The Throat

THE THROAT

by PETER STRAUB

A being can only be touched where it yields. For a woman, this is under her dress; and for a god it's on the throat of the animal being sacrificed.

—George Bataille, Guilty

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe thanks to all who helped by contributing their insight, intelligence, advice, stories, and support: Charles Bernstein; Tom Noli; Hap Beasley; Scott Hamilton; Warren Vache; Lila Kalinich; Joe Haldeman; Eda Rak; my brother, John Straub; and my wondrous editor, Laurie Bernstein.

PART ONE

TIM UNDERHILL

1

AN alcoholic homicide detective in my hometown of Millhaven, Illinois, William Damrosch, died to ensure, you might say, that this book would never be written. But you write what comes back to you, and then afterward it comes back to you all over again.

I once wrote a novel called The Divided Man about the Blue Rose murders, and in that book I called Damrosch Hal Esterhaz. I never alluded to my own connections to the Blue Rose murders, but those connections were why I wrote the book. (There was one other reason, too.) I wanted to explain things to myself—to see if I could slice through to the truth with that old, old weapon, the battered old sword, of story telling.

I wrote The Divided Man after I was processed out of the army and had settled into a little room near Bang Luk, the central flower market in Bangkok. In Vietnam I had killed several people at long distance and one close up, so close that his face was right before me. In Bangkok, that face kept coming back to me while I was writing. And with it came, attached like an enormous barnacle to a tiny boat, the other Vietnam, the Vietnam before Vietnam, of childhood. When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call "colorful." After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it's just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be.

About a year after I straightened out, I came back to America and wound up writing a couple of books with a novelist named Peter Straub. These were called Koko and Mystery, and maybe you read them. It's okay if you didn't. Peter's a nice enough kind of guy, and he lives in a big gray Victorian house in Connecticut, just off Long Island Sound. He has a wife and two kids, and he doesn't get out much. Peter's office on the third floor of his house was the size of my whole loft on Grand Street, and his air conditioning and his sound system always worked.

Peter liked listening to my descriptions of Millhaven. He was fascinated with the place. He understood exactly how I felt about it. "In Millhaven, snow falls in the middle of summer," I'd say, "sometimes in Millhaven, flights of angels blot out the whole sky," and he'd beam at me for about a minute and a half. Here are some other things I told him about Millhaven: once, on the near south side of town, a band of children killed a stranger, dismembered him, and buried the pieces of his body beneath a juniper tree, and later the divided and buried parts of the body began to call out to each other; once a rich old man raped his daughter and kept her imprisoned in a room where she raved and drank, raved and drank, without ever remembering what had happened to her; once the pieces of the murdered man buried beneath the juniper tree called out and caused the children to bring them together; once a dead man was wrongly accused of terrible crimes. And once, when the parts of the dismembered man were brought together at the foot of the tree, the whole man rose and spoke, alive again, restored.

For we were writing about a mistake committed by the Millhaven police and endorsed by everyone else in town. The more I learned, the worse it got: along with everyone else, I had assumed that William Damrosch had finally killed himself to stop himself from murdering people, or had committed suicide out of guilt and terror over the murders he had already done. Damrosch had left a note with the words blue rose on the desk in front of him.

But this was an error of interpretation—of imagination. What most of us call intelligence is really imagination—sympathetic imagination. The Millhaven police were wrong, and I was wrong. For obvious reasons, the police wanted to put the case to rest; I wanted to put it to rest for reasons of my own.

I've been living in New York for six years now. Every couple of months I take the New Haven Line from Grand Central, get off at the Greens Farms stop, and stay up late at night drinking and talking with Peter. He drinks twenty-five-year-old malt whiskey, because he's that kind of guy, and I drink club soda. His wife and his kids are asleep and the house is quiet. I can see stars through his office skylight, and I'm aware of the black bowl of night over our heads, the huge darkness that covers half the planet. Now and then a car swishes down the street, going to Burying Hill Beach and Southport.

Koko described certain things that happened to members of my old platoon in and after the war, and Mystery was about the long-delayed aftermath of an old murder in a Wisconsin resort. Because we liked the idea, we set the novel on a Caribbean island, but the main character, Tom Pasmore—who will turn up later in these pages—was someone I knew back in Millhaven. He was intimately connected with the Blue Rose murders blamed on William Damrosch, and a big part of Mystery is his discovery of this connection.

After Mystery I thought I was done with Damrosch, with Millhaven, and with the Blue Rose murders. Then I got a call from John Ransom, another old Millhaven acquaintance, and because much in his life had changed, my life changed too. John Ransom still lived in Millhaven. His wife had been attacked and beaten into a coma, and her attacker had scrawled the words blue rose on the wall above her body.

2

I never knew John Ransom very well. He lived in a big house on the east side and he went to Brooks-Lowood School. I lived in Pigtown, on the fringes of the Valley, south of downtown Millhaven and a block from the St. Alwyn Hotel, and I went to Holy Sepulchre. Yet I knew him slightly because we were both tackles, and our football teams played each other twice a year. Neither team was very good. Holy Sepulchre was not a very big school, and Brooks-Lowood was tiny. We had about one hundred students in each grade. Brooks-Lowood had about thirty.

John Ransom said, "Hi," the first time we faced each other in a game. These preppies are a bunch of cupcakes, I thought. When play started, he hit me like a bulldozer and pushed me back at least a foot. The Brooks-Lowood quarterback, a flashy bit of blond arrogance named Teddy Heppenstall, danced right past me. When we lined up for the next play, I said, "Well, hi to you, too," and we butted shoulders and forearms, utterly motionless, while Teddy Heppenstall romped down the other side of the field. I was sore for a whole week after the game.

Every November, Holy Sepulchre sponsored a Christian Athletes' Fellowship Dinner, which we called "the football supper." It was a fundraiser held in the church basement. The administration invited athletes from high schools all over Millhaven to spend ten dollars on hamburgers, potato chips, baked beans, macaroni salad, Hawaiian Punch, and a speech about Christ the Quarterback from Mr. Schoonhaven, our football coach. Mr. Schoonhaven believed in what used to be called muscular Christianity. He knew that if Jesus had ever been handed a football, He would have demolished anyone who dared get between Him and the endzone. This Jesus bore very little resemblance to Teddy Heppenstall, and none at all to the soulful, rather stricken person who cupped His hands beneath His own incandescent heart in the garish portrait that hung just inside the church's heavy front doors.

Few athletes from other schools ever attended the football suppers, although we were always joined by a handful of big crew-cut Polish boys from St. Ignatius. The St. Ignatius boys ate hunched over their plates as if they knew they had to hold in check until next football season their collective need to beat up on someone. They liked to communicate threat, and they seemed perfectly attuned to Mr. Schoonhaven's pugnacious Jesus.

At the close of the season in which John Ransom had greeted me and then flicked me out of Teddy Heppenstall's way, a tall, solidly built boy came into the church basement near the end of the first, informal part of the football supper. In a couple of seconds we would have to snap into our seats and look reverential. The new boy was wearing a tweed sports jacket, khaki pants, a white button-down shirt, and a striped necktie. He collected a hamburger, shook his head at the beans and macaroni salad, took a paper cup of punch, and slid into the seat beside mine before I could recognize him.

Mr. Schoonhaven stood up to the microphone and coughed into his fist. A report like a gunshot resounded through the basement. Even the St. Ignatius delinquents sat up straight. "What is a Gospel?" Mr. Schoonhaven bellowed, beginning as usual without preamble. "A Gospel is something that may be believed." He glared at us and yelled, "And what is football? It too is something that can be believed."

"Spoken like a true coach," the stranger whispered to me, and at last I recognized John Ransom.

Father Vitale, our trigonometry teacher, frowned down the table. He was merely distributing the frown he wished to bestow on Mr. Schoonhaven, who was a Protestant and could not keep from sounding like one on these occasions. "What are the Gospels about? Salvation. Football is about salvation, too," said the coach. "Jesus never dropped the ball. He won the big game. Each of us, in our own way, is asked to do the same. What do we do when we're facing the goalposts?"

I took my pen out of my shirt pocket and wrote on a creased napkin, What are you doing here? Ransom read my question, turned over the paper, and wrote, I thought it would be interesting. I raised my eyebrows.

Yes, it's interesting, John Ransom wrote on the napkin.

I felt a flash of anger at the thought that he was slumming. To all the rest of us, even the St. Ignatius hoodlums, the cinder-block church basement was as familiar as the cafeteria. In fact, our cafeteria was almost identical to the church basement. I had heard that waiters and waitresses served the Brooks-Lowood students at tables set with linen tablecloths and silverware. Actual waiters. Actual silverware, made of silver. Then something else occurred to me. I wrote, Are you Catholic? and nudged John Ransom's elbow. He looked down, smiled, and shook his head.

Of course. He was a Protestant.

Well? I wrote.

I'm waiting to find out, he wrote.

I stared at him, but he returned to Mr. Schoonhaven, who was telling the multitude that the Christian athlete had a duty to go out there and kill for Jesus. Stomp! Batter! Because that was what He wanted you to do. Take no prisoners!

John Ransom leaned toward me and whispered, "I like this guy."

Again I felt a chill of indignation. John Ransom imagined that he was better than us.

Of course, I thought that I was better than Mr. Schoonhaven, too. I thought I was better than the church basement, not to mention Holy Sepulchre and, by extension, the eight intersecting streets that constituted our neighborhood. Most of my classmates would end up working in the tanneries, can factories, breweries, and tire recapping outfits that formed the boundary between ourselves and downtown Millhaven. I knew that if I could get a scholarship I was going to college; I planned to get out of our neighborhood as soon as possible. I liked the place I came from, but a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

That John Ransom had trespassed into my neighborhood and overheard Mr. Schoonhaven's platitudes irritated me, and I was about to snarl something at him when I noticed Father Vitale. He was getting ready to push himself off his chair and smack me on the back of my head. Father Vitale knew that man was sinful from the mother's womb and that "Nature, which the first human being harmed, is miserable," as St. Augustine says. I faced forward and clasped my hands in front of my plate. John Ransom had also noticed the surly old priest gathering himself to strike, and he too clasped his hands on the table. Father Vitale settled back down.

There must have been some envy in my irritation. John Ransom was a fairly good-looking boy, as good looks were defined in the days when John Wayne was considered handsome, and he wore expensive clothes with unselfconscious ease. One look at John Ransom told me that he owned closets full of good jackets and expensive suits, that his drawers were stuffed with oxford-cloth shirts, that he owned his own tie rack.

Mr. Schoonhaven sat down, the parish priest stood to give a prayer, and the dinner was over. All the football and baseball players from St. Ignatius and Holy Sepulchre began to move toward the steps up to the nave.

John Ransom asked me if we were supposed to take our plates into the kitchen.

"No, they'll do it." I nodded toward the weary-looking women, church volunteers, who were now standing in front of the serving tables. They had cooked for us, and most of them had brought beans and macaroni in covered dishes from their own kitchens. "How did you hear about this, anyhow?"

"I saw an announcement on our notice board."

"This can't be much like Brooks-Lowood," I said.

He smiled. "It was okay. I liked it. I liked it fine."

We started moving toward the stairs behind the other boys, some of whom were looking suspiciously at him over their shoulders.

"You know, Tim, I enjoyed playing against you," John Ransom said. He was smiling at me and holding out his hand.

I stared stupidly at his hand for a couple of beats before I took it. At Holy Sepulchre boys never shook hands. Nobody I knew shook hands in this way, socially, unless they were closing a deal on a used car.

"Don't you love being a lineman?" he asked.

I laughed and looked up from the spectacle of our joined hands to observe the expressions on the faces of Father Vitale and a few of the women volunteers. It took me a moment to figure out this expression. They were looking at me with interest and respect, a combination so unusual in my experience as to be rare. I understood that neither Father Vitale nor the volunteers had ever had much contact with someone like John Ransom; to them it looked as if he had come all the way from the east side just to shake my hand.

No, I wanted to protest, it's not me. Because I finally understood: every year, Holy Sepulchre sent out flyers about the Christian Athletes' Fellowship Dinner to every high school in the city, and not only was John Ransom the first Brooks-Lowood student who had ever come, he was the only student from the entire east side who had ever been interested enough to attend the football supper. That was the point: he was interested.

The other boys were already up in the church vestibule by the time John Ransom and I reached the bottom of the stairs. I could hear them laughing about Mr. Schoonhaven. Then I heard the voice of Bill Byrne, who weighed nearly three hundred pounds and was the Bluebirds' center, saying something about a "dork tourist," and then, even more horribly, "some east side fag who showed up to suck Underhill's dick." There was a burst of dirty laughter. It was just aimless, all-purpose hostility, but I almost literally prayed that John Ransom had not heard it. I didn't think a well-dressed hand-shaking boy like John Ransom would enjoy being called a pervert—a fairy, a queer, a cocksucker!

But because I had heard it, he had too, and from the hiss of indrawn breath behind me, so had Father Vitale. John Ransom surprised me by laughing out loud.

"Byrne!" shouted Father Vitale. "You, Byrne!" He put one hand on my right shoulder and the other on John Ransom's left and shoved us apart so that he could push between us. My classmates opened the creaking side door onto Vestry Street as Father Vitale squeezed into the space between John Ransom and myself. He had forgotten we were there, I think, and his big swarthy face moved past mine without a glance. I could see enormous black open pores on his nose, as if even his skin was breathing hard, stoking in air like a furnace. He was panting by the time he got to the top of the stairs. The stench of cigarettes followed him like a wake.

"That priest smokes too much," John Ransom said.

We reached the top of the steps just as the door slammed shut again, and we walked through the vestibule, hearing running footsteps on Vestry Street and the priest's yells of Boys! Boys!

"Maybe we should give him a minute," John Ransom said. He put his hands in his pockets and ambled off toward the arched entrance to the interior of the church.

"Give him a minute?" I asked.

"Let him catch his breath. He certainly isn't going to catch them." John Ransom was gazing appreciatively into the long, dim length of Holy Sepulchre. He might have been in a museum. I saw him take in the font of holy water and the ranks of flickering, intermittent candles, some new, some guttering nubs. Ransom looked into the depths of our church as if he were memorizing it: he wasn't smiling anymore, but his evident pleasure was not in any way diminished by the reappearance of Father Vitale, who came back in through the Vestry Street door and huffed and puffed like a tugboat through the gray air. He did not speak to either of us. As he moved down the aisle, Father Vitale almost instantly lost his individuality and became a scenic element of the church itself, like a castle on a German cliff or a donkey on a dusty Italian road. I was seeing Father Vitale as John Ransom saw him.

He turned around and inspected the vestibule in the same way, as if seeing it was understanding it. He was not the supercilious tourist for whom I had mistaken him. He wanted to take it in, to experience it in a way that would probably not have occurred to any other Brooks-Lowood boy. I thought that John Ransom would have taken that same attitude to the bottom of the world.

Later, John Ransom and I both went to the bottom of the world.

When I was seven years old, my sister April was killed— murdered. She was nine. I saw it happen. I thought I saw something happen. I tried to help her. I tried to stop whatever it was from happening, and then I was killed too, but not as permanently as April.

I guess I think the bottom of the world is the center of the world; and that sooner or later we all see it, all of us, according to our capacities.

The next time I saw John Ransom was in Vietnam.

3

Ten months after I graduated from Berkeley, I was drafted—I let it happen to me, not out of any sense that I owed my country a year of military service. Since graduating I had been working in a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue and writing short stories at night. These invariably came back in the stamped, self-addressed manila envelopes I had folded inside my own envelopes to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and Harpers—not to mention Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Antaeus, The Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares. At least I think it was Ploughshares. I knew that I did not want to teach, and I had no faith that teaching deferments would hold (they didn't). The more that my stillborn stories came back to me, the more discouraging it became to spend forty hours a week surrounded by other people's books. When my 2-S classification was adjusted to 1-A, I felt that I might have been given a way out of my impasse.

I flew to Vietnam on a commercial airline. About three-fourths of the passengers in tourist class were greenhorns like me, and the stewardesses had trouble looking at us directly. The only really relaxed passengers in our section of the plane were the weatherbeaten lifers at the back of the cabin, noncoms, who were as loose and clubby as golfers on a weekend flight to Myrtle Beach.

In the first-class cabin at the front of the plane sat men in dark suits, State Department functionaries and businessmen making a good thing for as long as they could out of cement or building supplies in Vietnam. When they looked at us, they smiled—we were their soldiers, after all, protecting their ideals and their money.

But between the patriots at the front and the relaxed, disillusioned lifers at the rear, in two rows just aft of first class, was another group I could not figure out at all. As a group, they were lean, muscular, short-haired, like soldiers, but they wore Hawaiian shirts and khaki pants, or blue button-down shirts with crisp blue jeans. They looked like a college football team at a tenth-year reunion. These men took no notice of us at all. What language I overheard was bright, hard-edged military jargon.

When one of the lifers walked past my seat, stretching his legs before going to sleep, I touched his wrist and asked him about the men at the front of the cabin.

He bent low and squeezed out a single word.

Greenies?

We landed at Tan Son Nhut in sunlight that seemed almost visibly dense. When the stewardess swung open the jet's door and the astonishing heat rolled in, I felt that my old life had gone forever. I thought I could smell the polish melting off my buttons. In that moment I decided not to be afraid of anything until I really had to be—I felt that it was possible to step away from my childhood. This was the first of the queer exaltations—the sudden sense of a new freedom—that sometimes visited me in Vietnam, and which I have never felt elsewhere.

My orders sent me to Camp White Star, a base in II Corps located outside of Nha Trang. There I was supposed to join other new members of my regiment for transport north to Camp Crandall in I Corps. One of the unexplained glitches not unusual in army life occurred, and the men I was supposed to join had been sent on ahead of me. I was left awaiting orders for eight days.

Every day I reported to a cynical captain named McCue, Hamilton McCue, who rubbed his square fingers over his babyish pink cheeks and assigned me to whatever task took his momentary fancy. I moved barrels from beneath the latrine and poured kerosene into them so old Vietnamese women could incinerate our shit; I cannibalized broken-down jeeps for distributor caps, alternators, and working fuel pumps; I raked stones out of the fifteen square yards of dust in front of the officers' club. Eventually McCue decided that I was having an unseemly amount of fun and assigned me to the body squad. The body squad unloaded corpses from the incoming helicopters, transferred them to the "morgue" while the paperwork was done, and then loaded them into the holds of planes going to Tan Son Nhut, where they were flown back to the States.

The other seven members of the body squad were serving out their remaining time in Vietnam. All of them had once been in regular units, and most of them had re-upped so that they could spend another year in the field. They were not ordinary people— the regiment had slam-dunked them into the body squad to get them out of their units.

Their names were Scoot, Hollyday, di Maestro, Picklock, Ratman, Attica, and Pirate. They had a generic likeness, being unshaven, hairy—even Ratman, who was prematurely bald, was hairy—unclean, missing a crucial tooth or two. Scoot, Pirate, and di Maestro wore tattoos (BORN TO DIE, DEALERS IN DEATH, and a death's head suspended over an umber pyramid, respectively). None of them ever wore an entire uniform. For the whole of my first day, they did not speak to me, and went about the business of carrying the heavy body bags from the helicopter to the truck and from the truck to the "morgue" in a frosty, insulted silence.

The next day, after Captain McCue told me that my orders still had not come through and that I should return to the body squad, he asked me how I was getting on with my fellow workers. That was what he called them, my "fellow workers."

"They're full of stories," I said.

"That's not all they're full of, the way I hear it," he said, showing two rows of square brown teeth that made his big cheeks look as if his character were being eroded from within. He must have seen that I had just decided I preferred the company of Ratman, Attica, and the rest to his own, because he told me that I would be working with the body squad until my orders came through.

On the second day, the intensity of my new comrades' disdain had relaxed, and they resumed the unfinishable dialogue I had interrupted.

Their stories were always about death.

"We're pounding the boonies," Ratman said, shoving another wrapped corpse into the back of our truck. "Twenty days. You listening, Underdog?"

I had a new name.

"Twenty days. You know what that's like out there, Underdog?"

Pirate spat a thick yellow curd onto the ground.

"Like forty days in hell. In hell you're already dead, but out in the boonies everybody's trying to kill you. Means you never sleep right. Means you see things."

Pirate snorted and tossed another body onto the truck. "Fuckin' right."

"You see your old girlfriend fuckin' some numbnuts fuck, you see your fuckin' friends get killed, you see the fuckin' trees move, you see stuff that never happened and never will, man."

" 'Cept here," Pirate said.

"Twenty days," Ratman said. The back of the truck was now filled with bodies in bags, and Ratman swung up and locked the rear panel. He leaned against it on stiff arms, shaking his drooping head. His fingertips were bulbous, the size of golf balls, and each came to a pointed tip at the spot where his fingerprints would have been centered. I found out later that he had earned his name by eating two live rats in a tunnel where his platoon had found a thousand kilos of rice. "Too fat for speed," he was supposed to have said.

"Every sense you got is out there, man, you hear a mouse move—"

"Hear rats move," di Maestro said, slapping the side of the truck as if to wake up the bodies in the green bags.

"—hear the dew jumpin' out of the leaves, hear the insects moving in the bark. Hear your own fingernails grow. Hear that thing in the ground, man."

"Thing in the ground?" Pirate asked.

"Shit," said Ratman. "You don't know? You know how when you lie down on the trail you hear all kinds of shit, all them damn bugs and monkeys, the birds, the people moving way up ahead of you—"

"Better be sure they're not coming your direction," di Maestro said from the front of the truck. "You takin' notes, Underdog?"

"—all kinds of shit, right? But then you hear the rest. You hear like a humming noise underneath all them other noises. Like some big generator's running way far away underneath you."

"Oh, that thing in the ground," Pirate said.

"It is the ground," said Ratman. He stepped back from the truck and gave Pirate a fierce, wild-eyed glare. "Fuckin' ground makes the fuckin' noise by itself. You hear me? An' that engine's always on. It never sleeps."

"Okay, let's move," di Maestro said. He climbed up behind the wheel. Hollyday, Scoot, and Attica crowded into the seat beside him. Ratman scrambled up behind the cab, and Picklock and Pirate and I followed him. The truck jolted down the field toward the main body of the camp, and the helicopter pilot and some of the ground crew turned to watch us go. We were like garbagemen, I thought. It was like working on a garbage truck.

"On top of which," Ratman said, "people are seriously trying to interfere with your existence."

Picklock laughed, but instantly composed himself again. So far, neither he nor Pirate had actually looked at me.

"Which can fuck you up all by itself, at least until you get used to it," Ratman said. "Twenty-day mission. I been on longer, but I never went on any worse. The lieutenant went down. The radio man, he went down. My best friends at that time, they went down."

"Where is this?" Pirate asked.

"This is Darlac Province," said Ratman. "Not too damn far away."

"Right next door," said Pirate.

"Twentieth day," said Pirate. "We're out there. We're after some damn cadre. Hardly any food left, and our pickup is in forty-eight hours. This target keeps moving, they go from ville to ville, they're your basic Robin Hood-type cadre." Ratman shook his head. The truck hit a low point in the road on the outskirts of the base, and one of the bags slithered down the pile and landed softly at Ratman's feet. He kicked it almost gently.

"This guy, this friend of mine, name of Bobby Swett, he was right ahead of me, five feet ahead of me. We hear some kind of crazy whoop, and then this big red-and-yellow bird flashes past us, big as a turkey, man, wings like fuckin' propellers, man, and I'm thinkin', okay, what woke this mother up! And Bobby Swett turns around to look at me, and he's grinnin'. His grin is the last thing I see for about ten minutes. When I come to I remember seeing Bobby Swett come apart all at once, like something inside him exploded, but—you get it?—I'm remembering something I didn't really see. I think I'm dead. I fucking know I'm dead. I'm covered in blood and this brownskin little girl is bending over me. Black hair and black eyes. So now I know. There are angels, and angels got black hair and black eyes, hot shit."

A brown wooden fence hid the long low shed we called the morgue, and when we had passed the stenciled graves registration sign, Ratman vaulted off the back of the truck and opened the storage bay. We had four hours turnaround time, and today there were a lot of bodies.

Di Maestro backed the truck up into the bay, and we started hauling the long bags into the interior of the shed.

"Long nose?" asked Pirate.

"Long nose, shit yes."

"A Yard."

"Sure, but what did I know? She was a Rhade—most of the Yards in Darlac Province, of which they got about two thousand, are Rhade. 'I died,' I say to this girl, still figuring she's a angel, and she coos something back at me. It seems to me that I can remember this big flash of light—I mean, that was something I actually saw."

"Good ol' Bobby Swett tripped a mine," said Pirate.

I was getting to like Pirate. Pirate knew I was the real subject of this story, and he was selfless enough to keep things rolling with little interjections and explanations. Pirate was slightly less contemptuous of me than the rest of the body squad. I also liked the way he looked, raffish without being as ratlike as Ratman. Like me, Pirate tended toward the hulking. He seldom wore a shirt in the daytime, and always had a bandanna tied around his head or his neck. When I had been out in the field for a time, I found myself imitating these mannerisms, except for when the mosquitos got bad.

"You think I don't know that? What I'm saying is"—Rat-man shoved another dead soldier in a zippered bag into the darkness of the shed—"what I'm sayin is, I was dead too. For a minute, maybe longer."

"Of what?"

"Shock," Ratman said simply. "That's the reason I never saw Bobby Swett get blown apart. Didn't you ever hear about this? I heard about it. Lotsa guys I met, it happened to them or someone they knew. You die, you come back."

"Is that true?" I asked.

For a second, Ratman looked wrathful. I had challenged his system of belief, and I was a person who knew nothing.

Pirate came to my rescue. "How come you could remember seeing this guy get wasted, if you didn't see it in the first place?"

"I was out of my body."

"Goddamn it, Underdog," said Picklock, and grabbed the handle of the heavy bag I had nearly dropped. "What the fuck is the matter with you?" Single-handedly, he tossed the bag into the shed behind us.

"Underdog, never drop the fucking bags," said di Maestro, and deliberately dropped a bag onto the concrete. Whatever was inside it gurgled and splatted.

For a moment or two we continued to unload the bodies into the shed.

Then Ratman said, "Anyhow, about a second later I found out I was still alive."

"What makes you think you're alive?" asked Attica.

"On top of everything else, this guy shoves his face into mine, and for sure he ain't no angel. I can see the goddamn canopy above his head. The birds start screeching again. The first thing I know for sure is Bobby Swett is gone, man—I'm wearing whatever's left of him. And this guy says to me, 'Get on your feet, soldier.' I can just about make out what he's saying through the ringing in my ears, but you know this asshole is used to obedience. I let out a groan when I try to move, because, man, every square inch of me feels like hamburger."

"Ah," said Picklock and Attica, nearly in unison. Then Attica said, "You're a lucky son of a bitch."

"Bobby Swett didn't even make it into one a these bags," said Ratman. "That fucker turned into vapor." He sullenly grabbed the handles of another bag, inspected it for a second, said, "No tag," and shoved it on top of the others in the shed.

"Oh, goody," said Attica. Attica had a smooth brown head, and his biceps jumped in his arms when he lifted the bags. He pulled a marker from his fatigues and made a neat check on the end of the bag. As he turned back to the truck, he grinned at me, stretching his lips without opening his mouth, and I wondered what was coming.

"Finally I got up, like in a kinda daze," Ratman said. "I still couldn't hear hardly nothing. This guy is standing in front of me, and I see he's totally crazy, but not like we go crazy. This mother's crazy in some absolutely new kinda way. I'm still so fucked up I can't tell what's so different about him, but he's got these eyes which they are not human eyes." He paused, remembering. "Everybody else in my platoon is sort of standing around watching. There's the little Yard mascot in these real loose fatigues, and there's this big guy in front of me on the trail with the sun behind his head. I mean this dude is in command. He is the show. Even the lieutenant, who is a fucking ramrod, is just standing there. Well, shit, I think, he just saw this guy raise me from the dead, what else is he gonna do? The big guy is still checking me out—he's scoping me. He's got these eyes, like some animal in a pit that just killed all the animals that were down there with him."

"He looked like Attica," said di Maestro.

"Damn straight he did," Attica said. "I'm a warrior, I ain't like you losers, I'm a fucking god of war."

"And then I see what's really funny about this guy," said Ratman. "He's got this open khaki shirt and tan pants and there's a little black briefcase on the ground next to him."

"Uh oh," said di Maestro.

"Plus which, there's scars all over his chest—punji stick scars. The bastard fell on punji sticks and he lived."

"Him," said di Maestro.

"Yeah, him. Bachelor."

"This is after twenty days. Bobby Swett gets turned into— into red fog right in front of me. I get killed or something like that, and nobody's moving because of this guy with the briefcase. 'I am Captain Franklin Bachelor, and I've been hearing about you,' this guy says to me. Like I didn't know. But he's really talking to all of us, he's just checking me out to see how bad I got hurt."

"And then I look down at my hands and I see they're this funny color—sort of purple. Even under Bobby's blood, I can see my skin is turning this purple color. And I push up my sleeve and my whole damn arm is purple. And it's swelling up, fast."

" 'This fool's a walking bruise,' says Captain Bachelor. He gives the whole platoon a disgusted look. We're in his part of the world now, by God, and we better know it. For two weeks we been getting in his way, and he wants us out. He's asking us politely, and we're on the same side, after all, which is worth remembering, but if we don't get outa his share of the countryside, our luck might take a turn for the worse. He just kind of smiles at us, and the Montagnard girl is standing right up next to him, and she's got an M-16, and he's got some kind of fancy machine I never saw before or since but I think was some kind of Swedish piece, and I got to thinkin' about what's in the briefcase, and then I got it. All at once."

"Got what?" I asked, and everyone in the body squad looked down, or at the stack of bodies in the shed, and then they unloaded the last two bodies. We went into the shed to begin the next part of the job. Nobody spoke until di Maestro looked at the tag taped to the bag closest to him and started checking the names.

"So you got out of there," he said.

"The lieutenant used Bachelor's radio, and even before the argument was over, we was on our way toward the LZ. When we got back to the base, we got our showers, we got real food, we got blasted every possible way, but afterward I never felt the same. Those scars. That fuckin' briefcase, man. And the little Yard chick. You know what? He was havin' a ball. He was throwin' a party."

"They more or less got their own war," said Scoot. He was a short skinny man with deep-set eyes, a ponytail, and a huge knife that dangled from his waistband on a dried, crinkly leather thong that looked like a body part. He could lift twice his own weight, and like a weight lifter he existed in some densely private space of his own.

"Green Berets are cool with me," said Attica, and then I understood part of it.

"Some of them were on my flight," I said. "They—"

"Can't we get some work done around here?" asked di Maestro, and for a time we checked the dog tags against our lists.

Then Pirate said, "Ratman, what was the payoff?"

Ratman looked up from beside a body bag and said, "Five days after we got back to camp, we heard about a couple dozen Rhade Yards took out about a thousand VC. They went through all these hamlets in the middle of the night. 'Course, the way I heard it, some a those thousand VC were little babies and such, but CIDG did itself a power of good that night."

"CIDG?" I asked.

"I heard of fifty-sixty guys, First Air Cav, offed by friendly fire," Scoot said. "Shit happens."

"Friendly fire?" I said.

"Comes in all shapes and sizes," Scoot said, smiling in a way I did not understand until later.

Ratman uttered a sound halfway between a snarl and a laugh. "And the rest was, I puffed up about two times my size. Felt like a goddamn football. Even my eyelids were swole up, man. They finally put me in the base hospital and packed me in ice—but not a bone broken, man. Not a bone broken."

"Now, I wonder what shape this boy is in," said Attica, patting the body without a tag. Nearly all the bags had been named by the time they got to us, and it was our task to ensure that all had names by the time they left. We had to unzip the bags and compare the name on the tag taped to the body bag with the name on the tag either insetted into the dead man's mouth or taped to his body. From Vietnam the bodies went back to America, where the army decanted them into wooden coffins and sent them home.

"Your turn, Underdog," said Attica. "Your hands ain't dirty yet, are they? You check this unit out."

"You puke on it, I'll stomp your guts out," said di Maestro, and surprised me by laughing. I had not heard di Maestro laugh before. It was a creaky, humorless bray that might have come from one of the bags lined up before us.

"Yeah, don't puke on the unit," said Pirate. "That really messes 'em up."

Attica had intended me to open the bag and find the dead soldier's tag from the moment he had noticed that the matching tag was missing. "You're new boy," he said. "This the new boy's job."

I moved toward Attica and the bag with the check. For a moment I suspected that when I unzipped the bag, some hideous creature would jump out at me, drenched in blood like Ratman after Bobby Swett had disintegrated in front of him. Because that was why he told the story! They wanted me to scream, they wanted my hair to turn white. After I vomited, they'd take turns stomping my guts out. It was their version of friendly fire.

I had not entirely left my old self behind on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut, after all.

Scoot was regarding me with real curiosity. "It's the new boy's job," Attica repeated, and I guessed that although the term was ridiculous when applied to him, he had been the new boy before me.

I bent over the long black bag. There were fabric handles on each end, and the zipper ran from one to the other.

I grasped the zipper and promised myself that I would not close my eyes. Behind me, the men took a collective breath. I pulled the zipper across the bag.

And I almost did vomit, not because of what I saw but because of the dead boy's stench, which moved like a huge black dog out of the opening in the bag. For a second I did have to close my eyes. A greasy web had fastened itself over my face. The gray ruined face inside the bag stared upward with open eyes. My stomach lurched. This was what they had been waiting for, I knew, and I held my breath and yanked the zipper another twelve inches down the bag.

The dead boy's mud-colored face was shot away from his left cheek down. His upper teeth closed on nothing. A few loose teeth had lodged in the back of his neck. The other tag was not in the cavity. The uniform shirt was stiff and black with blood, and the blast that had taken away the boy's lower jaw had also removed his throat. The small, delicate bones of the top vertebrae were fouled with blood.

"There's no tag on this guy," I said, though what I wanted to do was scream.

Di Maestro said, "You ain't finished yet."

I looked up at him. A big fuzzy belly drooped over his pants, and four or five days' growth of beard began just under his rapacious eyes. He looked like a fat goat.

"Who cleans these people up?" I asked before I realized that the answer might be that the new guy does.

"They make 'em presentable at the other end." Di Maestro grinned and crossed his arms over his chest. The tattoo of a grinning skull floated over a brown pyramid on his right forearm. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was now present all about me, the frame houses with peeling brickface crowded together, the vacant lots and the St. Alwyn Hotel. I saw my sister's face.

"If you can't find the tag inside the shirt, sometimes they put 'em in the pockets or the boots." Di Maestro turned away. The others had already lost interest.

I struggled with the top button of the stiffened shirt, trying not to touch the ragged edges of flesh around the collar. The odor poured up at me. My eyes misted.

The button finally squeezed through the hole, but the collar refused to separate. I pulled it open. Dried blood crackled like breakfast cereal. His throat had been opened like a surgical diagram. A few more teeth were embedded in the softening flesh. I knew that what I was seeing I would see for the rest of my life —the ropes of flesh, the open cavity that should have been filled with speech. Lost teeth.

The tag was nowhere inside his neck.

I unbuttoned the next two buttons and found only a pale bloodied chest.

Then I had to turn away to breathe and saw the rest of the body squad going efficiently down the rows of bodies, dipping into the unzippered bags, making sure the names matched. I turned back to my anonymous corpse and began fighting with a shirt pocket.

The button finally passed through the buttonhole, and I pushed my fingers into me opening, cracking it open like the pocket of a stiffly starched shirt. A thin hard edge of metal caught beneath my fingernail. The tag came away from the cloth with a series of dry little pops. "Okay," I said.

Di Maestro said, "Attica used to shake down these units in five seconds flat."

"Two seconds," Attica said, not bothering to look up.

I got away from the gaping body in the bag and held out the unreadable tag.

"Underdog's a pearl diver," di Maestro announced. "Now wash it off."

The stained, crusty sink stood beside a spattered toilet. I held the tag beneath a trickle of hot water. The stench of the body still clung to me, as gummy on my hands and face as the film of fat from ham hocks. Flakes of blood fell off the tag and dissolved to red in the water. I dropped the tag and scrubbed my hands and face with PhisoHex until the greasy feeling was gone. The body squad was cracking up behind me. I rubbed my face with the limp musty rag that hung between the sink and the toilet.

"Looking forward to the field?" Ratman asked.

"The unit's name," I said, picking the tag out of the pink water at the bottom of the sink, "is Andrew T. Majors."

"That's right," said di Maestro. "Now tape it to the bag and help us with the rest of them."

"You knew his name?" I was too startled to be angry. Then I remembered that he had the field officer's list, and Andrew T. Majors was the only name on it not also found on a tag. "You'll get used to it," di Maestro said, not unkindly.

I had not even understood what the rest of the body squad had seen at once, that Bobby Swett had been killed by an American explosive; and that Captain Franklin Bachelor, the Green Beret with the briefcase and the Rhade mistress, had scared Ratman's lieutenant right back to camp because he was leading the "cadre" the lieutenant had spent two weeks chasing.

When I turned up at the shed the next day, Attica actually greeted me. I jolted along in the back of the truck with Attica and Pirate and felt a naive pride in myself and what I was doing.

Five units tagged with the right names waited on the tarmac. All five had died of concussion in a field. (Walking across anything that resembles a field still makes me nervous.) Apart from killing them, the shell did no damage at all. Three of them were eighteen-year-olds who looked like wax dummies, one was a heavyset baby-faced lieutenant, and the fifth man was a captain in his mid-thirties. It was all over in about five minutes.

"Shall we pop over to the country club, play a round a golf?" Attica asked in a surprisingly passable British accent.

"I fancy a fucking tea dance," Scoot said. His slow-moving drawl made the sentence sound so odd that no one laughed.

"Well, there is one thing we could do," said Pirate.

Again I felt a comprehensive understanding from which I was excluded.

"I guess there is," said di Maestro. He stood up. "How much money you got on you, Underdog?"

I was tempted to lie, but I took what I had out of my pocket and showed it to him.

"That'll do," he said. "You ever been in the village?" When I looked blank he said, "Outside the gate. The other part of the camp."

I shook my head. When I got to White Star, I had been still so turned around that I had noticed only a transition from an Asian turmoil to the more orderly disorder of an army base. I had the vague impression of having gone through a small town.

"Never?" He had trouble believing it. "Well, it's about time you got wet."

"Get wet time," Pirate said.

"You walk through the gate. As long as you're on foot, they don't bullshit you. They're supposed to keep the gooks out, not keep us in. They know where you're going. You turn into the first lane and keep going until the second turn—"

"By the bubble," Attica said.

"You see a sign says BUBBLE in big letters. Turn right there and go under the sign. Go six doors down. Knock on the green door that says LY."

"Lee?"

He spelled it. "Li Ly. Say you want six one hundreds. It'll be about thirty bucks. You get 'em in a plastic bag, which you put into your shirt and forget you have. You don't want to look too fuckin' sneaky coming back through."

"Some Jack," Scoot said.

"Why not? Across from bubble, go into this little shack, pick up two fifths, Jack Daniels. Shouldn't cost more than ten bucks."

"New guy buys a round," said Attica.

Without confessing that I had no idea what one hundreds were, I nodded and stood up.

"Lock and load," said Scoot.

I walked out of the shed into the amazing noontime heat. When I went around the fence that isolated us, I saw soldiers lining up at the distant mess hall, the dusty walkways and the rows of wooden buildings, the two ballroom-sized tents, the flags. A jeep was rolling toward the gate.

By the time I reached the gate, I was sweating hard. There was no guardhouse or checkpoint, only a lone soldier beside the dirt road.

The road out of the main part of the camp extended straight through a warren of ramshackle buildings and zigzag streets— the military road was the only straight thing in sight. Two hundred yards away, in harsh brilliant light, I saw a real checkpoint with a flag and a guardhouse and a striped metal gate. The jeep was just beginning to approach the checkpoint, and a guard stood in front of the gate to meet it. I was aware of being watched as soon as I passed through the gate—it was like stepping out of the elevator into a men's suit department.

Beside a hand-painted sign reading HEINECKEN COLD BEER ROCK a Vietnamese boy in a white shirt lounged in a narrow doorway. An old woman carried a full basket of laundry down a steep flight of stairs. Vietnamese voices floated down from upper rooms. Two nearly naked children, one of them different from the other in a way I did not take the time to figure out, appeared at my legs and began whining for dollah, dollah.

By the time I reached the BUBBLE sign, five or six children had attached themselves to me, some of them still begging for dollah, others drilling questions at me in an incomprehensible mixture of English and Vietnamese. Two girls leaned out the windows of bubble and watched me pass beneath the sign.

I turned right and heard the girls taunting me. Now I could smell wood smoke and hot oil. The shock of this unexpected world so close to the camp, and an equal, matching shock of pleasure almost made me forget that I had a purpose.

But I remembered the green door, and saw the name Ly picked out in sharp businesslike black letters above the knocker. The children keened and tugged at my clothes. I knocked softly at the door. The children became frantic. I dug in my pockets and threw a handful of coins into the street. The children rushed away and began fighting for the coins. My entire body was drenched in sweat.

The door cracked open, and a white-haired old woman with a plump, unsmiling face frowned out at me. Certain information was communicated instantly and wordlessly: I was too early. Customers kept her up half the night. She was doing me a favor by opening the door at all. She looked hard at my face, then looked me up and down. I pulled the bills from my pocket, and she quickly opened the door and motioned me inside, protecting me from the children, who had seen the bills and were running toward me, squeaking like bats. She slammed the door behind me. The children did not thump into the door, as I expected, but seemed to evaporate.

The old woman took a step away from me and wrinkled her nose in distaste, as if I were a skunk. "Name."

"Underhill."

"Nevah heah. You go way."

She was still sniffing and frowning, as if to place me by odor.

"I'm supposed to buy something."

"Nevah heah. Go way." Li Ly snapped her fingers at the door, as if to open it by magic. She was still inspecting me, frowning, as if her memory had failed her. Then she found what she had been looking for. "Dimstro," she said, and almost smiled.

"Di Maestro."

"Da dett man."

The dead man? The death man?

She lowered her arm and gestured me toward a camp table and a wooden chair with a rush seat. "What you want?"

I told her.

"Sis?" Again the narrow half-smile. Six was more than di Maestro's usual order: she knew I was being diddled.

She padded into a back room and opened and closed a series of drawers. In the enclosed front room, I began to smell myself. Da dett man, that was me too.

Li Ly came out of the back room carrying a rolled cellophane parcel of handmade cigarettes. Ah, I thought, pot. We were back to the recreations of Berkeley. I gave Li Ly twenty-five dollars. She shook her head. I gave her another dollar. She shook her head again. I gave her another two dollars, and she nodded. She tugged at the front of her loose garment, telling me what to do with the parcel, and watched me place the wrapped cigarettes inside my shirt. Then she opened the door to the sun and the smells and the heat.

The children materialized around me again. I looked again at the smallest, the filthy child of two I had noticed earlier. His eyes were round, and his skin was a smooth shade darker than the dusty gold of the others. His hair was screwed up into tight rabbinical curls. Whenever the other children bothered to notice him, they gave him a blow. I sprinted across the street to another open-fronted shop and bought Jack Daniels from a bowing skeleton. The children followed me almost to the gate, where the soldier on duty scattered them with a wave of his M-16.

In the shed di Maestro unrolled the cellophane package and inspected each tight white tube. "Ly Li loves your little educated ass," he said.

Scoot had produced a bag of ice cubes from the enlisted man's club and dropped some of them into plastic glasses. Then he cracked open the first bottle and poured for himself. "Life on the front," he said. He drank the entire contents of his glass in one swallow. "Outstanding." He poured himself another glass.

"Take this slow," di Maestro said to me. "You won't be used to this stuff. In fact, you might wanna sit down."

"What do you think we did at Berkeley?" I said, and several of my colleagues called me a sorry-ass shit.

"This is a little different," di Maestro said. "It ain't just grass."

"Give him some and shut him the fuck up," said Attica.

"What is it?" I asked.

"You'll like it," di Maestro said. He placed a cigarette in my mouth and lit it with his Zippo.

I drew in a mouthful of harsh, perfumed smoke, and Scoot sang, "Hoo-ray and hallelujah, you had it comin' to ya, Goody for her, goody goody for me, I hope you 're satisfied, you rascal you."

Holding the smoke as di Maestro inhaled and passed the long cigarette to Ratman, I scooped ice cubes into a plastic glass. Di Maestro winked at me, and Ratman took two deep drags before passing the cigarette to Scoot. I poured whiskey over the ice and walked away from the table.

"Hoo-ray and hallelujah," Scoot rasped, holding the smoke in his lungs.

My knees felt oddly numb, almost rubbery. Something in the center of my body felt warm, probably the Jack Daniels. Picklock lit up the second cigarette, and it came around to me by the time I had taken a couple of sips of my drink.

I sat down with my back against the wall.

"Goody goody for it, goody goody for shit, goody goody for war, goody goody for whores…"

"We oughta have music," Ratman said.

"We have Scoot," said di Maestro.

Then the world abruptly went away and I was alone in a black void. A laughing void lay on either side of me, a world without time or space or meaning.

For a moment I was back in the shed, and Scoot was saying, "Damn right."

Then I was not in the shed with the body squad and the five units, but in a familiar world full of noise and color. I saw the peeling paint on the side of the Idle Hour Tavern. A neon beer sign glowed in the window. The paint had once been white, but the decay of things was as beautiful as their birth. Elm leaves heaped up in the gutter brown and red, and through them cool water sluiced toward the drain. Experience itself was sacred. Details were sacred. I was a new person in a world just being made.

I felt safe and whole—the child within me was also safe and whole. He set down his rage and his misery and looked at the world with eyes refreshed. For the second time that day I knew I wanted more of something: a taste of it was not enough. I knew what I needed.

This was the beginning of my drug addiction, which lasted, off and on, for a little more than a decade. I told myself that I wanted more, more of that bliss, but I think I really wanted to recapture this first experience and have it back entire, for nothing in that decade-and-a-bit ever surpassed it.

During that decade, a Millhaven boy who has much more to do with this story than I do began his odd divided life. He lost his mother at the age of five; he had been taught to hate, love, and fear a punishing deity and a sinful world. The boy's name was Fielding Bandolier, but he was known as Fee until he was eighteen; after that he had many names, at least one for each town where he lived. Under one of these names, he has already appeared in this story.

I was in Singapore and Bangkok, and Fee Bandolier's various lives were connected to mine only by the name of a record, Blue Rose, recorded by the tenor saxophonist Glenroy Breakstone in 1955 as a memorial to his pianist, James Treadwell, who had been murdered. Glenroy Breakstone was Millhaven's only great jazz musician, the only one worthy of being mentioned with Lester Young and Wardell Grey and Ben Webster. Glenroy Breakstone could make you see musical phrases turning over in the air. Passionate radiance illuminated those phrases, and as they revolved they endured in.the air, like architecture.

I could remember Blue Rose note for note from my boyhood, as I demonstrated to myself when I found a copy in Bangkok in 1981, and listened to it again after twenty-one years in my room upstairs over the flower market. It was on the Prestige label. Tommy Flanagan replaced James Treadwell, the murdered piano player. Side One: "These Foolish Things"; "But Not for Me"; "Someone to Watch Over Me"; "Star Dust." Side Two: "It's You or No One"; "Skylark"; "My Ideal"; '"Tis Autumn"; "My Romance"; "Blues for James."

4

When I emerged from the trance induced by Li Ly's cigarettes, I found myself seated on the floor of the shed beside the desk, facing the open loading bay. Di Maestro was standing in the middle of the room, staring with great concentration at nothing at all, like a cat. His right index finger was upraised, as if he were listening to a complicated bit of music. Pirate was seated against the opposite wall, holding another 100 in one hand and a dark brown drink in the other.

"Enjoy the trip?"

"What's in there besides grass?" My mouth was full of glue.

"Opium."

"Aha," I said. "Any left?"

He inhaled and nodded toward the desk. I craned my neck and saw two long cigarettes lying loose between the typewriter and the bottle. I took them from the desk and put them in my shirt pocket.

Pirate made a tsk, tsk sound against his teeth with his tongue.

I squinted into the sunlight on the other side of the bay and saw Picklock lying in the bed of the truck, either asleep or in a daze. He looked like an oversized dog. If you got too close he would bristle and woof. Di Maestro attended to his imperious music. Scoot was ranging back and forth over the body bags, humming to himself as he looked at the tags. Attica was gone. Ratman, at first glance also missing, finally appeared as a pair of boots protruding from beneath the body of the truck. One of the bottles of Jack Daniel's had disappeared, probably with Attica, and the other was three-fourths empty.

I discovered the glass in my hand. All the ice had melted. I drank some of the warm watery liquid, and it cut through the glue in my mouth.

"Who lives outside the camp?" I asked.

"Where you were? That's inside the camp."

"But who are they?"

"We have won their hearts and minds," Pirate said.

"Where do the kids come from?"

"Benny's from heaven," Pirate said, obscurely.

Di Maestro lowered his finger. "I believe I'd accept another cocktail."

To my surprise, Pirate got to his feet, walked in my direction across the shed, and put his hand around a glass left on the desk. He poured an inch of whiskey into it and gave the glass to di Maestro. Then he went back to his old place.

"When first I came to this fucking paradise," di Maestro said, still carefully regarding his invisible point in space, "there must have been no more than two-three kids out there. Now there's almost ten." He drank about half of what was in his glass. "I think all of 'em kinda look like Red Dog Atwater." This was the name of our CO.

Scoot stopped humming. "Oh, shit," he said. "Oh, sweet Jesus on a pole."

"Listen to that hillbilly," di Maestro said.

Scoot was so excited that he was pulling on his ponytail. "They finally got him. He's here. The goddamn son of a bitch is dead."

"It's a friend of Scoot's," Pirate said.

Scoot was kneeling beside one of the body bags, running his hands over it and laughing.

"Close friend," said Pirate.

"He nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects," said Scoot. He unzipped the bag in one quick movement and looked up, challenging di Maestro to stop him. That smell that set us apart came from the bag.

Di Maestro leaned over and peered down into the bag.

"So that's him."

Scoot laughed like a happy baby. "This makes my fuckin' month. And I almost missed him. I knew he'd get wasted some day, so I kept checkin' the names, but today's the day he comes in."

"He's got that pricky little nose," di Maestro said. "He's got those pricky little eyes."

Picklock stirred in the truck bed, sat up, rubbed his eyes, and grinned. Like Scoot, Picklock was generally cheered by fresh reminders that he was in Vietnam. The door at the far end of the shed opened, and I turned around to see Attica saunter in. He was wearing sunglasses and a clean shirt, and he brought with him a sharp clean smell of soap.

"Chest wound," di Maestro said.

"He died slow, at least," said Scoot.

"That Havens?" Attica's saunter picked up a little speed. He tilted his head and tipped an imaginary hat as he passed me.

"I found Havens," Scoot said. There was awe in his voice. "He almost got through."

"Who checked his tag?" Attica asked, and stopped moving for an instant.

Di Maestro slowly turned toward me. "On your feet, Underdog."

I picked myself up. A fragment of that peace that had altered my life had returned.

"Did you check the tags on Captain Havens?"

It was a long time ago, but I could dimly remember checking a captain's tags.

Attica's rich dark laugh sounded like music—like Glenroy Breakstone, in fact. "The professor didn't know shit about Havens."

"Uh huh." Scoot was gloating down into the bag in a way that made me uneasy.

I asked who Havens was.

Scoot tugged his ponytail again. "Why do you think I wear this fuckin' thing? Havens. This is my protest." The word struck him. "I'm a protestor, di Maestro." He stuck up two fingers in the peace symbol.

"Baby," di Maestro said. "Bomb Hanoi."

"Fuck that, bomb Saigon." He leveled an index finger at me. His eyes burned far back in his head, and his cheeks seemed sunken. Scoot was always balanced on an edge between concentration and violence, and all the drugs did was to make this more apparent. "I never told you about Havens? Didn't I give you the Havens speech?"

"You didn't get around to it yet," di Maestro said.

"Fuck the Havens speech," said Scoot. His sunken, intent look was frightening exactly to the extent that it showed he was thinking. "You know what's wrong with this shit, Underdog?" He gave the peace symbol again and looked at his own hand as if seeing the gesture for the first time. "All the wrong people do this. People who think there are rules behind the rules. That's wrong. You fight for your life till death do you part, and then you got it made. Peace is the fight, man. You don't know that, you're fucked up."

"Peace is the fight," I said.

"Because there ain't no rules behind the rules."

That I nearly understood what he was saying scared me—I did not want to know whatever Scoot knew. It cost too much.

Havens must have been the reason Scoot was on the body squad instead of out in the field where he belonged. I had been wondering what someone like Scoot could do that would be bad enough to banish him from his regular unit, and it occurred to me that now I was about to find out.

Scoot stared at di Maestro. "You know what's gonna happen here."

"We'll send him home," di Maestro said.

"Gimme a drink," Scoot said. I poured the rest of the Jack Daniels into my glass and walked across the shed to get a look at Captain Havens. I gave Scoot the glass and looked down at a brown-haired American man. His jaw was square, and so was his forehead. He had that pricky little nose and those pricky little eyes. A transparent sheet of adhesive plastic covered the hole in his chest. Scoot tossed the glass back to me and detached his knife from its peculiar thong, which looked more than ever like a body part. Then I saw what it was.

Scoot noticed my quiver of revulsion, and he turned his crazy glance on me again. "You think this is about revenge. You're wrong. It's proof."

Proof that he was right and Captain Havens had been wrong—wrong from the start. No matter what he said, I still thought it was revenge.

Attica took an interested step forward. Picklock sat up straight in the back of the truck.

Scoot leaned over Captain Havens's body and began sawing off his left ear. It took more effort than I had imagined it would, and the long cords of muscle stood out in his arm. At length the white-gray bit of flesh stretched and came away, looking smaller than it had on Captain Havens's head.

"Dry it out, be fine in a week or two," Scoot said. He placed the ear beside him on the concrete and bent over Captain Havens like a surgeon in midoperation. He was smiling with concentration. Scoot pushed the double-edged point beneath the hair just beside the wound he had made and began running the blade upward along the hairline.

I turned away, and someone handed me the last of the 100 that had been circulating. I took another hit, handed back the roach, and walked past Attica toward the door. "Make a nice wall mount," Attica said.

As soon as I got outside, the sunlight poured into my eyes and the ground swung up toward me. I staggered for a moment. The sound of distant shelling came to me, and I turned away from the main part of the camp, irrationally afraid that body parts were going to fall out of the sky.

I moved aimlessly along a dirt track that led through a stand of weedy trees—spindly trunks with a scattering of leaves and branches at their tops, like afterthoughts. It came to me that the army had chosen to let these miserable trees stand. Normally they leveled every tree in sight. Therefore, they wanted to hide whatever was behind the trees. I felt like a genius for having worked this out.

An empty village had been erected on the far side of the growth of trees. One-story wooden structures marched up both sides of two intersecting streets. There were no gates and no guards. Before me in the center of the suburb, on a little green at the intersection of the two streets, an unfamiliar military flag hung limply beside the Stars and Stripes.

It looked like a ghost town.

A man in black sunglasses and a neat gray suit walked out of one of the little frame buildings and looked at me. He crossed over the rough grass in front of the next two structures, glancing at me now and then. When he reached the third building he jumped up the steps and disappeared inside. He had looked as out of place as Magritte's locomotive coming out of a fireplace.

The instant the door closed behind Magritte, another opened and a tall soldier in green fatigues emerged. It was like a farce: a clockwork village where one door opened as soon as another closed. The tall soldier glanced at me, seemed to hesitate, and began moving toward me.

Fuck you, I thought, I have a right to be here, I do the dirty work for you assholes.

He kicked up dust as he walked. He was carrying a .45 in a black leather holster hung from his web belt, and two ballpoint pens jutted out of the slanted, blousy pocket of his shirt. There were two crossed rifles on his collar, and a captain's star on his epaulets. He carried something soft in one hand, and a wristwatch with a steel band hung upside down from a slot in his collar.

Too late, I remembered to salute. When my hand was still at my forehead, I saw that the man coming toward me had the face I had just seen in a body bag. It was Captain Havens. My eyes dropped to the name tag stitched to his shirt. The steel watch covered the first two or three letters, and all I could read was SOM.

Good trick, I thought. First I see him being scalped, then I see him coming at me.

I thought of wet elm leaves in a gutter.

The ghost of Captain Havens smiled at me. The ghost called me by name and asked, "How'd you find out I was here?" When he came closer I saw that the ghost was John Ransom.

5

"Just a guess," I said, and when his smile turned quizzical, "I was just following the road to see where it went."

"That's pretty much how I got here, too," Ransom said. He was close enough to shake my hand, and as he reached out he must have caught the stench of the shed, and maybe the smells of whiskey and the 100s too. His eyebrows moved together. "What have you been doing?"

"I'm on the body squad. Over there." I nodded toward the road. "What do you do? What is this place?"

He had grasped my hand, but instead of shaking it, he spun me around and marched me away from the empty-looking camp and into the spindly trees. "You better stay out of sight until you straighten up," he said.

"You should see what the rest of them are doing," I said, but sat down at the base of one of the trees and leaned against the slick, spongy bark. The man in the gray suit and sunglasses came out of the building he had entered earlier and strode back across the grass to the building he had left. He jumped up onto the stoop and touched his breast pocket before he went in. "Johnny got his gun," I said.

"That's Francis Pinkel, Senator Burrman's aide. Pinkel thinks he's James Bond. That's a Walther PPK in his shoulder holster. We're giving the senator a briefing, and then we'll take him up in a helicopter and show him one of our projects."

"You in some kind of private army?" He showed me the soft green cap in his hand. "You're one of those guys in Harry Truman shirts who carry briefcases and live out in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhades." I laughed.

"Sometimes we're asked to fly in wearing civvies," he said. He placed the beret on his head. It was a dark forest green with a leather roll around its bottom seam, and it had a patch with two arrows crossing a sword above the words De Oppresso Liber. It looked good on him. "How'd a lousy grunt like you learn so much?"

"You learn a lot, working on the body squad. What is this place, here?"

"Special Operations Group. We ride piggyback on White Star when we're not in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhade."

"You really do that?"

John Ransom explained that the CIDG program in Darlac Province had been going since the early sixties, but that he had been assigned to border surveillance in the highlands near the Laotian border, in Khan Due. Last year, they had parachuted in a bulldozer and carved a landing strip out of a jungle ridge line. While they looked for the Khatu tribesmen he was supposed to be working with, his actual troops were press-ganged teenagers from Danang and Hue. The teenagers were a little hairy, Ransom said. They weren't much like the Rhade Montagnards. He sounded frustrated when he told me about his troops, and angry with himself for letting me see his frustration—the teenagers played transistors on patrol, he said. "But they kill everything that moves. Including monkeys."

"How long have you been here?"

"Five months, but I've been in the service three years. Did the Special Forces training at Bragg, got here just in time to help set up Khan Due. It's not like the regular army." He had begun to sound oddly defensive to me. "We actually get out and do things. We get into parts of the country the army never sees, and our A teams do a lot of damage to the VC."

"I wondered who was doing all that damage," I said.

"These days people don't believe in an elite, even the army has problems with that, but that's what we are. You ever hear of Sully Fontaine? Ever hear of Franklin Bachelor?"

I shook my head. "We're a pretty elite group in the body squad, too. Ever hear of di Maestro? Picklock? Scoot?"

He nearly shuddered. "I'm talking about heroes. We have guys who fought the Russians with Germany—we have guys who fought the Russians in Czechoslovakia."

"I didn't know we were fighting the Russkies yet," I said.

"We're fighting communism," he said simply. "That's what it's all about. Stopping the spread of communism."

He had maintained his faith even during five months of shepherding teenage hoodlums through the highlands, and I thought I could see how he had done it. He was staring forward to see something like pure experience.

I wished that he could meet Scoot and Ratman. I thought Senator Burrman should meet them, too. They could have an exchange of views.

"How did you get on the body squad?" Ransom asked me.

Francis Pinkel popped out of a building and scouted the ghost town for marauding VC. A burly gray-haired man who must have been the senator came out after him, followed by a Special Forces colonel. The colonel was short and solid and walked as if he were trying to drive his feet into the ground by the sheer force of his personality.

"Captain McCue thought I'd enjoy the work."

I saw Ransom memorizing the name. He asked me where I was supposed to join my unit, and I told him.

He flipped up the watch hanging from his collar. "About time for my dog and pony show. Can't you get a shower and drink a lot of coffee or something?"

"You don't understand the body squad," I said. "We work better this way."

"I'm going to take care of you," he said, and began to trot out of the woods toward the senator's building. Then he turned around and waved. "Maybe we'll run into each other at Camp Crandall." It was clear he thought that we never would.

I met John Ransom twice at Camp Crandall. Everything about him had changed by the first time we met again, and by the second time he had changed even more. He'd had a narrow scrape at a fortified Montagnard village called Lang Vei. Most of his Bru tribesmen had been killed, and so had most of the Green Berets there. After a week, Ransom escaped from an underground bunker filled with the bodies of his friends. When the surviving Bru finally made it to Khe Sanh, the marines took away their rifles and ordered them back into the jungle. By this time a prominent marine officer had publicly ridiculed what he called the Green Berets' "anthropological" warfare.

6

I have used the phrase "the bottom of the world" twice, and that is two times too often. Neither I, nor John Ransom, nor any other person who returned ever saw the real bottom of the world. Those who did can never speak. Elie Wiesel uses the expression "children of the night" to describe Holocaust survivors: some children came out of that night and others did not, but the ones who did were changed forever. Against a background of night and darkness stands a child. The child, whose hand is extended toward you, who is smiling enigmatically, has come straight out of that dark background. The child can speak or must be silent forever, as the case may be.

7

My sister April's death—her murder—happened like this. She was nine, I was seven. She had gone out after school to play with her friend Margaret Rasmussen. Dad was where he always was around six o'clock in the evening, at the end of South Sixth Street, our street, in the Idle Hour. Mom was taking a nap. Margaret Rasmussen's house was five blocks away, on the other side of Livermore Avenue. It was only two blocks away if you crossed Livermore and went straight through the arched tunnel like a viaduct that connected the St. Alwyn Hotel to its annex. Bums and winos, of which our neighborhood had a share, sometimes gathered in this tunnel. My sister, April, knew she was supposed to go the three blocks around the front of the St. Alwyn and then back down Pulaski Street, but she was always impatient to get to Margaret Rasmussen's house, and I knew that she usually went straight through the tunnel.

This was a secret. It was one of our secrets.

I was listening to the radio alone in our living room. I want to remember, I sometimes think I really do remember, a sense of dread directly related to the St. Alwyn's tunnel. If this memory is correct, I knew that April was going to have crossed Livermore Street in no more than a minute, that she was going to ignore the safety of the detour and walk into that tunnel, and that something bad waited for her in there.

I was listening to "The Shadow," the only radio program that actually scared me. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. After this came a sinister, even a frightening, laugh. Not long before, Dad had shown me a Ledger article claiming that the real Shadow, the one the radio series was on, was an old man who lived in Millhaven. His name was Lamont von Heilitz, and a long time ago he called himself "an amateur of crime."

I turned off the radio and then, sneakily, switched it back on again in case Mom woke up and wondered what I was doing. I walked out of the front door and jogged down the path to the sidewalk, where I began to run toward Livermore Street. April was not waiting on the corner for the light to change, which meant that she had already crossed Livermore and would be in the tunnel. All I wanted was to get past the Idle Hour unnoticed and to see April's slight blond figure emerging into the sunlight on the far side of the tunnel. Then I could turn around and go home.

I don't believe in premonitions, not personally. I believe that other people have them, not me.

A stalled truck kept me from seeing across Livermore Avenue. The truck was long and shiny, with some big name painted on its side, ALLERTON maybe, or ALLINGHAM. Elms still lined Millhaven's streets, and their leaves were strewn thickly in the gutter, where clear water from a broken hydrant gurgled over and through them and carried a few, like toast-colored rafts, to the drain down the street. A folded newspaper lay half in, half out of the water; I remember a photograph of one boxer hitting another in a spray of sweat and saliva.

At last the truck began to move forward, ALLERTON or ALLINGHAM with it.

The truck moved past the front of the arched little bridge to the St. Alwyn annex, and I leaned forward to see through the traffic. Cars slid by and interrupted my view. April's pale blue dress was moving safely through the tunnel. She was about half of the way down its length, and had perhaps four feet to go before coming out into the disappearing daylight. The flow of cars cut her off from me again, then allowed me another flash of blue.

An adult-sized shadow moved away from the darkness of the wall and moved toward April. The traffic blocked my view again.

It was just someone coming home through the tunnel— someone on his way to the Idle Hour. But the big shadow had been moving toward April, not past her. I imagined that I had seen something in the big shadow's hand.

Through the sound of horns and engines, I thought I heard a voice rising to a scream, but another blast of horns cut it off. Or something else cut it off. The horns stopped blaring when the traffic moved—homeward traffic at six-fifteen on an autumn night, moving beneath the elms that arched over Livermore and South Sixth Street. I peered through the cars, nearly hopping with anxiety, and saw April's oddly limp back. Her hair fell back past her shoulders, and the whole streak of blond and pale blue that was her back went up. The man's arm moved. Dread froze me to the sidewalk.

For a moment it seemed that everything on the street, maybe everything in Millhaven, had stopped, including me. The thought of what was happening across the street pushed me forward over the leaves packed into the gutter and down into the roadbed. There was no traffic anymore, only an opening between cars through which I saw April's dress floating in midair. I moved into the opening, and only then became aware that cars were flowing past on both sides of me and that most of them were blowing their horns. For a moment, nearly my last moment, I knew that all movement had ceased in the tunnel. The man stopped moving. He turned toward the noise in the street, and I saw the shape of his head, the set of his shoulders.

At that point, though I was unaware of it, my father came out of the Idle Hour. Several other men came with him, but Dad was the first one through the door.

A car horn blasted in my ear, and I turned my head. The grille of an automobile was coming toward me with what seemed terrific slowness. I was absolutely unable to move. I knew that the car was going to hit me. This certainty existed entirely apart from my terror. It was like knowing the answer to the most important question on a test. The car was going to hit me, and I was going to die.

Writing about this in the third person, in Mystery, was easier.

My vision of things ceases with the car coming toward me with terrific unstoppable slowness, frame by frame, as a car would advance through a series of photographs. Dad and his friends saw the car hit me; they saw me adhere to the grille, then slip down to be caught on a bumper ornament and dragged thirty feet before the car jolted to a halt and threw me off.

At that moment I died—the boy named Timothy Underhill, the seven-year-old me, died of shock and injury. He had a fractured skull, his pelvis and his right leg were shattered, and he died. Such a moment is not visible from a sidewalk. I have the memory of sensation, of being torn from my body by a giant, irresistible force and being accelerated into another, utterly different dimension. Of blazing light. What remains is the sense of leaving the self behind, all personality and character, everything merely personal. All of that was gone, and something else was left. I want to think that I was aware of April far ahead of me, sailing like a leaf through some vast dark cloudgate. There was an enormous, annihilating light, a bliss, an ecstasy you have to die to earn. Unreasoning terror surrounds and engulfs this memory, if that's what it is. I dream about it two or three times a week, a little more frequently than I dream about the man I killed face-to-face. The experience was entirely nonverbal and, in some basic way, profoundly inhuman. One of my clearest and strongest impressions is that living people are not supposed to know.

I woke up encased in plaster, a rag, a scrap, in a hospital room. There followed a year of wretchedness, of wheelchairs and useless anger—all this is in Mystery. Not in that book is my parents' endless and tongue-tied misery. My own problems were eclipsed, put utterly into shadow by April's death. And because I see her benevolent ghost from time to time, particularly on airplanes, I guess that I have never really recovered either.

On October fifteenth, while I was still in the hospital, the first of the Blue Rose murders took place on almost exactly the same place where April died. The victim was a prostitute named Arlette Monaghan, street name Fancy. She was twenty-six. Above her body on the brick wall of the St. Alwyn, the murderer had written the words BLUE ROSE.

Early in the morning of October twentieth, James Treadwell's corpse was found in bed in room 218 of the St. Alwyn. He too had been murdered by someone who had written the words BLUE ROSE on the wall above the body.

On the twenty-fifth of October, another young man, Monty Leland, was murdered late at night on the corner of South Sixth and Livermore, the act sheltered from the sparse traffic down Livermore at that hour by the corner of the Idle Hour. The usual words, left behind by the tavern's front door, were painted over as soon as the police allowed by the Idle Hour's owner, Roman Majestyk.

On November third, a young doctor named Charles "Buzz" Laing managed to survive wounds given him by an unseen assailant who had left him for dead in his house on Millhaven's east side. His throat had been slashed from behind, and his attacker had written BLUE ROSE on his bedroom wall.

The final Blue Rose murder, or what seemed for forty-one years to be the final Blue Rose murder, was that of Heinz Stenmitz, a butcher who lived on Muffin Street with his wife and a succession of foster children, all boys. Four days after the attack on the doctor, Stenmitz was killed outside his shop, next door to his house. I have no difficulty remembering Mr. Stenmitz. He was an unsettling man, and when I saw his name in the Ledger's subhead (the headline was BLUE ROSE KILLER CLAIMS FOURTH VICTIM ), I experienced an ungenerous satisfaction that would have shocked my parents.

I knew, as my parents did not—as they refused to believe, despite a considerable scandal the year before—that there were two Mr. Stenmitzes. One was the humorless, Teutonic, but efficient butcher who sold them their chops and sausages. Tall, blond, bearded, blue-eyed, he carried himself with an aggressive rectitude deeply admired by both my parents. His attitude was military, in the sense that the character played over and over by C. Aubrey Smith in Hollywood films of the thirties and forties was military.

The other Mr. Stenmitz was the one I saw when my parents put two dollars in my hand and sent me to the butcher shop for hamburger. My parents did not believe in the existence of this other man within Mr. Stenmitz. If I had insisted on his presence, their disbelief would have turned into anger.

The Mr. Stenmitz I saw when I was alone always came out from behind the counter. He would stoop down and rub my head, my arms, my chest. His huge blond bearded head was far too close. The smells of raw meat and blood, always prominent in the shop, seemed to intensify, as if they were what the butcher ate and drank. "You came to see your friend Heinz?" A pat on the cheek. "You can't stay away from your friend Heinz, can you?" A sharp, almost painful pat on the buttocks. His thick red fingers found my pockets and began to insinuate themselves. His eyes were the lightest, palest blue eyes I've ever seen, the eyes of a Finnish sled dog. "You have two dollars? What are these two dollars for? So your friend Heinz will show you a nice surprise, maybe?"

"Hamburger," I would say.

The fingers were pinching and roaming through my pocket. "Any love letters in here? Any pictures of pretty girls?"

Sometimes I saw the miserable child who had been sent to his house, a child for whom Mr. and Mrs. Stenmitz were paid to care, and the sight of that hopeless Billy or Joey made me want to run away. Something had happened to these children: they had been squeezed dry and ironed flat They were slightly dirty, and their clothes always looked too big or too small, but what was scary about them was that they had no humanity, no light—it had been drained right out of them.

When I saw Mr. Stenmitz's name under the terrible headline I felt amazed and fascinated, but mainly I felt relief. I would not have to go into his shop alone anymore; and I would not have to endure the awful anxiety of going there with my parents and seeing what they saw, C. Aubrey Smith in a butcher's apron, while also seeing the other, terrible Heinz Stenmitz winking and capering beneath the mask.

I was glad he was dead. He couldn't have been dead enough, to suit me.

8

Then there were no more of the murders. The last place someone wrote BLUE ROSE on a wall was outside Stenmitz's Quality Meats and Home-Made Sausages. The man who wrote those mysterious words near his victims' bodies had called it quits. His plan, whatever it was, had been fulfilled, or his rage had satisfied itself. Millhaven waited for something to happen; Millhaven wanted the second shoe to drop.

After another month, in a great fire of publicity, the second shoe did drop. One of my clearest memories of the beginning of my year of convalescence is of the Ledger's revelations about the secret history of the murders. The Ledger found a hidden coherence in the Blue Rose murders and was delighted, with the sort of delight that masquerades as shock, by the twist at the story's end. I read a tremendous amount during that year, but I read nothing as avidly as I did the Ledger. It was terrible, it was tragic, but it was all such a tremendous story. It became my story, the story that most opened up the world for me.

As each installment of William Damrosch's story appeared in the Ledger, I cut it out and pasted it into an already bulging scrapbook. When discovered, this scrapbook caused some excitement. Mom thought that a seven-year-old so interested in awfulness must be awful himself; Dad thought the whole thing was a damn shame. It was over his head, out of his hands. He gave up on everything, including us. He lost his elevator operator job at the St. Alwyn and moved out. Even before he was fired from the St. Alwyn, he had given indications of turning into one of the winos who hung out in Dead Man's Tunnel, and after he had been fired and moved into a tenement on Oldtown Way, he slipped among them for a time. Dad did not drink in Dead Man's Tunnel. He carried his pint bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag to other places around the Valley and the near south side, but his clothes grew dirty and sour, he seldom shaved, he began to look old and hesitant.

The front pages of the Ledger that I pasted into my Blue Rose scrapbook described how the homicide detective in charge of the murder investigation had been found seated at his desk in his shabby basement apartment with a bullet hole in his right temple. It was the day before Christmas. The Ledger being what it was, the blood and other matter on the wall beside the body was not unrecorded. Detective Damrosch's service revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38 from which a single shot had been fired, was dangling from his right hand. On the desk in front of the detective was a bottle of Three Feathers bourbon, all but empty, an empty glass, a pen and a rectangular sheet of paper torn from a notebook, also on the desk. The words BLUE ROSE had been printed on the paper in block capitals. Sometime between three and five o'clock in the morning, Detective Damrosch had finished his whiskey, written two words on a sheet of notebook paper, and by committing suicide confessed to the murders he had been supposed to solve.

Sometimes life is like a book.

The headlines that followed traced out Detective William Damrosch's extraordinary background. His real name was Carlos Rosario, not William Damrosch, and he had been not so much born as propelled into the world on a freezing January wind—some anonymous citizen had seen the half-dead child on the frozen bank of the Millhaven River. The citizen called the police from the telephone booth in the Green Woman Taproom. When the police scrambled down from the bridge to rescue the baby, they found his mother, Carmen Rosario, stabbed to death beneath the bridge. The crime was never solved: Carmen Rosario was an illegal immigrant from Santo Domingo and a prostitute, and the police made only perfunctory efforts to find her killer. The nameless child, who was called Billy by the social worker who had taken him from the police, was placed into a series of foster homes. He grew up to be a violent, sexually uncertain teenager whose intelligence served mainly to get him into trouble. Given the choice of prison or the army, he chose the army; and his life changed. By now he was Billy Damrosch, having taken the name of his last foster father, and Billy Damrosch could use his intelligence to save his life. He came out of the army with a box full of medals, a scattering of scars, and the intention of becoming a policeman in Millhaven. Now, with the prescience of hindsight, I think he wanted to come back to Millhaven to find out who had killed his mother.

According to the police, he could not have killed April, because Bill Damrosch only killed people he knew.

Monty Leland, who had been killed in front of the Idle Hour, was a small-time criminal, one of Damrosch's informants. Early in his career, before his transfer from the vice squad, Damrosch had many times arrested Arlette Monaghan, the prostitute slashed to death behind the St. Alwyn, a tenuous link considering that other vice squad officers past and present had arrested her as often. It was assumed that James Treadwell, the piano player in Glenroy Breakstone's band, had been murdered because he had seen Damrosch kill Arlette.

The most telling connections between Detective Damrosch and the people he murdered entered with the remaining two victims.

Five years before the murders began, Buzz Laing had lived for a year with William Damrosch. This information came from a housekeeper Dr. Laing had fired. They was more than friends, the housekeeper declared, because I never had to change more than one set of sheets, and I can tell you they fought like cats and dogs. Or dogs and dogs. Millhaven is a conservative place, and Buzz Laing lost half of his patients. Fortunately, he had private money—the same money that had paid for the disgruntled housekeeper and the big house on the lake—and after a while, most of his patients came back to him. For the record, Laing always insisted that it was not William Damrosch who had tried to kill him. He had been attacked from behind in the dark, and he had passed out before he was able to turn around, but he was certain that his attacker had been larger than himself. Buzz Laing was six feet two, and Damrosch was some three inches shorter. But it was the detective's relationship with the last victim of the Blue Rose murderer that spoke loudest. You will already have guessed that Billy Damrosch was one of the wretched boys who passed through the ungentle hands of Heinz Stenmitz. By now, Stenmitz was a disgraced man. He had been sent to the state penitentiary for child molestation after a suspicious social worker named Dorothy Greenglass had finally discovered what he had been doing to the children in his care. During his year in jail, his wife continued to work in the butcher shop while broadcasting her grievances—her husband, a God-fearing hardworking Christian man, had been railroaded by liars and cheats. Some of her customers believed her. After Stenmitz came home, he went back behind the counter as if nothing had happened. Other people remembered the testimony of the social worker and the few grown boys who had agreed to speak for the prosecution.

It was what you would expect—one of those tormented boys had come back to exact justice. He had wanted to forget what he had done—he hated the kind of man Stenmitz had turned him into. It was tragic. Decent people would put all this behind them and go back to normal life.

But I turned the pages of my scrapbook over and over, trying to find a phrase, a look in the eye, a curl of the mouth, that would tell me if William Damrosch was the man I had seen in the tunnel with my sister.

When I tried to think about it, I heard great wings beating in my head.

I thought of April sailing on before me into that world of annihilating light, the world no living person is supposed to know. William Damrosch had killed Heinz Stenmitz, but I did not know if he had killed my sister. And that meant that April was sailing forever into that realm I had glimpsed.

So of course I saw her ghost sometimes. When I was eight I turned around on a bus seat and saw April four rows back, her pale face turned toward the window. Unable to breathe, I faced forward again. When I turned back around, she was gone. When I was eleven I saw her standing on the lower deck of the double-decker ferry that was taking my mother and myself across Lake Michigan. I saw her carrying a single loaf of French bread to a car in the parking lot of a Berkeley grocery store. She appeared among a truckful of army nurses at Camp Crandall in Vietnam —a nine-year-old blond girl in the midst of the uniformed nurses, looking at me with an unsmiling face. I have seen her twice, riding by in passing taxis, in New York City. Last year, I was flying to London on British Airways, and I turned around in my seat to look for the stewardess and saw April seated in the last seat of the last row in first class, looking out of the window with her chin on her fist. I faced forward and held my breath. When I looked around again, the seat was empty.

9

This is where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen.

10

MY first book, A Beast in View, was about a false identity, and it turned out that The Divided Man was also about a mistaken identity. I was haunted by William Damrosch, a true child of the night, who intrigued me because he seemed to be both a decent man and a murderer. Along with Millhaven, I assumed that he was guilty. Koko was essentially about a mistaken identity and Mystery was about the greatest mistake ever made by Lamont von Heilitz, Millhaven's famous private detective. He thought he had identified a murderer, and that the murderer had then committed suicide. These books are about the way the known story is not the right or the real story. I saw April because I missed her and wanted to see her, also because she wanted me to know that the real story had been abandoned with the past. Which is to say that part of me had been waiting for John Ransom's phone call ever since I read and reread the Ledger's description of William Damrosch's body seated dead before his desk. The empty bottle and the empty glass, the dangling gun, the words printed on the piece of notebook paper. The block letters.

The man I killed face to face jumped up in front of me on a trail called Striker Tiger. He wore glasses and had a round, pleasant face momentarily rigid with amazement. He was a bad soldier, worse even than me. He was carrying a long wooden rifle that looked like an antique. I shot him and he fell straight down, like a puppet, and disappeared into the tall grass. My heart banged. I stepped forward to look at him and imagined him raising a knife or lifting that antique rifle where he lay hidden in the grass. Yet I had seen him fall the way dead birds fall out of the sky, and I knew he was not lifting that rifle. Behind me a soldier named Linklater was whooping, "Did you see that? Did you see Underdown nail that gook?" Automatically I said, "Underhill." Conor Linklater had some minor mental disorder that caused him to jumble words and phrases. He once said, "The truth is in the pudding." Here is the pudding. I felt a strange, violent sense of triumph, of having won, like a blood-soaked gladiator in an arena. I went forward through the grass and saw a leg in the black trousers, then another leg opened beside it, then his narrow chest and outftung arms, finally his head. The bullet had entered his throat and torn out the back of his neck. He was like the mirror image of Andrew T. Majors, over whose corpse I had become a pearl diver for the body squad. "You got him, boy," said Conor Linklater. "You got him real good." The savage sense of victory was gone. I felt empty. Below his thin ankles, his feet were as bony as fish. From the chin up he looked as if he were working out one of those algebra problems about where two trains would meet if they were traveling at different speeds. It was clear to me that this man had a mother, a father, a sister, a girlfriend. I thought of putting the barrel of my M-16 in the wound in his throat and shooting him all over again. People who would never know my name, whose names I would never know, would hate me. (This thought came later.) "Hey, it's okay," Conor said. "It's okay, Tim." The lieutenant told him to button his lip, and we moved ahead on Striker Tiger. While knowing I would not, I almost expected to hear the man I had killed crawling away through the grass.

11

ON the morning of the day that John Ransom called me, I shuddered awake all at once. A terrible dream clung to me. I jumped out of bed to shake it off, and as soon as I was on my feet I realized that I had only been dreaming. It was just past six. Early June light burned around the edges of the curtain near my bed. I looked down from my platform over the loft and saw the books stacked on my coffee table, the couches with their rumpled covers, the stack of papers that was one-third of the first draft of a novel on my desk, the blank screen and keyboard of the computer, the laser printer on its stand. Three empty Perrier bottles stood on the desk. My kingdom was in order, but I needed more Perrier. And I was still shaken by the dream.

I was seated in a clean, high-tech restaurant very different from Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant two floors beneath my loft on Grand Street. (Two friends, Maggie Lah and Michael Poole, live in the loft between my place and the restaurant.) Bare white walls instead of painted palm fronds, pink linen tablecloths with laundry creases. The waiter handed me a long stiff folded white menu printed with the restaurant's name, L'Imprime. I opened me menu and saw Human Hand listed among Les Viandes. Human hand, I thought, that'll be interesting, and when the waiter returned, I ordered it. It came almost immediately, two large, red, neatly severed hands covered with what looked more like the rind of a ham than skin. Nothing else was on the white disc of the plate. I cut a section from the base of the left hand's thumb and put it in my mouth. It seemed a little undercooked. Then the sickening realization that I was chewing a piece of a hand struck me, and I gagged and spat it out into my pink napkin. I shoved the plate across the table and hoped that the waiter would not notice that I did not have the stomach for this meal. At that moment I woke up shuddering and jumped out of bed.

From the light that gathered and burned around the edge of the curtain, I knew that the day would be hot. We were going to have one of those unbearable New York summers when the dog shit steams like dumplings on the sidewalks. By August the entire city would be wrapped in a hot wet towel. I lay back down on the bed and tried to stop shaking. Outside, in the sunny space between buildings, I heard the cooing of a bird and thought it was a white dove. The dove made a morning sound, and my mind stalled for a moment on the question of whether the bird was a morning or a mourning dove. It had a soft, questioning cry, and when the sound came again, I heard what the cry was. Oh, it drew in its breath, who? Oh (indrawn breath), who, who? Oh, who? It seemed a question I had been hearing all my life.

I got up and took a shower. In the way that some people sing, I said, Oh, who? After I dried myself I remembered the two red hands on the white plate, and wrote this memory down in a notebook. The dream was a message, and even if I was never able to decode it, I might be able to use it in a book. Then I wrote down what the dove had said, thinking that the question must be related to the dream.

My work went slowly, as it had for four or five mornings in row. I had reached an impasse in my book—I had to solve a problem my story had given me. I wrote a few delaying sentences, made a few notes, and decided to take a long walk. Walking gives the mind a clean white page. I got up, put a pen in my shirt pocket and my notebook in the back pocket of my trousers, and let myself out of the loft.

When I walk I cover great distances, both distracted and lulled by what happens on the street. In theory, the buckets go down into the well and bring up messages for my notebook while my attention is elsewhere. I don't get in my own way; I think about other things. The blocks go by, and words and sentences begin to fill the clean white page. But the page stayed empty through Soho, and by the time I was halfway across Washington Square, I still had not taken my notebook out of my pocket. I watched a teenage boy twirl a skateboard past the drug dealers with their knapsacks and briefcases and saw a motorboat clipping over blue water. One of my characters was steering it. He was squinting into the sun, and now and then he raised his hand to shield his eyes. It was very early morning, just past sunrise, and he was speeding across a lake. He was wearing a gray suit. I knew where he was going, and took out my notebook and wrote: Charlie—speedboat—suit—sunrise—docks at Lily's house— hides boat in reeds. I saw fine drops of mist on the lapels of Charlie's nice gray suit.

So that was what Charlie Carpenter was up to.

I began walking up Fifth Avenue, looking at all the people going to work, and saw Charlie concealing his motorboat behind the tall reeds at the edge of Lily Sheehan's property. He jumped out onto damp ground, letting the boat drift back out into the lake. He moved through the reeds and wiped his face and hands with his handkerchief. Then he dabbed at the damp places on his suit. He stopped a moment to comb his hair and straighten his necktie. No lights showed in Lily's windows. He moved quickly across the long lawn toward her porch.

At Fourteenth Street I stopped for a cup of coffee. At Twenty-fourth Street Lily came out of her kitchen and found Charlie Carpenter standing inside her front door.Decided to stop off on your way to work, Charlie? She was wearing a long white cotton robe printed with little blue flowers, and her hair was shapeless. I saw that Lily had recently applied eggplant-colored polish to her toenails. You're full of surprises.

Then it stopped moving, at least until it would start again. At Fifty-second Street, I went into the big B. Dalton to look for some books. In the religion section downstairs I bought Gnosticism, by Benjamin Walker, The Nag Hammadi Library, and The Gospel According to Thomas. I took the books outside and decided to walk to Central Park.

When I got past the zoo I sat on a bench, took out my notebook, and looked for Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan. They had not moved. Lily was still saying You're full of surprises, and Charlie Carpenter was still standing inside her front door with his hands in his pockets, smiling at her like a little boy. They both looked very fine, but I was not thinking about them now. I was thinking about the body squad and Captain Havens. I remembered the strange, disordered men with whom I had spent that time and saw them before me, in our shed. I remembered my first body, and Ratman's story about Bobby Swett, who had disappeared into a red mist. Mostly, I could see Ratman as he was telling the story, his eyes angry and sparkling, his finger jabbing, his whole being coming to life as he talked about the noise the earth made by itself. Ratman seemed astonishingly young now—skinny, with a boy's unfinished skinniness.

Then, without wanting to, I remembered some of what happened later, as I occasionally do when a nightmare wakes me up. I had to get up off the bench, and I shoved my notebook in my pocket and started walking aimlessly through the park. I knew from experience that it would be hours before I could work or even speak normally to anyone. I felt as though I were walking over graves—as though a lot of people like Ratman and di Maestro, both of whom had only been boys too young to vote or drink, lay a few feet beneath the grass. I tensed up when I heard someone coming up behind me. It was time to go home. I turned around and went toward what I hoped was Fifth Avenue. A pigeon beat its wings and jumped into the air, and a circle of grass beneath it flattened out in the pattern made by an ascending helicopter.

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.

I saw the face of the man I had killed on a Chinese man carrying his daughter on his shoulders. He jumped up on an almost invisible trail. His face looked frozen—it was almost funny, all that amazement. I watched the Chinese man carry his daughter toward a Sabrett's hot dog cart. The girl's round face filled like a glass with serious, gleeful concentration. Her father held a folded dollar in his hand. He was carrying a ridiculous old rifle that was probably less accurate than a BB gun. He got a hot dog wrapped in white tissue and handed it up to his daughter. No ketchup, no mustard, no sauerkraut. Just your basic hot dog experience. I raised my M-16 and I shot him in the throat and he fell straight down. It looked like a trick.

Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan had turned away from me, they were grinding their teeth and wailing.

I sat down on a bench in the sun. I was sweating. I was not sure if I had been going east toward Fifth Avenue, or west, deeper into the park. I slowly inhaled and exhaled, trying to control the sudden panic. It was just a bad one. It was just a little worse than normal. It was nothing too serious. I grabbed one of the books I had bought and opened it at random. It was The Gospel According to Thomas, and here is what I read:

The Kingdom of Heaven

Is like a woman carrying a jug

Full of meal on a long journey.

When the handle broke,

The meal streamed out behind her, so that

She never noticed anything was wrong, until

Arriving home, she set the jug down

And found that it was empty.

The Kingdom of Heaven

Is like a man who wished to assassinate a noble.

He drew his sword at home, and struck it against the wall,

To test whether his hand were strong enough.

Then he went out, and killed the noble.

I thought of my father drinking in the alley behind the St. Alwyn Hotel. Hard Millhaven sunlight bounced and dazzled from the red bricks and the oil-stained concrete. Drenched in dazzling light, my father raised his pint and drank.

I stood up and found that my legs were still shaking. I sat down again before anyone could notice. Two young women on the next bench laughed at something, and I glanced over at them.

One of them said, "You are sworn to secrecy. Let us begin at the beginning."

Back on Grand Street I typed my notes into the computer and printed them out. I saw that I had mapped out the next few days' work. I thought of going downstairs for lunch so I could show Maggie Lah those enigmatic, barbaric verses from the gnostic gospel, but remembered it was Friday, one of the days she worked on her philosophy M.A. at NYU. I went into my own kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Fastened to the door is a photograph I cut out of the New York Times the day after Ted Bundy was executed. It shows his mother holding a telephone receiver to her ear while she plugs her other ear with an index finger. She has bangs and big glasses and concentration has pulled her thick eyebrows together. The caption is Louise Bundy, of Tacoma, Wash., saying goodbye by telephone to her son, Theodore Bundy, the serial killer who was executed for murder yesterday morning in Florida.

Whenever I see this terrible photograph, I think about taking it down. I try to remember why I cut it out in the first place. Then I open the refrigerator door.

The telephone rang as soon as I pulled the handle, and I closed the door and went into the loft's main room to answer it.

I said, "Hello," and the voice on the other end said the same thing and then paused. "Am I speaking to Timothy Underhill? Timothy Underhill, the writer?"

When I admitted to my identity, my caller said, "Well, it's been a long time since we've met. Tim, this is John Ransom."

And then I felt an of course: as if I had known he would call, that predetermined events were about to unfold, and that I had been waiting for this for days.

"I was just thinking about you," I said, because in Central Park I had remembered the last time I had seen him—he had been nothing like the friendly, self-justifying captain I had met on the edge of Camp White Star, parroting slogans about stopping communism. He had reminded me of Scoot. Around his neck had been a necklace of dried blackened little things I'd taken for ears before I saw that they were tongues. I had not seen him since, but I never forgot certain things he had said on that day.

"Well, I've been thinking about you, too," he said. Now he sounded a long way from the man who had worn the necklace of tongues. "I've been reading The Divided Man."

"Thanks," I said, and wondered if that was what he was calling about. He sounded tired and slow.

"That's not what I mean. I thought you'd like to know something. Maybe you'll even want to come out here."

"Out where?"

"Millhaven," he said. Then he laughed, and I thought that he might be drunk. "I guess you don't know I came back here. I'm a professor here, at Arkham College."

That was a surprise. Arkham, a group of redbrick buildings around a trampled little common, was a gloomy institution just west of Millhaven's downtown. The bricks had long ago turned sooty and brown, and the windows never looked clean. It had never been a particularly good school, and I knew of no reason why it should have improved.

"I teach religion," he said. "We have a small department."

"It's nice to hear from you again," I said, beginning to disengage myself from the conversation and him.

"No, listen. You might be interested in something that happened. I want, I'd like to talk to you about it."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Someone attacked two people and wrote blue rose near their bodies. The first person died, but the second one is in a coma. She's still alive."

"Oh." I couldn't say any more. "Is that really true?"

"The second one was April," he said.

My blood stopped moving.

"My wife, April. She's still in a coma."

"My God," I said. "I'm sorry, John. What happened?"

He gave me a sketchy version of the attack on his wife. "I just wanted to ask you a question. If you have an answer, that's great. And if you can't answer, that's okay too."

I asked him what the question was, but I thought I already knew what he was going to ask.

"Do you still think that detective, Damrosch, the one you called Esterhaz in the book, killed those people?"

"No," I said—almost sighed, because I half suspected what a truthful answer to that question would mean. "I learned some things since I wrote that book."

"About the Blue Rose murderer?"

"You don't think it's the same person, do you?" I asked.

"Well, I do, yes." John Ransom hesitated. "After all, if Damrosch wasn't the murderer, then nobody ever caught the guy. He just walked away."

"This must be very hard on you."

He hesitated. "I just wanted to talk to you about it. I'm— I'm—I'm not in great shape, I guess, but I don't want to intrude on you anymore. You told me more than enough already. I'm not even sure what I'm asking."

"Yes, you are," I said.

"I guess I was wondering if you might want to come out to talk about it. I guess I was thinking I could use some help."

You are sworn to secrecy.

Let us begin at the beginning.

PART TWO

FRANKLIN BACHELOR

1

My second encounter with John Ransom in Vietnam took place while I was trying to readjust myself after an odd and unsettling four-day patrol. I did not understand what had happened—I didn't understand something I'd seen. Actually, two inexplicable things had happened on the last day of the patrol, and when I came across John Ransom, he explained both of them to me.

We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. Damp gray twilight settled around us. We couldn't smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. A black, six-six, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound grunt named Leonard Hamnet fingered a letter he had received months before out of his pocket and squinted at it, trying to read it for the thousandth time while spooning canned peaches into his mouth. By now, the precious letter was a rag held together with tape.

At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the lieutenant yelled, "Shit!" and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.

The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy, named Tyrell Budd, coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.

One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the solid ground on the other side of the paddy. A little group of thatched huts was visible through the sparse trees. Then the two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. I experienced that endless moment of pure helplessness in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to leave it. The shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us. A shell fragment whizzed overhead, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage's helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground. A little smoke drifted up from it.

We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, but he was breathing. Leonard Hamnet picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder.

When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of the misery we were to encounter later in a place called la Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The huts were empty—something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again.

Michael Poole's map said that the place was named Bong To.

Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.

Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. "I caught a head wound," he said.

"You wouldn't have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner," Hamnet said.

Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. "I see double," he said. "I'll never get that helmet back on."

The medic said, "Take it easy, we'll get you out of here."

Out of here?" Spanky brightened up.

"Back to Crandall," the medic said.

A nasty little wretch named Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. "There ain't nobody here," Spitalny said. "What the fuck is going on?" He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.

Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat. "Spitalny, Tiano," the lieutenant said. "Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now."

Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was Spitalny's only friend, said, "You do it this time, Lieutenant."

Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.

"Hey, I'm gone, I'm already there," Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes had found us.

Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots.>

Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village. "Maybe I better take a look," the lieutenant said. He flicked his lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.

The lieutenant came hurrying back out of the hut. "Underhill, Poole," he said, "I want you to see this." Poole and I glanced at each other. Poole seemed a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen's eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same. "What is it, Lieutenant?" he asked.

The lieutenant gestured for us to follow him into the hut and went back inside. Poole looked as if he felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.

The lieutenant was fingering his sidearm just inside the hut. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on his lighter.

"You tell me what it is, Poole."

He marched into the hut, holding up the lighter like a torch.

Inside, he stooped down and tugged at the edges of a wooden panel in the floor. I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. "Now. Tell me what this is."

"It's where they hide the kids when people like us show up," I said. "Did you take a look?"

I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn't about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.

"Taking a look is your job, Underhill," he said.

For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.

"Give me the lighter," Poole said, and grabbed it away from the lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the lieutenant and me by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.

The lighter flared again. I could see Poole's extended arm, the jittering little flame, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed room was less than an inch above the top of Poole's head. He moved away from the opening.

"What is it? Are there any"—the lieutenant's voice made a creaky sound—"any bodies?"

"Come down here, Tim," Poole called up.

I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped down.

Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was sickeningly strong.

"What do you see?" the lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.

I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed old bloodstains.

"Hot," Poole said, and closed the lighter.

"Come on, damn it," came the lieutenant's voice. "Get out of there."

"Yes, sir," Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room. The topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like the left-hand pages of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.

"Well, well," Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains, and we saw dried blood on the metal links.

"I want you guys out of there, and I mean now," whined the lieutenant.

Poole snapped the lighter shut, and we moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand, but of course he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We stiff-armed ourselves up out of the hole. The lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and a thick, fleshy nose, and his adam's apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. "Well, how many?"

"How many what?" I asked.

"How many are there?" He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a good body count.

"There weren't exactly any bodies, Lieutenant," said Poole, trying to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.

"Well, what's that good for?" He meant, How is that going to help me?

"Interrogations, probably," Poole said. "If you questioned someone down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you could just drag the body into the woods."

"Field Interrogation Post," said the lieutenant, trying out the phrase. "Torture, Use Of, highly indicated." He nodded again. "Right?"

"Highly," Poole said.

"Shows you what kind of enemy we're dealing with in this conflict."

I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space with the lieutenant, and I took a step toward the door of the hut. I did not know what Poole and I had seen, but I knew it was not a Field Interrogation Post, Torture, Use Of, highly indicated, unless the Vietnamese had begun to interrogate monkeys. It occurred to me that the writing on the wall might have been names instead of poetry—I thought that we had stumbled into a mystery that had nothing to do with the war, a Vietnamese mystery.

For a second, music from my old life, music too beautiful to be endurable, started playing in my head. Finally I recognized it: "The Walk to the Paradise Gardens," from A Village Romeo and Juliet by Frederick Delius. Back in Berkeley, I had listened to it hundreds of times.

If nothing else had happened, I think I could have replayed the whole piece in my head. Tears filled my eyes, and I stepped toward the door of the hut. Then I stopped moving. A boy of seven or eight was regarding me with great seriousness from the far corner of the hut. I knew he was not there—I knew he was a spirit. I had no belief in spirits, but that's what he was. Some part of my mind as detached as a crime reporter reminded me that "The Walk to the Paradise Gardens" was about two children who were about to die and that in a sense the music was their death. I wiped my eyes with my hand, and when I lowered my arm, the boy was still there. I took in his fair hair and round dark eyes, the worn plaid shirt and dungarees that made him look like someone I might have known in my childhood in Pigtown. Then he vanished all at once, like the flickering light of the Zippo. I nearly groaned aloud.

I said something to the other two men and went through the door into the growing darkness. I was very dimly aware of the lieutenant asking Poole to repeat his description of the uprights and the bloody chain. Hamnet and Burrage and Calvin Hill were sitting down and leaning against a tree. Victor Spitalny was wiping his hands on his filthy shirt. White smoke curled up from Hill's cigarette, and Tina Pumo exhaled a long white stream of vapor. The unhinged thought came to me with absolute conviction that this was the Paradise Gardens. The men lounging in the darkness; the pattern of the cigarette smoke, and the patterns they made, sitting or standing; the in-drawing darkness, as physical as a blanket; the frame of the trees and the flat gray-green background of the paddy.

My soul had come back to life.

Then I became aware of something wrong about the men arranged before me, and again it took a moment for my intelligence to catch up to my intuition. I had registered that two men too many were in front of me. Instead of seven, there were nine, and the two men that made up the nine of us left were still behind me in the hut. A wonderful soldier named M. O. Dengler was looking at me with growing curiosity, and I thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. A sick chill went through me. I saw Tom Blevins and Tyrell Budd standing together at the far right of the platoon, a little muddier than the others but otherwise different from the rest only in that, like Dengler, they were looking directly at me.

Hill tossed his cigarette away in an arc of light, Poole and Lieutenant Joys came out of the hut behind me. Leonard Hamnet patted his pocket to reassure himself that he still had his mysterious letter. I looked back at the right of the group, and the two dead men were gone.

"Let's saddle up," the lieutenant said. "We aren't doing jack shit around here."

"Tim?" Dengler asked. He had not taken his eyes off me since I had come out of the hut. I shook my head.

"Well, what was it?" asked Tina Pumo. "Was it juicy?"

Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.

"Aren't we gonna torch this place?" asked Spitalny.

The lieutenant ignored him. "Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post. Field Interrogation Post."

"No shit," said Pumo.

"These people are into torture, Pumo. It's just another indication."

"Gotcha." Pumo glanced at me and his eyes grew curious. Dengler moved closer.

"I was just remembering something," I said. "Something from the world."

"You better forget about the world while you're over here, Underhill," the lieutenant told me. "I'm trying to keep you alive, in case you hadn't noticed, but you have to cooperate with me." His adam's apple jumped like a begging puppy.

The next night we had showers, real food, cots to sleep in. Sheets and pillows. Two new guys replaced Tyrell Budd and Thomas Blevins, whose names were never mentioned again, at least by me, until long after the war was over and Poole, Linklater, Pumo, and I looked them up, along with the rest of our dead, on the Wall in Washington. I wanted to forget the patrol, especially what I had seen and experienced inside the hut.

I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was sitting in the brothers' tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R&R in Taipei. Spanky Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisical: great jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his friends back in Little Rock and which he knew so well he could find individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions, changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under different names—"Cherokee" and "KoKo,"

"Indiana" and "Donna Lee"—or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words—"I Thought About You" (Art Tatum), "You and the Night and the Music" (Sonny Rollins), "I Love You" (Bill Evans), "If I Could Be with You" (Ike Quebec), "You Leave Me Breathless" (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, "Thou Swell," by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.

On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Gardens. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.

After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, "Enough." The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.

"I'm gonna have a smoke and a drink," Cotton announced, and pushed himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light, the light from another world, began to fade. Cotton sighed, plopped a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to Wilson Manly's shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.

Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. "What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it'll just go on like this day after day, or do you think it's going to get stranger and stranger?" He did not wait for me to answer. "I think it'll always sort of look the same, but it won't be—I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that's what happens when you're out here long enough. The edges melt."

"Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler," Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.

Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, he never looked as though he belonged in uniform. "Here's what I mean, kind of," he said. "When we were listening to that trumpet player—"

"Brownie, Clifford Brown," Spanky whispered.

"—I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time."

"Sweetie-pie," Spanky said softly. "You pretty hip, for a little ofay square."

"When we were back in that village," Dengler said. "Tell me about that."

I said that he had been there too.

"But something happened to you. Something special."

I shook my head.

"All right," Dengler said. "But it's happening, isn't it? Things are changing."

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and an American child. I smiled and shook my head. It came to me with a great and secret thrill that someday I would be able to write about all this, and that the child had come searching for me out of a book I had yet to write.

2

I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside into the slight coolness that followed the rain. The sun, visible again, was a deep orange ball far to the west. A packet of white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.

The shack where an enterprising weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor was all the way on the other side of camp. The enlisted men's club was rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese "33" beer in American bottles.

One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted man's club but closer than Manly's shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes away, at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy's. Billy had gone home long ago, but his club, supposedly an old French command post, had endured. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy's was closed. Billy's did not look anything like a French command post: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. There was no electricity and no ice. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal bootprints on either side of a hole in the floor.

The building stood in a grove of trees in the curve of the road, and as I walked downhill toward it in the sunset, a muddy camouflaged jeep gradually emerged from invisibility on the right side of the bar, floating out of the trees like an optical illusion.

Low male voices stopped when I stepped onto the rotting porch. I looked for insignia on the jeep, but mud caked the door panels. Some white object gleamed dully from the backseat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.

The door opened before I could reach the handle. A boy called Mike stood before me in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt too large for him. Then he saw who I was. "Oh," he said. "Yes. Tim. Okay. You can come in." He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me an uncomfortable smile.

"It's okay?" I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn't.

"Yesss." He stepped back to let me in.

The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. Pungent cordite hung in the air. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.

"Oh, hell," someone said from off to my left. "We have to put up with this?"

I turned my head and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even murkier.

"Is okay, is okay," said Mike. "Old customer. Old friend."

"I bet he is," the voice said. "Just don't let any women in here."

"No women," Mike said. "No problem."

I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.

"You want whiskey, Tim?" Mike asked.

"Tim?" the man said. "Tim?"

"Beer," I said, and sat down.

A nearly empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnny Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk's well-guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife.

"I just want to make sure about this," he said. "You're not a woman, right? You swear to that?"

"Anything you say," I said.

He put his hand on the gun.

"Got it," I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer. "Tim. Funny name. Sounds like a little guy—like him." He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. "Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress."

"Don't you like women?" I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse. I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.

"This rear-echelon dipshit is personally interfering with my state of mind," the drunk said to the burly man on his right. "Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue."

"Leave him alone," the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.

The drunken officer startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.

This is serious, he said. Most of the people in the world I do not despise are already dead, or should be.

There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it's pretty close.

Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian novel: You should remember what we have brought with us.

It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.

Your prisoner requires more drink, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.

"Whiskey," said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.

For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.

The haggard soldier, who had been silent until now, said, "Something is gonna happen here." He looked straight at me. "Pal?"

"That man is nobody's pal," the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.

For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.

"Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?" said the drunk. "Is that much understood?"

The soldier who had called me "pal" laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk's glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.

The captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. "Goddamn," he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said, "Goddamn" again, but in a different tone of voice.

I started laughing.

"Oh, this is—" He shook his head. "This is really—"

"Where have you been?" I asked him. John Ransom turned to the table. "Hey, I know this guy. He's an old football friend of mine."

The drunken major shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. "I don't care about football," he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.

"Buy the sergeant a drink," said the haggard officer. John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.

We watched the major's head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached his shirt, Ransom said, "All right, Jed," and the other man slid the .45 out from under the major's hand. He pushed it beneath his belt. "The man is out," Jed told us.

Ransom turned back to me. "He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that." Ransom did not have to specify who he was. "Jed and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking." He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.

For a moment no one spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it was going to disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.

"How come you're always fucked up when I see you?"

"You have to ask?"

He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.

"I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn't I?" I agreed that he had.

"What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn't even a real graves registration unit, was it?" He smiled and shook his head. "The only one with any training was that sergeant, what's his name. Italian."

"Di Maestro."

Ransom nodded. "The whole operation was going off the rails." Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. "I heard some things—" He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his eyes.

I asked if he were still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.

"You're not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?"

He opened his eyes. "You have a good memory. No, I'm not there anymore." He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. "I'm kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sanh. It'll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. I'd settle for a dry place on level ground."

"Where did you come from now?"

"Incountry." His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. "Way incountry. We had to get the major out."

"Looks like you had to pull him out, like a tooth."

My ignorance made him sit up straight. "You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?"

And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.

"In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don't even dream of—he's a legend. The Last Irregular. He fell on punji sticks and lived—he's still got the scars."

A legend, I thought. He was one of the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.

"Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That's straight."

Franklin Bachelor had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black-haired angel.

And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of the jeep.

"I did hear of him," I said. "I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too."

"His wife" Ransom said.

I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.

"We're stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States— Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we'll just keep pouring whiskey into him."

"He's going to want his gun back."

"Maybe I'll give it to him." His glance told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. "He's in for a rough time at Langley. There'll be some heat."

"Why Langley?"

"Don't ask. But don't be naive, either. Don't you think they're…" He would not finish that sentence. "Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?"

"I suppose something went wrong."

"The man stepped over some boundaries, maybe a lot of boundaries—but tell me that you can do what we're supposed to do without stepping over boundaries."

For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and pinstriped suits, questioning Major Bachelor. They thought they were serious men.

"It was like this place called Bong To, in a funny way." Ransom waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, "A ghost town, I mean. I don't suppose you've ever heard of Bong To."

"My unit was just there." His head jerked up. "A mortar round scared us into the village."

"You saw the place?"

I nodded.

"Funny story." Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it.

I said that I wasn't asking him to tell me any secrets.

"It's not a secret. It's not even military."

"It's just a ghost town."

Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and around in his hands before he drank.

"Complete with ghosts."

"I honestly wouldn't be surprised." He drank what was left in his glass and stood up. "Let's take care of Major Bachelor, Jed," he said.

"Right."

Ransom carried our bottle to the bar.

Ransom and Jed picked up the major between them. They were strong enough to lift him easily. Bachelor's greasy head rolled forward. Jed put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own pocket. Together they carried the major to the door.

I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It was dark now, and lantern light spilled through the gaps in the windows.

All of us went down the rotting steps, the major bobbing between the other two.

Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the major into the backseat. Jed squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.

John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for the next part of his job.

"I'll give you a ride back to camp," he said.

I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backward. "You know why that mortar round came in, don't you?" he asked me. He grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of camp. "He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a lieutenant went straight for the place instead." He was still grinning. "It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of roundeyes going in there."

"He didn't send in any more fire."

"No. He didn't want to damage the place. It's supposed to stay the way it is. I don't think they'd use the word, but that village is like a kind of monument." He glanced at me again.

Ransom paused and then asked, "Did you go into any of the huts? Did you see anything unusual there?"

"I went into a hut. I saw something unusual."

"A list of names?"

"I thought that's what they were."

"Okay," Ransom said. "There's a difference between private and public shame. Between what's acknowledged and what is not acknowledged. Some things are acceptable, as long as you don't talk about them." He looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. "I've been learning things," Ransom said.

I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut's basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.

"One day in Bong To, a little boy disappeared."

My heart gave a thud.

"Say, three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He's just gone—poof. A couple of months later, it happened again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they scour the village. The villagers scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest."

"What happens next is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a local no-good, in fact. He's just standing near the well with his hands together. He's hungry—that's what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants more. He wants to be fed. " The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.

"Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she's about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does? She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl's face and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers."

"The next night, two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chiefs hut. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, he saw her pass into the chief's hut without the benefit of the door."

"The dead wife comes back out through the wall of the chief's hut. She's licking blood off her hands."

"The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. All these women go howling up to the chief's door. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find."

Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.

"But what happened?" I asked. "How did you hear about it?"

He shrugged. "I probably heard that story half a dozen times, but Bachelor knew more about it than anyone I ever met before. They probably carried out the pieces of the chief's body and threw them into the excrement pit. And over months, bit by bit, everybody in the village crossed a kind of border. By that time, they were seeing ghosts all the time. Bachelor says they turned into ghosts."

"Do you think they turned into ghosts?"

"I think Major Bachelor turned into a ghost, if you ask me. Let me tell you something. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people."

I got out of the jeep and closed the door Ransom peered at me through the jeep's window. "Take better care of yourself."

"Good luck with your Bru."

"The Bru are fantastic" He slammed the jeep into gear and sho away, cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took off to wherever he was going.

PART THREE

JOHN RAMSOM

1

Once I had started remembering John Ransom, I couldn't stop. I tried to write, but my book had flattened out into a movie starring Kent Smith and Gloria Grahame. I called a travel agent and booked a ticket to Millhaven for Wednesday morning.

The imagination sometimes makes demands the rest of the mind resists, and Tuesday night I dreamed that the body Scoot was busily dismembering was my own.

I jerked awake into suffocating darkness.

The sheet beneath me was cold and greasy with sweat. In the morning the blurry yellow pattern of my body would be printed on the cotton. My heart thundered. I turned over the pillow and shifted to a dry place on the bed.

2

I realized at last that the thought of seeing Millhaven again filled me with dread. Millhaven and Vietnam were oddly interchangeable, fragments of some greater whole, some larger story—a lost story that preceded the fables of Orpheus and Lot's wife and said, You will lose everything if you turn around and look back. You turn around, you look back. Are you destroyed? Or is it that you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret, filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself?

Early Wednesday morning, I showered and packed and went out onto the street to get a cab.

3

I got to the gate, boarded the plane, took my seat, buckled myself in, and it hit me that, at nearly fifty years of age, I was traveling halfway across the continent to help someone look for a madman.

Yet my motives had been clear from the moment that John Ransom had told me his wife's name. I was going to Millhaven because I thought that I might finally learn who had killed my sister.

The stewardess appeared in front of me to ask what I wanted to drink. My brain said the words, "Club soda, please," but what came out of my mouth was "Vodka on the rocks." She smiled and handed me the little airline bottle and a plastic glass full of ice cubes. I had not had a drink in eight years. I twisted off the cap of the little bottle and poured vodka over the ice cubes, hardly believing I was doing it. The stewardess moved on to the next row. The sharp, bitter smell of alcohol rose up from the glass. If I had wanted to, I could have stood up, walked to the toilet, and poured the stuff into the sink. Death was leaning against the bulkhead at the front of the plane, smiling at me. I smiled back and raised the glass and gave myself a good cold mouthful of vodka. It tasted like flowers. An unheeded little voice within me shouted no no no, o god no, this is not what you want, but I swallowed the mouthful of vodka and immediately took another, because it was exactly what I wanted. Now it tasted like a frozen cloud— the most delicious frozen cloud in the history of the world. Death, who was a dark-haired, ironic-looking man in a gray double-breasted suit, nodded and smiled. I remembered everything I used to like about drinking. When I thought about it, eight years of abstinence really deserved a celebratory drink or two. When the stewardess came back, I smiled nicely at her, waggled my glass, and asked for another. And she gave it to me, just like that.

I idly turned around to see who else was on the plane, and the alcohol in my system instantly turned to ice: two rows behind me, at the window seat in the last row of the first-class section, was my sister April. For a moment our eyes met, and then she turned away toward the gray nothingness beyond the window, her chin propped on her nine-year-old palm. I had not seen her for so long that I had managed to forget the conflicting, violent sensations her appearances caused in me. I experienced a rush of love, mixed as always with grief and sadness, also with anger. I took her in, her hair, her bored, slightly discontented face. She was still wearing the blue dress in which she had died. Her eyes shifted toward me again, and I nearly stood up and stepped out into the aisle. Before I had time to move, I found myself staring at the covered buttons on the uniform of the stewardess who had placed herself between April and myself. I looked up into her face, and she took a step back.

"Can I help you with anything?" she asked. "Another vodka, sir?"

I nodded, and she moved up the aisle to fetch the drink. April's seat was empty.

4

After I sauntered dreamily out into the clean, reverberant spaces of Millhaven's airport, looking for another upright gray wraith like myself, I didn't recognize the overweight balding executive in the handsome gray suit who had been inspecting my fellow passengers until he finally stepped right in front of me. He said, "Tim!" and burst out laughing. Finally I saw John Ransom's familiar face in the face of the man before me, and I smiled. He had put on a lot of pounds and lost a lot of hair since Camp Crandall. Except for an enigmatic, almost restless quality in the cast of his features, the man pronouncing my name before me might have been the president of an insurance company. He put his arms around me, and for a second everything we had seen of our generation's war came to life around us, distanced now, a part of our lives we had survived.

"Why are you always wrecked whenever I see you?" he asked.

"Because when I see you I never know what I'm getting into," I told him. "But this is just a temporary lapse."

"I don't mind if you drink."

"Don't be rash," I said. "I think the whole idea of coming out here must have spooked me a little."

Of course Ransom knew nothing of my early life—I still had to tell him why I had been so fascinated by William Damrosch and the murders he was supposed to have committed—and he let his arms drop and stepped back. "Well, that makes two of us. Let's go down and get your bags."

When John Ransom left the freeway to drive through downtown Millhaven on the way to the near east side, I saw a city that was only half-familiar. Whole rows of old brick buildings turned brown by grime had been replaced by bright new structures that gleamed in the afternoon light; a parking lot had been transformed into a sparkling little park; on the site of the gloomy old auditorium was a complex of attractive concert halls and theaters that Ransom identified as the Center for the Performing Arts.

It was like driving through the back lot of a movie studio— the new hotels and office buildings that reshaped the skyline seemed illusory, like film sets built over the actual face of the past. After New York, the city seemed unbelievably clean and quiet. I wondered if the troubling, disorderly city I remembered had disappeared behind a thousand face-lifts.

"I suppose Arkham College looks like Stanford these days," I said.

He grunted. "No, Arkham's the same old rock pile it always was. We get by. Barely."

"How did you wind up there in the first place?"

"Come to think of it, which I seldom do, that must seem a little strange."

I waited for the story.

"I went there because of a specific man, Alan Brookner, who was the head of the religion department. He was famous in my field, I mean really famous, one of the three or four most significant people in the field. When I was in graduate school, I hunted down everything he'd ever written. He was the only real scholar at Arkham, of course. I think they gave him his first job, and he never even thought about leaving for a more glamorous position. That kind of prestige never meant anything to him. Once the school realized what they had, they let him write his own ticket, because they thought he'd attract other people of his stature."

"Well, he attracted you."

"Ah, but I'm not even close to Alan's stature. He was one of a kind. And when other famous religious scholars came out here, they generally took one look at Arkham and went back to the schools they came from. He did bring in a lot of good graduate students, but even that's fallen off a bit lately. Well, considerably, to tell you the truth." John Ransom shook his head and fell silent for a moment.

Now we were driving past Goethe Avenue's sprawling stone mansions, long ago broken up into offices and apartment houses. The great elms that had lined these streets had all died, but Goethe Avenue seemed almost unchanged.

"I gather that you became quite close to this professor," I said, having forgotten his name.

"You could say that," Ransom said. "I married his daughter."

"Ah," I said. "Tell me about that." After Vietnam, he had gone to India, and in India he had turned back toward life. He had studied, meditated, studied, meditated, courted calm and won it: he would always be the person who had burrowed through a mountain of dead bodies, but he was also the person who had crawled out on the other side and survived. In all of this, he had a Master, and the Master had helped him see over the horrors he had endured. His Master, the leader of a small following containing only a few non-Indians like Ransom, was a young woman of great simplicity and beauty named Mina.

After a year in the ashram, his nightmares and sudden attacks of panic had left him. He had seen the other side of the absolute darkness into which Vietnam had drawn him. Mina had sent him intact out into the world again, and he had spent three years studying in England and then another three at Harvard without telling more than half a dozen people that he had once been a Green Beret in Vietnam. Then Alan Brookner had brought him back to Millhaven.

A month after he began working at Arkham under Brookner, he had met Brookner's daughter, April.

John thought that he might have fallen in love with April Brookner the first time he had seen her. She had wandered into the study to borrow a book while he was helping her father organize a collection of essays for publication. A tall blond athletic-looking girl in her early twenties, April had shaken his hand with surprising firmness and smiled into his eyes. "I'm glad you're helping him with this muddle," she had said. "Left to his own devices, he'd still be getting mixed up between Vorstellung and vijnapti, not that he isn't anyhow." The incongruity between her tennis-player looks and allusions to Brentano and Sanskrit philosophy surprised him, and he grinned. She and her father had exchanged a few good-natured insults, and then April wandered off toward her father's fiction shelves. She stretched up to take down a book. Ransom had not been able to take his eyes off her. "I'm looking for a work of radically impure consciousness," she said. "What do you think, Raymond Chandler or William Burroughs?" The title of Ransom's dissertation had been The Concept of Pure Consciousness, and his grin grew wider. "The Long Goodbye," he said. "Oh, I don't think that's impure enough," she said. She turned over the book in her hands and cocked her head. "But I guess I'll settle for it." She showed him the title of the book she had already selected: it was The Long Goodbye. Then she dazzled him with a smile and left the room. "Impure consciousness?" Ransom had asked the old man. "Watch out for that one," said the old man. "I think her first word was virtuoso." Ransom asked if she really knew the difference between Vorstellung and vijnapti. "Not as well as I do," Brookner had grumped. "Why don't you come for dinner next Friday?" On Friday, Ransom had shown up embarrassingly overdressed in his best suit. He had still enjoyed dinner, yet April was so much younger than he that he could not imagine actually taking her out on a date. And he was not sure he actually knew what a "date" was anymore, if he ever had. He didn't think it could mean the same thing to April Brookner that it did to him—she'd want him to play tennis, or spend half the night dancing. She looked as if she relished exertion. Ransom was stronger than he appeared to be (especially when he was wearing a banker's suit). He jogged, he swam in the college pool, but he did not dance or play tennis. His idea of a night out involved an interesting meal and a good bottle of wine: April looked as if she would follow a couple of hours of archery with a good fast run up one of the minor Alps. He asked her if she had liked the Chandler novel. "What a poignant book," she said. "The hero makes one friend, and by the end he can't stand him. The loneliness is so brutal that the most emotional passages are either about violence or bars." "Deliver me from this young woman, Ransom," Brookner said. "She frightens me." Ransom asked, "Was virtuoso really her first word?" "No," April said. "My first words were senile dementia."

About a year ago, the memory of this remark had ceased to be funny.

There had been a courtship unlike any Ransom had ever experienced. April Brookner seemed to be constantly assessing him according to some impenetrably private standard. April was very sane, but her sanity transcended normal definitions. Ransom later learned that two years earlier she had backed out of marriage with a boy who had graduated from the University of Chicago with her because—in her words—"I realized that I hated all his metaphors. I couldn't live with someone who would never understand that metaphors are real." She had recognized the loneliness in the Chandler novel because it echoed her own.

Her mother had died in April's fourth year, and she had grown up the brilliant daughter of a brilliant man. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Chicago, she moved back to Millhaven to do graduate work at the Millhaven branch of the University of Illinois. April never had any intention of teaching, but she wanted to be near her father. Ransom sometimes felt that she had married him because she couldn't think of anything else to do.

—Why me?, Ransom had asked her once.

—Oh, you were obviously the most interesting man around, she said. You didn't act like a jerk just because you thought I was beautiful. You always ordered just the right thing in Chinese restaurants, you were kind of experimental, and my jokes didn't make you mad. You didn't act like your mission in life was to correct me.

After they married, April left graduate school and took a job in a brokerage house. Ransom had thought she would quit within six months, but April astounded him by the speed and pleasure with which she had learned the business. Within eighteen months, she knew minute details of hundreds of companies—companies of all sizes. She knew how the division presidents got on with their boards; she knew which factories were falling apart; she knew about new patents and old grudges and unhappy stockholders. "Really, it isn't any harder than learning everything there is to know about sixteenth-century English poetry," she said. "These guys come in drooling with greed, and all I have to do is show them how they can make a little more money. When I do that, they give me a chunk of their pension funds. And when that does well, they fall down and kiss my feet."

"You have corrupted my daughter," Brookner said to him once. "Now she is a money machine. The only consolation is that I will not have to spend my declining years in a room with a neon sign flashing outside the window."

"It's just a game to April," Ransom had said to him. "She says her real master is Jacques Derrida."

"I spawned a postmodern capitalist," Brookner said. "You understand, at Arkham it is an embarrassment suddenly to possess a great deal of money."

The marriage settled into a busy but peaceful partnership. April told him that she was the world's only ironic Yuppie— when she was thirty-five, she was going to quit to have a baby, manage their own investments, learn to be a great cook, and keep up her elaborate research projects into local history. Ransom had wondered if April would ever really leave her job, baby or not. Certainly none of her customers wanted her to abandon them. The Millhaven financial community had given her their annual Association Award at a dinner April had privately ridiculed, and the Ledger had run a photograph of the two of them smiling a little shamefacedly as April cradled the huge cup on which her name was to be inscribed.

Ransom would never know if April would have left her job. Five days after April had won the hideous cup, someone had stabbed her, beaten her, and left her for dead.

He still lived in the duplex he and April had rented when they were first married. Twenty-one Ely Place was three blocks north of Berlin Avenue, a long walk from Shady Mount, but close to the UI-M campus, where April had once been enrolled, and only a ten-minute drive to Millhaven's downtown, where he and April had both had their offices. April's money had allowed them to buy the building and convert it into a single-family house. Now Ransom had a book-lined office on the third floor, April an office filled with glittering computers, stacks of annual reports, and a fax machine that continued to disgorge papers; the second floor had been converted into a giant master bedroom and a smaller guest room, both with bathrooms; the ground floor contained the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

5

"How is your father-in-law handling all this?"

"Alan doesn't really know what happened to April." Ransom hesitated. "He, ah, he's changed quite a bit over the past year or so." He paused again and frowned at the stack of books on his coffee table. All of them were about Vietnam—Fields of Fire, The Thirteenth Valley, 365 Days, The Short Timers, The Things They Carried. "I'll make some coffee," he said.

He went into the kitchen, and I began to take in, with admiration and even a little envy, the house Ransom and his wife had made together. Extraordinary paintings, paintings I could not quite place, covered the wall opposite the long couch that was my vantage point. I closed my eyes. A few minutes later, the clatter of the tray against the table awakened me. Ransom did not notice that I had dozed off.

"I want an explanation," he said. "I want to know what happened to my wife."

"And you don't trust the police," I said.

"I wonder if the police think I did it." He threw out his arms, lifted them, then poured coffee into pottery mugs. "Maybe they think I'm trying to mislead them by bringing up all the old Blue Rose business." He took his own mug to a tufted leather chair.

"But you haven't been charged with anything."

"I get the feeling that the homicide detective, Fontaine, is just waiting to pounce."

"I don't understand why a homicide detective is involved in the first place—your wife is in the hospital."

"My wife is dying in the hospital."

"You can't really be sure of that," I said. He started shaking his head, misery and conflict printed clearly on his face, and I said, "I guess I'm confused. How can a homicide detective investigate a death that hasn't happened?"

He looked up, startled. "Oh. I see what you mean. The reason for that is the other victim."

I had completely forgotten the other victim. "The assault on April falls into an ongoing homicide investigation. When and if she dies, of course, Fontaine will be in charge of that investigation, too."

"Did April know this guy?"

Ransom shook his head again. "Nobody knows who he is."

"He was never identified?"

"He had no identification of any kind, nothing at all, and nobody ever reported him missing. I think he must have been a vagrant, a homeless person, something like that." I asked if he had seen the man's body. He shifted in his chair. "I gather the killer scattered pieces of the guy all over Livermore Avenue." i

Before I could respond, Ransom went on. "The guy who's doing this doesn't care who he kills. I don't even think he needed an actual reason. It was just time to get to work again."

One reason John Ransom had wanted me to come back to Millhaven was that he had been talking nonstop to himself inside his head for weeks, and now he had to let some of these arguments out.

"Tell me about the person who did this," I said. "Tell me who you think he is—the kind of person you see when you think of him."

Ransom looked relieved.

"Well, I have been thinking about that, of course. I've been trying to work out what kind of person would be capable of doing these things." He leaned toward me, ready, even eager, to share his speculations.

I settled back in my own chair, all too conscious of the disparity between what Ransom and I were discussing and our setting. It was one of the most beautiful private rooms I had ever seen, beautiful in a restrained way centered in the paintings that filled the room. I thought that one of these must be a Vuillard, and the others seemed oddly familiar. The soft colors and flowing shapes of the paintings carried themselves right through the room, into the furniture and the few pieces of sculpture visible on low tables.

"I think he's about sixty. He might have had an alcoholic parent, and he was probably an abused child. You might find some kind of head injury in his history—that turns up surprisingly often, with these people. He is very, very controlled. I bet he has a kind of inflexible inner schedule. Every day, he does the same things at the same time. He's still strong, so he might even exercise regularly. He would probably seem to be the last person you'd suspect of these crimes. And he is intelligent."

"What does he look like? What did he do for a living? How does he relax?"

"I think the only thing that distinguishes him physically, apart from his being in excellent condition for his age, is that he looks very respectable. And I think he might live down in that area where the murders took place, because with one exception, he stuck with it."

"You mean, he lives in my old neighborhood?" The exception he had mentioned must have been his wife.

"I think so. People see him, but they don't really notice him. As for relaxing, I don't think he really can relax, so he wouldn't take vacations or anything—probably couldn't really afford that, anyhow—but I bet he was a gardener."

"And the phrase Blue Rose is related to his gardening?"

Ransom shrugged. "It's a funny choice of words—it's his way of identifying himself. And I think gardening would suit this guy very well—he could work out some of his tensions, he could indulge his compulsion for order, and he can do it alone."

"So if we go down to the near south side and find a healthy-looking but boring sixty-year-old man who has a neat flower garden in back of his house, we'll have our man."

Ransom smiled. "That'll be him. Handle with care."

"After being Blue Rose for a couple of months forty years ago, he managed to control himself until this year, when he snapped again."

Ransom leaned forward again, excited to have reached the core of all his theorizing. "Maybe he wasn't in Millhaven during those years. Maybe he had some job that took him here and there—maybe he sold ladies' stockings or shoelaces or men's shirts." Ransom straightened up, and his eyes burned into me. "But I think he was in the military. I think he joined up to escape the possibility of arrest and spent all the time between then and now in army bases all over the country and in Europe. He would have been in Korea, he might even have been in Vietnam. He probably spent some time in Germany. He undoubtedly lived on a lot of those bases set outside small towns all over the South and the Midwest. And every now and then, I bet he went out and killed somebody. I don't think he ever stopped. I think he was a serial killer before we even knew such things existed. Nobody ever connected his crimes, nobody ever matched the data—Tim, they only began to think about doing that five or six years ago. The FBI has never heard of this guy because nothing he ever did was reported to them. He'd get off the base, persuade some civilian to follow him into an alley or a hotel—he's a very persuasive guy—and then he'd kill them."

6

As I listened to John Ransom, my eyes kept returning to the painting I thought was a Vuillard. A middle-class family that seemed to consist entirely of women, children, and servants moved through a luxuriant back garden and sat beneath the spreading branches of an enormous tree. Brilliant molten lemon yellow light streamed down through the intense electric green of the thick leaves.

Ransom took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. "You seem fascinated by this room, especially the paintings." He was smiling again. "April would be pleased. She picked most of them out. She pretended that I helped her, but she did all the work."

"I am fascinated," I said. "Isn't that a Vuillard? It's a beautiful painting." The other paintings and little sculptures in the room seemed related to the Vuillard in some fashion, though they were clearly by several different artists. Some were landscapes with figures, some had religious themes, others were almost abstract. Most of them had a flat, delicate, decorative quality that had been influenced, like Van Gogh and Gauguin, but after them, by Japanese prints. Then I recognized that a small painting of the descent from the Cross was by Maurice Denis, and then I understood what April Ransom had done and was struck by its sheer intelligence.

She had collected the work of the group called the Nabis, the "prophets"—she had found paintings by Serusier, K.-X. Roussel, and Paul Ranson, as well as Denis and Vuillard. Everything she had bought was good, and all of it was related: it had a significant place in art history, and because most of these artists were not well known in America, their work would not have cost a great deal. As a collection, it had a greater value than the pieces would have had individually, and the pieces themselves would already be worth a good deal more than the Ransoms had paid for them. And they were pleasing paintings—they aestheticized pain and joy, grief and wonder, and made them graceful.

"There must be more Nabis paintings in this room than anywhere else in the country," I said. "How did you find them all?"

"April was good at things like that," Ransom said, suddenly looking very tired again. "She went to a lot of the families, and most of them were willing to part with a couple of pieces. It's nice that you like the Vuillard—that was our favorite, too."

It was the centerpiece of their collection: the most important painting they owned, and also the most profound, the most mysterious and radiant. It was an outright celebration of sunlight on leaves, of the interaction of people in families and of people with the natural world.

"Does it have a name?" I stood up to get a closer look.

"I think it's called The Juniper Tree."

I looked at him over my shoulder, but he gave no indication of knowing that there was a famous Brothers Grimm story with that name, nor that the name might have meant anything to me. He nodded, confirming that I had heard him right. The coincidence of the painting's name affected me as I went toward the canvas. The people beneath the great tree seemed lonely and isolated, trapped in their private thoughts and passions; the occasion that had brought them together was a sham, no more than a formal exercise. They paid no attention to the radiant light and the vibrant leaves, nor to the shimmer of color which surrounded them, of which they themselves were a part.

"I can see April when I look at that," Ransom said behind me.

"It's a wonderful painting," I said. It was full of heartbreak and anger, and these feelings magically increased its radiance— because the painting itself was a consolation for them.

He stood up and came toward me, his eyes on the painting. "There's so much happiness in that canvas."

He was thinking of his wife. I nodded.

"You can help me, can't you?" Ransom asked. "We might be able to help the police put a name to this man. By looking into the old murders, I mean."

"That's why I'm here."

Ransom clamped his fist around my arm. "But I have to tell you, if I find out who attacked my wife, I'll try to kill him—if I get anywhere near him, I'll give him what he gave April."

"I can understand how you'd feel that way," I said.

"No, you can't." He dropped his hand and stepped closer to the painting, gave it a quick, cursory glance, and began wandering back to his chair. He put his hand on the stack of Vietnam novels. "Because you never had the chance to know April. I'll take you to the hospital with me tomorrow, but you won't really—you know, the person lying there in that bed isn't—"

Ransom raised a hand to cover his eyes. "Excuse me. I'll get you some more coffee."

He took my cup back to the table, and I took in the room again. The marble fireplace matched the pinks and grays in the paintings on the long walls, and one vivid slash of red was the same shade as the sky in the Maurice Denis painting of the descent from the Cross. A pale, enormous Paul Ranson painting of a kneeling woman holding up her hands in what looked like prayer or supplication hung above the fireplace. Then I noticed something else, the flat edge of a bronze plaque laid flat on the marble.

I walked around the furniture to take a look at it, and John Ransom came toward me with the mug as soon as I stood the plaque upright. "Oh, you found that."

I read the raised letters on the surface of the bronze. "The Association Award of the Financial Professionals of the City of Millhaven is hereby given to April Ransom on the Occasion of the Annual Dinner, 1991."

John Ransom sat down and held out his hand for the plaque. I exchanged it for the coffee, and he stared at it for a second before sliding it back onto the mantel. "The plaque is just a sort of token—the real award is having your name engraved on a big cup in a glass case in the Founder's Club."

Ransom raised his eyes to mine and blinked. "Why don't I show you the picture that was taken the night she won that silly award? At least you can see what she looked like. You'll come to the hospital with me, too, of course, but in a way there's more of the real April in the picture." He jumped up and went out into the hallway to go upstairs.

I walked over to the Vuillard painting again. I could hear John Ransom opening drawers in his bedroom upstairs.

A few minutes later, he came back into the living room with a folded section of the Ledger in one hand. "Took me a while to find it—been intending to cut out the photograph and stick it in an album, but these days I can hardly get anything done." He gave me the newspaper.

The photograph took up the top right corner of the first page of the financial section. John Ransom was wearing a tuxedo, and his wife was in a white silk outfit with an oversized jacket over a low-cut top. She was gleaming into the camera with her arms around a big engraved cup like a tennis trophy, and he was nearly in profile, looking at her. April Ransom was nearly as tall as her husband, and her hair had been cropped to a fluffy blond helmet that made you notice the length of her neck. She had a wide mouth and a small, straight nose, and her eyes seemed very bright. She looked smart and tough and triumphant. She was a surprise. April Ransom looked much more like what she was, a shrewd and aggressive financial expert, than like the woman her husband had described to me during the ride to Ely Place from the airport. The woman in the photograph did not suffer from uselessly complicated moral sensitivities: she bought paintings because she knew they would look good on her walls while they quadrupled in value, she would never quit her job to have a child, she was hardworking and a little merciless and she would not be kind to fools.

"Isn't she beautiful?" Ransom asked. I looked at the date on the top of the page, Monday, the third of June. "How long after this came out was she attacked?"

Ransom raised his eyebrows. "The police found April something like ten days after the awards dinner—that was on Friday, the thirty-first of May. That unknown man was killed the next Wednesday. On Monday night April never came home from the office. I went crazy, waiting for her. Around two in the morning I finally called the police. They told me to wait another twenty-four hours, and that she would probably come home before that. I got a call the next afternoon, saying that they had found her, and that she was unconscious but still alive."

"They found her in a parking lot, or something like that?" Ransom placed the folded section of the newspaper on the coffee table next to the stack of books. He sighed. "I guess I thought I must have told you. A maid at the St. Alwyn found her when she went in to check on the condition of a room." There was something like defiance in his eyes and his posture, in the way he straightened his back, when he told me this.

"April was in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel?"

Ransom jerked down the front of his suit jacket and smoothed his tie. "The room where the maid found her had been empty all day, and someone was due to take it on that night. April got up to that room, or was brought up to that room, conscious or not, without anyone seeing her go into the hotel."

"So how did she get there?" I asked. I felt sorry for John Ransom and asked my stupid question to buy time while I absorbed this information.

"She flew. I don't have any idea how she got into the hotel, Tim. All I know is that April would never have met any kind of boyfriend at the St. Alwyn, because even if she had a boyfriend, which she did not, the St. Alwyn is too seedy. She'd never go inside that place."