“Well, only a damn fool tries to run down a buck, but there am I, a damn fool, running after him, and there he is, standing in the lake, in oh, eight, nine inches of water, and he’s just looking at me. That very moment, the sun goes behind a cloud, and the freeze comes—temperature must have fallen thirty degrees in ten minutes, not a word of a lie. And that old stag, he gets ready to run, and he can’t move! He’s frozen into the ice.
   “Me, I just walk over to him slowly. You can see he wants to run, but he’s iced in and it just isn’t going to happen. But there’s no way I can bring myself to shoot a defenseless critter when he can’t get away—what kind of man would I be if I done that, heh? So I takes my shotgun and I fires off one shell, straight up into the air.
   “Well, the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck just about jump out of his skin, and seein’ that his legs are iced in, that’s just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and shivering fit to bust.
   “I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the Lakeside Ladies’ Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn’t freeze to death. ‘Course, the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit of bright orange wool, so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts wear orange at hunting season,” he added, helpfully. “And if you think there’s a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I’ve got the antlers up on my rec room wall to this day.”
   Shadow laughed, and the old man smiled the satisfied smile of a master craftsman. They pulled up outside a brick building with a large wooden deck, from which golden holiday lights hung and twinkled invitingly.
   “That’s five-oh-two,” said Hinzelmann. “Apartment three would be on the top floor, around the other side, overlooking the lake. There you go, Mike.”
   “Thank you, Mr. Hinzelmann. Can I give you anything toward gas?”
   “Just Hinzelmann. And you don’t owe me a penny. Merry Christmas from me and from Tessie.”
   “Are you sure you won’t accept anything?”
   The old man scratched his chin. “Tell you what,” he said. “Sometime in the next week or so I’ll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle. Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting onto bed.”
   Shadow smiled. “Merry Christmas, Hinzelmann,” he said.
   The old man shook Shadow’s hand with one red-knuckled hand. It felt as hard and as callused as an oak branch. “Now, you watch the path as you go up there, it’s going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at the side there, see it? I’ll just wait in the car down here until you’re safely inside. You just give me the thumbs-up when you’re in okay, and I’ll drive off.”
   He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the wooden steps on the side of the house and had opened the apartment door with his key. The door to the apartment swung open. Shadow made a thumbs-up sign, and the old man in the Wendt-Tessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car with a name made him smile one more time—Hinzelmann and Tessie swung around and made their way back across the bridge.
   Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to seventy degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.
   There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt sat in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away. He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket, and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.
   The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, and, somewhere in the building, a radio playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night.
   In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there.
   He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (practice all your tricks, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not his own, all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to requirements, not that trick. Oh, not that one).
   But this was a good town. He could feel it.
   He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first night in Cairo. He thought of Zorya…what the hell was her name? The midnight sister.
   And then he thought of Laura…
   It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He could see her. He could, somehow, see her.
   She was in Eagle Point, in the backyard outside her mother’s big house.
   She stood in the cold, which she did not feel anymore or which she felt all the time, she stood outside the house that her mother had bought in 1989 with the insurance money after Laura’s father, Harvey McCabe, had passed on, a heart attack while straining on the can, and she was staring in, her cold hands pressed against the glass, her breath not fogging it, not at all, watching her mother, and her sister and her sister’s children and husband in from Texas, home for Christmas. Out in the darkness, that was where Laura was, unable not to look.
   Tears prickled in Shadow’s eyes, and he rolled over in his bed.
   He felt like a Peeping Tom, turned his thoughts away, willed them to come back to him: he could see the lake spread out below him as the wind blew down from the arctic, prying jack-frost fingers a hundred times colder than the fingers of any corpse.
   Shadow’s breath came shallowly now. He could hear a wind rising, a bitter screaming around the house, and for a moment he thought he could hear words on the wind.
   If he was going to be anywhere, he might as well be here, he thought, and then he slept.


* * *


Meanwhile.
A conversation.

   Dingdong.
   “MizCrow?”
   “Yes.”
   “Miz Samantha Black Crow?”
   “Yes.”
   “Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, ma’am?”
   “Are you cops? What are you?”
   “My name is Town. My colleague here is Mister Road. We’re investigating the disappearance of two of our associates.”
   “What were their names?”

   “I’m sorry?”
   “Tell me their names. I want to know what they were called. Your associates. Tell me their names and maybe I’ll help you.”
   “…Okay. Their names were Mister Stone and Mister Wood. Now, can we ask you some questions?”
   “Do you guys just see things and pick names? ‘Oh, you be Mister Sidewalk, he’s Mister Carpet, say hello to Mister Airplane’?”
   “Very funny, young lady. First question: we need to know if you’ve seen this man. Here. You can hold the photograph.”
   “Whoah. Straight on and profile, with numbers on the bottom…And big. He’s cute, though. What did he do?”
   “He was mixed up in a small-town bank robbery, as a driver, some years ago. His two colleagues decided to keep all the loot for themselves and ran out on him. He got angry. Found them. Came close to killing them with his hands. The state cut a deal with the men he hurt: they testified against him. Shadow here got six years. He served three. You ask me, guys like that, they should just lock them up and throw away the key.”
   “I’ve never heard anyone say that in real life, you know. Not out loud.”
   “Say what, Miz Crow?”
   “ ‘Loot.’ It’s not a word you ever hear people say. Maybe in movies people say it. Not for real.”
   “This isn’t a movie, Miz Crow.”
   “Black Crow. It’s Miz Black Crow. My friends call me Sam.”
   “Got it, Sam. Now about this man—”
   “But you aren’t my friends. You can call me Miz Black Crow.”
   “Listen, you snot-nosed little—”
   “It’s okay, Mister Road. Sam here—pardon, ma’am—I mean, Miz Black Crow wants to help us. She’s a law-abiding citizen.”
   “Ma’am, we know you helped Shadow. You were seen with him, in a white Chevy Nova. He gave you a ride. He bought you dinner. Did he say anything that could help us in our investigation? Two of our best men have vanished.”
   “I never met him.”
   “You met him. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re stupid. We aren’t stupid.”
   “Mm. I meet a lot of people. Maybe I met him and forgot already.”
   “Ma’am, it really is to your advantage to cooperate with us.”
   “Otherwise, you’ll have to introduce me to your friends Mister Thumbscrews and Mister Pentothal?”
   “Ma’am, you aren’t making this any easier on yourself.”
   “Gee. I’m sorry. Now, is there anything else? ‘Cos I’m going to say ‘Buh-bye now’ and close the door and I figure you two are going to go and get into Mister Car and drive away.”
   “Your lack of cooperation has been noted, ma’am.”
   “Buh-bye now.”
   Click.

Chapter 10

   I’ll tell you all my secrets
   But I lie about my past
   So send me off to bed forevermore

Tom Waits, “Tango Till They’re Sore”



   A whole life in darkness, surrounded by filth, that was what Shadow dreamed, his first night in Lakeside. A child’s life, long ago and far away, in a land across the ocean, in the lands where the sun rose. But this life contained no sunrises, only dimness by day and blindness by night.
   Nobody spoke to him. He heard human voices, from outside, but could understand human speech no better than he understood the howling of the owls or the yelps of dogs.
   He remembered, or thought he remembered, one night, half a lifetime ago, when one of the big people had entered, quietly, and had not cuffed him or fed him, but had picked him up to her breast and embraced him. She smelled good. Hot drops of water had fallen from her face to his. He had been scared, and had wailed loudly in his fear.
   She put him down on the straw, hurriedly, and left the hut, fastening the door behind her.
   He remembered that moment, and he treasured it, just as he remembered the sweetness of a cabbage heart, the tart taste of plums, the crunch of apples, the greasy delight of roasted fish.
   And now he saw the faces in the firelight, all of them looking at him as he was led out from the hut for the first time, which was the only time. So that was what people looked like. Raised in darkness, he had never seen faces. Everything was so new. So strange. The bonfire light hurt his eyes. They pulled on the rope around his neck, to lead him to the place where the man waited for him.
   And when the first blade was raised in the firelight, what a cheer went up from the crowd. The child from the darkness began to laugh with them, in delight and in freedom.
   And then the blade came down.


   Shadow opened his eyes and realized that he was hungry and cold, in an apartment with a layer of ice clouding the inside of the window glass. His frozen breath, he thought. He got out of bed, pleased he did not have to get dressed. He scraped at a window with a fingernail as he passed, felt the ice collect under the nail, then melt to water.
   He tried to remember his dream, but remembered nothing but misery and darkness.
   He put on his shoes. He figured he would walk into the town center, walk across the bridge across the northern end of the lake, if he had the geography of the town right. He put on his thin jacket, remembering his promise to himself that he would buy himself a warm winter coat, opened the apartment door, and stepped out onto the wooden deck. The cold took his breath away: he breathed in, and felt every hair in his nostrils freeze into rigidity. The deck gave him a fine view of the lake, irregular patches of gray surrounded by an expanse of white.
   The cold snap had come, that was for sure. It could not be much above zero, and it would not be a pleasant walk, but he was certain he could make it into town without too much trouble. What did Hinzelmann say last night—a ten-minute walk? And Shadow was a big man. He would walk briskly and keep himself warm. He set off south, heading for the bridge.
   Soon he began to cough, a dry, thin cough, as the bitterly cold air touched his lungs. Soon his ears and face and lips hurt, and then his feet hurt. He thrust his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets, clenched his fingers together trying to find some warmth. He found himself remembering Low Key Lyesmith’s tall tales of the Minnesota winters—particularly the one about a hunter treed by a bear during a hard freeze who took out his dick and pissed an arching yellow stream of steaming urine that was already frozen hard before it hit the ground, then slid down the rock-hard frozen-piss-pole to freedom. A wry smile at the memory and another dry, painful cough.
   Step after step after step. He glanced back. The apartment building was not as far away as he had expected.
   This walk, he decided, was a mistake. But he was already three or four minutes from the apartment, and the bridge over the lake was in sight. It made as much sense to press on as to go home (and then what? Call a taxi on the dead phone? Wait for spring? He had no food in the apartment, he reminded himself).
   He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature downward as he walked. Minus ten? Minus twenty? Minus forty, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was wind chill, and the wind was now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the Arctic across Canada.
   He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand—and foot—warmers. He wished he had them now.
   Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge seemed to be no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer.
   The occasional cars that roared past him seemed unreal: spaceships, little freeze-dried packages of metal and glass, inhabited by people dressed more warmly than he was. An old song his mother had loved, “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” began to run through his head, and he hummed it through closed lips, kept pace to it as he walked.
   He had lost all sensation in his feet. He looked down at his black leather shoes, at the thin cotton socks, and began, seriously, to worry about frostbite.
   This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat Jesus-Christ-I-screwed-up-big-time territory. His clothes might as well have been netting or lace: the wind blew through him, froze his bones and the marrow in his bones, froze the lashes of his eyes, froze the warm place under his balls, which were retreating into his pelvic cavity.
   Keep walking, he told himself. Keep walking. I can stop and drink a pail of air when I get home. A Beatles song started in his head, and he adjusted his pace to match it. It was only when he got to the chorus that he realized that he was humming “Help.”
   He was almost at the bridge now. Then he had to walk across it, and he would still be another ten minutes from the stores on the west of the lake—maybe a little more…
   A dark car passed him, stopped, then reversed in a foggy cloud of exhaust smoke and came to a halt beside him. A window slid down, and the haze and steam from the window mixed with the exhaust to form a dragon’s breath that surrounded the car. “Everything okay here?” said a cop inside.
   Shadow’s first, automatic instinct was to say Yup, everything’s just fine and jimdandy thank you officer. But it was too late for that, and he started to say, “I think I’m freezing. I was walking into Lakeside to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walk“—he was that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had come out was “F-f-freezing,” and a chattering noise, and he said, “So s-sorry. Cold. Sorry.”
   The cop pulled open the back door of the car and said, “You get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay?” Shadow climbed in gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the driver’s seat. Shadow stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the last time he’d been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth, his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good sign.
   The cop put the car in drive and moved off. “You know, that was,” he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, “if you’ll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do. You didn’t hear any of the weather advisories? It’s minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the wind-chill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure when you’re down at minus thirty, windchill’s the least of your worries.”
   “Thanks,” said Shadow. “Thanks for stopping. Very, very grateful.”
   “Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her birdfeeder in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the sidewalk. She’s in intensive care now. It was on the TV this morning. You’re new in town.” It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already.
   “I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I’d buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasn’t expecting this cold.”
   “Yeah,” said the cop. “It took me by surprise as well. I was too busy worrying about global warming. I’m Chad Mulligan. I’m the chief of police here in Lakeside.”
   “Mike Ainsel.”
   “Hi, Mike. Feeling any better?”
   “A little, yes.”
   “So where would you like me to take you first?”
   Shadow put his hands down to the hot-air stream, painful on his fingers, then he pulled them away. Let it happen in its own time. “Can you just drop me off in the town center?”
   “Wouldn’t hear of it. Long as you don’t need me to drive a getaway car for your bank robbery I’ll happily take you wherever you need to go. Think of it as the town welcome wagon.”
   “Where would you suggest we start?”
   “You only moved in last night.”
   “That’s right.”
   “You eaten breakfast yet?”
   “Not yet.”
   “Well, that seems like a heck of a good starting place to me,” said Mulligan.
   They were over the bridge now, and entering the northwest side of the town. “This is Main Street,” said Mulligan, “and this,” he said, crossing Main Street and turning right, “is the town square.”

   Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was colorless, beautiful in a skeletal way, the bandshell empty, the fountain turned off for the winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow.
   “…and this,” concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, “is Mabel’s.”
   He got out of the car, opened the passenger door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.
   The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat down at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.
   A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze.
   “Hello, Chad,” she said. “You’ll want a hot chocolate while you’re thinking.” She handed them two laminated menus.
   “No cream on the top, though,” he agreed. “Mabel knows me too well,” he said to Shadow. “What’ll it be, pal?”
   “Hot chocolate sounds great,” said Shadow. “And I’m happy to have the whipped cream on the top.”
   “That’s good,” said Mabel. “Live dangerously, hon. Are you going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer?”
   “Not yet,” said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. “This is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door marked Pointers. It was next to a door marked Setters.
   “You’re the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road. The old Pilsen place. Oh, yes,” she said, happily, “I know just who you are. Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you. You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?”
   “Breakfast for me,” said Shadow. “What’s good?”
   “Everything’s good,” said Mabel. “I make it. But this is the farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are particularly good. Warming and filling too. My speciality.”
   Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. “First pasty I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s real good.”
   “They’re a yoopie thing,” she told him. “Mostly you need to be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work the iron mines brought them over.”
   “Yoopie?”
   “Upper Peninsula. U.P. Yoopie. It’s the little chunk of Michigan to the northeast.”
   The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot chocolate and slurped it. “Mabel,” he said, “are you forcing this nice young man to eat one of your pasties?”
   “It’s good,” said Shadow. It was too, a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry.
   “They go straight to the belly,” said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. “I warn you. Okay: So you need a car?” With his parka off, he was revealed (as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than cop.
   Shadow nodded, mouth full.
   “Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitz’s selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4-Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point they’d probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don’t care about ugly, it’s got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the men’s room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasn’t in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheila’s.”
   The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it. It was astonishingly filling. “Stick-to-your-ribs food,” as his mother would have said. “Sticks to your sides.”
   “So,” said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the hot-chocolate foam from around his lips. “I figure we stop off next at Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Dave’s Finest Food so you can fill your larder, then I’ll drop you up by Lakeside Realty. If you can put down a thousand up front for the car they’ll be happy, otherwise five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. It’s an ugly car, like I said, but if the kid hadn’t painted it purple it’d be a ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you’ll need something like that to get around this winter, you ask me.”
   “This is very good of you,” said Shadow. “But shouldn’t you be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I’m complaining, you understand.”
   Mabel chuckled. “We all tell him that,” she said.
   Mulligan shrugged. “It’s a good town,” he said, simply. “Not much trouble. You’ll always get someone speeding within city limits—which is a good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages. Friday, Saturday nights you get some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse—and that one can go both ways, believe me. Men and women. But out here things are quiet. They call me out when someone’s locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year there’s a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest police case we’ve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone who got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back. ‘My Juvenile Delinquent is Screwing Your Honor Student.’ You remember, Mabel?”
   She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as funny as Mulligan did.
   “What did you do?” asked Shadow.
   “I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down at the jail. Dan’s not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset.”
   Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates.
   Hennings Farm and Home Supplies was a warehouse-sized building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys (the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile. Shadow wondered idly what she’d look like in ten years’ time.
   Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Hennings Farm and Home checkout counter, who scanned in his purchases with a chattering hand-held gun, capable, Shaded had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it through.
   “Ten pairs of long underwear?” said the girl. “Stocking up, huh?” She looked like a movie starlet.
   Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tie and foolish. He said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and the goose-down-filled coat.
   He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the men’s rest room, came out wearing many of his purchases.
   “Looking good, big fella,” said Mulligan.
   “At least I’m warm,” said Shadow, and outside, in the parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of him was warm enough. At Mulligan’s invitation, he put his shopping bags in the back of the police car, arid rode in the passenger seat, in the front.
   “So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel?” asked the chief of police. “Big guy like you. What’s your profession, and will you be practicing it in Lakeside?”
   Shadow’s heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. “I work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the heavy lifting.”
   “Does he pay well?”
   “I’m family. He knows I’m not going to rip him off, and I’m learning a little about the trade on the way. Until I figure out what it is I really want to do.” It was coming out of him with conviction, smooth as a snake. He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in that moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (“You want to see Lucy’s tits?” asked a voice in his head). Mike Ainsel didn’t have bad dreams, or believe that there was a storm coming.
   He filled his shopping basket at Dave’s Finest Food, doing what he thought of as a gas-station stop-milk, eggs, bread, apples, cheese, cookies. Just some food. He’d do a real one later. As Shadow moved around, Chad Mulligan said hello to people and introduced Shadow to them. “This is Mike Ainsel, he’s taken the empty apartment at the old Pilsen place. Up around the back,” he’d say. Shadow gave up trying to remember names. He just shook hands with people and smiled, sweating a little, uncomfortable in his insulated layers in the hot store.
   Chad Mulligan drove Shadow across the street to Lakeside Realty. Missy Gunther, her hair freshly set and lacquered, did not need an introduction—she knew exactly who Mike Ainsel was. Why, that nice Mr. Borson, his uncle Emerson, such a nice man, he’d been by, what, about six, eight weeks ago now, and rented the apartment up at the old Pilsen Place, and wasn’t the view just to die for up there? Well, honey, just wait until the spring, and we’re so lucky, so many of the lakes in this part of the world go bright green from the algae in the summer, it would turn your stomach, but our lake, well, come fourth of July you could still practically drink it, and Mr. Borson had paid for a whole year’s lease in advance, and as for the Toyota 4-Runner, she couldn’t believe that Chad Mulligan still remembered it, and yes, she’d be delighted to get rid of it. Tell the truth, she’d pretty much resigned herself to giving it to Hinzelmann as this year’s klunker and just taking the tax write-off, not that the car was a klunker, far from it, no, it was her son’s car before he went to school in Green Bay, and, well, he’d painted it purple one day and, ha-ha, she certainly hoped that Mike Ainsel liked purple, that was all she had to say, and if he didn’t she wouldn’t blame him…
   Chief of Police Mulligan excused himself near the middle of this litany. “Looks like they need me back at the office. Good meeting you, Mike,” he said, and he moved Shadow’s shopping bags into the back of Missy Gunther’s station wagon.
   Missy drove Shadow back to her place, where, in the drive, he saw an elderly SUV. The blown snow had bleached half of it to a blinding white, while the rest of it was painted the kind of drippy purple that someone would need to be very stoned, very often, to even begin to be able to find attractive.
   Still, the car started up on the first try, and the heater worked, although it took almost ten minutes of running the engine with the heater on full before the interior of the car changed from unbearably cold to merely chilly. While this was happening, Missy Gunther took Shadow into her kitchen—excuse the mess, but the little ones just leave their toys all over after Christmas and she just didn’t have the heart, would he care for some leftover turkey dinner? Well, coffee then, won’t take a moment to brew a fresh pot—and Shadow took a large red toy car off a window seat and sat down, while Missy Gunther asked if he had met his neighbors yet, and Shadow confessed that he hadn’t.
   There were, he was informed while the coffee dipped, four other inhabitants of his apartment building—back when it was the Pilsen place the Pilsens lived in the downstairs flat and rented out the upper two flats, now their apartment, which was taken by a couple of young men, Mr. Holz and Mr. Neiman, they actually are a couple and when she said couple, Mr. Ainsel, Heavens, we have all kinds here, more than one kind of tree in the forest, although mostly those kind of people wind up in Madison or the Twin Cities, but truth to tell, nobody here gives it a second thought. They’re in Key West for the winter, they’ll be back in April, he’ll meet them then. The thing about Lakeside is that it’s a good town. Now next door to Mr. Ainsel, that’s Marguerite Olsen and her little boy, a sweet lady, sweet, sweet lady, but she’s had a hard life, still sweet as pie, and she works for the Lakeside News. Not the most exciting newspaper in the world, but truth to tell Missy Gunther thought that was probably the way most folk around here liked it.
   Oh, she said, and poured him coffee, she just wished that Mr. Ainsel could see the town in the summer or late in the spring, when the lilacs and the apple and the cherry blossoms were out, she thought there was nothing like it for beauty, nothing like it anywhere in the world.
   Shadow gave her a five-hundred-dollar deposit, and he climbed up into the car and started to back it up, out of her front yard and onto the driveway proper. Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. “This is for you,” she said. “I nearly forgot.” She handed him a buff envelope. “It’s kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don’t have to look at it now.”
   He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town. He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt of that.
   In ten minutes he was home.
   He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him.
   It contained a passport. Blue, plasticated cover and, inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy Gunther’s precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for various local stores.
   “I think I may like it here,” said Shadow, aloud. He looked out of the icy window at the frozen lake. “If it ever warms up.”
   There was a bang at the front door at around 2:00 P.M. Shadow had been practicing the Sucker Vanish with a quarter, tossing it from one hand to the other undetectably. His hands were cold enough and clumsy enough that he kept dropping the coin onto the tabletop, and the knock at the door made him drop it again.
   He went to the door and opened it.
   A moment of pure fear: the man at the door wore a black mask which covered the lower half of his face. It was the kind of mask that a bank robber might wear on TV, or a serial killer from a cheap movie might wear to scare his victims. The top of the man’s head was covered by a black knit cap.
   Still, the man was smaller and slighter than Shadow, and he did not appear to be armed. And he wore a bright plaid coat, of the kind that serial killers normally avoid.
   “Ih hihelhan,” said the visitor.
   “Huh?”

   The man pulled the mask downward to reveal Hinzelmann’s cheerful face. “I said, ‘It’s Hinzelmann.’ You know, I don’t know what we did before they came up with these masks. Well, I do remember what we did. Thick knitted caps that went all around your face, and scarves and you don’t want to know what else. I think it’s a miracle what they come up with these days. I may be an old man, but I’m not going to grumble about progress, not me.”
   He finished this speech by thrusting a basket at Shadow, filled high with local cheeses, bottles, jars, and several small salamis that proclaimed themselves to be venison summer sausage, and by coming inside. “Merry day after Christmas,” he said. His nose and ears and cheeks were red as raspberries, mask or no mask. “I hear you already ate a whole one of Mabel’s pasties. Brought you a few things.”
   “That’s very kind of you,” said Shadow.
   “Kind, nothing. I’m going to stick it to you next week for the raffle. The Chamber of Commerce runs it, and I run the Chamber of Commerce. Last year we raised almost seventeen thousand dollars for the children’s ward of Lakeside Hospital.”
   “Well, why don’t you put me down for a ticket now?”
   “It don’t start until the day the klunker hits the ice,” said Hinzelmann. He looked out of Shadow’s window toward the lake. “Cold out there. Must have dropped fifty degrees last night.”
   “It happened really fast,” agreed Shadow.
   “We used to pray for freezes like this back in the old days,” said Hinzelmann. “My daddy told me.”
   “You’d pray for days like this?”
   “Well, yah, it was the only way the settlers survived back then. Weren’t enough food for everyone, and you couldn’t just go down to Dave’s and fill up your shopping cart in the old days, no sir. So my grampaw, he got to figgerin’, and when a really cold day like this come along he’d take my grarnmaw, and the kids, my uncle and my aunt and my daddy—he was the youngest—and the serving girl and the hired man, and he’d go down with them to the creek, give ‘em a little drink of rum and herbs, it was a recipe he’d got from the old country, then he’d pour creek water over them. Course they’d freeze in seconds, stiff and blue as so many Popsicles. He’d haul them to a trench they’d already dug and filled with straw, and he’d stack ‘em down there, one by one, like so much cordwood in the trench, and he’d pack straw around them, then he’d cover the top of the trench with two-b’-fours to keep the critters out—in those days there were wolves and bears and all sorts you never see anymore around here, no hodags though, that’s just a story about the hodags and I wouldn’t ever stretch your credulity by telling you no stories, no sir—he’d cover the trench with two-b’-fours and the next snowfall would cover it up completely, save for the flag he’d planted to show him where the trench was.
   “Then my grampaw would ride through the winter in comfort and never have to worry about running out of food or out of fuel. And when he saw that the true spring was coming he’d go to the flag, and he’d dig his way down through the snow, and he’d move the two-by-fours, and he’d carry them in one by one and set the family in front of the fire to thaw. Nobody ever minded except one of the hired men who lost half an ear to a family of mice who nibbled it off one time my grampaw didn’t push those two-by-fours all the way closed. Of course, in those days we had real winters. You could do that back then. These pussy winters we get nowadays it don’t hardly get cold enough.”
   “No?” asked Shadow. He was playing straight man, and enjoying it enormously.
   “Not since the winter of ‘49, and you’d be too young to remember that one. That was a winter. I see you bought yourself a vehicle.”
   “Yup. What do you think?”
   “Truth to tell, I never liked that Gunther boy. I had a trout stream down in the woods a way, on back of my property, way back, well it’s town land but I’d put down stones in the river, made little pools and places where the trout liked to live. Caught me some beauties too-one fellow must have been a six-, seven-pound brook trout, and that little Gunther so-and-so he kicked down each of the pools and threatened to report me to the DNR. Now he’s in Green Bay, and soon enough he’ll be back here. If there were any justice in the world he’d’ve gone off into the world as a winter runaway, but nope, sticks like a cockleburr to a woolen vest.” He began to arrange the contents of Shadow’s welcome basket on the counter. “This is Katherine Powdermaker’s crabapple jelly. She’s been giving me a pot for Christmas for longer than you’ve been alive, and the sad truth is I’ve never opened a one. They’re down in my basement, forty, fifty pots. Maybe I’ll open one and discover that I like the stuff. Meantime, here’s a pot for you. Maybe you’ll like it.”
   “What’s a winter runaway?”
   “Mm.” The old man pushed his woolen cap above his ears, rubbed his temple with a pink forefinger. “Well, it ain’t unique to Lakeside—we’re a good town, better than most, but we’re not perfect. Some winters, well, maybe a kid gets a bit stir crazy, when it gets so cold that you can’t go out, and the snow’s so dry that you can’t make so much as a snowball without it crumbling away…”
   “They run off?”
   The old man nodded, gravely. “I blame the television, showing all the kids things they’ll never have—Dallas and Dynasty, all of that nonsense. I’ve not had a television since the fall of ‘83, except for a black-and-white set I keep in a closet for if folk come in from out of town and there’s a big game on.”
   “Can I get you anything, Hinzelmann?”
   “Not coffee. Gives me heartburn. Just water.” Hinzelmann shook his head. “Biggest problem in this part of the world is poverty. Not the poverty we had in the Depression but something more in…what’s the word, means it creeps in at the edges, like cock-a-roaches?”
   “Insidious?”
   “Yeah. Insidious. Logging’s dead. Mining’s dead. Tourists don’t drive farther north than the Dells, ‘cept for a handful of hunters and some kids going to camp on the lakes—and they aren’t spending their money in the towns.”
   “Lakeside seems kind of prosperous, though.”
   The old man’s blue eyes blinked. “And believe me, it takes a lot of work,” he said. “Hard work. But this is a good town, and all the work all the people here put into it is worthwhile. Not that my family weren’t poor as kids. Ask me how poor we was as kids.”
   Shadow put on his straight-man face and said, “How poor were you as kids, Mister Hinzelmann?”
   “Just Hinzelmann, Mike. We were so poor that we couldn’t afford a fire. Come New Year’s Eve my father would suck on a peppermint, and us kids, we’d stand around with our hands outstretched, basking in the glow.”
   Shadow made a rimshot noise. Hinzelmann put on his ski mask and did up his huge plaid coat, pulled, out his car keys from his pocket, and then, last of all, putted on his great gloves. “You get too bored up here, you just come down to the store and ask for me. I’ll show you my collection of hand-tied fishing flies. Bore you so much that getting back here will be a relief.” His voice was muffled, but audible.
   “I’ll do that,” said Shadow with a smile. “How’s Tessie?”
   “Hibernating. She’ll be out in the spring. You take care now, Mr. Ainsel.” And he closed the door behind him as he left.
   The apartment grew ever colder.
   Shadow put on his coat and his gloves. Then he put on his boots. He could hardly see through the windows now for the ice on the inside of the panes which turned the view of the lake into an abstract image.
   His breath was clouding in the air. He went out of his apartment onto the wooden deck and knocked on the door next door. He heard a woman’s voice shouting at someone to for heaven’s sake shut up and turn that television down—a kid, he thought, adults don’t shout like that at other adults. The door opened and a tired woman with very long, very black hair was staring at him warily.
   “Yes?”
   “How do you do, ma’am. I’m Mike Ainsel. I’m your next-door neighbor.”
   Her expression did not change, not by a hair. “Yes?”
   “Ma’am. It’s freezing in my apartment. There’s a little heat coming out of the grate, but it’s not warming the place up, not at all.”
   She looked him up and down, then a ghost of a smile touched the edges of her lips and she said, “Come in, then. If you don’t there’ll be no heat in here, either.”
   He stepped inside her apartment. Plastic, multicolored toys were strewn all over the floor. There were small heaps of torn Christmas wrapping paper by the wall. A small boy sat inches away from the television set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and shouting his way across the screen. Shadow kept his back to the TV set.
   “Okay,” she said. “This is what you do. First you seal the windows, you can buy the stuff down at Hennings, it’s just like Saran Wrap but for windows. Tape it to windows, then if you want to get fancy you run a blow-dryer on it, it stays there the whole winter. That stops the heat leaving through the windows. Then you buy a space heater or two. The building’s furnace is old, and it can’t cope with the real cold. We’ve had some easy winters recently, I suppose we should be grateful.” Then she put out her hand. “Marguerite Olsen.”
   “Good to meet you,” said Shadow. He pulled off a glove and they shook hands. “You know, ma’am, I’d always thought of Olsens as being blonder than you.”
   “My ex-husband was as blond as they come. Pink and blond. Couldn’t tan at gunpoint.”
   “Missy Gunther told me you write for the local paper.”
   “Missy Gunther tells everybody everything. I don’t see why we need a local paper with Missy Gunther around.” She nodded. “Yes. Some news reporting here and there, but my editor writes most of the news. I write the nature column, the gardening column, an opinion column every Sunday and the ‘News from the Community’ column, which tells, in mind-numbing detail, who went to dinner with who for fifteen miles around. Or is that whom?”
   “Whom,” said Shadow, before he could stop himself. “It’s the objective case.”
   She looked at him with her black eyes, and Shadow experienced a moment of pure dйjа vu. I’ve been here before, he thought.
   No, she reminds me of someone.
   “Anyway, that’s how you heat up your apartment,” she said.
   “Thank you,” said Shadow. “When it’s warm you and your little one must come over.”
   “His name’s Leon,” she said. “Good meeting you, Mister…I’m sorry…”
   “Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Mike Ainsel.”
   “And what sort of a name is Ainsel?” she asked.
   Shadow had no idea. “My name,” he said. “I’m afraid I was never very interested in family history.”
   “Norwegian, maybe?” she said.
   “We were never close,” he said. Then he remembered Uncle Emerson Borson, and added, “On that side, anyway.”


* * *

   By the time Mr. Wednesday arrived, Shadow had put clear plastic sheeting across all the windows, and had one space heater running in the main room and one in the bedroom at the back. It was practically cozy.
   “What the hell is that purple piece of shit you’re driving?” asked Wednesday, by way of greeting.
   “Well,” said Shadow, “you drove off with my white piece of shit. Where is it, by the way?”
   “I traded it in in Duluth,” said Wednesday. “You can’t be too careful. Don’t worry—you’ll get your share when all this is done.”
   “What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.”
   Wednesday smiled his smile, the one that made Shadow want to hit him. “You’re living here because it’s the last place they’ll look for you. I can keep you out of sight here.”
   “By ‘they’ you mean the black hats?”
   “Exactly. I’m afraid the House on the Rock is now out of bounds. It’s a little difficult, but we’ll cope. Now it’s just stamping our feet and flag-waving, caracole and saunter until the action starts—a little later than any of us expected. I think they’ll hold off until spring. Nothing big can happen until then.”
   “How come?”

  “Because they may babble on about micromilliseconds and virtual worlds and paradigm shifts and what-have-you, but they still inhabit this planet and are still bound by the cycle of the year. These are the dead months. A victory in these months is a dead victory.”
   “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Shadow. That was not entirely true. He had a vague idea, and he hoped it was wrong.
   “It’s going to be a bad winter, and you and I are going to use our time as wisely as we can. We shall rally our troops and pick our battleground.”
   “Okay,” said Shadow. He knew that Wednesday was telling him the truth, or a part of a truth. War was coming. No, that was not it: the war had already begun. The battle was coming. “Mad Sweeney said that he was working for you when we met him that first night. He said that before he died.”
   “And would I have wanted to employ someone who could not even best a sad case like that in a bar fight? But never fear, you’ve repaid my faith in you a dozen times over. Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”
   “Las Vegas, Nevada?”
   “That’s the one.”
   “No.”
   “We’re flying in there from Madison later tonight, on a gentleman’s red-eye, a charter plane for high rollers. I’ve convinced them that we should be on it.”
   “Don’t you ever get tired of lying?” asked Shadow. He said it gently, curiously.
   “Not in the slightest. Anyway, it’s true. We are playing for the highest stakes of all. It shouldn’t take us more than a couple of hours to get to Madison, the roads are clear. So lock your door and turn off the heaters. It would be a terrible thing if you burned down the house in your absence.”
   “Who are we going to see in Las Vegas?”
   Wednesday told him.
   Shadow turned off the heaters, packed some clothes into an overnight bag, then turned back to Wednesday and said, “Look, I feel kind of stupid. I know you just told me who we’re going to see, but I dunno. I just had a brain-fart or something. It’s gone. Who is it again?”
   Wednesday told him once more.
   This time Shadow almost had it. The name was there on the tip of his mind. He wished he’d been paying closer attention when Wednesday told him. He let it go.
   “Who’s driving?” he asked Wednesday.
   “You are,” said Wednesday. They walked out of the house, down the wooden stairs and the icy path to where a black Lincoln Town Car was parked.
   Shadow drove.


* * *


   Entering the casino, one is beset at every side by invitation—invitations such that it would take a man of stone, heartless, mindless, and curiously devoid of avarice, to decline them.
   Listen: a machine-gun rattle of silver coins as they tumble and spurt down into a slot machine tray and overflow onto monogrammed carpets is replaced by the siren clangor of the slots, the jangling, blippeting chorus swallowed by the huge room, muted to a comforting background chatter by the time one reaches the card tables, the distant sounds only loud enough to keep the adrenaline flowing through the gamblers veins.
   There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors.
   The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It’s a sacrifice, of sorts.
   The money flows through the casino in an uninterrupted stream of green and silver, streaming from hand to hand, from gambler to croupier to cashier to the management to security, finally ending up in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum, the Counting Room. And it is here, in the counting room of this casino, that you come to rest, here, where the greenbacks are sorted, stacked, indexed, here in a space that is slowly becoming redundant as more and more of the money that flows through the casino is imaginary: an electrical sequence of ons and offs, sequences that flow down telephone lines.
   In the counting room you see three men, counting money under the glassy stare of the cameras they can see, the insectile gazes of the tiny cameras they cannot see. During the course of one shift each of the men counts more money than he will see in all the pay packets of his life. Each man, when he sleeps, dreams of counting money, of stacks and paper bands and numbers that climb inevitably, that are sorted and lost. Each of the three men has idly wondered, not less than once a week, how to evade the casino’s security systems and run off with as much money as he could haul; and, reluctantly, each man has inspected the dream and found it impractical, has settled for a steady paycheck, avoided the twin specters of prison and an unmarked grave.
   And here, in the sanctum sanctorum, there are the three men who count the money, and there are the guards who watch and who bring money and take it away; and then there is another person. His charcoal-gray suit is immaculate, his hair is dark, he is clean-shaven, and his face and his demeanor are, in every sense, forgettable. None of the other men has even observed that he is there, or if they have noticed him, they have forgotten him on the instant.
   As the shift ends the doors are opened, and the man in the charcoal suit leaves the room and walks, with the guards, through the corridors, their feet shushing along the monogrammed carpets. The money, in strongboxes, is wheeled to an interior loading bay, where it is loaded into armored cars. As the ramp door swings open, to allow the armored car out onto the early streets of Las Vegas, the man in the charcoal suit walks, unnoticed, through the doorway, and saunters up the ramp, out onto the sidewalk. He does not even glance up to see the imitation of New York on his left.
   Las Vegas has become a child’s picture—book dream of a city—here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame. Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o’ war.
   The man in the charcoal suit ambles comfortably along the sidewalk, feeling the flow of the money through the town. In the summer the streets are baking, and each store doorway he passes breathes wintry A/C out into the sweaty warmth and chills the sweat on his face. Now, in the desert winter, there’s a dry cold, which he appreciates. In his mind the movement of money forms a fine latticework, a three dimensional cat’s cradle of light and motion. What he finds attractive about this desert city is the speed of movement, the way the money moves from place to place and hand to hand: it’s a rush for him, a high, and it pulls him like an addict to the street.
   A taxi follows him slowly down the street, keeping its distance. He does not notice it; it does not occur to him to notice it: he is so rarely noticed himself that he finds the concept that he could be being followed almost inconceivable.
   It’s four in the morning, and he finds himself drawn to a hotel and casino that has been out of style for thirty years, still running until tomorrow or six months from now when they’II implode it and knock it down and build a pleasure palace where it was, and forget it forever. Nobody knows him, nobody remembers him, but the lobby bar is tacky and quiet, and the air is blue with old cigarette smoke and someone’s about to drop several million dollars on a poker game in a private room upstairs. The man in the charcoal suit settles himself in the bar several floors below the game, and is ignored by a waitress. A Muzak version of “Why Can’t He Be You?” is playing, almost subliminally. Five Elvis Presley impersonators, each man wearing a different-colored jumpsuit, watch a late night rerun of a football game on the bar TV.
   A big man in a light gray suit sits at the man in the charcoal suit’s table, and, noticing him even if she does not notice the man in the charcoal suit, the waitress, who is too thin to be pretty, too obviously anorectic to work Luxor or the Tropicana, and who is counting the minutes until she gets off work, comes straight over and smiles. He grins widely at her. “You’re looking a treat tonight, m ‘dear, a fine sight for these poor old eyes,” he says, and, scenting a large tip, she smiles broadly at him. The man in the light gray suit orders a Jack Daniel’s for himself and a Laphroaig and water for the man in the charcoal suit sitting beside him.
   “You know,” says the man in the light gray suit, when his drink arrives, “the finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn’t see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said ‘I know. But it’s the only game in town.’ And he went back to the game.”
   Dark eyes stare at the man in the light gray suit mistrustfully. The man in the charcoal suit says something in reply. The man in the light suit, who has a graying reddish beard, shakes his head.
   “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry about what went down in Wisconsin. But I got you all out safely, didn’t I? No one was hurt.”
   The man in the dark suit sips his Laphroaig and water, savoring the marshy taste, the body-in-the-bog quality of the whiskey. He asks a question.
   “I don’t know. Everything’s moving faster than I expected. Everyone’s got a hard-on for the kid I hired to run errands—I’ve got him outside, waiting in the taxi. Are you still in?”

   The man in the dark suit replies.
   The bearded man shakes his head. “She’s not been seen for two hundred years. If she isn’t dead she’s taken herself out of the picture.”
   Something else is said.
   “Look,” says the bearded man, knocking back his Jack Daniel’s. “You come in, be there when we need you, and I’ll take care of you. Whaddayou want? Soma? I can get you a bottle of Soma. The real stuff.”
   The man in the dark suit stares. Then he nods his head, reluctantly, and makes a comment.
   “Of course I am,” says the bearded man, smiling like a knife. “What do you expect? But look at it this way: it’s the only game in town.” He reaches out a paw like hand and shakes the other man’s well-manicured hand. Then he walks away.
   The thin waitress comes over, puzzled: there’s now only one man at the corner table, a sharply dressed man with dark hair in a charcoal-gray suit. “You doing okay?” she asks. “Is your friend coming back?”
   The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won forty-thousand dollars at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home.
   The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.



* * *

   “So who was that guy you were seeing?” asked Shadow as they walked back down the Las Vegas concourse. There were slot machines in the airport. Even at this time of the morning people stood in front of them, feeding them coins. Shadow wondered if there were those who never left the airport, who got off their planes, walked along the jetway into the airport building, and stopped there, trapped by the spinning images and the flashing lights until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then, with nothing left, just turned around and got onto the plane back home.
   And then he realized that he had zoned out just as Wednesday had been telling him who the man in the dark suit they had followed in the taxi had been, and he had missed it.
   “So he’s in,” said Wednesday. “It’ll cost me a bottle of Soma, though.”
   “What’s Soma?”
   “It’s a drink.” They walked onto the charter plane, empty but for them and a trio of corporate big spenders who needed to be back in Chicago by the start of the next business day.
   Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniel’s. “My kind of people see your kind of people…” he hesitated. “It’s like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people…we feed on belief, on prayers, on love.”
   “And Soma is…”
   “To take the analogy further, it’s a honey wine. Like mead.” He chuckled. “It’s a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a potent liqueur.”
   They were somewhere over Nebraska eating an unimpressive in-flight breakfast when Shadow said, “My wife.”
   “The dead one.”
   “Laura. She doesn’t want to be dead. She told me. After she got me away from the guys on the train.”
   “The action of a fine wife. Freeing you from durance vile and murdering those who would have harmed you. You should treasure her, Nephew Ainsel.”
   “She wants to be really alive. Can we do that? Is that possible?”
   Wednesday said nothing for long enough that Shadow started to wonder if he had heard the question, or if he had, possibly, fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then he said, staring ahead of him as he talked, “I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.
   “I know a charm that will heal with a touch.
   “I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.
   “I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.
   “A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it.”
   His words were quiet, urgent. Gone was the hectoring tone, gone was the grin. Wednesday spoke as if he were reciting the words of a religious ritual, or remembering something dark and painful.
   “A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.
   “A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it.
   “An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.
   “A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.
   “Those were the first nine charms I learned. Nine nights I hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spear’s point. I swayed and blew in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me.
   “For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.
   “An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes.
   “A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.
   “A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.
   “A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.
   “A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams.”
   His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the plane’s engine noise.
   “A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.
   “A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.
   “And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”
   He sighed, and then stopped talking.
   Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.
   “Laura,” was all he said.
   Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadow’s pale gray eyes with his own. “I can’t make her live again,” he said. “I don’t even know why she isn’t as dead as she ought to be.”
   “I think I did it,” said Shadow. “It was my fault.”
   Wednesday raised an eyebrow.
   “Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it on to Laura.”
   Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. “That could do it,” he said. “And no, I can’t help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course.”
   “What,” asked Shadow, “is that supposed to mean?”
   “It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones and thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”
   He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray.
   Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesday’s gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okay—something that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well.
   He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything.
   Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesday’s hand.


* * *

   The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas.
   “Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves.”
   “All at the same time?”
   “Don’t get smart with me, m’boy. You can keep out of sight in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you were in a city they’d get your scent in minutes.”
   “I’ll stay put and keep out of trouble.” Shadow meant it as he said it. He’d had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go forever. “When are you coming back?” he asked.
   “Soon,” said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincoln’s engine, slid up the window, and drove off into the frigid night.

Chapter 11

   Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Ben Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack.


   Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.
   He was down at the video, tanning, bait and tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann’s hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.
   He asked Hinzelmann.
   “For real?” asked Hinzelmann.
   “For real,” said Shadow.
   “Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard-they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it has to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir crazy-winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.
   “Storybooks were like gold dust-anything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, they’d make the Germans tell them the stories.
   “Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she’d not suffer them to take it from her.” He shook his head meditatively, closed the fly cabinet with a click. “Bad business. You want a video rental card? Eventually they’ll open a Blockbusters here, and then we’ll soon be out of business. But for now we got a pretty fair selection.”
   Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television, and no VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann’s company-the reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin of the old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him.
   Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, and took out a tin box-by the look of it, it had once been a Christmas box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, “How many you want me to put you down for?”
   “How many of what?”
   “Klunker tickets. She’ll go out onto the ice today, so we’ve started selling tickets. Each ticket is five dollars, ten for forty, twenty for seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we can’t promise it’ll go down in your five minutes, but the person who’s closest stands to win five hundred bucks, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times aren’t spoken for. You want to see the info sheet?”
   “Sure.”
   Hinzelmann handed Shadow a photocopied sheet. The klunker was an old car with its engine and fuel tank removed, which would be parked out on the ice for the winter. Sometime in the spring the lake ice would melt, and when it was too thin to bear the car’s weight the car would fall into the lake. The earliest the klunker had ever tumbled into the lake was February the twenty-seventh (“That was the winter of 1998. I don’t think you could rightly call that a winter at all”), the latest was May the first (“That was 1950. Seemed that year that the only way that winter would end was if somebody hammered a stake through its heart”). The beginning of April appeared to be the most common time for the car to sink-normally in midafternoon.
   All of the midafternoons in April had already gone, marked off in Hinzelmann’s lined notebook. Shadow bought a thirty-minute period on the morning of March 23, from 9:00 A.M. to 9:30 A.M. He handed Hinzelmann thirty dollars.
   “I just wish everybody in town was as easy a sell as you are,” said Hinzelmann.
   “It’s a thank-you for that ride you gave me that first night I was in town.”
   “No, Mike,” said Hinzelmann. “It’s for the children.” For a moment he looked serious, with no trace of impishness on his creased old face. “Come down this afternoon, you can lend a hand pushing the klunker out onto the lake.”
   He passed Shadow six blue cards, each with a date and time written on it in Hinzelmann’s old-fashioned handwriting, then entered the details of each in his notebook.
   “Hinzelmann,” asked Shadow. “Have you ever heard of eagle stones?”
   “Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that’s Eagle River. Can’t say I have.”
   “How about thunderbirds?”
   “Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down. I’m not helping, am I?”
   “Nope.”
   “Tell you what, why don’t you go look at the library. Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn’t I?”
   Shadow nodded, and said so long. He wished he’d thought of the library himself. He got into the purple 4-Runner and drove south on Main Street, following the lake around to the southernmost point, until he reached the castlelike building that housed the city library. He walked inside. A sign pointed to the basement: LIBRARY SALE, it read. The library proper was on the ground floor, and he stamped the snow off his boots.
   A forbidding woman with pursed, crimson-colored lips asked him pointedly if she could help him.
   “I guess I need a library card,” he said. “And I want to know all about thunderbirds.”
   Native American Beliefs and Traditions were on a single shelf in one castlelike turret. Shadow pulled down some books and sat in the window seat: In several minutes he had learned that thunderbirds were mythical gigantic birds who lived on mountaintops, who brought the lightning and who flapped their wings to make the thunder. There were some tribes, he read, who believed that the thunderbirds had made the world. Another half hour’s reading did not turn up anything more, and he could find no mention of eagle stones anywhere in the books’ indexes.
   Shadow was putting the last of the books back on the shelf when he became aware of somebody staring at him. Someone small and grave was peeking at him from around the heavy shelves. As he turned to look, the face vanished. He turned his back on the boy, then glanced around to see that he was being watched once more.
   In his pocket was the Liberty dollar. He took it out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, making sure the boy could see it. He finger-palmed it into his left hand, displayed both hands empty, raised his left hand to his mouth and coughed once, letting the coin tumble from his left hand into his right.
   The boy looked at him wide-eyed and scampered away, returning a few moments later, dragging an unsmiling Marguerite Olsen, who looked at Shadow suspiciously and said, “Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing magic for him.”
   “Just a little prestidigitation, ma’am. Say, I never did say thank you for your advice about heating the apartment. It’s warm as toast in there right now.”
   “That’s good.” Her icy expression had not begun to thaw.
   “It’s a lovely library,” said Shadow.
   “It’s a beautiful building. But the city needs something more efficient and less beautiful. You going to the library sale downstairs?”
   “I wasn’t planning on it.”
   “Well, you should. It’s for a good cause.”
   “I’ll make a point of getting down there.”
   “Head out into the hall and then go downstairs. Good seeing you, Mister Ainsel.”
   “Call me Mike,” he said.
   She said nothing, just took Leon’s hand and walked the boy over to the children’s section.
   “But Mom,” Shadow heard Leon say, “It wasn’t pressed igitation. It wasn’t. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it.”
   An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged: paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out.
   Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number painted in white on the spine. “You’re the first person over in that corner all day,” said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open metal cashbox. “Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the children’s books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that.” The man was reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar.”
   Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy of Herodotus’s Histories bound in peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperback copy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox.
   “Buy one more, it’s still a dollar,” said the man. “And if you take another book away, you’ll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space.”
   Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Dave’s Finest Food brown paper sack.
   Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way back. He could even see his apartment building, like a doll’s house, up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake.
   “March the twenty-third,” Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. “Nine A.M. to nine-thirty A.M.” He wondered if the lake or the klunker could hear him-and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could. He doubted it.
   The wind blew bitter against his face.
   Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadow’s apartment when he got back. Shadow’s heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front seat.
   He walked over to the car, carrying his paper sack of books.
   Mulligan lowered his window. “Library sale?” he said.
   “Yes.”
   “I bought a box of Robert Ludlum books there two, three years back. Keep meaning to read them. My cousin swears by the guy. These days I figure if I ever get marooned on a desert island and I got my box of Robert Ludlum books with me, I can catch up on my reading.”
   “Something particular I can do for you, Chief?”
   “Not a darn thing, pal. Thought I’d stop by and see how you were settling in. You remember that Chinese saying, you save a man’s life, you’re responsible for him. Well, I’m not saying I saved your life last week. But I still thought I should check in. How’s the Purple Gunther-mobile doing?”
   “Good,” said Shadow. “It’s good. Running fine.”
   “Pleased to hear it.”
   “I saw my next-door neighbor in the library,” said Shadow. “Miz Olsen. I was wondering…”
   “What crawled up her butt and died?”
   “If you want to put it like that.”
   “Long story. You want to ride along for a spell, I’ll tell you all about it.”
   Shadow thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” he said. He got into the car, sat in the front passenger seat. Mulligan drove north of town. Then he turned off his lights and parked beside the road.
   “Darren Olsen met Marge at U.W. Stevens Point and he brought her back north to Lakeside. She was a journalism major. He was studying, shit, hotel management, something like that. When they got here, jaws dropped. This was, what, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She was so beautiful…that black hair…” he paused. “Darren managed the Motel America over in Camden, twenty miles west of here. Except nobody ever seemed to want to stop in Camden and eventually the motel closed. They had two boys. At that time Sandy was eleven. The little one-Leon, is it?-was just a babe in arms.
   “Darren Olsen wasn’t a brave man. He’d been a good high school football player, but that was the last time he was flying high. Whatever. He couldn’t find the courage to tell Margie that he’d lost his job. So for a month, maybe for two months, he’d drive off early in the morning, come home late in the evening complaining about the hard day he’d had at the motel.”
   “What was he doing?” asked Shadow.
   “Mm. Couldn’t say for certain. I reckon he was driving up to Ironwood, maybe down to Green Bay. Guess he started out as a job hunter. Pretty soon he was drinking the time away, getting stoned, more than probably meeting the occasional working girl for a little instant gratification. He could have been gambling. What I do know for certain is that he emptied out their joint account in about ten weeks. It was only a matter of time before Margie figured out-there we go!”
   He swung the car out, flicked on the siren and the lights, and scared the daylights out of a small man in a car with Iowa plates who had just come down the hill at seventy.
   The rogue lowan ticketed, Mulligan returned to his story.
   “Where was I? Okay. So Margie kicks him out, sues for divorce. It turned into a vicious custody battle. That’s what they call ‘em when they get into People magazine. Vicious Custody Battle. She got the kids. Darren got visitation rights and precious little else. Now, back then Leon was pretty small. Sandy was older, a good kid, the kind of boy who worships his daddy. Wouldn’t let Margie say nothing bad about him. They lost the house-had a nice place down on Daniels Road. She moved into the apartment. He left town. Came back every six months to make everybody miserable.

   “This went on for a few years. He’d come back, spend money on the kids, leave Margie in tears. Most of us just started wishing he’d never come back at all. His mom and pop had moved to Florida when they retired, said they couldn’t take another Wisconsin winter. So last year he came out, said he wanted to take the boys to Florida for Christmas. Margie said not a hope, told him to get lost. It got pretty unpleasant-at one point I had to go over there. Domestic dispute. By the time I got there Darren was standing in the front yard shouting stuff, the boys were barely holding it together, Margie was crying.
   “I told Darren he was shaping up for a night in the cells. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but he was sober enough not to do that. I gave him a ride down to the trailer park south of town, told him to shape up. That he’d hurt her enough…Next day he left town.
   “Two weeks later, Sandy vanished. Didn’t get onto the school bus. Told his best friend that he’d be seeing his dad soon, that Darren was bringing him a specially cool present to make up for having missed Christmas in Florida. Nobody’s seen him since. Noncustodial kidnappings are the hardest. It’s tough to find a kid who doesn’t want to be found, y’see?”
   Shadow said that he did. He saw something else as well. Chad Mulligan was in love with Marguerite Olsen himself. He wondered if the man knew how obvious it was.
   Mulligan pulled out once more, lights flashing, and pulled over some teenagers doing sixty. He didn’t ticket them, “just put the fear of God in them.”


* * *

   That evening Shadow sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to transform a silver dollar into a penny. It was a trick he had found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions, but the instructions were infuriating, unhelpful and vague. Phrases like “then vanish the penny in the usual way,” occurred every sentence or so. In this context, Shadow wondered, what was “the usual way”? A French drop? Sleeving it? Shouting “Oh my god, look out! A mountain lion!” and dropping the coin into his side pocket while the audience’s attention was diverted?
   He tossed his silver dollar into the air, caught it, remembering the moon and the woman who gave it to him, then he attempted the illusion. It didn’t seem to work. He walked into the bathroom and tried it in front of the mirror, and confirmed that he was right. The trick as written simply didn’t work. He sighed, dropped the coins in his pocket and sat down on the couch. He spread the cheap throw rug over his legs and flipped open the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. The type, in two columns, was so small as to be almost unreadable. He flipped through the book, looking at the reproductions of the photographs of the period, at the several incarnations of the Lakeside City Council therein: long side whiskers and clay pipes and battered hats and shiny hats, worn with faces that were, many of them, peculiarly familiar. He was unsurprised to see that the portly secretary of the 1882 city council was a Patrick Mulligan: shave him, make him lose twenty pounds and he’d be a dead ringer for Chad Mulligan, his-what, great-great-grandson? He wondered if Hinzelmann’s pioneer grandfather was in the photographs, but it did not appear that he had been city council material. Shadow thought he had seen a reference to a Hinzelmann in the text, while flipping from photograph to photograph, but it eluded him when he leafed back for it, and the tiny type made Shadow’s eyes ache.
   He put the book down on his chest and realized his head was nodding. It would be foolish to fall asleep on the couch, he decided soberly. The bedroom was only a few feet away. On the other hand, the bedroom and the bed would still be there in five minutes, and anyway, he was not going to go to sleep, only to close his eyes for a moment…


   Darkness roared.
   He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people.
   They looked at him with dark, proud eyes.
   “Tell me about the thunderbirds,” said Shadow. “Please. It’s not for me. It’s for my wife.”
   One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky.
   “Ask them yourself,” she said. Summer lightning flickered, momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon.
   There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. It’s bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. It’s old dry bone.
   It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower.
   It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the eggshells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor.
   Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face.
   He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spire-enormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air.
   They were circling the spire.
   They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, thought Shadow.
   Then the first bird swung out of its glide toward him, blue lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice of skulls, hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe.
   Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into his arm.
   He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wing-for if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbird’s feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a man-but the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb.
   There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings.
   He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to…
   The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls…


   The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up.
   “What the fuck,” shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, “what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at?”
   “I was asleep,” said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly.
   “What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a hiding place like Lakeside, if you’re going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it?”
   “I dreamed of thunderbirds…” said Shadow. “And a tower. Skulls…” It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.
   “I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What’s the point in hiding you, if you’re going to start to fucking advertise?”
   Shadow said nothing.
   There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. “I’ll be there in the morning,” said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. “We’re going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional.” And the line went dead.
   Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. It was 6:00 A.M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake. And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing was insistent and low and heartbreaking.
   Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking a lost child.


* * *

   San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow’s neck. Wednesday was wearing a deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an entertainment lawyer.
   They were walking along Haight Street. The street people and the hustlers and the moochers watched them go by, and no one shook a paper cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.
   Wednesday’s jaw was set. Shadow had seen immediately that the man was still angry, and had asked no questions when the black Lincoln Town Car had pulled up outside the apartment that morning. They had not talked on the way to the airport. He had been relieved that Wednesday was in first class and he was back in coach.
   Now it was late in the afternoon. Shadow, who had not been in San Francisco since he was a boy, who had only seen it since then as a background to movies, was astonished at how familiar it was, how colorful and unique the wooden houses, how steep the hills, how very much it didn’t feel like anywhere else.
   “It’s almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside,” he said.
   Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, “It’s not. San Francisco isn’t in the same country as Lakeside anymore than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis.”
   “Is that so?” said Shadow, mildly.
   “Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers-money, a federal government, entertainment-it’s the same land, obviously-but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.” They were approaching a park at the end of the road. “Be nice to the lady we are visiting. But not too nice.”
   “I’ll be cool,” said Shadow.
   They stepped onto the grass.
   A young girl, no older than fourteen, her hair dyed green and orange and pink, stared at them as they went by. She sat beside a dog, a mongrel, with a piece of string for a collar and a leash. She looked hungrier than the dog did. The dog yapped at them, then wagged its tail.
   Shadow gave the girl a dollar bill. She stared at it as if she was not sure what it was. “Buy dog food with it,” Shadow suggested. She nodded, and smiled.
   “Let me put it bluntly,” said Wednesday. “You must be very cautious around the lady we are visiting. She might take a fancy to you, and that would be bad.”
   “Is she your girlfriend or something?”
   “Not for all the little plastic toys in China,” said Wednesday, agreeably. His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have been invested for the future. Shadow suspected that anger was the engine that made Wednesday run.
   There was a woman sitting on the grass, under a tree, with a paper tablecloth spread in front of her, and a variety of Tupperware dishes on the cloth.
   She was-not fat, no, far from fat: what she was, a word that Shadow had never had cause to use until now, was curvaceous. Her hair was so fair that it was white, the kind of platinum-blonde tresses that should have belonged to a long-dead movie starlet, her lips were painted crimson, and she looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty.
   As they reached her she was selecting from a plate of deviled eggs. She looked up as Wednesday approached her, put down the egg she had chosen, and wiped her hand. “Hello, you old fraud,” she said, but she smiled as she said it, and Wednesday bowed low, took her hand, and raised it to his lips.
   He said, “You look divine.”
   “How the hell else should I look?” she demanded, sweetly. “Anyway, you’re a liar. New Orleans was such a mistake-I put on, what, thirty pounds there? I swear. I knew I had to leave when I started to waddle. The tops of my thighs rub together when I walk now, can you believe that?” This last was addressed to Shadow. He had no idea what to say in reply, and felt a hot flush suffuse his face. The woman laughed delightedly. “He’s blushing! Wednesday, my sweet, you brought me a blusher. How perfectly wonderful of you. What’s he called?”

  “This is Shadow,” said Wednesday. He seemed to be enjoying Shadow’s discomfort. “Shadow, say hello to Easter.”
   Shadow said something that might have been Hello, and the woman smiled at him again. He felt like he was caught in headlights-the blinding kind that poachers use to freeze deer before they shoot them. He could smell her perfume from where he was standing, an intoxicating mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle, of sweet milk and female skin.
   “So, how’s tricks?” asked Wednesday.
   The woman-Easter-laughed a deep and throaty laugh, full-bodied and joyous. How could you not like someone who laughed like that? “Everything’s fine,” she said. “How about you, you old wolf?”
   “I was hoping to enlist your assistance.”
   “Wasting your time.”
   “At least hear me out before dismissing me.”
   “No point. Don’t even bother.”
   She looked at Shadow. “Please, sit down here and help yourself to some of this food. Here, take a plate and pile it high. It’s all good. Eggs, roast chicken, chicken curry, chicken salad, and over here is lapin-rabbit, actually, but cold rabbit is a delight, and in that bowl over there is the jugged hare-well, why don’t I just fill a plate for you?” And she did, taking a plastic plate, piling it high with food, and passing it to him. Then she looked at Wednesday. “Are you eating?” she asked.
   “I am at your disposal, my dear,” said Wednesday.
   “You,” she told him, “are so full of shit it’s a wonder your eyes don’t turn brown.” She passed him an empty plate. “Help yourself,” she said.
   The afternoon sun at her back burned her hair into a platinum aura. “Shadow,” she said, chewing a chicken leg with gusto. “That’s a sweet name. Why do they call you Shadow?”
   Shadow licked his lips to moisten them. “When I was a kid,” he said. “We lived, my mother and I, we were, I mean, she was, well, like a secretary, at a bunch of U.S. embassies, we went from city to city all over northern Europe. Then she got sick and had to take early retirement and we came back to the States. I never knew what to say to the other kids, so I’d just find adults and follow them around, not saying anything. I just needed the company, I guess. I don’t know. I was a small kid.”
   “You grew,” she said.
   “Yes,” said Shadow. “I grew.”
   She turned back to Wednesday, who was spooning down a bowl of what looked like cold gumbo. “Is this the boy who’s got everybody so upset?”
   “You heard?”
   “I keep my ears pricked up,” she said. Then to Shadow, “You keep out of their way. There are too many secret societies out there, and they have no loyalties and no love. Commercial, independent, government, they’re all in the same boat. They range from the barely competent to the deeply dangerous. Hey, old wolf, I heard a joke you’d like the other day. How do you know the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?”
   “I’ve heard it,” said Wednesday.
   “Pity.” She turned her attention back to Shadow. “But the spook show, the ones you met, they’re something else. They exist because everyone knows they must exist.” She drained a paper cup of something that looked like white wine, and then she got to her feet. “Shadow’s a good name,” she said. “I want a mochaccino. Come on.”
   She began to walk away. “What about the food?” asked Wednesday. “You can’t just leave it here.”
   She smiled at him, and pointed to the girl sitting by the dog, and then extended her arms to take in the Haight and the World. “Let it feed them,” she said, and she walked, with Wednesday and Shadow trailing behind her.
   “Remember,” she said to Wednesday, as they walked, “I’m rich. I’m doing just peachy. Why should I help you?”
   “You’re one of us,” he said. “You’re as forgotten and as unloved and unremembered as any of us. It’s pretty clear whose side you should be on.”
   They reached a sidewalk coffeehouse, went inside, sat down. There was only one waitress, who wore her eyebrow ring as a mark of caste, and a woman making coffee behind the counter. The waitress advanced upon them, smiling automatically, sat them down, took their orders.
   Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesday’s square gray hand. “I’m telling you,” she said, “I’m doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf.”
   “And you wax fat and affluent on their worship and their love?” he said, dryly.
   “Don’t be an asshole.” Suddenly she sounded very tired. She sipped her mochaccino.
   “Serious question, m’dear. Certainly I would agree that millions upon millions of them give each other tokens in your name, and that they still practice all the rites of your festival, even down to hunting for hidden eggs. But how many of them know who you are? Eh? Excuse me, miss?” This to their waitress.
   She said, “You need another espresso?”
   “No, my dear. I was just wondering if you could solve a little argument we were having over here. My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word ‘Easter’ means. Would you happen to know?”
   The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, “I don’t know about any of that Christian stuff. I’m a pagan.”
   The woman behind the counter said, “I think it’s like Latin or something for ‘Christ has risen,’ maybe.”
   “Really?” said Wednesday.
   “Yeah, sure,” said the woman. “Easter. Just like the sun rises in the east, you know.”
   “The risen son. Of course-a most logical supposition.” The woman smiled and returned to her coffee grinder. Wednesday looked up at their waitress. “I think I shall have another espresso, if you do not mind. And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?”
   “Worship?”
   “That’s right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk?”
   Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, “The female principle. It’s an empowerment thing. You know?”
   “Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?”
   “She’s the goddess within us all,” said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. “She doesn’t need a name.”
   “Ah,” said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, “so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”
   “You’re making fun of me,” she said. “We don’t do any of that stuff you were saying.” She took a deep breath. Shadow suspected she was counting to ten. “Any more coffees here? Another mochaccino for you, ma’am?” Her smile was a lot like the one she had greeted them with when they had entered.
   They shook their heads, and the waitress turned to greet another customer.
   “There,” said Wednesday, “is one who ‘does not have the faith and will not have the fun,’ Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let’s see-I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don’t know, you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favor here-this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets.”
   Her green eyes looked at Wednesday. They were, Shadow decided, the exact same color as a leaf in spring with the sun shining through it. She said nothing.
   “We could try it,” continued Wednesday. “But I would end up with ten fingers, ten toes, and five nights in your bed. So don’t tell me they worship you and keep your festival day. They mouth your name, but it has no meaning to them. Nothing at all.”
   Tears stood out in her eyes. “I know that,” she said, quietly. “I’m not a fool.”
   “No,” said Wednesday. “You’re not.”
   He’s pushed her too far, thought Shadow.
   Wednesday looked down, ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he said. Shadow could hear the real sincerity in his voice. “We need you. We need your energy. We need your power. Will you fight beside us when the storm comes?”
   She hesitated. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her left wrist.
   “Yes,” she said, after a while. “I guess I will.”
   I guess it’s true what they say, thought Shadow. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. Then he felt guilty for thinking it.
   Wednesday kissed his finger, touched it to Easter’s cheek. He called their waitress over and paid for their coffees, counting out the money carefully, folding it over with the check and presenting it to her.
   As she walked away, Shadow said, “Ma’am? Excuse me? I think you dropped this.” He picked up a ten-dollar bill from the floor.
   “No,” she said, looking at the wrapped bills in her hand.
   “I saw it fall, ma’am,” said Shadow, politely. “You should count them.”
   She counted the money in her hand, looked puzzled, and said, “Jesus. You’re right. I’m sorry.” She took the ten-dollar bill from Shadow, and walked away.
   Easter walked out onto the sidewalk with them. The light was just starting to fade. She nodded to Wednesday, then she touched Shadow’s hand and said, “What did you dream about, last night?”
   “Thunderbirds,” he said. “A mountain of skulls.”
   She nodded. “And do you know whose skulls they were?”
   “There was a voice,” he said. “In my dream. It told me.”
   She nodded and waited.
   He said, “It said they were mine. Old skulls of mine. Thousands and thousands of them.”
   She looked at Wednesday, and said, “I think this one’s a keeper.” She smiled her bright smile. Then she patted Shadow’s arm and walked away down the sidewalk. He watched her go, trying-and failing-not to think of her thighs rubbing together as she walked.
   In the taxi on the way to the airport, Wednesday turned to Shadow. “What the hell was that business with the ten dollars about?”
   “You shortchanged her. It comes out of her wages if she’s short.”
   “What the hell do you care?” Wednesday seemed genuinely irate.
   Shadow thought for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me. She hadn’t done anything wrong.”
   “No?” Wednesday stared off into the middle distance, and said, “When she was seven years old she shut a kitten in a closet. She listened to it mew for several days. When it ceased to mew, she took it out of the closet, put it into a shoebox, and buried it in the backyard. She wanted to bury something. She consistently steals from everywhere she works. Small amounts, usually. Last year she visited her grandmother in the nursing home to which the old woman is confined. She took an antique gold watch from her grandmother’s bedside table, and then went prowling through several of the other rooms, stealing small quantities of money and personal effects from the twilight folk in their golden years. When she got home she did not know what to do with her spoils, scared someone would come after her, so she threw everything away except the cash.”
   “I get the idea,” said Shadow.
   “She also has asymptomatic gonorrhea,” said Wednesday. “She suspects she might be infected but does nothing about it. When her last boyfriend accused her of having given him a disease she was hurt, offended, and refused to see him again.”
   “This isn’t necessary,” said Shadow. “I said I get the idea. You could do this to anyone, couldn’t you? Tell me bad things about them.”
   “Of course,” agreed Wednesday. “They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive.”
   “And that makes it okay for you to steal ten bucks from her?”
   Wednesday paid the taxi and the two men walked into the airport, wandered up to their gate. Boarding had not yet begun. Wednesday said, “What the hell else can I do? They don’t sacrifice rams or bulls to me. They don’t send me the souls of killers and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. Isn’t that fair?”
   “My mom used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ ” said Shadow.
   “Of course she did,” said Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that moms say, right up there with ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?’ ”
   “You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly. “It was the right thing to do.”
   Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. “May your choices always be so clear,” he said.


* * *

   The cold snap was easing when Wednesday dropped Shadow off in the small hours of the morning. It was still obscenely cold in Lakeside, but it was no longer impossibly cold. The lighted sign on the side of the M&I Bank flashed alternately 3:30 A.M. and -5°F as they drove through the town.
   It was 9:30 A.M. when Chief of Police Chad Mulligan knocked on the apartment door and asked Shadow if he knew a girl named Alison McGovern.
   “I don’t think so,” said Shadow, sleepily.
   “This is her picture,” said Mulligan. It was a high school photograph. Shadow recognized the person in the picture immediately: the girl with the blue rubber-band braces on her teeth, the one who had been learning all about the oral uses of Alka-Seltzer from her friend.
   “Oh, yeah. Okay. She was on the bus when I came into town.”
   “Where were you yesterday, Mister Ainsel?”
   Shadow felt his world begin to spin away from him. He knew he had nothing to feel guilty about (You’re a parole-violating felon living under an assumed name, whispered a calm voice in his mind. Isn’t that enough?).
   “San Francisco,” he said. “California. Helping my uncle transport a four-poster bed.”
   “You got any ticket stubs? Anything like that?”
   “Sure.” He had both his boarding pass stubs in his back pocket, pulled them out. “What’s going on?”
   Chad Mulligan examined the boarding passes. “Alison McGovern’s vanished. She helped out up at the Lakeside Humane Society. Feed animals, walk dogs. She’d come out for a few hours after school. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs the Humane Society, she’d always run her home when they closed up for the night. Yesterday Alison never got there.”
   “She’s vanished.”
   “Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to hitchhike up to the Humane Society. It’s out on County W, pretty isolated. Her parents told her not to, but this isn’t the kind of place where things happen…people here don’t lock their doors, you know? And you can’t tell kids. So, look at the photo again.”
   Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth in the photograph were red, not blue.
   “You can honestly say you didn’t kidnap her, rape her, murder her, anything like that?”
   “I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn’t do that shit.”
   “That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us look for her?”
   “Me?”
   “You. We’ve had the K-9 guys out this morning-nothing so far.” He sighed. “Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with some dopey boyfriend.”
   “You think it’s likely?”