Galilee

PART SIX. Ink and Water

So Galilee sailed away; I cannot tell you where. If this were a different kind of book I might well invent the details of his route, culled from books and maps. But in doing so I would be trading on your ignorance; assuming you wouldn't notice if I failed to get the details right.

It's better I admit the truth: Galilee sailed away, and I don't know where he went. When I dose my eyes, and wait for an image of him to come I usually find him sitting on the rolling deck of The Samarkand looking less than happy with his lot. But though I've searched the horizon for some due as to his whereabouts I see only the wastes of the ocean. To an eye more canny than mine perhaps there are dues even here, but I'm no sailor. To me, one seascape looks much like the next.

I will confess that I tried to apply what I thought would be simple logic to the question. I took down from the shelves several maps I'd been given over the years (the older ones may even have belonged to Galilee himself; long before he left to wander the world, he loved to trace imaginary journeys) and having spread them out on the floor of my study I walked among them with a book on celestial navigation in one hand and a volume on tides and currents in the other, trying to plot the likeliest course for The Samarkand to have taken. But the challenge defeated me. I set his course north past the island (that much I remember seeing, through Rachel's eyes); I began to calculate the prevailing winds at that time, and set The Samarkand before them, but I became hopelessly distracted by the very charts that were supposed to be anchoring my imagination. They were, as I said, old charts; made at a time when knowledge was not so vigorously (some would say calamitously) divided from the pleasures of fancy. The makers of these maps had seen nothing wrong with adding a few decorative touches here and there: filigreed beasts that rose out of the painted ocean to foam at passing ships; flights of windy angels poised at every quarter, with streaming hair and trumpeters' cheeks; even a great squid on one of the maps with eyes like twin furnaces and tentacles (so the note informed me) the length of six clippers. In the midst of such wonders, my pathetic attempts at rational projections went south. I left off my calculations and sat in the midst of the maps like a man trading in such things, waiting for a buyer.

Galilee had been in love before, of course, and survived to tell the tale. But he'd only once before been in love with a Geary, and that made all the difference in the world. Loving a woman who belonged in the family of your enemy wasn't wise; there were plenty of tragedies that testified to that. And in his experience love always ended up a bitter business. Sweet for a time yes, but never for long enough to justify the consequences: the weeks of self-recrimination, the months of lost sleep, the years of loneliness. Every time a romance ended, he'd tell himself that he'd never fall again. He'd stay out at sea, where he was safe from his own appetites.

What did he want from love anyway? A mate or a hiding place? Both perhaps. And yet hadn't he raged again and again against the witless contentment of his animal self, smug in its nest, in its ease, in the comfort of its own dirt?

He hated that part of himself: the part that wanted to be wrapped in the arms of some beloved; that asked to be hushed and sung to and forgiven. What stupidity! But even as he railed against it, fled it, out to sea, he shuddered at the thought of what lay ahead, now that love was gone again. Not just the loneliness and the sleepless nights, but the horror of being out in the fierce, hard light that burned over him, set there by his own divinity.

As he guided The Samarkand out into the ocean currents, he wondered how many more times he'd be able to sail away before the toll of partings became intolerable. Perhaps this was the last. That wouldn't be such a terrible oath to take: to swear that after Rachel there'd be no more seductions, no more breaking of hearts. It would be his mark of respect to her, though she'd never know he'd made it: to say that after her there would only be the sea.

That said, he couldn't readily put the woman from his mind. He sat out on deck through the night, while The Samarkand was carried further and further from land, thinking about what had passed between them. How she'd looked, lying in the carved bed that first night; how she'd talked to him as he told the story of Jerusha and the river-man, asking questions, prodding him to make the story better, finer, deeper. How she'd imitated the child bride while she lay there, pulling the sheet off her body to show herself to him; and how exquisite that sight had been. How they'd touched; how he thought of her all the time they were parted, wondering whether to risk bringing her on board the boat. He'd never let a woman set foot on The Samarkand before, holding to ancient superstition on the matter. But her presence made such fears seem nonsensical. What boat would not be blessed to have such a creature tread its boards?

Nor did he now regret the decision. Sitting under the stars he seemed to see her, turning to smile at him. There she was, with her arms open to welcome him in. There she was, saying she loved him. Whatever wonders he saw after this-and he'd seen wonders: the sea turned silver with squid, storms of gold and vermilion-there would be no vision out of sea or sky that would command his devotion as she had. If only she hadn't been a Geary.

So, Galilee sailed away, and-as I said-I don't know where he wandered. I do know where he ended up, however. After three weeks The Samarkand put into the little harbor at Puerto Bueno. There had been storms all along that coast earlier in the month, and the town had taken a severe battering. Several houses close to the quay, repeatedly assaulted by waves breaking over the harbor wall, had been damaged; and one had collapsed entirely, killing the widow who'd lived there. But Galilee's house at the top of the hill was virtually unharmed, and it was here he returned, climbing the steep streets of the town without speaking to anyone he encountered, though he knew them all, and they all knew him.

The roof of the Higgins house had leaked during the storms, and the place smelled damp. There was mildew everywhere; and much of the furniture in the upper rooms had begun to rot. He didn't care. There was nothing here that mattered to him. Any vague dreams he might have once entertained of bringing a companion here, and living a kind of ordinary life, now seemed foolish; laughable. What a perfect waste of time, to indulge dreams of domesticity.

By chance the weather brightened the day after he appeared-which fact did nothing to harm his reputation as a man of power among the townspeople-but the scene from the windows of his house-the clouds steadily sculpted to nothingness by the wind, the sea glittering in the sun-gave him no pleasure. He'd seen it all before.

This, and every other glory. There was nothing new to watch for; no surprises left in earth or heaven. He could close his eyes forever, and pass away without regret, knowing he'd seen the best of things.

Oh, and the worst. He'd seen the worst, over and over again.

He wandered from one stagnant room to the next, and up the stairs and down; and everywhere he went, he saw visions of things he wished he'd never witnessed. Some of them had seemed like brave sights at the time. In his youth, bloody business had excited him; why did its echoes now come to bruise him the way they did?

Why when he lay down on the mildewed bed did he remember a whorehouse in Chicago, where he'd chased down two men and slaughtered them like the cattle they made such profit from? Why, after all these years, did he remember how one of them had made a little speech as he lay dying, and thanked his murderer for the ease of it all?

Why when he sat down to empty his bowels did his mind conjure up a yellow dog, which had shit itself in terror, seeing its master with his throat cut on the Starrs, and Galilee sitting at the bottom of the flight, drinking the dead man's champagne?

And why, when he tried to sleep-not in the bed but on the threadbare sofa in the living room-did he remember a rainy February night and a man who had no better reason to die than that he'd crossed the will of one mightier, and he, Galilee, no better reason to commit murder than that he served that same will? Oh that was a terrible memory. In some ways-though it was not the bloodiest of his recollections-it was the most distressing because it had been such an intimate encounter. He remembered it so clearly: the car rocking as gusts of wind came off the ocean; the rain rattling on the car roof; the stale heat of the interior, and the still staler heat that came off the man who died in his arms.

Poor George; poor, innocent George. He'd looked up at Galilee with such confusion on his face; his lips trying to form some last coherent question. He'd been too far gone to shape the words; but Galilee had supplied the answer anyway.

"I was sent by your father," he'd said.

The confounded look had slipped away and George's face had become oddly placid, hearing that he was dying at the behest of his father; as though this were some last, wretched service he could render the old man, after which he was finally free of Cadmus's jurisdiction.

Any ambition Galilee might have entertained of fathering a child had gone at that moment: to be the father's agent in the murder of a son had killed all appetite in him. Not simply the appetite for parenthood-though that had been the saddest casualty of the night at Smith Point Beach; the very desire to live had lost its piquancy at that moment. Destroying a man because he stood between your family and its ascendance was one thing (all kings did it, sooner or later); but to order the death of your own child because he disappointed you: that was another order of deed entirely, and to have been obliged to perform it had broken Galilee's heart.

And still, after all this time, he couldn't get the scene out of his head. The hours of the whorehouse in Chicago, and his memories of the yellow dog shitting on the stairs, were bad enough; but they were nothing by comparison with the memory of the look on George Geary's face that rainy night.

And so it went on for a week and a half: memories by day and dreams by night, and nothing to do but endure them. He ventured out of the house at evening, and went down to check that all was well with The Samarkand, but even that journey became harder as time passed; he was so exhausted. This could not go on. The time had come to make a decision. There was no great heroism in suffering, unless perhaps it was for a cause. But he had no causes, nor ever had; not to live for, not to die for. All he had was himself.

No, that wasn't true. If he'd just had himself he wouldn't have been haunted this way.

She'd done this to him. The Geary woman; the wretched, gentle Geary woman, whom he'd wanted so badly to put out of his heart, but could not. It was she who'd reminded him of his capacity for feeling, and in so doing had opened him up as surely as if she'd wielded a knife, letting these unwelcome things have access to his heart. It was she who'd reminded him of his humanity, and of all that he'd done in defiance of his better self. She who'd stirred the voice of the man on the whorehouse floor, and roused the yellow dog, and put the sight of George Geary before him.

His Rachel. His beautiful Rachel, whom he tried not to conjure but who was there all the time, holding his hand, touching his arm, telling him she loved him.

Damn her to hell for tormenting him this way! Nothing was worth this pain, this constant gnawing pain. He no longer felt safe in his own skin. She'd invaded him, somehow; possessed him. Sleeplessness made him irrational. He began to hear her voice, as though she were in the next room, and calling to him. Twice he came into the dining room and found the table set for two.

There was no happy end to this, he knew. There would be no escaping her, however patiently he waited. She had too strong a hold on his soul for him to hope for deliverance.

It was as though he were suddenly old-as though the decades in which time had left him untouched had suddenly caught up with him-and all he could look forward to now was certain decline; an inevitable descent into obsessive lunacy. He would become the madman on the hill, locked away in a world of rotted visions; seeing her, hearing her, and tormented day and night by the shameful memories that came with love: the knowledge of his cruelties, his innumerable cruelties.

Better to die soon, he thought. Kinder to himself, though he probably didn't deserve the kindness.

On the sixth evening, climbing the hill to the house, he conceived his plan. He'd known several suicides in his life, and none of them had made a good job of it. They'd left other people with a mess to clear up, for one thing, which was not his style at all. He wanted to go, as far as it were possible, invisibly.

That night, he made fires in all the hearths in the house, and burned everything that might be used to construe some story about him. The few books he'd gathered over the years, an assortment of bric-a-brac from the shelves and windowsills, some carvings he'd made in an idle hour (nothing fancy, but who knew what people would read into what they found here?). There wasn't a lot to burn, but it took time nevertheless, what with his state of mind so dreamy and his limbs aching from want of rest.

When he had finished, he opened all the doors and windows, every one, and just before dawn headed down the hill to the harbor. His neighbors would get the message, seeing the house left open. After a couple of days some brave soul would venture inside, and once word spread that he'd made a permanent departure the place would be stripped of anything useful. At least so he hoped. Better somebody was using the chairs and tables and clocks and lamps than that they all rot away.

The wind was strong. Once The Samarkand was clear of the harbor, its sails filled; and long before the people of Puerto Bueno were up and brewing their morning coffee or pouring their breakfast whiskies their sometime neighbor was gone.

His plan was very simple. He would sail The Samarkand a good distance from land, and then-once he was certain neither wind nor current would bear him back the way he'd come-he'd surrender his captaincy over both vessels, his body and his boat, and let nature take its course. He would not trim his sails if a storm arose. He would not steer the boat from reef or rocks. He would simply let the sea have him, whenever and however she chose to take him. If she chose to overturn The Samarkand and drown him, so be it. If she chose to dash the boat to pieces, and him along with it, then that was fine too. Or if she chose to match his passivity with her own, and let him linger becalmed until he perished on deck, and was withered by the sun, then that lay in her power too, and he wouldn't lift a hand to contradict her will.

He had only one fear: that if hunger and thirst made him delirious he might lose the certainty that moved him now, and in a moment of weakness attempt to take control of the vessel again, so he scoured the boat for anything that might be put to practical use, and threw it all overboard. His mariner's charts, his life jackets, his compass, his flares, his inflatable life raft: all of it went. He left only a few luxuries to sweeten these last days, reasoning that suicide didn't have to be an uncivilized business. He kept his cigars, his brandy, a book or two. Thus supplied, he gave himself over to fate and the tides.

Most murder, as you're probably aware, is domestic. The conventions of popular fiction tell an untruth: the person most likely to take your life by violence is not some anonymous maniac but the man or woman with whom you breakfasted this morning. So I doubt that I'm spoiling any great mystery if I confirm here that the man who murdered Margie was Garrison Geary.

He didn't do it because he despised her, though he did. He didn't do it because she had a lover, though she had. He did it because she refused him knowledge, which may seem like an obscure reason for slaughtering your spouse, but will probably be one of the lesser strangenesses ahead.

By the time Rachel got back to New York, Garrison had confessed. Not to cold-blooded murder, of course, but rather to an act of self-defense in the face of his wife's crazed attempt on his life. According to his testimony it had happened like this: he'd come home to find Margie in a drunken state, wielding a Colt .38. She was sick of their life together, she'd told him, and wanted an end to it all. He'd tried to reason with her, but she'd been in far too inflamed a state to be talked down. Instead she'd fired at him. The bullet had missed, however, and before she could fire a second time Garrison had attempted to disarm her. In the struggle the gun had gone off, wounding

Margie. He'd called the police instantly, but by the time medical help arrived it was too late. Her body-weakened by years of abuse-had given up.

There was a good deal of evidence in support of Garrison's account. The first and most potent piece was this: the gun was Margie's. She'd bought it six years ago, after one of her drinking circle had been attacked on the street, and died in the resulting coma. Margie hadn't concealed her pleasure in the weapon; it was a "pretty gun," she'd said, and she'd have not the least hesitation in using it should the occasion arise.

According to Garrison, she had. She'd intended to kill him, and he'd done what anybody would have done under the circumstances. He didn't make any false show of grief. His marriage to Margie had been little more than a duty for years, he freely admitted. But if he'd wanted her out of his life, he pointed out, there were less foolhardy ways to engineer that than to shoot her in his own bathroom. Divorce, for instance. It didn't make any sense for him to murder her. It only jeopardized his liberty.

Portions of his testimony appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, along with quotes from a number of sources that suggested his arguments carried weight. Nor could most of the commentators refrain from reporting some unflattering anecdote about Margie's alcoholism, which had been public knowledge (and on occasion a public spectacle) for a decade or more. Of course there was also no scarcity of gossip pieces, both in magazines and on television, raking up some of the less savory stories from Garrison's past. Two of his former mistresses consented to be interviewed, as did a number of sometime employees. The portraits they drew weren't particularly flattering. Even if only half of what they were remembering was true Garrison still emerged as self-centered, autocratic and on occasion sexually compulsive. But when each of them was asked the important question-in your opinion, was this self-defense or murder?-they were all of the opinion that the man they'd known would not have shot his wife in cold blood. One of the mistresses even added that "Garrison was very sentimental about Margie. He'd always be telling me how it had been when they were first in love. I used to tell him I didn 't want to hear about all that, but sometimes I think he couldn 't help talking about her. It used to make me a little jealous, but looking back I think it's sort of sweet."

The other subject that came under close scrutiny during this period was the family itself. The Garrison Geary Murder Case gave the press across the country, from the most high-minded journals to the lowliest gutter rags, a perfect excuse to dust off all their old stories about the Gearys. "As rich as the Rockefellers and as influential as the Kennedys," the piece in Newsweek began, "the Geary family has been an American institution since the end of the Civil War, when its founding fathers came to a sudden and impressive prominence which has not diminished since that time. Whatever the demands of the age, the Gearys have been their equal. Warmongers and peacemakers, traditionalists and radicals, hedonists and Puritans; it has sometimes seemed that within the ranks of the Geary clan an example of every American extreme could be found. With the police investigations into the murder of Margaret Geary ongoing, a cloud of doubt hangs over the family's reputation; but however those investigations are concluded one thing may be reliably predicted: the family will survive, as will the American public's endless fascination with its affairs."

Rachel had not told anybody she was on her way back, but she didn't doubt that word would precede her, courtesy of Jimmy Hornbeck. She was right. The Central Park apartment was adorned with fresh flowers, and there was a note on the table from Mitchell, welcoming her home, and thanking her for coming. It was a curiously detached little missive, not that far removed from a hotel manager's note of thanks to a returning guest. But nothing about Mitchell surprised her any more. She was perfectly sanguine about what lay before her. Whatever new grotesqueries she was about to witness she was determined to view them with the same amused detachment that she'd seen in Margie.

She called Mitchell in the early evening to announce her arrival. He suggested she come to the mansion for some supper. Loretta would like to see her, he said; and so would he. She agreed to come. Good, he said, he'd send Ralphie to pick her up.

"There are reporters outside the home all the time," he warned.

"Yes, they were waiting for me when I came back here."

"What did you tell them?"

"Absolutely nothing."

"Who the hell's telling them our business, that's what I want to know. When all this is over, I'm going to find out who the fuck these people are-"

"And do what?"

"Fire then- asses! I'm so sick of having cameras everywhere and people asking stupid fucking questions." She'd never heard Mitch exasperated this way before; he'd always accepted scrutiny as the price of living the high life. "You know some sonofabitch got a photograph of Garrison in jail, sitting on the can. And some fucking rag printed it! A picture of my brother taking a dump in a cell. Can you believe that?"

The outburst shocked her; not because somebody had taken a picture of Garrison relieving himself, but because until this moment she hadn't imagined his being behind bars. She'd just assumed that Cecil, or the phalanx of lawyers the family had hired to defend Garrison, had secured his release on bail.

"When does he get out?" she asked him.

"We're pressing for that right now," Mitch said. "I mean, he's innocent. We all know that. It was a horrible accident and we all wish it hadn't happened, but it's ridiculous keeping him locked up like he was a common criminal."

A common criminal: that went to the heart of it. Whatever else Garrison might have been, Mitchell seemed to be saying, he was American royalty, and deserved to be treated with appropriate respect. It was an impression Rachel had reinforced when she went over to the mansion: the atmosphere was one of besiegement; the drapes closed against the curious eyes of the hoi polloi, while the noble Gearys debated their response to the crisis. Loretta set the tone for these exchanges. The imperiousness was intact, but it was shaded now with a certain bruised melancholy, as though some martyrdom had been visited upon her which she was bearing with fortitude. She welcomed Rachel back with a dry kiss.

They gathered for supper around the dining room table, with Loretta at one end and-rather pointedly positioned, Rachel thought-Cecil at the other. Besides Deborah, Rachel and Mitch three other members of the clan were present. Norah was there, tanned and brittle; George's brother Richard had come up from Miami, where he'd just successfully defended a man who'd cut up a hooker with an electric carving knife, and Karen, flown in from Europe. She was the one member of the group Rachel had not met; she'd been out of the country during the wedding. She was a contained woman, her body, her gestures and her voice neat and unassuming. Rachel had the impression that she'd not come back out of love for either Garrison or the family, but because an edict had gone out, demanding her presence. She certainly had little to contribute to the debate. In fact she said scarcely a word throughout the supper, seldom even looking up from her plate.

There was no doubt as to the star of the evening: it was Loretta. She made a statement of intent the moment they all sat down.

"We're going to start acting like a family again," she said to everyone. "This business with Garrison is a wake-up call, to us all. It's time to put our differences aside. Whatever problems we have with one another-and they're bound to come along in the best of circumstances-this is the time to forget about them and show people what we're made of. Cadmus, as I'm sure you know, is now bedridden, and I'm afraid he's very weak. In fact, some of the time he doesn't even know who I am, which is of course very painful. But he has periods when his mind's suddenly very lucid, and then he can be astonishingly acute. Earlier this evening he started talking about hearing voices in the house. And I told him that yes, we were having a little family gathering. I didn't tell him why, of course. He doesn't know about… what happened… and I don't intend to tell him. But he did say to me, when I explained to him that we were all gathering together, that he was going to be here with us. And I think in a very real sense he is. He should be our inspiration right now." There were murmurs of assent around the table, the loudest coming from Richard. "We all know what Cadmus would say if he knew what was going on," Loretta said.

"Fuck 'em all," said Mitch. Norah laughed into her wine glass.

Loretta moved on without glancing in her stepson's direction. "He'd say: business as usual. We have to demonstrate our strength as a family. Our solidarity. Which is why I'm particularly grateful to you, Rachel, for coming back at such short notice. I know things between you and Mitchell aren't very easy at the moment so it means a lot to me personally that you're here. Now, Cecil, why don't you tell us all the situation as far as Garrison's bail is concerned?"

The next hour was dedicated to legal issues: the history of the judge who would be presiding over the hearing, supplied by Richard; brief assessments of the prosecutors from Cecil, then onto the business problems arising from Garrison's temporary indisposal. Rachel didn't understand many of the issues under discussion, but there was no doubt that despite Loretta's talk of business as usual family affairs were hard to keep on track without Garrison to give the orders. A dozen times, maybe more, a question had to be left unanswered because it fell into Garrison's area of expertise.

Finally, the conversation returned to Rachel.

"Has Mitchell told you about the fund-raiser on Friday night?" Loretta asked her.

"No, I…"

Loretta threw Mitchell a weary look. "It's for the hospital. The pediatric ward. It was about the only charity Margaret had the slightest interest in, and I think it's important we have a presence there."

"I was going to talk to Rachel about it later," Mitchell put in.

"Later's no good, Mitchell," Loretta said. "We've had too much 'later' in this household. Things being put off and put off…" What the hell was she talking about, Rachel wondered. "We've got to get on and do what we need to do. Even if it makes us uncomfortable or-"

"All right, Loretta," Mitchell said. "Calm down."

"Don't you condescend to me," Loretta replied, her voice monotonal. "You're going to listen to me for once in your pampered little life. We're in a mess here. Do you understand me?" Mitchell just stared, which inflamed Loretta all the more. "DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?" she yelled, slamming her palm down on the table. All the silverware jumped.

"Loretta-" Cecil said softly.

"Don't you start pouring oil, Cecil. This isn't any time to be making nice. We're in terrible trouble. All of us. The whole family. Terrible, terrible trouble."

"He'll be out in a week," Mitchell said.

"Is this willful or are you just too stupid to see what's right in front of your nose?" Loretta said, her voice not quite so loud, but still several notches above the conver sational. "There's more to all this than what happened to poor Margie…"

"Oh don't start your Cassandra act, for God's sake," Mitchell said, his voice thick with contempt.

"Mitchell," Cecil said, "a little respect…"

"If she wants some respect she should start being practical, and not telling us it's all in the fucking stars."

"That's not what I'm saying," Loretta said.

"Oh I'm sorry. What is it today? Tarot cards?"

"If your father could hear you-"

"My father thought you were as crazy as a coot," Mitchell said, getting up from the table. "And I'm not going to waste my time sitting here listening to you chatter on like you understand a damn thing about the way the business life of this family works."

"You're the one who's out of his depth," Loretta said.

"There you go again with your inane little threats!" Mitchell yelled. "I know what you're doing! You think I don't see you trying to get Rachel over to your side?"

"Oh for God's sake-"

"Sending her off to that stinking little island, thinking it's some kind of secret."

Rachel caught hold of his hand. "Mitch," she said. "You're making a fool of yourself. Shut up."

He looked as though she'd just slapped him, hard. He pulled his hand out of her grip. "Are you in with her then?" he said, looking at Rachel but pointing at Loretta. "Is this some fucking conspiracy? Cecil? Help me out here. I want to know what's going on."

"Nothing's going on," Cecil said, wearily. "We're just all tired and stressed out. And sad,"

"She isn't sad," Mitchell said, looking back at Loretta, who was wearing an expression of regal inviolability. "She's fucking glad Margie's dead and my brother's in a jail cell."

"I think you should apologize for that," Cecil said.

"It's the truth!" Mitchell protested. "Look at her!"

Now it was Cecil who rose. "I'm sorry, Mitchell, I can't permit you to talk to Loretta that way."

"Sit the fuck down!" Mitchell yelled. "Who the hell do you think you are?" Cecil did and said nothing. "You know what happens when the old man goes? It's Garrison and me. We're in charge. And if Garrison stays in jail, then it's just me." He made a tight little smile. "So you'd better watch yourself, Cecil. I'm going to be looking very hard at the kind of support I'm getting. And if I see a lack of loyalty, I'm not going to think twice." Cecil glanced down at his plate. Then he sat down. "Better," Mitchell said. "Rachel. We're leaving."

"So go," Rachel said, "I'll talk to you tomorrow." Mitchell hesitated. "I'm not coming with you," Rachel said.

"It's up to you," Mitchell replied, with an unconvincing show of indifference.

"I know," Rachel said. "And I'm staying here."

Mitchell made no further attempt to convince her. He left the room without another word.

"Brat," Loretta remarked quietly.

"I'd better go and calm him down," Richard said.

"Why don't we all just go home to bed?" Norah suggested.

"I think that's probably a very good idea," Loretta said. "Rachel… would you stay just a couple of minutes? I need to have a word with you."

The rest of the company departed. When the last of them had gone, and the door was closed Loretta said: "I noticed you didn't eat."

"I wasn't hungry."

"Lovesick?" Rachel said nothing. "It'll pass," Loretta went on. "You'll have plenty to distract you in the next few days." She sipped on her white wine. "You've got nothing to hide," she said. "We've all felt what you're feeling now."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Him," Loretta said quietly. "Galilee. I'm talking about

Galilee." Rachel looked up, and found Loretta's eyes there, ready to read her. "Was he all you wanted him to be?" she asked.

"I told you. I don't… know…"

Loretta looked pained. "There's no need for deceit," she said, "lie to Mitchell, by all means. But not to me." She kept looking at Rachel; as if waiting for her to spill her pain. Greedy for it, in fact.

"Why should I lie to Mitchell?" Rachel said, determined to deflect this interrogation by gaze.

"Because it's all he deserves," Loretta said flatly. "He was born with too many blessings for his own good. It's made him stupid. If he'd had a harelip he'd have been twice the man he is."

"So I take it you think I'm rather stupid too."

"Why would I think that?"

"I married him."

"Brilliant women marry perfect clods every day of the week. Sometimes you have to do that to get on in the world. If you're a shoe-girl in a shoestore and if you don't get out all you'll ever do is sell shoes then by God you do everything in your power to change your circumstances. There's no shame in that. You did what you had to do. And now you're finished with him. And there's no shame in that either." She paused for a moment, as if to allow time for Rachel to respond; but this little speech had left Rachel dumbstruck. "Is it really so hard to admit to?" Loretta went on. "If I were you I'd be proud of myself. I really would."

"Proud of what?"

"Now you're being obtuse," Loretta said, "and it's not worthy of you. What are you afraid of?"

"I just don't know… I don't know why you're talking this way to me when we scarcely know one another and… well, to be honest I thought you didn't really like me."

"Oh I like you well enough," Loretta said. "But liking isn't really the point any more, is it? We need one another, Rachel."

"For what?"

"For self-protection. Whatever your dense husband thinks, he's not going to be running the Geary empire."

"Why not?"

"Because he's inheriting a lot more than he'll be able to deal with. He'll crack. He's already cracking because he doesn't have Garrison to hold his hand."

"What if Garrison gets off?"

"I don't think there's any 'what if?' about it. He'll get off. But there's other stuff, just waiting to be uncovered. His women, for one thing."

"So he has a mistress. Nobody's going to care."

"You know what he likes to do?" Loretta said. "He likes to hire women to play dead. Doll themselves up to look like corpses and lie there and be violated. That's one of his milder obsessions."

"Oh my God…"

"He's been getting more indiscreet over the last year or so. In fact, I think he wants to get caught. There are some photographs…"

"Of what?"

"You don't need to know," Loretta said. "Just take it from me that if the least disgusting of them was to be made public Garrison's little circle of influence would disappear overnight."

"And who has these pictures?" Loretta smiled. "You?" Rachel said. "You've got them?"

Loretta smoothed out a wrinkle in the tablecloth, her tone completely detached. "I'm not going to sit back and watch a necrophile and his idiot brother take charge of all this family owns. AD this family stands for." She looked up from the smoothed linen. "The point is: we all have to take sides. You can either work with me to make sure we don't lose everything when Cadmus dies, or you can run to Mitchell and tell him I'm conspiring against the two of them, and take your chances with them. It's up to you."

"Why are you trusting me now?" Rachel said. "Because Margie's dead?"

"God, no. She was no use to me. She was too far gone. Garrison again. God knows what he put Margie through, behind locked doors."

"She'd never have put up with-"

"With playing dead on a Saturday night? I think a lot of women do that and a lot worse to keep their husbands happy."

"So you still haven't answered my question. Why are you telling me all this now?"

"Because now there's something you want and I can help you get it."

There was a long silence. Then Rachel said: "Galilee?"

Loretta nodded. "Who else?" she said. "In the end, everything comes back to Galilee."

Under normal circumstances Rachel would have hated the Hospital Benefit Gala. It was exactly the kind of grand, glittering event which had come to seem like an unpleasant duty after a few months of marriage: all glassy gazes and frigid smiles. But circumstances had changed. For one thing, Mitchell was wary of her, which she liked. Several times during the evening when she strayed from his side for some innocent reason he came to join her and quietly told her to stay close by. When she asked him why he told her he didn't want her cornered by some inquisitive sonofabitch who'd pump her for information about Garrison, to which she replied that she was quite capable of talking her way out of a difficult situation, and anyway what did she know that was worth gossiping about?

"You're making a fool of me," he said when he caught up with her for the fourth time. There was fury in his eyes, but he had to perfection the trick of maintaining a benign expression despite his true feelings; the accusations emerged through an opulent smile. "I don't want you talking to anybody-do you understand me: anybody-without me right there with you. I'm perfectly serious, Rachel."

"I'm going to go where the hell I like and say whatever I feel like saying, Mitchell, and neither you nor your brother nor Cecil nor Cadmus nor any other damn Geary is going to stop me."

"Garrison'll destroy you, you know that," Mitchell said. He wasn't even attempting to smile any longer.

Rachel was incredulous. "You sound like a bad imitation of a gangster."

"But he will. He's not going to let you get away with anything."

"God, you are so infantile. Now you're going to set your big brother on me?"

"I'm just trying to warn you."

"No. You're trying to frighten me. And it's not going to work."

He looked away for a moment, to see that nobody was close enough to hear him. "Who do you think's going to be there to help you if you get into trouble?" he said. "We're the only real family you've got, baby. The only people you could turn to if things got nasty."

Rachel was beginning to feel faintly sick. There was no mistaking what Mitch was saying.

"I think I need to go home," she told him.

"You know, you do look a little flushed," he said, his hand going up to her cheek. "What's wrong?"

"I'm just tired," she said.

"I'll take you down to the street."

"I'll be all right."

"No," he said, linking his arm through hers, and drawing her close to him. "I'll go with you."

Together they made their way through the crowd, pausing a couple of times so that Mitchell could exchange a few words with someone he knew. Rachel made little attempt to play the attentive wife; she slipped his hold and moved on toward the door after a few seconds, leaving him to follow her.

"We should talk some more," he said once they reached the street.

"About what? I have nothing to say to you."

"Just because we'd had some hard times-hear me out, Rachel please-that doesn't mean we have to throw up our hands and let everything we ever had, everything we ever felt for one another, go to hell. We should talk. We really should." He kissed her lightly on the cheek. "I want the best for you."

"Is that why you threatened me in there?" Rachel said.

"If it came out that way then I'm sorry, I'm truly sorry, it's not what I meant at all. I just want you to see things the way I see them." She stared at him, hoping he felt her contempt. "I've got a much better picture of the situation right now," he said. "I have more… information about the way things are. And I know-trust me, Rachel, I know-that you're not in a safe place."

"I'll take the risk."

"Rachel-"

"Go to hell," she told him very calmly.

The chauffeur was out of the car, opening the door for her.

"Call me tomorrow," Mitchell said. She ignored him. "We're not done yet, Rachel."

"You can dose the door," she told the driver, who obliged her, leaving a muted Mitchell standing on the sidewalk, looking both irritated and faintly forlorn.

As she stepped out of the car at the other end of her journey, a young bespectacled man-who'd been out of sight behind the potted cypress at the door-stepped into view.

"Mrs. Geary?" he said. "I have to talk to you." He was dressed in what her mother would have called his Sunday best: a powder-blue suit; a thin black tie; polished shoes. His blond hair was trimmed close to his scalp, but the severity of the cut didn't spoil the amiability of his features. His face was round, his nose and mouth small; his eyes soft and anxious.

"Please hear me out," he begged, though Rachel had done nothing to indicate that she would ignore him. "It's very important." He glanced nervously toward the security guard who kept twenty-four-hour vigilance at the door of her building. "I'm not crazy. And I'm not begging. It's-"

"Is he causing a problem here, Mrs. Geary?" the guard wanted to know.

"-it's about Margie," the young man said hurriedly. His voice had dropped to a whisper.

"What about her?"

"We knew one another," the young man said. "My name's Danny."

"The barman?"

"Yeah. The barman."

"Do you want to just go inside, Mrs. Geary?" the guard went on. "I can deal with this guy for you."

"No, he's okay," Rachel said. Then, to Danny: "You'd better come on in."

"No, I think I'd feel safer if we just walked."

"All right, we'll walk."

At Danny's request they crossed to the other side of the street, and walked under the trees around the park.

"Why all the secrecy?" she asked him. "You're not in any danger."

"I don't trust the family. Margie said they were like the Mafia."

"Margie exaggerated."

"She also said you were the only one worth a damn."

"That's nice to hear."

"She loved you so much, you know?"

"I loved her," Rachel said. "She was a wonderful lady."

"So she told you about me?"

"A little. She said she had a younger man in her life. Boasted, really."

"We got on great. She liked my martinis and I… I

thought she was like somebody you'd see in a movie, you know?"

"Larger than life."

"Right. Larger than life."

"She never did anything by halves, that's for sure."

"I know that," he said, with a little smile. "She was, you know, really… passionate. I never met any woman like her. Not that I've been around that many older women-I mean, I wouldn't want you to think I was some kind of gigolo or something."

"What a nice, old-fashioned word."

"Well, that's not me."

"I understand, Danny," Rachel said gently. "You genuinely felt something for Margie."

"And she felt something for me," Danny replied. "I know she did. But she didn't want everybody gossiping. She knew people would think she was being sleazy. You know, with me being younger; and a barman, for Chrissakes."

"So is all this about making sure I don't say anything? Because you needn't worry. I'm not going to blab about it."

"Oh, I know that," he said. "Really. She trusted you and so do I."

"So, what do you want?"

He studied the sidewalk for a few yards. Then he said: "I wrote her some letters, talking about things we'd done together. Physical things." He put his hand to his face and plucked at his moustache. "It was a stupid thing to do; but there were days when I was so full of feelings I had to write it down."

"And where are these letters?"

"Somewhere in her apartment, I guess."

"And you want me to get them back?"

"Yes. If possible. And… there's some photographs too."

"How much stuff are we talking about?"

"Only five or six photographs. There's more letters.

Maybe ten or twelve. I wasn't keeping track. I mean, I never expected…" For the first time in the conversation she thought he was going to start crying. His voice cracked; he reached into his pocket and dug out a handkerchief. "God," he said. "I'm a wreck."

"You're doing really well," Rachel said.

"I know you probably think I was in it for what she could give me, and right at the beginning that's what it was about. I'm not going to lie about that. I liked that she had plenty of money, and I liked that she gave me things. But in the end, I didn't care any more. I just wanted her." Without warning, the tears became a rant. "And that bastard sonofabitch husband of hers! Jesus! Jesus! How could anybody believe a word he says? He should be fried! Fucking fried!"

"He's going to get off," Rachel said quietly.

"Then there's no justice. Because he killed her in cold blood."

"You seem very sure about that," Rachel said. Danny didn't reply. "Is that because you were with her that night?"

"I don't know that we should get into this," Danny said.

"It seems to me we're already there."

"Suppose you have to testify under oath."

"Then I'll lie," Rachel said flatly.

Danny cast her a sideways glance. "How come you're like this?"

"Like what?"

"Just… not all pissy with me, you know? I'm just a barman."

"And I'm a girl who sold jewelry."

"But you're a Geary now."

"That's a mistake I'm going to fix."

"So you're not afraid of them?"

"I don't want Margie's name dragged in the dirt any more than you do. I'm not guaranteeing I'll find this stuff, but I'll do what I can."

Danny gave her his telephone number, and they parted. If he didn't hear from her, he said, he'd just assume she'd changed her mind, which he'd perfectly understand, given the circumstances.

But Rachel had no intention of changing her mind. As she walked home she was already laying plans for how best to get into Margie and Garrison's apartment in the Trump Tower and search it without being discovered. There were risks involved, no doubt of that; she was consorting with somebody who the police would surely want to interrogate, if they knew of his existence. Her silence in the matter was probably a crime; and searching a murder site, then removing (if she was successful) evidence of the affair was certainly interfering with the processes of the law. But she didn't care. There was more at stake in this endeavor than finding Danny's love letters and a few indiscreet photographs.

She was all but lost in a labyrinth of potential alliances: Loretta wanted her on her side, Danny needed her help, Mitchell had effectively threatened her if she didn't stay close by. Suddenly she was important to the balance of power; but she didn't entirely know why. Nor did she know what the consequences of choosing the wrong allegiance would be. What fell to the victor in this battle between sons and stepmother? Simply the incalculable wealth of the Gearys? Prize enough to murder for, without question; but only if those involved were not already rich beyond dreams of avarice.

Something else moved these people, and it wasn't money. Nor was it love; nor did she think it was power. Until she knew what it was she would not be safe, of that she was certain. Perhaps if she went to the place where Margie had died-Margie, who had been a victim of this thing she could not grasp or understand-its nature would come clear. It was a primitive hope, she realized; close to a kind of superstition. But what else was she to do? Her analytical powers had failed her. It was time to trust to her instincts, and her instincts told her to go and look where the harm had already been done; to look, as it were, back along the path of the bullet that had taken poor Margie's life. Back into the dark heart of Garrison Geary, and to whatever hopes or fears had moved him to murder.

Glancing back over the last several chapters, I realize that I've left a thread of my story dangling (actually, I'm certain I've left a good many more than one, but the rest will be sewn into the design in due course). I'm speaking of my sister's adventures. You'll recall that the last time I saw her she was in flight from Cesaria, who was furious with her for some unspecified crime. If you'll allow me a moment here I'll tell you what all that was about. My fear is that if I don't tell you now the urgency of what is about to happen in the lives of the Gearys will prevent me from breaking in at a later point. In short, this may be the last real breath I can take. After this, the deluge.

So; Marietta. She appeared in my chambers three or four days after my encounter with Cesaria, wearing a dreamy smile.

"What are you on?" I asked her.

"I've had a couple of mushrooms," she replied.

I was irritated with her, and I said so. She had too little sense of responsibility, I said: always in pursuit of some altered state or other.

"Oh, listen to you. So you didn't take the cocaine and Benedictine?"

I admitted that I had, but that I'd had a legitimate reason: it was helping me stay alert through the long hours of writing. It was quite a different situation, I said, to indulging day after day, the way she did.

"You're exaggerating," she said.

In my fine self-righteousness I made a list for her. There was nothing she wouldn't try. She smoked opium and chewed coca leaves; she ate pharmaceutical painkillers like candies and washed them down with tequila and rum; she liked heroin and cherries in brandy and hashish brownies.

"Lord, Maddox, you can be so tiresome sometimes. If I play music and the music's worth a damn, I'm altering my state. If I touch myself, and I give myself pleasure, I'm altering my state."

"They're not comparable."

"Why not?" I drew a breath before replying. "See? You don't have an answer."

"Wait, wait, wait-" I protested.

"Anyway," she went on, "I don't see that it's your business what I do with my head."

"It becomes my business if I have to deal with your mother."

Marietta rolled her eyes. "Oh Lord, I knew we'd get round to that eventually."

"I think I deserve an explanation."

"She found me going through some old clothes, that's all," Marietta replied.

"Old clothes?"

"Yes… it was ridiculous. I mean, who cares after all this time?"

Despite her cavalier attitude she was plainly concealing something she felt guilty about. "Whose clothes were they?" I asked her.

"His," she said with a little shrug.

"Galilee's?"

"No… his." Another shrug. "Father's."

"You found clothes that belonged to our father-"

"-who art in Heaven… yes."

"And you were touching them?"

"Oh for God's sake, Maddox, don't you start. They were clothes. Old clothes. I don't think he'd even worn them. You know what a peacock he was."

"That's not what I remember."

"Well maybe he only did it for my benefit," she said with a sly smirk. "I had the pleasure of sitting in his dressing room with him many times-"

"I've heard enough, thank you," I told her. I didn't like the direction the conversation was taking; nor the gleam in Marietta's eye. But I was too late. The rebel in her was roused, and she wasn't about to be quelled.

"You started this," she said. "So you can damn well hear me out. It's all true; every word of it."

"I still-"

"Listen to me," she insisted. "You should know what he got up to when nobody else was looking. He was a priapic old bastard. Have you used that word yet by the way? Priapic?"

"No."

"Well now you can, quoting me."

"This isn't going in the book."

"Christ, you can be an old woman sometimes, Maddox. It's part of the story."

"It's got nothing to do with what I'm writing."

"The fact that the founding father of our family was so oversexed he used to parade around in front of his six-year-old daughter with a hard-on? Oh, I think that's got everything to do with what you're writing." She grinned at me, and I swear any God-fearing individual would have said the Devil was in that face. The beautiful exuberance of her features; the naked pleasure she took in shocking me.

"Of course I was fascinated. You know the origin of the word fascinated? It's Latin. Fasdnare means to put under a spell. It was particularly attributed to serpents-"

"Why do you insist on doing this?"

"He had that power. No question. He waved his snake and I was… enchanted." She smiled at the memory. "I couldn't take my eyes off it. I would have followed it anywhere. Of course I wanted to touch it, but he told me no. When you're a little older, he said, then I'll show what it can do."

She stopped talking; stared out the window at the passing sky. I was ashamed of my curiosity, but I couldn't help myself.

"And did he?" I said.

She kept staring. "No, he never did. He wanted to-I could see it in his eyes sometimes-but he didn't dare. You see I told Galilee all about it. That was my big mistake. I told him I'd seen Papa's snake and it was wonderful. I swore him to secrecy of course but I'm damn sure he told Cesaria, and she probably gave Papa hell. She was always jealous of me."

"That's ridiculous."

"She was. She still is. She threw a fit when she found me in the dressing room. After all these years she didn't want me near his belongings." She finally pulled her gaze from the clouds and looked back at me. "I love women more than life itself," she said. "I love everything about them. Their feel, their smell, the way they move when you stroke them… And I really can't bear men. Not in that way. They're so lumpen. But I'd have made an exception for Papa."

"You're grotesque, you know that?"

"Why?" I just made a pained face. "We don't have to live by the same rules as everybody else," she said. "Because we're not like everybody else."

"Maybe we'd all be a little happier if we were."

"Happy? I'm ecstatic. I'm in love. And I really mean it this time. I'm in love. With a farmgirl no less."

"A farmgirl."

"I know it doesn't sound very promising but she's extraordinary, Maddox. Her name's Alice Pennstrom, and I met her at a barn dance in Raleigh."

"They have lesbian barn dances these days?"

"It wasn't a dyke thing. It was men and women. You know me. I've always liked helping straight girls discover themselves. Anyway, Alice is wonderful. And I wanted to dress up in something special for our three-week anniversary."

"That's why you were looking through the clothes?"

"Yeah. I thought maybe I'd find something special. Something that would really get Alice going," Marietta said. "Which I did, by the way. So anyway thank you for taking the heat from Cesaria. I'll do the same for you one of these days."

"I'm going to hold you to that," I said.

"No problem," Marietta said. "If I make a promise, I'm good for it." She glanced at her watch. "Hey, I gotta go. I'm meeting Alice in half an hour. What I came in here for was a book of poems."

"Poems?"

"Something I can recite to her. Something sexy and romantic, to get her in the mood."

"You're welcome to look around," I said. "I presume, by the way, that all this means you think we've made peace?"

"Were we ever at war?" Marietta said, as though a little puzzled at my remark. "Where's the poetry section?"

"There isn't one. They're scattered all over."

"You need some organization in here."

"Thank you, but it suits me just the way it is."

"So point me to a poet."

"You want a lesbian poet? There's some Sappho up there, and a book of Marina Tsvetaeva."

"Is any of that going to make Alice moist?"

"Lord, you can be crude sometimes."

"Well is it or isn't it?"

"I don't know," I snapped. "Anyway, I thought you'd already seduced this woman."

"I have," Marietta said, scanning the shelves. "And it was amazing sex. So amazing that I've decided to propose to her."

"Is this a joke?"

"No. I want to marry my Alice. I want to set up house and adopt children. Dozens of children. But first I need a poem, to make her feel… you know what I mean… no, come to think of it, you probably don't… I want her to be so in love with me it hurts."

I pointed. "To your left-"

"What?"

"-the little dark turquoise book. Try that." Marietta took it down.

"It's a book of poems by a nun."

"A nun?" Marietta went to put the book back.

"Wait," I said to her, "give it a chance. Here-" I went over to Marietta, and took the book-which she hadn't yet opened-from her hand. "Let me find something for you, then you can leave me alone." I flicked through the musty pages. It was years since I'd perused these lyrics, but I remembered one that had moved me.

"Who is she?" Marietta said.

"I told you: a nun. Her name was Mary-Elizabeth Bowen. She died in the forties, at the age of a hundred and one."

"A virgin?"

"Is that relevant?"

"Well it is if I'm trying to find something sexy."

"Try this," I said, and passed the book back to her.

"Which one?"

"I was a very narrow creature."

Marietta read it aloud:

"I was a very narrow creature at my heart.

Until you came.

None got in and out of me with ease;

Yet when you spoke my name

I was unbounded, like the world-"

She looked up at me. "Oh I like this," she said. "Are you sure she was a nun?"

"Just read it…"

"I was unbounded, like the world.

I never felt such fear as then, being so limitless,

When I'd known only walls and whisperings.

I fled you foolishly;

Looked in every quarter for a place to hide.

Went into a bud, it blossomed.

Went into a cloud, it rained.

Went into a man, who died,

And bore me out again,

Into your arms.''

"Oh my Lord," she said.

"You like that?"

"Who did she write it for?"

"Christ, I assume. But you needn't tell Alice that."

She went away happy, and despite my protests at her disturbing me, I felt curiously refreshed by her conversation. The idea of her marrying Alice Pennstrom still seemed absurd, but who am I to judge? It's so long since I felt the kind of sensual love Marietta obviously felt; and I suppose I was slightly envious of it.

There's nothing more personal, I think, than the shape that emptiness takes inside you; nor more particular than the means by which you fill it. This book has become that means for me: when I'm writing about other people's loss, and the imminence of disaster, I feel comforted. Thank God this isn't happening to me, I think, and lick my lips as I relate the next catastrophe.

But before I get to that next catastrophe, I want to add a coda to my account of Marietta's visit. The very next day, at noon or thereabouts, she returned to my study.

She'd obviously not slept since the previous meeting-there were bruisy rings around her eyes, and her voice was a growl-but she was in a fine mood. The poem had worked, she said. Alice had accepted her proposal of marriage.

"She didn't hesitate. She just told me she loved me more than anybody she'd ever met, and she wanted to be with me for the rest of our lives."

"And did you tell her that your life's going to be a hell of a lot longer than hers?"

"I don't care."

"She's going to have to know sooner or later."

"And I'll tell her, when I think she's ready for it. In fact, I'm going to bring her here after we're married. I'm going to show her everything. And you know what, brother o' mine?"

"What?"

Marietta's voice dropped to a raspy whisper. "I'm going to find a way to keep her with me. The years aren't going to take Alice away from me. I won't let it happen."

"It's a natural process. Marietta. And how do you propose to stop it?"

"Papa knew a way. He told me."

"Was this one of your dressing room conversations?"

"No, this was a lot later. Just before Galilee came home."

I was fascinated now. Clearly this was no joke. "What did he tell you?"

"That he'd contemplated keeping your mother with him, but Cesaria had forbidden it."

"Did he tell you how he'd intended to do it?"

"No. But I'm going to find out," Marietta said nonchalantly. Then, dropping her voice to something less than a whisper: "If I have to break into his tomb and shake it out of him," she said, "I'll do it. Whatever it takes, I'm marrying my Alice till the end of the world."

What do I make of all this? To be truthful, I try my best not to think too hard about all that she said. It unsettles me. Besides, I've got tales to tell: Garrison's in jail and Margie's in the morgue; Loretta's plotting an insurrection. I have more than enough to occupy my thoughts without having Marietta's obsessions to puzzle over.

All that said, I'm certain there's some truth in what she told me. My father was undoubtedly capable of extraordinary deeds. He was divine, after his own peculiar fashion, and divinity brings capacities and ambitions that don't trouble the rest of us. So it seems quite plausible that at some point in his relationship with my mother, whom I think he loved, he contemplated a gift of life to her.

But if my sister believes she can get his bones to tell her how that gift might have been given, she's in for a disappointment. My father is beyond interrogation, even by his own daughter, and however much Marietta may strut and boast, she wouldn't dare go where his soul has gone.

If you think I'm tempting fate with these assertions, then so be it. I don't have the will to explain to you where Nicodemus has gone; and I fervently hope-hope more passionately than I could imagine hoping for anything-that I never have cause to try and find that will. Not because I would fail in that pursuit (though I surely would) but because it would mean the unknowable was attempting to make itself known, and the laws by which this world lives would be littered at our feet.

On such a day, I would not want to be sitting writing a book. On such a day I'm not certain I would want to be alive.

The day after Rachel's encounter with Danny was the day of the funeral. Margie had told her lawyers some years before how she wanted to be buried: alongside her brother Sam-who'd died in a motorcycle accident at the age of twenty-two-and her mother and father, in a small churchyard in Wilmington, Pennsylvania. The significance of this wasn't lost on anybody. It was Margie's last act of rejection. Whatever choices she'd made in her life, she knew exactly where she wanted to be in death: and it wasn't entombed with the Gearys.

Rachel got an early morning call from Mitchell suggesting they travel together, but she declined, and drove to Wilmington alone. It was an ill-tempered day, blustery and bleak, and only the most hardy of celebrity-spotters had trekked through the rain to ogle the mourners. The press were present in force, however, and they had a rare assortment of luminaries to report on. Gossip though she was, Margie had never been much of a name-dropper (she was almost as gleeful discussing the intricacies of a favorite waiter's adulteries as those of a congressman), and it wasn't until now that Rachel realized just how many famous and influential people Margie had known. Not simply known, but impressed herself so favorably upon that they'd left the comfort of their fancy houses and their congressional offices, their weekend homes by the shore and in the mountains, to pay their respects. Rachel found herself wondering if Margie's spirit was here, mingling with the mighty. If so, she was probably remarking uncharitably on this one's facelift and that one's waistline; but in her heart she'd surely be proud that the life she'd lived-despite its excesses-had earned this show of sorrow and gratitude.

Mitchell had not yet arrived, but Loretta was already sitting on the front row of the pews, staring fixedly at the flower-bedecked casket. Rachel didn't particularly want to share the woman's company, but then nor did she want to be seen to be making any statement by sitting apart, so she made her way down the aisle, pausing in front of the casket for a few moments, then went to sit at Loretta's side.

There were tears on Loretta's immaculately painted face; in her trembling hands a sodden handkerchief. This was not the calculating woman who'd presided over the family table at the mansion a few evenings before. Her sadness was too unflattering to be faked: her eyes puffy, her nose running. Rachel put her hand over Loretta's hand, and gripped it. Loretta sniffed.

"I wondered if you'd come," she said quietly.

"I'm not going anywhere," Rachel said.

"I wouldn't blame you if you did," Loretta said. "This is all such a mess." She kept staring at the casket. "At least she's out of it. It's just us now." There was a long silence. Then Loretta murmured: "She hated me."

Rachel was about to mouth some platitude; then thought better of it. Instead she said: "I know."

"Do you know why?"

"No."

"Because of Galilee."

It was the last name Rachel had expected to hear in these circumstances. Galilee belonged in another world; a warm, enchanted world where the air smelled of the sea. She closed her eyes for a moment and brought that place into her mind's eye. The deck of The Samarkand at evening: the sleepy ocean rolling against the hull, the creaking ropes calling out the stars, and Galilee encircling her. She longed to be there as she'd longed for nothing in her life. Longed to hear his promises, even knowing he'd break them.

Her thoughts were interrupted by murmurings from the pews behind her. She opened her eyes, in time to follow Loretta's gaze toward the back of the church. There was a small group of dark-suited mourners there. The first one she recognized was Cecil; then the tallest of them turned to look toward the altar, and she heard Loretta murmur oh Lord, that's all we need and realized she was looking at Garrison. He'd changed since Rachel had seen him last: his hair was short, his face pinched and pale. He looked almost frail.

The murmurs quickly subsided, and eyes were averted, but a subtle change had passed through the assembly. The man responsible for the death of the woman they'd come to mourn was here, walking down the aisle to pay his respects before her casket. Mitchell accompanied him, his arm lightly holding Garrison's elbow, as if to guide him.

"When did he get out?" Rachel whispered to Loretta.

"This morning," she replied. "I told Cecil to keep him away." She shook her head. "It's grotesque."

Garrison was standing in front of Margie's casket now. He leaned over to his brother, and whispered something. Mitchell stepped back. Then Garrison reached over and put both his hands on the casket. There was nothing theatrical about the gesture; indeed he seemed oblivious to the presence of those around him. He simply stood there with his head bowed, as if attempting to commune with the body. Rachel glanced over her shoulder. Everyone-even those members of the congregation who'd earlier averted their eyes-was now watching the mourning man. How many of them, she wondered, believed his version of events? Probably most. Lord knows it was hard enough for her to believe that Garrison was capable of mourning at the casket of a woman he'd murdered.

As she turned back she found Mitchell staring at her. He looked exhausted. For the first time in the years she'd known him she saw the resemblance to Garrison: in the fierceness of his stare and the weary shape of his shoulders. In other circumstances she might have said a couple of weeks in the Caribbean would have cured his ills, but she knew better: he was sliding away from himself-or at least from the polished illusion of himself he'd presented to the world; away into the sad, shadowy place where Garrison had skulked all these years.

What had Loretta called them? The idiot and the nec-rophile? A little excessive perhaps, but it probably wasn't so very far from the truth. They certainly belonged together, the tainted fruit of a tainted tree.

Mitchell had taken his gaze off her by now, and was gently tugging on his brother's arm. Garrison looked back at him. Rachel saw Mitchell say come along, and lamblike Garrison went with him. They sat together at the far end of the same row as Rachel and Loretta. Again, Mitchell glanced Rachel's way. This time she too averted her gaze.

The service was conducted with considerable decorum by a very elderly preacher who during his eulogy told the gathering that he'd baptized Margie in this very church, forty-eight years before. He had followed the life of "this remarkable woman," as he called her, with the same mixture of astonishment and sadness he was certain they all felt. She had been troubled, he said, and had perhaps not always made the best of choices in her life's journey, but now she stood on the Golden Floor, where the vicissitudes of her life were lifted from her, and she could go lightly on her way. Rachel had never heard anybody refer to heaven as the Golden Floor before. She liked the phrase immensely, though she suspected that if Margie had been one of the mourners rather than the mourned she would have slipped away at the first mention of paradise, and gone to sit among the gravestones and smoke a cigarette.

With the service over, the casket was carried out to the graveside. This was the part Rachel had been dreading; but by the time the moment of descent came, and she was standing there in the drizzle watching the casket go from view, she'd been anticipating the horror of it for so long the actuality was something of an anticlimax. There were more prayers; flowers thrown down into the grave; then it was over.

The rain came on heavily as she drove back to the city. A few miles short of the bridge she was overtaken by a white Mercedes being driven at suicidal speed, which was pursued through the deluge by two police cars. Another two miles and she saw red lights flashing through the downpour, and flames burning on the highway. The pursued car had plowed into the back of a large truck; and two other vehicles had then struck it, spinning across the slick asphalt. One was burning, its lucky occupants standing in the rain watching the conflagration. The other had turned over and sat in the rain like a tortured tortoise, while the officers attempted to free the family inside. As for whoever had been driving the Mercedes, he or she had presumably been given up for dead, along with any passengers: it had concertinaed against the rear of the truck and was virtually unrecognizable. Needless to say, the entire highway was blocked. She waited for half an hour before the flow was reestablished, during which time she saw a whole melancholy scenario played out before her like a piece of rain-sodden theater. The arrival of firetrucks and ambulances; the freeing of the family (one of whom, a child, was delivered from the wreckage dead); grief and accusations; and finally the prying apart of the truck and the Mercedes, the contents of which were thankfully concealed from her view. It was only when she was off on her way again that she turned her thoughts to the business of the following day: the search for Danny's letters. If she was lucky Garrison would go to Mass in the morning, as he sometimes did. He had his liberty to give thanks for. And while he was being a good Catholic boy she'd go up to the apartment in the Trump Tower and start her search. If she failed to find anything in the first attempt, she'd either have to wait for the following Sunday, when she could guarantee his absence, or else somehow monitor his whereabouts during the week. It would be hard to spy on the Tower without being noticed. There'd be journalists cruising around for a little while yet; and there had of course been some staff in residence, though she'd heard from somebody that two of them had left after Margie's murder and the third had been telling all kinds of tales to the gutter-press, so she'd presumably been fired.

In the end she'd just have to trust to luck, and have a good, solid excuse for her presence in the apartment if she was discovered. The fact was she felt perversely exhilarated at the thought of going into the Tower. For too long she'd been a passive object; part of the grand Geary scheme. Even her trip to Kaua'i had been initiated by somebody within the family. By helping Danny-or attempting to do so-she was defying her allotted role; and her only regret was that she'd taken so long to do it. Such were the seductions of luxury.

Now, as she began to see the path before her more clearly, she found herself wondering whether Galilee, the prince of her heart, was also one of those seductions. Was he the ultimate luxury? Dropped in her path to distract her from looking where she was not supposed to look? How she longed to have Margie at the other end of a telephone, to share these ruminations with her. Margie had always been able to go unerringly to the heart of a subject; to strip away all the high-minded stuff and focus on the real meat of a thing. What would she have said about Rachel's theorizing? That it was irrelevant, probably, to the business of getting through the day. That attempting to understand the big picture was to partake of a peculiarly male delusion: the belief that events could be shaped and dictated, forced to reflect the will of an individual. Margie had never had much time for that kind of thinking. The only things in life that could truly be controlled were the little things: the number of olives in your martini, the height of your heel. And the men who believed otherwise-the potentates and the plutocrats-were setting themselves up for terrible disappointment sooner or later; which fact, of course, gave her no little pleasure.

Perhaps, Rachel thought, these things worked differently on the Golden Floor. Perhaps up there the Grand Design was the subject of daily chitchat, and the spirits of the dead took pleasure in working out the vast patterns of human endeavor. But she doubted it. Certainly she couldn't imagine Margie having much time for that kind of business. Matters of destiny might be the subject of debate in other quarters, but where Margie held court there would be a happy throng of gossipers, rolling their eyes at the theorists.

The thought made Rachel smile; the first smile of that long, unhappy day. Margie had earned her freedom. Whether her suffering had been self-inflicted (or at least self-perpetuated) the point was surely that she'd endured it without losing sight of the sweet soul she'd been before the Gearys had found her. She'd made the trick look simple, but, as Rachel had found, it was hard to pull off. This world was like a labyrinth; it was easy to get lost in, to become a stranger to yourself. Rachel had been lucky. She'd rediscovered herself back on the island; found the wildling Rachel, the woman of flesh and blood and appetite. She would not lose that woman again. However dark the maze became, however threatening its occupants, she would never again let go of the creature she was; not now that Galilee loved her.

Sunday morning, and the rain was heavier than ever, so heavy at times you couldn't see more than a block in any direction. If there'd been any photographers outside the Tower they'd taken refuge until their subject came back from Mass; or else they'd followed him there. Margie had given Rachel a key to the apartment when the first difficulties with Mitchell had begun, telling her to use the place whenever she wanted to escape.

"Garrison's scarcely ever here," she'd said, "so you needn't worry about meeting him in his underwear. Which is quite a sight, believe me. He looks like a stick of dough with a paunch."

Rachel had never liked the Tower, or the apartment. It had always seemed, despite its glitz, a rather depressing place, even on bright days. And on a day like today, with the sky gray, it was murky and melancholy. The fact that the rooms were furnished with antiques, and the halls hung with huge, futile paintings which Garrison had collected as investments in the early eighties, only added to the charmlessness of the place.

She waited in the hallway for a few moments listening for any sound of occupancy. The only noise she heard came from outside; rain beating against the windows; the distant wail of a siren. She was alone. Time to begin.

She started up the stairs, her ascent taking her into still darker territory. There was a grandfather dock at the top of the flight and her heart jumped when she saw it looming there, imagining for a moment it was Garrison, waiting for her.

She paused while the hammering in her heart subsided. I'm afraid of him, she thought. It was the first time she'd admitted the fact to herself: she was afraid of what he might do if he found her trespassing where she had no business going. It was one thing to hear Loretta talk about his perversions, or to see him, weak and pale, standing before Margie's casket. It was quite another to imagine encountering him here, in the place where he'd slaughtered his own wife. What would she say to him if he did suddenly appear? Did she have a single lie in her head that he'd believe? Probably not. Her only defense against his malice was the fact that she had once been his brother's bride, and how secure a lien against assault was that? The bond between the brothers was far stronger than any claim she might have. At that moment, standing on the stairs, she believed he would probably kill her if the occasion called for it.

She thought of what Mitchell had said two days before; that remark about how dangerous her life would become if he weren't there to protect her. It wasn't an empty threat; it had carried weight. She was forfeitable, just like Margie.

"Get a grip," she murmured to herself. This was neither the place nor time to contemplate her vulnerability.

She had to do what she'd come here to do and then get out. Daring the pale face of the clock (which had not worked, Margie had once told her, since the last years of the Civil War) she climbed the rest of the stairs to the second floor. Margie's private sitting room was on this floor; so was her bedroom, and the bathroom where she'd died. Rachel had intended not to go into the bathroom unless she ran out of places to search, but now, marooned on the landing, she knew the proximity of the place would haunt her unless she confronted it. Flipping on the landing light she went to the bedroom door. It was open a few inches. The room was bright: the investigating officers had left all the drapes wide. They'd also left the room in a state of complete disarray; the whole place had clearly been picked over for evidence. This was the only room in the house hung with pictures that reflected Margie's eclectic taste: a cloyingly sweet Chagall, a small Pissarro depicting a little French village, two Kandinskys. And in bizarre contrast to all this color, two Motherwell Elegies, stark black forms against dirty white, which hung like memento mori to either side of her bed.

Rachel picked her way through the numerous drawers which had been pulled out and laid on the floor to be searched, and went to the bathroom door. Her heart began to hammer again as she reached for the handle. She disregarded its din, and opened the door.

It was a big room, all pink marble and gold; the tub-which Margie had loved to lounge in-enormous. "I feel like a million-dollar hooker when I'm in that tub," Margie had liked to boast.

There were still countless reminders of her presence littered about. Perfume bottles and ashtrays, a photograph of her brother Sam tucked into the frame of the Venetian mirror, another photograph (this one of Margie in lacy underwear, taken by a society photographer who'd specialized in aesthetically sleazy portraits), hanging beside the door to the shower. Again, there was also ample evidence that the police had been here. In several places the black marble surface had been dusted for fingerprints, and a layer of dust remained. The congealed remains of a pizza-presumably consumed while the investigators were at work-sat in a greasy box beside the bath. And the contents of the drawers had been sorted through; a selection of questionable items set on the counter. A plethora of pill bottles; a small square mirror, along with a razor (kept for sentiment's sake, presumably; Margie had stopped using recreational cocaine years ago) and a collection of sexual items: a small pink vibrator, a jar of cherry-flavored body lubricant, some condoms.

The sight of all this distressed Rachel. She couldn't help but imagine the officers smirking as they dug through the drawers; making tasteless jokes at Margie's expense. Not that she would have given a damn.

Rachel had seen enough. She wasn't going to be haunted by this place; any power it might have had over her had been trampled away. At least so she thought until she went to switch off the light. There on the wall was a dark spatter. She told herself to look away, but her eye went no further than the next dried drop, which was larger. She touched it. The drop came away on her fingertip, like cracked paint. It was Margie's blood. And there was more of it, a lot more of it, invisible on the speckled marble until now.

Suddenly it didn't matter that the police had defiled the room with their pizza and their sticky fingers. Margie had died here. Oh, God in Heaven, Margie had died here. This was her lifeblood, spilled on the wall: a smear close to Rachel's shoulder, where she'd fallen back or reached out in the hope of keeping herself from falling, a larger dot on the floor between Rachel's feet, almost as dark as the marble.

She looked away, revolted, but the defenses she'd put up to keep herself from picturing what had happened here had collapsed. Suddenly she had the scene before her, in horrid detail. The sound of the shots echoing off the marble, off the mirrors; the look of disbelief on Margie's face as she retreated from her husband; the blood running out between her fingers, slapping on the floor.

What had Garrison done when the shots were fired? Dropped the gun and fallen to his knees beside her? Or stumbled to the phone to call for an ambulance? More likely he'd called Mitchell, or a lawyer; put off the moment when help could come for as long as possible, to be certain that the life had gone from Margie. Every last breath.

Rachel covered her face with her hands, but the image refused to be banished so easily. It pulsed before her: Margie's face, openmouthed; her hands, fluttering, her body, robbed of motion, or the prospect of motion, darkening as the blood spread over it.

"Stop this," Rachel said to herself.

She wanted to get out of the bathroom without looking at it again, but she knew that was the worst thing she could do. She had to uncover her eyes and confront what she'd seen. There was nothing here that could hurt her, except for her own superstition.

She reluctantly let her hands drop from her face and forced herself to study the scene afresh. First the sink and its surrounds; then the mirror and the tub. Finally, the blood on the floor. Only when she'd taken it all in did she turn to leave the bathroom.

Where now? The bedroom lay before her, with all the drawers laid out. She could waste an hour going through the room, but it was a fool's errand. If the letters were here, then they were so well hidden the police had failed to find them, and so, more than likely, would she.

Instead she picked her way back across the littered floor to the landing and crossed to Margie's sitting room. She glanced at her watch as she did so. She'd been in the house twelve minutes already. There was no time for further delay.

She opened the sitting room door, and immediately retreated, pursued out onto the landing by Didi, Margie's pug, who yapped with all the ferocity of a dog three times his size.

"Hush, hush-." She dropped down to her knees so he could sniff her hands. "It's only me."

He ceased his din on the instant, and instead began a round of grateful mewlings, dancing around in circles before her. She'd never much cared for the animal, but her heart went out to it now. It was doubtless wondering where its mistress had disappeared to, and took Rachel's presence as a sign of her return.

"You come with me," she said to the animal. It duly trotted after her into the sitting room, where a plate of uneaten food and an excrement-caked newspaper testified to its sorry state. The rest of the room was in a far tidier condition than either the bedroom or the bathroom. Either the police had neglected to examine it thoroughly, or else the officer who'd done so was a woman.

Rachel didn't linger. She immediately started to go round the room, opening every cupboard and drawer. There were plenty of plausible hiding places-rows of books (mostly airport romances), heaps of Broadway playbills, even a collection of letters (all of them from charitable organizations begging Margie's support)-but there was no sign of anything vaguely incriminating. Didi stayed close by throughout the search, plainly determined not to lose his companion now he had her. Once only did he leave her side, waddling to the door as though he'd heard somebody in the house. Rachel paused and ventured out onto the landing, listening as intently as the dog, but it seemed to be a false alarm. Back to her search she went, checking on the time as she did so. She'd spent almost half an hour in the sitting room; she couldn't afford to stay in the house much longer. But if she left empty-handed, would she have the courage to return? Certainly she'd used up every cent of enthusiasm she had for the venture. It wouldn't be easy to persuade herself to repeat the process; not now that she had specifics to dwell on: the blood, the murk, the disarray.

When she returned into the sitting room Didi was not at her heel. She called to him, but he didn't come. She called again, and this time heard a lapping sound from the far side of the room. There was another door, which led into a small bathroom, with room for only a sink and a toilet. Didi had somehow scrambled up onto the toilet seat and was drinking from the bowl, the sight both sad and absurd. She told him to get down. He looked up, water dripping from his chops, and gave her a quizzical look. She told him again to get down, this time coming to pluck him off his perch. He was off the seat before she could get to him however, and scampered off between her legs.

She glanced around the tiny room: there was nowhere here to hide anything, except for the plain cabinet that boxed the sink. She bent down and opened it up. It smelt of disinfectant. There was a small store of bathroom cleansers and spare toilet tissue. She pulled them out and peered into the shadows. The pipes coming from the sink were wet; when she reached up to touch them her fingers came away covered in mold. She peered in again. There was something else in beneath the sink beside pipes; something wrapped up in paper. She reached a second time, and this time took hold of the object, which was wedged between the pipe and the damp-sodden plaster. It wouldn't move. She cursed, which sent Didi, who'd returned to see what was going on, scurrying from her side. Suddenly, the object shifted, and her cold fingers weren't quick enough to catch it before it dropped to the ground. There was the muffled sound of a breaking bottle, and then the smell of brandy wafted up out of the cabinet. Clearly what she'd found was liquor Margie had stashed away during some long-surrendered attempt at drying out. Didi was back again, sniffing after the brandy, the smell of which was giddying.

"Get out of there!" Rachel said, catching hold of him to haul him from the muck. He squealed like a piglet. She told him to stop complaining and unceremoniously threw him in the direction of the door. Then she proceeded to put the bleach and disinfectant and toilet tissue back. Hopefully if she closed the cabinet door tight nobody would catch the smell of liquor. And even if they did, she reasoned, what were they going to find? Just a broken bottle. As she slid the last of the disinfectants into the cabinet she caught sight of something else, lying beside the brandy. Not one but two envelopes, both bulky. Either Danny wrote very long letters, she thought, or else he'd miscalculated the number of photographs he'd taken. She pulled the envelopes out into the light. They had both been in contact with the wall; there were flecks of decayed plaster adhering to them. Otherwise, they'd survived their hiding place intact. One of them was considerably heavier than the other however. It didn't contain letters or photographs, she thought; more like a small, thick book.

This wasn't the place to examine the contents; she could do that at home. She finished putting the disinfectants into the cabinet, firmly closed the door, and bidding Didi a quick farewell headed out of the sitting room onto the landing.

If Garrison came in now, she thought, she wouldn't be able to tell a lie worth a damn. The pleasure at her discovery was written all over her face. She tucked the envelopes into her coat and hurried down the stairs, keeping her eye on the front door as she descended; but the good fortune which had delivered the envelopes into her hands held. She opened the door a few inches, checking to see if there were any photographers out there, and finding that the ram was still pelting down and the sidewalk deserted, slipped out and down the steps, thoroughly pleased with herself.

I have to make room here for the briefest of digressions on the inevitable and probably inexhaustible subject of my invert sister. The last I wrote of her she'd come into my room flushed with success, having read Sister Mary-Elizabeth's poem to her beloved, and had her proposal of marriage accepted. A few hours ago she came back with details of the arrangements.

"No excuses," she said to me. "You have to be there."

"I've never been to a lesbian wedding," I said, "I wouldn't know what to do."

"Be happy for me."

"I am."

"I want you to dance and get drunk and make a sentimental speech about our childhood."

"Oh what? You and Daddy in the dressing room?"

She gave me a fierce look. Maybe it's some remnant of an atavistic power lodged in her, but when she gets fierce she looks rabid.

"Has Alice ever seen you angry?" I asked her.

"Once or twice."

"No. I mean really angry. Crazy-angry. I-could-tear-your-heart-out-and-eat-it angry."

"Hm… no."

"Shouldn't she be warned, before you tie the knot? I mean, you can be a terror."

"So can she. She's the only girl in a family of eight."

"She has seven brothers?"

"Seven brothers. And they treat her very respectfully."

"Rich family?"

"White trash. Two of the brothers are in jail. The father's an alcoholic. Beer for breakfast."

"Are you sure she's not just after you for your money?" I said. Marietta glowered. "Jesus, I'm just asking. I don't want to see you hurt."

"If you're so suspicious, then you come and meet her. Meet them all."

"You know I can't do that."

"Why not? And don't tell me you're working."

"But that's the truth. I am. Morning, noon and night."

"This is a damn sight more important than your book. This is the woman I love and adore and idolize."

"Hm. Love, adore and idolize, huh? She must be good in bed."

"She's the best, Eddie. I mean, the very best. She eats me out like she'd just invented it. I scream so loud the trailer shakes."

"She lives in a trailer? Are you sure you're doing the right thing?"

Marietta picked at her front tooth, which she always does when she's uneasy. "Most of the time," she replied.

"But…?"

"But what?"

"No. You tell me. Most of the time's enough?"

"Okay, smartass. When you met Chiyojo were you absolutely certain-not even a breath of doubt-that she was the one?"

"Absolutely."

"You had an affair with her brother," she reminded me lightly.

"So?"

"So how certain could you be about marrying a woman when you were screwing her brother?"

"That was different. He was…" r

"A transvestite."

"No. He was an actor." She rolled her eyes. "How did we get into this?" I said.

"You were trying to talk me out of marrying Alice."

"No I wasn't. I really wasn't. I was observing that… I don't know what I was observing. Never mind."

Marietta came over to me and took hold of my hand. "You know, you're very good for me," she said.

"I am?"

"You make me question things. You make me think twice."

"I don't know if that's such a good thing. Sometimes I wish I hadn't thought twice so many times, if you see what I mean. I might have done more with my life."

"I think Alice is the one, Eddie."

"Then marry her, for God's sake."

She squeezed my hand hard. "I really want you to meet her first. I want your opinion. It means a lot to me."

"So maybe you should bring her here," I said. Marietta looked doubtful. "She's going to see this place eventually. And I think we'd both have a better idea of whether it was going to work out once we saw how she responded."

"You mean: tell her everything?"

"Not everything. Nobody could handle everything. Just enough to see whether she's ready for the truth."

"Hm. Would you help me?"

"Like how?"

"Keep Cesaria from scaring her."

"I can't stop her if she wants to do something. Nobody could. Not even Dad."

"But you'd do your best."

"Yes. I'll be the voice of reason, if that makes any difference."

"You'd tell Cesaria you suggested it?"

I sighed. "If I must" I said.

"Then that's settled. I'll go talk to Alice now."

"Just give me a little warning. So I can organize myself."

"I'm excited."

"Oh Lord. I don't like the sound of that."

Of course I'm regretting it. Who wouldn't? The best it can be is a fiasco. But what else was I going to do? This obviously isn't some overnight romance. Marietta feels something profound for this woman. I can see it in her eyes. I can hear it in her voice. And it would be hypocritical of me to be writing with such enthusiasm about the grand-if stymied-passion between Rachel and Galilee and at the same time turn a blind eye to something that's happening right in front of me.

Anyway, I've agreed. The woman will come to us and we'll see what we'll see.

Meanwhile, I have a story to tell.

The Central Park apartment was deserted when Rachel got back from her expedition to the Trump Tower. Even so, she didn't sit down at the dining room table and open the two envelopes she'd found, just in case somebody were to walk in on her. She went to her bedroom, where she locked the door and drew the drapes. Only then did she sit cross-legged on the bed to examine her booty.

In the less bulky of the two envelopes she found the letters and the photographs. Danny was quite the eroticist, to judge by what he'd written. His concern that if these letters had fallen into the wrong hands they might be used to besmirch Margie was well founded. There were dates and times and locations here; there were heated reminiscences of deeds done and boastful promises of how much more intricate it was going to get next time. Nor was any of this put in a roundabout way. "We're going to have to start fucking in a soundproof room," he said in one of the letters, "the way you like to shout. I'm sitting here hard as

a rock thinking about you yelling your head off, and me just sliding in and out, long strokes, the way you like. There isn 't a thing I wouldn 't do for you, you know that? When we 're together I feel as though the rest of the world can just go to hell-we don't need anybody but each other. I wish I could have been a baby, sometimes, and drunk the milk from your beautiful tits. Or been born out of you. Fuck, I know that sounds twisted, but you said we shouldn 't be afraid of any of the things we feel, right? I'd like to fuck you so deep I get lost inside you, and you 'd carry me around for a while, like I was your baby. Then when you wanted me out and giving you the nasty you 'd just open your legs and out I'd come, all ready to service you."

The photographs were not as graphic as the letters, by any means, but they were still notably perverse. Danny was obviously proud of his endowment, and quite happy to have it recorded for posterity, while Margie's sense of humor was evident in the way she toyed with him. In one photograph she had drawn on his lower belly and upper thighs with lipstick; flames perhaps, as though his groin was on fire. In another, he was coupling with her while wearing her pantyhose, through which his dick stuck, ripe cherry red. All good old-fashioned fun.

Rachel called Danny at home and told him the good news. He was just about to go down to the bar to start his shift, but he was happy to call in sick and come and pick the letters and photographs up immediately if that suited Rachel best. She told him not to do anything that would make people even faintly suspicious. The stuff was quite safe in her possession, she said. They could meet when Danny's shift was over, at midnight or so, and she could give everything to him then. They agreed on a meeting place, two blocks north of the bar where Danny worked.

That duty done, she turned her attention to the contents of the other envelope. She was expecting to find further evidence of Margie's philanderings; but what she found was something else entirely. It was a journal, clothbound and in an advanced state of disrepair, its cover stained and torn, its spine cracked, its pages loosened from their stitching. A thin brown leather strap had been tied around it to keep its contents together: when she untied it she discovered that several separate sheets of paper had been interleaved with the journal's pages. Their condition varied wildly. There were a few neatly folded, and well preserved, there were others that were little more than scraps. What was written on the sheets similarly ran the gamut: from perfect copperplate to a chaotic scrawl. Some were letters, some seemed to be fragments of a sermon (at least there was much talk of God and redemption there); some were crudely illustrated, their subjects always the same: soldiers, in what looked to be Civil War garb. There was no form of identification at the beginning of the book-indeed it seemed to start in midsentence-but when she flipped on through it she found that the first four or five pages had come loose at some point, and the owner had slipped them into the middle of the book. On the first page was an inscription written in an elegant, feminine hand.

This is for your thoughts, my darling Charles.

Bring it back to me when this horrid war is over, and we'll put it away, and put all the suffering away with it.

I love you more than life, and will show my love a thousand ways when you are here again.

Your adoring wife,

Adina

Below this, the date: September the Second, 1863

So they were Civil War soldiers in the sketches, Rachel thought. This journal had belonged to some military man who'd used it to record experiences as he went to battle. She knew little about the war between the states; history had never been a subject she'd warmed to. Especially when it was brutal; and what little she did remember of her lessons about the period concerned the cruelties that had brought the war about and the cruelties that had ended it. There had been nothing to engage her sympathies, so whatever dates and names she'd learned had quickly fled from her head.

But a history book and a journal such as this were very different things. One was filled with facts, to be learned parrot-fashion. The other had a voice, a drama, a sense of the specific. In a short time, she found herself entranced, not by the details of what was being described-much of it was a forlorn catalog of woes and privations: inedible food, dying animals, long, exhausting marches, foot rot and gut "rot and lice-but the tangible presence of the man who was doing the describing, his self-portrait becoming more detailed, line by line. He loved his wife, he had faith in God and in the cause of the South, he hated Lincoln (a "damned hypocrite") and almost all Northerners ("they pretend righteousness because it suits them"); he liked his horse better than most of the men he commanded, and yet seemed to feel their hardship more than his own.

Isn 't there a better way to settle our differences, he wrote, than to put before the bullet and the bayonet common men such as these, who have no true comprehension of what is at issue here, nor in truth care to, but only want to have this bloody business done so that they can return to doing what the Lord made them to do: to plow and drink and die surrounded by their children and their children's children.

When I hear them talking among themselves they don't talk of politics and the greatness of our cause: they talk about clean water and strawberry pie. What is the use of putting such simple souls to death? Better that we chose ten princes of the South, and ten gentlemen of the North, if they could find that number, and set them in a field with swords, to

fight until there was only one remaining. Let the victory go to that side then, and spill only the blood of nineteen men, instead of this wholesale slaughter, which so grievously wounds the body of the nation.

Just a few pages later, in a passage dated August 22nd, 1864 ("a filthy, clammy night") he returned to the subject of how the men suffer, but from a different point of view.

I find myself losing patience with the idea that this war is the Lord's work. We were given free will; and we have chosen what? To make one another suffer.

Yesterday we came upon a hill which had apparently been, for a week or a month, who knows now, a place of some strategic importance. There were dead men, or what the foul heat of this season makes of dead men, everywhere. Blue and gray, in what seemed to me equal numbers. Why had they not been given Christian burials? I can only assume because there were not enough infantrymen of either side left alive to perform that duty, nor enough compassion left in their commanders to bring in a brigade and put the dead in the ground. The battle moves on to another hill-which will for a week or a month seem of vital strategic importance-and these hundreds of men, all somebody's sons, left for flies to breed in.

I'm ashamed of myself tonight. I wish I were not a man, if this is what men are.

The more Rachel read, the more questions she had. Who was this fellow, who had poured his feelings onto the page so eloquently she felt as though she could hear him, speaking to her? How had he learned to express himself so powerfully, and what purpose had he turned that power to when the fighting was finished? A preacher? A pacifist politician? Or had he done as his wife intended, and taken the book, with all its rage and its disappointment, back home to be sealed up and never spoken of again?

Then there was another series of questions, that were nothing to do with Charles and Adina. How had Margie come by the book? And why had she wrapped it up and hidden it alongside the letters from Danny? This was scarcely scandalous material. Perhaps at the time Charles's views would have been thought radical, but almost a century and a half later, what did it matter what he'd written?

She read on. Every now and then she'd unfold one of the loose notes tucked between the pages, some of which had nothing to do with anything she'd so far read, some of which looked to be thoughts he'd jotted down when he couldn't get to his journal, some of which were letters. There were two, side by side, from Adina, both sad and curiously abrupt. The first said:

Dearest husband,

I write with the worst of news, and know of no way to sweeten it. Two days ago the Lord took our darling Nathaniel from us, in a fever which came so suddenly that he was gone before Henrietta could bring Dr. Sarris to the house.

He would be four the first Tuesday of next month, and I had promised him you would take him up on your horse as a birthday .treat when you came home. He spoke-of this at the last.

I do not think he much suffered.

The second was shorter still.

I must go to Georgia, if I can, Adina wrote. I have word from Hamilton that the plantation has been brought to ruin, and that our father is in such despair he has twice attempted to end his own life. I will bring him back to Charleston with me, and tend to him there.

The hand that had written these letters was still just recognizably the same that had penned the inscription, but it had deteriorated into a spiky scrawl. Rachel could scarcely imagine what state the woman must have been reduced to: her husband gone, one of her children dead, her family fortune lost; it was a wonder she'd kept her sanity. But then, perhaps she hadn't.

Again, Rachel moved on. In an hour or so she'd have to set out for her meeting with Danny, but she didn't want to leave the journal. It fascinated her; these tragic lives, unraveling before her, like the lives of people in a novel. Except that this book gave her none of the familiar comforts of fiction. No authorial voice to put these events in a larger context; no certainty, even, that she would be shown how their troubles were resolved.

A few pages on, however, about halfway through the journal, she chanced upon a page which would significantly change the direction of all that followed.

Tonight I do not know if I am a sane man, Charles wrote. I have had such a strange experience today, and want to write it down before 1 go to sleep so that I do not dismiss it tomorrow as something my exhausted mind invented. It was not. I'm certain, it was not. I know how the visions that arise from fatigue appear-I've seen some of them-and this was of a different order.

We are marching southeast, through North Carolina. It rains constantly, and the ground has turned to mud; the men are so tired they neither sing nor complain, barely having the energy left to put one boot in front of another. I wonder how long it will be before 1 have to join them; my horse is sick, and I believe he only continues to walk out of love of me. Poor thing! I've seen the cook, Nickelberry, eyeing him now and then, wondering if there's any way in the world he can turn such a carcass into edible fare.

So, that was what the day brought, and it was horrible enough. But then, as dusk came, and it was that hour when nothing in the world seems solid and certain, I looked down

and saw-oh God in Heaven, my pen does not want to make these words-I saw my boy, my golden-haired Nathaniel, sitting on the saddle in front of me.

thought ofAdina 's letter: of how she had promised that ride upon the horse, and my heart quickened, for today was Nathaniel's birthday.

I expected the presence to disappear after a time, but it did not. As the night drew on he stayed there, as though to comfort me. Once, in the darkness, I sensed him look round and back at me, and saw his pale face and his dark eyes there before me.

I spoke then. I said: I love you, my son.

He replied to me! As if all this weren't extraordinary enough, he replied. Papa, he said, the horse is tired, and wants me to ride her away.

It was unbearable, to hear that little voice in the darkness telling me that my horse was not long for this world.

told him: then you must take her. And I had no sooner spoken than I felt my horse shudder beneath me, and the life went out of her, and she fell to the ground. I fell with her, of course, into the mud. There were lamps brought, and some fuss made of me, but I had fallen, I think, in a kind of swoon, which had perhaps kept me from any serious harm.

Of Nathaniel, of course, there was no sign. He had gone, riding the spirit of my horse away, wherever the souls of the loyal and the loving go.

There was a small space on the page now. When Charles took up his account again, he was plainly in an even more agitated state.

I cannot sleep. I wonder if I will ever sleep again. I think of the child all the time. Why did he come to me? What was he telling me?

Nickelberry is a better man than I took him to be. Most cooks are vile men in my experience. He is not. The men

call him Nub. He saw me writing in this book earlier, and came to me and asked me if I would write a letter for him, to send back to his mother. I told him I would. Then he said he was sorry my horse had died but I should take comfort that it had nourished many men who were so sick if they had not eaten tonight they would have perished. I thanked him for the thought, but I could see that he wanted to say more, and couldn 'tfind a way to begin. So I told him simply to spit it out. And out it came. He said he'd heard that there was now no hope that we could win this war. I told him that was probably true. To which he said, plain as day: then why are we still fighting?

Such a simple question. And I listened to the rain beating on the tent, and heard the wounded sobbing somewhere near, and thought of Nathaniel, come to ride with me, and I wanted to weep, but I did not dare. Not because I was ashamed. I like this man Nickelberry; I wouldn't care that I wept in front of him. I didn't dare begin to weep because I was afraid I would never stop.

I told him truthfully: "Once I would have said we should fight to the death to prove the righteousness of our cause. But now I think nothing is pure in this world, nor ever was, and we will die uselessly, as we have lived."

Did I say that he was a little drunk? I think he was. But he seemed quickly sobered by this, and said he would visit me again tomorrow, so that I could write the letter to his mother. Then he left me to sleep.

But I cannot. I think of what he said, and what I replied, and I wonder if tomorrow I should not forsake my uniform, and the cause I was ready to die for, and act as a man not as a soldier; and go my own way.

I can scarcely believe I wrote those words. But I believe that's why Nathaniel came to take the horse: it was his way of shaking me out of my stupor; of stopping me marching to my death. What would I have died for? For nothing. All of this for nothing.

Rachel looked at the clock. It was time to go, but she didn't want to stop reading, so she slipped the letters and the photographs back into one envelope, and the book back into the other, and took them both with her. As so often happened in this city the weather had changed suddenly: a warm wind had blown the rain clouds upstate, and for once the streets smelled sweet. As the cab bounced and rattled its way toward Soho she took out the journal again, and began to read.

The battle of Bentonville began on Monday, the twenty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. It was not, by the standards of the war between the states, a great, decisive or even particularly bloody battle: but it has this distinction: it is the last hurrah of the Southern Confederacy. Thirty-six days later General Joseph E. Johnston would meet William T. Sherman at the Bennett farmhouse and surrender his men. The war would be over.

Captain Charles Rainwill Holt did not desert on the night before the battle, as he had intended to; he thought better of it. The weather, which had been inclement during the march, became fouler still, and he judged his chances of getting away in the darkness without some harm or other coming to him less than good.

On the following day the battle began, and from the beginning it was a mess. The terrain was in places forested with pine, and in others swamp and briar. The men on both sides were exhausted, and there was scarcely an encounter through that first day and night that did not end chaotically. Men lost in smoke and rain and darkness firing back upon their own comrades. Charges led upon lines that did not exist. Earthworks abandoned before they were half dug. The wounded left in the woods (which had been set alight by cannon fire despite the rain) and burned alive within earshot of their fellows.

There was worse to come, and the captain knew it, but as the hours passed that stupor from which his son had come to stir him fell upon him again. More than once he saw an opportunity, and could not bring himself to take it. It was not fear of a stray bullet that kept him from moving. There was something leaden in him, like a weight that war had poured into his bowels, and it kept him from his escape.

It was Nickelberry the cook who finally persuaded him to leave. Not with words, but with his own departure.

It was just after dusk on the second day, and Charles had gone out from the encampment a little way, to try and put his thoughts in order. Behind him the men gathered round their cautious fires, trying by whatever means they could to keep their spirits up. Somebody was plucking a banjo; one or two exhausted voices were raised to sing along. The sound came strangely between the trees, like the sound of phantoms. Charles tried to bring to mind the garden in Charleston where he'd proposed to Adina; he'd calmed his troubled spirits many times thinking of that spot. Of the fragrance of its air; of the nightbirds that made such melody in the trees. But tonight he could not remember the perfume of that place, or its music. It was as if that Eden had never existed.

As he stared off into the darkness, lost in these melancholy thoughts, he saw a figure moving between the trees not ten yards from him. He was about to challenge the man, when he realized who it was.

"Nickelberry…?" he whispered.

The figure froze, so still the captain could barely distinguish him from the trees amongst which he stood.

"Is that you, Nickelberry?"

There was no reply, but he was certain that it was indeed the cook, so he began to walk in the man's direction. "Nickelberry? It's Captain Holt."

Nickelberry responded by moving off again, away from the camp.

"Where are you going?" the captain demanded, picking up his pace to catch up with the cook. The briars slowed the advance of both men, but Nickelberry in particular. He had walked into a very thorny patch, and flailed at them, cursing in his frustration.

The captain was almost upon him now.

"Don't get any closer!" Nickelberry said. "I don't want to hurt you none, but I ain't staying and you ain't gonna make me stay. No sir."

"It's all right, Nub. Calm down."

"I'm done with this damn war."

"Keep your voice down, will you? They'll hear us."

"You ain't gonna try and turn me in?"

"No I'm not."

"If you try-" The captain saw one of Nub's meat carving knives, pale silver, between them. "I'll kill you before they take me."

"I'm sure you would."

"I don't care no more. You hear me? I'd prefer to take my chances out there than stay and be killed."

The captain studied the man before him. He could barely see Nub's expression in the darkness, but he could bring the man's broad, expressive face into his mind's eye readily enough. There was cunning in that face; and tenacity. He wouldn't make a bad companion, Charles thought, if a man had to be living by his wits out there.

"You want to go on your own?" Holt said.

"Huh?"

"Or we could go together."

"Together?"

"Why not?"

"A captain and a cook?"

"Makes no difference what we were back there. Once we run we're both deserters."

"You're not trying to trick me?"

"No. I'm going. If you want to come with me, then come. If you don't-"

"I'm coming," Nickelberry said.

"Then put away the knife." Holt could feel Nickelberry's gaze on him, still doubtful. "Put it away. Nub." There was a further moment of vacillation; then Nickelberry slid the knife back into his belt. "Good," Charles said. "Now… did you know you were headed toward enemy lines?"

"I thought they were east of here."

"No. They're right there," Holt said, pointing off between the trees. "If you look carefully, you can see their fires."

Nickelberry looked. The fires were indeed visible; flickers of yellow in the enveloping night.

"Lord, look at that. I would have walked straight into their arms." Any lingering reservations he might have had about the captain's allegiances were plainly allayed. "So which way we goin'?" he said.

"The way I've reckoned it," the Captain said, "our best hope is to head south toward the Goldsboro Road, and then make our way from there. I want to head home to Charleston."

"Then I'll come with you," Nickelberry said. "I ain't got no better place to go."

None of what I've just recounted found its way into the pages of Holt's journal. He did not write in it again for almost two weeks, by which time the battle of Bentonville was long since over.

This is what Rachel read, as the cab carried her down Madison Avenue:

We came into Charleston last night. I can barely recognize the city, such is the violence that has been done to it by the

Yankees. Nickelberry kept asking me questions as we went, but I had not the life in me to answer. When I think of how this noble city stood before the war, and the way it is laid waste now, such despair rises in me, for truly all that was good seems to me to have passed away. This city, which was so fine, is now a kind of hell: blackened by fire and haunted by the dead. Entire streets I knew have disappeared. People wander the rubble, their faces blank, their hands bloody after turning over brick upon brick upon brick, looking for something by which to remember the life they had.

We went straight way to Tradd Street, expecting the worst, but found a strange thing. Though much around in the street lay in ruins, my house was almost whole. Some damage to the roof, windows blown in, and the gardens all withered of course, but otherwise intact.

But, oh, when I went inside, I almost wished a volley had blown it to smithereens. My house, my precious house, had been used as a place for the dying and the dead. I do not know why it was so chosen-I cannot believe Adina would have allowed this; I must assume it was done after she had departed for Georgia. I only know that every room seemed to contain some sight more sickening than the one before.

The living room had been stripped of furniture, but for the mahogany table which had been fetched from the dining room and used for a surgeon to work upon. The floor around it was black with old blood, the table the same. And all around the room, the remnants of the surgeon's craft: saws and hammers and knives. The kitchen had been used to make poultices and the like, and stank so badly that Nickel-berry, who I may say has a stronger stomach than most, vomited. I did the same, but I went on from room to room despite Nub telling me I should not.

Upstairs, in what used to be the bedroom in which Adina and I slept-the bedroom where Nathaniel was conceived, and Evangeline and Miles-I found an empty coffin. The bed had gone; looted, I presume, or used for firewood. And

in the other bedrooms filthy mattresses, blankets, bowls and all the accoutrements of the sickroom. I cannot bring myself to write further what vile signs I found of the souls who had passed their last there.

Nickelberry kept urging me away, and finally I went with him. But before I left I said I wanted to go out into the garden. He begged me not to; said he had come to like my company on the road and was fearful for my sanity. But I would not be persuaded to depart until I had seen the place where I had sat in the years before the war, and taken such joy. Somehow I knew that the worst would be there; and I would not be finished with this business until I had laid eyes upon that worst, whatever it was.

I know of no place that proffered such fragrances as that little plot of ground: jasmine and magnolia, tea olive and banana shrub; all lent the air a sweetness that could make my head swim on summer nights. And now, despite the harms all around, nature was still doing its best to grace the air. Some of the smaller trees and shrubs had survived the destruction, and their branches were budding. There were even a few flowers underfoot.

But these little victories could not compete with the terrible sight that lay in the middle of the garden. The surgeons' accomplices had dug holes there, to bury the gangrenous parts hacked from the wounded. They had done their job poorly. Upon their departure dogs had come and dug up this horrid meat, and picked it clean. Here, where my children had played, and my darling Adina walked in love, were human bones in their many dozens. I think my coming out had disturbed some of the animals, because in places the dirt was freshly turned, and as yet undevoured trophies lay. A leg, its foot still booted. An arm, severed at midbicep. Much else I could not make sense of, nor wanted to.

have seen every kind of misery in these three years, and endured everything as best a man may be expected to endure such horrors. But to find sights that rank with the worst I have witnessed in this place, where my children played,

where I spoke words of devotion to my wife, where-in short-I made my heaven, is nearly more than I can bear.

Were it not for Nub, I should now surely be dead by my own hand.

He says we should leave the city tomorrow. I have agreed. For tonight, we are sleeping on the steps of St. Michael's Church, where I am presently writing this. Nub has gone off to beg or steal some food (which he's very good at doing) but the thought of what I saw this evening makes me so sick to my stomach I doubt I shall eat.

The little club where Danny had arranged to meet Rachel was thronged with the late-night crowd, and she had to search it for several minutes before she located him. She felt strangely dislocated, as though she'd left some part of herself behind her in the pages of Captain Holt's journal. There was nothing in her experience that remotely approached the horrors he had described, but the fact that she was holding in her hands the book which he'd had in his pocket when he'd walked into his house on Tradd Street made the vision he was evoking all the more immediate. It was the crowd before her which seemed unreal; their alcohol-flushed features smeared in the murk.

Even Danny, when she finally located him, seemed remote from her, viewed through smoke-thickened gloom.

"I was beginning to think you weren't going to come," he said. His voice was a little slurred with drink. "You want one?"

"I'll have a brandy," Rachel said. "Make it a double, will you?"

"Why don't you go sit down? I'm sorry about the crowd. I guess somebody's having a birthday party. Do you want to go somewhere else?"

"No, I'll just have a drink, and give you the stuff, then-"

"-you don't have to lay eyes on me again," Danny said. "That's a promise." He didn't wait for Rachel to protest, which she would have done out of politeness, but headed off into the midst of the birthday celebrants.

Rachel went to an empty table at the back of the room, and sat down. She was sorely tempted to take out the journal again, though this was scarcely an ideal place to be reading it. The lights were so dim she probably wouldn't be able to make sense of it, she told herself. To distract herself she looked for Danny. He was still at the bar, waving a bill to attract somebody's attention.

Without consciously planning to do so, she reached into the envelope and pulled out the journal again. At a nearby table a group of drunken partiers had started to sing a birthday song. Several of them attempting vainly to harmonize. The cacophony troubled her as far as the end of the first sentence. Then she was back with the deserters, in the silent city.

I am writing this two days after we came into Charleston, and I am not certain 1 know how to describe what has taken place since my last entry.

Best to keep it plain, I think. Nub came back to St. Michael's a little before dawn, and he not only brought food, good food, the best I'd seen in many months, he also came with news of a strange encounter he'd had.

It seemed he'd met a woman whom he'd first taken to be some kind of apparition, she was, he said, so perfect in this ghostly place, so beautiful, so graceful. Her name was Olivia, and she was apparently so charmed by Nickel-berry, and he so enamored of her, that when she invited him halfway across the city to meet a friend of hers, he went.

By the time he came back to see me he had not only met this friend, who goes by the strange name of Galilee-

Rachel stopped reading, as though struck. She looked up. The crowd was wild around her. The singers were up from their table, reeling around, the unlucky focus of their attentions still sitting, dumbfounded by drink. Danny had secured a glass of brandy, along with something for himself, and was working his way back towards Rachel's table, but he was having difficulty weaving between the partiers. Before he could catch Rachel's eye, she looked back at the journal, half expecting the words she'd seen there to have disappeared.

But no. They were there:

-this friend, who goes by the strange name of Galilee-

It couldn't be the same man, of course. This Galilee had lived and died in an earlier age; long before the Galilee she knew had been born.

She had a few seconds before Danny reached her. Long enough to quickly scan the next few lines:

-but had tasted some generosity of his which had changed him in a fashion I cannot quite describe. He said to me that we had to go together to meet this man, and that when we 'd met I would feel to some measure the hurts I had suffered in this city undone-

"What are you reading?"

Danny was setting the drinks down on the table. Holt's words were still in Rachel's eyes-

-the hurts I had suffered in this city-

"Oh it's just an old diary."

"Family heirloom?"

"No."

-undone-

Danny sat down. "Your brandy," he said, pushing the glass in Rachel's direction.

"Thank you." She picked up the brandy and sipped. It burned a little against her lips and on her tongue. "Are you all right?" Danny said.

"Yes, I'm fine."

"You look a little shaken up."

"No… I'm just… these last few days…" She could barely put a coherent sentence together, she was so distracted by what she'd just read. "I don't want to seem rude-" she said, making a concerted effort to be articulate. The sooner this conversation was over, the sooner she'd be back with the journal, finding out what awaited the captain. "I've just got a lot on my mind right now. This is what I found at the apartment." She handed Danny the envelope containing letters and the photographs. He glanced around to see if anybody was looking his way, and then, a little tentatively, reached into the envelope and slid out the contents.

"I didn't count them," Rachel said, "but I assume it's everything."

"I'm sure it is," Danny said, staring down at the evidence of his romance. "Thank you so much."

"What are you going to do with it all?"

"Keep it."

"Just be careful, Danny." He glanced up at her. "Don't talk to anybody about Margie. I wouldn't want… you know…"

"You wouldn't want me to be found in the East River."

"I'm not saying-"

"I know what you're saying," he replied. "And thank you. But you don't have to worry about me. Really you don't. I'm going to be fine."

"Good," she said, draining the last of her brandy. "Thank you for the drink."

"You're going already?"

"Stuff to do."

Danny got up, and somewhat awkwardly took her hand. "I know it's a cliche," he said, "but I don't know what I would have done without you." He looked, suddenly, like a lost twelve-year-old. "You took some risks, I know."

"For Margie…" she said.

"Yes," he replied, with a sad little smile, "for Margie."

"You keep well, Danny," Rachel said, hugging him. "I know there's good things ahead for you."

"Oh?" he said doubtfully. "I think the best times went with Margie." He kissed her on the cheek. "She loved us both, huh? So that's something."

"That's a lot, Danny."

"Yeah," he said, trying to put on a little brightness. "You're right. That's a lot."

A bout the time Rachel caught her cab back uptown, and opened the journal to pick up Captain Holt's story where she'd left off. Garrison was pouring his fourth Scotch of the night, slipping the bottle down beside the high-backed armchair set before his dining room window. He wasn't alone in his liquored state. Mitchell was sitting in front of the fire, which he'd insisted be lit, in a worse state of intoxication than he'd been in since law school. Two maudlin drunks, talking of how their women had betrayed them. They'd poured out their hearts tonight, as liberally as they'd poured the Scotch: confessed their indifference to the labors of the marital bed, and their weariness with their adulteries; promised that their only loyalties lay with one another, and that whatever betrayals there might have been, they were a thing of the past; and most significantly, debated in detail how their dealings had to be handled from now on, now that they knew how isolated they were.

"I know it's no good looking back…" Mitchell slurred.

"No it isn't…"

"But I can't help it. When I think of the way things were."

"They weren't as wonderful as you remember. Memories are lies. Especially the good ones."

"Were you never happy?" Mitch said. "Not once? Not for an afternoon?"

Garrison grunted as he thought about this. "Well now you mention it," he said finally. "I do remember that day

I dumped you in the yard with the fire ants, and you got bit all over your ass. I was pretty damn happy that day. Do you remember that?"

"Do I remember-"

"I got beaten black and blue for that."

"By Poppa?"

"No, by mother. She never left it to George when it came to something important, because she knew we weren't scared of him. She beat me within an inch of my life."

"You deserved it," Mitchell said, "I was sick for a week. And you didn't give a shit."

"I didn't like that you got all the attention. But you know what? When I was moping around, pissed off that you were being pampered, Cadmus said to me: see what happens if you make people sorry for someone? I remember him saying that, plain as day. He wasn't angry with me. He just wanted me to understand that I'd done a stupid thing: I'd made everybody lovey-dovey with you. So I didn't try and hurt you after that, in case you got the attention."

Mitchell got up and went to fetch the bottle from Garrison.

"Speaking of the old man-" Mitchell said, "Jocelyn told me you kept him company last night."

"I sure did. I sat by his bed for a few hours when they brought him back from the hospital. I tell you, he's tough. The doctors didn't think he was going to come home."

"Did he tell you anything?"

Garrison shook his head. "He was raving most of the time. It's the painkillers they've got him on. They make him delirious." Garrison fell silent for a long moment. "You know what I started to wonder."

"What?"

"If we took him off the medication…"

"We can't-"

"I mean just took his pills away."

"Waxman wouldn't allow that."

"We wouldn't tell Waxman. We'd just do it."

"He'd be in agony."

A tiny smile appeared on Garrison's face. "But we'd get some straight answers from him, if we had the pills." He shook his fist, as though it contained the means to Cad-mus's comfort.

"Fuck…" Mitchell said softly.

"I know it's not a very pretty idea," Garrison said, "but we don't have a lot of options left. He's not going to hang on forever. And when he's gone…"

"There's got to be some other way," Mitch said. "Let me try talking to him."

"You can't get anything out of him. He doesn't trust either of us any more. I don't think he ever did. He didn't trust anybody but himself." Garrison thought on this for a moment. "Smart man."

"So how do you know all this stuff exists?"

"Because Kitty told me about it. She was the only one who ever talked to me about the Barbarossas. She'd seen the journal."

"So at least the old man trusted her."

"I guess he did. At the beginning. I guess we all start out trusting our wives…"

"Wait," Mitch said. "I just had a thought-"

"Margie."

"Yeah."

"I'm there before you, brother."

"Cadmus liked her."

"So maybe he gave her the journal? Yeah. Like I say, I'm there before you." He slid deeper into his seat, cocooned in shadow. "But if she had it, she certainly wasn't going to tell me about it. Even with a gun waved in her face."

"Have you searched your apartment?"

"The police already went through it, top to bottom."

"So maybe they took it."

"Yeah, maybe…" Garrison said, without much confi dence. "Cecil's trying to find out what they lifted from the place while I was locked up. But I can't see why they'd remove something like that. It's no use to them."

Mitchell sighed. "I'm so sick of this," he said.

"Sick of what?"

"All this shit about the Barbarossas. I don't know why we don't just forget about 'em. If they were such a fucking problem, the old man would have done something about them years ago."

"He couldn't," Garrison said, sipping on his whisky. "They're too powerful."

"If they're so powerful why have I never heard of them?"

"Because they don't want you to know. They're secretive."

"So what have they got to hide? Maybe it's something we can use against them."

"I don't think so," Garrison said, very quietly. Mitchell looked at him, expecting him to say more, but he kept his silence. Several seconds passed. Then Garrison murmured, "The women know more than we do."

"Because they get serviced by that sonofabitch?"

"I think they get more than that," Garrison said.

"I want to kill the fuck," Mitchell replied.

"I don't want you trying anything," Garrison said calmly. "Do you understand me, Mitch?"

"He fucked my wife."

"You knew you'd have to let her go to him sooner or later."

"It's bullshit…"

"It won't happen again," Garrison said, his voice colorless. "She was the last." He looked out at his brother from the cleft of the chair. "We're going to bring them down, Mitch. Him and all his family. That's why I don't want any personal vendettas from you. I don't want them getting twitchy. I want to know everything there is to know about them before we move against them."

"Which brings us back to the journal," Mitchell said. He set his glass on the sill. "You know maybe I should talk to Cadmus."

Garrison didn't reply to the suggestion. He didn't even acknowledge it. Instead he drained his whisky glass, and then-his voice no more than a bruised whisper-he said: "You know what Kitty told me?"

"What?"

"That they're not human."

Mitchell laughed; the sound hard and ragged.

Garrison waited until it died away, then he said: "I think she was telling the truth."

"That's fucking stupid," Mitchell said. "I don't want to hear about it." He bared his teeth in disgust. "How could you fucking believe a thing like that?"

"I think she even took me to the Barbarossa house, when I was a baby."

"Fuck the house," Mitchell said, swatting all this irritating talk away. "I don't want to hear any more! Okay?"

"We've got to face it sooner or later."

"No," Mitchell said, with absolute resolution. "If you're going to start talking like this, I'm going home."

"It's not something we can hide from," Garrison said mildly. "It's a fact of our lives, Mitch. It always has been. We just didn't know it."

Mitchell paused at the door. Sluggish and befuddled with drink, he couldn't raise any coherent counter to what Garrison was saying. All he could say was: "Bull. Shit."

Garrison went on, as though Mitch hadn't spoken. "You know what?" he said. "Maybe it's for the best. We've run our course the way we are. It's time for something new." He was talking to an empty room now; Mitch had already left. Still, he finished his thought. "Something new," he said again, "or maybe something very old."

Garrison didn't sleep that night. He'd never needed more than three and a half hours' rest a night, and since Margie's death that number had gone down to two hours, sometimes just one. He was running on fumes, of course, and he knew it. He couldn't go on denying his body the rest it needed without paying a price. But with his fatigue came a strange clarity. The conversation he'd had with his brother tonight, for instance, would have been unthinkable a few weeks before: his mind would have rejected the ideas he'd espoused as surely as Mitchell had done. But now he knew better. He was living in a world of mysteries, and out of fear he'd chosen to ignore their presence. Now it seemed to him the only way forward was to reach out and touch those mysteries; know what they were, know what they meant; let them work whatever changes they wished upon him.

Mitchell would come to share his point of view in time. He'd have no choice. The old empire was receding into oblivion: the old powers dying, the old certainties going with them. Something had to replace those powers, and it wouldn't be a democracy of love and truth; of that Garrison was certain. The new age, when it came, would be just as elite as the one passing away. A chosen few-those with the will to live superior lives-would have the wherewithal to do so. The rest, as ever, would Uve and die in futility. The difference lay only in the coinage of power. The age of railroads and stockyards and timber and oil would give way to a time in which power was measured by some other means; a means which he as yet had no language to describe. He felt its imminence as he sometimes felt things in dreams; a knowledge beyond the scope of his five senses; beyond measurement or even materiality. He did not know where his appetite for such possibilities came from, but he knew it had always been in him. The day Grandma Kitty had told him of the Barbarossas he'd felt some sleeping part of his nature awaken. He could remember everything about that conversation still. How she'd stared at him as she spoke, watching every nuance of his response; how she'd touched his face, her touch kindlier than he'd ever had from her before; how she'd promised to tell him secrets that would change his life forever, when the time was right. Of course she'd been the one to tell him about the journal, though he'd pretended to Mitchell he wasn't certain this was so. There was a book, she'd said, in which the way to get into the heart of the Barbarossas' land was described; along with all that had to be endured on that road. Terrible things, she'd implied; horrors that would drive a soul to insanity if they weren't prepared. That was why it was essential to have this book: the information it contained was vital to any endeavor concerning the Barbarossas.

Oh, the nights he'd lain awake, wondering about that book! Trying to imagine how it might look, how it might feel in his hands. Was it large or small; were its pages thick or thin? Would he know the moment he read it what wisdom it was imparting, or would it be written in a code which he had to crack? Then there was the most important question of the lot: where did Cadmus keep this book? He would sometimes steal into his grandfather's study-which was a room he was strictly forbidden to enter-and stare at the shelves and cupboards (he didn't dare touch anything) wondering where it might be hidden. Was there a safe behind the books, or a secret compartment under the floor? Or was it hidden away in one of the drawers of Cadmus's antique desk, which had seemed so intimidating to him as a child that he'd had an almost superstitious fear of it, as though it had a life of its own and might come after him, snorting like a bull, if he stared at it for too long?

He was never once caught in the study. He was far too clever for that. He knew how to wait and watch and plan; he knew how to lie. The one thing he couldn't do was charm; not even his own grandmother. When, after Cad-mus's recovery, he'd asked Kitty to talk about what she'd intimated to him, she bluntly refused to do so, to the point of denying that they'd ever had the conversation. He'd grown sullen, realizing that there was nothing he could say or do that would persuade her to open the subject again, and his sullenness had become thereafter his chief defining feature. In any family photograph he was the one without the smile; the glowering adolescent whom everybody treated gingerly for fear he snap like an ill-tempered dog. He didn't much like the pose, or the response it elicited, but he couldn't compete with Mitchell's effortless charm. If he was patient, he knew, the time would come when he'd have the power to seek these secrets out for himself. Meanwhile he'd work, and play the loving grandson, watching for any dues that might inadvertently fall from Cadmus's lips; about where he might find the journal, and what it contained.

But Cadmus had let nothing slip. Though he'd encouraged Garrison in his rise to power, and countless times made it dear how much he trusted Garrison's judgment, that trust had never extended to talking about the Barba-rossas. Nor had Garrison been able to draw Loretta into his confidence. She'd made her suspicion of him, mingled with a mild distaste, plain from the outset, and nothing he'd said or done had made her warm to him. More irksome still was the knowledge that she, though new to the Geary dynasty, had access to information that he was denied. More than information, of course. She, like Kitty and Margie and Mitchell's wife, had taken herself off to

Kaua'i more than once, to be with one ol die Barbarossa clan. Why this ritual was sanctioned Garrison had never understood; he only knew that it was a tradition that went back a long way. He'd raised some objections to it when he'd first heard it mooted, but Cadmus had made it unequivocally clear that the matter was not up for debate. There were some things, he'd said to Garrison, that had to be accepted without challenge, however unpalatable. They were part of the way the world worked.

"Not my world," Garrison had said, working himself up into a fine fury. "I'm not allowing my wife to go off to some island and play around with a total stranger."

"Just be quiet," Cadmus had said. Then, in hushed, even tones he'd explained that Garrison would do exactly as he was told on this matter, or suffer the consequences. "If you can't behave as I wish you to behave, then you have no place in this family," he'd said.

"You wouldn't throw me out," Garrison had replied. "Not now."

"You watch me," his grandfather had said. "If you argue with me about this, you go. It's as simple as that. It's not as though you're devoted to your wife, after all. You cheat on her, don't you?" Garrison had sulked. "Well don't you?"

"Yes."

"So let her cheat on you, if it helps the family."

"I don't see how-"

"It doesn't matter whether you see or not."

That had been the end of the conversation, and Garrison had left with not the slightest doubt as to his grandfather's sincerity. Cadmus was not a man to make idle threats. Duly warned. Garrison had kept his objections to himself thereafter. And what little faith he'd had in his grandfather's love for him died.

Now, as the first light of dawn crept into the sky, he thought of the old man, sick to death but unwilling to die, and wondered if he should have one more try at getting the truth out of him. No doubt, as Mitchell had said, taking Cadmus's pills off him for half a day would be a torment; but it might make him talk. And even if it didn't, there'd be some satisfaction to be had from making the bastard beg for his painkillers. Picturing the scene, Cadmus yellow-white with agony, sobbing to have his opiates back, brought a smile to Garrison's face. But first he would see how well Mitchell did getting the truth out of Cadmus. If his brother failed, then he'd have no choice but to play the torturer, and be thankful for the chance.

Ink and water; water and ink.

Last night, I dreamt about Galilee. It wasn't one of the waking dreams-the visions, if you will-in which I witness the matter of these pages. It was a dream that came to me while I was asleep, but which so forcibly impressed itself upon my mind that it was still there when I woke.

This is what I dreamed. I was hovering like a bird above a churning sea, and adrift in that sea, bound to a wretched raft, and naked, was Galilee. He was covered in wounds, and his blood was running off into the water. I couldn't see any sharks, but that's not to say they weren't all around him. The sea was black, however, like the ink in my pen; it concealed its inhabitants.

As I watched, wave after dark wave struck the raft, and one by one its pieces were disengaged and swept away, so that soon Galilee's body was draped over the three or four planks that remained, his head and lower limbs submerged in the water. Now, for the first time, he seemed to realize that he was about to die, and began to struggle to work the knots free. His body glistened with sweat, and sometimes, as the scene grew more frenzied, I couldn't decide what I was seeing. Was that black, shining form broken on the planks still my brother, or was it the breaking wave that had swept him away?

I wanted to wake now; the whole scene distressed me. I had no desire to watch my brother drown. I told myself to wake up. You don't have to endure this, I said, just open your eyes.

I started to feel the dream receding from me. But even as it did so my brother's writhings became more desperate-the wounds on his body gaping as he thrashed-and he pulled a hand free of the ropes. He hauled his head up out of the waves. When he did so the water seemed to ding around his skull, as though it had knitted a spumy crown there; his eyes were wild, his mouth was letting out a soundless scream. He tore at the binding around his other wrist, and then, sitting up on what was left of the raft, reached down into the water to free his legs.

He wasn't quick enough. The planks beneath him were sundered, and swept away. He fell backward into the water, his wounds pouring blood as he did so, and the waterlogged boards to which his feet were still tied dragged him down, down beneath waves.

And now came the most curious event in the sequence. As his dark body sank from sight, the waters into which he was disappearing forsook their negritude, as though in reverence to the flesh they'd claimed. It was not that they became translucent, like any common sea. Rather their concealing darkness became a revelatory light, which blazed so brightly it outshone the sky.

I could see my brother's body, sinking into the bright depths. I could see every living form that swam in the sea around him, all silhouetted against the brightness of the water. Shoals of tiny fish, moving as a single entity; vast squid-vaster than any such creature I'd seen before-watching Galilee descend toward their realm; and of course innumerable sharks, circling him as he sank, describing protective spirals around his body.

And then, as they say in books of cowardly fancy, I woke, and it was all a dream.

I don't discount the possibility that though the images I saw were not real, as I believe my visions are, they were true. That Galilee, if not already drowned, is about to be drowned.

What does that do to the story I thought I was telling? Well, to put it crudely, it pinches it off before it was fully shit out. (I'm sorry, that's not the prettiest of metaphors, but I'm not in the prettiest of moods; and it expresses indecently well how I feel today about what I'm doing. That this whole wretched business has simply been one long, problematic excretion. One day I'm constipated, the next it runs out of me like foul water.)

But now I revolt you. I'll stop.

Back to Rachel for a while. I'll let the dream sit, and revisit it in a few hours. Maybe it'll make a different kind of sense later.

The last we heard of Rachel she was in a cab returning to the apartment on Central Park. In her hands, the journal which Garrison had spent so many hours in his youth wondering about; imagining its size, and its weight; puzzling over what it might contain. And there in its pages she'd discovered a mystery: that there had been a man called Galilee in Charleston, in the spring of 1865. Now Nickelberry was taking Holt to meet him, promising that the encounter would help the captain heal the pain he'd endured here.

I had not witnessed such excess I was about to see, the captain wrote, since the early days of the war, when I had occasion to come into a bordello where one of my men had been murdered in a brawl. To be truthful luxury, especially in excess, has never pleased me; only in nature do I find an overabundance delightful; evidence of creation's limitless

cup. It was my darling Adina who was the one who liked to have fine things in the house-vases and silks and pretty pictures. For me, as I think for most of my sex, fineries are acceptable in moderation, but can quickly come to seem smothering.

So then, imagine this: two houses in the East Battery, facing the water, and so damaged by enemy fire as to seem from the outside little more than the husks of dwellings, but which, upon entering, are revealed to contain the gleanings from fifty of Charleston's finest houses, every article chosen because it speaks precociously to the senses.

This was the place into which Nickelberry took me; the place he'd been brought by his.guide and advocate Olivia, who was but one of a dozen or so people who occupied this unlikely palace.

It seems Nub had accepted the bounty of the place without questioning it (such is a cook's nature, perhaps; especially during times of scarcity). I, on the other hand, began to interrogate Olivia immediately. How had all this sickly magnificence been accrued, 1 demanded to know. The woman was black, and ill-educated (she'd been a slave, though she was now dressed in a gown, and draped in jewelry, that would have been the envy of any fine woman on Meeting Street): she could not answer me coherently. I became frustrated with her, but before my agitation grew too great a white woman, much older than Olivia, appeared at my side. She introduced herself as the widow of General Walter Harris, a man under whose command I had fought in Virginia. She seemed quite happy to answer my questions. None of the luxuries in the midst of which we stood had been pirated or looted, she explained, but given freely to the man who lived here, the aforementioned Galilee. I expressed surprise at this, for besides the great treasure-house of valuables here there was also food and drink in an abundance I think no Charlestonian has seen since the beginning of the siege. I was invited by the ladies to sit and eat, and after so many months in which the best fare available was fried biscuits

in bacon fat could not restrain myself. I was not alone at the table. There was a Negro boy, no more than twelve, and a young man from Alabama by the name ofMaybank and a fourth woman, very pale and elegant, whom this fellow Maybank fed with his fingers, as though he were enslaved to her. I ate gingerly at first, overwhelmed by what was before me, but my appetite grew rather than diminishing, and I ate enough for ten men; was then sick to my stomach; and, having vomited, came back to the table quite refreshed, and partook again. Sweetbreads with sherry, thick slices of a baked calf's head, oysters and mushrooms, a fine she-crab soup and a brown oyster stew with benne seeds. There was a wine souffle for dessert, and huckleberry pie and conserved peaches-what we used to call peach leather when I was young-and fruit candy such as we would have for Christmas. Nickelberry, Olivia and the general's widow ate with me, while the younger woman, one Katherine Morrow, made herself very drunk with brandy, and at last took herself off in search of our host, then promptly passed out on the floor next door. The young man Maybank declared suddenly that he wished to have congress with the woman while she was in this state, and called for the Negro boy Thaddeus to help him undress the woman.

I protested, but Nickelberry advised me to hold my tongue. They had a perfect right to pleasure themselves with the drunken Miss Morrow if they so chose, he said; such was the law of this place. Olivia confirmed the fact. If I was to intervene, she warned me, and Galilee chanced to hear of it, he would kill me…

Rachel had not noticed the journey back to the apartment; nor the trip in the elevator. Now she was sitting at the window, with the glory of New York before her, and she didn't see it. All she saw was the house in the East Battery, its rooms a catalog of excesses; and the captain, sitting at the table, gorging himself-

I asked what manner of man this Galilee was, and Olivia smiled at me. You 'II see, she said. And you 'II understand, when he starts to speak to you, what kind of king he is.

King? I said, of what country? Of every country, Olivia replied; of every city, of every stone.

He's black, the widow Harris said, but he was never a slave. I asked her how she knew this, and she answered, simply, that there was not a man on earth who could put Galilee in chains.

All, needless to say, strange talk; and while it was going on the sounds from the adjacent room growing louder, as Maybank and the boy violated Miss Morrow.

Nickelberry left the table, and went to watch. He called me presently to join him, and to my shame I picked up the bottle of wine I had all but emptied and went to see.

Miss Morrow was no longer incapacitated, but responding to her violations with vigor. The boy was naked by now, and straddled her, rubbing his little rod between her breasts, while Maybank took the route between her legs, which he had made available by tearing her fine silk dress apart.

The scene was entirely bestial, but I will not lie: I was aroused. Fiery, in fact.

After years of sickness and corpses, I was glad to see healthy flesh sweating healthy sweat. The din of their mutual pleasuring filled the room, echoing back and forth between the bare walls so that it was as though there were not three but ten lovers before me. I began to feel giddy, my head pounding, and I turned away to find that Nickelberry was back at the table with Olivia, who had bared herself for his perusal. He looked like a greedy child, his hands plunged into plates of creamy dessert, which he then smeared upon the woman's handsome bosom. She seemed quite happy at this, and pressed his face against her, so he might lick the cream off her body.

The widow Harris now came to me, and offered her own flesh for my pleasure. I declined. She promptly told me I

could not. If I was capable of giving her the pleasure of love, then I was obliged to do so. This too was the law.

I told her that I was a married man, at which she laughed, saying that in this place it mattered not at all what a man or woman had been before they entered; that all histories were forgotten here, and a person became what suited them.

Then I do not belong here, I told her. Are you so proud of what you were out there? she said to me, her face all flushed. You fled your duty; you lost your family and your house. You're less than me, out there. Imagine that! You who were so fine, less than an ugly old widow.

She angered me, and I struck her, drunk as I was, I struck her hard across her painted face. She fell back against the wall, shrieking at me now-obscenities I would not have believed she knew, except that she was spitting them at me in a vile stream. I threw down the bottle I'd been drinking from, and for a moment, thinking perhaps I meant to do her more serious harm, she ceased to shriek. But then I turned from her, and she began again, following me like a fury, berating me.

In my drunken desire to get away from the woman I became lost. The route I had supposed would take me out into the street brought me instead to a darkened flight of stairs. I ascended them stumbling, and crouched in the gloom halfway up. The widow had not seen me ascend; she passed below, cursing me.

I waited there in the darkness, shuddering. Not from fear of the widow, but from grief at what she'd said. The woman was right, I knew. I'm nothing now. Less than nothing.

And then, as if my sorrow had been spoken, a man appeared at the top of the stain and looked down at me. No, not at me; into me. I never felt such a gaze as this. I was in fear of it at first. I felt he might kill me with it, as readily as a man who reached into another's body and took hold of his heart.

But then he came down the stairs a little way, and sat

there, and quietly said: "A man who is nothing has nothing to lose. I am Galilee. Welcome," and I felt as though I had a reason to live.

A reason to live. Rachel put the journal down and stared out across the darkened park. It was impossible that this Galilee be the same man as she'd met, but it was so easy to imagine him there on the stairs, imagine him speaking those words of welcome, imagine him being the man who'd given the captain reason to live.

Hadn't he done that for her, in a way? Hadn't he reawakened her sense of her own significance, her own power?

She set the journal down on the table, glancing at the opening of the next paragraph.

How shall I say what happened to me then?

She looked away from it. She couldn't bear to read any more, not tonight. Her head was too filled up, sickened almost the way the captain had been sickened, by the sheer excess of what she'd read. There was a change in the prose too, which was not lost on her. The earlier entries had been nicely written, but their eloquence had been that of a man striving for some distance from the horrors jn which he was immersed. But now he had begun to write like a storyteller, creating the scene and his place in it with terrible immediacy. The visions his words had put in Rachel's head still swarmed before her: the house, the food, the sexual couplings.

The last time she'd felt so consumed by a story, Galilee had been the man telling it-

She looked at the journal again, without touching it; at the way the words were neatly laid on the page. Too neatly perhaps. Was this the diary of a man who was living out these experiences, and hours later setting them down? Or had this all been constructed after the fact, by a man who'd been tutored in the art of telling a tale? Tutored by a man who loved stories; who told them as seductions.

"No…" she said to herself. No, this was not the same man; once and for all, there were two Galilees: one in the journal, the other in her memory. She looked at the teasing words again:

Haw shall I say what happened to me then?

It was a clever bluff, that sentence. The writer knew exactly how he was going to say what happened to him; he had the words ready. But it made those words seem more true, didn't it, if they appeared to come from a man uncertain of his own skills? She felt a spasm of revulsion for the story, and for her own complicity in its deceits. She'd gorged on it, hadn't she? Lapped up every decadent detail, as though this other life could give her dues to her own.

So far, it had shown her nothing of any real value. Yes, it had titillated her with its Gothic nonsenses; its tales of ghost children and unearthed limbs, but these scenes in the house had gone too far. She didn't believe it any longer. It might pass itself off as history, but it was a fabrication; its excesses made it absurd.

She was still angry with herself when she went to bed, and she couldn't sleep. After an hour and a half lying in an uneasy doze she got up, popped a sleeping pill, and went back to bed to try again. The pill turned out to be a bad idea. Something in her simply didn't want to rest, and her body fought the soporific. When she finally succeeded in falling asleep for a few minutes her head was filled with a chaotic rush of fragments, from which she woke in an aching sweat, with such a dread upon her, such a pro found, wrenching dread, that she had to get up again, turn on the light and talk herself back into a semblance of calm. She padded down to the kitchen, made herself a cup of Earl Grey tea and returned to the journal. What was the use of trying to resist it, she thought as she sat down in the circle of lamplight and turned her eyes to the page. Nonsense or not, it had her in its grip, and she couldn't be free of it until it had finished with her.

Halfway across town, lying awake in his bed, Cadmus Geary thought of his beloved Louise, and of those days of dalliance that sometimes seemed so far off they'd happened in another life and at others, as tonight, seemed to have taken place just a few days ago, the memory was so clear. What a beauty she had been! Entirely deserving of his devotion. Of course she was playing hard to get tonight, but that was one of the prerogatives of beauty; all he could do was stay close to her, and hope she saw his sincerity.

"Louise…" he murmured.

A man's voice answered. "There's nobody called Louise here," it said quietly.

His faint condescension irritated Cadmus. "I know that," he snapped. He reached for his spectacles which were on the bedside table.

"You want some water?" the man said.

"No, I want to see who the hell I'm talking to."

"It's Mitchell."

"Mitchell?" His fumbling fingers had found his spectacles, and he put them on, peering at his grandson through the thumbed glass. "What time is it?"

"It's the middle of the night."

"So what are you doing here?"

"We've been talking, on and off."

"Have I been making any sense?"

"Of course," Mitchell reassured him. This was not strictly true. Though the old man had been more coherent than Garrison had reported, he was still in a semidelirious state much of the time. "You've been sleeping, on and off."

"Talking in my sleep?"

"Yes," Mitchell said. "Nothing scandalous. You've just been calling for this woman Louise."

Cadmus sank back into the pillow. "My lovely Louise," he sighed. "She was the best thing that ever happened to me." He dosed his eyes. "What are you waiting for?" he said. "You've got to have something better to be doing than sitting here. I'm not planning to die just yet."

"I didn't think you were."

"So go have a party. Get drunk. Fuck your wife, if she'll let you."

"She won't." ,

"Then fuck somebody else's wife." He opened his eyes again and laughed, the sound like the hiss of escaping air. "That's more fun anyway."

"I'd prefer to be here with you."

"Would you really?" the old man said incredulously. "Either I'm more interesting than I thought or you're even duller." He raised his head an inch or so and peered at his grandson. "You got the looks didn't you, Mitch? I mean, you really are a handsome fellow. But… you're not as bright as your mother and you're not as honest as your father, and that's a pity, because I had some hopes for you."

"Help me then."

"Help you?"

"Tell me how you want me to be, and I'll work at it."

"You can't work at it," Cadmus said, his tone close to contempt. "Just get on with what you've got. Nobody blames you. It's the luck of the draw." He settled his head back on his pillow, delicately, as though his skull was cracked. "Are you here alone?" he said.

"There's a nurse…"

"No. I mean your brother."

"Garrison's not here."

"Good. I don't want him here." He closed his eyes. "We've all done things we regret, but… but… oh Lord, oh Lord…" He shivered a little.

"Should I get another blanket for you?"

"It doesn't help. I'm just cold and there's nothing to be done about it. What I want is my Louise…" He made a puckish little smile. "She'd warm me up."

"I don't know who you're talking about."

"Your wife… resembles my Louise… did you know that?"

"Really?"

"We have that much in common, at least. A taste in beauty."

"Where is she now?" Mitchell said.

"Your wife?" Cadmus said. "You don't know where your wife is?" He made another laugh. "That was a joke, Mitchell."

"Oh."

"I don't remember you being so humorless."

"Things have changed. I've changed."

"Well, don't lose your sense of humor. In the end it may be all you've got. Christ knows, it's all I've got." Mitchell started to protest, but the old man hushed him. "Don't tell me how deeply loved I am because I know better. I'm an inconvenience. I'm standing between you and your inheritance."

"We just want to do our best for the family," Mitchell said.

"We meaning…?"

"Garrison and myself."

"Since when was murder a smart thing to do?" Cadmus said, with agonizing sloth. "All your brother has brought this family is shame. Shame. I'm ashamed of my own grandchildren."

"Wait-" Mitchell protested. "That was all Garrison. I had nothing to do with what happened to Margie."

"No?"

"Absolutely not. I loved Margie."

"She was like a sister to you."

"She was."

"You don't understand how it could have happened. It's a tragedy. Poor Margie, poor drunken Margie. What did she ever do to deserve it?" He bared his brown teeth. "You want to know what she did? I'll tell you what she did. She gave birth to a nigger, and your big brother never forgave her that."

"What?"

"You didn't know? She had Galilee's kid. At least, that's what Garrison thought. How could it be his? I mean, he's a Geary. So how could it be his, a little black fuck of a thing?"

"I don't understand."

"I think that's the first honest thing you've said tonight. No, I'm sure you don't understand. I'm sure it's all completely beyond you." He shook his head. "What did you really come here for?" he said.

"Wait. Back up. I want to know about Margie."

"You've heard all you're going to hear from me. I want to know what you came here for."

"I just wanted to talk."

"About what?"

"Anything you wanted to talk about. We used to be so close and-"

"Stop. Stop," Cadmus said. "I'm squirming, listening to this crap. I'll ask you one more time: what did you come here for? You answer me truthfully or get the hell out of here and don't ever come back." He leaned up out of the pillow. "And when I say that, I mean it. Don't ever come back."

Mitchell nodded. "Okay," he said quietly. "So… it's simple. I want to find the Barbarossas."

"Now we get to it," Cadmus said. For the first time in the conversation he looked genuinely pleased. "Go on."

"Garrison says there's a book-"

"Does he indeed?"

"-some kind of journal, which your first wife told him about."

"Kitty didn't know how to keep her mouth shut."

"So this book exists?"

"Oh yes. It exists."

"I came here to get it."

"I don't have it, son."

Mitchell leaned closer to his grandfather. "Where is it?" he said again. "Come on. Tell me. I've been honest with you."

"And I'm returning the compliment. I don't have it. And even if I did, I wouldn't give it to you."

"Why the hell not? What do you care what we do to those people?"

"By we you mean this family?" He narrowed his watery eyes. "Are you planning a war, Mitch? Because if you are, don't. You don't know what you're taking on."

"I know the Barbarossas have got some kind of hold over us."

"They have more than a hold," Cadmus said, his voice emotionless. "They own us. And let me tell you, we're lucky, we are very lucky, to have been left alone all these years. Because if they took it into their heads to come after us, we wouldn't stand a chance."

"Are they Mafia?"

"Oh Lord, wouldn't that be nice? If they were just men with guns."

"So who are they?"

"I don't know," the old man replied. "But I'm afraid I'm going to find out, the moment my heart stops beating."

"Don't say that."

"Does it make you nervous?" Cadmus said. "It should." His eyes were shiny with tears. "There's more to this than you'll ever get your head round, son, so for your own sake, let it go. Don't let Garrison pull you into this mess. He's got no other option, you see. He was born into it. But you… you can walk away if you want to. Save yourself. God knows it's too late for me. And for your brother. And of course your wife-"

"She hasn't a clue about any of this."

"She's theirs," Cadmus said flatly. "All the women are. I sometimes think that's what's saved us from being wiped out. Galilee likes the Geary women. The Geary women like Galilee." He pressed his fingers to his pale lips, and wiped away some spittle. "I lost Kitty to him. Long before the cancer got her, she was gone from me. Then I lost Loretta. That's hard to take. I loved them both, but it wasn't enough."

Mitchell put his head in his hands. "Garrison said they weren't like us," he murmured.

"He's right and he's wrong. I think they're more like us than not. But they're also more than we could ever be." The tears began to tumble down his cheeks. "I suppose I should be comforted by that. I didn't stand a chance against the likes of him. Nothing I could have done for my wives would ever have been enough. He had them the moment he laid eyes on them."

"Don't cry. Pops," Mitchell said. "Please."

"I cry all the time, take no notice."

Mitchell moved closer to the bed. "Let me be a part of this," he said, his voice soft and full. "Please. I know you think I'm a fuckup… but… it's just because nothing's ever been clear to me. Nobody ever took the time to explain. So I just looked the other way. I pretended I didn't care. But I do. Pops, I do. I want to know who these people are; I want to make them suffer the way you've suffered."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you're my grandson and I won't be responsible for sending you to your death."

"Why are you so afraid of them?"

"Because I'm almost dead, son. And if I've got an eternal soul, it's in a lot of trouble. I don't want you on my conscience. It's already heavy enough."

Mitchell drew a deep breath. "All right," he said, rising from the chair. "I don't know what else to say. You've got your agenda, I've got mine."

"Christ, son, listen to yourself," Cadmus said softly. "This isn't a business deal that's going sour. This is our lives."

"You made us that way, Pops," Mitchell said. "You taught Dad, and Dad taught us: business before pleasure. Business before anything."

"I was wrong," Cadmus said. "You won't hear me admit that ever again, but I was wrong." Mitchell stood at the door for a moment, and stared at the stick figure in the bed.

"Goodnight, Pops."

"Wait," the old man said.

"What?"

"Do this for me," Cadmus said. "Wait until I'm in the ground. You won't have to wait long, believe me. Just… wait until I'm gone. Please."

"If I agree to that-"

"More business?"

"If I agree to that, you have to tell me where the journal is."

Cadmus closed his eyes again, and for several seconds Mitchell was marooned at the door, not knowing whether to leave or stay. At last, the old man drew a creaking breath, and said:

"All right. Have it your way. I gave the journal to Margie."

"That's what Garrison thought. But he couldn't find it."

"Then ask Loretta. Or your wife. Maybe Margie passed it on. But just you remember… I told you to walk away. I warned you, and you didn't want to hear."

"I'm sure that's got you a place in heaven. Pops," Mitchell said. "Goodnight."

The stick man didn't answer. He was weeping again, quietly. Mitchell didn't offer any further words of consolation. As his grandfather had said, old men weep; there was nothing to be done about it.

One by one, all the secrets are coming out like stars at twilight. Just for the record, Cadmus's claim about Garrison's wife having borne him a black child is at least partially true. She indeed became pregnant, but the child didn't live. She miscarried in the fifth month, and the few people who knew that the infant brought dead from her body was black were paid off handsomely for their silence. Garrison, as Cadmus said, assumed it was Galilee's child. That was perhaps the profoundest error he ever made; one which goes to the heart of all that he is; and more pertinently, all he must in time become.

As for Margie, I can't tell you with any certainty what information she was given when she recovered; though I think it's more than likely that she was never told that her womb had produced such a heresy. Cadmus certainly didn't want any disruptions in the equilibrium of the family; he surely kept the knowledge to the smallest possible circle of people. And Garrison had no reason to tell a single soul: all the sight of that dead child did-yes, he saw the corpse; he made a point of going to the morgue and looking at it, all wrapped in its tiny shroud-all that sight did was deepen the divide between himself and his wife. The first stone on the road that led to Margie's death was laid that day. There's more to tell of this matter, of course; but some stars take longer to show themselves than others. The paradox is this: that the darker it gets, the more of these secrets we can see. Eventually, they're arrayed in all their glory; and it's the very things we hid from sight, the things we're most ashamed of, that we use to steer our course.

Three, four, five days went by, and Galilee let The Samarkand go where the tides took it. For thirty-six hours the boat scarcely moved at all, becalmed in silken water. He sat on deck most of the time, sucking his cigar, looking down into the cool depths. A great white shark came by for a while, and cirded the vessel several times, but most of the time the sky and sea were deserted, and the only sound came from some part of The Samarkand, a board creaking, a knot grinding, as though the boat, like its owner, was starting to doubt its own existence, and was making a noise to remind itself that it was still real.

It might have been forgiven its doubts, when there was so much that was illusory walking its deck. The emptier Galilee's belly became, the more his delirium grew, and the more his delirium grew, the more visions he saw. He saw his family, in various groupings. I appeared to him more than once, I'm sure, and at one point we entered into a long and convoluted exchange inspired by a quote from Heraclitus which had lodged in his mind-something about rubble making the fairest of worlds. He had an even longer conversation with a vision of Luman, and for a time sat in the company of Marietta and Zabrina singing a filthy sailors' ballad, tears pouring down his cheeks.

"Why didn't you come home?" the hallucination of Zabrina asked him.

"I couldn't. Not after what happened. Everybody hated me."

"We got over it," Zabrina said. "At least I did."

Marietta said nothing. She was rather less solid than Zabrina and for some reason Galilee felt faintly guilty around her.

"It seems to me," Zabrina said, rather formally, "that you've played just about every role in the repertoire except the Prodigal. You've been a lover. You've been a fool. You've been a murderer."

"Your point?" he said.

"You could still go home if you wanted to. All you have to do is take command of the boat again."

"I have no compass. I have no maps."

"You could steer by the stars," Zabrina said.

Galilee smiled at his own delusion. "I've played this role too," he said. "The Tempter. I've played it over and over again. I know how it works. Don't waste your breath."

"That's a pity," Zabrina purred. "I would have liked to have seen you, one last time. We could have gone to the stables together, and said hello to father."

"Do you think it's just a coincidence?" Galilee said. "Christ born in a stable. Dad dying in one."

"Pure accident," Marietta said. "Christ and father have absolutely nothing in common. For one thing, father was quite the cockmeister."

"I've never heard that before," Zabrina said.

"About Dad?"

"No, the phrase. Cockmeister. I never heard it before."

So the hallucinatory conversations went on, seldom elevated above this chatty level, and when they were, only fleetingly so. Others besides family members came and went. Margie lingered for a little time one night, her voice slurred with drink as she told him how much she loved him. Kitty, the exquisite Kitty, drifted in a little later, but would not speak: she only stared at him for a while, with a look of incredulity on her face, as though she couldn't believe his stupidity. She'd always berated him for his self-pity, and this last time was no exception; she simply chose to do it in silence.

There were many others who didn't make it as far as the deck: haunting presences whom he glimpsed beneath the water, looking up at him as they drifted by. Victims of his, mostly; men and women whose lives he'd taken, always as quickly as he could; but what violent death was ever quick enough? Oh, some pitiable creatures there. Many he could not lay name to, thankfully; a few whose accusing looks made him want to hide his head. He didn't succumb to his cowardice; but met their gazes as best his tears would allow, until at length they drifted out of sight.

There was one further class of visitation, which did not make itself known until the afternoon of the fifth day. The becalming had long since passed; The Samarkand, now in the grip of a powerful current, was moving through a mounting swell, her bows on occasion clipping so deep into the spumy water it seemed she would not rise again; but each time emerging. Galilee had lashed himself to the mainmast so as not to be swept overboard. Lack of nourishment had made him weak; his legs would scarcely bear him up, and his arms would not have had the strength to prevent a wave from taking him. There he sat, the very image of a beleaguered mariner, while the boat rocked and pitched, and his teeth chattered with the cold, and his eyes rolled in their sockets.

But then, it seemed to him he glimpsed-down a valley between the steep steel waves-a stand of golden trees. For a grim instant he thought the currents had played some wretched trick, and carried him back to Kaua'i, but when the sight came again he saw this was not an island. It was instead the most beautiful and torturous vision of them all. It was home.

There down an alley of oaks swathed in Spanish moss he saw the house that Jefferson had built; his mother's house; the place from which he had fled and fled, and never escaped. Cesaria was there, behind one of those windows. She saw him, in his exile. Perhaps she'd always seen him, always had him in the corner of her eye, as a mother will; never let him go entirely, despite all that he'd done to be free of her.

He watched as the scene came and went-eclipsed by the mounting waves, then revealed again-thinking he might glimpse her there. But the vision contained nothing that breathed: not so much as a squirrel in the grass. Or at least nothing that cared to show itself to him.

And after a time, this too passed away. Another darkness fell and he remained where he was, tied to the mast. While the sky swung back and forth above him.

Rachel had returned into Holt's journal with the utmost cynicism, determined that this time it would not catch her up in its manipulations. But she failed. After just a few paragraphs she was back in the world the words conjured: the house in the East Battery, filled with the smells of food and sex. And Galilee on the stairs, welcoming Holt into his world. Whether this was a true account or not, she couldn't resist turning the pages.

The passages that followed were filled with descriptions of how Holt and Nickelberry lived for the next week or so: an almost obsessive listing of how their palates and their groins were titillated. Holt now seemed to have little trouble confessing his own excesses. Despite the fact that he had once been a devoted family man, he was almost boastful of them, recounting without embarrassment his liaisons with several of the women of the house. It made astonishing reading, especially as all this salacious detail was set down in a journal which he'd been given by his own wife (and whose dedication-I love you more than life, and will show my love a thousand ways when you are here again-was there on the opening page). Poor Adina; she'd been forgotten, at least for now. Her husband had entered a world whose laws did not allow for sentimental attachments. They were all living too desperately, too hungrily, to care what they'd been before they'd stepped into the house. All reserve, all shame, all common decencies had evaporated. According to the journal they ate, drank and coupled morning, noon and night, inspired to this behavior by three things. One, the fact that everybody in the house was engaged in the same headlong pursuit of pleasure, all spurring one another to new experiments. Two, a steady supply of erotic stimulants from Galilee, most of which Holt (and Rachel) had never heard of. And thirdly, the presence of the lawmaker himself. There was nobody in the house, male or female, young or old, who had not been bedded by Galilee. That fact emerged first in a conversation Holt reportedly had with Nickelberry; a man who'd seemed until now assuredly heterosexual. Not so. He had, in Holt's words, played the wife to our host, and told me without a blush that he had seldom felt so loved as when he had lain in Galilee's embrace.

Rachel was surprised that she could still be shocked after the exhaustive sexual litany that the preceding pages had contained, but shocked she was. Though she believed it preposterous to think that this Galilee was the same man she'd known, her mind's eye conjured him whenever the name appeared on the page. Then it was her Galilee, in all his beauty, she saw holding Nickelberry in his arms; kissing him, seducing him, making a wife of him.

She should have anticipated what would come next, but she didn't. While she was still struggling with her repugnance at what Holt had described, he began a confession much closer to his heart, and no doubt the hardest thing he had written in the book.

I went to Galilee last night, he wrote, as Nickelberry had. I don't know why I went particularly; I felt no desire to be with him. At least not the same kind of desire that I feel when I go with a woman. Nor did he ask me for my company; though once I was with him he confessed that he'd wanted my arms about him, and my lips on his. I should not be ashamed, he said, to take pleasure this way. It was

a wasted hope in most men; only the bravest rose to the challenge.

I told him I did not feel brave. I was afraid of the act before us, I said; afraid of its consequences for my soul; and most of all, afraid of him.

He didn't laugh off this confession. Instead he wrapped me up tenderly, as though he held something more precious than flesh and bone. He told me to listen to him, and would tell me a story to calm my fears-

A story? What was this? Another Galilee who told stories?

-I felt like a child there in his embrace, and part of me wanted to be free of it. But his presence was so calming to my troubled spirit, that this child in me, which had not spoken in so many years, said: lie still. I want to hear the story. And I lay still, obedient to this child, and presently all the horrors I had seen, every one, all the death, all the pain, became a kind of dream I'd had from which I was waking into this embrace.

The story he told began like a nursery tale, but by degrees it grew stranger, calling forth all manner of feelings in me. It was a tale of two princes who lived, he said, in a country far from here, where the rich were kind-

-And the poor had God. Rachel knew that country. The child bride Jerusha had lived there. It was Galilee's invented land.

She sat absolutely still, the whine of her blood loud in her ears, while her eyes passed stupidly over the line, as if by study they might change it.

It was a tale of two princes…

But no; the words remained the same, however many times she read them. She could not avoid the truth, though it was hard-oh more than hard; nearly impossible-to contemplate. But she had no choice, besides willful self deception. The sum of evidence was now too persuasive.

This Galilee, here on the page before her-this man who'd lived a hundred and forty years ago, and more; this man was the same Galilee she loved. Not his father or his grandfather: him. The same flesh and blood and bone; the same spirit in that flesh and blood and bone; the same soul.

She accepted it, though it made chaos of all she'd understood about the world. She wouldn't squirm around any longer, hoping that something easier to believe was true if she could only find it. She was only tormenting herself if she did that; putting off the moment when she accepted the facts and tried to make sense of them.

It wasn't as though he'd lied to her. Quite the reverse, in fact. He'd intimated several times that he was not quite the same order of being as she was. He'd talked of being a man without grandparents, for instance. But she hadn't wanted to know. She'd been too deeply infatuated with him to want to countenance anything that might spoil the romance.

So much for denial. It was time to accept the truth, in all its strangeness. Two human lifetimes ago he'd been up to the same seductive tricks he'd worked on her, with Captain Holt as the object of his affections. The image of the two men entwined was lodged in her mind's eye: Holt like a child in his lover's arms, lulled into a state of passivity by the story Galilee was telling.

In a country far from here, there lived two princes…

She didn't care what happened next, neither to the princes nor to the men they represented. Her hunger for the journal had suddenly passed; her eyes were no longer drawn to the page. It had told her all that she needed to know. More, in fact.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand and got up from the table, flipping the journal closed. She felt light-headed and hot, as though she was catching the flu. She went through to the kitchen, got herself a glass of water, sipped it for a moment, then decided she'd go back to bed. Maybe she'd feel better after a few more hours of sleep. And now, with the journal's hold on her finally broken, she'd have a better chance of getting the rest she needed.

Glass in hand, she padded back to the bedroom. It was a little after five o'clock. She set the glass down, and lay down thinking that if she needed to take half of another sleeping pill she would. But as she was in the process of shaping the thought, exhaustion overtook her.

I settled down to sleep a couple of hours ago believing I'd brought Part Six to an adequate conclusion. But here I am, appending these paragraphs, and effectively spoiling the neatness of my conclusion by so doing. Ah well; this was never fated to be a book distinguished by its tidiness. I'm sure it's going to get a damn sight less orderly before we get to the final pages.

What was so urgent that I had to get up out of bed and write about it? Only another dream. I offer it here not because I think it's prophetic, like my dream of Galilee on the raft, but because it moved me so strangely.

It was a dream about Luman's children.

That's odd in itself, because I hadn't given any conscious thought to the conversation I'd had about his bastards for several weeks. My unconscious mind was apparently turning the subject over however, and its investigations produced this bizarrity: I dreamed I was a piece of paper; a sheet of tattered paper. And the wind had me. It was blowing me across an immense landscape, flipping me over and over. As so often happens in dreams, I saw more than I could possibly describe, all concentrated into a few seconds of dream time. Sometimes I was lifted high into the air, and I was looking down at towns that were so far below me their inhabitants were tiny dots; sometimes I was skimming a dusty road with all the other windborne trash. I saw canyons and cities; I clung to picket fences and telegraph poles; I was becalmed in the heat of a Louisiana summer, and forked up with the leaves in Vermont; I was frozen to a fence in Nebraska, while the wire whined in the wind; I was in the meltwaters when the spring warmed the rivers of Wisconsin. By degrees a sense of imminence crept upon me. The landscapes continued to roll on-the peaks of the High Country, a palmy beach, a field of poppies and wild violets-but I knew my journey was moving toward resolution.

My destination was an unpromising place. A grimy neighborhood in a minor city somewhere in Idaho; a wasteland of gutted buildings and rubble and gray grass. But there a man sat in the remnants of a broken-down truck, and when I came to his feet he reached down and picked me up. It was a strange sensation, to be held in those tobacco-stained ringers, but I knew, looking at the man's face, that he was one of Luman's children. There was something of my half-brother's satiric fever there, and something of his piercing curiosity, though both had been dulled by hardship.

He seemed to sense that he had found more than-a piece of trash in me, because he tossed his cigarette away, and getting up from his seat in the crippled vehicle he shouted:

"Hey! Hey! Lookee what I got here!"

He didn't wait for those he'd summoned to come to him, but strode with a quickening step to the remains of a garage, its pumps like rusted sentinels guarding a half-demolished building. A black woman in early middle age-her bones marking her indisputably as Cesaria's grandchild-appeared.

"What is it, Tru?" she asked him.

He handed his prize over to her, and the woman studied me.

"That's a sign," Tru drawled.

"Could be," the woman said.

"I told you. Jessamine."

The woman called over her shoulder, back into the garage. "Hey, Kenny. Look what Tru's found. Where'd you find it?"

"It just blew my way. And you was saying I was crazy."

"I didn't say you was crazy," Jessamine replied.

"No, I did," said a third voice, and a man who was in age and color somewhere between his companions came and snatched me out of Jessamine's hands. His skull was as bald as an egg, but the rest of his face was covered with a thick growth of beard. Again, there was no doubt of his ancestry. He didn't even look at what he had in his hand.

"Ain't nothing but a piece of trash," Kenny said, and before the other two could protest he'd turned his back on them and was stalking away.

They didn't follow him. At a guess, he intimidated them. But once his back was turned on them, I saw him cast a forlorn look at what he held. His eyes were wet with tears.

"Don't want to hope no more," he murmured to himself.

Then he turned my face to the flames of a small fire burning among the bricks. There was a moment of sheer panic, as the heat caught hold of me. I felt my body curl up in the flames, and blacken, blacken until I was the color of Galilee. Then I woke, bathed in enough sweat that had I indeed been burning I would have surely extinguished myself.

There; that's the dream, as best I remember it. One of the stranger night visions I've had, I must say. I don't know what to make of it. But now that I've written it down, I withdraw what I said earlier, about it not being prophetic. Perhaps it is. Perhaps somewhere out in the middle of the country three of Luman's bastards are waiting for an omen, even now; knowing that they're more than the world has let them be, but not knowing what. Waiting for someone to come and tell them who they are. Waiting for me.