hirty."
Frank said, "Do you remember what the name was on the driver's license?"
Otto fingered his shark's tooth necklace. "Name? You already know his name."
"What I'm wondering," Frank said, "is whether or not he showed you a phony driver's license."
"His picture was on it," Otto said.
"That doesn't mean it was genuine."
"But you can't change pictures on a California license. Doesn't the card self-destruct or something if you mess around with it?"
"I'm saying the whole card might be a fake."
"Forged credentials," Otto said, intrigued. "Forged credentials...." Clearly, he had watched a couple of hundred old espionage movies on television. "What is this, some sort of spy thing?"
"I think we've gotten turned around here," Frank said impatiently.
"Huh?"
"We're supposed to be the ones asking questions," Frank said. "You just answer them. Understand?"
The bartender was one of those people who reacted quickly, strongly, and negatively to a pushy cop. His dark face closed up. His eyes went blank.
Aware that they were about to lose Otto while he still might have something important to tell them, Tony put a hand on Frank's shoulder, squeezed gently. "You don't want him to start munching on a glass, do you?"
"I'd like to see it again," the blonde said, grinning.
"You'd rather do it your way?" Frank asked Tony.
"Sure."
"Go ahead."
Tony smiled at Otto. "Look, you're curious, and so are we. Doesn't hurt a thing if we satisfy your curiosity, so long as you satisfy ours."
Otto opened up again. "That's the way I see it, too."
"Okay," Tony said.
"Okay. So what's this Bobby Valdez done that makes you want him so bad?"
"Parole violations," Tony said.
"And assault," Frank said grudgingly.
"And rape," Tony said.
"Hey," Otto said, "didn't you guys say you were with the homicide squad?"
The band finished Still the Same with a clatter-bang-boom of sound not unlike the derailment of a speeding freight train. Then there were a few minutes of peace while the lead singer made unamusing small talk with the ringside customers who sat in clouds of smoke that, Tony felt sure, had come partly from cigarettes and partly from burning eardrums. The musicians pretended to tune their instruments.
"When Bobby Valdez comes across an uncooperative woman," Tony explained to Otto, "he pistol-whips her a little to make her more eager to please. Five days ago, he went after victim number ten, and she resisted, and he hit her on the head so hard and so often that she died in the hospital twelve hours later. Which brought the homicide squad into it."
"What I don't understand," the blonde said, "is why any guy would take it by force when there's girls willing to give it away." She winked at Tony, but he didn't wink back.
"Before the woman died," Frank said, "she gave us a description that fit Bobby like a custom-made glove. So if you know anything about the slimy little bastard, we've got to hear it."
Otto hadn't spent all his time watching spy movies. He had seen his share of police shows, too. He said, "So now you want him for murder-one."
"Murder-one," Tony said. "Precisely."
"How'd you know to ask me about him?"
"He accosted seven of those ten women in singles' bar parking lots--"
"None of them in our lot," Otto interrupted defensively. "Our lot is very well lighted."
"That's true," Tony said. "But we've been going to singles' bars all over the city, talking to bartenders and regular customers, showing them those mug shots, trying to get a line on Bobby Valdez. A couple of people at a place in Century City told us they thought they'd seen him here, but they couldn't be sure."
"He was here all right," Otto said.
Now that Otto's feathers had been smoothed, Frank took over the questioning again. "So he caused a commotion, and you did your beer glass trick, and he showed you his ID."
"Yeah."
"So what was the name on the ID?"
Otto frowned. "I'm not sure."
"Was it Robert Valdez?"
"I don't think so."
"Try to remember."
"It was a Chicano name."
"Valdez is a Chicano name."
"This was more Chicano than that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... longer... with a couple Zs in it."
"Zs?"
"And Qs. You know the kind of name I mean. Something like Velazquez."
"Was it Velazquez?"
"Nah. But like that."
"Began with a V?"
"I couldn't say for sure. I'm just talking about the sound of it."
"What about the first name?"
"I think I remember that."
"And?"
"Jaun."
"J-U-A-N?"
"Yeah. Very Chicano."
"You notice an address on his ID?"
"I wasn't looking for that."
"He mention where he lived?"
"We weren't exactly chummy."
"He say anything at all about himself?"
"He just drank quietly and left."
"And never came back?"
"That's right."
"You're positive?"
"He's never been back on my shift, anyway."
"You got a good memory."
"Only for the troublemakers and the pretty ones."
"We'd like to show those mug shots to some of your customers," Frank said.
"Sure. Go ahead."
The blonde sitting next to Tony Clemenza said, "Can I get a closer look at them? Maybe I was in here when he was. Maybe I even talked to him."
Tony picked up the photographs and swiveled on his barstool.
She swung toward him as he swung toward her, and she pressed her pretty knees against his. When she took the pictures from him, her fingers lingered for a moment on his. She was a great believer in eye contact. She seemed to be trying to stare right through his brain and out the back of his skull.
"I'm Judy. What's your name?"
"Tony Clemenza."
"I knew you were Italian. I could tell by your dark soulful eyes."
"They give me away every time."
"And that thick black hair. So curly."
"And the spaghetti sauce stains on my shirt?"
She looked at his shirt.
"There aren't really any stains," he said.
She frowned.
"Just kidding. A little joke," he said.
"Oh."
"Do you recognize Bobby Valdez?"
She finally looked at the mug shot. "Nope. I must not have been here the night he came in. But he's not all that bad, is he? Kind of cute."
"Baby face."
"It would be like going to bed with my kid brother," she said. "Kinky." She grinned.
He took the pictures from her.
"That's a very nice suit you're wearing," she said.
"Thank you."
"It's cut really nice."
"Thank you."
This was not just a liberated woman exercising her right to be the sexual aggressor. He liked liberated women. This one was something else. Something weird. The whips and chains type. Or worse. She made him feel like a tasty little morsel, a very edible canapé, the last tiny piece of toast and caviar on a silver tray.
"You sure don't see many suits in a place like this," she said.
"I guess not."
"Body shirts, jeans, leather jackets, the Hollywood look--that's what you see in a place like this."
He cleared his throat. "Well," he said uneasily, "I want to thank you for helping us as much as you could."
She said, "I like men who dress well."
Their eyes locked again, and he saw that flicker of ravenous hunger and animal greed. He had the feeling that if he let her lead him into her apartment, the door would close behind him like a set of jaws. She'd be all over him in an instant, pushing and pulling and whirling him around as if she were a wave of digestive juices, breaking him down and sucking the nutrients out of him, using him until he fragmented and dissolved and simply ceased to exist except as a part of her.
"Got to go to work," he said, sliding off the barstool. "See you around."
"I hope so."
For fifteen minutes, Tony and Frank showed the mug shots of Bobby Valdez to the customers in Paradise. As they moved from table to table, the band played Rolling Stones and Elton John and Bee Gees material at a volume that set up sympathetic vibrations in Tony's teeth. It was a waste of time. No one in Paradise remembered the killer with the baby face.
On the way out, Tony stopped at the long oak bar where Otto was mixing strawberry Margaritas. "Tell me something," he shouted above the music.
"Anything," Otto yelled.
"Don't people come to these places to meet each other?"
"Making connections. That's what it's all about."
"Then why the hell do so many singles' bars have bands like that one?"
"What's wrong with the band?"
"A lot of things. But mostly it's too damned loud."
"So?"
"So how can anyone possibly strike up an interesting conversation?"
"Interesting conversation?" Otto said. "Hey man, they don't come here for interesting conversation. They come to meet each other, check each other out, see who they want to go to bed with."
"But no conversation?"
"Look at them. Just look around at them. What would they talk about? If we didn't play music loud and fairly steady, they'd get nervous."
"All those maddeningly quiet spaces to fill."
"How right you are. They'd go somewhere else."
"Where the music was louder and they only needed body language."
Otto shrugged. "It's a sign of the times."
"Maybe I should have lived in another time," Tony said.
Outside, the night was mild, but he knew it would get colder. A thin mist was coming off the sea, not genuine fog yet, but a sort of damp greasy breath that hung in the air and made halos around all the lights.
Frank was waiting behind the wheel of the unmarked police sedan. Tony climbed in on the passenger's side and buckled his seatbelt.
They had one more lead to check out before they quit for the day. Earlier, a couple of people at that Century City singles' bar had said they'd also seen Bobby Valdez at a joint called The Big Quake on Sunset Boulevard, over in Hollywood.
Traffic was moderate to heavy heading toward the heart of the city. Sometimes Frank got impatient and darted from lane to lane, weaving in and out with toots of the horn and little squeals of the brakes, trying to get ahead a few car lengths, but not tonight. Tonight, he was going with the flow.
Tony wondered if Frank Howard had been discussing philosophy with Otto.
After a while, Frank said, "You could have had her."
"Who?"
"That blonde. That Judy."
"I was on duty, Frank."
"You could have set something up for later. She was panting for you."
"Not my type."
"She was gorgeous."
"She was a killer."
"She was what?"
"She'd have eaten me up alive."
Frank considered that for about two seconds, then said, "Bullshit. I'd take a crack at her if I had the chance."
"You know where she's at."
"Maybe I'll mosey back there later, when we're done."
"You do that," Tony said. "Then I'll come visit you in the rest home when she's finished with you."
"Hell, what's the matter with you? She wasn't that special. That kind of stuff can be handled easy."
"Maybe that's why I didn't want it."
"Send that one by me again."
Tony Clemenza was tired. He wiped his face with his hands as if weariness was a mask that he could pull off and discard. "She was too well-handled, too well-used."
"Since when did you become a Puritan?"
"I'm not," Tony said, "Or ... yeah ... okay, maybe I am. Just a little. Just a thin streak of Puritanism in there somewhere. God knows, I've had more than a few of what they now call 'meaningful relationships.' I'm far from pure. But I just can't see myself on the make in a place like Paradise, cruising, calling all the women 'foxes,' looking for fresh meat. For one thing, I couldn't keep a straight face making the kind of chatter that fills in between the band's numbers. Can you hear me making that scene? 'Hi, I'm Tony. What's your name? What's your sign? Are you into numerology? Have you taken est training? Do you believe in the incredible totality of cosmic energy? Do you believe in destiny as an arm of some all-encompassing cosmic consciousness? Do you think we were destined to meet? Do you think we could get rid of all the bad karma we've generated individually by creating a good energy gestalt together? Want to fuck?'"
"Except for the part about fucking," Frank said, "I didn't understand a thing you said."
"Neither did I. That's what I mean. In a place like Paradise, it's all plastic chatter, glossy surface jive talk formulated to slide everyone into bed with as little friction as possible. In Paradise, you don't ask a woman anything really important. You don't ask about her feelings, her emotions, her talents, her fears, hopes, wants, needs, dreams. So what happens is you end up going to bed with a stranger. Worse than that, you find yourself making love to a fox, to a paper cut-out from a men's magazine, an image instead of a woman, a piece of meat instead of a person, which means you aren't making love at all. The act becomes just the satisfying of a bodily urge, no different than scratching an itch or having a good bowel movement. If a man reduces sex to that, then he might as well stay home alone and use his hand."
Frank braked for a red light and said. "Your hand can't give you a blow job."
"Jesus, Frank, sometimes you can be crude as hell."
"Just being practical."
"What I'm trying to say is that, for me at least, the dance isn't worth the effort if you don't know your partner. I'm not one of those people who'd go to a disco just to revel in my own fancy choreography. I've got to know what the lady's steps are, how she wants to move and why, what she feels and thinks. Sex is just so damned much better if she means something to you, if she's an individual, a quirky person all her own, not just a smooth sleek body that's rounded in all the right places, but a unique personality, a character with chips and dents and marks of experience."
"I can't believe what I'm hearing," Frank said as he drove away from the traffic signal. "It's that old bromide about sex being cheap and unfulfilling if love isn't mixed up with it somehow."
"I'm not talking about undying love," Tony said. "I'm not talking about unbreakable vows of fidelity until the end of time. You can love someone for a little while, in little ways. You can go on loving her even after the physical part of the relationship is over. I'm friends with old lovers because we didn't look at each other as new notches on the gun: we had something in common even after we stopped sharing a bed. Look, before I'm going to go for a tumble in the sack, before I'm going to get bare-assed and vulnerable with a woman, I want to know I can trust her: I want to feel she's special in some way, dear to me, a person worth knowing, worth revealing myself to, worth being a part of for a while."
"Garbage," Frank said scornfully.
"It's the way I feel."
"Let me give you a warning."
"Go ahead."
"The best advice you'll ever get."
"I'm listening."
"If you think there's really something called love, if you honest-to-God believe there's actually a thing called love that's as strong and real as hate or fear, then all you're doing is setting yourself up for a lot of pain. It's a lie. A big lie. Love is something writers invented to sell books."
"You don't really mean that."
"The hell I don't." Frank glanced away from the road for a moment, looked at Tony with pity. "You're how old--thirty-three?"
"Almost thirty-five," Tony said as Frank looked back at the street and pulled around a slow-moving truck that was loaded down with scrap metal.
"Well, I'm ten years older than you," Frank said. "So listen to the wisdom of age. Sooner or later, you're going to think you're in true love with some fluff, and while you're bending over to kiss her pretty feet she's going to kick the shit out of you. Sure as hell, she'll break your heart if you let her know you have one. Affection? Sure. That's okay. And lust. Lust is the word, my friend. Lust is what it's really all about. But not love. What you've got to do is forget all this love crap. Enjoy yourself. Get all the ass you can while you're young. Fuck 'em and run. You can't get hurt that way. If you keep daydreaming about love, you'll only go on making a complete goddamned fool out of yourself, over and over and over again, until they finally stick you in the ground."
"That's too cynical for me."
Frank shrugged.
Six months ago, he had gone through a bitter divorce. He was still sour from the experience.
"And you're not really that cynical, either," Tony said. "I don't think you really believe what you said."
Frank didn't say anything.
"You're a sensitive man," Tony said.
Frank shrugged again.
For a minute or two, Tony tried to revive the dead conversation, but Frank had said everything he intended to say about the subject. He settled into his usual sphinxlike silence. It was surprising that he had said all he said, for Frank was not much of a talker. In fact, when Tony thought about it, the brief discussion just concluded seemed to have been the longest they'd ever had.
Tony had been partners with Frank Howard for more than three months. He still was not sure if the pairing was going to work out.
They were so different from each other in so many ways. Tony was a talker. Frank usually did little more than grunt in response. Tony had a wide variety of interests other than his job: films, books, food, the theater, music, art, skiing, running. So far as he could tell, Frank didn't care a great deal about anything except his work. Tony believed that a detective had many tools with which to extract information from a witness, including kindness, gentleness, wit, sympathy, empathy, attentiveness, charm, persistence, cleverness--and of course, intimidation and the rare use of mild force. Frank felt he could get along fine with just persistence, cleverness, intimidation, and a bit more force than the department thought acceptable; he had no use whatsoever for the other approaches on Tony's list. As a result, at least twice a week, Tony had to restrain him subtly but firmly. Frank was subject to eye-bulging, blood-boiling rages when too many things went wrong in one day. Tony, on the other hand, was nearly always calm. Frank was five-nine, stocky, solid as a blockhouse. Tony was six-one, lean, rangy, rugged looking. Frank was blond and blue-eyed. Tony was dark. Frank was a brooding pessimist. Tony was an optimist. Sometimes it seemed they were such totally opposite types that the partnership never could be successful.
Yet they were alike in some respects. For one thing, neither of them was an eight-hour-a-day cop. More often than not, they worked an extra two hours, sometimes three, without pay, and neither of them complained about it. Toward the end of a case, when evidence and leads developed faster and faster, they would work on their days off if they thought it necessary. No one asked them to do overtime. No one ordered it. The choice was entirely theirs.
Tony was willing to give more than a fair share of himself to the department because he was ambitious. He did not intend to remain a detective-lieutenant for the rest of his life. He wanted to work his way up at least to captain, perhaps higher than that, perhaps all the way to the top, right into the chief's office, where the pay and retirement benefits were a hell of a lot better than what he would get if he stayed where he was. He had been raised in a large Italian family in which parsimony had been a religion as important as Roman Catholicism. His father, Carlo, was an immigrant who worked as a tailor. The old man had labored hard and long to keep his children housed, clothed, and fed, but quite often he had come perilously close to destitution and bankruptcy. There had been much sickness in the Clemenza family, and the unexpected hospital and pharmacy bills had eaten up a frighteningly high percentage of what the old man earned. While Tony was still a child, even before he was old enough to understand about money and household budgets, before he knew anything about the debilitating fear of poverty with which his father lived, he sat through hundreds, maybe thousands, of short but strongly worded lectures on fiscal responsibility. Carlo instructed him almost daily in the importance of hard work, financial shrewdness, ambition, and job security. His father should have worked for the CIA in the brainwashing department. Tony had been so totally indoctrinated, so completely infused with his father's fears and principles, that even at the age of thirty-five, with an excellent bank account and a steady job, he felt uneasy if he was away from work more than two or three days. As often as not, when he took a long vacation, it turned into an ordeal instead of a pleasure. He put in a lot of overtime every week because he was Carlo Clemenza's son, and Carlo Clemenza's son could not possibly have done otherwise.
Frank Howard had other reasons for giving a big piece of himself to the department. He did not appear to be any more ambitious than the next guy, and he did not seem unduly worried about money. As far as Tony could tell, Frank put in the extra hours because he really lived only when he was on the job. Being a homicide detective was the only role he knew how to play, the one thing that gave him a sense of purpose and worth.
Tony looked away from the red taillights of the cars in front of them and studied his partner's face. Frank wasn't aware of Tony's scrutiny. His attention was focused on his driving; he peered intently at the quicksilver flow of traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. The green glow from the dashboard dials and gauges highlighted his bold features. He was not handsome in the classic sense, but he was good-looking in his own way. Broad brow. Deeply-set blue eyes. The nose a bit large and sharp. The mouth well-formed but most often set in a grim scowl that flexed the strong jawline. The face unquestionably contained power and appeal--and more than a hint of unyielding single-mindedness. It was not difficult to picture Frank going home and sitting down and, every night without fail, dropping into a trance that lasted from quitting time until eight the next morning.
In addition to their willingness to work extended hours, Tony and Frank had a few other things in common. Although many plainclothes detectives had tossed out the old dress code and now reported for duty in everything from jeans to leisure suits, Tony and Frank still believed in wearing traditional suits and ties. They thought of themselves as professionals, doing a job that required special skills and education, a job as vital and demanding as that of any trial attorney or teacher or social worker--more demanding, in fact--and jeans simply did not contribute to a professional image. Neither of them smoked. Neither of them drank on the job. And neither of them attempted to foist his paperwork on the other.
So maybe it'll work out between us, Tony thought. Maybe in time I can quietly convince him to use more charm and less force with witnesses. Maybe I can get him interested in films and food, if not in books and art and theater. The reason I'm having so much trouble adjusting to him is that my expectations are far too high. But Jesus, if only he'd talk a little more instead of sitting there like a lump!
For the rest of his career as a homicide detective, Tony would expect a great deal of anyone who rode with him because, for five years, until last May 7, he had worked with a nearly perfect partner, Michael Savatino. He and Michael were both from Italian families; they shared certain ethnic memories, pains, and pleasures. More important than that, they employed similar methods in their police work, and they enjoyed many of the same extracurricular activities. Michael was an avid reader, a film buff, and an excellent cook. Their days had been punctuated by fascinating conversations.
Last February, Michael and his wife, Paula, had gone to Las Vegas for a weekend. They saw two shows. They ate dinner twice at Battista's Hole in the Wall, the best restaurant in town. They filled out a dozen Keno cards and won nothing. They played two-dollar blackjack and lost sixty bucks. And one hour before their scheduled departure, Paula put a silver dollar in a slot machine that promised a progressive jackpot, pulled the handle, and won slightly more than two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Police work never had been Michael's first choice for a career. But like Tony, he was a seeker of security. He attended the police academy and climbed relatively quickly from uniformed patrolman to detective because public service offered at least moderate financial security. In March, however, Michael gave the department a sixty-day notice, and in May he quit. All of his adult life, he had wanted to own a restaurant. Five weeks ago, he opened Savatino's, a small but authentic Italian ristorante on Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from the Century City complex.
A dream come true.
How likely is it that I could make my dream come true the same way? Tony wondered as he studied the night city through which they moved. How likely is it that I could go to Vegas, win two hundred thousand bucks, quit the police force, and take a shot at making it as an artist?
He did not have to ask the question aloud. He didn't need Frank Howard's opinion. He knew the answer. How likely was it? Not very damned likely. About as likely as suddenly learning he was the long-lost son of a rich Arabian prince.
As Michael Savatino had always dreamed of being a restaurateur, so Tony Clemenza dreamed of earning his living as an artist. He had talent. He produced fine pieces in a variety of media: pen and ink, watercolor, oil. He was not merely technically skilled; he had a sharp and unique creative imagination as well. Perhaps if he had been born into a middle-class family with at least modest financial resources, he would have gone to a good school, would have received the proper training from the best professors, would have honed his God-given abilities, and would have become tremendously successful. Instead, he had educated himself with hundreds of art books and through thousands of hours of painstaking drawing practice and experimentation with materials. And he suffered from that pernicious lack of self-confidence so common to those who are self-taught in any field. Although he had entered four art shows and had twice won top prize in his division, he never seriously considered quitting his job and plunging into the creative life. That was nothing more than a pleasant fantasy, a bright daydream. No son of Carlo Clemenza would ever forsake a weekly paycheck for the dread uncertainties of self-employment, unless he had first banked a windfall from Las Vegas.
He was jealous of Michael Savatino's good fortune. Of course, they were still close friends, and he was genuinely happy for Michael. Delighted. Really. But also jealous. He was human, after all, and in the back of his mind, the same petty question kept blinking off and on, off and on, like a neon sign: Why couldn't it have been me?
Slamming on the brakes, jolting Tony out of his reverie, Frank blew the horn at a Corvette that cut him off in traffic. "Asshole!"
"Easy, Frank."
"Sometimes I wish I was back in uniform again, handing out citations."
"That's the last thing you wish."
"I'd nail his ass."
"Except maybe he'd turn out to be out of his skull on drugs or maybe just plain crazy. When you work the traffic detail too long, you tend to forget the world's full of nuts. You fall into a habit, a routine, and you get careless. So maybe you'd stop him and walk up to his door with your ticket book in hand, and he'd greet you with a gun. Maybe he'd blow your head off. No. I'm thankful traffic detail's behind me forever. At least when you're on a homicide assignment, you know the kind of people you're going to have to deal with. You never forget there's going to be someone with a gun or a knife or a piece of lead pipe up ahead somewhere. You're a lot less likely to walk into a nasty little surprise when you're working homicide."
Frank refused to be drawn into another discussion. He kept his eyes on the road, grumbled sullenly, wordlessly, and settled back into silence.
Tony sighed. He stared at the passing scenery with an artist's eye for unexpected detail and previously unnoticed beauty.
Patterns.
Every scene--every seascape, every landscape, every street, every building, every room in every building, every person, every thing--had its own special patterns. If you could perceive the patterns in a scene, you could then look beyond the patterns to the underlying structure that supported them. If you could see and grasp the method by which a surface harmony had been achieved, you eventually could understand the deepest meaning and mechanisms of any subject and then make a good painting of it. If you picked up your brushes and approached the canvas without first performing that analysis, you might wind up with a pretty picture, but you would not produce a work of art.
Patterns.
As Frank Howard drove east on Wilshire, on the way to the Hollywood singles' bar called The Big Quake, Tony searched for patterns in the city and the night. At first, coming in from Santa Monica, there were the sharp low lines of the sea-facing houses and the shadowy outlines of tall feathery palms--patterns of serenity and civility and more than a little money. As they entered Westwood, the dominant pattern was rectilinear: clusters of office highrises, oblong patches of light radiating from scattered windows in the mostly dark faces of the buildings. These neatly ordered rectangular shapes formed the patterns of modern thought and corporate power, patterns of even greater wealth than had been evident in Santa Monica's seaside homes. From Westwood they went to Beverly Hills, an insulated pocket within the greater fabric of the metropolis, a place through which the Los Angeles police could pass but in which they had no authority. In Beverly Hills, the patterns were soft and lush and flowing in a graceful continuum of big houses, parks, greenery, exclusive shops, and more ultra-expensive automobiles than you could find anywhere else on earth. From Wilshire Boulevard to Santa Monica Boulevard to Doheny, the pattern was one of ever-increasing wealth.
They turned north on Doheny, crawled up the steep hills, and swung right onto Sunset Boulevard, heading for the heart of Hollywood. For a couple of blocks, the famous street delivered a little bit on the promise of its name and legend. On the right stood Scandia, one of the best and most elegant restaurants in town, and one of the half dozen best in the entire country. Glittering discos. A nightclub specializing in magic. Another spot owned and operated by a stage hypnotist. Comedy clubs. Rock and roll clubs. Huge flashy billboards advertising current films and currently popular recording stars. Lights, lights and more lights. Initially, the boulevard supported the university studies and government reports that claimed Los Angeles and its suburbs formed the richest metropolitan area in the nation, perhaps the richest in the world. But after a while, as Frank continued to drive eastward, the blush of glamor faded. Even L.A. suffered from senescence. The pattern became marginally but unmistakably cancerous. In the healthy flesh of the city, a few malignant growths swelled here and there: cheap bars, a striptease club, a shuttered service station, brassy massage parlors, an adult book store, a few buildings desperately in need of renovation, more of them block by block. The disease was not terminal in this neighborhood, as it was in others nearby, but every day it gobbled up a few more bites of healthy tissue. Frank and Tony did not have to descend into the scabrous heart of the tumor, for The Big Quake was still on the edge of the blight. The bar appeared suddenly in a blaze of red and blue lights on the righthand side of the street.
Inside, the place resembled Paradise, except that the decor relied more heavily on colored lights and chrome and mirrors than it did in the Santa Monica bar. The customers were somewhat more consciously stylish, more aggressively au courant, and generally a shade better looking than the crowd in Paradise. But to Tony the patterns appeared to be the same as they were in Santa Monica. Patterns of need, longing, and loneliness. Desperate, carnivorous patterns.
The bartender wasn't able to help them, and the only customer who had anything for them was a tall brunette with violet eyes. She was sure they would find Bobby at Janus, a discotheque in Westwood. She had seen him there the previous two nights.
Outside, in the parking lot, bathed in alternating flashes of red and blue light, Frank said, "One thing just leads to another."
"As usual."
"It's getting late."
"Yeah."
"You want to try Janus now or leave it for tomorrow?"
"Now," Tony said.
"Good."
They turned around and traveled west on Sunset, out of the area that showed signs of urban cancer, into the glitter of the Strip, then into greenery and wealth again, past the Beverly Hills Hotel, past mansions and endless marching rows of gigantic palm trees.
As he often did when he suspected Tony might attempt to strike up another conversation, Frank switched on the police band radio and listened to Communications calling black-and-whites in the division that provided protection for Westwood, toward which they were heading. Nothing much was happening on that frequency. A family dispute. A fender-bender at the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilshire. A suspicious man in a parked car on a quiet residential street off Hilgarde had attracted attention and needed checking out.
In most of the city's other sixteen police divisions, the night was far less safe and peaceful than it was in privileged Westwood. In the Seventy-seventh, Newton, and Southwest divisions, which served the black community south of the Santa Monica Freeway, none of the mid-watch patrol officers would be bored; in their bailiwicks the night was jumping. On the east side of town, in the Mexican-American neighborhoods, the gangs would continue to give a bad name to the vast majority of law-abiding Chicano citizens. By the time the mid-watch went off duty at three o'clock--three hours after the morning watch came on line--there would be several ugly incidents of gang violence on the east side, a few punks stabbing other punks, maybe a shooting and a death or two as the macho maniacs tried to prove their manhood in the wearisome, stupid, but timeless blood ceremonies they had been performing with Latin passion for generations. To the northwest, on the far side of the hills, the affluent valley kids were drinking too damned much whiskey, smoking too much pot, snorting too much cocaine--and subsequently ramming their cars and vans and motorcycles into one another at ghastly speeds and with tiresome regularity.
As Frank drove past the entrance to Bel Air Estates and started up a hill toward the UCLA campus, the Westwood scene suddenly got lively. Communications put out a woman-in-trouble call. Information was sketchy. Apparently, it was an attempted rape and assault with a deadly weapon. It was not clear if the assailant was still on the premises. Shots had been fired, but Communications had been unable to ascertain from the complainant whether the gun belonged to her or the assailant. Likewise, they didn't know if anyone was hurt.
"Have to go in blind," Tony said.
"That address is just a couple of blocks from here," Frank said.
"We could be there in a minute."
"Probably a lot faster than the patrol car."
"Want to assist?"
"Sure."
"I'll call in and tell them."
Tony picked up the microphone as Frank hung a hard left at the first intersection. A block later they turned left again, and Frank accelerated as much as he dared along the narrow, tree-flanked street.
Tony's heart accelerated with the car. He felt an old excitement, a cold hard knot of fear in his guts.
He remembered Parker Hitchison, a particularly quirky, morose, and humorless partner he had endured for a short while during his second year as a patrol officer, long before he won his detective's badge. Every time they answered a call, every damned time, whether it was a Code Three emergency or just a frightened cat stuck in a tree, Parker Hitchison sighed mournfully and said, "Now, we die." It was weird and decidedly unsettling. Over and over again on every shift, night after night, with sincere and unflagging pessimism, he said it--"Now, we die"--until Tony was almost crazy.
Hitchison's funereal voice and those three somber words still haunted him in moments like this.
Now we die?
Frank wheeled around another corner, nearly clipping a black BMW that was parked too close to the intersection. The tires squealed, and the sedan shimmied, and Frank said, "That address ought to be right around here somewhere."
Tony squinted at the shadowy houses that were only partly illuminated by the streetlamps. "There it is, I think," he said, pointing.
It was a large neo-Spanish house set well back from the street on a spacious lot. Red tile roof. Cream-colored stucco. Leaded windows. Two big wrought-iron carriage lamps, one on each side of the front door.
Frank parked in the circular driveway.
They got out of the unmarked sedan.
Tony reached under his jacket and slipped the service revolver out of his shoulder holster.

***

After Hilary had finished crying at her desk in the study, she had decided, in a daze, to go upstairs and make herself presentable before she reported the assault to the police. Her hair had been in complete disarray, her dress torn, her pantyhose shredded and hanging from her legs in ludicrous loops and tangles. She didn't know how quickly the reporters would arrive once the word had gotten out on the police radio, but she had no doubt that they would show up sooner or later. She was something of a public figure, having written two hit films and having received an Academy Award nomination two years ago for her Arizona Shifty Pete screenplay. She treasured her privacy and preferred to avoid the press if at all possible, but she knew that she would have little choice but to make a statement and answer a few questions about what had happened to her this night. It was the wrong kind of publicity. It was embarrassing. Being the victim in a case like this was always humiliating. Although it should make her an object of sympathy and concern, it actually would make her look like a fool, a patsy just waiting to be pushed around. She had successfully defended herself against Frye, but that would not matter to the sensation seekers. In the unfriendly glare of the television lights and in the flat gray newspaper photos, she would look weak. The merciless American public would wonder why she had let Frye into her house. They would speculate that she had been raped and that her story of fending him off was just a coverup. Some of them would be certain that she had invited him in and had asked to be raped. Most of the sympathy she received would be shot through with morbid curiosity. The only thing she could control was her appearance when the newsmen arrived. She simply could not allow herself to be photographed in the pitiable, dissheveled state in which Bruno Frye had left her.
As she washed her face and combed her hair and changed into a silk robe that belted at the waist, she was not aware that these actions would damage her credibility with the police, later. She didn't realize that, in making herself presentable, she was actually setting herself up as a target for at least one policeman's suspicion and scorn, as well as for charges of being a liar.
Although she thought she was in command of herself, Hilary got the shakes again as she finished changing clothes. Her legs turned to jelly, and she was forced to lean against the closet door for a minute.
Nightmarish images crowded her mind, vivid flashes of unsummoned memories. At first, she saw Frye coming at her with a knife, grinning like a death's head, but then he changed, melted into another shape, another identity, and he became her father, Earl Thomas, and then it was Earl who was coming at her, drunk and angry, cursing, taking swipes at her with his big hard hands. She shook her head and drew deep breaths and, with an effort, banished the vision.
But she could not stop shaking.
She imagined that she heard strange noises in another room of the house. A part of her knew that she was merely imagining it, but another part was sure that she could hear Frye returning for her.
By the time she ran to the phone and dialed the police, she was in no condition to give the calm and reasoned report she had planned. The events of the past hour had affected her far more profoundly than she had thought at first, and recovering from the shock might take days, even weeks.
After she hung up the receiver, she felt better, just knowing help was on the way. As she went downstairs, she said aloud, "Stay calm. Just stay calm. You're Hilary Thomas. You're tough. Tough as nails. You aren't scared. Not ever. Everything will be okay." It was the same litany that she had repeated as a child so many nights in that Chicago apartment. By the time she reached the first door, she had begun to get a grip on herself.
She was standing in the foyer, staring out the narrow leaded window beside the door, when a car stopped in the driveway. Two men got out of it. Although they had not come with sirens blaring and red lights flashing, she knew they were the police, and she unlocked the door, opened it.
The first man onto the front stoop was powerfully built, blond, blue-eyed, and had the hard no-nonsense voice of a cop. He had a gun in his right hand. "Police. Who're you?"
"Thomas," she said. "Hilary Thomas. I'm the one who called."
"This your house?"
"Yes. There was a man--"
A second detective, taller and darker than the first, appeared out of the night and interrupted her before she could finish the sentence. "Is he on the premises?"
"What?"
"Is the man who assaulted you still here?"
"Oh, no. Gone. He's gone."
"Which way did he go?" the blond man asked.
"Out this door."
"Did he have a car?"
"I don't know."
"Was he armed?"
"No. I mean, yes."
"Which is it?"
"He had a knife. But not now."
"Which way did he run when he left the house?"
"I don't know. I was upstairs. I--"
"How long ago did he leave?" the tall dark one asked.
"Maybe fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago."
They exchanged a look that she did not understand but which she knew, immediately, was not good for her.
"What took you so long to call it in?" the blond asked.
He was slightly hostile.
She felt she was losing some important advantage that she could not identify.
"At first I was ... confused," she said. "Hysterical. I needed a few minutes to get myself together."
"Twenty minutes?"
"Maybe it was only fifteen."
Both detectives put away their revolvers.
"We'll need a description," the dark one said.
"I can give you better than that," she said as she stepped aside to let them enter. "I can give you a name."
"A name?"
"His name. I know him," she said. "The man who attacked me. I know who he is."
The two detectives gave each other that look again. She thought: What have I done wrong?

***

Hilary Thomas was one of the most beautiful women Tony had ever seen. She appeared to have a few drops of Indian blood. Her hair was long and thick, darker than his own, a glossy raven-black. Her eyes were dark, too, the whites as clear as pasteurized cream. Her flawless complexion was a light milky bronze shade, probably largely the result of carefully measured time in the California sun. If her face was a bit long, that was balanced by the size of her eyes (enormous) and by the perfect shape of her patrician nose, and by the almost obscene fullness of her lips. Hers was an erotic face, but an intelligent and kind face as well, the face of a woman capable of great tenderness and compassion. There was also pain in that countenance, especially in those fascinating eyes, the kind of pain that came from experience, knowledge; and Tony expected that it was not merely the pain she'd suffered that night; some of it went back a long, long time.
She sat on one end of the brushed corduroy sofa in the book-lined study, and Tony sat on the other end. They were alone.
Frank was in the kitchen, talking on the phone to a desk man at headquarters.
Upstairs, two uniformed patrolmen. Whitlock and Farmer, were digging bullets out of the walls.
There was not a fingerprint man in the house because, according to the complainant, the intruder had worn gloves.
"What's he doing now?" Hilary Thomas asked.
"Who?"
"Lieutenant Howard."
"He's calling headquarters and asking someone to get in touch with the sheriff's office up there in Napa County, where Frye lives."
"Why?"
"Well, for one thing, maybe the sheriff can find out how Frye got to L.A."
"What's it matter how he got here?" she asked. "The important thing is that he's here and he's got to be found and stopped."
"If he flew down," Tony said, "it doesn't matter much at all. But if Frye drove to L.A., the sheriff up in Napa County might be able to find out what car he used. With a description of the vehicle and a license number, we've got a better chance of nailing him before he gets too far."
She considered that for a moment, then said, "Why did Lieutenant Howard go to the kitchen? Why didn't he just use the phone in here?"
"I guess he wanted you to have a few minutes of peace and quiet," Tony said uneasily.
"I think he just didn't want me to hear what he was saying."
"Oh, no. He was only--"
"You know, I have the strangest feeling," she said, interrupting him. "I feel like I'm the suspect instead of the victim."
"You're just tense," he said. "Understandably tense."
"It isn't that. It's something about the way you're acting toward me. Well ... not so much you as him."
"Frank can seem cool at times," Tony said. "But he's a good detective."
"He thinks I'm lying."
Tony was surprised by her perspicacity. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. "I'm sure he doesn't think any such thing."
"He does," she insisted. "And I don't understand why." Her eyes fixed on his. "Level with me. Come on. What is it? What did I say wrong?"
He sighed. "You're a perceptive lady."
"I'm a writer. It's part of my job to observe things a little more closely than most people do. And I'm also persistent. So you might as well answer my question and get me off your back."
"One of the things that bothers Lieutenant Howard is the fact that you know the man who attacked you."
"So?"
"This is awkward," he said unhappily.
"Let me hear it anyway."
"Well..." He cleared his throat. "Conventional police wisdom says that if the complainant in a rape or an attempted rape knows the victim, there's a pretty good chance that she contributed to the crime by enticing the accused to one degree or another."
"Bullshit!"
She got up, went to the desk, and stood with her back to him for a minute. He could see that she was struggling to maintain her composure. What he had said had made her extremely angry.
When she turned to him at last, her face was flushed. She said, "This is horrible. It's outrageous. Every time a woman is raped by someone she knows, you actually believe she asked for it."
"No. Not every time."
"But most of the time, that's what you think," she said angrily.
"No."
She glared at him. "Let's stop playing semantical games. You believe it about me. You believe I enticed him."
"No," Tony said. "I merely explained what conventional police wisdom is in a case like this. I didn't say that I put much faith in conventional police wisdom. I don't. But Lieutenant Howard does. You asked me about him. You wanted to know what he was thinking, and I told you."
She frowned. "Then ... you believe me?"
"Is there any reason I shouldn't?"
"It happened exactly the way I said."
"All right."
She stared at him. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do you believe me when he doesn't?"
"I can think of only two reasons for a woman to bring false rape charges against a man. And neither of them makes any sense in your case."
She leaned against the desk, folded her arms in front of her, cocked her head, and regarded him with interest. "What reasons?"
"Number one, he has money, and she doesn't. She wants to put him on the spot, hoping she can pry some sort of big settlement out of him in return for dropping the charges."
"But I've got money."
"Apparently, you've got quite a lot of it," he said, looking around admiringly at the beautifully furnished room.
"What's the other reason?"
"A man and a woman are having an affair, but he leaves her for another lady. She feels hurt, rejected, scorned. She wants to get even with him. She wants to punish him, so she accuses him of rape."
"How can you be sure that doesn't fit me?" she asked.
"I've seen both your movies, so I figure I know a little bit about the way your mind works. You're a very intelligent woman, Miss Thomas. I don't think you could be foolish or petty or spiteful enough to send a man to prison just because he hurt your feelings."
She studied him intently.
He felt himself being weighed and judged.
Obviously convinced that he was not the enemy, she returned to the couch and sat down in a swish of dark-blue silk. The robe molded to her, and he tried not to show how aware he was of her strikingly female lines.
She said, "I'm sorry I was snappish."
"You weren't," he assured her. "Conventional police wisdom makes me angry, too."
"I suppose if this gets into court, Frye's attorney will try to make the jury believe that I enticed the son of a bitch."
"You can count on it."
"Will they believe him?"
"They often do."
"But he wasn't just going to rape me. He was going to kill me."
"You'll need proof of that."
"The broken knife upstairs--"
"Can't be connected to him," Tony said. "It won't be covered with his prints. And it's just a common kitchen knife. There's no way we can trace it to the point of purchase and tie it to Bruno Frye."
"But he looked so crazy. He's ... unbalanced. The jury would see that. Hell, you'll see it when you arrest him. There probably won't even be a trial. He'll probably just be put away."
"If he'a lunatic, he knows how to pass for normal," Tony said. "After all, until tonight, he's been regarded as an especially responsible and upstanding citizen. When you visited his winery near St. Helena, you didn't realize you were in the company of a madman, did you?"
"No."
"Neither will the jury."
She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. "So he's probably going to get away clean."
"I'm sorry to say there's a good chance that he will."
"And then he'll come back for me."
"Maybe."
"Jesus."
"You wanted the unvarnished truth."
She opened her lovely eyes. "I did, yes. And thank you for giving it to me." She even managed a smile.
He smiled back at her. He wanted to take her in his arms, hold her close, comfort her, kiss her, make love to her. But all he could do was sit on his end of the couch like a good officer of the law and smile his witless smile and say, "Sometimes it's a lousy system."
"What are the other reasons?"
"Excuse me?"
"You said one reason Lieutenant Howard didn't believe me was because I knew the assailant. What are the other reasons? What else makes him think I'm lying?"
Tony was about to answer her when Frank Howard walked into the room.
"Okay," Frank said brusquely. "We've got the sheriff looking into it up there in Napa County, trying to get a line on when and how this Frye character left town. We also have an APB out, based on your description, Miss Thomas. Now, I went to the car and got my clipboard and this crime report form." He held up the rectangular piece of masonite and the single sheet of paper affixed to it, took a pen from his inside coat pocket. "I want you to walk Lieutenant Clemenza and me through your entire experience just once more, so I can write it all down precisely in your own words. Then we can get out of your way."
She led them to the foyer and began her story with a detailed recounting of Bruno Frye's surprise appearance from the coat closet. Tony and Frank followed her to the overturned sofa, then upstairs to the bedroom, asking questions as they went. During the thirty minutes they needed to complete the form, as she reenacted the events of the evening, her voice now and then became tremulous, and again Tony had the urge to hold and soothe her.
Just as the crime report was completed, a few newsmen arrived. She went downstairs to meet them.
At the same time, Frank got a call from headquarters and took it on the bedroom phone.
Tony went downstairs to wait for Frank and to see how Hilary Thomas would deal with the reporters.
She handled them expertly. Pleading weariness and a need for privacy, she did not allow them into her house. She stepped outside, onto the stone walk, and they gathered in front of her. A television news crew had arrived, complete with a minicam and the standard actor-reporter, one of those men who had gotten his job largely because of his chiseled features and penetrating eyes and deep fatherly voice. Intelligence and journalistic ability had little to do with being a performer in televsion news; indeed, too much of either quality could be seriously disadvantageous; for optimum success, the career-minded television reporter had to think much the same way that his program was structured--in three- and four- and five-minute segments, never dwelling longer than that on any one subject, and never exploring anything at great depth. A newspaperman and his photographer, not so pretty as the television man and a bit rumpled, were also present. Hilary Thomas fielded their questions with ease, answering only those that she wanted to answer, smoothly turning away all of those that were too personal or impertinent.
The thing that Tony found most interesting about her performance was the way she kept the news people out of the house and out of her most private thoughts without offending them. That was no easy trick. There were many excellent reporters who could dig for the truth and write fine stories without violating the subject's rights and dignity; but there were just as many of the other kind, the boars and the con men. With the rise of what The Washington Post glowingly referred to as "advocacy journalism"--the despicable slanting of a story to support the reporter's and the editor's personal political and social beliefs--some members of the press, the con men and the boars, had gone on a power trip of unprecedented irresponsibility. If you bristled at a reporter's manner and methods or at his obvious bias, if you dared to offend him, he might decide to use his pen to make you look like a fool, a liar, or a criminal; and he would see himself as the champion of enlightenment in a battle against evil. Clearly, Hilary was aware of the danger, for she dealt masterfully with them. She answered more questions than not, stroked the news people, accorded them respect, charmed them, and even smiled for the cameras. She didn't say that she knew her assailant. She didn't mention the name Bruno Frye. She didn't want the media speculating about her previous relationship with the man who had attacked her.
Her awareness forced Tony to reevaluate her. He already knew that she was talented and intelligent; now he saw she was also shrewd. She was the most intriguing woman he had encountered in a long time.
She was nearly finished with the reporters, carefully extricating herself from them, when Frank Howard came down the stairs and stepped to the doorway, where Tony stood in the cool night breeze. Frank watched Hilary Thomas as she answered a reporter's question, and he scowled fiercely. "I've got to talk to her."
"What did headquarters want?" Tony asked.
"That's what I've got to talk to her about," Frank said grimly. He had decided to be tight-lipped. He wasn't going to reveal his information until he was damned good and ready. That was another of his irritating habits.
"She's almost through with them," Tony said.
"Strutting and preening herself."
"Not at all."
"Sure. She's loving every minute of it."
"She handles them well," Tony said, "but she really doesn't seem to enjoy it."
"Movie people," Frank said scornfully. "They need that attention and publicity like you and I need food."
The reporters were only eight feet away, and although they were noisily questioning Hilary Thomas, Tony was afraid they might hear Frank. "Not so loud," he said.
"I don't care if they know what I think," Frank said. "I'll even give them a statement about publicity hounds who make up stories to get newspaper coverage."
"Are you saying she made this all up? That's ridiculous."
"You'll see," Frank said.
Tony was suddenly uneasy. Hilary Thomas brought out the chivalrous knight in him; he wanted to protect her. He didn't want to see her hurt, but Frank apparently had something decidedly unpleasant to discuss with her.
"I've got to talk to her now," Frank said. "I'll be damned if I'll stand around cooling my heels while she sucks up to the press."
Tony put a hand on his partner's shoulder. "Wait here. I'll get her."
Frank was angry about whatever headquarters had told him, and Tony knew the reporters would recognize that anger and be irritated by it. If they thought there was progress in the investigation--especially if it looked to be a juicy bit, a scandalous twist--they would hang around all night, pestering everybody. And if Frank actually had uncovered unflattering information about Hilary Thomas, the press would make headlines out of it, trumpet it with that unholy glee they reserved for choice dirt. Later, if Frank's information proved inaccurate, the television people most likely wouldn't make any correction at all, and the newspaper retraction, if there ever was one, would be four lines on page twenty of the second section. Tony wanted her to have an opportunity to refute whatever Frank might say, a chance to clear herself before the whole thing became a tawdry media carnival.
He went to the reporters and said, "Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but I believe Miss Thomas has already told you more than she's told us. You've squeezed her dry. Now, my partner and I were scheduled to go off duty a few hours ago, and we're awfully tired. We've put in a hard day, beating up innocent suspects and collecting bribes, so if you would let us finish with Miss Thomas, we would be most grateful."
They laughed appreciatively and began to ask questions of him. He answered a few of them, giving out nothing more than Hilary Thomas had done. Then he hustled the woman into her house and closed the door.
Frank was in the foyer. His anger had not subsided. He looked as if steam should be coming from his ears. "Miss Thomas, I have some more questions to ask you."
"Okay."
"Quite a few questions. It'll take a while."
"Well ... shall we go into the study?"
Frank Howard led the way.
To Tony, Hilary said, "What's happening?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. I wish I did."
Frank had reached the center of the living room. He stopped and looked back at her. "Miss Thomas?"
She and Tony followed him into the study.

***

Hilary sat on the brushed corduroy couch, crossed her legs, straightened her silk robe. She was nervous, wondering why Lieutenant Howard disliked her so intensely. His manner was cold. He was filled with an icy anger that made his eyes look like cross sections of two steel rods. She thought of Bruno Frye's strange eyes, and she could not suppress a shiver. Lieutenant Howard glowered at her. She felt like the accused at a trial during the Spanish Inquisition. She would not have been terribly surprised if Howard had pointed a finger and charged her with witchcraft.
The nice one, Lieutenant Clemenza, sat in the brown armchair. The warm amber light from the yellow-shaded floor lamp fell over him and cast soft shadows around his mouth and nose and deeply set eyes, giving him an even gentler and kinder aspect than he ordinarily possessed. She wished he was the one asking questions, but at least for the moment, his role was evidently that of an observer.
Lieutenant Howard stood over her, looked down at her with unconcealed contempt. She realized that he was trying to make her look away in shame or defeat, playing some police version of a childish staring contest. She looked back at him unwaveringly until he turned from her and began to pace.
"Miss Thomas," Howard said, "there are several things about your story that trouble me."
"I know," she said. "It bothers you that I know the assailant. You figure I might have enticed him. Isn't that conventional police wisdom?"
He blinked in surprise but quickly recovered. "Yes. That's one thing. And there's also the fact that we can't find out how he got into this house. Officer Whitlock and Officer Farmer have been from one end of the place to the other, twice, three times, and they can't find any sign of forced entry. No broken windows. No smashed or jimmied locks."
"So you think I let him in," she said.
"I certainly must consider it."
"Well, consider this. When I was up there in Napa County a few weeks ago, doing research for a screenplay, I lost my keys at his winery. House keys, car keys--"
"You drove all the way up there?"
"No. I flew. But all my keys were on the same ring. Even the keys for the rental car I picked up in Santa Rosa: they were on a flimsy chain, and I was afraid I'd lose them, so I slipped them on my own key ring. I never found them. The rental car people had to send out another set. And when I got back to L.A., I had to have a locksmith let me into my house and make new keys for me."
"You didn't have the locks changed?"
"It seemed like a needless expense," she said. "The keys I lost didn't have any identification on them. Whoever found them wouldn't know where to use them."
"And it didn't occur to you they might have been stolen?" Lieutenant Howard asked.
"No."
"But now you think Bruno Frye took the keys with the intention of coming here to rape and kill you."
"Yes."
"What does he have against you?"
"I don't know."
"Is there any reason he should be angry with you?"
"No."
"Any reason he should hate you?"
"I hardly know him."
"It's an awfully long way for him to come."
"I know."
"Hundreds of miles."
"Look, he's crazy. And crazy people do crazy things."
Lieutenant Howard stopped pacing, stood in front of her, glared down like one of the faces on a totempole of angry gods. "Doesn't it seem odd to you that a crazy man would be able to conceal his madness so well at home, that he would have the iron control needed to keep it all bottled up until he was off in a strange city?"
"Of course it seems odd to me," she said. "It's weird. But it's true."
"Did Bruno Frye have an opportunity to steal those keys?"
"Yes. One of the winery foremen took me on a special tour. We had to clamber up scaffolding, between fermentation vats, between storage barrels, through a lot of tight places. I couldn't have easily taken my purse with me. It would have been in my way. So I left it in the main house."
"Frye's house."
"Yes."
He was crackling with energy, supercharged. He began to pace again, from the couch to the windows, from the windows to the bookshelves, then back to the couch again, his broad shoulders drawn up, head thrust forward.
Lieutenant Clemenza smiled at her, but she was not reassured.
"Will anyone at the winery remember you losing your keys?" Lieutenant Howard asked.
"I guess so. Sure. I spent at least half an hour looking for them. I asked around, hoping someone might have seen them."
"But no one had."
"That's right."
"Where did you think you might have left them?"
"I thought they were in my purse."
"That was the last place you remembered putting them?"
"Yes. I drove the rental car to the winery, and I was sure I'd put the keys in my purse when I'd parked."
"Yet when you couldn't find them, you never thought they might have been stolen?"
"No. Why would someone steal my keys and not my money? I had a couple hundred dollars in my wallet."
"Another thing that bothers me. After you drove Frye out of the house at gunpoint, why did you take so long to call us?"
"I didn't take long."
"Twenty minutes."
"At most."
"When you've just been attacked and nearly killed by a maniac with a knife, twenty minutes is a hell of a long time to wait. Most people want to get hold of the police right away. They want us on the scene in ten seconds, and they get furious if it takes us a few minutes to get there."
She glanced at Clemenza, then at Howard, then at her fingers, which were tightly laced, white-knuckled. She sat up straight, squared her shoulders. "I ... I guess I ... broke down." It was a difficult and shameful admission for her. She had always prided herself on her strength. "I went to that desk and sat down and began to dial the police number and ... then ... I just ... I cried. I started to cry ... and I couldn't stop for a while."
"You cried for twenty minutes?"
"No. Of course not. I'm really not the crying type. I mean, I don't fall apart easily."
"How long did it take you to get control of yourself?"
"I don't know for sure."
"Fifteen minutes?"
"Not that long."
"Ten minutes?"
"Maybe five."
"When you regained control of yourself, why didn't you call us then? You were sitting right there by the phone."
"I went upstairs to wash my face and change my clothes," she said. "I've already told you about that."
"I know," he said. "I remember. Primping yourself for the press."
"No," she said, beginning to get angry with him. "I wasn't 'primping' myself. I just thought I should--"
"That's the fourth thing that makes me wonder about your story," Howard said, interrupting her. "It absolutely amazes me. I mean, after you were almost raped and murdered, after you broke down and wept, while you were still afraid that Frye might come back here and try to finish the job he started, you nevertheless took time out to make yourself look presentable. Amazing."
"Excuse me," Lieutenant Clemenza said, leaning forward in the brown armchair. "Frank, I know you've got something, and I know you're leading up to it. I don't want to spoil your rhythm or anything. But I don't think we can make assumptions about Miss Thomas's honesty and integrity based on how long she took to call in the complaint. We both know that people sometimes go into a kind of shock after an experience like this. They don't always do the rational thing. Miss Thomas's behavior isn't all that peculiar."
She almost thanked Lieutenant Clemenza for what he had said, but she sensed a low-grade antagonism between the two detectives, and she did not want to fan that smoldering fire.
"Are you telling me to get on with it?" Howard asked Clemenza.
"All I'm saying is, it's getting late, and we're all very tired," Clemenza told him.
"You admit her story's riddled with holes?"
"I don't know that I'd put it quite like that," said Clemenza.
"How would you put it?" Howard asked.
"Let's just say there are some parts of it that don't make sense yet."
Howard scowled at him for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Good enough. I was only trying to establish that there are at least four big problems with her story. If you agree, then I'll get on with the rest of it." He turned to Hilary. "Miss Thomas, I'd like to hear your description of the assailant just once more."
"Why? You've got his name."
"Indulge me."
She couldn't understand where he was going with his questioning. She knew he was trying to set a trap for her, but she hadn't the faintest idea what sort of trap or what it would do to her if she got caught in it. "All right. Just once more. Bruno Frye is tall, about six-four--"
"No names, please."
"What?"
"Describe the assailant without using any names."
"But I know his name," she said slowly, patiently.
"Humor me," he said humorlessly.
She sighed and settled back against the sofa, feigning boredom. She didn't want him to know that he was rattling her. What the hell was he after? "The man who attacked me," she said, "was about six-feet-four, and he weighed maybe two hundred and forty pounds. Very muscular."
"Race?" Howard asked.
"He was white."
"Complexion?"
"Fair."
"Any scars or moles?"
"No."
"Tattoos?"
"Are you kidding?"
"Tattoos?"
"No."
"Any other identifying marks?"
"No."
"Was he crippled or deformed in any way?"
"He's a big healthy son of a bitch," she said crossly.
"Color of hair?"
"Dirty blond."
"Long or short?"
"Medium length."
"Eyes?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Yes, he had eyes."
"Miss Thomas--"
"Okay, okay."
"This is serious."
"He had blue eyes. An unusual shade of blue-gray."
"Age?"
"Around forty."
"Any distinguishing characteristics?"
"Like what?"
"You mentioned something about his voice."
"That's right. He had a deep voice. It rumbled. A gravelly voice. Deep and gruff and scratchy."
"All right," Lieutenant Howard said, rocking slightly on his heels, evidently pleased with himself. "We have a good description of the assailant. Now, describe Bruno Frye for me."
"I just did."
"No, no. We're pretending that you didn't know the man who attacked you. We're playing this little game to humor me. Remember? You just described your assailant, a man without a name. Now, I want you to describe Bruno Frye for me."
She turned to Lieutenant Clemenza. "Is this really necessary?" she asked exasperatedly.
Clemenza said, "Frank, can you hurry this along?"
"Look, I've got a point I'm trying to make," Lieutenant Howard said. "I'm building up to it the best way I know how. Besides, she's the one slowing it down."
He turned to her, and again she had the creepy feeling she was on trial in another century and that Howard was some religious inquisitionist. If Clemenza would permit it, Howard would simply take hold of her and shake until she gave the answers he wanted, whether or not they were the truth.
"Miss Thomas," he said, "if you'll just answer all of my questions, I'll be finished in a few minutes. Now, will you describe Bruno Frye?"
Disgustedly, she said, "Six-four, two hundred and forty pounds, muscular, blond, blue-gray eyes, about forty years old, no scars, no deformities, no tattoos, a deep gravelly voice."
Frank Howard was smiling. It was not a friendly smile. "Your description of the assailant and Bruno Frye are exactly the same. Not a single discrepancy. Not one. And of course, you've told us that they were, in fact, one and the same man."
His line of questioning seemed ridiculous, but there was surely a purpose to it. He wasn't stupid. She sensed that already she had stepped into the trap, even though she could not see it.
"Do you want to change your mind?" Howard asked. "Do you want to say that perhaps there's a small chance it was someone else, someone who only resembled Frye?"
"I'm not an idiot," Hilary said. "It was him."
"There wasn't even maybe some slight difference between your assailant and Frye? Some little thing?" he persisted.
"No."
"Not even the shape of his nose or the line of his jaw?" Howard asked.
"Not even that."
"You're certain that Frye and your assailant shared precisely the same hairline, exactly the same cheekbones, the same chin?"
"Yes."
"Are you positive beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Bruno Frye who was here tonight?"
"Yes."
"Would you swear to that in court?"
"Yes, yes, yes!" she said, tired of his badgering.
"Well, then. Well, well. I'm afraid if you testified to that effect, you'd wind up in jail yourself. Perjury's a crime."
"What? What do you mean?"
He grinned at her. His grin was even more unfriendly than his smile. "Miss Thomas, what I mean is--you're a liar."
Hilary was so stunned by the bluntness of the accusation, by the boldness of it, so disconcerted by the ugly snarl in his voice, that she could not immediately think of a response. She didn't even know what he meant.
"A liar, Miss Thomas. Plain and simple."
Lieutenant Clemenza got out of the brown armchair and said, "Frank, are we handling this right?"
"Oh, yeah," Howard said. "We're handling it exactly right. While she was out there talking to the reporters and posing so prettily for the photographers, I got a call from headquarters. They heard back from the Napa County Sheriff."
"Already?"
"Oh, yeah. His name's Peter Laurenski. Sheriff Laurenski looked into things for us up there at Frye's vineyard, just like we asked him to, and you know what he found? He found that Mr. Bruno Frye didn't come to Los Angeles. Bruno Frye never left home. Bruno Frye is up there in Napa County right now, right this minute, in his own house, harmless as a fly."
"Impossible!" Hilary said, pushing up from the sofa.
Howard shook his head. "Give up, Miss Thomas. Frye told Sheriff Laurenski that he intended to come to L.A. today for a week-long stay. Just a short vacation. But he didn't manage to clear off his desk in time, so he cancelled out and stayed home to get caught up on his work."
"The sheriff's wrong!" she said. "He couldn't have talked to Bruno Frye."
"Are you calling the sheriff a liar?" Lieutenant Howard asked.
"He ... he must have talked to someone who was covering for Frye," Hilary said, knowing how hopelessly implausible that sounded.
"No," Howard said. "Sheriff Laurenski talked to Frye himself."
"Did he see him? Did he actually see Frye?" she demanded. "Or did he only talk to someone on the phone, someone claiming to be Frye?"
"I don't know if it was a face to face chat or a phone conversation," Howard said. "But remember, Miss Thomas, you told us about Frye's unique voice. Extremely deep. Scratchy. A guttural, gravelly voice. Are you saying someone could have easily imitated it on the phone?"
"If Sheriff Laurenski doesn't know Frye well enough, he might be fooled by a bad imitation. He--"
"It's a small county up there. A man like Bruno Frye, an important man like that, is known to just about everyone. And the sheriff has known him very well for more than twenty years," Howard said triumphantly.
Lieutenant Clemenza looked pained. Although she did not care much what Howard thought of her, it was important to Hilary that Clemenza believed the story she had told. The flicker of doubt in his eyes upset her as much as Howard's bullying.
She turned her back on them, went to the mullioned window that looked out on the rose garden, tried to control her anger, couldn't suppress it, and faced them again. She spoke to Howard, furious, emphasizing every word by pounding her fist against the window table: "Bruno--Frye--was--here!" The vase full of roses rocked, toppled off the table, bounced on the thick carpet, scattering flowers and water. She ignored it. "What about the sofa he overturned? What about the broken porcelain I threw at him and the bullets I fired at him? What about the broken knife he left behind? What about the torn dress, the pantyhose?"
"It could be just clever stage dressing," Howard said. "You could have done it all yourself, faked it up to support your story."
"That's absurd!"
Clemenza said, "Miss Thomas, maybe it really was someone else. Someone who looked a lot like Frye."
Even if she had wanted to retreat in that fashion, she could not have done it. By forcing her to repeatedly describe the man who attacked her, by drawing several assurances from her that the assailant had been none other than Bruno Frye, Lieutenant Howard had made it difficult if not impossible for her to take the way out that Clemenza was offering. Anyway, she didn't want to back up and reconsider. She knew she was right. "It was Frye," she said adamantly. "Frye and nobody else but Frye. I didn't make the whole thing up. I didn't fire bullets into the walls. I didn't overturn the sofa and tear up my own clothes. For God's sake, why would I do a crazy thing like that? What reason could I possibly have for a charade of that sort?"
"I've got some ideas," Howard said. "I figure you've known Bruno Frye for a long time, and you--"
"I told you. I only met him three weeks ago."
"You've told us other things that turned out not to be true," Howard said. "So I think you knew Frye for years, or at least for quite a while, and the two of you were having an affair--"
"No!"
"--and for some reason, he threw you over. Maybe he just got tired of you. Maybe it was another woman. Something. So I figure you didn't go up to his winery to research one of your screenplays, like you said. I think you went up there just to get together with him again. You wanted to smooth things over, kiss and make up--"
"No."
"--but he wasn't having any of it. He turned you away again. But while you were there, you found out that he was coming to L.A. for a little vacation. So you made up your mind to get even with him. You figured he probably wouldn't have anything planned his first night in town, probably just a quiet dinner alone and early to bed. You were pretty sure he wouldn't have anyone to vouch for him later on, if the cops wanted to know his every move that night. So you decided to set him up for a rape charge."
"Damn you, this is disgusting!"
"It backfired on you," Howard said. "Frye changed his plans. He didn't even come to L.A. So now you're caught in the lie."
"He was here!" She wanted to take the detective by the throat and choke him until he understood. "Look, I have one or two friends who know me well enough to know if I'd been having an affair. I'll give you their names. Go see them. They'll tell you I didn't have anything going with Bruno Frye. Hell, they might even tell you I haven't had anything going with anyone for a while. I've been too busy to have much of a private life. I work long hours. I haven't had a lot of time for romance. And I sure as hell haven't had time to carry on with a lover who lives at the other end of the state. Talk to my friends. They'll tell you."
"Friends are notoriously unreliable witnesses," Howard said. "Besides, it might have been that one affair you kept all to yourself, the secret little fling. Face it, Miss Thomas, you painted yourself into a corner. The facts are these. You say Frye was in this house tonight. But the sheriff says he was up there, in his own house, as of thirty minutes ago. Now, St. Helena is over four hundred miles by air, over five hundred by car. He simply could not have gotten home that fast. And he could not have been in two places at once because, in case you haven't heard, that's a serious violation of the laws of physics."
Lieutenant Clemenza said, "Frank, maybe you should let me finish up with Miss Thomas."
"What's to finish? It's over, done, kaput." Howard pointed an accusing finger at her. "You're damned lucky, Miss Thomas. If Frye had come to L.A. and this had gotten into court, you'd have committed perjury. You might have wound up in jail. You're also lucky that there's no sure way for us to punish someone like you for wasting our time like this."
"I don't know that we've wasted our time," Clemenza said softly.
"Like hell we haven't." Howard glared at her. "I'll tell you one thing: If Bruno Frye wants to pursue a libel suit, I sure to God will testify for him." Then he turned and walked away from her, toward the study door.
Lieutenant Clemenza didn't make any move to leave and obviously had something more to say to her, but she didn't like having the other one walk out before some important questions were answered. "Wait a minute," she said.
Howard stopped and looked back at her. "Yeah?"
"What now? What are you going to do about my complaint?" she said.
"Are you serious?"
"Yes."
"I'm going to the car, cancel that APB on Bruno Frye, then call it a day. I'm going home and drink a couple cold bottles of Coors."
"You aren't going to leave me here alone? What if he comes back?"
"Oh, Christ." Howard said. "Will you please drop the act?"
She took a few steps toward him. "No matter what you think, no matter what the Napa County Sheriff says, I'm not putting on an act. Will you at least leave one of those uniformed men for an hour or so, until I can get a locksmith to replace the locks on my doors?"
Howard shook his head. "No. I'll be damned if I'll waste more police time and taxpayers' money to provide you with protection you don't need. Give up. It's all over. You lost. Face it, Miss Thomas." He walked out of the room.
Hilary went to the brown armchair and sat down. She was exhausted, confused, and scared.
Clemenza said, "I'll make sure Officers Whitlock and Farmer stay with you until the locks have been changed."
She looked up at him. "Thank you."
He shrugged. He was noticeably uncomfortable. "I'm sorry there's not much more I can do."
"I didn't make up the whole thing," she said.
"I believe you."
"Frye really was here tonight," she said.
"I don't doubt that someone was here, but--"
"Not just someone. Frye."
"If you'd reconsider your identification, we could keep working on the case and--"
"It was Frye," she said, not angrily now, just wearily. "It was him and no one else but him."
For a long moment, Clemenza regarded her with interest, and his clear brown eyes were sympathetic. He was a handsome man, but it was not his good looks that most pleased the eye; there was an indescribably warm and gentle quality in his Italian features, a special concern and understanding so visible in his face that she felt he truly cared what happened to her.
He said, "You've had a very rough experience. It's shaken you. That's perfectly understandable. And sometimes, when you go through a shock like this, it distorts your perceptions. Maybe when you've had a chance to calm down, you'll remember things a little... differently. I'll stop by sometime tomorrow. Maybe by then you'll have something new to tell me."
"I won't," Hilary said without hesitation. "But thanks for ... being kind."
She thought he seemed reluctant to leave. But then he was gone, and she was alone in the study.
For a minute or two, she could not find the energy to get out of the armchair. She felt as if she had stepped into a vast pool of quicksand and had expended every bit of her strength in a frantic and futile attempt to escape.
At last she got up, went to the desk, picked up the telephone. She thought of ringing the winery in Napa County, but she realized that would accomplish nothing. She knew only the business office number. She didn't have Frye's home phone listing. Even if his private number was available through Information--and that was highly unlikely--she would not gain any satisfaction by dialing it. If she tried calling him at home, only one of two things could happen. One, he wouldn't answer, which would neither prove her story nor disprove what Sheriff Laurenski had said. Two, Frye would answer, surprising her. And then what? She would have to reevaluate the events of the night, face the fact that the man with whom she had fought was someone who only resembled Bruno Frye. Or perhaps he didn't look like Frye at all. Maybe her perceptions were so askew that she had perceived a resemblance where there was none. How could you tell when you were losing your grip on reality? How did madness begin? Did it creep up on you, or did it seize you in an instant, without warning? She had to consider the possibility that she was losing her mind because, after all, there was a history of insanity in her family. For more than a decade, one of her fears had been that she would die as her father had died; wild-eyed, raving, incoherent, waving a gun and trying to hold off monsters that were not really there. Like father, like daughter?
"I saw him," she said aloud. "Bruno Frye. In my house. Here. Tonight. I didn't imagine or hallucinate it. I saw him, dammit."
She opened the telephone book to the yellow pages and called a twenty-four-hour-a-day locksmith service.

***

After he fled Hilary Thomas's house, Bruno Frye drove his smoke-gray Dodge van out of Westwood. He went west and south to Marina Del Rey, a small-craft harbor on the edge of the city, a place of expensive garden apartments, even more expensive condominiums, shops, and unexceptional but lushly decorated restaurants, most with unobstructed views of the sea and the thousands of pleasure boats docked along the man-made channels.
Fog was rolling in along the coast, as if a great cold fire burned upon the ocean. It was thick in some places and thin in others, getting denser all the time.
He tucked the van into an empty corner of a parking lot near one of the docks, and for a minute he just sat there, contemplating his failure. The police would be looking for him, but only for a short while, only until they found out that he had been at his place in Napa County all evening. And even while they were looking for him in the L.A. area, he would not be in much danger, for they wouldn't know what sort of vehicle he was driving. He was sure Hilary Thomas had not seen the van when he left because it was parked three blocks from her house.
Hilary Thomas.
Not her real name, of course.
Katherine. That's who she really was. Katherine.
"Stinking bitch," he said aloud.
She scared him. In the past five years, he had killed her more than twenty times, but she had refused to stay dead. She kept coming back to life, in a new body, with a new name, a new identity, a cleverly constructed new background, but he never failed to recognize Katherine hiding in each new persona. He had encountered her and killed her again and again, but she would not stay dead. She knew how to come back from the grave, and her knowledge terrified him more than he dared let her know. He was frightened of her, but he couldn't let her see that fear, for if she became aware of it, she'd overwhelm and destroy him.
But she can he killed, Frye told himself. I've done it. I've killed her many times and buried many of her bodies in secret graves. I'll kill her again, too. And maybe this time she won't be able to come back.
As soon as it was safe for him to return to her house in Westwood, he would try to kill her again. And this time he planned to perform a number of rituals that he hoped would cancel out her supernatural power of regeneration. He had been reading books about the living dead--vampires and other creatures. Although she was not really any of those things, although she was horrifyingly unique, he believed that some of the methods of extermination that were effective against vampires might work on her as well. Cut out her heart while it was still beating. Drive a wooden stake through it. Cut off her head. Stuff her mouth full of garlic. It would work. Oh, God, it had to work.
He left the van and went to a public phone close by. The damp air smelled vaguely of salt, seaweed, and machine oil. Water slapped against the pilings and the hulls of the small yachts, a curiously forlorn sound. Beyond the plexiglas walls of the booth, rank upon rank of masts rose from the tethered boats, like a defoliated forest looming out of the night mist. About the same time that Hilary was calling the police, Frye phoned his own house in Napa County and gave an account of his failed attack on the woman.
The man on the other end of the line listened without interruption, then said, "I'll handle the police."
They spoke for a few minutes, then Frye hung up. Stepping out of the booth, he looked around suspiciously at the darkness and swirling fog. Katherine could not possibly have followed him, but nevertheless, he was afraid she was out there in the gloom, watching, waiting. He was a big man. He should not have been afraid of a woman. But he was. He was afraid of the one who would not die, the one who now called herself Hilary Thomas.
He returned to the van and sat behind the wheel for a few minutes, until he realized that he was hungry. Starving. His stomach rumbled. He hadn't eaten since lunch. He was familiar enough with Marina Del Rey to know there was not a suitable restaurant in the neighborhood. He drove south on the Pacific Coast Highway to Culver Boulevard, then west, then south again on Vista Del Mar. He had to proceed slowly, for the fog was heavy along that route; it threw the van's headlight beams back at him and reduced visibility to thirty feet, so that he felt as if he was driving underwater in a murky phosphorescent sea. Almost twenty minutes after he completed the telephone call to Napa County (and about the same time that Sheriff Laurenski was looking into the case up there in behalf of the L.A. police), Frye found an interesting restaurant on the northern edge of El Segundo. The red and yellow neon sign cut through the fog: GARRIDO'S. It was a Mexican place, but not one of those norte-americano chrome and glass outlets serving imitation comida; it appeared to be authentically Mexican. He pulled off the road and parked between two hotrods that were equipped with the hydraulic lifts so popular with young Chicano drivers. As he walked around to the entrance, he passed a car bearing a bumper sticker that proclaimed CHICANO POWER. Another one advised everyone to SUPPORT THE FARM WORKERS' UNION. Frye could already taste the enchiladas.
Inside, Garrido's looked more like a bar than a restaurant, but the close warm air was redolent with the odors of a good Mexican kitchen. On the left, a stained and scarred wooden bar ran the length of the big rectangular room. Approximately a dozen dark men and two lovely young seńoritas sat on stools or leaned against the bar, most of them chattering in rapid Spanish. The center of the room was taken up by a single row of twelve tables running parallel to the bar, each covered with a red tablecloth. All of the tables were occupied by men and women who laughed and drank a lot as they ate. On the right, against the wall, there were booths with red leatherette upholstery and high backs; Frye sat down in one of them.
The waitress who hustled up to his table was a short woman, almost as wide as she was tall, with a very round and surprisingly pretty face. Raising her voice above Freddie Fender's sweet and plaintive singing, which came from the jukebox, she asked Frye what he wanted and took his order: a double platter of chili verde and two cold bottles of Dos Equis.
He was still wearing leather gloves. He took them off and flexed his hands.
Except for a blonde in a low-cut sweater, who was with a mustachioed Chicano stud, Frye was the only one in Garrido's who didn't have Mexican blood in his veins. He knew some of them were staring at him, but he didn't care.
The waitress brought the beer right away. Frye didn't bother with the glass. He put the bottle to his lips, closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and chugged it down. In less than a minute, he had drained it. He drank the second beer with less haste than he had consumed the first, but it was also gone by the time she brought his dinner. He ordered two more bottles of Dos Equis.
Bruno Frye ate with voracity and total concentration, unwilling or unable to look away from his plate, oblivious of everyone around him, head lowered to receive the food in the fevered manner of a graceless glutton. Making soft animal murmurs of delight, he forked the chili verde into his mouth, gobbled up huge dripping bites of the stuff, one after the other, chewed hard and fast, his cheeks bulging. A plate of warm tortillas was served on the side, and he used those to mop up the delicious sauce. He washed everything down with big gulps of icy beer.
He was already two-thirds finished when the waitress stopped by to ask if the meal was all right, and she quickly realized the question was unnecessary. He looked up at her with eyes that were slightly out of focus. In a thick voice that seemed to come from a distance, he asked for two beef tacos, a couple of cheese enchiladas, rice, refried beans, and two more bottles of beer. Her eyes went wide, but she was too polite to comment on his appetite.
He ate the last of the chili verde before she brought his second order, but he did not rise out of his trance when the plate was clean. Every table had a bowl of taco chips, and he pulled his in front of him. He dipped the chips into the cup of hot sauce that came with them, popped them into his mouth whole, crunched them up with enormous pleasure and a lot of noise. When the waitress arrived with more food and beer, he mumbled a thank you and immediately began shoveling cheese enchiladas into his mouth. He worked his way through the tacos and the side dishes. A pulse thumped visibly in his bull neck. Veins stood out boldly across his forehead. A film of sweat sheathed his face, and beads of sweat began to trickle down from his hairline. At last he swallowed the final mouthful of refried beans and chased it with beer and pushed the empty plates away. He sat for a while with one hand on his thigh, one hand wrapped around a bottle, staring across the booth at nothing in particular. Gradually, the sweat dried on his face, and he became aware of the jukebox music again; another Freddie Fender tune was playing.
He sipped his beer and looked around at the other customers, taking an interest in them for the first time. His attention was drawn to a group at the table nearest the door. Two couples. Good-looking girls. Darkly handsome men. All in their early twenties. The guys were putting on an act for the women, talking just a fraction too loud and laughing too much, doing the rooster act, trying too hard, determined to impress the little hens.
Frye decided to have some fun with them. He thought about it, figured out how he would set it up, and grinned happily at the prospect of the excitement he would cause.
He asked the waitress for his check, gave her more than enough money to cover it, and said, "Keep the change."
"You're very generous," she said, smiling and nodding as she went off to the cash register.
He pulled on the leather gloves.
His sixth bottle of beer was still half-full, and he took it with him when he slid out of the booth. He headed toward the exit and contrived to hook a foot on a chair leg as he passed the two couples who had interested him. He stumbled slightly, easily regained his balance, and leaned toward the four surprised people at the table, letting them see the beer bottle, trying to look like a drunk.
He kept his voice low, for he didn't want others in the restaurant to be aware of the confrontation he was fomenting.
He knew he could handle two of them, but he wasn't prepared to fight an army. He peered blearily at the toughest looking of the two men, gave him a big grin, and spoke in a low mean snarl that belied his smile. "Keep your goddamned chair out of the aisle, you stupid spic."
The stranger had been smiling at him, expecting some sort of drunken apology. When he heard the insult, his wide brown face went blank, and his eyes narrowed.
Before that man could get up, Frye swung to the other one and said, "Why don't you get a foxy lady like that blonde back there? What do you want with these two greasy wetback cunts?"
Then he made swiftly for the door, so the fight wouldn't start inside the restaurant. Chuckling to himself, he pushed through the door, staggered into the foggy night, and hurried around the building to the parking lot on the north side to wait.
He was only a few steps from his van when one of the men he had left behind called to him in Spanish-accented English. "Hey! Wait a second, man!"
Frye turned, still pretending drunkenness, weaving and swaying as if he found it difficult to keep the ground under his feet. "What's up?" he asked stupidly.
They stopped, side by side, apparitions in the mist. The stocky one said, "Hey, what the hell you think you're doin', man?"
"You spics looking for trouble?" Frye asked, slurring his words.
"Cerdo! the stocky one said.
"Mugriento cerdo!" said the slim man.
Frye said, "For Christ's sake, stop jabbering that damn monkey talk at me. If you have something to say, speak English."
"Miguel called you a pig," said the slim one. "And I called you a filthy pig."
Frey grinned and made an obscene gesture.
Miguel, the stocky man, charged, and Frye waited motionless, as if he didn't see him coming. Miguel rushed in with his head down, his fists up, his arms tucked close to his sides. He threw two quick and powerful punches at Frye's iron-muscled midsection. The brown man's granite hands made sharp hard slapping sounds as they landed, but Frye took both blows without flinching. By design, he was still holding the beer bottle, and he smashed it against the side of Miguel's head. Glass exploded and rained down on the parking lot in dissonant musical notes. Beer and beer foam splashed over both men. Miguel dropped to his knees with a horrible groan, as if he had been poleaxed. "Pablo," he called pleadingly to his friend. Grabbing the injured man's head with both hands, Frye held him steady long enough to ram a knee into the underside of his chin. Miguel's teeth clacked together with an ugly noise. As Frye let go of him, the man fell sideways, unconscious, his breath bubbling noisily through bloody nostrils.
Even as Miguel crumpled onto the fog-damp pavement, Pablo came after Frye. He had a knife. It was a long thin weapon, probably a switchblade, probably sharpened into cutting edges on both sides, certain to be as wickedly dangerous as a razor. The slim man was not a charger as Miguel had been. He moved swiftly but gracefully, almost like a dancer, gliding around to Frye's right side, searching for an opening, making an opening by virtue of his speed and agility, striking with the lightning moves of a snake. The knife flashed in, from left to right, and if Frye had not jumped back, it would have torn open his stomach, spilling his guts. Crooning eerily to himself, Pablo pressed steadily forward, slashing at Frye again and again, from left to right, from right to left. As Frye retreated, he studied the way Pablo used the knife, and by the time he backed up against the rear end of the Dodge van, he saw how to handle him. Pablo made long sweeping passes with the knife instead of the short vicious arcs employed by skilled knife fighters; therefore, on the outward half of each swing, after the blade had passed Frye but before it started coming back again, there was a second or two when the weapon was moving away from him, posing no threat whatsoever, a moment when Pablo was vulnerable. As the slim man edged in for the kill, confident that his prey had nowhere to run, Frye timed one of the arcs and sprang forward at precisely the right instant. As the blade swung away from him, Frye seized Pablo's wrist, squeezing and twisting it, bending it back against the joint. The slim man cried out in agony. The knife flew out of his slender fingers. Frye stepped behind him, got a hammerlock on him, and ran him face-first into the rear end of the van. He twisted Pablo's arm even farther, got the hand all the way up between the shoulder blades, until it seemed something would have to snap. With his free hand, Frye gripped the seat of the man's trousers, literally lifted him off his feet, all hundred and forty pounds of him, and slammed him into the van a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, until the screaming stopped. When he let go of Pablo, the slim man went down like a sack of rags.
Miguel was on his hands and knees. He spit blood and shiny white bits of teeth onto the black macadam.
Frye went to him.
"Trying to get up, friend?"
Laughing softly, Frye stepped on his fingers. He ground his heel on the man's hand, then stepped back.
Miguel squealed, fell on his side.
Frye kicked him in the thigh.
Miguel did not lose consciousness, but he closed his eyes, hoping Frye would just go away.
Frye felt as if electricity was coursing through him, a million-billion volts, bursting from synapse to synapse, hot and crackling and sparking within him, not a painful feeling, but a wild and exciting experience, as if he had just been touched by the Lord God Almighty and filled up with the most beautiful and bright and holy light.
Miguel opened his swollen dark eyes.
"All the fight gone out of you?" Frye asked.
"Please," Miguel said around broken teeth and split lips.
Exhilarated, Frye put a foot against Miguel's throat and forced him to roll onto his back.
"Please."
Frye took his foot off the man's throat.
"Please."
High with a sense of his own power, floating, flying, soaring, Frye kicked Miguel in the ribs.
Miguel choked on his own scream.
Laughing exuberantly, Frye kicked him repeatedly, until a couple of ribs gave way with an audible crunch.
Miguel began to do something he had struggled manfully not to do for the past few minutes. He began to cry.
Frye returned to the van.
Pablo was on the ground by the rear wheels, flat on his back, unconscious.
Saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah," over and over again, Frye circled Pablo, kicking him in the calves and knees and thighs and hips and ribs.
A car started to pull into the lot from the street, but the driver saw what was happening and wanted no part of it. He put the car in reverse, backed out of there, and sped off with a screech of tires.
Frye dragged Pablo over to Miguel, lined them up side by side, out of the way of the van. He didn't want to run over anyone. He didn't want to kill either of them, for too many people in the bar had gotten a good look at him. The authorities wouldn't have much desire to pursue the winner of an ordinary street fight, especially when the losers had intended to gang up on a lone man. But the police would look for a killer, so Frye made sure that both Miguel and Pablo were safe.
Whistling happily, he drove back toward Marina Del Rey and stopped at the first open service station on the right-hand side of the street. While the attendant filled the tank, checked the oil, and washed the windshield, Frye went to the men's room. He took a shaving kit with him and spent ten minutes freshening up.
When he traveled, he slept in the van, and it was not as convenient as a camper; it did not have running water. On the other hand, it was more maneuverable, less visible, and far more anonymous than a camper. To take full advantage of the many luxuries of a completely equipped motor home, he would have to stop over at a campground every night, hooking up to sewer and water and electric lines, leaving his name and address wherever he went. That was too risky. In a motor home, he would leave a trail that even a noseless bloodhound could follow, and the same would be true if he stayed at motels where, if the police asked about him later, desk clerks would surely remember the tall and extravagantly muscled man with the penetrating blue eyes.
In the men's room at the service station, he stripped out of his gloves and yellow sweater, washed his torso and underarms with wet paper towels and liquid soap, sprayed himself with deodorant, and dressed again. He was always concerned about cleanliness; he liked to be clean and neat at all times.
When he felt dirty, he was not only uncomfortable but deeply depressed as well--and somewhat fearful. It was as if being dirty stirred up vague recollections of some intolerable experience long forgotten, brought back hideous memories to the edge of his awareness, where he could sense but not see them, perceive but not understand them. Those few nights when he had fallen into bed without bothering to wash up, his repeating nightmare had been far worse than usual, expelling him from sleep in a screaming flailing terror. And although he had awakened on those occasions, as always, with no clear memory of what the dreams had been about, he had felt as if he'd just clawed his way out of a sickeningly filthy place, a dark and close and foul hole in the ground.
Rather than risk intensifying the nightmare that was sure to come, he washed himself there in the men's room, shaved quickly with an electric razor, patted his face with aftershave lotion, brushed his teeth, and used the toilet. In the morning, he would go to another service station and repeat the routine, and he would also change into fresh clothes at that time.
He paid the attendant for the gasoline and drove back to Marina Del Rey through ever-thickening fog. He parked the van in the same dockside lot from which he had made the call to his house in Napa County. He got out of the Dodge and walked to the public phone booth and called the same number again.
"Hello?"
"It's me," Frye said.
"The heat's off."
"The police called?"
"Yeah."
They talked for a minute or two, and then Frye returned to the Dodge.
He stretched out on the mattress in the back of the van and switched on a flashlight he kept there. He could not tolerate totally dark places. He could not sleep unless there was at least a thread of illumination under a door or a night light burning dimly in a corner. In perfect darkness, he began to imagine that strange things were crawling on him, skittering over his face, squirming under his clothes. Without light, he was assaulted by the threatening but wordless whispers that he sometimes heard for a minute or two after he awakened from his nightmare, the blood-freezing whispers that loosened his bowels and made his heart skip.
If he could ever identify the source of those whispers or finally hear what they were trying to tell him, he would know what the nightmare was about. He would know what caused the recurring dream, the icy fear, and he might finally be able to free himself from it.
The problem was that whenever he woke and heard the whispers, that tailend of the dream, he was in no state of mind to listen closely and to analyze them; he was always in a panic, wanting nothing more than to have the whispers fade away and leave him in peace.
He tried to sleep in the indirect glow of the flashlight, but he could not. He tossed and turned. His mind raced. He was wide awake.
He realized that it was the unfinished business with the woman that was keeping him from sleep. He had been primed for the kill, and it had been denied him. He was edgy. He felt hollow, incomplete.
He had tried to satisfy his hunger for the woman by feeding his stomach. When that had not worked, he had tried to take his mind off her by provoking a fight with those two Chicanos. Food and enormous physical exertion were the two things he had always used to stifle his sexual urges, and to divert his thoughts from the secret blood lust that sometimes burned fiercely within him. He wanted sex, a brutal and bruising kind of sex that no woman would willingly provide, so he gorged himself instead. He wanted to kill, so he spent four or five hard hours lifting progressive weights until his muscles cooked into pudding and the violence steamed out of him. The psychiatrists called it sublimation. Lately, it had been less and less effective in dissipating his unholy cravings.
The woman was still on his mind.
The sleekness of her.
The swell of hips and breasts.
Hilary Thomas.
No. That was just a disguise.
Katherine.
That was who she really was.
Katherine. Katherine the bitch. In a new body.
He could close his eyes and picture her naked upon a bed, pinned under him, thighs spread, squirming, writhing, quivering like a rabbit that sees the muzzle of a gun. He could envision his hand moving over her heavy breasts and taut belly, over her thighs and the mound of her sex ... and then his other hand raising the knife, plunging it down. jamming the silvered blade into her, all the way into her softness, her flesh yielding to him, the blood springing up in bright wet promise. He could see the stark terror and excruciating pain in her eyes as he smashed through her chest and dug for her living heart, trying to rip it out while it was still beating. He could almost feel her slick warm blood and smell the slightly bitter coppery odor of it. As the vision filled his mind and took command of all his senses, he felt his testicles draw tight, felt his penis twitch and grow stiff--another knife--and he wanted to plunge it into her, all the way into her marvelous body, first his thick pulsing penis and then the blade, spurting his fear and weakness into her with one weapon, drawing out her strength and vitality with the other.
He opened his eyes.
He was sweating.
Katherine. The bitch.
For thirty-five years, he had lived in her shadow, had existed miserably in constant fear of her. Five years ago, she had died of heart disease, and he had tasted freedom for the first time in his life. But she kept coming back from the dead, pretending to be other women, looking for a way to take control of him again.
He wanted to use her and kill her to show her that she did not scare him. She had no power over him any more. He was now stronger than she was.
He reached for the bundle of chamois cloths that lay beside the mattress, untied them, unwrapped his spare knife.
He wouldn't be able to sleep until he killed her.
Tonight.
She wouldn't be expecting him back so soon.
He looked at his watch. Midnight.
People would still be returning home from the theater, late dinner, parties. Later, the streets would be deserted, the houses lightless and quiet, and there would be less chance of being spotted and reported to the police.
He decided that he would leave for Westwood at two o'clock.







Three



THE LOCKSMITH came and changed the locks on the front and back doors, then went on to another job in Hancock Park.
Officers Farmer and Whitlock left.
Hilary was alone.
She didn't think she could sleep, but she knew for sure she couldn't spend the night in her own bed. When she stood in that room, her mind's eye filled with vivid images of terror: Frye smashing through the door, stalking her, grinning demoniacally, moving inexorably toward the bed and suddenly leaping onto it, rushing across the mattress with the knife raised high.... As before, in a curious dreamlike flux, the memory of Frye became a memory of her father, so that for an instant she had the crazy notion that it had been Earl Thomas, raised from the dead, who had tried to kill her tonight. But it was not merely the residual vibrations of evil in the room that put it off limits. She was also unwilling to sleep there until the ruined door had been removed and a new one hung, a job that couldn't be taken care of until she could get hold of a carpenter tomorrow. The flimsy door that had been there had not held long against Frye's assault, and she had decided to have it replaced with a solid-core hardwood door and a brass deadbolt. But if Frye came back and somehow got into the house tonight, he would be able to walk right into her room while she slept--if she slept.
And sooner or later he would come back. She was as certain of that as she ever had been about anything.
She could go to a hotel, but that didn't appeal to her. It would be like hiding from him. Running away. She was quietly proud of her courage. She never ran away from anyone or anything; she fought back with all of her ingenuity and strength. She hadn't run away from her violent and unloving parents. She had not even sought psychological escape from the searing memory of the final monstrous and bloody events in that small Chicago apartment, had not accepted the kind of peace that could be found in madness or convenient amnesia, which were two ways out that most people would have taken if they'd been through the same ordeal. She had never backed away from the endless series of challenges she had encountered while struggling to build a career in Hollywood, first as an actress, then as a screenwriter. She had gotten knocked down plenty of times, but she had picked herself up again. And again. She persevered, fought back, and won. She would also win this bizarre battle with Bruno Frye, even though she would have to fight it alone.
Damn the police!
She decided to sleep in one of the guest rooms, where there was a door she could lock and barricade. She put sheets and a blanket on the queen-size bed, hung towels in the adjoining guest bathroom.
Downstairs, she rummaged through the kitchen drawers, taking out a variety of knives and testing each for balance and sharpness. The large butcher's knife looked deadlier than any of the others, but to her small hand it was unwieldy. It would be of little use in close quarters fighting, for she needed room to swing it. It might be an excellent weapon for attack, but it was not so good for self-defense. Instead, she chose an ordinary utility knife with a four-inch blade, small enough to fit in a pocket of her robe, large enough to do considerable damage if she had to use it.
The thought of plunging a knife into another human being filled her with revulsion, but she knew that she could do it if her life was threatened. At various times during her childhood, she had hidden a knife in her bedroom, under the mattress. It had been insurance against her father's unpredictable fits of mindless violence. She had used it only once, that last day, when Earl had begun to hallucinate from a combination of delirium tremens and just plain lunacy. He had seen giant worms coming out of the walls and huge crabs trying to get in through the windows. In a paranoid schizophrenic fury, he had transformed that small apartment into a reeking charnel house, and she had saved herself only because she'd had a knife.
Of course, a knife was inferior to a gun. She wouldn't be able to use it against Frye until he was on top of her, and then it might be too late. But the knife was all she had. The uniformed patrolmen had taken her .32 pistol with them when they left right behind the locksmith.
Damn them to hell!
After Detectives Clemenza and Howard had gone, Hilary and Officer Farmer had had a maddening conversation about the gun laws. She became furious every time she thought of it.
"Miss Thomas, about this pistol...."
"What about it?"
"You need a permit to keep a handgun in your house."
"I know that. I've got one."
"Could I see the registration?"
"Its in the nightstand drawer. I keep it with the gun."
"May Officer Whitlock go upstairs and get it?"
"Go ahead."
And a minute or two later:
"Miss Thomas, I gather you once lived in San Francisco."
"For about eight months. I did some theater work up there when I was trying to break in as an actress."
"This registration bears a San Francisco address."
"I was renting a North Beach apartment because it was cheap, and I didn't have much money in those days. A woman alone in that neighborhood sure needs a gun."
"Miss Thomas, aren't you aware that you're required to fill out a new registration form when you move from one county to another?"
"No."
"You really aren't aware of that?"
"Look, I just write movies. Guns aren't my business."
"If you keep a handgun in your house, you're obliged to know the laws governing its registration and use."
"Okay, okay. I'll register it as soon as I can."
"Well, you see, you'll have to come in and register it if you want it back."
"Get it back?"
"I'll have to take it with me."
"Are you kidding?"
"It's the law, Miss Thomas."
"You're going to leave me alone, unarmed?"
"I don't think you need to worry about--"
"Who put you up to this?"
"I'm only doing my job."
"Howard put you up to it, didn't he?"
"Detective Howard did suggest I check the registration. But he didn't--"
"Jesus!"
"All you have to do is come in, pay the proper fee, fill out a new registration--and we'll return your pistol."
"What if Frye comes back here tonight?"
"It isn't very likely, Miss Thomas."
"But what if he does?"
"Call us. We've got some patrol cars in the area. We'll get here--"
"--just in time to phone for a priest and a morgue wagon."
"You've got nothing to fear but--"
"--fear itself? Tell me, Officer Farmer, do you have to take a college course in the use of the cliché before you can become a cop?"
"I'm only doing my duty, Miss Thomas."
"Ahhh ... what's the use."
Farmer had taken the pistol, and Hilary had learned a valuable lesson. The police department was an arm of the government, and you could not rely on the government for anything. If the government couldn't balance its own budget and refrain from inflating its own currency, if it couldn't find a way to deal with the rampant corruption within its own offices, if it was even beginning to lose the will and the means to maintain an army and to provide national security, then why should she expect it to stop a single maniac from cutting her down?
She had learned long ago that it was not easy to find someone in whom she could place her faith and trust. Not her parents. Not relatives, every one of whom preferred not to get involved. Not the paper-shuffling social workers to whom she had turned for help when she was a child. Not the police. In fact, she saw now that the only person anyone could trust and rely on was himself.
All right, she thought angrily. Okay. I'll deal with Bruno Frye myself.
How?
Somehow.
She left the kitchen with the knife in her hand, went to the mirrored wet bar that was tucked into a niche between the living room and the study, and poured a generous measure of Remy Martin into a large crystal snifter. She carried the knife and the brandy upstairs to the guest room, defiantly switching off the lights as she went.
She closed the bedroom door, locked it, and looked for some way to fortify it. A highboy stood against the wall to the left of the door, a heavy dark pine piece taller than she was. It weighed too much to be moved as it was, but she made it manageable by taking out all the drawers and setting them aside. She dragged the big wooden chest across the carpet, pushed it squarely against the door, and replaced the drawers. Unlike many highboys, this one had no legs at all; it rested flat on the floor and had a relatively low center of gravity that made it a formidable obstacle for anyone trying to bull his way into the room.
In the bathroom, she put the knife and the brandy on the
floor. She filled the tub with water as hot as she could stand it, stripped, and settled slowly into it, wincing and gasping as she gradually submerged. Ever since she had been pinned beneath Frye on the bedroom floor, ever since she'd felt his hand pawing at her crotch and shredding her pantyhose, she had felt dirty, contaminated. Now, she soaked herself with great pleasure, worked up a thick lilac-scented lather, scrubbed vigorously with a washcloth, pausing occasionally to sip Remy Martin. At last, when she felt thoroughly clean again, she put the bar of soap aside and settled down even farther in the fragrant water. Steam rose over her, and the brandy made steam within her, and the pleasant combination of inner and outer heat forced fine drops of perspiration out of her brow. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the contents of the crystal snifter.
The human body will not run for long without the proper maintenance. The body, after all, is a machine, a marvelous machine made of many kinds of tissues and fluids, chemicals and minerals, a sophisticated assemblage with one heart-engine and a lot of little motors, a lubricating system and an aircooling system, ruled by the computer brain, with drive trains made out of muscles, all constructed upon a clever calcium frame. To function, it needs many things, not the least of which are food, relaxation, and sleep. Hilary had thought she would be unable to sleep after what had happened, that she would spend the night like a cat with its ears up, listening for danger. But she had exerted herself tonight in more ways that one, and although her conscious mind was reluctant to shut down for repairs, her subconscious knew it was necessary and inevitable. By the time she finished the brandy, she was so drowsy that she could hardly keep her eyes open.
She climbed out of the tub, opened the drain, and dried herself on a big fluffy towel as the water gurgled away. She picked up the knife and walked out of the bathroom, leaving the light on, pulling the door halfway shut. She switched off the lights in the main room. Moving languorously in the soft glow and velvet shadows, she put the knife on the nightstand and slid naked into bed.
She felt loose, as if the heat had unscrewed her joints.
She was a bit dizzy, too. The brandy.
She lay with her face toward the door. The barricade was reassuring. It looked very solid. Impenetrable. Bruno Frye wouldn't get through it, she told herself. Not even with a battering ram. A small army would find it difficult to get through that door. Not even a tank would make it. What about a big old dinosaur? she wondered sleepily. One of those tyrannosaurus rex fellas like in the funny monster pictures. Godzilla. Could Godzilla bash through that door...?
By two o'clock Thursday morning, Hilary was asleep.

***

At 2:25 Thursday morning, Bruno Frye drove slowly past the Thomas place. The fog was into Westwood now, but it was not as turbid as it was nearer the ocean. He could see the house well enough to observe that there was not even the faintest light beyond any of the front windows.
He drove two blocks, swung the van around, and went by the house again, even slower this time, carefully studying the cars parked along the street. He didn't think the cops would post a guard for her, but he wasn't taking any chances. The cars were empty; there was no stakeout.
He put the Dodge between the pair of Volvos two blocks away and walked back to the house through pools of foggy darkness, through pale circles of hazy light from the mist-cloaked streetlamps. As he crossed the lawn, his shoes squished in the dew-damp grass, a sound that made him aware of how ethereally quiet the night was otherwise.
At the side of the house, he crouched next to a bushy oleander plant and looked back the way he had come. No alarm had been set off. No one was coming after him.
He continued to the rear of the house and climbed over a locked gate. In the back yard, he looked up at the wall of the house and saw a small square of light on the second floor. From the size of it, he supposed it was a bathroom window; the larger panes of glass to the right of it showed vague traces of light at the edges of the drapes.
She was up there.
He was sure of it.
He could sense her. Smell her.
The bitch.
Waiting to be taken and used.
Waiting to be killed.
Waiting to kill me? he wondered.
He shuddered. He wanted her, had a fierce hardon for her, but he was also afraid of her.
Always before, she had died easily. She had always come back from the dead in a new body, masquerading as a new woman, but she had always died without much of a struggle. Tonight, however, Katherine had been a regular tigress, shockingly strong and clever and fearless. This was a new development, and he did not like it.
Nevertheless, he had to go after her. If he didn't pursue her from one reincarnation to the next, if he didn't keep killing her until she finally stayed dead, he would never have any peace.
He did not bother to try opening the kitchen door with the keys he had stolen out of her purse the day she'd been to the winery. She had probably had new locks installed. Even if she hadn't taken that precaution, he would be unable to get in through the door. Tuesday night, the first time he had attempted to get into the house, she had been at home, and he had discovered that one of the locks would not open with a key if it had been engaged from inside. The upper lock opened without resistance, but the lower one would only release if it had been locked from outside, with a key. He had not gotten into the house on that occasion, had had to come back the next night, Wednesday night, eight hours ago, when she was out to dinner and both of his keys were useable. But now she was in there, and although she might not have had the locks replaced, she had turned those special deadbolts from the inside, effectively barring entrance regardless of the number of keys he possessed.
He moved along to the corner of the house, where a big mullioned window looked into the rose garden. It was divided into a lot of six-inch-square panes of glass by thin strips of dark, well lacquered wood. The book-lined study lay on the other side. He took a penlight from one pocket, flicked it on, and directed the narrow beam through the window. Squinting, he searched the length of the sill and the less visible horizontal center bar until he located the latch, then turned off the penlight. He had a roll of masking tape, and he began to tear strips trom it, covering the small pane that was nearest the window lock. When the six-inch square was completely masked over, he used his gloved fist to smash through it: one hard blow. The glass shattered almost soundlessly and did not clatter to the floor, for it stuck onto the tape. He reached inside and unlatched the window, raised it, heaved himself up and across the sill. He barely avoided making a hell of a racket when he encountered a small table and nearly fell over it.
Standing in the center of the study, heart pounding, Frye listened for movement in the house, for a sign that she had heard him.
There was only silence.
She was able to rise up from the dead and come back to life in a new identity, but that was evidently the limit of her supernatural power. Obviously, she was not all-seeing and all-knowing. He was in her house, but she did not know it yet.
He grinned.
He took the knife from the sheath that was fixed to his belt, held it in his right hand.
With the penlight in his left hand, he quietly prowled through every room on the ground floor. They were all dark and deserted.
Going up the stairs to the second floor, he stayed close to the wall, in case any of the steps creaked. He reached the top without making a sound.
He explored the bedrooms, but he encountered nothing of interest until he approached the last room on the left. He thought he saw light coming under the door, and he switched off his flash. In the pitch-black corridor only a nebulous silvery line marked the threshold of the last room, but it was more marked than any of the others. He went to the door and cautiously tried the knob. Locked.
He had found her.
Katherine.
Pretending to be someone named Hilary Thomas.
The bitch. The rotten bitch.
Katherine, Katherine, Katherine....
As the name echoed through his mind, he clenched his fist around the knife and made short jabbing motions at the darkness, as if he were stabbing her.
Stretching out face-down on the floor of the hallway, Frye looked through the inch-high gap at the bottom of the door. A large piece of furniture, perhaps a dresser, was pushed up against the other side of the entrance. A vague indirect light spread across the bedroom from an unseen source on the right, some of it finding its way around the edges of the dresser and under the door.
He was delighted by what little he could see, and a flood of optimism filled him. She had barricaded herself in the room, which meant the hateful bitch was afraid of him. She was afraid of him. Even though she knew how to come back from the grave, she was frightened of dying. Or maybe she knew or sensed that this time she would not be able to return to the living. He was going to be damned thorough when he disposed of the corpse, far more thorough than he had been when he'd disposed of the many other women whose bodies she had inhabited. Cut out her heart. Pound a wooden stake through it. Cut off her head. Fill her mouth with garlic. He also intended to take the head and the heart with him when he left the house; he would bury the pair of grisly trophies in separate and secret graves, in the hallowed ground of two different churchyards, and far away from wherever the body itself might be interred. Apparently, she was aware that he planned to take extraordinary precautions this time, for she was resisting him with a fury and a purpose the likes of which she had never shown before.
She was very quiet in there.
Asleep?
No, he decided. She was too scared to sleep. She was probably sitting up in bed with the pistol in her hands.
He pictured her hiding in there like a mouse seeking refuge from a prowling cat, and he felt strong, powerful, like an elemental force. Hatred boiled blackly within him. He wanted her to squirm and shake with fear as she had made him do for so many years. An almost overpowering urge to scream at her took hold of him; he wanted to shout her name--Katherine, Katherine--and fling curses at her. He kept control of himself only with an effort that brought sweat to his face and tears to his eyes.
He got to his feet and stood silently in the darkness, considering his options. He could throw himself against the door, break through it, and push the obstacle out of the way, but that would surely be suicidal. He wouldn't get through the fortifications fast enough to surprise her. She would have plenty of time to line up the sights of the gun and put half a dozen bullets into him. The only other thing he could do was wait for her to come out. If he stayed in the hallway and didn't make a sound all night, the uneventful hours might wear the edges off her watchfulness. By morning, she might get the idea that she was safe and that he wasn't ever coming back. When she walked out of there, he could seize her and force her back to the bed before she knew what was happening.
Frye crossed the corridor in two steps and sat on the floor with his back against the wall.
In a few minutes, he began to hear rustling sounds in the dark, soft scurrying noises.
Imagination, he told himself. That familiar fear.
But then he felt something creeping up his leg, under his trousers.
It's not really there, he told himself.
Something slithered under one sleeve and started up his arm, something awful but unidentifiable. And something ran across his shoulder and up his neck, onto his face, something small and deadly. It went for his mouth. He pressed his lips together. It went for his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut. It went for his nostrils, and he brushed frantically at his face, but he couldn't find it, couldn't knock it off. No!
He switched on the penlight. He was the only living creature in the hallway. There was nothing moving under his trousers. Nothing under his sleeves. Nothing on his face.
He shuddered.
He left the penlight on.

***

At nine o'clock Thursday morning, Hilary was awakened by the telephone. There was an extension in the guest room. The bell switch accidentally had been turned all the way up to maximum volume, probably by someone from the housecleaning service that she employed. The strident ringing broke into Hilary's sleep and made her sit up with a start.
The caller was Wally Topelis. While having breakfast, he had seen the morning paper's account of the assault and attempted rape. He was shocked and concerned.
Before she would tell him any more than the newspaper had done, she made him read the article to her. She was relieved to hear that it was short, just a small picture and a few column inches on the sixth page. It was based entirely on the meager information that she and Lieutenantns might naturally think of Sirius as reddish. 
Secondly, as pointed out by Kenneth Brecher, the copies of Ptolemy we now have 
are certainly not the eighteen-hundred-year-old originals. The oldest copies we have 
can only be traced back a thousand years and have already been translated from 
Greek to Arabic and back to Greek. Who knows what errors of copying and 
translation may have crept in? 
In the oldest copy, for instance, we have a summary at the end which says that there 
are 'five red stars' -which is correct. Was Sirius added later in the body of the book 
by someone who was overly influenced by poetic descriptions or Egyptian tradition, 
or by sheer accident? 
By the tenth century, the Arabian astronomers were listing only five red stars and 
omitting Sirius -and they must surely have had access to copies of Ptolemy older 
than any we now possess. 
My conclusion? The mysterious redness of Sirius in Greek times is no mystery 
because it wasn't red, and was never said to be red in any literal sense. 


6 


Below the Horizon 


The role of a writer is hard, for on every hand he meets up with critics. Some critics 
are, I suppose, wiser than others, but there are very few who are so wise as to resist 
the urge to show off. 
Critics of science popularization always have the impulse to list every error they can 
find and trot them out and smile bashfully at this display of their own erudition. 
Sometimes the errors are egregious and are worth pointing out; sometimes the critic 
is indulging in nitpicking; 
and sometimes the critic inadvertently shows himself up.' 


I've got a review of one of my science collections in my hand right now. Never mind 
where it appeared and who wrote it -except that the critic is a reputable professional 
astronomer. The point is that three fourths of the review is a listing of my errors. 
Some of the errors referred to by the critic are well taken and I'll have to be more 
careful in the future. Other errors he listed I found simply irritating. 
After all, in writing on science for the public, you must occasionally cut a corner if 
you are not to get bogged down in too much off-target detail. Naturally, you don't 
want to cut a corner in such a way as to give a false impression. If you must 
simplify, you don't want ever to oversimplify. 
But what is the boundary line between 'simplify' and 'oversimplify'? There is no 
scientific formula that will give you the answer. Each popularizer must come to his 
own conclusion with respect to that, and to do so he must consult his own intuition 
and good sense. While laying no claim to perfection, you understand, I hope you 
won't mind my saying that in this respect my intuition is pretty good. 


But to the point ... 

The reviewer says: 'Elsewhere he [Isaac Asimov] states, incorrectly, that "as seen 
from the United States . . . Alpha Centauri ... is always below the horizon." It can, in 
fact be seen from the lower part of Florida every night during the summer months.' 

(Of course, he can be nitpicked as well. By 'lower part of Florida' he means the 
southern part. Apparently he assumes that the north-is-up convention in modern 
maps is a cosmic law. And he doesn't really mean that it is seen every night; he 
means every night that the clouds don't interfere. See how easy nitpicking is, 
Professor Reviewer?) 

However, even an irritating review can be useful since I can now go into the 
matter of just which stars can be seen from which points on earth. 

To begin with, I will make some simplifications which I will specify in full, lest I 
be nitpicked either for having not made them or for having made them without 
stating the fact. 

1. We will suppose that the earth is a perfectly smooth body with no surface 
irregularities whatever. I rather think that it doesn't matter for the purposes of this 

essay that it is an oblate spheroid, but as long as we're simplifying, let's go all the 
way. Let's suppose it is a perfect mathematical sphere so that from any point on earth 
we will see a true, perfectly circular horizon. 

2. We will suppose that the atmosphere does not absorb light. We will suppose 
there are no clouds, no fogs, no mists, no smoke. Every star that is bright enough to 
see with the naked eye is seen. 
3. We will suppose that only the stars exist in the sky. There is no sun to blank out 
the stars in the daytime. No moon, planets, comets, or any other solar system objects, 
to confuse the issue. Just the stars! 
4. We will suppose atmospheric refraction does not exist. In actual fact, refraction 
tends to make a star appear higher above the horizon than it really is (unless it is 
directly at zenith) and since this effect is more pronounced the closer the star is to 
the horizon, a star which is distinctly below the horizon can actually be seen slightly 
above. We will ignore this and suppose that light travels from a star to our eye in a 
perfectly straight line without being affected by either refraction or, for that matter, 
any gravitational field. 
5. Let us suppose that the earth's orientation with respect to the stars is absolutely 
unchanging. This is not so, of course, for the orientation changes in several ways: 
a. The earth's axis shifts with time, so that if we imagine it to be extended to a 
point in the sky at both ends, each point marks out a slow circle with time. The earth 
takes nearly twenty-six thousand years to shift so as to describe that circle which is 
called 'the precession of the equinoxes'. 
b. The earth's axis inclines more to the ecliptic and then less to the ecliptic by a 
matter of 2.5° in a cycle that is forty-one thousand years long. 
c. The position of the North Pole on the earth's surface varies from moment to 
moment so that it describes an irregular circle that deviates from the average by 
distances of up to a couple of hundred metres. 
d. The land we stand on is slowly moving as the tectonic plates shift. 
6. We will assume that the stars are not themselves changing position relative to 
each other. Of course, all the stars are moving, but except for some of the very 
nearest, these motions are so damped out by huge distances that even our best 
instruments can scarcely detect any change at all over a lifetime. For the very near 
stars, where "proper motion' can be measured by astronomers, the motion is still not 
great enough to be noticeable to the naked eye over a human lifetime. 
All these simplifications do not introduce any substantial errors in what is to be my 
exposition. 

Next let us describe the sky with reference to the earth. 
To the eye, the sky appears to be a solid sphere that encloses the earth. If we wanted 
to make a three-dimensional model of the universe we could make a small sphere 
with the continents and oceans painted upon it. That would be the terrestrial sphere. 
Around it we could construct a larger concentric sphere (one with the same centre as 
the smaller one) and call it the celestial sphere.1 
On the celestial sphere we can mark off the stars as we see them in the sky. This 
ignores the fact that the sky is not really a spherical surface but that it is an endless 
volume and that the stars are not at the same distance from earth but at wildly 
different distances. From the standpoint of this essay, however, the markings on the 
sphere are sufficient. 
How do we locate the stars on the celestial sphere? 
To begin with, let's extend earth's axis in imagination until it reaches the sky in both 
directions. The northern end of the axis reaches the sky at the North Celestial Pole 
and the southern end of the axis would reach it at the South Celestial Pole. 

1 'Celestial' is from the Latin word for 'sky'. 'Ceiling' comes from the same Latin word. 


If we were standing precisely at the North Pole, the North Celestial Pole would be at 
the zenith, directly overhead. The South Celestial Pole would be at the nadir, on the 
spot on the celestial sphere that is on the other side of the earth directly under our 
feet. If we were standing precisely at the South Pole, it would be the South Celestial 
Pole that would be at zenith and the North Celestial Pole that would be at nadir. 
On earth, we can draw a circle about the surface in such a way that every point on 
that circle is exactly halfway between earth's North Pole and South Pole. The circle 
is the equator, so called because it divides the earth's surface into two equal halves. 
You can draw a similar circle on the celestial sphere and you will have the celestial 
equator. 
If you are standing anywhere on the equator, then the celestial equator will be a line 
across the sky starting on the horizon due east, passing through the zenith and ending 
on the horizon due west. 
Just as you mark off the surface of the terrestrial sphere into parallels of latitude and 
meridians of longitude, so you can mark off the celestial sphere into parallels of 
celestial latitude and meridians of celestial longitude. 
If earth and sky were at rest with respect to each other, every star in the sky would be 
exactly at zenith with respect to some point on the surface of the earth. The celestial 
latitude and longitude of that star would be precisely the latitude and longitude of the 
point on earth's surface over which it stood at zenith. 
As a matter of fact, though, the earth turns from west to east, completing one turn 

with respect to the stars in twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes.2 Naturally, to us 
standing on the earth it seems as though we were motion less and that the sky was 
turning from east to west in twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes per turn. 
The apparent rotation of the celestial sphere is equal and opposite to that of the real 
rotation of the earth and it takes place on the same axis. That means that the Celestial 
North Pole and the Celestial South Pole remain fixed in the sky. All other points in 
the sky make circles parallel to the celestial equator. That means their celestial 
latitude does not change with time. 
The celestial longitude does change and that means the complication of an accurate 

clock must be brought in. In this essay, however, we're concerned only with celestial 
latitude, which is a good break for us. 
Celestial latitude is usually referred to as 'declination' by astronomers and is marked 
off as plus and minus from the celestial equator, rather than as north and south. On 
the terrestrial sphere, for instance, we would speak of latitudes of 40°N and 40°S, 
but on the celestial sphere, we speak of declinations of +40° and —40°. 
Now, then, let's imagine we are standing precisely at the North Pole. The North 
Celestial Pole is at zenith and, as the celestial sphere turns, it stays there. The entire 
celestial sphere pivots around it and every point on the sphere describes a circle 
parallel to the horizon. The celestial equator is exactly at the horizon at all points. 
This means that every star in the sphere that is in the north celestial hemisphere, and 
therefore has a positive declination, remains above the horizon at all times and is 
therefore visible. (Remember we are ignoring sun, clouds, haze, refraction and all 
other phenomena that would tend to spoil our pretty theoretical picture.) 
If every star in the north celestial hemisphere is forever visible, as seen from the 

North Pole, the reverse is true for every star in the south celestial hemisphere (all of 
which have a negative declination). Such stars describe circles below 
the horizon and 

2 It takes another four minutes for the turning earth to catch up with the position of the sun in the sky, since in the 
interval the sun has moved slightly with respect to the stars. It is with respect to the sun that we measure the length 
of the day. That makes the day twenty-four hours long. 


parallel to it so that they never rise above it. 
From the North Pole, then, we see only one half the stars in the sky (assuming they 
are evenly spread over the celestial sphere, which they are, if we consider only those 
visible to the naked eye). We always see the stars with positive declination and we 
never see the stars with negative declination. 
From the South Pole, the situation is reversed. We always see the stars with negative 
declination and we never see the stars with positive declination. 
Next, imagine yourself back at the North Pole and moving away from it along some 
particular meridian of longitude towards lower latitudes. Your motion is reflected in 
the sky, since as you move on the surface of the earth, it seems to you that you 
remain on top of the sphere with your body vertical and that it is the Celestial Sphere 
-the entire celestial sphere - that tips. 
Suppose you move 10° south of the North Pole. Since the North Pole is at 90°N such 
a motion brings you to 80°N. At 80°N, the North Celestial Pole seems to have 
moved 10° away from the zenith and it is now 80° above the northern horizon. In the 
same way (though you can't see it) the South Celestial Pole has moved 10° away 
from the nadir and is now 80° below the southern horizon. 
This tilt continues as you move towards lower and lower latitudes. 
The general rule is that when you are at x°N, the North Celestial Pole is x° above the 
northern horizon and the South Celestial Pole is x° 
below the southern horizon. (The 
two celestial poles must, of course, always be directly opposite each other on the 
celestial sphere.) 

Again the situation is reversed in the southern hemisphere. As you move away 
from the South Pole, the South Celestial Pole tilts downward towards the southern 
horizon and the North Celestial Pole tilts upward (unseen) towards the northern 
horizon. 
The general rule is that when you are at x°S, 
the South Celestial Pole is x° 
above the 
southern horizon and the North Celestial Pole is x° below the northern horizon. 
At the equator, which is at 0°, the North Celestial Pole is 0° above the northern 
horizon and the South Celestial Pole is 0° above the southern horizon. In other 
words, both celestial poles are exactly at the horizon -at opposite points on the 
horizon, of course. 

Come back, now, to 80°N, where the North Celestial Pole is 10° away from the 
zenith in the direction of the northern horizon. The entire celestial sphere is tilted and 
that includes the celestial equator, half of which is lifted above the southern horizon 
and the other half is dropped below the northern horizon. The maximum height of 
the celestial equator is 10° above the horizon due south, while the maximum depth is 
10° below the horizon due north. 
Since all the stars make circles parallel to the celestial equator, all are now making 
circles that are oblique to the horizon. 
Since the celestial equator dips 10° below the northern horizon at one end of its 
circle, any star located in the north celestial hemisphere within 10° of the celestial 
equator -that is, any star with a declination between +10° and 0° -dips below the 
northern horizon as it moves around the sky. 
On the other hand, since the celestial equator rises 10° above the southern horizon at 
the other end of its circle, any star located in the south celestial hemisphere within 
10° of the celestial equator -that is, any star with a declination between 0° and -10° rises 
above the southern horizon as it moves around the sky. 
Any star with a positive declination of more than +10° gets closer to the horizon at 
the northern end of its circle than at its southern, but never quite sinks below it. Any 
star with a negative declination of more than -10° rises closer to the horizon at the 
southern end of its circle than at its northern, but never quite rises above it. 
From a stand of 80°N then, we can summarize by saying that all stars with a positive 
declination of more than +10° are always visible in the sky (we're disregarding the 
occasional presence of the sun, remember) and all stars with a negative declination 


of more than -10° are never visible in the sky. Those stars with a declination between 
+10° and -10° are sometimes above the horizon and visible and sometimes below the 
horizon and invisible. 
We can work this out for any latitude on earth and come up with a general rule. 
If you are standing at x°N on the terrestrial sphere then all stars with a positive 
declination of more than 4-(90 -x)° are always in the sky, while all stars with a 
negative declination of more than -(90 -x)° are never in the sky. All stars with a 
declination between +(90 -x)° and -(90 -x)° rise and set, and so are sometimes in 
the sky and sometimes not in the sky. 
If you are standing at x°S on the terrestrial sphere, the situation is symmetrically 
opposed. All stars with a negative declination of more than -(90 -x)° are always in 
the sky. All stars with a positive declination of more than +(90 -x)° are never in the 
sky. All stars with a declination between -(90 -x)° and +(90 -x)° rise and set and are 
sometimes in the sky and sometimes not in the sky. 
If you are standing on the equator, which is at 0°, then all stars with a declination 
between + (90 -0)° and -(90 -0)° -that is, between +90° and -90° -rise and set and 
are sometimes in the sky and sometimes not in the sky. 
But declinations between +90° and -90° are all there is, so that at the equator, all the 
stars are in the sky at some time or another, all of them making circles that are 
perpendicular to the horizon. 
It is only at the equator that all stars in the sky can be seen at one time or another. (In 
actual fact, stars near the celestial poles would, as seen from the equator, be always 
near the horizon and would therefore be difficult to observe -but we are ignoring 
horizon effects.) 

It works the other way around, too. Suppose a star has a declination of +60°. That 
means it is 30° from the North Celestial Pole. When the North Celestial Pole is more 
than 30° above the northern horizon, the star must always remain above the horizon. 
For it to dip below the horizon, it would have to move to a position that is more than 
30° from the North Celestial Pole, which is impossible. 
The North Celestial Pole is just 30° above the northern horizon when you are 
standing at 30°N on the surface of the earth. Anywhere on earth from 30°N 
northwards, the star with a declination of +60° is always in the sky. Anywhere on 
earth from 30°S southwards, it is never in the sky. Anywhere on earth between 30°N 
and 30°S, it rises and sets and is sometimes in the sky and sometimes not. 
We can present the general rule. If a star has a declination of +x°, it is always in the 
sky from any point on earth north of (90 -x)°N, never in the sky from any point 
south of (90 -x)°S, and is sometimes in the sky and sometimes not from any point 
between (90 - x)°N and (90 - x)0S. 
If a star has a declination of -X°, it is always in the sky from any point of (90 -x)°S, 
never in the sky from any point north of (90 -x)°N, and is sometimes in the sky and 
sometimes not from any point between (90 -x)°S and (90 - x)°N. 

The corollary to this is that from any point in the northern hemisphere, the North 
Celestial Pole is always in the sky. It is at 90°N and is therefore always visible from 
any point north of (90 - 90)°N, or 0°, which is the equator 
-while the South Celestial Pole is never in the sky. Contrariwise, from any point in 
the southern hemisphere, the South Celestial Pole is always in the sky and the North 
Celestial Pole never is. At the equator, both celestial poles are exactly at the horizon. 

Another corollary is that from any point on earth other than the North Pole and the 
South Pole, any star on the celestial equator is always seen to rise and set and is 
therefore seen part of the time and not seen the other part. 

But now to cases. The declination of Alpha Centauri is 
—60° 38', or, since there are 60 minutes of arc to a degree, we can work it out in the 
decimal system (which I personally prefer) and make the declination -60.63°. 


By the rules we have worked out, then, Alpha Centauri is always in the sky for all 
latitudes south of (90 -60.63)°S, or 29.37°S. It is never 
in the sky for all latitudes 
north of 29.37°N. Finally, it rises and sets and is sometimes in the sky and 
sometimes not in the sky for all latitudes between 29.37°S and 29.37°N. 
Next, we must ask ourselves how this relates to the United States. 
The line of 29.37°N cuts across Florida at a latitude just north of Daytona Beach. I 
would estimate, then, that the southern two thirds of Florida offers a view of Alpha 
Centauri in the sky at certain times. 
So far my reviewer is right, but if he undertakes to correct my errors, he is honour-

bound to make none of his own. By specifying Florida, he leaves the implication that 
the 'lower' part of the state (to use his geographical term) is the only part of the 
United States from which Alpha Centauri can be seen. 
Not so! The line of 29.37°N also cuts across the southernmost tip of Louisiana, about 

thirty miles south of New Orleans. From any point in southernmost Louisiana, 
including the Mississippi Delta region. Alpha Centauri is sometimes visible in the 
sky. 
We're still not through. The line of 29.37°N cuts across the state of Texas at about 
the latitude of Galveston and San Antonio. From any point in Texas south of those 
two cities, Alpha Centauri is sometimes visible in the sky. 
And we're still 
not through. My reviewer may have forgotten that one of the fifty 
states is Hawaii and that it is the most southern of all of them. All 
of Hawaii is well 
south of the 29.37°N mark and therefore Alpha Centauri is in the sky at certain times 
as viewed from any part of the state of Hawaii. 
What my reviewer should have said, then, if he had really wanted to be terribly 
erudite, was that Alpha Centauri was visible from all or part of no fewer than four 
states of the fifty. 

Now, then, how wrong was I? 
The area from which Alpha Centauri is visible, at least sometimes, I estimate to be 
something like this: 36,000 square miles in Florida; 4000 square miles in Louisiana; 
40,000 square miles in Texas; and 6400 square miles in Hawaii, for a total of 86,400 
square miles. This leaves an area of 3,450,000 square miles in the United States from 

which Alpha Centauri can never be seen. 
In other words, Alpha Centauri can't be seen from 97.6 per cent of the land area of 
the United States, and it can sometimes be seen from 2.4 per cent. I think, then, that 
it is a pretty fair approximation to say that Alpha Centauri cannot be seen from the 
United States in an essay in which I don't want to get into the minutiae of when and 
where a star can be seen and when and where it cannot be. 
In fact, we're not through. A star is seen at a maximum height above the horizon 

equal to the difference between the latitude at which you are located and the latitude 
that marks the limit from which the star can be seen. 
For instance, the southernmost part of Louisiana is at a latitude of 29.0°N, so that 
from even the southernmost part of Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta, Alpha Centauri 
is never more than about 0.4 degrees above the southern horizon. 
At even the southernmost point in Texas, the city of Brownsville, Alpha Centauri 
reaches a maximum height of 3.5° above the southern horizon and at the 
southernmost point in Florida, Key West, Alpha Centauri is never seen more than 
4.3° above the southern horizon. 
These are maximum heights above the horizon. 

Now it is not easy to observe stars that are very close to the horizon. Not only are 


there often obstructions on the horizon, but even where there are not, there is often a 
haze. 
I should say that, in practical terms, the only portion of the fifty states from which 
Alpha Centauri is easily visible is Hawaii. Hawaii's area, however, makes up only 

0.18 per cent of the nation. Therefore, in a practical sense. Alpha Centauri is not seen 
in the sky from 99.82 per cent of the United States. 
Well, then, what ought I to have said? Ought I to have said, 'Alpha Centauri cannot 
be seen at all from 97.6 per cent of the United States; can be seen in theory and 
sometimes in fact when one is lucky, in 2.2 per cent of the United States; and can be 
seen easily in 0.2 per cent of the United States'? Ought I to have said, 'Alpha 
Centauri cannot be seen from the United States, except from the state of Hawaii, and 
the southern parts of Florida, Louisiana and Texas'? 

Or do you think that for the purposes of the article, if I say 'Alpha Centauri cannot 
be seen from the United Slates', it is worth making a fuss over? 

And if my erudite reviewer is 
going to make a fuss over it. how smart is he if he 
remembers Florida and forgets Hawaii? 


The Planets 



7 


Just Thirty Years 


Some years back there arose the likelihood that my series of six 'Lucky Starr' books, 
teenage novels of science fiction adventure that I wrote originally in the 
nineteen-fifties under the pseudonym Paul French, would be resurrected, and published 
in new editions. 

'Excellent,' said I (for I am never averse to the resurrection of my books), 'but the 
science in them is outdated by now. Therefore, I will insert a short foreword warningreaders of this and describing just where the outdating occurs.' 

The publishers were a bit uneasy about this. They felt it might ruin the sales of the 
book. I was adamant, however, and I had my way. Soft-cover editions of the books havebeen published by New American Library and by Fawcett Books, while a hard-coveredition was published by Gregg Press,1 and in each case my short forewords appeared. 
The happy ending is that sales did not seem to be in the least impeded.

But how quickly science advances! How quickly statements made in science fiction, 
in good faith and after careful research, are outmoded, and converted from sciencefiction into fantasy.

For instance, to get down to cases, exactly thirty years ago this month as I write, The 
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (where these essays first saw the light of day)
was born. How much of what was science fiction at its birth is fantasy now? I don't havethe space to review all of science, but suppose we consider one branch that is of 
particular appeal to science fiction -the planets of the solar system. Suppose we 
consider them one by one. 

Mercury 

In 1949, it had been accepted for sixty years that Mercury showed only one face to the 
sun. Its period of rotation, it was thought, was eighty-eight days -exactly equal to its 
period of revolution about the sun.

This meant that Mercury had a 'sun side' and a 'dark side'. The sun side was 
incredibly hot, of course, especially when Mercury was at perihelion and received a 
hundred times as much solar radiation as earth did. The night side, on the other hand, 
was in perpetual darkness, and had a temperature little if anything above absolute 
zero. 

In between was a 'twilight zone'. To be sure. Mercury's orbit was so elliptical that if 
you stopped to work out the nature of the twilight zone, you would find that almost all 
of it got enough sun at one time and enough darkness at another to end up with an 
unbearable temperature one way or the other or both. This was often ignored, though, 
and Mercury's twilight zone was considered a region of at least bearable temperature at 
least in science fiction stories - and human settlements were placed there.

But then microwave astronomy was developed in the decades after World War IIand, in the early nineteen-sixties, it was found that microwaves were radiated from the 
dark side in surprising quantities. The temperature of the dark side had to be well 
above absolute zero, therefore. 

A beam of microwaves could also be sent from earth to Mercury. Striking Mercury, 
the beam would be reflected and the reflected beam could be picked up back on earth. Ifthe reflecting surface were motionless, the reflected waves would have very much the 
characteristics of the original beam. If the reflecting surface were moving (as it would be 
if the planet were rotating) the reflected beam would exhibit changed characteristics, 
the amount of the change being dependent upon the speed of surface motion.

In 1965, it was discovered from microwave reflections that Mercury rotated not in 
eighty-eight days after all, but in 58.7 days -just two thirds its period of revolution 
around the sun. 

1 My own name was used in these new editions. Paul French has retired. 


This meant that the sun side and the dark side of Mercury entered the realm of 
fantasy. Every part of Mercury experienced both day and night. Each day and each 
night is eighty-eight earth days long, but there is neither constant day nor constant 
night anywhere. The surface of Mercury gets hot and it gets cold, but it never gets ashot as the mythical sun side or as cold as the equally mythical dark side. 

There went parts of my book Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury. 

And what did the surface of Mercury look like? In 1949, we couldn't say. It was hot, of 
course, and many were the imagined pools of tin, lead and selenium lying about here 
and there on the sun side (as in my story Runaround).

In 1974, the probe Mariner 10 passed close by Mercury and took photographs that 
revealed its surface in detail. It looks very much like a larger moon, though it lacks 
'maria', the wide, relatively flat and unscarred 'seas' of the moon. No pools of anything. 

Venus 

In 1949, we knew virtually nothing about Venus, except for its orbit, its diameter and 
its brightness. Since it was always obscured by a thick and featureless cloud cover, we 
didn't know anything about its surface, and we didn't even know its period of rotation.

From its cloud cover, though, which we assumed to be water droplets, we could 
suppose it was a much wetter and soggier planet than earth. In fact, it even seemed 
possible that it might have a planetary ocean with little or no dry land. I assumed as 
much in Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus.

With a cloud cover and a large ocean, Venus might not be too hot.

In the nineteenth-century theory of solar-system formation called the 'nebular 
hypothesis', it was necessary to suppose that the planets formed from the outside in, 
so that Mars was older than earth and earth was older than Venus. The nebular 
hypothesis went by the boards about the turn of the century, but the notion remained 
in the science fiction mind. It was very common to suppose that Venus was rich incomparatively primitive life. It was still in the dinosaur age, so to speak.

As for rotation, since there was absolutely no way of telling, it was simplest to 
suppose it rotated in something like twenty-four hours, give or take a little.

By the mid-nineteen-fifties, however, astronomers were beginning to come up with 
some puzzling observations. Microwaves from Venus seemed to be present in unexpectedly 
large quantities. Venus might be warmer than expected.

Then, on December 14, 1962, a probe, Mariner 2, flew close by Venus and was able 
to measure the microwave emission with great precision. It seemed clear that 
Venus's surface temperature approached an unbelievable 500°C on both the sunlit and 
the night portion. There couldn't possibly be a drop of liquid water anywhere on the 
surface of the planet. 

Why so hot? The answer lay in the atmosphere. In 1967, a probe, Venyera 4, actuallyentered Venus's atmosphere, analysing it as it parachuted down. The atmosphere of 
Venus, it turned out, was ninety times as dense as that of earth, and 95 per cent of it 
was carbon dioxide. 

Carbon dioxide is transparent to visible light and quite opaque to infrared. Sunlight 
passes through, is absorbed by the surface and is converted to heat. The hot surface 
reradiates energy as infrared, which cannot get through the atmosphere. The heat is 
trapped and Venus's temperature goes up till the infrared is forced through.

Nor are the clouds themselves simply water droplets. There are very likely droplets 
of sulphuric acid present, too.

What about Venus's period of rotation? Microwaves can penetrate the clouds easilyand will be reflected by the surface. Those reflections show Venus to be turning on its 
axis once in 243.1 earth days and in a retrograde fashion -east to west, rather than 
earth's west to east. This means that the length of time between sunrise and sunset on 
Venus is 117 earth days. 


Earth 

In 1949, the earth was considered to be a rather static place. The land might lift and 
subside slightly, and shallow arms of the sea might invade and retreat, but the continents 
stayed put. There had been some theories of 'continental drift' but no one of 
importance believed them.

On the other hand, the ocean floor was beginning to reveal some secrets. The floorwas by no means flat and featureless. There was a huge mountain range windingdown the Atlantic Ocean and into the other oceans. It was called the Mid-Ocean Ridge. 

Making use of sonar soundings, William Maurice Ewing and Bruce Charles Heezen 
showed in 1953 that, running down the length of the mountain range, was a deep 
canyon. This was eventually found to exist in all portions of the Mid-Ocean Ridge, so 
that it is sometimes called the Great Global Rift. 

The rift divided the earth's crust into large 'tectonic plates', so called from the 
Greek word for 'carpenter' since they seemed so tightly joined. 

In 1960, Harry Hammond Hess presented evidence in favour of 'sea-floor 
spreading'. Hot molten rock slowly welled up from great depths into the Great Global 
Rift in the mid-Atlantic, for instance, and solidified at or near the surface. This 
upwelling of solidifying rock forced the two plates apart on either side. The plates 
moved apart at the rate of from 2 to 18 centimetres (1 to 7 inches) a year. As the plates 
moved apart, South America and Africa moved farther apart. 

The continents shift as the tectonic plates move; oceans form; mountain ranges 
buckle upwards; the sea floor buckles downwards; volcanoes erupt and 
earthquakes take place where the plates meet; and so on.

Human beings have invaded the deep. In 1949, a bathyscaphe, a ship capable of 
manoeuvring far below the ocean's surface, had already penetrated 1.4 kilometres 

(0.85 miles) below the ocean surface. 
On January 14, 1960, however, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh took a 
bathyscaphe to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, plumbing 11 kilometres (7 miles) 
below the ocean surface to the deepest part of the abyss. 

Moon 

In 1949, as had been true throughout human history, human beings could see 
only one side of the moon, a side that was airless, waterless, changeless and 
cratered. 

We could dream about the other, hidden side, however. Perhaps, for some reason, it 
was less forbidding. Even if it weren't, might there not be enough remnants of water and 
air in the crater shadows or under the moon's surface on either side to support 
primitive life, at least? Advantage was taken of these notions in occasional science 
fiction stories. 

In 1959, however, a probe, Luna 3, sent back, for the first time ever, photographs of 
the far side of the moon. Other probes did the same. Eventually, probes orbiting themoon sent back detailed photographs of every part of the moon and the moon could be 
mapped with almost the detail that the earth could be.

It turned out that the hidden side of the moon was exactly like the visible side: 
airless, waterless, changeless and cratered. The one difference was that the far side of 
the moon, like Mercury, lacked the 'maria' of the visible side of the moon.

On July 20, 1969, the first human foot was placed on the moon and a few days later 
the first moon rocks were brought back to earth. Much more has been brought backsince and the evidence seems to indicate that not only is there no water on the moon 
but that there hasn't been any since the early days of the solar system.

In fact, the moon is littered with glassy fragments that seem to indicate that it has 
been exposed in the past to much greater heat than that to which it is exposed now. 
Perhaps it had originally had an elliptical orbit that had brought it much closer to the 
sun at perihelion than it ever gets now and perhaps it had then been captured by earth.

If we ever get samples of Mercury rocks, it will be interesting to compare them with 
those from the moon. 


Mars 

In 1949, it was still possible to believe that Mars was covered with an intricate 
network of canals that could bespeak the presence not only of life, but of intelligent life 
and of a high, though decadent, civilization. In fact, this became virtually a dogma of 
science fiction. 

To be sure, Mars was smaller than earth, had a far thinner atmosphere and far less 
water and was far colder, but it had a day that was as long as ours, and an axis that wastipped like ours so that it had seasons like ours -and it had visible ice caps.

The first crack in this picture came on July 14, 1965, when the probe Mariner 4passed Mars and sent back twenty photographs of the planet.

There were no canals shown. What were shown were craters, rather like those on 
the moon, and the state of their apparent age seemed to show there could have been 
little erosion and that there was therefore not much in the way of air or water on Mars.

In 1967, Mariners 6 and 7 passed Mars, and showed that the atmosphere was 
thinner, drier and colder than even the most pessimistic preprobe estimates. There 
could not possibly be any form of advanced life on Mars, let alone intelligent life with 
great engineering ability. The canals seen by a few astronomers were apparently 
optical illusions.

In 1971, the probe Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars and the entire Martian 
surface was photographed in detail. Though there were no canals, there were enormous 
volcanoes -one of them, Olympus Mons, far more huge than anything of the sort on 
earth. Another record was set by Valles Marineris, a canyon that dwarfed earth's Grand 
Canyon to a toothpick scratch. There were markings, too, that looked precisely like 
dried river beds. 

There was at least some geological life to Mars. Could there be biological life on it, 
too? Even if only microscopic?

In 1976, the probes Vikings 1 and 2 soft-landed on the Martian surface and tested the 
soil for signs of microscopic life. The results were rather similar to what might havebeen expected if life were present but absolutely nothing in the way of organic 
compounds could be detected.

My stories David Starr: Space Ranger and 'The Martian Way' were each in part 
outdated by these discoveries. 

Phobos and Deimos 

In 1949, the Martian satellites were dim specks of light and nothing more. Theywere tiny, but that was all we could say.

Some of the later Mars probes took the first close-up photographs of the satellites. 
They are irregular bodies that look like potatoes, complete with eyes. The longest 
diameter was 28 kilometres (17 miles) for Phobos, and 16 kilometres (10 miles) for 
Deimos. Both were thoroughly cratered. Phobos had striations in addition, while 
Deimos had its craters buried in dust. 

The satellites were dark while Mars was reddish. Very likely, Phobos and Deimos 
are captured asteroids of the kind called 'carbonaceous chondrites'. These contain considerable 
quantities of water and organic compounds so that the surfaces of Mars'tiny satellites may prove of greater interest, once they are reached, than the surface of 
Mars itself. 

Asteroids 

In 1949, the asteroids were considered to be confined very largely to the asteroid belt 
and it was a science fiction dogma that the region was littered with debris and wasvirtually impassable. My first published story, 'Marooned off Vesta', dealt with a ship 
that had been wrecked in the asteroid belt by collision with planetary debris.

To be sure there were occasional exceptions. A few asteroids ('earth-grazers') came 
in closer than Mars, and in 1948 Icarus had been discovered. It approached the sun 
more closely than Mercury did. Also, at least one asteroid, Hidalgo, was known to 
recede as far as the orbit of Saturn. 


Over the course of the next thirty years, however, many more asteroids were 
discovered that penetrate the inner regions of the planetary system. A whole class of 
'Apollo objects' are now known that approach the sun more closely than Venus 
does, and in 1978, an asteroid was discovered with an orbit that, at every point, is 
closer to the sun than earth's orbit is. 

In 1977, Charles Kowall, studying photographic plates in search of distant comets, 
came across an object that seemed to be moving unusually slowly for an asteroid. Itturned out to be an object of asteroid size, to be sure, but one with an orbit that, at its 
closest, was as far from the sun as Saturn was, and, at its farthest, retreated to the 
distance of Uranus's orbit. He called it Chiron. 

It is clear that asteroids are a far more pervasive feature of the solar system than had 
been thought in 1949. Furthermore, the asteroid belt itself is less dangerous than had 
been thought. Probes have passed through it without any trouble and without any sign 
of unusual concentration of matter. 

Jupiter 

In 1949, it was known that Jupiter was a giant, that it was striped with colours fromorange to brown and that it had ammonia and methane impurities in an atmosphere 
made up largely of hydrogen and helium. Nothing more of its constitution was known 
than that. 

In science fiction stories, it was supposed that under a deep and dense atmosphere 
there was a solid surface. I took advantage of this belief in my story 'Victory Unintentional'. 


In 1955, active microwave radiation was detected from Jupiter and on 
December 3, 1973, a probe, Pioneer 10, skimmed its surface. It discovered that 
Jupiter had a magnetosphere (belts of electrically charged particles outside its 
atmosphere) that was both far more voluminous and far more densely charged than 
earth was. 

The magnetosphere was deadly, and was large enough to envelop Jupiter's large 
satellites, which may therefore be unreachable by anything but unmanned probes.

Furthermore, it would appear that the assumption of a sizeable solid core must be 
put aside. Jupiter would seem to be, essentially, a ball of red-hot liquid hydrogen, with acentre that may be compressed into solid 'metallic hydrogen'. 

On March 5, 1979, the probe Voyager 1 made a close approach to Jupiter and sent 
back photographs that showed incredible activity: an atmosphere boiling and 
twisting in unimaginable storms. One photograph shows what appears to be a thin 
ring of debris surrounding Jupiter. 

Jupiter's Satellites 

In 1949, the four large satellites, lo, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, were known 
only as dots of light. Their sizes were estimated, lo was moon-sized, Europa a trifle 
smaller, Ganymede and Callisto considerably larger. Nothing was known of their 
surfaces, though they were supposed to be smaller versions of Mars. In science 
fiction, life was frequently placed on their surfaces. I did it in stories such as 'The 
Callistan Menace' and 'Christmas on Ganymede'.

Once the cratering of Mercury and Mars was discovered, it began to be assumed 
that the satellites of Jupiter were airless, lifeless, and cratered, too.

The probe, Voyager 1, took the first good closeup pictures of the satellites. 
Ganymede and Callisto were indeed cratered. The craters were shallow because those 
satellites were largely icy and the surface didn't have the mechanical strength to 
support high-walled, deep-centred craters.

The big surprise was that lo and Europa were not cratered.

Europa seemed to be marked by long straight fissures, something like the Martian 
canals brought to life -except that they are probably cracks in an icy crust. The ice,
presumably, fills and blots out any craters that form.

The real surprise was lo. Photos of lo showed there were active volcanoes on it 
spewing clouds of dust and gas upwards. The surface of the satellite must be coated 
with sulphur lava, which would explain its reddish-yellow colour and the haze of 
sodium around it and through its orbit. It is this lava which has filled in and obliterated 
any craters that formed.

One small satellite, Amalthea, is inside lo's orbit. It is elongated, with the long axis 


pointing towards Jupiter, as though tidal effects are pulling it apart. Jupiter's ring is 
inside Amalthea's orbit. 

In 1949, only six small satellites were known to be circling Jupiter beyond 
Callisto's orbit. Since then the number has risen to eight, possibly nine. 

Satellites 

No probes have as yet reached Saturn, so our knowledge of the planet is about what it 
was in 1949, except that we can suppose that what we have learned about Jupiter is 
also true of Saturn.2 

In 1949, the number of satellites known to circle Saturn was nine, as it had been for 
half a century. In 1967, however, Audouin Dolfuss discovered a tenth satellite, whichhe named Janus. It circles Saturn more closely than any other satellite, and its orbit lies 
just outside Saturn's magnificent rings. (I didn't mention Janus, of course, in my book

Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn.)3 

Uranus 

No startling discoveries have been made about Uranus itself since 1949, but in 1977, 
James L. Elliot and others, who were investigating an occultation of a star by that 
planet, discovered that the star underwent a pattern of dimming and brightening before 
Uranus's edge moved in front of it, and the same pattern in reverse after Uranus'sopposite edge had passed beyond it.

Apparently, Uranus had rings -thin dark rings not visible to ordinary inspection 
at that planet's great distance. This, and the even more recent discovery of a ringaround Jupiter, now makes it look as though ringed planets may be common, and 
that every large planet far from its star has them. The remarkable thing about Saturn isnot that it has rings but that they are so voluminous and bright. 

Neptune 

Nothing of significance has been learned about Neptune beyond what was known in 
1949. 

Pluto 

In 1949, Pluto was known only as a dot of light. It was thought to be possibly as largeand as massive as earth. 

In 1955, from small but regular brightenings and dim-mings, it was found to have a 
rotation period of 6.4 earth days. The estimate of its size shrank, however, until, in 
the nineteen-seventies, it was thought to be merely as large and as massive as Mars. 

On June 22, 1978, James W. Christy, examining photographs of Pluto, noticed adistinct bump on one side. He examined other photographs and finally decided that 
Pluto had a satellite, which he called Charon. Pluto and Charon circled each other in 

6.4 days, each facing only one side to the other. 
From the degree of separation and the time of revolution, it could be calculated that 
Pluto had a diameter of only 3000 kilometres (1850 miles) and Charon one of 1200 
kilometres (750 miles). The two together have only one eighth the mass of our moon. 

2 Since this was written probes have indeed reached Saturn and have shown that the ring system is morecomplex than we had thought and that its magnetic field is considerably weaker than had been expected.

3 Janus may not exist after all but Saturn-probes have discovered several small satellites near the ring 
systems. 


Summary 

Just thirty years have passed since the founding of The Magazine of Fantasy and 
Science Fiction and see what changes have been made in only one small branch ofhuman knowledge.

In those thirty years we have lost the sun side and dark side of Mercury; the oceans of 
Venus; the canals of Mars; the solid surface of Jupiter; and (possibly) life on anyplanet in the solar system other than earth. 

In those thirty years we have gained the faster rotation of Mercury and the slower 
rotation of Venus; the hellish heat of Venus; the volcanoes and canyons of Mars; the 
liquid nature of Jupiter; rings for Jupiter and Uranus; craters for Mercury, Mars, 
Phobos, Deimos, Ganymede and Callisto; tectonic plates for earth and, possibly,
Europa, active volcanoes on lo, additional satellites for Jupiter and Saturn; and a 
satellite for a shrunken Pluto. 

Just thirty years! What will we find out in thirty years more? 

Note 

The article above was written in March 1979. Since then, time has not stood still, you 
may be sure.

Saturn's satellites have been studied in detail. Several have been partially mapped. 
Mimas has a crater that is enormous, considering the size of the satellite. Rhea and 
Dione are thickly cratered. Enceladus seems to be smooth, but a good look was not 
obtained by the Voyager probe which passed by in early 1981. lapetus has one side lightand one side dark, but the reason for it is still not known. Titan has an atmosphere 
much thicker than expected; thicker than earth's is. What's more, the atmosphere is 
rich in nitrogen.

Then, too, there are Saturn's rings, which have a structure much more complex 
than anyone dreamed. There may be as many as a thousand subrings making it up, 
including several in Cassini's division which had been thought to be empty. Some of the 
subrings are not quite circular and at least one seems to be braided. There are also'spokes' in the rings, dark regions crossing the rings at right angles to their rotation.

A second Voyager probe is on its way. 


The Moon 



8 

A Long Day's Journey 


Last month my wife, Janet, and I were in upstate New York with a group who were 
intending to watch the Perseid meteor shower in the small hours of the morning.

Unfortunately, three of the four nights that were devoted to the task were solidlycloud-covered, and on the fourth night the display was not spectacular. Nevertheless, 
we had a lot of fun, and not the least of it was listening to lectures on astronomical 
subjects.

One night we were heading out from the hotel to the outlying building where Fred 
Hess (a marvellous lecturer on matters astronomical) was going to fill us in on ways of 
predicting eclipses. We were looking forward to it.

In the elevator, an elderly and snappish woman looked at our outfits with disfavour and 
said, 'You'll freeze to death if you go out like that.'

Since I am not particularly sensitive to cold and since I was quite certain that an 
August evening was not likely to be below 60°F even if the day had been cloudy, Icontented myself with smiling benignly. Janet, however, who is more sensitive to cold 
than I am, looked at her watch uneasily and said, 'I don't have time to go back for my 
sweater.' 

I was about to assure her that she wouldn't need it, when the harpy cried out, 'Are you 
going to listen to those fairy tales?' 

I looked astonished. We Perseid people made up only a small fraction of the total 
clientele at the resort hotel and there were other activities that had nothing to do with 
us, but I hadn't heard of any fairy-tale presentations. 'Fairy tales?' I asked.

'All that talk about the stars,' she said angrily. 'Don't listen to it. It's fairy tales.'

I'nj afraid I laughed, which must have annoyed her, for as we walked off, she decided 
to escalate the level of insult and applied the very worst epithet she could think of to 
the innocent lecture on eclipses which we were about to attend. Behind us, her voice 
rose to a screech. 'It's science fiction,' she yelled. 'Science fiction!' 

Poor thing! I decided to devote my next essay to something that would sound a 
lot more science fictiony than does the staid and everyday matter of eclipses -not that 
I imagined for one moment that she would read my essays even if she knew how. 

The subject under discussion in this essay is the tidal influence of the moon upon the 
earth. I have discussed the tides in some detail in an earlier essay ('Time and Tide', in 
Asimov on Astronomy, Doubleday 1974), and I will arbitrarily assume you have read 
it and remember it. 

In that earlier essay, I did spend a few paragraphs on the way the tides are 
slowing earth's rotation period, and it is that which I wish to go into in some detail 
now. 

Any of us who played with tops when young1 know that the rate of their rotation 
gradually slows and that they eventually wobble, then topple over and are motionless. 
The rotational energy of a spinning top is gradually depleted and turned into heat 
through friction of its point with the ground it is spinning on and through the resistance 
of the air it is turning through. What's more, its tiny store of angular momentumis transferred to the earth's enormous supply. 

If the top were spinning without making contact with anything material, and if it 
were turning in an absolute vacuum, there would be no friction and no way of losingrotational energy or angular momentum. The top would, in that case, spin forever at 
an undiminishing rate. 

1 Do tops still exist? I haven't seen anyone playing with a top in years 


If we consider the solid ball of the earth, together with its overlying ocean and 
atmosphere, as a spinning top, it would seem to represent the ideal case. Earth makes 
no contact with any material object as it spins and it is surrounded by the vacuum of 
space.

To be sure, nothing is ever ideal. Interplanetary space isn't quite an absolute 
vacuum, and the atmosphere and oceans react to the rotation by setting up whirling,
energy-consuming currents in the air and water. However, so large is earth's supplyof rotational energy and angular momentum and so small is the effect of these 
departures from the ideal that any change in rotation that results from these 
nonidealities is vanishingly small.

This brings us to the tides. The solid ball of the earth, as it spins, is constantlypassing through the two shallow mounds of ocean, one facing the moon, and one 
facing away from the moon -the tides produced by the fact that different portions of 
the earth are at slightly different distances from the moon and therefore subjected 
to slightly different intensities of lunar gravitation.

As shorelines pass through the tidal bulges, and as the water moves up the shore 
and then down, there is a frictional effect. Some of the rotational energy of the 
earth is converted into heat - and some of its angular momentum vanishes also.2 

What's more, there are two tidal bulges in the solid earth itself (smaller than the 
ocean bulges) so that as the earth turns, the rocks heave up a few inches and settle 
back, heave up a few inches and settle back, over and over, twice a day. Here, too, 
there is friction and both rotational energy and angular momentum are converted or 
transferred. Altogether it is estimated that the earth is losing some 20 to 40 billion 
kilocalories of rotational energy every minute. 

As a result of the tidal effect, then, the earth's period of rotation must be constantlyslowing; or, to put it in a more mundane way that more immediately impinges upon the 
consciousness of people, the day must be constantly lengthening. 

To be sure, even the colossal loss of 20 to 40 billion kilocalories of rotational energyeach minute shrinks to nearly nothing in comparison with the titanic store of rotationalenergy possessed by the earth. The tidal braking effect is therefore extraordinarilysmall and it would appear that the day becomes one second longer only after the tides 
have been exerting their braking effect for 62,500 years. This means that at the end of acentury, the day is 0.0016 of a second longer than at the beginning of the century, or, 
to put it another way, that each day is 0.000000044 of a second longer than the daybefore. 

That's pretty, but can we be sure? Can the lengthening of the day be actuallymeasured? 

It can, for we now have atomic clocks that could just about measure such a 
difference from day to day -and that could certainly do so with ease if we measured 
the length of several days now and the length of several days next year. 

There are complications, though. As clocks grew more accurate, astronomers 
discovered that the rotation of the earth is not constant and that the earth is, in fact, a 
rotten timekeeper.

The observed positions, from moment to moment, of bodies such as the moon, the 
sun, Mercury and Venus, which could be obtained with steadily greater precision as 
clocks were improved, all showed discrepancies from the theoretical positions theyought to have. What's more, the discrepancies were just about the same for all four 
bodies. It could not be expected of coincidence that all four bodies would move in 
unison, so it seemed, instead, that it was the earth's period of rotation that was 
unsteady.

If the earth's period of rotation slowed slightly, the position of the heavenlybodies would seem to move ahead of theoretical; if the earth's period of rotation 
speeded slightly, the position of the heavenly bodies would fall behind. Between 
1840 and 1920, the rate of earth's rotation slowed by over a second and then it 
started speeding up again. 

2 Angular momentum doesn't truly vanish. It can't. It is cancelled by an opposite angular momentum, or it 
is transferred. There is no opposite angular momentum involved here so it must be transferred. But where?
We'll take this up in the next chapter. 


Why? Because the earth is not a perfect, unchanging body. There are earthquakes 
and shiftings of mass within the earth. If the mass shifts, on the average, slightly closer 
to the centre of the earth, the earth's rotation speeds slightly; if the mass shifts 
slightly farther from the centre, the earth's rotation slows slightly.

In fact, as clocks continued to improve, it was found that earth's rotation rate 
changed with the seasons. In the spring the day is about one twelfth of a second longer 
than it is in the autumn. This is because of shifting mass due to snowfall, seasonal 
changes in air and water currents and so on.

These changes are all cyclic, however. Seasons and earthquakes will now lengthen, 
now shorten the day, but in the long run there will be, on the average, no change.

Superimposed on these cyclical changes of a second or more is the much smaller 
noncyclical change of an increase in the length of the day at a rate of 44 billionths of a 
second per day. How can one detect that tiny secular change in all that melange of 
far larger cyclical changes?

Actually, it isn't difficult. 

Suppose that the day has remained constant in length for aeons, but has suddenlybegun to increase at the rate of a hundredth of a second per year. At the end of acentury, the day is one second longer than it had been at the beginning of the century. 
Certainly that's not going to make any practical difference in your life, and if all you 

have is an ordinary watch, you won't even be able to measure the change.

But the differences mount up. Each day in the second year starts 1/100 of a second 
later than did the equivalent day in the first year, and at the end of the second year, the 
day starts 365/100, or 3.65 seconds, later than did the day at the beginning of the first 

year. 
Each day of the third year starts 2/100 of a second later than the equivalent day in thefirst year, so that at the end of the third year the day starts 6.30 + 3.65, or 9.95 seconds 
later than did the first day of the first year. And so on.

Even though individual days all through the century have been only fractions of a 
second longer than earlier days, the cumulative error from day to day mounts up and 
by the time a whole century has passed, a particular day would be beginning 2.3 daysafter the moment in time it would have begun had there been no tiny lengthening of 
the day at all. 

Next, suppose that each year, at the same time precisely, something astronomical 
and noticeable happens -let us say a total eclipse of the sun. Through time 
immemorial, while the day has been of absolutely constant length, the sun has always

been eclipsed, let us say, at 4 P.M. on August 31. 
Once the day suddenly begins to lengthen very slowly, the eclipse of the sun begins 
coming earlier each year by an amount equal to the cumulative error. By the end of 
the century, the eclipse would be coming on August 29 at 8:48 A.M. 

It doesn't matter what kind of timepiece you have. You don't need one to tell you 
that the eclipse is coming earlier; all you need is a calendar. And from the discrepancy 
in the coming of the eclipse, once you eliminate all other possible causes, you can 
fairly reason that the day is lengthening at a rate too small for you to measure directly. Infact, even without a decent timepiece you can get a good estimate of the rate.

Of course, an increase of 0.01 of a second per year is large compared to what reallytakes place. At the actual rate at which the earth's day is increasing, the cumulative 
error in the course of a hundred years is only thirty-three seconds and that's not 
enough to be helpful. This means we must make use of longer time intervals.

Consider that eclipses of the sun do happen. They don't happen once a year to the 
second, but they happen in such a way that, if we assume the length of a day is constant, 
we can calculate backwards and decide exactly when an eclipse ought to have taken 

place along a certain course on earth's surface in, say, 585 B.C. 
If the length of the day is not constant, then the eclipse will take place at a different 
time and the cumulative error over not one century but twenty-five centuries will be 
large enough to detect.

It might be argued that ancient people had only the most primitive methods of 
keeping time and that their whole concept of time recording was different from ours. 
It would therefore be risky to deduce anything from what they said about the time of 

eclipses. 


It is not only time that counts, however. An eclipse of the sun can be seen onlyfrom a small area of the earth, marked out by a line perhaps 160 kilometres (100 miles) 
across at most. If, let us say, an eclipse were to take place only one hour after the 
calculated time, the earth would turn in that interval and at, say, 40°N the eclipse 
would be seen 1200 kilometres (750 miles) farther west than our calculations would 
indicate. 

Even if we don't completely trust what ancient people may say about the time of an 
eclipse, we can be sure that they report the place of the eclipse and that will tell us 
what we want to know. From their reports, we know the amount of the cumulative 
error and, from that, the rate of the lengthening of the day. That is how we know that 
the earth's day is increasing at the rate of one second every 62,500 years; and is 
decreasing at that rate, if we imagine time to be going backwards, and look into the 
past. 

Determining cumulative errors is one way of measuring the rate of the lengthening of 
the day. It would be nice to be even more direct, though, and to measure the actual 
length of an ancient day and show that it was less than twenty-four hours long. 

How is that done, though? At a change of 0.0016 of a second per century (increasingas we go into the future, decreasing as we go into the past), it would take a long time 
to produce a day with a difference in length that would show up on direct 
measurement. 

The day is now exactly twenty-four hours in length, or 86,400 seconds. At the time 
the Great Pyramid was built some forty-five centuries ago, the day was 86,399.93 
seconds long. There is no way we can tell by direct evidence that the pharaohs 
were living days that were 7/100 of a second shorter than those we are living today.

And as for measuring days in prehistoric times that would seem certainly out of 
the question. 
Yet not so. It can be done. It is not human beings only who keep records, though we 
are the only ones who do it deliberately. 

Corals apparently grow faster in summer than in winter. Their skeletons alternate 
regions of fast and slow growth and therefore show annual markings we can count. 
They also grow faster by day than by night and form small daily markings superimposed 
on the larger annual ones. Naturally, they form some 365 daily ridges a year.

Now let's imagine we are going back in time and studying corals as we go. The 
length of the year would remain unchanged as we move into the past. (There are 
factors that would cause it to change, but these are so much smaller than the 
changes in the length of the day that we make no serious error if we consider the 
length of the year as constant.) The length of the day grows shorter, however, and there 
are therefore more of the shorter days in the year. That means the corals ought to 
show more daily markings superimposed on the annual marking.

Assuming a shortening of the day, of 0.0016 of a second per century as we go back intime, and assuming that rate to be constant, the day should have been 6400 seconds 

(1.78 hours) shorter 400 million years ago than it is today. The day at that period should 
therefore have been 22.22 hours long, and there should at that time have been 394.5 
such days in the year.
In 1963, the American palaeontologist John West Wells, of Cornell University, 
studied certain fossil corals from the Middle Devonian, fossils that were estimated to 
be about 400 million years old.

Those fossils showed about 400 daily markings per year, indicating the day to have 
been 21.9 hours long. Considering the natural uncertainty in the age of the fossils that 
is pretty good agreement.3 

Next, let's amuse ourselves by asking another question. The earth reached its present 
form, more or less, about 4.6 billion years ago. Assuming that, as we go into thepast, the day shortens at a constant rate of 0.0016 of a second per century, how longwas the day when the earth was first formed? 

Under those conditions, the original day was 73.600 seconds (or 20.4 hours) shorter 
than it is today. In other words, the original day, when earth was freshly in existence, 
was 3.6 hours long. 

3 Nevertheless, let's not dismiss the discrepancy. I'll pick that up again in the next chapter. 

Does this sound weirdly impossible?4 Well, then, let's compare earth and Jupiter. 


Jupiter has 318 times the mass of earth and that mass is, on the average, considerablyfarther from the axis of rotation, since Jupiter is the larger body. Both factors 
contribute to a greater angular momentum of rotation for Jupiter, one that is 
about 70,000 times as great as that of earth. 

To be sure, Jupiter has four large satellites, two of which are distinctly more 
massive than our moon. Each of these has a tidal effect on Jupiter, which is increased 
by the fact that Jupiter's large diameter produces a large drop in gravitational pull 
across its width. 

Doing some quick calculations that take into account the mass and distance of 
Jupiter's large satellites, as well as Jupiter's diameter compared to earth, it seems to 
me that the tidal effect of the four satellites on Jupiter is some 1800 times as great as 
that of the moon on the earth. 

And yet, considering Jupiter's enormous angular momentum, it would seem to methat the slowing effect of the satellites on Jupiter's rotation, and the consequent 
lengthening of its day, is only one fortieth that of the slowing effect of the moon on 
the earth. 

Consequently, in the 4.6 billion years since the formation of the Solar system,
Jupiter's day has lengthened by just about 30 minutes, or 0.5 of an hour. Since 
Jupiter's day is now 9.92 hours long, it must have been 9.42 hours long at the time of 
formation. 

Still, earth's day at the time of formation was only 3.6 hours long, according to mycalculations -only two-fifths the length of Jupiter's day at the time of formation. Is that 
reasonable? 

Let's not forget the difference in size between the planets. Jupiter's circumference 
is 449,000 kilometres (278,600 miles), while earth's is 40,077 kilometres (24,900 miles). 
If Jupiter turned in 9.42 hours at the beginning, an object on its equator would move at 
a speed of 13.25 kilometres (8.22 miles) per second. If earth turned in 3.6 hours at the 
beginning, an object on its equator would move at a speed of 3.1 kilometres (1.9 
miles) per second.

As you see, in terms of equatorial speed, the primordial earth would be spinning at 
less than a quarter of primordial Jupiter's rate. In fact, the primordial earth would be 
spinning at less than a quarter of Jupiter's rate right now.

Nor would the earth be turning so quickly at the start that it would be in danger of 
flying apart. Escape velocity from earth is 11.3 kilometres (7.0 miles) per second. Earth 
would have to turn in about an hour to have its equatorial speed reach the escape 
velocity.

Earth, then, was born spinning rapidly, and it is owing to the moon's tidal 
influence that we now have a long day's journey from sunrise to sunrise, one that is 
nearly seven times the original length. 

Suppose that we consider the moon next. Escape velocity from the moon is 2.4 
kilometres (1.5 miles) per second. How fast would the moon have to rotate in order 
that objects at its equator would reach escape velocity and fly away? The moon's 
circumference is 10,920 kilometres (6786 miles) and it would have to make a 
complete revolution in 1.26 hours before it would begin to lose material at the equator.
Suppose, just for fun, then, that when it was formed 4.6 billion years ago, it was 
spinning with a rotation rate of just a trifle over 1.26 hours -just enough for it to 
hold together. 

Suppose, too, that the moon was then located where it is now and that it was 
subjected to the tidal influence of the earth. 

The earth has eighty-one times the mass of the moon so, all things being equal, it 
would have eighty-one times the tide-producing power. However, the moon is smaller 
in size than the earth is, and there is a smaller drop in gravitational pull over its 
lesser width. That tends to negate some of the earth's mass advantage. Even so, the 
tidal effect of the earth on the moon is 32.5 times that of the moon on the earth. 

In addition, the moon's store of angular momentum (if it were rotating in 1.26 
hours) would be only one thirty-third of the earth's store right now. Consequently Ishould judge that the moon would be slowing at a rate some 1000 times that of theearth right now. Its day would be lengthening at the rate of 0.016 of a second per 
year.

The present sidereal period of rotation of the moon is 27.32 days or 2,360,450 
seconds; and if the primordial rotation was 1.26 hours that would be 4536 seconds. To 


go from the latter to the former at a rate of increase of 0.016 of a second per year 
(which we will assume will hold constant from year to year) would require about 
150 million years, or only one thirtieth of the moon's lifetime.

In other words, as geologic time goes, the moon's rotation period was quicklyslowed to its present value. 
Why did its rotation not continue to be slowed, until now its period of rotation 
would be much longer than 27.32 days? 

Well, the magic in 27.32 days is that it is precisely equal to the length of time it 
takes the moon to go around the earth and if the moon both rotates and revolvesin that same length of time, it faces one side always to the earth, so that the tidal 
bulges are frozen in place, with one directly facing the earth and one facing directlyaway. The moon will then no longer turn through the bulges and there is no longer 
a tidal slowing effect due to the earth's action upon it. Once it reaches a rotationperiod equal to its revolution period, it is 'locked in' gravitationally and its 
rotation period no longer changes, except for other, more slowly working, causes.

As you can see, the gravitational effect would work to lock in any small bodyrevolving about some large body, provided the small body isn't too small (the smaller 
the body the smaller the tidal effect upon it) and provided it isn't too far from the 
large body (the tidal effect decreases as the cube of increasing distance).

We now know that the two satellites of Mars are gravitationally locked and present 
only one side to Mars, and we are quite certain this is true also of the five closestsatellites to Jupiter.

It used to be thought that Mercury was gravitationally locked to the sun and that it 
presented one side only to the luminary. However, the sun's tidal effect on Mercuryis only about one ninth that of the earth on the moon and, apparently, that is not 
enough to quite do the job (with Mercury's unusually elliptical orbit increasing the 
difficulty perhaps). In any case, Mercury rotates in just two thirds of the period of its 
revolution. 

This, too, is a form of gravitational locking and achieves a certain stability. 
Rotation equal to two thirds the revolution is not as stable as rotation equal to revolution, 
but the sun's tidal effect is apparently not quite strong enough to knockMercury out of this lesser level of stability into the greater one. 

But now I want to turn to the question of the diminishing store of rotational 
angular momentum of earth and moon as each slows the other's rotation. 
That angular momentum must be transferred, but where? That matter will be taken 
up in the next chapter. 


9 


The Inconstant Moon 


When I was twenty years old I was in love for the first time. It was the palest, most 
feckless and harmless love you can imagine but I was only twenty, and backward for 
my age.1 At any rate, I took the worshipped object to the fairgrounds where there 
were all sorts of daredevil rides, and paused before the rollercoaster.

I had never been on a rollercoaster, but I knew exactly what it was - in theory. Ihad heard the high-pitched female screams that rent the air as the vehicle swooped 
downwards, and the manner in which each young woman clung with calculated 
closeness to the young man next to her had been observed by me.

It occurred to me that if my date and I went on a rollercoaster, she would screamand cling closely to me, and that sensation, I was sure (even though I had not yet 
experienced it), would be a pleasant one. I therefore suggested the rollercoaster and 
the young woman, with unruffled composure, agreed.

As we were slowly cranked up to the first peak, I remember speculating on the 
possibilities of kissing her while she glued herself to me in helpless terror. I even 
tried to carry out this vile scheme as we topped the rise and started moving 
downwards. 

What stopped me was the agonizing discovery that I was possessed of a virulent case 
(till then unsuspected) of acrophobia, a morbid fear of heights and falling. 

It was I who clung to the young lady (who seemed unaffected by either sensation, 
that of falling or that of being clung to) and I did not enjoy it, either. What I wantedthe young lady to be, with every fibre of my being, was the solid earth.

I survived the voyage, but the impression of macho coolness that I had been tryingto cultivate was irretrievably ruined and, needless to say, I did not get the girl.(Iprobably wouldn't have anyway.)

Of course, you mustn't make this out as worse than it is. It is only my own fallingthat I am averse to and consider to be a bad idea. I don't lose my sleep over otherthings falling. I have never, for instance, worried about the moon falling.2 

As it happens, though, the moon is not falling. The fact is, indeed, quite the reverse, 
which brings me to the topic of this chapter.

In the last chapter I discussed the manner in which the tides sapped the rotational 
energy of the earth, causing the earth's rotation to slow and the day to increase in 
length at the rate of 1 second every 62,500 years.

1 explained that the moon, with a smaller rotational energy than earth, and 
subjected to a stronger tidal influence from the more massive earth than we are 
from the less massive moon, had its day lengthen at a more rapid rate. The 
moon's period of rotation is 27.32 days now, a period that is exactly equal to 
its period of revolution about the earth (relative to the stars).

With the period of its rotation equal to the period of its revolution, the moon faces 
one side always to the earth. One tidal bulge on the moon always faces directly towards 
us and the other directly away from us. The moon does not rotate through the bulges 
and the tidal action has ceased. Therefore, its day is no longer lengthening after the 
fashion of the past. The moon is still subject to a little tidal influence from earth, 
however. The moon's orbit is slightly elliptical. That means that it is closer to the earth 
during one half of its orbit than during the other. While the moon is closer than 
average to the earth, it moves a bit faster than average; while it is farther away, itmoves a bit slower. 

1 Don't feel bad. Gentle Reader. I've made up for it since. 

2 Not that it's such a bad thing to worry about. Newton did, and, one thing leading to another, he ended 
with the theory of universal gravitation. 


On the other hand, its rate of rotation is absolutely steady, regardless of the 
moon's distance from the earth. 

While the moon is in the close half of its orbit, its faster orbital speed outpaces its 
rotational speed and the moon's surface (as viewed from earth) seems to drift veryslowly from east to west. In the far half of its orbit, the slower orbital speed falls 
behind the rotational speed and the moon's surface (again as viewed from earth) seems 
to drift very slowly from west to east.

This slow oscillation of the moon's surface, first in one direction for two weeks and 
then in the other direction for two weeks more, is called 'libration' from the Latin 
word for 'scales'. (The moon seems to be swaying slightly back and forth around an 
equilibrium point, as scales do when a small weight has been placed in one pan or the 
other.) 

Because of libration, the tidal bulge does move slightly and consumes rotational 
energy. This tends to damp the libration very slowly and tends to lock the moon more 
tightly in place. The only way this can happen is for the moon's orbit to become less 
elliptical and more nearly circular. If the moon's orbit were perfectly circular, the rate 
of rotation and of revolution would match precisely and libration would end. 

The fact that the moon does not revolve in the plane of the earth's equator 
introduces an off-centre pull of the earth's equatorial bulge, which again produces atidal influence that can be countered by the moon's slowly shifting into the 
equatorial plane.
These secondary tidal influences I have just described are weaker than the one which 
gradually slows a world's rotation, so that although there has been plenty of time to 
slow the moon's rotation to its period of revolution, there has not yet been time to 
change its orbit into a circular one in the equatorial plane.
Consider Mars' two satellites, though. These were captured, possibly late in Martian 
history. They would surely have been circling Mars, originally, in rather elliptical 
and sharply inclined orbits. They are small bodies, though, with very little rotational 
energy, and Mars' tidal influence has had its way with them. Not only do they face 
one side eternally towards Mars, but they move in circular orbits in Mars' equatorial 
plane. 

But shouldn't earth's rotation become gravitationally locked, eventually, under the 
influence of the moon's tidal effects? 
We know that the earth's period of rotation is slowing. Because the moon has a 
smaller tidal effect on earth than earth has on the moon, and because the earth has 
considerably more rotational energy than the moon ever had, the earth's rate of 
rotation slows at a much more gradual pace than the moon's did.
Still someday, someday, won't earth's rate of rotation slow to the point where it 
equals the moon's revolution about the earth? Won't one side of the earth always face 
the moon, just as one side of the moon always faces the earth today? When that 
happens, the tidal bulge on earth will also be stationary, and neither the earth nor the 
moon 
will be subject to the other's tidal influence, and doesn't that mean there will be no 
further change?
When that happens, the earth might (one would suppose) have a day that was 27.32 
days long and earth and moon would circle each other rather like a dumbbell -all in 
one piece, with the connecting rod being the insubstantial tidal influence.
Well, not quite right. When the dumbbell rotation comes into existence, the period of 
earth's rotation will not then be 27.32 days long.
To see why not, let's consider. 

When rotational energy disappears, it can't really disappear, thanks to the law of 
conservation of energy, but it can (and does) change its form. It becomes heat. The 
loss of rotational energy is so slow that the heat formed is not significant and just 
adds, insensibly, to the heat gained from the sun (which must be, and is, radiated 
away at night).
The earth, as its rotation slows, also loses rotational angular momentum, and this, 
too, can't really disappear -thanks to the law of conservation of angular momentum.
The loss must somehow be made up for by a gain elsewhere.
Angular momentum, without going into the mathematics of it, depends on two 


things: the average speed of rotation about the axis of all parts of the rotating body, 
and the average distance from the axis of all parts of the rotating body. The angular 
momentum goes up or down as the speed increases or decreases, and also goes up or 
down as the distance increases or decreases. 
As the rotational angular momentum goes down through the loss of rotational speed, 
thanks to tidal action, this could be made up for, and the law of conservation of 
angular momentum preserved, if the average distance of all parts of the earth fromthe axis of rotation were to increase. In other words, all would be well if a slowingearth could expand in size -but it can't. The earth is not going to expand against the 
pull of its own gravity.
Where does that leave us? 
Well, the earth and moon circle each other in a monthly revolution so that there is arevolutionary angular momentum, as well as rotational ones for each body. The two 
bodies circle the centre of gravity of tfae earth-moon system.
The location of the centre of gravity depends on something that we would recognize 
as the principle of the seesaw. If two people of equal mass were on opposite ends of 
a seesaw, that seesaw would balance if the fulcrum was under the exact middle of 
the plank. If one person were more massive than the other, the fulcrum would haveto be nearer the more massive person. To be exact, the mass of person A multiplied 
by his or her distance from the fulcrum must be equal to the mass of person B 
multiplied by his or her distance from the fulcrum. If person A is ten times as 
massive as person B, person A must be only one tenth as far from the fulcrum as 
person B.
Imagine earth and moon at opposite edges of a seesaw and with the fulcrum replaced 
by 'centre of gravity'. Earth is 81.3 times as massive as the moon. Therefore, the 
distance from the centre of the earth to the centre of gravity must be 1/81.3 times as 
far as the distance from the centre of the moon to the centre of gravity.
The average distance of the centre of the earth from the centre of the moon is 
484,404 kilometres (238,869 miles). If we take 1/81.3 of that, we get 4728 
kilometres (2938 miles).
This means that the centre of the earth is 4728 kilometres (2938 miles) from the 
centre of gravity, while the centre of the moon is, naturally, 379,676 kilometres 
(235,931 miles) from it. Both moon and earth revolve about the centre of gravityonce each 27.32 days, the moon making a large circle, and the earth a much smaller 
one. 
In fact, the centre of gravity, being only 4728 kilometres (2938 miles) from the 
earth's centre, is closer to the earth's centre than the earth's surface is. The centre of 
gravity of the earth-moon system is located 1650 kilometres (1025 miles) beneath 
the surface of the earth. 
One can therefore say, without too great a lie, that the moon is revolving about the 
earth. It is not, however, revolving about the earth's centre.
If the moon's orbit were an exact circle, the earth's centre would also describe an 
exact circle though one with only 1/81.3 times the diameter. Actually, the moon's 
orbit is slightly elliptical, which means that the distance between moon and earth 
increases and decreases slightly in the course of the month. The position of the 
centre of gravity moves slightly farther and closer to the earth's centre in 
consequence.
At its farthest, the centre of gravity of the earth-moon system is 5001 kilometres 
(3107 miles) from earth's centre; and at its closest, it is 4383 kilometres (2724 miles) 
from the earth's centre. Its position, therefore, varies from 1377 to 1995 kilometres 
(867 to 1240 miles) beneath the surface of the earth.
It is therefore perfectly possible to balance the loss of rotational angular momentumwith an equal gain in revolutionary angular momentum. This will take place if the 
distance of the earth and the moon from the centre of gravity increases.
This is another way of saying that as the tidal influence of the moon very graduallyslows the earth's rotation, it very gradually increases the moon's distance from us. 
So, as I said at the beginning of this essay, the moon is not falling, it is rising.
As the moon recedes from us, its apparent angular diameter decreases. In the far 
past, it was distinctly closer, and, therefore, larger in appearance. In the far future, it 
will be distinctly farther, and, therefore, smaller in appearance.
That means that in the future, total eclipses of the sun will cease being visible from 


the surface of the earth. At the present moment, the moon is already somewhat 
smaller in apparent diameter than the sun is, so that even when the moon is directlyin front of the sun, it tends not to cover it all. A thin rim of the sun laps beyond the 
moon all around and an 'annular eclipse' is formed. That's because the average 
angular diameter of the sun is 0.533° and that of the moon is 0.518°.
If the moon's orbit about the earth were exactly circular and the earth's orbit about 
the sun were exactly circular, that would be it. There would be only annular eclipses 
at best and never any total eclipse.
However, earth's orbit is slightly elliptical so that its distance from the sun varies. 
The sun therefore tends to be a little farther than average during one half of the year 
and a little nearer than average the other half. I've already mentioned that this stage 
is true of the moon in its monthly cycle.
The sun is smallest in appearance when it is farthest and its angular diameter is then 
0.524°. The moon is largest in appearance when it is nearest and its angular diameter 
is then 0.558°. There is therefore the possibility of a total eclipse of the sun, when 
the sun is farther off (and smaller) than usual, or the moon is nearer (and larger) than 
usual, or both. 
As, under tidal influence, the moon recedes, its apparent diameter throughout its 
orbit will decrease, and, if we assume the sun will remain at its present distance in 
the meanwhile (as it will), then the time will come when the moon, even at its 
closest, will have an angular diameter of less than 0.524°. After that, no total eclipse 
will be visible from the earth's surface at any time.
The moon will have to recede from a closest approach of 356,334 kilometres 
(221,426 miles) as at present, to a closest approach of 379,455 kilometres (235,793 
miles) if it is to appear, even at its largest, no larger than the sun at its smallest. The 
moon must recede 23,121 kilometres (14,367 miles) for this to happen.
How long will it take the moon to recede by so much?
At the present moment the moon is receding from us at the rate of 3 centimetres (1.2 
inches) per year, or roughly 2.5 millimetres (0.1 of an inch) each revolution.
At that rate, it will take the moon about 750 million years to recede that far. 
Actually, it should take longer, since as the moon recedes its tidal influence weakens 
and its rate of recession slowly declines. I should suspect it would take closer to abillion years for the recession.
The situation, it appears, would not be so bad. The number of total eclipses per 
century will slowly decline, the number of annular eclipses will slowly increase, and 
the duration of the total eclipses that do occur will gradually shorten, but it will be 
nearly a billion years before the total eclipses cease altogether.
And for that matter, allowing for stronger tidal influences in the past, it may havebeen only 600 million years ago, when the first trilobites were evolving, that annular 
eclipses were impossible. Every time the moon, then slightly larger in appearance 
than it is now, would pass squarely in front of the sun, the eclipse had to be total. 

* * * 

Let's get back now to the slowing rotation of the earth.
As the earth's rotation rate slows, the moon's distance increases and its time of 
revolution about the earth also increases. (In addition, tidal influences will see to it 
that the moon's period of rotation will slow in time with the slowing of its period of 
revolution.)
Thus, by the time that the moon has receded to a distance which will make total 
eclipses impossible, the month will no longer be 27.32 days long relative to the stars,
but will be 29.98 days long. And as the moon continues to recede, the month will 
continue to grow longer.
By the time the earth's period of rotation has lengthened to 27.32 days - the length of 
the present period of revolution of the moon -the then period of revolution will be 
substantially longer, and the earth's rotation will have to continue to slow before the 
dumbbell rotation will be set up.
Is it possible the earth will never catch up? That no matter how slowly it rotates, the 
moon will retreat so far that its period of revolution will always be longer?
No, the earth's rotation will catch up. When the earth's rotation has slowed to the 
point where the day is equal to 47 present days, the moon will have receded so far 


that its period of revolution will also be equal to 47 present days.
At that time, the distance of the moon from the earth will be, on the average, 551,620 
kilometres (342,780 miles) and its apparent angular diameter will be about 0.361°.
Then we will have earth and moon revolving about each other dumbbell fashion, and 
if there were no outside interference, that would continue forever. 
But there is outside interference. There is the sun. 


* * * 

The sun exerts a tidal effect on the earth, as the moon does, but to a different extent. 
The tidal effect on the earth by each of two bodies varies directly with the mass the 
two bodies and inversely as the cube of their distances from the earth. 
The sun's mass is 27 million times that of the moon. However, the sun's distance 
from the earth is 389.17 times the moon's distance from the earth and the cube of 

389.17 is about 58,950,000. If we divide 27,000,000 by 58,950,000 we find that the 
sun's tidal effect on the earth is only about 0.46 that of the moon.
The tidal effect on earth of all bodies other than the sun and the moon is 
insignificant. We can say, then, that the total tide effect on earth is roughly two-
thirds moon-caused and one third sun-caused. 
The lengthening of the day by one second in 62,500 years is the result of the tidal 
effect of moon and sun combined, and it is the combined effect that is balanced bythe recession of the moon. 
Once the earth and moon reach their dumbbell revolution, however, the moon's tidal 
effect virtually vanishes. That leaves the sun's tidal effect alone in the field. Without 
going into details, the sun's tidal influence on earth and moon together is such as to 
speed the rotation of both bodies and balance that increase in rotational angular 
momentum by a decrease in revolutionary angular momentum.
In other words, the moon will begin to spiral closer to the earth. (Then, finally, it will 
be falling.) The moon will come closer and closer to the earth and there is apparentlyno limit on how close it can come -except that it will never actually crash into the 
earth. 
As the moon approaches the earth, the tidal effect of the earth on the moon will 
increase. By the time the centre of the moon approaches to only about 15,000 
kilometres (9600 miles) from the centre of the earth, and the surface of the moon is 
only 7400 kilometres (4600 miles) from the surface of the earth, the moon will be 
revolving about the earth once every 5.3 hours. By then, the earth's tidal effect on the 
nearby moon will be fifteen thousand times as great as it is now, or five hundred 
thousand times the intensity of the moon's present tidal effect upon us. 
Under those conditions, earth's tidal influence will begin to pull the moon apart into 
a number of sizeable fractions. These will collide and fragment and gradually, 
through continuing tidal effects, spread out over the entire orbit of the moon, 
forming a flat, circular ring in the equatorial plane of the earth. 
In short, the earth will acquire a ring, smaller in actual extent than Saturn's but much 
denser in material, and much brighter, since earth's rings will be much closer to the 
sun (despite the fact that the moon rings will be made up of dark rock rather than the 
ice of Saturn's rings). 
Will there be human beings present on earth to watch those beautiful rings? Not 
unless we have long since left earth and are watching from a distance. 
The moon's tidal effect upon earth at the time of its own breakup would be fifteen 
thousand times what it is now. That would not be enough to break up the earth, since 
it would be far less than earth's tidal effect on the moon, and since the earth would be 
held together by a stronger gravitational pull. 
The moon's tidal effect would, however, be strong enough to create tides several 
kilometres high and would send the oceans washing over the continents from one 
end to the other. 
After the moon's breakup, the tidal effect on us, coming, as it would, from all 
directions, would cancel out and disappear, to be sure, but by then, after millions of 
years of enormous tides, the damage would have been •2.one. It's hard to see how 
land life, or perhaps any life, could survive under such conditions. 
That point is, however, academic, since the earth would nave ceased to be habitable 
long before the moon started approaching again. 

Let's go back to the dumbbell rotation, with earth's day 4? present days in length. 
Imagine what it would mean having the sun shine down for some 560 hours between 
rising and setting. It shines for longer than that at one time in the regions of the pole, 
of course, but the sun is then skimming the horizon. Imagine 560 hours between 
sunrise and sunset in the tropics with the sun riding high in the sky. There's no doubt 
that by midafternoon the oceans would be nearly (if not quite) boiling.
That alone would put into serious question the habita-bility of the earth, without our 
having to regard the Antarctic conditions to which the earth would sink in the course 
of a 560-hour-long night. 
The alternation in temperature between prolonged day and prolonged night would 
make it very difficult, if not impossible, for life to maintain a foothold on the planet. 
And yet that point is academic, too, as we will find when we calculate the time it 
would take for the moon to recede to a distance at which its period of revolution 
would be 47 days. It will by that time have receded 167,200 kilometres (104,000 
miles) beyond its present distance. 
If its present rate of recession of three centimetres a year were to continue year after 
year, then it would take something like 55.7 billion years for the moon to recede to 
the poirit where earth and moon were revolving dumbbell fashion. 
The recession will not continue at its present rate, however. As the moon recedes, its 
tidal effect on earth diminishes, earth's rate of rotational slowdown decreases and the 
moon's rate of recession would decrease, too. 
My guess is that it would take at least 70 billion years for the dumbbell situation to 
be achieved. 
And of what significance is such a period of time, when in 7 billion years (just one 
tenth of the time required for reaching the dumbbell situation) the sun will expand 
into a red giant and both earth and moon will be physically destroyed?
In the course of the 7 billion years before the earth is made uninhabitable by the 
heating and expanding sun, the earth's period of rotation will have slowed down onlyto the point where the day would be fifty-five hours long. In fact, allowing for the 
slow decrease in intensity of the moon's tidal effect, I suspect the day would be 
forty-eight hours long, or just twice its present length.
It will then get hotter during the day and colder during the night than it does now, 
and earth won't be as pleasant a place then as it is today; but it will still be habitable, 
if that were all we had to worry about.
But there is the sun, and assuming that humanity survives for 7 billion years, it will 
be the expanding sun that will drive us away from our planet and not the slowingrotation. 


The Elements 



10 


The Useless Metal 


When the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant went wrong, I came to certain 
conclusions and found, as often happens, that I was out of step with the world.

The predominant sentiment seemed to be: 'Aha! Scientists told us it couldn't 
happen, but it did. So much for those smarty-pants scientists. Now let's tear down the 
nuclear age.' 

And yet that's not what really happened. Scientists never said things couldn't gowrong. They said enough safety measures had been taken to make the chance of 
real damage extraordinarily small.

What the antinuclear people said was something like this: 'Wait! An accident will 
take place and hundreds of thousands of people will be killed outright and millions 
will get cancer and thousands of square miles of land will be forever useless.'

So? Three Mile Island seems to have been poorly designed to begin with. People 
in charge seem to have disregarded certain warning signals and to have been 
unnecessarily careless. There were mechanical failures followed by human error. There 
was even theoretical insufficiency since a hydrogen bubble formed that no one had everpredicted.

In other words, it was practically a worst-possible-case kind of accident. What were 
the consequences? 

The power station was put out of action and will stay out of action for a long, longtime, but not one person was killed and there is no clear evidence that anyone was hurt, 
for radiation escape was low. There may be an additional case of cancer or two as aresult and, while I don't want to minimize this, the number of cancer cases will be 
far less than will be caused in the same area by tobacco smoking and automobile 
exhaust. 

It seemed to me, then, that the Three Mile Island incident was a case where 
the scientists' predictions proved correct and those of the antinuclear people 
incorrect. And yet the incident was instantly labelled a 'catastrophe' by the media 
and the antinuclears. What would they have called it, I wonder, if one person 
had been killed? 

In any case, when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked me to write a piece stating myviews on the matter, I wrote a sardonic article for the April 15, 1979, issue. Mypro-nuclear views ran side by side with an antinuclear article by George Wald. 

Two weeks later, I was in Philadelphia and a young woman stopped me and 
said, rather sadly, 'I was sure that you of all people would be on the antinuclear 
side. You're so liberal.' 

That saddened me. I am certainly a liberal, but that doesn't mean I automaticallyplug in to the official liberal viewpoint. I like to think for myself - a prejudice of 
mine of long standing. 

Still, all that brooding on the subject reminded me at last that I have never 
written an F & SF essay on uranium. So here goes: 

To begin at the beginning, there is a mineral called blende, from a Germanword meaning 'to blind' or 'to deceive'. (Many mineralogical terms are German 
because Germany led the world in metallurgy in the Middle Ages.) The reason for 
the use of the word is that blende looks like galena, a lead ore, but it yields no 
lead and therefore it deceives miners. 

Actually, blende is mostly zinc sulphide and it has become an important zinc 
ore. It is now more commonly called sphalerite, from a Greek word meaning'treacherous', which still harps on its deceitful nature. 

There are other varieties of blende, differing among themselves in appearance, 
in one way or another. One is called pitchblende, not because it is in any waypitchy or tarry, but only because it is a glossy black in colour; black as pitch, in 


other words. 

Pitchblende is met up with in conjunction with silver, lead and copper ores in 
Germany and Czechoslovakia. The early mineralogists considered it an ore of 
zinc and iron. 

One place where pitchblende occurs is at the silver mines in St Joachimsthal 
(St Joachim's Valley) in Czechoslovakia, 120 kilometres (70 miles) west of Prague, 
just at the East German border. (The place is now called Jachymov by the Czechs.) 

The spot is of particular interest to Americans because about the year 1500, 
coins were struck that were made out of the silver from the mines there and that 
were therefore called Joachimsthalers, or Thalers for short. Other coins similar in 
size and value were also called that and eventually the name was used, in 1794, bythe infant United States for its unit of currency -which we call 'dollars'. (StJoachim, if you want to know, was, according to legend, the father of the Virgin 
Mary.) 

One person who interested himself in pitchblende was the German chemist 
Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817). In 1789, he obtained a yellowsubstance from pitchblende which he rightly decided was an oxide of a new metal. 

At that time, the tradition of associating the metals and the planets was still 
strong. In one case, the metal quicksilver was so closely associated with the 
planet 

Mercury that it actually received the planetary name as its own, at least in English.

As it happened, eight years earlier, the German-British astronomer William Herschel 
(1738-1822) had discovered a new planet and had named it Uranus, after Ouranos, the 
god of the sky in the Greek myths, and the father of Kronos (Saturn). Klaproth 
decided to name the new metal after the new planet and he named it uranium.

As it turned out, pitchblende is largely a mixture of uranium oxides and it is now 
called uraninite. 

Klaproth then tried to react the yellow uranium oxide (actually uranium trioxide, 
UO3) with charcoal. The carbon atoms of the charcoal, he expected, would combine 
with the oxygen in the uranium trioxide, leaving behind metallic uranium. He did 
obtain a black powder with a metallic lustre and assumed that was uranium metal.
So did everyone else at the time. Actually, the carbon had combined with only one 
oxygen atom from each molecule, leaving behind the blackish uranium dioxide, UO2. 

In 1841, a French chemist, Eugene Peligot (1811-90), realized there was somethingodd about the 'uranium metal'. When he conducted certain chemical reactions, the 
uranium at the beginning and at the end didn't add up correctly. Apparently, he was 
counting in some non-uranium atoms as uranium. He grew suspicious that what he 
considered uranium metal was really an oxide and contained oxygen atoms in addition 
to uranium. 

He therefore decided to prepare uranium metal by a different procedure. He started 
with uranium tetrachloride (UC14) and tried to tear the chlorine atoms away by using 
something a good deal more active than charcoal. He used metallic potassium, not at 
all a comfortable substance to deal with, but the cautious Peligot performed theexperiment carefully enough to suffer no harm. 

The chlorine atoms were successfully removed, all of them, and left behind was a 
black powder with properties quite different from those of Klaproth's black powder. 
This time, the powder was the metal itself. Peligot was the first to isolate uranium -a 
half century after it had been thought to have been isolated. 

No one cared much about this, however, except a few chemists. Uranium was athoroughly useless metal and no one, except for those few chemists, ever thought of it or 
even heard of it. 

In the early nineteenth century, it came to be accepted that the various elements 
were made up of atoms, and that those atoms had characteristic differences in mass. 
By following the events in various chemical reactions it was possible to judge the 
relative masses of the different kinds of atoms ('atomic weights'), but it was also 
possible to make mistakes.

Counting the mass of the hydrogen atom (the lightest one) as 1, the atomic weight 
of uranium was taken to be about 116 around the middle of the nineteenth century.
This meant that uranium atoms were fairly massive, but by no means unusually so. 
Uranium atoms, it was thought, were a little more massive than silver atoms and a 


little less massive than tin atoms. 
The most massive atoms were, at that time, thought to be those of bismuth, the 
atomic weight of which was 209. The bismuth atom, in other words, was thought to be 

1.8 times as massive as the uranium atom. 
In 1869, however, the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) 
was working out the periodic table. He was arranging the elements in the order of their 
atomic weight and in a system of rows and columns that divided them into natural 
families, with all members of a given family showing similar properties. 

In some cases, Mendeleev came across an element that didn't fit this neat 
family arrangement. Rather than assume his whole notion was wrong, he 
wondered if the atomic weights might in those cases be mistaken. For instance, 
uranium's properties didn't fit if it were pushed into the atomic-weight-116 slot. Ifits atomic weight were doubled, it did fit. 

Starting from this new slant, it was easy to reinterpret the experimental findings 
and show that it actually did make more sense to suppose the atomic weight of 
uranium to be in the neighbourhood of 240 (the best current figure is 238.03). 

This was about 1871, and for the first time the useless metal uranium gained an 
interesting distinction. It had a higher atomic weight than any other known 
element. Its atoms were 1.14 times as massive as those of bismuth. 

For over a century now, it has retained that distinction, in a way. To be sure, 
atoms more massive than those of uranium have been dealt with, but they were all 
formed in the laboratory and they don't survive for long -certainly not for 
geological periods. 

We can put it this way. Of all the atoms present in the earth's crust at the time of 
its formation, the most massive that are still to be found in the earth's crust today in 
more than vanishing traces are those of uranium. What's more, they are the most 
massive that can exist (though, of course, this was not understood in 1871). 

The position of uranium at the end of the list of elements was interesting -to 
chemists. To the world generally, it remained a useless metal and of no account. 

So things stood till 1896. 

The year before that, Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen (1845-1923) had 
discovered X rays and had suddenly become world-famous. X rays became the 
hottest thing in science and every scientist wanted to investigate the new 
phenomenon. 

Roentgen's X rays had issued from a cathode-ray tube, and the cathode rays 
(streams of speeding electrons, it was soon discovered) produced fluorescent spots 
on the glass, and it was from those spots that the X rays were given off. 
Furthermore, the X rays were detected by the fact that they induced fluorescence 
in certain chemicals. Therefore, there might be some connection between X rays 
and fluorescence generally. 

(Fluorescence, by the way, takes place when atoms are excited in some way and 
are raised to a higher energy level. When the atoms fall back to normal the energyis given off as visible light. Sometimes the fall to normal takes time and visible 
light is given off even when the exciting phenomenon is removed. The light is then 
called phosphorescence.) 

As it happened, a French physicist, Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908), was 
particularly interested in fluorescent substances, as his father had been before him.
It occurred to him that fluorescent substances might be emitting X rays along with 
visible light. It seemed to him to be worth checking the matter. 

To do that, he planned to make use of photographic plates, well wrapped in 
black coverings. Light could not get through the coverings and even exposure to 
sunlight would not succeed in fogging the plates. He would put the fluorescent 
substance on the covered plate and if the fluorescence was ordinary light only, the 
plate still would not be fogged. If, however, the fluorescence contained X rays, 
which had the property of passing through a reasonable thickness of matter, theywould pass through the covering and fog the photographic plate. 

Becquerel tried this on a number of different fluorescent substances with 
negative results; that is, the photographic plates remained resolutely unfogged. 


One fluorescent substance, in which Becquerel's father had been particularlyinterested, was potassium uranyl sulphate, a substance made up of complex 
molecules that contained one uranium atom in each molecule. 

That alone, of the fluorescent substances Becquerel tried, seemed to give apositive result. After some exposure to the sun, the photographic plate, on 
development, showed some fogging. Becquerel's heart beat faster and his hopes 
climbed. He hadn't had a chance to do much exposing because it had been a largelycloudy day, but as soon as the weather cleared, he planned to do a better job, 
give it a good slug of exposure and check the matter beyond all doubt. 

Of course you know what had to happen. Paris settled down for a long siege of 
wet weather and there was no sunlight. Becquerel had obtained new 
photographic plates, well wrapped, and he had no chance to use them. So he put 
them in the drawer, put the potassium uranyl sulphate in the drawer with themand waited for the sun. 

As the days passed and the clouds persisted, Becquerel got so upset that he 
decided he had to do something. He might as well develop the new plates and see if 
he had had some lingering phosphorescence that included X rays. He developed the 
plates and was stupefied. They were tremendously fogged, almost as though he 
had exposed them uncovered, to sunlight. 

Whatever was coming out of the potassium uranyl sulphate, it could pass 
through black paper and it didn't require prior excitation by the sun. In fact, it 
didn't require fluorescence, for samples of potassium uranyl sulphate that had 
been on reagent shelves away from sunlight for indefinite periods also fogged 
the plates. What's more, uranium compounds that were not fluorescent at all 
also fogged the plates. What was still more, the amount of fogging depended on 
the amount of uranium present and not on that of any of the other atoms. 

It was uranium, and uranium specifically, that gave rise to these X-raylike 
radiations. 

Almost at once, a brilliant Polish-French chemist, Marie Sklodowska Curie 
(1867-1934), began to study the phenomenon, and she termed it 'radioactivity'. 
Uranium, in other words, was radioactive. Curie discovered that another element, 
thorium, with atoms nearly as massive as those of uranium (the atomic weight of 
thorium is 232) was also radioactive. 

The fact of radioactivity was glamorous. Nothing like that had ever been detected 
before. 

The implications were even more important than the fact itself.

Radioactive atoms were giving off some radiations that were like X rays but were 
even more penetrating. These were 'gamma rays'. 

But radioactive atoms were also giving off something else, streams of particles 
that were much smaller than any atoms. This was the final proof of something that 
was just coming to be suspected; that atoms were not the ultimate particles of 
matter they had been taken to be since they were first proposed in 1803 (and, in 
fact, since they had first been conceived by the ancient Greeks twenty two 
centuries earlier). Atoms were made up of still smaller 'subatomic particles'. 

When a uranium atom or a thorium atom gave off. a subatomic particle, that 
changed its structure and made of it an atom of a new element. It was, after all, 
possible to transmute one element into another, as the old alchemists had thought, 
but under far different conditions from any that the alchemists could have 
imagined. 

Yet when uranium minerals were tested for radioactivity, it was found that the 
radioactivity detected was far higher than could be accounted for by the uranium 
present.

What's more, if uranium compounds were separated from the minerals and 
refined to a high degree of purity, the radioactivity of those uranium compounds 
was found to be low - about as low as it ought to be. 

That meant that present in the uranium minerals were substances that weremore radioactive than uranium -much more radioactive. But how could that be? If 
those substances were that radioactive, they should have broken down long ago and 
be all gone. What were they doing in the minerals? 


What's more, it turned out that the pure uranium compound, freshly isolated 
from the minerals and hardly radioactive at all, grew steadily more radioactive as 
it stood. 

What was happening was that the uranium (atomic number 92) wasn't beingconverted to lead (atomic number 82) in one fell swoop. Instead, the uraniumwas converted through a series of steps to lead, by way of a whole series of 
elements of intermediate atomic number. It was these intermediate elements that 
were more radioactive than uranium and they would break down and vanish if 
fresh supplies weren't formed continually from the further breakdown of uranium. 

Of course, if an element is formed very slowly and breaks down very rapidly, 
there is very little of it present at any one time. Under ordinary circumstances 
there would be far too little of it present to be detectable or isolable. 

The circumstances are not ordinary. The intermediate elements are giving off 
radiation that makes it possible to detect even infrasmall quantities. 

Curie and her husband, Pierre (1859-1906), set about isolating some of these 
radioactive intermediates. They subjected pitchblende to chemical reactions that 
would separate the different elements present, and always followed the trail of the 
radioactivity. Whenever the reaction succeeded in producing a solution or a 
precipitate in which the radioactive radiation seemed to be concentrated, theyworked on that solution or that precipitate. 

Step by step, they worked their material down to smaller and smaller quantities of 
more and more richly radioactive material. In July 1898 they isolated a few pinches of 
powder containing a new element hundreds of times as radioactive as uranium. This 
they called polonium after Curie's native land, and its atomic number is 84. 

Working on, they detected, in December 1898, a still more radioactive substance 
with an atomic number that eventually proved to be 88. They named it radiumbecause of the overwhelming strength of its radioactivity. Its half-life is 1622 years 
and it is 3 million times as radioactive as uranium and 8.7 million times as 
radioactive as thorium. 

The Curies had so small a quantity of radium to begin with that they could 
detect its presence only by the radiations. That was enough, in theory, but theywanted an actual quantity that they could weigh and show in the time-honoured 
way of establishing the existence of a new element.

For that they had to start with tons of waste slag from the mines at St 
Joachimsthal. The mine owners were delighted to let the crazy chemists have all 
they wanted, provided those chemists paid the shipping costs. The Curies got 
eight tons. 

By 1902, they had succeeded in producing a tenth of a gram of radium after 
several thousand steps of purification, and eventually they obtained a full gram. 

Radium stole the show. For forty years, when one mentioned radioactivity, 
one thought of radium. It was the wonder substance par excellence, and people or 
institutions who could gain a tiny quantity to experiment with felt themselves fortunate 
indeed. 

As for uranium, it instantly dropped back out of the limelight once more. It was onlythe dull parent substance, interesting (if at all) only for the sake of its glamorousdaughter. 

And yet who hears of radium today? Who cares about it? It is utterly uninterestingand it is uranium that is the wonder of the world. 

The ugly duckling had become a vulture. 

I'll explain in the next chapter. 


11 


Neutrality! 


The science fiction writer Lester del Rey is, like myself, a member of a small group 
called the Trap-Door Spiders. Once a month we attend a dinner, and the usual routine 
is that I get a taxi near my place, direct the driver to Lester's place, pick him up and 
then go to the dinner.

Usually, Lester is waiting in front of the door of his apartment house. This time, 
however, I was a little early and he had not yet come down.
That didn't bother me. I just called to the doorman, "Sir, please ring Lester del 
Rey and tell him his taxi awaits.' 
At this, the taxi driver, who till then had confined himself to an occasional wheeze, 
sat up excitedly and cried out, 'Lester del Rey? You know Lester del Rey?' 

'He's a friend of mine,' I said, with quiet pride.

I listen to him all the time on the late-night shows!' said the driver, in clear awe. 
(Lester has been a frequent guest on such shows since there are few people who can 
sound so authoritative on so vast a number of subjects, and still fewer who hesitate 
less to do so.)

'Well, there he is,' I said. 
As Lester approached the cab, the driver said to me gruffly, 'Move to the other side 
of the seat, you. I want to be able to talk to Mr del Rey.' 

I moved. Lester took his seat. The driver fawned all over him and Lester accepted 
it with a visible expansion of his cephalic diameter. They talked briskly the entire trip 
and Lester did not bother to introduce me. 

Nor did I try to introduce myself. This was not out of any sudden attack of 
diffidence or modesty, you understand. It was just that, being a morning person, I amnever on late-night shows, and so I was quite certain that the driver had never heard 
of me. I didn't want to contribute further to Lester's cranial swelling by demonstratingthat fact. 

Besides, thought I, it's not always the glamour of the moment that counts. Look at 
radium. 

In the last chapter, you will remember, I had reached the point where radium had 
become a superstar among elements, with uranium all but ignored except as its dull 
progenitor. But, of course, conditions didn't remain so.

The discovery of radioactivity and of the streams of subatomic particles given off byradioactive elements had led to an understanding of the structure of the atom.

Through the work of the New Zealand-born Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), it 
became clear by 1911 that almost all the mass of the atom was concentrated in a 
nucleus at the centre. The nucleus was only 1/100,000 the diameter of the atom itself. 
What made up the vast bulk of the atom was a cloud of low-mass electrons.

The nature of the atom could be altered if the nucleus were banged about with 
sufficient energy to alter its structure. This was not likely under ordinarycircumstances, however. At everyday temperatures, atoms striking each other do so 
with energy far, far less than is required to break through the electronic barriers and to 
allow one nucleus to strike another. 

Radioactive atoms, however, give off subatomic particles no larger than electrons or 
nuclei in size, and these could slip through the electron barrier and into the depths of 
the atom. This is especially true of the 'alpha particles', which are as massive as heliumatoms (indeed, it eventually turned out that they were naked helium nuclei). If thealpha particle just happened to be aimed correctly, it would penetrate an atom and 
strike its nucleus. In doing so, it might rearrange the nuclear structure and change 


its identity. This would be a 'nuclear reaction'. 

The first deliberate nuclear reaction induced in this way came in 1919. It was 
carried through by Rutherford, who managed to transform nitrogen atoms into 
oxygen atoms. Rutherford proceeded to bombard atoms of many different 
varieties with alpha particles in order to induce further nuclear reactions and, in 
the process, learn more about nuclear structure and the fundamental properties of 
matter. 

There was a catch, though. Alpha particles were charged with positive 
electricity and so were atomic nuclei. Similar electric charges repel each other so 
that, as an alpha particle approached a nucleus, the particle was repelled, lost 
velocity and energy and became less capable of inducing a nuclear reaction. 

The more massive the atomic nucleus, the greater its positive charge and the 
greater its repelling effect. For nuclei more massive than that of potassium 
(with a nucleus carrying a charge of +19) no alpha particle found in nature 
possessed enough energy even to strike the nucleus, let alone rearrange it. 

One alternative was to use protons as subatomic missiles. Since protons are 
hydrogen nuclei, they are easy to obtain. They have an electric charge of +1, onlyhalf that of the alpha particle, so that the protons are repelled less intensely and, 
all things being equal, can more easily strike a nucleus. 

All things are not equal, however. A proton has only one fourth the mass of analpha particle and can disturb the nucleus correspondingly less. 

But then, beginning in 1929, devices were developed that accelerated charged 
particles, particularly protons, and imparted to them far more energy than was 
found naturally in connection with radioactive atoms. The most successful deviceof this sort was the cyclotron, invented by the American physicist Ernest Orlando 
Lawrence (1901-58) in 1931. After that, the art of bringing about nuclear reactions 
by bombardment with subatomic particles went into high gear. 

It was clear that nuclear reactions produced far more energy per mass of 
reacting materials than chemical reactions did. (Chemical reactions involve onlythe outer electron cloud of the atoms.) It didn't seem likely, however, that such 
nuclear energy could be tapped by human beings. Unfortunately, atomic nuclei are 
so incredibly tiny and make up so minute a portion of the atomic volume that 
most subatomic particles, fired at random (as they had to be), missed the nuclei. 
This meant that the energy expended on accelerating the particles was far greater 
than the nuclear energy produced by the vanishingly small percentage of those 
particles that scored direct hits on the nuclei. 

But science doesn't stand still. In 1930, evidence was obtained to the effect that 
when beryllium atoms were exposed to alpha rays, something -call it N emerged 
which could induce nuclear reactions. It was just as though N were astream of subatomic particles. 

The trouble was, though, that all the devices that served to detect subatomic 
particles detected nothing at all in the case of N.

This might not be a mystery. What such devices detected whenever they reacted 
to the presence of subatomic particles were not the particles themselves but the 
electric charges on the particles. 

In 1932, the English physicist James Chadwick (1891-1974) pointed out that 
N could be explained easily if one were to suppose that it consisted of a stream of 
particles that were as massive as protons but that lacked any electric charge at all. 
They were electrically neutral and therefore could be called neutrons.

If Chadwick were right, it would be the first known occurrence of neutrality on the 
subatomic level, but physicists seized upon the explanation eagerly. Not only did it 
explain N neatly and elegantly, but it also supplied a particle that had already been 
suggested as the only way of accounting for certain nuclear properties that until then 
had been puzzling physicists.

It became clear almost at once that atomic nuclei (all except that of the simplest 
hydrogen isotope, which was a simple proton) were made up of combinations of 
protons and neutrons and that it was by changing the nature of the combination through 
bombardment by subatomic particles that nuclear reactions were brought about.

Once neutrons were recognized and once methods for producing them were 
discovered, it was quickly understood that they offered a new and particularly excitingbombardment device. 


Since neutrons were uncharged, they were not repelled by the positively charged 
atomic nuclei. If they happened to be aimed correctly, there was no repelling force to 
swerve them away or turn them back. The neutrons just moved on remorselessly and 
struck the nuclei. 

The percentage of hits was therefore increased considerably if one used neutrons 
rather than protons or alpha particles. Even so, however, the percentage would remain 
extremely small so that the chance of getting out more energy than one was putting in 
still seemed out of the question.

The disadvantage of the situation was that there was no good way of 
accelerating neutrons. Electrically charged subatomic particles were accelerated by a 
properly manipulated electromagnetic field. The field acted upon the electric charge, 
which served as a 'handle' for the particle. The uncharged neutron had no handle, so 
that if it were emitted from nuclei with a certain amount of energy, that was all the 
energy it could have. You could give it no more. 

Since, as it seemed, the less energy a subatomic particle had, the less effective it 
would be in inducing a nuclear reaction, the advantage of the neutron's neutralityseemed to be balanced, and perhaps more than balanced, by the disadvantage. 

Neutrons as produced were, of course, capable of inducing nuclear reactions. This 
was demonstrated in 1932, the very year of the neutron's discovery by, among others, 
the American chemist William Draper Harkins (1873-1951). Fairly energetic neutrons 
were used in these cases. 

In 1934, however, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-54) found that neutrons 
lost energy if they passed through materials made up of light atoms, such as water or 
paraffin.

What happened was this. If a neutron hits a massive atom, that neutron might be 
absorbed and induce a nuclear reaction; but it might also simply bounce. The 
massive atom is so massive that it hardly moves under the impact and the neutron 
bounces back at its original speed of approach -like a ball bouncing back from a wall. 
The neutron, in this way, keeps all its energy.

If a neutron, however, hits a relatively light nucleus and bounces, the light nucleus 
recoils somewhat and takes up some of the momentum so that the neutron bounces 
back with less speed and energy than it had approached. After several bounces of this 
sort, the neutron ends up with no more energy than ordinary atoms would have at that 
temperature. It would move very slowly indeed for a subatomic particle and it is 
then referred to as a 'slow neutron'. 

One would suppose that slow neutrons, possessing virtually no energy, would be 
useless as far as inducing nuclear reactions was concerned, but this is not so. 

Fermi made the crucial discovery that slow neutrons are more effective in inducingnuclear reactions than fast neutrons are. What happens is this:1 Although electric 
repulsion (or attraction) is not a factor in the case of the uncharged neutrons, there are 
certain nuclear forces that actually attract a neutron if they get close enough to anucleus, and would do so much more strongly than an electric charge would.

However, whereas an electric charge can make itself felt at a considerable 
distance, the nuclear attraction falls off so rapidly with distance that it will make itself 
felt only in the immediate neighbourhood of a nucleus. Since a slow neutron is 
bound to remain near a nucleus longer than a fast one would, the slow neutron 
would have a greater chance of being sucked into the nucleus and of inducing a 
nuclear reaction. 

Fermi began to use slow neutrons for bombardment and found that in many cases 
what happened was that the neutron was absorbed and added to the strange. But I figured it was the stress and the grief. He was such an important man, such a leading figure in the community."
"Cold," Joshua said. "He was an extremely cold and self-contained man. Vicious in business. Winning a battle with a competitor wasn't always enough for him; if at all possible, he preferred to utterly destroy the other fellow. I've always thought he was capable of cruelty and physical violence. But attempted rape? Attempted murder?"
Tannerton looked at Joshua and said, "Mr. Rhinehart, I've often heard it said that you don't mince words. You've got a reputation, a much admired reputation, for saying exactly what you think and to hell with the cost. But...."
"But what?"
"But when you're speaking of the dead, don't you think you ought to--"
Joshua smiled. "Son, I'm a cantankerous old bastard and not entirely admirable. Far from it! As long as truth is my weapon, I don't mind hurting the feelings of the living. Why, I've made children cry, and I've made kindly gray-haired grandmothers weep. I have little compassion for fools and sons of bitches when they're alive. So why should I show more respect than that for the dead?"
"I'm just not accustomed to--"
"Of course, you're not. Your profession requires you to speak well of the deceased, regardless of who he might have been and what heinous things he might have done. I don't hold that against you. It's your job."
Tannerton couldn't think of anything to say. He closed the lid of the coffin.
"Let's settle on the arrangements," Joshua said. "I'd like to get home and have my dinner--if I have any appetite left when I leave here." He sat down on a high stool beside a glass-fronted cabinet that contained more tools of the mortician's trade.
Tannerton paced in front of him, a freckled, mop-haired bundle of energy. "How important is it to you to have the usual viewing?"
"Usual viewing?"
"An open casket. Would you find it offensive if we avoided that?"
"I hadn't really given it a thought," Joshua said.
"To be honest with you, I don't know how ... presentable the deceased can be made to look," Tannerton said. "The people at Angels' Hill didn't give him quite a full enough look when they embalmed him. His face appears to be somewhat drawn and shrunken. I am not pleased. I am definitely not pleased. I could attempt to pump him up a bit, but patchwork like that seldom looks good. As for cosmetology ... well ... again, I wonder if too much time has passed. I mean, he apparently was in the hot sun for a couple of hours after he died, before he was found. And then it was eighteen hours in cold storage before the embalming was done. I can certainly make him look a great deal better than he does now. But as for bringing the glow of life back to his face.... You see, after all that he's been through, after the extremes of temperature, and after this much time, the skin texture has changed substantially; it won't take makeup and powder at all well. I think perhaps--"
Beginning to get queasy, Joshua interrupted. "Make it a closed casket."
"No viewing?"
"No viewing."
"You're sure?"
"Positive."
"Good. Let me see.... Will you want him buried in one of his suits?"
"Is it necessary, considering the casket won't be open?"
"It would be easier for me if I just tucked him into one of our burial gowns."
"That'll be fine."
"White or a nice dark blue?"
"Do you have something in polka dots?"
"Polka dots?"
"Or orange and yellow stripes?"
Tannerton's ever-ready grin slipped from beneath his dour funeral director expression, and he struggled to force it out of sight again. Joshua suspected that, privately, Avril was a fun-loving man, the kind of hail-fellow-well-met who would make a good drinking buddy; but he seemed to feel that his public image required him to be somber and humorless at all times. He was visibly upset when he slipped up and allowed the private Avril to appear when only the public man ought to be seen. He was, Joshua thought, a likely candidate for an eventual schizophrenic breakdown.
"Make it the white gown," Joshua said.
"What about the casket? What style would--"
"I'll leave that to you."
"Very well. Price range?"
"Might as well have the best. The estate can afford it."
"The rumor is he must have been worth two or three million."
"Probably twice that," Joshua said.
"But he really didn't live like it."
"Or die like it," Joshua said.
Tannerton thought about that for a moment, then said, "Any religious services?"
"He didn't attend church."
"Then shall I assume the minister's role?"
"If you wish."
"We'll have a short graveside service," Tannerton said. "I'll read something from the Bible, or perhaps just a simple inspirational piece, something nondenominational."
They agreed on a time for burial: Sunday at two o'clock in the afternoon. Bruno would be laid to rest beside Katherine, his adoptive mother, in the Napa County Memorial Park.
As Joshua got up to leave, Tannerton said, "I certainly hope you've found my services valuable thus far, and I assure you I'll do everything in my power to make the rest of this go smoothly."
"Well," Joshua said, "you've convinced me of one thing. I'm going to draw up a new will tomorrow. When my times comes, I sure as hell intend to be cremated."
Tannerton nodded. "We can handle that for you."
"Don't rush me, son. Don't rush me."
Tannerton blushed. "Oh, I didn't mean to--"
"I know, I know. Relax."
Tannerton cleared his throat uncomfortably. "I'll... uh ... show you to the door."
"No need. I can find it myself."
Outside, behind the funeral home, the night was very dark and deep. There was only one light, a hundred-watt bulb above the rear door. The glow reached only a few feet into the velveteen blackness.
In the late afternoon, a breeze had sprung up, and with the coming of the night, it had grown into a gusty wind. The air was turbulent and chilly; it hissed and moaned.
Joshua walked to his car, which lay beyond the meager semicircle of frosty light, and as he opened the door he had the peculiar feeling he was being watched. He glanced back at the house, but there were no faces at the windows.
Something moved in the gloom. Thirty feet away. Near the three-car garage. Joshua sensed rather than saw it. He squinted, but his vision was not what it had once been; he couldn't discern anything unnatural in the night.
Just the wind, he thought. Just the wind stirring through the trees and bushes or pushing along a discarded newspaper, a piece of dry brush.
But then it moved again. He saw it this time. It was crouched in front of a row of shrubs leading out from the garage. He could not see any detail. It was just a shadow, a lighter purple-black smudge on the blue-black cloth of the night, as soft and lumpy and undefined as all the other shadows--except that this one moved.
Just a dog, Joshua thought. A stray dog. Or maybe a kid up to some mischief.
"Is someone there?"
No reply.
He took a few steps away from his car.
The shadow-thing scurried back ten or twelve feet, along the line of shrubbery. It stopped in an especially deep pool of darkness, still crouching, still watchful.
Not a dog, Joshua thought. Too damned big for a dog. Some kid. Probably up to no good. Some kid with vandalism on his mind.
"Who's there?"
Silence.
"Come on now."
No answer. Just the whispering wind.
Joshua started toward the shadow among shadows, but he was suddenly arrested by the instinctive knowledge that the thing was dangerous. Horrendously dangerous. Deadly. He experienced all of the involuntary animal reactions to such a threat: a shiver up his spine; his scalp seemed to crawl and then tighten; his heart began to pound; his mouth went dry; his hands curled into claws; and his hearing seemed more acute than it had been a minute ago. Joshua hunched over and drew up his bulky shoulders, unconsciously seeking a defensive posture.
"Who's there?" he repeated.
The shadow-thing turned and crashed through the shrubs. It ran off across the vineyards that bordered Avril Tannerton's property. For a few seconds, Joshua could hear the steadily diminishing clamor of its flight, the receding thud-thud-thud of heavy running footsteps and the fading wheeze as it gasped for breath. Then the wind was the only sound in the night.
Looking over his shoulder a couple of times, he returned to his car. He got in, closed the door, locked it.
Already, the encounter began to seem unreal, increasingly dreamlike. Was there actually someone in the darkness, waiting, watching? Had there been something dangerous out there, or had it been his imagination? After spending half an hour in Avril Tannerton's ghoulish workshop, a man could be expected to jump at strange noises and start looking for monstrous creatures in the shadows. As Joshua's muscles relaxed, as his heart slowed, he began to think he had been a fool. The threat he had sensed so strongly seemed, in retrospect, to be a phantom, a vagary of the night and wind.
At worst, it had been a kid. A vandal.
He started the car and drove home, surprised and amused by the effect Tannerton's workroom had had upon him.

***

Saturday evening, promptly at seven o'clock, Anthony Clemenza arrived at Hilary's Westwood house in a blue Jeep station wagon.
Hilary went out to meet him. She was wearing a sleek emerald-green silk dress with long tight sleeves and a neckline cut low enough to be enticing but not cheap. She hadn't been on a date in more than fourteen months, and she nearly had forgotten how to dress for the ritual of courtship; she had spent two hours choosing her outfit, as indecisive as a schoolgirl. She accepted Tony's invitation because he was the most interesting man she'd met in a couple of years--and also because she was trying her best to overcome her tendency to hide from the rest of the world. She had been stung by Wally Topelis's assessment of her; he had warned her that she was using the virtue of self-reliance as an excuse to hide from people, and she had recognized the truth in what he'd said.
She avoided making friends and finding lovers, for she was afraid of the pain that only friends and lovers could inflict with their rejections and betrayals. But at the same time that she was protecting herself from the pain, she was denying herself the pleasure of good relationships with good people who would not betray her. Growing up with her drunken violent parents, she had learned that displays of affection were usually followed by sudden outbursts of rage and anger and unexpected punishment.
She was never afraid to take chances in her work and in business matters; now it was time to bring the same spirit of adventure to her personal life. As she walked briskly toward the blue Jeep, swinging her hips a little, she felt tense about taking the emotional risks that the mating dance entailed, but she also felt fresh and feminine and considerably happier than she had in a long time.
Tony hurried around to the passenger's side and opened the door. Bending low, he said, "The royal carriage awaits."
"Oh, there must be some mistake. I'm not the queen."
"You look like a queen to me."
"I'm just a lowly serving girl."
"You're a great deal prettier than the queen."
"Better not let her hear you say that. She'll have your head for sure."
"Too late."
"Oh?"
"I've already lost my head over you."
Hilary groaned.
"Too saccharine?" he asked.
"I need a bite of lemon after that one."
"But you liked it."
"Yes, I admit I did. I guess I'm a sucker for flattery," she said, getting into the Jeep in a swirl of green silk.
As they drove down toward Westwood Boulevard, Tony said, "You're not offended?"
"By what?"
"By this buggy?"
"How could I be offended by a Jeep? Does it talk? Is it liable to insult me?"
"It's not a Mercedes."
"A Mercedes isn't a Rolls. And a Rolls isn't a Toyota."
"There's something very Zen about that."
"If you think I'm a snob, why'd you ask me out?"
"I don't think you're a snob," he said. "But Frank says we'll be awkward with each other because you've got more money than I have."
"Well, based on my experience with him, I'd say Frank's judgments of other people are not to be trusted."
"He has his problems," Tony agreed as he turned left onto Wilshire Boulevard. "But he's working them out."
"I will admit this isn't a car you see many of in L.A."
"Usually, women ask me if it's my second car."
"I don't really care if it is or isn't."
"They say that in L.A. you are what you drive."
"Is that what they say? Then you're a Jeep. And I'm a Mercedes. We're cars, not people. We should be going to the garage for an oil change, not to a restaurant for dinner. Does that make sense?"
"No sense at all," Tony said. "Actually, I got a Jeep because I like to go skiing three or four weekends every winter. With this jalopy, I know I'll always be able to get through the mountain passes, no matter how bad the weather gets."
"I've always wanted to learn to ski."
"I'll teach you. You'll have to wait a few weeks. But it won't be long until there's snow at Mammoth."
"You seem pretty sure we'll still be friends a few weeks from now."
"Why wouldn't we be?" he asked.
"Maybe we'll get into a fight tonight, first thing, at the restaurant."
"Over what?"
"Politics."
"I think all politicians are power-hungry bastards too incompetent to tie their own shoelaces."
"So do I"
"I'm a Libertarian."
"So am I--sort of."
"Short argument."
"Maybe we'll fight over religion."
"I was raised a Catholic. But I'm not much of anything any more."
"Me either."
"We don't seem to be good at arguing."
"Well," she said, "maybe we're the kind of people who fight over little things, inconsequential matters."
"Such as?"
"Well, since we're going to an Italian restaurant, maybe you'll love the garlic bread, and I'll hate it."
"And we'll fight over that?"
"That or the fettucini or the manicotti."
"No. Where we're going, you'll love everything," he said. "Wait and see."
He took her to Savatino's Ristorante on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was an intimate place, seating no more than sixty and somehow appearing to seat only half that number; it was cozy, comfortable, the kind of restaurant in which you could lose track of time and spend six hours over dinner if the waiters didn't nudge you along. The lighting was soft and warm. The recorded opera--leaning heavily to the voices of Gigli and Caruso and Pavarotti--was played loud enough to be heard and appreciated, but not so loud that it intruded on conversation. There was a bit too much decor, but one part of it, a spectacular mural, was, Hilary thought, absolutely wonderful. The painting covered an entire wall and was a depiction of the most commonly perceived joys of the Italian lifestyle: grapes, wine, pasta, dark-eyed women, darkly handsome men, a loving and rotund nonna, a group of people dancing to the music of an accordionist, a picnic under olive trees, and much more. Hilary had never seen anything remotely like it, for it was neither entirely realistic nor stylized nor abstract nor impressionistic, but an odd stepchild of surrealism, as if it were a wildly inventive collaboration between Andrew Wyeth and Salvador Dali.
Michael Savatino, the owner, who turned out to be an ex-policeman, was irrepressibly jolly, hugging Tony, taking Hilary's hand and kissing it, punching Tony lightly in the belly and recommending pasta to fatten him up, insisting they come into the kitchen to see the new cappuccino machine. As they came out of the kitchen, Michael's wife, a striking blonde named Paula, arrived, and there was more hugging and kissing and complimenting. At last, Michael linked arms with Hilary and escorted her and Tony to a corner booth. He told the captain to bring two bottles of Biondi-Santi's Brunello di Montelcino, waited for the wine, and uncorked it himself. After glasses had been filled and toasts made, he left them, winking at Tony to show his approval, seeing Hilary notice the wink, laughing at himself, winking at her.
"He seems like such a nice man," she said when Michael had gone.
"He's some guy," Tony said.
"You like him a great deal."
"I love him. He was a perfect partner when we worked homicide together."
They fell smoothly into a discussion of policework and then screenwriting. He was so easy to talk to that Hilary felt she had known him for years. There was absolutely none of the awkwardness that usually marred a first date.
At one point, he noticed her looking at the wall mural. "Do you like the painting?" he asked.
"It's superb."
"Is it?"
"Don't you agree?"
"It's pretty good," he said.
"Better than pretty good. Who did it? Do you know?"
"Some artist down on his luck," Tony said. "He painted it in exchange for fifty free dinners."
"Only fifty? Michael got a bargain."
They talked about films and books and music and theater. The food was nearly as good as the conversation. The appetizer was light; it consisted of two stubby crčpes, one filled with unadulterated ricotta cheese, the other with a spicy concoction of shaved beef, onions, peppers, mushrooms, and garlic. Their salads were huge and crisp, smothered in sliced raw mushrooms. Tony selected the entrée, Veal Savatino, a specialita of the house, incredibly tender white-white veal with a thin brown sauce, pearl onions, and grilled strips of zucchini. The cappuccino was excellent.
When she finished dinner and looked at her watch, Hilary was amazed to see that it was ten minutes past eleven.
Michael Savatino stopped by the table to bask in their praise, and then he said to Tony, "That's number twenty-one."
"Oh, no. Twenty-three."
"Not by my records."
"Your records are wrong."
"Twenty-one," Michael insisted.
"Twenty-three," Tony said. "And it ought to be numbers twenty-three and twenty-four. It was two meals, after all."
"No, no," Michael said. "We count by the visit, not by the number of meals."
Perplexed, Hilary said, "Am I losing my mind, or does this conversation make no sense at all?"
Michael shook his head, exasperated with Tony. To Hilary he said, "When he painted the mural, I wanted to pay him in cash, but he wouldn't accept it. He said he'd trade the painting for a few free dinners. I insisted on a hundred free visits. He said twenty-five. We finally settled on fifty. He undervalues his work, and that makes me angry as hell."
"Tony painted that mural?" she asked.
"He didn't tell you?"
"No."
She looked at Tony, and he grinned sheepishly.
"That's why he drives that Jeep," Michael said. "When he wants to go up in the hills to work on a nature study, the Jeep will take him anywhere."
"He said he had it because he likes to go skiing."
"That too. But mostly, it's to get him into the hills to paint. He should be proud of his work. But it's easier to pull teeth from an alligator than it is to get him to talk about his painting."
"I'm an amateur," Tony said. "Nothing's more boring than an amateur dabbler running off at the mouth about his 'art.'"
"That mural is not the work of an amateur," Michael said.
"Definitely not," Hilary agreed.
"You're my friends," Tony said, "so naturally you're too generous with your praise. And neither of you has the qualifications to be an art critic."
"He's won two prizes," Michael told Hilary.
"Prizes?" she asked Tony.
"Nothing important."
"Both times he won best of the show," Michael said.
"What shows were these?" Hilary asked.
"No big ones," Tony said.
"He dreams about making a living as a painter," Michael said, "but he never does anything about it."
"Because it's only a dream," Tony said. "I'd be a fool if I seriously thought I could make it as a painter."
"He never really tried," Michael told Hilary.
"A painter doesn't get a weekly paycheck," Tony said. "Or health benefits. Or retirement checks."
"But if you only sold two pieces a month for only half what they're worth, you'd make more than you get as a cop," Michael said.
"And if I sold nothing for a month or two months or six," Tony said, "then who would pay the rent?"
To Hilary, Michael said, "His apartment's crammed full of paintings, one stacked on the other. He's sitting on a fortune, but he won't do anything about it."
"He exaggerates," Tony told her.
"Ah, I give up!" Michael said. "Maybe you can talk some sense into him, Hilary." As he walked away from their table, he said, "Twenty-one."
"Twenty-three." Tony said.
Later, in the Jeep, as he was driving her home, Hilary said, "Why don't you at least take your work around to some galleries and see if they'll handle it?"
"They won't."
"You could at least ask."
"Hilary. I'm not really good enough."
"That mural was excellent."
"There's a big difference between restaurant murals and fine art."
"That mural was fine art."
"Again, I've got to point out that you aren't an expert."
"I buy paintings for both pleasure and investment."
"With the aid of a gallery director for the investment part?" he asked.
"That's right. Wyant Stevens in Beverly Hills."
"Then he's the expert, not you."
"Why don't you show some of your work to him?"
"I can't take rejection."
"I'll bet he won't reject you."
"Can we not talk about my painting?"
"Why?"
"I'm bored."
"You're difficult."
"And bored," he said.
"What shall we talk about?"
"Well, why don't we talk about whether or not you're going to invite me in for brandy."
"Would you like to come in for brandy?"
"Cognac?"
"That's what I have."
"What label?"
"Remy Martin."
"The best." He grinned. "But, gee, I don't know. It's getting awfully late."
"If you don't come in," she said, "I'll just have to drink alone." She was enjoying the silly game.
"Can't let you drink alone," he said.
"That's one sign of alcoholism."
"It certainly is."
"If you don't come in for a brandy with me, you'll be starting me on the road to problem drinking and complete destruction."
"I'd never forgive myself."
Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting side by side on the couch, in front of the fireplace, watching the flames and sipping Remy Martin.
Hilary felt slightly light-headed, not from the cognac but from being next to him--and from wondering if they were going to go to bed together. She had never slept with a man on the first date. She was usually wary, reluctant to commit herself to an affair until she had spent a couple of weeks--sometimes a couple of months--evaluating the man. More than once she had taken so long to make up her mind that she had lost men who might have made wonderful lovers and lasting friends. But in just one evening with Tony Clemenza, she felt at ease and perfectly safe with him. He was a damned attractive man. Tall. Dark. Rugged good looks. The inner authority and self-confidence of a cop. Yet gentle. Really surprisingly gentle. And sensitive. So much time had passed since she'd allowed herself to be touched and possessed, since she'd used and been used and shared. How could she have let so much time pass? She could easily imagine herself in his arms, naked beneath him, then atop him, and as those lovely images filled her mind, she realized that he was probably having the same sweet thoughts.
Then the telephone rang.
"Damn!" she said.
"Someone you don't want to hear from?"
She turned and looked at the phone, which was a walnut box model that stood on a corner desk. It rang, rang.
"Hilary?"
"I'll bet it's him," she said.
"Him who?"
"I've been getting these calls...."
The strident ringing continued.
"What calls?" Tony asked.
"The last couple of days, someone's been calling and then refusing to speak when I answer. It's happened six or eight times."
"He doesn't say anything at all?"
"He just listens," she said. "I think it's some nut who was turned on by the newspaper stories about Frye."
The insistent bell made her grit her teeth.
She stood up and hesitantly approached the phone. Tony went with her. "You have a listed number?"
"I'm getting a new one next week. It'll be unlisted."
They reached the desk and stood looking at the phone. It rang again and again and again.
"It's him," she said. "Who else would let it ring that long?"
Tony snatched up the receiver. "Hello?"
The caller didn't respond.
"Thomas residence," Tony said. "Detective Clemenza speaking."
Click.
Tony put the phone down and said, "He hung up. Maybe I scared him off for good."
"I hope so."
"It's still a good idea to get an unlisted number."
"Oh, I'm not going to change my mind about that."
"I'll call the telephone company service department first thing Monday morning and tell them the LAPD would appreciate a speedy job."
"Can you do that?"
"Sure."
"Thank you, Tony." She hugged herself. She felt cold.
"Try not to worry about it," he said. "Studies show that the kind of creep who makes threatening phone calls usually gets all his kicks that way. The call itself usually satisfies him. He usually isn't the violent type."
"Usually?"
"Almost never."
She smiled thinly. "That's still not good enough."
The call had spoiled any chance that the night might end in a shared bed. She was no longer in the mood for seduction, and Tony sensed the change.
"Would you like me to stay a while longer, just to see if he calls again?"
"That's sweet of you," she said, "But I guess you're right. He's not dangerous. If he was, he'd come around instead of just calling. Anyway, you scared him off. He probably thinks the police are here just waiting for him."
"Did you get your pistol back?"
She nodded. "I went downtown yesterday and filled out the registration form like I should have done when I moved into the city. If the guy on the phone does come around, I can plink him legally now."
"I really don't think he'll bother you again tonight."
"I'm sure you're right."
For the first time all evening, they were awkward with each other.
"Well, I guess I'd better be going."
"It is late," she agreed.
"Thank you for the cognac."
"Thank you for a wonderful dinner."
At the door he said, "Doing anything tomorrow night?"
She was about to turn him down when she remembered how good she had felt sitting beside him on the sofa. And she thought of Wally Topelis's warning about becoming a hermit. She smiled and said, "I'm free."
"Great. What would you like to do?"
"Whatever you want."
He thought about it for a moment, "Shall we make a whole day of it?"
"Well ... why not?"
"We'll start with lunch. I'll pick you up at noon."
"I'll be ready and waiting."
He kissed her lightly and affectionately on the lips, "Tomorrow," he said,
"Tomorrow."
She watched him leave, then closed and locked the door.

***

All day Saturday, morning and afternoon and evening, the body of Bruno Frye lay alone in the Forever View Funeral Home, unobserved and unattended.
Friday night, after Joshua Rhinehart had left, Avril Tannerton and Gary Olmstead had transferred the corpse to another coffin, an ornate brass-plated model with a plush velvet and silk interior. They tucked the dead man into a white burial gown, put his arms straight out at his sides, and pulled a white velvet coverlet up to the middle of his chest. Because the condition of the flesh was not good, Tannerton did not want to expend any energy trying to make the corpse presentable. Gary Olmstead thought there was something cheap and disrespectful about consigning a body to the grave without benefit of makeup and powder. But Tannerton persuaded him that cosmetology offered little hope for Bruno Frye's shrunken yellow-gray countenance.
"And anyway," Tannerton had said, "you and I will be the last people in this world to lay eyes on him. When we shut this box tonight, it'll never be opened again."
At 9:45 Friday night, they had closed and latched the lid of the casket. That done, Olmstead went home to his wan little wife and his quiet and intense young son. Avril went upstairs; he lived above the rooms of the dead.
Early Saturday morning, Tannerton left for Santa Rosa in his silver-gray Lincoln. He took an overnight bag with him, for he didn't intend to return until ten o'clock Sunday morning. Bruno Frye's funeral was the only one that he was handling at the moment. Since there was to be no viewing, he hadn't any reason to stay at Forever View; he wouldn't be needed until the service on Sunday,
He had a woman in Santa Rosa. She was the latest of a long line of women; Avril thrived on variety. Her name was Helen Virtillion. She was a good-looking woman in her early thirties, very lean, taut, with big firm breasts which he found endlessly fascinating.
A lot of women were attracted to Avril Tannerton, not in spite of what he did for a living but because of it. Of course, some were turned off when they discovered he was a mortician. But a surprising number were intrigued and even excited by his unusual profession.
He understood what made him desirable to them. When a man worked with the dead, some of the mystery of death rubbed off on him. In spite of his freckles and his boyish good looks, in spite of his charming smile and his great sense of fun and his open-hearted manner, some women felt he was nonetheless mysterious, enigmatic. Unconsciously, they thought they could not die so long as they were in his arms, as if his services to the dead earned him (and those close to him) special dispensation. That atavistic fantasy was similar to the secret hope shared by many women who married doctors because they were subconsciously convinced that their spouses could protect them from all of the microbial dangers of this world.
Therefore, all day Saturday, while Avril Tannerton was in Santa Rosa making love to Helen Virtillion, the body of Bruno Frye lay alone in an empty house.
Sunday morning, two hours before sunrise, there was a sudden rush of movement in the funeral home, but Tannerton was not there to notice.
The overhead lights in the windowless workroom were switched on abruptly, but Tannerton was not there to see.
The lid of the sealed casket was unlatched and thrown back. The workroom was filled with screams of rage and pain, but Tannerton was not there to hear.

***

At ten o'clock Sunday morning, as Tony stood in his kitchen drinking a glass of grapefruit juice, the telephone rang. It was Janet Yamada, the woman who had been Frank Howard's blind date last night.
"How'd it go?" he asked.
"It was wonderful, a wonderful night."
"Really?"
"Sure. He's a doll."
"Frank is a doll."
"You said he might be kind of cold, difficult to get to know, but he wasn't."
"He wasn't?"
"And he's so romantic."
"Frank?"
"Who else?"
"Frank Howard is romantic?"
"These days you don't find many men who have a sense of romance," Janet said. "Sometimes it seems like romance and chivalry were thrown out the window when the sexual revolution and the women's rights movement came in. But Frank still helps you on with your coat and opens doors for you and pulls your chair out and everything. He even brought me a bouquet of roses. They're beautiful."
"I thought you might have trouble talking to him."
"Oh, no. We have a lot of the same interests."
"Like what?"
"Baseball, for one thing."
"That's right! I forgot you like baseball."
"I'm an addict."
"So you talked baseball all night."
"Oh, no," she said. "We talked about a lot of other things. Movies--"
"Movies? Are you trying to tell me Frank is a film buff?"
"He knows the old Bogart pictures almost line by line. We traded favorite bits of dialogue."
"I've been talking about film for three months, and he hasn't opened his mouth," Tony said.
"He hasn't seen a lot of recent pictures, but we're going to a show tonight."
"You're seeing him again?"
"Yeah. I wanted to call and thank you for fixing me up with him," she said.
"Am I one hell of a matchmaker, or am I one hell of a matchmaker?"
"I also wanted to let you know that even if it doesn't work out, I'll be gentle with him. He told me about Wilma. What a rotten thing! I wanted you to know that I'm aware she put a couple of cracks in him, and I won't ever hit him too hard."
Tony was amazed. "He told you about Wilma the first night he met you?"
"He said he used to be unable to talk about it, but then you showed him how to handle his hostility."
"Me?"
"He said after you helped him accept what had happened, he could talk about it without pain."
"All I did was sit and listen when he wanted to get it off his chest."
"He thinks you're a hell of a great guy."
"Frank's a damned good judge of people, isn't he?"
Later, feeling good about the excellent impression that Frank had made on Janet Yamada, optimistic about his own chances for a little romance, Tony drove to Westwood to keep his date with Hilary. She was waiting for him; she came out of the house as he pulled into the driveway. She looked crisp and lovely in black slacks, a cool ice-blue blouse, and a lightweight blue corduroy blazer. As he opened the door for her, she gave him a quick, almost shy kiss on the cheek, and he got a whiff of fresh lemony perfume.
It was going to be a good day.

***

Exhausted from a nearly sleepless night in Helen Virtillion's bedroom, Avril Tannerton got back from Santa Rosa shortly before ten o'clock Sunday morning.
He did not look inside the coffin.
With Gary Olmstead, Tannerton went to the cemetery and prepared the gravesite for the two o'clock ceremony. They erected the equipment that would lower the casket into the ground. Using flowers and a lot of cut greenery, they made the site as attractive as possible.
At 12:30 back at the funeral home, Tannerton used a chamois cloth to wipe the dust and smudged fingerprints from Bruno Frye's brass-plated casket. As he ran his hand over the rounded edges of the box, he thought of the magnificent contours of Helen Virtillion's breasts.
He did not look inside the coffin.
At one o'clock, Tannerton and Olmstead loaded the deceased into the hearse.
Neither of them looked inside the coffin.
At one-thirty they drove to the Napa County Memorial Park. Joshua Rhinehart and a few local people followed in their own cars. Considering that it was for a wealthy and influential man, the funeral procession was embarrassingly small.
The day was clear and cool. Tall trees cast stark shadows across the road, and the hearse passed through alternating hands of sunlight and shade.
At the cemetery, the casket was placed on a sling above the grave, and fifteen people gathered around for the brief service. Gary Olmstead took up a position beside the flower-concealed control box that operated the sling and would cause it to lower the deceased into the ground. Avril stood at the front of the grave and read from a thin book of nondenominational inspirational verses. Joshua Rhinehart was at the mortician's side. The other twelve people flanked the open grave. Some of them were grape growers and their wives. They had come because they had sold their harvests to Bruno Frye's winery, and they considered their attendance at his funeral to be a business obligation. The others were Shade Tree Vineyards executives and their wives, and their reasons for being present were no more personal than those of the growers. Nobody wept.
And nobody had the opportunity or the desire to look into the coffin.
Tannerton finished reading from his small black book. He glanced at Gary Olmstead and nodded.
Olmstead pushed a button on the control box. The powerful little electric motor hummed. The casket was lowered slowly and smoothly into the gaping earth.

***

Hilary could not remember another day that was as much fun as that first full day with Tony Clemenza.
For lunch, they went to the Yamashiro Skyroom, high in the Hollywood Hills. The food at Yamashiro was uninspiring, even ordinary, but the ambience and the stunning view made it a fine place for an occasional light lunch or dinner. The restaurant, an authentic Japanese palace, had once been a private estate. It was surrounded by ten acres of lovely ornamental gardens. From its mountaintop perch, Yamashiro offered a breathtaking view of the entire Los Angeles basin. The day was so clear that Hilary could see all the way to Long Beach and Palos Verdes.
After lunch, they went to Griffith Park. For an hour, they walked through part of the Los Angeles Zoo, where they fed the bears, and where Tony did hilarious imitations of the animals. From the zoo they went to a special afternoon performance of the dazzling Laserium hologram show in the Griffith Park Observatory.
Later, they passed an hour on Melrose Avenue, between Doheny Drive and La Cienega Boulevard, prowling through one fascinating antique shop after another, not buying, just browsing, chatting with the proprietors.
When the cocktail hour arrived, they drove to Malibu for Mai Tais at Tonga Lei. They watched the sun set into the ocean and relaxed to the rhythmic roar of breaking waves.
Although Hilary had been an Angeleno for quite some time, her world had been composed only of her work, her house, her rose garden, her work, the film studios, her work, and the few fancy restaurants in which the motion picture and television crowd gathered to do business. She had never been to the Yamashiro Skyroom, the zoo, the laser show, the Melrose antique shops, or Tonga Lei. It was all new to her. She felt like a wide-eyed tourist--or, more accurately, like a prisoner who had just finished serving a long, long sentence, most of it in solitary confinement.
But it was not just where they went that made the day special. None of it would have been half as interesting or as much fun if she'd been with someone other than Tony. He was so charming, so quick-witted, so full of fun and energy, that he made the bright day brighter.
After slowly sipping two Mai Tais each, they were starving. They drove back to Sepulveda and went north into the San Fernando Valley to have dinner at Mel's landing, another place with which she was not familiar. Mel's was unpretentious and moderately priced, and it offered some of the freshest and tastiest seafood she had ever eaten.
As she and Tony ate Mel's steamed clams and discussed other favorite places to eat, Hilary found that he knew ten times as many as she did. Her knowledge did not extend much beyond that handful of expensive dining spots that served the movers and shakers of the entertainment industry. The out-of-the-way eateries, the hole-in-the-wall cafés with surprising house specialties, the small mom-and-pop restaurants with plainly served but delicious food--all of that was one more aspect of the city about which she had never taken time to learn. She saw that she had become rich without ever discovering how to use and fully enjoy the freedom that her money could provide.
They ate too many of Mel's clams and then too much red snapper with too many Malaysian shrimp. They also drank too much white wine.
Considering how much they consumed, it was amazing, Hilary thought, that they had so much time between mouthfuls for conversation. But they never stopped talking. She was usually reticent on the first few dates with a new man, but not with Tony. She wanted to hear what he thought about everything, from Mork and Mindy to Shakespearean drama, from politics to art. People, dogs, religion, architecture, sports, Bach, fashions, food, women's liberation, Saturday morning cartoons--it seemed urgent and vital that she know what he thought about those and a million other subjects. She also wanted to tell him what she thought about all those things, and she wanted to know what he thought of what she thought, and pretty soon she was telling him what she thought of what he thought of what she thought. They chattered as if they had just learned that God was going to strike everyone in the world deaf and dumb at sunrise. Hilary was drunk, not on wine, but on the fluidity and intimacy of their conversation; she was intoxicated by communication, a potent brew for which she had built up little tolerance over the years.
By the time he took her home and agreed to come in for a nightcap, she was certain they would go to bed together. She wanted him very much; the thought of it made her warm and tingly. She knew he wanted her. She could see the desire in his eyes. They needed to let dinner settle a bit, and with that in mind, she poured white crčme de menthe on the rocks for both of them.
They were just sitting down when the telephone rang.
"Oh, no," she said.
"Did he bother you after I left last night?"
"No."
"This morning?"
"No."
"Maybe that's not him."
They both went to the phone.
She hesitated, then picked it up. "Hello?"
Silence.
"Damn you!" she said, and she slammed the receiver down so hard that she wondered if she'd cracked it.
"Don't let him rattle you."
"I can't help it," she said.
"He's just a slimy little creep who doesn't know how to deal with women. I've seen others like him. If he ever got a chance to make it with a woman, if a woman offered herself to him on a silver platter, he'd run away screaming in terror."
"He still scares me."
"He's no threat. Come back to the couch. Sit down. Try to forget about him."
They returned to the sofa and sipped their crčme de menthe in silence for a minute or two.
At last, she softly said, "Damn."
"You'll have an unlisted number by tomorrow afternoon. Then he won't be able to bother you any more."
"But he sure spoiled this evening. I was so mellow."
"I'm still enjoying myself."
"It's just that ... I'd figured on more than just drinks in front of the fireplace."
He stared at her. "Had you?"
"Hadn't you?"
His smile was special because it was not merely a configuration of the mouth; it involved his whole face and his expressive dark eyes; it was the most genuine and by far the most appealing smile that she had ever seen. He said, "I've got to admit I had hopes of tasting more than the crčme de menthe."
"Damn the phone."
He leaned over and kissed her. She opened her mouth to him, and for a brief sweet moment their tongues met. He pulled back and looked at her, put his hand against her face as if he was touching delicate porcelain. "I think we're still in the mood."
"If the phone rings again--"
"It won't."
He kissed her on the eyes, then on the lips, and he put one hand gently on her breast.
She leaned back, and he leaned into her. She put her hand on his arm and felt the muscles bunched beneath his shirt.
Still kissing her, he stroked her soft throat with his fingertips, then began to unbutton her blouse.
Hilary put her hand on his thigh, where the muscles were also tense beneath his slacks. Such a lean hard man. She slid her hand up to his groin and felt the huge steeliness and fierce heat of his erection. She thought of him entering her and moving hotly within her, and a thrill of anticipation made her shiver.
He sensed her excitement and paused in the unbuttoning of her blouse to lightly trace the swell of her breasts where they rose above the cups of her bra. His fingers seemed to leave cool trails on her warm skin; she could feel the lingering ghost of his touch as clearly as she could feel the touch itself.
The telephone rang.
"Ignore it," he said.
She tried to do as he said. She put her arms around him and slid down on the couch and pulled him on top of her. She kissed him hard, crushing her lips against his, licking, sucking.
The phone rang and rang.
"Damn!"
They sat up.
It rang, rang, rang.
Hilary stood.
"Don't," Tony said. "Talking to him hasn't helped. Let me handle it another way and see what happens."
He got up from the couch and went to the corner desk. He lifted the receiver, but he didn't say anything. He just listened.
Hilary could tell from his expression that the caller had not spoken.
Tony was determined to wait him out. He looked at his watch.
Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Two minutes.
The battle of nerves between the two men was strangely like a childish staring contest, yet there was nothing childish about it. It was eerie. Goosebumps popped up on her arms.
Two and a half minutes.
It seemed like an hour.
Finally, Tony put down the phone. "He hung up."
"Without saying anything?"
"Not a word. But he hung up first, and I think that's important. I figured if I gave him a dose of his own medicine he wouldn't like it. He thinks he's going to frighten you. But you're expecting the call, and you just listen like he does. At first, he thinks you're only being cute, and he's sure he can outwait you. But the longer you're silent, the more he starts to wonder if you aren't up to some trick. Is there a tap on your phone? Are you stalling so the police can trace the call? Is it even you who picked up the phone? He thinks about that, starts to get scared, and hangs up."
"He's scared? Well, that's a nice thought," she said.
"I doubt that he'll get up the nerve to call back. At least not until you've changed numbers tomorrow. And then he'll be too late."
"Nevertheless, I'll be on edge until the man from the phone company's done his job."
Tony held out his arms, and she moved into his embrace. They kissed again. It was still extraordinarily sweet and good and right, but the sharp edge of unrestrained passion could no longer be felt. Both of them were unhappily aware of the difference.
They returned to the couch, but only to drink their crčme de menthe and talk. By twelve-thirty in the morning, when he had to go home, they had decided to spend the following weekend on a museum binge. Saturday, they'd go to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to look at the German expressionist paintings and the Renaissance tapestry. Then they would spend most of Sunday at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which boasted a collection of art richer than any other in the world. Of course, in between the museums, they would eat a lot of good food, share a lot of good talk, and (they ardently hoped) pick up where they had left off on the couch.
At the front door, as he was leaving, Hilary suddenly couldn't bear to wait five days to see him again. She said, "What about Wednesday?"
"What about it?"
"Doing anything for dinner?"
"Oh. I'll probably fry up a batch of eggs that are just getting stale in the refrigerator."
"All that cholesterol's bad for you."
"And maybe I'll cut the mold off the bread, make some toast. And I should finish the fruit juice I bought two weeks ago."
"You poor dear."
"The bachelor's life."
"I can't let you eat stale eggs and moldy toast. Not when I make such a terrific tossed salad and filet of sole."
"A nice light supper," he said.
"We don't want to get bloated and sleepy."
"Never know when you might have to move fast."
She grinned. "Precisely."
"See you Wednesday."
"Seven?"
"Seven sharp."
They kissed, and he walked away from the door, and a cold night wind rushed in where he had been, and then he was gone. Half an hour later, upstairs, in bed, Hilary's body ached with frustration. Her breasts were full and taut; she longed to feel his hands on them, his fingers gently stroking and massaging. She could close her eyes and feel his lips on her stiffening nipples. Her belly fluttered as she pictured him braced above her on his powerful arms, and then she above him, moving in slow sensuous circles. Her sex was moist and warm, ready, waiting. She tossed and turned for almost an hour before she finally got up and took a sedative.
As sleep crept over her, she held a drowsy dialogue with herself.
Am I falling in love?
--No. Of course not.
Maybe. Maybe I am.
--No. Love's dangerous.
Maybe it'll work with him.
--Remember Earl and Emma.
Tony's different.
--You're horny. That's all it is. You're just horny.
That, too.
She slept, and she dreamed. Some of the dreams were golden and fuzzy about the edges. In one of them she was naked with Tony, lying in a meadow where the grass felt like feathers, high above the world, a meadow atop a towering pillar of rock, and the warm wind was cleaner than sunshine, cleaner than the electric current of a lightning bolt, cleaner than anything in the world.
But she had nightmares, too. In one of them, she was in the old Chicago apartment, and the walls were closing in, and when she looked up she saw there was no ceiling, and Earl and Emma were staring down at her, their faces as big as God's face, grinning down at her as the walls closed in, and when she opened the door to run out of the apartment, she collided with an enormous cockroach, a monstrous insect bigger than she was, and it obviously intended to eat her alive.

***

At three o'clock in the morning, Joshua Rhinehart woke, grunting and tussling briefly with the tangled sheets. He'd drunk a bit too much wine with dinner, which was most unusual for him. The buzz was gone, but his bladder was killing him; however, it was not merely the call of nature that had disturbed his sleep. He'd had a horrible dream about Tannerton's workroom. In that nightmare, several dead men--all of them duplicates of Bruno Frye--had risen up from their caskets and from the porcelain and stainless steel embalming tables; he had run into the night behind Forever View, but they had come after him, had searched the shadows for him, moving jerkily, calling his name in their flat dead voices.
He lay on his back in the darkness, staring at the ceiling which he could not see. The only sound was the nearly inaudible purr of the electronic digital clock on the nightstand.
Before his wife's death three years ago, Joshua had seldom dreamed. And he'd never had a nightmare. Not once in fifty-eight years. But after Cora passed away, all of that changed. He dreamed at least once or twice a week now, and more often than not the dream was a bad one. Many of them had to do with losing something terribly important but indescribable, and there always ensued a frantic but hopeless search for that which he had lost. He didn't need a fifty-dollar-an-hour psychiatrist to tell him that those dreams were about Cora and her untimely death. He still had not adjusted to life without her. Perhaps he never would. The other nightmares were filled with walking dead men who often looked like him, symbols of his own mortality; but tonight they all bore a striking resemblance to Bruno Frye.
He got out of bed, stretched, yawned. He shuffled to the bathroom without turning on a lamp.
A couple of minutes later, on his way back to bed, he stopped at the window. The panes were cold to the touch. A stiff wind pressed against the glass and made mewling sounds like an animal that wanted to be let inside. The valley was still and dark except for the lights of the wineries. He could see the Shade Tree Vineyards to the north, farther up in the hills.
Suddenly, his eye was caught by a fuzzy white dot just south of the winery, a single smudge of light in the middle of a vineyard, approximately where the Frye house stood. Lights in the Frye house? There wasn't supposed to be anyone there. Bruno had lived alone. Joshua squinted, but without his glasses, everything at a distance tended to grow hazier the harder he tried to focus on it. He couldn't tell if the light was at the Frye place or at one of the administration buildings between the house and the main winery complex. In fact, the longer he stared the less he was sure that it was a light he was watching; it was faint, lambent; it might only be a reflection of moonlight.
He went to the nightstand and, not wanting to turn on a lamp and spoil his night vision, he felt for his glasses in the dark. Before he found them, he knocked over an empty water glass.
When he got back to the window and looked up into the hills again, the mysterious light was gone. Nevertheless, he stood there for a long while, a vigilant guardian. He was executor of the Frye estate, and it was his duty to preserve it for final distribution in accordance with the will. If burglars and vandals were stripping the house, he wanted to know about it. For fifteen minutes, he waited and watched, but the light never returned.
At last, convinced that his weak eyes had deceived him, he went back to bed.

***

Monday morning, as Tony and Frank pursued a series of possible leads on Bobby Valdez, Frank talked animatedly about Janet Yamada. Janet was so pretty. Janet was so intelligent. Janet was so understanding. Janet was this, and Janet was that. He was a bore on the subject of Janet Yamada, but Tony allowed him to gush and ramble. It was good to see Frank talking and acting like a normal human being.
Before checking out their unmarked police sedan and getting on the road, Tony and Frank had spoken to two men on the narcotics squad, Detectives Eddie Quevedo and Carl Hammerstein. The word from those two specialists was that Bobby Valdez was most likely selling either cocaine or PCP to support himself while he pursued his unpaid vocation as a rapist. The biggest money in the L.A. drug market was currently in those two illegal but extremely popular substances. A dealer could still make a fortune in heroin or grass, but those were no longer the most lucrative commodities in the underground pharmacy. According to the narcs, if Bobby was involved in drug traffic, he had to be a pusher, selling directly to users, a man at the lower end of the production and marketing structure. He was virtually penniless when he got out of prison last April, and he needed substantial capital to become either a manufacturer or an importer of narcotics. "What you're looking for is a common street hustler," Quevedo had told Tony and Frank. "Talk to other hustlers." Hammerstein had said, "We'll give you a list of names and addresses. They're all guys who've taken falls for dealing drugs. Most of them are probably dealing again; we just haven't caught them at it yet. Put on a little pressure. Sooner or later, you'll find one of them who's run into Bobby on the street and knows where he's holed up." There were twenty-four names on the list that Quevedo and Hammerstein had given them.
Three of the first six men were not at home. The other three swore they didn't know Bobby Valdez or Juan Mazquezza or anyone else with the face in the mug shots.
The seventh name on the list was Eugene Tucker, and he was able to help them. They didn't even have to lean on him. Most black men were actually one shade of brown or another, but Tucker was truly black. His face was broad and smooth and as black as tar. His dark brown eyes were far lighter than his skin. He had a bushy black beard that was salted with curly white hairs, and that touch of frosting was the only thing about him, other than the whites of his eyes, that was not very, very dark. He even wore black slacks and a black shirt. He was stocky, with a big chest and bigger arms, and his neck was as thick as a wharf post. He looked as if he snapped railroad ties in two for exercise--or maybe just for fun.
Tucker lived in a high-rent townhouse in the Hollywood Hills, a roomy place that was sparsely but tastefully furnished. The living room had only four pieces in it: a couch, two chairs, a coffee table. No end tables or fancy storage units. No stereo. No television set. There weren't even any lamps; at night, the only light would come from the ceiling fixture. But the four pieces that he did have were of remarkably high quality, and each item perfectly accented the others. Tucker had a taste for fine Chinese antiques. The couch and chairs, which recently had been reupholstered in jade-green velvet, were all made of hand-carved rosewood, a hundred years old, maybe twice that, immensely heavy and well-preserved, matchless examples of their period and style. The low table was also rosewood with a narrow inlaid ivory border. Tony and Frank sat on the couch, and Eugene Tucker perched on the edge of a chair opposite them.
Tony ran one hand along the rosewood arm of the couch and said, "Mr. Tucker, this is marvelous."
Tucker raised his eyebrows. "You know what it is?"
"I don't know the precise period," Tony said. "But I'm familiar enough with Chinese art to know this is definitely not a reproduction that you picked up on sale at Sears."
Tucker laughed, pleased that Tony knew the value of the furniture. "I know what you're thinking," he said good-naturedly. "You're wondering how an ex-con, just two years out of the stir, can afford all this. A twelve-hundred-dollar-a-month townhouse. Chinese antiques. You're wondering if maybe I've gotten back into the heroin trade or some allied field of endeavor."
"In fact," Tony said, "that's not what I'm asking myself at all. I am wondering how the devil you've done it. But I know it's not from selling junk."
Tucker smiled. "How can you be so sure?"
"If you were a drug dealer with a passion for Chinese antiques," Tony said, "you'd simply furnish the entire house at a single crack, instead of a piece or two at a time. You are clearly into something that earns a lot of bread, but not nearly as much as you'd make distributing dope like you used to do."
Tucker laughed again and applauded approvingly. He turned to Frank and said, "Your partner is perceptive."
Frank smiled. "A regular Sherlock Holmes."
To Tucker, Tony said, "Satisfy my curiosity. What do you do?"
Tucker leaned forward, suddenly frowning, raising one granite fist and shaking it, looking huge and mean and very dangerous. When he spoke he snarled: "I design dresses."
Tony blinked.
Collapsing back in his chair, Tucker laughed again. He was one of the happiest people Tony had ever seen. "I design women's clothes," he said. "I really do. My name's already beginning to be known in the California design community, and some day it'll be a household word. I promise you."
Intrigued, Frank said, "According to our information, you did four years of an eight-year sentence for wholesaling heroin and cocaine. How'd you go from that to making women's clothes?"
"I used to be one mean son of a bitch," Tucker said. "And those first few months in prison, I was even meaner than usual. I blamed society for everything that happened to me. I blamed the white power structure. I blamed the whole world, but I just wouldn't put any blame on myself. I thought I was a tough dude, but I hadn't really grown up yet. You aren't a man until you accept responsibility for your life. A lot of people never do."
"So what turned you around?" Frank asked.
"A little thing," Tucker said. "Man, sometimes it amazes me how such a little thing can change a person's life. With me, it was a TV show. On the six o'clock news, one of the L.A. stations did a five-part series about black success stories in the city."
"I saw it," Tony said. "More than five years ago, but I still remember it."
"It was fascinating stuff," Tucker said. "It was an image of the black man you never get to see. But at first, before the series began, everybody in the slammer figured it would be one big laugh. We figured the reporter would spend all his time asking the same idiot question: 'Why can't all these poor black folks work hard and become rich Las Vegas headliners like Sammy Davis, Jr.?' But they didn't talk to any entertainers or sports stars."
Tony remembered that it had been a striking piece of journalism, especially for television, where news--and especially the human interest stories on the news--had as much depth as a teacup. The reporters had interviewed black businessmen and businesswomen who had made it to the top, people who had started out with nothing and eventually had become millionaires. Some in real estate. One in the restaurant business. One with a chain of beauty shops. About a dozen people. They all agreed that it was harder to get rich if you were black, but they also agreed that it was not as hard as they thought when they started out, and that it was easier in Los Angeles than in Alabama or Mississippi or even Boston or New York. There were more black millionaires in L.A. than in the rest of California and the other forty-nine states combined. In Los Angeles, almost everyone was living in the fast lane; the typical southern Californian did not merely accommodate himself to change but actively sought it and reveled in it. This atmosphere of flux and constant experimentation drew a lot of marginally sane and even insane people into the area, but it also attracted some of the brightest and most innovative minds in the country, which was why so many new cultural and scientific and industrial developments originated in the region. Very few Southern Californians had the time or patience for outmoded attitudes, one of which was racial prejudice. Of course, there was bigotry in L.A. But whereas a landed white family in Georgia might require six or eight generations to overcome its prejudice toward blacks, that same metamorphosis of attitudes often transpired in one generation of a Southern California family. As one of the black businessmen on the TV news report had said, "The Chicanos have been the niggers of L.A. for quite some time now." But already that was changing, too. The Hispanic culture was regarded with ever-increasing respect, and the browns were creating their own success stories. Several people interviewed on that news special had offered the same explanation for the unusual fluidity of Southern California's social structures and for the eagerness with which people there accepted change; it was, they said, partly because of geology. When you were living on some of the worst fault lines in the world, when the earth could quake and move and change under your feet without warning, did that awareness of impermanence have a subconscious influence on a person's attitudes toward less cataclysmic kinds of change? Some of those black millionaires thought it did, and Tony tended to agree with them.
"There were about a dozen rich black people on that program," Eugene Tucker said. "A lot of guys in the slammer with me just hooted at the TV and called them all Uncle Toms. But I started thinking. If some people on that show could make it in a white world, why couldn't I? I was just as clever and smart as any of them, maybe even smarter than some. It was a completely new image of a black man to me, a whole new idea, like a light bulb going on in my head. Los Angeles was my home. If it really offered a better chance, why hadn't I taken advantage of it? Sure, maybe some of those people had to act like Uncle Toms on their way to the top. But when you've made it, when you've got that million in the bank, you're nobody's man but your own." He grinned. "So I decided to get rich."
"Just like that," Frank said, impressed.
"Just like that."
"The power of positive thinking."
"Realistic thinking," Tucker corrected.
"Why dress designing?" Tucker asked.
"I took aptitude tests that said I'd do well in design work or any aspect of the art business. So I tried to decide what I'd most enjoy designing. Now, I've always liked to choose the clothes my girlfriends wear. I like to go shopping with them. And when they wear an outfit I've picked, they get more compliments than when they wear something they chose themselves. So I hooked up with a university program for inmates, and I studied design. Took a lot of business courses, too. When I was finally paroled, I worked for a while at a fast food restaurant. I lived in a cheap rooming house and kept my expenses down. I drew some designs, paid seamstresses to sew up samples, and started hawking my wares. It wasn't easy at first. Hell, it was damned hard! Every time I got an order from a shop, I walked it to the bank and borrowed money against it to complete the dresses. Man, I was clawing to hold on. But it got better and better. It's pretty good now. In a year, I'll open my own shop in a good area. And eventually you'll see a sign in Beverly Hills that says 'Eugene Tucker.' I promise you."
Tony shook his head. "You're a remarkable man."
"Not particularly," Tucker said. "I'm just living in a remarkable place and a remarkable time."
Frank was holding the manila envelope that contained the mug shots of Bobby "Angel" Valdez. He tapped it against his knee and looked at Tony and said, "I think maybe we've come to the wrong place this time."
"It sure looks that way," Tony said.
Tucker slid forward on his chair. "What was it you wanted?"
Tony told him about Bobby Valdez.
"Well," Tucker said, "I don't move in the circles I once did, but I'm not completely out of touch either. I donate fifteen or twenty hours of my time every week to Self-Pride. That's a city-wide anti-drug campaign. I feel sort of like I've got debts to pay, you know? A Self-Pride Volunteer spends about half his time talking to kids, the other half working on an information-gathering program, sort of like TIP. You know about TIP?"
"Turn in Pushers," Tony said.
"Right. They have a number you can call and give anonymous tips about neighborhood drug dealers. Well, we don't wait for people to call us at Self-Pride. We canvas those neighborhoods where we know pushers work. We go door to door, talk to parents and kids, pump them for anything they know. We build up dossiers on dealers until we feel we've really got the goods, then we turn the dossiers over to the LAPD. So if this Valdez is dealing, there's a chance I'll know at least a little something about him."
Frank said, "I have to agree with Tony. You are rather remarkable."
"Hey, look, I don't deserve any pats on the back for my work at Self-Pride. I wasn't asking for congratulations. In my day I created a lot of junkies out of kids who might have done right if I hadn't been there to steer them wrong. It's going to take me a long, long time to help enough kids to balance the equation."
Frank took the photographs out of the envelope and gave them to Tucker.
The black man looked at each of the three shots. "I know the little bastard. He's one of about thirty guys we're building files on right now."
Tony's heartbeat accelerated a bit in anticipation of the chase to come.
"Only he doesn't use the name Valdez," Tucker said.
"Juan Mazquezza?"
"Not that either. I think he calls himself Ortiz."
"Do you know where we can find him?"
Tucker stood up. "Let me call the information center at Self-Pride. They might have an address on him."
"Terrific," Frank said.
Tucker started toward the kitchen to use the phone in there, stopped, looked back at them. "This might take a few minutes. If you'd like to pass the time looking at my designs, you can go into the study." He pointed to a set of double doors that opened off the living room.
"Sure," Tony said. "I'd like to see them."
He and Frank went into the study and found that it was even more sparsely furnished than the living room. There was a large expensive drawing table with its own lamp. A high stool with a padded seat and a spring back stood in front of the table, and beside the stool there was an artist's supply cabinet on wheels. Near one of the windows, a department store mannequin posed with head tilted coyly and shiny-smooth arms spread wide; bolts of bright cloth lay at its plastic feet. There were no shelves or storage cabinets; stacks of sketches and drawing tablets and draftsman's tools were lined up on the floor along one wall. Obviously, Eugene Tucker was confident that eventually he would be able to furnish the entire townhouse with pieces as exquisite as those in the living room, and in the meantime, regardless of the inconvenience, he did not intend to waste money on cheap temporary furniture.
Quintessential California optimism, Tony thought.
Pencil sketches and a few full-color renditions of Tucker's work were thumbtacked to one wall. His dresses and two-piece suits and blouses were tailored yet flowing, feminine yet not frilly. He had an excellent sense of color and a flair for the kind of detail that made a piece of clothing special. Every one of the designs was clearly the work of a superior talent.
Tony still found it somewhat difficult to believe that the big hard-bitten black man designed women's clothes for a living. But then he realized that his own dichotomous nature was not so different from Tucker's. During the day, he was a homicide detective, desensitized and hardened by all of the violence he saw, but at night, he was an artist, hunched over a canvas in his apartment-studio, painting, painting, painting. In a curious way, he and Eugene were brothers under the skin.
Just as Tony and Frank were looking at the last of the sketches, Tucker returned from the kitchen. "Well, what do you think?"
"Wonderful," Tony said. "You've got a terrific feeling for color and line."
"You're really good," Frank said.
"I know," Tucker said, and he laughed.
"Does Self-Pride have a file on Valdez?" Tony asked.
"Yes. But he calls himself Ortiz, like I thought. Jimmy Ortiz. From what we've been able to gather, he deals strictly in PCP. I know I'm not on solid ground when I start pointing the finger at other people ... but so far as I'm concerned, a PCP dealer is the lowest kind of bastard in the drug trade. I mean, PCP is poison. It rots the brain cells faster than anything else. We don't have enough information in our file to turn it over to the police, but we're working on it."
"Address?" Tony asked.
Tucker handed him a slip of paper on which the address had been noted in neat handwriting. "It's a fancy apartment complex one block south of Sunset, just a couple of blocks from La Cienega."
"We'll find it," Tony said.
"Judging from what you've told me about him," Tucker said, "and from what we've learned about him at Self-Pride, I'd say this guy isn't the kind who's ever going to knuckle down and rehabilitate himself. You'd better put this one away for a long, long time."
"We're sure going to try," Frank said.
Tucker accompanied them to the front door, then outside, where the patio deck in front of the townhouse offered a wide view of Los Angeles in the basin below. "Isn't it gorgeous?" Tucker asked. "Isn't it something?"
"Quite a view," Tony said.
"Such a big, big, beautiful city," Tucker said with pride and affection, as if he had created the megalopolis himself. "You know, I just heard that the bureaucrats back in Washington made a study of mass transit possibilities for L.A. They were determined to ram some system or other down our throats, but they were stunned to find out it would cost at least one hundred billion dollars to build a rapid transit railway network that would handle only ten or twelve percent of the daily commuter crush. They still don't understand how vast the West is." He was rhapsodizing now, his broad face alight with pleasure, his strong hands tossing off one gesture after another. "They don't realize that the meaning of L. A. is space--space and mobility and freedom. This is a city with elbow room. Physical and emotional elbow room. Psychological elbow room. In L.A., you have a chance to be almost anything you want to be. Here, you can take your future out of the hands of other people and shape it yourself. It's fantastic. I love it. God, I love it!"
Tony was so impressed with the depth of Tucker's feeling for the city that he revealed his own secret dream. "I've always wanted to be an artist, to make a living with my art. I paint."
"Then why are you a cop?" Tucker asked.
"It's a steady paycheck."
"Screw steady paychecks."
"I'm a good cop. I like the work well enough."
"Are you a good artist?"
"Pretty good, I think."
"Then take the leap," Tucker said. "Man, you are living on the edge of the Western world, on the edge of possibility. Jump. Jump off. It's one hell of a thrill, and it's so damned far to the bottom that you'll never crash into anything hard or sharp. In fact, you'll probably find exactly the same thing I found. It's not like falling down at all. You'll feel like you're falling up!"
Tony and Frank followed the brick wall to the driveway, past a jade-plant hedge that had thick juicy leaves. The unmarked sedan was parked in the shade of a large date palm.
As Tony opened the door on the passenger's side, Tucker called to him from the patio deck, "Jump! Just jump off and fly!"
"He's some character," Frank said as he drove away from the townhouse.
"Yeah," Tony said, wondering what it felt like to fly.
As they headed for the address that Tucker had given them, Frank talked a little about the black man and then a lot about Janet Yamada. Still mulling over Eugene Tucker's advice, Tony gave his partner only half his attention. Frank didn't notice that Tony was distracted. When he was talking about Janet Yamada, he really didn't attempt to carry on a conversation; he delivered a soliloquy.
Fifteen minutes later, they found the apartment complex where Jimmy Ortiz lived. The parking garage was underground, guarded by an iron gate that opened only to an electronic signal, so they couldn't see if there was a black Jaguar on the premises.
The apartments were on two levels, in randomly set wings, with open staircases and walkways. The complex was structured around an enormous swimming pool and a lot of lush greenery. There was also a whirlpool spa. Two girls in bikinis and a hairy young man were sitting in the swirling water, drinking a martini lunch and laughing at one another's banter as tendrils of steam writhed up from the turbulent pool around them.
Frank stopped at the edge of the Jacuzzi and asked them where Jimmy Ortiz lived.
One of the girls said, "Is he that cute little guy with the mustache?"
"Baby face," Tony said.
"That's him," she said.
"Does he have a mustache now?"
"If it's the same guy," she said. "This one drives a terrific Jag."
"That's him," Frank said.
"I think he lives over there." she said, "in Building Four, on the second floor, all the way at the end."
"Is he home?" Frank asked.
No one knew.
At Building Four, Tony and Frank climbed the stairs to the second floor. An open-air balcony ran the length of the building and served the four apartments that faced onto the courtyard. Along the railing, opposite the first three doors, pots of ivy and other climbing plants had been set out to give the second level a pleasant green look like that enjoyed by ground-floor residents; but there were no plants in front of the end apartment. The door was ajar.
Tony's eyes met Frank's. A worried look passed between them.
Why was the door ajar?
Did Bobby know they were coming?
They flanked the entrance. Waited. Listened.
The only sound came from the happy trio in the courtyard whirlpool.
Frank raised his eyebrows questioningly.
Tony pointed to the doorbell.
After a brief hesitation, Frank pressed it.
Inside, the chimes rang softly. Bong-bing-bong.
They waited for a response, eyes on the door.
Suddenly the air seemed perfectly still and oppressively heavy. Humid. Thick. Syrupy. Tony had trouble breathing it; he felt as if he were drawing a fluid into his lungs.
No one answered the bell.
Frank rang it again.
When there was still no response, Tony reached under his jacket and slipped his revolver from its shoulder holster. He felt weak. His stomach was bubbling acidly.
Frank took out his revolver, listened closely for sounds of movement inside, then finally pushed the door all the way open.
The foyer was deserted.
Tony leaned sideways to get a better look inside. The living room, of which he could see only a small part, was shadowy and still. The drapes were shut, and there were no lights burning.
Tony shouted, "Police!"
His voice echoed under the balcony roof.
A bird chirruped in an olive tree.
"Come out with your hands raised, Bobby!"
On the street, a car horn sounded.
In another apartment a phone rang, muffled but audible.
"Bobby!" Frank shouted. "You hear what he said? We're the police. It's all over now. So just come out of there. Come on! Right now!"
Down in the courtyard, the whirlpool bathers had grown very quiet.
Tony had the crazy notion that he could hear people in a dozen apartments as they crept stealthily to their windows.
Frank raised his voice even further: "We don't want to hurt you, Bobby!"
"Listen to him!" Tony shouted into the apartment. "Don't force us to hurt you. Come on out peacefully."
Bobby didn't respond.
"If he was in there," Frank said, "he'd at least tell us to go fuck ourselves."
"So what now?" Tony asked.
"I guess we go in."
"Jesus, I hate shit like this. Maybe we should call a backup team."
"He's probably not armed," Frank said.
"You're kidding."
"He doesn't have any prior arrests for carrying a gun. Except when he's after a woman, he's a sniveling little creep."
"He's a killer."
"Women. He's only dangerous to women."
Tony shouted again: "Bobby, this is your last chance! Now, dammit, come out of there nice and slow!"
Silence.
Tony's heart was hammering furiously.
"Okay," Frank said. "Let's get this over with."
"If memory serves me right, you went in first the last time we had to do something like this."
"Yeah. The Wilkie-Pomeroy case."
"Then I guess it's my turn," Tony said.
"I know you've been looking forward to this."
"Oh, yes."
"With all your heart."
"Which is now in my throat."
"Go get him, tiger."
"Cover me."
"The foyer's too narrow for me to give you good cover. I won't be able to see past you once you go in."
"I'll stay as low as possible," Tony said.
"Make like a duck. I'll try to look over you."
"Just do the best you can."
Tony's stomach was cramping up on him. He took a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm down. That trick had no effect other than to make his heart pound harder and faster than it had been doing. At last, he crouched and launched himself through the open door, the revolver held out in front of him. He scuttled across the slippery tile floor of the foyer and stopped at the brink of the living room, searching the shadows for movement, expecting to take a bullet right between the eyes.
The living room was dimly illuminated by thin strips of sunlight that found their way around the edges of the heavy drapes. As far as Tony could tell, all of the lumpy shapes were couches and chairs and tables. The place appeared to be full of big, expensive, and utterly tasteless Americanized Mediterranean furniture. A narrow shaft of sunlight fell across a red velvet sofa that had a large and thoroughly grotesque wrought-iron fleur-de-lis bolted to its imitation oak side.
"Bobby?"
No response.
A clock ticking somewhere.
"We don't want to hurt you, Bobby."
Only silence.
Tony held his breath.
He could hear Frank breathing.
Nothing else.
Slowly, cautiously, he stood.
No one shot at him.
He felt along the wall until he located a light switch. A lump with a garish bullfight scene on its shade came on in one corner, and he could see that both the living room and the open dining area beyond it were deserted.
Frank came in behind him and motioned toward the door of the foyer closet.
Tony stepped back, out of the way.
Holding his revolver at gut-level, Frank gingerly opened the sliding door. The closet contained only a couple of lightweight jackets and several shoe boxes.
Staying away from each other in order to avoid making a single easy target of themselves, they crossed the living room. There was a liquor cabinet with ridiculously large black iron hinges: the glass in the cabinet doors was tinted yellow. A round coffee table was in the center of the room. a mammoth eight-sided thing with a useless copper-lined brazier in the middle of it. The sofa and high-backed chairs were upholstered in flame-red velvet with lots of gold fringe and black tassels. The drapes were flashy yellow and orange brocade. The carpet was a thick green shag. It was a singularly ugly place to live.
And, Tony thought, it's also an absurd place in which to die.
They walked through the dining area and looked into the small kitchen. It was a mess. The refrigerator door and a few of the cupboards were standing open. Cans and jars and boxes of food had been pulled off the shelves and dumped onto the floor. Some items appeared to have been thrown down in a rage. Several jars were broken; sharp fragments of glass sparkled in the garbage. A puddle of maraschino cherry juice lay like a pink-red amoeba on the yellow tiles; the bright red cherries gleamed in every corner. Chocolate dessert topping was splashed all over the electric stove. Cornflakes were scattered everywhere. And dill pickles. Olives. Dry spaghetti. Someone had used mustard and grape jelly to scrawl one word four times on the only blank wall in the kitchen:

Cocodrilos
Cocodrilos
Cocodrilos
Cocodrilos

They whispered:
"What is it?"
"Spanish."
"What's it mean?"
"Crocodiles."
"Why crocodiles?"
"I don't know."
"Creepy," Frank said.
Tony agreed. They had walked into a bizarre situation. Even though he could not understand what was happening, Tony knew there was great danger ahead. He wished he knew which door it would pop out of.
They looked in the den, which was as overfurnished as the other two rooms. Bobby wasn't hiding in there or in the den closet.
They moved warily back down the hall toward the two bedrooms and two baths. They didn't make a sound.
They didn't find anything out of the ordinary in the first bedroom and bathroom.
In the master bedroom, there was another mess. All of the clothes had been taken out of the closet and strewn about. They were piled on the floor, wadded into balls on the bed, draped over the dresser where they had fallen when thrown, and most if not all of them were badly damaged. Sleeves and collars had been stripped off shirts. Lapels had been torn from sports jackets and suit coats. The inseams of trousers had been ripped open. The person who had done all of that had been functioning in a blind rage, yet he had been surprisingly methodical and thorough in spite of his fury.
But who had done it?
Someone with a grudge against Bobby?
Bobby himself? Why would he mess up his own kitchen and destroy his own clothes?
What did crocodiles have to do with it?
Tony had the disturbing feeling that they were moving too fast through the apartment, that they were overlooking something important. An explanation for the strange things they'd discovered seemed to be hovering at the edge of his mind, but he could not reach out and grab it.
The door to the adjoining bath was closed. It was the only place they hadn't looked.
Frank trained his revolver on the door and watched it while he spoke to Tony. "If he didn't leave before we got here, he has to be in the bathroom."
"Who?"
Frank gave him a quick perplexed glance. "Bobby, of course. Who else?"
"You think he tore up his own place?"
"Well ... what do you think?"
"We're missing something."
"Yeah? Like what?"
"I don't know."
Frank moved toward the bathroom door.
Tony hesitated, listening to the apartment.
The place was about as noisy as a tomb.
"Somebody must be in that bathroom," Frank said.
They took up positions flanking the door.
"Bobby! You hear me?" Frank shouted. "You can't stay in there forever. Come out with your hands raised!"
Nobody came out.
Tony said, "Even if you're not Bobby Valdez, no matter who you are, you've got to come out of there."
Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.
Frank took hold of the knob and twisted it slowly until the bolt slipped out of its slot with a soft snick. He pushed the door open and convulsively threw himself back against the wall to get out of the way of any bullets or knives or other indications that he was unwelcome.
No gunfire. No movement.
The only thing that came out of the bathroom was a really terrible stench. Urine. Excrement.
Tony gagged. "Jesus!"
Frank put one hand over his mouth and nose.
The bathroom was deserted. The floor was puddled with bright yellow urine, and feces was smeared over the commode and sink and clear glass shower door.
"What in the name of God is going on here?" Frank asked through his fingers.
One Spanish word was printed twice in feces on the bathroom wall.

Cocodrilos
Cocodrilos

Tony and Frank swiftly retreated to the center of the bedroom, stepping on torn shirts and ruined suits. But now that the bathroom door had been opened, they could not escape the odor without leaving the room altogether, so they went into the hallway.
"Whoever did this really hates Bobby," Frank said.
"So you no longer think Bobby did it to himself?"
"Why would he? It doesn't make sense. Christ, this is about as weird as they come. The hairs are up on the back of my neck."
"Spooky," Tony agreed.
His stomach muscles were still painfully cramped with tension, and his heart was thumping only slightly slower than it had been when they'd first crept into the apartment.
They were both silent for a moment, listening for the footsteps of ghosts.
Tony watched a small brown spider as it climbed the corridor wall.
Finally Frank put his gun away and took out his handkerchief and wiped his sweat-streaked face.
Tony holstered his own revolver and said, "We can't just leave it like this and put a stakeout on the place. I mean, we've gone too far for that. We've found too much that needs explaining."
"Agreed," Frank said. "We'll have to call for assistance, get a warrant, and run a thorough search."
"Drawer by drawer."
"What do you think we'll find?"
"God knows."
"I saw a phone in the kitchen," Frank said.
Frank led the way down the hall to the living room, then around the corner, into the kitchen. Before Tony could follow him across the threshold from the dining area, Frank said, "Oh, Jesus," and tried to back out of the kitchen.
"What's the matter?"
Even as Tony spoke, something cracked loudly.
Frank cried out and fell sideways and clutched at the edge of a counter, trying to stay on his feet.
Another sharp crack slammed through the apartment, echoing from wall to wall, and Tony realized it was gunfire.
But the kitchen had been deserted!
Tony reached for his revolver, and he had the peculiar feeling he was moving in slow-motion while the rest of the world rushed past in frantic double time.
The second shot took Frank in the shoulder and spun him around. He crashed down into the mess of maraschino cherry juice and dry spaghetti and cornflakes and glass.
As Frank dropped out of the way, Tony was able to see beyond him for the first time, and he spotted Bobby Valdez. He was wriggling out of the cupboard space under the sink, a spot they hadn't thought to investigate because it looked too small to conceal a man. Bobby was squirming and slithering out of there like a snake from a tight hole. Only his legs were still under the sink; he was on his side, pulling himself out with one arm, holding a .32 pistol in his other hand. He was naked. He looked sick. His eyes were huge, wild, dilated, sunken in rings of puffy dark flesh. His face was shockingly pale, his lips bloodless. Tony took in all of those details in a fraction of a second, with senses sharpened by a flood of adrenaline.
Frank was just hitting the floor, and Tony was still reaching for his revolver when Bobby fired a third time. The bullet whacked into the edge of the archway. An explosion of plaster chips stung Tony's face.
He threw himself backward and down, twisting as he went, struck the floor too hard with his shoulder, gasped in pain, and rolled out of the dining area, out of the line of fire. He scrambled behind a chair in the living room and finally got his gun out of its holster.
Perhaps six or seven seconds had passed since Bobby had fired the first shot.
Someone was saying, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," in a quivering, high-pitched voice.
Suddenly, Tony realized he was listening to himself. He bit his lip and fought off an attack of hysteria.
He now knew what had been bothering him; he knew what they had overlooked. Bobby Valdez was selling PCP, and that should have told them something when they saw the state of the apartment. They should have remembered that pushers were sometimes stupid enough to use what they sold. PCP, also called angel dust, was an animal tranquilizer that had a fairly predictable effect upon horses and bulls. But when people took the stuff, their reactions ranged from placid trances to weird hallucinations to unexpected fits of rage and violence. As Eugene Tucker said, PCP was poison: it literally ate away at brain cells, rotted the mind. Supercharged on PCP, bursting with perverse energy, Bobby had smashed up his kitchen and had done all the other damage in the apartment. Pursued by fierce but imaginary crocodiles, desperately seeking refuge from their snapping jaws, he had squirmed into the cupboard under the sink and had pulled the doors shut. Tony hadn't thought to look in the cupboard because he hadn't realized they were stalking a raving lunatic. They had searched the apartment with caution, prepared for the moves that might be expected of a mentally-disturbed rapist and incidental killer, but unprepared for the bizarre actions of a gibbering madman. The mindless destruction evident in the kitchen and master bedroom, the apparently senseless writing on the walls, the disgusting mess in the bathroom--all of those were familiar indications of PCP-induced hysteria. Tony never served on the narcotics squad, but, nevertheless, he felt he should have recognized those signs. If he had interpreted them properly, he most likely would have checked under the sink, as well as anywhere else conceivably big enough for a man to hide, even if the quarters would be brutally uncomfortable; for it was not uncommon for a person on an extremely ugly PCP trip to surrender totally to his paranoia and try to hide from a hostile world, especially in cramped, dark, womblike places. But he and Frank misinterpreted the clues, and now they were up to their necks in trouble.
Frank had been shot twice. He was badly hurt. Maybe dying. Maybe dead.
No!
Tony tried to push that thought out of his mind as he cast about for a way to seize the initiative from Bobby.
In the kitchen Bobby began to scream in genuine terror. "Hay muchos cocodrilos!"
Tony translated: There are many crocodiles!
"Cocodrilos! Cocodrilos! Cocodrilos! Ah! Ah! Ahhhhh!"
His repeated cry of alarm swiftly degenerated into a wordless wail of agony.
He sounds as if he's really being eaten alive, Tony thought, shivering.
Still screaming, Bobby rushed out of the kitchen. He fired the .32 into the floor, apparently trying to kill one of the crocodiles.
Tony crouched behind the chair. He was afraid that, if he stood up and took aim, he would be cut down before he could pull the trigger.
Doing a frantic little jig, trying to keep his bare feet out of the mouths of the crocodiles, Bobby fired into the floor once, twice.
Six shots so far, Tony thought. Three in the kitchen, three here. How many in the clip? Eight? Maybe ten.
Bobby fired again, twice, three times. One of the bullets ricocheted off something.
Nine shots had been fired. One more to go.
"Cocodrilos!"
The tenth shot boomed deafeningly in the enclosed space, and again the bullet ricocheted with a sharp whistle.
Tony stood up from his hiding place. Bobby was less than ten feet away. Tony held the service revolver in both hands, the muzzle lined up on the naked man's hairless chest. "Okay, Bobby. Be cool. It's all over."
Bobby seemed surprised to see him. Clearly, he was so deeply into his PCP hallucinations that he didn't remember seeing Tony in the kitchen archway less than a minute ago.
"Crocodiles," Bobby said urgently, in English this time.
"There are no crocodiles," Tony said.
"Big ones."
"No. There aren't any crocodiles."
Bobby squealed and jumped and whirled and tried to shoot at the floor, but his pistol was empty.
"Bobby," Tony said.
Whimpering, Bobby turned and looked at him.
"Bobby, I want you to lay face-down on the floor."
"They'll get me," Bobby said. His eyes were bulging out of his head; the dark irises were rimmed with wide circles of white. He was trembling violently. "They'll eat me."
"Listen to me, Bobby. Listen carefully. There are no crocodiles. You're hallucinating them. It's all inside your head. You hear me?"
"They came out of the toilets," Bobby said shakily. "And out of the shower drains. And the sink drain, too. Oh, man, they're big. They're real big. And they're all trying to bite off my cock." His fear began to turn to anger; his pale face flushed, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a wolflike snarl. "I won't let them. I won't let them bite off my cock. I'll kill all of them!"
Tony was frustrated by his inability to get through to Bobby, and his frustration was exacerbated by the knowledge that Frank might be bleeding to death, getting weaker by the second, in desperate need of immediate medical attention. Deciding to enter into Bobby's dark fantasy in order to control it, Tony spoke in a soft and reassuring voice: "Listen to me. All of those crocodiles have crawled back into the toilets and the drains. Didn't you see them going? Didn't you hear them sliding down the pipes and out of the building? They saw that we'd come to help you, and they knew they were outnumbered. Every one of them has gone away."
Bobby stared at him with glassy eyes that were less than human.
"They've all gone away," Tony said.
"Away?"
"None of them can hurt you now."
"Liar."
"No. I'm telling the truth. All of the crocodiles have gone down the--"
Bobby threw his empty pistol.
Tony ducked under it.
"You rotten cop son of a bitch."
"Hold it, Bobby."
Bobby started toward him.
Tony backstepped away from the naked man.
Bobby didn't walk around the chair. He angrily pushed it aside, knocked it over, even though it was quite heavy. Tony remembered that a man in an angel dust rage often exhibited superhuman strength. It was not uncommon for four or five burly policemen to have difficulty restraining one puny PCP junkie. There were several medical theories about the cause of this freakish increase in physical power, but no theory was of any help to an officer confronted by a raging man with the strength of five or six. Tony figured he probably wouldn't he able to subdue Bobby Valdez with anything less than the revolver, even though he was philosophically opposed to using that ultimate force.
"I'm gonna kill you," Bobby said. His hands were curled into claws. His face was bright red, and spittle formed at one corner of his mouth.
Tony put the big octagonal coffee table between them. "Stop right there, dammit!"
He didn't want to have to kill Bobby Valdez. In all his years with the LAPD, he had shot only three men in the line of duty, and on every occasion he had pulled the trigger strictly in self-defense. None of those three men had died.
Bobby started around the coffee table.
Tony circled away from him.
"Now, I'm the crocodile," Bobby said, grinning.
"Don't make me hurt you."
Bobby stopped and grabbed hold of the coffee table and tipped it up, over, out of the way, and Tony backed into a wall, and Bobby rushed him, shouting something unintelligible, and Tony pulled the trigger, and the bullet tore through Bobby's left shoulder, spinning him around, driving him to his knees, but incredibly, he got up again, his left arm all bloody and hanging uselessly at his side, and, screaming in anger rather than agony, he ran to the fireplace and picked up a small brass shovel and threw it, and Tony ducked, and then suddenly Bobby was rushing at him with an iron poker raised high, and the damned thing caught Tony across the thigh, and he yelped as pain flashed up his hip and down his leg, but the blow wasn't hard enough to break bones, and he didn't collapse, but he did drop down as Bobby swung it again, at his head this time, with more power behind it this time, and Tony fired up into the naked man's chest, at close range, and Bobby was flung backwards with one last wild cry, and he crashed into a chair, then fell to the floor, gushing blood like a macabre fountain, twitched, gurgled, clawed at the shag carpet, bit his own wounded arm, and finally was perfectly still.
Gasping, shaking, cursing, Tony holstered his revolver and stumbled to a telephone he'd spotted on one of the end tables. He dialed 0 and told the operator who he was, where he was, and what he needed. "Ambulance first, police second," he said.
"Yes, sir," she said.
He hung up and limped into the kitchen.
Frank Howard was still sprawled on the floor, in the garbage. He had managed to roll onto his back, but he hadn't gotten any farther.
Tony knelt beside him.
Frank opened his eyes. "You hurt?" he asked weakly.
"No," Tony said.
"Get him?"
"Yeah."
"Dead?"
"Yeah."
"Good."
Frank looked terrible. His face was milk-white, greasy with sweat. The whites of his eyes had an unhealthy yellowish cast that had not been there before, and the right eye was badly bloodshot. There was a hint of blue in his lips. The right shoulder and sleeve of his suit coat were soaked with blood. His left hand was clamped over his stomach wound, but a lot of blood had leaked from under his pale fingers; his shirt and the upper part of his trousers were wet and sticky.
"How's the pain?" Tony asked.
"At first, it was real bad. Couldn't stop screaming. But it's starting to get better. Just kind of a dull burning and thumping now."
Tony's attention had been focused so totally on Bobby Valdez that he hadn't heard Frank's screams.
"Would a tourniquet on your arm help at all?"
"No. The wound's too high. In the shoulder. There's no place to put a tourniquet."
"Help's on the way," Tony said. "I phoned in."
Outside, sirens wailed in the distance. It was too soon to be an ambulance or a black-and-white responding to his call. Someone must have phoned the police when the shooting started.
"That'll be a couple of uniforms," Tony said. "I'll go down and meet them. They'll have a pretty good first aid kit in the cruiser."
"Don't leave me."
"But if they've got a first aid kit--"
"I need more than first aid. Don't leave me," Frank repeated pleadingly.
"Okay."
"Please."
"Okay, Frank."
They were both shivering.
"I don't want to be alone," Frank said.
"I'll stay right here."
"I tried to sit up," Frank said.
"You just lay there."
"I couldn't sit up."
"You're going to be okay."
"Maybe I'm paralyzed."
"Your body's taken a hell of a shock, that's all. You've lost some blood. Naturally, you're weak."
The sirens moaned into silence outside of the apartment complex.
"The ambulance can't be far behind," Tony said.
Frank closed his eyes, winced, groaned.
"You'll be okay, buddy."
Frank opened his eyes. "Come to the hospital with me."
"I will."
"Ride in the ambulance with me."
"I don't know if they'll let me."
"Make them."
"All right. Sure."
"I don't want to be alone."
"Okay," Tony said. "I'll make them let me in the damned ambulance even if I have to pull a gun on them to do it."
Frank smiled thinly, but then a flash of pain burned the smile off his face. "Tony?"
"What is it, Frank?"
"Would you ... hold my hand?"
Tony took his partner's right hand. The right shoulder was the one that had taken the bullet, and Tony thought Frank would have no use of that extremity, but the cold fingers closed around Tony's hand with surprising strength.
"You know what?" Frank asked.
"What?"
"You should do what he says."
"What who says?"
"Eugene Tucker. You should jump off. Take a chance. Do what you really want with your life."
"Don't worry about me. You've got to save your energy for getting better."
Frank grew agitated. He shook his head. "No, no, no. You've got to listen to me. This is important... what I'm trying to tell you. Damned important."
"Okay," Tony said quickly. "Relax. Don't strain yourself."
Frank coughed, and a few bubbles of blood appeared on his bluish lips.
Tony's heart was working like a runaway triphammer. Where was the goddamned ambulance? What the hell was taking the lousy bastards so long?
Frank's voice had a hoarse note in it now, and he was forced to pause repeatedly to draw breath. "If you want to be a painter ... then do it. You're still young enough ... to take a chance."
"Frank, please, for God's sake, save your strength."
"Listen to me! Don't waste any more... time. Life's too goddamned short ... to fiddle away any of it."
"Stop talking like that. I've got a lot of years ahead, and so do you."
"They go by so fast ... so fucking fast. It's no time at all."
Frank gasped. His fingers tightened their already firm grip on Tony's hand.
"Frank? What's wrong?"
Frank didn't say anything. He shuddered. Then he began to cry.
Tony said, "Let me see about that first aid kit."
"Don't leave me. I'm afraid."
"I'll only be gone a minute."
"Don't leave me." Tears streamed down his cheeks.
"Okay. I'll wait. They'll be here in a few seconds."
"Oh. Jesus," Frank said miserably.
"But if the pain's getting worse--"
"I'm not ... in much pain."
"Then what's wrong? Something's wrong."
"I'm just embarrassed. I don't want anyone ... to know."
"Know what?"
"I just ... lost control. I just. ..I... peed in my pants."
Tony didn't know what to say.
"I don't want to be laughed at," Frank said.
"Nobody's going to laugh at you."
"But, Jesus, I peed ... in my pants ... like a baby."
"With all this other mess on the floor, who's going to notice?"
Frank laughed, wincing at the pain the laughter caused, and he squeezed Tony's hand even harder.
Another siren. A few blocks away. Approaching rapidly.
"The ambulance," Tony said. "It'll be here in a minute."
Frank's voice was getting thinner and weaker by the second. "I'm scared, Tony."
"Please, Frank. Please, don't be scared. I'm here. Everything's going to be all right."
"I want ... someone to remember me," Frank said.
"What do you mean?"
"After I'm gone ... I want someone to remember I was here."
"You'll be around a long time yet."
"Who's going to remember me?"
"I will," Tony said thickly. "I'll remember you."
The new siren was only a block away, almost on top of them.
Frank said, "You know what? I think ... maybe I will make it. The pain's gone all of a sudden."
"Is it?"
"That's good, isn't it?"
"Sure."
The siren cut out as the ambulance stopped with a squeal of brakes almost directly below the apartment windows. Frank's voice was getting so weak that Tony had to lean close to hear it. "Tony ... hold me." His grip on Tony's hand slackened. His cold fingers opened. "Hold me, please. Jesus. Hold me, Tony. Will you?"
For an instant, Tony was worried about complicating the man's wounds, but then he knew intuitively that it no longer mattered. He sat down on the floor in the garbage and blood. He put an arm under Frank and lifted him into a sitting position. Frank coughed weakly, and his left hand slid off his belly; the wound was revealed, a hideous and unrepairable hole from which intestines bulged. From the moment Bobby first pulled the trigger, Frank had begun to die; he had never had a hope of survival.
"Hold me."
Tony took Frank into his arms as best he could, held him, held him as a father would hold a frightened child, held him and rocked gently, crooned softly, reassuringly. He kept crooning even after he knew that Frank was dead, crooning and slowly rocking, gently and serenely rocking, rocking.

***

At four o'clock Monday afternoon, the telephone company serviceman arrived at Hilary's house. She showed him where the five extensions were located. He was just about to begin work on the kitchen phone when it rang.
She was afraid that it was the anonymous caller again. She didn't want to answer it, but the serviceman looked at her expectantly, and on the fifth ring she overcame her fear, snatched up the receiver. "Hello?"
"Hilary Thomas?"
"Yes."
"This is Michael Savatino. Savatino's Ristorante?"
"Oh, I don't need reminding. I won't forget you or your wonderful restaurant. We had a perfect dinner."
"Thank you. We try very hard. Listen, Miss Thomas--"
"Please call me Hilary."
"Hilary, then. Have you heard from Tony yet today?"
Suddenly she was aware of the tension in his voice. She knew, almost as a clairvoyant might know, that something awful had happened to Tony. For a moment she was breathless, and fuzzy darkness closed in briefly at the edges of her vision.
"Hilary? Are you there?"
"I haven't heard from him since last night. Why?"
"I don't want to alarm you. There was some trouble--"
"Oh, God."
"--but Tony wasn't hurt."
"Are you sure?"
"Just a few bruises."
"Is he in the hospital?"
"No, no. He's really all right."
The knot of pressure in her chest loosened a bit.
"What kind of trouble?" she asked.
In a few sentences, Michael told her about the shooting.
It could have been Tony who died. She felt weak.
"Tony's taking it hard," Michael said. "Very hard. When he and Frank first started working together, they didn't get along well. But things have improved. The past few days, they got to know each other better. In fact they'd gotten fairly close."
"Where's Tony now?"
"His apartment. The shooting was at eleven-thirty this morning. He's been at his apartment since two. I was with him until a few minutes ago. I wanted to stay, but he insisted I go to the restaurant as usual. I wanted him to come with me, but he wouldn't. He won't admit it, but he needs someone right now."
"I'll go to him," she said.
"I was hoping you'd say that."
Hilary freshened up and changed clothes. She was ready to leave fifteen minutes before the repairman had finished with the phones, and she never endured a longer quarter-hour.
In the car, on the way to Tony's place, she recalled how she had felt in that dark moment when she'd thought Tony was seriously hurt, perhaps dead. She nearly had been sick to her stomach. An intolerable sense of loss had filled her.
Last night, in bed, awaiting sleep, she had argued with herself about whether or not she loved Tony. Could she possibly love anyone after the physical and psychological torture she had suffered as a child, after what she had learned about the ugly duplicitous nature of most other human beings? And could she love a man she'd known for only a few days? The argument still wasn't settled. But now she knew that she dreaded losing Tony Clemenza in a way and to a degree that she had never feared losing anyone else in her life.
At his apartment complex, she parked beside the blue Jeep.
He lived upstairs in a two-story building. Glass wind chimes were hung from the balcony near one of the other apartments; they sounded melancholy in the late-afternoon breeze.
When he answered the door, he wasn't surprised to see her. "I guess Michael called you."
"Yes. Why didn't you?" she asked.
"He probably told you I'm a total wreck. As you can see, he exaggerates."
"He's concerned about you."
"I can handle it," he said, forcing a smile. "I'm okay."
In spite of his attempt to play down his reaction to Frank Howard's death, she saw the haunted look in his face and the bleak expression in his eyes.
She wanted to hug him and console him, but she was not very good with people in ordinary circumstances, let alone in a situation like this. Besides, she sensed that he had to be ready for consolation before she dared offer it, and he was not.
"I'm coping," he insisted.
"Can I come in anyway?"
"Oh. Sure. Sorry."
He lived in a one-bedroom bachelor apartment, but the living room, at least, was large and airy. It had a high ceiling and a row of big windows in the north wall.
"Good northern light for a painter," Hilary said.
"That's why I rented the place."
It looked more like a studio than like a living room. A dozen of his eye-catching paintings hung on the walls. Other canvases were standing on the floor, leaning against the walls, stacks of them in some places, sixty or seventy in all. Two easels held works in progress. There were also a large drawing table, stool, and artist's supply cabinet. Tall shelves were jammed full of oversized art books. The only concessions to ordinary living room decor were two short sofas, two end tables, two lamps, a coffee table--all of which were arranged to form a cozy conversation corner. Although its arrangement was peculiar, the room had great warmth and livability.
"I've decided to get drunk," Tony said as he closed the door. "Very drunk. Totally smashed. I was just pouring my first drink when you rang. Would you like something?"
"What are you drinking?" she asked.
"Bourbon on the rocks."
"Make it the same for me."
While he was in the kitchen preparing drinks, she took a closer look at his paintings. Some of them were ultra-realistic; in these the detail was so fine, so brilliantly observed, so flawlessly rendered that, in terms of realism, the paintings actually transcended mere photography. Several of the canvases were surrealistic, but in a fresh and commanding style that was not at all reminiscent of Dali, Ernst, Miro, or Tanguy. They were closer to the work of René Magritte than to anything else, especially the Magritte of The Domain of Arnheim and Ready-Made Bouquet. But Magritte had never used such meticulous detail in his paintings, and it was this realer than real quality in Tony's visions that made the surrealistic elements especially striking and unique.
He returned from the kitchen with two glasses of bourbon, and as she accepted her drink she said, "Your work is so fresh and exciting."
"Is it?"
"Michael is right. Your paintings will sell as fast as you can create them."
"It's nice to think so. Nice to dream about."
"If you'd only give them a chance--"
"As I said before, you're very kind, but you're not an expert."
He was not at all himself. His voice was drab, wooden. He was dull, washed out, depressed.
She needled him a bit, hoping to bring him to life. "You think you're so smart," she said. "But you're dumb. When it comes to your own work, you're dumb. You're blind to the possibilities."
"I'm just an amateur."
"Bullshit."
"A fairly good amateur."
"Sometimes you can be so damned infuriating," she said.
"I don't want to talk about art," he said.
He switched on the stereo: Beethoven interpreted by Ormandy. Then he went to one of the sofas in the far corner of the room.
She followed him, sat beside him. "What do you want to talk about?"
"Movies," he said.
"Do you really?"
"Maybe books."
"Really?"
"Or theater."
"What you really want to talk about is what happened to you today."
"No. That's the last thing."
"You need to talk about it, even if you don't want to."
"What I need to do is forget all about it, wipe it out of my mind."
"So you're playing turtle," she said. "You think you can pull your head under your shell and close up tight."
"Exactly," he said.
"Last week, when I wanted to hide from the whole world, when you wanted me to go out with you instead, you said it wasn't healthy for a person to withdraw into himself after an upsetting experience. You said it was best to share your feelings with other people."
"I was wrong," he said.
"You were right."
He closed his eyes, said nothing.
"Do you want me to leave?" she asked.
"No."
"I will if you want me to. No hard feelings."
"Please stay," he said.
"All right. What shall we talk about?"
"Beethoven and bourbon."
"I can take a hint," she said.
They sat silently side by side on the sofa, eyes closed, heads back, listening to the music, sipping the bourbon, as the sunlight turned amber and then muddy orange beyond the large windows. Slowly, the room filled up with shadows.

***

Early Monday evening, Avril Tannerton discovered someone had broken into Forever View. He made that discovery when he went down to the cellar, where he had a lavishly equipped woodworking shop; he saw that one of the panes in a basement window had been carefully covered with masking tape and then broken to allow the intruder to reach the latch. It was a much smaller-than-average window, hinged at the top, but even a fairly large man could wriggle through it if he was determined.
Avril was certain there was no stranger in the house at the moment. Furthermore, he knew the window hadn't been broken Friday night, for he would have noticed it when he spent an hour in his workshop, doing fine sanding on his latest project--a cabinet for his three hunting rifles and two shotguns. He didn't believe anyone would have the nerve to smash the window in broad daylight or when he, Tannerton, was at home, as he had been the previous night, Sunday; therefore, he concluded that the break-in must have occurred Saturday night, while he was at Helen Virtillion's place in Santa Rosa. Except for the body of Bruno Frye, Forever View had been deserted on Saturday. Evidently, the burglar had known the house was unguarded and had taken advantage of the opportunity.
Burglar.
Did that make sense?
A burglar?
He didn't think anything had been stolen from the public rooms on the first floor or from his private quarters on the second level. He was positive he would have noticed evidence of a theft almost immediately upon his return Sunday morning.
Besides, his guns were still in the den, and so was his extensive coin collection; certainly, those things would be prime targets for a thief.
In his woodworking shop, to the right of the broken cellar window, there were a couple of thousand dollars' worth of high-quality hand and power tools. Some of them were hanging neatly from a pegboard wall, and others were nestled in custom racks he had designed and built for them. He could tell at a glance that nothing was missing.
Nothing stolen.
Nothing vandalized.
What sort of burglar broke into a house just to have a look at things?
Avril stared at the pieces of glass and masking tape on the floor, then up at the violated window, then around the cellar, pondering the situation, until suddenly he realized that, indeed, something had been taken. Three fifty-pound bags of dry mortar mix were gone. Last spring, he and Gary Olmstead had torn out the old wooden porch in front of the funeral home; they'd built up the ground with a couple truckloads of topsoil, had terraced it quite professionally, and had put down a new brick veranda. They had also torn up the cracked and canted concrete sidewalks and had replaced them with brick. At the end of the five-week-long chore, they found themselves with three extra bags of mortar mix, but they didn't return them for a refund because Avril intended to construct a large patio behind the house next summer. Now those three bags of mix were gone.
That discovery, far from answering his questions, only contributed to the mystery. Amazed and perplexed, he stared at the spot where the bags had been stacked.
Why would a burglar ignore expensive rifles, valuable coins, and other worthwhile loot in favor of three relatively inexpensive bags of dry mortar mix?
Tannerton scratched his head. "Strange," he said.

***

After sitting quietly beside Hilary in the gathering darkness for fifteen minutes, after listening to Beethoven, after sipping two or three ounces of bourbon, and after Hilary replenished their drinks, Tony found himself talking about Frank Howard. He didn't realize he was going to open up to her until he had already begun speaking; he seemed to hear himself suddenly in mid-sentence, and then the words poured out. For half an hour, he spoke continuously, pausing only for an occasional sip of bourbon, recalling his first impression of Frank, the initial friction between them, the tense and the humorous incidents on the job, that boozy evening at The Bolt Hole, the blind date with Janet Yamada, and the recent understanding and affection that he and Frank had found for each other. Finally, when he began to recount the events in Bobby Valdez's apartment, he spoke hesitantly, softly. When he closed his eyes he could see that garbage- and blood-spattered kitchen as vividly as he could see his own living room when his eyes were open. As he tried to tell Hilary what it had been like to hold a dying friend in his arms, he began to tremble. He was terribly cold, frigid in his flesh and bones, icy in his heart. His teeth chattered. Slouched on the sofa, deep in purple shadow, he shed his first tears for Frank Howard, and they felt scalding hot on his chilled skin.
As he wept, Hilary took his hand; then she held him in much the same way that he had held Frank. She used her small cocktail napkin to dry his face. She kissed his cheeks, his eyes.
At first, she offered only consolation, and that was all he sought; but without either of them consciously striving to alter the embrace, the quality of it began to change. He put his arms around her, and it was no longer entirely clear who was holding and comforting whom. His hands moved up and down her sleek back, up and down, and he marveled at the exquisite contours; he was excited by the firmness and strength and suppleness of her body beneath the blouse. Her hands roamed over him, too, stroking and squeezing and admiring his hard muscles. She kissed the corners of his mouth, and he eagerly returned those kisses full on her lips. Their quick tongues met, and the kiss became hot, fiercely hot and liquid; it left them breathing harder than they had been when their lips first touched.
Simultaneously, they realized what was happening, and they froze, uncomfortably reminded of the dead friend for whom mourning had just begun. If they gave each other what they so badly needed and wanted, it might be like giggling at a funeral. For a moment, they felt that they were on the verge of committing a thoughtless and thoroughly blasphemous act.
But their desire was so strong that it overcame their doubts about the propriety of making love on this night of all nights. They kissed tentatively, then hungrily, and it was as sweet as ever. Her hands moved demandingly over him, and he responded to her touch, then she to his. He realized it was good and right for them to seek joy together. Making love now was not an act of disrespect toward the dead; it was a reaction to the unfairness of death itself. Their unquenchable desire was the result of many things, one of which was a profound animal need to prove that they were alive, fully and unquestionably and exuberantly alive.
By unspoken agreement, they got up from the couch and went to the bedroom.
Tony switched on a lamp in the living room as they walked out; that light spilled through the open doorway and was the only thing that illuminated the bed. Soft penumbral light. Warm and golden light. The light seemed to love Hilary, for it didn't merely fall dispassionately upon her as it did upon the bed and upon Tony; it caressed her, lovingly accented the milky bronze shade of her flawless skin, added luster to her raven-black hair, and sparkled in her big eyes.
They stood beside the bed, embracing, kissing, and then he began to undress her. He unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off. He unhooked her bra; she shrugged out of it and let it fall to the floor. Her breasts were beautiful--round and full and upswept. The nipples were large and erect; he bent to them, kissed them. She took his head in her hands, lifted his face to hers, found his mouth with hers. She sighed. His hands trembled with excitement as he unbuckled her belt, unsnapped and unzipped her jeans. They slid down her long legs, and she stepped out of them, already having stepped out of her shoes.
Tony went to his knees before her, intending to pull off her panties, and he saw a four-inch-long welt of scar tissue along her left side. It began at the edge of her flat belly and curved around to her back. It was not the result of surgery; it wasn't the thin line that even a moderately neat doctor would leave. Tony had seen old, well healed bullet and knife wounds before, and even though the light was not bright, he was sure that this mark had been caused by either a gun or a blade. A long time ago, she had been hurt badly. The thought of her enduring so much pain stirred in him a desire to protect and shelter her. He had a hundred questions about the scar, but this wasn't the right time to ask them. He tenderly kissed the welt of puckered skin, and he felt her stiffen. He sensed that the scar embarrassed her. He wanted to tell her it didn't detract from her beauty or desirability, and that, in fact, this single minor flaw only emphasized her otherwise incredible physical perfection.
The way to reassure her was with actions, not words. He pulled down her panties, and she stepped out of them. Slowly, slowly, he moved his hands up her gorgeous legs, over the lovely curves of her calves, over the smooth thighs. He kissed her glossy black pubic bush, and the hairs bristled crisply against his face. As he stood, he cupped her firm buttocks in both hands, gently kneaded the taut flesh, and she moved against him, and their lips met again. The kiss lasted either a few seconds or a few minutes, and when it ended, Hilary said, "Hurry."
As she pulled back the covers and got into bed, Tony stripped off his own clothes. Nude, he stretched out beside her and took her in his arms.
They explored each other with their hands, endlessly fascinated by textures and shapes and angles and sizes and degrees of resiliency, and his erection throbbed as she fondled it.
After a while, but long before he actually entered her, he felt strangely as if he were melting into her, as if they were becoming one creature, not physically or sexually so much as spiritually, blending together through some sort of truly miraculous psychic osmosis. Overwhelmed by the warmth of her, excited by the promise of her magnificent body, but most deeply affected by the unique murmurs and movements and actions and reactions that made her Hilary and nobody but Hilary, Tony felt as if he had taken some new and exotic drug. His perceptions seemed to extend beyond the range of his own senses, so that he felt almost as if he were seeing through Hilary's eyes as well as through his own, feeling with his hands and her hands, tasting her mouth with his but also tasting his mouth with hers. Two minds, meshed. Two hearts, synchronized.
Her hot kisses made him want to taste every part of her, every delicious inch, and he did, arriving, at long last, at the warm juncture of her thighs. He spread her elegant legs and licked the moist center of her, opened those secret folds of flesh with his tongue, found the hidden nubble that, when softly flicked, caused her to gasp with pleasure.
She began to moan and writhe under the loving lash.
"Tony!"
He made love to her with his tongue and teeth and lips.
She arched her back, clutched the sheets with both hands, thrashed ecstatically.
As she raised herself, he slipped his hands under her, grabbed her rump, held her to him.
"Oh, Tony! Yes, yes!"
She was breathing deeply, rapidly. She tried to pull away from him when the pleasure became too intense, but then a moment later she thrust herself at him, begging for more. Eventually, she began to quiver all over, and those shallow tremors swiftly grew into wonderful wrenching shudders of pure delight. She gasped for breath and tossed her head and cried out deliriously, rode the wave within her, came and came again, lithe muscles contracting, relaxing, contracting, relaxing, until finally she was exhausted. She collapsed, and sighed.
He raised his head, kissed her fluttering belly, then moved up to tease her nipples with his tongue.
She reached down between them and gripped the iron hardness of him. Suddenly, as she anticipated this final joining, this complete union, she was filled with a new erotic tension.
He opened her with his fingers, and she released him from her hand, and he guided himself into her.
"Yes, yes, yes," she said as he filled her up. "My lovely Tony. Lovely, lovely, lovely Tony."
"You're beautiful."
It had never been sweeter for him. He braced himself above her on his fully-extended arms, looked down at her exquisite face. Their eyes locked, and after a moment it seemed that he was no longer merely staring at her, but into her, through her eyes, into the essence of Hilary Thomas, into her soul. She closed her eyes, and a moment later he closed his, and he discovered that the extraordinary bond was not destroyed when the gaze was broken.
Tony had made love to other women, but he had never been as close to any of them as he was to Hilary Thomas. Because this coupling was so special, he wanted to make it last a long time, wanted to bring her to the edge with him, wanted to take the plunge together. But this time he did not have the kind of control that usually marked his love-making. He was rushing toward the brink and could do nothing to stop himself. It was not just that she was tighter and slicker and hotter than other women he had known; it was not merely some trick of well-trained vaginal muscles; it was not that her perfect breasts drove him wild or that her silken skin was far silkier than that of any other women in his experience. All of those things were true, but it was the fact that she was special to him, extraordinarily special in a way that he had not yet even fully defined, that made being with her unbearably exciting.
She sensed his onrushing orgasm, and she put her hands on his back, pulled him down. He didn't want to burden her with his full weight, but she seemed unaware of it. Her breasts squashed against his chest as he settled onto her. She lifted her hips and ground her pelvis against him, and he thrust harder and faster. Incredibly, she started to come again just as he began to spurt uncontrollably. She held him close, held him tight, repeatedly whispering his name as he erupted and erupted within her, thickly and forcefully and endlessly within her, in the deepest and darkest reaches of her. As he emptied himself, a tremendous tide of tenderness and affection and aching need swept through him, and he knew that he would never be able to let her go.

***

Afterwards, they lay side by side on the bed, holding hands, heartbeats gradually easing.
Hilary was physically and emotionally wrung out by the experience. The number and startling power of her climaxes had shaken her. She'd never felt anything quite like it. Each orgasm had been a bolt of lightning, striking to the core of her, jolting through every fiber, an indescribably thrilling current. But Tony had given her a great deal more than sexual pleasure, she had felt something else, something new to her, something splendid and powerful that was beyond words.
She was aware that some people would say the word "love" perfectly described her feelings, but she wasn't ready to accept that disturbing definition. For a long, long time, since her childhood, the words "love" and "pain" had been inextricably linked in Hilary's mind. She couldn't believe that she was in love with Tony Clemenza (or he with her), dared not believe it, for if she were to do so, she would make herself vulnerable, leave herself defenseless.
On the other hand, she had difficulty believing that Tony would knowingly hurt her. He wasn't like Earl, her father. He wasn't like anyone she had ever known before. There was a tenderness about him, a quality of mercy, that made her feel that she would be perfectly safe in his hands. Perhaps she ought to take a chance with him. Maybe he was the one man who was worth the risk.
But then she realized how she would feel if their luck together went sour after she had put everything on the line for him. That would be a hard blow. She didn't know if she would bounce back from that one.
A problem.
No easy solution.
She didn't want to think about it right now. She just wanted to lay beside him, basking in the glow that they had created together.
She began to remember their lovemaking, the erotic sensations that had left her weak, some of which still lingered warmly in her flesh.
Tony rolled onto his side and faced her. He kissed her throat, her cheek. "A penny for your thoughts."
"They're worth more than that," she said.
"A dollar."
"More than that."
"A hundred dollars?"
"Maybe a hundred thousand."
"Expensive thoughts."
"Not thoughts, really. Memories."
"Hundred-thousand-dollar memories?"
"Mmmmmm."
"Of what?"
"Of what we did a few minutes ago."
"You know," he said, "you surprised me. You seem so proper and pure--almost angelic--but you've got a wonderfully bawdy streak in you."
"I can be bawdy," she admitted. "Very bawdy."
"You like my body?"
"It's a beautiful body."
For a while, they talked mostly nonsense, lovers' talk, murmuring dreamily. They were so mellow that everything seemed amusing to them.
Then, still speaking softly, but with a more serious note in his voice, Tony said, "You know, of course, I'm not ever going to let go of you."
She sensed that he was prepared to make a commitment if he could determine that she was ready to do likewise. But that was the problem. She wasn't ready. She didn't know if she would ever be ready. She wanted him. Oh, Jesus, how she wanted him! She couldn't think of anything more exciting or rewarding than the two of them living together, enriching each other's lives with their separate talents and interests. But she dreaded the disappointment and pain that would come if he ever stopped wanting her. She had put all of those terrible years in Chicago with Earl and Emma behind her, but she could not so easily disregard the lessons she had learned in that tenement apartment so long ago. She was afraid of commitment.
Looking for a way to avoid the implied question in his statement, hoping to keep the conversation frivolous, she said, "You're never going to let go of me?"
"Never."
"Won't it be awkward for you, trying to do police work with me in hand?"
He looked into her eyes, trying to determine if she understood what he had said.
Nervously, she said, "Don't hurry me, Tony. I need time. Just a little time."
"Take all the time you want."
"Right now I'm so happy that I just want to be silly. It's not the right time to be serious."
"So I'll try to be silly." he said.
"What shall we talk about?"
"I want to know all about you."
"That sounds serious, not silly."
"Tell you what. You be half-serious, and I'll be half-silly. We'll take turns at it."
"All right. First question."
"What's your favorite breakfast food?"
"Cornflakes," she said.
"Your favorite lunch?"
"Cornflakes."
"Your favorite dinner?"
"Cornflakes."
"Wait a minute," he said.
"What's wrong?"
"I figure you were serious about breakfast. But then you slipped in two silly responses in a row."
"I love cornflakes."
"Now you owe me two serious answers."
"Shoot."
"Where were you born?"
"Chicago."
"Raised there?"
"Yes."
"Parents?"
"I don't know who my parents are. I was hatched from an egg. A duck egg. It was a miracle. You must have read all about it. There's even a Catholic church in Chicago named after the event. Our Lady of the Duck Egg."
"Very silly indeed."
"Thank you."
"Parents?" he asked again.
"That's not fair," she said. "You can't ask the same thing twice."
"Who says?"
"I say."
"Is it that horrible?"
"What?"
"Whatever your parents did."
She tried to deflect the question. "Where'd you get the idea they did something horrible?"
"I've asked you about them before. I've asked you about your childhood, too. You've always avoided those questions. You were very smooth, very clever about changing the subject. You thought I didn't notice, but I did."
He had the most penetrating stare she'd ever encountered. It was almost frightening.
She closed her eyes so that he couldn't see into her.
"Tell me," he said.
"They were alcoholics."
"Both of them?"
"Yeah."
"Bad?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Violent?"
"Yeah."
"And?"
"And I don't want to talk about it now."
"It might be good for you."
"No. Please, Tony. I'm happy. If you make me talk about them ... then I won't be happy any more. It's been a beautiful evening so far. Don't spoil it."
"Sooner or later, I want to hear about it."
"Okay," she said. "But not tonight."
He sighed. "All right. Let's see.... Who's your favorite television personality?"
"Kermit the Frog."
"Who's your favorite human television personality?"
"Kermit the Frog," she said.
"I said human this time."
"To me, he seems more human than anyone else on TV."
"Good point. What about the scar?"
"Does Kermit have a scar?"
"I mean your scar."
"Does it turn you off?" she asked, again trying to deflect the question.
"No," he said. "It just makes you more beautiful."
"Does it?"
"It does."
"Mind if I check you out on my lie detector?"
"You have a lie detector here?"
"Oh, sure," she said. She reached down and took his flaccid prick in her hand. "My lie detector works quite simply. There's no chance of getting an inaccurate reading. We just take the main plug"--she squeezed his organ--"and we insert it in socket B."
"Socket B?"
She slid down on the bed and took him into her mouth. In seconds, he swelled into pulsing, rigid readiness. In a few minutes, he was barely able to restrain himself.
She looked up and grinned. "You weren't lying."
"I'll say it again. You're a surprisingly bawdy wench."
"You want my body again?"
"I want your body again."
"What about my mind?"
"Isn't that part of the package?"
She took the top this time, settled onto him, moved back and forth, side to side, up and down. She smiled at him as he reached for her jiggling breasts, and after that she was not aware of single movements or individual strokes; everything blurred into a continuous, fluid, superheated motion that had no beginning and no end.
At midnight, they went to the kitchen and prepared a very late dinner, a cold meal of cheese and leftover chicken and fruit and chilled white wine. They brought everything back to the bedroom and ate a little, fed each other a little, then lost interest in the food before they'd eaten much of anything.
They were like a couple of teenagers, obsessed with their bodies and blessed with apparently limitless stamina. As they rocked in rhythmic ecstasy, Hilary was acutely aware that this was not merely a series of sex acts in which they were engaged; this was an important ritual, a profound ceremony that was cleansing her of long-nurtured fears. She was entrusting herself to another human being in a way she would have thought impossible only a week ago, for she was putting her pride out of the way, prostrating herself, offering herself up to him, risking rejection and humiliation and degradation, with the fragile hope that he would not misuse her. And he did not. A lot of the things they did might have been degrading with the wrong partner, but with Tony each act was exhalting, uplifting, glorious. She was not yet able to tell him that she loved him, not with words, but she was saying the same thing when, in bed, she begged him to do whatever he wanted with her, leaving herself no protection, opening herself completely, until, finally, kneeling before him, she used her lips and tongue to draw one last ounce of sweetness from his loins.
Her hatred for Earl and Emma was as strong now as it had been when they were alive, for it was their influence that made her unable to express her feelings to Tony. She wondered what she would have to do to break the chains that they had put on her.
For a while, she and Tony lay in bed, holding each other, saying nothing because nothing needed to be said.
Ten minutes later, at four-thirty in the morning, she said, "I should be getting home."
"Stay."
"Are you capable of doing more?"
"God, no! I'm wiped out. I just want to hold you. Sleep here." he said.
"If I stay, we won't sleep."
"Are you capable of doing more?"
"Unfortunately, dear man, I'm not. But I've got things to do tomorrow, and so have you. And we're much too excited and too full of each other to get any rest so long as we're sharing a bed. We'll keep touching like this, talking like this, resisting sleep like this."
"Well," he said, "we've got to learn to spend the night together. I mean, we're going to be spending a lot of them in the same bed, don't you think?"
"Many, many," she said. "The first night's the worst. We'll adjust when the novelty wears off. I'll start wearing curlers and cold cream to bed."
"And I'll start smoking cigars and watching Johnny Carson."
"Such a shame," she said.
"Of course, it'll take a bit of time for the freshness to wear off."
"A bit," she agreed.
"Like fifty years."
"Or sixty."
They delayed her leaving for another fifteen minutes, but finally she got up and dresssed. Tony pulled on a pair of jeans. In the living room, as they walked toward the door, she stopped and stared at one of his paintings and said, "I want to take six of your best pieces to Wyant Stevens in Beverly Hills and see if he'll handle you."
"He won't."
"I want to try."
"That's one of the best galleries."
"Why start at the bottom?"
He stared at her, but he seemed to be seeing someone else. At last, he said, "Maybe I should jump."
"Jump?"
He told her about the impassioned advice he had received from Eugene Tucker, the black ex-convict who was now designing dresses.
"Tucker is right," she said. "And this isn't even a jump. It's only a little hop. You're not quitting your job with the police department or anything. You're just testing the waters."
Tony shrugged. "Wyant Stevens will turn me down cold, but I guess I don't lose anything by giving him the chance to do it."
"He won't turn you down," she said. "Pick out half a dozen paintings you feel are most representative of your work. I'll try to get us an appointment with Wyant either later today or tomorrow."
"You pick them out right now," he said. "Take them with you. When you get a chance to see Stevens, show them to him."
"But I'm sure he'll want to meet you."
"If he likes what he sees, then he'll want to meet me. And if he does like it, I'll be happy to go see him."
"Tony, really--"
"I just don't want to be there when he tells you it's good work but only that of a gifted amateur."
"You're impossible."
"Cautious."
"Such a pessimist."
"Realist."
She didn't have time to look at all of the sixty canvases that were stacked in the living room. She was surprised to learn that he had more than fifty others stored in closets, as well as a hundred pen and ink drawings, nearly as many watercolors, and countless preliminary pencil sketches. She wanted to see all of them, but only when she was well-rested and fully able to enjoy them. She chose six of the twelve pieces that hung on the living room walls. To protect the paintings, they carefully wrapped them in lengths of an old sheet, which Tony tore apart for that purpose.
He put on a shirt and shoes, helped her carry the bundles to her car, where they stashed them in the trunk.
She closed and locked the trunk, and they looked at each other, neither of them wanting to say goodbye.
They were standing at the edge of a pool of light cast by a twenty-foot-high sodium-vapor lamp. He kissed her chastely.
The night was chilly and silent. There were stars.
"It'll be dawn before long," he said.
"Want to sing 'Two Sleepy People' with me?"
"I'm a lousy singer," he said.
"I doubt it." She leaned against him. "Judging from my experience, you're excellent at everything you do."
"Bawdy."
"I try to be."
They kissed again, and then he opened the driver's door for her.
"You're not going to work today?" she asked.
"No. Not after ... Frank. I have to go in and write up a report, but that'll take only an hour or so. I'm taking a few days. I've got a lot of time coming to me."
"I'll call you this afternoon."
"I'll be waiting," he said.
She drove away from there on empty early-morning streets. After she had gone a few blocks, her stomach began to growl with hunger, and she remembered that she didn't have the fixings for breakfast at home. She'd intended to do her grocery shopping after the man from the telephone company had gone, but then she'd heard from Michael Savatino and had rushed to Tony's place. She turned left at the next corner and went to an all-night market to pick up eggs and milk.

***

Tony figured Hilary wouldn't need any more than ten minutes to get home on the deserted streets, but he waited fifteen minutes before he called to find out if she had made the trip safely. Her phone didn't ring. All he got was a series of computer sounds--the beeps and buzzes that comprised the language of smart machines--then a few clicks and snaps and pops, then the hollow ghostly hissing of a missed connection. He hung up, dialed once more, being careful to get every digit right, but again the phone would not ring.
He was certain that the new unlisted number he had for her was correct. When she had given it to him, he had double-checked to be sure he'd gotten it right. And she read it off a carbon copy of the telephone company work order, which she had in her purse, so there wasn't any chance she was mistaken about it.
He dialed the operator and told her his problem. She tried to ring the number for him, but she couldn't get through, either.
"Is it off the hook?" he asked.
"It doesn't seem to be."
"What can you do?"
"I'll report the number out of order," she said. "Our service department will take care of it."
"When?"
"Does this number belong to either an elderly person or an invalid?"
"No," he said.
"Then it falls under normal service procedures," she said. "One of our servicemen will look into it sometime after eight o'clock this morning."
"Thank you."
He put down the receiver. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. He stared pensively at the rumpled sheets where Hilary had lain, looked at the slip of paper on which her new number was written.
Out of order?
He supposed it was possible that the serviceman had made a mistake when he'd switched Hilary's phones yesterday afternoon. Possible. But not probable. Not very likely at all.
Suddenly, he thought of the anonymous caller who had been bothering her. A man who did that sort of thing was usually weak, ineffectual, sexually stunted; almost without exception, he was incapable of having a normal relationship with a woman, and he was generally too introverted and frightened to attempt rape. Usually. Almost without exception. Generally. But was it conceivable that this crank was the one out of a thousand who was dangerous?
Tony put one hand on his stomach. He was beginning to feel queasy.
If bookmakers in Las Vegas had been taking bets on the likelihood of Hilary Thomas becoming the target of two unconnected homicidal maniacs in less than a week, the odds against would have been astronomical. On the other hand, during his years with the Los Angeles Police Department, Tony had seen the improbable happen again and again; and long ago he had learned to expect the unexpected.
He thought of Bobby Valdez. Naked. Crawling out of that small kitchen cabinet. Eyes wild. The pistol in his hand.
Outside the bedroom window, even though first light still had not touched the eastern sky, a bird cried. It was a shrill cry, rising and falling and rising again as the bird swooped from tree to tree in the courtyard; it sounded as if it was being pursued by something very fast and very hungry and relentless.
Sweat broke out on Tony's brow.
He got up from the bed.
Something was happening at Hilary's place. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

***

Because she stopped at the all-night market to buy milk, eggs, butter, and a few other items, Hilary didn't get home until more than half an hour after she left Tony's apartment. She was hungry and pleasantly weary. She was looking forward to a cheese omelet with a lot of finely chopped parsley--and then at least six uninterrupted hours of deep, deep sleep. She was far too tired to bother putting the Mercedes in the garage: she parked in the circular driveway.
The automatic lawn sprinklers sprayed water over the dark grass, making a cool hissing-whistling sound. A breeze rustled the palm fronds overhead.
She let herself into the house by the front entrance. The living room was pitch-black. But having anticipated a late return, she had left the foyer light burning when she'd gone out. Inside, she held the bag of groceries in one arm, closed and double-locked the door.
She switched on the living room ceiling light and took two steps out of the foyer before she realized that the place had been destroyed. Two table lamps were smashed, the shades torn to shreds. A glass display case lay in thousands of sharp pieces on the carpet; and the expensive limited-edition porcelains that had been in it were ruined: they were reduced to worthless fragments, thrown down on the stone hearth and ground underfoot. The sofa and armchairs were ripped open; chunks of foam and wads of cotton padding material were scattered all over the floor. Two wooden chairs, which apparently had been smashed repeatedly against one wall, were now only piles of kindling, and the wall was scarred. The legs were broken off the lovely little antique corner desk; all of the drawers were pulled from it and the bottoms knocked out of them. Every painting was still where she'd put it, but each hung in unrepairable ribbons. Ashes had been scooped out of the fireplace and smeared over the beautiful Edward Fields carpet. Not a single piece of furniture or decoration had been overlooked; even the fireplace screen had been kicked apart, and all of the plants had been jerked out of their pots and torn to bits.
Hilary was dazed at first, but then her shock gave way to anger at the vandals. "Son of a bitch," she said between clenched teeth.
She had passed many happy hours personally choosing every item in the room. She spent a small fortune on them, but it wasn't the cost of the wreckage that disturbed her; most of it was covered by insurance. However, there was sentimental value that could not be replaced, for these were the first really nice things that she had ever owned, and it hurt to lose them. Tears shimmered at the corners of her eyes.
Numb, disbelieving, she walked farther into the rubble before she realized that she might be in danger. She stopped, listened. The house was silent.
An icy shiver raced up her spine, and for one horrible instant she thought she felt someone's breath against the nape of her neck.
She whirled, looked behind her.
No one was there.
The foyer closet, which had been closed when she'd come into the house, was still closed. For a moment, she stared at it expectantly, afraid that it would open. But if anyone had been hiding in there, waiting for her to arrive, he would have come out by now.
This is absolutely crazy, she thought. It can't happen again. It just can't. That's preposterous. Isn't it?
There was a noise behind her.
With a soft cry of alarm, she turned and threw up her free arm to fend off the attacker.
But there was no attacker. She was still alone in the living room.
Nevertheless, she was convinced that what she had heard was not something so innocent as a naturally settling beam or floorboard. She knew she was not the only person in the house. She sensed another presence.
The noise again.
In the dining room.
A snapping. A tinkling. Like someone taking a step on broken glass or shattered china.
Then another step.
The dining room lay beyond an archway, twenty feet from Hilary. It was as black as a grave in there.
Another step: tinkle-snap.
She started to back up, cautiously retreating from the source of the noise, edging toward the front door, which now seemed a mile away. She wished she hadn't locked it.
A man moved out of the perfect darkness of the dining room, into the penumbral area beneath the archway, a big man, tall, and broad in the shoulders. He paused in the gloom for a second, then stepped into the brightly lit living room.
"No!" Hilary said.
Stunned, she stopped backing toward the door. Her heart leapt, and her mouth went dry, and she shook her head back and forth, back and forth: no, no, no.
He was holding a large and wickedly sharp knife. He grinned at her. It was Bruno Frye.

***

Tony was thankful that the streets were empty, for he couldn't have tolerated any delay. He was afraid he was already too late.
He drove hard and fast, north on Santa Monica, then west on Wilshire, putting the Jeep up to seventy miles an hour by the time he reached the first downslope just outside the Beverly Hills city limits, engine screaming, windows and loose dashboard knobs vibrating tinnily. At the bottom of the hill, the traffic light was red. He didn't brake. He pressed the horn in warning and flew through the intersection. He slammed across a shallow drainage channel in the street, a broad depression that was almost unnoticeable at thirty-five miles an hour, but at his speed it felt like a yawning ditch beneath him; for a fraction of a second he actually was airborne, thumping his head into the roof in spite of the restraining harness that he wore. The Jeep came back to the pavement with a bang, a many-voiced chorus of rattles and clanks, and a sharp bark of tortured rubber. It began to slue to the left, its rear end sliding around with a blood-chilling screech, smoke curling up from the protesting tires. For an electrifying instant, he thought he was going to lose control, but then abruptly the wheel was his again, and he was more than halfway up the next hill without realizing how he'd gotten there.
His speed was down to forty miles an hour, and he got it back up to sixty. He decided not to push it beyond that. He only had a short distance to go. If he wrapped the Jeep around a streetlamp or rolled it over and killed himself, he wouldn't be able to do Hilary any good.
He was still not obeying the rules of the road. He went much too fast and wide on what few turns there were, swinging out into the east-bound lanes, again thankful that there were no oncoming cars. The traffic signals were all against him, a perverse twist of fate, but he ignored every one of them. He wasn't worried about getting a ticket for speeding or reckless driving. If stopped, he would flash his badge and take the uniformed officers along with him to Hilary's place. But he hoped to God he wasn't given a chance to pick up those reinforcements, for it would mean stopping, identifying himself, and explaining the emergency. If they pulled him over, he would lose at least a minute.
He had a hunch that a minute might be the difference between life and death for Hilary.

***

As she watched Bruno Frye coming through the archway, Hilary thought she must be losing her mind. The man was dead. Dead! She had stabbed him twice, had seen his blood. She had seen him in the morgue, too, cold and yellow-gray and lifeless. An autopsy had been performed. A death certificate had been signed. Dead men don't walk. Nevertheless, he was back from the grave, walking out of the dark dining room, the ultimate uninvited guest, a large knife in one gloved hand, eager to finish what he had started last week; and it simply was not possible that he could be there.
Hilary closed her eyes and willed him to be gone. But a second later, when she forced herself to look again, he was still there.
She was unable to move. She wanted to run, but all of her joints--hips, knees, ankles--were rigid, locked, and she didn't have the strength to make them move. She felt weak, as frail as an old, old woman; she was sure that, if she somehow managed to unlock her joints and take a step, she would collapse.
She couldn't speak, but, inside, she was screaming.
Frye stopped less than fifteen feet from her, one foot in a cotton snowdrift of stuffing that had been torn from one of the ruined armchairs. He was pasty-faced, shaking violently, obviously on the edge of hysteria.
Could a dead man be hysterical?
She had to be out of her mind. Had to be. Stark raving mad. But she knew she wasn't.
A ghost? But she didn't believe in ghosts. And besides, wasn't a spirit supposed to be insubstantial, transparent, or at least translucent? Could an apparition be as solid as this walking dead man, as convincingly and terrifyingly real as he was?
"Bitch," he said. "You stinking bitch!"
His hard, low-pitched, gravelly voice was unmistakable.
But, Hilary thought crazily, his vocal cords already should have started to rot. His throat should be blocked with putrescence.
She felt high-pitched laughter building in her, and she struggled to control it. If she began to laugh, she might never stop.
"You killed me," he said menacingly, still teetering on the brink of hysteria.
"No," she said. "Oh, no. No."
"You did!" he screamed, brandishing the knife. "You killed me! Don't lie about it. I know. Don't you think I know? Oh, Jesus! I feel so strange, so alone, all alone, so empty." There was genuine spiritual agony mixed up with his rage. "So empty and scared. And it's all because of you."
He slowly crossed the few yards that separated him from her, stepping carefully through the rubble.
Hilary could see that this dead man's eyes were not blank or filmed with milky cataracts. These eyes were blue-gray and very much alive--and brimming with cold, cold anger.
"This time you'll stay dead," Frye said as he approached. "You won't come back this time."
She tried to retreat from him, took one hesitant step, and her legs almost buckled. But she didn't fall. She had more strength left than she had thought.
"This time," Frye said, "I'm taking every precaution. I'm not giving you a chance to come back. I'm going to cut your fuckin' heart out."
She took another step, but it didn't matter; she could not escape. She wouldn't have time to reach the door and throw off both locks. If she tried that, he would be on her in a