Running Dog

1

Van wasn't ready for solid foods. He was living on milk shakes and soup. He never complained, Gao noticed, but he was clearly more intense than usual. That was worse than complaints.

They listened to country music and kept on driving, through Lexington, Bowling Green, Memphis, Little Rock, Dallas, San Angelo, and on toward a pinpoint on the map called Ozona.

Road signs baffled Cao. The country grew rugged, empty and vast. He wanted to turn back. It was Van who kept them rolling. His cheek was still badly bruised. His upper lip was swollen and purplish. He referred to his road map constantly when he wasn't driving.

In Ozona, the lone town in a sprawling county, they saw a Toyota that appeared to match the one they were looking for. It was parked in a service station, off to one side, away from the pumps. A young woman sat on the fender drinking a Coke. Using binoculars, Cao checked the license. D.C. plates. Numbers matched.

The rangers were parked alongside the town square. Van showed his partner the map, gesturing excitedly at the line he'd drawn from New York, where they'd started, through a point tangent to the curve in the Ohio River near Huntington, where they'd been ambushed and humiliated, and down across four states and into Mexico. The line was straight and passed very near Ozona.

Gao was happy because Van was happy.

It was decided Van would telephone Earl Mudger. Van knew the place names and had an easier time pronouncing them.

Moll sat in the back of a checkered cab, thinking this was the best time of year, unarguably-the snap and clarity of autumn. The driver kept missing lights, mumbling to himself.

At one of these lights a car appeared on the right, a silver Chrysler. From the corner of her eye, Moll watched the driver's window come steadily down. Reflections gradually vanished, replaced by Earl Mudger's smiling face.

"I called."

"Once."

"I see," he said. "You have a point system."

"Did you leave a number?"

"There's a point system in effect. I lost points."

"I don't think you left a number."

"I called only once and I didn't leave a number. I'm dead. They're taking me away. A new low, pointwise."

The light changed. Her driver edged the cab forward. Mudger kept pace so that his front door was even with the taxi's rear door.

"My car or yours?" he said.

"I like it this way."

"Tell you what."

Horns were blowing. Her driver was mumbling again. They crawled up Central Park West. Mudger suddenly floored it. There was a split second of noisy tire-gripping and then the Chrysler sprang forward. Half a block away he braked into a U-turn and went slamming into a parking space nose first. The door opened and he came ambling out, crossing the center stripes just as the taxi approached. He kept on walking, forcing the cab to stop, and then came around the right side and opened the rear door. Moll slid over in the seat. Mudger got in and closed the door as the sound of horns grew thick behind them.

"We want the park," Mudger told the driver. "Flip an R first chance and make some circles in the park."

He looked at Moll.

"You like these old cabs."

"Character."

"I don't know how to talk to you. You know that? I think that's why I'm here. To learn how to talk to you."

"I thought our chat went fairly well."

"You had me on the defensive," he said.

"It was your territory."

"You don't know what to call me, do you? We have this little difficulty with names."

"It was your territory. You managed my arrival and departure."

"We have this little tension between us."

They were in Central Park, heading north toward the Eighty-sixth Street transverse.

"Here on business, I think you said."

"Lining up customers."

"What for?"

"The Mudger tip."

"Yes, your invention. I recall."

"Steel," he said.

Heading east they passed the volleyball courts where she'd played tennis with Selvy. These goddamn bastards. Who were they and what did they want?

"This is your territory," he said. "Which means I don't stand a Chinaman's chance."

"You're still managing the arrivals."

"Only my own."

"You're commandeering taxis. That little old man is terrified."

"After we ride around a while and get all this dialogue out of our systems, I think we ought to have some dinner."

"I've given it up," she said.

"What else have you given up?"

"You guessed it."

"Now why would you want to do a thing like that?"

"The humor's gone out of it. It's basically a humorous pastime, but lately the laughs have been few and far between."

"Two myths about women. Women see the humor in sex and appreciate men who do the same. Women care more for tenderness than for the act itself, the hardware involved- techniques, proportions, etcetera."

"Who's talking about sex? I'm talking about movies. Going to the movies."

"I said it, didn't I? Don't stand a chance. She left me gasping."

"What is it about our sparring and jabbing that gives you so much pleasure?"

"Does it show?" he said. "I didn't know it showed."

"I think that's called a shit-eating grin."

"It's my military smile. Can't seem to shake it."

"We've all read about the tough time you combat vets have had making the transition. One day you're standing around a provincial interrogation center, supervising the torture of some farmer."

"Better slow down," he told her.

"Next day you're back in the States, looking around, a little bewildered. It's no wonder you're still using the same smile. I know, the farmer was dangerous. The enemy was everywhere."

"You're way beyond your range."

"True," she said. "It's prim and smug for noncombatants to criticize Those Who Were There. I understand that viewpoint and sympathize with it. Still, I've always felt the best view is the objective one, and sometimes this is made sharper and keener by distance. By thousands of intervening miles. The suffering we witness on either side can amount to a lie. But you're right, by and large. In my ridiculous urge to be fair, I definitely see your viewpoint. And I agree. I'm beyond my range. So let's stay closer to home. Things I've heard and seen."

The cab headed downtown along the western edge of the park.

"You and the Senator are chasing the same item. I know what it is, although I can't say I fully understand the various motivations. Doesn't matter. What's important is that a man was killed because of it."

"You think that's important."

"It merits consideration."

"I don't think it's so important."

He was crowding her a bit, edging her way, his left arm moving along the back of the seat.

"Are you learning how to talk to me?" she said.

"What?"

"You said you didn't know how to talk to me. That's why you're here, you said."

"I'm learning something. I'm not sure what it is. You think that's important. A man was killed. Did you think that was important ten years ago? In the days of your demolitions expert."

"You know about him. Of course."

"Of course I know. Late, great Gary Penner. And there you were, a slip of a girl, in your greatcoat with epaulets. How many people did Gary put into orbit, plying his trade? You ought to know. Living with the man. Having lived with the man. A few night watchmen. A few passersby. Arm here, leg there."

She looked out the window.

"You didn't take part directly. Enough fun just watching from the sidelines. But you've matured, haven't you? Terror isn't the erotic commodity it used to be. We know too much. We've seen. We've taken up organic gardening."

"You think I've matured, do you?"

"Somewhat," he said. "To a certain extent. Enough so that you've drawn a line."

The smile. The head tilting right.

"What you think is taking place, I'm flat-out telling you it's not that way. To the extent I straightened out the alliances for you once before, that's the way it still stands. There you go now. Putting me on the defensive again."

"In the flesh you have your convincing moments. I'm the first to admit."

"We have this tension. The air's a little crackly. Maybe I shouldn't let it bother me. Maybe it's auspicious. It might be I'm misreading the thing completely. Sometimes tension's to be encouraged. Sure, tension's a bitch of a stimulant sometimes. See, down home everything's so smooth, so mellow, a man can be put off by the little mocking noises he hears in a place like New York. Sure, these little whipcracks, these hard edges. Personal relations work like machinery. The air is taut. People know what they want. There's a rasp, a little machinelike whine you hear in conversations in restaurants and shops. Women walk around with little numbers clicking behind their eyeballs. I wonder what they're seeing in there. My impression, New York women, they're always keeping something in reserve, holding it back, saving the little extras. Who for, who for? Their analysts. That's why bald-headed Jews always look so happy. Nobody keeps a secret from a bald-headed Jew. They get all the leftovers, the most interesting parts, the greasiest and wettest and sweetest and best. Let me figure out how to decipher this suspense between us. I want to see if I can find out what it is people enjoy about these uneasy codes they keep sending into the air, all this nervous strain. Tension's an edge, that must be it, a goading force, a heightener. It betokens something good. Maybe there's a wild time in the works. What do you think? Who knows? Some all-out supersonics."

He started edging toward her again. Twilight. The cab moving uptown now. Fifth Avenue 's taupe stone buildings. That surfer's gleam rising to Mudger's face. His lustrous blue eyes seemed to have been attached to him independent of his other features. They were devices of a sensitivity and distinctness she didn't associate with Mudger, although she was willing to consider the possibility she was wrong. All she had to do was recall the number of varying moods he'd already composed and demolished in the relatively brief time they'd been in the taxi together.

She would have liked to suspend judgment, somehow to sabotage her own capacity to perceive the crux of things. When she was with Mudger earlier, in Virginia, sitting under the scarlet oaks, she'd felt they were communicating from either side of a semitransparent curtain or theatrical scrim. It was a weakness of hers. She liked drifting into strange terrains. It was what she'd had for a while with Selvy. That other son of a bitch. That son of a bitch in entirely different ways.

But things were clearer now. She was able to follow this man's line of attack, or that man's, or the other's, nearly to the end. The only real question remaining was a rhetorical one, a lament, uttered solely for effect. Who are these bastards and what do they want?

They passed a horse-drawn cab, four tourists huddled in the chill. Some kids chased each other across the road, causing the driver to start mumbling. Mudger sat with his head tilted back. She noticed the cuts and crosshatchings on his fingers, the eroded skin near his thumbnails.

"Who are you sleeping with these days?" he said.

"That's what my father used to ask me."

"Was he jealous?"

"Just sophisticated, that's all, and a little stupid."

"You should have slept with Percival. He knows interesting people. You could have had some sneaky fun. Junkets galore. You could have written a book. Lloyd's into everything. He'd love having someone like you to show off for. We talk, Lloyd and I. Not directly. There are channels. It never hurts to stay in touch."

He was getting ready to deliver another preemptive speech. Mo!! had noticed during their first meeting how he tried to establish prior rights to convictions and views he assumed she held. A tactic she found amusing.

"People are born conservative. They have to learn how to be liberal. In substance, at the bedrock, we're all of us conservative. People at the helm, I'm talking about. Lloyd's an instance of this. Slowly, surely reverting. Progress, mild reforms, old Lloyd's made a name. But those are the gleanings, the accidents, the random accretions. It all slides off eventually. It becomes sheer biology at a certain point." Here he smiled thinly, as though anticipating a joke on himself. "You return to your origins. What's old age but a kind of jaded infancy? You get physically smaller. You start to babble. You become sexually neuter."

"Poor Lloyd Percival."

"Now, myself, I'm getting out before any of those dire things can happen to me."

"Yes, you've said."

"The corollary to secrecy and power in this country is selfpity. I want to avoid that if I can."

The meter read twenty-one dollars.

"We're not getting anywhere, Earl."

"At least you call me by my name."

"It signifies an end to tension. To all these energies you tell me you detect in the air."

"I only sense what's there."

"Ride's over."

"That's regrettable."

"Your specialized bullshit versus my debased sensibility."

"She's warming up at last."

"If bullshit was music, you'd be a brass band."

"Don't stop now."

"It's over, really."

"What else do you have?"

"Nothing else," she said.

Mudger leaned toward the bulletproof partition.

"Flip an L," he told the driver. "Flip an R. Flip an L."

"Old man doesn't like me, it appears."

"He belongs in the archives," the driver mumbled into his steering wheel.

"Picturesque old character."

"He's an oral history. Keep talking. I'll find a museum."

"Ought to be driving a hansom. You ought to be driving a hansom cab with a colorful personality like that."

Mudger sat back, smiling. It was an unsatisfactory way to end. Caricatures and gibes. Moll felt an injustice was being done to her own feelings, which were complex.

A downpour hit. The cab was stopped outside her building. Mudger sat in darkness, looking straight ahead. He didn't speak until Mol! reached for the door, and then very quietly began. With rain beating down on the hood and roof, she had to concentrate intently to hear.

"I've seen you in motion, physically, only once. Walking toward my house that time. Getting out of the limousine and coming slowly toward the house. I remember it. It's engraved. It's the clearest picture I have of you. Physically in motion. Long legs. Long legs kill me. I'd die for long legs. I see you walking. You're tentative, not knowing really where you are. It's a lovely, a choice body. Forgive the crudeness. It's a choice body. Then you're standing still. Watching me in the doorway. I'd love to get my hands on that body. That's a little strong. That's crude. A little violent-sounding. But it's what I'd love to do. My hands, those legs. Feel those long legs wrapped around me. That's what I was thinking in that doorway. First time I saw you. Love to get my hands on that body. Has to happen, I thought. Must happen. I want that bitch. We'll fuck each other dizzy. We'll be walking in circles for two weeks. I'm trying not to be crude. Although I don't think you mind. You're way beyond minding a thing like that. Woman like you. Long legs like yours. You don't mind a little rough language, a touch of the unrefined. Legs like yours, and I'm only speculating, you can't possibly be put off by a little directness, a crude word now and again. This is number two. Second time I'm watching. Only this time you're walking away. Cunt. Aren't you? Only this time you're leaving, not arriving. Aren't you? Cunt. Bitch, Cunt."

He spoke softly all the way through, almost wistfully, even to the very end, so that his words were touched with a curious melancholy, a tone of longing. This was strange, of course, the voice he'd chosen, considering what he had to say. It was like a formal recital. Something learned for school. Yes, a recitation. A factual and rather pretty narrative. A calm and beautifully detached and rather touching enumeration of small truths.

She walked in the rain to the front door. Upstairs the first thing that caught her eye was the smoking pistol, the neon sculpture she'd bought to commemorate the final evening she'd spent at Frankie's Tropical Bar. With that other son of a bitch. That son of a bitch in entirely different ways. It was all so strange. She stayed depressed a long time.

The phone in Mudger's car was mounted on a panel behind the front seat, passenger side. When it buzzed he put his left foot on the accelerator, leaned far to his right and extended his arm over the seat to reach it, without taking his eyes off the road.

His driver had left a week earlier to take a job with the National Park Service in Arizona. Doctor's orders, he said. Dry climate. Mudger knew he was going back to PAC/ORD. It was Lomax in Dallas.

"Some progress, Earl."

"Tell me about it."

"I made contact. In fact I flew down on the kid's plane. What they call a carnival atmosphere prevailed."

"How'd you manage that?"

"Easy," Lomax said. "But I haven't located the item. Next step is the warehouse. Richie's jittery but I think I can get us inside."

"They have a moat, I understand, with crocodiles."

"They have dogs is what they have. It's a lot more secure than the DC-9."

"I heard from Van," Mudger said.

"Where is he?"

" Southwest Texas."

"How's his face? Still hurt?"

"They found the subject."

"Jesus, did they? That's fantastic. Okay, you said it. They'd get it done. Had me fooled, I admit. No more snide remarks about the rangers."

Mudger passed a Mercedes on the Jersey turnpike, heavy rain, the phone cradled between his head and shoulder.

"He wants to be found."

A pause while Lomax considered this.

"Explain, Earl."

"He wants to be found. That's the explanation. How the hell else could they have found him?"

"Why does he want to be found?"

"I don't know."

"Are they fixed or traveling?"

"They're still traveling."

"Where to, you ttiink?"

The Mercedes came into view on the left Mudger increased his speed.

"He's heading for the Mines."

"I guess, if he's led them down that far, could be."

"Sure, he's heading for the Mines."

"Does Van know he's being led?"

"Tell you the truth, Arthur, he was so goddamn happy I didn't have the heart to tell him."

Gao walked away from the roadside stand, eating a taco. He got into the microbus and Van drove off, obviously impatient. Propped on the dash was a Polaroid photo Cao had taken of his buddy standing in front of the statue of Davy Crockett in the town square in Ozona.

2

Talerico inspected the plants arrayed along the picture window in the living room. A police car turned into the street and went slowly past. Yellow cruisers. Cops with small neat mustaches, like army officers in World War I movies. He watched the car turn a corner and head toward the golf course. His wife had overwatered the Swedish ivy. He'd have to mention it.

His daughters kept asking about the Mounties. They'd seen pictures somewhere. Bright red tunics and widebrimmed hats. The famous musical ride. Talerico didn't think of them as Mounties. They were the RCMP and if they wore bright red uniforms while bouncing around on their horsies, they weren't always easy to spot the rest of the time. He'd also been made aware of the provincial police. Not to mention the Toronto morality squad, whose officers liked to keep busy confiscating equipment and prints, and padlocking bookstores, peep shows and other outlets.

Talerico had come up from the Buffalo arm to develop Toronto for hard-core, if and when it became legal. In the meantime he was dipping and dancing, teasing along the margins of what was legally distributable, checking out the under-the-counter trade and making contacts with local people the family might want to install as corporate officials.

His smallest daughter came into view, out on the lawn, playing with friends. After Buffalo, a city of sofa burnings and larger conflagrations, this place was easy to take. The kids, especially, loved it. His wife was right behind. He, Vincent, harbored secret yearnings for the familiar faces and voices. The mother, the sister, the cousins, the uncles, the nieces.

Still, it was only a couple of hours' drive to Buffalo and to all those smoldering ruins that were constantly being hosed down by overworked firemen. Here, once a week, to ease the longing for familiar things, he drove down to Pasquale Brothers on King Street and filled a couple of shopping bags with cheese, noodles, peppers, sausage, cold cuts, anchovies and olives.

He checked his watch. Two-hour time difference. Still a little early to call.

Talerico suffered from a facial nerve paralysis. About a year ago he got out of bed one morning to find that the right side of his face had more or less collapsed. It had slid down, like an acre of mud. He had trouble closing his mouth completely; the right corner didn't quite shut. His bushy mustache dipped far to the right and his voice occasionally sounded hollow.

The split was distinct. The left side of his face was normal. The right side was numb and set lower than the left. The right side was also expressionless. When he sneezed or blinked, only the left eye closed. The right eye hung there, frozen, staring blankly. It was slanted down, at an angle to the other eye. It was like an animal's eye, people said. A hawk, a snake, a shark. It was mysterious and fierce, staring out impassively, uninfluenced by what was happening on the other side of his face.

Vinny the Eye.

He went downstairs to the den. The phone down there was attached to a device called a blue box. It was roughly four by six inches, inlaid with digital keys. By dialing out-ofservice numbers in nearby communities and then activating the blue box, he was able to switch the calls to points anywhere in the U.S. or Canada while being billed only for the short-range connections. It's the little things that give you the edge.

The long-distance target this time was Dallas. A man Talerico knew only as Kidder. He'd been told Kidder had a multiple answering service. On the ninth or tenth ring, a man picked up.

"B and G Realty."

"I want Kidder."

"Wait a second, I'll transfer."

Half a minute later a woman came on.

" Sherman Kendall Catering."

"Kidder."

"Who do I say?"

"Vincent Talerico."

He heard whispering. About five seconds of breathing. In the background a phone rang and the woman answered: "Tall Man Fashions."

Talerico heard the original male voice.

"Vinny Tal."

"Is this Kidder?"

"Talking."

"Do we know each other?"

"You know me as Sherman Kantrowitz. Or Sherman Kaye."

"Sure," Talerico said.

"You're the one with the eye? Or that's Paul?"

"That's me."

"I knew you before the eye. I knew you in Lockport with Bobby and Monica that time. They knocked him down, I understand."

"He got put in a drum."

"Where?"

"I don't think it matters. Does it matter?"

"You don't want to reminisce, Tal. I understand. I assume this is long distance we're talking."

"I'm calling about a certain Richie Armbrister. Runs a lot of skin out of there."

"Preview Distributions. That's the parent. He's got about two hundred paper airplanes. Plus which he's got an accounting system that's totally bombproof."

"That's him."

"Why, you want to walk in?"

"Right now I'm interested in a particular piece of merchandise. I want to develop the kid. Bring him around to a different viewpoint."

"How personal?"

"I ought to visit," Talerico said. "Have a meal."

"Who from down here knows you're coming?"

"Nobody."

"Don't you want to tell somebody?"

"You're my field agent, Kidder. Keep an eye on this Richie kid. See if you can get inside his fortress. I'll be down soon. You'll show me the sights."

"Shouldn't you say something? That's the accepted way. You tell somebody you're coming down."

"I'm known for doing things unorthodox," Talerico said. "That's what makes me a legend."

His wife Annette was in the kitchen watching a Richard Conte movie in French on channel 25. Richard Conte was Talerico's favorite actor. The early Richard Conte.

He watched Annette leaning over the breakfast dishes, concentrating on the movie, trying to fathom it. No one concentrated the way she did. She got lost in things, profoundly involved. The next day, if you asked her, she wouldn't be able to tell you what she'd seen.

"Hey."

"You scared me," she said.

"Richard Conte gets shot in about two minutes."

"I didn't know you were there."

"He dies in the street."

"No, he doesn't."

"You put too much water in the Swedish ivy. I go away for a day and a half, you start watering in panic. How many times do I have to tell you? What do I have to do? Do I have to make a chart?"

"Let me watch this."

"He gets shot. He dies in the street."

"I'm too good to you," she said.

"You're not good to me. I'm good to you."

"I'm too good. That's always been my trouble."

"I'm good to you," he said. "You don't know how good."

"Ralphie used to tell me. 'You're too good to people. Don't be so good all the time.' He was right, as usual."

Talerico spread some jam on a slice of leftover toast.

"Who the hell is Ralphie?"

"Only my brother."

"That gets thrown out of college. That makes his parents ashamed. Which, that brother?"

"Stop hanging around. I don't like it when you hang around. Go out. Jog, like a Canadian."

He took a bite out of the stiff toast.

"When you water-listen to this, Annette. When you water, if you put too much water or do it too often, you cause little punctures in the leaf. You know which one's the Swedish ivy. It's hanging. It's the only one in the living room that hangs down. Now I'm going away again so I'm telling you so you'll be careful. Go easy. Don't be in such a hurry to empty the can. Too much water, the cells burst."

"You make me tired. You're why I'm tired all the time."

"I'm good to you," he said "You don't know what goes on out there."

Selvy held the magnum by the barrel. Dipping slightly, he moved his arm slowly back, then brought it forward, swiftly, tossing the gun, end over end, into the Rio Grande.

He walked back along the dirt road toward Sample's Café. There was a pickup next to his car at the side of the house. Nadine stood on the front steps, looking a little shiny.

"Changed your clothes finally," he said.

"I've decided to become a total blue-jeans person."

"Now that you're home."

"I might even sleep in them. That's an open threat. My dad's here."

"I know."

Some of the houses had been abandoned. Others were half ghosts, apparently still occupied, but with windows out completely, or with soft plastic sheeting replacing the glass, torn sheeting, sheeting rippling in the wind, and with sand everywhere, and tire tracks in the harder dirt, distinct reliefs, like tribal markings left behind to clarify local weather and geology.

Her father sat at the kitchen table, using a penknife to pick at the insides of a fluorescent light fixture. He was older than Selvy had expected, with a raw look about him, all brick and sand, and a tie-dyed blue bandanna around his neck. Functional, Selvy thought. Keep the sweat from moving freely.

"My dad, Jack Rademacher. Glen with one _n_ Selvy."

They sat around a while talking about the weather. Nadine went out to buy an ice cream at one of the general stores up the road. There was a lull. Her father kept scratching at the fixture.

"I think she came in with beer."

"No thanks."

"I don't take a drink myself."

"Lately I've kept away."

"I never have. I never saw the point."

"I have," Selvy said. "But recently I decided to keep away. As recently as a day or two ago."

"What was she doing in New York?"

"Acting."

Jack shook his head, although not in disbelief. It was a comment, bitterly negative. He mumbled something about the ballast in the fixture. Needed new ballast.

"She saw her sister."

"In Little Rock," Selvy said.

"That one's damn crazy. We lost hope for that one early. What the hell's she doing out there?"

"Nadine went alone."

"She must be selling picture frames," Jack said.

He finished what he was doing and went upstairs. Through the window Selvy saw Nadine talking to a couple of small girls, dusty kids in dresses they'd outgrown. Jack came back down, carrying an old pair of boxing gloves, which he set before Selvy on the kitchen table. They were small and discolored, not very heavily padded, the leather peeling everywhere.

"I used to fight for money. Before her sister was born. The border towns. Their mother wanted me to give it up. I had over twenty fights."

"Weren't you past the age, even then?"

"I was fit," Jack said. "I never trained. I never ran the way they do. Didn't see the point. But her mother was carrying the first. What the hell, I stopped."

He carried the gloves back upstairs, returning a moment later. There was another lull. Nadine said something that made the two girls laugh. One of them jumped several times, laughing, the tips of three fingers in her mouth.

"You know about that training base," Selvy said. "You go west to Marathon and then it's southeast of there, near where the silver mines used to he, off on some mud road."

"Mule deer, some dove and quail."

"Is it still there?"

"They pulled out in July."

"Where to?"

"Didn't say where to. Try Central America."

"Did they take everything with them?"

"They left some barracks standing," Jack said. "There were a dozen or so of those long barracks. Now there's two, maybe three."

"I'd heard they might move."

"I couldn't tell you why, exactly. They were never too free with information, were they? Always was a secretive kind of place. They had their reasons, I guess."

"Yes."

"If they didn't have their reasons, they wouldn't have plunked down in the middle of nowhere."

Selvy drove his car down to a lookout just above the river. He walked back up to the house.

That night he sat on a cot in an almost bai'e room off the kitchen. The temperature kept dropping. He heard the plastic sheeting on the windows of nearby houses whip and snap in the wind.

The girl came in.

"What's the plan?"

"No plan," he said.

"We're leaving soon, aren't we?"

"I thought you'd want to stay a while. He seems to like having you back. You want to stay, don't you?"

"Do I look like I've got long cow tits, wearing this sweater?"

"I don't know. Take it off."

"You want to go alone, don't you? Never mind. I didn't say that."

"Take it off. Then I can tell you."

She bent a leg back and kicked the door shut, lightly. She took off the sweater, and her shoes and jeans, and stood there in her briefs. Appliquéd beneath the elastic band were the words: _Not tonight-I've got a headache_. Selvy leaned back on the cot, knees bent up, to unlace his shoes.

"I'm beginning to think you maneuvered me here."

"What for?" he said.

"So you could leave me with someone. That way you wouldn't have to just slip out some morning with me in some motel room, sound asleep, leaving me there. You want to leave me with him."

He took off his shirt.

"If I had maneuvers in mind, I'd have left you at your sister's. I showed up, didn't I, after your sister's."

"That was different."

"How?"

"This is the end of the line," she said.

He smiled, stepping out of his pants. Nadine smiled too, moving toward him and delivering a mock blow to his arm. They tried to make love quietly. It was an old cot, and squeaked, and Jack was somewhere nearby, moving about. She kept on smiling, her eyes closed. When they were in bed together, everything about her suggested appealing healthiness. It bothered him. She seemed to think sex was wholesome and sweet.

Selvy would never understand her. All the more reason to think of her as the girl. But he was beginning to understand something else. Black limousine. Certain things were becoming clear.

After Nadine left to go to her room, he heard Jack come downstairs and knock at his door. He showed Selvy a photograph of three men he used to go fishing with. They stood in front of a pickup, wearing trail vests and wading boots.

"This one's Jack Brady. Same as me. Jack. This is Vernon Floyd. That one's Buck Floyd."

Selvy nodded.

"Now that pickup. I goddamn swerved to avoid a hole about so wide and my rear tires went for a walk on me. Truck swapped ends for sure. Now Vernon. He called me every name. Brother Buck couldn't talk for laughing."

He looked at Selvy, who nodded again. Then he took the picture back upstairs. Selvy listened to the sheeting as it snapped in the wind.

It was becoming clear. He was starting to understand what it meant. All that testing. The polygraphs. The rigorous physicals. The semisecrecy. All those weeks at the Mines. Electronics. Code-breaking. Currencies. Weapons. Survival.

All the paramilitary sessions. The small doses of geopolitics. The psychology of terrorism. The essentials of counterinsurgency.

What it meant. The full-fledged secrecy. The reading. The routine. The double life. His private disciplines. His handguns. His regard for precautions. How your mind works. The narrowing of choices. What you are. It was clear, finally. The whole point. Everything.

All this time he'd been preparing to die.

It was a course in dying. In how to die violently. In how to be killed by your own side, in secret, no hard feelings. They'd been grooming him. They'd spotted his potential, his capacity for favorable development. All this time. It was a ritual preparation.

We are teaching you how to die violently. This is the only death that matters, steel or lead or tungsten alloy, death by hard metal, taking place in secret. To ensure the success of the course, we ourselves will kill you.

He lay in the dark, smoking.

Sure. The rougher the testing, the more certain you can be they're preparing you to die. They want perfect specimens, physically and otherwise. It's less resonant if you're flawed.

So. He'd be able to sleep now. Good.

All conspiracies begin with individual self-repression. They'd seen his potential. He'd checked off the right numbers in the elaborate profiles. They liked his style in the interviews. The computers approved.

Black limousine.

Of course. It was only fitting. All this time they'd been conveying him to the cemetery. In short hops. In stages. Now he knew. He'd sleep finally. Good.

He listened. The wind sound was haunting, a series of timed cries, level and clear. There was a change in direction and the wind's speed increased. The sound grew very different. The wind met creaking obstacles, banging through the hulks nearby, the ghost structures with windows blown out and doors leaning, weeds coming up through the floorboards.

The girl came to him in the dawn, moon-striped and pale, with dream-brown eyes, knocking over a chair as she crossed the room. She scrambled under the blanket. It was freezing and they couldn't stop trembling with cold-induced laughter as they pressed tight in the dark.

It hit seventy-five next day. They walked down the winding dirt road to the car, still parked near the river. Nadine sat on the fender. Selvy sat on the front end of the roof, his feet on the hood. The sky was glassy blue, marked by a single vapor trail formed in the wake of a passing plane.

"Are you as sluggish as I am?"

"No," he said.

"It's my biorhythms. They're way out of whack today."

"I'm great, I'm tuned."

"Biorhythmically I feel awful."

"You need a swim," he said.

The river wasn't wide here. On the Mexican side the rock wall was variously gray and copper, depending on the shadow line. Down here, with no buildings in view, no people around, it was all rocks and sky. A hawk sailed parallel to the cliff line where it ran straight for a fifty-yard stretch. He watched Nadine climb down to the lower bank, cautiously, skidding down the last dusty incline on her bottom, using her feet to brake.

Her voice was small, though remarkably clear.

"Got hit spang in the mouth with a pebble."

She stripped to her briefs and stepped into the water. The river twisted here. From his perch he could see material suspended in the areas of water that were touched by the sun. Mineral particles, brownish sediment. She slipped full-body into the river, dog-paddling in small circles.

"Not too cold. I thought it might be colder. Haven't done this in five years."

Her voice kept changing as she turned toward the opposite bank, then circled back this way. He saw her touch bottom at the near bank and stand erect, running her hands through her hair. When she spoke again he could tell by the pure tone of her voice that she was looking up at him.

"Hey, bo, come on down, get a little wet."

Selvy was looking across the river to the top of the rock wall. Two figures had appeared on the cliff line. First one, then the other ARVN ranger. He felt the briefest of regrets, thinking of his handguns. There was no mistaking the one he'd roughed up. Mustache. Wouldn't take his eyes off Selvy. The other one, the knife squatter, the one who'd waited motionless in the microbus, didn't mind tossing a look at Nadine.

She looked up that way, following Selvy's gaze. Then she turned toward the car again. Her voice was very small.

"I don't know more'n a monkey who they are."

Selvy remained on the car roof, watching them.

"They're not local people exactly," he said. "Why don't you stay right where you are for the time being? Put on your shirt if you want."

The two men remained for a long moment on the cliff line. Stetsons, sunglasses, tight denim pants. Nothing behind them but clear sky. Finally they moved back. Because of their higher elevation, from Selvy's vantage point, it took just two steps. They were out of sight.

The girl put on her jeans and climbed up to the lookout.

"This is turning into a Western," she said.

"What was it before?"

"I don't know what it was before. But it resembles a Western right now."

"Nothing like a swim," he told her. "You ought to be feeling better."

Selvy got in the car and started it up. Nadine kept looking over to the Mexican side. When the car started moving, she walked after it, opened the door and got in. He drove up to the post office. Less than a hundred yards away, tourists were emerging from a bus.

Selvy got out of the car and went over to talk to the bus driver. Above the curved windshield, in the slot where destinations are lettered, appeared the words: WILD WEST AND MEXICO. Nadine watched the imprint of her wet underwear gradually appear on her jeans.

He came back to the car and leaned against the door on her side. A few of the tourists drifted down this way, going into the general store, taking pictures of each other.

"I'm leaving the car with you."

"You want me to keep it for you."

"I want you to keep it."

"Keep it, period," she said.

"That's right."

The tourists slowly spread through town, mostly older people and eight or nine Japanese. Selvy walked over to the house. Through the front window she saw him speaking to her father. He came back out, carrying a can of beer and a soft drink, also in a can. He held them in one hand back against his hip.

Nadine remained in the car, sipping the beer. Selvy leaned against the door. A man asked if he'd move the car. He wanted to take a picture of his wife standing near the post office door. The car was in the way. Selvy said no.

In pairs and small groups, the tourists eventually reassembled outside the bus. The driver appeared, unwrapping a stick of gum. No one stepped aboard until he was behind the wheel.

Selvy tossed the empty soda can onto the back seat. The girl's jeans were wet, an explicit outline. Her shirt was wet in patches. She'd taken a map out of the glove compartment and was unfolding it elaborately, spreading it across the dash and up along the windshield. He walked over to the bus and stepped on. The door closed behind him with a splash of compressed air. In the brief moment before he slipped into his seat, Selvy noted something odd about the people, or the seating pattern, or something-he wasn't sure what.

It wasn't until they were well under way, heading west on U.S. 90, that he turned in his seat for a longer look. It was the Japanese. They were spread throughout the bus, singly or in pairs, nine of them, and they were all asleep. The other tourists talked, compared postcards, looked out the windows. It was as though the Japanese, secretly, by inborn means, had been able to communicate to each other the placid imperative: sleep.

He faced front again. They'd gone to sleep immediately and they continued sleeping despite the noise and motion. This apartness he'd always found interesting in Asians. This somehow challenging sense of calm. It only remained for him to discover whether they'd wake up simultaneously, raising their heads in unison.

3

All the windows were closed. The blinds were down. Lightborne double-locked the gallery door. Then he turned toward Odell and gestured, arms outstretched, palms up: what do we have?

Odell looked up from a book of etchings. He was older than Richie, but not much, and fuller in the face, although with the same prominent teeth. The book was titled _Extraterrestrial Sex Positions_.

Sixteen millimeter, he said. Considered an amateur film gauge at the time this footage was shot. No standard, or optical, sound track. Magnetic sound, if any, would have to be added. Problems there with certain projectors. Possible problems adapting 16mm to motion picture theaters. Schools and churches, yes. TV, yes.

"Wonderful," Lightborne said. "Schools and churches, that's wonderful."

He'd had to strain to hear what Odell was saying. Odell spoke rapid!y and sometimes indistinctly, with much more of an accent than his cousin had-a run-on Georgia voice, a clipclop, rather than Richie's slight but piercing twang.

Lightborne circ!ed the small table that held the projector Odell had brought with him. They wouldn't be able to view the film until the following day. The projector had a defective part, Odell had discovered, and it was ten p.m.-too late to find a replacement.

Curiously, Lightborne wasn't disappointed. He found he was in no hurry to look at the footage. At some rudimentary level it was an experience he feared. He'd feared it all along, he realized. His involvement brimmed with fear.

Moll Robbins would be joining him for the screening. He wanted a disinterested intelligence on the scene. More than that. He wanted company. Human warmth. An interpreter of the meaning of his fear.

It was all so real. It had such weight. Objects were what they seemed to be. History was true.

Odell said he'd talked to Richie on the phone. Richie was barricaded in the warehouse. He was feeding the dogs infrequently, to give them a meaner edge. He'd had this feeling for months, Odell said. Someone was out to get him. Some dark force. There was a sniper somewhere, waiting for the right moment. He was sitting on a bed in some rooming house, cleaning his rifle scope. He had a bullet with Richie's name on it. Dallas, Richie would say. What am I doing in Dallas?

"All he talks about is John F. Kidney, Bobby Kidney, Martin Luther Kang, Jaws Wallace."

"What?" Lightborne said.

"I keep telling him what Rose Kidney told Tiddy Kidney."

Long pause.

"What did she tell him?"

"That was Harry Truman."

"If you can't stand the heat," Lightborne said.

"That was Harry S Truman, wasn't it, said that."

Odell went on.

Richie was obsessed not only by his impending assassination but by the conflicting reports that would ensue. He'd been shot by one white male, or two white males, or one white male with a mulatto child. The rifle used had no prints, had several sets of prints, now being checked, or had several sets of prints but they'd been accidentally wiped off by the police.

Richie was especially obsessed by fingerprints being wiped off by the police, Odell said.

Lightborne went behind the partition into the living area. He turned on both taps in the wash basin, hoping this would lead Odell to think he was shaving. Then he sat at the foot of his cot and stared into the black window shade three feet away.

_History is true_.

Selvy got a ride from a man in a pickup, south from Marathon. The man was about seventy-five years old. There was a deer rifle on a rack at the back of the cab. Four hours till nightfall. The desert.

He saw it as a memory. Deep gullies at right angles to the road. Flash-flood warnings. Yucca stalk and ocotillo sticking out of the sand. Things don't usually resume existence precisely as you've recalled them. Spires, buttes, pinnacles, the eroded remnants, to left and right, in scaly rust and copper and sandy brown. Well ahead he saw the waveform, the scant silhouette, of the Chisos Mountains, palest slate, lying so completely in a plane it could not possibly be more than arbitrary light, a mood or fabrication.

Finally a car approached and passed. Then nothing again. A buzzard on a fencepost. Single windmill in the distance. Everything here was in the distance. Distance was the salient fact. Even after you reached something, you were immersed in distance. It didn't end until the mountains and he wasn't going that far.

They stopped for gas at the old frontier store, an adobe structure with a lone pump and the remains of a small covered wagon out front. Selvy went inside. There was a broad counter covered with rocks for sale. Along one wall was the owner's barbed wire collection. There were display cases full of sundries. In one case, Selvy spotted an item labeled Filipino guerrilla bolo.

The owner got it out for him. A long heavy single-edged knife with a broad blade. Flecks of rust. Small nicks in the cutting edge. Fifteen dollars.

"I always thought bolos were curved blades."

"Machete family," the owner said. "Vegetation, cane."

"From bolo punch, I guess I got the idea. An uppercut that comes way around. Got any honing oil?"

"I might find some."

"With all those rocks over there, think you can find one that's perfectly rectangular, about half an inch thick?"

"If you want a whetstone, I've got some Washita, if I know where to find it."

Selvy also bought a canteen and filled it with water. Then he paid the man and went outside. A teenage girl was cleaning the windshield. When she was finished, they moved back onto the road.

"Planning on making it before dark."

"There's time," Selvy said.

"I've my doubts."

"We're right about there. I'd say less than five minutes and we'll be there."

"You don't want to forget the walk."

"I'm tuned," Selvy said. "The walk is good as made."

A coyote loped across the road and disappeared in some brush alongside a gulley.

"What's that you got there?"

"Filipino guerrilla bolo."

"Where's your jungle?"

"I bought it for the name."

"You didn't get your money's worth unless a jungle came with it."

"I like the name," he told the old man. "It's romantic."

Along a slight elevation in the highway, he spotted the primitive road that led to the Mines. The man stopped the pickup and Selvy hopped out and started walking east. The trail was dusty except for isolated parts, hardened mud, where he saw signs of old tire tracks, mostly heavy tread.

The canteen was looped to his belt, left side. Bolo on the other side, at a forty-five-degree angle to his leg, cutting edge up.

He began to run. The canteen bounced against his thigh. He ran for twenty minutes. It felt good. It felt better with each passing minute. Prickly pear and mesquite. A memory unwinding. He walked for an hour, then ran for fifteen minutes. A dust devil swirled to his right. The weather was changing down there, far beyond the transient whirlwind. Something was building over the mountains.

Ninety minutes later he saw the barracks, two of them, surrounded by debris of various kinds, kitchen and plumbing equipment, a gutted jeep, a useless windmill, anonymous junk. This grouping of common objects he found briefly touching. Signs of occupancy and abandonment. Faceted in sad light. A human presence. In the rose and gold of sunset.

The wood-burning stove still sat in the long barracks. He found canned food in a locker. In the smaller building a dozen cots were ranged along a wall. He dragged one of them back into the long barracks and set it near the stove.

After eating he went outside, wrapped in a blanket. It was still clear in this area, broad scale of stars. No more than thirty degrees now, dropping. Dry cold. A pure state. An elating state of cold. Not weather. It wasn't weather so much as memory. A category of being.

The temperature kept dropping but this didn't signify change. It signified intensity. It signified a concentration of the faculty of recall. A steadiness of image. No stray light.

It was snowing in the mountains.

All behind him now. Cities, buildings, people, systems. All the relationships and links. The plan, the execution, the sequel. He could forget that now. He'd traveled the event. He'd come all the way down the straight white line.

He realized he didn't need the blanket he was wrapped in. The cold wasn't getting to him that way. In a way that called for insulation. It was perfect cold. The temperature at which things happen on an absolute scale.

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection.

Choice is a subtle form of disease.

When he woke up it was still dark. Gray ash in the stove. He walked to the window, naked, and looked east into the vast arc of predawn sky. He crouched by the window. He crossed his arms over his knees and lowered his head. Motionless, he waited for light to burn down on the sand and rimrock and dead trees.

4

A set of tracks ran east and west along the front of the warehouse in downtown Dallas. It was a five-story building with corrugated metal doors and flaking paint. There was a loading platform out front. A small sign: PREVIEW DISTRIBUTIONS. All the windows were boarded up.

Inside Richie Armbrister sat at a long table, tapping the keys of a pocket calculator. At his elbow a desk lamp burned. Nearby three dogs bay sleeping. In the gloom beyond was the figure of Daryl Shimmer, Richie's bodyguard, extended across an old sofa. Two more dogs near the sofa, sleeping. Beyond that, in total darkness, fork lifts and pallets and shipping cylinders, enormous ones, numbering in the hundreds.

Daryl was becoming increasingly morose and withdrawn. Physically distant. Richie noticed how he'd gradually been moving farther away. The sofa was a backward step, from Daryl's point of view. He'd spent the whole evening sitting in a fork-lift vehicle in the dark, about thirty yards away. He'd had to revert to the sofa if he wanted to sleep.

Everyone else was gone. They left singly, in pairs, in small groups, over a period of twenty-four hours, reverently, slipping out the north door. The warehouse was quiet for the first time since Richie had bought it.

There had been phone calls from a man who identified himself as Sherman Kramer. Daryl recognized the name. Kidder. A small-time operator. But with connections. Large connections.

A certain man was spending a lot of time in the parking lot across the street. Richie had watched him through a gap between two boards that were nailed across one of the windows. He spent most of his time near the Ross Avenue end of the lot, which was the far end in relation to the warehouse. He leaned against a car. Or walked back and forth. Richie thought it might be the man he'd found in his sauna aboard the DC-9. Hard to tell from this distance, looking through a dirtsmeared window.

Lightborne's phone was disconnected. No forwarding number. Richie had wanted to speak with Odell. He trusted Odell. Odell was family. Real family. The only number he had for Odell in New York was Lightborne's number. Disconnected.

He tried to concentrate on the figures before him. Avenues of commerce. That's all he cared about. The higher issues. Demography. Patterns of distribution. Legal maneuvers and technicalities. Bookkeeping finesse. He'd never even asked Lightborne what the footage was supposed to show.

He had visions of a mishandled investigation. They would fail to trace the rifle to its owner. They'd lose his autopsy report. Witnesses would move out of state, never to be heard from again. His funeral. A closed-coffin affair.

The phone rang. He watched Daryl start to rise. It rang again. Daryl came toward the table where Richie was sitting. He picked up the phone in a series of masterfully sullen movements, his face showing a blend of resentment and lingering obligation. Richie had doubled his salary on the way in from the airport and promised him a dune buggy with chromed exhausts for his birthday. This was in return for Daryl's sworn allegiance, no matter what.

"It's Kidder again."

"What's he want?" Richie said. "I don't want to talk to him."

"Same thing. A meeting."

"I don't have any can with any film. That's all I'm saying. That's the meeting. We just had it."

"He doesn't know anything about cans with films," Daryl said. "He just wants to arrange talks. Someone's coming."

"Not here. They're not coming here. Tell him the dogs."

"He says outside is okay. He has someone he's bringing. Tomorrow, after eight sometime. Outside, inside, makes no difference."

"What should we do?"

"Ask him who he's bringing."

"Ask him," Richie said.

"He says no names available right now. A respected man in the field."

"Ask him what field."

"Too late," Daryl said. "He hung up."

Richie took a bite of one of the Danish butter cookies he'd carried back from New York. He pushed the container toward Daryl, who waved him off and headed slowly toward the sofa, his lean frame slumping. One of the dogs stirred, briefly, as Daryl dropped onto the sofa. The dogs were good dogs, Richie believed. Scout dogs. German shepherds. Trained in simulated combat conditions.

That was for break-ins. Close-quarter action. What about long range? There were bullets these days that went through concrete. On the other side of the parking lot and across Ross Avenue was the General Center Building. Excellent place for a sniper. Perfect place. He could stand on the roof and blast away, firing not only through Richie's boarded windows but through the brick walls as well. He'd leave the rifle on the roof and disappear, confident that the police would smear his fingerprints.

It was a hell of a party. Loud. The Senator liked noise at his parties. Young crowd mostly. He biked having young people around.

He moved sideways through the living room, from group to group, smiling, barking out greetings, clutching the upper arms of men, gripping women at the waist. Maneuvering around the cocktail table he came across a woman who reminded him of a Vestier nude he'd seen in a private collection in Paris-big-hipped, self-satisfied, status-oriented. An executive secretary.

Standing with her was a younger woman, much less monumental. Elbowing his way into the conversation, Percival wasn't surprised to see her suddenly _actuate_-the eyes, the smile, the tense and hopeful and solemn delight. Being recognized would never cease to be one of the spiritual rewards of public service.

"You are," he said.

Mouth moving.

"Museum. Fascinating, I would think."

Noise music laughter.

Of course he'd _expected_ to be recognized. It was his house and his party. Still, it was always interesting, watching people release this second self of theirs. Women especially. Becoming shiny little space pods with high-energy receptors. Percival believed celebrity was a phenomenon related to religious mysticism. That ad for the Rosicrucians. WHAT SECRET POWER DOES THIS MAN POSSESS? Celebrity brings out the cosmic potential in people. And that couldn't be anything but good. What was the word? Salutary. That couldn't be anything but salutary.

As the older woman, the Vestier, looked on, Percival led this mellow child to the short staircase at the other end of the living room. There they sat, intimate chums, with their drinks, on the next to last step.

"Now then. P'raps we can talk."

"This is the really nicest house."

"You were saying. Museum. You mentioned."

"Where I work."

"You're associated with? Museums. I am passionate. Treasures, treasures."

"The Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology."

"Jesus Christmas."

"Who did your decor?" she said.

"I did."

"It's so lovingly done."

She was half smashed, he realized. Roughly his own situation. A Pakistani put his left hand on the fourth step, as a brace, then leaned up toward Percival, diagonally, to shake hands. Percival thought it might be Peter Sellers.

"I really like your programs," the young woman said.

"I'm trying to think. Are you a Renoir? I see you as a little firmer. A Titian Venus. Not quite melted."

"I am just so charmed by this whole situation."

"Let me ask," he said. "An important question. But private. Calls for outright privacy. Repeat after me. This question."

"This question."

"Calls for."

"Who did the wallpaper?"

"Some Irishman with a crooked face _did_ it. I selected the patterns."

"It really. It shows so much obvious love and care."

"Important, important question. Now wait. We need to ensconce ourselves. Because it's that kind of question."

"Ho ho."

"Exactly," he said. "Now follow me. How's your drink?"

"My dreenk she all right, señor."

He led her into the bedroom. She let her body sag to indicate awe. The canopy bed, the armoire, the miniature lowboy, the grain cutter's bench, the cloverleaf lamp table, the mighty oak rocker.

"Sit, sit, sit."

He found himself thinking of Lightborne. It may have been the sight of the phone. He'd been trying to call Lightborne, who had promised him a screening. They'd talked twice on the phone and Percival had disguised his voice, in a different way, each time. He was trying to figure out how to handle the screening. Lightborne had assured him it would be private. Still, there'd have to be a projectionist in the immediate vicinity, and Lightborne would probably want to be present as well. How to view the footage without being recognized. Preceding that, however, was the problem of contacting Lightborne. Percival had been calling for two days. A disconnect recording every time. No forwarding number.

He sat at the end of the bed, watching her rock.

"You had a question, Senator."

"Call me Lloyd."

"I am so charmed by this."

"You have an extraordinarily expressive mouth."

"I know."

"English-expressive."

"I would like to ask, confidentially. Are you thinking of the presidency? Of running? Because I have heard talk. Young people find your programs extremely appealing."

"No, no, no. That's a dead end, the presidency."

"I think you'd find young people very supportive."

He watched her drink.

"I'm having trouble with the Titian concept," he said. "Your mouth is so English. Do you know Sussex at all?"

"Tallish man? Wears striped shirts with white collars?"

"Call me Lloyd," he said.

He got up and closed the door. He stood behind her chair, gripping the uprights, and rocked her slowly back and forth.

"Except the Sunbelt would be a problem," she said. "You wouldn't find a power base down there."

The phone rang. He moved quickly to the side of the bed, realizing belatedly that it couldn't be Lightborne, that Lightborne didn't know who he was, much less how to reach him. It was his wife, back home. A picture came immediately to mind. She is sitting up in bed. Her face gleams with some kind of restorative ointment. All over the room are volumes of the Warren Report along with her notebooks full of "correlative data." She is wearing a pale-blue bed jacket of puffy quilted material.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Wondering how you are."

"Go away. Will you go away?"

"I am away."

"I'm having a noisy, noisy party and I love it."

"I don't hear a thing," she said.

"I'm in the bedroom and the door is closed."

"Who's with you?"

"Oswald was the lone assassin. When will you get it through your thick skull?"

"There's someone with you and I don't give two shits, if you want to know the truth."

"She's a girl with lambent hair," he said.

"What else? Jesus, I mean what else would she be?"

"I'll put her on."

He carried the phone over to the rocking chair and asked the young woman to tell his wife where she worked.

"The Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology."

Percival took the phone from her and walked back across the room. This time, addressing his wife, he whispered fiercely.

"See what you've done to me?"

"I've done? I've done?"

"I have no patience with this kind of thing."

"That doesn't make sense, Lloyd."

"It's all been drained out of me."

"What kind of thing?"

"I'm bone dry," he said.

He went downstairs, circulated briefly and came back up with two fresh drinks. He stood behind her chair, rocking.

"Senator, you had a question."

"It all started with a question."

"I'm sure waiting."

"Yes, yes, yes, yes."

He swiveled the rocker a few degrees to the right so that she could see him, and vice versa, in the mirror over the lowboy. He felt completely sober. He felt clear-headed to a remarkable degree.

"How would I look in a beard?" he said.

Ignoring the mirror, she glanced back over her shoulder, as though only the real thing, the three-dimensional Senator Percival, could serve as a basis from which to develop a mature reply. He was gratified to see she was treating the question with the attentive care he felt it deserved.

"Would you recognize me as Lloyd Percival if you saw me in a beard? Dark glasses, say, and a beard. If you saw me in an unlikely place. A more or less run-down area. Far from the splendor of Capitol Hill."

Talerico walked through the arrivals lounge. He was wearing a vested suede suit and carrying a Burberry trenchcoat over one arm.

He saw Kidder waiting in the baggage area. Definitely a type. They ran to types, these people with nine phone numbers and a different name for each day of the week. A man who looks pressed for time or money. A man who operates in a state of permanent exhaustion. He was probably no more than thirty years old. A shame. Fatigue was his medium by now. He needed it to live.

"Vinny Tal, how are you?"

"Head winds."

"Twenty minutes late. But no problem. We drive down there. You talk to this Richie. Nice and smooth."

"It's arranged."

"It's more or less arranged," Kidder said.

They went outside and got into Kidder's bent Camaro. He started up, turned on the lights, and they moved off.

"Vinny, I want to ask. Frankly. What's wrong with your face? What happened to cause that?"

"This woman I knew, about a year ago, threw lye in my face."

"That's awful. That's awful."

"Lye."

"What for? Why?"

"I was so fucking handsome she couldn't stand it."

Kidder hit the steering wheel with the heel of his right hand.

"Shit, you had me thinking."

"It was driving her crazy, just looking at me. She had the permanent hots. She had to do something. It was wrecking her life."

"You had me going. Vin."

"It always gets a reaction. The lye. It has that effect on people. Lye."

The door on Talerico's side squeaked. Something rattled around in the trunk. He was sorry he hadn't arranged to rent a car. He owned an Olds Cutlass Supreme. He was accustomed to a measure of comfort. This thing here was a coffee pot.

"Let me ask. Vin. Ever been down here? Everybody has two first names down here."

"I watch TV."

"That's in case they forget one of them. Which they aren't too bright, some of them."

"First time down."

"I have to say I frankly like it. It's humane. People walk around. They're living."

"We're almost there, or what."

"We're still in the airport," Kidder said. "This is the airport."

The car made Talerico think of his youth. Six or seven guys piling into an old Chevy. Chipping in a quarter each for gas. It was depressing to think this Kidder rode around in the same kind of car. This Kidder here.

"What kind of harassment up there? They harass people in Canada?"

"You have the FBI. I have the RCMP."

"Which means what?"

"Which means they can kick in my door any time of day or night."

"That's Russia."

"My ass, Russia. There's a thing called a writ of assistance. With a writ of assistance they come pouring in. It doesn't have to have my name on it, or my address, or whatever it is they're searching for. It's wide open. First they come pouring through your doors and windows. Then they fill in the blanks."

"It must feel good to be back in the U.S.," Kidder said.

"I'm thrilled."

"We're out of the airport. We just left the airport."

"Keep up the good work."

"That was the airport line right there. We're definitely out."

"You talk to this Richie?"

"I talked to the dipshit who answers his phone."

"You didn't get in the warehouse, in other words."

"Ta!, it's a warehouse. What's so special? You say you want to develop the kid. Does it make a difference where? You talk. You make your point."

"Tell you what I found out, asking around independently. His dogs don't bark. They're trained to be silent. They come at you without warning."

"See?" Kidder said. "Good thing I didn't try to get inside. You should have told me earlier. What if I'd tried to get inside?"

"They come out of the dark, leaping," Talerico said. "Trained to go for the throat. But silent. They don't even growl."

"What's this thing you're after?"

"Dirty movie, what else? Too hot for this Richie to handle. I'm doing the kid a favor."

"How'd you hear about it?"

"I got a call from New York."

"The relatives. Always the relatives."

"Paulie gave me a call. What? Ten days ago."

"I never met the man," Kidder said. "I know the man's reputation."

"He called me. That's how I heard."

"How did he hear?"

"Somebody named Lightborne called him. Out of nowhere. Said he was lining up bidders. Wanted to know if Paul was interested in bidding."

"Interested in bidding," Kidder said.

"Can you imagine that?"

"Interested in bidding."

They would try to talk girls into getting in the car. Seven guys in the car, not too many girls were interested. You didn't ordinarily find girls that curious. They kept a zip gun under the driver's seat. They never went anywhere without the gun. This guy Kidder here. That was about his level. His sex life is probably restricted to the back seat of the car. He keeps a Navy flare in the glove compartment.

"Tell you what I could go for," Talerico said. "I could go for some zookie."

"What's zookie?"

"Jewish nookie."

"I had to ask, right?"

"It always gets a reaction. Zookie. It has that little sound people like."

"See those lights?" Kidder said.

Twenty minutes later the car eased into the dark parking lot located across the tracks from the warehouse. A single freight car sat on the tracks. _Ship It On the Frisco!_ Kidder turned off the headlights and they sat facing the warehouse. It was cold. Talerico got out of the car to put on his trench… coat, then slid back into the seat. This wasn't what he'd had in mind.

Half an hour later they saw a figure emerge from beneath the freight car, coming up from a position on all fours. Slender young man. Black. Wearing a heavy sweater. Carrying a flashlight.

"His name's Daryl Shimmer. He looks after the kid."

"Who looks after him?"

Daryl came toward the car, looking around him every few steps. Ten feet away he put his left hand under the sweater and lifted a small gun out of his belt. He approached the driver's side.

"Shit," Talerico said wearily.

Daryl had the gun in Kidder's face. A.25 caliber automatic. Talerico could read the imprint _Hartford Ct. U.S.A._ above Daryl's long dusty thumb extended along the barrel.

"I know you people looking for some motion picture. We don't know where it's at. Now Richie there, it's all he can do to piss inside the bowl, the way you people keep pressuring. We're saying get back. We don't know the whereabouts. We don't want to know. We're walking away. It's all over, we're saying. You locate the motion picture, more power to you. Don't even tell us about it."

"Listen, hard-on," Kidder said.

Daryl bit his lower lip.

"Get that thing out of my face. That's in bad taste, a pointed gun. That's ugly."

"Who you talking?"

"Scumbag."

"I fucking shoot."

"Anything I hate, man, it's being pointed at."

Overlapping dialogue. Volume increasing all the time.

"You ought to put some meat on your bones," Talerico said quietly. "You're awful thin. I hate to see that."

"Shut up all around."

"You ought to eat more of that soul food."

"Get that gun," Kidder said. "If you don't get that gun. Point it out of here."

"Who you talking?"

"Dipshit. You hard-on."

Daryl had the gun right in Kidder's cheek and he was biting his lower lip again. Kidder was screaming at him, coming up with names Talerico hadn't heard in years.

"You ought to spend more time with people," Talerico said softly. "You're alone too much. I don't like to see that. It's unhealthy. Look at you. You don't know how to behave around people. You ought to get out more. And you ought to eat more. You ought to put some meat on those bones."

Another figure appeared. This one at the side of the freight car. He came walking toward the Camaro. Daryl, keeping the gun in Kidder's face, directed the flashlight into the car.

"They're ready to listen, Richie."

"I heard that yelling. We don't need that here. Yelling."

"This trouble's yours," Kidder said. "This is yours."

"I came out to show we don't have anything to hide. I came out in good faith. I don't know anything about the item you want. You keep putting pressure. It's aggravating."

"The pressure's in your head," Talerico said.

"I didn't even bring the dogs, to show good faith. To make an appearance. I thought this would lessen the mystery. You wouldn't want to get in there so much if you saw me, if you saw there's nothing special and that I don't have the item."

"He wants his Bugs Bunny teeth kicked in," Talerico explained to Kidder.

"This is yours," Kidder kept shouting. "I'm looking at you right here."

Richie was wearing an oversized peacoat. His hands were stuffed into the deep pockets. He nodded in Talerico's direction. A gesture meant for Daryl-shine the light on the other one.

Talerico turned the right side of his face toward the light. The dead side. The side with the chilled meat. His fierce eye stared blankly.

"I'm not even here," Kidder was shouting. "The whole thing's over."

"He wants to eat this gun," Daryl said.

"You stupid bastards. You cuntlaps. You don't know where you're standing."

Talerico had heard this kind of dislocated shouting before. It reminded him of his cousin Paul. When Paul faced trouble, he got meaner, he got deadly. And sometimes he shouted things that connected to the situation only in the loosest of ways, if at all. Talerico had seen his cousin terrorize people- cops more than once, men with guns-simply by displaying rage that bordered on the irrational. He was obviously possessed. Too real to deal with. Once they see you don't mind dying, they're in serious trouble and know it.

All in all, Talerico was impressed by this aspect of Kidder. Kidder was tough. He didn't take shit. He screamed and ranted. The closer he got to dying, the more he seemed to control the situation. The more he intimidated the opposition.

It wasn't bluff, either. That was clear. It was genuine outrage and meanness and fury. Kidder was definitely impressing him. He didn't think a man that exhausted could summon such insanity.

"I want to make like a statement here," Talerico said.

"I feel we welcome that," Richie said. "Whatever we can exchange in the way of views, that means it's looking up."

"You died five minutes ago. You've been dead five full minutes. You're so dead I can smell you. That's my statement."

"I don't want to know who he is," Richie told his bodyguard.

"Look at the eye," Talerico said.

"If you know who he is," Richie said, "don't tell me."

He turned and headed toward the warehouse, slipping around the freight car and out of sight.

"Eat and run," Kidder screamed.

"You're going, aren't you?" Daryl said.

"I'm looking right at them."

"You're going. You want to go."

"They don't know the words. They're someplace else completely."

Daryl bit his lower lip. He squeezed the trigger and Talerico jumped into the door and bounced back and then found the handle and had the door open. He walked quickly, head down, his ears belling electrically. He went past the warehouse and then made a left. There were banks, shops, hotels. Very little traffic. No cabs in sight. He'd have to call for a cab.

He made a right and saw the Southland Hotel. It was roughly ten p.m. Very dead here in the urban core. He'd get a cab to take him to the airport. First plane out. New York, Chicago, Toronto. His overnight bag was in the back seat of Kidder's car. He went over the contents mentally. Nothing there that might be traced to him. Not even a monogrammed shirt.

A cab pulled up at the hotel as Talerico approached.

Sooner or later, in this line of work, in acquisitions, you were bound to find yourself in a stress situation, especially if your business took you to a part of the U.S. where everybody owns a gun of one kind or another, for one purpose or another.

Cowboys.

Earl Mudger stood outside Lien's, a Vietnamese restaurant located above the Riverwalk in San Antonio. He'd stopped off here, instead of flying directly to Dallas, in order to have dinner with an old war buddy, George Barber, who was now attached to the Air Force Security Service, stationed at Kelly.

He was glad he'd thought of it. They'd enjoyed themselves in all the time-honored ways. Affection, sentiment, vague regret. He was waiting for George to get his car from a nearby lot and take him to the airport for the short flight to Dallas.

George had filled Mudger in on the latest hardware. It was a complex sensation, hearing that specialized language again, studded as it was with fresh terms. It reminded Mudger of Vietnam, of course. The brand names. The comfort men found in the argot of weaponry.

It also reminded him of the surreal conversation he'd had, long distance with Van, just before he'd left home to come down here. With Tran Le on the extension, translating when necessary, Mudger had listened to Van explain that he wanted to approach the subject by air. They'd traced the subject to an old encampment somewhere between U.S. 385 and the Rio Grande where it loops north above Stillman. It wasn't enough for Van to say he wanted a helicopter. He tried to specify type, size, trade name, model number and technical characteristics.

All this nomenclature, which wasn't even English to begin with, eventually defeated Van, who said he'd settle for whatever Mudger could come up with. Thanks largely to George Barber's efforts, Mudger came up with a two-man patrol helicopter, a Hughes 200, one of the types used by U.S. customs agents to keep up with border smuggling. As an afterthought, Mudger asked George if a stretcher pannier could be fitted externally to this type of aircraft. It could.

Tran Le wanted to know what a "subject" was.

George drove up and Mudger got in the car. Vietnam, in more ways than one, was a war based on hybrid gibberish. But Mudger could understand the importance of this on the most basic of levels, the grunt level, where the fighting man stood and where technical idiom was often the only element of precision, the only true beauty, he could take with him into realms of ambiguity.

Caliber readings, bullet grains, the names of special accessories. Correspondents filled their dispatches with these, using names as facets of narrative, trying to convey the impact of violent action by reporting concatenations of letters and numbers. Mudger loved it, both ironically and in the plainest of ways. Spoken aloud by sweaty men in camouflage grease, these number-words and coinages had the inviolate grace of a strict meter of chant.

Weapons were named, surnamed, slang-named, christened, titled and dubbed. Protective devices. Bearings of perfect performance. Reciting these names was the soldier's poetry, his counterjargon to death.

"I guess I ought to hit it," George said, "or you'll miss your plane."

Mudger didn't really care. This operation was slop. Maybe it was true, what people seemed to suspect. Without PAC/ORD behind him, things were slipping badly. No doubt PAC/ORD itself was helping manage the process of deterioration. This whole thing should have been handled by now, without his presence becoming necessary. The other thing, Van and Cao and the adjustment, was an even greater mess, at least potentially, having the foreordained character of some classical epic, modernized to include a helicopter. But he was the one who'd let it go on. That was stupid. He wanted to be in his basement shop, right now, pounding a heated steel blank with a double-faced hammer.

Early man roaming the tundra. You have to name your weapon before you can use it to kill.

Lomax was motionless in the cashier's shack.

It occurred to him that one day soon areas such as this would be regarded as precious embodiments of a forgotten way of life. Commerce and barter. The old city. The marketplace. Downtown.

What are we doing to our forests, our lakes, our warehouse districts? That's how it would go. What are we doing to our warehouse districts, our freight yards, our parking lots?

He was tired, hungry and cold. The man who handed out tickets and collected money had left some Ritz crackers stacked on a piece of wax paper. Lomax edged them away with his elbow. Other people's food. Other people's refrigerators. He'd always been vaguely disgusted by things he'd happened to see in other people's refrigerators.

He heard a man shout. The sound had the tone of an insult. Briefly someone's head became visible over the top of a car parked about fifty yards away. The voice again, screaming insults. A second figure appeared, moving toward the car.

Lomax sucked in his breath and removed the automatic from his waistband holster. He put his left hand on the door handle, ready to push it open if necessary. It was possible his silhouette could be detected in the very dim light cast by a streetlamp not far away. He remained motionless for several minutes. Some more screaming. No one else around. The old city. The abandoned core.

The second figure moved off, toward the warehouse. Lomax opened the door of the shack. There was a gunshot. He moved quickly to the nearest car, crouching down behind it. Someone passed within twenty yards of him, moving quickly, a man, head down, as if he were walking into a stiff wind. Lomax looked over the trunk of the car. Someone was walking in the opposite direction, slowly. Also male. He disappeared behind the freight car.

Lomax stayed where he was for three full minutes, listening. Then he headed toward the car where the shooting had taken place. He held his gun against his thigh. That arm he kept stiff, not swinging naturally as the other arm was. He saw himself leaving the scene. A jump in time. He saw himself getting off a plane at National in Washington. He saw himself selling condominiums on the Gulf Coast.

Both doors were open. On the ground on the driver's side was a man, breathing deeply. Lomax crouched five feet away, his gun directed at the man's head.

"Who are you?"

The same worried breathing. The deadweight respiration of a deep sleeper.

"Who are you?" Lomax said.

"Fuck off. I'm hit."

"I know you're hit."

"The slug's in my throat. I feel something."

Lomax leaned to his right for a better look. The man had been shot on the left side of the face, below the cheekbone. With the doors open, the car's interior light had come on and Lomax could see powder burns rimming the hole in the man's cheek. There was blood all over his mouth.

"What's your name? Who are you?"

"Mind your own business. Let me breathe."

"I can get you an ambulance. Would you like that?"

"If I start choking, put your finger down my throat. I'd appreciate your doing that. I hate that feeling of choking. I fucking dread it."

"No promises," Lomax said, "unless you tell me who you are."

"I'm Sherman Kantrowitz."

"Who are you, Sherman? Who were those other people?"

"I'm the son of Sophie and Nat."

"Who were those people?"

The same uneven deep breathing. The search for a rhythm.

"Who do you work for, Sherman?"

"I want to swallow but I'm afraid."

Lomax saw himself playing eighteen holes a day. The sun is shining. There's a sweet breeze from the Gulf.

Tran Le.

The fields were tawny and sparse. Three-quarters of the wheel and more. Winter's pure alcohol in the air.

Tran Le standing by the window.

Her eyes were large and dark and had a special dimension inward, an element of contriteness, as of a child always on the verge of being punished. Without this softening depth, her face might have had too much contour. The lines of her cheekbones and jaw were strong and exact, and she had a full mouth, wide and silver-pink and sensual, and a little greedy in a certain light, a little coarse. Again a counterpoise. It mocked the childlike eyes.

She moved from window to window now. Small lamps swung on the patio. A cane chair stood beneath a tree. The end of a red canoe jutted from one of the stables. She crossed to the other side of the room. Leaves turned slowly in the pond. The scarlet runner hung over the edge of a small shed. It was quiet, minutes till sundown, a tinted light in the fields. She watched the ponies graze.

5

It took the cabdriver about sixty seconds to write out a receipt. Moll watched a pair of dog-walkers stop near the curb to give their pets a chance to sniff each other. Cute. She took the receipt and went up the stairs to the front door of the brownstone.

In the vestibule she rang the bell and waited for Grace Delaney to buzz her in. Nothing happened. She rang again. It was after eleven but this was Monday and Grace always stayed until midnight, or later, on Mondays.

Moll had a set of keys. Before opening the door, she peered through the glass panel, her view obscured by the crosshatched metal grating on the other side of the pane of glass.

She entered the building and started climbing to the third floor. She walked with her head twisted to the left and angled upward so that she might see ahead to the landing and the next bend in the staircase.

Both doors on the third floor were locked. She climbed the final flight. Two keys to the door of the outer office. On the second try she fitted each to its respective lock. Only one lock had been fastened.

All the lights were on. She entered hesitantly, calling Grace's name. She walked through the outer area into Grace's office. The usual clutter. Proofs, correspondence, photographs. A bottle of hand lotion on the coffee table. A paper cup nearly filled with vegetable soup.

She stood in the middle of the room, feeling a dim presentiment. Something about to happen. Someone about to appear. She picked up the phone and dialed Grace's home number, if only to break the mood. A recording came on, overamplified and dense: "_This is Grace Delaney. I'm not here right now. No one is here. At the beeping sound, leave your name and number-_"

Of course. Nobody is where they should be. Moll realized how wrong she'd been to feel apprehensive. The action was elsewhere, and included everyone but her. By refusing sexual alliance with Earl Mudger, she'd sealed herself off from the others. That was the effect, intended or not. There was no danger here. No one watched or listened any longer. Security. Why did it feel so disappointing?

She fastened both locks and walked slowly down the stairs and out of the building.

Grace Delaney sat near the immense Victorian birdcage in the lobby of the Barclay, off Park Avenue. She checked her watch several times and eventually walked over to one of the house phones. A man answered.

"I'm checking the vent in the bathroom."

"First you get me here," Grace said. "Then you make me wait."

"I'm in the middle of checking the vent."

"I'm coming up."

"We want to be sure the room's lily white. Don't we want that?"

"We want that."

"Of course we do," he said.

Fifteen minutes later she got off the elevator at 12. The room was located along the main corridor. Lomax let her in. The curtains were drawn. Only one light was on-a small table lamp-and he'd placed it on the floor, apparently to make the lighting as indirect as possible. He helped her off with her coat and hung it in the closet.

"That dress is a winner."

"Second-string," she said. "A relic."

"You know how to wear clothes. Clothes hang well on you. You have a sense of what looks good."

He sat on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.

"You're a New York woman," he said. "A classic type."

"Shut up, Arthur, will you?"

"No, really, in the best sense."

She took off her dress and put it over a chair.

"I never thought I'd end up in bed with a man who wears Clark's Wallabees."

"I don't wear them in bed."

"At least they're not Hush Puppies," she said. "Good Christ, think of it."

Lomax stood up to get out of his pants.

"What's wrong with Clark's Wallabees? They're a damn good shoe."

A pair of chambermaids talked and laughed as they walked past the door.

"What about some room service, Gracie? Scotch, bourbon? This is Scotch weather. This is the season."

"I've got my flask."

She sat before the mirror in her bra, panties, stockings and garter belt. A bobby pin was in her mouth as she rearranged her hair. Lomax stood nude, briefly; then he slipped under the covers, watching her.

"Did you have to cancel something?"

"Just Moll," she said.

"My schedule's a super bitch."

"Only I didn't cancel, I just split. Meaning to ask, Arthur. Who was this friend of hers? What friend was she talking about?"

"You mean the collection."

"I told you she had someone who could get her access to Percival's collection."

"Him we forget about."

"Were they lovers?"

"Yes indeedy."

"Where is he now?"

"Doesn't matter," Lomax said. "Far away."

"You seemed rather interested, Arthur, at the time."

"Fact-gathering, that's all."

"And what are the facts?"

"Maybe he gave her access, maybe not. I haven't thought about it lately. Onward and upward."

Grace walked over to his side of the bed. He put his hands on her breasts, over the bra, for a long moment. It seemed part of a set program. Then she went into the bathroom, leaving the door open.

"What happened in Dallas, Arthur?"

He didn't answer. She came out holding her handbag. She took the silver flask out of it and walked over to the far side of the bed. She sat there, removing her stockings.

"What's this lamp doing on the floor?"

"A little mood thing," he said.

"Sure it's not bugged?"

"I ought to know how to sweep a room by now."

"Sen-si-tive."

"Bastards, I wouldn't put it past them."

She faced him, reclining on top of the covers, the flask between them.

"Which bastards?"

"PAC/ORD."

"Aren't they your bastards, ultimately? Don't you still have a channel?"

"Did I tell you that?"

"As long as it's not the tax man," she said. "As long as you're keeping the tax man away from my door."

Lomax leaned over to lick her navel. Someone pushed a room-service tray along the corridor.

"It's ongoing," he said. "I have to keep fending off. Tax fraud is no joke."

"Pricks."

"Willful omission."

"Isn't there a statute of limitations?"

"Not for fraud," he said.

"This was years ago."

"You were a political. They love politicals and they love big-time mob figures. And they love to make their cases around February or March. Instills fear in the tax-paying public. That's when you see pictures of your favorite mob figure coming down the courthouse steps. Late February, early March."

"Why aren't they content to just seize my bank account or car or whatever?"

"They favor prosecutions in cases like yours. Of course it depends on how much money's involved. You were tied into some very radical adventures, Gracie. You were playing around with some large sums of money. Willful omission. Multiple filing schemes. Terribly naughty girl."

"The movement was a living thing," she said dryly.

"I'll show you a living thing."

"It was one's duty to beat the system."

"You want a living thing?"

"What have they got, exactly?"

"I've seen your paper. They keep the paper. There's all kinds of computerized data. But they keep the paper. There are clear indications of fraud. As I say, I've been fending off. Fortunately for you, there's a chain of mutual interests."

Grace ran the tip of her index finger over his lips. She drank from the flask and passed it to Lomax. Street sounds barely audible. He took a brief surprised swallow.

"This isn't Scotch."

"It's vodka."

"This is Scotch weather."

"Wod-ka."

"Should I call room service?" he said to himself. "Then I'd have to get dressed."

"Tell me about Dallas, Arthur."

"Cold and dark."

"You've dropped wee hints."

"You make me do these things. It's not to be believed, what you make me do."

"What we make each other do."

"It's because I've lost the faith."

"You don't give a rat's ass. I understand, sweet."

"Take off your top, why don't you?"

"Due time, love."

"I don't believe. I used to believe but now I don't."

"I understand, pet."

She turned toward him, moving closer-the flask, in her left hand, resting on his chest.

"It was frankly nasty," he said.

"You tell such charming stories."

"Ain't it the truth."

"Let me get all curled up and toasty and snug."

"What happened, various sets of people were maneuvering for position. That's standard. I stationed myself according to plan, waiting for Earl. This can be a full-time occupation. It happens with him. Fierce enthusiasms. The earth is scorched for miles around. Other times, where is he? He says thus and so but he's not where he's supposed to be, he's in Saudi on some leasing deal. In the meantime I find myself face to face with a guy who has a bullet in his throat. It's very dark. What's going on? After a lot of prodding, I find out he's free-lancing for Talerico, Vincent, a middle-level mobster. Everybody's after the same thing. We knew about the Senator's interest. We knew about Richie's interest, the kid, Armbrister. Now we have the families in all their Renaissance glory. What happens then, a car comes barreling around the corner and I go diving out of sight. I'm underneath a pickup truck, peering out, feeling this is the onset of a midlife crisis."

"The dark night of the soul," Grace said.

"For what, or whom?"

"When the priests stop believing, what does it mean?"

"Of course it was Mudger. He was sitting in the back of an ordinary cab. I crawled out and walked over. Told him what I knew. He suggested I get in, which I did, and we drove off."

"Leaving the man with the bullet in his throat."

"That happens, Gracie."

"Don't call me Gracie."

"Do you want me to call you what Earl calls you?"

"What's that?"

"Never mind," he said.

"What does Earl call me?"

"Take off your top."

"Tough darts, bubie."

She drank from the flask and resettled herself.

"Do I go on?"

"You're in the cab," she said.

"Earl, anyway, tells me he's disillusioned. The whole thing's a mess. Let the families have the goddamn footage. He no longer wants it."

"What does he want?"

"He wants to start a zoo. He wants to buy a huge tract somewhere and build some kind of safariland. Animals running around, people with cameras, I don't know. Part zoo, part natural habitat. He wasn't clear on details. He'd only thought of it on the flight up from San Antonio. It's part of Earl's nostalgia for Vietnam. He had a zoo there."

"I wonder if I'd like him," Grace said. "Moll did and didn't."

"You don't like anyone. Who do you like?"

"She wrote an interesting piece. Uneven and loose as hell. But her best work really. I was genuinely upset."

"Earl calls you FCB."

"What does that mean?"

"It's a joke name. Doesn't mean anything. Earl made it up. Actually we both made it up."

"I don't think I'd like him."

"You wouldn't like the Senator either. You don't like anyone."

"I'm old and tired," she said.

"The Senator is also out of the running. On to something else. A touch more traditional."

"Who cares? Do I look as though I care?"

"You're still young," Lomax said. "I'm the one who's old. I feel old."

"You're younger than I am, Arthur, and I don't even care."

"I feel old. I'm the old one. Forget chronology. If I were a dog I'd be only six years old, chronologically, but I feel ready for the meat machine."

Grace removed her brassiere and lay facing the ceiling. Lomax put the flask on the small table by the bed. His radio pager started beeping. This was a small device he'd lately taken to carrying everywhere. It was in the closet right now, in his coat pocket. Unlike the pagers generally in use, this one operated within a radius of one thousand miles from the originating signal. Activated by computer, the device enabled Earl Mudger to contact Lomax wherever he was, whatever he was doing, within that radius. When the beeping started, Lomax was to call a certain number and receive whatever instructions had been prepared for him.

The noise stopped after fifteen long seconds. Grace looked over at him, waiting for some reaction.

"I'll tell you who I give credit to," Lomax said.

He clasped his hands behind his head.

"Who are the only ones who believe in what they're doing? The only ones who aren't constantly adjusting, constantly wavering-this way, that way. Being pressed. Being forced to adopt new stances."

"The families," she said.

"They're serious. They're totally committed. The only ones. They see clearly, _bullseye_, straight ahead. They know what they belong to. They don't question the premise."

"Are they still in the running then?"

"They _are_ the running," Lomax said. "There's just that old lunk, the art dealer, who's probably sitting on the film can himself, thinking all he has to do is arrange an auction."

"What does FCB mean?"

Lomax glanced over at her, a hint of small bitter amusement in his face.

"You're sure," he said.

"Tell me, yes, I'm curious."

He pulled his right hand out from behind his head and used the middle finger to groom first one sideburn, then the other.

"Flat-Chested Bitch," he said.

Her mouth went tight. Supine, she rolled rightward, swinging her left arm up and over to deliver a roundhouse blow to the area just above his right eye. He folded up, oddly, as though he'd been hit in the groin. Both hands covering his right eye, he turned away from her, his body compact, close to the edge of the bed.

"It's a joke name," he said.

The second blow, a hammerlike left, caught him behind the ear. The radio pager began beeping again.

"It doesn't mean anything," he said. "It's just the way we communicate, in abbreviations, in codes sometimes. We give everybody a different kind of name. Some are a lot worse than yours."

Grace lay back on the bed, listening to the paging device emit its programmed series of noises. Her mouth was still rigid but she was breathing normally, as though spasms of violence were common in her life.

Moll sat in the tub, trying to turn the pages of the early edition of the _Times_ without getting them wet.

Interesting item back near the obits.

Learned today that Senator Lloyd Percival was married last Thursday in Bethesda, Maryland, hours after his divorce became final.

Bride is Dayton (DeDe) Baker, 20, a specimen trainee at the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C.

Funny but puzzling.

Ceremony performed in the meditation suite of the Stone Hollow Country Club by the Rev. Penny W. Parker, founder of the Humanist Missions.

Jesus.

The story, amid some typographical chaos, went on to quote the Senator, 6i, as saying today that he felt "reborn, revitalized-ready to attempt bold new ventures." He was interviewed with his wife before the couple left for the airport, en route to an undisclosed destination.

The next day at the office, on an impulse, Moll looked for the story in the late city edition. She found that a paragraph had been left out of the earlier version. She filled in the rest by walking down the ball and checking the magazine's files.

The bride's father was the late Freeman Reed Baker, a well-known authority on Persian art and culture. He was also the central figure in a scandal involving the disappearance, fifteen years earlier, of rare examples of ancient erotica- carpet-weavings, textiles, metalwork-from a legendary private collection in Isfahan.

I am beginning to understand.

At the time of the apparent theft, Dr. Baker had been special curator of the so-called Forbidden Rooms, a restricted area of the collection.

Very sexy stuff.

He died of natural causes three years ago in eastern Turkey, still under a cloud of suspicion. The treasures have not been recovered.

Back in her cubicle, Moll wondered if Lightborne had seen the story. If so, he'd be saying a mental farewell to Lloyd Precival. The Senator has clearly abandoned fortress Berlin, _Nazis in motion_, preferring the reassurances of desert stillness. The art of mystics and nomads. Old-fashioned contentments.

6

Selvy found a Sam Browne belt in someone's foot locker in the long barracks. He put it on. A decent enough fit. He liked the feel of the shoulder strap that extended diagonally across his chest. He thought he might figure out a way to attach the bolo somehow, knowing that the original belt had been designed, by a one-armed British general, to support a sword.

He stood outside the barracks. A clear day. Occasional small whirlwinds in the area. Memory. A playback. He watched a raven soar toward the mountains, wind-assisted, rising at first gradually, a continuous and familiar fact, and then in spasmodic surges, peculiar stages of rapid ascent, wholly without effort and seemingly beyond the limits of what is possible in the physical world-imperceptible transitions that left the watcher trying to account for missing segments of space or time.

Large soaring birds were the only things here that lived without reference to a sense of distance. Or so he imagined, Selvy did. He'd once exchanged stares, at fifteen feet, with a red-tailed hawk that had lighted on a tree stump at the edge of a deserted ranch, perhaps twenty miles from this spot, during exercises with live ammunition. That was how he'd come to believe in the transcendent beauty of predators.

That day was like this one. A morning of startling brightness. Clarity without distracting glare. The sky was saturated with light. Everything was color.

He was twenty yards from the barracks when he realized two cats were at his feet. He stopped and turned. Three more cats moved this way. He knew what it meant. Still more cats came out from under the barracks. They followed him, moving around his feet, mewing. Cats approached from another direction now, the windmill. An image unwinding. After ten paces he crouched down and they were all over and around him, scratching, crying out, at least fifteen cats and kittens, allowing themselves to be petted and rubbed, or just stretching in the sun, purring, or sniffing at his clothes, all of them looking healthy and well fed.

Levi Blackwater was here.

At the Mines, back then, he'd been an unwelcome presence in most gatherings of men. An ordinary boy from Ohio, named out of Genesis, he'd served as technical adviser to ARVN forces in the relatively early days of U.S. involvement. Out on a reconnaissance patrol, he'd been captured by the Vietcong, and tortured, and had come to love his captors. Eight months inside a prison building in a VC base camp in a mangrove thicket. Fish heads and rice. They strung him up by the feet. They held his head under water. They cut off two of his fingers.

The more they tortured him, the more he loved them. They were helping him. He considered it help.

At the Mines he cooked and worked in the laundry and did odd jobs. The men knew his history and stayed away from him. Selvy was an exception. He went to Levi for lessons in meditation.

Moll was suspicious of quests. At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagerness of spirit.

She sat in the dark, listening to Odell fiddle with the projector.

Even more depressing than the nature of a given quest was the likely result. Whether people searched for an object of some kind, or inner occasion, or answer, or state of being, it was almost always disappointing. People came up against themselves in the end. Nothing but themselves. Of course there were those who believed the search itself was all that mattered. The search itself is the reward.

Lightborne wouldn't agree. Lightborrie wanted a marketable product, she was sure. He wasn't in it for the existential lift.

Odell turned on a lamp and approached the screen in order to make sure it would be parallel to the strip of film itself when it moved through the projector gate. While he was doing this, Moll glanced over at Lightborne.

"What was it doing when you arrived?" he said. "Was that rain or sleet? I need new boots. I'd like to find something with some lining this year. This is a bad year, they're saying, looking long range."

He'd been making the same nervous small talk ever since Moll walked in. Twice now Odell had turned on the light to make a last-minute adjustment somewhere. Both times Lightborne had immediately started talking. In the dark he was silent. He chewed his knuckles in the dark.

Once more Odell turned off the lamp. Moll began to feel that special kind of anticipation she'd enjoyed since childhood-a life in the movies. It was an expectation of pleasure like no other. Simple mysteries are the deepest. What did it mean, this wholly secure escape, this credence in her heart? And how was it possible that4 bad, awful, god-awful movies never seemed to betray the elation and trust she felt in the seconds before the screen went bright? The anticipation was apart from what followed. It was permanently renewable, a sense of freedom from all the duties and conditions of the nonmovie world.

She felt it even here, sitting in a hard straight chair in a shabby gallery before a small screen. She felt it despite her knowledge of the various dealings, procedures and techniques that surrounded the acquisition of the film.

A two-dimensional city would materialize out of the darkness, afloat in various kinds of time, all different from the system in which real events occur. Yet we understand it so readily and well. They connect to us, all the city's spatial and temporal codes, as though from a place we knew before.

"I had the phone turned off," Lightborne said. "A temporary measure. To mute out the sound of certain voices."

He started to say something else but his voice drifted off and the only sound that remained was the running noise of motion picture film winding through the transport mechanism of the black projector.

_A bare room/black and white_.

_Plaster is cracked in places. On other parts of the wall it is missing completely. The lights in the room flicker_.

_Three children appear. A girl, perhaps eleven, carries a chair. Two younger children, a boy and a very small girl, drag in a second chair between them_.

_The children set the chairs on the floor and walk out of camera range_.

_There is a disturbance. The picture jumps as though the camera has been farred by some brief violent action_.

_A blank interval_.

_Again the room. The camera setup is the same_.

_A fourth child appears, a girl. She walks across the room and climbs onto one of the chairs, sitting primly, trying to suppress a bashful smile_.

_The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs. A woman appears, very drawn, moving toward the seated child. The lights flicker. Another girl appears; she notices the camera and walks quickly out of range_.

_The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs_.

_The camera is immobile. It does not select. People pass in and out of its viewing field_.

_The woman sits next to the small girl, absently stroking the child's hand. The woman is blond and attractive, clearly not well. She appears weak. It is even possible to say she is emotionally distressed. The oldest girl stands next to her, speaking. The woman slowly nods_.

_The boy carries in another chair. Three more adults appear, a man and two women. They stand about awkwardly, the man trying to work out a seating arrangement. The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs_.

_The once bare room is crowded with chairs and people_.

_The lights flicker overhead_.

"What do you think?" Lightborne said.

"I don't know what to think."

"You know who it could be? Magda Goebbels."

"The first woman?" Moll said.

"Those could be her children. I'm saying 'could be.' I'm trying to supply identities. Make a little sense out of this."

"Do you think it's the bunker?"

"It could be the doctor's former room. Hitler's quack doctor was allowed to leave. Goebbels took over his room."

"The three others," Moll said.

"I don't know. They could be secretaries, the women. The man, almost anything. A chauffeur, a stenographer, a valet, a bodyguard."

"Magda Goebbebs, you think."

"I'm saying 'could be.' This isn't what I expected. I wasn't looking for this at all."

Nothing much had happened thus far but Moll found something compelling about the footage she was watching. It wasn't like a feature film or documentary; it wasn't like TV newsfilm. It was primitive and blunt, yet hypnotic, not without an element of mystery.

Faces and clothing were immediately recognizable as belonging to another era. This effect was heightened by the quality of the film itself, shot with natural lighting. Bleached grays and occasional blurring. Lack of a sound track. Light leaks in the camera, causing flashes across the screen. The footage suggested warier times-dark eyes and fussy mouths, heavy suits, dresses in overlapping fabric, an abruptness and formality of movement.

_Four adults and five children, all seated, fill the screen. They face the camera head-on_.

_Time passes_.

"What's that jump?"

"It could be the shelling," Lightborne said.

"That's the second time."

"The Russians are a quarter of a mile away. Nuisance fire. In an all-out bombardment, they wouldn't be able to film. Aside from the steady concussion, the place would be full of smoke and dust."

_The blond woman slowly rises and walks off camera_.

"She knows what happens."

"What do you mean?" Moll said.

"The children."

"What happens?"

"Goebbels has them poisoned."

_Another room_.

_This one, although small and narrow and with an incomplete look about it, contains a writing desk, sofa and chairs. The walls are paneled. There's a picture in a circular frame over the writing desk_.

_A woman sits in one of the chairs, facing an open door that leads to another room. She turns the pages of a magazine. There's a trace of self-consciousness in the way she does this. Finally she decides to look directly at the camera, smiling pleasantly. This puts her at ease_.

_From her next reaction, it is clear that someone in the adjoining room is speaking to her_.

_She sits with her legs crossed, paying no attention to the magazine pages she continues to turn. A light-haired woman in her early thirties, she wears a dark tailored suit, a bracelet, and what appear to be expensive shoes. She has a small worried mouth (even in her present good humor) and a somewhat shapeless nose. Two distinct shadow lines make her cheeks look puffy_.

_She gestures toward the open door_.

"Where are we?" Moll said.

"Still in the bunker. It's not inconsistent, the two rooms. See that picture over the desk? If we could see it from a better angle, being in a circular frame, that could be his portrait of Frederick the Great, which would make this room his living room."

"Whose living room?"

"It's a possibility. It could be. And through that open door, that's his bedroom. Whoever's shooting this film, it could be he's shooting one room, he's stopping, he's walking over to the next room."

"Editing in the camera," Moll said.

"We're getting everything. What do you think? We're getting the one and only take of each scene."

"It's certainly unprofessional. But I can't say I mind."

"Those kids and those others are sitting in the first room waiting for the camera to come back. Maybe that's why the thing seems so real. It's true. It's happening. I didn't look for this at all."

_Another woman enters the room. The blond woman from the first sequence. Magda Goebbels-if Lightborne's speculation is correct_.

_She hands the younger woman a flower. Expression of delighted surprise. It's a white boutonniere. The woman takes it into the next room_.

_Visual static. Flash frames_.

"What are we looking at?"

"I don't know," Lightborne said.

"If that's Frau Goebbels standing there, who's the woman who just disappeared?"

"That shouldn't be hard to answer."

"I want to hear you say it."

"You know as well as I."

"Who is she?"

"It's real," Lightborne said. "I believe it. It's them."

The routine persisted.

In the late morning sun, Selvy placed the bolo knife on a bench in the littered compound. Seating himself on an overturned crate, he began working with oil and whetstone on the base of the blade. A snowy torn rolled in the dirt nearby. Directly ahead the spare land extended to the bottom of an enormous butte, its sloping sides covered with rockf all.

He saw it as memory, as playback. The border of appearances. Within is perfect color, the sense of topography as an ethical schematic. Landscape is truth.

When he looked up, ten minutes into his sharpening, he saw Levi Blackwater approaching from the southeast. Had to be him. There had always been something physically offcenter about Levi. Nothing so distinct as a limp or even an ungainliness of stride. The right shoulder sagged a bit. Maybe that was it. And the head tilted. And the right arm hung slightly lower. All apparent as he drew nearer.

He was a tall man, balding, and wore the same old field cap with ventilating eyelets. He was pale, he was sickly white, as always. Soft baby skin. A little like skin that's been transplanted from another part of the body. He stood smiling now. That knowing smile. Dust devils spinning fifty, sixty yards away.

"I came in to feed the cats."

Only Levi could speak of traveling to this remote site as "coming in."

"Where are you when you're out?"

Levi kept smiling and stood in profile, turning his head left toward the barest stretch of desert. He came forward to shake hands. It was the right hand that lacked two fingers, severed by his captors. Selvy had forgotten the directness of Levi's manner of looking at people.

"I always knew if anyone came back, Glen, it would be you."

"Not much left, is there?"

"Everything you'll need."

"I won't be staying, Levi."

People use names as information and Selvy believed the use of that particular name, Glen, indicated that Levi was deeply pleased to see him and wanted to suggest a new level of seriousness. In the past he'd often called Selvy by his rarely used first name, which was Howard. A teasing intimacy. It "had amused Levi to do this. His eyes would search Selvy's face. Those fixed looks, curious and frank at the same time, were irritating to Selvy, even more than hearing the name Howard. But he'd never complained, thinking this would put a distance between them.

Levi had been tortured, had spent extended periods of time in a dark room not much larger than a closet, and consequently had things to pass on, knowledge to impart, both practical and otherwise. He'd found tolerances, ways of dealing with what, in the end, was the sound of his own voice. He'd come out stronger, or so he believed, having lived through pain and confinement, the machine of self.

"This is a stop then? On a longer trip?"

"You might say."

"A way station," Levi said.

The phrase seemed to please him. His liquid eyes peered out of the shadow cast by the visor of his hat. He wore a soiled fatigue jacket, torn in places.

"I see you've brought along some metal."

"An antique," Selvy said.

"We were just getting started when you left."

"I know."

"We were beginning to see results, I think. I'm happy you've come back, even for a while. It's gratifying. You're looking well, Glen."

"Off the booze a while."

"You ought to stay, you know. There are things you can learn here."

"True. I believe that."

"The less there is, Glen, the more you're tested to find the things that do exist. Within and without. It works. If you limit yourself to the narrowest subject, you force yourself to concentrate to such an extent that you're able to learn a great deal about it. You already know a great deal about it. You find you already know much more than you'd imagined."

"I believe that."

"With no limits, you wander back and forth. You're defeated at the outset."

"That's why you're here, Levi."

"Both of us."

"Tighter and tighter limits."

"To learn. To find out what we know. When you left, we were just starting out. Damn shame if you didn't stay for a time. I've learned so much. So very much of everything."

He was squatting on the other side of the bench where the knife lay on several old newspapers, the only things Selvy could find to soak up the honing oil. Levi let a fistful of sand gradually spill to the ground. The sky was changing radically. Dust rising in the wind. Darkness edging across the southwesterly wheel of land.

"I'm born all the time," Levi said. "I remember other lives."

Staring.

"Creature of the landscape."

Smiling.

"Gringo mystic."

The wind lifted dust in huge whispering masses. Toward Mexico the mountains were obscured in seconds. The butte in the middle distance still showed through in swatches of occasional color, in hillside shrubs and the mineral glint of fallen rock.

"I feel myself being born. I've grown out here. I know so much. It's ready to be shared, Glen."

"I'm on a different course right now."

"You were making real progress."

"I'm primed, Levi."

"Yes, I can see."

"I'm tuned, I'm ready."

"I don't accept that."

"You know how it ends."

"I don't understand."

"You know what to do, Levi."

"Have we talked about something like this?"

Sand came whipping across the compound. Above and around them it massed in churning clouds. Wind force increased, a whistling gritty sound. Levi took off his field cap and jammed it in his pocket. His jacket had a hood attachment, tight fitting, with a drawstring around the face and a zippered closure that extended over the mouth. Levi fastened this lower part only as far as the point of his chin.

Selvy recognized a sound apart from the wind. He got to his feet and took off the Sam Browne belt. He threw it in the dirt. Damn silly idea. He had to admit to a dim satisfaction, noting the confusion in the other man's eyes.

"There's no way out, Glen. No clear light for you in this direction. You can't find release from experience so simply."

"Dying is an art in the East."

"Yes, heroic, a spiritual victory."

"You set me on to that, Levi."

"Tibet. Is that the East? It's beyond the East, isn't it?"

"A man chooses a place."

"But this is part, only part, of a longer, longer process. We were just beginning to understand. There's so much more. You think you're about to arrive at some final truth. Truth is a disappointment. You'll only be disappointed."

Selvy went into the long barracks and started ripping apart a bed sheet, planning to fashion some kind of mask, basic protection against the blowing sand.

Levi followed him in. Selvy watched him detach the hood from his jacket. He moved forward and put it over Selvy's head, slowly fastening the drawstring. His eyes, always a shade burdened with understanding, began to fill with a deep, sad and complex knowledge. He raised the zipper on the bower part of the hood. Selvy, feeling foolish, turned toward the door.

Outside he went to the bench and picked up the bob knife. He heard the sound again. There it was, _color_, black and bright red, a small helicopter, bearing this way, seeming to push against the wind.

Little bastards must be serious, out flying in this weather.

He walked about a hundred yards beyond the compound. The sand stung his eyes. He heard the motor but kept losing sight of the aircraft. Then he saw it again, off to the left, shouting distance, touching down near a gulley, trim, vivid in the murky gusts, its spiral blades coming slowly to a halt.

Inside the projector the film run continued noisily.

_The first room_.

_There are now six children and five adults, all seated, facing the camera. Among the adults are the two women from the flower sequence in the furnished room_.

_The smaller children are restless. Several adults wear rigid smiles; they look like victims of prolonged formalities. Two children trade seats. A woman turns to whisper_.

_For the first time the camera is active_.

_In a long slow panning movement, it focuses eventually on a figure lust beyond the doorway. A man in costume. After an interval of distortion, the camera, starting at the man's feet, moves slowly up his body_.

_Oversized shoes, turned up slightly at the points_.

_Baggy pants_.

_Vest and tight-fitting cutaway_.

_A dark narrow tie_.

_A wing collar, askew_.

_A battered derby_.

_A white boutonniere in the lapel of the cutaway_.

_A cane hooked over his wrist_.

_This footage has the mysterious aura of an event that cuts across time. This is because the man, standing beyond the doorway, is not yet visible to the audience of adults and children in the immediate vicinity. The other audience, watching in a dark room in New York in the 1970s, is aware of this, and they feel a curious sense of preview. They are seeing the man "first."_

"Is it?" Moll said.

"It could be."

"Jesus, it's almost charming."

"But do I want it?"

"He looks so very old."

"Do I need it?" Lightborne said.

_The camera is trained on the man's face. Again it moves, coming in for a medium close-up_.

_Eyes blank_.

_Little or no hair alongside his ears_.

_Face pale and lined_.

_Flaccid mouth_.

_Smoothly curved jaw_.

_The famous mustache_.

_Head shaking, he acknowledges the presence of the camera. It pulls back. The man moves forward, walking in a screwy mechanical way. Here the camera pans the audience. As the man enters the room, the adults show outsized delight, clearly meant to prompt the children, who may or may not be familiar with Charlie Chaplin_.

_Back on the performer, the camera pulls back to a corner of the room, providing a view from the wings, as it were_.

_He's a relatively small man with narrow shoulders and wide hips. It's now evident that his pantomime, intended as Chaplinesque, of course, is being enlarged and distorted by involuntary movements-trembling arm, nodding head, a stagger in his gait_.

"Do you want me to tell you what this is?"

"He's not bad, you know," Moll said. "Despite the tottering and such. He's doing fairly well."

"This is one of her home movies."

"Whose?"

"We saw her before."

"Eva Braun, you mean."

"This is her idea. She was a home-movie nut. She had movies made of herself swimming, walking in the woods, standing around with _him_. He's in some of them."

"He's in this one."

"But he didn't like Chaplin, if I recall correctly. I think he's on record as not being a Chaplin fan."

"I believe it was mutual."

"On the other hand he was a gifted mimic. He did imitations."

"Who did imitations? Say it."

"There were resemblances other than physical. He and Charlie."

_The figure shuffles toward the camera, his cane swinging. Behind him, in a corner of the screen, one of the small girls earnestly looks on_.

_Briefly the man is flooded in light_the bleached and toneless effect of overexposure. With the return of minimal detail and contrast, he is very close to the camera, and his lifeless eyes acquire a trace of flame, the smallest luster. A professional effect. It's as though the glint originated in a nearby catch light_.

_He produces an expression, finally-a sweet, epicene, guilty little smile. Charlie's smile. An accurate reproduction_.

"They were born the same week of the same month of the same year."

"Is that a point?"

"Within days of each other."

"But is that a point?"

"It's a fact. A truth. It's history."

"You're overwrought, Mr. Lightborne."

"Not that I'm convinced it's him. It's not him. He didn't empathize with the tramp character at all. Why is he doing this?"

"For the children, presumably."

"Who do I sell this to?"

_Three-quarter view. At first he seems to be speaking to the smallest of the children, a girl about three years old. it is then evident he is only moving his lips-an allusion to silent movies. One of the women can be seen smiling_.

"Hitler humanized."

"It's disgusting," Lightborne said. "What do I do with a thing like this? Who needs it?"

"I would think it has considerable value."

"Historical. Historical value."

"It's almost touching."

"Has to be one of her home movies. That bitch. What is she, stupid? Artillery shells are raining down and she's making movies. That whole bunch, they were movie-mad."

"You're certain about the children."

"Cyanide."

"So here we are."

"I expected something hard-edged. Something dark and potent. The madness at the end. The perversions, the sex. Look, he's twirling the cane. A disaster."

_Flash frames_.

"I set things in motion."

_New camera setup_.

_This is the sole attempt at "art." The camera faces the audience head-on. The members of the audience are attempting to pretend that the Chaplinesque figure is still performing at a point directly behind the camera_.

_Two adults remain, an unidentified man and woman. Both gaze dutifully past the camera, forcing tight smiles. Of the six children, only three seem interested in the illusion. One of the others kneels on the chair, her back to the "action." One looks directly at the camera. The smallest climbs down from her chair_.

_There is a general shifting of eyes. The members of the audience are clearly being prompted by someone off-camera_.

"I put powerful forces to work."

_Silently they applaud the masquerade_.

The hoods of their ski parkas kept getting blown off their heads. He saw the bright orange lining.

He gave a neighborly shout. _Hey_. Louder. One more time. He saw the ranger on the left reach out and touch the other's arm. Both had him in view now. They turned into the wind, which was at his back.

They came toward him like skiers cross-country, absorbed in economy and method, beaning into the force of the storm, each step a deliberate and nearby ritual movement, diagonal stride with poles.

He forced the bower part of the hood up over his nose so that only his eyes were visible. He saw the bright nylon lining intermittently. He had his feet firmly planted in the dirt, to maintain balance. They emerged from a swirl of dust, vanishing in a single stride.

He held the long knife across his stomach. Handle in his right hand. Blunt edge resting lightly in his left. He was rocked by the wind. The sound gathered density.

Moving slowly, not appearing to struggle, they emerged again, still empty-handed, he noticed, one of them unzipping his parka, vanishing, the other vanishing, the first transformed now, an apparition, ballooning bright nylon, the second emerging, undoing his jacket, which likewise fibbed with wind, and they came more quickly, released from their trekking pace, orange lining wind-billowed, metal at their belts. These bursts of unexpected color. The beauty of predators.

Strong sense of something being played out. Memory, a film. Rush of adolescent daydreams. He'd been through it in his mind a hundred times, although never to the end.

They moved in, showing spear-point bowies. One of them edged off to the side. He seemed to think if he moved slowly enough, Selvy would forget about him. The other one, in clear sight, stopped his maneuvering, as an afterthought, to remove the parka he wore. Selvy wanted to ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing.

When they closed in, Selvy used a backhand slash. Motion only. Drawing reaction. He turned to meet the man coming full-tilt, coming too fast, giving up alternatives. He went to one knee, throwing the man off-stride. The ranger's face registered mistake. Selvy used his free hand to push off from the ground, giving him added spring. Stunned breath. He found the midsection, realizing he'd used too much force going in.

He was attached, in effect, to the man he'd stabbed. He shoved his left forearm up against the ranger's chest, pressuring forward, trying to withdraw the knife at the same time. The man sagged to the ground, all mash, Selvy slipping down with him part of the way. When he turned, rising with the knife, too late, the other ranger was on him, white-eyed, wincing with every thrust.

He could see sand in the man's bashes. They held each other briefly. The tension left Selvy's face, replaced by deep concentration.

What he needed right now was a drink.

Van lessened his grip in stages, letting the body ease to the ground. He walked over to Gao, whose mouth was wide open. Sand came skimming along the ground in broad flat masses.

The blowing dust, which had been part of things, inseparable from events, was now a space away, the landscape, the weather, small rough particles striking Van's face and arms. He reached for his parka and put it back on.

He put the bowie knife back in its sheath. He robbed up his jeans and took a second, smaller knife that was clipped to the outside of his boot. Working carefully with this utility model he cut the drawstring on Selvy's hood. Then he sliced the fabric down along the zipper. He put the knife away. With both hands he opened up the hood and lifted it off Selvy's head.

He knelt there, still breathing heavily. The wind force decreased. He realized he was booking directly toward the helicopter; the fuselage was briefly visible. On all fours he searched for the guerrilla bob. It was five feet away, nearly buried. He lifted it out of the sand and used it to cut off the subject's head.

It was something he'd done before and seen others do. Heads on poles in the high noon slush of rice fields. A discomfort reserved for the spirits of particular enemies.

He dragged Gao's body to the aircraft. The weather kept easing and he saw the butte he'd nearby flown into before setting down. He went back for the other man's head, first emptying out a duffel bag to carry it in.

He thought Earl would want to have it. Evidence that the adjustment had been made.

"There's another reel," Odell said. "Where's everybody going?"

Mobl was heading toward the door. Lightborne went around turning on lamps. Briefly he stood near a three-foothigh fertility figure-wood and horsehair.

"I knew it would be no good. A document, with gestures. I was always the chief skeptic. I told everybody. Did they listen? Or did they keep calling me up? Long distance, local, from airplanes. I'm a dealer in knickknacks. I shouldn't have to turn off my phone to avoid hearing things."

He moved toward a wall switch, running his hand through a streak of yellowish hair over his right ear. After flicking on the light, he slipped behind the partition into his living quarters. Here he turned on more lights. Then he sat on his cot and stared into the black window shade.

Odell left his seat by the projector to unlock the door for Moll Robbins. He wore white cotton gloves, important when handling master film. As she stepped out, he gestured toward the screen.

"Who are those people?" he said.

Lightborne could hear Odell close the gallery door and walk over to the projector. Apparently he was getting ready to screen the second reel. A few moments later the lights in the gallery went out, one by one. Lightborne remained on his cot. There was a noise outside, just a yard or two away, it seemed. He lifted the window shade. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and a man with tinted glasses was sitting on his fire escape.

It was Augie the Mouse. He sat facing the window, his back against the vertical bars, knees up, hands jammed into the pockets of his long strange charcoal coat, big-buttoned, rabbinical. He had a small pointed face. His hair was dark and wild. He kept sniffling, and every time he sniffled he moved his head to the left, as though to clean his nose on the worn lapel of the coat; he couldn't get his nose that far down, however, and kept rubbing his chin instead-a detail he didn't appear to notice.

"What do you want?"

Augie cocked his head. The window was shut and he couldn't hear what had been said. Lightborne thought of running out of the room. He thought of shouting for Odell. But the man was just sitting there. His casual attitude finally prompted Lightborne to open the window.

"What do you want?"

"I still don't hear you."

"What do you want?"

"You're seeing things. There's nobody here."

"Broad daylight," Lightborne said, not knowing quite what he meant.

Augie seemed to take the remark as a compliment.

"People can see us from those windows."

"They can see you. I'm not here. They see some old man moving his lips."

"Is this a new hangout for derelicts? The streets are no longer adequate. Is that what I'm meant to conclude?"

"You see these glasses I'm wearing?"

"I can call my colleague, who's right in the next room there."

"These are called shooting glasses," Augie said.

Down on Houston Street, Molb watched a flock of pigeons fly over a two-story building into the back alleys. Seconds later Lightborne saw the same pigeons turn a bend and hurry toward a nearby roof.

"Do I have something for you?"

"I'm beginning to hear," Augie said.

"Did somebody send you to pick up something from me? Is that it? An item?"

"I'm taking form."

"Is it something that fits into a round can?"

"You're beginning to see me," Augie said. "I just arrived from my country place."

Lightborne heard something behind him. It was Odell, standing on this side of the partition. Augie didn't seem upset at the sight of another person. He sat sniffling, hands still in his pockets.

"What happens now?" Lightborne said. "Do I tell my colleague to go get it and bring it out to you while I remain here as insurance? He knows the handling procedures. Is that what happens?"

"No."

"What happens?"

"You invite me in."

"We can do that," Lightborne said. "We can do it inside. Fine, sure. But all this is assuming you tell me who sent you."

"Hey. I'm not here to audition."

"I don't necessarily mind parting with the item. But I'd like the option of knowing the recipient."

Augie let his head slump to one side, closing his eyes at the same time. Weary disappointment. I come here to do a simple job, he seemed to be thinking, and they start in with their complications, with their ballbreaking little remarks. Opening his eyes, he waited a long moment before moving his head to an upright position.

"Maybe you notice how far into these pockets my hands go. Practically half an arm is in there. That's made possible by the pockets being conveniently ripped out. What my hands are in there holding, if you want a clue to size, it takes both hands to hold, and I'm not talking about dick. You know dick?"

"I know," Lightborne said with a sigh.

"It's not dick I'm holding."

He invited Augie in. Odell, surprisingly, seemed to grasp the nature of the situation, and said nothing. All three went into the gallery. The second reel was running. One of the women from the earlier footage-unidentified-was teaching the oldest of the girls how to waltz, leading her stiffly around the floor. Briefly visible were two smaller girls, running from the camera.

Lightborne turned on the two nearest lamps and asked Odebl to halt the screening and get everything repacked. Augie the Mouse strolled around the gallery, browsing, both hands still in his pockets, holding the sawed-off whatever-itwas.

Lightborne wondered if they'd blame him for what was on the film. All he could do was suggest possible outlets. They could sell it to one of the networks for a news special. They could sell it to the Whitney Museum or the Canadian Film Board. He'd come up with a list of suggestions. What else could he do? Could he tell them people like to dress up? Gould he tell them history is true?

Moll felt like walking. After early rain, the day had turned warmer and very bright. Movies in the afternoon. The rude surprise of sunlight when you emerge. What is this place? Why are these people so short and ugly? Look at the hard surfaces, the blatant flesh of things.

When she reached Tenth Street, a limousine seemed to approach her, moving slowly down Fifth Avenue, veering toward the curb. She felt herself reacting.

Days later, trying to hail a cab outside her building, she watched another long black car move toward her. She was certain this one would stop. She waited to see the back door slowly open. It was raining lightly and the wipers cut a pair of arcs across the windshield.

But the car kept on moving, droplets of rain gleaming on its surface. She watched it head onto the transverse road on the other side of Central Park West, where it disappeared in the trees.

Levi Bbackwater surveyed the remains from a small rise about sixty yards away. He was motionless, positioned in a crouch, leaning slightly forward on his toes. His left hand, as though acting independently of his field of concentration, gathered a quantity of loose dirt.

The land was a raked paint surface. The power of storms to burnish and renew, he thought, had never been more clearly evident. The sky was flawless. Things _existed_. The day was scaled to the pure tones of being and sense.

The last sweeps of weather had caused the body to become partly buried. Levi knew who it was from the color of the trousers and the single russet boot still visible. He also knew what to do with the body. He remembered.

You approach death with a clear mind. You choose the right place. They'd discussed this often. Glen used to talk about pure landscape. He loved the desert. When you leave the earth-plane, there's a right place and a right way.

Levi knew everything there was to know about Glen. His childhood and adolescence on army bases. His father's steady ascent through the ranks-nicer houses, bigger backyards. His mother's piteous drift into lassitude, amnesia, silence. Glen spoke of these things with intense detachment, already a student of the process of separation. They camped, the two men, in the desert, talking into the starry dawn.

Glen wanted to be left in a sitting posture. What was known as an "air burial" would be provided. No receptacle for the body. No actual burial. He would be placed on a wooden framework or rudimentary platform of Levi's devising. Left for the air, for the large soaring birds. They'd discussed it often.

Levi had always wanted to giggle when Glen mentioned this. It was such an oversimplification. It left so much out.

Still, he would do as his friend had asked. In his own excessive way, Glen believed. He believed easily and indiscriminately, taking to things with a quick and secret fervor. It was a tendency which Levi had hoped to moderate, given the opportunity.

He let the dirt pass through his hand. He got to his feet, cap low over his eyes, and walked in his crooked way toward the body, slowly. Glen would get his air burial, yes. But first Levi would sit and chant, directing the escape, the separation of the deceased from his body, as taught by the masters of the snowy range.

This was a _lama_ function, and therefore an enormous presumption on Levi's part, but he knew the chant, after all, and he had love in his heart for the world.

It was a day of primal light, perfect arrangements of color. No voice could speak this. A raven swayed in the wind.

After chanting, he would try to determine whether the spirit had indeed departed. Levi wasn't sure he knew how to do this. But he believed he would _feel_ something; something would _tell_ him whether he was on the right path. He knew for certain how you started. You started by plucking a few strands of hair from the top of the dead man's head.