August 1960. Worst heat wave since ’43. The year of the riots.

No clouds. The sun cruising a sheet-metal sky, scorching Detroit’s mean streets all day long, hammering the heat down to the ancient salt mines beneath the city.

By noon the auto plants were like ovens. People said the temperature at Ford Rouge hit a hundred and thirty up near the steel ceilings. Overhead crane operators had to rotate down to the factory floor every half hour, panting like dogs, their clothes soaked.

Welders were working half blind, squinting through steamy visors, torches slippery with grease and sweat. And the painters in the infrared booths? Hell on earth.

But the assembly lines never stopped. Never even slowed down.

Nightfall brought no relief. Black tar bubbling in the streets and alleys like grease on a griddle, black folks boiling out of their tenements and rowhouses. Restless and surly. And thirsty. Very thirsty.

Brownie’s Lounge on Dequinder was buzzing by seven, jammed tight by ten. Selling Stroh’s beer by the gallon. Straight up. No glasses. Shop rats guzzling the brew out of the pitchers. Getting high, feeling mighty. Ready to hear some blues.

John Lee Hooker’s trio came on at nine, kicking out jams on Brownie’s postage-stamp dance floor. Big John wailing on his old Harmony guitar, James Cotton on harmonica, and a pickup bass player.

No drummer. No need for one. If you can’t feel the beat when John Lee stomps his size 13 Florsheims on a hardwood dance floor, you’d best lie down. You might be dead.

Around midnight the crowd finally started to thin. Working men had to be up at four. Making Thunderbirds, making Fairlanes, making that overtime pay. The best way for a blue-collar black man to rise in this life. The UAW saved the crap jobs for blacks, but the bosses didn’t care if a man worked double shifts for time-and-a-half. Turning out Fords for Cadillac money.

By one-forty A.M. Brownie’s Lounge was down to a die-hard handful of customers.

Four white kids, blues fans from the University of Detroit, applauding wildly as John Lee closed his show with Smokestack Lightning.

A few couples still grinding each other on the dance floor, ignoring the beat, rocking to a rhythm of their hearts and loins. Hot to trot.

A few hookers gabbing near the door, too whipped to stroll the Cass Corridor for trade.

And at the bar? One old white man. A stone killer.

Miranda Wheeler was against adultery in theory. She had been raised uptight and proper, if not churchgoing, her parents nominally Episcopalian or the like, and she had occasioned to sin far more in her mind than in practice. Though not a classic beauty like of film or supermarket fashion magazines, she was not bad to look at with almost always a pleasant smile. Her body attracted male notice and comment even now at thirty-one, and after one kid, causing her some embarrassment and an uneasy glow. Fit and curvy in all the right places, she carried herself with an awkward charm, as if her body were a new pair of shoes that did not quite fit. She worked during the school year as a teacher’s aide at Laurel Elementary, where little Duff Jr. would enter fourth grade in the fall.

My name is Christian Richelieu. A good name, all in all, and famous on both counts, though neither appreciably influenced my life.

That I don’t believe in a Messiah practically goes without saying. The notion that a Saviour will rescue us from loneliness and despair would amuse me if not for the misery. But the yearning I see etched on troubled faces in the street is sincere and I don’t laugh.

The cardinal at least was French, like me, and being a politician and a pragmatist, he did not wait but sought solace in this life. Perhaps he found it. Who knows? Still, he was first a great moralist, then a tireless sinner, and I am neither.

I am simply amoral.

So much for my name, which is more interesting than my appearance. In looks I am suitably ordinary, an advantage in my profession, and that’s all that needs saying.

I loved it so much I was cradling it in my hands, fondling its stock, bracing its chamber between my thumbs, staring into its barrel like you’d look into a lover’s eyes, in search of some kind of truth. It stared back at me deeply and gave me the ultimate truth: Yeah, you got it right, Grant. I’m your trusty Glock. You can count on me. I’m going to kill you.

I kissed its muzzle. My tongue tasted oil; and I could smell powder traces on my fingers. I’d cleaned it out after being down at the firing range all afternoon, blasting at all those black hanging targets, trying to get rid of all my black thoughts but only making them blacker. It was all I could do to keep from turning my Glock on myself then and there.

I didn’t want to go out that way, in front of everybody. I wanted to have some privacy and leave a note — three notes, maybe, addressed to different people and taped up on my bathroom mirror. One to my landlord, saying sorry about the mess and take what you want. Another to Captain Feliciano, telling him thanks for your support when the going got tough, but face the facts, guy, I’m a screwup. The last to Mom, saying love you lots and none of this is your fault, even if you did put Poncho to sleep.

I loved my Glock so much I was laying four of its six inches on my tongue, forming my lips around it, hooking my thumbs around its safe-action trigger. There’s no such thing as a safety catch on a Glock — you have to apply direct pressure in the right spot, or the trigger acts like a safety and refuses to fire.

My thumb was in the right spot. The rest ought to be cake.

I was telling myself that if I was a real man, I’d do it.

I was sweating bullets, staring down at the trigger cross-eyed. The last thing I’d see would be the knuckly creases on my thumb parting ever so slightly.

I depressed the safe action so it wouldn’t be safe anymore — and I wouldn’t be depressed anymore.

I did it. I squeezed the trigger.

It should have fired. But it didn’t. It jammed on me.

For the first time in my career, my Glock had let me down.

And now my hands were shaking and my heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack. If I tried again, I was going to screw it up. And I didn’t want to fail.

I set the gun down. My stomach churned in disgust. With fumbling fingers, I tapped out a cigarette and lit it on the third match. It felt good to have that smoke in my lungs. The nicotine got my mind to thinking — maybe the ol’ Glock was giving me a sign, that I needed help, that something was terribly wrong with me. And you don’t argue with a Glock.

I didn’t know where to begin. The brass always encouraged us to use the departmental psychiatrists — but everyone knew what that was about. I couldn’t count on total confidentiality. Whatever was wrong with me might get leaked to IA. It might get subpoenaed in some future court case if my policing skills were called into question, and such a case was not outside the realm of possibility. It might simply get spread around as interprecinct gossip: Officer Grant’s a loose cannon. Yeah, you can’t trust Tom Grant as your backup. The guy’s nuts. Let’s find, him a nice desk job and pull him off the streets.

I couldn’t turn to the department. No sir, not on my life.

Facedown on the kitchen table in front of me lay the Village Voice. One of the classified ads on the back page caught my eye:

LONELY? DEPRESSED? SUICIDAL?

CALL THE 24-HOUR HELP LINE!

555-HELP 555-HELP 555-HELP

It looked like what I needed. Help was only a phone call away. Even though it was two in the morning, somebody would be there on the other end of the line to talk me down.

I picked up the phone and called.

“Hello?” A man’s voice, exceedingly mild, somewhat sleepy.

“Um, yes, is this the help line?” I croaked.

“Yeah, sure.” He cleared his throat. “How can I help you?”

“I–I just tried to kill myself.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“What happened? Why didn’t it work?”

“My gun jammed.”

“Oh, you’re using a gun? What kind?”

“What kind? Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters. What kind of gun do you own?”

“Well, it’s a Glock.”

“Mmm,” said the guy on the help line. “What model?”

“It’s a seventeen-L. Semiauto, six-inch barrel.”

“What does that use? Nine-millimeters? Forty-caliber Smith & Wessons? Or forty-fives?”

“Nine-millimeters,” I said.

“How many in the clip?”

“I’ve got seventeen in the clip and one in the chamber. The one in the chamber jammed. I’m going to have to start all over.”

“How much does a gun like that cost?” the help line wanted to know.

“I don’t know what it costs now. I got mine, what, four years ago, when I joined the academy. It set me back about eight hundred.”

“The academy?” he said. “You mean the police academy?”

“Yes, I’m a policeman.”

“How interesting.”

“Listen, I’m serious about this. I’m going to take my Glock apart, clean it all up, reload it, and try again. Probably one chance in a billion that it’ll jam again.”

“Probably,” the help line said.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Aren’t you going to try to talk me out of it?”

“Why should I?”

“I thought that’s what you were there for.”

“If you want to kill yourself and you thought I was going to try to talk you out of it, why would you call?” he asked.

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Why don’t you do it right now, while I’m on the phone?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Talk to me while you’re unjamming your gun or whatever it is you have to do. I’ll wait. Get it all nice and ready, and then do it. Just do it. I want to hear it.”

“Listen, maybe I dialed the wrong number, buddy.”

“No, you didn’t. You dialed five-five-five-H-E-L-P, didn’t you? That’s me. I’m the help line. You got what you wanted.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Who cares whether you understand? You’re about to kill yourself. In a few minutes, no one’s going to give a damn about you anymore. You’ll be gone, and we’ll still be here. It’s not for you to understand. Are you beginning to see my logic?”

“Not exactly.”

“How are you going to do it? Side of the head? In the mouth? Through the chest?”

“In the mouth.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s best. Side of the head, there’s too much chance you’ll turn yourself into a vegetable. Through the chest, you’re not guaranteed to hit the heart. You might only wound yourself, pass out, and wind up in the hospital.”

“I don’t need your advice,” I said. “I want help.”

“Help? You want help? What do you think I’m giving you?”

“Not that kind of help.”

“I didn’t specify what kind of help in my ad, now, did I?”

“No, but—”

“Everyone always assumes I’m here to rescue them. I’m not. You want to kill yourself, that’s fine by me. I can’t abide suicides who get halfway there and then can’t finish the job. Some of them only need a little push to be on their way. So I put the number in the paper. I want them to call me at that moment of crisis, when all they need is a little encouragement.”

“You’re sick.”

“Ho-ho!” he said. “You’re the one who’s already tried to kill himself once this evening, and you want to do it again. Which one of us do you think is sick?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, and began to laugh. “I see what you’re doing. I can see right through you. You’re smart, you know that? You really take the cake. You’re using reverse psychology, just like my mother used to do when I was a kid.”

“Oh?” the help line said. “Just how am I doing that?”

“By pretending you want me to go ahead and do it, acting like you get some kind of kick out of other people dying while you hang there on the line. You think all we’re doing is feeling sorry for ourselves and looking for someone to hold our hands and tell us it’s okay, tell us we’re somebody special, tell us there’s a brighter day dawning somewhere over the rainbow.”

“Stop wasting my time. Are you going to do it or not?”

“See?” I said. “Instead of giving us soothing words, you give us abuse. You try to make us feel even more worthless, because you think we’re going to react against it and tell ourselves we’re really okay. We listen to you and think you’re a jerk, but we say to ourselves, ‘Hey, why should I listen to this guy?’ and before you know it, you’ve cured us of our mania and sent us on our merry way. Isn’t that how it goes?”

The voice on the help line gave a rude, audible yawn.

“Hello?” I said. “Are you still there?”

“I’ve been making a sandwich. You were saying?”

“Never mind what I was saying. I’m onto you, and it won’t work. Maybe with some other schlemiel, but not with me, man.”

“What won’t work?”

“The reverse psychology trick. You’ve just proved to me what a lousy world it is that we live in. I don’t want any part of it. I’m going to clean my gun up and blow my brains out.”

“Do you really mean it this time?”

“Of course I mean it!” I shouted. “If you want to hear it for yourself, just stay on the line. It won’t take very long.”

“You promise? You’re not just pulling my leg?”

“I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“That’s the spirit! Where do you live?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not telling you. Now you believe me, and you want to send somebody over. Somebody from my precinct, maybe, or an ambulance or some goddamn social worker.”

“No,” he said in that calm, level voice of his. “No, I want to come over. I want to see it for myself. Maybe I can even help you do it. That is, if you really want my help—”

“I can take care of it myself, thank you very much.”

“I’m not so sure. You sound chicken to me.”

“Chicken?” I said. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

“What’s your name?” he asked, unfazed by my suggestion.

“Tom,” I said.

“Tom what?”

“Just Tom, okay? I don’t want you reporting me.”

“I’m not going to report you. You can trust me, Tom. My name’s Ray. I’m your friend Ray. I’m here to help you.”

“Lot of help you’ve given me so far, pal.”

“I have,” Ray said. “Only you just don’t appreciate it. Now why don’t you tell me where you live? I want to come over.”

“As long as you promise not to interfere,” I said.

“Oh, I won’t,” Ray said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

I gave him my address. He said he lived only fifteen blocks away and could be there in ten minutes. We hung up.

I laid out some newspaper and started cleaning my gun.

Between the hammer of the midwestern sun and the relentless sweep of the bone-dry wind, the small town of Wheatshocker seemed crushed flat and just about to blow across the plains. Long billows of dust filled the empty streets like strings of fog. Male dogs learned to squat or leaned against withered fence posts so the wind wouldn’t blow them over when they lifted their legs to pee. The piss dried instantly on the sere dirt, then blew away before the dogs finished. Shadows as black as tar huddled protectively in the shallow dunes that lined the few buildings left on the main street. Most of the windowfronts were as empty as a fool’s laugh, while those with glass were etched in formless shapes by the sharp, ghostly wind. The red bricks of the Farmers Bank and Trust had faded to a pallid pink, held in place by desiccated, crumbling mortar. A ’32 Ford sedan idled in the bank’s alley, as dusty as the rest of the heaps parked in front of the bank. A humpbacked man as small as a child sat behind the wheel, smoking a ready-roll. Only a pro would have noticed the low chortle of the reground cam in his engine. Nothing moved down the street but a mismatched team of mules slowly pulling a wagon with a large Negro in overalls and a canvas-covered bed.

The heat-stunned silence was shattered by a single gunshot. Four armed men backed out of the bank, carrying a canvas laundry bag and pushing along an old lady in a feedsack dress and a young girl in white ruffles.

“And stay down, you damn hayseeds!” the red-headed one shouted. “We’ve got hostages!”

The group scrambled into the sedan, the last man firing a shot into the bank’s front window, then the car sped down the dusty street and around a corner after the wagon with its plodding mules. The crumbling sidewalk in front of the bank slowly filled with a group of confused customers and tellers huddled together like the survivors of a natural disaster. A red-faced man, holding a handkerchief against a bloody knot on his bald head, shoved through the crowd, and stared into the dust cloud into which the bank robbers had disappeared.

“One of you fools get that worthless old bastard out of my bank,” he ordered.

“I believe the sheriff’s a-dyin’,” one of the tellers ventured.

“Not in my bank, he isn’t,” the banker said. “We can’t afford to bury the idiot now.”

A frail old woman with a hooked nose said to no one in particular, “I believe Mr. Baines was sweet on that poor widow woman.”

“How the hell did they know to come today?” the banker muttered, his words lost on the gritty wind.

The oily smell of diesel fumes wafts through the open window, filling the small room above the Algiers Wharf. Gordon Urquhart, sitting in the only chair in the room, a gray metal folding chair, takes a long drag on his cigarette and looks out the window at a listless tugboat chugging up the dark Mississippi. The river water, like a huge black snake, glitters with the reflection of the New Orleans skyline on the far bank.

Gordon’s cigarette provides the room’s only illumination. It’s so dark he can barely see his hand. He likes it, sitting in the quiet, waiting for the room’s occupant to show up. Not quite six feet tall, Gordon is a rock-solid two hundred pounds. His hair turning silver, Gordon still sees himself as the good-looking heartbreaker he was in his twenties.

He wasn’t born Gordon Urquhart those forty years ago. When he saw the name in a movie, he liked it so much he became Gordon Urquhart. He made a good Gordon Urquhart. Since the name change, he’d gone up in life.

He yawns, then takes off his leather gloves and places them on his leg. He wipes his sweaty hands on his other pants leg.

The room, a ten-by-ten-foot hole-in-the-wall, has a single bed against one wall, a small chest of drawers on the other wall, and a sink in the far corner. Gordon sits facing the only door.

He closes his eyes and daydreams of Stella Dauphine. He’d caught a glimpse of her last night on Bourbon Street. She walked past in that short red dress without even noticing him. As she moved away, bouncing on those spiked high heels, he saw a flash of her white panties when her dress rose in the breeze. He wanted to follow, but had business to take care of.

Sitting in the rancid room, Gordon daydreams of Stella, of those full lips and long brown hair. She’s in the same red dress, only she’s climbing stairs. He moves below and watches her fine ass as she moves up the stairs. Her white panties are sheer enough for him to see the crack of her round ass.

They’re on his ship from his tour in the U.S. Navy. Indian Ocean. Stella stops above him and spreads her legs slightly. He can see her dark pubic hair through her panties. She looks down and asks him directions.

Gordon goes up and shows her to a ladder, which she goes up, her ass swaying above him as he goes up after her, his face inches from her silky panties. Arriving at the landing above, she waits for him atop the ladder. He reaches up and pulls her panties down to her knees, runs his fingers back up her thighs to her bush and works them inside her wet pussy. She gasps in pleasure.

A sound brings Gordon back to the present. He hears footsteps coming up the narrow stairs to the hall and moving to the doorway. Gordon pulls on his gloves and lifts the .22-caliber Bersa semiautomatic pistol from his lap. He grips the nylon stock, slips his finger into the trigger guard, and flips off the safety as the door opens. He points the gun at the midsection of the heavyset figure standing in the doorway.

Faintly illuminated by the dull, yellowed hall light, Lex Smutt reaches for the light switch. Gordon closes one eye. The light flashes on and Smutt freezes, his wide-set hazel eyes staring at the Bersa.

“Don’t move, fat boy!” Gordon opens his other eye and points his chin at the bed. “Take a seat.”

Smutt moves slowly to his bed and sits. At five-seven and nearly three hundred pounds, Smutt knows better than to think of himself as anything but a toad. He runs his hands across his bald head and bites his lower lip. Wearing a tired, powder-blue seersucker suit, white shirt, and mud-brown tie loosened around his thick neck, Smutt is as rumpled as a crushed paper bag.

“Keep your hands where I can see them.” Gordon rises, his knees creaking, and closes the door. In his black suit, Gordon wears a black shirt and charcoal-gray tie.

Yawning again, Gordon says, “Long time, no see.”

Smutt lets out a nervous laugh.

Gordon’s mouth curls into a cold grin. “Lex Smutt. That’s your real name, ain’t it? It’s a stupid name. You stupid?”

Smutt shakes his head slowly, his gaze fixed on the Bersa.

“You know why I’m here.”

Smutt’s eyes widen as if he hasn’t a clue.

“Give me the fifteen thousand. Or die.”

A shaky smile comes to Smutt’s thin lips. “I don’t have it.”

“Then die.” Gordon cocks the hammer — for effect — and points the Bersa between Smutt’s eyes.

Raising his hands, Smutt stammers, “Come on, now. Gimme a minute.”

“You’ll have the money in a minute?” Gordon’s hand remains steady as he closes his left eye and aims carefully at the small dark mole between Smutt’s eyebrows. The loud blast of a ship’s horn causes Smutt to jump. Gordon is unmoved.

As long seconds tick by, Gordon takes the slack up in the trigger and starts to pull it slowly. Staring eye-to-eye, Smutt blinks.

“I got six grand,” Smutt says.

Gordon’s trigger finger stops moving, but his hand remains steady. He blinks and nods.

“Where?”

“On me.”

“Where?”

Smutt wipes away the sweat rolling down the sides of his face and exhales loudly. “For a minute there I thought—”

“Where?” Gordon interrupts.

Leaning back on his hands, Smutt looks around the room.

Gordon raises his size-eleven shoe and kicks him in the left shin. Smutt shrieks and grabs his leg. He rocks back and forth twice before Gordon presses the muzzle of the Bersa against the man’s forehead.

“Where?” Gordon growls.

“Under the bed.” Smutt rubs his shin with both hands. “Under the floorboard.”

Gordon grabs the seersucker suit collar with his left hand and yanks Smutt off the bed, shoving the man to the floor. Kicking the bed aside, Gordon orders Smutt to pull up the floorboard.

“Come up with anything except money and you’re dead.”

On his hands and knees now, Smutt crawls over to where his bed used to stand. Reaching for the loose board, he looks up at Gordon and says, “We have to come to an understanding.”

Gordon points the Bersa at the floor next to Smutt’s hand and squeezes off a round. A pop is followed by the sound of the shell casing bouncing on the wood floor.

Smutt looks at the neat hole next to his hand, looks back at Gordon, then yanks up the loose board. He reaches inside and pulls out a brown paper bag. He hands it to Gordon without looking up.

Snatching the bag, Gordon takes a couple of steps back. He opens the bag and quickly counts the money. Six grand exactly.

“You’re nine thousand short.”

Smutt rolls over on his butt and sits like a Buddha, hand on his knees. He wipes the sweat away from his face again and says, “Mr. Happer will just have to understand. You just came into this but it’s been goin’ on awhile. I need time. Most of the fifteen is vig... interest. You know.”

Gordon points the Bersa at the mole again. “You’re certain this is all you have?”

Smutt nods slowly, looking at the floor now. He waves a hand around. “Does it look like I got more?”

“Try yes or no!”

“No!” Smutt’s voice falters and he clears his throat.

“I heard you won more than this at the Fairgrounds.”

“Well, you heard wrong.”

Gordon waits.

Smutt won’t look up.

So Gordon asks, “Why deny it? You cleared over twenty thousand.”

“I had other bills to pay.”

“Before Mr. Happer?” Gordon’s voice is deep and icy.

“I told you this has been going on awhile. I need time.”

“You shoulda thought of that before. Now look at me.” Gordon closes his left eye again.

Smutt looks up and Gordon squeezes off a round that strikes just to the left of the mole. Smutt shudders and bats his eyes. Gordon squeezes off another shot, this one just to the right of the mole. Smutt’s mouth opens and he falls slowly forward, face first, in his lap.

Gordon steps forward and puts two more in the back of the man’s head.

Then he carefully picks up the spent casings, all five of them, and puts them in his coat pocket. The air smells of gunpowder now and faintly of blood. He searches the body and finds another four hundred in Smutt’s coat pocket. Still on his haunches, Gordon looks inside the hole in the floor, but there’s nothing else there.

He ransacks the room before leaving.

The night air feels damp on his face as he walks around the corner to where he’d squirreled away his low-riding Cadillac.

The old man ordered the soup of the day again, homemade noodles and chicken served with bread and a glass of house wine, and wiped at his nose with his napkin the whole time he ate. It was February, and everybody on the East Coast had the flu. The old man looked like he should have been home in bed, but his habits were set deep. At ten to six every morning, for instance, he stepped out of his front door in his bathrobe and slippers to retrieve the Inquirer. Two hours later he came out again, dressed in an overcoat, and walked to the end of his block and caught the SEPTA bus to work. Twice this week he’d given his seat to young women. Exactly at one o’clock he left the store, walked the four blocks to the restaurant, and had his soup of the day and wine, always sitting at the same table near the kitchen. The tab always came to six dollars, and he always left a dollar for the waitress. She had a snake tattooed around the fleshy part of her arm, and beneath it the name Jerry was written in script.

The man who had been keeping track of the old man’s habits was named Whittemore, and he noticed the hair in his plate as soon as the waitress set it on the table. The hair lay across his fish and was anchored at one end in a little white paper cup of tartar sauce, moving slightly in the air from the overhead fan, like something dying in bed but not quite dead. He moved closer and saw that most of the hair was black, but out toward the end, away from the tartar sauce, there was a bulb of root where it was brown.

The waitress was a blonde, so the hair had come from the kitchen, which was worse in a way than if it had just belonged to the waitress herself. She had the tattoo, of course, and a stud in her nose — a small pearl — and a stained blouse, but this was the human being, after all, that they’d sent out to greet the public. Christ knew what they looked like back in the kitchen.

“Is everything all right, hon?” She came back to his table empty-handed from the other side on the way to the kitchen. Whittemore looked up and saw the back of the stud glistening inside her nose. A week ago, when he first walked in and saw the pearl, he thought it was some kind of growth.

“It’s fine,” he said.

She put a hand on her hip and he noticed her fingers. Cloudy, yellow nails, the skin itself stained dark. He wondered if she was also a photographer, had her hands in chemicals in her off-hours. Or maybe just a Camel smoker. The point was, who could eat the food after they saw her hands? He shuddered suddenly, remembering that he’d been having ideas about this same girl earlier in the week. He remembered the exact words that came into his head: She looks up for anything.

“You don’t eat much,” she said.

“Too much stress.”

She nodded, as if that made perfect sense, and then gave him a little wink “I’m the same way,” she said. “I just come in to calm my nerves.”

I thug.

That’s not a grammatical error. I fully intended to use the word “thug” as a verb. I realize, of course, that for you, unless you happen to have some knowledge of hip-hop music and culture or hard-boiled noir fiction, you’re probably not familiar with this particular usage. But as I said, I actually meant to use the word “thug” as a verb, rather than in its much more common and familiar usage as a noun. The reasons for this are twofold:

1) I have, of late, been giving a great deal of thought as to how we define both ourselves and each other by what we do.[1] I am fascinated by the subtle yet significant differences between the phrases “I thug” and “I am a thug.” The play in signification here seems never to exhaust its ability to keep my intellect bouncing back and forth, questioning the point at which I cease to be the sum of my actions and become the thing itself (i.e., at what point do I cease thugging and simply become thug?).

2) I find this type of nontraditional and playful usage of language to be quite stimulating and more than a little amusing. And I have always imagined it to be exactly the type of intellectual exercise with which my friends and I would ceaselessly amuse ourselves, over postmeal cocktails and cappuccinos at, say, Mum’s or Cha Cha Cha, had I, of course, any friends.

At any rate, I thug. And indeed it follows then that I must, to myself at least, pose the following question — since I do thug, am I then a thug?

Rather than attempting to answer that question presently, though,[2] I reach in front of me to the coffee table, pick up both the television remote control and the current issue of the TV Guide on top of which it rests. The Guide has been conveniently left open to the proper day but not the proper time, so I find myself flipping past pages of upcoming television “events” to reach the four p.m. listings.[3] Not often having the inclination to watch television in the late afternoon, and curious as to with what I might be able to divert my attention, I find myself pleasantly surprised to see that, in addition to its regular eleven p.m. broadcast, the Charlie Rose show is now shown at four in the afternoon. I turn on the 36-inch Mitsubishi to channel 28, anxious to see whom Mr. Rose will be interviewing.[4]

No sooner do I realize that a group of well-known journalists are discussing the ethical ramifications of the recent media coverage of a number of national news events[5] than I hear the unmistakable dull grinding of the garage door opener as it echoes through the kitchen. I turn off the television, slink into the kitchen, and take a position with my back flat against the wall next to the door leading into the garage.[6] I hear Bobby’s keys jangling for a moment, and then a click as the door is unlocked. The door opens, concealing me from his peripheral vision as he steps into the room. I slam the door forcefully behind him.

He jumps and spins toward the sound. When he sees me, the expression of fear on his face is very nearly palpable. The reasons for his fear are quite understandable, in fact, even logical, given three significant factors inherent in the situation: 1) there is someone in his kitchen who, for all intents and purposes, has no legal right to be there; 2) the particular someone standing in his kitchen is indeed quite intimidating, due not only to the aforementioned size and bulk,[7] but also to the fact that the particular someone is, save for his eyelashes, completely bald (I suffer from a relatively rare disorder — alopecia areata — that causes, in more extreme cases such as mine, a complete ceasing of hair growth that may or may not be permanent),[8] and 3) he knows precisely who the particular someone is and precisely why he is there. “Hello, Bobby,” I say, smiling, friendly, pleasant. It’s important to me to make the effort, whenever and wherever possible, to be as polite and courteous as the situation allows. This, I think, has more than a little to do with my particularly imposing physicality. It is an attempt, on both the conscious and, I suspect, subconscious levels, to allay, insomuch as it is possible, people’s reactions to my appearance.[9]

“Jesus Fucking Christ!” Bobby yells. “I almost pissed myself, you fucking bald-headed freak!” (Italics mine.)

Of the many deprecatory references he might have uttered, he lit upon the single possibility that would undoubtedly cause me, at least momentarily, to lose my composure.[10] I slap him in the face, and as he raises his hands in defense I deliver a forceful uppercut to his solar plexus. The power of the blow lifts him an inch off the floor, and as the wind explodes out of his lungs he collapses like a deboned salmon onto the floor.

I watch him writhe there awhile, gasping for breath, trying to fill his lungs with air. I know I have a few moments before he’ll be capable of processing any rational thoughts, so I let him go and take a seat at the kitchen table. It’s a nice butcher-block set, very Pottery Barn. The accoutrements of the American bottled-water demographics’ consumerism were rampant — a two-door stainless restaurant refrigerator, an oversized gourmet stove with industrial-grade grates, a triple oven with convection, microwave, and broiler in one brushed chrome unit, all surrounding a granite-topped island over a rust-colored, antiqued tile floor.

Bobby’s desperate writhing begins to slow, and I look down at him. His belted black leather coat is bunched up under his armpits, tufts of his carefully gelled and expensively trimmed yellow hair now jut from his head at odd angles, and he writhes in a semifetal position on the tile. The short gasps of air he is able to take into his lungs grow longer and he looks up at me. I smile affably.

“I’m sorry, Bobby,” I say. “That was rather unprofessional of me.”

Bobby has a puzzled look in his soft-contacted, artificially blue eyes.

“But, of course, I am more than a little sensitive in regard to my baldness.”[11] I pause for emphasis. “So I’ll say this only once — do not ever mention it again.”

Bobby’s breathing approaches normalcy and he sits up.

“Are we clear on that point?”

He tries to answer, but isn’t quite able yet. He nods instead.

“Good.” I give him a moment to reflect on his situation, watching as he brushes a stiffened lock of hair off his forehead. I wonder if he will stay seated on the floor, or get up and perhaps attempt to join me at the table.

“You, of course, know why I’m here,” I say. He stays on the floor and nods again. Good.[12] I pause here, to allow him the option of the next move. He stares dumbly at me for a solid ten seconds. “Where’s the money, Bobby?”

He reaches into his inside breast pocket and pulls out a roll of bills. Without even counting, I know it will be short. I take it from his outstretched hand and thumb through the bundle of twenties and fifties.

“You’re light, Bobby.”

He lowers his eyes to the tile.

“This won’t even cover the vig.”[13]

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Yes.”

“Then why even offer it up?”

“I don’t know.” Bobby looks up at me. Plastic blue eyes pleading. “You seem like a reasonable guy.”

“I am a reasonable guy, Bobby.”

He looks relieved for a moment. Doesn’t realize there’s a “but” coming.

“But I’m also an honest guy, Bobby.”

Now he looks puzzled.

“What did I tell you last week?”

He hunches his shoulders and spreads his hands.

“You know,” I say.

He looks at the tile again. I begin to think he finds it more interesting than our conversation.

“Tell me, Bobby.”

Silence.

I reach down and lift his chin, turning his face toward mine. I wonder if this is what mothers of uncooperative children feel. “Tell me what I said would happen if you came up light again this week.” More silence.

I grab him by the lapels and stand, raising him to his feet. Letting go of his collar, I palm his face like a basketball and give him a shove. His body slams against the wall, his head bouncing slightly off the ecru-painted drywall.[14] I close the distance between us and look down into his face. I rest my hand gently on his shoulder and whisper. “What did I say, Bobby?”

He mumbles toward my chest. “You told me you’d break my thumbs.”

“That’s right.” I step back a bit, but not enough to let him move away from the wall. “Now what am I supposed to do, Bobby? What should I do?”

“Cut me some slack, man. Please.”

I consider the possibility for a moment. “You know I can’t do that. You’re not the only one accountable here.” Making a special effort to soften my voice, as if talking to a child, I say, “But I’ll tell you what...” I am sorry as soon as I speak. Looking into his eyes, I see I’ve given him too much hope. “Sit down at the table, hold still, and don’t scream. I’ll make it as painless as possible.”

I can’t read his expression. His brows are arched high above his rounded eyes and his teeth are still clenched together, making the cords on his neck stand out.

“Sit at the table,” I say.

He looks at me as if I’m speaking a foreign language, so I put my hand on his shoulder and tug him toward the table. I sit him down. He lowers his head again.

“Are you crying?” I ask.

He shakes his head, lying.

“Give me a hand.”

He holds both hands a few inches above the table and considers them.

“Come on, Bobby. I’m going to break them both anyway. It’s not Sophie’s Choice.”[15] He looks even more confused. So I reach down, grab his left hand, and quickly snap the thumb.[16]

He yelps like a kicked Chihuahua.

Before he can pull the right hand away, I grab it and repeat the process.

Another yelp, more crying. He holds both hands in front of and away from himself as if they are on fire. He looks confused, tears on his cheeks.[17]

I walk around the island to the freezer. Going well above and beyond the call of duty, I pull out a tray of ice and dump it into a Williams-Sonoma kitchen towel. I fold the ice into the green-checkered fabric and carry it back to Bobby.

“Hold this between your palms.” I hand it to him. “Not too tight. I’ll see you next time, Bobby.”

He mutters something incomprehensible.

“You know what happens next time, right, Bobby?”

Bobby nods.

“Look at me, Bobby.”

He looks at me.

“You know?”[18]

He nods.

“You should go to the emergency room to have those set.”

Another nod.

“Have a nice day, Bobby.”

I lock the door behind myself as I walk out into the street. The cool blue of the sky is just beginning to warm where the sun is nearing the horizon. I feel an itch on the back of my head. Reaching up, I gently rub my finger across the spot, hoping to feel a point or two of new hair growth. I don’t.

Sitting behind the wheel of my car, again I wonder — verb or noun?

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 of bucks and said I should go get some supper at Leroy’s,” the temporary blonde 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 twenty-seven — that’s right, isn’t it, Clarence? — twenty-seven 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 blonde 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 blonde.

“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 blonde said. “With some a the other girls, too.” She shot another nervous look at the black woman. “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 thirty 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 half 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.”

For mid-October, the weather in London was quite warm and the sun was out, another rare occurrence in this cloudy town. Kevin Tanner, assistant professor of English at Lovecraft University in Massachusetts, sat on a park bench in the middle of a small courtyard at the Tower of London. He still felt a bit jet-lagged, like everything he saw was too bright and loud, and the scents and sounds were too strong and forceful. He was near one of the largest stone buildings in the Tower of London complex, the White Tower, and there he waited. He had been here once before, as a grad student, more than sixteen years ago, and it seemed like not much had changed over the years. There were manicured lawns, sidewalks, and walls and battlements and towers, all representing nearly a thousand years of English history. And beyond the Tower complex, the soaring span of the Tower Bridge — looking ancient, of course, but less than a hundred years old — and the wide and magnificent Thames.

At his feet was a small red knapsack, and just a half-hour ago — after spending nearly twenty minutes in line for the privilege of spending eleven pounds to gain entry — a well-dressed and polite security officer had examined his bag and its contents. Inside the bag was a water bottle, two candy bars, a thick guidebook to London, and secured in a zippered pouch within the knapsack, his passport and round-trip airline ticket. He supposed that if the security guard had been more on the job, he would have looked at the airline ticket and inquired as to how an assistant professor at a small college with a savings account of just over two thousand dollars could have afforded a round-trip, first-class airline ticket. Now that would have been something worth investigating.

Despite the oddity of this whole trip and the arrangements, he had enjoyed the flight over. He had never traveled business class in his life, never mind first class, and he felt slightly guilty at having all the attention and comforts of being up in the forward cabin. But after ten or so minutes, he quickly realized why it was so special. How could anybody not want to fly first class if they could afford it? The wide, plush seats, with plenty of elbow- and legroom, and the flight attendants who were at his beck and call. That’s when he felt that familiar flush of anger and embarrassment. Anger at being someone supposedly admired in society, a teacher of children, a molder of future generations, and the only way he could come to England and in first class was through the generosity of strangers. And embarrassment, for he was a grown man, had made grownup choices, and he shouldn’t be angry at that.

Still, he thought, looking down at his bag, it was going to be pleasant flying back.

He looked around him, seeing the crowds of tourists. There were two types: those moving about the grounds of the Tower by themselves, with brochures and maps, and those in large groups following one of the numerous Yeoman Warders, dressed in their dark blue and red Beefeater uniforms. Each uniform had ER written on the chest in fine script. Elizabeth Regina. Kevin crossed his legs, waited, checked his watch. It was 11 A.M., and a man came over to him, wearing a red rose in the lapel of his suit coat. He was tall, gaunt, with thick gray hair combed back in a lionlike mane. The suit and shoes were black, as was the tie, and the shirt was white. The man came to him and nodded.

“Professor Tanner,” he said in a cultured English accent that said it all: Cambridge or Oxford, followed by a civil service position at Whitehall, relaxing in all the right clubs, following the cricket matches on the BBC.

“The same,” Kevin said. “And Mister Lancaster?”

“As well,” he said. “May I join you?”

He shifted on the park bench, turned so he could watch the man sit down and see how he carefully adjusted the pleat of his pants.

“I trust your flight was uneventful?”

“It was,” he said.

“And your room is satisfactory?”

Kevin smiled. “The Savoy is just as it’s advertised. I think even a broom closet would be satisfactory in that place.”

If he was hoping for a response from Mister Lancaster, it didn’t happen. The older man nodded and said, “I see. I appreciate you coming here on such short notice. Will your university miss you?”

“No,” he said, a note of regret in his voice, he realized. “I’m on sabbatical. Supposedly working on a book. Which is why I was able to drop everything to come here and see you.”

“Really, then.”

Kevin paused. “All right, I have to admit, you folks raised my curiosity. A round-trip first-class ticket, first-class accommodations, plus a stipend in pounds equal to about a thousand dollars. All to meet with you at the Tower of London. And to discuss what?”

“Quite,” Lancaster said, folding his long hands over his knees. “History, if you don’t mind. Some history old and history new, all starting here in England.”

“Are you sure you want me?” he asked. “I’m an assistant professor of English. Not history.”

The older man shrugged. “Yes, I know you’re not a professor of history. And yet I know everything there is to know about you, Professor Tanner. Your residence in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Your single life. The courses you teach, your love of Shakespeare and Elizabethan England. Your solitary book, a study of gravestone epitaphs in northern New England, which sold exactly six hundred and four copies two years ago. And the fact that you are currently struggling on another book, one that will guarantee you receive tenure. But that book is nowhere near being completed, am I correct?”

Kevin knew he should be insulted by the fact that this pompous Englishman knew so much about his life, but he was almost feeling honored, that someone should care so much. “All right, you’ve done some research. To what purpose?”

“To help you with this book you’re working on,” Lancaster said.

“Excuse me?”

Lancaster turned away and said, “Look about you, Professor Tanner. Hundreds of years of history, turned into a bloody tourist attraction. The other day I was on a tour here, with a visitor from Germany. One of the Beefeaters told the tourists that the ER on his chest stood for ‘Extremely Romantic.’ Imagine that, making sport of our monarch, in this property that belongs to her. And think about all of the people who have been imprisoned here, from Lady Jane Grey to Sir Walter Raleigh to Rudolf Hess. And in this White Tower behind us, do you know what famous black deed happened there?”

He turned on his bench, looked at the tall building, the line of tourists snaking their way in. “The two princes.”

“Yes, the two princes. Young Edward the Fourth and his younger brother Richard, the Duke of York. Imprisoned here by Richard the Third. You do know Richard the Third, do you not?”

“If you know my background, you already know the answer to that.”

“Ah, yes, Richard the Third. One of the most controversial monarchs this poor, green, sceptered isle has ever seen. Made even more famous by our bard, Mister Shakespeare. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent.’ Either a great man or an evil man, depending on your point of view. And what happened to the young princes, again, depending on your point of view. What do you think happened, Professor?”

Kevin said carefully, “There’s evidence supporting each view, that Richard the Third either had the princes killed, to remove possible claimants to the throne, or that he was ignorant of the whole thing. But the bones of two young boys were found there, buried under a staircase, some years later.”

“Very good, you’ve given me a professor’s answer, but not a scholar’s answer. So tell me again, Professor, what do you think happened?”

Kevin felt pressure, like he was going up before the damn tenure board itself. “I think he had them murdered. That’s what I think.”

“And what’s your evidence?”

“The evidence is, who profits? After Richard the Third seized the throne, he had to eliminate any possible rivals. Those two boys were his rivals. He did what he had to do. It was purely political, nothing else.”

“Hmmm. And your book, the one you’re working on, compares and contrasts our Richard, our Duke of Gloucester, with another Richard from your country, am I correct?”

“Jesus,” Kevin exclaimed. “Who the hell are you people?”

“Never mind that right now,” Lancaster said, leaning in closer to him. “Correct, am I not? Our Richard and your Richard, the Duke of San Clemente. Mister Nixon. Quite the comparison, eh? Richard the Third and Richard Nixon. The use of power, the authority, all that wonderful stuff. But tell me, the book is not going well, is it?”

Kevin thought about lying and then said, “Yeah, you’re right. The book isn’t going well.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because it’s all surface crap, that’s all,” he said heatedly. “Sure, it sounds good on paper and in talking at the faculty lounge, but c’mon, Richard the Third and Nixon? Nixon certainly was something else, but he didn’t have blood on his hands, like your Duke of Gloucester. And don’t start yapping at me about Vietnam. He didn’t start that war. Kennedy and Johnson did. And for all his faults, he ended it the best way he could. Messily, but the best way he could. And I think, and so do other historians, that his opening to China balanced that out. And that’s why the book isn’t going well. Because it’s all on the surface, like it came from some overheated grad student’s imagination.”

Lancaster nodded again, plucked a piece of invisible lint off his suit coat. “Perhaps you’re ignoring the rather blatant comparisons.”

“What do you mean?”

The older man gestured to the White Tower. “What crime was committed here. The murder of two young princes. And what kind of crime was committed in your own country. In 1963 and 1968. Two young princes, loved and admired, who promised great things to their people. Cut down at a young age.”

Kevin was aghast. “The Kennedys?”

“Of course.”

“You brought me all the way over here to spout conspiracy theories? Gibberish? Who the hell are you?”

“I told you, in a matter of—”

Kevin grabbed his knapsack. “And I’ll tell you, unless you come straight with me, right now, I’m leaving. I’m not here to listen to half-ass Kennedy assassination theories. And you can cancel my room and airfare home, and I don’t care. I’ll pay my own way.”

“And not finish your book?”

“That’s the price I’ll pay,” Kevin said.

Lancaster smiled thinly. “How noble. Very well. Here we go. Leave now and your book will never be completed, you know that, don’t you. Leave now and you won’t get tenure. In fact, your life will start getting unwound. You will be forced out of your college, perhaps be tossed back into the great unwashed. Teaching English at high schools or what you folks call vocational technical schools. Or perhaps conjugating verbs to prisoners. Is that a better life than teaching at a comfortable university?”

Kevin felt his breathing quicken. “Go on.”

“Stay with me and learn what I have to offer, and you’ll not only write your book, you’ll write a book that will become an instant bestseller. You will be known across your country and ours as well. If you want to stay at your university, that will be fine, but I can tell you, once this book comes out, Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Columbia will come begging at your door. That’s your choice now, isn’t it. To stay or go.”

“Yeah, that’s a hell of a choice,” Kevin said.

Lancaster smiled. “But a choice nonetheless. It’s a pleasant day, Professor Tanner. We’re both alive and breathing and enjoying this lovely autumn day in the best city on this planet. Let me continue with what I have to say, and what I have to offer. And then you can leave and decide what to do next. All right? Don’t you at least owe me some time, considering the expense that was incurred to bring you over to our fair country?”

Kevin lowered his knapsack to the ground. “All right, I guess I do owe you that. But make it quick and to the point. And I’m not going to do a damn thing until you tell me who you are, and why you spent all this money to have me fly over.”

Lancaster nodded, folded his long hands. “Very well. That seems quite fair. Well, let’s begin, shall we? Another history lesson, if you prefer. Let’s set the stage, that place, as Shakespeare said, where we are all just actors. But this stage has a bloody history. Tell me, who runs the world?”

Kevin hesitated, thinking that he had fallen into the clutches of that odd group of loons and eccentrics who sometimes haunt college campuses. At one faculty luncheon some months ago, he remembered some physics professor bemoaning the fact that a junkyard dealer in New Hampshire had finally come across a Unified Field Theory and wanted the professor’s assistance in getting his theory published. So now it was Kevin’s turn, and again that temptation came up, to walk away from this odd man.

But...like the man said, it was a pleasant day, he had money and a nice room and a ticket back home, and if nothing else, at least he’d have a good story to tell at the next English faculty function.

So he nodded, gestured toward Lancaster. “All right, a fair question. Who does run the world? I’m not sure the world is actually run. If anything, I think it’s hard to even come to an agreement as to who actually runs the country. As a conservative, I could say legally elected governments, in most cases, run most countries in the world. As a liberal, I suppose I could make a case that in some nations, corporations or the military have their hands in running things.”

“Ah, not a bad answer,” Lancaster said. “But let’s try another theory, shall we? What would you say if I told you that royal families across this great globe actually... as you say it, run things?”

Oh, this was going to be a great story when he got back to Massachusetts, he thought. Kevin said, “All right, that’s a theory. An odd one, but still a theory. But I’m not sure I understand you. Royal families, like the House of Windsor, actually run things?” Kevin found himself laughing. “Then you’d think they could do a better job in running their own personal lives, don’t you?”

Lancaster didn’t return the laughter. “How droll, I’m sure, Professor Tanner. But when I say royal families, I don’t restrict myself to Europe. To make you feel more comfortable, let’s discuss your own country, shall we?”

“The States?” He tried to restrain a laugh. “What royalty we have resides in Hollywood. Or Palm Springs. Or on Wall Street. They’re involved in entertainment or business, and they get their photos in People magazine when they become famous, and in the National Enquirer when they get arrested or sent into drug rehab. That’s our royalty, Mister Lancaster. Your royalty’s been written up by Mister Shakespeare himself. Our royalty, if that’s what you call it, is a pretty ratty lot, if you ask me.”

Lancaster’s face seemed more drawn. “This isn’t a joke.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t being amusing.”

“You certainly weren’t. And you’re not taking this seriously. Not at all. And I suggest you do.”

“Or what? Will you have me arrested?”

Lancaster’s look was not reassuring. “That would be easier to accomplish than you think, Professor Tanner. So let’s proceed, shall we? I was asking you about royalty in America. I don’t care about your tycoons or your entertainers. What I do care about is the royalty involved in politics, the kind that actually, again as you say, ‘runs things.’ ”

Kevin didn’t like the threat he had just heard, but he pressed on. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. We don’t have any kind of royalty in the United States.”

Lancaster’s look was imperious. “Really? Look at your own history. What names in the last half of the twentieth century have either been in your Oval Office or nearby in your Congress? Let’s try, shall we? Roosevelt, Kennedy, Rockefeller, du Pont, Bush, Gore, Byrd, Russell... wealthy families of influence who reside in and maintain the circles of power in your country. Tell me, Professor Tanner, are you really that naive?”

“No, I’m not that naive, and I’m also not that stupid,” Kevin said, thinking again of what a great tale this would make once he got back home. “But you’re reaching, Mister Lancaster, you’re reaching quite a lot. Those families are political families, that’s all, just like other families that have their backgrounds in oil, retail, or other kinds of business. Some families pick cattle, others pick politics. That’s it.”

“Really?” the man asked, his voice filled with skepticism.

“Really,” Kevin said.

“These... families, as you call them, have been running your government and your lives for many decades, Professor Tanner. Just like the royal families in Shakespeare’s time. In public they may show their good works and charities, as they run for office and for influence, but in private, it’s quite different. They lie, they cheat, and they steal, and oftentimes they kill. Look at your own news reports over the years, when famed members of these families would often die.”

“What do you mean? They kill each other?”

Lancaster made a dismissive motion with a long hand. “Of course. Again, look at the news reports. Many times, members of your royal family — a Kennedy, a du Pont, a Rockefeller — perishes. Sometimes it’s called a drug overdose. Other times, an accidental shooting. And in one memorable case a few years ago, a plane crash. Those are the cover stories. The real stories are darker, more malignant, as they kill each other, always vying for power, for influence, for money.”

Kevin sighed. The shadows were getting longer, it was getting cooler, and he recalled the size of the bed waiting for him back at the Savoy. He said, “No offense, Mister Lancaster, but I think you’re nuts. Again, no offense. The story of royal families in the United States, acting like characters from Shakespeare... Well, it’s too fantastic.”

“Is it, now?” he asked. “Think of young John F. Kennedy, Jr., the one who died in that plane crash. He was a charming young man, of middling intelligence and skills. But what did he have going for him? Any extraordinary talents, any extraordinary gifts? Not really, am I right? He was just a pleasant young man. Yet tell me, Professor Tanner, if he had decided to enter politics, perhaps as a congressman, how long before he would be a leading candidate for president on the Democratic ticket? Two years? Four? Do you doubt that?”

And the truth is, Kevin couldn’t doubt what the old man was saying about that particular subject, because it made sense. In his own home state of Massachusetts, old Teddy Kennedy was the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla of politics, swatting down ineffectual opponents every six years, like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, swatting down aircraft. Not to mention the Kennedy offspring that had been spun off from Massachusetts, setting up their own political dynasties in Rhode Island, New York, and Maryland...

“So you’re telling me that John-John was murdered, is that it?” Kevin asked.

Lancaster slowly shrugged. “A possibility, that’s all I can say. Just a possibility. But there’s a reality we need for you to look at. A very real event that happened almost forty years ago. A lifetime, for sure, but the death of your own young princes is still a topic that bestirs the imagination, does it not?”

With this odd talk and the cooling weather and the harsh cries of the ravens — legend had it that if they were ever to leave the Tower, England would fall, which is why they had their wings clipped — Kevin was starting to get seriously spooked. The Tower of London no longer seemed to be the cheery tourist attraction that it had been earlier. His imagination could bring forth all of the bloody and horrible deeds that had taken place among these buildings, among these battlements. He suddenly wished that this gaunt man had never contacted him, had never pulled him away from his comfortable little life at Lovecraft University. He wished now he had tossed away that thick airmail envelope with ROYAL MAIL emblazoned in the upper right corner.

“Yes, the two princes — the two Kennedys — still bestir the imagination,” Kevin said. “But I have to ask you again, who are you people? And why me?”

Lancaster shifted his weight. “Very well. A fair question. For the past few hundred years, ever since Shakespeare’s time, this poor little globe has been under the influence of these families, who front companies, governments, and armies. As time passes, they have formed two alliances. Not a firm alliance — there are shifts here and there — but groupings of interest.”

The old man made a noise like a sigh, as if he had worked hard every day, carrying a heavy burden on those thin shoulders. “Our group believes in the freedom of the individual, in concentrating power in the smallest possible arena. Where you have an open press, a Freedom of Information Act, legitimate elections, you can trust that our group or its allies have been behind it.”

“So that’s your group,” Kevin said. “And the other one?”

“The second group has as its goal power: power of a government over people, a corporation over people, of one group of people over another. When you read about a newspaper in Russia being closed, when you read about Internet software that can track you on-line, when you read about Balkan tribes slaughtering each other, you can be sure this group is behind it. By their actions, by their deeds, they are the offspring of Richard the Third. For lack of a better phrase, we call them Richard’s Children.”

“You do, do you,” Kevin said, now convinced that he was spending the afternoon with a madman. “And what do you call yourselves?”

A thin smile. “You’re a bright young man. I’m sure you can figure it out.”

Then it struck him. The red rose in the lapel. The last name. “The War of the Roses... The House of York fighting against the House of Lancaster. White rose versus red rose. Is that it?”

A crisp nod. “Very good. You’re correct. It’s been a long struggle, over generations and generations, but now we feel it’s time to strike a blow. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism, Richard’s Children and their allies are gathering strength. It’s time to bring things out in the open.”

“Which is where I come in?”

“Exactly,” Lancaster said. “Meaning no offense, but an anonymous professor from an obscure college comes across documentation and facts about the murder of America’s two young princes. His book becomes a worldwide bestseller. The evidence he presents is irrefutable. The major news organizations, upset that such a scoop and story have escaped them over the years, perform their own research, based on the leads that this young professor has uncovered. And when these leads are followed, they will end up in some very interesting areas of inquiry. Richard’s Children will have to retreat, maybe for decades, maybe long enough so that a true human civilization can emerge, a civilization based on the sanctity of the individual.”

Lancaster reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a thick brown envelope. “In here you will find some evidence. But not the whole story, and nothing so directly offered, of course.”

Kevin refused to take the offered envelope. “What do you mean, nothing so directly offered?”

“What I mean is that you will be offered leads, avenues to explore,” Lancaster said. “It makes sense that way, does it not? For if everything is offered to you on a silver platter, then it will be shown that you performed little or no original research on your part. Your work, your published book, will be roundly criticized and ignored. But if you follow these leads” — he wiggled the envelope back and forth — “all will become clear. Everything. And your life will change in ways you can’t imagine.”

Kevin waited, watched the man who was offering so much. But what was behind that offer? Lancaster said, “Enclosed in the envelope, of course, is another stipend. About five thousand dollars.”

Again, Kevin waited. He finally said, “There’s no guarantee, you know. Publishers aren’t exactly lining up outside my office to sign me up for a new book. I could write this and nothing would happen.”

“I doubt that,” Lancaster said. “And speaking of doubts, don’t believe that we won’t be watching you. Do the research, do the work that goes into this book. Don’t entertain any thoughts of going back home to your little place and pretend this meeting didn’t happen, that you don’t have an obligation. Have I made myself clear?”

His hand seemed to move of its own volition as it grasped the heavy envelope. “Yes. Quite clear.”

“Good. We’ll be in touch.”

Kevin bent over to place the envelope in his knapsack, and when he raised his head, Lancaster was gone. He looked around at the paths, now almost entirely deserted of tourists, and he got up himself and shouldered his bag. Within a few minutes he was on a crowded sidewalk, heading for the Tower Hill tube station, and the knapsack — with the envelope safely inside — felt like a boulder.

Lourdes became Mrs. Mahmood’s personal maid when her friend Viviana quit to go to L.A. with her husband. Lourdes and Viviana were both from Cali in Colombia and had come to South Florida as mail-order brides. Lourdes’s husband, Mr. Zimmer, worked for a paving contractor until his death, two years from the time they were married.

She came to the home on Ocean Drive, only a few blocks from Donald Trump’s, expecting to not have a good feeling for a woman named Mrs. Mahmood, wife of Dr. Wasim Mahmood, who altered the faces and breasts of Palm Beach ladies and aspirated their areas of fat. So it surprised Lourdes that the woman didn’t look like a Mrs. Mahmood, and that she opened the door herself: this tall redheaded woman in a little green two-piece swimsuit, sunglasses on her nose, opened the door and said, “Lourdes, as in Our Lady of?”

“No, ma’am, Lourdes, the Spanish way to say it,” and had to ask, “You have no help here to open the door?”

The redheaded Mrs. Mahmood said, “They’re in the laundry room watching soaps.” She said, “Come on in,” and brought Lourdes into this home of marble floors, of statues and paintings that held no meaning, and out to the swimming pool, where they sat at a patio table beneath a yellow and white umbrella.

There were cigarettes, a silver lighter, and a tall glass with only ice left in it on the table. Mrs. Mahmood lit a cigarette, a long Virginia Slim, and pushed the pack toward Lourdes, who was saying, “All I have is this, Mrs. Mahmood,” Lourdes bringing a biographical data sheet, a printout, from her straw bag. She laid it before the redheaded woman showing her breasts as she leaned forward to look at the sheet.

“‘Your future wife is in the mail’?”

“From the Latina introduction list for marriage,” Lourdes said. “The men who are interested see it on their computers. Is three years old, but what it tells of me is still true. Except of course my age. Now it would say thirty-five.”

Mrs. Mahmood, with her wealth, her beauty products, looked no more than thirty. Her red hair was short and reminded Lourdes of the actress who used to be on TV at home, Jill St. John, with the same pale skin. She said, “That’s right, you and Viviana were both mail-order brides,” still looking at the sheet. “Your English is good — that’s true. You don’t smoke or drink.”

“I drink now sometime, socially.”

“You don’t have e-mail.”

“No, so we wrote letters to correspond, before he came to Cali, where I lived. They have parties for the men who come and we get — you know, we dress up for it.”

“Look each other over.”

“Yes, is how I met Mr. Zimmer in person.”

“Is that what you called him?”

“I didn’t call him anything.”

“Mrs. Zimmer,” the redheaded woman said. “How would you like to be Mrs. Mahmood?”

“I wouldn’t think that was your name.”

She was looking at the printout again. “You’re virtuous, sensitive, hardworking, optimistic. Looking for a man who’s a kind, loving person with a good job. Was that Mr. Zimmer?”

“He was OK except when he drank too much. I had to be careful what I said or it would ’cause him to hit me. He was strong, too, for a guy his age. He was fifty-eight.”

“When you married?”

“When he died.”

“I believe Viviana said he was killed?” The woman sounding like she was trying to recall whatever it was Viviana had told her. “An accident on the job?”

Lourdes believed the woman already knew about it, but said, “He was disappeared for a few days until they find his mix truck out by Hialeah, a pile of concrete by it but no reason for the truck to be here since there’s no job he was pouring. So the police have the concrete broken open and find Mr. Zimmer.”

“Murdered,” the redheaded woman said.

“They believe so, yes, his hands tied behind him.”

“The police talk to you?”

“Of course. He was my husband.”

“I mean did they think you had anything to do with it.”

She knew. Lourdes was sure of it.

“There was a suspicion that friends of mine here from Colombia could be the ones did it. Someone who was their enemy told this to the police.”

“It have anything to do with drugs?”

The woman seeing all Colombians as drug dealers.

“My husband drove a cement truck.”

“But why would anyone want to kill him?”

“Who knows?” Lourdes said. “This person who finked, he told the police I got the Colombian guys to do it because my husband was always beating me. One time he hit me so hard,” Lourdes said, touching the strap of her blue sundress that was faded almost white from washing, “it separated my shoulder, the bones in here, so I couldn’t work.”

“Did you tell the Colombian guys he was beating you?”

“Everyone knew. Sometime Mr. Zimmer was brutal to me in public, when he was drinking.”

“So maybe the Colombian guys did do it.” The woman sounding like she wanted to believe it.

“I don’t know,” Lourdes said, and waited to see if this was the end of it. Her gaze moved out to the sunlight, to the water in the swimming pool lying still, and beyond to red bougainvillea growing against white walls. Gardeners were weeding and trimming, three of them Lourdes thought at first were Latino. No, the color of their skin was different. She said, “Those men...”

“Pakistanis,” Mrs. Mahmood said.

“They don’t seem to work too hard,” Lourdes said. “I always have a garden at home, grow things to eat. Here, when I was married, I worked for Miss Olympia. She call her service Cleaning with Biblical Integrity. I wasn’t sure what it means, but she would say things to us from the Holy Bible. We cleaned offices in buildings in Miami. What I do here Viviana said would be different, personal to you. See to your things, keep your clothes nice?”

Straighten her dresser drawers. Clean her jewelry. Mrs. Mahmood said she kicked her shoes off in the closet, so Lourdes would see they were paired and hung in the shoe racks. Check to see what needed to be dry-cleaned. Lourdes waited as the woman stopped to think of other tasks. See to her makeup drawers in the bathroom. Lourdes would live here, have Sundays off, a half day during the week. Technically she would be an employee of Dr. Mahmood’s.

Oh? Lourdes wasn’t sure what that meant. Before she could ask, Mrs. Mahmood wanted to know if she was a naturalized citizen. Lourdes told her she was a permanent resident, but now had to get the papers to become a citizen.

“I say who I work for I put Dr. Wasim Mahmood?”

The redheaded wife said, “It’s easier that way. You know, to handle what’s taken out. But I’ll see that you clear at least three-fifty a week.”

Lourdes said that was very generous. “But will I be doing things also for Dr. Mahmood?”

The redheaded woman smoking her cigarette said, “What did Viviana tell you about him?”

“She say only that he didn’t speak to her much.”

“Viviana’s a size twelve. Woz likes them young and as lean as snakes. How much do you weigh?”

“Less than one hundred twenty-five pounds.”

“But not much — you may be safe. You cook?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I mean for yourself. We go out or order in from restaurants. I won’t go near that fucking stove and Woz knows it.”

Lourdes said, “Wos?”

“Wasim. He thinks it’s because I don’t know how to cook, which I don’t, really, but that’s not the reason. The two regular maids are Filipina and speak English. In fact, they have less of an accent than you. They won’t give you any trouble, they look at the ground when they talk to anyone. And they leave at four, thank God. Woz always swims nude — don’t ask me why, it might be a Muslim thing — so if they see him in the pool they hide in the laundry room. Or if I put on some southern hip-hop and they happen to walk in while I’m bouncing to Dirty South doing my aerobics, they run for the laundry room.” She said without a pause, “What did Viviana say about me?”

“Oh, how nice you are, what a pleasure to work here.”

“Come on — I know she told you I was a stripper.”

“She say you were a dancer before, yes.”

“I started out in a dump on Federal Highway, got discovered and jumped to Miami Gold on Biscayne, valet parking. I was one of the very first, outside of black chicks, to do southern hip-hop, and I mean Dirty South raw and uncut, while the other girls are doing Limp Bizkit, even some old Bob Seeger and Bad Company — and that’s OK, whatever works for you. But in the meantime I’m making more doing laptops and private gigs than any girl at the Gold and I’m twenty-seven at the time, older than any of them. Woz would come in with his buddies, all suits and ties, trying hard not to look Third World. The first time he waved a fifty at me I gave him some close-up tribal strip-hop. I said, ‘Doctor, you can see better if you put your eyeballs back in your head.’ He loved that kind of talk. About the fourth visit I gave him what’s known as the million-dollar hand job and became Mrs. Mahmood.”

She told this sitting back, relaxed, smoking her Virginia Slim cigarette, Lourdes nodding, wondering at times what she was talking about, Lourdes saying “I see” in a pleasant voice when the woman paused.

Now she was saying, “His first wife stayed in Pakistan while he was here in med school. Right after he finished his residency and opened his practice, she died.” The woman said, “Let’s see... You won’t have to wear a uniform unless Woz wants you to serve drinks. Once in a while he has some of his ragtop buddies over for cocktails. Now you see these guys in their Nehru outfits and hear them chattering away in Urdu. I walk in, ‘Ah, Mrs. Mahmood,’ in that semi-British singsongy way they speak, ‘what a lovely sight you are to my eyes this evening.’ Wondering if I’m the same chick he used to watch strip.”

She took time to light another cigarette, and Lourdes said, “Do I wear my own clothes working here?”

“At first, but I’ll get you some cool outfits. What are you, about an eight?”

“My size? Yes, I believe so.”

“Let’s see — stand up.”

Lourdes rose and moved away from the table in the direction Mrs. Mahmood waved her hand. Now the woman was staring at her. She said, “I told you his first wife died?”

“Yes, ma’am, you did.”

“She burned to death.”

Lourdes said, “Oh?”

But the redheaded woman didn’t tell her how it happened. She smoked her cigarette and said, “Your legs are good, but you’re kinda short-waisted, a bit top-heavy. But don’t worry, I’ll get you fixed up. What’s your favorite color?”

“I always like blue, Mrs. Mahmood.”

She said, “Listen, I don’t want you to call me that anymore. You can say ma’am in front of Woz to get my attention, but when it’s just you and I? I’d rather you called me by my own name.”

“Yes?”

“It’s Ginger. Well, actually it’s Janeen, but all of my friends call me Ginger. The ones I have left.”

Meaning, Lourdes believed, since she was married to the doctor, friends who also danced naked, or maybe even guys.

Lourdes said, “Ginger?”

“Not Yinyor. Gin-ger. Try it again.”

“Gin-gar?”

“That’s close. Work on it.”

I pulled into the Thatcher driveway and shut down my motorcycle. I dropped the sidestand, but I didn’t climb off — not yet. When Jane called a half-hour earlier, she told me Charlie was worse and he wanted to see me. She asked me to come right away. I had rushed to their place, but now that I was there, instead of going in, I sat astride my bike taking in deep lungfuls of air. It had just stopped raining, and the night was heavy with the smell of jasmine. Charlie Thatcher took great pride in his yard, and I told myself I just wanted to steal a moment to enjoy the fragrance of his night-blooming jasmine. That was what I told myself, but even before the thought could form, I knew it was a lie.

The porch light came on, but I was parked beyond the reach of its yellow glow. The front door opened, and Jane stepped outside. “Pry?” she called. “Is that you out there?”

“Yeah,” I said as I stood and swung my leg over the bike, “it’s me.”

She came down the steps and met me. “I can’t believe you rode a motorcycle,” she said. She held her hand palm up. “Didn’t you notice it was raining?” She tried to smile, but there was a puffy thickness to her face, and the smile couldn’t quite materialize.

“Yeah, I know, but I felt like riding.” The truth was that when I got depressed, I liked to ride, and depression that night was as pervasive as the smell of Charlie’s jasmine. I gave a little shrug. “Sometimes it makes me feel better.”

When I said that, Jane’s features came all unscrewed and fell apart. “Oh, Pry,” she said, and she rushed to me and threw her arms around my waist. She dropped her head to my chest, and deep, horrible gusts of sound came out of her. She was getting soaked from the water that clung to my oilskin coat, but that didn’t seem to matter. “It’s happening,” she said. “It’s happening so fast.”

I put my arms around her and pulled her close without saying anything. Charlie had been diagnosed a month earlier with liver cancer. A week ago, he had been admitted to the hospital. Two days ago, against his doctors’ advice, he had insisted we bring him home.

“He asked me to call you,” Jane said. She lifted her head and looked up at me. “He said it’s important that he talk to you right away. He’s in terrible pain, but he won’t take anything because he wants to have it together when he talks to you.”

I gave her a squeeze, and with my hands still on her shoulders, I pushed her back a step and looked down. “It’s okay. I’m here now. How are you doing?” I asked.

She wiped her tears away with both hands and said, “I’m not doing so good. I cry constantly, except when I’m around Charlie. I haven’t cried in front of him yet. He doesn’t need to see my hysteria on top of everything else.” She punctuated her comment with another of those not-quite-right smiles.

We walked to the house, and once we were on the porch, I took off my coat, shook the rain from it, and draped it over the railing. “Did he say what’s on his mind?” I asked.

“No, he’s being secretive as hell, but I could tell that it’s important to him.” She opened the front door and led me inside. “He said he would explain everything to me and the boys once he’s had a chance to talk to you.” She nodded toward the staircase and told me to go on up. There was the glint of a scolding mother in her eye. “I’d offer to bring you a beer,” she said, “but since you’re riding that motorcycle, I won’t.” Jane never missed an opportunity to let me know she thought motorcycles were dangerous.

I grabbed hold of the thick oak banister and pulled myself up the stairs. The Thatcher home was on Fifth Street, one block from Balboa Park. It was a large, drafty place built in the early 1930s. Charlie had been my number-two man for years, and when I sold my security business, the new owners promoted him to general manager. I assumed when that happened, he and Jane would then sell this place in San Diego and move up to North County, where the main offices were located. When I suggested that, though, Charlie wouldn’t consider it. “This is where we raised our two boys,” he told me, “and this is where we’ll stay.”

Once I was at the landing outside Charlie’s room, I hesitated again about going inside. I could no longer smell the jasmine, so I was forced to admit the truth. Charlie Thatcher was as close to me as an uncle, and I was not taking this well.

When a hoarse voice called, “Come on in, Father Delaney,” I swallowed, gave the door a shove, and stepped inside.

“I’ve never been mistaken for a priest before,” I said. Charlie was in a hospital bed, and it had been adjusted so that he was more or less in a sitting position.

“Oh, Jeez, lookie who’s here. It’s the biker trash.” Charlie was originally from Queens, New York, and to my West Coast ears he sounded exactly like Archie Bunker from that old television series. Except for his size, he even looked like Archie. Charlie was much bigger, though — six-three and well over two hundred pounds. At least before he’d gotten sick he’d been over two hundred pounds. Now he was losing weight fast. It had been only two days since I had seen him, and in that short time, Charlie looked to have taken off twenty pounds and put on twenty years.

I took my best shot at a smile and said, “Good God, Charlie, you look like hell.”

“Thanks a lot. I was feeling kinda blue until now, but you really perk a fella up.”

I patted his hand. “It’s the least I can do.”

He growled. “Lately, doin’ the least is what you do the most.” Charlie liked to give me a hard time about what he considered my life of leisure. I had spent my twenties and early thirties building my business. By the time I sold out, we were doing it all: uniformed security guards, night watchmen, the installation of burglar alarms, private investigations. It had been an all-consuming process for a lot of years. Now I could afford to spend my time doing what I wanted to do, which usually involved riding the motorcycles I had customized myself at my home up the coast. It was not the sort of activity the hard-working Charlie Thatcher considered productive.

We had gotten past our obligatory insults-at-first-sight, and now there was a moment thick with silence. It was Charlie who broke it. “The doc figures less than a week.” When he said that, I felt very heavy and allowed myself to drop into the straight-backed chair beside his bed. “Maybe a lot less,” he added. “I didn’t believe it at first, but I know it’s true. It’s strange, you know? It’s like I can feel myself draining away.”

I started to tell him how sorry I was, but he knew that without my saying it. Charlie could always read my mind. We had known each other for eighteen years. Right after he retired from the navy, I hired him as a security guard for a strip mall in National City. It was a tough area, but Big Charlie was perfect for the job. Providing security for that place had been my first contract, so Charlie had been with me since the beginning.

With what looked like a lot of pain, he lifted a hand toward the door. “Close that thing all the way, would you, John?” My name’s John Pryor, but most people call me Pry; Charlie always called me John. I shut the door, and as I came back he said, “I thought you might be Father Delaney because I asked Janey to give both of you a call. Since the rectory’s only a few blocks away, I expected him to show up first.”

“You must have forgotten my disregard for speed limits.”

He gave my little joke a quick smile — more than it deserved, really — but I could tell the niceties were over. Charlie had something on his mind. “This is better,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you first, anyway.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

He stared for a long moment at his frail, blotchy hands. Finally he shook his head and said in a weak voice, “I’m not a good man, John.”

I sat back down in the chair and leaned my forearms over the bed’s rail. “That’s crazy. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.” And I wasn’t just saying that, either. Charlie Thatcher was an honorable, unselfish man. He was a loving father and husband. He was a Boy Scout leader and a Little League coach. He spent one night a week serving soup in a shelter down on Market Street. He had been a Big brother to dozens of underprivileged kids. “Hell, Charlie,” I said, “you’re the guy that every sleazeball politician in the country pretends to be. What do you mean, you’re not a good man?”

He turned to me, and the rims of his eyes stood out red against his yellowed complexion. “I’m not, John. I wanted to be. I tried to be.” He turned his head toward the window and looked into the darkness of his large backyard. “I wanted to make up for what I had done, but there was no making up for it.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

He turned back to me, and the pain I saw in his face was not pain caused by his sickness; it came from something else. “I’m a murderer, John. Thirty-five years ago, I killed a man.”

I’m not sure how long it was before I stammered out, “You’re kidding, right?” Of course the question was so stupid, Charlie didn’t even bother to answer it.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever told. But now it’s time I tell everyone. Father Delaney—” His voice broke. “—Jane, the boys. I should have told them long before now.”

“What happened, Charlie?” I asked. I still didn’t believe him. I couldn’t picture Charlie Thatcher being a murderer; the image just wouldn’t come.

He dropped his head back to the stack of pillows behind him and stared at some spot on the ceiling. “When it happened,” he began, “I was in the navy. I was drinking in a bar in East San Diego, and for some reason — I don’t remember why — this guy wanted to fight. I was a tough kid with a hot temper, so we stepped out into the alley.”

I asked, “It happened in a fight?”

“Not really. The guy was my size or even bigger, but he wasn’t a fighter.” Charlie looked at me, and I knew what he was saying was true. “I punched him a couple of times, and he hit the ground hard, smacking the back of his head. It could’ve ended there, but something in me clicked, you know? I had this — I don’t know — this rage, and it took over. There was no stopping it. I knocked this guy down, and then I was on top of him driving my fist into his face over and over and over. When I came to my senses, I started running, and I didn’t stop until I was back at the ship. The next day I heard on the radio that the guy was dead.”

“Were you ever questioned by the police?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t know the man. There was nothing to connect me to him. I don’t even remember how the argument started in the first place. We’d only talked for maybe ten minutes in the bar, and I guess no one had noticed us. San Diego was a pretty rough place in those days, especially in that part of town. There was a story in the newspaper a couple of days later. His name was Duane Tragovic. He was a petty criminal. He’d been arrested a dozen times. There wasn’t much of an investigation. I don’t think this guy’s death was real high on the cops’ list of things to do.”

We both sat silent for a moment. “I tried to just forget about it,” Charlie finally said, “but I couldn’t. Maybe Tragovic was a criminal, but it didn’t matter what he was; what mattered was what I was, and I was a murderer.

“The paper said that Tragovic had a wife. Marlee was her name, and for some reason I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I’d not only committed a crime against Tragovic, but I had committed a crime against her as well. It got to where I couldn’t stand being in San Diego. I thought if I could get out of town, I could put this behind me, so I volunteered for duty on a river patrol boat in Vietnam.” He fixed me with his rheumy eyes. “But I could never stop thinking about it, John.” He lifted his hand and formed a fist. “Every single day for the last thirty-five years, I have remembered the feel of hitting that man — beating him. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of him and his wife. I wanted to find her and tell her how sorry I was, but I couldn’t do it. I knew if I ever found her, the truth would come out, and I couldn’t face what that would mean. Eventually I had a family of my own, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell them.” His eyes filled, and he shook his head. “I was too much of a coward to let them know what kind of a man I really am.”

As soon as he said that, he gave a gasp, and his body jerked. He clenched his eyes and sucked in a quick, shallow breath. It was clear he was in severe pain.

“Charlie,” I said, “what can I do?”

He didn’t answer. He just lay there with his eyes clasped and his teeth gritted. After a bit he seemed to relax, but when the pain passed, he looked thinner and even more frail. The angles where the sheet touched his body seemed sharper. In a matter of seconds the pain had come and gone, but when it left, it had taken a piece of Charlie with it. It seemed that there was less of him lying in front of me now than there had been only a moment before.

Slowly he rubbed his eyes, but there was a shadow there — a darkness — he could not rub away. “I tried to be good,” he said in a raspy whisper, “but it didn’t matter what kind of a man I tried to be, I could never change what I became that night so long ago.”

There was a faint rapping at the door, and a middle-aged man wearing a white clerical collar stuck in his head.

“Father Delaney,” Charlie said, “give us another second, would you?”

The man nodded. “I’ll be right out here when you’re ready.” He stepped back into the hall and closed the door.

“I need to make my confession, John.”

I stood and looked back toward the door that led into the hallway. “Sure, I’ll leave and send the priest right in.”

“No, no,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. I am going to confess to Father Delaney and to Janey and the kids, too, but that wasn’t what I meant when I said I need to make my confession. What I meant was I need to make my confession to Marlee Tragovic. I have to tell her what I did to her husband and beg her to forgive me.” He lifted his eyes to mine, and I saw the sadness that had always been there. I had seen it before, but I had never recognized it for what it was. “I want you to find her for me,” he said. “I want you to bring her here.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “My God, Charlie, it’s been thirty-five years.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and the shadow in his eyes darkened. “Thirty-five long years.” He swallowed hard. “You can do it, though, John. I have faith in you. But you better hurry. I’m not getting any younger.” Then he added with a feeble smile, “Or much older, either, for that matter.”

It was a Tuesday morning, about a quarter past eleven. The little yellow dog hid in among the folds of the drapes, peeking out now and then to see if I was still in the reclining living room chair. Each time he caught sight of me, he bared his teeth and then slowly withdrew into the pale green fabric.

The room smelled of lavender and cigarette smoke.

The ticking of the wind-up clock, which I had carried all the way from France after my discharge, was the only sound except for the occasional passing car. The clock was encased in a fine dark wood, its numerals wrought in pale pink metal — copper and tin, most probably.

The cars on Genesee sounded like the rushing of wind.

I flicked my cigarette in the ashtray. A car slowed down. I could hear the tires squealing against the curb in front of our house.

A car door opened. A man said something in French. Bonnie replied in the same language. It was a joke of some sort. My Louisiana upbringing had given me a casual understanding of French, but I couldn’t keep up with Bonnie’s Parisian patter.

The car drove off. I took a deep drag on the Pall Mall I was nursing. She made it to the front step and paused. She was probably smelling the mottled yellow and red roses that I’d cultivated on either side of the door. When I’d asked her to come live with us she said, “As long as you promise to keep those rosebushes out front.”

The key turned in the lock and the door swung open. I expected her to lag behind because of the suitcase. She always threw the door open first and then lifted the suitcase to come in.

My chair was to the left of the door, off to the side, so the first thing Bonnie saw was the crystal bowl filled with dried stalks of lavender. She was wearing dark blue slacks and a rust-colored sweater. All those weeks in the Air France stewardess uniform made her want to dress down.

She noticed the flowers and smiled, but the smile quickly turned into a frown.

“They came day before yesterday.”

Bonnie yelped and leapt backward. The little yellow dog jumped out of hiding, looked around, and then darted out through the open door.

“Easy,” she cried. “You scared me half to death.”

I stood up from the chair.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you saw me.”

“What are you doing home?” Her eyes were wild, fearful.

For the first time I didn’t feel the need or desire to hold her in my arms.

“Just curious,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

I took two steps toward her. I must have looked a little off wearing only briefs and an open bathrobe in the middle of a workday.

Bonnie took a half-step backward.

“The flowers,” I said. “I was wondering about the flowers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They been sittin’ there since the special delivery man dropped them off. Me and the kids were curious.”

“About what?”

“Who sent ’em.” The tone of my voice was high and pleasant, but the silence underneath was dead.

“I don’t understand,” Bonnie said. I almost believed her.

“They’re for you.”

“Well?” she said. “Then you must have seen the note.”

“Envelope is sealed,” I said. “You know I always try to teach my children that other people’s mail is private. Now what would I look like openin’ your letter?”

She heard the my in “my children.”

Bonnie stared at me for a moment. I gestured with my right hand toward the tiny envelope clipped to an upper stem. She ripped off the top flowers getting the envelope free. She tore it open and read. I think she must have read it through three times before putting it in her pocket.

“Well?”

“From one of the passengers,” she said. “Jogaye Cham. He was on quite a few of the flights.”

“Oh? He send all the stewardesses flowers?”

“I don’t know. Probably. He’s from a royal Senegalese family. His father is a chief. He’s working to unite the emancipated colonies.”

There was a quiet pride in her words.

“He was on at least half of the flights we took, and I was nice to him,” Bonnie continued. “I made sure that we had the foods he liked, and we talked about freedom.”

“Freedom,” I said. “Must be a good line.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, suddenly angry. “Black people in America have been free for a hundred years. Those of us from the Caribbean and Africa still feel the bite of the white man’s whips.”

It was an odd turn of a phrase — “the white man’s whips.” I was reminded that when a couple first become lovers they begin to talk alike. I wondered if Jogaye’s speeches concerned the white man’s whips.

I didn’t respond to what she said, just inhaled some more smoke and looked at her.

After a brief hesitation, Bonnie picked up her suitcase and carried it into our bedroom. I returned to the big chair, put out the butt, and lit up another, my regimen of only ten cigarettes a day forgotten. After awhile I heard the shower come on.

I had installed that shower especially for Bonnie.

If someone were to walk in on me right then, they might have thought that I was somber but calm. Really, I was a maniac trapped by a woman who would neither lie nor tell the truth.

I’d read the note, steamed it open, and then glued it shut. It was written in French, but I used a school dictionary to decipher most of the words. He was thanking her for the small holiday that they took on Madagascar in between the grueling sessions with the French, the English, and the Americans. It was only her warm company that kept his mind clear enough to argue for the kind of freedom that all of Africa must one day attain.

If she had told me that it was a gift from the airlines or the pilot or some girlfriend that knew she liked lavender, then I could have raged at her lies. But all she did was leave out the island of Madagascar.

I had looked it up in the encyclopedia. It’s five hundred miles off the West African coastline, almost a quarter million square miles in area. The people are not Negro, or at least do not consider themselves so, and are more closely related to the peoples of Indonesia. Almost five million people lived there. A big place to leave out.

I wanted to drag her out of the shower by her hair, naked and wet, into the living room. I wanted to make her tell me everything that I had imagined her and her royal boyfriend doing on a deserted beach eight thousand miles away.

The bouquet had been sent to her care of the Air France office. Her boyfriend expected them to hold it there. But some fool sent it on, special delivery.

I decided to go into the bathroom and ask her if she expected me to lie down like a dog and take her abuse. My hands were fists. My heart was a pounding hammer. I stood up recklessly and knocked the glass ashtray from the arm of the chair. It shattered. It probably made a loud crashing sound, but I didn’t notice. My anger was louder than anything short of a forty-five.

“Easy,” she called from the shower. “What was that?”

I took a step toward the bathroom and the phone rang.

“Can you get that, honey?” she called.

Honey.

“Hello?”

“Easy, is that you?”

I recognized the voice but could not place it for my rage.

“Who is this?”

“It’s EttaMae,” she said.

I sat down again. Actually, I fell into the chair so hard that it tilted over on its side. The end table toppled, taking the lamp with it. More broken glass.

“What?”

“I called Sojourner Truth,” she was saying, “and they said you had called in sick.”

“Etta, it’s really you?”

Bonnie came rushing out of the bathroom.

“What happened?” she cried.

Seeing her naked body, thinking of another man caressing it, holding on to the phone and hearing a woman that I had been searching for for months — I was almost speechless.

“I need a minute, baby,” I said to both women at once.

“Hold on a minute,” I said to Etta while waving Bonnie back to her shower. “Hold on.”

Bonnie stared for a moment. She seemed about to say something and then retreated to the bathroom.

I sat there on the floor with the phone in my lap. If I had had a gun in my hand, I would have gone outside and killed the yellow dog.

The receiver was making noise, so I brought it to my head.

“... Easy, what’s goin’ on over there?”

“Etta?”

“Yes?”

“Where have you been?”

“There’s no time for that now, Easy. I got to talk to you.”

“Where are you?”

She gave me an address on the Pacific Coast Highway, at Malibu Beach.

I hung up and went to the bedroom. Three minutes later I was dressed and ready to go,

“Who was that?” Bonnie called from the bathroom.

I went out of the front door without answering because all I had in my lungs was a scream.

Contrary to popular belief, the human cranium isn’t a single helmet-shaped bone but eight bones fused together, and the facial mask is fourteen bones fused together, and these, in the victim, had been smashed with a blunt object, smashed, dented, and pierced, as if the unknown killer had wanted not merely to kill his victim but to obliterate her. No hair remained on any skull fragments, for no scalp remained to contain hair, but swaths of sun-bleached brown hair had been found with the skeleton and had been brought to him in a separate plastic bag. Since rotted clothing found at the scene was a female’s clothing, the victim had been identified as female. A woman, or an older adolescent girl.

“A jigsaw puzzle. In three dimensions.” He smiled. Since boyhood he’d been one to love puzzles.

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 thirty-three. The temperature got up to 100 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 son of a bitch, 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 daytime. 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 a while. 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 mustache. 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 where 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 a while 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 mustache, 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 downriver 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 a 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 where Schmidt was parked. Nobody saw me get into his car. 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 80 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 Schlitzes 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 row houses 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 row house. 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 toward Northwest.

Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on.

Another block or so I came upon 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 toward 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.

“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 marvelous 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.

Charles 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 midsentence, “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 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 marvelous!”

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 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 shirtwaist 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 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 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 rosebushes 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,” 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 makeup 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.”

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?”

Pat and Clyde were murdered on pot roast night. The doorbell rang just as Pat was setting the butter and margarine (Clyde was watching his cholesterol) on the table. She was thinking about James Dean. She had loved him desperately as a teenager, seen his movies dozens of times, written his name across her notebooks, carefully taped pictures of him to the inside of her locker so that she would have the pleasure of seeing his tortured, sullen face from East of Eden as she exchanged her French and English textbooks for science and math. When she graduated from high school she took down the photos and pasted them to the inside cover of her yearbook, which she perused longingly several times over the summer and brought with her to the University of Massachusetts, where it sat, unopened, alongside her thesaurus and abridged collegiate dictionary until she met Clyde, received her M.R.S. degree, and packed her things to move into their two-bedroom ranch house on Bridge Street.

Before she put the meat in the oven that afternoon, Pat had made herself a cup of tea and turned on the television. Channel 38 was showing Rebel Without a Cause, and as the light slowly began to rise through the screen of their old Zenith she saw James Dean on the steps of the planetarium, clutching at the mismatched socks of a dead Sal Mineo and crying. She put down her tea, slid her warm fingertips inside the V-neck of her dress, and held her left breast. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her nipple hard and erect against the palm of her hand. It was like seeing an old lover, like remembering a piece of herself that no longer existed. She watched the credits roll and glanced outside to see her husband mowing the lawn. He had a worried expression on his face and his socks pulled up to his knees.

That evening before dinner, as she arranged the butter and margarine side by side on the table — one yellow airy and light, the other yellow hard and dark like the yolk of an egg — she wondered how she could have forgotten the way James Dean’s eyebrows curved. Isn’t memory a strange thing, she thought. I could forget all of this, how everything feels, what all of these things mean to me. She was suddenly seized with the desire to grab the sticks of butter and margarine in her hands and squeeze them until her fingers went right through, to somehow imprint their textures and colors on her brain like a stamp, to make them something that she would never lose. And then she heard the bell.

When she opened the door Pat noticed that it was still daylight. The sky was blue and bright and clear and she had a fleeting, guilty thought that she should not have spent so much time indoors. After that she crumpled backwards into the hall as the bullet from a .38-caliber Saturday Night Special pierced her chest, exited below her shoulder blade, and jammed into the wood of the stairs, where it would later be dug out with a penknife by Lieutenant Sales and dropped gingerly into a transparent plastic Baggie.

Pat’s husband Clyde was found in the kitchen by the back door, a knife in his hand (first considered a defense against his attacker and later determined as the carver of the roast). He had been shot twice — once in the stomach and once in the head — and then covered with cereal, the boxes lined up on the counter beside him and the crispy golden contents of Captain Crunch, Corn Flakes, and Special K emptied out over what remained of his face.

Nothing had been stolen.

It was a warm spring evening, full of summer promises. Pat and Clyde’s bodies lay silent and still while the orange sunset crossed the floors of their house and the streetlights clicked on. As darkness came, and the skunks waddled through the backyard and the raccoons crawled down from the trees, they were still there, holding their places, suspended in a moment of quiet blue before the sun came up and a new day started and life went on without them.

It was Clyde’s mother who called the police. She dialed her son’s number every Sunday morning from Rhode Island. These phone calls always somehow perfectly coincided with whenever Pal and Clyde had just settled down to breakfast, or whenever they were on the verge of making love.

Thar she blows, Clyde would say, and take his hot coffee with him over to where the phone hung on the wall, or slide out of bed with an apologetic glance at his wife. The coffee and Pat would inevitably cool, and in this way his mother would ruin every Sunday. It had been years now since they frolicked in the morning, but once, when they were first married and Pat was preparing breakfast, she had heard the phone, walked over to where her husband was reading the paper, dropped to her knees, pulled open his robe, and taken him in her mouth. Let it ring, she thought, and he had let it ring. Fifteen minutes later the police were on their front porch with smiles as Clyde, red-faced, bathrobe bulging, answered their questions at the door.

In most areas of her life Clyde’s mother was a very nice person. She behaved in such a kind and decorous manner that people would often remark, having met her, What a lovely woman. But with Clyde she lost her head. She was suspicious, accusing, and tyrannical. Her husband had died suddenly a few years back, and once she got through her grief her son became her man. She pushed this sense of responsibility through him like fishhooks, plucking on the line, reeling him back in when she felt her hold slipping, so that the points became embedded in his flesh so deep that it would kill him to take them out.

She dialed the police after trying her son thirty-two times, and because the lieutenant on duty was a soft touch, his own mother having recently passed, a cruiser was dispatched to Pat and Clyde’s on Bridge Street, and because one of the policemen was looking to buy in the neighborhood, the officers decided to check out the back of the house after they got no answer, and because there was cereal blowing around in the yard the men got suspicious, and because it was a windy day and because the hinges had recently been oiled and because the door had been left unlocked and swung open and because one of them had seen a dead body before, a suicide up in Hanover, and knew blood and brain and bits of skull when he saw them, he made the call back to the station, because his partner was quietly vomiting in the rosebushes, and said, We’ve got trouble.

It was a bad winter and a worse spring. It was the summer Bill Allen lived and died, the sweltering summer I landed a job cutting trees for Robert Wilson’s scab-logging outfit near Orford, New Hampshire. June boiled itself away into the heavy steam of July. Heat devils rose in waves off the blacktop as timber trucks rolled in. By the end of July, we switched gears and started cutting stove wood. I was cutting eight cords a day while Robert worked the hydraulic splitter. Then we’d deliver it in one of our dump trucks. Some men drove to the woodlot to pick up their own. Some of them had white salt marks on their boots and jackets from sweat — some of them smelled like beer. Most of them smelled like gasoline. They didn’t say much, just paid for their wood and left with it in their pickup trucks. They were either busy working or busy living their lies, which is work in itself. I knew about that. The hard work crushed one empty beer can day after another, adding to my lifetime pile of empties. Summer moved on, gray in spite of the bright sun.

That Friday, I was Bill Allen. I was Bill Allen all that summer. Bill Allen was what caused me to jump every time the phone rang. I was Bill Allen from Glens Falls, New York, and I was taking a summer off from college. I repeated that story as often and as loudly as possible. And each ring of the phone might be someone asking me to prove I was Bill Allen, which was out of the question. Back in December, in the middle of another, different lie, I tried to rob a gas station near Cape May, New Jersey. It was off-season then, nobody around, and I thought it would be easy. It fit the person I’d lied about being. A high school girl was behind the counter. I wore a ski mask and carried a cheap, semiautomatic pistol. I must have touched the trigger, because the gun went off. Maybe she lived. I really couldn’t say. I left fast. My brain was on fire, I hadn’t meant to shoot her. But it was too late for that. I took a roll of bills and ended up at Robert’s. Robert paid cash at the end of the week, didn’t bother with Uncle Sam, didn’t ask for references, and had plenty of backbreaking work that needed doing, without his son around to help him. Bill Allen was just the man for the job, and every day I was Bill Allen to the best of my ability. It didn’t help — my grim yesterdays cast the longest shadows in the Connecticut River Valley. I watched every car, studied every face. Bill Allen never knew a peaceful day. If it hadn’t been for the marathon workload Robert demanded, Bill Allen never would have slept. I’d have probably shot Bill Allen myself if I hadn’t been working so hard to keep him going. Some days, he lives on with different names. Allen Williams, Al Wilson, Bill Roberts. Bill Allen probably died in a fire that summer. Leave it at that, with questions about Bill Allen.

That one autumn, when Marie got to the cabin, something looked wrong. She took in the familiar view: the clapboard bungalow she and Ernie had inherited from his father, the bushes and trees that had grown up over the years, the dock pulled in for the season. She sat in the idling car, reminded of those “find the mistake” puzzles John used to pore over as a child, intent on locating mittens on the water skier, milk bottles in the parlor. Bent in a corner somewhere over the softening page, her blue-eyed boy would search for hours, convinced that after every wrong thing had been identified, more wrong things remained.

Sunlight pooled in the dooryard. The day gleamed, the clean Maine air casting a sober whiteness over everything. The gravel turnaround seemed vaguely disarranged. Scanning the line of spruce that shielded the steep slope to the lake’s edge, Marie looked for movement. Behind the thick mesh screen of the front porch she could make out the wicker tops of the chairs. She turned off the ignition, trying to remember whether she’d taken time to straighten up the porch when she was last here, in early August, the weekend of Ernie’s birthday. He and John had had one of their fights, and it was possible that in the ensuing clamor and silence she had forgotten to straighten up the porch. It was possible.

She got out of the car and checked around. Everything looked different after just a few weeks: the lake blacker through the part in the trees, the brown-eyed Susans gone weedy, the chairs on the porch definitely, definitely moved. Ernie had pushed a chair in frustration, she remembered. And John had responded in kind, upending the green one on his way out the door and down to the lake. They’d begun that weekend, like so many others, with such good intentions, only to discover anew how mismatched they were, parents to son. So, she had straightened the chairs — she had definitely straightened them — while outside Ernie’s angry footsteps crackled over the gravel and, farther away, John’s body hit the water in a furious smack.

She minced up the steps and pushed open the screen door, which was unlocked. “Hello?” she called out fearfully. The inside door was slightly ajar. Take the dog, Ernie had told her, she’ll be good company. She wished now she had, though the dog, a Yorkie named Honey Girl, was a meek little thing and no good in a crisis. I don’t want company, Ernie. It’s a week, it’s forty miles, I’m not leaving you. Marie was sentimental, richly so, which is why her wish to be alone after seeing John off to college had astonished them both. But you’re still weak, Ernie argued. Look how pale you are. She packed a box of watercolors and a how-to book in her trunk as Ernie stood by, bewildered. I haven’t been alone in years, she told him. I want to find out what it feels like. John had missed Vietnam by six merciful months, then he’d chosen Berkeley, as far from his parents as he could get, and now Marie wanted to be alone. Ernie gripped her around the waist and she took a big breath of him: man, dog, house, yard, mill. She had known him most of her life, and from time to time, when she could bear to think about it, she wondered whether their uncommon closeness was what had made their son a stranger.

You be careful, he called after her as she drove off. The words came back to her now as she peered through the partly open door at a wedge of kitchen she barely recognized. She saw jam jars open on the counter, balled-up dishtowels, a box of oatmeal upended and spilling a bit of oatmeal dust, a snaggled hairbrush, a red lipstick ground to a nub. Through the adjacent window she caught part of a rumpled sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, plus an empty glass and a couple of books.

Marie felt a little breathless, but not afraid, recognizing the disorder as strictly female. She barreled in, searching the small rooms like an angry, old-fashioned mother with a hickory switch. She found the toilet filled with urine, the back hall cluttered with camping gear, and the two bedrooms largely untouched except for a grease-stained knapsack thrown across Marie and Ernie’s bed. By the time she got back out to the porch to scan the premises again, Marie had the knapsack in hand and sent it skidding across the gravel. The effort doubled her over, for Ernie was right: her body had not recovered from the thing it had suffered. As she held her stomach, the throbbing served only to stoke her fury.

Then she heard it: the sound of a person struggling up the steep, rocky path from the lake. Swishing grass. A scatter of pebbles. The subtle pulse of forward motion.

It was a girl. She came out of the trees into the sunlight, naked except for a towel bundled under one arm. Seeing the car, she stopped, then looked toward the cabin, where Marie uncoiled herself slowly, saying, “Who the hell are you?”

The girl stood there, apparently immune to shame. A delicate ladder of ribs showed through her paper-white skin. Her damp hair was fair and thin, her pubic hair equally thin and light. “Shit,” she said. “Busted.” Then she cocked her head, her face filled with a defiance Marie had seen so often in her own son that it barely registered.

“Cover yourself, for God’s sake,” Marie said.

The girl did, in her own good time, arranging the towel over her shoulders and covering her small breasts. Her walk was infuriatingly casual as she moved through the dooryard, picked up the knapsack, and sauntered up the steps, past Marie, and into the cabin. Marie followed her in. She smelled like the lake.

“Get out before I call the police,” Marie said.

“Your phone doesn’t work,” the girl said peevishly. “And I can’t say much for your toilet, either.”

Of course nothing worked. They’d turned everything off, buttoned the place up after their last visit, John and Ernie at each other’s throats as they hauled the dock up the slope, Ernie too slow on his end, John too fast on his, both of them arguing about whether or not Richard Nixon was a crook and should have resigned in disgrace.

“I said get out. This is my house.”

The girl pawed through the knapsack. She hauled out a pair of panties and slipped them on. Then a pair of frayed jeans, and a mildewy shirt that Marie could smell across the room. As she toweled her hair it became lighter, nearly white. She leveled Marie with a look as blank and stolid as a pillar.

“I said get out,” Marie snapped, jangling her car keys.

“I heard you.”

“Then do it.”

The girl dropped the towel on the floor, reached into the knapsack once more, extracted a comb, combed her flimsy, apparitional hair, and returned the comb. Then she pulled out a switchblade. It opened with a crisp, perfunctory snap.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “I get to be in charge, and you get to shut up.”

Marie shot out of the cabin and sprinted into the dooryard, where a bolt of pain brought her up short and windless. The girl was too quick in any case, catching Marie by the wrist before she could reclaim her breath. “Don’t try anything,” the girl said, her voice low and cold. “I’m unpredictable.” She glanced around. “You expecting anybody?”

“No,” Marie said, shocked into telling the truth.

“Then it’s just us girls,” she said, smiling a weird, thin smile that impelled Marie to reach behind her, holding the car for support. The girl presented her water-wrinkled palm and Marie forked over the car keys.

“Did you bring food?”

“In the trunk.”

The girl held up the knife. “Stay right there.”

Marie watched, terrified, as the girl opened the trunk and tore into a box of groceries, shoving a tomato into her mouth as she reached for some bread. A bloody trail of tomato juice sluiced down her neck.

Studying the girl — her quick, panicky movements — Marie felt her fear begin to settle into a morbid curiosity. This skinny girl seemed an unlikely killer; her tiny wrists looked breakable, and her stunning whiteness gave her the look of a child ghost. In a matter of seconds, a thin, reluctant vine of maternal compassion twined through Marie and burst into violent bloom.

“When did you eat last?” Marie asked her.

“None of your business,” the girl said, cramming her mouth full of bread.

“How old are you?”

The girl finished chewing, then answered: “Nineteen. What’s it to you?”

“I have a son about your age.”

“Thrilled to know it,” the girl said, handing a grocery sack to Marie. She herself hefted the box and followed Marie into the cabin, her bare feet making little animal sounds on the gravel. Once inside, she ripped into a box of Cheerios.

“Do you want milk with that?” Marie asked her.

All at once the girl welled up, and she nodded, wiping her eyes with the heel of one hand, turning her head hard right, hard left, exposing her small, translucent ears. “This isn’t me,” she sniffled. She lifted the knife, but did not give it over. “It’s not even mine.”

“Whose is it?” Marie said steadily, pouring milk into a bowl.

“My boyfriend’s.” The girl said nothing more for a few minutes, until the cereal was gone, another bowl poured, and that, too, devoured. She wandered over to the couch, a convertible covered with anchors that Ernie had bought to please John, who naturally never said a word about it.

“Where is he, your boyfriend?” Marie asked finally.

“Out getting supplies.” The girl looked up quickly, a snap of the eyes revealing something Marie thought she understood.

“How long’s he been gone?”

The girl waited. “Day and a half.”

Marie nodded. “Maybe his car broke down.”

“That’s what I wondered.” The girl flung a spindly arm in the general direction of the kitchen. “I’m sorry about the mess. My boyfriend’s hardly even paper-trained.”

“Then maybe you should think about getting another boyfriend.”

“I told him, no sleeping on the beds. We didn’t sleep on your beds.”

“Thank you,” Marie said.

“It wasn’t my idea to break in here.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“He’s kind of hiding out, and I’m kind of with him.”

“I see,” Marie said, scanning the room for weapons: fireplace poker, dictionary, curtain rod. She couldn’t imagine using any of these things on the girl, whose body appeared held together with thread.

“He knocked over a gas station. Two, actually, in Portland.”

“That sounds serious.”

She smiled a little. “He’s a serious guy.”

“You could do better, don’t you think?” Marie asked. “Pretty girl like you.”

The girl’s big eyes narrowed. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“You look younger.”

“Well, I’m not,” Marie said. “My name is Marie, by the way.”

“I’m Tracey.”

“Tell me, Tracey,” Marie said. “Am I your prisoner?”

“Only until he gets back. We’ll clear out after that.”

“Where are you going?”

“Canada. Which is where he should’ve gone about six years ago.”

“A vet?”

Tracey nodded. “War sucks.”

“Well, now, that’s extremely profound.”

“Don’t push your luck, Marie,” Tracey said. “It’s been a really long week.”

They spent the next hours sitting on the porch, Marie thinking furiously in a chair, Tracey on the steps, the knife glinting in her fist. At one point Tracey stepped down into the gravel, dropped her jeans, and squatted over the spent irises, keeping Marie in her sights the whole time. Marie, who had grown up in a different era entirely, found this fiercely embarrassing. A wind came up on the lake; a pair of late loons called across the water. The only comfort Marie could manage was that the boyfriend, whom she did not wish to meet, not at all, clearly had run out for good. Tracey seemed to know this, too, chewing on her lower lip, facing the dooryard as if the hot desire of her stare could make him materialize.

“What’s his name?” Marie asked.

“None of your business. We met in a chemistry class.” She smirked at Marie’s surprise. “Premed.”

“Are you going back to school?”

Tracey threw back her head and cackled, showing two straight rows of excellent teeth. “Yeah, right. He’s out there right now paying our preregistration.”

Marie composed herself, took some silent breaths. “It’s just that I find it hard to believe—”

“People like you always do,” Tracey said. She slid Marie a look. “You’re never willing to believe the worst of someone.”

Marie closed her eyes, wanting Ernie. She imagined him leaving work about now, coming through the mill gates with his lunch bucket and cap, shoulders bowed at the prospect of the empty house. She longed to be waiting there, to sit on the porch with him over a pitcher of lemonade, comparing days, which hadn’t changed much over the years, really, but always held some ordinary pleasures. Today they would have wondered about John, thought about calling him, decided against it.

“You married?” Tracey asked, as if reading her mind.

“Twenty years. We met in seventh grade.”

“Then what are you doing up here alone?”

“I don’t know,” Marie said. But suddenly she did, she knew exactly, looking at this girl who had parents somewhere waiting.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the girl said.

“You couldn’t possibly.”

“You’re wondering how a nice girl like me ended up like this.” When Marie didn’t answer, she added, “Why do you keep doing that?”

“What?”

“That.” The girl pointed to Marie’s hand, which was making absent semicircles over her stomach. “You pregnant?”

“No,” Marie said, withdrawing her hand. But she had been, shockingly, for most of the summer; during John’s final weeks at home, she had been pregnant. Back then her hand had gone automatically to the womb, that strange, unpredictable vessel, as she and Ernie nuzzled in bed, dazzled by their change in fortune. For nights on end they made their murmured plans, lost in a form of drunkenness, waiting for John to skulk through the back door long past curfew, when they would rise from their nestled sheets to face him — their first child now, not their only — his splendid blue eyes glassy with what she hoped were the normal complications of adolescence, equal parts need and contempt.

They did not tell him about the pregnancy, and by the first of September it was over prematurely, Marie balled into a heap on their bed for three days, barely able to open her swollen eyes. “Maybe it’s for the best,” Ernie whispered to her, petting her curled back. They could hear John ramming around in the kitchen downstairs, stocking the cupboards with miso and bean curd and other things they’d never heard of, counting off his last days in the house by changing everything in it. As Ernie kissed her sweaty head, Marie rested her hand on the freshly scoured womb that had held their second chance. “It might not have been worth it,” Ernie whispered, words that staggered her so thoroughly that she bolted up, mouth agape, asking, “What did you say, Ernie? Did you just say something?” Their raising of John had, after all, been filled with fine wishes for the boy; it was not their habit to acknowledge disappointment, or regret, or sorrow. As the door downstairs clicked shut on them and John faded into another night with his mysterious friends, Marie turned to her husband, whom she loved, God help her, more than she loved her son. Take it back, she wanted to tell him, but he mistook her pleading look entirely. “She might’ve broken our hearts,” he murmured. “I can think of a hundred ways.” He was holding her at the time, speaking softly, almost to himself, and his hands on her felt like the meaty intrusion of some stranger who’d just broken into her bedroom. “Ernie, stop there,” she told him, and he did.

It was only now, imprisoned on her own property by a skinny girl who belonged back in chemistry class, that Marie understood that she had come here alone to find a way to forgive him. What did he mean, not worth it? Worth what? Was he speaking of John?

Marie looked down over the trees into the lake. She and Ernie had been twenty years old when John was born. You think you’re in love now, her sister warned, but wait till you meet your baby — implying that married love would look bleached and pale by contrast. But John was a sober, suspicious baby, vaguely intimidating; and their fascination for him became one more thing they had in common. As their child became more and more himself, a cryptogram they couldn’t decipher, Ernie and Marie’s bungled affections and wayward exertions revealed less of him and more of themselves.

Ernie and Marie, smitten since seventh grade: it was a story they thought their baby son would grow up to tell their grandchildren. At twenty they had thought this. She wanted John to remember his childhood the way she liked to: a soft-focus, greeting card recollection in which Ernie and Marie strolled hand in hand in a park somewhere with the fruit of their desire frolicking a few feet ahead. But now she doubted her own memory. John must have frolicked on occasion. Certainly he must have frolicked. But at the present moment she could conjure only a lumbering resignation, as if he had already tired of their story before he broke free of the womb. They would have been more ready for him now, she realized. She was in a position now to love Ernie less, if that’s what a child required.

The shadow of the spruces arched long across the dooryard. Dusk fell.

Tracey got up. “I’m hungry again. You want anything?”

“No, thanks.”

Tracey waited. “You have to come in with me.”

Marie stepped through the door first, then watched as Tracey made herself a sandwich. “I don’t suppose it’s crossed your mind that your boyfriend might not come back,” Marie said.

Tracey took a big bite. “No, it hasn’t.”

“If I were on the run I’d run alone, wouldn’t you? Don’t you think that makes sense?”

Chewing daintily, Tracey flattened Marie with a luminous, eerily knowing look. “Are you on the run, Marie?”

“What I’m saying is that he’ll get a lot farther a lot faster without another person to worry about.”

Tracey swallowed hard. “Well, what I’m saying is you don’t know shit about him. Or me, for that matter. So you can just shut up.”

“I could give you a ride home.”

“Not without your keys, you couldn’t.” She opened the fridge and gulped some milk from the bottle. “If I wanted to go home, I would’ve gone home a long time ago.”

It had gotten dark in the cabin. Marie flicked on the kitchen light. She and Ernie left the electricity on year-round because it was more trouble not to, and occasionally they came here in winter to snowshoe through the long, wooded alleys. It was on their son’s behalf that they had come to such pastimes, on their son’s behalf that the cabin had filled over the years with well-thumbed guidebooks to butterflies and insects and fish and birds. But John preferred his puzzles by the fire, his long, furtive vigils on the dock, leaving it to his parents to discover the world. They turned up pine cones, strips of birch bark for monogramming, once a speckled feather from a pheasant. John inspected these things indifferently, listened to parental homilies on the world’s breathtaking design, all the while maintaining the demeanor of a goodhearted homeowner suffering the encyclopedia salesman’s pitch.

“Why don’t you want to go home?” Marie asked. “Really, I’d like to know.” She was remembering the parting scene at the airport, John uncharacteristically warm, allowing her to hug him as long as she wanted, thanking her for an all-purpose “everything” that she could fill in as she pleased for years to come. Ernie, his massive arms folded in front of him, welled up, nodding madly. But as John disappeared behind the gate Ernie clutched her hand, and she knew what he knew: that their only son, their first and only child, was not coming back. He would finish school, find a job in California, call them twice a year.

“My father’s a self-righteous blowhard, if you’re dying to know,” Tracey said. “And my mother’s a doormat.”

“Maybe they did the best they could.”

“Maybe they didn’t.”

“Maybe they tried in ways you can’t know about.”

Tracey looked Marie over. “My mother’s forty-two,” she said. “She would’ve crawled under a chair the second she saw the knife.”

Marie covered the mustard jar and returned it to the fridge. “It’s possible, Tracey, that your parents never found the key to you.”

Tracey seemed to like this interpretation of her terrible choices. Her shoulders softened some. “So where’s this son of yours, anyway?”

“We just sent him off to Berkeley.”

Tracey smirked a little. “Uh-oh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marie asked. “What do you mean?”

“Berkeley’s a pretty swinging place. You don’t send sweet little boys there.”

“I never said he was a sweet little boy,” Marie said, surprising herself. But it was true: her child had never been a sweet little boy.

“You’ll be lucky if he comes back with his brain still working.”

“I’ll be lucky if he comes back at all.”

Tracey frowned. “You’re messing with my head, right? Poor, tortured mother? You probably don’t even have kids.” She folded her arms. “But if you do have a kid, and he’s at Berkeley, prepare yourself.”

“Look, Tracey,” Marie said irritably, “why don’t you just take my car? If you’re so devoted to this boyfriend of yours, why not go after him?”

“Because I’d have no idea where to look, and you’d run to the nearest police station.” Tracey finished the sandwich and rinsed the plate, leading Marie to suspect that someone had at least taught her to clean up after herself. The worst parent in the world can at least do that. John had lovely manners, and she suddenly got a comforting vision of him placing his scraped plate in a cafeteria sink.

“The nearest police station is twenty miles from here,” Marie said.

“Well, that’s good news, Marie, because look who’s back.”

Creeping into the driveway, one headlight out, was a low-slung, mud-colored Valiant with a cracked windshield. The driver skulked behind the wheel, blurry as an inkblot. When Tracey raced out to greet him, the driver opened the door and emerged as a jittery shadow. The shadow flung itself toward the cabin as Marie fled for the back door and banged on the lock with her fists.

In moments he was upon her, a wiry man with a powerful odor and viselike hands. He half-carried her back to the kitchen as she fell limp with panic. Then, like a ham actor in a silent movie, he lashed her to a kitchen chair with cords of filthy rawhide.

“You wanna tell me how the fuck we get rid of her?” he snarled at Tracey, whose apparent fright gave full flower to Marie’s budding terror. That he was handsome — dark-eyed, square-jawed, with full, shapely lips — made him all the more terrifying.

“What was I supposed to do?” Tracey quavered. “Listen, I kept her here for a whole day with no—”

“Where’s your keys?” he roared at Marie.

“Here, they’re here,” Tracey said, fumbling them out of her pocket. “Let’s go, Mike, please, let’s just go.”

“You got money?” he asked, leaning over Marie, one cool strand of his long hair raking across her bare arm. She could hardly breathe, looking into his alarming, moist eyes.

“My purse,” she gasped. “In the car.”

He stalked out, his dirty jeans sagging at the seat, into which someone had sewn a facsimile of the American flag. He looked near starving, his upper arms shaped like bedposts, thin and tapering and hard. She heard the car door open and the contents of her purse spilling over the gravel.

“The premed was a lie,” Tracey said. “I met him at a concert.” She darted a look outside, her lip quivering. “You know how much power I have over my own life, Marie?” She lifted her hand and squeezed her thumb and index finger together. “This much.”

He was in again, tearing into the fridge, cramming food into his mouth. The food seemed to calm him some. He looked around. He could have been twenty-five or forty-five, a man weighted by bad luck and a mean spirit that encased his true age like barnacles on a boat. “Pick up our stuff,” he said to Tracey. “We’re out of this dump.”

Tracey did as he said, gathering the sleeping bag and stuffing it into a sack. He watched her body damply as she moved; Marie felt an engulfing nausea but could not move herself, not even to cover her mouth at the approaching bile. Her legs were lashed to the chair legs, her arms tied behind her, giving her a deeply discomfiting sensation of being bound to empty space. She felt desperate to close her legs, cross her arms over her breasts, unwilling to die with her most womanly parts exposed. “I’m going to be sick,” she gulped, but it was too late, a thin trail of spit and bile lolloping down her shirtfront.

Mike lifted his forearm, dirty with tattoos, and chopped it down across Marie’s jaw. She thumped backward to the floor, chair and all, tasting blood, seeing stars, letting out a squawk of despair. Then she fell silent, looking at the upended room, stunned. She heard the flick of a switchblade and felt the heat of his shadow. She tried to snap her eyes shut, to wait for what came next, but they opened again, fixed on his; in the still, shiny irises she searched for a sign of latent goodness, or regret, some long-ago time that defined him. In the sepulchral silence she locked eyes with him, sorrow to sorrow. He dropped the knife. “Fuck this, you do it,” he said to Tracey, then swaggered out. She heard her car revving in the dooryard, the radio blaring on. Now her eyes closed. A small rustle materialized near her left ear; it was Tracey, crouching next to her, holding the opened blade.

“Shh,” Tracey said. “He’s a coward, and he doesn’t like blood, but he’s not above beating the hell out of me.” She patted Marie’s cheek. “So let’s just pretend I’ve killed you.”

Marie began to weep, silently, a sheen of moisture beading beneath her eyes. She made a prayer to the Virgin Mary, something she had not done since she was a child. She summoned an image of Ernie sitting on the porch, missing her. Of John scraping that plate in the college cafeteria. With shocking tenderness, Tracey made a small cut near Marie’s temple just above the hairline. It hurt very little, but the blood began to course into her hair in warm, oozy tracks. Tracey lifted the knife, now a rich, dripping red. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “But head wounds bleed like crazy.” The horn from Marie’s car sounded in two long, insistent blasts.

“You chose a hell of a life for yourself, Tracey,” Marie whispered.

“Yeah,” Tracey said, closing her palm lightly over the knife. She got up. “But at least I chose.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Ditto. Take care.”

For much of the long evening Marie kept still, blinking into the approaching dark. She had to pee desperately but determined to hold it even if it killed her, which she genuinely thought it might. She was facing the ceiling, still tied, the blood on her face and hair drying uncomfortably. She recalled John’s childhood habit of hanging slothlike from banisters or chair backs, loving the upside-down world. Perhaps his parents were easier to understand this way. She saw now what had so compelled him: the ceiling would make a marvelous floor, a creamy expanse you could navigate however you wished; you could fling yourself from corner to corner, unencumbered except for an occasional light fixture. Even the walls looked inviting: the windows appeared to open from the top down, the tops of doors made odd, amusing steps into the next room, framed pictures floated knee-high, their reversed images full of whimsy, hard to decode. In time she got used to the overturned room, even preferred it. It calmed her. She no longer felt sick. She understood that Ernie was on his way here, of course he was, he would be here before the moon rose, missing her, full of apology for disturbing her peace, but he needed her, the house was empty and their son was gone, and he needed her as he steered down the dirt road, veering left past the big boulder, entering the dooryard to find a strange, battered car and a terrifying silence.

“Oh, Ernie,” she said when he did indeed panic through the door. “Ernie. Sweetheart. Untie me.” In he came, just as she knew he would.

And then? They no longer looked back on this season as the autumn when they lost their second child. This season — with its gentle temperatures and propensity for inspiring flight — they recalled instead as that one autumn when those awful people, that terrible pair, broke into the cabin. They exchanged one memory for the other, remembering Ernie’s raging, man-sized sobs as he worked at the stiff rawhide, remembering him rocking her under a shaft of moonlight that sliced through the door he’d left open, remembering, half laughing, that the first thing Marie wanted to do, after being rescued by her prince, was pee. This moment became the turning point — this moment and no other — when two long-married people decided to stay married, to succumb to the shape of the rest of their life, to live with things they would not speak of. They shouldered each other into the coming years because there was no other face each could bear to look at in this moment of turning, no other arms they could bear but each other’s, and they made themselves right again, they did, just the two of them.

Christopher Chambers was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and has since lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. He received a degree in English at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls in 1984, and over the following ten years worked as a salesman, bus driver, meat cutter, farmhand, carpenter, journalist, photographer, bartender, dockworker, lifeguard, screenwriter, and editor. He taught martial arts in Minneapolis, high school physical education in South Florida, and writing at the University of Alabama, where he received an M.F.A. degree. His work has appeared in such journals as the Gettysburg Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarter After Eight, Notre Dame Review, Exquisite Corpse, Controlled Burn, Quarterly West, and the Carolina Quarterly. His short story collection, Aardvark to Aztec, was short-listed for the Mary McCarthy Prize. His short fiction has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Literary Award for Short Fiction, and is included in the recent anthology French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories from America’s Oldest Bohemia. He lives in New Orleans, where he teaches at Loyola University.

“Aardvark to Aztec” was written on an old Royal portable, in the summer, as I recall. I was living in a cabin outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I dragged a wooden table onto the porch that overlooked a ravine that was overgrown and unremarkable most of the time, but became unexpectedly beautiful each spring with an abundance of dogwood blossoms, and on those summer nights when fireflies lit up like a distant metropolis. It was on one of these nights, on that porch, sitting at my typewriter, to a chorus of nocturnal insects, that I tapped out the first sentence. The writing began with the character of Miranda and her vague discontent, so I guess it should have been no surprise for me to discover in the end that it is indeed her story. The clown, like much of the story, came out of nowhere. There may have been a small glass of whiskey, and an inexpensive cigar on the table as well. Perhaps strains of Hank Williams drifting out through the screen door, the drone of the firefly beyond the ravine. I realized quickly that someone was going to die in this story. I didn’t know who, but it saddened me, because I was already coming to grow fond of each of these characters.