No Such Creature

FOUR

Zig hated the smell of horseshit, and he could detect it from a long way away. At first he couldn’t understand why a self-storage outfit would smell like manure. But the moment he and Clem had stepped off the huge freight elevator, he’d figured it out; you could tell by the shape of the units.

“Jesus,” Clem said. “Why’s it smell like horseshit in here?”

“Used to be a riding academy,” Zig said. “Remember there was a sign coming north off the Strip?”

“Why you gonna put a riding academy in the middle of Las fucking Vegas?”

“I don’t know, Clem. Why do certain assholes have to smell like a fucking distillery all the time?”

“I had an Irish coffee. What’s the big deal?”

They walked along the corridors of units, each one numbered and padlocked, until eventually they found 704. A security camera halfway down the corridor stared at them with a baleful purple gaze.

“Stu better be taking care of the kid on the front desk,” Zig said.

“He will. He was gonna start a big argument about missing items and insurance and threaten lawsuits, the whole bit. Kid won’t be looking at no camera. Anyway, that’s why we got ball caps.”

“He better be good, this guy.”

“Stu’s good. Known him for years.”

“I haven’t.”

Zig took the bolt cutters out of the duffle bag and sent the lock crashing to the floor. When they stepped inside the locker, the smell of horseshit was a lot stronger.

“Fuck me,” Zig said. “Fucking Melvin.”

Except for some loose plastic bags and pellets of Styrofoam, the locker was empty.

“I knew we shoulda kept that guy alive for a while.”

Zig turned on Clem. “Oh, yeah? You knew it, huh? You’re so fucking clairvoyant? I suppose that’s why you said something at the time, right? That’s why you said, ’Hey, Zig, maybe we better keep him alive till we make sure he’s telling the truth.”

“Okay, okay, you’re right. You’re right. I shoulda said something.”

Zig kicked the locker wall with the heel of his boot, making a dent.

He cursed himself silently as they headed back to the elevator. It should have been obvious that no one would store the proceeds from a jewellery heist in a place like this. A smart thief would put them in a safe somewhere, just like a jeweller. He’d been half expecting to find a safe inside the locker, which would have posed a problem, for sure, but he could see in retrospect why that didn’t make sense.

“I am sick and fucking tired,” he said, “of learning from mistakes.”

“I know what you mean, boss.”

“Next time’ll be different.”

“Way different.” Clem punched the elevator button.

“Next time we detain the guy someplace safe, someplace where speed is not required. We’re gonna be way more thorough. And we’re gonna make sure we got our hands on the goods before we do anything else. Melvin just panicked and made shit up.”

“I think you’re right,” Clem said. “He wanted that bag off in a big way.”

As the elevator rattled them back toward street level, the barnyard smells began to diminish. Zig kicked the door. Fucking Melvin.

It was Max and Owen’s practice to take back roads wherever possible. They sought out the old U.S. highways that had been superseded by the interstates. Partly this was a security measure-the old highways were less frequently patrolled than the interstates-but mostly it was for pleasure. Max always scheduled their shows so that there was no hurry, and he liked to see the small towns and the countryside. Otherwise, he said, you might as well leave the Rocket at home and take a bloody plane.

Consequently, it took them fourteen hours to drive from San Francisco to Las Vegas, taking US 93 down through Nevada. Along the way they listened to dialect CDs, practising accents as they drove. Max was particularly insistent on Australian at the moment. When they weren’t doing that, he liked to find the smallest radio stations to hear the local news and ads. “When Walker’s Shoes are what you wear, it’s almost like you’re walking on air.” And he enjoyed hearing the “so-called Christians,” as he called them, foaming at the mouth over homosexuals, liberals and other degenerates.

Sitting beside him all day, Owen tried to think up a good way to tell him his news. After the next town, he would think, then maybe after the next gas station. So far he hadn’t managed to work up the courage.

Max was at the wheel as they approached Vegas, and even though he was exhausted and yearning for his bunk, Owen felt as if they were landing on a distant planet. As the sun set, the sky turned lilac, then mauve, and in the dry desert twilight the lights of the city became visible when they were still a hundred miles away.

“It looks like an idea,” Max said. “Not even an idea-a notion-soon to become an idea.”

“You should’ve been a poet, Max.”

“I am a poet. Every poet’s a thief. Poets break into your mind and heart, and their verses are so many shards of glass they leave scattered around.”

“Except people like poets. They don’t like thieves.”

“They don’t like poets either. Any poet who dies rich is either a charlatan or a songwriter.”

“Shakespeare got rich. He owned the biggest house in Stratford, you told me.”

“Will Shakespeare, aside from being my hero, my angel, was a one-man corporation: actor, manager and playwright. He was also a dab hand with real estate. In my heyday I knew everything there was to know about the great Will.”

“I still don’t understand how you could give up acting. You must have been great.”

“Sadly, the world thought otherwise. There was a time, though-oh, there was a time. I wish you could have seen my Hamlet. The Old Vic-the Old Wreck we used to call it. I got to play that slippery little Dane for three months running before the most discerning audience in the Western world.” Max swept a hand grandly across the speeding desert. “Standing ovations every night. Dozens of letters I got. Dozens! Gielgud wrote me the most charming note. I thought to myself, ‘Max, your ship has come in. You’re going to be a second Olivier.”

“I can’t believe you never made it,” Owen said.

“Neither can I, my lad. Neither can I. You put your heart and soul into something, devote your life to it, you think success must surely come. But ambition is a one-armed bandit. The world spits out success just often enough to keep us mortal fools yanking that lever. But nothing came of it. No film offers, no great parts. It was as if there’d been no Hamlet, no letters, no standing ovations. As if it had been erased from the entire world’s memory banks, except my own.”

“It’s totally unfair.”

“Well, I made mistakes. Thought I could do anything. Took on roles I never should have considered. Turned down others that, in hindsight, might have been better bets. Offended a few people here and there.”

“No, Max. You?”

“It’s not funny, boy. It ate me up. I wanted it so badly. Perhaps I wanted it too badly. Tried too hard. Certainly a couple of critics took me to task for chewing the scenery. I learned from that. But possibly I learned too late.”

“Well, you’ve put on enough performances since,” Owen said, trying to cheer him up. “You’ve put on a lot of shows.”

“So I have, boy. So I have. It was either that or spend the rest of my life heaving sandbags backstage. That’s what they had me do! After a few years I was so desperate to stay in the theatre, I actually did it-on the sly, of course. Then the stagehands’ union got wind of it and had me cashiered, and that’s when I turned to my life of travel and romance. Note it well, lad: classical training will never see you wrong. Not that I’d want to see you become an actor-perish the thought.”

Owen had visited Las Vegas before, back when he was twelve years old, the first long trip he had ever taken with his uncle. That time, before the Rocket and before Owen was included in Max’s shows, they had stayed at Circus Circus, a children’s paradise, and Owen had loved every minute of it.

After they got settled in the trailer park, they took the car downtown to the El Cortez for dinner.

“Why did you pick this place?” Max said when they sat down to eat. “A sudden fit of thrift?”

“Bugsy Siegel used to own it,” Owen said. “It’s my theme this year. Criminal history. That’s why we had Alcatraz, and that’s why we’re having dinner at the El Cortez.”

“Poor Bugsy. Ended up with more holes in him than Saint Sebastian. You’re a peculiar boy, Owen, have I told you that today?”

“Well, look who brought me up.”

“Bollocks. I get to choose where we have dessert.”

Max chose Sir Slots-a-Lot’s Kitchen, just off the Strip. It was reasonably priced, served down-home cooking, and offered several rows of slot machines in case a diner should feel the urge to shed money between courses. It was decorated with suits of armour that had been shipped to Vegas all the way from a Hollywood movie set.

They ordered chocolate sundaes, with brandy for Max and a Coke for Owen. As they waited for the food to arrive, they stared dumbly at the array of television screens, all tuned to Celebrity Poker. The room rang with the intermittent ka-ching of the slots.

“Chocolate sundaes,” said Max, who had the sweet tooth of a ten-year-old. “Food of the gods.”

Owen couldn’t finish his.

“Why so down in the mouth, old chum? We put on a great show the other night, and you sit there like a death’s head.”

“I got accepted into Juilliard’s drama program.”

Max regarded him, spoon in mid-air. The blue eyes were bright and alert, but he suddenly looked very old.

“I’m gonna go, Max. I want to start my own life.”

Owen couldn’t meet Max’s gaze. He had to look away at the televised hands stacking their chips, gripping their fans of cards. Moans of disappointment wafted over from the slot machines.

“Don’t study theatre, boy,” Max said. “You’ll just end up another bloody waiter.”

“I have a good shot at it, Max. They loved my audition.”

Max sat back, rolled his shoulders bearlike against the booth, and leaned forward again as far as his bulk would permit. He spoke in what was for him a pretty soft voice. “Look at us, Owen. We’re free and easy. We have excitement, money, friends! Most boys your age would kill for this life.”

“It’s been fun,” Owen said. “It really has. We’ve had some great times. But I need to move on. I’ve saved a lot from our road trips, and there’s that money from Mom and Dad to cover the rest. Hey, listen, my marks were so good the school’s offered to pay half my tuition.”

“Of course. And who was it made you study? Who stood over you like a learned Colossus?”

“You did, Max. I could never have done it without you.”

“And not just the studies, mind. Do you have any conception of the life I saved you from? Modesty forbids I should raise the issue, but you force me. Think about it, boy. Do you have any idea where it was you were headed?”

Owen’s tenth birthday is the best birthday ever. He is an only child, and his parents-both British by birth, both physicians in a family practice in Norwalk, Connecticut-tend to go overboard on birthdays. In addition to his presents, which include a telescope, several books and five complete seasons of Doctor Who on DVD, they’ve driven down to New York City in the Volvo to see The Lion King on Broadway.

After the show, they stroll through the crowds and the noise and traffic, the ruby flashes and multicoloured pinwheels of Broadway’s light show, and make their way to Serendipity. New York seems to Owen the most brilliant creation in the universe-it is a universe, where everything is gaudy, loud, musical and fun. When Serendipity’s house specialty of frozen hot chocolate is set before him, Owen feels like a king himself.

He loved the musical, and can’t stop talking about it. To his parents’ amusement he breaks into an excellent reprise of “The Madness of King Scar,” singing at the table I’m revered, I am reviled, I’m idolized, I am despised, I’m keeping calm, I’m going wild!

His parents beam at him across the table.

“Owen,” his mother says, “do you even know what ‘reviled’ means?”

“Nope. It sounds good, though.”

“Ten years old and already a ham,” says his dad. His wiry black beard made his smile a vivid flash.

Owen glows under their praise, and resumes spelunking in the depths of his frozen hot chocolate, which performs the culinary miracle of being simultaneously hot and cold.

That night, as they drive back home in the dark, he falls in love with the vast glittering bridges, the Fifty-ninth Street and the Triborough.

“Hey, Dad. Do they make models of those bridges?”

“I don’t know, Owen. They might.”

“Would they have lights on them?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we look them up on the Net?”

“That would be so cool. I’d build one right across my bed and sleep under it.”

His mother turns around in the front seat. “Someone’s imagination is working overtime tonight. Did you have a good birthday?”

“The best. Best, best ever.”

“That’s good, sweetie.”

By the time they get to the relative darkness of the Merritt Parkway, Owen is sacked out across the back seat. The road surface is glassy calm after the constant chop of the Bronx, the curves slow.

He can’t have slept for more than a few minutes-Norwalk is only about eighteen miles up the Merritt-before he is awakened by sirens. He’s too sleepy to sit up, or even to open his eyes, but he can hear them getting closer, and his parents’ disembodied voices.

“Police,” his mother says. “My God, there’s someone moving awfully fast back there.”

The sirens get louder. A sudden roar and then the car swerves. Owen sits up, gripping the back of the driver’s seat.

“God, that was a near thing,” his father says, real agitation in his voice. “Idiot barrelling along on the inside lane.”

Horns honk up ahead. The sirens gain on them from behind.

“It’s a police chase,” his mother says. “Can we get in the other lane?”

“Unfortunately, everybody else has the same idea.”

“Owen, sit back, sweetie. Is your seat belt on?”

Owen sits back and adjusts the shoulder strap across his chest. A police car goes blaring by on their left, red light flashing.

“Good Lord,” he hears his father say.

Then an oncoming car veers into their lane. His mother’s scream is the last thing Owen hears.

Eight years later his memory of specific details following the catastrophe is thin. He woke in hospital with no memory of the cars’ actual impact. He tried to call for his mother but couldn’t speak; there was a tube in his throat. Where were his parents? Why weren’t they here beside the bed? He wanted them to come right away and take him home. A young nurse came in and saw he was awake. She checked his chart and called for a doctor.

When the doctor came in, he removed the tube in Owen’s throat and held out a glass of water with a straw in it. Owen took a sip and asked for his mother and father. The doctor wanted to examine him first. He asked him a lot of questions, shone a light in his pupils, and tested his reflexes. When Owen asked again for his mother and father, the nurse said she would have to ask someone else. She and the doctor left together.

They were gone so long that he thought they must have called his mom and dad at home and they would now be driving to the hospital. His room was filled with cards and stuffed animals from classmates. He realized he must have been unconscious for a few days; his parents would have had to go home. Owen was not a boy who cried easily, but tears now flowed from his eyes and down his cheeks. He turned on his side, bruises protesting, and sobbed.

Finally an older woman came in, not dressed like a nurse. He realized later that she must have been the hospital social worker. She had a soothing voice, and the face of a beneficent moon surrounded by a penumbra of platinum hair. Mrs. Callow. She told him he’d been sleeping for three days.

“The first thing I want you to know, Owen, is you’re not alone. Have you noticed all your cards and presents?”

“Where’s my mom? I thought someone was going to get her.”

Mrs. Callow reached out and smoothed his hair. “Don’t forget, Owen, there are lots of people on staff here who care about you and want only the best for you. People who work in other departments, other floors, they’re all asking after you. I think you’re going to find you’re kind of special around here.”

“My mom and dad are coming, though, right? You called them, right?”

“Things may look pretty bleak sometimes,” Mrs. Callow went on, “but Owen, we’re going to do everything we can to help. We’re going to find a way to ensure your happiness, I promise. You’re my number one priority, young man, and I’m going to go all out for you. But,” she added with a social worker’s rhetorical flourish, “I’m going to need your help with that-can you do that, Owen?”

“I want my mom.” Owen couldn’t stop himself, he didn’t want to cry in front of a stranger, but the spigot opened and the tears gushed out again.

“I need to tell you something, Owen. Something very sad.”

“I don’t like it here. I want to go home.” He was bawling like a newborn now. He’d never felt anything like this before, unless it had been in a nightmare, some nameless voracious thing devouring him. He had no idea what this moon-faced woman was about to tell him, but he knew it wouldn’t be good. “I want to go home,” he wailed again.

“I know, sweetheart,” Mrs. Callow said, and took his hands in her warm palms, “but unfortunately that’s the sad thing I have to tell you.”

Owen was absolutely, unequivocally alone. It wasn’t as if he had relatives in the area, or even in the country; he didn’t have any relatives at all. His mother had lost both her parents when she was in her early twenties. His paternal grandmother had been a drunk who died in a psychiatric hospital of Korsakoff’s syndrome, and his grandfather had recently died of Parkinson’s. Like himself, both his parents had been only children, and so he was without aunts and uncles.

The state had to intervene and make him a temporary ward until such time as a suitable home might be found. The order of such business begins with a receiving home, usually run by a good-hearted, inexhaustible couple who are on call seven days a week to take in children they have never met. A child may stay overnight or as long as a few weeks.

If suitable relatives are not forthcoming, and the child is not a major behavioural problem, he or she will then be moved to a foster home. This is intended to be for the longer term-ideally until the child is returned to his natural home or adopted into a loving family. This is not generally expected to happen with children over the age of seven or eight, but the social agencies try to be optimistic.

A difficult child faces a bleaker future of group homes and detention centres, but that was not likely in the cards for a good-natured boy like Owen Maxwell.

Various friends and neighbours came forward in the early days-Owen didn’t lack for friends-but none of their families proved suitable to the Department of Children and Families. Either they could not make the required long-term commitment or they had children too close in age, which would be likely to cause conflict. Owen was lucky in one way: both his parents had been covered by munificent life insurance policies. In some cases the applicants to foster Owen may well have been motivated by something other than altruism.

He would never forget the cold clench in his stomach when Mrs. Callow first took him to the receiving home. It was a natty little house of red brick in a corner of Norwalk with which he was completely unfamiliar. Mr. and Mrs. Platt were both jolly ovoids with carroty red hair, as if a pair of Toby jugs had leapt from the shelf and incarnated themselves for the sole purpose of greeting newly orphaned boys.

Mrs. Platt showed him where the bathroom was, explaining the house rules, which were Byzantine, and showed him to the IKEA-crisp chamber he would be sharing with a buzz-cut urchin some two years his senior nicknamed, appropriately, Buzz. Buzz had claimed the top bunk upon arrival some days previously and warned Owen on his first night that if he tried to storm that fastness he would be repelled “by any means necessary.” Those were his actual words.

Outside the borders of his own bunk, Buzz had no concept of privacy, or of its corollary, private property. Within the first three nights Owen lost a Harry Potter book, a Game Boy and a much-loved baseball mitt. Buzz was a versatile sportsman, and one of his favourite pastimes was a game he called Goober. The rules were not complex. When the rest of the household was supposedly dreaming, Buzz would roll back the top end of his mattress, affording him a perfect if somewhat segmented view of Owen, lying awake in grief and loneliness.

“Watch this,” Buzz said one night, and with a solemn expression he released a viscous blob of saliva from between pursed lips. It elongated, drooped toward the transfixed Owen, and was then reeled back up by a sudden intake of Buzz’s breath. “The trick,” Buzz explained, “is to see how low I can get it to go without actually hitting you.”

“Kind of a one-sided game,” Owen pointed out. “What am I supposed to do-spit upward and see if it’ll reach you?”

“No, doofus. You’re supposed to not move a muscle, no matter how close it gets. It’s a test of nerve.”

“I don’t want to play.”

“Too bad, ‘cause here it comes.” Another hideous blob drooped toward him.

“If that hits me,” Owen said, “I will kill you.”

Buzz made an insincere attempt to recall his missile and it hit Owen squarely in the forehead. His reaction was instantaneous. He booted the springs above him with all his strength, causing Buzz to carom off the ceiling and plummet to the floor. The noise was stupendous, and brought Mr. and Mrs. Platt clattering into the room. Accusations were hurled, evidence weighed, and a rapid judgment reached: the boys would alternate bunks every other day until they learned civility. The experience left Owen with a lifelong aversion to bottom bunks.

Terror and loss were with him day and night, and yet Owen behaved with the utmost calm and politeness to his social worker and foster parents. But every night, when Buzz was asleep, he wept, clutching his pillow to his face in a hot, soggy mass.

After a few days in the land of Buzz, Owen was taken to visit a prospective foster home. Melanie Prine, his social worker from the Department of Children and Families, drove him for miles and miles outside of Norwalk, so that he really had no idea where he was. She was pretty, and yet he couldn’t bear to look at her. To him she consisted entirely of the ten red fingernails that gripped the steering wheel and the chirpy voice telling him about the Tunkles, his prospective foster parents, but his heart was too thick with grief to take anything in. Owen, strapped into the passenger seat as the ever-bleaker countryside rolled by, felt a heavy numbness travelling upward from his ankles until it encased his whole body.

The Tunkles were waiting on the front porch. Melanie Prine gave them a cheery wave as they drove up, five scarlet fingernails flashing in the sun. They were nice enough, and their house was a nice-enough house. Owen could see that it was a comfortable place, a house where people could live with each other, but it was not his house. He did not live here. He did not know anyone here.

The family had an older daughter of sixteen, a blonde girl who said hi and then vanished, and a still older son who was away at college. Melanie Prine abandoned Owen there for the afternoon, leaving the Tunkles to try to interest him in farm life. He was shown to his room, a nice-enough room to be sure, but not his. Just as the bathroom was not his bathroom, the kitchen not his kitchen, the basement not his basement, the front yard with its single stunted maple not his yard. It was as if everyone was playing a game: Let’s pretend this is normal. Let’s pretend we know each other. Let’s pretend we care.

With each minute that ticked by, Owen was exiled deeper into an inner Siberia. The worst moments were when Mr. Tunkle, a bony little man whose skin looked parched and stiff as if he’d been salted and left to dry in the sun, took him by the hand (a hand rough as a plank) to show him the pigs, the chickens, the fields, the cows. Owen had never seen anything so dreary.

Norwalk is not a big city, but it is not a small town and it is most definitely not the country. To Owen, farms were something you drove by to get somewhere interesting-a river, an aquarium, a museum, a campground, an airport. You didn’t stop at farms. The sunlight beat down on the place in a way he had never experienced in shady Norwalk. The chickens were repulsive, the cows somnolent, the pigs appalling. Owen was not afraid of manual labour; he had enjoyed helping his father fix things around the house, and he earned pocket money shovelling snow and raking leaves. But the idea that he would be expected to spend time with these creatures made his heart shrivel.

He would be required to change schools, the nearest neighbour was a mile away, and he would probably never see his friends again.

“Well, what did you think of the Tunkles?” Melanie Prine asked when they were on the way back to the receiving home. Her fingernails had dimmed to carmine in the late afternoon light.

Owen couldn’t answer.

“They’re nice, don’t you think?”

“They’re okay.”

“And isn’t that farmhouse incredible?”

“I don’t want to live there.”

“So much to do out here, don’t you think?”

“I don’t want to live there.”

“Open space everywhere. Lots of fresh air. Did you see they’ve even got a swimming hole?”

“I don’t want to live there.”

Five of the ten red fingernails lifted off from the steering wheel and travelled toward him as Miss Prine tried to comfort him with a touch on his shoulder. It was the briefest feathery touch, but it burst something inside Owen’s chest and he convulsed with tears.

“No one expects you to like it right away, Owen.”

“I don’t want to live there,” he said again, all but choking on each word.

“You’re not used to the country, I know. But a farm is an ideal place to grow up. So much to do. And it’s fun looking after the animals, don’t you think?”

“I want to live in my own home,” he said miserably. “Why can’t I just stay at home?”

“Owen, your parents aren’t there anymore. There’s no one to look after you.”

“But you said there’s money, right? Insurance money? Why can’t we pay a babysitter and I’ll just stay in my house? I don’t have to have new parents. I don’t want new parents. Would you want new parents?”

“No, Owen, I wouldn’t. Nobody wants to lose their parents. You’ve been very unlucky. But we have to find you another family to live with, and the Tunkles are good parents and they have room.”

“But I don’t want to live there.”

Owen was sent to the Tunkles the following day. He spent a painful weekend supposedly adapting to the routines of the farm, and when Monday rolled around he took the bus to his new school and sat silently throughout his classes. He made no effort to acknowledge his new classmates, and when his teacher called on him, he had nothing to say, he had heard nothing. He was focused strictly on the final bell, waiting hour after hour, minute after minute, for it to ring. When finally it did ring, he went nowhere near the bus stop. He walked into town and back to his old neighbourhood.

He had never seen his house with all the curtains closed. It sat blind and mute on the corner where it had always been. No car in the drive, of course, but then there never was when he got home from school. He still had his key, and let himself in.

It was a little stuffy, a little dusty, but it smelled the same. It smelled of his house, the way no other house would ever smell. And nothing had changed. All the furniture was there. The coats were still hanging in the vestibule-his mother’s, his father’s, his own-above a chaotic jumble of footwear. The merest objects filled him not just with pain, but with awe: his father’s enormous running shoes, the wellingtons his mother wore in the garden. He went and sat on the couch in the living room, facing the television. His reflection on the dim screen, thin and distorted, looked back at him.

He had never seen the house so dark, not during the day. He fell sideways into the cushions and cried, but it didn’t help. After a while he went to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Snapple from the fridge. All the same food was there. Nothing had been done yet, by whoever had come in to close the curtains. The electricity was on, and the water.

The message light was blinking by the phone, but he didn’t want to see who had called.

His plan was this: He would live in this house by himself. He would continue going to school as if nothing had happened. If he could get that insurance money, he would hire someone to cook and clean and look after the house while he was at school. He pictured a fat, cheerful woman who would bake lots of pies. Miss Prine would be impressed; she would see that he could get along without a mother and father.

But for now he had to keep quiet. He couldn’t open the curtains, and he was afraid even to turn on lights. The cops would burst in, thinking there was a burglary in progress. He brought a jar of peanut butter and some crackers into the living room and ate in front of the TV. For dessert he had a granola bar.

His parents had not brought him up to be religious, but he found, looking around at the empty chairs where his parents used to sit, with their books still open beside them, that he was thinking about God. What possible reason could God have to snatch his parents from this house, this town, this planet, and leave him behind? He would have to be a mean God. How would He explain it to his parents, wherever they might be now, who surely must be missing him too?

He woke up when the lights came on sometime later. Miss Prine stood over him, along with a policeman and an older man in a sober grey suit. He had an English accent just like his parents, and he looked a lot like the pictures of his grandfather.

“Owen?” Miss Prine said softly. “I think I have some good news for you. This is your great-uncle, Uncle Max.”

This jocular, highly verbal and theatrical tonnage of humanity managed to wade his way through the swamp of child welfare regulations, and to win over the support of Miss Prine in particular. It turned out he was the brother of Owen’s paternal grandfather, whom this strange apparition referred to as “Tommy.” He had a battered satchel full of family photographs that he showed Owen and Miss Prine during their first, supervised office visit. Many of them were the same images his parents had kept in musty old albums, but there were others he had never seen before: Max and Tommy as young men in cricket whites, Max and his father as a boy on a Brighton pier, Max in the crowd at Owen’s parents’ wedding in London. He told Owen a couple of amusing stories involving his father as a boy-the time he got stuck in the mulberry tree, the time he blew up his train set using his chemistry set, the time he ran away from home and asked to live with Uncle Max.

“Bit of a sticky situation, that one,” he said. “Tommy was quite miffed that I’d taken the boy in. But what could I do? He was on my front porch with a little suitcase. Anyway, it was only for a weekend. Tommy and I had a rather bitter falling-out eventually-not over that. This was much later. Real estate deal went bad and we ended up losing pots of money. Anyway, that’s why me and this handsome young lad have never met. Didn’t even realize I had family in the country until I read the terrible news.”

The DCF checked Max’s background. He had been the first of the family to move to the States, settling into Manhattan years previously, where he ran a thriving theatrical supply business with a specialty in wigs. Since there were two countries involved, the paperwork took a considerable amount of time.

A bargain was worked out whereby Owen would stay with the Tunkles while he got to know Max better through more visits. Max drove up regularly from New York. At first they were supervised by Miss Prine-lunches at coffee shops and the like. But then Max was allowed to take Owen on day trips to the city: the Central Park zoo, the boat pond, the Museum of Natural History, the Staten Island Ferry.

When Miss Prine saw how well he and the boy got along, she became Max’s champion at the agency and in court. Eventually Owen was placed with him as a temporary ward, taking up residence in the extra bedroom of his Stuyvesant Town apartment. The initial adjustment period was rocky but brief, and soon the boy began to thrive. He got used to Max and Manhattan both, and he loved the long trips Max took him on, which, as far as he knew to this day, were crime free.

After two years Max asked him if he would like to make their arrangement permanent. “You and me against the world, lad. Taking on all comers. Thick and thin. You don’t have to call me Dad, you can call me Max, Uncle Max, Sir Max, Lord High Max, whatever variation strikes your fancy, what say you, sir?”

Owen replied with an unhesitating and resounding yes.

So here they are years later in Sir Slots-a-Lot Kitchen in Las Vegas, Nevada, Owen trying to explain that he isn’t ungrateful, he just wants something different for his life than robbing dinner parties. Something his mother and father would have been proud of.

“Ten years old, both parents dead-tragic, heartbreaking, positively Dickensian. You were headed for a series of foster homes, maybe a group home, maybe a locked facility, who knows? You’d’ve probably got molested and beaten and crushed and ruined and ended up a serial killer or next thing to, drooling away your final years on death row.”

“Well, look at me now,” Owen said, stirring the melted puddle of his sundae. “I’m a criminal.”

“Tush, boy.” Max leaned across the table and gave his best stage whisper. “You are a gentle criminal, a saintly criminal, a Saint Francis of the highway. You lead a completely non-violent existence. You harm no one, just as I taught you. Your life is good, I engineered it for you, and now you repay me by deciding to take up the sorry occupation that tore me up and spat me out.” Max sat back. The banquette wobbled ominously.

“Max, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. You gave me a home-sort of.”

“Sort of! I know not sort of! I put a roof over your head, made sure you got a good education, taught you right from wrong. No, no, let’s have no sort-ofs. Why can’t you study something useful? Locksmithing. Martial arts. Computer security.”

“Max, you loved acting. You still love acting.”

“The skill, not the profession. If you try to do it for a living, it will break your heart. I don’t want to see that happen.”

Owen spoke softly. “I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, or wondering where the next job is going to come from. And anyway, Max, I think it’s time for you to retire.”

Max shoved his dish forward and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin.

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” Owen went on, “but this line of work, it isn’t for old-older guys. You’re getting tired, you’re forgetting things. Yesterday you forgot where you were, for Pete’s sake. Sooner or later you’re going to make some horrible mistake, and I don’t want to see you go back to jail. I don’t want to go to jail either.”

“Pah. Seven years of hell, that was, seven years of hell. I will never go back inside. Never, never, never, never, never.” Max gripped Owen’s forearm as if he were taking his blood pressure. “Who are you to tell me my powers are in decline? Where are these glaring lapses, these colossal blunders? You’re only trying to justify running off to Juilliard so you can become a waiter, a cab driver.”

“Max, you’re not listening to me. It’s not just you’re getting too old. This life is getting to you. You’re not sleeping anymore.”

“I sleep like a baby.”

“You’re forgetting things, you’re having nightmares, half the time you’re not even all there. You’re a threat to your own safety.”

“Rubbish.”

“Max, please don’t be hurt. It’s just that I-”

Owen was saved from further speech by the arrival of a man wearing baggy shorts and a blinding Hawaiian shirt, carrying a mug of beer in both hands as if it were some kind of isotope.

“Max, you old mofo,” the man said. “You have room at your table for a respectable working stiff?”

“Yes, and even for you,” Max said, patting the seat beside him. “Owen, allow me to introduce Charlie Zigler, known to all and sundry as Zig. Old acquaintance from Oxford.” Oxford was Max’s word for prison, in this case a certain locked institution in Ossining, New York.

Zig put down his beer glass to shake hands. He was a compact, nervy man who blinked a lot. It gave him a look that was both curious and startled, a raccoon rudely awakened.

“Who’s the kid?”

“I don’t even know this boy,” Max said. “Never seen him before in my life. He just came up and asked me for money.”

Owen introduced himself. “I’m his nephew.”

“Uh-oh,” Zig said with a wink. “You must have bruised your old uncle’s ego somehow. How you keeping, Max?”

“Couldn’t be better. And you? Last time I saw you, you had grandiose plans to usurp William H. Gates, third of that name, in the pantheon of computer gods.”

“Exactly right,” Zig said, blinking. “Took a ‘puter repair course at a community college. Paid for itself after two weeks. Ask me anything.”

“How do I replace the PRAM battery in my PowerBook?” Owen said.

“No idea,” Zig said, and let fly with a laugh that sent pressure waves slamming into Owen’s eardrums.

“Don’t even talk to him,” Max said to Zig. “You’ll give him the illusion he’s human.”

“Poor old Max. Say, you still pulling those lame-ass dinnertime gigs, or did you finally retire?”

“Suddenly the whole world is breathless for my resignation. I suppose you want me to carve my own coffin and lie down in it too, you hideous dwarf.”

“Maybe you should move into an honest trade like myself.”

“I’m a travelling salesman-a friend to the bald, the gay, the theatrical. What could be more honest? Anyway, what do you care what I do, where I live, or whether I retire?”

“There’s some badass dudes out there, my friend. I wouldn’t want to see the Subtractors get hold of you.”

“The Subtractors,” Owen said. “I always thought they were a myth.”

“They exist,” Zig said. “And believe me, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of those guys.”

“Urban legend,” Max said. “No such creature.”

“Legend, huh?” Zig drank down half his beer. With each gulp his Adam’s apple bounced higher and higher up his gullet as if it might ring a bell and win a prize. “Lemme tell you about this urban legend, kid.” His face loomed forward across the table, blinking and foam-flecked. “The Subtractors is a group of individuals, a secret organization, call them. No one knows who they are, only what they do. And what they do is not pleasant. They prey upon thieves, see? They hear about a tasty job going down, they get their hands on one of the likely crew, and they, I don’t know how else to put it, they subtract parts of his body until he reveals where the score is tucked away. Bolt cutters are their tool of choice, although they have been known to use straight razors, exacto knives, whatever’s handy.”

“That’s sick,” Owen said.

“Scares hell out of me.” Zig jerked his head toward Max. “Gramps never mentioned them to you?”

“Naturally not. I keep rumour, superstition and falsehood off the curriculum.”

“The Subtractors exist, kid. And if Pa Clampett here was a decent father figure, he would have warned you about them.”

“Sounds like something out of a Tarantino movie,” Owen said.

“Doesn’t it?” Max said. “The distinct tang of fiction.”

“You don’t believe me?” Zig said to Owen.

Owen shrugged.

Blinking ferociously, Zig opened the buttons of his shirt, top to bottom, eyes fixed on Owen, a smirk on his face. He pulled open his shirt.

“Whoa,” Owen said, and looked away.

Zig turned to Max, displaying his chest like a stripper.

“Hmm,” Max said. “And they didn’t return them when they were finished?”

“That’s all you got to say?” Zig said. “Urban legend? No such animal? If that’s the case, where the fuck are my nipples?”

“Do I need to remind you,” Max said, gesturing at Sir Slots-a-Lot’s shining armour, the maces and lances, “that we are in a restaurant?”

“Just don’t tell me the Subtractors don’t exist,” Zig said, buttoning up. “Happened three years ago. Me and a couple of colleagues got into the customs house in San Francisco. Had a tip on some icons that were being held there. Next thing I know …”

“Your tits were in the wringer.”

“Razor, actually.”

Owen was still having trouble catching his breath. “Did you tell them where the stuff was?”

“Course I did. What do you think I am? Superman?”

“I would have told them after the first one,” Max said. “In fact, I would have told them before the first one. I would have handed them a map and a key.”

“Unfortunately, the Subtractors don’t work that way. They had ’em off and in a jar before I could say jack shit. They hadda show they were serious, see? I had five more seconds to tell ’em or I’d be sitting here singing soprano.”

“I don’t imagine your colleagues were too pleased.”

“No, I imagine not. Lucky for me, in the process of helping themselves to our score the Subtractors killed both of ’em. Paper put the number of bullet holes at thirty each.”

“That was lucky,” Max said. “Have you thought about cosmetic surgery?”

“I don’t know,” Zig said with a shrug. “Kind of a conversation piece.”

Later, on their way back to the Rocket, Max told Owen to be sure and keep away from Zig if he should bump into him anywhere else in town. Despite his surface friendliness, the man was a violent pig, a rapist, and possessed of nothing resembling a conscience.

“If he’s so awful, why were you so friendly to him?”

“That, my boy, is one of the cruelties of incarceration. One must choose one’s friends from a very murky pool.”