Beasts

7 IN AT THE DEATH

The last truck left Caddie off at an interchange a mile or more from the center of the city. The driver pointed out to her the slim white needle, impossibly tall, just visible beyond the river, and said this was as close as he came to it; so she swung down from the cab and began to walk toward it.

It had been terrifying at first to stand alone beside the vast spread of naked highway, waiting for the trucks. For a year she had rarely been out of the company of the pride, had forgotten, if she’d ever known, how to discount the terror of this inhuman landscape, stone and sounds and vast signs and speed. She wanted to run from it, but there was no one who could do this but she; certainly none of the leos, and Meric was known from the tape in which she had appeared only briefly. So she had stood waiting in a thin rain for the trucks — there was almost no other traffic — holding out her thumb in the venerable gesture. She recoiled when they bore down on her and barreled past, wrapped in thin veils of mist that their tires pressed out from the road’s wet surface; but she stayed.

When at last one, with a long declension of gears, slowed and stopped fifty yards down from where she stood, her heart beat fast as she ran to it. She felt for the gun in her belt, under her jacket; she felt her breasts move as she ran.

They were only truck drivers, though, she came quickly to learn, the same she had dealt with every week in Hutt’s bar. They talked a lot, but that didn’t bother her. Only once did she feel compelled to mention the gun, casually, in passing: a person has to protect herself.

In a way, it was the small talk that was harder to answer: Where are you from? Why are you going to Washington? Who are you?

Looking for a relative. Promise of a job. Come from, well, north, Up there. Because she couldn’t tell them that she had come hundreds of miles at the direction of the fox to try, somehow, to free the lion.

The last truck moved off, ascending stately through its gears. She turned up her jacket collar — it was still damp autumn here, not winter, as it was up north, and yet penetrating — and went down into the maze of concrete, trying to keep the white needle in sight.

She was nearing the end of the longest year of her life. It had been distended by loss, by suffering — by death, for it seemed to her that since she had seen she would die, in the mountains, and had accepted that, that she had in fact died; and when the ghostly sleds had appeared, creeping through the blowing snow with supernatural purpose and a faint wailing, it had taken her a time to understand that they had not come to signal the death she awaited but to thrust her back into life.

And then she had killed a man, an eternity later, when they had at last come down out of the mountains. A Federal man, one of the black coats, who still slogged through mud implacably toward her in dreams. That was a long moment, a year in itself. Yet it took her less time than it had taken Painter to kill the man who had come on them in the cabin in the woods, back at the beginning of her life.

Moving northwest with the widowed pride, always deeper into wilderness and solitude, always waiting for something, some word of Painter, some word from the fox, she felt her time expand vastly. Grief, waiting, solitude: if you want to live forever, she thought, choose those. In a way Caddie perceived but couldn’t express, the pride did live forever, the females and the children: they lived within each moment forever, till the next moment. They took the same joy in the sunrise, hunted and played and ate with the same single-minded purpose, as they had when Painter had been with them; and their grief, when they felt it, was limitless, with no admixture of hope or expectation. She had explained to Meric: leos aren’t like Painter, not most of them. Painter has been wounded into consciousness, his life is — a little bit — open to us, something shines through his being which is like what shines through ours, but the females and the children are dark, You’ll never learn their story because they have no story. If you want to go among them, you have to give up your own story: be dark like they are.

Caddie by now knew how to do that, to an extent, but Meric would never learn it, and in any case it wasn’t allowed to either of them then, because with Painter gone they two must act as the bridge between the pride and the human world it moved through and lived in, They had to spend Reynard’s money in the towns, they had to learn the safe border crossings, they had constantly to think. Caddie forced herself to struggle against the wisdom of the females, fight it with human cunning for their sakes, forced herself to believe that only by keeping her head above the dark water could she help save them, when all she wanted to do was give up the burden of cunning and sink down amid their unknowing forever. No: only to Painter could she resign that burden.

Then at one of the prearranged mail drops had come the summons from the fox, Suspicious, anxious, unable to believe that Reynard could really know all he pretended to know, she had nevertheless left Meric to shepherd the pride and followed her instructions. It was all she could do.

She soon lost sight of the monument. The littered, shabby streets urged her on, striking purposefully through the buildings but leading nowhere except to further streets. Alarmed by acrid odors that had come to mean danger to her, she began to see why Painter had smoked tobacco in towns. She walked aimlessly among crowds that seemed bent on pressing business, hurrying people with eyes intent, lugging heavy bags that perhaps they were carrying somewhere or perhaps had stolen from somewhere they were eager to get away from. Caddie thrust her hands into her pockets and walked on, unable to catch anyone’s eye or hold his attention long enough to ask a question.

At a convergence of streets, stores were lit up, and the sallow globes of a few unbroken street lights were on. Lines of people stood patiently waiting to be let in one at a time to buy — what? Caddie wondered, In one barred store window, televisions: ranks of them, all showing the same image differently distorted, a man’s head and shoulders, his mouth moving silently. Then, in an instant, they all changed, to show a street like this one. A black three-wheeled car. Two men in dark overcoats got out, looking wary and tired. Between them a third, a tiny limping creature, in a hat whose brim hid him from the camera, but whose manner revealed him to Caddie. She could almost smell him.

She went to the door of the store. A burly black guard, armed, stood in the doorway, looking bored. Caddie slipped past him, expecting to be seized, but the guard seemed not to care.

“…has not revealed the identity of its witness, though he is believed to have been a high official in the Gregorius government. USE says facts revealed in the hearings will shed dramatic new light on the assassination of two years ago....” He spoke with such a clipped, false intonation that she could barely understand him.

Someone stepped in front of her then; and another, coatless — he must work here, she thought — came to stand next to her. “This ain’t a the-ayter,” he said.

“What?”

The person in front of her stepped away. On the screen was an image that made her heart leap. Painter stood in front of his tent, his old shotgun in his hands, He looked at her — or at Meric, rather — calm, puzzled, faintly amused.

The store employee put his hand on Caddie’s shoulder. “You ain’t buyin’,” he said. “Go home and watch it.”

She pulled away from him, desperate to hear. The guard at the door glanced over, and proceeded toward her ponderously.

She heard the clipped, brisk voice say: “Government channels are silent.” And Painter was replaced by a smiling woman standing next to a television, which showed the same woman and the same television, which showed her again.

The monument she found at last stood at the end of an oblong pool, empty now and a receptacle for the litter of those camped on the sward of brown grass around it. For the height of a man the monument was marked with slogans, most of them so covered with the other slogans as to be unreadable. It rose above these, though, to a chaste height. When Caddie looked up at it it seemed to be in the act of tumbling on her.

She went carefully around the perimeter of the park again and again, slowly, without much hope. Reynard between those men had obviously been a prisoner. How could he meet her here if he wasn’t free? She studied the knots of people gathered around fires lit in corroded steel drums, looking for his small face, sure she wouldn’t see it.

Night made it certain. She was trying to decide which of the fires she would approach, how she could buy food, when a bearded man, smiling, put a paper into her hand, WHERE IS HE NOW? the paper shouted, and beneath this was a grotesque picture of what might be a leo. Startled, she looked up. The man reminded her of Meric, despite the beard, despite the sunken chest and long neck: something gentle and self-effacing in his eyes and manner. She tried to read the paper, but could only pick out words in the last light: civil rights, nature, leo, crimes, USE, freedom, Sten Gregorius.

He must have seen the look of wonderment on her face, because he turned back to her after handing out more of the sheets. “Here,” he said, digging into a pocket, “wear a button.” He wore one like the one he gave her: the cartoon of the leo, and under it the words BORN FREE.

She didn’t know how any of this had come about, but this man must be a friend, She wanted desperately to tell him, to ask him for help; but she didn’t dare. She only looked at him, and at the button. He turned to go. She said: “Will you be here tomorrow?”

“Here or over there,” he said, pointing to where a pillared shrine was lit garishly by spotlights. “Every day. If I’m not in jail.” He made a sudden, aggressive gesture with upraised fist, but his inoffensive face still smiled. She let him go, with a sinking heart.

She was not alone, There were others who knew about Painter. Many others. She didn’t know if that was good or bad. She slipped in among a silent crowd around a fire at the base of the monument, the strange button clutched in her hand like a token, and rested her back against the stone, Her last meal had been hours ago, but she hardly noticed that she was hungry; hunger had come, over the months, to seem her natural state.

“They’ll bring him out in a moment,” Barron said, “Yes. There, There he is.”

The room they stood in was a consulting room of what had once been a public mental hospital meant for the dangerous insane. It was empty now, except for its single prisoner or patient; he had been installed here because no one could think of anywhere else to put him: no other cage.

The window of the consulting room looked out on the exercise yard, a high box of blackened brick, featureless. The single rusted steel door that led into the yard opened. Nothing could be seen within. Then the leo came out.

Even at this distance, and even though he was draped in an old army greatcoat, Reynard could see that he was thin and damaged. He walked aimlessly for a moment, taking small steps. He seemed constricted; then Reynard saw that his wrists were shackled. He wondered briefly if they had had to smith special shackles for those wrists. Painter went to the one corner of the blind court where thin sunlight fell in a long diagonal, and sat, lowering himself carefully to the ground. He rested his back against the blank brick and looked out at nothing, unmoving. Now and again he moved his arms within the shackles, perhaps because they chafed, perhaps because from moment to moment he forgot they were on him.

“What have you done to him?” Reynard asked.

“His condition is his own fault,” Barron said quickly. “He won’t eat, he won’t respond to therapy.” He turned from the window. “As far as we can tell, he’s physically unimpaired. Just weak, Of course he makes difficulties when we try to examine him.”

“I think,” Reynard said, “your prisoner is dying.”

“Wrong. He has injections daily. Almost daily.” As though trying to draw Reynard with him away from the window, he went to the far end of the room and perched on a dusty metal desk. “And he’s not a prisoner. He’s a subject of the USE Hybrid Species Project research arm. Technically, an experimental subject.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway, you’ve seen him, Now can we begin? You understand,” he went on, “that I don’t have any governmental authority. I can’t make any legal deals.”

“Of course.”

“I can only act as a mediator.”

“I think it’ll do.”

“This shouldn’t enter into it,” Barron said, looking at his knuckles, “but you, you personally, have made enormous difficulties for the government. Just enormous. It would be completely within their rights just to seize you and try you, or…”

“Or toss me down there. I know that. I think that what I have to offer will outweigh any vengeful feelings.”

“Sten Gregorius.”

“Yes. Where he is now, who his people are, the evidence against them, everything.”

“We don’t have much reason to believe you know all of that.”

“My information regarding him” — he gestured toward the yard below the window — “was accurate enough.”

“It put us to a lot of trouble. Unnecessary trouble.”

“Well?”

“You might be merely planning to confuse us, tell lies….”

“I’ve voluntarily put myself in your hands this time,” Reynard said. “I’m helpless. I know that if I mislead you now, the full weight of your authority will fall on me, I’m sure also that you have, well, experimental methods of extracting truths. The research arm.”

“That’s an odious slander.”

“Is it?”

“We wouldn’t let you renege, that’s true enough,” said Barron testily.

“It’s all I meant.”

“And what you want in exchange. It doesn’t seem enough. Not for such a betrayal.”

Reynard turned to the window again and looked out. “Perhaps you feel more deeply about betrayal than I do.” Barron had to lean out over the desk now to catch his hoarse whisper. “The answer is that I’m at the end of my powers. I’ve eluded your government so far because of a large fortune I managed to assemble working for Gregorius. That’s gone now. I’m old, not well, I’ve spent my life in motion, but I can’t run anymore. Eventually I’d be cornered, taken —” He paused, staring down into the yard. “Rather than have that happen, I’d prefer to trade the last of what I have for peace. For time to die peacefully in.” He turned to Barron, “Remember,” he said. “I’m not a man. I am the only, the first and last of me there will ever be. You know I’m sterile. I have no loyalties. Only advantages.”

Barron didn’t speak for a moment; the affectless voice had seemed to paralyze him. Then he cleared his throat, opened his briefcase and looked inside, closed it. Himself again. “So,” he said briskly, “in exchange for immunity, and a pension or the like — we’ll negotiate details — you’re willing to give evidence that Sten Gregorius and yourself planned the murder of Gregorius; that USE had nothing to do with it; that the murderers weren’t USE agents; that Sten Gregorius is still conspiring against the Federal provisional government in the Northern Autonomy. Nashe?”

“Nashe, I hear, is dead.”

“Then what you have to say about her can’t hurt her.”

“There’s the other thing I require,” Reynard said.

“Yes.”

“The leo.”

Barron straightened. “Yes, I think that’s odd.”

“Do you?”

“It’s also probably impossible. He’s committed several crimes; he’s very dangerous.”

Reynard made a noise that might have been a laugh. “Look at him,” he said. “I think you’ve broken his spirit. At least.”

“The criminal charges…”

“Come now,” Reynard said almost sharply. “You’ve said yourself he’s not a prisoner. An experimental subject only. Well. Put an end to the experiment.”

“He’s still dangerous. It would be like… like…” He seemed to search unused places for a forgotten image. “Like releasing Barabbas to the populace.”

Reynard said nothing. Barron supposed he had spoken over the creature’s head. “He’s part of the conspiracy, in any case,” he said.

“A very small part,” Reynard said. “He never understood it. He was used, first to help me, then to distract your attention. He worked well enough.”

“He and his kind have gotten completely bound up together in the public mind with Sten Gregorius. That may have been an accident….”

“No accident. It was due to your stupidity in persecuting the leos so — so artlessly. Sten took up their cause. It was ready-made. By you.” He limped toward the desk where Barron still sat, and Barron drew back as though he were being approached by something repugnant. “Maybe I can put this so that you can see the advantage to you. You’re planning a reservation somewhere for the leos, a kind of quarantine.”

“In the Southeastern Autonomy.”

“Well then. Once Sten is in your hands, and the leo has gone voluntarily to this reservation, the union will evaporate.”

“He would never go voluntarily,” Barron said. “These beasts never do anything voluntarily except make trouble.”

“Let me talk to him. I could persuade him. He listens to me. I’ve been his adviser, his friend.” No irony. This was presented as an argument only. Barron marveled: no thin skin of pretense was drawn over this creature’s amorality. It made him easy to deal with, Only—

“Why,” he said, “do you insist on this? It can’t be just to make things easier for us.”

Reynard sat on the edge of a metal folding chair. Barron wondered if he was at a loss. It seemed unlikely. He moved his hands on the head of his stick. His long feet just touched the floor. “Do you go to zoos?” he said at last.

“When I was a kid. In my opinion, zoos…”

“You might have noticed,” Reynard went on, “that according to a curious human logic, the cages are proportionate in size to the creatures they contain. Small cages for small animals — weasels, foxes — big ones for big animals. In old zoos, anyway.”

“Well?”

“People go to zoos. They pity the lions, noble beasts, caged like that, with hardly room to move. In fact the lion is relatively comfortable, He’s a lazy beast and exerts himself only when he must — if he doesn’t have to, he rests. Other animals — foxes, notably — have a natural urge for movement. In the wild, they may cover miles in a night. They pace endlessly in their little cages. All night, when the zoo is closed, they pace — two body lengths this way, two that way. For hours. They probably go mad quite quickly. A madness no one notices.

“To put it baldly: I would do anything to avoid the cage. I hope you grasp that, He — down there — probably doesn’t care. So long as he has a cage suited to his dignity.”

“The reservation.”

“It’s the least I can do for him,” Reynard said, again with no irony. “The very least.”

Barton stood and went to the window. The leo still sat; his eyes appeared to be closed, Was he sleeping? Maybe the fox was right. Barton had felt, though he had ignored, a certain pity for the leos who would be committed to quarantine. Left over from guilt over the Indian reservations, perhaps. But the Indians were, after all, men. Maybe the USE plan, besides being the only practicable one, was the kindest too.

“All right,” he said. “When do you want to talk to him? I make no promises. But I agree in principle.”

“Now,” Reynard said.

Face upward into the weak sun, Painter watched brilliance expand and deliquesce on his eyelids. Entranced by hunger, he had entered into a fugue of sleep, memory, waking, rough dream.

Coalescing in sunlight, fat, strong; taste of blood from cut lips, a haze of fury, then some victory — ancientest childhood. Sun and darkness, warmth of light and then warmth of flesh in lightlessness, amid other bodies.

Sleep. Consciousness spring by spring flaring like anger along flesh wakened roughly, nothing father Sun could do against the father before him, his battle only, only perceived in enormous flashings of feeling, the possibility of victory, the battle prolonged, unacknowledged, he shackled and… Shackled. He raised his arms and opened his eyes. Vision of nothing. Still shackled. Stains of ancient rains ran across the yard, meeting at the drain in the center, rays from a minute black sun, tears from a deadeye.

Wandering. Nothing to do, nothing he couldn’t do, coursing the stream of his own blood, turning and spinning on its currents. But bounded: banks of men, channeling him. He pressing on their united faces, passing through, they coalescing again behind and in front, rebounding him, Towns and roads. Strength for sale: cold steel half-dollars and paper as fine as shed snakeskin. As though in disguise he wore them. Smells burned him, tobacco burned smells, half-dollars bought both, language crept in between his eyes and came out his mouth tasting of tobacco. At a touch, anger could flare; they pressed so tightly together, how could they bear themselves? Learning how to bind down strengths and knit them up, twigs bound too tightly to burn. Until he was packed and pregnant as bound dynamite, faceless as quarried walls: the stone walls he square-cut in quarries, faceted walls all of one stone, like the faces that looked at him, faceted, unyielding, nothing could move them except dynamite.

The walls around him now were black; those had been pale. Would he die here? Sun had withdrawn from him. He would die here when Sun withdrew altogether; day by day it had grown narrower, a few minutes’ blessing only now, tenderly feeling the brick wall brick by brick as it ascended away from him, Winter, and he would die in prison.

In prison. That was where he had been cut in two, years ago, in the darkness. Feeling the manskin peel away in the darkness like a separate being. Solitary. No place else to put you. Steel doors closing like cryings-out. Rage at the darkness. Too dumb to know better, Half a man, they said. Like the blond boy who kissed his hands for it, wept before him: not a man. They didn’t know he had a man concealed on his person. Carrying a concealed weapon, resisting arrest, solitary: and in the darkness feeling the man peel away, as though he were a skin, and the manskin in darkness acquired his own life.

How long? Day after dark day he descended stairs, kept descending further stairs into further darkness, illuminating it with unyielding will, following the manskin that led the way. Solitary. Not alone though. Because the manskin led him. Down to the bottom of the darkness, his being held up before him like a torch, the manskin always just ahead, hair streaming from his head like language from his mouth; stepless darkness where they went down in the halo of his light-bearing aliveness. In the end, the bottom, and he made the manskin turn. No retreat. You are me. In the terrible dry light of understanding looking into his face, drawing close to his face, reaching for him, he for him, coupling ravishing, beast with two backs but ever after that one face only. He did not die in prison.

The fox came to him in prison. He thought at first he had invented him too. Not a prison like this one: white, naked, without surfaces, only the cryings-out of steel doors shrieking closed together. Get you out of here. What did he want? Nothing. Out of there: away from darkness, through the shrieking doors, into Sun’s face again. Why?

Accept it as your due, the fox had said. Only accept it. You deserve my service; only accept it.

“Painter,” said the fox.

Take me as your servant, he had said. Only go by my direction for a while. For a long while, maybe. Take what you deserve; I’ll point it out to you.

“Painter,” said the fox.

If this were the fox before him now in the black prison, he would kill him. The fox had betrayed him, freed him from the white prison so that he could die in the black; had given him over to the men. Had killed his son.

Would kill him. Sun alone knew why he wanted such deaths. And if this were the fox.

“Painter.”

before him now he would

“Your servant,” said the fox.

“You.”

“I’ve come to get you out. Again.”

“You put me here.” His long-unused voice was thick.

“An error. A piece of planning that went badly. My apologies. It’s worked out for the best.”

“My son is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Painter moved his arms against the shackles. Reynard, hardly taller than he, though he stood, bent over him, leaning on his stick. “How ill are you?”

“I could still kill you.”

“Listen to me now. You must listen. There is a way out of this.”

“Why? Why listen?”

“Because,” Reynard said, “you have no one else.”

From the window of the consulting room, Barron looked down on them. Like a scene from some antique cartoon or fairytale, seeing them together. Hideous, in a way. Misdirected ingenuity. Frankenstein. He wondered at the fox, though; had he been right, about his own nature? It would be interesting to see what limits there were to his intelligence. Certainly he was cunning, cold, in a way no man could be; but still he apparently had been unable to see that the price he had asked for his betrayal was too high, and that to leave him in peace was something the government couldn’t possibly do. Once Reynard was of no more use to them, he certainly couldn’t be set free to do more mischief.

Tests, maybe. It would be interesting to see. A misdirected experiment, perhaps, and yet perhaps something could be leamed from it.

What were they saying? He cursed himself for not having forseen this, not having the courtyard bugged.

In the morning, Caddie found a food shop and ate, pressed in among other bodies, watching the windows steam up and the steam condense to tears that streaked the panes. An argument started and threatened to become a fight. Everyone here seemed touchy, frustrated, at flashpoint. What did they want so badly, which they weren’t getting? What was it that goaded them?

She began her circuit of the park again, carefully studying faces and places, wondering what she could do alone, if she couldn’t find Reynard. Nothing. She had no idea where Painter was. Government channels are silent. But she couldn’t give up, not after having come so far, counted so much on this plan, readied herself so carefully for any sacrifice…. She found that she was hurrying, not searching, driven by anxiety. She stopped, and closed her eyes. No hope, she must have no hope. When her heart was calm, she opened her eyes. At an intersection of streets not far off was a slim, black three-wheeler, closed and faceless.

She approached it by stages, uncertain, and not wanting to reveal herself. When she passed by it, walking aimlessly and not looking at it, as though passing by chance, the passenger door was pushed open by a stick. “Get in,” Reynard whispered.

His traveling den smelled richly of him, though he himself was obscure in the shuttered darkness. The man up front was uniformed. Caddie looked from him to Reynard, uncertain.

“My jailer,” Reynard said. His harsh sandpaper voice was fainter than ever. “On our side, though. More or less.”

Still not knowing how freely she could speak, Caddie gave him the paper the bearded man had given her. She saw Reynard’s spectacles glint as he bent over it, his nose almost touching it. He folded it, thoughtful.

“It’s Meric Landseer who’s done this,” he said at last. “Yes. His tapes. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Well. It’ll do. Yes.” He put the paper back in her hand, and leaned close to her, seizing her wrist in the strong, childlike grip she had first felt in the woods, in the hollow tree. “Now listen to me and remember everything I say. I’m going to tell you where Painter is. I’m going to tell you what he must do to be free, and what the price is, and what you must do. Remember everything.”

When he had told her, though, she refused. He said nothing, only waited for her answer. She felt she would weep. “I can’t.” she said.

“You must.” He stirred, impatient or uncomfortable. “We don’t have time here to talk. If I’m missed, they’ll suspect something. They’ll prevent this. Now I’ll tell you: it was I who sent the Federals to the Preserve, to arrest Painter, Do you understand? Because of me he’s where he is. He might have died. He will die, now, if he’s not freed. His son. I murdered him. By what I did. Do you understand? All my fault. You might have starved. His wives and children. All my fault. Do you understand?”

He had taken her wrist again, and squeezed insistently. She looked at his black shape, feeling well up in her a disgust so deep that saliva gathered in her mouth, as though she would spit at him. Alien, horrid, as unfeeling as a spider. She wanted desperately to leave, to do this without him, but she knew she couldn’t. “All right,” she said thickly.

“You’ll do it.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly as I said.”

“Yes.”

“Remember everything.”

“Yes.” She pulled her wrist from his fingers. He pushed open the door with his stick.

“Go,” he said.

She went across the street to the park, pulling up her jacket collar against the cold wind, which blew papers and filth against her ankles as she walked. She wouldn’t weep. She’d think of Painter and Painter’s son only. As though she were an extension of the gun and not the reverse, she would execute its purposes. She wouldn’t think.

The pillared shrine contained only an enormous seated figure Caddie thought she should know but couldn’t remember. His name, most of his left leg, and some fingers had been erased by a bomb. The black rays of the blast still flashed up the pillars and across the walls as though frozen at the moment of ignition. The same desperate and illegible slogans marked this monument, sprayed across the slogans cut in stone. With malice toward none, and justice for all.

Vengeance.

At the side of the building the bearded man sat on the steps, eating hard-boiled eggs from a paper and talking animatedly to a group of men and women gathered around him. The step was littered with eggshell and his beard was flecked with yolk.

“Brutality,” he was saying. “What does that mean? It doesn’t matter what they do. Their morality isn’t ours, it can’t be. It’s enough that we see the right in our terms, and if we see it we must act on it. The basis of all political action…”

He turned and looked at her, munching. She gave him back the paper he had given her, with the picture of the leo on it.

“I know where he is,” she said.

“Without the shackles,” Reynard said.

“We can’t,” Barron said. “How do we know what he’ll do?”

“A crowd of people is outside,” Reynard said. “They’ve been waiting all night. Do you want them to see him shackled?”

“Well, why did you delay us all night?” Barron’s voice was a tense whisper attempting a shout, It was hideously cold in the corridors of the old hospital; he felt tremors of anxiety and cold and sleeplessness contract his chest. The corridors were dim; only every third or fourth light was lit, glaring off the particolored green enamel of the walls, as though the place were lit with fading flares. “We’ll take him out a back way.”

“I think they’ve discovered all the exits.”

The guards and overcoated marshals whom Barron had brought in to organize this release stood around looking stupidly efficient, waiting for orders to execute. “We’ll have to get the van around to the back.”

“They’ll follow that for sure. Leave the van where it is. Send some people out the front way, to make it look as though he were coming out that way. Then we’ll go out the back. The car that brought me is across the street; one of your people is driving it. Use that.”

“That’s crazy,” Barron said. He was in an agony of indecision. “How did all those people find this place? What do they want?”

“However they did,” Reynard said, almost impatiently, “they certainly won’t go away until the leo is gone. In fact, more are collecting.” He looked at the marshals, who nodded. “You’ll have a mass demonstration if you don’t act quickly.”

Barron looked from the marshals to the door through which the leo was to come. He had meant it all to be so simple. The leo would walk freely out of the building and into a waiting van. A single camera would record it. Tomorrow, his arrival at the barracks in Georgia. The news would show it, with understated commentary. Later, when a fully articulated program had been developed, the film would be a powerful incentive to other leos.

All spoiled now. The leo refused to leave unless Reynard was present. Reynard fussed and delayed. The crowd condensed out of the city like fog. And Barron was frightened. “All right,” he said. “All right. We’ll do that, We’ll take him to that car. You’ll remain here.” He steeled himself. “I’ll go with him.”

Reynard said nothing for a moment. Then his pink tongue licked his dark lips: Barron could hear the sound it made. “Good,” he said, “It’s brave of you.”

“Let’s get it over with.” He signaled to the marshals. From the car he could radio to be met somewhere. He wouldn’t have to be alone with the leo for more than ten minutes. And the driver would be there. Armed.

They opened the heavy doors along the corridor, and signals were passed down. A dark figure appeared at the hallway’s end, and came toward them. Two guards on each side, and two waiting at each branching corridor. He passed beneath the glare of the lights, in and out of pools of darkness. The men at his side, since they chose not to touch him as guards usually do, appeared more like attendants. The leo, draped in his overcoat, seemed to be making some barbaric kingly progress past the guards, beneath the lights.

He stopped when he reached Reynard.

“Take off the shackles,” Reynard whispered. The attendants looked from the fox to Barron. Barron nodded. He must retain control of this situation; his must be the okay. He chose not to look at the leo; a glimpse showed him that the leo’s face was passive, expressionless.

The shackles fell to the floor with a startling clatter.

“Down here,” Barron said, and they began a procession — marshals, Barron, Reynard, the leo, more marshals, a hurried, undignified triumph: only the leo walked a measured pace.

Through the dirty glass of the back exit they could see the deserted street lit by a single dim streetlight and the pale light of predawn. Across the street, down another street, they could just make out where the threewheeler was.

“Can’t we get him closer?” Barron said. “You. Go over and tell him…” A knot of people appeared in the street, searching. Someone pointed to the door they stood behind; then the group turned away, running, apparently to summon help.

“Don’t wait,” Reynard said. “Do it now.”

Barron looked up at the leo’s huge, impassive face, trying to discover something in it. “Yes,” he said; and then, loudly, as people do to someone they aren’t sure will understand, he said: “Are you ready now?”

The leo nodded almost imperceptibly. Reynard, at his elbow — he came not much higher, stooped as he was now — said: “You know what to do.” The leo nodded again, looking at nothing.

Barron took hold of the bar that opened the door. “You,” he said, sectioning out with his hand some of the marshals, “Watch here till we get off. The rest of you take him” — Reynard — “to the front, to the van. If they want something to look at, they can look at him. Quick.”

With some bravado, he pushed open the door and held it for the leo, who went out and down the steps without waiting. From both ends of the street, people appeared, sudden masses, as though floodgates had been opened. Barron saw them; his head swiveling from side to side, he skipped to catch up with the leo. He reached up as though to take the beast’s elbow, but thought better of it. The car was just ahead. The crowd hadn’t yet seen them.

Good-bye, Barron, Reynard thought. Exhaustion swept him; he felt faint for a moment. The marshals collected around him and he raised a hand to make them wait a moment. He leaned on the stick. Only one more thing to do. He summoned strength, and straightened himself, leaning against the glass door facing the marshals. “All right,” he said. “All right.” Then he raised the stick, as though to indicate them.

The charge in the stick killed one marshal instantly, hurtling him into the others; two others it wounded. It threw Reynard, wrist broken, out the door and into the street. He began to scuttle rapidly across the pavement, his mouth grimacing with effort, his arms outstretched as though to break an inevitable fall. The crowd had swollen hugely in an instant; when it heard the blast and saw Reynard come stumbling out, it flowed around him as he went crabwise down the street opposite the way Barron and Painter had gone. Behind him, the marshals, guns drawn, came running; the crowd shrieked as one at the guns and the blood, and tried to stop their motion, but they were impelled forward by those behind.

The cameraman turned on his lights.

One person pushed out of the crowd toward the hurrying figure, ran toward him as the marshals ran after him, the marshals unable to fire because of the crowd. The swiveling, jostled blue light turned them all to ghastly sculptured friezes revealed by lightning.

Caddie reached the fox first. The crowd, impelled by her, surged close to the wounded, spidery creature. He grasped Caddie’s arm.

“Now,” he whispered. “Quick.”

Quick, secret as a handshake, unperceived clearly by anyone — later the police would study the film, trying to guess which one of the fleeting, flaring, out-of-focus faces had been hers, which hand held the momentary glint of gun — she fired once, twice, again into the black creature who seemed about to embrace her. The gun sounds were puny, sudden, and unmistakable; the crowd groaned, screamed as though wounded itself, and struggled to move back, trampling those in back. Caddie was swallowed in it.

They made a wide circle around the fox. The blue light played over him; his blood, spattering rapidly on the pavement, was black. He tried to rise. The marshals, guns extended, shouting, surrounded him like baying hounds. His spectacles lay on the pavement; he reached for them, and stumbled. His mouth was open, a silent cry. He fell again.

Far off, coming closer, sirens wailed, keening.