The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

John Updike Bech Noir from The New Yorker

Bech had a new sidekick. Her moniker was Robin. Rachel (Robin) Teagarten. Twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy big hair, figure on the short and solid side. She interfaced for him with an IBM PS/1 his publisher had talked him into buying. She set up the defaults, rearranged the icons, programmed the style formats, accessed the ANSI character sets — Bech was a stickler for foreign accents. When he answered a letter, she typed it for him from dictation. When he took a creative leap, she deciphered his handwriting and turned it into digitized code. Neither happened very often. Bech was of the Ernest Hemingway save-your-juices school. To fill the time, he and Robin slept together. He was seventy-four, but they worked with that. Seventy-four plus twenty-six was one hundred; divided by two that was fifty, the prime of life. The energy of youth plus the wisdom of age. A team. A duo.

They were in his snug aerie on Crosby Street. He was reading the Times at breakfast. Caffeineless Folger’s, D’Agostino orange juice, poppy-seed bagel lightly toasted. The crumbs and poppy seeds had scattered over the newspaper and into his lap but you don’t get something for nothing, not on this hard planet. Bech announced to Robin, “Hey, Lucas Mishner is dead.”

A creamy satisfaction — the finest quality, made extra easy to spread by the toasty warmth — thickly covered his heart.

“Who’s Lucas Mishner?” Robin asked. She was deep in the D section — Business Day. She was a practical-minded broad with no experience of culture prior to 1975.

“Once-powerful critic,” Bech told her, biting off his phrases. “Late Partisan Review school. Used to condescend to appear in the Trib Book Review, when the Trib was still alive on this side of the Atlantic. Despised my stuff. Called it ‘superficially energetic but lacking in the true American fiber, the grit, the wrestle.’ That’s him talking, not me. The grit, the wrestle. Sanctimonious bastard. When The Chosen came out in ’63, he wrote, ‘Strive and squirm as he will, Bech will never, never be touched by the American sublime.’ The simple, smug, know-it-all son of a bitch. You know what his idea of the real stuff was? James Jones. James Jones and James Gould Cozzens.”

There Mishner’s face was, in the Times, twenty years younger, with a fuzzy little rosebud smirk and a pathetic slicked-down comb-over, like limp Venetian blinds throwing a shadow across the dome of his head. The thought of him dead filled Bech with creamy ease. He told Robin, “Lived way the hell up in Connecticut. Three wives, no flowers. Hadn’t published in years. The rumor in the industry was he was gaga with alcoholic dementia.”

“You seem happy.”

“Very.”

“Why? You say he had stopped being a critic anyway.”

“Not in my head. He tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. Vengeance is mine.”

“Who said that?”

“The Lord. In the Bible. Wake up, Robin.”

“I thought it didn’t sound like you,” she admitted. “Stop hogging the Arts section.”

He passed it over, with a pattering of poppy seeds on the teak breakfast table Robin had installed. For years he and his female guests had eaten at a low glass coffee table farther forward in the loft. The sun slanting in had been pretty, but eating all doubled up had been bad for their internal organs. He liked the cut of Robin’s smooth broad jaw across the table. Her healthy big hair, her pushy plump lips, her little flattened nose. “One down,” he told her, mysteriously.

A week later, he was in the subway. The Rockefeller Center station on Sixth Avenue, the old IND line. The downtown platform was jammed. All those McGraw-Hill, Exxon, and Time-Life execs were rushing back to their wives in the Heights. Or going down to West Fourth to have some herbal tea and put on drag for the evening. Monogamous transvestite executives were clogging the system. Bech was in a savage mood. He had been to MOMA, checking out the new art. It had all seemed pointless, poisonous, violent, inept. None of it had been Bech’s bag. Art had passed him by. Literature was passing him by. Music he had never gotten exactly with, not since USO record hops. Those cuddly little WACs from Ohio in their starched uniforms. That war had been over too soon, before he got to kill enough Germans.

Down in the subway, three groups of electronic buskers — one country, one progressive jazz, and one doing Christian hip-hop — were competing. Overhead, a huge voice kept unintelligibly announcing cancellations and delays. In the cacophony, Bech spotted an English critic: Raymond Featherwaite, former Cambridge eminence lured to CUNY by American moola. From his perch in the CUNY crenellations, using his antique matchlock arquebus, he had been snottily potting American writers for twenty years, courtesy of the ravingly Anglophile New York Review of Books. “Prolix” and “voulu,” Featherwaite had called Bech’s best-selling comeback book, Think Big, in 1978. When, in 1985, Bech had ventured a harmless collection of sketches and stories, Biding Time, Featherwaite had written, “One’s spirits, however initially well-disposed toward one of America’s more carefully tended reputations, begin severely to sag under the repeated empathetic effort of watching Mr. Bech, page after page, strain to make something of very little.”

The combined decibels of the buskers drowned out, for all but the most attuned city ears, the approach of the train whose delay had been so indistinctly bruited. Featherwaite, like all these Englishpersons who were breeding like wood lice in the rotting log piles of the New York literary industry, was no slouch at pushing ahead, through the malleable ex-colonials. Though there was hardly room to place one’s shoes on the filthy speckled concrete, Featherwaite had shoved and wormed his way to the front of the crowd, right to the edge of the platform. His edgy profile, with its supercilious overbite and artfully projecting eyebrows, turned with arrogant expectancy toward the screamingly approaching D train, as though hailing a servile black London taxi or Victorian brougham. Featherwaite affected a wispy-banged Nero haircut. There were rougelike touches of color on his cheekbones. The tidy English head bit into Bech’s vision like a branding iron.

Prolix, he thought. Voulu. He had had to look up “voulu” in his French dictionary. It put a sneering curse on Bech’s entire oeuvre, for what, as Schopenhauer had asked, isn’t willed?

Bech was three bodies back in the crush, tightly immersed in the odors, clothes, accents, breaths, and balked wills of others. Two broad-backed bodies, padded with junk food and fermented malt, intervened between himself and Featherwaite, while others importunately pushed at his own back. As if suddenly shoved from behind, he lowered his shoulder and rammed into the body ahead of his; like dominoes, it and the next tipped the third, the stiff-backed Englishman, off the platform. In the next moment the train with the force of a flash flood poured into the station, drowning all other noise under a shrieking gush of tortured metal. Featherwaite’s hand in the last second of his life had shot up and his head jerked back as if in sudden recognition of an old acquaintance. Then he had vanished.

It was an instant’s event, without time for the D-train driver to brake or a bystander to scream. Just one head pleasantly less in the compressed, malodorous mob. The man ahead of Bech, a ponderous African-American with bloodshot eyes, wearing a knit cap in the depths of summer, regained his balance and turned indignantly, but Bech, feigning a furious glance behind him, slipped sideways as the crowd arranged itself into funnels beside each door of the now halted train. A woman’s raised voice — foreign, shrill — had begun to leak the horrible truth of what she had witnessed, and far away, beyond the turnstiles, a telepathic policeman’s whistle was tweeting. But the crowd within the train was surging outward against the crowd trying to enter, and in the thick eddies of disgruntled and compressed humanity nimble, bookish, elderly Bech put more and more space between himself and his unwitting accomplices. He secreted himself a car’s length away, hanging from a hand-burnished bar next to an ad publicizing free condoms and clean needles, with a dainty Oxford edition of Donne’s poems pressed close to his face, as the whistles of distant authority drew nearer. The train refused to move and was finally emptied of passengers, while the official voice overhead, louder and less intelligible than ever, shouted word of cancellation, of disaster, of evaluation without panic.

Obediently Bech left the stalled train, blood on its wheels, and climbed the metallic stairs sparkling with pulverized glass. His insides shuddered in tune with the shoving, near-panicked mob about him. Gratefully he inhaled the outdoor air and Manhattan anonymity. Avenue of the Americas, a sign said, in stubborn upholding of an obsolete gesture of hemispheric good will. Bech walked south, then over to Seventh Avenue. Scrupulously he halted at each red light and deposited each handed-out leaflet (GIRLS! COLLEGE SEX KITTENS TOPLESS! BOTTOMLESS AFTER 6:30 P.M.!) in the nearest city trash receptacle. He descended into the Times Square station, where the old IRt’s innumerable tunnels mingled their misery in a vast subterranean maze of passageways, stairs, signs, and candy stands. He caught an N train that took him to Broadway and Prince. Afternoon had sweetly turned to evening while he had been underground. The galleries were closing, the restaurants were opening. Robin was in the loft, keeping lasagna warm. “I thought MOMA closed at six,” she said.

“There was a tieup in the Sixth Avenue subway. Nothing was running. I had to walk down to Times Square. I hated the stuff the museum had up. Violent, attention-getting.”

“Maybe there comes a time,” she said, “when new art isn’t for you, it’s for somebody else. I wonder what caused the tieup.”

“Nobody knew. Power failure. A shootout uptown. Some maniac,” he added, wondering at his own words. His insides felt agitated, purged, scrubbed, yet not yet creamy. Perhaps that needed to wait until the morning Times. He feared he could not sleep, out of nervous anticipation, yet he toppled into dreams while Robin still read beneath a burning light, as if he had done a long day’s worth of physical labor.

“English Critic, Teacher Dead in West Side Subway Mishap,” the headline read. The story was low on the front page and jumped to the obituaries. The obit photo, taken decades ago, glamorized Featherwaite — head facing one way, shoulders another — so he resembled a younger, less impish brother of George Sanders. High brow, thin lips, cocky glass chin. “...according to witnesses appeared to fling himself under the subway train as it approached the platform... colleagues at CUNY puzzled but agreed he had been under significant stress compiling permissions for his textbook of postmodern narrative strategies... former wife, reached in London, allowed the deceased had been subject to mood swings and fits of creative despair... the author of several youthful satirical novels and a single book of poems likened to those of Philip Larkin.. born in Scunthorpe, Yorkshire, the third child and only son of a greengrocer and a part-time piano teacher...” and so on.

“Ray Featherwaite is dead,” he announced to Robin, trying to keep a tremble of triumph out of his voice.

“Who was he?”

“A critic. More minor than Mishner. English. Came from Yorkshire, in fact — I had never known that. Went to Cambridge on a scholarship. I had figured him for inherited wealth; he wanted you to think so.”

“That makes two critics this week,” said Robin, preoccupied by the dense gray pages of stock prices.

“Every third person on this island is some kind of critic,” Bech pointed out. He hoped the conversation would move on.

“How did he die?”

There was no way to hide it; she would be reading this section eventually. “Jumped under a subway train, oddly. Seems he’d been feeling low, trying to secure too many copyright permissions or something. These academics are under a lot of stress, competing for tenure.”

“Oh?” Robin’s eyes — bright, glossy, a living volatile brown, like a slick moist pelt — had left the stock prices. “What subway line?”

“Sixth Avenue, actually.”

“Maybe that was the tieup you mentioned.”

“Could be. Very likely, in fact.”

“Why are your hands trembling? You can hardly hold your bagel.” The poppy seeds were pattering on the obituary page.

“Who knows?” he asked her. “I may be coming down with something. I went out like a light last night.”

“I’ll say,” said Robin, returning her eyes to the page.

“Sorry,” he said, ease beginning to flow again within him. The past was sinking, every second, under fresher, obscuring layers of the recent past. “Did it make you feel neglected? A young woman needs her sex.”

“No,” she said, preoccupied by the market’s faithful rise. “It made me feel tender. You seemed so innocent.”

Robin, like Spider-man’s wife, Mary Jane, worked in a computer emporium. She didn’t so much sell them as share her insights with customers as they struggled in the crashing waves of innovation and the lightning-swift undertow of obsolescence. It thrilled Bech to view her in her outlet — Smart Circuits, on Third Avenue near Twenty-seventh Street, a few blocks from Bellevue — standing solid and calm in a gray suit whose lapels swerved to take in her bosom. Amid her array of putty-colored monitors and system-unit housings, she received the petitions of those in thrall to the computer revolution. They were mostly skinny young men with parched hair and sunless complexions. Sometimes Bech would enter the store, like some grizzled human glitch, and take Robin to lunch. Sometimes he would sneak away content with his glimpse of this princess decreeing in her realm. He marveled that at the end of the day she would find her path through the circuitry of the city and come to him. The tenacity of erotic connection anticipated the faithful transistor and the microchip.

Bech had not always been an object of criticism. His first stories and essays, appearing in defunct mass publications like Liberty and defunct avant-garde journals like Displeasure, roused little comment, and his dispatches, published in The New Leader, from Normandy in the wake of the 1944 invasion, and then from the Bulge and Berlin, went little noticed in a print world flooded with war coverage. But, ten years later, his first novel, Travel Light, made a small splash, and for the first time he saw, in print, spite directed at himself. Not just spite, but a willful mistaking of his intentions and a cheerfully ham-handed divulgence of all his plot’s nicely calculated and hoarded twists. A New York Jew writing about Midwestern bikers infuriated some reviewers — some Jewish, some Midwestern — and the sly asceticism of his next, novella-length novel, Brother Pig, annoyed others: “The contemptuous medieval expression for the body which the author has used as a title serves only too well,” one reviewer (female) wrote, “to prepare us for the sad orgy of Jewish self-hatred with which Mr. Bech will disappoint and repel his admirers — few, it is true, but in some rarefied circles curiously fervent.”

As he aged, adverse phrases from the far past surfaced in his memory with an amazing vividness, word for word — “says utterly nothing with surprising aplomb,” “too toothless or shrewd to tackle life’s raw meat,” “never doffs his velour exercise togs to break a sweat,” “the sentimental coarseness of a pornographic valentine,” “prose arabesques of phenomenal irrelevancy,” “refusal or failure to ironize his reactionary positions,” “starry-eyed sexism,” “minor, minorer, minor-most” — and clamorously rattled around in his head, rendering him, some days, while his brain tried to be busy with something else, stupid with rage. It was as if these insults, these hurled mud balls, these stains on the robe of his vocation were, now that he was nearing the end, bleeding wounds. That a negative review might be a fallible verdict, delivered in haste, against a deadline, for a few dollars, by a writer with problems and limitations of his or her own, was a reasonable and weaseling supposition he could no longer, in the dignity of his years, entertain. Any adverse review, even a single timid phrase of qualification or reservation within a favorable and even adoring review, stood revealed as the piece of pure enmity it was — an assault, a virtual murder, a purely malicious attempt to unman and destroy him. The army of critics stood revealed as not fellow wordsmiths plying a dingy and dying trade but satanic legions, deserving only annihilation. A furious lava — an acidic indignation begging for the Maalox of creamy, murderous satisfaction — had gradually become Bech’s essence, his angelic ichor.

The female reviewer, Deborah Frueh, who had in 1957 maligned Brother Pig as a flight of Jewish self-hatred was still alive, huddled in the haven of Seattle, amid New Age crystals and medicinal powders, between Boeing and Mount Rainier. Though she was grit too fine to be found in the coarse sieve of Who’s Who, he discovered her address in the Poets & Writers’ directory, which listed a few critical articles and her fewer books, all children’s books with heart-tugging titles like Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday and The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home and A Teddy Bear’s Bequest. These books, Bech saw, were her Achilles’ heel.

He wrote her a fan letter, in a slow and childish hand, in black ballpoint, on blue-lined paper. “Dear Deborah Freuh,” he wrote, deliberately misspelling, “You are my favrite writer. I have red your books over ‘n’ over. I would be greatful if you could find time to sign the two enclosed cards for me and my best frend Betsey and return them in the inclosed envelop. That would be really grate of you and many many thanx in advance.” He signed it, “Your real fan, Mary Jane Mason.”

He wrote it once and then rewrote it, holding the pen in what felt like a little girl’s fist. Then he set the letter aside and worked carefully on the envelope. He had bought a cheap box of a hundred at an office-supply store on lower Broadway and destroyed a number before he got the alchemy right. With a paper towel he delicately moistened the dried gum on the envelope flap — not too much, or it curled. Then, gingerly using a glass martini-stirring rod, he placed three or four drops of colorless poison on the moist adhesive.

Prowling the cavernous basement of the renovated old sweatshop where he lived, Bech had found, in a cobwebbed janitor’s closet, along with a quaint hand pump of tin and desiccated rubber, a thick brown-glass jar whose label, in the stiff and guileless typographic style of the nineteen-forties, proclaimed POISON and displayed along its border an array of dead vermin, roaches and rats and centipedes in dictionary-style engraving. In his thieving hand, the jar sloshed, half full. He took it upstairs to his loft and through a magnifying glass identified the effective ingredient as hydrocyanic acid. When the rusty lid was unscrewed, out rushed the penetrating whiff, cited in many a mystery novel, of bitter almonds. Lest the adhesive be betraying bitter when licked, and Deborah Frueh rush to ingest an antidote, he sweetened the doctored spots with some sugar water mixed in an orange-juice glass and applied with an eyedropper.

The edges of glue tended to curl as they dried, a difficulty he mitigated by rolling them the other way before applying the liquids. The afternoon waned; the roar of traffic up on Houston reached its crescendo unnoticed; the windows of the converted factory across Crosby Street entertained unseen the blazing amber of the lowering sun. Bech was wheezily panting in the intensity of his concentration. His nose was running; he kept wiping it with a trembling handkerchief. He had reverted to elementary school, where he and his peers had built tiny metropolises out of cereal boxes and scissored into being red valentines and black profiles of George Washington, even made paper Easter eggs and Christmas trees, under their young and starchy Irish and German instructresses, who without fear of objection swept their little Jewish-American pupils into the Christian calendar.

Bech thought hard about the return address on the envelope, which could become, once its fatal bait was taken, a dangerous clue. The poison, before hitting home, might give Deborah Frueh time to seal the thing, which in the confusion after her death might be mailed. That would be perfect — the clue consigned to a continental mailbag and arrived with the junk mail at an indifferent American household. In the Westchester directory he found a Mason in New Rochelle and fistily inscribed the address beneath the name of his phantom Frueh fan. Folding the envelope, he imagined he heard a faint crackling — microscopic sugar and cyanide crystals? His conscience, dried up by a century of atrocity and atheism, trying to come to life? He slipped the folded envelope with the letter and four (why not be generous?) three-by-five index cards into the envelope painstakingly addressed in the immature, girlish handwriting. He hurried downstairs, his worn heart pounding, to throw Mary Jane Mason’s fan letter into the mailbox at Broadway and Prince.

Like the reflected light of a city set to burning, the lurid sunset hung low in the direction of New Jersey. The streets were crammed with the living and the guiltless, heading home in the day’s horizontal rays, blinking from the subway’s flicker and a long day spent at computer terminals. Bech hesitated a second before relinquishing his letter to the blue, graffiti-sprayed box, there in front of Victoria’s Secret. A young black woman with an armful of metered nine-by-twelve envelopes impatiently arrived at his back, to make her more massive, less lethal drop. He stifled his qualm. The governmental box hollowly sounded with the slam of the lid upon the fathomless depths of sorting and delivery to which he consigned his missive. His life had been spent as a votary of the mails. This was but one more submission.

Morning after morning, the Times carried no word on the death of Deborah Frueh. Perhaps, just as she wasn’t in Who’s Who, she was too small a fish to be caught in the Times’ obituary net. But no, they observed at respectful length the deaths of hundreds of people of whom Bech had never heard. Former aldermen, upstate prioresses, New Jersey judges, straight men on defunct TV comedies, founders of Manhattan dog-walking services — all got their space, their chiseled paragraphs, their farewell salute. Noticing the avidity with which he always turned to the back of the Metro section, Robin asked him, “What are you looking for?”

He couldn’t tell her. “Familiar names,” he said. “People I once knew.”

“Henry, it seems morbid. Here, I’m done with Arts and Sports.”

“I’ve read enough about arts and sports,” he told this bossy tootsie, “to last me to the grave.”

He went to the public library, the Hamilton Fish Park branch on East Houston, and in the children’s section found one of Deborah Frueh’s books, Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday, and checked it out. He read it and wrote her another letter, this time in blue ballpoint, on unlined stationery with a little Peter Maxish elf-figure up in one corner, the kind a very young girl might be given for her birthday by an aunt or uncle. “Dear Deborah Frueh,” he wrote, “I love your exciting work. I love the way at the end of ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday’ Jennifer realizes that she has had a pretty good day after all and that in life you can’t depend on anybody else to entertain you, you have to entertain your own mind. At the local library I have ‘The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home’ on reserve. I hope it isn’t too sad. ‘Teddy Bear’s Bequest’ they never heard of at the library. I know you are a busy woman and must be working on more books but I hope you could send me a photograph of you for the wall of my room or if your too busy to do that please sign this zerox of the one on the cover of Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday.’ I like the way you do your hair, it’s like my Aunt Daphne, up behind. Find enclosed a stamped envelope to send it in. Yours hopefully, Judith Green.”

Miss Green in Bech’s mind was a year or so older than Mary Jane Mason. She misspelled hardly at all, and had self-consciously converted her grammar-school handwriting to a stylish printing, which Bech slaved at for several hours before attaining the proper girlish plumpness in the o’s and m’s. He tried dotting the i’s with little circles and ultimately discarded the device as unpersuasive. He did venture, however, a little happy face, with smile and rudimentary pigtails. He intensified the dose of hydrocyanic acid on the envelope flap, and eased off on the sugar water. When Deborah Frueh took her lick — he pictured it as avid and thorough, not one but several swoops of her vicious, pointed tongue — the bitterness would register too late. The bitch would never know what hit her. A slowed heart, inhibited breathing, dilated pupils, convulsive movements, and complete loss of consciousness follow within seconds. He had done his research.

The postmark was a problem. Mary Jane up there in New Rochelle might well have had a father who, setting off in the morning with a full briefcase, would mail her letter for her in Manhattan, but two in a row and Frueh might smell a rat, especially if she had responded to the last request and was still feeling queasy. Bech took the Hoboken ferry from the World Financial Center, treating himself to a river view of his twinkling, aspiring home town. He looked up Greens in a telephone booth near the terminal. He picked one on Willow Street to be little Judy’s family. He deposited his letter in a scabby dockside box and, leaving the missive to move on its own tides toward Seattle, took the ferry back to lower Manhattan. The writer’s nerves hummed; his eyes narrowed against the river glare. What did Whitman write of such crossings? “Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!” And, later on, speaking so urgently from the grave, “Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d, Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried.” That “yet was hurried” was brilliant, with all of Whitman’s brilliant homeliness.

A week went by. Ten days. The desired death was not reported in the Times. Bech wondered if a boy fan might win a better response, a more enthusiastic, heterosexual licking of the return envelope. “Dear Deborah Freuh,” Bech typed, using the hideous Script face available on his IBM PS/1. “You are a great writer, the greatest as far as I am concerned in the world. Your book titled ‘The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home’ broke me up, it was so sad and true. I don’t want to waste any more of your time reading this so you can get back to writing another super book but it would be sensational if you would sign the enclosed first-day cover for Sarah Orne Jewett, the greatest female American writer until you came along. Even if you have a policy against signing I’d appreciate your returning it in the enclosed self-addressed stamped envelope since I am a collector and spent a week’s allowance for it at the hobby shop here in Amityville, Long Island, NY. Sign it on the pencil line I have drawn. I will erase the line when you have signed. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Yours very sincerely, Jason Johnson, Jr.”

It was a pleasant change, in the too-even tenor of Bech’s days, to ride the Long Island Rail Road out to Amityville and mail Jason Johnson’s letter. Just to visit Penn Station again offered a fresh perspective — all that Roman grandeur from his youth, that onetime temple to commuting Fortuna, reduced to these ignoble ceilings and Tartarean passageways. And then, after the elevated views of tar-roofed Queens, the touching suburban stations, like so many knobbed Victorian toys, with their carefully pointed stonework and gleaming rows of parked cars and stretches of suburban park. In Amityville he found a suitable Johnson — on Maple Drive — and mailed his letter and headed back to town, the stations accumulating ever shabbier, more commercial surroundings and the track bed becoming elevated and then, with a black roar, buried, underground, underriver, undercity, until the train stopped at Penn Station again and the passengers spilled out into a gaudy, perilous mess of consumeristic blandishments, deranged beggars, and furtive personal errands.

Four days later, there it was, in four inches of Times type, the death of Deborah Frueh. Respected educator was also a noted critic and author of children’s books. Had earlier published scholarly articles on the English Metaphysicals and Swinburne and his circle. Taken suddenly ill while at her desk in her home in Hunts Point, near Seattle. Born in Conshohocken, near Philadelphia. Attended Barnard College and Duke University graduate school. Exact cause of death yet to be determined. Had been in troubled health lately — her weight a stubborn problem — colleagues at the University of Washington reported. Survived by a sister, Edith, of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and a brother, Leonard, of Teaneck, New Jersey.

Another ho-hum exit notice, for every reader but Henry Bech. He knew what a deadly venom the deceased had harbored in her fangs.

“What’s happened?” Robin asked from across the table.

“Nothing’s happened,” he said.

“Then why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a man who’s been told he’s won a million dollars but isn’t sure it’s worth it, what with all the tax problems.”

“What a strange, untrammeled imagination,” he said.

“Let me see the page you’re reading.”

“No. I’m still reading it.”

“Henry, are you going to make me stand up and walk around the table?”

He handed her the cream-cheese-stained obituary page. Robin, while the rounded points of her wide jaw thoughtfully clenched and unclenched on the last milky crumbs of her whole-bran flakes, flicked her quick brown eyes up and down the columns of print. Her eyes held points of red like the fur of a fox. Morning sun slanting through the big loft window made an outline of light, of incandescent fuzz, along her jaw. Her eyelashes glittered like a row of dewdrops on a spiderweb strand. “Who’s Deborah Frueh?” she asked. “Did you know her?”

“A frightful literary scold,” he said. “I never met the lady, I’m not sorry to say.”

“Did she ever review you or anything?”

“I believe she did, once or twice.”

“Favorably?”

“Not really.”

“Really unfavorably?”

“It could be said. Her reservations about my work were unhedged, as I vaguely recall. You know I don’t pay much attention to reviews.”

“And that Englishman last month, who fell in front of the subway train — didn’t you have some connection with him, too?”

“Darling, I’ve been publishing for over fifty years. I have slight connections with everybody in the print racket.”

“You’ve not been quite yourself lately,” Robin told him. “You’ve had some kind of a secret. You don’t talk to me the breezy way you used to. You’re censoring.”

“I’m not,” he said, hating to lie, standing as he was knee-deep in the sweet clover of Deborah Frueh’s extermination. He wondered what raced through that fat harpy’s mind in the last second, as the terrible-tasting cyanide nipped down her esophagus and halted the oxidation process within her cells. Not of him, certainly. He was one of multitudes of writers she had put in their places. He was three thousand miles away, the anonymous progenitor of Jason Johnson, Jr.

“Look at you!” Robin cried, on so high a note that her orange-juice glass emitted a surprised shiver. “You’re triumphant! Henry, you killed her.”

“How would I have done that?”

She was not balked. Her eyes narrowed. “At a distance, somehow,” she guessed. “You sent her things. A couple of days, when I came home, there was a funny smell in the room, like something had been burning.”

“This is fascinating,” Bech said. “If I had your imagination, I’d be Balzac.” He went on, to deflect her devastating insights, “Another assiduous critic of mine, Aldie Cannon — he used to be a mainstay of The New Republic but now he’s on PBS and the Internet — says I can’t imagine a thing. And hate women.”

Robin was still musing, her smooth young mien puzzling at the crimes to which she was an as yet blind partner. She said, “I guess it depends on how you define ‘hate.’ ”

But he loved her. He loved the luxurious silken whiteness of her slightly thickset young body, the soothing cool of her basically factual mind. He could not long maintain this wall between them, this ugly partition in the light-filled loft of their love match. The next day the Times ran a little follow-up squib on the same page as the daily book review — basically comic in its tone, for who would want to murder an elderly, overweight book critic and juvenile author — stating that the Seattle police had found suspicious chemical traces in Frueh’s autopsied body. Bech confessed to Robin. The truth rose irrepressible in his throat like the acid burn of partial regurgitation. Pushing the large black man who pushed a body that pushed Featherwaite’s. Writing Deborah Frueh three fan letters with doped return envelopes. Robin listened while reposing on his brown beanbag chair in a terry-cloth bathrobe. She had taken a shower, so her feet had babyish pink sides beneath the marble-white insteps with their faint blue veins. It was Sunday morning. She said when he was done, “Henry, you can’t just go around rubbing out people as if they existed only on paper.”

“I can’t? That’s where they tried to rub me out, on paper. They preyed on my insecurities, to shut off my creative flow. They nearly succeeded. I haven’t written nearly as much as I could have.”

“Was that their fault?”

“Partly,” he estimated. Perhaps he had made a fatal error, spilling his guts to this chesty broad. “Okay. Turn me in. Go to the bulls.”

“The bulls?”

“The police — haven’t you ever heard that expression? How about ‘the fuzz’? Or ‘the pigs’?”

“I’ve never heard them called that, either.”

“My God, you’re young. What have I ever done to deserve you, Robin? You’re so pure, so straight. And now you loathe me.”

“No, I don’t, actually. I might have thought I would, but in fact I like you more than ever.” She never said “love,” she was too post-Jewish for that. “I think you’ve shown a lot of balls, frankly, translating your resentments into action instead of sublimating them into art.”

He didn’t much like it when young women said “balls” or called a man “an asshole,” but today he was thrilled by the cool baldness of it. They were, he and his mistress, in a new realm, a computerized universe devoid of blame or guilt, as morally null as an Intel chip. There were only, in this purified universe, greater or lesser patches of electricity, and violence and sex were greater patches. She stood and opened her robe. She emitted a babyish scent, a whiff of sour milk; otherwise her body was unodiferous, so that Bech’s own aromas, the product of seven and a half decades of marination in the ignominy of organic life, stood out like smears on a white vinyl wall. Penetrated, Robin felt like a fresh casing, and her spasms came rapidly, a tripping series of orgasms made almost pitiable by her habit of sucking one of his thumbs deep into her mouth as she came. When that was over, and their pulse rates had leveled off, she looked at him with her fox-fur irises shining expectantly, childishly.

“So who are you going to do next?” she asked. Her pupils, those inkwells as deep as the night sky’s zenith, were dilated by excitement.

“Well, Aldie Cannon is very annoying,” Bech reluctantly allowed. “He’s a forty-something smart-aleck, from the West Coast somewhere. Palo Alto, maybe. He has one of these very rapid agile nerdy minds — whatever pops into it must be a thought. He began by being all over The Nation and The New Republic and then moved into the Vanity Fair/GQ orbit, writing about movies, books, TV, music, whatever, an authority on any sort of schlock, and then got more and more on radio and TV — they love that kind of guy, the thirty-second opinion, bing, bam — until now that’s basically all he does, that and write some kind of junk on the Internet, his own Web site, I don’t know — people send me printouts whenever he says anything about me, I wish they wouldn’t.”

“What sort of thing does he say?”

Bech shifted his weight off his elbow, which was hurting. Any joint in his body hurt, with a little use. His body wanted to retire but his raging spirit wouldn’t let it. “He says I’m the embodiment of everything retrograde in pre-electronic American letters. He says my men are sex-obsessed narcissistic brutes and all my female characters are just anatomically correct dolls.”

“Ooh,” murmured Robin, as if softly struck by a bit of rough justice.

Bech went on, aggrieved, “He says things like, and I quote, ‘Whenever Bech attempts to use his imagination, the fuse blows and sparks fall to the floor. But short circuits aren’t the same as magic-realist fireworks.’ End quote. On top of being a smart-aleck he’s a closet prude. He hated the sex in Think Big; he wrote, as I dimly remember, ‘These tawdry and impossible wet dreams tell us nothing about how men and women really interact.’ Implying that he sure does, the creepy fag. He’s never interacted with anything but a candy machine and the constant torrent of cultural crap.”

“Henry, his striking you as a creepy fag isn’t reason enough to kill him.”

“It is for me.”

“How would you go about it?”

“How would we go about it maybe is the formula. What do we know about this twerp? He’s riddled with insecurities, has all this manicky energy, and is on the Internet.”

“You have been mulling this over, haven’t you?” Robin’s eyes had widened; her lower lip hung slightly open, looking riper and wetter than usual, as she propped herself above him, bare-breasted, livid-nippled, her big hair tumbling in oiled coils. Her straight short nose didn’t go with the rest of her face, giving her a slightly flattened expression, like a cat’s. “My lover the killer,” she breathed.

“My time on Earth is limited.” Bech bit off his words. “I have noble work to do. I can’t see Cannon licking return envelopes. He probably has an assistant for that. Or tosses them in the waste-basket, the arrogant little shit.” He averted his eyes from Robin’s bared breasts, their gleaming white weight like that of gourds still ripening, snapping their vines.

She said, “So? Where do I come in, big boy?”

“Computer expertise. You have it, or know those that do. My question of you, baby, is could we break into his computer?”

Robin’s smooth face, its taut curves with their faint fuzz, hardened. “If he can get out,” she said, “a cracker can get in. The Internet is one big happy family, like it or not.”

The Aldie Cannon mini-industry was headquartered in his modest Upper East Side apartment. He lived, with this third wife and two maladjusted small children, not on one of the East Side’s genteel, ginkgo-shaded side streets but in a raw new blue-green skyscraper, with balconies like stubby daisy petals, over by the river. His daily Internet feature, “Cannon Fodder,” was produced in a child-resistant study on a Compaq PC equipped with Windows 95. His opinionated claptrap was twinkled by modem to a site in San Jose, where it was checked for obscenity and libel and misspellings before going out to the millions of green-skinned cyberspace goons paralyzed at their terminals. E-mail sent to fodder.com went to San Jose, where the less inane and more provocative communications were forwarded to Aldie, for possible use in one of his columns.

Robin, after consulting some goons of her acquaintance, explained to Bech that the ubiquitous program for E-mail, Sendmail, had been written in the Unix ferment of the late nineteen-seven-ties, when security had been of no concern; it was notoriously full of bugs. For instance, Sendmail performed security checks only on a user’s first message; once the user passed, all his subsequent messages went straight through. Another weakness of the program was that a simple I, the “pipe” symbol, turned the part of the message following it into input, which could consist of a variety of Unix commands the computer was obliged to obey. These commands could give an intruder log-in status and, with some more manipulation, a “back door” access that would last until detected and deleted. Entry could be utilized to attach a “Trojan horse” that would flash messages onto the screen, with subliminal brevity if desired.

Bech’s wicked idea was to undermine Cannon’s confidence and sense of self — fragile, beneath all that polymathic, relentlessly with-it bluster — as the critic sat gazing at his monitor. Robin devised a virus: every time Aldie typed an upper-case “A” or a lowercase “x,” a message would flash, too quickly for his conscious mind to register but distinctly enough to penetrate the neuronic complex of brain cells. The program took Robin some days to design; especially finicking were the specs of such brief interruptions, amid the seventy cathoderay refreshments of the screen each second, in letters large enough to make an impression. She labored while Bech slept; half-moon shadows smudged and dented the lovely smoothness of her face. Delicately she strung her binaries together. They could at any moment be destroyed by an automatic “sniffer” program or a human “sysadmin,” a systems administrator. Federal laws were being violated; heavy penalties could be incurred. Nevertheless, out of love for Bech and the fascination of a technical challenge, Robin persevered and, by the third morning, succeeded.

Bech began, once the intricate, illicit commands had been lodged, with some hard-core Buddhism, BEING IS PAIN, the subliminal message read; NON-BEING IS NIRVANA. Invisibly these truths rippled into the screen’s pixels for a fifteenth of a second — that is, five refreshments of the screen, a single one being, Robin and a consulted neurophysiologist agreed, too brief to register even subliminally. After several days of these equations, Bech asked her to program the more advanced NO MISERY OF MIND IS THERE FOR HIM WHO HATH NO WANTS. It was critical that the idea of death be rendered not just palatable but inviting, NON-BEING IS AN ASPECT OF BEING, and BEING OF NON-BEING: this Bech had adapted from a Taoist poem by Seng Ts’an. From the same source he took TO BANISH REALITY IS TO SINK DEEPER INTO THE REAL. Out of his own inner resources he proposed ACTIVITY IS AVOIDANCE OF VICTORY OVER SELF.

Together he and Robin scanned Cannon’s latest effusions, in print or on the computer screen, for signs of mental deterioration and spiritual surrender. Deborah Frueh had taken the bait in the dark, and Bech had been frustrated by his inability to see what was happening — whether she was licking an envelope or not, and what effect the diluted poison was having on her detestable innards. But in the case of Aldie Cannon, his daily outpouring of cleverness surely would betray symptoms. His review of a Sinead o’connor concert felt apathetic, though he maintained it was her performance, now that she was no longer an anti-papal skinhead, that lacked drive and point. His roundup of recent books dwelling, with complacency or alarm, upon the erosion of the traditional literary canon — cannon fodder indeed, the ideal chance for him to do casual backflips of lightly borne erudition — drifted toward the passionless conclusion that “the presence or absence of a canon amounts to much the same thing; one is all, and none is equally all.” This didn’t sound like the Aldie Cannon who had opined of Bech’s collection When the Saints, “Some of these cagey feuilletons sizzle but most fizzle; the author has moved from not having much to say to implying that anyone’s having anything to say is a tiresome breach of good taste. Bech is a literary dandy, but one dressed in tatters — a kind of shreds and patches, as Hamlet said of another fraud.”

It was good for Bech to remember these elaborate and gleeful dismissals, lest pity bring him to halt the program. Where the celebrant of pop culture would once wax rapturous over Julia Roberts’s elastic mouth and avid eyes, Aldie now dwelt upon her ethereal emaciation in My Best Friend’s Wedding, and the “triumphant emptiness” of her heroine’s romantic defeat and the film’s delivery of her into the arms of a homosexual. Of Saul Bellow’s little novel, he noticed only the “thanatoptic beauty” of its culmination in a cemetery, where the hero’s proposal had the chiseled gravity of an elegy or death sentence. The same review praised the book’s brevity and confessed — this from Aldie Cannon, Pantagruelian consumer of cultural produce — that some days he just didn’t want to read one more book, see one more movie, go to one more art show, look up one more reference, wrap up one more paragraph with one more fork-tongued aperçu. And then, just as the Manhattan scene was kicking into another event-crammed fall season, “Cannon Fodder” now and then skipped a day on the Internet, or was replaced, with a terse explanatory note, by one of the writer’s “classic” columns from a bygone year.

Bech had made a pilgrimage to the blue-green skyscraper near the river to make sure a suicide leap was feasible. Its towering mass receded above him like giant railroad tracks — an entire railroad yard of aluminum and glass. The jutting semicircular petals of its balconies formed a scalloped dark edge against the clouds as they hurtled in lock formation across the sere-blue late-summer sky. It always got to the pit of Bech’s stomach, the way the tops of skyscrapers appeared to lunge across the sky when you looked up, like the prows of ships certain to crash. The building was fifty-five stories high and had curved sides. Its windows were sealed but the balconies were not caged. Within Bech a siren wailed, calling Aldie out, out of his cozy claustral nest of piped-in, faxed, E-mailed, messengered, videoed cultural fluff and straw — culture, that tawdry, cowardly anti-nature — into the open air, the stinging depths of space, cosmic nature pure and raw.

NON-BEING IS BLISS, Bech told Robin to make the Trojan horse spell, and SELFHOOD IS IMPURITY, and, at ever-faster intervals, the one WORD JUMP.

JUMP, the twittering little pixels cried, and jump you twit or JUMP YOU HOLLOW MAN Or DO THE WORLD A FUCKING FAVOR AND JUMP.

“I can’t believe this is you,” Robin told him. “This killer.”

“I have been grievously provoked,” he said.

“Just by reviews? Henry, nobody takes them seriously.”

“I thought I did not, but now I see that I have. I have suffered a lifetime’s provocation. My mission has changed; I wanted to add to the world’s beauty, but now I merely wish to rid it of ugliness.”

“Poor Aldie Cannon. Don’t you think he means well? Some of his columns I find quite entertaining.”

“He may mean well but he commits atrocities. His facetious half-baked columns are crimes against art and against mankind. He has crass taste — no taste, in fact. He has a mouth to talk but no ears with which to listen.” Liking in his own ear the rhythm of his tough talk, Bech got tougher. “Listen, sister,” he said to Robin. “You want out? Out you can have any time. Walk down two flights. The subway’s a block over, on Broadway. I’ll give you the buck fifty. My treat.”

She appeared to think it over. She said what women always say, to stall. “Henry, I love you.”

“Why the hell would that be?”

“You’re cute,” Robin told him. “Especially these days. You seem more, you know, together. Before, you were some sort of a sponge, just sitting there, waiting for stuff to soak in. Now you’ve, like they say on the talk shows, taken charge of your life.”

He pulled her into his arms with a roughness that darkened the fox-fur glints in her eyes. A quick murk of fear and desire clouded her features. His shaggy head cast a shadow on her silver face as he bowed his neck to kiss her. She made her lips as soft as she could, as soft as the primeval ooze. “And you like that, huh?” he grunted. “My becoming bad.”

“It lets me be bad.” Her voice had gotten small and hurried, as if she might faint. “I love you because I can be a bad girl with you and you love it. You eat it up. Yum, you say.”

“Bad is relative,” he told her, from the sage height of his antiquity. “For my purposes, you’re a good girl. So it excites you, huh? Trying to bring this off.”

Robin admitted, “It’s kind of a rush.” She added, with a touch of petulance as if to remind him how girlish she was, “It’s my project. I want to stick with it.”

“Now you’re talking. Here, I woke up with an inspiration. Flash the twerp this.” It was another scrap of Buddhist death-acceptance: LET THE ONE WITH ITS MYSTERY BLOT OUT ALL MEMORY OF COMPLICATIONS. JUMP.

“It seems pretty abstract.”

“He’ll buy it. I mean, his subconscious will buy it. He thinks of himself as an intellectual. He majored in philosophy at Berkeley, I read in that stuff you downloaded from the Internet.”

She went to the terminal and pattered through the dance of computer control. “It went through, but I wonder,” she said.

“Wonder what?”

“Wonder how much longer before they find us and wipe us out. There are more and more highly sophisticated security programs; crackers are costing industry billions.”

“The seed is sown,” Bech said, still somewhat in Buddhist mode. “Let’s go to bed. I’ll let you suck my thumb, if you beg nicely. You bad bitch,” he added, to see if her eyes would darken again. They did.

But the sniffers were out there, racing at the speed of light through the transistors, scouring the binary code for alien configurations and rogue algorithms. It was Robin, now, who each morning rushed, in her terry-cloth bathrobe, on her pink-sided bare feet, down the two flights to the loft lobby and brought up the Times and scanned its obituary page. The very day after her Trojan horse, detected and killed, failed to respond, there it was: “Aldous Cannon, 43, Critic, Commentator.” Jumped from the balcony of his apartment on the forty-eighth floor. No pedestrians hurt, but an automobile parked on York Avenue severely damaged. Wife, distraught, said the writer and radio personality, whose Web site on the Internet was one of the most visited for literary purposes by college students, had seemed preoccupied lately, and confessed to sensations of futility. Had always hoped to free up time to write a big novel. In a separate story in Section B, a wry collegial tribute from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Bech and Robin should have felt jubilant. They had planted a flickering wedge of doubt beneath the threshold of consciousness and brought down a media-savvy smart-ass. But, it became clear after their initial, mutually congratulatory embrace, there above the breakfast-table confusion, the sweating carton of orange juice and the slowly toasting bagels, that they felt stunned, let down and ashamed. They avoided the sight and touch of each other for the rest of the day, though it was a Saturday. They had planned to go up and cruise the Met and then try to get an outdoor table at the Stanhope, in the deliciously crisp September air. But the thought of art in any form sickened them: sweet icing on dung, thin ice over the abyss. Robin went shopping for black jeans at Barneys and then up in the train to visit her parents in Garrison, while Bech in a stupor like that of a snake digesting a poisonous toad sat watching two Midwestern college football teams batter at each other in a screaming, chanting stadium far west of the Hudson, where life was sunstruck and clean.

Robin spent the night with her parents. She returned so late on Sunday she must have hoped her lover would be asleep. But he was up, waiting for her, reading Donne. The day’s lonely meal had generated a painful gas in his stomach. His mouth tasted chemically of nothingness. Robin’s key timidly scratched at the lock and she entered; he met her near the threshold and they softly bumped heads in a show of contrition. They had together known sin. Like playmates who had mischievously destroyed a toy, they slowly repaired their relationship. As Aldie Cannon’s wanton but not unusual (John Berryman, Jerzy Kosinski) self-erasure slipped deeper down into the stack of used newspapers, and the obligatory notes of memorial tribute tinnily, fadingly sounded in the PEN and Authors Guild newsletters, the duo on Crosby Street recovered their dynamism. Literary villains of Gotham, beware!