Enough Rope

Answers to Soldier

Keller flew United to Portland. He read a magazine on the leg from JFK to O’Hare, ate lunch on the ground, and watched the movie on the nonstop flight from Chicago to Portland. It was a quarter to three local time when he carried his hand luggage off the plane, and then he had only an hour’s wait before his connecting flight to Roseburg.

But when he got a look at the size of the plane he walked over to the Hertz desk and told them he wanted a car for a few days. He showed them a driver’s license and a credit card and they let him have a Ford Taurus with thirty-two hundred miles on the clock. He didn’t bother trying to refund his Portland-to-Roseburg ticket.

The Hertz clerk showed him how to get on I-5. He pointed the Taurus in the right direction and set the cruise control three miles over the posted speed limit. Everybody else was going a few miles an hour faster than that but he was in no hurry, and he didn’t want to invite a close look at his driver’s license. It was probably all right, but why ask for trouble?

It was still light out when he took the off-ramp for the second Roseburg exit. He had a reservation at the Douglas Inn, a Best Western on Stephens Street. He found it without any trouble. They had him in a ground-floor room in the front, and he had them change it to one in the rear, and a flight up.

He unpacked, showered. The phone book had a street map of downtown Roseburg and he studied it, getting his bearings, then tearing it out and taking it with him when he went out for a walk. The little print shop was only a few blocks away on Jackson, two doors in from the corner between a tobacconist and a photographer with his window full of wedding pictures. A sign in Quik-Print’s window offered a special on wedding invitations, perhaps to catch the eye of bridal couples making arrangements with the photographer.

Quik-Print was closed, of course, as were the tobacconist and the photographer and the credit jeweler next door to the photographer and, as far as Keller could tell, everybody in the neighborhood. Keller didn’t stick around long. Two blocks away he found a Mexican restaurant that looked dingy enough to be authentic. He bought a local paper from the coin box out front and read it while he ate his chicken enchiladas. The food was good, and ridiculously inexpensive. If the place were in New York, he thought, everything would be three and four times as much and there’d be a line in front.

The waitress was a slender blonde, not Mexican at all. She had short hair and granny glasses and an overbite, and she sported an engagement ring on the appropriate finger, a diamond solitaire with a tiny stone. Maybe she and her fiancé had picked it out at the credit jeweler’s, Keller thought. Maybe the photographer next door would take their wedding pictures. Maybe they’d get Burt Engleman to print their wedding invitations. Quality printing, reasonable rates, service you can count on.

In the morning he returned to Quik-Print and looked in the window. A woman with brown hair was sitting at a gray metal desk, talking on the telephone. A man in shirtsleeves stood at a copying machine. He wore horn-rimmed glasses with round lenses, and his hair was cropped short on his egg-shaped head. He was balding, and this made him look older, but Keller knew he was only thirty-eight.

Keller stood in front of the jeweler’s and pictured the waitress and her fiancé picking out rings. They’d have a double-ring ceremony, of course, and there would be something engraved on the inside of each of their wedding bands, something no one else would ever see. Would they live in an apartment? For a while, he decided, until they saved the down payment for a starter home. That was the phrase you saw in real estate ads and Keller liked it. A starter home, something to practice on until you got the hang of it.

At a drugstore on the next block he bought an unlined paper tablet and a black felt-tipped pen. He used four sheets of paper before he was pleased with the result. Back at Quik-Print, he showed his work to the brown-haired woman.

“My dog ran off,” he explained. “I thought I’d get some flyers printed, post them around town.”

lost dog, he’d printed. Part Ger. Shepherd. Answers to Soldier. Call 765-1904.

“I hope you get him back,” the woman said. “Is it a him? Soldier sounds like a male dog, but it doesn’t say.”

“It’s a male,” Keller said. “Maybe I should have specified.”

“It’s probably not important. Did you want to offer a reward? People usually do, although I don’t know if it makes any difference. If I found somebody’s dog I wouldn’t care about a reward, I’d just want to get him back with his owner.”

“Everybody’s not as decent as you are,” Keller said. “Maybe I should say something about a reward. I didn’t even think of that.” He put his palms on the desk and leaned forward, looking down at the sheet of paper. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks kind of homemade, doesn’t it? Maybe I should have you set it in type, do it right. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Ed? Would you come and take a look at this, please?”

The man in the horn rims came over and said he thought a hand-lettered look was best for a lost-dog notice. “It makes it more personal,” he said. “I could do it in type for you, but I think people would respond to it better as it is. Assuming somebody finds the dog, that is.”

“I don’t suppose it’s a matter of national importance anyway,” Keller said. “My wife’s attached to the animal and I’d like to recover him if it’s possible, but I’ve a feeling he’s not to be found. My name’s Gordon, by the way. Al Gordon.”

“Ed Vandermeer,” the man said. “And this is my wife, Betty.”

“A pleasure,” Keller said. “I guess fifty of these ought to be enough. More than enough, but I’ll take fifty. Will it take you long to run them?”

“I’ll do it right now. Take about three minutes, cost you three-fifty.”

“Can’t beat that,” Keller said. He uncapped the felt-tipped pen. “Just let me put in something about a reward,” he said.

Back in his motel room he put through a call to a number in White Plains. When a woman answered he said, “Dot, let me speak to him, will you?” It took a few minutes, and then he said, “Yeah, I got here. It’s him, all right. He’s calling himself Vandermeer now. His wife’s still going by Betty.”

The man in White Plains asked when he’d be back.

“What’s today, Tuesday? I’ve got a flight booked Friday but I might take a little longer. No point rushing things. I found a good place to eat. Mexican joint, and the motel set gets HBO. I figure I’ll take my time, do it right. Engleman’s not going anywhere.”

He had lunch at the Mexican café. This time he ordered the combination plate. The waitress asked if he wanted the red or the green chili.

“Whichever’s hotter,” he said.

Maybe a mobile home, he thought. You could buy one cheap, a nice doublewide, make a nice starter home for her and her fellow. Or maybe the best thing for them was to buy a duplex and rent out half, then rent out the other half when they were ready for something nicer for themselves. No time at all you’re in real estate, making a nice return, watching your holdings appreciate. No more waiting on tables for her, and pretty soon her husband can quit slaving at the lumber mill, quit worrying about layoffs when the industry hits one of its slumps.

How you do go on, he thought.

He spent the afternoon walking around town. In a gun shop the proprietor, a man named McLarendon, took some rifles and shotguns off the wall and let him get the feel of them. A sign on the wall said, guns don’t kill people unless you aim real good. Keller talked politics with McLarendon, and socioeconomics. It wasn’t that tricky to figure out McLarendon’s position and to adopt it as one’s own.

“What I really been meaning to buy,” Keller said, “is a handgun.”

“You want to protect yourself and your property,” McLarendon said.

“That’s the idea.”

“And your loved ones.”

“Sure.”

He let the man sell him a gun. There was, locally, a cooling-off period. You picked out your gun, filled out a form, and four days later you could come back and pick it up.

“You a hothead?” McLarendon asked him. “You fixing to lean out the car window, shoot a state trooper on your way home?”

“It doesn’t seem likely.”

“Then I’ll show you a trick. We just backdate this form and you’ve already had your cooling-off period. I’d say you look cool enough to me.”

“You’re a good judge of character.”

The man grinned. “This business,” he said, “a man’s got to be.”

It was nice, a town that size. You got in your car and drove for ten minutes and you were way out in the country.

Keller stopped the Taurus at the side of the road, cut the ignition, rolled down the window. He took the gun from one pocket and the box of shells from the other. The gun — McLarendon kept calling it a weapon — was a .38-caliber revolver with a two-inch barrel. McLarendon would have liked to sell him something heavier and more powerful. If Keller had wanted, McLarendon probably would have been thrilled to sell him a bazooka.

He loaded the gun and got out of the car. There was a beer can lying on its side perhaps twenty yards off. Keller aimed at it, holding the gun in one hand. A few years ago they started firing two-handed in cop shows on TV, and nowadays that was all you saw, television cops leaping through doorways and spinning around corners, gun gripped rigidly in both hands, held out in front of their bodies like a fire hose. Keller thought it looked silly. He’d feel self-conscious, holding a gun like that.

He squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand, and he missed the beer can by several feet. The report of the gunshot echoed for a long time.

He took aim at other things — at a tree, at a flower, at a white rock the size of a clenched fist. But he couldn’t bring himself to fire the gun again, to break the stillness with another gunshot. What was the point, anyway? If he used the gun he’d be too close to miss. You got in close, you pointed, you fired. It wasn’t rocket science, for God’s sake. It wasn’t neurosurgery. Anyone could do it.

He replaced the spent cartridge and put the loaded gun in the car’s glove compartment. He spilled the rest of the shells into his hand and walked a few yards from the road’s edge, then hurled them with a sweeping sidearm motion. He gave the empty box a toss and got back in the car.

Traveling light, he thought.

Back in town, he drove past Quik-Print to make sure they were still open. Then, following the route he’d traced on the map, he found his way to 1411 Cowslip, a Dutch colonial house on the north edge of town. The lawn was neatly trimmed and fiercely green, and there was a bed of rosebushes on either side of the path leading from the sidewalk to the front door.

One of the leaflets at the motel told how roses were a local specialty. But the town had been named not for the flower but for Aaron Rose, a local settler.

He wondered if Engleman knew that.

He circled the block, parked two doors away on the other side of the street from the Engleman residence. Vandermeer Edward, the White Pages listing had read. It struck Keller as an unusual alias. He wondered if Engleman had picked it out himself, or if the feds had selected it for him. Probably the latter, he decided. “Here’s your new name,” they would tell you, “and here’s where you’re going to live, and who you’re going to be.” There was an arbitrariness about it that somehow appealed to Keller, as if they relieved you of the burden of decision. Here’s your new name, and here’s your new driver’s license with your new name already on it. You like scalloped potatoes in your new life, and you’re allergic to bee stings, and your favorite color is blue.

Betty Engleman was now Betty Vandermeer. Keller wondered why her first name hadn’t changed. Didn’t they trust Engleman to get it right? Did they figure him for a bumbler, apt to blurt out “Betty” at an inopportune moment? Or was it sheer coincidence, or sloppiness on their part?

Around six-thirty the Englemans came home from work. They rode in a Honda Civic hatchback with local plates. They had evidently stopped to shop for groceries on the way home. Engleman parked in the driveway while his wife got a bag of groceries from the back. Then he put the car in the garage and followed her into the house.

Keller watched lights go on inside the house. He stayed where he was. It was starting to get dark by the time he drove back to the Douglas Inn.

On HBO, Keller watched a movie about a gang of criminals who have come to a small town in Texas to rob the bank. One of the criminals was a woman, married to one of the other gang members and having an affair with another. Keller thought that was a pretty good recipe for disaster. There was a prolonged shoot-out at the end, with everybody dying in slow motion.

When the movie ended he went over to switch off the set. His eye was caught by the stack of flyers Engleman had run off for him. lost dog. Part Ger. Shepherd. Answers to Soldier. Call 765-1904. reward.

Excellent watchdog, he thought. Good with children.

A little later he turned the set back on again. He didn’t get to sleep until late, didn’t get up until almost noon. He went to the Mexican place and ordered huevos rancheros and put a lot of hot sauce on them.

He watched the waitress’s hands as she served the food and again when she took his empty plate away. Light glinted off the little diamond. Maybe she and her husband would wind up on Cowslip Lane, he thought. Not right away, of course, they’d have to start out in the duplex, but that’s what they could aspire to. A Dutch colonial with that odd kind of pitched roof. What did they call it, anyway? Was that a mansard roof or did that word describe something else? Was it a gambrel, maybe?

He thought he ought to learn these things sometime. You saw the words and didn’t know what they meant, saw the houses and couldn’t describe them properly.

He had bought a paper on his way into the café, and now he turned to the classified ads and read through the real estate listings. Houses seemed very inexpensive. You could actually buy a low-priced home here for twice what he would be paid for the week’s work.

There was a safe-deposit box no one knew about rented under a name he’d never used for another purpose, and in it he had enough cash to buy a nice home here for cash. Assuming you could still do that. People were funny about cash these days, leery of letting themselves be used to launder drug money.

Anyway, what difference did it make? He wasn’t going to live here. The waitress could live here, in a nice little house with mansards and gambrels.

Engleman was leaning over his wife’s desk when Keller walked into Quik-Print. “Why, hello,” he said. “Have you had any luck finding Soldier?”

He remembered the name, Keller noticed.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “the dog came back on his own. I guess he wanted the reward.”

Betty Engleman laughed.

“You see how fast your flyers worked,” he went on. “They brought the dog back even before I got the chance to post them. I’ll get some use out of them eventually, though. Old Soldier’s got itchy feet, he’ll take off again one of these days.”

“Just so he keeps coming back,” she said.

“Reason I stopped by,” Keller said, “I’m new in town, as you might have gathered, and I’ve got a business venture I’m getting ready to kick into gear. I’m going to need a printer, and I thought maybe we could sit down and talk. You got time for a cup of coffee?”

Engleman’s eyes were hard to read behind the glasses. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

They walked down to the corner, Keller talking about what a nice afternoon it was, Engleman saying little beyond agreeing with him. At the corner Keller said, “Well, Burt, where should we go for coffee?”

Engleman just froze. Then he said, “I knew.”

“I know you did, I could tell the minute I walked in there. How?”

“The phone number on the flyer. I tried it last night. They never heard of a Mr. Gordon.”

“So you knew last night. Of course, you could have made a mistake on the number.”

Engleman shook his head. “I wasn’t going on memory. I ran an extra flyer and dialed the number right off it. No Mr. Gordon and no lost dog. Anyway, I think I knew before then. I think I knew the minute you walked in the door.”

“Let’s get that coffee,” Keller said.

They went into a place called the Rainbow Diner and had coffee at a table on the side. Engleman added artificial sweetener to his and stirred it long enough to dissolve marble chips. He had been an accountant back East, working for the man Keller had called in White Plains. When the feds were trying to make a RICO case against Engleman’s boss, Engleman was a logical place to apply pressure. He wasn’t really a criminal, he hadn’t done much of anything, and they told him he was going to prison unless he rolled over and testified. If he did what they said, they’d give him a new name and move him someplace safe. If not, he could talk to his wife once a month through a wire screen, and have ten years to get used to it.

“How did you find me?” he wanted to know. “Somebody leaked it in Washington?”

Keller shook his head. “Freak thing,” he said. “Somebody saw you on the street, recognized you, followed you home.”

“Here in Roseburg?”

“I don’t think so. Were you out of town a week or so ago?”

“Oh, God,” Engleman said. “We went down to San Francisco for the weekend.”

“That sounds right.”

“I thought it was safe. I don’t even know anybody in San Francisco, I was never there in my life. It was her birthday, we figured nothing could be safer. I don’t know a soul there.”

“Somebody knew you.”

“And followed me back here?”

“I don’t even know. Maybe they got your plate and had somebody run it. Maybe they checked your registration at the hotel. What’s the difference?”

“No difference.”

He picked up his coffee and stared into the cup. Keller said, “You knew last night. Did you call someone?”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. You’re in the witness-protection program. Isn’t there somebody you can call when this happens?”

“There’s somebody I can call,” Engleman said. He put his cup back down again. “It’s not that great a program,” he said. “It’s great when they’re telling you about it, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.”

“I’ve heard that,” Keller said.

“Anyway, I didn’t call anybody. What are they going to do? Say they stake my place out, the house and the print shop, and they pick you up. Even if they make something stick against you, what good does it do me? We have to move again because the guy’ll just send somebody else, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, I’m not moving anymore. They moved us three times and I don’t even know why. I think it’s automatic, part of the program, they move you a few times during the first year or two. This is the first place we really settled into since we left, and we’re starting to make money at Quik-Print, and I like it. I like the town and I like the business. I don’t want to move.”

“The town seems nice.”

“It is,” Engleman said. “It’s better than I thought it would be.”

“And you didn’t want to develop an accounting practice?”

“Never,” Engleman said. “I had enough of that, believe me. Look what it got me.”

“You wouldn’t necessarily have to work for crooks.”

“How do you know who’s a crook and who isn’t? Anyway, I don’t want any kind of work where I’m always looking at the inside of somebody else’s business. I’d rather have my own little business work, there side by side with my wife, we’re right there on the street and you can look in the front window and see us. You need stationery, you need business cards, you need invoice forms, I’ll print ’em for you.”

“How did you learn the business?”

“It’s a franchise kind of a thing, a turn-key operation. Anybody could learn it in twenty minutes.”

“No kidding,” Keller said.

“Oh, yeah. Anybody.”

Keller drank some of his coffee. He asked if Engleman had said anything to his wife, learned that he hadn’t. “That’s good,” he said. “Don’t say anything. I’m this guy, weighing some business ventures, needs a printer, has to have, you know, arrangements so there’s no cash-flow problem. And I’m shy talking business in front of women, so the two of us go off and have coffee from time to time.”

“Whatever you say,” Engleman said.

Poor scared bastard, Keller thought. He said, “See, I don’t want to hurt you, Burt. I wanted to, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d put a gun to your head, do what I’m supposed to do. You see a gun?”

“No.”

“The thing is, I don’t do it, they send somebody else. I come back empty, they want to know why. What I have to do, I have to figure something out. You don’t want to run.”

“No. The hell with running.”

“Well, I’ll figure something out,” Keller said. “I’ve got a few days. I’ll think of something.”

After breakfast the next morning Keller drove to the office of one of the realtors whose ads he’d been reading. A woman about the same age as Betty Engleman took him around and showed him three houses. They were modest homes but decent and comfortable, and they ranged between forty and sixty thousand dollars.

He could buy any of them out of his safe-deposit box.

“Here’s your kitchen,” the woman said. “Here’s your half-bath. Here’s your fenced yard.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he told her, taking her card. “I have a business deal pending and a lot depends on the outcome.”

He and Engleman had lunch the next day. They went to the Mexican place and Engleman wanted everything very mild. “Remember,” he told Keller, “I used to be an accountant.”

“You’re a printer now,” Keller said. “Printers can handle hot food.”

“Not this printer. Not this printer’s stomach.”

They each drank a bottle of Carta Blanca with the meal. Keller had another bottle afterward. Engleman had a cup of coffee.

“If I had a house with a fenced yard,” Keller said, “I could have a dog and not worry about him running off.”

“I guess you could,” Engleman said.

“I had a dog when I was a kid,” Keller said. “Just the once, I had him for about two years when I was eleven, twelve years old. His name was Soldier.”

“I was wondering about that.”

“He wasn’t part shepherd. He was a little thing, I suppose he was some kind of terrier cross.”

“Did he run off?”

“No, he got hit by a car. He was stupid about cars, he just ran out in the street. The driver couldn’t help it.”

“How did you happen to call him Soldier?”

“I forget. Then when I did the flyer, I don’t know, I had to put answers to something. All I could think of were names like Fido and Rover and Spot. Like signing John Smith on a hotel register, you know? Then it came to me, Soldier. Been years since I thought about that dog.”

After lunch Engleman went back to the shop and Keller returned to the motel for his car. He drove out of town on the same road he’d taken the day he bought the gun. This time he rode a few miles farther before pulling over and cutting the engine.

He got the gun from the glove box and opened the cylinder, spilling the shells out into his palm. He tossed them underhand, then weighed the gun in his hand for a moment before hurling it into a patch of brush.

McLarendon would be horrified, he thought. Mistreating a weapon in that fashion. Showed what a judge of character the man was.

He got back in his car and drove back to town.

He called White Plains. When the woman answered he said, “You don’t have to disturb him, Dot. Just tell him I didn’t make my flight today. I changed the reservation, I moved it ahead to Tuesday. Tell him everything’s okay, only it’s taking a little longer, like I thought it might.” She asked how the weather was. “It’s real nice,” he said. “Very pleasant. Listen, don’t you think that’s part of it? If it was raining I’d probably have it taken care of, I’d be home by now.”

Quik-Print was closed Saturdays and Sundays. Saturday afternoon Keller called Engleman at home and asked him if he felt like going for a ride. “I’ll pick you up,” he offered.

When he got there Engleman was waiting out in front. He got in and fastened his seat belt. “Nice car,” he said.

“It’s a rental.”

“I didn’t figure you drove your own car all the way out here. You know, it gave me a turn. When you said how about going for a ride. You know, going for a ride. Like there’s a connotation.”

“Actually,” Keller said, “we probably should have taken your car. I figured you could show me the area.”

“You like it here, huh?”

“Very much,” Keller said. “I’ve been thinking. Suppose I just stayed here.”

“Wouldn’t he send somebody?”

“You think he would? I don’t know. He wasn’t killing himself trying to find you. At first, sure, but then he forgot about it. Then some eager beaver in San Francisco happens to spot you and sure, he tells me to go out and handle it. But if I just don’t come back—”

“Caught up in the lure of Roseburg,” Engleman said.

“I don’t know, Burt, it’s not a bad place. You know, I’m going to stop that.”

“What?”

“Calling you Burt. Your name’s Ed now, so why don’t I call you Ed? What do you think, Ed? That sound good to you, Ed, old buddy?”

“And what do I call you?”

“Al’s fine. What should I do, take a left here?”

“No, go another block or two,” Engleman said. “There’s a nice road, leads through some very pretty scenery.”

A while later Keller said, “You miss it much, Ed?”

“Working for him, you mean?”

“No, not that. The city.”

“New York? I never lived in the city, not really. We were up in Westchester.”

“Still, the whole area. You miss it?”

“No.”

“I wonder if I would.” They fell silent, and after perhaps five minutes he said, “My father was a soldier, he was killed in the war when I was just a baby. That’s why I named the dog Soldier.”

Engleman didn’t say anything.

“Except I think my mother was lying,” he went on. “I don’t think she was married, and I have a feeling she didn’t know who my father was. But I didn’t know that when I named the dog. When you think about it, it’s a stupid name anyway for a dog, Soldier. It’s probably stupid to name a dog after your father, as far as that goes.”

Sunday he stayed in the room and watched sports on television. The Mexican place was closed; he had lunch at Wendy’s and dinner at a Pizza Hut. Monday at noon he was back at the Mexican café. He had the newspaper with him, and he ordered the same thing he’d ordered the first time, the chicken enchiladas.

When the waitress brought coffee afterward, he asked her, “When’s the wedding?”

She looked utterly blank. “The wedding,” he repeated, and pointed at the ring on her finger.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m not engaged or anything. The ring was my mom’s from her first marriage. She never wears it, so I asked could I wear it, and she said it was all right. I used to wear it on the other hand but it fits better here.”

He felt curiously angry, as though she’d betrayed the fantasy he’d spun out about her. He left the same tip he always left and took a long walk around town, gazing in windows, wandering up one street and down the next.

He thought, Well, you could marry her. She’s already got the engagement ring. Ed’ll print your wedding invitations, except who would you invite?

And the two of you could get a house with a fenced yard, and buy a dog.

Ridiculous, he thought. The whole thing was ridiculous.

At dinnertime he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to go back to the Mexican café but he felt perversely disinclined to go anywhere else. One more Mexican meal, he thought, and I’ll wish I had that gun back so I could kill myself.

He called Engleman at home. “Look,” he said, “this is important. Could you meet me at your shop?”

“When?”

“As soon as you can.”

“We just sat down to dinner.”

“Well, don’t ruin your meal,” Keller said. “What is it, seven-thirty? How about if you meet me in an hour.”

He was waiting in the photographer’s doorway when Engleman parked the Honda in front of his shop. “I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, “but I had an idea. Can you open up? I want to see something inside.”

Engleman unlocked the door and they went in. Keller kept talking to him, saying how he’d figured out a way he could stay in Roseburg and not worry about the man in White Plains. “This machine you’ve got,” he said, pointing to one of the copiers. “How does this work?”

“How does it work?”

“What does that switch do?”

“This one?”

Engleman leaned forward, and Keller got the loop of wire out of his pocket and dropped it around the other man’s neck. The garrote was fast, silent, deadly. Keller made sure Engleman’s body was where it couldn’t be seen from the street, made sure to wipe his prints off any surfaces he might have touched. He turned off the lights, closed the door behind him.

He had already checked out of the Douglas Inn, and now he drove straight to Portland, with the Ford’s cruise control set just below the speed limit. He drove half an hour in silence, then turned on the radio and tried to find a station he could stand. Nothing pleased him and he gave up and switched it off.

Somewhere north of Eugene he said, “Jesus, Ed, what else was I going to do?”

He drove straight through to Portland and got a room at the ExecuLodge near the airport. In the morning he turned in the Hertz car and dawdled over coffee until his flight was called.

He called White Plains as soon as he was on the ground at JFK. “It’s all taken care of,” he said. “I’ll come by sometime tomorrow. Right now I just want to get home, get some sleep.”

The following afternoon in White Plains Dot asked him how he’d liked Roseburg.

“Really nice,” he said. “Pretty town, nice people. I wanted to stay there.”

“Oh, Keller,” she said. “What did you do, look at houses?”

“Not exactly.”

“Every place you go,” she said, “you want to live there.”

“It’s nice,” he insisted. “And living’s cheap compared to here. A person could have a decent life.”

“For a week,” she said. “Then you’d go nuts.”

“You really think so?”

“Come on,” she said. “Roseburg, Oregon? Come on.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess a week’s about as much as I could handle.”

A few days later he was going through his pockets before taking some clothes to the cleaners. He found the Roseburg street map and went over it, remembering where everything was. Quik-Print, the Douglas Inn, the house on Cowslip. The Mexican café, the other places he’d eaten. The gun shop. The houses he’d looked at.

He folded the map and put it in his dresser drawer. A month later he came across it, and for a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he laughed. And tore it in half, and in half again, and put it in the trash.

Keller’s Therapy

“I had this dream,” Keller said. “Matter of fact I wrote it down, as you suggested.”

“Good.”

Before getting on the couch Keller had removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. He moved from the couch to retrieve his notebook from the jacket’s inside breast pocket, then sat on the couch and found the page with the dream on it. He read through his notes rapidly, closed the book, and sat there, uncertain how to proceed.

“As you prefer,” said Breen. “Sitting up or lying down, whichever is more comfortable.”

“It doesn’t matter?”

“Not to me.”

And which was more comfortable? A seated posture seemed more natural for conversation, while lying down on the couch had the weight of tradition on its side. Keller, who felt driven to give this his best shot, decided to go with tradition. He stretched out, put his feet up.

He said, “I’m living in a house, except it’s almost like a castle. Endless passageways and dozens of rooms.”

“Is it your house?”

“No, I just live here. In fact I’m a kind of servant for the family that owns the house. They’re almost like royalty.”

“And you are a servant.”

“Except I have very little to do, and I’m treated like an equal. I play tennis with members of the family. There’s this tennis court in back of the house.”

“And this is your job? To play tennis with them?”

“No, that’s an example of how they treat me as an equal. And I eat at the same table with them, instead of eating downstairs with the servants. My job is the mice.”

“The mice?”

“The house is infested with mice. I’m having dinner with the family, I’ve got a plate piled high with good food, and a waiter in black tie comes in and presents a covered dish. I lift the cover and there’s a note on it, and it says, ‘Mice.’ ”

“Just the single word?”

“That’s all. I get up from the table and I follow the servant down a long hallway, and I wind up in an unfinished room in the attic. There are tiny mice all over the room, there must be twenty or thirty of them, and I have to kill them.”

“How?”

“By crushing them underfoot. That’s the quickest and most humane way, but it bothers me and I don’t want to do it. But the sooner I finish, the sooner I can get back to my dinner, and I’m very hungry.”

“So you kill the mice?”

“Yes,” Keller said. “One almost gets away but I stomp on it just as it’s getting out the door. And then I’m back at the dinner table and everybody’s eating and drinking and laughing, and my plate’s been cleared away. Then there’s a big fuss, and finally they bring my plate back from the kitchen, but it’s not the same food as before. It’s...”

“Yes?”

“Mice,” Keller said. “They’re skinned and cooked, but it’s a plateful of mice.”

“And you eat them?”

“That’s when I woke up,” Keller said. “And not a moment too soon, I’d have to say.”

“Ah,” Breen said. He was a tall man, long-limbed and gawky, wearing chinos and a dark green shirt and a brown corduroy jacket. He looked to Keller like someone who had been a nerd in high school, and who now managed to look distinguished, in an eccentric sort of way. He said “Ah” again, and folded his hands, and asked Keller what he thought the dream meant.

“You’re the doctor,” Keller said.

“You think it means that I am the doctor?”

“No, I think you’re the one who can say what it means. Maybe it just means I shouldn’t eat Rocky Road ice cream right before I go to bed.”

“Tell me what you think the dream might mean.”

“Maybe I see myself as a cat.”

“Or as an exterminator?”

Keller didn’t say anything.

“Let us work with this dream on a very superficial level,” Breen said. “You’re employed as a corporate troubleshooter, except that you used another word for it.”

“They tend to call us expediters,” Keller said, “but troubleshooter is what it amounts to.”

“Most of the time there is nothing for you to do. You have considerable opportunity for recreation, for living the good life. For tennis, as it were, and for nourishing yourself at the table of the rich and powerful. Then mice are discovered, and it is at once clear that you are a servant with a job to do.”

“I get it,” Keller said.

“Go on, then. Explain it to me.”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? There’s a problem and I’m called in and I have to drop what I’m doing and go and deal with it. I have to take abrupt arbitrary action, and that can involve firing people and closing out whole departments. I have to do it, but it’s like stepping on mice. And when I’m back at the table and I want my food — I suppose that’s my salary?”

“Your compensation, yes.”

“And I get a plate of mice.” He made a face. “In other words, what? My compensation comes from the destruction of the people I have to cut adrift. My sustenance comes at their expense. So it’s a guilt dream?”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s guilt. My profit derives from the misfortunes of others, from the grief I bring to others. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“On the surface, yes. When we go deeper, perhaps we will begin to discover other connections. With your having chosen this job in the first place, perhaps, and with some aspects of your childhood.” He interlaced his fingers and sat back in his chair. “Everything is of a piece, you know. Nothing exists alone and nothing is accidental. Even your name.”

“My name?”

“Peter Stone. Think about it, why don’t you, between now and our next session.”

“Think about my name?”

“About your name and how it suits you. And” — a reflexive glance at his wristwatch — “I’m afraid our hour is up.”

Jerrold Breen’s office was on Central Park West at Ninety-fourth Street. Keller walked to Columbus Avenue, rode a bus five blocks, crossed the street, and hailed a taxi. He had the driver go through Central Park, and by the time he got out of the cab at Fiftieth Street he was reasonably certain he hadn’t been followed. He bought coffee in a deli and stood on the sidewalk, keeping an eye open while he drank it. Then he walked to the building where he lived, on First Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth. It was a prewar high-rise, with an Art Deco lobby and an attended elevator. “Ah, Mr. Keller,” the attendant said. “A beautiful day, yes?”

“Beautiful,” Keller agreed.

Keller had a one-bedroom apartment on the nineteenth floor. He could look out his window and see the UN building, the East River, the borough of Queens. On the first Sunday in November he could watch the runners streaming across the Queensboro Bridge, just a couple of miles past the midpoint of the New York marathon.

It was a spectacle Keller tried not to miss. He would sit at his window for hours while thousands of them passed through his field of vision, first the world-class runners, then the middle-of-the-pack plodders, and finally the slowest of the slow, some walking, some hobbling. They started in Staten Island and finished in Central Park, and all he saw was a few hundred yards of their ordeal as they made their way over the bridge into Manhattan. Sooner or later the sight always moved him to tears, although he could not have said why.

Maybe it was something to talk about with Breen.

It was a woman who had led him to the therapist’s couch, an aerobics instructor named Donna. Keller had met her at the gym. They’d had a couple of dates, and had been to bed a couple of times, enough to establish their sexual incompatibility. Keller still went to the same gym two or three times a week to raise and lower heavy metal objects, and when he ran into her they were friendly.

One time, just back from a trip somewhere, he must have rattled on about what a nice town it was. “Keller,” she said, “if there was ever a born New Yorker, you’re it. You know that, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“But you’ve always got this fantasy, living the good life in Elephant, Montana. Every place you go, you dream up a whole life to go with it.”

“Is that bad?”

“Who’s saying it’s bad? But I bet you could have fun with it in therapy.”

“You think I need to be in therapy?”

“I think you’d get a lot out of therapy,” she said. “Look, you come here, right? You climb the Stair Monster, you use the Nautilus.”

“Mostly free weights.”

“Whatever. You don’t do this because you’re a physical wreck.”

“I do it to stay in shape.”

“And because it makes you feel good.”

“So?”

“So I see you as all closed in and trying to reach out,” she said. “Going all over the country and getting real estate agents to show you houses you’re not going to buy.”

“That was only a couple of times. And what’s so bad about it, anyway? It passes the time.”

“You do these things and don’t know why,” she said. “You know what therapy is? It’s an adventure, it’s a voyage of discovery. And it’s like going to the gym. It’s... look, forget it. The whole thing’s pointless anyway unless you’re interested.”

“Maybe I’m interested,” he said.

Donna, not surprisingly, was in therapy herself. But her therapist was a woman, and they agreed he’d be more comfortable working with a man. Her ex-husband had been very fond of his therapist, a West Side psychologist named Breen. Donna had never met the man herself, and she wasn’t on the best of terms with her ex, but—

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll call him myself.”

He’d called Breen, using Donna’s ex-husband’s name as a reference. “But I doubt that he even knows me by name,” he said. “We got to talking a while back at a party and I haven’t seen him since. But something he said struck a chord with me, and, well, I thought I ought to explore it.”

“Intuition is a powerful teacher,” Breen said.

Keller made an appointment, giving his name as Peter Stone. In his first session he talked some about his work for a large and unnamed conglomerate. “They’re a little old-fashioned when it comes to psychotherapy,” he told Breen. “So I’m not going to give you an address or telephone number, and I’ll pay for each session in cash.”

“Your life is filled with secrets,” Breen said.

“I’m afraid it is. My work demands it.”

“This is a place where you can be honest and open. The idea is to uncover those secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself. Here you are protected by the sanctity of the confessional, but it’s not my task to grant you absolution. Ultimately, you absolve yourself.”

“Well,” Keller said.

“Meanwhile, you have secrets to keep. I can respect that. I won’t need your address or telephone number unless I’m forced to cancel an appointment. I suggest you call in to confirm your sessions an hour or two ahead of time, or you can take the chance of an occasional wasted trip. If you have to cancel an appointment, be sure to give me twenty-four hours’ notice. Or I’ll have to charge for the missed session.”

“That’s fair,” Keller said.

He went twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, at two in the afternoon. It was hard to tell what they were accomplishing. Sometimes Keller relaxed completely on the sofa, talking freely and honestly about his childhood. Other times he experienced the fifty-minute session as a balancing act; he was tugged in two directions at once, yearning to tell everything, compelled to keep it all a secret.

No one knew he was doing this. Once when he ran into Donna she asked if he’d ever given the shrink a call, and he’d shrugged sheepishly and said he hadn’t. “I thought about it,” he said, “but then somebody told me about this masseuse, she does a combination of Swedish and shiatsu, and I’ve got to tell you, I think it does me more good than somebody poking and probing at the inside of my head.”

“Oh, Keller,” she’d said, not without affection. “Don’t ever change.”

It was on a Monday that he recounted the dream about the mice. Wednesday morning his phone rang, and it was Dot. “He wants to see you,” she said.

“Be right out,” he said.

He put on a tie and jacket and caught a cab to Grand Central and a train to White Plains. There he caught another cab and told the driver to head out Washington Boulevard and let him off at the corner of Norwalk. After the cab drove off he walked up Norwalk to Taunton Place and turned left. The second house on the right was a big old Victorian with a wraparound porch. He rang the bell and Dot let him in.

“The upstairs den,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”

He went upstairs, and forty minutes later he came down again. A young man named Louis drove him back to the station, and on the way they chatted about a recent boxing match they’d both seen on ESPN. “What I wish,” Louis said, “I wish they had like a mute button on the remote, except what it would do is it would mute the announcers but you’d still hear the crowd noise and the punches landing. What you wouldn’t have is the constant yammer-yammer-yammer in your ear.” Keller wondered if they could do that. “I don’t see why not,” Louis said. “They can do everything else. If you can put a man on the moon, you ought to be able to shut up Al Bernstein.”

Keller took the train back to New York and walked to his apartment. He made a couple of phone calls and packed a bag. At 3:30 he went downstairs, walked half a block, and hailed a cab to JFK, where he picked up his boarding pass for American’s 6:10 flight to Tucson.

In the departure lounge he remembered his appointment with Breen. He called and canceled the Thursday session. Since it was less than twenty-four hours away, Breen said, he’d have to charge him for the missed session, unless he was able to book someone else into the slot.

“Don’t worry about it,” Keller told him. “I hope I’ll be back in time for my Monday appointment, but it’s always hard to know how long these things are going to take. If I can’t make it I should at least be able to give you the twenty-four hours’ notice.”

He changed planes in Dallas and got to Tucson shortly before midnight. He had no luggage aside from the piece he was carrying, but he went to the baggage claim area anyway. A rail-thin man with a broad-brimmed straw hat stood there holding a hand-lettered sign that read NOSCAASI. Keller watched the man for a few minutes, and observed that no one else was watching him. He went up to him and said, “You know, I was figuring it out the whole way to Dallas. What I came up with, it’s Isaacson spelled backwards.”

“That’s it,” the man said. “That’s exactly it.” He seemed impressed, as if Keller had cracked the Japanese naval code. He said, “You didn’t check a bag, did you? I didn’t think so. Car’s this way.”

In the car the man showed him three photographs, all of the same man, heavyset, dark, with glossy black hair and a greedy pig face. Bushy mustache, bushy eyebrows. Enlarged pores on his nose.

“That’s Rollie Vasquez,” the man said. “Son of a bitch wouldn’t exactly win a beauty contest, would he?”

“I guess not.”

“Let’s go,” the man said. “Show you where he lives, where he eats, where he gets his ashes hauled. Rollie Vasquez, this is your life.”

Two hours later the man dropped him at a Ramada Inn and gave him a room key and a car key. “You’re all checked in,” he said. “Car’s parked at the foot of the staircase closest to your room. She’s a Mitsubishi Eclipse, pretty decent transportation. Color’s supposed to be silver-blue, but she says gray on the papers. Registration’s in the glove box.”

“There was supposed to be something else.”

“That’s in the glove box, too. Locked, of course, but the one key fits the ignition and the glove box. And the doors and the trunk, too. And if you turn the key upside down it’ll still fit, ’cause there’s no up and down to it. You really got to hand it to those Japs.”

“What’ll they think of next?”

“Well, it may not seem like much,” the man said, “but all the time you waste making sure you got the right key, then making sure you got it right side up.”

“It adds up.”

“It does,” the man said. “Now, you got a full tank of gas. It takes regular, but what’s in there’s enough to take you upwards of four hundred miles.”

“How’re the tires? Never mind. Just a joke.”

“And a good one,” the man said. “ ‘How’re the tires?’ I like that.”

The car was where it was supposed to be, and the glove box held the car’s registration and a semiautomatic pistol, a .22-caliber Horstmann Sun Dog, fully loaded, with a spare clip lying alongside it. Keller slipped the gun and the spare clip into his carry-on, locked the car, and went to his room without passing the desk.

After a shower, he sat down and put his feet up on the coffee table. It was all arranged, and that made it simpler, but sometimes he liked it better the other way, when all he had was a name and address and no one on hand to smooth the way for him. This was simple, all right, but who knew what traces were being left? Who knew what kind of history the gun had, or what the string bean with the NOSCAASI sign would say if the police picked him up and shook him?

All the more reason to do it quickly. He watched enough of an old movie on cable to ready him for sleep, then slept until he woke up. When he went out to the car he had his bag with him. He expected to return to the room, but if he didn’t he’d be leaving nothing behind, not even a fingerprint.

He stopped at Denny’s for breakfast. Around one he had lunch at a Mexican place on Figueroa. In the late afternoon he drove up into the hills north of the city, and he was still there when the sun went down. Then he drove back to the Ramada.

That was Thursday. Friday morning the phone rang while he was shaving. He let it ring. It rang again just as he was ready to leave. He didn’t answer it this time, either, but went around wiping surfaces a second time with a hand towel. Then he went out to the car.

At two that afternoon he followed Rolando Vasquez into the men’s room of the Saguaro Lanes bowling alley and shot him three times in the head. The little gun didn’t make much noise, not even in the confines of the tiled lavatory. Earlier he had fashioned an improvised suppressor by wrapping the barrel of the gun with a space-age insulating material that muffled most of the gun’s report without adding much in the way of weight or bulk. If you could do that, he thought, you ought to be able to shut up Al Bernstein.

He left Vasquez propped in a stall, left the gun in a storm drain half a mile away, left the car in the long-term lot at the airport.

Flying home, he wondered why they had needed him in the first place. They’d supplied the car and the gun and the finger man. Why not do it all themselves? Did they really need to bring him all the way from New York to step on the mouse?

“You said to think about my name,” he told Breen. “The significance of it. But I don’t see how it could have any significance. It’s not as if I chose it myself.”

“Let me suggest something,” Breen said. “There is a metaphysical principle which holds that we choose everything about our lives, that in fact we select the very parents we are born to, that everything which happens in our lives is a manifestation of our will. Thus there are no accidents, no coincidences.”

“I don’t know if I believe that.”

“You don’t have to. We’ll just take it for the moment as a postulate. So, assuming that you chose the name Peter Stone, what does your choice tell us?”

Keller, stretched full length upon the couch, was not enjoying this. “Well, a peter’s a penis,” he said reluctantly. “A stone peter would be an erection, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?”

“So I suppose a guy who decides to call himself Peter Stone would have something to prove. Anxiety about his virility. Is that what you want me to say?”

“I want you to say whatever you wish,” Breen said. “Are you anxious about your virility?”

“I never thought I was,” Keller said. “Of course it’s hard to say how much anxiety I might have had back before I was born, around the time I was picking my parents and deciding what name they should choose for me. At that age I probably had a certain amount of difficulty maintaining an erection, so I guess I had a lot to be anxious about.”

“And now?”

“I don’t have a performance problem, if that’s the question. I’m not the way I was in my teens, ready to go three or four times a night, but then who in his right mind would want to? I can generally get the job done.”

“You get the job done.”

“Right.”

“You perform.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“What do you think?”

“Don’t do that,” Keller said. “Don’t answer a question with a question. If I ask a question and you don’t want to respond, just leave it alone. But don’t turn it back on me. It’s irritating.”

Breen said, “You perform, you get the job done. But what do you feel, Mr. Peter Stone?”

“Feel?”

“It is unquestionably true that peter is a colloquialism for the penis, but it has an earlier meaning. Do you recall Christ’s words to the first Peter? ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church.’ Because Peter means rock. Our Lord was making a pun. So your first name means rock and your last name is Stone. What does that give us? Rock and stone. Hard, unyielding, obdurate. Insensitive. Unfeeling.”

“Stop,” Keller said.

“In the dream, when you kill the mice, what do you feel?”

“Nothing. I just want to get the job done.”

“Do you feel their pain? Do you feel pride in your accomplishment, satisfaction in a job well done? Do you feel a thrill, a sexual pleasure, in their death?”

“Nothing,” Keller said. “I feel nothing. Could we stop for a moment?”

“What do you feel right now?”

“Just a little sick to my stomach, that’s all.”

“Do you want to use the bathroom? Shall I get you a glass of water?”

“No, I’m all right. It’s better when I sit up. It’ll pass. It’s passing already.”

Sitting at his window, watching not marathoners but cars streaming over the Queensboro Bridge, Keller thought about names. What was particularly annoying, he thought, was that he didn’t need to be under the care of a board-certified metaphysician to acknowledge the implications of the name Peter Stone. He had very obviously chosen it, and not in the manner of a soul deciding what parents to be born to and planting names in their heads. He had picked the name himself when he called to make his initial appointment with Jerrold Breen. Name? Breen had demanded. Stone, he had replied. Peter Stone.

Thing is, he wasn’t stupid. Cold, unyielding, insensitive, but not stupid. If you wanted to play the name game, you didn’t have to limit yourself to the alias he had selected. You could have plenty of fun with the name he’d borne all his life.

His full name was John Paul Keller, but no one called him anything but Keller, and few people even knew his first or middle names. His apartment lease and most of the cards in his wallet showed his names as J. P. Keller. Just Plain Keller was what people called him, men and women alike. (“The upstairs den, Keller. He’s expecting you.” “Oh, Keller, don’t ever change.” “I don’t know how to say this, Keller, but I’m just not getting my needs met in this relationship.”)

Keller. In German it meant cellar, or tavern. But the hell with that, you didn’t need to know what it meant in a foreign language. Just change a vowel. Keller = Killer.

Clear enough, wasn’t it?

On the couch, eyes closed, Keller said, “I guess the therapy’s working.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I met a girl last night, bought her a couple of drinks, went home with her. We went to bed and I couldn’t do anything.”

“You couldn’t do anything.”

“Well, if you want to be technical, there were things I could have done. I could have typed a letter, sent out for a pizza. I could have sung ‘Melancholy Baby.’ But I couldn’t do what we’d both been hoping I would do, which was have sex with her.”

“You were impotent.”

“You know, you’re very sharp. You never miss a trick.”

“You blame me for your impotence,” Breen said.

“Do I? I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I even blame myself. To tell you the truth, I was more amused than devastated by the experience. And she wasn’t upset, perhaps out of relief that I wasn’t upset. But just so nothing like this ever happens again, I’ve decided I’m changing my name to Dick Hardin.”

“What was your father’s name?”

“My father,” Keller said. “Jesus, what a question. Where did that come from?”

Breen didn’t say anything.

Neither, for several minutes, did Keller. Then, eyes closed, he said, “I never knew my father. He was a soldier. He was killed in action before I was born. Or he was shipped overseas before I was born and killed when I was a few months old. Or possibly he was home when I was born, or came home on leave when I was very small, and he held me on his knee and told me he was proud of me.”

“You have such a memory?”

“I have no memory,” Keller said. “The only memory I have is of my mother telling me about him, and that’s the source of the confusion, because she told me different things at different times. Either he was killed before I was born or shortly after, and either he died without seeing me or he saw me one time and sat me on his knee. She was a good woman but she was vague about a lot of things. The one thing she was completely clear on, he was a soldier. And he got killed over there.”

“And his name—”

Was Keller, he thought. “Same as mine,” he said. “But forget the name, this is more important than the name. Listen to this. She had a picture of him, a head-and-shoulders shot, this good-looking young soldier in a uniform and wearing a cap, the kind that folds flat when you take it off. The picture was in a gold frame on her dresser when I was a little kid, and she would tell me how that was my father.

“And then one day the picture wasn’t there anymore. ‘It’s gone,’ she said. And that was all she would say on the subject. I was older then, I must have been seven or eight years old.

“Couple of years later I got a dog. I named him Soldier, I called him that after my father. Years after that two things occurred to me. One, Soldier’s a funny thing to call a dog. Two, whoever heard of naming a dog after your father? But at the time it didn’t seem the least bit unusual to me.”

“What happened to the dog?”

“He became impotent. Shut up, will you? What I’m getting to’s a lot more important than the dog. When I was fourteen, fifteen years old, I used to work afternoons after school helping out this guy who did odd jobs in the neighborhood. Cleaning out basements and attics, hauling trash, that sort of thing. One time this notions store went out of business, the owner must have died, and we were cleaning out the basement for the new tenant. Boxes of junk all over the place, and we had to go through everything, because part of how this guy made his money was selling off the stuff he got paid to haul. But you couldn’t go through all this crap too thoroughly or you were wasting time.

“I was checking out this one box, and what do I pull out but a framed picture of my father. The very same picture that sat on my mother’s dresser, him in his uniform and his military cap, the picture that disappeared, it’s even in the same frame, and what’s it doing here?”

Not a word from Breen.

“I can still remember how I felt. Like stunned, like Twilight Zone time. Then I reach back in the box and pull out the first thing I touch, and it’s the same picture in the same frame.

“The whole box is framed pictures. About half of them are the soldier and the others are a fresh-faced blonde with her hair in a page boy and a big smile on her face. What it was, it was a box of frames. They used to package inexpensive frames that way, with a photo in it for display. For all I know they still do. So what my mother must have done, she must have bought a frame in a five-and-dime and told me it was my father. Then when I got a little older she got rid of it.

“I took one of the framed photos home with me. I didn’t say anything to her, I didn’t show it to her, but I kept it around for a while. I found out the photo dated from World War Two. In other words, it couldn’t have been a picture of my father, because he would have been wearing a different uniform.

“By this time I think I already knew that the story she told me about my father was, well, a story. I don’t believe she knew who my father was. I think she got drunk and went with somebody, or maybe there were several different men. What difference does it make? She moved to another town, she told people she was married, that her husband was in the service or that he was dead, whatever she told them.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“How do I feel about it?” Keller shook his head. “If I slammed my hand in a cab door, you’d ask me how I felt about it.”

“And you’d be stuck for an answer,” Breen said. “Here’s a question for you. Who was your father?”

“I just told you—”

“But someone fathered you. Whether or not you knew him, whether or not your mother knew who he was, there was a particular man who planted the seed that grew into you. Unless you believe yourself to be the second coming of Christ.”

“No,” Keller said. “That’s one delusion I’ve been spared.”

“So tell me who he was, this man who spawned you. Not on the basis of what you were told or what you’ve managed to figure out. I’m not asking this question of the part of you that thinks and reasons. I’m asking that part of you that simply knows. Who was your father? What was your father?”

“He was a soldier,” Keller said.

Keller, walking uptown on Second Avenue, found himself standing in front of a pet shop, watching a couple of puppies cavorting in the window.

He went inside. One whole wall was given over to stacked cages of puppies and kittens. Keller felt his spirits sinking as he looked into the cages. Waves of sadness rocked him.

He turned away and looked at the other pets. Birds in cages, gerbils and snakes in dry aquariums, tanks of tropical fish. He was all right with them. It was the puppies that he couldn’t bear to look at.

He left the store. The next day he went to an animal shelter and walked past cages of dogs waiting to be adopted. This time the sadness was overwhelming, and he felt it physically as pressure against his chest. Something must have shown on his face, because the young woman in charge asked him if he was all right.

“Just a dizzy spell,” he said.

In the office she told him that they could probably accommodate him if he was especially interested in a particular breed. They could keep his name on file, and when a specimen of that breed became available—

“I don’t think I can have a pet,” he said. “I travel too much. I can’t handle the responsibility.” The woman didn’t respond, and Keller’s words echoed in her silence. “But I want to make a donation,” he said. “I want to support the work you do.”

He got out his wallet, pulled bills from it, handed them to her without counting them. “An anonymous donation,” he said. “I don’t want a receipt. I’m sorry for taking your time. I’m sorry I can’t adopt a dog. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

She was saying something, but he didn’t listen. He hurried out of there.

“ ‘I want to support the work you do.’ That’s what I told her, and then I rushed out of there because I didn’t want her thanking me. Or asking me questions.”

“What would she ask?”

“I don’t know,” Keller said. He rolled over on the couch, facing away from Breen, facing the wall. “ ‘I want to support your work.’ But I don’t even know what their work is. They find homes for some animals, and what do they do with the others? Put them to sleep?”

“Perhaps.”

“What do I want to support? The placement or the killing?”

“You tell me.”

“I tell you too much as it is,” Keller said.

“Or not enough.”

Keller didn’t say anything.

“Why did it sadden you to see the dogs in their cages?”

“I felt their sadness.”

“One feels only one’s own sadness. Why is it sad to you, a dog in a cage? Are you in a cage?”

“No.”

“Your dog, Soldier. Tell me about him.”

“All right,” Keller said. “I guess I could do that.”

A session or two later, Breen said, “You have never been married.”

“No.”

“I was married.”

“Oh?”

“For eight years. She was my receptionist, she booked my appointments, showed clients to the waiting room until I was ready for them. Now I have no receptionist. A machine answers the phone. I check the machine between appointments, and take and return calls at that time. If I had had a machine in the first place I’d have been spared a lot of agony.”

“It wasn’t a good marriage?”

Breen didn’t seem to have heard the question. “I wanted children. She had three abortions in eight years and never told me. Never said a word. Then one day she threw it in my face. I’d been to a doctor, I’d had tests, and all indications were that I was fertile, with a high sperm count and extremely motile sperm. So I wanted her to see a doctor. ‘You fool, I’ve killed three of your babies already, why don’t you leave me alone?’ I told her I wanted a divorce. She said it would cost me.”

“And?”

“We were married eight years. We’ve been divorced for nine. Every month I write an alimony check and put it in the mail. If it was up to me I’d rather burn the money.”

Breen fell silent. After a moment Keller said, “Why are you telling me all this?”

“No reason.”

“Is it supposed to relate to something in my psyche? Am I supposed to make a connection, clap my hand to my forehead, say, ‘Of course, of course! I’ve been so blind!’ ”

“You confide in me,” Breen said. “It seems only fitting that I confide in you.”

A couple of days later Dot called. Keller took a train to White Plains, where Louis met him at the station and drove him to the house on Taunton Place. Later Louis drove him back to the train station and he returned to the city. He timed his call to Breen so that he got the man’s machine. “This is Peter Stone,” he said. “I’m flying to San Diego on business. I’ll have to miss my next appointment, and possibly the one after that. I’ll try to let you know.”

Was there anything else to tell Breen? He couldn’t think of anything. He hung up, packed a bag, and rode Amtrak to Philadelphia.

No one met his train. The man in White Plains had shown him a photograph and given him a slip of paper with a name and address on it. The man in question managed an adult bookstore a few blocks from Independence Hall. There was a tavern across the street, a perfect vantage point, but one look inside made it clear to Keller that he couldn’t spend time there without calling attention to himself, not unless he first got rid of his tie and jacket and spent twenty minutes rolling around in the gutter.

Down the street Keller found a diner, and if he sat at the far end he could keep an eye on the bookstore’s mirrored front windows. He had a cup of coffee, then walked across the street to the bookstore, where there were two men on duty. One was a dark and sad-eyed youth from India or Pakistan, the other the jowly, slightly exophthalmic fellow in the photo Keller had seen in White Plains.

Keller walked past a whole wall of videocassettes and leafed through a display of magazines. He had been there for about fifteen minutes when the kid said he was going for his dinner. The older man said, “Oh, it’s that time already, huh? Okay, but make sure you’re back by seven for a change, will you?”

Keller looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. The only other customers were closeted in video booths in the back. Still, the kid had had a look at him, and what was the big hurry, anyway?

He grabbed a couple of magazines at random and paid for them. The jowly man bagged them and sealed the bag with a strip of tape. Keller stowed his purchase in his carry-on and went to find himself a hotel room.

The next day he went to a museum and a movie, arriving at the bookstore at ten minutes after six. The young clerk was gone, presumably having a plate of curry somewhere. The jowly man was behind the counter, and there were three customers in the store, two checking the video selections, one looking at magazines.

Keller browsed, hoping they would decide to clear out. At one point he was standing in front of a whole wall of videocassettes and it turned into a wall of caged puppies. It was momentary, and he couldn’t tell if it was a genuine hallucination or just some sort of mental flashback. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

One customer left, but the other two lingered, and then someone new came in off the street. And in half an hour the Indian kid was due back, and who knew if he would take his full hour, anyway?

He approached the counter, trying to look a little more nervous than he felt. Shifty eyes, furtive glances. Pitching his voice low, he said, “Talk to you in private?”

“About what?”

Eyes down, shoulders drawn in, he said, “Something special.”

“If it’s got to do with little kids,” the man said, “no disrespect intended, but I don’t know nothing about it, I don’t want to know nothing about it, and I wouldn’t even know where to steer you.”

“Nothing like that,” Keller said.

They went into a room in back. The jowly man closed the door, and as he was turning around Keller hit him with the edge of his hand at the juncture of neck and shoulder. The man’s knees buckled, and in an instant Keller had a loop of wire around his neck. In another minute he was out the door, and within the hour he was on the northbound Metroliner.

When he got home he realized he still had the magazines in his bag. That was sloppy, he should have discarded them the previous night, but he’d simply forgotten them altogether and never even unsealed the package.

Nor could he find a reason to unseal it now. He carried it down the hall, dropped it unopened into the incinerator. Back in his apartment, he fixed himself a weak scotch and water and watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel. The vanishing rain forest, one more goddam thing to worry about.

“Oedipus,” Jerrold Breen said, holding his hands in front of his chest, his fingertips pressed together. “I presume you know the story. Unwittingly, he killed his father and married his mother.”

“Two pitfalls I’ve thus far managed to avoid.”

“Indeed,” Breen said. “But have you? When you fly off somewhere in your official capacity as corporate expediter, when you shoot trouble, as it were, what exactly are you doing? You fire people, you cashier entire divisions, close plants, rearrange human lives. Is that a fair description?”

“I suppose so.”

“There’s an implied violence. Firing a man, terminating his career, is the symbolic equivalent of killing him. And he’s a stranger, and I shouldn’t doubt that the more important of these men are more often than not older than you, isn’t that so?”

“What’s the point?”

“When you do what you do, it’s as if you are seeking out and killing your unknown father.”

“I don’t know,” Keller said. “Isn’t that a little far-fetched?”

“And your relationships with women,” Breen went on, “have a strong Oedipal component. Your mother was a vague and unfocused woman, incompletely present in her own life, incapable of connection with others. Your own relationships with women are likewise blurred and out of focus. Your problems with impotence—”

“Once!”

“—are a natural consequence of this confusion. Your mother herself is dead now, isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“And your father is not to be found, and almost certainly deceased. What’s called for, Peter, is an act specifically designed to reverse this entire pattern on a symbolic level.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s a subtle point,” Breen admitted. He crossed his legs, propped an elbow on a knee, extended his thumb, and rested his bony chin on it. Keller thought, not for the first time, that Breen must have been a stork in a prior life. “If there were a male figure in your life,” Breen went on, “preferably at least a few years your senior, someone playing a faintly paternal role vis-à-vis yourself, someone to whom you turn for advice and direction.”

Keller thought of the man in White Plains.

“Instead of killing this man,” Breen said, “symbolically, I need hardly say — I am speaking symbolically throughout — but instead of killing him as you have done with father figures in the past, it seems to me that you might do something to nourish this man.”

Cook a meal for the man in White Plains? Buy him a hamburger? Toss him a salad?

“Perhaps you could think of a way to use your particular talents to this man’s benefit instead of his detriment,” Breen went on. He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his forehead. “Perhaps there is a woman in his life — your mother, symbolically — and perhaps she is a source of great pain to your father. So, instead of making love to her and slaying him, like Oedipus, you might reverse the usual course of things by, uh, showing love to him and, uh, slaying her.”

“Oh,” Keller said.

“Symbolically, that is to say.”

“Symbolically,” Keller said.

A week later Breen handed him a photograph. “This is called the Thematic Apperception Test,” Breen said. “You look at the photograph and make up a story about it.”

“What kind of story?”

“Any kind at all,” Breen said. “This is an exercise in imagination. You look at the subject of the photograph and imagine what sort of woman she is and what she is doing.”

The photo was in color, and showed a rather elegant brunette dressed in tailored clothing. She had a dog on a leash. The dog was medium size, with a chunky body and an alert expression in its eyes. It was that color which dog people call blue, and which everyone else calls gray.

“It’s a woman and a dog,” Keller said.

“Very good.”

Keller took a breath. “The dog can talk,” he said, “but he won’t do it in front of other people. The woman made a fool of herself once when she tried to show him off. Now she knows better. When they’re alone he talks a blue streak, and the son of a bitch has an opinion on everything. He tells her everything from the real cause of the Thirty Years’ War to the best recipe for lasagna.”

“He’s quite a dog,” Breen said.

“Yes, and now the woman doesn’t want other people to know he can talk, because she’s afraid they might take him away from her. In this picture they’re in the park. It looks like Central Park.”

“Or perhaps Washington Square.”

“It could be Washington Square,” Keller agreed. “The woman is crazy about the dog. The dog’s not so sure about the woman.”

“And what do you think about the woman?”

“She’s attractive,” Keller said.

“On the surface,” Breen said. “Underneath it’s another story, believe me. Where do you suppose she lives?”

Keller gave it some thought. “Cleveland,” he said.

“Cleveland? Why Cleveland, for God’s sake?”

“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”

“If I were taking this test,” Breen said, “I’d probably imagine the woman living at the foot of Fifth Avenue, at Washington Square. I’d have her living at number one Fifth Avenue, perhaps because I’m familiar with that particular building. You see, I once lived there.”

“Oh?”

“In a spacious apartment on a high floor. And once a month,” he continued, “I write out an enormous check and mail it to that address, which used to be mine. So it’s only natural that I would have this particular building in mind, especially when I look at this particular photograph.” His eyes met Keller’s. “You have a question, don’t you? Go ahead and ask it.”

“What breed is the dog?”

“The dog?”

“I just wondered,” Keller said.

“As it happens,” Breen said, “it’s an Australian cattle dog. Looks like a mongrel, doesn’t it? Believe me, it doesn’t talk. But why don’t you hang on to that photograph?”

“All right.”

“You’re making really fine progress in therapy,” Breen said. “I want to acknowledge you for the work you’re doing. And I just know you’ll do the right thing.”

A few days later Keller was sitting on a park bench in Washington Square. He folded his newspaper and walked over to a dark-haired woman wearing a blazer and a beret. “Excuse me,” he said, “but isn’t that an Australian cattle dog?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“It’s a handsome animal,” he said. “You don’t see many of them.”

“Most people think he’s a mutt. It’s such an esoteric breed. Do you own one yourself?”

“I did. My ex-wife got custody.”

“How sad for you.”

“Sadder still for the dog. His name was Soldier. Is Soldier, unless she’s gone and changed it.”

“This fellow’s name is Nelson. That’s his call name. Of course the name on his papers is a real mouthful.”

“Do you show him?”

“He’s seen it all,” she said. “You can’t show him a thing.”

“I went down to the Village last week,” Keller said, “and the damnedest thing happened. I met a woman in the park.”

“Is that the damnedest thing?”

“Well, it’s unusual for me. I meet women at bars and parties, or someone introduces us. But we met and talked, and then I happened to run into her the following morning. I bought her a cappuccino.”

“You just happened to run into her on two successive days.”

“Yes.”

“In the Village.”

“It’s where I live.”

Breen frowned. “You shouldn’t be seen with her, should you?”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

“All it’s cost me so far,” Keller said, “is the price of a cappuccino.”

“I thought we had an understanding.”

“An understanding?”

“You don’t live in the Village,” Breen said. “I know where you live. Don’t look so surprised. The first time you left here I watched you from the window. You behaved as though you were trying to avoid being followed. So I bided my time, and when you stopped taking precautions, that’s when I followed you. It wasn’t that difficult.”

“Why follow me?”

“To find out who you were. Your name is Keller, you live at 865 First Avenue. I already knew what you were. Anybody might have known just from listening to your dreams. And paying in cash, and all of these sudden business trips. I still don’t know who employs you, the crime bosses or the government, but then what difference does it make? Have you been to bed with my wife?”

“Your ex-wife.”

“Answer the question.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Christ. And were you able to perform?”

“Yes.”

“Why the smile?”

“I was just thinking,” Keller said, “that it was quite a performance.”

Breen was silent for a long moment, his eyes fixed on a spot above and to the right of Keller’s shoulder. Then he said, “This is profoundly disappointing. I had hoped you would find the strength to transcend the Oedipal myth, not merely reenact it. You’ve had fun, haven’t you? What a naughty little boy you’ve been! What a triumph you’ve scored over your symbolic father! You’ve taken his woman to bed. No doubt you have visions of getting her pregnant, so that she can give you what she so cruelly denied him. Eh?”

“Never occurred to me.”

“It would, sooner or later.” Breen leaned forward, concern showing on his face. “I hate to see you sabotaging your own therapeutic process this way,” he said. “You were doing so well.”

From the bedroom window you could look down at Washington Square Park. There were plenty of dogs there now, but none of them were Australian cattle dogs.

“Some view,” Keller said. “Some apartment.”

“Believe me,” she said, “I earned it. You’re getting dressed. Going somewhere?”

“Just feeling a little restless. Okay if I take Nelson for a walk?”

“You’re spoiling him,” she said. “You’re spoiling both of us.”

On a Wednesday morning, Keller took a cab to La Guardia and a plane to St. Louis. He had a cup of coffee with an associate of the man in White Plains and caught an evening flight back to New York. He caught another cab and went directly to the apartment building at the foot of Fifth Avenue.

“I’m Peter Stone,” he told the doorman. “I believe Mrs. Breen is expecting me.”

The doorman stared.

“Mrs. Breen,” Keller said. “In Seventeen-J.”

“I guess you haven’t heard,” the doorman said. “I wish it wasn’t me that had to tell you.”

“You killed her,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Breen told him. “She killed herself. She threw herself out the window. If you want my professional opinion, she was suffering from depression.”

“If you want my professional opinion,” Keller said, “she had help.”

“I wouldn’t advance that argument if I were you,” Breen said. “If the police were to look for a murderer, they might look long and hard at Mr. Stone-hyphen-Keller, the stone killer. And I might have to tell them how the usual process of transference went awry, how you became obsessed with me and my personal life, how I couldn’t seem to dissuade you from some inane plan to reverse the Oedipal complex. And then they might ask you why you employ aliases, and just how you make your living, and... do you see why it might be best to let sleeping dogs lie?”

As if on cue, the dog stepped out from behind the desk. He caught sight of Keller and his tail began to wag.

“Sit,” Breen said. “You see? He’s well trained. You might take a seat yourself.”

“I’ll stand. You killed her, and then you walked off with the dog, and—”

Breen sighed. “The police found the dog in the apartment, whimpering in front of the open window. After I went down and identified the body and told them about her previous suicide attempts, I volunteered to take the dog home with me. There was no one else to look after it.”

“I would have taken him,” Keller said.

“But that won’t be necessary, will it? You won’t be called upon to walk my dog or make love to my wife or bed down in my apartment. Your services are no longer required.” Breen seemed to recoil at the harshness of his own words. His face softened. “You’ll be able to get back to the far more important business of therapy. In fact” — he indicated the couch — “why not stretch out right now?”

“That’s not a bad idea. First, though, could you put the dog in the other room?”

“Not afraid he’ll interrupt, are you? Just a little joke. He can wait for us in the outer office. There you go, Nelson. Good dog... Oh, no. How dare you bring a gun to this office? Put that down immediately.”

“I don’t think so.”

“For God’s sake, why kill me? I’m not your father. I’m your therapist. It makes no sense for you to kill me. You’ve got nothing to gain and everything to lose. It’s completely irrational. It’s worse than that, it’s neurotically self-destructive.”

“I guess I’m not cured yet.”

“What’s that, gallows humor? But it happens to be true. You’re a long way from cured, my friend. As a matter of fact, I would say you’re approaching a psychotherapeutic crisis. How will you get through it if you shoot me?”

Keller went to the window, flung it wide open. “I’m not going to shoot you,” he said.

“I’ve never been the least bit suicidal,” Breen said, pressing his back against a wall of bookshelves. “Never.”

“You’ve grown despondent over the death of your ex-wife.”

“That’s sickening, just sickening. And who would believe it?”

“We’ll see,” Keller told him. “As far as the therapeutic crisis is concerned, well, we’ll see about that, too. I’ll think of something.”

The woman at the animal shelter said, “Talk about coincidence. One day you come in and put your name down for an Australian cattle dog. You know, that’s a very uncommon breed in this country.”

“You don’t see many of them.”

“And what came in this morning? A perfectly lovely Australian cattle dog. You could have knocked me over with a sledgehammer. Isn’t he a beauty?”

“He certainly is.”

“He’s been whimpering ever since he got here. It’s very sad, his owner died and there was nobody to keep him. My goodness, look how he went right to you! I think he likes you.”

“I’d say we were made for each other.”

“I can almost believe it. His name is Nelson, but of course you can change it.”

“Nelson,” he said. The dog’s ears perked up. Keller reached to give him a scratch. “No, I don’t think I’ll have to change it. Who was Nelson, anyway? Some kind of English hero, wasn’t he? A famous general or something?”

“I think an admiral. Commander of the British fleet, if I remember correctly. Remember? The Battle of Trafalgar Square?”

“It rings a muted bell,” he said. “Not a soldier but a sailor. Well, that’s close enough, wouldn’t you say? Now I suppose there’s an adoption fee to pay, and some papers to fill out.”

When they’d handled that part she said, “I still can’t get over it. The coincidence and all.”

“I knew a man once,” Keller said, “who insisted there was no such thing as a coincidence or an accident.”

“Well, I wonder how he’d explain this.”

“I’d like to hear him try,” Keller said. “Let’s go, Nelson. Good boy.”

Keller on the Spot

Keller, drink in hand, agreed with the woman in the pink dress that it was a lovely evening. He threaded his way through a crowd of young marrieds on what he supposed you would call the patio. A waitress passed carrying a tray of drinks in stemmed glasses and he traded in his own for a fresh one. He sipped as he walked along, wondering what he was drinking. Some sort of vodka sour, he decided, and decided as well that he didn’t need to narrow it down any further than that. He figured he’d have this one and one more, but he could have ten more if he wanted, because he wasn’t working tonight. He could relax and cut back and have a good time.

Well, almost. He couldn’t relax completely, couldn’t cut back altogether. Because, while this might not be work, neither was it entirely recreational. The garden party this evening was a heaven-sent opportunity for reconnaissance, and he would use it to get a close look at his quarry. He had been handed a picture in the old man’s study back in White Plains, and he had brought that picture with him to Dallas, but even the best photo wasn’t the same as a glimpse of the fellow in the flesh, and in his native habitat.

And a lush habitat it was. Keller hadn’t been inside the house yet, but it was clearly immense, a sprawling multilevel affair of innumerable large rooms. The grounds sprawled as well, covering an acre or two, with enough plants and shrubbery to stock an arboretum. Keller didn’t know anything about flowers, but five minutes in a garden like this one had him thinking he ought to know more about the subject. Maybe they had evening classes at Hunter or NYU, maybe they’d take you on field trips to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Maybe his life would be richer if he knew the names of the flowers, and whether they were annuals or perennials, and whatever else there was to know about them. Their soil requirements, say, and what bug killer to spray on their leaves, or what fertilizer to spread at their roots.

He walked along a brick path, smiling at this stranger, nodding at that one, and wound up standing alongside the swimming pool. Some twelve or fifteen people sat at poolside tables, talking and drinking, the volume of their conversation rising as they drank. In the enormous pool, a young boy swam back and forth, back and forth.

Keller felt a curious kinship with the kid. He was standing instead of swimming, but he felt as distant as the kid from everybody else around. There were two parties going on, he decided. There was the hearty social whirl of everybody else, and there was the solitude he felt in the midst of it all, identical to the solitude of the swimming boy.

Huge pool. The boy was swimming its width, but that dimension was still greater than the length of your typical backyard pool. Keller didn’t know whether this was an Olympic pool, he wasn’t quite sure how big that would have to be, but he figured you could just call it enormous and let it go at that.

Ages ago he’d heard about some college-boy stunt, filling a swimming pool with Jell-O, and he’d wondered how many little boxes of the gelatin dessert it would have required, and how the college boys could have afforded it. It would cost a fortune, he decided, to fill this pool with Jell-O — but if you could afford the pool in the first place, he supposed the Jell-O would be the least of your worries.

There were cut flowers on all the tables, and the blooms looked like ones Keller had seen in the garden. It stood to reason. If you grew all these flowers, you wouldn’t have to order from the florist. You could cut your own.

What good would it do, he wondered, to know the names of all the shrubs and flowers? Wouldn’t it just leave you wanting to dig in the soil and grow your own? And he didn’t want to get into all that, for God’s sake. His apartment was all he needed or wanted, and it was no place for a garden. He hadn’t even tried growing an avocado pit there, and he didn’t intend to. He was the only living thing in the apartment, and that was the way he wanted to keep it. The day that changed was the day he’d call the exterminator.

So maybe he’d just forget about evening classes at Hunter, and field trips to Brooklyn. If he wanted to get close to nature he could walk in Central Park, and if he didn’t know the names of the flowers he would just hold off on introducing himself to them. And if—

Where was the kid?

The boy, the swimmer. Keller’s companion in solitude. Where the hell did he go?

The pool was empty, its surface still. Keller saw a ripple toward the far end, saw a brace of bubbles break the surface.

He didn’t react without thinking. That was how he’d always heard that sort of thing described, but that wasn’t what happened, because the thoughts were there, loud and clear. He’s down there. He’s in trouble. He’s drowning. And, echoing in his head in a voice that might have been Dot’s, sour with exasperation: Keller, for Christ’s sake, do something!

He set his glass on a table, shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants and stepped out of them. Ages ago he’d earned a Red Cross lifesaving certificate, and the first thing they taught you was to strip before you hit the water. The six or seven seconds you spent peeling off your clothes would be repaid many times over in quickness and mobility.

But the strip show did not go unnoticed. Everybody at poolside had a comment, one more hilarious than the next. He barely heard them. In no time at all he was down to his underwear, and then he was out of range of their cleverness, hitting the water’s surface in a flat racing dive, churning the water till he reached the spot where he’d seen the bubbles, then diving, eyes wide, barely noticing the burn of the chlorine.

Searching for the boy. Groping, searching, then finding him, reaching to grab hold of him. And pushing off against the bottom, lungs bursting, racing to reach the surface.

People were saying things to Keller, thanking him, congratulating him, but it wasn’t really registering. A man clapped him on the back, a woman handed him a glass of brandy. He heard the word “hero” and realized that people were saying it all over the place, and applying it to him.

Hell of a note.

Keller sipped the brandy. It gave him heartburn, which assured him of its quality; good cognac always gave him heartburn. He turned to look at the boy. He was just a little fellow, twelve or thirteen years old, his hair lightened and his skin lightly bronzed by the summer sun. He was sitting up now, Keller saw, and looking none the worse for his near-death experience.

“Timothy,” a woman said, “this is the man who saved your life. Do you have something to say to him?”

“Thanks,” Timothy said, predictably.

“Is that all you have to say, young man?”

“It’s enough,” Keller said, and smiled. To the boy he said, “There’s something I’ve always wondered. Did your whole life actually flash before your eyes?”

Timothy shook his head. “I got this cramp,” he said, “and it was like my whole body turned into one big knot, and there wasn’t anything I could do to untie it. And I didn’t even think about drowning. I was just fighting the cramp, ’cause it hurt, and just about the next thing I knew I was up here coughing and puking up water.” He made a face. “I must have swallowed half the pool. All I have to do is think about it and I can taste vomit and chlorine.”

“Timothy,” the woman said, and rolled her eyes.

“Something to be said for plain speech,” an older man said. He had a mane of white hair and a pair of prominent white eyebrows, and his eyes were a vivid blue. He was holding a glass of brandy in one hand and a bottle in the other, and he reached with the bottle to fill Keller’s glass to the brim. “ ‘Claret for boys, port for men,’ ” he said, “ ‘but he who would be a hero must drink brandy.’ That’s Samuel Johnson, although I may have gotten a word wrong.”

The young woman patted his hand. “If you did, Daddy, I’m sure you just improved Mr. Johnson’s wording.”

“Dr. Johnson,” he said, “and one could hardly do that. Improve the man’s wording, that is. ‘Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ He said that as well, and I defy anyone to comment more trenchantly on the experience, or to say it better.” He beamed at Keller. “I owe you more than a glass of brandy and a well-turned Johnsonian phrase. This little rascal whose life you’ve saved is my grandson, and the apple — nay, sir, the very nectarine — of my eye. And we’d have all stood around drinking and laughing while he drowned. You observed, and you acted, and God bless you for it.”

What did you say to that? Keller wondered. It was nothing? Well, shucks? There had to be an apt phrase, and maybe Samuel Johnson could have found it, but he couldn’t. So he said nothing, and just tried not to look po-faced.

“I don’t even know your name,” the white-haired man went on. “That’s not remarkable in and of itself. I don’t know half the people here, and I’m content to remain in my ignorance. But I ought to know your name, wouldn’t you agree?”

Keller might have picked a name out of the air, but the one that leaped to mind was Boswell, and he couldn’t say that to a man who quoted Samuel Johnson. So he supplied the name he’d traveled under, the one he’d signed when he checked into the hotel, the one on the driver’s license and credit cards in his wallet.

“It’s Michael Soderholm,” he said, “and I can’t even tell you the name of the fellow who brought me here. We met over drinks in the hotel bar and he said he was going to a party and it would be perfectly all right if I came along. I felt a little funny about it, but—”

“Please,” the man said. “You can’t possibly propose to apologize for your presence here. It’s kept my grandson from a watery if chlorinated grave. And I’ve just told you I don’t know half my guests, but that doesn’t make them any the less welcome.” He took a deep drink of his brandy and topped up both glasses. “Michael Soderholm,” he said. “Swedish?”

“A mixture of everything,” Keller said, improvising. “My great-grandfather Soderholm came over from Sweden, but my other ancestors came from all over Europe, plus I’m something like a sixteenth American Indian.”

“Oh? Which tribe?”

“Cherokee,” Keller said, thinking of the jazz tune.

“I’m an eighth Comanche,” the man said. “So I’m afraid we’re not tribal bloodbrothers. The rest’s British Isles, a mix of Scots and Irish and English. Old Texas stock. But you’re not Texan yourself.”

“No.”

“Well, it can’t be helped, as the saying goes. Unless you decide to move here, and who’s to say that you won’t? It’s a fine place for a man to live.”

“Daddy thinks everybody should love Texas the way he does,” the woman said.

“Everybody should,” her father said. “The only thing wrong with Texans is we’re a long-winded lot. Look at the time it’s taking me to introduce myself! Mr. Soderholm, Mr. Michael Soderholm, my name’s Garrity, Wallace Penrose Garrity, and I’m your grateful host this evening.”

No kidding, thought Keller.

The party, lifesaving and all, took place on Saturday night. The next day Keller sat in his hotel room and watched the Cowboys beat the Vikings with a field goal in the last three minutes of double overtime. The game had seesawed back and forth, with interceptions and runbacks, and the announcers kept telling each other what a great game it was.

Keller supposed they were right. It had all the ingredients, and it wasn’t the players’ fault that he himself was entirely unmoved by their performance. He could watch sports, and often did, but he almost never got caught up in it. He had occasionally wondered if his work might have something to do with it. On one level, when your job involved dealing regularly with life and death, how could you care if some overpaid steroid abuser had a touchdown run called back? And, on another level, you saw unorthodox solutions to a team’s problems on the field. When Emmitt Smith kept crashing through the Minnesota line, Keller found himself wondering why they didn’t deputize someone to shoot the son of a bitch in the back of the neck, right below his star-covered helmet.

Still, it was better than watching golf, say, which in turn had to be better than playing golf. And he couldn’t get out and work, because there was nothing for him to do. Last night’s reconnaissance mission had been both better and worse than he could have hoped, and what was he supposed to do now, park his rented Ford across the street from the Garrity mansion and clock the comings and goings?

No need for that. He could bide his time, just so he got there in time for Sunday dinner.

“Some more potatoes, Mr. Soderholm?”

“They’re delicious,” Keller said. “But I’m full. Really.”

“And we can’t keep calling you Mr. Soderholm,” Garrity said. “I’ve only held off this long for not knowing whether you prefer Mike or Michael.”

“Mike’s fine,” Keller said.

“Then Mike it is. And I’m Wally, Mike, or W.P., though there are those who call me ‘The Walrus.’ ”

Timmy laughed, and clapped both hands over his mouth.

“Though never to his face,” said the woman who’d offered Keller more potatoes. She was Ellen Garrity, Timmy’s aunt and Garrity’s daughter-in-law, and Keller was now instructed to call her Ellie. Her husband, a big-shouldered fellow who seemed to be smiling bravely through the heartbreak of male-pattern baldness, was Garrity’s son, Hank.

Keller remembered Timothy’s mother from the night before, but hadn’t got her name at the time, or her relationship to Garrity. She was Rhonda Sue Butler, as it turned out, and everybody called her Rhonda Sue, except for her husband, who called her Ronnie. His name was Doak Butler, and he looked like a college jock who’d been too light for pro ball, although he now seemed to be closing the gap.

Hank and Ellie, Doak and Rhonda Sue. And, at the far end of the table, Vanessa, who was married to Wally but who was clearly not the mother of Hank or Rhonda Sue, or anyone else. Keller supposed you could describe her as Wally’s trophy wife, a sign of his success. She was young, no older than Wally’s kids, and she looked to be well-bred and elegant, and she even had the good grace to hide the boredom Keller was sure she felt.

And that was the lot of them. Wally and Vanessa, Hank and Ellen, Doak and Rhonda Sue. And Timothy, who he was assured had been swimming that very afternoon, the aquatic equivalent of getting right back on the horse. He’d had no cramps this time, but he’d had an attentive eye kept on him throughout.

Seven of them, then. And Keller... also known as Mike.

“So you’re here on business,” Wally said. “And stuck here over the weekend, which is the worst part of a business trip, as far as I’m concerned. More trouble than it’s worth to fly back to Chicago?”

The two of them were in Wally’s den, a fine room paneled in knotty pecan and trimmed out in red leather, with western doodads on the walls — here a branding iron, there a longhorn skull. Keller had accepted a brandy and declined a cigar, and the aroma of Wally’s Havana was giving him second thoughts. Keller didn’t smoke, but from the smell of it the cigar wasn’t a mere matter of smoking. It was more along the lines of a religious experience.

“Seemed that way,” Keller said. He’d supplied Chicago as Michael Soderholm’s home base, though Soderholm’s license placed him in Southern California. “By the time I fly there and back...”

“You’ve spent your weekend on airplanes. Well, it’s our good fortune you decided to stay. Now what I’d like to do is find a way to make it your good fortune as well.”

“You’ve already done that,” Keller told him. “I crashed a great party last night and actually got to feel like a hero for a few minutes. And tonight I sit down to a fine dinner with nice people and get to top it off with a glass of outstanding brandy.”

The heartburn told him how outstanding it was.

“What I had in mind,” Wally said smoothly, “was to get you to work for me.”

Whom did he want him to kill? Keller almost blurted out the question until he remembered that Garrity didn’t know what he did for a living.

“You won’t say who you work for,” Garrity went on.

“I can’t.”

“Because the job’s hush-hush for now. Well, I can respect that, and from the hints you’ve dropped I gather you’re here scouting out something in the way of mergers and acquisitions.”

“That’s close.”

“And I’m sure it’s well paid, and you must like the work or I don’t think you’d stay with it. So what do I have to do to get you to switch horses and come work for me? I’ll tell you one thing — Chicago’s a real nice place, but nobody who ever moved from there to Big D went around with a sour face about it. I don’t know you well yet, but I can tell you’re our kind of people and Dallas’ll be your kind of town. And I don’t know what they’re paying you, but I suspect I can top it, and offer you a stake in a growing company with all sorts of attractive possibilities.”

Keller listened, nodded judiciously, sipped a little brandy. It was amazing, he thought, the way things came along when you weren’t looking for them. It was straight out of Horatio Alger, for God’s sake — Ragged Dick stops the runaway horse and saves the daughter of the captain of industry, and the next thing you know he’s president of IBM with rising expectations.

“Maybe I’ll have that cigar after all,” he said.

“Now, come on, Keller,” Dot said. “You know the rules. I can’t tell you that.”

“It’s sort of important,” he said.

“One of the things the client buys,” she said, “is confidentiality. That’s what he wants and it’s what we provide. Even if the agent in place—”

“The agent in place?”

“That’s you,” she said. “You’re the agent, and Dallas is the place. Even if you get caught red-handed, the confidentiality of the client remains uncompromised. And do you know why?”

“Because the agent in place knows how to keep mum.”

“Mum’s the word,” she agreed, “and there’s no question you’re the strong, silent type, but even if your lip loosens you can’t sink a ship if you don’t know when it’s sailing.”

Keller thought that over. “You lost me,” he said.

“Yeah, it came out a little abstruse, didn’t it? Point is you can’t tell what you don’t know, Keller, which is why the agent doesn’t get to know the client’s name.”

“Dot,” he said, trying to sound injured. “Dot, how long have you known me?”

“Ages, Keller. Many lifetimes.”

“Many lifetimes?”

“We were in Atlantis together. Look, I know nobody’s going to catch you red-handed, and I know you wouldn’t blab if they did. But I can’t tell what I don’t know.”

“Oh.”

“Right. I think the spies call it a double cutout. The client made arrangements with somebody we know, and that person called us. But he didn’t give us the client’s name, and why should he? And, come to think of it, Keller, why do you have to know, anyway?”

He had his answer ready. “It might not be a single,” he said.

“Oh?”

“The target’s always got people around him,” he said, “and the best way to do it might be a sort of group plan, if you follow me.”

“Two for the price of one.”

“Or three or four,” he said. “But if one of those innocent bystanders turned out to be the client, it might make things a little awkward.”

“Well, I can see where we might have trouble collecting the final payment.”

“If we knew for a fact that the client was fishing for trout in Montana,” he said, “it’s no problem. But if he’s here in Dallas—”

“It would help to know his name.” She sighed. “Give me an hour or two, huh? Then call me back.”

If he knew who the client was, the client could have an accident.

It would have to be an artful accident too. It would have to look good not only to the police but to whoever was aware of the client’s own intentions. The local go-between, the helpful fellow who’d hooked up the client to the old man in White Plains, and thus to Keller, could be expected to cast a cold eye on any suspicious death. So it would have to be a damn good accident, but Keller had managed a few of those in his day. It took a little planning, but it wasn’t brain surgery. You just figured out a method and took your best shot.

It might take some doing. If, as he rather hoped, the client was some business rival in Houston or Denver or San Diego, he’d have to slip off to that city without anyone noting his absence. Then, having induced a quick attack of accidental death, he’d fly back to Dallas and hang around until someone called him off the case. He’d need different ID for Houston or Denver or San Diego — it wouldn’t do to overexpose Michael Soderholm — and he’d need to mask his actions from all concerned — Garrity, his homicidal rival, and, perhaps most important, Dot and the old man.

All told, it was a great deal more complicated (if easier to stomach) than the alternative.

Which was to carry out the assignment professionally and kill Wallace Penrose Garrity the first good chance he got.

And he really didn’t want to do that. He’d eaten at the man’s table, he’d drunk the man’s brandy, he’d smoked the man’s cigars. He’d been offered not merely a job but a well-paid executive position with a future, and, later that night, light-headed from alcohol and nicotine, he’d had fantasies of taking Wally up on it.

Hell, why not? He could live out his days as Michael Soderholm, doing whatever unspecified tasks Garrity was hiring him to perform. He probably lacked the requisite experience, but how hard could it be to pick up the skills he needed as he went along? Whatever he had to do, it would be easier than flying from town to town killing people. He could learn on the job. He could pull it off.

The fantasy had about as much substance as a dream, and, like a dream, it was gone when he awoke the next morning. No one would put him on the payroll without some sort of background check, and the most cursory scan would knock him out of the box. Michael Soderholm had no more substance than the fake ID in his wallet.

Even if he somehow finessed a background check, even if the old man in White Plains let him walk out of one life and into another, he knew he couldn’t really make it work. He already had a life. Misshapen though it was, it fit him like a glove.

Other lives made tempting fantasies. Running a print shop in Roseburg, Oregon, living in a cute little house with a mansard roof — it was something to tease yourself with while you went on being the person you had no choice but to be. This latest fantasy was just more of the same.

He went out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He got back in his car and drove around for a while. Then he found a pay phone and called White Plains.

“Do a single,” Dot said.

“How’s that?”

“No added extras, no free dividends. Just do what they signed on for.”

“Because the client’s here in town,” he said. “Well, I could work around that if I knew his name. I could make sure he was out of it.”

“Forget it,” Dot said. “The client wants a long and happy life for everybody but the designated vic. Maybe the DV’s close associates are near and dear to the client. That’s just a guess, but all that really matters is that nobody else gets hurt. Capeesh?”

“ ‘Capeesh’?”

“It’s Italian, it means—”

“I know what it means. It just sounded odd from your lips, that’s all. But yes, I understand.” He took a breath. “Whole thing may take a little time,” he said.

“Then here comes the good news,” she said. “Time’s not of the essence. They don’t care how long it takes, just so you get it right.”

“I understand W.P. offered you a job,” Vanessa said. “I know he hopes you’ll take him up on it.”

“I think he was just being generous,” Keller told her. “I was in the right place at the right time, and he’d like to do me a favor, but I don’t think he really expects me to come to work for him.”

“He’d like it if you did,” she said, “or he never would have made the offer. He’d have just given you money, or a car, or something like that. And as far as what he expects, well, W.P. generally expects to get whatever he wants. Because that’s the way things usually work out.”

And had she been saving up her pennies to get things to work out a little differently? You had to wonder. Was she truly under Garrity’s spell, in awe of his power, as she seemed to be? Or was she only in it for the money, and was there a sharp edge of irony under her worshipful remarks?

Hard to say. Hard to tell about any of them. Was Hank the loyal son he appeared to be, content to live in the old man’s shadow and take what got tossed his way? Or was he secretly resentful and ambitious?

What about the son-in-law, Doak? On the surface, he looked to be delighted with the aftermath of his college football career — his work for his father-in-law consisted largely of playing golf with business associates and drinking with them afterward. But did he seethe inside, sure he was fit for greater things?

How about Hank’s wife, Ellie? She struck Keller as an unlikely Lady Macbeth. Keller could fabricate scenarios in which she or Rhonda Sue had a reason for wanting Wally dead, but they were the sort of thing you dreamed up while watching reruns of Dallas and trying to guess who shot J.R. Maybe one of their marriages was in trouble. Maybe Garrity had put the moves on his daughter-in-law, or maybe a little too much brandy had led him into his daughter’s bedroom now and then. Maybe Doak or Hank was playing footsie with Vanessa. Maybe...

Pointless to speculate, he decided. You could go around and around like that and it didn’t get you anywhere. Even if he managed to dope out which of them was the client, then what? Having saved young Timothy, and thus feeling obligated to spare his doting grandfather, what was he going to do? Kill the boy’s father? Or mother or aunt or uncle?

Of course he could just go home. He could even explain the situation to the old man. Nobody loved it when you took yourself off a contract for personal reasons, but it wasn’t something they could talk you out of, either. If you made a habit of that sort of thing, well, that was different, but that wasn’t the case with Keller. He was a solid pro. Quirky perhaps, even whimsical, but a pro all the way. You told him what to do and he did it.

So, if he had a personal reason to bow out, you honored it. You let him come home and sit on the porch and drink iced tea with Dot.

And you picked up the phone and sent somebody else to Dallas.

Because either way the job was going to be done. If a hit man had a change of heart, it would be followed in short order by a change of hit man. If Keller didn’t pull the trigger, somebody else would.

His mistake, Keller thought savagely, was to jump in the goddam pool in the first place. All he’d had to do was look the other way and let the little bastard drown. A few days later he could have taken Garrity out, possibly making it look like suicide, a natural consequence of despondency over the boy’s tragic accident.

But no, he thought, glaring at himself in the mirror. No, you had to go and get involved. You had to be a hero, for God’s sake. Had to strip down to your skivvies and prove you deserved that junior lifesaving certificate the Red Cross gave you all those years ago.

He wondered whatever happened to that certificate.

It was gone, of course, like everything he’d ever owned in his childhood and youth. Gone like his high school diploma, like his Boy Scout merit badge sash, like his stamp collection and his sack of marbles and his stack of baseball cards. He didn’t mind that these things were gone, didn’t waste time wishing he had them any more than he wanted those years back.

But he wondered what physically became of them. The lifesaving certificate, for instance. Someone might have thrown out his baseball cards, or sold his stamp collection to a dealer. A certificate, though, wasn’t something you threw out, nor was it something anyone else would want.

Maybe it was buried in a landfill, or in a stack of paper ephemera in the back of some thrift shop. Maybe some pack rat had rescued it, and maybe it was now part of an extensive collection of junior lifesaving certificates, housed in an album and cherished as living history, the pride and joy of a collector ten times as quirky and whimsical as Keller could ever dream of being.

He wondered how he felt about that. His certificate, his small achievement, living on in some eccentric’s collection. On the one hand, it was a kind of immortality, wasn’t it? On the other hand, well, whose certificate was it, anyway? He’d been the one to earn it, breaking the instructor’s choke hold, spinning him and grabbing him in a cross-chest carry, towing the big lug to the side of the pool. It was his accomplishment and it had his name on it, so didn’t it belong on his own wall or nowhere?

All in all, he couldn’t say he felt strongly either way. The certificate, when all was said and done, was only a piece of paper. What was important was the skill itself, and what was truly remarkable was that he’d retained it.

Because of it, Timothy Butler was alive and well. Which was all well and good for the boy, and a great big headache for Keller.

Later, sitting with a cup of coffee, Keller thought some more about Wallace Penrose Garrity, a man who increasingly seemed to have not an enemy in the world.

Suppose Keller had let the kid drown. Suppose he just plain hadn’t noticed the boy’s disappearance beneath the water, just as everyone else had failed to notice it. Garrity would have been despondent. It was his party, his pool, his failure to provide supervision. He’d probably have blamed himself for the boy’s death.

When Keller took him out, it would have been the kindest thing he could have done for him.

He caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for more coffee. He’d just given himself something to think about.

“Mike,” Garrity said, coming toward him with a hand outstretched. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Had a phone call from a fellow with a hankering to buy a little five-acre lot of mine on the south edge of town. Thing is, I don’t want to sell it to him.”

“I see.”

“But there’s ten acres on the other side of town I’d be perfectly happy to sell to him, but he’ll only want it if he thinks of it himself. So that left me on the phone longer than I would have liked. Now what would you say to a glass of brandy?”

“Maybe a small one.”

Garrity led the way to the den, poured drinks for both of them. “You should have come earlier,” he said. “In time for dinner. I hope you know you don’t need an invitation. There’ll always be a place for you at our table.”

“Well,” Keller said.

“I know you can’t talk about it,” Garrity said, “but I hope your project here in town is shaping up nicely.”

“Slow but sure,” Keller said.

“Some things can’t be hurried,” Garrity allowed, and sipped brandy, and winced. If Keller hadn’t been looking for it, he might have missed the shadow that crossed his host’s face.

Gently he said, “Is the pain bad, Wally?”

“How’s that, Mike?”

Keller put his glass on the table. “I spoke to Dr. Jacklin,” he said. “I know what you’re going through.”

“That son of a bitch,” Garrity said, “was supposed to keep his mouth shut.”

“Well, he thought it was all right to talk to me,” Keller said. “He thought I was Dr. Edward Fishman from the Mayo Clinic.”

“Calling for a consultation.”

“Something like that.”

“I did go to Mayo,” Garrity said, “but they didn’t need to call Harold Jacklin to double-check their results. They just confirmed his diagnosis and told me not to buy any long-playing records.” He looked to one side. “They said they couldn’t say for sure how much time I had left, but that the pain would be manageable for a while. And then it wouldn’t.”

“I see.”

“And I’d have all my faculties for a while,” he said. “And then I wouldn’t.”

Keller didn’t say anything.

“Well, hell,” Garrity said. “A man wants to take the bull by the horns, doesn’t he? I decided I’d go out for a walk with a shotgun and have a little hunting accident. Or I’d be cleaning a handgun here at my desk and have it go off. But it turned out I just couldn’t tolerate the idea of killing myself. Don’t know why, can’t explain it, but that seems to be the way I’m made.”

He picked up his glass and looked at the brandy. “Funny how we hang on to life,” he said. “Something else Sam Johnson said, said there wasn’t a week of his life he’d voluntarily live through again. I’ve had more good times than bad, Mike, and even the bad times haven’t been that godawful, but I think I know what he was getting at. I wouldn’t want to repeat any of it, but that doesn’t mean there’s a minute of it I’d have been willing to miss. I don’t want to miss whatever’s coming next, either, and I don’t guess Dr. Johnson did either. That’s what keeps us going, isn’t it? Wanting to find out what’s around the next bend in the river.”

“I guess so.”

“I thought that would make the end easier to face,” he said. “Not knowing when it was coming, or how or where. And I recalled that years ago a fellow told me to let him know if I ever needed to have somebody killed. ‘You just let me know,’ he said, and I laughed, and that was the last said on the subject. A month or so ago I looked up his number and called him, and he gave me another number to call.”

“And you put out a contract.”

“Is that the expression? Then that’s what I did.”

“Suicide by proxy,” Keller said.

“And I guess you’re holding my proxy,” Garrity said, and drank some brandy. “You know, the thought flashed across my mind that first night, talking with you after you pulled my grandson out of the pool. I got this little glimmer, but I told myself I was being ridiculous. A hired killer doesn’t turn up and save somebody’s life.”

“It’s out of character,” Keller agreed.

“Besides, what would you be doing at the party in the first place? Wouldn’t you stay out of sight and wait until you could get me alone?”

“If I’d been thinking straight,” Keller said. “I told myself it wouldn’t hurt to have a look around. And this joker from the hotel bar assured me I had nothing to worry about. ‘Half the town’ll be at Wally’s tonight,’ he said.”

“Half the town was. You wouldn’t have tried anything that night, would you?”

“God, no.”

“I remember thinking, I hope he’s not here. I hope it’s not tonight. Because I was enjoying the party and I didn’t want to miss anything. But you were there, and a good thing, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Saved the boy from drowning. According to the Chinese, you save somebody’s life, you’re responsible for him for the rest of your life. Because you’ve interfered with the natural order of things. That make sense to you?”

“Not really.”

“Or me either. You can’t beat them for whipping up a meal or laundering a shirt, but they’ve got some queer ideas on other subjects. Of course they’d probably say the same for some of my notions.”

“Probably.”

Garrity looked at his glass. “You called my doctor,” he said. “Must have been to confirm a suspicion you already had. What tipped you off? Is it starting to show in my face, or the way I move around?”

Keller shook his head. “I couldn’t find anybody else with a motive,” he said, “or a grudge against you. You were the only one left. And then I remembered seeing you wince once or twice, and try to hide it. I barely noticed it at the time, but then I started to think about it.”

“I thought it would be easier than doing it myself,” Garrity said. “I thought I’d just let a professional take me by surprise. I’d be like an old bull elk on a hillside, never expecting the bullet that takes him out in his prime.”

“It makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. Because the elk didn’t arrange for the hunter to be there. Far as the elk knows, he’s all alone there. He’s not wondering every damn day if today’s the day. He’s not bracing himself, trying to sense the crosshairs centering on his shoulder.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Neither did I,” said Garrity. “Or I never would have called that fellow in the first place. Mike, what the hell are you doing here tonight? Don’t tell me you came over to kill me.”

“I came to tell you I can’t.”

“Because we’ve come to know each other.”

Keller nodded.

“I grew up on a farm,” Garrity said. “One of those vanishing family farms you hear about, and of course it’s vanished, and I say good riddance. But we raised our own beef and pork, you know, and we kept a milk cow and a flock of laying hens. And we never named the animals we were going to wind up eating. The milk cow had a name, but not the bull calf she dropped. The breeder sow’s name was Elsie, but we never named her piglets.”

“Makes sense,” Keller said.

“I guess it doesn’t take a Chinaman to see how you can’t kill me once you’ve hauled Timmy out of the drink. Let alone after you’ve sat at my table and smoked my cigars. Reminds me, you care for a cigar?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, where do we go from here, Mike? I have to say I’m relieved. I feel like I’ve been bracing myself for a bullet for weeks now. All of a sudden I’ve got a new lease on life. I’d say this calls for a drink except we’re already having one, and you’ve scarcely touched yours.”

“There is one thing,” Keller said.

He left the den while Garrity made his phone call. Timothy was in the living room, puzzling over a chessboard. Keller played a game with him and lost badly. “Can’t win ’em all,” he said, and tipped over his king.

“I was going to checkmate you,” the boy said. “In a few more moves.”

“I could see it coming,” Keller told him.

He went back to the den. Garrity was selecting a cigar from his humidor. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m fixing to smoke one of these things. If you won’t kill me, maybe it will.”

“You never know.”

“I made the call, Mike, and it’s all taken care of. Be a while before the word filters up and down the chain of command, but sooner or later they’ll call you up and tell you the client changed his mind. He paid in full and called off the job.”

They talked some, then sat a while in silence. At length Keller said he ought to get going. “I should be at my hotel,” he said, “in case they call.”

“Be a couple of days, won’t it?”

“Probably,” he said, “but you never know. If everyone involved makes a phone call right away, the word could get to me in a couple of hours.”

“Calling you off, telling you to come home. Be glad to get home, I bet.”

“It’s nice here,” he said, “but yes, I’ll be glad to get home.”

“Wherever it is, they say there’s no place like it.” Garrity leaned back, then allowed himself to wince at the pain that came over him. “If it never hurts worse than this,” he said, “then I can stand it. But of course it will get worse. And I’ll decide I can stand that, and then it’ll get worse again.”

There was nothing to say to that.

“I guess I’ll know when it’s time to do something,” Garrity said. “And who knows? Maybe my heart’ll cut out on me out of the blue. Or I’ll get hit by a bus, or I don’t know what. Struck by lightning?”

“It could happen.”

“Anything can happen,” Garrity agreed. He got to his feet. “Mike,” he said, “I guess we won’t be seeing any more of each other, and I have to say I’m a little bit sorry about that. I’ve truly enjoyed our time together.”

“So have I, Wally.”

“I wondered, you know, what he’d be like. The man they’d send to do this kind of work. I don’t know what I expected, but you’re not it.”

He stuck out his hand, and Keller gripped it. “Take care,” Garrity said. “Be well, Mike.”

Back at his hotel, Keller took a hot bath and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning he went out for breakfast, and when he got back there was a message at the desk for him: Mr. Soderholm — please call your office.

He called from a pay phone, even though it didn’t matter, and he was careful not to overreact when Dot told him to come home, the mission was aborted.

“You told me I had all the time in the world,” he said. “If I’d known the guy was in such a rush—”

“Keller,” she said, “it’s a good thing you waited. What he did, he changed his mind.”

“He changed his mind?”

“It used to be a woman’s prerogative,” Dot said, “but now we’ve got equality between the sexes, so that means anyone can do it. It works out fine because we’re getting paid in full. So kick the dust of Texas off your feet and come on home.”

“I’ll do that,” he said, “but I may hang out here for a few more days.”

“Oh?”

“Or even a week,” he said. “It’s a pretty nice town.”

“Don’t tell me you’re itching to move there, Keller. We’ve been through this before.”

“Nothing like that,” he said, “but there’s this girl I met.”

“Oh, Keller.”

“Well, she’s nice,” he said. “And if I’m off the job there’s no reason not to have a date or two with her, is there?”

“As long as you don’t decide to move in.”

“She’s not that nice,” he said, and Dot laughed and told him not to change.

He hung up and drove around and found a movie he’d been meaning to see. The next morning he packed and checked out of his hotel.

He drove across town and got a room on the motel strip, paying cash for four nights in advance and registering as J. D. Smith from Los Angeles.

There was no girl he’d met, no girl he wanted to meet. But it wasn’t time to go home yet.

He had unfinished business, and four days should give him time to do it. Time for Wallace Garrity to get used to the idea of not feeling those imaginary crosshairs on his shoulder blades.

But not so much time that the pain would be too much to bear.

And, sometime in those four days, Keller would give him a gift. If he could, he’d make it look natural — a heart attack, say, or an accident. In any event it would be swift and without warning, and as close as he could make it to painless.

And it would be unexpected. Garrity would never see it coming.

Keller frowned, trying to figure out how he would manage it. It would be a lot trickier than the task that had drawn him to town originally, but he’d brought it on himself. Getting involved, fishing the boy out of the pool. He’d interfered with the natural order of things. He was under an obligation.

It was the least he could do.

Keller’s Horoscope

Keller got out of the taxi at Bleecker and Broadway because that was easier than trying to tell the Haitian cabdriver how to find Crosby Street. He walked to Maggie’s building, a former warehouse with a forbidding exterior, and rode up to her fifth-floor loft. She was waiting for him, wearing a black canvas coat of the sort you saw in western movies. It was called a duster, probably because it was cut long to keep the dust off. Maggie was a small woman — elfin, he had decided, was a good word for her — and this particular duster reached clear to the floor.

“Surprise,” she said, and flung it open, and there was nothing under it but her.

Keller, who’d met Maggie Griscomb at an art gallery, had been keeping infrequent company with her for a while now. Just the other day a chance remark of his had led Dot to ask if he was seeing anybody, and he’d been stuck for an answer. Was he? It was hard to say.

“It’s a superficial relationship,” he’d explained.

“Keller, what other kind is there?”

“The thing is,” he said, “she wants it that way. We get together once a week, if that. And we go to bed.”

“Don’t you at least go out for dinner first?”

“I’ve given up suggesting it. She’s tiny, she probably doesn’t eat much. Maybe eating is something she can only do in private.”

“You’d be surprised how many people feel that way about sex,” Dot said. “But I’d have to say she sounds like the proverbial sailor’s dream. Does she own a liquor store?”

She was a failed painter who’d reinvented herself as a jewelry maker. “You bought earrings for the last woman in your life,” Dot reminded him. “This one makes her own. What are you going to buy for her?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s economical. Between not giving her gifts and not taking her out to dinner, I can’t see this one putting much of a strain on your budget. Can you at least send the woman flowers?”

“I already did.”

“Well, it’s something you can do more than once, Keller. That’s one of the nice things about flowers. The little buggers die, so you get to throw them out and make room for fresh ones.”

“She liked the flowers,” he said, “but she told me once was enough. Don’t do it again, she said.”

“Because she wants to keep things superficial.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Keller,” she said, “I’ve got to hand it to you. You don’t find that many of them, but you sure pick the strange ones.”

“Now that was intense,” Maggie said. “Was it just my imagination, or was that a major earth-shaking experience?”

“High up there on the Richter scale,” he said.

“I thought tonight would be special. Full moon tomorrow.”

“Does that mean we should have waited?”

“In my experience,” she said, “it’s the day before the full moon that I feel it the strongest.”

“Feel what?”

“The moon.”

“But what is it you feel? What effect does it have on you?”

“Makes me restless. Heightens my moods. Sort of intensifies things. Same as everybody else, I guess. What about you, Keller? What does the moon do for you?”

As far as Keller could tell, all the moon did for him was light up the sky a little. Living in the city, where there were plenty of streetlights to take up the slack, he paid little attention to the moon, and might not have noticed if someone took it away. New moon, half moon, full moon — only when he caught an occasional glimpse of it between the buildings did he know what phase it was in.

Maggie evidently paid more attention to the moon, and attached more significance to it. Well, if the moon had had anything to do with the pleasure they’d just shared, he was grateful to it, and glad to have it around.

“Besides,” she was saying, “my horoscope says I’m going through a very sexy time.”

“Your horoscope.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you do, read it every morning?”

“You mean in the newspaper? Well, I’m not saying I never look, but I wouldn’t rely on a newspaper horoscope for advice and counsel any more than I’d need Ann Landers to tell me if I have to pet to be popular.”

“On that subject,” he said, “I’d say you don’t absolutely have to, but what could it hurt?”

“And who knows,” she said, reaching out for him. “I might even enjoy it.”

A while later she said, “Newspaper astrology columns are fun, like Peanuts and Doonesbury, but they’re not very accurate. But I got my chart done, and I go in once a year for a tune-up. So I’ll have an idea what to expect over the coming twelve months.”

“You believe in all that?”

“Astrology? Well, it’s like gravity, isn’t it?”

“It keeps things from flying off in space?”

“It works whether I believe in it or not,” she said. “So I might as well. Besides, I believe in everything.”

“Like Santa Claus?”

“And the Tooth Fairy. No, all the occult stuff, like tarot and numerology and palmistry and phrenology and—”

“What’s that?”

“Head bumps,” she said, and capped his skull with her hand. “You’ve got some.”

“I’ve got head bumps?”

“Uh-huh, but don’t ask me what they mean. I’ve never even been to a phrenologist.”

“Would you?”

“Go to one? Sure, if somebody steered me to a good one. In all of these areas, some practitioners are better than others. There are the storefront gypsies who are really just running a scam, but after that you’ve still got different levels of proficiency. Some people have a knack and some just hack away at it. But that’s true in every line of work, isn’t it?”

It was certainly true in his.

“What I don’t get,” he said, “is how any of it works. What difference does it make where the stars are when you’re born? What has that got to do with anything?”

“I don’t know how anything works,” she said, “or why it should. Why does the light go on when I throw the switch? Why do I get wet when you touch me? It’s all a mystery.”

“But head bumps, for Christ’s sake. Tarot cards.”

“Sometimes it’s just a way for a person to access her intuition,” she said. “I used to know a woman who could read shoes.”

“The labels? I don’t follow you.”

“She’d look at a pair of shoes that you’d owned for a while, and she could tell you things about yourself.”

“ ‘You need half-soles.’ ”

“No, like you eat too much starchy food, and you need to express the feminine side of your personality, and the relationship you’re in is stifling your creativity. Things like that.”

“All by looking at your shoes. And that makes sense to you?”

“Does sense make sense? Look, do you know what holism is?”

“Like eating brown rice?”

“No, that’s whole foods. Holism is like with holograms, the principle’s that any cell in the body represents the entire life in microcosm. That’s why I can rub your feet and make your headache go away.”

“You can?”

“Well, not me personally, but a foot reflexologist could. That’s why a palmist can look at your hand and see evidence of physical conditions that have nothing to do with your hands. They show up there, and in the irises of your eyes, and the bumps on your head.”

“And the heels of your shoes,” Keller said. “I had my palm read once.”

“Oh?”

“A year or two ago. I was at this party, and they had a palmist for entertainment.”

“Probably not a very good one, if she was hiring out for parties. How good a reading did she give you?”

“She didn’t.”

“I thought you said you had your palm read.”

“I was willing. She wasn’t. I sat down at the table with her and gave her my hand, and she took a good look and gave it back to me.”

“That’s awful. You must have been terrified.”

“Of what?”

“That she saw imminent death in your hand.”

“It crossed my mind,” he admitted. “But I figured she was just a performer, and this was part of the performance. I was a little edgy the next time I got on a plane—”

“I’ll bet.”

“—but it was a routine flight, and time passed and nothing happened, and I forgot about it. I couldn’t tell you the last time I even thought about it.”

She reached out a hand. “Gimme.”

“Huh?”

“Give me your hand. Let’s see what got the bitch in a tizzy.”

“You can read palms?”

“Not quite, but I can claim a smattering of ignorance on the subject. Let’s see now, I don’t want to know too much, because it might jeopardize the superficiality of our relationship. There’s your head line, there’s your heart line, there’s your life line. And no marriage lines. Well, you said you’ve never been married, and your hand says you were telling the truth. I can’t say I can see anything here that would make me tell you not to buy any long-playing records.”

“That’s a relief.”

“So I bet I know what spooked her. You’ve got a murderer’s thumb.”

Keller, working on his stamp collection, kept interrupting himself to look at his thumb. There it was, teaming up with his forefinger to grip a pair of tongs, to pick up a glassine envelope, to hold a magnifying glass. There it was, his own personal mark of Cain. His murderer’s thumb.

“It’s the particular way your thumb is configured,” Maggie had told him. “See how it goes here? And look at my thumb, or your left thumb, as far as that goes. See the difference?”

She was able to recognize the murderer’s thumb, he learned, because a childhood friend of hers, a perfectly gentle and nonviolent person, had one just like it. A palmist had told her friend it was a murderer’s thumb, and the two of them had looked it up in a book on the subject. And there it was, pictured lifesize and in color, the Murderer’s Thumb, and it was just like her friend Jacqui’s thumb, and, now, just like Keller’s.

“But she never should have given you your hand back the way she did,” Maggie had assured him. “I don’t know if anybody’s keeping statistics, but I’m sure most of the murderers walking around have two perfectly normal thumbs, while most people who do happen to have a murderer’s thumb have never killed anybody in their life, and never will.”

“That’s a comfort.”

“How many people have you killed, Keller?”

“None, for God’s sake.”

“And do you sense a burst of homicidal rage in your future?”

“Not really.”

“Then I’d say you can relax. You may have a murderer’s thumb, but I don’t think you have to worry about it.”

He wasn’t worried, not exactly. But he would have to say he was puzzled. How could a man have a murderer’s thumb all his life and be unaware of it? And, when all was said and done, what did it mean?

He had certainly never paid any particular attention to his thumb. He had been aware that his two thumbs were not identical, that there was something slightly atypical about his right thumb, but it was not eye-catchingly idiosyncratic, not the sort of thing other kids would notice, much less taunt you about. He’d given it about as much thought over the years as he gave to the nail on the big toe of his left foot, which was marked with ridges.

Hit man’s toe, he thought.

He was poring over a price list, France & Colonies, wrestling with some of the little decisions a stamp collector was called upon to make, when the phone rang. He picked it up, and it was Dot.

He made the usual round trip by train, Grand Central to White Plains and back again, He packed a bag before he went to bed that night, and in the morning he caught a cab to JFK and a plane to Tampa. He rented a Ford Escort and drove to Indian Rocks Beach, which sounded more like a headline in Variety than a place to live. But that’s what it was, and, though he didn’t see any Indians or rocks, it would have been hard to miss the beach. It was a beauty, and he could see why they had all these condos on it, and vacation time-shares.

The man Keller was looking for, an Ohioan named Stillman, had just moved in for a week’s stay in a beachfront apartment on the fourth floor of Gulf Water Towers. There was an attendant in the lobby, Keller noticed, but he didn’t figure to be as hard to get past as the Maginot Line.

But would he even need to find out? Stillman had just arrived from sunless Cincinnati, and how much time was he going to spend inside? No more than he had to, Keller figured. He’d want to get out there and soak up some rays, maybe splash in the Gulf a little, then zone out some more in the sun.

Keller’s packing had included swim trunks, and he found a men’s room and put them on. He didn’t have a towel to lie on — he hadn’t taken a room yet — but he could always lie on the sand.

It turned out he didn’t have to. As he was walking along the public beach, he saw a woman approach a man, her hands cupped. She was holding water, and she threw it on the man, who sprang to his feet. They laughed joyously as he chased her into the surf. There they frolicked, perfect examples of young hormone-driven energy, and Keller figured they’d be frolicking for a while. They’d left two towels on the sand, anonymous unidentifiable white beach towels, and Keller decided one was all they needed. It would easily accommodate the two of them when they tired of splashing and ducking one another.

He picked up the other towel and walked off with it. He spread it out on the sand at the private beach for Gulf Water Towers residents. A glance left and right revealed no one who in any way resembled George Stillman, so Keller stretched out on his back and closed his eyes. The sun, a real stranger to New York of late, was evidently wholly at home in Florida, and felt wonderful on his skin. If it took a while to find Stillman, that was okay with him.

But it didn’t.

Keller opened his eyes after half an hour or so. He sat up and looked around, feeling a little like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day. When he failed to see either Stillman or his own shadow, he lay down and closed his eyes again.

The next time he opened them was when he heard a man cursing. He sat up, and not twenty yards away was a barrel-chested man, balding and jowly, calling his right hand every name in the book.

How could the fellow be that mad at his own hand? Of course he might have a murderer’s thumb, but what if he did? Keller had one himself, and had never felt the need to talk to it in those terms.

Oh, hell, of course. The man was on a cell phone. And, by God, he was Stillman. The face had barely registered on Keller at first, his attention held by the angry voice and the keg-shaped torso thickly pelted with black hair. None of that had been visible in the head-and-shoulders shot Dot had shown him, and it was what you noticed, but it was the same face, and here he was, and wasn’t that handy?

While Stillman took the sun, Keller did the same. When Stillman got up and walked to the water’s edge, so did Keller. When Stillman waded in, to test his mettle in the surf, Keller followed in his wake.

When Keller came ashore, Stillman stayed behind. And by the time Keller left the beach, carrying two towels and a cellular phone, Stillman had still not emerged from the water.

Why a thumb?

Keller, back in New York, pondered the question. He couldn’t see what a thumb had to do with murder. When you used a gun, it was your index finger that gave the trigger a squeeze. When you used a knife, you held it in your palm with your fingers curled around the handle. Your thumb might press the hilt, as a sort of guide, but a man could have no thumbs at all and still get the business end of a knife to go where he wanted it.

Did you use your thumbs when you garroted somebody? He mimed the motion, letting his hands remember, and he didn’t see where the thumbs had much of a part to play. Manual strangulation, now that was different, and you did use your thumbs, you used all of both hands, and would have a hard time otherwise.

Still, why a murderer’s thumb?

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Dot said. “You go off to some half-a-horse town at the ass end of nowhere special and you poke around for a week or two. Then you go to a vacation paradise in the middle of a New York winter and you’re back the same day. The same day!”

“I had an opening and I took it,” he said. “I wait and maybe I never get that good a shot at him again.”

“I realize that, Keller, and God knows I’m not complaining. It just seems like a shame, that’s all. Here you are, the two of you, fresh off a couple of planes from the frozen North, and before either one of you gets the chill out of your bones, you’re on a flight to New York and he’s rapidly approaching room temperature.”

“Water temperature.”

“I stand corrected.”

“And it was like a bathtub.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “He could have opened his veins in it, but after you held his head underwater for a few minutes he no longer felt the need to. But couldn’t you have waited a few days? You’d have come home with a tan and he’d have gone into the ground with one. You meet your Maker, you want to look your best.”

“Sure,” he said. “Dot, have you ever noticed anything odd about my thumb?”

“Your thumb?”

“This one. Does it look strange to you?”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Keller. That’s the most complete change of subject I’ve ever encountered in my life. I’d be hard put to remember what we were talking about before we started talking about your thumb.”

“Well?”

“Don’t tell me you’re serious? Let me see. I’d have to say it looks like a plain old thumb to me, but you know what they say. You’ve seen one thumb...”

“But look, Dot. That’s the whole point, that they’re not identical. See how this one goes?”

“Oh, right. It’s got that little...”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are mine both the same? Like two peas in a pod, as far as I can make out. This one’s got a little scar at the base, but don’t ask me how I got it because I can’t remember. Keller, you made your point. You’ve got an unusual thumb.”

“Do you believe in destiny, Dot?”

“Whoa! Keller, you just switched channels again. I thought we were discussing thumbs.”

“I was thinking about Louisville.”

“I’m going to take the remote control away from you, Keller. It’s not safe in your hands. Louisville?”

“You remember when I went there.”

“Vividly. Kids playing basketball, guy in a garage, and, if I remember correctly, the subtle magic of carbon monoxide.”

“Right.”

“So?”

“Remember how I had a bad feeling about it, and then a couple got killed in my old room, and—”

“I remember the whole business, Keller. What about it?”

“I guess I’ve just been wondering how much of life is destined and preordained. How much choice do people really have?”

“If we had a choice,” she said, “we could be having some other conversation.”

“I never set out to be what I’ve become. It’s not like I took an aptitude test in high school and my guidance counselor took me aside and recommended a career as a killer for hire.”

“You drifted into it, didn’t you?”

“That’s what I always thought. That’s certainly what it felt like. But suppose I was just fulfilling my destiny?”

“I don’t know,” she said, cocking her head. “Shouldn’t there be music playing in the background? There always is when they have conversations like this in one of my soap operas.”

“Dot, I’ve got a murderer’s thumb.”

“Oh, for the love of God, we’re back to your thumb. How did you manage that, and what in the hell are you talking about?”

“Palmistry,” he said. “In palmistry, a thumb like mine is called a murderer’s thumb.”

“In palmistry.”

“Right.”

“I grant you it’s an unusual-looking thumb,” she said, “although I never noticed it in all the years I’ve known you, and never would have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out. But where does the murderer part come in? What do you do, kill people by running your thumb across their lifeline?”

“I don’t think you actually do anything with your thumb.”

“I don’t see what you could do, aside from hitching a ride. Or making a rude gesture.”

“All I know,” he said, “is I had a murderer’s thumb and I grew up to be a murderer.”

“ ‘His Thumb Made Him Do It.’ ”

“Or was it the other way around? Maybe my thumb was normal at birth, and it changed as my character changed.”

“That sounds crazy,” she said, “but you ought to be able to clear it up, because you’ve been carrying that thumb around all your life. Was it always like that?”

“How do I know? I never paid much attention to it.”

“Keller, it’s your thumb.”

“But did I notice it was different from other thumbs? I don’t know, Dot. Maybe I should see somebody.”

“That’s not necessarily a bad idea,” she said, “but I’d think twice before I let them put me on any medication.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said.

The astrologer was not what he’d expected.

Hard to say just what he’d been expecting. Someone with a lot of eye makeup, say, and long hair bound up in a scarf, and big hoop earrings — some sort of cross between a Gypsy fortune-teller and a hippie chick. What he got in Louise Carpenter was a pleasant woman in her forties who had thrown in the towel in the long battle to retain a girlish figure. She had big blue-green eyes and a low-maintenance haircut, and she lived in an apartment on West End Avenue full of comfortable furniture, and she wore loose clothing and read romance novels and ate chocolate, all of which seemed to agree with her.

“It would help,” she told Keller, “if we knew the precise time of your birth.”

“I don’t think there’s any way to find out.”

“Your mother has passed?”

Passed. It might be more accurate, he thought, to say that she’d failed. He said, “She died a long time ago.”

“And your father...”

“Died before I was born,” Keller said, wondering if it was true. “You asked me over the phone if there was anyone who might remember. I’m the only one who’s still around, and I don’t remember a thing.”

“There are ways to recover a lot of early memory,” she said, and popped a chocolate into her mouth. “All the way back to birth, in some instances, and I’ve known people who claim they can remember their own conception. But I don’t know how much to credit all of that. Is it memory or is it Memorex? Besides, you probably weren’t wearing a watch at the time.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I don’t know the doctor’s name, and he might be dead himself by this time, but I’ve got a copy of my birth certificate. It doesn’t have the time of birth, just the date, but do you suppose the Bureau of Vital Statistics would have the information on file somewhere?”

“Possibly,” she said, “but don’t worry about it. I can check it.”

“On the Internet? Something like that?”

She laughed. “No, not that. You said your mother mentioned getting up early in the morning to go to the hospital.”

“That’s what she said.”

“And you were a fairly easy birth.”

“Once her labor started, I came right out.”

“You wanted to be here. Now you happen to be a Gemini, John, and... shall I call you John?”

“If you want.”

“Well, what do people generally call you?”

“Keller.”

“Very well, Mr. Keller. I’m comfortable keeping it formal if you prefer it that way, and—”

“Not Mr. Keller,” he said. “Just plain Keller.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what people generally call me.”

“I see. Well, Keller... no, I don’t think that’s going to work. I’m going to have to call you John.”

“Okay.”

“In high school kids used to call each other by their last names. It was a way to feel grown up. ‘Hey, Carpenter, you finish the algebra homework?’ I can’t call you Keller.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m being neurotic, I realize that, but—”

“John is fine.”

“Well then,” she said, and rearranged herself in the chair. “You’re a Gemini, John, as I’m sure you know. A late Gemini, June nineteenth, which puts you right on the cusp of Cancer.”

“Is that good?”

“Nothing’s necessarily good or bad in astrology, John. But it’s good in that I enjoy working with Geminis. I find it to be an extremely interesting sign.”

“How so?”

“The duality. Gemini is the sign of the twins, you see.” She went on talking about the properties of the sign, and he nodded, agreeing but not really taking it all in. And then she was saying, “I suppose the most interesting thing about Geminis is their relationship to the truth. Geminis are naturally duplicitous, yet they have an inner reverence for the truth that echoes their opposite number across the Zodiac. That’s Sagittarius, of course, and your typical Sadge couldn’t tell a lie to save his soul. Gemini can lie without a second thought, while being occasionally capable of this startling Sagittarian candor.”

“I see.”

He was influenced as well by Cancer, she continued, having his sun on its cusp, along with a couple of planets in that sign. And he had a Taurus moon, she told him, and that was the best possible place for the moon to be. “The moon is exalted in Taurus,” she said. “Have you noticed in the course of your life how things generally turn out all right for you, even when they don’t? And don’t you have an inner core, a sort of bedrock stability that lets you always know who you are?”

“I don’t know about that last part,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Maybe it’s your Taurus moon that got you here.” She reached for another chocolate. “Your time of birth determines your rising sign, and that’s important in any number of ways, but in the absence of available information I’m willing to make the determination intuitively. My discipline is astrology, John, but it’s not the only tool I use. I’m psychic, I sense things. My intuition tells me you have Cancer rising.”

“If you say so.”

“And I prepared a chart for you on that basis. I could tell you a lot of technical things about your chart, but I can’t believe you’re interested in all that, are you?”

“You’re psychic, all right.”

“So instead of nattering on about trines and squares and oppositions, let me just say it’s an interesting chart. You’re an extremely gentle person, John.”

“Oh?”

“But there’s so much violence in your life.”

“Oh.”

“That’s the famous Gemini duality,” she was saying. “On the one hand, you’re thoughtful and sensitive and calm, exceedingly calm. John, do you ever get angry?”

“Not very often.”

“No, and I don’t think you stifle your anger, either. I get that it’s just not a part of the equation. But there’s violence all around you, isn’t there?”

“It’s a violent world we live in.”

“There’s been violence swirling around you all your life. You’re very much a part of it, and yet you’re somehow untouched by it.” She tapped the sheet of paper, with his stars and planets all marked out. “You don’t have an easy chart,” she said.

“I don’t?”

“Actually, that’s something to be grateful for. I’ve seen charts of people who came into the world with no serious oppositions, no difficult aspects. And they wind up with lives where nothing much happens. They’re never challenged, they never have to draw upon inner resources, and so they wind up leading reasonably comfortable lives and holding secure jobs and raising their kids in a nice safe clean suburb. And they never make anything terribly interesting of themselves.”

“I haven’t made much of myself,” he said. “I’ve never married or fathered a child. Or started a business, or run for office, or planted a garden, or written a play, or... or...”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never expected to get...”

“Emotional?”

“Yes.”

“It happens all the time.”

“Oh.”

“Just the other day I told a woman she’s got Jupiter squaring her sun, but that her Jupiter and Mars are trined, and she burst into tears.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Neither did she.”

“Oh.”

“I see so much in your chart, John. This is a difficult time for you, isn’t it?”

“I guess it must be.”

“Not financially. Your Jupiter — well, you’re not rich, and you’re never going to be rich, but the money always seems to be there when you need it, doesn’t it?”

“It’s never been a problem.”

“No, and it won’t be. You’ve found ways to spend it in the past couple of years—” Stamps, he thought. “—and that’s good, because now you’re getting some pleasure out of your money. But you won’t overspend, and you’ll always be able to get more.”

“That’s good.”

“But you didn’t come here because you were concerned about money.”

“No.”

“You don’t care that much about it. You always liked to get it and now you like to spend it, but you never cared deeply about it.”

“No.”

“I’ve prepared a solar return,” she said, “to give you an idea what to expect in the next twelve months. Some astrologers are very specific—‘July seventeenth is the perfect time to start a new project, and don’t even think about being on water on the fifth of September.’ My approach is more general, and... John? Why are you holding your right hand like that?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“With the thumb tucked inside. Is there something about your thumb that bothers you?”

“Not really.”

“I’ve already seen your thumb, John.”

“Oh.”

“Did someone once tell you something about your thumb?”

“Yes.”

“That it’s a murderer’s thumb?” She rolled her eyes. “Palmistry,” she said heavily.

“You don’t believe in it?”

“Of course I believe in it, but it does lend itself to some gross oversimplification.” She reached out and took his hand in both of hers. Hers were soft, he noted, and pudgy, but not unpleasantly so. She ran a fingertip over his thumb, his homicidal thumb.

“To take a single anatomical characteristic,” she said, “and fasten such a dramatic name to it. No one’s thumb ever made him kill a fellow human being.”

“Then why do they call it that?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t studied the history of palmistry. I suppose someone spotted the peculiarity in a few notorious murderers and spread the word. I’m not even certain it’s statistically more common among murderers than the general population. I doubt anyone really knows. John, it’s an insignificant phenomenon and not worth noticing.”

“But you noticed it,” he said.

“I happened to see it.”

“And you recognized it. You didn’t say anything until you noticed me hiding it in my fist. That was unconscious, I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

“I see.”

“So it must mean something,” he said, “or why would it stay in your mind?”

She was still holding his hand. Keller had noticed that this was one of the ways a woman let you know she was interested in you. Women touched you a lot in completely innocent ways, on the hand or the arm or the shoulder, or held your hand longer than they had to. If a man did that it was sexual harassment, but it was a woman’s way of letting you know she wouldn’t mind being harassed herself.

But this was different. There was no sexual charge with this woman. If he’d been made of chocolate he might have had something to worry about, but mere flesh and blood was safe in her presence.

“John,” she said, “I was looking for it.”

“For...”

“The thumb. Or anything else that might confirm what I already knew about you.”

She was gazing into his eyes as she spoke, and he wondered how much shock registered in them. He tried not to react, but how did you keep what you felt from showing up in your eyes?

“And what’s that, Louise?”

“That I know about you?”

He nodded.

“That your life has been filled with violence, but I think I already mentioned that.”

“You said I was gentle and not full of anger.”

“But you’ve had to kill people, John.”

“Who told you that?” She was no longer holding his hand. Had she released it? Or had he taken it away from her?

“Who told me?”

Maggie, he thought. Who else could it have been? Maggie was the only person they knew in common. But how did Maggie know? In her eyes he was a corporate suburbanite, even if he lived alone in the heart of the city.

“Actually,” she was saying, “I had several informants.”

His heart was hammering. What was she saying? How could it be true?

“Let me see, John. There was Saturn, and Mars, and we don’t want to forget Mercury.” Her tone was soft, her gaze so gentle. “John,” she said, “it’s in your chart.”

“My chart.”

“I picked up on it right away. I got a very strong hit while I was working on your chart, and when you rang the bell I knew I would be opening the door to a man who had done a great deal of killing.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t cancel the appointment.”

“I considered it. Something told me not to.”

“A little bird?”

“An inner prompting. Or maybe it was curiosity. I wanted to see what you looked like.”

“And?”

“Well, I knew right away I hadn’t made a mistake with your chart.”

“Because of my thumb?”

“No, though it was interesting to have that extra bit of confirmation. And the most revealing thing about your thumb was the effort you made to conceal it. But the vibration I picked up from you was far more revealing than anything about your thumb.”

“The vibration.”

“I don’t know a better way to put it. Sometimes the intuitive part of the mind picks up things the five senses are blind and deaf to. Sometimes a person just knows something.”

“Yes.”

“I knew you were...”

“A killer,” he supplied.

“Well, a man who has killed. And in a very dispassionate way, too. It’s not personal for you, is it, John?”

“Sometimes a personal element comes into it.”

“But not often.”

“No.”

“It’s business.”

“Yes.”

“John? You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

Could she read his mind? He hoped not. Because what came to him now was that he was not afraid of her, but of what he might have to do to her.

And he didn’t want to. She was a nice woman, and he sensed she would be able to tell him things it would be good for him to hear.

“You don’t have to fear that I’ll do anything, or say anything to anyone. You don’t even need to fear my disapproval.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t make many moral judgments, John. The more I see, the less I’m sure I know what’s right and what’s wrong. Once I accepted myself” — she reached, grinning, for a chocolate — “I found it easier to accept other people. Thumbs and all.”

He looked at his thumb, then raised his eyes to meet hers.

“Besides,” she said, very gently, “I think you’ve done wonderfully in life, John.” She tapped his chart. “I know what you started with. I think you’ve turned out just fine.”

He tried to say something, but the words got stuck in his throat.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Go right ahead and cry. Never be ashamed to cry, John. It’s all right.”

And she drew his head to her breast and held him while, astonished, he sobbed his heart out.

“Well, that’s a first,” he said. “I don’t know what I expected from astrology, but it wasn’t tears.”

“They wanted to come out. You’ve had them stored up for a while, haven’t you?”

“Forever. I was in therapy for a while and never even got choked up.”

“That would have been when? Three years ago?”

“How did you... It’s in my chart?”

“Not therapy per se, but I saw there was a period when you were ready for self-exploration. But I don’t believe you stayed with it for very long.”

“A few months I got a lot of insight out of it, but in the end I felt I had to put an end to it.”

Dr. Breen, the therapist, had had his own agenda, and it had conflicted seriously with Keller’s. The therapy had come to an abrupt end, and so, not coincidentally, had the doctor.

He wouldn’t let that happen with Louise Carpenter.

“This isn’t therapy,” she told him now, “but it can be a powerful experience. As you just found out.”

“I’ll say. But we must have used up our fifty minutes.” He looked at his watch. “We went way over. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“I told you it’s not therapy, John. We don’t worry about the clock. And I never book more than two clients a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We have all the time we need.”

“Oh.”

“And we need to talk about what you’re going through. This is a difficult time for you, isn’t it?”

Was it?

“I’m afraid the coming twelve months will continue to be difficult,” she went on, “as long as Saturn’s where it is. Difficult and dangerous. But I suppose danger is something you’ve learned to live with.”

“It’s not that dangerous,” he said. “What I do.”

“Really?”

Dangerous to others, he thought. “Not to me,” he said. “Not particularly. There’s always a risk, and you have to keep your guard up, but it’s not as though you have to be on edge all the time.”

“What, John?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You had a thought, it just flashed across your face.”

“I’m surprised you can’t tell me what it was.”

“If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d say you thought of something that contradicted the sentence you just spoke. About not having to be on edge all the time.”

“That’s what it was, all right.”

“This would have been fairly recent.”

“You can really tell all that? I’m sorry, I keep doing that. Yes, it was recent. A few months ago.”

“Because the period of danger would have begun during the fall.”

“That’s when it was.” And, without getting into specifics at all, he talked about his trip to Louisville, and how everything had seemed to be going wrong. “And there was a knock on the door of my room,” he said, “and I panicked, which is not like me at all.”

“No.”

“I grabbed something” — a gun — “and stood next to the door, and my heart was hammering, and it was nothing but some drunk who couldn’t find his friend. I was all set to kill him in self-defense, and all he did was knock on the wrong door.”

“It must have been upsetting.”

“The most upsetting part was seeing how upset I got. That didn’t get my pulse racing like the knock on the door did, but the effects lasted longer. It still bothers me, to tell the truth.”

“Because the reaction was unwarranted. But maybe you really were in danger, John. Not from the drunk, but from something invisible.”

“Like what, anthrax spores?”

“Invisible to you, but not necessarily to the naked eye. Some unknown adversary, some secret enemy.”

“That’s how it felt. But it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Did he?

“I changed my room,” he said.

“Because of the drunk who knocked on your door?”

“No, why would I do that? But a couple of nights later I couldn’t sleep because of noise from the people upstairs. I had to keep my room that night, the place was full, but I let them put me in a new room first thing the next morning. And that night...”

“Yes?”

“Two people checked into my old room. A man and a woman. They were murdered.”

“In the room you’d just moved out of.”

“It was her husband. She was there with somebody else, and the husband must have followed them. Shot them both. But I couldn’t get past the fact that it was my room. Like if I hadn’t changed my room, her husband would have come after me.”

“But he wasn’t anyone you knew.”

“No, far from it.”

“And yet you felt as though you’d had a narrow escape.”

“But of course that’s ridiculous.”

She shook her head. “You could have been killed, John.”

“How? I kept thinking the same thing myself, but it’s just not true. The only reason the killer came to the room was because of the two people who were in it. They were what drew him, not the room itself. So how could he have ever been a danger to me?”

“There was a danger, though.”

“The chart tells you that?”

She nodded solemnly, holding up one hand with the thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “You and Death,” she said, “came this close to one another.”

“That’s how it felt! But—”

“Forget the husband, forget what happened in that room. The woman’s husband was never a threat to you, but someone else was. You were out there where the ice was very thin, John, and that’s a good metaphor, because a skater never realizes the ice is thin until it cracks.”

“But—”

“But it didn’t,” she said. “Whatever endangered you, the danger passed. Then those two people were killed, and that got your attention.”

“Like ice cracking,” he said, “but on another pond. I’ll have to think about this.”

“I’m sure you will.”

He cleared his throat. “Louise? Is it all written in the stars, and do we just walk through it down here on earth?”

“No.”

“You can look at that piece of paper,” he said, “and you can say, ‘Well, you’ll come very close to death on such and such a day, but you’ll get through it safe and sound.’ ”

“Only the first part. ‘You’ll come very close to death’—I could have looked at this and told you that much. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that you’d survive. The stars show propensities and dictate probabilities, but the future is never entirely predictable. And we do have free will.”

“If those people hadn’t been killed, and if I’d just gone on home—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I’d be here having this conversation, and you’d tell me what a close shave I’d had, and I’d figure it for just so much starshine. I’d had a feeling, but I would have forgotten all about it. So I’d look at you and say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and turn the page.”

“You can be grateful to the man and woman.”

“And to the guy who shot them, as far as that goes. And to the bikers who made all the noise in the first place. And to Ralph.”

“Who was Ralph?”

“The drunk’s friend, the one he was looking for in all the wrong places. I can be grateful to the drunk, too, except I don’t know his name. But then I don’t know any of their names, except for Ralph.”

“Maybe the names aren’t important.”

“I used to know the name of the man and woman, and of the man who shot them, the husband. I can’t remember them now. You’re right, the names aren’t important.”

“No.”

He looked at her. “The next year...”

“Will be dangerous.”

“What do I have to worry about? Should I think twice before I get on an airplane? Put on an extra sweater on windy days? Can you tell me where the threat’s coming from?”

She hesitated, then said, “You have an enemy, John.”

“An enemy?”

“An enemy. There’s someone out there who wants to kill you.”

“I don’t know,” he told Dot.

“You don’t know? Keller, what’s to know? What could be simpler? It’s in Boston, for God’s sake, not on the dark side of the moon. You take a cab to La Guardia, you hop on the Delta shuttle, you don’t even need a reservation, and half an hour later you’re on the ground at Logan. You take a cab into the city, you do the thing you do best, and you’re on the shuttle again before the day is over, and back in your own apartment in plenty of time for Jay Leno. The money’s right, the client’s strictly blue-chip, and the job’s a piece of cake.”

“I understand all that, Dot.”

“But?”

“I don’t know.”

“Keller,” she said, “clearly I’m missing something. Help me out here. What part of ‘I don’t know’ don’t I understand?”

I don’t know, he very nearly answered, but caught himself in time. In high school, a teacher had taken the class to task for those very words. “The way you use it,” she said, “ ‘I don’t know’ is a lie. It’s not what you mean at all. What you mean is ‘I don’t want to say’ or ‘I’m afraid to tell you.’ ”

“Hey, Keller,” one of the other boys had called out. “What’s the capital of South Dakota?”

“I’m afraid to tell you,” he’d replied.

And what was he afraid to tell Dot? That the Boston job just wasn’t in the stars? That the day the client had selected as ideal, this coming Wednesday, was a day specifically noted by his astrologer — his astrologer! — as a day fraught with danger, a day when he would be at extreme risk.

(“So what do I do on those days?” he’d asked her. “Stay in bed with the door locked? Order all my meals delivered?” “The first part’s not a terrible idea,” she’d advised him, “but I’d be careful who was on the other side of the door before I opened it. And I’d be careful what I ate, too.” The kid from the Chinese restaurant could be a Ninja assassin, he thought. The beef with oyster sauce could be laced with cyanide.)

“Keller?”

“The thing is, Wednesday’s not the best day for me. There was something I’d planned on doing.”

“What have you got, tickets to a matinee?”

“No.”

“No, of course not. It’s a stamp auction, isn’t it? The thing is, Wednesday’s the day the subject goes to his girlfriend’s apartment in Back Bay, and he has to sneak over there, so he leaves his security people behind. Which makes it far and away the easiest time to get next to him.”

“And she’s part of the package, the girlfriend?”

“Your call, whatever you want. She’s in or she’s out, whatever works.”

“And it doesn’t matter how? Doesn’t have to be an accident, doesn’t have to look like an execution?”

“Anything you want. You can plunge the son of a bitch into a vat of lanolin and soften him to death. Anything at all, just so he doesn’t have a pulse when you’re through with him.”

Hard job to say no to, he thought. Hard job to say I don’t know to.

“I suppose the following Wednesday might work,” Dot said. “The client would rather not wait, but my guess is he will if he has to. He said I was the first person he called, but I don’t believe it. He’s the type of guy’s not that comfortable doing business with a woman. Our kind of business, anyway. So I think I was more like the third or fourth person he called, and I think he’ll wait a week if I tell him he has to. Do you want me to see?”

Was he really going to lie in bed waiting for the bogeyman to get him?

“No, don’t do that,” he said. “This Wednesday’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said. He wasn’t sure, he was miles short of sure, but it had a much better ring to it than I don’t know.

Tuesday, the day before he was supposed to go to Boston, Keller had a strong urge to call Louise Carpenter. It had been a couple of weeks since she’d gone over his chart with him, and he wouldn’t be seeing her again for a year. He’d thought it might turn out to be like therapy, with weekly appointments, and he gathered that there were some clients who dropped in frequently for an astrological tune-up and oil change, but he gathered that astrology was a sort of hobby for them. He already had a hobby, and Louise seemed to think an annual checkup was sufficient, and that was fine with him.

So he’d see her in a year’s time. If he was still alive.

The forecast for Wednesday was rain and more rain, and when he woke up he saw they weren’t kidding. It was a bleak, gray day, and the rain was coming down hard. An apologetic announcer on New York One said the downpour was expected to continue throughout the day and evening, accompanied by high winds and low temperatures. The way he was carrying on, you’d have thought it was his fault.

Keller put on a suit and tie, good protective coloration in a formal kind of city like Boston, and the standard uniform on the air shuttle. He got his trench coat out of the closet, put it on, and wasn’t crazy about what he saw in the mirror. The salesman had called it olive, and maybe it was, at least in the store under their fluorescent lights. In the cold, damp light of a rainy morning, however, the damn thing looked green.

Not shamrock green, not Kelly green, not even putting green. But it was green, all right. You could slip into it on St. Patrick’s Day and march up Fifth Avenue, and no one would mistake you for an Orangeman. No question about it, the sucker was green.

In the ordinary course of things, the coat’s color wouldn’t have bothered him. It wasn’t so green as to bring on stares and catcalls, just green enough to draw the occasional appreciative glance. And there was a certain convenience in having a coat that didn’t look like every other coat on the rack. You knew it on sight, and you could point it out to the cloakroom attendant when you couldn’t find the check. “Right there, a little to your left,” you’d say. “The green one.”

But when you were flying up to Boston to kill a man, you didn’t want to stand out in a crowd. You wanted to blend right in, to look like everybody else. Keller, in his unremarkable suit and tie, looked pretty much like everybody else.

In his coat, no question, he stood out.

Could he skip the coat? No, it was cold outside, and it would be colder in Boston. Wear his other topcoat, unobtrusively beige? No, it was porous, and he’d get soaked. He’d take an umbrella, but that wouldn’t help much, not with a strong wind driving the rain.

What if he bought another coat?

But that was ridiculous. He’d have to wait for the stores to open, and then he’d spend an hour picking out the new coat and dropping off the old one at his apartment. And for what? There weren’t going to be any witnesses in Boston, and anyone who did happen to see him go into the building would only remember the coat.

And maybe that was a plus. Like putting on a postman’s uniform or a priest’s collar, or dressing up as Santa Claus. People remembered what you were wearing, but that was all they remembered. Nobody noticed anything else about you that might be distinctive. Your thumb, for instance. And once you took off the uniform or the collar or the red suit and the beard, you became invisible.

Ordinarily he wouldn’t have had to think twice. But this was an ominous day, one of the days his motherly astrologer had warned him about, and that made every little detail something to worry about.

And wasn’t that silly? He had an enemy, and this enemy was trying to kill him, and on this particular day he was particularly at risk. And he had an assignment to kill a man, and that task inevitably carried risks of its own.

And, with all that going on, he was worrying about the coat he was wearing? That it was too discernibly green, for God’s sake?

Get over it, he told himself.

A cab took him to La Guardia and a plane took him to Logan, and another cab dropped him in front of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He walked through the lobby, came out on Newbury Street, and walked along looking for a sporting goods store. He walked awhile without seeing one, and wasn’t sure Newbury Street was the place for it. Antiques, leather goods, designer clothes, Limoges boxes — that was what you bought here, not Polartec sweats and climbing gear.

Or hunting knives. If you could find such an article here in Back Bay, it would probably have an ivory handle and a sterling silver blade, along with a three-figure price tag. He was sure it would be a beautiful object, and worth every penny, but how would he feel about tossing it down a storm drain when he was done with it?

Anyway, was it a good idea to buy a hunting knife in the middle of a big city on a rainy spring day in the middle of the week? Deer season was, what, seven or eight months off? How many hunting knives would be sold in Boston today? How many of them would be bought by men in green trench coats?

In a stationery store he browsed among the desk accessories and picked out a letter opener with a sturdy chrome-plated steel blade and an inlaid onyx handle. The salesgirl put it in a gift box without asking. It evidently didn’t occur to her that anyone might buy an item like that for himself.

And in a sense Keller hadn’t. He’d bought it for Alvin Thurnauer, and now it was time to deliver it.

That was the subject’s name, Alvin Thurnauer, and Keller had seen a photograph of a big, outdoorsy guy with a full head of light brown hair. Along with the photo, the client had supplied an address on Emerson Street and a set of keys, one for the front door and one for the second-floor apartment where Thurnauer and his girlfriend would be playing Thank God It’s Wednesday.

Thurnauer generally showed up around two, Dot had told him, and Keller was planted in a doorway across the street by half past one. The air was a little colder in Boston, and the wind a little stiffer, but the rain was about the same as it had been in New York. Keller’s coat was waterproof, and his umbrella had not yet been blown inside out, but he still didn’t stay a hundred percent dry. You couldn’t, not when the rain came at you like God was pitching sidearm.

Maybe that was the risk. On a fateful day, you stood in the rain in Boston and caught your death of cold.

He toughed it out, and shortly before two a cab pulled up and a man got out, bundled up anonymously enough in a hat and coat, neither of them green. Keller’s heart quickened. It could have been Thurnauer — it could have been anybody — and the fellow did stand looking across at the right house for a long moment before turning and heading off down the street. Keller gave up watching him when he got a couple of houses away. He retreated into the shadows, waiting for Thurnauer.

Who showed up right on time. Two on the button on Keller’s watch, and there was the man himself, easy to spot as he got out of his cab because he wasn’t wearing a hat. The mop of brown hair was a perfect field mark, identifiable at a glance.

Do it now?

It was doable. Just because he had keys didn’t mean he had to use them. He could dart across the street and catch up with Thurnauer before the man had the front door open. Do him on the spot, shove him into the vestibule where the whole world wouldn’t see him, and be out of sight himself in seconds.

That way he wouldn’t have to worry about the girlfriend. But there might be other witnesses, people passing on the street, some moody citizen staring out the window at the rain. And he’d be awfully visible racing across the street in his green coat. And the letter opener was still in its box, so he’d have to use his hands.

And by the time he’d weighed all these considerations the moment had passed and Thurnauer was inside the house.

Just as well. If a roll in the hay was going to cost Thurnauer his life, let him at least have a chance to enjoy it. That was better than rushing in and doing a slapdash job. Thurnauer could have an extra thirty or forty minutes of life, and Keller could get out of the goddam rain and have a cup of coffee.

At the lunch counter, feeling only a little like one of the lonely guys in his Edward Hopper poster, Keller remembered that he hadn’t eaten all day. He’d somehow missed breakfast, which was unusual for him.

Well, it was a high-risk day, wasn’t it? Pneumonia, starvation — there were a lot of hazards out there.

Eating would have to wait. He didn’t have the time, and he never liked to work on a full stomach. It made you sluggish, slowed your reflexes, spoiled your judgment. Better to wait and have a proper meal afterward.

While his coffee was cooling he went to the men’s room and took the letter opener out of its gift box, which he discarded. He put the letter opener in his jacket pocket where he could reach it in a hurry. You couldn’t cut with it, the blade’s edge was rounded, but it came to a good sharp point. But was it sharp enough to penetrate several layers of cloth? Just as well he hadn’t acted on the spur of the moment. Wait for Thurnauer to get out of his coat and jacket and shirt, and then the letter opener would have an easier time of it.

He drank his coffee, donned his green coat, picked up his umbrella, and went back to finish the job.

Nothing to it, really.

The keys worked. He didn’t run into anybody in the entryway or on the stairs. He listened at the door of the second-floor apartment, heard music playing and water running, and let himself in.

He closed his umbrella, took off his coat, slipped off his shoes, and made his way in silence through the living room and along a hallway to the bedroom door. That was where the music was coming from, and it was where the woman, a slender dishwater blonde with almost translucent white skin, was sitting cross-legged on the edge of an unmade bed, smoking a cigarette.

She looked frighteningly vulnerable, and Keller hoped he wouldn’t have to hurt her. If he could get Thurnauer alone, if he could do the man and get out without being seen, then he could let her live. If she saw him, well, then all bets were off.

The shower stopped running, and a moment later the bathroom door opened. A man emerged with a dark green towel around his waist. The guy was completely bald, and Keller wondered how the hell he’d managed to wind up in the wrong apartment. Then he realized it was Thurnauer after all. The guy had taken off his hair before he got in the shower.

Thurnauer walked over to the bed, made a face, and reached to take the cigarette away from the girl, stubbing it out in an ashtray. “I wish to God you’d quit,” he said.

“And I wish you’d quit wishing I would quit,” she said. “I’ve tried. I can’t quit, all right? Not everybody’s got your goddam willpower.”

“There’s the gum,” he said.

“I started smoking to get out of the habit of chewing gum. I hate how it looks, grown women chewing gum, like a herd of cows.”

“Or the patch,” he said. “Why can’t you wear a patch?”

“That was my last cigarette,” she said.

“You know, you’ve said that before, and much as I’d like to believe it—”

“No, you moron,” she snapped. “It was the last one I’ve got with me, not the last one I’m ever going to smoke. If you had to play the stern daddy and take a cigarette away from me, did it have to be my last one?”

“You can buy more.”

“No kidding,” she said. “You’re damn right I can buy more.”

“Go take a shower,” Thurnauer said.

“I don’t want to take a shower.”

“You’ll cool off and feel better.”

“You mean I’ll cool off and you’ll feel better. Anyway, you just took a shower and you came out grumpy as a bear with a sore foot. The hell with taking a shower.”

“Take one.”

“Why? What’s the matter, do I stink? Or do you just want to get me out of the room so you can make a phone call?”

“Mavis, for Christ’s sake...”

“You can call some other girl who doesn’t smoke and doesn’t sweat and—”

“Mavis—”

“Oh, go to hell,” Mavis said. “I’m gonna go take a shower. And put your hair on, will you? You look like a damn cue ball.”

The shower was running and Thurnauer was hunched over her makeup mirror, adjusting his hairpiece, when Keller got a hand over his mouth and plunged the letter opener into his back, fitting it deftly between two ribs and driving it home into his heart. The big man had no time to struggle; by the time he knew what was happening, it had already happened. His body convulsed once, then went slack, and Keller lowered him to the floor.

The shower was still running. Keller could be out the door before she was out of the shower. But as soon as she did come out she would see Thurnauer, and she’d know at a glance that he was dead, and she’d scream and yell and carry on and call 911, and who needed that?

Besides, the pity he’d felt for her had dried up during her argument with her lover. He’d responded to a sense of her vulnerability, a fragile quality that he’d since decided was conveyed by that see-through skin of hers. She was actually a whining, sniping, carping nag of a woman, and about as fragile as an army boot.

So, when she stepped out of the bathroom, he took her from behind and broke her neck. He left her where she fell, just as he’d left Thurnauer on the bedroom floor. You could try to set a scene, make it look as though she had stabbed him and then broken her neck in a fall, but it would never fool anybody, so why bother? The client had merely stipulated that the man be dead, and that’s what Keller had delivered.

It was sort of a shame about the girl, but it wasn’t all that much of a shame. She was no Mother Teresa. And you couldn’t let sentiment get in the way. That was always a bad idea, and especially on a high-risk day.

There were good restaurants in Boston, and Keller thought about going to Locke-Ober’s, say, and treating himself to a really good meal. But the timing was wrong. It was just after three, too late for lunch and too early for dinner. If he went someplace decent they would just stare at him.

He could kill a couple of hours. He hadn’t brought his catalog, so there was no point making the rounds of the stamp shops, but he could see a movie, or go to a museum. It couldn’t be that hard to find a way to get through an afternoon, not in a city like Boston, for God’s sake.

On a nicer day he’d have been happy enough just walking around Back Bay or Beacon Hill. Boston was a good city for walking, not as good as New York, but better than most cities. With the rain still coming down, though, walking was no pleasure, and cabs were hard to come by.

Keller, back on Newbury Street, walked until he found an upscale coffee shop that looked okay. It wasn’t going to remind anybody of Locke-Ober, but it was here and they would serve him now, and he was too hungry to wait.

The waitress wanted to know what the problem was. “It’s my coat,” Keller told her.

“What happened to your coat?”

“Well, that’s the problem,” he said. “I hung it on the hook over there, and it’s gone.”

“You sure it’s not there?”

“Positive.”

“Because coats tend to look alike, and there’s coats hanging there, and—”

“Mine is green.”

“Green green? Or more like an olive green?”

What difference did it make? There were three coats over there, all of them shades of beige, none at all like his. “The salesman called it olive,” he said, “but it was pretty green. And it’s not here.”

“Are you sure you had it when you came in?”

Keller pointed at the window. “It’s been like that all day,” he said. “What kind of an idiot would go out without a coat?”

“Maybe you left it somewhere else.”

Was it possible? He’d shucked the coat in the Emerson Street living room. Could he have left it there?

No, not a chance. He remembered putting it on, remembered opening his umbrella when he hit the street, remembered hanging both coat and umbrella on the peg before he slid into the booth and reached for the menu. And where was the umbrella? Gone, just like the coat.

“I didn’t leave it anywhere else,” he said firmly. “I was wearing the coat when I came in, and I hung it up right there, and it’s not there now. And neither is my umbrella.”

“Somebody must of taken it by mistake.”

“How? It’s green.”

“Maybe they’re color-blind,” she suggested. “Or they have a green coat at home, and they forgot they were wearing the tan one today, so they took yours by mistake. When they bring it back—”

“Nobody’s going to bring it back. Somebody stole my coat.”

“Why would anybody steal a coat?”

“Probably because he didn’t have a coat of his own,” Keller said patiently, “and it’s pouring out there, and he didn’t want to get wet any more than I do. The three coats on the wall belong to your three other customers, and I’m not going to steal a coat from one of them, and the guy who stole my coat’s not going to bring it back, so what am I supposed to do?”

“We’re not responsible,” she said, and pointed to a sign that agreed with her. Keller wasn’t convinced the sign was enough to get the restaurant off the hook, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t about to sue them.

“If you want me to call the police so you can report it...”

“I just want to get out of here,” he said. “I need a cab, but I could drown out there waiting for an empty one to come along.”

She brightened, able at last to suggest something. “Right over there,” she said. “The hotel? There’s a canopy’ll keep you dry, and there’s cabs pulling up and dropping people off all day long. And you know what? I’ll bet Angela at the register’s got an umbrella you can take. People leave them here all the time, and unless it’s raining they never think to come back for them.”

The girl at the cash register supplied a black folding umbrella, flimsy but serviceable. “I remember that coat,” she said. “Green. I saw it come in and I saw it go out, but I never realized it was two different people coming and going. It was what you would call a very distinctive garment. Do you think you’ll be able to replace it?”

“It won’t be easy,” he said.

“You didn’t want to do this one,” Dot said, “and I couldn’t figure out why. It looked like a walk in the park, and it turns out that’s exactly what it was.”

“A walk in the rain,” he said. “I had my coat stolen.”

“And your umbrella. Well, there are some unscrupulous people out there, Keller, even in a decent town like Boston. You can buy a new coat.”

“I never should have bought that one in the first place.”

“It was green, you said.”

“Too green.”

“What were you doing, waiting for it to ripen?”

“It’s somebody else’s problem now,” he said. “The next one’s going to be beige.”

“You can’t go wrong with beige,” she said. “Not too light, though, or it shows everything. My advice would be to lean toward the tan end of the spectrum.”

“Whatever.” He looked at her television set. “I wonder what they’re talking about.”

“Nothing as interesting as raincoats, would be my guess. I could unmute the thing, but I think we’re better off wondering.”

“You’re probably right. I wonder if that was it. Losing the raincoat, I mean.”

“You wonder if it was what?”

“The feeling I had.”

“You did have a feeling about Boston, didn’t you? It wasn’t a stamp auction. You didn’t want to take the job.”

“I took it, didn’t I?”

“But you didn’t want to. Tell me more about this feeling, Keller.”

“It was just a feeling,” he said. He wasn’t ready to tell her about his horoscope. He could imagine how she’d react, and he didn’t want to hear it.

“You had a feeling another time,” she said. “In Louisville.”

“That was a little different.”

“And both times the jobs went fine.”

“That’s true.”

“So where do you suppose these feelings are coming from? Any idea?”

“Not really. It wasn’t that strong a feeling this time, anyway. And I took the job, and I did it.”

“And it went smooth as silk.”

“More or less,” he said.

“More or less?”

“I used a letter opener.”

“What for? Sorry, dumb question. What did you do, pick it up off his desk?”

“Bought it on the way there.”

“In Boston?”

“Well, I didn’t want to take it through the metal detector. I bought it in Boston, and I took it with me when I left.”

“Naturally. And chucked it in a Dumpster or down a sewer. Except you didn’t or you wouldn’t have brought up the subject. Oh, for Christ’s sake, Keller. The coat pocket?”

“Along with the keys.”

“What keys? Oh, hell, the keys to the apartment. A set of keys and a murder weapon and you’re carrying them around in your coat pocket.”

“They were going down a storm drain before I went to the airport,” he said, “but first I wanted to get something to eat, and the next thing I knew my coat was gone.”

“And the thief got more than just a coat.”

“And an umbrella.”

“Forget the umbrella, will you? Besides the coat he got keys and a letter opener. There’s no little tag on the keys, tells the address, or is there?”

“Just two keys on a plain wire ring.”

“And I hope you didn’t let them engrave your initials on the letter opener.”

“No, and I wiped it clean,” he said. “But still.”

“Nothing to lead to you.”

“No.”

“But still,” she said.

“That’s what I said. ‘But still.’ ”

Back in the city, Keller picked up the Boston papers. Both covered the murder in detail. Alvin Thurnauer, it turned out, was a prominent local businessman with connections to local political interests and, the papers hinted, to less savory elements as well. That he’d died violently in a Back Bay love nest, along with a blonde to whom he was not married, did nothing to diminish the news value of his death.

Both papers assured him that the police were pursuing various leads. Keller, reading between the lines, concluded that they didn’t have a clue. They might guess that someone had contracted to have Thurnauer hit, and they might be able to guess who that someone was, but they wouldn’t be able to go anywhere with it. There were no witnesses, no useful physical evidence.

He almost missed the second murder.

The Globe didn’t have it. But there it was in the Herald, a small story on a back page, a man found dead on Boston Common, shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon.

Keller could picture the poor bastard, lying facedown on the grass, the rain washing relentlessly down on him. He could picture the dead man’s coat, too. The Herald didn’t say anything about a coat, but that didn’t matter. Keller could picture it all the same.

Green as the grass.

He stared hard at his thumb, then looked in a drawer for the copy of his chart Louise had given him. It looked even more impressive now, if no less incomprehensible. He put it back in the drawer.

Later, when the sky was dark, he went outside and looked up at the stars.

Keller’s Designated Hitter

Keller, a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other, walked up a flight and a half of concrete steps and found his way to his seat. In front of him, two men were discussing the ramifications of a recent trade the Tarpons had made, sending two minor-league prospects to the Florida Marlins in return for a left-handed reliever and a player to be named later. Keller figured he hadn’t missed anything, as they’d been talking about the same subject when he left. He figured the player in question would have been long since named by the time these two were done speculating about him.

Keller took a bite of his hot dog, drew a sip of his beer. The fellow on his left said, “You didn’t bring me one.”

Huh? He’d told the guy he’d be back in a minute, might have mentioned he was going to the refreshment stand, but had he missed something the man had said in return?

“What didn’t I bring you? A hot dog or a beer?”

“Either one,” the man said.

“Was I supposed to?”

“Nope,” the man said. “Hey, don’t mind me. I’m just jerking your chain a little.”

“Oh,” Keller said.

The fellow started to say something else, but broke it off after a word or two as he and everybody else in the stadium turned their attention to home plate, where the Tarpons’ cleanup hitter had just dropped to the dirt to avoid getting hit by a high inside fastball. The Yankee pitcher, a burly Japanese with a herky-jerky windup, seemed unfazed by the boos, and Keller wondered if he even knew they were for him. He caught the return throw from the catcher, set himself, and went into his pitching motion.

“Taguchi likes to pitch inside,” said the man who’d been jerking Keller’s chain, “and Vollmer likes to crowd the plate. So every once in a while Vollmer has to hit the dirt or take one for the team.”

Keller took another bite of his hot dog, wondering if he ought to offer a bite to his new friend. That he even considered it seemed to indicate that his chain had been jerked successfully. He was glad he didn’t have to share the hot dog, because he wanted every bite of it for himself. And, when it was gone, he had a feeling he might go back for another.

Which was strange, because he never ate hot dogs. A few years back he’d read a political essay on the back page of a news magazine that likened legislation to sausage. You were better off not knowing how it was made, the writer observed, and Keller, who had heretofore never cared how laws were passed or sausages produced, found himself more conscious of the whole business. The legislative aspect didn’t change his life, but, without making any conscious decision on the matter, he found he’d lost his taste for sausage.

Being at a ballpark somehow made it different. He had a hunch the hot dogs they sold here at Tarpon Stadium were if anything more dubious in their composition than your average supermarket frankfurter, but that seemed to be beside the point. A ballpark hot dog was just part of the baseball experience, along with listening to some flannel-mouthed fan shouting instructions to a ballplayer dozens of yards away who couldn’t possibly hear him, or booing a pitcher who couldn’t care less, or having one’s chain jerked by a total stranger. All part of the Great American Pastime.

He took a bite, chewed, sipped his beer. Taguchi went to three and two on Vollmer, who fouled off four pitches before he got one he liked. He drove it to the 396-foot mark in left center field, where Bernie Williams hauled it in. There had been runners on first and second, and they trotted back to their respective bases when the ball was caught.

“One out,” said Keller’s new friend, the chain jerker.

Keller ate his hot dog, sipped his beer. The next batter swung furiously and topped a roller that dribbled out toward the mound. Taguchi pounced on it, but his only play was to first, and the runners advanced. Men on second and third, two out.

The Tarpon third baseman was next, and the crowd booed lustily when the Yankees elected to walk him intentionally. “They always do that,” Keller said.

“Always,” the man said. “It’s strategy, and nobody minds when their own team does it. But when your guy’s up and the other side won’t pitch to him, you tend to see it as a sign of cowardice.”

“Seems like a smart move, though.”

“Unless Turnbull shows ’em up with a grand slam, and God knows he’s hit a few of ’em in the past.”

“I saw one of them,” Keller recalled. “In Wrigley Field, before they had the lights. He was with the Cubs. I forget who they were playing.”

“That would have had to be before the lights came in, if he was with the Cubs. Been all around, hasn’t he? But he’s been slumping lately, and you got to go with the percentages. Walk him and you put on a .320 hitter to get at a .280 hitter, plus you got a force play at any base.”

“It’s a game of percentages,” Keller said.

“A game of inches, a game of percentages, a game of woulda-coulda-shoulda,” the man said, and Keller was suddenly more than ordinarily grateful that he was an American. He’d never been to a soccer match, but somehow he doubted they ever supplied you with a conversation like this one.

“Batting seventh for the Tarpons,” the stadium announcer intoned. “Number 17, the designated hitter, Floyd Turnbull.”

“He’s a designated hitter,” Dot had said, on the porch of the big old house on Taunton Place. “Whatever that means.”

“It means he’s in the lineup on offense only,” Keller told her. “He bats for the pitcher.”

“Why can’t the pitcher bat for himself? Is it some kind of union regulation?”

“That’s close enough,” said Keller, who didn’t want to get into it. He had once tried to explain the infield fly rule to a stewardess, and he was never going to make that sort of mistake again. He wasn’t a sexist about it, he knew plenty of women who understood this stuff, but the ones who didn’t were going to have to learn it from somebody else.

“I saw him play a few times,” he told her, stirring his glass of iced tea. “Floyd Turnbull.”

“On television?”

“Dozens of times on TV,” he said. “I was thinking of seeing him in person. Once at Wrigley Field, when he was with the Cubs and I happened to be in Chicago.”

“You just happened to be there?”

“Well,” Keller said. “I don’t ever just happen to be anyplace. It was business. Anyway, I had a free afternoon and I went to a game.”

“Nowadays you’d go to a stamp dealer.”

“Games are mostly at night nowadays,” he said, “but I still go every once in a while. I saw Turnbull a couple of times in New York, too. Out at Shea, when he was with the Cubs and they were in town for a series with the Mets. Or maybe he was already with the Astros when I saw him. It’s hard to remember.”

“And not exactly crucial that you get it right.”

“I think I saw him at Yankee Stadium, too. But you’re right, it’s not important.”

“In fact,” Dot said, “it would be fine with me if you’d never seen him at all, up close or on TV. Does this complicate things, Keller? Because I can always call the guy back and tell him we pass.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Well, I hate to, since they already paid half. I can turn down jobs every day and twice on Sundays, but there’s something about giving back money once I’ve got it in my hands that makes me sick to my stomach. I wonder why that is?”

“A bird in the hand,” Keller suggested.

“When I’ve got a bird in my hand,” she said, “I hate like hell to let go of it. But you saw this guy play. That’s not gonna make it tough for you to take him out?”

Keller thought about it, shook his head. “I don’t see why it should,” he said. “It’s what I do.”

“Right,” Dot said. “Same as Turnbull, when you think about it. You’re a designated hitter yourself, aren’t you, Keller?”

“Designated hitter,” Keller said, as Floyd Turnbull took a called second strike. “Whoever thought that one up?”

“Some marketing genius,” his new friend said. “Some dipstick who came up with research to prove that fans wanted to see more hits and home runs. So they lowered the pitching mound and told the umpires to quit calling the high strike, and then they juiced up the baseball and brought in the fences in the new ballparks, and the ballplayers started lifting weights and swinging lighter bats, and now you’ve got baseball games with scores like football games. Last week the Tigers beat the A’s fourteen to thirteen. First thing I thought, Jeez, who missed the extra point?”

“At least the National League still lets pitchers hit.”

“And at least nobody in the pros uses those aluminum bats. They show college baseball on ESPN and I can’t watch it. I can’t stand the sound the ball makes when you hit it. Not to mention it travels too goddam far.”

The next pitch was in the dirt. Posada couldn’t find it, but the third base coach, suspicious, held the runner. The fans booed, though it was hard to tell who they were booing, or why. The two in front of Keller joined in the booing, and Keller and the man next to him exchanged knowing glances.

“Fans,” the man said, and rolled his eyes.

The next pitch was belt-high, and Turnbull connected solidly with it. The stadium held its collective breath and the ball sailed toward the left field corner, hooking foul at the last moment. The crowd heaved a sigh and the runners trotted back to their bases. Turnbull, looking not at all happy, dug in again at the plate.

He swung at the next pitch, which looked like ball four to Keller, and popped to right. O’Neill floated under it and gathered it in and the inning was over.

“Top of the order for the Yanks,” said Keller’s friend. “About time they broke this thing wide open, wouldn’t you say?”

With two out in the Tarpons’ half of the eighth inning, with the Yankees ahead by five runs, Floyd Turnbull got all of a Mike Stanton fastball and hit it into the upper deck. Keller watched as he jogged around the bases, getting a good hand from what remained of the crowd.

“Career home run number 393 for the old warhorse,” said the man on Keller’s left. “And all those people missed it because they had to beat the traffic.”

“Number 393?”

“Leaves him seven shy of four hundred. And, in the hits department, you just saw number 2988.”

“You’ve got those stats at your fingertips?”

“My fingers won’t quite reach,” the fellow said, and pointed to the scoreboard, where the information he’d cited was posted. “Just twelve hits to go before he joins the magic circle, the Three Thousand Hits club. That’s the only thing to be said for the DH rule — it lets a guy like Floyd Turnbull stick around a couple of extra years, long enough to post the kind of numbers that get you into Cooperstown. And he can still do a team some good. He can’t run the bases, he can’t chase after fly balls, but the son of a bitch hasn’t forgotten how to hit a baseball.”

The Yankees got the run back in the top of the ninth on a walk to Jeter and a home run by Bernie Williams, and the Tarpons went in order in the bottom of the ninth, with Rivera striking out the first two batters and getting the third to pop to short.

“Too bad there was nobody on when Turnbull got his homer,” said Keller’s friend, “but that’s usually the way it is. He’s still good with a stick, but he hits ’em with nobody on, and usually when the team’s too far behind or out in front for it to make any difference.”

The two men walked down a succession of ramps and out of the stadium. “I’d like to see old Floyd get the numbers he needs,” the man said, “but I wish he’d get ’em on some other team. What they need for a shot at the flag’s a decent left-handed starter and some help in the bullpen, not an old man with bad knees who hits it out when you don’t need it.”

“You think they should trade him?”

“They’d love to, but who’d trade for him? He can help a team, but not enough to justify paying him the big bucks. He’s got three years left on his contract, three years at six-point-five million a year. There are teams that could use him, but nobody can use him six-point-five worth. And the Tarps can’t release him and go out and buy the pitching they need, not while they’ve got Turnbull’s salary to pay.”

“Tricky business,” Keller said.

“And a business is what it is. Well, I’m parked over on Pentland Avenue, so this is where I get off. Nice talking with you.”

And off the fellow went, while Keller turned and walked off in the opposite direction. He didn’t know the name of the man he had talked to, and would probably never see him again, and that was fine. In fact it was one of the real pleasures of going to a game, the intense conversations you had with strangers whom you then allowed to remain strangers. The man had been good company, and at the end he’d provided some useful information.

Because now Keller had an idea why he’d been hired.

“The Tarpons are stuck with Turnbull,” he told Dot. “He draws this huge salary, and they have to pay it whether they play him or not. And I guess that’s where I come in.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Are you sure about this, Keller? That’s a pretty extreme form of corporate downsizing. All that just to keep from paying a man his salary? How much could it amount to?”

He told her.

“That much,” she said, impressed. “That’s a lot to pay a man to hit a ball with a stick, especially when he doesn’t have to go out and stand around in the hot sun. He just sits on the bench until it’s his turn to bat, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I think you might be on to something,” she said. “I don’t know who hired us or why, but your guess makes more sense than anything I could come up with off the top of my head. But I feel myself getting a little nervous, Keller.”

“Why?”

“Because this is just the kind of thing that could set your milk to curdling, isn’t it?”

“What milk? What are you talking about?”

“I’ve known you a long time, Keller. And I can just see you deciding that this is a hell of a way to treat a faithful employee after long years of service, and how can you allow this to happen, di dah di dah di dah. Am I coming through loud and clear?”

“The di dah part makes more sense than the rest of it,” he said. “Dot, as far as who hired us and why, all I am is curious. Curiosity’s a long way from righteous indignation.”

“Didn’t do much for the cat, as I remember.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m not that curious.”

“So I’ve got nothing to worry about?”

“Not a thing,” he said. “The guy’s a dead man hitting.”

The Tarpons closed out the series with the Yankees — and a twelve-game home stand — the following afternoon. They got a good outing from their ace right-hander, who scattered six hits and held the New Yorkers to one run, a bases-empty homer by Brosius. The Tarps won, 3–1, with no help from their designated hitter, who struck out twice, flied to center, and hit a hard liner right at the first baseman.

Keller watched from a good seat on the third base side, then checked out of his hotel and drove to the airport. He turned in his rental car and flew to Milwaukee, where the Brewers would host the Tarps for a three-game series. He picked up a fresh rental and checked in at a motel half a mile from the Marriott where the Tarpons always stayed.

The Brewers won the first game, 5–2. Floyd Turnbull had a good night at bat, going three for five with two singles and a double, but he didn’t do anything to affect the outcome; there was nobody on base when he got his hits, and nobody behind him in the order could drive him in.

The next night the Tarps got to the Brewers’ rookie southpaw early and blew the game open, scoring six runs in the first inning and winding up with a 13–4 victory. Turnbull’s homer was part of the big first inning, and he collected another hit in the seventh when he doubled into the gap and was thrown out trying to stretch it into a triple.

“Why’d he do that?” the bald guy next to Keller wondered. “Two out and he tries for third? Don’t make the third out at third base, isn’t that what they say?”

“When you’re up by nine runs,” Keller said, “I don’t suppose it matters much one way or the other.”

“Still,” the man said, “it’s what’s wrong with that prick. Always for himself his whole career. He wanted one more triple in the record book, that’s what he wanted. And forget about the team.”

After the game Keller went to a German restaurant south of the city on the lake. The place dripped atmosphere, with beer steins hanging from the hand-hewn oak beams, an oompah band in lederhosen, and fifteen different beers on tap. Keller couldn’t tell the waitresses apart, they all looked like grown-up versions of Heidi, and evidently Floyd Turnbull had the same problem; he called them all Gretchen and ran his hand up under their skirts whenever they came within reach.

Keller was there because he’d learned the Tarpons favored the place, but the sauerbraten was reason enough to make the trip. He made his beer last until he’d cleaned his plate, then turned down the waitress’s suggestion of a refill and asked for a cup of coffee instead. By the time she brought it, several more fans had crossed the room to beg autographs from the Tarpons.

“They all want their menus signed,” Keller told the waitress. “You people are going to run out of menus.”

“It happens all the time,” she said. “Not that we run out of menus, because we never do, but players coming here and our other customers asking for autographs. All the athletes like to come here.”

“Well, the food’s great,” he said.

“And it’s free. For the players, I mean. It brings in other customers, so it’s worth it to the owner, plus he just likes having his restaurant full of jocks. About it being free for them, I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

“It’ll be our little secret.”

“You can tell the whole world, for all I care. Tonight’s my last night. I mean, what do I need with jerks like Floyd Turnbull? I want a pelvic exam, I’ll go to my gynecologist, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I noticed he was a little free with his hands.”

“And close with everything else. They eat and drink free, but most of them at least leave tips. Not good tips, ballplayers are cheap bastards, but they leave something. Turnbull always leaves exactly twenty percent.”

“Twenty percent’s not that bad, is it?”

“It is when it’s twenty percent of nothing.”

“Oh.”

“He said he got a home run tonight, too.”

“Number 394 of his career,” Keller said.

“Well, he’s not getting to first base with me,” she said. “The big jerk.”

“Night before last,” Keller said, “I was in a German restaurant in Milwaukee.”

“Milwaukee, Keller?”

“Well, not exactly in Milwaukee. It was south of the city a few miles, on Lake Michigan.”

“That’s close enough,” Dot said. “It’s still a long way from Memphis, isn’t it? Although if it’s south of the city, I guess it’s closer to Memphis than if it was actually inside of Milwaukee.”

“Dot...”

“Before we get too deep into the geography of it,” she said, “aren’t you supposed to be in Memphis? Taking care of business?”

“As a matter of fact...”

“And don’t tell me you already took care of business, because I would have heard. CNN would have had it, and they wouldn’t even make me wait until Headline Sports at twenty minutes past the hour. You notice how they never say which hour?”

“That’s because of different time zones.”

“That’s right, Keller, and what time zone are you in? Or don’t you know?”

“I’m in Seattle,” he said.

“That’s Pacific time, isn’t it? Three hours behind New York.”

“Right.”

“But ahead of us,” she said, “in coffee. I’ll bet you can explain, can’t you?”

“They’re on a road trip,” he said. “They play half their games at home in Memphis, and half the time they’re in other cities.”

“And you’ve been tagging along after them.”

“That’s right. I want to take my time, pick my spot. If I have to spend a few dollars on airline tickets, I figure that’s my business. Because nobody said anything about being in a hurry on this one.”

“No,” she admitted. “If time is of the essence, nobody told me about it. I just thought you were gallivanting around, going to stamp dealers and all. Taking your eye off the ball, so to speak.”

“So to speak,” Keller said.

“So how can they play ball in Seattle, Keller? Doesn’t it rain all the time? Or is it one of those stadiums with a lid on it?”

“A dome,” he said.

“I stand corrected. And here’s another question. What’s Memphis got to do with fish?”

“Huh?”

“Tarpons,” she said. “Fish. And there’s Memphis, in the middle of the desert.”

“Actually, it’s on the Mississippi River.”

“Spot any tarpons in the Mississippi River, Keller?”

“No.”

“And you won’t,” she said, “unless that’s where you stick Turnbull when you finally close the deal. It’s a saltwater fish, the tarpon, so why pick that name for the Memphis team? Why not call them the Gracelanders?”

“They moved,” he explained.

“To Milwaukee,” she said, “and then to Seattle, and God knows where they’ll go next.”

“No,” he said. “The franchise moved. They started out as an expansion team, the Sarasota Tarpons, but they couldn’t sell enough tickets, so a new owner took over and moved them to Memphis. Look at basketball, the Utah Jazz and the L.A. Lakers. What’s Salt Lake City got to do with jazz, and when did Southern California get to be the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes?”

“The reason I don’t follow sports,” she said, “is it’s too damn confusing. Isn’t there a team called the Miami Heat? I hope they stay put. Imagine if they move to Buffalo.”

Why had he called in the first place? Oh, right. “Dot,” he said, “I was in the Tarpons’ hotel earlier today, and I saw a guy.”

“So?”

“A little guy,” he said, “with a big nose, and one of those heads that look as though somebody put it in a vise.”

“I heard about a guy once who used to do that to people.”

“Well, I doubt that’s what happened to this fellow, but that’s the kind of face he had. He was sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper.”

“Suspicious behavior like that, it’s no wonder you noticed him.”

“No, that’s the thing,” he said. “He’s distinctive-looking, and he looked wrong. And I saw him just a couple of nights before in Milwaukee at this German restaurant.”

“The famous German restaurant.”

“I gather it is pretty famous, but that’s not the point. He was in both places, and he was alone both times. I noticed him in Milwaukee because I was eating by myself, and feeling a little conspicuous about it, and I saw I wasn’t the only lone diner, because there he was.”

“You could have asked him to join you.”

“He looked wrong there, too. He looked like a Broadway sharpie, out of an old movie. Looked like a weasel, wore a fedora. He could have been in Guys and Dolls, saying he’s got the horse right here.”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“And what I think,” he said, “is I’m not the only DH in the lineup... Hello? Dot?”

“I’m here,” she said. “Just taking it all in. I don’t know who the client is, the contract came through a broker, but what I do know is nobody seems to be getting antsy. So why would they hire somebody else? You’re sure this guy’s a hitter? Maybe he’s a big fan, hates to miss a game, follows ’em all over the country.”

“He looks wrong for the part, Dot.”

“Could he be a private eye? Ballplayers cheat on their wives, don’t they?”

“Everybody does, Dot.”

“So some wife hired him, he’s gathering divorce evidence.”

“He looks too shady to be a private eye.”

“I didn’t know that was possible.”

“He doesn’t have that crooked-cop look private eyes have. He looks more like the kind of guy they used to arrest, and he’d bribe them to cut him loose. I think he’s a hired gun, and not one from the A-list, either.”

“Or he wouldn’t look like that.”

“Part of the job description,” he said, “is you have to be able to pass in a crowd. And he’s a real sore thumb.”

“Maybe there’s more than one person who wants our guy dead.”

“Occurred to me.”

“And maybe a second client hired a second hit man. You know, maybe taking your time’s a good idea.”

“Just what I was thinking.”

“Because you could do something and find yourself in a mess because of the heat this ferret-faced joker stirs up. And if he’s there with a job to do, and you stay in the background and let him do it, where’s the harm? We collect no matter who pulls the trigger.”

“So I’ll bide my time.”

“Why not? Drink some of that famous coffee, Keller. Get rained on by some of that famous rain. They have any stamp dealers in Seattle, Keller?”

“There must be. I know there’s one in Tacoma.”

“So go see him,” she said. “Buy some stamps. Enjoy yourself.”

“I collect worldwide, 1840 to 1949, and up to 1952 for British Commonwealth.”

“In other words, the classics,” said the dealer, a square-faced man who was wearing a striped tie with a plaid shirt. “The good stuff.”

“But I’ve been thinking of adding a topic. Baseball.”

“Good topic,” the man said. “Most topics, you get bogged down in all these phony Olympics issues every little stamp-crazy country prints up to sell to collectors. Soccer’s even worse, with the World Cup and all. There’s less of that crap with baseball, on account of it’s not an Olympic sport. I mean, what do they know about baseball in Guinea-Bissau?”

“I was at the game last night,” Keller said.

“Mariners win for a change?”

“Beat the Tarpons.”

“About time.”

“Turnbull went two for four.”

“Turnbull. He on the Mariners?”

“He’s the Tarpons’ DH.”

“They brought in the DH,” the man said, “I lost interest in the game. He went two for four, huh? Am I missing something here? Is that significant?”

“Well, I don’t know that it’s significant,” Keller said, “but that puts him just five hits shy of three thousand, and he needs three home runs to reach the four hundred mark.”

“You never know,” the dealer said. “One of these days, St. Vincent — Grenadines may put his picture on a stamp. Well, what do you say? Do you want to see some baseball topicals?”

Keller shook his head. “I’ll have to give it some more thought,” he said, “before I start a whole new collection. How about Turkey? There’s page after page of early issues where I’ve got nothing but spaces.”

“You sit down,” the dealer said, “and we’ll see if we can’t fill some of them for you.”

From Seattle the Tarpons flew to Cleveland for three games at Jacobs Field, then down to Baltimore for four games in three days with the division-leading Orioles. Keller missed the last game against the Mariners and flew to Cleveland ahead of them, getting settled in and buying tickets for all three games. Jacobs Field was one of the new parks and an evident source of pride to the local fans, and the previous year they’d filled the stands more often than not, but this year the Indians weren’t doing as well and Keller had no trouble getting good seats.

Floyd Turnbull managed only one hit against the Indians, a scratch single in the first game. He went oh for three with a walk in game two, and rode the bench in the third game, the only one the Tarpons won. His replacement, a skinny kid just up from the minors, had two hits and drove in three runs.

“New kid beat us,” said Keller’s conversational partner du jour. He was a Cleveland fan, and assumed Keller was, too. Keller, who’d bought an Indians cap for the series, had encouraged him in this belief. “Wish they’d stick with old Turnbull,” the man went on.

“Close to three thousand hits,” Keller said.

“Lots of hits and homers, but he never seems to beat you like this kid just did. Hits for the record book, not for the game — that’s Floyd for you.”

“Excuse me,” Keller said. “I see somebody I better go say hello to.”

It was the Broadway sharpie, wearing a Panama fedora with a bright red hatband. That made him easy to spot, but even without it he was hard to miss. Keller had picked him out of the crowd back in the third inning, checked now and then to make sure he was still in the same seat. But now the guy was in conversation with a woman, their heads close together, and she didn’t look right for the part. The instant camaraderie of baseball notwithstanding, a woman who looked like her didn’t figure to be discussing the subtleties of the double steal with a guy who looked like him.

She was tall and slender, and she bore herself regally. She was wearing a suit, and at first glance you thought she’d come from the office, and then you decided she probably owned the company. If she belonged at a ballpark at all, it was in the sky boxes, not the general-admission seats.

What were they discussing with such urgency? Whatever it was, they were done talking about it before Keller could get close enough to listen in. They separated and headed off in different directions, and Keller tossed a mental coin and set out after the woman. He already knew where the man was staying, and what name he was using.

He tagged the woman to the Ritz-Carlton, which sort of figured. He’d gotten rid of his Indians cap en route, but he still wasn’t dressed for the lobby of a five-star hotel, not in the khakis and polo shirt that were just fine for Jacobs Field.

Couldn’t be helped. He went in, hoping to spot her in the lobby, but she wasn’t there. Well, he could have a drink at the bar. Unless they had a dress code, he could nurse a beer and maybe keep an eye on the lobby without looking out of place. If she was settled in for the night he was out of luck, but maybe she’d just gone to her room to change, maybe she hadn’t had dinner yet.

Better than that, as it turned out. He walked into the bar and there she was, all by herself at a corner table, smoking a cigarette in a holder — you didn’t see that much anymore — and drinking what looked like a rust-colored cocktail in a stemmed glass. A Manhattan or a Rob Roy, he figured. Something like that. Classy, like the woman herself, and slightly out-of-date.

Keller stopped at the bar for a bottle of Tuborg, carried it to the woman’s table. Her eyes widened briefly at his approach, but otherwise nothing much showed on her face. Keller drew a chair for himself and sat down as if there was no question that he was welcome.

“I’m with the guy,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No names, all right? Straw hat with a red band on it. You were talking to him, what, twenty minutes ago? You want to pretend I’m talking Greek, or do you want to come with me?”

“Where?”

“He needs to see you.”

“But he just saw me!”

“Look, there’s a lot I don’t understand here,” Keller said, not untruthfully. “I’m just an errand boy. He coulda come himself, but is that what you want? To be seen in public in your own hotel with Slansky?”

“Slansky?”

“I made a mistake there,” Keller said, “using that name, which you wouldn’t know him by. Forget I said that, will you?”

“But...”

“Far as that goes, we shouldn’t spend too much time together. I’m going to walk out, and you finish your drink and sign the tab and then follow me. I’ll be waiting out front in a blue Honda Accord.”

“But...”

“Five minutes,” he told her, and left.

It took her more than five minutes, but under ten, and she got into the front seat of Honda without any hesitation. He pulled out of the hotel lot and hit the button to lock her door.

While they drove around, ostensibly heading for a meeting with the man in the Panama hat (whose name wasn’t Slansky, but so what?), Keller learned that Floyd Turnbull, who’d had an affair with this woman, had sweet-talked her into investing in a real estate venture of his. The way it was set up, she couldn’t get her money out without a lengthy and expensive lawsuit — unless Turnbull died, in which case the partnership was automatically dissolved. Keller didn’t try to follow the legal part. He got the gist of it, and that was enough. The way she spoke about Turnbull, he got the feeling she’d pay a lot to see him dead, even if there was nothing in it for her.

Funny how people tended not to like the guy.

And now Slansky had all the money in advance, and in return for that she had his sworn promise that Turnbull wouldn’t have a pulse by the time the team got back to Memphis. She’d been after him to get it done in Cleveland, but he’d stalled until he’d gotten her to pay him the entire fee up front, and it looked as though he wouldn’t do it until they were in Baltimore, but it really better happen in Baltimore, because that was the last stop before the Tarpons returned to Memphis for a long home stand, and—

Jesus, suppose the guy tried to save himself a trip to Baltimore?

“Here we go,” he said, and turned into a strip mall. All the stores were closed for the night, and the parking area was empty except for a delivery van and a Chevy that wouldn’t go anywhere until somebody changed its right rear tire. Keller parked next to the Chevy and cut the engine.

“Around the back,” he said, and opened the door for her and helped her out. He led her so that the Chevy screened them from the street. “It gets tricky here,” he said, and took her arm.

The man he’d called Slansky was staying at a budget motel off an interchange of I-71, where he’d registered as John Carpenter. Keller went and knocked on his door, but that would have been too easy.

Hell.

The Tarpons were staying at a Marriott again, unless they were already on their way to Baltimore. But they’d just finished a night game, and they had a night game tomorrow, so maybe they’d stay over and fly out in the morning. He drove over to the Marriott and walked through the lobby to the bar, and on his way he spotted the shortstop and a middle reliever. So they were staying over, unless someone in the front office had cut those two players, and that seemed unlikely, as they didn’t look depressed.

He found two more Tarpons in the bar, where he stayed long enough to drink a beer. One of the pair, the second-string catcher, gave Keller a nod of recognition, and that gave him a turn. Had he been hanging around enough for the players to think of him as a familiar face?

He finished his beer and left. As he was on his way out of the lobby, Floyd Turnbull was on his way in, and not looking very happy. And what did he have to be happy about? A stringbean named Anliot had taken his job away from him for the evening, and had won the game for the Tarpons in the process. No wonder Turnbull looked like he wanted to kick somebody’s ass, and preferably Anliot’s. He also looked to be headed for his room, and Keller figured the man was ready to call it a night.

Keller went back to the budget motel. When his knock again went unanswered, he found a pay phone and called the desk. A woman told him that Mr. Carpenter had checked out.

And gone where? He couldn’t have caught a flight to Baltimore, not at this hour. Maybe he was driving. Keller had seen his car, and it looked too old and beat-up to be a rental. Maybe he owned it, and he’d drive all night, from Cleveland to Baltimore.

Keller flew to Baltimore and was in his seat at Camden Yards for the first pitch. Floyd Turnbull wasn’t in the lineup, they’d benched him and had Graham Anliot slotted as DH. Anliot got two singles and a walk in his first three trips to the plate, and Keller didn’t stick around to see how he ended the evening. He left with the Tarpons coming to bat in the top of the seventh, and leading by four runs.

The clerk at Ace Hardware rang Keller’s purchases — a roll of picture-hanging wire, a packet of screw eyes, a packet of assorted picture hooks — and came to a logical conclusion. With a smile, he said, “Gonna hang a pitcher?”

“A DH,” Keller said.

“Huh?”

“Sorry,” he said, recovering. “I was thinking of something else. Yeah, right. Hang a picture.”

In his motel room, Keller wished he’d bought a pair of wire-cutting pliers. In their absence, he measured out a three-foot length of the picture-hanging wire and bent it back on itself until the several strands frayed and broke. He fashioned a loop at each end, then put the unused portion of the wire back in its box, to be discarded down the next handy storm drain. He’d already rid himself of the screw eyes and the picture hooks.

He didn’t know where Slansky was staying, hadn’t seen him at the game the previous evening. But he knew the sort of motel the man favored, and figured he’d pick one near the ballpark. Would he use the same name when he signed in? Keller couldn’t think of a reason why not, and evidently neither could Slansky; when he called the Sweet Dreams Motel on Key Highway, a pleasant young woman with a Gujarati accent told him that yes, they did have a guest named John Carpenter, and would he like her to ring the room?

“Don’t bother,” he said. “I want it to be a surprise.”

And it was. When Slansky — Keller couldn’t help it, he thought of the man as Slansky, even though it was a name he’d made up for the guy himself — when Slansky got in his car, there was Keller, sitting in the backseat.

The man stiffened just long enough for Keller to tell that his presence was known. Then, smoothly, he moved to fit the key in the ignition. Let him drive away? No, because Keller’s own car was parked here at the Sweet Dreams, and he’d only have to walk all the way back.

And the longer Slansky was around, the more chances he had to reach for a gun or crash the car.

“Hold it right there, Slansky,” he said.

“You got the wrong guy,” the man said, his voice a mix of relief and desperation. “Whoever Slansky is, I ain’t him.”

“No time to explain,” Keller said, because there wasn’t, and why bother? Simpler to use the picture-hook wire as he’d used it so often in the past, simpler and easier. And if Slansky went out thinking he was being killed by mistake, well, maybe that would be a comfort to him.

Or maybe not. Keller, his hands through the loops in the wire, yanking hard, couldn’t see that it made much difference.

“Awww, hell,” said the fat guy a row behind Keller, as the Oriole center fielder came down from his leap with nothing in his glove but his own hand. On the mound, the Baltimore pitcher shook his head the way pitchers do at such a moment, and Floyd Turnbull rounded first base and settled into his home-run trot.

“I thought we caught a break when the new kid got hurt,” the fat guy said, “on account of he was hotter’n a pistol, not that he won’t cool down some when the rest of the league figures out how to pitch to him. He’ll be out what, a couple of weeks?”

“That’s what I hear,” Keller said. “He broke a toe.”

“Got his foot stepped on? Is that how it happened?”

“That’s what they’re saying,” Keller said. “He was in a crowded elevator, and nobody knows exactly what happened, whether somebody stepped on his foot or he’d injured it earlier and only noticed it when he put a foot wrong. They figure he’ll be good as new inside of a month.”

“Well, he’s not hurting us now,” the man said, “but Turnbull’s picking up the slack. He really got ahold of that one.”

“Number 398,” Keller said.

“That a fact? Two shy of four hundred, and he’s getting close to the mark for base hits, isn’t he?”

“Four more and he’ll have three thousand.”

“Well, the best of luck to the guy,” the man said, “but does he have to get ’em here?”

“I figure he’ll hit the mark at home in Memphis.”

“Fine with me. Which one? Hits? Homers?”

“Maybe both,” Keller said.

“You didn’t bring me one,” the man said.

It was the same fellow he’d sat next to the first time he saw the Tarpons play, and that somehow convinced Keller he was going to see history made. At his first at-bat in the second inning, Floyd Turnbull had hit a grounder that had eyes, somehow picking out a path between the first and second basemen. It had taken a while, the Tarpons were four games into their home stand, playing the first of three with the Yankees, and Turnbull, who’d been a disappointment against Tampa Bay, was nevertheless closing in on the elusive numbers. He had 399 home runs, and that scratch single in the second inning was hit number 2999.

“I got the last hot dog,” Keller said, “and I’d offer to share it with you, but I never share.”

“I don’t blame you,” the fellow said. “It’s a selfish world.”

Turnbull walked in the bottom of the fourth and struck out on three pitches two innings later, but Keller didn’t care. It was a perfect night to watch a ballgame, and he enjoyed the banter with his companion as much as the drama on the field. The game was a close one, seesawing back and forth, and the Tarpons were two runs down when Turnbull came up in the bottom of the ninth with runners on first and third.

On the first pitch, the man on first broke for second. The throw was high and he slid in under the tag.

“Shit,” Keller’s friend said. “Puts the tying run in scoring position, so you got to do it, but it takes the bat out of Turnbull’s hands, because now they have to put him on, set up the double play.”

And if the Yankees walked Turnbull, the Tarpon manager would lift him for a pinch runner.

“I was hoping we’d see history made,” the man said, “but it looks like we’ll have to wait a night or two... Well, what do you know? Torre’s letting Rivera pitch to him.”

But the Yankee closer only had to throw one pitch. The instant Turnbull swung, you knew the ball was gone. So did Bernie Williams, who just turned and watched the ball sail past him into the upper deck, and Turnbull, who watched from the batter’s box, then jumped into the air, pumping both fists in triumph, before setting out on his circuit of the bases. The whole stadium knew, and the stands erupted with cheers.

Four hundred homers, three thousand hits — and the game was over, and the Tarps had won.

“Storybook finish,” Keller’s friend said, and Keller couldn’t have put it better.

“Try that tea,” Dot said. “See if it’s all right.”

Keller took a sip of iced tea and sat back in the slat-backed rocking chair. “It’s fine,” he said.

“I was beginning to wonder,” she said, “if I was ever going to see you again. The last time I heard from you there was another hitter on the case, or at least that’s what you thought. I started thinking maybe you were the one he was after, and maybe he took you out.”

“It was the other way around,” Keller said.

“Oh?”

“I didn’t want him getting in the way,” he explained, “and I figured the woman who hired him was a loose cannon. So she slipped and fell and broke her neck in a strip mall parking lot in Cleveland, and the guy she hired—”

“Got his head caught in a vise?”

“That was before I met him. He got all tangled up in some picture wire in Baltimore.”

“And Floyd Turnbull died of natural causes,” Dot said. “Had the biggest night of his life, and it turned out to be the last night of his life.”

“Ironic,” Keller said.

“That’s the word Peter Jennings used. Celebrated, drank too much, went to bed, and choked to death on his own vomit. They had a medical expert on who explained how that happens more often than you’d think. You pass out, and you get nauseated and vomit without recovering consciousness, and if you’re sleeping on your back, you aspirate the stuff and choke on it.”

“And never know what hit you.”

“Of course not,” Dot said, “or you’d do something about it. But I never believe in natural causes, Keller, when you’re in the picture. Except to the extent that you’re a natural cause of death all by yourself.”

“Well,” he said.

“How’d you do it?”

“I just helped nature a little,” he said. “I didn’t have to get him drunk, he did that by himself. I followed him home, and he was all over the road. I was afraid he was going to have an accident.”

“So?”

“Well, suppose he just gets banged around a little? And winds up in the hospital? Anyway, he made it home all right. I gave him time to go to sleep, and he didn’t make it all the way to bed, just passed out on the couch.” He shrugged. “I held a rag over his mouth, and I induced vomiting, and—”

“How? You made him drink warm soapy water?”

“Put a knee in his stomach. It worked, and the vomit didn’t have anywhere to go, because his mouth was covered. Are you sure you want to hear all this?”

“Not as sure as I was a minute ago, but don’t worry about it. He breathed it in and choked on it, end of story. And then?”

“And then I got out of there. What do you mean, ‘and then’?”

“That was a few days ago.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I went to see a few stamp dealers. Memphis is a good city for stamps. And I wanted to see the rest of the series with the Yankees. The Tarpons all wore black armbands for Turnbull, but it didn’t do them any good. The Yankees won the last two games.”

“Hurray for our side,” she said. “You want to tell me about it, Keller?”

“Tell you about it? I just told you about it.”

“You were gone a month,” she said, “doing what you could have done in two days, and I thought you might want to explain it to me.”

“The other hitter,” he began, but she was shaking her head.

“Don’t give me ‘the other hitter.’ You could have closed the sale before the other hitter ever turned up.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “Dot, it was the numbers.”

“The numbers?”

“Four hundred home runs,” he said. “Three thousand hits. I wanted him to do it.”

“Cooperstown,” she said.

“I don’t even know if the numbers’ll get him into the Hall of Fame,” he said, “and I don’t really care about that part of it. I wanted him to get in the record books, four hundred homers and three thousand hits, and I wanted to be able to say I’d been there to see him do it.”

“And to put him away.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t have to think about that part of it.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she asked him if he wanted more iced tea, and he said he was fine, and she asked him if he’d bought some nice stamps for his collection.

“I got quite a few from Turkey,” he said. “That was a weak spot in my collection, and now it’s a good deal stronger.”

“I guess that’s important.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It gets harder and harder to say what’s important and what isn’t. Dot, I spent a month watching baseball. There are worse ways to spend your time.”

“I’m sure there are, Keller,” she said. “And sooner or later I’m sure you’ll find them.”

Keller By a Nose (e-book extra story)

“So who do you like in the third?”

Keller had to hear the question a second time before he realized it was meant for him. He turned, and a little guy in a Mets warm-up jacket was standing there, a querulous expression on his lumpy face.

Who did he like in the third? He hadn’t been paying any attention, and was stuck for a response. This didn’t seem to bother the guy, who answered the question himself.

“The Two horse is odds-on, so you can’t make any money betting on him. And the Five horse might have an outside chance, but he never finished well on turf. The Three, he’s okay at five furlongs, but at this distance? So I got to say I agree with you.”

Keller hadn’t said a word. What was there to agree with?

“You’re like me,” the fellow went on. “Not like one of these degenerates, has to bet every race, can’t go five minutes without some action. Me, sometimes I’ll come here, spend the whole day, not put two dollars down the whole time. I just like to breathe some fresh air and watch those babies run.”

Keller, who hadn’t intended to say anything, couldn’t help himself. He said, “Fresh air?”

“Since they gave the smokers a room of their own,” the little man said, “it’s not so bad in here. Excuse me, I see somebody I oughta say hello to.”

He walked off, and the next time Keller noticed him the guy was at the ticket window, placing a bet. Fresh air, Keller thought. Watch those babies run. It sounded good, until you took note of the fact that those babies were out at Belmont, running around a track in the open air, while Keller and the little man and sixty or eighty other people were jammed into a midtown storefront, watching the whole thing on television.

Keller, holding a copy of the Racing Form, looked warily around the OTB parlor. It was on Lexington at Forty-fifth Street, just up from Grand Central, and not much more than a five-minute walk from his First Avenue apartment, but this was his first visit. In fact, as far as he could tell, it was the first time he had ever noticed the place. He must have walked past it hundreds if not thousands of times over the years, but he’d somehow never registered it, which showed the extent of his interest in off-track betting.

Or on-track betting, or any betting at all. Keller had been to the track three times in his entire life. The first time he’d placed a couple of small bets — two dollars here, five dollars there. His horses had run out of the money, and he’d felt stupid. The other times he hadn’t even put a bet down.

He’d been to gambling casinos on several occasions, generally work-related, and he’d never felt comfortable there. It was clear that a lot of people found the atmosphere exciting, but as far as Keller was concerned it was just sensory overload. All that noise, all those flashing lights, all those people chasing all that money. Keller, feeding a slot machine or playing a hand of blackjack to fit in, just wanted to go to his room and lie down.

Well, he thought, people were different. A lot of them clearly got something out of gambling. What some of them got, to be sure, was the attention of Keller or somebody like him. They’d lost money they couldn’t pay, or stolen money to gamble with, or had found some other way to make somebody seriously unhappy with them. Enter Keller, and, sooner rather than later, exit the gambler.

For most gamblers, though, it was a hobby, a harmless pastime. And, just because Keller couldn’t figure out what they got out of it, that didn’t mean there was nothing there. Keller, looking around the OTB parlor at all those woulda-coulda-shoulda faces, knew there was nothing feigned about their enthusiasm. They were really into it, whatever it was.

And, he thought, who was he to say their enthusiasm was misplaced? One man’s meat, after all, was another man’s poisson. These fellows, all wrapped up in Racing Form gibberish, would be hard put to make sense out of his Scott catalog. If they caught a glimpse of Keller, hunched over one of his stamp albums, a magnifying glass in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, they’d most likely figure he was out of his mind. Why play with little bits of perforated paper when you could bet money on horses?

“They’re off!”

And so they were. Keller looked at the wall-mounted television screen and watched those babies run.

It started with stamps.

He collected worldwide, from the first postage stamp, Great Britain’s Penny Black and Two-Penny Blue of 1840, up to shortly after the end of World War Two. (Just when he stopped depended upon the country. He collected most countries through 1949, but his British Empire issues stopped at 1952, with the death of George VI. The most recent stamp in his collection was over fifty years old.)

When you collected the whole world, your albums held spaces for many more stamps than you would ever be able to acquire. Keller knew he would never completely fill any of his albums, and he found this not frustrating but comforting. No matter how long he lived or how much money he got, he would always have more stamps to look for. You tried to fill in the spaces, of course — that was the point — but it was the trying that brought you pleasure, not the accomplishment.

Consequently, he never absolutely had to have any particular stamp. He shopped carefully, and he chose the stamps he liked, and he didn’t spend more than he could afford. He’d saved money over the years, he’d even reached a point where he’d been thinking about retiring, but when he got back into stamp collecting his hobby gradually ate up his retirement fund — which, all things considered, was fine with him. Why would he want to retire? If he retired, he’d have to stop buying stamps.

As it was, he was in a perfect position. He was never desperate for money, but he could always find a use for it. If Dot came up with a whole string of jobs for him, he wound up putting a big chunk of the proceeds into his stamp collection. If business slowed down, no problem — he’d make small purchases from the dealers who shipped him stamps on approval, send some small checks to others who mailed him their monthly lists, but hold off on anything substantial until business picked up.

It worked fine. Until the Bulger & Calthorpe auction catalog came along and complicated everything.

Bulger & Calthorpe were stamp auctioneers based in Omaha. They advertised regularly in Linn’s and the other stamp publications, and traveled extensively to examine collectors’ holdings. Three or four times a year they would rent a hotel suite in downtown Omaha and hold an auction, and for a few years now Keller had been receiving their well-illustrated catalogs. Their catalog featured an extensive collection of France and French colonies, and Keller leafed through it on the off-chance that he might find himself in Omaha around that time. He was thinking of something else when he hit the first page of color photographs, and whatever it was he forgot it forever.

Martinique #2. And, right next to it, Martinique #17.

On the screen, the Two horse led wire to wire, winning by four and a half lengths. “Look at that,” the little man said, once again at Keller’s elbow. “What did I tell you? Pays three-fucking-forty for a two dollar ticket. Where’s the sense in that?”

“Did you bet him?”

“I didn’t bet on him,” the man said, “and I didn’t bet against him. What I had, I had the Eight horse to place, which is nothing but a case of getting greedy, because look what he did, will you? He came in third, right behind the Five horse, so if I bet him to show, or if I semi-wheeled the Trifecta, playing a Two-Five-Eight and a Two-Eight-Five...”

Woulda-coulda-shoulda, thought Keller.

He’d spent half an hour with the Bulger & Calthorpe catalog, reading the descriptions of the two Martinique lots, seeing what else was on offer, and returning more than once for a further look at Martinique #2 and Martinique #17. He interrupted himself to check the balance in his bank account, frowned, pulled out the album that ran from Leeward Islands to Netherlands, opened it to Martinique, and looked first at the couple hundred stamps he had and then at the two empty spaces, spaces designed to hold — what else? — Martinique #2 and Martinique #17.

He closed the album but didn’t put it away, not yet, and he picked up the phone and called Dot.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if anything came in.”

“Like what, Keller?”

“Like work,” he said.

“Was your phone off the hook?”

“No,” he said. “Did you try to call me?”

“If I had,” she said, “I’d have reached you, since your phone wasn’t off the hook. And if a job came in I’d have called, the way I always do. But instead you called me.”

“Right.”

“Which leads me to wonder why.”

“I could use the work,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You worked when? A month ago?”

“Closer to two.”

“You took a little trip, went like clockwork, smooth as silk. Client paid me and I paid you, and if that’s not silken clockwork I don’t know what is. Say, is there a new woman in the picture, Keller? Are you spending serious money on earrings again?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Then why would you... Keller, it’s stamps, isn’t it?”

“I could use a few dollars,” he said. “That’s all.”

“So you decided to be proactive and call me. Well, I’d be proactive myself, but who am I gonna call? We can’t go looking for our kind of work, Keller. It has to come to us.”

“I know that.”

“We ran an ad once, remember? And remember how it worked out?” He remembered, and made a face. “So we’ll wait,” she said, “until something comes along. You want to help it a little on a metaphysical level, try thinking proactive thoughts.”

There was a horse in the fourth race named Going Postal. That didn’t have anything to do with stamps, Keller knew, but was a reference to the propensity of disgruntled postal employees to exercise their Second Amendment rights by bringing a gun to work, often with dramatic results. Still, the name was guaranteed to catch the eye of a philatelist.

“What about the Six horse?” Keller asked the little man, who consulted in turn the Racing Form and the tote board on the television.

“Finished in the money three times in his last five starts,” he reported, “but now he’s moving up in class. Likes to come from behind, and there’s early speed here, because the Two horse and the Five horse both like to get out in front.” There was more that Keller couldn’t follow, and then the man said, “Morning line had him at twelve-to-one, and he’s up to eighteen-to-one now, so the good news is he’ll pay a nice price, but the bad news is nobody thinks he’s got much of a chance.”

Keller got in line. When it was his turn, he bet two dollars on Going Postal to win.

Keller didn’t know much about Martinique beyond the fact that it was a French possession in the West Indies, and he knew the postal authorities had stopped issuing special stamps for the place a while ago. It was now officially a department of France, and used regular French stamps. The French did that to avoid being called colonialists. By designating Martinique a part of France, the same as Normandy or Provence, they obscured the fact that the island was full of black people who worked in the fields, fields that were owned by white people who lived in Paris.

Keller had never been to Martinique — or to France, as far as that went — and had no special interest in the place. It was a funny thing about stamps; you didn’t need to be interested in a country to be interested in the country’s stamps. And he couldn’t say what was so special about the stamps of Martinique, except that one way or another he had accumulated quite a few of them, and that made him seek out more, and now, remarkably, he had all but two.

The two he lacked were among the colony’s first issues, created by surcharging stamps originally printed for general use in France’s overseas empire. The first, #2 in the Scott catalog, was a twenty centime stamp surcharged “MARTINIQUE” and “5c” in black. The second, #17, was similar: “MARTINIQUE / 15c” on a four centime stamp.

According to the catalog, #17 was worth $7500 mint, $7000 used. #2 was listed at $11,000, mint or used. The listings were in italics, which was Scott’s way of indicating that the value was difficult to determine precisely.

Keller bought most of his stamps at around half the Scott valuation. Stamps with defects went much cheaper, and stamps that were particularly fresh and well-centered could command a premium. With a true rarity, however, at a well-publicized auction, it was very hard to guess what price might be realized. Bulger & Calthorpe described #2 — it was lot #2144 in their sales catalog — as “mint with part OG, F-VF, the nicest specimen we’ve seen of this genuine rarity.” The description of #17 — lot #2153 — was almost as glowing. Both stamps were accompanied by Philatelic Foundation certificates attesting that they were indeed what they purported to be. The auctioneers estimated that #2 would bring $15,000, and pegged the other at $10,000.

But those were just estimates. They might wind up selling for quite a bit less, or a good deal more.

Keller wanted them.

Going Postal got off to a slow start, but Keller knew that was to be expected. The horse liked to come from behind. And in fact he did rally, and was running third at one point, fading in the stretch and finishing seventh in a field of nine. As the little man had predicted, the Two and Five horses had both gone out in front, and had both been overtaken, though not by Going Postal. The winner, a dappled horse named Doggen Katz, paid $19.20.

“Son of a bitch,” the little man said. “I almost had him. The only thing I did wrong was decide to bet on a different horse.”

What he needed, Keller decided, was fifty thousand dollars. That way he could go as high as twenty-five for #2 and fifteen for #17 and, after buyer’s commission, still have a few dollars left for expenses and other stamps.

Was he out of his mind? How could a little piece of perforated paper less than an inch square be worth $25,000? How could two of them be worth a man’s life?

He thought about it and decided it was just a question of degree. Unless you planned to use it to mail a letter, any expenditure for a stamp was basically irrational. If you could swallow a gnat, why gag at a camel? A hobby, he suspected, was irrational by definition. As long as you kept it in proportion, you were all right.

And he was managing that. He could, if he wanted, mortgage his apartment. Bankers would stand in line to lend him fifty grand, since the apartment was worth ten times that figure. They wouldn’t ask him what he wanted the money for, either, and he’d be free to spend every dime of it on the two Martinique stamps.

He didn’t consider it, not for a moment. It would be nuts, and he knew it. But what he did with a windfall was something else, and it didn’t matter, anyway, because there wasn’t going to be any windfall. You didn’t need a weatherman, he thought, to note that the wind was not blowing. There was no wind, and there would be no windfall, and someone else could mount the Martinique overprints in his album. It was a shame, but—

The phone rang.

Dot said, “Keller, I just made a pitcher of iced tea. Why don’t you come up here and help me drink it?”

In the fifth race, there was a horse called Happy Trigger and another called Hit the Boss. If Going Postal had resonated with his hobby, these seemed to suggest his profession. He mentioned them to the little fellow. “I sort of like these two,” he said, “but I don’t know which one I like better.”

“Wheel them,” the man said, and explained that Keller should buy two Exacta tickets, Four-Seven and Seven-Four. That way Keller would only collect if the two horses finished first and second. But, since the tote board indicated long odds on each of them, the potential payoff was a big one.

“What would I have to bet?” Keller asked him. “Four dollars? Because I’ve only been betting two dollars a race.”

“You want to keep it to two dollars,” his friend said, “just bet it one way. Thing is, how are you going to feel if you bet the Four-Seven and they finish Seven-Four?”

“It’s right up your alley,” Dot told him. “Comes through another broker, so there’s a good solid firewall between us and the client. And the broker’s reliable, and if the client was a corporate bond he’d be rated triple-A.”

“What’s the catch?”

“Keller,” she said, “what makes you think there’s a catch?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But there is, isn’t there?”

She frowned. “The only catch,” she said, “if you want to call it that, is there might not be a job at all.”

“I’d call that a catch.”

“I suppose.”

“If there’s no job,” he said, “why did the client call the broker, and why did the broker call you, and what am I doing out here?”

Dot pursed her lips, sighed. “There’s this horse,” she said.

The fifth race was reasonably exciting. Bunk Bed Betty, a big brown horse with a black mane, led all the way, only to be challenged in the stretch and overtaken at the wire by a thirty-to-one shot named Hypertension.

Hit the Boss was dead last, which made him the only horse that Happy Trigger beat.

Keller’s new friend got very excited toward the end of the race, and showed a ten-dollar Win ticket on Hypertension. “Oh, look at that,” he said, when they posted the payoff. “Gets me even for the day, plus yesterday and the day before. That was Alvie Jurado on Hypertension, and didn’t he ride a gorgeous race there?”

“It was exciting,” Keller allowed.

“A lot more exciting with ten bucks on that sweetie’s nose. Sorry about your Exacta. I guess it cost you four bucks.”

Keller gave a shrug that he hoped was ambiguous. In the end, he’d been uncomfortable betting four dollars, and unable to decide which way to bet his usual two dollars. So he hadn’t bet anything. There was nothing wrong with that, as a matter of fact he’d saved himself two dollars, or maybe four, but he’d feel like a piker admitting as much to a man who’d just won over three hundred dollars.

“The horse’s name is Kissimmee Dudley,” Dot told him, “and he’s running in the seventh race at Belmont Saturday. It’s the feature race, and the word is that Dudley hasn’t got a prayer.”

“I don’t know much about horses.”

“They’ve got four legs,” she said, “and if the one you bet on comes in ahead of the others, you make money. That’s as much as I know about them, but I know something about Kissimmee Dudley. Our client thinks he’s going to win.”

“I thought you said he didn’t have a prayer.”

“That’s the word. Our client doesn’t see it that way.”

“Oh?”

“Evidently Dudley’s a better horse than anybody realizes,” she said, “and they’ve been holding him back, waiting for the right race. That way they’ll get long odds and be able to clean up. And, just so nothing goes wrong, the other jockeys are getting paid to make sure they don’t finish ahead of Dudley.”

“The race is fixed,” Keller said.

“That’s the plan.”

“But?”

“But a plan is what things don’t always go according to, Keller, which is probably a good thing, because otherwise the phone would never ring. You want some more iced tea?”

“No thanks.”

“They’ll have the race on Saturday, and Dudley’ll run. And if he wins you get two thousand dollars.”

“For what?”

“For standing by. For making yourself available.”

“I think I get it,” he said. “And if Kissimmee Dudley should happen to lose — where’d they come up with a name like that, do you happen to know?”

“Not a clue.”

“If he loses,” Keller said, “I suppose I have work to do.”

She nodded.

“The jockey who beats him?”

“Is toast,” she said, “and you’re the toaster.”

None of the horses in the sixth race had a name that meant anything to Keller. Then again, picking them by name hadn’t done him much good so far. This time he looked at the odds. A longshot wouldn’t win, he decided, and a favorite wouldn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile, so maybe the answer was to pick something in the middle. The Five horse, Mogadishy, was pegged at six-to-one.

He got in line, thinking. Of course, sometimes a longshot came in. Take the preceding race, for instance, with its big payoff for Keller’s OTB buddy. There was a longshot in this race, and it would pay a lot more than the twelve bucks he’d win on his six-to-one shot.

On the other hand, no matter what horse he bet on, the return on his two-dollar bet wasn’t going to make any real difference to him. And it would be nice to cash a winning ticket for a change.

“Sir?”

He put down his two dollars and bet the odds-on favorite to show.

Dot lived in White Plains, in a big old Victorian house on Taunton Place. She gave him a ride to the train station, and a little over an hour later he was back in his apartment, looking once again at the Bulger & Calthorpe catalog.

If Kissimmee Dudley ran and lost, he’d have a job to do. And his fee for the job would be just enough to fill the two spaces in his album. And, since the horse was racing at Belmont, it stood to reason that all of the jockeys lived within easy commuting distance of the Long Island racetrack. Keller wouldn’t have to get on a plane to find his man.

If Kissimmee Dudley won, Keller got to keep the two thousand dollar standby fee. That was a decent amount of money for not doing a thing, and there were times when he’d have been happy to see it play out that way.

But this wasn’t one of those times. He really wanted those stamps. If the horse lost, well, he’d go out and earn them. But what if the damned horse won?

The sixth race ended with Pass the Gas six lengths ahead of the field. Keller cashed his ticket, and ran into his friend, who’d been talking with a fellow who bore a superficial resemblance to Jerry Orbach.

“Saw you in line to get paid,” the little man said. “What did you have, the Exacta or the Trifecta?”

“I don’t really understand those fancy bets,” Keller admitted. “I just put my money on Pass the Gas.”

“Paid even money, didn’t he? That’s not so bad.”

“I had him to show.”

“Well, if you had enough of a bet on him—”

“Just two dollars.”

“So you got back two-twenty,” the man said.

“I just felt like winning,” Keller said.

“Well,” the man said, “ you won.”

He’d put down the catalog, picked up the phone. When Dot answered he said, “I was thinking. If that Dudley horse wins, the client wins his bet and I don’t have any work to do.”

“Right.”

“But if one of the other jockeys crosses him up—”

“It’s the last time he’ll ever do it.”

“Well,” he said, “why would he do it? The jockey, I mean. What would be the point?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m just trying to understand it,” he said. “I mean, I could understand if it was boxing. Like in the movies. They want the guy to throw a fight. But he can’t do it, something in him recoils at the very idea, and he has to go on and win the fight, even if it means he’ll get his legs broken.”

“And never play the piano again,” Dot said. “I think I saw that movie, Keller.”

“All the boxing movies are like that, except the ones with Sylvester Stallone running up flights of steps. But how would that apply with horses?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been years since I saw National Velvet.”

“If you were a jockey, and they paid you to throw a race, and you didn’t — I mean, where’s the percentage in it?”

“You could bet on yourself.”

“You’d make more money betting on Kissimmee Dudley. He’s the longshot, right?”

“That’s a point.”

“And that way nobody’d have a reason to take out a contract on you, either.”

“Another point,” Dot said, “and if the jockeys are all as reasonable as you and I, Keller, you’re not going to see a dime beyond the two grand. But they’re very small.”

“The jockeys?”

“Uh-huh. Short and scrawny little bastards, every last one of them. Who the hell knows what somebody like that is going to do?”

Keller’s friend was short enough to be a jockey, but a long way from scrawny. Facially, he looked a little like Jerry Orbach. It was beginning to dawn on Keller that everybody in the OTB parlor, even the blacks and the Asians, looked a little like Jerry Orbach. It was a sort of a horseplayer look, and they all had it.

“Kissimmee Dudley,” Keller said. “Where’d somebody come up with a name like that?”

The little man consulted his Racing Form. “By Florida Cracker out of Dud Avocado,” he said. “Kissimmee’s in Florida, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“I think so.” The fellow shrugged. “The name’s the least of that horse’s problems. You take a look at his form?”

The man reeled off a string of sentences, and Keller just let the words wash over him. If he tried to follow it he’d only wind up feeling stupid. Well, so what? How many of these Jerry Orbach clones would know what to do with a perforation gauge?

“Look at the morning line,” the man went on. “Hell, look at the tote board. Old Dudley’s up there at forty-to-one.”

“That means he doesn’t have a chance?”

“A longshot’ll come in once in a while,” the man allowed. “Look at Hypertension. With him, though, his past performance charts showed he had a chance. A slim one, but slim’s better than no chance at all.”

“And Kissimmee Dudley? No chance at all?”

“He’d need a tail wind and a whole lot of luck,” the man said, “before he could rise to the level of no chance at all.”

Keller slipped away, and when he came back from the ticket window his friend asked him what horse he’d bet on. Keller’s response was mumbled, and the man had to ask him to repeat it.

“Kissimmee Dudley,” he said.

“That right?”

“I know what you said, and I suppose you’re right, but I just had a feeling.”

“A hunch,” the man said.

“Sort of, yes.”

“And you’re a man on a lucky streak, aren’t you? I mean, you just won twenty cents betting the favorite to show.”

The line was meant to be sarcastic, but something funny happened; by the time the man got to the end of the sentence, his manner had somehow changed. Keller was wondering what to make of it — had he just been insulted or not?

“The trick,” the fellow said, “is doing the wrong thing at the right time.” He went away and came back, and told Keller he probably ought to have his head examined, but what the hell.

“Kissimmee Dudley,” he said, savoring each syllable. “I can’t believe I bet on that animal. Only way he’s gonna win the seventh race is if he was entered in the sixth, but it’ll be some sweet payoff if he does. Not forty-to-one, though. Price is down to thirty-to-one.”

“That’s too bad,” Keller said.

“Except it’s a good sign, because it means some late bets are coming in on the horse. You see a horse drop just before post time from, say, five-to-one to three-to-one, that’s a good sign.” He shrugged. “When you start at forty-to-one, you need more than good signs. You need a rocket up your ass, either that or you need all the other horses to drop dead.”

Keller wasn’t sure what to watch for. He knew what you did to get your horse to run faster. You hit him with the whip, and dug your heels into his flanks.

But suppose you wanted to slow him down? You could sit back in the saddle and yank on the reins, but wouldn’t that be a little on the obvious side? Could you just hold off on the whip and cool it a little with the heel-digging? Would that be enough to keep your mount from edging out Kissimmee Dudley?

The horses were entering the starting gate, and he picked out Dudley and decided he looked like a winner. But then they all looked like winners to Keller, big well-bred horses, some taking their positions without a fuss, others showing a little spirit and giving their riders a hard time, but all of them sooner or later going where they were supposed to go.

Two of the jockeys were girls, Keller noticed, including the one riding the second favorite. Except you were probably supposed to call them women, you had to stop calling them girls these days around the time they entered kindergarten, from what Keller could tell. Still, when they were jockey-size, it seemed a stretch to call them women. Was he being sexist? Maybe, or maybe he was being sizeist, or heightist. He wasn’t sure.

“They’re off!”

And so they were, bursting out of the starting gate. Neither of the girl jockeys was riding Kissimmee Dudley, so if one of them won, well, she’d live to regret it, albeit briefly. Some people in Keller’s line of work didn’t like to take out women, while others were supposed to get a special satisfaction out of it. Keller didn’t care one way or the other. He wasn’t a sexist when it came to business, although he wasn’t sure that was enough to make him a hero in the eyes of the National Organization of Women.

“Will you look at that!”

Keller had been looking at the screen, but without registering what he was seeing. Now he realized that Kissimmee Dudley was out in front, with a good lead on the rest of the field.

Keller’s little friend was urging him on. “Oh, you beauty,” he said. “Oh, run, you son of a bitch. Oh, yes. Oh, yes!”

Were any of the horses being held back? If so, Keller couldn’t see it. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear Kissimmee Dudley was simply outrunning all of the other horses, proving himself to be superior to the competition.

But wait a damn minute. That piebald horse — what did he think he was doing? Why was he gaining ground on Dudley?

“No!” cried the little man. “Where’d the Two horse come from? It’s that fucking Alvie Jurado. Fade, you cocksucker! Die, will you? Come on, Dudley!”

The guy had liked Jurado well enough when he was making money for him on Hypertension. Now, riding a horse called Steward’s Folly, he’d become the enemy. Maybe, Keller thought, the jockey was just trying to make it look good. Maybe he’d ease up at the very end, settling for the place money and avoiding any suspicion that he’d thrown the race.

But it was a hell of a show Jurado was putting on, standing up in the stirrups, flailing away with the whip, apparently doing everything he possibly could to get Steward’s Folly to the wire ahead of Kissimmee Dudley.

“It’s Kissimmee Dudley and Steward’s Folly,” the announcer cried. “Steward’s Folly and Kissimmee Dudley. They’re neck and neck, nose to nose as they hit the wire—”

“Shit on toast,” Keller’s friend said.

“Who won?”

“Who fucking knows? See? It’s a photo finish.” And indeed the word photo flashed on and off on the television screen. “Son of a bitch. Where did that fucking Jurado come from?”

“He gained a lot of ground in a hurry,” Keller said.

“The little prick. Now we have to wait for the photo. I wish they’d hurry. See, I really got behind that hunch of yours.” He showed a ticket, and Keller leaned over and squinted at it.

“A hundred dollars?”

“On the nose,” the little man said, “plus I got him wheeled in the five dollar Exacta. You got a hunch and I bet a bunch. And he went off at twenty-eight to one, and if it’s a Six-Two Exacta with him and Steward’s Folly, Jesus, I’m rich. I’m fucking rich. And you got two bucks on him yourself, so you’ll win yourself fifty-six dollars. Unless you went and played him to show, which would explain why you’re so calm, ’cause it’d be the same to you if he comes in first or second. Is that what you went and did?”

“Not exactly,” Keller said, and fished out a ticket.

“A hundred bucks to win! Man, when you get a hunch you really back it, don’t you?”

Keller didn’t say anything. He had nineteen other tickets just like it in his pocket, but the little man didn’t have to know about them. If the photo of the two horses crossing the finish line showed Dudley in front, his tickets would be worth $58,000.

If not, well, Alvie Jurado would be worth almost as much.

“I got to hand it to you,” the little man said. “All that dough on the line, and you’re calm as a cucumber.”

Ten days later, Keller sat at his dining room table. He was holding a pair of stainless steel stamp tongs, and they in turn were holding a little piece of paper worth—

Well, it was hard to say just how much it was worth. The stamp was Martinique #2, and Keller had wound up bidding $18,500 for it. The lot had opened at $9000, and there was a bidder in the third row on the right who dropped out around the $12,000 mark, and then there was a phone bidder who hung on like grim death. When the auctioneer pounded the gavel and said, “Sold for eighteen five to JPK,” Keller’s heart was pounding harder than the gavel.

It was still racing eight lots later when the second stamp, Martinique #17, went on the block. It had a lower Scott value than #2, and was estimated lower in the Bulger & Calthorpe sales catalog, and the starting bid was lower, too, at an even $6000.

And then, remarkably, it had wound up sailing all the way to $21,250 before Keller prevailed over another phone bidder. (Or the same one, irritated at having lost #2 and unwilling to miss out on #17.) That was too much, it was three times the Scott value, but what could you do? He wanted the stamp, and he could afford it, and when would he get a chance at another one like it?

With buyer’s commission, the two lots had cost him $43,725.

He admired the stamp through his magnifier. It looked beautiful to him, although he couldn’t say why; aesthetically, it wasn’t discernibly different from other Martinique overprints worth less than twenty dollars. Carefully, he cut a mount to size, slipped the stamp into it, and secured it in his album.

Not for the first time, he thought of the little man at the OTB parlor. Keller hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, and doubted he’d ever cross paths with him again. He remembered the fellow’s excitement, and how impressed he’d been by Keller’s own coolness.

Cool? Naturally he’d been cool. Either way he won. If he didn’t cash the winning tickets on Kissimmee Dudley, he’d do just about as well when he punched Alvie Jurado’s ticket. It was interesting, waiting to see how the photo came out, but he couldn’t say it was all that nerve-wracking.

Not when you compared it to sitting in a hotel suite in Omaha, waiting for hours while lot after lot was auctioned off, until finally the stamps you’d been waiting for came up for bids. And then sitting there with your pencil lifted to indicate you were bidding, sitting there while the price climbed higher and higher, not knowing where it would stop, not knowing if you had enough cash in the belt around your waist. How high would you have to go for the first lot? And would you have enough left for the other one? And what was the matter with that phone bidder? Would the man never quit?

Now that was excitement, he thought, as he cut a second mount for Martinique #17. That was true edge-of-the-chair tension, unlike anything those Jerry Orbach lookalikes in the OTB parlor would ever know.

He felt sorry for them.

What difference did it make, really, how the photo-finish turned out? What did he care who won the race? If Kissimmee Dudley held on to win by a nose or a nose hair, it was up to Keller to work out a tax-free way to cash twenty $100 tickets. If Steward’s Folly made it home first, Alvie Jurado moved to the top of Keller’s list of Things to Make and Do. Whichever chore Keller wound up with, he had to pull it off in a hurry; he had to have his money in hand — or, more accurately, in belt — when his flight took off for Omaha.

And now it was over, and he’d done what he had to, so did it matter what it was he’d done?

Hell, no. He had the stamps.