Last Days

I

It was only later that he realized the reason they had called him, but by then it was too late for the information to do him any good. At the time, all the two men had told him on the telephone was that they'd seen his picture in the paper, read about his infiltration and so-called heroism and how, even when faced with the man with the cleaver-or the "gentleman with the cleaver" as they chose to call him-he hadn't flinched, hadn't given a thing away. Was it true, they wanted to know, that he hadn't flinched? That he had simply watched the man raise the cleaver and bring it down, his hand suddenly becoming a separate, moribund creature?

He didn't bother to answer. He only sat holding the telephone receiver against his face with his remaining hand and looking at the stump that marked the end of the other arm. The shiny, slightly puckered termination of flesh, flaked and angry at its extreme.

"Who is this?" he finally asked.

The men on the other end of the telephone laughed. "This is opportunity knocking," one of them said, the one with the deeper voice. "Do you want to be trapped behind a desk the rest of your life, Mr. Kline?"

The other voice, the one with a lisp, kept asking questions. Was it true, it wanted to know, that after he had removed his belt with his remaining hand and tightened it as a tourniquet around the stump, he then stood up, turned on one of the burners on the stovetop, and cauterized the wound himself?

"Maybe," Kline said.

"Maybe to what?" asked Low Voice.

"I have it on authority that you did," said Lisp. "Was it electric or gas? I would think electric would be better. But then again it would take awhile for electric to warm up."

"It was a hotplate," said Kline.

"A hotplate?" said Low Voice. "Good Lord, a hotplate?"

"So, electric?" asked Lisp.

"I didn't have anything else," said Kline. "There was only a hotplate."

"And then, once cauterized, you turned around and shot him through the eye," said Lisp. "Left-handed no less."

"Maybe," said Kline. "But that wasn't in the papers. Who told you that?"

"I have it on authority," said Lisp. "That's all."

"Look," said Kline. "What's this all about?"

"Opportunity, Mr. Kline," said Low Voice. "I told you already."

"There's a plane ticket waiting under your name at the airport."

"Why?" asked Kline.

"Why?" asked Lisp. "Because we admire you, Mr. Kline."

"And we'd like your help."

"What sort of help?"

"We must have you, Mr. Kline. Nobody else will do," said Low Voice.

"No?" said Kline. "Why should I trust you? And who are you exactly?"

Lisp laughed.

"Mr. Kline," Lisp said, "surely by now you realize that you can't trust anyone. But why not take a chance?"

There was no reason to go. It was not a question, as Low Voice had suggested, of either a desk job or their offer, whatever their offer happened to be. The pension he had received was enough to live on. Plus, right after he had lost his hand and cauterized the wound himself and then shot the so-called gentleman with the cleaver through the eye, he had taken the liberty, in recompense for the loss of his hand, of helping himself to a briefcase containing several hundred thousand dollars. This he saw as a profoundly moral act in a kind of moral, biblical, old testament sense: an eye for a hand, and a bag of money thrown in. The fact that the eye had had a brain and a skull behind it was incidental.

So, in short, there was no reason to accept the invitation. Better to stay put, have a lifelike prosthetic made to fit over the stump or, at the very least, wear and learn how to use the hooks that had been given him. Perfect a game of one-handed golf. Purchase a drawerful of prosthetics for all occasions. Buy some cigars. All of life was open to him, he told himself. Opportunity could knock all it liked.

And besides, he was having trouble getting out of bed. Not that he was depressed, but it was hard to get out of bed especially when he remembered that the first thing he'd be doing was trying to brush his teeth left-handed. So, instead, he spent more and more time rubbing the end of his stump, or simply staring at it. It seemed, the termination of it, at once a part of him and not at all part of him, fascinating. Sometimes he still reached for things with his missing hand. Most days he couldn't even put on the hooks. And if he couldn't bring himself to strap on the hooks, how could he be expected to leave the house? And if he didn't leave the house, how could he be expected to go to the airport, let alone pick up the ticket, let alone board a plane?

Things will get better, he told his stump. Someday we'll leave the house. Things are bound to improve.

A week after the first call, they called back.

"You missed it," said Lisp. "You missed the flight."

"Is it because of fear?" asked Low Voice. "Are you afraid of flying?"

"How can you say that to him?" Lisp asked Low Voice. "A man who cauterizes his own stump isn't going to let a little something like that get to him, is he?"

"So he missed the flight," said Low Voice. "He didn't allow for enough time. Got held up at security, maybe."

"Yes," said Lisp. "That's sure to be it."

They both fell silent. Kline kept the receiver pressed against his ear.

"Well?" asked Lisp.

"Well what?" asked Kline.

"What happened?" asked Lisp.

"I didn't go."

"He didn't go," said Low Voice.

"We know that," said Lisp. "We know you didn't go, otherwise you'd be here. If you'd gone we wouldn't be calling you there."

"No," said Kline.

The phone was silent again. Kline listened to it, staring at the veiled window.

"So?" said Low Voice.

"So what?"

"Goddammit," said Lisp. "Do we have to go through this again?"

"Look," said Kline. "I don't even know who you are."

"We already told you who we are," said Lisp.

"We're opportunity," said Low Voice. "And we're knocking."

"I'm going to hang up," said Kline.

"He's hanging up," said Low Voice, his voice sounded worn out and exhausted.

"Wait!" said Lisp. "No!"

"Nothing personal," said Kline. "I'm just not your man."

Almost as soon as he hung up, the telephone began ringing again. He let it ring. He stood up and walked around the apartment, from room to room. There were four rooms, if you counted the bathroom as a room. In every one he could hear the telephone clearly. It kept ringing.

In the end, he picked up the receiver. "What?" he said.

"But you are our man," said Lisp, his voice desperate. "We're just like you."

"There's the ticket-" said Low Voice.

"No ticket," said Kline. "No opportunity. I'm not your man."

"Do you think we are acquaintances of the man with the hatchet?" asked Lisp.

"Cleaver," said Low Voice.

"We are not acquaintances of the man with the hatchet," Lisp said. "We're just like you."

"And what am I like, exactly?" said Kline.

"Come and see," said Low Voice. "Why not come and see?"

"If we wanted to kill you," Lisp said. "You'd be dead by now." It was odd, thought Kline, to be threatened by a man with a lisp.

"Please, Mr. Kline," said Low Voice.

"We don't want to kill you," said Lisp. "Ergo, you're still alive."

"Aren't you even a little curious, Mr. Kline?" asked Low Voice.

"No," said Kline. And hung up the telephone.

When the telephone began to ring again, he unplugged it from the wall. Rolling the cord up around it, he packed it away in the closet.

He walked around the house. He would have to go out, he realized, in a day or two, to buy food. He went into the bedroom and took, from the table beside the bed, a notepad and a pen. Going into the kitchen he opened all the doors of the cabinets, the refrigerator, the freezer, and sat thinking.

Eggs, he thought.

Eggs, he wrote, though doing it with his left hand it came out looking like Esgs.

My left hand doesn't want eggs, he thought. It wants esgs.

He kept writing, his left hand mutilating each word slightly. What do you think of that? he asked his stump. And then wondered if he was speaking to his stump or to his missing hand. Did it matter? he wondered. He wondered what had become of his hand. Probably it had stayed on the table where it had been cut off. Probably it had still been there when the police arrived and had been taken away to be frozen and marked as an exhibit. It was probably still frozen somewhere.

Esgs it is, he thought. And dread. And maybe a glass or two of nelk.

He stared at the notepad, stopped staring only when he heard water dripping out of the defrosting freezer. He was not sure how much time had passed.

He got up and closed the freezer and fridge, and then stood waiting, listening for the motor to kick in.

A few days went by. His electric razor broke, emitting only a low hum when he plugged it in. He stopped shaving. The food mostly ran out. I need to get some food, he thought, but instead drank a glass of sour milk.

He lay in the bed, holding the milk-ghosted glass with one hand, balanced on his chest. He could get up, he thought. He could get out of bed and get up and get out of the house. I need to get some food, he thought, and then thought, later. There would always be time to get food later. Esgs and dread. At some point he realized that the glass he had thought he was holding was being held with his missing hand. The glass was balanced on his chest, the stump stationed beside it, a blunt animal. He was not quite sure how the glass had got there.

He was not going out, he realized hours later. The milk still ringing the bottom of the glass had dried into a white sheet and had begun to crack. Perhaps it was days later. He had missed his chance, he realized, and now what little will he had had slipped away and it was too late. He closed his eyes. When he opened them it was dark outside, so he closed them again.

When he opened them, a pale daylight leaked into the room through the curtains. Beside him, sitting on kitchen chairs they had dragged into the bedroom, were two men. They were bundled in heavy coats and gloves and scarves despite the warmth of the room.

"Hello, hello," said the first, his voice bass.

"We knocked," said the other. His upper lip was mostly missing, a ragged scar in its place; it looked as if the lip had been cut into with a pair of pinking shears. "We knocked and knocked, but nobody answered. So we let ourselves in. It was locked," he said, "but we knew you didn't mean the lock for us."

When Kline didn't say anything, the one with the torn lip said, "You remember us? The telephone?" The man lisped on the us, but having seen the lip it was hard for him to think of him as just Lisp anymore.

"The telephone," said Kline, his voice raspy.

The torn-lipped man raised his eyebrows and looked at his companion. "He's pretending not to remember," he said.

"Of course you remember," said the one with the bass voice. "Opportunity knocking? All that?"

"Ah," said Kline. "I'm afraid so."

"Look at you," said Torn-Lip. "Do you want to die in bed?"

"You don't want to die in bed," said Low Voice.

"We're here to save you," said Torn-Lip.

"I don't want to be saved," said Kline.

"He doesn't want to be saved," said Low Voice.

"Sure he does," said Torn-Lip. "He just doesn't know it yet."

"But I-"

"Mr. Kline," said Torn-Lip, "we have given you every opportunity to be reasonable. Why didn't you take advantage of either of the tickets we left for you?"

"I don't need your ticket," said Kline.

"When was the last time you ate?" asked Low Voice.

Torn-Lip reached out and prodded Kline's face with a gloved finger. "Clearly, you are your own worst enemy, Mr. Kline."

"Depression," said Low Voice. "Lassitude, ennui. I so diagnose."

"Look," said Kline, struggling to lift himself up a little in the bed. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"He sits," said Torn-Lip.

"Or nearly so. Who says the man doesn't have any fight left to him?"

"That's the spirit," said Torn-Lip. "That's the man who can have his hand cut off and not flinch."

"Come away with us, Mr. Kline."

"No," said Kline.

"What can we say to convince you?"

"Nothing," said Kline.

"Well, then," said Torn-Lip. "Perhaps there are means other than words."

Kline watched as the man grasped one of his gloved hands with the other. He twisted the hand about and levered it downward and the hand came free. Kline felt his stump tingle. The other man, he saw, was doing the same thing. They pulled back their sleeves to show him the bare exposed lumps of flesh in which their forearms terminated.

"You see," said Torn-Lip, "just like you."

"Come with us," said the other.

"But," said Kline. "I don't-"

"He thinks we're asking," said Torn-Lip, leaning in over the bed, his damaged mouth livid. "We're not asking. We're telling."

II

Before he knew it, their hands were screwed back on and they had him out of the bed and were dragging him down the emergency stairwell.

"Wait," he said. "My claw."

"Your claw?"

"For my hand."

You don't need it, they claimed, and kept pulling him down the stairs. "Where are you taking me?" he asked.

"He wants to know where we're taking him, Ramse," said Low Voice.

"To the car," said Torn-Lip-said Ramse-grunting the words. They came to a landing and Kline felt his own body sway to one side and then steady itself. Ramse was beside him, his head sticking out from under Kline's arm, his lips, torn and whole, tight against each other. "Tell him we're going to the car," Ramse said.

"We're going to the car," said Low Voice, and Kline looked over to find Low Voice's head under the other arm.

"But," he said.

"Enough questions," said Ramse. "Just try to move your feet. If you have them, may as well use them."

He looked down and could not see feet, only legs. There was a whispery sound, but it wasn't until they left the landing and started down the next set of stairs and the sound changed to a thumping that he realized it was his own feet dragging. He tried to get his feet underneath him, but the two men were moving too quickly and all he could do was to nearly trip them all down the stairs.

"Never mind, never mind," said Ramse. "We're almost there." And indeed, Kline realized, they were pushing through the fire exit door and into full sunlight. There was a car there, long and black with tinted windows. They hustled him into the back of it.

Ramse got in on the driver's side, Low Voice on the other. There was something wrong with the steering wheel, Kline noticed, as if a cup holder had been welded into it. Low Voice opened the glove box, awkwardly groped a candy bar out of it with his artificial hand, passed it back to Kline.

"Eat this," he said. "It'll help focus you."

Kline heard the locks snap down. He took the candy bar, began to strip the wrapper off it. It was almost more than he could manage. In the front, the two men were shucking their coats and hats, piling them on the seat between them. He watched Ramse snap off his artificial hand, glove and all, and drop it atop the pile. Low Voice did the same.

"That's better," Low Voice said.

Kline ate a little of the candy bar. It was chocolate, something crispy inside it. He chewed. Ramse, he realized, was holding his remaining hand up, toward the other man.

"Gous?" Ramse asked.

"What?" the man said. "Yes, right," Gous said. "Sorry."

With his single hand he reached out and took Ramse's remaining hand and twisted it. Kline watched the hand circle about and break free. Ramse rubbed his two stumps against each other. Gous reached out and took hold of Ramse's ear, tore it off. It came free, leaving a gaping unwhelked hole behind.

"There," said Ramse. "That's better." He looked at Kline in the rearview mirror, lifted up both stumps. "Like you," he said, smiling. "Only more so."

They drove, the city slowly dissolving around them and breaking up into fields and trees. Gous kept rummaging in the glove box, passing back food. There was another candy bar, a plastic bag of broken pretzels, a tin of sardines. Kline took a little of each, left what remained on the seat beside him. He was beginning to feel a little more alert. Outside, the sun was high; even through the tinted glass it looked hot outside. They turned right and went up a ramp and entered the freeway, the car quickly gaining speed.

"Where are we?" Kline asked.

"Here we go," said Gous, ignoring him.

"Smooth sailing from here on out," said Ramse. "For a while anyway."

"But," said Kline. "Where, I don't-"

"Mr. Kline," said Gous. "Please sit back and enjoy the ride."

"What else?" asked Kline.

"What else?" said Gous.

"What do you mean what else?" asked Ramse.

"What else comes off."

"Besides the hands and the ear?" said Ramse. "Some toes," he said, "but they're already off. Three gone from one foot, two from the other."

"What happened?" asked Kline.

"What do you mean what happened, Mr. Kline? Nothing happened."

"We don't do accidents," said Gous. "Accidents and acts of God don't mean a thing, unless they're followed later by acts of will. Pretzel?" he asked.

"Your own case was hotly debated," said Ramse. "Some wanted to classify it as an accident."

"But it was no accident," said Gous.

"No," said Ramse. "Others argued, successfully, that it was no accident but instead an act of will. But then the question came 'An act of will on whose part?' On the part of the gentleman with the hatchet, surely, no denying that, but responsibility can hardly rest solely with him, can it now, Mr. Kline?" He turned a little around as he said it, pivoting his missing ear toward Kline. "All you had to do was tell him one thing, Mr. Kline, just a lie, and you would have kept your hand. But you didn't say a thing. A matter of will, Mr. Kline. Your will to lose the hand far outweighed your will to retain it."

Outside, the highway had narrowed to a two-lane road, cutting through dry scraggled woods, the road's shoulder heaped in dust.

"What about you?" Kline asked Gous.

"Me?" said Gous, blushing. "Just the hand," he said. "I'm still new."

"Have to start somewhere," said Ramse. "We brought him along because the powers that be thought you might be more comfortable with someone like you."

"He's not like me."

"You have one amputation, he has one amputation," said Ramse. "Yours is a hand, his is a hand. In that sense, he's like you. When you start to look closer, well. ."

"I used anesthetic," said Gous.

"You, Mr. Kline, did not use anesthetic. You weren't given that option."

"It's frowned upon," said Gous, "but not forbidden."

"And more or less expected for the first several amputations," said Ramse. "This makes you exceptional, Mr. Kline."

Kline looked at the seat next to him, the open tin of sardines, the filets shining in their oil.

"I'm exceptional as well," said Ramse. "I've never been anesthetized."

"He's an inspiration to us all," said Gous.

"But that you cauterized your wound yourself, Mr. Kline," said Ramse. "That makes you truly exceptional."

"I'd like to get out of the car now," said Kline softly.

"Don't be ridiculous, Mr. Kline," said Gous, grinning. "We're in the middle of nowhere."

"I could count the number of people who self-cauterize on one finger of one hand," said Ramse.

"If he had a hand," said Gous.

"If I had a hand," said Ramse.

They drove for a while in silence. Kline stayed as still as he could in the back seat. The sun had slid some little way down the horizon. After a while it vanished. The tin of sardines had slid down the seat and was now at an angle, the oil leaking slowly out. He straightened the tin, then rubbed his fingers dry on the floor carpeting. It was hard not to stare at Ramse's missing ear. He looked down at his own stump, looked at Gous' stump balanced on the seat's back. The two stumps were actually quite different, he thought. The end of Gous' was puckered. His own had been puckered and scarred from the makeshift cauterization; after the fact, a doctor had cut a little higher and smoothed it off, planed it. Outside, the trees, already sparse, seemed to vanish almost entirely, perhaps partly because of the gathering darkness but also the landscape was changing. Ramse pushed one of his stumps into the panel and turned on the headlights.

"Eight," said Ramse, gesturing his head slightly backward.

"Eight?" asked Kline. "Eight what?"

"Amputations," said Ramse. Kline watched the back of his head. "Of course that doesn't mean a thing," he said. "Could be just eight toes, all done under anesthetic, the big toes left for balance. That should hardly qualify for an eight," he said.

Gous nodded next to him. He held up his stump, looked over the back. "This counts as a one," he said. "But I could have left the hand and cut off all the fingers and I'd be a four. Five if you took the thumb."

They were waiting for Kline to say something. "That hardly seems fair," he offered.

"But which is more of a shock?" asked Ramse. "A man losing his fingers or a man losing his hand?"

Kline didn't know if he was expected to answer. "I'd like to get out of the car," he said.

"So there are eights," said Ramse, "and then there are eights." They came to a curve. Kline watched Ramse post the other hand on the steering wheel for balance, turning the wheel with his cupped stump. "Personally I prefer a system of minor and major amputations, according to which I'd be a 2/3."

"I prefer by weight," said Gous. "Weigh the lopped-off member, I say."

"But you see," said Ramse, "bled or unbled? And doesn't that give a certain advantage to the corpulent?"

"You develop standards," said Gous. "Penalties and handicaps."

"Why do you need me?" asked Kline.

"Excuse me?" asked Ramse.

"He wants to know why we need him," said Gous.

"That's easy," said Ramse. "A crime has been committed."

"Why me?" asked Kline.

"You have a certain amount of experience in investigation," said Gous.

"Not investigation exactly, but infiltration," said Ramse.

"And you don't flinch, Mr. Kline," said Gous.

"No, he doesn't flinch."

"But-" said Kline.

"You'll be briefed," said Ramse. "You'll be told what to do."

"But the police-"

"No police," said Ramse. "It was hard enough to get the others to agree on you."

"If it hadn't been for the hand," said Gous.

"If it hadn't been for the hand," said Ramse, "you wouldn't be here. But you're one of us, like it or not."

III

He woke up when the car stopped in front of a set of metal gates. It was fully dark outside.

"Almost there," said Ramse from the front.

The gates opened a little and a small man stepped out, turning pale and white in the over-bright halogen glow of the headlights. The man came over to the driver's door. Kline could see he was missing an eye, one closed lid seeming flat and deflated. He was wearing a uniform. Ramse rolled down the window, and the man peered into the car.

"Mr. Ramse," said the guard. "And Mr. Gous. Who's in the back?"

"That would be Mr. Kline," said Ramse. "Hold up your arm, Mr. Kline," said Ramse.

Kline lifted his hand.

"No, the other one," said Ramse.

He lifted the stumped arm and the guard nodded. "A one?" he asked.

"Right," said Ramse. "But self-cauterized."

The guard whistled. He drew away from the window and made his way back to the gates, which he drew open just wide enough for the car to pass through. Through the rear window, Kline watched him draw the gates shut after them.

"Welcome home, Mr. Kline," said Ramse.

Kline didn't say anything.

They passed a row of houses, turned down a smaller road where the houses were a little more spread out, then down a third, smaller, tree-lined alley that dead-ended in front of a small, two-story building. Ramse stopped the car. The three of them climbed out.

"You'll be staying here, Mr. Kline," said Ramse. "First floor, second door to the left once you go through the entrance. There's probably an hour or two of night left," he said. "We'll see you in the morning. For now, why don't you try to get some sleep?"

When he went in, he couldn't figure out how to turn the hall light on so, instead, wandered down the dark hall dragging his hand along the wall, feeling for doorways. His fingers stuttered past one. He lifted his fingers from the wall and brought them near his face. They smelled of dust. He went on until he came to another doorframe, fumbled around for the handle.

Inside, he found a switch. It was a small windowless room, containing a narrow single bed with a thin, ratty blanket. In one corner was a metal cabinet. The floor was linoleum, a streaked blue. The light, he saw, was a naked bulb, hanging from the center of the ceiling. The walls' paint was cracking.

Welcome home, he thought.

He closed the door. There was no lock on it. He opened the cabinet. It was full of stacks of calendars, each month featuring a woman in various states of undress, smiling furiously. He looked at the first picture for some time before realizing the girl was missing one of her thumbs. With each month, the losses became more obvious and more numerous, March losing a breast, July missing both breasts, a hand, and a forearm. The December girl was little more than a torso, her breasts shaved off, wearing nothing but a thin white cloth banner from one shoulder to the opposite hip, reading "Miss Less Is More."

He put the calendar back and closed the cabinet. Turning off the light he lay in the bed, but kept seeing Miss Less Is More's face contorted with joy. There was Ramse's face too, his mutilated ear just above the car seatback angling itself toward him. His own stump was tingling. He got up and turned on the light, tried to sleep with it on.

He dreamt that he was sitting at the table again, the gentleman with the cleaver standing before him, cleaver coming down. Only in his dream he wasn't just the man losing his hand but also the man with the cleaver. He watched himself bring the cleaver down and the hand come free and the fingers pulse. The sheared plane of his wrist grew pale and then suddenly puffed, blood pulsing out. He stripped off his belt with his remaining hand and tightened it quickly around his arm until the bleeding slowed and mostly stopped. He watched himself do it, holding the cleaver in his hand. Then he watched himself, pale and holding the belt tight, go to the stove and turn it on, wait for the coils of the burner to smoke and begin to glow. He pushed his stump down and heard it sizzle and smelt the burnt flesh, and when he lifted the stump away it was smoking. Bits of flesh and blood were stuck to the burner and smoldering.

Then, with his left hand, face livid with pain, he took out his gun and, left-handed, shot himself through the eye. It was a hell of a thing to watch, a hell of a thing to feel. And as soon as it was over it started again, and kept starting until he forced himself awake.

Gous and Ramse were in the room, the first standing at the open cabinet looking through the calendar, rubbing at his crotch with his stump, the second standing near the bed, looking at Kline.

"Rise and shine," said Ramse.

Kline sat on the edge of the bed, pulling his pants on awkwardly with stump and arm. Ramse watched. Only when he was done did he say, "There's new clothes for you."

"Where?" asked Kline.

"Gous has them," said Ramse. "Gous?" he said, louder.

"What?" said Gous, turning stiffly away from the calendar, face red with shame or heat, or perhaps both.

"Clothes, Gous," said Ramse.

"Oh, right," said Gous, and picking up a pile of clothing near his feet, threw it to Kline.

Kline stripped out of the clothes he had just put on as Ramse watched. The new clothing consisted of a pair of gray slacks, a white shirt, a red clip-on tie. The buttons weren't easy one-handed, particularly since the shirt was freshly starched, but after the first three they got easier. He tried to leave the tie on the bed, but Ramse stopped him.

"Put it on," he said.

"Why?"

"I'm wearing one, Gous is wearing one," said Ramse. And indeed, Kline had failed to notice, their outfits were the same as his: white shirts, gray slacks, red clip-on tie. He found himself wondering how Ramse had managed to put on his shirt by himself. Perhaps he hadn't.

"Let's go," said Gous once Kline's tie was on, and nudged him toward the exit.

"Look," said Ramse, as they went out the door and started to walk down the drive. "Things are done in a certain way here. We hope you'll try to respect that."

"All right," said Kline.

"The other thing," said Ramse. "The investigation."

"He's taking you to Borchert," said Gous.

"I'm taking you to Borchert," said Ramse. 'He'll tell you about the investigation."

"Who's Borchert?"

"It's not who's Borchert," said Ramse, "but what he is. And what he is is a twelve."

"A twelve?"

"That's right," said Gous, then rattled off in a schoolboy's voice, "Leg, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, left arm, finger, finger, ear, eye, ear."

"A twelve," said Ramse. "Of course that includes a lot of digits, but when you add in two lopped limbs, it's impressive."

"He's second in command," said Gous. "After Aline."

"I see," said Kline. "What's the investigation about?"

"We don't know," said Gous.

"Borchert will tell you," said Ramse.

"You don't know?" asked Kline.

"I know a little. I should know more," said Ramse wistfully. "I'm an eight. There's no reason to keep me in the dark. Gous is another story."

"I'm just a one," admitted Gous.

"He's just a one," said Ramse, smiling. "At least for now."

"I'm a one too," said Kline.

"That's right," said Gous to Ramse. "He's a one but he's going to find out."

"He's an exception," said Ramse. "He's the exception that proves the rule."

"Why?" asked Kline. They came to a small path cutting away from the road, paved with crushed white shells. Ramse and Gous stepped onto it, Kline followed.

"Yes, why?" asked Gous.

"How the hell should I know," asked Ramse. "I'm an eight. They don't always tell me everything. Maybe because he's a self-cauterizer."

"Listen," said Kline. "I'll see Borchert and talk to him, but that's it. I'm not interested in staying."

"Borchert can be very persuasive," said Ramse.

"Don't insult Borchert," said Gous. "Be polite to him, listen to him, don't talk back."

"He's a twelve," said Ramse. "Plus his leg's amputated at the hip. That's commitment for you, eh?"

"He stayed awake for the operation," said Gous.

"But he had anesthetic," said Ramse.

"Still," said Gous.

"What about cauterization?" asked Kline.

"The cauterization?" asked Gous. "Don't know. Ramse, was he anesthetized for that too?"

"Don't know," said Ramse. "Probably. In any case, he didn't self-cauterize."

"Almost nobody does," said Gous.

"Really nobody but you," said Ramse.

The path moved back into trees, descending into a sort of depression. Kline saw, affixed to an old oak, a security camera. Then the path took a sharp curve and started uphill again. It widened into a tree-lined avenue, at the end of which was what looked like an old manor house, or a boarding school, made of gray stone. Kline counted six sets of windows in rows three tall.

They reached the gate, Kline listening to the shells crunching beneath his feet. A guard came out from behind a pillar of the house and stood on the opposite side of the gate, watching them with a single eye.

"What is wanted?" he asked, his hands folded.

"Cut it out," said Ramse. "This isn't ceremonial. We're here to see Borchert."

"Borchert?" said the guard. "What is wanted?"

"Cut it out," said Ramse. "This is Kline."

"Kline?" said the guard, unfolding his arms to reveal hands shorn of all but a thumb, a forefinger, and a middle finger. He took hold of the key and fitted it to the lock. "Why didn't you say so?" the guard said. "Let him enter."

"Are all the guards missing an eye?" asked Kline.

"Yes," Gous said happily. "All of them."

"They made a pact," said Ramse, knocking on the door. "It's a subsect. Whatever else they're missing they cut out the eye once they're initiated. Borchert started down that path," said Ramse. "He was a guard initiate, and then gave it up. What his connection to the guards is now isn't quite clear, is mysterious. That's why he's second in command, not first."

"And the eye's not all," said Gous.

"No?" said Kline.

"Let's just say that a guard can hit all the high notes and none of the low ones."

"Well," said Ramse, "nobody knows about that for certain except the guards. And they don't discuss it."

The door was opened by another guard who asked again, "What is wanted?" This time Ramse brought his heels together and rattled off what to Kline seemed clearly a memorized, ritual response. "Having been faithful in all things, we come to see he who is even more faithful than we."

"That is correct," said the guard. "And what are the three of you?"

"Two ones," said Gous. "And an eight."

"Which is the eight?"

"I am," said Ramse.

"You may enter," said the guard. "The others may not."

"But we're here with Kline," said Ramse. "We're bringing Kline to Borchert."

"Kline?" said the guard. "We've been waiting for him. He can come in, too, the other one will have to wait outside."

Kline felt something on his shoulder and looked back to see Gous' stump lying there. "A pleasure, Mr. Kline," Gous said. "Don't forget me."

"I won't," said Kline, confused.

The guard ushered them through the gate and into a bare, white hall. Before the door closed Kline looked behind him to see Gous on the other side, tilting his head trying to see in.

This guard, Kline saw, had only one hand, all the fingers on it shaved away except for the thumb and the bottom half of the forefinger.

The guard led them down the white hall to a door at the end, knocked three times.

"You're lucky," said Ramse.

"Lucky?"

"To come in," said Ramse. "Normally a one wouldn't be allowed. There had to be a special dispensation."

"I don't feel lucky," said Kline. The guard turned around and looked at him, hard, then turned away, rapped three more times.

"Don't say that," whispered Ramse. "You don't know how hard it was to convince them to bring you."

The door came open, another guard pushing his face out. Ramse and Kline watched their guard push his face in and whisper to the other. They whispered back and forth a few times then the other guard nodded, opened the door.

"Go ahead," said the first guard. "Go through."

Ramse and Kline passed through the door, the second guard letting them come in and then shutting it behind them. Inside was a stairwell. The guard led them up it to the third floor, led them down a hall, past three doors, stopped to knock on a fourth. When a muffled voice answered from behind, he opened it, ushered them in.

The room was large, Spartan in furnishing: a bed sitting low to the floor, a low desk, a small bookshelf, a reclining chair. In the latter sat a man wearing a bathrobe. He was missing an arm and a leg, his robe cut away and left open at shoulder and hip to reveal the planed surfaces, hardly stumps at all. The other arm and leg were intact, though the hand was missing all but two of its fingers, the foot all but the big toe. Both ears, too, had been cut off, leaving only a hole and a shiny patch of flesh on either side of the head. One eyelid was open, revealing a piercing eye, the other closed but deflated, the eye under it clearly absent.

"Ah," said the man. "Mr. Kline, I presume. I had assumed you had refused our invitation several weeks ago."

"It seems not," said Kline.

"He's delighted to be here," said Ramse, quickly. "It's a true pleasure for him, as well as for me, sir, to be granted audience with-"

"I wonder," said Borchert, raising his voice. "Mr. Ramse, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Ramse, "I'm-"

"I wonder, Mr. Ramse, if you'd mind waiting outside. Mr. Kline and I have private matters to discuss."

"Oh," said Ramse, looking crestfallen. "Yes, of course."

"An eight," said Borchert, once Ramse was gone, "though you wouldn't know it to look at him. What does he mean by wearing shoes in here? Where are his manners?"

"Do you want me to take my shoes off?"

"Are you missing any toes?"

"No," said Kline.

"There's no point then, is there?" said Borchert. "But come a little closer and show me your stump."

Kline went closer. He held his missing hand out; Borchert took it deftly between his remaining fingers and thumb and pulled it forward until it was only inches from his face, his eyes dilating.

"Yes, nicely done," said Borchert. "Quite professional. But I'd thought you were a self-cauterizer?"

"I was," said Kline. "It was redone afterwards."

"What a shame," said Borchert, smiling thinly. "Still, a good start nonetheless." He let go of Kline's hand, readjusted himself in his chair. "You're welcome to sit down," he said. "Unfortunately I'm in the only chair. Do feel free to help yourself to the floor."

Kline looked about him, finally settling to the floor, posting his stump against it and bringing the rest of his body down.

"There," said Borchert. "That's better now, isn't it. I suppose you're wondering why you're here."

"The investigation," said Kline.

"The investigation," said Borchert. "That's right. You want the details."

"No," said Kline.

"No?"

"I'm wondering how I can arrange to leave."

"Leave me?" said Borchert. "You find me offensive somehow?"

"Leave this whole place."

"But why, Mr. Kline?" said Borchert, smiling. "This is paradise."

Kline did not say anything.

Borchert let his smile fade slowly, artificially. "I was against bringing you," he said. "I don't mind telling you. No outsiders has always been my policy, and no recruiting. But some of the others were impressed by this story of self-cauterization. Perhaps it's nothing more than a story, Mr. Kline?"

"No," said Kline. "It's true."

"But why, Mr. Kline? Surely you could have easily applied a tourniquet and called a doctor?"

"Then I wouldn't have been able to kill the man who cut my hand off."

"The so-called gentleman with the cleaver," said Borchert, nodding. "But surely you could have killed the fellow later?"

"No," said Kline. "It was either him or me, right then. I cauterized the arm to distract him. He couldn't quite take in what I was doing, which gave me a certain advantage. Otherwise, he would have shot me."

"Yet you could take it in, Mr. Kline, even though it was your own arm. And afterwards your remaining hand was steady enough to shoot him through the eye. You were God for a moment, even if you didn't realize it. I suspect you tapped into something without knowing it, Mr. Kline. An ecstasy. I almost begin to suspect we have something to learn from you."

"I wouldn't think so," said Kline.

"Modest, too," said Borchert. "You know what you've done to our community? You've started something, Mr. Kline. Everybody is talking about self-cauterization. The creed is threatening to transform. Schism. No selfcauterizers yet, but it's only a matter of time, and then smoothly cut surfaces," he said, gesturing at his missing arm and leg, "are likely to give way to hard-puckered and rippled stumps, ugly and dappled. A little bit rough trade, no? I can't say it's to my taste, Mr. Kline, but perhaps I'm becoming antiquated."

"Perhaps," said Kline.

Borchert looked at him sharply. "I doubt it," he said. "In any case, Mr. Kline, despite my personal objections to you, now that you are here, I can't afford to let you go. Too much is at stake. I send you out of here without an investigation and we'll have a schism."

"I'm not staying," said Kline.

"You leave and I'll have to kill you," said Borchert. "For the good of the faith. Nothing personal."

Kline looked at his hand, then looked at Borchert.

"Wouldn't you like to at least hear about it, Mr. Kline? Before deciding if it's worth dying for?"

"All right," said Kline. "Why not?"

"A crime has been committed. You are not to discuss the specific details of this crime with anyone with fewer than ten amputations. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes," said Kline.

"And in any case, Mr. Kline, I expect you to be discreet. This is a somewhat precarious society. The only one who knows the full extent of this crime is myself and, in a moment, yourself."

Kline just nodded.

"In short, we've had a murder," said Borchert.

"A murder," said Kline. "Murder's not exactly my specialty."

"No," said Borchert. "But you're all we have."

"May I ask who was murdered?"

"A man called Aline," said Borchert. "He organized this community, this brotherhood. A prophet, a visionary. Both arms lopped off at the shoulder, legs gone, penis severed, ears removed, eyes removed, tongue cut partly out, teeth removed, lips peeled away, nipples sliced off, buttocks gone. Anything that could be removed removed. A true visionary. Murdered."

"How was he murdered?"

"Someone broke open his sternum, chopped his heart out."

"Do you have any idea who-"

"No," said Borchert. "And we'd like the heart back if possible."

"Why do you need the heart back?"

Borchert smiled. "Mr. Kline," he said. "We're a brotherhood. This is a religion. His heart means something to us."

Kline shrugged.

"I don't expect you to understand," said Borchert. "You're an outsider. But perhaps you'll understand one day." He moved awkwardly in his chair. "By the way," he said, "What became of your own hand?"

"I don't know," said Kline.

"You don't know," said Borchert. "Imagine that. Colonel Pierre Souvestre's leg was buried in a full-blown state funeral when he lost it in 1917. Your hand, on the other hand, is probably rotting in a pile of garbage somewhere."

Kline stood up. "When can I see the body?" he asked.

Borchert sighed. "I've told you everything you need to know about it," he said. "There's no need to see the body."

"You don't have the body anymore?"

"No," said Borchert. "It's not that."

"Then what?"

"His body is sacred to us," said Borchert. "Even without the heart."

"Are there any witnesses?"

"You're not to approach anyone with more than ten amputations without an invitation."

Kline looked about the room. "That makes the investigation a little difficult."

"I'm sure you'll manage," Borchert said.

"Can I at least see the room?"

"Yes," said Borchert, slowly. "I suppose we could manage that."

"So I'm to investigate a murder without seeing a body and without being able to interview witnesses or suspects?"

"Don't exaggerate, Mr. Kline. Just don't break in on anyone unannounced. Talk to me and I'll make arrangements."

Turning, Kline made for the door.

"Oh, and one more thing, Mr. Kline," said Borchert.

"What's that?" asked Kline.

Borchert held up one of his two remaining fingers. "As an act of good faith," he said, "to show you I have nothing against self-cauterization, that I'm an open-minded man, I'd like your help removing the upper joint of this."

"You want me to cut it off."

"Just the top joint," Borchert said. "Little more than a symbolic gesture, a pact if you will. You'll find a cleaver in the top drawer," he said, gesturing to the back of the room with a flick of his head. "There's a stove there as well, Mr. Kline, built into the counter, which I'll ask you to turn on."

Kline looked at him, looked into the back of the room, shrugged. "Why not?" he asked.

Opening the drawer, he removed the cleaver. He placed it on the counter, resting it on a butcher's block, the wood of which was laced with dozens of thin crosshatched marks. He went back to Borchert, and dragged his chair to the back of the room, set it flush against the counter.

"You don't know what an honor this is for you," said Borchert. "It's quite a gesture of intimacy. Almost anyone here would kill for it. A shame it's wasted on you."

"I'll take your word for it," said Kline.

He took Borchert by the wrist and placed the hand on the butcher's block. He folded the index finger back into Borchert's palm, leaving the remaining finger, the middle finger, angled down against the butcher's block. The burner had warmed now and was glowing red, smoking slightly. He rested his stump just above Borchert's knuckle and held the finger steady, pushed it down slightly so that the first joint was firmly against the wood.

"Just the first joint?" he asked.

Borchert smiled. "For now," he said.

He lifted the cleaver and brought it down hard and fast, as had been done to him, to his hand. The blade was sharp; there was almost no resistance as it went through the joint, perhaps a slight snap as it chopped through bone. The finger's nail and the flesh and bone just below it sat on one side of the blade, the rest of the finger on the other. Borchert's face, he saw, had gone pale.

"Well done," said Borchert, his voice strained. "Now, Mr. Kline, if you would see your way clear of releasing my hand. ."

Looking down, Kline realized that his stump was pushing down on Borchert's hand so hard that Borchert couldn't move. Blood was sputtering a little out of the finger's end, weakly. He lifted his stump and Borchert moved his finger away from the blade slightly and blood came puddling up now against the blade. He watched Borchert swing the hand about and, stretching his arm, bring the fingertip down onto the burner coil.

The flesh hissed, the blood hissing too, the air quickly filling with a smell that seemed to Kline like the smell of his own burning flesh. Now, he thought, it is time for Borchert to pick up the gun and shoot me through the eye. When Borchert took his finger away, Kline could still hear it hissing a little.

And then Borchert turned to face him, his face wreathed in ecstasy, his eyes dilated wide.

IV

He was allowed to go back to his room and rest. He seemed to be the only one occupying the house, despite there being a half-dozen other rooms. Gous brought him a tray of food at lunchtime, and Gous sat at the small table with him while he ate, querying him gently about what Borchert had said. Kline didn't answer.

"Of course I understand," said Gous. "There's an order to these things. A one can't be told much."

"Where's Ramse?" asked Kline.

Gous shrugged. "Ramse was needed elsewhere," he said. "We're not glued at the hip."

Kline nodded, cutting into his meat, pork he thought, with his knife, keeping the plate from sliding with his stump. He put down the knife, picked up the fork, speared the meat.

"Do you know Aline?" he asked, once he had finished chewing.

"Aline?" asked Gous. "Everybody knows Aline. Not personally, maybe, but we know him. He's the prophet. He's the great one."

"Gous," said Kline. "Don't take this the wrong way, but how did you get involved in all this?"

"In all what?"

"All this," said Kline, gesturing with his stump. "This whole place." He reached out and took hold of Gous' stump. "In this," he said.

"Ramse," said Gous. "He got me started."

"He came up to you and said, 'Why don't you hack that off?'"

"It's not something I'm supposed to talk about," said Gous. "Not with outsiders."

"Am I an outsider, Gous?"

"Well," said Gous. "Yes and no."

"Here I am," said Kline. "I'm right here, just like you."

"True," said Gous.

"I've talked with Borchert," said Kline. "Have you talked with Borchert?"

"No," said Gous.

"Well, then?"

Gous held his head with his hand. "I'm not supposed to talk about it," he said.

"It's a secret," said Kline.

"Not secret, sacred," said Gous. He looked straight at Kline. "When you have the call, you'll know," he said.

"Maybe I've already had the call."

"Maybe," said Gous. "It's not for me to say."

He spent the day thinking. Aline was dead, the cult in crisis. What he was being called upon to do was to investigate, discover the murderer, and thus redeem the cult, allow it to go on. Was that right? Yet, according to Borchert he would not be allowed to see the body, would have to ask permission to interview anyone, would be monitored every step of the way. Was he really there to investigate at all, or was he simply Borchert's concession to someone else?

Near dark Ramse arrived, a basket full of food slung over one of his arms.

"Well, well," he said as he set the basket down on the table. "Had a good day?"

"Fair," said Kline. He opened the basket, dished up the food. There were two plates, so he gave some to Ramse as well.

"Borchert's quite a fellow, no?"

"Yes, quite."

"They don't make them better than that," said Ramse. "And a twelve too, to boot."

"Thirteen," said Kline. He began eating. Ramse, he noticed, wasn't touching his food.

"Thirteen?" asked Ramse, looking stricken. "What do you mean?"

"He had me cut off something."

"Leg, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, left arm, finger, finger, ear, eye, ear. What else?"

"Finger," said Kline.

"The whole finger?"

"Just the first joint," said Kline.

"That hardly counts as a thirteen," said Ramse, looking relieved.

"You're not eating," said Kline.

"No," said Ramse.

"You already ate?"

"I don't have any hands," said Ramse. "You'll have to feed me when you're done."

Kline nodded, began to eat more quickly. When he was done, he pulled Ramse's plate closer, dipped his spoon in, lifted the spoon to Ramse's mouth. Ramse positioned his mouth so that the spoon's handle fit snugly into the lip's tear. It was hard for Kline not to stare at it.

"Do you have a picture of Aline?" he asked.

Ramse shook his head. "No pictures," he said. "The man's a prophet."

"That doesn't mean you can't have a picture."

"We're not Catholics," said Ramse between mouthfuls. "Or Mormons. Besides, we're concentrating on his absence, not his presence, on what he's severed rather than what remains."

Kline nodded. He kept shoveling food onto the spoon, lifting it into Ramse's mouth. Not even the presence of an absence, he thought, but absence as absence proper. It shouldn't be called a twelve, but a minus twelve.

"Ramse," said Kline, once the food was gone. "How did you get involved?"

"Involved," asked Ramse. "I'm an eight, aren't I? They can't withhold everything from me."

"Not in the investigation," said Kline. "In the cult."

Ramse stared at him. "First of all, it's not a cult," he said. "Second, I can't tell you."

"That's what Gous said."

Ramse smiled. "Why do you want to know?"

"I don't know," said Kline. "Curious, I suppose."

"Just curious?"

"I don't know," said Kline. He ran the edge of his stump along the grain of the table. It felt so good he did it again.

"What did Borchert have to say?" Ramse asked.

"A great guy, Borchert."

"You shouldn't make fun."

"Who says I'm making fun? He told me not to talk about it."

"I'm an eight, aren't I? You can talk to me. You don't have to keep a secret from me."

Kline shook his head, smiled. "It's not secret, it's sacred," he said.

"You shouldn't make fun," Ramse said again. "You should tolerate other peoples' religious beliefs. Besides, I already know a few things about it."

"Oh?" said Kline. "Why don't you tell me what you know?"

"Tit for tat," said Ramse. He slashed his stump bluntly past his face. "My lips are sealed," he said. "Besides, I've come on an errand. I'm supposed to conduct you to the scene of the crime."

The crime scene was in the same building that Borchert had been in. Ramse tried to follow Kline up but the guard instead locked Ramse outside on the porch, led Kline up alone.

"What do you know about this?" Kline asked.

"About what?" the guard asked.

"About the crime."

"What crime?"

"The murder."

"What murder?"

Kline stopped asking. On the third floor they passed the first and second doors, stopped at the third. The guard gestured to it.

"I'll wait here," he said.

"You don't care to come in?" asked Kline.

The guard said nothing. "Whose room is this?" asked Kline. The guard said nothing. "Aline's room?" asked Kline. The guard still said nothing.

"You're not allowed to come in?"

"I'll be waiting," said the guard. "Right here."

Kline sighed. Opening the door, he went in.

The room looked much like Borchert's room: a simple bed, a chair, a bare floor, little more. On the floor near the bed was a large irregular bloodstain, perhaps three times the size of Kline's head. The wall nearby was spattered with blood as well. Someone had drawn a figure in chalk on the floor, though it took Kline a moment to realize that was what it was.

"Good Christ," he said.

It looked like a simple blotch at first, but in a moment he realized what he was seeing was the outline of an armless and legless torso. He got down on his knees and looked more closely at the chalk figure. It must have been drawn wrong, for the head didn't fit snugly into the pool of dried blood that had sprent out of it. He got up, brushed off his knees, went over to look at the nearest wall. Blood was fanned all along it but in no regular pattern, as if spattered from eight or ten different blows. No blood on the other walls. It was as if the killer had struck the limbless torso once and then had hauled it a few feet away to strike it again, and so on. A legless, armless man wouldn't be able to cover much ground while being stabbed, would he?

He had stared at the wall for quite some time before it struck him that something else was wrong. He didn't have to bend over to see the spatter. He knelt down again beside the chalk torso and measured it roughly with his arm. It was slightly shorter than the arm itself. The spatter should be quite a bit lower on the wall.

Maybe, he thought, Aline had been in a chair. But the only chair in the room had no bloodstains on it. Maybe, he thought, whoever killed Aline had done so while holding him in their arms, perhaps dancing or spinning as he stabbed. He could imagine the limbless torso stiff, rigid, struggling.

But that didn't strike him as quite right either. True, he had been trained to infiltrate; true, his experience with crime scenes was far less than most of his former colleagues. Perhaps the killer had struck upward each time, as if carrying a golf swing through? Perhaps that would account for the odd spatter and the decreased amount of blood on the lower part of the wall?

But why? he wondered. Why strike that way at all?

And what was the instrument? From the way the spatter was slung he would have guessed a knife, some kind of blade. Without seeing a photograph of the body it was difficult to be sure. It hardly seemed likely that the killer would attempt to use a knife as if it were a golf club. Something was wrong.

He regarded the chalk torso, the way the blood had pooled unconvincingly out of the chalk head. It had been drawn wrong somehow. He reached out to touch the surface of the pool of dried blood. It looked almost lacquered. It was slick in some places, cracking on the surface in others, darker and thicker in the center. The light from the ceiling shined off it in a kind of busted nimbus, the shape not unlike that of a broken jaw.

What could blood tell? he wondered. Where blood was could tell a lot. Could blood itself tell nothing?

He got out his keys and dug at the blood in the center of the stain. The top quarter-inch layer cracked away in bits, but underneath it merely separated. Right near the floor the blood was almost moist, like a dough.

How long had it been? he wondered. They had started calling him several weeks ago. At least that; it could have been longer: he had been confused enough not to know exactly how much time had gone by. Aline, then, must have been dead for at least three weeks, perhaps more than a month. There was no way blood would stay moist for that long. It would either dry out completely or it would begin to rot and stink. And why were there no flies?

He went out into the hall. The guard was waiting, standing as stiffly as he had been when Kline had gone into the room.

"Nobody was killed in that room," said Kline

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the guard.

"Whose room is it?"

The guard just looked at him.

"I need to see Borchert," said Kline. "Right now."

"The room, Mr. Kline?" said Borchert absently. "What room is that exactly?" He held his mutilated finger between them and scrutinized it, his eyes flashing back and forth between it and Kline. "Nice work, don't you think, Mr. Kline?"

The fingertip was pale and puffy, streaked dark at the end, a sort of red collar just below the cut.

"It's infected," said Kline.

"Nonsense," said Borchert. "What you see is simply the body sealing itself off."

"About the room-"

"I can see the appeal of self-cauterization, Mr. Kline," said Borchert. "Ugly, true, but you really do have something there. Less clinical. A return to natural religion, so to speak."

"I don't have anything," said Kline. "This has nothing to do with me."

"Oh, but it does, Mr. Kline. You may be an unintentional avatar, but you are an avatar nonetheless."

"Look," said Kline. "I'm done with this. I'm leaving."

"So sorry, Mr. Kline," said Borchert. "But we've talked about this. If you try to leave, you'll be killed. Now what was this about the room?"

Kline shook his head. "Nobody was killed in that room."

"What room?"

"The murder room."

"Oh," said Borchert. "I see." He used his arm to raise himself out of the chair and onto his remaining leg and then stood there, half gone. He stood tilted slightly in the direction of his absent limbs, as if crimped at the side, for balance. "How can you be so sure, Mr. Kline?"

"Everything is wrong," said Kline. "The blood spatter pattern is irregular, the positioning of the body isn't right in regard to blood flow-"

"But surely, Mr. Kline, irregular doesn't mean falsified. Perhaps it's simply an unusual circumstance."

"Perhaps," said Kline. "But there's something wrong with the blood."

"The blood?"

"It isn't completely dry."

"But surely-"

"It's been artificially dried. A fan or a hair dryer or something. But it's still damp underneath. It couldn't possibly belong to the body of a man killed several weeks ago."

Borchert looked at him thoughtfully a long moment and slowly hopped his way around so he could slide back into the chair.

"Well?" said Kline.

"So it's a reconstruction," said Borchert. "So what?"

"So what?" said Kline. "How can I be expected to solve a crime by looking at a reconstruction of it?"

"Mr. Kline, surely you're enough of an armchair philosopher to realize that everything is a reconstruction of something else? Reality is a desperate and evasive creature."

"Am I being asked to solve the crime or the reconstruction of the crime?"

"The crime," said Borchert. "The reconstruction," he said, gesturing to himself with his thumb and his one and two-thirds fingers, "c'est moi."

"I can't get anywhere without real evidence."

"I have perfect faith in you, Mr. Kline."

"At least let me talk to a few people who might know something."

"Somewhat tricky," said Borchert. "But, ever the optimist, I'm convinced something can be arranged."

Shaking his head, Kline went toward the door. Once there he turned, saw Borchert smiling in his chair. When he smiled, Kline realized that all his bottom teeth had been removed.

"This is going well, don't you think?" said Borchert, speaking loudly, perhaps for the sake of the guard. "Thank you, dear friend, for stopping by."

V

Ramse showed up a few days later with a tape recorder balanced on his forearms. He put it on the table near Kline.

"What's this for?" asked Kline.

"It's a tape recorder," said Ramse. "For taping things. Borchert asked me to bring it."

"What does he want me to do with it?"

"It's for the interviews," said Ramse. "For the crime."

Kline nodded. He went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of milk, drank it slowly as Ramse watched.

"Anything else you need?" Kline asked.

"No," said Ramse. "Just that."

Kline nodded. "Right," he said. "Where's Gous?"

"He's getting ready for the party."

"The party?"

"Didn't he send you an invitation?"

"No."

Ramse furrowed his brow. "An oversight," he said. "He'd want you to come. I'm sure he wants you to come. Will you?"

Kline shrugged. "Why not?" he said.

"It's settled then," said Ramse. "I'll pick you up at eight."

Kline nodded, looked absently at his watch. Until the accident, he had worn his watch on his right arm, but now if he wore it there it threatened to slide off the stump.

Across the table, Ramse cleared his throat.

"You're still here?" asked Kline.

"Shall I wait outside or would you rather I came back later?" asked Ramse.

"For the party?"

"You don't understand," claimed Ramse. "I'm supposed to take the tape back."

"But I haven't conducted any interviews yet."

"That's what the tape's for."

"Right," said Kline. "To tape the interviews."

"No," said Ramse. "To tape the questions."

"To tape the questions?"

Ramse nodded. "These people," he said. "They're all ten or above. You're a one. You can't see them in person."

"But I see Borchert."

"Borchert's the exception," said Ramse. "You see him when someone above a ten has to be seen. If you were a three or a four some might condescend to see you, but they won't see a one. Not even a self-cauterizer."

"Jesus," said Kline. "That's ridiculous."

"I've been instructed by Borchert not to listen to the questions," said Ramse. "I'm only an eight. I don't need to know everything. I'm to take the tape back to Borchert once you've finished recording. Would you like me to wait in the hall or would you prefer I come back later?"

He sat staring at the tape recorder. It was ridiculous, he knew. Perhaps Ramse was right, it was only a question of proper behavior, no ones among the tens, but why in that case even bring him in at all? Why not solve their murder on their own?

He went and opened the door. Ramse was there, waiting, leaning against the wall. Kline closed the door again.

What were his options? One: he could refuse to send the tape back. Borchert would hardly allow that. He would be punished in some way, he was certain. And it would only prolong the amount of time he would have to spend in the compound. Two: he could send back a blank tape. Same problem: it bought him a little time, but time for what? Three: he could send back a series of questions.That had the advantage of moving things forward, or at least of moving them in some direction.

He sighed. He went to the table and pressed the record button.

"One: State your name and your relation to the deceased.

"Two: Where were you on the night Aline was murdered?

"Three: Do you know of anyone who might want Aline dead for any reason?

"Four: Did you see the body? If so, please describe in detail what you saw.

"Five: Are you absolutely certain Aline's death wasn't a suicide?

"Six: Did you kill Aline?"

It was ridiculous, but at least it was a start. They would tell him nothing, he was almost sure. He turned the tape off.

Ramse showed up at eight o'clock sharp, wearing a tuxedo that had been modified to better reveal his amputations, no shoes, no socks. He had, slung over one arm, a plastic dry cleaner's bag containing another tuxedo, which he handed to Kline.

"Try this on," he said.

Kline did. It was a little loose but generally fit quite well, the right sleeve cut back slightly to reveal his stump.

They walked across the gravel lot in front of the house, following the road toward the gate, turning down a footpath after about a hundred meters. At the end was a gravel circle, a bar to the left, a neon one-legged woman on the sign. A well-lit lodge structure was to the right, which was where they went.

A one-handed man was standing at the open door, smiling. Kline could hear music blaring from the door behind him.

"Hello, Ramse," the man said affably. "This the guy?"

"This is him, John," said Ramse. "In the flesh."

They both laughed at that for some reason. The man held out his remaining hand, his right. "Put it there," he said, which Kline tried, left-handed and very awkwardly, to do.

"Self-cauterizer, huh?" asked John. "People have been talking. There's a buzz going."

"Don't embarrass him, John," said Ramse. Ushering Kline before him, he made his way in.

The room was filled with several dozen men in tuxedos, all amputees. Streamers descended without pattern from the ceiling, brushing against men's shoulders, dipping into their drinks. Ramse took him to the bar and Kline got a drink and stood next to Ramse nursing it, giving Ramse sips from time to time. The men were mostly ones or twos as far as Kline could tell in the dim light, though there were fours and fives as well and one person that Kline thought might be a seven or eight-the room was dark and in motion so it was hard to tell how many toes the man was actually missing. Then suddenly Gous was beside him, rubbing his shoulder with his stump.

"How nice of you to come," he said to Kline, smiling. He was dressed differently than the others. He was wearing a tuxedo, but one sleeve of it had been wrapped in plastic, and a line had been drawn in permanent marker between his middle and fourth finger, angling across his palm to terminate at the palm's edge just before the wrist. "Ramse didn't know if you'd come," he said, "but I was sure you would." He turned to Ramse. "Stretter didn't come, the bastard."

"I'm sure he meant to," said Ramse. "Something must have come up."

"No," said Gous. "He never meant to. I came for him three times, but now that he's a five, he's too good for me."

"Surely he can't mean it personally," said Ramse. "It's just some sort of mistake."

But Gous was already turning away, shaking his head. Kline watched Ramse go after him. He took a sip of his drink, looked around, then began to walk slowly around the room. There were no women, he quickly realized, nothing but men, everyone in their thirties and forties, nobody either very young or very old.

The back of the room wasn't a solid wall at all but a divider, a series of linked panels that, he saw, looking more closely, slid along a metal track in the floor. The two central panels each had a handle and a latch holding them together.

"Would you like to have a look?" asked a voice behind him.

"Where are all the women?" asked Kline, turning. Behind him was John.

"Aren't any here," said John, smiling. "There are a few over in the bar, but otherwise none. This is a brotherhood, after all."

Kline nodded, looked about him.

"So, you want a preview?" asked John.

Kline shrugged.

"I don't think anyone would mind," John said. "They've all seen it before anyway."

He put his drink down on the floor, used his hand to turn one of the latches. The panel disengaged and slid open an inch. He rolled it along the track until there was enough space for Kline to slide through.

"Go on," he said, stooping for his drink. "I'll wait out here."

Kline slid through, careful not to spill his drink. On the other side, the remainder of the hall was dark and bare and sober except for a rolling metal table draped in white cloth. A smaller square table, also draped in cloth, sat beside it. A large domed light was over them. It was the only light in the room, the dome functioning like a spotlight.

He smelled the smoke before he saw the man step out of the darkness and move toward him. The man was wearing scrubs, had his cloth surgical mask pulled down around his neck so he could smoke a cigarette. When he lifted the cigarette to his lips, Kline could see he was missing a finger.

"Is it time?" he asked. And then, seeing the drink in Kline's hand, "Are you bringing that for me?"

Kline handed him the drink, and without a word left.

"Well," said John. "What do you think? First-rate setup, no?"

"Where's Ramse?" asked Kline.

"Ramse?" said John. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe over there?"

Kline started across the hall, moving from cluster to cluster until he found Ramse speaking to a man in a chair whose legs had been cut off at the knee.

"I need to talk to you," he said.

"All right," said Ramse, excusing himself from the legless man. "What's the trouble?"

"Jesus," said Kline. "What kind of party is this?"

"It's Gous' party," said Ramse. "His three. Where's your drink? Do you need another drink?"

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Isn't it obvious?" said Ramse. He looked at Kline, eyes wide, then shook his head. "I forget you don't know us very well," he said. "It's an amputation party."

"An amputation party."

"Like a coming out," said Ramse. "Gous is giving up two fingers. He's gathered his friends around him for the occasion. He's going from a one to a three."

"Jesus," said Kline. "I have to leave."

Kline tried to make for the door but Ramse was pressing his forearm to Kline's chest. "You can't leave," hissed Ramse, "not now that you've come. It'd break Gous' heart."

"But," said Kline. "I don't believe in any of this. I can't stay here."

"It's not that you don't believe," said Ramse. "It's just that you don't have the call yet."

"No," said Kline. "It's that I don't believe."

"I don't care what you believe," said Ramse. "Just do this for Gous. He admires you. What has he ever done to you to deserve this?"

"What has he ever done to deserve losing his fingers?"

"He doesn't see it that way," said Ramse. "He's had the call. This for him is an act of faith. You don't have to believe in it, but you can still respect him."

"I have to go," said Kline, pushing against his arm.

"No," said Ramse. "Please, just for Gous. Have compassion. Please."

By the time the amputation took place, Kline had had a few drinks, had drunk enough in fact that he had trouble making his eyes focus. To see reasonably well, he had to cover one eye with his stump.

Eventually Ramse coaxed the drink out of his hand, goaded him now through the open partition and into the half-room beyond. He stood on the edge of the lit circle, swaying slightly, Ramse beside him, Ramse's forearm tucked under his arm. In the center was the doctor, his mask up now. He had stripped the cloth off the small metal cart to reveal an array of tools that seemed half to be medical instruments, half to be from the knife block of a gourmet chef. Jesus, Kline thought.

Gous came into the circle, smiling, while the tuxedo-dressed gentlemen clapped gently. Two gentlemen were called forward as witnesses, each of them placing a stump under one of Gous' arms. He leaned over the large table, placed his hand on it, palm up. The doctor took a hypodermic off the table and slid its needle into Kline's hand. His fingers twitched. Or rather Gous' fingers, Kline realized; it was not his own hand, he could not start to think of it as his own hand. The four of them-the doctor, Gous, the two witnesses-stood as if in tableau, motionless in a way that Kline found unbearable, only the doctor moving from time to time to regard his watch. At last he took a metal probe from the small metal cart and pushed at the hand.

Gous watched him, then nodded slightly. The two witnesses braced themselves behind him. The doctor switched on a cauterizer. After a moment, Kline could smell the way it oxidized the air. The doctor let his fingers run over the instruments, then took up the cauterizer with one hand. What looked like a stylized and carefully balanced cleaver was in the other. He approached the table, lined the cleaver along the line Gous had drawn on his hand, and then raised it, brought it swiftly down.

Kline saw Gous' eyelids flutter, then the rest of his body faltered and was supported and caught by the witnesses behind him. All around, the men began to clap quietly, and blood began to spurt from the wound. Kline closed his eyes, felt himself begin to lean to one side, but Ramse caught him, held him upright. He could hear the buzz of the cauterizer and a moment later began to smell burning flesh.

"Hey," whispered Ramse. "Are you all right?" All around them, men were beginning to move.

"Just a little drunk," said Kline, opening his eyes. Gous was there before him, having his hand bandaged.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" asked Ramse. "Gous certainly didn't think so. Not so bad, eh?"

"I don't know," Kline said. "I want to go home."

"The night's still young," said Ramse. "We're only getting started."

The rest of the night was a blur to him. At some point he lost his tuxedo jacket; at another point, he found the next day, someone had smeared a swath of blood across his forehead. At one point he could hear Ramse telling everyone not to give him another drink and then he was outside, vomiting onto the gravel, Ramse seeming to be trying at once to hold him up and to knock him over. Then they were stumbling across the gravel courtyard, Kline covering one of his eyes so he could see, and into the bar where he was drinking not whiskey but first coffee and then water. It was not exactly a bar either, but more like a club. They were sitting in armchairs, a small coffee table before them, pointed toward a stage, and Kline realized the curtain was opening.

The stage was bare at first, lit by a reddish spotlight, and then a woman came out onto it swaddled from knees to neck in boas.

"Watch this," said Ramse, his words slurring even more than usual. "She's really something."

A strip show, thought Kline. He had seen a strip show before, more than once, had seen several in fact with the man who had since come to be known as the gentleman with the cleaver, the man who was dead now. He didn't care about strip shows one way or the other. He watched the woman lose one boa after another while Ramse whistled. She would let a boa trail first and then finally let it flop all the way off and then kick it to one side of the stage. And then finally she was done, stripped naked, blurred in the red light, not particularly attractive.

He waited for the curtain to go down but the curtain did not go down. He turned to Ramse but found him still staring rapt at the girl, and so he himself turned back to her and watched as, with a flick of the wrist, she cracked off her hand.

A dim howl went up through the house and Kline heard, scattered through the chairs, a dull thumping, the sound of stumps beating against one another. She made her way toward one side of the stage, spinning slightly, and then snapped the stump of her arm against her remaining hand and Kline saw three fingers wobble loose and slough away. The crowd roared. He tried to stand up but Ramse had his hand on his shoulder and was shouting in his ear. "Just wait," Ramse shouted, "the best is yet to come!"

And then the woman sashayed across the stage and reached up with her remaining finger and thumb to tear free her ear. She spun it around a few times before tossing it out into the audience. Kline saw a group of men rise up in a dark mass trying somehow, with what hands they had left between them, to catch it. And then she turned away, turned her back to them, and when she turned back her artificial breasts had been pulled away to hang like an apron around her belly, revealing two shiny flat patches where they had been. She spread her legs and squatted and Kline imagined her legs were beginning to separate, to split up. Jesus, God, he thought, and tried to stand, and felt Ramse trying to hold him down, and felt the blood rush to his head. He staggered forward and into the small table, hot coffee sloshing all over his legs, and looked up to see the woman on the stage gouging her fingers beneath one side of her face, but mercifully, before she had torn it away, he had fallen and did not, despite Ramse's urging, get up again.

VI

It was late in the afternoon before he could bring himself to get up again, his head still spinning. He went into the bathroom and drank cup after cup of water and then turned on the water, stood under the shower for a while, steam rising around him.

He got dressed and opened the door, found outside a covered plate of food and, next to it, a cassette tape. Putting the plate of food on the table, he removed the lid. Pancakes, sodden now with syrup, with eggs floating grimly to one side. There was no silverware. He ate with his fingers until he felt sick, then went to the bathroom and threw up and then came back and ate a little more, just enough to keep something in his stomach.

The tape he put into the tape recorder, turned it on.

"One: State your name and your relation to the deceased," he heard himself asking.

"Two: Where were you on the night Aline was murdered?

"Three: Do you know of anyone who might want Aline dead for any reason?

"Four: Did you see the body? If so, please describe in detail what you saw.

"Five: Are you absolutely certain Aline's death wasn't a suicide?

"Six: Did you kill Aline?"

What followed was a blank unrolling of tape, a dim static that lasted five or six minutes, and then the tape clicked loudly and a man's voice began to talk.

"Helming," the voice said. "We were. . associates." There was a pause, the tape microphone clicked off but the tape ran on.

"I was in my room. I heard a noise and had Michael carry me out into the hall and-"

The tape fell suddenly silent, part of it erased.

"I don't know why anyone would [blank space] question I suppose of having insufficient faith."

"No, I didn't see the [blank]. ."

"Yes."

"No. I-"

The tape cut abruptly off, and there was silence and then it resumed with another voice, another individual, the same enigmatic, half-erased style, nothing really stated of substance. Why were there gaps? A third voice was the same, and it was only then that Kline realized that the answers being given were vague enough that they could be read as responses to almost any questions. On that night I was in my room. I heard a noise and went into the hall and- could be answering his question Where were you on the night Aline was killed? but he could imagine other questions that might have been posed that would elicit the same response. Where were you on the night the hallway was graffitied? Where were you on the night Marker came in drunk? None of the three recorded voices mentioned the word "murdered" or the word "Aline" or the word "death." Or if they did it was in the portion of the tape that had been erased.

He rewound the tape and listened again, turning up the volume as high as it would go, listening to the blank spots of erased tape, hoping to hear hints of whatever had been there before the erasure. He heard nothing but a low half-muttering which, he realized, wasn't a human voice at all but the magnified sound of the tape recorder's mechanism itself. He turned off the tape and sat, thinking, wondering what to do next.

When Ramse arrived with dinner balanced on his arms in the early evening, Kline demanded to see Borchert.

"I'll put in a request," said Ramse.

"I need to see him right away," said Kline. "I need to see him now."

"Right now what you need to do is eat some supper," said Ramse. "And try to get over your hangover. You were a hell of a mess last night."

"I need to see Borchert," said Kline. "It's urgent."

"Fine," said Ramse. "Go ahead and eat. I'll walk over and see what I can do."

At the door he stopped and looked back, a look of reproach on his face. "You didn't even ask about Gous," he said.

"What about him?"

"About how he's doing."

"How is he doing?"

"Good," said Ramse. "He's doing just fine."

"Wonderful," said Kline. "Now, goddammit, go get Borchert."

Once Ramse was gone Kline uncovered the tray and ate: boiled potatoes, a thin and curling piece of grayish meat, a pile of overcooked carrots. He ate slowly, moving from potatoes to meat to carrots and back again until it was all gone, then sat playing the tape over. It seemed obvious that there was no real interest in solving the crime. Why even bring me out at all?

When Ramse returned, he turned the tape off.

"It's all arranged," said Ramse. "Borchert will see you."

"Good," said Kline, standing up. "Let's go."

Ramse looked a little surprised. "Oh, not today, Mr. Kline," he said. "He can't do it today."

"I need to see him today."

"He can see you in three days," said Ramse. "That was the best he could do."

Kline pushed past Ramse and went out the door, out of the house. He could hear Ramse calling after him, loudly. He walked briskly across the gravel-ridden lot in front of the house, turned down the road, cut at the right moment down the path to dip down through the trees. He wondered if Ramse was following him. He broke into a jog.

He came up over the top, the tree-lined path, the house looming up, the gate before it, a guard darting out again from behind a pillar of the house, standing at the far side of the gate regarding him with one eye. He couldn't tell if it was the same guard as before.

"What is wanted?" asked the guard.

"I'm here to see Borchert," said Kline, moving forward until he was nearly touching the gate.

"Borchert isn't seeing anyone today," said the guard.

"He'll see me."

The guard swiveled his head a little, fixed his remaining eye hard on Kline. "No," he said. "He won't."

Kline reached across the top of the gate and punched him. He was prepared to feel his hand strike the guard's temple but the sensation of his stump striking it was an odd one. It ached. The guard fell to the ground without a word, and as he struggled to get up Kline clambered over the gate. He kicked him a few times until he was sure the guard had stopped moving.

By the time he was knocking on the door of the house, he could see Ramse nearing the gate. The gatekeeper was still down but on his knees now, struggling his way up. He knocked again and the inner guard cracked the door open and said "What is wanted?" and Kline, without awaiting a response, kicked the door hard so that the edge of it split open the man's forehead and he stumbled back, spattering blood. Kline struck him open-palmed on the chest, knocking him down, and rushed by, down the hall and into the stairwell.

But before he had made the third floor he was struck hard on the back of the head. A stair tread rose up and struck his face. By the time he got up, there were one-eyed men all around him, and his own blood was getting into his eyes. Then they were hitting him so hard and so often that he could no longer hear, or rather what sound there was came in waves, and it seemed that he was falling down more stairs than there were stairs to fall down, and then, after that, he had a hard time even remembering that he was human.

When his eyes focused again, there was Borchert, above him. He realized he was lying on the floor of Borchert's room, blood coming in phlegm-streaked ribbons from his nose. He pulled himself up to sitting, wiped his arm across his face.

"Well, Mr. Kline," said Borchert. "It seems you wanted to see me quite badly."

Kline said nothing.

"What is this all about?"

He tried to speak but before he could get anything out had to swallow back blood.

"Was it worth it, Mr. Kline?" asked Borchert. "It was once such a lovely face, too. Are you willing to trade your face for a little face-to-face conversation?"

"I need to see them," said Kline.

"Them?" asked Borchert. "My dear Kline, who?"

"The people on the tape."

"Mr. Kline," said Borchert. "You're a one. You can hardly expect someone in the double digits-"

"I need to see them," said Kline.

"But Mr. Kline-"

"Something's wrong with the tape," said Kline. "With the questions. It doesn't all mesh."

Borchert looked at him, coolly. "I don't think that you should let the tape trouble you, Mr. Kline. Why don't you simply accept it for what it purports to be?"

"Because it's not what it is," said Kline.

Borchert nodded slowly. "Very well, Mr. Kline," he said. "What do you propose?"

"I need to see them," Kline said. "Rules or no."

"And you want me to make the necessary arrangements. You're certain of it?"

"Yes," said Kline.

Borchert sighed. "So be it," he said. "I'll make the necessary arrangements, Mr. Kline. You'll see them tomorrow."

"I want to see them today."

"Not today, tomorrow. Don't push your luck."

Kline nodded, stood to go. His body was sore, bruised.

"Would you mind wiping your blood off the floor before you go, Mr. Kline?" asked Borchert, rising from the chair to stand perfectly balanced on his remaining leg. "And Mr. Kline," he said. "Now you have a history of violence. I advise you to be careful."

Late evening, Gous arrived with a half-empty bottle of Scotch cradled in the crook of his elbow, Scotch which was, according to him, compliments of Borchert.

"How kind of him," said Kline, flatly.

"Why he should care after your escapade this afternoon is beyond me," said Gous.

"Maybe that's why I only get half a bottle."

Gous nodded. "Do you have glasses?" he asked.

"No."

"I guess Borchert didn't think you rated glasses," said Gous. He fumbled awkwardly at the lid with his bandaged hand. "I'm going to have to ask you to open it," he said.

"How's your hand?" asked Kline.

"Nice of you to ask," said Gous. "Recovering nicely, thank you," he said, lifting the bandaged lump in the air. "I'm supposed to keep it elevated. And I shouldn't drink too much," he said. "Alcohol thins the blood and all that."

Kline screwed the cap off the bottle and drank. It was good Scotch, or at least good enough. He took another mouthful then pushed the bottle over to Gous, who, using his forearms like chopsticks, managed to get it to his mouth. He almost upset the bottle putting it back on the table.

"What made you change your mind?" he asked.

"My mind?" asked Kline.

"About amputation."

"Who said I changed my mind?" Lifting the bottle, he took another drink.

"Why would Borchert have sent over a bottle otherwise? Did you get a call?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Gous nodded. "It's nobody's business but your own," he said.

Kline reached for the bottle, watched the stump at the end of his arm knock against it, nearly knock it over. "Nobody's business but my own," he said, aloud, his voice sounding quite distant.

"That's right," Gous said. "That's what I said."

Kline could see on the end of his arm, the ghost of his hand, pale and transparent, sprouting oddly from the stump. "That's right," he heard himself say. He flexed his missing fingers, saw them move. They had cut off his hand but the ghost of his hand was still there. Perhaps this was what was meant by a call? Perhaps Borchert, shorn of most of his limbs, saw the ghosts of what was missing: vanished limbs grown uncarnate, pure.

He looked up. There was Gous, across the table from him, his eyes drooping, half-closed, his face mostly gone in shadow. Kline tried to reach for the bottle but couldn't find it.

"Where was I?" he asked.

He saw Gous' eyelids wince, come all the way open. "We should get you into bed," Gous said. "While I still can."

"It isn't Scotch," said Kline, to where Gous had been, but Gous wasn't there anymore. It took him some time to realize that Gous was there beside him, looming above him, trying to get him out of the chair. And then, without knowing how, he was standing, Gous beside him, and they were gliding slowly through the room.

"No," said Gous, slowly. "It is Scotch. But that's not all it is."

Fuck, thought Kline. "I thought you were my friend," he said, and felt himself falling. And then he was on the bed, sprawled, Gous sitting beside him looking down at him.

"I am your friend," Gous said. "I drank with you, didn't I?"

Kline tried to nod but nothing happened. He could see the wrappings around Gous' hand staining with blood.

"Besides," said Gous, "friendship is one thing, God another."

"Scoot over," Gous said. Kline was not sure how much time had passed. "There's enough room on that bed for two."

Gous' cheek on the pillow, just next to his own eye, was the last thing he would remember until, hours later, he awoke, alone, to the sight of his bandaged foot, the bandages already steeped with blood. Even then it was not until he felt the dressings with his remaining hand that he realized that three of his toes had been removed.

VII

"This is what you wanted," said Borchert after Kline had forced his shoe over his bandaged foot and limped over to Borchert's building. It had been difficult to walk without the toes, hard to keep his balance, and very painful. By the time he had reached the building his shoe was saturated with blood. The guard, perhaps the same guard as the day before, had regarded him with one eye and said, "What is wanted?" In answer he had merely lifted his bloody shoe slightly. The guard, without another word, let him pass, as did the guard behind the door. And now here he was, upstairs, across from Borchert, in Borchert's room, being told that he had gotten what he wanted.

"You should be careful about what you ask for," said Borchert.

"I didn't ask for anything."

"You asked," said Borchert, "to interview certain people in person. I told you I would make arrangements. I have made them. I took the fewest number of toes possible," he said. "Even now, for them to see you is to stretch the rules a little. A four, normally. . but it isn't unheard of."

"I want to leave," said Kline.

"Of course you do," said Borchert cheerily. "But I believe we've already discussed that. It's not possible."

"Why are you doing this?"

"What am I doing exactly?" asked Borchert. "I've made you a four. I've done you a favor."

"I don't see it that way."

"Perhaps someday you will."

"I doubt it."

Borchert looked at him seriously. "I doubt it too," he said. "Look," he said, "at your missing hand."

"When can I leave?" asked Kline.

"When all this is done."

"When will that be?"

Borchert shrugged. "That depends on you," he said. He lifted his remaining hand, pointed his crippled middle digit at Kline. "Now, if I'm not mistaken, you have interviews to conduct."

He was taken down a floor and then down the hall to another door, behind which was one of the interviewees, an eleven, his legs hacked off at the knees, his fingers and one thumb all shaved down nearly to knuckle. He recognized his voice as the third on the tape: Andreissen. Before he would speak with Kline, Andreissen demanded to see the missing toes, suggesting that Kline should not hide his light under a bushel.

Kline sat and loosened his shoe and slowly worked it off, blood dripping from it to puddle on the floor. He dropped the shoe onto the floor and began unwrapping the sodden dressing. Andreissen came nimbly out of his chair and, like an ape, propelled himself across the floor on his knuckles and the stumps of his knees. His eyes were lucid and shining, and when Kline got the wrapping off to reveal his mangled foot Andreissen came very close indeed. Kline could hardly bear to look at the foot. The place where the toes had been was cauterized but now cracked and seeping a flux of blood and pus.

"I thought you self-cauterized," said Andreissen. "Part of the reason I agreed to this was because I wanted to see what self-cauterization looked like."

"I didn't do this," said Kline.

"You shouldn't be walking on it," he said. "Doesn't it hurt?"

"Of course it hurts."

Andreissen nodded. He knuckled his way back across the floor, clambered back into the chair. "As I told Borchert," he said, once properly situated, "I'm here to help. I'm all for law and order."

"Good for you," said Kline.

"But, honestly, I said all there was to say on the tape."

Kline nodded. He dragged his foot along the floor, watching the thin lines of blood run. "It's about the tape," he said. "That's what I came about."

"Oh?"

"There's something wrong with the tape," said Kline. "I need to figure out what."

"The tape didn't work?"

"Something like that," said Kline. "So I'm just going to ask the questions again, all right?"

"Why don't you talk to Borchert?" he asked. "Why don't you ask him?"

"First question," said Kline. "State your name and your relation to the deceased."

"Technically that's not a question."

"Please answer," said Kline.

"I believe you already know my name," he said. "It's Andreissen."

"Thank you," said Kline. "What was your relation to the deceased?"

"The deceased?" said Andreissen. "I thought you were sticking to the original questions."

"That is one of the original questions."

"No it isn't."

"It's not?" said Kline.

"What's this talk of the deceased? There is no deceased."

"Aline."

"What about Aline?"

"He's the deceased."

"Aline?" Andreissen shook his head, laughed. "You're pulling my leg."

"Aline's dead."

"It's impossible," said Andreissen.

"Why do you think I'm here?"

"I saw him just yesterday," said Andreissen. "He seemed very much alive to me."

"You're lying," said Kline.

"I swear to you," said Andreissen. "On my missing legs."

Kline stood, limped around the room.

"Can you stop that?" said Andreissen. "You're getting blood everywhere."

"What were the questions you were asked? On the tape, what were the questions?"

"Me? About the robbery of course."

"What robbery?"

Andreissen narrowed his eyes. "What is this all about? Do you think I did it? I didn't do it."

"Do what?"

"The robbery."

"What robbery?"

"Christ," said Andreissen. "What sort of game are you playing?"

"Where's Aline's room? Down the hall?"

"No," said Andreissen. "Up a level. Last door. Why?"

"I was told it was somewhere else."

"What is this?" asked Andreissen. He posted his palms against the chair's arms, pulled himself up to stand in the chair's seat on his stumps. "I didn't agree to this. Borchert didn't say anything about this. I want you to leave."

"Fine," said Kline. "I'm leaving."

He went out into the hall. The guard was gone. He went to the stairs but instead of going down went up and down to the end of the hall. A guard was standing in front of the last door. He watched Kline nervously.

"This is Aline's room?" Kline asked.

The guard made no gesture, said nothing.

"Mind if I see for myself?" asked Kline, and reached for the doorknob.

The guard struck him once with the edge of his palm, fast, in the throat. He couldn't breathe. He stumbled back, his hand to his throat, still unable to breathe, and then made a conscious decision to stumble forward instead, throwing himself against the door. The handle was locked. The guard hit him again, in the side of the temple, and he slid down along the door, and then the guard was pulling him back into the middle of the hall, massaging his throat, trying to help him to breathe again.

"Well," said Borchert. "Mr. Kline. Always a pleasant surprise. You should be more careful. You should have a little more respect."

"Aline's not dead," said Kline, still rubbing his throat.

"Of course he is," said Borchert. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

"Andreissen."

"Why would he say that?" asked Borchert.

"He said I was here to investigate a robbery."

"No, no," said Borchert. "Aline's dead. You're here for Aline."

"Who's dead?"

"It's that you're only a four," said Borchert. "He's not telling you the truth because of that."

"You're lying."

"Maybe we should remove another toe," said Borchert. "Or maybe two more. Then we'll see if Andreissen tells you the truth."

"No," said Kline. "No more toes."

"All right, then," said Borchert. "Perhaps one of the others will be a little more forthcoming."

"No more interviews."

"All right," said Borchert. "You're the investigator. You should do what feels right."

Using his remaining foot, Borchert pushed the chair slowly along the floor until he was back by the counter. Slowly he managed to open the cabinet above it and to tug down first one glass and then another. And then, more precariously, a bottle of Scotch. He took off the cap with his mouth. He moved the glasses to the edge of the counter and, pinning the bottle between his arm and his body, poured.

"Drink?" he asked.

"Absolutely not," said Kline.

"Oh come on," said Borchert. "It's Scotch, plain and simple. Nothing but Scotch."

"No," said Kline.

"Suit yourself," said Borchert. He pinched the glass' rim between his thumb and remaining half-finger, lifted it to his lips, drank. "So," he said. "Made any progress, have we?"

"On what?"

"On finding Aline's killer."

"My guess is that Aline is still very much alive."

"Please, Mr. Kline. Let's have no more such talk."

"Show me the body."

Borchert shook his head. "I can't allow you to see the body. At the very least you'd have to lose a few more toes."

"This is absurd."

"Be that as it may, Mr. Kline," said Borchert, taking a large swallow. "Be that as it may."

Later that evening he wandered out of his room and down the hall and into the gravel yard in front of the building. He stood looking up at the stars, his foot aching with pain, feeling slightly feverish. He did not understand what it was he had gotten himself into, nor for that matter how he had gotten himself into it. But the more important question was, now that he was in, how to get out.

He walked out to the main road, turned, limped toward the main gates. A man was dead, murdered, or perhaps very much alive. Borchert was playing with him, and perhaps the others were as well. The night was cool, cloudless. Where was this place? He turned and looked back, saw the building he was staying in, the only light being that of his own room. Why was nobody else in the building? Had there been anyone living in the building but him since his arrival? Where did Gous and Ramse sleep?

At the main gate at the edge of the compound, the guard stepped out of the shadows and flicked on his flashlight, shining the beam into Kline's eyes.

"What is wanted?" he asked.

"It's Kline," Kline said, squinting his eyes.

"Right," said the guard. "We met the first night. A one. Self-cauterizer. Right hand, right?"

"Yes," said Kline. "Now a four."

"A four?" said the guard. "That was quick. What else?"

"A few toes," he said. "Nothing much."

The guard moved the flashbeam down, shined it on Kline's feet. Kline could see the man now, a dim shape just behind the flashlight.

"I need to leave," said Kline. "Please open the gate."

"I'm sorry," said the guard. "I can't do that."

"My work here is finished," said Kline.

"I have my orders, I'm afraid," said the guard.

Kline took a step forward. The guard brought the light up and into his eyes. Kline took another step and heard a rustling and a click and the guard quickly flashed the light back on himself to reveal a sort of metal prosthetic slipped over his stump, a gun barrel at the end of it.

"I thought prosthetics were frowned upon," said Kline.

"We don't like to use them," said the guard. "But when we have to, we do."

"Say I climb the fence somewhere."

"You're welcome to try. My guess is we'd catch you eventually."

Kline nodded, turned to leave.

"Very nice to see you, Mr. Kline," said the guard. "If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask."

He found Gous and Ramse in the bar, already drunk, Ramse in particular, who was drinking whiskey through a straw. Gous kept saying he had to go easy, that it thinned the blood, and then taking another drink. They cheered when they caught sight of Kline, clapped him on the back with their stumps.

"Drink?" asked Ramse.

Kline nodded. Ramse called the bartender over. "A drink for my friend here," he said.

"The self-cauterizer."

"Word gets around," said Ramse.

"Say," said Gous, his voice slurred and too slow. "When do the women come out?"

"Ten," said the bartender. "I told you already. Ten."

"Drink?" Ramse asked Kline.

"He's already getting me a drink," said Kline.

"Hell," said Ramse. "I wanted to get you a drink."

"You did," said Kline.

"What?" asked Ramse. "What?"

"Never mind," said Kline.

"Just so you know," said Ramse. "I'm buying the next one."

Kline smiled.

"So," said Gous, hunched over his drink. "How's the investigation?"

"It's not."

"No?" said Gous. "Thash too bad."

"Do you want to hear about it?" asked Kline.

"About what?" asked Ramse.

"The investigation," said Kline. The bartender put the drink on the counter. Kline took it up in his left hand and drank from it.

"Oh, no," said Ramse. "You can't tell Gous anything."

"Why not?" asked Gous. "Why not?"

"Gous is a one," said Ramse. "We can't bring a one in."

"I was a one," said Kline. "They brought me in."

"I'm not a one," said Gous, lifting up his hand. "Not any more."

"Still," said Ramse. "You're not much. You're what you are and we love you for it, but you're not much."

"It's all right, Ramse," said Kline. "Trust me."

"I just don't think-"

"Ramse," said Kline. "Trust me and listen."

Ramse opened his mouth, then closed it again.

"Aline is dead," Kline said.

"Aline is dead?" said Ramse, his voice rising.

"Is that possible?" said Gous. "How is that possible?"

"Or not," said Kline. "Maybe not."

"Well," said Gous. "Which is it?"

"What did you say about Aline?" asked the bartender.

"Nothing," said Kline.

"Oh, God," said Ramse, shaking his head. "Dear God."

"Aline is either dead or not dead," said Gous to the bartender.

"Be quiet, Gous," said Kline.

"Well, which is he?" asked the bartender. "Dead or not dead? There's a big difference, you know."

"That," said Gous, stabbing the air with his stump. "Is what I intend to find out."

"You don't think there's a big difference?" asked Ramse.

"Ramse," said Kline. "Look at me. Why am I here? What am I investigating?"

"What?" said Ramse. "Smuggling."

"Smuggling?"

Gous, Kline noticed, was watching them more intently.

"Somebody smuggled out pictures."

"What sorts of pictures?"

"Sex pictures," said Ramse. "Of people missing limbs. Somebody stealing them and selling them without the proceeds benefiting the community."

"That," said Kline, "in your opinion, is why I am here?"

Ramse nodded.

"No," said Kline. "I'm here because of Aline."

"Who's either dead or not dead."

"Exactly," said Kline.

"There's a big difference," said Gous. "That's what we intend to find out."

"What?" said Ramse.

"That," said Gous.

"What?" said Ramse, looking around. "What's going on?"

"Exactly," said Kline. "That's what I want to know."

VIII

There are two possibilities, he thought, as he was escorted on his way to visit Borchert the next morning, a hungover Ramse on one side of him, a hungover Gous on the other side. He was coming at Borchert's request. Possibility one: Aline is dead. Possibility two: Aline is alive. Perhaps Ramse was right, perhaps he really did know something and the reason he, Kline, was here was because of smuggling or theft. But if it was smuggling, why hadn't he been told? Why had Borchert told him he was investigating a murder? Certainly, considering what Kline's specialty had been before, it seemed more logical that they would recruit him to investigate a smuggling operation.

Perhaps Borchert himself had a vested interest, had reasons to stop the smuggling from being investigated.

But even so, why declare Aline dead? Why suggest there is a murder to be investigated? Why not simply suggest something a little more benign?

And here he was, standing alone in front of Borchert, with Gous and Ramse abandoned at the gate, the one-armed, one-legged man looking grimly at him from his chair.

"I thought we had an agreement," Borchert was saying.

"What agreement?"

"I asked you not to speak about the case with those who didn't need to know. Instead, you've been spreading rumors."

"Look," said Kline. "I don't know what I'm doing here. What exactly am I investigating?"

"Aline's death."

"I don't believe Aline is dead."

"No," said Borchert. "You've made that quite clear."

"What about the smuggling?"

"The smuggling," said Borchert. "A cover story. Something we agreed to tell people like Ramse."

"And Andreissen?"

"We talked about that," said Borchert. "I give my solemn word that if you simply have one or two more amputations, Andreissen will change his story. Why didn't you speak to any of the others? Perhaps one of them would tell you the truth."

"You're lying."

Borchert sighed. "Well," he said. "I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but you're a stubborn bastard and have your own particular way of conducting business. You'd be better off if you were willing to take some things on faith, but Thou woulds't doubt, as Jesus said, and for the doubting there's nothing but what you can touch." He turned his head, gestured with his chin to the counter behind. "There's a gun there," he said. "In the drawer. No bullets in it, but the guard outside Aline's door doesn't need to know that. If you need to go see for yourself, go see for yourself. I wouldn't advise it, but neither will I prevent you."

Kline took the pistol and left. He could see, as soon as he opened the door to the hall, the guard in front of what he had been told by Andreissen was Aline's door. Was it the door Borchert expected him to go to as well? he wondered. Or was he being told to visit the room where Borchert had led him before, the faked crime scene?

"Is this the door to Aline's room?" Kline asked the guard.

The guard did not reply. Kline realized the man's lone eye was directed downward, fixed on his hand, and then Kline remembered the gun. He lifted his hand, pointed the pistol at the man's head.

"Please open the door," he said.

The guard shook his head.

"I'll kill you," said Kline.

"Then kill me."

Kline hit the guard hard in the face with his stump, then hit him across his jaw with the butt of the pistol. The guard took two awkward steps, wavering into the door, and Kline struck him with the pistol butt again, just behind the ear. The man went down in a heap.

The door was unlocked. He opened it and went in, locking it behind him.

Inside, it was dark. He felt around on the wall to either side of the door for a switch, only found one after his eyes had adjusted enough to see it, low on the wall, at knee level.

The room was as simple as Borchert's. A counter and a small kitchen in the back of the room. A single chair, this one with a sort of net webbing draped over it. A bed, in this case, three feet long, flush to the floor, pushed against one wall.

In the bed, a mutilated head rode on the pillow, the rest of the body covered by a blanket. He knelt down beside it. The eyes had been dug out, the lids cut off as well. The ears had been shorn away to leave two whirls of slick pink flesh. The nose, too, was gone, leaving a dark gaping hole. The lips seemed to have been gnawed mostly away, perhaps by the teeth that now loomed through their gap.

As he watched, the flesh on the face shivered and the head turned slightly, the missing eyes seeming to bore into his own eyes. He broke the gaze and then, grabbing the blanket, tugged it off the body.

Underneath was only a torso, all limbs gone, nipples cut away, penis severed. He sat watching the chest rise and fall, air whistling between the teeth. There was something wrong with the way the body lay, he realized, and he pushed it over onto the side a little, enough to see that the buttocks had been shaved away.

The mouth said something urgently but he couldn't understand what because most of the tongue was gone. He let go of the body. He looked away, let himself slip from his knees to lie on the floor. Behind him, he could hear someone pounding at the door. He stayed there, staring up at the ceiling, listening to Aline babble, until they came and dragged him away.

"So," said Borchert, "now you've seen for yourself." He was standing using a cane, precariously grounded in his palm to support himself. Kline was in the chair now, Borchert's chair, having been brought there by the guards after they had dragged him by the feet out of Aline's room and down the stairs, his head bumping against each step.

"What's wrong with you?" asked Borchert. "You look feverish."

"Aline's alive," said Kline.

"Of course he's alive," said Borchert. "I must apologize for lying, Mr. Kline, but trust I had my reasons."

"Why?"

"Why, Mr. Kline?" Borchert turned, moved closer by hopping slightly. "You want to know?"

"Yes."

Borchert smiled. "Knowledge is the most valuable of commodities," he said. "Shall we trade? I'll trade you knowledge for a limb."

"What?"

"You heard me," said Borchert. "Knowledge for a limb. You choose the limb. Or even just a hand or foot. That should be enough."

"No," said Kline.

"That's you're problem," said Borchert. "You don't want to know badly enough."

"I want to know," said Kline.

"Truth or flesh," said Borchert. "Which is more important?"

Kline didn't answer.

"Or say just a digit," said Borchert. "A single finger or toe. What does a finger or toe matter? You've already lost eight digits. What difference would one more make?"

Kline stood up, made for the door. He could hear Borchert behind him, chuckling.

"The offer stands, Mr. Kline," he said. "Come back any time."

He lay in bed, thinking. With the light off he kept seeing Aline's mutilated face, the head riding up on the pillow, blankets tucked just below the chin. Eventually he got up and turned the light on.

His foot ached. It was still weeping blood and fluid where the toes had been, and the foot itself was oddly dark, seemed swollen. He put it on a pillow, kept it elevated, which seemed to help a little.

What was the truth? he wondered. How important was it to know? And once he knew, what then?

He looked at his stump. He could still, sometimes, feel the hand there. And, when Borchert had drugged him, he had been able to see it as well, half-present, like a ghost. He tried to will himself to see it again, could not.

Maybe there was someone who could give him something for his foot, he thought, an anti-inflammatory or perhaps something more, before the foot became too swollen, too painful, to walk on. He would take that, and then stay in bed, waiting for the toes to heal.

Why? he wondered, again seeing Aline's face despite the light still being on. Why had Borchert lied to him? What did he have to gain by pretending Aline was dead when he was actually alive?

He kept turning the question around in his head.

And when, at last, he came up with an answer, he realized he was in very great trouble indeed.

IX

The guard at the gate didn't want to admit him when he arrived, but Kline told him he was coming for an amputation, that Borchert had invited him to return. The guard consulted his fellow behind the door and then waited with Kline at the gate in the dark while the latter guard went upstairs to consult Borchert.

"It's very late," said the guard.

"He'll see me," said Kline. "He told me to come."

And indeed, when the other guard returned, he was admitted.

He went with the other guard up the stairs to Borchert's room. The guard knocked. When Borchert called back, the guard opened the door and allowed Kline to enter alone.

"Well," said Borchert. "Truth is important to you after all, Mr. Kline."

He was sitting in his chair, a gun in his hand gripped awkwardly with his remaining fingers. "Please stay right there, Mr. Kline," he said.

"It's not loaded," said Kline.

"No?" said Borchert. "What makes you think that?"

"The gun you gave me wasn't," said Kline.

"No, it wasn't," said Borchert, "but wasn't that perhaps because I was giving it to you?"

Kline didn't answer.

"Care to tell me what you know?" asked Borchert.

"You're planning to kill Aline," said Kline.

"And?"

"And planning to make it look like I killed him."

"You've been most obliging in that regard," said Borchert. "You've acted your role nicely. A documented penchant for violence. A certain obsession with Aline, dead or alive. You're only wrong in one particular, that being that I've already killed Aline."

"When?"

"Not long after you last left. For a limbless man he put up quite a fight."

"Why?"

"Ah," said Borchert. "Mr. Kline, I doubt if I can make you understand."

"Try me."

"Try me, Mr. Kline? How colloquial of you. It was a matter of belief. Aline and I disagreed on certain particulars, questions of belief. Either he or I had to be done away with for the good of the faith in a way that would leave the survivor blameless. Otherwise there would have been a schism. Naturally, I, in my position, preferred that he be done away with rather than I."

"You were enemies."

"Not at all. Each of us admired the other. It was simply an expedient political move, Mr. Kline. It had to be done."

"Why me?"

"Why you, Mr. Kline? Simply because you were there, and because God had touched you with His grace, had chosen you by removing your hand. You'll of course be rewarded in heaven for your role in all this. Whether you'll be rewarded in this life, though, is entirely another matter."

"Perhaps I should go," said Kline.

"A good question, Mr. Kline. Do I kill you or do I let you go? Hmmm? What do you think, Mr. Kline? Shall I let you go? Shall we flip a coin?"

Kline did not answer.

"No coin?" asked Borchert. "Do you care to express an opinion?"

"I'd like to go," said Kline.

"Of course you would," said Borchert. "And so you shall. Today shall be a day for mercy, not justice. Perhaps, with a little luck, you'll even be able to make it out the gate and past the guards to the so-called freedom of the outside world."

Kline turned toward the door.

"But then again," he heard from behind him, "surely justice must temper mercy, Mr. Kline. Am I right? So perhaps you'd care to leave a little something we can remember you by."

Kline stood still. And then, without turning around, he reached slowly for the door handle.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," said Borchert. "I hate to shoot a man in the back."

Kline stopped, turned to face him.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"You know exactly what I want," said Borchert, his eye steady. "Flesh for knowledge."

"No," said Kline.

"You told the guard you'd come up here for an amputation," said Borchert. "There's a cleaver on the counter. The same cleaver you used on my finger. Where the hand is gone, the arm shall follow. Otherwise I shoot you. It makes honestly no difference to me, Mr. Kline. You've accomplished your purpose. Technically, you're no longer needed."

Kline started slowly for the back of the room. Borchert watched him go, pushing at the floor with his foot to turn his chair around.

The cleaver was there, imbedded in the butcher's block.

"Go ahead, Mr. Kline. Take it by the cronge and tug it free."

He took the cleaver by the handle. "What's to stop me from killing you?" he asked.

"Do you really know how to throw a cleaver, Mr. Kline? Where does one learn such skills? Some sort of Vocational and Technical school? Can you imagine you'd be able to hit me, let alone hit me so that the blade itself will stick? And even if you did, I imagine I'd be able to squeeze off a shot beforehand-"

"Assuming the gun is loaded."

"Assuming the gun is loaded," agreed Borchert affably. "A shot that would bring the guards running and that would get you killed. So, Mr. Kline, you'd be trading the possibility of killing me for your own life. Is that really what you want to do? No? Now be a good boy and cut off your arm."

He turned on the burner in the countertop, waited for it to heat up. The cleaver seemed sharp enough, though he realized it might have some difficulty cutting through bone. If he hit the joint just right it probably wouldn't matter, though he shouldn't forget he was cutting left-handed; did he have sufficient force in his left hand to cut all the way through in a single blow?

He lined the cleaver along the crease of his elbow, found the flesh to run almost from one end of the blade to the other. He would have to hit it exactly right.

In his mind's eye, the cleaver is already coming swiftly down, beginning to bite through skin and flesh and bone. He will be washed over with pain and will stagger, but before going down he must remember to thrust the new end of his arm against the burner to cauterize it, so that he doesn't bleed to death. And then, if he is still standing, he may manage to stagger from the room and down the stairs and eventually out of the compound altogether, where, limping, feverish, in pain, he will make his way out into the lone and dreary world.

And this, he realizes, is only the best possible outcome. In all probability it will be much worse. The hatchet will strike wrong and he will have to strike a second time. He will wooze and fall before cauterizing the wound and then lie on the floor bleeding to death from the wound. The guards will catch him at the gate and kill him. Or even worse, all will go well, the arm coming smoothly off, but Borchert, smiling, will say "Very good, Mr. Kline. But why stop there? What shall we cut off next?"

He raises the cleaver high. His whole life is waiting for him. He only needs to bring the cleaver down for it to begin.