Black Sunday

5

NOW THAT HAFEZ NAJEER AND Abu Ali were dead, only Dahlia and Muhammad Fasil knew Lander’s identity, but Benjamin Muzi had seen him several times, for Muzi had been Lander’s first link to Black September and the plastic.

From the beginning, the great problem had been obtaining the explosives. In the first white heat of his epiphany, when he knew what he would do, it had not occurred to Lander that he would need help. It was part of the aesthetic of the act that he do it alone. But as the plan flowered in his mind, and as he looked down on the crowds again and again, he decided they deserved more than the few cases of dynamite that he could buy or steal. They should have more attention than the random shrapnel from a shattered gondola and a few pounds of nails and chain.

Sometimes, as he lay awake, the upturned faces of the crowd filled his midnight ceiling, mouths open, shifting like a field of flowers in the wind. Many of the faces became Margaret’s. Then the great fireball lifted off the heat of his face and rose to them, swirling like the Crab nebula, searing them to charcoal, soothing him to sleep.

He must have plastic.

Lander traveled across the country twice looking for plastic. He went to three military arsenals to case the possibilities for theft and saw that it was hopeless. He went to the plant of a great corporation that manufactures baby oil and napalm, industrial adhesives and plastic explosives, and he found that plant security was as tight as that of the military and considerably more imaginative. The instability of nitroglycerine ruled out extracting it from dynamite.

Lander checked newspapers avidly for stories about terrorism, explosions, bombs. The pile of clippings in his bedroom grew. It would have offended him to know that this was patterned behavior, to know in how many bedrooms sick men keep clippings, waiting for their day. Many of Lander’s clippings carried foreign datelines—Rome, Helsinki, Damascus, The Hague, Beirut.

In a Cincinnati motel in mid-July the idea came to him. He had flown over a fair that day and was getting mildly drunk in the motel lounge. It was late. A television set was suspended from the ceiling over the end of the bar. Lander sat almost directly beneath it, staring into his drink. Most of the customers were facing him, turned on their stools, the bloodless light of the TV playing over their uplifted faces.

Lander stirred and came alert. Something in the expression on the faces of the customers watching television. Apprehension. Anger. Not fear exactly, for they were safe enough, but they wore the look of a man watching wolves from his cabin window. Lander picked up his drink and walked down the bar until he could see the screen. Film of a Boeing 747 sitting in the desert with heat shimmer around it. The forward end of the fuselage exploded, then the center section, and the plane was gone in a belch of flame and smoke. The program was a rerun of a news special on Arab terrorism.

Cut to Munich. The horror at the Olympic village. The helicopter at the airport. Muffled gunfire inside it as the Israeli athletes were shot. The embassy at Khartoum where the American and Belgian diplomats were slain. Al Fatah leader Yasir Arafat denying responsibility.

Yasir Arafat again at a news conference in Beirut, bitterly accusing England and the United States of aiding the Israelis in terrorist raids against the guerrillas. “When our revenge comes, it will be big,” Arafat said, his eyes reflecting double moons from the television lights.

A statement of support from Colonel Khadafy, student of Napoleon and Al Fatah’s constant ally and banker: “The United States deserves a strong slap in the face.” A further comment from Khadafy—“Goddamn America.”

“Scumbag,” said a man in a bowling jacket who stood next to Lander. “Bunch of scumbags.”

Lander laughed loudly. Several of the drinkers turned to him.

“That funny to you, Jack?”

“No. I assure you, sir, that is not funny at all. You scumbag.” Lander put money on the bar and walked out with the man shouting after him.

Lander knew no Arabs. He began to read accounts of the Arab-American groups sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinian Arabs, but the one meeting he attended in Brooklyn convinced him that Arab-American citizens’ committees were far too straight for him. They discussed subjects such as “justice” and “individual rights” and encouraged writing to congress-men. If he put out feelers there for militants, he rightly suspected, he would soon be approached by an undercover cop with a Kel transmitter strapped to his leg.

Demonstrations in Manhattan on the Palestinian question were no better. At United Nations Plaza and Union Square he found less than twenty Arab youngsters surrounded by a sea of Jews.

No, he needed a competent and greedy crook with good contacts in the Middle East. And he found one. Lander obtained the name of Benjamin Muzi from an airline pilot he knew who brought back interesting packages from the Middle East in his shaving kit and delivered them to the importer.

Muzi’s office was gloomy enough, set in the back of a shabby warehouse on Sedgwick Street in Brooklyn. Lander was shown to the office by a very large and odorous Greek, whose bald head reflected the dim overhead light as they wound through a maze of crates.

Only the office door was expensive. It was of steel with two deadbolts and a Fox lock. The mail slot was belly-high, with a hinged metal plate in the inside that could be bolted shut.

Muzi was very fat, and he grunted as he lifted a pile of invoices off a chair and motioned for Lander to sit down.

“May I offer you something? A refreshment?”

Muzi drained his bottle of Perrier water and fished a fresh bottle out of his ice chest. He dropped in two aspirin tablets and took a long swallow. “You said on the telephone that you wished to speak to me on a matter of the utmost confidence. Since you haven’t offered your name, do you have any objection to being called Hopkins?”

“None whatever.”

“Excellent. Mr. Hopkins, when people say ‘in confidence’ they generally mean contravention of the law. If that is the case here, then I will have nothing whatever to do with you—do you understand me?”

Lander removed a packet of bills from his pocket and placed it on Muzi’s desk. Muzi did not touch the money or look at it. Lander picked up the packet and started for the door.

“A moment, Mr. Hopkins.” Muzi gestured to the Greek who stepped forward and searched Lander thoroughly. The Greek looked at Muzi and shook his head.

“Sit down, please. Thank you, Salop. Wait outside.” The big man closed the door behind him.

“That’s a filthy name,” Lander said.

“Yes, but he doesn’t know it,” Muzi said, mopping his face with a handkerchief. He steepled his fingers under his chin and waited.

“I understand you are a man of wide influence,” Lander began.

“I am certainly a wide man of influence.”

“Certain advice—”

“Contrary to what you may believe, Mr. Hopkins, it is not necessary to indulge in endless Arabic circumlocutions in dealing with an Arab, especially since, for the most part, Americans lack the subtlety to make it interesting. This office is not bugged. You are not bugged. Tell me what you want.”

“I want a letter delivered to the head of the intelligence section of A1 Fatah.”

“And who might that be?”

“I don’t know. You can find out. I am told you can do nearly anything in Beirut. The letter will be sealed in several tricky ways and it must get there unopened.”

“Yes, I expect it must.” Muzi’s eyes were hooded like a turtle’s.

“You’re thinking letter bomb,” Lander said. “It’s not. You can watch me put the contents in the envelope from ten feet away. You can lick the flap, then I’ll put on the other seals.”

“I deal with men who are interested in money. People with politics often don’t pay their bills, or they kill you out of ineptitude. I don’t think—”

“Two thousand dollars now, two thousand dollars if the message gets there satisfactorily.” Lander put the money back on the desk. “Another thing, I would advise you to open a numbered bank account in the Hague.”

“To what purpose?”

“To put a lot of Libyan currency in if you should decide to retire.”

There was a prolonged silence. Finally Lander broke it.

“You have to understand that this must go to the right man the first time. It must not be handed around.”

“Since I don’t know what you want, I am working blind. Certain inquiries could be made, but even inquiry is dangerous. You are aware that Al Fatah is fragmented, contentious within itself.”

“Get it to Black September,” Lander said.

“Not for four thousand dollars.”

“How much?”

“Inquiries will be difficult and expensive and even then you can never be sure—”

“How much?”

“For eight thousand dollars, payable immediately, I would do my best.”

“Four thousand now and four thousand afterward.”

“Eight thousand now, Mr. Hopkins. Afterward I will not know you and you will never come here again.”

“Agreed.”

“I am going to Beirut in a week’s time. I do not want your letter until immediately before my departure. You can bring it here on the night of the seventh. It will be sealed in my presence. Believe me, I do not want to read what is in it.”

The letter contained Lander’s real name and address and said that he could do a great service for the Palestinian cause. He asked to meet with a representative of Black September anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. He enclosed a money order for fifteen hundred dollars to cover any expenses.

Muzi accepted the letter and the eight thousand dollars with a gravity just short of ceremony. It was one of his peculiarities that, when his price was met, he kept his word.

A week later, Lander received a picture postcard from Beirut. There was no message on it. He wondered if Muzi had opened the letter himself and gotten the name and address from it.

A third week passed. He had to fly four times out of Lakehurst. Twice in that week he thought he was being followed as he drove to the airfield, but he could not be sure. On Thursday, August 15, he flew a night-sign run over Atlantic City, flashing billboard messages from the computer-controlled panels of lights on the blimp’s great sides.

When he returned to Lakehurst and got into his car, he noticed a card stuck under the windshield wiper. Annoyed, he got out and pulled it loose, expecting an advertisement. He examined the card under the dome light. It was a chit good for a swim at Maxie’s Swim Club, near Lakehurst. On the back was written “tomorrow three p.m. flash once now for yes.”

Lander looked around him at the darkened airfield parking lot. He saw no one. He flashed his headlights once and drove home.

There are many private swimming clubs in New Jersey, well maintained and fairly expensive, and they offer a variety of ex clusionary policies. Maxie’s had a predominantly Jewish clientele, but unlike some of the club owners Maxie admitted a few blacks and Puerto Ricans if he knew them. Lander arrived at the pool at two forty-five p.m. and changed into his swimsuit in a cinder-block dressing room with puddles on the floor. The sun and the sharp smell of chlorine and the noisy children reminded him of other times, swimming at the officers’ club with Margaret and his daughters. Afterward a drink at poolside, Margaret holding the stem of her glass with fingers puckered from the water, laughing and tossing her wet hair back, knowing the young lieutenants were watching.

Lander felt very much alone now, and he was conscious of his white body and his ugly hand as he walked out on the hot concrete. He put his valuables in a wire basket and checked them with the attendant, tucking the plastic check tag in his swimsuit pocket. The pool was an unnatural blue and the light danced on it, hurting his eyes.

There are a lot of advantages in a swimming pool, he reflected. Nobody can carry a gun or a tape recorder; nobody can be fingerprinted on the sly.

He swam back and forth lazily for half an hour. There were at least fifteen children in the pool with a variety of inflated seahorses and inner tubes. Several young couples were playing keepaway with a striped beach ball, and one muscle-bound young man was anointing himself with suntan oil on the side of the pool.

Lander rolled over and began a slow backstroke across the deep end, just out of range of the divers. He was watching a small, drifting cloud when he collided with a swimmer in a tangle of arms and legs, a girl in a snorkel mask who had been kicking along, apparently watching the bottom instead of looking where she was going.

“Sorry,” she said, treading water. Lander blew water out of his nose and swam on, saying nothing. He stayed in the pool another half hour, then decided to leave. He was about to climb out when the girl in the snorkel mask surfaced in front of him. She took off the mask and smiled.

“Did you drop this? I found it on the bottom of the pool.” She was holding his plastic check tag.

Lander looked down to see that the pocket of his swimsuit was wrong side out.

“You’d better check your wallet and make sure everything is there,” she said and submerged again.

Tucked inside the wallet was the money order he had sent to Beirut. He gave his basket back to the attendant and rejoined the girl in the pool. She was in a water fight with two small boys. They complained loudly when she left them. She was splendid to see in the water, and Lander, feeling cold and shriveled inside his swimming trunks, was angered at the sight.

“Let’s talk in the pool, Mr. Lander,” she said, wading to a depth where the water lapped just below her breasts.

“What am I supposed to do, shoot off in my pants and spill the whole business right here?”

She watched him steadily, multicolored pinpoints of light dancing in her eyes. Suddenly he placed his mangled hand on her arm, staring into her face, watching for the flinch. A gentle smile was the only reaction he saw. The reaction he did not see was beneath the surface of the water. Her left hand slowly turned over, fingers hooked, ready to strike if necessary.

“May I call you Michael? I am Dahlia Iyad. This is a good place to talk.”

“Was everything in my wallet satisfactory to you?”

“You should be pleased that I searched it. I don’t think you would deal with a fool.”

“How much do you know about me?”

“I know what you do for a living. I know you were a prisoner of war. You live alone, you read very late at night, and you smoke a rather inferior grade of marijuana. I know that your telephone is not tapped, at least not from the telephone terminal in your basement or the one on the pole outside your home. I don’t know for certain what you want.”

Sooner or later he would have to say it. Aside from his distrust of this woman, it was difficult to say the thing, as hard as opening up for a shrink. All right.

“I want to detonate twelve hundred pounds of plastic explosive in the Super Bowl.”

She looked at him as though he had painfully admitted a sexual aberration that she particularly enjoyed. Calm and kindly compassion, suppressed excitement. Welcome home.

“You have no plastic, do you, Michael?”

“No.” He looked away as he asked the question. “Can you get it?”

“That’s a lot. It depends.”

Water flew off his head as he snapped back to face her. “I don’t want to hear that. That is not what I want to hear. Talk straight.”

“If I am convinced you can do it, if I can satisfy my commander that you can do it and will do it, then yes, I can get the plastic. I’ll get it.”

“That’s all right. That’s fair.”

“I want to see everything. I want to go home with you.”

“Why not?”

They did not go directly to Lander’s house. He was scheduled for a night-sign flight and he took Dahlia with him. It was not common practice to take passengers on night-sign flights, since most of the seats were removed from the gondola to make room for the on-board computer that controlled the eight thousand lights along the sides of the blimp. But with crowding there was room. Farley, the copilot, had inconvenienced everyone on two previous occasions by bringing his Florida girlfriend and was in no position to grumble at giving up his seat to this young woman. He and the computer operator licked their lips over Dahlia and entertained themselves with lewd pantomimes at the rear of the gondola when she and Lander were not looking.

Manhattan blazed in the night like a great diamond ship as they passed over at twenty-five hundred feet They dropped toward the brilliant wreath of Shea Stadium, where the Mets were playing a night game, and the sides of the dirigible became huge flashing billboards, letters moving down its sides. “Don’t forget. Hire the Vet” was the first message. “Winston. tastes God—” This message was interrupted while the technician cursed and fumbled with the perforated tape.

Afterward, Dahlia and Lander watched while the ground crew at Lakehurst secured the floodlit blimp for the night. They paid special attention to the gondola, as the men in coveralls removed the computer and reinstalled the seats.

Lander pointed out the sturdy handrail that runs around the base of the cabin. He led her to the rear of the gondola to watch while the turbojet generator that powers the lights was detached. The generator is a sleek, heavy unit shaped like a largemouth bass, and it has a strong, three-point attachment that would be very useful.

Farley approached them with his clipboard. “Hey, you people aren’t going to stay here all night.”

Dahlia smiled at him vacuously. “It’s all so exciting.”

“Yeah.” Farley chuckled and left them with a wink.

Dahlia’s face was flushed and her eyes were bright as they drove home from the airfield.

She made it clear from the first that, inside his house, she expected no performance of any kind from Lander. And she was careful not to show any distaste for him either. Her body was there, she had brought it because it was convenient to do so, her attitude seemed to say. She was physically deferential to Lander in a way so subtle that it does not have a name in English. And she was very, very gentle.

In matters of business it was quite different. Lander quickly found that he could not browbeat her with his superior technical knowledge. He had to explain his plan in minute detail, defining terms as he went along. When she disagreed with him it was usually on methods for handling people, and he found her to be a shrewd judge of people and greatly experienced in the behavior of frightened men under pressure. Even when she was adamant in disagreement she never emphasized a point with a body movement or a facial expression that reflected anything other than concentration.

As the technical problems were resolved, at least in theory, Dahlia could see that the greatest danger to the project was Lander’s instability. He was a splendid machine with a homicidal child at the controls. Her role became increasingly supportive. In this area, she could not always calculate and she was forced to feel.

As the days passed, he began to tell her things about himself—safe things that did not pain him. Sometimes in the evenings, a little drunk, he carped endlessly about the injustices of the Navy until she finally went to her room after midnight, leaving him cursing at the television. And then one night, as she sat on the side of his bed, he brought her a story like a gift. He told her about the first time he ever saw a dirigible.

He was a child of eight with impetigo on his knees, and he was standing on the bare clay playground of a country school when he looked up and saw the airship. Silver, wearing for a reach across the wind, it floated over the schoolyard, scattering in the air behind it tiny objects that floated down—Baby Ruth candy bars on small parachutes. Running after the airship, Michael could stay in its shadow the length of the schoolyard, the other children running with him, scrambling for the candy bars. Then they reached the plowed field at the edge of the schoolyard and the shadow moved away, rippling over the rows. Lander in his short pants fell in the field and tore the scabs off his knees. He got to his feet again and watched the dirigible out of sight, rivulets of blood on his shins, a candy bar and parachute clutched in his hand.

While he was lost in the story, Dahlia stretched out beside him on the bed, listening. And he came to her from the playground, with wonder and the light of that old day still in his face.

After that he became shameless. She had heard his terrible wish and had accepted it as her own. She had received him with her body. Not with withering expectations, but with abundant grace. She saw no ugliness in him. Now he felt that he could tell her anything, and he poured it out—the things that he could never tell before, even to Margaret. Especially to Margaret.

Dahlia listened with compassion and concerned interest. She never showed a trace of distaste or apprehension, though she learned to be wary of him when he was talking about certain things, for he could become angry at her suddenly for injuries that others had done to him. Dahlia needed to know Lander, and she learned him very well, better than anyone else would ever know him—including the blue-ribbon commission that investigated his final act. The investigators had to rely on their piles of documents and photographs, their witnesses stiff upon the chair. Dahlia had it from the monster’s mouth.

It is true that she learned Lander in order to use him, but who will ever listen for free? She might have done a great deal for him if her object had not been murder.

His utter frankness and her own inferences provided her with many windows on his past. Through them, she watched her weapon forged….

Willett-Lorance Consolidated School, a rural school between Willett and Lorance, South Carolina, February 2, 1941:

“Michael, Michael Lander, come up here and read your paper. I want you to pay strict attention, Buddy Ives. And you too, Junior Atkins. You two have been fiddling while Rome burns. At six-weeks tests, this class will be divided into the sheep and the goats.”

Michael has to be called twice more. He is surprisingly small walking up the aisle. Willett-Lorance has no accelerated program for exceptional children. Instead, Michael has been “skipped” ahead. He is eight years old and in the fourth grade.

Buddy Ives and Junior Atkins, both twelve, have spent the previous recess dipping a second-grader’s head in the toilet. Now they pay strict attention. To Michael. Not to his paper.

Michael knows he must pay. Standing before the class in his baggy short pants, the only pair in the room, reading in a voice barely audible, he knows he will have to pay. He hopes it will happen on the playground. He would rather be beaten than dipped.

Michael’s father is a minister and his mother is a power in the PTA. He is not a cute, appealing child. He thinks there is something terribly wrong with him. For as long as he can remember he has been filled with horrible feelings that he does not understand. He cannot yet identify rage and self loathing. He has a constant picture of himself as a prissy little boy in short pants, and he hates it. Sometimes he watches the other eight-year-olds playing cowboys in the shrubbery. On a few occasions he has tried to play, yelling “bang bang” and pointing his finger. He feels silly doing it. The others can tell he is not really a cowboy, does not believe in the game.

He wanders over to his classmates, the eleven- and twelve-year-olds. They are choosing sides to play football. He stands in the group and waits. It is not too bad to be chosen last, as long as you are chosen. He is alone between the two sides. He is not chosen. He notes which team chose last and walks over to the other team. He can see himself coming toward them. He can see his knobby knees beneath the short pants, knows they are talking about him in the huddle. They turn their backs to him. He cannot beg to play. He walks away, his face burning. There is no place on the red clay playground where he can get out of sight.

As a Southerner, Michael is deeply imprinted with the Code. A man fights when called on. A man is tough, straightforward, honorable, and strong. He can play football, he loves to hunt, and he allows no nasty talk around the ladies, although he discusses them in lewd terms among his fellows.

When you are a child, the Code without the equipment will kill you.

Michael has learned not to fight twelve-year-olds if he can help it. He is told that he is a coward. He believes it. He is articulate and has not yet learned to conceal it. He is told that he is a sissy. He believes that this must be true.

He has finished reading his paper before the class now. He knows how Junior Atkins’s breath will smell in his face. The teacher tells Michael he is a “good classroom citizen.” She does not understand why he turns his face away from her.

September 10, 1947, the football field behind Willett-Lorance Consolidated:

Michael Lander is going out for football. He is in the tenth grade and he is going out without his parents’ knowledge. He feels that he has to do it. He wants the good feeling his classmates have about the sport. He is curious about himself. The uniform makes him wonderfully anonymous. He cannot see himself when he has it on. The tenth grade is late for a boy to begin playing football, and he has much to learn. To his surprise the others are tolerant of him. After a few days of forearms and cleats, they have discovered that, though he is naive about the game, he will hit and he wants to learn from them. It is a good time for him. It lasts a week. His parents learn that he is going out for football. They hate the coach, a godless man who, it is rumored, keeps alcohol in his home. The Reverend Lander is on the school board now. The Landers drive up to the practice field in their Kaiser. Michael does not see them until he hears his name being called. His mother is approaching the sideline, walking stiff-ankled through the grass. The Reverend Lander waits in the car.

“Take off that monkey suit.”

Michael pretends not to hear. He is playing linebacker with the scrubs in scrimmage. He assumes his stance. Each blade of grass is distinct in his eyes. The tackle in front of him has a red scratch on his calf.

His mother is walking the sideline now. Now she is crossing it. She is coming. Two hundred pounds of pondered rage. “I said take off that monkey suit and get in that car.”

Michael might have saved himself in that moment. He might have yelled into his mother’s face. The coach might have saved him, had he been quicker, less afraid for his job. Michael cannot let the others see any more. He cannot be with them after this. They are looking at each other now with expressions he cannot stand. He trots toward the prefabricated building they use for a dressing room. There are snickers behind him.

The coach has to speak to the boys twice to resume the practice. “We don’t need no mama’s boys no way,” he says.

Michael moves very deliberately in the dressing room, leaving his equipment in a neat pile on the bench with his locker key on top. He feels only a dull heaviness inside, no surface anger.

Riding home in the Kaiser, he listens to a torrent of abuse. He replies that, yes, he understands how he has embarrassed his parents, that he should have thought of others. He nods solemnly when reminded that he must save his hands for the piano.

July 18, 1948: Michael Lander is sitting on the back porch of his home, a mean parsonage beside the Baptist church in Willett. He is fixing a lawn mower. He makes a little money fixing lawn mowers and small appliances. Looking through the screen, he can see his father lying on a bed, listening to the radio, his hands behind his head. When he thinks of his father, Michael sees his father’s white, inept hands, the ring from Cumberland-Macon Divinity School loose behind the knuckle of his ring finger. In the South, as in many other places, the church is an institution of, by, and for women. The men tolerate it for the sake of family peace. The men of the community have no respect for the Reverend Lander because he could never make a crop, could never do anything practical. His sermons are dull and rambling, composed while the choir is singing the offertory hymn. The Reverend Lander spends much of his time writing letters to a girl he knew in high school. He never mails the letters, but locks them in a tin box in his office. The combination padlock is childishly simple. Michael has read the letters for years. For laughs.

Puberty has done a great deal for Michael Lander. At fifteen he is tall and lean. He has, by considerable effort, learned to do convincingly mediocre schoolwork. Against all odds, he has developed what appears to be an affable personality. He knows the joke about the bald-headed parrot, and he tells it well.

A freckle-faced girl two years older has helped Michael discover that he is a man. This is a tremendous relief to him after years of being told that he is a queer, with no evidence to judge himself either way.

But in the blossoming of Michael Lander, part of him has stood off to the side, cold and watchful. It is the part of him that recognized the ignorance of the classroom, that constantly replays little vignettes of grade school making the new face wince, that flashes the picture of the unlovely little scholar in front of him in moments of stress, and can open under him a dread void when his new image is threatened.

The little scholar stands at the head of a legion of hate and he knows the answer every time, and his creed is Goddamn You All. At fifteen Lander functions very well. A trained observer might notice a few things about him that hint at his feelings, but these in themselves are not suspicious. He cannot bear personal competition. He has never experienced the gradients of controlled aggression that allow most of us to survive. He cannot even endure board games; he can never gamble. Lander understands limited aggression objectively, but he cannot take part in it. Emotionally, for him there is no middle ground between a pleasant, uncompetitive atmosphere and total war to the death with the corpse defiled and burned. So he has no outlet. And he has swallowed his poison longer than most could have done.

Though he tells himself that he hates the church, Michael prays often during the day. He is convinced that assuming certain positions expedites his prayers. Touching his forehead to his knee is one of the most effective ones. When it is necessary for him to do this in public places, he must think of a ruse to keep it from being noticeable. Dropping something beneath his chair and bending to get it is a useful device. Prayers delivered in thresholds or while touching a door lock are also more effective. He prays often for persons who appear in the quick flashes of memory that sear him many times a day. Without willing it, despite his efforts to stop, he conducts internal dialogues often during his waking hours. He is having one now:

“There’s old Miss Phelps working in the teacherage yard. I wonder when she’ll retire. She’s been at that schoolhouse for a long time.

“Do you wish she was rotten with cancer?”

“No! Dear Jesus forgive me, I don’t wish she was rotten with cancer. I wish I was rotten with cancer ferst. [He touches wood.] Dear God, let me be rotten with cancer first, oh, Father.”

“Would you like to take your shotgun and blow her rotten ignorant old guts out?”

“No! No! Jesus, Father, no, I don’t. I want her to be safe and happy. She can’t help what she is. She’s a kind and good lady. She’s all right. Forgive me for saying Goddamn.”

“Would you like to stick her face in the lawn mower?”

“I wouldn‘t, I wouldn’t. Christ help me stop thinking that.”

“Fuck the Holy Ghost.”

“No! I mustn’t think it, I won’t think it, that’s the mortal sin. I can’t get forgiven. I won’t think fuck the Holy Ghost. Oh, I thought it again.”

Michael reaches behind him to touch the latch of the screen door. He touches his forehead to his knee. Then he concentrates hard on the lawn mower. He is eager to finish it. He is saving his money for a flying lesson.

From the first, Lander was attracted to machinery and he had a gift for working with machines. This did not become a passion until he discovered machines that enveloped him, that became his body. When he was inside them, he saw his actions as those of the machine, he never saw the little scholar.

The first was a Piper Cub on a grass airfield. At the controls he saw nothing of Lander, but he saw the little plane banking, stalling, diving, and its shape was his and its grace and strength were his and he could feel the wind on it and he was free.

Lander joined the Navy when he was sixteen, and he never went home again. He was not accepted for flight school the first time he applied, and he served throughout the Korean War handling ordnance on the carrier Coral Sea. A picture in his album shows him standing before the wing of a Corsair with a ground crew and a rack of fragmentation bombs. The others in the crew are smiling, and they have their arms around one another’s shoulders. Lander is not smiling. He is holding a fuse.

On June 1, 1953, Lander awoke in the enlisted men’s barracks at Lakehurst, New Jersey, shortly after dawn. He had arrived at his new assignment in the middle of the night and he needed a cold shower to wake up. Then he dressed carefully. The Navy had been good for Lander. He liked the uniform, liked the way he looked in it and the anonymity it gave him. He was competent and he was accepted. Today he would report for his new job, handling pressure-actuated depth-charge detonators being prepared for experiments in antisubmarine warfare. He was good with ordnance. Like many men with deep-seated insecurities, he loved the nomenclature of weapons.

He walked through the cool morning toward the ordnance complex, looking around curiously at all he had not seen when he arrived in darkness. There were the giant hangars that held the airships. The doors on the nearest one were opening with a rumble. Lander checked the time, then stopped on the sidewalk, watching. The nose came out slowly and then the great length of it. The airship was a ZPG-1 with a capacity of a million cubic feet of helium. Lander had never been so close to one before. Three hundred twenty-four feet of silver airship, the rising sun touching it with fire. Lander trotted across the asphalt apron. The ground crew was swarming under the airship. One of the portside engines roared and a puff of blue smoke hung in the air behind it.

Lander did not want to arm airships with depth charges. He did not want to work on them or roll them in and out of hangars. He saw only the controls.

He qualified easily for the next competitive examination for officer candidate school. Two hundred eighty enlisted men took the test on a hot July afternoon in 1953. Lander placed first. His standing in OCS won him a choice of assignments. He went to the airships.

The extension of the kinesthetic sense in controlling moving machines has never been satisfactorily explained. Some people are described as “naturals,” but the term is inadequate. Mike Hailwood, the great motorcycle racer, is a natural. So was Betty Skelton, as anyone will testify who has seen her do an outside Cuban Eight in her little biplane. Lander was a natural. At the controls of an airship, freed of himself, he was sure and decisive, pressure-proof. And while he flew, part of his mind was free to race ahead, weighing probabilities, projecting the next problem and the next.

By 1955, Lander was one of the most proficient airship pilots in the world. In December of that year, he was second of ficer on a series of hazardous flights from South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts, testing the effects of ice accumulation in bad weather. The flights won for the crew the Harmon Trophy for that year.

And then there was Margaret. He met her in January at the officers’ club at Lakehurst, where he was being lionized after the flights from South Weymouth. It was the beginning of the best year of his life.

She was twenty years old and good-looking and fresh from West Virginia. Lander the lion, in his perfect uniform, knocked her out. Oddly, he was the first man for her and, while teaching her was a great satisfaction to him, the memory of it made things much more difficult for him later when he believed that she had others.

They were married in the chapel at Lakehurst with its plaque made of wreckage from the airship Akron.

Lander came to define himself in terms of Margaret and his profession. He flew the biggest, longest, sleekest airship in the world. He thought Margaret was the best-looking woman in the world.

How different Margaret was from his mother! Sometimes when he awakened from dreaming of his mother, he looked at Margaret for a long time, admiring her as he checked off the physical differences.

They had two children, they went to the Jersey shore in the summer with their boat. They had some good times. Margaret was not a very perceptive person, but gradually she came to realize that Lander was not exactly what she had thought. She needed a fairly constant level of reinforcement, but he swung between extremes in his treatment of her. Sometimes he was cloyingly solicitous. When he was thwarted in his work or at home, he became cold and withdrawn. Occasionally he showed flashes of cruelty that terrified her.

They could not discuss their problems. Either he adopted an annoying pedantic attitude or he refused to talk at all. They were denied the catharsis of an occasional fight.

In the early sixties he was away much of the time, flying the giant ZPG-3W. At 403 feet, it was the biggest nonrigid airship ever built. The forty-foot radar antenna revolving inside its vast envelope provided a key link in the country’s early-warning system. Lander was happy, and his behavior while he was at home was correspondingly good. But the extension of the Distant Early Warning Line, the “DEW Line” of permanent radar installations, was eating into the airships’ defense role, and in 1964 the end came for Lander as a Navy airship pilot. His group was disbanded, the airships were dismantled, and he was on the ground. He was transferred to Administration.

His behavior toward Margaret deteriorated. Scalding silences marked their hours together. In the evenings he cross-examined her about her activities during the day. She was innocent enough. He would not believe it. He grew physically indifferent to her. By the end of 1964, her activities in the daytime were no longer innocent. But, more than sex, she sought warmth and friendship.

Lander volunteered for helicopters during the Vietnam expansion, and he was readily accepted. He was distracted now by his training. He was flying again. He gave Margaret expensive presents. She felt uncomfortable and uneasy about them, but this was better than the way he had acted before.

On his final leave before shipping out to Vietnam they went to Bermuda for a good vacation. If Lander’s conversation was tiresomely larded with the technicalities of rotary-wing aircraft, he was at least attentive, sometimes loving. Margaret responded. Lander thought he had never loved her so much.

On February 10, 1967, Lander flew his 114th air-sea rescue mission off the carrier Ticonderoga in the South China Sea. A half hour after moonset, he hung over the dark ocean off Dong Hoi. He was in a holding pattern fifteen miles at sea, waiting for some F-4s and Skyraiders coming home from a raid. One of the Phantoms was hit. The pilot reported that his starboard engine had conked and he was showing a fire light. He would try to make it to the sea before he and the second officer ejected.

Lander, in the rattling cockpit of his helicopter, was talking to the pilot all the time, Vietnam a dark mass to his left.

“Ding Zero One, when you’re well over the water gimme some lights if you gottem.” Lander could find the Phantom crew on the water by their homing device, but he wanted to cut down on the time as much as possible. “Mr. Dillon; he said to the door gunner, ”we’ll go down with you facing landward. Ops confirms no friendly vessels are close by. Any boat that ain’t rubber ain’t ours.”

The voice of the Phantom pilot was loud in his earphones. “Mixmaster, I’ve got a second fire light and she’s filling up with smoke. We’re punching out.” He yelled the coordinates, and before Lander could repeat them for confirmation he was gone.

Lander knew what was happening—the two-man crew pulling down their face curtains, the canopy blowing off, the fliers rocketing up into the cold air, turning in their ejection seats, the seats falling away, and then the jar and the cool rush down through the darkness to the jungle.

He wheeled the big helicopter landward, blades slapping the heavy sea air. He had a choice now. He could wait for air cover, hang around trying to contact the men by radio, waiting for protection, or he could go in.

“There it is, sir:” The copilot was pointing.

Lander could see a shower of fire a mile inland as the Phantom blew up in the air. He was over the beach when the homing signal came through. He called for air cover, but he did not wait for it. The helicopter, showing no lights, skimmed over the double canopy forest.

The light signal blinked from the narrow, rutted road. The two on the ground had the good sense to mark a landing zone for him. There was room for the rotor between the banks of trees flanking the road. Setting it down would be quicker than pulling them up with the hook one by one. Down, sinking between the banks of trees, blowing the weeds flat at the sides of the road, and suddenly the night was full of orange flashes and the cockpit ripped around him. Splattered with the copilot’s blood, falling, rocking crazily, the smell of burning rubber.

The bamboo cage was not long enough for Lander to stretch out in it. His hand had been smashed by a bullet, and the pain was constant and terrible. He was delirious part of the time. His captors had nothing to treat him with except a little sulfa powder from an old French medical kit. They took a thin plank from a crate and bound the hand flat against it. The wound throbbed constantly. After three days in the cage, Lander was marched northward to Hanoi, prodded along by the small, wiry men. They were dressed in muddy black pajamas and carried very clean AK-47 automatic rifles.

During the first month of his confinement in Hanoi, Lander was half crazy with the pain in his hand. He was in a cell with an Air Force navigator, a thoughtful former zoology teacher named Jergens. Jergens put wet compresses on the mangled hand and tried to comfort Lander as best he could, but Jergens had been confined for a long time and he was very shaky himself. Thirty-seven days after Lander arrived, Jergens reached the point where he could not stop yelling in the cell and they took him away. Lander cried when he was gone.

One afternoon in the fifth week, a young Vietnamese doctor came into the cell carrying a small black bag. Lander shrank away from him. He was seized by two guards and held while the doctor injected a powerful local anesthetic into his hand. The relief was like cool water flowing over him. In the next hour, while he could think, Lander was offered a deal.

It was explained to him that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s medical facilities were terribly inadequate to treat even their own wounded. But a surgeon would be provided to repair his hand and drugs would be administered to ease the pain—if he signed a confession of his war crimes. It was clear to Lander that if the mangled meat at the end of his arm were not repaired, he would lose the hand and possibly the entire arm. He would never fly again. He did not believe that a confession signed under these circumstances would be regarded seriously at home. Even if it was, he preferred the hand to anyone’s good opinion. The anesthetic was wearing off. Pain was beginning to shoot up his arm again. He agreed.

He was not prepared for what came next. When he saw the lectern, the room full of prisoners sitting like a class, when he was told that he must read his confession to them, he froze.

He was hustled into an anteroom. A powerful hand smelling of fish was clamped over his mouth while a guard twanged his metacarpals. He was about to faint. He nodded frantically, straining against the hand over his face. He was given another shot while the hand was tied out of sight beneath his jacket.

He read, blinking in the lights, while the movie camera whirred.

Sitting in the front row was a man with the leathery, scarred head of a plucked hawk. He was Colonel Ralph DeJong, senior American officer at the Plantation prison camp. In his four years of imprisonment, Colonel Dejong had done 258 days of solitary confinement. As Lander completed his confession, Colonel Dejong spoke suddenly, his voice carrying through the room. “It’s a lie.”

Two guards were on Dejong instantly. They dragged him from the room. Lander had to read the conclusion a second time. Dejong served one hundred days in solitary confinement on reduced rations.

The North Vietnamese fixed Lander’s hand at a hospital on the outskirts of Hanoi, a stark building whitewashed inside, with cane screens over the openings where the windows had been blown out. They did not do a pretty job. The red-eyed surgeon who worked on Lander did not have the training for cosmetic surgery on the red spider clamped to his table, and he had few drugs. But he had stainless-steel wire and ligatures and patience and, eventually, the hand functioned again. The doctor spoke English and exercised his English on Lander in maddeningly tedious conversations while he worked.

Lander, desperate for some distraction, looking anywhere but at his hand while the work went on, saw an old French-made resuscitator, obviously unused, in the corner of the operating room. It was driven by a DC motor with an eccentric flywheel pumping the bellows. Gasping, he asked about it.

The motor was burned out, the doctor said. No one knew how to fix it.

Driving his attention into any corner where it might escape the pain, Lander talked about armatures and how they are rewound. Beads of sweat stood out on his face.

“Could you repair it?” The doctor’s brow was furrowed. He was tying a tiny knot. The knot was no bigger than the head of a fire ant, no bigger than a tooth pulp, bigger than the blazing sun.

“Yes.” Lander talked about copper wire and reels, and some of the words were cut off in the middle.

“There,” the doctor said. “That finishes you for now.”

The majority of American POWs behaved in a manner admirable in the eyes of the American military. They endured for years to return to their country with a crisp salute slanting above their sunken eyes. They were determined men with strong, resilient egos. They were men for whom beliefs were possible.

Colonel Dejong was one of these. When he emerged from solitary confinement to resume command of the POWs he weighed 140 pounds. Deep in his skull his eyes glowed redly, as a martyr’s eyes reflect the fire. He had not passed judgment on Lander until he saw him in a cell with a spool of copper wire, rewinding the armature on a North Vietnamese motor, a few fishbones beside him on a plate.

Colonel Dejong passed the word and Lander received the Silence in the compound. He became an outcast.

Lander had never been able to bring his usual level of craftsmanship to bear on the jerry-built system of defenses that allowed him to survive. His disgrace before the other prisoners, the isolation that came later, were all the old, bad times come back again. Only Jergens would talk to him and Jergens was often in solitary. He was taken away whenever he could not stop yelling.

Weakened by his wound, riddled with malaria, Lander was stripped down to his two ill-matched parts—the child, hated and hating, and the man he had created in the image of what he wanted to be. The old dialogues in his head resumed, but the voice of the man, the voice of sanity remained the stronger. He endured in this state for six years. It took more than prison for Lander to let go and allow the child to teach the man to kill.

On the last Christmas of his captivity, he was given one letter from Margaret. She had a job, it said. The children were all right. A picture was enclosed, Margaret and the children in front of the house. The children were longer. Margaret had gained a little weight. The shadow of the person who took the picture lay in the foreground. The shadow was wide. It fell on their legs. Lander wondered who had taken the picture. He looked at the shadow more than he looked at his wife and children.

On February 15, 1973, Lander was led aboard an Air Force C-141 at Hanoi. An orderly fastened his seat belt. He did not look out the window.

Colonel Dejong was also on the plane, though he was hard to recognize. His nose had been broken and his teeth kicked out in the past two years as he set an example of noncooperation for his men. Now he set an example by ignoring Lander. If Lander noticed, he did not show it. He was gaunt and sallow and subject any second to a malarial chill. The Air Force doctor aboard the plane kept a close eye on him. A refreshment cart went up and down the aisle constantly.

A number of officers had been sent along on the plane to talk with the POWs, if they wanted to talk. One of these men sat by Lander. Lander did not want to talk. The officer called his attention to the goodie wagon. Lander took a sandwich and bit into it. He chewed several times, then spit the bite into his barf bag. He put the sandwich in his pocket. Then he put another sandwich in his pocket.

The officer beside him started to reassure him that there would be plenty of sandwiches, then decided against it. He patted Lander’s arm. No response.

Clark Air Force Base, the Philippines. A band was there, and the base commander, ready to greet the men. Television cameras were waiting. Colonel Dejong was to be first off the plane. He walked down the aisle toward the door, saw Lander, and stopped. For a second there was hate in Dejong’s face. Lander looked up at him and quickly turned away. He was trembling. Dejong opened his mouth, then his expression softened by a millimeter and he walked on, into the cheers, into the sun.

Lander was taken to St. Alban’s Naval Hospital in Queens. There he began a journal, a project he would not continue long. He wrote very slowly and carefully. He was afraid that if he went any faster, the pen might get away from him and write something he did not wish to see.

Here are the first four entries:

Lander’s return was difficult for Margaret. She had begun to build a different life with different people in his absence, and she interrupted that life to take him home. It is probable that she would have left him had he come home from his last tour in 1968, but she would not file for a divorce while he was imprisoned. She tried to be fair, and she could not bear the thought of leaving him while he was sick.

The first month was awful. Lander was very nervous, and his pills did not always help him. He could not stand to have the doors locked, even at night, and he prowled the house after midnight, making sure they were open. He went to the refrigerator twenty times a day to reassure himself that it was full of food. The children were polite to him, but their conversation was about people he did not know.

He gained strength steadily and talked of returning to active duty. The records at St. Alban’s Hospital showed a weight gain of eighteen pounds in the first two months.

The records of the Judge Advocate General of the Department of the Navy show that Lander was summoned to a closed hearing on May 24 to answer charges of collaboration with the enemy lodged by Colonel Ralph Delong.

The transcript of the hearing records that Exhibit Seven, a piece of North Vietnamese propaganda film, was shown at the hearing, and that, immediately afterward, the hearing was recessed for fifteen minutes while the defendant excused himself. Subsequently, testimony by the defendant and by Colonel Dejong was heard.

The transcript on two occasions records that the accused addressed the hearing board as “Mam.” Much later, these quotations were considered by the blue-ribbon commission to be typographical errors in the transcript.

In view of the accused’s exemplary record prior to capture and his decoration for going after the downed air crew, the action that led to his capture, the officers at the hearing were inclined to be lenient.

A memorandum signed by Colonel Dejong is affixed to the transcript. It states that, in view of the Defense Department’s expressed wish to avoid adverse publicity regarding POW misconduct, he is willing to drop the charges “for the larger good of the service” if Lander offers his resignation.

The alternative to resignation was court martial. Lander did not think he could sit through the film again.

A copy of his resignation from the United States Navy is attached to the transcript.

Lander was numb when he left the hearing room. He felt as if one of his limbs had been struck off. He would have to tell Margaret soon. Although she had never mentioned the film, she would know the reason for his resignation. He walked aimlessly through Washington, a solitary figure on a bright spring day, neat in the uniform he could never wear again. The film kept running in his head. Every detail was there, except that, somehow, his POW uniform was replaced with short pants. He sat down on a bench near the Ellipse. It was not so far to the bridge into Arlington, not so far to the river. He wondered if the undertaker would cross his hands on his chest. He wondered if he could write a note requesting that the good hand be placed on top. He wondered if the note would dissolve in his pocket. He was staring at the Washington Monument without really seeing it. He saw it with the tunnel vision of a suicide, the monument standing up in the bright circle like a post reticule in a telescopic sight. Something moved into his field of vision, crossing the bright circle, above and behind the pointed reticule.

It was the silver airship of his childhood, the Aldrich blimp. Behind the still point of the monument he could see it por poising gently in a headwind and he gripped the end of his bench as though it were the elevator wheel. The ship was turning, turning faster now as it caught the wind on the starboard side, making a little leeway as it droned over him. Hope drifted down upon Lander through the clear spring air.

The Aldrich Company was glad to have Michael Lander. If the company officials were aware that for ninety-eight seconds his face had appeared on network television denouncing his country, they never mentioned it. They found that he could fly superbly and that was enough.

He trembled half the night before his flight test. Margaret had great misgivings as she drove him to the airfield, only five miles away from their house. She needn’t have worried. He changed even as he walked toward the airship. All the old feeling flooded him and invigorated him and left his mind calm and his hands steady.

Flying appeared to be marvelous therapy for him, and for part of him it was. But Lander’s mind was jointed like a flail, and as he regained his confidence the half of his mind held steady by that confidence gave strength to the blows from the other half. His humiliation in Hanoi and Washington loomed ever greater in his mind during the fall and winter of 1973. The contrast between his self-image and the way he had been treated grew larger and more obscene.

His confidence did not sustain him through the hours of darkness. He sweated, he dreamed, he remained impotent. It was at night that the child in him, the hater, fed by his suffering, whispered to the man.

“What else has it cost you? What else? Margaret tosses in her sleep, doesn’t she? Do you think she gave away a little while you were gone?”

“No.”

“Fool. Ask her.”

“I don’t have to ask her.”

“You stupid limpdick.”

“Shut up.”

“While you were squalling in a cell, she was straddling one.”

“No. No. No. No. No. No.”

“Ask her.”

He asked her one cold evening near the end of October. Her eyes filled with tears and she left the room. Guilty or not?

He became obsessed with the thought that she had been unfaithful to him. He asked her druggist if her prescription for birth control pills had been renewed regularly over the past two years and was told that it was none of his business. Lying beside her after yet another of his failures, he was tormented by graphic scenes of her performing acts with other men. Sometimes the men were Buddy Ives and Junior Atkins, one on Margaret, the other awaiting his turn.

He learned to avoid her when he was angry and suspicious, and he spent some of his evenings brooding in his garage workshop. Others he passed trying to make light conversation with her, feigning an interest in the details of her daily routine, in the doings of the children at school.

Margaret was deceived by his physical recovery, and his success at his job. She thought he was practically well. She assured him that his impotence would pass. She said the Navy counselor had talked to her about it before he came home. She used the word impotence.

The blimp’s first spring tour in 1974 was confined to the Northeast, so Lander could stay at home. The second was to be a run down the East Coast to Florida. He would be away three weeks. Some of Margaret’s friends had a party the night before his departure and the Landers were invited. Lander was in a good humor. He insisted that they attend.

It was a pleasant gathering of eight couples. There was food and dancing. Lander did not dance. Talking rapidly, a film of sweat on his forehead, he told a captive group of husbands about the balonet and damper systems in airships. Margaret interrupted his discourse to show him the patio. When he returned, the talk had turned to professional football. He took the floor to resume his lecture where he had left off.

Margaret danced with the host. Twice. The second time, the host held her hand for a moment after the music had stopped. Lander watched them. They were talking quietly. He knew they were talking about him. He explained all about catenary curtains while his audience stared into their drinks. Margaret was being very careful, he thought. But he could see her soaking up the attention of the men. She drew it in through her skin.

Driving home he was silent, white with rage.

Finally, in the kitchen of their house, she could stand his silence no longer.

“Why don’t you just start yelling and get it over with?” she said. “Go ahead and say what you’re thinking.”

Her kitten came into the kitchen and rubbed itself on Lander’s leg. She scooped it up, fearful that he might kick it.

“Tell me what I did, Michael. We were having a good time, weren’t we?”

She was so very pretty. She stood convicted by her loveliness. Lander said nothing. He approached her quickly, looking into her face. She did not back away. He had never struck her, could never strike her. He grabbed the kitten and went to the sink. When she realized what he was doing, the kitten was already in the garbage disposal. She ran to the sink and tore at his arms as he switched it on. She could hear the kitten until the disposal’s ablative action disposed of its extremities and reached its vitals. All the time, Lander was staring into her face.

Her screams woke the children. She slept in their room. She heard him when he left shortly after daylight.

He sent her flowers from Norfolk. He tried to call her from Atlanta. She did not answer the telephone. He wanted to tell her that he realized his suspicions were groundless, the product of a sick imagination. He wrote her a long letter from Jack sonville, telling her he was sorry, that he knew he had been cruel and unfair and crazy and that he would never behave that way again.

On the tenth day of the scheduled three-week tour, the copilot was bringing the blimp to the landing mast when a freak gust of wind caught it and swung it into the maintenance truck, tearing the fabric of the envelope. The airship would stand down for a day and a night while repairs were made. Lander could not face a motel room for a day and a night with no word from Margaret.

He caught a flight to Newark. At a Newark pet store he bought a fine Persian kitten. He arrived at his house at midday. The house was quiet, the children were at camp. Margaret’s car was in the driveway. Her teapot was heating on a low fire. He would give her the kitten and tell her he was sorry and they could hold each other and she would forgive him. He took the kitten out of the carrier and straightened the ribbon around its neck. He climbed the stairs.

The stranger was reclining on the daybed, Margaret astride him pumping, her breasts bouncing. They did not see Lander until he screamed. It was a short fight. Lander did not have all his strength back and the stranger was big, fast and frightened.. He slugged Lander hard on the temple twice and he and Margaret fled together.

Lander sat on the playroom floor, his back against the wall. His mouth was open and bleeding and his eyes were vacant. The teapot whistle shrilled for half an hour. He did not move, and when the water boiled away, the house was filled with the smell of scorched metal.

When pain and rage reach levels far above the mind’s capacity to cope, a curious relief is possible but it requires a partial death.

Lander smiled an awful smile, a bloody rictus smile, when he felt his will die. He believed that it passed out through his mouth and nose in a thin smoke riding on a sigh. The relief came to him then. It was over. Oh, it was over. For half of him.

The remains of the man Lander would feel some pain, would jerk galvanically like frogs’ legs in a skillet, would cry out for relief. But he would never again sink his teeth into the pumping heart of rage. Rage would never again cut out his heart and rub it pumping in his face.

What was left could live with rage because it was made in rage and rage was its element and it thrived there as a mammal thrives in air.

He rose and washed his face, and when he left the house, when he returned to Florida, he was steady. His mind was as cool as snake’s blood. There were no more dialogues in his head. There was only one voice now. The man functioned perfectly because the child needed him, needed his quick brain and clever fingers. To find its own relief. By killing and killing and killing and killing. And dying.

He did not yet know what he would do, but as he hung over the crowded stadiums week after week, it would come to him. And when he knew what he must do, he sought the means, and before the means came Dahlia. And Dahlia heard some of these things and inferred much of the rest.

He was drunk when he told her about finding Margaret and her lover in the house and afterward he became violent. She caught him behind the ear with the heel of her hand, knocking him unconscious. In the morning, he did not remember that she had hit him.

Two months passed before Dahlia was sure of him, two months of listening, of watching him build and scheme and fly, of lying next to him at night.

When she was sure, she told Hafez Najeer these things and Najeer found it good.

Now, with the explosives at sea, moving toward the United States at a steady twelve knots in the freighter Leticia, the entire project was threatened by Captain Larmoso’s treachery and perhaps by the treachery of Benjamin Muzi himself. Had Larmoso interfered with the crates at Muzi’s orders? Perhaps Muzi had decided to keep the advance payment, sell Lander and Dahlia to the authorities, and peddle the plastic elsewhere. If so, they could not risk picking up the explosives on the New York dock. They must pick up the plastic at sea.