Night of the Juggler

Chapter 1

His name was Gus. He had another name, of course, a last name, but sometimes he forgot it. When this occurred, when he was swept by a dreadful and chilling loss of identity, the experience made him as tense as a threatened animal and deepened a redness in his mind that caused him to shake with fury.

When they teased him about this in the fruit and vegetable store he helped keep clean, when the Puerto Rican clerks would laugh at him and say, “Hey, Gus! You Gus who? Gus who?” he would avoid their eyes and try to control the trembling in his hands, while wondering in his dim, lacerated mind at their cruelty.

When this happened, when the insolent clerks with their soft eyes and glossy hair and slurred, liquid English grinned at him and teased him, Senor Perez, who owned this decrepit vegetable shop in the South Bronx, would give them angry, warning headshakes, and the clerks would stop smiling and some might even shrug in a gesture that suggested an indifferent contrition, and then they would all return to their work, ripping brown outer leaves from heads of lettuce, watering mounds of green onions and young cabbages, waiting on the Puerto Ricans and occasional blacks who bought their meager orders of fruits and vegetables at Senor Perez’s shop in this pocket of decay in New York City.

At these times Gus would go into the back room of the shop, and when no one was looking at him, he would hurry into the alley that ran through an area near 135th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue. He was more at home in alleys and in darkness than he was in the shop or in daylight on crowded sidewalks. A tall, huge man, Gus went along the alley with the stalking strides of an animal, at home with the stink of garbage, the slithering sound of rats, and groups of Puerto Ricans in leather jackets bunched ominously at street corners; none of this fetid and potentially dangerous ambiance menaced him; it was not so much that he was confident in this environment, it was rather that he was simply unaware of it.

In the vestibule of the tenement where he lived with Mrs. Schultz in a small rented room, Gus would stare with an annealing sense of impending relief at the dirty oblong cards beneath the mailboxes.

When he found Mrs. Schultz’s name, he would drop his eyes an inch and there, penciled in below it, was his own name: Gus Soltik. He never received any mail; there was no one to write to him, but it gave him a sense of security to know that his name was written there under the mailbox. He couldn’t read his name in a conventional sense, but he had memorized those particular letter shapes and knew the smudged pencil marks meant Gus Soltik.

While he could not make change and had only vague notions of the value of money, he was familiar with the concept of numbers and could easily make his way to the numerically designated streets in the various boroughs of New York City.

Gus Soltik’s “thought processes” were unconventional, to put it as simply as possible. He did not “think” in consecutive patterns; it was as difficult for him to string ideas together as it would have been for a “normal” person to enumerate and define the physical objects of his environment without an alphabet. Thus, to “understand” concepts and emotions and things, Gus Soltik required a specific word, which appeared in his mind as clearly as if it were written in chalk on slate.

Thus, the word “cage” was his reference for all animals. He had no name, however, for his physical needs. He had no way to get inside himself; he was conscious of his existence as an object, but there was no way he could assess or conceive of Gus Soltik in subjective terms.

He did not know that his odor was rank. He wasn’t aware that people on the sidewalks frequently turned to stare after him. He did not understand why it made him feel so desolate and desperate when he forgot his name. It was one of many things he didn’t understand, although it worried him the most. He didn’t know that his physical strength was as great as the combined strength of several average men. He did not know, for another thing, that the small yellow leather hat he wore above his bulging forehead made him look ridiculous, as if he were a mongoloid child dressed by someone with a malicious sense of humor.

But Gus Soltik knew some things with the instincts of an animal. His eyesight was acute, and his sense of hearing was exceptional; he was always the first to be aware of approaching subway trains, for example, and in the old tenement where he lived, he could track Mrs.

Schultz all through the house by her footsteps, even though she wore soft felt slippers indoors. His sense of direction was impeccable; he could drift through any of the boroughs of New York at any time of the day or night, but when he wanted to return “home,” some indicator in his mind pointed straight at the Triboro Bridge in the lower Bronx. He could walk for hour after hour, mile after mile, sometimes breaking into a clumsy, lumbering trot but never feeling tired, never breathing hard.

And one other thing, Gus Soltik knew. He knew that he was thirty years old. His mother had died when he was twenty-five, and after she died, he did something each year, and he had now done it four times.

And he would do it again within the next twenty-four hours, a total of five times in all, which made him thirty.

He knew vaguely that it was disloyal to his mother to forget his name.

All he had left of her now was one of her dresses, black and shapeless but with a pretty collar made of tiny seed pearls. That dress hung in the small back room he rented from Mrs. Schultz, and with the dress were the dried flowers and the card.

It was all he had left of his mother.

But Gus Soltik, with the instinct of a wild creature, could always sense the approaching anniversary of her death. It was the time of year when the days were darker and shorter and the winds against his bulging forehead and massive hands were streaked with a coldness which would intensify until snow was falling in the streets and the gutters were noisy with the sound of running slush and water. And when it became cold, he listened and watched Mrs. Schultz with the wariness of an animal because the old woman did something each year that told Gus Soltik the exact day his mother had been killed.

On each anniversary of his mother’s death Mrs. Schultz paid the priests at the crumbling heap of St. Stanislaus to celebrate a requiem high mass to deliver his mother’s soul from all evil and from the torments of hell. She had tried to explain all this to Gus, but he understood nothing but the horror of his mother screaming in some place that raged with fire.

Mrs. Schultz had taken him to the first mass. But he had never gone again; he had been frightened by the three black-clad priests on the altar, and the sound of the vengeful, wrathful music from the choir loft had so terrified him that his heart had thudded and pounded like an imprisoned animal within his massive rib cage. So he had never gone again. But Mrs. Schultz was proud and happy to save her dimes and quarters until she had enough to pay for that dead mass which commemorated the soul of Gus’ mother.

When she told him about it, he knew the time was coming; when she waddled off to the church thick with sweaters under her old black coat, Gus Soltik knew for certain it was now time to mark the day of his mother’s death.

On an afternoon in the middle of October, Gus Soltik sat in the sunlight of Central Park and looked at little girls playing in the children’s zoo at Sixty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.

There were blacks and Puerto Ricans and white girls, some running in shrill packs, others accompanied by young mothers or nurses. The sun was warm on the backs of Gus Soltik’s hands and warm on his face, and the iron bench he sat on was pleasantly warm, excitingly so, under his heavy, powerful thighs.

It was early afternoon, and the sunlight on this lovely fall day dropped through the tawny crowns of changing maples and elms and struck the worn brick walks and green lawns like a shower of copper pennies. And the sunlight fell on the bare and flashing arms of little girls, brown and white and black, caressing them with a shimmering radiance and transmuting all the various colors of their flesh into tones of glowing gold.

Gus heard the growling of the lions from the big zoo at Sixty-fifth Street. That told him the time. Two thirty. That’s when they fed them.

The growling that was like distant thunder made him think of Lanny Gruber. Lanny was his friend. Lanny talked slowly to him, and Gus could understand him.

Children were playing ball on the lawn near Gus, their voices a piping counterpoint to the guttural cacophony of the lions. Old men and women sat nearby feeding peanuts to squirrels. Some of them, with tired, sagging faces, stared with wistful hostility at the romping children.

Neatly groomed businessmen crossed back and forth on their way to Fifth Avenue or Central Park West. Gus was not afraid of them, but in some fashion they diminished him, with the arrogant swing of their briefcases, the fact that they seemed to know things. When Gus thought of them sitting in offices and phoning from one city to another (as he believed was possible) to tell people things, it made him feel small and vulnerable. Still, he wasn’t afraid of them because he knew they wouldn’t hurt him.

Then Gus noticed something that made his big body go tense with fear; a patrolman in a blue uniform was watching him. Policemen would hurt you, he knew. It was his worst fear; not so much being hurt, but knowing no way to make them stop it.

He vividly remembered one of his mother’s anniversaries, and a basement with someone his mother had warned him about, teaching her a lesson, feeling strong and excited, when a door was kicked in and they came at him like raging animals, one big with orange-red hair, the other dark with a terrible scar on his cheek, and Gus had seen all this in splintered bars of light coming through the door they had smashed in. They had shouted at him, fury straining their voices, and had fired at him with guns, but with a strength made boundless by terror, Gus had knocked them down and fled from the basement.

Yes, they would hurt you and never stop it, he thought, staring sullenly and fearfully, but from the corners of his eyes, at the young cop in the blue uniform.

Patrolman Max Prima, who stood rocking on his stout boots while watching Gus Soltik, summed up his first impressions of that hulking figure in one word: “weirdo.” (Patrolman Max Prima had been named after his great-great-grandfather, Massimo Prima, who had lived in Florence and had been distantly related to one of the ancillary branches of the Medici family; Max Prima had become a welterweight finalist in the Golden Gloves as a result of a thousand fistfights connected with that unwelcome bequest from his great-great-grandfather, which his tough, alley-smart peers in Brooklyn had converted into various adaptations such as “Assimo” or “Masturbatio.”

After his triumphs in the Golden Gloves he had had no more fights, but he had become sick of the name Massimo, and despite his mother’s tearful remonstrances, he had legally shortened it to Max.) Patrolman Max Prima was twenty-four years of age. He had become a cop because he admired his uncle, Ernesto, who had been a police officer in the borough of Manhattan and had filled him with stories of historic exploits (largely crap, Max Prima later decided); but there was a primal truth in them which had stirred a romantic streak in his nature, and he had never regretted for an instant buying illusion for reality and putting in for the police department.

Other words were occurring to him as he continued to study Gus Soltik. Hype? No, probably not. Whipdick? Probably. But in the main it was Prima’s instinct that told him Gus Soltik was bad news. A wrongo. It was the way he was looking at those little girls in the children’s zoo. The fact was, this big, hulking man in the brown turtleneck sweater and silly yellow cap was pretending not to look at them. That was what had alerted Max Prima’s interest. He was learning to trust his instincts, as Uncle Ernesto had told him to. It was a thing, a fact, a vector, that veteran cops depended on with an almost implicit faith but that few of them could describe with any accuracy. Uncle Ernesto would say, “You see a woman sitting in a window all week. All month. One day the window is closed. Better check it out. . A family without children taking four quarts of milk a day. . the price of hash dropping. . you keep your eyes open, you see and hear things like that, you check ‘em out, or buck the information up where action can be taken on it.”

Patrolman Prima sauntered toward the bench on which Gus Soltik was sitting, but while he was still twenty yards away, the big man looked at him closely with glazing, narrowing eyes, then stood and walked with heavy, lumbering strides along the curving pathway that would bring him out to Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties.

Max Prima stopped. So what could he do? Collar him for what? Read him his rights? Slate him at the 22nd Precinct on Transverse Three?

On what charge? Because I got a funny feeling in my gut that he’s trouble? Because he looks sick? He could imagine what the sergeant would say to that.

But because Max Prima was an excellent young cop and would one day be an even better one, he took a pencil and notebook from an inner pocket of his tunic and wrote a careful description of the big man in the brown turtleneck sweater. He wrote:

“Subject: Caucasian, early thirties, six-three, two-twenty or more, moves like he’s fast and strong. Thick blond hair, grows ragged down his neck. Low, round forehead, bulging. Eyes set wide apart. Small nose and mouth, big chin, thick neck. At about 2:30 P.M., October 14, subject was wearing a brown sweater, denim work pants, and Wellington boots with stacked heels. Small yellow leather cap. No cause to interrogate or arrest. But subject was staring at young girls in the children’s zoo in a manner that looked suspicious and unhealthy.

Seemed to have nothing else to do with his time, but took off when I started walking toward him.”

Max Prima decided that the best thing he could do was to get this report over to Lieutenant Vincent Tonnelli’s Special Unit, which had been set up a couple of months ago, with headquarters at the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street. (Rumor had it that Gypsy Tonnelli’s assignment came not only from the chief of detectives and the commissioner, but from the man in Gracie Mansion himself. But only after the Gypsy had fought for it.)

The Gypsy would know what to do with it. If anybody could stop the Juggler from making it five in a row, it was that legendary Sicilian cop, Lieutenant Vincent “Gypsy” Tonnelli.

As he circled back toward the arsenal and the lion house, the word blazing like fire in Gus Soltik’s mind was “walls.” This word was Gus Soltik’s mnemonic unit to embrace concepts of fear and uncertainty and unfairness. It warned him that he was being threatened or that a trap was waiting to spring shut on him. The cop frightened him. But it wasn’t fair. The cop was wrong. Gus wasn’t planning to teach a lesson to any of those girls. He knew the one he would teach a lesson to. And it was too early. Not until three. He thought of her in a pair of separate references, which at times blended confusingly into a single baffling semantic unit.

The words she caused to form in his mind were alternately “green skirt” or “white legs.” But when the words on occasion mingled together in a mysterious fashion, they stood out in his mind as “greenropes.”

Chimes sounded from the Delacorte clock. Two thirty. Now the cages were feeding. The clock, on a high arch above the peristyle linking the monkey house with the lion house, was surrounded by a cortege of humorously sculpted animals, all of which “played” a merry musical accompaniment to the clock’s chimes.

As always, Gus Soltik watched with fascination and a sense of awe as the smiling beasts circled the base of the clock, providing a tinkling, bell-like concert for the appreciative audience that had grouped itself in the courtyard between the peristyle and the pond of sea lions. The chubby gray metal animals caught in prancing dance steps filled the air with sweet and innocent music.

The hippo bowed a violin, the kangaroo blew a horn, the bear shook a tambourine while the elephant played an accordion and the goat tinkled his pipes and the penguin pounded a pair of drums.

Lanny. This was where he had met him. The day he had brought the food. Gus liked standing here with the name “Lanny” forming in his mind. There were big people here, too, watching the show. Not just children. That made it all right for him to be here. While he enjoyed the prancing animals and occasionally clapped his big hands together in an attempt to show approval for their antics, the music disturbed him; it was frightening because he didn’t understand it.

Gus went into the animal house where Charlie, the tiger, was feeding and the big lion, Garland, was pacing behind his bars with the regularity of a metronome, obviously having savaged and pulped and devoured his twenty pounds of raw meat, for his eyes were sleepy and there was blood on his whiskers and the floor of the cage.

Gus felt at home with the cages. He liked the smell of the animals, acrid and fetid, and despite the tang of ammonia in the air, the smell was wild and exciting.

Without realizing it in any way at all, Gus Soltik was also given a sense of annealment and strength by the behavior of many of the people in the lion house. They were afraid, and they held their children up to be frightened by the sudden, erratic roaring of the big cats. And for reasons he was forever helpless to define, Gus Soltik took some pathetic comfort from this spectacle.

He stood looking at the big lion called Garland because it was too soon for “greenropes.”

Garland was eight years old, a black-maned African male, a gift to the city of New York from Jomo Kenyatta, President of Kenya. He had been named by the schoolchildren of New York in a contest conducted by the Daily News. The name which had, in fact, topped all others had been Bert Lahr, but this had been disallowed (privately) on the assumption that the children’s votes had been influenced by adults who remembered the great comedian from The Wizard of Oz. The contest officials decided to name the little cat Judy, which they thought would satisfy all age groups, but Jomo’s gift had turned out to be a male, and so they had decided on the lovely but epicene Garland, a name which had not received a single vote in the contest.

He could not tell time, but he could estimate it with reasonable accuracy. And now he knew it was time to look at “greenropes.”

The growling of the lions waiting to be fed had fixed the time for Gus Soltik. Soon, very soon now, he thought, as he hurried toward a place of concealment he had already chosen, thick privet underbrush just behind the wall bordering the eastern side of Central Park at Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties-soon, he was thinking with a surge of agitation, because he mustn’t be late. The bus would be stopping at the intersection, and she would get off and stand talking to her friend, the winds blowing their green skirts about their white legs, and it was very important that he see her now, because tomorrow was the anniversary of his mother’s death.

Shortly after three o’clock a yellow bus with black trim from Miss Prewitt’s Classes stopped at Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties of Manhattan. When the front doors opened with a gentle pneumatic hiss, a pair of chattering youngsters climbed down the steps and stood at the intersection waving good-bye to friends, who waved back to them from behind the windows of the bus which was accelerating, heading toward the southern boundaries of Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street.

The names of the two girls were Kate (Katherine Jackson) Boyd and Tish (Patricia) Tennyson, and they were eleven years of age and wore identical uniforms, which consisted of smartly cut black blazers, short green flannel skirts, green berets, white socks, and black moccasins.

The girls lived in adjoining apartment buildings whose drawing-room windows faced the verdant and dramatic views of Central Park.

Kate Boyd had shining blond hair which she wore in a ponytail, secured by a green ribbon, and a pale, unblemished complexion from which her cherry-dark eyes blazed with an almost comical intensity. It was apparent from even a superficial view of these youngsters that the confident excitement and aggressiveness in Kate’s manner completely dominated her friend, Tish Tennyson, whose skin tended to be sallow and whose chubby hips and rounded stomach had scored permanent diagonal creases in her green flannel skirt.

As the crisp gusting winds whipped their hair about their foreheads and cheeks, the two girls hugged their book bags to their chests and chattered at each other with ferocious intensity. Their present preoccupation and stimulation stemmed from a mix of heady ingredients: boys, older boys at that, practically men, and the girls’ shabby betrayal by these adult and arrogant males.

Kate and Tish had scored a coup for their fifth-grade class. They had worked up their nerve to approach Bob Elliott, who was seventeen and the leader of a rock group called The Purple Dreams, with an offer to play the Prewitt School’s “sweet young thing” afternoon tea dance.

To their surprise and delight, Bob Elliott had accepted; The Purple Dreams were cool and “in,” thus an impressive catch indeed for a fifth-grade tea dance. Even though the fee was high, one hundred dollars for a three-hour gig, plus fifteen dollars for the transportation of their electronic gear, Kate Boyd had committed the class funds to the project without reservations, knowing that whatever the price, it was a triumph and worth it.

But this morning their excitement and dreams had collapsed, after Bob Elliott had called to tell them the gig was off because two of The Purple Dreams were down with the flu. This, while wretchedly disappointing, was something they could live with, but at lunch in a pizzeria near Miss Prewitt’s, Kate had learned a bitter, unacceptable truth: Bob Elliott had simply dropped them to play a more prestigious date at Darwin Prep’s senior dinner dance.

Kate Boyd, who was flamingly outraged by any and all degrees of injustice, had cabbed across town to Bob Elliott’s apartment immediately on learning of his betrayal.

“He just laughed at me,” Kate said for about the fifteenth time to Tish.

“Laughed at me. He said we were just kids and wouldn’t understand his music anyway.”

“Did you really say it to him?” Tish said with a thread of excitement in her voice. “What you told me?”

Kate sighed. “No, I didn’t.”

“But you said you said it.”

“Well, I wanted to. I wanted to say, ‘I’d like to kick you’”-Kate lowered her voice theatrically-”’right in your jewels, Bob Elliott.’”

“But you didn’t.”

“Don’t be stupid. I wanted to, it’s the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t, Kate.”

“You don’t even know what it means,” Kate said.

Tish looked anxiously at Kate. She could stand neither Kate’s dismissal nor Kate’s displeasure. “Maybe I don’t,” she said. “Where’d you hear it?”

“They were in bed and she was laughing,” Kate said, and then added the logical prologue to the sentence as almost an afterthought: “I heard my mother say it to my father.”

“When’s your mother coming back, Kate?”

“Well, we’re not sure. She calls every day, of course, but she’s got to take care of her aunt.”

“What’s the matter with her aunt?”

Kate shrugged in what she meant to suggest was a gesture of casual dismissal, but she felt the sting of tears in her eyes and looked quickly away from Tish, tilting her face against the cold, freshening breezes.

“She’s got some kind of flu, from Brazil or from Greece or wherever it’s coming from this year.”

Again Tish felt a pang of anxiety; she shouldn’t have asked about Kate’s mother.

“Can I call you later, Kate?” Tish asked, with a fruitless effort to make the question sound casual. “I mean, after homework?”

“If you want to,” Kate said, and hurried off into the lobby of her building where old Mr. Brennan, the uniformed doorman, greeted her with a genuine smile and walked the length of the foyer with her to the elevators.

At about six o’clock that night, Luther Boyd let himself into the Fifth Avenue apartment which he had rented for three months from a theatrical producer who was staging a show in London, a production (he had explained to Boyd’s complete disinterest) which would feature Sir Laurence Olivier as an albino Othello, surrounded by an otherwise all-black cast, save for Desdemona, who would be played by the Oriental actress Yoko Tani, whose role-as opposed to the others-would be comprised of operatic recitative and arias. Luther Boyd had wished him well but without excessive conviction since the last play he himself had seen had been a production of Camelot after Julie Andrews had left the company.

The walls of the large apartment were covered with memorabilia of the theater: faded playbills, first-night telegrams, the glossy photographs of actresses and actors with intimate greetings and signatures. None of this held much interest for Luther Boyd, although he knew that some of the glamorous faces awed and fascinated Kate.

Luther Boyd thought there was something sentimental and childish about the lavish salutations and congratulations on the photographs and in the telegrams. And he thought there was something tacky and unsporting in the defensive effusions which obviously stemmed from box-office flops. But he could live with all this. He had rented the apartment, not for its furnishings, but for the dramatic and sustaining views of Central Park afforded him from the formal drawing room and his book-lined study. The shining crowns of Chinese elms and black alders that he could observe from these fifth-floor windows gave him cheerful memories of the six hundred open acres which surrounded his dairy farm in southern Pennsylvania. Also, he enjoyed walking in the park in the evening, and since flora and fauna and terrain were as much his profession as his pleasure, his investigations satisfied him as both a soldier and a naturalist.

On his leisurely strollings from the southern end of the Mall (his customary starting point) north past the cruciform esplanade of the band shell and then farther north to the boathouse and lake, he had observed dozens of domestic and exotic trees and shrubs; in his east-west crisscrossings along this north-south route (he had been advised to avoid the Ramble), he had found what amounted to a naturalist’s laboratory. In these few weeks Boyd had seen and studied, sometimes to his astonishment, towering cork trees, monumental magnolias with leaves like polished green leather, English and peach-leafed hawthorns, cucumber trees, bald cypresses, red and silver maples, and oaks of all varieties, black and English, red and willow and scarlet.

As he closed the door of the apartment, Luther Boyd was greeted by a furious excitement by Kate’s Scottie, Harry Lauder, and by what he judged to be a gratified insolence from their housekeeper, Carrie Snow, a stout middle-aged black lady, who stood waiting for him in the long drawing room with her hat on and a brownpaper market bag in her arms.

“You’ll have to clean up after your ownselves tonight, Mr. Boyd.” Her white teeth flashed in a smile of relish against the gloom of the long room, which at this hour was lighted only with a pair of table lamps.

“Food’s in the oven, and the plates are out, so you’ll have to serve yourself, too.”

“Very well, Carrie,” Luther Boyd said. “And Kate?”

“She’s in the bathtub, but first she did some homework before she used up all that was left of that pheasant in a sandwich.”

“We’ve still got six or eight brace in the freezer, Carrie.”

“I know, but it seems strange.”

Whatever Carrie’s point was, Luther Boyd thought with a certain weary humor, she was certainly determined to make it.

“What’s strange about it?” he asked her, trapped by their relationship-which was blended of what: sympathy, courtesy, guilt? — into asking a question when he didn’t give one goddamn about the answer.

Barbara had never appreciated his frequent need to get back to barracks and training camps. In those simple environments, one could cut through just such knots of supererogatory sensitivities. One told a captain what to do, and the captain did it. Or he’d better have a goddamned good reason for not doing it. But here Luther Boyd stood pleasantly tired after six hours in an office and two hours on a squash racquets’ court, fencing with a gloomy black lady’s hurt feelings, judging without interest what finesse might incline this tiny, boring conflict toward a sensible and, he hoped, speedy conclusion.

“Well, the strange thing is, Mr. Boyd, is a young girl, I mean, a baby child, sitting around in the afternoon watching TV and eating pheasant sandwiches.”

There it was, the rebuke. Now presumably Carrie Snow felt better, having got that off her chest. Luther Boyd glanced at his watch.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to hurry, Mrs. Snow, if you’re going to make that bus.”

This was a nice, tactical stroke, but it made Luther Boyd feel irritated with himself, because that had been his rebuke to her, a dismissal, with all that meant to her crotchety but basically kindly sensitivities.

Luther Boyd disliked insolence, not because it rankled him in any personal sense, but because he correctly assayed it as a surrogate for anger, an emotion he respected, particularly if it resulted in positive and constructive action. Yet stern as he was in his judgments on everyone around him, including himself, he was fair enough to understand that anger was a luxury that certain blacks and other misbegotten creatures of the world could savor only in the silence of their souls.

Mrs. Snow looked uneasily past him toward the kitchen.

“I could catch the next bus, Mr. Boyd-it don’t matter that much-and put away the things after dinner.”

He saw the white flags of surrender in her fluttering eyes. (“Thank you kindly, General Lee. It’s a privilege to accept such a magnificent example of the swordmaker’s art.”) What else could he do but accept her offer of service? He paid her well, and he and Barbara and Kate treated her well; but if they denied her a sense of usefulness, what did the rest of it mean?

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Snow,” Luther Boyd said.

And so, his tactical energies expended in trivia, Luther Boyd went toward his study, while Mrs. Snow, her dignity flying like plumes, strode importantly into the kitchen.

Kate Boyd, who liked to think of herself as a curious observer rather than as a busybody, made it a habit to take her bath with the door open a crack so that she missed nothing that went on in the apartment, and when she heard her father’s footsteps going toward his study, she sang out, “Daddy, is that you?”

“Yes, honey. I’ll see you after your bath. . ”

“But I’ve got some absolutely dreadful news.”

He opened the door of the bathroom and looked in on her. The air was steamy and warm and fragrant. Kate was up to her chin in bubbles, and whorls of thick, creamy shampoo had transferred her hair into what looked like a great white Afro.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked her.

“It’s about Bob Elliott.”

“After your bath,” he said, and smiled at her and closed the bathroom door.

On this particular night, Luther Boyd would have preferred that Carrie Snow had gone home on schedule and that Kate was sleeping over with Tish or one of her other new friends. Luther Boyd did not mind taking care of himself, in fact, he preferred it; one look at him would have confirmed this in the eyes of anyone who understood the physical disciplines of thoroughbreds. He was tall and rangily built and, at the age of forty-two, still played hours of squash racquets every day, lifted weights, and worked out regularly with a judo expert, who was proficient enough to give him an active, though ultimately inconclusive, match. They played only for exercise, which put Luther Boyd at a disadvantage, for-if they had played to a conclusion-it would be no contest for him.

As a result, his stomach was as hard as something fashioned from whalebone, and as recently as six months previously, he had scored a remarkable ninety-seven over the Rangers’ obstacle training course at Fort Benning, Georgia.

His clothes camouflaged the power of his body because he preferred gabardines and coverts, fabrics which streamlined the width and strength of his shoulders with chiseled economy.

Walking into his study, Luther Boyd was frowning and rubbing his jaw with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, one of his few physical gestures which revealed an inner anxiety. He would have preferred to be alone tonight because he was trying to solve two problems, one simple and the other very complex, and the frowning concern in his expression now made him look oddly youthful and vulnerable. This oddness stemmed from the fact that everything about Luther Boyd, from his closely cut black hair, sharply angled features, and cold gray eyes, suggested a confidence and authority of such an impregnable essence that it was difficult to imagine a problem he couldn’t solve with simply a snap of his fingers.

The first problem centered on Major General Scott Carmichael’s putatively authoritative three-volume work on the strategy and tactics of what the general described as “Phoenix Confrontation” by which he meant “guerrilla warfare.”

That was problem number one. And that was why Luther Boyd was in New York in an apartment which he had rented for three months: to check the proof of the general’s three-volume exegesis of guerrilla warfare, to verify facts, dates, and place-names and, more exasperatingly, to reshape what seemed to him a variety of warped conclusions in Carmichael’s treatise.

That was the simple problem. Since retiring from the Army in the early seventies with the rank of bird colonel, Luther Boyd had augmented the income from various substantial trust funds by free-lancing as a military consultant to publishing firms, motion-picture companies, foreign governments and, on more than one occasion, the United States Army.

Luther Boyd’s special area of expertise was guerrilla warfare. He had served five years in Vietnam with Ranger units and had volunteered to serve an additional five years as a special consultant and instructor at the Rangers’ permanent facility at Fort Benning, Georgia.

But presently he couldn’t concentrate on the first problem because of the second, which was the fact that his wife, Barbara, whom he loved and needed desperately, had walked out on him after fourteen years of marriage. And there seemed to be no way to get her back. He couldn’t beg, couldn’t explain himself to people. Colonel Boyd had given orders so long that he was almost physically uncomfortable in relationships which required a democratic exchange of viewpoints and opinions.

Pacing restlessly, Luther Boyd glanced about the large study, looking for solace and solutions from his own personal effects, the hunting prints that had belonged to his father, the deep chairs of antelope hide, the small-scale maps whose battlefields he knew from personal experience, and the portable campaign desk on which was a tray of bottles, glasses, and bucket of ice cubes. And his books and charts and maps, of course.

Luther Boyd had asked the producer, his landlord, to clear all the shelves of leather-bound collections of scripts and press clippings, and now a portion of Boyd’s personal library stood in their place: military histories, biographies, and the battle orders of classic conflicts from Hamilcar Barca to Grant and Patton.

Still massaging his hard, angular jaw in a gesture of reflexive anxiety, Boyd stood at the windows and looked down at the pedestrian and automobile traffic on Fifth Avenue and the sidewalk running parallel to Central Park. He noted something then, absently, without interest, his reaction a simple professional reflex; in the pedestrian traffic moving along the eastern side of the park, one man stood as motionless as a rock in a stream, a big man, Luther Boyd could judge, even from this height, who was simply standing there, streams of pedestrians eddying around him, and his head, topped by what seemed to be a yellow cap, was tilted back as if he were staring up at the windows of Boyd’s apartment.

Good soldiers, like good cops, trust their instincts. They try to understand an unnatural silence on a battlefield; they try, and frequently succeed, to define the cannon or tank beneath nets of camouflage; and with a combination of experience and instinctual perceptions, they sense the movements of troops, know well in advance the vectors of attack and the possible collapse of flanks.

And if these martial nuances were correct, the reserves would be committed in time and those flanks would hold like solid walls of iron and will.

And because Luther Boyd was an expert in military tactics and strategy, he was wondering idly, but without real interest (in truth, distracting himself from thinking of Barbara), why this big man was standing motionless in the rush hour when everyone was hurrying for trains and buses and home.

Kate ran into the room, and Luther Boyd swung his daughter up in his arms and sat down with her in one of the deep suede chairs. She had changed into plaid slacks and a light-blue cashmere sweater whose color flattered her blue eyes and shining blond hair. Straight from her bath, she was as fragrant as a bar of fresh soap.

“Now what’s all this about Bob Elliott?” he said, after she had given him a hug and a kiss.

Kate told him about their betrayal with flashing eyes and ferocious zest, but when she finished, her mood changed, and she sighed and said, “I really felt a little bit sorry for him afterward, because he knew that I knew he was lying.”

“I wouldn’t waste any sympathy on him,” Boyd said. “He broke his word to you and he lied to you because he didn’t have the guts to tell you the truth.”

Kate looked into her father’s eyes, then looked away from him and with the tip of a finger drew a slow, small circle around the buttonhole in the lapel of his gabardine jacket.

“Daddy, if Mommy’s never coming home, shouldn’t we talk about it?”

He searched vainly for words to answer her question, and the silence between them became awkward and embarrassing. At last he said,

“Very well, we’ll talk about it.”

They heard Harry Lauder barking with excitement and anticipation at the front door of the living room.

“I’d better take him out for a walk first,” she said. “He knows it’s time.”

“All right,” Luther Boyd said. “Then we’ll have our talk. But remember the ground rules, Kate. Make sure Mr. Brennan is on the sidewalk where he can see you, and stay on this side of the avenue.”

Kate untangled herself from his arms and lap and walked to the door, where she stopped with her back toward him, a suggestion of tension in her little shoulders. She looked back at her father, and he realized from the sad maturity in her expression that she had guessed at the core of the abrasive estrangement between himself and Barbara.

“Does she blame you because Buddy got killed?”

He had no ready answer for this question, and feeling helpless, he stared in silence at the backs of his big, powerful hands. Then he glanced about the room as if seeking some escape from Kate’s troubled eyes, noting irrelevantly how the last of the daylight had coated the surfaces of the furniture and carpeting with a fine veneer of rose and lemon reflections. At last Luther Boyd did the thing he feared to do (which was something his father had always commanded him to do without hesitation), and that was simply to turn away from the familiar, sustaining volumes of his military library and to look steadily into his young daughter’s troubled and faintly accusing eyes. “Yes, it’s got something to do with Buddy’s death,” he said.

“But it wasn’t your fault that Buddy got killed.”

“I’ll try to explain it to you, although I’m not sure I can,” he said.

“But it wasn’t your fault,” she said, and there was a tone of stubborn loyalty in her voice. “How could it be?”

“That’s one of the questions I’m not sure I can answer,” he said wearily.

After she had gone off with her Scottie, Luther Boyd stood and paced the floor restlessly, rubbing his jaw with the wedge formed by his thumb and forefinger. He tried not to think of Barbara. To distract himself, he thought of General Carmichael, whose problems at least presented a fair and reasonable challenge. One of the general’s most serious flaws stemmed from a paradoxical stylistic ingenuity; he was, in fact, an excellent persuasive writer, but this was a talent best served in the breach in the writing of military manuals. War was not a debate, with issues to be decided by closely reasoned arguments. The object was not to win on paper and lose in combat, or to study maps and ignore the battlefield. He took a volume at random from a shelf and flipped through the pages until he came to this quotation: “The enemy is badly beaten, greatly demoralized and exhausted of ammunition. The road to Vicksburg is open. All we want now are men, ammunition and hard bread. . ”

That was the kind of writing soldiers understood, clear and unequivocal, General Grant to Sherman.

From another volume he read: “It is 132 miles to the Rhine from here, and if this army will attack with venom and desperate energy, it is more than probable that the war will end before we get to the Rhine. Therefore, when we attack, we go like hell.” General Patton to the 95th Division in October, 1944.

And from yet another volume he read wise words from a statesman who was not only a military but a political strategist: “The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.” That was the British bulldog with the cigar, Sir Winston Churchill.

But as he replaced the volume on the shelf, Luther Boyd realized he was committing a mistake which he would not permit in any officer in his command; he was postponing the decision of what and how much to tell his daughter, Kate, and that was an unforgivable and cowardly indulgence.

John “Buddy” Boyd had been Barbara Boyd’s son by a first marriage to a man who had been killed in an automobile accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when Buddy (then Buddy Shaw) had been four years of age. When Luther Boyd married Barbara Shaw, he had adopted Buddy, and when the boy was old enough to discuss the matter, they had mutually agreed to change his name legally from Shaw to Boyd.

Luther Boyd had loved Buddy as he would have a natural son and had gloried in his triumphs and suffered with his defeats, caring for him as wisely and completely as he cared for their daughter, Kate.

Buddy Boyd had enlisted in the Army four years before, despite a perforated eardrum, which would have automatically exempted him from service, and despite a high draft number, which mathematically excluded him from any chance of conscription.

But Buddy Boyd had ignored his mother’s injunctions to stay in college and had died unspectacularly but with great finality in a two-truck collision during his boot training at Fort Riley, Kansas. At first, Barbara had been a rock of determination and strength. She had packed off Buddy’s clothes and cameras and butterfly collections to Army hospitals, and she had converted his two rooms, which were directly above Luther Boyd’s library, into a ballet suite for Kate and her friends, complete with mirrors and bars and Degas prints. But after the first year, something insidious and virulent eroded her resolution and confidence.

She began to question her son’s death and then her husband’s life. She questioned his decisions, his values, his code of honor, which was the very core of Luther Boyd’s existence. She had come to believe that Boyd’s feverish preoccupation (her phrase) with weapons and falconry and hunting and killing had created an atmosphere that was like a stench of death in their home, and in this noisome air her son had sickened and died. How could the son of Colonel Luther Boyd decide not to go to war? Hating it, despising it, fearing it, loathing the guns and the killing. Buddy had nonetheless embraced it with his young life rather than risk Colonel Luther Boyd’s disapproval.

It wasn’t that way, Boyd thought bitterly. He simply was what he was, and there was no way to change that. Barbara could change, but he couldn’t. She could slip into the oblivion of drinks at dusk, she could exercise her grief in these spasms of neurotic indulgence, but there were no such anodynes or escape for Colonel Luther Boyd. He had been bred to take it, to clamp his teeth against any cry of pain or loss, leaving the possibly annealing tears to women and children and cowards.

The front doorbell echoed through the silent apartment. Luther Boyd walked through the corridor and living room and opened the door. Mr. Brennan, the uniformed lobby attendant, stood in the outer hallway.

Behind him the elevator doors were open.

“This just came in special delivery, Mr. Boyd,” Mr. Brennan said, handing Boyd a neatly wrapped package about the size of a deck of playing cards. Luther Boyd took the package but didn’t glance at it; his eyes were fixed hard and straight at Mr. Brennan.

“Did Kate go outside with Harry Lauder?”

“You’d better believe she didn’t, Mr. Boyd,” Mr. Brennan said. “She’s waiting right in the lobby for me to come down and keep an eye on her.”

As a young man Mr. Brennan had been a welterweight contender with the ring name of Kid Irish, and at sixty-four he was still in excellent physical condition and would have dearly relished the opportunity to deck any bastard who’d lay a finger on Kate Boyd.

“Well, fine,” Luther Boyd said. “And thanks.”

He closed the door and unwrapped the package. His fingers were a bit clumsy because he recognized Barbara’s handwriting on the heavy brown paper. The package contained a slim cartridge of electronic tape and a note from Barbara.

The note read:

I can’t ever explain anything to you, because I know you’re waiting for me to finish so you can point out in your logical, precise manner how wrong I am. But you do deserve an explanation. And so does poor, dear Kate. I’ve put down some of my feelings on this tape. Whether they “explain” anything, I’m not sure. But please believe that I have tried to be honest.

There was no signature. Luther Boyd stood uncertainly for a moment or so in the dimly lighted living room, tossing the slender cartridge up and down gently in the palm of his hand. At last he came to a decision which gave him very little pleasure. He sighed and walked back to the den, where a tape recorder rested on his desk alongside a neat stack of unanswered correspondence.

Luther Boyd made himself a mild scotch with soda and packed a pipe from a soft leather tobacco pouch. Then he set the tape in its spool, snapped the switch, and watched it begin to spin, his expression hard and thoughtful.