Chapter Seven. Bird Dream

   'Thinner.' The Gypsy-vulture croaked, passing over the common, over the Village Pub, the Waldenbooks on the corner of Main and Devon, over Esta-Esta, Fairview's moderately good Italian restaurant, over the post office, over the Amoco station, the modern glass-walled Fairview Public Library, and finally over the salt marshes and out into the bay.
   Thinner, just that one word, but it was a malediction enough, Halleck saw, because everyone in this affluent upper-class-commute-to-the-city-and-have-a-few-drinks-in-the-club-car-on-the-way-home suburb, everyone in this pretty little New England town set squarely in the heart of John Cheever country, everyone in Fairview was starving to death.
   He walked faster and faster up Main Street, apparently invisible – the logic of dreams, after all, is only whatever the dream demands – and horrified by the results of the Gypsy's curse. Fairview had become a town filled with concentration-camp survivors. Big-headed babies with wasted bodies screamed from expensive prams. Two women in expensive designer dresses staggered and lurched out of Cherry on Top, Fairview's version of the old ice-cream shoppe. Their faces were all cheekbones and bulging brows stretching parchment-shiny skin; the necklines of their dresses slipped from jutting skin-wrapped collarbones and deep shoulder hollows in a hideous parody of seduction.
   Here came Michael Houston, staggering along on scarecrow-thin legs, his Savile Row suit flapping around his unbelievably gaunt frame, holding out a vial of cocaine in one skeletal hand. 'Toot-sweet?' he screamed at Halleck – it was the voice of a rat caught in a trap and squealing out the last of its miserable life. 'Toot-sweet? It helps speed up your metabolism, Billy-boy! Toot-sweet? Toot -'
   With deepening horror Halleck realised the hand holding the vial was not a hand at all but only clattering bones. The man was a walking, talking skeleton.
   He turned to run, but in the way of nightmares, he could seem to pick up no speed. Although he was on the Main Street sidewalk, he felt as if he was running in thick, sticky mud. At any moment the skeleton that had been Michael Houston would reach out and he – it – would touch his shoulder. Or perhaps that bony hand would begin to scrabble at his throat.
   'Toot-sweet, toot-sweet, toot-sweet!' Houston's squalling, ratlike voice screamed. The voice was drawing closer and closer; Halleck knew that if he turned his head, the apparition would be close to him, so very close – sparkling eyes bulging from sockets of naked bone, the uncovered jawbone jerking and snapping.
   He saw Yard Stevens shamble out of Heads Up, his beige barber's smock flapping over a chest and a belly that were now nonexistent. Yard was screeching in a horrid, crowlike voice, and when he turned toward Halleck, he saw it was not Yard at all, but Ronald Reagan. 'Where's the rest of me?' he screamed. 'Where's the rest of me? WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?'
   'Thinner,' Michael Houston was now whispering into Halleck's ear, and now what Halleck had feared happened: those finger bones touched him, twiddling and twitching at his sleeve, and Halleck thought he would go mad at the feeling. 'Thinner, so much thinner, toot-de-sweet, and thin – de-thin, it was his wife, Billy-boy, his wife, and you're in trouble. oh-baby, sooo much trouble. . .'

Chapter Eight. Billy's Pants

   Billy jerked awake, breathing hard, his hand clapped across his mouth. Heidi slept peacefully beside him, deeply buried in a quilt. A mid-spring wind was running around the eaves outside.
   Halleck took one quick, fearful look around the bedroom, assuring himself that Michael Houston – or a scarecrow version of him – was not in attendance. It was just his bedroom, every corner of it known. The nightmare began to drain away … but there was still enough of it left so that he scooted over next to Heidi. He did not touch her – she woke easily – but he got into the zone of her warmth and stole part of her quilt.
   Just a dream.
   Thinner, a voice in his mind answered implacably.
   Sleep came again. Eventually.
   The morning following the nightmare, the bathroom scales showed him at 215, and Halleck felt hopeful. Only two pounds. Houston had been right, coke or not. The process was slowing down. He went downstairs whistling and ate three fried eggs and half a dozen link sausages.
   On his ride to the train station, the nightmare recurred to him in vague fashion, more as a feeling of deja vu than actual memory. He looked out the window as he passed Heads Up (which was flanked by Frank's Fine Meats and Toys Are Joys) and for just a moment he expected to see a half-score of lurching, shambling skeletons, as if comfortable, plushy Fairview had somehow been changed into Biafra. But the people on the streets looked okay; better than okay. Yard Stevens, as physically substantial as ever, waved. Halleck waved back and thought: Your metabolism is warning you to quit smoking, Yard. The thought made him smile a little, and by the time his train pulled into Grand Central, the last vestiges of the dream were forgotten.
   His mind at rest on the matter of his weight loss, Halleck neither weighed himself nor thought much about the matter for another four days . . . and then an embarrassing thing very nearly happened to him, in court and in front of Judge Hilmer Boynton, who had no more sense of humor than your average land turtle. It was stupid; the kind of thing you have bad dreams about when you're a grade-school kid.
   Halleck stood to make an objection and his pants started to fall down.
   He got halfway up, felt them sliding relentlessly down his hips and buttocks, bagging at the knees, and he sat down very quickly. In one of those moments of almost total objectivity – the ones which come unbidden and which you would often just as soon have forgotten Halleck realized that his movement must have looked like some sort of bizarre hop. William Halleck, attorney-at-law, does his Peter Rabbit riff. He felt a blush mount into his cheeks.
   'Is it an objection, Mr Halleck, or a gas attack?'
   The spectators – mercifully few of them – tittered.
   'Nothing, your Honor,' Halleck muttered. 'I … I changed my mind.'
   Boynton grunted. The proceedings droned on and Halleck sat sweating, wondering just how he was going to get up.
   The judge called a recess ten minutes later. Halleck sat at the defense table pretending to pore over a sheaf of papers. When the hearing room was mostly empty, he rose, hands stuffed into his suit coat pockets in a gesture he hoped looked casual. He was actually holding his trousers up through his pockets.
   He took off the suit coat in the privacy of a men's room stall, hung it up, looked at his pants, and then took off his belt. His pants, still buttoned and zipped, slithered down to his ankles; his change made a muffled jingle as his pockets struck the tile. He sat down on the toilet, held the belt up like a scroll, and looked at it. He could read a story there which was more than unsettling. The belt had been a Father's Day present two years ago from Linda. He held the belt up, reading it, and felt his heart speeding up to a frightened run.
   The deepest indentation in the Niques belt was just beyond the first hole. His daughter had bought it a little small, and Halleck remembered thinking at the time ruefully – that it was perhaps forgivable optimism on her part. It had, nevertheless, been quite comfortable for a long while. It was only since he'd quit smoking that it got to be a bit hard to buckle the belt, even using the first hole.
   After he'd quit smoking … but before he'd hit the Gypsy woman.
   Now there were other indents in the belt: beyond the second hole … and the fourth … and the fifth … finally the sixth and last.
   Halleck saw with growing horror that each of the indents was lighter than the last. His belt told a truer, briefer story than Michael Houston had done. The weight loss was still going on, and it wasn't slowing down; it was speeding up. He had gotten to the last hole in the Niques belt he'd believed only two months ago he would have to quietly retire as too small. Now he needed a seventh hole, which he didn't have.
   He looked at his watch and saw he'd have to get back soon. But some things were more important than whether or not Judge Boynton decided to enter a will into probate.
   Halleck listened. The men's room was quiet. He held up his pants with one hand and stepped out of the stall. He let his pants drop again and looked at himself in one of the mirrors over the row of sinks. He raised the tails of his shirt in order to get a better look at the belly which until just lately had been his bane.
   A small sound escaped his throat. That was all, but that was enough. The selective perception couldn't hold up; it shattered all at once. He saw that the modest potbelly which had replaced his bay window was now gone. Although his pants were down and his shirt was pulled up over his unbuttoned vest, the facts were clear enough in spite of the ludicrous pose. Actual facts, as always, were negotiable – you learned that quickly in the lawyer business – but the metaphor which came was more than persuasive; it was undeniable. He looked like a kid dressed up in his father's clothes. Halleck stood in disarray before the short row of sinks, thinking hysterically: Who's got the Shinola? I've got to daub on a fake mustache!
   A gagging, rancid laughter rose in his throat at the sight of his pants bundled around his shoes and his black nylon socks climbing three-quarters of the way up his hairy calves. In that moment he suddenly, simply, believed … everything. The Gypsy had cursed him, yes, but it wasn't cancer; cancer would have been too kind and too quick. It was something else, and the unfolding had only begun.
   A conductor's voice shouted in his mind, Next stop, Anorexia Nervosa! All out for Anorexia Nervosa!
   The sounds rose in his throat, laughter that sounded like screams, or perhaps screams that sounded like laughter, and what did it really matter?
   Who can I tell! Can I tell Heidi? She'll think I'm crazy.
   But Halleck had never felt saner in his life.
   The outer door of the men's room banged open.
   Halleck retreated quickly into the stall and latched it, frightened.
   'Billy?' John Parker, his assistant.
   'In here.'
   'Boynton's coming back soon. You okay?'
   'Fine,' he said. His eyes were shut.
   'Do you have gas? Is it your stomach?'
   Yeah, it's my stomach, all right.
   'I just got to mail a package. I'll be out in a minute or so.'
   'Okay.'
   Parker left. Halleck's mind fixed on his belt. He couldn't go back into Judge Boynton's court holding up his pants through the pockets of his suit coat. What the hell was he going to do?
   He suddenly remembered his Swiss army knife – good old army knife, which he had always taken out of his pocket before weighing himself. Back in the old days, before the Gypsies had come to Fairview.
   No one asked you assholes to come – why couldn't you have gone to Westport or Stratford instead?
   He took the knife out and quickly cored a seventh hole in the belt. It was ragged and unlovely, but it worked. Halleck buckled the belt, put on his coat, and exited the stall. For the first time he was aware of just how much his pants were swishing around his legs – his thin legs. Have other people been seeing it? he thought with fresh and stinging embarrassment. Seeing how poorly my clothes fit? Seeing and pretending not to? Talking. . .
   He splashed water on his face and left the men's room.
   As he came back into the courtroom, Boynton was just entering in a swish of black robes. He looked forbiddingly at Billy, who made a wan gesture of apology. Boynton's face remained fixed; apology definitely not accepted. The droning began again. Somehow, Billy got through the day.
   He stood on the scales that night after Heidi and Linda were both asleep, looking down, not believing. He looked for a long, long time.
   195.

Chapter Nine

   The next day he went out and bought clothes; he bought them feverishly, as if new clothes, clothes that fit him well, would solve everything. He bought a new, smaller Niques belt as well. He became aware that people had stopped complimenting him on his weight loss; when had that started? He didn't know.
   He put on the new clothes. He went to work and came home. He drank too much, ate second helpings that he ,didn't want and which sat heavily in his stomach. A week passed, and the new clothes did not look trim and neat anymore; they had begun to bag.
   He approached the bathroom scales, his heart thudding so heavily that it made his eyes throb and his head ache. He would discover later that he had bitten his lower lip hard enough to make it bleed. The image of the scale had taken on childish overtones of terror in his mind – the scale had become the goblin of his life. He stood before it for perhaps as long as three minutes, biting down hard on his lower lip, unaware of either the pain or the salty taste of blood in his mouth. It was evening. Downstairs, Linda was watching Three's Company on TV, and Heidi was running the weekly household accounts on the Commodore in Halleck's study.
   With a kind of lunge, he got onto the scale.
   188.
   He felt his stomach roll over in a single giddy tumble, and for one desperate moment it seemed impossible that he would not vomit. He struggled grimly to keep his supper down – he needed that nourishment, those warm healthy calories.
   At last the nausea passed. He looked down at the calibrated dial, dully remembering what Heidi had said It doesn't weigh heavy, it weighs light. He remembered Michael Houston saying that at 217 he was still thirty pounds over his optimum weight. Not now, Mikey, he thought tiredly. Now I'm … I'm thinner.
   He got off the scales, aware that he now felt a certain measure of relief – the relief a Death Row prisoner might feel, seeing the warden and the priest appear at two minutes of twelve, knowing that the end had come and there was going to be no call from the governor. There were certain formalities to be gone through, of course, yes, but that was all. It was real. If he talked about it to people, they would think he was either joking or crazy – no one believed in Gypsy curses anymore, or maybe never had – they were definitely declasse in a world that had watched hundreds of marines come home from Lebanon in coffins, in a world that had watched five IRA prisoners starve themselves to death, among other dubious wonders – but it was true, all the same. He had killed the wife of the old Gypsy with the rotting nose, and his sometime golf partner, good old tit-grabbing Judge Cary Rossington, had let him off without even so much as a tap on the wrist, and so the old Gypsy had decided to impose his own sort of justice on one fat Fairview lawyer whose wife had picked the wrong day to give him his first and only handjob in a moving car. The sort of justice a man like his sometime friend Ginelli might appreciate.
   Halleck turned off the bathroom light and went downstairs, thinking of Death Row convicts walking down the last mile. No blindfold, Faddah … but who's got a cigarette? He smiled wanly.
   Heidi was sitting at his desk, the bills on her left, the glowing screen in front of her, the Marine Midlands checkbook propped on the keyboard like sheet music. A common enough sight on at least one night during the first week of the new month. But she wasn't writing checks or running figures. She was only sitting there, a cigarette between her fingers, and when she turned to him, Billy saw such woe in her eyes that he was almost physically staggered.
   He thought of selective perception again, the funny way your mind had of not seeing what it didn't want to see … like the way you kept pulling your belt smaller and smaller to hold your oversized pants up around your shrinking waistline, or the brown circles under your wife's eyes … or the desperate question in those eyes.
   'Yeah, I'm still losing weight,' he said.
   'Oh, Billy,' she said, and exhaled in a long, trembling sigh. But she looked a little better, and Halleck supposed she was glad it was out in the open. She hadn't dared mention it, just as no one at the office had dared to say: Your clothes are starting to look like they came from Omar the Tentmaker, Billy-boy … Say, you haven't got a growth or anything, do you? Somebody hit you with the old cancerstick, did they, Billy? You got yourself a great big old tumor inside you someplace, all black and juicy, sort of a rotted human toadstool down there in your guts, sucking you dry? Oh, no, nobody says that shit; they let you find it out for yourself. One day you're in court and you start to lose your pants when you stand up to say, 'Your Honor, I object!' in the best Perry Mason tradition, and nobody has to say a motherfucking word.
   'Yeah,' he said, and then actually laughed a little, as if to cover same.
   'How much?'
   'The scale upstairs says I'm down to one-eighty-eight.'
   'Oh, Christ!'
   He nodded toward her cigarettes. 'Can I have one of those?'
   'Yes, if you want one. Billy, you're not to say a word to Linda about this – not one!'
   'Don't have to,' he said, lighting up. The first drag made him feel dizzy. That was okay; the dizziness was kind of nice. It was better than the numb horror that had accompanied the end of the selective perception. 'She knows I'm still losing weight. I've seen it on her face. I just didn't know what I was seeing until tonight.'
   'You've got to go back to see Houston,' she said. She looked badly frightened, but that confused expression of doubt and sorrow was gone from her eyes now. 'The metabolic series -'
   'Heidi, listen to me,' he said … and then stopped.
   'What?' she asked. 'What, Billy?'
   For a moment he almost told her, told her everything. Something stopped him, and he was never sure later what it was … except that, for one moment, sitting there on the edge of his desk and facing her with their daughter watching TV in the other room and one of her cigarettes in his hand, he felt a sudden savage moment of hate for her.
   The memory of what had happened – what had been happening – in the minute or so before the old Gypsy woman darted out into the traffic returned to him in a flash of total recall. Heidi had scooted over next to him and had put her left arm around his shoulders … and then, almost before he was aware it had happened, she had unzipped his fly. He felt her fingers, light and oh so educated, slip through the gap, and then through the opening in his shorts.
   In his teens, Billy Halleck had occasionally perused (with sweaty hands and slightly bulging eyes) what were referred to by his peers as 'stroke books.' And sometimes in these 'stroke books,' a 'hot bimbo' would wrap her 'educated fingers' around some fellow's 'stiffening member. 'All nothing but wet dreams set in type, of course … except here was Heidi, here was his wife gripping his own stiffening member. And, by damn, she was beginning to jerk him off. He had glanced at her, astonished, and had seen the roguish smile on her lips.
   'Heidi, what are you -?'
   'Shhh. Don't say a word.'
   What had possessed her? She had never done such a thing before, and Halleck would have sworn that such a thing had never crossed her mind. But she had done it, and the old Gypsy woman had darted
   Oh, tell the truth! As long as the scales are dropping from your eyes, you might as well drop all of them, don't you think? You got no business lying to yourself; the hour's gotten too late for that. Just the facts, ma'am.
   All right, the facts. The fact was that Heidi's unexpected move had excited him tremendously, probably because it had been unexpected. He had reached for her with his right hand and she had pulled her skirt up, exposing a perfectly ordinary pair of yellow nylon panties. Those panties had never excited him before, but they did now … or perhaps it was the way she had pulled up her skirt that had excited him; she had never done that before, either. The fact was that about eighty-five percent of his attention had been diverted from his driving, although in nine out of ten parallel worlds, things probably still would have turned out perfectly okay; during the business week, Fairview's streets were not just quiet, they were downright somnolent. But never mind that, the fact was that he hadn't been in nine out of ten parallel worlds; he had been in this one. The fact was that the old Gypsy woman hadn't darted out from between the Subaru and the Firebird with the racing stripe; the fact was that she simply walked from between the two cars, holding a net bag full of purchases in one gnarled and liver-spotted hand, the sort of net bag Englishwomen often take with them when they go shopping along the village high street. There had been a box of Duz laundry powder in the Gypsy woman's net bag; Halleck remembered that. She had not looked; that was true enough. But the final fact was just that Halleck had been doing no more than thirty-five miles an hour and he must have been almost a hundred and fifty feet from the Gypsy woman when she stepped out in front of his Olds. Plenty of time to stop if he had been on top of the situation. But the fact was that he was on the verge of an explosive orgasm, all but the tinest fraction of his consciousness fixed below his waist as Heidi's hand squeezed and relaxed, slipped up and down with slow and delicious friction, paused, squeezed, and relaxed again. His reaction had been hopelessly slow, hopelessly too late, and Heidi's hand had clamped on him, stifling the orgasm that shock had brought on for one endless second of pain and a pleasure that was inevitable but still gruesome.
   Those were the facts. But hold it a second., folks! Hang on a bit, friends and neighbors! There were two more facts, weren't there? The first fact was that if Heidi hadn't picked that particular day to try out a little autoeroticism, Halleck would have been on top of his job and his responsibility as the operator of a motor vehicle, and the Olds would have stopped at least five feet short of the old Gypsy woman, stopped with a screech of brakes that would have caused the mothers wheeling their babies across the common to look up quickly. He might have shouted, 'Why don't you look where you're going?' at the old woman while she looked at him with a species of stupid fright and incomprehension. He and Heidi would have watched her scurry across the street, their hearts thudding too hard in their chests. Perhaps Heidi would have wept over the fallen grocery bags and the mess on the carpet in the back.
   But things would have been all right. There would have been no hearing, and no old rotten-nosed Gypsy waiting outside to caress Halleck's cheek and whisper his dreadful one-word curse. That was the first ancillary fact. The second ancillary fact, which proceeded from the first, was that all of this could be traced directly back to Heidi. It had been her fault, all of it. He had not asked her to do what she had done; he had not said, 'Say! How about you jack me off while we drive home, Heidi? It's three miles, you got time.' No. She had just done it … and, should you wonder, her timing had been ghastly.
   Yes, it had been her fault, but the old Gypsy hadn't known that, and so Halleck had received the curse and Halleck had now lost a grand total of sixty-one pounds, and there she sat, and there were brown circles under her eyes and her skin looked too sallow, but those brown circles weren't going to kill her, were they? No. Ditto the sallow skin. The old Gypsy hadn't touched her.
   So the moment when he might have confessed his fears to her, when he might have said simply: I believe I'm losing weight because I have been cursed – that moment passed. The moment of crude and unalloyed hate, an emotional boulder shot out of his subconscious by some crude and primitive catapult, passed with it.
   Listen to me, he said, and like a good wife she had responded: What, Billy?
   'I'll go back and see Mike Houston again,' he said, which was not what he had originally intended to say at all. 'Tell him to go ahead and book the metabolic series. As Albert Einstein was wont to say, “What the fuck.”'
   'Oh, Billy,' she said, and held her arms out to him. He went into them, and because there was comfort there, he felt shame for his bright hate of only moments ago … but in the days which followed, as Fairview spring proceeded at its usual understated and slightly preppy pace into Fairview summer, the hate recurred more and more often, in spite of all he could do to stop it or hold it back.

Chapter Ten

   He made the appointment for the metabolic series through Houston, who sounded less optimistic after hearing that Halleck's steady weight-loss had continued and that he was, in fact, down twenty-nine pounds since his physical the month before.
   'There still may be a perfectly normal explanation for all this,' Houston said, calling back with the appointment and the information three hours later, and that told Halleck all he needed to know. The perfectly normal explanation, once the odds-on favorite in Houston's mind, had now become the dark horse.
   'Uh-huh,' Halleck said, looking down at where his belly had been. He never would have believed you could miss the gut that jutted out in front of you, the gut that had eventually gotten big enough to hide even the tips of your shoes – he'd had to lean and peer to find out if he needed a shine or not – especially he never would have believed it if you'd told him such a thing was possible while he was climbing a flight of stairs after too many drinks the night before, clutching his briefcase grimly, feeling a dew of sweat on his forehead, wondering if this was the day the heart attack was going to come, a paralyzing pain on the, left side of his chest which suddenly broke free and ripped down his left arm. But it was true; he missed his damn gut. In some weird way he couldn't understand even now, that gut had been a friend.
   'If there's still a normal explanation,' he said to Houston, 'what is it?'
   'This is what those guys are going to tell you,' Houston said. 'We hope.'
   The appointment was at the Henry Glassman Clinic, a small private facility in New Jersey. They would want him there for three days. The estimated cost of his stay and the menu of tests they expected to run on him made Halleck very glad he had complete medical coverage.
   'Send me a get-well card,' Halleck said bleakly, and hung up.
   His appointment was for May 12 – a week away. During the days between, he watched himself continue to erode, and he strove to contain the panic that nibbled slowly away at his resolve to play the man.
   'Daddy, you're losing too much weight,' Linda said uneasily at dinner one night – Halleck, sticking grimly by his guns, had downed three thick pork chops with applesauce. He'd also had two helpings of mashed potatoes. With gravy. 'If it's a diet, I think it's time you quit it.'
   'Does it look like I'm dieting?' Halleck said, pointing at his plate with his fork, which dripped gravy.
   He spoke mildly enough, but Linda's face began to work and a moment later she fled from the table, sobbing, her napkin pressed to her face.
   Halleck looked bleakly at his wife, who looked bleakly back at him.
   This is the way the world ends, Halleck thought inanely. Not with a bang but a thinner.
   'I'll talk to her,' he said, starting to get up.
   'If you go see her looking like you do right now, you'll scare her to death,' Heidi said, and he felt that surge of bright metallic hate again.
   186. 183. 181. 180. It was as if someone – the old Gypsy with the rotting nose, for instance – was using some crazy supernatural eraser on him, rubbing him out, pound by pound. When had he last weighed 180? College? No … probably not since he had been a senior in high school.
   On one of his sleepless nights between the fifth of May and the twelfth, he found himself remembering an explanation of voodoo he had once read – it works because the victim thinks it works. No big supernatural deal; simply the power of suggestion.
   Perhaps, he thought, Houston was right and I'm thinking myself thin … because that old Gypsy wanted me to. Only now I can't stop. I could make a million bucks writing a response to that Norman Vincent Peale book … call it The Power of Negative Thinking.
   But his mind suggested the old power-of-suggestion idea was, in this case at least, a pile of crap. All that Gypsy said was 'Thinner.' He didn't say 'By the power vested in me I curse you to lose six to nine pounds a week until you die.' He didn't say 'Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, soon you will need a new Niques belt or you will be filing objections in your Jockey shorts.' Hell, Billy, you didn't even remember what he said until after you'd started to lose the weight.
   Maybe that's just when I became consciously aware of what he said, Halleck argued back. But …
   And so the argument raged.
   If it was psychological, though, if it was the power of suggestion, the question of what he was going to do about it remained. How was he supposed to combat it? Was there a way he could think himself fat again? Suppose he went to a hypnotist – hell, a psychiatrist! – and explained the problem. The shrink could hypnotize him and plant a deep suggestion that the old Gypsy man's curse was invalid. That might work.
   Or, of course, it might not.
   Two nights before he was scheduled to check into Glassman Clinic, Billy stood on the scales looking dismally down at the dial – 179 tonight. And as he stood looking down at the dial, it occured to him in a perfectly natural way – the way things so often occur to the conscious mind after the subconscious has mulled them over for days and weeks that the person he really ought to talk to about these crazy fears was Judge Cary Rossington.
   Rossington was a tit-grabber when he was drunk, but he was a fairly sympathetic and understanding guy when he was sober … up to a point, at least. Also, he was relatively close-mouthed. Halleck supposed it was possible that at some drunken party or other (and as with all the other constants of the physical universe – sunrise in the east, sunset in the west, the return of Halley's Comet you could be certain that somewhere in town after nine P.M, people were guzzling manhattans, fishing green olives out of martinis, and, quite possibly, grabbing the tits of other men's wives), he might be indiscreet about ole Billy Halleck's paranoid-schizo ideas regarding Gypsies and curses, but he suspected that Rossington might think twice about spilling the tale even while in his cups. It was not that anything illegal had been done at the hearing; it had been a textbook case of municipal hardball, sure, but no witnesses had been suborned, no evidence had been eighty-sixed. It was a sleeping dog just the same, though, and old shrewdies like Cary Rossington did not go around kicking such animals. It was always possible – not likely, but fairly possible – that a question concerning Rossington's failure to disqualify himself might come up. Or the fact that the investigating officer hadn't bothered to give Halleck a breathalyzer test after he'd seen who the driver was (and who the victim was). Nor had Rossington inquired from the bench as to why this fundamental bit of procedure had been neglected. There were other inquiries he could have made and had not.
   No, Halleck believed his story would be safe enough with Cary Rossington, at least until the matter of the Gypsies dwindled away a bit in time … five years, say, or seven. Meantime, it was this year Halleck was concerned about. At the rate he was going, he would look like a fugitive from a concentration camp before the summer was over.
   He dressed quickly, went downstairs, and pulled a light jacket out of the closet.
   'Where are you going?' Heidi asked, coming out of the kitchen.
   'Out,' Halleck said. 'I'll be back early.'
   Leda Rossington opened the door and looked at Halleck as if she had never seen him before – the overhead light in the hall behind her caught her gaunt but aristocratic cheekbones, the black hair which was severely pulled back and showing just the first traces of white (No, Halleck thought, not white, silver … Leda's never going to have anything as plebeian as white hair), the lawn-green Dior dress, a simple little thing that had probably cost no more than fifteen hundred dollars.
   Her gaze made him acutely uncomfortable. Have I lost so much weight she doesn't even know who I am? he thought, but even with his new paranoia about his personal appearance he found that hard to believe. His face was gaunter, there were a few new worry lines around his mouth, and there were discolored pouches under his eyes from lack of sleep, but otherwise his face was the same old Billy Halleck face. The ornamental lamp at the other end of the Rossington dooryard (a wrought-iron facsimile of an 1880's New York streetlamp, Horchow Collection, $687 plus mailing) cast only a dim wash of light up this far, and he was wearing his jacket. Surely she couldn't see how much weight he'd lost … or could she?
   'Leda? It's Bill. Bill Halleck.'
   'Of course it is. Hello, Billy.' Still her hand hovered below her chin, half-fisted, touching the skin of her upper throat in a quizzical, pondering gesture. Although her features were incredibly smooth for her fifty-nine years, the face lifts hadn't been able to do much for her neck; the flesh there was loose, not quite wattled.
   She's drunk, maybe. Or … He thought of Houston, tidily tucking little Bolivian snowdrifts up his nose. Drugs? Leda Rossington? Hard to believe of anyone who can bid a two no-trump with a strictly ho-hum hand … and then make it good. And on the heels of that: She's scared. Desperate. What's this? And does it tie in somehow with what's happening to me?
   That was crazy, of course … and yet he felt an almost frenzied need to know why Leda Rossington's lips were pressed so tight, why, even in the dim fight and despite the best cosmetics money could buy, the flesh under her eyes looked almost as baggy and discolored as the flesh under his own, why the hand that was now fiddling at the neckline of her Dior dress was quivering slightly. Billy and Leda Rossington considered each other in utter silence for perhaps fifteen seconds … and then spoke at exactly the same time.
   'Leda, is Cary -' 'Cary's not here, Billy. He's'
   She stopped. He made a gesture for her to go on.
   'He's been called back to Minnesota. His sister is very ill.'
   'That's interesting,' Halleck said, 'since Cary doesn't have any sisters.'
   She smiled. It was an attempt at the well-bred, pained sort of smile polite people save for those who have been unintentionally rude. It didn't work; it was merely a pulling of the lips, more grimace than smile.
   'Sister, did I say? All of this has been very trying for me – for us. His brother, I mean. His -'
   'Leda, Cary's an only child,' Halleck said gently. 'We went over our sibs one drunk afternoon in the Hastur Lounge. Must have been … oh, four years ago. The Hastur burned down not long after. That head. shop, the King in Yellow, is there now. My daughter buys her jeans there.'
   He didn't know why he was going on; in some vague way he supposed it might set her at ease if he did. But now, in the light from the hall and the dimmer light from the wrought-iron yard lamp, he saw the bright track of a single tear running from her right eye almost to the corner of her mouth. And the arc below her left eye glimmered. As he watched, his words tangling in each other and coming to a confused stop, she blinked twice, rapidly, and the tear overflowed. A second bright track appeared on her left cheek.
   'Go away,' she said. 'Just go away, Billy, all right? Don't ask questions. I don't want to answer them.'
   Halleck looked at her, and saw a certain implacability in her eyes, just below the swimming tears. She had no intention of telling him where Cary was. And on an impulse he didn't understand either then or later, with absolutely no forethought or idea of gain, he pulled down the zipper of his jacket and held it open, as if flashing her. He heard her gasp of surprise.
   'Look at me, Leda,' he said. 'I've lost seventy pounds. Do you hear me? Seventy pounds!'
   'That doesn't have anything to do with me!' she cried in a low, harsh voice. Her complexion had gone a sick clay color; spots of rouge stood out on her face like the spots of color on a clown's cheeks. Her eyes looked raw. Her lips had drawn back from her perfectly capped teeth in a terrorized snarl.
   'No, but I need to talk to Cary,' Halleck persisted. He came up the first step of the porch, still holding his jacket open. And I do, he thought. I wasn't sure before, but I am now. 'Please tell me where he is, Leda. Is he here?'
   Her reply was a question, and for a moment he couldn't breathe at all. He groped for the porch rail with one numb hand.
   'Was it the Gypsies, Billy?'
   At last he was able to pull breath into his locked lungs. It came in a soft whoop.
   'Where is he, Leda?'
   'Answer my question first. Was it the Gypsies?'
   Now that it was here – a chance to actually say it out loud -he found he had to struggle to do so. He swallowed -swallowed hard – and nodded. 'Yes. I think so. A curse. Something like a curse.', He paused. 'No, not something like. That's bullshit equivocation. I think I've had a Gypsy curse laid on me.'
   He waited for her to shriek derisive laughter – he had heard that reaction so often in his dreams and in his conjectures – but her shoulders only slumped and her head bowed. She was such a picture of dejection and sorrow that in spite of his fresh terror, Halleck felt poignant, almost painful empathy for her – her confusion and her terror. He climbed the second and third porch steps, touched her arm gently … and was shocked by the bright hate on her face when she raised her head. He stepped back suddenly, blinking … and then had to grab for the porch railing to keep from tumbling off the steps and landing on his pratt. Her expression was a perfect reflection of the way he had momentarily felt about Heidi the other night. That such an expression should be directed against him he found both inexplicable and frightening.
   'It's your fault!' she hissed at him. 'All your fault! Why did you have to hit that stupid Gypsy cunt with your car? It's all your fault!'
   He looked at her, incapable of speaking. Cunt? He thought confusedly. Did I hear Leda Rossington say 'cunt'? Who would have believed she even knew such a word? His second thought was: You've got it all wrong, Leda, it was Heidi, not me … and she's just great. In the pink. Feeling her oats. Hitting on all cylinders. Kicking up dickens. Taking …
   Then Leda's face changed: she looked at Halleck with a calmly polite expressionlessness.
   'Come in,' she said.
   She brought him the martini he'd asked for in an oversize glass -two olives and two tiny onions were impaled on the swizzle stick, which was a tiny gold-plated sword. Or maybe it was solid gold. The martini was very strong, which Halleck did not mind at all … although he knew from the drinking he'd done over the last three weeks that he'd be on his ass unless he went slow; his capacity for booze had shrunk along with his weight.
   Still, he took a big gulp to start with and closed his eyes with gratitude as the booze exploded warmth out from his stomach. Gin, wonderful high-calorie gin, he thought.
   'He is in Minnesota,' she said dully, sitting down with her own martini. It was, if anything, bigger than the one she had given to Billy. 'But not visiting relatives. He's at the Mayo Clinic.'
   'The Mayo -'
   'He's convinced it's cancer,' she went on. 'Mike Houston couldn't find anything wrong, and neither could the dermatologists he went to in the city, but he's still convinced it's cancer. Do you know that he thought it was herpes at first? He thought I'd caught herpes from someone.'
   Billy looked down, embarrassed, but he needn't have done so. Leda was looking over his right shoulder, as if reciting her tale to the wall. She took frequent birdlike sips at her drink. Its level sank slowly but steadily.
   'I laughed at him when he finally brought it out. I laughed and said, “Cary, if you think that is herpes, then you know less about venereal diseases than I do about thermodynamics.” I shouldn't have laughed, but it was a way to … to relieve the pressure, you know. The pressure and the anxiety. Anxiety? The terror.'
   'Mike Houston gave him creams that didn't work, and the dermatologists gave him creams that didn't work, and then they gave him shots that didn't work. I was the one that remembered the old Gypsy, the one with the half-eaten nose, and the way he came out of the crowd at the flea market in Raintree the weekend after your hearing, Billy. He came out of the crowd and touched him … he touched Cary. He put his hand on Cary's face and said something. I asked Cary then, and I asked him later, after it had begun to spread, and he wouldn't tell me. He just shook his head.'
   Halleck took a second gulp of his drink just as Leda set her glass, empty, on the table beside her.
   'Skin cancer,' she said. 'He's convinced that's what it is because skin cancer can be cured ninety percent of the time. I know the way his mind works – it would be funny if I didn't, wouldn't it, after living with him for twenty-five years, watching him sit on the bench and make real-estate deals and drink and make real-estate deals and chase other men's wives and make real-estate deals and … Oh, shit, I sit here and wonder what I would say at his funeral if someone gave me a dose of Pentothal an hour before the services. I guess it would come out something like – He bought a lot of Connecticut land which is now shopping centers and snapped a lot of bras and drank a lot of Wild Turkey and left me a rich widow and I lived with him through the best years of my life and I've had more fucking Blackglama mink coats than I ever had orgasms, so let's all get out of here and go to a roadhouse somewhere and dance and after a while maybe somebody will get drunk enough to forget I've had my fucking chin tied up behind my fucking ears three fucking times, twice in fucking Mexico City and once in fucking Germany and snap my fucking bra." Oh, fuck it. Why am I telling you all this?'
   'The only things men like you understand are humping, plea-bargaining, and how to bet on pro-football games.'
   She was crying again. Billy Halleck, who now understood the drink she had now almost finished was far from her first of the evening, shifted uncomfortably in his chair and took a big gulp of his own, drink. It banged into his stomach with untrustworthy warmth.
   'He's convinced it's skin cancer because he can't let himself believe in anything as ridiculously old-world, as superstitious, as penny-dreadful-novel as Gypsy curses. But I saw something deep down in his eyes, Billy. I saw it a lot over the last month or so. Especially at night. A little more clearly every night. I think that's one of the reasons he left, you know. Because he saw me seeing it.
   'Refill?'
   Billy shook his head numbly and watched her go to the bar and mix herself a fresh martini. She made extremely simple martinis, he saw; you simply filled a glass with gin and tumbled in a couple of olives. They left twin trails of bubbles as they sank to the bottom. Even from where he was sitting, all the way across the room, he could smell the gin.
   What was it with Cary Rossington? What had happened to him? Part of Billy Halleck most definitely did not want to know. Houston had apparently made no connection between what was happening to Billy and what was happening to Rossington -why should he have? Houston didn't know about the Gypsies. Also, Houston was bombing his brain with big white torpedoes on a regular basis.
   Leda came back and sat down again.
   'If he calls and says he's coming back,' she told Billy calmly, 'I'm going to our place on Captiva. It will be beastly hot this time of year, but if I have enough gin, I find I barely notice the temperature. I don't think I could stand to be alone with him anymore. I still love him – yes, in my way, I do – but I don't think I could stand it. Thinking of him in the next bed … thinking he might … might touch me . . .' She shivered. Some of her drink spilled. She drank the rest all at once and then made a thick blowing sound, like a thirsty horse that has just drunk its fill.
   'Leda, what's wrong with him? What's happened?'
   'Happened? Happened? Why, Billy dear, I thought I'd told you, or that you knew somehow.'
   Billy shook his head. He was starting to believe he didn't know anything.
   'He's growing scales. Cary is growing scales.'
   Billy gaped at her.
   Leda offered a dry, amused, horrified smile, and shook her head a little.
   'No – that's not quite right. His skin is turning into scales. He has become a case of reverse evolution, a sideshow freak. He's turning into a fish or a reptile.'
   She laughed suddenly, a harsh, cawing shriek that made Halleck's blood run cold: She's tottering on the brink of madness, he thought – the revelation made him colder still. I think she'll probably go to Captiva no matter what happens. She'll have to get out of Fairview if she wants to save her sanity. Yes.
   Leda clapped both hands over her mouth and then excused herself as if she had burped – or perhaps vomited – instead of laughed. Billy, incapable of speaking just then, only nodded and got up to make himself a fresh drink after all.
   She seemed to find it easier to talk now that he wasn't looking at her, now that he was at the bar with his back turned, and Billy purposely lingered there.

Chapter Eleven. The Scales of Justice

   Cary had been furious – utterly furious – at being touched by the old Gypsy. He had gone to see the Raintree chief of police, Allen Chalker, the following day. Chalker was a poker-buddy, and he had been sympathetic.
   The Gypsies had come to Raintree directly from Fairview, he told Cary. Chalker said he kept expecting them to leave on their own. They had already been in Raintree for five days, and usually three days was about right – just time enough for all the town's interested teenagers to have their fortunes told and for a few desperately impotent men and a like number of desperately menopausal women to creep out to the encampment under cover of darkness and buy potions and nostrums and strange, oily creams. After three days the town's interest in the strangers always waned. Chalker had finally decided they were waiting for the flea market on Sunday. It was an annual event in Raintree, and drew crowds from all four of the surrounding towns. Rather than make an issue of their continuing presence – Gypsies, he told Cary, could be as ugly as ground wasps if you poked them too hard – he decided to let them work the departing flea-market crowds. But if they weren't gone come Monday morning, he would move them along.
   But there had been no need. Come Monday morning, the farm field where the Gypsies had camped was empty except for wheel ruts, empty beer and soda cans (the Gypsies apparently had no interest in Connecticut's new bottle-and-can-deposit law), the blackened remains of several small cookfires, and three or four blankets so lousy that the deputy Chalker sent out to investigate would only
   poke at them with a stick – a long stick. Sometime between sundown and sunup, the Gypsies had left the field, left Raintree, left Patchin County … had, Chalker told his old poker buddy Cary Rossington, left the planet as far as he either knew or cared. And good riddance.
   On Sunday afternoon the old Gypsy man had touched Cary's face; on Sunday night they had left; on Monday morning Cary had gone to Chalker to lodge a complaint (just what the legal basis of the complaint might have been, Leda Rossington didn't know); on Tuesday morning the trouble had begun. After his shower, Cary had come downstairs to the breakfast nook wearing only his bathrobe and had said: 'Look at this.'
   'This' turned out to be a patch of roughened skin just a little above his solar plexus. The skin was a shade lighter than the surrounding flesh, which was an attractive coffeewith-cream shade (golf, tennis, swimming, and a UV sunlamp in the winter kept his tan unvarying). The rough patch looked yellowish to her, the way the calluses on the heels of her feet sometimes got in very dry weather. She had touched it (her voice faltered momentarily here) and then drawn her finger away quickly. The texture was rough, almost pebbly, and surprisingly hard. Armored – that was the word that had risen unbidden in her mind.
   'You don't think that damned Gypsy gave me something, do you?' Cary asked worriedly. 'Ringworm or impetigo or some damned thing like that?'
   'He touched your face, not your chest, dear,' Leda had replied. 'Now, get dressed quick as you can. We've got brioche. Wear the dark gray suit with the red tie and dress up Tuesday for me, will you? What a love you are.'
   Two nights later he had called her into the bathroom, his voice so like a scream that she had come on the run (All our worst revelations come in the bathroom, Billy thought.) Cary was standing with his shirt off, his razor humming forgotten in one hand, his wide eyes staring into the mirror.
   The patch of hard, yellowish skin had spread – it had become a blotch, a vaguely treelike shape that spread upward to the area between his nipples and downward, widening, toward his belly button. This changed flesh was raised above the normal flesh of his belly and stomach by almost an eighth of an inch, and she saw there were deep cracks running through it; several of them looked deep enough to slip the edge of a dime into. For the first time she thought he was beginning to look … well, scaly. And felt her gorge rise.
   'What is it?' he nearly screamed at her. 'Leda, what is it?'
   'I don't know,' she said, forcing her voice to remain calm, 'but you've got to see Michael Houston. That much is clear. Tomorrow, Cary.'
   'No, not tomorrow,' he said, still staring at himself in the mirror, staring at the raised arrowhead-shaped hump of harsh yellow flesh. 'It may be better tomorrow. Day after tomorrow if it isn't better. But not tomorrow.'
   'Cary -'
   'Hand me that Nivea cream, Leda.'
   She did, and stood there a moment longer – but the sight of him smearing the white goo over that hard yellow flesh, listening to the pads of his fingers rasp over it – that was more than she could stand, and she fled back to her room. That was the first time, she told Halleck, that she had been consciously glad for the twin beds, consciously glad he wouldn't be able to turn over in his sleep and … touch her. She had lain wakeful for hours, she said, hearing the soft rasp-rasp of his fingers moving back and forth across that alien flesh.
   He told her the following night that it was better; the night after that he claimed it was better still. She supposed she should have seen the lie in his eyes … and that he was lying to himself more than he was to her. Even in his extremity, Cary had remained the same selfish son of a bitch she supposed he had always been. But it hadn't all been Cary's doing, she added sharply, still not turning back from the bar where she was now fiddling aimlessly with the glasses. She had developed her own brand of highly specialized selfishness over the years. She had wanted, needed the illusion almost as much as he had.
   On the third night, he had walked into their bedroom wearing only his pajama pants. His eyes were soft and hurt, stunned. She had been rereading a Dorothy Sayers mystery ~ they were, for always and ever, her favorites and it dropped from her fingers as she saw him. She would have screamed, she told Billy, but it seemed to her that all her breath was gone. And Billy had time to reflect that no human feeling was truly unique, although one might like to think so: Cary Rossington had apparently gone through the same period of self-delusion followed by shattering self-awakening that Billy had gone through himself.
   Leda had seen that the hard yellow skin (the scales there was no longer any way to think of them as anything else) now covered most of Cary's chest and all of his belly. It was as ugly and thickly humped up as burn tissue. The cracks zigged and zagged every which way, deep and black, shading to a pinkish-red deep down where you most definitely did not want to look. And although you might at first think those cracks were as random as the cracks in a bomb crater, after a moment or two your helpless eye reported a different story. At each edge the hard yellow flesh rose a bit more. Scales. Not fish scales but great rough reptile scales, like those on a lizard or a 'gator or an iguana.
   The brown arc of his left nipple still showed; the rest of it was gone, buried, under that yellow-black carapace. The right nipple was entirely gone, and – a twisted ridge of this strange new flesh reached around and under his armpit toward his back like the grasping surfacing claw of some unthinkable monstrosity. His navel was gone. And …
   'He lowered his pajama pants,' she said. She was now working on her third drink, taking those same rapid birdlike sips. Fresh tears had begun to leak from her eyes, but that was all. 'That's when I found my voice again. I screamed at him to stop, and he did … but not before I'd seen it was sending fingers down into his groin. It hadn't touched his penis … at least, it hadn't yet … but where it had advanced, his pubic hair was gone and there were just those yellow scales.
   “'I thought you said it was getting better,” I said.'
   “'I honestly thought it was,” he answered me. And the next day, he made the appointment with Houston.'
   Who probably told him, Halleck thought, about the college kid with no brain and the old lady with the third set of teeth. And asked if he'd like a short snort of the old brain-squirts.
   A week later Rossington had been seeing the best team of dermatologists in New York. They knew immediately what was wrong with him, they said, and a regimen of 'hard-gamma' X rays had followed. The scaly flesh continued to creep and spread. It did not hurt, Rossington told her; there was a faint itching at the borders between his old skin and this horrible new invader, but that was all. The new flesh had absolutely no feeling at all. Smiling the ghastly, shocked smile that was coming to be his only expression, he told her that the other day he had lit a cigarette and crushed it out on his own stomach … slowly. There had been no pain, none at all
   She had put her hands up to her ears and screamed at him to stop.
   The dermatologists told Cary they had been a bit offcourse. What do you mean? Cary asked. You guys said you knew. You said you were sure. Well, they said, these things happen. Rarely, ha-ha, very rarely, but now we have it licked. All the tests, they said, bore this new conclusion out. A regimen of hipovites – high potency vitamins to those unfamiliar with high-priced doc talk and glandular injections had followed. At the same time this new treatment was getting under way, the first scaly patches had begun to show up on Cary's neck … the underside of his chin … and finally on his face. That was when the dermatologists finally admitted they were stumped. Only for the moment, of course. No such thing is incurable. Modern medicine … dietary regimen … and mumble-mumble … likewise blah-de-dah …
   Cary would no longer listen to her if she tried to talk to him about the old Gypsy, she told Halleck; once he had actually raised his hand as if to strike her … and she had seen the first humping and roughening of the skin in the tender webbing between the thumb and forefinger on his right hand.
   'Skin cancer!' he shouted at her. 'This is skin cancer, skin cancer, skin cancer! Now will you for Christ's sweet sake shut up about that old wog!'
   Of course he was the one who was making at least nominal sense, she was the one who was talking in fourteenth-century absurdities … and yet she knew it had been the doing of the old Gypsy who had stepped out of the crowd at the Raintree flea market and touched Cary's face. She knew it, and in his eyes, even when he raised his hand to her that time, she saw that he knew it too.
   He had arranged for a leave of absence with Glenn Petrie, who was shocked to hear his old friend, fellow jurist, and golf partner Cary Rossington had skin cancer.
   There had followed two weeks, Leda told Halleck, that she could barely bring herself to remember or speak of. Cary had alternately slept like the dead, sometimes upstairs in their room but just as often in the big overstuffed chair ,in his den or with his head in his arms at the kitchen table. He began to drink heavily every afternoon around four. He would sit in the family room, holding the neck of a J. W. Dant whiskey bottle in one roughening, scaly hand, watching first syndicated comedy shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Beverly Hillbillies, then the local and national news, then syndicated game shows like The Joker's Wild and Family Feud, then three hours of primetime, followed by more news, followed by movies until two or three in the morning. And all the while he drank whiskey like Pepsi-Cola, straight from the bottle.
   On some of these nights he would cry. She would come in and observe him weeping while Warner Anderson, imprisoned inside their Sony large-screen TV, cried, 'Let's go to the videotape!' with the enthusiasm of a man inviting all his old girlfriends to go on a cruise to Aruba with him. On still, other nights – mercifully few of them – he would rave like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod, shambling and stumbling through the house with the whiskey bottle held in a hand that was not really a hand anymore, shouting that it was skin cancer, did she hear him, it was fucking skin cancer and he had gotten it from the fucking UV lamp, and he was going to sue the dirty quacks that had done this to him, sue them right down to the motherfucking ground, litigate the bastards until they didn't have so much as a shit-stained pair of skivvies to stand up in. Sometimes when he was in these moods, he broke things.
   'I finally realized that he was having these … these fits … on the nights after Mrs Marley came in to clean,' she said dully. 'He'd go up into the attic when she was here, you see. If she'd seen him, it would have been all over town in no time at all. It was the nights after she'd been in and he'd been up there in the dark that he felt most like an outcast, I think. Most like a freak.'
   'So he's gone to the Mayo Clinic,' Billy said.
   'Yes,' she said, and at last she looked at him. Her face was drunk and horrified. 'What's going to become of him, Billy? What can become of him?'
   Billy shook his head. He hadn't the slightest idea. Furthermore, he found he had no more urge to contemplate the question than he'd had to contemplate that famous news photograph of the South Vietnamese general shooting the supposed Vietcong collaborator in the head. In a weird way he couldn't quite understand, this was like that.
   'He chartered a private plane to fly to Minnesota, did I tell you that? Because he can't bear to have people look at him. Did I tell you that, Billy?'
   Billy shook his head again.
   'What's going to become of him?'
   'I don't know,' Halleck said, thinking: And just by the way, what's going to become of me, Leda?
   'At the end, before he finally gave up and went, both of his hands were claws. His eyes were two . . . two bright little sparks of blue inside these pitted, scaly hollows. His nose . . .' She stood up and wobbled toward him, hitting the corner of the coffee table hard enough with her leg to make it shift – She doesn't feel it now, Halleck thought, but she's going to have one hell of a painful bruise on her calf tomorrow, and if she's lucky she'll wonder where she got it, or how.
   She grasped at his hand. Her eyes were great glittering pools of uncomprehending horror. She spoke with a gruesome, breathy confidentiality that prickled the skin of Billy's neck. Her breath was rank with undigested gin.
   'He looks like an alligator now,' she said in what was almost an intimate whisper. 'Yes, that's what he looks like, Billy. Like something that just crawled out of a swamp and put on human clothes. It's like he's turning into an alligator, and I was glad he went. Glad. I think if he hadn't gone, I would have gone. Yes. Just packed a bag and … and . . .'
   She was leaning closer and closer, and Billy stood up suddenly, unable to stand any more of this. Leda Rossington rocked back on her heels and Halleck just barely managed to catch her by the shoulders … he had also drunk too much, it seemed. If he had missed her, she might very well have brained herself on the same glass-topped, brass-bound coffee table (Trifles, $587 plus mailing) on which she had struck her leg … only instead of waking up with a bruise, she could have waked up dead. Looking into her half-mad eyes, Billy wondered if she might not welcome death.
   'Leda, I have to go.'
   'Of course,' she said. 'Just came for the straight dope, didn't you, Billy dear?'
   'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry about everything that's happened. Please believe me.' And, insanely, he heard himself adding: 'When you talk to Cary, give him my best.'
   'He's hard to talk to now,' she said remotely. 'It's happening inside his mouth, you see. It's thickening his gums, plating his tongue. I can talk to him, but everything he says to me – all of his replies – come out in grunts.'
   He was backing into the hall, backing away from her, wanting to be free of her soft, relentlessly cultured tones, needing to be free of her gruesome, glittering eyes.
   'He really is,' she said. 'Turning into an alligator, I mean. I expect that before long they may have to put him in a tank … they may have to keep his skin wet.' Tears leaked from her raw eyes, and Billy saw she was dribbling gin from her canted martini glass onto her shoes.
   'Good night, Leda,' he whispered.
   'Why, Billy? Why did you have to hit the old woman? Why did you have to bring this on Cary and me? Why?'
   'Leda -'
   'Come back in a couple of weeks,' she said, still advancing as Billy groped madly behind him for the knob of the front door, holding on to his polite smile by a huge act of will. 'Come back and let me have a look at you when you've lost another forty or fifty pounds. I'll laugh … and laugh … and laugh.'
   He found the knob. He turned it. The cool air struck his flushed and overheated skin like a benison.
   'Good night, Leda. I'm sorry . . .'
   'Save your sorry!' she screamed, and threw her martini glass at him. It struck the doorjamb to Billy's right and shattered. 'Why did you have to hit her, you bastard? Why did you have to bring it on all of us? Why? Why? Why?'
   Halleck made it to the corner of Park Lane and Lantern Drive and then collapsed onto the bench inside the bus shelter, shivering as if with ague, his throat and stomach sour with acid indigestion, his head buzzing with gin.
   He thought: I hit her and killed her and now I'm losing weight and I can't stop. Cary Rossington conducted the hearing, he let me off without so much as a tap on the wrist, and Cary's in the Mayo Clinic. He's in the Mayo Clinic, and if you believe his wife, he looks like a fugitive from Maurice Sendak's Alligators All Around. Who else was in on it? Who else was involved in a way that the old Gypsy Might have decided called for revenge?
   He thought of the two cops, rousting the Gypsies when they came into town … when they had presumed to start doing their Gypsy tricks on the town common. One of them had just been a spear-carrier, of course. Just a patrol-car jockey following …
   Following orders.
   Whose orders? Why, the police chiefs orders, of course. Duncan Hopley's orders.
   The Gypsies had been rousted because they had no permit to perform on the common. But of course they would have understood that the message was somewhat broader than that. If you wanted Gypsy folk out, there were plenty of ordinances. Vagrancy. Public nuisance.
   Spitting on the sidewalk. You name it.
   The Gypsies had made a deal with a fanner out on the west side of town, a sour old man named Arncaster. There was always a farm, always a sour old farmer, and the Gypsies always found him. Their noses have been trained to smell out guys like Arncaster, Billy thought now as he sat on the bench listening to the first droplets of spring rain strike the bus shelter's roof. Simple evolution. All it takes is two thousand years of being moved along. You talk to a few people; maybe Madame Azonka does a free reading or two. You sniff for the name of the fellow in town who owns land but owes money, the fellow who has no great love for the town or for town ordinances, the guy who posts his apple orchards during hunting season out of pure orneriness – because he'd rather let the deer have his apples than let the hunters have the deer. You sniff for the name and you always find it, because there's always at least one Arncaster in the richest towns, and sometimes there are two or three to choose among.
   They parked their cars and campers in a circle, just as their ancestors had drawn their wagons and handcarts into a circle two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred years before them. They obtained a fire permit, and at night there was talk and laughter and undoubtedly a bottle or two passed from hand to hand.
   All of this, Halleck thought, would have been acceptable to Hopley. It was the way things were-done. Those who wanted to buy some of whatever the gypsies were selling could drive out the West Fairview Road to the Arncaster place; at least it was out of sight, and the Arncaster place was something of an eyesore to begin with – the farms the Gypsies found always were. And soon they would move on to Raintree or Westport, and from thence out of view and thought.
   Except that, after the accident, after the old Gypsy man had made a nuisance of himself by turning up on the courthouse steps and touching Billy Halleck, 'the way things were done' was no longer good enough.
   Hopley had given the Gypsies two days, Halleck remembered, and when they showed no signs of moving along, he had moved them along. First Jim Roberts had revoked their Are permit. Although there had been heavy showers every day for the previous week, Roberts told them that the fire danger had suddenly gone way, way up. Sorry. And by the way, they wanted to remember that the same regulations which controlled campfires and cook-fires also applied to propane stoves, charcoal fires, and brazier fires.
   Next, of course, Hopley would have gone around to visit a number of local businesses where Lars Arncaster had a credit line – a line of credit that was usually overextended. These would have included the hardware store, the feed-and-grain store on Raintree Road, the Farmers' Co-Op in Fairview Village, and Normie's Sunoco. Hopley might also have gone to visit Zachary Marchant at the Connecticut Union Bank … the bank that held Amcaster's mortgage.
   All part of the job. Have a cup of coffee with this one, a spot of lunch with that one – perhaps something as simple as a couple of franks and lemonades purchased at Dave's Dog Wagon – a bottle of beer with the other one. And by sundown of the following day, everyone with a claim cheek on a little piece of Lars Arncaster's ass had given him a call, mentioning how really good it would be to have those damned Gypsies out of town . . how really grateful everyone would be.
   The result was just what Duncan Hopley had known it would be. Arncaster went to the Gypsies, refunded the balance of whatever sum they had agreed upon for rent, and had undoubtedly turned a deaf ear to any protests they might have made (Halleck was thinking specifically of the young man with the bowling pins, who apparently had not as yet comprehended the immutability of his station in life). It wasn't as if the Gypsies had a signed lease that would stand up in court.
   Sober, Arncaster might have told them they were just lucky he was an honest man and had refunded them the unused portion of what they had paid. Drunk – Arncaster was a three-six-packs-a-night man – he might have been slightly more expansive. There were forces in town that wanted the Gypsies gone, he might have told them.
   Pressure had been brought to bear, pressure that a poor dirt farmer like Lars Arncaster simply couldn't stand against. Particularly when half the so-called 'good people' in town had the knife out for him to begin with.
   Not that any of the Gypsies (with the possible exception of Juggler, Billy thought) would need a chapter-and-verse rendition.
   Billy got up and walked slowly back home through a cold, drifting rain. There was a light burning in the bedroom; Heidi, waiting up for him.
   Not the patrol-car jockey; no need for revenge there. Not Arncaster; he had seen a chance for five hundred dollars cash money and had sent them on their way because he'd had to do so.
   Duncan Hopley?
   Hopley, maybe. A strong maybe, Billy amended. In one way Hopley was just another species of trained dog whose most urgent directives were aimed at preserving Fairview's well-oiled status quo. But Billy doubted if the old Gypsy man would be disposed to take such a bloodlessly sociological view of things, and not just because Hopley had rousted them so efficiently following the hearing. Rousting was one thing. They were used to that. Hopley's failure to investigate the accident which had taken the old woman's life …
   Ah, that was something else, wasn't it?
   Failure to investigate? Hell, Billy, don't make me laugh. Failure to investigate is a sin of omission. What Hopley did was to throw as much dirt as he could over any possible culpability. Beginning with the conspicuous lack of a breathalyzer test. It was a cover-up on general principles. You know it, and Cary Rossington knew it too.
   The wind was picking up and the rain was harder now. He could see it cratering the puddles in the street. The water had a queer polished look under the amber highsecurity streetlamps that lined Lantern Drive. Overhead, branches moaned and creaked in the wind, and Billy Halleck looked up uneasily.
   I ought to go see Duncan Hopley.
   Something glimmered – something that might have been the spark of an idea. Then he thought of Leda Rossington's drugged, horrified face … he thought of Leda saying He's hard to talk to now … it's happening inside his mouth, you see … everything he says to me comes out in grunts.
   Not tonight. He'd had enough for tonight.
   'Where did you go, Billy?'
   She was in bed, lying in a pool of light thrown by the reading lamp. Now she laid her book aside on the coverlet, looked at him, and Billy saw the dark brown hollows under her eyes. Those brown hollows did not exactly overwhelm him with pity . . . at least, not tonight.
   For just a moment he thought of saying: I went to see Cary Rossington, but since he was gone I ended up having a few drinks with his wife – the kind of drinks the Green Giant must have when he's on a toot. And you'll never guess what she told me, Heidi, dear. Cary Rossington, who grabbed your tit once at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, is turning into an alligator. When he finally dies, they can turn him into a brand-new product: Here Come de Judge Pocketbooks.
   'Nowhere,' he said. 'Just out. Walking. Thinking.'
   'You smell like you fell into the juniper bushes on your way home.'
   'I guess I did, in a manner of speaking. Only it was Andy's Pub I actually fell into.'
   'How many did you have?'
   'A couple.'
   'It smells more like five.'
   'Heidi, are you cross-examining me?'
   'No, honey. But I wish you wouldn't worry so much. Those doctors will probably find out what's wrong when they do the metabolic series.'
   Halleck grunted.
   She turned her earnest, scared face toward him. 'I just thank God it isn't cancer.'
   He thought – and almost said – that it must be nice for her to be on the outside; it must be nice to be able to see gradations of the horror. He didn't say it, but some of what he felt must have shown on his face, because her expression of tired misery intensified.
   'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It just … it seems hard to say anything that isn't the wrong thing.'
   You know it, babe, he thought, and the hate flashed up again, hot and sour. On top of the gin, it made him feel both depressed and physically ill. It receded, leaving shame in its wake. Cary's skin was changing into God knew what, something fit only to be seen in a circus-sideshow tent. Duncan Hopley might be just fine, or something even worse might be waiting for Billy there. Hell, losing weight wasn't so bad, was it?
   He undressed, careful to turn off her reading lamp first, and took Heidi in his arms. She was stiff against him at first. Then, just when he began to think it was going to be no good, she softened. He heard the sob she tried to swallow back and thought unhappily that if all the storybooks were right, that there was nobility to be found in adversity and character to be built in tribulation, then he was doing a piss-poor job of both finding and building.
   'Heidi, I'm sorry,' he said.
   'If I could only do something,' she sobbed. 'If I could only do something, Billy, you know?'
   'You can,' he said, and touched her breast.
   They made love. He began thinking, This one is for her, and discovered it had been for himself after all; instead of seeing Leda Rossington's haunted face and shocked, glittering eyes in the darkness, he was able to sleep.
   The next morning, the scale registered 176.

Chapter Twelve. Duncan Hopley

   He had arranged a leave of absence from the office in order to accommodate the metabolic series – Kirk Penschley had been almost indecently willing to accommodate his request, leaving Halleck with a truth he would just as soon not have faced; they wanted to get rid of him. With two of his former three chins now gone, his cheekbones evident for the first time in years, the other bones of his face showing almost as clearly, he had turned into the office bogeyman.
   'Hell yes!' Penschley had responded almost before Billy's request was completely out of his mouth. Penschley spoke in a too-hearty voice, the voice people adopt when everyone knows something is seriously wrong and no one wants to admit it. He dropped his eyes, staring at the place where Halleck's belly used to be. 'Take however much time you need, Bill.'
   'Three days should do it,' he'd replied. Now he called Penschley back from the pay phone at Barker's Coffee Shop and told him he might have to take more than three days. More than three days, yes – but maybe not just for the metabolic series. The idea had returned, glimmering. It was not a hope yet, nothing as grand as that, but it was something.
   'How much time?' Penschley asked him.
   'I don't know for sure,' Halleck said. 'Two weeks, maybe. Possibly a month.'
   There was a momentary silence at the other end, and Halleck realized Penschley was reading a subtext: What I really mean, Kirk, is that I'll never be back. They've finally diagnosed the cancer. Now comes the cobalt, the drugs for pain, the interferon if we can get it, the laetrile if we wig out and decide to head for Mexico. The next time you see me, Kirk, I'll be in a long box with a silk pillow under my head.
   And Billy, who had been afraid and not much more for the last six weeks, felt the first thin stirrings of anger. That's not what I'm saying, goddammit. At least, not yet.
   'No problem, Bill. We'll want to turn the Hood matter over to Ron Baker, but I think everything else can hang fire for a while longer.'
   The fuck you do. You'll start turning over everything else to staff this afternoon, and as for the Hood litigation, you turned it over to Ron Baker last week – he called Thursday afternoon and asked me where Sally put the fucking ConGas depositions. Your idea of hanging fire, Kirk-baby, has to do solely with Sunday-afternoon chicken barbecues at your place in Vermont. So don't bullshit a bullshitter.
   'I*ll see he gets the file,' Billy said, and could not resist adding, 'I think he's already got the Con-Gas deps.'
   A thoughtful silence at Kirk Penschley's end as he digested this. Then: 'Well … if there's anything I can do . . .'
   'There is something,' Billy said. 'Although it sounds a little Loony Tunes.'
   'What's that?' His voice was cautious now.
   'You remember my trouble this early spring? The accident?'
   'Ye-es.'
   'The woman I struck was a Gypsy. Did you know that?'
   'It was in the paper,' Penschley said reluctantly.
   'She was part of a … a … What? A band, I guess you'd say. A band of Gypsies. They were camping out here in Fairview. They made a deal with a local farmer who needed cash -'
   'Hang on, hang on a second,' Kirk Penschley said, his voice a trifle waspy, totally unlike his former paid mourner's tone. Billy grinned a little. He knew this second tone, and liked it infinitely better. He could visualize Penschley, who was forty-five, bald, and barely five feet tall, grabbing a yellow pad and one of his beloved Flair Fineliners. When he was in high gear, Kirk was one of the brightest, most tenacious men Halleck knew. 'Okay, go on. Who was this local farmer?'
   'Arncaster. Lars Arncaster. After I hit the woman
   'Her name?'
   Halleck closed his eyes and dragged for it. It was funny … all of this, and he hadn't even thought of her name since the hearing.
   'Lemke,' he said finally. 'Her name was Susanna Lemke.'
   'L-e-m-p-k-e?'
   'No P.'
   'Okay.'
   'After the accident, the Gypsies found that they'd worn out their welcome in Fairview. I've got reason to believe they went on to Raintree. I want to know if you can trace them from there. I want to know where they are now. I'll pay the investigative fees out of my own pocket.'
   'Damned right you will,' Penschley said jovially. 'Well, if they went north into New England, we can probably track them down. But if they headed south into the city or over into Jersey, I dunno. Billy, are you worried about a civil suit?'
   . 'No,' he said. 'But I have to talk to that woman's husband. If that's what he was.'
   'Oh,' Penschley said, and once again Halleck could read the man's thoughts as clearly as if he'd spoken them aloud: Billy Halleck is neatening up his affairs, balancing the books. Maybe he wants to give the old Gyp a check, maybe he only wants to face him and apologize and give the man a chance to pop him one in the eye.
   'Thank you, Kirk,' Halleck said.
   'Don't mention it,' Penschley said. 'You just work on getting better.'
   'Okay,' Billy said, and hung up. His coffee had gotten cold.
   He was really not very surprised to find that Rand Foxworth, the assistant chief, was running things down at the Fairview police station. He greeted Halleck cordially enough, but he had a harried look, and to Halleck's practiced eye there seemed to be far too many papers in the In basket on Foxworth's desk and nowhere near enough in the Out basket. Foxworth's uniform was impeccable … but his eyes were bloodshot.
   'Dunc's had a touch of the flu,' he said in answer to Billy's question – the response had the canned feel of one that has been given many times. 'He hasn't been in for the last couple of days.'
   'Oh,' Billy said. 'The flu.'
   'That's right,' Foxworth said, and his eyes dared Billy to make something of it.
   The receptionist told Billy that Dr Houston was with a patient.
   'It's urgent. Please tell him I only need a word or two with him.'
   It would have been easier in person, but Halleck hadn't wanted to drive all the way across town. As a result, he was sitting in a telephone booth (an act he wouldn't have been able to manage not long ago) across the street from the police station. At last Houston came on the line.
   His voice was cool, distant, more than a bit irritated. Halleck, who was either getting very good at reading subtexts or becoming very paranoid indeed, heard a clear message in that cool tone: You're not my patient anymore, Billy. I smell some irreversible degeneration in you that makes me very, very nervous. Give me something I can diagnose and prescribe for, that's all I ask. If you can't give me that, there's really no basis for commerce between us. We played some pretty good golf together, but I don't think either of us would say we were ever friends. I've got a Sony beeper, $200,000 worth of diagnostic equipment, and a selection of drugs to call on so wide that … well, if my computer printed them all out, the sheet would stretch from the front doors of the country club all the way down to the intersection of Park Lane and Lantern Drive. With all that going for me, I feel smart. I feel useful. Then you come along and make me look like a seventeenth-century doctor with a bottle of leeches for high blood pressure and a trepanning chisel for headaches. And I don't like to feel that way, big Bill. Not at all. Nothing toot-sweet about that. So get lost. I wash my hands of you. I'll come and see you in your coffin … unless, of course, my beeper beeps and I have to leave.
   'Modern medicine,' Billy muttered.
   'What, Billy? You'll have to speak up. I don't want to give you short shrift, but my P.A. called in sick and I'm going out of my skull this morning.'
   'Just a single question, Mike,' Billy said. 'What's wrong with Duncan Hopley?'
   Utter silence from the other end for almost ten seconds. Then: 'What makes you think anything is?'
   'He's not at the station. Rand Foxworth says he has the flu, but Rand Foxworth lies like old people fuck.'
   There was another long pause. 'As a lawyer, Billy, I shouldn't have to tell you that you're asking for privileged information. I could get my ass in a sling.'
   'If somebody tumbles to what's in that little bottle you keep in your desk, your ass could be in a sling, too. A sling so high it would give a trapeze artist acrophobia.'
   More silence. When Houston spoke again, his voice was stiff with anger … and there was an undercurrent of fear. 'Is that a threat?'
   'No,' Billy said wearily. 'Just don't go all prissy on me, Mike. Tell me what's wrong with Hopley and that'll be the end of it.'
   –'Why do you want to know?'
   'Oh, for Christ's sake. You're living proof that a man can be just as dense as he wants to be, do you know that, Mike?'
   'I don't have the slightest idea what
   'You've seen three very strange illnesses in Fairview over the last month. You didn't make any connection among them. In a way, that's understandable enough; they were all different in their specifics. On the other hand, they were all similar in the very fact of their strangeness. I have to wonder if another doctor – one who hadn't discovered the pleasure of plugging fifty dollars' worth of cocaine up his pump every day, for instance * might not have made the connection in spite of the diverse symptoms.'
   'Now, wait just a goddamn minute!'
   'No, I won't. You asked why I wanted to know, and by God, I am going to tell you. I'm losing weight steadily – I go on losing weight even if I stuff eight thousand calories a day down my throat. Cary Rossington has gotten some bizarre skin disease. His wife says he's turning into a
   sideshow freak. He's gone to the Mayo Clinic. Now, I want to know what's wrong with Duncan Hopley, and secondarily' I want to know if you've had any other inexplicable cases.'
   'Billy, it's not like that at all. You sound like you've got some crazy idea or other. I don't know what it is -'
   'No, and that's all right. But I want an answer. If I don't get it from you, I'll get it some other way.'
   'Hang on one second. If we're going to talk about this, I want to go into the study. It's a little more private there.'
   'Fine.'
   There was a click as Houston put Billy on hold. He sat in the phone booth, sweating, wondering if this was Houston's way of ditching him. Then there was another click.
   'You still there, Billy?'
   'Yes.'
   'Okay,' Houston said, the note of disappointment in his voice both unmistakable and somehow comic. Houston sighed. 'Duncan Hopley has got a case of runaway acne.'
   Billy got to his feet and opened the door of the phone booth. Suddenly it was too hot in there. 'Acne!'
   'Pimples. Blackheads. Whiteheads. That's all. You happy?'.
   'Anyone else?'
   'No. And, Billy, I don't exactly consider pimples off the-wall. You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there, but it's not like that. Dunc Hopley has got a temporary glandular imbalance, that's all. And it's not exactly a new thing with him, either. He has a history of skin problems going back to the seventh grade.'
   'Very rational. But if you add Cary Rossington with his alligator skin and William J. Halleck with his case of involuntary anorexia nervosa into the equation, it starts to sound a little like Stephen King again, wouldn't you say?'
   Patiently Houston said: 'You've got a metabolic problem, Bill. Cary … I don't know. I've seen some -'
   'Strange things, yes, I know,' Billy said. Had this cocaine-sniffing gasbag really been his family doctor for ten years? Dear God, was that the truth? 'Have you seen Lars Arncaster lately?'
   'No,' Houston said impatiently. 'He's not my patient. I thought you said you only had one question.'
   Of course he's not your patient, Billy thought giddily, he doesn't pay his bills on time, does he? And a fellow like you, a fellow with expensive tastes, really can't afford to wait, can he?
   'This really is the last one,' Billy said. 'When did you last see Duncan Hopley?'
   'Two weeks ago.'
   'Thank you.'
   'Make an appointment next time, Billy,' Houston said in an unfriendly voice, and hung up.
   Hopley did not, of course, live on Lantern Drive, but the police chief's job paid well, and he had a trim New England saltbox on Ribbonmaker Lane.
   Billy parked in the driveway at dusk, went to the door, and rang the bell. There was no answer. He rang again. No answer. He leaned on the bell. Still no answer. He went to the garage, cupped his hands around his face, and peered in. Hopley's car, a conservative cordovan-colored Volvo, was parked in there. FVW 1, the license plate read. There was no second car. Hopley was a bachelor. Billy went back to the door and began hammering on it. He hammered for nearly three minutes and his arm was getting tired when a hoarse voice yelled: 'Go away! Fuck off!'
   'Let me in!' Billy shouted back. 'I have to talk to you!'
   There was no answer. After a minute, Billy began to hammer again. There was no response at all this time … but when he stopped suddenly, he heard a whisper of movement on the other side of the door. He could suddenly picture Hopley standing there – crouching there – waiting for the unwelcome, insistent visitor to go away and leave him in peace. Peace, or whatever passed for it in Duncan Hopley's world these days. Billy uncurled his throbbing fist.
   'Hopley, I think you're there,' he said quietly. 'You don't have to say anything; just listen to me. It's Billy Halleck. Two months ago I was involved in an accident. There was an old Gypsy woman who was jaywalking -'
   Movement behind the door; definite now. A shuffle rustle.
   'I hit her and killed her. Now I'm losing weight. I'm not on a diet or anything like that; I'm just losing weight. About seventy-five pounds so far. If it doesn't stop soon, I'm going to look like the Human Skeleton in a carny sideshow.
   'Cary Rossington – Judge Rossington – presided at the preliminary hearing and declared that there was no case. He's developed some weird skin disease -'
   Billy thought he heard a low gasp of surprise.
   and he's gone out to the Mayo Clinic. The doctors have told him it isn't cancer, but they don't know what it is. Rossington would rather believe it is cancer than what he knows it really is.'
   Billy swallowed. There was a painful click in his throat.
   'It's a Gypsy curse, Hopley. I know how crazy that sounds, but it's the truth. There was an old man. He touched me when I came out of the hearing. He touched Rossington when he and his wife were at a flea market in Raintree. Did he touch you, Hopley?'
   There was a long, long silence … and then one word drifted to Billy's ears through the mail slot, like a letter full of bad news from home:
   'Yes . . .'
   'When? Where?'
   No answer.
   'Hopley, where did the Gypsies go when they left Raintree? Do you know?'
   No answer.
   'I have to talk to you!' Billy said desperately. 'I've got an idea, Hopley. I think -'
   'You can't do anything,' Hopley whispered. 'It's gone too far. You understand, Halleck? Too … far.'
   That sigh again – papery, dreadful.
   'It's a chance!' Halleck said furiously. 'Are you so far gone that doesn't mean anything to you?'
   No answer. Billy waited, hunting inside himself for more words, other arguments. He could find none. Hopley simply wasn't going to let him in. He had begun to turn away when the door clicked open.
   Billy looked at the black crack between the door and the jamb. He heard those rustling movements again, now going away, back down the darkened front hall. He felt goose flesh scutter down his back and sides and arms, and for a moment he almost went away anyhow – Never mind Hopley, he thought, if anyone can find those Gypsies, Kirk Penschley can, so never mind Hopley, you don't need him, you don't need to see what he's turned into.
   Pushing the voice back, Billy grasped the knob of the police chief's front door, opened it, and stepped inside.
   He saw a dim shape at the far end of the hall. A door on the left opened; the shape went in. A dim light glowed, and for a moment a shadow stretched long and gaunt across the hall floor, bending to go halfway up the far wall, where there was a framed photograph of Hopley receiving an award from the Fairview Rotary Club, The shadow's misshapen head lay on the photograph like an omen.
   Billy walked down the hall, spooked now – no use kidding himself. He half-expected the door behind him to slam shut and lock … and then the Gypsy will dart out of the shadows and grab me from behind, just like the big scare scene in a cheap horror movie. Sure. Come on, asshole, get your act together! But his triphammering heartbeat did not slow.
   He realized that Hopley's little house had an unpleasant smell – low and ripe, like slowly spoiling meat.
   He stood outside the open door for a moment. It looked like a study or a den, but the light was so faint it was impossible to tell for sure.
   'Hopley.'
   'Come in,' the papery voice whispered.
   Billy did.
   It was Hopley's den, all right. There were rather more books than Billy would have expected, and a warm Turkish rug on the floor. The room was small, probably cozy and pleasant under the right circumstances.
   There was a blondwood desk in the center. A Tensor lamp stood on it. Hopley had bent the lamp's neck so that the shade was less than an inch from the desk blotter. There was a small and savagely concentrated circle of light on the blotter; the rest of the room was a cold land of shadows.
   Hopley himself was a manlike bulk in what might have been an Eames chair.
   Billy stepped over the threshold. There was a chair in the corner. Billy sat in it, aware that he had picked the chair in the room which was farthest from Hopley. Nevertheless, he found himself straining to see Hopley clearly. It was impossible. The man was nothing but a silhouette. Billy found himself almost waiting for Hopley to flip the Tensor lamp up so that it glared into his, Billy's eyes. Then Hopley would lean forward, a cop out of a 1940's film noir, screaming: 'We know you did it, McGonigal! Stop trying to deny it! Confess! Confess and we'll let you have a cigarette! Confess and we'll give you a glassa icewadduh! Confess and we'll let you go to the batroom!'
   –But Hopley only sat canted back in his Eames chair. There was a soft rustle as he crossed his legs.
   'Well? You wanted to come in. You're in. Tell your tale, Halleck, and get out. You're not exactly my favorite person in all the world these days.'
   'I'm not Leda Rossington's favorite person, either,' Billy said, 'and frankly, I don't give much of a shit what she thinks, or what you think, either. She thinks it's my fault. Probably you do too.'
   'How much did you have to drink when you hit her, Halleck? My best guess is that if Tom Rangely had given you the breathalyzer, that little balloon would have floated straight up to heaven.'
   'Nothing to drink, no drugs,' Billy said. His heart was still thudding, but now it was powered by rage rather than fear. Each thud sent a sick bolt of pain through his head. 'You want to know what happened? Huh? My wife of sixteen years picked that day to give me a handjob in the car. She never did anything like that before. I don't have the slightest clue why she picked that day to do it. So while you and Leda Rossington -and probably Cary Rossington as well – have been busy laying it off on me because I was behind the wheel, I've been busy laying it off on my wife because she had a hand inside my pants. And maybe we should all just lay it off on fate or destiny or something and stop worrying about blame.'
   Hopley grunted.
   'Or do you want me to tell you how I begged Tom Rangely on my knees for him not to give me a breath test or a blood test? How I cried on your shoulder to soft pedal the investigation and kick those Gypsies out of town?'
   This time Hopley didn't even grunt. He was only a silent slumped shape in the Eames chair.
   'Isn't it just a little late for all these games?' Billy asked. His voice had hoarsened, and he realized with some astonishment that he was on the verge of tears. 'My wife was jerking me off, true. I hit the old woman and killed her, true. She herself was at least fifty yards from the nearest crosswalk and came out from between two cars, true. You soft-pedaled the investigation and hustled them out of town as soon as Cary Rossington slapped a quick coat of whitewash on me, also true. And none of it means shit. But if you do want to sit here in the dark and hand out the guilt, my friend, don't forget to give yourself a. plateful.'
   'A great closing summation, Halleck. Great. You ever seen Spencer Tracy in that movie about the Monkey Trial? You must have.'
   'Fuck you,' Billy said, and got up.
   Hopley sighed. 'Sit down.'
   Billy Halleck stood uncertainly, realizing that part of him wanted to use his anger for its own less-than-noble purposes. That part wanted to get him out of here in a manufactured huff simply because that dark slumped shape in the Eames chair scared him shitless.
   'Don't be such a sanctimonious prick,' Hopley said. 'Sit down, for Christ's sake.'
   Billy sat down, aware that his mouth was dry and that there were small muscles in his thighs which were jumping and dancing uncontrollably.
   'Have it the way you like it, Halleck. I'm more like you than you think. I don't give a fart in a high wind for the postmortems, either. You're right ~ I didn't think, I just did it. They weren't the first bunch of drifters I ever busted out of town, and I've done other little cosmetic jobs when some hot-shit townie got involved in a mess. Of course I couldn't do anything if the townie in question made the mess outside the Fairview town limits … but you'd be surprised how many of our leading lights never learned that you don't shit where you eat.
   'Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised.'
   Hopley uttered a gasping, wheezy laugh that made goose bumps rise on Billy's arms.
   'All part of the service. If nothing had happened, none of us -you, me, Rossington – would even remember those Gypsies ever existed by now.'
   Billy opened his mouth to utter a hot denial, to tell Hopley that he would remember the sick double-thud he'd heard for the rest of his life … and then he remembered the four days at Mohonk with Heidi, the two of them laughing together, eating like horses, hiking, making love every night and sometimes in the afternoons. How long had that been after it had happened? Two weeks?
   He closed his mouth again.
   'What's happened has happened. I guess the only reason I let you in at all was that it's good to know someone else believes this is happening, no matter how insane it is. Or maybe I just let you in because I'm lonely. And I'm scared, Halleck. Very scared. Extremely scared. Are you scared?'
   'Yes,' Billy said simply.
   'You know what scares me the most? I can live like this for quite a while. That scares me. Mrs Callaghee does my grocery shopping and she comes in twice a week to clean and do the washing. I've got the TV, and I like to read. My investments have done very well over the years, and if I'm moderately frugal, I could probably go on indefinitely. And just how much temptation to spend does a man in my position have, anyway? Am I going to buy a yacht, Halleck? Maybe charter a Lear and fly to Monte Carlo with my honey to watch the Grand Prix race there next month? What do you think? How many parties do you think I'd be welcome at now that my whole face is sliding off?'
   Billy shook his head numbly.
   'So … I could live here and it would just … just go on. Like it's going on right now, every day and every night. And that scares me, because it's wrong to go on living like this. Every day I don't commit suicide, every day I just sit here in the dark watching game shows and sitcoms, that old Gypsy fuck is laughing at me.'
   'When … when did he … ?'
   'Touch me? Just about five weeks ago, if it matters. I went up to Milford to see my mother and father. I took them out to lunch. I had a few beers before and a few more during the meal and decided to use the men's room before we left. The door was locked. I waited, it opened, and he came out. Old geezer with a rotted nose. He touched my cheek and said something.'
   'What?'
   'I didn't hear it,' Hopley said. 'Just then, someone in the kitchen dropped a whole stack of plates on the floor. But I didn't really have to hear it. All I've got to do is look in the mirror.'
   'You probably don't know if they were camped in Milford.'
   'As a matter of fact, I checked that out with the Milford P. D. the next day,' Hopley said. 'Call it professional curiosity – I recognized the old Gyp; no way you're going to forget a face like that, you know what I mean?'
   'Yes,' Billy said.
   'They had been camped on a farm in East Milford for four days. Same sort of deal as the one they had with that hemorrhoid Arncaster. The cop I talked to said he'd been keeping pretty close tabs on them and that they appeared to have moved on just that morning.'
   'After the old man touched you.'
   'Right.'
   'Do you think he knew you were going to be there? In that particular restaurant?'
   'I never took my folks there before,' Hopley said. 'It was an old place that had just been renovated. Usually we go to a dago place way on the other side of town. It was my mother's idea. She wanted to see what they did to the rugs or the paneling or something. You know how women are.'
   'You didn't answer my question. Do you think he knew you were going to be there?'
   There was a long, considering silence from the slumped shape in the Eames chair. 'Yes,' Hopley said at last. 'Yes, I do. More insanity, Halleck, right? Good thing no one's keeping score, isn't it?'
   'Yes,' Billy said. 'I guess it is.' A peculiar little giggle escaped him. It sounded like a very small shriek.
   'Now, what's this idea of yours, Halleck? I don't sleep much these days, but I usually start tossing and turning right around this time of night.'
   Asked to bring out in words what he had only thought about in the silence of his own mind, Billy found himself feeling absurd – his idea was weak and foolish, not an idea at all, not really, but only a dream.
   'The law firm I work for retains a team of investigators,' he said. 'Barton Detective Services, Inc.'
   'I've heard of them.'
   'They are supposed to be the best in the business. I … That is to say . . .'
   He felt Hopley's impatience radiating off the man in waves, although Hopley did not move at all. He summoned what dignity he had left, telling himself that he surely knew as much about what was going on as Hopley, that he had every bit as much right to speak; after all, it was happening to him too.
   'I want to find him,' Billy said. 'I want to confront him. I want to tell him what happened., I … I guess I want to come completely clean. Although I suppose if he could do these things to us, he may know anyway.'
   'Yes,' Hopley said.
   Marginally encouraged, Billy went on: 'But I still want to tell him my side of it. That it was my fault, yes, I should have been able to stop in time – all things being equal, I would have stopped in time. That it was my wife's fault, because of what she was doing to me. That it was Rossington's fault for whitewashing it, and yours for going easy on the investigation and then humping them out of town.'
   Billy swallowed.
   'And then I'll tell him it was her fault, too. Yes. She was jaywalking, Hopley, and so okay, it's not a crime they give you the gas chamber for, but the reason it's against the law is that it can get you killed the way she got killed.'
   'You want to tell him that?'
   'I don't want to, but I'm going to. She came out from between two parked cars, didn't look either way. They teach you better in the third grade.'
   'Somehow I don't think that babe ever got the Officer Friendly treatment in the third grade,' Hopley said. 'Somehow I don't think she ever went to the third grade, you know?'
   'Just the same,' Billy said stubbornly, 'simple common sense -'
   'Halleck, you must be a glutton for punishment,' -the shadow that was Hopley said. 'You're losing weight now – do you want to try for the grand prize? Maybe next time he'll stop up your bowels, or heat your bloodstream up to about a hundred and ten degrees, or -'
   'I'm not just going to sit in Fairview and let it happen!' Billy said fiercely. 'Maybe he can reverse it, Hopley. Did you ever think of that?'
   'I've been reading up on this stuff,' Hopley said. 'I guess I knew what was happening almost from the time the first pimple showed up over one of my eyebrows. Right where the acne attacks Always started when I was in high school – and I used to have some pisser acne attacks back then, let me tell you. So I've been reading up on it. Like I said, I like to read. And I have to tell you, Halleck, that there are hundreds of books on casting spells and curses, but very few on reversing them.'
   'Well, maybe he can't. Maybe not. Probably not, even. But I can still go to him, goddammit. I can stare him in the face and say, "You didn't cut enough pieces out of the pie, old man. You should have cut out a piece for my wife, and one for your wife, and while we're at it, old man, how about a piece for you? Where were you while she was walking into the street without looking where she was going? If she wasn't used to in-town traffic, you must have known it. So where were you? Why weren't you there to take her by the arm and lead her down to the crosswalk on the corner? Why -'
   'Enough,' Hopley said. 'If I was on a jury, you'd convince me, Halleck. But you forgot the most important factor operating here.'
   'What's that?' Billy asked stiffly.
   'Human nature. We may be victims of the supernatural, but what we're really dealing with is human nature. As a police officer – excuse me, former police officer – I couldn't agree more that there's no absolute right and absolute wrong; there's just one gray shading into the next, lighter or darker. But you don't think her husband's going to buy that shit, do you?'
   'I don't know.'
   'I know,' Hopley said. 'I know, Halleck. I can read that guy so well I sometimes think he must be sending me mental radio signals. All his life he's been on the move, busted out of a place as soon as the “good folks” have got all the maryjane or hashish they want, as soon as they've lost all the dimes they want on the wheel of chance. All his life he's heard a bad deal called a dirty gyp. The “good folks” got roots; you got none. This guy, Halleck, he's seen canvas tents burned for a joke back in the thirties and forties, and maybe there were babies and old people that burned up in some of those tents. He's seen his daughters or his friends' daughters attacked, maybe raped, because all those “good folks” know that gypsies fuck like rabbits and a little more won't matter, and even if it does, who gives a fuck. To coin a phrase. He's maybe seen his sons, or his friends' sons, beaten within an inch of their lives … and why? Because the fathers of the kids who did the beating lost some money on the games of chance. Always the same: you come into town, the “good folks” take what they want, and then you get busted out of town. Sometimes they give you a week on the local pea farm or a month on the local road crew for good measure. And then, Halleck, on top of everything, the final crack of the whip comes. This hotshot lawyer with three chins and bulldog jowls runs your wife down in the street. She's seventy, seventy-five, half-blind, maybe she only steps out too quick because she wants to get back to her place before she wets herself, and old bones break easy, old bones are like glass, and you hang around thinking maybe this once, just this once, there's going to be a little justice … an instant of justice to make up for a lifetime of crap -'
   'Quit it,' Billy Halleck said hoarsely, 'just quit it, what do you say?' He touched his cheek distractedly, thinking he must be sweating heavily. But it wasn't sweat on his cheek; it was tears.
   'No, you deserve it all,' Hopley said with savage joviality, 'and I'm going to give it to you. I'm not telling you not to go ahead, Halleck – Daniel Webster talked Satan's jury around, so hell, I guess anything's possible. But I think you're still holding on to too many illusions. This guy is mad, Halleck. This guy is furious. For all you know, he may be right off his gourd by now, in which case you'd be better off making your pitch in the Bridgewater Mental Asylum. He's out for revenge, and when you're out for revenge, you're not apt to see how everything is shades of gray. When your wife and kids get killed in a plane crash, you don't want to listen to how circuit A fucked up switch B, and traffic controller C had a touch of bug D and navigator E picked the wrong time to go to shithouse F. You just want to sue the shit out of the airline … or kill someone with your shotgun. You want a goat, Halleck. You want to hurt someone. And we're getting hurt. Bad for us. Good for him. Maybe I understand the thing a little better than you, Halleck.'
   Slowly, slowly, his hand crept into the narrow circle of light thrown by the Tensor lamp and turned it so that it shone on his face. Halleck dimly heard a gasp and realized it had come from him.
   He heard Hopley saying: How many parties do you think I'd be welcome at now that my whole face is sliding off?
   Hopley's skin was a harsh alien landscape. Malignant red pimples the size of tea saucers grew out of his chin, his neck, his arms, the back of his hands. Smaller eruptions rashed his cheeks and forehead; his nose was a plague zone of blackheads. Yellowish pus oozed and flowed in weird channels between bulging dunes of proud flesh. Blood trickled here and there. Coarse black hairs, beard hairs, grew in crazy helter-skelter tufts, and Halleck's horrified overburdened mind realized that shaving would have become impossible some time ago in the face of such cataclysmic upheavals. And from the center of it all, helplessly embedded in that trickling red landscape, were Hopley's staring eyes.
   They looked at Billy Halleck for what seemed an endless length of time, reading his revulsion and dumbstruck horror. At last he nodded, as if satisfied, and turned the Tensor lamp off.
   'Oh, Christ, Hopley, I'm sorry.'
   'Don't be,' Hopley said, that weird joviality back in his voice. 'Yours is going slower, but you'll get there eventually. My service pistol is in the third drawer of this desk, and if it gets bad enough I'll use it no matter what the balance is in my bankbook. God hates a coward, my father used to say. I wanted you to see me so you'll understand. I know how he feels, that old Gyp. Because I wouldn't make any pretty legal speeches. I wouldn't bother with any sweet reason. I'd kill him for what he's done to me, Halleck.'
   That dreadful shape moved and shifted. Halleck heard Hopley draw his fingers down his cheek, and then he heard the unspeakable, sickening sound of ripe pimples breaking wetly open. Rossington is plating, Hopley's rotting, and I'm wasting away, he thought. Dear God, let it be a dream, even let me be crazy … but don't let this be happening.
   'I'd kill him very slowly,' Hopley said. 'I will spare you the details.'
   Billy tried to speak. There was nothing but a dry croak.
   'I understand where you're coming from, but I hold out very little hope for your mission,' Hopley said hollowly. 'Why don't you consider killing him instead, Halleck? Why don't you … ?'
   But Halleck had reached his limit. He fled Hopley's darkened study, cracking his hip hard on the corner of his desk, madly sure that Hopley would reach out with one of those dreadful hands and touch him. Hopley didn't.
   Halleck ran out into the night and stood there breathing great lungfuls of clean air, his head bowed, his thighs trembling.

Chapter Thirteen

   He thought restlessly for the rest of the week of calling Ginelli at Three Brothers – Ginelli seemed like an answer of some kind -just what kind, he didn't know. But in the end he went ahead and checked into the Glassman Clinic and began the metabolic series. If he had been single and alone, as Hopley was (Hopley had made several guest appearances in Billy's dreams the night before), he would have canceled the whole business. But there was Heidi to think about … and there was Linda – Linda, who truly was an innocent bystander and who understood none of this. So he checked into the clinic, hiding his crazy knowledge like a man hiding a drug habit.
   It was, after all, a place to be, and while he was there, Kirk Penschley and the Barton Detective Services would be taking care of his business. He hoped.
   So he was poked and prodded. He drank a horrid chalky-tasting barium solution. He was given X rays, a CAT-scan, an EEG, an EKG, and a total metabolic survey. Visiting doctors were brought around to look at him as if he were a rare zoo exhibit. A giant panda, or maybe the last of the dodo birds, Billy thought, sitting in the solarium and holding an unread National Geographic in his hands. There were Band-Aids on the backs of both hands. They had stuck a lot of needles in him.
   On his second morning at Glassman, as he submitted to yet another round of poking and prying and tapping, he noticed that he could see the double stack of his ribs for the first time since … since high school? No, since forever. His bones were making themselves known, casting shadows against his skin, coming triumphantly out. Not only were the love handles above his hips gone, the blades of his pelvic bones were clearly visible. Touching one of them, he thought that it felt knobby, like the gearshift of the first car he had ever owned, a 1957 Pontiac. He laughed a little, and then felt the sting of tears. All of his days were like that now. Upsy-downsy, weather unsettled, chance of showers.
   I'd kill him very slowly, he heard Hopley saying. I will spare you the details.
   Why? Billy thought, lying sleepless in his clinic bed with the raised invalid sides. You didn't spare me anything else.
   During his three-day stay at Glassman, Halleck lost seven pounds. Not much, he thought with his own brand of gallows joviality. Not much, less than the weight of a medium-sized bag of sugar. At this rate I won't fade away to nothing until … gee! Almost October!
   172, his mind chanted. 172 now, if you were a boxer you'd be out of the heavyweight class and into the middleweight … would you care to try for welterweight, Billy? Lightweight? Bantamweight? How about flyweight?
   Flowers came: from Heidi, from the firm. A small nosegay came from Linda – written on the card in her flat, sprawling hand was Please get well soon, Daddy – Love you, Lin. Billy Halleck cried over that.
   On the third day, dressed again, he met with the three doctors in charge of his case. He felt much less vulnerable in jeans and a MEET ME IN FAIRVIEW T-shirt; it was really amazing how much it meant to be out of one of the goddamn hospital johnnies. He listened to them, thought of Leda Rossington, and suppressed a grim smile.
   They knew exactly what was wrong with him; they were not mystified at all. Au contraire, they were so excited they were damned near making weewee in their pants. Well … maybe a note of caution was in order. Maybe they didn't know exactly what was wrong with him yet, but it was surely one of two things (or possibly three). One of them was a rare wasting disease that had never been seen outside of Micronesia. One was a rare metabolic disease that had never been completely described. The third – just a possibility, mind you! – was a psychological form of anorexia nervosa, this last so rare that it had long been suspected but never actually proven. Billy could see from the hot light in their eyes that they were pulling for that one; they would get their names in the medical books. But in any case, Billy Halleck was definitely a rara avis, and his doctors were like kids on Christmas morning.
   The upshot was that they wanted him to hang in at Glassman for another week or two (or possibly three). They were going to whip what was wrong with him. They were going to whip it good. They contemplated a series of megavitamins to start with (certainly!), plus protein injections (of course!), and a great many more tests (without a doubt!).
   There was the professional equivalent of dismayed howls -and they were almost literally howls – when Billy told them quietly that he thanked them, but he would have to leave. They remonstrated with him; they expostulated; they lectured. And to Billy, who felt more and more often lately that he must be losing his mind, the trio of doctors began to look eerily like the Three Stooges. He halfexpected them to begin bopping and boinking each other, staggering around the richly appointed office with their white coats flapping, breaking things and shouting in Brooklyn accents.
   'You undoubtedly feel quite well now, Mr Halleck,' one of them said. 'You were, after all, quite seriously overweight to begin with, according to your records. But I need to warn you that what you feel now may be spurious. If you continue to lose weight, you can expect to develop mouth sores, skin problems . . .'
   If you want to see some real skin problems, you ought to check out Fairview's chief of police, Halleck thought. Excuse me, ex-chief.
   He decided, on the spur of the moment and apropos of nothing, to take up smoking again.
   '. . . diseases similar to scurvy or beriberi,' the doctor was continuing sternly. 'You're going to become extremely susceptible to infections – everything from colds and bronchitis to tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, Mr Halleck,' he said impressively. 'Now if you stay here -'
   'No,' Billy said. 'Please understand that it's not even an option.'
   One of the others put his fingers gently to his temples as if he had just developed a splitting headache. For all Billy knew, he had – he was the doctor who had advanced the idea of psychological anorexia nervosa. 'What can we say to convince you, Mr Halleck?'
   'Nothing,' Billy replied. The image of the old Gypsy came unbidden into his mind – he felt again the soft, caressing touch of the man's hand on his cheek, the scrape of the hard calluses. Yes, he thought, I'm going to take up smoking again. Something really devilish like Camels or Pall Malls or Chesterfoggies. Why not? When the goddamn doctors start looking like Larry, Curly, and Moe, it's time to do something.
   They asked him to wait a moment and went out together. Billy was content enough to wait – he felt that he had finally reached the caesura in this mad play, the eye of the storm, and he was content with that … that, and the thought of all the cigarettes he would soon smoke, perhaps even two at a time.
   They came back, grim-faced but looking somehow exalted -men who had decided to make the ultimate sacrifice. They would let him stay free of charge, they said: he need pay only for the lab work.
   'No,' Billy said patiently. 'You don't understand. The major medical coverage pays for all of ^that anyway; I checked. The point is, I'm leaving. Simply leaving. Bugging out.'
   They stared at him, uncomprehending, beginning to be angry. Billy thought of telling them how much like the Three Stooges they looked, and decided that would be an extremely bad idea. It would complicate things. Such fellows as these were not used to being challenged, to having their gris-gris rejected. He did not think it past possibility that they might call Heidi and suggest that a competency hearing was in order. And Heidi might listen to them.
   'We'll pay for the tests too,' one of them said finally, in a this-is-our-final-offer tone.
   'I'm leaving,' Billy said. He spoke very quietly, but he saw that they finally believed him. Perhaps it was the very quietness of his tone that had finally convinced them that it was not a matter of money, that he was authentically mad.
   'But why? Why, Mr Halleck?'
   'Because,' Billy said, 'although you think you can help me … ah … gentlemen, you can't.'
   And looking at their unbelieving, uncomprehending faces, Billy thought he had never felt so lonely in his life.
   On his way home he stopped at a smoke shop and bought a package of Chesterfield Kings. The first three puffs made him feel so dizzy and sick that he threw them away.
   'So much for that experiment,' he said aloud in the car, laughing and crying at the same time. 'Back to the old drawing board, kids.'

Chapter 14. Linda was gone.

   Heidi, the normally tiny lines beside her eyes and the corners of her mouth now deep with strain (she was smoking like a steam engine, Billy saw – one Vantage 100 after another), told Halleck she had sent Linda to her Aunt Rhoda's in Westchester County.
   'I did it for a couple of reasons,' Heidi said. 'The first is that … that she needs a rest from you, Billy. From what's happening to you. She's half out of her mind. It's gotten so I can't convince her you don't have cancer.'
   'She ought to talk to Cary Rossington,' Billy muttered as he went into the kitchen to turn on the coffee. He needed a cup badly – strong and black, no sugar. 'They sound like soulmates.'
   'What? I can't hear you.'
   'Never mind. Just let me turn on the coffee.'
   'She's not sleeping,' Heidi said when he came back. She was twisting her hands together restlessly. 'Do you understand?'
   'Yes,' Billy said, and he did … but it felt as if there was a thorn lodged somewhere inside of him. He wondered if Heidi understood that he needed Linda too, if she really understood that his daughter was also part of his support system. But part of his support system or not, he had no right to erode Linda's confidence, her psychological equilibrium. Heidi was right about that. She was right about that no matter how much it cost.
   He felt that bright hate surface in his heart again. Mommy had driven his daughter off to auntie's house as soon as Billy had called and said he was on his way. And how come? Why, because the bogey-daddy was coming home! Don't run screaming, dear, it's only the Thin Man …
   Why that day? Why did you have to pick that day?
   'Billy? Are you all right?' Heidi's voice was oddly hesitant.
   Jesus! You stupid bitch! Here you are married to the Incredible Shrinking Man, and all you can think to ask is if I'm all right?
   'I'm as all right as I can be, I guess. Why?'
   'Because you looked … strange for a minute.'
   Did I? Did I really? Why that day, Heidi? Why did you pick that day to reach into my pants after all the prim years of doing everything in the dark?
   'Well, I suppose I feel a little strange almost all the time now,' Billy said, thinking: You've got to stop it, my friend. This is pointless. What's done is done.
   But it was hard to stop it. Hard to stop it when she stood there smoking one cigarette after another but looking and seeming perfectly well, and …
   But you will stop it, Billy. So help me.
   Heidi turned away and stubbed her cigarette out in a crystal ashtray.
   'The second thing is … you've been keeping something from me, Billy. Something to do with this. You talk in your sleep, sometimes. You've been out nights. Now, I want to know. I deserve to know.' She was beginning to cry.
   'You want to know?' Halleck asked. 'You really want to know?' he felt a strange dry grin surface on his face.
   'Yes! Yes!'
   So Billy told her.
   Houston called him the following day, and after a long and meaningless prologue, he got to the point. Heidi was with him. He and Heidi had had a long chat (did you offer her a toot for the human snoot? Halleck thought of asking, and decided that maybe he had better not). The upshot of their long chat was simply this: they thought Billy was just as crazy as a loon.
   'Mike,' Billy said, 'the old Gypsy was real. He touched all three of us: me, Cary Rossington, Duncan Hopley. Now, a guy like you doesn't believe in the supernatural I accept that. But you sure as shit believe in deductive and inductive reasoning. So you've got to see the possibilities. All three of us were touched by him, all three of us have mysterious physical ailments, Now, for Christ's sake, before you decide I've gone crazy, at least consider the logical link.'
   'Billy, there is no link.'
   'I just -,
   'I've talked to Leda Rossington. She says Cary is in the Mayo being treated for skin cancer. She says it's gone pretty far, but they're reasonably sure he's going to be okay. She further says she hasn't seen you since the Gordons' Christmas party.'
   'She's lying!'
   Silence from Houston . . . and was that the sound of Heidi crying in the background? Billy's hand tightened on the telephone until the knuckles grew white.
   'Did you talk to her in person, or just on the phone?'
   'On the phone. Not that I understand the difference that makes.'
   'If you saw her, you'd know. She looks like a woman who's had most of the life shocked right out of her.'
   'Well, when you find out your husband has skin cancer, and it's reached the serious stage
   'Have you talked to Cary?'
   'He's in intensive care. People in intensive care are allowed telephone calls only under the most extreme circumstances.'
   'I am down to a hundred and seventy,' Billy said. 'That's a net loss of eighty-three pounds, and I call that pretty extreme.'
   Silence from the other end. Except for that sound that might be Heidi crying.
   'Will you talk to him? Will you try?'
   'If his doctors allow him to take a call, and if he'll talk to me, yes. But, Billy this hallucination of yours-'
   IT IS NO FUCKING HALLUCINATION!' Don't shout, God, don't do that.
   Billy closed his eyes.
   'All right, all right,' Houston soothed. 'This idea. Is that a better word? All I wanted to say is that this idea is not going to help you get better. In fact, it may be the root cause of this psycho-anorexia, if that's really what you're suffering from, as Dr Yount believes. You -'
   'Hopley,' Billy said. Sweat had broken out on his face. He mopped his brow with his handkerchief. He had a flicker-flash of Hopley, that face that really wasn't a face anymore but a relief map of hell. Crazy inflammations, trickling wetness, and the sound, the unspeakable sound when he raked his nails down his cheek.
   There was a long silence from Houston's end.
   'Talk to Duncan Hopley. He'll confirm -'
   'I can't, Billy. Duncan Hopley committed suicide two days ago. He did it while you were in the Glassman Clinic. Shot himself with his service pistol.'
   Halleck closed his eyes tightly and swayed on his feet. He felt as he had when he tried to smoke. He pinched his cheek savagely to keep from fainting dead away.
   'Then you know,' he said with his eyes still closed. 'You know, or someone knows – someone saw him.'
   'Grand Lawlor saw him,' Houston said. 'I called him just a few minutes ago.'
   Grand Lawlor. For a moment Billy's confused, frightened mind didn't understand – he believed that Houston had uttered a garbled version of the phrase grand jury. Then it clicked home. Grand Lawlor was the county coroner. And now that he thought of it, yes, Grand Lawlor had testified before a grand jury or two in his time.
   This thought brought on an irrational giggling fit. Billy pressed his palm over the phone's mouth piece and hoped Houston wouldn't hear the giggles; if he did, Houston would think he was crazy for sure.
   And you'd really like to believe I'm crazy, wouldn't you, Mike? Because if I was crazy and I decided to start babbling about the little bottle and the little ivory spoon, why, no one would believe me anyway, would they? Goodness, no.
   And that did it; the giggles passed.
   'You asked him -'
   'For a few details concerning the death? After the horror story your wife told me, you're damned right I asked him.' Houston's voice grew momentarily prim. 'You just ought to be damned glad that when he asked me why I wanted to know, I hung tough.'
   'What did he say?'
   'That Hopley's complexion was a mess, but nothing like the horror show you described to Heidi. Grand's description leads me to believe that it was a nasty outbreak of the adult acne I'd treated Duncan for off and on ever since I first examined him back in 1974. The outbreaks depressed him quite badly, and that came as no surprise to me – I'd have to say that adult acne, when it's severe, is one of the most psychologically bruising nonlethal ailments I know of.'
   'You think he got depressed over the way he looked and killed himself.'
   'In essence, yes.'
   'Let me get this straight,' Billy said. 'You believe this was a more or less ordinary outbreak of the adult acne he'd had for years … but at the same time you believe he killed himself because of what he was seeing in the mirror. That's a weird diagnosis, Mike.'
   'I never said it was the skin outbreak alone,' Houston said. He sounded annoyed. 'The worst thing about problems is the way they seem to come in pairs and trios and whole gangs, never one by one. Psychiatrists have the most suicides per ten thousand members of the profession, Billy, but cops aren't far behind. Probably there was a combination of factors – this latest outbreak could have just been the straw that broke the camel's back.'
   'You should have seen him,' Billy said grimly. 'That wasn't a straw, that was the fucking World Trade Center.'
   'He didn't leave a note, so I guess we'll never know, will we?'
   'Christ,' Billy said, and ran a hand through his hair. 'Jesus Christ.'
   'And the reasons for Duncan Hopley's suicide are almost beside the point, aren't they?'
   'Not to me,' Billy said. 'Not at all.'
   'It seems to me that the real point is that your mind played you a nasty trick, Billy. It guilt-tripped you. You had this … this bee in your bonnet about Gypsy curses … and when you went over to Duncan Hopley's that -night, you simply saw something that wasn't there.' Now Houston's voice took on a cozy, you-can-tell-me tone. 'Did you happen to drop into Andy's Pub for a couple before you went over to Duncan's house? Just to, you know, get yourself up for the encounter a little?'
   'No.'
   'You sure? Heidi says you've been spending quite a bit of time in Andy's.'
   'If I had,' Billy said, 'your wife would have seen me there, don't you think?'
   There was a long period of silence. Then Houston said colorlessly: 'That was a damned low blow, Billy. But it's also exactly the sort of comment I'd expect from a man who is under severe mental stress.'
   'Severe mental stress. Psychological anorexia. You guys have got a name for everything, I guess. But you should have seen him. You should have. . .'Billy paused, thinking of the flaming pimples on Duncan Hopley's cheeks, the oozing whiteheads, the nose that had become almost insignificant in the gruesome, erupting landscape of that haunted face.
   'Billy, can't you see that your mind is hunting a logical explanation for what's happening to you? It feels guilt about the Gypsy woman, and so -'
   'The curse ended when he shot himself,' Billy heard himself saying. 'Maybe that's why it didn't look so bad. It's like in the werewolf movies we saw when we were kids, Mike. When the werewolf finally gets killed, it turns back into a man again!'
   Excitement replaced the confusion he had felt at the news of Hopley's suicide and Hopley's more or less ordinary skin ailment. His mind began to race down this new path, exploring it quickly, ticking off the possibilities and probabilities.
   Where does a curse go when the cursee finally kicks it? Shit, might as well ask where a dying man's last breath goes.
   Or his soul. Away. It goes away. Away, away, away. Is there maybe a way to drive it away?
   Rossington – that was the first thing. Rossington, out there at the Mayo Clinic, clinging desperately to the idea that he had skin cancer, because the alternative was so much worse. When Rossington died, would he change back to … ?
   He became aware that Houston had fallen silent. And there was a noise in the background, unpleasant but familiar … Sobbing? Was that Heidi, sobbing?
   'Why's she crying?' Billy rasped.
   'Billy -'
   'Put her on!'
   'Billy, if you could hear yourself
   'Goddammit, put her on!'
   'No. I won't. Not while you're like this.'
   'Why, you cheap coke-sniffing little
   'Billy, quit it!'
   Houston's roar was loud enough to make Billy hold the phone away from his ear for a moment. When he put it back, the sobbing had stopped.
   'Now, listen,' Houston said. 'There are no such things as werewolves and Gypsy curses. I feel foolish even telling you that.'
   'Man, don't you see that's part of the problem?' Billy asked softly. 'Don't you understand that's how these guys have been able to get away with this stuff for the last twenty centuries or so?'
   'Billy, if there's a curse on you, it's been laid by your own subconscious mind. Old Gypsies can't lay curses. But your own mind, masquerading as an old Gypsy, can.'
   'Me, Hopley, and Rossington,' Halleck said dully, 'all at the same time. You're the one who's blind, Mike. Add it up. '
   'It adds up to coincidence, and nothing more. How many times do we have to go around the mulberry bush, Billy? Go back to the Glassman. Let them help you. Stop driving your wife crazy.'
   For a moment he was tempted to just give in and believe Houston – the sanity and rationality in his voice, no matter how exasperated, were comforting.
   Then he thought of Hopley turning the Tensor lamp so that it shone savagely up onto his face. He thought of Hopley saying I'd kill him very slowly – I will spare you the details.
   'No,' he said. 'They can't help me at the Glassman, Mike.'
   Houston sighed heavily. 'Then who can? The old Gypsy?'
   'If he can be found, maybe,' Halleck said. 'Just maybe. And there's another guy I know who might be of some help. A pragmatist, like you.'
   Ginelli. The name had surfaced in his mind as he was speaking.
   'But mostly, I think I've got to help myself.'
   'That's what I've been telling you!'
   'Oh – I was under the impression you'd just advised me to check back into the Glassman Clinic.'
   Houston sighed. 'I think your brains must be losing weight, too. Have you thought about what you're doing to your wife and daughter? Have you thought about that at all?'
   Did Heidi tell you what she was doing to me when the accident happened? Billy almost blurted out. Did she tell you that yet, Mikey? No? Oh, you ought to ask her … My, yes.
   'Billy?'
   'Heidi and I will talk about it,' Billy said quietly.
   'But don't you -'
   'I think you were right about at least one thing, Mike.'
   'Oh? Good for me. And what was that?'
   'We've gone around the mulberry bush enough,' Billy said, and hung up the telephone.
   But they didn't talk about it.
   Billy tried a couple of times, but Heidi only shook her head, her face white and set, her eyes accusing him. She only responded once.
   It was three days after the telephone conversation with Houston, the one in which Heidi had been sobbing accompaniment in the background. They were just finishing dinner. Halleck had put away his usual lumberjack's meal -three hamburgers (with buns and fixin's), four ears of corn (with butter), half a pint of french fries, and two helpings of peach cobbler with hard sauce. He still had little or no appetite, but he had discovered an alarming. fact – if he didn't eat, he lost more weight. Heidi had arrived back home following Billy's conversation – argument – with Houston pale and silent, her face puffed from the tears she had cried in Houston's office. Upset and miserable himself, he had skipped lunch and dinner … and when he weighed himself the next morning he saw that he had plummeted five pounds to 167.
   He stared at the figure, feeling a coldly fluttering swirl of moths in his gut. Five pounds, he thought. Five pounds in one single day! Christ!
   He had skipped no more meals since then.
   Now he indicated his empty plate – the clean corn cobs, the remains of the burgers, salad, french fries, dessert.
   'Does that look like anorexia nervosa to you, Heidi?' he asked. 'Does it?'
   'No,' she said unwillingly. 'No, but
   'I've been eating like this for the last month,' Halleck said, 'and in the last month I've lost just about sixty pounds. Now, would you like to explain how my subconscious managed that trick? Losing two pounds a day on an intake of roughly six thousand calories per twenty-four hours?'
   'I … I don't know … but Mike … Mike says-'
   'You don't know and I don't know,' Billy said, tossing his napkin into his plate angrily – his stomach was groaning and rolling under the weight of food he had dumped into it. 'And Michael Houston doesn't know either.'
   'Well, if it's a curse, why isn't anything happening to me?' she shrieked at him suddenly, and although her eyes blazed with anger, he could see the tears that were starting up in them.
   Stung, scared, and temporarily unable to control himself, Halleck shouted back: 'Because he didn't know, that's why! That's the only reason! Because he didn't know!'
   Sobbing, she pushed her chair back, almost fell over, and then fled from the table. Her hand was pressed to the side of her face as if she had just come down with a monstrous headache.
   'Heidi!' he yelled, getting up so fast he knocked his chair over. 'Heidi, come back!'
   Her footsteps didn't pause on the stairs. He heard a door slam shut – not their bedroom door. Too far down the upstairs hall. Linda's room, or the guestroom.
   Halleck was betting on the guestroom. He was right. She didn't sleep with him again during the week before he left home.
   That week – the last week – had the consistency of a confused nightmare in Billy's mind when he tried to think about it later. The weather turned hot and oppressive and surly, as if dog days had come early this year. Even crisp, cool, double-knit Lantern Drive seemed to wilt a bit. Billy Halleck ate and sweated, sweated and ate … and his weight settled slowly but surely through it all. At the end of the week, when he rented a car and left, heading up Interstate 95 toward New Hampshire and Maine, he was down another eleven pounds, to 156.
   During that week the doctors from the Glassman Clinic called again and again. Michael Houston called again and again. Heidi looked at Billy from her white-ringed eyes, smoked, and said nothing. When he spoke of calling Linda, she only said in a dead, brittle voice: 'I'd prefer you didn't do that.'
   On Friday, the day before he left, Houston called again.
   'Michael,' Billy said, closing his eyes. 'I've already stopped taking calls from the Glassman doctors. I'm going to stop taking them from you, if you don't cut the shit.'
   'I wouldn't do that, just yet,' Houston said. 'I want you to listen to me very carefully, Billy. This is important.'
   Billy listened to Houston's new rap with no real surprise and only the deepest, dullest stirrings of anger and betrayal. Hadn't he seen it coming, after all?
   Heidi had been in again. She and Houston had had a long consultation that had ended with more tears. Houston had then held a long consultation with the Three Stooges at the Glassman Clinic ('Not to worry, Billy, it's all covered by professional privilege'). Houston had seen Heidi again. They all thought that Billy would perhaps profit from a battery of psychiatric tests.
   'I want to urge you most strongly to take these of your own free will,' Houston finished.
   'I bet. And I also bet I know where you'd like me to take the tests. At the Glassman Clinic, right? Do I win a Kewpie doll?'
   'Well, we thought that was the logical
   'Oh, uh-huh, I see. And while they're testing my brains, I assume the barium enemas will continue?'
   Houston was eloquently silent.
   'If I say no?'
   'Heidi has legal recourse,' Houston said carefully. 'You understand?'
   'I understand,' Billy said. 'You're talking about you and Heidi and the Three Stooges there at the Glassman Clinic getting together and committing me to Sunnyvale Acres, Basket-Weaving Our Speciality.'
   'That's pretty melodramatic, Billy. She's worried about Linda as well as about you.'
   'We're both worried about Linda,' Billy said. 'And I'm worried about Heidi, as well. I mean, I have my moments when I'm so angry with her that I feel sick to my stomach, but I mostly still love her. And so I worry. You see, she's misled you to a degree, Mike.'
   'I don't know what you're talking about.'
   'I know you don't. And I'm not going to tell you. She might, but my guess is that she won't – all she wants to do is forget that the whole thing ever happened, and filling you in about certain details she may have overlooked the first time around would get in the way of that. Let's just say that Heidi's got her own guilt trip to work out. Her cigarette consumption is up from a pack a day to two and a half.'
   A long pause … and then Mike Houston returned to his original chorus: 'However that may be, Billy, you must see that these tests are in the best interests of everyone con -'
   'Good-bye, Mike,' Halleck said, and hung up softly.

Chapter Fifteen. Two Phone Conversations

   Billy spent the rest of the afternoon stewing his way back and forth through the air-conditioned house, catching glimpses of his new self in mirrors and polished surfaces.
   How we see ourselves depends a lot more on our conception of our physical bulk than we usually think.
   He found nothing comforting in this idea at all.
   My sense of what I'm worth depends on how much of the world I displace as I walk around? Christ, that's a demeaning thought. That guy Mr T. could pick up an Einstein and lug him around all day under one arm like a … a schoolbook or something. So does that make Mr T. somehow better, more important?
   A haunting echo of T. S. Eliot chimed in his head like a faraway bell on Sunday morning: That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all. And it wasn't. The idea of size as a function of grace, or intelligence, or as a proof of God's love, had gone out around the time that the obesely waddling William Howard Taft had turned the presidency over to the epicene – almost gaunt – Woodrow Wilson.
   How we see reality depends a lot more on our conception of our physical bulk than we usually think.
   Yes – reality. That was a lot closer to the heart of the matter. When you saw yourself being erased pound by pound, like a complicated equation being erased from a blackboard line by line and computation by computation, it did something to your sense of reality. Your own personal reality, reality in general.
   He had been fat – not bulky, not a few pounds over weight, but downright pig-fat. Then he had been stout, then just about normal (if there really was such a thing the Three Stooges from the Glassman Clinic seemed to think there was, anyway), then thin. But now thinness was beginning to slip into a new state: scrawniness. What came after that? Emaciation, he supposed. And after that, something that still lingered just beyond the bounds of his imagination.
   He was not seriously worried about being hauled away to the funny farm; such procedures took time. But the final conversation with Houston showed him clearly just how far things had gone, and how impossible it was that anyone was going to believe him – then or ever. He wanted to call Kirk Penschley – the urge was nearly insurmountable, even though he knew Kirk would call him when and if any of the three investigative agencies the firm employed had turned up something.
   He called a New York number instead, paging to the back of his address book to find it. Richard Ginelli's name had bobbed uneasily up and down in his mind since the very beginning of this thing – now it was time to call him.
   Just in case.
   'Three Brothers,' the voice on the other end said. 'Specials tonight include veal marsala and our own version of fettuccine Alfredo.'
   'My name is William Halleck, and I would like to speak to Mr Ginelli, if he's available.'
   After a moment of considering silence, the voice said: 'Halleck.'
   'Yes.'
   The phone clunked down. Faintly Billy could hear pots and pans crashing and bashing together. Someone was swearing in Italian. Someone else was laughing. Like everything else in his life these days, it all seemed very far away.
   At last the phone was picked up.
   'William!' It occurred to Billy again that Ginelli Was the only person in the world who called him that. 'How are you doing, paisan?'
   'I've lost some weight.'
   'Well, that's good,' Ginelli said. 'You were too big, William, I gotta say that, too big. How much you lose?'
   'Twenty pounds.'
   'Hey! Congratulations! And your heart thanks you, too. Hard to lose weight, isn't it? Don't tell me, I know. Fucking calories stick right on there. Micks like you, they hang over the front of your belt. Dagos like me, you discover one day you're ripping out the seat of your pants every time you bend over to tie your shoes.'
   'It actually wasn't hard at all.'
   'Well, you come on in to the Brothers, William. I'm gonna fix you my own special. Chicken Neapolitan. It'll put all that weight back on in one meal.'
   'I might just take you up on that,' Billy said, smiling a little. He could see himself in the mirror on his study wall, and there seemed to be too many teeth in his smile. Too many teeth, too close to the front of his mouth. He stopped smiling.
   'Yeah, well, I really mean it. I miss you. It's been too long. And life's short, paisan. I mean, life is short, am I right?'
   'Yeah, I guess it is.'
   Ginelli's voice dropped a notch. 'I heard you had some trouble out there in Connecticut,' he said. He made Connecticut sound as if it was someplace in Greenland, Billy thought. 'I was sorry to hear it.'
   'How did you hear that?' Billy said, frankly startled. There had been a squib about the accident in the Fairview Reporter -decorous, no names mentioned – and that was all. Nothing in the New York papers.
   'I keep my ear to the ground,' Ginelli replied. Because keeping your ear to the ground is really what it's all about, Billy thought, and shivered.
   'I have some problems with that,' Billy said now, picking his words carefully. 'They are of an … extralegal nature. The woman -you know about the woman?'
   'Yeah. I heard she was a Gyp.'
   'A Gypsy, yes. She had a husband. He has … made some trouble for me.'
   'What's his name?'
   'Lemke, I believe. I'm going to try to handle this myself, but I wondered … if I can't . . .'
   'Sure, sure, sure. You give me a call. Maybe I can do something, maybe I can't. Maybe I'll decide I don't want to. I mean, friends are always friends and business is always business, do you know what I mean?'
   'Yes, I do.'
   'Sometimes friends and business mix, but sometimes they don't, am I right?'
   'Yes.'
   'Is this guy trying to hit on you?'
   Billy hesitated. 'I'd just as soon not say too much right now, Richard. It's pretty peculiar. But, yeah, he's hitting on me. He's hitting on me pretty hard.'
   'Well, shit, William, we ought to talk now!'
   The concern in Ginelli's voice was clear and immediate. Billy felt tears prick warmly at his eyelids and pushed the heel of his hand roughly up one cheek.
   'I appreciate that – I really do. But I want to try to handle it myself, first. I'm not even entirely sure what I'd want you to do.'
   'If you want to call, William, I'm around. Okay?'
   'Okay. And thanks.' He hesitated. 'Tell me something, Richard – are you superstitious?'
   'Me? You ask an old wop like me if I'm superstitious? Growing up in a family where my mother and grandmother and all my aunts went around hail-Marying and praying to every saint you ever heard of and another bunch you didn't ever hear of and covering up the mirrors when someone died and poking the sign of the evil eye at crows and black cats that crossed their path? Me? You ask me a question like that?'
   'Yeah,' Billy said, smiling a little in spite of himself. 'I ask you a question like that.'
   Richard Ginelli's voice came back, flat, hard, and totally devoid of humor. 'I believe in only two things, William. Guns and money, that's what I believe in. And you can quote me. Superstitious? Not me, paisan. You are thinking of some other dago.'
   'That's good,' Billy said, and his own smile widened. It was the first real smile to sit on his face in almost a month, and it felt good – it felt damned good.
   That evening, just after Heidi had come in, Penschley called.
   'Your Gypsies have led us a merry chase,' he said. 'You've piled up damn near ten thousand dollars in charges already, Bill. Time to drop it?'
   'Tell me what you've got first,' Billy said. His hands were sweating.
   Penschley began to speak in his dry elder-statesman voice.
   The Gypsy band had first gone to Greeno, a Connecticut city about thirty miles north of Milford. A week after they had been rousted from Greeno, they turned up in Pawtucket, near Providence, Rhode Island. After Pawtucket, Attleboro, Massachusetts. In Attleboro, one of them had been arrested for disturbing the peace and then had jumped his piddling bail.
   'What seems to have happened is this,' Penschley said. 'There was a town fellow, sort of a bully, who lost ten bucks playing quarters on the wheel of chance. Told the operator it was rigged and that he would get even. Two days later he spotted the Gypsy coming out of a Nite Owl store. There were words between them, and then there was a fight in the parking lot. There were a couple of witnesses from out of town who say the town fellow provoked the fight. There were a couple more from in town who claim the Gypsy started it. Anyway, it was the Gypsy who got arrested. When he jumped bail, the local cops were delighted. Saved them the cost of a court case and got the Gypsies out of town.'
   'That's usually how it works, isn't it?' Billy asked. His face was suddenly hot and burning. lie was somehow quite sure that the man who had been arrested in Attleboro was the same young man who had been juggling the bowling pins on the Fairview town common.
   'Yes, pretty much,' Penschley agreed. 'The Gypsies know the scoop; once the fellow is gone, the local cops are happy. There's no APB, no manhunt. It's like getting a fleck of dirt in your eye. That fleck of dirt is all one can think about. Then the eye waters and washes it out. And once its gone and the pain stops, one doesn't care where that fleck of dirt went, does one?'
   'A fleck of dirt,' Billy said. 'Is that what he was?'
   'To the Attleboro police, that's exactly what he was. Do you want the rest of this now, Bill, or shall we moralize on the plight of various minority groups for a bit first?'
   'Give me the rest, please.'
   'The Gypsies stopped again in Lincoln, Mass. They lasted just about three days before getting the boot.'
   'The same group every time? You're sure?'
   'Yes. Always the same vehicles. There's a list here., with registrations – mostly Texas and Delaware tags. You want the list?'
   'Eventually. Not now. Go on.'
   There wasn't much more. The Gypsies had shown up in Revere, just north of Boston, had stayed ten days, and moved on of their own accord. Four days in Portsmouth, New Hampshire … and then they had simply dropped out of sight.
   'We can pick up their scent again, if you want,' Penschley said. 'We're less than a week behind now. There are three first-class investigators from Barton Detective Services on this, and they think the Gypsies are almost certainly somewhere in Maine by now. They've paralleled 1-95 all the way up the coast from Connecticut – hell, all the way up the coast from at least the Carolinas, from what the Greeley men were able to find of their back-trail. It's almost like a circus tour. They'll probably work the southern Maine tourist areas like Ogunquit and Kennebunkport, work their way up to Boothbay Harbor, and finish in Bar Harbor. Then, when the tourist season starts to run out, they'll head back down to Florida or the Texas gulf coast for the winter.'
   'Is there an old man with them?' Billy asked. He was gripping the phone very tightly. 'About eighty? With a horrible nose condition – sore, cancer, something like that?'
   A sound of riffling papers that seemed to go on forever. Then:
   'Taduz Lemke,' Penschley said calmly. 'The father of the woman you struck with your car. Yes, he's with them.'
   'Father?' Halleck barked. 'That's impossible, Kirk! The woman was old, around seventy, seventy-five
   'Taduz Lemke is a hundred and six.'
   For several moments Billy found it impossible to speak at all. His lips moved, but that was all. He looked like a man kissing a ghost. Then he managed to repeat: 'That's impossible.'
   'An age we all could certainly envy,' Kirk Penschley said, 'but not at all impossible. There are records on all of these people, you know – they're not wandering around eastern Europe in caravans anymore, although I imagine some of the older ones, like this fellow Lemke, wish they were. I've got pix for you … Social Security numbers . . . fingerprints, if you want them. Lemke has variously claimed his age to be a hundred and six, a hundred and eight, and a hundred and twenty. I choose to believe a hundred and six, because it jibes with the Social Security information that Barton operatives were able to obtain. Susanna Lemke was his daughter, all right, no doubt at all about that. And, for whatever it's worth, he's listed as “president of the Taduz Company” on the various gaming permits they've had to obtain … which means he's the head of the tribe, or the band, or whatever they call themselves.'
   His daughter? Lemke's daughter? In Billy's mind it seemed to change everything. Suppose someone had struck Linda? Suppose it had been Linda run down in the street like a mongrel dog?
   '. . . it down?'
   'Huh?' He tried to bring his mind back to Kirk Penschley.
   'I said, are you sure you don't want us to close this down? It's costing you, Bill.'
   'Please ask them to push on a little further,' Billy said. 'I'll call you in four days – no, three – and find out if you've located them.'
   'You don't need to do that,' Penschley said, 'If – when the Barton people locate them, you'll be the first to know.`
   'I won't be here,' Halleck said slowly.
   'Oh?' Penschley's voice was carefully noncommittal. 'Where do you expect to be?'
   'Traveling,' Halleck said, and hung up shortly afterward. He sat perfectly still, his mind a confused whirl, his fingers – his very thin fingers – drumming uneasily on the edge of his desk.

Chapter Sixteen. Billy's Letter

   Heidi went out the next day just after ten to do some shopping. She did not look in on Billy to tell him where she was going or when she would be back – that old and amiable habit was no more. Billy sat in his study watching the Olds back down the driveway to the street. For just a moment Heidi's head turned and their eyes seemed to meet, his confused and scared, hers dumbly accusing: You made me send our daughter away, you won't get the professional help you need, our friends are starting to talk. You seem to want someone to copilot you over into ha-ha-land, and I'm elected … Well, fuck you, Billy Halleck. Leave me alone. Burn if you want to, but you've got no right to ask me to join you in the pot.
   Just an illusion, of course. She couldn't see him far back in the shadows.
   Just an illusion, but it hurt.
   After the Olds had disappeared down the street, Billy ran a piece of paper into his Olivetti and wrote: 'Dear Heidi' at the top. It was the only part of the letter that came easily. He wrote it one painful sentence at a time, always thinking in the back of his mind that she would come back in while he was pecking it out. But she did not. He finally pulled the note from the typewriter and read it over:
   Dear Heidi,
   By the time you read this, I'll be gone. I don't know exactly where, and I don't know exactly for how long, but I hope that when I come back, all of this will be over. This nightmare we've been living with.
   Heidi, Michael Houston is wrong – wrong about everything. Leda Rossington really did tell me that the old Gypsy – his name is Taduz Lemke, by the way touched Cary, and she really did tell me that Cary's skin was plating. And Duncan Hopley really was covered with pimples … It was more horrible than you can imagine.
   Houston refuses to allow himself any serious examination of the chain of logic I've presented in defense of my belief, and he's certainly refused to combine that chain of logic with the inexplicability of what's happening to me (155 this morning; almost a hundred pounds now). He cannot do these things -it would knock him out entirely of his orbit if he did. He would rather see me committed for the rest of my life than to even seriously entertain the possibility that all of this is happening as a result of a Gypsy's curse. The idea that such off-the-wall-things as Gypsy curses exist at all anywhere in the world, but especially in Fairview, Connecticut – is anathema to everything Michael Houston has ever believed in. His gods come out of bottles, not out of the air.
   But I believe that somewhere deep inside of yourself, you may believe it's possible. I think part of your anger at me this last week has been my insistence on believing what your own heart knows to be true. Accuse me of playing amateur shrink if you want, but I've reasoned it like this: to believe in the curse is to believe that only one of us is being punished for something in which we both played a part. I'm talking about guilt avoidance on your part . . . and God knows, Heidi, in the craven and cowardly part of my soul, I feel that if I'm going through this hellish decline, you should be going through one also … misery loves company, and I guess we've all got a streak of one hundred percent gold-plated bastard in our natures, tangled up so tightly with the good part of us that we can never get free of it.
   There's another side of me, though, and that other part loves you, Heidi, and would never wish the slightest harm to come to you. That better part of me also has an intellectual, logical side, and that's why I've left. I need to find that Gypsy, Heidi. I need to find Taduz Lemke and tell him what I've worked out over the last six weeks or so. It's easy to blame, easy to want revenge. But when you look at things closely, you start to see that every event is locked onto every other event; that sometimes things happen just because they happen. None of us like to think that's so, because then we can never strike out at someone to ease the pain; we have to find another way, and none of the other ways are so simple, or so satisfying. I want to tell him that there was no evil intent. I want to ask him if he'll reverse what he's done … always assuming it's in his power to do so. But what I want to do more than anything else, I find, is to simply apologize. For me … for you … for all of Fairview. I know a lot more about Gypsies than I used to, you see. I guess you could say that my eyes have been opened. And I think it's only fair to tell You one more thing, Heidi – if he can reverse it, if I find I have a future to look forward to after all – I will not spend that future in Fairview. I find I've had a bellyful of Andy's Pub, Lantern Drive, the country club, the whole dirty hypocritical town. If I do have that future, I hope you and Linda will come along to some other, cleaner place and share it with me. If you won't, or can't, I'll go anyway. If Lemke won't or can't do anything to help me, I will at least feel that I've done all that I could. Then I can come home, and will happily check into the Glassman Clinic, if that's what you still want.
   I encourage you to show this letter to Mike Houston if you want to, or the Glassman doctors. I think they'll all agree that what I'm doing may be very good therapy. After all, they'll reason, if he's doing this to himself as a punishment (they keep talking about psychological anorexia nervosa, apparently believing that if you feel guilty enough, you can speed up your metabolism until it's burning umpty-umpty calories a day), facing Lemke may provide exactly the sort of expiation he needs. Or, they'll reason, there are two other possibilities; one, that Lemke will laugh and say he never cast a curse in his life, thereby shattering, the psychological fulcrum my obsession is balanced on; or it may occur to them that Lemke will recognize the possibility of profit, lie and agree that he cursed me, and then charge me for some trumpery 'cure' – but, they'll think, a trumpery cure for a trumpery curse might be totally effective!
   I've engaged detectives through Kirk Penschley and have determined that the Gypsies have been heading steadily north up Interstate 95. I hope to track them down in Maine. If something definitive happens, I will let you know soonest; in the meantime, I'll try not to try you. But believe I love you with all my heart.
   Yours.
   Billy
   He put the letter in an envelope with Heidi's name scrawled across the front and propped it against the lazy Susan on the kitchen table. Then he called a cab to take him to the Hertz office in Westport. He stood out on the steps waiting for the cab to come, still hoping inside that Heidi would come first and they could talk about the things in the note.
   It wasn't until the cab had swung into the driveway and Billy was in the backseat that he admitted to himself that talking to Heidi at this point maybe wasn't such a good idea – being able to talk to Heidi was part of the past, part of the time when he had been living in Fat City … in more ways than one, and without even knowing it. That was the past. If there was any future, it was up the turnpike, somewhere in Maine, and he ought to get chasing after it before he melted away to nothing.