and buried her face in Sepp Mason’s chest. He carried her into the bedroom, kicked the door shut behind them. Alone in the main room of the cabin with Carter Mason, I found myself staring at the bedroom door. I forced my mind to turn away, and I looked at the old man. Carter Mason still watched the silent door, except he did not really see the door. He saw a distance that existed somewhere deep inside his own thoughts. But the .45 remained ready in his hand, and he was too far away for me to jump him. He continued to gaze at the door with his unseeing eyes. “Sepp’s mother walked out four years ago. You live off the land out here, it’s hard when you got no woman in the house. I been doing it forty years, I can handle it alone. But Sepp, he needed a woman so we got him one.” “You got something,” I said. “I’m not so sure it’s what you had in mind.” His massive head and beard turned slowly to study me. He did not erupt in the rage that existed only millimeters beneath his skin, he did not do anything. Only sat there looking at me. “They’ll find you sometime,” I said. “The FBI. BATF. What do you do then?” Now he did explode. “We fight the bastards! We’re free men, we’ve got our rights no matter how hard the fucking government tries to take them away.” “The right to kidnap a wife when you want one?” “If we goddamn have to,” the old man roared. “A man makes his own life. They show up here, we fight them and we beat them!” He was crazy, yes, but it wasn’t a medical insanity. It was the insanity of pushing an idea, a theory, as far as it could go, and then going farther. The insanity of frustration, of being left out. The insanity of feeling you don’t count, that the world you believed in is being taken away from you. “You can’t beat them,” I said. “You know what cops are. Their job is to protect those in power, and the laws they make to stay in power. It doesn’t matter who’s in power. The cops defend what exists today, keep order, control the citizens. Any cops, any time, any place. They can’t allow you to defy the law. You’re in rebellion, if not revolution, and no government, nation, or tribe ever made rebellion or revolution legal. You want to change the world, you better be ready to die.” Carter Mason sneered. “You think that scares us, Fortune? A free man fights for his rights. If we die, we die.” “The woman too?”

He suddenly stood. “You talk too much. Get up.” He marched me into the storeroom and locked the door. An hour later he threw in a bag of homemade trail-mix and beef jerky, and soon after I finished eating the wild cries of lovemaking began to echo through the cabin. Now, in the dark storeroom, I tried to block out the sounds from the distant bedroom. The images of every woman I ever made love to were filling my mind, when I needed to think of how I would get out of this alive. I finally went to sleep without any ideas, the cries from the bedroom still in my mind. I woke up to pitch dark, looked at my watch. It was barely midnight. At first I heard only silence, but as I lay there in the dark storeroom I began to hear a different set of sounds. Voices, talking softly and quietly. Talking on and on somewhere in the cabin. I was still listening to them when I fell asleep again, and when I awakened once more the cries of passion were back. When I woke up the final time in the darkness, my watch read: 3:47 A.M., and the voices were talking again, low and steady. I lay awake listening, and thinking about those quiet voices, hearing the earlier passion, and wondering. In the morning the FBI was there. And the BATF. From the dark of the store room, a thin line of light under the door, I heard the old man’s voice, “Sepp, we got company.” The store room door flung open. “Get out here, Fortune.” Blinded by the glare of the morning sunlight, I stepped out into the main room. When my vision finally cleared, I saw Carter Mason at his post beside the front window, his .45 in his hand, but staring back into the room to where Sepp Mason stood in the open bedroom door, the M-16 down at his side, and Gretchen Bayer beside him. She had both hands on Sepp’s arm, and looked as belligerent and protective as he did. As I watched, the old man seemed to shrink, to become smaller. His eyes above the thick, gray beard were suddenly dull and tired. As if he knew all at once that something he had long been afraid might be true, was true. I watched him, and watched Sepp and Gretchen Bayer, and if what I thought I could see was right, I knew the way out of this. I crossed to the corner of the second window. The Feds were at the edge of the Ponderosa pines in full assault gear: Three FBI, two BATF, and a single Nevada cop with a dog. An advance unit. There would be more soon. They acted as if they had just arrived, lurking inside the edge of the Ponderosas, and were not yet sure this was the right cabin. I turned from the window quickly. “Okay,” I said, “what’s it going to be? Fight them, or give it up? You don’t have a lot of time to make up your minds.” One arm around Gretchen Bayer, Sepp Mason said, “We can talk to them. It’s changed. You go out, Fortune. Tell them Gretchen wants to stay. Tell them she doesn’t want their help.” Gretchen Bayer said, “Or my father’s. I stay with Sepp.” It had been there, not in the cries and moans of last night, but in the voices talking softly and quietly between the bouts of passion. “They won’t buy it,” I told them. “They’ll say you’re another Patty Hearst, a brainwashed woman

under psychological duress. It’s a kidnaping, and the victim doesn’t get to call it off.” “I’m not going to prison,” Sepp said, his voice flat. “And I’m staying with her.” “She’s got her own life,” I told him. “No,” Gretchen Bayer said, “I don’t. I’ve got a career, a bank account, a famous name. I never needed any of it. He did. My son-of-a-bitch father. If I’m famous, he’s famous. If I’m rich, he’s rich. He told me it was what I wanted, and made me believe it. I never really did, but I had nothing else. Now I do.” “With him?” “Him, the mountains, a life,” she said, her voice as fierce as her eyes. I shook my head. “They won’t let you. They can’t. They’ve spent a ton of money to rescue you, and they can’t let Sepp and Carter walk away. It’s prison for sure. Ten years at least. You can wait—” Gretchen Bayer was enraged, “Then we’ll fight them! The three of us. If they go down, I go down too. How’s that going to look?” “No,” Sepp told her. “You’re a woman, it’s not your job. I’ll go to pris—” She rounded on him. “In a pig’s ass it isn’t! I can fight as good as you! And I say what I damn well do and don’t do!” I saw that admiration on his face again, but his voice was iron. “No.” All the while Sepp, Gretchen, and I had been talking, I had kept sight of Carter Mason. The old man stood silent the whole time, listening, watching, the .45 hanging down toward the floor, forgotten. I hoped I was right about what that meant, and took a breath. “They have to jail someone. It’s cost too much, there have been way too many headlines and TV news bulletins, and they’d look stupid. They can’t lose all the way.” There was a silence. When the old man finally spoke, his voice was clear, his decision made. “It was all me, Fortune. Sepp didn’t know I was going to do any of it. He only went along after because I’m his father, and I brought him up to respect his father.” “Dad—!” Carter Mason tossed the .45 onto the table, and dismissed his son with a wave of his giant hand. “I don’t have a life, boy. I’ve known that for a long time. All I’ve got is an attitude. I hate everyone not like me. Everyone who doesn’t think like me is the enemy. Other people ain’t really people. Alone against the world and proud of it. No wonder your mother left me. I’ve gone from one damned hate to another all my life. You got a chance for a real life, boy. Never saw you take to a woman like you done with her. Or her to you. You take this chance, you hear me?” For a time no one said anything more, and then from outside a voice boomed through a bullhorn, “You in there! This is the FBI. Release your prisoner, and come out with your hands up!” The old man turned to the cabin door. “I’ll go out.” “Not you,” I said, “me.” I faced Sepp and Gretchen. “I’m pretty sure the cabin isn’t surrounded yet. There’re too few of them, and they’re not absolutely sure we’re in here. Is there a window in the bedroom?” “No,” Sepp said. “Can the two of you squeeze through that narrow kitchen window?” Sepp and Gretchen looked at the long, high window above the kitchen sink, and nodded in unison.

“Okay. As soon as I go out, and they’re all watching me because they don’t know who I am, you two go out that window. Go somewhere you know you’re pretty safe, but no one else knows about, not even Carter. Stay there. Start whatever new life you’ve got in mind.” I turned back to Carter Mason. “You wait here. Just sit tight and don’t do a damn thing.” I stepped to the door, opened it, and shouted. “Okay, we’re coming out!” With my lone hand held high, I stepped out and walked straight toward them. There are times being a so-called cripple comes in handy. A one-armed man is not especially threatening, and no one-armed man was part of the kidnaping, so who was I? Their weapons tracked me all the way, but I could see them looking at each other, then back at me, then at a tall, gray-haired man in full FBI field gear. When I was five feet away, three of them jumped out, grabbed me, dragged me into the cover of the first line of Ponderosas, and patted me down. They seemed disappointed to find no weapons. They hustled me to the tall FBI man. “Who are you?” “Dan Fortune. Private investigator working for Klaus Bayer.” “What the hell were you doing inside that cabin? Are the kidnapers there? Who are they? Where’s the woman? Is she alive? Have they harmed her? If they have…Goddamn it, talk to me. You’re in deep trouble, Fortune.” “No I’m not, you are. You ready to listen, or do you want to talk some more? I’ve got all day.” He almost strangled. “Talk.” “Their names are Carter and Sepp Mason. Father and son. Local survivalists. I found them yesterday, twenty-four hours before you did.” I exaggerated, but I made my point. “That’s going to look pretty lame. Especially since Gretchen Bayer doesn’t want to be rescued, and won’t testify against them.” “Goddamn it, For—” I cut him off, “The girl and Sepp Mason have found each other. It’s as real as anything I’ve seen, believe me. She says she’s ready to die with them in a hail of bullets and a river of blood if that’s how you want to play it. If you don’t like that scenario, try this: Carter Mason will swear the whole thing was his idea. Sepp went along only to protect the girl. Carter Mason grabbed her to get a woman for Sepp. They didn’t touch her, and Sepp told her if she didn’t like the life out here after a while, they’d send her home. You get the picture?” He had stopped sputtering about a minute back. I waited, but he only scowled at me now, so I continued. “The Bayer woman and Sepp Mason are already gone. Carter Mason will confess to doing the whole thing. Neither the son nor Gretchen Bayer will testify, even if you find them. If you do find them, they’ll fight. So, either you leave Sepp and the Bayer girl alone, and go home in triumph with Carter Mason in tow and confessing to everything, or you try to find Sepp and the girl and end up in a bloody shootout probably killing them both. Your call.” “I could kill you and this Carter Mason, then go after the son and the girl.” “Too many people know what I’m doing and why. Especially Klaus Bayer. Gamble on getting away with killing me, if you want to, and take a chance on not killing the girl when they fight you, but the folks back in Washington must be getting awful tired of the FBI coming home with nothing but corpses to show for the money.” He thought that over. “Who handles Klaus Bayer?”

“I do. You can deal with the media.” It killed him. “Get the goddamn father out here.” It killed Klaus Bayer too, when I told him, but I remembered what Gretchen had said and convinced him if he ever wanted the girl to make him a buck again, he had better let her go.

“A Girl Named Charlie” Stanley Cohen “Wait!” Harry Waller said. “Stop! Just stop! Put your clothes back on. I’ve changed my mind.” “You what?” “I’ve changed my mind. So just put your clothes back on. Okay?” She stopped disrobing, and she didn’t say anything, but she was clearly annoyed. He watched her get back into her things, a bizarre collection of tacky, youthful clothing. His earlier impression of her had been dead wrong. She was no adult! He refused to believe that she could be nineteen. Or even eighteen. She might not yet be seventeen! A kid who might’ve been coming home from high school, in a plaid miniskirt, a blouse getting a little threadbare, and a worn, rope-knit sweater. But a beautiful kid, with virtually no makeup. Beautiful! She had to be younger than his own two daughters in college, either of whom would have envied her perfect, light auburn hair that fell straight from the crown of her head down around her shoulders. Now that he looked at them for the first time, her shoes gave some things away. Street-worn wooden platforms with what looked like six-inch heels, the uppers attached to the blocky platforms by brassy nails, a few of the nails missing here and there. Without the shoes, she was really tiny. He glanced at her coat, lying across a chair, that had to keep out the bitter winds of the city’s winter, and it was a ratty little thing of nondescript fake fur. He was glad he’d stopped her before she finished removing everything. And he felt queasy as he shook his head and wondered: How in God’s name had he ever allowed himself to come to be in that grubby little room with her? She was definitely not an adult! And even if she were…But when she’d first approached him on the street, she was a beautiful young woman with a smile that would easily capture any man’s fantasies, and he rationalized that he was away from home, in another part of the country, where no one knew him, and it had been such a long time… “Listen,” she said, and she wasn’t smiling anymore, “even if we don’t do nothing, if that’s the way you want it, I still have to have my fifty. If we come up here to this room, I have to get my money.” “I’ll give you your money. Don’t sweat it. Okay?” Anything to just get himself out of there, and try to forget that he’d ever set foot in the place. But then, on a sudden impulse, he asked her, “Tell me something. How much of that fifty dollars do you get to keep?” “Who wants to know?” Her facial expression had become rock-hard. He hated seeing her face change that way. Where was that totally disarming smile he’d seen back on the street when she first approached him? That had been really something. “I do,” he answered. “What do you wanna know for?” “I don’t know. Just curious. I’m not asking for any particular reason.” “You a cop?” He chuckled. “No,” he answered as benignly as he could, “I am not a cop.” She studied him. “You older ones always ask the same damn questions.” It served him right. She’d probably heard more than a few reformers’ diatribes from her customers. Her “johns.” But afterward, most probably. After they’d allow her to ply her chosen trade. He was not about to become one of her johns. But he really did want to know. “Look. I changed my mind because…I

really just don’t feel too hot. Okay?” Then he quickly added, “Listen, I’m sure you’d’ve been great. Something really special. I’m real sure you’d’ve made my trip to New York something to remember. Okay?” This made her smile, and once again he saw the face that had so completely captured his attention when she first approached him on Eighth Avenue, standing in the entryway to an adult books, videos, and specialties shop. “You don’t know what you missed,” she said with a confident smile as she finished getting back into her clothes. “I’ll tell you that. And now, if you don’t mind, give me my fifty dollars. I’ve got to get back down on the street.” “Wait!” “What for?” “I really want to know.” “Know what?” “How much of that money you get to keep.” “You’re a cop!” “Oh, come on. I’m not a cop. I don’t even live around here. I’m from Ohio, as a matter of fact. Just another visitor to this big city of yours. But I like knowing about things. How much of this money do you get to keep for yourself?” “Look, I’ve got to get back on down there. If I don’t make my quota, sometimes it gets a little rough.” He saw a trace of fear in those clear blue eyes of hers and it almost made him flinch. Did this kind of story still exist in the world? Wasn’t it ancient history? He took out his money clip and peeled off three twenties. “Here’s your fifty and an extra ten. Now you don’t have to be in such a hurry. Okay?” She eagerly reached for the money. “Thanks.” A windfall. It brought back her smile. “Now, I really want to know. How much of this sixty dollars do you get to keep?” “Why do you older guys always wanna ask a bunch of crazy questions?” Then she said, “Okay, if you wanna know so bad, I’ll tell ya. I don’t keep any of it.” “Not even the extra ten?” “I don’t keep any of it.” “Who gets it?” “I give it all to my man.” “Your pimp.” “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you don’t call him by that word. Okay?” “Just one big happy family? Right?” “Matter fact, yeah.” “What do you call him?” “I call him Cecil. His name is Cecil.” “Cecil?” “That’s what I said. That’s his name.”

“And you’re telling me you just hand over every nickel you take in? You don’t get to keep anything for yourself? No percentage? Absolutely nothing?” Defiantly she said, “That’s right!” “What’s in it for you? What do you do if you need something? A drink. Something to eat. Some clothes or whatever.” “He gives me money. Whatever I happen to need, he takes care of.” Well, of course! He could easily tell that by looking at her lovely, stylish clothes. He shook his head. “What about the extra ten I just gave you? Are you maybe going to at least keep that for yourself?” A trace of a smile and a devilish gleam in her eye. Like she was going to be getting away with some big-time larceny. “Yeah, I might keep that.” “Where do you live, sweetheart?” She shrugged. “Right here, mostly. Once in a while, Cecil takes me out to his place.” Her face brightened. “God, you should see his pad! Really fancy place. He’s got this great view of Central Park! …And he took me to this really fancy restaurant once. French.” He looked around the grubby room. A bed and not much else. A small three-drawer dresser and a couple of wooden chairs. And a tiny bathroom with fixtures that belonged in a junk heap somewhere. He glanced into the bathroom and saw a filthy shower curtain and a couple of unclean-looking towels hanging from hooks. And the room was one flight up a littered stairwell above an adult books and videos shop. He looked back at her. “Why the hell are you…If you were at least a smart little operator, quietly building yourself a small fortune, then maybe…maybe I could understand…” “I’m doing all right,” she snapped with all that defiance. “I can almost tell.” He shook his head. “Look, if this is what you want to do, it’s your business, but it seems to me you should at least be getting a little something for yourself out of what you’re doing here.” “Mister, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go back downstairs. You came up here because you wanted to. Right? Nobody forced ya. You coulda gotten what you paid for. Right? Now, if you don’t mind, let’s go!” “Hold it a minute!” he said, almost shouting. “I’m paying for your time. Right? I even gave you more than you asked for. Remember?” She recoiled from the abrupt change in his raised voice. She was suddenly a child being scolded by her father. “How many men a day do you, uh, bring up here?” And as he asked the question, he was thinking, for his own amusement, “up here, to this lovely super-palazzo of sensuous pleasure.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Different numbers. Six. Seven. Eight, sometimes. The best I ever did was, I think it was…I think it was ten. Boy, was I hustling that day! Cecil doesn’t like it if I don’t get at least four.” “And you give all the money to him?” “I already told you that.” “And it’s fifty every time?” “Once or twice I got talked into going for less and Cecil wasn’t too happy about it.” That little shadow

of fear crept back over her eyes. “Do you ever get more than fifty?” “Sometimes. Listen, I’m good. You don’t know what you’re missing.” “And you give all the money, every single bit of it, to Cecil?” “I already told you that.” “How often does he come and check up on you?” “Usually once a day. Sometimes twice, but not often. And then at the end of the night.” “I suppose he’s got other girls working for him as well. Right?” “That’s right.” “How many, all together? Do you know?” With a shake of her head, she said, “Matter fact, no. I really don’t know.” “You girls ever get together and compare notes?” “Oh, Cecil don’t allow that.” He shook his head. “What’s to stop you from keeping some of what you take in? Keeping it for yourself?” “He definitely don’t allow that.” “How would he know?” “He just comes and takes it all.” “Hide some of it, then.” “I can’t do that.” Once again that little specter of fear moved across her face. “Now listen to me for a minute,” he said. “And listen carefully. Suppose you kept what you got from just one man each day and put it in the bank. Just one. And otherwise went right on, business as usual. Come on. It seems to me that you’re certainly entitled to do that. And he’d have no way of knowing you were doing it if he only comes around once a day. Now think about this. At fifty dollars a day, do you realize you could put away over a thousand dollars a month?” “But I already told you, I can’t do that.” “The hell you can’t! You can!” “No, I can’t!” “Yes, you can. And I’m going to set it up for you. I’m going to open you a savings account in the closest bank around here. And every day you go and take your little passbook and deposit what you get from just one man. Just one. And give the rest to Cecil like you’ve been doing. Before you know it, you’ll have a lot of money. Do you understand?” He studied her fragile, clear-skinned face as she looked away in deep thought. How in God’s name had she gotten to where she was?…And how often, during a day’s work, had she probably had to endure some kind of terrible abuse at the hands of some who-knows-what kind of john? “I better not try it,” she said, finally. “I don’t need it. He takes care of everything.” “The passbook is small. You can keep it someplace.” He looked at the cavernous shoulder bag she carried. “You could hide it somewhere down in that. What about in the lining? Or you could hide it

here in the room. He won’t find it. You said he only comes around once or twice a day. Why is it you don’t want some money of your own?” She looked away again. Her mind was finally dealing with the possible treasure he was setting before her. The wheels were turning. “I don’t know…You really think over a thousand dollars in a month? That’s a lotta money.” “I’ll set the whole thing up. You won’t have to do a thing. I’ll bring you the passbook tomorrow. I’ll meet you here in front of the shop downstairs at noon tomorrow. Okay? Tomorrow, twelve noon, sharp. Incidentally, I guess I need to know your name.” She hesitated a moment. “You have to know that?” This amused him. “How can I open the account in your name if I don’t know your name?” A trace apprehensively, she said, “It’s Charlie.” “Charlie?” “That’s what I said.” “Is that short for…uh, what…Charlene or something like that?” “It’s Charlie. Just plain Charlie.” “How’d you happen to get a name like that?” “My daddy wanted a boy.” A look of severe pain darkened her face. “Then change it! A name’s a name. You can have any name you want…. I don’t suppose your daddy’s anywhere around to object. Am I right?” “Hell, I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.” “I might have guessed as much. And your mother, too, probably. Right?” “I’m not exactly sure where she is, either. And I’m not looking for her. Not with the man she’s with now.” “That’s too bad.” But not all that surprising. “Where do you live, Charlie?” “Right here. I told you that” “Oh, right. You did.” He looked around the room again and shook his head. “Okay, so we’ll stick with Charlie for now. Charlie what? What’s your last name?” “Sweeney.” “And I’ll probably need your address. What’s your address, Charlie Sweeney?” She thought a moment and then shook her head. “I don’t know what it is. I never looked. We’ll have to get it off the door downstairs. If there is a number…Hey! Why do you want to go to all this trouble, anyway?” It was time for him to think a minute. He smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I really don’t think you’d understand…. C’mon. Let’s go.” As they walked out of the room, he said, “Listen. Why don’t you give me back my fifty and I’ll use that to open the account for you? And keep the ten, in case something comes to mind that you need for yourself.” She looked sharply at him, her expression tough once again.

He laughed and shook his head. “Forget it, forget it, I’ll use another fifty to open the account for you. And don’t worry about it. I can afford it.” He spotted Charlie in front of the same shop, her hands in the pockets of the ratty coat, her voluminous bag slung over her shoulder. She was walking back and forth, doing her thing, approaching one man after another with her disarming, absolutely unforgettable smile. Her long hair shone in the brilliant winter sun. As he was about to cross the street, she spotted him. She immediately turned and reversed her direction, quickening her steps as she did. He had to hustle to catch her, dodging the heavy traffic as he made his way across the street. “Charlie!” When he finally caught up with her and touched her shoulder, she stopped and spun around, defiant again, her eyes blazing. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he said. “I’m bringing you the bank passbook just as I said I would.” “I don’t want it. I told you I didn’t want it, and I do not want it.” “Don’t be a fool! I want you to have it. Now listen to me. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble and expense for you to have this. Okay?” “I said I don’t want it!” “Well, want it or not, you’ve got it.” He took out an envelope, removed the passbook, and showed her the deposit notation. “See right here? Fifty bucks for a start. You’re all set up. One deposit a day and you’ll have a thousand dollars in less than a month. In fact, in a little over three weeks.” “You keep the book,” she said. “It’s for you. Don’t you understand?” He looked helplessly around. He had a plane to catch. “Here. Take it.” He stuffed the envelope into her bag. She reached into her bag, found it, took it out, and threw it down onto the sidewalk. He quickly picked it up and grabbed her arm and stuffed the envelope back into her bag. “Charlie, listen to me! You keep this!” He looked around him, wondering if anybody was watching this bizarre little scene. She shrugged, finally, and then turned and started walking away from him, the passbook still in her bag. “Wait a minute. I’ve got to tell you a couple of things. It’s the bank right down there on the corner.” He pointed at it. “There are two signature cards in there with it. Sign them by the red X and take them to the bank. That gets the account started. Okay? Ask for Mrs. Walsh. That’s Walsh. W-a-l-s-h. I wrote her name on a little slip of paper and it’s in there, too. She’ll take care of you. Okay? Charlie, you’re gonna be rich!” She studied him for a moment and, finally, the defiance slowly disappeared from her face. She smiled her smile. “Thanks.” He made a mental note to remember that smile. It was a great smile. “Good luck, Charlie.” The flight attendant handed him two little miniatures of good scotch and he poured them over ice. He

took a sip and shook his head. Charlie Sweeney. A young girl named Charlie Sweeney. Sixty and then fifty more. A hundred and ten dollars! But what the hell! It’ll have been well spent if it helps her. Before coming to New York on this trip, he wouldn’t have considered himself capable of going anywhere near any part of the Charlie business. But that was only until he got a look at that captivating smile in the dark light of evening. “Look out for Sin City, Harry. And all those ladies of the night. They’ll see you coming and pick you like a Christmas goose! And you won’t have your wife to keep you out of trouble this time.” He’d heard all of the usual, silly locker-room-style banter before leaving for New York, and found it amusing but inconsequential. Yes, he’d often taken Martha with him when possible, on trips of this kind, but, regrettably, they’d been separated for almost a year. But still, he was no candidate for any contact with the ladies of the night. He never had been and, even without Martha, wasn’t about to ever start. He’d worked in New York for a couple of years before his work took him to the Midwest, and during those early years, while still single, he’d had good relationships with a couple of rather nice women, but none of them led to marriage. But even when he wasn’t involved in one of those affairs, the thought of going anywhere near one of the play-for-pay ladies, on the stroll, as they were called, had never so much as entered his mind. And on subsequent trips back, his total disinterest had been exactly the same. His four days in New York had gone well. He’d been tied up with business contacts the first three nights. A lot of good food, and even more satisfying, good business results, and to add to the pleasure of the trip, a chance to enjoy some real theater for a change, by taking clients, something he’d missed since moving to the Midwest. So, finding himself totally uninvolved and bored his last evening, he gave in to the silly urge to just take a walk and behave like a tourist and wander over to have a quick tourist’s look at some of the seamy underside of the world’s greatest city. After an early dinner alone in a good restaurant near his hotel, he walked out of the hotel on Lexington, up to Park Avenue, south on Park, through the newly renovated Grand Central (he’d been told not to miss that), onto Forty-second Street, and west on Forty-second. When he reached the Times Square area, it wasn’t the glitter in the glitter capital of the universe that impressed him (he knew it would still be there), as it was just the quantity of it, the absolute glut. No other place in the world was anything like it. He continued walking west on Forty-second, and this block had definitely changed for the better since his last visit. Two large, newly renovated and reopened Broadway theaters. In fact, he’d even taken his clients to one of them the previous night, where he thoroughly enjoyed actually getting to see the spectacular, tough-ticket Disney production of The Lion King. He reached Eighth Avenue, looked north, and to his surprise, most of what he remembered seeing there over the years was gone. This particular strip of Sin City, for the most part, had been cleaned out. The marquees of all the porno theaters he vaguely recalled along there, hyping double and triple features in lurid titles, were dark. And since it was not yet eight o’clock, patrons of the many legitimate theaters in the area were scurrying around to make their curtains. He decided to walk up Eighth and take a closer look. He headed up the street, did notice the bright lights of one place that called itself a sex club, and also saw a couple of shops offering adult books, videos, and other merchandise. He stopped for a moment in front of one of the more provocative shops, and suddenly found himself face-to-face with a girl named Charlie Sweeney. “Hi.” Her smile had been simply beautiful. “Hello,” he’d responded with his own smile. How could he not do so to a person with that face?

“Wanna go out?” “Want to do what?” He understood perfectly but asked the dumb question anyway. “Would’ja like some company?…You know.” He sipped his drink and gazed out the plane window at the horizon. Flying had a pacifying quality about it. Rationalizations came easier, especially with a double scotch in hand. On the first moment he saw her, he considered it virtually impossible that her face could exist against the backdrop of those surroundings. But since it had been almost a year, and he was miles away from home, it was easy to convince himself that he had been possessed by the moment. The hundred and ten dollars helped ease the guilt he felt for that brief moment of lunacy. As things turned out, he didn’t let it happen. And besides that, he’d done something for her. Something worthwhile. Maybe he’d changed her life, turned it around, helped her go from there to, hopefully, someplace better…He’d be back in New York again in a couple of months. He’d have to wander back over to her territory and check up on her. See if she was still around there. See if she was getting rich. He drained his glass. The liquor helped a lot. Back in the Big Apple with a couple of midday hours to waste before his flight home, and consumed by curiosity, he headed straight for Eighth Avenue. He walked up and down the street looking for her, but didn’t see her anywhere. He considered forgetting about the whole business, just leaving well enough alone, but his curiosity got the best of him. He entered the sex shop uncertainly and looked around the place. The proprietor was the only person there. Feeling like an idiot but determined to go ahead with it and check up on his one-hundred-and-ten-dollar investment, he said, “Uh, I’m looking for…Uh, would you happen to know the whereabouts of a young woman named Charlie Sweeney?” The man studied him for a couple of seconds. “Just a minute.” Then he walked through a door behind a wall of paperbacks. He picked up a phone and dialed a number. The heat of extreme uneasiness crept over him as he waited for the proprietor to return. He considered just walking out and not risking any further embarrassment. But, what the hell! He was from out of town, so to speak. And he really wanted to know about Charlie. He glanced around him at all the book covers and videocassettes and other items on display. He heard the man’s low voice as he talked into the phone, but couldn’t make out anything the man said. When the man reappeared, he asked the man, “Is she around here somewhere, do you know? Will she be very long? I really don’t have a lot of time. I, uh, have to catch a plane.” “Just a couple minutes.” The man’s expression was somewhat cryptic. He suddenly wished he hadn’t come back to the shop. It wasn’t all that important, all that big a deal. Curiosity. Maybe a chance to see that face and beautiful smile again. Just see how she was doing… After all, he’d invested money. Right?…He decided that he hoped she wouldn’t be anywhere around, and he considered just dashing the hell out of there, but the proprietor’s reaction to his inquiry had him intrigued. And, as he stood there, feeling like some kind of idiot, fidgeting as the minutes ticked by, he admitted to himself that, yes, he was really curious to see her again. After some ten or fifteen minutes, a man in a rumpled jacket and tie entered the shop. “Are you the man

looking for Charlie Sweeney?” “Uh, not exactly, I, uh…” The man drew a gold detective’s shield from his jacket pocket. “I’d like to ask you to come over to precinct head-quarters and fill out a statement for us.” “There must be some mistake, I, uh…” “You asked about Charlie Sweeney. Right?” He felt like an idiot. Why did he ever come back to this place? “Look,” the cop said. “It’s just a routine thing. There’s no charges involved…Hey! Take it easy! I told you there’s no charges. We won’t do anything that would cause you any kind of embarrassment. Okay?” “Uh, I really don’t have any time for that sort of thing. I have to get to the airport to catch a plane.” “We’ll give you a ride to the airport.” The cop smiled. “In an unmarked car.” “I have to go back to my hotel first and pick up my stuff. I don’t want to miss my flight. I really don’t have enough time, if you don’t mind.” “What time’s your flight?” He hesitated, and then blurted out the truth. “It’s at three-ten.” “Where’s your hotel?” “On Lex.” “We’ve got plenty of time. We’ll be glad to take you by your hotel and then give you a lift to the airport. Okay?” The cop smiled again. “And like I said, I’m in an unmarked car. Okay?” “Then, can you at least give me some idea of what this is all about?” “You came in here and asked for Charlie Sweeney. Right?” Reluctantly, he admitted, “Yes.” “Well, she’s dead. And we’re working on the case.” He gasped. “Dead! Of what?” “Her pimp beat her to death. But we think we’ve got a pretty tight case on him, and anything you can add could turn out to be a big help. And, like I said, everything’ll be held in strictest confidence. We won’t do anything to cause you any embarrassment. Okay?” “I’d still rather not be involved in all this.” “I’m afraid we’re not going to give you that option. I’m going to have to insist that you come to the station with me. But the whole thing won’t take but a few minutes. And like I said, we’ll be more than glad to take you by your hotel and then get you out to the airport in plenty of time for your three-ten flight.” He sat in front of a desk, the detective who’d picked him up sat in a chair next to him, and another detective behind the desk sat with his hands on the keyboard of a typewriter, asking the questions and typing in his answers. “And you did go up to her room with her?”

“Yes, but we didn’t do anything. Really. I absolutely did not touch her.” “Something made you change your mind? I assume that when you went up with her, you’d planned to”—a trace of a smile—“avail yourself of her services.” “This is very embarrassing…” “As we’ve assured you, we’ll protect your privacy. We’re just trying to get all the stuff we can get our hands on to nail this bastard. Cecil Brown is a lowlife of the first order, and we want him bad. And I think we’ve got him on this one. Anyway, go on. What happened when you went to her room?” “Nothing. I suddenly realized how young she was, and felt like a complete idiot, and that was that. I felt really terrible about the whole thing. I still can’t believe I’d gone up there with her.” “You give her any money?” “Oh, she insisted. Whether we did anything or not.” “Even though you didn’t do anything?” “That’s what she said. And she was, how shall I say it, pretty emphatic about that.” “How much did you give her?” “She said I had to give her fifty. Which, incidentally, she told me was all going to Cecil, as she referred to him. Well, what I had handy was a bunch of twenties, and I was feeling sorry for her, so I gave her three twenties. Sixty dollars. I figured maybe she’d at least keep the ten.” “And then you both just returned to the street? That’s it?” “That’s it…. Tell me something. Why’d he kill her? She gave me the impression she was making a lot of money and giving every penny to him.” “Well, it was apparently because she was holding out some of her take. And the Cecil types don’t go along with that. But we think we’ve got a pretty tight case on him. She’d been squirreling some money away in a bank over in the neighborhood she worked, and when we brought the son of a bitch in, we found her passbook in his briefcase.” A snicker. “Can you imagine an animal like him with a briefcase? Alligator leather, no less.” He felt a little sick. “Just out of curiosity, do you think I might see the passbook?” The cop thought a minute. “Sure. I don’t see any reason why not.” He went to a file cabinet and returned with a large envelope. He reached into it and fished around until he found the little book. “This is it. One thing I can’t fathom is why he kept it. But those guys aren’t too smart, fortunately.” Harry recognized the soiled and bent but familiar little passbook the cop handed him, and opened it…. The book still contained only one entry, a deposit of fifty dollars.

“Bless Me Father for I Have Sinned” Ed Gorman Except for his roman collar, you would not have known Gary Brackett was a priest. He looked much more like the brawny tow-headed football player he’d been twenty years ago when we were friends here at this small coed midwestern Catholic college. I stood on the edge of the two hundred people milling about beneath the big WELCOME WILDCATS OF ’62 banner strung between two white birch trees on the east side of Smiley’s Lake, one of those small bodies of blue water too small for any sort of commercial exploitation but big enough to go rowing across. Or to drown in. There was breeze on the lake now, carrying with it the natural scents of the June afternoon, wildflowers such as bloodroot and ginseng and wild ginger, and the smell of sunlight on newly born grass. Most of us were strangers to each other now, working hard at pretending otherwise of course, but the years had changed us in many ways, not just physically. The one-time class clown seemed inexplicably melancholy these days; the golden girl looked tarnished now, two bad marriages, the whispers went; and some of the invisible ones, the ones nobody had ever paid any attention to, swaggered about with the air of conquest, a couple of them multimillionaires. The spouses had it worst of all, dragged along unwillingly and then forgotten when some of the old cliques reconvened. The ninety-two degree midwestern heat curbed a lot of appetites, including mine. Hot potato salad not being my favorite. Or heat-soggy ham, for that matter. For the past twenty minutes I’d done my explaining to at least two dozen classmates, some of whom I could identify without a glance at their name tags, some of whom, even with the name tags, were still mysterious figures. Why hadn’t I been at the dance last night? Well, my job as a CPA in Cleveland had forced me to work most of the night and grab a plane only this morning. What happened to that beautiful wife of yours, Gwen? Oh, you know, 50 percent of marriages end in divorce and all, and she just found other things and other people, and now with the kids in college there’s even less reason to keep in touch. So how is good old foursquare Robert Anderson doing (I’d played chess instead of baseball, preferred Tony Bennett to the Beach Boys, liked girls shy as myself)? Well, besides my hair thinning a bit, and the woman I date saying that I can’t seem to stay awake past ten o’clock, and even my boss saying I should take time off to “have myself a gosh-darn ball” (my boss being as square as I am and rarely using swear words), well, I guess I’m doing fine. I drive a new Buick, own a DVD player, have a few dollars in the bank, and did pretty well with my last physical check-up. I was getting melancholy myself. In a practical sense, our lives were over. Most of us were nearing sixty years old; we’d had our chances and we’d had to settle for very mixed results. I felt this most of all with the pretty girls. The really pretty ones should be immortal somehow. But they weren’t. And it wasn’t because their looks had gone. Most of them were still pretty, still graceful, still winsome and fetching. And yet you could see that they were carrying death just like the rest of us mortals. And it wasn’t fair to them. And it wasn’t fair to us. I finished with my mingling and got myself ready to do what I’d come here to do. Which was why I was watching Gary Brackett. Or rather (I’d never been able to get used to this),

Father Gary Brackett. The priesthood had made him no less popular with women. There was a virtual receiving line that wound around a wide elm tree and stretched to a picnic table set off by itself next to the lake’s edge where half a dozen aged green rowboats sat bobbing in the blue water. The laughter of women has always been musical to me, and it floated on the air now, graceful as one of the monarch butterflies so prevalent here. A woman named Trudy Carrington (her name tag I had to check out quickly) came up and took my arm and said, “Isn’t it wonderful, Robert? I mean, really inspirational, I mean, of all of us who would have a vocation—that dreamboat Gary Brackett?” She winked at me. Even in her fleshiness you could see the cute girl she’d been, especially in the mischievous green eye. “And I know I shouldn’t be saying this, but he’s still a dreamboat.” Then she drifted back to her group—the old social cliques were indomitable, the popular with the popular, the outcasts still cast out—and I edged closer to where Father Gary held court. One thing Trudy had been right about—Gary was certainly the most unlikely of us to “find a vocation,” as the priests of the older generation say. As his roommate, I knew just how many of the coeds he’d gone through, and it was an astonishing number. Not that he’d been a braggart, but I’d heard enough plaintive phone calls, seen enough plaintive notes, glimpsed enough plaintive visits to know how in demand he was. Good looks, enough promise as a quarterback that the pros even sent out a few scouts from time to time, a steady three-point-five scholastic average, and a genuinely decent soul—never mean the way some jock-types got after a few beers, and never given to making easy fun of people obviously less fortunate. He’d put up with me, hadn’t he? “Robert!” My head snapped up as I heard my name and then there he was, looming over me as he’d always loomed over me, putting both hands on my shoulders and saying, “You know, I was really afraid you weren’t going to show up. I’ve been asking everybody about you. Gosh, it’s good to see you. Why don’t you come over and have a beer?” I laughed, “I knew it was a fake.” “What?” “That Roman collar.” Now he laughed. “Oh, I see. You’re one of those Catholics who want all of your prelates to be in the Barry Fitzgerald mold. Pious and saintly with twinkly eyes and an unending supply of patience.” We were at the table now and he deftly reached out, grabbed a can of Bud from a white styrofoam ice container, and popped it open. “Well, to ruin your image of the modern day priest completely, Robert, I not only have an occasional beer, I even smoke cigars from time to time, and have even been known to watch TV shows where a pretty woman can be seen now and then. And I find many of my flock to be a pain in the rear, overdemanding, intolerant, and indifferent to the real concerns of life.” He laughed again. “Now does that sound like Barry Fitzgerald?” “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But I don’t believe it, either.” From other classmates with whom I’d kept in touch, I knew that Father Gary Brackett had been a missionary for several years in Africa, working with the most downtrodden and famine-stricken of the lost souls there, and then had put in an equal number of years back in the States working in ghettos of every description, taking jobs that even most priests, no matter how dedicated, would shun. He looked at the lake. “We spent a lot of hours out there, didn’t we, Robert?”

“We sure did,” I sighed. “It was all ahead of us.” “What was?” I had some beer. It tasted as good as liquid gold. The breeze came off the lake again, scent of water, stench of outboard motors. “Oh, everything, I suppose. When you’re twenty-one and looking ahead, everything seems possible. The most beautiful women. The most important position. Kind of a James Bond fantasy.” I looked at him and smiled. “Then you find yourself forty-two and divorced and lonely and a CPA in Cleveland.” “You’re unhappy, Robert?” “Oh, not really, I guess.” He was a priest now, even if he did have a Bud in his hand, watching my face, searching me out for what I really wanted to say. I glanced back at the lake. “You remember a girl named Stephanie Moore?” “Sure. She came here our senior year. A transfer from somewhere in Minnesota.” For a moment a curious sadness came into his eyes. For the first time his laugh seemed strained. “She led us all on a merry chase, that’s for sure.” “She sure did,” I said. Then I looked at the lake again, remembering. Cautiously, I said, “That’s the only part that bothers me. Standing here, I mean.” “The lake?” “Right.” He turned and stared at the lake, too. On the other side, a quarter mile across, the shore was lined with birches blazing white in the afternoon sunlight. “She drowned there,” he said. “Yes.” “You were one of the people Father MacReady asked to dive for her body, weren’t you?” “Yes.” Swimming had been the only sport at which I’d shown any prowess. “I wonder what she’d be doing today.” “Probably two kids. A housewife. She’d have married well. That I’m sure of.” “You think so?” he said. “I’m not so sure. She took her beliefs very seriously. I suppose that’s why she was so frustrating for all of us.” He looked at me and smiled. “It wasn’t exactly a secret that most of us were in love with her, including you and me.” “No, not exactly a secret.” “But we’d never met anybody like her before,” he said. And we hadn’t. Her parents had sent her out here from the University of Minnesota in hopes of taming her. She’d been beautiful, red hair reaching the small of her back, and given to challenging everything you believed in, from the existence of God to the veracity of capitalism (her father was a millionaire many times over). What she was, of course, was the first of her breed—a very early model of the hippies much of our generation would become. But we didn’t know that then. That was 1962 and the presumption was that we were all going to be good little boys and girls and go, respectively, right into life insurance and housekeeping as soon as we graduated. No, all we knew then was that she was possessed of a beauty and grace that almost hurt the eyes, a beauty that could hold you in its reckless

sway until you thought you’d suffocate or go mad. “No,” Father Gary Brackett said. “I really couldn’t see her in suburbia. She’d be working in the women’s movement or running some avant garde theater somewhere or being a reporter for one of the networks. Something like that.” She was becoming a living presence for me. I could almost see her that last day, running shoeless in jeans along the beach, hollering for me to catch her, those child-like games she loved to play. I stared out at the lake where I’d taken her that night and I knew then that at last, after all these years, I needed to unburden myself. “Father.” “Yes?” “See those rowboats?” He smiled. “Look inviting, don’t they?” “I’d appreciate it if you’d row across to the other side with me.” For a moment our eyes held and I knew he sensed that something much more important than reliving old memories was going to happen. His years as a priest had given him an instinct for people, and his instinct was properly reading me now. “Sure,” he said, softly. “Why don’t I take a couple more beers for us?” I nodded and while he went to get the beers, I went down to get the oars ready and the boat pushed away from the muddy shore. St. Michael’s College is six gray stone buildings that resemble a fortress tucked into the side of a long sloping hill topped by pines and hardwoods. Seen from the center of the lake, and especially on a beautiful day, the college resembles one of those Shangri-las tucked away in a rugged Alpine forest. “We had good days here, Robert,” Father Gary said as I rowed us toward the far shore. I worked slowly, liking the feel of the wooden oars and the pull on the long muscles of my arms. “Very good.” I paused, nodded to the two beers that sat between us in the old wooden rowboat, which needed a paint job and some patching. “Mind if I stop rowing for a while and just have a beer?” “Not at all, Robert.” As he popped it for me and handed it over, he said, “There’s something you want to say, isn’t there?” “Yes.” “Well, we’re certainly good enough friends to say anything to each other, Robert.” “I don’t want you to be my friend.” “You don’t want me to be your friend?” “No. Not for the next few minutes.” “Then what do you want me to be, Robert?” “I want you to be my priest.” “I see.” “I want to go to confession.”

He sipped some beer. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable going to another priest.” I shook my head, watched the surface of the water for a time. There’d just been a minor splash. Occasionally, if you were so inclined, you could catch catfish and smallmouth bass and northern pike in this lake. Water bugs of various kinds sewed intricate and inexplicable patterns, inches above the water. I lifted my head and said, “This is something I should have confessed our senior year. I’ve tried to confess it many times. Many times. But somehow I never go through with it. I get in the confessional and I—I lock up. Tight. I make my usual rote confession—but I never say what I really want to say. What I really need to say.” I stared at him directly. “Father Brackett, I want you to hear my confession.” “All right, Robert. I’ll be glad to.” He set down his beer. “Are you ready?” “Yes, I am.” “Why don’t you begin, then.” I nodded. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one month since my last confession. But a long, long time—twenty-five years—since my last truthful confession.” So I began. “I can’t tell you what it was like. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t concentrate. In one semester my grade point went from a 3.9 to nearly flunking out. I lost fifteen pounds. I started drinking beer to the point that I’d vomit. “I had no idea what to do. In the past, of course, I’d had crushes on various girls. Puppy love, as my parents called it. Maybe if I hadn’t been a virgin the feeling wouldn’t have been so intense—but Stephanie was all I could think of. I’d see how other boys—even you, Father—were wrapped up in her but somehow I knew that my feelings for her were even more disastrous than yours. You, at least, had other women to fall back on. I didn’t have anybody, and I was going crazy. “Then one night I convinced her—I was pleading with her—to go rowing with me. I had to be near her. I had to tell her face to face how much I loved her and how much I needed her. I had this insane sense that somehow once she saw how hopelessly smitten I was, she’d change her mind about me, see how much I really loved her. “She surprised me by agreeing to go. I suppose I sounded so pathetic, she took pity on me. I picked her up at the dorm. I can still remember how I felt—some crazy kind of optimism, as if she were really my girl and this was just one of our regular dates. “I thought rowing was an especially romantic idea so we went down to the lake and then, in the middle of it all, I told. Everything that was in my heart. Everything. I can still remember how the moonlight made the water golden and how green everything smelled and how even at night her hair was fiery red and her face was beautiful beyond description. “She heard me out, Father. I have to say that for her. She heard me out. She even touched my hand a few times when what I was saying became very painful for me. Even when I started to cry she didn’t ask me to take her back to the dorm, she just kept stroking my hand, trying to calm me down the way you try to calm down an animal that’s in pain. I suppose she’d been through this with a lot of boys. “And when I was finished she just said, ‘I’m sorry, Robert. I don’t love you and I never could. I wish I could. I genuinely do because I can see how deeply you care for me. But I can’t help my feelings, Robert. I really can’t.’ “And then, Father, despite her kindness and her pity, I went crazy. I realized then not only how foolish

I’d been but how hopeless my life would be without her. So before I knew what I was doing, I grabbed her and pushed her over the side of the boat and held her under by her beautiful red hair until her thrashing stopped and I knew she’d drowned. “Then I rowed back to shore and went directly to the chapel and sat there praying all night for what I’d done. In the morning Father MacReady organized a search for her and chose me as one of the people to look in the lake. “I found her body and drug it to shore and ever since I’ve been living with the terrible thing I did. “There is not a single day that goes by, Father, that I don’t think of her and think of my sin. And now I am confessing my sin and asking God for forgiveness.” During all of this I’d kept my head down, the way you do in a confessional, not seeing how he was reacting, indeed almost afraid of how he would be reacting to his former friend who had turned out to be the killer of a beautiful young woman. Finally, when I raised my eyes, I saw something that convinced me instantly that the stories of his goodness and kindness were true. For he sat watching me with tears filling his eyes and his head shaking in pity for me. “You’ve suffered so much,” he said. “Yeah, I have. But I didn’t suffer as much as she did.” “And it’s ruined your life.” “Yes, Father, it has. I’m afraid my guilt took its toll on my first marriage and on every relationship I’ve tried to have since then.” “I need to talk to you, Robert,” he said. “You can’t grant me absolution?” “Would you mind rowing again, Robert?” Startled by his strange reaction, I put my hands on the oars and started the boat once more toward the far shore. He sat back on his elbows, sipping his beer, and said, “Have you ever wondered why I became a priest? I was a pretty unlikely candidate.” “Everybody’s wondered that, Father.” “It came on suddenly. My vocation.” “Yes, it did, now that you mention it.” I still had no idea why we were having this conversation. “Senior year, it was,” he said. I turned down a very good chance to try out for the Bears. I turned down a great job offer from General Electric. I even turned down an opportunity to become a model in TV commercials. In order to become a priest.” “I remember. And I remember being surprised.” “Had you ever known me to be particularly religious before?” “No. That’s why it was all so surprising, I suppose.” He smiled. “Father MacReady always complained that he could scarcely get me to go to Sunday mass

let alone weekday mass. Yet I became a priest. And do you know why?” His eyes were fixed on mine. “No.” “To atone.” “Atone?” “Yes. For a sin I committed.” “What sin?” “Killing Stephanie.” “But I killed Stephanie!” He sighed, stared at the lake. “No, you didn’t. Apparently she managed to swim to shore after you thought she’d drowned. That’s when I found her. And I went through much the same thing you did. Just seeing her there—wet, helpless—I went crazy, too. I didn’t ask her what had happened to her. Seeing her so vulnerable I thought it would be a good time to tell her how I felt—how, despite the fact that I could have any other woman I wanted, I could not get her to show me any interest whatsoever. How she literally had ruined my life, never answering my calls or letters or treating me with any kind of interest at all. “But she only started crying. Now, given what you’ve just told me, I can see why. She was frightened and confused about having nearly been killed. But I took her tears as yet another rebuff of me—so I pushed her backward into the lake and held her under until I was sure she was dead. “After the body was discovered the next day, the impact of what I’d done overwhelmed me. I didn’t have the courage to step forward and say that I was the guilty party. The police called it an accidental drowning and obviously that’s how it was going to go into the record books. But I knew I was still guilty so I gave my life to Christ. All these years I’ve performed good works as atonement for what I did to poor Stephanie.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Robert. You suffered for nothing. You’re an innocent man.” He said he’d drive me to the airport instead of me having to take a cab. I needed to be back in Cleveland the next morning early. On the way, I said, “You’ve paid for your sin, Father. The work in Africa. The ghettos.” “Oh, no,” he said. “No, you can never pay for a sin like that. Cold-blooded murder. And if I’d confessed to the police, you wouldn’t have had to waste twenty-five years of useless guilt.” I smiled. “You became something the world needs, Father. A truly selfless man, one who has devoted himself to helping others. Do you think you would have otherwise?” “No,” he said. “No, I guess I wouldn’t have.” At the airport he waited with me till the big silver United plane eased into view and then we shook hands and he said, “Thanks for hearing my confession. Now I think I’m going to go see the police.” I shook my head. “You owe me something, Father.” “What?” “Twenty-five years of needless guilt.” He averted his eyes, ashamed. “I know,” he said, softly.

“So I’m calling in my debt. I want you to do what I tell you.” “All right.” Then I smiled again. “The world doesn’t need one more lonely prisoner behind stone walls. But it does need somebody who goes out and helps the poor and tends to the sick and the dying. Keep doing your penance, Father, because that way the whole world benefits. I want you to promise me that, all right?” Five minutes later the plane was arcing east toward Cleveland. A classmate called me about it, a fellow I knew who was in constant touch with the alumni association. Father Brackett had turned himself in and confessed to the police. The district attorney was now preparing for trial. This was a month after the class reunion. A few days later I got a call from Father Brackett himself. “I take it you’ve heard.” “Yes, I did.” “I want to thank you for hearing my confession that day,” he said. “I thought you agreed not to turn yourself in.” “Render unto Caesar,” he said. “I owe a debt to society. I need to pay it.” “If that’s what you think is best, Father.” “Take care of yourself.” “You, too,” I said. Father Brackett was found guilty of manslaughter and is serving five to ten. I plan to visit him next week.

“War Can Be Murder” Mike Doogan Two men got out of the Jeep and walked toward the building. Their fleece-lined leather boots squeaked on the snow. One of the men was young, stocky and black. The other was old, thin and white. Both men wore olive drab wool pants, duffel coats and knit wool caps. The black man rolled forward onto his toes with each step, like he was about to leap into space. The white man’s gait was something between a saunter and a stagger. Their breath escaped in white puffs. Their heads were burrowed down into their collars and their hands were jammed into the pockets of their coats. “Kee-rist it’s cold,” the black man said. Their Jeep ticked loudly as it cooled. The building they approached was part log cabin and part Quonset hut with a shacky plywood porch tacked onto the front. Yellow light leaked from three small windows. Smoke plumed from a metal pipe punched through its tin roof. A sign beside the door showed a black cat sitting on a white crescent, the words “Carolina Moon” lettered beneath. “You sure we want to go in here?” the black man asked. “Have to,” the white man said. “I’ve got an investment to protect.” They hurried through the door and shut it quickly behind them. They were standing in a fair-sized room that held a half-dozen tables and a big bar. They were the only ones in the room. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, stale beer and desperation. The white man led the way past the bar and through a door, turned left and walked down a dark hallway toward the light spilling from another open door. The light came from a small room that held a big bed and four people not looking at the corpse on the floor. One, a big, red-haired guy, was dressed in olive drab with a black band around one biceps that read “MP” in white letters. The other man was short, plump, and fair-haired, dressed in brown. Both wore guns on their hips. One of the women was small and temporarily blond, wearing a red robe that didn’t hide much. The other woman was tall, black, and regal as Cleopatra meeting Caesar. “I tole you, he give me a couple a bucks and said I should go get some supper at Leroy’s,” the temporary blond was saying. “’Lo, Zulu,” the thin man said, nodding to the black woman. “Mister Sam,” she replied. “What the hell are you doing here, soldier?” the MP barked. “That’s Sergeant,” the thin man said cheerfully. He nodded to the plump man. “Marshal Olson,” he said. “Damn cold night to be dragged out into, isn’t it?” “So it is, Sergeant Hammett,” the plump man said. “So it is.” He shrugged toward the corpse on the floor. “Even colder where he is, you betcha.” “Look you,” the MP said. “I’m ordering you to leave. And take that dinge with you. This here’s a military investigation, and if you upstuck it, I’ll throw you in the stockade.” “If I what it?” Hammett asked. “Upstuck,” the MP grated. “Upstuck?” Hammett asked. “Anybody got any idea what he’s talking about?” “I think he means ‘obstruct,’ ” the black man said. “Why thank you, Clarence,” Hammett said. He pointed to the black man. “My companion is Clarence

Jefferson Delight. You might know him better as Little Sugar Delight. Fought Tony Zale to a draw just before the war. Had 27—that’s right, isn’t it Clarence?—27 professional fights without a loss. Not bad for a dinge, eh?” To the plump man, he said, “It’s been a while since I was involved in this sort of thing, Oscar, but I believe that as the U.S. marshal you’re the one with jurisdiction here.” To the MP, he said, “Which means you can take your order and stick it where the sun don’t shine.” The MP started forward. Hammett waited for him with arms hanging loosely at his sides. The marshal stepped forward and put a hand on the MP’s chest. “Maybe you’d better go cool off, fella,” he said. “Maybe go radio headquarters for instructions while I talk to these folks here.” The MP hesitated, relaxed, said, “Right you are, Marshal,” and left the room. “Maybe we should all go into the other room,” the marshal said. The others began to file out. Hammett crouched next to the corpse, which lay on its back, arms outflung, completely naked. He was a young, slim, sandy-haired fellow with blue eyes and full lips. His head lay over on his shoulder, the neck bent much farther than it should have been. Hammett laid a hand on the corpse’s chest. “Give me a hand, Oscar, and we’ll roll him over,” he said. The two men rolled the corpse onto its stomach. Hammett looked it up and down, grunted, and they rolled it back over. “You might want to make sure a doctor examines that corpse,” he said as the two men walked toward the barroom. “I think you’ll find he was here to receive rather than give.” The temporary blond told a simple story. A soldier had come into her room, given her $2 and told her to get something to eat. “He said don’t come back for an hour,” she said. She’d gone out the back door, she said, shooting a nervous look at the black woman, so she wouldn’t have to answer any questions. When she returned she’d found the soldier naked and dead. “She told me,” the black woman said to the marshal, “and I sent someone for you.” “What did you have to eat?” Hammett asked the temporary blond. “Leroy said it was beefsteak, but I think it was part of one of them moose,” she said. “And some mushy canned peas and a piece of chocolate cake. I think it give me the heartburn. That or the body.” “That’s a story that should be easy enough to check out,” Hammett said. “And what about you, Zulu?” the marshal asked. “I was in the office or behind the bar all night, Mister Olson,” the black woman said. “That gentleman came in, had a drink, paid the usual fee and asked for a girl. When I asked him which one, he said it didn’t matter. So I sent him back to Daphne.” “Seen him before?” the marshal asked. “Lots of men come through here,” Zulu said. “But I think he’d been here before.” “He done the same thing with me maybe three, four times before,” the temporary blond said. “With some a the other girls, too.” She shot another nervous look at the black women. “We talk sometimes, ya know.” “Notice anybody in particular in here tonight?” the marshal said. “Quite a few people in here tonight,” Zulu said. “Some for the music, some for other things. Maybe 30

people in here when the body was found. I think maybe one of them is on the city council. And there was that banker…” “That’s enough of that,” the marshal said. “And he could have let anybody in through the back door,” Zulu said. The red-haired MP came back into the barroom, chased by a blast of cold air. “The major wants me to bring the whore in to the base,” he said to the marshal. “I don’t think Daphne wants to go anywhere with you, young man,” Zulu said. “I don’t care what a whore thinks,” the MP said. Zulu leaned across the bar and very deliberately slapped the MP across the face. He lunged for her. Hammett stuck a shoulder into his chest and the marshal grabbed his arm. “You probably don’t remember me, Tobin,” Hammett said, leaning into the MP, “but I remember when you were just a kid on the black-and-blue squad in San Francisco. I heard you did something that got you thrown out of the cops just before the war. I don’t remember what. What was it you did to get tossed off the force?” “Fuck you,” the MP said. “How do you know so much, anyway?” “I was with the Pinks for a while,” Hammett said. “I know some people.” “You can relax now, son” the marshal said to the MP. “Nobody roughs up Zulu when I’m around. You go tell your major that if he wants to be involved in this investigation he should speak to me directly. Now beat it.” “I’m too old for this nonsense,” Hammett said after the MP left, “but you can’t have people beating up your partner. It’s bad for business.” “There ain’t going to be any business for a while,” the marshal said. “Until we get to the bottom of this, you’re closed, Zulu. I’ll roust somebody out and have ’em collect the body. Otherwise, keep people out of that room until I tell you different.” With that, he left. “I believe I’ll have a drink now, Zulu,” Hammett said. “You heard the marshal,” the black woman said. “We’re closed.” “But I’m your partner,” Hammett said, grinning. “Silent partner,” she said. “I guess you forgot the silent part.” “Now there’s gratitude for you, Clarence,” Hammett said. “She begs me for money to open this place and now that she has my money she doesn’t want anything to do with me. Think what I’m risking. Why, if my friends in Hollywood knew I was part owner of a cathouse…” “They’d all be lining up three deep for free booze and free nooky,” Zulu said. “Now you two skedaddle. I’ve got to get Daphne moved to another room, and I’ll have big. clumsy white folk tracking in and out of here all night. I’ll be speaking to you later, Mister Sam.” The two men went back out into the cold. “Little Sugar Delight?” the black man said. “Tony Zale? Why do you want to be telling such stories.” “Why, Clarence,” Hammett said, “think how boring life would be if we didn’t all make up stories.”

The black man slid behind the wheel and punched the starter. The engine whirred and whined and exploded into life. “You can drop me back at the Lido Gardens,” Hammett said. “I have a weekend pass and I believe there’s a nurse who’s just about drunk enough by now.” Hammett awoke the next morning alone, sprawled fully clothed on the bed of a small, spare hotel room. One boot lay on its side on the floor. The other was still on his left foot. He raised himself slowly to a sitting position. The steam radiator hissed and somewhere outside the frosted-over window a horn honked. Hammett groaned loudly as he bent down to remove his boot. He pulled off both socks, then took two steps across the bare, cold floor to a small table, poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher and drank it. Then another. He took the empty glass over to where his coat dangled from the back of a chair and rummaged around in the pockets until he came up with a small bottle of whiskey. He poured some into the glass, drank it and shuddered. “The beginning of another perfect day,” he said aloud. He walked to the washstand and peered into the mirror. The face that looked back was pale and narrow, topped by crew-cut gray hair. He had baggy, hound-dog brown eyes and a full, salt-and-pepper mustache trimmed at the corners of a wide mouth. He took off his shirt and regarded his pipe stem arms and sunken chest. “Look out, Tojo,” he said. He walked to the other side of the bed, opened a small leather valise and took out a musette bag. Back at the washstand, he reached into his mouth and removed a full set of false teeth. His cheeks, already sunken, collapsed completely. He brushed the false teeth vigorously and replaced them in his mouth. He shaved. Then he took clean underwear from the valise, left the room, and walked down the hall toward the bathroom. About halfway down the hall, a small, dark-haired man lay snoring on the floor. He smelled of alcohol and vomit. Hammett stepped over him and continued to the bathroom. After bathing, Hammett returned to his room, put on a clean shirt and walked down a flight of stairs to the lobby. He went through a door marked “cafe” and sat at the counter. A clock next to the cash register read 11:45. A hard-faced woman put a thick cup down in front of him a filled it with coffee. Hammett took a pair of eyeglasses out of his shirt pocket and consulted the gravy-stained menu. “Breakfast or lunch?” he asked the hard-faced woman. “Suit yourself,” she said. “I’ll have the sourdough pancakes, a couple of eggs over easy and orange juice,” Hammett said. “Coffee, too.” “Hey, are these real eggs?” asked a well-dressed, middle-aged man sitting a few stools down. The left arm of his suit coat was empty and pinned to his lapel. The hard-faced women blew air through her lips. “Cheechakos,” she said. “A course they’re real eggs. Real butter, too. This here’s a war zone, you know.” She yelled Hammett’s order through a serving hatch to the Indian cook. “Can’t get this food back home?” Hammett asked the one-armed man. “Ration cards,” the man replied. “Or the black market.”

“Much money in the black market?” Hammett asked. The one-armed man made a sour face. “Guess so,” he said. “You can get most anything off the back of a truck, most of it with military markings. And they say the high society parties are all catered by Uncle Sam. But I wouldn’t know for certain.’ He flicked his empty sleeve. “Got this at Midway. I’m not buying at no goddamn black market.” A boy selling newspapers came in off the street. Hammett gave him a dime and took a newspaper, which was cold to the touch. “Budapest Surrenders!” the headline proclaimed. A small article said the previous night’s temperature have reached 28 below zero, the coldest of the winter. In the lower, right-hand corner of the front page was a table headed “Road to Berlin,” It showed that allied troops were 32 miles away at Zellin on the eastern front, 304 miles at Kleve on the western front and 504 miles away at the Reno River on the Italian Front. The hard-faced woman put a plate of pancakes and eggs in front of Hammett. As he ate them he read that the Ice Carnival had donated $1,100 in proceeds to the Infantile Paralysis Fund, the Pribilof Five— two guitars, a banjo, an accordion and a fiddle—had played at the USO log cabin and Jimmy Foxx had re-signed with the Phillies. He finished his meal, put a 50-cent piece next to his plate, and stood up. “Where do you think you are, mister?” the hard-faced woman said. “Seattle? That’ll be $1.” “Whew!” the one-armed said. Hammett dug out a dollar, handed it to the woman and left the 50-cent piece on the counter. “Wait’ll you have a drink,” he said to the one-armed man. Hammett walked across the lobby to the hotel desk and asked the clerk for the telephone. He consulted the slim telephone book, dialed, identified himself, and waited. “Oscar,” he said. “Sam Hammett. Has the doctor looked at that corpse from last night? Uh-huh. Uhhuh. Was I right about him? I see. You found out his name yet and where he was assigned? A sergeant? That kid was a sergeant? What’s this man’s Army coming to? And he was in supply? Nope, I don’t know anybody over there. But if you want, I can have a word with General Johnson. Okay. How about the Carolina Moon? Can Zulu open up again? Come on, Oscar. Be reasonable. They didn’t have anything to do with the killing. All right then. I guess we’d better hope you find the killer soon. See you. Oscar. ‘Bye.” Hammett returned to his room, put on his overcoat and went out of the hotel. The air was warmer than it had been the night before, but not warm. He walked several blocks along the street, moving slowly over the hard-packed snow. He passed mostly one- or two-story wooden buildings, many of them hotels, bars or cafes. He counted seven buildings under construction. A few automobiles of pre-war vintage passed him, along with several Jeeps and a new, olive drab staff car. He passed many people on foot, most of them men in work clothes or uniforms. When his cheeks began to get numb, he turned left, then left again and walked back toward the hotel. A couple of blocks short of his destination, he turned left again, crossed the street and went into a small shop with “Book Cache” painted on its window. He browsed among the tables of books, picked one up and walked to the counter. “Whatya got there?” the woman behind the counter asked. Her hair was nearly as gray as Hammett’s ”Theoretical Principles of Marxism by V.I. Lenin.” She smiled. “That sounds like a thriller. Buy or rent?”

“Rent,” Hammett said. “Probably won’t get much call for this,” the woman said. “How about 10 cents for a week?” “Better make it two weeks,” Hammett said, handing her a quarter. “This isn’t easy reading.” The woman wrote the book’s title, Hammett’s name and barracks number and the rental period down in a register, gave him a nickel back, and smiled again. “Aren’t you a little old to be a soldier?” she asked. “I was 21 when I enlisted,” he said, grinning. “War ages a man.” When it came time to turn for his hotel, Hammett walked on. Two blocks later he was at a small wooden building with a sign over the door that read Military Police. “I’m looking for the duty officer,” he told the MP on the desk. A young lieutenant came out of an office in the back. “Sergeant Sam Hammett of General Johnson’s staff,” Hammett said. “I’m working on a piece for Army Up North about military policing and I need some information.” “Don’t you salute officers on General Johnson’s staff?” the lieutenant snapped. “Not when we’re off duty and out of uniform, sir,” Hammett said. “As I’m certain they taught you in OCS, sir.” The two men looked at one another for a minute, then the lieutenant blinked and said, “What can I do for you sergeant?” “I need some information on staffing levels, sir,” Hammett said. “For instance, how many men did you have on duty here in Anchorage last night, sir?” Each successive sir seemed to make the lieutenant more at ease. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But if you’d like to step back into the office, we can look at the duty roster.” Hammett looked at the roster. Tobin’s name wasn’t on it. He took a notebook out of his coat pocket and wrote in it. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Now I’ll need your name and hometown. For the article.” Back at the hotel, Hammett removed his coat and boots. He poured some whiskey into the glass, filled it with water, lay down on the bed and began writing a letter. “Dear Lillian,” it began. “I am back in Anchorage and have probably seen the end of my posting to the Aleutians.” When he’d finished the letter, he made himself another drink and picked up his book. Within five minutes he was snoring. He dreamed he was working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency again, paired with a big Irish kid named Michael Carey on the Fatty Arbuckle case. He dreamed he was at the Stork Club, arguing with Hemingway about the Spanish Civil War. He dreamed he was in a watering hole on Lombard with an older Carey, who pointed out red-haired Billy Tobin and said something Hammett couldn’t make out. He dreamed he was locked in his room on Post Street, drinking and writing The Big Knockover. His wife, Josie, was pounding on the door, asking for more money for herself and his daughters. “Hey mister, wake up.” It was the desk clerk’s voice. He pounded on the door again. “Wake up, mister.”

“What do you want?” Hammett called. “You got a visitor downstairs. A shine.” Hammett got up from the bed and pulled the door open. “Go get my visitor and bring him up,” he said. The desk clerk returned with the black man right behind him. “Clarence, this is the desk clerk,” Hammett said. “What’s your name?” “Joe,” the desk clerk said. “Joe,” Hammett said, “this is Clarence ‘Big Stick’ LeBeau. Until the war came along he played third base for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro League. Hit 30 home runs or more in seven—it was seven, wasn’t it, Clarence?—straight seasons. If it weren’t for the color line, he’d have been playing for the Yankees. Not bad for a shine, huh?” “I didn’t mean nothing by that, mister,” the desk clerk said. “You neither, Clarence.” His eyes darted this way and that. “I got to get back to the desk,” he said, and scurried off. “Welcome to my castle,” Hammett said, stepping aside to let the black man in. “What brings you here?” “I’ve got to get started to Florida for spring training,” the black man said. “The things you come up with. I didn’t know white folk knew anything about the Birmingham Black Barons. And why do you keep calling me Clarence?” “It suits you better than Don Miller,” Hammett said. “And it keeps everybody guessing. Confusion to the enemy.” “You been drinking?” Miller said. “A little,” Hammett said. “You want a nip?” Miller shook his head. “But I’ve been sleeping more. The old need their sleep. What brings you here?” “I was at the magazine office working on the illustrations for that frostbite article when I was called into the presence of Major General Davenport Johnson himself. He said you’d promised to go to a party tonight at some banker’s house, and since he knew what an irresponsible s.o.b. you were, those were his words, he was ordering me to make sure you got there. Party starts in half an hour, so you’d better get cleaned up.” “I’m not going to any goddamn party at any goddamn banker’s house,” Hammett said. “I’m going to the Lido Gardens and the South Seas and maybe the Owl Club.” “This is Little Sugar Delight you’re talking to, remember,” Miller said. “You’re going to the party if I have to carry you. General’s orders.” “General’s orders,” Hammett said, and laughed. “That’ll teach me to be famous.” He took off his shirt, washed his face and hands, put the shirt back on, knotted a tie around his neck, put on his uniform jacket and a pair of glistening black shoes that he took from the valise and picked up his overcoat. “All right, Little Sugar,” he said, “let’s go entertain the cream of Anchorage society.” Hammett got out of the Jeep in front of a two-story wooden house. Light spilled from all the windows and the cold air carried the muffled murmur of voices. “You can go on about your business,” he told Miller. “I’ll walk back to town.”

“It must be 20 below, Sam,” Miller said. “Nearer 30, I expect,” Hammett said. “But it’s only a half-dozen blocks and I like to walk.” Indoors, the temperature was 110 degrees warmer. Men in suits and uniforms stood around drinking, talking and sweating. Among them was a sprinkling of overdressed women with carefully done-up hair. A horse-faced woman wearing what might have been real diamonds and showing a lot of cleavage walked up to Hammett. “Aren’t you Dashiell Hammett, the writer?” she asked. Hammett stared down the front of her dress. “Actually, I’m Samuel Hammett, the drunkard,” he said after several seconds. “Where might I find a drink?” Hammett quickly downed a drink and picked up another. The woman led him to where a large group, all wearing civilian clothes, was talking about the war. “I tell you,” a big, bluff man with dark, wavy hair was saying, “we are winning this war because we believe in freedom and democracy.” Everyone nodded. “And free enterprise, whatever Roosevelt might think,” said another man. Everyone nodded again. “What do you think, Dashiell?” the woman asked. Hammett finished his drink. His eyes were bright and he had a little smile on his lips. “I think I need another drink,” he said. “No,” the woman said, “about the war.” “Oh, that,” Hammett said. “First of all, we’re not winning the war. Not by ourselves. We’ve got a lot of help. The Soviets, for example, have done much of the dying for us. Second, the part of the war we are winning we’re winning because we can make more tanks and airplanes and bombs than the Germans and the Japs can. We’re not winning because our ideas are better than theirs. We’re winning because we’re drowning the sonsabitches in metal.” When he stopped talking, the entire room was quiet. “That was quite a speech,” the woman said, her voice much less friendly than it had been. “You’d have been better off just giving me another drink,” Hammett said. “But don’t worry. I can get it myself.” He was looking at a painting of a moose when a slim, curly-haired fellow who couldn’t have been more than 30 walked up to him. He had a major’s oak leaves on his shoulders. “That was quite a speech, soldier” the major said. “What’s an NCO doing at this party, anyway?” “Ask the general,” Hammett said. “Oh, that’s right, you’re Hammett, the hero of the morale tour.” The major took a drink from the glass he was holding. “You must be something on a morale tour with speeches like that.” When Hammett said nothing, the major went on, “I hear you’re involved in the murder of one of my sergeants.” Hammett laughed. “I don’t know about involved,” he said. “but I’ve got a fair idea who did it.”

The major moved closer to Hammett. “I think you’ll find that in the Army, it’s safer to mind your own business,” he said. “Much safer.” Hammett thrust his face into the major’s face and opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by another voice. “Ah, Sergeant Hammett,” the voice said, “I see you’ve met Major Allen. The major’s the head of supply out at the fort.” “Thanks for clearing that up, general,” Hammett said, “I thought maybe he was somebody’s kid and these were his pajamas.” The major’s face reddened and his mouth opened. “Sergeant!” the general barked. “Do you know the punishment for insubordination?” “Sorry, general, major,” Hammett said. “This whiskey just plays hob with my ordinarily high regard for military discipline.” The major stomped off. “That mouth of yours will get you into trouble one day, sergeant,” the general said. He sounded as if he were trying hard not to laugh. “Yes, sir,” Hammett said. “But he is a jumped up little turd.” “Yes, he is that,” the general said. “Regular Army. His father was regular Army, too. Chief of supply at the Presidio. Did very well for himself. Retired to a very nice home on Nob Hill. This one’s following in the family footsteps. All polish and connections. There, see? See how politely he takes his leave of the hostess. Now you behave yourself.” The general looked at the picture of the moose. “Damned odd animal, isn’t it?” he said, and moved off. The general left the party a half hour later and Hammett a few minutes after that. He made his way down the short, icy walkway and, as he turned left, his feet flew out from under him. As he fell he heard three loud explosions. Something whirred past his ear. He twisted so that he landed on his side and rolled behind a car parked at the curb. He heard people boil out of the house behind him. “What was that?” they called. And, “Are you all right?” Hammett got slowly to his feet. There were no more shots. “I’m fine,” he called. “But I could use a lift downtown, if anyone is headed that way.” It was nearly midnight when Hammett walked into the smoke and noise of the Lido Gardens. A fourpiece band was making a racket in one corner, and a table full of WACs was getting a big play from about twice as many men in the other. Hammett navigated his way across the room to the bar and ordered a whiskey. “Not bad for a drunk,” he said to himself and turned to survey the room. His elbow hit the shoulder of the man next to him. The man spilled some of his beer on the bar. “Hey, watch it you old bastard,” the man growled, looking up. A broad smile split his face. “Well if it isn’t Dash Hammett, the worst man on a stakeout I ever saw. What are you doing here at the end of the earth?” “Dispensing propaganda and nursemaiding Hollywood stars,” Hammett said. “Isn’t that why every man goes to war? And what about you, Carey? The Pinks finally figure out how worthless you are and let

you go?” The two men shook hands. “No, it’s a sad tale,” the other man said. “A man of my years should have been able to spend the war behind a desk, in civilian clothes. But then the Army figured out that a lot of money was rolling around because of the war and that money might make people do some bad things.” Both men laughed. “So they drafted me. Me, with my bad knees and failing eyesight. Said I had special qualifications. And here I am, back out in the field, chasing crooks. For even less money than the agency paid me.” “War is, indeed, hell,” Hammett said. “Let me buy you a drink to ease the pain.” He signaled to the bartender. When both men had fresh drinks, he asked, “What brings you to Alaska?” “Well, you’ll get a good laugh out of this,” Carey said. “You’ll never guess who we found as a supply sergeant at Fort Lewis. Bennie the Grab. And he had Spanish Pete Gomez and Fingers Malone as his corporals.” “Mother of god,” Hammett said. “It’s a surprise there was anything left worth stealing at that place.” “You know it, brother,” Carey said. “So you can imagine how we felt when all of the paperwork checked out. Bennie and the boys wouldn’t have gotten much more than a year in the brig for false swearing when they joined up if it hadn’t been for some smart young pencil pusher. He figured out they were sending a lot of food and not much of anything else to the 332nd here at Fort Richardson.” “Don’t tell me,” Hammett said. “There is no 332nd.” “That’s right,” Carey said. “The trucks were leaving the warehouses, but the goods for the 332nd weren’t making it to the ships. There wasn’t a restaurant or diner or private dinner party in the entire Pacific Northwest that didn’t feature U.S. Army butter and beef. We scooped up Bennie and the others, a couple of captains, a major and a full bird colonel. All the requisitions were signed by a Sergeant Prevo, and I drew the short straw and got sent up here to arrest him and roll things up at this end.” “It seems you got here just a bit late, Michael,” Hammett said. “Because unless there are two supply sergeants named Prevo, your man got his neck broken in a gin mill last night. My gin mill, if it matters.” “This damned Army,” Carey said. “We didn’t tell anybody at this end, because we didn’t know who might be involved. And it looks like we’ll never find out now, either.” “I don’t know about that,” Hammett said. “I need to know two things. Were the men running the supply operation at Fort Lewis regular Army? And what was it a kid named Billy Tobin got kicked off the force in ‘Frisco for? If you can answer those questions, I might be able to help you.” Before Hammett went down the hall to the bathroom the next morning, he took a small pistol from his valise and slipped it into the pocket of his pants. He left it there went he went downstairs for bacon and eggs. As he ate, he read an authoritative newspaper story about the Jap Army using babies as bayonet practice targets in Manila. He spent the rest of the day in his room, reading and dozing, leaving the room to take one telephone call. He ate no lunch. He looked carefully up and down the hallway before his visits to the bathroom. When his watch said 7:30, he got fully dressed, packed his valise and sat on the bed. Just at 8 p.m., there was a knock on his door. “Mister,” the desk clerk called. “You got a visitor. The same fella.” Hammett walked downstairs and settled his bill with the clerk. He and Miller went out and got into a Jeep. Neither man said anything. The joints on the far side of the city limits were doing big business as

they drove past. The Carolina Moon was the only dark building. As they pulled up in front of it, Hammett said, “You might want to find yourself a quiet spot to watch the proceedings.” “What you doing this for?” Miller asked. “Solving murders isn’t your business.” “This one is my business,” Hammett said. “Zulu’s got to eat, and I want a return on my investment. Nobody’s making any money with the Moon closed.” “You and Miss Zulu more than just business partners?” Miller asked. “A gentleman wouldn’t ask such a question,” Hammett said, “and a gentleman certainly won’t answer it.” Hammett hurried into the building. He had trouble making out the people in the dimly lit barroom. Zulu was there, and the temporary blond. The marshal. The MP. Carey, a couple of tough-looking gents Hammett didn’t know and the major from the party. The MP was standing at the bar, looking at himself in a piece of mirror that hung behind it. Everyone else was sitting. Hammett went around behind the bar, took off his coat and laid it on the bar. He poured himself a drink and drank it off. The MP wandered over to stand next to the door to the hallway. “I see you’ve got everyone assembled,” Hammett said to Carey. The investigator nodded. “The major came to me,” he said. “Said as it was his sergeant that was killed, he wanted to be in on this.” “That’s one of the things that bothered me about this,” Hammett said. “Major Allen seems to know things he shouldn’t. For instance, major, how did you know I was involved in this affair?” The major was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m certain my friend Major Haynes of the military police must have mentioned your name to me.” “We’ll leave that,” Hammett said. “Because the other thing that bothered me came first. Oscar, did you call the MPs the night of the killing?” The marshal shook his head. “Then what was the sergeant doing here?” “Said he was in the neighborhood,” the marshal said. “But Oscar,” Hammett said, “don’t the MPs always patrol in pairs on this side of the city limits?” “They certainly do,” the marshal said. “What about that, young fella?” The MP looked at the marshal, then at Hammett. “My partner got sick,” he said. “I had to go it alone. Then I saw all them soldiers leaving here and came to see what was what.” “Michael?” Hammett said. “Like you said, the duty roster said the sergeant wasn’t even on duty that night,” the investigator said. Everyone was looking at the MP now. He didn’t say anything. “This is your case, Oscar,” Hammett said, “so let me tell you a story. “There’s a ring of thieves operating out of Fort Lewis, pretending to send food to a phony outfit up here then selling it on the black market. The ones doing the work were crooks from San Francisco. Tobin here would have known them from his time with the police there.

“Their man on this end, the fellow who was killed the other night, didn’t seem to have any connection with them. Michael told me on the telephone today that he was from the midwest and had never been arrested. He seemed to be just a harmless pansy who used the Moon to meet his boyfriend.” “That’s disgusting,” the major said. “That’s what happens when the Army makes a place the dumping ground for all of its undesirables, Major,” Hammett said. “What did you do to get sent here?” “I volunteered,” the major grated. “I’ll bet you did,” Hammett said. “Anyway, last night Michael reminded me that Tobin here had been run off the San Francisco force for beating up a dancer at Finocchio’s. He claimed the guy made a pass at him, but the inside story was that it was a lover’s quarrel.” “That’s a goddamn lie!” the MP shouted. “It’s just one coincidence too many,” Hammett said, his voice as hard as granite. “You knew the San Francisco mob. They’re stealing from the government. Prevo’s in on the scheme. He was queer. You’re queer. You’re sewn up tight. What happened? He get cold feet and you had to kill him?” The MP looked from one face to another in the room. Then he looked at Hammett. “I didn’t kill the guy,” the MP said. “It was him.” He pointed to the major. Everyone looked at the major, then back at the MP. He was holding his automatic in his hand. “That’s not going to do you any good, young man,” the marshal said. “This is Alaska. Where you going to run?” The MP seemed not to hear him. “I ain’t no queer!” he shouted at Hammett. “I hate queers. I beat that guy up ‘cause he made a pass at me, just like I said. I’d have killed him if I thought I’d get away with it. Here, I was just giving the major a little cover in case anything happened. Like the place got raided or something. Then the other day he told me some pal of his had warned him that they’d knocked over the Fort Lewis end of the deal and we were going to have to do something about his boyfriend. ‘Jerry will talk,’ he said. ‘I know he will.’ I told him I wasn’t killing anybody. The stockade was better than the firing squad. So he comes out the back door of this place the other night and says he killed the pansy himself.” “That’s a goddamn lie,” the major shouted, leaping to his feet. “I don’t even know this man. I’ve got a wife and baby at home. I’m no fairy.” “You’re for it, Tobin,” Hammett said to the MP. “He doesn’t leave anything to chance. Why, he tried to shoot me last night just on the off chance I might know something. I’ll bet he does have a wife and child. And I’ll bet there’s nothing to connect him to either you or the corpse. And there’s the love letters Michael found in your footlocker.” “Love letters?” the MP said. “What love letters?” He looked at Hammett, then at the major. Understanding flooded his face. “You set me up!” he screamed at the major. “You set me up as a fairy!” The automatic barked. The slug seemed to pick the major up and hurl him backwards. The temporary blond screamed. All over the room, men were taking guns from holsters and pockets. They seemed to be moving in slow motion. The MP swung the gun toward Hammett. “You should have kept your nose out of this,” the MP said, leveling the automatic. His finger closed on the trigger.

Don Miller stepped out of the hallway behind the MP and laid a sap on the back of his head. The MP collapsed like he was filled with sawdust. Miller and Hammett looked at one another for a long moment. Hammett took his hand off the pistol in the pocket of his coat. “I think that calls for a drink,” he said, pouring himself one. The marshal was putting cuffs on the MP. Carey looked up from where the major lay and shook his head. “I guess this means you’ll be able to open up again, Zulu,” Hammett said. The following afternoon Miller found Hammett lying on a table in the cramped offices of the magazine Army Up North, reading Lenin. “I’ve got some errands to run in town,” he told Hammett. “Fine by me,” Hammett said, sitting up. “I’ve been thinking I’ll put in my papers. The war can’t last much longer and this looks like as close as I’ll get to any action.” “You’d have been just as dead if that MP shot you as you would if it’d been a Jap bullet,” Miller said. “I suppose,” Hammett said. “This morning the general told me that they were going to show Major Allen as killed in the line of duty. They’ll give Tobin a quick trial and life in the stockade. The whole thing’s being hushed up. The brass don’t want to embarrass the major’s father, and they don’t want the scandal getting back to the President and Congress. This is the country I enlisted to protect?” Miller shrugged. “I got to be going,” he said. “Right you are,” Hammett said. “And by the way, thanks for stepping in last night. I didn’t want to shoot that kid and I didn’t want to get shot myself.” Miller turned to leave. “I suppose I’ll just give the Moon to Zulu if I go.” Hammett said. “That’d be real nice,” Miller said over his shoulder. He went out, got into a Jeep, drove downtown and parked. He walked into the federal building, climbed a set of stairs, walked down a hallway and went through an unmarked door without knocking. He sat in a chair and told the whole story to a man on the other side of the desk. “That’s all very interesting,” the man said, “but did the subject say anything to you or anyone else about Marx, Lenin or communism? “Is that all you care about?” Miller asked. “I keep telling you, I’ve never heard him say anything about communism.” “You’ve got to understand,” the man said. “This other matter just isn’t important. The director says we are already fighting the next war, the war against communism. This war is a triumph of truth, justice and the American way. And it’s over.” Miller said nothing. “You can let yourself out,” the man said. Then he turned to his typewriter, rolled a form into it and began to type.

“The Painted Lady” DeLoris Stanton Forbes Most of the people I deal with in my profession are women, and many of the women I deal with say silly things like, “Oh, I just fell in love with that house.” They say things like that because my job is to usher women through houses like a tour guide. I’m a realtor; here’s my card. See, it says LOWELL AMES, REAL ESTATE, and it’s got a line drawing of a house in one corner, a sketch like a kid would make. There’s a rectangle with a peaked roof and a chimney with smoke coming out. My friend Arty said that the drawing looked stupid, to which I said, “What business are you in, Arty?” And he said, “You know I took early retirement,” at which point I said, “When you get a job, I’ll take your advice.” So when a woman says she’s fallen in love with a house, I think to myself, yeah, you’re in love with a house, lady, but that won’t sell your fatfaced husband, Mrs. So-and-so. He’s got his eye on the bottom line, and when he finds out the seller won’t budge on his two hundred eighty-five thousand seven hundred fifty dollar asking price, Mr.-Fifty-inch-waist So-and-so will tell you, “So get over it,” and you’ll end up with a hundred fifty thousand dollar number that looks like everybody else’s, and that’s the way it goes in the real estate business. I should know. Besides, people don’t fall in love with houses. They get infatuated. And more often than not, Mrs. Soand-so ends up buying something from some other realtor, something cheaper but maybe even more eye-catching and thus halfway satisfying that Mr. and Mrs. will fight about for the rest of their married days, and that’s the way it goes. Or they go ape over something far too expensive (again offered by some other realtor) for some other reason and start a downward spiral of second mortgages and bank foreclosures guaranteed to haunt them for years. Buyers kid themselves. But people fall in love with the idea of a house, not the house itself. I know that for sure. I should, I’ve been in the real estate business long enough. Eighteen years, going on nineteen, I’ve seen it all. The days when the only way to go was to sweet-talk the hell out of the buyer, and then those other times when it was strictly a seller’s market. Today it’s mezzo-mezzo, a little of each. For one thing, there’s plenty of credit floating around. More and more of what used to be called the middlers have become the big spenders. But I don’t believe the fable that there’s one perfect house—just one—to spend a lifetime in. Even though I preach it. When it suits me. But then Hector Muñoz built his painted lady. And Ramona Kurtz fell in love. Ramona Kurtz, self-proclaimed newcomer to the Fairland area, was the one who called the Muñoz house a painted lady. “Beg pardon?” I said. I thought I’d heard her wrong. “It’s wonderful. All my life I’ve been looking for a painted lady of my own. Just like this, this is it. What fabulous colors!” she dimpled. She had full cheeks and high cheekbones; she was what my friend Arty, who was into lady-watching, would call a dish and a half. “A painted lady,” I repeated. “Yes. Well, Hector’s got a fine reputation as a builder. Great attention to detail. He uses top-of-the-line materials, incorporates all the very latest conveniences, and still manages to keep his houses traditional in appearance. But it does tend to make his properties kind of pricey.” She blinked long eyelashes at me. “Money,” she purred, “is no object.” I parked in the driveway, handed her out. She was that kind of client. Most of them are out of the car before I can get around to the door, but not Ramona Kurtz. She actually waited for me. I had the strangest sense of déjà vu going back to the days when ladies acted like ladies rather than potential power brokers. Kind of refreshing.

I opened the picket-fenced gate of a brick garden path that gave entrance to the wraparound verandah. The Muñoz house—all right, the Painted Lady…why would she call it the Painted Lady anyway? Fabulous colors, she said. True, its basic color was what I call beige but Hector called “old ivory,” and its elongated, louvered shutters were a “jade gray-green,” while its bracketed overhangs were “sunkissed coral” and its wrought-iron stanchions were “ebony black,” but the architectural style was Italianate and that was the way the Italians did things; I guess that was the reason Ramona Kurtz called it the Painted Lady. The house wore its colors like movie star makeup. To the practical eye, Lady was a two story, symmetrical, stuccoed, four-dormered building of concrete block on the first floor and wooden shingles on the second, with an attached four-car garage and houselength verandahs front and back. (That’s the way we do things in Florida. The concrete block resists termites and keeps varmints away. We don’t do cellars here in Florida, we set houses on concrete slabs.) Ramona Kurtz stood looking and making cooing noises, and when she wasn’t cooing, she made purring noises. I was expecting it, and sure enough, there it came: she said, “Oooh, I’ve really fallen in love with this house! Even before I get inside. It’s so—so—me!” And she tucked her arm through mine and took us shoulder to shoulder along the brick walkway, up the flared entry steps onto the wooden front porch pillared with Doric columns, past the segmental arched windows and shutters and an elliptical fanlight underneath four second story dormers and a parapeted sable-end roof (I copied all that off the Muñoz brochure, sounds good, doesn’t it?), and through the double-carved wood and beveled glass doors. As we walked, she said, “Are you from here, Lowell? You don’t sound Floridian. Not that there’s any specific Floridian sound, people come here from all over, don’t they? What I mean is, you don’t sound Southern.” I went into my canned speech. “I’m originally from Queens, New York; been here in Fairland, the class city of Central Florida, nine years now. Real estate’s been the name of my game for close to twenty years. Let me show you the outstanding features of this house, the house you call the Painted Lady. That’s a cute name, the Painted Lady. Don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.” “Oh, it’s a well-known name among architectural aficionados. So tell me, Lowell—I may call you Lowell, yes? And you call me Ramona. Are you married?” She caught me off stride, sent me off spiel. “No. I’m what you’d call an old batch.” I shut my mouth after that. Sometimes I’d throw in a little joke here, like how my friend Arty says I’m so ugly no woman would marry me or I’m so mean no woman would marry me, some quip like that, but that results in the woman saying, “Oh, I don’t believe that. You’re not ugly at all.” Chit-chat like that, and I didn’t feel like indulging in repartee with Ramona Kurtz. Can’t say why, there was something about her. So I pointed out that the first floor of the Painted Lady featured a high-ceilinged foyer with an Austrian crystal chandelier, a formal dining room, and a great room (living room) with a walk-in fireplace. (Should you ever want to walk into a fireplace—maybe to warm your buns? Okay, okay, I’m no comedian. But at least that remark got her to remove her arm from mine.) The fireplace was flanked by leaded-glass french doors leading to the rear verandah. The right wing contained the kitchen with a nook and a pantry, a half bath, and a utility room. The left wing held the master suite with more french doors looking out on the verandah and two walk-in closets, private double toilets with bidet, and an almost pool-sized Roman tub with a Lucite-enclosed multiheaded shower. The four-car garage was attached but separated from the main building by a courtyard entry, where the Carolina jasmine provided privacy and smelled great, too. At the top of the divided staircase, the second floor offered two roomy bedroom suites, each with its own bath, a récreation room big enough for both pool and ping-pong tables, and a bonus suite (for the live-in maid?) over the garage. As

I pointed out to Ramona Kurtz, “It’s not a big, big house—its rooms are large and its ceilings are ten feet high, but it’s not what I’d call a barn of a house. It’s a manageable house. Built for elegant living for the smaller family.” “I see there’s a pool out back.” Ramona Kurtz peered through the Carolina jasmine. “And a Jacuzzi and a cabana guesthouse. It’s handy for visiting relatives, maybe. Like a mother-inlaw?” When she wasn’t paying attention, I studied my client. She was one goodlooking woman. Arty would go ape. But there was something that turned me off, just something… Ramona twinkled at me. “No mother-in-law,” she said. “I’m not married.” “Is that so?” Divorced, I supposed, but didn’t ask. I figured her age for maybe late thirties…all right, early forties. Hair—kind of copper-colored. Eyes, green. Skin, she had what George Costanza on Seinfeld would have called a “rosy glow.” Figure? From what I could see from the fit of the off-white linen slacks and the matching tank top, through the see-through animal print shirtjacket, she surely rated nine, maybe nine and a half. She smiled at me. “Interested?” she asked with what amounted to a leer. I grinned back like a sheep and opened the Painted Lady’s patio doors, stood back to let Ramona Kurtz enter. She walked in like a bride to the altar and stopped abruptly, bringing me up very short indeed. “My goodness,” she said. “There’s someone here.” We’d entered the great/living room with the huge fieldstone fireplace. Standing in front of the fireplace was the builder, Hector Muñoz. With him was a pudgy blonde, and lurking behind the blonde was Bethel Parsons. Bad show. Two possible buyers, one house. Potential conflict—and Bethel Parsons to boot. Bethel Parsons was my bet noire, that’s the way my recent-college graduate secretary Debbi Bolster put it. Bethel Parsons had been awarded Realtor of the Month enough times to guarantee her the title of Realtor of the Year, for whatever that was worth, which publicity-wise was plenty. “Well, Lowell.” Hector put out a manicured hand to shake mine; his smile reminded me of the song “Mack the Knife.” “How nice to see you, but I didn’t expect…sorry, Mrs. Stevens,” this to the blonde lady, “we must have confused our appointment schedule. But such things can happen, I regret to say, when a house is—” chuckle, chuckle “—such a hot property.” “I love it,” trilled Mrs. Stevens in a voice that could have come from Barbie the doll. “I just love it. But where’s the kitchen? I’m one of those rare women who spend a great deal of time in the kitchen.” “Oh well, in that case…” Bethel Parsons took but a moment to give me her standard battlefield glare before she hustled the lady toward the right wing. “Wait till you see the range, it has double convective ovens, and the walk-in freezer has zone controls…” Hector Muñoz stayed with us. He was eyeing Ramona Kurtz, who was ogling him back, so I introduced them. “Oh,” she cooed, “you’re the man who built this fabulous house. That’s what it is, just fabulous! I’m so pleased to meet you.” “I’m pretty proud of it myself, if I do say so. Nothing but the best in this dwelling, I can tell you that. Nothing but the best.” And he showed all his capped teeth in a smug smile. If he’d been wearing suspenders, he would have stuck his thumbs inside them and snapped them. “It reveals a great deal about you, Mr. Muñoz. This house. It represents your public exterior. That’s what Carl Jung said. He viewed houses as a symbol of the psyche. I believe he was referring to the occupant of the house, but it must apply even more to the designer, the builder. The house is the self we choose to display to others.” In her enthusiasm she reached out and touched Hector’s arm. I waited for

him to swell up and crow. Instead his smile grew puzzled, and he asked, “Carl Jung?” “The famous Austrian psychologist.” Pat, pat on the arm. “Oh. That Carl Jung.” “Oh, Hector,” Bethel Parsons chirped from the kitchen doorway, “a question. Please?” “‘Scuse me.” Hector went kitchenward. “Y’all come back now, you hear?” Even I knew better than to say y’all to just one person, but Hector didn’t mind. He just beamed, nodded at Ramona, and went on his way. Ramona Kurtz looked as though she might follow, but I called her back. Not a good idea to join the party there; mixing would-be buyers was like putting the Yorkies in with the pit bulls only you never knew which was which until they tangled. I steered her in another direction. “Shall we take a look-see out back? The landscaping is of particular interest, one of Mr. Muñoz’ relatives, a cousin I believe, is a landscape architect…” “I just love the way the porch wraps around the house.” Ramona talked as we walked. “It has the feel of those old Southern mansions…Edward Hopper—he’s the famous artist who specialized in paintings of houses, you know—he believed that the porch is a transition between private and public, past and future. Doesn’t that just grab you? Let’s see, the asking price is five hundred thousand. Do you think Hector would accept an offer of four hundred? Cash money?” What I thought was that Hector had a live one in the kitchen and he wasn’t going to drop his price until he stopped playing the field. The other thought I had was, hadn’t she said price was no object? Some people just plain love to dicker, she must be one of those, but in this case she’d brought her dickering gear to the wrong bowling alley. I was trying to find words to discourage her hopes without dashing her bargain basement plans when I heard the birdlike (make that crowlike) tones of Bethel Parsons from the back porch of the Painted Lady. “You can go home now, Lowell,” she announced. “Mrs. Stevens and Hector, we’ve got a deal!” “No!” screamed Ramona Kurtz; it was a primeval scream. “This is my house. The Painted Lady is mine! I was here first. Tell her, Lowell! Tell her—” and she ran past me, pushed Bethel aside to disappear into the building. “Mr. Muñoz! Hector! This house is mine. I was here first!” “What’s wrong with that woman?” asked Bethel Parsons. “A disappointment in love,” I told her. “You see before you a woman with a broken heart.” I can be as hokey as the best of them when I’m in the mood. And I was in the mood. I could just see my big fat commission flying off on the wings of a painted bunting (the only bird I could imagine belonging to the Painted Lady). Looking at Mrs. Stevens, the fraulike, ordinary looking Mrs. Stevens who stood now at Bethel’s side wearing a smug smile, I felt a twinge of another kind of regret. I’d quickly come to realize that the Painted Lady was a special sort of dwelling. It really belonged to a woman who would see a porch as a transition between past and future. But that’s the way it went in the real estate business. I should know. I’ve been in it long enough. I maybe gave a thought or two to Ramona Kurtz in the next few days. She didn’t want to see any other houses, thank you. She wasn’t sure she wanted to move to Fairland at all. All this I learned by e-mail because I was unable to reach her even by telephone. So eventually I gave up and worked other acres, other developments. I sold a lakefront lot and a links-side condo in the next month or so, enough to keep me going, living as I did on my real estate earnings. Self-employed entrepreneurs don’t have pensions to fall back on, they live life on a wing and a purchase agreement. Little did my new secretary

know how shaky was the cash flow that provided her weekly stipend; like show business, a posh front is everything in the real estate game. The big realtor seminar in September was being held in Orlando that year; among the major topics for discussion was the rapid growth of sale-by-owner companies. I could have taken the podium on that one myself. Sure, the owner can sell his property if he or she markets it right, and if he or she relies on the sell-it-yourself company’s website and sales booklets, he (or she—I’m not gonna keep this up, you know what I mean when I say he) might get what he expects and then again he might not. He can finalize the sale without a hitch—if he’s willing to work at it, if he knows the do’s and dont’s, and if (this is the biggie) he’s lucky. Sellers should start out with copies of real estate contracts, they should take note that almost everything is negotiable, from who pays closing costs to who gets the repair bills. All details should be put in writing because once you sign the contract you’re headed for closing and it’s too late to say, “But I didn’t mean that…I meant this!” Oh yes, I could give the prospective seller a few tips. Don’t let strangers just walk in, make appointments. When making appointments get names and phone numbers, and call them back to make certain they’re coming. Don’t let anyone know your comings and goings, don’t blab about security information, and do ask for an I.D. from anyone who sees the house. Remove all valuables like guns, jewelry, silverware, collections, and never leave strangers alone in the house. Isn’t all that common sense? And pay the bucks to have a real estate attorney look over the contract before you sign. That’s after you’ve made sure the buyer can come up with the moolah via mortgage or whatever. It’s work, I would tell them, and you’ve got to use your smarts. If you think you can do it, all the best. But you might find out that I come cheap at seven point three percent for sales over two hundred thou. I was on my way to the discussion of upgrades on courier fees, recording fees, title insurance premiums, and underwriting fees (little items that nearly always surprise both seller and buyer) when I ran into Bethel Parsons. Literally. Suddenly there was a woman in my path, and lo and behold, it was Bethel all duded up in a sunshine-yellow suit. I thought she looked like a dried-up daffodil. Time to get your hair touched up, I could have told her if I wanted to be nasty. But feeling benevolent, I said excuse me and hi. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “I’ve been around.” I tried to figure what kind of a deal she wanted to cut, but I couldn’t come up with any listings that might interest this bigtime operator. She whipped out a pair of sunglasses and hid her eyes behind them. “Whatever happened to that woman who behaved so badly at the Muñoz house?” “Ramona Kurtz? I don’t know. I guess she’s left town. You broke her heart, you know. She was crazy about the Painted Lady.” “The Painted Lady?” “That was her name for it. I suppose Mrs. Stevens is happily playing Martha Stewart in her new kitchen.” “I wouldn’t use the word happily. She’s being stalked, she says. By that woman—Kurtz, you said. She’s going to call the police for a restraining order.” “Stalked? You’re kidding. Is the woman paranoid? Who’d stalk somebody just because they bought a house?” And even as I asked the rhetorical question, I answered it. Ramona Kurtz might. She’d said she loved the Painted Lady, and if I worked at it, I could believe her, and I could even believe Mrs. Stevens. There’d been something a little strange about Ramona Kurtz.

“So you don’t know where she is?” “Haven’t the least idea. She was staying at the Lakeside Inn, but the last time I called they told me she’d checked out. Without a forwarding address.” Bethel rearranged her brochures and notepads and prepared to depart. “Well, thanks anyway. How are you doing?” “Oh, fine. I’m doing just fine. How about you?” “Fine. Just fine. Busy, very busy in fact. Well, see you around.” “Right. See you around.” And as we parted, I realized that I hadn’t run into Bethel at all. Instead of being the runner-into, I was the runnee. She and Mrs. Stevens must be pretty agitated about Ramona Kurtz. Wherever she might be. Where she might be was right there in Fairland. I found that out when I ran into her a couple of days later, again literally. I’d gone into Loving Companions, which is a pet store, not a dating club, for a bag of the special dog food they carried called Old Folks Chow. My mostly-Airedale Gordon, who is somewhere in the vicinity of seventeen years old, couldn’t hack the regular canned stuff any more, so I had to pay premium for this special mix that digested easily. Every time I went to Loving Companions I went in with the thought that one of these days I was going to put Gordon to sleep, but then when I’d bought a twenty-five pound bag and hoisted it into the trunk of my car I figured I wouldn’t do it just yet. Not until this bag of Old Folks Chow was gone—then maybe. But the next thing I knew, I had another bag, and so it went. Maybe it was because when I looked at his hairy dogface and he looked back at me out of trusting amber eyes, I putted off to Loving Companions; I guess I’m just a sucker. As Arty says. Anyway, I was going around a corner with the Old Folks Chow in my shopping cart when I bumped somebody. That somebody let out a little yelp, bringing me to an abrupt stop and causing me to say, “Sorry, ma’am. Jeez, I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?” At first I didn’t recognize her. She’d changed the color of her hair, and she’d gained some weight. She was all decked out in some long-skirted grape-colored outfit, and she had a snake wrapped around her neck. So, like I said, I didn’t recognize her. Mostly I was looking at the snake. It was a big snake. “It’s Mr. Ames, isn’t it?” she said, and then I looked from the snake into her face and recognized those eyes. “No, I’m all right. You startled me, that’s all. What do you think of my boa constrictor? Isn’t he a beauty? I’m thinking about buying him and taking him to North Carolina with me.” “You’re moving to North Carolina?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the snake. “Yes. Tryon. It’s lovely country, and I’ve found another painted lady. Not the same, of course. This one’s brick, and I’ve always thought there was something kind of institutional about brick. Still, you can’t have everything, can you? I don’t think I’ll buy the snake after all.” She began to unwind the reptile from her torso. It swayed toward me, so I backed off with my cart, saying, “Well, it’s nice to have seen you. Good luck, Mrs. Kurtz. May you have a long and happy life with your painted lady.” I probably broke a shopping cart speed limit getting out of there. There definitely was something strange about Ramona Kurtz. As far as I was concerned, Tryon was welcome to its new resident. Having thought that thought, I forgot all about her. That’s the way it is in the real estate business. Clients come and clients go. Painted Ladies don’t come along very often, however, but I kept looking, One day I’d sell one of those beauties, and my reputation would be made. One day… It was just about then that I met Peggy Bolster. Debbi’s mother. Debbi’s widowed mother. Peggy could

probably tell you the date and time of the meeting, women keep track of things like that. “It’s the anniversary of our first…” whatever, and, “Ooh, they’re playing our song!” Stuff like that. Anyway, all I remember was walking into my office and there was this really nice looking lady wearing a pink dress with a lace collar, a lady with soft brown curly hair and smiley blue eyes and dimples. To me she looked just like the subject of an old song that went “I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad…” “Oh, hi, Mr. Ames. This is my mother, Peggy. She’s moving to town.” I guess I’ve got to explain why I was a bachelor at age forty-seven. You tell somebody that these days when we’re all into psychoanalysis and they figure you’re a real mama’s boy, which I’m not, or that I go for other guys, which I don’t. The thing was just that I’d spent all my adult life selling real estate and supporting my mother until she passed away in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients three years ago. Somehow I never could fit the gal in with the job timewise or moneywise. Arty said my problem was that my expectations were too high, and he could have been right. I’ve got some what you might call old fashioned ideas. If so (and I don’t say it isn’t so), Peggy Bolster looked exactly like the kind of woman who might—just might—fit the lease requirements. For one thing she was a widow, a little younger than I but close enough in age so that we were on the same wavelength. And she was so darned pretty. And sweet—yes, in the full meaning of the word. If I could create an ideal woman, she would be Peggy Bolster. All right, you guessed it, I’ll bottom-line it. I fell for her. All the way. I stopped doing a lot of things I used to do, like meeting Arty down at Barney’s Bar and Grill to watch the ballgames, and watching reruns of Seinfeld every weeknight on cable. I ceased carrying home an armload of books from the library every two weeks and taking Gordon to the park any day I didn’t have an appointment. I even stopped reading the morning paper through and through each day, which is why I missed the obituary that Bethel Parsons told me about at my wedding reception. I had to dig back in my stack of papers for recycling to find the article. It said that Laura Louise Stevens, age thirty-nine, had died suddenly at her home on Buena Vista Lane after encountering a nest of baby rattlesnakes in her garden. It told when and where the funeral was to be held, and it named her husband and a couple of sisters as survivors. Rattlesnakes, I thought. Hmm. Snakes, I thought. Hmm…. Even baby snakes have poisonous venom, they’re born equipped, as it were. And if there were enough of them and if nobody found you in time for some antivenin, which was the case, Bethel said, it was bye-bye Laura Louise Stevens in her rose garden. I wondered if my pet store sold baby rattlesnakes in quantity like some sell ladybugs. Maybe so. For snake farmers. Somebody somewhere must grow snakes. Seemed to me I’d read something about guys who milked snakes for venom to make antivenin, something like that. But then I thought, Lowell, you are letting Ramona Kurtz and the Painted Lady thing get to you, forget about it. Thank your lucky stars it has nothing to do with you. You and your bride are about to fly off to Lauderdale to board a ship for a honeymoon cruise. Say adios to Mrs. Stevens, may she rest in peace, and begin your wonderful new life. That’s what I told myself, and that’s what I did, we did. I had to begin thinking “we” instead of “I.” Our first ointment insect came up when we got back. Peggy had moved into my bachelor apartment— good-sized, two bedrooms and bath-and-a-half, fifteen by twenty foot living room with a dining ell that I never used, and what I called a Pullman kitchen, just my speed. Mostly I worked the microwave and used the dishwasher maybe a couple of times a week, no need to waste water and energy for a couple of plates and a coffee mug. But women are nesters and Peggy found the kitchen. “It’s frustrating, Lowell darling. I want to come up with all these wonderful dishes for you, and I just

don’t have the proper equipment. Pots and pans, for one thing. Storage is totally inadequate. And the apartment is simply not suitable for entertaining. Not that I plan to do a lot of entertaining, Lowell dear, but sometimes I’d like to have the girls in for a couple of tables of bridge, and we owe people for all the prenuptial parties they gave us. You can see how that could be difficult, can’t you?” She put her little hand with its pearly pink fingernails on my arm and looked up into my face with those pure blue eyes. “And while Gordon is a darling dog, he’s old, and I’m afraid he smells. You don’t notice because you’re used to it, but to strangers it could be offensive. You can see that, can’t you?” “Sure. I can see that,” I said. “I never needed more space than this. I set my computer up in the second bedroom and turned it into a home office. And Debbi fits right into the dining ell, filing cabinets and all. Maybe I should turn the whole thing into an office and we should get a little house…” “A house! Oh, Lowell! You are so sweet!” Peggy kissed me, and I had a quick flashback to Leigh Hunt’s poem: “Say I’m weary, say I’m sad; say that health and wealth have missed me; say I’m growing old, but add—” It ends with “Jenny kissed me!” but I changed it to “Peggy kissed me!” I vowed to find her the nicest little house in the whole territory, one where Gordon could live his days out in a nice outdoor doghouse. If I couldn’t find the perfect house for us, who could? After all, I’d been in the real estate business for almost twenty years. But Peggy found what she wanted herself. She found the house she fell in love with the same day that Bethel Parsons called to tell me that Mr. Stevens was suing Hector Muñoz and Bethel herself for the death of his wife, who died, he claimed, because neither the builder nor the realtor had warned them about snakes on the property. “Lowell, I tell you that there were never any reports of snake infestations in the entire development—never! Nowhere! You know what I think? You can tell me I’m bonkers, but I think that crazy woman who wanted the house had something to do with this. Do you have her address in North Carolina? Tryon, you say? Hector is hiring a private detective, and we’re going to hunt that crazy woman down. Now he can’t sell that lovely house for love nor money, and you know I’m not a rich woman, Lowell. What realtor is? Oh, I’m so effing mad I could stand in front of my office and scream!” You guessed it. The house Peggy stumbled across was the Painted Lady. “I absolutely love that house, Lowell. And I understand it’s selling for a song, something about a woman who owned it dying from a snakebite. Isn’t that the silliest thing you ever heard? Spreading a rumor that a house is hexed, a badluck property? We can buy it, can’t we? I’ve got the money from my former husband’s insurance policy, I’m sure we can afford it one way or another, Say you’ll buy it for me, Lowell? I just adore that house! They call it the Painted Lady.” “Well,” said Arty when I told him about it, “you’ve done every single thing she wanted. You had the big wedding instead of the little wedding. You took the cruise ship to the West Indies instead of the drive to the Grand Canyon, though you had told me that that was a lifelong ambition. I expect you’ll buy the house. Like I said, you’ve done everything else she wanted. Why change now?” “I’ve got this feeling,” I confessed, “this feeling that Ramona Kurtz is out there somewhere just waiting.” “That doesn’t really add up, does it?” Arty took a long drink of beer, burped gently. “If the crazy woman were still yearning for the place, why didn’t she step up and buy it? You said you can get it at cost.” “I don’t know.” I stared into my mug of draft beer, I only drink draft. “I’ve just got this feeling.” “Well,” said Arty, “look at it this way. If eventually all this honey-do business begins to get to you and you can’t take it any more—after all, this is your first time at being a husband, and you’ve got no idea

how long you’ll feel so giddy—who knows, one day something could happen to the new Mrs. Ames, like an accident, you know. You won’t need to feel guilty. You’ve got a built-in excuse. The Painted Lady did her in.” I took a long, long drink. “You know, Arty, sometimes you’re a jerk. A real jerk. You know that, don’t you?” “Yeah,” said Arty. He grinned. “I know. How about another round? The little lady let you off the leash long enough for another round?” I signaled the bartender. “And this one,” I said, “is on me.”

“The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us” George P. Pelecanos Someday I’m gonna write all this down. But I don’t write so good in English yet, see? So I’m just gonna think it out loud. Last night I had a dream. In my dream, I was a kid, back in the village. My friends and family from the chorio, they were there, all of us standing around the square. My father, he had strung a lamb up on a pole. It was making a noise, like a scream, and its eyes were wild and afraid. My father handed me my Italian switch knife, the one he gave me before I came over. I cut into the lamb’s throat and opened it up wide. The lamb’s warm blood spilled onto my hands. My mother told me once: Every time you dream something, it’s got to be a reason. I’m not no kid anymore. I’m twenty-eight years old. It’s early in June, Nineteen-Hundred and ThirtyThree. The temperature got up to one hundred degrees today. I read in the Tribune, some old people died from the heat. Let me try to paint a picture, so you can see in your head the way it is for me right now. I got this little one-room place I rent from some old lady. A Murphy bed and a table, an icebox and a stove. I got a radio I bought for a dollar and ninety-nine. I wash my clothes in a tub, and afterwards I hang the roocha on a cord I stretched across the room. There’s a bunch of clothes, pantalonia and one of my work shirts and my vrakia and socks, on there now. I’m sitting here at the table in my union suit. I’m smoking a Fatima and drinking a cold bottle of Abner Drury beer. I’m looking at my hands. I got blood underneath my fingernails. I washed real good but it was hard to get it all. It’s five, five-thirty in the morning. Let me go back some, to show how I got to where I am tonight. What’s it been, four years since I came over? The boat ride was a boat ride so I’ll skip that part. I’ll start in America. When I got to Ellis Island I came straight down to Washington to stay with my cousin Toula and her husband Aris. Aris had a fruit cart down on Pennsylvania Avenue, around 17th. Toula’s father owed my father some lefta from back in the village, so it was all set up. She offered me a room until I could get on my feet. Aris wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t give a good goddamn what he was happy about. Toula’s father should have paid his debt. Toula and Aris had a place in Chinatown. It wasn’t just for Chinese. Italians, Irish, Polacks and Greeks lived there, too. Everyone was poor except the criminals. The Chinamen controlled the gambling, the whores, and the opium. All the business got done in the back of laundries and in the restaurants. The Chinks didn’t bother no one if they didn’t get bothered themselves. Toula’s apartment was in a house right on H Street. You had to walk up three floors to get to it. I didn’t mind it. The milkman did it every day and the old Jew who collected the rent managed to do it, too. I figured, so could I. My room was small, so small you couldn’t shut the door all the way when the bed was down. There was only one toilet in the place, and they had put a curtain by it, the kind you hang on a shower. You had to close it around you when you wanted to shit. Like I say, it wasn’t a nice place or nothing like it, but it was okay. It was free. But nothing’s free, my father always said. Toula’s husband Aris made me pay from the first day I moved in. Never had a good word to say to me, never mentioned me to no one for a job. He was a sonofabitch, that one. Dark, with a hook in his nose, looked like he had some Turkish blood in him. I

wouldn’t be surprised if the gamoto was a Turk. I didn’t like the way he talked to my cousin, either, ’specially when he drank. And this malaka drank every night. I’d sit in my room and listen to him raise his voice at her, and then later I could hear him fucking her on their bed. I couldn’t stand it, I’m telling you, and me without a woman myself. I didn’t have no job then so I couldn’t even buy a whore. I thought I was gonna go nuts. Then one day I was talking to this guy, Dimitri Karras, lived in the 606 building on H. He told me about a janitor’s job opened up at St. Mary’s, the church where his son Panayoti and most of the neighborhood kids went to Catholic school. I put some Wildroot tonic in my hair, walked over to the church, and talked to the head nun. I don’t know, she musta liked me or something, ’cause I got the job. I had to lie a little about being a handyman. I wasn’t no engineer, but I figured, what the hell, the furnace goes out you light it again, goddamn. My deal was simple. I got a room in the basement and a coupla meals a day. Pennies other than that, but I didn’t mind, not then. Hell, it was better than living in some Hoover Hotel. And it got me away from that bastard Aris. Toula cried when I left, so I gave her a hug. I didn’t say nothing to Aris. I worked at St. Mary’s about two years. The work was never hard. I knew the kids and most of their fathers: Karras, Angelos, Nicodemus, Recevo, Damiano, Carchedi. I watched the boys grow. I didn’t look the nuns in the eyes when I talked to them so they wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Once or twice I treated myself to one of the whores over at the Eastern House. Mostly, down in the basement, I played with my pootso. I put it out of my mind that I was jerking off in church. Meanwhile, I tried to make myself better. I took English classes at St. Sophia, the Greek Orthodox church on 8th and L. I bought a blue serge suit at Harry Kaufman’s on 7th Street, on sale for eleven dollars and seventy-five. The Jew tailor let me pay for it a little bit at a time. Now when I went to St. Sophia for the Sunday service I wouldn’t be ashamed. I liked to go to church. Not for religion, nothing like that. Sure, I wear a stavro, but everyone wears a cross. That’s just superstition. I don’t love God, but I’m afraid of him. So I went to church just in case, and also to look at the girls. I liked to see ’em all dressed up. There was this one koritsi, not older than sixteen when I first saw her, who was special. I knew just where she was gonna be, with her mother, on the side of the church where the women sat separate from the men. I made sure I got a good view of her on Sundays. Her name was Irene, I asked around. I could tell she was clean. By that I mean she was a virgin. That’s the kind of girl you’re gonna marry. My plan was to wait till I got some money in my pocket before I talked to her, but not too long so she got snatched up. A girl like that is not gonna stay single forever. Work and church was for the day time. At night I went to the coffeehouses down by the Navy Yard in Southeast. One of them was owned by a hardworking guy from the neighborhood, Angelos, lived at the 703 building on 6th. That’s the cafeneion I went to most. You played cards and dice there if that’s what you wanted to do, but mostly you could be yourself. It was all Greeks. That’s where I met Nick Stefanos one night, at the Angelos place. Meeting him is what put another change in my life. Stefanos was a Spartan with an easy way, had a scar on his cheek. You knew he was tough but he didn’t have to prove it. I heard he got the scar running protection for a hooch truck in upstate New York. Heard a cheap pistola blew up in his face. It was his business, what happened, none of mine. We got to talking that night. He was the head busman down at some fancy hotel on 15th and Penn, but he was leaving to open his own place. His friend Costa, another Spartiati, worked there and he was gonna leave with him. Stefanos asked me if I wanted to take Costa’s place. He said he could set it up. The pay was only a little more than what I was making, a dollar-fifty a week with extras, but a little more was a lot. Hell, I wanted to make better like anyone else. I thanked Nick Stefanos and asked him when I could start.

I started the next week, soon as I got my room where I am now. You had to pay management for your bus uniform, black pants and a white shirt and short black vest, so I didn’t make nothing for awhile. Some of the waiters tipped the busmen heavy, and some tipped nothing at all. For the ones who tipped nothing you cleared their tables slower, and last. I caught on quick. The hotel was pretty fancy and its dining room, up on the top floor, was fancy, too. The china was real, the crystal sang when you flicked a finger at it, and the silver was heavy. It was hard times, but you’d never know it from the way the tables filled up at night. I figured I’d stay there a coupla years, learn the operation, and go out on my own like Stefanos. That was one smart guy. The way they had it set up was, Americans had the waiter jobs, and the Greeks and Filipinos bused the tables. The coloreds, they stayed back in the kitchen. Everybody in the restaurant was in the same order that they were out on the street: the whites were up top and the Greeks were in the middle; the mavri were at the bottom. Except if someone was your own kind, you didn’t make much small talk with the other guys unless it had something to do with work. I didn’t have nothing against anyone, not even the coloreds. You didn’t talk to them, that’s all. That’s just the way it was. The waiters, they thought they were better than the rest of us. But there was this one American, a young guy named John Petersen, who was all right. Petersen had brown eyes and wavy brown hair that he wore kinda long. It was his eyes that you remembered. Smart and serious, but gentle at the same time. Petersen was different than the other waiters, who wouldn’t lift a finger to help you even when they weren’t busy. John would pitch in and bus my tables for me when I got in a jam. He’d jump in with the dishes, too, back in the kitchen, when the dining room was running low on silver, and like I say, those were coloreds back there. I even saw him talking with those guys sometimes like they were pals. It was like he came from someplace where that was okay. John was just one of those who made friends easy, I guess. I can’t think of no one who didn’t like him. Well, there musta been one person, at least. I’m gonna come to that later on. Me and John went out for a beer one night after work, to a saloon he knew. I wasn’t comfortable because it was all Americans and I didn’t see no one who looked like me. But John made me feel okay and after two beers I forgot. He talked to me about the job and the pennies me and the colored guys in the kitchen were making, and how it wasn’t right. He talked about some changes that were coming to make it better for us, but he didn’t say what they were. “I’m happy,” I said, as I drank off the beer in my mug. “I got a job, what the hell.” “You want to make more money don’t you?” he said. “You’d like to have a day off once in a while, wouldn’t you?” “Goddamn right. But I take off a day, I’m not gonna get paid.” “It doesn’t have to be like that, friend.” “Yeah, okay.” “Do you know what ‘strength in numbers’ means?” I looked around for the bartender ’cause I didn’t know what the hell John was talking about and I didn’t know what to say. John put his hand around my arm. “I’m putting together a meeting. I’m hoping some of the busmen and the kitchen guys will make it. Do you think you can come?” “What we gonna meet for, huh?” “We’re going to talk about those changes I been telling you about. Together, we’re going to make a plan.”

“I don’t want to go to no meeting. I want a day off, I’m just gonna go ask for it, eh?” “You don’t understand.” John put his face close to mine. “The workers are being exploited.” “I work and they pay me,” I said with a shrug. “That’s all I know. Other than that? I don’t give a damn nothing.” I pulled my arm away but I smiled when I did it. I didn’t want to join no group, but I wanted him to know we were still pals. “C’mon, John, let’s drink.” I needed that job. But I felt bad, turning him down about that meeting. You could see it meant something to him, whatever the hell he was talking about, and I liked him. He was the only American in the restaurant who treated me like we were both the same. You know, man to man. Well, he wasn’t the only American who made me feel like a man. There was this woman, name of Laura, a hostess who also made change from the bills. She bought her dresses too small and had hair bleached white, like Jean Harlow. She was about two years and ten pounds away from the end of her looks. Laura wasn’t pretty but her ass could bring tears to your eyes. Also, she had huge tits. I caught her giving me the eye the first night I worked there. By the third night she said something to me about my broad chest as I was walking by her. I nodded and smiled, but I kept walking’ cause I was carrying a heavy tray. When I looked back she gave me a wink. She was a real whore, that one. I knew right then I was gonna fuck her. At the end of the night I asked her if she would go to the pictures with me sometime. “I’m free tomorrow,” she says. I acted like it was an honor and a big surprise. I worked every night, so we had to make it a matinee. We took the streetcar down to the Earle, on 13th Street, down below F. I wore my blue serge suit and high button shoes. I looked like I had a little bit of money, but we still got the fisheye, walking down the street. A blonde and a Greek with dark skin and a heavy black moustache. I couldn’t hide that I wasn’t too long off the boat. The Earle had a stage show before the picture. A guy named William Demarest and some dancers who Laura said were like the Rockettes. What the hell did I know, I was just looking at their legs. After the coming attractions and the short subject the picture came on: Gold Diggers of 1933. The man dancers looked like cocksuckers to me. I liked Westerns better, but it was all right. Fifteen cents for each of us. It was cheaper than taking her to a saloon. Afterwards, we went to her place, an apartment in a row-house off H in Northeast. I used the bathroom and saw a Barnards Shaving Cream and other man things in there, but I didn’t ask her nothing about it when I came back out. I found her in the bedroom. She had poured us a couple of rye whiskies and drawn the curtains so it felt like the night. A radio played something she called “jug band;” it sounded like colored music to me. She asked me, did I want to dance. I shrugged and tossed back all the rye in my glass and pulled her to me rough. We moved slow, even though the music was fast. “Bill?” she said, looking up at me. She had painted her eyes with something and there was a black mark next to one of them were the paint had come off. “Uh,” I said. “What do they call you where you’re from?” “Vasili.” I kissed her warm lips. She bit mine and drew a little blood. I pushed myself against her to let her know what I had. “Why, Va-silly,” she said. “You are like a horse, aren’t you?” I just kinda nodded and smiled. She stepped back and got out of her dress and her slip, and then undid her brassiere. She did it slow. “Ella,” I said.

“What does that mean?” “Hurry it up,” I said, with a little motion of my hand. Laura laughed. She pulled the bra off and her tits bounced. They were everything I thought they would be. She came to me and unbuckled my belt, pulling at it clumsy, and her breath was hot on my face. By then, God, I was ready. I sat her on the edge of the bed, put one of her legs up on my shoulder, and gave it to her. I heard a woman having a baby in the village once, and those were the same kinda sounds that Laura made. There was spit dripping out the side of her mouth as I slammed myself into her over and over again. I’m telling you, her bed took some plaster off the wall that day. After I blew my load into her I climbed off. I didn’t say nice things to her or nothing like that. She got what she wanted and so did I. Laura smoked a cigarette and watched me get dressed. The whole room smelled like pussy. She didn’t look so good to me no more. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and breathe fresh air. We didn’t see each other again outside of work. She only stayed at the restaurant a coupla more weeks, and then she disappeared. I guess the man who owned the shaving cream told her it was time to quit. For awhile there nothing happened and I just kept working hard. John didn’t mention no meetings again though he was just as nice as before. I slept late and bused the tables at night. Life wasn’t fun or bad. It was just ordinary. Then that bastard Wesley Schmidt came to work and everything changed. Schmidt was a tall young guy with a thin moustache, big in the shoulders, big hands. He kept his hair slicked back. His eyes were real blue, like water under ice. He had a row of big straight teeth. He smiled all the time, but the smile, it didn’t make you feel good. Schmidt got hired as a waiter, but he wasn’t any good at it. He got tangled up fast when the place got busy. He served food to the wrong tables all the time, and he spilled plenty of drinks. It didn’t seem like he’d ever done that kind of work before. No one liked him, but he was one of those guys, he didn’t know it, or maybe he knew and didn’t care. He laughed and told jokes and slapped the busmen on the back like we were his friends. He treated the kitchen guys like dogs when he was tangled up, raising his voice at them when the food didn’t come up as fast as he liked it. Then he tried to be nice to them later. One time he really screamed at Raymond, the head cook on the line, called him a “lazy shine” on this night when the place was packed. When the dining room cleared up Schmidt walked back into the kitchen and told Raymond in a soft voice that he didn’t mean nothing by it, giving him that smile of his and patting his arm. Raymond just nodded real slow. Schmidt told me later, “That’s all you got to do, is scold ’em and then talk real sweet to ’em later. That’s how they learn. ’Cause they’re like children. Right, Bill?” He meant coloreds, I guess. By the way he talked to me, real slow the way you would to a kid, I could tell he thought I was a colored guy, too. At the end of the night the waiters always sat in the dining room and ate a stew or something that the kitchen had prepared. The busmen, we served it to the waiters. I was running dinner out to one of them and forgot something back in the kitchen. When I went back to get it, I saw Raymond, spitting into a plate of stew. The other colored guys in the kitchen were standing in a circle around Raymond, watching him do it. They all looked over at me when I walked in. It was real quiet and I guess they were waiting to see what I was gonna do. “Who’s that for?” I said. “Eh?” “Schmidt,” said Raymond. I walked over to where they were. I brought up a bunch of stuff from deep down in my throat and spit real good into that plate. Raymond put a spoon in the stew and stirred it up. “I better take it out to him,” I said, “before it gets cold.” “Don’t forget the garnish,” said Raymond.

He put a flower of parsley on the plate, turning it a little so it looked nice. I took the stew out and served it to Schmidt. I watched him take the first bite and nod his head like it was good. None of the colored guys said nothing to me about it again. I got drunk with John Petersen in a saloon a coupla nights after and told him what I’d done. I thought he’d a get a good laugh out of it, but instead he got serious. He put his hand on my arm the way he did when he wanted me to listen. “Stay out of Schmidt’s way,” said John. “Ah,” I said, with a wave of my hand. “He gives me any trouble, I’m gonna punch him in the kisser.” The beer was making me brave. “Just stay out of his way.” “I look afraid to you?” “I’m telling you, Schmidt is no waiter.” “I know it. He’s the worst goddamn waiter I ever seen. Maybe you ought to have one of those meetings of yours and see if you can get him thrown out.” “Don’t ever mention those meetings again, to anyone,” said John, and he squeezed my arm tight. I tried to pull it away from him but he held his grip. “Bill, do you know what a Pinkerton man is?” “What the hell?” “Never mind. You just keep to yourself, and don’t talk about those meetings, hear?” I had to look away from his eyes. “Sure, sure.” “Okay, friend.” John let go of my arm. “Let’s have another beer.” A week later John Petersen didn’t show up for work. And a week after that the cops found him floating down river in the Potomac. I read about it in the Tribune. It was just a short notice, and it didn’t say nothing else. A cop in a suit came to the restaurant and asked us some questions. A couple of the waiters said that John probably had some bad hootch and fell into the drink. I didn’t know what to think. When it got around to the rest of the crew, everyone kinda got quiet, if you know what I mean. Even that bastard Wesley didn’t make no jokes. I guess we were all thinking about John in our own way. Me, I wanted to throw up. I’m telling you, thinking about John in that river, it made me sick. John didn’t ever talk about no family and nobody knew nothing about a funeral. After a few days, it seemed like everybody in the restaurant forgot about him. But me, I couldn’t forget. One night I walked into Chinatown. It wasn’t far from my new place. There was this kid from St. Mary’s, Billy Nicodemus, whose father worked at the city morgue. Nicodemus wasn’t no doctor or nothing, he washed off the slabs and cleaned the place, like that. He was known as a hard drinker, maybe because of what he saw every day, and maybe just because he liked the taste. I knew where he liked to drink. I found him in a no-name restaurant on the Hip-Sing side of Chinatown. He was in a booth by himself, drinking something from a teacup. I crossed the room, walking through the cigarette smoke, passing the whores and the skinny Chink gangsters in their too-big suits and the cops who were taking money from the Chinks to look the other way. I stood over Nicodemus and told him who I was. I told him I knew his kid, told him his kid was good. Nicodemus motioned for me to have seat. A waiter brought me an empty cup. I poured myself some gin from the teapot on the table. We tapped cups and drank. Nicodemus had straight black hair wetted down and a big mole with hair coming out of it on one of his cheeks. He talked better than I did. We said some things that were about nothing and then I asked him some questions about John. The gin had loosened his tongue.

“Yeah, I remember him,” said Nicodemus, after thinking about it for a short while. He gave me the once-over and leaned forward. “This was your friend?” “Yes.” “They found a bullet in the back of his head. A twenty-two.” I nodded and turned the teacup in small circles on the table. “The Tribune didn’t say nothing about that.” “The papers don’t always say. The police cover it up while they look for who did it. But that boy didn’t drown. He was murdered first, then dropped in the drink.” “You saw him?” I said. Nicodemus shrugged. “Sure.” “What’d he look like?” “You really wanna know?” “Yeah.” “He was all gray and blown up, like a balloon. The gas does that to ’em, when they been in the water.” “What about his eyes?” “They were open. Pleading.” “Huh?” “His eyes. It was like they were sayin’ please.” I needed a drink. I had some gin. “You ever heard of a Pinkerton man?” I said. “Sure,” said Nicodemus. “A detective.” “Like the police?” “No.” “What, then?” “They go to work with other guys and pretend they’re one of them. They find out who’s stealing. Or they find out who’s trying to make trouble for the boss. Like the ones who want to make a strike.” “You mean, like if a guy wants to get the workers together and make things better?” “Yeah. Have meetings and all that. The guys who want to start a union. Pinkertons look for those guys.” We drank the rest of the gin. We talked about his kid. We talked about Schmeling and Baer, and the wrestling match that was coming up between Londos and George Zaharias at Griffith Stadium. I got up from my seat, shook Nicodemus’s hand, and thanked him for the conversation. “Efcharisto, patrioti.” “Yasou, Vasili.” I walked back to my place and had a beer I didn’t need. I was drunk and more confused than I had been before. I kept hearing John’s voice, the way he called me “friend.” I saw his eyes saying please. I kept thinking, I should have gone to his goddamn meeting, if that was gonna make him happy. I kept

thinking I had let him down. While I was thinking, I sharpened the blade of my Italian switch knife on a stone. The next night, last night, I was serving Wesley Schmidt his dinner after we closed. He was sitting by himself like he always did. I dropped the plate down in front of him. “You got a minute to talk?” I said. “Go ahead and talk,” he said, putting the spoon to his stew and stirring it around. “I wanna be a Pinkerton man,” I said. Schmidt stopped stirring his stew and looked up my way. He smiled, showing me his white teeth. Still, his eyes were cold. “That’s nice. But why are you telling me this?” “I wanna be a Pinkerton, just like you.” Schmidt pushed his stew plate away from him and looked around the dining room to make sure no one could hear us. He studied my face. I guess I was sweating. Hell, I know I was. I could feel it dripping on my back. “You look upset,” said Schmidt, his voice real soft, like music. “You look like you could use a friend.” “I just wanna talk.” “Okay. You feel like having a beer, something like that?” “Sure, I could use a beer.” “I finish eating, I’ll go down and get my car. I’ll meet you in the alley out back. Don’t tell anyone, hear, because then they might want to come along. And we wouldn’t have the chance to talk.” “I’m not gonna tell no one. We just drive around, eh? I’m too dirty to go to a saloon.” “That’s swell,” said Schmidt. “We’ll just drive around.” I went out to the alley were Schmidt was parked. Nobody saw me get into hiscar. It was a blue, ’31 Dodge coupe with wire wheels, a rumble seat, and a trunk rack. A five-hundred dollar car if it was a dime. “Pretty,” I said, as I got in beside him. There were hand-tailored slipcovers on the seats. “I like nice things,” said Schmidt. He was wearing his suit jacket, and it had to be eighty degrees. I could see a lump under the jacket. I figured, the bastard is carrying a gun. We drove up to Colvin’s, on 14th Street. Schmidt went in and returned with a bag of loose bottles of beer. There must have been a half dozen Schlitz’s in the bag. Him making waiter’s pay, and the fancy car and the high-priced beer. He opened a coupla beers and handed me one. The bottle was ice cold. Hot as the night was, the beer tasted good. We drove around for a while. We went down to Hanes Point. Schmidt parked the Dodge facing the Washington Channel. Across the channel, the lights from the fish vendors on Maine Avenue threw color on the water. We drank another beer. He gave me one of his tailor-mades and we had a couple smokes. He talked about the Senators and the Yankees, and how Baer had taken Schmeling out with a right in the tenth. Schmidt didn’t want to talk about nothing serious yet. He was waiting for the beer to work on me, I knew. “Goddamn heat,” I said. “Let’s drive around some, get some air moving.”

Schmidt started the coupe. “Where to?” “I’m gonna show you a whorehouse. Best secret in town.” Schmidt looked me over and laughed. The way you laugh at a clown. I gave Schmidt some directions. We drove some, away from the park and the monuments to where people lived. We went through a little tunnel and crossed into Southwest. Most of the street lamps were broke here. The rowhouses were shabby, and you could see shacks in the alleys and clothes hanging on lines outside the shacks. It was late, a long time past midnight. There weren’t many people out. The ones that were out were coloreds. We were in a place called Bloodfield. “Pull over there,” I said, pointing to a spot along the curb where there wasn’t no light. “I wanna show you the place I’m talking about.” Schmidt did it and cut the engine. Across the street were some houses. All except one of them was dark. From the lighted one came fast music, like the colored music Laura had played in her room. “There it is right there,” I said, meaning the house with the light. I was lying through my teeth. I didn’t know who lived there and I sure didn’t know if that house had whores. I had never been down here before. Schmidt turned his head to look at the rowhouse. I slipped my switch knife out of my right pocket and laid it flat against my right leg. When he turned back to face me he wasn’t smiling no more. He had heard about Bloodfield and he knew he was in it. I think he was scared. “You bring me down to niggertown, for what?” he said. “To show me a whorehouse?” “I thought you’re gonna like it.” “Do I look like a man who’d pay to fuck a nigger? Do I? You don’t know anything about me.” He was showing his true self now. He was nervous as a cat. My nerves were bad, too. I was sweating through my shirt. I could smell my own stink in the car. “I know plenty,” I said. “Yeah? What do you know?” “Pretty car, pretty suits…top-shelf beer. How you get all this, huh?” “I earned it.” “As a Pinkerton, eh?” Schmidt blinked real slow and shook his head. He looked out his window, looking at nothing, wasting time while he decided what he was gonna do. I found the raised button on the pearl handle of my knife. I pushed the button. The blade flicked open and barely made a sound. I held the knife against my leg and turned it so the blade was pointing back. Sweat rolled down my neck as I looked around. There wasn’t nobody out on the street. Schmidt turned his head. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand and straightened his arm. “What do you want?” he said. “I just wanna know what happened to John.” Schmidt smiled. All those white teeth. I could see him with his mouth open, his lips stretched, those teeth showing. The way an animal looks after you kill it. Him lying on his back on a slab. “I heard he drowned,” said Schmidt. “You think so, eh?”

“Yeah. I guess he couldn’t swim.” “Pretty hard to swim, you got a bullet in your head.” Schmidt’s smile turned down. “Can you swim, Bill?” I brought the knife across real fast and buried it into his armpit. I sunk the blade all the way to the handle. He lost his breath and made a short scream. I twisted the knife. His blood came out like someone was pouring it from a jug. It was warm and it splashed onto my hands. I pulled the knife out and while he was kicking at the floorboards I stabbed him a coupla more times in the chest. I musta hit his heart or something because all the sudden there was plenty of blood all over the car. I’m telling you, the seats were slippery with it. He stopped moving. His eyes were open and they were dead. I didn’t get tangled up about it or nothing like that. I wasn’t scared. I opened up his suit jacket and saw a steel revolver with wood grips holstered there. It was small caliber. I didn’t touch the gun. I took his wallet out of his trousers, pulled the bills out of it, wiped off the wallet with my shirttail, and threw the empty wallet on the ground. I put the money in my shoe. I fit the blade back into the handle of my switch knife and slipped the knife into my pocket. I put all the empty beer bottles together with the full ones in the paper bag and took the bag with me as I got out of the car. I closed the door soft and wiped off the handle and walked down the street. I didn’t see no one for a couple of blocks. I came to a sewer and I put the bag down the hole. The next block I came to another sewer and I took off my bloody shirt and threw it down the hole of that one. I was wearing an undershirt, didn’t have no sleeves. My pants were black so you couldn’t see the blood. I kept walking towards Northwest. Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on. Another block or so I came up on a group of mavri standing around the steps of a house. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer. I wasn’t gonna run or nothing. I had to go by them to get home. They stopped talking and gave me hard eyes as I got near them. That’s when I saw that one of them was the cook, Raymond, from the kitchen. Our eyes kind of came together but neither one of us said a word or smiled or even made a nod. One of the coloreds started to come towards me and Raymond stopped him with the flat of his palm. I walked on. I walked for a couple of hours, I guess. Somewhere in Northwest I dropped my switch knife down another sewer. When I heard it hit the sewer bottom I started to cry. I wasn’t crying ‘cause I had killed Schmidt. I didn’t give a damn nothing about him. I was crying ‘cause my father had given me that knife, and now it was gone. I guess I knew I was gonna be in America forever, and I wasn’t never going back to Greece. I’d never see my home or my parents again. When I got back to my place I washed my hands real good. I opened up a bottle of Abner Drury and put fire to a Fatima and had myself a seat at the table. This is where I am right now. Maybe I’m gonna get caught and maybe I’m not. They’re gonna find Schmidt in that neighborhood and they’re gonna figure a colored guy killed him for his money. The cops, they’re gonna turn Bloodfield upside down. If Raymond tells them he saw me I’m gonna get the chair. If he doesn’t, I’m gonna be free. Either way, what the hell, I can’t do nothing about it now. I’ll work at the hotel, get some experience and some money, then open my own place, like Nick Stefanos. Maybe if I can find two nickels to rub together, I’m gonna go to church and talk to that girl, Irene, see if she wants to be my wife. I’m not gonna wait too long. She’s clean as a whistle, that one. I’ve had my eye on her for some time.

“Moody’s Blues” Hal Charles That Friday in March when the renters moved into the old Forbes place a bad feeling stirred in Moody’s gut. The three rusty pickups passed him like a funeral procession before pulling into the driveway of the home Matt and Kathy had always kept spotless before their deaths about a year ago. Unable to decide whether to sell the place, their four kids had compromised on renting it out as a temporary source of income. There were six newcomers. Maybe because they didn’t look much alike, they didn’t seem to Moody a real family—more like older hippies. A woman with two large, yellowed canines balancing a cigarette between her lips, a bearded man older than Moody was, three men who looked to be in their mid thirties, and a little girl with a dirty blond ponytail, about ten. No sir, they sure weren’t the second coming of the Waltons. And of course, Cutler, Kentucky, wasn’t Walton’s Mountain, either. “Fact is,” Moody often declared to the boys gathered round the Cutler Marathon to listen to one of his stories, “we got more killings in our little community than a big city like Lexington.” No one had a good explanation as to why death had taken up permanent residence in a tiny town in the heart of the Bluegrass. They were too far out in the country, declared Pete Culross between puffs on his unfiltered cigarette, to get that city water filled with “fluoride and sech.” And Bobby Lee Plummer, a local sage with one year of community college, swore it was the fault of the army depot. “We know they have all that nerve-gas stuff stored out there,” he reasoned, “so if they’re willing to tell us that much, what else you think they got?” Moody was down at the end of his driveway sorting through the mail when the three pickups passed. No one had returned his friendly wave, and the last thing he saw was the little girl’s eyes looming in the back window like a pair of cue balls. 4:40. Karoline wouldn’t be home from her job at the Wal-Mart for another hour at least. He scrounged around the kitchen till he found the banana bread his wife had baked the night before. Moody didn’t much like anything made from rotten bananas anyway, and taking it to the newcomers was the neighborly thing to do. Maybe someday they’d put that on his tombstone. RILEY MOODY—ALWAYS WENT THAT EXTRA MILE. With the Forbeses’ deaths, the nearest neighbors had lived about three miles down and around the big bend of the Kentucky River. It was gonna be nice to have people close by when Karoline got into one of her weeklong bad spells. Especially since those spells seemed to be more and more frequent. As Moody made his way down the narrow road spider-webbed with cracks, the sky looked like a big piece of slate balanced on the hilltops, making the valley feel like a tomb. Dust still hovered over the old Forbes driveway as he started up. At the top of the hill he ran into the ponytailed girl. She was flipping an open jackknife into the spring soil as if she were playing mumbletypeg. “Your momma and daddy let you fool around with dangerous weapons?” Moody asked. She continued to throw her knife at some imaginary target without looking up. “Don’t have no momma or daddy,” she said, “and I don’t know what this ‘dangerous weapon’ you’re talking about is.” “Everybody’s got a momma and daddy, child,” said Moody. “Jerrold often tells me I was ‘born of the Devil,’ if that’s what you mean.” Moody rested his snakeskin boot on a downed tree and tried another approach. “My daddy used to have the biggest knife in all Clement County. Momma called it ‘The Widow-maker.’” “Why’s that?”

“’Cause if he made one slip, she was gonna be a widow.” “Clemily in there”—she gestured at the wooden house—“is the closest thing I got to a momma.” Moody sat down on the log. “You sure look old enough to go to school. What grade you in?” Expertly she closed the knife with an open palm. “When we left Letcher County, I was in third grade, but we just got here today. They haven’t had time to put me back into school yet.” Moody remembered how when Carol was in third grade she was almost too much to handle. “What’re you holding there?” she asked. “Banana bread. Wife baked it yesterday.” He held it out. “Want some?” The little girl eyed the plate the way he looked at a snake that he suddenly came upon in the woods. Moody put the plate down close to her. She moved forward and lifted up the aluminum foil. “Ain’t had much to eat since breakfast and that was just a can of Dew.” She pinched off a corner of the bread. “Smells good. Don’t guess it would hurt none.” As she placed the morsel in her mouth, a deep voice came from the direction of the house. “Joy Lynn, you’d best put that down ’less you want your mouth washed out with vinegar.” The little girl spun around. “Jason, I—” “Clemily’ll have us some supper fixed in a while. Meantime, why don’t you help her unpack?” “‘Cause she’s so bossy and smells like a cigarette all the time, that’s why.” Jason jumped off the porch. He seemed about ten years younger than Moody, but his shoulders were almost twice as big. “My fault,” apologized Moody. “I was just trying to be neighborly and…Joy Lynn was the first person I ran into.” Jason shoved the little girl in the direction of the house and stood so close to Moody that he could smell the man’s breath. He’d been drinking something like ’shine. His hair was long and stringy and crusted with oil and dirt. The air grew cold and still. “Where we come from,” the stranger said without emotion, “a man who goes around offering treats to little girls ain’t a man a’tall. He’s kinda like a bull that hangs ’round other bulls ’steada cows, if you catch my drift.” “Listen,” said Moody, standing toe-to-toe with his antagonist, “I’m only trying to do the neighborly thing. If you don’t like banana bread, just tell me.” The man put his two forefingers in his mouth and whistled loud enough to hurt Moody’s ears. A large black dog that looked to Moody part Doberman, part Rottweiler, all hellhound came bounding toward him. “Sit, Scarf,” the man commanded. “You take one step toward the house,” he said to Moody, “and you save me the trouble of fixing my dog dinner.” Moody listened to the wind that blew down the palisades long ago formed by the Kentucky River. He didn’t know what to do. The little girl spit the piece of banana bread at him. “I didn’t like your food nohow.” Jason slapped his dungareed thigh. “Joy Lynn, honey, you gonna be all right.” Then they turned and walked back to the house, the dog at their heels. Moody couldn’t tell if the whistle he heard came from the wind rushing through the palisades or his own breath forcing itself out of the gap between his two front teeth.

Moody flipped through the sports pages of the Lexington Herald-Leader he had picked up when the framing crew had stopped for lunch at Hardee’s. Not one darn piece of news about UK. If the Wildcats couldn’t find them a big man for next year, they were gonna get killed off the boards. A few years ago it had been an honor just to be asked to wear the blue and white. Now Kentucky had to recruit like they wasn’t king of the hill no more. Karoline had set her purse on the kitchen table before he even noticed she’d come in. “You’re late,” he said. “Couldn’t be helped. We got this young girl, couldn’t be more than twenty, come into the store at shift change. Wants her money back on a coffeepot she’d been using since Christmas. Lordy, she had more babies than toes, and they wuz running every which way picking up stuff. People nowadays have more children than sense.” “We got some new neighbors today. Moved into Matt and Kathy’s place. Gawd, I miss those two.” But she didn’t hear him. She had already gone back into their bedroom. “What’s for supper?” Moody yelled after her. “Baloney,” she called. “And I know I made you a baloney sandwich for lunch.” “No matter,” he said, not wanting to tell her some crows at the job site had gotten lucky and he’d eaten hot fast-food. “You’ll have to get the stuff out yourself. I got to finish this quilt ’fore Carol comes back.” She shut the door to the bedroom. Moody stared at the oak door he had built himself, just like everything else in this cabin. He knew he should go back in there and talk to Karoline, but he knew equally well it wouldn’t do any good. For the longest time he stared at the patterns in the oak trying to make sense of them. He dozed off, waking once when he thought he heard sirens, then falling back asleep. Saturday morning Moody ran into Beverly Scruggs at the Cutler Marathon before he’d even gotten his first cup of coffee. “See who’s back in town?” Scruggs motioned toward the gas pump. Moody stared through the plate glass covered with cigarette ads. “Sure looks like Carson Craft to me.” “They let him out of the FCI six months early for good behavior. Now we got the best paper-hanger in the Commonwealth back home.” Moody hated the way Scruggs tried to impress everybody using words he picked up off his satellite dish. Anybody else would’ve said “counterfeiter,” but not good old Beverly. “You hear sirens last night,” he asked, “or was I just dreaming?” “You don’t know?” said Luther Hagen from the next booth. “Know what?” said Moody. “Follow me.” Moody got up and hiked outside till Hagen stopped him by the FREE AIR pump. He pointed at the ground. “Tell me what you see.” The cement was stained dull like that time Karoline dropped her nail polish on the hearth.

“That’s blood,” announced Hagen. “Belonged to some guy who told Mary Lou he was from Detroit.” “Do tell,” said Moody. “How’d blood get there?” “Why this Detroit guy was shot right there. Didn’t kill him, though, but they could’ve started a good blood drive just by sucking up what that boy left there.” “What really happened here last night?” said Beverly Scruggs. “The Gunfight at the Cutler Marathon, they’re calling it,” said Charlie Wiggins, who had stopped filling his tank long enough to butt in. “Fact, that boy from Detroit, bleeding like a gutted pig, somehow got into his fancy sports car and took off like a bat outta hell. Little Davey Lackey didn’t fare so well. Took a bullet through his chest.” “Now,” commented Scruggs, “he’s taking the big dirt sleep.” “Hold it,” said Moody, trying to make some sense of the story, “are you telling me there was a shooting here last night that’s part of the Lackey-Conyers squabble?” “Biggest feud in the South since the Hatfields and McCoys kissed and made up,” said Charlie Wiggins. “Word is Old Man Conyers decided to end this thing by—” “Bringing in some ‘muscle from the Motor City,’ ” finished Beverly Scruggs. “A hit man from Detroit in Cutler?” said Moody, wanting to tear out that satellite dish once and for all. “Isn’t that what I just said?” shot back Scruggs. Moody stared down at the bloodstain. What was going on? When he was a boy, the only bloodshed was in the annual softball game between Cutler Baptist and Cutler Church of God, and that was for a good cause, the Old Nail Keg. He walked back inside and sat down where Mary Lou had poured his coffee. As he added cream and sugar, he heard a familiar voice. “I’d like to buy you that cup.” Moody looked up to see Jason, the man he’d encountered at the Forbes place the day before. “Yeah,” continued Jason, “my brothers and me’ve gotten a little overprotective of Joy Lynn, her being the only girl in the family.” Moody just stared at him. “And don’t worry none about Scarf. Only thing that dog’s interested in is rabbit.” “Coulda fooled me,” said Moody. “Oh, and that banana bread was sure good.” Jason smiled. “Next time, we owe you.” He snatched up Moody’s check and headed to the cash register. “See you ‘round, neighbor.” Moody began to stir the cream and coffee into one. Nothing made sense. “Look, Mary Lou’s done changed the score already.” Beverly Scruggs pointed toward the checkout lane. On the little chalkboard over the cash register, 11 had been crossed out and 12 written in. A dozen deaths already this year, noted Moody, scratching his head, and spring had just started last week. Sunday morning after church Moody stood furiously lifting the black pump handle up and down. No matter how hard he stroked, he couldn’t seem to pull up the cold water, the really cold water that slaked your thirst, the cold water that cooled your whole body down. Karoline was sitting on the back porch,

alone, having one of her spells. It had started in church as Preacher Blithe was quoting the TwentyThird Psalm, holding up the promise of the Lord as they walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Karoline had started whimpering, and no rod or staff could comfort her. Even Preacher Blithe had tried to talk with her after church, but she’d climbed into the pickup and said simply, “Take me home. We’re not having Sunday fixin’s with Aunt May and Uncle Hector today.” Moody had suggested they go for a drive, maybe up to Red River Gorge, or take the Palisades Ferry into Lexington and eat at Morrison’s Cafeteria. But she’d preferred to sit on the back porch working on another section of her quilt. “Some days you got to put up with warm water,” his daddy had told him when he was too small to man the pump, “but don’t you ever forget how good the cold stuff tastes.” But Moody couldn’t remember. Leastways, not with Karoline. He began walking across the newly green field, over the split-rail fence, through the metal gate that kept Cooper’s cattle off his property, down the limestone-littered road that led to the river. Once there, he pulled out a bag of the best stuff in the county, rolled it up in paper, lit it, and drew deeply. He’d promised Karoline he’d give up the “evil weed” when they’d married, but of course she’d promised to love, honor, and obey. He walked along a sandbar that constantly shifted as the gate to lock ten was raised and lowered. The remains of a campfire and beer cans betrayed a teenagers’ party. Adults woulda shot holes in the cans. Slowly Moody started to feel better, to get the taste of that really cold water. Then he began to imagine he could see the holes along the shore where his great-grandfather had legally planted hemp half a century earlier to help the war effort. Up ahead, on a familiar rock ledge, he spotted someone fishing. Moody drew closer to the fisherman, who was sitting on what they’d been taught—about the time hair showed up under his armpits—to call Black Man Rock. He took one last long toke, then flipped his smoke into the river. It made a hissing sound like a small snake. The squatting figure sure looked familiar. “Why, Joy Lynn, as I live and breathe,” said Moody happily. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she said without looking at him. “The boys done warned me and so did Papa Jim and Clemily.” “They’re right.” Moody picked up a flat rock that had been lying between his snakeskin boots. “Only I’m no stranger. We met two days ago.” “Don’t you go throwing no rock,” she warned. “You’ll scare away the fish.” “Nothing to scare, leastways if you’re gonna use breadcrumbs.” “And why shouldn’t I, Mr. Smarty-pants?” Her eyes locked on his, daring him to answer. “Breadcrumbs break up and float away when they hit the water. Mostly bluegill in this hole, and they like real worms or maybe a big, juicy cricket.” “Oh.” As she stopped her arm in mid cast, her T-shirt slid up on her shoulder, revealing a skin discoloring that looked like a purple armband. Moody climbed up on the rock. “So’d you like the banana bread after all?” “Listen, I’m sorry I spit that out at you. I had to or Jason or Papa Jim woulda smacked me. I did give what you left to Scarf and he loved it.” She smiled. Moody smiled back and sat down beside her, wondering why Jason had lied to him. “So what made you decide to go fishing anyway?”

“Had to. Jeffrey shoved the pole in my hand and told me to take a hike. They had some business to take care of. Prob’ly has something to do with that guy that came to the house the other night in the coolest car I’ve ever seen. Spoke like he used his nose for his mouth and, get this, he drove a ‘55 BMW 507. How sweet! That sucker’s got a 3.2 liter, 150 horsepower V-8 under the hood, and the shame of it is they only made two hundred and fifty-two of them.” “How did a little girl get to know so much about cars?” “I’m not little. I’m already ten. And that’s all the boys read, car magazines. They’re always talking about what they’re gonna buy themselves this fall.” “What about schoolbooks?” Moody said. “Ain’t no pictures of cars in schoolbooks. Just a lot of names and dates.” “Like the names of cars and the dates they came off the assembly line.” She punched him in the arm. Her smile was ringed with yellow teeth. “Guess you got me there.” “Say,” said Moody, standing up, “what’s say we catch ourselves some big, juicy crickets and see how many bluegill we can haul in before nightfall.” She jumped up. “That’s a good idea. Know why?” “Tell me.” “’Cause”—she laughed—“fish taste a whole lot better’n banana bread anyways.” Moody pulled off state road 502 and slid into the Cutler Marathon parking lot at dusk. They had caught a batch of bluegill, and he had shown Joy Lynn how to string them on a cut branch. Karoline had been on a marathon of her own with that quilt of hers and couldn’t stop to make supper. Didn’t matter. The gas station cooked up the best fried chicken in the county because they never spared the grease. And the company wasn’t bad, either. As he climbed out of his F-150, he spotted an old friend pumping gas into a Kentucky state police cruiser. “Toss right sweep on two,” he called. “Ronnie Trapp, you’re the only man I know I recognize better from the back than the front.” The trooper spun around. “Riley Moody, you old coon dog. Anybody else said that to me I’d arrest them for Indecent Advances, but not you. You musta followed my backside through the five hole a million times. How long has it been?” Moody slapped him on the back. “Twenty years, maybe.” Trapp laughed. “No, partner, I mean since I saw you last.” “Why, you were just a little thing.” Trapp laughed again. “Moody, you old liar, I was never a little thing. Say, how’s the family…your wife.” “Karoline’s about the same as she ever was.” “Hey, check out these bars.” The trooper pointed to his shirt. “So it’s Lieutenant Trapp now. Where they got you?” “Post nine. Up in Richmond. I’m the new commander.”

“Whew-ee, I always knew you’d be more than captain of the Woodhole Wackers. Hey, the other night I finally met somebody who’s got shoulders wider than yours.” “No matter how wide your shoulders or fast your draw—” “Speaking of fast draw,” Moody said, leaning back against the gray cruiser, “you must be the ones investigating the Great Cutler Shootout here Friday night.” “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just another drug deal gone bad. I-75 is one big conduit from Miami to Detroit, and it’s only six miles away.” “Drug deal?” said Moody in disbelief. “Boys ’round here claim it was a hit man Houston Conyers called in from Detroit. Way to end the feud once and for all.” “The worst those feuding fools ever did was smack each other up the side of the head. Maybe rearrange a few teeth. Unfortunately, that Lackey kid got caught in the middle.” The state policeman shook his head and removed the fuel nozzle from his car. “Folks round here never change, do they? A made-up story beats the truth every time.” “What are you telling me?” Moody pressed. “I’m saying it was no hit. Just some drug dealer from Detroit who got himself shot. Unfortunately, he was only wounded. Climbed into his sports car and beat it outta Dodge.” Moody wondered aloud. “Wouldn’t be a BMW, would it?” Trapp thought awhile. “Seems to me it was. Some vintage model, too. We put out a statewide A.P.B., but couldn’t find it. Say, how’d you know about the car?” Not wanting to get Joy Lynn involved, Moody answered, “One of the boys told me. That’s the thing about made-up stories. Sometimes they contain a little grain of truth.” Spring slipped into summer, which passed as quickly as an afternoon shower. Moody’s framing crew finished the custom job they were building in Richmond for some professor and moved on to a spec house in Waco. Beverly Scruggs’s cattle got loose and wandered close to the army depot. When they started acting funny and stopped giving milk, Scruggs swore, “It’s the beginning of mad cow disease in the U.S. of A.” Moody decided Scruggs and his satellite dish deserved each other. Missy Turpin accidentally-on-purpose shot her husband during one of their frequent knock-down-drag-em-outs, Clephus Fester nose-dived off the Kentucky River Bridge, and Mary Lou had the chalk scoreboard up to 14. Bobby Lee started a pool, betting all comers Cutler would break its modern-day record of 21 before Christmas. For Moody it was the summer of unspoken rules. Rule number one was, don’t say boo to Karoline until she finished her quilt. That was okay because he taught himself to cook, and by August he was into the “Gourmet Meals” section of Karoline’s Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. Rule number two was, don’t drive the welcome wagon up to the new neighbors’ house. Moody did meet Papa Jim in June. By accident the F-150 stuck in the driveway mud after the water line burst. Looking like the sixty-year-old head of an Amish sect, Papa Jim stopped his king-cab truck, got out a chain, and hauled Moody loose. He drove off before Moody could even thank him. Rule number three was, don’t tell Joy Lynn’s kin where she was on Sunday afternoons, not that they ever asked where she’d been—or cared. When the fishing dried up, Moody took the girl to the Kentucky Horse Park, Natural Bridge, and even to a Reds game. If nothing else, they sat on the rock, and he made up stories for her about the goings-on in Cutler. But one late-August Sunday stuck uppermost in his mind. They went up to the all-you-can-eat brunch at the Oak Tree Inn in Tilghman.

Joy Lynn stuffed her face with mashed potatoes, grits, chicken wings, sweet corn, fried apples, and country ham like she was a bear getting ready to hibernate. “You got a hollow leg, child?” said Moody. “Can’t figure out anywhere else you could put all those fixings.” He wiped his lips with his napkin. Watching him, Joy Lynn did the same. “It’s all so good.” “So what’d you like best?” “The corn.” She beamed. “I’ve been waiting all summer for the boys to harvest our corn crop, but they keep saying it’s not ready yet.” She looked at him sheepishly. “Do you suppose we could go back a third time? Sometimes when I’m bad and don’t deserve no food, they don’t feed me.” Moody fought the urge to react. “What about school? You eat there?” She began twisting her napkin. “I’m…I’m not in school yet.” “School started in Clement County two weeks ago, honey.” “Papa Jim says that he’s not sure we’re going to stay past next week. So it don’t make much sense to put me in when he’d have to take me right out again if we move on.” Moody felt a pain in his stomach that had nothing to do with all the food he had eaten trying to keep up with Joy Lynn. Before his momma’d passed on, she had told him, “You got the Moody Curse all right, Riley. You got the ability to put up with things you know in your heart ain’t quite right without making them worse, but you know you eventually got to do something about them.” He knew his momma was right just as certain as he knew that time was almost on top of him. “Eventually” arrived on Labor Day weekend. Saturday morning Moody busied himself with all the small tasks he could find. The lawnmower got a new spark plug and the front yard got mowed. Then he took the tiller he had salvaged from the junkyard and plowed the garden under. Nothing but a few leggy tomato plants and some undersized peppers that Karoline had neglected once she’d begun the quilt. After a baloney sandwich and pack of Nabs, he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer, so he grabbed the hoe and headed through the field and up the hill. So far back nobody could remember, the hill had been named Blind Man’s Bluff. On it sat a lone oak that must have been well over a hundred years old. Beneath it was a rusty fence that was missing more spindles than it had. The fence encircled an area about twenty by twenty, and twice a year Moody hoed the grass loose and stood upright any of the headstones that had started to lean. He was careful not to disturb any of the large, natural stones, as the souls of the black people gone to rest had over time become just as precious to him as those of his own family. As usual, he was more patient around his momma’s marker, kneeling down and cleaning out the growth so that not a single blade of grass was on top of it, and, as usual, when he got to the last headstone, he cried. He was blinking his eyes clear when suddenly he heard a screaming from the direction of the house. He took off sprinting, unmindful of the holes various creatures had dug in the field. Sweat rolled down his face as he stumbled, righted himself, then passed through the honeysuckle hedge and spotted Karoline. She was standing on the back porch holding the quilt up as proud as a child who had won the secondgrade coloring contest. “I’m afinished,” she yelled gleefully. “I’m afinished.” As Moody reached the back steps, she looked down at him and said earnestly, “Carol will be so pleased, won’t she?”

Moody started up the wooden stairs. “Do you think Carol will be coming home from college soon?” she asked. Moody took the quilt from her and laid it over the railing. Then he took his wife’s hands. “Karoline, you know Carol won’t be coming home from college?” Karoline stared quizzically into his eyes. “She won’t?” “No,” said Moody emphatically, “she’s—” “That’s right,” said Karoline, quickly straightening up and jerking her hands free. “I forgot. She has that new job in…Louisville, isn’t it?” “It’s not Louisville—” “Cincinnati, then. She used to so love that zoo—” “Karoline,” Moody heard himself yelling, “our daughter is—” “At Aunt Sarah’s. That’s it. I remember now. When Carol was a little girl, she always said that if Sarah got sick, she’d be happy to fly to Colorado to take care of her favorite aunt.” Karoline was shaking with excitement. Moody reached out gently and placed his fingers on her cheeks. He could feel the steady beat of her accelerating heart. “Listen,” he said, “you and I and Preacher Blithe and everybody else in Cutler knows where Carol is. Why won’t you admit it?” Moody tried to keep his words as tender as his hands. She began bouncing up and down, rhythmically, as if repeatedly leaping over some invisible jump rope. Moody fought her, trying to calm her, but she wouldn’t respond to his words or touch. Finally, unable to affect her, he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder like a sack of grain, and headed down the steps. She began smacking his back with her balled-up hands, but he barely felt it. Despite her weight, he took long strides. His eyes clouded over with tears, making it hard to see where he was headed, but he kept going. “I should have done this a long time ago,” he announced, stepping through the still-open gate. He put her down. She turned away and faced their log cabin below. He put his hands on her shoulders and gently but firmly turned her around. She brought her hands up over her eyes. “No,” she screamed. “Open your eyes and look,” he demanded. “I can’t. I can’t look at my own fault.” “It wasn’t yours,” he contradicted. “If it was anybody’s, it was mine. I knew you were in fragile condition, but I went with the crew up to Frankfort to frame that house. My fault. Just because we were being paid a bonus.” Karoline fell to her knees, facing the stone. “You got sick so fast, Carol, I didn’t know what to do.” “You did what any momma would do,” Moody said, kneeling beside her. “You took care of her as best you knew how.” “I”—she sobbed—“I’d never seen a seizure before. I didn’t know what to do. She was flopping all over that floor like she was holding onto a bare wire. She scratched me.” Karoline rubbed her fingers along her left breast. “Scratched her own momma like she was some sort of cat. Carol, I am so sorry.” Moody pulled his wife of twenty-two years to his chest and held her tightly. He felt her heave and throe

as though she were having a fit herself. He leaned back against the oak tree and sat there with his arms around her. Finally, when the afternoon shade covered them, she stopped shaking and began to sleep. The next morning, Sunday, Karoline had gone off to the Wal-Mart. She had told him the earliest she would be back was about dark. It was inventory time again. Once again Moody had busied himself with little chores because he didn’t want to look. He reglued the leg of a dining room chair his daddy had carved and his mother had caned with corn shuckings. Then he got ready for winter by splitting the hickory tree that had fallen in the spring. Finally, when his curiosity could no longer be contained, he mounted the stairs to the loft and opened the door. Karoline had preserved Carol’s room as if she were caretaker to a shrine. The bookcase was absolutely dust-free, and the white, ruffled curtains were spotless. Sitting on a shelf that he had built and hung over the bed was the doll collection. The brass on the four-poster bed gleamed in the late-morning light from where his wife periodically rubbed it. And now, thrown over the bed, was the large blue and white quilt Karoline had spent most of the spring and summer making. In spite of himself, he sat down and began to cry. He should have known that taking his wife up to the family graveyard and making her face the truth would do no good. In his heart he had always doubted it would, and that was probably why he had put off for so long forcing her to confront the headstone. After months of therapy, the doctor in Lexington had answered his final question with, “These things take time. There is no timetable, no guarantees. Some, like you, seem to be able to move on after the death of a loved one. Others, like Karoline, may never recover.” That had been last winter. Carol had been dead for over a year. Moody had taken comfort in the other doctor’s words that something had gone wrong in Carol’s brain that no one but God could have known about. He had found solace in his everyday activities where words and places and smells would remind him of her short life. Even Joy Lynn. Twelve years, twelve short years was all the time he had been able to share with his only child. Moody stood up and smoothed the quilt where he had been sitting. As the day before had shown him, Karoline’s way of dealing with the death was different. The quilt, like the ritual cleaning of this room, had been a way of prolonging Carol’s life. But until Saturday he hadn’t realized the depth of his wife’s denial. Karoline had actually created an elaborate story about Carol, wherein she finished high school and went on to college. Having her be the first in the Moody line to graduate had always been a family dream. Then a career in a big city. Yes, in her mind Karoline had accomplished all those things their daughter hadn’t been able to. Carefully Moody shut the door on his past, but not his memories. Moody checked his watch just like he had the minute before. 1:44. He was sitting on the same rock where he had met Joy Lynn for almost six months. Every Sunday noon. Even when the big gullywasher had come that day in June, she’d been there. Atop the rock with a smile and anticipation. But not today. Moody had to admit he was worried. She had told him that Papa Jim might have them leave before the corn was ready. Maybe they had pulled up stakes, left sometime during the past week while he was at work. Just headed someplace else for the fall and winter like the birds. He started walking along the river in the direction she always came from. When he reached Bend Road, he started up it, approaching their property from the opposite direction he had that spring day. A deeper thought troubled him. He had seen new people move in before, but no matter how shy they were or how much they kept to themselves, sooner or later they got to know people at church, at PTA,

somewhere. But other than Jason’s brief appearance at the Marathon station, not this group. And what Joy Lynn had told him made no sense. They had planted corn. No one left a good corn crop in the ground and moved on. Corn could be harvested late into fall, and if by chance something was wrong with it, the corn always made good silage for cattle. As Moody cut off of Bend Road so as to come in behind the old Forbes place, he had a good idea what he’d find, so he took his time and was careful about each step. These people were private for a purpose —and it didn’t have anything to do with being antisocial. First came the NO HUNTING and POSTED signs of newly cut lumber and fresh paint. The first strand of piano wire, still gleaming in the afternoon sun, was easy to spot and avoid, but a razor blade got him. Luckily the blade, attached to narrow-gauge wire, only grazed the back of his hand, and he wrapped his handkerchief around it to stop the bleeding. These people were determined not to let anyone close. Up ahead he heard Scarf bark. He tossed up a few leaves. At least he was downwind. His eyes were so accustomed to searching at neck level that he never saw the tripwire, but the moment his boot made contact he felt the pressure. Quickly he looked off to the right, then the left. There was a box to his right. His boot’s pressure had pulled the door open and out slithered several snakes. Timber rattlers. Luckily they had been in the box, not in the sun, and the coolness had rendered them slow. Carefully he sidled left, glad he had worn his boots. The newcomers must have gone across the river into Estill County and trapped them some snakes. The Kentucky River provided a natural barrier. As long as he had lived in Clement County, he had seen eight-foot-long king snakes and a rat snake or two, but never rattlers or copperheads. He was coming up behind the Forbes place now. He couldn’t see anybody, but he heard talking from the front, toward the driveway he’d been on six months ago. When he reached the back of the house, he peered around to the front. Five of them—Papa Jim, the woman, and the three boys—were building a barrier at the top of the driveway. A wagon had been overturned and some fertilizer bags filled and piled on top of each other. To one side they were busy stacking logs. A boulder to the other side provided natural cover. Quickly Moody began peering through the windows. In the old master bedroom, huddled next to the fireplace with an empty fertilizer bag pulled over her shoulders, was Joy Lynn. He tried to raise the window, but it was stuck. He tried the back-porch screen door. It opened with only a slight creak. He came through the back door and into the kitchen. From there he cut through the room old Matt Forbes had used for his office. The bedroom door was locked. Moody reached up by the transom and found a key still there. He unlocked the bedroom door and opened it, still hearing the voices out front. A shotgun clicked open. As he stuck his head in the bedroom, he put his finger to his lips. Joy Lynn just stared at him as though she had never seen him before. He motioned her over. She just sat there. “Where them sixteen-gauge shells?” came through a window. Unwilling to wait, Moody crossed the room and picked the girl up. She didn’t help or resist, but when he had her hoisted on his shoulder, her nails began to dig into his back. He left the bedroom and cut through the old study. “I think they’re inside,” he thought he heard from the front. “What are you doing?” the little girl whispered in his ear. “Playing a game,” he whispered back. Moody started back the way he had come in, but giving the snake trap wide berth. He heard shouting

from the house. Then a barking. He began to move faster, lengthening his stride while still carrying Joy Lynn. “I’m scared,” she confessed. He started to say, “Me too,” but caught himself. Up ahead Moody spotted the road through the underbrush. “I’m not sure I want to go with you,” Joy Lynn said. His heart jumped. “Why not?” “Papa Jim and Clemily are all I got. They took—” Her words were interrupted by a barking. Directly in front of them. Between them and the road. Scarf. “Good dog, Scarf,” said Joy Lynn, her voice close to panic. Moody could see the dog wasn’t wagging its tail. Its teeth were bared and it was panting loudly. He put the girl down behind him and quickly ripped off his belt. Then he took off his shirt and wrapped it around his arm. Once, when he was younger, he’d gotten this close to a coydog—half-coyote, half-dog —but his father’d been around to shoot the creature before it got closer. Scarf charged them. Joy Lynn screamed. Moody crouched. The dog stopped suddenly and Moody couldn’t figure out why. Between him and the dog was a timber rattler, now very much awake and close enough to take a piece out of either him or the dog. Scarf twitched first. The rattler struck. The dog howled. Moody grabbed Joy Lynn and they hit Bend Road running. They crossed onto the other side, onto Moody property, and started up the edge. Sooner or later the pursuit would be after them. They forded Hines Creek, which ran from his springhouse. When they had passed the driveway entrance, Moody asked, “What were you saying about Papa Jim and Clemily?” She stopped and grabbed his hand. “My real parents, Ma and Pa, were kilt up in the mountains two years ago trying to protect the crop.” “You mean marijuana?” he said. Moody knew his suspicions had been right. The Forbes place, isolated and with rich land, was perfect. Grass growers often tried to hide the stuff in cornfields. Events of the past six months were starting to make sense. The privacy, the visitor in the fancy car, the gunfight. “Yes. It was in the Daniel Boone forest, so they couldn’t take our property away from us. Only some other people tried. A lot of shooting broke out. The five of us got away, and Papa Jim said he’d look after me since my pa had been such a loyal worker. But…” “But what, honey?” Tears hung in the corners of her eyes. “What do I do now?” “You stick with me, honey.” Moody squeezed her hand. “Something bad’s about to happen here now.” “I know. Jason was talking. They heard some people from Detroit are mad at them and are coming to get what’s theirs.” Just then Moody heard some vehicles coming down Bend Road. He pressed Joy Lynn down into the tall, unmowed grass and then ducked down himself. On the road he spotted several big trucks. As they passed, he saw Michigan license plates. “Come on,” he said, heading straight toward his log cabin. “We’ve got to call the state police.”

Usually Moody loved the twilight. Things that bothered him during the day seemed to fade away, and the things that scared him in the night hadn’t shown up yet. It was a time when nature was usually quiet, with the birds finished for the day and the nighttime chorus not yet in place. But this Sunday was different. He had called Trapp at the KSP barracks in Richmond. On telling the dispatcher it was an emergency, he’d been patched through to the post commander, who was already en route, having been given a tip that he might want to see what was growing at the old Forbes place. “You’d best be careful,” Moody had warned. “Those hillbillies haven’t got much firepower, but I’d bet my farm those up-North drug dealers didn’t come down here with no shotguns.” Down below in the valley, when the occasional firing was interrupted by long bursts, he knew he was right. If the army had taught him one thing years ago, it was respect for superior weaponry, especially automatic weapons. A few minutes later a green chopper touched down in his side yard, landing like an awkward praying mantis. A dozen men in full riot gear swarmed out the doors and headed toward the Forbes place. Moody looked away from the living room window. On the couch beside him, Joy Lynn’s little body heaved with deep sleep. He had cooked her two hamburgers, baked a potato, and fixed a green salad. When she was still hungry, he made her a milkshake with fresh strawberries. While she was eating, he noticed for the first time that her T-shirt was the same one she wore every Sunday. In Carol’s room he had found a pair of jeans and a blue top that his daughter had liked to wear to her church youth group. The words “I Shall Fear No Evil” were still visible across the front. When Joy Lynn balled herself up in a fetal position, he went back upstairs, got the new quilt, and covered her. Just after dark, when the area had grown quiet, he saw the headlights coming up the driveway. He closed the door behind him and went out onto the front porch. Trapp got out of the cruiser and took off a bulletproof vest that had blood on it. “You got a cold one?” he said. “I think I could use it.” As the helicopter was lifting off his property, Moody came back with two bottles of Miller Lite. Trapp finished his in almost a single gulp. Moody handed him the second beer. This time the trooper took a sip. “Nine dead,” said Trapp, looking down toward the Forbes place. “Five locals and four imports. Two of mine wounded.” He took a larger sip. “Worst bloodbath I’ve seen since Desert Storm.” “That whole family gone?” Moody said. “Four men and a woman. That’s all there were, isn’t it?” Moody hesitated, listening to his heart beat. “Far as I know.” “We got three of that Detroit crew in custody. It seems your neighbors ambushed one of their mules last March, but instead of doing something about it then, these creeps waited till the marijuana was ready to harvest. Planned to come in here, kill them all, and take their crop.” “Awfully cold-blooded.” “My daddy used to say there was a type a man who was closer to animal than human being. I never truly knew what he meant till today.” Trapp finished the beer. “I got some of my men camped out down there in case anybody else shows, vultures included. We’ll be back tomorrow to haul those plants outta there to burn. My guess is, that crop might be worth close to seven or eight million dollars.” “Lotta money,” Moody said. “Someday, just once, I’d like to find out that men do things for reasons other than money.” Trapp

started to hand him the bottle, then stopped and hugged him. “All those years, I protected your butt. This time, you saved mine.” He stepped back. “I owe you bigtime. If you hadn’t called and given me a heads-up on what was really going down, I’d have walked in there naked and got myself killed.” Moody took the bottle from him. Trapp started down the porch, then stopped and pivoted. “You need anything, ever, Riley, you let me know.” Moody said, “Hey, what are friends for?” “Yeah,” said the trooper. “I’d do it again,” said Moody, “even if there was money involved.” Moody went back inside, his mind exploding in sound. In the back of his head he heard his mother reminding him of the Moody Curse. Another voice was Karoline retelling her made-up story of Carol. Then Joy Lynn was saying, “What do I do now?” He picked up the phone and dialed the recently released Carson Craft, who offered to do the job Moody wanted quick and cheap. Then he re-covered Joy Lynn, who had kicked her quilt loose, and sat down to wait. Sometime just after ten he heard Karoline’s Toyota coming up the drive. She pulled in next to the F150. Moody went outside and opened the car door for her. “You startled me,” she said, picking up a Wal-Mart bag. “We had quite a ruckus around here,” Moody said. “Just wanted to make sure you’d be okay.” “How sweet, Riley.” She kissed him on the cheek. He walked her up to the bottom step and said, “Wait here.” “Is it a surprise?” she said. “You know how I love surprises.” A minute later he opened the front door and brought Joy Lynn onto the porch. In the moth-covered front light, the sleepy-eyed little girl stood there in her bare feet wearing the new quilt like an oversized cape. “Carol, you’re back,” said Karoline, dropping the Wal-Mart bag on the ground. She hurried up the steps and pulled the little girl into her. Moody stepped off to the side. Karoline led Joy Lynn into the house. “How was Aunt Sarah’s? Did you like Colorado? Isn’t flying wonderful?” Karoline stopped at the edge of the kitchen. “I’ll fix us some hot chocolate like I always do, and you can tell me all about your summer.” As the woman disappeared into the kitchen, Joy Lynn turned around and held her hands out as if to ask, “What’s going on?” “We’ll talk in the morning,” Moody whispered. “In the meantime, just enjoy yourself.” Joy Lynn shrugged her shoulders and entered the bright kitchen. Tomorrow, Moody decided, was time enough to tell Joy Lynn what had happened to Papa Jim and the others. Somehow, too, he’d have to explain about Karoline, about Carol, about the birth certificate and adoption papers Carson Craft was working on even now. Then the story about Aunt Sarah’s death—

yeah, how Karoline had a deal with her sister to raise her daughter if anything happened. He’d tell Cutler Elementary, on Tuesday, about Joy Lynn being home-schooled in Colorado. And he’d let the boys down at the Cutler Marathon know he wouldn’t have as much free time as before. Yeah, decided Moody, closing the front door, it was nice to have Trapp covering his backside, but the trooper had been wrong about one thing. Made-up stories weren’t just better than the truth. Sometimes, for a good cause, made-up stories were the truth.•

"Mom Lights a Candle" James Yaffe Mom was telling us the story of Hannukah. Not exactly the version that you’ll find in the Book of the Maccabees. “So the Israelites won the war against the Greeks and kicked them out of the country,” Mom said. “Finally they could enjoy the blessings of freedom and worshiping God like they pleased. Only it turned out there was a flea in the ointment. They couldn’t have a celebration until all the men that fought in the war purified themselves for eight days, and this they could do only by lighting a candle with the holy oil that was kept in the temple. But when those lowlife Greeks ran away, they took all the bottles of holy oil with them, except for one bottle that they overlooked and left it behind. “‘All right,’ said the Israelites, ‘at least we can purify ourselves for one day. One is better than nothing, no? Anyway what can it hurt?’ So they used this bottle of oil to light the candle, and a miracle happened. At the end of the first day the candle didn’t go out. For the next eight days it went on burning. And this is why Hannukah lasts eight days, and every night we light one more candle than the night before. Also this is why the children get a present every night, because otherwise such a long ceremony could bore them to death, and who could blame them?” “What a beautiful story!” said Ann Swenson. Ann is my boss, the local Public Defender, and for weeks she had been hinting to me how interested she was in attending a genuine Hannukah candle–lighting ceremony. So Mom was having her over for dinner on the sixth night of Hannukah, along with her husband Don, the town’s leading dermatologist. “They were pretty superstitious in those ancient times, weren’t they?” Don said. “Believing in miracles and so on.” “What’s the matter with miracles?” Mom said. “I believe in them absolutely. As long as they don’t break the laws of nature.” Before any of us could examine this statement too closely, it was time to say the blessings and light the candles—you’re supposed to do it right after the sun goes down—so the conversation had to stop for awhile. While we’re lighting them—six of them tonight, plus the shamesh (the “server”) which has to be lit first so you can use it to light the others—I’ll answer the question you’re no doubt asking yourself. How did my mother, a New Yorker through and through since her parents brought her over from the old country, end up at the age of eighty in Mesa Grande, this middle-sized town nestling in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains? The answer is me. Until a few years ago I was happy with my job on the New York City Homicide Squad, and Mom was happy with it too. Every Friday night she had my wife Shirley and me for dinner,

and I told her about the latest murder case that was stumping the department, and she asked a few questions and then, using her superior insight into human nature (honed and polished through her long experience with crooked butchers, greedy landlords, and other neighborhood pests), she solved our murder case for us. But suddenly my wife Shirley died, and I couldn’t bear New York anymore, so I accepted Ann Swenson’s offer to be the chief investigator with the Public Defender’s office. A year later Mom packed up her favorite pieces of furniture, her collection of knick–knacks from the old days, and her albums of baby pictures, and came out here too. I never kid myself that she did this because she hated being separated from her darling only son. What she hated being separated from were her Friday night murders. She was smart enough, of course, not to accept my offer that she should move in with me. She bought herself a small house, on the opposite side of town. “Mothers and sons is the most beautiful relationship there is,” she explained. “It shouldn’t be spoiled by them living in the same house together.” So the candles in the menorah, the traditional candleholder with nine branches, were lit now. They were flickering on the mantelpiece facing the window, because on every night of Hannukah you’re supposed to let the world outside see from the street that you’re celebrating the miracle that happened more than two thousand years ago. They’re pretty small candles, even the shamesh is only a little bit bigger, so they never flicker very long—just as the freedom of the Israelites didn’t last very long, only eighty years, and then the Romans squashed it for good—but in the meantime you bask in that light, you feel great about life, and you stuff yourself with delicious food. “So talking about people with blood on their hands,” Mom said, “is your office handling any interesting murders lately?” I wasn’t embarrassed by this question. Long ago I had explained to Ann about Mom’s habit of giving me hints that sometimes helped me solve my cases. Once or twice, in fact, Ann had already seen Mom in action. “What a coincidence,” Ann said. “The case we just got assigned to us has a lot to do with Hannukah. A man was killed in the middle of a candle–lighting ceremony, like the one you just had.” “It’s a pretty bloodthirsty story, honey,” Don Swenson said. “Maybe we shouldn’t spoil the dinner, ruin everybody’s appetite—” “Don’t worry already,” Mom said. “A little blood wouldn’t spoil a good dinner. It’ll bring out the flavor. Eat your matzoh ball soup, and let’s hear the details.” So alternating between talking and eating, I filled Mom in on the case. It took me quite awhile, between the soup and the chopped liver and the pot roast with noodle pudding. I didn’t come to the end if it till we were all sipping Mom’s coffee and taking bites of heavenly schnecken full of raisins and cinnamon and a few thousand calories at least. “Susan Kleinman,” I started in, “is a woman in her forties, living with her five-year old son and her father who’s in his seventies. Her husband Mark, an up-and coming dentist, died three years ago. A sudden heart attack, very tragic, but he left her fairly well fixed, in a two-storey house in a nice section of town. She added to her income by taking a job as a dental assistant, which she used to do for her husband. And she had religion to comfort her in her loss. Mark Kleinman had been an observant Jew, though not fanatical, and Jeremiah Bosky, Susan’s father, was a Conservative rabbi before he suffered the stroke that left his legs paralyzed. “Naturally this family has always celebrated Hannukah. It was a happy time for them in the past—but

not this year. Susan’s late husband had a younger brother, Ivan, who was exactly the opposite from him in every respect. Everybody describes him as a bum, a drinker, a deadbeat who could never hold a steady job and was always borrowing money that he never paid back. He was a wanderer too, never staying long in one place, going for months with nobody knowing where he was, then suddenly showing up at his brother’s door, dead broke, shabbily dressed, smiling as he asked for another loan. Everybody mentions that charming smile of his.” “I had a second cousin like that,” Mom said. “Herbie the Horseplayer, we called him. One day he played one horse too many, and from the coffin he was smiling up at us.” “Anyway,” I went on, “last week on the first night of Hannukah Susan Kleinman’s brother-in-law Ivan shows up at her house. She hasn’t seen him since her husband’s funeral, but on his death bed Mark asked her not to abandon the poor fellow, so Susan invites him to stay with them for a few days. Pretty soon she knows she made a big mistake. Ivan begins by borrowing the money from her to pay the cab he rode up in. He talks too loud and too slow to her father, pretending to think the old man is hard of hearing, which he isn’t. He makes snide cracks about Judaism and prayers and the whole idea of being Jewish, and guffaws at the suggestion he should hang around on the first night of Hannukah. Then he borrows fifty bucks from Susan because he has a hot date that night. “‘But you just got to town,’ Susan says, ‘who can you have a date with?’ “‘That’s what the fifty bucks is for,’ he says. ‘Getting-acquainted money.’ “But the worst thing he does, he turns on the charm for his young nephew Joey, Susan’s five-year old. He has the boy eating out of his hand in no time. The next day he’s teaching him risque songs, giving him the graphic details of his sexual conquest the night before, and advising him not to pay any attention to all these dreary rules—regarding table manners, telling the truth, and being kind and considerate to others—that his mother and his grandfather are always pumping into him. ‘It’s all a lot of crap, kiddo,’ he says. ‘People who can’t make it in this world come up with crap like that because they’re jealous of people who can.’ “That night Ivan skips the Hannukah candle-lighting again to go out on the town—take one guess how he gets the money to finance his little expedition—and Joey, during dinner, asks Susan why they waste their time on all that Hannukah crap. “When Ivan stumbles in at one that morning, Susan is waiting up for him and tells him he’s got to leave the next day. He tells her he isn’t ready yet. ‘What’re you going to do, sister dear?’ he says. ‘Get Grandpa to throw me out on my ear? Call the cops? That would make a nice stink in your quiet respectable neighborhood!’ “But the next day—which is three days ago, the third day of Hannukah—he tells Susan, in the middle of the afternoon, that he’s going to stick around for dinner and the candle-lighting tonight. He tells her the girl he had a date with, the same girl he picked up on his first night in town, just called to say her father wouldn’t let her out of the house and especially not to see him, and since she’s a teenager she has to follow Daddy’s orders. Susan definitely gets the feeling he’s scared about something. “Which brings us to the murder. The candle-lighting takes place upstairs in old Jeremiah’s room, since he can’t get downstairs in his wheelchair. Being the oldest person in the group, Jeremiah says the introductory blessing, then Susan lights the shamesh and uses it to light the first candle, and all of a sudden the doorbell rings downstairs. A genuinely religious person isn’t supposed to interrupt the candlelighting for anything except an emergency, but Ivan couldn’t care less, so he goes downstairs to see who’s at the door. While the next candle is being lit, the people in the old man’s room hear Ivan’s feet walking down the stairs, then they hear the front door opening, and then they hear a noise that drives candles and prayers right out of their heads. It’s a loud blast, like a gun, a very big gun, being

shot off. “Susan rushes down the stairs, telling Joey to stay in the room with Grandpa. What she finds is her brother-in-law Ivan lying in the front doorway, and his head and clothes and the whole area is a bloody mess. She also thinks she hears a car driving away from the house, but it’s not surprising that she doesn’t go outside to take a look. Next she calls the police, then she runs upstairs, intercepting Joey just in time to keep him from looking over the bannister and seeing the horrible sight below. She sends him to his room and orders him to stay there until she comes for him. She tells her father what happened, and then she goes downstairs to wait for the police. In the middle of that horror, and with a crowd of people from the neighborhood already gathering on the street to gawk at the show, she takes a seat and waits patiently and calmly—a damn brave woman. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the police arrive. “They could see right away that Ivan was shot in the face and the chest by some kind of powerful hunting gun. But the gun hadn’t been dropped anywhere on the lawn or nearby. There were no clear footmarks in the blood, and no car tracks on the grass—though there wouldn’t be, of course, if the killer had been parked on the street. “Then the cops who are searching the neighborhood make a big discovery. There’s an empty house on the corner, it’s had a For Sale sign in front of it for months, and inside the garage the cops find a man, some kind of homeless vagrant, with his clothes practically in rags, and all his belongings shoved into a sack. He’s cowering in the back of the garage, trying to hide behind some rusty old machinery, and on the floor next to him is a gun. A big hunting rifle, very old, battered and scratched, but it still seemed to be in fairly good shooting condition. He swears it doesn’t belong to him. He was sleeping on the floor of the garage, he says, and the gun got thrown through the wide-open garage door—he thought it came from a car that went speeding by, but it was dark out, he was groggy from the cheap wine he drank earlier, so he couldn’t even begin to describe that car. But he swears he didn’t kill anybody, he was fast asleep for the last few hours until a lot of noise woke him up, he doesn’t even know anybody who lives in this neighborhood. He keeps giving his name—Oscar Mulligan—as if that was some kind of proof that he’s telling the truth. “The next morning the cops send the gun to the lab and compare it to the bullets in Ivan’s body. Sure enough this is the gun that killed him, though it’s such an old model, and it’s obviously been through so many people’s hands for so many years, that there’s no way of tracing who it belongs to. The cops believe Oscar Mulligan’s story. He isn’t so old, probably no more than fifty, but he looks twenty years older, and his hands are shaking so hard he doesn’t seem to have the strength to pull a trigger, much less aim a gun at somebody. But you know our brilliant DA. He likes to arrest people. Gives him the feeling he’s a big man. Mulligan’s got no motive, nobody’s been able to find any connection between him and Ivan Kleinman, and he isn’t physically capable of committing the crime—but he’s got no money, no connections, no lawyer. If you can’t arrest a nobody like him, who can you arrest, for God’s sake? So this morning the DA files charges against Mulligan, and that’s how the Public Defender’s office got into the case.” “So what are the steps you’re taking?” “The obvious ones,” Ann said. “Dave’s been spending the last three days digging up other people who might have motives for murdering Ivan Kleinman.” “And how is it going, this digging?” Mom asked. “Too damn well,” I said. “Ivan Kleinman’s trail wasn’t hard to follow. It’s littered with the crumpled remains of women he made love to, took their money, and dumped them. Beginning with his ex-wife.” “This no-good was married once?”

“Oh yes. Five years ago he married this woman, Betty Davidson. She lived in Denver—still does—and works as a computer researcher for a financial consultant. She was brought up in a religious family, and they had a nice traditional wedding, with a rabbi, and Ivan broke the glass under his foot. Then they settled down in Betty’s house, and Ivan looked for a job (though he didn’t happen to find one) and began to wear dark three-piece suits and subscribe to Time magazine. Susan and Mark went to visit them three or four times in the next year. Susan liked Betty very much—‘a nice simple goodnatured person,’ she says—and she was thrilled at the change in Ivan. But it all blew up after a year, when Ivan talked Betty into putting all their money—meaning her money, of course—in a joint checking account. The first check he drew on it was for the entire amount, and he never went home from the bank.” “But this Betty still isn’t out of Susan Kleinman’s life?” “Well, Susan and Mark tried to go on being friendly with her, but she made it clear she didn’t want anything more to do with them. She told them she blamed them for not warning her what Ivan was really like. After that Susan didn’t hear from Betty for years, not even when Mark died—until a few weeks ago, when Betty called and wanted to know where Ivan was. When Susan said she didn’t know, Betty wouldn’t believe her, and she did a lot of yelling, until Susan had to hang up on her. Since then she’s called three or four more times, leaving her number when Susan refused to talk to her. Also leaving threats to the effect that Ivan had destroyed her life, so now she was going to do the same for his. “Another thing about Betty. She does a lot of hunting, and her basement is full of guns, And she can’t account for any of her time from noon on the day of the murder to midnight. She said she took a drive in the country, just to enjoy the weather—which, I’m sure you remember, was cold as hell.” “So what are you waiting for?” Mom said. “Tell the police about this ex-wife—she sounds like a good candidate.” “Oh, we can do better than that, Mom. I’ve come up with another half dozen candidates who’re just as good. People, male and female, who hated Ivan’s guts and don’t have any alibi. There’s Burt Callahan, this ex-Marine who lives in a trailer on the South side of town. A few years ago he found out Ivan was having a hot affair with Doris, Callahan’s wife. He beat her up and went to jail for six months, and she divorced him while he was inside. He came out threatening to give Ivan what he deserved. He’s a gun man too—he’s got a collection of souvenirs from his time in the Marines—and on the night of the murder he was drinking himself into a stupor in his trailer—all alone, nobody saw him do it. “And there’s Carlo Spinelli, who owns this restaurant in town. Ivan was in there on the first night of Hannukah and picked up the waitress, Rosa, who happens to be Spinelli’s daughter. He took her out again on the second night, and the date ended with him asking her to do something—the poor girl couldn’t even bring herself to tell me what it was—and her refusing to do it, so he gave her a black eye. She went crying to her father, and he told the whole neighborhood he’d kill the bastard, and wandered all over the city till the early hours of the morning. This was the reason, incidentally, why Ivan stayed home on the third night of Hannukah: he was scared of running into Rosa’s father. “I’ve dug up at least three more injured husbands and outraged fathers, not to mention furious women with shooting experience. And also, Ivan did a little gambling, and sometimes it slipped his mind to pay his losses. And also—” “So you can bring up all these people in court,” Mom said. “Sure we can,” Ann said. “The trouble is, we haven’t got any evidence against any of them, including against Betty Davidson, the ex-wife. All we’ve got in any of these cases is a motive.” “But for your client, this homeless fellow with the sack, the District Attorney don’t even have a

motive.” “What does it matter?” Ann said. “Our client was hiding out in a garage half a block from the murder scene, and the murder gun was in his possession. He’s a misfit. He’s homeless. Obviously he’s mentally unstable. Who knows, he could be a serial killer. People like that don’t need any motives.” She shook her head; her cheeks were flushed. Ann really lets herself care about things. “So what do you think, Mom?” I said. “Got any brilliant ideas about what we’re missing?” Mom sipped down the last of drop of her coffee and wiped her mouth with her napkin. Finally she spoke. “Could I ask you maybe a few questions? About this Betty, the ex-wife. When she and Ivan lived together, did he make sarcastic remarks about being Jewish and practicing the religion, like he did the night he was killed?” “He sure did. She used to complain about it to Susan and Mark. But she loved Ivan in those days, so she convinced herself like she told them, that some day he’d ‘grow out of it.’” “Another question,” Mom said. “This Callahan and this Spinelli, and all these other people that had a grudge against Ivan Kleinman—did they know he was Jewish?” “I don’t see how it matters, Mom—” “Never mind matters please. Answer the question.” “Well, most of them probably didn’t. After his experience with Betty Davidson, Ivan made a point of keeping away from Jewish girls, he told Susan that they were obsessed with getting married and having children. He also told her that he never let any of his gentile girlfriends know he was Jewish, on the theory that some of them might be anti-Semitic, and that would cut down on his chances of getting them into bed with him.” Mom thought this over a moment, then gave a nod. “One more question I’ll ask. What happened to the candles?” “Excuse me?” “When the doorbell rang and Ivan Kleinman went downstairs to answer it, Susan was lighting the Hannukah candles. So what happened to those candles?” “Nobody really paid attention, Mom. Nobody thought it was particularly—” “I think I might know the answer to that,” Ann said. “I talked to the policeman who spoke to old Mr. Bosky on the night of the murder—the first policeman to go upstairs, five or ten minutes after they arrived. He mentioned to me that there was the smell of smoke in the room. He saw melted wax and the burnt wicks filling up the three holders on the right side of the candelabra—excuse me, the menorah?— and he saw what was left of the server candle in the raised holder in the middle, with some wisps of smoke rising up from it. He thought the old man was performing some kind of witchcraft or voodoo or something, I had a hard time convincing him otherwise.” Mom nodded, grinned, made a little whistling noise. I recognized all of these symptoms. “So it’s obvious now what happened, no?” she said. These little dramatic ploys of hers were totally familiar to me after all these years. I wouldn’t let them get a rise out of me. But they were new to Ann and Don, who gaped and shook their heads, and said, “But how could you possibly—” Just the reactions Mom was fishing for. I could see the pleasure sparkling in her eyes.

“It’s so simple,” Mom said, “maybe it isn’t even worth explaining. You don’t have to search all over the world for people that hated this Ivan Kleinman. You don’t have to wear yourself out checking alibis. Look at how this murder actually happened, and you can see there’s only one person that could’ve done it. The murderer rings a doorbell, holding a big gun in his hand, planning to shoot the person that comes to the door. But suppose it’s the wrong person. Suppose the door is opened by somebody the murderer don’t want to kill. Then this somebody starts yelling, and other people in the house come to the door, and maybe some of the neighbors look out their windows, and everybody sees who the murderer is, without he even got a shot at the person he wants to kill. So how can this murderer be sure, when he comes to the Kleinman house, that Ivan, and only Ivan, is going to open the door? “The answer is another question: Why was Ivan the one that opened the door? Because the rest of the family was upstairs lighting the Hannukah candles, saying the blessings, and this is a ceremony you’re not supposed to interrupt in the middle, unless there’s a real emergency. But Ivan was the person in that house that laughed at the old Jewish ceremonies. He’s the only one that was going to open the door if the bell rang while the candles were being lighted. “So look already what the murderer has to know if he’s going to commit this murder and get away with it. He has to know about Hannukah, what goes on with the candle-lighting. He has to know the menorah is going to be in a window looking out on the street, so the whole world should see the family is celebrating the holiday—and also so a murderer standing outside, waiting for his chance, knowing it depends on exact down-to-the-minute timing, can see exactly when the candle-lighting begins. Because if he rings the doorbell too soon, there’s no guarantee the person he’s after will come to the door. “Another thing, more important already, he has to know the attitudes to this holiday in this particular family. He has to know what Susan feels about being Jewish—that she wouldn’t ever go to the door while she was lighting the candles or send her little boy to do it. He has to know what Ivan feels about these things also—that he’d be happy to answer the doorbell during the candle-lighting, since this would be another way of sticking his tongue out at those foolish old Jewish customs… “So look at those candidates you mentioned. The ex-Marine, the Italian restaurant owner, all those mad husbands and fathers, all those poor women that got their hearts broke—how many of them knew even that Ivan was Jewish? How many of them know anything about Hannukah? And the ones that maybe do—the ones that are Jewish themselves maybe—how many of them know what’s going on inside the Kleinman family, what are Susan’s and Ivan’s personal attitudes to religion—how many of them are so intimate with the Kleinmans they could have this information? “So we just ruled out the whole population of the world, didn’t we, and narrowed the murderer down to only one suspect? She knows about Hannukah, because she’s Jewish and goes to the synagogue. She knows about Ivan’s snotty attitudes to his religion, because she lived with him for a year as his wife. “So—am I right or am I wrong?” Long pause, while Arm and I gave each other some triumphant and superior looks. “You’re right, Mom,” I said. “It was Betty Davidson, the ex-wife. She hated him for what he did to her, she’s a little bit crazy with her bitterness, so she drove from Denver and parked her car down the street from Susan’s house, and kept watch on the window of the old man’s bedroom until she saw the candles lighting up in there. Then she rang the doorbell and stood with her gun ready, and when Ivan opened the door she blasted away.” “There’s absolutely no doubt about it,” Ann said. “She made a full confession a few hours ago, when the Denver police came to arrest her.” “She did more than that,” I said. “She had another gun, hidden under her overcoat. She pulled it out and

turned it on herself. She was dead before they could call the ambulance.” Another long pause, and the look on Mom’s face was worth the effort I’d been making all night to keep my cool. It was a look of confusion! In my whole life before I couldn’t remember when I ever saw Mom looking confused! “You arrested her?” Mom said. “She confessed? She killed herself? My nice logical solution—you figured it out yourself before you even got here tonight, before you told me anything about the case! A test, this is what it was? You were testing me if I still got all my brains in my head?” I was suddenly a little nervous. I couldn’t tell from the look on Mom’s face how she was taking the trick we’d played on her. I went up to her in her old easychair and put my arms around her. “You passed the test with shining colors, Mom. You’re still the world’s champion.” “But you have to admit,” Ann said, “Dave didn’t come out of this too badly either. He figured it all without one bit of help from you. It shows what a great teacher he’s had.” Another moment of silence, and then Mom’s face softened and a big smile, which included her eyes, spread over her face. “I give you credit, Davie,” Mom said. “Not for the murder only, also for fooling your old mother. Not many people, since I was twelve years old, able to say such a thing.” Then her smile exploded into a laugh, and she offered more coffee and schnecken all around. Half an hour later Ann and Don got up to go. I did too, because Mom was looking tired all of a sudden. But she took me by the hand and said I shouldn’t leave just yet, she needed me to help her with the dishes. Ten minutes later we were alone, facing each other, in her livingroom. “The day is never going to come,” I said, “when you need my help with your dishes. Remember who I am? I’m the klutz, the schlimazl, the idiot son with seven thumbs and two left feet. So let’s hear what’s on your mind.” “Congratulations, you’re making logical deductions again,” Mom said. She dropped onto the couch with a sigh. “You’re right, we definitely got something to talk about.” As I sat down next to her, I felt a sharp pang deep inside me. Was Mom about to tell me what, I suddenly realized, I’d been dreading to hear from her for three or four years now? But as it turned out, the time for that terrible conversation hadn’t come just yet. “What we have to do now,” Mom said, “is clear up the truth about this murder.” “But we’ve got the truth,” I said. “We asked ourselves the right questions, the same ones that you did tonight, and we came to the same logical conclusions. And the woman did confess—” Mom broke in, with that touch of impatience in her voice. “Asking the right questions is very nice. It’s also necessary to ask all of them.” “Which ones did we leave out, Mom?” “You asked how the murderer knew that Ivan would be the person that opened the door. You didn’t ask how she knew in the first place that Ivan was going to be in the house that night.” “Well, he was living there—” “For the first time in years, and for only three nights. And for his first two nights he didn’t get in till the early hours, he picked up this teenage waitress, this Rosa, and went out with her twice, and was planning a third time. It wasn't till the middle of the afternoon that he told his sister-in-law he was staying home on the third night, on account of he was scared of the girl’s father. So tell me please—

how did the ex-wife find out he was going to be home that night, he was going to be there when the candles were lit? Only one way she could find this out—somebody that knew about it had to tell her. Somebody, in the middle of the afternoon, had to call her up on the phone and say to her something like, ‘He’s going to be eating with the family tonight. He’s going to be here when we light the candles. Whatever you want to do about that, tonight is the night to do it.’ Somebody that expected she would try to kill Ivan Kieinman, though there was no way to know how. Somebody that wanted so much to get rid of him, but didn’t want to run the risk doing it himself. “Did you ever ask yourself already, why is there a shamesh on the menorah? Wouldn’t it be easier we should light one of the sacred candles every night and use it to light the other sacred candles? It would be a big saving in candles, no? But the ancient rabbis decided this wouldn’t be right. The eight sacred candles, they decided, stand for light and learning and freedom, and they can’t be used for impure purposes, for gaining anything practical or beneficial or unspiritual. They can’t be used as candlelighters, which would make their purpose impure. There has to be a ninth candle which isn’t sacred, which does the hard work and sometimes maybe the dirty work so the others won’t have to spoil their purity. Purity yet! Very nice when you’re worshiping God. But when you want to kill somebody, only you don’t want to soil yourself doing it with your own hands. So you find for yourself a shamesh that will do it for you. This type purity—excuse me, I’ll take dirt!” “But Mom, the person who set this up had to be living in that house. And there’s nobody that could be. Susan wasn’t going to commit murder when all she had to do to get Ivan out of the house was call the police. Five-year old little Joey wasn’t going to do it—even if he could think up such a plan, he doesn’t know how to dial a phone number yet. Ivan didn’t arrange it all himself out of some suicidal guilt feelings—when did he ever give any sign that he was capable of feeling guilt or working up the courage to commit suicide? And the old grandfather, Jeremiah Bosky—he’s paralyzed from the waist down, he can’t get down the stairs by himself.” “Why did he need to get down the stairs? What did he need legs for? All he needed was a phone in his room—which he had—and the phone number of his shamesh, which he also had—Betty Davidson called the house three four times and left her number. But you know what’s the big giveaway, the final proof what he did? It’s the celebration he gave for himself after she committed the murder for him.” “What celebration?” “Right after the murder, when everybody left him alone in his room. Can you imagine it already, the look on his face? He did it! He got rid of the evil tyrant! He won another battle for freedom! Such joy he was feeling, such pride in himself!” “But how did he celebrate?” “The way the ancient Israelites did, how else? He lit the candles, the ones that Susan started to light but everybody forgot about them when the shooting happened. She managed to light only one candle and was just starting in on the second, but when the policeman went up to the old man’s room, maybe forty minutes or more after the shooting, he found three of the candle holders full of melted wax…And also he found the shamesh with smoke rising up from it…It was still giving out smoke over forty minutes after Susan lighted it? There’s only two explanations for this that I could think of. One is that old Jeremiah went through the candle-lighting ceremony all over again when he was alone in the room. This is the explanation I’m preferring.” “What’s the other one, Mom?” “The miracle that happened over two thousand years ago was happening again, right here in Mesa Grande. The candle went on burning after it was out of oil. About this explanation, you’ll excuse me, I’ve got my doubts. God isn’t performing any miracles for a foolish conceited old man that wanted to

take over God’s work for Him.” I couldn’t say anything for a long time. I like to think that my disappointment—my awareness that Mom had outclassed me once more—was the least of the emotions I was feeling. A frown, thoughtful not angry, came over Mom’s face. “Of course,” she said, “it isn’t possible anybody could ever prove any of this in a courtroom, with a judge or a jury.” “Maybe it isn’t. But the police have to give it a try anyway. That old man is an accomplice in a murder. Morally he’s just as guilty as—” ’So we tell the police, we make a big stink, they arrest him—so then what happens? Look at this old man, what do you think is the condition of his health? Even if there was a trial in a courtroom, what’s the chances he’ll still be alive at the end of it?” “That’s not the point, Mom—” “So what’s the point already? Susan Kleinman and her little boy get their names and pictures every day in the newspapers and on the television. She loses her job—what dentist can trust an assistant who’s got a lunatic for a father? The little boy goes to school, where all the children point their fingers at him and tell him they’re not allowed to play with him because he comes from a family of murderers. And he grows up thinking this himself, full of anger at the grandfather he loves! Two nice people that never hurt anybody, the rest of their lives are ruined—in your opinion, this is the point?” “It’s a question of justice. Guilt should be brought out into the open…” “And after you bring it out, think how good you’re going to feel about yourself! Think how pure you’re going to be! What’s the misery of a couple innocent people compared to that?” Mom said nothing more. She just looked at me, and after awhile I looked down at the carpet… “So here’s what you can do now,” Mom finally said, bustling to her feet. “Help me clean up the mess from these candles.”

“If All is Dark” Mat Coward Years ago, I saved someone’s life. But only for a while. I’m not long back from a funeral, so the past is very much on my mind. There’s one day from my childhood that I think about a lot. Not that it was any great big thing, it wasn’t of life-sized importance, but it’s something that’s stuck in my memory over the years. What’s strange, thinking about it now, is that I can’t even remember how the kid died, though I must surely have known at the time. When I was fourteen, I wrote a poem and it was published in the school magazine. It was a poem about depression. (See? I said I was fourteen.) There was a boy at school, nearly a year older than me, very bright but very tough. He spoke in a growl with his teeth shut. Karl May: he wasn’t tall—no taller than me, maybe even an inch shorter—he wasn’t big, in fact he wasn’t far off weedy, but everyone was frightened of him. I used to think it was because he growled. Or because he looked at you with his eyes shut or because he always had his hands in his blazer pockets and he shivered a lot. It wasn’t that, though. The teachers were frightened of him, too; not physically, but…well, yes, I suppose, physically. In a way. Not because they thought he was likely to give them dead legs, presumably, or knee them in the nuts, or shove their heads down toilet bowls. They were frightened of him, I think now, because from the first moment they put eyes on him they knew: he isn’t one of ours. There could be no contact between them and him. The only contact he had with people was when he shoved their heads down toilet bowls, and he couldn’t do that to the teachers. As an adult, looking back, I understand that the reason everyone was frightened of Karl wasn’t because he growled but because we could all see where he was going and at some single-cell stratum of our evolved souls we were afraid that if he touched us, or looked at us, or got too near us, we’d have to go with him. He smelled a bit, too, though by all accounts he came from a perfectly decent, clean home. I only ever had one conversation with Karl. He beat me up a few times, but that didn’t involve dialogue, as such. Then the school mag came out, a few days before the summer term ended. I was waiting at a bus stop one afternoon after school, with a few friends, when Karl walked straight up to me. His hair was dark and wild, chopped in all directions, as if the barber had been trying to kill him but had lost his nerve. The other people at the bus stop made space around us. “You wrote that poem?” One thing about Karl, because of his growl it took an effort to make out his words. You had to lean in a bit to hear him properly—which brought you nicely into the range of his knee. You’d try and lean your ears towards him, while at the same time moving your groin away from him. You’d look like an old man leaning over a balcony. “Poem?” I said, my hands pressing my school bag against my balls. “Poem in the mag,” said Karl. He opened his eyes, and spoke the first two lines of my poem. “If all is dark—and all is dark…” I had never been—have never been since—so surprised by anything. I had no idea how to respond. Whatever I said he was going to beat me up, wasn’t he? That was what Karl May did, beat people up. That was who he was. I knew better than to lie, though; bullies enjoy liars. “Yeah, I wrote that.” “All right,” he said, his eyes still open. “Nice one. Good poem.”

He liked my poem? I couldn’t understand what was happening. What was he doing reading the school mag in the first place—let alone admitting to liking a poem? But now, thinking back, I realise my body understood long before my mind did: my back had straightened, and I held my school bag by my side. “OK. Well—thanks.” He nodded. “It gave me assistance,” he said, the phrase clumsy but precise, as if he weren’t speaking his native tongue. “I considered it helpful.” Then he closed his eyes again, and wandered off. He was on his own. He didn’t live on my bus route, I’d never seen him at that stop before. He must have gone there purposely to seek me out. To say thank you for a poem. And about a fortnight later, I heard that he’d killed himself. Rope or pills, I would guess; I think that’s what teenagers mostly use. The first job I ever got sacked from, it was for being continually late for work. The boss called me into his office one lunchtime, after I’d been there for about three months, and told me that the firm was going to struggle on without me. “Looking at your supervisor’s report, Dave, I see that you have turned up after ten o’clock on almost thirty per cent of working days.” “I know,” I said. “The thing is, I oversleep.” “Oh,” said the boss. “You sleep on your own time as well, do you?” He gave me a reference, though. They always did in those days. It was 1979, and I was nineteen. In all fairness, I’d only been caught asleep at work once—and in my defence, I was drunk on that occasion. It had been someone’s birthday. It was kind of the boss to sack me at lunchtime, because it meant I could spend the rest of a perfumed spring day strolling around London with my tie in my pocket, exchanging my Luncheon Vouchers in a sandwich bar, popping into a couple of pubs for a slow half, and thumbing the stock in second-hand bookshops. Sometime in the mid-afternoon I was walking slowly along a quiet street near the Old Bailey, happy that I wasn’t sitting in an office during that most dragsome period of the working day, when, through a shopfront window, I saw a very pretty girl. She looked about my age, with dark hair and a lot of smiles. She was laughing with a colleague as I pushed the door open, and the little bell jangled above my head. “Hello.” She stood up. She was wearing a white shirt and a blue skirt, but on her it looked quite informal. I was glad I’d taken my tie off. “Can I help you?” She said it as if she really meant it. She fetched me a cup of coffee as I sat at her desk, not looking with any great interest at her company’s leaflets. “Thanks,” I said. “I could do with that.” “You might not think so once you’ve tasted it. The water here’s foul.” “Really? Well, next time I’ll bring my own.” She didn’t just smile a lot; she laughed a lot, scrunching her eyes up as she did so. She was lovely. She looked as if she was full of kindness, and didn’t care who knew it. “The thing is,” I said, “I’ve just been sacked. And I was on my way down to the river to chuck myself in, when I saw your sign.” “Recruitment,” she said, nodding. “Simple and to the point. And just in time.”

“So—we’ve already saved your life! Well, in that case we’d better see what else we can do for you. What sort of firm were you working for?” “I think it was probably the KGB,” I said. “But it used insurance as a cover story.” “And are you particularly committed to working in the insurance industry?” I looked at her and she looked at me and I choked back a laugh at the same moment as she released one. “No, I know,” she said. “It’s not very likely, is it? But I’m supposed to ask.” “I don’t care what I do.” I took out a packet of Rothmans, and we both lit up. “As long as it’s dull, mostly indoors, and nothing I’ve got to think about.” “Dull?” “Yeah,” I said. “And Luncheon Vouchers—I do insist on Luncheon Vouchers.” She half-closed her eyes, perhaps against the smoke from her cigarette. Or from mine. It was obvious she wasn’t a frequent smoker. “You actually want the job to be dull?” “Definitely. Look—working is dull. Right? That’s an unavoidable fact. So the worst thing you can do is get yourself a job that seems to be slightly interesting, that hints at being something that might engage your interest. Because before long, you’ll realise it’s not. It’s just another job.” “And you’ll be disappointed.” “Right. Disappointed and disillusioned and bitter.” “Whereas if you go into a job knowing from the start that it’s dull…yeah, actually that makes sense.” “Because work isn’t life, is it?” I looked around for an ashtray. There wasn’t one. She slid a green metal wastepaper bin round the desk with her foot. “Ta. Life is what you do after work. Work is just eight hours of—you hope—tolerable tedium. Necessary, but—” “Dull. Yeah.” “I mean this job, here,” I said. “My job?” “Your job. Recruitmenting. It’s not your life, is it? It’s only a job.” “Actually, it’s bloody awful,” she said and giggled. She looked around, but there was no-one else in the room. The man I’d seen her talking to before I came in had legged it into the back office as soon as I appeared, and had yet to emerge. “Boring as hell. But I know what you mean—you’ve got to buy a ticket if you want to ride on the bus.” “Exactly. So, then, after work,” I said—and that was where my nerve ran out. Or the effect of the couple of pints I’d had at lunchtime ran out, or the euphoria of being unemployed for an afternoon ran out. She waited a second or two to see if I was actually going to ask her out, then she closed her eyes and smiled and said “Tell you what, let’s fill in a form. We can’t have you missing out on your eight hours of daily tedium, can we?” “I’m entitled to my tedium,” I agreed. “Course you are.” She opened a draw and pulled out a form; white top copy, then green, then blue, with carbon paper between the layers. It took her only a moment or two to locate a biro on the desk.

“Obvious place to start: what’s your name?” “Funny, I was just going to ask you the same question.” “Oh, really?” She tapped the pen against her teeth. “Well, you know, in case I need to…” She smiled as I spluttered, then held out her right hand. “Alison Martin.” “Pleased to meet you, Alison.” We shook hands. “I’m Dave Paddock.” “Paddock?” She screwed up her eyes again, as if to see me more clearly by removing distractions. “Right.” She wrote my name in the appropriate box. “Address, please.” I gave her the address of the youth hostel where I had been living since coming to London the previous year. Admitting to such lodgings completed my deflation. “You’re not a Londoner, then, originally?” “God, no fear! No, I grew up in Swindon.” Alison chucked the pen down on the desktop, and sat back in her swivel chair. “I thought I heard a hint of the old accent in there! I’m from Swindon, too.” “You’re kidding?” “How about that? Which school did you…” This time her eyes opened wide. “You wrote that poem!” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Poem?” “You’re Dave Paddock—you wrote a poem in a school mag. My brother had it taped to the wall above his bed. A poem about depression.” “Your brother?” “Karl May. You were at school with him, and you wrote a poem.” “Well, yes, that’s right. But you said your name was Alison Martin?” “Oh, that’s my—I’m married.” She picked up her cup of coffee, turned it round and put it down again. “I see. Yes, of course.” Married? It seemed more than ridiculous, that such a lively young girl could be married. Almost obscene, somehow. “I’m twenty-three,” she said. “Nearly four years older than Karl.” “Right. We probably never met, then. At school.” “It is you, though?” “Yes,” I said. “I did write a poem. About depression. Though, in mitigation, I should say I’ve never written one before or since. A teenage aberration.” Alison was looking past me, out through the window. “That poem! It was the only thing—you knew he’d died?” “Yes.” Oh God, what I’d said about jumping in the river! I must have still known, then, how Karl had died. Did he drown? I don’t remember, and I don’t remember remembering. “Yes, I’m very sorry. It was very sad.” She took up her pen again, clicked it on then off. “Well, long time ago. But that poem you wrote—it was…I don’t know how to explain. It was something that…well, let’s say Karl wasn’t someone who

took a lot of interest in poems. Or in anything, really.” With a visible effort, she looked at me and smiled. “Were you a friend of his? At school?” “I…well, I—” “No, sorry, daft question. He didn’t have any friends. Not really. ‘If all is dark…’.” She smoothed the carbon form out in front of her, though it wasn’t creased. Nothing had happened to it that might cause it to crease. “Look, let’s talk about something else. How about O Levels?” “You’ll never guess what I saw yesterday.” “What?” She’d lost her pen. “A bloke wearing a bowler hat.” “Really?” “Honest. Bowler hat, pinstripe, umbrella, buttonhole, copy of The Times. Just like in an old film.” “Well I never.” Her eyes were half-closed again, and the smile was full. Not strong, but full. “Mind, he was Japanese.” “Oh, well!” She laughed. “That doesn’t count. Come back and tell me when you see an Englishman wearing a bowler.” You could call it a passionate affair, except that it lasted longer than most marriages and we never had sex together. We slept together many times, but we never had sex together. I sometimes had sex on my own, if we’re being honest, while we were sleeping together, but I don’t think that counts. You couldn’t call it platonic, though, not by a long way. Physical lust was always there, it just didn’t take the form most usually associated with it. The physical form. Our closeness had nothing to do with our shared background. It was a thing between us, a hot thing but not one that burned out. We didn’t talk about her brother after that first day; didn’t talk about the old town much. Neither of us ever mentioned that bloody poem, ever again. We had some interests in common, which provided us with a kind of prophylactic. It meant we could go on dates, and pretend they weren’t dates. Ian Dury concerts, CND demos, Indian restaurants. Flicking through Time Out, and kissing when we parted. We could pretend we were close friends, that we had a kind of sibling-like friendship, the sort where a boy and girl can see each other naked without noticing. It meant that we could sleep in the same bed, sexless, without having to explain ourselves to ourselves. We weren’t friends, though, we were never friends. We were lovers. Pretending has its uses, I’m not silly enough to deny that; but pretending about the past isn’t pragmatism, it’s madness. I first met Alison’s husband a month or so after I’d met Alison, at a housewarming party. They’d moved from a bedsit in Mill Hill to a two-bedroomed, ground floor flat in Crouch End. I arrived at about ten, carrying the obligatory bottle of white wine—and hoping, like every other male person in the place, that someone else had brought some beer. I despised him as soon as I saw him, sitting on the stairs which led from the kitchen to the shared garden, smoking a joint. On his own. Who smokes dope on their own? At their own party? “Hi,” I said. “You must be Barry. I’m Dave. Thanks for inviting me.” He looked, said nothing, blew smoke. He was fairly tall, quite blond, reasonably well-built. His arms

and legs, his shoulders and neck, hung perfectly, with relaxed elegance, as if the genes of his joints had been taught deportment in the womb. As if whatever space he inhabited at any given moment had been designed with him in mind. He wasn’t really posh—a little posher than me and Alison, but nothing spectacular. He was just one of those people who always seems perfectly comfortable. Even years later, when I knew full well that it was false, he always seemed that way to me. I still had my bottle of wine—my passport, my credential—under my arm. He reached out a casual hand and slipped the bottle free, leaving me standing with a small O between my elbow and my side. I must have looked like a sailor on shore leave. He examined the label. I could have saved him the trouble. It said: “White wine. Produce of France.” The chateau went modestly unnamed. The first words Barry Martin ever said to me: “They just piss in the bottles, you know, and ship it over.” “Who do?” “The French.” He held the bottle over the edge of the iron stairs, and let it go. I heard it bounce on the grass below. “Still—what do the fucking English know about wine?” “That you’re not supposed to drop the bottles,” I said. “It stirs up the sediment.” Barry took a short drag on his joint and then chucked that over the side, too. There was at least three inches of smoking left on it. He took his time exhaling, and said: “There’s beer in the kitchen.” I took my time looking at him. I lit a cigarette. Then I said: “Thank fuck for that.” I despised Barry from the start, but from the start I quite liked him. He was wearing an old tweed sports jacket over a blue t-shirt, and a badge on the lapel read: “Life is shit, there’s nothing else to say”. The point about a slogan like that is, you’ve got to accessorise it with a reasonably cheerful face and manner otherwise there’s no joke. Barry wore it perfectly. I hardly ever saw him not wearing a badge, or sometimes a slogan t-shirt. (My memory says “never,” but I’m not sure that’s likely). The slogans were always witty, cool; never overtly political. He despised anything related to conventional politics, the way only the born-comfortable can. I returned from the kitchen with two cans of beer, and offered one to Barry. He shook his head. “You’re not drinking?” “I’m not allowed to, matey. Not until midnight.” “Not allowed to?” He tipped his head towards the house. “Ask her. She makes the rules, I merely follow them.” He watched me drink the first half of a can, then he said: “She’s an old school friend of yours, I gather,” meaning that he gathered no such thing and that he wanted me to know he didn’t give a toss. “Sort of,” I said. I wasn’t trying to match his coolness. I just couldn’t be bothered to explain. “What do you do?” I asked, though I already knew. He was a student. Had been one for the last six years, ever since leaving school. Was likely to be one forever more, I reckoned, reading between the lines. The lines on Alison’s face when she spoke of him. “I study philosophy.” It’s the sort of thing people might say with a slight air of apology, or selfdeprecation. Especially in those days. Barry just said it straight. “What do you do?” “I don’t study philosophy,” I said. He lit a cigarette, a Camel, and blew the smoke up above his head. After a moment, he said: “What, full time?”

Funny beats Cool, like Paper wraps Stone. The noise of our laughter—and of Barry drumming his feet on the stairs in time to his laughter—earned us an audience. Women smelling of perfume and holding wine glasses (there must have been men there, too, but I didn’t notice them) leant against the kitchen doorway, or perched on the lower stairs with their knees together, watching us as if we were a show. This was a novel pleasure for me; but not, I felt, for Barry. “I saw this ad on telly the other night,” he said, rolling another joint. “Only caught the end of it, don’t know what it was for, but the tag was: ‘Most people have less tartar and some people have no tartar at all’.” “Well,” I said, “that’s Thatcher’s Britain for you, isn’t it?” “Exactly! I mean, it’s two nations, isn’t it? In the southeast there’s people who’ve got more tartar than they know what to do with. Up north, they never see tartar except in glossy magazines at th’hairdressers.” Over the months, as we got to know each other better…no: wrong phrase. We didn’t get to know each other better—that was the point, really. We reckoned we knew enough about each other in the first few seconds to make any kind of relationship based on learning about each other unnecessary and probably unwise. Let’s say, then, that as we spent more time with each other it became clear that we were opposites in just about every way. Less than opposites, we inhabited different geometries. Except in those spaces between the angles, that playing field between the barbed wire, where we kicked jokes back and forth, up and down the wings. You begin to glimpse the evolutionary purpose of laughter when your life becomes folded into that of someone you like but can’t abide. One of our onlookers, that warm night on the stairs, chided her host for his off-colour humour. “You’re not exactly right-on, Barry, are you?” “I can’t help it,” said Barry, well into the beer by now. “The only things that make me laugh are jokes that are offensive to minorities. Don’t know why.” “Maybe,” I suggested, “when you were a baby, your mum dropped you on a poofter’s head?” Barry loved that. His eyes sprang wide, the lush lashes making them look like big round spiders, and he laughed with his mouth open, spilling beer from his can as he threw his arms into the air the way a Latin American football fan celebrates a goal. “I don’t care who I offend,” he said, “as long as they’re downtrodden, so they can’t get me back.” Alison told me once that one of Barry’s early philosophy exams had included the question: “What colour is paint?” I laughed at that—a lot—and Alison smiled, but Barry did neither. Comedy, like everything else, had to be on his terms. His badge that day read: “Don’t look at me—I’m horribly shy.” Big badge, big letters in Day-Glo. One of my favourites. It must be, for me to have remembered it; he never wore the same badge twice, as far as I saw. I’ve no idea where he got them from. (It strikes me now—and only now—that I’ve also no idea what he thought they were for. Did he really think people didn’t pay him enough attention already?) We were sitting in a pub, somewhere in the West End, on a Saturday morning. I don’t recall when we started going out as a threesome, or how. It must have been Alison’s idea, I’m sure; wouldn’t have been anybody else’s. It wasn’t a regular thing. Sometimes I’d arrange to meet Alison somewhere, and she’d turn up with him. Nothing was ever said, any more than anything was ever said when she turned up without him. I think, sometimes, she just felt more comfortable with both of us than with either of us.

Barry’s topic on that occasion was “the apathetic bloody masses,” how they didn’t know what was going on in the world and how they wouldn’t care even if they did know and how people (like me and Alison) who went on Anti-Nazi demos and so on were wasting our time. He was pretty drunk, and his voice was loud in the small pub, until he was silenced by a great chorus of hushes. The masses were trying to hear the television, which was covering a march by miners or steelworkers, I forget which, who were demonstrating against their industry being closed down. I leant across the table, and said: “You know nothing about the life of the ‘masses,’ Barry. My mum used to have to walk ten miles to work every day, carrying a baby.” He squinted at me. “Really?” “Oh yeah. If she turned up without a baby, they’d send her home.” He always had a loud laugh, and we had to leave the pub shortly after that. I don’t think he ever hit her—unless I’m fooling myself—but he was a moody, self-pitying, semialcoholic perpetual student who used a lot more drugs than even the most liberal person might consider wise, and talked about suicide more often than he talked about anything else of significance. To his wife, I mean. “You wouldn’t be the first couple to split up,” I told her once, when we were alone in my studio flat in Edgware. I said it the way a friend would say it, but I won’t pretend I was unaware that my words caused her more pain than comfort. They comforted me, though. “We’d be the first us to split up,” she said, and she never offered me a better explanation than that. It wasn’t something she liked talking about, and I’m not a psychologist. All I can offer is the observation that Alison was someone who stuck at things, who finished what she started. She had the same job for something like twelve years (whereas I very rarely kept a job for more than six months). She tried learning Italian at night classes for several years, long after returning from the holiday she was supposed to be learning it for. She evidently had no talent for languages, but she kept going back to the class, autumn after autumn, doing her homework and playing her language tapes. She didn’t believe in parachutes. That’s the nearest I’ve ever been able to get to an explanation. Although, lately, it sometimes occurs to me that perhaps she would have left him, if there’d been someone she wanted to be with more. I’ve no special reason for thinking that’s true; feeling sorry for yourself, let’s admit it, is one of the few pleasures that deepens in middle-age. In fact they did separate a few times, particularly in the early days. If I was single at the time, she’d usually stay with me for the duration. (I have lived with women on and off throughout my adult life, but never for very long, and only ever through a process of gradualism—the pink toothbrush, the spare pair of knickers, the fat paperback, the spare key—rather than because of sexual optimism). Their separations lasted anything from a weekend to a month. Alison never said to me “I’ve left him” or “We’ve split up”. She never lied. She used to ring from a phone box and ask if I could put her up for “a while.” If I couldn’t, she’d go to her mum’s. If I could, she’d be at the door an hour later, shouldering a single overnight bag, and carrying a bottle of wine. She was a very proper guest. The first time it happened—the first four or five times, in all honesty—I had hopes. At times, I almost felt as if she did, too; though that might only be vanity, contemporary or retrospective. Vanity, or easement. She didn’t drink much, but she could hold what she did drink. One night, with too much vodka taken, and far too many old LPs dusted off, I said: “Just close friends, eh? Eternally. Shuddering like magnets.”

Alison kissed me on the ear. “The only way I could ever get away from him would be if one of us died.” “But why?” “Because any other way could only happen if I wanted it to.” I had just enough self-restraint left—or just enough cowardice—not to ask what was, obviously, the crucial question: did she want to want to leave him? Writing things down in chronological order, I’m sure I’m not the first person to discover, makes them make sense more—or make more senses. I’ve already made it clear that Barry and I had less than nothing in common, but I realise now that there was very little common ground between the three of us, or between any two of us. Amongst the many things which Barry held in contempt were popular music and restaurant food. Alison and I enjoyed both, but when you come to think of it, these are very soft things on which to base a friendship. It’s as if two nations were to a sign a mutual aid treaty solely because neither of them spoke Latvian. Almost everyone doesn’t speak Latvian; almost everyone likes curry and jazz. I’m not sure we agreed on anything difficult. Alison believed in a god, but not in religion; I believed in neither. (Barry, naturally, found hilarity in the idea that untrained minds like ours might imagine that they had the slightest knowledge of what they did or didn’t believe in). I was—still am, really—a sort of off-the-shelf Leftie, of the kind which could be found in most homes twenty years ago. Alison just wished everyone would be nice to each other, all over the world. Barry was broadly in favour of anything which might “outrage the moronocracy” (that is, basically, anyone who wasn’t Barry), and which was finished before the pubs opened. One thing none of us could resist, though, was a laugh. A belly-shaker, a rib-rattler, the kind of laugh you don’t do after the age of about thirty-five because the loss of respiratory function reminds you too strongly of death. Generally, we laughed at different things: Dave and Barry, or Barry and Alison, or Alison and Dave, but not usually Dave and Barry and Alison at the same time. It did happen, though. Probably on few enough occasions as to be numerable, but when it did—we really went. Three is the fatal number for that kind of thing, and we’d feed off each other until an explosion became inevitable. Sometimes, we were able to bottle that explosion, and detonate it at our leisure. Once, we all dressed up in dark suits and went from door to door in a respectable suburb, telling whoever opened the door that we brought good news about the Bible. The good news was “It’s all a pack of lies, so you can do anything you want to do.” The only snag with that one was that most people shut their doors so quickly that they missed the punch line. My favourite “intervention,” as Barry called them, began when we happened to hear a morality campaigner on Any Questions who spoke, in the manner of her tribe, almost entirely in cliches. There was one cliche in particular which caught our collective fancy. A couple of weeks later, we attended a public meeting addressed by this hag. She kept us waiting for ten jaw-clenching minutes before she finally came out with it. “It is time,” she declared, “for the decent people of this country to stand up and say ‘Enough is enough’.” Swiftly, to avoid being drowned out by applause, twenty people—the three of us, and a load of college acquaintances of Barry’s—rose to their feet and cried in unison: “Enough is enough!” The bonus was witnessing the moralist’s desperate attempts, during the rest of her speech, to avoid her favourite phrase. She came close several times, causing us to twitch in our seats.

We managed to keep straight faces until the rally was over—the joke would have been ruined otherwise —but once we were alone, we laughed ourselves to the very edge of heart attacks. Alison had to rush to the loo, as she actually wet herself slightly, which I found strangely exciting. I haven’t got a thing about urine, it was the thrill of seeing her lose control. That was so un-Alison. She phoned me one January evening in 1992, her voice filled with such panic that for a moment I didn’t recognise it. “Oh Dave, please—he’s bleeding to death!” I was living quite close to them at that time, and my bicycle got me there in less than ten minutes. The front door of their terraced house was open, and I found Alison standing outside the bathroom, drenched in tears. “Dave, please!” I tried the bathroom door. It was locked. Alison said something about the key, and I said “Never mind that, call an ambulance.” I looked through the keyhole to make sure Barry wasn’t near the door, then I smashed the door in. I kicked it first with the flat of my foot, then with the side. It wobbled. I charged at it three times, my weight behind my shoulder, and eventually it went in. Barry was unconscious in the overfull bath, beside which lay a straight razor and an empty bottle. His throat and upper chest were streaked with blood. Draped over the cistern was a t-shirt, which said: “There must be a God. Things don’t get this bad by accident.” I used it to push against his wounds. The ambulance arrived very quickly. In hospital, the following day, Barry didn’t say anything to me for quite a while. He didn’t pretend to be asleep; he simply didn’t speak. I was tired, so I lay down on the empty bed next to his. “I understand you saved my life, you interfering sod,” he said, after about ten minutes. I’d almost dropped off. I sat up. “Alison did, really. She’s the one that found you, called the ambulance.” He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Well, they say the wound wouldn’t have been enough to kill me anyway. It had already stopped bleeding when the ambulance got there.” I shrugged. “All I know is, you were unconscious when I broke the door in.” “That was because I was drunk, you prat, not because I was bleeding.” “Fair enough.” “I don’t know how much that door will cost, either.” He thought about it for a while. Or thought about something, I suppose. “It was original, you know. They stopped making them about half a century ago.” “Not surprised,” I said. “Flimsy piece of crap.” He sent me to fetch him a coffee from the machine. I got him a tea, with extra sugar. “Still,” I said. “You’re luckier than most.” Barry raised an eyebrow. “Well, yeah, you are—you have the consolations of philosophy.” He almost laughed at that, I thought, but didn’t. Perhaps his throat hurt. He sipped the tea and called me a bastard. “You know that Elvis Presley quote? Someone like Elvis, anyway, some famous ape or other. He’s supposed to have said that he was a just a normal guy after all, because ‘I put my pants on one leg

at a time, same as everyone else’.” “Yeah, I think I’ve heard that.” “Well,” said Barry, “I put mine on both legs at once.” “Do you? Are you sure?” “Oh, yes. I sit on the bed to do it. It’s much quicker. Both legs at once. So what does that make me?” “A naked ape,” I said. “Has Alison been in to—” “She’d better not.” “Oh. Right.” My stomach flooded with dancing acids. I stared at the far wall for a while. Barry stuck with the ceiling. We could have swapped, but neither view had an edge over the other, in all truth. “They want to keep me in for a bit,” he said. “Not surprised, after such a—” “Nothing to do with all this bollocks.” “Ah. OK.” I allowed him a gap and when he didn’t fill it, I said: “I wasn’t very popular at school, you know.” He lolled his head on the pillow, and looked at me. “No?” “No. You know when kids play cricket with a wicket chalked on the wall? They used to make me wicketkeeper.” He gave a polite chuckle. That was so unexpected that it made me fear he was dying, after all. “I abuse substances,” he said, “which have shown me nothing but kindness.” He wasn’t wearing pyjamas. He was wearing boxer shorts, and a t-shirt that said: “I’m so clever it hurts.” As soon as he got home from hospital, he sent Alison on an errand over the other side of town to get a part he wanted for his hi-fi, and while she was out he had the locks changed. Computer dating, blind dates, hobby groups—the lot. For a while in my early thirties I tried everything, left no embarrassment unplundered, in my attempts to get paired up. The project did not fruit, and looking back I have no idea why I ever thought it would or should. I’m clearly not the marrying kind, and I’ve never been a man who’s found being single difficult. I can cook and I’ve always had plenty of girlfriends. Perhaps I’ll think differently when I’m old; who knows? In any case, the obsession burned and died, helped on its way by a very pleasant, rather fat Australian teacher. We went out together a few times, and I thought for a while we might become friends, until she told me otherwise. “Good luck,” she said, at our final farewell. “I really hope you find someone who needs you to a degree that’ll keep you happy.” I didn’t know what her words meant, but I knew what she meant. Barry and Alison, as far as I know, never met again in the flesh, after he’d kicked her out. They divorced in a fairly peaceable manner. I kept in touch with both of them, somewhat sporadically. My feelings towards both of them—jointly and severally—had changed, I suppose. By the mid-90s, Barry had remarried. I’ve never met his second wife. They live in Yorkshire; I believe she’s a teacher. Well into his fourth decade, Barry at last gave up being a student and took his first fulltime job. He works for a large financial company, in a field known as “Human Resources”. I’m not sure if this is a position for which a training in philosophy is compulsory or merely desirable. Perhaps there

was a clause in the job advert: “Applicants will be self-motivated, and familiar with spreadsheets and nature of good and evil. Neat handwriting is essential, in-house training will be given in specific software applications.” I shouldn’t take the piss. A job is a job. Alison also found someone new. She became involved in what, by the turn of the century, was known as the anti-globalisation movement. The last few times I spoke to her she seemed astonishingly knowledgeable about matters which the rest of us had hardly heard of: genetic patenting, the World Trade Organisation, capital relocation. It was hard for me to keep up my end of the conversation, not only because I didn’t follow these things as closely as she evidently did but also because—all right, yes, to be frank, it was difficult for me to incorporate the holding of a fully-formed, rational world view into my picture of Alison. It was at a demonstration outside an international meeting of finance ministers at a hotel in the West End that she met Jules, a French farmer and environmental activist. In 1996, she went to live with him near Lyon, and they had two children. The funeral was held there, five years later. I’m not sure precisely what killed her, but it was a cancer of some sort, and very fast. “She was always a bit crazy,” Barry said to me, as we stood by the graveside, sweating in our formal clothes. “You know her brother topped himself, when they were kids?” It was the first time he’d ever alluded to Karl in my hearing. “Yeah,” I said. “So I heard.” A priest lamented in a language neither of us spoke. “She tried to kill me once, you know,” said Barry. “Alison. Tried to murder me.” I sighed, and wondered how much longer it’d be before I could get a cold drink and a cigarette. I’d only ever been to cremations, before. “Yeah I know,” I said. “I was there.” When I’d arrived at their house that night, at first I hadn’t understood what Alison, in her distressed state, was saying. It took me a few minutes to figure it out. “Dave, please! Dave, Dave, he’s bleeding! Someone’s tried to kill him, he’s bleeding to death.” “What?” I tried the bathroom door; it was locked. “What’s happened?” “Someone’s tried to kill Barry!” “Who?” I said. She stopped crying, and said: “Me.” They’d had a row—or he’d had a row with her, more likely—which ended with him announcing, not for the first time, that he was going to kill himself. He’d made a big show of searching the house for his grandfather’s old razor, a nasty looking item with an ivory handle. He’d taken it into the bathroom with him; that and a bottle of vodka. Alison knew the form; they’d been through this before, and she knew her part. She waited a while, and then went to the bathroom ready to do her grovelling. What was different about this occasion, she was never able—and never really tried—to explain to me. The one thing she did keep saying to me, in the few minutes before the ambulance arrived, was: “The door wasn’t locked! The bloody door wasn’t even locked!” I may be quite wrong, but I take this to mean that Barry had put on this great performance, with the booze and the blade and the threats; had forced her into a role, onto a stage, which she had no desire to be part of; and then…he hadn’t even had the decency to use the props properly. He felt so little for her, thought so little of her, that he couldn’t be bothered to get the details right. He hadn’t even locked the door.

She locked it, afterwards. After she’d found him semi-conscious in a nice, deep bath, cheerfully burbling, and after she’d hacked at him with the razor—and after she’d realised that she wasn’t going to be able to kill him with such a blunt instrument unless she took it in both hands and dug it right in and tore out his throat with it. She just didn’t have the strength. She locked the door because she was afraid that he’d come round, and come after her. As the ambulance men carried him out, Alison put her arm through mine and said: “I don’t know, Davey—the four of us, eh? What are we like?” I said: “The four of us?” But she didn’t clarify. She just repeated: “What are we like, Davey?” “I didn’t think you knew,” I said, as we walked back to the house for the post-burial refreshments. “I didn’t think you knew.” It was so hot my shoes squelched when we walked downhill. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?” “If I answer that,” said Barry, “you’ll think I’m a parrot.” I took his point. I had only a rough idea of why I’d never told anyone, so it really wasn’t reasonable that I should expect to know why he hadn’t. There were a great many people at Jules and Alison’s house: kids, grannies, neighbours with sunfurrowed faces, and smart young people in suits that seemed almost indecently chic. Barry and I stood in the garden, under the shade of a large tree, and drank beer as quickly as we could. If you held it in your hand for long, it became unpleasantly warm. I put out my cigarette after the first drag; it was just too hot to smoke. “If you were wearing a badge today, what would it say?” Barry finished his second cigarette and lit another. I remembered now that he smoked very little; that is, he smoked about thirty a day, but he smoked them almost entirely with his hands, not his mouth. “Badge? What badge?” “You always used to wear badges, or sometimes t-shirts, with witty slogans on them. I think you had them printed specially. I never saw them on sale anywhere.” “Did I? Well believe it or not, Dave, I no longer wear slogan t-shirts. I am older than I used to be, even if you’re not.” I lit another one; no sense in being defeatist. “A bloke at work the other day told me he’d got a collection of 78 records. I said, ‘I don’t call 78 records much of a collection’.” Barry chucked his beer glass over a stone wall, pressed his fingers against his temples, and said: “Dave, for Christ’s sake, don’t you—” “At a times like these,” said Jules, putting one arm around Barry and one around me. I almost choked on my cigarette; I hadn’t heard him come up behind us. “At such a times, one doesn’t know what to… one simply doesn’t know.” “Quite,” said Barry. “Quite.” I nodded. “Even you, Barry, with all your learnings…” Jules shook his head. “Quite.” Nod.

“A philosopher, but at a time like these…” “Quite.” “Still,” I said, putting my free arm around the Frenchman’s waist. “If you want to know what colour paint is, Barry’s your man.” Not that having the last word means anything. How could you ever know if it was the last word? And if it was, who’d be left to remember? I saved someone’s life once. Though I know Barry doesn’t agree; he says his wounds were superficial, and that he’d have been all right anyway. But I believe I saved her life. If she hadn’t called me, if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t gone to her so quickly, she would surely have ended up in prison. Years ago, I saved someone’s life. But only for a while. The time passed, and then I went to her funeral. You could say that I saved Barry’s life, too, and he is still alive. Though, like all of us, only briefly. We shared a taxi back to the station, rode together on the train and through the channel tunnel. In London, our journeys diverged. We said goodbye, and as I walked off in one direction and he walked off in another I heard him call my name. I turned, and through the flickering gaps in a crisscrossing crowd, I saw him put his bag on the floor, untuck his shirt and lift it up his chest. Underneath, he was wearing a t-shirt. It read: “I’ve seen the past and it doesn’t work.” He was grinning, of course: jokes don’t count unless you’ve got something to set them against.

“Ukulele and the World’s Pain” James Sallis Sure, I killed the son of a bitch. I mean, what right did he think he had, bursting out in laughter like that when I took Miss Shelley out of her case? I’m a professional, too. I was getting scale just like him. I’ve paid my union dues and a lot more dues besides. It was a good date. Sonny Martin had made a name for himself in country music, and now he was doing what he’d been talking about doing for years, he was cutting a jazz album. I’d played on a couple of Martin sessions before. He liked the freshness of the sound, I guess. And he knew that jazz was my first love, too. One time during a session break, I remember, I think this was on his album Longneck Love, we started goofing on “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” just the two of us, and before we knew, everybody else had picked his instrument back up and was playing along. Playing music’s not about making sounds, you know, it’s about listening. Everything unfolds out of the first note, that first attack. Sonny always reminded me a lot of the great George Barnes, just this plain, balding, fat guy with a Barcalounger and two or three cheap suits at home doing his job, only his job happened to be, instead of working as an auto mechanic or Sears salesman, recording country hits. Or in this case, playing great jazz and backup. You half-expected a cigar stump to be sticking out of his mouth there above the Gibson. By contrast, the guy who thought Miss Shelley was so funny was a real Bubba type with stringy hair, glasses that kept sliding down his nose and getting pushed back up, and run-over white shoes with plastic buckles most of the gold paint had come off of. He played a fair guitar, but you know what? That’s not enough. Besides him, there was a drummer who looked vaguely familiar and couldn’t have been more than nineteen, the great, loose Morty Epstein on bass, and a pianist who gave the impression of spending more time in concert halls than with the likes of us. We slammed around on a 12-bar shuffle just to start the thing running and get acquainted, and that went well, with the guitar sliding in these little pulls, bends and stumbling, broken runs way up high— Sonny’s guitar was so solid Bubba could float. But towards the end he left off that and, staying high, started strumming on just two or three strings, looking over at me. Sonny called “Sweet Georgia Brown” and we worked it through a time or two by ear, kind of clanging and clunking along, then Sonny had the guitar player scribble out some quick charts. I got mine and we started running it and a line or two in, looking ahead, I can see it’s wrong. So I just played right on past it, grinning at the guitar player the whole time. As we started winding down, Sonny nodded me in for a solo. I took a chorus and it was pretty hot and he signalled for another and that one was steaming, and then we all took off again. I looked over and the piano man’s staring at me, shaking his head, fingers going on about their business there below. Looks like he just ate a cat. Next we worked up a head version of a slow, ballady blues, then put some time in on jamming “Take the A Train” and “Lulu’s Back in Town.” Again Bubba threw some charts together and again mine was wrong—wildly wrong this time. He did everything but hop keys on me. I don’t know, maybe his mother was frightened by some Hawaiian when he was in there in the womb growing that greasy hair and trying on those white shoes. That’s where Miss Shelley and her kin came from—you all know that. But you probably don’t know much more. That it emerged around 1877, most likely as a derivative of a four-string folk guitar, the machada or machete, introduced to the islands by the Portuguese. Or how it hitched a ride back to the U.S. with returning sailors and soldiers. Martin started selling them in 1916; Gibson, Regal, Vega,

Harmony and Kay all offered standard to premium models alongside their guitars, banjos and mandolins; National manufactured resonator ukes. Briefly, banjo ukuleles came into favor. Other variations include the somewhat larger taropatch, an eight-string uke of paired strings, and the tiple, whose two outer courses of steel strings are doubled, with an additional third string added to the two inner courses and tuned an octave lower. Mario Maccaferri, the man who designed the great Django Reinhardt’s guitar, after losing half a million or so with plastic guitars no one would buy, recouped with sale of some nine million plastic ukes. And the players! The ever-amazing Roy Smeck. Cliff Edwards, known as Ukulele Ike. Or Lyle Ritz. Trained on violin, he was a top studio bass player in the 60s and 70s and turned out three astonishing albums of straightahead jazz ukulele. We worked through what we had again, then broke for lunch. Morty and I grabbed hot dogs at the taco stand by the park across the street and sat on a bench catching up. The fountain was clogged with food wrappers, leaves and cigarette butts as usual. Kids in swings were shoved screaming towards the sky. Old men sat on benches tossing stale bread at pigeons. Morty’s son had just started college all the way up in Iowa, he told me, studying physical chemistry, whatever that was. Better be looking for more gigs, I said. He shook his head. Don’t I know it, he said. Don’t I know it. I told Morty I had a quick errand that couldn’t wait, I’d see him inside. Well, we got back from lunch break, as you know, everybody but the guitar player, and after we wait a while and drink up a pot of coffee Sonny says: Anybody see Walt out there? But none of us know him, of course, and who’d want to look at that greasy hair while he was eating? So we—Sonny, I should say—finally called the session off, shut it down. And I do regret that. Some fine music was this close to being cut. Can I tell you one thing before we go? There’s this story about Eric Dolphy. He’s called in to overdub on a session. Brings all his instruments along. He listens to the tape and what he does is he adds this single note, on bass clarinet, right at the end. That’s it. He collects scale for the session, puts his horn back in the case, and goes home. But what he did there, what that one note was, was Dolphy finding his holy moment, you know? That’s what we’re all looking for, what we go on looking for, that single holy moment, all our lives.

“The Spy and the Minotaur” Edward D. Hoch The man from MI6 was new since Rand’s time, and as they sat in his office overlooking the Thames he outlined the nature of the mission as if he were instructing the newest man in the department. Rand took about three minutes of it before he raised his hand. “I’m afraid you have the wrong man, Sir Michael. I’ve been retired from Concealed Communications for years, and even when I headed up the department I was never a field agent.” Sir Michael Bradford was a soft-spoken, slender man with a halo of white hair around a bald spot at the top of his head. His appearance and demeanor put Rand in mind of a cloistered monk who’d somehow escaped into the outer world. “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Rand,” he said quietly. “We are quite aware of your record as head of Double-C, and in the years since your retirement. Naturally, we’d like a younger man for this assignment, but you are the only person with the necessary qualifications. Of course, we can’t order you to take it on. We can only point out its vital importance to Britain and its allies.” He paused for a moment, shifting a few items on his desk, then added, “Crete in October can be a very pleasant place. Temperatures around seventy and only a few rainy days. Will you do it?” “No,” Rand answered at once. “I doubt that I’d agree if the prime minister himself asked me.” Sir Michael considered it for a moment and then reached for the red telephone on his desk. “Let’s see about that.” When Rand related the conversation to his wife at home that evening, Leila could hardly believe it. “You actually spoke with the prime minister?” “It certainly sounded like him.” “How could you say no to the prime minister?” “I couldn’t. I’m going.” “To Crete? There’s no one else they can send to Crete?” He knew the news would upset her. “I’m the only one with the proper qualifications. With this whole terrorist thing, after what happened in New York and all, I could hardly say no.” “What qualifications?” she asked. “A knowledge of digital photography as a method of concealing secret messages. Remember? I wrote an article on the subject for Counterpane, the Internet security magazine, last year. Naturally that went into my personnel file at British Intelligence. My other qualification is that I know Laura Peters. She insists the contact be someone she knows and can trust.” “Laura Peters. Where have I heard that name before?” “Nearly seven years ago, on the island of Lamu, off the coast of Kenya. You had gone home after our Egyptian trip that year and I went on alone.” Then she remembered. “Those American spies, Ryder and his wife! And Laura Peters was—” “The donkey lady. She’s with the International Donkey Protection Trust, setting up donkey sanctuaries in various remote areas. Somehow she’s the key to this business on Crete, and she won’t talk to a stranger.” “Is it safe, Jeffery?” Leila asked.

“What’s safe these days? Perhaps we’ll never really be safe again. Anyway, I leave tomorrow. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two. Come along, if you’d like.” “You know I can’t get away from the university at the start of a term. But I don’t like you going there.” “It’s not Afghanistan or Iraq. What could happen to me on Crete?” “There’s always the Minotaur,” she replied, only half in jest. Oddly enough, the gift shop at the Herakleion Airport on Crete carried no Minotaur-inspired toys like the “Nessy” images so popular with visitors to Loch Ness. Rand saw only some reproductions of Minotaur artwork by Picasso and Dali. Perhaps the idea of a man with the head of a bull was not so attractive as a gliding sea serpent in the cool waters of a Scottish lake. When he asked the clerk for a map of the Minotaur’s maze, she replied brusquely, “That is all myth.” He checked in at the Xenia Hotel, overlooking the waters of the Cretan Sea. It was a quiet place with a spectacular harbor view, and once in his room he phoned Leila back in England to confirm that he’d arrived safely. “I suppose you’re going down to the beach,” she said. “No, there are mostly fishing boats in this area. The city has some sort of wine festival in progress, but I guess I’d better stick to business.” “You’d better,” she agreed. “Take care. I’m getting too old to come rescue you.” Next Rand placed a call to the British Embassy in Athens and was switched briefly to a man named Foxfell who would be his contact there. “Have you encountered any old friends?” Foxfell asked. “Not yet.” “Keep us informed.” Rand had an address for the International Donkey Protection Trust, and Sir Michael had advised against phoning first. “If they’re on to her, the line may not be secure. We mustn’t endanger her in any way.” So Rand made his way into the city center, past colorful flower markets and busy outdoor taverns. The buildings, many a mere two or three stories high, served as homes to more than a hundred thousand people. He was dressed casually, like most others, wearing a hat and dark glasses against an afternoon sun that was warmer than he’d been led to expect. The address he sought was near the Morosini Fountain, an intricately carved wonder that gushed water into a basin whose raised sides formed eight segments, rather like a snowflake. Bas-relief scenes along the sides portrayed sea gods, and nymphs riding the backs of dolphins. The entire area was a lively meeting place with cafes, bookstalls, and shops. But he realized it was siesta time, after three o’clock. He assumed that wouldn’t matter to an Englishwoman like Laura Peters, but most shops in the area were closed until five, and when he reached the Donkey Trust building he found it was closed, too. He walked around the back of the long, low building through a vacant lot and saw from the faded sign on its exterior wall that it had once been a fish market. The donkeys apparently were kept inside since there was no outside pen for them. Rand was casually examining the sign for the former fish market when a chip of plaster flew off the wall not a foot in front of his face. He dropped instinctively to the ground. Someone had fired a shot from a silenced gun, and he’d been the target. He crawled a few feet along the wall, afraid to raise his head until he came to a side door covered with sheet metal. Certain it would be locked, he reached up and quickly tried the knob. The door opened and he slithered inside. The first thing he heard was the braying of a donkey in one of the stalls nearby. As he accustomed his

eyes to the dim light, he could make out a second donkey and a row of stalls, with a small office and desk beyond. The rest of the long building seemed piled with supplies: rows of donkey feed and medications for treating them. But his attention went to the glass-enclosed office, where a woman was slumped over the desk, her head hidden by a mop of brownish hair. Rand saw the blood and knew she was dead, and was certain he’d come too late to contact Laura Peters. Then he pushed back the hair from her face and saw that it was not Laura at all, but an older woman with dark Mediterranean features. She’d been shot once in the back of the head. Perhaps the killer, too, had mistaken her for Laura Peters. Rand hurried to the back door and opened it enough to peer out, but across the vacant lot there was no sign of the gunman who’d fired at him. At the same moment, he heard a noise at the building’s front door, a key in the lock. He slipped into a stall with one of the donkeys and waited silently. When the animal brayed, Rand tried to silence it with his hand and only succeeded in getting licked. “Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called out. She had a British accent, and even after seven years he was pretty certain it was Laura Peters. “Laura,” he called softly, but then she saw the body and let out a scream. He was on her in an instant, covering her mouth. “Be quiet! It’s Jeffery Rand. You know me from Lamu.” She relaxed a bit and he took his hand from her mouth. She was wearing a gray tunic that reached just below her knees, with a green vest over it. Her brown hair was shorter than he remembered. “Did you kill Rachel?” she asked. “Of course not! I think the killer took a shot at me, too. Did she work with you?” Laura nodded. “Rachel Dikte. She lived here in Herakleion. I hired her to handle the donkeys and the supplies.” “You have to report this to the police.” “The killer thought it was me, didn’t he?” “I don’t know,” he told her. “We have to find someplace to talk.” She composed herself as best she could. “You get out of here and I’ll phone for the police. I’ll try to meet you in two hours at the Church of St. Peter. It’s just a couple of blocks away.” “In case you’re not there, give me a number where you can be reached.” But Laura shook her head. “The phone lines aren’t safe. What hotel are you at?” “The Xenia.” “If I’m not at the church in two hours I’ll contact you there. Now get out while I call the police.” Rand hardly expected her to turn up at the church, but she was there, kneeling in prayer with a black veil over her face. He knelt beside her for a few moments and then she whispered, “Were you followed?” “No.” “I’ll leave first. Wait five minutes and then follow me. I’ll be at the Myrto. It’s a little bar on an isolated beach and it’s never crowded this late in the season. Do you have the name?” “Myrto,” he repeated. “I’ll find it.”

His guidebook indicated it was a long walk, so he took a cab to a nearby corner and went the last few blocks on foot. She was seated alone at a table for two in a back room. There were only a few other customers at the bar. “Sorry for all this,” she told him at once. “When I saw Rachel’s body I went a little paranoid. How’ve you been?” “Pretty good for a man my age.” “Your hair is gray now.” He smiled at her. “It happens.” “I can’t trust anyone. I told your man in Athens it had to be someone I knew. I was surprised when they dug you up.” They ordered some food from the waiter and Laura suggested a bottle of raki. “That’s what the festival is all about,” she explained. “It’s a local liquor distilled from grain, grapes, and plums.” “I’ll try a little of it. I’m not much of a drinker. Now tell me why I’m here and why that woman back at the Donkey Trust is dead.” “The second part is easy. She’s dead because they thought it was me. I’m usually there alone.” Rand remembered from their previous meeting that the International Donkey Protection Trust of Sidmouth, Devon, existed to provide rest and sanctuary for injured, sick, and tired donkeys. Laura was paid to find these animals and nurse them back to health, and she told him she’d spent much of the last decade in Africa and the Mediterranean on her mission. “What is it you’re involved in?” he asked. “Protecting donkeys is a long way from steganography.” “From what?” “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It’s a technical term for a method of hiding messages in digital photographs or music files transmitted through the Internet. I wrote an article about it for a magazine, which is one of the reasons I’m here. The other reason is you, of course.” He tasted some of the raki and made a face. “You don’t like it,” she observed. “It’s a taste that takes getting used to. We’ll see. Tell me, did you have any trouble with the police?” “No, they came and wrote up a report and took away Rachel’s body. They’re assuming it was an attempted robbery.” “What’s there to steal, except some sick donkeys?” “Exactly, but I didn’t tell them that. Let them think what they want.” “Before I entered through your back door and found her body, someone took a shot at me, too. I assume it was the killer, who thought I might have seen him fleeing the place.” “Did you?” “No. When I found the front door locked I was merely seeking another entrance. But tell me your story, and how British Intelligence became involved.” She downed some of the raki and began. “I’ve been here about eight months, working mostly alone out of that building. I hired Rachel Dikte back in June to help me out on a part-time basis. Mostly she looked after the donkeys while I scouted out new clients in the nearby vineyards. You wouldn’t believe how they treat their donkeys! When I find sick or injured ones I can usually persuade their owners to let me nurse them back to health. Then I load them in my van and bring them back here, all the while wearing a tunic or dress. They frown on women wearing trousers on Crete.”

She’d always been a talker. “What about the digital messages?” he asked. “I met a man named Carlos Vultura who offered to set up a Web site on the Internet for the Donkey Trust, or the Donkey Sanctuary as it’s now called. I already had a second phone line for my computer, and the only additional expense would be having it on all the time so the Web page is accessible day and night. He said I could even have a link to the sanctuary’s main Web page in England. I had to admit it made sense. Most of our vineyards are on the Internet, and if some of them would contact me about their donkeys it would save me a good deal of chasing around the countryside. Carlos started coming into my office in the afternoons, working on the Web site. It looked quite nice, with a full-color photograph of a donkey at the top of the page. Then one afternoon a few weeks back I returned to the office unexpectedly while he was working. It seemed to unnerve him and he shuffled some papers out of sight. Later, I found one on the floor that he’d missed. There were a couple of dozen handwritten names on it, mostly Arab names, each followed by a string of numbers. I put it in my drawer, intending to return it to him, but it slipped my mind.” “This was a few weeks ago?” Laura Peters nodded. “Just after the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Later, when newspapers published the names of the terrorists who had hijacked those airliners, I dug out that list again. More than half the names were on it. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do something. There was no one I could trust on Crete, and I didn’t want to report it to our headquarters back in Devon. Finally, last week, I put in a call to the British embassy in Athens. I told them I might have information about the September Eleventh attacks, and that a list of names may have been hidden somehow on the Internet. I didn’t mention the Donkey Trust site. I said I would only talk to someone I knew or whose identity could be verified by London. I guess that’s when they sent you.” “You said there were numbers following the names. Do you remember any of them?” “Some were 11901. As you know, that could be the European manner of writing the date 11 September 2001.” “Have you seen this man Vultura lately?” “Not around here, but I see him at a small tavern he owns. That’s where I first met him.” “Has he been at your refuge since that day you surprised him?” “Now that you mention it, I don’t think he has. That’s why I never thought to return the list to him.” When their food came, she asked him about steganography. “What kind of a word is that, anyway?” “It’s Greek for ‘hidden writing,’” Rand explained. “In ancient Greece, a message was written on a wooden tablet and covered with wax. The recipient scraped off the wax to read the message. In Internet use, steganography takes advantage of the fact that digital files can be slightly altered and still look almost the same to the human eye. Hidden messages have been found on pornographic Web sites, music sites, and even the eBay auction site. The great advantage is that there is no contact between sender and recipient. For example, the digital image of your donkey could be downloaded anonymously and its message read by anyone who knows the technique.” “Have terrorists actually used this method of communication?” “Oh yes. It was used by a recently apprehended group planning to blow up the United States embassy in Paris. They did all their communicating through pictures posted on the Internet. I think we can assume that the September Eleventh terrorists used it, too. That list of names you possess could be invaluable.” “I’m ready to turn it over to you. It’s still in my desk.”

“If this Vultura tried to kill you for that list, he now realizes his mistake in killing Rachel. Your life could be in danger.” “I know that.” Rand thought about it as he finished the last of his raki. “I think I’d like to meet Carlos Vultura.” “What for?” “I feel like walking into the lion’s den. Let’s go over to his tavern after dinner.” “People will see us together,” she pointed out. “I’m sure the word has already gotten around. That bartender picked up the telephone as soon as he saw me sit down with you.” The Taverna Minotaur was a small storefront with a few tables in front, all unoccupied at the moment. “It’s a nice place,” Laura told him. “On summer nights they often have Greek dancing here in the street.” A slender man carrying a menu walked toward them with just the suggestion of a limp. He wore a bushy moustache like many of the local men. “Carlos, I want you to meet a friend of mine, Jeffery Rand.” The tavern owner smiled to show off a gold tooth. “Good evening, Mr. Rand. Welcome to our little watering place. Do you know Laura from England?” “From Africa, actually,” she told him. “We met when I was tending to donkeys on an island off the coast of Kenya.” “Could I tempt you with some local delicacies? We have fine fresh octopus, caught daily just offshore.” “Thank you,” Rand told him, “but we’ve just eaten.” He took their orders for a local beer and then asked Laura, “Are you getting any reaction to the new Web site?” “Yes, and all of it favorable. You’ve been a great help to me.” When he retreated to fill their order Rand asked, “What happened to his leg?” “Gored during the running of the bulls in Spain, back when he was young. He likes to tell people it was a Minotaur, but there are some who’ll tell you he’s the Minotaur himself. His reputation is a bit shady, though he’s always been a gentleman around me.” “He was after something else with you and the Donkey Trust Web site.” “It seems like it,” she agreed. She had to go back to check on the donkeys and Rand couldn’t allow her to go alone. The streets were still crowded with noisy festivalgoers celebrating the distillation of raki. When they reached it, the office with its donkey stable was just as it had been on his earlier visit, though he was relieved to see that Rachel Dikte’s body had been removed. While Laura checked over her charges, Rand said, “You could give me that list now and I’d be on my way tomorrow.” She went to the desk and opened a bottom drawer. “It’s right—” The color drained from her face. “It was here this morning. Whoever killed Rachel must have taken it.”

“Perhaps that’s what he was after.” He walked with her to her nearby apartment, arranging to meet her there the following morning. Then he made his way back through the streets to his hotel. He didn’t like the way this whole thing was developing. Stopping at the hotel desk, he asked the room clerk for a favor. In the morning he was awakened by the gentle ringing of his bedside phone. It was not yet eight o’clock and he wondered who might be calling him at such an early hour. “Good morning. This is your friend from Athens,” the voice announced, and he recognized Foxfell, the man he’d called when he arrived the previous day. “I am in the lobby. May I come up?” Rand sat up. “In this lobby? Here?” “Yes.” “Give me five minutes.” There was no time to shower, but he brushed his teeth and dressed quickly. He was running the electric razor over his face when the door chime sounded. Sam Foxfell proved to be a sturdy man in his forties with rimless glasses and hair just beginning to gray. He showed Rand his British Embassy identification, which gave no hint of ties to MI6. “Sorry to be here so early, Mr. Rand, but things have taken a bad turn.” “How is that?” Rand shut the door behind him. “A woman named Rachel Dikte has been murdered. She worked at the Donkey Trust.” “I know. I was there when the body was found.” “Oh? We believe we know the identity of her killer.” Rand hazarded a guess. “A man named Vultura, right?” “We know about Vultura. He certainly has criminal connections but he’s no terrorist.” “He designed a Web page for the Donkey Trust. That’s how the digital messages are being transmitted to terrorist cells around the world.” “We know that, but the messages weren’t placed there by Vultura. It was Laura Peters.” “Laura? That’s crazy. She’s the one who alerted you.” “We believe now that was only a cover-up for her own involvement. London is convinced she is an important cog in the terrorist network.” “I don’t believe it,” Rand said firmly. Foxfell slipped a folded paper from an inside pocket. “I have here a list of the countries in which she has worked for the Donkey Trust during the past decade. You’ll note that several of them like Somalia and Yemen have served as sanctuaries for terrorist groups.” Rand handed back the list with barely a glance. “These are countries where donkeys are used and often mistreated. It stands to reason they’d be places where the Donkey Trust would be active.” “I don’t think you fully comprehend the task we’re facing, Mr. Rand. No one is safe from terrorist attacks. These are times that call for harsh measures.” “Against a young woman trying to protect animals?” “Some of these people can turn to violence, as you know. In England, animal rights groups have staged

a number of raids—” Rand interrupted to ask, “How can you believe she was responsible for Rachel Dikte’s death?” “We have a strong suspicion.” “Based on what?” The embassy man sighed. “You say you were there when the body was found. Suppose you tell me exactly what happened.” Rand told about entering the building and seeing the body, then about Laura’s arrival. “She arranged to meet me two hours later, after the police had been notified.” Foxfell’s lips curled into a little smile of triumph. “The police were never notified.” “What?” “Dikte’s body was found late last evening in the shallow water of Venetian Harbor, some distance from the Donkey Trust building. I was called at once by my contact with the police who knew of my interest in Laura Peters and her operations here. I flew down overnight.” “That doesn’t make any sense!” Rand protested. “Why would Laura move the body?” “Perhaps because it would incriminate her if found at her office.” He reached into his pocket again and took out a vial of colorless liquid. “We need to search her place, undetected. I want you to slip this into her coffee or beer or whatever. It’s harmless but it’ll put her to sleep.” Rand shook his head. “No. That’s out of my line. I’ve never done that sort of work and I’m not going to start now.” “I have my instructions from the top—” “No,” Rand repeated. “I don’t kill people.” “I told you it’s harmless.” “I’m not risking her life on whether or not you’re telling the truth.” Foxfell’s eyes hardened, but he returned the vial to his pocket. “I’ll have to contact London about this.” “You do that.” Rand reached Laura’s apartment a little after ten. “Before we go to the Donkey Trust I think we should talk,” he told her. “What about?” “Did you contact the police after we found Rachel Dikte’s body yesterday?” “Why do you ask?” “Her body was pulled from the harbor last night. I doubt if the police put it there.” She sighed and glanced around, motioning him inside. The apartment was almost Spartan in its décor, with only a photograph of Laura and some others with a donkey decorating one wall. He sat on the sofa while she talked. “After you left I decided against calling the police. Nothing they could do would bring Rachel back, and they might even close the sanctuary. I’ve had trouble with the authorities in the past. Finally I called a friend named Kanakis to help.” “Who’s he?”

“Aristide Kanakis, a local carpenter who built the stables for my donkeys. He’s been very helpful around the place.” “In removing bodies?” She flushed a bit. “He said he’d give her a proper burial. I never dreamed he’d dump her in the harbor. He wrapped the body and took it away in his truck.” “That was a foolish thing to do. Now the embassy people think you might have killed her. Let’s go have a talk with this Kanakis person.” “He’s probably out on a job. I can try reaching him on his cell phone.” Even on Crete one couldn’t get away from them, Rand marveled, as Laura produced one from her own purse and pressed a button for speed-dialing. It was answered immediately and she said, “Aristide, this is Laura. It’s important I talk to you. Where are you now?” She listened and said, “I’ll be there in ten minutes. I have an English friend with me.” “Where is he?” Rand asked after she put away the phone. “At the Church of St. Mark, near Venizelos Square. It’s back toward the Donkey Trust.” “Another church?” “This one is a cultural center now.” When they reached the place, they found Kanakis building a ramp to allow easier handicapped access to the old church, a spectacular mixture of Gothic and Renaissance styles that presently housed an exhibition of art from the Byzantine period. Kanakis was a bearded man with glistening brown eyes who shook Rand’s hand with a smooth and vigorous palm. “You are a tourist in Crete?” he asked in passable English. “Business and pleasure,” Rand answered with a shrug. Glancing about to make sure they were not overheard, Laura asked, “Aristide, what did you do with Rachel yesterday?” He was reluctant to answer in front of Rand. Finally, after she insisted on knowing, he said, “The field I’d planned on was in use as a festival site. I drove around until dark without finding another place. Finally I took her to the harbor. I am sorry, Laura.” She hung her head in despair. “What have I gotten myself into?” “Did you examine the body?” Rand asked the bearded man. “As little as possible. I don’t like dead bodies. She’d been shot once in the head with a silenced pistol.” “Could the killer have mistaken her for Laura?” “I don’t see how, unless the lights were out. Rachel’s hair was a lot longer.” “Did you mop up the blood?” “I did that,” Laura answered. “I suppose I should tell the police everything.” “Let’s wait a bit,” Rand suggested. Then, to Kanakis, “Did you ever notice anyone hanging around the Donkey Trust?” He shook his head. “But I wasn’t around that much, only when Laura needed some carpentry work or heavy lifting.” “Like bodies?”

He heard her sharp intake of breath at his words, but Kanakis leaped to her defense. “You must be crazy if you think she killed Rachel. It was probably some thief she caught searching for money.” “That’s not too likely when she was shot in the back of the head while seated at the desk. She wouldn’t have turned her back on a robber, not even to call the police.” Kanakis picked up a board and went back to his work on the ramp. “Let me know if you find out anything.” Then, to Laura, “I’m sorry about yesterday.” “I shouldn’t have asked you to do it. I made a big mistake.” Rand thought of Sam Foxfell with his vial of colorless liquid and had to agree with her. They headed for the Donkey Trust under cloudy skies that hinted at one of the island’s rare autumn rainstorms. It had been a foggy morning when he awoke but now the wind was picking up. At Laura’s workplace he spent some time examining the desk at which Rachel had been seated when she died. One end of it was occupied by the computer, and it seemed likely she might have been working on it when she was shot. He was sure the screen had been blank when he found the body, but the killer might have turned it off. “There’s nothing of value kept here?” Rand asked Laura as he paced around the piles of supplies. “What are all these blankets for?” She smiled. “To keep the donkeys warm, of course. Winter nights can get chilly.” Wandering up and down the aisles he remarked, “How do you find what you need? This place is like a maze.” “Then Crete is the right place for it.” He opened a file drawer at random. “What are these?” “I take pictures of all our clients.” “By clients you mean donkeys?” “Sure.” They were suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Carlos Vultura, blown into the place like an ill wind. “I just learned that they found Rachel’s body,” he said. “What happened?” “You know as much as we do,” Laura told him. “Could it have been suicide?” “I understand she’d been shot.” “My God! This is becoming a dangerous place to live.” “It always has been,” Laura replied, “since the Minotaur.” One of the donkeys brayed and Vultura was reminded of something else. “Your Web site is down. Did you know that?” She seemed puzzled. “It was working this morning.” Going to the computer, she tried to call up the Web-site files. “They’re gone! They’ve been deleted!” “No problem,” he assured her. “I can restore the old site or design a new one for you when I get back from Athens day after tomorrow. I have to fly there tonight if the airport’s open.”

“But what could have happened to it?” “You say it was on the Web this morning?” Laura nodded. “I check the counter occasionally from my apartment to see how many people have visited the site. How could anyone have deleted it?” “Only through this machine, unless they hacked into it from outside.” The thought occurred to Rand that Vultura, as designer of the Web site, might know exactly how to do that. “How many people have keys to this place?” he asked Laura. “No one besides me. Rachel didn’t even have one, though at times like yesterday I left her alone while I went out after donkeys.” Rand was remembering her arrival. “You didn’t have a donkey when you got back here.” “I was called to one of the vineyards, but the animal died before I arrived.” Something Vultura said had stuck in Rand’s mind. “You’re flying to Athens tonight if the airport’s open? Why wouldn’t it be?” “It was closed all last night by the fog, but if this wind keeps up it should clear the air.” “Interesting.” “I should be all right until you get back,” Laura told Vultura. “I’ll post a simple message on the Web site with my phone number.” After he’d departed, Rand remarked, “He does try to be helpful.” “Too helpful. I might believe him if I hadn’t found that sheet of names in his handwriting. But why would he or anyone else have deleted my Web page?” “Steganography is only a practical method of cryptography if the enemy doesn’t suspect you’re using it. That’s why some of their favorite digitized pictures are pornography, auction items, and the like— photos that might be downloaded by thousands of people without arousing suspicion. The minor digital data added to the photos results in a picture not quite as sharp as the original, and once experts spot it they can read it with a minimum of effort. Of course the added information can also be encrypted, but then the recipient needs the code book or key to decipher it. After what happened to Rachel yesterday, someone decided the donkey Web page had to be deleted for now, before the information fell into the wrong hands. If the killer stole that list from your drawer when he shot Rachel, he might have returned this morning and deleted the Web page.” He’d gotten to his feet. “Where are you going now?” she asked. “I want to check with the airport about last night’s flights being grounded.” “Why is that so important?” “I’m not sure that it is. I’ll be back later. Be careful who you let in. Rachel probably knew her killer.” Before he could reach his hotel, a limousine with diplomatic plates drew up alongside him. Foxfell was seated in back and he opened the rear door for Rand. “Get in, sir. I’ve been in touch with London.” “All right.” Rand slid in next to him and the driver pulled away from the curb. “Sir Michael says you are to follow my orders in this matter.” “Does Sir Michael know you’ve been here on Crete since before I arrived?” He seemed puzzled. “What?”

“The airport was closed last night because of the fog, so you couldn’t have flown in. I imagine you came over on the ferry with this car some days ago. When I phoned you in Athens the call was switched down here.” “They said you were smart,” Foxfell said with a sigh. “But that doesn’t really change the situation. You’re still under orders.” “The Donkey Trust Web site has been deleted, probably by the same person who killed Rachel Dikte.” “Who may be Laura Peters herself.” “No. If she was sending instructions to terrorists on her Web site, she’d hardly have reported it to you.” “We don’t want to harm her. We only want her to sleep a bit so the Donkey Trust can be searched.” “I’ll take her to dinner. You can search it then.” “I’m told she has a great many files and supplies there. It would take hours to do a thorough search.” “Then you’re out of luck. She’s not going to be harmed in any way, by you or anyone else.” “Don’t be too sure of that, Mr. Rand.” There was no need to call the airport about the previous night’s fog. Foxfell had admitted he’d been on the scene all along. In fact, he must have been already on Crete when Rachel was killed. Rand thought about that back in his room, and about the deleted Web site. And about the bullet that had almost killed him the previous day. Suddenly he knew he had to get back to the Donkey Trust. He’d been a fool to leave her alone. There was a taxi waiting outside the hotel and he grabbed it, shouting the address at the driver. The work day had ended, but crowds for the festival were gathering again. Ten minutes later, Rand was forced to abandon the cab and go the last few blocks on foot. The street door was unlocked and he entered, hearing at first only the braying of the donkeys. The little office was empty. She was not in sight. “Laura!” he called. There was a scuffling sound from back among the piles of supplies. “Rand! He’s got a gun!” He hurried down the nearest aisle, past the pile of donkey blankets and the filing cabinets, then left to a wooden wall formed by the row of stalls. The place was like a maze, as he’d told her himself. “Laura! Where are you?” There was a soft popping sound as something thudded into the boxes of donkey meal by his side. The silenced pistol again, as close as the last time. “Rand!” she called again. For only an instant did he consider the possibility that there was no Minotaur, that Laura herself was the Minotaur luring him to his destruction. Then he rounded the last corner and saw her, held in the grip of the man he sought. And, of course, as he’d known, it was the carpenter, Kanakis. At that moment, a smoke bomb went off over their heads. Sam Foxfell had a great sense of the dramatic. Later, when Kanakis had been overpowered and taken away, and Laura and Rand had cleared their lungs and eyes of the smoke, Foxfell sat down with them. “Of course I had you followed,” he told Rand at once. “It wouldn’t have looked very good for me to let you get killed. My man told me Kanakis was in the building, too, so we moved in, just in case.”

“I have to say you both arrived just in time,” Laura admitted. “Kanakis stopped by, as he often did, and I thought nothing of it till I saw that gun with its silencer. That was just as you entered, and he pulled me behind a stack of boxes.” Rand nodded. “Into the maze. I was suspicious of Kanakis for two reasons. When we shook hands his palm seemed much too smooth to have worked as a carpenter for very long. And he mentioned Rachel’s killer had a silenced pistol. I hadn’t told anyone that. He knew it because he was the killer. No doubt he made a duplicate key to the building while he was building your donkey stalls. Once Vultura set up your Web site he sneaked in here and made his own alterations to the photograph of the donkey, incorporating lists of names and dates for terrorist cells in various countries. Vultura noticed the photo on the Web site wasn’t as sharp as it had been and he came here to investigate. He used his own software to read the hidden digital message and was copying down those names when you surprised him. That was the list you found. Yesterday, Rachel must have come upon that list while Kanakis was here. He killed her and stole it, taking a shot at me while he escaped. It was ironic that you later called on him to dispose of her body.” “Now we’ll never see the full list,” Foxfell said, “not with her Web site deleted.” Rand smiled and slipped a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “I learned long ago not to take chances. Back at my hotel last night I asked to use their computer. I downloaded the donkey photograph before Kanakis had a chance to delete the site.” He handed the picture to Foxfell. “The rest is up to you.”