The Throat

"As soon as I got here, you told me you thought Blue Rose was an old soldier. And you had worked out this wonderful story about what happened when you got to Bachelor's camp in Darlac Province. It was a good story, but it left out some important details."

"I never wanted to talk about that," he said.

"You made me work it out of you. You kept dropping hints."

"Hints." He shook his head sadly.

"Let's talk about what really happened in Darlac Province," I said.

"Why don't you just rave, and when you're finished raving, why don't you get out of here and leave me alone?"

"You shared an encampment with another Green Beret named Bullock. Bullock and his A team went out one day and never came back. You went out and found their bodies tied to trees and mutilated. Their tongues had been cut out."

"I told you that," John said.

"You didn't think the VC had killed them. You thought Bachelor had done it. And when you saw Bullock's ghost, you were positive. You were where you thought he was all the time —you were at the point where you could see through the world."

"That's where I was," he said. "But I don't think that you've ever been there."

"Maybe not, John. But the important thing is that you felt betrayed—and you were right. So you wanted to do what you thought Bachelor would do."

"You better know what you're talking about," John said. "You better not be throwing out guesses."

"Bachelor had already escaped by the time you got there. So you burned his camp to the ground. Then you systematically killed everyone who had been left behind, all of Bachelor's followers who were too young, too old, or too feeble to go with him. How did you do it? One an hour, one every two hours? At the end, you killed his child—put him on the ground and cut him in half with your bayonet. Then you killed his wife. At the end, you hacked her up and put her in the communal pot and ate some of her flesh. You even cleaned her skull. You were being Bachelor, weren't you?"

He glowered at me, working his jaws. I saw that held-down anger surge into his eyes, but this time he did not try to conceal it. "You don't really have the right to talk about this, you know. It doesn't belong to you. It belongs to people like us."

"But I'm not wrong, am I?"

"That's not really relevant," John said. "Nothing you say is really relevant."

"But it isn't wrong," I said.

John threw up his hands. "Look, even if all this happened, which no one in the normal world would believe, because they could not even begin to comprehend it, it just gives Bachelor more reason to want revenge on me."

"Bachelor never worked that way," I said. "He couldn't. You were right about him—he was always across the border, and every human concern but survival was meaningless to him. After Lang Vo, he went through three or four different identities. By the time he spent twelve years calling himself Michael Hogan, all he cared about Franklin Bachelor was that the world should keep thinking he was dead."

"What you're saying just proves that he killed my wife. If you don't see that, I can't even talk to you."

"He didn't kill her," I said. "He beat her up. Or he had Billy Ritz beat her up. It amounts to the same thing."

"Now I know you're crazy." John threw back his head and growled at the ceiling. His face was starting to get red. "I told you. I hit her. It was the end of my marriage." He lowered his head and looked at me with spurious pity. "Why in the world would Billy Ritz beat up my wife?"

"To slow her down," I said. "Or stop her altogether, without killing her."

"Slow her down. That means something to you."

"April was writing a letter a week to Armory Place about the Green Woman. Hogan took his victims there. He kept his notes in the basement. He had to stop her."

"So he killed her," John said. "I wish you could hear yourself. You turn everything around into its opposite."

"You went out for a drive with April the night she admitted seeing Byron Dorian. You'd been planning to kill her for weeks. You had an argument in the car, and you got out and went to the bar down the street. I think you were drinking to get up the courage to finally do it. You thought you'd have to get home by yourself, but when you left the bar, her car was still parked down the street. And when you looked inside it, there she was, unconscious. Probably bleeding. You were very convincing about the shock of seeing the car, but part of your shock was that she was waiting for you to come back."

He rolled back in the chair and put his hands over his eyes. "You didn't know who had beaten her up—all you knew was that it was time to carry out your plan. So you drove behind the St. Alwyn, let yourself in the back door, and carried her up the stairs to the second floor, beat her and stabbed her, and wrote BLUE ROSE on the wall. That's where you made a mistake." He took his hands off his eyes and let his arms drop. "You used a blue marker. Hogan's markers were either black or red, the colors used to mark homicides as either open or closed on the Homicide Division's board. I bet you went into the pharmacy in the old annex and bought the marker that night. When you killed Grant Hoffman, you got it right—you wrote BLUE ROSE with a black marker. You probably bought that one at the pharmacy, too, and threw it away later."

"Jesus, you don't quit," John said. "So after I spend all night by her bedside, I suppose I got up the next morning and ran all the way down Berlin Avenue with a hammer in my hand, miraculously got into her room, killed her, miraculously got out, and then ran all the way back. And I managed to do all that in about fifteen-twenty minutes."

"Exactly," I said.

"On foot."

"You drove," I said. "You parked on the street across Berlin Avenue so no one in the hospital would see your car, and then you waited on the lawn until you saw the night workers leave the hospital. The man who owned the property saw you out in front of his house. He could probably even identify you."

John knitted his fingers together, propped his chin on them, and glared at me.

"You were going to lose everything, and you couldn't take it. So you cooked up this Blue Rose business to make it look as though her death were part of a pattern—you used some kind of story to sucker poor Grant Hoffman into that passage, and you tore him to pieces to make sure he'd never be identified. You're worse than Hogan—he couldn't help killing, but you murdered two people for the sake of your own comfort."

"So what do you think you're going to do now?" John was still glaring at me, his chin propped on his joined hands.

"Nothing. I just want you to understand that I know."

"You think you know. You think you understand." John glared at me for a moment—his feelings were boiling away within him—and then he pushed himself up out of his chair. He could not sit still any longer. "That's funny, actually. Very funny." He took two steps toward the wall of paintings and then slammed his hands together, palm to palm, not as if applauding, but as if trying to give himself pain. "Because you never understood anything. You have no idea of who I really am. You never did."

"Maybe not," I said. "Not until now, anyhow."

"You're not even close. You never will be. You know why? Because you have a little mind—a little soul."

"But you murdered your wife."

He swung himself around slowly, the contempt in his eyes all mixed up with rage. He couldn't tell the difference anymore. His own bitterness had poisoned him so deeply that he was like a scorpion that had stung itself and kept on stinging. "Sure. Yeah. If you choose to put it that way."

He smoldered away for a second, waiting for me to criticize or condemn him—to prove once and for all that I did not understand. When I said nothing, he whirled around again and moved closer to the wall of paintings. For a monent, I thought that he was going to rip one of them off the wall and tear it to shreds in his hands. Instead, he thrust his hands into his pockets, turned away from the paintings, and marched toward the fireplace.

I got a single burning glance. "Do you know what my life has been like? Can you even begin to imagine my life? Those two people—" He got to the fireplace and whirled to face me again. His face was stretched tight with the sheer force of his emotions. "The fabulous Brookners. You know what they did to me? They put me in a box and nailed it shut. They rammed me into a coffin. And then they jumped up on the lid, just to make sure I'd never get out. They had a high old time, up on top of my coffin. Do you even begin to imagine that those two people knew anything about decency! About respect? About honor! They turned me into a babysitter."

"Decency," I said. "Respect. Honor."

"That's right. Am I making sense to you? Do you begin to get the point?"

"In a way," I said, wondering if he were going to make another rush at me. "I can see how you'd feel like Alan's babysitter."

"Oh, first I was April's. In those days, I was just Alan's little flunky. Later, I got to be his babysitter, and by then my wonderful wife was jumping into bed with that sleazy kid."

"Which was indecent," I said. "Unlike luring your own graduate student into a brick alley and tearing him to pieces."

John's face darkened, and he stepped forward and kicked at one of the wooden legs of the coffee table. The leg split in half, and the table canted over toward him, spilling books onto the floor. John smiled down at the mess, clearly contemplating giving the books a separate kick of their own, and then changed his mind and moved to the mantelpiece. He gave me a look of utter triumph and utter bitterness, picked up the bronze plaque, raised it over his head, and slammed it down onto the edge of the mantel. A chunk of veiny pink marble dropped to the floor, leaving a ragged, chewed-looking gap in the mantel. Breathing hard, John gripped the plaque and looked around his living room for a target. Finally, he picked out the tall lamp near the entrance, cocked back his right arm, and hurled the plaque at the lamp. It sailed past the lamp and clattered against the wall, where it left a dark smudge and a dent before dropping to the floor. "Get out of my house."

"I want to say one more thing, John."

"I can't wait." He was still breathing hard, and his eyes looked as if they had stretched and lengthened in his skull.

"No matter what you say, we used to be friends. You had a quality I liked a lot—you took risks because you believed that they might bring you to some absolutely new experience. But you lost the best part of yourself. You betrayed everything and everybody important to you for enough money to buy a completely pointless life. I think you sold yourself out so that you could keep up the kind of life your parents always had, and you have scorn even for them. The funny thing is, there's still enough of the old you left alive to make you drink yourself to death. Or destroy yourself in some quicker, bloodier way."

He grimaced and looked away, balling his hands. "It's easy to make judgments when you don't know anything."

"In your case," I said, "there isn't all that much to know."

He stood hunched into himself like a zoo animal, and I stood up and walked away. The atmosphere in the house was as rank as a bear's cage. I got to the front door and opened it without looking back. I heard him get to his feet and move toward the kitchen and his freezer. I closed the door behind me, shutting John Ransom up in what he had made for himself, and walked out into a sunny world that seemed freshly created.

5

Tom was sitting in front of his computer when I got back to his house, scratching his head and looking back and forth from the screen to a messy pile of newspaper clippings on his desk. Across the room, the copy machine ejected sheet after sheet into five different trays. There was already a foot-high stack of paper in each of the trays. He looked up at me as I leaned into the room. "So you saw John." It wasn't a question.

He nodded—he knew all about John Ransom. He had known the first time John came into his house. "The papers will all be copied in another couple of hours. Will you give me a hand writing the note and wrapping the parcels?"

"Sure," I said. "What are you doing now?"

"Messing around with a little murder in Westport, Connecticut."

"Play on," I said. "I have to get some sleep."

Two hours later, I yawned myself back downstairs and usedthe office telephone to book my return flight to New York while the last of the sheets pumped out of the copy machine.

Tom swiveled his chair toward me. "What should we say in the letter that goes along with the papers?"

"As little as possible."

"Right," Tom said, and clicked to a fresh screen.

I thought you should see this copy of the bundle of papers I found in the garbage can behind my store yesterday evening. Four other people are also getting copies. The originals are destroyed, as they smelted bad. The man who wrote these pages claims to have killed lots of people. Even worse, he makes it clear that he is a police officer here in town. I hope you can put him away for good. Under the circumstances, I choose to remain anonymous.

"A little fancy," I said.

"I never claimed to be a writer." Tom set the machine to print out five copies and then went down to his kitchen and returned with big sheets of butcher's paper and a ball of string. We tied up each of the stacks of copied papers, wrapped them in two sheets of the thick brown paper, and tied them up again. We printed the names and working addresses of Isobel Archer, Chief Harold Green, and Geoffrey Bough on three packages. On the fourth, Tom printed BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE UNIT, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA.

"What about the fifth one?" I asked.

"That's for you, if you want it. I'd like to keep the originals."

I printed my own name and address on the final parcel.

Millhaven's central post office looks like an old railroad station, with a fifty-foot ceiling and marble floors and twenty windows in a row like the ticket booths at Grand Central. I took two of the fat parcels up to one of them, and Tom carried two shopping bags with the others to the window beside mine. The man behind the counter asked if I was really sure I wanted to mail these monsters. I wanted to mail them. What were they, anyhow? Documents. Did I want the printed matter rate? "Send them first class," I said. He hoisted them one by one onto his scale and told me my total was fifty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents. And I was a damn fool, his manner said. When Tom and I left, the clerks were passing long spools of stamps across the wet pads on their counters.

We went back out into the heat. The Jaguar sat at a meter down a long length of marble steps. I asked Tom if he would mind taking me somewhere to see an old friend.

"As long as you introduce me to him," Tom said.

6

At five o'clock, we were sitting downstairs in the enormous room in front of a television set Tom had wheeled out of the apparent chaos of file cabinets and office furniture. I was holding a glass of cold Ginseng-Up, three bottles of which I had discovered in Tom's refrigerator. I liked Ginseng-Up. You don't often find a drink that tastes like fried dust.

Alan Brookner had gained back nearly all of his weight, he was clean-shaven and dressed in a houndstooth jacket with a rakish ascot, his gold cufflinks were in place, and he'd had a haircut. I introduced him to Tom Pasmore, and he introduced us to Sylvia, Alice, and Flora. Sylvia, Alice, and Flora were widows in their late seventies or early eighties, and they looked as if they'd spent the past forty of those years shuttling between the hairdressing salon, yoga classes, and the spa where they had facials and herbal wraps. Because none of them wanted to leave either of the others alone with Alan, they left together.

"I have to hand it to John," Alan had said. "He found a place where I have to work to be lonely." His voice carried across Golden Manor's vast, carpeted lounge, but none of the white-haired people having tea and cucumber sandwiches in the other chairs turned their heads. They were already used to him.

"It's a beautiful place," I said.

"Are you kidding? It's gorgeous," Alan boomed. "If I'd known about this setup, I would have moved in years ago. I even got Eliza Morgan an administrative job on the staff here—those girls are all jealous of her." He lowered his voice. "Eliza and I have lunch together every day."

"Do you see much of John?"

"He came twice. That's all right. I make him uncomfortable. And he didn't appreciate what I did after I came to my senses, or whatever is still left of my senses. So he doesn't waste time on me, and that's fine. I mean it, it's hunky-dory. John is a little childish sometimes, and he has the rest of his life to think about."

Tom asked him what he had done.

"Well, after I got acclimated here, I put my finances back in the hands of my lawyer. You have to be a man my age to understand my needs—you might not know this, but John has a tendency to get a little wild; to take risks, and all I want is a good income on my money. So I replaced him as my trustee, and I think he resented that."

"I think you did the right thing," I said, and Alan's dark, icy eyes met mine.

Tom excused himself to go to the bathroom.

"I think about John from time to time," Alan said, lowering his voice again. "I wonder if he and April would have stayed married. I wonder about who he really is."

I nodded.

"Alan, there will probably be something on the news tonight that relates to April's death. That's all I can say. But it's likely to wind up being a big story."

"About time," Alan said.

I sipped my Ginseng-Up. Jimbo took off his glasses and looked out through the screen like Daddy bringing home news about a layoff at the plant. He informed us that a distinguished homicide detective had been found dead this morning in circumstances suggesting that the recent upheavals in the Millhaven police department may not be over. Suicide could not be ruled out. Now to Isobel Archer, with the rest of the story.

Isobel stood up in front of the cordoned-off Beldame Oriental and told us that an anonymous tip about a gunshot had brought her here, to an abandoned theater near the site of the murders of April Ransom and Grant Hoffman, where she had persuaded the Reverend Clarence Edwards, the clergyman who rented the theater for Sunday services of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, to look inside. In the basement she had discovered the body of Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, dead of what appeared to be a single gunshot wound to the head. Beside Sergeant Hogan's body had been written the words BLUE ROSE.

What she said next made me want to stand up and cheer.

"This matter is now under intensive investigation by the Millhaven Police Department, but older residents of the city will note the chilling similarities between this scene and the 1950 death of Detective William Damrosch, recently exonerated in the Blue Rose murders of that year. Perhaps this time, forty years will not have to pass before the truth is known."

Tom turned to me. "Well, I'll keep you in touch, of course, but I bet you'll be able to read all about it in The New York Times."

"Here's to Isobel," I said, and we clinked glasses.

Long after the news was over, we went out to dinner at a good Serbian restaurant on the South Side—an unpretentious place with checked tablecloths, low lighting, and friendly, solicitous waiters, all of them brothers and cousins, who knew Tom and took a clear, quiet pride in the wonderful food their fathers and uncles prepared in the kitchen. I ate until I thought I'd burst, and I told Tom about the letter I was going to write. He asked me to send him a copy of the reply, if I ever got one. I promised that I would.

And when we got back to his house, Tom said, "I know what we should put on," and got up to pluck from the shelf a new recording of A Village Romeo and Juliet conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. The music took us on the long walk to the Paradise Gardens. Where the echoes dare to wander, shall we two not dare to go?

At two o'clock, midday for Tom, we said good night and went to our separate rooms, and before noon the next day, after another long session of cathartic talk, we embraced and said our good-byes at Millhaven Airport. Before I went through the metal detector and walked to my gate, I watched him walk easily, almost athletically, away down the long corridor, knowing that there was nowhere he would not dare to go.

PART EIGHTEEN

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

1

I returned to my life, the life I remembered. I worked on my book, saw my friends, took long walks that filled my notebook, read and listened to lots of music. I wrote and mailed the letter I had been thinking about, never really expecting a reply. I had been gone so short a time that only Maggie Lah had even noticed that I had been away, but Vinh and Michael Poole knew that my old habits, those that spoke of peace and stability, had returned, and that I no longer paced and churned out pages all through the night. Intuitive Maggie said, "You were in a dark place, and you learned something there." Yes, I said, that's right. That's just what happened. She put her arms around me before leaving me to my book.

The New York Times brought news of the upheavals in Millhaven. Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan first appeared on page A6, and within two days had moved to A2. The next day, there was another story on A2, and then he landed on the front page and stayed there for a week. Tom Pasmore sent me bundles of the Ledger, two or three issues wrapped up in a parcel the size of a pre-Christmas Sunday Times, and Geoffrey Bough and a lot of other Millhaven reporters filled in the details my own newspaper left out. Once the extent of Hogan's crimes became known, Ross McCandless and several other police officials retired. Merlin Waterford was forced out of office and replaced by a liberal Democrat of Norwegian stock who had been a Rhodes scholar and had a surprisingly good relationship with the African-American community, largely, I thought, because he had never, ever said anything even faintly stupid.

Some of the less lurid portions of Michael Hogan's diarylike notes were printed in first the Ledger, then the Times. Then some of what Hannah Belknap would call the gooshier sections were printed. People, Time, and Newsweek all ran long stories about Millhaven and Hogan, Hogan and Walter Dragonette, Hogan and William Damrosch. The FBI announced that Hogan had murdered fifty-three men and women, in Pensacola, Florida, where he had been known as Felix Hart, Allerton, Ohio, where he had been Leonard "Lenny" Valentine, and Millhaven. There were short, carefully censored stories about his career as Franklin Bachelor. Demonstrators packed into Armory Place all over again, marches filled Illinois Avenue, photographs of Hogan's victims filled the newspapers and magazines. From the cell where he was waiting for his trial, Walter Dragonette told a reporter that in his experience Detective Sergeant Hogan had always been a gentleman, and it was time for the healing to begin.

After a great deal of legal wrangling, eighteen innocent men were released from the jails where they had been serving life sentences. Two innocent men in Florida had already been executed. All eighteen, along with the families of the two dead men, filed monumental lawsuits against the police departments responsible for the arrests.

In September, a consortium of publishers announced that they were bringing out The Confessions of Michael Hogan as a mass-market paperback, profits to go to the families of the victims.

In October I finished the first draft of The Kingdom of Heaven, looked around, and noticed that the sun still beat down on the Soho sidewalks, the temperature was still in the high seventies and low eighties, and that the young market traders, in the restaurants and coffee shops on the weekends were beginning to look like Jimbo on my last evening in my hometown. Daddy had come home with ominous news about layoffs. Some of the young men in the carefully casual clothes were wearing stubbly three-day beards and chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. I began rewriting and editing The Kingdom of Heaven, and by early December, when I finished the book, delivered it to my agent and my publisher, and gave copies to my friends, the temperatures had fallen only as far as the mid-forties.

A week later, I had lunch at Chanterelle with Ann Folger, my editor. No bohemian, Ann is a crisp, empathic blond woman in her mid-thirties, good company and a good editor. She had some useful ideas about improving a few sections of the book, work that I could do in a couple of days.

Happy about our conversation and fonder than ever of Ann Folger, I walked back to my loft and dragged out of the closet where I had hidden it my own copy of The Confessions of Michael Hogan—the parcel with my name and address on it that Tom Pasmore had mailed, one window away from me in Millhaven's central post office. It had never been opened. I carried it downstairs and heaved it into the Saigon dumpster. Then I went back upstairs and began work on the final revisions.

2

The next day was Saturday, and December was still pretending to be mid-October. I got up late and put on a jacket to go out for breakfast and a walk before finishing the revisions. Soho doesn't get as relentless about Christmas as midtown Manhattan, but still I saw a few Santas and glittery trees sprayed with fake snow in shop windows, and the sound system in the cafe where I had an almond croissant and two cups of French Roast coffee was playing a slow-moving baroque ecstasy I eventually recognized as Corelli's Christmas Concerto. And then I realized that I was in the cafe where I'd been just before I saw Allen Stone getting out of his car. That seemed to have happened years, not months, before—I remembered those weeks when I had written twenty pages a night, almost three hundred pages altogether, and found that I was mourning the disappearance of that entranced, magical state. To find it again, if it could be found without the disturbance that had surrounded it, I'd have to write another book.

When I got back to my loft, the telephone started ringing as soon as I pushed the key into the lock. I opened the door and rushed inside, peeling off my jacket as I went. The answering machine picked up before I got to the desk, and I heard Tom Pasmore's voice coming through its speaker. "Hi, it's me, the Nero Wolfe of Eastern Shore Drive, and I have some mixed news for you, so—"

I picked up. "I'm here," I said. "Hello! What's this mixed news? More amazing developments in Millhaven?"

"Well, we're having a three-day snowstorm. Counting the wind chill factor, it's eighteen below here. How is your book coming along?"

"It's done," I said. "Why don't you come here and help me celebrate?"

"Maybe I will. If it ever stops snowing, I could come for the holidays. Do you mean it?"

"Sure," I said. "Get out of that icebox and spend a week in sunny New York. I'd love to see you." I paused, but he did not say anything, and I felt a premonitory chill. "All the excitement must be over by now, isn't it?"

"Definitely," Tom said. "Unless you count Isobel Archer's big move—she got a network job, and she's moving to New York in a couple of weeks."

"That can't be the mixed news you called about."

"No. The mixed news is about John Ransom." I waited for it.

Tom said, "I heard it on the news this morning—I usually listen to the news before I go to bed. John died in a car crash about two o'clock last night. It was the middle of the storm, and he was all alone on the east-west expressway. He rammed right into an abutment. At first they thought it was an accident, a skid or something, but he turned out to have about triple the legal alcohol level in his blood."

"It could still have been an accident," I said, seeing John barreling along through the storm in the middle of the night, clamping a three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka between his thighs. The image was of endless night, almost demonic in its despair.

"Do you really think so?"

"No," I said. "I think he killed himself."

"So do I," Tom said. "The poor bastard."

That would have been the last word on John Ransom, but for a letter that I found in my mailbox, by the sort of ironic coincidence forbidden to fiction but in which the real world revels, late that same afternoon.

To get my mail, I have to leave my loft and go downstairs to the rank of boxes in the entry, one door away from the entrance to Saigon. The mail generally comes around four in the afternoon, and sometimes I get to the boxes before the mailman. Like all writers, I am obsessive about the mail, which brings money, contracts, reviews, royalty statements, letters from fans, and Publishers Weekly, where I can check on the relative progress of myself and my myriad colleagues. On the day I heard from Tom, I went down late because I wanted to finish up my revisions, and when I finally got downstairs I saw that the box was stuffed with envelopes. I immediately pitched into the big garbage can we had installed beneath the boxes all envelopes covered with printing, all appeals for funds, all offers to subscribe to esoteric literary journals published by universities. Two were left, one from my foreign agent, the other from some foreign country that liked exotic stamps. My name was hand-printed on the second envelope in clear, rounded letters.

I went back upstairs, sat at my desk, and peered at the stamps on the second envelope. A tiger, a huge fleshy flower, a man in a white robe up to his knees in a brown river. With a small shock, I realized that the letter was from India. I tore open the envelope and removed a single sheet of filmy paper, tinted rose.

Dear Timothy Underhill,

I am late in responding because your letter took an extra time to reach us here. The address you used was rather vague. But as you see, it did arrive! You ask about your friend John Ransom. It is difficult to know what to say. You will understand that I cannot go into details, but I feel that I may inform you that we at the ashram were moved by your friend's plight at the time he came to us. He was suffering. He required our help. Ultimately, however, we were forced to ask him to leave—a painful affair for all concerned. John Ransom was a disruptive influence here. He could not open himself, he could not find his true being, he was lost and blind in an eternal violence. There would have been no question of his being allowed to return. I am sorry to write these things to you about your friend, but I do hope that his spiritual search has after so many years finally brought him peace. Perhaps it has.

Yours sincerely,

Mina

3

Two days after receiving Mina's letter and faxing a copy to Tom, my revisions delivered to Ann Folger, I walked past the video store again, the same video store I had been passing on my walks nearly every day since my return, and this time, with literally nothing in the world to do, I remembered that during my period of insomnia I had seen something in the window that interested me. I went back and looked over the posters of movie stars. The movie stars were not very interesting. Maybe I had just been thinking about Babette's Feast again.

Then I saw the announcement about the old noir films and remembered.

I went into the shop and rented From Dangerous Depths, the movie Fee Bandolier and I had both seen at the Beldame Oriental, the movie that had seen us at the moment of our greatest vulnerability.

As soon as I got home, I pushed it into the VCR and turned on the television set. I sat on my couch and unbuttoned my jacket and watched the advertisements for other films in the series spool across the screen. The titles came up, and the movie began. Half an hour later, jolted, engrossed, I remembered to take off my jacket.

From Dangerous Depths was like a Hitchcock version of Fritz Lang's M, simultaneously roughed up and domesticated for an American audience. I had remembered nothing of this story; I had blanked it out entirely. But Fee Bandolier had not blocked it out. Fee had carried the story with him wherever he went, to Vietnam, to Florida and Ohio and Millhaven.

A banker played by William Bendix abducted a child from a playground, carried him into a basement, and slit his throat. Over his corpse, he crooned the dead boy's name. The next day, he went to his bank and charmed his employees, presided over meetings about loans and mortgages. At six o'clock, he went home to his wife, Grace, played by Ida Lupino. An old school friend of the banker's, a detective played by Robert Ryan, came for dinner and wound up talking about a case he found disturbing. The case involved the disappearance of several children. Over dessert, Robert Ryan blurted out his fear that the children had been killed. Didn't they know a certain family? William Bendix and Ida Lupino looked across the table at their friend, their faces dull with anticipatory horror. Yes, they did know the family. Their son, Ryan said, was the last child to have vanished. "No!" cried Ida Lupino. "Their only child?" Dinner came to an end. Forty-five minutes later in real time, in movie time three days after the dinner, William Bendix offered a ride home to another small boy and took him into the same basement. After murdering the boy, he lovingly sang the boy's name over his corpse. The next day, Robert Ryan visited the child's parents, who wept as they showed him photographs. The movie ended with Ida Lupino turning away to call Robert Ryan after shooting her husband in the heart.

Tingling, I watched the cast list roll the already known names toward the top of the screen:

Lenny Valentine-Robert Ryan

Franklin Bachelor-William Bendix

Grace Bachelor-Ida Lupino

And then, after the names of various detectives, bank employees, and townspeople, the names of the two murdered boys:

Felix Hart-Bobby Driscoll

Mike Hogan-Dean Stockwell

4

I ejected the tape from the VCR and slid the cassette back into its box. I walked three times around my loft, torn between laughter and tears. I thought of Fee Bandolier, a child staring at a movie screen from a seat in the wide central aisle of the Beldame Oriental; probably it had always been Robert Ryan, not Clark Gable, of whom Michael Hogan had reminded me. At last I sat at my desk and dialed Tom Pasmore's telephone number. His answering machine cut in after two rings. At the end of a twenty-four-hour day, Tom had finally gone to bed. I waited through his message and said to the tape, "This is the John Galsworthy of Grand Street. If you want to learn the only thing you don't already know, call me as soon as you get up."

I took the tape out of the box and watched it again, thinking of Fee Bandolier, the man I had known and the first Fee, the child Fee, my other self, delivered to me at so many times and in so many places by imagination. There he was, and I was there too, beside him, crying and laughing at the same time, waiting for the telephone to ring.