Too Many Murders

May 1967

The death of Erica Davenport was the epicenter of a human earthquake; it shook people and their constructions to their foundations, from the chief executives of Cornucopia, through Carmine Delmonico and his family, all the way to the FBI.

“But she’s Ulysses!” Ted Kelly insisted, seeking out Carmine in his office at County Services. “We’ve known that for two years!”

“Then why didn’t you arrest her?”

“Evidence! It’s called evidence? No matter where we went, no matter what we unearthed, we could never find a shred of evidence against her that would stand up in court. If we’d tried her, she would have walked, and in a blaze of publicity that would have harmed our image as much as it enhanced hers.”

“That’s because she wasn’t Ulysses,” Carmine said. “I have actually heard of evidence, Ted, and it wasn’t there for the simple reason that Erica Davenport wasn’t Ulysses. I think she knew who Ulysses is, but that’s a far cry from being him. And you know what, Special Agent Kelly? I don’t like your attitude any more today than I did when I put your big ass on the ground. You’re as thick as two planks.”

“She was Ulysses, I tell you!” Kelly smacked his fists on his thighs, beat them up and down in frustration. “We’d just finished planning the neatest sting operation in espionage history-she couldn’t have resisted the bait, she’d have gone to her drop and we’d have been waiting. Now-Fuck!”

“You found out where her drop is?” Carmine asked, looking astonished and ingenuous.

“This one,” Special Agent Kelly said in goaded tones, then embarked on a tutorial. “Spies have a list of drop sites, they never use the same one twice. Their list is coded and they work through it. They have signals to alert their contact that something is going to be dropped, usually in a deserted spot like woods or an abandoned factory-”

“Or identical briefcases, or a package taped under a seat on a bus, or the fourth brick from the right seventeen rows from the top,” Carmine finished with a grin. “Come on, Kelly! All that’s horseshit, and you know it. The wad of money-the spy who can’t name his contact because he doesn’t know who his contact is-what a load of crap. First off, whoever’s doing this isn’t in it for the money or the intellectual thrill. He’s an ideologue, in it for the greater glory of Mother Russia, or Marx and Lenin-a Communist ideology, anyway. Secondly, the stolen item is passed openly, after a phone call or a fax from a number no one could know about. You can’t tap every phone in the country, or intercept every telex. No matter how fanatically you watch any individual, if he’s as smart as Ulysses he’ll pass his information right under your noses and you’ll never see or smell it. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that you and the FBI don’t know how important in himself Ulysses is! Which means he rides around big cities in a limo, uses private facilities when he has to go, has the run of five-star hotels, eats in places where you and I couldn’t afford the water in the finger bowls-how am I doing, Ted?”

“Ulysses was Erica Davenport,” Kelly said stubbornly.

“Ulysses is alive and well and slipped a noose around that poor woman’s neck,” Carmine said harshly. “Not, however, before he broke her arms and legs in two places each, to be sure how much she knew and whom she might have told.”

The mask fell completely. In a second the clumsy, slightly dense, distinctly lower-grade FBI agent disappeared, to be replaced by a highly trained, highly professional, intelligent and capable man.

“I give in,” Ted Kelly said ruefully. “They warned me you were hard to dupe, but I had to try. The last thing I need or want is anyone at Cornucopia thinking I might be in your league at sniffing out wrongdoers. I want Ulysses to think I’m a dumb official of a dumb institution, and so do my bosses. It’s okay for you, you’re hunting a murderer. You can get farther by spreading your tail and peacocking your skill, but my quarry’s different. I have to pretend I haven’t got to first base even when I’m stealing home. My man doesn’t make mistakes.”

“He is these days,” Carmine said, leaning forward in his chair. “All of a sudden, Mr. Kelly, you and I are hunting the selfsame predator. I’ve known for some time that my killer is your Ulysses. No, it’s not a guess. It’s fact.” He glanced at his railroad clock. “Got a spare half hour?”

“Sure.”

“Then I’ll hang out the Do Not Disturb signs.”

This consisted in closing his doors and routing all his calls through Delia. Then Carmine returned to his desk and told Ted Kelly why he knew that Ulysses had murdered eleven people who sat down to enjoy a charity banquet five months ago.

“So you see,” he concluded, “it may end in our getting hard evidence not of espionage but of murder. Is that going to be a problem for the FBI?”

“Anything but,” Special Agent Ted Kelly said. “Learning there are spies inside the city gates is very alarming for the general populace. You’re welcome to the glory. I’ll slink back to Washington happily looking like a fool. That way, I’m in good shape for the next traitor.”

“I’m not after glory!” Carmine snapped.

“I know, but if we catch the fucker, someone has to shine and it can’t be me. All I can say is, if you do catch him-no, when you catch him!-he can’t ever be let out of prison.”

“He won’t have done anything to warrant a federal trial or a federal prison,” Carmine said, “and Connecticut is a liberal-minded state. None of us can predict what some fool parole board of the future might decide. They’re always stacked with idealists.”

Kelly rose to his immense height and held out his hand to shake Carmine’s warmly. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “His parole board will be stacked with believers in recidivism. I forgive you for calling me a cunt. I behaved atrociously.”

“In public,” Carmine said, steering him toward the outer door, “we continue the pretense-flattened ears, bared teeth and snarls every time we meet. What, by the way, was on the film you took from the telescope camera?”

“Nothing worth reporting on,” Kelly said. “Just Holloman Harbor’s shoreline from the Long Island ferry wharf clear to the point beyond East Holloman. Tide in, tide out. We figured it might have had something to do with a meeting or a drop.”

There was no one in the hall; Special Agent Ted Kelly went down it in three long strides and vanished into the stairwell. As soon as he had gone, Carmine went to see Delia.

“Our federal turkey is no turkey,” he said, grinning. “He’s an eagle, but if you catch sight of his wingspan while he’s in turkey mode, he’ll convince you he’s really a buzzard.”

“A very strange bird,” said Delia solemnly.

“Any news?” he asked.

“Not a sausage. Abe and Corey have exhausted their lists of those who might have sat at Peter Norton’s table, without any responses. I daresay people simply forget. No, don’t go! The Commissioner wants to see you. Now, he shouted. I fear Uncle John is not in a good mood.”

If the expression on Commissioner Silvestri’s face was an indication, “not in a good mood” was putting it mildly. Carmine stood to take his medicine.

“What’s the bastard going to do next?” Silvestri asked.

An innocuous question; he was going to be oblique. “That depends on whether he was in my boat shed himself or not.”

“Why?”

“The assistant is extremely valuable, yes, sir, but expendable nonetheless. My feeling is that he stayed in the Bat Cave and sent Robin to my boat shed.”

“Slimy rodent! How’s Desdemona?”

“No different than she was the last time you asked, sir.” Carmine looked at his watch. “That was an hour ago.”

“And your mother?” Silvestri asked, squirming in his seat.

“Ditto.”

“I hear Myron’s managed to get Erica Davenport’s body out of police custody and is flying her to L.A. for burial.”

Carmine eyed his boss curiously. “Where did you hear that?”

A look of discomfort came over the Commissioner’s face. “I-uh-I was talking to him.”

“Phone or flesh?” Carmine asked warily.

“Phone. Sit down, man, sit down!”

His wariness growing, Carmine sat. “Spit it out, John!”

“That’s no way to speak to your superior.”

“My patience is finite, sir.”

“I guess you know how important Myron is?”

“I do,” said Carmine, waiting for it.

“The thing is, he’s buzzing around in Hartford like a wasp inside a pair of shorts.”

“Angry, pushy and trapped.”

“Those, plus a lot else. He wants Erica Davenport’s murder put as our number one priority, and the Governor thinks that’s appropriate, given the publicity.”

“Myron leaked the story himself,” Carmine said.

“Yeah, well, we all know that. But the Governor wants him buzzing somewhere far away from Hartford. He’s got this bee in his bonnet-”

“Wasps, now bees. Just tell me!”

“I’m sending you to London to investigate Dr. Davenport’s time there as a student.” Silvestri coughed. “An anonymous benefactor has donated funds to send your wife and baby with you because of the recent attempt on their lives. Hartford has made a special grant to fund your own trip,” Silvestri ended, shutting his eyes on the gathering storm.

There were only two ways to go. One would ruin his entire day, the other would at least allow him to vent some kind of emotion. Carmine chose the other, and laughed until he cried.

“Fuck a duck!” He gasped, clutching his sides. “I can’t go to London, I just can’t! The minute I’m away, all hell will break loose. Surely you can see that, John?”

“Of course I can! And I said so! But I may as well have saved my breath. This investigation is being run as a political football, thanks to Myron Mandelbaum.”

“He means well, but he should butt out of what he doesn’t understand. His trouble is that he tends to see life as a movie-everything happens at the speed of light and no one pauses to think. An odyssey to London won’t help me find a killer or a spy, but it might let him get away.” Carmine groaned.

“I know, I know.”

“Did Hartford lay down any conditions? Like, how long I have to stay away?”

“Considering strains on the budget, I’d think the quicker you’re back, the better. The anonymous benefactor can’t bankroll a public servant.”

“Any bets?”

“How can I help?” Silvestri asked.

“Run interference with Hartford for me. It’s Desdemona and Julian preying on Myron’s mind, so if I come back in a couple of days, I’ll have to leave them in London for a few days more. If I can find the name of someone who can tell me about Erica’s time there before I leave Holloman, it will help. I can fly back as soon as I’ve milked the thing dry,” Carmine said.

“Delia! Put her on finding that name, Carmine.”

“She’s the one should be going to England.”

“Yeah, yeah, I agree, but Myron wouldn’t. However,” said the Commissioner, looking conspiratorial, “we might be able to throw some dust in everybody’s eyes. Don’t tell a soul where you’re going, just give it out that you’re moving your family out of Holloman for a while, and drive off to JFK as if you’re going to L.A. I’ll talk to Myron and put the fear of a Catholic Hell in his Jewish soul. He’s to tell everyone that Desdemona and Julian are going to stay with him. It makes sense, so I doubt you’ll be tailed to the airport, at least as far as the departure gates. That way, if you can finish London in two or three days, no one will get too cocky at your absence.”

In the end only Delia and John Silvestri knew where Carmine took his wife and son two days later. After some thought he also decided to confide in Ted Kelly, who could bumble around Cornucopia telling all and sundry that Carmine had gone to L.A. and could arrive back on the next plane if things got out of hand.

Desdemona was relieved and excited, explaining to the women of Carmine’s family that she was looking forward to revisiting the place where she had honeymooned: Myron’s Hampton Court Palace. That gentleman’s lavish hand was everywhere, Carmine discovered; they were picked up at their house by a limousine that had enough space in its nether regions to hold a small party, and whisked onto their 707 aircraft without joining the crush of people waiting to board. Though Carmine objected that his own ticket was economy even if his wife and son were traveling first class, he was put next to them in first class because, the chief hostess said smoothly, he had been upgraded. It didn’t escape his notice that the rest of the first-class passengers shuddered to see an infant and popped extra pills to ensure that they slept through a wailing baby. They needn’t have bothered, he thought with an inward grin; Julian enjoyed the experience, wincing as ascent and descent altered the pressure on his eardrums, but not howling. To him it must be small potatoes after Holloman Harbor.

“I prefer a train,” said Desdemona, thoroughly bored.

Myron had put them in the Hilton, clever enough to know that London’s luxury hotels were not well endowed with big elevators, level floors, high doorways and vast beds; Desdemona needed room, especially in an elevator with a baby buggy. Thus, the Hilton.

It wasn’t his first visit to London by any means, and Delia had given Carmine a name: Professor Hugh Lefevre. She had even arranged an appointment for him: eleven the next morning, at the professor’s residence in St. John’s Wood. Apparently Dr. Lefevre didn’t care to eat out at a restaurant, even an expensive one; Carmine could have a cup of tea, he told Delia.

Expecting some degree of affluence, Carmine trod a street of conjoined houses, rather dilapidated, faintly Georgian, each with a flight of dirty steps leading up to a front door alongside which was a panel of handwritten names. He found his house, went up its steps and discovered that H. Lefevre lived in 105, up a dingy staircase in a dingy hall. There was no bell connection, and 105 of course was not the ground floor. A glance at his watch informed him that he was on time, so he bounded up the dark stairs onto a landing with five doors. His was the back one, would look down on whatever passed for a yard behind the house. He knocked.

“Enter!” said a voice.

Sure enough, the knob turned and the door opened. Carmine stepped into a large room lit only by two windows and the grace of a heavily overcast day. Like the whole house, it was dingy. The wallpaper had faded and peeled, the thick velvet curtains were stained, and the furniture, a mixture of styles, was chipped and battered if wooden or oozing stuffing if upholstered. Books lay everywhere, including a wall of shelves. The desk was piled with papers, and a small manual typewriter sat on a low table to one side of the desk chair, which rotated to face it or the desk.

A man standing by one window turned to face Carmine as he advanced with hand extended to his host, who shook it.

“Professor Lefevre?”

“That is I. Be seated, Captain Delmonico.”

“Whereabouts, sir?”

“There will do. Where the light falls on your face. Hmm! Women must make utter fools of themselves over you. It’s a New World look-America, Australia, South Africa-makes no difference. The Old World look is softer, less blatantly masculine.”

“I haven’t noticed any women making utter fools of themselves over me,” Carmine said, smiling easily. It was a good technique, flattering him yet making him uncomfortable. Well, two can play at that game, Professor. He gazed about, seeming puzzled. “Is this the best England can do for a full professor?” he asked.

“I am a Communist, Captain. It is not a part of my ethic to submerge myself in comfort when so many people know none.”

“But your private way of life can’t benefit them, sir.”

“That is not the point! The point is that I choose to live in a spartan fashion to display my ethic to people like you, who do live in comfort. I imagine your house has every luxury.”

Carmine laughed. “I wouldn’t say every luxury, just those that mean my wife doesn’t have to drudge nor my child know the horror of monotony.”

Ah, a hit! Professor Hugh Lefevre stiffened in his chair, no easy feat for one being devoured by arthritis. Twenty years ago when Erica Davenport had been his student, he must have had a certain attraction for women, been tall, probably moved with languid grace and enjoyed his handsomeness, a thing of straight thin nose, black brows and lashes, a wealth of black hair worn long, and cornflower blue eyes. The remnants of it still showed, but pain and an unnecessary degree of hardship had chewed away at him, outside as well as inside. Warm air, decent food and some help keeping house would have held his diseases at bay. But no, Carmine thought, he had an ethic, and now, when I said “the horror of monotony” to him, he reacted like a steer to a goad.

“What do you do with your money?” Carmine asked, curious.

“Donate it to the Communist Party.”

“Where, in all likelihood, some lip-service member uses it to live in comfort.”

“It is not so! We are all believers.”

Time to stop annoying him. Carmine leaned forward. “I’m sorry, Professor, I don’t mean to denigrate you or your ideals. My secretary told you-I’m glad you have a phone, by the way-that I need some background on Dr. Erica Davenport, who was one of your students, as I understand it.”

“Ah, Erica!” the old man said, smiling to reveal bad teeth. “Why should I answer your questions? Is there a new McCarthy in the Senate? Is she being persecuted by your capitalist government? You’ve had a wasted trip, Captain.”

“Erica Davenport is dead. She was murdered in a particularly brutal way, after a torture that consisted of breaking all the bones in her arms and legs,” Carmine said steadily. “I’m not a capitalist tool, I’m simply the homicide detective assigned to investigate her death. Her political views are not my concern. Her murder is.”

Lefevre wept a little in the easy way of the old; too many cracks develop in the emotional dam wall as the years go by, Carmine thought. And the old man had felt something for her.

“Just tell me what she was like twenty years ago, sir.”

“Like?” The faded blue eyes widened. “Like the sun, the stars! Ablaze with life and enthusiasm, champing at the bit to change the world. We were all very left at the L.S.E.-in fact, we were famous for it. She arrived already indoctrinated to some extent, so to finish the process was easy. When I discovered that she spoke fluent Russian, I understood her future importance. I allowed her to think she had seduced me, then I went to work to-I believe the phrase is, ‘turn her.’ Naturally Moscow was interested, especially after I learned how able and intelligent she was. The chance to insert a sleeper in some huge American business enterprise was too good to miss. But she began to dither-demur, even.”

“Why so frank, Professor? Aren’t you talking to me about your treason as well as hers?”

“What treason? I’ve never done a thing,” Lefevre said smugly. “There’s nothing at the L.S.E. would interest Moscow apart from persons.” He stopped suddenly and looked at Carmine in confusion. “Tea! You’re here for a cup of tea,” he said.

“Thanks, I don’t need one. Go on about Erica.”

“My superiors in the Party took over and arranged for Erica to go to Moscow and meet all the most important people. It was done on a special passport the KGB prepared for her, while her own passport was stamped to show a pilgrimage to the classical world, and she was equipped with souvenirs. Considering that the cold war was just commencing, Moscow was very careful with Erica, who might have to wait a very long time before she was activated.”

Lefevre got up and went to the window, staring down into a yard filled with unkempt long grass and rusting pieces of junk-old kerosene heaters, chamber pots, tin trunks. No discarded washing machines here, Carmine thought, coming to gaze over the old man’s shoulder. The tenants must all belong to the Communist Party.

“So Erica went off to Moscow in the summer of 1948?”

“Yes.” Lefevre stopped again, frowning and pulling at his lower lip. Sighing, he returned to his chair.

“What happened in Moscow?”

“The first trip-three weeks-went splendidly. Erica returned in alt-over the moon. She had met all the members of the Central Committee, and held Josef Stalin’s hand. He wasn’t terribly well, you know. Then she had to return to Moscow for her training, and Moscow wanted to be absolutely sure of her loyalty. It was a nine-week sojourn. For anyone else it would have been longer, but she was an apt pupil, on fire with zeal. Also capable of significantly contributing to her story.”

He stopped again, clearly distressed. Had it not been for the news of her horrifying death, Carmine knew, he would have fished in vain for any of this. No doubt FBI and CIA agents had encountered him in their own enquiries when Ulysses first came on the scene, and he had stuck to Erica’s “pilgrimage” to the classical world. Luck travels with the harbinger of death, Carmine thought. He’s old, lonely and by-passed. Now he can talk about her without endangering her.

“You’ve already told me she was a traitor, Professor. What else is there to know?”

He finally took the plunge. “On her last night in Moscow, Erica was raped. From what she told me, it was at a drunken dinner attended by Party officials and KGB officers just below the top ranks. Why they picked on her I don’t know, save that she had been highly favored by their superiors, she was American, very beautiful, and not sexually generous.”

“It was a terrible rape,” Carmine said softly. “On autopsy twenty years later, she still bore the physical scars. How did she survive, sir?”

“Bound herself up and came back to London as arranged. To me. I sent her to Guy’s Hospital, where I had a friend. It was manic in those days, battling with the teething troubles of the National Health. We arranged that her medical records should get lost in the system. London was a very different place then. The country was still on ration books for food, it was difficult to get decent clothes-a fruitful situation for us teaching in institutions of higher learning. Some very promising students fell into our hands like ripe peaches.”

“What about Erica? She must have returned from Moscow that second time changed out of all recognition,” Carmine said.

“In one way, yes. In another, no. The fire had gone, but an icy determination took its place. She abjured all sexual activity until someone in high authority made her understand that sex is a beautiful woman’s best tool. She was instructed in the art of fellatio. A large amount of money was placed in a Boston bank in her name, and, as far as I know, she began her upwards climb. After a few mawkish letters, I lost contact with her.”

“Then you don’t know that she rose to be the highest executive in a very large American company that manufactures weapons of war?” Carmine asked.

“No, really?” Hugh Lefevre looked delighted. “How truly marvelous!”

“But she didn’t spy for Moscow.”

“You can’t possibly know that. After her training, she would be able to dupe anybody.”

“Erica was a blind for someone else. She must have had a controller-someone who guided her actions and told her what to do. She never behaved like a master spy because she wasn’t a master spy. She was just a blind.”

“I hope you’re correct, Captain. If you are, then Erica’s company is still penetrated. Splendid, splendid!”

When Carmine left, he walked all the way back to the Hilton, as much of his way as possible through Regent’s Park, among azaleas and rhododendrons, blossoming trees and rich carpets of impossibly green grass. Hyde Park it wasn’t, but it had its charms. Only when he found a refreshment pavilion and had that cup of tea did he lose the last of the sour taste in his mouth that was Professor Hugh Lefevre. Old, crippled, fueled by an ideology. There were plenty of people like him; differing ideologies, perhaps, but the same end result.

He joined Desdemona for lunch in the coffee shop, as she had just come in from a long walk through Hyde Park pushing Julian in what she now called a “pram”-less than a day, and his wife’s Englishness was back with a vengeance. But she looked rested and relaxed despite her hike. Myron might be a pain in the ass, but occasionally he got some things right.

How to tell her that he was going home? Directly, no apologies and no prevarication.

“I got everything I needed from Professor Lefevre,” he said, reaching to take her hand. “That means I have to go home.”

The light died in her eyes, but she mustered all her resources and managed to look merely disappointed. “I know you’d stay if you could,” she said steadily, “so it must be very urgent. I imagine all policemen’s wives go through this sort of thing-the divorce rate is so high.” She stretched her mouth into a smile. “Well, Captain Delmonico, you’re not going to get rid of me as easily as that! Yes, I’m disgruntled, but I knew when I married you what sort of person you are. And you do have a fatal attraction for nasty cases! It rubbed off on me straight away, so I must have the same quality. My bed will be cold, but not as cold as yours-I have Julian. Just promise me that when it’s all over, you’ll bring me back here. Not in Myron’s luxury! Some smelly private hotel out on the Gloucester Road will do-I can bear the curry and the cabbage. And we won’t need to hire a pram because Julian seems to prefer a stroller. He’s inherited your curiosity, my love, and likes to see where he’s going.”

“It’s a deal,” said Carmine, kissing her hand. “I’ll worry just the same. London’s a big place.”

“Oh, we won’t be in London,” Desdemona said blandly. “I arranged it with Delia. We both knew you’d go home quickly, so Julian and I are going to stay with Delia’s parents in the Cotswolds. No one will find out where we’ve gone. Myron’s generosity can get us there-I confess I quail at the thought of battling with a baby, a pram and luggage on a train. We’ll travel in a Rolls.”

“It will be trains, buses and taxis next time,” he warned.

“Yes, but you’ll be there to help. I am a very large person, Carmine, but I have only one pair of hands.”

Light was dawning on Carmine. “You are pissed off at me! What a relief!”

“Yes, of course I’m pissed off!” she said crossly. “It’s no fun trying to be a perfect policeman’s wife, I can tell you! I didn’t expect you to find what you were looking for quite so quickly. I thought Julian and I would have you for at least three days. I’ve never seen the crown jewels!”

“That’s good, neither have I.”

“How long have I got?” she asked.

“I was going to see if there’s a plane tonight, but I’ll try for one tomorrow morning. Is that a lynching party?”

“No, at least we can cuddle in a king-sized bed tonight. I’ll call Mrs. Carstairs to tell her we’re coming, then we’ll check out together tomorrow morning and set off in Myron’s Rolls. Our route is west, and so is Heathrow. We can drop you off,” said Desdemona.

“That’s very smart, lovely lady. I don’t think you’re in any danger here, but it won’t do any harm to behave covertly, to use spy terminology. No one knows Delia has parents here.”

“This is a spy thing, isn’t it?”

“My interest is purely murder,” Carmine said.

At last, thought Carmine complacently as the car set him down at the bedlam of Heathrow, I am free of Myron Mendel Mandelbaum! I can use my economy class ticket and suffer the proper indignities of air travel for nine hours. But Myron had the last laugh. No sooner was Carmine on board the 707 than the chief hostess came swanning into the tail of the plane and upgraded him to first class. Accepting a bourbon and soda in a crystal tumbler, Carmine surrendered to the fleshpots.

“You have all the luck,” Ted Kelly said when Carmine ended his story. “We had several tries at Professor Lefevre, but he swore that Erica Davenport was just one more bright American student availing herself of the economic wisdom of the L.S.E. The lying old goat! He fooled us, all the time prating about his membership in the Communist Party. England’s riddled with open Communists, while our really dangerous ones dived underground with the coming of Joe McCarthy. He did more harm than good.”

“Witch hunts always do,” Carmine said.

“We’re no farther ahead for knowing about Erica.”

“I disagree. Ulysses has lost his blind. Have you ever established when exactly Cornucopia began losing secrets?”

“When our blind arrived ten years ago. The rocket fuel governor two years ago brought the thefts into the open when too many people got to know of it,” Kelly said.

“Has Cornucopia lost anything more since Erica began to get cold feet?”

“You think that happened after the Maxwell banquet, right?”

“Sure.”

“We don’t know,” Kelly said gloomily. “There haven’t been any leaps-and-bounds advances in Red designs, though we’ve made real big ones. Our own espionage network can’t find anything.”

“Well, my guess is that Ulysses is lying low. He’s got a cache of secrets waiting to go, but he’s not sure if the storm’s blown over. With Erica silenced, he’s probably relaxing, though that depends on what she told him when he tortured her.”

“What could she have told him?” Kelly demanded.

“Whatever passed between her and Skeps at the Maxwell event, first off,” Carmine said. “Ulysses may not have been there that night, but deputed Erica to quiz Skeps about something-maybe what Skeps knew about him? But she sidestepped until the Pugh blackmail letter. What we don’t know is whether it was addressed to her and she passed it on to Ulysses, or whether it was directly addressed to Ulysses.” Carmine growled in the back of his throat. “Like it or not-and I don’t like it!-I have to make that god-awful drive to Orleans to see Philomena Skeps again. Now that Erica’s dead, the lady might be more forthcoming about her relationship with Erica.”

“Why don’t you fly up?”

Carmine sneered. “Oh, sure! There’s no air service, and I can just see the Commissioner authorizing the hire of a plane.”

“Jesus, Carmine, sometimes you’re dumb! I’ll get you there and back in an FBI helicopter.”

“And that,” said Carmine grimly, “is why we small-time cops hate the FBI! Money to burn. Which is not going to stop me taking you up on the offer.”

“Tomorrow?”

“The sooner the better.”

“How’s your family doing in London?”

“Gallivanting all over the shop,” said Carmine, not about to tell this new ally that Desdemona and Julian were actually staying in a house outside a pair of villages called Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter. In fact, so paranoid had he become that he had fitted his home phone with a scrambler and conversed with Delia about his family in whispers. In some corner of his mind he wondered what the Carstairses thought when their phone was fitted with a scrambler too, but he didn’t care; no one was going to get at Desdemona and Julian again if he could help it.

“Pity you couldn’t stay with them a little longer.”

“Yes, but they’re safe, and having a great time seeing all the sights.”

“I’ve realized,” Ted Kelly said slowly, “the significance of the shots on that telescopic camera. Ulysses wanted to see how to get to your house by sneaking along the water’s edge. There’s no public access, all the properties go clear down to the water.”

“My interpretation too, Ted. Though he sent his assistant, who’s either fitter or younger or both. If he thinks we don’t know he has an assistant, sending him would let Ulysses establish an alibi.” Carmine gave a wry smile. “The odd thing is that hers isn’t the first body to wind up on that piece of land. A poor murdered teenaged girl was dumped there during the tenancy of the previous owner. That body was moved by a rowboat, whereas Erica was carried or dragged along the shore.”

Kelly was staring, astonished. “Jesus! Lightning does strike twice!” he exclaimed. “That was the Ghost case, right?”

“Yes. She was artistically arranged on the edge of the path, not anchored underwater.”

The FBI agent got to his feet. “Call me when you have a time set up for Philomena Skeps. I’ll have a chopper waiting at what Holloman calls an airport.”

Carmine grinned. “We do have weekday flights to New York and Boston,” he said. “Have you forgotten Chubb has a law school and a medical school that grow experts like a vacant lot grows weeds? There’s always a bunch of Chubb experts testifying in some court.”

What a difference flying made! Carmine was on the ground at a tiny airport for private planes in Chatham twenty-five minutes after rising precariously off the ground in Holloman. It was a curious sensation, especially staring down at the scene-often water-between his feet; the chopper was like a glass bowl inside and a mosquito outside. His pilot was a silent guy who concentrated on keeping the insect flying, though he did speak as Carmine alighted.

“I’ll be waiting here” was all he said.

A Ford Fairlane lookalike was parked by the fence, the keys in its ignition but not a soul in sight. Well, well, Carmine thought, the FBI wants Mrs. Skeps and Mr. Tony Bera to think I drove here in my cop car, ass sore and temper ruffled.

Between his first visit and this one, the Cape Cod villages had greened up and produced some May flowers; the day was fine and the sky blue, the Atlantic placidly calm. I still want a summer cottage here, Carmine said to himself. It would be so great to take my children paddling, teach them to swim, help them build sand castles, have peanut butter and jelly picnics. My son’s experience in Holloman Harbor won’t turn him off. Julian is not timid or shy; he’s too like his mother.

He thought about them as he drove the short distance to the Skeps house. People like Corey’s wife deemed their overt happiness a front, but then, that was Maureen; she could never believe that other women weren’t filled with her own discontent. And of course what almost everyone-even Patrick-failed to take into account was the age factor. Most people had been married at least ten years by the time he and Desdemona tied their knot, and the events that had drawn them together were as perilous as exhausting. Desdemona had never been married, and his own first marriage had been a brief thing of lust rather than love. Age, he reflected, brought wisdom, but it also brought a genuine gratitude for the happiness of sharing life with someone as much liked as loved.

Philomena Skeps was in her front garden watching for him, clad in cutoff jeans, sneakers and a plain white T-shirt. The flesh of her smooth brown legs was firm, and it was evident that her breasts did not need a bra to enhance them; her mop of black hair was carelessly bunched on top of her head. If she was aiming for a gamine look, however, she missed the mark; her beauty belonged in a French salon, not a street market.

“Captain,” she said, shaking his hand firmly. “If we sit behind the house, we can enjoy the fresh air without getting cold. I do so much love fresh air.”

“Where’s Mr. Bera?” he asked, following her down the far side of the house and around the back to a flagged patio.

“He’ll be here when he makes it,” she said, indicating a white, woven cane chair. “Lemonade?”

“Thanks.”

He let her settle, let her chat about the joys of spring and fresh air, watching her as he sipped an excellent proprietary concoction. Her eyes in the sunlight were the same green as water full of ribboned weed, dense and changeful.

“You weren’t tempted to go to L.A. for Erica’s funeral?” he asked, holding out his glass for more S.S. Pierce lemonade.

“No, I wasn’t.” The eyes filled with tears, blinked away. “No one would tell me how she died, Captain, beyond saying she was murdered.” Now the eyes were direct, resolute. “However, I take you for a kind but hard man, and ask you. How did she die? Was it very bad?”

“Yes, it was very bad. She was tortured first. Every long bone in her arms and legs was broken. Then she was strangled with a rope noose.”

“A hanging?”

“No. Simple strangulation, if I may be excused for saying that. It probably came as a relief.”

No tears now, but the creature behind the eyes had retreated to some place he couldn’t reach. “I see,” she said. “That is an odd kind of torture, surely? There was no sexual element.”

“From my experience, it was not a sexual murder. She was tortured to obtain information, I think. Certainly the textbooks would argue no sex was involved, though sometimes I wonder how much-or how little-we know about sexual murder. Did it ever occur to you that she might be in danger?”

“Not of murder. Rape I could understand, because she invited it-so cold, so sexually uninterested. There is a kind of man who regards women like Erica as needing to be brought down a peg or two, and what more effective way than rape?”

God, this is an intelligent woman! he thought. “Did you know that she had been gang-raped as a young woman?”

“No, but it makes perfect sense.”

“She didn’t confide in you?”

“I told you, Captain. We were not on good terms.”

“Recently, yes, but at one time you were. There’s no point in denying it, Mrs. Skeps.”

“Yes, at one time we were great friends. It’s because of me that she became Desmond’s mistress-I begged her. Of course that altered our friendship, though we remained close for a long time after. Had I known of the rape, I would never have asked. I was very selfish, Captain. While Erica kept him sexually sated, Desmond left me alone. It surprised me when she said that they engaged in nothing but fellatio, but of course men love it.”

“Why did it surprise you?” Carmine asked.

“Because she was so uninterested in sex. Not disinterested, uninterested.” Philomena Skeps struck her hands together. “Oh, please! Let’s leave this sordid subject!”

“Why were you such great friends?”

“A marriage of minds. Our intellects meshed perfectly. We loved to read, we liked to discuss what we’d read-all the myriad activities, phenomena and creatures of the world fascinated us. We loved beauty in all its guises-a moth’s antennae, the iridescence of a beetle’s carapace, fish-you name it, we loved it. Neither of us had ever known such a wonderful friendship. So when it ended, I was devastated.”

“Why did it end? How did it end?”

“I still don’t know. Erica ended it out of the blue. In November of 1964, Thanksgiving Day. She was coming here to dinner with me, Tony, young Desmond. But she arrived far too early. I was in the kitchen,” Philomena Skeps said in a desolate voice, “at the counter, making the turkey stuffing. Erica came in, stood about six feet from me, and said our friendship was over. She disliked me, she said, and was sick of pretending otherwise. Desmond was making it hard for her, she said. Young Desmond detested her, and she was sick of that too. There were a dozen more reasons, all much the same as those. I was too astounded to argue, I just stood with my hands full of bread and listened. Then she turned on her heel and left. Just like that! I never really saw her again, except at functions and meetings we couldn’t avoid.”

“It must have been a sorrow for you, Mrs. Skeps.”

“No, a tragedy! Life has never been the same since.”

“How did you cope with the fact that your ex-husband gave Erica control over your son’s inheritance?”

“I was crushed, but I wasn’t surprised. Desmond would have done anything to make life difficult for me. It affected Tony worse. He couldn’t find anything in the will that would enable him to challenge it legally. Of course now that Erica is dead, things will be different.” She couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice.

“Why did your son detest Erica?” Carmine asked.

Her smile was twisted. “Jealousy, of course! He felt that Erica was more important to me than he was, and in one way he was right. An intellect craves equal company, and no matter how great the love, children can never compete on an intellectual level. It is a wise child who understands that. Young Desmond isn’t wise. So he loathed Erica, who stole me from him. When the friendship ended, my son rejoiced. Which reminds me, I must stop calling him ‘young’ Desmond. He’s simply Desmond now.”

How he managed to keep his face expressionless, Carmine never after understood, only that somehow he had, while this very strange woman produced a mixture of Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Medea and about a dozen other Greeks who’d wormed their way into the psychology textbooks. I fervently hope, he thought, that by the time this terrifying amalgam explodes, I’ll be safely retired. Jesus, what a mess!

“Mother?” came a voice.

Speak of the devil!

With two dark parents he couldn’t help but be dark, though face and body were more Philomena than his father. Having come into puberty, he had embarked upon his first growth spurt, and was taller now than his mother. He wore nothing save a pair of cutoff jeans, revealing a wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped physique that ended in beautiful hands and feet. When he moved the hands, they were graceful. His face was as much feminine as masculine, of that kind called epicene, and Carmine doubted that the double-sexed look would vanish as he grew older. Chiseled features in a northern European mold, and large, bright green eyes smudged with thick black lashes. Nor would he develop acne; his brown skin was flawless, innocent of pustules.

Carmine felt his hackles rise. Here was trouble.

The boy came to lean against his mother, standing to one side of her chair, and she turned her head to kiss his arm, smiling.

“Captain Delmonico, this is my son, Desmond.”

“Hi,” said Carmine, rising and extending his hand.

The boy took it, but fastidiously, with a faint moue of distaste around his red-lipped mouth. “Hi,” he said. Then, to his mother, “Is this about the Wicked Witch of Cornucopia?”

“About Erica Davenport, yes, dear. Some lemonade?”

“No.” He stood posed like a Praxiteles statue, oblivious to the fact that the visitor’s foot itched to kick some manners into the conceited little shit. “I’m bored,” he said.

“With all that schoolwork still to do?” she ventured.

“Since my I.Q. is two hundred, Mother, it’s scarcely a problem!” he said tartly. “I need a bigger library.”

“Yes, he does,” she said to Carmine ruefully. “I’m afraid that we’re going to have to move to Boston. The Cape suits me, but it retards Desmond.” Her head went back to her son. “As soon as the legal ramifications are disentangled, dearest, we’ll go to Boston. Just a few more weeks, Tony says.”

“I take it you’ve fully recovered from the chicken pox?” Carmine asked the boy.

He didn’t like the reference to a pedestrian childhood ailment, so he ignored the question. “Where’s Tony?” he asked, fretful and peevish.

“Here!” said Anthony Bera’s voice from the back door.

The change in young Desmond was both sudden and dramatic; he lit up, bounded to Bera and hugged him. “Tony, thank God!” he cried. “Let’s take the boat out, I’m bored.”

“Good idea,” Bera said, “but I have to talk to the Captain first. Why don’t you get things ready? We need bait.”

The boy went off, but not before a little more talk passed between him and Bera. Carmine smothered a sigh of mingled sorrow and disgust. Young Desmond had already been sexually initiated, but not by a woman. Bera was mentor in this area too. A few more Greeks flitted through Carmine’s mind.

“Did young Desmond exaggerate his I.Q.?” Carmine asked as soon as the boy was out of earshot.

“Some,” Bera said, laughing, “but it’s right up there in the genius range.” He frowned. “It’s rather narrow, however. His gifts are mathematical, not artistic, and he lacks curiosity.”

“A detached reading of someone devoted to you, surely.”

“There’s no point in being anything else,” Bera said, not perturbed by the fact that Carmine had realized what was going on between him and the boy.

“I presume you’ll contest the will now?” Carmine asked.

“I’m not sure it’s even necessary. Skeps’s will didn’t make any provision for Erica’s death. If a board of trustees is appointed and it’s impeccable enough to satisfy the children’s courts of New York State, I think things can be arranged minus any legal fuss,” Bera said easily. “The boy’s mother is a good guardian unfairly dealt with by a vengeful ex-husband. Can you see Phil Smith or the other Cornucopia Board members making life hard for Philomena now? As long as they’re among the trustees, things will be hunky-dory.”

A very superficial summary for someone he deems a legal ignoramus, thought Carmine, but it will probably work out that way in the end. And it answers my questions. Cornucopia will go on under the same management for at least another three or four years. After that, given young Desmond-who knows? He’ll probably have graduated from Harvard by then, and be a player. The kid’s homosexuality doesn’t worry me. What does is his patriotism. Is Ted Kelly certain of Anthony Bera’s loyalties in that respect? I’m sure going to ask him!

Rising to his feet, Carmine said his farewells. Philomena didn’t escort him to the Fairlane, Bera did, eyeing the car.

“You’ve put some miles on it coming here three times,” he said, holding the driver’s door open.

“Yeah, well, shit happens,” said Carmine, got in, and drove off with a wave.

A few minutes later he was in the air heading across Nantucket Sound.

“Is that Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard?” he asked as the water became a patchwork quilt land.

“Martha’s Vineyard,” said the pilot.

And so, after flying down I-95 on the Connecticut shore, he reached Holloman while the Fairlane would still have been negotiating the Cape itself. Ducking down as he left the chopper, Carmine resolved to buy Special Agent Ted Kelly a bottle of his favorite tipple. What a difference! Home again in time for a Malvolio’s lunch. The whole trip had taken less than three hours.

For want of something better to do, he went back to his least loved destination, Cornucopia, that afternoon.

Phil Smith had moved into Desmond Skeps’s offices but had not availed himself of Richard Oakes the male secretary, Carmine noted as he waited for Smith’s exquisitely turned out elderly dragon to announce him.

Erica’s decor was still in place, but subtly defeminized; the vases of flowers were gone, the pictures of dreamy country lanes had been replaced by starkly grim Hogarth etchings, and red kid had replaced sage green kid on the padded furniture.

“You need a few swastika flags,” Carmine said.

“Excuse me?”

“A lot of black, white and red in here. Very Nazi.”

“You, Captain, are fond of making incendiary remarks, but I am not rising to the bait today,” Smith said. “I’m too happy.”

“Didn’t like a woman boss, huh?”

“What man genuinely does? I could have stomached her sex, however. What made my gorge rise was her indecision.”

Perhaps aping mourning, Smith was in a black silk suit with a black tie closely covered in white spots; his cuff links were black onyx and yellow gold, his shoes the finest black kid. A sartorial wonder, thought Carmine, sitting down. In fact, Smith looked younger, even handsomer. Being el supremo of Cornucopia obviously pleased him mightily, just as he said.

“Where’s Richard Oakes?” Carmine asked.

Smith looked contemptuous. “He’s a homosexual, Captain, and I don’t like homosexuals. I banished him to Outer Mongolia.”

“And where’s that, in Cornucopia’s version of the globe?”

“Accounting.”

“It would be my Outer Mongolia too, I confess. The arctic wastes of numbers… However, I can’t agree with you about homosexuals. For some men, it’s a natural state of being, not to be confused with some of the sexual criminals I encounter.” To himself he wondered how long it was since Smith had set eyes on Desmond Skeps III-what a shock that was going to be!

The pretense of bonhomie disappeared; Phil Smith reverted to type. “What do you want?” he asked rudely. “I’m a busy man.”

“I want to know your whereabouts all day on the day that Erica Davenport’s body was put in my boat shed.”

“I was here, and I can produce witnesses to vouch for that from eight in the morning until six that evening,” Smith said. “Go and look somewhere else, for God’s sake! The only kind of murder I do is

Outer Mongolian. And yes, I would have dealt with Dr. Erica Davenport, but not by extinguishing her life. What kind of punishment is that? By the time I finished with her, she’d have been in a straitjacket.”

“I accept that, Mr. Smith. When you called her indecisive, what did you mean?”

“Exactly what the word suggests. Having a homosexual for a secretary was indicative, believe me. One of the ways Cornucopia stays on top is by absorbing smaller, independent companies, especially if they have clever ideas or find a niche in the market for a new product. Takeover negotiations have a form and a time span that Erica was ignorant of. We missed taking over four companies in fewer than four days, thanks to her. Three belonged to Fred Collins, one to me. We’d been performing the ritual mating dance for months or weeks, depending. But she dithered, the shortsighted fool, then ran to Wallace Grierson.”

“Couldn’t you override her?” Carmine asked curiously.

“Not the way Desmond structured his will-she had the yea or nay, holding Desmond Three’s majority,” Smith said sourly.

“Hmm. So there were advantages in being rid of her, even if your technique would not have involved murder.”

“Are you a fool too, Captain? Haven’t I said that?”

“No, Mr. Smith, I am not a fool,” Carmine said coolly. “I just like to be absolutely sure.” He got up and wandered over to the long wall, where the Hogarth etchings were hanging in mathematical precision. Depictions of a London long gone, a place of horrific suffering, starvation, dissipation, glaringly unwanted humanity. Smith watched him, puzzled.

“These are amazing,” Carmine said, turning to look at the seated figure behind the black lacquer desk. “Human misery at its most acute, and the artist walked through it every day. It doesn’t say much for the government of the time, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t, I suppose.” Smith shrugged. “Still, I don’t walk through it. Why the interest?”

“No reason, really. It just seems a strange theme for the office of a company director, particularly when the products are aimed at creating more human misery.”

“Oh, puh-lease!” Smith exclaimed. “Don’t blame me, blame my wife! I put her in charge of the decorating.”

“That would account for it,” Carmine said, smiled, and left.

From there he went to see Gus Purvey, Fred Collins and Wal Grierson, in that order.

Purvey was genuinely upset, and had flown to L.A. for the funeral. Like Phil Smith, his alibi for the day of Erica’s death was ironclad.

“Mr. Smith says Dr. Davenport was indecisive,” Carmine said to him, wondering if this was old news or new. Old, it seemed.

“I don’t agree,” Purvey said, wiping his eyes. “Phil and Fred are a pair of sharks, they bite everything in their path without stopping to think whether it would go down well or give them indigestion. Erica thought all four companies would wind up a liability rather than an asset.”

Collins repeated Phil Smith’s views, but Grierson came down on Purvey’s side.

“She had a natural caution,” he said, “that I think was why Des picked her to head Cornucopia. I do know, however, that she was in favor of Dormus buying out a small company with good ideas about solar power. That’s decades off, but I’m interested. So was Erica. I want to let the firm alone, just infuse some much needed capital into their infrastructure, and reap the benefits down the track. The same with distillation of fresh water from salt. You have to browse through the world of small companies, Captain, not gobble,” Grierson said, unconsciously echoing Purvey’s shark metaphor. “In that respect Erica’s indecision was great. Unfortunately, in most respects it was disastrous.”

“What’s going to happen now that Dr. Davenport is gone?”

“Phil Smith is bound to take over. Funny, that. For the last fifteen years he’s been inert, now all of a sudden he’s woken up and is behaving like a chief executive.” Grierson frowned. “Trouble is, I’m not sure his burst of energy will last. I hope it does. There’s no way I want the job.”

“What’s Smith’s wife like?” Carmine asked, thinking of the brown pancake hat.

“Natalie?” Grierson laughed. “She’s a Lapp-calls herself a Sami. Hard to believe she’s an Eskimo, isn’t it? Weird blue eyes, blonde hair. The Sami are fair, I’m told. Her English is awful. I like her, she’s-uh-jovial. The kids are real lookers, all blonde. A girl, then two boys. None of them wanted to follow Pop into the firm-amazing how often that happens. No matter how rich people are, their kids do their own thing.”

“No clotheshorses among them?”

“Just good workhorses, Natalie saw to that. She has some bug in her head about the homeland, so the minute each kid got through with college, off they went to the land of the midnight sun. They didn’t stay, of course. Scattered around the world.”

“The Smiths sound like an odd couple.”

This is fascinating, Carmine was thinking; I would never have suspected Wal Grierson of this kind of cozy gossip. Just goes to show. He’s best friends with a woman-his wife.

“The Smiths are absolutely orthodox compared to what the Collinses used to be like when his first wife was alive. Aki was Turkish-another blonde. Gorgeous in a weird way. Came from somewhere near Armenia or the Caucasus. Their sons are the best-looking kids-young men now, of course. One’s a Marine officer stationed in West Germany, the other’s a NASA scientist trying to put a man on the moon.”

“What happened to her? Divorce?”

Wal Grierson’s face sobered. “No. She died in a shooting accident at their cabin in Maine. Some fucking gun-crazy idiot mistook her for a deer and blew her face away. That’s why we put up with Fred’s bimbos. When Aki was alive, he was different.”

“That’s a real tragedy,” Carmine said.

“Yeah, poor old Fred.”

Strange pictures were forming in Carmine’s mind, but they wavered and quivered on the fringes of actual thought, like moving objects some sadistic ophthalmologist deliberately kept right on the margins of peripheral vision. They were there, but they were not there. Swing your head to focus on them, and they vanished-poof!

“Or am I going crazy?” he asked Desdemona, the scrambler on the phone engaged.

“No, dear heart, you’re stone cold sane,” she said. “I know the feeling. Oh, I miss you!” She paused, then added in a master stroke of guile, “So does Julian. He does, Carmine! Every time a man approaches with something like your gait, he starts jigging up and down-it’s adorable!”

“That’s an awful thing to say.”

“You have an idea who it is, don’t you?” she asked.

“No, that’s just it-I don’t. I should, yet I don’t.”

“Cheer up, it will come to you. Is the weather nice?”

He got his own back. “Perfect Connecticut spring days.”

“Guess what it’s doing here?”

“Raining. At fifty degrees of latitude, Desdemona, with a climate that mild, it has to rain a lot. It’s the Gulf Stream.”

When Simonetta Marciano barged into his office, Carmine was surprised at the intrusion, but not at the manner of it; Simonetta always barged, it was her nature. She had never grown out of the war-year 1940s, which had seen her greatest triumph, the marital catching of Major Danny Marciano, who had thus far escaped entrapment. Barely out of her teens, Simonetta had no use for the GIs in her own age group. She wanted a mature man who could keep her in good style from the beginning of their relationship. And, setting eyes on Major Marciano, Simonetta went after him with all the delicious ploys of youth, beauty, and high spirits. Now he was within a couple of years of retirement from the Holloman Police, while she was in her early forties.

Today she was clad in a button-down-the-front dress of pink with darker pink polka dots; it ended at her knees, displaying good legs in stockings with seams, and her shoes were pink kid with oldfashioned medium heels and bows on their fronts. Her dark hair was rolled back from her face in a continuous sausage, and on the back of her head she had pinned a huge pink satin bow. The fashion these days was for pink or brownish lipstick, but Simonetta wore brilliant red. All of which might have suggested to strangers that she was free with her favors, but they would have been mistaken. Simonetta was passionately devoted to her Danny and their four children; her baser qualities were all channeled into gossip, and there was nothing she didn’t know. She had feelers into the Mayor’s offices, Chubb, the clutter of departments that made up County Services, the Chamber of Commerce, the Knights of Columbus, Rotary, the Shriners, and many more places that might yield some juicy tidbit. Having Simonetta on your side, her husband joked, was like enjoying all the benefits of the Library of Congress without the hassle of borrowing.

“Hi,” said Carmine, coming to peck her rouged cheek and put her into a chair. “You look great, Netty.”

She preened. “Coming from you, that’s a compliment.”

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks, I can’t stay, I’m on my way to a women’s lib meeting in Buffo’s wine cellar.” She giggled. “Lunch and a good Italian red as well as lots of dirt.”

“I didn’t know you were a feminist, Netty.”

“I’m not,” she said, and snorted. “What I am into is equal pay for equal work.”

“How can I help?” Carmine asked, genuinely baffled.

“Oh, you can’t! I’m not here for that. I’m here because I remembered hearing Danny say you and yours were looking for people who attended the Maxwell Foundation banquet.”

“You were there yourself, Netty.”

“I was, at John’s table. None of us knew a thing about what you were looking for, I remember that.” She plunged off on an apparent tangent. “You know the Lovely Peace funeral home?”

“Who doesn’t? Bart must have buried half of East Holloman.”

“The half that matters, anyway.”

He was intrigued; this was typical Simonetta, a perfectionist at the art of gossip. Drop crumbs on the water and gather all the ducks, then produce your shotgun, that was Simonetta.

“He hasn’t been the same since Cora died,” Netty said.

“They were a devoted couple,” Carmine said gravely.

“Such a pity he didn’t have a son to take over the business! Daughters are well and good, but they never seem to want to follow in Pop’s footsteps.”

“Except, as I recollect, Netty, the older one’s husband is a mortician who has taken over Bart’s business.”

“Don’t let Bart hear you call him a mortician! He likes the old description-undertaker.”

Carmine had had enough. “Netty, where are you going?”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there! It’s eighteen months since Cora died, and Bart’s daughters worry about him,” Netty said, determined to pursue her own convoluted course. “They let him alone for the first six months, but when he didn’t start to get out and around, they pushed him. He got nagged into going to the Schumann whenever there was a new show in town, to the Chubb Rep season, the movies, public meetings-the poor old guy got no peace.”

“Are you leading up to informing me that he was at the Maxwell banquet?” Carmine asked.

She looked crestfallen. “Gosh, Carmine, you’re impatient! But okay, Bart’s daughters nagged him into buying a plate for the Maxwell banquet.” She cheered up. “I was talking to his younger daughter yesterday, and she said something about Bart’s being at the banquet. Seems he didn’t have a good time, at least when he sat down at some table he told Dolores was full of drunks and weirdos. We were sitting next to each other in Gloria’s beauty parlor, and Dolores mentioned this after I asked how Bart was doing.” She grinned. “I got a blow by blow description of Bart’s progress, we had plenty of time waiting for the lotion to set.” She got up, gathering her sweater, her car keys and her pink plastic pocketbook. “Gotta go, Carmine, gotta go! You go see Bart. Maybe he can help.”

And off she went, almost colliding with Delia in the doorway.

“Goodness! Who was that?” Delia asked.

“Danny Marciano’s wife, Simonetta. One of the most valuable resources the Holloman PD owns. In fact, if the FBI could tap into her, their worries would be over.” Carmine consulted his watch. “Nearly lunchtime. Could you find me a number for Joseph Bartolomeo, please, Delia? And an address.”

As Carmine remembered the proprietor of the Lovely Peace funeral home, he had lived in a very nice house next to his place of business, both conveniently located a reasonable walk or a short hearse ride from St. Bernard’s Catholic church. But after his wife’s death he had handed the business over to his son-in-law and bought a condominium apartment in Carmine’s old spot, the Nutmeg Insurance building just yards down Cedar Street from County Services.

After some thought, Carmine decided to have Delia make the call inviting the undertaker to lunch at Malvolio’s. He was at home, and had no hesitation in accepting.

By the time Carmine walked into Malvolio’s his guest was installed in a booth at the far end of the big diner, sipping at a mug of coffee Minnie had already produced. Though his name was Joseph Bartolomeo, everyone who knew him called him Bart, and it suited him, having few connotations of ethnic background or physical type. The world was full of Joes, from Stalin to McCarthy, Carmine reflected, but of Barts there were far fewer. Now approaching seventy, Bart looked any age from fifty to eighty, for he had an Alec Guinness quality of anonymity that meant people failed to remember what he looked like or how he behaved. His physique was ordinary, his face was ordinary, his coloring was ordinary, his manner was ordinary. Which had been great assets for an undertaker, that self-effacing person who conscientiously cares for the beloved dead, organizes and supervises their obsequies, and leaves not a trace of himself behind to mar the last memories.

“Bart, how are you?” Carmine asked, sliding into his side of the booth and holding out a hand.

Yes, even his grip was ordinary: neither too limp nor too firm, neither too dry nor too moist.

“I’m well, Carmine,” Bart said with a smile.

It wasn’t necessary to offer him condolences a year and a half old; Carmine had been at Cora’s funeral. “Let’s have our lunch, then we’ll talk,” he said. “What’s your fancy?”

“Minnie says the special’s good-brisket. I think I’ll have that, and rice pudding to follow,” Bart said.

Carmine ordered a Luigi Special salad with Thousand Island dressing. With no Desdemona at home to cook ruinous dinners, he could revert to his bachelor meals.

They ate with enjoyment, passing the time as old East Hollomanites did. Only after Minnie had cleared the pudding bowls away did Carmine become serious.

“I had a visit from Netty Marciano this morning,” he said, “and she told me that you were at the Maxwell banquet. Is that right, Bart?”

“Yes, I bought a plate. It was real well organized, but I didn’t enjoy it much, at least at first,” Bart said.

“Take me through it, I need to know.”

“Well, I was supposed to be at a table of friends, but when I got there I found out the rest had canceled-the gastric bug. So they sat me with five dentists and four wives-the odd dentist was a woman who turned her back on me. I didn’t know one of them. They had a great time, I had a lousy time.” Bart sighed. “That’s the trouble with going anywhere on your own. And with being an undertaker. The minute people ask you what you do for a crust, they look at you as if you’re Boris Karloff.”

“I’m sorry,” Carmine said gently.

“When the dessert was cleared, I decided to look for a better place to sit,” Bart went on in his soft, anything but ordinary voice. “My first try was a flop-Dubrowski the lawyer and some lawyer pals from out of town. They all talked about business, whether the clients would tolerate a raise in fees, that kind of thing. I didn’t stay past telling them I was an undertaker and getting the Boris Karloff treatment.”

“Lawyers are the pits,” Carmine said with feeling.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Bart paused, furrowing an already furrowed brow.

“Where did you go next?”

“To a weird table-really, really weird! Four women and four men, but it was hard to believe that any of them were friends. One guy was a Chubber who looked down his nose at all the others-I remember he called them Philistines. One guy was so fat-I thought it wouldn’t be long before he needed a funeral home. The same for an old lady who had breathing problems and a blue tinge under her nails. A few of them were drunk, I mean really drunk, especially a tall, thin, dark guy who sat with his nose in a glass of strong booze, drinking away. There was a pretty girl who looked out of her depth, and a woman who looked so tired I thought she was going to go to sleep with her head on the table. I don’t think she was drunk, just tired. I knew the fourth woman because everyone knows her-Dee-Dee the whore. What she was doing there, I can’t even imagine.”

Carmine listened enthralled, wondering whether to interrupt Bart’s narrative flow or hold his questions until Bart was done. No, let him continue, Carmine decided.

“The other man was very young, student age. He reminded me of the Chubber except that he was very plain in the face and the Chubber was handsome. I sat down between the fat guy and the Chubber in one of the two vacant chairs. The other one was on the far side of Mister Drunk, between him and the snooty kid. Just after I sat down, this woman came along and sat between the kid and Mister Drunk. She was drunk too, none too steady on her feet, and she looked as if she had a bone to pick with Mister Drunk.”

Time to interrupt. “How come, after five months, Bart, you remember every little detail?” Carmine asked. If he didn’t ask, some hotshot defense attorney sure would. Best to know now what answer Bart would give.

“It’s my job to remember every little detail,” Bart said with dignity, a trifle wounded. “Who’s sitting where, who’s not speaking to whom, what color the Mascetti family hates or what color the Castelanos hate-undertaking is a very delicate job. And I can’t forget everything the next day either. Death picks and chooses, no one can be sure when the same people will be back to bury the next family member.”

“How right you are, Bart! Can you describe the drunken new arrival at the table?” Carmine asked.

“Oh, sure. She was a really beautiful woman, much higher class than the four women sitting down. Blonde, with very short hair. Wonderful clothes, very pale blue. When the fat guy tried to act like a host, she cut him dead. In fact, I don’t think she even noticed the others, she was too intent on Mister Drunk. I guess he was someone important, from the way the fat guy and the Chubber and the young guy treated him-as if they were afraid of him but needed him. No, not the young guy. He was like Netty Marciano-ears flapping to get all the gossip.”

“Did he get any?” Carmine asked.

“Well, the beauty and Mister Drunk were lovers who’d just split up-that was what she was displeased about, if that’s the right word.” Bart smiled apologetically. “It’s not necessary now, but I’ve spent most of my life speaking in euphemisms. But I’ll say to you now, Carmine, she was pissed as well as pissed! Mister Drunk hardly noticed-he was too far gone, I think. She didn’t understand that.”

“Do you remember what they talked about? Was it all to do with the ending of their affair? Did she mention any names?”

Bart frowned. “She did, but I don’t remember any of them. They weren’t the names of people I knew. Except for one that caught my attention because it’s the name of a saint, Philomena, and I’ve never heard of a real woman called it. The people waiting on the table were really attentive, I think due to Mister Drunk’s importance. Their supervisor whispered in their ears, at any rate, and they hopped to refill glasses, keep the table neat, hand out clean ashtrays. So the beauty got drunker, and she started to ramble. Weird stuff! All about Russia and holding Stalin’s hand, kissing Khrushchev’s bald head-there was a lot of it. She started hissing in Mister Drunk’s ear about if only he knew what was going on inside his own company, and how someone was his enemy. She kept it up, a kind of hiss-it sounded real mean, vindictive. He’d all but passed out, so I don’t think he heard any of it.

The fat guy was trying to persuade both of them to have some coffee, and all three of the waiters were hovering.”

For the first time since the Ghost, Carmine felt the icy needles crawling through his jaw. He gazed at Joseph Bartolomeo in awe, wondering at his luck. “What happened next?” he asked.

Bart shrugged. “I don’t know, Carmine. I saw a table full of people I knew right against the back wall, and I got out of there. Brr!” He shivered. “I was never gladder than when I sat down among friends and started to have a good time.”

“Later on, Bart, you might have to testify to this in a court of law,” Carmine said, “so don’t forget any of it.”

The nondescript grey eyes opened wide. “Why should I?”

Carmine walked him back down the block to the Nutmeg Insurance building, shook him fervently by the hand, and then went in search of Abe and Corey.

His allusions to the espionage element in the case had been inadvertent or need-to-know, limited only because his team didn’t have security clearances.

“Well, fuck that,” he said in his new, much quieter office. “If either of you breathes a word, even to a wife, I’ll shell out your balls, so make sure you don’t. It’s my career on the line as well as yours. I trust you, guys, and that’s more than I can say for Ted Kelly.”

At the end of Carmine’s narrative, Corey and Abe exchanged glances of mingled relief and triumph; at long last they knew the ins and outs of this god-awful mess of a case.

“As soon as she was sober,” Carmine said, “Erica confessed what she’d done to her controller, who is Ulysses. That surprises you? You think that was a stupid thing to do? Catholics confess to a priest, right? Erica was as indoctrinated as anyone is to any religion. She didn’t fart without permission from Ulysses. As I see it, she told Ulysses exactly what had happened, and gave it as her opinion that no one had noticed, least of all Skeps. Ulysses will have known she was speaking the truth. She was utterly dependent on him, and he terrified her.”

“So okay, Erica broke her cover, and Ulysses knew it on, say, December fourth, the day after,” Corey said, struggling with behavior he found hard to understand. “But, Carmine, four months go by! Then everybody who was connected to table seventeen was murdered. Why did Ulysses wait so long?”

“Think about it, Corey-think!” Carmine said patiently. “The murder of eleven people is a massive undertaking. Even Ulysses needed time to plan it.”

“And time for the world to forget there ever had been a charity banquet,” Abe said, understanding. “Ulysses is a smart cookie-smart enough to know that murder produces different consequences from espionage. I don’t say spies don’t murder, but they do it covertly. The murder of civilians is overt. If what he planned was multiple murder, he must have known there would be cops crawling everywhere, and that some of them might be smart cookies too. Homicide cops are in-your-face guys.”

“I get it!” Corey said. “Ulysses didn’t want any murders, but if he had to, he would have preferred to kill his victims one at a time, spaced out. In a big city, no sweat. In Holloman? Impossible. Quite a few of his victims were pretty important, their deaths would have made the Post. He couldn’t be sure that a potential victim wouldn’t wake up to what was going down. They all knew where they were sitting on a certain night. He just couldn’t risk so many deaths strung out. If he had to kill them, he had to kill them all at once.”

“You’re both right,” Carmine said, smiling. “If they had to die, they had to die all at once, even the waiters. Not on the tail of the function, but maybe two months later, or three. So he waited for any consequences of Erica’s indiscretion, and he waited in vain. Nothing happened, nothing at all. I see Ulysses sitting back with a sigh of relief as the fourth month ended. He was safe, and he wouldn’t need to invite homicide cops into his little corner of the world. Then he got Evan Pugh’s letter on March twenty-ninth. In a way, Evan’s identity was manna from heaven. The one who’d woken up was another evil bastard.”

“Pugh didn’t send his letter to Erica?” Corey asked.

“No. Her drunken ramblings didn’t really matter, even the garbage about holding Joe Stalin’s hand and playing kissies with the Central Committee. If anyone had accused her, she would have laughed in their face and called it a fairy tale. It must have been something she hissed in Desmond Skeps’s ear later on. When she was talking about a traitor inside the Cornucopia gates. I think she spoke his name,” Carmine said.

“But if she did, why did Evan Pugh wait four months to act? I can see the logic of letting time go by,” Abe said, “but I can’t get my head around Evan Pugh’s four-month wait.”

On the far wall opposite Carmine’s desk hung Mickey McCosker’s only attempt at decoration: a cheap cardboard reproduction of a wilted arum lily in a vase. Suddenly it was too much to bear. Carmine got up, walked across, yanked at the picture, and pulled it down. He perched it on top of an empty wastebasket and brushed his hands together in satisfaction.

“I hate it,” he said to his stunned team. “Mickey said it reminded him of his wife on their wedding night, though he never said which one.”

He sat down again. “I believe the answer lies in Evan Pugh’s character,” he said. “Because it was sadistic, he got a kick out of the nasty vibes flying around after Erica arrived. But at the end of the evening he went back to Paracelsus and embarked on some other creepy mischief. He forgot about the events at table seventeen until he was reminded by one of those quirks of fate no one can predict. An issue of News magazine at the end of March featured a special article on the Communist leaders since the great purges of the late Thirties. It went on sale about March twenty-sixth, and Myron was carrying a copy when he came to Holloman to introduce us to his lady love, Erica Davenport. He was raving about the article, and begging me to read it. I didn’t have the time because we’d just had twelve murders.”

“My God!” Corey exclaimed. “Evan Pugh read it!”

“Yes, and whatever the journalist said about some of the Central Committee members tallied exactly with what Erica had said. After that, he must have remembered the things she hissed-a significant word from Bart Bartolomeo. Plenty of esses in her speech, I’m guessing. And think of our luck! We found Bart five months after the Maxwell banquet, and he’s the perfect witness! His profession disciplined him to notice things and remember them.”

“Erica told Skeps who Ulysses was,” Abe said. “Wow!”

“Yes, and Evan Pugh remembered.”

“Pugh recognized his name?” Corey asked.

“I doubt it,” Carmine said. “All he needed was the name. He was a pre-med who got straight As-he knew how to research. After News came out, he must have decided all his Christmases had come at once. A chance to tease and torment someone with far more to lose than mere money. He didn’t need money himself. That’s one of the strangest things about this case-no one needs the money.”

“He sent off his letter,” Abe said.

“And Ulysses was forced to kill everyone connected to table seventeen,” Corey added.

“Answer me this, Carmine,” Abe said, frowning. “Why didn’t Ulysses just hire an out-of-state gunman and mow each of them down? Why all the histrionics? Poison, injection, shootings, rape, knife, pillows. Is he laughing at us?”

“No, I think it was an attempt to make the killings seem unrelated,” Carmine said. “Yes, he’s got an ego the size of Tokyo, but it doesn’t rule him. This guy probably has colonel’s or even general’s rank within the KGB-he’s as cold as ice, he doesn’t posture like a politician. All he’s been trying to do since December third is patch up Erica Davenport’s mistakes. We have to assume that he’s never made a mistake himself, and it may be that Erica wasn’t his choice-more that she was the only sleeper Moscow had to front for Ulysses. Women have a weakness, guys. They fall in love differently from men, which makes them hard for men to control.”

“So Ulysses tried to vary his murders, hoping we’d be as confused as we were snowed under,” Abe said thoughtfully.

“Exactly.”

A pause ensued; Corey terminated it. “There’s another thing puzzles me, Carmine,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Why wasn’t Bart murdered?”

Carmine looked uncertain. “The best I can come up with is that it’s possible Erica never even knew he was there. He was a silent man on the far side of a very fat guy, and he would have been invisible to her if she didn’t give the table her attention when she sat down. We know she didn’t, because she was drunk, and focused on Desmond Skeps. If she never realized Bart was there, Ulysses wouldn’t have been told. The other possibility is that she kind of noticed him, but he’s such an anonymous type that she forgot him a moment later. One thing I do know, guys-if Bart’s still alive, Ulysses either doesn’t know he exists, or he hasn’t been able to find out who he is.”

“We have to put a watch on Bart,” Corey said.

“And give his importance away? That’s why I had lunch with him openly, even walked him back to the Nutmeg Insurance building. We didn’t look like a detective and a witness, we looked like two old pals catching up. I used to live in the Nutmeg Insurance, and Ulysses will know that. So I must have friends there, right?”

“No watch,” said Corey, mentally deducting lieutenant’s points.

“What about Netty?” Abe asked hollowly.

They gazed at each other in dismay. Then Carmine shrugged.

“We’ll just have to hope that she heard something really tasty at Buffo’s wine cellar. There’s a good chance. It was a women’s lunch with plenty of libbers present. Pauline Denbigh on the menu?”

“One thing we never do,” said Corey. “Whoever sees Netty doesn’t so much as breathe Bart’s name.”

On the morrow Carmine, Danny Marciano and John Silvestri had to attend one of the Mayor’s “ceremonials,” as the Commissioner had named them. Ethan Winthrop was a true Connecticut Yankee by birth, but he owned the temperament of a P. T. Barnum. His much loved mayoralty was as stuffed with pomp and circumstance as he could persuade his councilors to condone, which meant there was plenty; his councilors were thoroughly cowed and didn’t honestly care, so long as they could enjoy councilors’ perks. Thus Taft and Travis High Schools received fat subsidies for their bands, a benefit all around: Taft or Travis marched off with all the band trophies far and wide, while the Mayor could fill Holloman’s air with the sounds of brilliant brass during his ceremonials.

Having to attend these events irked the police chiefs, and was one of the few disadvantages Carmine suffered after his promotion to captain-lieutenants didn’t need to go, captains did. Worse than that, it meant digging out his uniform. Under normal circumstances only Danny Marciano was in uniform, as he headed the uniformed cops. Silvestri, a law unto himself, was prone to wear a black suit and a black polo-necked sweater. Carmine stuck to chinos, shirts without a tie, a tweed jacket with a Chubb tie in one pocket, and loafers. Neat and comfortable.

Since the police dress uniform for such senior cops was encrusted with silver braid and detail, it was navy blue rather than black, to avoid any Gestapo connotations. Women like Delia Carstairs, Desdemona Delmonico and Simonetta Marciano privately thought that the three senior officers looked terrific in dress uniform; all were trim-waisted, broad-shouldered and handsome. Netty had a full wall of photographs of her Danny in full dress uniform, with a few of Silvestri and Carmine to round them off. This view was not shared by the martyrs encased in the uniforms, which had high Chinesestyle collars that Carmine, for one, swore had been sharpened on a wheel.

However, needs must. Carmine, Danny and Silvestri attended on the Green while both high school bands played and marched, and the Mayor did his thing alongside M.M. of Chubb in all the glory of his President’s gown and cap. It was Town’s tribute to Gown as the academic year drew to a close. Luckily the day was fine and calm; the Green was in bloom, the grass springy and still lush. Best of all were the copper beeches, back in leaf and towering over Mayor Winthrop’s celebration of an amity that sometimes had its fragile side.

They were bunched on or around a dais swathed in purple and blue, purple being the color of Chubb, blue of Holloman. On top of the dais the really important people stood, with the Mayor and M.M. in pride of place. The three police chiefs were three steps lower, their capped heads level with the knees of the dignitaries on the dais; the Fire Commissioner and his deputy, in lighter blue uniforms, flanked them.

“Typical Ethan,” said Silvestri to his opposite number, fire chief Bede Murphy, “posing us like fucking flowers in an arrangement.”

Carmine paid scant attention; his collar was simultaneously cutting him and choking him. He craned his neck, shifted his head from side to side, then tipped his chin up as far as it would go. Something flashed in the high branches of the closest copper beech. He stopped moving and stared, his face suddenly expressionless, an old reflex that went back to the lawless days during the war, when soldiers cracked and started shooting up hated figures like officers and MPs. There! Another flash as someone lying on a branch adjusted his weapon; it was the glass end of a telescopic sight catching the sun.

“Down!” he roared. “Everybody down, down, down!”

His right hand had cleared his long-barreled.38 from its holster, and out of the corner of his eye he saw John Silvestri doing the same, with Danny a little behind. The speeches had begun and the two bands were silent, kids sitting demurely on the grass as if they’d never heard of a joint or a hubcap.

It was not Carmine’s words that sent the dignitaries diving in a flutter of robes; it was the sight of three fancy-dress cops, weapons drawn, running like sprinters in the direction of the copper beech, Carmine in the lead. The kids were scattering wildly, girls shrieking, boys yelling, while the watching crowd vanished save for Channel

Six’s news crew, gifted with the best footage since that memorable day the year before.

Danny Marciano was down, clutching at his left arm, but Carmine and Silvestri were already too near for a long rifle, clumsy at close distance.

The sniper got off one last shot, useless, but no one heard the rifle, drowned in the much louder report of two revolvers as Carmine and Silvestri fired together, and again, and a third time. The smaller branches heaved and crackled as a limp body hurtled through them to lie motionless on the ground.

Sirens were wailing, flashing lights showing eerily on South Green Street; someone with a walkie-talkie must have radioed in almost as soon as Carmine moved.

“He’s dead,” Carmine said. “That’s a pity.”

“We couldn’t risk the kids,” Silvestri panted.

“Jesus, the gall!” Carmine looked up at Silvestri from a crouch. “How’s Danny? We need to cordon this off, John, right now, so get it done.”

Off came the silver-encrusted jacket; Carmine flung it to one side and knelt to examine his quarry. A total stranger, which was a disappointment: in his early forties, fit and trim in a brown sweat suit, his face streaked with brown greasepaint that would have made him all but invisible high in a coppery tree.

Silvestri returned. “Danny’s okay-winged, but the bullet missed anything vital. Who is the bastard?”

“No one we know.”

“Who did he mean to kill?”

“My guess is M.M. ahead of the Mayor, but probably as many on the dais as he had time to take out.” Carmine picked up the rifle, anchored by a lanyard to the assassin, who was too well versed in his job to let it accidentally fall. “A Remington.308 chambering five rounds. New firearm, I’ve never seen one.”

“Marine issue this year.” Silvestri followed such things. “How dare he?” The Commissioner swelled with a terrifying rage, his lips peeled back to bare his teeth. “How dare anyone do this in my town? My town! Our kids were here-our kids! Someone is shitting all over us, someone who can get hold of a new weapon!”

“Someone we have to stop,” Carmine said. “One thing I can tell you, John-I’ll never bitch about this uniform again. My collar was giving me hell, so I was moving my head around. A ray of sun sneaked through the leaves and hit the lens of his sight just as I stretched my neck. I saw a flash, then another. It reminded me of a situation I had once at Fort Bragg. Know what? Danny’s always at me to switch to an automatic, but if I hadn’t been packing a long-barreled revolver-and the same for you!-we’d never have gotten the motherfucker.”

“Yeah, right, Carmine,” Silvestri said, thumping him on the back in what looked to Channel Six like a congratulatory gesture. “But Danny’s right, snipers aside, and we won’t get another of them. Time to go automatic.” He sighed regretfully.

“There’s nothing more we can learn here,” the Commissioner went on. “Let’s check out the turkeys in this shoot and make sure no one’s hurt.”

Dignity was sorely wounded, but nothing else except Henry Howard’s Tudor bonnet, which was used as a vomit bowl by several grateful men. The probable primary target, Mawson MacIntosh, was too enraged to think of his dignity or his skin. He stalked over to Silvestri and Carmine with the kind of look on his face that had congressional committees shivering well before his tongue cut them to ribbons. The only person he was known to be afraid of was God.

“What is the world coming to, gentlemen?” he demanded, his eyes snapping fury. “There were children here!”

“I’m sure you won’t feel like saying yes, M.M., but have dinner with me tonight at Sea Foam and I’ll tell you a long story,” Silvestri said. “Seven o’clock, no wives, and I don’t give a flying fuck about security clearances!”

The President of Chubb exchanged his furious look for a triumphant one. “I know enough to realize I don’t know nearly enough,” he said. “I’ll be there, John. And I want it all.”

“You’ll get it all.”

Carmine suppressed a sigh. Whatever Special Agent Ted Kelly and various heads of various departments in Washington might say, once Holloman felt itself invaded, the ranks closed against all outsiders. Even Hartford tended to leave Holloman alone.

And it was such a beautiful day, he thought as he walked back to Cedar Street and County Services, where the first thing he would have to do was lodge his sidearm with the duty sergeant. Just as well it hadn’t been a prolonged shootout; he didn’t carry spare rounds in a dress uniform. This hadn’t been a nasty case in that respect, either. His wife and son had suffered, but no one had tried to gun him down, even including on the Green this morning. Too insignificant a target? Well, Mr. Ulysses, you keep on thinking that way.

“The Commissioner will be lodging his.38 as soon as he comes in,” he said to Sergeant Tasco. “We don’t know whose round nailed the sniper, so both weapons will have to go to Ballistics for a test fire.”

“Sure thing, Carmine.” Tasco looked a little stunned. “After all these years, the Commissioner finally used his old long-barreled.38! I didn’t know you packed a long barrel too.”

“Better aim at a longer distance,” Carmine said. “Came in handy this morning.”

“How close were you?”

“About thirty yards.”

“But the sniper was farther away than that by far!”

“When under fire, Joey, run toward the guns, not away.”

He went upstairs on foot, to find Delia had already put chairs out for the meeting sure to happen; she was composed and efficient, apparently taking the threat to her boss and her uncle in stride.

Abe and Corey came in with the Commissioner; Carmine’s team were more rattled than Silvestri, who glanced at the wall where the wilted arum lily had hung.

“Thank God you got rid of it,” he said to Carmine as he sat down. “Mickey has a weird sense of humor.”

“I’m putting up pictures of Desdemona and Julian instead.”

They were all seated, including Delia, but no one seemed to want to open proceedings.

Silvestri spoke: “Is this a campaign of terror?”

“Ulysses would like us to think so, sir,” Carmine said.

“Are we any closer to catching the bastard? Do we even know who he is?”

“The who is still in the wind,” Carmine said seriously. “I have vague ideas, but nothing strong enough to send my other suspects home yet. However, I do think we’re closer. Why? Because the evidence is mounting. How’s Danny?”

“He can go home from the hospital in three or four days. Poor Netty’s the basket case.”

Abe and Corey exchanged a glance not lost on Carmine; it said, as if spoken aloud, that Danny’s winged arm would save Bart Bartolomeo’s life. Simonetta had bigger things to discuss than Bart and a charity banquet.

“I’m going to fill in M.M.,” the Commissioner said in his noarguments voice. “His security clearances are probably higher than the other President’s, but I don’t care anyway. Chubb is more important than Cornucopia in my book. It’s been around far longer and benefited the world one helluva lot more.”

“Yes, sir, no one would deny that, or your decision to fill him in,” Carmine said patiently. “Among other things, two of our murders were committed inside Chubb colleges. Chubb’s under attack too. There is an element of terror involved, and that fact gladdens my heart. It says that Ulysses is very worried. He’s trying to send us in a dozen different directions at once, like racked-up balls on a pool table. Imagine the chaos if the sniper had picked off M.M., the Mayor, Hank Howard and however many more he managed to get before someone found out where he was roosting. Shots echo, the leaves would disperse the sound, and a good marksman with a Remington.308 would have kept on plugging away. We’d have been inundated with Staties, Feds, you name it. The place would have boiled over, and in the confusion Ulysses would have had time to smooth out the tracks Erica made him leave.”

“May I ask a question?” Delia ventured.

“Ask away,” Carmine said.

“I gather you think the sniper was prepared to die. Does that mean he’s a political assassin? A man prepared to die for an ideal? It does, doesn’t it?”

“A question needing to be asked,” Carmine said. “However, I don’t believe the Reds are so swimming in assets that they can afford to sacrifice good men for relatively nothing. I think of them as pretty much like us-scratching to make ends meet. The USSR is rich, but the USA is richer. Cornucopia is yielding them secrets, admittedly, and items with military applications must be at the top of their wish list. But it’s my opinion that the whole operation is entirely at the discretion of Ulysses-that Moscow’s interest is insulated from the realities Ulysses is facing. Erica Davenport had to be Moscow’s mistake rather than the KGB’s, so you can bet those in Moscow responsible are busy covering their asses. It’s up to Ulysses to remedy Moscow’s blunder, he’s aware of that. From what I know about him, he’d use his black arts to search the market for a professional assassin, a man without political ideals of any kind.”

“But to die?” Delia’s face paled under its makeup. “A professional assassin would want to live to enjoy spending his fee, which I imagine would be very large indeed.”

“Delia’s right,” said Abe.

“What if this is his dream job?” Silvestri asked. “What if he’s got a family somewhere, and Ulysses offered him so much money that they’d be comfortable for the rest of their lives? Like, multimillions? If he’s not a political idealist, then that’s the only other reason I can think of that would tempt him to burn his boats and take the job. It must be part of his pact with Ulysses not to be taken alive, otherwise the whole fee wouldn’t be paid.”

“That’s brilliant, sir!” Corey cried, the lieutenancy rising to the forefront of his mind. Not that his compliment was meant insincerely, just that under ordinary circumstances he would have said nothing. “A man might do it for his family.”

“Snipers,” said Carmine, “are in a special category. They don’t see their prey close up after they’ve made a kill. All they see is a two-dimensional effigy in their sights, then a heap on the ground. Like a fighter pilot. It’s clean killing, in that you shouldn’t ever see the mess you’ve made. So I can understand how a man might become a professional sniper, yet still retain a part at least of his humanity.”

“Well, the chaos never happened beyond whatever Channel Six can make of it,” Silvestri said, sighing. “Between now and two this afternoon I have to fabricate a convincing story for my interview with dear old Di of the Post and whatever lady shark is anchoring Six’s News at Six on Six. After Di, I have to face the out-of-town journalists. A crazy, huh?”

“Someone with a grudge against Town and Gown,” Carmine said with a grin. “We’ll have to hope that we can put a name to him from his prints, but somehow I doubt his prints are on file with anyone. He’s a foreign national, probably from East Germany via Brazil or Argentina. I’d pull all the stops out, sir, give him any background you like, and say we’re not releasing his actual identity to protect the innocent.”

The Commissioner got up, wincing. “I’m getting too old to play chasings across the Green,” he said with a grimace. “And I fired my sidearm at last! What a bummer.”

“What happens now, Carmine?” Abe asked.

“We go to Judge Thwaites and we ask for search warrants for the homes, other properties, and offices of Mr. Philip Smith, Mr. Gus Purvey, Mr. Fred Collins, Mr. Wal Grierson, and Mr. Lancelot Sterling,” Carmine said. “They have the money to pay five or ten million to a sniper. In one respect this morning’s fracas was a godsend-Doubting Doug will be so fired up he’d give us warrants for anyone except M.M. and Delia’s Uncle John.”

“We don’t have the manpower,” Corey said, frowning. “If it’s to work, we have to hit them all at once. Why chickenfeed like Sterling, Carmine? He’s not a billionaire or anything like.”

“By the pricking of my thumbs,” Carmine said. “He’s a sadist, which makes him interesting. As to the manpower, name me a better time to pull cops off ordinary duty than in the aftermath of a sniper attack. Various substances are being flushed down toilets, arsenals buried inside mattresses and walls, and every hood in Holloman has his head in the sand. That will go for Mohammed el Nesr and the Black Brigade too. We’ll fill the air with the sound of sirens, and everyone will think we’re on the trail of assassins.”

“Offices first?” Abe asked.

“No, homes first.”

Face downcast, Delia started clearing the chairs away.

“Delia, you get Wallace Grierson,” Carmine said. “You’ve already taken the Oath, now I hereby depute you as a detective sergeant in the Holloman Police Department. Grierson’s a waste of time, so you’ll be safe even if I can’t issue you with a sidearm. But the search has to be thorough. I don’t want any of the Cornucopia Board imagining that I’ve played favorites. Most of them have cabins in Maine-the Maine Staties can deal with them, with particular attention to barns, sheds and bear traps. I’ll call them while Tasco assembles the troops, who don’t have to know ahead of time what we’re up to.”

Delia was in ecstasy, so much so that she didn’t even mind being palmed off on Wallace Grierson. “What do we look for, Carmine?” she asked, brown eyes as bright as a bird dog’s at the sight of the master’s shotgun.

“Hobbies that don’t fit,” Carmine said instantly. “Most important, home darkrooms capable of color film development, enlarging, diminishing. A peculiar taste in books, such as Nazi Germany, Communism, Russia in all ideological guises, Mainland China. Also sciences at a higher level than we might expect. Abe, you get Lancelot Sterling because you have a knack for finding secret doors and compartments. I’m putting Larry Pisano on Gus Purvey. And you, Corey, get Fred Collins.”

“Which leaves you with Phil Smith,” Abe said thoughtfully. “Any reason for that, Carmine?”

“No, not really. Fred Collins smells the skunkiest, but I don’t want him spooked by getting our biggest cannon. As chief executive, Phil Smith will expect to get me.”

“His wife is a seed,” Delia said, wrinkling her nose.

“How do you mean, Delia?”

“She says she’s a Sami Lapp, but I doubt it. Too much Tartar in her features. Her accent’s unusually thick for someone who’s spent most of her life in an English-speaking country. More the way a Chinese speaks English, if you know what I mean-the syntax and sounds of her native tongue are just too far from those of any Indo-Aryan language,” said Delia.

“That’s right, you talked to her at Myron’s party,” Carmine said. “What did you think of her as a person?”

“Oh, I liked her. I told you, she’s a seed.”

Judge Thwaites having been very willing to issue warrants, Carmine began his searches at two in the afternoon. It was a coordinated operation, each team in place before all the homes were invaded simultaneously. Opposition was principally on account of each family’s ejection from their premises while the search went on, with the single exception of the head of the household. All the men were at home thanks to the sniper, who had frightened every woman in Holloman and its surrounds.

Phil Smith lived quite a long way out, on a beautiful property nestled in the flank of North Rock where the basaltic outcrop had flung out a small canyon whose walls, decreasing in height, enclosed a large, classically Georgian house built of limestone. It stood in quite English gardens, replete with beds of flowers in full bloom and having a planned, Inigo Jones look to them from the placement of trees and bushes to fountains and statues. There was even a folly, Carmine discovered, a round, open temple of Ionic columns that held a table and chairs. It overlooked a small artificial lake on which white swans cruised gracefully and weeping willows fringed the far bank. No surprise then to see peacocks wandering, tails folded, to pick amid the grass for grubs and worms.

Philip Smith was not amused, but, after perusing the warrant thoroughly, he asked his wife to wait in the folly while he escorted Carmine and his cops on their search. The servants-all Puerto Ricans, Carmine noted, who seemed inured to Smith’s arrogant treatment-were banished to their cars.

Smith was clad in camelhair trousers, a fawn silk shirt and a fawn cashmere sweater: what the lord of the manor wears when he is at home, Carmine thought. His superbly barbered iron grey hair was swept back from his face without a parting, and his freshly shaven cheeks smelled faintly of some expensive cologne.

“This is an unpardonable imposition,” he said, following Carmine into the house.

“Under ordinary circumstances I’d agree with you, Mr. Smith, but after what happened on the Green this morning, I’m afraid the gloves are off,” Carmine said, gazing around a foyer that rose three storeys and was capped by a stained glass ceiling of blues, greens and whites-no red spectrum colors to conflict with the sky. The floor was filled travertine, the walls pale beige, and the art stunning. Whoever had done the decorating had not attempted to impart a baronial look-no suits of armor or crossed pikes. The staircase flared to the second floor, and repeated the pattern up to the third. A balustrade ran around the second and third floors where they abutted the soaring foyer. The Smiths’ taste in art was eclectic: old, Impressionist, modern, ultramodern, photography of a high order.

“Okay, here we go,” he said to Smith. “Every painting has to come down, sir. Its back has to be inspected as well as the wall behind it. My men know to be careful, but do you want to stay and supervise, or would you prefer to go on with me?”

“I’ll go on with you, Captain,” Smith said, lips thin.

Carmine paid due attention to the various living rooms, but if Smith were Ulysses, he’d not use them for nefarious purposes apart from concealing something behind a painting. Each of them would have to be examined.

The library was a room to strike envy into the heart of any reader, though Carmine decided that its owner was not a scholar by inclination. Many of the volumes were there for gilt-edged, leather-bound show: beautiful Victorian editions of sermons, outmoded scientific theories, classical literature from Greece and Rome. The shelves bearing colorful dust jackets of novels and nonfiction works were those Smith frequented. Innocuous stuff, from Zane Grey to movie star biographies. The safe, he soon discovered, was behind a section of assorted editions of the Britannica; the beaded walnut trim had worn where Smith’s hand triggered the lever.

“Open it, Mr. Smith,” Carmine said.

Smith obeyed, smiling sourly; he wasn’t worried.

It held $10,000 in cash, some securities and shares, and three locks of flaxen hair, two tied with blue ribbon, one pink.

“My children’s hair,” Smith said. “Have you done that?”

“No,” Carmine said. “Why keep them in here?”

“In case of burglary or simple vandalism. The art doesn’t really matter, but my children do.”

“They’re all away, aren’t they?”

“Yes. I miss them, but one cannot impede the progress of one’s children for the sake of having them nearby,” Smith said a little sadly.

“Whereabouts are they?”

“Anna is in Africa-Peace Corps. Her mother worries about her constantly. She’s already infected with malaria.”

“Yeah, it’s a slapdash program,” Carmine said. “They never really prepare these kids for what’s in store. And the boys?”

“Peter is in Iran-he’s a petroleum geologist. Stephen is a marine biologist attached to Woods Hole. At present he’s somewhere in the Red Sea.”

The safe closed, they moved on. The bedrooms underwent scrutiny-Smith and his wife still slept together-and they moved to the top floor.

“Mostly junk,” Smith said, “but Natalie likes everything kept tidy, so it’s not difficult to search.” He was relaxed and more affable than at the beginning of his home’s inspection; it was hard to sustain outrage when its object was so patently indifferent to it.

“You have no live-in servants?” Carmine asked.

“No. We like our privacy as much as the next one.”

“What’s this?” Carmine asked, looking at a tightly sealed door. He pushed it, but it refused to open.

“My darkroom,” Smith said curtly, and produced a key.

“You mean yours is the eye behind all those great photographs in the family room and the television den?”

“Yes. Also the little movie theater upon occasion. Natalie calls me Cecil B. de Smith.”

Carmine chuckled dutifully and entered the best-equipped darkroom he had ever seen. There was nothing it didn’t have, and everything was automated. Even Myron didn’t have facilities like these-though why should he, owning a studio? Philip Smith could take a set of blueprints all the way down to a microdot if he felt so inclined. But was he so inclined? There was one way to find out.

“Given the nature of this case, Mr. Smith, I’m afraid I’m going to have to impound the contents of your darkroom,” he said without apology. “That includes all your film, developed and undeveloped, these books on photography, your photographic paper and cameras. It will all be returned to you later.”

The tension in the big facility was palpable; at long last he had gotten under Philip Smith’s skin. But why?

“Close your ears,” he said, and blew the whistle on a cord around his neck. “Clean cases, guys,” he said to the cops who rapidly appeared. “Everything has to be packed as if it were made of tissue paper, and handle every item as little as humanly possible-around the edges if you can. I want nothing dislodged or smeared, from a print to a fly speck. Malloy and Carter, you stay here while the others go for boxes and cases.”

“I’m going to lose pictures I would treasure,” Smith said.

“Not necessarily, Mr. Smith. Anything undeveloped will be processed in our own darkrooms, and we’ll try to keep your unused film unspoiled. What’s on the roof?” he asked, already on his way through the door.

Smith was seething, but clearly felt it was better to stick with Carmine than protect his darkroom. “Nothing!” he snapped.

“That’s as may be, but the paint on the midsection of these steps looks well worn.” Carmine climbed them and pushed at an angled door that opened sideways.

He emerged onto a large, flat roof faced with asphalt, and stood staring at what from the ground had seemed to be a cupola. In the days when a building of this kind was what wealthy people aspired to, it would have contained a water tank; gravity feed would have enabled water to be piped throughout the house, a rare luxury. Above the cupola was a thin, whippy antenna he hadn’t noticed from the ground, and in its straight side, hidden by the roof parapet, sat a door.

“What’s this?” Carmine asked, walking across.

“My ham radio setup,” Smith said. “No doubt, thinking me Ulysses, you’ll want to impound its contents too?”

“Yes, I will,” Carmine said cheerfully, waiting as Smith opened the door with another key. “State of the art,” he said inside, gazing about. “You could talk to Moscow from here.”

“With North Rock hemming me in? Possible, Captain, but not likely,” Smith said, sneering. “In this Year of Our Lord 1967, I very much doubt that spies communicate directly with their masters. The world grows more sophisticated at an ever-increasing rate, haven’t you noticed? You can look until the cows come home, but you won’t find one single thing to suggest such a puerile activity! I’ve had no opportunity to alter my bandwidths or otherwise tamper with my ham setup, but confiscate away. As soon as my lawyers swing into action, I’ll have it back-and it had better be undamaged.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith,” Carmine said nicely, “but if it’s any consolation, exactly the same thing is happening to your fellow Board members.”

“Answer me one thing, Captain! Your business is murder, not espionage. Espionage is a federal crime, out of your legal sphere. I take it you’ve impounded the contents of my darkroom and my radio shack with a view to searching for evidence of espionage. I can sue you,” Smith said.

“Sir!” Carmine exclaimed, looking thunderstruck. “Judge Thwaites’s warrant clearly says ‘pursuant to murder,’ and I am pursuing murder. Poison can be concealed in bottles of developer, syringes and hypodermic needles inside all kinds of equipment, cutthroat razors in a bathroom cabinet or on a tiny guillotine-you had several guillotines in your darkroom-pistols in the weirdest places. Need I go on? The contents of your kitchen also suffered.” He spread his hands in a very Italian gesture. “Until everything I confiscated has been examined, Mr. Smith, I cannot be sure it isn’t part of a murder kit.”

“Slippery,” Smith said, nostrils pinched.

“As any other greased pig, sir,” Carmine said. “Espionage is not my affair, as you so rightly point out. Apart from any other consideration, I’m not trained to look for evidence of it. Nor is anyone else in the Holloman Police Department. If Mr. Kelly of the FBI were interested in your darkroom or your radio shack, I’m sure he’d be obtaining his own warrants. What he does is his business. Mine is very definitely murder, and this morning saw what could have been yet another mass murder.”

Smith stood on his roof listening, his anger dying. “Yes, I see why this sudden spurt of activity,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, “but I resent the emphasis on Cornucopia.”

Carmine looked conspiratorial. “I’ll let you in on one sequestered piece of evidence, Mr. Smith, that might help you understand,” he said. “The sniper wasn’t a lunatic. He was a professional assassin, sufficiently skilled to hire himself out for big dollars. Which makes anyone in possession of big dollars a prime suspect in his hire. There are few multimillionaires in Holloman, apart from members of the Cornucopia Board.”

“I see,” Smith said, turned on his heel, walked to the door in the roof, and disappeared.

Carmine followed more slowly.

As it turned out, both Wal Grierson and Gus Purvey owned fully equipped darkrooms, though Smith was the only ham radio operator.

“The quality of their photography is very high,” Carmine said the next morning, “so, taking into account the fact that they could all buy and sell J. P. Morgan, we can’t impugn their patriotism because of their plush darkrooms. All we’ve done is what we set out to do-rob them of the chance to turn Cornucopia secrets into something small enough to smuggle out of the country. Though I think it’s more likely that Ulysses has already performed his darkroom magic on at least some of what he hasn’t yet passed. And I agree with Phil Smith-espionage is not our business. Our other objective was to rattle a few cages, and I think we’ve done that. Through Smith, they’ll all soon know about our assassin theory.” He looked enquiring. “Anyone got anything interesting to report?”

“I do,” Abe said, but not triumphantly. “You were right about Lancelot Sterling, Carmine-he’s a sadist. He lives on his own in a very nice condo just beyond Science Hill-no wife or kids on his horizon ever. The pictures on his walls were all photographs of muscular young men, emphasis on butt shots. He had a concealed closet full of leather, chains, handcuffs, fetters, and some pretty weird dildoes. I think he hoped I’d be content at finding that, but something about his attitude told me there were other goodies better hidden. So I kept on poking and pressing. Under a fancy chopping-block island in his kitchen I found the kind of whips that would shred flesh. They stank of blood, so I confiscated them. But the thing that turned my stomach was carried openly in his pants pocket-a change purse with a drawstring. It looked like leather, but finer than kid or chamois, light brown in color. The minute I focused on it, he started to yell about his civil rights and how dare I, and when I picked it up he went bananas. So I brought it in and gave it to Patrick.”

“What’s your considered opinion, Abe?” Carmine asked.

“That we’ve stumbled on another murderer unconnected to our case, Carmine. I’ve cordoned off the apartment-it’s on the first floor with its own section of basement-and I need to go back with two good men and maybe a jackhammer. He’s killed, I’d swear to that, but I don’t know whether he’s put the body in his walled-up basement or somewhere else. I checked him into Major Minor’s motel for tonight, but he’s looking for a lawyer.”

“Then get a fresh warrant from Judge Thwaites now, Abe. Produce one of the bloody whips,” Carmine said. “Anyone else?”

His answer was a general shaking of heads; his team was tired, not in a mood for discussions.

Carmine went to find Patrick.

A very enterprising man, Dr. Patrick O’Donnell had seized upon the landslide of murders to augment his Medical Examiner’s department. Several new pieces of equipment had been approved by the Mayor and Hartford, and he had expanded his empire to embrace ballistics, documents, and other disciplines not usually under the sway of the coroner. What made it easier-and more sensible-was the small size of the Holloman PD and his own persuasive, loquacious, charming personality. His latest coup came as a great relief to his deputy coroner, Gustavus Fennel, namely the addition of a third coroner, Chang Po. Gus Fennel was happiest on autopsies, but Chang was a forensics man.

“How goes it, cuz?” Carmine asked, pouring coffee.

Patrick propped his booteed feet on the desk and grinned. “I’ve had a great morning,” he said. “Look at this, cuz.”

He reached into an evidence box that would have been a snug fit for a pair of light bulbs and withdrew a small, pale brown drawstring bag.

“Careful,” he warned as Carmine took it. “Abe thought it held change, but the change was actually inside a rubber liner.”

Carmine turned it over in his hand curiously, noting its peculiar construction and marveling at the patience that must have gone into fashioning something that puffed out on either side of a complex central seam.

“Any ideas?” Patsy asked, eyes bright.

“Maybe,” his cousin said slowly, “but enlighten me, Patsy.”

“It’s a human scrotum.”

Only iron self-control prevented Carmine from dropping the thing in sheer revulsion. “Jesus!”

“There are some indigenous populaces that cure the scrotums of large animals,” Patrick said, “and in Victorian times it was a fad among some pukkah hunters to take an elephant’s or a lion’s scrotum as a trophy, have the taxidermist turn it into a water bag or a tobacco pouch. But such,” he continued blithely, “is the human male’s horror of castration that it’s a rare man indeed who would take a human scrotum as a trophy. This suspect of Abe’s certainly has.”

“Are you sure it’s human?”

“He left a few pubic hairs, and the shape and size are exactly right if the victim was possessed of a loose rather than a tight scrotal sac. The testes don’t vary much, but the scrotum does. Whoever did this is a real sicko.”

“I’d better tell Abe before he goes to Doubting Doug.”

One brisk phone call later and Carmine was free to quiz Patrick on other things. “Whose bullet killed our assassin?”

“Silvestri’s. No wonder he could take out whole Nazi machinegun nests! The man’s a wonder with that old.38 he won’t be parted from. I bet he never even goes to the range to practice, either,” Patsy said. “Head shot-well, you know that. But you didn’t do too badly yourself, Carmine. Two of your three rounds plugged him in the right shoulder. Your third round lodged in the tree branch. Silvestri’s other two were in the chest.”

“I never claimed to be Dead Eye Dick, especially at thirty yards or more.”

“I know you-you were hoping to immobilize his shooting arm and keep him alive for questioning,” Patsy said shrewdly.

“True, but John was right-we couldn’t risk the kids. I was in error. Do me a favor, Patsy?”

“Sure, anything.”

“Send the guy’s prints to Interpol and our military. He’s not from these parts, I know it in my bones, but he just might have come to someone else’s attention. I’m thinking East Germany as state of origin, but he’s no ideologue. He was in it for the money, which means he has family somewhere.”

“Faint hope, but I’ll do it, of course. One last thing, cuz, before you vanish?”

“Speak.”

“What am I supposed to do with a whole room crammed with cases of photographic and broadcasting apparatus?”

“Since we don’t have the manpower to mount that kind of examination, Patsy, I’m donating it to Special Agent Ted Kelly. Let the FBI find any microdots or snapshots of Granny holding up a set of blueprints,” Carmine said with a grin. “I’ll have Delia inform the Cornucopia Board that our evidence has been subpoenaed by the FBI. They’ll get it back, but not for weeks.”

“How can that really help? They’re all so rich they can buy new gear and get going again within days.”

“They could, but buying new gear would be noticed, and even rich people hesitate to spend their money on stuff they’ve already got. They know they’ll get it back, so what’s the hurry? There are reasons why none of them wants to draw attention to himself.”

“You mean Ulysses?”

“How do you know that name?”

“Carmine, honestly! Ted Kelly has a mouth as big as his feet, and he has a habit of using Malvolio’s as his meeting place whenever another FBI agent comes to town. I mean, we’re hicks, the next best thing to Ozark hillbillies on his map of the nation,” Patrick said. “Besides, Holloman is Holloman. It has no secrets.”

“Please tell me Netty Marciano doesn’t know!”

“Of course she doesn’t! This is men’s business.”

So Carmine left in a pall of gloom; the whole of his world knew about Ulysses, which was the penalty for a rather strident independence, he reflected. He was as guilty as the next man; so was John Silvestri. It reminded him of the time a more zealous mayor than Ethan Winthrop had tried to introduce a one-way traffic system to Holloman, where streets had gone both ways since the horse and cart. Holloman didn’t like it, and Holloman refused to obey. Years went by before sheer automobile pressure finally brought one-way streets. It’s a fool politician who tries to create Utopia, he thought. I bet the Reds know that.

Lancelot Sterling didn’t move back into his condominium, which became permanently cordoned off when Abe discovered the well-preserved remains of a man carefully laid out beneath the false bottom of a very long, capacious storage bin attached to the wall of his basement. When its lid was lifted it was found to contain someone’s property: clothes, books, a set of weights, geographical magazines, maps, a tent, a sleeping bag, and other items that suggested an up-front, hiking itinerant.

The body was nude and, externally, missing its scrotum, though the penis was intact. A midline incision, meticulously sutured, ran from his throat to just above the pubes, but the contours of the trunk were perfect. Very little decomposition had occurred, Patrick thought because the compartment under the body was full of hygroscopic crystals. Someone, presumably Sterling, was reactivating them a bucket at a time, which made them a pink or colorless patchwork.

“He heats them in an oven to drive out the moisture they soak up,” Patrick explained, “which accounts for the change in color. It must have cost Sterling a bundle to accumulate this much. He’s put pans of sodium bicarbonate around to remove any smell, but I doubt the smell’s as bad as a freshman dissecting lab.” He pointed at the incision. “I’ll have to get him on my table to find out, but I predict that Sterling has removed the entrails-alimentary canal, liver, lungs, kidneys, bladder. Probably left the heart in situ. This is a mummy. With the false bottom in place, I imagine the humidity inside his secret compartment is very near zero. I’ll test it with a hygrometer.”

He was talking to Abe; Carmine had handed the case over to him to see how he fared, very glad that his decision seemed the logical one. Abe was the original investigating officer. Corey had no valid grounds to assume either that Abe had been favored or that he had been excluded for any reason having to do with Larry Pisano’s lieutenancy. Now Carmine hoped for a case to give to Corey. The day when the panel met to decide which man got the job was looming, and there were four people-two detectives and two wives-who would be examining their treatment with a microscope. The closer the day drew, the greater Carmine’s grief. Why did Lancelot Sterling have to be such a meaty murder, and how could he equilibrate Corey?

Abe was glowing when Carmine walked into the autopsy suite, despite the grisly nature of the crime; it was his talent for finding concealed compartments that had broken the case open, and he felt all the thrill of a job done better than others could have. He was not by nature overambitious, nor was he a selfish man, but he had his share of pride, both in his work and in himself.

“There was a wallet in the storage bin,” Abe said to Carmine. “The victim’s name is Mark Schmidt, according to his driver’s license, issued in Wisconsin two years ago on his eighteenth birthday. Whatever money he had is gone, but his MasterCard is there. The last receipt is dated October of 1966-seven months ago. No photos or letters.”

“The thoracic and abdominal cavities have been stuffed with a plastic mattress foam,” Patrick said, “as well as sticks of incense and spices. This is a serious attempt at mummification without the natron Herodotus describes. Sterling’s brought the Egyptians up to date-better tools, better techniques. As you can see, Mark is very good-looking, with a head of hair like M.M.’s, kind of apricotbcolored. That may be why Sterling made no attempt to remove the brain-didn’t want to risk ruining it. The kid was in the pink of health when he was asphyxiated, probably with a plastic bag during a drug-induced sleep. Strangulation would have marred him. I can’t establish a time frame for the anal sex, so I can’t tell you whether he was by inclination homosexual. There’s been a lot of anal insult over the past year, certainly. The ligature tying off the rectum-the one that severed the colon-is a good ten inches in from the anus, which suggests that Sterling has been engaging in necrophilia.”

All Abe’s pleasure fled in an instant; he stared at Patsy in horror. “No!” he whispered.

“Definitely yes, Abe,” Patsy said gently.

“Any idea when he died?” Abe asked, valiantly recovering.

“I think that receipt tells you more than autopsy can. Put down seven months ago, Abe.” Patrick looked at Carmine. “Where is Mr. Lancelot Sterling?”

“Downstairs in a holding cell.”

From which he was brought to an interrogation room. Abe did the questioning, while Carmine watched on the far side of the one-way window.

He appears so inoffensive, Carmine thought. Just one of literally millions of men who spend their working hours pushing paper in offices, have never done any other kind of job, and never will. Living unexciting lives, looking forward to putting their feet up with a few cans of beer to watch football.

Sterling was on the tall side of average, had a good head of nut-brown hair, and regular features that should have made him handsome, yet didn’t. A part of that was his expression-haughty, conceited, humorless. The other contributing factor was his eyes, which lacked all animation. He would never pull the wings off butterflies, Carmine thought, because he wouldn’t even notice their existence. Whatever world he lives in has no color, no vitality, no joy, no sorrow. All it consists of is a single appalling drive. In all truth he is a monster. Being caught hardly impinges on him; all that matters is that he’s lost Mark Schmidt and his little change purse.

“Do you think he’s killed others?” Abe asked later, seeking the respected opinion he’d leaned on for years.

“You know more about this case than I do, Abe. What do you think?” Carmine countered.

“Then, no,” Abe said. “He’s paid to flog youths, but Mark Schmidt is his first murder. It’s taken him years to assemble his tools and things like seventy pounds of hygroscopic crystals.”

“Do you think he’d kill again?”

Abe thought for a while, then shook his head. “Probably not, at least while Mark Schmidt fascinated him. If the attraction faded or the body decomposed too much, he’d wait until he found the right person, even if it took a long time. He made no secret of the fact that they lived together for six months. Well, he made no secret of any of it. He maintains that Mark died from natural causes and he couldn’t bear to part with him.” Abe flailed his hands around, frustrated. “It’s a good thing he’s mad-really, really mad. No one will want to try him, too much publicity.”

“And there you have it, Abe. If it’s any consolation, you worked the case exactly as it needed to be worked.” Carmine looked into his eyes. “Will you sleep tonight?”

“Most likely not, but all things fade. I’d rather lose my sleep than my humanity.”

And home to an empty house. Carmine went up to his bedroom and stood staring at the big bed, properly made because he was a tidy man who disliked all kinds of disorder. Born and raised a Catholic, he had long left organized religion in the past; his job and his intellect rebelled against the astronomical conundrums lumped together under the single word “faith,” something he couldn’t see or feel. Of course Julian would go to St. Bernard’s Boys together with however many male siblings he might end up owning, but that had a certain logic.

Kids needed ethics, principles and morals instilled in them at school as well as at home. As to what Julian and his potential brothers made of “faith” once they were grown, that was their business.

Even so, gazing at the bed, Carmine was conscious that his house was filled with presences, the intangible spiritual relics of his wife, his son, all the others who had lived here. It made his loneliness worse, not better. Oh, the time and thought he’d put into this room, once he was entrusted with the decorating! A very plain room, Desdemona had said, but sumptuous in color; she had been awestruck at his instinct for color. He’d had an antique Chinese three-leafed screen in storage, trimmed in black and silver brocade, painted in black upon a white background, of rounded mountains poking their heads through mist, wind-warped conifers, a small pagoda up a tortuous flight of a thousand steps. He’d hung it above the bed, and done the room in lavender blue and peach so that neither sex triumphed. Desdemona loved the room and when heavy with Julian had embarked upon embroidering a bedspread in black and white, an echo of the screen. His birth had interrupted it, and it lay inside a cedar chest awaiting, she joked, her next pregnancy. If they had enough children, one day it would be finished. In the meantime, the spread was lavender blue with a little peach detail.

Missing her unbearably, he turned away and went down to the kitchen, where his aunt had left a clam sauce for pasta. His mother was still too busy blaming herself for Desdemona’s peril to bother about cooking, but his sisters, aunts and cousins were making sure he didn’t starve. The door to Sophia’s tower led off the family sitting room, and was firmly shut; the owner of the eyrie was having a hard time of it in L.A., she informed her true father over the phone, as Myron was hovering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Justifiably annoyed, Carmine had called him, abused him roundly for worrying a teenaged girl, and told him to snap out of it. Damn Erica Davenport! he thought for the hundredth time as he tipped fine fettuccine into a pan of boiling, salted water. She had cut a swath through the people he loved.

Voices sounded at the front door; a key turned in the lock. Carmine stood stock-still by the stove, the last of the fettuccine falling into the water of its own accord. Desdemona! That was Desdemona’s voice! But he couldn’t move to go to her, shock had nailed his feet to the floor.

“I might have known he’d still be at Cedar Street,” she was saying to someone, “and I’ll bet he forgot to shop.” Then, in a loud call, “Thank you, sir! I’ll be fine.” The taxi driver.

She forged into the kitchen like a battleship in full sail, Julian on her left arm, wearing slacks and a blouse creased from her journey, her face flushed, her eyes sparkling.

“Carmine!” she said, stopping in her own wake as she saw him. The wonderful smile transformed her plain face. “Dearest heart, you look like a fish in the bottom of a boat.”

He closed his mouth and enveloped her and the baby in his arms, his lashes wet as he searched for her lips and found them. Only Julian, squawking at being squashed, recalled them to the time and place. Carmine took his son and kissed him all over his face, something Julian loved; Desdemona moved to the stove.

“Pasta and clam sauce,” she said, peering into the bowl and the pan. “Aunt Maria, I’ll bet. There’s tons for two of us.” Then she took Julian from his father. “If you’ll excuse me, I intend to give him his dinner, then a bath, after which he goes sleepy-byes.”

“What about jet lag, kid?” Carmine asked the baby.

“Don’t worry about it,” Desdemona said. “I’ve deliberately kept him awake for hours and hours. The rest of first class was not amused.”

“How did you get from JFK?”

“Caught the Connecticut limousine. I wasn’t game to tell Myron that I was coming home. He wouldn’t understand.”

And off she went with Julian, talking some nonsense in his ear. All the ghosts had vanished.

“We didn’t find a thing in all that darkroom and radio gear,” Ted Kelly said gloomily. “Not a goddamn thing!”

“Did you really think you would?” Carmine asked, still wrapped in the bliss of having Desdemona and Julian home.

“I guess not, but it’s a disappointment all the same. I will admit, Carmine, that you and/or the Commissioner were pretty clever over the sniper on the Green,” Kelly said, a trifle grudgingly. “We could never find an excuse to search the Cornucopia Board’s homes. Though you’re skating on thin ice. Those guys have the money to take the County of Holloman all the way to the Supreme Court.”

“We’ve apologized for acting overhastily in the stress of the moment. Do you honestly think they will sue us, Ted?” Carmine asked, smiling.

“No. Too much public fuss. They’re petrified that someone will tell Ed Murrow about Ulysses.”

“So thought the Commissioner and/or I.”

“You’re a cunt, Delmonico.”

“Step outside.”

“I take it back. How come everybody knows about Ulysses?”

“Blame yourself. With your voice, you don’t need a megaphone, yet you will persist in having your meetings right here in a cop diner. The ears flap like Dumbo.”

“I hate small towns!”

“This is a small city, not a town.”

“Same difference. You all know too much about each other.”

“Switch from your turkey to your eagle hat for a moment. Is it true that the entire Cornucopia Board is flying to Zurich in an attempt to acquire some Swiss company that makes transistors?”

“Who’s your source?” Kelly demanded suspiciously.

“Erica Davenport’s ex-secretary, Richard Oakes, who is now demoted to working for Michael Donald Sykes, yet another unhappy victim of top management,” Carmine said, toying with a plain salad. “Oakes and I went for a stroll this morning along the banks of the Pequot, where our words floated away on the breeze and our only witnesses were a flock of gulls. We must be in for a storm.”

“Why are we in for a storm?” Kelly asked, sidetracked.

“The gulls, Ted! Inland a bit?”

“Oh! What exactly did Oakes tell you?”

“That it’s more profitable these days to make transistors than cuckoo clocks, and that this Swiss company is onto something big. The word’s out, so everyone’s after the firm. Oakes said Cornucopia’s howling for the moon. Neither he nor Sykes can understand why the Board is going to Zurich.”

“But we know why,” Kelly said grimly.

“That we do. The trip enables Ulysses to take his purloined secrets with him. Which tells me, Mr. Kelly, that Ulysses hasn’t passed any to Moscow since sometime before April third. His briefcase must be full.”

“Tell me about it! There’s nothing we can do, Carmine! The bastard will depart the country smelling like a rose, safely hemmed in by his fellow Board members.”

Carmine felt like pacing, but that would rivet all eyes on them as well as all ears. Instead, he threw his hands into the air wildly. “But how did he talk the others into making the trip? They’re businessmen! If Sykes and Oakes know they’re howling at the moon, so must they! How did he bring them around?”

“That’s the easy part,” Kelly said ruefully. “The Board’s just taken delivery of a brand-new Lear jet-long-range fuel tanks, reclining seats, spare pilot-the works. I bet all of them are eager to see what color the sky is over Zurich. Even better, the wives will have to stay home. Not enough room with a three-man flight crew and a couple of hostesses.”

“When is this jaunt happening?” Carmine asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon. The jet’s on the tarmac here. Then they’ll fly down to JFK to get international clearance,” Kelly said, and sighed. “Yep, tomorrow afternoon all Cornucopia’s secrets fly away, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Ulysses is going to get away with it, Carmine thought as he walked back up Cedar Street to County Services. The fact that I know who he is beyond a shadow of a doubt is irrelevant; I have absolutely no proof. Just a cop’s instinct and the end result of myriad little facts and details coming together in my mind, some of those facts and details gotten with great pain and the calling in of favors.

Kelly doesn’t know, and I’m not inclined to tell him. Fate pushed him into being here, a behemoth, and there’s a message in that: he belongs to a behemoth. He’s not the problem, it’s his faceless bosses, the ones who’ll push the buttons, the papers and the people in that ponderous sequence of steps protocol dictates before the big guns are ready for firing. By the time the sixteen-inchers roar, Ulysses will have performed his conjuring trick and look squeaky-clean. Ulysses is one guy; it doesn’t take an army to catch him. In fact, an army can’t. No one would notice him slink off in the clouds of dust. Let Ted Kelly go his way; I’ll go mine because I know who and what I have to contend with, have known since the significance of Bart Bartolomeo’s words sank into my mind and the lightbulb lit up.

What I have to do is get Ulysses for murder. It’s neater and more final, if final can have a degree. My espionage facts and details paint a picture, but I don’t have an atom of proof; when Ulysses paints the same picture it will be more convincing. Whereas the murders he’s committed must leave a trail of hard evidence that I can find if I look in the right places.

He had long passed County Services and decided now to keep going for a while. The wind was whipping up a little, but it felt good snatching at his face. He glanced up at the sky to see mackerel cloud up there and found the time to file a resolution to make sure the shutters on his house were closed before he went to bed. Then it was back to Ulysses.

Think, Carmine, think! Who did Ulysses kill with his own hands? Desmond Skeps. Dee-Dee Hall, which flummoxes me. Why a whore who gives great blow jobs? No one else. His assistant killed Evan Pugh, Cathy Cartwright and Beatrice Egmont. Hired guns shot the three blacks-black hired guns, to blend into the neighborhood. The assistant impersonated a peddler of potions named Reuben to trick Peter Norton’s wife, and probably egged on Joshua Butler. It may have taken Ulysses himself to pierce Pauline Denbigh’s armor, but he didn’t kill the Dean. I don’t have the chance of a snowflake in hell to prove any of them. It has to be Skeps or Dee-Dee, or both.

What were his weapons?

Desmond Skeps… A hypodermic needle and several syringes, inexpertly wielded. Once upon a time he was shown how to use them, but the years have gone by since, and Skeps must have had tricky veins. Curare. An ammoniac household liquid. Drano. A tourniquet. Chloral hydrate in a glass of single malt Scotch. A safety razor. A midget soldering iron. Steel wire.

Dee-Dee… A cutthroat razor. Only a scalpel has that kind of edge apart from a razor, and even Patsy’s autopsy blades couldn’t inflict a wound like that on a standing woman by an assailant looking her in the face. It’s the way forefinger and thumb hold the junction of the razor’s shell and its-tang? Very close up, and very personal. Ulysses must have been drenched in Dee-Dee’s blood like a man under a running tap. He didn’t cut the carotid arteries until the jugular veins slowed to a trickle, then he got a second bath. Hate! This was done in absolute hatred fiercer by far than Desmond Skeps. Who escorted Dee-Dee to the banquet. That says Skeps knew why Ulysses hated Dee-Dee, even if Skeps didn’t know Ulysses was Ulysses. And what was it with Dee-Dee? She stood and took her death without a protest, according to Patsy. So she knew why Ulysses hated her, and admitted her guilt.

I wonder if he kept those blood-saturated clothes? If his hatred burned that hot, maybe he needed a souvenir. The razor? That, he will definitely have. Enshrined somewhere. Not as a remembrance. As an instrument of execution.

An image rose behind Carmine’s eyes so vividly that the hairs on his neck stood up. Jesus! I know where! I know where!

His steps slowed; he stopped, turned around and walked back to County Services at a steady pace, jubilation dying. Knowing was one thing; marshaling his forces to prove it was another. Doubting Doug would have reverted to normal; easier to get blood out of a stone than a warrant to search premises. Not that Ulysses would part with his mementos. In that respect there was no hurry. Strictly speaking, the urgency was not his affair, as it concerned the spy rather than the killer. Except that Carmine was an American patriot. It was his duty to foil the spy too.

By the time he gained his office his demeanor was as always. Delia, bursting on his gaze in green and orange paisley, gave him the kind of fright that only days ago would have provoked a smile. Today it was merely jarring.

“Abe’s down with Lancelot Sterling,” she said, “and Corey is skulking around the aerodrome. He said something about a new Lear jet, but I confess I was only half listening. I was on the phone to Desdemona.”

“I might have known,” he said, torn between an urge to tell Delia what was filling his mind and reluctance to burden her with his own frustrations.

“They’re safe here,” she said, smiling.

That decided him. “Sit down, Delia. I need to talk.”

By the end of it she looked horrified. Then she did a very un-Delia thing: she stroked his arm. “My dear Carmine, I fully comprehend your dilemma. But if Ulysses hated Dee-Dee with such passion, it must relate to some sort of ruination, and she must have been the instrument of it. I think it might pay me to make exhaustive enquiries into Dee-Dee’s background. That’s the trouble with prostitutes. No one bothers to look at them with a magnifying glass. Am I still empowered to act as a detective?”

“I haven’t rescinded the order, as you well know.”

“Then I’m going to see Dee-Dee’s pimp, her friends, enemies and acquaintances.” She paused, brows lifted. “It would be a lot easier if I had a badge,” she said.

“That far I won’t go, Delia. Don’t push your luck.”

The storm blew into Holloman on gale-force winds halfway through the night. Curled in bed with his front shielding Desdemona’s back, Carmine woke to the whipping roar of hard-driven rain on the windows, lifted his head to listen, then lay back with a sigh. No hope that this would last long enough to delay the Cornucopia expedition to Zurich. By afternoon the gale would be blown out.

“Mmf?” Desdemona asked.

Carmine cupped a breast. “Just the storm. Go back to sleep.”

“No damage, but the garden’s a mess,” Desdemona said the next morning, removing her rubber boots in the laundry. “I had high hopes for a weeping cherry, but a flying branch clobbered it. Too exposed to the elements, our dream home.”

“You can’t have it all, lovely lady.” Carmine shrugged his shoulders into his jacket and poked through the waterproofed coats hanging on pegs. “It’s going to rain all day, so don’t take Julian out. If you need groceries, call someone.”

A rather cold rain beating in his face, Carmine plodded up the path to their big garage, which had to be on East Circle itself and thus had no sheltered communication with the house, a good fifty feet lower. Inside the garage he shed his raincoat before climbing into the Fairlane; he’d park under the building and keep dry. As soon as he keyed the ignition he turned on the police radio and sat listening. Nothing much, just terse talk larded with the abstruse numbers and letters designed to keep police business the business of the police. If only it did! he thought as he rolled out into the aftermath of the night’s storm. Maybe I’ll take a detour and look at the Cornucopia jet. But I won’t announce my intention on the radio. Too many people make a hobby of tuning in, and they don’t need a radio shack.

Holloman’s little airport lay behind chain-link fencing on the west arm of the Harbor, which was part industrial wasteland and part working factories. Between it and the perpetually humming artery that was I-95 reared the clusters of tall cylindrical tanks holding every kind of petroleum-based fuel from aviation gasoline to diesel and heating oil.

Instead of using I-95 for such a short run, Carmine drove along the waterfront dockland, past the fuel farm, and so, finally, turned through the open airport gate onto a concrete apron used as a parking lot. He crossed it and swung around behind the upmarket shed that served Holloman’s commuters as a terminal, his eyes absorbing their first sight of a Lear jet. Disappointingly small, it sat not far from the shed in the glory of flawless white paint, the Cornucopia horn-of-plenty logo emblazoned on its tail.

A rap on his passenger-side window made Carmine jump. Corey opened the door and slid in, coat streaming.

“You’re wet, Corey!”

“It’s wet, Carmine! Sorry, but I had to hide my wheels. No choice except to run through the rain. I figured you’d cruise by to take a look. What d’you think? Squeezing into that must be like going inside a tube of toothpaste. Doesn’t look as if they’d be able to stand up, though I guess they can in a central aisle. Give me a train any day.”

“It’s a power thing, Corey. They can spit on the peasants being herded like cattle. Have you been here all night?”

“Didn’t need to. They weren’t going anywhere in that storm. They mightn’t be going anywhere today if the rain doesn’t stop.”

“What do you hope to find?” Carmine asked curiously.

The long, dark, beaky face screwed up, the dark eyes narrowed. “I wish I knew! It’s just a feeling I have, boss. Something’s in the wind-or the rain, or the sea spray. I don’t know.”

“I’ll send someone over with a bacon roll and a thermos of coffee. In an unmarked, over by that hangar,” Carmine said. “Go with your hunches, Corey.”

And what do you think about that? he asked himself as he drove away. Corey’s found his own case. The fact that nothing’s going to come of it is beside the point. It should have occurred to me that the Cornucopia bunch are sneaky enough to aim for an earlier departure.

Two bacon rolls and a thermos of coffee were most welcome. Warm and relatively dry, Corey Marshall settled to spend a few boring hours of waiting. The windows of his car were cranked down just enough to prevent his windshield fogging up, and he was cunningly situated where he couldn’t be seen, yet could see in all directions. The rain had steadied, neither pouring down nor sprinkling, and it had been falling now for eight hours. The ground was hard even where it was exposed; between that, the big areas of concrete, and some patches of tar-seal, runoff was copious. On the road outside the airport gate a section of the bed had sagged and crumbled, plugging up a drain grating and causing the water to pool fairly deeply. Lovely weather for ducks, thought Corey, trying to find interest in everything. He had to stay awake, but more than that: he had to stay alert.

A great deal of his time was occupied in thinking about the lieutenancy and, he had come to realize with a sinking horror, a marriage that hadn’t panned out the way he had envisioned. Oh, he loved Maureen and more than loved his two children, who seemed to suffer from Maureen’s deficiencies even more than he did; he pitied them, an awful emotion for a father to feel. He understood that a person’s nature was a given, but he wished with all his heart that Maureen’s nature was less avaricious, less scratchy. His daughter, nine years old, had worked out how to keep out of trouble, mainly by effacing herself, whereas his son, now twelve, was beginning to inherit his mother’s frustrations at the world of men. Always in trouble for untidiness, loudness, poor grades at school. It had come to a head a couple of weeks earlier, and he had hoped that, recalled to a sense of her own imperfections, Maureen would let up on the two males in her home. And she had-for a week. Now it was drifting back to where it usually was.

In his heart of hearts he knew that divorce was inevitable, for he knew that even if he did get Larry Pisano’s job, Maureen would find something fresh to pick about. A clunky second car, an unsatisfactory kitchen, Gary’s acne due to eating junk food-what the raise in pay wouldn’t stretch to fix, she would nag about. Not for any other reason than that she was permanently discontented, and how could you fix that? If it weren’t for the kids he would file for divorce tomorrow, but for the sake of the kids he couldn’t do that, ever. No fool, he knew that they loved him as the bearable side of their home life, their coconspirator and ally. In a war?

Well, he decided as midday became early afternoon, the Marshall family just has to get through this. It won’t end until Denise is at college and no one’s left at home except Maureen and me. Then the shit can hit the fan in all directions, and I won’t care.

His preoccupation vanished the moment a passenger van drove through the gates and crept across to the Lear. The crew, Corey decided as they got out, talking cheerfully among themselves, chiefly about the fact that the rain had stopped. A flight crew of three men in tailored navy uniforms, the captain with four rows of gold braid on his sleeves, the other two with three rows. Wow! The Cornucopia Board wasn’t stinting on what they paid the guys responsible for keeping them safely in the air. Two slender, very pretty women in navy uniforms Corey put down as the cabin crew. No stinting here either. The steps were let down, and the men entered the cockpit, one armed with a clipboard; the two girls went to the back of the van and dealt with foil-wrapped containers, a big styrofoam chest for cold food, and various towels and linens. Amazed, Corey watched the girls work for some time. Even several small flower arrangements were unearthed.

The ground crew turned up; one of them connected the Lear to a fuel source, taking exquisite care that not a drop spilled onto the concrete. Hoses were hooked up, tires checked, a dozen and one tasks performed. In the cockpit Corey could see the heads of pilot and copilot, their hands fluttering over what he presumed were the toggles and switches of gear on the roof above the instrument panels.

Next to arrive was a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, two men seated in its front: Wal Grierson and Gus Purvey. They alighted and went into the shed, Corey guessed to use the rest room-a bigger facility than available on an airplane, even a private jet. Each was carrying a briefcase, but neither was dressed formally. Jeans, open-necked shirts, button-up sweaters, jackets over their arms. Laughing, they walked to the Lear and climbed the steps. As they disappeared inside, a small Ford drove up, two men aboard. One got out, went to the Rolls and got in. Then Ford and Rolls drove away. That’s how you do it when you don’t feel like a chauffeur, Corey thought. A peon picks up what you’ve discarded.

A fire engine from Station Two trundled in, the special truck fitted out for airport duty. No plane bigger than a joyriding specimen could take off or land without a fire truck’s presence. Its crew looked pleased to be liberated from a rainy shift, and patently admired the neat little jet they were obliged to shepherd off the runway in as much safety as tanks full of avgas allowed.

Only Phil Smith and Fred Collins to come. Activity died down as the hostesses entered the plane for good. The van drove away, the fire truck went to its designated position.

Corey didn’t huddle down again. Instead, he turned in his seat to look back up the road, idly noting that beyond the pool where the road had subsided a little, a four-inch steel pipe had risen through the asphalt and lay right across the road like a ship’s cable or a filled fire hose. A silence had fallen with the cessation of the rain, and in the distance Corey heard the roar of a powerful sports car approaching. Going far too fast, it appeared in his vision on the heels of its grunty sound, a twelve-cylinder XKE Jaguar painted British racing green, Phil Smith behind its wheel, Fred Collins beside him. They too were laughing, “away at last!” written all over their faces.

The front wheels of the Jag hit the pipe, and the rest seemed to happen in slow motion. First the sensationally long hood of the sports car rose vertically into the air, followed by the remainder. The car actually did a somersault, Smith and Collins spilling out onto the road before the Jag crashed, top side down, and lay next to the pool with its front wheels spinning crazily.

“Ambulance! Ambulance to airport, road emergency!” Corey was barking into his radio before the Jag came down. “Medics! Need medics! Road emergency at airport! Road emergency!”

Almost before he had finished speaking, Corey was out of his car and running, suddenly aware that no one else had seen a thing. He went first to Fred Collins, closer, and bent to find a carotid pulse. Yes! Strong, and there didn’t seem to be a widening sheet of blood. One leg was twisted under him and he was groaning. He was probably all right unless he had internal injuries.

Now to Smith, who lay on his right side, eyes closed. Yes! A carotid pulse, and fairly strong. He wasn’t moving.

The wind gusted; a sheet of paper blew into Corey’s eyes, was brushed away impatiently. Then Corey saw Smith’s briefcase, still in his hand. Had the fool tried to drive a stick-shift sports car hanging on to a briefcase? Or had he grabbed for it even as the accident happened? It was beautifully turned and crafted stainless steel with two combination locks, but the force of the impact had sprung them, and there were papers everywhere. Most had settled on the surface of the pool.

“Nothing I can do for you, buster,” he said, “but I can pick up your papers before they blow away.”

Working in a frenzy, he gathered every sheet he could find. Many were wet from immersion in the water, but Corey didn’t care; he collected them as the sirens wailed in the distance, then ran for his car. The firemen were coming, but he had the excuse of needing to use his radio again, and who’d remember that he was carrying loads of papers? Their attention was on the accident.

The papers went into his trunk, just in case some nosy Cornucopia guy came looking. He picked up his mike and talked to Dispatch, who informed him that Captain Delmonico was on his way and that two ambulances should already be there.

“Thank God it stopped raining,” he said to Carmine a minute later. “Want me to tell those turkeys on the jet that they’re not going anywhere unless they want to leave two Board members behind in the hospital?”

“Abe’s got that,” Carmine said, eyeing Corey shrewdly. “I want to know why you look like the mutt that got to the pedigree bitch ahead of her designated mate.”

For answer, Corey led him around to the back of his car and popped the trunk. “The contents of Phil Smith’s briefcase,” he said. “I wish I could say I’d gotten all four briefcases, but one is a start. The way I saw it, there the guy is, lying unconscious in the road, and his papers drowning in that pool there. So I did what any considerate citizen would do-I picked them up. Then I figured I could always say later that our police labs have great facilities for drying papers that would otherwise have disintegrated, so I saw it as my citizen’s duty to save them if I could. He won’t buy it, but he can’t argue about it either.”

“Great work, Corey,” Carmine said sincerely. “Our luck that the accident happened, but your initiative and presence of mind that Smith’s papers have fallen into our hands.”

The two men walked back to the road, where both ambulances were loading up. Thanks to Corey’s having demanded medics, two of the new physician’s assistants had come with the standard crews.

They reached Fred Collins’s medic first.

“I don’t think he’s suffered much internally,” the woman said, folding up her stethoscope. “Blood pressure’s okay. Comminuted fracture of his right femur-he won’t be going skiing for a while. Grazes and bruises. That’s about it.”

“Head injury,” said Smith’s medic. “Broken right humerus, right scapula is suspect too. His skull impacted on the road, but the water cushioned it some. No left-sided weakness that I can find, but we’ll know more when he’s examined by neurosurgeons. His pupils are reacting. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get him to where they can deal with any cerebral edema.”

Wal Grierson and Gus Purvey were waiting anxiously, prevented from approaching by the customary police cordon. Sergeant Terry Monks and his team had just arrived, and would inspect the site of the accident to reconstruct it and apportion blame.

“Though,” Terry Monks said to Carmine angrily, “what are two stupid old men doing in an E-type Jag with no roll bar and no seat belts?”

“A roll bar would spoil the car’s looks, and seat belts are for people who drive Yank tanks. However, if you’re fair, Terry, you’ll have to admit that not wearing seat belts saved their lives,” Carmine said, just to ruffle Terry.

“Yeah! But a roll bar and seat belts would have seen the stupid old geezers walk away.”

Onward to Grierson and Purvey.

“This is terrible! Terrible!” Purvey said, face ashen. “I can’t count the times I’ve told Phil to stop behaving like Stirling Moss! He drives like a bat out of hell!”

“A pity he’s not conscious to hear himself described as a stupid old geezer,” Carmine said. “That’s the verdict of our traffic accident men.”

“Stupid is right,” Grierson said through his teeth, more angry than upset. “I guess we’re not going to Zurich. Gus, you get to tell Natalie and Candy while I deal with things here.” As if on cue, the little Ford and the Rolls appeared and parked just down the road.

“Take the car. It can come back for me as soon as you get home and get your own wheels.”

Purvey, looking hangdog, set off along the airport’s chain-link fence in the direction of the Rolls.

“I thought you were a Mustang man,” Carmine said.

“The Rolls is the most comfortable car on the road,” said Grierson, smiling slightly. “Jesus, what a mess!”

Carmine looked at Corey and Abe. “Corey, drive across the tarmac and out the far gate. Abe, you’re still with me.”

The Fairlane followed Corey’s car closely. Only when they were out of the far gate and back on the road past the fuel farm did Carmine breathe a sigh of relief. He had used the time to fill Abe in on what resided in Corey’s trunk, and Abe’s hands were trembling in sheer excitement. He glanced at Carmine.

“One chance in four it’s the right briefcase,” he said.

“Where’s Delia?”

“Out like a bloodhound on Dee-Dee’s trail.”

“There’s a phone booth, and I do believe the phone is still connected,” Carmine said, pulling in to the side of the road. “Abe, get on to Danny and ask him to send out search parties for Delia. This isn’t something I want going out on our radio; it’s too important for truckers and bored housewives. The one person we need most in this operation is Delia.”

Who was waiting, eyes bright, when Carmine and Abe walked in. Two Plant Physical workmen had erected a setup consisting of as many trestle tables as the office would hold, their tops newly covered with butcher paper held down by thumbtacks. The limp and sodden contents of Philip Smith’s briefcase were stacked haphazardly on a chair seat under Delia’s martial eye. As soon as the last table was finished and the two handymen had left, she began distributing the papers, one sheet at a time, on the off-white surfaces at her disposal.

“Oh, the man is a treasure!” she exclaimed, bustling from one table to another with various sheets. “Meticulous in the extreme! Not his secretary’s doing, I can assure you-apart from Yours Truly, no secretary would dream of such precision. See? Every follow-on page is labeled in the top left-hand corner with subject or person plus date of the missive, while the page number is in the right-hand corner. Wonderful, wonderful!”

In all, there were 139 pages of letters and reports, plus a bound 73-page dissertation on the advantages of maintaining a research facility. That seemed peculiar to Carmine; Cornucopia Research was at least five years old, so why carry a bulky book full of long-established facts well known to the whole industry?

“He’s a paper snob,” said Delia when every page had been laid out and the bound report sat wrapped in a clean towel to dry its outer leaves and edges. “Nothing but high rag content paper, even for his memo pads. No cheap pulp for Mr. Smith! Nor ordinary print for his captions and letterheads-hot-pressed print only. At the same time, he’s not splashy. Plain white stationery, black print, not even a color horn-of-plenty logo. Yes, everything of the very best, yet understated.”

“Then you and I are going to go to work reading, Delia,” Carmine said. “Corey, you take the hospital watch. Report any change in Smith’s condition to me the moment you hear. The chief neurosurgeon, Tom Dennis, is a friend of mine, so I’ll make sure we know as soon as a change happens. Abe, you hold the fort with Dee-Dee, Sir Lancelot, Pauline Denbigh and anyone else of interest. If there’s a new case, you take it.”

“What are we looking for?” Delia asked as Abe and Corey left. “Naturally I have some idea, but I’d like detailed instructions.”

“The trouble is that if it’s a verbal code, I don’t think we stand a hope of cracking it,” Carmine said, frowning.

“You mean statements like ‘the clouds are dark over dear old Leningrad’?”

“Yes. If ‘the rifling commences two feet down the barrel’ actually means ‘don’t expect more from me quickly,’ we won’t know. But I don’t think that kind of information interests us. We’re looking for plans and formulae, probably reduced to microdots.”

“How big is a microdot?” Delia asked.

“According to Kelly, whatever size will look logical, from the dot over an i to a fly speck or the bull’s-eye in a two-inch drawing of a target. They don’t have to be round, anyway. Round is less likely to be detected, Nature being nonlinear.”

Her face puckered in dismay. “Oh, Carmine! There must be literally a million dotted i’s here! Even if Mr. Smith’s comatose state lasts several days, we have no chance of finding anything.”

There was a fresh carafe of coffee on the counter. Carmine poured himself a mug and sat down on the wheeled chair he had stolen from the typists’ pool because he could move around with his chair still attached to his butt. “That’s why I don’t think microdots are above an i. Or at least, an i with an ordinary dot. We should be looking for dots that are too big. That look like typos or smears. Kelly’s so cagey that I haven’t got much useful out of him, so we’re winging it, Delia. To the best of my knowledge, cameras have finite limits, so maybe the reduction process can only be taken so far before another shot has to be taken and the reduction process recommenced. Since the space race began, things have miniaturized fast, but… I’m in true ignorance as to how it’s done or how small a reduction in size can go.” Carmine shrugged. “The best advice I can offer you is to use your common sense, Delia. If it looks wrong, we should see if it comes off. If it comes off, we should examine it under fifty or a hundred power on one of Patsy’s microscopes.”

They started to read, Delia on the letters, Carmine on the reports. An hour went by in silent intensity.

“How extraordinary!” Delia said.

Carmine jumped. “Huh?”

“Hasn’t Mr. Smith always had a reputation for doing nothing?”

“So my sources have led me to believe.”

“Well, for someone who has coasted through the however-many years of his-er-emboardment-he’s kept a close eye on all sorts of people. Nor, it seems, is he happy to leave some of his observations behind during his absence. I’m reading a letter Mr. Smith apparently means to send to an M. D. Sykes, who bears the title of general manager of Cornucopia Central. I gather this means Mr. Sykes orders the stationery, checks the salaries and wages, looks after cleaning contracts and all sorts. Though from time to time over the years Mr. Sykes has had to substitute for men more senior than he.”

“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Carmine exclaimed, careful of his expletives when ladies were present. “I wouldn’t have thought that Smith so much as noticed Cornucopia Central employed a general manager, let alone noticed it’s Sykes. But to notice what Sykes has done! Is the letter interesting?”

“Yes and no. It’s quite long. Mr. Smith lays out the feats Mr. Sykes has accomplished over the years when substituting for more senior executives, and praises his diligence and experience. Mr. Smith informs Mr. Sykes that, in his capacity as Chairman of the Board, he is promoting Mr. Sykes to the position of managing director, immediately under the Board. Mr. Sykes will now be responsible for overseeing all the Cornucopia subsidiaries on an executive level, and will answer only to the Board.”

“That’s a real bombshell,” Carmine said, grinning. “Michael Donald will be happy! I can understand why Smith wouldn’t want it lying around on his desk while he’s away, though I wonder why he didn’t just ship it off as internal mail before he went? A minor mystery. He plays Napoleonic war games.”

“Who, Mr. Smith?”

“No, Mr. Michael Donald Sykes. On his new salary, he’ll be able to stage his hero’s coronation in Notre Dame, complete with gold and jewels.”

“How odd!” Delia exclaimed, still on the letter to Sykes.

“What’s odd?”

“Mr. Smith’s system of tabulation-to which, by the way, he is much addicted. I’ve always preferred the letters of the alphabet to numbers when I tabulate because, provided one does not need more than twenty-six items, the tabulation column remains the same width. With numbers, once the number ten arrives, the column is one character wider, and to the left side at that. Most annoying! Whereas Mr. Smith neither enumerates nor eletterates-he uses a big, round black spot to tabulate-” She drew a hissing breath. “A big, round black spot!” she squealed.

Carmine scooted around the table on his wheeled chair and looked. “Holy shit!” he cried, forgetting ladies.

“There’s another thing, Carmine,” Delia said, voice shaking. “What machines can make a spot this size? A typewriter can’t, nor anything I can think of apart from a printing press setting type. These tabulation spots must have been applied by hand. If they’re not microdots, then Mr. Smith has gone to the trouble of using Letraset, and a man as fanatically tidy as that would be insane, even if he did force his secretary to do it.”

“One thing for sure, Delia, Mr. Smith is not insane,” said Carmine in grim jubilation. “I’ve got the bastard!”

“You mean he’s Ulysses?”

“Oh, I’ve known that for some time.”

He propelled himself across to a little table on which he had assembled a box of glass microscope slides, another of glass cover slips, some fine tweezerlike forceps, and a thin, pointed scalpel. Picking up the tray holding them, he returned to Smith’s letter to M. D. Sykes and, working very delicately, tried to get the tip of the scalpel under the edge of a spot. It slid in easily; the spot came away, balanced on the scalpel tip. Carmine transferred it to a slide and dropped a cover slip on top. He took a total of five of the eleven spots in the Sykes letter, chosen at random.

With five glass slides on a paper plate, he walked to the Medical Examiner’s department, Delia at his side.

“Tell me these aren’t Letraset spots,” he said to Patrick, giving him the plate. “Tell me they have typing on them, or schematics, or anything that shouldn’t be there.”

“You have found yourself a genuine, one hundred percent, twenty-four karat, first-water microdot,” Patsy said after examining the first slide. “A hundred-power-man, what a camera! What reduction ratios! Even so, it must have taken a dozen separate shots to get this down so small. No resolution has been lost, the definition’s perfect.”

“So now we know why Smith didn’t send M. D. Sykes’s letter by internal mail before he left,” Carmine said to Delia as they went back to his office. “It had to travel out of the country with him. In Zurich the microdots in it would have been removed and Letraset spots substituted. Once back in Holloman, he could personally hand Mr. Sykes his promotion.”

“Oh, Carmine, I am so delighted for you!”

“Save your ecstasies, Delia. Now I have to call Ted Kelly and tell him what we’ve found. I’m afraid that our participation in the case of Ulysses the spy is at an end.”

An accurate prophecy. The astounded Ted Kelly arrived in minutes, gasping at what he called Carmine’s luck.

“No, it wasn’t my luck!” Carmine snapped, temper flaring. “It was the initiative of Sergeant Corey Marshall that got you your proof of espionage, Special Agent Kelly, and I insist that he be properly credited! If his name and his feat don’t appear in your report, I’ll tear Washington down around your ears!”

“Okay, okay!” Kelly yelled, backing away with palms up. “It will be written into my report, I promise!”

“I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you, Kelly!” Carmine thrust two typewritten sheets of police paper at him. “This is Corey’s report of what happened, and that’s how your own report starts. Fuck the FBI, and fuck you! You’ve piggybacked on our work, and I want that acknowledged.”

“I’m so happy I’d consent to anything,” Kelly said. “Are Smith’s papers here?”

Carmine handed him a Holloman Police Department cardboard box. “Every last one, minus five spots off the Sykes letter. Which, by the way, I photocopied to make sure Mr. Sykes gets it. There’s probably a copy in Smith’s office, but I wanted to make sure. M. D. Sykes has been screwed around enough.”

Kelly took the box as if it contained the crown jewels, then looked enquiring. “Um-the five spots?” he asked.

“Are going, together with a microscope, with me to the chambers of Judge Thwaites. I need proof of wrongdoing to get a search warrant. As soon as I’ve done that, I’ll send you the evidence,” Carmine said.

“You can’t do that!”

“Try and stop me. I told you, you’ll get them back. I was not kidding when I said I don’t trust you or the FBI, Special Agent Kelly. As far as I know, the contents of Smith’s briefcase may never come to light, or his person be tried for treason. But he will be tried for at least one murder, and for that, he’ll go to prison for a very long time. Now piss off and leave me to my own business.”

“Do you think they will try Mr. Smith for treason?” Delia asked, looking at a room full of trestle tables.

“I have no idea. Get rid of the tables, Delia. I’m going up to see your Uncle John.” In the doorway he stopped. “Delia?”

“Yes?” she asked, one hand on the phone.

“You did a brilliant job. I don’t know what I’d do without you, and that’s the truth.”

His secretary made a sound like a squeezed kitten, went very bright red, and turned away.

“Once Doubting Doug gets a look at my microdots, John, I should get my warrant,” Carmine said.

“The more so because it vindicates his issuance of warrants after the sniper,” Silvestri said. “No egg on his face. I hope the proof of Dee-Dee’s murder is where you think it is, Carmine, because I have a funny feeling the Feds don’t want this guy tried for treason. The days of the Rosenbergs are over. Smith’s a high-end Boston WASP.”

“I don’t think so,” Carmine said thoughtfully. “There was a Philip

Smith, I’m sure, but at some time over the past twenty-five years, a KGB colonel assumed his identity. Sometimes Smith makes weird mistakes about American customs and traditions, and his wife, according to Delia, is not a Sami Lapp. Delia thinks she hails from one of those Stans that comprise Siberia or the Central Asian steppes. Her native language is not Indo-Aryan.”

“Nor are Turkish and Hungarian, for that matter.”

“True. Despite which, John, I’d bet my last buck Smith’s a plant. There is no Anna Smith in the Peace Corps in Africa, and the Stephen Smith who’s doing marine biology in the Red Sea-interesting color choice-isn’t really attached to Woods Hole. He has a kind of honorary status there thanks to hefty donations to projects the Woods Hole people find difficult to fund. As for Peter Smith, petroleum engineer, he was in Iran working for BP, but went off wildcatting to Afghanistan, of all places.”

“You suspect all three kids are in the USSR?”

“Between assignments, yes. Think how valuable they are! Totally bilingual, as American as apple pie.”

“There’s apple pie everywhere, Carmine.”

“Yes, but not flavored with cinnamon. Flavored with cloves.”

“What’s really worrying you?” Silvestri asked.

“First off, the assistant. We still haven’t found him, and he’s even more resourceful when it comes to murder than Smith is. He’s why I’ve had Danny put a guard on Smith’s hospital room-the most vigilant men only, and in pairs.”

“Any ideas at all about who he is?”

“Only that he’s attached to Cornucopia. Lancelot Sterling was my pick, but I was wrong. It’s not Richard Oakes the male secretary-he’s too frail. So whoever it is hasn’t been noticed as a suspect of anything. If he is caught, we may not even know his face, let alone his name.”

“Don’t Communists usually congregate in cells, Carmine?”

“The ideologues do, but does anyone know about the people who conduct active sabotage or espionage? That’s where the Communist witch hunts failed. Ideology tended to be equated with damaging activity. It didn’t always follow. But there might be a cell of damaging activists centered on Holloman and headed by Philip Smith. We know Erica Davenport was involved, and we know Smith has an assistant. That’s three. How big is a cell? I don’t feel like asking Ted Kelly, but that’s my stubbornness. Say, four to six members? In which case, we’re still in the dark about one to three of them.”

“Pauline Denbigh?” Silvestri asked.

“I doubt it. She’s an elitist and a feminist. The Reds may have loads of women doctors and dentists, but the Communist Party isn’t stuffed with women at a high level, is it? No, I think she was tricked into killing her husband on the correct date, and is getting her kicks out of refusing to admit it.”

“What about Philomena Skeps?”

“I can’t imagine she’s anything worse than an overprotective mother, but I intend to see her again,” Carmine said. “For one thing, the ultimate control of Cornucopia is undecided, and that’s not helped by this car accident. Can Philomena Skeps run the company? Or will she hand it over to her cat’s-paw, Anthony Bera? Or leave it with the suddenly invigorated Phil Smith, given that she doesn’t know he’s a traitor and a killer?”

“Maybe Mr. Michael Donald Sykes will inherit the mantle,” Silvestri said with a grin.

Carmine sighed, so loudly that the Commissioner blinked. “What’s that for?” he asked.

“The FBI helicopter that made it so easy to get to Orleans on the Cape. I don’t suppose County Services can afford one?”

“About as likely, Carmine, as a ticket to Mars.”

“I hate that drive!”

“Then take Desdemona and make a day of it.”

“I will, but not until Saturday,” Carmine said.

“How’s Smith?”

“Coming around, Tom Dennis says. No subdural hematoma or gross cerebral contusions, just a fractured skull and some swelling of the brain that’s going down nicely. His right upper arm and shoulder blade are more painful. Collins needed surgery to fix his broken leg, and is swearing he’ll never ride in an open car again. According to Corey, it was amazing to watch that machine flip in midair.”

“Middle-aged teenyboppers!” Silvestri said. Suddenly he looked curious. “Carmine, what exactly tipped you off that Smith was Ulysses? I mean, it could have been any of them.”

“No, I never suspected Grierson, John. What tipped me off was the verb Bart Bartolomeo used when he described what Erica Davenport said to Desmond Skeps at the Maxwell banquet. Not her words-those he didn’t hear. But he said she kept hissing. It took a while for the lightbulb to go on, and I’m not sure when suspicion became certainty, but you can’t hiss Collins or Purvey or Grierson. Smith, you can. Big time. Whatever else she said must have been full of esses too, but if she’d spoken a name that interrupted the sibilants, Bart would have noticed. Once I realized what Bart had actually said, I concentrated on Mr. Philip Smith.”

“So it was all in a name,” Silvestri said.

Warrant in hand, Carmine drove the next morning together with a squad car and Patsy’s forensics van to the beautiful valley wherein Philip Smith had built his mansion.

Natalie Smith met him at the door, her profoundly blue eyes flashing fire, the anger distorting her smooth, yellowish face. “Can’t you leave him alone?” she asked, her thick foreign accent making the words difficult to understand.

“Sorry, Mrs. Smith, I have to exercise this warrant.”

“Must I sit in the folly? It’s cold today,” she said.

“No, ma’am. It’s the folly we’re searching, so you can stay in your house.”

Carmine walked across the lush grass between the garden beds to where the little round temple stood, its Ionic columns, each fluted, supporting a tiled terra-cotta roof that sat on it like a Chinese coolie’s hat. Only the English could have termed a garden adornment a folly, Carmine thought, treading up the steps. Steps and floor were both greenish terrazzo; the rest of the folly was constructed of pure white marble. Who in America had the skill to fashion this? he wondered. No one, he decided. The columns were probably imported from Italy, where sculptors abounded. American equivalents would be carving fancy tombstones.

A cursory inspection revealed no overt hiding place, but he had Abe Goldberg.

“Think you can find the secret compartment?” Carmine asked.

Abe’s fair, freckled face broke into a smile, his blue eyes sparkled. “Does a fat baby fart?” he asked.

Carmine moved off the steps onto the grass and watched Abe work. First he had two cops remove the white table and chairs, then he stood at the center of the folly and rotated, his head tilted toward the roof. That over, he repeated the rotation, this time gazing at the floor. Then he walked each circular step all the way around, using Carmine as his marker. After which he lay flat out on the floor and started rapping it with his knuckles.

“Nothing,” he said curtly.

The steps had been installed in sections of arc thirty degrees wide, which meant each full step had twelve sections. The edge of the highest step measured about three and three-quarter feet per section.

“Cumbersome to remove, but feasible,” he said, picking up a crowbar and inserting it under the overlapping lip of the step.

He found the one that lifted on his fifth attempt. It was fitted as snugly as the others, but dislodged when levered and broke into jagged pieces.

“He doesn’t open the compartment with a crowbar, Carmine. See? The section actually slides outward on runners like an expensive drawer. I’ve broken it,” he ended with some regret. “Such nice work too.” Up went his shoulders in a shrug. “No use regretting. Where’s my camera?”

The Holloman PD used supermarket brown paper bags for large items of evidence, small brown paper bags, and little brown paper envelopes. Abe’s camera flashing blue under his eyes, Carmine flinched at the smell emanating from the compartment, then put both hands inside and withdrew a pair of coveralls akin to a boilersuit. Flash, flash from the camera. The garment was rigid with browned, dried blood, so much so that it took time to compress it into folds, reduce it to something that would slide into the bag. It had not been as carefully preserved as Lancelot Sterling’s souvenir; mold and mildew fuzzed and whiskered its crevices, and insects scurried for shelter.

“There’s nothing else inside,” said Abe, disappointed.

“Well, we photographed it in situ, withdrawn, the step, the sliding mechanism and everything else we can think of,” Carmine said, sitting back on his heels. “It’s enough, but I want the razor. Where is it?”

“You said enshrined, but you don’t enshrine anything you revere in the same space as you put your bloody clothes,” Abe said. “The Ghost, Carmine! Think adoration.”

“Then it’s somewhere else in here, Abe. In one of these columns. There must be a column drum with a compartment in it at about… head height. So he can look without touching.”

“Won’t happen,” Abe said pessimistically. “The marble will be too thick to sound hollow. There must be a spring that opens a door when pressed, but not manually. At the weight, given that the door will be the full length of one column drum, Smith must have electrically wired the spring. Wiring under the ground, under the steps and the floor, up inside the shrine column. All of them are probably hollow at their centers, but the shrine one much more so. I bet he triggers the door by an impulse from a wireless control he holds in his hand-he’s a ham radio nut, he must know every trick there is. If he wasn’t carrying the control to Zurich with him-and why would he?-then it’s lying in the open among the other junk in his radio shack.”

“Check the columns with a magnifier first, Abe. If there is a door, the joins must show.”

“Look at a column closely, Carmine-any column will do.”

“Shit!” said Carmine, peering. “A thin line runs down the middle of each flute.”

“We have to find his control. Either that, or demolish the whole temple.”

“Which would be a terrible shame,” Carmine agreed. “Okay, Abe, go look in the radio shack. Our warrant doesn’t extend to the house, but the shack’s in the open on the roof. Find the control, and it won’t matter-no, it does matter! Smith’s too rich for us to bluff the lawyers he’ll hire. Back I go to the Judge.”

Two hours elapsed before Carmine returned with a warrant to look in the radio shack. Judge Thwaites, horrified at the news that evidence had already been recovered implicating Smith in murder, made it a sweeping one. If they needed, they could search the house as well.

They didn’t need to. A search of the radio shack yielded three small switch panels of the kind people use to open their garage doors. The difference was that all three were homemade. The second opened the door hidden in one column.

Folded into its ivory shell, the razor was perched on two forked silver prongs arising from a stand worked in exquisite filigree; the whole cavity was lined with padded crimson satin.

“The stand isn’t silver,” Abe said. “It’s not tarnished.”

“My guess is chromium plating rather than platinum,” said Carmine, peering closely.

Using his clean handkerchief, he removed the razor, taking care not to smudge its surfaces. It hadn’t been washed, and dried blood coated it thickly, especially around the hinge. It went into a brown envelope, sealed and witnessed.

“I should have remembered to bring rubber gloves,” Patsy’s technician said regretfully. “Dr. O’Donnell is very keen to make them compulsory for gathering evidence.”

“It’s okay, we’ll manage,” Carmine said. “After all the fuss about this case dies down, the Commissioner and your boss are planning a think tank about evidence. It’s a headache.”

“If Smith’s prints are on that razor,” Abe said, packing up his camera, “we’ve got him cold.”

“Provided the prints are either in the blood itself or over the top of the blood,” Carmine said.

“They will be, Carmine, they will be!”

“What I’m wondering is what those other two garage door buttons open. Doubting Doug is going to murder me, but I think I have to have a warrant for this entire property, inside and out, and go around every room, statue, sundial, pillar and post until I open two other electrically controlled secret doors. I have a feeling it will pay me to do that,” Carmine said.

“You’ve already got warrants up the wazoo,” Abe objected.

“Yes, but the judicial climate is changing, Abe, and the cops who don’t go with it are fools. I want my new warrant to specify that I’m looking for what these two controls open.”

“Then make sure the batteries powering them are new.”

On Saturday the Delmonico couple piled into the Fairlane and set off for Orleans. Even though she knew she would have to wait elsewhere while Carmine quizzed Philomena Skeps, Desdemona was delighted at the expedition. She had never been to Cape Cod, and the prospect of a rare day out with Carmine thrilled her. In Holloman he was at the mercy of his huge family, and so by extension was she, not to mention the demands of his job. Now she was almost one hundred percent sure she had him captive for eight or ten hours. No one was going to walk through the door, no phone was going to ring asking for his police presence. Into the bargain, it was a perfect day on the cusp of summer.

Julian had been left with Aunt Maria and a tribe of girl cousins who would spoil him rotten, and Desdemona was not so doting a mother that she fretted when he wasn’t with her. This was a holiday, and she could see from the volume of traffic on I-95 that quite a number of other people had decided to take a drive Capeward on such a beautiful day. The only thing that blighted her mood was Carmine’s wearing a.38 automatic on his belt together with his gold captain’s shield. But when she opened the glove box to put a bag of candy inside and saw a second.38 nestled among spare ammunition clips, she gasped in horror.

“Oh, I don’t believe it!” she cried. “Where are we going, to Dodge City?”

“You’ve been watching television,” he accused, smiling.

“And you’ve been accumulating paranoia! Honestly, Carmine! Two guns? Extra ammunition? How can I be comfortable in the midst of an arsenal? Is Julian to see this sort of thing?”

“The spare is always in the glove box, Desdemona. You don’t normally open it, is all. I’d forgotten it was there.”

“Codswallop! You’d forget your own head first!”

“Well, maybe.” He grinned. “Without my sidearm I feel naked, and that’s the truth. When we go into a HoJo’s for some breakfast, I’ll be wearing my jacket and no one will know. John Silvestri suggested I take you, but don’t make me regret it, Desdemona. I have to see two suspects today, and while I don’t expect fireworks, it’s a stupid cop that isn’t prepared for them.”

She sat in silence for a while, digesting the note of finality in his voice and not liking the fact that he had rebuked her as if it were she at fault. Her strength and independence rebelled, but her sense of justice said she had known when she married a cop what it entailed. What bothered her was the gap that yawned between the sexes when it came to guns. Women abominated them. Men esteemed them. And Julian would be on his father’s side.

“I wonder,” she said at last, “how do other women manage to sleep knowing their husbands have a gun under the pillow?”

“About like you, lovely lady. Out like a light for as many hours as the kids permit.”

She laughed. “Touché!”

“If I pushed papers or machined metal for a living, there would be no need for me to carry a gun,” Carmine said. “But cops are peacetime soldiers. There’s a war going on, and soldiers have to be armed.

The worst of it is that the war involves civilians too. Look at you and Julian by the boat shed.”

“Then perhaps,” she said, swallowing, “I should learn to use a gun, even if I don’t carry one.”

“I think that’s sensible,” Carmine said warmly. “Shooting accidents happen through sheer ignorance. I’ll arrange for you to learn at the police range. Better fire a.38 automatic, because I’ve switched to one, though Silvestri won’t.”

Yet one more battle lost, Desdemona thought. I wasn’t able to make him see my side of it, but he worked me around to seeing his side. And what would I do if someone came after Julian? I would want to protect him.

They pottered through the incredible seaside mansions of Rhode Island, mostly converted now to institutions and rest homes, but still betraying their millionaire origins. After a good breakfast they entered the biceps of the Cape, and Desdemona marveled at the beauty.

“Better in July, when the roses are out,” Carmine said.

“I never realized how many hauntingly beautiful, Old World spots this part of America has. I thought seaside villages like Essex in Connecticut were glorious, but the Cape Cod villages are more so-no, make that differently so,” said Desdemona.

They reached Orleans in the early afternoon. Carmine set Desdemona down in the sand dunes beginning to run up the Atlantic side of the Cape’s forearm, and drove off to see Philomena Skeps.

Who was waiting, placidity unruffled. Well, I’m here to spoil that, Carmine thought, seating himself in a white chair on the patio behind her house.

“When do you move to Boston?” he asked.

“Not before September,” she said. “One last Cape summer.”

“But you’ll keep this house, surely?”

“Yes, though I doubt I’ll manage much more than an occasional weekend visit. Desmond is keen to be somewhere that he can see movies, play pinball machines, mingle with friends.”

She spoke in the same gentle, even voice, but the unhappiness ran beneath its timber like water in an underground stream. Ah! Carmine thought. She’s beginning to realize her son’s sexual inclinations.

In fact, she had subtly aged in a very few short weeks. Her eyes were starting to produce crow’s-feet at their outer edges, and two faint lines ran down her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, which now turned down a little. The most amazing change of all was a broad ribbon of stark white hair through the black curls above her left forehead; it gave her an eldritch quality, as of a medieval sorceress.

“Have you established the future of Cornucopia yet?”

“I think so,” she replied with a faint smile. “Phil Smith will continue as Chairman of the Board, the present members will all continue, and I will stay in the background as trustee of my son’s controlling interest. Provided nothing untoward happens, I don’t see why anything should change. Erica’s death leaves a vacancy on the Board that I intend shall be filled by Tony Bera.”

“It’s in relation to the composition of the Cornucopia Board that I’m here, Mrs. Skeps,” Carmine said in the same formal way. “Philip Smith will be leaving the Board permanently.”

Her deep green eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

“He’s been arrested for murder and espionage.”

Her breast heaved; she clutched at her throat. “No! No, that’s quite impossible! Phil? You are mistaken, Captain.”

“I assure you, I am not. The evidence is overwhelming.”

“Espionage?”

“Oh, yes. He’s been passing secrets to Moscow for at least ten years,” Carmine said.

“Is that why-?” She broke off.

“Why what, Mrs. Skeps?”

“Why he speaks Russian when he’s alone with Natalie.”

“If you’d told me that earlier, ma’am, it would have helped.”

“I never thought anything of it until now. Natalie’s not comfortable in English, and though Russian isn’t her native tongue, she speaks it well. Phil said he’d done a Berlitz course when he married her. He used to laugh about it.”

“Well, he’s not laughing now.”

She twisted in her chair, upset and distracted. “Tony! I need Tony!” she cried. “Where is he? He should be here!”

“Knowing Mr. Bera, I predict he’s lurking outside waiting for the right moment.” Carmine got up and went to the corner of the house. “Mr. Bera!” he bellowed. “You’re needed!”

Bera appeared seconds later, took one look at Philomena, and glared at Carmine furiously. “What have you said to put her in such a state?” he demanded.

Carmine told him, which clearly astounded him as much as it had Philomena. The two of them huddled on a cast iron settee and stared at Carmine as if he bore their execution orders.

“Two places vacant on the Board!” Bera exclaimed.

Which gives me an idea of his priorities, Carmine thought. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about espionage or murder, all he cares about is a pliant Board to protect young Desmond’s-and his own-interests. Mr. Anthony Bera bears watching.

“If it’s any consolation, Mr. Smith’s last executive order was to appoint a new managing director for Cornucopia Central,” he said briskly. “He fills Erica Davenport’s non-Board shoes, though not her Board ones. His name is Mr. M. D. Sykes.”

This news item didn’t interest either of them, but Carmine hadn’t thought it would. He’d thrown it in to provoke a reaction, and had he got one, he would have had to dig into the past of Mr. M. D. Sykes. A relief to know there was no necessity.

When he left, it was with the rooted conviction that Tony Bera would skim as much cream off young Desmond’s milk pan as he could over the next eight years. But that was white-collar crime, not his concern.

“What an odd world it is,” he said to Desdemona as they headed for a lobster restaurant. “Some guy pinches ten grand from his firm, and he goes to prison. Whereas some other guy pinches millions from a company’s funds and doesn’t even get prosecuted.”

“Better to be at the top of the heap than the bottom,” Desdemona said. “Oh, Carmine, thank you for today! I rolled in the sand, paddled, let the wind blow through my hair, feasted my eyes on these gorgeous villages-absolute heaven!”

“I only wish I’d accomplished more,” he grumbled. “That pair may not be spies or killers, but they’re guilty of a lot of things. Bera’s got Philomena hooked, yet he’s also seduced her son. The bastard swings both ways.”

“Oh, that’s disgusting!” she cried. “To make love to a woman and her son! Surely she doesn’t know?”

“No, she doesn’t know, though she’s starting to suspect that young Desmond likes men too much. If you saw the kid, you’d know he’s behind the eight ball anyway. Too beautiful. It probably began at school, and that’s what she’s blaming.”

“You’re saying it’s inherent in the boy?”

“Definitely.”

“Is he effeminate?”

“No! Tough as old leather, hard as nails.”

At which moment the Fairlane entered the parking lot of the lobster restaurant.

Desdemona dismissed worries that were not her concern save as a mother. She was too happy to be cast down, she reflected, ordering a lobster roll. What had sent her in a hurry from London back to Holloman was the knowledge that the fertile segment of her monthly cycle was due, and that if she missed spending it with Carmine, she would have to wait another month to try again. Julian was about to turn six months old; if she conceived now, he would be fifteen or sixteen months old when the new baby arrived. That was long enough. If they were brothers, the younger stood a chance of physically catching up before Julian left home. And that, she thought in satisfaction, means that if they do detest each other, the older won’t always be able to wallop the tar out of the younger.

Tummy full of lobster roll, Desdemona fell asleep before they got to Providence.

And so much for Silvestri’s theory about companionship, Carmine thought, his right arm aching from the pressure of his wife’s head. Still, it’s been a great day, and with any luck I’ll never have to go back to Orleans.

On Monday, Carmine was allowed to see Philip Smith, who occupied a private room high in the Chubb-Holloman Hospital. At Carmine’s request it was the last room down a long corridor, and as far from the fire stairs as any room could be. The room opposite had been requisitioned by the County and served as a recreation area of sorts, enabling Smith’s round-the-clock guards to use its bathroom, have a coffee carafe on permanent tap, and sit in comfortable chairs on their breaks. How the Commissioner had wangled it Carmine didn’t want to know: the FBI was picking up the tab.

Smith’s room was filled with flowers. That, together with the soft lilac of its walls and padded vinyl furniture, gave it an un-hospital look at first glance. Then, past such things, the eyes noticed the sterility of the bed, the ropes and pulleys, the incredible way any occupant of such an infernal rack was automatically shrunken in size, stripped of authority and power.

This Philip Smith looked older than his sixty years, his handsome face collapsed in on itself a little, his blue-grey eyes unutterably weary.

When Carmine entered, only those eyes moved. Smith probably had to be turned and adjusted by a nurse, given his arm and shoulder. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a nurse in attendance.

“I’ve been expecting you for several days,” Smith said.

“Where’s your private nurse?”

“Fool of a woman! I told her to wait at the station until I buzzed.

I’m grateful for the attention when I need it, but I loathe gratuitous solicitude. Can I do this for you, can I do that for you? Pah! When I want something, I’m capable of asking.”

Carmine sat in a padded lilac vinyl chair. “For what they charge, these should be covered in Italian kid,” he said.

“So a visitor’s toddler can wee on them? Have a heart!”

“True. Save Italian kid for boardrooms and executive offices. Where you’re going, Mr. Smith, there won’t even be vinyl. Just hard plastic, steel, mattress ticking and concrete.”

“Rubbish! They’ll never convict me.”

“Holloman will. Have you been interviewed by the FBI?”

“Interminably. That’s why I’ve hungered to see your face, Captain. It has a certain Romanesque nobility the FBI faces have lacked. I think the only person who hasn’t made the journey from Washington to see me is J. Edgar Hoover himself, but I hear that he’s a disappointment in the flesh-soft and rather chubby.”

“Appearances can be deceiving. Have you been charged?”

“With espionage? Yes, but they won’t follow through.” Smith’s lips drew back to reveal teeth yellowed by his hospital stay. “I lost my luck,” he said simply. “It ran foul of yours.”

“Men your age shouldn’t drive twelve-cylinder sports cars, more like. It was wet, the road was a mess, you were going way too fast, and you weren’t concentrating,” Carmine said.

“Don’t rub it in. I must have driven that road a hundred times to board a hired plane. I guess it was the thought that this time I’d be boarding my own plane.”

“I’m charging you with the murder of Dee-Dee Hall, Mr. Smith. We found your coveralls and the razor.”

The hatred blazed; his body stiffened, battling to shed its restraints until the pain struck. He groaned. “That unprintable, unmentionable whore! She deserved to die as all whores should-cut from ear to ear! The scarlet yawn for a scarlet woman!”

“I’m more interested in why Dee-Dee didn’t flee or fight.”

“I need the nurse,” he said, groaning again.

Carmine pressed the buzzer.

“Now look at what you’ve done!” the woman chided, slotting a syringe into an outlet on his IV drip.

“Speak not in ignorance, you moron!” Smith whispered.

Bridling indignantly, she left.

“I’d like to know the why of Dee-Dee,” Carmine said.

“Would you indeed? The thing is, do I feel like telling you?” Smith asked, settling into his pillows gratefully as the pain ebbed. “Are we alone? Are you recording what I say?”

“We are alone, and I am not recording us. A tape would not be valid evidence in a court of law without witnesses present and your consent. When I charge you formally, I’ll have witnesses, and remind you of your rights under the Constitution.”

“So much solicitude, and all for me!” Smith mocked. His eyes clouded a little. “Yes, why not? You’re a cross between a mastiff and a bulldog, but there’s cat in there too. Curiosity is your besetting sin, Erica said to me, very frightened.”

His lids fell, he dozed. Carmine waited patiently.

“Dee-Dee-!” he said suddenly, eyes open. “I suppose you searched for my Peace Corps daughter?” he asked.

“Yes, but I couldn’t find one.”

“Anna wasn’t interested in good works,” Philip Smith said. “Her bent was purely destructive, and America suited her because here there are so few social brakes one can apply to headstrong children. She was the wrong age to make the move from West Germany to Boston and then Holloman-the bleakness of her old life was blown away on the gale of indulgence, promiscuity, infantile aspirations, undisciplined passions. The wrong age, the wrong place, the wrong child…” Smith stopped.

Carmine said nothing, did not move. It would come out at Smith’s pace, and in chunks.

“School? What was school, except a place to avoid? Anna played hookey so much that Natalie and I were obliged to give it out that we were teaching her at home. We were utterly impotent, we couldn’t control her. She laughed at us, she mocked us, she couldn’t be trusted with socialist enlightenment. From her fourteenth year onward, it was like having an enemy in the house-she knew we were hiding something. So Natalie and I agreed that she should have whatever money she wanted, and do whatever she wanted.” Came a sinister chuckle. “Since she hardly lived at home or acknowledged us, few people knew of her, isn’t that odd? We were able to continue our socialist duties by giving up Anna as a lost cause.”

Another pause. Smith dozed, Carmine watched.

“She acquired a boyfriend when she was fourteen. A twenty-year-old petty criminal named Ron David-a black man!” Smith shouted it; Carmine jumped. “Sex enthralled her, she couldn’t get enough of it or him, would rut with him anywhere, anytime, anyhow. He had an apartment on the edge of the Argyle Avenue ghetto- disease-ridden, rat-infested. Full of whores, including Dee-Dee Hall, who was a good friend of his. Ron introduced Anna to Dee-Dee, and Dee-Dee introduced Anna to heroin. Does that appall you, Captain Delmonico? Don’t let it! Save your horror for my next item of news: Anna and Dee-Dee became lovers. They were inseparable. Inseparable…”

Dear God, thought Carmine, I don’t want to hear this. Take a break, Mr. Smith, sleep a while. Did you love your wayward daughter, or was she an embarrassing nuisance? I can’t tell.

Smith continued. “There was no difference between Dee-Dee and the heroin. Both were vital necessities to Anna, who moved out of Ron’s apartment and into Dee-Dee’s.” Another sinister chuckle. “But Ron refused to take his marching orders. The money Anna had lavished on him was now being lavished on Dee-Dee. You would think, Captain, wouldn’t you, that my daughter would have accepted my offer to house her and Dee-Dee in the lap of luxury on the West Coast? No, that would have been too convenient for her parents! She and Dee-Dee liked living in squalor! The heroin was easy to obtain, and what else mattered?”

“How long were Anna and Dee-Dee together?” Carmine asked.

“Two years.”

“And this was back in the very early 1950s?”

“Yes.”

“Then Dee-Dee wasn’t much older than Anna. Two kids.”

“Don’t you dare pity them! Or me!” Smith cried.

“I do pity them, but I don’t pity you. What happened?”

“Ron invaded Dee-Dee’s apartment with a cutthroat razor, intending to teach them a lesson. I am not conversant with the cant, but I gather that he was ‘off his face’ with drugs. So it was Anna used the razor. She cut his throat very efficiently. Dee-Dee called me at home and told me. I was obliged to deal with that nightmare just as my-my patriotic socialist duties at Cornucopia were commencing. Ron vanished-and don’t hope to find his body, Captain! It lies very far from Connecticut.”

“Where is Anna now?” Carmine asked.

“In a camp in Siberia where she has no access to heroin or sex or whores,” her father said. “She’s thirty-one years old.”

“And all these years later you took out your spleen on a poor, defenseless whore?” Carmine asked incredulously. “Christ, has it never occurred to you that you yourself might be to blame for some of it?”

Smith chose not to hear the second part. “Defenseless, nothing! Poor, nothing!” he shouted. “Dee-Dee Hall is a symptom of the disease rotting America’s stinking carcass! Women like her should be shot or put to hard labor! Whores-drugs-Jews-homosexuals-blacks-adolescent promiscuity!”

“You make me sick, Mr. Smith,” Carmine said evenly. “I don’t think you’re a patriotic socialist, I think you’re a Nazi. Marx and Engels were both Jews, and they’d spit on you! How long is it since you slid inside the original Philip Smith’s shell? He was a full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, but a shadow. He answered to no one, he did what he pleased, he went where he pleased, and everybody on his West German base assumed he was someone big with one of the secret services. How do I know this when the FBI thought you were CIA and dropped their enquiries? Easy, Mr. Smith! I spent the war in the military police-there’s nothing and no one I can’t learn about. In 1946, when he went on a secret mission, one Philip Smith was kidnapped and shot, and another Philip Smith took his place. That Philip Smith-you-returned from Germany to Boston early in 1947, complete with foreign wife, like so many of those Occupation guys. The hardest thing to conceal was the age of your marriage and your kids. But you did it the best way-you just appeared, a discharged colonel and his family, in Boston.”

Smith was listening impassively, his mouth shaped into a sneer. But the eyes, windows on a morphine-dulled brain, were confused and astounded.

“The aristocratic Boston millionaire adopted an aloof pose that enabled him to fill the shoes of someone never seen since 1940, when the original Smith, having no close relatives, joined the army way ahead of Pearl Harbor. You manufactured a blood kinship to the Skepses in the shrewdest way-simply say it to all and sundry, and sooner or later all and sundry will believe it. Including the Skepses. You joined the Board of Cornucopia in 1951, four years after your reappearance in Boston society. Having built that beautiful house, you moved to Holloman and became who you really are-a rude, arrogant, ruthless shit. People at Cornucopia, including the very young Desmond Skeps, accepted the fact that you adorned the Board but did no work. After all, what’s unique about that? Most members of boards do nothing except take fat fees.”

“Envious, Captain?” Smith asked with a purr in his voice.

“Of you? No way, Mr. Smith. I am consumed with admiration of the dedicated socialist agent doing his patriotic duty as he lives high off the hog among his ideological enemies. You’ve never lived in a cold-water walk-up flat on the sixth floor where the pipes freeze, and you never will. You, Mr. Smith, are far above ordinary people, and that won’t change, whichever country you live in, will it, huh? The USSR or the USA, you’ll still be in a limousine, still have servants to treat like dirt, still have all the perks of a rich and powerful party man. Here, it’s a capitalist party. There, it’s the Communist Party.

Makes no difference to you! Well, you’ve failed both masters. You’re of no further use.”

“What a romantic you are, Delmonico,” Smith said, lips distorted in an anger he couldn’t quite suppress.

“I’ve been accused of that before, but I don’t find it an insult.” Carmine leaned forward in his chair until his face loomed close to Smith’s. “You know what’s most romantic of all? That you were exposed for what you are by a capitalist toy like a sex-symbol sports car. You so nearly got away with it! That you didn’t is entirely your own fault. Think about that when you sit on your stinking toilet in your prison cell, staring at the stains on your hand-me-down mattress! They’ll have to isolate you because the most degenerate killer or child molester will deem you the pits-a traitor to your country. Oh, but you figure you’ll be imprisoned for murder, not treason, right? Rich guy, bribing the warden for special privileges? It won’t happen, Mr. Smith. Whichever prison is honored by your presence is going to know all about your treason. Your books will arrive covered in shit, your magazines will be torn to ribbons, your pens won’t work-”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Smith screamed, his face the color of his bedsheet. “You wouldn’t dare! The FBI and CIA won’t let it happen! They need names, they think I can give them names! I will be very comfortably housed, wait and see!”

“Who’s the romantic here?” Carmine asked with a grin. “They’ll leave you to Connecticut’s mercy until one of your names bears fruit, and none will. The only names you know belong to your own cell, all implicated in murder.”

“You’re wrong!”

“I’m right. You’ll never come to trial for treason, it’s too sensitive. Prison for murder suits everyone, Mr. Smith, and there won’t be any comfort.”

Smith’s free left hand flailed. “All this for a whore?”

“You bet your life it is,” Carmine said grimly. “Desmond Skeps found out about Dee-Dee and Anna, and brought Dee-Dee to the Maxwell banquet to flaunt her in your face. I’m guessing that he blamed you for the breakup of his marriage and then his affair with Erica-why, I suspect you don’t know any more than I do. He was a paranoid kind of guy, and you represented a bunch of things he envied. You wore your clothes as easily as you did your persona, while he was behind the door when God handed out the gifts. Among his other deficiencies, he lacked courage, so he fortified himself with booze that night. What he didn’t know was that you were Ulysses-but Erica did. She told him. Your good luck that he was too drunk to take it in. Yet that banquet was the start of your downfall.”

“Nonsense, all nonsense,” Smith said wearily.

“Not nonsense. Good sense. How you must have sweated! Though it looked as if you’d gotten away with it, you still made your plans in case you hadn’t. Four months went by. Four whole months! Then Evan Pugh fronted up to your office, bold as brass, and handed you a letter. By the time you’d read it, he was gone. But you’d set eyes on him, and you knew what he was. It takes one to know one. The plan swung into action.” Carmine stopped.

“I’m tired, and in pain,” Smith said. “Go away.”

“A bear trap!” Carmine said. “What was its significance?”

“It had none because I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s because of people like him that you’re persecuting me. Not because of a whore. Dee-Dee Hall doesn’t matter.”

“She does to me,” Carmine said, and walked out.

“It was unreal, John,” he said to the Commissioner later. “At first I thought Smith adored his daughter, but he couldn’t have. No one who loves would incarcerate the object of his love in a Siberian concentration camp. He could so easily have shut her away in some plush asylum-places like L.A. and New York must abound in them! No, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.”

“I do.” Silvestri chewed on his cigar and grimaced, then threw it in his wastebasket. “Where did you find the time to do all the research?”

Carmine smiled. “A bit here, a bit there. It seemed so far out that I couldn’t share it until I’d gotten it all straight. I think maybe Smith’s people in Russia were czarist aristocrats who switched camps in time to ride the Communist parade. Lenin was short of educated helpers in 1917 and probably willing to overlook the antecedents of some eager volunteers. Smith himself would have grown up under the system from his tenth birthday. We tend to forget that it’s only fifty years since the Red Revolution.”

“A mere mote in history’s eye,” Silvestri said. “It runs so counter to human nature that I’m picking it only has another three or four decades to go before the greedies pull it down.”

Carmine’s eyes danced. “I love it when you philosophize,” he said, grinning.

“Any more remarks like that, and you’ll feel the toe of my regulation boot up your ass.” He changed the subject. “I’d feel happier if I thought we were any closer to catching Smith’s assistant, Carmine.”

“Not a sign of the bastard,” Carmine said. “He’s lying low and waiting for orders. What I don’t know is if his orders will come from Smith or Moscow.”

“I’m fed up with wars, especially cold ones.”

“Insane, isn’t it? Smith’s not in a position to issue any orders at the moment. The FBI or CIA or whoever are tapping his phone.” Suddenly Carmine bounced in his chair. “Want to hear something weird, John?”

“Weird away.”

“Smith can’t bring himself to use the word ‘spy.’ When he came to a spot in his narrative where he had to say it, he went all melodramatic on me and called it his ‘patriotic socialist duty.’ I’ve never heard anything weirder than that, spoken by a sophisticated smoothie like him. For a minute I really felt as if I were in the pages of a Black Hawk comic book.”

“In denial, I suppose,” Silvestri said.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“When are you going back to Smith’s property to play with your garage controls? It might pay off.”

“I agree, but give me a day or two, sir! The Judge can be very exasperating,” Carmine wheedled.

It got him nowhere. “Tomorrow, Captain, tomorrow.” Then Silvestri relented. “I’ll call the persnickety old terror and beg him to be nice. Once he hears the story, he’ll play ball.”

Abe and Corey were in their office, sufficiently bored to follow Carmine to his room with alacrity.

“We have two controls,” Carmine said, “and five acres of landscaped gardens as well as a three-storey mansion to search.”

“No, sir, three controls,” Abe said. “The one that opened the column might open another door out of signal range.”

“I don’t know about that,” Corey said dubiously. “I heard that a garage door control on Long Island was opening the missile silo doors on a base in Colorado.”

“Yeah, and we can all get Kansas City on our television sets if the weather’s right,” Carmine said. “Well, on this exercise we’re not going to worry about missile silo doors or Kansas City, okay? You’re right, Abe, we should use all three controls. What I want to do today is work out a plan.”

“Delia!” said Abe and Corey in chorus.

“Delia?” Carmine called.

She came in quickly, the only one of his little task force disappointed at the solution of the importance of Dee-Dee Hall; her mission of exploration had fizzled as soon as Smith explained about his daughter.

“Isn’t it lucky,” she said gleefully, “that I have aerial survey maps of Mr. Smith’s property? I got maps of all four suspects’ properties and had Patsy blow them up to poster size.”

“One step ahead as always,” said Carmine.

Though the picture was black-and-white, it displayed most features clearly, provided they were not under the canopies of trees. A border of tall conifers surrounded Smith’s five acres. The house showed all its exterior features, from cornices to the radio shack, and the artificial lake proved to have a tiny isle in its middle joined to land by a Chinese bridge. The picture had been taken with the sun directly overhead-a necessity for a useful survey from the air.

“The white or grey dots must be statues, and the fountains are self-explanatory,” Delia said. “The jumble behind the house must be garages, garden or equipment sheds, the usual appurtenances of a mansion on a fair-sized piece of land. See there? That’s a patch of dead or dying grass, so you should check it for a slab of concrete underneath. My papa insisted on building an atomic bomb shelter in our back lawn, and the grass was never the same over it. He still keeps it stocked with food.”

“Well, I don’t think we should deal with the outside first,” Corey said firmly. “If I were Smith, I wouldn’t have my secret compartments anywhere I’d get wet. And what about a hard winter? Feet of snow!”

“You’re right, Corey,” said Carmine. “We do the house first. Also the outbuildings and the immediate vicinity of the house. He has an army of Puerto Rican servants to clear snow away.”

“There’s one more thing,” Abe said.

“What’s that?” Carmine asked, enjoying listening.

“The controls might trigger more than one door each.”

“Depending on missile silo doors and Kansas City. What a bummer! Who can give us advice?” Carmine asked.

“The new guy working with Patrick,” Corey said. “I had lunch with him the other day. He was the one told me about the missile silo doors-he used to be a master sergeant in the air force. This guy-his name is Ben Tucker-is a utility player. Photography, electronics, mechanics. I can ask him for tips.”

“Do that, Corey.”

“What about warrants?” Delia asked.

“The Commissioner assures me that Doubting Doug will play ball,” Carmine said.

“Huh! I’ll believe that when I see it,” Abe muttered.

Whatever Silvestri had told Judge Thwaites worked. When Carmine appeared in chambers the next morning, his warrant was already waiting for him.

“Commie spies!” His Honor exclaimed, wearing the same face that saw him hand down a maximum prison term. “You nail this bastard to the wall, Carmine!”

Their plan had been worked out: they would start as far from each other as possible, Carmine upstairs on the roof working down, Abe on the bottom floor working up, and Corey in the outbuildings. Each had a control, understanding that, having done it all, they would have to exchange controls and do it again, and yet a third time. For that reason, a system was mandatory, and each man was doomed to the same territory three times over.

It took less time than they had originally envisioned. If the batteries powering the controls were kept fresh, one press on a button could last as long as the thumb or fingertip doing the pressing. They became expert at standing in the center of a space and pressing, rotating slowly as they did so. Provided the signal beamed out above occluding furniture or objects, it was powerful enough to work in situations where a garage control would not have. Carmine began to understand the Long Island garage and the missile silo doors. Wow! That must have sent people back to the drawing boards! But what genius to trace the offending control! Kansas City was more captious by far.

They discovered a total of seven concealed compartments, only one of which was triggered by the folly control. That one yielded a metal box similar to three others found elsewhere, all fitted with padlocks. Each compartment was photographed, contents in situ, then contents removed, and contents themselves.

“When are you going to tell the FBI?” Abe asked, back at Cedar Street.

“Only after I’ve filtered out evidence of eleven murders,” Carmine said. “Once that’s done, they can have the espionage data and the controls. Knowing Special Agent Kelly, they’ll be there for months, and end in tearing the place apart stone by stone. Pity, but I can’t think anyone would ever want to live there again.”

Carmine kept Delia but liberated Abe and Corey to take new cases and go back over Smith’s murders.

His trove consisted of four locked metal boxes the size of a shoe box, a stack of ten thin children’s exercise books, five fatter leather-bound books, and a series of Holloman County property plans, including the Cornucopia Building, the County Services building, the Nutmeg Insurance building, and Carmine’s house and grounds on East Circle.

“These, we keep,” he said to Delia, putting the plans to one side. “None relates to his spying activities.”

The leather-bound books were all to do with his spying: codes, ciphers, a journal written in Russian Cyrillic script.

“We hand these over to the FBI,” he said. “If they need additional proof of espionage, here it is.”

“The microdots were proof enough!” Delia snapped.

“Ah, but he’s an embarrassment, you see. In the social pages of papers and magazines, object of articles in the Wall Street Journal and News-how terrible! What do we inspect next? The exercise books or the tin boxes?”

“The boxes,” Delia said eagerly.

“Pandora at heart.” Carmine picked up the one taken from the compartment triggered by the folly control. “If there’s tangible evidence of murder, this is the one.” He picked up a pair of double-action snips and broke the padlock’s U.

“Ohhh!” sighed Delia.

The box held an ampoule and a vial of two curares, six 10cc glass Luer-Lok syringes, a hypodermic needle, steel wire, a tiny soldering iron, an ordinary safety razor, and two small bottles fitted with thick rubber caps.

“Bingo!” cried Carmine. “We’ve got him for the murder of Desmond Skeps.”

“Why on earth did he keep all this?” Delia asked.

“Because it amused him. Or fascinated him. Or he couldn’t bear to part with it,” Carmine said. “Mr. Smith is a mixture.”

Two of the three remaining boxes contained money, each to the sum of $100,000 in mixed denominations.

“But Carmine, he doesn’t need money!”

“His cache for a fast getaway,” Carmine explained. “Once he got to Canada, it’s enough to hire a private jet to anywhere.”

The last metal box contained a 9mm Luger automatic with spare clips and assorted travel documents; among the passports was a Canadian one for a Philippe d’Antry.

“There are none here for his wife,” Delia said sorrowfully.

“Rats and sinking ships, I’m afraid. Just as I’ll bet he’s left her to fend for herself in this crisis. If she has any sense, she’ll have a cache of her own, and disappear.”

“Remain only the exercise books,” Delia said, handing them to Carmine.

“Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian,” he said as he tossed each of the top five onto the FBI pile. “Ah! We have English!” He read for a moment, then looked at Delia, his face puzzled. “It’s as if he has two personae. The spy thought, wrote and worked in Russian. The killer thought, wrote and worked in English. His entire life is compartmentalized! If ever a man was made to be two different men, it’s Mr. Philip Smith a.k.a. whatever his Russian name is.” He reached for the phone. “I’d better tell Desdemona I won’t be home early. With any luck, I’ll find out who his assistant is, maybe even his hirelings.” He held up five of the exercise books. “Straight down the middle. Five in Russian, five in English. And I can’t leave until I’ve read my five and digested their contents.”

He leaned over, took Delia’s hand and lightly kissed it. “I can’t thank you enough, Miss Carstairs, but your part in this is done. Go home and relax.”

“It was my pleasure,” Delia said gruffly, “but I’m not going home. First, I’m off to Malvolio’s to get you a snack and one of Luigi’s thermoses of decent coffee. A burger, a bacon roll or a roast beef sandwich?”

“A burger,” he said, crumbling. Two dinners wouldn’t hurt for one night, would they?

“Then,” she continued, “I’m going around to see Desdemona and Julian. I’ve been so busy since they got back from England that I haven’t had a chance to find out how my potty papa is.”

“From what I’ve been told, potty,” Carmine said.

The first exercise book contained the sketchy details of Smith’s occasional forays into crime during the first fifteen years of his tenure on the Cornucopia Board. The first entry of all, however, predated his appointment.

“The first Skeps has to go,” it said in part. “My orders are explicit, as the son will be much easier to fool. It will be perfect KGB-as much powder as will fit on the head of a thumbtack, made from the same plant my mother used as an aperient when I was a child. A smaller dose would do it, but the swifter the better. In the first teaspoonful of the caviar I buy him, old miser. He wonders at its quality.”

And then, some entries later: “The old man died, and the clock stopped, never to go again. A good song, I like it. The second Desmond Skeps has inherited, and Phil is there. Phil is always there. But I have refused to sit on the Board.”

Two more entries saw Smith on the Board, though the book made no mention of Dee-Dee and his daughter.

It was kept, Carmine was interested to see, as a kind of diary; each entry was dated as day, month, year, which was not the American way of month, day, year. Each entry spoke about the murder of someone who had gotten in Smith’s way, always dispatched by a dose of the magic powder developed by the KGB-a vegetable alkaloid of some kind, probably, unbelievably potent. Which plant? And why did none of his eleven victims of April third, 1967, die of it? Apparently it caused a total breakdown of the body’s systems akin to the death mushroom, and produced a diagnosis of nonspecific septicemia, etiology unknown.

There were no references to what secrets he stole, or when he stole them; these must be in the Russian diaries. What a feast the FBI was in for!

The second-to-last book contained the Maxwell Foundation banquet, but it also contained many ravings about the perfidies of Dr. Erica Davenport, whom Smith loathed.

“I curse the day Moscow foisted this idiot woman on me!” Smith said, his anger-rarely expressed until now-let loose. “A fool, a beautiful fool who has left a trail a kilometer wide for the Americans to trace. When she appeared ten years ago I inundated KGB with protests, only to be told that she had powerful Party friends out to bring KGB down. Said friends have put her here to report on my loyalty. She transmits my every move to Moscow! Ah, but she’s afraid of me! It didn’t take me long to establish ascendancy over her, to intimidate her, to make her cower and cringe. But fear of me does not prevent her reporting back to her Party friends in Moscow, I am perpetually aware of that. Of course I report on her to KGB: I complain of her, I criticize her stupidity. Her friends in the Party may defend her, but I have the ear of KGB, I hold high KGB rank, my power in Moscow is greater than hers.”

Carmine leaned back in his chair, metaphorically winded. So that’s it! Stupid of me, to assume they were a team working together to steal our secrets. They turn out to be opponents in a game of surveillance, constantly watching each other for evidence of ideological disloyalty. Her Party bosses were appalled at Smith’s lifestyle, whereas his KGB bosses, pragmatists to the core, understood that his lifestyle was imperative for success. So Smith deemed Erica the spy, and Erica deemed Smith the spy. The mere smuggling of secrets was incidental to their political tussle. Only one of them could win in Moscow, and Erica knew she was losing. KGB rules, not the Communist Party.

He read on. The date was the fourth of December. “The crazy bitch! I abominate obscenities, but she is a bitch-a stringy, fawning female dog. Six days ago she came to me in hysterical tears to tell me that Desmond had finished with her services as a fellatrix-he’s going back to Philomena. Oh, the tears! The grief! ‘But I love him, Phil, I love him!’ So what? was my answer. You continue to do your patriotic duty! You will be nice to him, you will feed him business inspirations that I have fed you, and he will be grateful, he will be impressed, he will advance you even higher. All that and more I told her while she shivered and howled, the stupid bitch.

“Now she was here again with a new confession, hard on the heels of my witnessing last night with my own eyes Desmond Skeps arm in arm with Dee-Dee Hall! He brought that whore to the banquet! No wonder he chose to sit far from me and the other executives! ‘I know your secret, Phil,’ he said to me as he passed by. ‘I know what happened to your daughter. What would the world make of the pristine Phil Smith and a junkie girl?’ I pondered the answer to that question as I watched him at the fat banker’s table, Dee-Dee preening in skin-tight puce satin and white mink. It was she got him drunk, of course. Desmond can’t take a second drink. If he does, he keeps on drinking.

“I saw Erica, drunk, weave her way to his table and sit there for a few minutes. Why can’t people govern their passions? Desmond was drunk because he’s missing Erica’s fellatio and unsure of Philomena, Erica was drunk because she’s in love with Desmond. Round and round they go, where they stop, only I will know…

“Today I learned what transpired when Erica sat down with Desmond. She has confessed to me that, in the throes of her drunken state, she told Desmond that I am Ulysses. Confessed to me in floods of terrified tears! It is the weapon I’ve needed to fire at her Party friends in Moscow for ten years, so I made her write it out in Russian, and had Stravinsky witness it. ‘However,’ I said to the stupid bitch, ‘if you do as I order you, I won’t send it to Moscow.’

“I am released from her! I have my lever! Desmond was too drunk to hear what she said. She swore it, and I believe her, having seen him with my own eyes. Now I have my lever, and I wait. I wait to see what will ensue. If the Ulysses story comes out, Erica has to deny it-convincingly. I have my lever!”

What a world you live in, Mr. Smith, Carmine thought, the book dropped as he poured himself another mug of coffee. What a world you live in! Dog-eat-dog is too kind. Snake-eat-snake, more like. It’s Smith who is the financial genius, not Desmond Skeps, not Erica Davenport. They were his pawns, he used them to build that company ever upward. More and more secrets. And that’s how come he could finally dispense with Erica-a written confession for Moscow, himself the head honcho of Cornucopia. He didn’t fear her Moscow bosses anymore.

His plans were made with KGB thoroughness.

An entry on the tenth of December read: “Not a peep about Ulysses the master spy as yet, but I have been thinking, and thinking hard. If there is a peep, I must be ready to move as quickly as a bolt of lightning, and with the same devastation. It won’t be Desmond who makes the accusation-I’ve spoken to him many times since the banquet, and he suspects nothing. All he feels for me is gratitude that I gave him my special hangover cure. He doesn’t even seem to remember that he brought Dee-Dee Hall, and when I asked him why he had, he looked utterly blank. In the end he said it must have been a combination of booze and her ability to perform fellatio-he was missing Erica’s attentions in that department, but Philomena had insisted that Erica must go, and he was desperate to get Philomena back. I believe him on that point; he showed me a suite of pink diamonds he had bought her-a million dollars! Coming from Desmond, that’s desperation. He’s an inveterate miser. It must have been Dee-Dee who told him about Anna, and asked him to take her to the banquet just to torment me, the whore gone sanctimonious.

“Erica won’t say anything, that is a given. Therefore the accusation, if it comes, will be from someone else at the table-someone not too drunk to remember. I do not believe Erica’s protestations that her voice was too low for anyone save Desmond to hear. However, were it to be made in a spirit of patriotic zeal, I think it would already have been made, and loudly. That it has not predisposes me to think it will come as blackmail, either to Erica or directly to me. I have alerted her, which terrified her anew, the silly bitch. All I do is clean up the messes she makes.

“Naturally I have observed all the people attached to the table, so I have a fairly good idea whence the blackmail will come, if come it does. Blackmail is a two-edged sword, and Stravinsky agrees with me there. We have concluded that, if a blackmail threat does arise, all eleven people will have to die.

“If I commenced now, I could kill them one by one over time. The local police are surprisingly good, but not of KGB excellence. On the other hand, I confess that I am intrigued at the prospect of killing all eleven en masse. Such a coup! It would do more than merely confuse the local police-it would bamboozle them. And the exercise in sheer logistics is very appealing. Stravinsky demurs, but Stravinsky will obey orders. All good tools do, and Stravinsky is a good tool. A dream project! I am so bored! I need the stimulus of a completely new and novel project to lift me out of my doldrums, and this particular project is feasible. Stravinsky is forced to concur. Who would ever suspect one hand at the back of eleven deaths, if the way each person dies is utterly different? Oh, what a challenge! I am wide awake at last!”

And there you have it, Carmine thought. Ulysses had his espionage work down to such a fine art that he was bored, needed a fresh stimulus. A nice backhanded compliment for the Holloman Police- we’re surprisingly good, though not the KGB. I thank whatever gods there are for that!

“I’ve discovered that two of the men at the table have wives who can be tricked,” wrote Smith on the nineteenth of December. “Mrs. Barbara Norton is quite insane, but hides it well. Disguised as a bowler named Reuben, Stravinsky struck up a conversation with her. An empty gourd where her brain should be. Norton the fat banker terrorizes her, and she’s ripe for murder.

“The same can be said of Dr. Pauline Denbigh, though I will appeal to her personally, as one snob to another. Her husband beats her sadistically-what scum! She showed me those of her wounds that can decently be exposed. A mind of her quality, scorned for adolescent sluts! I’ll leave her a jar of cyanide. She’ll do the rest without prompting, except that I’ll force her to act on the date of my choice. She’d resist all bribes except a Rilke original. I’ll let her see it, and arrange that she’ll have it after she’s acquitted. I’ll pay Bera a fortune-anonymously-on condition that he gets her off. He will!”

That would do it, Carmine thought. I doubt anything Smith has said in here would alter the jury’s verdict, either. It’s the mention of her wounds that will matter, not the date. A Rilke original! Man, the guy must have some contacts! Not that the jury would ever see this diary. Bera would find some way to have it struck from evidence.

And the feminism aspect fizzled out with Pauline Denbigh. Carmine abandoned it without much regret. All his enquiries had produced nothing that helped the case against Dean Denbigh’s wife, nor had it unearthed a lover. Perhaps she truly was a sexually frigid person. Perhaps all her energies were channeled into women’s causes and her love of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bianca Tolano tore at the heartstrings. “I noted her at the table next to Dee-Dee the whore, and couldn’t tell the difference between them,” Smith said on the twenty-second of December. “A pair of whores! One the brassy finished product, the other the demure, sweet whore-in-the-making. The one in the making reminds me of Erica, so I’ll visit the death on her that I long to give Erica. I’ve seen my tool. A sycophantic crawler named Lancelot Sterling drew my attention to him when I paid a visit to the twentieth floor of Accounting. A crippled runt named Joshua Butler. I admit I went there thinking Sterling might be my tool, but he’s a deviate, not a cripple. Scum! When Joshua Butler left work I loitered in my Maserati and offered him a ride home. He was enthralled! I ended by taking him out to my house-no one was home-and giving him dinner. Stravinsky waited on table and agreed he was perfect for our purposes. By the end of the evening he was so enchanted he would have done anything for me. Not that I mentioned what I wanted! I simply started peering into his more disgusting fantasies. He’ll do beautifully, though Stravinsky, stronger-stomached, will have to do most of the psychic exploration.”

Intermixed with Smith’s cold-blooded planning were touches of-mercy? Carmine wasn’t sure that was the right word. But he did seem to have compassion for two of the victims, Beatrice Egmont and Cathy Cartwright. Eventually Carmine concluded that Smith esteemed them as worthy matrons who did not deserve to die, so should die quickly, painlessly.

Evan Pugh, he was interested to see, was intended to get a dose of KGB powder and die of nonspecific septicemia. Not a pleasant death by any means, but not as payback as the death he did get. Nor as terrifying while the agony lasted. He would have been in the hospital, drugged to the limit and not really suffering the way the bear trap made him suffer.

The three black victims had their entry.

“The waiters will have to die too. Interesting, that for all their prating, white Americans still use black ones as their servants. And their whores, witness Dee-Dee. Stravinsky will procure out-of-state assassins-three, one for each. I like the idea of three different guns, all American-made. With silencers, as in the movies. Stravinsky thinks I go too far, but the decisions are not Stravinsky’s. I-am-so-bored!!! These American fools can’t catch me, so what does it matter?”

Jesus, you supercilious bastard! You’re bored! Isn’t that a shame?

The entry for the twenty-ninth of March was fascinating.

“And to think I was convinced the threat was over! Now I find it isn’t. How stimulating! I am wide awake, alert and intelligent, as their advertisement says. Well, Mr. Evan Pugh, Motor Mouth is going to kill you differently than originally planned. The bear trap will be used, with Stravinsky doing an impersonation of Joshua Butler. The preparatory work has already been done, just in case. I have suspected for a long time that the blackmailer would be Mr. Evan Pugh, so the beam has been located and the bolt holes reamed out one size too small, no threads. Stravinsky has the proper tools, a strong right arm and sufficient height. You shall have your wad of money-a drop in the ocean to me! And you shall have a most painful death. Motor Mouth. So American. The bear trap is made in America too.”

The entry on the fourth of April concerned Desmond Skeps.

“Dead at last, Desmond Skeps, with your perpetual whinging about Philomena, your denial of your own guilt in driving her away. A very good woman, for an American.

“I did enjoy watching him die! I despise those men who obtain sexual pleasure from the suffering of others, but I confess that I was moved to an erection at the sight of Desmond Skeps trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey, eyes and brain alive, the rest of him as dead as a dodo. I played with him, I and my tiny soldering iron. How he tried to scream! But his vocal cords weren’t up to it. Just hoarse yowls. The ammonia in his veins really hurt, but the Drano at the end was inspired. What a way to go! I loved every minute of it. From the moment he told me that he’d appointed Erica as young Desmond’s guardian, he had no further use. He was so enamored of her business acumen, never knowing that the acumen was mine. Bye-bye, Desmond!”

Of Erica’s murder he had nothing much to say; clearly it wasn’t necessary for him to dwell on her agony.

“Stravinsky broke the bitch’s arms and legs one bone at a time, but she gave nothing away except the names of her Party friends in Moscow. Had she had anything more to confess, she would have. Stravinsky especially enjoyed it. We agreed that it would have to be the hired assassin Manfred Mueller-as good a name as any-who got rid of her body. I wanted it put on Delmonico’s property, Stravinsky thought that a mistake. Of course I won the argument, so Mueller took the body there. My luck that the gigantic wife appeared. Not that it made much difference. Mueller got away cleanly. So, unfortunately, did the wife. A grotesque.”

The entry on the sniper in the copper beech was extremely interesting; Smith was very rattled.

“I have lost my luck,” he wrote. “The great Julius Caesar believed implicitly in luck, and who am I to contradict him? But the trouble with luck is not that it runs out-it doesn’t. Rather, it encounters another man’s luck that is stronger, and fails. As mine has. I have encountered Delmonico’s luck. Now all I can do is send him in a thousand different directions at once. Manfred Mueller is willing to kill as many of Holloman’s illustrious citizens as he can, and lay down his own life in the process. His price? Ten million dollars in a Swiss bank account in his wife’s name. I have done it. But Stravinsky says it will not answer, and I very much fear that Stravinsky is right.”

Interesting, thought Carmine. He said something like that to my face. About losing his luck because mine is stronger.

That was the last entry in the fifth book. Tired and sick, Carmine gathered his evidence together and put it in an old box he marked

ODDMENTS-1967. Then he took it to the cage and saw it put among a dozen other equally grimy boxes. Even if the faithful Stravinsky donned the uniform of a Holloman cop and came asking, he would not get it.

Stravinsky… A code name, it had to be a code name. The exercise books had given absolutely no hint as to who Stravinsky was. The music? No, surely not! Any bets Stravinsky is Stravinsky because Stravinsky picked the name? Or the KGB bosses? He’s like Smith, KGB. And here I thought Desdemona had seen him when Erica’s body was dumped. Now I learn that the sniper dumped the body. Smith always spoke of Stravinsky as an almost-equal, as someone whose opinion he respected. Stravinsky was treasured, valued too much to confide his identity to the pages of these diaries of murder.

“I always feel let down at the end of a difficult case,” Carmine said to Desdemona that evening. “As usual, the end of it depends on the courts-anticlimactic, not high drama. Smith can’t escape conviction, but I strongly suspect Pauline Denbigh will, and as for Stravinsky, he won’t even be identified.”

“You don’t think he might be Purvey or Collins?” she asked.

“No, that feels wrong. This is master and apprentice, not a hierarchy.”

“What will happen to Cornucopia?”

“There’s only one hand strong enough to take the helm, and it belongs to Wal Grierson, who won’t like it one little bit. His heart’s at Dormus with the turbines, not spread across thirty different companies.” Carmine shrugged. “Still, he’ll do his duty-pray note that I do not include the word ‘patriotic’ in that! Meaningless cant, when it’s trotted out endlessly.”

“Your mama will come out of her conniption fit the moment she hears the villains have been caught. Though what will she hear, Carmine? How much of it will make the news?”

“Precious little. Smith will be written off as a maniac found fit to stand trial. The information in the exercise books will never be used. He’ll go down on physical evidence-the razor for Dee-Dee and the killing kit for Skeps. His motive? Control of Cornucopia,” said Carmine without regret.

“How can that be stretched to encompass Dee-Dee?”

“The DA will allege that she tried to blackmail him as one of her customers.”

“He’ll hate that! He’s a shocking Puritan.”

“Then let him produce a better reason for killing her. One thing for sure, he won’t admit to treason. He’s convinced he won’t stand trial for treason.”

“Do you think he will?” Desdemona asked curiously.

“I have no idea,” Carmine said.

“He must be a very vain man.”

“Vain in every way,” Carmine said with feeling, “from his custom-made clothes to his custom-made house.”

“Not to mention his custom-made sports cars.” She unwound her legs. “Dinner.”

“What is it tonight?”

“Saltimbocca alla Romana.”

“Wow!” Carmine slipped an arm about her waist and walked with her to the kitchen.

“Myron’s bringing Sophia home,” she said, setting out the dishes and checking her ziti in tomato sauce. The frying pan was already sitting on the stove, the veal and its prosciutto waiting alongside a small bowl of minced fresh sage. “Fancy a sear of marsala liquor in the pan afterward?”

“Why not? Has Myron gotten over his depression?”

“The moment, I gather, you ripped him a new arsehole for making Sophia’s life hard.” She lit the gas under her pan, wiped it with a smear of olive oil. “Fifteen minutes and we can eat.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“Have you decided which one gets the lieutenancy?” asked the Commissioner.

“Sir!” cried Carmine, looking thunderstruck. “That’s not my decision to make!”

“If it’s not yours, whose is it, for crying out loud?”

“Yours and Danny’s!”

“Crap. It’s yours. Danny and I will go along.”

“Sir, I can’t! I honestly can’t! Just when I think one guy is it, the other one comes back stronger than ever! Look at their last two cases! Abe collars the mummy fruitcake in a brilliant piece of work. Right, he’s got Larry’s job. Then Corey collars Phil Smith’s papers in a brilliant piece of work. John, they’re both so good! It’s a crying shame that I have to lose one of them to another police department when he doesn’t get the job. Abe is intellectual, thoughtful, sensitive, calm and precise. Corey is clever, thinks on his feet, seizes the initiative, has enough logic to pass, and copes. Different qualities and different styles, but either of them would make a much better lieutenant than Larry Pisano, and you know it. So don’t go passing the buck to me, Commissioner! You’re the head of this department-you make the decision!”

Silvestri listened solemnly, temper unruffled. When Carmine ran down he smiled, nodded, and looked insufferably smug.

“Did I tell you that I had a call from J. Edgar Hoover this morning?” he asked. “He was mighty pleased at the solution to the Cornucopia mess, and very happy to have the FBI take the credit for what was Holloman Police Department work. Well, I played along all dipshit dopey local cop, then I struck a pretty neat deal with him. I wouldn’t contradict a thing, provided that he took Mickey McCosker and his team onto the FBI payroll. J. Edgar was delighted to oblige.” Silvestri huffed, immensely tickled by his own crafty thinking. “Therefore, Captain Delmonico, there are two lieutenant’s jobs going begging. One for Abe, and one for Corey. And I’ll have a proper number of detectives on my payroll at last.”

“I could kiss you!”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“You can have the honor of telling them, John.”

“Any idea who you want for your own team?”

“One certainty. Your niece Delia, if she’s willing to go to police academy and qualify.”

Silvestri gaped. “Delia? Honest?”

“Dead earnest. That woman is a brilliant detective, she’s wasted as a secretary,” Carmine said.

“She’s too old and too fat.”

“Depends on her, doesn’t it? If she makes it through, she makes it through. I’m betting she will-she’s got all of the Silvestri guile and brains. She doesn’t need to be Hercules, just capable of giving chase and tackling. If she can’t cross a foaming torrent hanging onto a rope by her arms, tough shit. She comes from the academy straight onto my team.”

“What about Larry’s men?”

“I’ll split them up. One to Abe, one to Corey. That way, we each have one experienced detective, plus one new. We’ll choose our second-stringers from the applicant pool.”

“It might earn Delia some enemies.”

“I doubt it. The most the pool will be hoping for are two men into detectives. Instead, there’ll be three.”

“No one will ever believe she’s a cop!” Silvestri cried.

“Ain’t that the truth?”

What fantastic news! Carmine left County Services in the Fairlane, a very happy man. Summer was almost here, though it rarely became hot until after Independence Day, six weeks away.

He picked up the winding, leafy domain of Route 133 and headed for Philip Smith’s property. It bore the scars of much frantic digging, he noted after he passed through the imposing gates and followed the curves of the drive to the house.

“Though,” Special Agent Ted Kelly had told him, “no one’s found another secret compartment. You Holloman cops scooped us. Great stuff you found!”

One of the better outcomes, Carmine reflected as he pushed the bell, was the disappearance of the FBI back to their federal playground. No one would be more relieved than Wal Grierson.

Natalie Smith opened the door, then put her finger to her lips and led him back down the steps to an exposed position on the grass many yards away from the nearest FBI hole.

“They have put microphones inside,” she said.

“How did you know that what I have to say is better said without federal eavesdroppers?” he asked.

The impossibly blue eyes narrowed as the face smiled. “I know because you are the only one who really understands,” she said, her accent far less thick. “Philip found it impossible to believe that a local policeman could spoil his plans, but I knew differently.”

“The faithful Stravinsky,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “Stravinsky? Who is that? The composer?”

“You, Mrs. Smith. Stravinsky can’t be anyone else.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“No. I have no proof.”

“Then why do you say I am this Stravinsky?”

“Because your husband is a very rigid, puritanical man. He has strong feelings about women, wives, whores, the whole feminine half of the human race. Yet on the surface he seems to have abandoned you, his wife. That, Mrs. Smith, he would never do. Therefore he knows that his wife is capable of looking after herself. As would Stravinsky. Who else can the faithful Stravinsky be, except you? Who else shares Philip’s days, nights, thoughts, ideas, aspirations, plans? Who else could impersonate Joshua Butler going up the sophomore stairs at Paracelsus? And why couldn’t Stravinsky get rid of Erica’s body? Because he didn’t have the strength. Mounting a bear trap took every ounce of it. He could hold a pillow over an old woman’s face, or slip a needle into a drugged woman’s vein. His appearance can be so scary that he could walk the streets of Harlem looking for professional gunmen in complete safety. You, Mrs. Smith, you! Don’t bother denying it. You’re a master of true disguise. You alter your appearance from inside your mind.”

She stared across the lawn, red lips compressed. “So what are you going to do with Stravinsky, my dear Captain?”

“Advise him to quit the country in a hurry. Not today, but certainly tomorrow. You must have your cache-money, a weapon, travel documents. Use them!”

“But if I choose to stay with Philip, what can you do?”

“Hound you, Mrs. Smith. Perpetually hound you. Do you think, because I can stand here talking to you as if you’re a human being, that I’ve forgotten you tried to murder my daughter? I haven’t. It burns my brain like a white-hot poker. I’d give a lot to kill you, but I prize my family too much.”

“You won’t stop my going?”

“I can’t.”

“I too am KGB,” she said, staring at North Rock.

“Stravinsky would have to be. I trust that fact will make you welcome in Moscow?”

“I will survive.”

“So will you go?”

Her shoulders hunched. “If I can say goodbye to Philip, I will go. He would want it.”

“I’m sure you’ll have plenty to tell them in Moscow when they debrief you.”

“You would indeed hound me,” she said slowly. “Yes, you would. I will go tomorrow.”

“Tell me how. I want to be sure you do.”

“I will send you a telegram from Montreal. It will say, ‘Stravinsky sends greetings from Montreal.’ Of course I could have someone else send it, but my patriotic duties in America are at an end. KGB will want me back.”

“Thank you, the telegram will be fine.”

A sorry conclusion, but the only one, Carmine thought as he drove away. Today Stravinsky will visit the hospital to see Smith, and say her farewells. He, good KGB agent that he is, will wish her well. Any federal tape recorders will inform those who listen that the grieving wife is simply telling her husband that her psychiatrist is putting her in a private hospital for a few days, and that it’s on the outskirts of Boston. She’ll catch the commuter plane from Holloman to Logan, but not to leave the airport. She’ll switch to the Montreal plane and be away, the faithful Stravinsky. A murdering bitch, but indeed a faithful one. That squat figure, that shapeless body, that rather terrifying face. But most of all, those spooky blue eyes. A contradiction, that’s Stravinsky.

There was still time to make his last call on this nasty case, a kind of valediction his so-called insatiable curiosity made imperative. Namely, a visit to some of the inhabitants of the Cornucopia Building.

He took an elevator to the thirty-ninth floor, and found Wallace Grierson occupying Desmond Skeps’s old office.

“Look what you’ve done!” Grierson said angrily.

“You’re in a suit and tie,” Carmine said mildly.

“And you don’t care, do you?”

“It’s not my fault. Blame Philip Smith.”

“Don’t worry, I do.” Grierson’s spurt of temper died. “I may have found a way out of my predicament, however.”

“May you? Who?”

“You’re quick, I’ll give you that. None other than Mr. Michael Sykes.”

“Ah, Michael Donald himself!” Carmine said, grinning. “He was promoted, but as Smith did the promoting, I wasn’t sure the rest of the Board would-er-come to the Party.”

“Ha ha, very funny! Actually Phil may have done us a big favor. Mickey turns out to be amazing.”

“Mickey?”

“That’s his diminutive of choice.”

“It fits.” Carmine held out his hand. “This is goodbye, sir. I won’t be haunting your corridors anymore.”

“Thank God for that!”

And why not? Carmine asked himself when the elevator came. He pressed 38, wondering which floor M. D. Sykes was occupying. Floor 38, it turned out. Richard Oakes was in the outer office and went so white when Carmine filled his gaze that he seemed likely to faint.

“Is your boss in?” Carmine asked.

“Mr. Sykes?” It came out as a squeak.

“The very one. May I see him?”

Oakes nodded, throat working. It was probably a signal to proceed, Carmine decided, and proceeded.

He found Michael Donald Sykes sitting at Erica Davenport’s lacquered desk, but it was hard to associate this person with the disgruntled denizen of a managerial limbo. Sykes actually seemed to have trimmed down in size yet grown in height, and wore a well-cut suit of Italian silk, a shirt with French cuffs and gold links, and a Chubb alumnus tie. No wonder he’d resented being passed over! He had the proper credentials. Carmine felt a rush of pleasure at the thought that Sykes had triumphed.

A cardboard box sat on the desk in front of him, spilling curly wood shavings, and about a dozen two-inch-high figures, exquisitely painted, stood freed from their packing: Napoleon Bonaparte and his marshals, all on horseback.

“Mr. Sykes, I’m very glad to see you here.”

“Why, thank you!” the not-so-little man exclaimed. “What do you think of my new acquisitions? I can afford to add Jena and Ulm to my battles! Aren’t these gorgeous? They’re made in Paris by the best militaria model maker in the world.” He picked up a splendid figure wearing a leopardskin hussar’s pelisse. “See? Murat, the great cavalry commander.”

“Wonderful,” said Carmine. He held out his hand. “This is definitely goodbye, Mr. Michael Donald Sykes.”

“Don’t tempt fate, Captain! Still, Cornucopia is safe now, and in excellent hands,” Sykes said.

He escorted Carmine to the elevators and saw him leave, then returned to his office and sat for a moment drinking in the sight of his new goodies. Inside his desk drawer was a powerful magnifying glass with a battery-operated light; Sykes switched it on and stared through it, his blue eye huge, its white shot with scarlet veins. Murat was close to hand; he lifted the figure and turned it over, looking for any impairment, any sign that Murat had been maimed. Then he sighed, smiled, and produced a dissecting needle. It went under the edge of the satchel Murat wore and pried a section of the paint away.

“Shostakovich will be pleased,” he said.