"No. But this isn"t the happiest place in the world to come back to, for me. I guess you know that."

"Oh, I guess I do. But I don"t have to get depressed just because you do. That wasn"t such a great phone connection. How did Harl take it?"

"How the h.e.l.l did you expect him to take it? He"s bursting with joy and hope and all that, in a good effort to hide the fact that what we took back there to him might be, in his code of values, better off dead. She started coming apart. She was very, very raggedy by the time the reunion happened."

"Nothing out of the Vitrier woman?"

"What could she do? Why should she try to do anything? And they had to buy my story. I saw the girl wandering around near Sanborne"s. I was sure I recognized her as Beatrice Bowie, who was supposed to have died. In fact, I was in Mexico at her father"s request, finding out how she died. Here you are, Emba.s.sy. Straighten things out. They would rather have had me hand them some armed infernal device. They hated it. They kept looking very Princeton and sighing and hunting for new forms to fill out. Meyer, G.o.ddamit, pack! I want to be home. I want to be on the Flush. I want to go to some island no developer has ever found yet, where no beer can has yet washed ash.o.r.e."

"Enjoy beautiful Oaxaca."

And she hit me at a dead run, grabbing and laughing and saying if we were going to stand out here all day, she, Elena, could not wait for the surprise.

I told her she was supposed to be back at work. She told me she wanted a little more vacation, and so did Margarita, and so they took a little more.

"But can they just do that?" I asked Meyer.

"When Enelio Fuentes owns that much of the insurance company they can, buddy."

So we had drinks and dinner at the Victoria, abundant and long and I tried to be festive, but it kept slipping on me. I kept worrying the whole thing. Picking at it. Meyer said impatiently, "Will you kindly get off that tiresome point of no return, McGee? Please? For me? And for these Guadalajara girls, and for your own sake? A grown-up man must make a lousy decision from time to time, knowing it is lousy, because the only other choice is lousy in another dimension, and no matter which way he jumps, he will not like it. So he accepts the fact that the fates dealt him two low cards, and he goes on from there. Or better, why don"t you two go on from here. I seem to have been moved into another cottage, and only this insurance friend of mine seems able to find it after dark."

But it still kept nibbling and chewing at me. It kept me just a little apart from all the joy of Elena. And it woke me near dawn, thinking again of that look in Harlan Bowie"s eyes, and wondering if the son of a b.i.t.c.h would clap her away somewhere forever, for her own good, of course.

Dawn-thoughts are the bleak ones. And these took me back to T. Harlan Bowie"s arena-Garden Suite Number Five in that quietest part of Coral Gables. As a medical precaution they had put him on a tranquilizer and then told him I was on the way, bringing back his only chick, alive. I left Bix with his nurse-therapist, Mrs. Kreiger, while I tried to prepare him for her.

I tried, but I don"t think he was listening closely. "Look, Mr. Bowie, she went down there with rotten people. It was a setup. She could put her hands on twenty-five thousand, and they knew it, and they conned her out of it, every dime of it. Some people, Mr. Bowie, have too much of a taste for marijuana. It takes over. They just float and they don"t give a d.a.m.n."

"My daughter isn"t that kind of person, McGee."

"She was fogged over, believe me. In the early part of the trip the three men were all banging her, and the other girl too-the one you buried."

"Then they were taking her by force, and I am going to see that they are prosecuted."

"This wasn"t kid games. Two of them are dead. She"s under suspicion of conspiring to smuggle heroin across the border. She got hooked on heroin, Mr. Bowie. She was an addict, or is an addict. A woman gave her a home cure. She cycled her down through some other opiates and got her over onto something that"s not physically addicting. It was a lot of trouble. The woman wanted her."

"Wanted her?"

"And got her, as a girlfriend, as a female h.o.m.os.e.xual partner."

"Are you out of your mind?"

"I"m just trying to tell you that this is a different girl. She"s an addictive personality, and she isn"t going to be able to handle any part of this without getting back onto some kind of a high. And you can"t reach her because she bombed herself so long and so big, her mind is not on our wavelength anymore. I"m trying to tell you that-"

"McGee, I think I"m a little tired of you telling me things. I want to see my daughter, please."

Bixie was down off the charas high, and was being threatened with all the hard edges of reality, and she wanted no part of it. She was mean, edgy, suspicious, and unpredictable. She was vulgar and sullen and semi-psychotic. And she was not about to rush in and kiss dear old daddy and cry tears of joyous welcome, and express any sympathy for his being in a wheelchair.

She came scuffing in, glanced at him, and went over and slouched into a chair. Mrs. Kreiger saw him having problems with the wheelchair and hurried around and wheeled him over to the girl. He reached and grabbed her hand. He was weeping. "Bix. Oh, Bix honey."

But Bix honey looked narrow-eyed at me. "Is this the big treat, you rotten, dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d? You bring me back to this silly old fart? Where"s Eva? What have you done to Eva? Look, I"ve got to have a surprise. Honest to G.o.d, I"ve got to have a surprise or I"m going to go up the walls screaming."

"You"re home now!" he said.

"Somebody get him off me," she said.

"I thought you were dead, honey."

She looked at him with the coldest dark blue eyes in town. "And I wish you were, old man. I wish to h.e.l.l you were."

Mrs. Kreiger said, "Doctor Kohn wants to have a look at her. Should I... take her along now?"

"Yes. And... let me know what they suggest, please."

When they were gone he wiped his eyes and shook his head. "It isn"t possible she could change so much. What can... be done?"

"I think maybe you"ve got to make her able to live with somebody she despises. She despises Bix Bowie, and always has, but didn"t know there was a way to escape. It will take a lot of love, a lot of patience, a lot of motivation to make her ever believe that the Bix Bowie of the real world isn"t a total failure. Excuse me, but what else have you got worth doing?"

"It... it"s a second chance?"

"And very d.a.m.ned slim."

"It"s the only thing I can do."

So maybe he would and maybe he wouldn"t give it the big try. Or it might last only so long. I wondered about that look in his eye. Maybe I"d only imagined it was there. Second try, second rejection. But maybe, just maybe, he might have the guts for the job.

I heard a rooster crow a long way across the silence of the predawn morning in Oaxaca.

Near dawn, and Elena was curled into me, fists against my chest, round knees pressing against my belly. So I kissed the sleeping eye that was nearest and handiest.

She grunted and came but partway up out of sleep, far enough to begin a slow and determined worming and squirming, trying to work the undermost leg under me, under my waist. When I saw what she was trying to do, I made it easier for her. She slid the leg under, and then hooked her calf back against me. She lifted the other leg over me, the drowsy weight of it coming down across my waist. She uncurled her fists and slid her hands around my ribs, one under me, one on top, and flattened her palms against my back.

So then there was the unseen questing, and a guiding touch, and then a snubbed pressure increasing until-celebrated with a little snuff of sudden insuck of air through her nose-we were suddenly, sleekly, deeply coupled. She hitched her self a little higher, changed her position, moved her hands further around me, and made her small warm sound of contentment.

I slid my hands down her back until they reached and cupped the warm, smooth, solid b.u.t.tocks. And like some familiar, faithful, trusty, loyal little machine, that touch and pressure was enough to start the slow, rhythmic pumping of her hips, rich and sleepy and demanding.

So with gray at the windows, and her mouth turning upward for the kiss, with the slow deep steady beat that would begin to change only when we neared climax, this became the reality, this became the life-moment, this became the avowal, the communion, the immortality. The private rhythm of our need, a small and personal and totally shared thing, was that special thing in the world and in time which changed the Rockos and Evas, the Jerrys and Wallys and Bruceys and Carls, the Bixies and Beckys to scare-masks fashioned of cardboard and spit, empty things which hang on strings from an empty tree, turning in the parching wind that blows across the empty heart.

"Ah," said the tireless, tawny, loving engine. Bless all the sisters, wherever they are.