It was a crazy offer, and only a madman would accept it!

I still get gooseflesh thinking of it.

It began in Le Bouc, a French restaurant a stone’s throw from Dallas — that is, if the stone were encased within a guided missile. My traveling companion and I had sat down for a drink, having heard the bar prices were reasonable. I doubt we had twenty dollars between us.

It was a blistering hot day, the kind that numbs the senses and fries the brain to the texture of a fine Swiss cheese, and the reason most Texans wear wide brimmed ten gallon hats had just occurred to me: the brims protected the wearer’s forehead from the sun’s fearsome rays. Of course!

“The armpit of the nation,” Landry suddenly announced, apropos of nothing. He spoke so loudly I glanced around to make certain no one had overheard. I was suddenly aware that both of us were conspicuous non-Texans by our lack of hats, Levi’s, and rangy drawls, and were, for that reason, interlopers.

“What makes you say that?” I said, and instantly regretted asking, realizing it would lead into one of Landry’s monologues filled with machismo, seasoned with chauvinism, and leavened with the occasional off-color remark or description.

“Because these sonsabitches have all the money in the world, and they flaunt it,” he said.

“Do I detect a note of jealousy there?”

“Damn straight. You know what I could do with the kind of money in this state? This drifting around is for cockroaches. If I had one tenth the money of one of those sonsabitches in Dallas, I’d plant my ass down in Big D and stay, y’know? Get me one of those estates with a winding driveway so long you run outta gas just driving in from the front gate. Y’know?”

“I know,” I said. I’d heard this diatribe before, and although it changed slightly in the re-telling, it was essentially the same tirade I’d heard during our travels through Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. And it always began after a drink, or two, or three. Up until then, Landry was a pleasant enough companion.

“I’d do anything to get that kinda dough,” Landry was saying. “Anything. I wouldn’t care who I’d have to screw.”

The waiter drew abreast of our table. “Another?” he asked.

I was about to say no. My chamois-thin wallet wouldn’t permit it, but Landry rumbled before I could speak. “Yeah, two more.”

The waiter nodded, took our empty glasses away, and left.

I could have questioned the wisdom of ordering drinks when our pocketbooks were rubbed raw and we had little hope of getting back to California, but decided against it. Landry was again speaking of his obsessions, and he was a dangerous man to cross, even verbally.

“These sonsabitches think money’ll buy anything, and maybe they’re right. Truthfully, I couldn’t stand living here. Too hot, for one thing. And the women — most of ’em are high priced whores.”

“Are you talking about Dallas,” I asked, “or Texas in general?”

Landry shrugged. “The whole damn South. I couldn’t stand being here more than a couple of days. You think we could—”

The waiter returned with two double bourbons on a tray. He set them down before us, and before I could pay for mine Landry dropped a five dollar bill, folded lengthwise, on the tray. “Keep the change,” he said. The waiter stared down a moment, looked as if he were about to comment and thought better of it, and carried the tray away.

“Thanks,” I said, sipping my drink. I was about to comment on it when I froze.

It was all make-believe — until Death wrote the script!

Elaine was nervous and bound to make a mistake, but I forced myself to stay seated and watch the scene develop.

“Oh, Father, Christina is dead before my very eyes.”

“Hush, Beatrice,” said the bearded man. “It is the way of nature. The weak are preyed upon by the strong.”

“But Christina was my favorite dove.”

At that moment a tall man wearing a cape appeared behind them. Perched on his shoulder was a huge hooded hawk.

She turned toward him suddenly. “Who are...”

“No, no, no,” screamed a voice from the darkness. “How many times do I have to tell you that your turn comes after the Duke speaks, not before.” A small figure in cut-off jeans and a t-shirt bounded onto the stage.

“I’m sorry,” Elaine said.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” mimicked the director. “All I’ve heard from you this last week of rehearsal is how sorry you are. This isn’t the senior play, missy! This show goes on in two nights, and I’m not going to let your missed cues and dropped lines embarrass me.”

Elaine began to cry. When I could see her tears were real, I couldn’t hold back any longer. “Wait a minute,” I shouted, “you can’t talk to her like that.”

The director glared up at me as I marched down an aisle. “And who may I ask is this, the local drama critic?”

“I’m Elaine’s father and...”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said with unmistakeable disgust, “you don’t understand. Mr. Fields is right. I do keep messing up.”

“Ah, our backwoods constable,” said the director on seeing my badge. “If you’re out to arrest somebody, I assure you the only crime here is your daughter’s acting.” He turned to the rest of the cast. “My leading lady is felled by an emergency appendectomy, and I’m stuck with a no-talent local.”

I was about to demonstrate the long arm of the law was more than a cliche when the caped figure with the hawk interrupted.

“Gentlemen, enough of this bickering. Larry, if you’d spend more time directing our last-minute fill-in and less on your daily constitutionals around the countryside, we’d be better off. I’ve learned to adjust to the obvious shortcomings of this production.” He looked condescendingly at the cast and crew. “I should think you could do as much. Now, if you’re through wasting my time...”

Roger Manchester seemed so different from the actor I had seen so many times in the movies. He had been up there for years with Gable, Flynn, and Cooper. When a new generation of leading men had come along, though, he showed up in more mature roles, on TV guest spots, and in the papers — always with a young starlet at some Hollywood party. He had always played the humble good guy, but in person he seemed the opposite. How had Seth Fuller, the owner of the playhouse, gotten an actor of Manchester’s stature to come to Clement County, Kentucky?

I apologized to Fields and the rest of the cast, then got in my car and headed for the office. I had made a mistake, but with Elaine I was used to that. Since her mother had died a few years ago, raising Elaine had become solely my responsibility, and I was usually a little overprotective. I had always been able to keep my temper in check, except when it came to my daughter.

A long time ago the green elephant had been taken from him. Now, sixty years later, Sing Li was determined to get it back — at any cost!

Madame Chen was born Mai Ling in the year 1910 in a tiny hamlet in Northern China. The citizens of her village were simple, hard working folk who knew little of the world beyond the limits of their homes except for the grim, frightening stories of ruthless bandits who roamed the barren hills spreading havoc and death.

One such outlaw was Sing Li, who in 1920 was a tall, lean, hard faced stripling of nineteen with ten years of bandit activity behind him. Born of simple stock, he had been kidnapped at an early age and had learned all aspects of the bandit’s trade from the notorious Wong Ho. When Ho was killed in 1919 by government soldiers, Sing Li took over the band and continued to terrorize the hills. His constant companion was a hand sized gem shaped like an elephant that hung on a chain around his neck. Hand ground, the piece boasted hundreds of flat surfaces that literally shattered light into an everchanging spectrum of beautiful colors. Sing had stolen it from a rich merchant at the tender age of fourteen and it was said by his men that this gem was the only real love in Sing Li’s life. He was known as the evil one with the green elephant to his victims.

In August of 1920, Sing Li and his band of cutthroats attacked Mai Ling’s village.

The village elders and youth were not fighters so the battle, if indeed it could be called a battle, was shortlived. Mai Ling’s mother managed to hide ten year old Mai but was caught by the lustful Sing Li in a clearing in back of her home.

Mai Ling watched in horror and disbelief as her mother was first ravished then killed by the mad animal called the evil one with the green elephant.

After the bandit’s orgy had run its course, they began to drink and soon were fighting among themselves for the pitiful loot from the village. Sing Li, drunk from rice wine was sitting in the clearing near the body of Mai Ling’s mother lost in admiration of the green elephant. Over and over, he vowed he would take it to his grave.

He fell asleep.

Mai Ling waited several minutes, then crawled out of the bushes and after first touching her mother’s dead face reverently, crawled over to the sleeping Sing Li. Her small, delicately featured face was tense with both sorrow and hatred. The green elephant gleamed at her in the moonlight.

He had taken her mother so she would take the elephant.

His head was slumped over his chest and he was leaning back against a tree. Her small hands quickly removed the elephant and chain from his neck. She saw a stubby dagger on the ground nearby. Anger flared in her face. She picked up the knife and was about to plunge it into his chest when his eyes suddenly opened.

They stared at each other for an instant, then he grabbed her arm.

“Pig!” he snarled.

Mai Ling leaned forward and clamped her teeth hard on his wrist. With a cry of pain, he let go of her arm. Mai darted off into the darkness, dropping the knife but clutching the green elephant.

Sing Li glanced down at his bleeding wrist, then tried to rise but the rice wine had taken its toll on his legs. He was too drunk to do anything but shout threats into the darkness.

It started out as an open and shut case. Trouble was, it was entirely too open!

“I thought you said it was open and shut,” said Detective Sergeant Barton Rimble, combing his fingers through a shock of blue-black hair. “Now you say we’re dead in the water. What the hell’s the problem?”

Calvin Cupflutter winced. Cupflutter was new to Homicide; he was Rimble’s junior by fifteen years, and had soft, baby-bottom features on a sunburnt oval face. He was often asked for his ID in bars. “You’d better see for yourself, sir,” he said cautiously. “We have what you might call... a complication.”

“It better be good,” snapped Rimble.

Rimble and Cupflutter jaywalked across the street, in front of a guacamole-colored Buick with out-of-state plates and a decal that said SMILE, GOD LOVES YOU. Another twelve paces brought them to the sliding glass doors of the Rupert Muncie Convention Center, a domelike building with colorless walls and sloping, mirrored windows.

“Godzilla’s doghouse,” muttered Rimble.

Cupflutter led him inside, past a dense gaggle of people milling in the foyer. The scene of the crime was an immense auditorium, kidney-shaped, with long rows of folding chairs surrounding a raised platform. Refreshments were available on tables to the rear. Beside one of the tables was a portly, middle-aged man with a Sterling silver letter opener jutting from his back.

The mobster’s life had been good, long and healthy. His death was something else!

Don Alberto trudged through the mist, squinting to keep track of the hooded figure who marched steadily ahead of him and occasionally sniffing the air for traces of brimstone that somehow weren’t there. The place was not what he expected. It didn’t matter, though. He was ready to go; he had already cheated Death for more than a decade.

That was one of the benefits of being wealthy. He could afford the very best in health care and was always first in line for transplants. His heart had gone first. Since then there were two kidney failures, new corneas to fix his cataracts, and half a dozen other operations along the way.

With so many problems, being a top man in the Mob didn’t hurt, either. It meant that he could always find a donor — willing or unwilling — if he needed one.

When the end finally did come, when he was no longer able to keep his body functioning, the Don went without protest. Death was so much a part of his business that he had long ago stopped fearing it, and his own death had come almost as a pleasant surprise. He couldn’t quite remember the transition from the hospital bed to... to wherever he was now. He had simply become aware of being led by a hooded figure across an endless expanse of ankle-deep mud shrouded by endless sheets of mist.

All things considered, the place wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. The mist didn’t bother him. He wasn’t curious to know what might be around him. And the mud, if that’s what it was, was cold but not unpleasant. At least there was no fire and brimstone, just the mist, the mud, and of course the hooded figure he had instinctively known he was supposed to follow. It could be a lot worse.

She was in the big lonely building late at night, but she wasn’t alone. There was a killer with her!

It was four in the morning when Susie, crossing the lobby with a fresh cup of coffee, had a fleeting sense that something was out of place.

She paused and looked around with some trepidation. She had been working, here only a month, and it seemed that whenever something was wrong it turned out to be her fault. But right now, she decided, she was imagining it: the law offices of Wentworth, Mosby & Stant looked as punctiliously elegant as usual. On the wall between the elevators, the stainless steel letters which spelled out the firm’s name gleamed even in the faint light. The dark wood furniture and beige carpeting were fresh from the ministrations of the night cleaning crew. The magazines in the waiting area were neatly stacked, the ash trays polished. The vase on the receptionist’s console awaited the morning delivery of fresh flowers.

Susie shrugged. She supposed that she was only missing the familiar background noises — the low continuous hubbub of voices, buzzing telephones, clattering typewriters, and whirring copying machines. Just now, she could hear only the sigh of the ventilating system.

She crossed the lobby to the huge windows. This was the twentieth floor — the firm occupied this entire floor, as well as the one above — and she looked out on a vista of black towers and distant, empty streets. In the daytime, downtown had a population in the tens of thousands; at this hour, she mused, she was one of a couple of hundred.

She turned and walked back to her office. The long corridor was dim as a tunnel, and the doors were thrown open on empty offices. It amused Susie that she — the lowliest paralegal in the firm — had the place to herself. She felt like kicking off her shoes and capering down the hall, or sneaking into one of the partners’ offices and helping herself to a cigar.

But then she noticed that she was not alone: there was a sliver of light showing beneath the door of Harry Stant, the senior litigating partner. The mere proximity of this imposing figure was enough to puncture Susie’s irreverent mood. Last week he had frostily advised her that she must attain the proper legal gravity: her penchant for playing practical jokes on the mail-room boys and sending facetious memos to the associates was most unsuitable. Adopting a sober expression, she hurried back to her office.

The tiny cubicle was stacked with boxes. They contained a client’s financial records, and she had been ordered to get them organized by next morning. As she lugged yet another box onto her desk, she noticed a memo lying on her in-tray. Dated yesterday, it said that since an unnamed associate had reported his keys lost, the office locks would be changed the next day. New keys would be distributed —

Abruptly Susie realized why she had thought something was wrong as she crossed the lobby. She should not have been able to cross the lobby at all. The heavy security doors between the elevators and the reception console should have been closed and locked. But they had been wide open.

She winced as hot coffee sloshed over her fingers. Her hand was shaking. She put the cup down and stood.

What was she going to do now? Make a mad dash for the elevators? She caught sight of her reflection in the dark window — shoulders hunched, hand to her mouth — and made herself relax. She was being foolish. They’d simply forgotten to close the security doors last evening. She’d never known them to forget, but still—

She would go to Mr. Stant. Yes, that would make her feel better. She hoped he would not think it was another of her pranks; if he did, one look at her face ought to convince him otherwise. She left her office and started down the corridor.

But after a few steps she stopped dead. The light in Stant’s office had gone out.

“He’s not there.”

An unauthorized surveillance is a tricky business. It gets trickier when one corpse too many turns up!

I cut the ignition and switched off the car lights at the blinking yellow signal of the intersection. Beside me on the front seat, my detective partner, Tony Costanza, checked the set of his shoulder holster as our unmarked black police sedan rolled ahead silently into the next block.

The car curved in a sweeping arc into the shadowed mouth of an alley and drifted down a narrow, walled-in passageway. I eased the car to a stop with just a touch of the brake as the early-morning stillness settled in around us.

I raised an arm and sleeved the breathless summer night’s perspiration from my forehead, then sat for a second listening to the low-pitched street noises and other night sounds peculiar to this particular backwater of the city.

“Let’s go, Mickey,” Tony growled. “Move it. He’s not comin’ to us out here.”

“He’s not coming to us in there, either, if he hears us,” I said softly. “Don’t slam the car door when you get out.”

Tony’s snort was muffled. “Eleven nights in a row we stake out this miserable hole, an’ eleven nights you got to say ‘Don’t slam the car door’? At least get yourself a new line.”

I slid out on my side. The macadam underfoot was damp with night mist. Tony’s sardonic whisper floated out to me from the front seat. “I was tellin’ Louise before you picked me up tonight it was a damn good thing this had been her idea in the first place, or she’d never have trusted me out till all hours all these nights, even with you as chaperone.”

I grimaced at the mention of Louise’s name. I removed my watch with its tell-tale radium dial and put it into my pocket. Across the alley Tony scrambled from the sedan. We met at the front of the car, Tony’s solid two hundred pounds bulking larger-than-life in the night.

Somebody wanted him dead in the worst way — and that’s the way he got it!

I was backstage at the Dover Theatre trying to help Captain Michael Monks of Homicide solve a murder. One of the newsiest and most celebrated of his long career with the New York Police Department.

The Tan Hat Man had been running on Broadway for three hit months when a pistol shot sounded like a cough during the middle of Act Two and leading man Walter Wiley pitched off the apron of the stage into the orchestra pit — dead. That’s a long sentence but it gives some idea of the length of Walter Wiley’s hold on the public. Also, there hadn’t been a murder in a playhouse since Lincoln.

Not even the hastily-struck overture by the baffled musicians could drown out the screams of a terrified matinee audience. Theatre parties and vacationing matrons from the Coast and Mid-West had packed the plush seats of the Dover. The death of Walter Wiley stunned the entertainment world. Or so the Manhattan tabloids blared. Broadway’s Mr. Excitement — the singing, dancing sensation known as Walter Wiley had been strangely, inexplicably murdered. I’m quoting again.

Like the assassination of Honest Abe, an unknown killer had struck from the audience. But the cops didn’t even have a John Wilkes Booth to contend with. Walter Wiley’s murderer remained. Nobody for three whole days while the official police machinery rolled. Producer David Merrick fumed, but kept on selling tickets for The Tan Hat Man. He would re-open when Monks found the murderer.

“A theatre crowd of fifteen hundred people,” Monks groaned at me over a bottle of pop. “Might just as well have been Yankee Stadium.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “It’s not as bad as all that.”

Monks’ smile was sheer irony. “No? Pray tell us more. I’m not using your private crystal ball, Noon.”

“Since when did you let numbers bother you? Fifteen hundred customers. So what? You can whittle that down.”

“I’m still listening, Noon.”

“Okay. Wiley was killed with a .22. Through the heart. Front and center. A perfect shot under any conditions. Knowing what you know about .22’s, you can eliminate the mezzanine and second balcony. The distance is too great.”

Monks scowled and put the empty pop bottle down behind one of the flats that was designed to represent a Manhattan skyline. “Go on.”

“Also, you couldn’t shoot a man onstage from a sitting position. Not in a packed house with someone sitting in front of you. Wiley was center stage when he fell. He hadn’t moved for a good two minutes before the shot. I know this show. Saw it last month and remember the stage business. Wiley was singing The Tan Hat Man. You know — where he stands still marking time like a soldier with a cane slung over his shoulder. So you know he was shot while he was standing there facing his adoring public.”

“So?”

“So the killer stood up in the dark to fire. And since from the standpoint of range, we eliminate the last twenty rows of the orchestra section — at least twenty — I’d say your killer had to be placed somewhere from Rows A to D. Or E.”

Rose had a secret. And she wouldn’t tell it to anybody. Ever!

The song blew into her mind unexpectedly, like hot September wind, bringing with it the smell of the kindergarten room and the feel of her plastic nap-pack warmed by the sun. She closed her eyes and pretended she was lying on the nap-pack right now, and she sang the song in a very small voice, hoping no one else would hear:

The first day of school, Rose thought, they had learned that song the very first day. Where were the red-checked dress and white pinafore she had worn that morning? Home in the closet, probably; her mama hadn’t packed any of the clothes she liked best when she sent her to this place. Rose remembered fingering the smocking on the front of the dress when Miss Williams called her name and made her stand up. Later, Miss Williams had taken off the pinafore and hung it up so it wouldn’t get dirty when she played with her new friends.

All my new friends, she thought proudly, though of course they hadn’t been ready to be her friends at first. They giggled because she was the only one wearing a dress, and her heart sank since she knew there were no jeans in her closet at home, just a long row of pink and red and yellow and blue dresses. They snickered because she was afraid of the teeter-totter on the playground, afraid of the slide, even afraid to play in the sandbox because sometimes naughty children threw sand. Until that first day at school she had played only with her mama, rising and falling gently on the tiny backyard teeter-totter, swinging decorously on the red plastic swing, never far from her mama’s arms.

“Hey, she’s singing!” A voice broke harshly into her memories. “I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t hear it.”

Rose clamped her lips over the third “good morning” and finished the song inside her head. She told herself she didn’t care what the people here said. The song filled her with a kind of joy, as if all the happy times at school were locked up in those few short lines. Gradually, because Miss Williams had insisted, her classmates had stopped teasing her about her dainty, always-perfect clothes. During story time she drifted with the magic of Miss Williams’ voice into a land where she had a father as well as a mama. She was a princess in that land, and she had fourteen brothers and sisters, and they played together all day every day. They wore what they wanted and they never worried about being sick and they all went to the summer camp where Miss Williams was a counselor, and they went swimming and climbed trees and never had to ask permission because they were all princes and princesses and could do as they pleased.

Steiner was dead, and there were some people who thought this was as it should be. The eulogy was understandably short.

Nobody, but nobody, worked harder at being an arrogant boor than Philip Steiner III (“call me Phil”), who rode around town in a ragtop Jag (nobody could remember seeing the top up), his stringy hair flapping in the wind and his hi-fi stereo at max volume.

Steiner had a regular box at the baseball park, was overbearingly egocentric at cocktail parties and attended all of the county Republican meetings, although he was never invited. Thanks to an industrious father, he had more money than he could spend. But even so, he refused to contribute to the Community Fund on grounds that the poor didn’t know how to handle money.

The truth was that Steiner could have funded all of the city’s charities for a year if he had just offered his backside as a target in a kicking contest, at about a dollar a kick.

Steiner occasionally sensed that people disliked him, but, being unfamiliar with human insights, he paid no attention to his own. Steiner was handsome, in his own way. His regular features, too early criss-crossed with lines etched by alcohol and varnished by sun and wind, gave him a devilish mask that appealed to some women.

His wife, Carrie, had long since ceased to care. Steiner did as he pleased, and it pleased him to see how many young women in the Community he could defoliate. Carrie’s only feeling toward him was dull hatred. She wanted to end the marriage, but her attorney — who was on Steiner’s payroll — advised against it.

Thus there was shock, but no deep feeling of community loss, when Steiner and his Jag were found at the bottom of a steep embankment early one morning. Both were quite beyond repair.

No one in the organization could do the job. It required an outsider — someone who would not be bothered by the bizarre method of execution!

It was agreed that we had to get rid of Vito Rozsa and the assignment was given to me because I knew where I could get the man to do the job.

Julius Antonucci sighed as he gazed at the others gathered at the long table. “I just don’t understand Vito. He seems to have no respect for anybody else’s territory. His piece of the city is every bit as good as any one of ours, but he not only admits raiding, he seems to glory in it and dares us to do anything about it.”

I concurred. “If we don’t police ourselves, who will? We have to get rid of Vito once and for all. We should never have recruited him in the first place. We’ll have to be more careful in the future.”

However exterminating Vito might present something of a problem. I could not do the work myself. Neither could anyone in the organization. In this case, the matter would have to be handled by an outsider and I thought that I had the man.

Joseph Mathias. He was something of a giant, perhaps six foot-five and dull-witted. He had managed to get his picture in the newspapers a number of times, usually in connection with murder investigations, but he had never yet been jailed.

After our meeting adjourned, I went back home and changed to a sports jacket and slacks. I also put on a bow tie.

Ronnie wasn’t a bad kid. He was just desperate, so he’d have to rob his own mother!

“It’s $10.00, Ronnie, and you’d better pay up, if you know what’s good for you!”

Ziggy’s heavy, mean-eyed face was twisted into a sinister frown, and Ronnie knew that the bigger boy meant what he said.

Ronnie swallowed past the sudden lump in his throat, and tried to ignore the meaty fist pulling the material of his shirt.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, Ziggy. I told you I’ll have the money. I will, I promise, this evening, just like I told you.”

Ziggy pushed the smaller youth away, at the same time releasing his hold on his shirt. Ronnie swayed and stumbled, trying to keep his balance.

“You’d better have it, kid, or it will be the last time you welch on a bet!”

Ronnie watched Ziggy’s broad back receding down the alley. He felt weak and sick to his stomach. He kept thinking of Dick Thomas; of what had happened to him when he couldn’t pay up. The thought nauseated him.

He jammed his hands into his pockets, and headed for home. There was only one thing to do. He would have to hit his old lady’s purse again, although he hated to do it.

It wasn’t that he had any compuction against stealing from his mother, but it had only been a week since the last time, and he was afraid that she would get suspicious. The old bag would have probably caught on long ago, except that she was so busy with that stupid club of hers, that she never knew what was going down around the house.

He glanced at his watch, 2:15 pm; he had better hurry. She was due to go to some crazy protest or something at 3:00 pm. He had heard her talking to some other old broad on the phone.

He quickened his stride, and began experiencing a surge of elation. It was going to be all right. Ronnie, the super-stud, was going to score again. It was going to be all right.

He tried to explain to them who he really was — but they wouldn’t listen!

He liked the country, always had.

He liked the colleges especially, with their ivied walls and peaceful classrooms, where he could enunciate the gutteral syllables of his mother tongue without dishonor. It was a good country, and he wanted only to see more of it.

He’d married a woman, married too young, perhaps. Married foolishly. She always wanted a better house, or more money, or some other demand he could not meet. He wanted only the peace of his classroom, and his students. Perhaps some day she’d drive him back across the sea, to that other land he’d all but forgotten though still it was home.

Once he’d decided to leave her, decided while he stood in the morning hallway of their walk-up apartment and watched the rising sun trace little patterns of brightness on the faded carpet. He remembered the breeze in the air that day, remembered how it tinkled the hanging glass chimes over the porch steps. He’d walked all the way to the campus that morning, nodding unseeingly at the neighbors who passed, breathing in the air and squinting at the sun and thinking about leaving the wife he no longer loved.

Between classes they often let him fool about in the chemistry lab, where he daydreamed of inventing an explosive so powerful it would rid the world of war. Surely Joseph Pulitzer would have understood that. And Nobel, who invented dynamite while still trying to tell the world it could live at peace. When he talked of such things to his wife, she merely laughed. Had the atomic bomb ended war? Not forever, surely.

And he thought about his wife, eyes scanning the stoppered bottles on the lab shelf.