Clandestine

19

I watched from my window as the propellers churned their way through a billowy cloud bank over the Pacific. The plane then arced left and headed inland for the long trip to a middle America I had never seen: first Chicago, then a connecting flight to southern Wisconsin, birthplace of Margaret Cadwallader and Marcella DeVries Harris.

As California, Arizona, and Nevada passed below me, I shifted my gaze from that arid landscape to the whirring propellers and became hypnotized by their circuitous motion. After a while a process of synchronization took over: my mind started to run in perfect circles, logically, chronologically, and in thematic unison: Marcella DeVries was born in Tunnel City, Wisconsin, in 1912. Tunnel City was eighty-five miles from Waukesha, where Maggie Cadwallader was born in 1914. Two years and eighty-five miles apart.

"I'm just a Wisconsin farm girl," Maggie had told me. She had also gotten hysterical when she'd seen my off-duty revolver. "No, no, no, no!" she had screamed. "I won't let you hurt me! I know who sent you!"

Six months later she was dead, strangled in the very bedroom where we had made love. The time of her death coincided with Marcella Harris's abrupt journey to parts unknown.

"You can't go home again," Marcella had told her neighbor, Mrs. Groberg.

"Gooey cheese and smelly sauerkraut," her son had remembered—ethnic foods from the German/Dutch/Polish-dominated state of Wisconsin.

A comely stewardess brought me coffee but got only a distracted grunt of thanks. I stared at the propeller closest to me, watching it cut the air, feeling a deepening symbiosis of past and present, and a further unfolding of logic. Eddie Engels and Janet Valupeyk had been lovers. Eddie had been intimate with Maggie Cadwallader. Eddie had told Janet in the early summer of '51 to rent Marcella Harris the apartment on Hibiscus Canyon. It had to be related, all of it. It was too perfect not to be.

When the plane landed in Chicago and I hit terra firma again, I decided to change my plans and rent a car to drive the hundred miles or so into Wisconsin. I picked up an efficient-looking Ford at a rental agency and set off. It was near dusk and still very hot. There was a breeze coming from Lake Michigan that did its best to cool things off, but failed.

I drove into the heart of the city, watching the early evening tourists and window-shoppers, not knowing what I was looking for. When I passed a printer's shop on the near north side I knew that it was my destination. I went in and purchased five dollars' worth of protective coloration; two hundred phony insurance investigator business cards, these bearing my real name and a ritzy-sounding Beverly Hills address and phone number.

At a nearby novelty store I purchased three reasonably realistic-looking badges designating me "Deputy Sheriff," "Official Police Stenographer," and "International Investigator." When I scrutinized that last one more closely, I threw it out the window of my car—it had the distinct look of a kiddies' cereal box giveaway. But the others looked real, my business cards looked real, and the .38 automatic in my suitcase was real. I found a hotel room on the north side and went to bed early; I had a hot date with history, and I wanted to be rested for it.

Southern Wisconsin was colored every conceivable shade of green. I crossed the Illinois-Wisconsin border at eight o'clock in the morning and left the wide eight-lane interstate, pushing my '52 Ford sedan north on a narrow strip of blacktop through a succession of dairy farms interrupted every few miles or so by small lakes.

I almost missed Tunnel City, spotting the turn-off sign at the last moment. I swung a sharp right-hand turn and entered a two-lane road that ran straight through the middle of a giant cabbage field. After half a mile a sign announced "Tunnel City, Wis. Pop. 9,818." I looked in vain for a tunnel, then realized as I dropped down into a shallow valley that the town was probably named for some kind of underground irrigation system that fed water to the endless fields of cabbage that surrounded it.

The town itself was intact in every respect from fifty years ago: red brick courthouse, red brick grain and feed stores, red brick general store; white brick drugstore, grocery store, and public library. The focal point for the little community seemed to be the two tractor supply stores, glass-fronted, situated directly across the street from each other, their crystal-clear windows jammed with spanking-new farm machinery.

A few sunburned men in coveralls stood in front of each store, talking good-naturedly. I parked my car and joined one group on the sidewalk. It was very hot and very humid, and I immediately shed my suit coat. They spotted me for a city slicker right away, and I saw subtle signals pass between them. I knew I was going to be the butt of some jokes, so I resigned myself to it.

I was about to say "Good morning" when the largest of the three men immediately in front of me shook his head sadly and said, "Not a very good morning, young fellow."

"It is a bit muggy," I said.

"You from Chicago?" a small beetle-browed man asked. His small blue eyes danced with the knowledge that he had a live one.

I didn't want to disappoint him. "I'm from Hollywood. You can get anything you want in Hollywood except good sauerkraut juice, so I came to Wisconsin because I couldn't afford a trip to Germany. Take me to your wisest cabbage."

This got a big laugh all around. I dug into my coat pocket and brought out a handful of my business cards, giving one to each man. "Fred Underhill," I said, "Amalgamated Insurance, Los Angeles." When the stolid-looking farmers didn't seem impressed, I dropped my bomb: "You men ever read the L.A. papers?"

"No reason to," the big man said.

"Why?" the beetle-browed man asked.

"What's it got to do with the price of cheese in Wisconsin?" another asked.

I took that as my cue: "A Tunnel City girl was murdered in Los Angeles last month. Marcella DeVries. Married name Harris. The killer hasn't been found. I'm investigating a claim and working with the L.A. police. Marcella was here four years ago, and she may have been back even later than that. I need to talk to people who knew her. I want the son of a bitch who killed her. I . . ." I let my voice trail off.

The men were staring at me blankly. Their lack of expression told me they knew Marcella DeVries and weren't surprised about her murder. Their immobile faces also told me that Marcella DeVries was an anomaly to them, far beyond the limits of their smalltown bailiwick.

No one said a word. The other group of tractor worshipers had halted their conversation and were staring at me. I pointed across the street to a white three-story building that bore a sign reading "Badger Hotel—Always Clean Rooms."

"Are the rooms there really always clean?" I asked my rapt audience.

No one answered.

"I'll be staying there," I said. "If any of you want to talk to me, or know anyone who might, that's where I'll be."

I locked my car, got my suitcase out of the trunk, and walked to the Badger Hotel.

I lay on my clean bed for four hours, in my skivvies, waiting for an onslaught of farmers bent on detailing every aspect of the life of Marcella DeVries Harris. No one called or knocked on my door. I felt like the marshal summoned to clean up the rowdy town who finds that the townsfolk are unaccountably afraid of him.

I checked my watch: five-thirty. The heat and smothering humidity were starting to abate, so I decided to go for a walk. I dressed in slacks and sport shirt and strolled through the clean lobby of the Badger Hotel, getting a suspicious look from the clean desk clerk before entering the clean streets of Tunnel City, Wisconsin.

Tunnel City had one business thoroughfare, named, appropriately, Main Street. Every bit of Tunnel City commerce existed on that one street. The town's residential streets spread out from this commercial hub, pointing outward to the bordering farmland.

I walked south, toward the cabbage fields, feeling out of place. Every house I passed was white, with a perfectly tended front lawn bearing well-pruned trees and shrubs. Every automobile parked in every driveway was clean and glistening. The people who sat on the porches looked resolute and strong.

I walked all the way to where Tunnel City proper ended and Tunnel City's nourishing farmland began. Walking back to my hotel I knew why Marcella DeVries had had to get out—and why she had had to return.

I was strolling down Main Street looking for a place to eat when a man crossed the street toward me, coming from the direction of the hotel. He was a tall man in his forties, dressed in blue jeans and a checked sport shirt. There was something different about him, and when his gaze zeroed in on me I knew he wanted to talk.

When he hit the sidewalk he planted himself firmly in my path and stuck out a large bony hand for me to shake. I took it.

"I'm Will Berglund, Officer," the man said.

"Fred Underhill, Mr. Berglund, and I'm not a policeman, I'm an insurance investigator."

"I don't care. I knew Marcy DeVries better than anyone. I—" The man was obviously very moved.

"Where can we go to talk, Mr. Berglund?"

"I run the movie theater here in town." He pointed down Main Street. "The last show is over at nine-forty-five. Meet me there then. We can talk in my office."

When I walked into the lobby of the Badger Theater Will Berglund shooed the few remaining moviegoers out the door, locked it, and wordlessly led me to an upstairs office crowded with beatup theater seats and inoperative movie projectors. "I like to tinker," he said by way of explanation.

I took a seat without being asked, and he took one across from me. My mind was jumping with questions that I never got the chance to ask—I didn't need to. Berglund opened all the windows in the room for air and began to talk.

He talked without interruption for seven hours, his manner by turns plaintive, morose, but above all else tragically accepting. It was an intimate story, a panorama of small-town life, small-town talk, small-town hope, and small-town retribution. It was the story of Marcella DeVries.

They had been lovers from the very beginning, first in spirit, then in flesh.

The Berglund family had emigrated from Norway the same year as the DeVries family had left Holland. A network of Old Country friends and cousins secured work for the two families in the stockyards of Chicago.

It was 1906, and work was plentiful. The hardy Berglund men became foremen, the quicker-witted DeVries men became master bookkeepers. The three Berglund brothers and Piet and Karl DeVries shared a dream common to immigrants—the dream of Old Country power, the dream of land.

All five men, then in their thirties, were impatient. They knew that the feudal power they so desperately desired could not be achieved by the attrition of begging, borrowing, scrimping, and slaughtering cattle with ten-pound sledgehammers. Time was not on their side, and history was not on their side. But brains and ruthlessness were, compounded by their Calvinist religious fervor, and the five men embarked on a career of crime, with only one goal in mind: the acquisition of twenty-five thousand dollars.

It took three years, and cost two lives, one from each family. The Berglunds and DeVrieses became burglars and armed robbers. Piet DeVries was the acknowledged leader and treasurer, Willem Berglund his adjutant. They were the planners, the shrewd overseers of impetuous Karl DeVries and the outright violent Hasse and Lars Berglund.

Piet was a romantic intellectual, and an ardent lover of Beethoven. He loved jewelry, and converted the cash gleaned from the gang's burglaries into diamonds and rubies that he sold in turn for a small profit on the commodities exchange, always keeping a few small gems for himself. He longed to be a jewel thief—for the romance of it as well as for the profit—and he planned the strongarm theft of an elderly, jewel-bedecked Chicago matron known to attend the opera unescorted. His brother Karl and Lars Berglund were to do the job. It was 1909, and the money from the robbery would put them well over their twenty-five-thousand mark.

The woman traveled to and from her home on the near north side in a horse-drawn carriage. The men waited under the steps of her brownstone, armed with revolvers. When she pulled to the curb and her driver helped her up the stairs, Karl and Lars sprang from their hiding place, expecting to easily overpower their prey. The driver shot them both in the face at point-blank range with a custom-made six-shot Derringer.

The three surviving members of the Berglund-DeVries combine fled to St. Paul, Minnesota, with eighteen thousand dollars in cash and jewelry. Hasse Berglund wanted to kill Piet DeVries. One night, drunk, he tried. Willem Berglund interceded, beating Hasse senseless with a lead-filled cane. Hasse was irreparably brain damaged, and Willem was distraught with guilt. To assuage Willem's guilt, Piet placed the now childlike Hasse in an asylum, paying the director of the institution two thousand dollars to keep him there in perpetuity.

Where were two immigrants, one Norwegian, one Dutch, with sixteen thousand dollars, without wives or children, and above all else, without land, to go? Their dream was dairy farming, but now that was impossible. Sixteen thousand dollars would not purchase two dairy farms, and co-ownership was out of the question—the two men were bound by spilled blood, but hatred lay in abeyance beneath that bondage. So they traveled, living frugally, drifting through Minnesota and Wisconsin until they ended up, in 1910, thirty miles east of Lake Geneva in a little town in the middle of a giant cabbage field.

They married the first girls from their home countries who were nice to them: Willem Berglund wed Anna Nyborg, seventeen, Oslo-born, tall and blond, with a frail body and a face of cameolike loveliness. Piet DeVries wed Mai Hendenfelder, the daughter of a ruined Rotterdam shipping magnate, because she loved Brahms and Beethoven, had a beautiful thick body, and could cook.

Tunnel City in 1910 had cabbage, but it also had aspirations to the ultimate Wisconsin trade: cheese. Piet DeVries, thirty-seven-year-old Dutch dairy farmhand, and Willem Berglund, thirty-nine-year-old Norwegian bank teller and part-time milkman, wanted to settle for nothing less than a dairy dukedom, but with their depleted funds they found themselves reluctantly looking for other options.

The land had the last laugh—huge lots of it were bought by wealthy cheese farmers, acreage stretching all the way to Lake Geneva, acreage whose soil temperature and consistency soon proved to be almost totally unsuitable for grazing large numbers of milk cows. But it was wonderful soil for growing cabbage.

So Piet DeVries and Willem Berglund reluctantly joined the crowd, plopped down their sixteen thousand dollars and bought cabbage acreage, two adjoining parcels of land separated by nothing but a dusty country road.

Cabbage brought them moderate prosperity, and family life—at first—brought them moderate happiness. Willem and Anna soon had twin sons, Will and George; while Piet and Mai produced Marcella and John, two years apart.

Willem played solitaire chess and went for long exhausting runs down country roads. Piet taught himself to play the violin, and listened to scratchy Beethoven on his newly purchased Victrola. The two men formed a truce, at once bitter and steeped in mutual respect. Though not of the same blood, their ties went deep. Despite the close proximity of their property, they seldom socialized; when they did, they treated each other with the exaggerated deference of the mutually fearful.

Both men were considered anomalies by their fellow townspeople. They held a separate designation, based, people said, not on their aloofness but on something in their eyes, some fascinating secret knowledge.

It was a knowledge passed on to the second generation. The people of Tunnel City discerned that, too, as soon as little Will and Marcella were old enough to walk and talk and react to the environment that they knew wasn't good enough for them.

Marcella DeVries and the twins Will and George Berglund were born three months apart, in 1912. Marcella was born first. Piet was ecstatic. He had wanted a girl and he got one—chubby and pink and redheaded like him. Willem Berglund wanted a male heir, and got what he wanted—twice over. But George was a sickly infant, born at half the weight of his healthy twin brother, and was quickly diagnosed as hopelessly backward. At the age of three, when Will was well on his way to speaking in the precisely modulated tones of an educated adult, George was unable to stand, drooled like an idiot, and flapped his arms like a chicken.

Willem hated the child. He considered him a hideous punishment, perpetrated by a hateful God for whom he no longer had any use. He hated his wife, he hated God, he hated cabbage, and he hated Tunnel City, Wisconsin. But most of all he now truly hated Piet DeVries.

Piet seemed to be flourishing. He loved his wife, he loved his violin, he loved his Victrola, and he loved his children: precocious Marcella of the red hair and translucent green eyes, whose dark freckles seemed to float in clusters all about her pretty face, who, although willful and spoiled to the point of becoming tyrannical when she didn't get her way, was nonetheless the fiercely loving daughter he had always dreamed of and little Johnny—thirteen pounds at birth—laughing, happy, bungling in his hugeness, adoring of his family. Always, always laughing. "My little dinosaur," Piet would call him, then pull a nonexistent tail on the boy's rump until father and son collapsed in tears of joyous laughter.

George Berglund, who never walked or spoke a human sound, died of scarlet fever in 1919. He was seven years old. Willem buried him in a burlap bag in a shallow grave next to the toolshed adjoining his house.

Piet crossed the road to offer condolences to the man to whom he hadn't spoken in over a year. Willem slapped him before he could say a word.

Hasse Berglund died the following year. Sodomized repeatedly by his fellow inmates at the asylum, he could stand the abuse no longer and threw himself off a high ledge into a granite quarry that the inmates were forced to work in.

The director of the asylum wrote Willem a letter demanding two hundred dollars for a "decent Christian burial" for the "boy." He never got his money. Willem simply forgot to send it; he had other things on his mind. He had to destroy Piet DeVries. He talked about it to Anna, late at night. Young Will listened at the bedroom door: Piet had been responsible for the deaths of Lars and Hasse—and even little idiot Georgie. That was the past, and it was enough. But now Piet and his little redheaded vixen daughter were trying to destroy Willem's golden Will, his only remaining true blood, with poetry and music and God knew what else. God! Willem would then exclaim hysterically to the sobbing Anna that there was no God beyond his land and his family, and that, by God, he would teach Piet that.

Marcella and Will knew each other by instinct, by mind, and by rote. With the discernment of highly attuned animals they found each other across the dusty country road that separated the two farms, across the legacy of ambition and violence that bound their fathers. The inevitability of the two was so correct that Willem Berglund and Piet DeVries just sat back and let it happen.

It happened. When the children were four they would toddle into the cabbage field together and construct mansions out of the brown soil that ran through the irrigation furrows. Often after a day of play in the fields they would return to the DeVries farmhouse and pick out tunes on Mai's piano.

When they were seven, the year of George's death, they discovered the town, and would walk hand in hand down Main Street to the public library and read together for hours, lugging huge armfuls of books out to the pergola that stood behind the white brick building. In the wintertime they would hide in the wooden feed bin at the edge of the Berglund property, make a fire out of twigs, and tell stories until they fell asleep.

No one—not Willem, nor Piet, nor their wives, nor the neighbors—took exception to this arrangement. Somehow, it was implicitly understood that these two children were the uneasy truce between the families, and if they remained free to be together there would be no more tragedy.

But the twenties came, and Willem took to drink, and his nighttime rantings against Piet took on a renewed vehemence. Will, now ten, had long ceased to believe that his father would ever carry out his threats, but things were changing. He and Marcella were changing. Their conversations were more and more frequently being interrupted by roughhouse horseplay that inevitably led to touching and kissing and probing. Soon they were lovers in the flesh, and soon it seemed that everyone knew and loathed and feared it.

Marcella at twelve was taller than Will, already full-breasted with smooth freckled skin stretched taut over wide hipbones. Men from the town looked at her and felt immediately guilty for their thoughts. The same men looked at Will and hated him for what they knew he had.

The poetry-reading, nature-loving golden children who strolled down Main Street, lost in each other, drew much attention in the staid little farming community. Small-town talk—compounded by the strangeness of Piet and Willem—made resentment and curiosity fester, and the two lovers began to take their love clandestinely to wherever they could find a knoll or a mantle of grass or a field overgrown with foliage where they could lie together.

In 1926 Willem made his first overt move against Piet, dumping large piles of compost into his irrigation sluices. Piet knew about it and did nothing to retaliate. A week later Piet's collie dog was found bludgeoned to death. Still Piet did nothing.

Late at night Will would hear his father cackle drunkenly to the wife who had come to hate him. Piet was a coward, he said, gone soft from his sissy music. A man who won't avenge his land is less than a dead dog, Willem shrieked, and by God, a coward had no right to own land.

Will was watching and listening through a spy hole in the ceiling that Piet had long ago told him to construct. Will knew that it was different this time, that his father's timidity, so long held in check by his fear of Piet, was waning. Willem was awestruck at Piet's reluctance to retaliate, and young Will knew that his father would take his revenge as far as he could.

Will loved Piet, and told him what he knew. Piet shook his head and told Will two things: "Don't tell Marcella, and tell your mother to go and stay with her family in Green Bay."

Anna Berglund left for upstate Wisconsin the following day, and Marcella already knew, informed by the almost telepathic rapport between herself and Will.

And she retaliated. Marcella knew that Willem spent his Thursday mornings in town, withdrawing money from the bank to pay his farmhands and buying provisions. She waited for him there, in the lobby of the Badger Hotel, armed with hatred for her lover's father and fierce love and contempt for her own.

Townspeople sensed that something was about to happen: Marcella DeVries, straight-A student, was not in school, was instead sitting in an overstuffed chair fuming silently, her normally pale skin as florid as her bright red hair, twisting her hands into knots and staring straight through the plate glass window, watching the National Bank. A crowd formed outside the hotel.

Willem showed up at nine o'clock, when the bank opened. Marcella waited until he finished his transactions, then walked across the street to wait for him. He came out the door a few minutes later, carrying a brown paper bag full of money. When he saw Marcella there was a fearful silence, then she rushed at him and flung the paper bag to the ground, spilling its contents. Greenbacks drifted down Main Street in the April wind, and the crowd watched in horrified awe as fourteen-year-old Marceila DeVries wreaked her revenge. She punched, scratched, kicked, and bit Willem Berglund, pummeling him to the ground, pulling the whiskey bottle out of his waistband and spilling the contents over his head, cursing him in English, Dutch, and German until her throat and rage gave out.

She reserved the worst of her wrath for her father, her mother, and her lover. They were cowards too, and it was worse because she loved them.

Marcella cleaned house that Wisconsin Walpurgisnacht; informing her gentle mother that this farmhouse was no place for a weak woman, that she was to get out until such a time as her father was strong enough to shelter a woman of her kind. Piet made no move to stop his daughter. As much as he loved his wife, he was in awe of the redheaded girl who bore his features.

Mai Hendenfelder DeVries left that night for the shelter of friends in Lake Geneva. Marcella had directions for Papa, too: he was not to tinker with his violin or play his Victrola or read until he exhausted himself in the fields each day like the cheap German immigrant labor he hired. Shamed and humiliated beyond words, Piet mutely agreed. Marcella raged on: he was to renounce God and Jesus Christ and the Dutch Reformed Church. Piet balked. Marcella raged. Piet continued to balk until Marcella said simply, with brutal finality—"If you don't, you will never see Johnny or me again."

Sobbing, abject, and utterly degraded, he agreed.

Will had not helped Marcella humiliate his father. Marcella considered this the ultimate betrayal.

They were through, of course, the golden elite were now just tarnished fragments; but that wasn't enough for Marcella. She wanted further revenge—something that would solidify her contempt for the Berglund family and all of Tunnel City, Wisconsin.

Will and Marcella had exchanged love letters for years, explicit ones, full of references to lovemaking and dripping with contempt for the picayune small-town ways of Tunnel City. In those letters the genitalia of prominent townspeople were derided, Tunnel City High School teachers were excoriated as buffoons and Willem Berglund was satirized and dissected in vicious detail.

Marcella savored the letters her weakling lover had sent her. She considered her options and decided to wait before using them.

Small-town talk continued as Willem endeavored to drink himself to death; Piet worked side by side with his laborers, and Marcella and Will went to high school and never spoke to each other.

Marcella had a new cause: her brother, Johnny. Johnny, at fourteen, was six-foot-six, and blond like his mother. He was a wild but quiet boy who preferred the company of animals, often raiding the outdoor pantries of neighboring farmhouses to steal sides of beef and pork to feed to the legions of homeless dogs and cats who roamed the outskirts of town.

Marcella, now bereft of a lover, became the aimless giant's benefactor, counselor, tutor, and anodyne. She held her brother fiercely close in the wake of her loss, and taught the bright but lazy boy subjects as diverse as geometry and poetry, medieval history and calculus. She awakened in him more than he knew he possessed, and by doing so reached deep for her best.

The new DeVries combine had a dream; a dream that expressed both Marcella's elitist contempt and Johnny's love for animals: medicine. Marcella the microbe hunter, the doctor who would go into "pure research," and Johnny, the veterinarian who would surround himself with the love of strays and foundlings seeking to be healed. It was a powerful dream, one that would take them far from the hated confines of Tunnel City, Wisconsin. But first Marcella had to have her revenge on the town.

In June of 1928, at sixteen, she graduated from Tunnel City High School, the youngest member of her class. Piet was very proud. Mai, still estranged from her family, returned from Lake Geneva at Piet's urgings to see the daughter she hated smile contemptuously in gown and mortarboard on the stage of the school auditorium as she was lauded in small-town hyperbole for her academic accomplishments. After the ceremony, Mai returned to Lake Geneva, never to see her family again.

Diploma in hand, Marcella went about her business. There were eighty-three letters from Will. On the Monday morning after her graduation, Marcella spent hours deciding where each letter should go to achieve the maximum insult and harm. This accomplished, she went on her mission. Main Street was first, where Marcella dropped little packets of vitriol with the mayor, town alderman, librarian, sheriff, barber, and every businessman on the four commercial blocks of Tunnel City.

"Read this," she said to each recipient. "See if you recognize any of your friends."

The churches were next: Dutch Reformed, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Baptist all received messages of hate tailored to offend at the level of both faith and viscera.

Marcella then traversed the residential streets of Tunnel City in a concise, well-mapped-out pattern until her brown paper bag was empty. Then she walked home and told her brother to pack his bag, that they would be leaving soon to pursue their dream.

Their departure was delayed. Marcella figured she would wait two days, to collect her thoughts and savor the first ripples of shocked reaction from the town before stealing her father's cache of gems and heading for New York City with Johnny.

She holed up in her bedroom reading Baudelaire and thumbing through East-Coast college catalogues. On Tuesday night she heard her father weeping in his bedroom. That meant that he knew.

Marcella decided to go for a last walk in the cabbage fields. She skipped down the dusty road that separated the DeVries and Berglund farms. Willem Berglund was waiting. He was stone cold sober and carrying a straight razor. He grabbed Marcella and threw her to the ground and raped her, the razor at her throat. After he finished he lay on top of her as she stared off into the sky, teeth clenched, refusing to make a sound. When he regained his breath, Willem stood up and urinated on Marcella's prostrate form. Then he walked back into the darkness of his cabbage fields.

Marcella lay there for an hour, then hobbled home. She forced herself to cry. Her father was still awake, tinkering with his violin. Marcella told him what had happened, then turned and went to bed. Piet didn't. He stayed up all night, playing the Beethoven symphonies in chronological order on his Victrola and executing the most difficult passages of the Kreutzer Sonata on his violin.

In the morning, while Marcella and Johnny were still asleep, Piet walked to the home of one of his farmhands and asked to borrow a 10-gauge double-barreled shotgun. Varmints, Piet said. The man gave his employer the gun and shells with his good wishes. Piet then walked to the Berglund farmhouse, the loaded shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. He knocked on his neighbor's door. Willem answered immediately, as if expecting someone.

Piet stuck the shotgun into Willem's chest and fired, ripping him apart at the level of the lower torso. The top half of Willem's body flew back into his living room, while the lower half crumpled at Piet's feet. Piet reloaded and stepped into the living room, gathering the two pieces of what had once been his friend into a pile next to the fireplace. He dipped his hand into Willem's blood and smeared "God's mercy on us" on the wall, then stuck the shotgun into his mouth and squeezed both triggers.

If it was more than she had bargained for she never told anyone, not even Will years later when they were reconciled and corresponded voluminously.

Marcella gathered up her brother and her father's jewelry shortly after dark on the night he died and headed south, on foot, toward Chicago. As they passed the far border of what were once the Berglund and DeVries cabbage farms, Marcella took an ax and smashed the connecting points of the irrigation sluices that fed water to the farmland. She didn't know if this would flood the cabbage fields or render them dry as a bone, and she didn't care; she only wanted the land on both sides of the dusty country road to suffer as she had.

They traveled southeast, by train and by bus. Marcella decided on a circuitous route, to give Johnny time to accept his father's death. Although they were only sixteen and fourteen, no one bothered them; Marcella had the competent look of a woman in her twenties and Johnny was too big to be considered anything but an adult.

They arrived in New York City two weeks later. Marcella had half-expected a sheriff's posse of Tunnel Cityites to follow them, but no one pursued. New York City sweltered in a summer heat wave, and Marcella sold the jewels and set about trying to register in premed at Columbia and New York universities. She was not accepted at either school, or at Brooklyn College, New York City College, or at the half-dozen other schools she applied to.

There was a simple reason for this: Tunnel City High School would not forward her transcript, and she could not return to pick it up, lest she be held and placed in a home for wayward girls. Marcella thought about this. She had seven thousand three hundred dollars in a bank account, she had Johnny, and she had her will to succeed. She had a two-room flat near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and she had her brains.

Marcella decided that fate was on her side. She was right. On Independence Day, 1928, she went walking and passed the Fletcher School of Nursing on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. Next door to it was the Fletcher School of Pharmacology. Both schools were "fully accredited"—it said so right there above the door. Marcella had a feeling that this was her destiny, at least for the time being. She was right again.

Willard Fletcher took one look at the hard-eyed young redhead seated across the desk from him and knew that she could give him things his wife never could. He told Marcella this on their first night in bed together.

The admissions office was quiet that day as Marcella explained that her small-town high school had recently burned down and their records were destroyed in the fire. She was a straight-A student, as was her brother John, and she wanted to take the Fletcher School of Nursing's three-year course before transferring to a prestigious university medical school. John eventually wanted to study veterinary medicine, but that was out of the question now. The Fletcher School of Pharmacology would serve as good preveterinary training, didn't Mr. Fletcher agree?

Mr. Fletcher did indeed. He took Marcella's registration fees, and she and Johnny were enrolled for the fall semester. It was that simple. Except, he explained, for the matter of her records. The schools had a reputation to uphold, and before the semester started he wanted to be sure that Marcella was bright and competent enough to tackle the curriculum. Perhaps if they got together socially he could gently quiz her on her academic background, get to know her better, and satisfy himself that she was up to Fletcher School of Nursing standards. Would that be possible? Marcella smiled in anticipation of playing the game.

"Of course," she said.

Marcella played the game well. Her scholastic performance was so superior and her hold over Willard Fletcher so absolute that after three semesters of study she had convinced her benefactor-lover to forge complete academic records going back to the first grade at various secondary schools in the Bronx.

Her fake transcript in hand, she applied to the nursing school of New York University, where she was immediately accepted.

She continued to be the nominal mistress of Willard Fletcher until she was well established at N.Y.U. Then she dropped him like a hot rock, causing an awful scene in the banquet room of a large Atlantic City hotel where they were attending a convention of medical supply wholesalers.

Marcella took her nurse's cap in June of 1931. Johnny was graduated from pharmacy school a year later, with scholastic honors and a codeine habit.

It was the height of the Depression, and their frugally spent money had run out. Marcella considered her options again: med school was out, for now. Money was too tight. She took a job at Bellevue Hospital, patching up derelicts brought to the emergency room. Johnny went to work in the hospital pharmacy, compounding the sedative mixtures used to knock the mental patients into harmless oblivion. He himself remained in a state of oblivion in his off-hours, only he wasn't so harmless—the once-gentle giant, now almost seven feet tall, had become a fearsome barroom brawler. Marcella was continually bailing him out of jail and taking him home to their Brooklyn Heights apartment, where she would stroke his battered head as he whimpered for his dead father.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, Will Berglund was a twenty-nine-year-old English teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Marcella DeVries was the head nurse at a Catholic hospital on Staten Island, and Johnny DeVries was New York City's leading supplier of illegal codeine.

War brought forth in these disparate individuals the same rush of patriotism that seized millions of other Americans. Will joined the army, received a commission, and was sent to the Pacific. His career as a soldier ended quickly: he caught mortar fire in both lower legs and was repatriated to the naval hospital at San Diego, California, where he underwent several operations and extensive therapy to restore his shattered nerve tissue.

It was there, in the hospital, that he was reunited with Marcella, now a thirty-year-old Wave lieutenant. The events of the previous fifteen years were shunted aside. Will loved Marcella as fiercely now, in her white uniform, as he had when she wore the gingham dresses of her childhood. Time and place and the necessity of healing obliterated the familial bloodletting of Tunnel City, and Marcella and Will again became lovers; the changing of bandages and emptying of bedpans metamorphosed into a late night love ritual that cleansed and healed them both. For the first time in their lives, their mutual small-town ghost was consigned to oblivion.

Johnny DeVries rounded out the San Diego triumvirate. A pharmacist's mate second-class assigned to the hospital pharmacy, he dispatched palliative compounds to the ships moored at the San Diego Naval Yard and moonlighted by running marijuana over the border from Tijuana. Johnny had modified his drug use, switching from codeine to reefers, and his violent behavior modified along with it. The seven-foot brawler was now content to spend his evenings in the Coronado Bay apartment he shared with Marcella and Will.

Marcella and Will would talk, and Will would gamely trundle across the living room to strengthen his now brace-clad legs, and Johnny would smoke hop in his bedroom and listen to Glenn Miller records.

The happy trio stayed together until the spring of 1943, when Marcella met the man who was to shatter her illusions and her life.

"When he walked and spoke, you knew that he knew; that he understood all of life's dark secrets—on the level of animal instinct—some highly attuned animal superior to man," Marcella wrote to Will years later. "He is the handsomest man I have ever seen; and he knows it and knows that you know it—and he respects you for your supreme good taste and treats you as an equal for wanting to know what it is he knows."

Marcella's infatuation and curiosity took flight, and three days after meeting Doc Harris, she announced to Will: "I cannot be with you. I have met a man I want to the exclusion of all else." It was brutally final. Will, who had known that Marcella would ultimately have to move on, accepted it. He moved out of the apartment and back to the hospital. He received his medical discharge a week later and returned to Wisconsin.

Doc Harris was a genius, Marcella decided. He could think two steps ahead of her, and of course she bordered on genius herself. He spoke five languages to her three, he knew more about medicine than she did, he could drink her under the table and never show it, he could dance like Gene Kelly, and at forty-five could do a hundred one-handed push-ups. He was a god. He had won twenty-nine fights as a professional light heavyweight during the Jack Dempsey era, he could lampoon small-town mores better than she and Will at their best, and he could cook Chinese food.

And he was enigmatic, willfully so: "I'm a walking euphemism," he told Marcella. "When I tell you I run a chauffeur service, it may or may not be the literal truth. When I tell you I use my medical background to benefit man, look for the riddle. When you wonder at my connections to the big brass here in Dago, wonder at what I can do for them that they can't do for themselves."

Marcella's mind ran with many possibilities regarding her new lover: he was a gangster, a high-ranking navy deserter, a remittance man devoted to a life of anonymous good. No explanation satisfied her, and she constantly thought about the literal truths she knew regarding this man who had taken over her life. She knew that he had been born near Chicago in 1898, that he had attended public schools there; that he had been a hero in World War I. She knew that he had never married because he had never found a woman to match the force of his personality. She knew that he had plenty of money but never worked. She knew that he had worked at odd jobs, gaining life experience after leaving med school at the beginning of the Depression. She knew that his small beachfront apartment was filled with the books she herself had read and loved. And she knew that she loved him.

One night in the summer of 1943 the lovers went walking on the beach near San Diego. Doc told Marcella that he was resettling in the Los Angeles area; that he had the "opportunity of a lifetime" there. His only regret, he said, was that they would have to part. Temporarily, of course—he would come down to Dago to visit. He wanted to be with her every spare moment; she was the only woman who had come close to touching the core of his heart.

Marcella, moved to the core of her heart, set about pulling strings to be with the man she loved. She was a consummate string-puller, and within two weeks she brought Doc the happy news: she was to be transferred to the naval hospital at Long Beach, a half hour's drive from Los Angeles. Her brother Johnny, now a master pharmacist's mate, was to be a hospital liaison there, procuring drugs and other hospital supplies from wholesalers in the Los Angeles area.

She beamed at Doc, who marveled aloud for several minutes at Marcella's gifts of manipulation. Finally he took her hand. "Will you marry me?" he asked. Marcella said yes.

They honeymooned in San Francisco, and moved to a spacious apartment in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. Marcella, newly promoted to lieutenant commander, took over her duties at the naval hospital, as did Petty Officer John DeVries, who had rented an apartment near the newlyweds.

It went well for a while: the Allies had turned the tide, and it was now only a matter of time before Germany and Japan capitulated, Marcella was satisfied with her supervisory duties, and Johnny and Doc had become great friends.

Doc had become the father that Johnny had lost. The two would spin off together in Doc's LaSalle convertible for long, aimless jaunts all over the L.A. basin. That was the trouble, Marcella decided. Doc was never around, and when he was he was deliberately mysterious and darkly elliptical.

It soon became obvious to her that her husband's "opportunity of a lifetime" was the receiving of stolen goods from an L.A.-based robbery gang. Johnny, high on hop one night, had told her that Doc had garages filled with stolen merchandise all over the city. He fenced the contraband goods—furs, jewelry, and antiques—to army and navy high brass, hangers-on in the movie industry, and the gamblers and other assorted con artists who frequented Hollywood Park and Santa Anita racetracks.

Doc was a loving, solicitous husband when he was around, but Marcella started to worry. She began drinking to excess and corresponding voluminously with Will to assuage the fears that were building in her about the man she loved. He seemed to be laughing at her, thinking always two or even three steps ahead of her, and always, always smiling darkly with what she imagined to be an evil, absolutely cold light in his eyes.

Marcella decided she needed a vacation by herself. She needed to cut down her intake of alcohol and collect her thoughts. She told Doc this, and he readily agreed. She had a month's accumulated leave time coming, and her superiors were more than willing to let their fiercely competent nurse take some time off to relax.

She drove to San Juan Capistrano and swam in the sea and wrote long letters to Will, who had—amazingly—resettled in Tunnel City. Astounded by this, Marcella telephoned him there. Will told her that he had found it necessary to confront his tragic past. He had become a seeker of the spiritual path. It worked, he told her; he was at peace here, running the town movie theater, going on bookbuying missions to Chicago for the Tunnel City Public Library, and meditatively walking the cabbage fields he had once hated so terribly.

Marcella returned to Los Angeles to find she was pregnant and that Johnny was once again addicted to codeine. He had taken up with a young woman that Doc had considered unworthy and had decreed that he not see again. Cowed by his father-surrogate, Johnny had agreed, and the woman had left Los Angeles.

Marcella was angry at her husband's hold over her brother, and hurt. She had exercised authority over Johnny much more benignly. Doc would coldly order Johnny about, tell him to drive him places, instruct him on what to wear and eat; and always, always with that cold smile on his face.

Marcella was troubled. But when she told Doc the news of her pregnancy, she was overjoyed to see the laughing, witty, and tender Doc of their courtship reemerge. He was solicitous, he was considerate, he anticipated her moods perfectly. She was never happier, she wrote to Will, not ever.

Michael was born in August of 1945, and Marcella's letters to Will became less frequent. She never mentioned her new child and ignored Will's written queries about him.

"Trouble, trouble," she wrote Will in October of that year. "John and I are being questioned about a drug robbery on an aircraft carrier. We have been singled out because of Johnny's addiction. It is a terrible, terrible thing."

"Trouble, awful trouble from all quarters," she wrote in November of '45, three months after the end of the war. It was their last contact for almost six years.

Will and Johnny had run into each other in Chicago late in '49. Johnny had looked terrible: emaciated, his skin a ghastly gray. Will had sought to comfort him, had told him about the "Order of the Clandestine Heart" to which he belonged. Johnny seemed interested, but became nervous when Will pushed the point.

John DeVries was murdered in Milwaukee in 1950. His killer was never found. When Will read of Johnny's murder in the Milwaukee newspapers, he tried to contact Marcella. It was no use—he sent telegrams to her last known address only to have them returned stamped "Gone, No Forwarding Address." He called every William Harris in the Los Angeles directories, to no avail. Finally, he drove to Milwaukee and talked to the two detectives assigned to investigate the killing.

Johnny had been found at dawn on the grass at a park a few blocks off Milwaukee's skid row. He had been stabbed repeatedly with a butcher knife. He was a known morphine addict and sometime dealer. His death was obviously tied into the drug underworld. The detectives, Kraus and Lutz, were considerate and kind to Will, but closed-minded about broadening their investigation. Although they told Will they would keep him informed, he drove back to Tunnel City troubled and feeling powerless.

He was to see Marcella one last time. She knocked on his door in the summer of 1951. It was the most startling event of his life. Marcella had lost weight and was close to hysteria. They talked of John's death and she sobbed in Will's arms. Will told Marcella of the Clandestine Heart monastery, and she seemed to listen and gain brief solace.

Marcella drank herself to sleep that night, passing out on Will's living room sofa. When Will awoke early the next morning she was gone. She had left a note: "Thank you. I will consider what you have said. I will seek what I have to seek. I envy your peace. I will try to gain what peace I can."

* * *

Will Berglund anticipated my one question: "I'll call those policemen in Milwaukee. I'll tell them you're coming."

I nodded at the farmer-lover-spiritual seeker. He seemed to take my brief turn of the head as absolution, and a slow trickle of tears ran from his eyes.

It was 5:00 A.M. I walked back to the Badger Hotel. My room had been gone through—magazines had been turned over and the bed had been tousled. I checked the contents of my suitcase. Everything was there, but my gun had been unloaded. I packed and walked downstairs and through the lobby, getting curious and hostile looks from some early-rising townspeople. I walked down Main Street feeling awed and humbled—and also powerful; I had been handed the wonder on a platter, and now it was up to me to put it in order.

20

It took me two hours to get to Milwaukee. The Wisconsin Dell Highway was deserted as I drove past small towns and through deep green grazing land. I had been awake for more than twenty-four hours, had traversed fifty years of history and was now nowhere near tired. All I could think of was the history lying in wait for me in Milwaukee, and how to synthesize all the knowledge that only I could tie together.

I thought of pharmacist's mates John DeVries and Eddie Engels. Had they known each other at the Long Beach Naval Hospital? Was Eddie connected to Marcella there? Was that the genesis of the train of deadly events that erupted in 1950 and continued through this summer?

Coming into Milwaukee on Blue Mound Road—an incongruously named, smog-choked four-lane highway—I said to myself: don't think.

Milwaukee was red brick, gray brick, white brick, factory smoke, and rows and rows of small white houses with small Wisconsin green front lawns, all modulated by the breeze wafting from Lake Michigan. I parked in the basement of the Greyhound Bus Depot on Wells Street, then shaved and changed clothes in the huge lavatory.

I checked my image in the mirror above the basin. I decided I was an anthropologist, well suited to dig into the ruins of blasted lives. This conclusion reached, I threaded my way down a corridor laced with sleeping winos to a pay phone, where I dialed the Operator and said, "Police Department, please."

Detectives Kraus and Lutz were still partners and were working the Eighth Precinct, located on Farwell Avenue, a few blocks from the sludgy, waste-carrying Milwaukee River. The old three-story police station was red brick, sandwiched between a sausage factory and a parochial school. I parked in front and walked inside, feeling nostalgia grip me in a bear hug: this had been my life once.

I showed my phony insurance business card to the desk sergeant, who didn't seem impressed, and asked for the detective division. Nonplussed, he said, "Third floor" and pointed me in the direction of the Lysol-smelling muster room.

I took the stairs two at a time in almost total darkness, and came out into a corridor painted a bright school-bus yellow. There was a long arrow painted along the wall underlining "Detective Division: The Finest of Milwaukee's Finest." I followed the arrow to a squad room crammed with desks and mismatched chairs. Nostalgia gripped me even harder: this was what I had once aspired to.

Two men occupied the room, conferring over a desk underneath a large ceiling fan. The men were blond, portly, and wearing identical gaudy hand-tooled shoulder holsters encasing .45 automatics with mother-of-pearl grips. They looked up when they heard my footsteps and smiled identically.

I knew I was going to be the audience for a cop comedy act, so I raised my arms in mock surrender and said, "Whoa, pardner, I'm a friend."

"Never thought that you weren't," the more red-faced of the two men said. "But how'd you get past the desk? You one of Milwaukee's finest?"

I laughed. "No, but I represent one of the finest insurance companies in Los Angeles." I fished two business cards out of my coat pocket and handed one to each cop. They responded with identical half nods and shakes of the head.

"Floyd Lutz," the red-faced man said, and stuck out his hand. I shook it.

"Walt Kraus," his partner said, extending his hand. I shook it.

"Fred Underhill," I returned.

We looked at one another. By way of amenities I said, "I take it Will Berglund called you about me?"

By way of amenities, Floyd Lutz said, "Yeah, he did. Who choked Johnny DeVries's sister, Underhill?"

"I don't know. Neither do the L.A. cops. Who sliced Johnny DeVries?"

Walt Kraus pointed to a chair. "We don't know," he said. "We'd like to. Floyd and I were on the case from the beginning. Johnny was a beast, a nice-guy beast, don't get me wrong, but seven feet tall? Three hundred pounds? That's a beast. The guy who cut him had to be a worse beast. Johnny's stomach was torn open from rib cage to belly button. Jesus!"

"Suspects?" I asked.

Floyd Lutz answered me: "DeVries pushed morphine. More correctly, he gave it away. He was a soft touch. He could never stay in business for long. He'd always wind up on skid row, sleeping in the park, passing out handbills and selling his blood like the other derelicts. He was a nice, passive guy most of the time, used to hand out free morph to the poor bastards on skid who had got hooked during the war. Floyd and me and most of the other cops did our best not to roust him, but sometimes we had to: when he got mad he was the meanest animal I've ever seen. He'd wreck bars and overturn cars, bust heads and fill skid row with dread. He was a terror. Walt and I figure his killer was either some bimbo on the row he beat up or some dope pusher who didn't like a soft touch on his turf. We checked out every major and minor known heroin and morph pusher from Milwaukee to Chi. Nada. We went back over Johnny's rap sheet and checked out the victims in every assault beef he ever had—over thirty guys. Most of them were transients. We ran makes on them all over the Midwest. Eight of them were in jail—Kentucky to Michigan. We talked to all of them—nothing. We talked to every skid row deadbeat who wasn't too fucked up on Sweet Lucy to talk. We sobered up the ones who were too fucked up. Nothing. Nothing all the way down the line."

"Physical evidence?" I asked. "ME's report?"

Lutz sighed. "Nothing. Cause of death a severed spinal cord or shock or massive loss of blood, take your pick. The coroner said that Big John wasn't fucked-up on morph when he was sliced—that was surprising. That was why Walt and I figured the guy who sliced him had to be a beast or a friend of Johnny's—someone who knew him. Anyone who could slice a guy like that when he was sober had to be a monster."

"Did Johnny have any friends?" I asked.

"Only one," Lutz said. "A chemistry teacher at Marquette. Was. He's a wino now. He and Johnny used to get drunk together on the row. The guy was nutso. Used to teach a semester, then take off a semester and go on a bender. The priests at Marquette finally got sick of it and gave him the heave-ho. He's probably still on skid; the last time I saw him he was sniffing gasoline in front of the Jesus Saves Mission." Lutz shook his head.

"What was the guy's name?" I asked.

Lutz looked to Kraus and shrugged. Kraus screwed his face into a memory search. "Melveny? Yeah, that's it—George 'The Professor' Melveny, George 'The Gluebird' Melveny. He's got a dozen skid row monickers."

"Last known address?" I queried.

Kraus and Lutz laughed in unison.

"Park bench," Kraus said.

"Slit trench," Lutz rhymed.

"No dough."

"Skid row." This sent the two detectives into gales of laughter.

"I get the picture," I said. "Let me ask you something: where did a skid row bum like Johnny DeVries get morphine?"

"Well," Floyd Lutz said, "he was a pharmacist by trade, before the dope got him. I always figured he was using George 'The Gluebird's' lab to make the shit. We checked it out once; no go. Beats me where he got the stuff. Johnny was kind of formidable in a lot of ways; you got the impression that maybe he was hot stuff once." Lutz shook his head again, and looked at Kraus, who shook his, too.

I sighed. "I need a favor," I said.

"Name it," Kraus said. "Any pal of Will Berglund's is a friend of mine."

"Thanks, Walt. Look, Will told me that maybe Johnny DeVries and his sister were involved in a drug robbery at the naval hospital in Long Beach, California, during the war. They were both stationed there. Could you call the provost marshal's office there at the hospital? A request from an official police agency might carry some weight. I'm just an insurance investigator—they won't give me the time of day. I—"

Lutz interrupted me. "Are you fishing in the same stream as us, Underhill?"

"All the way. A big load of morph was stolen, I know that, and that would explain where Johnny got the stuff he was pushing."

Kraus and Lutz looked at each other. "Use the phone in the skipper's office," Lutz said.

Kraus jumped up from his desk and walked to a cubicle partitioned off and festooned with Milwaukee Braves' pennants.

"All the particulars, Walt," Lutz called after him.

"Gotcha!" Kraus returned.

I looked at Lutz and popped my next request: "Could I see DeVries's rap sheet?"

He nodded and went to a bank of filing cabinets at the far end of the squad room. He fumbled around in them for five minutes, finally extracting a file and returning to me.

I was getting nervous. Kraus had been on the telephone a long time, and it was only 6:00 A.M. in L.A. His protracted conversation at that hour struck me as ominous.

The manila folder had "DeVries, John Piet; 6-11-14" typed on the front. I opened it. When I saw the series of mug shots clipped to the first page my hands started to shake and my mind recoiled and leaped forward at the same time. I was looking at the face of Michael Harris. Every curve, plane and angle was identical. It was more than a basic familial resemblance; it was purely parental. Johnny was Michael's father, but who was his mother? It couldn't have been Marcella. With shaking hands I turned the first page and went into double shock: John DeVries had listed Margaret Cadwallader of Waukesha, Wisconsin, as next of kin when he was arrested for assault and battery in 1946.

I put down the folder and suddenly realized I was gasping for air. Floyd Lutz had rushed to the water cooler and was now shoving a paper cup of water at me.

"Underhill," he was saying. "Underhill? What the hell is the matter with you? Underhill?"

I came out of it. I felt like a madman restored to sanity by a divine visitation; someone viewing reality for the first time.

I made my voice sound calm: "I'm all right. This guy DeVries reminded me of someone I knew as a kid. That's all."

"You holding out on me? Man, you look like you just got back from Mars."

"Ha-ha!" My laughter sounded phony even to my own ears, so to forestall anymore questions, I read through John DeVries's rap sheet; scores and scores of arrests for drunkenness, assault and battery, petty theft, and trespassing; a dozen thirty- and forty-five-day incarcerations in the Milwaukee County Jail; but nothing else related to blood. No further mention of Maggie Cadwallader, no mention of Marcella, no mention of children.

When I finished I looked up to find Walt Kraus staring down at me. "I pulled some tails and got what you wanted," he said. "The robbery was big-time, off an aircraft carrier bound for the Pacific. Forty-five pounds of morph—enough to supply every hospital ship in the fleet and then some. Three Marine liaisons were guarding it. Someone slipped them something, and they passed out. The snatch was made at three o'clock in the morning. The infirmary was picked clean. It never made the news because the navy high brass kiboshed it. DeVries and his sister and two others were strong suspects—they were all assigned to pharmaceutical supply, but they all had tight alibis. They were all questioned repeatedly, jailed as material witnesses, and finally released. The dope was never recovered. They—"

"What were the names of the other two suspects?" I blurted out. Kraus consulted some papers in his hand. "Pharmacist's mates Lawrence Brubaker and Edward Engels. Underhill, what the hell is the matter with you?"

I stood up, and the squad room, Kraus and Lutz reeled in front of me.

"Underhill?" Lutz called as I started to walk away. "Underhill!"

"Call Will Berglund," I think I shouted back.

Somehow I made it out of the police station and out into the hot Milwaukee sunlight. Every car and passerby on the street, every fragment of the passing scene, every inundation of the red brick midwestern skyline looked as awesome and incredible as a baby's first glimpse of life out of the womb and into the breach.

21

There was only one Cadwallader in the Milwaukee-Waukesha area phone directory: Mrs. Marshall Cadwallader, 311 Cutler Park Avenue, Waukesha. Rather than call first, I drove directly there, straight back over Blue Mound Road.

Cutler Park Avenue was a block of formerly ritzy townhouses converted into apartment houses and four-flats. Cutler Park itself—"Wisconsin's Greatest Showplace of Genuine Indian Artifacts"—stood across the street.

I parked my loaner and went looking for 311, checking out house numbers that ran inexplicably out of sequence. Number 311 was at the end of the block, a two-story apartment house guarded by a plaster jockey with one arm outstretched. The front door was open, and the directory in the small entrance foyer told me that Mrs. Marshall Cadwallader lived in apartment 103. My suspicion was that Mrs. Cadwallader was a widow, which suited my purposes: a single woman would be easier to question.

I felt my pulse race as I recalled the photographs Maggie had shown me of her adventurous-looking father. I walked down a hallway lined with cheap prints of southern plantations until I found number 103. I knocked, and the very image of what Maggie Cadwallader would have looked like at sixty-five answered the door.

Startled by this permutation of time and place, my now familiar insurance cover story went out the window and I stammered: "Mrs. Cadwallader, I'm a friend of your late daughter's. I investigated her . . ." The woman blanched as I hesitated. She looked frightened, and seemed about to slam the door in my face when I caught myself and continued: ". . . her death for the Los Angeles Police Department back in 1951. I'm an insurance investigator now." I handed her one of my cards, thinking that I almost believed I was in the insurance racket.

The woman took the card and nodded. "And you . . ." she said.

"And I believe there are other deaths tied into Margaret's."

Mrs. Cadwallader showed me into her modest living room. I seated myself on a couch covered with a Navajo blanket. She sat across from me in a wicker chair. "You were a friend of Maggie's?" she asked.

"No, I'm sorry, I mean . . . I didn't mean that. I was one of four detectives assigned to the case. We—"

"You arrested the wrong man and he killed himself," Mrs. Cadwallader said matter-of-factly. "I remember your picture in the paper. You lost your job. They called you a Communist. I remember thinking at the time how sad it was, that you made a mistake and they had to get rid of you so they called you that."

I felt the queerest sense of absolution creep over me.

"Why are you here?" Mrs. Cadwallader asked.

"Did you know a woman named Marcella DeVries Harris?" I countered.

"No. Was she Johnny DeVries's sister?"

"Yes. She was murdered in Los Angeles last month. I think her death was connected to Margaret's."

"Oh, God."

"Mrs. Cadwallader, did Margaret have a child out of wedlock?"

"Yes." She said it sternly, without shame.

"In 1945 or thereabouts?"

"On August 29, 1945."

"A boy?"

"Yes."

"And the child . . ."

"They gave up the child!" Mrs. Cadwallader suddenly shrieked. "Johnny was a drug addict, but Maggie had good stuff in her! Good Cadwallader-Johnson stock! She could have found herself a good man to love her, even with another man's baby. Maggie was a good girl! She didn't have to take up with drug addicts! She was a good girl!"

I moved to the grandmother of Michael Harris and tentatively placed an arm around her quaking shoulders. "Mrs. Cadwallader, what happened to Maggie's child? Where was he born? Who did Maggie and Johnny give him up to?"

She shrugged herself free of my grasp. "My grandson was born in Milwaukee. Some unlicensed doctor delivered him. I took care of Maggie after the birth. I lost my husband the year before, and I lost Maggie and I never even saw my grandson."

I held the old woman tightly. "Ssshh," I whispered, "Ssshh. What happened to the baby?"

Between body-wrenching dry sobs, Mrs. Cadwallader got it out: "Johnny took him to some orphanage near Fond du Lac—some religious sect he believed in—and I never saw him."

"Maybe someday you will," I said quietly.

"No! Only half of him is my Maggie! The dead half! The other half is that big, dirty, Dutch drug addict, and that's the part that's still alive."

I couldn't argue with her logic, it was beyond my province. I found a pen on the coffee table and wrote my real phone number in L.A. on the back of my bogus business card. I stuck it in Mrs. Cadwallader's hand.

"You call me at home in a month or so," I said. "I'll introduce you to your grandson."

Mrs. Marshall Cadwallader stared unbelievingly at the card. I smiled at her and she didn't respond.

"Believe me," I said. I could tell she didn't. I left her staring mutely at her living room carpet, trying to dig a way out of her past.

"My baby. My love."

"Where is he?"

"His father took him."

"Are you divorced?"

"He wasn't my husband, he was my lover. He died of his love for me."

"How, Maggie?"

"I can't tell you."

"What happened to the baby?"

"He's in an orphanage back east."

"Why, Maggie? Orphanages are terrible places."

"Don't say that! I can't! I can't keep him!"

I ran through Cutler Park searching for a pay phone. I found one and checked my watch: ten-fifteen, making it eight-fifteen in Los Angeles. A fifty-fifty chance: Either Doc or Michael would answer the phone.

I dialed the operator, and she told me to deposit ninety cents. I fed the machine the coins and got a ringing on the other end of the line.

"Hello?" It was unmistakably Michael's voice. My whole soul crashed in relief.

"Mike, this is Fred."

"Hi, Fred!"

"Mike, are you okay?"

"Sure."

"Where's your father?"

"He's asleep in the bedroom."

"Then talk quietly."

"Fred, what's wrong?"

"Ssshh. Mike, where were you born?"

"Wha-what? In L.A. Why?"

"What hospital?"

"I don't know."

"What's your birthday?"

"August 29."

"1945?"

"Yes. Fred—"

"Mike, what happened in the house on Scenic Avenue?"

"The house—"

"You know, Mike; the friends you stayed with while your mother went on her trip four years ago—"

"Fred, I . . ."

"Tell me, Mike!"

"Da-dad hurt the guys. Dad said that they were never going to hurt any other little boys."

"But they didn't hurt you, did they?"

"No! They were nice to me! I told Dad that—" Michael's voice had risen into a shrill wail. I was afraid he would wake Doc.

"Mike, I have to go now. Will you promise not to tell your father I called?"

"Yes, I promise."

"I love you, Mike," I said, not believing my own ears and hanging up before Michael could respond.

This time it took me a scant twenty-five minutes to make the run back to Milwaukee. Blue Mound Road had become an old friend in the course of three harried hours.

Back within the city limits where Blue Mound Road turned into Wisconsin Avenue, I stopped at a filling station and inquired with the attendant about the whereabouts of Marquette University and Milwaukee's skid row.

"The two are within shouting distance," the youth said. "Take Wisconsin Avenue to Twenty-seventh Street, turn left until you hit State Street. Don't hold your breath, but hold your nose."

Marquette University extended a solid ten blocks on the periphery of a skid row that rivaled L.A.'s Fifth Street for squalor and sheer despair—bars, package liquor stores, blood banks, and religious save-your-soul missions representing every faith and sect imaginable. I parked my car at Twenty-seventh and State and went walking, dodging and sidestepping knots of winos and ragpickers who were passing around short-dogs and gesticulating wildly at one another, babbling in a booze language compounded of loneliness and resentment.

I took my eyes off the street for five seconds and went crashing to the pavement; I had tripped over an old man, naked from the waist up, his lower body wrapped in a gasoline-soaked tweed overcoat. I got to my feet and brushed myself off, then attempted to help the old man up. I reached for his arms, then saw the sores on them and hesitated. The old man noticed this and began to cackle. I reached instead for a hunk of his overcoat, but he rolled himself away from me like a dervish until he was lying in the gutter in a sea of sewer water and cigarette butts. He cursed me and feebly flipped me the finger.

I left him and continued walking. After three blocks, I realized I had no real destination, and moreover that the denizens of the row had taken me for a cop: my size and crisp summer suit got me looks of fear and hatred, and if I played it right I could use this to my advantage without hurting anyone.

I recalled what Kraus and Lutz had told me: George "The Professor" Melveny, George "The Gluebird" Melveny, former Marquette chemistry teacher, last seen sucking on a rag in front of the Jesus Saves Mission. It was almost noon, and the temperature was soaring. I felt like shedding my suit coat, but that wouldn't work: the skid row inhabitants would then know I wasn't packing a gun and was therefore not the heat. I stopped in my tracks and surveyed the row in all directions: no sign of the Jesus Saves Mission. On impulse I ducked into a liquor store and purchased twenty shortdogs of Golden Lake muscatel. My liver shuddered as I paid, and the proprietor gave me the strangest look I have ever encountered as he loaded the poison into a large paper hag. I asked him for directions to the Jesus Saves Mission, and he snickered and pointed east, where the skid row dead-ended at the Milwaukee River.

There was a line of hungry-looking indigents extending halfway around the block as I approached the mission, obviously waiting for their noon meal. Some of them noticed my arrival and jabbed at one another, signaling the onslaught of bad news. They were wrong; it was Christmas in July.

"Santa Claus is here!" I shouted. "He's made a list and he's checked it twice, and he's decided that all of you folks deserve a drink!"

When all I got was puzzled looks, I dug into my paper bag and pulled out a short-dog. "Free wine for all!" I yelled. "Free cash to anyone who can tell me where to find George 'The Gluebird' Melveny!"

There was a virtual stampede to my side. The Jesus Saves Mission and its lackluster luncheon were forgotten. I was the man with the real goodies, and scores of winos and winettes started reaching fawningly toward me, poking tremulous hands in the direction of the brown paper bag I rested out of their reach on my shoulder. Information was screeched at me, tidbits and non sequiturs and epithets:

"Fuck, man."

"Glueman, Gluebird!"

"Sister Ramona!"

"Wetbrain!"

"Gimme, gimme, gimme!"

"See the sister!"

"Handbill!"

"Glueman!"

"Oh, God. Oh, God."

"Warruuggh!"

The crowd was threatening to drive me into the gutter, so I placed my brown bag on the sidewalk and backed off as they descended on it like starving vultures. Pushing and shoving ensued, and two men wrestled into the street and began feebly clawing and gouging at each other's faces.

Within minutes all twenty bottles were broken or snatched up, and the sad boozehounds had dispersed to consume their medicine, except for one particularly frail, sad-looking old man in ragged pants and a Milwaukee Braves T-shirt and Chicago Cubs baseball cap. He just stared at me and waited at the head of the bean line, along with the few other indigents who hadn't seemed interested in my offering.

I walked over to him. He was blond, and his skin had been burned to a bright cancerous red after years of outdoor living. "Aren't you a drinking man?" I asked.

"I can take it or leave it," he said, "unlike some others."

I laughed. "Well put."

"What do you want the Gluebird for? He don't hurt nobody."

"I just want to talk to him."

"He just wants to suck his rag in peace. He don't need no cops bothering him."

"I'm not a cop." I opened up my suit coat to show I was bereft of hardware.

"That don't prove nothin'," he said.

I sighed and lied: "I work for an insurance company. Marquette owes Melveny some money on an old employee claim. That's why I'm looking for him."

I could tell the wary man believed me. I took a five-spot out of my billfold and waved it in front of him. He snatched it up.

"You go down to Sister Ramona's; that's four blocks west of here. It's got a sign out front that says 'Handbill Passers Wanted.' The Gluebird's been working for the sister lately."

I believed him. His pride and dignity carried authority. I took off in the direction he was pointing.

Sister Ramona was a psychic who preyed on Milwaukee's superstitious lower middle classes. This was explained to me by one "Waldo," an ancient bum lounging in front of the storefront where she recruited the winos and blood bank rejects who carried her message via handbill into Milwaukee's poorer enclaves. She paid off in half gallons of wine that she bought dirt cheap by the truckload from an immigrant Italian wine maker from Chicago. He jacked up the alcohol content with pure grain spirits, which weighed in his vino at a hefty one hundred proof.

Sister Ramona wanted to keep her boys happy. She provided them with free outdoor sleeping quarters in the parking lot of the movie theater she owned; she fed them three grilled cheese sandwiches a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year; and she bailed them out of jail if they promised to repay the money by donating their blood for free at the blood bank owned by her gynecologist brother, who recently lost his license from poking too many patients in the wrong hole.

This came out in a torrent of words, unsolicited. Waldo went on to explain that the only trouble with Sister Ramona's scam was that her boys kept kicking off of cirrhosis of the liver and freezing to death in the winter when her parking lot became covered over with snowdrifts that she never bothered to clear out. Ol' sister had a high turnover, yes, sir, Waldo said, but there were always plenty of recruits to be found: sister was a wine cono-sewer supreme and she made a mean grilled cheese sandwich. And she wasn't prejudiced, Waldo said, no sir, she hired white men and Negroes alike and fed them the same and provided them with the same flop-out space in her parking lot.

When I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and said the words "George 'The Gluebird' Melveny," Waldo's eyes popped out and he said, "The Genius," in a voice others reserved for Shakespeare and Beethoven.

"Why is he a genius, Waldo?" I asked as the old man deftly snatched the five-spot out of my hands.

He started jabbering, "Because he's smart, that's why! Marquette University professor! Sister made him a crew chief until he couldn't drive no more. He don't sleep in her parking lot, he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the summertime on the beach by the lake, and in the wintertime he sleeps in the nice warm boiler room at Marquette. He so smart that sister don't pay him with no booze—he don't drink no more; sister pays him off with model airplanes 'cause he like to build them and sniff the glue! The Gluebird is a genius!"

I shook my head.

"Whassa matter, man?" Waldo asked.

"You think that's five dollars' worth of information?"

"I sure do!"

"So do I. You want to make another fin?"

"Yeah, man!"

"Then take me to the Gluebird, now."

"Yeah, man!"

We went cruising, in the front seat of my sweltering Ford sedan, zigzagging the streets of Milwaukee's lower-class neighborhoods in a random pattern until we spotted pairs of ragged men tossing handbills onto lawns and front porches. Some venturesome winos even jammed them into mailboxes.

Waldo said, "This is what sister call 'saturation bombing.' Bomb 'em right into her parlor, she says."

"How much does she charge?"

"Three dollars!" Waldo bellowed.

I shook my head. "Life's a kick in the brains, isn't it, Waldo?"

"Life's more like a kick in the ass," he said.

We drove on for another half hour. The Gluebird was not to be found among his colleagues. Exhaustion was catching up with me, but I knew I couldn't sleep.

Finally Waldo exclaimed, "The hobby shop!" and started jabbering directions. All I could pick out was "Lake Michigan," so I turned around and pointed the car toward a bright expanse of dark blue that was visible from our hilltop vantage point. Soon we were cruising down Lake Drive, and Waldo was craning his head out the window looking for the Gluebird.

"There!" he said, pointing to a row of shops in a modern shopping center. "That's it."

I pulled in, and finally spied a joint called Happy Harry's Hobby Haven. At last my exhausted, dumbfounded brain got the picture: Happy Harry was George Melveny's glue supplier.

"Stay here, Waldo," I said. I parked and walked into the little store.

Happy Harry didn't look too happy. He was a fat, middle-aged man who looked like he hated kids. He was suspiciously eyeing a group of them, who were holding balsa wood airplanes over their heads and dive-bombing them at one another, exclaiming "Zoom, karreww, buzz!" Suddenly, I felt very tired, and not up to sparring with the fat man, who looked like he would give a good part of his soul to converse with an adult.

I walked up to him and said, "George 'The Gluebird' Melveny."

He said in return, "Oh, shit."

"Why 'Oh, shit'?" I asked.

"No reason. I just figured you was a cop or something, and the Bird set himself on fire again."

"Does he do that often?"

"Naw, just once or twice. He forgets and lights a cigarette when his beard is full of glue. He ain't got much of a face left because of that, but that's okay, he ain't got much of a brain left either, so what's the diff? Right, Officer?"

"I'm not a cop, I'm an insurance investigator. Mr. Melveny has just been awarded a large settlement. If you point me in his direction, I'm sure he will repay the favor by purchasing glue by the caseload here at your establishment."

Happy Harry took it all in with a straight face: "The Bird bought three models this morning. I think he crosses the drive and goes down to the beach to play with them."

Before the man could say anything more, I walked out to the lot and told my tour guide we were going beachcombing.

We found him sitting in the middle of the sand, alternately staring at the white, churning tide of Lake Michigan and the pile of plastic model parts in his lap. I handed Waldo five dollars and told him to get lost. He did, thanking me effusively.

I stared at the Gluebird for several long moments. He was tall, and gaunt beyond gaunt, his angular face webbed with layers of white scar tissue burned to a bright red at the edges. His sandy hair was long and matted sideways over his head; his reddish-blond beard was sparkling with gooey crystalline matter that he picked at absently. It was a breezeless ninety degrees and he was still wearing wool slacks and a turtlenecked fisherman's sweater.

I walked up to him and checked out the contents of his lap as he stared slack-jawed at a group of children building sand castles. His bony, glue-encrusted hands held the plastic chassis of a 1940 Ford glued to the fuselage of a B-52 bomber. Tiny Indian braves with tomahawks and bows and arrows battled each other upside down along the plane's underbelly.

The Gluebird noticed me, and must have seen some sadness in my gaze, because he said in a soft voice: "Don't be sad, sonny, the sister has a cozy drift for you and I was in the war, too. Don't be sad."

"Which war, Mr. Melveny?"

"The one after the Korean War. I was with the Manhattan Project then. They gave me the job because I used to mix Manhattans for the fathers. By the pitcherful, with little maraschino cherries. The fathers were cherry themselves, but they could have told the sisters to kick loose, but they were cherry, too. Like Jesus. They could have got fired, like me, and left the sisters to work for the sister." Melveny held his mound of plastic up for me to see. I took it, and held it for a moment, then handed it back to him. "Do you like my boat?" he asked.

"It's very beautiful," I said. "Why did you get fired, George?"

"I used to be George, and it was George with me, but now I'm a bird. Caw! Caw! Caw! I used to be George, by George, and it was George by me, but the padres didn't know! They didn't care!"

"Care about what, George?"

"I don't know! I used to know, when I was George, but I don't know anymore!"

I knelt beside the old man and placed an arm around his shoulders. "Do you remember Johnny DeVries, George?"

The old Gluebird began to tremble, and his face went red—even the white scar tissue. "Big John, Big John, squarehead krauteater. Big John, he could recite the table of elements backwards! He had a prick the size of a bratwurst! Eight foot four in his stocking feet, Big John. Big John!"

"Was he your friend?"

"Dead friend! Dead man! Guy Fawkes. Welcome back, Amelia Earhart! Redevivus Big John! Big John Redux! Didn't know a bunsen burner from a bratwurst, but I taught him, by George, I taught him!"

"Where did he get his morphine, George?"

"The nigger had the dope—Johnny just got the cat's bones. The nigger got the pie and Johnny got the crust!"

I shook the Gluebird's bony shoulders. "Who killed Johnny, George?"

"The nigger had the pie, Johnny had the crumbs! Johnny Crumbum! Johnny said the slicer paid the piper, the slicer's gonna get me, but I got my memoirs at the monastery! Buddha's gonna get the slicer! And make my book a best-seller!"

I shook the Gluebird even harder, until his glue-streaked beard was in my face. "Who's the slicer, goddamnit?"

"Ain't no god. Johnny-boy. The Buddhist's got the Book and they don't believe in Jesus. Turnabout's fair play, Jesus don't believe in Buddha! George don't believe in George, by George, and that's George!"

I let go of the Gluebird. He caw-cawed at the seagulls flying above the lakefront, and flapped his emaciated arms in longing to join them. On the extreme off chance that God existed I said a silent prayer for him. I walked back to my car knowing I had gleaned enough from his ravaged mind to take me at least as far as Fond Du Lac.

22

I got a room in a motor court on Blue Mound Road and slept for sixteen hours straight, dreaming of Michael and Lorna floating on life rafts in a sea of airplane glue. It was just before dawn when I awoke and called Will Berglund in Tunnel City. Did the Clandestine Heart have a monastery near Fond Du Lac? Yes, he said, his voice blurred by sleep, it did. Did it have an orphanage? No, it didn't. Before I hung up I got explicit directions on the shortest route to the order. Will Berglund came awake as he sensed the anxiety in my voice, and he said he would call the prelate at the monastery and tell him I was coming.

I stopped for gas and a quick breakfast, then swung north in the direction of the lake country, certain that what awaited me at the Clandestine Heart Monastery would not be dull.

Two hours later I was skirting a crystal blue lake dotted with small pleasure craft. Sunbathers were jammed together on the narrow sandy lakefront, and the pine forests that surrounded Fond Du Lac were alive with camera-toting tourist families.

I checked the directions Will Berglund had given me: edge of lake through mountains to farmland, past three farmhouses, one mile to the road with the sign depicting major faiths.

I found the mountain road, then the flat grazing land and the three farmhouses. It was sweltering, close to one hundred degrees, but I was sweating more from nervous anticipation as I turned onto the road. It cut through a half mile of sandy-soil pine forest before ending at a clearing where a plain whitewashed cement building stood, three stories high without ornamentation or architectural style or signs of welcome. A parking area had been created next to the building. The cars that were parked there were spare, too: World War II vintage jeeps and a prewar Willys sedan. They looked well kept up.

I stared at the large wooden door as if expecting an austere miracle. Gradually I realized I was scared and didn't want to enter the monastery. This surprised me; and by reflex I got out of my car and ran to the door and banged on it as hard as I could.

The man who answered had a fresh, well-scrubbed look. He was small and refined looking, yet I got a distinct impression that he had known protracted bad times and had surmounted them. He nodded demurely and bade me enter into a long corridor of the same whitewashed cement as the exterior of the building.

At the end of the hallway I could see a meeting or worship hall of some kind.

The man, who could have been anywhere between thirty and forty-five, told me that the prelate was with his wife and would see me in a few minutes.

"You guys can get married?" I asked.

He didn't answer me, just shoved open a small wooden door in the corridor wall and pointed me inside. "Please wait here," he said, shutting the door behind me. The room was a monk's cell, with few furnishings and no adornment. I checked the door. It was unlocked. In fact, it held no locking mechanism—I was free to leave if I chose. There was one unbarred window, at about the eye level of a tall man. I peeked out and saw a garden behind the monastery. A man in dirty farmer's overalls was hoeing a row of radishes. I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled at him. He turned his head in my direction, smiled broadly, waved, and went back to his work.

For five minutes I stared in eerie silence at the naked lightbulb that illuminated the cell. Then my escort returned, telling me that the prelate had been contacted by Will Berglund and was anxious to give me all the help he could. He went on to add that although members of the Clandestine Heart Order eschewed the trappings of the world, they recognized their duty to participate in the world's urgent matters. In fact, it was in many ways the basic tenet of their faith. The whole spiel was as ambiguous as the rest of the religious rebop I had heard in my life, but I didn't tell the man that, I just nodded mutely and hoped I looked properly reverent. He led me past a main worship room and into a small room about double the size of the monk's cell, this one furnished with two metal folding chairs stenciled "Milwaukee General Hospital" on the back. He told me the prelate would join me momentarily, then padded out the door, which he left ajar.

The prelate showed up a minute later. He was a robust, stocky man with jet black hair and a very dark, rough-looking razor stubble. He was probably somewhere in his forties, but again, his age was hard to discern. I stood as he entered the room. We shook hands, and as he motioned me back to the chair he gave me a look that said he was all business. He sat down and let loose with a startling belch. It was a superb icebreaker.

"Jesus," I said spontaneously.

The man laughed. "No, I'm Andrew. He wasn't even one of the apostles. Are you versed in the scriptures, Mr. Underhill?"

"I used to be. I was forced into it. But I'm not what you'd call a believer."

"And your family?"

"I don't have a family. My wife is Jewish."

"I see. How did Will Berglund impress you?"

"As a guilt-ridden man. A decent, gentle man. Possibly an enlightened man."

Andrew smiled at me. "What did Will tell you about our order?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. "Although I admit it must have some appeal to the intellect or an intelligent man like Berglund wouldn't have been so hopped up on it. What interests me, though, is why John DeVries—"

"We'll talk about John later," Andrew said, interrupting me. "What I am interested in is what you will do with any information I give you."

The ascetic surroundings and Andrew's patient voice started to irritate me and I felt the periphery of my vision begin to blacken. "Look, goddamn you," I said harshly, "John DeVries was murdered. So was his sister. These are lives we're talking about, not biblical homilies. I . . ." I stopped.

Andrew had gone pale beneath his dark stubble, and his huge brown eyes were clouding over with grief. "Oh, God, Marcella," he whispered.

"You knew her?"

"Then it was true . . ."

"Then what was true, goddamnit?!"

Andrew faltered while I tried to control my excitement. He stared at his hands. I gave him a few moments to calm himself, then said gently: "Then what was true, Andrew?"

"Marcella told my wife and me last month that she was in danger, that her husband wanted custody of their son, that he was going to kidnap him."

"Last month? You saw Marcella Harris last month? Where?"

"In Los Angeles. Some awful town east of L.A. El Monte. Marcella phoned my wife. She said she needed to see us, that she needed spiritual counsel. She wired us plane fare and we flew to Los Angeles. We met Marcella at a bar in El Monte, my—"

"On a Saturday night? June 21? Does your wife have a blond ponytail?"

"Yes, but how do you know that?"

"I read it in the papers. The L.A. cops were looking for you as suspects in Marcella's murder. She was killed late that very night, after she left you at the bar. You should have listened, Andrew."

I let that sink in, watching Andrew sink into his grief. The calmness of that grief was unnerving: I got the feeling he was already bartering with God for a way off the hook. "When did you first meet Marcella?" I asked gently. "Tell me how she came to call on you for help last month."

Andrew hunched over in his chair in an almost supplicant's position. His voice was very soft: "Marcella came to the order four years ago. Will Berglund had told her about us. She was distraught, she told me that something terrible was going to happen and she was powerless to stop it. I told her that the Clandestine Heart Order is a spiritual discipline based on anonymous good deeds. We have a few wealthy patrons who own a print shop that prints up our little tracts, but basically we operate our farm here and support ourselves and give our food away to hungry people. We have three hours of silent meditation every day and a day of fasting every week. But mostly we journey to the cities. We put our little tracts in missions on skid rows, in jailhouse chapels, wherever there are lonely, despairing people. We walk city streets, picking lonely, drunken people out of gutters, feeding them, and giving them comfort. We don't actively seek recruits—ours is a severe discipline, and not for the capricious. And we are anonymous: we take no credit for the good we do. I told Marcella all this when we talked back in '51. She told me she understood, and she did. She was a tireless worker. She picked rag women up off the street and bathed and fed them, spending her own money to buy them clothes. She tendered love as no one I have ever seen. She waited outside the gates of the Milwaukee County Jail and drove the released prisoners into the city and talked to them and bought them dinners. She stood guard for twenty-four-hour stretches outside the emergency room at Waukesha General Hospital, offering her nursing skills for free and praying for accident victims. She gave and she gave and she gave, and in so doing transformed herself."

"Into what, Andrew?"

"Into someone who accepted life, and herself, on God's terms."

"And then?"

"And then she left, as abruptly as she came."

"How long was she with the order?"

"For about six weeks."

"She left in August of '51?"

"Yes . . . Yes, that's correct."

Something crashed within me. "I'm sorry I was abusive," I said.

"Don't be sorry, you want justice."

"I don't know what I want. Johnny DeVries came here independently of his sister, is that right?"

"Yes. Will Berglund sent him also. I think it was around Christmas of '49. He was no Marcella. He was a volatile drug addict with a lot of self-hatred. He tried to buy his way in here. Dirty money he'd earned from selling drugs. He made half-hearted attempts to listen to our message, but—"

"Have you ever operated an orphanage here?" I interjected.

"No, that requires a license. We serve anonymously, Mr. Underhill."

"Did John DeVries ever mention a woman named Margaret Cadwallader? Or a child he fathered with her out of wedlock?"

"No, mostly John talked about chemical formulas and the women he had sexual relations with, and—"

I stabbed in a darkness that was becoming increasingly brighter. "And he left his memoirs here, right, Andrew?"

Andrew hesitated. "He left a carton of personal effects, yes."

"I want to go through it."

"No, no. I'm sorry, you can't. That's absolute. John entrusted them to the order. I went through the carton and saw that there were no drugs, so I did John the decency of assuring him that his things would always be safe here. No, I can't let you see them."

"He's dead, Andrew. Other lives may be at stake in this thing."

"No. I won't belie his trust. That's final."

I reached inside my coat and into my waistband and pulled out my .38. I leaned over and placed the barrel in the middle of Andrew's forehead. "You show me that carton, or I'll kill you," I said.

It took him a moment to believe me. "I have work to do that requires me to acquiesce to you," he said.

"Then you know why I have to do what I'm doing," I said.

The carton was musty and mildewed and covered with spiderwebs. And it was heavy; reams and reams of paper weighted down with dampness. I hauled it out to my car under Andrew's watchful eye. He gave me some sort of two-handed benediction as I locked it in my trunk.

"Shall I return it to you?" I asked.

Andrew shook his head. "No, I think you've let me off the hook as far as God is concerned."

"What was that sign you made?"

"I was asking for God's mercy on readers of dark secrets."

"Have you read any of it?"

"No."

"Then how do you know what it is?"

"You wouldn't have come here if those pages contained joy."

"Thank you," I said. Andrew didn't answer; he just watched me drive away.

I rented a room at a motel in Fond Du Lac and settled in to read John DeVries's memoirs.

I emptied the musty carton onto my bed and arranged the paper into three neat piles, each one about a foot high. I gave each stack a cursory look to see if the writing was legible. It was. The black ink was smeared by dampness and age, but DeVries had a neat, concise handwriting and a narrative style that belied his drug addiction and rage; there was both chronological and thematic unity in his writing. The pages were not compiled by date, but each sheet was dated at the top. I went through all three piles and collated them according to month and year.

John DeVries's journals covered the war years, and more than anything else they detailed his fascination with and subservience to Doc Harris, who had taken over the life of Johnny's domineering sister; who had become his father and teacher and more; who had taken his aimless rage and given it form. "Johnny the enforcer" had only to stand by his avatar's side and look intimidating, and by so doing gained more respect than he had ever known.

Johnny had been given the job of bringing back into line the recalcitrant burglars and buyers that Doc dealt with as middlemen:

I read on through 1943, as Doc Harris consolidated his hold over John DeVries, moving him into a widening arena of violence interspersed with counseling on the philosophy and psychology of terror. Johnny beat up and robbed homosexuals at Doc's command; he broke the arms and legs of bet welehers; he pistol-whipped burglars who Doc thought were holding out on their take. And he never, ever questioned his mentor. The philosophy with which Doc dominated him was Hitlerian-Utopian, tailored to fit Johnny's history of overdependence on supportive figures:

I saw where that paragraph was taking me, so I flipped ahead in time to August, 1945. What I already knew was strongly confirmed: John DeVries, Eddie Engels, and Lawrence Brubaker had robbed the infirmary of the aircraft carrier Appomattox of forty-five pounds of undiluted morphine. Doc Harris was the mastermind. DeVries, Brubaker, and Engels were questioned, then released. Doc's intimidation of Johnny was so absolute that Johnny never cracked under questioning. The diary indicated that Engels and Brubaker were equally cowed, equally in the grip of the incredible Doc Harris's stranglehold. What I had strongly suspected was also confirmed; Marcella Harris did not participate in the crime—she was in the naval hospital in Long Beach miscarrying her expected child.

It was then, for the first time, that Johnny saw Doc Harris shaken. Due to complications, Marcella would now be barren for life. It was then that Johnny came to his mentor's aid to offer to him what Doc would never himself achieve with Marcella—Johnny told Doc that the girlfriend of whom Doc had disapproved was now pregnant in Wisconsin, and due to give birth in two weeks.

Doc and Johnny flew there. Doc delivered the child in a house trailer parked in a wheat field south of Waukesha. Maggie had wanted to keep the baby, but Doc, aided in the birth by Larry Brubaker, had terrorized her into releasing the child to him, for safe delivery to a "special" orphanage for "special" children. Doc returned to Los Angeles and his wife with the child she so desperately wanted and his own "moral heir."

Again I skipped ahead in time, only to find that time abruptly stopped, shortly after Johnny described the events of August, 1945. But there were at least a hundred sheets of paper remaining, undated but crowded with words. Johnny had inexplicably switched to red ink, and in a few moments I realized why: Johnny had sought Doc's absolute knowledge, and Doc had given it to him in gratitude for his moral heir. Here was the story of "the literal power of life and death" that Doc had exercised over many people. Here it was, appropriately in red, for it was the story of the insane Doc Harris's murderous ten-year career as a traveling abortionist on the underside of skid rows throughout the Midwest, armed with scalpel for cutting, cheap whiskey for anesthesia, and his own insane elitist hatred as motivation.

Johnny continued to quote his teacher verbatim:

I read on as Doc described his process of selection to an awed and finally sickened Johnny:

Doc Harris went on to describe his abortion techniques, but I couldn't go on. I began to weep uncontrollably and cry for Lorna. Someone rapped at my door, and I grabbed the pillow off the bed, smothered my cries and fell onto the floor thrashing and kicking convulsively. I must have fallen asleep that way, because when I awoke it was dark. The only light in the room came from a desk lamp. It took me a few seconds to recall where I was and what had happened. A scream rose up in my throat and I stifled it by holding my breath until I almost passed out.

I knew I would have to read the rest of the journal. Gradually I got to my feet and steeled myself for the task. Fearful and angry tears covered the remaining pages as I read the horrifying accounts of life and death and blood and pus and excrement, and life and death and death and death and death.

Johnny DeVries had finally become as sickened as I was, and had run to Milwaukee's skid row with a private supply of morphine. His prose style by this time had degenerated into incoherent rambling interspersed with chemical formulas and symbols I was incapable of understanding. Fear of Doc—"The slicer! The slicer! No one is safe from the slicer!"—covered the last pages.

Shaken, I locked my room and went for a walk. I needed to be with people who bore a semblance of health. I found a noisy cocktail bar and entered. The room was bathed in an amber light that softened the patrons' faces—to the good, I thought.

I ordered a double bourbon, then another—and another; a very heavy load for a nondrinker. I ordered yet another double and discovered I was weeping, and that the people at the bar were looking at me in embarrassed silence. I finished my drink and decided I didn't care. I signaled the bartender for a refill and he shook his head and looked the other way. I threaded my way through a maze of dancing couples toward a pay phone at the back of the room. I gave the operator Lorna's number in Los Angeles, then started feeding the machine dimes and quarters until the operator cut in and told me I had deposited three times the necessary amount.

When Lorna came on the line I just stammered drunkenly until she said, "Freddy, goddamnit, is that you?"

"Lor-Lorna. Lorna!"

"Are you crying, Freddy? Are you drunk? Where the hell are you?"

I brought myself under control enough to talk: "I'm in Wisconsin, Lor. I know a lot of things I have to tell you about. There's this great big little boy that might get hurt like Maggie Cadwallader. Lorna, please, Lor, I need to see you . . ."

"I didn't know you got drunk, Freddy. It's not like you. And I've never heard you cry." Lorna's voice was very soft, and amazed.

"I don't, goddamnit. You don't understand, Lor."

"Yes, I do. I always have. Are you coming back to L.A.?"

"Yes."

"Then call me then. Don't tell me anything about great big little boys or the past. Just go to sleep. All right?"

"All right."

"Good night, Freddy."

"Good night." I hung up before Lorna could hear me start to weep again.

Somehow I slept that night. In the morning I put Johnny's history of terror into the trunk of my car and drove to Chicago.

I stopped at a hardware store in the Loop and bought a reinforced cardboard packing crate, then spent an hour in the parking lot sifting through and annotating the memoirs. From a pay phone I called L.A. Information, and learned that Lawrence Brubaker's residence address and the address of Larry's Little Log Cabin were the same. This gave me pause, especially when I recalled that there was a post office directly across the street from the bar when Dudley Smith and I had braced him in '51.

Before transferring the mass of paper from the musty carton to the new one I checked my work: all references to Brubaker and the drug robbery were underlined. I dug some fresh sheets of stationery out of the glove compartment and wrote a cover letter:

Next I drove to a post office, where I borrowed masking tape and sealed up the carton tight as a drum. I addressed it to:

For a return address I wrote:

A nice touch. A just touch, one that would appeal to Lorna and other lovers of justice.

I explained several times what I wanted to the patient postal clerk: insured delivery, to the post office across the street, where the recipient would be required to produce identification and sign a receipt before getting his hands on the package. And I wanted the carton to arrive in three days' time; no sooner. The clerk understood; he was used to eccentrics.

I left the post office feeling light as air and solid as granite. I drove to O'Hare Field and left off the rented car, then caught an afternoon flight home to Los Angeles and my destiny.