Supervolcano: Eruption

V

“Oh, Christ. Another one,” Colin Ferguson said mournfully. Not all the little old ladies who died in San Atanasio went on the South Bay Strangler’s page in the ledger. Not even all the little old ladies who got murdered in town did. Just the week before, a punk ransacking a house for shit to steal so he could feed his habit put three slugs into seventy-four-year-old Lupe Sandoval when she got back from Safeway sooner than she might have. One of them blew out the back of her head. The punk sat in a cell, awaiting arraignment. Colin had questioned him; he still had no clue he’d done anything wrong. It made you wonder why you bothered sometimes. Meanwhile, the widow Sandoval’s family was scrambling for the cash they’d need to bury her.

Maria Peterfalvy, though… She’d got out of Hungary in 1956, one jump ahead of Russian tanks. A framed black-and-white photo on her dresser showed her not long afterwards. She’d been a beauty; no other word for it.

She wasn’t beautiful now, lying there on the bedroom floor in the cramped little tract house where she’d lived for upwards of forty years. First with her husband and kids; then, after he died and they got on with their own lives, by herself.

She wasn’t living now, either. Gabe Sanchez looked out through the window. Filmy curtains kept people on the outside from seeing in, but not the reverse. Sanchez said, “Here’s the first news van.”

“Happy fucking day,” Colin answered. Mrs. Peterfalvy wouldn’t mind his language, not any more she wouldn’t. He patted his hair with his hand, though he couldn’t imitate a newsie’s perfect coif. He held his fist-an imaginary mike-under Sanchez’s nose. “Tell me, Sergeant, why haven’t you been able to catch this Strangler son of a bitch when he’s knocked off-what is it? nineteen? — little old ladies now.”

“Nineteen is correct, yes,” Sanchez replied, as if he were really being interviewed. “And we haven’t caught him because he doesn’t leave fingerprints anywhere and his goddamn DNA isn’t in any of our databases.” He eyed Colin as if his boss truly were a brain-damaged reporter. “So why don’t you fuck off and die and let me try and do my job?”

“But don’t you realize you aren’t protecting the public the way the public deserves to be protected?” Colin persisted, his eyes wide with inncent indignation (or possibly raw ignorance).

Gabe Sanchez started to say something, then stopped and shook his head. “Man, that’s scary. You sound just like one of the shitheads. How d’you do it?”

“The more you repeat yourself, the better the imitation you do,” Colin said. “I mean, if you only say something once, it can’t be important, right? It can’t have any real significance, either.”

“That, too,” Sanchez agreed. “And here comes another van.”

“Where’s the coroner?” Colin asked morosely. “He’s the guy who needs to answer questions. Him and the DNA analysts, I mean.”

“But you’re the officer in charge of the investigation. That means you’re the guy with all the answers,” Gabe said. “You know you are, Lieutenant. It says so right here on the box.”

Colin told him where to put the box, and how to fold it before he did. Sergeant Sanchez laughed. He could afford to; he wasn’t the officer in charge of the investigation. Neither was Colin Ferguson, or not exactly. Even counting Mrs. Peterfalvy, only seven of the South Bay Strangler’s victims lived in San Atanasio. Other poor harried cops were looking for him all over the region.

But Colin was the man on the spot right now. He walked out to face the wolves. He wished they were wolves. He might have thrown them raw meat. He might have shot them. If all else failed, he might have reasoned with them. Reporters were immune to reason, and there wasn’t enough raw meat in the world to make them happy. Opening fire would have got him talked about.

He strode out onto Mrs. Peterfalvy’s neatly kept front lawn. Sure as hell, the newsies bore down on him like the slavering beasts they were. The TV and radio reporters thrust microphones in his face. He disliked them more than the ones who worked for newspapers. The latter actually had to be able to write. TV people just had to know how to read, and they didn’t even need to be especially good at that.

Video cameramen aimed the tools of their trade at him like so many bazookas. Unlike bazookas, though, video cameras could blow up an unwary man’s reputation. The cameramen watched what they filmed with a certain ironic detachment. Unlike the pretty people they abetted, they actually had to know what they were doing.

Reporters’ manners came straight out of preschool. Four shouted questions at the same time. They didn’t go Me!.. No, me!.. NO, ME! but they might as well have.

Like a playground monitor, Colin held up a hand. “If you all talk at once, I can’t hear any of you,” he said. That made them yell louder. But they started waving their hands, too. Colin pointed to a porky Hispanic guy from what he thought of as Eye-witless News. “Yes, Victor?”

“Is that the South Bay Strangler in there?” Victor asked, neatening his hair with the hand that wasn’t holding the mike.

“No, sir,” Colin answered, his face expressionless. “The victim is Maria Peterfalvy, age seventy-nine.” He spelled the last name. Some of the reporters, as he had reason to know, couldn’t spell their own right more than two times out of three.

Victor stamped his foot on the sidewalk. He pooched out his lower lip like a three-year-old working up to a tantrum. But he did manage to say, “No! What I mean is, did the South Bay Strangler strangle her?”

Then why don’t you say what ean? In Colin’s experience, people who didn’t speak clearly also didn’t think clearly. Then again, if you expected a TV reporter to think clearly, you were much too naive to make a good cop. “We don’t have anything back from the lab, of course,” Colin said. “As a matter of fact, the lab techs aren’t even here. So we can’t be sure yet.”

“But you do think so?” The redhead in the dark green suit couldn’t have finished lower than third runner-up in the Miss California pageant six or eight years earlier. Had they hired her for her reporting skills or for the way she filled out that suit? Colin couldn’t be sure about that, either, but he knew how he’d guess.

He also knew that, if he said no, most of the newsies would leave in a huff. The South Bay Strangler was sexy, especially during a sweeps month. Who cared about some dumb, ordinary murder, though? Poor Lupe Sandoval hadn’t so much as made the news, even though she was just as dead as Mrs. Peterfalvy.

“Everything we see is consistent with what the Strangler does,” the detective said reluctantly. “It could be a copycat case, of course, but that doesn’t seem likely.” Certain details about the Strangler’s M.O. hadn’t reached the media yet. (If they had, one TV station or another would have shouted them to the skies, with a big EXCLUSIVE! label pasted on.)

“How long will you let the Strangler continue his terrorization of women throughout this broad area of Los Angeles County?” another TV reporter demanded, as if it were all Colin’s fault. Colin had been positive that kind of question would come from somebody. It was one of the reasons he’d so looked forward to meeting the press.

“We’re doing everything we can to catch this guy, Dave,” he said. “If you can suggest anything we’ve missed, we’ll listen. Believe me, we will.”

“That’s not my place!” Dave sounded indignant. And well he might-the next idea he had would be his first. He went on, “What you’ve done hasn’t helped Mrs., uh, Peterfalk much, either, has it?”

Colin might have known-hell, had known-he would get the name wrong, and probably wrong like that. “Peterfalvy,” he corrected with cold politeness, and spelled it again. Useless, of course. The only time reporters were shown to be morons was when they came on with nothing to read-during a car chase, for instance. Otherwise, scripts from smarter people disguised their vapidity and foolishness.

“Any sign the Strangler’s slipped up here?” asked Mort Greenbaum, who’d covered the crime beat on the Breeze for about as long as Colin had been a San Atanasio cop. Not quite long enough to have started out in a snap-brim fedora, in other words, but long enough to give the impression that he had.

“Well, like I said before, the lab hasn’t turned the house upside down and inside out yet, so I can’t say for sure,” Colin replied. “Offhand, though, doesn’t look that way.”

“Gotcha.” Mort had a recorder, but he took notes, too, probably to organize his own thoughts. Looking up from the scribbles, he went on, “He’s bound to sooner or later, isn’t he?”

“Lord knows I hope so,” Colin said.

“Or maybe he’ll pick on a little old lady who sleeps with a. 45 under the pillow.”

“Maybe he will,” Colin agreed. “I’m still hoping we catch him, though. We don’t want to have to rely on civilians for do-it-yourself justice.”

“Woudn’t you have a better chance if the San Atanasio Police Department-if all the police departments in the impacted area-weren’t so incompetent?” Dave had finally figured out that Colin had mocked him for screwing up Mrs. Peterfalvy’s name. Cops weren’t supposed to do that to TV personalities: the natural order of things was the other way around. Now, stung, the handsome man in the Hugo Boss suit was trying to get his own back.

The TV news would be a hell of a lot better if you clowns weren’t brain-dead, too. Colin didn’t-quite-come out with it. You couldn’t let them know what you thought of them. And the chief would ream him out if he got into another slanging match with a reporter. Life was too short. A damn shame, but it was.

“I already told you, we’re doing everything we know how to do to go after him. State personnel and the FBI have given us a hand, too,” Colin said. “We expect to succeed.”

“How many more innocent victims will perish before you do?” Dave asked dramatically. He never knew how close he came to becoming one of them.

The coroner and the lab technicians pulled up then. Some of the reporters descended on Dr. Ishikawa for pearls of wisdom. He and the techs hadn’t done anything or viewed the crime scene yet, but that didn’t trouble the Fourth Estate. Other newshounds went after the neighbors for quotes about the late Mrs. Peterfalvy. If the neighbors didn’t tell them she was a nice old lady who never bothered anybody, Colin would learn something new about human nature.

Sergeant Sanchez came up behind Colin. “Boy, that musta been fun,” he said in a low voice.

“Always is,” Colin agreed. “I want a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. I want a drink, too.”

“I notice you aren’t saying you don’t drink.”

“Good for you, Sherlock! But I don’t. On duty I don’t. Unless I really and truly need one. Or more than one.”

“I’ll never tell,” Sanchez said.

“Somebody will. Or a surveillance camera will catch it. Or something else will go wrong. I don’t need one that bad. Wouldn’t mind writing a ticket for that cocksucker from Channel 2, though.”

“Think their van’s close enough to the hydrant there to write them up?”

Colin eyed it. “No,” he said regretfully. “Besides, they’d have a cow if one of us did it. They’d say it was on account of they were asking questions we didn’t like.” And they’d be right. But he didn’t say that.

“I didn’t mean you or me. That’s why God made the guys in the blue suits.” Sanchez hadn’t been out of a uniform so very long himself. By the way he talked, he’d never worn one.

Well, Colin had been that way himself. Most cops were. “Let it go,” he said. “It’s not like the dickhead would pay the ticket himself. TV stations, they’ve got money falling out of their assholes.”

“Wish I did,” Gabe Sanchez said morosely. “The bills my kids run up, they think I’m made of the stuff so I really can crap it.” He eyed Colin. “Yours are pretty much grown. Do they ever stop scrounging offa you?”

“Eventually. Pretty much. The one who’s still in college goes a long way toward making up for the other two, though. And there are the lawyers’ bills, too, but you know about those,” Colin said.

“Fuck, do I ever!” Sanchez winced. “Those mothers send their kids to Harvard, and it’s, like, petty cash for them. No wonder they run the country.”

“No wonder at all.” Colin nodded. Gabe had that one straight, all right. Did he ever! Colin consoled himself by remembering that even lawyers’ brats at Harvard fell foul of booze and dope. And some of them would decide they were more interested in discovering themselves than in getting a diploma. Some would figure they already knew it all, and again leave without the sheepskin. Some would graduate, and then try to make it as rock’n’ rollers instead of sensibly imitating Dad and Mom.

He knew all the verses to all those songs. Maybe, in the end, things evened out. Maybe. He wouldn’t bet anything he couldn’t afford to lose.

Dr. Ishikawa came out of Mrs. Peterfalvy’s neat little house. “We won’t be sure till the DNA results come in, but it sure looks like another one.”

“Yeah, I figured the same thing,” Colin said. “Will this guy ever fuck up?” He’d put on an optimistic face for the TV morons. Among his own kind, he could say what he really thought. Cops were like family. They didn’t-usually-hold the truth against you.

Not that that did you a hell of a lot of good. But there it was, and Colin took what small advantage of it he could.

The Rockies. There they were, right out the apartment window. Vanessa liked that. On clear days, you could see mountains in Los Angeles, too, but they sat lower on the horizon, and they sure didn’t march from north to south in one magnificent straight line. When it got smoggy, they disappeared.

Then again, the Rockies also disappeared when it got smoggy. Till Vanessa moved here, she hadn’t thought Denver could get smoggy. Surprise! Too many cars in not enough space could do that almost anywhere. Denver had so many cars, and so many people who’d moved here in the past twenty-five years to escape the crowding and pollution in wherever the hell they were from, that its freeway system was hopelessly overstretched. Morning and afternoon traffic crawls made Vanessa miss L.A.’s commutes. Before she moved, she wouldn’t have imagined anything could.

Pickles was not a big Denver booster. He’d spent the first couple of days after he got here pissing and shitting on the apartment rug. She’d gone through a bottle of that Nature’s Miracle enzyme junk, but the place still smelled of cat. Part of that was marking his new territory, of course. And part was expressing his opinion of anybody who could coop him up in a carrier for as long as it took to get from California to Colorado. He couldn’t write angry e-mails, but he got the message across.

Vanessa’s new job didn’t pay as well as the one she’d left. But the apartment was bigger, newer, and cheaper than the one she’d had before. People in Denver bitched about the high cost of housing. Vanessa wasn’t impressed. Even after a couple of market meltdowns, L.A. still cost more.

She didn’t particularly like her new job. Amalgamated Humanoids made everything from crash-test dummies to fancy audio-animatronic robots. They competed for a lot of government grants, so they needed someone to write and edit proposals. Reading RFPs from the Feds proved that Washington did believe in capital punishment, at least by boredom. Reading what allegedly bright Amalgamated Humanoids engineers fondly imagined to be English proved some people grew up without a native language. That was the kindest explanation Vanessa could find, anyhow.

She hadn’t likeeli job she’d quit so she could move to Denver, either. And she hadn’t liked the one before that. She really hadn’t liked the classes she was taking at Long Beach State, which was why she’d got a job instead.

She wasn’t happy unless she disliked something, not that she’d ever put it like that. Bryce had, not long before she told him to hit the road. Cause and effect? She would have denied on a stack of Bibles that the crack had anything to do with the breakup. She would have said the same thing about the poem he’d had accepted. It was, when you got right down to it, a pretty goddamn stupid poem.

One thing she didn’t love about Amalgamated Humanoids-she was starting a collection, the way she always did-was the wild up-and-down workload. Proposals had iron deadlines. If they had to go out by 3:27 p.m. Tuesday precisely, you made sure they did. If that meant pulling sixteen-hour days Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, you pulled them.

And if, after that, you spent the rest of the week counting paper clips and rubber bands and goofing around online, the boss didn’t care. You stored up energy for the next crazy time.

Not everything in Denver was perfect, then. But it was no worse than L.A. As soon as Vanessa turned in her California license plates for ones stamped out by Colorado convicts, she felt more or less at home.

The one down spot-the place where she was unhappy without wanting to be unhappy, in a manner of speaking-was her love life. When she was in the throes of writing, or of translating into English someone else’s godawful attempt at writing a proposal, she didn’t have time for Hagop. And she soon started to wonder if Hagop ever had time for her.

“I am too busy,” he would say when she called him. Not all the time, but often enough to be annoying. More than often enough: Vanessa had a low annoyance threshold.

He wasn’t always too busy. Oh, no. When he woke up with a bulge in his pants, he was charming and attentive and sweet… till she put out. Then the carpet business consumed him again.

Bryce had been horny all the damn time. He’d sulk and get pissy when she said no. And if she said no two or three days running, he’d play with himself instead. It made her feel she was just a convenience for him, maybe a little more enjoyable than a hand but not absolutely necessary. She’d told herself things would be different with an older man. He wouldn’t keep bugging her the way Bryce did. And he’d be grateful when she gave herself to him.

Well, yes and no. Hagop wasn’t horny all the damn time. Biology wouldn’t let him be. But, when he was, he bugged her just as much as somebody half his age would have. Once he got what he wanted, he ignored her till the next time he started feeling the pressure again.

Vanessa had never been one to suffer in silence. As soon as she got irked enough-which didn’t take long-she called him on it. “The only reason you want me around is so you can fuck me,” she said one evening, after he’d done just that. The blunt language would have made her father flinch, so she hoped it would have the same effect on any man his age.

No such luck. Hagop leaned up on one elbow and looked at her, his heavy-featured face expressionless. He liked a light on in the bedroom; seeing what they were up to helped him get where he was going. After a moment, he said, “And this surprises you because…?”

“If we’re lovers, you’re supposed to love me. Not just lay me. Not just make love to me. Love me,” Vanessa saidot just›Or what the hell did I go and get rid of Bryce for? She kept that part to herself: she had an accurate suspicion that Hagop wouldn’t care why. Bryce sure hadn’t cared why she’d dumped the guy she was living with before she met him. All he’d ever cared about was getting it in.

Hagop’s face remained studiously blank. “I am afraid you may ask more than I am able to give.”

“Oh, yeah? I’d better not.” Vanessa glared at him. “I’ve got news for you-I didn’t pack up and move to Colorado just to be your fuck toy.”

“I did not expect you to move here at all,” he answered with a shrug. “As long as you did, though, do you expect me not to enjoy it?”

Things were falling apart. Vanessa didn’t need to be the King of Babylon to see the writing on the wall. “You filthy son of a bitch!” she snarled-not the ideal endearment when they were both naked in her bed and his seed still dribbled out of her to make a wet spot, but most heartfelt. “You moved here to get rid of me!” It was obvious now. Why in blue, bleeding hell hadn’t it been while she was still back in San Atanasio?

With dignity, Hagop shook his head. “I moved here for exactly the reason I told you in California: I saw the chance to make more money.”

“Rug merchant!” she jeered. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it?”

He got out of bed and started to dress. “I am going to pretend I did not hear that. Count yourself lucky that I am.” His voice held.. nothing.

Vanessa knew all about hot rages. Meeting a cold one gave her pause. She’d fight like a wildcat. All the same, it wouldn’t be hard for her to end up dead in this apartment where she hadn’t lived very long.

“So I did not move here for the purpose of getting rid of you,” Hagop continued tonelessly, tucking his shirt into his slacks. “That, as they say in the trade, was an added bonus.”

An added redundancy. But she didn’t say that, either. She did say, “What am I supposed to do now?”

He shrugged again. “This is no longer my worry. You are old enough to be an adult, unlikely as it sounds. You will land on your feet or on your back-whichever suits you. And then, before too long, you will find out that the next one, whoever he is, does not measure up to your imagination, either.”

He walked out of the bedroom. Pickles meowed at him. He didn’t answer the cat. The front door opened. It closed. It didn’t slam-Hagop was still holding things in. His footsteps faded down the stairs. With the door closed, she couldn’t hear them at all by the time he got to the bottom.

“You bastard! You stinking, shitheaded bastard!” she whispered. Then she all but ran into the shower. She’d used it not long before he came over, but so what? Now she wanted to scrub every trace of his touch off her body. She didn’t usually use a bath sponge. Tonight she made an exception. She turned the water up as hot as she could stand, too.

Once she finally came out, she stripped the sheets off the bed. She wanted to throw them out. She really wanted to douse them in gasoline and make a bonfire out of them. Wasn’t some ancient movie called The Burning Bed? If she could douse Hagop in gasoline and make a bonfire out of him…

But she couldn’t. Oh, she could, but she was much too likely to get caught. The asshole wasn’t worth doing hard time for. As a cop’s kid, she knew better than most how godawful state prison was.

And she couldn’t even toss the sheets. Replacing them wouldn’t be cheap. After making this move-making this move for that worthless, reptilian turd! — she couldn’t afford a lot of grand gestures. She’d just have to shove quarters into one of the building’s machines and wash that man right out of her bedclothes. Any of Amalgamated Humanoids’ products had more in the way of warmth, more in the way of feeling, than he did.

So why hadn’t she realized that when she fell for him after she gave Bryce the heave-ho? She shrugged. She’d been looking for a lifeline, and she’d found one. Now she discovered it had an anvil on the end, not one of those cork floats.

She pulled fresh sheets out of a cabinet in the hall. All the bed linen in there had been washed since Hagop’s nasty sweat last polluted it. It would have to do. Grimly, she started making the bed. Pickles thought it was a game, and tried to help. In lieu of punting him, she tossed a couple of kitty treats out into the hall and bribed him to go away.

Bryce Miller wondered if he would ever see a job after he finally finished his thesis. The way the economy looked these days, odds were against him. He’d played the grad-school game as well as anybody could. He’d been a reader. He’d had research assistantships and TAships. He’d tutored high-school kids. He’d taught at a couple of community colleges. The proof of his success was that he could see the end of the dissertation ahead, and he wasn’t broke. Yet.

Maybe if he’d chosen a sexier field than Hellenistic poetry… He shook his head. Wrong comparison. Hellenistic poetry could be plenty sexy. It could, here and there, be downright filthy. Maybe if he’d chosen a more practical field than Hellenistic poetry…

“But then I wouldn’t be me,” he murmured. He had his laptop set up on the table in the dining nook of the little one-bedroom place he’d hastily found after Vanessa decided change was in the air. Papers and books covered about two-thirds of the tabletop. When he needed to eat, he had to put the computer away.

If he hadn’t found a secondhand copy of The Persian Boy when he was in high school, he might never even have heard of the Hellenistic age, much less ended up trying to make a living studying it. Somewhere out in the big, wide world, there might be people, possibly even English-speaking people, who could resist getting drawn in by Mary Renault’s prose. There might be, but Bryce wasn’t any of them. He’d started trying to find out how much in the novel was real and how much she was making up. Most of it and not a whole lot, respectively, he’d soon discovered.

Writers were dangerous people. They could warp the lives of readers they’d never met, readers they couldn’t meet because they were dead by the time some beat-up old copy of one of their books fell into the right-the wrong? — hands.

Bryce wondered if he would ever write a poem that affected even one person as much as The Persian Boy had changed him. He laughed at himself. Talk about setting your sights high!

Out in the courtyard, one of the poolside regulars did a cannonball that raised a splash like a young mushroom cloud. Three or four of the others gave forth with whoops and applause. Maybe a dozen people-more men than women-pretty much monopolized the pool here. There was no law that said Bryce couldn’t swim in it. He didn’t think they would have gone out of their way to make him feel unwelcome if he had.

But that was the point. They hung out there, and he didn’t. The same kind of group, down to sex ratio and precancerous tans, had ruled the roost at the building where he’d lived with Vanessa.

He looked down at his own hands. He was pale almost to invisibility. No need for him to worry about melanoma, no sir. He’d probably die of some fungus infection he caught from an Egyptian papyrus of the second century BC, or else of pneumonia brought on by aggressive library air-conditioning.

Another cannonball, this one even bigger and wetter than the last. More cheers from the regulars. Bryce eyed the waves rolling across the pool and slopping over the coping on the far side. If you threw an asteroid into the Pacific somewhere near New Zealand, waves would swamp Los Angeles the same way.

“Cheery thought,” he said. The longer he lived alone, the more he talked to himself. He would have worried about it more if Vanessa’s dad (which was still how he thought of Colin Ferguson most of the time) hadn’t told him he did the same thing.

Susan thought it was funny-peculiar that he’d stayed friends with his ex’s father. It wasn’t even that they both found themselves in the same boat at the same time (or that the boat was named Titanic). Dammit, Bryce liked Colin, and for some reason it worked both ways. Had the older man’s life worked out differently, he would have made a good scientist instead of a good cop. He had that restless itch to know, to put pieces together till they formed a satisfying whole.

It probably wasn’t an accident that his new lady friend was a geologist. Bryce wondered what he’d seen in Louise, back in the day. She was nice enough-she worked at being nice, in fact, worked hard at it-but she wasn’t what you’d call long on brains.

“So what?” Bryce wondered, again out loud. Chances were Colin had been so happy he was getting laid regularly that he hadn’t cared about anything else.

Kai su, teknon? Bryce wondered. That was Greek, and it was what Julius Caesar had really said when he saw that Brutus was one of the guys shoving knives into him on the Ides of March. It meant You, too, kid?

Bryce was aiming it at himself. Now that Vanessa was gone, he wondered what he’d seen in her past a pretty face, nice tits, and long legs that opened for him like the door into heaven. What more did you need? When you were first starting out, you thought everything was just like the movies and you were guaranteed to live happily ever after.

He knew what she’d seen in him. She’d been fighting with her then-boyfriend, and Bryce looked like an escape hatch. That she’d been fighting with the other guy should have been a red flag. But when you had a boner that wouldn’t quit, it was easy enough to figure the fights were all the fault of the SOB she was ditching.

Did Hagop What’s-his-name figure Vanessa’s fights with Bryce were all his fault? Maybe, but then again maybe not. Hagop had a good many miles on the odometer. Chances were he’d seen that things were rarely as one-sided as the person talking about them made them out to be.

Of course, why would he care? When you landed a girl young enough to be your daughter, why would you care about anything? It might not last long, but wouldn’t you have fun while it did?

When I’m in my fifties, will I troll for girls in their twenties? Bryce was sure he’d still look at girls in their twenties; that was one of the things they were for. But to touch instead of just look? He hoped to n agaappily settled with someone by then. He’d hoped to be happily settled with Vanessa. Whatever else might happen, that wouldn’t, not now.

His phone rang. He picked it up, and smiled when he recognized the number. “Hey, Susan,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.” In a manner of speaking, it was true.

“Well, good. I was thinking about you, too,” Susan Ruppelt said. German or maybe Dutch, Bryce guessed. One of these days, he’d get around to asking her. It wasn’t urgent, not the way it might have been a lifetime earlier. In L.A. these days, any white whose first language was English counted as an Anglo. That cracked up Bryce and some of his Jewish friends, which didn’t mean they didn’t take advantage of it. Susan went on, “How crazy should you get before your orals?”

“There’s an interesting question. You’re going to, you know, whether you want to or not,” he answered. She was scheduled to take them fall quarter. It seemed a long way off to Bryce, but it wouldn’t to Susan.

“Tell me about it!” she yipped.

“I know. I know.” He tried to sound soothing. He’d survived his exams almost three years ago now, and got blasted afterwards. “Listen, if your chairperson’s worth the paper she’s printed on-”

“She is,” Susan broke in. “Claudia can drive me nuts sometimes, but she’s one of the best in the country. That’s why I came here.”

“Cool.” Bryce stayed in soothing mode. He still didn’t call Professor Towers by his first name, and wondered if he ever would. But then again, Professor Towers’ first name was Elmer, so chances were nobody called him by it. That was neither here nor there, though. “Like I was saying, if she’s worth anything, she won’t let you go up for exams unless she’s sure you’ll do fine.”

“She told me the same thing. I don’t know whether to believe it, though,” Susan said.

“Believe it,” Bryce said firmly. “When you look back on them, doctoral exams are more a rite of passage, like, than anything else.”

“They don’t feel that way when you’re looking forward to them.” Susan sounded fretful-and who could blame her? Disasters did happen. The year after Bryce passed his orals, a woman doing ancient Rome gruesomely flunked hers. No one but the profs who examined her was supposed to know what happened, but word got out all the same. The guy under whom she’d studied had retired a few months after the fiasco. UCLA was still searching for a full-time Romanist. With upcoming budgets looking as starvation-lean as the current one, the university might keep searching for a long time.

But Susan wasn’t like poor underprepared Joanna. Bryce didn’t know much about Western medieval history. He knew a solid scholar when he saw one. And he’d done a Roman minor field himself, as Susan was going to with whatever temporary lecturer held the slot come fall. He’d tutored her after they started dating, but not for long-she had a better grasp of the Romans than he did.

“Hey, you know your stuff,” he said. “The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. You don’t come down with stage fright, do you?”

“Not usually. But I’m not used to going up on this big a stage, either.”

“They’ll cut you slack for that. They’ve seen panicked grad students before. If I got through, you can do it. You’re way more outgoing than I’ll ever be.”

“I’m just afraid I’ll forget everything the second they start asking me questions.”

“Won’t happen. Honest to God, babe, it won’t. They started me out with softballs so I could loosen up a little before they started hitting me with the tougher ones. From everything I’ve heard from other people, that’s how they usually do it.”

“They know so much, though.” Come hell or high water, Susan was going to worry. “If they want to flunk me, they can.”

“Sure they can. They can flunk anybody if they want to. They sure could’ve nailed me to the cross. But that’s the whole point. They won’t want to.”

“Really?” Susan said in a small voice.

“Really. You’ll do great,” Bryce answered. They’d been through this before. If she needed a shoulder to cry on-or to fret on-he was glad to lend his. He’d got through what she was approaching; he knew the bumps in the road. He sometimes thought grad students were the only people fit to associate with other grad students. No one else understood the peculiar pile of shit they had to shovel.

He also sometimes thought people who’d gone through messy breakups were the only ones fit to associate with others of their kind, for similar reasons.

“Thank you, Bryce,” Susan breathed. No messy breakups in her past, so Bryce hoped like hell he was full of it.