Vanishing Act

5

Jane Whitefield aimed the gun at the doorway and quietly stepped to the other end of the kitchen. She held the big pistol in both hands to ride out the recoil without allowing it to kick upward and deprive her of the second round. She aimed ten inches to the left of the doorjamb and three feet above the ground. If he was honest, he would walk in slowly and upright. The gun would look to him as though it weren’t being poked into his face. If he was dishonest, he would charge in low and the muzzle would be at the level of his chest. She would spend the evening cleaning the floor and spackling the hole in the wall.

He walked into the kitchen with his hands held out wide and the fingers spread, as though he were offering to hug somebody. His voice had sounded as though it was coming from above her, so she wasn’t surprised that he was tall. He was slim but muscular, and that wasn’t a good sign. He had short, dark-brown hair and brown eyes, so he was probably the one Jake had seen. His face looked as though he was in his late thirties or early forties, too old to be a sneak-thief. He had about three days’ worth of dark beard on his face, and he looked tired. That part was good.

"My name is John Felker, and—"

"How did you get in here?" she asked.

"You weren’t home, and I couldn’t find a safe place. The motels ..." He seemed to see that he wasn’t answering the question. "You mean the alarm system?"

"You know I do," she said evenly. "How?"

He gave a small, apologetic shrug. "They always wire the windows and doors and things. You can’t get past them. But on the attic of every house there’s a vent at the peak, just under the roof. If you take off the grille, a man can sometimes fit."

"If he happens to be up there."

"Your neighbor is painting his house. He has an extension ladder."

Jane resolved to have the alarm company come back if she survived this. "Then what?"

"Once you’re in the attic, there’s a trapdoor to come down. I cut off the alarm."

She worked her jaw and lifted the pistol a few degrees to aim at his belly. "The alarm has a battery for backup in case the power is shut off."

His eyes settled on the gun. "The terminal box for your system is in your bedroom closet. I couldn’t find the battery, so I connected the battery circuit to your hair dryer until the battery was drained before I shut off the main circuit breaker for the house. They were smart enough to wire your phone-junction box, so I had to be sure it wasn’t hot before I disconnected the phone wires."

"You shouldn’t have done it," she said.

"I’m sorry," he said, "but I had to. Once the phone was off, I turned the power on again so the alarm would still sound inside the house if somebody broke in. I just couldn’t have the alarm going off at the police station. The battery is charged up again. No harm done."

"If you get shot, I won’t be able to call an ambulance."

"If you shoot me from there, I won’t need one." He looked a little hopeful, his eyes now fixing on hers. "If you don’t, I can hook up the phone wires again as soon as you turn off the alarm."

’’That was a lot of work. What did you do it for?"

"I need to disappear."

"And you’re afraid of the police."

"Yes."

"Then you’re a criminal."

"So are you."

She caught herself liking him a little for that. He was straightforward and quick, not watching her for a reaction and then changing his story. But nobody knew that much about how alarm systems worked unless he had some very good reason... or some very bad reason. "Tell me what happened."

He looked down at his feet, then at her. "Like this?"

"You can sit. If you like, you can lie down."

"Where?"

"Right there," she said, almost smiling at his befuddlement. "On the floor."

He sat down on the floor and she watched him as she moved across the room, until she was eight feet away and could be sure nothing he did would neutralize the advantage of the gun. He sat absolutely still on the bare, shiny floor with his knees pulled up, held by his arms. He was lean and athletic and wore a clean pair of blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of good sneakers. The signs were ambiguous. Since he was clean, he probably wasn’t crazy. But men his age tended to let their bellies go a little bit unless what they did for a living involved fighting or they had some kind of sexual problem or they had spent a lot of time in prison, and there was a lot of overlap among those three. She decided he did look a little bit like a prisoner as he sat there on the floor, not at ease but motionless—maybe a captured soldier.

"Who told you to come here?" she asked.

"Harry Kemple."

Hearing the name was like feeling an injection of tranquilizer stab into her arm. The effect should have been calming, but the first impression was of the sharp, silvery needle sliding directly into the vein. Her impulse was to fight it. "Where did you meet Harry Kemple?"

"I used to be a cop."

She felt the ground under her begin to crumble. That was one of the few good explanations for the way he looked. Maybe it would even explain why he knew so much about breaking into a house and why he had a gun. But Harry Kemple would not have told a cop anything about her. So this one must be lying, and Harry Kemple had probably never made it home free.

Thinking of that term caught her by surprise. It was from the game that she and the Reinerts and the other neighborhood kids had played most summer evenings. When grown-ups noticed, they would ask, "Are you playing hide-and-seek?" but its only name here was chase. That reflected its seriousness and scope. It was played with competitiveness and cunning, and there were no boundaries at all. Combatants could and did climb trees to the roofs of houses or run a quarter mile to the river to crouch among the rotted pilings and mossy rocks from the old ferry landing.

Each person who was caught would become one of the chasers, until at last, one person, the best, would be pursued relentlessly by all of the others, sometimes in a roving pack and sometimes spread out to sweep the neighborhood like tiger hunters. It wasn’t enough to be the last one left. To win, you still had to make it back alone to touch the big tree where everyone had started. Hot and dry-tongued and panting, you would make the final dash from the last bit of cover, across the open space, arm out to slap the tree, and yell, "Home free!"

She felt sad. Harry had lasted long enough to be the last one out, but still out. "Did you take him in? Arrest him?"

"No," said Felker. "He got in touch with me to tell me."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because I helped him once. It was maybe five, six years ago. You know about Harry?"

"Something. Tell me how you helped him."

"I was a sergeant in St. Louis. Harry got picked up in one of those group arrests that sometimes happen. You’ve got three or four guys on a dark street and they’ve all got blood on them, and their clothes are all messed up and each one says he was minding his own business when somebody hit him."

"So you arrest all of them?"

Felker’s eyebrows went up and he gave a sad chuckle. "See, when you get there, you’re alone. You call for another car and get out on the pavement and what you think about is that there is no way in the world one man can control four except to shoot them. Usually, they know that as well as you do. You try to talk, you try to scare them with the lights and the baton and all that to get them to separate. When you do, they’re all yelling at once about who did what. If you get one aside to give you a clue, the others either run or attack him. It’s ugly. So what you do is survive on bluster until more cars get there, then sit them down and sort it out."

"And Harry was the victim?"

"I don’t think Harry was ever exactly a victim. He was just the worst fighter. You know Harry."

"I knew Harry."

"What do you mean?"

"I haven’t seen him in a long time."

Felker looked at her for a moment without speaking, then said, "Anyway, when they brought him in he was acting strange. If there waS a fine he wanted to pay it, if there were charges he could file against anybody he wanted to forgive and forget. This is from a guy with a split lip, a black eye, and a nose that was probably broken. At first I figured, Okay. This guy is wanted. But when I checked ... nothing. So I sat him down and talked to him."

"What did he tell you?"

"He had been running a floating poker game in Chicago for over a year. It seemed like it was a great idea. Harry wasn’t betting anything, and he got to take a rake off every pot. He would recruit the players and bring them in and introduce them to each other. He had a couple of very rich guys who liked the danger of it: sort of an anonymous, low-life way to gamble for big stakes. The higher the pots, the bigger the rake, and Harry was also getting a chair fee and catering it like a party."

"What did Harry say went wrong?" She was listening for anything that would tell her that this was a lie.

"Like everything else that’s supposed to be the most exclusive thing in town, this game started to get famous. So the inevitable happened. A man came to him and demanded to get in. The problem with that is there’s no way out. You say yes or the next guy in the door might be wearing a badge or he might not, but either way he’s going to have a gun, and the nice little business is history. The man who wanted a seat at the table was used to getting in where he wasn’t wanted. I forget his name ..."

"Jerry Cappadocia."

"That’s it. If you know the story, why are you making me repeat it?"

"So I can decide whether to shoot you."

"Oh." He stared at the floor for a moment. "What if Harry told it two different ways?"

"You can take it up with him in the afterlife," she said. "So what happened?"

"He let Cappadocia into the game. Harry never knew if what he had in mind was to take over the game or cheat the rich suckers or if he just wanted to play poker with people who had the kind of money he had but didn’t know enough about him to let him win. About the third week, two guys kick in the door and shoot Cappadocia. Whether they were just trying to do a holdup and recognized him, or he resisted, or if they were after him to begin with, nobody knows. But the minute the door hits the floor, the guy who organized the game is in trouble. The rich guys know he put a mobster in their game. The friends of Jerry Cappadocia think he sold their buddy. The police want to talk to him. The people who shot Cappadocia also have to be interested, because the others are, and even if he didn’t see anything, if the inducements were right, he might make a plausible guess. Jerry Cappadocia’s father is semi-retired, but the people who know him say he could make Harry want very much to come up with a name. So suddenly Harry has enemies."

"What did you do for Harry?"

"I asked some more questions. He didn’t think the three men arrested with him were trying to kill him for the Cappadocia thing, because they weren’t armed. He admitted he had also given them fresh personal reasons to hit him. He had been picking up traveling money by doing card tricks without saying ’Abracadabra.’ I thought about it for a while. It seemed to me that what he had been doing wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t a capital offense, so I held the others overnight, put down a name for Harry that he was too scared to make up for himself, and let him go."

"Where did he go then?"

"I don’t know. Maybe here. I didn’t hear from him again until a few days ago."

If this one was a liar, he was good at it. He had the facts, or some of them, right, and they were the ones he could be expected to know. But he was also telling her something she wanted to hear. She wanted to believe that Harry was still all right, that someone had seen him alive a few days ago. "Where did you run into him after all that time?"

"I didn’t. He called me."

"Why?"

"He knew I was in trouble. He told me that if I needed to disappear, there was a door out of the world. He told me that this was where it was."

"And you believed him?"

Felker looked at her, his eyes unblinking but showing puzzlement. "He had no reason to lie to me."

"You didn’t know him very well, and what you knew wasn’t very good. Why trust him?"

Felker seemed to look back on it with the kind of incredulity that people feel when they try to figure out the reasons for the decisions they have made. "Maybe it was the story. It was so ... odd. He said that years ago he had met an old guy on a cruise ship. Gambling is legal on the sea. They have pools on things and slot machines, and on some of them even a couple of tables. Cruises are expensive, so the long ones have mostly people with money."

So he knows that too, she thought. Was there any way to know that besides having Harry tell him? She listened for a mistake.

"So Harry bought a ticket and posed as an amateur who was bored with slot machines and went to find more amateurs. Only there’s an old guy in the game that Harry just can’t beat. No matter how long he waited, all his practice never swung the odds over to his side. The old guy is a South American industrialist. From Venezuela or someplace. One night they’re playing in the old man’s suite and it comes down to where everybody else goes back to his own cabin broke except Harry. They’re playing one-on-one now, and Harry is still losing. Finally, Harry is in for the price of his return ticket, and they show their cards. Harry loses."

He was watching her now too, probably thinking he must be doing all right because she hadn’t shot him yet.

"The old man stands up to rake in the money, and he gets a funny look on his face. His eyes bulge out and he freezes like a statue and starts to topple over. Harry makes a grab for him and gets one hand on his arm, but the other one kind of brushes his face. The guy’s mustache comes off."

She listened, and she began to hear what, she had been listening for—not mistakes, but evidence. He was beginning to sound more and more like Harry as he told the story. The voice, the cadence of his speech were the same. He wasn’t exactly mimicking Harry, because it wasn’t conscious. But he had heard Harry tell this story.

"This is not enough to think about, but the man is having a heart attack. Now Harry’s got a decision to make. When the old guy fell across the table, what he landed on was, among other things, all of Harry’s money and a whole lot more. And he knows that unless they do things a lot differently in South America, a man with a false mustache is not called an industrialist. But Harry did the right thing. He got on the phone, called the doctor, and then bagged all the money and locked it in the little safe in the cabin. The man recovered. Before they took him off in a helicopter, he gave Harry two things—the forty thousand in cash that was in the safe and your address. You see, he knew what Harry would need most... had known from the beginning, because he was no more an amateur than Harry was."

As Jane listened to Felker’s story, the events in her memory rose up to fill in the empty spaces. She could almost feel the hot, humid air that night in late June at the Big Wind Reservation of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho in Wyoming It was the summer of her last year at college, and she had joined the Tecumseh Society, a student group formed on the theory that the Shawnee leader who traveled from tribe to tribe in the early 1800s to unite the Indians might not have been entirely misguided.

Jane’s assignment that summer was to travel with a Jicarilla Apache named Ilona Tazeh through the northern plains to establish voter-registration programs on the festival circuit: the Northern Cheyenne Fourth of July Powwow and the Crow Fair in Montana, the Oglala Nation Powwow and the Standing Rock Powwow in South Dakota. That night after the celebrations, she had lured a few young recruits into the air-conditioning of her tiny motel room. The theme of her pitch was that attempting to deal with the society at large only as Senecas or Commanches or Navajos was tantamount to suicide.

What she talked about were the abrogations of law and decency the state and federal governments had committed against the Iroquois in the preceding twenty years: confiscating all of the Complanter Reservation in Pennsylvania and much of the Allegany Reservation in New York for the Kinzua Dam; taking a large part of the Tuscarora Reservation for a reservoir; and Canada and the United States conspiring to slice off sections of the Mohawks’ St. Regis and Caughnawaga reservations to widen the St. Lawrence Seaway. She was already getting good at this speech, which she always delivered like a messenger from a distant front arriving breathless and weary to warn soldiers who were already fighting similar battles on their own doorsteps.

Ten minutes after they had left, while she was wondering whether she had inspired or bored them, she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to find four old men. At first she thought they had come to look for their sons or daughters, but they told her they were a delegation of elders from different nations. It seemed that earlier in the day, Ilona had tried to impress a tall, handsome Shoshone student with the group’s daring by casually mentioning that her friend Jane had the knack for hiding fugitives from injustice. The elders had come to commend Alfred Strongbear to her care.

She found Alfred Strongbear to be a special problem. At the time she met him he had just finished pretending to be a Greek. He had found it necessary to finish because he had decided not to be just an ordinary Greek. He had been an exceptional Greek, a relative of both Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos who had enormous projects in the works. He had pillaged various parts of the country on the strength of these schemes— using his cousins’ discarded oil tankers as floats to harness the sea tides to produce electricity, assembling a group of American investors to buy one of the television networks because he, as a foreigner, was prohibited from buying it in his own name. There was even one that Jane had never quite understood, about using airport-security fluoroscopes to produce involuntary more-than-nude photographs of famous passengers and publishing them for pornographic purposes under cover of a Belgian shell corporation. By now he had collected a great deal of money from investors who should have known better, and there were a great many policemen looking for him who did.

Jane had summoned her courage, glanced at Alfred Strongbear, and said, "You want me to risk my future, maybe even my life, to save a man like that?"

The leader of the delegation of elders was a Southern Brule named Joseph Seven Bulls. He said quietly, ’’The man is a piece of scum. But he is also probably the last Beothuk Indian left on earth."

Jane asked, "Beothuk? Did you say Beothuk?" It was commonly believed that the last Beothuk on earth had left it in the 1820s. The one issue the French and English who settled Newfoundland agreed on was the extermination of the Beothuk. The Beothuk had never grasped the European concept of private property, so they were deemed to be a nation of thieves.

An Arapaho man of a scholarly demeanor named Ronald Kills on Horseback said, "Look at California. They had a dedication ceremony for Point Reyes Park and who shows up but the first Wappo and Coastal Miwok anybody’s seen in a hundred years. Same thing happened up along the Oregon border. Half the people that showed up for the memorial to the exterminated Modoc were Modoc."

Jane said, "But Newfoundland isn’t northern California, and we’re talking about a hundred and sixty years."

Seven Bulls said, "He knows some stories, and he knows the language. He’s a disgrace, but letting them take him at his age and put him in prison is a death sentence. You want everybody to get together to further the cause of the Indian. Well, here’s an Indian. He’s carrying what’s left of his people in his head."

Seven Bulls had her and he knew it. She had driven Alfred Strongbear aka Alfred Strong aka Demosthenes Patrakos off the reservation in the trunk of her car past a roadblock of state cops who had traced him that far and figured he would try to hide in the crowd.

She had been the one who made Alfred Strongbear a Venezuelan. She had been new at the craft in those days, but she had an aptitude for it. In the early part of the century, people used to take a name off a gravestone and get a copy of the dead person’s birth certificate, which they used to start collecting other documents in that name. By the eighties that method wasn’t working in the United States anymore, because it had been done too often. But Jane gambled that it might still work in a country where there wasn’t much demand for false identities and the records weren’t all computerized. Jane had a college friend named Manuela Corridos who was spending her summer vacation at home learning her parents’ sugar business in Merida, Venezuela. Manuela had found it exciting to collect the names and file the papers.

The bargain the elders had made with Alfred Strongbear was that within one year he would make one thousand hours of videotape recordings of the stories his parents and grandparents had told him—Beothuk mythology and cosmology, anecdotes about the old times, and whatever else they had managed to retain over five or six generations—and one thousand hours of videotapes in the lost language of the Beothuk. When Jane had seen him off in New York on what must have been the first of many cruises, he had given her a blessing in a language she didn’t know, winked, walked up the gangplank, and said something to the purser in Spanish. She had felt relieved to see the last of him.

A year later she received an envelope with the return address "Kills on Horseback, Big Wind Reservation, Wyoming." Inside was a photocopy of a letter from a professor in the anthropology department of the University of California at Berkeley. It said that the first five hundred hours of the tapes had been copied, circulated to experts, and analyzed. They were in an unaffiliated language that showed many similarities with what had been pieced together of the Beothuk Language Isolate. He needed to know more about Alfred Strongbear. Jane had sent the letter on to the mysterious Venezuelan in care of the shipping line.

Four years later, Alfred had sent her Harry Kemple. It had been the middle of a cold winter night, with the wind blowing hard across the river from Canada, and she was wearing thick wool socks and a flannel bath-robe. She had just come in from a trip to Chicago to transplant a teenaged boy named Raul. She had done this to hide him from a Los Angeles street gang who would only temporarily remain under the impression that they had succeeded in beating him to death for quitting. When Harry had said, "My name’s Harry Kemple and I’m from Chicago," her first thought was that he had something to do with Raul. He had said it apologetically, as people spoke when they came to announce that somebody had died.

Somebody had. Harry told her the story of meeting Alfred Strongbear first as a kind of credential, but he got around to the part about Jerry Cappadocia soon enough.

Harry told it to her differently. She could see him telling it now. "So Jerry Cappadocia walks up to me in the middle of the lunch hour at Mom’s. Hell, it was worse than that. What walks up to me is not a guy but a couple. What I see first is the girl. She looks like a cheerleader in one of those movies about cheerleaders where the whole thing is a waste of time until they end up in the shower, you know?" Jane didn’t, so he explained. "She’s very blond, very smooth, very young. Now, Mom’s has not seen a girl like this for some time. Mom’s is not in the guidebooks. Mom’s is what the polite would call a hole. It’s likely that this is the only female in the place who still has all her own teeth. So every head in the room turns to stare at her and each of her components. And to make matters worse, her name is Lenore. Not Eleanor, not Lena. Lenore. It actually occurred to me after I knew Jerry Cappadocia that having her was some kind of security measure—like in a war, they send in a big artillery barrage and aerial bombardment and flares to dazzle the enemy before a few little guys in olive-drab suits slip out of their foxholes and attack. But he seemed to really like her. I actually heard that she wasn’t even his full-time. He had to compete, because she couldn’t decide if she liked him or somebody else better.

"Anyway, now that he’s got the attention of half of Cook County, he makes his announcement. He likes to play poker, and he is interested in an invitation to my game."

Felker hadn’t mentioned any of this. Maybe Harry had told him an abbreviated version. Harry had been talking to a cop, and when someone talked to a cop, he tried to say the things that mattered. What mattered would have been the murder.

She tried to bring back what Harry had told her about the murder. "So Jerry Cappadocia is a bit ahead. I’ve been watching his hands like I’m considering putting mustard on them and eating them. It had occurred to me that a man like Jerry might very well be waiting for a chance to palm cards or even slip in some readers. Not that he needed the money, but because it was a reflex. This was not a sportsman; this was a thief. So far I hadn’t caught him at it, but tonight he was getting a little ahead, and that could mean he was doing it or it could mean nothing. But when amateurs start to see those chips piling up in front of them, even the best of them get some kind of euphoria, and they take chances.

"I had been drinking club soda all night to keep my head clear, but by now it has to go somewhere. I’m a little nervous about leaving the room to go to the can at this time, but I convince myself that this may be the best thing to do. If Jerry is going to cheat, he’ll pick the time when I’m gone to do it. That night the game was in an old-fashioned motel with eight little cabins. The bathroom is right behind Jerry, who always liked to face the front door, for obvious reasons.

"So I go into the bathroom and find that five or six bottles of club soda take a long time to drain out of a person. This gives me lots of time to stand there looking around. I notice that there’s a vent over the door. If I put one foot on the bathtub and hold on to the towel rack on the door, I can actually see down into the room. Better than that, I can see it from above, the way the bosses watch the dealers in Las Vegas. There’s only one thing I haven’t figured out, and that’s what I’m going to do if I catch Jerry cheating.

"Next thing I know, there’s something going on at the front door. I didn’t hear anybody knock, but I guess somebody did. This guy Milhaven, who is a very rich guy who probably never got a door in his life, says, ’Must be more drinks. Harry, get that, will you?’ He sees I don’t hop to it, so he goes to the door.

"He gets his hand on the knob and turns it, and that’s about all he gets to do. The door is kicked in, and it hits him. He’s on the ground. The two guys who kicked it in are already inside. One of them holds his gun in two hands to aim and pumps two rounds into Jerry Cappadocia’s chest, while the other bends over Milhaven and puts one into his forehead. There are four more guys in the game, and they go crazy. Nadler the lawyer charges toward the door, but the guy who shot Jerry stands his ground and drops him, then steps aside to let Nadler fall while he aims again. Somebody kicks over the table, and Villard the grocery king and Smith the broker duck behind it. I could have told them this was going to turn out to be a bad idea. They each get hit three or four times through the green felt. Hallman, who owns a bunch of sporting-goods stores, decides to go acrobatic and dive through the closed window. He gets two steps before they clip him, so what hits the window is a dead Hallman. About this time I hear another shot, and I’m ready to faint. I mean, there’s nobody left to shoot at but me.

"I’m still in the bathroom watching this, too scared to move. These two either don’t know about me or they heard somebody say I wasn’t around to get the door. They start stealing things—taking wallets and watches and stuff. Now, these particular six players represent a pretty impressive chunk of money. Each time they arrived to play, I would sell each of them ten grand in chips. It was a kind of assurance that everybody was serious. But each of them brought a lot more, so they could buy more chips if they had a setback. Gentlemen don’t ask each other to take checks for gambling debts. So right now these two shooters are doing pretty well pocket-mining. They get the money, walk out the door, and close it behind them.

"I’m still clinging to the bathroom door like a kitten that climbed up a tree that was bigger than it looked. I’m shaking. To tell you the truth, I’m glad they didn’t break in until my bladder was empty. After about a minute, I can’t think of a reason not to let myself down. I go and look at the six guys on the floor and see there’s no chance anybody is going to make a quick trip to the emergency room and make a dramatic recovery.

"I think maybe I’ll call the cops. I mean, I’m an innocent bystander, right? I actually reach for the phone, but I stop. There’s nothing I can do for these six guys, but there’s a lot I can do for me. See, what happened is strange. Maybe it’s just a robbery. They got maybe a hundred thousand and change. But what happened when they kicked in the door wasn’t that somebody said, ’Give me your money.’ The first one in found Jerry Cappadocia and put two holes in him. I went to look at Jerry’s body, and sure enough, while they were robbing the corpses, one of them had put another shot through his left temple. That was what I heard.

"It’s possible that these two robbers were good judges of character and realized in a tenth of a second that if anybody was going to give them trouble it was Jerry C., or maybe he made a move I didn’t catch and the robber panicked. I don’t know. But it looked to me like one of those situations where somebody wanted to kill one particular man and everything else was just to cover that. At this point I start thinking about how this affects my future. I can be excused for that because I’ve just established that I’m the only guy in the room who has one. The room, in fact, is my first problem. It would not take the C.I.A. to figure out who rented the room for the game. There’s also the fact that Jerry C. heard about the game a month before. If he had, just about anybody else could have too. And even if for some reason he didn’t tell his buddies about it, there was his girl."

"Lenore?" asked Jane.

"Yeah, Lenore," he said. "Her last name was Sanders."

"She would go to the police?"

"The police were my primary concern," said Harry. "But they were not my ultimate concern. One way or another the police were going to find out it was my game. They were also capable of counting the bodies and noticing that mine wasn’t one of them. Would this cause me harm? Some inconvenience, certainly. They would try to find me and hold me for questioning. But there were other considerations. I start thinking about the five original gentlemen I recruited for my game: Villard, Milhaven, Nadler, Hallman, and Smith. I realize I don’t really know much about them. If I get picked up and questioned and let go, are their families and friends going to forget it? Maybe. But in my experience, nobody in this country gets rich by accident. A lot of people who haven’t gotten caught at anything are pretty ruthless. The heirs and colleagues of men like that can be pretty ruthless too. And speaking of heirs and colleagues—"

"—Jerry Cappadocia," she said.

"Yes," said Harry. "Him I don’t have to wonder about. I know about his colleagues. A couple of them used to show up once a week in the attic of a furniture store where Handy Andy Gurlich ran his bookie operation to collect the Cappadocia family’s license fees. Any two of them together were evidence that human evolution is not a straight line. There are lots of dead ends and throwbacks.

"Then there’s the question of heirs. Jerry Cappadocia’s father has a certain renown. He had announced a couple of years back that he was retiring and Jerry would run the family businesses. This is a man who spent forty years building those businesses with his hands, and what they consist of is killing people who don’t give him money. He’s healthy, no more than sixty-some years old. I’ve heard he speaks English like a native, except there are a few words he never learned, like mercy. What is this man going to do when he learns his only child has been killed? It’s true I was a little worried about getting picked up by the police for questioning, but it was only because they’re the ones people call when they hear shots, and they drive through red lights to get there quickly. What was really on my mind was getting picked up later for questioning by Jerry Cappadocia’s father.

"And that brought to mind another problem. I really didn’t know anything. I saw two men kick in the door and murder six men and then spend five minutes kneeling on the floor to search them. I had never seen either of them before. I didn’t see their car, if they had one. They both wore white coats they stole out of the motel’s linen cart. I saw them through a vent, so most of what I saw was backs and the tops of heads covered with navy watch caps. But if these two shooters read in the papers that there was a guy who was watching them, what were they going to do? I mean, if the first order of business when they kicked in the door was shooting Jerry Cappadocia, they must have known who he was, right? They had to know what would happen to them if Mr. Cappadocia found out who it was that killed his son."

"Are you sure they’d know about Jerry’s father?" she asked.

"I know you’re not from Chicago, but trust me," Harry said. "Not knowing about Mr. Cappadocia is like saying, ’You mean Nancy Sinatra has a father?’ "

"So they’re probably looking for you too."

"As soon as they reload."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want to disappear for a little while," he said. "I don’t know who these two guys are, so I can’t get the police off my back by telling them, and I certainly can’t get Mr. C. off my back. And if I’m right, these two guys were not working on their own. Somebody hired them to kill Jerry C. In fact, this is the only bright spot."

"This is a bright spot?" she asked.

"For me it is. These days my standards are lower than other people’s. I figure the reason to hit Jerry is somebody wants to take over the Cappadocia operations. If that somebody now makes a move on Jerry’s father or goes around trying to slide Cappadocia businesses onto their own inventory, the somebody gets a name. Then I got nothing to tell anybody that they don’t know already. There’s no reason to put my feet in a meat grinder to ask me questions, and no reason to cut my head off to keep me from answering them."

As Jane brought it all back, this was the part that came back to her most vividly. Harry was only going to have to disappear for a little while. She could see him saying it, his face haggard and hopeful, like the face of a flood victim saying the rain had to stop soon. It was Harry at his most basic.

Harry had shown up at her door with nothing to offer except the story about Alfred Strongbear. The two robbers had left no money for him, not even the table stakes for the final poker game. He had tried to make up for it with expert advice. He once asked if she liked horses, and she had answered, "Yes," before she realized that he had said "the horses." "Never bet on anything less than a twenty-to-one shot," he advised. "It’s not worth your time. You can’t make anything. The secret is, the numbers fool people into thinking that handicapping is an exact science. No expert can figure it that close. When a horse opens at twenty-to-one, all they’re saying is that it’s a long shot. Fact is, it’s probably ten-to -one, or even eight-to-one unless it’s got three legs. One race in ten or fifteen, the others all go out and trip over their shoelaces." Harry had spent his life convincing himself that the long shots were going to come in. After she had studied him for a time, she understood that this was because he identified with them. If people had been assigned odds the way racehorses were, Harry would have been a twenty-to-one shot. She had an intuition that Harry was going to have to stay under longer than a little while, so she had given him a cover that would hold up. That had been five years ago.

Felker had gotten the essential parts of the story right, the ones Harry would have told a cop to get him to help. There was an account of the murder vague enough to reassure the cop that Harry didn’t know the kinds of details that would make it worth the cop’s while to put him in a cell, but vivid enough to convince him of what would happen to Harry if he did.

She was feeling a very strong impulse to believe Felker. It was just like Harry to have said Alfred Strongbear had given him forty thousand dollars instead of five thousand, and where would any of the story have come from if Harry hadn’t told him? And then there was the way he told it. He had listened to Harry’s voice, and she could tell that he liked Harry, thought he was funny. Maybe Harry was safe. Maybe this one was another like Harry, a man nobody was willing to take in and protect because he wasn’t exactly an innocent but who wasn’t a monster, either. The missing parts, the ones Felker didn’t know or didn’t remember, made it seem more likely. Harry had asked Alfred Strongbear, "If you want a mustache, why don’t you just grow one?" The old man had told him, "It comes in too thin. People would know I’m an Indian."

Jane said, "All right. You can get up now." She relaxed her arm to let the gun muzzle point down at the floor and walked into the living room.

"You’ll help me?" he asked.

"I didn’t say that," she said. "I’m just not afraid enough of you to shoot you. Go connect my phone."