"I"m sorry to hear it."

"Just two short years. That"s all we had."

"Yes. That"s too bad."

"Any day now."

"Those things happen."

"I need advice about the Madrina."

"What kind of advice?"

"They told me you know all about boats."

"I don"t know anything about ships. Over a hundred feet is a ship, unless it is a submarine, and then it"s still a boat."

"Advice about selling it. If I should sell it here or have them take it back home. I don"t trust Michael."

"Who is Michael?"

"He is the captain. Maybe if it is best to take it home to sell it, you could help me."

"A boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money. A ship is a bigger hole into which you throw more money. If you don"t want it, move off it right now. Get rid of the crew and all perishables, cancel the telephone hookup, and turn it over to one of the brokers. There are good ones here."

"I really can"t do that until after all that will and executor thing is taken care of."

"And he isn"t even dead yet."

"The way you say that, you make me sound... terrible."

"Not intended."

"I didn"t think it would be unreasonable, Travis, to suggest that we might help each other. And comfort each other." She added a slight arching of the back, for emphasis. A very subtle movement of her left hand indicated that I should come over and sit by her.

I stood up and said, "I"m dead, Anna. I"ll walk you back around to the Madrina."

She tossed off the rest of the brandy, frowned, shrugged, and let me walk her home. She hung on to my forearm with both hands and contrived to b.u.mp a hip into me every now and again.

"What if I want to fire Michael and he won"t let himself be fired by me?"

I was supposed to volunteer a.s.sistance. "Then you"ll have to let the executor fire him, I guess."

"He"s worked for Harvey for twenty-three years."

We stopped at the gangplank. She said, "Would you like to come aboard and look around?"

"Not really."

"You"re not very gracious, are you?"

"Not very."

"Well... if you feel terribly lonely and want someone to talk to who... faces the same kind of sorrow, I"ll be nearby. Okay?"

"Okay Anna. Sure. "Night."

I walked slowly home to the Busted Flush. There was a sour smell in the night air, like a broken drain. Anna was a very tidy little biscuit, with her old dark eyes set in that child"s face. She exuded a tantalizing flavor of corruption, of secret, unspeakable experience. There had been times in my life when I would have been happy to help her pa.s.s the time until old Harv died and then talked her into letting me help her take the Madrina home, by way of a lot of nice islands.

But I had seen the crocodile tears bulging in her dark eyes when she had said, "Any day now." And I had seen the greed behind the tears, the impulse to break into laughter. Everything old Harv had is now mine, fella. All, all mine. During those past two years she had probably been dreadfully afraid that he would live forever.

When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.

We are all at the mercy of the scriptwriters, directors, and actors in cinema and television. Man is a herd creature, social and imitative. We learn the outward manifestations of inner stress, patterning reaction to what we have learned. And because the visible ways we react are so often borrowed, we wonder about the truth of what is happening underneath. Do I really feel pain, grief, shock, loss?

It is as if we look inside and take a tentative rap at some bell that hangs in there. I had the horrid feeling that maybe my pain was tempered by some sick measure of relief, that I had escaped the trap of a permanent twoness.

Take a rap at that bell, dreading a possible flat, cracked, dissonant sound of self-pity, of a grubby selfishness.

But it rang true. It rang for her, for my lost girl. The loving and the losing were still larger than life. Than my life. The sound of the bell was almost unbearable. I was like a rat in a cage, subjected to supersonic experimentation. They run back and forth and roll at last onto their backs, chewing their paws b.l.o.o.d.y. I wanted to swim straight out into the sea. Or go visit Anna and help her into bed. Each was a form of drowning.

Five.

ON MONDAY morning I awoke glum, got up glum, dressed glum. The sky was a bright pewter, a radiance that cast no shadow but made people squint and walk hunched over, as if searching for something. It would be windless and silent one moment, then a hard blast would come slamming past, picking up dust devils and sc.r.a.ps of paper before subsiding into stillness. At sea on a day like this I would have been laying a course to the nearest shelter and checking the fuel level to see how fast I dared go to get there. It is the kind of weather that makes people cross.

Meyer was cross when he arrived at eleven for reheated coffee.

"How are you?" he asked, peering at me.

"Peachy."

"I"m sorry. It is the standard question one asks. How did you get rid of little Anna?"

"Walked her back to her personal ship. What made you jump to the conclusion I got rid of her?"

"Not such a big jump. Why shouldn"t you get rid of her? There"d be no reason to keep her around."

"Who brought her and dumped her on me?"

"Lili MacNair. And it wasn"t her fault. She just couldn"t get the Farmer woman to leave."

"Farmer?"

""Anna Farmer."

"Don"t look so exasperated, Meyer. I never caught her last name. Is she worth talking about, even? And does it matter a d.a.m.n one way or another what I do or don"t do with my days or with my nights?"

"Aha!" he said. "Tragic figger of a man."

"Meyer, I know what you are trying to do, and I forgive you. But don"t keep it up. Understand?"

He stared and finally nodded. "All right. I was out of line. A transparent, clumsy attempt to cheer the troops. What I came over for, aside from dispensing hollow cheer, was to complain about the bureaucracy. And to give you a conundrum to occupy your mind."

"A riddle?"

"Somewhat. I was on the phone at a reasonable morning hour, calling old friends in Washington. There are a lot of offices up there. And strange t.i.tles. Deputy Director to the a.s.sistant Director in charge of the Policy Committee on Administration. The phone directory is gigantic. I gave them the information and set them to scurrying about. I gave the same mission to three quite different people in three quite different departments, and then waited for the results. The last call came in fifteen minutes ago. That phone number they gave you is not an operating number. There is not now and never has been, at least in living memory, any Select Committee on Special Resources. The central register of all civil servants has no Robert A. Toomey, but it does have two Richard E. Klines. One is twenty-five and works for the Department of the Interior in Alaska. The other is sixty-one and based in Guam. Interesting?"

My head was too full of fragments, like a kaleidoscope, making its bright patterns of nonsense. I had decided that when they had visited me, my reaction had been paranoid.

"I don"t know what to think, Meyer. Don"t they have departments sort of hidden away, without public records and so forth?"

"So why give you a bad phone number?"

"Maybe you would like to try to make sense out of it."

"Too many parts missing," he said. He got up and roamed around the lounge, sighing audibly, pausing to look out the port, then resuming his circuit. "High-level inquiry," he said.

"What?"

"Excuse me. I"m talking to myself."

He roamed and muttered and finally sat down. He gave me a bright false smile. "It"s all too melodramatic. There is but one way I can make the parts fit together, and it offends me."

"See if it offends me."

"It will more than offend, Travis. All right. Postulate X. X is an unknown force, group, movement, with unknown objectives. X is powerful and has high-priority objectives. Secrecy is imperative. Brother t.i.tus represents the syndicate in Brussels, and he came down here from another part of the country to take a look at the land and make contact with Mr. Ladwigg. The odds against anyone seeing him and recognizing him are astronomical. But that is one way in which life is consistently quirky. It keeps serving up unlikely coincidences. Gretel told us her story about Brother t.i.tus on December seventh. And she said she had seen him "last week," if I remember correctly. Not "this week," "last week." The last week in November. Brother t.i.tus went back to X and reported being recognized. For some reason, this created a great danger to the high-priority objective. They had a week in which to plan and move. Their representatives were in the area by mid-week perhaps, or earlier. On Sat.u.r.day morning Ladwigg fell of his bike and died. Gretel was taken ill on Sat.u.r.day. They are the only two, we can a.s.sume, who saw t.i.tus face to face. Toomey and Kline came here Sat.u.r.day to find out if Gretel told you about him. From what you told me of the questioning, they would have gotten the information from anyone less wary than you."

"What the h.e.l.l are you trying to say?"

"I told you the reconstruction is so melodramatic it offends me. If you had told them all about Brother t.i.tus, as related by Gretel, right now you might be in the hospital, fading fast."

I thought it over. I could not make it seem real. "Okay, why the charade? If what is going on is so important, why not just wait until dark, thump my skull, and let me go out on the tide?"

"They do not want to create curiosity. A man falls off his bike and dies. One of the young women who work for him falls ill and dies. The authorities can accept that as routine. But what if the woman"s best friend should then die accidentally, or be taken ill in the same way?"

"The authorities would a.s.sume the friend caught it from her, whatever it was."

"But that would create a big flap. Gretel"s illness and death were reported, you said, to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta."

"By Dr. Tower."

"Having it turn out to be contagious would make headlines."

"Mental games are your specialty Meyer. But it does not amuse me one G.o.dd.a.m.n bit to have you making a lot of a.s.sumptions based on Gretel being murdered, poisoned somehow. For G.o.d"s sake, you saw her that one time there! She was sick. She was terribly, terribly ill. Know what her last words were? "I"m burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible." Great last words to remember. Comforting. Dammit, she could have mentioned t.i.tus to those people out there at Bonnie Brae. She could have asked about him. She could have asked the other partner, or Slater. And she could have told them about the fellow just the way she told us."

"The way she told us, remember, was to start by saying she thought there was something funny going on out there. And she would not be likely to bring that up with the people she was working for. Or with. And one good way to prove I am totally wrong is to find out if Broffski and Slater have been questioned, just as you were. I don"t think that pair came here from out of town to talk to you alone."

I looked at him. "If I thought for one moment that somebody had... poisoned her..."

"I am not sitting here, Travis, trying to dream up a cheap plot line for a grade Z movie. You asked me to try to make sense out of it. I can make melodramatic sense out of it, if I make the a.s.sumption that both Gretel and Ladwigg were killed. If they weren"t, the sense of it all eludes me."

"You"re serious!"

"Enough to want to try to prove it out one way or the other."

"Where would you start?"

"By finding out of Broffski and Slater were questioned too."

So once again I drove out to Bonnie Brae. I could not have guessed how difficult it would be. Memories of her were of a painful clarity, a vividness in the back of the mind.

Slater, the manager, was out for lunch. Stanley Broffski was in his office. What did we wish to speak to him about? the woman asked. I said it involved some negotiations with Herman Ladwigg. She trotted off and soon reappeared, beckoning us in.

Broffski sat behind a big white desk covered with piles of correspondence and blueprints. He was plump to the point of bursting out of his sport shirt. He had black hair combed across his forehead and a Groucho "mustache. He had an air of jolly impatience, amused exasperation.

He waved us into chairs, saying, "Honest to Christ, I wish to h.e.l.l Herm had the habit of writing things down. Nothing against him, you understand. n.o.body ever had a better partner. But he carried around too much in his head alla time! It"s driving me up the wall trying to find out who did what to who."

"I suppose," Meyer said, "you divided up all the responsibilities you have here."

"I"ve got the fat farm and the tennis club, and we"ll have a riding stable going pretty soon. They"re working on the stalls down there now." He swiveled his chair half around and pointed through the wide window to an old barn a hundred yards away. Two pickup trucks and a van were parked there, near a pile of fresh lumber. Off to the left a clutch of fatties trotted heavily down a long gentle slope. They were mostly women in their middle years, with a few men and a few adolescents, boys and girls. Despite the age differences, the fat at that distance looked the same, bouncing and flapping under the sweaty shorts and shirts. A lean woman was galloping along beside them, clapping her hands, running back and forth.

"We work the tract-house part together," he said. "I mean, we did. Herm handled the land sales. He was a wizard at that. We"re all going to miss him. Of course, we both worked with the manager, Morse Slater. Morse keeps everything running smooth. If he wasn"t around at this time, I"d be whipped. We lost a h.e.l.l of a good girl right after we lost Herm. Some kind of legionnaire flu, they say. She wasn"t here long, but Morse says she was the greatest. Everything from doing the billing to teaching tennis. h.e.l.l, it"s a sound operation here. Everything will turn out roses. We"ve got a nice community coming along. We"re keeping a lot of open s.p.a.ce, and nothing tacky gets built. What was it you had going with Herm, gentlemen? Was it something to do with the commercial area?"

"Actually," Meyer said, "we"re trying to find out who it was who flew in almost three weeks ago, maybe November twenty-eighth or -ninth, to talk to Mr. Ladwigg, and flew out the next morning."

"In a little blue airplane," Broffski said. His voice was no longer amiable, his face no longer jolly. "I am getting d.a.m.n sick and tired of that f.u.c.king blue airplane. I am going to close that strip. Who needs it?"

He bounded up and went around us to his office door. "Morse! Get in here a minute." Morse Slater came in, recognized me at once and came over to me. I stood up, and he shook my hand and said, "I"m terribly sorry I had to miss the service, Mr. McGee. I thought until the last minute I would make it, but something came up."

I said, "Sure. Understood. Meyer, this is Morse Slater. I told you about him."

As they shook hands Broffski said, "What"s going on? What service?"

"Gretel Howard," I told him.

There was a sudden look of comprehension. "McGee! Right. I heard about you from her. What has all this got to do with the f.u.c.king blue airplane?"

Meyer said politely, "Has someone else been interested in it?"

"We had the FAA out here. You tell them what it was about, Morse."

We all sat down and Morse said, "Apparently it was some sort of serious violation of the air safety rules, flying too close to a commercial liner, something like that. It was a Mr. Ryan from Washington, a field investigator, and they had traced the plane here. He was a very stubborn man. He couldn"t seem to accept the idea that no one except Mr. Ladwigg knew where the airplane came from or who was flying it. He insisted on talking to some of the other employees, and he even had me take him over to the Ladwigg home and let him interrogate Mrs. Ladwigg."