Chapter Seventeen

   He stopped that night in Providence. He called the office, got the answering service, and left a message for Kirk Penschley: would he please send all available photographs of the Gypsies and all available particulars on their vehicles, including license-plate numbers and VIN numbers to the Sheraton Hotel in South Portland, Maine?
   The service read the message back correctly – a minor miracle, in Billy's opinion – and he turned in. The drive from Fairview to Providence was less than a hundred and fifty miles, but he found himself exhausted. He slept dreamlessly for the first time in weeks. He discovered the following morning that there were no scales in the motel bathroom. Thank God, Billy Halleck thought, for small favors.
   He dressed quickly, stopping only once, as he was tying his shoes, perfectly amazed to hear himself whistling. He was headed up the Interstate again by eight-thirty, and was checked into a Sheraton across from a huge shopping mall by six-thirty. A message from Penschley was waiting for him: Information on its way, but difficult. May take a day or two.
   Great, Billy thought. Two pounds a day, Kirk, what the hell – three days and I can lose the equivalent of a six-pack of tallboys. Five days and I can lose a medium-size bag of flour. Take your time, fella, why not?
   The South Portland Sheraton was round, and Billy's room was shaped like a pie wedge. His overtaxed mind, which had so far dealt with everything, found it somehow almost impossible to deal with a bedroom that came to a point. He was road-tired and headachy. The restaurant, he thought, was more than he could face … especially if it came to a point. He ordered up from room service instead.
   He had just stepped out of the shower when the waiter's knock came. He donned the robe which the management had thoughtfully provided (THOU SHALT NOT STEAL, said a little card sticking out of the robe's pocket) and crossed the room, calling out 'Just a second!'
   Halleck opened the door … and was greeted for the first time with the unpleasant realization of how circus freaks must feel. The waiter was a boy of no more than nineteen, scruffy-haired and hollow-cheeked, as if in imitation of the British punk rockers. No prize himself. He glanced at Billy with the vacant disinterest of a fellow who sees hundreds of men in hotel robes each shift; the disinterest would clear a little when he looked down at the bill to see how much the tip was, but that was all. Then the waiter's eyes widened in a look of startlement which was almost horror. It was only for a moment; then the look of disinterest was back again. But Billy had seen it.
   Horror. It was almost horror.
   And the expression of startlement was still there – hidden, but still there. Billy thought he could see it now because another element had been added – fascination.
   The two of them were frozen for a moment, locked together in the uncomfortable and unwanted partnership of gawker and gawkee. Billy thought dizzily of Duncan Hopley sitting in his pleasant home on Ribbonmaker Lane with all the lights off.
   'Well, bring it in,' he said harshly, breaking the moment with too much force. 'You going to stand out there all night?'
   'Oh, no, sir,' the room-service waiter said, 'I'm sorry.' Hot blood filled his face, and Billy felt pity for him. He wasn't a punk rocker, not some sinister juvenile delinquent who had come to the circus to see the living crocodiles he was only a college kid with a summer job who had been surprised by a haggard man who might or might not have some sort of disease.
   The old guy cursed me in more ways than one, Billy thought.
   It wasn't this kid's fault that Billy Halleck, late of Fairview, Connecticut, had lost enough weight to almost qualify for freak status. He tipped him an extra dollar and got rid of him as quickly as possible. Then he went into the bathroom and looked at himself, slowly spreading his robe open, the archetypal flasher practicing in the privacy of his own room. He had belted the robe loosely to begin with, and it had left most of his chest and some of his belly exposed. It was easy enough to understand the waiter's shock just looking at that much. It became even easier with the robe open and his entire front reflected in the mirror.
   Every rib stood out clearly. His collarbones were exquisitely defined ridges covered with skin. His cheekbones bulged. His sternum was a congested knot, his belly a hollow, his pelvis a gruesome hinged wishbone. His legs were much as he remembered them, long and still quite well muscled, the bones still buried – he had never put on much weight there anyway. But above the waist, he really was turning into a carny freak – the Human Skeleton
   A hundred pounds, he thought. That's all it takes to bring the hidden ivory man out of the closet. Now you know what a thin edge there is between what you always took for granted and somehow thought would always be and this utter madness. If you ever wondered, now you know. You still look normal – well, fairly normal – with your clothes on, but how long will it be before you start getting looks like the one the waiter gave you even when you're dressed? Next week? The week after?
   His headache was worse, and although he had been ravenous earlier, he found he could only pick at his dinner. He slept badly and rose early. He did not whistle as he dressed.
   He decided Kirk Penschley and the investigators from Barton were right – the Gypsies would stick to the seacoast. During the summer in Maine, that was where the action was because that was where the tourists were. They came to swim in water that was too cold, to sun themselves (many days remained foggy and drizzly, but the tourist never seemed to remember them), to eat lobsters and clams, to buy ashtrays with seagulls painted on them, to attend the summer theaters in Ogunquit and Brunswick to photograph the lighthouses at Portland and Pemaquid, or just to hang out in trendy places like Rockport, Camden, and, of course, Bar Harbor.
   The tourists were along the seacoast, and so were the dollars they were so anxious to roll out of their wallets That's where the Gypsies would be – but where, exactly?
   Billy listed better than fifty seacoast towns, and then went downstairs. The bartender was an import from New Jersey who knew from nothing but Asbury Park, but Billy found a waitress who had lived in Maine all her life, was familiar with the seacoast, and loved to talk about it.
   'I'm looking for some people, and I'm fairly sure they'll be in a seacoast town – but not a really ritzy one. More of a … a . . .'
   'Honk-tonk kind of town?' she asked.
   Billy nodded.
   She bent over his list. 'Old Orchard Beach,' she said. 'That's the honkiest honky-tonk of them all. The way things are down there until Labor Day, your friends wouldn't get noticed unless they had three heads each.'
   'Other ones?'
   'Well … most of the seacoast towns get a little honky-tonky in the summer,' she said. 'Take Bar Harbor, for instance. Everybody who's ever heard of it has an image of Bar Harbor as real ritzy … dignified … full of rich people who go around in Rolls-Royces.'
   'It's not like that?'
   'No. Frenchman's Bay, maybe, but not Bar Harbor. In the winter it's just this dead little town where the ten-twenty-five ferry is the most exciting thing to happen all day. In the summer, Bar Harbor's a crazy town. It's like Fort Lauderdale is during spring break – full of heads and freaks and superannuated hippies. You can stand over the town line in Northeast Harbor, take a deep breath, and get stoned from all the dope in Bar Harbor if the wind's right. And the main drag – until after Labor Day, it's a street carnival. Most of these towns you got on your list are like that, mister, but Bar Harbor is like, top end, you know?'
   'I hear you,' Billy said, smiling.
   'I used to go up there sometimes in July or August and hang out, but not anymore. I'm too old for that now.'
   Billy's smile became wistful. The waitress looked all of twenty-three.
   Billy gave her five dollars; she wished him a pleasant summer and good luck finding his friends. Billy nodded, but for the first time he did not feel so sanguine about the possibility.
   'You mind a little piece of advice, mister?'
   'Not at all,' Billy answered, thinking she meant to give him her idea on the best place to start – and that much he had already decided for himself.
   'You ought to fatten yourself up a little,' she said. 'Eat pasta. That's what my mom would tell you. Eat lots of pasta. Put on a few pounds.'
   A manila envelope full of photographs and automobile information arrived for Halleck on his third day in South Portland. He shuffled through the photographs slowly, looking at each. Here was the young man who had been juggling the pins; his name was also Lemke, Samuel Lemke. He was looking at the camera with an uncompromising openness that looked as ready for pleasure and friendship as it did anger and sullenness. Here was the pretty young girl who had been setting up the slingshot target-shoot when the cops landed – and yes, she was every bit as lovely as Halleck had surmised from his side of the common. Her name was Angelina Lemke. He put her picture next to the picture of Samuel Lemke. Brother and sister. The grandchildren of Susanna Lemke? he wondered. The great-grandchildren of Taduz Lemke?
   Here was the elderly man who had been handing out fliers -Richard Crosskill. Other Crosskills were named. Stanchfields. Starbirds. More Lemkes. And then … near the bottom …
   It was him. The eyes, caught in twin nets of wrinkles, were dark and level and filled with clear intelligence. A kerchief was drawn over his head and knotted beside the left cheek. A cigarette was tucked into the deeply cracked lips. The nose was a wet and open horror, festering and terrible.
   Billy stared at the picture as if hypnotized. There was something almost familiar about the old man, some connection his mind wasn't quite making. Then it came to him. Taduz Lemke reminded him of those old men in the Dannon yogurt commercials, the ones from Russian Georgia who smoked unfiltered cigarettes, drank popskull vodka, and lived to such staggering ages as a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy. And then a line of a Jerry Jeff Walker song occurred to him, the one about Mr Bojangles: He looked at me to be the eyes of age …
   Yes. That was what he saw in the face of Taduz Lemke – he was the very eyes of age. In those eyes Billy saw a deep knowledge that made all the twentieth century a shadow, and he trembled.
   That night when he stepped on the scales in the bathroom adjoining his wedge-shaped bedroom, he was down to 137.

Chapter Eighteen. The Search

   Old Orchard Beach, the waitress had said. That's the honkiest honky-tonk of them all. The desk clerk agreed.
   So did the girl in the tourist-information booth four .miles down the highway, although she refused to put it in such blatantly pejorative terms. Billy turned his rental car toward Old Orchard Beach, which was about eighteen miles south.
   Traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper crawl still a mile from the beach. Most of the vehicles in this parade bore Canadian license plates. A lot of them were thyroidal rec-ves which looked big enough to transport entire football teams. Most of the people Billy saw, both in the crawling traffic and walking along the sides of the road, seemed dressed in the least the law would allow and sometimes less – there were a lot of string bikinis, a lot of ball-hugger swim trunks, a lot of oiled flesh on display.
   Billy was dressed in blue jeans, an open-collared white shirt, and a sport coat. He sat behind the wheel of his car and sweltered even with the air conditioning on full. But he hadn't forgotten the way the room-service kid had looked at him. This was as undressed as he was going to get, even if he finished the day with his sneakers full of sweat puddles.
   The crawling traffic crossed salt marshes, passed two dozen lobster-and-clam shacks, and then wound through an area of summer houses that were crammed together hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Similarly undressed people sat on lawn furniture before most of these houses, eating, reading paperback novels, or simply watching the endless flow of traffic.
   Christ, Billy thought, how do they stand the stink of the exhaust? It occurred to him that perhaps they liked it, that perhaps that was why they were sitting here instead of on the beach, that it reminded them of home.
   Houses gave way to motels with signs reading ON PARLE FRANCAIS ICI and CANADIAN CURRENCY AT PAR AFTER $250
   and WE FEATURE MIDNITE BLUE ON CABLE and 3 MINUTES TO OCEAN BONJOUR A NOS AMIS DE LA BELLE PROVINCE!
   The motels gave way to a main drag which seemed to feature mostly cut-rate camera stores, souvenir shops, the dirty-book emporiums. Kids in cut-offs and tank tops idled up and down, some holding hands, some staring into dirty windows with a blank lack of interest, some riding on skateboards and weaving their way through knots of pedestrians with bored elan. To Billy Halleck's fascinated, dismayed eyes, everyone seemed overweight and everyone – even the skateboard kids – seemed to be eating something: a slice of pizza here, a Chipwich there, a bag of Doritos, a bag of popcorn, a cone of cotton candy. He saw a fat man in an untucked white shirt, baggy green Bermudas, and thong sandals gobbling a foot-long dog. A string of something that was either onion or sauerkraut hung from his chin. He held two more dogs between the pudgy finger of his left hand, and to Billy he looked like a stage magician displaying red rubber balls before making them disappear.
   The midway came next. A roller coaster loomed against the sky. A giant replica of a Viking boat swung back and forth in steepening semicircles while the riders strapped inside shrieked. Bells bonged and lights flashed in an arcade to Billy's left; to his right, teenagers in striped muscle shirts drove dodge-'em cars into each other. Just beyond the arcade, a young man and a young woman were kissing. Her arms were locked around his neck. One of his hands cupped her buttocks; the other held a can of Budweiser.
   Yeah, Billy thought. Yeah, this is the place. Got to be.
   He parked his car in a baking macadam lot, paid the attendant seventeen dollars for a half-day stub, transferred his wallet from his hip pocket to the inside pocket of his sport coat, and started hunting.
   At first he thought that the weight loss had perhaps speeded up. Everyone was looking at him. The rational part of his mind quickly assured him that it was just because of his clothes, not the way he looked inside his clothes.
   People would stare at you the same way if you showed up on this boardwalk wearing a swimsuit and a T-shirt in October, Billy. Take it easy. You're just something to look at, and down here there's plenty to look at.
   And that was certainly true. Billy saw a fat woman in a black bikini, her deeply tanned skin gleaming with oil. Her gut was prodigal, the flex of the long muscles in her thighs nearly mythic, and strangely exciting. She moved toward the wide sweep of white beach like an ocean liner, her buttocks flexing in wavelike undulations. He saw a grotesquely fat poodle dog, its curls summer-sheared, its tongue more gray than pink – hanging out listlessly, sitting in the shade of a pizza shack. He saw two fistfights. He saw a huge gull with mottled gray wings and dead black eyes swoop down and snatch a greasy doughboy from the hand of an infant in a stroller.
   Beyond all this was the bone-white crescent of Old Orchard beach, its whiteness now almost completely obscured by reclining sunbathers at just past noon on an early-summer day. But both the beach and the Atlantic beyond it seemed somehow reduced and cheapened by the erotic pulses and pauses of the midway – its snarls of people with food drying on their hands and lips and cheeks, the cry of the hucksters ('Guess your weight!' Billy heard from somewhere to his left: 'If I miss by more than five pounds, you win the dollaya choice!'), the thin screeches from the rides, the raucous rock music spilling out of the bars.
   Billy suddenly began to feel decidedly unreal – outside of himself, as if he were having one of those Fate magazine instances of astral projection. Names – Heidi, Penschley, Linda, Houston – seemed suddenly to ring false and tinny, like names made up on the spur of the moment for a bad story. He had a feeling that he could look behind things and see the lights, the cameras, the key grips, and some unimaginable 'real world.' The smell of the sea seemed overwhelmed by a smell of rotten food and salt. Sounds became distant, as if floating down a very long hallway.
   Astral projection, my ass, a dim voice pronounced. You're getting ready to have sunstroke, my friend.
   That's ridiculous. I never had a sunstroke in my life.
   Well, I guess when you lose a hundred and twenty pounds, it really fucks up your thermostat. Now are you going to get out of the sun or are you going to wind up in an emergency room somewhere giving your Blue Cross and Blue Shield number?
   'Okay, you talked me into it,' Billy mumbled, and a kid who was passing by and dumping a box of Reese's Pieces into his mouth turned and gave him a sharp look.
   There was a bar up ahead called The Seven Seas. There were two signs taped to the door. ICY COOL, read one. TERMINAL HAPPY HOUR, read the other. Billy went in.
   The Seven Seas was not only icy cool, it was blessedly quiet. A sign on the juke read SOME ASSHOLE KICKED ME LAST NIGHT AND NOW I AM OUT OF ORDER. Below this was a French translation of the same sentiment. But Billy thought from the aged look of the sign and the dust on the juke that the 'last night' in question might have been a good many years ago. There were a few patrons in the bar, mostly older men who were dressed much as Billy himself was dressed – as if for the street rather than the beach. Some were playing checkers and backgammon. Almost all were wearing hats.
   'Help you?' the bartender asked, coming over.
   'I'd like a Schooner, please.'
   'Okay.'
   The beer came. Billy drank it slowly, watching the boardwalk ebb and flow outside the windows of the bar, listening to the murmur of the old men. He felt some of his strength – some of his sense of reality – begin to come back.
   The bartender returned. 'Hit you again?'
   'Please. And I'd like a word with you, if you have time.'
   'About what?'
   'Some people who might have been through here.'
   'Where's here? The Seas?'
   'Old Orchard.'
   The bartender laughed. 'So far as I can see, everyone in Maine and half of Canada comes through here in the summer, old son.'
   'These were Gypsies.'
   The bartender grunted and brought Billy a fresh bottle of Schooner.
   'You mean they were drift trade. Everyone who comes to Old Orchard in the summer is. The place here is a little different. Most of the guys who come in here live here year-round. The people out there . . .' He waved at the window, dismissing them with a flick of the wrist. 'Drift trade. Like you, mister.'
   Billy poured the Schooner carefully down the side of his glass and then laid a ten-dollar bill on the bar. 'I'm not sure we understand each other. I'm talking about real, actual Gypsies, not tourists or summer people.'
   'Real … Oh, you must mean those guys who were camped out by the Salt Shack.'
   Billy's heart speeded in his chest. 'Can I show you some pictures?'
   'Wouldn't do any good. I didn't see them.' He looked at the ten for a moment and then called: 'Lon! Lonnie! Come over here a minute!'
   One of the old men who had been sitting by the window got up and shuffled over to the bar. He was wearing gray cotton pants, a white shirt that was too big for him, and a snap-brim straw hat. Its face was weary. Only his eyes were alive. He reminded Billy of someone, and after a few moments it came to him. The old man looked like Lee Strasberg, the teacher and actor.
   'This is Lon Enders,' the bartender said. 'He's got a little place just on the west of town. Same side the Salt Shack's on. Lon sees everything that goes on in Old Orchard.'
   'I'm Bill Halleck.'
   'Meet you,' Lon Enders said in a papery voice, and took the stool next to Billy's. He did not really seem to sit; rather, his knees appeared to buckle the moment his buttocks were poised over the cushion.
   'Would you like a beer?' Billy asked.
   'Can't,' the papery voice rustled, and Billy moved his head slightly to avoid the oversweet smell of Enders' breath. 'Already had my one for the day. Doctor says no more than that. Guts're screwed up. If I was a car, I'd be ready for the scrap heap.'
   'Oh,' Billy said lamely.
   The bartender turned away from them and began loading beer glasses into a dishwasher. Enders looked at the ten-dollar bill. Then he looked at Billy.
   Halleck explained again while Enders' tired, too-shiny face looked dreamily off into the shadows of the Seven Seas and the arcade bells bonged faintly, like sounds overheard in a dream, next door.
   'They was here,' he said when Billy had finished. 'They was here, all right. I hadn't seen any Gypsies in seven years or more. Hadn't seen this bunch in maybe twenty years.'
   Billy's right hand squeezed the beer glass he was holding, and he had to consciously make himself relax his grip before he broke it. He set the glass down carefully on the bar.
   'When? Are you sure? Do you have any idea where they might have been going? Can you -?'
   Enders held up one hand – it was as white as the hand of a drowned man pulled from a well, and to Billy it seemed dimly transparent.
   'Easy, my friend,' he said in his whispering voice. 'I'll tell you what I know.'
   With the same conscious effort, Billy forced himself to say nothing. To just wait.
   'I'll take the tenspot because you look like you can afford it, my friend,' Enders whispered. He tucked it into his shirt pocket and then pushed the thumb and forefinger of his left hand into his mouth, adjusting his upper plate. 'But I'd talk for free. Hell, when you get old you find out you'd pay someone to listen … ask Timmy there if I can have a glass of cold water, would you? Even the one beer's too much, I reckon – it's burning what's left of my stomach something fierce – but it's hard for a man to give up all his pleasures, even when they don't pleasure him no more.'
   Billy called the bartender over, and he brought Enders his ice water.
   'You okay, Lon?' he asked as he put it down.
   'I been better and I been worse,' Lon whispered, and picked up the glass. For a moment Billy thought it was going to prove too heavy. But the old man got it to his mouth, although some spilled on the way there.
   'You want to talk to this guy?' Timmy asked.
   The cold water seemed to revive Enders. He put the glass down, looked at Billy, looked back at the bartender. 'I think somebody ought to,' he said. 'He don't look as bad as me yet … but he's getting there.'
   Enders lived in a small retirees' colony on Cove Road. He said Cove Road was part of 'the real Old Orchard – the one the tips don't care about.'
   'Tips?' Billy asked.
   'The crowds, my friend, the crowds. Me and the wife come to this town in 1946, just after the war. Been here ever since. I learned how to turn a tip from a master Lonesome Tommy McGhee, dead these many years now. Yelled my guts out, I did, and what you hear now is all that's left.'
   The chuckle, almost as faint as a breath of predawn breeze, came again.
   Enders had known everyone associated with the summer carnival that was Old Orchard, it seemed – the vendors, the pitchmen, the roustabouts, the glass-chuckers (souvenir salesmen), the dogsmen (ride mechanics), the bumpers, the carnies, the pumps and the pimps. Most of them were year-round people he had known for decades or people who returned each summer like migratory birds. They formed a stable, mostly loving community that the summer people never saw.
   He also knew a large portion of what the bartender had called 'drift trade.' These were the true transients, people who showed up for a week or two weeks, did some business in the feverish party-town atmosphere of Old Orchard, and then moved on again.
   'And you remember them all?' Billy asked doubtfully.
   'Oh, I wouldn't if they was all different from year to year,' Enders whispered, 'but that's not how drift trade is. They ain't as regular as the dogsmen and the doughthumpers, but they have a pattern too. You see this fellow who comes on the boardwalk in 1957, selling Hula Hoops off'n his arm. You see him again in 1960, selling expensive watches for three bucks apiece. His hair is maybe black instead of blond, and so he thinks people don't recognize him, and I guess the summer people don't, even if they was around in 1957, because they go right back and get rooked again. But we know him. We know the drift trade. Nothing changes but what they sell, and what they sell is always a few steps outside the law.
   'The pushers, they're different. There's too many, and they are always going to jail or dying off. And the whores get old too fast to want to remember. But you wanted to talk about Gypsies. I guess they're the oldest drift trade of all, when you stop to think about it.'
   Billy took his envelope of photographs from his sportcoat pocket and laid them out carefully like a pat poker hand: Gina Lemke. Samuel Lemke. Richard Crosskill. Maura Starbird.
   Taduz Lemke.
   'Ah!' The old man on the stool breathed in sharply when Billy put that last one down, and then he spoke directly to the photograph, cooling Billy's skin: 'Teddy, you old whoremaster!'
   He looked up at Billy and smiled, but Billy Halleck was not fooled – the old man was afraid.
   'I thought it was him,' he said. 'I didn't see nothing but a shape in the dark – this was three weeks ago. Nothing but a shape in the dark, but I thought … no, I knew …
   He fumbled the ice water to his mouth again, spilling more, this time down the front of his shirt. The cold made him gasp.
   The bartender came over and favored Billy with a hostile glance. Enders held his hand up absently to show he was all right. Timmy retreated to the dishwasher again. Enders turned the photograph of Taduz Lemke. over. Written on the back was Photo taken Attleboro, Mass., mid-May 1983.
   'And he hasn't aged a day since I first seen him and his friends here in the summer of 1963,' Enders finished.
   They had set up camp behind Herk's Salt Shack Lobster Barn on Route 27. They had stayed four days and four nights. On the fifth morning they were simply gone. Cove Road lay close by, and Enders said he had walked the half-mile the second evening the Gypsies were there (it was hard for Billy to imagine this ghostly man walking around the block, but he let it pass). He wanted to see them, he said, because they reminded him of the old days when a man could run his business if he had a business to run, and John Law stayed out of his way and let him do it.
   'I stood there by the side of the road quiet awhile,' he said. 'It was the usual raree and Gypsy turnout – the more things change, the more they stay the same. It used to be all tents and now it's vans and campers and such, but what goes on inside is just the same. A woman telling fortunes. Two, three women selling powders to the ladies … two, three men selling powders to the men. I guess they would have stayed longer, but I heard they arranged a dogfight for some rich Canucks and the state cops got wind of it.'
   'Dogfight!'
   'People want to bet, my friend, and drift trade is always willing to arrange the things they want to bet on – that's one of the things drift trade is for. Dogs or roosters with steel spurs or maybe even two men with these itty-bitty sharp knives that look almost like spikes, and each of 'em bites the end of a scarf, and the one who drops his end first is the loser. What the Gypsies call “a fair one.”'
   Enders was staring at himself in the back bar mirror at himself and through himself.
   'It was like the old days, all right,' he said dreamily. 'I could smell their meat, the way they cure it, and green peppers, and that olive oil they like that smells rancid when it comes out of the can and then sweet when it's been cooked. I could hear them talking their funny language, and this thud! thud! thud! that was someone throwing knives at a board. Someone was cooking bread the old way, on hot stones.
   'It was like old times, but I wasn't. I felt scared. Well, the Gypsies always scared me a little – difference was, back then I would have gone in anyway. Hell, I was a white man, wasn't I? In the old days I would have walked right up to their fire just as big as billy-be-damned and bought a drink or maybe a few joysticks – not just 'cause I wanted a drink or a toke but just in order to get a look around. But the old days made me an old man, my friend, and when an old man is scared, he don't just go on regardless, like he did when he was just learning to shave.
   'So I just stood there in the dark with the Salt Shack over on my one side and all those vans and campers and station wagons pulled up over here on my other, watching them walk back and forth in front of their fire, listening to them talk and laugh, smelling their food. And then the back of this one camper opened – it had a picture of a woman on the side, and a white horse with a horn sticking out of its head, a what-do-you-call-it .
   'Unicorn,' Billy said, and his voice seemed to come from somewhere or someone else. He knew that camper very well; he had first seen it on the day the Gypsies came to the Fairview town common.
   'Then someone got out,' Enders went on. 'Just a shadow and a red cigarette tip, but I knew who it was.' He tapped the photograph of the man in the kerchief with one pale finger. 'Him. Your pal.'
   'You're sure?'
   'He took a big drag on his butt and I saw … that.' He pointed at what was left of Taduz Lemke's nose but did not quite touch the glossy surface of the photograph, as if touch might be to risk contamination.
   'Did you speak to him?'
   'No,' Enders said, 'but he spoke to me. I stood there in the dark and I swear to God he wasn't even looking in my direction. And he said, “You miss your wife some, Flash, eh? Ess be all right, you be wid her soon now.” Then he flicked his cigarette off the end of his fingers and walked away toward the fire. I seen the hoop in his ear flash once -in the firelight, and that was all.'
   He wiped little beads of water from his chin with the cup of his hand and looked at Billy.
   'Flash was what they used to call me when I worked the penny-pitch on the pier back in the fifties, my friend, but nobody has called me that for years. I was way back in the shadows, but he saw me and he called me by my old name -what the Gypsies would call my secret name, I guess. They set a hell of a store by knowing a man's secret name.
   'Do they?' Billy asked, almost to himself.
   Timmy, the bartender, came over again. This time he spoke to Billy almost kindly … and as though Lon Enders was not there. 'He earned the ten, buddy. Leave 'im alone. He ain't well, and this here little discussion ain't making him no weller.'
   'I'm okay, Timmy,' Enders said.
   Timmy didn't look at him. He looked at Billy Halleck instead. 'I want you to get out of here,' he said to Billy in that same reasonable, almost kind voice. 'I don't like your looks. You look like bad luck waiting for a place to happen. The beers are free. Just go.'
   Billy looked at the bartender, feeling frightened and somehow humbled. 'Okay,' he said. 'Just one more question and I'll go.' He turned to Enders. 'Where did they head for?'
   'I don't know,' Enders said at once. 'Gypsies don't leave forwarding addresses, my friend.'
   Billy's shoulders slumped.
   'But I was up when they pulled out the next morning. I don't sleep worth a shit anymore, and most of their vans and cars didn't have much in the way of mufflers. I seen them go out Highway 27 and turn north onto Route 1. My guess would be … Rockland.' The old man fetched in a deep, shuddering sigh that made Billy lean toward him, concerned. 'Rockland or maybe Boothbay Harbor. Yes. And that's all I know, my friend, except that when he called me Flash, when he called me by my secret name, I pissed all the way down my leg into my left tennis shoe.' And Lon Enders abruptly began to cry.
   'Mister, would you leave?' Timmy asked.
   'I'm going,' Billy said, and did, pausing only to squeeze the old man's narrow, almost ethereal shoulder.
   Outside, the sun hit him like a hammer. It was midafternoon now, the sun heeling over toward the west, and when he looked to his left he saw his own shadow, as scrawny as a child's stick figure, poured on the hot white sand like ink.
   He dialed area code 203.
   They set a hell of a store by knowing a man's secret name.
   He dialed 555.
   I want you to get out of here. I don't like your looks.
   He dialed 9231, and listened to the phone begin to ring back home in Fat City.
   You look like bad luck waiting
   'Hello?' The voice, expectant and a little breathless, was not Heidi's but Linda's. Lying on his bed in his wedge-shaped hotel room, Billy closed his eyes against the sudden sting of tears. He saw her as she had been on the night he had walked her up Lantern Drive and talked to her about the accident – her old shorts, her long coltish legs.
   What are you going to say to her, Billy-boy? That you spent the day at the beach sweating out moisture, that lunch was two beers, and that in spite of a big supper which featured not one but two sirloin steaks, you lost three pounds today instead of the usual two?
   'Hello?'
   That you're bad luck waiting for a place to happen? That you're sorry you lied, but all parents do it?
   'Hello, is anyone there? Is that you, Bobby?'
   Eyes still closed, he said: 'It's Dad, Linda.'
   'Daddy?'
   'Honey, I can't talk,' he said. Because I'm almost crying. 'I'm still losing weight, but I think I've found Lemke's trail. Tell your mother that. I think I've found Lemke's trail, will you remember?'
   'Daddy, please come home!' She was crying. Billy's hand whitened on the telephone. 'I miss you and I'm not going to let her send me away anymore.'
   Dimly he could hear Heidi now: 'Lin? Is it Dad?'
   'I love you, doll,' he said. 'And I love your mother.'
   'Daddy -'
   A confusion of small sounds. Then Heidi was on the phone. 'Billy? Billy, please stop this and come home to us.'
   Billy gently hung the phone up and rolled over on the bed and put his face into his crossed arms.
   He checked out of the South Portland Sheraton the next morning and headed north on US 1, the long coastal highway which begins in Fort Kent, Maine, and ends in Key West, Florida. Rockland or maybe Boothbay Harbor, the old man in the Seven Seas had said, but Billy took no chances. He stopped at every second or third gas station on the northbound side of the road; he stopped at general stores where old men sat out front in lawn chairs, chewing toothpicks or wooden matches. He showed his pictures to everyone who would look; he swapped two one-hundred-dollar traveler's checks for two-dollar bills and passed them out like a man promoting a radio show with dubious ratings. The four photographs he showed most frequently were the girl, Gina, with her clear olive skin and her dark, promising eyes; the converted Cadillac hearse; the VW microbus with the girl and the unicorn painted on the side; Taduz Lemke.
   Like Lon Enders, people didn't want to handle that one, or even touch it.
   But they were helpful, and Billy Halleck had no trouble at all following the Gypsies up the coast. It wasn't the out-of-state plates; there were lots of out-of-state plates to be seen in Maine during the summer. It was the way the cars and vans traveled together, almost bumper to bumper; the colorful pictures on the sides; the Gypsies themselves. Most of the people Billy talked to claimed that the women or children had stolen things, but all seemed vague on just what had been stolen, and no one, so far as Billy could ascertain, had called the cops because of these supposed thefts.
   Mostly they remembered the old Gypsy with the rotting nose – if they had seen him, they remembered him most of all.
   Sitting in the Seven Seas with Lon Enders, he had been three weeks behind the Gypsies. The owner of Bob's Speedy-Serv station wasn't able to remember the day he had filled up their cars and trucks and vans, one after another, only that 'they stunk like Injuns.' Billy thought that Bob smelled pretty ripe himself but decided that saying so might be rather imprudent. The college kid working at the Falmouth Beverage Barn across the road from the Speedy-Serv was able to peg the day exactly -it had been June 2, his birthday, and he had been unhappy about working. The day Billy spoke to them was June 20, and he was eighteen days behind. The Gypsies had tried to find a camping place a little farther north in the Brunswick area and had been moved along. On June 4 they had camped in Boothbay Harbor. Not on the seacoast itself, of course, but they had found a farmer willing to rent them a hayfield in the Kenniston Hill area for twenty dollars a night.
   They had stayed only three days in the area – the summer season was still only getting under way, and pickings had apparently been slim. The farmer's name was Washburn. When Billy showed him the picture of Taduz Lemke he nodded and blessed himself, quickly and (Billy was convinced of this) unconsciously.
   'I never seen an old man move as fast as that one did, and I seen him luggin' more wood stacked up than my sons could carry.' Washburn hesitated and added, 'I didn't like him. It wasn't just his nose. Hell, my own gramps had skin cancer and before it carried him off it had rotted a hole in his cheek the size of an ashtray. You could look right in there and see him chewin' his food. Well, we didn't like that, but we still liked Gramps, if you see what I mean.' Billy nodded. 'But this guy … I didn't like him. I thought he looked like a bugger.'
   Billy thought to ask for a translation of that particular New Englandism, and then decided he didn't need one. Bugger, bugbear, bogeyman. The translation was in Farmer Washburn's eyes.
   'He is a bugger,' Billy said with great sincerity.
   'I had made up my mind to sen' 'em down the road,' he told Billy. 'Twenty bucks a night just for cleaning up some litter is a good piece of wages, but the wife was scairt of them and I was a little bit scairt of them too. So I went out that morning to give that Lemke guy the news before I could lose m'nerve, and they was already on the roll. Relieved me quite a bit.'
   'They headed north again.'
   'Ayuh, they sure did. I stood right on top of the hill there' – he pointed -'and watched 'em turn onto US 1. I watched 'em until they was out of sight, and I was some glad to see 'em go.'
   'Yes. I'll bet you were.'
   Washburn cast a critical, rather worried eye on Billy. 'You want to come up to the house and have a glass of cold buttermilk, mister? You look peaked.'
   'Thank you, but I want to get up around the Owl's Head area before sundown if I can.'
   'Looking for him?'
   'Yes.'
   'Well, if you find him, I hope he don't eat you up, mister, because he looked hungry to me.'
   Billy spoke to Washburn on the twenty-first – the first day of official summer, although the roads were already choked with tourists and he had to go all the way inland to Sheepscot before he was able to find a motel with a vacancy sign – and the Gypsies had rolled out of Boothbay Harbor on the morning of the eighth.
   Thirteen days behind now.
   He had a bad two days then when it seemed the Gypsies had fallen off the edge of the world. They had not been seen in Owl's Head, nor in Rockland, although both of them were prime summer tourist towns. Gas-station attendants and waitresses looked at his pictures and shook their heads. Grimly battling an urge to vomit precious calories over the rail – he had never been much of a sailor – Billy rode the inter-island ferry from Owl's Head to Vinalhaven, but the Gypsies had not been there either.
   On the evening of the twenty-third he called Kirk Penschley, hoping for fresh information, and when Kirk came on the line there was a funny double click just at the moment Kirk asked: 'How are you, Billy-boy? And where are you?'
   Billy hung up quickly, sweating. He had snagged the final unit in Rockland's Harborview Motel, he knew there probably wasn't another motel unit to be had between here and Bangor, but he suddenly decided he was going to move on even if it meant he ended up spending the night sleeping in the car on some pasture road. That double click. He hadn't cared for that double click at all. You sometimes heard that sound when the wire was being tapped, or when trace-back equipment was being used.
   Heidi's signed the papers on you, Billy.
   That's the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard.
   She signed them and Houston co-signed them.
   Give me a fucking break!
   Get out of here, Billy.
   He left. Heidi, Houston, and possible trace-back equipment aside, it turned out to be the best thing that he could have done. As he was checking into the Bangor Ramada Inn that morning at two o'clock, he showed the desk clerk the pictures -it had become a habit by now – and the clerk nodded at once.
   'Yeah, I took my girl over and got her fortune read,' he said. He picked up the photograph of Gina Lemke and rolled his eyes. 'She could really work it on out with that slingshot of hers. And she looked like she would work it-on out in a few other ways, if you know what I mean.' He shook his hand as if flicking water from the tips of his fingers. 'My girl got one look at the way I was lookin' at her and she dragged me out of there fast.' He laughed.
   A moment before, Billy had been so tired that bed was all he could think about. Now he was wide – awake again, his stomach cramping with adrenaline.
   'Where? Where were they? Or are they still -?'
   'Nah, they're not there anymore. Parsons' is where they were, but they're gone, all right. I was by there the other day.'
   'Is it a farmer's place?'
   'No – it's where Parsons' Bargain Barn used to be until it burned down last year.' He cast an uneasy eye at the way Billy's sweatshirt bagged on his body, at the blades of Billy's cheekbones and the skull-like contours of Billy's face, in which the eyes burned like candleflames. 'Uh … you want to check in?'
   Billy found Parsons' Bargain Barn the following morning – it was a scorched cinder-block shell in the middle of what seemed to be nine acres of deserted parking lot. He walked slowly across the crumbling macadam, heels clicking. Here were beer cans and soda cans. Here was a rind of cheese with beetles crawling in it. Here was a single shiny ball bearing. ('Hoy, Gina!' a ghostly voice called in his head). Here were the dead skins of popped balloons and here were the dead skins of two used Trojans, so similar to the balloons.
   Yes, they had been here.
   'I smell you, old man,' Billy whispered to the empty hull of the Bargain Barn, and the empty spaces that had been windows seemed to stare back at this scrawny scarecrowman with sallow distaste. The place looked haunted, but Billy felt no fear. The anger was back on him – he wore it like a coat. Anger at Heidi, anger at Taduz Lemke, anger at so-called friends like Kirk Penschley who were supposed to be on his side but who had turned against him. Had, or would.
   It didn't matter. Even on his own, even at a hundred and thirty pounds, there was enough of him left to catch up to the old Gypsy man.
   And what would happen then?
   Well, they would see, wouldn't they?
   'I smell you, old man,' Billy said again, and walked up to the side of the building. There was a realtor's sign there. Billy took his notebook from his back pocket and jotted down the information on it.
   The realtor's name was Frank Quigley, but he insisted that Billy call him Biff. There were framed pictures of a high-school-age Biff Quigley on the walls. In most of them Biff was wearing a football helmet. On Biff's desk was a pile of bronzed dog turds, FRENCHMAN'S DRIVER'S LICENSE, the little sign beneath read.
   Yes, Biff said, he had rented the space to the old Gyp with Mr Parsons' approval. 'He figured it couldn't look any worse than it does right now,' Biff Quigley said, 'and I guess he was right, at that.'
   He leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes crawling ceaselessly over Billy's face, measuring the gap between Billy's collar and Billy's neck, the way the front of Billy's shirt hung in folds like a flag on a still day. He laced his hands behind his head, rocked back in his office chair, and put his feet up on his desk beside the bronzed turds.
   'Not that it isn't priced to sell, you understand. That's prime industrial land out there, and sooner or later someone with some vision is going to make himself one hell of a deal. Yessir, one hell of a -'
   'When did the Gypsies leave, Biff?'
   Biff Quigley removed his hands from behind his head and sat forward. His chair made a noise like a mechanical pig – Squoink! 'Mind telling me why you want to know?'
   Billy Halleck's lips – they were thinner too now, and higher, so that they never quite met – drew back in a grin of frightening intensity and unearthly boniness. 'Yes, Biff, I mind.'
   Biff recoiled for a moment, and then he nodded and leaned back in his chair again. His Quoddy mocs came down on his desk again. One crossed over the other and tapped thoughtfully at the turds.
   'That's fine, Bill. A man's business ought to be his own. A man's reasons ought to be his own.'
   'Good,' Billy said. He felt the rage coming back and was grappling with it. Getting mad at this disgusting man with his Quoddy mocs and his crude ethnic slurs and his blowdried Jay-Cees haircut wasn't going to do him any good. 'Then since we agree -'
   'But it's still going to cost you two hundred bucks.'
   'What?' Billy's mouth dropped open. For a moment his anger was so great he was simply unable to move at all or to say anything else. This was probably just as well for Biff Quigley, because if Billy could have moved, Billy would have leapt upon him. His self-control had also lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months.
   'Not the information I give you,' Biff Quigley said. 'That's a freebie. The two hundred's for the information I won't give them.'
   'Won't . . . give . . who?' Billy managed.
   'Your wife,' Biff said, 'and your doctor, and a man who says he works for an outfit called Barton Detective Services.'
   Billy saw everything in a flash. Things weren't as bad as his paranoid mind had imagined; they were even worse. Heidi and Mike Houston had gone to Kirk Penschley and had convinced him that Billy Halleck was mad. Penschley was still using the Barton agency to track the Gypsies, but now they were all like astronomers looking for Saturn only so they could study Titan – or bring Titan back to the Glassman Clinic.
   He could also see the Barton operative who had sat in this chair a few days ago, talking to Biff Quigley, telling him that a very skinny man named Bill Halleck was going to show up soon, and when he did, this was the number to call.
   This was followed by an even clearer vision: he saw himself leaping across Biff Quigley's desk, seizing the bronzed pile of dog turds in mid-leap, and then bashing Biff Quigley's head in with them. He saw this in utter, savage clarity: the skin breaking, the blood flying up in a fine spray of droplets (some of them splashing on the framed pictures), the white glimmer of bone shattering to reveal the physical texture of the man's creepy mind; then he saw himself slamming the dog turds back where they belonged – where, in a manner of speaking, they had come from.
   Quigley must have seen this – or some of it – on Billy's haggard face, for an expression of alarm appeared on his own face. He hurriedly removed his feet from his desk and his hands from behind his neck. The chair emitted its mechanical pig squeal again.
   'Now, we could talk this over' he began, and Billy saw one manicured hand straying toward the intercom.
   Billy's anger abruptly deflated, leaving him shaken and cold. He had just visualized beating the man's brains out, not in any vague way but in the mental equivalent of Technicolor and Dolby sound. And good old Biff had known he was doing it, too.
   Whatever happened to the old Bill Halleck who used to give to the United Fund and make wassail on Christmas Eve?
   His mind returned: Yeah, that was the Billy Halleck that lived in Fat City. He moved. Gone, no forwarding.
   'No need for that,' Billy said, nodding at the intercom.
   The hand jerked, then diverted to a desk drawer, as if that had been its objective all the time. Biff brought out a pack of cigarettes.
   'Wasn't even thinking of it, ha-ha. Smoke, Mr Halleck?'
   Billy took one, looked at it, and then leaned forward to get a light. One drag and he was light-headed. 'Thanks.'
   'About the two hundred, maybe I was wrong– I'
   'No – you were right,' Billy said. He had cashed three hundred dollars' worth of traveler's checks on his way over here, thinking it might be necessary to grease the skids a little – but it had never occurred to him that he might have to grease them for such a reason as this. He took out his wallet, removed four fifties, and tossed them onto Biff's desk beside the dog turds. 'You'll keep your mouth shut when Penschley calls you?'
   'Oh, yes, sir!' Biff took the money and put it into the drawer with the cigarettes. 'You know it!'
   'I hope I do,' Billy said. 'Now, tell me about the Gypsies.'
   It was short and easy to follow; the only really complicated part had been the preliminaries. The Gypsies had arrived in Bangor on June 10. Samuel Lemke, the young juggler, and a man who answered the description of Richard Crosskill had come to Biff's office. After a call to Mr Parsons and one to the Bangor chief of police, Richard Crosskill had signed a standard short-term renewable lease form – the short term in this case was specified to be twenty-four hours. Crosskill signed as secretary of the Taduz Corporation while young Lemke stood by the door of Biffs office with his muscular arms crossed.
   'And just how much silver did they cross your palm with?' Billy asked.
   Biff raised his eyebrows. 'Beg your pardon?'
   'You got two hundred from me, probably a hundred from my concerned wife and friends via the Barton op who visited you – I just wondered how much the Gypsies coughed up. You've done pretty well out of this any way you cut it, haven't you, Biff?'
   Biff said nothing for a moment. Then, without answering Billy's question, he finished his story.
   Crosskill had come back on the two following days to resign the lease agreement. On the thirteenth he arrived again, but by then Biff had had a call from the chief of police and from Parsons. The complaints from the local citizenry had begun. The chief thought it was time for the Gypsies to move on. Parsons thought the same, but he would be willing to let them stay another day or so if they wanted to up the ante a bit – say, from thirty bucks a night to fifty.
   Crosskill listened to this and shook his head. He left without speaking. On a whim, Biff had driven out to the burned-out shell of the Bargain Barn that noon. He was in time to see the Gypsy caravan pulling out.
   'They headed for the Chamberlain Bridge,' he said, 'and that's all I know. Why don't you get out of here now, Bill? To be honest, you look like an advertisement for a vacation in Biafra. Looking at you sort of gives me the creeps.'
   Billy was still holding the cigarette, although he hadn't taken a puff since the first drag. Now he leaned forward butted it on the bronze dog turds. It fell smoldering to Biffs desk. 'To be honest,' he said to Biff, 'I feel exactly the same way about you.'
   The rage was back on him. He walked quickly out of Biff Quigley's office before it could move him in the wrong direction or make his hands speak in some terrible language they seemed to know.
   It was the twenty-fourth of June. The Gypsies had left Bangor via the Chamberlain Bridge on the thirteenth. Now he was only eleven days behind. Closer … closer, – but still too far.
   He discovered that Route 15, which began on the Brewer side of the bridge, was known as the Bar Harbor Road. It looked as if he might be going there after all. But along the way he would speak to no more realtors and stay at no more first-class motels. If the Barton people were still ahead of him, Kirk might well have put more people on the lookout for him.
   The Gypsies had driven the forty-four miles to Ellsworth on the thirteenth, and had been granted a permit to camp on the fairgrounds for three days. Then they had crossed the Penobscot River to Bucksport, where they had stayed another three days before moving on toward the coast again.
   Billy discovered all of this on the twenty-fifth; the Gypsies had left Bucksport late on the afternoon of June 19.
   Now he was only a week behind them.
   Bar Harbor was as crazily booming as the waitress had told him it would be, and Billy thought she had also at least suggested some of the resort town's essential wrongness. The main drag … until after Labor Day, it's a street carnival. Most of these towns are like that, but Bar Harbor is like, top end, you know? … I used to go up there sometimes in July or August and hang out, but not anymore. I'm too old for that now.
   Me too, Billy thought, sitting on a park bench in cotton pants, a T-shirt which read BANGOR'S GOT SOUL, and a sport coat that hung straight down from the bony rack of his shoulders. He was eating an ice-cream cone and drawing too many glances.
   He was tired – he was alarmed to find that he was always tired now, unless he was in the grip of one of his rages. When he parked the car and got out this morning to begin flashing the pictures, he had experienced a moment of nightmarish deja vu as his pants began to slide down his hips – excusez-moi, he thought, as they slid down my non-hips. The pants were corduroys he had bought in the Rockland army-navy store. They had a twenty-eight-inch waist. The clerk had told him (a little nervously) that he was going to run into trouble buying off-the-rack pants pretty soon, because he was almost into the boy waist sizes now. His leg size, however, was still thirty-two, and there just weren't that many thirteen-year-olds who stood six feet, two inches tall.
   Now he sat eating a pistachio ice-cream cone, waiting for some of his strength to come back and trying to decide what was so distressing about this beautiful little town where you couldn't park your cark and where you could barely walk on the sidewalks.
   Old Orchard had been vulgar, but its vulgarity had been straightforward and somehow exhilarating; you knew the prizes to be won in the Pitch-Til-U-Win booths were junk that would fall apart immediately, that the souvenirs were junk that would fall apart at almost the exact moment you got too far away to turn around and go back and bitch until they gave you your money back. In Old Orchard many of the women were old, and almost all of them were fat. Some wore obscenely small bikinis but most wore tank suits that seemed relics of the 1950's – you felt, passing these jiggling women on the boardwalk, that those suits were under the same terrible pressures as a submarine cruising far below her rated depth. If any of that iridescent miracle fabric gave way, fat would fly.
   The smells in the air had been pizza, ice cream, frying onions, every now and then the nervous vomit of some little kid who had stayed on the Tilt-A-Whirl too long. Most of the cars which cruised slowly up and down in the bumper-to-bumper Old Orchard traffic had been old, rusty around the bottoms of the doors, and usually too big. Many of them had been blowing oil.
   Old Orchard had been vulgar, but it had also had a certain peeling innocence that seemed missing in Bar Harbor.
   Here so many things were the exact reverse of Old Orchard that Billy felt a little as if he had stepped through the looking glass – there were few old women and apparently no fat women; hardly any women wearing bathing suits. The Bar Harbor uniform seemed to be tennis dress and white sneakers or faded jeans, rugby shirts, and boatniks. Billy saw few old cars and even fewer American cars. Most were Saabs, Volvos, Datsuns, BMW's, Hondas. All of them had bumper stickers saying things like SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR and LEGALIZE THE WEED. The bike people were here too – they wove in and out of the slowly moving downtown throngs on expensive tenspeeds, wearing polarized sunglasses and sun visors, flashing their orthodontically perfect smiles and listening to Sony Walkmen. Below town, in the harbor itself, a forest of masts grew – not the thick, dull-colored masts of working boats, but the slim white ones of sailboats that would be drydocked after Labor Day.
   The people hanging out in Bar Harbor were young, brainy, fashionably liberal, and rich. They also partied all night long, apparently. Billy had phoned ahead to make a reservation at the Frenchman's Bay Motel and had lain awake until the small hours of the morning listening to conflicting rock music pouring from six or eight different bars. The tally of wrecked cars and traffic violations mostly DWI's – in the local paper was impressive and a little disheartening.
   Billy watched a Frisbee fly over the crowds in their preppy clothes and thought: You want to know why this place and these people depress you? I'll tell you. They are studying to live in places like Fairview, that's why. They'll finish school, get married to women who will conclude their first affairs and rounds of analysis at roughly the same time, and settle down on the Lantern Drives of America. There they will wear red pants when they play golf, and each and every New Year's Eve will be the occasion of much tit-grabbing.
   'Yeah, that's depressing, all right,' he muttered, and a couple passing by looked at him strangely.
   They're still here.
   Yes. They were still here. The thought was so natural, so positive, that it was neither surprising nor particularly exciting. He had been a week behind them – they could be up in the Maritimes by now or halfway down the coast again; their previous pattern suggested they would be gone by now, and certainly Bar Harbor, where even the souvenir shops looked like expensive East Side auction rooms, was a little too tony to put up with a raggle-taggle band of Gypsies for long. All very true. Except they were still here, and he knew it.
   'Old man, I smell you,' he whispered.
   Of course you smell him. You are supposed to.
   That thought caused a moment's unease. Then he got up, tossed the remainder of his cone into a trash barrel, and walked back to the ice-cream vendor. The vendor did not seem particularly pleased to see Billy returning.
   'I wonder if you could help me,' Billy said.
   'No, man, I really don't think so,' the vendor said, and Billy saw the revulsion in his eyes.
   'You might be surprised.' Billy felt a sense of deep calm and predestination – not deja vu but real predestination. The ice-cream vendor wanted to turn away, but Billy held him with his own eyes – he found he was capable of that now, as if he himself had become some sort of supernatural creature. He took out the packet of photographs – it was now rumpled and sweat-stained. He dealt out the familiar tarot hand of images, lining them up along the counter of the man's booth.
   The vendor looked at them, and Billy felt no surprise at the recognition in the man's eyes, no pleasure – only that faint fear, like pain waiting to happen when the local anesthetic wears off. There was a clear salt tang in the air, and gulls were crying over the harbor.
   'This guy,' the ice-cream vendor said, staring fascinated at the photograph of Taduz Lemke. 'This guy – what a spook!'
   'Are they still around?'
   'Yeah,' the ice-cream vendor said. 'Yeah, I think they are. The cops kicked 'em out of town the second day, but they were able to rent a field from a farmer in Tecknor that's one town inland from here. I've seen them around. The cops have gotten to the point where they're writing 'em up for broken taillights and stuff like that. You'd think they'd take the hint.'
   'Thank you.' He began to collect his pictures again.
   'You want another ice cream?'
   'No, thank you.' The fear was stronger now – but the anger was there too, a buzzing, pulsing tone under everything else.
   'Then would you mind just sort of rambling on, mister? You're not particularly good for business.'
   'No,' Billy said. 'I suppose I'm not.'
   He headed back toward his car. The tiredness had left him.
   That night at a quarter past nine, Billy parked his rental car on the soft shoulder of Route 37-A, which leaves Bar Harbor to the northwest. He was on top of a hill, and a sea breeze blew around him, ruffling his hair and making his loose clothes flap on his body. From behind him, carried on that breeze, came the sound of tonight's rock-'n-roll party starting to crank up in Bar Harbor.
   Below him, to the right, he could see a large campfire surrounded by cars and trucks and vans. Closer in were the people – every now and then one of them strolled in front of the fire, a black cardboard cutout. He could hear conversation, occasional laughter.
   He had caught up.
   The old man is down there waiting for you, Billy – he knows you're here.
   Yes. Yes, of course. The old man could have pulled his little band right off the edge of the world – at least, as far as Billy Halleck would have been able to tell – if he had wanted. But that hadn't been his pleasure. Instead he had taken Billy over the jumps from Old Orchard to here. That had been what he wanted.
   The fear again, drifting like smoke through his hollow places ~ there were so many hollow places in him now, it seemed. But the rage was still there too.
   It's what I wanted too – and I may just surprise him. The fear I'm sure he expects. The anger – that may be a surprise.
   Billy looked back at the car for a moment, then shook his head. He started down the grassy side of the hill toward the fire.

Chapter Nineteen. In the Camp of the Gypsies

   He paused in back of the camper with the unicorn and the maiden on the side, a narrow shadow among other shadows, but more constant than those thrown by the shifting flames. He stood there listening to their quiet conversation, the occasional burst of laughter, the pop of an exploding knot in the fire.
   I can't go out there, his mind insisted with utter certainty. There was fear in this certainty, but also intertwined in it were inarticulate feelings of shame and propriety – he no more wanted to break into the concentric circles of their campfire and their talk and their privacy than he had wanted to have his pants fall down in Hilmer Boynton's courtroom. He, after all, was the offender. He was …
   Then Linda's face rose up in his mind; he heard her asking him to come home, and beginning to cry as she did.
   He was the offender, yes, but he was not the only one.
   The rage began to come up in him again. He clamped down on it, tried to compress it, to turn it into something a little more useful – simple sternness would be enough, he thought. Then he walked between the camper and the station wagon parked next to it, his Gucci loafers whispering in the dry timothy grass, and into their midst.
   There really were concentric circles: first the rough circle of vehicles, and inside that, a circle of men and women sitting around the fire, which burned in a dug hollow surrounded by a circle of stones. Nearby, a cut branch about six feet tall had been stuck into the earth. A yellow sheet of paper. – a campfire permit, Billy supposed – was impaled on its tip.
   The younger men and women sat on the flattened grass or on air mattresses. Many of the older people were sitting on lawn chairs made of tubular aluminum and woven plastic strips. Billy saw one old woman sitting propped up on pillows in a lounger, a blanket tucked around her. She was smoking a home-rolled cigarette and sticking S&H Green Stamps in a trading-stamp book.
   Three dogs on the far side of the fire began to bark halfheartedly. One of the younger men looked up sharply and drew back one side of his vest, revealing a nickel-plated revolver in a shoulder holster.
   'Enkelt!' one of the older men said sharply, putting his hand on the young man's hand.
   'Bodde har?'
   'Just det – han och Taduz!'
   The young man looked toward Billy Halleck, who now stood in the midst of them, totally out of place in his baggy sport coat and city shoes. There was a look not of fear but momentary surprise and – Billy would have sworn it – compassion on his face. Then he was gone, pausing only long enough to administer a kick to one of the hounds and growl, 'Enkelt!' The hound yipped once and then they all shut up.
   Gone to get the old man, Billy thought.
   He looked around at them. All conversation had ceased. They regarded him with their dark Gypsy eyes and no one said a word. This is how it feels when your pants really do fall down in court, he thought, but that wasn't a bit true. Now that he was actually in front of them, the complexity of his emotions had disappeared. The fear was there, and the anger, but both idled quietly, somewhere deep inside.
   And there's something else. They're not surprised to see you … and they're not surprised at how you look, either.
   Then it was true; all true. No psychological anorexia; no exotic form of cancer. Billy thought that even Michael Houston would have been convinced by those dark eyes. They knew what had happened to him. They knew why it was happening. And they knew how it would end.
   They stared at each other, the Gypsies and the thin man from Fairview, Connecticut. And suddenly, for no reason at all, Billy began to grin.
   The old woman with the trading stamps moaned and forked the sign of the evil eye at him.
   Approaching footsteps and a young woman's voice, speaking rapidly and angrily: 'Vad sa han! Och plotsligt brast han dybbuk, Papa! Alskling, grat inte! Snalla dybbuk! Ta mig Mamma!'
   Taduz Lemke, dressed in a nightshirt which fell to his bony knees, stepped barefoot into the light of the campfire. Next to him, wearing a cotton nightgown that rounded sweetly against her hips as she walked, was Gina Lemke.
   'Ta mig Mamma! Ta mig -' She caught sight of Billy standing in the center of the circle, his sport coat hanging, the seat of his pants bagging to almost below the coat's hem. She flung a hand up in his direction and then turned back to the old man as if to attack him. The others watched in silent impassivity. Another knot exploded in the fire. Sparks spiraled up in a tiny cyclone.
   'Ta mig Mamma! Va dybbuk! Ta mig inte till mormor! Ordo! Vu'derlak!'
   'Sa hon lagt, Gina,' the old man replied. His face and voice were both serene. One of his twisted hands stroked the smooth black flood of her hair, which fell to her waist. So far Taduz Lemke had not looked at Billy at all. 'Vi ska stanna.'
   For a moment she sagged, and in spite of the lush curves she seemed very young to Billy. Then she wheeled toward him again, her face rekindling. It was as if someone had thrown a shot of gasoline onto a dying fire.
   'You don't understand our lingo, mister?' she screamed at him. 'I say to my old-papa that you killed my old-mamma! I say you are a demon and we should kill you!'
   The old man put a hand on her arm. She shook it free, and rushed at Billy, barely skirting the campfire on flying bare feet. Her hair streamed out behind her.
   'Gina, verkligen glad!' someone cried, alarmed, but no one else spoke. The old man's serene expression did not change; he watched Gina approach Billy as an indulgent parent watches a wayward child.
   She spat on him – an enormous amount of warm white spittle, as if her mouth had been full of it. Billy could taste some of it on his lips. It tasted like tears. She looked up at him with her enormous dark eyes, and in spite of all that had happened, in spite of how much he had lost of himself, he was aware that he still wanted her. And she knew it too, he realized – the darkness in her eyes was mostly contempt.
   'If it would bring her back, you could spit on me until I drowned in it,' he said. His voice Was surprisingly clear and strong. 'But I'm not a dybbuk. Not a dybbuk, not a demon, not a monster. What you see . . .' He raised his arms and for a moment the firelight shone through his coat, making him look like a large but very malnourished white bat. He slowly lowered his hands to his sides again, *is all that I am.*
   For a moment she looked uncertain, almost fearful. Although her spittle was still trickling down his face, the contempt had left her eyes and Billy was wearily grateful for that.
   'Gina!' It was Samuel Lemke, the juggler. He had appeared beside the old man and was still buckling his pants. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of Bruce Springsteen on it. 'Enkelt men tillrackligt!'
   'You are a murdering bastard,' she said to Billy, and walked back the way she had come. Her brother attempted to put an arm around her, but she shook him off and disappeared into the shadows. The old man turned to watch her go, and then at last he turned his gaze on Billy Halleck.
   For a moment Billy stared at the festering hole in the middle of Lemke's face, and then his eyes were drawn to the man's eyes. The eyes of age, had he thought? They were something more than that … and something less. It was emptiness he saw in them; it was emptiness which was their fundamental truth, not the surface awareness that gleamed on them like moonlight on dark water. Emptiness as deep and complete as the spaces which may lie between galaxies.
   Lemke crooked a finger at Billy, and as if in a dream, Billy walked slowly around the campfire to where the old man stood in his dark gray nightshirt.
   'Do you know Rom?' Lemke asked when Billy stood directly in front of him. His tone was almost intimate, but it carried clearly in the silent camp, where the only sound was the fire eating into dry wood.
   Billy shook his head.
   'In Rom we call you skummade igenom, which means “white man from town.”'
   He grinned, showing rotted tobacco-stained teeth. The dark hole where his nose had been stretched and writhed.
   'But it also means how it sounds – ignorant scum.' Now his eyes finally let Billy's eyes go; Lemke seemed to lose all interest. 'Go on now, white man from town. You have no business with us, and we have no business with you. If we had business, it is done. Go back to your town.'
   He began to turn away.
   For a moment Billy only stood there with his mouth open, dimly realizing that the old man had hypnotized him – he had done it as easily as a farmer makes a chicken go to sleep by tucking its head under its wing.
   That's IT? part of him suddenly screamed. All of the driving, all of the walking, all of the questions, all of the bad dreams, all of the days and nights, and that's IT? You're just going to stand here without saying a word? Just let him call you ignorant scum and then go back to bed?
   'No, that is not it,' Billy said in a rough, loud voice.
   Someone drew in a harsh, surprised breath. Samuel Lemke, who had been helping the old man toward the back of one of the campers, looked around, startled. After a moment Lemke himself turned around. His face was wearily amused, but Billy thought for just a moment, just as the firelight touched his face, he had seen surprise there as well.
   Nearby, the young man who had first seen Billy reached under his vest again to where his revolver hung.
   'She's very beautiful,' Billy said. 'Gina.'
   'Shut up, white man from town,' Samuel Lemke said. 'I don't want to hear my sister's name come oud your mout.'
   Billy ignored him. He looked at Lemke instead. 'Is she your granddaughter? Great-granddaughter?'
   The old man studied him as if trying to decide whether or not something might be here after all – some sound other than the wind in a hollow ground. Then he began to turn away again.
   'Perhaps you'd wait just a minute while I write down my own daughter's address,' Billy said, raising his voice. He did not raise it much; he did not need to in order to bring out its imperative edge, an edge he had honed in a good many courtrooms. 'She's not as lovely as your Gina, but we think she's very pretty. Perhaps they could correspond on the subject of injustice. What do you think, Lemke? Will they'be able to talk about that after I'm as dead as your daughter? Who is able to finally sort out where an injustice really lay? Children? Grandchildren? Just a minute, I'll write down the address. It'll only take a second; I'll put it on the back of a photograph I have of you. If they can't figure this mess out, maybe they can get together someday and shoot each other and then their kids can give it a try. What do you think, old man … does that make any more sense than this shit?'
   Samuel put an arm on Lemke's shoulder. Lemke shook it off and walked slowly back to where Billy stood. Now Lemke's eyes were filled with tears of fury. His knotted hands slowly opened and closed. All the others watched, silent and frightened.
   'You run my daught' over in the road, white man,' he said. 'You run my daught' over in the road and then you have … you are borjade rulla enough to come here and speak out of your mout to my ear. Hey, I known who done what. I taken care of it. Mostly we turn and we drive out of town. Mostly, yeah, we do dat. But sometimes we get our justice.' The old man raised his gnarled hand in front of Billy's eyes. Suddenly it snapped into a closed fist. A moment later blood began to drip from it. From the others came a mutter not of fear or surprise but approval. 'Rom justice, skummade igenom. The other two I take care of already. The judge, he jump out of a window two nights ago. He is – . .'Taduz Lemke snapped his fingers and then blew on the ball of his thumb as if it were a seedling dandelion.
   'Did that bring your daughter back, Mr Lemke Did she come back when Cary Rossington hit the ground out there in Minnesota?'
   Lemke's lips twisted. 'I don't need her back. Justice ain't bringing the dead back, white man. Justice is justice. You want to get out of here before I fix you wit something else. I know what you and your woman were up to. You think I doan have the sight? I got the sight. You ask any of them. I got the sight a hundred years.'
   There was an assenting murmur from those around the fire.
   'I don't care how long you've had the sight,' Billy said. He reached out deliberately and grasped the old man's shoulders. From somewhere there was a growl of rage. Samuel Lemke started forward. Taduz Lemke turned his head and spat a single word in Romany. The younger man stopped, uncertain and confused. There were similar expressions on many of the faces around the campfire, but Billy did not see this; he saw only Lemke. He leaned toward him, closer and closer, until his nose almost touched the wrinkled, spongy mess that was all that remained of Lemke's nose.
   'Fuck your justice,' he said. 'You know about as much about justice as I know about jet turbines. Take it off me.'
   Lemke's eyes stared up into Billy's – that horrible emptiness just below the intelligence. 'Let go of me or I'll make it worse,' he said calmly. 'So much worse you think I blessed you the first time.'
   The grin suddenly broke on Billy's face – the bony grin which looked like a crescent moon that had been pushed over on its back. 'Go ahead,' he said. 'Try. But you know, I don't think you can.'
   The old man stared at him wordlessly.
   'Because I helped do it to myself,' Billy said. 'They were right about that much, anyway – it's a partnership, isn't it? The cursed and the one who does the cursing. We were all in it with you together. Hopley, Rossington, and me. But I am opting out, old man. My wife was jerking me off in my big old expensive car, right, and your daughter came out between two parked cars in the middle of the block like any ordinary jaywalker, and that's right, too. If she had crossed at the corner she would be alive now. There was fault on both sides, but she's dead and I can never go back to what my life was before. It balances. Not the best balance in the history of the world, maybe, but it balances. They've got a way of saying it in Las Vegas – they call it a push. This is a push, old man. Let it end here.'
   A strange and almost alien fear had arisen in Lemke's eyes when Billy began to smile, but now his anger, stony and obdurate, replaced it. 'I never take it off, white man from town,' Taduz Lemke said. 'I die widdit in my mout.'
   Billy slowly brought his face down on Lemke's until their foreheads touched and he could smell the old man's odor – it was the smell of cobwebs and tobacco and dim urine. 'Then make it worse. Go ahead. Make it – how did you say? – like you blessed me the first time.'
   Lemke looked at him for a moment longer, and now Billy sensed it was Lemke who was the one caught. Then suddenly Lemke turned his head to Samuel.
   'Enkelt av lakan och kanske alskade! Just det!'
   Samuel Lemke and the young man with the pistol under his vest tore Billy away from Taduz Lemke The old man's shallow chest rose and fell rapidly; his scant hair was disarrayed.
   He's not used to being touched – not used to being spoken to in anger.
   'It's a push,' Billy said as they pulled him away. 'Do you hear me?'
   Lemke's face twisted. Suddenly, horribly, he was three hundred years old, a terrible living revenant.
   'No poosh!' he cried at Billy, and shook his fist. 'No poosh, not never! You die thin, town man! You die like this!' He brought his fists together, and Billy felt a sharp stabbing pain in his sides, as if he had been between those fists. For a moment he could not get his breath and it felt as if all his guts were being squeezed together. 'You die thin!'
   'It's a push,' Billy said again, struggling not to gasp.
   'No poosh!' the old man screamed. In his fury at this continued contradiction, thin red color had crisscrossed his cheeks in netlike patterns. 'Get him out of here!'
   They began to drag him back across the circle. Taduz Lemke stood watching, his hands on his hips and his face a stone mask.
   'Before they take me away, old man, you ought to know my own curse will fall on your family,' Billy called, and in spite of the dull pain in his sides his voice was strong, calm, almost cheerful. 'The curse of white men from town.'
   Lemke's eyes widened slightly, he thought. From the corner of his eye Billy saw the old woman with the trading stamps in her blanketed lap fork the sign of the evil eye at him again.
   The two young men stopped pulling him for a moment; Samuel Lemke uttered a short, bewildered laugh, perhaps at the idea of a white upper-middle-class lawyer from Fairview, Connecticut, cursing a man who was probably the oldest Gypsy in America. Billy himself would have laughed two months ago.
   Taduz Lemke, however, was not laughing.
   'You think men like me don't have the power to curse?' Billy asked. He held his hands – his thin, wasted hands up on either side of his face and slowly splayed the fingers. He looked like a variety-show host asking an audience to end their applause. 'We have the power. We're good at cursing once we get started, old man. Don't make me start.'
   There was movement behind the old man – a flash of white nightgown and black hair.
   'Gina!' Samuel Lemke cried out.
   Billy saw her step forward into the light. Saw her raise the slingshot, draw the cradle back, and release it all in the same smooth gesture – like an artist drawing a line on a blank pad. He thought he saw a liquid, streaky gleam in the air as the steel ball flew across the circle, but that was almost certainly just imagination.
   There was a hot, glassy spear of pain in his left hand. It was gone almost as soon as it came. He heard the steel ball bearing she had fired thwang off the steel side of a van. At the same moment he realized he could see the girl's drawn, furious face, not framed in his spread fingers, but through his palm, where there was a neat round hole.
   She slingshotted me, he thought. Holy Christ, she did! Blood, black as tar in the firelight, ran down the pad of his palm and soaked the sleeve of his sport coat.
   'Enkelt!' she shrieked. 'Get out of here, eyelak! Get out of here, killing bastard!'
   She threw the slingshot. It landed at the edge of the fire, a wishbone shape with a rubber cup the size of an eyepatch caught in its fork. Then she fled, shrieking.
   No one moved. Those around the fire, the two young men, the old man, and Billy himself – all of them stood in tableau. There was the slam of a door, and the girl's shrieks were muffled. And still there was no pain.
   Suddenly, not even knowing he meant to do it, Billy held his bleeding hand out toward Lemke. The old man flinched back and forked the sign of the evil eye at Billy. Billy closed his hand as Lemke had done; blood ran from his closed fist as it had run from Lemke's closed fist.
   'The curse of the white man is on you, Mr Lemke – they don't write about that one in books, but I'm telling you it's true – and you believe that.'
   The old man screamed a flood of Romany. Billy felt himself hauled backward so suddenly that his head snapped on his neck. His feet left the ground.
   They're going to throw me in the fire. Christ, they're going to roast me in it …
   Instead he was carried back the way he had come, through the circle (people fell out of their chairs scrambling away from him) and between two pickups with camper caps. From one of them Billy heard a TV crackling out something with a laugh track.
   The man in the vest grunted, Billy was swung like a sack of grain (a very underweight sack of grain), and then for a moment he was flying. He landed in the timothy grass beyond the parked vehicles with a thud. This hurt a good deal more than the hole in his hand; there were no padded places on him anymore, and he felt his bones rattle inside his body like loose stakes in an old truck. He tried to get up and at first could not. White lights danced in front of his eyes. He groaned.
   Samuel Lemke came toward him. The boy's handsome face was smooth and deadly and expressionless. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out something – Billy at first thought it was a stick and only recognised it for what it was when Lemke unfolded the blade.
   He held his bleeding hand out, palm up, and Lemke hesitated. Now there was an expression on his face, one Billy recognized from his own bathroom mirror. It was fear.
   His companion muttered something to him.
   Lemke hesitated for a moment, looking down at Billy; then he refolded the blade into the knife's dark body. He spat in Billy's direction. A moment later the two of them were gone.
   He lay there for a moment, trying to reconstruct everything, to make some sense of it … but that was a lawyer's trick, and it would not serve him here in this dark place. His hand was starting to talk very loudly about what had happened to it now, and he thought that very soon it would hurt a lot more. Unless, of course, they changed their minds and came back here for him. Then they might end all hurting in very short order, and forever.
   That got him moving. He rolled over, slid his knees up to what was left of his stomach, then paused there a moment with his left cheek pressed against the beaten timothy and his ass in the air while a wave of faintness and nausea rode through him like a breaking wave. When it passed he was able to get to his feet and start up the hill to where his car was parked. He fell down twice on the way. The second time he believed it was going to be impossible to get to his feet again. Somehow -mostly by thinking about Linda, sleeping quietly and blamelessly in her bed – he was able to do it. Now his hand felt as if a dark red infection was pulsing in it and working its way up his forearm toward his elbow.
   An endless time later he reached the rental Ford and scrabbled for the keys. He had put them in his left pocket, and so had to reach across his crotch with his right hand to get at them.
   He started the car and paused for a moment, his screaming hand lying palm-up on his left thigh like a bird that has been shot. He looked down at the circle of vans and campers and the twinkle of the fire. A ghost of some old song came to him: She danced around the fire to a Gypsy melody/Sweet young woman in motion, how she enchanted me …
   He lifted his left hand slowly in front of his face. Ghostly green light from the car's instrument panel spilled through the round dark hole in his palm.
   She enchanted me, all right, Billy thought, and dropped the car in Drive. He wondered with almost clinical detachment if he would be able to make it back to the Frenchman's Bay Motel.
   Somehow, he did.

Chapter Twenty

   'William? What's wrong?'
   Ginelli's voice, which had been deeply blurred with sleep and ready to be angry, was now sharp with concern. Billy had found Ginelli's home number in his address book below the one for Three Brothers. He had dialed it without much hope at all, sure it would have been changed at some point during the intervening years.
   His left hand, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay in his lap. It had turned into something like a radio station and was now broadcasting approximately fifty thousand watts of pain – the slightest movement sent it raving up his arm. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Images of crucifixion kept occurring to him.
   'I'm sorry to call you at home, Richard,' he said, 'and so late.'
   'Fuck that, what's wrong?'
   'Well, the immediate problem is that I've been shot through the hand with a. . .'He shifted slightly, his hand flared, and his lips peeled back over his teeth. 'with a ball bearing.'
   Silence at the other end.
   'I know how it sounds, but it's true. The woman used a slingshot.'
   'Jesus! What -' A woman's voice in the background. Ginelli spoke briefly in Italian to her and then came back on the line. 'This is no joke, William? Some whore put a ball bearing through your hand with a slingshot?'
   'I don't call people at . . .' He looked at his watch and another flare of pain raced up his arm. '. . . at three o'clock in the morning and tell jokes. I've been sitting here for the last three hours trying to wait until a more civilized hour. But the pain . . .' He laughed a little, a hurt, helpless, bewildered sound. 'The pain is very bad.'
   'Does this have to do with what you called me about before?'
   'Yes.'
   'It was Gypsies?'
   'Yes. Richard. . .'
   'Yeah? Well, I promise you one thing. They don't fuck with you anymore after this.'
   'Richard, I can't go to a doctor with this and I'm in … I really am in a lot of pain.' Billy Halleck, Grandmaster of Understatement, he thought. 'Can you send me something? Maybe by Federal Express? Some kind of painkiller?'
   'Where are you?'
   Billy hesitated for just a moment, then shook his head a little. Everyone he trusted had decided he was crazy; he thought it very likely that his wife and his boss had gone through or soon would be going through the motions necessary to effect an involuntary committal in the state of Connecticut. Now his choices were very simple, and marvelously ironic: either trust this dope-dealing hood he hadn't seen in nearly six years, or give up completely.
   Closing his eyes, he said: 'I'm in Bar Harbor, Maine. The Frenchman's Bay Motel. Unit thirty-seven.'
   'Just a second.'
   Ginelli's voice moved away from the telephone again. Billy heard him speaking in a dim platter of Italian. He didn't open his eyes. At last Ginelli came back on the line again.
   'My wife is making a. couple of calls for me,' he said. 'You're wakin' up guys in Norwalk right now, paisan. I hope you're satisfied.'
   'You're a gentleman, Richard,' Billy said. The words came out in a guttural slur and he had to clear his throat. He felt too cold. His lips were too dry and he tried to wet them, but his tongue was dry too.
   'You be very still, my friend,' Ginelli said. The concern was back in his voice. 'You hear me? Very still. Wrap up in a blanket if you want, but that's all. You've been shot. You're in shock.'
   'No shit,' Billy said, and laughed again. 'I've been in shock for about two months now.'
   'What are you talking about?'
   'Never mind.'
   'All right. But we got to talk, William.'
   'Yes.'
   'I … Hold on a second.' Italian, soft and faint. Halleck closed his eyes again and listened to his hand broadcast pain. After a while Ginelli came back on the phone. 'A man is going to come by with some painkiller for you. He
   'Oh, hey, Richard, that's not
   'Don't tell me my business, William, just listen. His name is Fander. He's no doctor, this guy, at least not anymore, but he's going to look at you and decide if you ought to have some antibiotics as well as the dope. He'll be there before daylight.'
   'Richard, I don't know how to thank you,' Billy said. Tears were running down his cheeks; he wiped at them absently with his right hand.
   'I know you don't,' Ginelli said. 'You're not a wop. Remember, Richard: just sit still.'
   Fander arrived shortly before six o'clock. He was a little man with prematurely white hair who carried a country doctor's bag. He gazed at Billy's scrawny, emaciated body for a long moment without speaking and then carefully unwound the handkerchief from Billy's left hand. Billy had to put his other hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.
   'Raise it, please,' Fander said, and Billy did. The hand was badly swollen, the skin pulled taut and shiny. For a moment he and Fander gazed at each other through the hole in Billy's palm, which was ringed with dark blood. Fander took an odoscope from his bag and shone it through the wound. Then he turned it off.
   'Clean and neat,' he said. 'If it was a ball bearing there's much less chance of infection than there would have been with a lead slug.'
   He paused, considering.
   'Unless, of course, the girl put something on it before she fired it.'
   'What a comforting idea,' Billy croaked.
   'I'm not paid to comfort people,' Fander said coolly, especially when I'm routed out of bed at three-thirty and have to change from my pajamas into my clothes in a light plane that is bouncing around at eleven thousand feet. You say it was a steel bearing?'
   'Yes.'
   'Then you're probably all right. You can't very well soak a steel ball bearing in poison the way the Jivaro Indians soaked their wooden arrowheads in curare, and it doesn't seem likely the woman could have painted it with anything if it was all as spur-of-the-moment as you say. This should heal well, with no complications.' He took out disinfectant, gauze, an elastic bandage. 'I'm going to pack the wound and then bandage it. The packing is going to hurt like hell, but believe me when I tell you that it's going to hurt a lot more in the long run if I leave it open.'
   He cast another measuring eye on Billy – not so much the compassionate eye of a doctor, Billy thought, as the cold, appraising glance of an abortionist. 'This hand is going to be the least of your problems if you don't start eating again.'
   Billy said nothing.
   Fander looked at him a moment longer, then began packing the wound. At that point talk would have been impossible for Billy anyway; the pain-broadcasting station in his hand jumped from fifty thousand to two-hundred fifty thousand watts in one quick leap. He closed his eyes, clamped his teeth together, and waited for it to be over.
   At last it was over. He sat with his throbbing bandaged hand in his lap and watched Fander root in his bag once more.
   'All other considerations aside, your radical emaciation makes for problems when it comes to dealing with your pain. You're going to feel quite a bit more discomfort than you'd feel if your weight was normal, I'm afraid. I can't give you Darvon or Darvocet because they might put you in a coma or cause you to go into cardiac arrhythmia. How much do you weigh, Mr Halleck? A hundred and twenty-five?'
   'About that,' Billy muttered. There was a scale in the bathroom, and he had stepped on it before going out to the camp of the Gypsies – it was his own bizarre form of pep rally, he supposed. The needle had centered on 118. All the running around in the hot summer sun had helped to speed things up considerably.
   Fander nodded with a little moue of distaste. 'I'm going to give you some fairly strong Empirin. You take one single tablet. If you're not dozing off in half an hour, and if your hand is still very, very painful, you can take another half. And you go on like that for the next three or four days.' He shook his head. 'I just flew six hundred miles to give a man a bottle of Empirin. I can't believe it. Life can be very perverse. But considering your weight, even Empirin's dangerous. It ought to be baby aspirin.'
   Fander removed another small bottle from his bag, this one unmarked.
   'Aureomycin,' he said. 'Take one by mouth every six hours. But – mark this well, Mr Halleck – if you start having diarrhea, stop the antibiotic at once. In your state, diarrhea is a lot more apt to kill you than an infection from this wound.'
   He snapped the bag shut and stood up.
   'One final piece of advice that has nothing to do with your adventures in the Maine countryside. Get some potassium tablets as soon as possible and begin taking two every day – one when you get up, one when you go to bed. You'll find them at the drugstore in the vitamin section.'
   'Why?'
   'If you continue to lose weight, you will very soon begin to experience instances of heart arrhythmia whether you take Darvon or any other drug. This sort of arrhythmia comes from radical potassium depletion in the body. It may have been what killed Karen Carpenter. Good day, Mr Halleck.'
   Fander let himself out into the first mild light of dawn.
   For a moment he only stood there looking toward the sound of the ocean, which was very clear in the stillness.
   'You really ought to get off whatever hunger strike you are on, Mr Halleck,' he said without turning around. 'In many ways the world is nothing but a pile of shit. But it can also be very beautiful.'
   He walked toward a blue Chevrolet that was idling at the side of the building and got into the backseat. The car moved off.
   'I'm trying to get off it,' Billy said to the disappearing car. 'I'm really trying.'
   He closed the door and walked slowly back to the small table beside his chair. He looked at the medicine bottles and wondered how he was going to open them one-handed.

Chapter Twenty-one. Ginelli

   Billy ordered a large lunch sent in. He had never been less hungry in his life, but he ate all of it. When he was done he risked taking three of Fander's Empirin, reasoning that he was putting them on top of a turkey club sandwich, french fries, and a wedge of apple pie that had tasted quite a bit like stale asphalt.
   The pills hit him hard. He was aware that the pain transmitter in his hand had suddenly been reduced to a mere five thousand watts, and then he was cavorting through a feverish series of dreams. Gina danced across one of them, naked except for gold hoop earrings. Then he was crawling through a long dark culvert toward a round circle of daylight that always, maddeningly, stayed the same distance away. Something was behind him. He had a terrible feeling it was a rat. A very large rat. Then he was out of the culvert. If he had believed that would mean escape, he had been wrong – he was back in that starving Fairview. Corpses lay heaped everywhere. Yard Stevens lay sprawled in the middle of the town common, his own barber's shears driven deep into what remained of his throat. Billy's daughter leaned against a lamppost, nothing but a bunch of jointed sticks in her purple-and-white cheerleader's outfit. It was impossible to tell if she were really dead like the others or only comatose. A vulture fluttered down and landed on her shoulder. Its talons flexed once and its head darted forward. It ripped out a great swatch of her hair with its rotting beak. Bloody strands of scalp still clung to the ends, as clumps of earth cling to the roots of a plant which has been roughly pulled out of the ground. And she was not dead; Billy heard her moan, saw her hands stir weakly in her lap. No! he shrieked in this dream. He found he had the girl's slingshot in his hand. The cradle was loaded not with a ball bearing but a glass paperweight that sat on a table in the hall of the Fairview house. There was something inside the paperweight – some flaw – that looked like a blue-black thunderhead. Linda had been fascinated with it as a child. Billy fired the paperweight at the bird. It missed, and suddenly the bird turned into Taduz Lemke. A heavy thudding sound started somewhere – Billy wondered if it was his heart going into a fatal spell of arrhythmia. I never take it off, white man from town, Lemke said, and suddenly Billy was somewhere else and the thudding sound was still going on.
   He looked stupidly around the motel unit, at first thinking this was only another locale in his dreams.
   'William!' someone called from the other side of the door. 'Are you in there? Open this up or I'm gonna break it in! William! William!'
   Okay, he tried to say, and no sound came out of his mouth. His lips had dried and gummed shut. Nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. It was Ginelli.
   'William? Will … Oh, fuck.' This last was in a lower I'm-talking-to-myself voice, and was followed by a thump as Ginelli threw his shoulder against the door.
   Billy got to his feet and the whole world wavered in and out of focus for a moment. He got his mouth open at last, his lips parting with a soft rip that he felt rather than heard.
   'That's okay,' he managed. 'That's okay, Richard. I'm here. I'm awake now.'
   He went across the room and opened the door.
   'Christ, William, I thought you were . .
   Ginelli broke off and stared at him, his brown eyes widening and widening until Billy thought: He's going to run. You can't look that way at anyone or anything and not take to your heels as soon as you get over the first shock of whatever it was.
   Then Ginelli kissed his right thumb, crossed himself, and said, 'Are you gonna let me in, William?'
   Ginelli had brought better medicine than Fander's Chivas. He took the bottle out of his calfskin briefcase and poured them each a stiff hooker. He touched the rim of his plastic motel tumbler to the rim of Billy's.
   'Happier days than these,' he said. 'How's that?'
   'That's just fine,' Billy said, and knocked the shot off in one big swallow. After the explosion of fire in his stomach had subsided to a glow, he excused himself and went into the bathroom. He didn't need to use the toilet, but he did not want Ginelli to see him cry.
   'What did he do to you?' Ginelli asked. 'Did he poison your food?'
   Billy began to laugh. It was the first good laugh in a long time. He sat down in his chair again and laughed until more tears rolled down his cheeks.
   'I love you, Richard,' he said when the laughter had tapered off to chuckles and a few shrill giggles. 'Everyone else, including my wife, thinks I'm crazy. The last time you saw me I was forty pounds overweight and now I look like I'm trying out for the part of the scarecrow in the remake of The Wizard of Oz and the first thing out of your mouth is “Did he poison your food?”'
   Ginelli waved away both Billy's half-hysterical laughter and the compliment with the same impatience. Billy thought, Ike and Mike, they think alike, Lemke and Ginelli, too. When it comes to vengeance and countervengeance, they have no sense of humor.
   'Well? Did he?'
   'I suppose that he did. In a way, he did.'
   'How much weight have you lost?'
   Billy's eyes strayed to the wall-sized mirror across the room. He remembered reading – in a John D. MacDonald novel, he thought – that every modem motel room in America seems filled with mirrors, although most of those rooms are used by overweight businessmen who have no interest in looking at themselves in an undressed state. Its state wag very much the opposite of overweight, but he could understand the antimirror sentiment. He supposed it was his face – no, not just his face, his whole head which had thrown such a fright into Richard. The size of his skull had remained the same, and the result was that his head perched atop his disappearing body like the hideously oversize head of a giant sunflower.
   I never take it off you, white man from town, he heard Lemke say.
   'How much weight, William?' Ginelli repeated. His voice was calm, gentle even, but his eyes sparkled in an odd, clear way. Billy had never seen a man's eyes sparkle in quite that way, and it made him a little nervous.
   'When this began – when I came out of the courthouse and the old man touched me – I weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. This morning I weighed in at a hundred and sixteen just before lunch. That's what … a hundred and thirty-four pounds?'
   'Jesus and Mary and Joseph the carpenter from Brooklyn Heights,' Ginelli whispered, and crossed himself again. 'He touched you?'
   This is where he walks out – this is where they all walk out, Billy thought, and for one wild second he thought of simply lying, of making up some mad story of systematic food poisoning. But if there had ever been a time for lying, it was gone now. And if Ginelli walked, Billy would walk with him, at least as far as Ginelli's car. He would open the door for him and thank him very much for coming. He would do it because Ginelli had listened when Billy called in the middle of the night, and sent his rather peculiar version of a doctor, and then come himself. But mostly he would perform those courtesies because Ginelli's eyes had widened like that when Billy opened the door, and he still hadn't run away.
   So you tell him the truth. He says the only things he believes in are guns and money, and that's probably the truth, but you tell him the truth because that's the only way you can ever pay back a guy like him.
   He touched you? Ginelli had asked, and although that was only a second ago it seemed much longer in Billy's scared, confused mind. Now he said what was the hardest thing for him to say. 'He didn't just touch me, Richard. He cursed me.'
   He waited for that rather mad sparkle to die out of Ginelli's eyes. He waited for Ginelli to glance at his watch, hop to his feet, and grab his briefcase. Time sure has a way of flying, doesn't it? I'd love to stay and talk over this curse business with you, William, but I've got a hotplate of veal marsala waiting for me back at the Brothers, and …
   The sparkle didn't die and Ginelli didn't get up. He crossed his legs, neatened the crease, brought out a package of Camel cigarettes, and lit one.
   'Tell me everything,' he said.
   Billy Halleck told Ginelli everything. When he was done, there were four Camel butts in the ashtray. Ginelli was looking fixedly at Billy, as if hypnotized. A long silence spun out. It was uncomfortable, and Billy wanted to break it, but he didn't know how. He seemed to have used up all of his words.
   'He did this to you,' Ginelli said at last. 'This . . .' He waved a hand at Billy.
   'Yes. I don't expect you to believe it, but yes, he did.'
   I believe it,' Ginelli said almost absently.
   'Yeah? What happened to the guy who only believed in guns and money?'
   Ginelli smiled, then laughed. 'I told you that when you called that time, didn't I?'
   'Yeah.'
   The smile faded. 'Well, there's one more thing I believe in, William. I believe in what I see. That's why I'm a relatively rich man. That's also why I'm a living man. Most people, they don't believe what they see.'
   'No?'
   'No. Not unless it goes along with what they already believe. You know what I saw in this drugstore where I go? Just last week I saw this.'
   What?'
   They got a blood-pressure machine in there. I mean, they sometimes got them in shopping malls, too, but in the drugstore it's free. You put your arm through a loop and push a button. The loop closes. You sit there for a while and think serene thoughts and then it lets go. The reading flashes up in big red numbers. Then you look on the chart where it says “low,” “normal,” and “high” to figure out what the numbers mean. You get this picture?'
   Billy nodded.
   'Okay. So I am waiting for the guy to give me a bottle of this stomach medicine my mother has to take for her ulcers. And this fat guy comes waddling in. I mean, he goes a good two-fifty and his ass looks like two dogs fightin' under a blanket. There's a drinker's road map on his nose and cheeks and I can see a pack of Marlboros in his pocket. He picks up some of those Dr Scholl's corn pads and he's taking them to the cash register when the high-bloodpressure machine catches his eye. So he sits down and the machine does its thing. Up comes the reading. Two-twenty over one-thirty, it says. Now, I don't know a whole fuck of a lot about the wonderful world of medicine, William, but I know two-twenty over one-thirty is in the creepy category. I mean, you might as well be walking around with the barrel of a loaded pistol stuck in your ear, am I right?'
   'Yes.'
   'So what does this dummocks do? He looks at me and says, “All this digital shit is fucked up.” Then he pays for his corn pads and walks out. You know what the moral of that story is, William? Some guys – a lot of guys – don't believe what they are seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they want to eat or drink or think or believe. Me, I don't believe in God. But if I saw him, I would. I wouldn't just go around saying, “Jesus, that was a great special effect.” The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. And you can quote me.'
   Billy looked at him consideringly for a moment, and then burst out laughing. After a moment, Ginelli joined him.
   'Well,' he said, 'you still sound like the old William when you laugh, anyway. The question is, William, what are we going to do about this geezer?'
   I don't know.' Billy laughed again, a shorter sound. 'But I guess I have to do something. After all, I cursed
   'So you told me. The curse of the white dude from town. Considering what all the white dudes from all the towns have done in the last couple hundred years, that could be a pretty heavy one.' Ginelli paused to light another cigarette and then said matter-of-factly through the smoke: 'I can hit him, you know.'
   'No, that won't w -' Billy began, and then his mouth snapped closed. He'd had an image of Ginelli walking up to Lemke and punching him in the eye. Then suddenly he had realized that Ginelli was speaking of something much more final. 'No, you can't do that,' he finished.
   Ginelli either didn't understand or affected not to. 'Sure I can. And I can't get anyone else to, that's for sure. At least, not anyone trustworthy. But I am as capable of doing it now as I was at twenty. It ain't business, but believe me, it would be a pleasure.'
   'No, I don't want you to kill him or anyone else,' Billy said. 'That's what I meant.'
   'Why not?' Ginelli asked, still reasonable – but his eyes, Billy saw, continued to whirl and twirl in that mad way. 'You worried about being an accessory to murder? It wouldn't be murder, it'd be self-defense. Because he is killing you, Billy. Another week of this and people will be able to read the signs you're standing in front of without asking you to move. Another two and you won't dare to go out in a high wind for fear of blowing away.'
   'Your medical associate suggested that I might die of cardiac arrhythmia before it went that far. Presumably my heart is losing weight right along with the rest of me.' He swallowed. 'You know, I never had that particular thought until just now. I sort of wish I hadn't had it at all.'
   'See? He's killing you … but never mind. You don't: want me to hit him, I won't hit him. Probably not a good idea anyway. It might not end it.'
   Billy nodded. This had occurred to him, as well. Take it off me, he had told Lemke – apparently even white men from town understood that was something that had to be done. If Lemke was dead, the curse might simply have to run itself out.
   'The trouble is,' Ginelli said reflectively, 'you can't take back a hit.'
   'No.'
   He rubbed out his cigarette and stood up. 'I gotta think about this, William. It's a lot to think about. And I got to get my mind in a serene state, you know? You can't get ideas about complicated shit like this when you're upset, and every time I look at you, paisan, I want to pull out this guy's pecker and stuff it in the hole where his nose used to be.'
   Billy got up and almost fell. Ginelli grabbed him and Billy hugged him clumsily with his good arm. He didn't think he'd ever hugged a grown man in his life before this.
   'Thank you for coming,' Billy said. 'And for believing me.'
   'You're a good fellow,' Ginelli said, releasing him. 'You're in a bad mess, but maybe we can get you out of it. Either way, we're gonna put some stone blocks to this old dude. I'm gonna go out and walk around for a couple of hours, Billy. Get my mind serene. Think up some ideas. Also, I want to make some phone calls back to the city.'
   'About what?'
   'I'll tell you later. First I want to do some thinking. You be okay?'
   'Yes.'
   'Lie down. You have no color in your face at all.'
   'All right.' He did feel sleepy again, sleepy and totally worn out.
   'The girl who shot you,' Ginelli said. 'Pretty?'
   'Very pretty.'
   'Yeah?' That crazy light was back in Ginelli's eyes, brighter than ever. It troubled Billy.
   'Yeah.'
   'Lay down, Billy. Catch some Z's. Check you later.
   Okay to take your key?'
   'Sure.'
   Ginelli left. Billy lay down on the bed and put his bandaged hand carefully down beside him, knowing perfetly well that if he fell asleep he would probably just roll over on it and wake himself up again.
   Probably just humoring me, Billy thought. Probably on the phone to Heidi right now. And when I wake up, the men with the butterfly nets will be sitting on the foot of the bed. They …
   But there was no more. He drifted off and somehow managed to avoid rolling on his bad hand.
   And this time there were no bad dreams.
   There were no men with butterfly nets in the room when he woke up, either. Only Ginelli, sitting in the chair across the room. He was reading a book called This Savage Rapture and drinking a can of beer. It was dark outside.
   There were four cans of a six-pack sitting on top of an ice bucket on the TV, and Billy licked his lips. 'Can I have one of those?' he croaked.
   Ginelli looked up. 'It's Rip Van Winkle, back from the dead! Sure you can. Here, let me open you one.'
   He brought it to Billy, and Billy drank half of it without stopping. The beer was fine and cold. He had heaped the contents of the Empirin bottle in one of the room's ashtrays (motel rooms did not have as many ashtrays as mirrors, he thought, but almost). Now he fished one out and washed it down with another swallow.
   'How's the hand?' Ginelli asked.
   'Better.' In a way that was a lie, because his hand hurt very badly indeed. But in a way it was the truth, too. Because Ginelli was here, and that did more to make the pain less than the Empirin or even the shot of Chivas. Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all. This caused him to think of Heidi, because she was the one who should have been with him, not this hood, and she wasn't. Heidi was back in Fairview, stubbornly ignoring all this, because to give it any mental house-room would mean she might have to explore the boundaries of her own culpability, and Heidi did not want to do that. Billy felt a dull, throbbing resentment. What had Ginelli said? The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. He tried to push the resentment away – she was, after-all, his wife. And she was doing what she believed was right and best for him … wasn't she? The resentment went, but not very far.
   'What's in the shopping bag?' Billy asked. The bag was sitting on the floor.
   'Goodies,' Ginelli said. He looked at the book he was reading, then tossed it into the wastebasket. 'That sucks like an Electrolux. I couldn't find a Louis Lamour.'
   'What kind of goodies?'
   'For later. When I go out and visit your Gypsy friends.'
   'Don't be foolish,' Billy said sharply. 'You want to end up looking like me? Or maybe like a human umbrella stand?'
   'Easy, easy,' Ginelli said. His voice was amused and soothing, but that light in his eyes whirled and twirled. Billy realized suddenly that it hadn't all been spur-of-the-moment bullshit; he really had cursed Taduz Lemke. The thing he had cursed him with was sitting across from him in a cheap leatherette motel chair and drinking a Miller Lite. And with equal parts amusement and horror, he realized something else as well: perhaps Lemke knew how to lift his curse, but Billy hadn't the slightest idea of how to lift the curse of the white man from town. Ginelli was having a good time. More fun, maybe, than he'd had in years. He was like a pro bowler coming eagerly out of retirement to take part in a charity event. They would talk, but their talk would change nothing. Ginelli was his friend. Ginelli was a courtly if not exactly grammatical man who called him William instead of Bill or Billy. He was also a very large, very proficient hunting dog which had just slipped its chain.
   'Don't tell me to take it easy,' he said, 'just tell me what you plan to do.'
   'No one gets hurt,' Ginelli said. 'Just hold that thought, William. I know that's important to you. I think you're holding on to some, you know, principles you can't exactly afford anymore, but I got to go along because that's what you want and you are the offended party. No one gets hurt in this at all. Okay?'
   'Okay,' Billy said. He was a little relieved … but not much.
   'At least, not unless you change your mind,' Ginelli said.
   'I won't.'
   'You might.'
   'What's in the bag?'
   'Steaks,' Ginelli said, and took one out. It was a porterhouse wrapped in clear plastic and marked with a Sampson's label. 'Looks good, huh, I got four of 'em.'
   'What are they for?'
   'Let's keep things in order,' Ginelli said. 'I left here, I walked downtown. What a fucking horror show! You can't even walk on the sidewalk. Everyone's wearing Ferrari sunglasses and shirts with alligators on their tits. It looks like everyone in this town has had their teeth capped and most of 'em have had nose-jobs too.'
   'I know.'
   'Listen to this, William. I see this girl and guy walking along, right? And the guy has got his hand in the back pocket of her shorts. I mean, they are right out in public and he's got his hand in her back pocket, feeling her ass. Man, if that was my daughter she wouldn't sit down on what her boyfriend was feeling for about a week and a half.
   'So I know I can't get my mind in a serene state there, and I gave it up. I found a telephone booth, made a few calls. Oh, I almost forgot. The phone was in front of a drugstore, so I went in and got you these.' He took a bottle of pills from his pocket and tossed it to Billy, who caught it with his good hand. They were potassium capsules.
   'Thank you, Richard,' he said, his voice a little uneven.
   'Don't mention it, just take one. You don't need a fucking heart attack on top of everything else.'
   Billy took one with a swallow of beer. His head was starting to buzz gently now.
   'So I got some people sniffing around after a couple of things and then I went down by the harbor,' Ginelli resumed. 'I looked at. the boats for a while. William, there must be twenty … thirty … maybe forty million dollars' worth of boats down there! Sloops, yawls, fucking frigates, for all I could tell. I don't know diddlyfuck about boats, but I love to look at them. They . . .'
   He broke off and looked thoughtfully at Billy.
   'You think some of those guys in the alligator shirts and the Ferrari sunglasses are running dope in those pussywagons?'
   'Well, I read in the Times last winter that a lobsterman on one of the islands around here found about twenty bales of stuff floating around under the town dock, and it turned out to be some pretty good marijuana.'
   'Yeah. Yeah, that's about what I thought. This whole place has that smell to it. Fucking amateurs. They ought to just sail their pretty boats and leave the work to people who understand it, you know? I mean, sometimes they get in the way and then measures have to be taken and some guy finds a few bodies floating around under a dock instead of a few bales of weed. It's too bad.'
   Billy took another large swallow of beer and coughed on it.
   'But that is neither here nor there. I took a walk, looked at all those boats, and got my mind serene. And then I figured out what to do … or at least, the start of it and the shape of how it should go afterward. I don't have all the details worked out yet, but that'll come.
   'I walked back to the main drag and made a few more calls – follow-up calls. There is no warrant out for your arrest, William, but your wife and this nose-jockey doctor of yours sure did sign some papers on you. I wrote it down.' He took a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. “'Committal in absentia.” That sound right?'
   Billy Halleck's mouth dropped open and a wounded sound fell out of it. For a moment he was utterly stunned and then the fury which had become his intermittent companion swept through him again. He had thought it might happen, yes, had thought Houston would suggest it, and even thought Heidi might agree to it. But thinking about something and hearing it had actually happened – that your own wife had gone before a judge, had testified that you had gone loony, and had been granted a res gestae order of committal which she had then signed – that was very different.
   'That cowardly bitch,' he muttered thickly, and then the world was blotted out by red agony. He had closed his hands into fists without thinking. He groaned and looked down at the bandage on his left hand. Flowers of red were blooming there.
   I can't believe you just thought that about Heidi, a voice in his mind spoke up.
   It's just because my mind is not serene, he answered the voice, and then the world grayed out for a while.
   It wasn't quite a faint, and he came out of it quickly. Ginelli changed the bandage on his hand and repacked the wound, doing a job that was clumsy but fairly adequate. While he did it, he talked.
   'My man says it don't mean a thing unless you go back to Connecticut, William.'
   'No, that's true. But don't you see? My own wife.'
   'Never mind that, William. It doesn't matter. If we can fix things up with this old Gypsy, you'll start to gain weight again and their case is out of the window. If that happens, you'll have plenty of time to decide what you want to do about your wife. Maybe she needs a slapping to sharpen her up a little, you know? Or maybe you just got to walk. You can decide that shit for yourself if we can fix things up with the Gyp – or you can write Dear Fucking Abby, if you want. And if we can't fix things up, you're gonna die. Either way, this thing is gonna get taken care of. So what's the big deal about them getting a paper on your head?'
   Billy managed a white-lipped smile. 'You would have made a great lawyer, Richard. You have this unique way of putting things in perspective.'
   'Yeah? You think so?'
   'I do.'
   'Well, thanks. Next I called Kirk Penschley.'
   'You talked with Kirk Penschley?'
   'Yes.'
   'Jesus, Richard!'
   'What, you think he wouldn't take a call from a cheap hood like me?' Ginelli managed to sound both wounded, and amused at the same time. 'He took it, believe me. Of course, I called on my credit card – he wouldn't want my name on his phone bill, that much is true. But I've done a lot of business with your firm over the years, William.'
   'That's news to me,' Billy said. 'I thought it was just that one time.'
   'That time everything could be out in the open, and you were just right for it,' Ginelli said. 'Penschley and his big stud-lawyer partners would never have stuck you into something crooked. William – you were a comer. On the other hand, I suppose they knew you'd be meeting me sooner or later, if you hung around long enough in the firm, and that first piece of work would be a good introduction. Which it was – for me as well as for you, believe me. And if something went wrong – if our business that time had happened to turn the wrong corner or something – you could have been sacrificed. They wouldn't have liked to do it, but their view is better to sacrifice a comer than a genuine bull stud-lawyer. These guys all see the same they are very predictable.'
   'What other kind of business have you done with my firm?' Billy asked, frankly fascinated – this was a little like finding out your wife had been cheating on you long after you had divorced her for other reasons.
   'Well, all kinds – and not exactly with your firm. Let's say they have brokered legal business for me and a number of my friends and leave it at that. Anyway, I know Kirk well enough to call him and ask for a favor. Which he granted.'
   'What favor?'
   'I asked him to call this Barton bunch and tell them to lay off for a week. Lay off you, and lay off the Gypsies. I'm actually more concerned about the Gypsies, you want to know the truth. We can do this, William, but it'll be easier if we don't have to chase them from hoot to holler and then back to fucking hoot again.'
   'You called Kirk Penschley and told him to lay off,' Billy said, bemused.
   'No, I called Kirk Penschley and told him to tell the Barton agency to lay off,' Ginelli corrected. 'And not exactly in those words, either. I can' be a little bit political when I have to be, William. Give me some credit.'
   'Man, I give you a lot of credit. More every minute.'
   'Well, thank you. Thank you, William. I appreciate that.' He lit a cigarette. 'Anyway, your wife and her doctor friend will continue to get reports, but they'll be a little bit off. I mean, they'll be like the National Enquirer and Reader's Digest version of the truth – do you dig what I am saying.
   Billy laughed. 'Yeah, I see.'
   'So, we got a week. And a week should be enough.'
   'What are you going to do?'
   'All you'll let me do, I guess. I am going to scare them, William. I'm going to scare him. I'm going to scare him so bad he's gonna need to put a fucking Delco tractor battery in his pacemaker. And I'm going to keep raising the level of the scares until one of two things happens. Either he is gonna cry uncle and take off what he put on you, or we decide he don't scare, that old man. If that happens, I come back to you and ask if you have changed your mind about hurting people. But maybe it won't go that far.'
   'How are you going to scare him?'
   Ginelli touched the shopping bag with the toe of one Bally boot and told him how he meant to start. Billy was appalled. Billy argued with Ginelli, as he had foreseen; then he talked with Ginelli, as he had also foreseen; and although Ginelli never raised his voice, his eyes continued to whirl and twirl with that mad light and Billy knew he might as well have been talking to the man in the moon.
   And as the fresh pain in his hand slowly subsided to the former throbbing ache, he began to feel sleepy again.
   'When are you going?' he asked, giving up.
   Ginelli glanced at his watch. 'Ten past ten now. I'll give them another four or five hours. They been doing a good little business out there, from what I heard downtown. Telling a lot of fortunes. And the dogs – those pit-bulls. Christ Almighty. The dogs you saw weren't pit-bulls, were they?'
   'I never saw a pit-bull,' Billy said sleepily. 'The ones I saw all looked like hounds.'
   'Pit-bulls look like a cross between terriers and bulldogs. They cost a lot of dough. If you want to see pit-bulls fight, you got to agree to pay for one dead dog before the wagers even get put down. It's one nasty business.
   'They're into all the classy stuff in this town, ain't they, William – Ferrari sunglasses, dope boats, dogfights. Oh, sorry -and tarot and the I Ching.'
   'Be careful,' Billy said.
   'I'll be careful,' Ginelli said, 'don't worry.'
   Billy fell asleep shortly after. When he woke up it was ten minutes until four and Ginelli was gone. He was seized with the certainty that Ginelli was dead. But Ginelli came in at a quarter to six, so fully alive that he seemed somehow too big for the place. His clothes, face, and hands were splattered with mud that reeked of sea salt. He was grinning. That crazy light danced in his eyes.
   'William,' he said, 'we're going to pack your things and move you out of Bar Harbor. Just like a government witness going to a safe house.'
   Alarmed, Billy asked, 'What did you do?'
   'Take it easy, take it easy! Just what I said I was going to do – no more and no less. But when you stir up a hornet's nest with a stick, it's usually a good idea to flog your dogs on down the road afterward, William, don't you think so?'
   'Yes, but
   'No time now. I can talk and pack your stuff at the same time.'
   'Where?' Billy almost wailed.
   'Not far. I'll tell you on the way. Now, let's get going. And maybe you better start by changing your shirt. You're a good man, William, but you are starting to smell a little ripe.
   Billy had started up to the office with his key when Ginelli touched him on the shoulder and gently took it out of his hand.
   'I'll just put this on the night table in your room. You checked in with a credit card, didn't you?'
   'Yes. but -'
   'Then we'll just make this sort of an informal checkout. No harm done, less attention attracted to us guys. Right?'
   A woman jogging by on the berm of the highway looked casually at them, back at the road … and then her head snapped back in a wide-eyed double-take that Ginelli saw but Billy mercifully missed.
   'I'll even leave ten bucks for the maid,' Ginelli said. 'We'll take your car. I'll drive.'
   'Where's yours?' He knew Ginelli had rented one, and was now realizing belatedly that he hadn't heard an engine before Ginelli walked in. All of this was going too fast for Billy's mind -he couldn't keep up with it.
   'It's okay. I left it on a back road about three miles from here and walked. Pulled the distributor cap and left a note on the windshield saying I was having engine trouble and would be back in a few hours, just in case anybody should get nosy. I don't think anyone will. There was grass growing up the middle of the road, you know?'
   A car went by. The driver got a look at Billy Halleck and slowed down. Ginelli could see him leaning over and craning his neck.
   'Come on, Billy. People looking at you. The next bunch could be the wrong people.'
   An hour later Billy was sitting in front of the television in another motel room – this the living room of a seedy little suite in the Blue Moon Motor Court and Lodge in Northeast Harbor. They were less than fifteen miles from Bar Harbor, but Ginelli seemed satisfied. On the TV screen, Woody Woodpecker was trying to sell insurance to a talking bear.
   'Okay,' Ginelli said. 'You rest up the hand, William. I'm gonna be gone all day.'
   'You're going back there?'
   'What, go back to the hornet's nest while the hornets are still flying? Not me, my friend. No, today I'm gonna play with cars. Tonight'll be time enough for Phase Two. Maybe I'll get time enough to look in on you, but don't count on it.'
   Billy didn't see Richard Ginelli again until the following morning at nine, when he showed up driving a dark blue Chevy Nova that had certainly not come from Hertz or Avis. The paint was dull and spotted, there was a hairline crack in the passenger-side window, and a big dent in the trunk. But it was jacked in the back and there was a supercharger cowling on the hood.
   This time Billy had given him up for dead a full six hours ago, and he greeted Ginelli shakily, trying not to weep with relief. He seemed to be losing all control of his emotions as he lost weight … and this morning, as the sun came up, he had felt the first unsteady racings of his heart. He had gasped for breath and pounded at his chest with one closed fist. The beat had finally smoothed out again, but that had been it: the first instance of arrhythmia.
   'I thought you were dead,' he told Ginelli as he came in.
   'You keep saying that and I keep turning up. I wish you would relax about me, William. I can take care of myself. I am a big boy. If you thought I was going to underestimate this old fuck, that would be one thing. But I'm not. He's smart, and he's dangerous.'
   'What do you mean?'
   'Nothing. I'll tell you later.'
   'Now!'
   No.'.
   'Why not?'
   'Two reasons,' Ginelli said patiently. 'First, because you might ask me to back off. Second, because I haven't been this tired in about twelve years. I'm gonna go in there to the bedroom and crash out for eight hours. Then I'm gonna get up and eat three pounds of the first food I can snag. Then I'm gonna go back out and shoot the moon.'
   Ginelli did indeed look tired – almost haggard. Except for his eyes, Billy thought. His eyes are still whirling and twirling like a couple of fluorescent carnival pinwheels.
   'Suppose I did ask you to back off?' Billy asked quietly. 'Would you do it, Richard?'
   Richard looked at him for a long, considering moment and then gave Billy the answer he had known he would give ever since he had first seen that mad light in Ginelli's eyes.
   'I couldn't now,' Ginelli said calmly. 'You're sick, William. It's through your whole body. You can't be trusted to know where your own best interest lies.'
   In other words, you've taken out your own set of committal papers on me. Billy opened his mouth to speak this thought aloud and then closed his mouth again. Because Ginelli didn't mean what he said; he had only said what sounded sane.
   'Also because it's personal, right?' Billy asked him.
   'Yeah,' Ginelli replied. 'Now it's personal.'
   He went into the bedroom, took off his shirt and pants, and lay down. He was asleep on top of the coverlet five minutes later.
   Billy drew a glass of water, swallowed an Empirin, and then drank the rest of the water standing in the doorway. His eyes moved from Ginelli to the pants crumpled on the chair. Ginelli had arrived in a pair of impeccable cotton slacks, but somewhere in the last couple of days he had picked up a pair of blue jeans. The keys to the Nova parked out front would undoubtedly be in them. Billy could take them and drive away … except he knew he wouldn't do that, and the fact that he would be signing his own death warrant by so doing now seemed actually secondary. The important thing now seemed to be how and where all of this would end.
   At midday, while Ginelli was still sleeping deeply in the other room, Billy had another episode of arrhythmia. Shortly after, he dozed off himself and had a dream. It was short and totally mundane, but it filled him with a queer mixture of terror and hateful pleasure. In this dream he and Heidi were sitting in the breakfast nook of the Fairview house. Between them was a pie. She cut a large piece and gave it to Billy. It was an apple pie. 'This will fatten you up,' she said. 'I don't want to be fat,' he replied. 'I've decided I like being thin. You eat it.' He gave her the piece of pie, stretching an arm no thicker than a bone across the table. She took it. He sat watching as she ate every bite, and with every bite she took, his feelings of terror and dirty joy grew.
   Another spell of light arrhythmia jolted him awake from his dream. He sat there for a moment, gasping, waiting for his heart to slow to its proper rhythm, and eventually it did. He was seized by the feeling that he had had more than a dream – that he had just experienced a prophetic vision of some kind. But such feelings often accompany vivid dreams, and as the dream itself fades, so does the feeling. This happened to Billy Halleck, although he had cause to remember this dream not long after.
   Ginelli got up at six in the evening, showered, pulled on the jeans and a dark turtleneck sweater.
   'Okay,' he said. 'I'll see you tomorrow morning, Billy. Then we'll know.'
   Billy asked again what Ginelli meant to do, what had happened so far, and once again Ginelli refused to tell him.
   'Tomorrow,' he said. 'Meantime, I'll give her your love.'
   'Give who my love?'
   Ginelli smiled. 'Lovely Gina. The whore who put the ball bearing through your hand.'
   'Leave her alone,' Billy said. When he thought of those dark eyes, it seemed to be impossible to say anything else, no matter what she had done to him.
   'No one gets hurt,' Ginelli reiterated, and then he was gone. Billy listened to the Nova start up, listened to the rough sound of its motor – that roughness would smooth out only when it got up to around sixty-five miles an hour – as Ginelli backed it out of the space, and reflected that No one gets hurt wasn't the same thing as agreeing to leave the girl alone. Not at all.
   This time it was noon before Ginelli returned. There was a deep cut across his forehead and along his right arm there the turtleneck sweater's sleeve hung in two flaps.
   'You lost some more weight,' he said to Billy. 'You eating.
   'I'm trying,' Billy said, 'but anxiety isn't much good for the appetite. You look like you lost some blood.'
   'A little. I'm okay.'
   'A ' you going to tell me now what the hell you've been doing?
   'Yes. I'm going to tell you everything just as soon as I get out of the shower and bandage myself up. You're going to meet with him tonight, Billy. That's the important thing. That's what you want to psych yourself up for.'
   A stab of mingled fear and excitement poked at his belly like a shard of glass. 'Him? Lemke?'
   'Him,' Ginelli agreed. 'Now, let me get a shower, William. I must not be as young as I thought – all this excitement has got my ass dragging.' He called back over his shoulder, 'And order some coffee. Lots of coffee. Tell the guy to just leave it outside the door and slide the check underneath for you to sign.'
   Billy watched him go, his mouth hanging open. Then, when he heard the shower start, he closed his mouth with a snap and went to the phone to order the coffee.

Chapter Twenty-two. Ginelli's Story

   He spoke at first in quick bursts, falling silent for a few moments after each to consider what came next. Ginelli's energy seemed really low for the first time since he had turned up at the Bar Harbor Motor Inn on Monday afternoon. He did not seem much hurt – his wounds were really only deep scratches – but Billy believed he was badly shaken.
   All the same, that crazy glow eventually began to dawn in his eyes again, at first stuttering on and off like a neon sign just after you turn the switch at dusk, then glowing steadily. He pulled a flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and dumped a capful of Chivas into his coffee.. He offered Billy the flask. Billy declined – he didn't know what the booze might do to his heart.
   Ginelli sat up straighter, brushed the hair off his forehead, and began to talk in a more normal rhythm.
   At three o'clock on Tuesday morning, Ginelli had parked on a woods road which branched off from Route 37-A near the Gypsies' camp. He fiddled with the steaks for a while and then walked back to the highway carrying the shopping bag. High clouds were sliding across the halfmoon like shutters. He waited for them to clear off, and when they did for a moment he was able to spot the circle of vehicles. He crossed the road and set off cross-country in that direction.
   'I'm a city boy, but my sense of direction ain't as bad as it could be,' he said. 'I can trust it in a pinch. And I didn't want to go in the same way you did, William.'
   He cut through a couple of fields and a thin copse of woods; splashed through one boggy place that smelled, he said, like twenty pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag. He also caught the seat of his pants in some very old barbed wire that had been all but invisible in the moonless dark.
   'If all that is country living, William, the rubes can have it,' he said.
   He had not expected any trouble from the camp hounds; Billy was a case in point. They hadn't bothered to make a sound until he actually stepped into the circle of the campfire, although they surely must have caught his scent before then.
   'You'd expect Gypsies to have better watchdogs than that,' Billy commented. 'At least that's the image.'
   'Nah,' Ginelli said. 'People can find all kinds of reasons to roust Gypsies without the Gyps themselves giving them more.'
   'Like dogs that bark all night long?'
   'Yeah, like that. You got much smarter, William, and people are gonna think you're Italian.'
   Still, Ginelli had taken no chances – he moved slowly along the backs of the parked vehicles, skipping the vans and campers where people would be sleeping and only looking in the cars and station wagons. He saw what he wanted after checking only two or three vehicles: an old suit coat crumpled up on the seat of a Pontiac station wagon.
   'Car wasn't locked,' he said. 'Jacket wasn't a bad fit, but it smelled like a weasel died in each pocket. I seen a pair of old sneakers on the floor in the back. They was a little tight, but I crammed 'em on just the same. Two cars later I found a hat that looked like something left over from a kidney transplant and put that on.'
   He had wanted to smell like one of the Gypsies, Ginelli explained, but not just as insurance against a bunch of worthless mutts sleeping by the embers of the campfire it was the other bunch of dogs that interested him. The valuable dogs. The pit-bulls.
   Three-quarters of the way around the circle, he spotted a camper with a small rear window that had been covered with wire mesh instead of glass. He peered in and saw nothing at all – the back of the camper was completely bare.
   'But it smelled of dog, William,' Ginelli said. 'Then I looked the other way and risked a quick poke on the penlight I brought. The hay-grass was all broken down in a path going away from the back of that camper. You didn't have to be Dan'l Boone to see it. They took the fucking dogs out of the rolling kennel and stashed them somewhere else so the local dog warden or humane-society babe wouldn't find them if someone blabbed. Only they left a path even a city boy could pick up with one quick poke of his flashlight. Stupid. That's when I really started to believe we could put some blocks to them.'
   Ginelli followed the path over a knoll and to the edge of another small wooded area.
   'I lost the path,' he said. 'I just stood there for a minute or two wondering what to do next. And then I heard it, William. I heard it loud and clear. Sometimes the gods give you a break.'
   'What did you hear?'
   'A dog farting,' Ginelli said. 'Good and loud. Sounded like someone blowing a trumpet with a mute on it.'
   Less than twenty feet into the woods he had found a rough corral in a clearing. It was no more than a circle of thick branches driven into the ground and then laced up with barbed wire. Inside were seven pit-bulls. Five were fast asleep. The other two were looking dopily at Ginelli.
   They looked dopy because they were dopy. 'I thought they'd be stoned, although it wasn't safe to count on it. Once you train dogs to fight, they become a pain in the ass – they will fight with each other and wreck your investment unless you're careful. You either put them in separate cages or you dope them. Dope is cheaper and it's easy to hide. And if they had been straight, a rinky-dink piece of work like that dog corral wouldn't have held them. The ones getting their asses chewed would have busted out even if it meant leaving half their hides hanging on the wires behind them. They were only sobering them up when the betting line got heavy enough to justify the risk. First the dope, then the show, then more dope.' Ginelli laughed.
   'See? Pit-bulls are just like fucking rock stars. It wears them out quick, but as long as you stay in the black, you can always find more pit-bulls. They didn't even have a guard. '
   Ginelli opened his shopping bag and took out the steaks. After parking on the woods road, he had taken them out of their store shrink-wrap and injected a hypo of what he called Ginelli's Pit-Bull Cocktail into each: a mixture of Mexican brown heroin and strychnine. Now he waved them in the air and watched the sleeping dogs come slowly to life. One of them uttered a thick bark that sounded like the snore of a man with serious nasal problems.
   'Shut up or no dinner,' Ginelli said mildly. The dog that had barked sat down. It immediately developed a fairly serious starboard list and began to go back to sleep.
   Ginelli tossed one of the steaks into the enclosure. A second. A third. And the last. The dogs squabbled over them in listless fashion. There was some barking, but it had that same thick, snory quality, and Ginelli felt he could live with it. Besides, anyone coming from the camp to check on the makeshift kennel would be carrying a flashlight, and he would have plenty of time to fade back into the woods. But no one had come.
   Billy listened with horrified fascination as Ginelli told him calmly how he had sat nearby, dry-smoking a Camel and watching the pit-bulls die. Most of them had gone very quietly, he reported (was there the faintest tinge of regret in his voice? Billy wondered uneasily) – probably because of the dope they had already been fed. Two of them had very mild convulsions. That was all. All in all, Ginelli felt, the dogs were not so badly off; the Gypsies had had worse things planned for them. It was over in a little less than an hour.
   When he was sure they were all dead or at least deeply unconscious, he had taken a dollar bill from his wallet and a pen from his breast pocket. On the dollar bill he wrote:
   NEXT TIME IT COULD BE YOUR GRANDCHILDREN, OLD MAN. WILLIAM HALLECK SAYS TO TAKE IT OFF. The pit-bulls had worn twists of clothesrope for collars. Ginelli tucked the bill under one of them. He hung the foul-smelling coat on one of the corral posts and put the hat on top of it. He removed the sneakers and took his own shoes from his hip pockets. He put them on and left.
   Coming back, he said, he had gotten lost for a while and had ended up taking a header in the bad-smelling boggy place. Finally, however, he had seen farmhouse lights and gotten himself oriented. He found the woods road, got into his car, and started back toward Bar Harbor.
   He was halfway there, he said, when the car started to feel not right to him. He couldn't put it any better or make it any clearer – it just didn't seem right anymore. It wasn't that it looked different or smelled different; it just didn't seem right. He had had such feelings before, and on most occasions they had meant nothing at all. But on a couple …
   'I decided I wanted to ditch it,' Ginelli said. 'I didn't want to take even a little chance that one of them. might have had insomnia, been walking around, seen it. I didn't want them to know what I was driving, because then they could fan out, look for me, find me. Find you. See? I do take them serious. I look at you, William, and I got to.'
   So he had parked the car on another deserted side road, pulling the distributor cap, and had walked the three miles back into town. When he got there, dawn was breaking.
   After leaving Billy in his new Northeast Harbor quarters, Ginelli had cabbed back toward Bar Harbor, telling the driver to go slow because he was looking for something.
   'What is it?' the driver asked. 'Maybe I know where it is.'
   'That's all right,' Ginelli replied. 'I'll know it when I see it.'
   And so he had – about two miles out of Northeast Harbor he had seen a Nova with a For Sale sign in the windshield sitting beside a small farmhouse. He checked to make sure the owner was home, paid off the cab, and made a cash deal on the spot. For an extra twenty the owner – a young fellow, Ginelli said, who looked like he might have more head lice than IQ points – had agreed to leave his Maine plates on the Nova, accepting Ginelli's promise to send them back in a week.
   'I might even do it, too,' Ginelli said thoughtfully. 'If we're still alive, that is.'
   Billy looked at him sharply, but Ginelli only resumed his story.

   He had driven back toward Bar Harbor, skirting the town itself and heading out along 37-A toward the Gypsy camp. He had stopped long enough to call a person he would only identify to Billy as a 'business associate.' He told the 'business associate' to be at a certain pay-telephone kiosk in midtown New York at twelve-thirty P.M. – this was a kiosk Ginelli used often, and due to his influence it was one of the few in New York that was rarely out of order.
   He drove by the encampment, saw signs of activity, turned around about a mile up the road, and cruised back. A makeshift road had been carved through the hayfield from 37-A to the camp, and there was a car heading up it to 37-A.
   'A Porsche turbo,' Ginelli said. 'Rich kid's toy. Decal in the back window that said Brown University. Two kids in the front, three more in the back. I pulled up and asked the kid driving if they were Gypsies down there, like I'd heard. He said they were, but if I'd been meaning to get my fortune read, I was out of luck. The kids had gone there to get theirs read, but all they got was a quick here's-your-hat, what's-your-hurry routine. They were moving out. After the pit-bulls, I wasn't surprised.
   'I headed back toward Bar Harbor and pulled into a gas station – that Nova gobbles gas like you wouldn't believe, William, but it can walk and talk if you put the go to the mat. I also grabbed me a Coke and dropped a couple of bennies because by then I was starting to feel a little bit low.'
   Ginelli had called his 'business associate' and had arranged to meet him at the Bar Harbor airport that evening at five o'clock. Then he had driven back to Bar Harbor. He parked the Nova in a public lot and walked around town for a while, looking for the man.
   'What man?' Billy asked.
   'The man,' Ginelli repeated patiently, as if speaking to an idiot. 'This guy, William, you always know him when you see him. He looks like all the other summer dudes, like he could take you for a ride on his daddy's sloop or drop ten grams of good cocaine on you or just decide to split the Bar Harbor scene and drive to Aspen for the Summerfest in his Trans Am. But he is not the same as they are, and there are two quick ways to find it out. You look at his shoes, that's one. This guy's shoes are bad shoes. They are shined, but they are bad shoes. They have no class, and you can tell by the way he walks that they hurt his feet. Then you look at his eyes. That's big number two. These guys, it seems like they never wear the Ferrari sunglasses and you can always see their eyes. It's like some guys got to advertise what they are just like some guys have got to pull jobs and then confess to the cops. Their eyes say, “Where's the next meal coming from? Where's the next joint coming from? Where's the guy I wanted to connect with when I came here?” Do you dig me?'
   'Yes, I think I do.'
   'Mostly what the eyes say is, “How do I score?” What did you say the old man in Old Orchard called the pushers and the quick-buck artists?'
   'Drift trade,' Billy said.
   'Yeah!' Ginelli kindled. The light in his eyes whirled. 'Drift trade, right good! The man I was looking for is high-class drift trade. These guys in resort towns float around like whores looking for steady customers. They rarely fall for big stuff, they move on all the time, and they are fairly smart … except for their shoes. They got J. Press shirts and Paul Stuart sport coats and designer jeans … but then you look at their feet and their fucking loafers say "Caldor's, nineteen-ninety-five.' Their loafers say "I can be had, I'll do a job for you." With whores it's the blouses. Always rayon blouses. You have to train them out of it.
   'But finally I saw the man, you know? So I, like, engaged him in conversation. We sat on a bench down by the public library – pretty place – and worked it all out. I had to pay a little more because I didn't have time to, you know, finesse him, but he was hungry enough and I thought he'd be trustworthy, Over the short haul, anyway. For these guys, the long haul doesn't fucking exist. They think the long haul is the place they used to walk through to get from American History to Algebra II.'
   'How much did you pay him?'
   Ginelli waved his hand.
   'I am costing you money,' Billy said. Unconsciously he had fallen into Ginelli's rhythm of speech.
   'You're a friend,' Ginelli said, a bit touchily. 'We can square it up later, but only if you want. I am having fun. This has been one weird detour, William. “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” if you can dig on that one time. Now can I tell this? My mouth is getting dry and I got a long way to go and we got a lot to do later on.'
   'Go ahead.'
   The fellow Ginelli had picked out was Frank Spurton. He said he was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado on vacation, but to Ginelli he had looked to be about twenty-five – a pretty old undergrad. Not that it mattered. Ginelli wanted him to go out to the woods road where he had left the rental Ford and then follow the Gypsies when they took off. Spurton was to call the Bar Harbor Motor Inn when he was sure they had alighted for the night. Ginelli didn't think they would go too far. The name Spurton was to ask for when he called the motel was John Tree. Spurton wrote it down. Money changed hands – sixty percent of the total amount promised. The ignition keys and the distributor cap for the Ford also changed hands. Ginelli asked Spurton if he could put it on the distributor all right, and Spurton, with a car thief's smile, said he thought he could manage.
   'Did you give him a ride out there?' Billy asked.
   'For the money I was paying him, William, he could thumb.'
   Ginelli drove back to the Bar Harbor Motor Inn instead and registered under the John Tree name. Although it was only two in the afternoon, he snagged the last room available for the night – the clerk handed him the key with the air of one conferring a great favor. The summer season was getting into high gear. Ginelli went to the room, set the alarm clock on the night table for four-thirty, and dozed until it went off. Then he got up and went to the airport.
   At ten minutes past five, a small private plane – perhaps the same one that had ferried Fander up from Connecticut – landed. The 'business associate' deplaned, and packages, a large one and three small ones, were unloaded from the plane's cargo bay. Ginelli and the 'business associate' loaded the larger package into the Nova's backseat and the small packages into the trunk. Then the 'business associate' went back to the plane. Ginelli didn't wait to see it take off, but returned to the motel, where he slept until eight o'clock, when the phone woke him.
   It was Frank Spurton. He was calling from a Texaco station in the town of Bankerton, forty miles northwest of Bar Harbor. Around seven, Spurton said, the Gypsy caravan had turned into a field just outside of town everything had been arranged in advance, it seemed.
   'Probably Starbird,' Billy commented. 'He's their front man.'
   Spurton had sounded uneasy … jumpy. 'He thought they had made him,' Ginelli said. 'He was loafing way back, and that was a mistake. Some of them turned off for gas or something. He didn't see them. He's doing about forty, just goofing along, and all of a sudden two old station wagons and a camper pass him, bang-boom-bang. That's the first he knows that he's all of a sudden in the middle of the fucking wagon train instead of behind it. He looks out his side window as the camper goes by, and he sees this old guy with no nose in the passenger seat, staring at him and waggling his fingers – not like he's waving but like he's throwing a spell. I'm not putting words in this guy's mouth, William; that's what he said to me on the phone. "Waggling his fingers like he was throwing a spell.`
   'Jesus,' Billy muttered.
   'You want a shot in your coffee?'
   'No … yes.'
   Ginelli dumped a capful of Chivas in Billy's cup and went on. He asked Spurton if the camper had had a picture on the side. It had. Girl and unicorn.
   'Jesus,' Billy said again. 'You really think they recognized the car? That they looked around after they found the dogs and saw it on that road where you left it?'
   'I know they did,' Ginelli said grimly. 'He gave me the name of the road they were on – Finson Road – and the number of the state road they turned off to get there. Then he asked me to leave the rest of his money in an envelope with his name on it in the motel safe. “I want to boogie” is what he said, and I didn't blame him much.'
   Ginelli left the motel in the Nova at eight-fifteen. He passed the town-line marker between Bucksport and Bankerton at nine-thirty. Ten minutes later he passed a Texaco station that was closed for the night. There were a bunch of cars parked in a dirt lot to one side of it, some waiting for repair, some for sale. At the end of the row he saw the rental Ford. He drove on up the road, turned around, and drove back the other way.
   'I did that twice more,' he said. 'I didn't get any of that feeling like before,' he said, 'so I went on up the road a little way and parked the heap on the shoulder. Then I walked back.'
   'And?'
   'Spurton was in the car,' Ginelli said. 'Behind the wheel. Dead. Hole in his forehead, just above the right eye. Not much blood. Might have been a forty-five, but I don't think so. No blood on the seat behind him. Whatever killed him didn't go all the way through. A forty-five slug would have gone through and left a hole in back the size of a Campbell's soup can. I think someone shot him with a ball bearing in a slingshot, just like the girl shot you. Maybe it was even her that did it.'
   Ginelli paused, ruminating.
   'There was a dead chicken in his lap. Cut open. One word written on Spurton's forehead, in blood. Chicken blood is my guess, but I didn't exactly have time to give it the full crime-lab analysis, if you can dig that.'
   'What word?' Billy asked, but he knew it before Ginelli said it.
   “' NEVER.”'
   'Christ,' Billy said, and groped for the laced coffee. He got the cup to his mouth and then set it back down again.
   If he drank any of that, he was going to vomit. He couldn't afford to vomit. In his mind's eye he could see Spurton sitting behind the Ford's wheel, head tilted back, a dark hole over one eye, a ball of white feathers in his lap. This vision was clear enough so he could even see the bird's yellow beak, frozen half-open, its glazed black eyes …
   The world swam in tones of gray … and then there was a flat hard smacking sound and dull heat in his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw Ginelli settling back into his seat.
   'Sorry, William, but it's like that commercial for aftershave says – you needed that. I think you are getting the guilts, over this fellow Spurton, and I want you to just quit it, you hear?' Ginelli's tone was mild, but his eyes were angry. 'You keep getting things all twisted around, like these bleeding-heart judges who want to blame everybody right up to the President of the United States for how some junkie knifed an old woman and stole her Social Security check – everyone, that is, but the junkie asshole who did it and is right now standing in front of him and waiting for a suspended sentence so he can go out and do it again.'
   'That doesn't make any sense at all!' Billy began, but Ginelli cut him off.
   'Fuck it doesn't,' he said. 'You didn't kill Spurton, William. Some Gypsy did, and whichever one it was, it was the old man at the bottom of it and we both know it. No one twisted Spurton's arm, either. He was doing a job for pay, that's all. A simple job. He got too far back and they boxed him. Now, tell me, William – do you want it taken off or not.'
   Billy sighed heavily. His cheek still tingled warmly where Ginelli had slapped him. 'Yes,' he said. 'I still want it taken off.'
   'All right, then, let's drop it.'
   'Okay.' He let Ginelli speak on uninterrupted to the end of his tale. He was, in truth, too amazed by it to think much of interrupting.
   Ginelli walked behind the gas station and sat down on a pile of old tires. He wanted to get his mind serene, he said, and so he sat there for the next twenty minutes or so, looking up at the night sky – the last glow of daylight had just faded out of the west – and thinking serene thoughts. When he felt he had his mind right, he went back to the Nova. He backed down to the Texaco station without turning on the lights. Then he dragged Spurton's body out of the rental Ford and put it into the Nova's trunk.
   'They wanted to leave me a message, maybe, or maybe just hang me up by the heels when the guy who runs that station found a body in a car with my name on the rental papers in the glove compartment.' But it was stupid, William, because if the guy was shot with a ball bearing instead of a bullet, the cops would take one quick sniff in my direction and then turn on them – the girl does a slingshot target-shooting act, for God's sake.
   'Under other circumstances, I'd love to see the people I was after paint themselves into a corner like that, but this is a funny situation – this is something we got to work out by ourselves. Also, I expected the cops to be out talking to the Gypsies the next day about something else entirely, if things went the way I expected, and Spurton would only complicate things. So I took the body. Thank God that station was just sitting there by its lonesome on a country road, or I couldn't have done it.'
   With the body of Spurton in the trunk, curled around the smaller trio of boxes the 'business associate' had delivered that afternoon, Ginelli drove on. He found Finson Road less than half a mile farther up. On Route 37-A, a good secondary road leading west from Bar Harbor, the Gypsies had been clearly open for business. Finson Road unpaved, potholed, and overgrown – was clearly a different proposition. They had gone to earth.
   'It made things a little tougher, just like having to clean up after them down at the gas station, but in some ways I was absolutely delighted, William. I wanted to scare them, and they were behaving like people who were scared. Once people are scared, it gets easier and easier to keep them scared.'
   Ginelli killed the Nova's headlights and drove a quarter of a mile down the Finson Road. He saw a turnout which led into an abandoned gravel pit. 'Couldn't have been more perfect if I'd ordered it,' he said.
   He opened the trunk, removed Spurton's body, and pawed loose gravel over it. The body buried, he went back to the Nova, took two more bennies, and then unwrapped the big package which had been in the backseat. WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA was stamped on the box. Inside was a Kalishnikov AK-47 assault rifle and four hundred rounds of ammunition, a spring-loaded knife, a lady's draw-string leather evening bag loaded with lead shot, a dispenser of Scotch strapping tape, and jar of lampblack.
   Ginelli blacked his face and hands, then taped the knife to the fat part of his calf. He stuck the tape in his pocket and headed off.
   'I left the sap,' he said. 'I already felt enough like a superhero out of some fucking comic book.'
   Spurton had said the Gypsies were camped in a field two miles up the road. Ginelli went into the woods and followed the road in that direction. He didn't dare lose sight of the road, he said, because he was afraid of getting lost.
   'It was slow going,' he said. 'I kept stepping on sticks and running into branches. I hope I didn't walk through no fucking poison ivy. I'm very susceptible to poison ivy.'
   After two hours spent struggling through the tangled second growth along the east side of Finson Road, Ginelli had seen a dark shape on the road's narrow shoulder. At first he thought it was a road sign or some sort of post. A moment later he realized it was a man.
   'He was standing there just as cool as a butcher in a meat cooler, but I believed he had to be shitting me, William, I mean. I was trying to be quiet, but I hang out in New York City. Fucking. Hiawatha I am not, if you can dig that. So I figured he was pretending not to hear me so he could get a fix on me. And when he had it he'd turn around and start chopping. I could have blown him out his socks where he stood, but it would have waked up everyone within a mile and a half, and besides; I promised you that I wouldn't hurt anyone.
   'So I stood there and stood there. Fifteen minutes I stood there, thinking that if I move I'm gonna step on another stick and then the fun will begin. Then he moves from the side of the road into the ditch to take a piss, and I can't believe what I am seeing. I don't know where this guy took lessons in sentry duty, but it sure wasn't Fort Bragg. He's carrying the oldest shotgun I've seen in twenty years – what the Corsicans call a loup. And, William, he is wearing a pair of Walkman earphones! I could have walked up behind him, put my hands in my shirt, and armpit-farted out “Hail, Columbia” – he never would have moved.'
   Ginelli laughed. 'I tell you one thing – I bet that old man didn't know the guy was rock and rolling while he was supposed to be watching for me.'
   When the sentry moved back to his former place, Ginelli walked toward him on the sentry's blind side, no longer making much of an effort to be silent. He removed his belt as he walked. Something warned the sentry – something glimpsed out of the corner of his eye – at the last moment. The last moment is not always too late, but this time it was. Ginelli slipped the belt around his neck and pulled it tight. There was a short struggle. The young Gypsy dropped his shotgun and clawed at the belt. The earphones slid down his cheeks and Ginelli could hear the Rolling Stones, sounding lost between the stars, singing 'Under My Thumb.'
   The young man began to make choked gargling noises. His struggles weakened, then stopped entirely. Ginelli kept the pressure on for another twenty seconds, then relaxed it ('I didn't want to make him foolish,' he explained seriously to Billy) and dragged him up the hill and into the underbush. He was a good-looking, well-muscled man of perhaps twenty-two, wearing jeans and Dingo boots. Ginelli guessed from Billy's description that it was Samuel Lemke, and Billy agreed. Ginelli found a good-sized tree and used strapping tape to bind him to it.
   'It sounds stupid, saying you taped somebody to a tree, but only if you never had it done to you. Enough of that shit wound around you, and you might as well forget it. Strapping tape is strong. You're going to be where you are until someone comes along and cuts you loose.
   You can't break it and you sure as shit can't untie it.'
   Ginelli cut off the bottom half of Lemke's T-shirt, stuffed it into his mouth, and taped it in place.
   'Then I turned over the cassette in his machine and stuck the phones back on his head. I didn't want him to be too bored when he woke up.'
   Ginelli now walked up the side of the road. He and Lemke were of similar height, and he was willing to take the risk that he would be able to stroll right up to another sentry before being challenged. Besides, it was getting late and he'd had no sleep but two short naps in the last forty-eight hours. 'Miss enough sleep and you goof up,' he said. 'If you're playing Monopoly, that's all right. But if you're dealing with fuckers that shoot people and then write discouraging words on their foreheads in chicken blood, you're apt to die. As it happens, I did make a mistake. I was just lucky enough to get away with it. Sometimes God forgives.'
   This mistake was not seeing the second sentry until he was walking past him. It happened because the second man was well back in the shadows instead of standing at the edge of the road, as Lemke had been doing. Luckily for Ginelli, the reason was not concealment but comfort. 'This one wasn't just listening to a Walkman,' Ginelli said. 'This one was fast asleep. Lousy guards, but about what you expect from civilians. Also, they hadn't made up their minds that I was serious long-term trouble for them yet. If you think someone is seriously on the prod for your ass, that keeps you awake. Man, that keeps you awake even when you want to go to sleep.'
   Ginelli walked over to the sleeping guard, picked his spot on the guard's skull, and then applied the butt of the Kalishnikov to that spot with a fair amount of force. There was a thud like the sound of a limp hand striking a mahogany table. The guard, who had been propped comfortably against a tree, fell over in the grass. Ginelli bent and felt for a pulse. It was there, slow but not erratic. He pressed on.
   Five minutes later he came to the top of a low hill. A sloping field opened out and down on the left, Ginelli could see the dark circle of vehicles parked about two hundred yards from the road. No campfire tonight. Dim, curtainscreened lights in a few of the campers, but that was all.
   Ginelli worked his way halfway down the hill on his belly and his elbows, holding the assault rifle out in front of him. He found a rock outcropping that allowed him to both seat the stock firmly and to sight down the hill to the encampment.
   'The moon was just coming up but I wasn't going to wait for it. Besides, I could see well enough for what I had to do – by then I was no more than seventy-five yards from them. And it wasn't as if I had to do any fine work. Kalishnikov's no good for that anyway. Might as well try to take out a guy's appendix with a chain saw. Kalishnikov's good to scare people with. I scared them, all right. I bet just about all of them made lemonade in the sheets. But not the old man. He's as tough as they come, William.'
   With the automatic rifle firmly set, Ginelli pulled in a deep breath and sighted on the front tire of the unicorn camper. There was the sound of crickets and a small stream babbling somewhere close by. A whippoorwill cried out once across the dark field. Halfway through its second verse, Ginelli opened fire.
   The Kalishnikov's thunder ripped the night in two. Fire hung around the end of the barrel in a corona as the clip – thirty .30-caliber bullets, each in a casing almost as long as a king-size cigarette, each powered with a hundred and forty grains of powder – ran out. The unicorn camper's front tire did not just blow; it exploded. Ginelli raked the bellowing gun the length of the camper – but low. 'Didn't put a single goddamn hole in the body,' he said. 'Tore the hell out of the ground beneath it. Didn't even cut it close, because of the gas tank. Ever see a camper blow? It's like what happens when you light a firecracker and put a can over it. I saw it happen once, on the New Jersey turnpike.'
   The camper's back tire blew. Ginelli popped the first clip and slammed another one in. The uproar was beginning below. Voices yelled back and forth, some angry, most just scared. A woman screamed.
   Some of them – how many of the total number, Ginelli had no way of telling – were spilling out of the backs of campers, most in pajamas and nightgowns, all looking confused and scared, all trying to stare in five different directions at the same time. And then Ginelli saw Taduz Lemke for the first time. The old man looked almost comic in his billowing nightshirt. Straggles of hair were escaping from beneath his tasseled nightcap. He came around the front of the unicorn van, took one look at the flattened, twisted tires, and then looked directly up toward where Ginelli was lying. He told Billy that there was nothing comic in that burning glance.
   'I knew he couldn't see me,' he said. 'The moon wasn't up, I had lampblack on my face and hands, I was just another shadow in a whole field of them. But … I think he did see, me, William, and it cooled off my heart.'
   The old man turned toward his people, who were beginning to drift in his direction, still babbling and waving their hands. He shouted at them in Rom and swept an arm at the caravan. Ginelli didn't understand the language, but the gesture was clear enough: Get under cover, you fools.
   'Too late, William,' Ginelli said smugly.
   He had loosed the second burst directly into the air over their heads. Now a lot of people were screaming – men as well as women. Some hit the ground and began to crawl, most of them with their heads down and their butts waving in the air. The rest ran, breaking in all directions but the one from which the fire had come.
   Lemke stood his ground, bellowing at them, bullthroated. His nightcap fell off. The runners went on running, the crawlers crawling. Lemke might ordinarily rule them with an iron hand, but Ginelli had panicked them.
   The Pontiac station wagon from which he had taken the coat and sneakers the night before was parked next to the van, nose out. Ginelli slammed a third clip into the AK-47 and opened fire again.
   'There wasn't anyone in it last night, and the way it smelled, I guessed no one would be in it tonight, either. I killed that station wagon – I mean, I annihilated that motherfucker.
   'An AK-47 is a very mean gun, William. People who have only seen war movies think that when you use a machine gun or an automatic rifle you end up with this neat little line of holes, but it ain't like that. It's messy, it's hard, and it happens fast. The windshield of that old Bonneville blew in. The hood popped up a little. Then the bullets caught it and tore it right off. The headlights blew. The tires blew. The grille fell off. I couldn't see the water spraying out of the radiator, it was too dark for that, but when the clip ran out I could sure hear it. When the clip ran out that son of a bitch looked like it had run into a brick wall. And during all of it, while the glass and chrome were flying, that old man never moved. Just looked for the muzzle flash so he could send the troops after me if I was stupid and waited for him to get his troops together. I decided to split before he could.'
   Ginelli ran for the road, bent over low like a World War II soldier advancing under fire. Once there, he straightened up and sprinted. He passed the inner-perimeter sentry the one he had used the gun butt on – with hardly a glance. But when he reached the spot where he had taken Mr Walkman, he stopped, catching his breath.
   'Finding him wasn't hard, even in the dark,' Ginelli said. 'I could hear the underbrush shaking and crackling. When I got a little closer I could hear him, too – unth, unth, oooth, oooth, galump, galump.'
   Lemke had actually worked his way a quarter of the way around the tree he had been taped to – the net result being that he was more tightly bound than ever. The earphones had fallen off and were dangling around his neck by their wires. When he saw Ginelli he stopped struggling and just looked.
   'I saw in his eyes that he thought I was going to kill him, and that he was good and fucking scared,' Ginelli said. 'That suited me just fine. The old dude wasn't scared, but I'll tell you, that kid wishes sincerely that they had never fucked with you, William. Unfortunately, I couldn't really make him sweat – there wasn't time.'
   He knelt down by Lemke and held up the AK-47 so Lemke could see what it was. Lemke's eyes showed that he knew perfectly well.
   'I don't have much time, asshole, so listen good,' Ginelli said. 'You tell the old man that next time I won't be shooting high or low or at empty cars. Tell him William Halleck says to take it off. You got that?'
   Lemke nodded as much as the tape would allow. Ginelli tore it off his mouth and pulled the ball of shirting free.
   'It's going to get busy around here,' Ginelli said. 'You yell, they'll find you. Remember the message.'
   He turned to go.
   'You don't understand,' Lemke said hoarsely. 'He'll never take it off. He's the last of the great Magyar chiefs – his heart is a brick. Please, mister, I'll remember, but he'll never take it off.'
   On the road a pickup truck went bucketing by toward the Gypsy camp. Ginelli glanced in that direction and then back at Lemke.
   'Bricks can be crushed,' he said. 'Tell him that, too.'
   Ginelli broke out to the road again, crossed it, and jogged back toward the gravel pit. Another pickup truck passed him, then three cars in a line. These people, understandably curious about who had been firing an automatic weapon in their little town in the dead of night, presented no real problem for Ginelli. The glow of the approaching headlights allowed him plenty of time to fade back into the woods each time. He heard an approaching siren just as he ducked into the gravel pit.
   He started the Nova up and rolled it dark to the end of the short access lane. A Chevrolet with a blue bubble on the dashboard roared by.
   'After it was gone, I wiped the crap off my face and hands and followed it,' Ginelli said.
   'Followed it?' Billy broke in.
   'Safer. If there's shooting, innocent people break their legs getting to it so they can see some blood before the cops come and hose it off the sidewalk. People going in another direction are suspicious. Lots of times they are leaving because they've got guns in their pockets.'
   By the time he reached the field again there were half a dozen cars parked along the shoulder of the road. Headlight beams crisscrossed each other. People were running back and forth and yelling. The constable's car was parked near the spot where Ginelli had sapped the second young man; the bubble light on the dash whipped flickers of blue across the trees. Ginelli unrolled the Nova's window. 'What's up, officer?'
   'Nothing you need to worry about. Move along.' And just in case the fellow in the Nova might speak English but only understand Russian, the constable whipped his flashlight impatiently in the direction Finson Road was going.
   Ginelli rolled slowly on up the road, threading his way between the parked vehicles – the ones that belonged to the local folks, he guessed. It was maybe harder for you to move along gawkers who were your neighbors, he told Billy. There were two distinct knots of people in front of the station wagon Ginelli had shot up. One comprised Gypsy men in pajamas and nightshirts. They were talking among themselves, some of them gesticulating extravagantly. The other comprised town men. They stood silently, hands in pockets, gazing at the wreck of the station wagon. Each group ignored the other.
   Finson Road continued on for six miles, and Ginelli almost ditched the car not once but twice as people came barreling along what was little more than a dirt track at high speed.
   'Just guys out in the middle of the night hoping to see a little blood before the cops hosed it off the sidewalk, William. Or off the grass, in this case.'
   He connected with a feeder road that took him into Bucksport, and from there he turned north. He was back in the John Tree motel room by two in the morning. He set the alarm for seven-thirty and turned in.
   Billy stared at him. 'You mean that all the time I was worrying that you were dead you were sleeping in the same motel we left?'
   'Well, yeah.' Ginelli looked ashamed of himself for a moment, and then he grinned and shrugged at the same time. 'Put it down to inexperience, William. I am not used to people worrying about me. Except my momma, of course, and that is different.'
   'You must have overslept – you didn't get here until nine or so.'
   'No – I was up as soon as the alarm went off. I made a call and then walked downtown. Rented another car. From Avis this time. I don't have such good luck with Hertz.'
   'You're going to be in trouble about that Hertz car, aren't you?' Billy asked.
   'Nope. All's well. It could have been hairy, though. That's what the call was about – the Hertz car. I got that “business associate” of mine to fly back up from New York. There's a little airport in Ellsworth, and he came in there. Then the pilot hopped down to Bangor to wait for him. My associate thumbed over to Bankerton. He -'
   'This thing is escalating,' Billy said. 'You know that? It's turning into Vietnam.'
   'Fuck, no – don't be dumb, William.'
   'Only the housekeeper flew up from New York.'

   'Well, yeah. I don't know anyone in Maine, and the one connection I made here got his ass killed. Anyway, there was no problem. I got a full report last night. My associate got to Bankerton around noon yesterday, and the only guy at the station was this kid who looked like he was quite a few bricks short of a full load. Kid would pump gas when someone came, but mostly he was dicking around in one of the bays, lubing a car or something. While he was in there, my friend hot-wired the Ford and drove it away. Went right past the garage bay. Kid never even turned around. My associate drove to Bangor International Airport and parked the Ford car in one of the Hertz stalls. I told him to check for bloodstains, and when I talked to him on the phone he said he found some blood in the middle of the front seat – that was chicken blood, almost for sure – and cleaned it up with one of those Wet-Nap things. Then he filled in the information on the flap of the folder, dropped it into the Express Return box, and flew back to the Apple.'
   'What about the keys? You said he hot-wired it.'
   'Well,' Ginelli said, 'the keys were really the problem all along. That was another mistake. I chalk it up to short sleep, same as the other one, but maybe it really is old age creeping up. They were in Spurton's pocket and I forgot to get them when, I laid him to rest. But now . . .' Ginelli took out a pair of keys on a bright yellow Hertz tab. He jingled them. 'Ta-da!'
   'You went back,' Billy said, his voice a little hoarse. 'Good Christ, you went back and dug him up to get the keys.'
   'Well, sooner or later the woodchucks or the bears would have found him and dragged him around,' Ginelli said reasonably, 'or hunters would have found him. Probably in bird season, when they go out with their dogs. I mean, it's no more than a minor annoyance to the Hertz people to get an express envelope without the keys – people are always forgetting to return keys to rental cars and hotel rooms. Sometimes they send them back, sometimes they don't bother. The service manager just dials an eight-hundred number, reads off the car's VIN, number, and the guy at the other end – from Ford or GM or Chrysler – gives him the key pattern. Presto! New keys. But if someone found a body in a gravel pit with a steel ball-bearing in his head and a set of car keys in his pocket that could be traced to me … bad. Very bad news. You get me?'
   'Yes.'
   'Besides, I had to go back out there anyway, you know,' Ginelli said mildly. 'And I couldn't go in the Nova.'
   'Why not? They hadn't seen it.'
   'I got to tell it in order, William. Then you'll see. Another shot?'
   Billy shook his head. Ginelli helped himself.
   'Okay. Early Tuesday morning, the dogs. Later Tuesday morning, the Nova. Tuesday night, the heavy firepower.'
   Wednesday morning, early, the second rental car. You got all this?'
   'I think so.'
   'Now we're talking about a Buick sedan. The Avis guy wanted to give me an Aries K, said it was all he had left and I was lucky to get that, but an Aries K wasn't right. Had to be a sedan. Unobtrusive, but fairly big. Took twenty bucks to change his mind, but I finally got the car I wanted. I drove it back to the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, parked it, and made a couple more calls to make sure everything was happening the way I'd set it up. Then I drove over here in the Nova. I like that Nova, Billy – it looks like a mongrel and it smells like cowshit inside, but it's got bones.
   'So I get here and finally set your mind at rest. By then I'm ready to crash again, and I'm too tired to even think about going back to Bar Harbor, and I spent the whole day in your bed.'
   'You could have called me, you know, and saved at least one trip,' Billy said quietly.
   Ginelli smiled at him. 'Yeah, I could have phoned, but fuck that. A phone call wouldn't have shown me how you were, William. You haven't been the only one worried.'
   Billy lowered his head a little and swallowed with some difficulty. Almost crying again. Lately he was always almost crying, it seemed.
   'So! Ginelli arises, refreshed and without too much of an amphetamine hangover. He showers, jumps into the Nova, which smells more like cowshit than ever after a day in the sun, and heads back to Bar Harbor. Once there, he takes the smaller packages out of the Nova's trunk and opens them in his room. There's a thirty-eight Colt Woodsman and a shoulder holster in one of them. The stuff in the other two packages fits into his sport-coat pockets. He then leaves the room and swaps the Nova for the Buick. He thinks for a minute that if there were two of him he wouldn't have had to spend half so much time shuffling cars like a parking-lot valet at a swanky Los Angeles restaurant. Then he heads out to scenic Bankerton for what he hopes will be the last fucking time. He makes just one stop along the way, at a supermarket. He goes in and buys two things: one of those Ball jars women put up preserves in and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Pepsi. He arrives in Bankerton just as twilight is starting to get really deep. He drives to the gravel pit and goes right in, knowing that being coy won't make a difference at this point – if the body has been found because of the excitement last night, he's going to be in the soup anyway. But no one is there, and there are no signs that anyone has been there. So he digs down to Spurton, feels around a little, and comes up with the prize. Just like in the Cracker Jack box.'
   Ginelli's voice was perfectly expressionless, but Billy found this part of it unreeling in his mind like a movie not a particularly pleasant one. Ginelli squatting down, pushing aside the gravel with his hands, finding Spurton's shirt … his belt … his pocket. Reaching in. Fumbling through sandy change that would never be spent. And underneath the pocket, chilly flesh that was stiffened into rigor mortis. At last, the keys, and the hasty reinterment.
   'Bruh,' Billy said, and shivered.
   'It is all a matter of perspective, William,' Ginelli said calmly. 'Believe me, it is.'
   I think that's what scared me about it, Billy thought, and then listened with growing amazement as Ginelli finished the tale of his remarkable adventures.
   Hertz keys in his pocket, Ginelli returned to the Avis Buick. He opened the Pepsi-Cola, poured it into the Ball jar, then closed the jar with the wire cap. That done, he drove up to the Gypsy camp.
   'I knew they'd still be there,' he said. 'Not because they wanted to still be there, but because the State Bears would have damn well told them to stay put until the investigation was over. Here's a bunch of, well, nomads, you might as well call them, strangers in a hick town like Bankerton to be sure, and some other stranger or strangers come along in the middle of the night and shoot up the place. The cops tend to get interested in stuff like that.'
   They were interested, all right. There was a Maine State Police cruiser and two unmarked Plymouths parked at the edge of the field. Ginelli parked between the Plymouths, got out of his car, and started down the hill to the camp. The dead station wagon had been hauled away, presumably to a place where the crime-lab people could go over it.
   Halfway down the hill, Ginelli met a uniformed State Bear headed back up.
   'You don't have any business here, sir,' the Bear said. 'You'll have to move along.'
   'I convinced him that I did have a spot of business there,' Ginelli told Billy, grinning.
   'How did you do that?'
   'Showed him this.'
   Ginelli reached into his back pocket and tossed Billy a leather folder. He opened it. He knew what he was looking at immediately; he had seen a couple of these in the course of his career as a lawyer. He supposed he would have seen a lot more of them if he had specialized in criminal cases. It was a laminated FBI identification card with Ginelli's picture on it. In the photo Ginelli looked five years younger. His hair was very short, almost brush-cut. The card identified him as Special Agent Ellis Stoner.
   Everything suddenly clicked together in Billy's mind.
   He looked up from the ID. 'You wanted the Buick because it looked more like -'
   'Like a government car, sure. Big unobtrusive sedan. I didn't want to show up in the rolling tuna-fish can the Avis guy tried to give me, and I surely didn't want to show up in Farmer John's drive-in fuck-machine.'
   'This – one of the things your associate brought up on his second trip?'
   'Yes.'
   Billy tossed it back. 'It looks almost real.'
   Ginelli's smile faded. 'Except for the picture,' he said softly, 'it is.'
   For a moment there was silence as Billy tried to grope his way around that one without thinking too much about what might have happened to Special Agent Stoner, and if he might have had kids.
   Finally he said, 'You parked between two police cars and flipped that ID at a state cop five minutes after you finished digging a set of car keys out of a corpse's pocket in a gravel pit.'
   'Nah,' Ginelli said, 'it was more like ten.'
   As he made his way into the camp, he could see two guys, casually dressed but obviously cops, on their knees behind the unicorn camper. Each of them had a small garden trowel. A third stood, shining down a powerful flashlight while they dug through the earth.
   'Wait, wait, here's another one,' one of them said . He picked a slug out of the dirt on his trowel and dropped it into a nearby bucket. Blonk! Two Gypsy children, obviously brothers, stood nearby watching this operation.
   Ginelli was actually glad the cops were there. No one knew what he looked like here, and Samuel Lemke had seen only a dark smear of lampblack. Also, it was entirely plausible that an FBI agent would show up as a result of a shooting incident featuring a Russian automatic weapon. But he had developed a deep respect for Taduz Lemke. It was more than that word written on Spurton's forehead; it was the way Lemke had stood his ground in the face of those .30-caliber bullets coming at him out of the dark. And, of course, there was the thing, that was happening to William. He felt it was just possible that the old man might know who he was. He might see it in Ginelli's eyes, or smell it on his skin, somehow.
   Under no circumstances did he intend to let the old man with the rotten nose touch him.
   It was the girl he wanted.
   He crossed the inner circle and knocked on the door of one cif the campers at random. He had to knock again before it was opened by a middle-aged woman with frightened, distrustful eyes.
   'Whatever you want, we haven't got it for you,' she said. 'We've got troubles here. We're closed. Sorry.'
   Ginelli flashed the folder. 'Special Agent Stoner, ma'am. FBI.'
   Her eyes widened. She crossed herself rapidly and said something in Romany. Then she said, 'Oh, God, what next? Nothing is right anymore. Since Susanna died it's like we've been cursed. Or -'
   She was pushed aside by her husband, who told her to shut up.
   'Special Agent Stoner,' Ginelli began again.
   'Yeah, I heard what you said.' He worked his way out. Ginelli guessed he was forty-five but he looked older, an extremely tall man who slumped so badly that he looked almost deformed. He wore a Disney World T-shirt and huge baggy Bermuda shorts. He smelled of Thunderbird wine and vomit waiting to happen. He looked like the sort of man to whom it happened fairly often. Like three and four times a week. Ginelli thought he recognized him from the night before -it had either been this guy or there was another Gypsy around here who went six-four or six-five. He had been one of those bounding away with all the grace of a blind epileptic having a heart attack, he told Billy.
   'What do you want? We've had cops on our asses all day. We always got cops on our asses, but this is just . . .fucking … ridiculous. P He spoke in an ugly, hectoring tone, and his wife spoke to him agitatedly in Rom.
   He turned his head toward her. 'Det krigiska jag-haller,' he said, and added for good measure: 'Shut up, bitch.' The woman retreated. The man in the Disney shirt turned back to Ginelli. 'What do you want? Why don't you go talk to your buddies if you want something?' He nodded toward the crime-lab people.
   'Could I have your name, please?' Ginelli asked with the same blank-faced politeness.
   'Why don't you get it from them?' He crossed slabby, flabby arms truculently. Under his shirt his large breasts jiggled. 'We gave them our names, we gave them our statements. Someone took a few shots at us in the middle of the night, that's all any of us know. We just want to be let loose. We want to get out of Maine, out of New England, off the fucking East Coast.' In a slightly lower voice he added, 'And never come back.' The index and pinky fingers of his left hand popped out in a gesture Ginelli knew well from his mother and grandmother – it was the sign against the evil eye. He didn't believe this man was even aware he had done it.
   'This can go one of two ways,' Ginelli said, still playing the ultrapolite FBI man to the hilt. 'You can give me a bit of information, sir, or you can end up in the State Detention Center pending a recommendation on whether or not to charge you with the obstruction of justice. If convicted of obstruction, you would face five years in jail and a fine of five thousand dollars.'
   Another flood of Rom from the camper, this one nearly hysterical.
   'Enkelt!' the man yelled hoarsely, but when he turned back to Ginelli again, his face had paled noticeably. 'You're nuts.'
   'No, sir,' Ginelli said. 'It wasn't a matter of a few shots. It was at least three bursts fired from an automatic rifle. Private ownership of machine guns and rapid-fire automatic weapons is against the law in the United States. The FBI is involved in this case and I must sincerely advise you that you are currently waist-deep in shit, it's getting deeper, and I don't think you know how to swim.'
   The man looked at him sullenly for a moment longer and then said, 'My name's Heilig. Trey Heilig. You coulda gotten it from those guys.' He nodded.
   'They've got their jobs to do, I've got mine. Now, are you going to talk to me?' The big man nodded resignedly.
   He put Trey Heilig through an account of what had happened the night before. Halfway through it, one of the state detectives wandered over to see who he was. He glanced at Ginelli's ID and then left quickly, looking both impressed and a little worried.
   Heilig claimed he had burst out of his camper at the sound of the first shots, had spotted the gun flashes, and had headed up the hill to the left, hoping to flank the shooter. But in the dark he had stumbled over a tree or something, hit his head on a rock, and blacked out for a while – otherwise he surely would have had the bastard. In support of his story he pointed to a fading bruise, at least three days old and probably incurred in a drunken stumble, and his left temple. Uh-huh, Ginelli thought, and turned to another page in his notebook. Enough of the hocus-pocus; it was time to get down to business.
   'Thank you very much, Mr Heilig, you've been a great help.'
   Telling the tale seemed to have mollified the man. 'Well … that's okay. I'm sorry I jumped on you like that. But if you were us' He shrugged.
   'Cops,' his wife said from behind him. She was looking 'I out the door of the camper like a very old, very tired badger looking out of her hole to see how many dogs are around, and how vicious they look. 'Always cops, wherever we go. That's usual. But this is worse. People are scared.'
   'Enkelt, Mamma,' Heilig said, but more gently now.
   'I've got to talk to two more people, if you can direct me,' he said, and looked at a blank page in his notebook. 'Mr Taduz Lemke and a Mrs Angelina Lemke.'
   'Taduz is asleep in there,' Heilig said, and pointed at the unicorn camper. Ginelli found this to be excellent news indeed, if it was true. 'He's very old and all of this has tired him out real bad. I think Gina's in her camper over there – she ain't a missus, though.'
   He pointed a dirty finger at a small green Toyota with a neat wooden cap on the back.
   'Thank you very much.' He closed the notebook and tucked it into his back pocket.
   Heilig retreated to his camper (and his bottle, presumably), looking relieved. Ginelli walked across the inner circle again in the growing gloom, this time to the girl's camper. His heart, he told Billy, was beating high and hard and fast. He drew a deep breath and knocked on the door.
   There was no immediate answer. He was raising his hand to knock again when it was opened. William had said she was lovely, but he was not prepared for the depth of her loveliness -the dark, direct eyes with corneas so white they were faintly bluish, the clean olive skin that glowed faintly pink deep down. He looked for a moment at her hands and saw that they were strong and corded. There was no polish in the nails, which were clean but clipped as bluntly close as the fingernails of a farmer. In one of those hands she held a book called Statistical Sociology.
   'Yes?'
   'Special Agent Ellis Stoner, Miss Lemke,' he said, and immediately that clear, lucent quality left her eyes – it was as if a shutter had fallen over them. 'FBI.'
   'Yes?' she repeated, but. with no more life than a telephone-answering machine.
   'We're investigating the shooting incident that took place here last night.'
   'You and half the world,' she said. 'Well, investigate away, but if I don't get my correspondence-course lessons in the mail by tomorrow morning I'm going to get grades taken off for lateness. So if you'll excuse me -'
   'We've reason to believe that a man named William Halleck may have been behind it,' Ginelli said. 'Does that name mean anything to you?' Of course it did; for a moment her eyes opened wide and simply blazed. Ginelli had thought her lovely almost beyond believing. He still did, but he now also believed this girl really could have been the one who killed Frank Spurton.
   'That pig!' she spat. 'Han satte sig pa en av stolarna! Han sneglade pa nytt mot hyllorna i vild! Vild!'
   'I have a number of pictures of a man we believe to be Halleck,' Ginelli said mildly. 'They were taken in Bar Harbor by an agent using a telephoto lens -'
   'Of course it's Halleck!' she said. 'That pig killed my tantenyjad – my grandmother! But he won't bother us long. He . . .' She bit her full lower lip, bit it hard, and stopped the words. If Ginelli had been the man he was claiming to be she would already have assured herself of an extremely deep and detailed interrogation. Ginelli, however, affected not to notice.
   'In one of the photographs, money appears to be passing between the two men. If one of the men is Halleck, then the other one is probably the shooter who visited your camp last night. I'd like you and your grandfather to identify Halleck positively if you can.'
   'He's my great-grandfather,' she said absently. 'I think he's asleep. My brother is with him. I hate to wake him.' She paused. 'I hate to upset him with this. The last few days have been dreadfully hard on him.'
   'Well, suppose we do this,' Ginelli said. 'You look through the photos, and if you can positively identify the man as Halleck, we won't need to bother the elder Mr Lemke.'
   'That would be fine. If you catch this Halleck pig, you will arrest him?'
   'Oh, yes. I have a federal John Doe warrant with me.'
   That convinced her. As she swung out of the camper with a swirl of skirt and a heartbreaking flash of tanned leg, she said something that chilled Ginelli's heart: 'There won't be much of him to arrest, I don't think.'
   They walked past the cops still sifting dirt in the deepening gloom. They passed several Gypsies, including the two brothers, now dressed for bed in identical pairs of camouflage pajamas. Gina nodded at several of them and they nodded back but steered clear – the tall Italian-looking man with Gina was FBI, and it was best not to meddle in such business.
   They passed out of the circle and walked up the hill toward Ginelli's car, and the evening shadows swallowed them.
   'It was just as easy as pie, William,' Ginelli said. 'Third night in a row, and it was still as easy as pie … why not? The place was crawling with cops. Was the guy who shot them up just going to come back and do something else while the cops were there? They didn't think so … but they were stupid, William. I expected it of the rest of them, but not of the old man – you don't spend your whole life learning how to hate and distrust the cops and then just suddenly decide they're gonna protect you from whoever has been biting on your ass. But the old man was sleeping. He's worn out. That's good. We may just take him, William. We may just.'
   They walked back to the Buick. Ginelli opened the driver's-side door while the girl stood there. And as he leaned in, taking the .38 out of the shoulder holster with one hand and pushing the wire lid-holder off the Ball jar with the other, he felt the girl's mood abruptly change from bitter exultation to one of sudden wariness. Ginelli himself was pumped up, his emotions and intuitions turned outward and tuned to an almost exquisite degree. He seemed to sense her first awareness of the crickets, the surrounding darkness, the ease with which she had been split off from the others, by a man she had never seen before, at a time when she should have known better than to trust any man she'd never seen before. For the first time she was wondering why 'Ellis Stoner' hadn't brought the papers down to the camp with him if he was so hot to get an ID on Halleck. But it was all too late. He had mentioned the one name guaranteed to cause a knee-jerk spasm and hate and to blind her with eagerness.
   'Here we are,' Ginelli said, and turned back to her with the gun in one hand and the glass Ball jar in the other.
   Her eyes widened again. Her breasts heaved as she opened her mouth and drew in breath.
   'You can start to scream,' Ginelli said, 'but I guarantee it will be the last sound you ever hear yourself make, Gina.'
   For a moment he thought she would do it anyway … and then she let the breath out in a long sigh.
   'You're the one working for that pig,' she said. 'Hans satte sig pa -'
   'Talk English, whore,' he said almost casually, and she recoiled as if slapped.
   'You don't call me a whore,' she whispered. 'No one is going to call me a whore.' Her hands – those strong hands – arched and hooked into claws.
   'You call my friend William a pig, I call you a whore, your mother a whore, your father an asshole-licking toilet hound,' Ginelli said. He saw her lips draw back from her teeth in a snarl and he grinned. Something in that grin made her falter. She did not exactly look afraid – Ginelli told Billy later that he wasn't sure then if it was in her to look afraid but some reason seemed to surface through her hot fury, some sense of who and what she was dealing with.
   'What do you think this is, a game?' he asked her. 'You throw a curse onto someone with a wife and a kid, you think it is a game? You think he hit that woman, your gramma, on purpose? You think he had a contract on her? You think the Mafia had a contract put out on your old grandmother? Shit!'
   The girl was now crying with rage and hate. 'He was getting a jerk-off job from his woman and he ran her down in the street! And then they … they han tog in pojken whitewash him off -but we got him fixed. And you will be next, you friend of pigs. It don't matter what -'
   He pushed the glass cap off the top of the wide-mouthed jar with his thumb. Her eyes went to the jar for the first time. That was just where he wanted them.
   'Acid, whore,' Ginelli said, and threw it in her face. 'See how many people you shoot with that slingshot of yours when you're blind.'
   She made a high, windy screeching sound and clapped her hands over her eyes, too late. She fell to the ground. Ginelli put a foot on her neck.
   'You scream and I'll kill you. You and the first three of your friends to make it up here.' He took the foot away. 'It was Pepsi-Cola.'
   She got to her knees, staring at him through her spread fingers, and with those same exquisitely tuned, almost telepathic senses, Ginelli knew that she hadn't needed him to tell her it wasn't acid. She knew, had known almost at once in spite of the stinging. An instant later – barely in time – he knew she was going to go for his balls.
   As she sprang at him, smooth as a cat, he sidestepped and kicked her in the side. The back of her head struck the chrome edging of the open driver's-side door with a loud crunch and she fell in a heap, blood flowing down one flawless cheek.
   Ginelli bent toward her, sure she was unconscious, and she was at him, hissing. One hand tore across his forehead, opening a long cut there. The other ripped through the arm of his turtleneck and drew more blood.
   Ginelli snarled and pushed her back down. He jammed the pistol against her nose. 'Come on, you want to go for it? You want to? Go for it, whore! Go on! You spoiled my face! I'd love for you to go for it!'
   She lay still, staring at him with eyes now as dark as death.
   'You'd do it,' he said. 'If it was just you, you'd come at me again. But it would just about kill him, wouldn't it? The old man?'
   She said nothing, but a dim light seemed to flicker momentarily across the darkness of those eyes.
   'Well, you think what it would do to him if that really had been acid I threw in your face. Think what it would do to him if instead of you I decided to throw it in the faces of those two kids in the GI Joe pajamas. I could do it, whore. I could do it and then go back home and eat a good dinner. You look into my face and you are gonna know I could.'
   Now at last he saw confusion and a dawning of something that could have been fear – but not for herself.
   'He cursed you,' he said. 'I was the curse.'
   'Fuck his curse, that pig,' she whispered, and wiped blood from her face with a contemptuous flick of her fingers.
   'He tells me not to hurt anyone,' Ginelli went on, as if she had not spoken. 'I haven't. But that ends tonight. I don't know how many times your old gramps has gotten away with this before, but he ain't going to get away with it this time. You tell him to take it off. You tell him it's the last time I ask. Here. Take this.'
   He pressed a scrap of paper into her hand. On it he had Written the telephone number of the 'safe kiosk' in New York.
   'You gonna call this number by midnight tonight and tell me what that old man says. If you need to hear back from me, you call that number again two hours later. You can pick up your message … if there is one. And that's it. One way or another, the door is gonna be closed. No one at that number is gonna know what the fuck you are talking about after two o'clock tomorrow morning.-'
   'He'll never take it off.'
   'Well, maybe he won't,' he said, 'because that is the same thing your brother said last night. But that's not your business. You just play square with him and let him make up his own mind what he's gonna do – make sure you explain to him that if he says no, that's when the boogiewoogie really starts. You go first, then the two kids, then anybody else I can get my hands on. Tell him that. Now, get in the car.'
   'No. I*
   Ginelli rolled his eyes. 'Will you wise up? I just want to make sure I have time to get out of here without twelve cops on my tail. If I had wanted to kill you, I wouldn't have given you a message to deliver.'
   The girl got up. She was a little wobbly, but she made it. She got in behind the wheel and then slid across the seat.
   'Not far enough.' Ginelli wiped blood off his forehead and showed it to her on his fingers. 'After this, I want to see you crouched up against that door over there like a wallflower on her first date.'
   She slid against the door. 'Good,' Ginelli said, getting in. 'Now, stay there.'
   He backed out to Finson Road without turning on his lights – the Buick's wheels spun a little on the dry timothy grass. He shifted to drive with his gun hand, saw her twitch, and pointed the gun at her again.
   'Wrong,' he said. 'Don't move. Don't move at all. You understand?'
   'I understand.'
   'Good.'
   He drove back the way he had come, holding the gun on her.
   'Always it's this way,' she said bitterly. 'For even a little justice we are asked to pay so much. He is your friend, this pig Halleck?'
   'I told you, don't call him that. He's no pig.'
   'He cursed us,' she said, and there was a kind of wondering contempt in her voice. 'Tell him for me, mister, that God cursed us long before him or any of his tribe ever were,'
   'Save it for the social worker, babe.'
   She fell silent.
   A quarter of a mile before the gravel pit where Frank Spurton rested, Ginelli stopped the car.
   'Okay, this is far enough. Get out.'
   'Sure.' She looked at him steadily with those unfathomable eyes. 'But there is one thing you should know, mister – our paths will cross again. And when they do, I will kill you.'
   'No,' he said. 'You won't. Because you owe me your life tonight. And if that ain't enough for you, you ungrateful bitch, you can add in your brother's life last night. You talk, but you still don't understand the way things are, or why you ain't home-free on this, or why you ain't never gonna be home-free on this until you quit. I got a friend you could fly like a kite if you hooked up some twine to his belt. What have you got? I'll tell you what you got. You got an old man with no nose who put a curse on my friend and then ran away in the night like a hyena.'
   Now she was crying, and crying hard. The tears ran down her face in streams.
   'Are you saying God is on your side?' she asked him, her voice so thick the words were almost unintelligible. 'Is that what I hear you saying? You should burn in hell for such! blasphemy. Are we hyenas? If we are, it was people like your friend who made us so, My great-grandfather says there are no curses, only mirrors you hold up to the souls of men and women.'
   'Get out,' he said. 'We can't talk. We can't even hear each other.'
   'That's right.'
   She opened the door and got out. As he pulled away she screamed: 'Your friend is a pig and he'll die thin!'
   'But I don't think you will,' Ginelli said.
   'What do you mean?'
   Ginelli looked at his watch. It was after three o'clock. 'Tell you in the car,' he said. 'You've got an appointment at seven o'clock.'
   Billy felt that sharp, hollow needle of fear in his belly again. 'With him?'
   'That's right. Let's go.'
   As Billy got to his feet there was another arrhythmic episode this the longest one yet. He closed his eyes and grasped at his chest, What remained of his chest. Ginelli grabbed him. 'William, are you okay?'
   He looked in the mirror and saw Ginelli holding a grotesque sideshow freak in flapping clothes. The arrhythmia passed and was replaced by an even more familiar sensation – that milky, curdled rage that was directed at the old man … and at Heidi.
   'I'm okay,' he said. 'Where are we going,?
   'Bangor,' Ginelli said.

Chapter Twenty-three. The Transcript

   They took the Nova. Both things Ginelli had told him about it were true – it smelled quite strongly of cow manure, and it ate the road between Northeast Harbor and Bangor in great swallows. Genelli stopped around four to pick up a huge basket of steamer clams. They parked at a roadside rest area and divided them, along with a six-pack of beer. The two or three family groups at the picnic tables got a look at Billy Halleck and moved as far away as possible.
   While they ate, Ginelli finished his story. It didn't take long.
   'I was back in the John Tree room by eleven o'clock last night,' he said. 'I could have gotten there quicker, maybe, but I did a few loops and figure-eights and turn-backs just to make sure no one was behind me.
   'Once I was in the room, I called New York and sent a fellow out to the telephone I gave the girl the number for. I told him to take a tape deck and a steno plug with him – the kind of gadget reporters use to do phone interviews. I didn't want to have to rely on hearsay, William, if you can dig that. I told him to call me back with the tape as soon as she hung up.
   'I disinfected the cuts she put in me while I waited for the call-back. I'm not gonna say she had hydrophobia or anything like that, William, but there was so much hate in her, you know.'
   'I know,' Billy said, and thought grimly: I really do know. Because I'm gaining. In that one way, I'm gaining.
   The call had come at a quarter past twelve. Closing his eyes and pressing the fingers of his left hand against his forehead, Ginelli was able to give Billy an almost exact recitation of how the playback had gone.
   Ginelli's Man: Hello.
   Gina Lemke: Do you work for the man I saw tonight?
   Ginelli's Man: Yes, you could say that.
   Gina: Tell him my great-grandfather says
   Ginelli's Man: I got a steno plug on this. I mean, you are being taped. I will play it back for the man you mentioned. So
   Gina: You can do that?
   Ginelli's Man: Yes. So you are talking to him now, in a way of speaking.
   Gina: All right. My great-grandfather says he will take it off. I tell him he is crazy, worse, that he is wrong, but he is firm. He says there can be no more hurting and no more fear for his people – he will take it off. But he needs to meet with Halleck. He can't take it off unless he does. At seven o'clock tomorrow evening my great-grandfather will be in Bangor. There is a park between two streets Union and Hammond. He will be there sitting on a bench. He will be alone. So you win, big man – you win, mi hela po klockan. Have your pig friend in Fairmont Park, Bangor, tonight at seven.
   Ginelli's Man: That's all?
   Gina: Yes, except tell him I hope his cock turns black and falls off.
   Ginelli's Man: You're telling him yourself, sister. But you wouldn't be if you knew who you was telling.
   Gina: And fuck you, too.
   Ginelli's Man: You should call back here at two, to see if there's an answer.
   Gina: I'll call.
   'She hung up,' Ginelli said. He dumped the empty clam shells in a litter basket, came back, and added with no pity at all: 'My guy said it sounded like she was crying all through it.'
   'Christ Jesus,' Billy muttered.
   'Anyway, I had my guy put the steno plug back on the phone and I recorded a message for him to play back to her when she called at two. It went like this. "Hello, Gina.
   This is Special Agent Stoner. I have your message. It sounds like a go. My friend William will come to the park at seven o'clock this evening. He will be alone, but I will be watching. Your people will be watching too, I imagine. That's fine. Let us both watch and let neither of us get in the way of what goes on between the two of them. If anything happens to my friend, you will pay a high price.'
   'And that was it?'
   'Yes. That was it.'
   'The old man caved in.'
   'I think he caved in. It could still be a trap, you know.' Ginelli looked at him soberly. 'They know I'll be watching. They may have decided to kill you where I can see it, as revenge on me, and then take their chances with what happens next.'
   'They're killing me anyway,' Billy said.
   Or the girl could take it into her he had to do it on her own. She's mad, William. People don't always do what they're told when they're mad.'
   Billy looked at him reflectively. 'No, they don't. But either way, I don't have much choice, do I?'
   'No … I don't think you do. You ready?'
   Billy glanced toward the people staring at him and nodded. He'd been ready for a long time.
   Halfway back to the car he said: 'Did you really do any of it for me, Richard?'
   Ginelli stopped, looked at him, and smiled a little. The smile was almost vague … but that whirling, twirling light in his eyes was sharply focused – too sharply focused for Billy to look at. He had to shift his gaze.
   'Does it matter, William?'

Chapter Twenty-four. Purpurfargade Ansiktet

   They were in Bangor by late afternoon. Ginelli swung the Nova into a gas station, had it filled up, and got direction from the attendant. Billy sat exhaustedly in the passenger seat. Ginelli looked at him with sharp concern when h came back.
   'William, are you all right?'
   'I don't know,' he said, and then reconsidered. 'No.'
   'Is it your ticker again?'
   'Yeah.' He thought about what Ginelli's midnight doctor had said – potassium, electrolytes … something about how Karen Carpenter might have died. 'I ought to have something with potassium in it. Pineapple juice. Bananas. Or oranges.' His heart broke into a sudden disorganized gallop. Billy leaned back and shut his eyes and waited to see if he was going to die. At last the uproar quieted. 'A whole bag of oranges.'
   There was a Shop and Save up ahead. Ginelli pulled in. 'I'll be right back, William. Hang in.'
   'Sure,' Billy said vaguely, and fell into a light doze as soon as Ginelli left the car. He dreamed. In his dream he saw his house in Fairview. A vulture with a rotting beak flew down to the windowsill and peered in. From inside the house someone began to shriek.
   Then someone else was shaking him roughly. Billy started awake. 'Huh!'
   Ginelli leaned back and blew out breath. 'Jesus, William, don't scare me like that!'
   'What are you talking about?'
   'I thought you were dead, man. Here.' He put a net bag filled with navel oranges in Billy's lap. Billy plucked at the fastener with his thin fingers – fingers which now looked like white spider legs – and couldn't get it to give. Ginelli slit the bag open with his pocket knife, then cut an orange in quarters with it. Billy ate slowly at first, as one does a duty, then ravenously, seeming to rediscover his appetite for the first time in a week or more. And his disturbed heart seemed to calm down and rediscover something like its old steady beat … although that might have only been his mind playing games with itself.
   He finished the first orange and borrowed Ginelli's knife to cut a second one into pieces.
   'Better?' Ginelli asked.
   'Yes. A lot. When do we get to the park?'
   Ginelli pulled over to the curb, and Billy saw by the sign that they were on the corner of Union Street and West Broadway -summer trees, full of foliage, murmured in a mild breeze. Dapples and shadow moved lazily on the street.
   'We're here,' Ginelli said simply, and Billy felt a finger touch his backbone and then slide coldly down it. 'As close as I want to get, anyway. I would have dropped you off downtown, only you would have attracted one hell of a lot of attention walking up here.'
   'Yes,' Billy said. 'Like children fainting and pregnant women having miscarriages.'
   'You couldn't have made it anyway,' Ginelli said kindly. 'Anyway, it don't matter. Park's right down at the foot of this hill. Quarter of a mile. Pick a bench in the shade and wait.'
   'Where will you be?'
   'I'll be around,' Ginelli said and smiled. 'Watching you and watching out for the girl. If she ever sees me again before I see her, William, I ain't never going to have to change my shirt again. You understand?'
   'Yes.'
   'I'll be keeping my eye on you.'
   'Thank you,' Billy said, and was not sure just how, or how much, he meant that. He did feel gratitude to Ginelli, but it was a strange, difficult emotion, like the hate he now bore for Houston and for his wife.
   'Por nada,' Ginelli said, and shrugged. He leaned across the scat, hugged Billy, and kissed him firmly on both cheeks. 'Be tough with the old bastard, William.'
   'I will,' Billy said, smiling, and got out of the car. The dented Nova pulled away. Billy stood watching until it had disappeared around the comer at the end of the block, and then he started down the hill, swinging the bag of oranges in one hand.
   He barely noticed the little boy who, halfway up the block, abruptly turned off the sidewalk, scaled the Cowans' fence, and shot across their backyard. That night this little boy would awake screaming from a nightmare in which a shambling scarecrow with lifeless blowing hair on its skull-head bore down on him. Running down the hallway to his room, the boy's mother heard him screaming: 'It wants to make me eat oranges until I die! Eat oranges till I die! Eat till I die!'
   The park was wide and cool and green and deep. On one side, a gaggle of kids were variously climbing on the jungle gym, teeter-tottering, and whooshing down the slide. Far across the way a softball game was going on – the boys against the girls, it looked like. In between, people walked, flew kites, threw Frisbees, ate Twinkies, drank Cokes, slurped Slurpies. It was a cameo of American midsummer in the latter half of the twentieth century, and for a moment Billy warmed toward it – toward them.
   All that's lacking is the Gypsies, a voice inside him whispered, and the chill came back – a chill real enough to bring goose bumps to his arms and cause him to abruptly cross his thin arms over his reed of a chest. We ought to have the Gypsies, oughtn't we? The old station wagons with the NRA stickers on the rusty bumpers, the campers, the vans with the murals on the sides – then Samuel with his bowling pins and Gina with her slingshot. And they all came running. They always came running. To see the juggling, to try the slingshot, to hear the future, to get a potion or a lotion, to bed a girl– or at least to dream of it– to see the dogs tear at each other's guts. They always come running. Just for the strangeness of it. Sure, we need the Gypsies. We always have. Because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there? Well, they'll be along soon, right?
   'Right,' he croaked, and sat down on a bench that was almost in the shade. His legs were suddenly trembling, strengthless. He took an orange out of the bag and after some effort managed to tear it open. But now his appetite Was gone again and he could only eat a little.
   The bench was quite a distance apart from the others, and Billy attracted no undue attention, so far as he could tell – from a distance, he could have been a very thin old man taking in a little afternoon air.
   He sat, and as the shade crept up first over his shoes, then his knees; and finally puddled in his lap, an almost fantastical sense of despair overtook him – a feeling of waste and futility much darker than these innocent afternoon shadows. Things had gone too far and nothing could be taken back. Not even Ginelli, with his psychotic energy, could change what had happened. He could only make things worse.
   I should have never… Billy thought, but then whatever it was he should have never done broke up and faded out like a bad radio signal. He dozed again. He was in Fairview, a Fairview of the Living Dead. Corpses lay everywhere starvelings. Something pecked sharply at his shoulder.
   No.
   Peck!
   No!
   But it came again, peck, and peck and peck, it was the vulture with the rotting nose, of course, and he didn't want to turn his head for fear it might peck his eyes out with the black remnants of its beak. But
   (peck)
   it insisted, and he
   (!peck!peck!)
   slowly turned his head, rising out of the dream at the same time and seeing -with no real surprise that it was Taduz Lemke beside him on the bench.
   'Wake up, white man from town,' he said, and plucked sharply at Billy's sleeve again with his twisted, nicotine stained fingers. Peck! 'Your dreams are bad. They have a stink I can smell on your breath.'
   'I'm awake,' Billy said thickly.
   'You sure?' Lemke asked, with some interest.
   'Yes.'
   The old man wore a gray serge suit, double-breasted. On his feet were high-topped black shoes. What little hair he had was parted in the middle and pulled sternly backward from his forehead, which was as lined as the leather of his shoes. A gold hoop sparkled from one of his earlobes.
   The rot, Billy saw, had spread – dark lines now radiated out from the ruins of his nose and across most of his runneled left cheek.
   'Cancer,' Lemke said. His bright black eyes – the eyes of a bird for sure – never left Billy's face. 'You like that? It make you happy?' 'Happy' came out 'hoppy.'
   'No,' Billy said. He was still trying to clean away the dregs of the dream, to hook himself into this reality. 'No, of course not.'
   'Don't lie,' Lemke said. 'There is no need. It make you happy, of course it make you happy.'
   'None of it makes me happy,' he said. 'I'm sick about it all. Believe me.'
   'I don't believe nothing no white man from town ever told me,' Lemke said. He spoke with a hideous sort of geniality. 'But you sick, oh yeah. You think. You nastan farsk – dying from being thin. So I brought you something. It's gonna fatten you up, make you better.' His lips drew back from the black stumps of his teeth in a hideous grin. 'But only when somebody else eats it.'
   Billy looked at what Lemke held on his lap and saw with a floating kind of deja vu that it was a pie in a disposable aluminum pie plate. In his mind he heard his dream self telling his dream wife: I don't want to be fat. I've decided I like being thin. You eat it.
   'You look scared,' Lemke said. 'It's too late to be scared, white man from town.'
   He took a pocketknife from his jacket and opened it, performing the operation with an old man's grave and studied slowness. The blade was shorter than the blade of Ginelli's pocketknife, Billy saw, but it looked sharper.
   The old man pushed the blade into the crust and then drew it across, creating a slit about three inches long. He withdrew the blade. Red droplets fell from it onto the crust. The old man wiped the blade on the sleeve of his jacket, leaving a dark red stain. Then he folded the blade and put the knife away. He hooked his misshapen thumbs over opposing sides of the pie plate and pulled gently. The slit gaped, showing a swimming viscous fluid in which dark things – strawberries, maybe -floated like clots. He relaxed his thumbs. The slit closed. He pulled at the edges of the pie plate again. The slit opened. So he continued to pull and release as he spoke. Billy was unable to look away.
   'So … you have convinced yourself that it is … What did you call it? A poosh. That what happened to my Susanna is no more your fault than my fault, or her fault, or God's fault. You tell yourself you can't be asked to pay for it – there is no blame, you say. It slides off you because your shoulders are broken. No blame, you say. You tell yourself and tell yourself and tell yourself. But there is no poosh, white man from town. Everybody pays, even for things they dint do. No poosh.'
   Lemke fell reflectively silent for a moment. His thumbs tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. The slit in the pie opened and closed.
   'Because you won't take blame – not you, not your friends – I make you take it. I stick it on you like a sign. For my dear dead daughter that you killed I do this, and for her mother, and for her children. Then your friend comes. He poisons dogs, shoots guns in the night, uses his hands on a woman, threatens to throw acid into the faces of children. Take it off, he says – take it off and take it off and take it off. And finally I say okay as long as he will podol enkelt – get out of here! Not from what he did, but from what he will do – he is crazy, this friend of yours, and he will never stop. Even my 'Gelina says she sees from his eyes he will never stop. “But we'll never stop, either,” she says, and I say, “Yes we will. Yes we will stop. Because if we don't, we are crazy like the town man's friend. If we don't stop, we must think what the white man says is right – God pays back, that it's a poosh.”'
   Tense and relax. Tense and relax. Open and close.
   “'Take it off,” he says, and at least he don't say “Make it disappear, make it not there anymore.” Because a curse is in some way like a baby.'
   His old dark thumbs pulled. The slit stretched open.
   'No one understand these things. Not me, either, but I know a little. “Curse” is your word, but Rom is better. Listen: Purpurfargade ansiktet. You know that?'
   Billy shook his head slowly, thinking the phrase had a richly dark texture.
   'It mean something like “Child of the night-flowers.” Is like to get a child who is varsel – changeling. Gypsies say varsel is always found under lilies or nightshade, which blooms at night. This way of saying is better because curse is a thing. What you have is not a thing. What you have is alive.'
   'Yes,' Billy said. 'It's inside, isn't it! It's inside, eating me.'
   'Inside? Outside?' Lemke shrugged. 'Everywhere. This thing – urpurfargade ansiktet – you bring it into the world like a baby. Only it grows strong faster than a baby, and you can't kill it because you can't see it – only you can see what it does.'
   The thumbs relaxed. The slit closed. A dark red rivulet trickled across the mild topography of the pie crust.
   'This curse … you dekent felt o gard da borg. Be to it like a father. You still want to be rid of it?'
   Billy nodded.
   'You still believe in the poosh?'
   'Yes.' It was only a croak.
   The old Gypsy man with the rotting nose smiled. The black lines of rot under his left cheek dipped and wavered. The park was nearly empty now. The sun was nearing the horizon. The shadows covered them. Suddenly the knife was in Lemke's hand again, the blade out.
   He's going to stab me, Billy thought dreamily. Going to stab me in the heart and run away with his strawberry pie under his arm.
   'Unwrap your hand,' Lemke said.
   Billy looked down.
   'Yes – where she shot you.'
   Billy pulled the clamps out of the elastic bandage and slowly unwrapped it. Underneath, his hand looked too white, fishlike. In contrast, the edges of the wound were dark, dark red – a liverish color. The same color as those things inside his pie, Billy thought. The strawberries. Or whatever they are. And the wound had lost its almost perfect circularity as the edges puffed together. Now it looked like …
   Like a slit, Billy thought, his eyes drifting back to the pie.
   Lemke handed Billy the knife.
   How do I know you haven't coated this blade with curare or cyanide or D-Con Rat-Prufe? he thought about asking, and then didn't. Ginelli was the reason. Ginelli and the Curse of the White Man from Town.
   The pocketknife's worn bone handle fitted comfortably into his hand.
   'If you want to be rid of the purpurfargade ansiktet, first you give it to the pie … and then you give the pie with the curse-child inside it to someone else. But it has to be soon, or it come back on you double. You understand?'