Peter Straub
MAGIC TERROR
[7 tales]

Copyright

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Georges Borchardt, Inc., for permission to reprint six lines from ‘Down by the Station, Early in the Morning’, from A Wave, by John Ashbery (New York: Viking, 1984). Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.

All of the pieces in this work have been previously published: ‘Ashputtle’ was originally published in Black Thorn, White Rose, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (William Morrow, 1994); ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ was originally published in Murder on the Run, by the Adams Round Table (Berkley, 1998); ‘The Ghost Village’ was originally published in The Mists from Beyond, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg (ROC, 1993); ‘Porkpie Hat’ was originally published in Murder for Halloween, edited by Michele Slung and Roland Hartman (Mysterious Press, 1994); ‘Bunny Is Good Bread’ was originally published, under the title ‘Fee’, in Borderlands 4, edited by Elizabeth E. Monteleone and Thomas F. Monteleone (Borderlands Press, 1994); ‘Hunger, an Introduction’ was originally published in Ghosts, edited by Peter Straub (Borderlands Press, 1995); and ‘Mr Clubb and ‘Mr Cuff was originally published in Murder for Revenge, edited by Otto Penzler (Delacorte Press, 1998).

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperColIinsPublishers 2001

First published in the USA by Random House 2000

Copyright © Peter Straub 2000

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN; 9780007109906

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007401574

Version: 2016-08-10

Dedication

For Lawrence Block

Epigraph

The result is magic, then terror, then pity at the emptiness, Then air gradually bathing and filling the emptiness as it leaks, Emoting all over something that is probably mere reportage. But nevertheless likes being emoted on.

… the light

From the lighthouse that protects us as it pushes us away.

‘Down by the Station, Early in the Morning.’ JOHN ASHBERY

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Ashputtle

Isn’t It Romantic?

The Ghost Village

Bunny Is Good Bread

Porkpie Hat

Hunger, an Introduction

Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff

About the Author

Also by Peter Straub

Praise

About the Publisher

Ashputtle

People think that teaching little children has something to do with helping other people, something to do with service. People think that if you teach little children, you must love them. People get what they need from thoughts like this.

People think that if you happen to be very fat and are a person who acts happy and cheerful all the time, you are probably pretending to be that way in order to make them forget how fat you are, or cause them to forgive you for being so fat. They make this assumption, thinking you are so stupid that you imagine that you’re getting away with this charade. From this assumption, they get confidence in the superiority of their intelligence over yours, and they get to pity you, too.

Those figments, those stepsisters, came to me and said, Don’t you know that we want to help you? They came to me and said, Can you tell us what your life is like?

These moronic questions they asked over and over: Are you all right? Is anything happening to you? Can you talk to us now, darling? Can you tell us about your life?

I stared straight ahead, not looking at their pretty hair or pretty eyes or pretty mouths. I looked over their shoulders at the pattern on the wallpaper and tried not to blink until they stood up and went away.

What my life was like? What was happening to me?

Nothing was happening to me. I was all right.

They smiled briefly, like a twitch in their eyes and mouths, before they stood up and left me alone. I sat still on my chair and looked at the wallpaper while they talked to Zena.

The wallpaper was yellow, with white lines going up and down through it. The lines never touched – just when they were about to run into each other, they broke, and the fat thick yellow kept them apart.

I liked seeing the white lines hanging in the fat yellow, each one separate.

When the figments called me darling, ice and snow stormed into my mouth and went pushing down my throat into my stomach, freezing everything. They didn’t know I was nothing, that I would never be like them, they didn’t know that the only part of me that was not nothing was a small hard stone right at the center of me.

That stone has a name. MOTHER.

If you are a female kindergarten teacher in her fifties who happens to be very fat, people imagine that you must be truly dedicated to their children, because you cannot possibly have any sort of private life. If they are the parents of the children in your kindergarten class, they are almost grateful that you are so grotesque, because it means that you must really care about their children. After all, even though you couldn’t possibly get any other sort of job, you can’t be in it for the money, can you? Because what do people know about your salary? They know that garbage men make more money than kindergarten teachers. So at least you didn’t decide to take care of their delightful, wonderful, lovable little children just because you thought you’d get rich, no no.

Therefore, even though they disbelieve all your smiles, all your pretty ways, even though they really do think of you with a mixture of pity and contempt, a little gratitude gets in there.

Sometimes when I meet with one of these parents, say a fluffy-haired young lawyer, say named Arnold Zoeller, Arnold and his wife, Kathi, Kathi with an i, mind you, sometimes when I sit behind my desk and watch these two slim handsome people struggle to keep the pity and contempt out of their well-cared-for faces, I catch that gratitude heating up behind their eyes.

Arnold and Kathi believe that a pathetic old lumpo like me must love their lovely little girl, a girl say named Tori, Tori with an i (for Victoria).And I think I do rather love little Tori Zoeller, yes I do think I love that little girl. My mother would have loved her, too. And that’s the God’s truth.

I can see myself in the world, in the middle of the world. I see that I am the same as all nature.

In our minds exists an awareness of perfection, but nothing on earth, nothing in all of nature, is perfectly conceived. Every response comes straight out of the person who is responding.

I have no responsibility to stimulate or satisfy your needs. All that was taken care of a long time ago. Even if you happen to be some kind of supposedly exalted person, like a lawyer. Even if your name is Arnold Zoeller, for example.

Once, briefly, there existed a golden time. In my mind existed an awareness of perfection, and all of nature echoed and repeated the awareness of perfection in my mind. My parents lived, and with them, I too was alive in the golden time. Our name was Asch, and in fact I am known now as Mrs Asch, the Mrs being entirely honorific, no husband having ever been in evidence, nor ever likely to be.(To some sixth-graders, those whom I did not beguile and enchant as kindergartners, those before whose parents I did not squeeze myself into my desk chair and pronounce their dull, their dreary treasures delightful, wonderful, lovable, above all intelligent, I am known as Mrs Fat-Asch. Of this I pretend to be ignorant.) Mr and Mrs Asch did dwell together in the golden time, and both mightily did love their girl-child. And then, whoops, the girl-child’s Mommy upped and died. The girl-child’s Daddy buried her in the estate’s church yard, with the minister and everything, in the coffin and everything, with hymns and talking and crying and the animals standing around, and Zena, I remember, Zena was already there, even then. So that was how things were, right from the start.

The figments came because of what I did later. They came from a long way away – the city, I think. We never saw city dresses like that, out where we lived. We never saw city hair like that, either. And one of those ladies had a veil!

One winter morning during my first year teaching kindergarten here, I got into my car – I shoved myself into my car, I should explain; this is different for me than for you, I rammed myself between the seat and the steering wheel, and I drove forty miles east, through three different suburbs, until I got to the city, and thereupon I drove through the city to the slummiest section, where dirty people sit in their cars and drink right in the middle of the day. I went to the department store nobody goes to unless they’re on welfare and have five or six kids all with different last names. I just parked on the street and sailed in the door. People like that, they never hurt people like me.

Down in the basement was where they sold the wallpaper, so I huffed and puffed down the stairs, smiling cute as a button whenever anybody stopped to look at me, and shoved myself through the aisles until I got to the back wall, where the samples stood in big books like the fairy-tale book we used to have. I grabbed about four of those books off the wall and heaved them over onto a table there in that section and perched myself on a little tiny chair and started flipping the pages.

A scared-looking black kid in a cheap suit mumbled something about helping me, so I gave him my happiest, most pathetic smile and said, well, I was here to get wallpaper, wasn’t I? What color did I want, did I know? Well, I was thinking about yellow, I said. Uh-huh, he says, what kinda yellow you got in mind? Yellow with white lines in it. Uh-huh, says he, and starts helping me look through those books with all those samples in them. They have about the ugliest wallpaper in the world in this place, wallpaper like sores on the wall, wallpaper that looks like it got rained on before you get it home. Even the black kid knows this crap is ugly, but he’s trying his damnedest not to show it.

I bestow smiles everywhere. I’m smiling like a queen riding through her kingdom in a carriage, like a little girl who just got a gold and silver dress from a turtledove up in a magic tree. I’m smiling as if Arnold Zoeller himself and of course his lovely wife are looking across my desk at me while I drown, suffocate, stifle, bury their lovely, intelligent little Tori in golden words.

I think we got some more yellow in this book here, he says, and fetches down another big fairy-tale book and plunks it between us on the table. His dirty-looking hands turn those big stiff pages. And just as I thought, just as I knew would happen, could happen, would probably happen, but only here in this filthy corner of a filthy department store, this ignorant but helpful lad opens the book to my mother’s wallpaper pattern.

I see that fat yellow and those white lines that never touch anything, and I can’t help myself, sweat breaks out all over my body, and I groan so horribly that the kid actually backs away from me, lucky for him, because in the next second I’m bending over and throwing up interesting-looking reddish goo all over the floor of the wallpaper department. Oh God, the kid says, oh lady. I groan, and all the rest of the goo comes jumping out of me and splatters down on the carpet. Some older black guy in a clip-on bow tie rushes up toward us but stops short with his mouth hanging open as soon as he sees the mess on the floor. I take my hankie out of my bag and wipe off my mouth. I try to smile at the kid, but my eyes are too blurry. No, I say, I’m fine, I want to buy this wallpaper for my kitchen, this one right here. I turn over the page to see the name of my mother’s wallpaper – Zena’s wallpaper, too – and discover that this kind of wallpaper is called ‘The Thinking Reed’.

You don’t have to be religious to have inspirations.

An adventurous state of mind is like a great dwelling-place.

To be lived truly, life must be apprehended with an adventurous state of mind.

But no one on earth can explain the lure of adventure.

Zena’s example gave me two tricks that work in my classroom, and the reason they work is that they are not actually tricks!

The first of these comes into play when a particular child is disobedient or inattentive, which, as you can imagine, often occurs in a room full of kindergarten-age children. I deal with these infractions in this fashion. I command the child to come to my desk.(Sometimes, I command two children to come to my desk.) I stare at the child until it begins to squirm. Sometimes it blushes or trembles. I await the physical signs of shame or discomfort. Then I pronounce the child’s name. ‘Tori,’ I say, if the child is Tori. Its little eyes invariably fasten upon mine at this instant. ‘Tori,’ I say, ‘you know that what you did is wrong, don’t you?’ Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the child nods its head. ‘And you will never do that wrong thing again, will you?’ Most often the child can speak to say No. ‘Well, you’d better not,’ I say, and then I lean forward until the little child can see nothing except my enormous, inflamed face. Then in a guttural, lethal, rumble-whisper, I utter, ‘OR ELSE.’ When I say ‘OR ELSE,’ I am very emphatic. I am so very emphatic that I feel my eyes change shape. I am thinking of Zena and the time she told me that weeping on my mother’s grave wouldn’t make a glorious wonderful tree grow there, it would just drown my mother in mud.

The attractiveness of teaching is that it is adventurous, as adventurous as life.

My mother did not drown in mud. She died some other way. She fell down in the middle of the downstairs parlor, the parlor where Zena sat on her visits. Zena was just another lady then, and on her visits, her ‘social calls’, she sat on the best antique chair and held her hands in her lap like the most modest, innocent little lady ever born. She was half Chinese, Zena, and I knew she was just like bright sharp metal inside of her, metal that could slice you but good. Zena was very adventurous, but not as adventurous as me. Zena never got out of that town. Of course, all that happened to Zena was that she got old, and everybody left her all alone because she wasn’t pretty anymore, she was just an old yellow widow-lady, and then I heard that she died pulling up weeds in her garden. I heard this from two different people. You could say that Zena got drowned in mud, which proves that everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the time.

The other trick I learned from Zena that is not a trick is how to handle a whole class that has decided to act up. These children come from parents who, thinking they know everything, in fact know less than nothing. These children will never see a classical manner demonstrated at home. You must respond in a way that demonstrates your awareness of perfection. You must respond in a way that will bring this awareness to the unruly children, so that they too will possess it.

It can begin in a thousand different ways. Say I am in conference with a single student – say I am delivering the great OR ELSE. Say that my attention has wandered off for a moment, and that I am contemplating the myriad things I contemplate when my attention is wandering free. My mother’s grave, watered by my tears. The women with city hair who desired to give me help, but could not, so left to be replaced by others, who in turn were replaced by yet others. How it felt to stand naked and besmeared with my own feces in the front yard, moveless as a statue, the same as all nature, classical. The gradual disappearance of my father, like that of a figure in a cartoon who grows increasingly transparent until total transparency is reached. Zena facedown in her garden, snuffling dirt up into her nostrils. The resemblance of the city women to certain wicked stepsisters in old tales. Also their resemblance to handsome princes in the same tales.

She who hears the tale makes the tale.

Say therefore that I am no longer quite anchored within the classroom, but that I float upward into one, several, or all of these realms. People get what they need from their own minds. Certain places, you can get in there and rest. The classical was a cool period. I am floating within my cool realms. At that moment, one child pulls another’s hair. A third child hurls a spitball at the window. Another falls to the floor, emitting pathetic and mechanical cries. Instantly, what was order is misrule. Then I summon up the image of my ferocious female angels and am on my feet before the little beasts even notice that I have left my desk. In a flash, I am beside the light switch. The Toris and Tiffanys, the Joshuas and Jeremys, riot on. I slap down the switch, and the room goes dark.

Result? Silence. Inspired action is destiny.

The children freeze. Their pulses race – veins beat in not a few little blue temples. I say four words. I say, Think what this means.’ They know what it means. I grow to twice my size with the meaning of these words. I loom over them, and darkness pours out of me. Then I switch the lights back on, and smile at them until they get what they need from my smiling face. These children will never call me Mrs Fat-Asch; these children know that I am the same as all nature.

Once upon a time a dying queen sent for her daughter, and when her daughter came to her bedside the queen said, ‘I am leaving you, my darling. Say your prayers and be good to your father. Think of me always, and I will always be with you.’ Then she died. Every day the little girl watered her mother’s grave with her tears. But her heart was dead. You cannot lie about a thing like this. Hatred is the inside part of love. And so her mother became a hard cold stone in her heart. And that was the meaning of the mother, for as long as the little girl lived.

Soon the king took another woman as his wife, and she was most beautiful, with skin the color of gold and eyes as black as jet. She was like a person pretending to be someone else inside another person pretending she couldn’t pretend. She understood that reality was contextual. She understood about the condition of the observer.

One day when the king was going out to be among his people, he asked his wife, ‘What shall I bring you?’

‘A diamond ring,’ said the queen. And the king could not tell who was speaking, the person inside pretending to be someone else, or the person outside who could not pretend.

‘And you, my daughter,’ said the king, ‘what would you like?’

‘A diamond ring,’ said the daughter.

The king smiled and shook his head.

‘Then nothing,’ said the daughter. ‘Nothing at all.’

When the king came home, he presented the queen with a diamond ring in a small blue box, and the queen opened the box and smiled at the ring and said, ‘It’s a very small diamond, isn’t it?’ The king’s daughter saw him stoop forward, his face whitening, as if he had just lost half his blood. ‘I like my small diamond,’ said the queen, and the king straightened up, although he still looked white and shaken. He patted his daughter on the head on his way out of the room, but the girl merely looked forward and said nothing, in return for the nothing he had given her.

And that night, when the rest of the palace was asleep, the king’s daughter crept to the kitchen and ate half of a loaf of bread and most of a quart of homemade peach ice cream. This was the most delicious food she had ever eaten in her whole entire life. The bread tasted like the sun on the wheatfields, and inside the taste of the sun was the taste of the bursting kernels of the wheat, even of the rich dark crumbly soil that surrounded the roots of the wheat, even of the lives of the bugs and animals that had scurried through the wheat, even of the droppings of those foxes, beetles, and mice. And the homemade peach ice cream tasted overwhelmingly of sugar, cream, and peaches, but also of the bark and meat of the peach tree and the pink feet of the birds that had landed on it, and the sharp, brittle voices of those birds, also of the effort of the hand crank, of the stained, whorly wood of its sides, and of the sweat of the man who had worked it so long. Every taste should be as complicated as possible, and every taste goes up and down at the same time: up past the turtledoves to the far reaches of the sky, so that one final taste in everything is whiteness, and down all the way to the mud at the bottom of graves, then to the mud beneath that mud, so that another final taste in everything, in even peach ice cream, is the taste of blackness.

From about this time, the king’s daughter began to attract undue attention. From the night of the whiteness of turtledoves and the blackness of grave-mud to the final departure of the stepsisters was a period of something like six months.

I thought of myself as a work of art. I caused responses without being responsible for them. This is the great freedom of art.

They asked questions that enforced the terms of their own answers.Don’t you know we want to help you? Such a question implies only two possible answers, 1: no, 2: yes. The stepsisters never understood the queen’s daughter, therefore the turtledoves pecked out their eyes, first on the one side, then on the other. The correct answer – 3: person to whom question is directed is not the one in need of help – cannot be given. Other correct answers, such as 4: help shall come from other sources, and 5: neither knowledge nor help mean what you imagine they mean, are also forbidden by the form of the question.

Assignment for tonight: make a list of proper but similarly forbidden answers to the question What is happening to you? Note: be sure to consider conditions imposed by the use of the word happening.

The stepsisters arrived from the city in grand state. They resembled peacocks. The stepsisters accepted Zena’s tea, they admired the house, the paintings, the furniture, just as if admiring these things, which everybody admired, meant that they, too, should be admired. The stepsisters wished to remove the king’s daughter from this setting, but their power was not so great. Zena would not permit it, nor would the ailing king.(At night, Zena placed her subtle mouth over his sleeping mouth and drew breath straight out of his body.) Zena said that the condition of the king’s daughter would prove to be temporary. The child was eating well. She was loved. In time, she would return to herself.

When the figments asked, What is happening to you? I could have answered, Zena is happening to me. This answer would not have been understood. Neither would the answer, My mother is happening to me.

Undue attention came about in the following fashion. Zena knew all about my midnight feasts, but was indifferent to them. Zena knew that each person must acquire what she needs. This is as true for a king’s daughter as for any ordinary commoner. But she was ignorant of what I did in the name of art. Misery and anger made me a great artist, though now I am a much greater artist. I think I was twelve.(The age of an artist is of no importance.) Both my mother and Zena were happening to me, and I was happening to them, too. Such is the world of women. My mother, deep in her mud-grave, hated Zena. Zena, second in the king’s affections, hated my mother. Speaking from the center of the stone at the center of me, my mother frequently advised me on how to deal with Zena. Silently, speaking with her eyes, Zena advised me on how to deal with my mother. I, who had to deal with both of them, hated them both.

And I possessed an adventurous mind.

The main feature of adventure is that it goes forward into unknown country.

Adventure is filled with a nameless joy.

Alone in my room in the middle of Saturday, on later occasions after my return from school, I removed my clothes and placed them neatly on my bed.(My canopied bed.) I had no feelings, apart from a sense of urgency, concerning the actions I was about to perform. Perhaps I experienced a nameless joy at this point. Later on, at the culmination of my self-display, I experienced a nameless joy. And later yet, I experienced the same nameless joy at the conclusions of my various adventures in art. In each of these adventures as in the first, I created responses not traceable within the artwork, but which derived from the conditions, etc., of the audience. Alone and unclothed now in my room, ready to create responses, I squatted on my heels and squeezed out onto the carpet a long cylinder of fecal matter, the residue of, dinner not included, an entire loaf of seven-grain bread, half a box of raisins, a can of peanuts, and a quarter pound of cervelat sausage, all consumed when everyone else was in bed and Zena was presumably leaning over the face of my sleeping father, greedily inhaling his life. I picked up the warm cylinder and felt it melt into my hands. I hastened this process by squeezing my palms together. Then I rubbed my hands over my body. What remained of the stinking cylinder I smeared along the walls of the bedroom. Then I wiped my hands on the carpet.(The white carpet.) My preparations concluded, I moved regally through the corridors until I reached the front door and let myself out.

I have worked as a certified grade-school teacher in three states. My record is spotless. I never left a school except by my own choice. When tragedies came to my charges or their parents, I invariably sent sympathetic notes, joined volunteer groups to search for bodies, attended funerals, etc., etc. Every teacher eventually becomes familiar with these unfortunate duties.

Outside, there was all the world, at least all of the estate, from which to choose. Two lines from Edna St Vincent Millay best express my state of mind at this moment: The world stands out on either side/No wider than the heart is wide. I well remember the much-admired figure of Dave Garroway quoting these lovely words on his Sunday-afternoon television program, and I pass along this beautiful sentiment to each fresh class of kindergartners. They must start somewhere, and at other moments in their year with me they will have the opportunity to learn that nature never gives you a chance to rest. Every animal on earth is hungry.

Turning my back on the fields of grazing cows and sheep, ignoring the hills beyond, hills seething with coyotes, wildcats, and mountain lions, I moved with stately tread through the military rows of fruit trees and, with papery apple and peach blossoms adhering to my bare feet, passed into the expanse of the grass meadow where grew the great hazel tree. Had the meadow been recently mown, long green stalks the width of caterpillars leapt up from the ground to festoon my legs.(I often stretched out full length and rolled in the freshly mown grass meadow.) And then, at the crest of the hill that marked the end of the meadow, I arrived at my destination. Below me lay the road to the unknown towns and cities in which I hoped one day to find my complicated destiny. Above me stood the hazel tree.

I have always known that I could save myself by looking into my own mind.

I stood above the road on the crest of the hill and raised my arms. When I looked into my mind I saw two distinct and necessary states, one that of the white line, the other that of the female angels, akin to the turtledoves.

The white line existed in a calm rapture of separation, touching neither sky nor meadow but suspended in the space between. The white line was silence, isolation, classicism. This state is one half of what is necessary in order to achieve the freedom of art, and it is called the Thinking Reed.

The angels and turtledoves existed in a rapture of power, activity, and rage. They were absolute whiteness and absolute blackness, gratification and gratification’s handmaiden, revenge. The angels and turtledoves came streaming up out of my body and soared from the tips of my fingers into the sky, and when they returned they brought golden and silver dresses, diamond rings, and emerald tiaras.

I saw the figments slicing off their own toes, sawing off their heels, and stepping into shoes already slippery with blood. The figments were trying to smile, they were trying to stand up straight. They were like children before an angry teacher, a teacher transported by a righteous anger. Girls like the figments never did understand that what they needed, they must get from their own minds. Lacking this understanding, they tottered along, pretending that they were not mutilated, pretending that blood did not pour from their shoes, back to their pretend houses and pretend princes. The nameless joy distinguished every part of this process.

Lately, within the past twenty-four hours, a child has been lost.

A lost child lies deep within the ashes, her hands and feet mutilated, her face destroyed by fire. She has partaken of the great adventure, and now she is the same as all nature.

At night, I see the handsome, distracted, still hopeful parents on our local news programs. Arnold and Kathi, he as handsome as a prince, she as lovely as one of the figments, still have no idea of what has actually happened to them – they lived their whole lives in utter abyssal ignorance – they think of hope as an essential component of the universe. They think that other people, the people paid to perform this function, will conspire to satisfy their needs.

A child has been lost. Now her photograph appears each day on the front page of our sturdy little tabloid-style newspaper, beaming out with luminous ignorance beside the columns of print describing a sudden disappearance after the weekly Sunday school class at St-Mary-in-the-Forest’s Episcopal church, the deepening fears of the concerned parents, the limitless charm of the girl herself, the searches of nearby video parlors and shopping malls, the draggings of two adjacent ponds, the slow, painstaking inspections of the neighboring woods, fields, farms, and outbuildings, the shock of the child’s particularly well-off and socially prominent relatives, godparents included.

A particular child has been lost. A certain combination of variously shaded blond hair and eyes the blue of early summer sky seen through a haze of cirrus clouds, of an endearingly puffy upper lip and a recurring smudge, like that left on corrasable bond typing paper by an unclean eraser, on the left side of the mouth, of an unaffected shyness and an occasional brittle arrogance destined soon to overshadow more attractive traits will never again be seen, not by parents, friends, teachers, or the passing strangers once given to spontaneous tributes to the child’s beauty.

A child of her time has been lost. Of no interest to our local newspaper, unknown to the Sunday school classes at St-Mary-in-the-Forest, were this moppet’s obsession with the dolls Exercise Barbie and Malibu Barbie, her fanatical attachment to My Little Ponies Glory and Applejacks, her insistence on introducing during classtime observations upon the cartoon family named Simpson, and her precocious fascination with the music television channel, especially the ‘videos’ featuring the groups Kris Kross and Boyz II Men. She was once observed holding hands with James Halliwell, a first-grade boy. Once, just before naptime, she turned upon a pudgy, unpopular girl of protosadistic tendencies named Deborah Monk and hissed, ‘Debbie, I hate to tell you this, but you suck.’

A child of certain limitations has been lost. She could never learn to tie her cute but oddly blunt-looking size 1 running shoes and eventually had to become resigned to the sort fastened with Velcro straps. When combing her multishaded blond hair with her fingers, she would invariably miss a cobwebby patch located two inches aft of her left ear. Her reading skills were somewhat, though not seriously, below average. She could recognize her name, when spelled out in separate capitals, with narcissistic glee; yet all other words, save and and the, turned beneath her impatient gaze into random, Sanskrit-like squiggles and uprights.(This would soon have corrected itself.) She could recite the alphabet all in a rush, by rote, but when questioned was incapable of remembering if O came before or after S. I doubt that she would have been capable of mastering long division during the appropriate academic term.

Across the wide, filmy screen of her eyes would now and then cross a haze of indefinable confusion. In a child of more finely tuned sensibilities, this momentary slippage might have suggested a sudden sense of loss, even perhaps a premonition of the loss to come. In her case, I imagine the expression was due to the transition from the world of complete unconsciousness (Barbie and My Little Ponies) to a more fully socialized state (Kris Kross).Introspection would have come only late in life, after long exposure to experiences of the kind from which her parents most wished to shelter her.

An irreplaceable child has been lost. What was once in the land of the Thinking Reed has been forever removed, like others before it, like all others in time, to turtledove territory. This fact is borne home on a daily basis. Should some informed anonymous observer report that the child is all right, that nothing is happening to her, the comforting message would be misunderstood as the prelude to a demand for ransom. The reason for this is that no human life can ever be truly substituted for another. The increasingly despairing parents cannot create or otherwise acquire a living replica, though they are certainly capable of reproducing again, should they stay married long enough to do so. The children in the lost one’s class are reported to suffer nightmares and recurrent enuresis. In class, they exhibit lassitude, wariness, a new unwillingness to respond, like the unwillingness of the very old. At a schoolwide assembly where the little ones sat right up in front, nearly every one expressed the desire for the missing one to return. Letters and cards to the lost one now form two large, untidy stacks in the principal’s office and, with parental appeals to the abductor or abductors broadcast every night, it is felt that the school will accumulate a third stack before these tributes are offered to the distraught parents.

Works of art generate responses not directly traceable to the work itself. Helplessness, grief, and sorrow may exist simultaneously alongside aggressiveness, hostility, anger, or even serenity and relief. The more profound and subtle the work, the more intense and long-lasting the responses it evokes.

Deep, deep in her muddy grave, the queen and mother felt the tears of her lost daughter. All will pass. In the form of a turtledove, she rose from grave-darkness and ascended into the great arms of a hazel tree. All will change. From the topmost branch, the turtledove sang out her everlasting message.All is hers, who will seek what is true. ‘What is true?’ cried the daughter, looking dazzled up. All will pass, all will change, all is yours, sang the turtledove.

In a recent private conference with the principal, I announced my decision to move to another section of the country after the semester’s end.

The principal is a kindhearted, limited man still loyal, one might say rigidly loyal, to the values he absorbed from popular music at the end of the nineteen sixties, and he has never quite been able to conceal the unease I arouse within him. Yet he is aware of the respect I command within every quarter of his school, and he has seen former kindergartners of mine, now freshmen in our trisuburban high school, return to my classroom and inform the awed children seated before them that Mrs Asch placed them on the right path, that Mrs Asch’s lessons would be responsible for seeing them successfully through high school and on to college.

Virtually unable to contain the conflict of feelings my announcement brought to birth within him, the principal assured me that he would that very night compose a letter of recommendation certain to gain me a post at any elementary school, public or private, of my choosing.

After thanking him, I replied, ‘I do not request this kindness of you, but neither will I refuse it.’

The principal leaned back in his chair and gazed at me, not unkindly, through his granny glasses. His right hand rose like a turtledove to caress his graying beard, but ceased halfway in its flight, and returned to his lap. Then he lifted both hands to the surface of his desk and intertwined the fingers, still gazing quizzically at me.

‘Are you all right?’ he inquired.

‘Define your terms,’ I said. ‘If you mean, am I in reasonable health, enjoying physical and mental stability, satisfied with my work, then the answer is yes, I am all right.’

‘You’ve done a wonderful job dealing with Tori’s disappearance,’ he said. ‘But I can’t help but wonder if all of that has played a part in your decision.’

‘My decisions make themselves,’ I said. ‘All will pass, all will change. I am a serene person.’

He promised to get the letter of recommendation to me by lunchtime the next day, and as I knew he would, he kept his promise. Despite my serious reservations about his methods, attitude, and ideology – despite my virtual certainty that he will be unceremoniously forced from his job within the next year – I cannot refrain from wishing the poor fellow well.

Isn’t It Romantic?

N steered the rented Peugeot through the opening in the wall and parked beside the entrance of the auberge. Beyond the old stable doors to his left, a dark-haired girl in a bright blue dress hoisted a flour sack off the floor. She dropped it on the counter in front of her and ripped it open. When he got out of the car, the girl gave him a flat, indifferent glance before she dipped into the bag and smeared a handful of flour across a cutting board. Far up in the chill gray air, thick clouds slowly moved across the sky. To the south, smoky clouds snagged on trees and clung to the slopes of the mountains. N took his carry-on bag and the black laptop satchel from the trunk of the Peugeot, pushed down the lid, and looked through the kitchen doors. The girl in the blue dress raised a cleaver and slammed it down onto a plucked, headless chicken. N pulled out the handle of the carry-on and rolled it behind him to the glass enclosure of the entrance.

He moved through and passed beneath the arch into the narrow, unlighted lobby. A long table stacked with brochures stood against the far wall. On the other side, wide doors opened into a dining room with four lines of joined tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths and set for dinner. A blackened hearth containing two metal grilles took up the back wall of the dining room. On the left side of the hearth, male voices filtered through a door topped with a glowing stained-glass panel.

N moved past the dining room to a counter and an untidy little office – a desk and table heaped with record books and loose papers, a worn armchair. Keys linked to numbered metal squares hung from numbered hooks. A clock beside a poster advertising Ossau-Iraty cheese said that the time was five-thirty, forty-five minutes later than he had been expected. ‘Bonjour. Monsieur? Madame?’ No one answered. N went to the staircase to the left of the office. Four steps down, a corridor led past two doors with circular windows at eye level, like the doors into the kitchens of diners in his long-ago youth. Opposite were doors numbered 101, 102, 103. A wider section of staircase ascended to a landing and reversed to continue to the next floor. ‘Bonjour.’ His voice reverberated in the stairwell. He caught a brief, vivid trace of old sweat and unwashed flesh.

Leaving the carry-on at the counter, he carried the satchel to the dining room doors. Someone beyond barked out a phrase, others laughed. N walked down the rows of tables and approached the door with the stained-glass panel. He knocked twice, then pushed the door open.

Empty tables fanned out from a door onto the parking lot. A man in a rumpled tweed jacket and with the face of a dissolute academic; a sallow, hound-faced man in a lumpy blue running suit; and a plump, bald bartender glanced at him and then leaned forward to continue their conversation in lowered voices. N put his satchel on the bar and took a stool. The bartender eyed him and slowly came up the bar, eyebrows raised.

In French, N said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but there is no one at the desk.’

The man extended his hand across the bar. He glanced back at his staring friends, then smiled mirthlessly at N. ‘Mr Cash? We had been told to expect you earlier.’

N shook his limp hand. ‘I had trouble driving down from Pau.’

‘Car trouble?’

‘No, finding the road out of Oloron,’ N said. He had driven twice through the southern end of the old city, guessing at the exits to be taken out of the roundabouts, until a toothless ancient at a crosswalk had responded to his shout of ‘Montory?’ by pointing toward the highway.

‘Oloron is not helpful to people trying to find these little towns.’ The innkeeper looked over his shoulder and repeated the remark. His friends were nearing the stage of drunkenness where they would be able to drive more confidently than they could walk.

The hound-faced man in the running suit said, ‘In Oloron, if you ask “Where is Montory?” they answer, “What is Montory?”

‘All right,’ said his friend. ‘What is it?’

The innkeeper turned back to N. ‘Are your bags in your car?’

N took his satchel off the bar. ‘It’s in front of the counter.’

The innkeeper ducked out and led N into the dining room. Like dogs, the other two trailed after them. ‘You speak French very well, Mr Cash. I would say that it is not typically American to have an excellent French accent. You live in Paris, perhaps?’

‘Thank you,’ N said. ‘I live in New York.’ This was technically true. In an average year, N spent more time in his Upper East Side apartment than he did in his lodge in Gstaad. During the past two years, which had not been average, he had lived primarily in hotel rooms in San Salvador, Managua, Houston, Prague, Bonn, Tel Aviv, and Singapore.

‘But you have spent perhaps a week in Paris?’

‘I was there a couple of days,’ N said.

Behind him, one of the men said, ‘Paris is under Japanese occupation. I hear they serve raw fish instead of cervelas at the Brasserie Lipp.’

They came out into the lobby. N and the innkeeper went to the counter, and the two other men pretended to be interested in the tourist brochures.

‘How many nights do you spend with us? Two, was it, or three?’

‘Probably two,’ said N, knowing that these details had already been arranged.

‘Will you join us for dinner tonight?’

‘I am sorry to say that I cannot.’

Momentary displeasure surfaced in the innkeeper’s face. He waved toward his dining room and declared, ‘Join us tomorrow for our roasted mutton, but you must reserve at least an hour in advance. Do you expect to be out in the evenings?’

‘I do.’

‘We lock the doors at eleven. There is a bell, but as I have no desire to leave my bed to answer it, I prefer you to use the keypad at the entrance. Punch twenty-three forty-five to open the door. Easy, right? Twenty-three forty-five. Then go behind the counter and pick up your key. On going out again the next day, leave it on the counter, and it will be replaced on the rack. What brings you to the Basque country, Mr Cash?’

‘A combination of business and pleasure.’

‘Your business is …?’

‘I write travel articles,’ N said. ‘This is a beautiful part of the world.’

‘You have been to the Basque country before?’

N blinked, nudged by a memory that refused to surface. ‘I’m not sure. In my kind of work, you visit too many places. I might have been here a long time ago.’

‘We opened in 1961, but we’ve expanded since then.’ He slapped the key and its metal plate down on the counter.

N put his cases on the bed, opened the shutters, and leaned out of the window, as if looking for the memory that had escaped him. The road sloped past the auberge and continued uphill through the tiny center of the village. On the covered terrace of the cement-block building directly opposite, a woman in a sweater sat behind a cash register at a display case filled with what a sign called ‘regional delicacies’. Beyond, green fields stretched out toward the wooded mountains. At almost exactly the point where someone would stop entering Montory and start leaving it, the red enclosure of the telephone booth he had been told to use stood against a gray stone wall.

The innkeeper’s friends staggered into the parking lot and left in a mud-spattered old Renault. A delivery truck with the word Comet stenciled on a side panel pulled in and came to a halt in front of the old stable doors. A man in a blue work suit climbed out, opened the back of the truck, pulled down a burlap sack from a neat pile, and set it down inside the kitchen. A blond woman in her fifties wearing a white apron emerged from the interior and tugged out the next sack. She wobbled backward beneath its weight, recovered, and carried it inside. The girl in the blue dress sauntered into view and leaned against the doorway a foot or two from where the delivery man was heaving his second sack onto the first. Brown dust puffed out from between the sacks. As the man straightened up, he gave her a look of straightforward appraisal. The dress was stretched tight across her breasts and hips, and her face had a coarse, vibrant prettiness entirely at odds with the bored contempt of her expression. She responded to his greeting with a few grudging words. The woman in the apron came out again and pointed to the sacks on the floor. The girl shrugged. The delivery man executed a mocking bow. The girl bent down, slid her forearms beneath the sacks, lifted them waist-high, and carried them deeper into the kitchen.

Impressed, N turned around and took in yellowish-white walls, a double bed that would prove too short, an old television set, a nightstand with a reading lamp, and a rotary phone. Framed embroidery above the bed advised him that eating well would lead to a long life. He pulled the carry-on toward him and began to hang up his clothes, meticulously refolding the sheets of tissue with which he had protected his suits and jackets.

A short time later, he came out into the parking lot holding the computer bag. Visible through the opening, the girl in the blue dress and another woman in her twenties, with stiff fair hair fanning out above a puggish face, a watermelon belly, and enormous thighs bulging from her shorts, were cutting up greens on the chopping block with fast, short downstrokes of their knives. The girl lifted her head and gazed at him. He said ‘Bon soir.’ Her smile put a youthful bounce in his stride.

The telephone booth stood at the intersection of the road passing through the village and another that dipped downhill and flattened out across the fields on its way deeper into the Pyrenees. N pushed tokens into the slot and dialed a number in Paris. When the number rang twice, he hung up. Several minutes later, the telephone trilled, and he picked up the receiver.

An American voice said, ‘So we had a little hang-up, did we?’

‘Took me a while to find the place,’ he said.

‘You needum Injun guide, findum trail heap fast.’ The contact frequently pretended to be an American Indian. ‘Get the package all right?’

‘Yes,’ N said. ‘It’s funny, but I have the feeling I was here before.’

‘You’ve been everywhere, old buddy. You’re a grand old man. You’re a star.’

‘In his last performance.’

‘Written in stone. Straight from Big Chief.’

‘If I get any trouble, I can cause a lot more.’

‘Come on,’ said the contact. N had a detailed but entirely speculative image of the man’s flat, round face, smudgy glasses, and furzy hair. ‘You’re our best guy. Don’t you think they’re grateful? Pretty soon, they’re going to have to start using Japanese. Russians. Imagine how they feel about that.’

‘Why don’t you do what you’re supposed to do, so I can do what I’m supposed to do?’

N sat outside the café tabac on the Place du Marche in Mauléon with a nearly empty demitasse of espresso by his elbow and a first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in near-mint condition before him, watching lights go on and off in a building on the other side of the arcaded square. He had used the telephone shower in his room’s flimsy bathtub and shaved at the flimsy sink, had dressed in a lightweight wool suit and his raincoat, and, with his laptop case upright on the next chair, he resembled a traveling businessman. The two elderly waiters had retired inside the lighted café, where a few patrons huddled at the bar. During the hour and a half N had been sitting beneath the umbrellas, a provincial French couple had taken a table to devour steak and pommes frites while consulting their guidebooks, and a feral-looking boy with long, dirty-blond hair had downed three beers. During a brief rain shower, a lone Japanese man had trotted in, wiped down his cameras and his forehead, and finally managed to communicate his desire for a beef stew and a glass of wine. Alone again, N was beginning to wish that he had eaten more than his simple meal of cheese and bread, but it was too late to place another order. The subject, a retired politician named Daniel Hubert with a local antiques business and a covert sideline in the arms trade, had darkened his shop at the hour N had been told he would do so. A light had gone on in the living room of his apartment on the next floor and then, a few minutes later, in his bedroom suite on the floor above that. This was all according to pattern.

‘According to the field team, he’s about to move up into the big time,’ his contact had said. ‘They think it’ll be either tonight or tomorrow night. What happens is, he closes up shop and goes upstairs to get ready. You’ll see the lights go on as he goes toward his bedroom. If you see a light in the top floor, that’s his office, he’s making sure everything’s in place and ready to go. Paleface tense, Paleface know him moving out of his league. He’s got South Americans on one end, ragheads on the other. Once he gets off the phone, he’ll go downstairs, leave through the door next to the shop, get in his car. Gray Mercedes four-door with fuck-you plates from being Big Heap Deal in government. He’ll go to a restaurant way up in the mountains. He uses three different places, and we never know which one it’s going to be. Pick your spot, nice clean job, get back to me later. Then put it to some mademoiselle – have yourself a ball.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Hey, we love the ragheads, you kidding? They’re customers. These guys travel with a million in cash, we worship the camel dung they walk on.’

The lights at the top of the house stayed on. A light went on, then off, in the bedroom. With a tremendous roar, a motorcycle raced past. The wild-looking boy who had been at the café glanced at N before leaning sideways and disappearing through the arcade and around the corner. One of the weary waiters appeared beside him, and N placed a bill on the saucer. When he looked back at the building, the office and bedroom lights had been turned off, and the living room lights were on. Then they turned off. N stood up and walked to his car. In a sudden spill of the light from the entry, a trim silver-haired man in a black blazer and gray slacks stepped out beneath the arcade and held the door for a completely unexpected party, a tall blond woman in jeans and a black leather jacket. She went through one of the arches and stood at the passenger door of a long Mercedes while M. Hubert locked the door. Frustrated and angry, N pulled out of his parking spot and waited at the bottom of the square until they had driven away.

They did this more than they ever admitted. One time in four, the field teams left something out. He had to cover for their mistakes and take the fall for any screwups. Now they were going two for two – the team in Singapore had failed to learn that his subject always used two bodyguards, one who traveled in a separate car. When he had raised this point afterward, they had said they were ‘working to improve data flow worldwide’. The blond woman was a glitch in the data flow, all right. He traveled three cars behind the Mercedes as it went through a series of right-hand turns on the one-way streets, wishing that his employers permitted the use of cell phones, which they did not. Cell phones were ‘porous’, they were ‘intersectable’, even, in the most delightful of these locutions, ‘capacity risks’. N wished that one day someone would explain the exact meaning of ‘capacity risk’. In order to inform his contact of M. Hubert’s playmate, he would have to drive back to the ‘location usage device’, another charming example of bureaucratese, the pay telephone in Montory. You want to talk capacity risks, how about that?

The Mercedes rolled beneath a streetlamp at the edge of the town and wheeled left to double back. Wonderful, he was looking for a tail. Probably he had caught sight of the field team while they were busily mismanaging the data flow. N hung back as far as he dared, now and then anticipating the subject’s next move and speeding ahead on an adjacent street. Finally, the Mercedes continued out of Mauléon and turned east on a three-lane highway.

N followed along, speculating about the woman. In spite of her clothes, she looked like a mistress, but would a man bring his mistress to such a meeting? It was barely possible that she represented the South Americans, possible but even less likely that she worked for the buyers. Maybe they were just a lovely couple going out for dinner. Far ahead, the Mercedes’s taillights swung left off the highway and began winding into the mountains. They had already disappeared by the time he came to the road. N made the turn, went up to the first bend, and turned off his lights. From then on, it was a matter of trying to stay out of the ditches as he crawled along in the dark, glimpsing the other car’s taillights and losing them, seeing the beams of the headlights picking out trees on an upward curve far ahead of him. Some part of what he was doing finally brought back the lost memory.

From inside the telephone booth, he could see the red neon sign, AUBERGE DE L’ÉTABLE, burning above the walled parking lot.

‘Tonto waiting,’ said the contact.

‘I would have appreciated a few words about the girlfriend.’

‘White man speak with forked tongue.’

N sighed. ‘I waited across from his building. Hubert seemed to be doing a lot of running up and down the stairs, which was explained when he came out with a stunning young lady in a motorcycle jacket. I have to tell you, I hate surprises.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘He dodged all over the place before he felt safe enough to leave Mauléon. I followed him to an auberge way up in the mountains, trying to work out how to handle things if the meeting was on. All of a sudden, there’s this variable, and the only way I can let you know about it is to turn around and drive all the way back to this phone, excuse me, this location usage device.’

‘That would have been a really terrible idea,’ said his contact.

‘I waited for them to go into the lot and leave their car, and then I pulled up beside a wall and climbed uphill to a spot where I could watch their table through the glasses. I was trying to figure out how many reports I’d have to file if I included the girl. Remember Singapore? Improvising is no fun anymore.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then they had dinner. The two of them. Basque soup, roast chicken, salad, no dessert. A bottle of wine. Hubert was trying to jolly her up, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. The place was about half full, mainly with local people. Guys in berets playing cards, two foursomes, one table of Japanese guys in golf jackets. God knows how they found out about the place. When they drove out, I followed them back and waited until all the lights went out. In the midst of all this wild activity, I remembered something.’

‘Nice. I understand people your age tend to forget.’

‘Let me guess. You knew about the girl.’

‘Martine is your background resource.’

‘Since when do I need a backup?’ Seconds ticked by in silence while he struggled with his fury. ‘Okay. Fine. I’ll tell you what, that’s dandy. But Martine does all the paperwork.’

‘Let me work on that one. In the meantime, try to remember that we’ve been mainstreaming for some time now. Martine has been in field operations for about a year, and we decided to give her a shot at learning from the old master.’

‘Right,’ N said. ‘What does Hubert think she is?’

‘An expert on raghead psychology. We positioned her so that when he needed someone to help him figure out what these people mean when they say things, there she was. Doctorate in Arab studies from the Sorbonne, two years doing community liaison for an oil company in the Middle East. Hubert was so happy with the way she looks, he put her up in his guest room.’

‘And Martine told him that his partners would have him followed.’

‘He never laid eyes on you. She’s impressed as hell, Kemo sabe. You’re her hero.’

‘Martine should spend a couple of days with me after we’re done,’ N said, almost angry enough to mean it. ‘Let me advance her education.’

‘You?’ The contact laughed. ‘Forget it, not that it wouldn’t be educational for both of you. If you could handle encryption programs, you wouldn’t have to use LUDs.’

It took N a moment to figure out that the word was an acronym.

‘I hope you realize how much I envy you,’ the contact said. ‘When you came down the trail, this business was a lot more individual. Guys like you made up the rules on the fly. I was hired because I had an MBA, and I’m grateful to help rationalize our industry, move it into the twenty-first century, but even now, when you have to dot every i and cross every t, fieldwork seems completely romantic to me. The years you’ve been out there, the things you did, you’re like Wyatt Earp. Paleface, I was honored to be assigned your divisional region controller.’

‘My what?’

‘Your contact person.’

‘One of us is in the wrong line of work,’ N said.

‘It was a pleasure, riding through the Old West with you.’

‘To hell with you, too,’ N said, but the line was already dead.

Thirty-odd years ago, an old-timer called Sullivan had begun to get a little loose. A long time before that, he had been in the OSS and then the CIA, and he still had that wide-shouldered linebacker look and he still wore a dark suit and a white shirt every day, but his gut drooped over his belt and the booze had softened his face. His real name wasn’t Sullivan and he was of Scandinavian, not Irish, descent, with thick coarse blond hair going gray, an almost lipless mouth, and blue eyes so pale they seemed bleached. N had spent a month in Oslo and another in Stockholm, and in both places he had seen a lot of Sullivans. What he had remembered during the drive into the mountains was what had brought him to the French Pyrenees all that time ago – Sullivan.

He had been in the trade for almost a year, and his first assignments had gone well. In a makeshift office in a San Fernando Valley strip mall, a nameless man with a taut face and an aggressive crew cut had informed him that he was getting a golden opportunity. He was to fly to Paris, transfer to Bordeaux, meet a legend named Sullivan, and drive to southwest France with him. What Sullivan could teach him in a week would take years to learn on his own. The job, Sullivan’s last, his swan song, was nothing the older man could not handle by himself. So why include N? Simple – Sullivan. He seemed to be losing his edge; he wasn’t taking care of the loose ends as well as he once had. So while N absorbed the old master’s lessons, he would also be his backstop, make sure everything went smoothly, and provide nightly reports. If Sullivan was going to blow it, he would be pulled out, last job or not. The only problem, said the man with the crew cut, was that Sullivan would undoubtedly hate his guts.

And to begin with, he had. Sullivan had barely spoken on the drive down from Bordeaux. The only remark he made as they came up into the mountains was that Basques were so crazy they thought they were the sole survivors of Atlantis. He had dropped N off at the hotel in Tardets, where he had a room and a waiting car, with the suggestion that he skip coming over for dinner that night. N had spoken of their instructions, of his own desire to be briefed. ‘Fine, I give up, you’re a Boy Scout,’ Sullivan had snarled, and sped off to his own lodgings, which were, N remembered once more as the Peugeot rolled downhill from the telephone booth, the Auberge de l’Étable.

Though the inn had been roughly half its present size, the dining room was the same massive hall. Sullivan had insisted on a table near the lobby and well apart from the couples who sat near the haunch of mutton blackening over the open fire. Alternately glaring at him and avoiding his glance, Sullivan drank six marcs before dinner and in French far superior to the young N’s complained about the absence of vodka. In Germany you could get vodka, in England you could get vodka, in Sweden and Denmark and Norway and even in miserable Iceland you could get vodka, but in France nobody outside of Paris had even heard of the stuff. When their mutton came, he ordered two bottles of Bordeaux and flirted with the waitress. The waitress flirted back. Without any direct statements, they arranged an assignation. Sullivan was a world-class womanizer. Either the certainty that the waitress would be in his bed later that night or the alcohol loosened him up. He asked a few questions, endured the answers, told stories that made young N’s jaw drop like a rube’s. Amused, Sullivan recounted seductions behind enemy lines, hair-raising tales of OSS operations, impersonations of foreign dignitaries, bloodbaths in presidential palaces. He spoke six languages fluently, three others nearly as well, and played passable cello. ‘Truth is, I’m a pirate,’ he said, ‘and no matter how useful pirates might be, they’re going out of style. I don’t fill out forms or itemize my expenses or give a shit about reprimands. They let me get away with doing things my way because it almost always works better than theirs, but every now and again, I make our little buddies sweat through their custom-made shirts. Which brings us to you, right? My last job, and I get a backup? Give me a break – you’re watching me. They told you to report back every single night.’

‘They also said you’d give me the best education in the world,’ N told him.

‘Christ, kid, you must be pretty good if they want me to polish your rough edges.’ He swallowed wine and smiled across the table in what even the young N had sensed as a change of atmosphere. ‘Was there something else they wanted you to do?’

‘Polishing my rough edges isn’t enough?’ asked the suddenly uncertain young N.

Sullivan had stared at him for a time, not at all drunkenly but in a cold curious measuring fashion. N had known only that this scrutiny made him feel wary and exposed. Then Sullivan relaxed and explained what he was going to do and how he planned to do it.

Everything had gone well – better than well, superbly. Sullivan had taken at least a half dozen steps that would have unnerved the crew-cut man in the strip mall, but each one, N took pains to make clear during his reports, had saved time, increased effectiveness, helped bring about a satisfactory conclusion. On the final day, N had called Sullivan to see when he was to be picked up. ‘Change of plans,’ Sullivan had said. ‘You can drive yourself to the airport. I’m spending one more night with the descendants of the Atlanteans.’ He wanted a farewell romp with the waitress. ‘Then back to the civilian life. I own thirty acres outside Houston, think I’ll put up a mansion in the shape of the Alamo but a hundred times bigger, get a state-of-the-art music room, fly in the best cellist I can get for weekly lessons, hire a great chef, rotate the ladies in and out. And I want to learn Chinese. Only great language I don’t already know.’

On a rare visit to headquarters some months later, N had greeted the man from the strip mall as he carried stacks of files out of a windowless office into a windowless corridor. The man was wearing a small, tight bow tie, and his crew cut had been cropped to stubble. It took him a couple of beats to place N. ‘Los Angeles.’ He pronounced it with a hard g. ‘Sure. That was good work. Typical Sullivan. Hairy, but great results. The guy never came back from France, you know.’

‘Don’t tell me he married the waitress,’ N had said.

‘Died there. Killed himself, in fact. Couldn’t take the idea of retirement, that’s what I think. A lot of these Billy the Kid-type guys, they fold their own hands when they get to the end of the road.’

Over the years, N now and again had remarked to himself the elemental truth that observation was mostly interpretation. Nobody wanted to admit it, but it was true anyhow. If you denied interpretation – which consisted of no more than thinking about two things, what you had observed and why you had observed it – your denial was an interpretation, too. In the midst of feeling more and more like Sullivan, that is, resistant to absurd nomenclature and the ever-increasing paperwork necessitated by ‘mainstreaming’, he had never considered that ‘mainstreaming’ included placing women in positions formerly occupied entirely by men. So now he had a female backup: but the question was, what would the lady have done if M. Hubert had noticed that N was following him? Now there, that was a matter for interpretation.

A matter N had sometimes weighed over the years, at those rare times when it returned to him, was the question Sullivan had put to him before he relaxed. Was there something else they wanted you to do?

In institutions, patterns had longer lives than employees.

The parking lot was three-quarters full. Hoping that he still might be able to get something to eat, N looked at the old stable doors as he took a spot against the side wall. They were closed, and the dining room windows were dark. He carried the satchel to the entrance and punched the numerical code into the keypad. The glass door clicked open. To the side of the empty lobby, the dining room was locked. His hunger would have to wait until morning. In the low light burning behind the counter, his key dangled from the rack amid rows of empty hooks. He raised the panel, moved past the desk to get the key, and, with a small shock like the jab of a pin, realized that of the thousands of resource personnel, information managers, computer jocks, divisional region controllers, field operatives, and the rest, only he would remember Sullivan.

The switch beside the stairs turned on the lights for a carefully timed period which allowed him to reach the second floor and press another switch. A sour, acrid odor he had noticed as soon as he entered the staircase intensified on the second floor and worsened as he approached his room. It was like the smell of rot, of burning chemicals, of a dead animal festering on a pile of weeds. Rank and physical, the stench stung his eyes and burrowed into his nose. Almost gasping, N shoved the key into his lock and escaped into his room to discover that the stink pursued him there. He closed the door and knelt beside the bed to unzip his laptop satchel. Then he recognized the smell. It was a colossal case of body odor, the full-strength version of what he had noticed six hours earlier. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said aloud. In seconds he had opened the shutters and pushed up the window. Someone who had not bathed in months, someone who reeked like a diseased muskrat, had come into his room while he had been scrambling around on a mountain. N began checking the room. He opened the drawers in the desk, examined the television set, and was moving toward the closet when he noticed a package wrapped in butcher paper on the bedside table. He bent over it, moved it gingerly from side to side, and finally picked it up. The unmistakable odors of roast lamb and garlic penetrated both the wrapper and the fading stench.

He tore open the wrapper. A handwritten sheet of lined paper had been folded over another, transparent wrapper containing a thick sandwich of coarse brown bread, sliced lamb, and roast peppers. In an old-fashioned girlish hand and colloquial French, the note read: I’m hoping you don’t mind that I made this for you. You were gone all evening and maybe you don’t know how early everything closes in this region. So in case you come back hungry, please enjoy this sandwich with my compliments. Albertine.

N fell back on the bed, laughing.

The loud bells in the tower of the Montory church that had announced the hour throughout the night repeated the pious uproar that had forced him out of bed. Ignoring both mass and the Sabbath, the overweight young woman was scrubbing the tiled floor in the dining room. N nodded at her as he turned to go down into the lounge, and she struggled to her feet, peeled off a pair of transparent plastic gloves, and threw them splatting onto the wet floor to hurry after him.

Three Japanese men dressed for golf occupied the last of the tables laid with white paper cloths, china, and utensils. N wondered if the innkeeper’s drunken friend might have been right about the Brasserie Lipp serving sushi instead of Alsatian food, and then recognized them as the men he had seen at the auberge in the mountains. They were redistributing their portion of the world’s wealth on a boys-only tour of France. What he was doing was not very different. He sat at the table nearest the door, and the young woman waddled in behind him. Café au lait. Croissants et confiture. Jus de l’orange. Before she could leave, he added, ‘Please thank Albertine for the sandwich she brought to my room. And tell her, please, that I would like to thank her for her thoughtfulness myself.’

The dread possibility that she herself was Albertine vanished before her knowing smile. She departed. The Japanese men smoked in silence over the crumbs of their breakfast. Sullivan, N thought for the seventh or eighth time, also had been assigned a backup on his last job. Had he ever really believed that the old pirate had killed himself? Well, yes, for a time. In N’s mid-twenties, Sullivan had seemed a romantic survivor, unadaptable to civilian tedium. Could a man with such a life behind him be content with weekly cello lessons, a succession of good meals, and the comforts of women? Now that he was past Sullivan’s age and had prepared his own satisfactions – skiing in the Swiss Alps, season tickets to Knicks and Yankees games, collecting first editions of Kipling and T. E. Lawrence, the comforts of women – he was in no doubt of the answer.

Was there something else they wanted you to do?

No, there had not been, for Sullivan would have seen the evidence on his face as soon as he had produced his question. Someone else, an undisclosed backup of N’s own, had done the job for them. N sipped his coffee and smeared marmalade on his croissants. With the entire day before him, he had more than enough time to work out the details of a plan already forming in his head. N smiled at the Japanese gentlemen as they filed out of the breakfast room. He had time enough even to arrange a bonus Sullivan himself would have applauded.

Back in his room, he pulled a chair up to a corner of the window where he could watch the parking lot and the road without being seen and sat down with his book in his lap. Rain pelted down onto the half-empty parking lot. Across the road, the innkeeper stood in the shelter of the terrace with his arms wrapped around his fat chest, talking to the woman in charge of the display case stocked with jars of honey, bottles of Jurançon wine, and fromage de brebis. He looked glumly businesslike. The three Japanese, who had evidently gone out for a rainy stroll, came walking down from the center of the village and turned into the lot. The sight of them seemed to deepen the innkeeper’s gloom. Wordlessly, they climbed into a red Renault L’Espace and took off. An aged Frenchman emerged and made an elaborate business of folding his yellow raincoat onto the passenger seat of his Deux Chevaux before driving off. Two cars went by without stopping. The cold rain slackened and stopped, leaving shining puddles on the asphalt below. N opened Kim at random and read a familiar paragraph.

He looked up to see a long gray tour bus pulling up before the building on the other side of the road. The innkeeper dropped his arms, muttered something to the woman at the register, and put on his professional smile. White-haired men with sloping stomachs and women in varying stages of disrepair filed out of the bus and stared uncertainly around them. The giant bells set off another clanging tumult. The innkeeper jumped down from the terrace, shook a few hands, and led the first of the tourists across the road. It was Sunday, and they had arrived for the Mutton Brunch. When they were heavy and dull with food and wine, they would be invited to purchase regional delicacies.

Over the next hour, the only car to pull into the lot was a Saab with German plates, which disgorged two obese parents and three blond teenagers, eerily slim and androgynous. The teenagers bickered over a mound of knapsacks and duffel bags before sulking into the auberge. The muddy Renault turned in to park in front of the bar. Dressed in white shirts, red scarves, and berets, the innkeeper’s two friends climbed out. The hound-faced man was holding a tambourine, and the other retrieved a wide-bodied guitar from the back seat. They carried their instruments into the bar.

N slipped his book into the satchel and ran a comb through his hair and straightened his tie before leaving the room. Downstairs, the fire in the dining room had burned low, and the sheep turning on the grill had been carved down to gristle and bone. The bus tourists companionably occupied the first three rows of tables. The German family sat alone in the last row. One of the children yawned and exposed the shiny metal ball of a tongue piercing. Like water buffalos, the parents stared massively, unblinkingly out into the room, digesting rather than seeing. The two men in Basque dress entered from the bar and moved halfway down the aisle between the first two rows of tables. Without preamble, one of them struck an out-of-tune chord on his guitar. The other began to sing in a sweet, wavering tenor. The teenagers put their sleek heads on the table. Everyone else complacently attended to the music, which migrated toward a nostalgic sequence and resolved into ‘I Hear a Rhapsody’, performed with French lyrics.

Outside, N could see no one at the kitchen counter. The air felt fresh and cool, and battalions of flinty clouds marched across the low sky. He moved nearer. ‘Pardon? Allô?’ A rustle of female voices came from within, and he took another step forward. Decisive footsteps resounded on a wooden floor. Abruptly, the older woman appeared in the doorway. She gave him a dark, unreadable look and retreated. A muffled giggle vanished beneath applause from the dining room. Softer footsteps approached, and the girl in the bright blue dress swayed into view. She leaned a hip against the door frame, successfully maintaining an expression of indifferent boredom.

‘I wish I had that swing in my backyard,’ he said.

‘Quoi?’

In French,-he said, ‘A stupid thing we used to say when I was a kid. Thank you for making that sandwich and bringing it to my room.’ Ten feet away in the brisk air, N caught rank, successive waves of the odor flowing from her and wondered how the other women tolerated it.

‘Nadine said you thanked me.’

‘I wanted to do it in person. It is important, don’t you agree, to do things in person?’

‘I suppose important things should be done in person.’

‘You were thoughtful to notice that I was not here for dinner.’

Her shrug shifted her body within the tight confines of the dress. ‘It is just good sense. Our guests should not go hungry. A big man like you has a large appetite.’

‘Can you imagine, I will be out late tonight, too?’

Her mouth curled in a smile. ‘Does that mean you’d like another sandwich?’

‘I’d love one.’ For the sake of pleasures to come, he took two more steps into her stench and lowered his voice. ‘We could split it. And you could bring a bottle of wine. I’ll have something to celebrate.’

She glanced at his satchel. ‘You finished what you are writing?’

She had questioned her boss about him.

‘It’ll be finished by tonight.’

‘I never met a writer before. It must be an interesting way of life. Romantic.’

‘You have no idea,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you something. Last year I was writing a piece in Bora Bora, and I talked to a young woman a bit like you, beautiful dark hair and eyes. Before she came to my room, she must have bathed in something special, because she smelled like moonlight and flowers. She looked like a queen.’

‘I can look more like a queen than anyone in Bora Bora.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

She lowered her eyes and swayed back into the kitchen.

After parking in a side street off the Place du Marche, N strolled through shops, leafed through Kim and sipped menthe à l’eau at cafés, watched pedestrians and traffic move through the ancient town. In a shop called Basque Espadrilles he saw the Japanese from the auberge swapping their golf caps for yellow and green berets that made them look like characters in a comic film. They paid no attention to his smile. Caucasians all looked alike. Passing the extensive terrace of what seemed to be the best restaurant in town, he observed elegant M. Daniel Hubert and adventurous Martine in intense discussion over espresso. M. Hubert’s black silk suit and black silk T-shirt handsomely set off his silver hair, and Martine’s loose white sweater, short tan skirt, and oversized glasses made her look as if she had come from delivering a lecture. Here the reason for his observation was no mystery, but how might it be interpreted? N backed away from the terrace, entered the restaurant by its front door, and came outside behind them. He drank mineral water at a distant table and let their gestures, their moves and countermoves, sink into him. After a sober consideration of his position in the food chain, M. Hubert was getting cold feet. Smiling, intelligent, professorial, above all desirable Martine was keeping him in the game. What can we conclude, knowing what we know? We can, we must conclude that the object of N’s assigned task was not poor M. Hubert himself but the effect the task would have upon his buyers. N pressed button A, alarmingly closing a particular door. Another door opened. All parties profited, not counting the winkled buyers and not counting N, who no longer counted. A series of mechanical operations guided money down a specific chute into a specific pocket, that was all. It was never anything else. Not even now.

N trailed along as they walked back to M. Hubert’s building, and his wandering gaze sought the other, the hidden player, he whose existence was likely as unknown to Martine as it had been to his own naive younger self. Hubert had settled down under Martine’s reassurances. Apparently pausing in admiration of some particularly impressive window embrasures, N watched him unlock his great carved door and knew that the little devil was going to go through with it. Would a lifetime’s caution have defeated ambition had his ‘consultant’ been unattractive? Almost certainly, N thought. Hubert had not come so far by ignoring his own warning signals. They knew what they were doing; Hubert would not permit himself to exhibit weakness before a woman he hoped to bed. But N’s employers had their own essential vulnerability. They trusted their ability to predict behavior.

In the guise of a well-dressed tourist absorbed by sixteenth-century masonry, N drifted backward through the arches and found lurking within the café tabac the proof of his evolving theory.

Standing or rather slumping at the back of the bar, the feral-looking boy with messy shoulder-length blond hair was tracking him through the open door. His motorcycle canted into the shadow of a pillar. As one returning to himself after rapt concentration, N looked aimlessly into the square or across it. The boy snapped forward and gulped beer. With a cheering surge of the old pleasure, N thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and walked into the square, waited for cars to pass, and began to amble back the way he had come. The boy put down his beer and moved to the front of the café. N reached the bottom of the square and turned around with his head raised and his hands in his pockets. The boy struck an abstracted pose between the pillars.

If his job had been to instruct the boy in their craft, he would have told him: Never close off an option until the last moment. Roll the bike, dummy, until I tell you what to do. The kid thought making up your mind was something you did minute by minute, a typical hoodlum notion. N strolled away, and the boy decided to follow him on foot. A sort of cunning nervous bravado spoke in his slow step forward. All he needed was a target painted on his chest. Enjoying himself, N sauntered along through the streets, distributing appreciative touristy glances at buildings beautiful and mundane alike, and returned to the restaurant where Martine had coaxed M. Hubert back into the game. He pretended to scan the menu in its glass case. Two shops away, the boy spun to face a rack of scenic postcards. His sagging, scruffy leather jacket was too loose to betray his weapon, but it was probably jammed into his belt, another thuggish affectation. N strolled onto the terrace and took a table in the last row.

The boy sidled into view, caught sight of him, sidled away. N opened his satchel, withdrew his novel, and nodded at a waiter. The waiter executed a graceful dip and produced a menu. The boy reappeared across the street and slouched into a café to take a window seat. That wouldn’t have been so bad, if everything else had not been so awful. N spread the wings of the menu and deliberately read all the listings. Can’t you see? I’m telling you what to do. You have time to go back for your motorcycle, in case you’ll need it when I leave. The boy plopped his chin on his palm. N ordered mushroom soup, lamb chops, a glass of red burgundy, a bottle of Badoit gazeuse. He opened his book. Plucky Kimball O’Hara, known as Kim, presently in the Himalayas, was soon to snatch secret papers from a couple of Russian spies. The boy raked his hair with his fingers, stood up, sat down. A bowl of mushroom soup swirled with cream sent up a delicious, earthy odor. The boy finally slouched off up the sidewalk. N returned to Kim, the Russians, and the wonderful soup.

He had begun on the lamb chops when he heard the motorcycle approach the terrace, blot out all other sounds, and cut out. N took a swallow of wine. Across the street and just visible past the front of the restaurant, the boy was dismounting. He shook out his hair and knelt beside his machine, an old Kawasaki with fat panniers hanging from the saddle. After a sketchy pretense of fussing with the engine for a couple of minutes, he wandered away. N cut open a chop to expose sweet, tender meat precisely the right shade of pink.

When he had paid for his lunch, he made certain the boy was out of sight and ducked into the restaurant. The men’s room was a cubicle in a passageway alongside the kitchen. He locked the door, relieved himself, washed and dried his hands and face, and sat down on the lid of the toilet. Five minutes went by while he ignored the rattle of the handle and knocks on the door. He let another two minutes pass, and then opened the door. The frowning man outside thrust past him and closed the door with a thump. N turned away from the dining room and continued down the passage to a service door, which let him out into a narrow brick alley. A vent pumped out heat above overflowing garbage bins. N moved toward the top of the alley, where a motorcycle revved and revved like a frustrated beast. The boy was supposed to carry out his instructions at night, either in the mountains or on the little roads back to Montory, but after having seen N, he was in a panic at losing him. The sound of the motorcycle descended into a low, sustained rumble and grew louder. N faded backward. Maybe the kid would want to see if the restaurant had a back door – that wouldn’t be so stupid.

N ducked behind the garbage bins and peered over the refuse as the walls amplified the rumble. The boy stopped short with his front wheel turned into the alley. The bike sputtered, coughed, died. ‘Merde.’ The boy looked into the alley and repeated himself with a more drastic inflection. What he had figured out meant merde for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as far as he was concerned. N waited to see what he would do next, plod to the nearest approved telephone to report failure or come down the alley in search of whatever scraps he might salvage from the ruin.

The kid pushed his bike into the alley and mooched along for a dozen feet. Muttering to himself, he propped the bike against a wall. N braced his legs and reached into the satchel. He closed his hand around the grip of the nine-millimeter pistol, fitted with his silencer of choice, and thumbed the safety up and the hammer down. The kid’s footsteps slopped toward him from maybe twenty feet away. The boy was uttering soft, mindless obscenities. The sullen footsteps came to within something like ten feet from the far end of the garbage bins. N drew out the pistol, tightened the muscles in his legs, and jumped up, already raising his arm. The kid uttered a high-pitched squeal. His blunt face went white and rubbery with shock. N carried the gesture through until his arm extended straight before him. He pulled the trigger. A hole that looked too small to represent real damage appeared between the kid’s eyebrows at the moment of the soft, flat explosion. The force of the bullet pushed the kid backward and then slammed him to the ground. The casing pinged off brick and struck concrete. A dark spray of liquid and other matter slid down the face of the wall.

N shoved the pistol back into the satchel and picked up the cartridge case. He bent over the body, yanked the wallet out of his jeans and patted for weapons, but found only the outline of a knife in a zippered pocket. He moved up to the Kawasaki, unhooked the panniers on their strap, and carried them with him out of the alley into an afternoon that seemed sharp-edged and charged with silvery electricity.

A tide of black-haired priests with boys’ faces washed toward him from five or six feet away, their soutanes swinging above their feet. One of them caught his mood and smiled at him with teeth brilliantly white. He grinned back at the priest and stepped aside. A red awning blazed like a sacred fire. Moving past, the boy priests filled the sidewalk, speaking machine-gun South American Spanish in Ecuadorean accents. Another noticed N and he, too, flashed a brilliant smile. It was the Lord’s day. The priest’s sculpted coif sliced through the glittering air. N nodded briskly, still grinning, and wheeled away.

By the time he got back to the Peugeot, his forehead was filmed with sweat. He unlocked the car, tossed the panniers inside, climbed in, and placed the satchel next to his right leg. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and fished the boy’s wallet from his jacket pocket. It was made of red leather stamped with the Cartier logo. Three hundred francs, about sixty dollars. A driver’s license in the name of Marc-Antoine Labouret, with an address in Bayonne. A prepaid telephone card. A membership card from a video rental store. The business card of a Bayonne lawyer. A folded sheet of notepaper filled with handwritten telephone numbers, none familiar. A credit card made out to François J. Pelletier. Another credit card made out to Rémy Grosselin. Drivers’ licenses in the names of François J. Pelletier and Rémy Grosselin of Toulouse and Bordeaux, respectively, each displaying the image of a recently deceased young criminal. The forgeries were what N thought of as ‘friend of a friend’ work, subtly misaligned and bearing faint, pale scars of erasure. He withdrew the money, put the wallet on the dash, and pulled the panniers toward him.

The first held only rammed-in jeans, shirts, underwear, socks, a couple of sweaters, and everything was crushed and wrinkled, filthy, permeated with a sour, poverty-stricken smell. Disgusted, N opened the second pannier and saw glinting snaps and the dull shine of expensive leather. He extracted an alligator handbag. It was empty. The next bag, also empty, was a black Prada. He took four more women’s handbags from the pannier, each slightly worn but serviceable, all empty. Fitting them back into the pannier, N could see the kid roaring alongside his victims, ripping the bags from their shoulders, gunning away. He had stripped the money and valuables, junked everything else, and saved the best to peddle to some other rodent.

Either N’s employers were getting desperate, or he had misidentified a would-be mugger as his appointed assassin. The latter seemed a lot more like reality. Irritated, concerned, and amused all at once, he went over the past twenty-four hours. Apart from the boy, the only people he had seen more than once were Japanese tourists who went out for walks in the rain and bought garish berets. His contact had said something about Japanese labor, but that meant nothing. A siren blared behind him. Immediately, another screamed in from his left. He shoved the Cartier wallet into one of the panniers and wound back through the one-way streets.

A boom and clatter of bells louder than sirens celebrated the conclusion of another mass. The traffic slowed to pedestrian speed as it moved past the restaurant, where uniformed policemen questioned the remaining diners on the terrace. Two others, smart in their tunics and Sam Browne belts, blocked the entrance of the alley. The traffic picked up again, and soon he was breezing down the wide, straight road toward Montory.

At Alos, an abrupt turn took him over an empty bridge. Halfway across, he halted, trotted around the front of the car, opened the passenger door, and in one continuous motion reached inside, thrust his hip against the railing, and sent the panniers whirling out over the swift little Saison River.

The contact took twenty minutes to call him back.

‘So we had a little hang-up, did we?’ N asked, quoting his words back to him.

‘I’m not in the usual place. It’s Sunday afternoon, remember? They had to find me. What’s going down? You weren’t supposed to call in until tonight.’

‘I’m curious about something,’ N said. ‘In fact, I’m a pretty curious guy, all in all. Humor me. Where did they find you? A golf course? Is it like being a doctor, you carry a beeper?’

There was a short silence. ‘Whatever you’re unhappy about, we can work it out.’ Another brief silence. ‘I know Martine came as a nasty surprise. Honestly, I don’t blame you for being pissed. You need her like a hole in the head. Okay, here’s the deal. No reports, no paperwork, not even the firearms statements. You just walk away and get that big, big check. She handles all the rest. Are you smiling? Do I see a twinkle in your eye?’

‘You were at your health club, maybe?’ N asked. ‘Did you have to leave a really tense racquetball match just for me?’

The contact sighed. ‘I’m at home. In the old wigwam. Actually, out in back, setting up a new rabbit hutch for my daughter. For her rabbit, I mean.’

‘You don’t live in Paris.’

‘I happen to live in Fontainebleau.’

‘And you have a beeper.’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘What’s the rabbit’s name?’

‘Oh, dear,’ the contact said. ‘Is this how we’re going to act? All right. The rabbit’s name is Custer. Family joke.’

‘You mean you’re a real Indian?’ N asked, and laughed out loud in surprise. ‘An honest-to-God Red Man?’ His former image of his contact as a geek in thick glasses metamorphosed into a figure with high cheekbones, bronze skin, and straight, shoulder-length black hair.

‘Honest Injun,’ the contact said. ‘Though the term Native American is easier on the ears. You want to know my tribal affiliation? I’m a Lakota Sioux.’

‘I want to know your name.’ When the contact refused to speak, N said, ‘We both know you’re not supposed to tell me, but look at it this way: You’re at home. No one is monitoring this call. When I’m done here, no one is ever going to hear from me again. And I have to say, telling me your name would reinforce that bond of trust I find crucial to good fieldwork. As of now, the old bond is getting mighty frayed.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Tell me your name first. Please, don’t get tricky. I’ll know if you’re lying.’

‘What on earth is going on down there? All right. I’m putting my career in your hands. Are you ready? My name is Charles Many Horses. My birth certificate says Charles Horace Bunce, but my Indian name was Many Horses, and when you compete for government contracts, as we have been known to do, you have to meet certain standards. Many Horses sounds a lot more Native American than Bunce. Now can you please explain what the hell got you all riled up?’

‘Is someone else down here keeping an eye on me? Besides Martine? Someone I’m not supposed to know about?’

‘Oh, please,’ the contact said. ‘Where’s that coming from? Ah, I get it – sounds like you spotted somebody, or thought you did anyhow. Is that what this is all about? I guess paranoia comes with the territory. If you did see someone, he’s not on our payroll. Describe him.’

Today in Mauléon, I noticed a kid I saw hanging around the café last night. Five-ten, hundred and fifty pounds, late twenties. Long blond hair, grubby, rides a Kawasaki bike. He was following me, Charles, there is no doubt at all about that. Where I went, he went, and if I weren’t, you know, sort of reasonably adept at my job, I might never have noticed the guy. As it was, I had to run out of a restaurant by the back door to ditch him. Okay, call me paranoid, but this sort of thing tends to make me uncomfortable.’

‘He’s not ours,’ the contact said quickly. ‘Beyond that, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s your call, champ.’

‘Okay, Charles,’ said N, hearing a murky ambiguity in the man’s voice. ‘This is how it goes. If I see the kid again tonight, I have to deal with him.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said the contact.

‘One more thing, Charles. Have we, to your knowledge, taken on any Japanese field people? You mentioned this possibility yesterday. Was that an idle remark, or … no. There are no idle remarks. We hired some Japanese.’

‘Now that you mention it, a couple, yeah. It’s impossible to find people like you anymore. At least in the States.’

‘Are these the Japanese gentlemen I’m seeing wherever I go, the past couple of days?’

‘Let me ask you a question. Do you know how strong the yen is against Western currencies? It’s a joke. If you fly first-class on Air France, they give you sushi instead of escargots. Busy little Japanese tourists are running around all over Europe, the Pyrenees included.’

‘Sushi instead of snails.’ The knowledge that he had heard an almost identical remark not long before set off a mental alarm which subsided at the recollection of the drunken Basques.

‘It’s about money, what a shock. Walk right in, right? You want it, we got it. Just ask Tonto. What’s our revenge against the palefaces? Casinos. That’ll work.’

‘Like an MBA,’ N said. ‘You’re too embarrassed to admit you went to Harvard, but you did.’

‘Now, just how …’ The contact gave a wheezy chuckle. ‘You’re something else, pardner. Heap proud, go-um Harvard, but people assume you’re an asshole. Anyhow, lay off the Japs. You see the same ones over and over because that’s where they are.’

‘Neat and tidy, peaceful and private. Just Hubert, Martine, and me.’

‘See how easy it gets when you dump your anxiety? Try not to mess up his car. Martine’ll drive it back to town. The mule who’s bringing her car down from Paris is going to drive the Mercedes to Moscow. We have a buyer lined up.’

‘Waste not, want not.’

‘Or, as my people say, never shoot your horse until it stops breathing. I’m glad we had this talk.’

Neat and tidy, peaceful and private. Lying on his bed, N called a private line in New York and asked his broker to liquidate his portfolio. The flustered broker required a lengthy explanation of how the funds could be transferred to a number of coded Swiss accounts without breaking the law, and then he wanted to hear the whole thing all over again. Yes, N said, he understood an audit was inevitable, no problem, that was fine. Then he placed a call to a twenty-four-hours-a-day-every-day number made available to select clients by his bankers in Geneva, and through multiple conferencing and the negotiation of a four-and-a-half-point charge established the deposit of the incoming funds and distribution of his present arrangements into new accounts dramatically inaccessible to outsiders, even by Swiss standards. On Monday, the same accommodating bankers would ship by same-day express to an address in Marseilles the various documents within a lockbox entrusted to their care. His apartment was rented, so that was easy, but it was a shame about the books. He stripped down to his shirt and underwear and fell asleep watching a Hong Kong thriller dubbed into hilarious French in which the hero detective, a muscly dervish, said things like ‘Why does it ever fall to me to be the exterminator of vermin?’ He awakened to a discussion of French farm prices among a professor of linguistic theory, a famous chef, and the winner of last year’s Prix Goncourt. He turned off the television and read ten pages of Kim. Then he put the book in the satchel and meticulously cleaned the pistol before inserting another hollow-point bullet into the clip and reloading. He cocked the pistol, put on the safety, and nestled the gun in beside the novel. He showered and shaved and trimmed his nails. In a dark gray suit and a thin black turtleneck, he sat down beside the window.

The lot was filling up. The German family came outside into the gray afternoon and climbed into the Saab. After they drove off, a muddy Renault putted down the road and turned in to disgorge the innkeeper’s friends. A few minutes later the red L’Espace van pulled into the lot. The three Japanese walked across the road in their colorful new berets to inspect the food and drink in the display case. The blond woman offered slivers of cheese from the wheels, and the Japanese nodded in solemn appreciation. The girl in the blue dress wandered past the kitchen doors. The men across the street bought two wedges of cheese and a bottle of wine. They bowed to the vendor, and she bowed back. An eager-looking black-and-white dog trotted into the lot and sniffed at stains. When the Japanese came back to the auberge, the dog followed them inside.

N locked his door and came down into the lobby. Mouth open and eyes alert, the dog looked up from in front of the table and watched him put his key on the counter. N felt a portion of his anticipation and on the way outside patted the animal’s slender skull. At the display counter he bought a wedge of sheep’s-milk cheese. Soon he was driving along the narrow road toward Tardets, the sharp turn over the river at Alos, and the long straight highway to Mauléon.

Backed into a place near the bottom of the arcade, he took careful bites of moist cheese, unfolding the wrapper in increments to keep from dropping crumbs on his suit. Beneath the yellow umbrellas across the square, an old man read a newspaper. A young couple dangled toys before a baby in a stroller. Privileged by what Charles (Many Horses) Bunce called its fuck-you plates, M. Hubert’s Mercedes stood at the curb in front of the antique shop. A pair of students trudged into the square and made for the café, where they slid out from beneath their mountainous backpacks and fell into the chairs next to the couple with the baby. The girl backpacker leaned forward and made a face at the baby, who goggled. That one would be a pretty ride, N thought. A lot of bouncing and yipping ending with a self-conscious show of abandonment. An elegant woman of perhaps N’s own age walked past his car, proceeded beneath the arcade, and entered the antique store. He finished the last of the cheese, neatly refolded the wrapping paper, and stuffed it into an exterior pocket of the case. In the slowly gathering darkness, lights went on here and there.

There were no Japanese golfers in Basque berets. The backpackers devoured croque-monsieurs and trudged away, and the couple pushed the stroller toward home. An assortment of tourists and regulars filled half of the tables beneath the umbrellas. A man and a woman in sturdy English clothing went into Hubert’s shop and emerged twenty minutes later with the elegant woman in tow. The man consulted his watch and led his companions away beneath the arcades. A police car moved past them from the top of the square. The stolid man in the passenger seat turned dead eyes and a Spam-colored face upon N as the car went by. There was always this little charge of essential recognition before they moved on.

Obeying an impulse still forming itself into thought, N left his car and walked under the arches to the window of the antique store. It was about twenty minutes before closing time. M. Hubert was tapping at a desktop computer on an enormous desk at the far end of a handsome array of gleaming furniture. A green-shaded lamp shadowed a deep vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows. The ambitious Martine was nowhere in sight. N opened the door, and a bell tinkled above his head.

Hubert glanced at him and held up a hand, palm out. N began moving thoughtfully through the furniture. A long time ago, an assignment had involved a month’s placement in the antiques department of a famous auction house, and, along with other crash tutorials, part of his training had been lessons in fakery from a master of the craft named Elmo Maas. These lessons had proved more useful than he’d ever expected at the time. Admiring the marquetry on a Second Empire table, N noticed a subtle darkening in the wood at the top of one leg. He knelt to run the tips of his fingers up the inner side of the leg. His fingers met a minuscule but telltale shim that would be invisible to the eye. The table was a mongrel. N moved to a late-eighteenth-century desk marred only by an overly enthusiastic regilding, probably done in the thirties, of the vine-leaf pattern at the edges of the leather surface. The next piece he looked at was a straightforward fake. He even knew the name of the man who had made it.

Elmo Maas, an artist of the unscrupulous, had revered an antiques forger named Clement Tudor. If you could learn to recognize a Tudor, Maas had said, you would be able to spot any forgery, no matter how good. From a workshop in Camberwell, South London, Tudor had produced five or six pieces a year for nearly forty years, concentrating on the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and distributing what he made through dealers in France and the United States. His mastery had blessed both himself and his work: never identified except by disciples like Maas, his furniture had defied suspicion. Some of his work had wound up in museums, the rest in private collections. Using photographs and slides along with samples of his own work, Maas had educated his pupil in Tudor’s almost invisible nuances: the treatment of a bevel, the angle and stroke of chisel and awl, a dozen other touches. And here they were, those touches, scattered more like the hints of fingerprints than fingerprints themselves over a Directoire armoire.

M. Hubert padded up to N. ‘Exquisite, isn’t it? I’m closing early today, but if you were interested in anything specific, perhaps I could …?’ At once deferential and condescending, his manner invited immediate departure. Underlying anxiety spoke in the tight wrinkles about his eyes. A lifetime of successful bluffing had shaped the ironic curve of his mouth. N wondered if this dealer in frauds actually intended to go through with the arms deal after all.

‘I’ve been looking for a set of antique bookcases to hold my first editions,’ N said. ‘Something suitable for Molière, Racine, Diderot – you know the sort of thing I mean.’

Avarice sparkled in Hubert’s eyes. ‘Yours is a large collection?’

‘Only a modest one. Approximately five hundred volumes.’

Hubert’s smile deepened the wrinkles around his eyes. ‘Not so very modest, perhaps. I don’t have anything here that would satisfy you, but I believe I know where to find precisely the sort of thing you are looking for. As I stay open on Sundays I close on Monday, but perhaps you could take my card and give me a call at this time tomorrow. May I have your name, please?’

‘Roger Maris,’ N said, pronouncing it as though it were a French name.

‘Excellent, Monsieur Maris. I think you will be very pleased with what I shall show you.’ He tweaked a card from a tray on the desk, gave it to N, and began leading him to the door. ‘You are here for several more days?’

‘Until next weekend,’ N said. ‘Then I return to Paris.’

Hubert opened the door, setting off the little bell again.

‘Might I ask a few questions about some of the pieces?’

Hubert raised his eyebrows and tilted his head forward.

‘Is your beautiful Second Empire table completely intact?’

‘Of course! Nothing we have has been patched or repaired. Naturally, one makes an occasional error, but in this case …?’ He shrugged.

‘And what is the provenance of the armoire I was looking at?’

‘It came from a descendant of a noble family in Périgord who wanted to sell some of the contents of his château. Taxes, you know. One of his ancestors purchased it in 1799. A letter in my files has all the details. Now I fear I really must …’ He gestured to the rear of the shop.

‘Until tomorrow, then.’

Hubert forced a smile and in visible haste closed the door.

Ninety minutes later the Mercedes passed beneath the streetlamp at the edge of town. Parked in the shadows beside a combination grocery store and café a short distance up the road, N watched the Mercedes again wheel sharply left and race back into Mauléon, as he had expected. Hubert was repeating the actions of his dry run. He started the Peugeot and drove out of the café’s lot onto the highway, going deeper into the mountains to the east.

Barely wide enough for two cars, the winding road to the auberge clung to the side of the cliff, bordered on one side by a shallow ditch and the mountain’s shoulder, on the other a grassy verge leading to empty space. Sometimes the road doubled back and ascended twenty or thirty feet above itself; more often, it fell off abruptly into the forested valley. At two narrow places in the road, N remembered, a car traveling up the mountain could pull over into a lay-by to let a descending car pass in safety. The first of these was roughly half the distance to the auberge, the second about a hundred feet beneath it. He drove as quickly as he dared, twisting and turning with the sudden curves of the road. A single car zipped past him, appearing and disappearing in a flare of headlights. He passed the first lay-by, continued on, noted the second, and drove the rest of the way up to the auberge.

The small number of cars in the wide parking lot were lined up near the entrance of the two-story ocher building. Two or three would belong to the staff. Canny little M. Hubert, like all con men instinctively self-protective, had chosen a night when the restaurant would be nearly empty. N parked at the far end of the lot and got out, the engine still running. His headlights shone on a white wooden fence and eight feet of meadow grass with nothing but sky beyond. Far away, mountains bulked against the horizon. He bent down and stepped through the bars of the fence and walked into the meadow grass. In the darkness, the gorge looked like an abyss. You could probably drop a hundred bodies down into that thing before anyone noticed. Humming, he jogged back to his car.

N turned into the lay-by and cut the lights and ignition. Far below, headlights swung around a curve and disappeared. He straightened his tie and patted his hair. A few minutes later, he got out of the car and stood in the middle of the road with the satchel under his arm, listening to the Mercedes as it worked its way uphill. Its headlights suddenly shot across the curve below, then lifted toward him. N stepped forward and raised his right arm. The headlights advanced, and he took another step into the dazzle. As two pale faces stared through the windshield, the circular hood ornament and toothy grille came to a reluctant halt a few feet short of his waist. N pointed to his car and raised his hands in a mime of helplessness. They were talking back and forth. He moved around to the side of the car. The window rolled down. M. Hubert’s face was taut with anxiety and distrust. Recognition softened him, but not by much.

‘Monsieur Maris? What is this?’

‘Monsieur Hubert! I am absolutely delighted to see you!’ N lowered his head to look in at Martine. She was wearing something skimpy and black and was scowling beautifully. Their eyes met, hers charged with furious concentration. Well, well. ‘Miss, I’m sorry to trouble the two of you, but I had car trouble on the way down from the auberge, and I am afraid that I need some help.’

Martine tried to wither him with a glare. ‘Daniel, do you actually know this man?’

‘This is the customer I told you about,’ Hubert told her.

‘He’s the customer?’

Hubert patted her knee and turned back to N. ‘I don’t have time to help you now, but I’d be happy to call a garage from the auberge.’

‘I only need a tiny push,’ N said. ‘The garages are all closed, anyhow. As you can see, I’m already pointed downhill. I hate to ask, but I’d be very grateful.’

‘I don’t like this, Daniel,’ Martine said.

‘Relax,’ Hubert said. ‘It’ll take five seconds. Besides, I have a matter to discuss with Monsieur Maris.’ He drove forward and stopped at the far end of the lay-by. N walked uphill behind him. Hubert got out, shaking his head and smiling. ‘This is a terrible place for car trouble.’ Martine had turned around to stare at N through the rear window.

‘Finding you was good luck for me,’ N said.

Hubert came up to him and placed two fingers on his arm in a delicate gesture of reconciliation. Even before he inclined his head to whisper his confidence, N knew what he was going to say. ‘Your question about that marquetry table troubled me more and more this evening. After all, my reputation is at stake every time I put a piece on display. I examined it with great care, and I think you may have been right. There is a definite possibility that I was misled. I’ll have to look into the matter further, but I thank you for bringing it to my attention.’ The two fingers tapped N’s arm.

He straightened his posture and in a conversational tone said, ‘So you had dinner at my favorite auberge? Agreeable, isn’t it?’ Hubert took one brisk stride over the narrow road, then another, pleased to have concluded one bit of business and eager to get on to the next.

A step behind him, N drew the pistol from the case and shoved the barrel into the base of Hubert’s skull. The dapper little fraud knew what was happening – he tried to dodge sideways. N rammed the muzzle into his pad of hair and pulled the trigger. With the sudden flash and a sound no louder than a cough came a sharp scent of gunpowder and burning flesh. Hubert jolted forward and flopped to the ground. N heard Martine screaming at him even before she got out of the Mercedes.

He pushed the gun into the satchel, clamped the satchel beneath his elbow, bent down to grasp Hubert’s ankles, and began dragging him to the edge of the road. Martine stood up on the far side of the Mercedes, still screaming. When her voice sailed into outraged hysteria, he glanced up from his task and saw a nice little automatic, a sibling to the one in his bedside drawer at home, pointed at his chest. Martine was panting, but she held the gun steady, both arms extended across the top of the Mercedes. He stopped moving and looked at her with an unruffled calm curiosity. ‘Put that thing down,’ he said. He dragged M. Hubert’s body another six inches backward.

‘Stop!’ she screeched.

He stopped and looked back up at her. ‘Yes?’

Martine stood up, keeping her arms extended. ‘Don’t do anything, just listen.’ She took a moment to work out what she would say. ‘We work for the same people. You don’t know who I am, but you are using the name Cash. You weren’t supposed to show up until the deal was set, so what’s going on?’ Her voice was steadier than he would have expected.

Hubert’s ankles in his hands, N said, ‘First of all, I do know who you are, Martine. And it should be obvious that what’s going on is a sudden revision of our plans for the evening. Our people found out your friend was planning to cheat his customers. Don’t you think we ought to get him off the road before the customers turn up?’

She glanced downhill without moving the pistol. ‘They didn’t tell me about any change.’

‘Maybe they couldn’t. I’m sorry I startled you.’ N walked backward until he reached the edge of the road. He dropped Hubert’s feet and moved forward to grab the collar of his jacket and pull the rest of his body onto the narrow verge. He set the satchel beside his feet.

She lowered the gun. ‘How do you know my name?’

‘Our contact. What’s he called now? Our divisional region controller. He said you’d be handling all the paperwork. Interesting guy. He’s an Indian, did you know that? Lives in Fontainebleau. His daughter has a rabbit named Custer.’ N bent at the knees and planted his hands on either side of Hubert’s waist. When he pulled up, the body folded in half and released a gassy moan.

‘He’s still alive,’ Martine said.

‘No, he isn’t.’ N looked over the edge of the narrow strip of grass and down into the same abyss he had seen from the edge of the parking lot. The road followed the top of the gorge as it rose to the plateau.

‘It didn’t look to me like he was planning to cheat anybody.’ She had not left the side of the Mercedes. ‘He was going to make a lot of money. So were we.’

‘Cheating is how this weasel made money.’ N hauled the folded corpse an inch nearer the edge, and Hubert’s bowels emptied with a string of wet popping sounds and a strong smell of excrement. N swung his body over the edge and let go. Hubert instantly disappeared. Five or six seconds later came a soft sound of impact and a rattle of scree, and then nothing until an almost inaudible thud.

‘He even cheated his customers,’ N said. ‘Half the stuff in that shop is no good.’ He brushed off his hands and looked down at his clothes for stains before tucking the satchel back under his left arm.

‘I wish someone had told me this was going to happen.’ She put the pistol in her handbag and came slowly around the trunk of the Mercedes. ‘I could always call for confirmation, couldn’t I?’

‘You’d better,’ N said. In English, he added, ‘If you know what’s good for you.’

She nodded and licked her lips. Her hair gleamed in the light from the Mercedes. The skimpy black thing was a shift, and her black sheer nylons ended in low-heeled pumps. She had dressed for the Arabs, not the auberge. She flattened a hand on the top of her head and gave him a straight look. ‘All right, Monsieur Cash, what do I do now?’

‘About what you were supposed to do before. I’ll drive up to the restaurant, and you go back to town for your car. The mule who’s driving it down from Paris takes this one to Russia. Call in as soon as you get to your – what is it? – your LUD.’

‘What about …?’ She waved in the direction of the auberge.

‘I’ll express our profound regrets and assure our friends that their needs will soon be answered.’

‘They said fieldwork was full of surprises.’ Martine smiled at him uncertainly before walking back to the Mercedes.

Through the side window N saw a flat black briefcase on the back seat. He got behind the wheel, put his satchel on his lap, and examined the controls. Depressing a button in the door made the driver’s seat glide back to give him more room. ‘I almost hate to turn this beautiful car over to some Russian mobster.’ He fiddled with the button, tilting the seat forward and lowering it. ‘What do we call our armament-deprived friends, anyway? Tonto calls them ragheads, but even ragheads have names.’

‘Monsieur Temple and Monsieur Law. Daniel didn’t know their real names. Shouldn’t we be going?’

Finally, N located the emergency brake and eased it in. He depressed the brake pedal and moved the automatic shift from park to its lowest gear. ‘Get me the briefcase from the back seat. Doing it now will save time.’ The Mercedes swam forward as he released the brake pedal. Martine glanced at him, then shifted around to put one knee on her seat. She bent sideways and stretched toward the briefcase. N dipped into the satchel, raised the tip of the silencer to the wall of her chest, and fired. He heard the bullet splat against something like bone and then realized that it had passed through her body and struck a metal armature within the leather upholstery. Martine slumped into the gap between the seats. Before him, a long leg jerked out, struck the dash, and cracked the heel off a black pump. The cartridge came pinging off the windshield and ricocheted straight to his ribs.

He shoved the pistol back home and tapped the accelerator. Martine slipped deeper into the well between the seats. N thrust open his door and cranked the wheel to the left. Her hip slid onto the handle of the gearshift. He touched the accelerator again. The Mercedes grumbled and hopped forward. Alarmingly near the edge, he jumped off the seat and turned into the spin his body took when his feet met the ground.

He was close enough to the sleek, recessed handle on the back door to caress it. Inch by inch, the car stuttered toward the side of the road. Martine uttered an indecipherable dream-word. The Mercedes lurched to the precipice, nosed over, tilted forward and down, advanced, hesitated, stopped. The roof light illuminated Martine’s half-conscious struggle to pull herself back into her seat. The Mercedes trembled forward, dipped its nose, and with exquisite reluctance slid off the earth into the huge darkness. Somersaulting in midair, it cast wheels of yellow light, which extinguished when it smashed into whatever was down there.

Visited by the blazing image of a long feminine leg unfurling before his eyes like a lightning bolt, N loped uphill. That lineament running from the molded thigh to the tender back of the knee, the leap of the calf muscle. The whole perfect thing, like a sculpture of the ideal leg, filling the space in front of him. When would she have made her move, he wondered. She had been too uncertain to act when she should have, and she could not have done it while he was driving, so it would have happened in the parking lot. She’d had that .25-caliber Beretta, a smart gun, in N’s opinion. Martine’s extended leg flashed before him again, and he suppressed a giddy, enchanted swell of elation.

Ghostly church bells pealed, and a black-haired young priest shone glimmering from the chiaroscuro of a rearing boulder.

He came up past the retaining wall into the mild haze of light from the windows of the auberge. His feet crunched on the pebbles of the parking lot. After a hundred-foot uphill run he was not even breathing hard, pretty good for a man of his age. He came to the far end of the lot, put his hands on the fence, and inhaled air of surpassing sweetness and purity. Distant ridges and peaks hung beneath fast-moving clouds. This was a gorgeous part of the world. It was unfortunate that he would have to leave it behind. But he was leaving almost everything behind. The books were the worst of it. Well, there were book dealers in Switzerland, too. And he still had Kim.

N moved down the fence toward the auberge. Big windows displayed the usual elderly men in berets playing cards, a local family dining with the grandparents, one young couple flirting, flames jittering and weaving over the hearth. A solid old woman carried a steaming platter to the family’s table. The Japanese golfers had not returned, and all the other tables were empty. On her way back to the kitchen, the old woman sat down with the card players and laughed at a remark from an old boy missing most of his teeth. No one in the dining room would be leaving for at least an hour. N’s stomach audibly complained of being so close to food without being fed, and he moved back into the relative darkness to wait for the second half of his night’s work.

And then he stepped forward again, for headlights had come beaming upward from below the lot. N moved into the gauzy light and once again experienced the true old excitement, that of opening himself to unpredictability, of standing at the intersection of infinite variables. A Peugeot identical to his in year, model, and color followed its own headlights into the wide parking lot. N walked toward the car, and the two men in the front seats took him in with wary, expressionless faces. The Peugeot moved alongside him, and the window cranked down. A lifeless, pockmarked face regarded him with a cold, threatening neutrality. N liked that – it told him everything he needed to know.

‘Monsieur Temple? Monsieur Law?’

Without any actual change in expression, the driver’s face deepened, intensified into itself in a way that made the man seem both more brutal and more human, almost pitiable. N saw an entire history of rage, disappointment, and meager satisfactions in his response. The driver hesitated, looked into N’s eyes, then slowly nodded.

‘There’s been a problem,’ N said. ‘Please, do not be alarmed, but Monsieur Hubert cannot join you tonight. He has been in a serious automobile accident.’

The man in the passenger seat spoke a couple of sentences in Arabic. His hands were curled around the grip of a fat black attaché case. The driver answered in monosyllables before turning back to N. ‘We have heard nothing of an accident.’ His French was stiff but correct, and his accent was barbaric. ‘Who are you supposed to be?’

‘Marc-Antoine Labouret. I work for Monsieur Hubert. The accident happened late this afternoon. I think he spoke to you before that?’

The man nodded, and another joyous flare of adrenaline flooded into N’s bloodstream.

‘A tour bus went out of control near Montory and ran into his Mercedes. Fortunately, he suffered no more than a broken leg and a severe concussion, but his companion, a young woman, was killed. He goes in and out of consciousness, and of course he is very distressed about his friend, but when I left him at the hospital Monsieur Hubert emphasized his regrets at this inconvenience.’ N drew in another liter of transcendent air. ‘He insisted that I communicate in person his profound apologies and continuing respect. He also wishes you to know that after no more than a small delay matters will go forward as arranged.’

‘Hubert never mentioned an assistant,’ the driver said. The other man said something in Arabic. ‘Monsieur Law and I wonder what is meant by this term, “a small delay”.’

‘A matter of days,’ N said. ‘I have the details in my computer.’

Their laughter sounded like branches snapping, like an automobile landing on trees and rocks. ‘Our friend Hubert adores the computer,’ said the driver.

M. Law leaned forward to look at N. He had a thick mustache and a high, intelligent forehead, and his dark eyes were clear and penetrating. ‘What was the name of the dead woman?’ His accent was much worse than the driver’s.

‘Martine is all I know,’ N said. ‘The bitch turned up out of nowhere.’

M. Law’s eyes creased in a smile. ‘We will continue our discussion inside.’

‘I wish I could join you, but I have to get back to the hospital.’ He waved the satchel at the far side of the lot. ‘Why don’t we go over there? It’ll take five minutes to show you what I have on the computer, and you could talk about it over dinner.’

M. Temple glanced at M. Law. M. Law raised and lowered an index finger and settled back. The Peugeot ground over pebbles and pulled up at the fence. The taillights died, and the two men got out. M. Law was about six feet tall and lean, M. Temple a few inches shorter and thick in the chest and waist. Both men wore nice-looking dark suits and gleaming white shirts. Walking toward them, N watched them straighten their clothes. M. Temple carried a large weapon in a shoulder holster, M. Law something smaller in a holster clipped to his belt. They felt superior, even a bit contemptuous toward M. Labouret – the antiques dealer’s flunky, as wed to his computer as an infant to the breast. N came up beside M. Temple, smiled, and ducked through the fence. ‘Better if they don’t see the screen,’ he told their scowling faces. ‘The people in the restaurant.’

Already impatient with this folly, M. Law nodded at M. Temple. ‘Go on, do it.’ He added something in Arabic.

M. Temple grinned, yanked down the front of his suit jacket, bent down, clamped his right arm across his chest, and steadied himself with the other as he thrust his trunk through the three-foot gap. N moved sideways and held the satchel upright on the top of the fence. M. Temple swung one leg over the white board and hesitated, deciding between raising his right leg before or behind. Leaning left, he bent his right knee and swiveled. A tasseled loafer rapped against the board. N took another step along the fence, pulling the satchel to his chest as if protecting it. M. Temple skipped sideways and pulled his leg through. Embarrassed, he frowned and yanked again at his jacket.

N knelt down with the satchel before him. M. Law gripped the board and passed his head through the gap. When he stepped over the board, N eased out the pistol and fired upward into the center of his intelligent forehead. The bullet tore through the back of M. Law’s skull and, guided by the laws of physics and sheer good luck, smacked into M. Temple’s chest as blood and gray pulp spattered his shirt. M. Temple staggered back and hit the ground, groaning. N felt like a golfer scoring a hole in one during a farewell tournament. He bounced up and moved alongside M. Temple. Grimacing and blowing red froth from his lips, the Arab was still gamely trying to yank his gun from the shoulder holster. The bullet had passed through a lung, or maybe just roamed around inside it before stopping. N settled the muzzle of the silencer behind a fleshy ear, and M. Temple’s right eye, large as a cow’s, swiveled toward him.

Light spilled from the auberge’s windows onto the row of cars and spread across the gravel. M. Law lay sprawled out on the board, his arms and legs dangling on either side. Blood dripped onto the grass beneath his head.

‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’ N said. Whatever unpleasantness M. Temple offered in return was cut short by the fall of the nine millimeter’s hammer.

N grabbed M. Law’s collar and belt and slid him off the board. Then he grasped his wrists and pulled him through the grass to the edge of the gorge and went back for M. Temple. He took their wallets from their hip pockets and removed the money, altogether about a thousand dollars in francs. He folded the bills into his jacket pocket and threw the wallets into the gorge. Taking care to avoid getting blood on his hands or clothes, N shoved M. Temple closer to the edge and rolled him over the precipice. The body dropped out of view almost instantly. He pushed M. Law after him, and this time thought he heard a faint sound of impact from far down in the darkness. Smiling, he walked back to the fence and ducked through it.

N opened the driver’s door of the Arabs’ Peugeot, took the keys from the ignition, and pushed the seat forward to lean in for the attaché case. From its weight, it might have been filled with books. He closed the door softly and tossed the keys over the fence. So buoyant he could not keep from breaking into quiet laughter, he moved across the gravel and walked down the hill to his car with the satchel beneath his left elbow, the case swinging from his right hand.

When he got behind the wheel, he shoved the case onto the passenger seat and turned on the roof light. For a couple of seconds he could do nothing but look at the smooth black leather, the stitching, the brass catches. His breath caught in his throat. N leaned toward the case and brought his hands to the catches and their sliding releases. He closed his eyes and thumbed the releases sideways. There came a substantial, almost resonant sound as the catches flew open. He pushed the top of the case a few inches up and opened his eyes upon banded rows of thousand-dollar bills lined edge to edge and stacked three deep. ‘One for the Gipper,’ he whispered. For a couple of seconds, he was content to breathe in and out, feeling all the muscles in his body relax and breathe with him. Then he started the car and sailed down the mountain.

When he turned into the walled lot, the bright windows framed what appeared to be a celebration. Candles glowed on the lively tables, and people dodged up and down the aisles, turning this way and that in the buzz and hum of conversation floating toward him. This happy crowd seemed to have claimed every parking spot not preempted by the Comet truck, parked in front of the kitchen at an angle that eliminated three spaces. N trolled past the dirty Renault belonging to the drunken Basques, the Japanese tourists’ tall red van, the Germans’ Saab, and other vehicles familiar and unfamiliar. There was a narrow space in front of the trellis beside the entrance. He slid into the opening, gathered his cases, and, holding his breath and sucking in his waist, managed to squeeze out of the car. Beyond the kitchen doors, the Comet man in the blue work suit occupied a chair with the bored patience of a museum guard while the women bustled back and forth with laden trays and stacks of dishes. N wondered what was so important that it was delivered after dark on Sunday and then saw a bright flash of blue that was Albertine, facing a sink with her back to him. Only a few inches from her hip, the innkeeper was leaning against the sink, arms crossed over his chest and speaking from the side of his mouth with an almost conspiratorial air. The intimacy of their communication, her close attention to his words, informed N that they were father and daughter. What Daddy doesn’t know won’t hurt him, he thought. The man’s gaze shifted outside and met N’s eyes. N smiled at his host and pushed the glass door open with his shoulder.

On his way to the counter he saw that his own elation had imbued an ordinary Sunday dinner with the atmosphere of a party. The Japanese men, the German family, French tourists, and groups of local Basques ate and drank at their separate tables. Albertine would not be free for hours. He had enough time to arrange the flights, pack his things, enjoy a long bath, even take a nap. As his adrenaline subsided, he could feel his body demand rest. The hunger he had experienced earlier had disappeared, another sign that he should get some sleep. N took his key from the board and lugged the increasingly heavy attaché case up the stairs, turning on the lights as he went.

He locked his door and sat on the bed to open the case. Twenty-five bills in each packet, six rows across, three stacks high. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars: no million, but a pretty decent golden handshake. He closed the case, slid it onto the closet shelf, and picked up the telephone. In twenty minutes he had secured for a fictitious gentleman named Kimball O’Hara a four a.m. charter from Pau to Toulouse and a five o’clock connecting flight to Marseilles. His employers’ concern would not reach the stage of serious worry until he was on his way to Toulouse, and he would be on a plane to Italy before they had completely advanced into outright panic. The bodies could go undiscovered for days. N folded and packed his clothes into his carry-on bag and set it beside the door, leaving out what he would wear later that night. Kim went on the bedside table. He would push the satchel down a drain somewhere in Oloron.

Hot water pounded into the fiberglass tub while he shaved for the second time that day. The bath lulled him into drowsiness. He wrapped a towel around his waist and stretched out on the bed. Before he dropped into sleep, the last image in his mind was that of a rigid, magnificent female leg encased in sheer black nylon.

Soft but insistent raps at the door awakened him. N looked at his watch: eleven-thirty, earlier than he had expected. ‘I’ll be right there.’ He stood up, stretched, refastened the towel around his waist. A mist of sickeningly floral perfume enveloped him when he unlocked the door. Wearing a raincoat over her nightgown, Albertine slipped into the room. N kissed her neck and grazed at her avid mouth, smiling as she moved him toward the bed.

She closed the door behind her, and the three men in the corridor stepped forward in unison, like soldiers. The one on the right jerked open a refuse bag and extended it toward her. She shoved the bloody cleaver and the ruined nightgown into the depths of the bag. The man quizzed her with a look. ‘You can go in,’ she said, grateful he had not exercised his abominable French. All three of them bowed. Despite her promises to herself, she was unable to keep from bowing back. Humiliated, she straightened up again, feeling their eyes moving over her face, hands, feet, ankles, hair, and whatever they detected of her body through the raincoat. Albertine moved aside, and they filed through the door to begin their work.

Her father stood up from his desk behind the counter when she descended into the darkened lobby. Beneath the long table, Gaston, the black-and-white dog, stirred in his sleep. ‘Did it go well?’ her father asked. He, too, inspected her for bloodstains.

‘How do you think it went?’ she said. ‘He was almost asleep. By the time he knew what was happening, his chest was wide open.’

The lock on the front door responded to the keypad and clicked open. The two permanent Americans eyed her as they came through the arch. Gaston raised his head, sighed, and went back to sleep. She said, ‘Those idiots in the berets are up there now. How long have you been using Japanese, anyhow?’

‘Maybe six months.’ The one in the tweed jacket spoke in English because he knew English annoyed her, and annoyance was how he flirted. ‘Hey, we love those wild and crazy guys, they’re our little samurai brothers.’

‘Don’t let your stupid brothers miss the briefcase in the closet,’ she said. The ugly one in the running suit leered at her. ‘That man had good clothes. You could try wearing some nice clothes, for a change.’

‘His stuff goes straight into the fire,’ the ugly one said. ‘We don’t even look at it. You know, we’re talking about a real character. Kind of a legend. I heard lots of amazing stories about him.’

‘Thank you, Albertine,’ said her father. He did not want her to hear the amazing stories.

‘You ought to thank me,’ she said. ‘The old rooster made me take a bath. On top of that, I wasted my perfume because he wanted me to smell like a girl in Bora Bora.’

Both of the Americans stared at the floor.

‘What does it mean to say,’ she asked, and in her heavily accented English said, ‘I wish I had that swing in my backyard?’

The permanent Americans glanced at each other. The one in the tweed jacket clapped his hands over his eyes. The ugly one said, ‘Albertine, you’re the ideal woman. Everybody worships you.’

‘Good, then I should get more money.’ She wheeled around to go downstairs, and the ugly one sang out, ‘Izz-unt it roman-tic?’ Beneath his sweet false tremulous tenor came the rumble of the disposal truck as it backed toward the entrance.

The Ghost Village
1

In Vietnam I knew a man who went quietly and purposefully crazy because his wife wrote him that his son had been sexually abused – ‘messed with’ – by the leader of their church choir. This man was a black six-foot-six grunt named Leonard Hamnet, from a small town in Tennessee named Archibald. Before writing, his wife had waited until she had endured the entire business of going to the police, talking to other parents, returning to the police with another accusation, and finally succeeding in having the man charged. He was up for trial in two months. Leonard Hamnet was no happier about that than he was about the original injury.

‘I got to murder him, you know, but I’m seriously thinking on murdering her too,’ he said. He still held the letter in his hands, and he was speaking to Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Conor Linklater, SP4 Cotton, Calvin Hill, Tina Pumo, the magnificent M. O. Dengler, and myself. ‘All this is going on, my boy needs help, this here Mr Brewster needs to be dismantled, needs to be racked and stacked, and she don’t tell me! Makes me want to put her down, man. Take her damn head off and put it up on a stake in the yard, man. With a sign saying: Here is one stupid woman.’

We were in the unofficial part of Camp Crandall known as No Man’s Land, located between the wire perimeter and a shack, also unofficial, where a cunning little weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor. No Man’s Land, so called because the CO pretended it did not exist, contained a mound of old tires, a piss tube, and a lot of dusty red ground. Leonard Hamnet gave the letter in his hand a dispirited look, folded it into the pocket of his fatigues, and began to roam around the heap of tires, aiming kicks at the ones that stuck out farthest. ‘One stupid woman,’ he repeated. Dust exploded up from a burst, worn-down wheel of rubber.

I wanted to make sure Hamnet knew he was angry with Mr Brewster, not his wife, and said, ‘She was trying –’

Hamnet’s great glistening bull’s head turned toward me.

‘Look at what the woman did. She nailed that bastard. She got other people to admit that he messed with their kids too. That must be almost impossible. And she had the guy arrested. He’s going to be put away for a long time.’

‘I’ll put that bitch away, too,’ Hamnet said, and kicked an old gray tire hard enough to push it nearly a foot back into the heap. All the other tires shuddered and moved. For a second it seemed that the entire mound might collapse.

‘This is my boy I’m talking about here,’ Hamnet said. ‘This shit has gone far enough.’

‘The important thing,’ Dengler said, ‘is to take care of your boy. You have to see he gets help.’

‘How’m I gonna do that from here?’ Hamnet shouted.

‘Write him a letter,’ Dengler said. ‘Tell him you love him. Tell him he did right to go to his mother. Tell him you think about him all the time.’

Hamnet took the letter from his pocket and stared at it. It was already stained and wrinkled. I did not think it could survive many more of Hamnet’s readings. His face seemed to get heavier, no easy trick with a face like Hamnet’s. ‘I got to get home,’ he said. ‘I got to get back home and take care of these people.’

Hamnet began putting in requests for compassionate leave relentlessly – one request a day. When we were out on patrol, sometimes I saw him unfold the tattered sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket and read it two or three times, concentrating intensely. When the letter began to shred along the folds, Hamnet taped it together.

We were going out on four- and five-day patrols during that period, taking a lot of casualties. Hamnet performed well in the field, but he had retreated so far within himself that he spoke in monosyllables. He wore a dull, glazed look, and moved like a man who had just eaten a heavy dinner. I thought he looked like a man who had given up, and when people gave up they did not last long – they were already very close to death, and other people avoided them.

We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. We had to eat cold C rations because heating them with C-4 would have been like putting up billboards and arc lights. We couldn’t smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. Hamnet’s C rations consisted of an old can of Spam that dated from an earlier war and a can of peaches. He saw Spanky staring at the peaches and tossed him the can. Then he dropped the Spam between his legs. Death was almost visible around him. He fingered the note out of his pocket and tried to read it in the damp gray twilight.

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

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

One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the damp but solid ground on the other side of the paddy. Here the trees were much sparser, and a little group of thatched huts was visible through them.

Then two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us – just one. One mortar, one round. That was the first thing. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth, and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. Whoever fired the mortar should have had an excellent idea of our location, and I experienced that endless moment of pure, terrifying helplessness – a moment in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to let go of it – until the shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us, and shell fragments whizzed through the air. One of the fragments sailed over us, sliced a hamburger-size wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage’s helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground, and a little smoke drifted up from it.

We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, except that he was breathing. Hamnet shouldered his pack and picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder. He saw me looking at him.

‘I gotta take care of these people,’ he said.

The other thing I did not understand – apart from why there had been only one mortar round – came when we entered the village.

Lieutenant Harry Beevers had yet to join us, and we were nearly a year away from the events at Ia Thuc, when everything, the world and ourselves within the world, went crazy. I have to explain what happened. Lieutenant Harry Beevers killed thirty children in a cave at Ia Thuc and their bodies disappeared, but Michael Poole and I went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened in there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands. A pitiful character named Victor Spitalny ran into the cave when he heard gunfire, and came pinwheeling out right away, screaming, covered with welts or hives that vanished almost as soon as he came out into the air. Poor Spitalny had touched it too. Because I was twenty and already writing books in my head, I thought that the cave was the place where the other Tom Sawyer ended, where Injun Joe raped Becky Thatcher and slit Tom’s throat.

When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of Ia Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong – it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The little huts, still inhabitable, were empty – something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again. It was a ghost village, in a country where people thought the earth was sanctified by their ancestors’ bodies.

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

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

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

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

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

The medic said, ‘Take it easy, we’ll get you out of here.’

‘Out of here?’ Spanky brightened up.

‘Back to Crandall,’ the medic said.

Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. ‘There ain’t nobody here,’ Spitalny said. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.

Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat.

‘Spitalny, Tiano,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now.’

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

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

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

‘So?’ Poole said.

Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots. He said, ‘I have to go home, Lieutenant. I don’t mean no disrespect, but I cannot take this shit much longer.’

The Lieutenant said he was working on it.

Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village.

Spanky Burrage said, ‘Good quiet place for Ham to catch up on his reading.’

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

The Lieutenant said something almost inaudible from inside the hut. He came back outside in a hurry, looking disturbed and puzzled even in the darkness.

‘Underhill, Poole,’ he said, ‘I want you to see this.’

Poole and I glanced at each other. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. Poole seemed to be a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the Lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen’s eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same.

‘What is it, Lieutenant?’ he asked.

The Lieutenant gestured for us to come to the hut, then turned around and went back inside. There was no reason for us not to follow him. The Lieutenant was a jerk, but Harry Beevers, our next lieutenant, was a baron, an earl among jerks, and we nearly always did whatever dumb thing he told us to do. Poole was so ragged and edgy that he looked as if he felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I didn’t have an idea in the world what was going on in Poole’s mind. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.

The Lieutenant was standing in the doorway, looking over his shoulder and fingering his sidearm. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on the lighter. The sudden hollows and shadows in his face made him resemble one of the corpses I had opened up when I was in graves registration at Camp White Star.

‘You want to know what it is, Poole? Okay, you tell me what it is.’

He held the lighter before him like a torch and marched into the hut. I imagined the entire dry, flimsy structure bursting into heat and flame. This Lieutenant was not destined to get home walking and breathing, and I pitied and hated him about equally, but I did not want to turn into toast because he had found an American body inside a hut and didn’t know what to do about it. I’d heard of platoons finding the mutilated corpses of American prisoners, and hoped that this was not our turn.

And then, in the instant before I smelled blood and saw the Lieutenant stoop to lift a panel on the floor, I thought that what had spooked him was not the body of an American POW but of a child who had been murdered and left behind in this empty place. The Lieutenant had probably not seen any dead children yet. Some part of the Lieutenant was still worrying about what a girl named Becky Roddenburger was getting up to back at Idaho State, and a dead child would be too much reality for him.

He pulled up the wooden panel in the floor, and I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The Lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell of blood floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The Lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. ‘Now. Tell me what this is.’

‘It’s where they hide the kids when people like us show up,’ I said. ‘Smells like something went wrong. Did you take a look?’

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

‘Taking a look is your job, Underhill,’ he said.

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

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

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

‘What is it? Are there any –’ The Lieutenant’s voice made a creaky sound. ‘Any bodies?’

‘Come down here, Tim,’ Poole called up.

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

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

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

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

‘Hot,’ Poole said, and closed the lighter.

‘Come on, damn it,’ came the Lieutenant’s voice. ‘Get out of there.’

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

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

‘I want you guys out of there, and I mean now,’ whined the Lieutenant.

Poole snapped the lighter shut.

‘I just changed my mind,’ I said softly. ‘I’m putting twenty bucks into the Elijah fund. For two weeks from today. That’s what, June twentieth?’

‘Tell it to Spanky,’ he said. Spanky Burrage had invented the pool we called the Elijah fund, and he held the money. Michael had not put any money into the pool. He thought that a new lieutenant might be even worse than the one we had. Of course he was right. Harry Beevers was our next lieutenant. Elijah Joys, Lieutenant Elijah Joys of New Utrecht, Idaho, a graduate of the University of Idaho and basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, was an inept, weak lieutenant, not a disastrous one. If Spanky could have seen what was coming, he would have given back the money and prayed for the safety of Lieutenant Joys.

Poole and I moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The Lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand – uselessly, because he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We levered ourselves up out of the hole stiff-armed, as if we were leaving a swimming pool. The Lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and thick, fleshy nose, and his Adam’s apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. He might not have been Harry Beevers, but he was no prize. ‘Well, how many?’

‘How many what?’ I asked.

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

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

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

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

Lieutenant Joys nodded. ‘Field Interrogation Post,’ he said, trying out the phrase. ‘Torture, Use of, Highly Indicated.’ He nodded again. ‘Right?’

‘Highly,’ Poole said.

‘Shows you what kind of enemy we’re dealing with in this conflict.’

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

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

If nothing else had happened, I think I could have replayed the whole piece in my head. Tears filled my eyes, and I stepped toward the door of the hut. Then I froze. A ragged Vietnamese boy of seven or eight was regarding me with great seriousness from the far corner of the hut. I knew he was not there – I knew he was a spirit. I had no belief in spirits, but that’s what he was. Some part of my mind as detached as a crime reporter reminded me that ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’ was about two children who were about to die, and that in a sense the music was their death. I wiped my eyes with my hand, and when I lowered my arm, the boy was still there. He was beautiful, beautiful in the ordinary way, as Vietnamese children nearly always seemed beautiful to me. Then he vanished all at once, like the flickering light of the Zippo. I nearly groaned aloud. That child had been murdered in the hut: he had not just died, he had been murdered.

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

My soul had come back to life.

Then I became aware that there was something wrong about the men arranged before me, and again it took a moment for my intelligence to catch up to my intuition. Every member of a combat unit makes unconscious adjustments as members of the unit go down in the field; survival sometimes depends on the number of people you know are with you, and you keep count without being quite aware of doing it. I had registered that two men too many were in front of me. Instead of seven, there were nine, and the two men that made up the nine of us left were still behind me in the hut. M. O. Dengler was looking at me with growing curiosity, and I thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. A sick chill went through me. I saw Tom Blevins and Tyrell Budd standing together at the far right of the platoon, a little muddier than the others but otherwise different from the rest only in that, like Dengler, they were looking directly at me.

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

‘Let’s saddle up,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘We aren’t doing any good around here.’

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

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

Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.

‘Aren’t we gonna torch this place?’ asked Spitalny.

The Lieutenant ignored him. ‘Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post. Field Interrogation Post.’

‘No shit,’ said Pumo.

‘These people are into torture, Pumo. It’s just another indication.’

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

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

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

As soon as he went ahead to lead us out of the village, I gave twenty dollars to Spanky and said, ‘Two weeks from today.’

‘My man,’ Spanky said.

The rest of the patrol was uneventful.

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

I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was sitting in the brothers’ tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R&R in Taipei. Spanky Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisal: great jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his friends back in Little Rock and that he knew so well he could find individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions, changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under different names – ‘Cherokee’ and ‘KoKo’, ‘Indiana’ and ‘Donna Lee’ – or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words – ‘I Thought About You’ (Art Tatum), ‘You and the Night and the Music’ (Sonny Rollins), ‘I Love You’ (Bill Evans), ‘If I Could Be with You’ (Ike Quebec), ‘You Leave Me Breathless’ (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, ‘Thou Swell’, by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.

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

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

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

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

‘Leonard,’ I said, and he swung his big buffalo’s head toward me. ‘You still putting in for compassionate leave?’

He nodded. ‘You know what I gotta do.’

‘Yes,’ Dengler said, in a slow, quiet voice.

‘They gonna let me take care of my people. They gonna send me back.’

He spoke with a complete absence of nuance, like a man who had learned to get what he wanted by parroting words without knowing what they meant.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. For a second he seemed as alien as Hamnet. ‘What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it’ll just go on like this day after day until some of us get killed and the rest of us go home, or do you think it’s going to get stranger and stranger?’ He did not wait for me to answer. ‘I think it’ll always sort of look the same, but it won’t be – I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that’s what happens when you’re out here long enough. The edges melt.’

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

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

‘Brownie, Clifford Brown,’ Spanky whispered.

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

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

‘When we were back in that village, last week,’ Dengler said. ‘Tell me about that.’

I said that he had been there too.

‘But something happened to you. Something special.’

‘I put twenty bucks in the Elijah fund,’ I said.

‘Only twenty?’ Cotton asked.

‘What was in that hut?’ Dengler asked.

I shook my head.

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

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Cotton and Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and a murdered child. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Fine,’ Dengler said.

‘What the fuck you sayin’ is fine?’ Cotton said. ‘I don’t mind listening to that music, but I do draw the line at this bullshit.’ He flipped himself off his bunk and pointed a finger at me. ‘What date you give Spanky?’

‘Twentieth.’

‘He last longer than that.’ Cotton tilted his head as the song on the radio ended. Armed Forces’ Radio began playing a song by Moby Grape. Disgusted, he turned back to me. ‘Check it out. End of August. He be so tired, he be sleepwalkin’. Be halfway through his tour. The fool will go to pieces, and that’s when he’ll get it.’

Cotton had put thirty dollars on August thirty-first, exactly the midpoint of Lieutenant Joys’s tour of duty. He had a long time to adjust to the loss of the money, because he himself stayed alive until a sniper killed him at the beginning of February. Then he became a member of the ghost platoon that followed us wherever we went. I think this ghost platoon, filled with men I had loved and detested, whose names I could or could not remember, disbanded only when I went to the Wall in Washington, DC, and by then I felt that I was a member of it myself.

2

I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside and enjoying the slight coolness that followed the rain. The packet of Si Van Vo’s white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.

Wilson Manly’s shack was all the way on the other side of camp. I never liked going to the enlisted men’s club, where they were rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese beer in American bottles. Certainly the bottles had often been stripped of their labels, and to a suspicious eye the caps looked dented; also, the beer there never quite tasted like the stuff Manly sold.

One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted men’s club but closer than Manly’s shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes’ walk from where I stood, just at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy himself, supposedly a Green Beret captain who had installed a handful of bar girls in an old French command post, had gone home long ago, but his club had endured. There were no more girls, if there ever had been, and the brand-name liquor was about as reliable as the enlisted men’s club’s beer. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. They spoke almost no English. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post, even one that had been transformed into a bordello: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. The wood was soft with rot. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. Around six-thirty the light bounced off the long foxed mirror that stood behind the row of bottles. After five minutes of blinding light, the sun disappeared beneath the pine boards, and for ten or fifteen minutes a shadowy pink glow filled the barroom. There was no electricity and no ice. Fingerprints covered the glasses. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal boot prints on either side of a hole in the floor.

The building stood in a little grove of trees in the curve of the descending road, and as I walked toward it in the diffuse reddish light of the sunset, a mud-spattered jeep painted in the colors of camouflage gradually came into view to the right of the bar, emerging from invisibility like an optical illusion. The jeep seemed to have floated out of the trees behind it, to be a part of them.

I heard low male voices, which stopped when I stepped onto the soft boards of the front porch. I glanced at the jeep, looking for insignia or identification, but the mud covered the door panels. Something white gleamed dully from the back seat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.

Before I could reach the handle, the door opened. A boy named Mike stood before me, in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt much too large for him. Then he saw who I was. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. Tim. Okay. You come in.’ His real name was not Mike, but Mike was what it sounded like. He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me a tight, uncomfortable smile. ‘Far table, right side.’

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

‘Yesss.’ He stepped back to let me in.

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

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

I turned my head to look into the murk of that side of the bar, and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even less distinct.

‘Is okay, is okay,’ said Mike. ‘Old customer. Old friend.’

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

‘No women,’ Mike said. ‘No problem.’

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

‘You want whiskey, Tim?’ Mike asked.

‘Tim?’ the man said. ‘Tim?’

‘Beer,’ I said, and sat down.

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

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

‘Anything you say,’ I said.

‘No woman walks into this place.’ He put his hand on the gun. ‘No nurse. No wife. No anything.

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