The Throat

John's chest and belly started jerking up and down again. He was laughing and crying at the same time. "He said, 'Don't come back here again, pal, we don't need your business.' " It took him a long time to get the sentence out. He passed my handkerchief over his face. His mouth flickered in and out of a crazy grin.

"I put a fifty-dollar bill on the bar and walked out. April was gone, of course—I hardly expected her to be waiting for me. It took about an hour to walk home. I was making all these speeches in my head. When I got here, her car was right out in front, and I thought, Oh God, at least she's home. I went upstairs, but she wasn't in the bedroom. I checked all over the house, calling her name. Finally I went back outside to see if she was still sitting in the car. When I opened the door, I almost fell over in a faint—there was blood all over both seats. A lot of blood. I went crazy. I ran up and down the block, thinking I must have hurt her a lot worse than I had imagined. I could see her getting out of the car and collapsing on someone's lawn. Jesus. I went all over the neighborhood, twice, out of my mind, and then I came back inside and called Shady Mount and said that I'd seen a dazed, bleeding woman walking down Berlin Avenue, and had anyone brought her to the Emergency Room? This very suspicious woman said she wasn't there. I didn't think I could call the cops—my story would have sounded so fishy! Down deep, Tim, down deep, I already knew she was dead. So I put a towel over the driver's seat and took the car to Alan's and put it in his garage. A couple of nights later, when I knew I'd really be in trouble if anyone found it, I went back there in the middle of the night and cleaned it up. That night, I went home and waited to hear something. Finally I just went to bed—well, actually, I slept on this couch here. I wasn't sober. But I don't suppose I have to tell you that. The day before you came, I took her car out to this place in Purdum."

He noticed the handkerchief balled up in his hands and unfolded it and blew his nose in it. Then he dropped it in the ashtray on top of the bloody one.

"At the time, I thought, after Vietnam, this must be the worst night I'll ever have, all my life. Little did I know."

"And the next day, the police called."

"Just after noon."

"When did you learn about the slogan, or the signature, or whatever it is?"

"At Shady Mount. Fontaine told me. He asked me if I had any idea what it meant."

"You didn't tell him about April's project?"

He shook his head. He looked stunned and resentful. "She wasn't sharing a lot with me by that time." The resentfulness went up a notch. "All I knew was that it was something that creep started her thinking about."

"Dorian's father was one of Bill Damrosch's old partners."

"Oh? I suppose that would be interesting, if you cared about that sort of thing."

He grabbed his drink, swallowed, moaned, and fell back against the cushions. Neither of us spoke for a time.

"Tell me what you think happened after you went into the bar."

John pressed the cold glass against one cheek, then another. Then he rolled the glass back and forth across his forehead. His eyes were slits. "First, I have to know that you believe me. You know I couldn't have killed April."

This was the question I had been putting off. I answered the only way I could. "I guess I do believe you, John." As soon as I spoke, I realized that I had told him the truth—I guessed that I did believe him.

"I could have sweetened it up, Tim. I could have said that I just got out of the car and walked away as soon as she started crying. I didn't have to tell you I hit her. I didn't make myself sound any better than I was."

"I know that," I said.

"This is the truth. It's ugly, but it's the truth."

"Do you think you were right about being followed?"

"Sure I was right," he said. "If I hadn't been so screwed up, I would have been paying more attention." He shook his head and groaned again. "Here's what happened. Someone parked about a block away from us and waited. They must have been surprised when I got out of the car—maybe they even thought I spotted them. That's why they started their car. They saw me go into the bar. When I didn't come right out with a pack of cigarettes or something, they went to the Mercedes and—and did what they did. So if I hadn't hit her—if I hadn't been so stupid I had to leave her alone—"

He clamped his eyes shut and pressed his lips together in a tight line. I waited for him to get back in control of himself. "There had to be two of them, because—"

"Because one drove her car here before they took her to the St. Alwyn."

Sudden anger made me shout. "Why didn't you tell me the truth when I first got here? All this subterfuge! Didn't you realize how it would look if the police found the car?"

Ransom stayed calm. "Well, they didn't find it, did they?" He drank again and swished the vodka around in his mouth. "After you left town, I was going to drive it to Chicago and leave it on the street with the keys in it. A present for the hoodlums. Then it wouldn't matter if the police found it."

He registered my impatience. "Look, I know it was a dumb scheme. I was scared, and I panicked. But forget about me for a second. Writzmann had to be one of the men in the car. That's why he hung around the hospital. He was waiting to see if April was going to wake up."

"All right, but that makes twice you lied to me," I said.

"Tim, I didn't think I could ever tell anyone what really happened. I was wrong. I'm apologizing. Just listen to me. There was another guy in that car, the cop you were talking about. And he must be the one who killed Writzmann."

"Yes," I said. "He met him in the Green Woman." John nodded slowly, as if this was utterly new and fascinating.

"Go on," he said.

"Writzmann probably asked for the meeting. His father called him up and said, Billy, I want you to keep your thugs away from me."

"Didn't I tell you we'd get something moving?" John said. "It worked like a charm."

"Is this really the kind of thing you had in mind?"

"I don't mind the bad guys bumping each other off. That's fine by me. Go on."

"Writzmann said that two people had come to his father's house asking about Elvee Holdings. That was all he had to say. The cop had to cut his connections to everything that would lead us to him. I don't know what he did. Probably he waited for Writzmann to turn his back and clubbed him with the butt of his gun. He dragged him to that chair, tied him up, and cut him to pieces. That's what he likes."

"Then he left him there overnight," John said. "He knew we were in for a hell of a storm, so yesterday morning he put him in the trunk of his car, waited until it started to really come down, and dumped him in front of the Idle Hour. Nobody'd be on the streets, and it was dark anyhow. It's beautiful. He's got his third Blue Rose victim, and nobody can tie him to Writzmann. He killed Grant Hoffman and my wife and his own stooge, and he's completely in the clear."

"Except that we know he's a cop. And we know he's the son of Bob Bandolier."

"How do we know the part about his being a cop?"

"The names given for the other two directors of Elvee Holdings were Leon Casement and Andrew Belinski. Casement was Bob Bandolier's middle name, and about ten years ago, the head of the homicide division in Millhaven was a guy named Andy Belin. Belin's mother was Polish, and the other detectives called him Belinski." I tried to smile at him, but the smile didn't turn out right. "I suppose that's station house humor."

"Wow," John said. He looked at me admiringly. "You're good."

"Fontaine told me," I said. "I'm not so sure I should have asked."

"Goddamn," John said. He sat up straight and leveled his entire arm at me. "Fontaine took his father's statements out of the Blue Rose file before he gave them to you. He ordered you to stay away from the Sunchanas, and when that didn't work, he hauled you all the way out to his father's grave. See? he said. Bob Bandolier is dead and buried. Forget this crap and go home. Right?"

"Basically. But he couldn't have taken Writzmann's body to the Idle Hour. I was with him when it started to rain."

"Think of how the man works," John said. "He had one stooge, right? Now he's got another one. He paid somebody to dump the body. It's perfect. You're his alibi."

It wouldn't even have to be money, I thought. Information would be better than money.

"So what do we do?" John asked. "We can hardly go to the police. They love Fontaine down there at Armory Place. He's Millhaven's favorite detective—he's Dick Tracy, for God's sake!"

"Maybe we can get him out in the open," I said. "Maybe we can even get him to put himself out in the open."

"How do we do that?"

"I told you that Fee Bandolier has been slipping into his father's old house in the middle of the night about once every two weeks. The woman who lives next door catches glimpses of him. She promised to call me the next time she saw him."

"To hell with that. Let's break into the place."

I groaned. "I'm too tired and sore to play cowboy."

"Think about it. If it isn't Fontaine, it's some other guy at Armory Place. Maybe there are family pictures in the house. Maybe there's, I don't know, something with his name on it. Why did he keep the house? He's keeping something in there."

"Something was always in there," I said. "His childhood. I'm going to bed, John." My muscles complained when I stood up.

He put his empty glass on the table and touched the bandage on the side of his head. Then he leaned back into the chair. For a second, we both listened to the rain beat against the windows.

I turned away to go toward the stairs. Gravity pulled at every cell in my body. All I wanted in the world was to get into bed.

"Tim," he said.

I turned around slowly. He was getting up, and he fixed me with his eyes. "You're a real friend."

"I must be," I said.

"We'll see this thing through together, won't we?"

"Sure," I said.

He came toward me. "From now on, I promise, there'll be nothing but the truth. I should have—"

"It's okay," I said. "Just don't try to kill me anymore."

He moved up close and put his arms around me. His head pressed against mine. He hugged me tight into his padded chest —it was like being hugged by a mattress. "I love you, man. Side by side, all right?"

"De Opresso Libri,"I said, and patted him on the back.

"There it is." He slammed his fist into my shoulder and gripped me tighter. "Tomorrow we start fresh."

"Yeah," I said, and went upstairs.

I undressed and got into bed with The Nag Hammadi Library. John Ransom was moving around in his bedroom, now and then bumping against the furniture. The hard, steady rain pounded the window and rattled against the side of the house. By the light of the bedside lamp, I opened the book to "The Thunder, Perfect Mind," and read:

For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,

and the one who fashions you on the outside is the

one who shaped the inside of you. And what you

see outside of you, you see inside of you;

it is visible and is your garment.

Before long, the words swam together and became different words altogether, and I managed to close the book and turn off the light before I dropped into sleep.

3

At four o'clock, I came irretrievably awake from a dream in which a hideous monster searched for me in a dark basement, and lay in bed listening to my heart thud against my chest. After a moment I realized that the rain had stopped. Laszlo Nagy was a better meteorologist than most weathermen.

For a while I followed the advice I always give myself on sleepless nights, that rest is the next best thing, and stayed in bed with my eyes closed. My heart slowed down, and I breathed easily and regularly while my body relaxed. An hour passed. Every time I turned the pillow over, I caught the traces of some florid scent and finally realized that it must have been whatever perfume or cologne Marjorie Ransom put on before she went to bed. I threw back the sheet and went to the window. Black, oily-looking fog pressed against the glass. The street lamp out on the sidewalk was only a dim, barely visible yellow haze, like the sun in a Turner painting. I turned on the overhead light, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and went downstairs in my pajamas to work on my book.

For another hour and a half I inhabited the body of a small boy whose bedroom walls were papered with climbing blue roses, a boy whose father said he struck him out of a great, demanding love, and whose mother lay dying in a stink of feces and decaying flesh. We're taking good care of this woman here, his father said, our love is better for her than any hospital. Beneath Charlie Carpenter's skin, Fee Bandolier watched his mother drifting out into blackness. I was in the air around him, Fee and not-Fee, Charlie and not-Charlie, watching and recording. When the sorrow became too great to continue, I put down the pencil and went back upstairs on trembling legs.

It was about six. I had this odd sense—that I was lost. John's house seemed no more or less real than the smaller house I had imagined around me. If I had still been drinking, I would have had two inches of John's hyacinth vodka and tried to get to sleep again. Instead, I checked the window—the fog had turned to a thick, impenetrable silver—took a quick shower, dressed in jeans and Glenroy's black sweatshirt, put my notebook in my pocket, and went back down to go outside.

4

The world was gone. Before me hung a weightless gauze of light grayish silver which parted as I passed through and into it, reforming itself at a constant distance of four or five feet before and behind me. I could see the steps going down to the walk, and the tall hedges on either side of the lawn tinged the silver dark green. The moist, chill air settled like mist against my face and hands. I moved toward the haze of the street lamp.

Out on the sidewalk, I could see the dim, progressively feebler and smaller points of light cast by the row of street lamps marching down Ely Place toward Berlin Avenue. If I counted them as I went along, as the child-me had counted the rows in the movie theater to be able to return to my seat, the lamps would be my landmarks. I wanted to get out of John's house for a little while; I wanted to replace Marjorie Ransom's tropical perfume with fresh air, to do what I did in New York, let the blank page fill itself with words while I moved thoughtlessly along.

I went three blocks and passed six lamps without seeing a house, a car, or another person. I turned around and looked back, and all of Ely Place except the few feet of sidewalk beneath my feet was a shimmering silver void. Seeming a long way away, much more distant than I knew it was, a circular yellow haze burned feebly through the bright emptiness. I put my back to it again and tried to look across what had to be Berlin Avenue.

But it didn't look like Berlin Avenue—it looked exactly like the other three intersections I had come to, with a low rounded curb and a flat white roadbed partially and intermittently revealed through gaps in the stationary fog. The gleam of the next streetlight cut through the fog ahead of me. Ely Place ended at Berlin Avenue, and there should have been no streetlight ahead of me. Maybe, I thought, one stood directly opposite Ely Place, on the other side of the avenue. But in that case, shouldn't it have been farther away?

Of course I could not really tell the distance between me and the next lamp. The fog made that impossible, distancing objects where it was thickest, bringing them nearer where it was less dense. I almost certainly had to be standing on the corner of Ely Place and Berlin Avenue. Starting at John's house, I had walked three blocks west. Therefore, I had reached Berlin Avenue.

I'll walk across the avenue, I thought, and then go back to John's. Maybe I could even get some sleep before the day really began.

I stepped down onto the roadbed, looking both ways for the circular yellow shine of headlights. There was no noise at all, as if the fog had muffled everything around in cotton. I took six slow steps forward into a gently yielding silver blankness that sifted through me as I walked. Then my foot struck a curb I could only barely see. I stepped up onto the next section of sidewalk. Some unguessable distance ahead of me, the next street lamp burned a circle of dim yellow the size of a tennis ball through the silver. Whatever I had crossed, it wasn't Berlin Avenue.

Three feet away, the green metal stalk of a street sign shone out of the fog. I went toward the sign and looked up. The green pole ascended straight up into thick cloud, like a skyscraper. I couldn't even see the signs, much less read the names stamped on them. I got right beside the pole and tilted back my head. Far up in a silver mass that seemed to shift sideways as I looked into it, a darker section of fog vaguely suggested a rectangle. Above that the shining silver fog appeared to coalesce and solidify, like a roof.

There must have been four blocks, not three, between John's house and Berlin Avenue. All I had to do was follow the lamps and keep counting. I began walking toward the glow of the lamp, and when I drew level with it, I said five to myself. As soon as I walked past the lamp, the world disappeared again into soft bright silvery emptiness. Berlin Avenue had to be directly ahead of me, and I moved along confidently until the dime-sized glow of yet another street lamp reached me through the fog from somewhere far ahead. Then I reached another intersection with a rounded curb down into a gray-white roadbed. Ely Place had stretched itself off into a dimensionless infinity.

But as long as I kept counting the street lamps, I was secure—the street lamps were my version of Ariadne's thread; they would lead me back to John's house. I stepped down into the narrow road and walked across.

Mystified, I walked another two blocks and passed three more lamps without hearing a car or seeing another human being. At the beginning of the next block, the ninth street lamp glowing just ahead of me, I realized what must have happened—I had turned the wrong way when I left John's house and was now far east of Berlin Avenue, nearing the Sevens and Eastern Shore Drive. The invisible houses around me had grown larger and grander, the lawns had become longer and more immaculate. In a few blocks, I would be across the street from the big bluffs falling away to the lakeshore.

Another block went by in a chilly silver emptiness, and then another. I had counted eleven lamps. If I had turned east instead of west on Ely Place, I was very nearly at Eastern Shore Road. Ahead of me lay another block and another dim circle of yellow light.

Two thoughts came to me virtually simultaneously: this street was never going to lead me either to Berlin Avenue or to Eastern Shore Road, and if John Ransom and I were going to break into Bob Bandolier's old house, this was the day to do it. I even thought there was an excellent reason for taking a look inside the Bandolier house. I'd dismissed John's statement that Fee was keeping something in the house by telling him yes, he kept his childhood there: now I thought that probably his adulthood—the records of his secret life—would be in the house, too. Where else could he have taken the boxes from the Green Woman? Elvee Holdings couldn't own property all over town. It was so obvious that I didn't see why I hadn't thought of it before.

Now all I had to do was to count off eleven street lamps and wait for John to get out of bed. I turned around and started moving back through the bright vacancy.

The sequence of lamps burned toward me, increasing in size from dull yellow pinpoints to glowing pumpkins and illuminating nothing but the reflective haze surrounding them. Once I heard a car moving down the street, so slowly that I could almost hear the tread of the tires flattening against the road. It crept up behind me and then finally inched past. The engine hissed. All I could see of the car were two ineffectual lines of light slanting abruptly toward the street, as if they were trying to read the concrete. It was like watching some huge invisible animal slide past me. Then the animal was gone. For a long moment I still heard it hissing, and then the sound was gone, too.

At the eleventh lamp I moved toward the edge of the sidewalk, trying to locate one of the hedges that marked the boundaries of John's lot. No tinge of dark green shone through the fog, and I held out my hands and groped back and forth without finding the hedge. I took another step toward the edge of the sidewalk and stumbled off the curb into the street. For a second I stood looking right and left, seeing nothing, half-stupefied with confusion. I could not be in the street—the car had gone past me on the other side. I took another step into the street, leaving the lamp behind me, and thrust my hands out in front of me, blindly reaching for anything I could actually touch.

I turned around and saw the reassuring yellow light reflecting itself off smoky particles that reflected onto other particles, then onto others, so that the lamp had become a smoky yellow ball of haze without edges or boundaries, continuing on beyond itself into the illusion of a reflection, like a fiction of itself.

I went back over the empty invisible street and came up onto the sidewalk again. When I got close enough to the pole so that it stood out shining and green against the silver, I brushed my fingers against it. The metal was cold and damp with tiny invisible droplets, solid as a house. I moved to the other side of the sidewalk, the side where the huge hissing animal had swept past me, and felt my way forward until I felt the sidewalk give way to short coarse grass.

I both understood and imagined that somehow I had walked all the way across the city to my old neighborhood, where snow fell in the middle of summer and angels blotted out half the sky. I came fearfully up the lawn, hoping to see John's sturdy, deceptive building come into being in front of me, but knowing that I was back in Pigtown and would see some other house altogether.

A dwelling with wide steps leading up to a porch gradually drifted toward me out of the silver mist. Beyond the porch, flaking boards dotted with sparkling silver drops led up to a broad black window. I stood a few feet from the edge of the porch, waiting. My heart went into overdrive. A small boy came forward out of the darkness behind the window and stopped moving as soon as he saw me looking in. Don't fear me, I thought, I have a thing to tell you, but the thing I wished to say instantly fractured into incoherence. The world is made of fire. You will grow up. Bunny is Good Bread. We can, we can come through. The boy blinked, and his eyes went out of focus. He would not hear me—he couldn't hear me. A huge white curl of fog swam out of the void like a giant paw, cutting me off from the boy, and when I stepped forward to see him again, the window was empty.

Don't be afraid, I wanted to say, but I was afraid, too.

I went blindly across the lawn, holding my hands out before me, and fifteen paces brushed me against a thick green hedge. I moved down the side of the tough, springy border until it fell away in a square corner at the edge of the sidewalk. Then I groped my way around it and went diagonally up across the next lawn until I saw familiar granite steps and a familiar door flanked by narrow windows.

Pigtown—either the real Pigtown or the one I carried within me—had melted away, and I was back on Ely Place.

5

Pink from the shower and dressed in gray slacks, a charcoal gray cotton turtleneck, and a dark blue silk jacket, John came downstairs a couple of hours later. A smaller, flesh-colored bandage was taped to his head. He smiled at me when he came into the living room, and said, "What a day! We don't usually get fogs like this, in the middle of summer." He clapped his hands together and regarded me for a moment, shaking his head as if I were a tremendous curiosity. "You get up early to do some work?" Before I could answer, he asked, "What's that mighty tome? I thought the gnostic gospels were my territory, not yours."

I closed the book. "How many blocks is it from here to Berlin Avenue?"

"Three," he said. "Can't you find the answer in the Gospel of Thomas? I like the verse where Jesus says, If you understand the world, you have found a corpse, but if you have found a corpse, you're superior to the world. That has the real gnostic thing, don't you think?"

"How many blocks is it to Eastern Shore Drive?"

He looked up and counted on his fingers. "Seven, I think. I might have left one out. Why?"

"I went out this morning and got lost. I went about nine blocks in the fog, and then I realized that I wasn't even sure what direction I was going."

"It must have been up," he said. "Or sideways. You can't go nine blocks in either of the usual directions. Look, I'm starved. Did you eat anything yet?"

I shook my head.

"Let's get something in the kitchen."

He turned around, and I followed him into the kitchen.

"What do you want? I'm going to have some fried eggs."

"Just toast," I said.

"Suit yourself." Ransom put bread into the toaster, greased a pan with margarine, and broke two eggs into the sizzling grease.

"Who lives in the house next door?" I asked him. "The one to the right?"

"Them? Bruce and Jennifer Adams. They're in their late sixties. Bruce used to own a travel agency, I guess. The one time we went to their house, it was full of these folk art sculptures from Bali and Indonesia. The stuff looked like it would walk around the house at night after all the lights were out."

"Have you ever seen any children over there?"

He laughed. "I don't think they'd let a kid within twenty feet of the place."

"What about the neighbors on the other side?"

"That's an old guy named Reynolds. April liked him enough to invite him over for dinner now and then. Used to teach French literature at the university. Reynolds is okay, I guess, but a little bit swishy." He was working a spatula under one of the eggs and stopped moving before he swung his head to glance at me. "I mean, you know what I mean. I don't have anything against the guy"

"I understand," I said. "But I guess there wouldn't be any children in that house, either."

Four slices of toast popped up in the toaster, and I put them on a plate and began spreading margarine on them.

"Tim," John said.

I looked up at him. He slid the eggs onto a plate, met my eyes, looked away, and then met my eyes again. "I'm really glad we had that conversation last night. And I'm grateful to you. I respect you, you know that."

"How long do you think this fog is going to last?"

He looked at the window. "Hard to say. Might even last until the afternoon, it's so thick. Why? You want to do something?"

"I think we might see if we can get into that house," I said.

"In this?" He was carrying his plate to the table, and he flapped a hand at the window. "Let's give it another half hour or so, and see what happens." He gave me a curious half-smile. "What made you change your mind?"

I spread a spoonful of jam on top of my toast. "I was thinking about what you said last night—that there had to be something in that house. Do you remember that little piece of paper I found in the Green Woman?"

He stopped shaking his head after I spoke a couple of sentences and began getting interested after I reminded him of Walter Dragonette's notebook.

"Okay," he said. "So if this guy kept detailed notes about every murder he committed, then we can really nail him. All we have to do is trace him back to the town where he was working."

"Tom Pasmore would probably be able to help us with that."

"I'm not putting any faith in that guy," he said. "This is our baby."

"We'll think about that after we get the notes," I said. For the rest of the morning, we listened to weather reports on the radio and kept checking the windows. The fog was as thick at ten as it had been at eight, and the radio advised everybody to stay home. There had been half a dozen accidents on the freeways, as well as another five or six minor crashes at intersections. No planes had left Millhaven airport since before midnight, and all incoming flights were being diverted to Milwaukee or Chicago.

John kept jumping up from the couch to take a few steps outside the front door, coming back in to razz me about getting lost.

I was glad he was in a good mood. While he ran in and out, checking to see if we could see far enough to drive, I leafed through "The Paraphrase of Shem" and "The Second Treatise of Great Seth."

"Why are you bothering with that drivel?" John asked.

"I'm hoping to find out," I said. "What do you have against it?"

"Gnosticism is a dead end. When people allude to it now, they make it mean anything they want it to mean by turning it into a system of analogies. And the whole point of gnosticism in the first place was that any kind of nonsense you could make up was true because you made it up."

"I guess that's why I like it," I said.

He shook his head in cheerful derision. At twelve-thirty we ate lunch. The planes were still sitting on the runways and the announcers hadn't stopped telling people to stay home, but from the kitchen window, we could see nearly halfway to the hemlocks at the back of John's property. "You won't lose your mind again if I bring that pistol, will you?" John asked me.

"Just don't shoot the old lady next door," I said.

6

I turned on the fog lights and pulled out into the street. The stop sign at the end of the block swam up out of the fog in time for me to brake to a halt.

"You can do this, right?" John asked.

Experimentally, I flicked on the headlights, and both the stop sign and the street ahead disappeared into a shimmering gray fog pierced by two useless yellow tunnels. Ransom grunted, and I punched the lights to low beam. At least other people would be able to see us coming.

"Let's hire a leper to walk in front of us, ringing a bell," Ransom said.

On a normal day, the drive to South Seventh Street took about twenty minutes; John and I got there in a little more than two and a half hours. We made it without accident, though we had two close calls and one miraculous intervention, when a boy on a bicycle suddenly loomed up directly in front of me, no more than two or three feet away. I veered around him and kept driving, my mouth dry and my bowels full of water.

We got out of the car a block away from the house. The fog obscured even the buildings across the sidewalk. "It's this way," I said, and led him across the street and down toward Bob Bandolier's old house.

7

I heard low voices. Hannah and Frank Belknap were sitting on their porch, looking out at nothing. From the sidewalk, I could just make out the porch of the Bandolier place. The Belknaps' voices came through the fog as clearly as voices on a radio that had been dialed low. They were talking about going to northern Wisconsin later in the summer, and Hannah was complaining about having to spend all day in a boat.

"You always catch more fish than I do, you know you do," Frank said.

"That doesn't mean it's all I want to do," said Hannah's disembodied voice.

John and I began walking slowly and softly across the lawn, making as little noise as possible.

The side of the house cut off Frank's reply. John and I walked over wet brown grass, keeping close to the building. At the corner we turned into the backyard. At the far end, barely visible in the fog, a low wooden fence with a gate stood along a narrow alley. We came up to the back door, set on a concrete slab a little larger than a welcome mat.

John bent down to look at the lock, whispered, "No problem," and hauled the big ball of keys out of his pants pocket. He riffled through them, singled out one, and tried it in the lock. It went a little way in and stopped. He pulled it out, flicked through the keys again, and tried another one that looked identical to the first. That didn't work, either. He turned to me, shrugged and smiled, and singled out another. This one slid into the lock as if it had been made for it. The lock mechanism clicked, and the door opened. John made an after you, Alfonse gesture, and I slid inside behind his back while he turned to close the door behind us.

I knew where everything was. It was the kitchen of the house where I had grown up, a little dusty and battered, but entirely familiar. A rectangular table with a scarred top stood a few feet from the door. In the dim light, I could make out the names BETHY JANEY BILLY scratched into the wood, along with a lot of random squiggles. Ransom took a couple of steps forward on the cracked yellow linoleum. "What are you waiting for?" he said.

"Decompression," I said. A section of wallpaper with images of shepherds and shepherdesses holding crooks drooped away from the wall. Someone, probably Bethy, Janey, and Billy, had scribbled over the images, and ancient yellow grease spots spattered the wall behind the little electric stove. An enormous cock and balls, imperfectly covered with a palimpsest of scrawled lines, sprouted from one of the shepherds near the loose seam of wallpaper. The Dumkys had left plenty of signs of their brief residence.

John said, "You should be used to a life of crime by now," and walked through the kitchen into the hallway. "What are there, three or four rooms?"

"Three, not counting the kitchen," I said. I came into thedark little hallway and put my hand on a doorknob. "The boy's bedroom would have been here," I said, and opened the door.

The narrow rectangle of Fee's old bedroom matched mine exactly. There was a narrow bed with a dark green army surplus blanket and a single wooden chair. A small chest of drawers, stained so dark it was almost black, stood against the wall. At the far end, a narrow window exposed a moving layer of fog. I stepped inside, and my heart shrank. John knelt to look under the bed. "Cooties." A frieze of stick figures, round suns with rays, and cartoon houses all interconnected by a road map of scribbled lines, covered the walls to the level of my waist. The light blue paint above the graffiti had turned dingy and mottled.

"This Fee kid got away with a lot of crap," John said.

"The tenants did this," I said. I went to the bed and pulled down the blanket. There were no sheets, just an ancient buttoned mattress covered in dirty stripes.

John gave me a curious look and began opening the drawers. "Nothing," he said. "Where would he stash the boxes?"

I shook my head and escaped the bedroom. The three windows at the front of the living room were identical to those in my old house, and the whole long rectangular room brought me back to childhood as surely as the bedroom. An air of leftover misery and rage seemed to intensify the musty air. I knew this room—I had written it.

I had placed two tables in front of the windows—the place where our davenport had stood—and there they were, more ornate than I had imagined, but the same height, and of the same dark wood. A telephone sat on the table to the left, beside a worn overstuffed chair—Bob Bandolier's throne. The long couch I had described stood against the far wall, green, not yellow, but with the same curved arms I had described.

And yet, I thought, it was more unlike than like the room I had imagined. I had thought that Bob Bandolier would provide his family with devotional pictures, the Sermon on the Mount or the Feeding of the Multitude, but there were no reproductions or chromographs on the walls, only wallpaper. I had imagined a small shelf of books with the Bible and paperback Westerns and mysteries, but the only shelves in the living room were shallow, glass, and rimmed with black metal piping—once they had held china figurines. A high-backed brocade chair with rolled arms stood beside the telephone table, and another matching chair without arms faced into the room from beside the other, empty table. His and hers.

"It's like a—like a museum of 1945," John said, turning to me with an incredulous smile.

"That's what it is," I said.

I sat down on the chaise and looked sideways. Through a window in the unadorned wall, I could just about make out the side of the Belknap house. Through a matching window in her own living room, Hannah had seen the adult Fee sitting just where I was now. John was looking behind the chairs and beneath the couch. Fee came at night and used only a flashlight, so he had never noticed the grease spots on the brocade chairs or the rim of grime along the edges of the couch cushions.

John opened the door opposite that into the common entry. I stood up and followed him into the bedroom where Anna Bandolier had died of starvation and neglect.

A rusty black stain wavered down the middle of the bare mattress on the double bed. John looked under the bed, and I opened Bob Bandolier's walnut clothing press. Two wire hangers hung from a metal rail, and a third lay deep in forty-year-old dust on the bottom of the press. "The drawers," John said, and we both opened one of the big drawers on either side of the little mirrored vanity table against the wall. Mine was empty. John pushed.his drawer closed and looked at me with both impatience and exasperation.

"Okay," he said. "Where are they?"

"After Bob Bandolier got rid of the Sunchanas, there were no more upstairs tenants. So he might have put the boxes there." Then I remembered something else. "And there's a basement, where they used to do the washing."

"I'll look upstairs." He brushed the dust off his knees and gave me another tight-mouthed look. "Let's get out of here as soon as we can. I don't trust this fog."

I could almost see little Fee Bandolier standing on the side of the bed on a cold night in November of 1950, holding onto his dying mother's arm while his father lay unconscious on the floor, surrounded by empty beer bottles.

"All right?" John asked.

I nodded, and he left the bedroom. I turned my back on the boy and walked out through the mists and vapors that emanated from everything I thought about him and went back through the living room toward the kitchen.

As in my old house, the basement door was next to the stove. I went down the wooden steps in the dark, letting my eyes adjust.

A long wooden workbench stood across the gray concrete floor from the bottom of the stairs. Against the wall above the back of the bench hung a row of coffee cans and jam jars filled with nails and screws. Soon I made out the shapes of boxes beneath the bench, and I exhaled with mingled relief and triumph and went to the bench and bent down and pulled the nearest box toward me.

It was about the size of a case of whiskey, and the top of the box had been folded, not taped, shut. I wrestled with the interlocking cardboard panels before all four of them sprang free at once, revealing a layer of dark fabric. Fee had wrapped his notes in cloth after seeing what the rats had done to them in the Green Woman. I grabbed a loose handful of cloth and pulled up. The cloth came out of the box without resistance. Sleeves flopped out of the bundle. It was a suit jacket. I dropped it on the floor and put my hands back into the box. This time I pulled out the trousers to the suit. Beneath the trousers, carelessly folded, were two more suits, one dark blue, the other dark gray. I stuffed the first suit back into the box, pushed it back under the workbench, and pulled another carton toward me. When I got the top open, I found a pile of white shirts with Arrow labels. They were grimy from the dust sifting down from the workbench and stiff with starch.

The next box held three more suits folded onto a layer of wrinkled boxer shorts and balled-up undershirts, the next a jumble of black shoes, and the final one at least a hundred wide, late-forties neckties tangled together like snakes. My knees creaked when I stood up.

Fee Bandolier had expelled the Dumkys, cleaned up what was important to him, and turned the lock on the door, sealing the past inside a bell jar.

A wide gray spiderweb hung between the wringer of the old washing machine and the slanting ledge of the small rectangular basement window in the wall behind it. I walked slowly down the length of the basement. A black bicycle the size of a Shetland pony leaned against the wall. I turned toward the bulky furnace in the center of the basement, seeing another row of boxes in the darkness. I moved forward, and the row of boxes mutated into the long rectangular dish of a coaster wagon. I pushed it with my foot, and it rolled backward on squeaking wheels, dragging its wooden handle with it. When it moved, I saw another box hidden between the coaster and the furnace.

"There," I said, and bent down to get my hands on it. Wisps and tatters of old spiderwebs hung from the box. It had been moved recently. I braced my muscles and jerked the box off the ground. It was nearly weightless. Whatever it contained was not hundreds of handwritten pages. I carried the box around the furnace toward the foot of the stairs and heard John walking across the kitchen floor.

I set the box down and opened the four flaps on its top. There was another box inside it. "Damn it," I said, and jumped up to go to the front of the furnace.

"Find anything?" John was at the top of the stairs.

"I don't know," I said. I pulled down the handle and swung open the door.

"There's nothing upstairs. Just bare rooms." Every other stair groaned beneath his weight. "What are you doing?"

"Checking the furnace," I said. "I just found two empty boxes."

The interior of the furnace was about the size of a baby carriage. Fine white ash lay across the bottom of the furnace, and black soot coated the grate. John came up beside me.

"I think we lost them," I said.

"Hold on," John said. "He didn't burn anything here. See that stuff?" He pointed at a nearly invisible area on the furnace wall, a section slightly lighter in color than the rest of the interior that I had taken for some kind of stain. John reached into the furnace and dragged it down with his fingers—the ancient spiderweb pulled toward him, then broke and collapsed into a single dirty gray rope.

The boxes lay where I had left them, the flaps of the outer box open on the smooth side of the one inside it. When I shook them, something rattled. "Let's pull them a," I said.

John came forward and flattened his hands on the box. I thrust my fingers inside and tugged. The inner box slid smoothly out. The brown tape across its top flaps had been slit down the middle. I bent up the flaps. Another, smaller box was inside it. I pulled out the third box. About the size of a toaster, it too had been cut open before being inserted into the nest. When I shook it, a papery, slithery sound came from inside the box.

"Guess you found the easter egg," John said.

I righted the box on the floor and opened it. A square white envelope lay in the bottom of the carton. I picked it up. The envelope was thicker and heavier than I expected. I carried it to the light at the head of the stairs. John watched me open the flap.

"Pictures," he said.

The old square, white-bordered photographs looked tiny by contemporary standards. I took them out of the envelope and stared at the first one. Some Dumky child had scribbled over its surface. Beneath the crazy lines, the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn was still visible. I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next. At first, it looked like a copy of the photograph I had just seen. There were fewer scribbles on this one. Then I saw that the photographer had moved a few feet nearer the opening of the tunnel, and the fan of vertical bricks at the top of the arch showed more clearly through the overlay of scribbles. The next one showed a neatly made bed beneath a framed painting invisible behind the mirrored explosion of the flash. Beside the bed, half of a door filled the frame. A little Dumky had scratched XXXXXXXXXXX across the door and the wall. He had run out of patience before he got to the bed, and the X's broke down into scrawls and loops. "What's that?" John asked.

The next photograph was of the same bed and door taken from an angle that included the corner of a dressing table. The details of the room lay buried under a lot more scribbled ink.

"A picture of room 218 at the St. Alwyn," I said, and looked up at Ransom's face. "Bob Bandolier took pictures of the sites before he did the murders."

I uncovered the next image, scarcely touched by the little Dumkys. Here, rendered in soft brown tones, was the Livermore Avenue side of the Idle Hour, where Monty Leland had been murdered. The photograph beneath had been taken from a spot nearer the corner of South Sixth and showed more of the tavern's side. A zigzag of ink ran across the wooden boards like a bolt of lightning.

"The guy was an obsessive's obsessive. It was planned out, like a campaign."

I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and found myself looking at a photograph almost unreadable beneath inky loops and scratches. I lifted it nearer my face. It had to be a picture of Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop, but something about the size or shape of the building buried beneath the ink bothered me.

The next was nearly as bad. The edge of a building that might equally have been the Taj Mahal, the White House, or the place where I lived on Grand Street dove beneath a hedge of scribbles.

"They worked that one over," John said.

I peered down at the picture, trying to figure out what troubled me about it. I could only barely remember the front of Stenmitz's shop. One side of the sign that projected out in a big V above the window read HOME-MADE SAUSAGES; the other side, QUALITY MEATS. Something like that seemed visible underneath the scrawls, but the proportions of the building seemed wrong.

"It must be the butcher shop, right?"

"I guess," I said.

"How come they're squirreled away in these boxes?"

"Fee must have found them in a drawer—wherever his father kept them. He put them down here to protect them—he must have thought that no one would ever find them."

"What do we do with them?"

I already had an idea about that.

I sorted through the photographs and chose the clearest of each pair. John took the envelope, and I passed him the others. He slid them into the envelope and tucked in the flap. Then he turned over the envelope and held it up close to his face, as I had done with the last photograph. "Well, well."

"What?"

"Take a look." He pointed to faint, spidery pencil marks on its top left-hand corner.

In faint, almost ladylike thin gray letters, the words blue rose appeared on the yellowing paper.

"Let's leave these here," I said, and put the envelope in the smallest box, folded the top shut, and slid the box into the next, and then inserted this one into the largest box, folded its flaps shut, and pushed if back behind the furnace.

"Why?" John asked.

"Because we know they're here." He frowned and pushed his eyebrows together, trying to figure it out. I said, "Someday, we might want to show that Bob Bandolier was Blue Rose. So we leave the envelope here."

"Okay, but where are the notes?"

I raised my shoulders. "They have to be somewhere."

"Great." John walked to the end of the basement, as if trying to make the boxes of notes materialize out of the shadows and concrete blocks. After he passed out of sight behind the furnace, I heard him coming up on the far side of the basement. "Maybe he hid them under the furnace grate."

We went back around to the front of the furnace. John opened the door and stuck his head inside. "Ugh." He reached inside and tried to pick up the grate. "Stuck." He withdrew his hand, which was streaked with gray and black on the back and completely blackened on the palm. The sleeve of the blue silk jacket had a vertical black stripe just below the elbow. John grimaced at the mess on his hand. "Well, I don't think they're in here."

"No," I said. "They're probably still in the boxes. He doesn't know that we know they exist."

I took another, pointless look around the basement.

John said, "What the hell, let's go home."

We went upstairs and back out into the fog. John locked the door behind us.

I got lost somewhere north of the valley and nearly ran into a car backing out of a driveway. It took me nearly two hours to get back to Ely Place, and when we pulled up in front of his house, John said, "Got any other great ideas?"

I didn't remind him that the idea had been his.

8

"What do we do now?" John asked. We were in the kitchen, eating a big salad I had made out of a tired head of lettuce, half of an onion, some old Monterey jack cheese, and cut-up slices of the remaining luncheon meat.

"We have to do some shopping," I said.

"You know what I mean."

I chewed for a little while, thinking. "We have to work out a way to get him to take us to those notes. And I've been running a few lines of research. I want to continue with those."

"What kind of research?"

"I'll tell you when I have some results." I didn't want to tell him about Tom Pasmore.

"Does that mean that you want to use the car again?"

"A little later, if that's all right," I said.

"Okay. I really do have to get down to the college to take care of my syllabus and a few other things. Maybe you could drive me there and pick me up later?"

"Are you going to set up Alan's courses, too?"

"I don't have any choice. April's estate is still locked up, until it gets out of probate."

I didn't want to ask him about the size of April's estate.

"It'll be a couple of million," he said. "Two something, according to the lawyers. Plus about half a million from her life insurance. Taxes will eat up a lot of it."

"There'll be a lot left over," I said.

"Not enough."

"Enough for what?"

"To be comfortable, I mean, really comfortable, for the rest of my life," he said. "Maybe I'll want to travel for a while. You know what?" He leaned back and looked at me frankly. "I have gone through an amazing amount of shit in my life, and I don't want any more. I just want the money to be there."

"While you travel," I said.

"That's right. Maybe I'll write a book. You know what this is about, don't you? I've been locked up inside Millhaven and Arkham College for a long time, and I have to find a new direction."

He looked at me, hard, and I nodded. This sounded almost like the old John Ransom, the one for whose sake I had come to Millhaven.

"After all, I've been Alan Brookner's constant companion for about ten years. I could bring his ideas to the popular audience. People are always ready for real insights packaged in an accessible way. Think about Joseph Campbell. Think about Bill Moyers. I'm ready to move on to the next level."

"So let's see if I get this right," I said. "First you're going to travel around the world, and then you're going to popularize Alan's ideas, and after that you're going to be on television."

"Come off it, I'm serious," he said. "I want to take time off to rethink my own experience and see if I can write a book that would do some good. Then I could take it from there."

"I like a man with a great dream," I said.

"I think it is a great dream." John looked at me for a couple of beats, trying to figure out if I was making fun of him and ready to feel injured.

"When you do the book, I could help you find the right agent."

He nodded. "Great, thanks, Tim. By the way."

I looked attentively at him, wondering what was next.

"If the fog lets up by tomorrow, I'm going to take the car out of Purdum and drive it to Chicago. You know, like I said? Feel like coming along?"

He wanted me to drive him to Purdum—he probably wanted me to drive the Mercedes to Chicago, too. "I have lots of things to do tomorrow," I said, not knowing how true that statement was. "We'll see what happens."

John seemed inclined to stay downstairs with the television. Jimbo was telling us that police had reported half a dozen cases of vandalism and looting in stores along Messmer Avenue, the main shopping street in Millhaven's black ghetto. Merlin Waterford had refused to acknowledge the existence of the Committee for a Just Millhaven, claiming that "the capture of one lunatic does not justify tinkering with our superb system of local government."

I picked up 365 Days, a book by a doctor named Ronald Glasser who had treated servicemen wounded in Vietnam, and took it upstairs with me.

9

I laid the four photographs on the bed and stretched out beside them. In soft brown-gray tones, visible to various degrees beneath the ballpoint scribbles, the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn, room 218, the flank of the Idle Hour, and what had to be Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop looked back at me. A powerful sense of time past—of difference—came from them. The arched passage and the exterior of the Idle Hour had not changed in forty years, but everything around them had been through wars, recessions, and the long disillusionment that followed the narcotic Reagan years.

I looked at the photograph of the hotel room where James Treadwell had died, set it aside and held the fourth photograph under the bedside lamp. It had to be the butcher shop, but something still troubled me—then I remembered the stench of blood and Mr. Stenmitz bending his great blond beast-head toward me. I dropped the photo onto the bed and picked up 365 Days.

Around three-thirty, John began hollering up the stairs that we'd better get going if we wanted to get to Arkham by four. I got into a jacket and put the four photographs in the pocket.

John was standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding a black briefcase. His other hand was balled into a pocket of the silk jacket. "Where will you be going, anyhow?" he asked me.

"I'll probably hit the computers at the university library," I said.

"Ah," he said, as if now he had everything finally figured out.

"There might be some more information about Elvee."

He leaned forward and peered at my eyes. "Are you all right? Your eyes are red."

"I ran out of Murine. If I get involved in something at the library, would you mind taking a cab home?"

"Try to wrap it up before seven," he said, looking grumpy. "After that, everything snaps shut like a trap. Budget cuts."

Twenty minutes later, I dropped John off in front of Arkham's seedy quadrangle and watched him disappear into the heavy gray clouds. A few dim lights burned down from windows in the dark shapes of the college buildings. In the fog, Arkham looked like an insane asylum on the moors. Then I cruised slowly down the street. When a pay telephone swam up out of the murk, I double-parked the car and called Tom's number.

After his message ended, I said that I had to see him as soon as possible, he should call me as soon as he got up, I had to be back at John's—

The line clicked. "Come on over," Tom said.

"You're up already?"

"I'm still up," he said.

10

"Do you know how many Allentowns there are in America?" Tom asked me. "Twenty-one. Some of them aren't even in the standard atlases. I didn't bother with Allentown, Georgia, Allentown, Florida, Allentown, Utah, or Allentown, Delaware, because they all have populations under three thousand—it's an arbitrary cutoff, but not even Fee Bandolier could get away with committing a string of murders in a town that size."

The start-up menus glowed from the monitors of his computers. Tom looked a little pale and his hair was rumpled, but the only other indication that he hadn't slept in twenty-four hours was that his necktie had been pulled below the undone top button of his shirt. He was wearing the same long silk robe he'd had on the other day.

"So I went through every one of the sixteen other Allentowns, looking for a Jane Wright who had been murdered in May 1977. Nothing. No Jane Wright. Most of these towns are so small that there were no murders at all in that month. All I could do then was go back to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and take another look."

"And?"

"I found something good."

"Are you going to tell me about it?"

"In time." Tom smiled at me. "You sounded like you had something pretty good yourself, on the phone."

There was no point in trying to get him to say anything until he was ready. I took a sip of his coffee and said, "April Ransom's car is in a garage in Purdum. John panicked when he found it in front of his house with blood all over the seats, and he took it to Alan's garage and cleaned it up and then stashed it out of town."

"Did he, now?" Tom tilted his head back and regarded me through half-closed eyes. "I thought he knew where that car was." He was smiling again, that same slow, almost luxuriant smile I had seen on the day I had brought John Ransom to meet him. "Somehow, I see that we do not think he is a guilty party here. Tell me the rest of it."

"After I left your house the other day, Paul Fontaine pushed me into an unmarked car and drove me out to Pine Knoll." I told him everything that had happened—Bob Bandolier's middle name and Andy Belin, Billy Ritz, my brawl and John's account of the night April was beaten. I described our visit to the house on South Seventh Street and brought the photographs out of my jacket pocket and put them on the table in front of us. Tom scarcely moved during my long recital—his eyes opened a bit when I got to Andy Belin, he nodded when I described calling the cab company, and he smiled again when I described the fight with John, but that was all.

Finally, he said, "Hadn't it already occurred to you that Fee Bandolier was a Millhaven policeman?"

"No," I said. "Of course it hadn't."

"But someone took Bob Bandolier's statements out of the Blue Rose file—only a policeman could do that, and only his son would want to."

He took in my response to these remarks. "Don't get angry with me. I didn't mention it because you wouldn't have believed me. Or was I wrong about that?"

"You weren't wrong."

"Then let's think about what else we have here." He closed his eyes and said nothing for at least an entire minute. Then he said, "Preservation." He smoothed out the front of the silk robe and nodded to himself.

"Maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit," I said. "Didn't John say Fee's house looked like a museum of the year 1945?" I nodded.

"It's his power source—his battery. He keeps that house to step back into his childhood and taste it again. It's a kind of shrine. It's like that ghost village in Vietnam you told me about." Finally, he bent forward and looked at the photographs. "So here we are," he said. "The sites of the original Blue Rose murders. With a slight overlay of static provided by the annoying tenants."

He pulled the fourth photograph toward him. "Hmmm."

"It has to be Stenmitz's shop, doesn't it?" Tom looked sharply up at me. "Do you have some doubts about that?"

I said I wasn't sure.

"It's almost unreadable," he said. "Wouldn't it be interesting if it were a photograph of something else?"

"What about your computers? Do you have a way to lift off the ink and expose what's underneath?"

Tom thought about it for a couple of seconds, frowning down at the ruined photograph with his chin in his hand. "The computer can extrapolate from me bits and pieces that are still visible— suggest a reconstruction. There's so much damage here it'll probably offer several versions of the original image."

"How long would that take?"

"At least a couple of days. It'll have to go through a lot of variations, and some of them will be worthless. To tell you the truth, nearly all of them will be worthless."

"Are you willing to do it?"

"Are you kidding?" He grinned at me. "I'll start as soon as you leave. Something bothers you about this picture, doesn't it?"

"I can't put my finger on it," I said.

"Maybe Bandolier originally intended to kill Stenmitz somewhere else," Tom said, more to himself than to me. He was looking at an invisible point in space, like a cat.

Then he focused on me again. "Why did Fee kill April Ransom?"

"To finish what his father started?"

"Did you read that book I gave you?"

We looked at each other for a moment. Finally I said, "You think that Franklin Bachelor could be Fee Bandolier?"

"I'm sure of it," Tom said. "I bet that Fee called his father twice, in '70 and '71, and that's why Bob changed his phone number. When Bob died, Fee inherited the house and sold it to Elvee."

"Can you get into the draft records from Tangent? We know Fee enlisted under another name right after he graduated from high school, in 1961."

"None of that information was ever computerized. But if you'd be willing to make a little trip, there's a good chance we could find out."

"You want me to go to Tangent?"

"I looked through almost every issue of the Tangent Herald published during the late sixties. I finally managed to find the name of the head of the local draft board, Edward Hubbel. Mr. Hubbel retired from the hardware business about ten years ago, but he's still living in his own home, and he's quite a character."

"Wouldn't he give you the information over the phone?"

"Mr. Hubbel is a little cranky. Apparently, war protestors gave him a lot of trouble during the late sixties. Someone tried to blow up the draft office in 1969, and he's still mad. Even after I explained that I was writing a book about the careers of veterans from various areas, he refused to talk to me unless I saw him in person. But he said he kept his own records of every boy from Tangent who went into the army while he ran the board, and if someone will take the trouble to see him in person, he'll make the effort of checking his files."

"So you do want me to go to Tangent," I said.

"I booked a ticket on a flight for eleven o'clock tomorrow. If the fog lifts, you can be back for dinner."

"What name did you use?"

"Yours," he said. "He won't talk to anyone but a veteran."

"Okay. I'll go to Tangent. Now will you tell me what you found in the police records in Allentown, Pennsylvania?"

"Sure," he said. "Nothing."

I stared at him. Tom was almost hugging himself in self-satisfaction.

"And that's the information you uncovered? Could you explain why that's so wonderful?"

"I didn't find anything in the police records because I don't have any access to them. You can't get there from here. I had to do it the hard way, through the newspapers."

"So you looked in the newspaper and found Jane Wright." He shook his head, but he was still bubbling over with suppressed delight.

"I don't get it," I said.

"I didn't find Jane Wright anywhere, remember? So I went back to the Allentown, Pennsylvania, records for anything that even looked close to the name and date on that piece of paper you found in the Green Woman."

Tom grinned at me again and stood up to walk around the side of the chesterfield. He picked up a manila folder lying next to the computer keyboard on his desk and tucked it under his elbow.

"Our man wants to keep a narrative account of every murder he's done as a kind of written memory. At the same time, someone as intelligent as Fee might work out a way to defuse these records, to make them harmless if anyone else found them. If he turned his own records into a kind of code, he'd have it both ways."

"A code? You mean, change the names or the dates?"

"Exactly. I ploughed through microfilm of the Allentown paper from the mid-seventies. And in the papers from May 1978, I came across a very likely little murder."

"Same month, one year off."

"The victim's name was Judy Rollin. Close enough to Jane Wright to suggest it, but so different that it amounts to a good disguise." He took the folder from under his elbow, opened it up, and took out the sheet of paper on the bottom. Then he walked back to me and handed me the file. "Take a look."

I opened the file, which held copies of three pages of newsprint. Tom had circled one story on each page. The pages had been reduced in size, and the type was just large enough to be read without a magnifying glass. On the first page, the circled story was about the discovery by three teenage boys of the corpse of a young woman who had been knifed to death and then dumped behind an abandoned steel mill. The second story gave the dead woman's name as Judy Rollin, twenty-six, a divorced hairdresser employed at the Hi-Tone Hair Salon last seen at Cookie's, a club five miles from the old steel mill. Mrs. Rollin had gone to the club with two friends who had gone home together, leaving her behind. The third article, headed DOOMED BY LIFE IN THE FAST LANE, was a salacious description of both Judy Rollin and Cookie's. The dead woman had indulged in drugs and alcohol, and the club was said to be "a well-known place of assignation for drug dealers and their customers."

The last article was ARRESTED GOOD-TIME GIRL MURDERED KILLS SELF IN CELL. A bartender at Cookie's named Raymond Bledsoe had hanged himself in his cell after confessing to Mrs. Rollin's murder. An informant had provided police with information that Bledsoe regularly sold cocaine to the victim, and Mrs. Rollin's handbag had been found in the trunk of his car. The detective in charge of the case said, "Unfortunately, it isn't possible for us to provide full-time surveillance for everyone who expresses an unwillingness to spend the rest of their lives in prison." The name of the detective was Paul Fontaine.

I handed the sheet of paper back to Tom, who slid it into his file.

"Paul Fontaine," I said. I felt a strange sense of letdown, almost of disappointment.

"So it seems. I'm going to do some more checking, but…" Tom shrugged and spread out his hands.

"He was so confident that he'd never get caught that he didn't bother changing his name when he came to Millhaven." Then I remembered the last time I'd seen Fontaine. "My God, I asked him if he'd ever heard of Elvee Holdings."

"He still doesn't know how close we are. Fontaine just wants you to get out of town. If we can get our friend in Tangent to identify him as Franklin Bachelor, we'll have a real weapon in our hands. And maybe you could fit in a visit to Judy Leatherwood, too."

"I suppose you have a picture," I said.

Tom nodded and went back to his desk to pick up a manila envelope. "I clipped this out of the Ledger."

I opened the envelope and took out the photograph of Paul Fontaine standing in front of Walter Dragonette's house in the midst of a lot of other officers. Then I looked back up at Tom and said that Judy Leatherwood wasn't going to believe that I was showing her the photograph to straighten out an insurance matter.

"That part's up to you." Tom said. "You have a well developed imagination, don't you?"

The last thing he said to me before he closed the door was "Be careful." I didn't think he was talking about driving in the fog

PART TWELVE

EDWARD HUBBLE

1

The flight to Tangent, Ohio, took off at twelve fifty-five, nearly two hours late. For most of the morning, I thought the plane would never leave, and I kept calling the airport to see if the flight had been cancelled. A young man at the ticket counter assured me that although some arriving aircraft had been rerouted, there were no problems with takeoffs. So while John took a cab to the suburbs to pick up his wife's car, I drove out to the airport at a rousing twenty-five miles an hour, passed a couple of fender-benders without having one, and left the Pontiac in the long-term parking garage.

Our flight boarded at a quarter to eleven, and at a quarter after, the captain announced that the tower was going to take advantage of a reduction in the fog to land aircraft that had been stacked up above us for several hours. He apologized for the delay, but said that it would not last much longer than thirty minutes.

After an hour, the stewardesses passed out free drinks and extra packets of honey-roasted nuts. I spent the time reading the last two day's issues of the Ledger, which I'd brought along.

The death of William Writzmann, alias Billy Ritz, took up only three inches of type on page five of the second section of yesterday's paper. Five grams of cocaine, divided into a dozen smaller quantities and double-wrapped in plastic pill envelopes, had been found in his suit pockets. Detective Paul Fontaine, interviewed at the scene, speculated that Writzmann had been murdered during a drug transaction, although other possibilities were under investigation. When questioned about the words written above the body, Fontaine replied, "At present, we think this was an attempt to mislead our investigation."

The next day, two patrons of the Home Plate Lounge remembered seeing Billy Ritz with Frankie Waldo. Geoffrey Bough examined the life of Frankie Waldo and came to certain conclusions he was careful, over the course of three long columns, not to state. Over the past fifteen years, the Idaho Meat Company had lost ground to national distributors organized into vertical conglomerates; yet Waldo's salary had tripled by 1990. In the mid-eighties, he had purchased a twelve-room house on four acres in Riverwood; a year later, he divorced his wife, married a woman fifteen years younger than himself, and bought a duplex apartment in the Waterfront Towers.

The source of this affluence was his acquisition of Reed & Armor, a rival meat company that had gone into disarray after its president, Jacob Reed, disappeared in February of 1983—Reed had gone out for lunch one day and never been seen again. Waldo immediately stepped in, bought the disintegrating company for a fraction of its real value, and merged the resources of the two firms. It was the operations of this new company that had roused the suspicions of various regulatory agencies, as well as the Internal Revenue Service.

Various persons who chose to remain anonymous reported having seen William Writzmann, known as Billy Ritz, in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs with Mr. Waldo, beginning in late 1982. I would have bet a year's royalties that these persons were all Paul Fontaine, rewriting history to suggest that Billy Ritz had killed Jacob Reed so that Ritz and Waldo could launder drug money through a profitable meat company.

I thought that Waldo was just a guy who spent too much money on stupid things. Eventually, he made the error of turning to Billy Ritz to get himself out of the hole. After that, he was nothing more than a victim with a glitzy apartment and a lakefront view. Paul Fontaine had Ritz murder Waldo in a way that looked like a gang killing. When Billy's body turned up, it was just the bigger dealers taking out the little ones. I wondered if anyone but me would ever wonder why a big-time dealer like Billy Ritz was walking around with separate grams and half grams in his pockets.

And then I reminded myself that I still had no real evidence that Paul Fontaine was Fee Bandolier. That was part of the reason I was sitting on a stalled airplane, waiting to take off for Ohio. I didn't even want Fee to be Paul Fontaine—I liked Fontaine.

2

The plane took off into a clinging layer of fog that soon thickened into dark wool. Then we shot out of the soft, clinging darkness into radiant light. The plane made a wide circle in the sudden light, and I looked down at Millhaven through the little window. A dirty, wrinkled blanket lay over the city. After ten minutes, the blanket had begun to admit shafts of light. Five minutes later, the land lay clear and green beneath us.

The speakers overhead hissed and crackled. The pilot's unflappable voice cut through the static. "You people might be interested in knowing that we departed Millhaven just before the tower decided to shut down operations until further notice. That inversion bowl that caused all the trouble is still stickin' around, so I congratulate you on not having chosen a later flight. Thank you for your patience."

An hour later, we landed at a terminal that looked like a ranch house with a conning tower. I walked through a long waiting room with rows of plastic chairs to the pay telephones and dialed the number Tom Pasmore had given me. A deep voice jerky with anxiety answered after four or five rings.

"You're the writer fellow I was talking to? Suppose you tell me what outfit you were in." I told him.

"You bring your discharge papers?"

"No, sir," I said. "Was that part of the agreement?"

"How do I know you're not some peacenik?"

"I have a few genuine scars," I said.

"What camp were you stationed at and who was the CO there?"

It was like talking to Glenroy Breakstone. "Camp Crandall. The CO was Colonel Harrison Pflug." After a second, I said, "Known as the Tin Man."

"Come out and let me get a look at you." He gave me a complicated set of directions involving a shopping mall, a little red house, a big rock, a dirt road, and an electric fence.

At the rental counter, I signed up for every available kind of insurance and took the keys to a Chrysler Imperial. The young woman waved her hand toward the glass doors at what looked like a mile of parking lot. "Row D, space 20. You can't miss it. It's red."

I carried my briefcase out into the sun and walked across the lot until I came up to a cherry-red car about the size of a houseboat. It should have had a raccoon tail on the antenna and a pair of fuzzy dice in the front window. I opened the door and let the ordinary heat trickle into the oven of the interior. When I got in, the car smelled like a Big Mac box.

About forty minutes later, I finally backtracked to a boulder slightly smaller than the one I had chosen, found my way to a dirt road that vanished into an empty field, and bounced the Chrysler's tires along the ruts until the road split into two forks. One aimed toward a far-off farmhouse, and the other veered left into a grove of oak trees. I looked into the trees and saw flashes of yellow and the glint of metal. I turned left.

Huge yellow ribbons had been tied head-high around each of the trees, and on the high cross-hatched metal fence that ran through them a black-and-white sign said: DANGER ELECTRIFIED FENCE NO TRESPASSERS. I got out of the car and went up to the fence. Fifty feet away, the dirt road ended at a white garage. Beside it stood a square, three-story white house with a raised porch and fluted columns. I pushed a button in the squawk box next to the gate.

The same deep, anxious voice came through the box. "You're a little late. Hold on, I'll let you in."

The box buzzed, and I pushed open the gate. "Close the gate behind you," the voice ordered. I drove in, got out of the car, and pushed the gate shut behind me. An electronic lock slammed home a bolt the size of my fist. I got back in the car and drove up toward the garage.

Before I stopped the car, a bent old man in a white short-sleeved shirt and a polka-dot bow tie appeared on the porch. He hobbled along the porch, waving at me to stop. I cut the engine and waited. The old man glowered at me and got to the white steps that came down to the lawn. He used the handrail and made it down the steps. I opened the door and stood up.

"Okay," he said. "I checked you out. Colonel Pflug was the CO at Camp Crandall right up until seventy-two. But I have to tell you, you have pretty flashy taste in vehicles."

He wasn't kidding—Hubbel didn't look like a man who had ever wasted much time on humor. He got up to within a yard of me and squinted at the car. Distaste narrowed his black little eyes. He had a wide flabby face and a short hooked nose like an owl's beak. Liver spots covered his scalp.

"It's a rental," I said, and held out my hand.

He turned his distaste to me. "I want to see something in that hand."

"Money?"

"ID."

I showed him my driver's license. He bent so far over that his nose nearly touched the plastic covering. "I thought you were in Millhaven. That's in Illinois."

"I'm staying there for a while," I said.

"Funny place to stay." He straightened up as far as he could and glared at me. "How'd you learn my name?"

I said that I had looked through copies of the Tangent newspaper from the sixties.

"Yeah, we were in the paper. Irresponsibility, plain and simple. Makes you wonder about the patriotism of those fellows, doesn't it?"

"They probably didn't know what they were doing," I said.

He glared at me again. "Don't kid yourself. Those commie dupes put a bomb right in our front door."

"That must have been terrible for you," I said.

He ignored my sympathy. "You should have seen the hate mail I got—people used to scream at me on the street. Thought they were doing good."

"People have different points of view," I said.

He spat onto the ground. "The pure, they are always with us."

I smiled at him.

"Well, come on in. I got complete records, like I said on the phone. It's all in good order, you don't have to worry about that."

We moved slowly toward the house. Hubbel said that he had moved out of town and put up his security fence in 1960. "They made me live in the middle of a field," he said. "I tell you one thing, nobody gets into this office unless they stood up for the red, white, and blue."

He stumped up the stairs, getting both feet on one step before tackling the next. "Used to be, I kept a rifle right by the front door there," he said. "Would have used it, too. In defense of my country." We made it onto the porch and crawled toward the door. "You say you got some scars over there?"

I nodded.

"How?"

"Shell fragments," I said.

"Show me."

I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and pulled it down over my shoulders to show him my chest. Then I turned around so that he could see my back. He shuffled forward, and I felt his breath on my back. "Pretty good," he said. "You still must have some of that stuff inside you."

My anger disappeared when I turned around and saw that his eyes were wet. "Every now and then, I set off metal detectors," I said.

"You come on in, now." Hubbel opened the door. "Just tell me what I can do for you."

3

The crowded front parlor of the old farmhouse was dominated by a long wooden desk with high-backed armchairs behind and before it. An American flag stood between the desk and the wall. A framed letter on White House stationery hung on the wall behind the desk. A couch, a shaky-looking rocker, and a coffee table filled most of the rest of the room. The rocker faced a television set placed on the bottom shelf of a unit filled with books and large journals that looked like the records of his hardware business.

"What's this book you want to write?" Hubbel got himself behind his desk and let out a little puff of exertion. "You interested in some of the boys you served with?"

"Not exactly," I said, and gave him some stuff about how representative soldiers had been affected by their wartime experience.

He gave me a suspicious look. "This wouldn't be one of those damn pack of lies that show our veterans as a bunch of criminals, I s'pose."

"Of course not."

"Because they aren't. People go on and on gassing about Post-Traumatic Whatzit, but the whole damn thing was made up by a bunch of journalists. I can tell you about boys right here in Tangent who came back from the war just as clean-cut as they were when they got drafted."

"I'm interested in a very special group of people," I said, not adding that it was a group of one.

"Of course you are. Let me tell you about one boy, Mitch Carver, son of a fireman here, turned out to be a good little soldier in Airborne." He went on to tell me the story, the point of which seemed to be that Mitch had come back from Vietnam, married a substitute schoolteacher, become a fireman just like his dad, and had two fine sons.

After the children had been produced like a merit badge, I said, "I understand that you also have records of the volunteers from your area."

"Why shouldn't I? I made a point of meeting each and every one of our boys who enlisted. A fine, fine bunch. And I kept up with them, too—just like the boys I helped get into the service. I was proud of all of them. You want to see the names?"

He gestured toward the row of record books. "See, I wrote down the name of every one of those boys. I call it my Roll Call of Honor. Fetch me a couple of those books, I'll show you."

I stood up and went to the bookshelves. "Could we look at the list from 1961?"

"You want to see something, get me the book for 1968— that's a whole volume all by itself, there's a million good stories in that one."

"I'm working on 1961," I said.

His venomous face distorted itself into a smile. A hooked old finger jabbed the air in my direction. "I bet that's the year you went in."

I had been drafted in 1967. "Got me," I said.

"Just remember you can't pull anything over on me. 'Sixty-'sixty-one is the second book in line."

I pulled the heavy book off the shelf and brought it to his desk. Hubbel opened the cover with a ceremonious flourish, roll call of honor had been written in broad black strokes on the first page. He flipped through pages covered with names until he came to 1961 and began moving his finger down the line. The names were listed in the order in which they had been drafted and had been written very carefully in the same broad strokes of Hubbel's fountain pen.

"Benjamin Grady," Hubbel said. "There's one for your book. Big, handsome kid. Took him right after high school. I wrote to him two or three times, but the letters never got through. I wrote a lot of my boys."

"You knew where he had been assigned?"

He peered up at me. "Took a special interest. Grady came back in 'sixty-two, but he didn't stay long. Went to college in New Jersey and married some Jewish girl, his dad told me. See?" He moved his finger across the line, where he had written NJ.

The finger traveled down the column again. "Here's a boy for you. Todd Lemon. Used to work at Bud's Service Station here in town, cutest little guy you ever saw in your life. Spunky. I can still remember him at the physical—when the doc asked him about drugs, he said, 'My body is my temple, sir,' and all the other fellows standing in line gave a big laugh of appreciation."

"You went to the physicals?"

"That was how I met the boys who enlisted," he said, as if that should have been obvious. "Every day of the physicals, I turned over the business to my clerks and went down there. Can't tell you what a thrill it was, seeing all those wonderful boys lined up—God, I was proud of all of them."

"Is there a separate list for the volunteers?"

My question made him indignant. "What kind of record-keeper would I be if there weren't? That's a separate category, after all."

I asked to see that list.

"Well, you're missing out on some fine, upstanding boys, but…" He turned over another page. Under the heading enlisted was a column of about twenty-five names. "If you'd let me show you 1967 or 1968, you'd have a lot more to choose from."

I scanned down the list, and my heart stopped about two-thirds of the way down, when I came to Franklin Bachelor. "I think I've heard of one of these people," I said.

"Bobby Arthur? You'd know him, of course. Great golfer —turned pro for a couple of years after the war."

"I was thinking of this one." I pointed at Bachelor's name.

He bent over to peer at the name, and then he brightened. "That boy, oh, yes. Very, very special. He got into Special Forces, had a wonderful career. One of our heroes." He nearly beamed at me. "What a boy. There was some kind of story there, I always thought."

He would have told me even if I hadn't asked.

"I didn't know him—I didn't know most of my boys, of course, but I never even heard of a family named Bachelor living in Tangent. By God, I believe I even checked the telephone book when I got to my place that evening, and damned if there were no Bachelors listed. I had a feeling this was one of those lads who signs up under another name. I didn't say anything, though —I let the boy go through. I knew what he was doing."

"What was he doing?"

Hubbel lowered his voice. "That boy was escaping." He looked up at me and nodded. He looked more like an owl than ever.

"Escaping?" I wondered if Hubbel had managed to guess that Fee had been avoiding arrest. He wouldn't have even begun to imagine the sorts of crimes Fee had committed: all of his "boys" had been as sinless as his own ideas of himself.

"That boy had been mistreated. I saw it right away—little round scars on his chest. Sort of thing that makes you sick inside. Idea that his own mother or father would do a thing like that to a handsome little lad."

"They scarred him?" I asked.

He almost whispered. "Burned him. With cigarettes. Until they left scars." Hubbel shook his spotted head, staring down at the page. His hands were spread out over the names, as if to conceal them. Maybe he just liked touching them. "Doc asked him about the scars, and the boy said he ran into bob wire. I knew—I could see. Bob wire doesn't leave scars like that. Small, like dimes. Shiny. I knew what happened to that boy."

"You have a wonderful memory," I said.

"I go over these journals pretty often, being here by myself." His face hardened. "Now I got so feeble, I can't get the books down so easy anymore, need a little help sometimes."

He moved his hands and stared down at the pages. "You probably want to copy down some of my boys' names."

I let him read out half a dozen names from the enlisted men and the draftees while I copied them into my notebook. They were all still living in Tangent, he said, and I'd have no trouble finding them in the telephone book.

"Do you think you'd still be able to identify Franklin Bachelor from a photograph?" I asked.

"Maybe. You got one?"

I opened my briefcase and took out the manila envelope. Tom had cut off the caption. I put it on top of the list of names, and Hubbel bent over so that his nose was only an inch away from it. He moved his head back and forth over the picture as if he were smelling it. "Policeman," he said. "He went into law enforcement?"

"Yes," I said.

"I'm going to write that in my book."

I watched the top of the spotted head drift back and forth over the photograph. Sparse gray hairs grew up out of his mottled scalp.

"Well, I believe you're right," he said. "It sure could be that boy I saw at the induction center." He blinked up at me. "Turned out fine, didn't he?"

"Which one is he?"

"You're not going to trick me," he said, and planted the tip of his right index finger on top of Paul Fontaine's face. "There he is, right there, that's the boy. Yep. Franklin Bachelor. Or whatever his real name was."

I packed the photograph away in my briefcase and told him how helpful he had been.

"Would you do me a favor before you leave?"

"Of course," I said.

"Fetch my journals for 1967 and 1968, will you? I'd like to remember some more of my boys."

I pulled the books from the shelf and piled them on his desk. He spread his hands out on top of them. "Tell you what, you honk the horn of that flashy car when you want me to open the gate. I'll push the button for you."

When I let myself out onto the porch, he was pushing his beaky nose down a long column of names.

4

I still had two hours before the flight back to Millhaven, and Tangent was only two miles down the highway past the airport. I drove until I came to streets lined with handsome houses set far back on wide lawns. After a while, the quiet streets led into a part of town with four-story office buildings and old-fashioned department stores.

I parked on a square with a fountain and walked around the square until I found a diner. The waitress at the counter gave me a cup of coffee and the telephone book. I took the book to the pay telephone near the kitchen and called Judy Leatherwood.

The same quavery voice I had heard at Tom's house said hello.

I couldn't remember the name of the insurance company Tom had invented. "Mrs. Leatherwood, do you remember getting a call from the Millhaven branch of our insurance company a few nights ago?"

"Oh, yes, I do," she said. "Mr. Bell? I remember speaking to him. This is about my brother-in-law's insurance?"

"I'd like to come out to speak to you about the matter," I said.

"Well, I don't know. Have you located my nephew?"

"He may have changed his name," I said.

For about ten seconds, she said nothing. "I just don't feel right about all this. I've been worried ever since I talked to Mr. Bell." Another long pause. "Did you give me your name?"

"Mister Underhill," I said.

"I think I shouldn't have said those things to Mr. Bell. I don't really know what that boy did—I don't feel right about it. Not at all."

"I understand that," I said. "It might help both of us if we could have a talk this afternoon."

"My son said he never heard of any insurance company doing things that way."

"We're a small family firm," I said. "Some of our provisions are unique to us."

"What was the name of your company again, Mr. Underhill?"

Then, blessedly, it came to me. "Mid-States Insurance."

"I just don't know."

"It'll only take a minute or two—I have to get on a flight back to Millhaven."

"You came all this way just to see me? I guess it would be okay."

I said I'd be there soon, hung up, and showed her address to the waitress. The directions she gave took me back the way I had come.

When I drove up to the nursing home, I realized that I had mistaken it for a grade school when I had driven past it on the way into town. It was a long low building of cream-colored brick with big windows on either side of a curved entrance. I parked in front of a sign that read FAIRHOME CENTER FOR THE AGED and walked toward a concrete apron beneath a wide red marquee. An electronic door whooshed open and let out a wave of cool air.

A woman who looked like Betty Crocker smiled when I came up to a white waist-high counter and asked if she could help me. I said that I wanted to see Mrs. Leatherwood.

"It'll be nice for Judy to have a visitor," she said. "Are you family?"

"No, I'm a friend," I said. "I was just speaking to her on the phone."

"Judy is in the Blue Wing, down the hall and through the big doors. Room six, on your right. I can get an aide to show you the way."

I said that I could find it by myself, and went down the hall and pushed open a bright blue door. Two uniformed nurses stood at a recessed station, and one of them came toward me. "Are you looking for one of the residents?"

"Judy Leatherwood," I said.

She smiled, said, "Oh, yes," and took me past the nurses' station to an open door and a room with a hospital bed and a bulletin board crowded with pictures of a young couple and two blond little boys. An old woman in a print dress sat on a wooden chair in front of a desk below the bright window at the end of the room. The light behind her head darkened her face. An aluminum walker stood beside her legs. "Judy, you have a visitor," the nurse said.

Her white hair gleamed in the light from the window. "Mister Underhill?"

"It's nice to meet you," I said, and came toward her. She lifted her face, showing me the thick, milky glaze over both of her eyes.

"I don't like this business," she said. "I don't want to be rewarded for my nephew's misfortune. If the boy is in trouble, won't he need that money himself?"

"That may not be an issue," I said. "May I sit down for a minute?"

She kept her face pointed toward the door. Her hands twisted in her lap. "I suppose."

Before I sat down, she asked, "Do you know where my nephew is? I'd like to know that."

"I want to ask you a question," I said.

She turned briefly to me and then back to the door. "I don't know what I should say."

"When your nephew lived with you, did you notice any scars on his body? Small, circular scars?"

Her hand flew to her mouth. "Is this important?"

"It is," I said. "I understand that this must be difficult for you."

She lowered her hand and shook her head. "Fee had scars on his chest. He never said how he got them."

"But you thought you knew."

"Mister Underhill, if you're telling me the truth about any of this rigamarole, please tell me where he is."

"Your nephew was a major in the Green Berets, and he was a hero," I said. "He was killed leading a team on a special mission into the DMZ in 1972."

"Oh, heavens." She said it twice more. Then she started to cry, softly, without moving in any way. I took a tissue from the box on her dresser and put it into her hands, and she dabbed her eyes.

"So there won't be any trouble about the money," I said.

I make an extravagant amount of money from writing, not as much as Sidney Sheldon or Tom Clancy but a lot anyhow, a matter I talk about only with my agent and my accountant. I have no family, and there's no one to spend it on except myself. I did what I had decided to do on the airplane if I learned conclusively that Fee Bandolier had grown up to be Franklin Bachelor, took my checkbook out of my briefcase, and wrote her a check for five thousand dollars.

"I'll give you a personal check right now," I said. "It's a little irregular, but there's no need to make you wait for our accounting office to process the papers, and I can get reimbursement from Mr. Bell."

"Oh, this is wonderful," she said. "I never dreamed—you know, what makes me so happy is that Fee—"

"I'm happy for you." I put the check in her hands. She clenched it into the tissue and dabbed her eyes again.

"Judy?" A man in a tight, shiny suit bustled into the room. "I'm sorry I couldn't get here right away, but I was on the phone. Are you all right?"

Before she could answer, he whirled toward me. "Bill Baxter. I run the business office here. Who are you, and what are you doing?"

I stood up and told him my name. "If Mrs. Leatherwood spoke to you about our earlier conversation—"

"You bet she did, and I want you out of here right now. We're going to my office, and I'm calling the police."

"Mr. Baxter, this man—"

"This man is a fraud," Baxter said. He grabbed my arm.

"I came here to give Mrs. Leatherwood a check," I said. "It represents the death benefit on a small insurance policy."

"He gave me a check, he did," Judy Leatherwood said. She extricated it from the tissue and flapped it at Baxter.

He snatched the check away from her, looked at me, back at the check, and then at me again. "This is a personal check."

"I didn't see any reason to make Mrs. Leatherwood wait two or three months for our office to issue the payment," I said, and repeated my statement about reimbursement.

Baxter dropped his arms. I could almost see the question mark floating over his head. "This doesn't make any sense. Your check is on a New York bank."

"I'm a troubleshooter for my company. I was in Millhaven when Mrs. Leatherwood's problem came up."

"He told me about my nephew—Fee was a major in Vietnam."

"Special Forces," I said. "He had quite a career."

Baxter scowled at the check again. "I think we'll use your phone to get in touch with Mr. Underhill's company."

"Why not call the bank to see if the check is covered?" I asked him. "Isn't that the main point?"

"You're giving her this money yourself?"

"You could look at it like that," I said.

Baxter stewed for a moment and then picked up the telephone and asked for directory assistance in New York. He put the call through the home's switchboard and asked to speak to the manager of my branch. He spoke for a long time without getting anywhere and finally said, "I'm holding a five-thousand-dollar check this man made out to one of our residents. I want to be assured that he can cover it."

There was a long pause. Baxter's face grew red.

"I knew I should have called Jimmy," said Judy Leatherwood.

"All right," Baxter said. "Thank you. I'll personally deposit the check this afternoon." He hung up and looked at me for a moment before handing the check back to her. The question mark still hung over his head. "Judy, you just got five thousand dollars, but I'm not sure why. When you first talked to this insurance company, did someone tell you the amount you were supposed to get?"

"Five thousand," she said, with an extra wobble in her voice.

"I'll walk Mr. Underhill to the door." He stepped out into the hall and waited for me to follow him.

I said good-bye to Judy Leatherwood and joined Baxter in the hallway. He set off at a quick march toward the big blue doors and the entrance, giving me sharp, inquisitive glances as we went. Betty Crocker waved good-bye to me. Once we got outside, Baxter stuffed his hands into the pockets of his shiny suit. "Are you going to explain what you just did in there?"

"I gave her a check for five thousand dollars."

"But you don't work for any insurance company."

"It's a little more complicated than that."

"Was her nephew really a Green Beret major?"

I nodded.

"Does this money come from him?"

"You might say that he owes a lot of people," I said.

He thought it over. "I think my responsibility ends at this point. I'm going to say good-bye to you, Mr. Underhill." He didn't offer to shake hands. I walked to my car, and he stood in the sun on the concrete apron until I drove past the entrance.

5

I turned in the keys to the Chrysler and paid for the gas I had used at the counter. There was still half an hour to fill before boarding, so I went to the telephones to call Glenroy Breakstone. "Tangent?" he asked me. "Tangent, Ohio? Man, that's a dead place. Back in the fifties, we played a place called the French Quarter there, and the owner used to pay us in one-dollar bills." I asked if I could come up to see him after I got back to Millhaven. "How soon?" he asked. I told him that I'd be there in about two hours. "As long as you're here before eight," he said. "I got a little business to do around then."

After that I tried Tom Pasmore's number, on the off-chance that he might be up, and when his machine answered, I began describing what I had learned from Edward Hubbel and Judy Leatherwood. He picked up before I was able to say more than a couple of sentences. "This case is turning my day around," he said. "I went to bed about an hour after you left, and I got up about noon to play with my machines a little more. So you found out, did you?"

"I found out, all right," I said, and told him about it in detail.

"Well, that's that," he said, "but I still feel like exploring matters for a while, just to see if anything interesting turns up."

Then I told him about giving Judy Leatherwood a check.

"Oh, you didn't! No, no, no." He was laughing. "Look, I'll pay you back as soon as I see you."

"Tom, I'm not criticizing you, but I couldn't leave her stranded."

"What do you think I am? I sent her a check for five thousand yesterday." He started laughing again. "She's going to love Mid-States Insurance."

"Oh, hell," I said.

He offered once again to pay me back.

"One white lie shouldn't cost you ten thousand dollars," I said.

"But it was my white lie." He was still laughing.

We talked for a few more minutes. There was still a lot of fog in Millhaven, and a small-scale riot had begun on Messmer Avenue. No one had been injured, so far.

I asked the cheerful blond person at the airline desk if the flight would be delayed. He said there were no problems.

Twenty minutes after we left the ground, the pilot announced that atmospheric problems in Millhaven meant that our flight was being diverted to Milwaukee, where we could either wait until conditions improved or arrange for connecting flights.

At about a quarter to seven, we touched down at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, where another cheerful blond person told us that if we remained in the departure lounge, we would be able to reboard and continue on to our original destination in no less than an hour. I had lost faith in cheerful blond persons and walked through the departure lounge, trudged along a series of corridors, took an escalator downstairs, and rented another car. This one was a gunmetal gray Ford Galaxy, and all it smelled of was new leather. They spray it into the cars, like air freshener.

6

South of Milwaukee, the city flattens out into miles of suburbs and then yields to the open farmland of the original Midwest. After I crossed the border into Illinois, the sunlight still fell on the broad green-and-yellow fields, and the billboards advertised high-yield fertilizer and super-effective crop spray. Herds of Holstein cows stood unmoving in vast pastures. Fifteen miles farther, the air darkened; and a little while after that, wisps and tendrils of fog floated between the cars ahead of me. Then the fields disappeared into misty gray. I turned on my fog lights when a Jeep Cherokee two hundred feet down the highway turned into a pair of tiny red eyes. After that, we crawled along at thirty miles an hour. The first Millhaven exit jumped up out of the emptiness barely in time for me to make the turn. After that, the ten-minute drive to the airport took half an hour, and it was seven-thirty before I found the rental parking spaces. I went into the terminal, turned over the keys, and walked back across the access road and down a long stretch of pavement to the long-term parking garage.

On the second floor, twenty or thirty cars stood parked at wide intervals on the gray cement. Overhead bulbs in metal cages shone down on cement pillars and bright yellow lines. The exit signs glowed red across empty space. I turned on the Pontiac's lights and rolled toward the curving wall before the ramp. Another pair of headlights shot out into the gloom. When I stopped to pay the attendant, long yellow beams elongated on the ramp behind me. The attendant handed back my change without looking at me, and the gate floated up. I sped out of the garage and across the pedestrian walkway, swerved onto the circular access road, and got up to forty on the empty drive to the highway. I wanted to vanish into the fog.

I paused at the stop sign long enough to be sure that nothing was coming, cramped the wheel, hit the accelerator and the horn at the same time, and cut into the middle lane. A huge sign flashing FOG WARNING 25MPH burned toward me from the side of the road. As soon as I got up to fifty, the taillights of a station wagon jumped toward me, and I swerved into the fast lane before I rammed into the puzzled face of the Irish retriever staring at me through the wagon's rear window. I whisked past the wagon. I thought that if I drove Paul Fontaine-style for another mile or two, I could put to rest the fear that Billy Ritz's replacement was gaining on me, back in the fog. And then I thought that probably no one was following me, cars drove out of the long-term garage night and day, and I slowed to twenty-five miles an hour. Tail-lights appeared before me in the fast lane, and I moved as slowly as a rowboat back into the center lane. Then I began to imagine a thug creeping toward me out of the sludge in my rearview mirror, and I moved the accelerator down until I was nipping along at forty. It seemed dangerously slow. I swerved around a little powder-blue hatchback that appeared in front of me with vivid, dreamlike suddenness, and ploughed through the drifting lengths and thicknesses of batting, of wool, of white gauze and gray gauze, and whipped past another flashing red FOG WARNING sign. A pain I had not felt in a good five years declared itself in a circle about eight inches in diameter on the upper right side of my back.

I remembered this pain, a combination of burn and puncture, though it is neither. Generally speaking, it is the legacy of the metal fragments embedded in my back, and specifically, the result of some flesh-encrusted screw, some rusty bolt, working its way toward the air like a restless corpse. I felt it now exactly in the place where Edward Hubbel, who had never understood why he had been mesmerized by lines of seminaked boys, had breathed on me while he scrutinized my scars. Edward Hubbel's breath had seeped through my skin and awakened the sleeping bolt. Now it was moving around, crawling toward the surface like Lazarus, where first a sharp edge, then a blunt curl, would emerge. For a week, I'd print spotty bloodstains on my shirts and sheets.

I slowed down before I slammed into the back of a truck and puttered along behind it while I tried rubbing my back on the seat. The truck picked up a little speed. I could feel the exact dimension of the little hatchet buried at the bottom of my shoulder blade. Pressing it against the seat seemed to calm it. The painful circle on my back shrank by half an inch. I looked into the rear-view mirror, saw nothing, and moved out to get around the truck. A horn blared; brakes shrieked. I jammed the accelerator. The Pontiac wavered ahead, and the massive wheels of the truck filled my side window. The horn blasted again. The Pontiac made up its mind and shot forward. The rear end of another car jumped into the windshield, and I hauled the Pontiac into the fast lane with my heart skipping and my mind in the clear empty space of panic. I never even ticked it. When I saw red lights ahead of me, I slowed down and waited for my heart to get back to normal. The screw in my back declared itself again. A few other little knots and bumps began to throb. Hubbel had breathed them all into wakefulness. Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, and I sped up by another five miles an hour. The headlights grew larger and sharper. I swung back into the middle lane.

The car behind me came up alongside me and stuck with me for a long time. I thought it must have been someone I had irritated or frightened during my Fontaine phase. The other car drifted toward my lane, and I swerved right far enough to put my tires on the yellow line. The other car swerved with me. It was dark blue, pocked with brown primer, with crumpled corrugations behind the headlight. I sped up; he sped up. I slowed down; he slowed down. Now he was only inches from the side of my car, and my heart began to trip again. I looked sideways at a curly dark head, heavy bare shoulders, and a flash of gold. The other driver was watching the front of the Pontiac. He moved his wheel, and his car whapped into mine just above the left front tire.

I slammed down the accelerator, and the Pontiac zoomed into the slow lane. There was a screech of metal as he dug a long strip down my side. The Pontiac jumped ahead. The other man raced up alongside to hit me again, and I zagged sideways. The rows of warning lights at the back of another semi zoomed toward me. When I saw its mudflaps, I swerved off the road and shuddered onto gravel. I kept pace with the semi for half a mile, telling myself that the other driver would think I had driven off the road. The truck driver blasted his air horn. I was glad I didn't have to hear what he was saying. Sooner or later, I was going to run into an exit sign or a stalled car, so I edged forward until I could see past the front of the cab, gunned the Pontiac, and scrambled back onto the road. The truck driver gave another enraged blast of his air horn.

The dark blue car swam up beside me again. This time he hit me hard enough to jolt my hands off the wheel. The semi's headlights filled my rearview mirror. The blue car veered away and then came back and ground against the side of the Pontiac. If he got me to slow down, or if he jarred me into an angle, the semi would flatten me. A calm little voice in the midst of my panic said that Fontaine had learned that I had tickets to Tangent and had someone watch the Pontiac until I came back. The same voice told me that a couple of witnesses would testify that I had been driving recklessly. The thug in the blue car would just disappear.

The semi's enormous radiator filled my rearview mirror. It looked carnivorous. The blue car swung into me again, and I fastened onto the wheel and slammed into him, just for the satisfaction. Sparks flew up between us. I could taste adrenaline. The big green rectangle of an exit sign took shape in the fog ahead of me. I took my foot off the accelerator, yanked the wheel to the right, and took off over the gravel. In seconds, I was shuddering over bumpy ground. The steel posts of the sign flew past the sides of the Pontiac, and the blue car sailed away into the fog only feet away from the cab of the semi. I went bumping through weeds. The bottom of the Pontiac scraped rock. Then a curb led down to the off ramp, and I thumped down onto the roadbed, drove without seeing or thinking for thirty seconds, pulled up at the stop sign, and started to shake.

7

I wiped my face with a handkerchief and got out to look at the damage. The man in the blue car would be swept along until the next exit, at least a mile away. He had put three long silver slashes down the side, buckled in the metal between the wheel and the door, and punched a lot of dents along the entire length of the car. I leaned against the car and breathed hard for a while, watching the ghostly traffic move along the highway in the fog. After a while I realized that I was on the off ramp to the south side of Millhaven, twenty minutes from Livermore Avenue. In all the excitement, I had reached the exit I wanted in the first place. I think I had forgotten that I had a destination.

I got back into the car and pointed it toward Pigtown. The uneasy thought came to me that the man in the blue car would already be traveling back toward me.

8

I didn't look at my watch until I saw the vague shape of the St. Alwyn towering over Livermore Avenue, and then I was surprised to see that it was ten to eight. Time seemed to have simultaneously speeded up and slowed down. The little hooks and ratchets in my back pulsed and burned, and I kept hearing air horns and seeing the blue car slamming toward me. As soon as I saw a parking spot, I moved up and reversed in. The right front tire rubbed against the dented shell, and the entire body of the Pontiac shuddered and moaned.

I paid the meter an hour's worth of quarters. Maybe Glen-roy's appointment had been called off; maybe his visitor was delayed by the fog. I had a feeling I knew what kind of appointment it was, anyhow. Meetings like that don't take long. I locked the car, shivering a little in the fog.

The hotel was two blocks away. I hugged myself against the cold, walking through the thin layers of gauze. The street lamps cast feeble yellow orbs, like Japanese lanterns. All of the shops were closed, and there was no one else on the street. The St. Alwyn receded as I walked toward it, as a mountain backs away when you approach it. Behind me, a distant, momentary crackle tugged at my subconscious, then died. I took another couple of steps and heard it again. This time I recognized the sound of gunfire. I turned around, and there came another rattling burst from off on the other side of the valley and a little way south. The sky held a faint orange tinge. If I'd been closer to Messmer Avenue, I would have heard fire gobbling up stores and houses.

The hot circle below my right shoulder blade began to sing more loudly, but that was a phantom, like the pain in a severed leg. It was just memory, brought back by the sound of small arms' fire. I crossed the next street in the fog, and then I couldn't take it anymore. Directly to my side, rising up two stories of solid darkened brick, was the old annex of the St. Alwyn, now a Valu-Rite pharmacy. I went over to the wall, bent my knees, and pressed my back against the cold brick. After a couple of seconds, the heat and pressure began to shrink. Real relief from phantom pain, as good as a Percodan. If I could press my back against the cold wall for an hour, I thought, all the bolts and fish hooks could go back to their rusty sleep.

I was standing half-crouched against the wall when a curly-haired young character in a black sleeveless T-shirt and baggy black pants came hurrying out of the arched little alleyway. He took a quick, automatic glance in my direction, turned away, then gave me a double take. He stopped moving with a kind of indolent, theatrical slowness. I pushed myself away from the wall. He was going to say something about the rattle of gunfire coming to us from the ghetto at that moment.

He grinned. That was disconcerting. He said, "You stupid fuck," even more disconcerting. Then he took a step near me, and I recognized him. Somewhere on the other end of the brick alley, tucked behind a dumpster or nestled in at the back of a liquor store, was a dark blue car with a lot of dents and scratches on its left side. He laughed at the recognition in my face. "This is beautiful," he said. "I don't believe it, but it's beautiful." He looked up and spread out his hands, as if thanking the god of lowlifes.

"You must be the new Billy Ritz," I said. "The old one had a little more style."

"Nobody is gonna help you now, shithead. There's nowhere you can go." He reached behind his back with his right hand, the muscles popping in his biceps and shoulders, and the hand came back filled with a solid black rod with shiny steel tips on both ends. A long blade popped out of the case. He was grinning again. He was going to have a good day, after all, and his boss was going to think he was a hot shot.

Ice formed in my stomach, in my lungs, along the inside of my chest. This was fear, a lot less of it than I had felt on the highway, and useful because of the anger that came along with it. I was safer here on the sidewalk than I had been tearing along on a fogbound highway. Nothing was going to come at me that I couldn't already see. I was probably twenty-five years older than this creep and a lot less muscular, but at his age, I had spent an entire summer in a sweatbox in Georgia, dealing with lousy food and a lot of determined men coming at me with knives and bayonets.

He jabbed at me, just having fun. I didn't move. He jabbed again. I kept my feet planted. We both knew he was too far away to touch me. He wanted me to run, so that he could trot up behind me and clamp his left arm around my neck.

He prowled toward me, and I let my arms dangle, watching his hands and his feet. "Jesus, you got nothing, you got no moves at all," he said.

His right foot stabbed out, and his right arm came up toward me. I felt a blast of mingled adrenaline and rage and twisted to my left. I grabbed his wrist with my right hand and closed my left just above his elbow. In the half-second he could have done something to get his momentum back, he swiveled his head and looked into my eyes. I brought up my right knee and slammed my hands down as hard as I could. I even grunted, the way they recommended back in Georgia. His arm came apart in my hands—the two long bones snapped away from the elbow, and the big one, the radius, sliced through the skin of his inner arm like a razor. The knife clunked down onto the sidewalk. He made a small astonished sound, and I got both hands on his forearm and yanked it, using as much torque as I could. I was hoping it would come off, but it didn't. Maybe I was standing too close to him. He stumbled in front of me, and I saw his eyes bulge. He started screaming. I pushed him down, but he was already crumpling. He landed on his side with his knees drawn up. His chest was sprayed with blood, and blood pumped through the ragged hole in his arm.

I walked around him and picked up the knife. He was still screaming, and his eyes looked glazed. He thought he was going to die. He wasn't, but he'd never really use his right arm again. I walked up to him and kicked the place where his elbow used to be. He passed out.

I looked up and down the street. There wasn't a person in sight. I knelt down beside him and shoved my hand into the pocket of his pants. I found a set of keys and a number of slippery little things. I threw the keys into the storm drain and put my hand back into his pocket and came out with four double-wrapped little plastic envelopes filled with white powder. These I dropped into my jacket pocket. I rolled him over and picked the pocket on the other side. He had a fat little wallet with about a hundred dollars and a lot of names and addresses written on little pieces of paper. I lifted the flap and looked at his driver's license. His name was Nicholas Ventura, of McKinney Street, about five blocks west of Livermore. I dropped the wallet and walked away on legs made of air. At the end of the block I realized that I was still holding his knife. I threw it into the street. It bounced and clattered until it was a dark spot in the fog.

I had seen him before, waiting with three other men at a round table at the back of Sinbad's Cavern. He was part of the talent pool. I turned into Widow Street and got myself up the steps to the St. Alwyn's entrance on my air-legs. I felt sick and weary, more sick than weary, but weary enough to lie down for a week. Instead of adrenaline, I could taste disgust.

The dried-out night clerk looked up at me and then elaborately looked away. I went to the pay telephones and called 911. "There's an injured man on the sidewalk alongside the St. Alwyn Hotel," I said. "That's on Livermore Avenue, between South Sixth and South Seventh. He needs an ambulance." The operator asked my name, and I hung up. Out of the sides of his eyes, the clerk watched me move toward the elevators. When I pushed the button, he said, "You don't go up without you go through me."

"I'll go through you, if that's what you really want," I said. He moved like a ghost to the far end of the counter and began playing with a stack of papers.

9

I rapped twice on Glenroy's door. Nat Cole was singing about Frim-Fram sauce with shifafa on the side, and Glenroy called out, "Okay, I'm coming." I could barely hear him through the music. The door opened, and Glenroy's eager smile vanished as soon as he saw my face. He leaned out and looked around me to see if anyone else was in the corridor.

"Hey, man, I said for you to come before eight. Why don't you go downstairs, get a drink at the bar, and then call me from the lobby? It'll be okay, I just need some time, you know."

"It's okay now," I said. "I have something for you."

"I got some private business to do." I palmed two of the packets and showed them to him. "Your man had an accident."

He backed away from the door. I walked toward the table with the box and the mirror. Glenroy kept his eyes on me until I sat down. Then he closed the door. I could see caution, worry, and curiosity working in his eyes. "I guess I should hear this story," he said, and came toward the table like a cat padding into a strange room.

Glenroy took the chair across from me, put the palms of his hands on the table, and stared at me as if I were some neighborhood child who had suddenly displayed a tendency toward arson. "Were you waiting for a grown-up delinquent named Nicholas Ventura?" I asked.

He closed his eyes and blew air through his nose. "I want you to talk to me," I said.

He opened his eyes as soon as I began to speak, and now he looked at me with an unhappy pity. "I thought I told you about staying out of trouble. You looked like you understood me."

"I had to take a trip today," I said. "Ventura was waiting for me. He tried to run me off the highway, and he nearly managed to do it."

Glenroy let one hand drop to the table and pressed the other against his cheek. He wanted to close his eyes again—he'd have closed his ears, if he could.

"Then I came here," I said. "I parked a couple of blocks away. The accident was that he saw me when he was coming here to make his delivery. He brightened right up."

"I got nothing to do with him, except for one thing," he said. "I can't explain him to you."

"He pulled out a knife and tried to kill me. I took care of that. He isn't going to talk about it, Glenroy. He'll be too embarrassed. But I don't think he'll be around anymore."

"You took his merchandise away from him?"

"I went through his pockets. That's how I learned his name."

"I suppose it could be worse," Glenroy said. "As it is, I'm glad I'm getting on that plane to Nice the day after tomorrow."

"You're not in any danger. I just want you to give me a name."

"You're a fool."

"I already know the name, Glenroy. I just want to make sure all the edges are nailed down. And then I want you to do something for me."

He rolled his head sideways on his palm. "If you want to be my friend, give me that merchandise and leave me out of it."

"I'm going to give it to you," I said. "After you tell me the name."

"I'd rather stay alive," he said. "I can't tell you anything. I don't even know anything." But he straightened up and pulled his chair closer to the table.

"Who was the detective that Billy Ritz worked with? Who helped him plant evidence, after he killed people?"

"Nobody knows that." Glenroy shook his head. "Some people might have worked out that that kind of business was goin' on, but those people made sure they stayed on the right side of Billy. That's all I can tell you."

"You're lying," I said. "I'm going to flush that shit down the toilet—I need your help, Glenroy."

He glowered at me for a moment, trying to work out how he could get what he wanted without endangering himself. "Billy was connected," he said. "You know what I mean? He was all over the place."

"What are you saying? That he was an informant for more than one detective?"

"That was the word." He was deeply uncomfortable.

"You don't have to tell me any names. Just nod when I say the name of anyone who used Billy as a source."

He chewed on it for a time and finally nodded.

"Bastian."

He did not react.

"Monroe."

He nodded.

"Fontaine."

He nodded again.

"Wheeler."

No response.

"Hogan."

He nodded.

"Good God," I said. "What about Ross McCandless?"

Glenroy pursed his lips, and then nodded again.

"Any more?"

"Someone like Billy keeps his business to himself."

"You didn't tell me a thing," I said. This was far truer than I wished it to be. At least Glenroy had nodded when I said Paul Fontaine's name, but he had not given me the confirmation I wanted.

"What was that thing you wanted me to do?" he asked. "Throw myself in front of a bus?"

"I want you to show me room 218," I said. "Shoo," he said. "Is that all? Show me what you got in your pocket."

I took out the four packets and put them on the table in front of him. Glenroy picked up each in turn and hefted it for weight, smiling to himself. "Guess I was his first stop of the night. This is a double eightball. Nick was gonna eyeball it down into packets, probably cut off a little for himself every time he did it."

"Congratulations," I said. "Nick still out there?"

"I called 911. He's in a hospital by now. He'll have to stay there for a couple of days."

"Maybe you and me will both stay alive for a while, after all."

"To tell you the truth, Glenroy, it could have gone either way."

"Now I know you're dangerous." He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. "You said you want to see James's old room?"

Before we left, he scooped up the plastic envelopes and put them in the wooden box.

10

Glenroy pushed the button marked 2 on the panel and leaned back on the wooden bar. "What did you find out?"

"Bob Bandolier had a son," I said. "After Bob's wife died, he sent him away to live with relatives. I think he started killing people when he was a teenager. He enlisted under a phony name and went to Vietnam. He worked in a couple of police departments around the country and finally came back here."

"Lot of detectives here were in Vietnam." The elevator came to a stop, and the doors slid open. A corridor painted a dark, gloomy shade of green stretched out before us. "But only one of them looks like he takes after Bad Bob."

We stepped out, and Glenroy looked up at me speculatively, beginning to get worried again. "You think this guy killed your friend's wife?"

I nodded.

"Which one?"

Glenroy motioned me down the hallway. He did not speak until we came around a corner and came up to the door of room 218. Yellow police tape was strung tautly across the frame, and a white notice on the door announced that entrance was a crime punishable by a fine and a jail term. "All this trouble, and they never bothered to lock the door," Glenroy said. "Not that the locks would stop you, anyhow."

I bent down to look at the keyhole in the doorknob. I didn't see any scratches.

Glenroy didn't even bother to look up and down the corridor. He just put his hand on the knob and opened the door. "No sense in hanging around." He bent under the tape and walked into the room.

I crouched down and followed him. Glenroy closed the door behind us.

"I was thinking of Monroe," Glenroy said. "He looks like Bob Bandolier. Monroe is a mean son of a bitch, too. He got a few people alone, you know, and they didn't look so good, time he got through with them."

He was looking at the floor as he spoke. I couldn't take my eyes off the bed, and what he was telling me fought for space in my mind with the shock of what was before me. The bed reminded me of the chair in the basement of the Green Woman. Whoever had brought April Ransom into this room had not bothered to pull back the long blue quilt or uncover the pillows. A dark stain lay like a shadow across the bed, and runners and strings of the same dark noncolor dripped down the sides of the quilt. Brown splashes and spatters surrounded the words above the bed. BLUE ROSE had been written in the same spiky letters I had seen in the alleyway behind the hotel.

"A cop like that turns up, every now and then," Glenroy said. He had wandered over to the window, which looked down into the passage behind the hotel.

"Goddamn, I hate being in this room." Glenroy drifted off to the dresser unit that ran along the wall opposite the bed. Cigarette butts filled the ashtray on top of the dresser. "Why did you want me to come here, anyhow?"

"I thought you might notice something," I said.

"I notice I want to get out." Glenroy finally glanced at the bed. "Your buddy has a lot of those pens."

I asked him what he meant.

"The words. They're blue. That makes three. Red, black, and blue."

I looked at the wall again. Glenroy was right—the slogan was written in dark blue ink.

"If it's all the same to you, I'm going back upstairs." Glenroy went to the door, cracked it open, and glanced back at me. His face was tight with impatience. I took in the slanting words for as long as I thought he could stand it, tingling with a recognition that would not come into focus.

I followed Glenroy back under the tape. "You better not come back here for a while," he said, and started toward the elevator.

I wandered down the hall until I came to a pair of wide metal doors. They led down to another pair of doors that must have opened into the lobby, and then continued down another few steps to the back entrance. I walked outside into the narrow alley behind the hotel, half-expecting a couple of policemen to come toward me with drawn guns. Cold fog moved up the alley from the brick passage, licking against the back of the pharmacy that had taken over the old annex. Up to my left, I could see the crumpled nose of Nick Ventura's car poking past the rear of the hotel.

I hurried through the passage. A few gunshots came from Messmer Avenue, a little more orange tinted the sky. A long smear of blood lay across the sidewalk. I walked around it and plodded through the fog until I got to the Pontiac. I kept seeing room 218 in my mind without understanding what had been wrong up there.

When I got close enough to the car to see it clearly, I groaned out loud. Some wayward child had happened along with a baseball bat and clubbed in the rear window. The Pontiac looked like it had been driven away from a junkyard. I didn't think John was going to react very gracefully to the sight of his car. I was surprised that I still cared.

PART THIRTEEN

PAUL FONTAINE

1

Back at John's, I took a couple of aspirins for the pain in my back and went upstairs. I didn't even bother with a book, I just stretched out on the guest bed and waited for unconsciousness. John must have been still on his way home from Chicago —I wasn't looking forward to his reaction to what had happened to his car. I had just decided to tell him about my meetings with Tom Pasmore when I witnessed my hand picking up the fourth, most disfigured photograph from the blood-soaked bed in the St. Alwyn. I understood that if I shook the photograph while holding it upside down, the markings would fall away like hair cuttings. I upended and shook the little square. Dried-up ink fragments obediently dropped to the floor. I turned the photograph over and saw an image I knew—a photograph my mother had taken in front of the house on South Sixth Street. A three-year-old me stood on the sidewalk while my father, Al Underhill, crouched behind me, his hat slanted back on his head, his hand loose and proprietorial on my shoulder.

2

Some time later, an actual hand on my shoulder brought me back up into the real world. I opened my eyes to the gloating face of John Ransom, six or seven inches away from mine. He was almost demonic with glee. "Come on," he said, "let's hear about it. You tell me your adventures, and I'll tell you mine."

"Did you see your car?"

He pulled away from me, waving the trouble away with his thick hands.

"Don't worry about that, I understand. I almost had a real crack-up myself on the way to Chicago. You must have been sideswiped, right?"

"Someone ran me off the road," I said.

He laughed and pulled the chair closer to the bed. "Listen to this. It was perfect."

John had made it from Purdum to Chicago in four hours, narrowly missing several incidents of the sort he'd assumed I'd had. The fog had vanished about thirty miles this side of Chicago, and he'd parked a block from the train station.

He had left the keys in the unlocked car and walked up the street. Two potential thieves had been chased away on the basis of being dressed too well. "I mean, some yuppie, what's he going to do, actually steal it? Give me a break. I had to shut up some guy who started yelling for a cop, and he gave me a big lecture about leaving the keys in my car. Anyhow, this white kid finally comes up, gold chain around his neck, his pants halfway down his ass, no laces in his shoes, and when this jerk sees the keys he starts ambling around the car, checking out the street to make sure nobody's watching him—I'm standing there, looking into a window, practically praying that he'll try the door." And finally the boy had tried the open door, nearly fainted when it opened, and jumped in and driven away in the car of his dreams.

"The kid'll beat the shit out of it for a couple of weeks, total it, and I'll get the insurance. Perfect." He all but covered his own face with kisses. Then he remembered that I had been in an accident and looked at me with a sort of humorous concern. "So you got run off the road? What happened?"

I went into the bathroom, and he stood outside the door while I splashed water on my face and told him about coming back from Tangent.

I rubbed my face with a towel. John was standing in the doorway, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

"He pulled a knife on me, but I got lucky. I broke his arm."

"Jesus," John said.

"Then I went inside the hotel and took a look at the room where they found April."

"What happened to the guy?"

"He's in the hospital now."

I went toward the door, and John backed away and slapped me on the back as I came through. "What was the point of going to the room?"

"To see if I'd notice anything."

"It must be pretty bad," John said.

"I have the feeling I missed something, but I can't work out what it was."

"The cops have been over that room a million times. Ah, what am I saying? A cop is the one who did it."

"I know who he is," I said. "Let's go downstairs, and I'll tell you the rest of my adventures."

"You found out his name in Tangent? Somebody described him?"

"Better than that," I said.

3

"John," I said, "I want to know where you were assigned after you brought the man you thought was Franklin Bachelor back to the States."

We were sitting at the table, eating a dinner both of us had made up out of food we had come across in the refrigerator and the freezer. John wolfed down the meal as if he hadn't eaten in a week. He'd had two substantial glasses of the hyacinth vodka while we worked in the kitchen and opened another bottle of the Chateau Petrus from his cellar.

Since we had come downstairs, he had been debating out loud with himself whether he should really go back to Arkham next year. If you thought about it, he said, his book was really a higher duty than meeting his classes. Maybe he should admit that he had to move on to a new phase of his life. My question interrupted this self-absorbed flow, and he looked up from his plate and stopped chewing. He washed down the food in his mouth with wine.

"You know exactly where I was. Lang Vei."

"Weren't you really somewhere else? A camp not far from Lang Vei?"

He frowned at me and sliced off another bit of veal. He took some more of the wine. "Is this more wild stuff you got from that quartermaster colonel?"

"Tell me."

He set down his knife and fork. "Don't you think the name of the cop is a lot more important? I've been really patient with you, Tim, I let you do your Julia Child number at the stove, but I don't feel like rooting around in ancient history."

"Did someone tell you to say that you'd been at Lang Vei?"

He gave me the look you'd give a mule that had decided to stop moving. Then he sighed. "Okay. After I finally made it to Khe Sanh, a colonel in Intelligence showed up and ordered me to tell people I'd been at Lang Vei. My orders were all rewritten, so as far as history goes, I was at Lang Vei."

"Did you know why you were given those orders?"

"Sure. The army didn't want to admit how badly it fucked up."

"Where were you, if you weren't at Lang Vei?"

"A little encampment called Lang Vo. We got wiped out right after Lang Vei was overrun. Me and a dozen Bru. The North Vietnamese took us apart."

"After you came back from Langley, they sent you off to a postage stamp in the jungle." So far, Colonel Runnel had been telling the truth. "Why did they do that?"

"Why do they do anything? That's the kind of thing we did."

"Did you think you were being punished for having brought back the wrong man?"

"It wasn't punishment." He glared at me. "I didn't lose any rank."

Maybe he was right. But I thought that Runnel was right, too. John was beginning to flush, turning red from the neck up.

"Tell me what happened at Lang Vo."

"It was a massacre." He was looking straight into my eyes. "First they shelled us, and then North Vietnamese regulars swarmed in, and then the tanks blasted the hell out of whatever was left standing." His entire face had turned red. "I felt like fucking Custer."

"Custer didn't get out alive," I said.

"I don't have to defend myself to you." He jammed his fork into the home fries, brought one up to his mouth, and looked at it as if it had turned into a cockroach. He put the fork back down on his plate.

I said that I wanted to know what had happened.

"I made a mistake," he said, and met my eyes again. "You want to know what happened, that's what happened. I didn't think they'd send so much force after us. I didn't think it'd be a goddamn siege."

I waited for him to explain how he had survived.

"Once things got hairy, I ordered everybody into this bunker, with firing slits raised above the ground. Two tunnels. It was a good system. It just didn't work against that many men. They pounded the shit out of us. They fired a grenade in through one of the slits, and that was pretty much that. I wound up flat on the ground with about a dozen guys lying on top of me. I couldn't see or hear. I could hardly breathe. All the blood almost drowned me. Finally, some guy got in through the tunnel and emptied a clip into us. Two, I think, but I wasn't really counting."

"You couldn't see him."

"I couldn't see anything," he said. "I thought I was dead. The way it turned out, I caught a round in my ass, and I had some grenade fragments in my legs. When I realized I was still alive, I crawled out. It took a long time." He picked up his fork and stared at the fried bit of potato again before putting it back on his plate. "A hell of a long time. The tunnels had collapsed."

I asked him if he remembered Francis Pinkel.

John almost smiled. "The little twerp who worked for Burrman? Sure. He came in the day before the shit hit the fan, gave us an hour of his precious time, and climbed back into the helicopter."

According to Runnel's mysterious informant, Pinkel had visited Lang Vo on the day of the assault. It made more sense as John told it: the assault on John's camp would have taken at least a day to coordinate.

"Well," I said, "the twerp reported sighting an A Team under an American officer after he lifted off."

"Really?" John raised his eyebrows.

"Do you remember Tom Pasmore asking if anyone might have a reason to want to injure you?"

"Pasmore? He's just living off his reputation."

I said I didn't think that was true, and John snorted in contempt. "What if I'd offered him a hundred thousand? Don't kid yourself."

"But the point is, can you think of anyone with a grudge against you?"

"Sure," he said. He was beginning to get irritated again. "Last year I flunked a kid out of graduate school because he could hardly read. He has a grudge against me, but I don't think he'd murder anybody." John looked at me as if I were being deliberately simpleminded. "Am I wrong, or is there actually some point to this?"

"Did you ever think about the name of Fee Bandolier's corporation?"

"Elvee? No. I never thought about it. I'm getting a little tired of this, Tim." He pushed his plate away and poured more wine into his glass.

"Lang Vei," I said. "Lang Vo."

"This is nuts. I ask you a question, and you give me gobble-dygook."

"Fielding Bandolier enlisted in the army in 1961."

"Great."

"Under the name Franklin Bachelor," I said. "I guess he has a thing about initials."

John had been raising his glass to his mouth. His arm stopped moving. His mouth opened a little wider, and his eyes turned cloudy. He took a big gulp of the wine and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Are you accusing me of something?"

"I'm accusing him, not you," I said. "Bachelor is resourceful enough to have made it back to the States under someone else's name. And he blamed you for his wife's death."

Anger flared in John's eyes, and for a second I thought he might try to strangle me again. Then I saw a curtain of reflection pass across his face, and he began to look at me with a growing sense of understanding.

"Why would he wait all this time to get his revenge?"

"Because after he came into your bunker and emptied a couple of clips into the bodies, he thought you were dead."

"So he wound up back here." He said it flatly, as if this was to have been expected.

"He's been living in Millhaven since 1979, but he had no idea that you were back here, too."

"How did he find out that I was alive?"

"He saw your picture in the paper. He killed Grant Hoffman two days later. Five days after that, he tried to kill your wife. His father murdered people at five-day intervals, and he was just following the pattern, even writing the same words."

"To make the murders look like they were connected to the old Blue Rose case."

"When April began writing to the department about the case, he went into the files and removed his father's statements. And moved his notes out of the Green Woman, in case anyone else got curious."

"Franklin Bachelor," John said. "The Last Irregular."

"Nobody knew what he really was," I said. "He had a lifetime of pretending to be someone else."

"Tell me his name," John said.

"Paul Fontaine," I said.

John repeated the detective's name, slowly, his voice rising at the end. "I can't believe it. Are you sure?"

"The man I saw in Ohio put his finger right on Fontaine's face," I said.

The telephone went off like a bomb, and I jumped no more than a foot or two.

The answering machine cut in, and we heard Alan Brookner's conversational bellow, raised about 10 percent above its usual volume. "Goddamn it, will you answer the phone? I'm sitting here all alone, the whole city's going crazy, and—"

John was already on his feet. Alan's voice clicked off as soon as John picked up the receiver, and from then on I could hear only half of the conversation. John was being placating, but to judge from the number of times he said, "Alan, I can hear you" and "No, I haven't been avoiding you," placation did not occur. "No, the police haven't been in touch," he said, and moved the receiver a few inches from his ear. "I will, I will," he said. "Of course you're worried. Everybody's worried." He moved the receiver away from his ear again. Then: "I know you don't care about what everybody else does, Alan, you never have." He endured another long tirade, during which my guilt at not having visited Alan Brookner increased exponentially.

He put down the receiver and did a brief mime of exhausted patience, wobbling his knees and shaking his hands and his head. "He assured me that he was going to call again. Is that startling news? No, it is not."

"I guess we've been ignoring him," I said.

"Alan Brookner has never been ignored for five whole minutes at a time." John came back into the living room and collapsed into his chair. "The problem is that Eliza goes home at five o'clock. All he has to do is eat the dinner she has warming in the oven, take off his clothes, and go to bed. But of course he doesn't do that. He has a couple of drinks and forgets about dinner. He watches the news, imagining it will be about himself and his daughter, there can't possibly be any other topic, the concept is ridiculous, and when he sees burning buildings and gunmen flitting through the fog he imagines that he is in danger"—John paused for a deep breath—"because it cannot be possible that what's on the news is not directly related to him."

"Isn't he just alarmed?"

"I've known him a lot longer than you have," John said. "He's going to keep on calling until I go over there." He looked up at me with a speculative gleam. "Unless you go. He adores you."

"I don't mind visiting Alan," I said.

"You must be some kind of frustrated nurse," John grumbled. "Anyhow, what do you say? If we're going to take a look inside Fontaine's house, this is the night." He made a third attempt at eating the home fry on his fork, and this time got it into his mouth. Chewing, he challenged me with a look. I did not respond. He shook his head in disgust and polished off the last of the veal. Then he slugged down a mouthful of wine and kept his eyes on me, trying to provoke me into agreement.

"God, Tim, I hate to say this, but I seem to be the only guy around here who's willing to see a little action."

I stared at him, and then I began to laugh.

"Okay, okay," he said. "I spoke out of turn. Let's see how bad it is before we make up our minds."

4

We settled onto the couch in the living room, and John flicked on the television with the remote. Looking more distressed than I had ever seen him, his hair slightly rumpled, his conservative tie out of plumb, Jimbo appeared on the screen, announcing for the hundredth time that the members of the Committee for a Just Millhaven had appeared at City Hall, led by the Reverend Clement Moore and accompanied by several hundred demonstrators, demanding a meeting with Merlin Waterford and a reconsideration of their demands. The mayor had sent out his deputy with the message that unscheduled appointments had never been and never would be permitted. The delegation had refused to leave the building. Arden Vass had sent in police to disperse the crowd, and after demands, counterdemands, and speeches, a teenage boy had been shot and killed by an officer who thought he had seen a pistol in the boy's hand. From a jail cell, the Reverend Clement Moore had issued the statement that "Decades of racial injustice, racial insensitivity, and economic oppression had finally come home to roost, and the fires of rage will not be banked."

A police car had been overturned and set on fire on North Sixteenth Street. Homemade incendiary bombs thrown into two white-owned businesses on Messmer Avenue had spread through the neighboring buildings, and fire fighters responding to the emergency had been fired upon from rooftops across the street.

Behind Jimbo's face, a camera showed figures running through the fog carrying television sets, piles of suits and dresses, armloads of groceries, mufflers, running shoes tied together by their laces. People trotted out of the fog, waved steaks and halogen lamps and cane-backed chairs at the camera, and disappeared again into the haze.

"Damage is presently estimated at the five-million-dollar level," Jimbo said. "For a report on some other disturbing aspects of the situation, here is Isobel Archer, live from Armory Place." Isobel appeared on the near side of a solid line of policemen separating her from a chaotic mob. She raised her voice to be heard over chants and howls. "Reports of isolated fires and incidents of shooting have begun to come in from other sections of the city," she said. A faint but distinct noise of breaking glass made her look over her shoulder. "There have been several accounts of drivers being dragged from their cars on Central Divide and Illinois Avenue, and several downtown merchants have hired private security firms to protect their stores. I'm told that gangs of armed rioters are traveling in cars and shooting at other vehicles. Lone pedestrians have been attacked and beaten on Livermore Avenue and Fifteenth Street Avenue." She winced at loud gunshots from somewhere on the far side of the line of police. "At this point, I'm told that we are moving to the top of police headquarters, where we may be able to show you something of the scale of the destruction."

The anchor's stolid face appeared again on a split screen. "On a personal note, Isobel, do you feel in danger yourself?"

"I believe that's why we're going to try to get to the roof," she said.

Jimbo filled the entire screen again. "While Isobel moves to a safer location, we advise all residents to draw their curtains, stay away from their windows, and refrain from leaving the house. Now. This just in. There are unconfirmed reports of arson and random gunfire in the fifteen hundred block of Western Boulevard, the twelve hundred block of Fifteenth Street Avenue, and sections of the near west side near the Galaxy Shopping Center. And now, Joe Ruddier with a commentary."

Mouth already open, eyes flaring, cheeks blazing, Joe Ruddler's irate, balloonlike visage zoomed onto the screen. He looked as if he had just charged out of a cage.

"If any good comes out of this, it ought to be that those uninformed, soft-headed idiots who babble about gun control will finally come to their senses!"

"This is the ideal time to take Fontaine's house apart," John said. He went into the kitchen and came back with his glass and the rest of the wine. A little windblown and out of breath, Isobel Archer appeared on top of police headquarters to point at the places where we would be able to see fires, had we been able to see them.

"This place is going to look like San Francisco after the great quake," John said.

"The fog won't last that long," I said. "It'll be gone by about midnight."

"Oh, yeah," John said. "And Paul Fontaine will turn up at the front door, tell us he found Jesus too, and apologize for all the trouble he caused me."

Alan Brookner called back around ten o'clock and held John on the phone for twenty minutes, ten of which John spent with the receiver a foot away from his head. When he hung up, he went straight into the kitchen and made a fresh drink.

A smiling young black face filled the screen as Jimbo announced that the teenager killed by a police bullet in City Hall was now identified as Lamar White, a seventeen-year-old honor student at John F. Kennedy High School. "White seems to have been unarmed at the time of his shooting, and the incident will be under departmental investigation."

The telephone rang again.

"John, John, John, John, John, John," Alan said through the answering machine. "John, John, John, John, John, John."

"You ever notice how they always turn into honor students as soon as they're dead?" John asked me.

"John, John, John, John, John…"

John got up and went to the telephone.

Jimbo said that Ted Koppel would be hosting a special edition of "Nightline" from the Performing Arts Auditorium tomorrow night. A police spokesman announced that all roads and highways in and out of Millhaven were to be blocked by state troopers.

Clutching one hand to the side of his head, John wandered back into the living room. "I have to go over there and get him," he said. "Do you think it's safe?"

"I don't think there's been any trouble up here," I said.

"I'm not going out without that gun." John looked at me as if he expected me to protest, and when I did not, he went upstairs and came back down buttoning the linen jacket over a lump at his waistband. I said I'd hold the fort. "You think this is all a joke," he said.

"I think it'd be better for Alan to spend the night here."

John went to the door, opened it carefully, looked both ways, gave me a last mournful glance, and went outside.

I sat watching pictures of fire lapping up entire blocks while men and women trotted past the camera carrying what they had looted. Stocks must have been getting low—their arms were full of toilet paper and light bulbs and bottles of mineral water. When the phone rang again, I got up to answer it.

Alan was hiding in a closet. Alan was sitting in a pile of feces on his kitchen floor. Whatever the crisis was, John had given up.

I answered the telephone, and a voice I did not recognize asked to speak to Tim Underhill.

"Speaking," I said.

The man on the other end of the line said he was Paul Fontaine.

5

When I didn't respond, he asked, "Are you still there?" I said I was still there.

"Are you alone?"

"For about five minutes," I said.

"We have to talk about a certain matter. Informally."

"What did you have in mind?"

"I have some information you might be interested in, and I think you have some I could use. I want you to meet me somewhere."

"This is a funny time for a meeting."

"Don't believe everything you hear on television. You'll be okay as long as you stay away from Messmer Avenue. Look, I'm at a pay phone near Central Divide, and I don't have much time. Meet me across Widow Street from the St. Alwyn at two o'clock."

"Why should I come?"

"I'll explain the rest there." He hung up.

I put down the telephone and instantaneously found myself, as if by teleportation, seated again on the couch in front of the babbling television. Of course I had no intention of meeting Fontaine on a deserted street at two in the morning—he wanted to put me in a position where my death could be attributed to random violence.

John Ransom and I had to get out of Millhaven as soon as we could. If the fog lifted, we could get to the airport before Fontaine realized that I was not going to show up across from the St. Alwyn. In Quantico, the FBI had experts who did nothing but think about people like Paul Fontaine. They could look into every homicide Fontaine had handled in Allentown and wherever else he had worked before returning to Millhaven. What I most needed was what I didn't have—the rest of the notes.

Where were Fontaine's narratives of his murders? Now it seemed to me that Ransom and I had merely rushed in and out of the house on South Seventh Street. We should have pried up floorboards and punched holes in the walls.

Once Fontaine realized that I was not going to show up to be murdered, he'd check every flight that left Millhaven during the night. Then he'd go to South Seventh Street and make a bonfire in the old furnace.

My thoughts had reached this unhappy point when the front door opened on a loud burst of talk, and John came in, literally leading Alan Brookner by the hand.

6

Alan wore the wrinkled top of a pair of pajamas under a gray suit jacket paired with tan trousers. John had apparently dressed his father-in-law in whatever he had pulled first out of his closet. Alan's hair drifted around his head, and his wild, unfocused eyes communicated both belligerence and confusion. He had reached a stage where he had to express himself as much through gesture as verbally, and he raised his hands to his head, carrying John's hand along. John released him.

Alan smacked his forehead with the hand John had just released. "Don't you get it?" He boomed this question toward John's retreating back. "It's the answer. I'm giving you the solution."

John stopped moving. "I don't want that answer. Sit down, Alan. I'll get you a drink."

Alan extended his arms and yelled, "Of course you want it! It's exactly what you want." He took in my presence and came through the foyer into the living room. "Tim, talk sense to this guy, will you?"

"Come over here," I said, and Alan moved toward the couch while keeping his eyes on John until he had passed through into the kitchen. Then he sat down beside me and ran both hands through his hair, settling most of it into place.

"He thinks he can solve everything by running away. You have to stay in place and face it."

"Is that the answer you're trying to give him?" I asked. John had evidently told the old man of his plans to move abroad.

"No, no, no." Alan shook his head, irritated by my inability to understand the matter all at once. "I have an endowed chair, and all I have to do is make sure that John gets the chair, starting next term. I can give it to him."

"Can you appoint your own successor?"

"Let me tell you something." He gripped my thigh. "For thirty-eight years, the administration has given me every single thing I ever asked for. I don't think they'll stop now."

Alan addressed these last words to John, who had returned to set a dark brown drink in front of him.

"It's not that simple." John took the chair at the end of the couch and turned to look at the television.

"Of course it is," Alan insisted. "I didn't want to admit what was happening to me. But I'm not going to pretend anymore."

"I'm not going to carry on for you," John said.

"Carry on for yourself," Alan said. "I'm giving you a way to keep yourself whole. What you want to do is run away. It's no good, kid."

"I'm sorry you feel rejected," John said. "It isn't personal."

"Of course it's personal," Alan roared.

"I'm sorry I brought it up," John said. "Don't make me say any more, Alan."

Alan overflowed with all he felt—he had been waving his arms while he spoke, splashing whiskey onto himself, the couch, and my legs. Now he gulped from the glass and groaned. I had to get John away from Alan and talk to him in private.

Alan came out of his sulk long enough to give me a way to do this.

"Talk to him, Tim. Make him see reason."

I stood up. "Let's go in the kitchen, John."

"Not you, too." He gave me a disbelieving glare.

I said John's name in a way that was like kicking him in the foot, and he looked sharply up at me. "Oh," he said. "Okay."

"Attaboy," Alan said.

I set off for the kitchen. John trailed along behind me. I opened the door and stepped outside. What was left of the fog curled and hung above the grass. John came out and closed the door.

"Fontaine called," I said. "He wants to trade information. We're supposed to meet at two o'clock on Widow Street, across from the St. Alwyn."

"That's great," John said. "He still thinks we trust him."

"I want to get out of town tonight," I said. "We can go to the FBI and tell them everything we know."

"Listen, this is our chance. He'll hand himself to us on a plate."

"You want me to meet him on a deserted street in the middle of the night?"

"We'll go down early. I'll hide in that little alley next to the pawnshop and hear everything he says. Together, we can handle him."

"That's crazy," I said, and then I understood what he really intended to do. "You want to kill him."

Alan shouted our names from within the kitchen, and John bit his lip and checked to see how persuasive he had been. "Running away won't work," he said, unconsciously echoing what Alan had just said.

The door swung open, and Alan stood framed in a spill of yellow light. "You getting him to see reason?"

"Give us a little more time," I said.

"The rioting seems to be pretty much over," Alan said. "Looks like four people got killed." When we said nothing, he backed away from the door. "Well, I won't get in your way."

When Alan had retreated from the door, I said, "You want to kill him. Everything else is just window dressing."

"How bad is that, as a last resort? It's probably the only safe way to deal with the guy." He waited for me to see the force of this. "I mean, there's no doubt in your mind that he's Bachelor, is there?"

"No," I said.

"He murdered my wife. And Grant Hoffman. He wants to murder you, and after that he wants to murder me. How concerned are you about the civil rights of a guy like that?"

"Two more!" Alan bawled through the window. "Total of six dead! Ten million dollars in damage!"

"I won't con you," John said. "I think it's a lot more likely that Fontaine will wind up dead than on trial."

"I do, too," I said. "You better make sure you know what you're doing."

"It's my life too." John held out his hand, and when I took it, I felt my uneasiness double on itself.

Hovering near the sink when we came back inside, Alan looked at our faces for clues to what had been decided. He had shucked the suit jacket, and parts of his pajama top had worked their way out of his trousers. "You get things straightened out?"

"I'll think about it," John said.

"Okay!" Alan boomed, taking this as surrender. "That's all I wanted to hear, kiddo." He beamed at John. "This calls for a celebration, what d'ya say?"

"Help yourself, please." John waved his hand at the evidence that Alan had already been helping himself. A scotch bottle and a glass with slivers of ice floating in dark brown liquid stood on the counter. Alan poured more whiskey into the glass and turned again to John. "Come on, join me, otherwise it's not a celebration."

John went into the living room, and I looked at my watch. It was about eleven-thirty. I hoped John was going to have sense enough to keep sober. Alan gripped me by the shoulder. "God bless you, boy." He pulled another glass from the shelf and splashed whiskey into it. "It's not a celebration unless you join in."

John was going to lead Alan on until I left town, and then he'd refuse the chair. That would be the end of it. I felt as though I'd just assented to a second murder. When John returned, he raised his eyebrows at the drink before me and then smiled. "Something to calm the nerves."

Alan clinked glasses with John, then with me. "I feel better than I have all day."

"Cheers," John said, raising his glass and giving me an ironic glance. His jacket shifted far enough to catch on the handle of the revolver, and he quickly pulled it back into place.

I tasted the Scotch. My whole body shuddered.

"Thirsty, eh?" Alan took a gulp and grinned at both of us. He seemed almost half-crazy with relief.

He and Alan left the kitchen, and I poured the drink out into the sink. When I came back into the living room, the two of them were back in their old places, staring at the television.

Alan's pajama top had come all the way out of his trousers, and a bright, unhealthy flush covered his cheekbones. He was saying, "We should go into the ghetto, set up storefront classrooms, really work with these people. You start with a pilot program and then you expand it until you have a couple of real classes going."

For another thirty minutes, we stared at the screen. The family of the boy who had been killed in City Hall announced through a lawyer that they were praying for peace. A pale blue map indicated burned-out neighborhoods with little red flames and areas where gunfire had taken place with little black pistols. John refilled Alan's glass. His hair and necktie back in place, Jimbo declared that the worst of the rioting seemed to be over and that police had restored order to all but the most troubled neighborhoods. Fire fighters trained hoses on a long row of blazing shop fronts.

At ten past twelve, when Alan's head had begun to loll forward on his chest, the telephone rang again. John jumped up and then waved me off the couch. "Go on, get it, he's checking in," he said.

Alan raised his head and blinked.

"You said I should call," a woman whispered. "Well, I'm calling."

"You have the wrong number," I said.

"Is this Al Underhill's boy? You said I should call. He's back. I just saw him go into the living room."

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

"Don't you remember?"

"Yes, Hannah, I remember," I said.

"Maybe you don't want to do anything, it's such a terrible night—"

"Stay in the house and keep your lights off," I said.

7

I came back into the living room and told Alan that I had to speak privately to John again. Before Alan had time to ask any questions, John was up on his feet and leading me into the kitchen. He went as far as the back door and then whirled to face me. "What did he say? Does he want you to come now?"

"Hannah Belknap called to tell me that she saw someone in the house next door."

"What is he doing there now?"

"He might be taking advantage of the chaos to move his notes again."

"What are you talking about?"

"Maybe we didn't look hard enough," I said. "They have to be there—it's the safest place."

John pursed his lips. "He might have decided to destroy them."

This possibility had occurred to me the second before John spoke it. Then I realized that Hannah had seen Fontaine in his old living room. "He's upstairs now," I said. "If we get down there fast enough, we might be able to catch him with them."

John opened his mouth, making up his mind. His eyes were large and clear and unreadable. "Let's go," he said. "It's even better."

I thought it was better, too, but for different reasons. If we could catch Fontaine with his records, we had a better chance of bringing him to justice than if we simply met him on an empty street. All we had to do was get down to South Seventh Street before Fontaine got away or burned the records of his secret life. My next thought was that we actually had plenty of time—if Fontaine had returned to his old house on this night, it was probably to wait out the two hours before the meeting he had arranged.

Alan appeared in the kitchen door. "What's going on? What was that phone call?"

"Alan, I'm sorry, but there's no time to explain," John said. "Tim and I have to go somewhere. We might have some good news for you."

"Where are you going?"

"Sorry, but it's none of your business." John pushed his way past the old man, who glanced at me and then took off after his son-in-law.

"I'll decide if it's my business or not," Alan said, a little louder than before but still a long way from shouting.

They were standing in the middle of the living room, about two feet from each other. Alan jabbed his finger at John. "Obviously, this mission of yours does concern me, if you say that you'll come back with good news. I'm coming along."

John turned to me in total exasperation.

"There might be some danger," I said.

"That settles it." Alan grabbed his jacket from the couch and wrenched it on. "I am not going to be left in the dark. That's that."

"Alan—"

Alan walked to the front door and opened it.

Something happened to John's face—it was not just that he gave up on the spot, but all resistance left him. "Fine," he said. "Come along. But you're going to sit in the backseat, and you're not going to do anything until we tell you to do it."

Alan looked at him as if he'd just smelled something nasty, but he turned away and went outside without protest.

"This is nuts," I said to John. "You're nuts."

"I didn't notice you doing much to stop him," John said. "We'll make him stay in the car. Maybe a witness will come in handy."

"A witness to what?"

The car door slammed.

Instead of responding, John went outside. I went after him and closed the door. Alan was already enthroned in the backseat, facing forward, ignoring us. John walked around to the passenger door. I looked up and saw that the night was perfectly clear. The row of street lamps marched down toward Berlin Avenue, and a scattering of stars lay across the black sky. I got into the car and started the engine.

"This has something to do with April's death," Alan boomed from the backseat. It was a statement, not a question.

"Maybe," John said.

"I can see right through you. You're made of glass."

"Would you please shut up, maybe?"

"Fine," Alan said. "I'll do that."

8

Gangs of boys standing outside the taverns and the factory walls stared at us when we drove through the valley. John put his hand on the butt of the revolver, but the boys stepped back deeper into the shadows and followed us with their eyes.

A police car turned out of a side street and stayed with us all the way down Goethals. I waited for the flashing lights and the siren. The car followed us onto Livermore. "Lose him," John said, and I made a careful right turn onto South Second and looked in the rearview mirror. The police car kept moving in a straight line down Livermore.

On Muffin Street, I turned left and drove past the rows of quiet houses. Through most of the dark windows flickered the gray-green of the television screen. They were sitting in the dark in front of their sets, watching what was left of the excitement. Finally, I came to South Seventh and turned down toward Bob Bandolier's old house. Two blocks away, I cut off the headlights and drifted past the darkened houses until I reached the same place where John and I had parked in the fog. I pulled in next to the curb and looked at John.

"Okay." He turned around to speak to Alan. "We're going to go into a house in the next block. If you see a man come out through the front door, lean over the seat and tap the horn. Tap it, Alan, don't honk the thing, just give it enough of a touch to make a short, sharp sound." He looked at me, still thinking, and then turned back to Alan. "And if you see lights come on in the window, in any window, or if you hear shots, get out of the car and hustle up there as fast as you can and start banging on the front door. Make a hell of a lot of noise."

"What's this about?" Alan asked.

"In a word, April," John said. "Do you remember what I told you to do?"

"April."

"That's right."

"I'm not going to sit in this car," Alan said.

"For God's sake," John said. "We can't waste any more time arguing with you."

"Good." Alan decided the issue by opening his door and climbing out of the car.

I got out and went around the rear to stand in front of him. John softly closed the passenger door and moved a couple of feet away, deliberately distancing himself. Haggard and defiant, Alan tilted his chin up and tried to stare me down. "Alan," I whispered, "we need you to stand watch for us. We're meeting a policeman inside that house"—I pointed at it—"and we want to get some boxes of papers from him."

"Why—" he began in his normal voice, and I put my finger in front of my mouth. He nodded and, in his version of a whisper, asked, "Why didn't you ask me along in the first place, if you needed me to stand watch?"

"I'll explain when we're done," I said.

"A policeman."

I nodded.

He leaned forward, curling his fingers, and I bent down. He put his mouth next to my ear. "Does John have my gun?"

I nodded again.

He stepped back, his face rigid. He wasn't giving anything away. John moved up the block, and I went toward him, looking back at Alan. He had the monkey-king look again, but at least he was standing still. John began walking across the street, and I moved along the side of the car and caught up with him before he reached the next curb. I looked back at Alan. He was walking past the front of the car, clearly intending to keep pace with us on the other side of the street. I waved him back toward the car. He didn't move. A single gunshot came from what I thought was the northwest. When I looked back at Alan, he was standing in the same place.

"Let the old fool do what he wants," John said. "He will, anyhow."

We went toward the Bandolier house with Alan trailing along on the other side of the street. When we reached the boundary of the property, John and I walked up onto the lawn at the same instant. I looked back at Alan, who was dithering on the sidewalk across the street. He stepped forward and sat on the curb. From one of the houses on our side of the street, Jimbo's bland, slow-moving voice drifted through an open window.

I went up toward the side of the house, hearing John pull the fat wad of keys out of his pocket. I hoped he could remember which one had worked the last time. We began working our way down the peeling boards.

When we reached the corner of the house, I grasped John's shoulder and kept him from walking into the backyard.

"Wait," I whispered, and he turned around to face me. "We can't go in the back."

"Sure we can," he said.

"We wouldn't make it halfway across the kitchen before he knew we were in the house."

"So what do you want to do?"

"I want to get on the porch," I said. "You stand against the building, where he can't see you when he opens the door."

"And then what?"

"I knock on the door and ask if I can see him now. He has to open it. He doesn't have any choice. As soon as he opens the door, Alan'll stand up and shout, and then I'll go in low and you come in high."

I jerked my head sideways, and we crept back along the side of the house.

Alan looked up at us as we crept back into view on the side of the porch. I put my finger to my lips, and he squinted at me and then nodded. I pointed up toward the porch and the door. He stood up from the curb. Stay there, I motioned. I mimed knocking and pretended to open a door. He nodded again. I poked my head forward, as if I were looking out, then put my hands on the sides of my mouth and waggled my head. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and stepped back off the sidewalk into the deeper darkness of the lawn behind it.

We came around the side of the porch and moved silently over the site of Bob Bandolier's old rose garden. Alan came a little forward off the lawn. Someone in the old Bandolier living room stood up on a creaking board and began pacing. Fontaine was walking around in his childhood, charging himself up.

Everything fell apart before John and I reached the porch steps.

Alan bellowed, "Stop! Stop!"

"Goddamn," John said, and took off across the lawn. Alan had misunderstood what he was supposed to do. I came up out of my own crouch and ran toward the steps before Fontaine could open the door.

But the front door was already open—that was what Alan had been yelling about. Paul Fontaine stepped outside, and a squad car, the same car we had seen patroling, turned into South Seventh from Livermore. Its light bar had not been turned on. "Goddamn you, Underhill," Fontaine said.

Alan blared, "Is that him?"

A light came on in the living room of the house behind him and in bedrooms of the houses on either side.

"Is that the man?"

Fontaine swore, either at me or at the world in general. He came running down the steps, and I tried to get away from him by cutting across the lawn toward John.

"Come back here, Underhill," Fontaine said.

I stopped running, not because of his words, but because I thought I saw someone moving through the darkness between the houses behind John and Alan Brookner. Alan was staring wildly from Fontaine to me and back, and John was still trying to calm him down.

"I'm not letting you get away," Fontaine said. The man between the houses across the street had vanished, if he had ever been there at all. The patrol car swung up to the curb about thirty feet away, and Sonny Berenger and another patrolman stepped out. As he uncurled, Sonny was looking straight at John and Alan—he had not even seen us yet.

"Underhill," Fontaine said.

Then Alan ripped the big revolver out from under John's jacket and jumped down into the street. Instead of going after him, John flattened out on the sidewalk. Alan raised the gun. He fired, and then fired again in a chaos of flares and explosions that filled the street. I heard people yelling and saw Alan drop the gun a second before I realized that I was lying down. I tried to get up. Pain yanked me back down into the grass. I had been hit in the front, but the pain blared out from the hot circle in my back. It felt as if I'd been hit with a sledgehammer.

I turned my head to see Fontaine. The big wheel of the world spun around me. Part of the wheel was a black shoe at the end of what looked like a mile-long gray leg. When the world came right-side up again, I turned my head very slowly in the other direction. I saw the stitching around a buttonhole of a gray suit. The reek of smoke and ashes came from his clothes. On the other side of the buttonhole a white shirt printed with a huge red blossom jerkily rose and fell. Alan had managed to hit us both. I got the elbow of my good arm under me, hitched up my knees, and pushed myself toward him. Then I rolled up on my elbow and saw the other patrolman running toward us.

A few inches away from mine, Fontaine's face was dull with shock. His eyes focused on mine, and his mouth moved.

"Tell me," I said. I don't know what I meant—tell me everything, tell me how Fee Bandolier turned into Franklin Bachelor. He licked his lips. "Shit," he said. His chest jerked up again, and blood gouted out of him and drenched my arm. "Bell." Another gout of blood soaked my arm, and the policeman's upper body appeared above us. Two rough hands dragged me away from Fontaine. I said, "Ouch," using what felt like commendable restraint, and the cop said, "Hang in there, just hang in there," but not to me.

I stared up at the black, starry sky and said, "Get Sonny." I hoped I would not die. I was floating in blood.

Then Sonny bent over me. I could hear the other cop doing something to Fontaine and visualized him slapping a big pressure bandage over the wound in his chest. But that was not where we were, that was somewhere else. "Are you going to make it?" Sonny asked, looking as if he hoped the answer were no.

"I owe you one, and here it is," I said. "Along with a lot of other people, Fontaine killed that graduate student and Ransom's wife. He was a Green Beret officer named Franklin Bachelor, and he grew up in this house as Fielding Bandolier. Check up on a company named Elvee Holdings, and you'll find out he was tied into Billy Ritz. Somewhere in this house, you'll find two boxes of notes Fontaine made on all his killings. And inside a couple of boxes in the basement, you'll find his father's photographs of the places where he killed the original Blue Rose victims."

As I said all this, Sonny's face went from rigid anger to ordinary cop impassivity. I figured that was a long distance. "I don't know where the notes are, but the pictures are behind the furnace."

His eyes flicked toward the house. "Fontaine owns it, through Elvee Holdings. Also the Green Woman Taproom. Look at the Green Woman's basement, you'll see where Billy Ritz died."

He took it all in—his world was whirling over on itself as sickeningly as mine had just done, but Sonny was not going to fail me. I nearly fainted from sheer relief. "The ambulance'll be here in a second," he said. "That old guy was April Ransom's father?"

I nodded. "How is he?"

"He's talking about the kingdom of heaven," Sonny said.

Oh yes, of course. The kingdom of heaven. Where a certain man had wished to kill a noble, tested his sword by striking it against the wall, and gone out and killed the noble. What else would he be talking about?

"How's Fontaine?"

"I think the crazy old bastard killed him," he said, and then the huge space he had occupied above me was filled again with black, starry night. Sirens came screaming into the street.

PART FOURTEEN

ROSS MCCANDLESS

1

During the journey in the ambulance, as endless as if we were going to some hospital on the moon, my body detached itself from my anxiety and settled into its new condition. I was awash in blood, bathed in it, blood covered my chest and my arms and hung like a sticky red syrup on my face, but most of it belonged to the dead or dying man on the next stretcher. I was going to live. One paramedic labored over Paul Fontaine's body while another cut off my shirt and looked at my wound. He held up two fingers in front of my face and asked how many I saw. "Three," I said. "Just kidding." He jabbed me with a needle. I heard Fontaine's body leap up off the stretcher as they tried to jump-start him, once, twice, three times. "Holy moly," said the paramedic whose face I had not seen, "I think this guy is Paul Fontaine."

"No shit," said the other. His face loomed again above mine, friendly, reassuringly professional, and black. "Are you a cop, too? What's your name, partner?"

"Fee Bandolier," I said, and startled him by laughing.

Whatever he had goosed into my veins put my pain to sleep and caused my anxiety to retreat another three or four feet toward the roof of the ambulance, where it hung like an oily cloud. We, the anxiety, the paramedics, the leaping corpse, and myself, whirled forward on our journey to the moon. "This Fontaine, he's a DOA," said the other paramedic, and from the oily cloud came the information that I had heard Fontaine's last words, but understood only one of them. He had struggled to speak—he had licked his lips and forced out a syllable he wanted me to hear. Bell. The bell tolls, ask not for whom. The tintinnabulation that so musically wells, what a tale their terror tells, how the danger sinks and swells. I wondered what was happening to Alan Brookner, I wondered if Sonny Berenger would be able to remember everything I'd told him. I had the feeling that a lot of policemen would be coming to see me, in my hospital on the moon. Then I floated away.

2

I woke up with the enormous drill-like head of an X-ray machine aimed at the right side of my chest, most of which was covered with a bloody pad. A technician armored in a diving helmet and a lead vest was ordering me to stand still. Instead of my clothes, I was wearing a flimsy blue hospital gown unbuttoned at the back and draped down off my right shoulder like a toga. Someone had cleaned all the blood off me, and I smelled like rubbing alcohol. It came as a surprise that I was standing up by myself. "Could you please try to stand still?" asked the surly beast in the armor, and the drill clicked and whirred. "Now turn around, and we'll do your back." I found that I could turn around. Evidently I had been performing miracles like this for some time. "We'll have to get that arm up," said the beast, and came out from behind his machine to take my right arm by the elbow and firmly rip it away from my shoulder. He paid no attention to the noises I made. "Hold it like that." Click. Whir. "You can go back to your room now."

"Where am I?" I asked, and he laughed. "I'm serious. What hospital is this?"

He walked out without speaking, and a nurse hurried forward out of nowhere with a long blue splint festooned with dangling white strips of Velcro and the information that I was in St. Mary's Hospital. Here was another homecoming: it was in St. Mary's that I had spent two months of my seventh year, and where a nurse named Hattie Bascombe had told me that the world was half night. A great dingy pile of brown brick occupying about a quarter-mile of Vestry Street, the hospital was a block away from my old high school. In real time, if there is such a thing, the whole endless journey in the ambulance could have taken no more than five minutes. The nurse clamped the sling onto my arm, tied up my gown, deposited me in a wheelchair, pushed me down a corridor, loaded me into an empty elevator, unloaded me, and then navigated me through a maze of hallways to a room with a high bed, both evidently mine. A lot of people wanted to talk to me, she said, I was a pretty popular guy. I said, "I vant to be alone." She was too young to know about Greta Garbo, but she left me alone anyhow.

A bemused-looking doctor with a long manila envelope in one hand came in about ten minutes later. "Well, Mr. Underhill," he said, "you present us with an unusual problem. The bullet that struck you traveled in a nice straight line past your lung and came to rest beneath your right shoulder blade. But according to these X rays, you're carrying so much metal around in your back that we can't distinguish the bullet from everything else. Under the circumstances, I think we'll just leave it there."

Then he shifted on his feet and smiled down at me with the envelope of X rays dangling over his crotch in his joined hands. "Would you mind settling a little dispute between me and the radiologist? What happened to you, some kind of industrial accident?"

He had clear blue eyes, a thick flop of blond hair on his forehead, and no lines at all, none, not even crow's feet. "When I was a little boy," I said, "I swallowed a magnet."

A tiny, almost invisible horizontal wrinkle, as fine as a single hair on a baby's head, appeared in the center of his forehead.

"Okay," I said. "It was more in the nature of foreign travel." He didn't get it. "If you're not going to operate, does that mean that I get to go home tomorrow?"

He said that they wanted to keep me under observation for a day or two. "We want to keep you clear of infections, see that your wound begins to heal properly." He paused. "And a police lieutenant named McCandless seemed concerned that you stay in one place. I gather that you can expect a lot of visitors over the next few days."

"I hope one of them brings me something to read."

"I could pick up some magazines from the lounge, if you like, and bring them to you the next time I'm in this wing."

I thanked him, and he smiled and said, "If you tell me how foreign travel can put about a pound of metal fragments in your back."

I asked how old the radiologist was.

That little baby-hair wrinkle turned up in his forehead again. "About forty-six, forty-seven, something like that."

"Ask him. He'll explain it to you."

"Get some rest," he said, and turned off the lights when he left.

As soon as he was gone, whatever they had given me while I was still only semiconscious began to wear off, and a wide track through my body burst into flame. I groped around for the bell to ring the nurse and finally found it hanging on a cord halfway down the side of the mattress. I pushed the button twice, waited a long time, and then pushed it again. A black nurse with stiff, bristling orange hair came in about twenty minutes later and said that I was due for a painkiller in about an hour. I didn't need it now, I just thought I needed it now. Out she went. The flames laughed and caroused. An hour later, she turned on the lights, wheeled in a tray with a row of needles lined up like dental tools, told me to roll over and jabbed me in the butt. "See?" she said. "You didn't really need it until now, did you?"

"Anticipation is half the fun," I said. She turned off the light and went away. The darkness started to move over me in long, smooth waves.

When I woke up, the window at the end of the room shone with a delicate pink light. The happy flames were already racing around and organizing another shindig. A little stack of magazines stood on the bedside table. I picked them up to see what they were. The doctor had brought me copies of Redbook, Modern Maturity, Modern Bride, and Longevity. I guessed the hospital didn't subscribe to Soldier of Fortune. I opened Redbook and began reading the advice column. It was very interesting on the subject of menopause, but just when I was beginning to learn something new about progesterone, my first visitor of the day arrived. Two visitors, actually, but only one of them counted. The other was Sonny Berenger.

3

The man who followed Sonny through the door had a wide, deeply seamed brick-colored face and short reddish hair shot with gray that rolled back from his forehead in tight waves. His tweed jacket bracketed a chest about four feet across. Next to Sonny Berenger, he looked like a muscular dwarf who could bend iron bars and bite nails in half. The detective gave me a quick, unsettling glance and ordered Sonny to close the door.

He came up to the bed and said, "My name is Ross McCandless, and I'm a lieutenant in Homicide. We have a lot to talk about, Mister Underhill."

"That's nice," I said.

Sonny came back from shutting the door and went to the foot of the bed. He looked about as animated as an Easter Island statue, but at least he didn't look hostile.

McCandless pulled up the chair and parked himself about two feet from my head. His light blue eyes, set close to his sharp little pickax of a nose, were utterly flat and dead, far past the boundary where they could have been called expressionless. They did not even have enough life in them to be lifeless. I was suddenly aware that the three of us were alone in the room and that whatever happened between us was going to shape reality. Sonny was going to contribute, or he would have been left out in the hall, I was going to contribute, but whatever reality we created together was mainly going to suit McCandless.

"How are you feeling? You doing all right?"

"No serious damage," I said.

"Yeah. I talked to your doctor." That took care of the social portion of our encounter. "I understand you feel you have some interesting information about the late Detective Fontaine, and I want to know about that. All about it. I've been talking with your friend Ransom, but it seems that you're the key to what happened on South Seventh Street last night. Why don't you just explain that whole situation to me, as you see it."

"Is Officer Berenger going to take a statement?"

"There's no need for that right now, Mr. Underhill. We are going to proceed with a certain amount of care here. In due time, you will be asked to sign a statement all of us will be able to live with. I assume you already knew that Detective Fontaine died of his wounds."

He had already cut Fontaine loose—now he was trying to control the damage. He wanted me to give him a quick route out of the chaos. I nodded. "Before I begin, could you tell me what happened to John and Alan Brookner?"

"When I left Armory Place, Mr. Ransom was being questioned by Detective Monroe. Professor Brookner is being held under observation at County Hospital. Bastian is trying to get a statement from him, but I don't think he's having much luck. The professor isn't very coherent."

"Has he been charged with anything?"

"You might say this conversation is part of that process. Last night, you made certain statements to Officer Berenger concerning Paul Fontaine and a company called Elvee Holdings. You also mentioned the names Fielding Bandolier and Franklin Bachelor. Why don't you start by telling me how you became aware of Elvee Holdings?"

"I had dinner with John on my first night in Millhaven," I said. "Just as we were finishing, he called the hospital and heard that his wife was showing signs of improvement, and he immediately left the restaurant to walk to Shady Mount." I described how I had noticed that a car was following him, taken down the license number in my notebook, trailed after both of them to Shady Mount, spoken to the driver in the hospital lobby, and recognized him from my visit earlier that day. "The driver turned out to be Billy Ritz."

"And what did you do with the license number?"

"The next day I went to the hospital without knowing that April had been killed, saw Paul Fontaine along with a lot of policemen on her floor, and gave him the license number."

McCandless looked briefly at Sonny. "You gave it to Fontaine?"

"Actually, I read it to him out of my notebook. I thought I had given him the sheet of paper, but at April's funeral, I opened my notebook and saw that I still had it. That afternoon, when John and Alan and I went to the morgue to identify Grant Hoffman's body, I saw the same car parked next to the Green Woman Taproom." I told him about seeing Billy Ritz putting cardboard boxes in his trunk. McCandless was still waiting to see how all this led to Elvee Holdings. I repeated what I had told John about working with a computer at the university library. "It turned out that a company named Elvee Holdings owned both the car and the Green Woman. I got the names and addresses of the corporate officers." When I gave him the names, McCandless could not keep from registering surprise—he'd been busy with the consequences of the riot, and he was starting his own research with me.