Who?

1

It was almost eight o’clock at night. Rogers put down his office phone and looked over toward Finchley. “He stopped for a hamburger and coffee at a Nedick’s on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. But he still hasn’t talked to anybody, been anywhere in particular, or looked for a place to stay. He’s still walking. Still wandering.”

Rogers thought to himself that at least the man had eaten. Rogers and Finchley hadn’t. On the other hand, the two of them were sitting down, while, with every step the man took on the concrete sidewalks, two hundred sixty- eight pounds fell on his already ruined feet. Then, why was he walking? Why didn’t he stop? He’d been up since before dawn in Europe, and yet he kept going.

Finchley shook his head. “I wonder why he’s doing that? What could he be after? Is he looking for somebody — hoping to run across someone?”

Rogers sighed. “Maybe he’s trying to wear us out.” He opened the Martino dossier in front of him, turned to the proper page, and ran his finger down the scant list of names. “Martino had exactly one relative in New York, and no close friends. There’s this woman who sent him the wedding announcement. He seems to have gone with her for a while, while he was at CCNY. Maybe that’s a possibility.”

“You’re saying this man might be Martino.”

“I’m saying no such thing. He hasn’t made a move toward her place, and it’s no more than five blocks outside the area he’s been covering. If anything, I’m saying he’s not Martino.”

“Would you want to visit an old girl friend that’s been married fifteen years?”

“Maybe.”

“It doesn’t prove anything one way or another.”

“I believe that’s what we’ve been saying right along.”

Finchley’s mouth quirked. His eyes were expressionless. “What about the relative?”

“His uncle? Martino used to work in his coffee house, right down in that area. The coffee house is a barbershop now. The uncle married a widow when he was sixty-three, moved to California with her, and died ten years ago. So that cleans it up. Martino didn’t make friends, and he had no relatives. He wasn’t a joiner, and he didn’t keep a diary. If there was ever anyone made for this kind of thing, Martino’s the one.” Rogers clawed at his scalp.

“And yet,” Finchley said, “he came straight to New York, and straight down into the Village. He must have had a reason. But, whatever it was, all he’s doing is walking. Around and around. In circles. It doesn’t tie in. It doesn’t make sense — not for a man of this caliber.” Finchley’s voice was troubled, and Rogers, remembering the episode between them earlier in the afternoon, gave him a sharp look. Rogers was still ashamed of his part in it, and didn’t care to have it revived.

He picked up his phone. “I’ll order some food sent up.”

2

The drugstore on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Seventh Street was small, with one narrow, twisting space of clear floor between the crowded corners. Like all small druggists, the owner had been forced to nail uprights to the counters and put shelves between them. Even so, there was barely room to display everything he had to carry in competition with the chain store up the street.

Salesmen had piled their display racks on every inch of eye-level surface, and tacked their advertising cards wherever they could. There was only one overhead cluster of fluorescent tubes, and the tight space behind the counters was always dark. There was one break in the wall of merchandise on the counters. There, behind an opening walled by two stands of cosmetics and roofed by a razor-blade card, the druggist sat behind his cash register, reading a newspaper.

He looked up as he heard the door open and close. His eyes went automatically to the metal side of the display case across from him, which he used for a mirror. The case was scuffed, and a little dirty. The druggist saw the vague outlines of a man’s large silhouette, but the creaking of the floorboards had already told him as much. He peered for a look at the face, and brought one hand up to the temple bar of his glasses. He got out of his chair, still holding his paper in the other hand, and thrust his head and shoulders out over the counter.

“Something I can do for — ”

The man who’d come in turned his glittering face toward him. “Where’s your telephone books, please?” he asked quietly.

The druggist had no idea of what he might have done in another minute. But the matter-of-fact words gave him an easy response. “Back through there,” he said, pointing to a narrow opening between two counters.

“Thank you.” The man squeezed himself through, and the druggist heard him turning pages. There was a faint rustle as he pulled a sheet out of the telephone company’s notepaper dispenser. The druggist heard him take out a pencil with a faint click of its clip. Then the telephone book thudded back into its slot, and the man came out, folding the note and putting it in his breast pocket. “Thank you very much,” he said. “Good night.”

“Good night,” the druggist answered.

The man left the store. The druggist sat back on his chair, folding the paper on his knee.

It was a peculiar thing, the druggist thought, looking blankly down at his paper. But the man hadn’t seemed to be conscious of anything peculiar about himself. He hadn’t offered any explanations; he hadn’t done anything except ask a perfectly reasonable question. People came in here twenty times a day and asked the same thing.

So it couldn’t really be anything worth getting excited about. Well — yes, of course it was, but the metal-headed man hadn’t seemed to think so. And it would be his business, wouldn’t it?

The druggist decided that it was something to think about, and to mention to his wife when he got home. But it wasn’t anything to be panicked by.

In a very brief space of time, his eyes were automatically following print. Soon he was reading again. When Rogers’ man came in a minute later, that was the way he found him.

Rogers’ man was one of a team of two. His partner had stayed with their man, following him up the street.

He looked around the drugstore. “Anybody here?”

The druggist’s head and shoulders came into sight behind the counter. “Yes, mister?”

The Security man fished in his pocket. “Got a pack of Chesterfields?”

The druggist nodded and slipped the cigarettes out of the rack behind the counter. He picked up the dollar the Security man put down.

“Say,” the Security man said with a puzzled frown, “did I just see a guy wearing a tin mask walk out of here?”

The druggist nodded. “That’s right. It didn’t seem to be a mask, though.”

“I’ll be damned. I thought I saw this fellow, but it’s kind of a hard thing to believe.”

“That’s what happened.”

The Security man shook his head. “Well, I guess you see all kinds of people in this part of town. You figure he was dressed up to advertise a play or something?”

“Don’t ask me. He wasn’t carrying a sign or anything.”

“What’d he do — buy a can of metal polish?” The Security man grinned.

“Just looked in a phone book, that’s all. Didn’t even make a call.” The druggist scratched his head. “I guess he was just looking up an address.”

“Boy, I wonder who he’s visiting! Well” — and he shrugged — “you sure do run into funny people down here.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the druggist said a little testily, “I’ve seen some crazy-looking things in other parts of town, too.”

“Yeah, sure. I guess so. Say — speakin’ of phones, I guess I might as well call this girl. Where’s it at?”

“Back there,” the druggist said, pointing.

“O.K., thanks.” The Security man pushed through the space between the two counters. He stood looking sourly down at the stand of phone books. He pulled the top sheet out of the note dispenser, looked at it for impressions, and saw none that made any sense. He slipped the paper into his pocket, looked at the books again — six of them, counting the Manhattan Classified-and shook his head. Then he stepped into the booth, dropped coins into the slot, and dialed Rogers’ office.

3

The clock on Rogers’ desk read a few minutes past nine. Rogers still sat behind his desk, and Finchley waited in the chair beside it.

Rogers felt tired. He’d been up some twenty-two hours, and the fact that Finchley and their man had done the same was no help.

It’s piled up on me, he thought. Day after day without enough sleep, and tension all the time. I should have been in bed hours ago.

But Finchley had gone through it all with him. And their man must feel infinitely worse. And what was a little lost sleep compared to what the man had lost? Still Rogers was feeling sick to his stomach. His eyes were burning. His scalp was numb with exhaustion, and he had a vile taste in his mouth. He wondered if his sticking to the job was made any the less because Finchley was younger and could take it, or because the metal-faced man was still following his ghost up and down the city streets. He decided it was.

“I hate to ask you to stay here so late, Finch,” he said.

Finchley shrugged. “That’s the job, isn’t it?” He picked up the piece of Danish pastry left over from supper, swirled his cold half-container of old coffee, and took a swallow. “I’ve got to admit I hope this doesn’t happen every night. But I can’t understand what he’s doing.”

Rogers toyed with the blotter on his desk, pushing it back and forth with his fingertips. “We ought to be getting another report fairly soon. Maybe he’s done something.”

“Maybe he’s going to sleep in the park.”

“The city police’ll pick him up if he tries to.”

“What about that? What’s the procedure if he’s arrested for a civil crime?”

“One more complication.” Rogers shook his head hopelessly, drugged by fatigue. “I briefed the Commissioner’s office and we’ve got cooperation on the administrative level. It’d be a poor move to issue a general order for all patrolmen to leave him alone. Somebody’d let it slip. The theory is that beat patrolmen will call in to their precinct houses if they spot a metal-headed man. The precinct captains have instructions that he’s to be left alone. But if a patrolman arrests him for vagrancy before he calls in, then all kinds of things could go wrong. It’ll be straightened out in a hurry, but it might get on record somewhere. Then, a few years from now, somebody doing a book or something might come across the record, and that’ll be that. We can’t keep the media bottled up forever.” Rogers sighed. “I only hope it’d be a few years from now.” He looked down at his desktop. “It’s a mess. This world was never organized to include a faceless man.”

It’s true, he thought. Just by being alive, he’s made me stumble from the very start. Look at us all — Security, the whole ANG-handcuffed because we couldn’t simply shoot him and get him out of the way. Going around in circles, trying to find an answer. And he hasn’t yet done anything.

For some reason, Rogers found himself thinking, “Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.” Emerson. Rogers grunted.

The telephone rang.

He picked it up and listened.

“All right,” he said finally, “get back to your partner. I’ll have somebody intercept and pick that paper up from you. Call in when your man gets to wherever he’s going.” He hung up. “He’s made a move,” he told Finchley. “He looked up an address in a phone book.”

“Any idea of whose?”

“I’m not sure…” Rogers flipped the Martino dossier open.

“The girl,” Finchley said. “The one he used to know.”

“Maybe. If he thinks they’re still close enough for her to do him any good. Why did he have to look up the address? It’s the same one as the one on the wedding announcement.”

“It’s been fifteen years, Shawn. He could have forgotten it.”

“He may never have known it.” And there was no guarantee the man was going to the address he’d copied. He might have looked it up for some future purpose. They couldn’t take chances. Everything had to be covered. The phone books had to be examined. There might be some mark — some oily fingerprint, wet with perspiration, some pencil mark; some trace -

Six New York City phone books. God knew how many pages, each to be checked.

“Finch, your people’ll have to furnish a current set of New York phone books. Worn ones. We’re going to switch ’em for a set I want to run through your labs. Got to have ’em right away.”

Finchley nodded and reached for the phone.

4

A travel-worn young man, lugging a scuffed cardboard suitcase, came into the drugstore on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Seventh Street.

“Like to make a phone call,” he said to the druggist. “Where is it?”

The druggist told him, and the young man just managed to get his suitcase through the narrow gap between the counters. He bumped it about clumsily for a few moments, and shifted it back and forth, annoying the druggist at his cash register, while he made his call.

When he left, the druggist’s original books went to the FBI laboratory, where the top sheet of notepaper had already checked out useless.

The Manhattan book was run through first, on the assumption that it was the likeliest. The technicians did not work page by page. They had a book with all Manhattan phones listed by subscribers’ addresses, and they laid out a square search pattern centering on the drugstore. A machine arranged the nearest subscribers’ addresses in alphabetical order, and then the technicians began to work on the book taken from the store, using their new list to skip whole columns of numbers that had a low probability under this system.

Rogers hadn’t supplied the technicians with Edith Chester’s name. It would have done no good. By the time the results came through, the man would have reached there. If that was where he was going. Furthermore, there was no proof he’d only looked up one address. Eventually, all six books would be checked out, and probably show nothing. But the check would be made, and no one knew how many others afterward.

Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.

5

Edith Chester Hayes lived in the back apartment on the second floor of a house off Sullivan Street. The soot of eighty years had settled into every brick, and industrial fumes had gnawed the paint into flakes. A narrow doorway opened into the street, and a dim yellow bulb glowed in the foyer. Battered garbage cans stood in front of the ground floor windows.

Rogers looked out at it from his seat in an FBI special car. “You always expect them to have torn these places down,” he said.

“They do,” Finchley answered. “But other houses grow older faster than these get condemned.” His voice was distracted as though he were thinking of something else, and thinking of it so intently that he barely heard what he was saying. He hunched in his corner of the back seat, his hand slowly rubbing the side of his face. He paid no attention when one of the ANG team that had followed the man here came up to the car and leaned in Rogers’ window.

“He’s upstairs, on the second floor landing, Mr. Rogers,” the man said. “He’s been there for fifteen minutes, ever since we got here. He hasn’t knocked on any door. He’s just up there, leaning against a wall.”

“Didn’t he even ring a doorbell?” Rogers asked. “How’d he get into the building?”

“They never lock the front doors in these places, Mr. Rogers. Anybody can get into the halls any time they want to.”

“Well, how long can he stay up there? Some tenant’s bound to come along and see him. That’ll start a fuss. And what’s the point of his just staying in the hall?”

“I couldn’t say, Mr. Rogers. Nothing he’s done all day makes sense. But he’s got to make a move pretty soon, even if it’s just coming back down and starting this walking around business again.”

Rogers leaned over the front seat and tapped the shoulder of the FBI technician, wearing headphones, who was bent over a small receiving set. “What’s going on?”

The technician slipped one phone. “All I’m getting is breathing. And he’s shuffling his feet once in a while.”

“Will you be able to follow him if he moves?”

“If he stays in a narrow hall, or stands near a wall in a room, yes, sir. These induction microphones’re pretty sensitive, and I’ve got it flat against an outside wall of her apartment.”

“I see. Let me know if he does anyth — ”

“He’s moving.” The technician snapped a switch, and Rogers heard the sound of heavy footsteps on the sagging hall floorboards. Then the man knocked softly on a door, his knuckles barely rapping the wood before he stopped.

“I’m going to up the gain a little,” the technician said. Then the speaker was full of the man’s heavy breathing.

“What’s he upset about?” Rogers wondered.

They heard the man knock hesitantly again. His feet moved nervously.

Someone was coming toward the door. They heard it open, and then heard a gasp of indrawn breath. There was no way of telling whether their man had made the sound or not.

“Yes?” It was a woman, taken by surprise.

“Edith?” The man’s voice was low and abashed.

Finchley straightened out of his slump. “That’s it — that explains it. He spent all day working up his nerve.”

“Nerve for what? Proves nothing,” Rogers growled.

“I’m Edith Hayes,” the woman’s voice said cautiously.

“Edith — I’m Luke. Lucas Martino.”

“Luke!”

“I was in an accident, Edith. I just left the hospital a few weeks ago. I’ve been retired.”

Rogers grunted. “Got his story all straight, hasn’t he?”

“He’s had all day to think of how to put it,” Finchley said. “What do you expect him to do? Tell her the history of twenty years while he stands in her doorway?”

“Maybe.”

“For Pete’s sake, Shawn, if this isn’t Martino how’d he know about her?”

“I can think of lots of ways Azarin could get this kind of detail out of a man.”

“It’s not likely.”

“Nothing’s likely. It’s not likely any one particular germ cell would grow up to be Lucas Martino. I’ve got to remember Azarin’s a thorough man.”

“Edith — ” the man’s voice said, “may — may I come in for a moment?”

The woman hesitated for a second. Then she said, “Yes, of course.”

The man sighed. “Thank you.”

He stepped into the apartment and the door closed.

“Sit down, Luke.”

“Thank you.” They sat in silence for a few moments. “You have a very nice-looking apartment, Edith. It’s been fixed up very comfortably.”

“Sam — my husband — liked to work with his hands,” the woman said awkwardly. “He did it. He spent a long time over it. He’s dead now. He fell from a building he was working on.”

There was another pause. The man said, “I’m sorry I was never able to come down and see you after I left college.”

“I think you and Sam would have liked each other. He was a good deal like you; orderly.”

“I didn’t think I ever showed much of that with you.”

“I could see it.”

The man cleared his throat nervously. “You’re looking very well, Edith. Have you been getting along all right?”

“I’m fine. I work. Susan stays at a friend’s house after school until I pick her up on my way home at night.”

“I didn’t know you had children.”

“Susan’s eleven. She’s a very bright little girl. I’m quite proud of her.”

“Is she asleep now?”

“Oh, yes — it’s well past her bedtime.”

“I’m sorry I came so late. I’ll keep my voice down.”

“I wasn’t hinting, Luke.”

“I — I know. But it is late. I’ll be going in a minute.”

“You don’t have to rush. I never go to bed before midnight.”

“But I’m sure you have things to do — clothes to iron, Susan’s lunch to pack.”

“That only takes a few minutes. Luke — ” Now the woman seemed steadier. “We were always so uncomfortable around each other. Let’s not keep to that old habit.”

“I’m sorry. Edith. You’re right. But — do you know, I couldn’t even call you and ask if I could see you? I tried, and I found myself imagining you’d refuse to see me. I spent all day nerving myself to do this.” The man was still uncomfortable. And as far as anyone listening could tell, he hadn’t yet taken off his coat.

“What’s the matter, Luke?”

“It’s complicated. When I was in their — in the hospital-I spent a long time thinking about us. Not as lovers, you understand, but as people — as friends. We never knew each other at all, did we? At least, I never knew you. I was too wrapped up in what I was doing and wanted to do. I never paid any real attention to you. I thought of you as a problem, not as a person. And I think I’m here tonight to apologize for that.”

“Luke — ” The woman’s voice started and stopped She moved in her creaking chair. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“I know I’m embarrassing you, Edith. I would have liked to handle this more gracefully. But I don’t have much time. And it’s almost impossible to be graceful when I have to come here looking like this.”

“That’s not important,” she said quickly. “And it doesn’t matter what you look like, as long as I know it’s you. Would you like some coffee?”

The man’s voice was troubled. “All right, Edith Thank you. We can’t seem to stop being strangers somehow, can we?”

“What makes you say that — No. You’re right. I’m trying very hard, but I can’t even fool myself. I’ll start the water boiling.” Her footsteps, quick and erratic faded into the kitchen.

The man sighed, sitting by himself in the living room.

“Well, now do you think?” Finchley demanded “Does that sound like Secret Operative X-Eight hatching a plan to blow up Geneva?”

“It sounds like a high school boy,” Rogers answered.

“He’s lived behind walls all his life. They all sound like this. They know enough to split the world open like a rotten orange, and they’ve been allowed to mature to the age of sixteen.”

“We aren’t here to set up new rules for handling scientists. We’re here to find out if this man’s Lucas Martino.”

“And we’ve found out.”

“We’ve found out, maybe, that a clever man can take a few bits of specific information, add what he’s learned about some kinds of people being a great deal alike, talk generalities, and fool a woman who hasn’t seen the original in twenty years.”

“You sound like a man backing into the last ditch with a lost argument.”

“Never mind what I sound like.”

“Just what do you suppose he’s doing this for, if he isn’t Martino?”

“A place to stay. Someone to run errands for him while he stays under cover. A base of operations.”

“Jesus Christ, man, don’t you ever give up?”

“Finch, I’m dealing with a man who’s smarter than I am.”

“Maybe a man with deeper emotions, too.”

“You think so?”

“No. No — sorry, Shawn.”

The woman’s footsteps came back from the kitchen. She seemed to have used the time to gather herself. Her voice was firmer when she spoke once more.

“Lucas, is this your first day in New York?”

“Yes.”

“And the first thing you thought of was to come here. Why?”

“I’m not sure,” the man said, sounding more as if he didn’t want to answer her. “I told you I thought a great deal about us. Perhaps it became an obsession with me. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have done it, I suppose.”

“Why not? I must be the only person you know in New York, by now. You’ve been badly hurt, and you want someone to talk to. Why shouldn’t you have come here?”

“I don’t know.” The man sounded helpless. “They’re going to investigate you now, you know. They’ll scrape through your past to find out where I belong. I hope you won’t feel bad about that — I wouldn’t have done it if I thought they’d find something to hurt you. I thought about it. But that wouldn’t have stopped me from coming. That didn’t seem as important as something else.”

“As what, Lucas?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you afraid I’d hate you? For what? For the way you look?”

“No! I don’t think that little of you. You haven’t even stared at me, or asked sneaking questions. And I knew you wouldn’t.”

“Then — ” The woman’s voice was gentle, and calm, as though nothing could shake her for long. “Then, did you think I’d hate you because you broke my heart?”

The man didn’t answer.

“I was in love with you,” the woman said. “If you thought I was, you were right. And when nothing ever came of it, you hurt me.”

Down in the car, Rogers grimaced with discomfort. The FBI technician turned his head briefly. “Don’t let this kind of stuff throw you, Mr. Rogers,” he said. “We hear it all the time. It bothered me when I started, too. But after a while you come to realize that people shouldn’t be ashamed to have this kind of thing listened to. It’s honest, isn’t it? It’s what people talk about all over the world. They’re not ashamed when they say it to each other, so you shouldn’t feel funny about listening.”

“All right,” Finchley said, “then suppose we all shut up and listen.”

“That’s O.K., Mr. Finchley,” the technician said. “It’s all going down on tape. We can play it back as often as we want to.” He turned back to his instruments. “Besides, the man hasn’t answered her yet. He’s still thinking it over.”

“I’m sorry, Edith.”

“You’ve already apologized once tonight, Lucas.” The woman’s chair scraped as she stood up. “I don’t want to see you crawling. I don’t want you to feel you have to. I don’t hate you — I never did. I loved you. I had found somebody to come alive to. When I met Sam, I knew how.”

“If you feel that way, Edith, I’m very glad for you.”

Her voice had a rueful smile in it. “I didn’t always feel that way about it. But you can do a great deal of thinking in twenty years.”

“Yes, you can.”

“It’s odd. When you play the past over and over in your head, you can begin to see things in it that you missed when you were living it. You come to realize that there were moments when one word said differently, or one thing done at just the right time, would have changed everything.”

“That’s true.”

“Of course, you have to remind yourself that you might be seeing things that were never there. You might be maneuvering your memories to bring them into line with what you’d want them to be. You can’t be sure you’re not just daydreaming.”

“I suppose so.”

“A memory can be that way. It can become a perfect thing. The people in it become the people you’d like best, and never grow old — never change, never live twenty years away from you that turn them into somebody you can’t recognize. The people in a memory are always just as you want them, and you can always go back to them and start exactly where you stopped, except that now you know where the mistakes were, and what should have been done. No friend is as good as the friend in a memory. No love is quite as wonderful.”

“Yes.”

“The — the water’s boiling in the kitchen. I’ll bring the coffee.”

“All right.”

“You’re still wearing your coat, Lucas.”

“I’ll take it off.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Rogers looked at Finchley. “What do you suppose she’s leading up to?”

Finchley shook his head.

The woman came back from the kitchen. There was a clink of cups. “I remembered not to put any cream or sugar in yours, Lucas.”

The man hesitated. “That’s very good of you, Edith. But — As a matter of fact, I can’t stand it black any more. I’m sorry.”

“For what? For changing? Here — let me take that in the kitchen and do it right.”

“Just a little cream, please, Edith. And two spoons of sugar.”

Finchley asked, “What do we know about Martino’s recent coffee-drinking habits?”

“They can be checked,” Rogers answered.

“We’ll have to be sure and do that.”

The woman brought the man’s coffee. “I hope this is all right, Lucas.”

“It’s very good. I-I hope it doesn’t upset you to watch me drink.”

“Should it? I have no trouble remembering you, Luke.”

They sat quietly for a few moments. Then the woman asked, “Are you feeling better now?”

“Better?”

“You hadn’t relaxed at all. You were as tense as you were that day you first spoke to me. In the zoo.”

“I can’t help it, Edith.”

“I know. You came here hoping for something, but you can’t even put it in words to yourself. You were always that way, Luke.”

“I’ve come to realize that,” the man said with a strained chuckle.

“Does laughing at it help you any, Luke?”

His voice fell again. “I’m not sure.”

“Luke, if you want to go back to where we stopped and begin it again, it’s all right with me.”

“Edith?”

“If you want to court me.”

The man was deathly quiet for a moment. Then he heaved to his feet with a twang of the chair springs.

“Edith — look at me. Think of the men that’ll follow you and me until I die. And I am going to die. Not soon, but you’d be alone again just when people depend on each other most. I can’t work. I couldn’t even ask you to go anywhere with me. I can’t do that, Edith. That’s not what I came here for.”

“Isn’t it what you thought of when you were lying in the hospital? Didn’t you think of all these things against it, and still hope?”

“Edith — ”

“Nothing could ever have come of it, the first time. And I loved Sam when I met him, and was happy to be his wife. But it’s a different time, now, and I’ve been remembering, too.”

In the car, Finchley muttered softly and with savage intensity. “Don’t mess it up, man. Don’t foul up. Do it right. Take your chance.” Then he realized Rogers was looking at him and went abruptly quiet.

In the apartment, all the man’s tension exploded out of his throat. “I can’t do it!”

“You can if I want you to,” the woman said gently.

The man sighed for one last time, and Rogers could see him in his mind’s eye — the straight, set shoulders loosening a little, the fingers uncurling; the man standing there and opening the clenched fist of himself. Martino or not, traitor or spy, the man had won — or found — a haven.

A door opened inside the apartment. A child’s voice said sleepily, “Mommy — I woke up. I heard a man talking. Mommy — what’s that?”

The woman caught her breath. “This is Luke, Susan,” she said quickly. “He’s an old friend of mine, and he just came back to town. I was going to tell you about him in the morning.” She crossed the room and her voice was lower, as if she were holding the child and speaking softly. But she was still talking very rapidly. “Lucas is a very nice man, honey. He’s been in an accident — a very bad accident — and the doctor had to do that to cure him. But it’s not anything important.”

“He’s just standing there, Mommy. He’s looking at me!”

The man made a sound in his throat.

“Don’t be afraid of me, Susan — I won’t hurt you. Really, I won’t.” The floor thudded to his weight as he moved clumsily toward the child. “See? I’m really a very funny man. Look at me blink my eyes. See all the colors they turn? Aren’t they funny?” He was breathing loudly. It was a continuous, unearthly noise in the microphone. “Now, you’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“Yes! Yes, I am. Get away from me! Mommy, Mommy, don’t let him!”

“But he’s a nice man, Susan. He wants to be your friend.”

“I can do other tricks, Susan. See? See my hand spin? Isn’t that a funny trick? See me close my eyes?” The man’s voice was urgent, now, and trembling under the nervous joviality.

“I don’t like you! I don’t like you! If you’re a nice man, why don’t you smile?”

They heard the man step back.

The woman said clumsily, “He’s smiling inside, honey,” but the man was saying “I’d — I’d better go, Edith. I’ll only upset her more if I stay.”

“Please — Luke — ”

“I’ll come back some other time. I’ll call you.” He fumbled at the door latches.

“Luke — oh, here’s your coat — Luke, I’ll talk to her. I’ll explain. She just woke up — she may have been having a nightmare…” Her voice trailed away.

“Yes.” He opened the door, and the FBI technician barely remembered to pull down his gain control.

“You will come back?”

“Of course, Edith.” He hesitated. “I’ll be in touch with you.”

“Luke — ”

The man was on the stairs, coming down quickly. The crash of his footsteps was loud, then fading as he passed the microphone blindly. Rogers signaled frantically from the car, and the two waiting ANG men began walking briskly in opposite directions away from the building. The man came out, tugging his hat onto his head. As he walked, his footsteps quickened. He turned up his coat collar. He was almost running. He passed one of the ANG men, and the other cut quickly around a corner, circling the block to fall in with his partner.

The man disappeared into the night, with the surveillance team trying to keep up behind him.

The microphone was still listening.

“Mommy — Mommy, who’s Lucas?”

The woman’s voice was very low. “It doesn’t matter, honey. Not any more.”

6

“All right,” Rogers said harshly, “let’s get going before he gets away from us.” He braced himself as the technician thumbed the starter and lurched the car forward.

Rogers was busy on his own radio, dispatching cover teams to cross the man’s path and pick up the surveillance before he could outwalk the team behind him. Finchley had nothing to say as the car moved up the street. His face, as they passed under a light, was haggard.

The car rolled past the nearest ANG man. He looked upset, trying to walk fast enough to keep the hurrying man in sight and still not walk so fast as to attract attention. He threw a quick glance toward the car. His mouth was set, and his nostrils were flared.

Their headlights touched the bulky figure of their man. He was taking short, quick steps, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. He kept his face down.

“Where’s he going now?” Rogers said unnecessarily. He didn’t need Finchley to tell him.

“I don’t think he knows,” Finchley said.

In the darkness, the man was walking uptown on MacDougal Street. The lights of the coffee shops above Bleecker lay waiting for him. He saw them and turned abruptly toward an alley.

A girl had come down the steps of her house beside him, and he brushed by her. He stopped, suddenly, and turned. He raised his head, his mouth falling open. He was frozen in a pantomime of surprise. He said something. The car lights splashed against his face.

The girl screamed. Her throat opened and she clapped her hands to her eyes. The hideous sound she made was trapped in the narrow street.

The man began to run. He swerved into an alley, and even in the car, the sound of his feet was like someone pounding on a hollow box. The girl stood quiet now, bent forward, holding herself as though she were embarrassed.

“Get after him!” Rogers, in turn, was startled by the note his voice had struck. He dug his hands into the back of the front seat as the driver yanked the car into the alley.

The man was running well ahead of them. Their headlights shone on the back of his neck, and the glare of resected light winked in the rippling shadows thrown by the flapping skirt of his trailing coat. He was running clumsily, like an exhausted man, and yet he was moving at fantastic speed.

“My God!” Finchley said. “Look at him!”

“No human being can run like that,” Rogers said. “He doesn’t have to drive his lungs. He won’t feel oxygen starvation as much. He’ll push himself as fast as his heart can stand.”

“Or faster.”

The man threw himself against a wall, breaking his momentum. He thrust himself away, down a cross street, headed back downtown.

“Come on!” Rogers barked at the driver. “Goose this hack.”

They screamed around the corner. The man was still far ahead, running without looking back. The street was lined with loading platforms at the backs of warehouses. There were no house lights, and street lamps only at the corners. A row of traffic lights stretched down toward Canal Street, changing from green to red in a pre-set rhythm that rippled along the length of the street in waves. The man careered down among them like something flapping, driven by a giant wind.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” Finchley muttered urgently, “He’ll kill himself.”

The driver jammed speed into the car, flinging them over the truck-broken street. The man was already well past the next corner. Now he turned his head back for an instant and saw them. He threw himself forward even faster, came to a cross street, and flailed around the corner, running toward Sixth Avenue now.

“That’s a one-way street against us!” the driver yelled.

“Take it anyway, you idiot!” Finchley shouted back, and the car plunged west with the driver working frantically at the wheel. “Now, catch him!” Finchley raged. “We can’t let him run to death!”

The street was lined with cars parked at the crowded curbs. The clear space was just wide enough for a single car to squeeze through, and somewhere a few blocks ahead of them another set of headlights was coming toward them, growing closer.

The man was running desperately now. As the car began to catch him, Rogers could see his head turning from side to side, looking for some narrow alleyway between buildings, or some escape of any kind.

When they pulled even with him, Finchley cranked his window down. “Martino! Stop! It’s all right. Stop!”

The man turned his head, looked, and suddenly reversed his stride, squeezing between two parked cars with a rip of his coat and running across the street behind them.

The driver locked his brakes and threw the gear lever into reverse. The transmission broke up, but it held the driveshaft rigid. The car slid on motionless wheels, leaving a plume of smoke upon the street, the tires bursting into flame. Rogers’ face snapped forward into the seat back, and his teeth clicked together. Finchley tore his door open and jumped out.

“Martino!”

The man had reached the opposite sidewalk. Still running west, he did not stop or look behind. Finchley began to run along the street.

As Rogers cleared the doorway on his side, he saw the oncoming car just on the other side of the next street, no more than sixty feet away.

“Finch! Get off the street!”

Their man had reached the corner. Finchley was almost there, still in the street, not daring to waste time and fight his way between the bumper-to-bumper parked cars.

“Martino! Stop! You can’t keep it up — Martino-you’ll die!”

The oncoming car saw them and twisted frantically into the cross street. But another car came around the corner from MacDougal and caught Finchley with its pointed fender. It spun him violently away, his chest already crumpled, and threw him against the side of a parked car.

For one second, everything stopped. The car with the crushed fender stood rocking at the mouth of the street. Rogers kept one hand on the side of the FBI car, the stench of burnt rubber swirling around him.

Then Rogers heard the man, far down a street, still running, and wondered if the man had really understood anything he’d heard since the girl screamed at him.

“Call in,” he snapped to the FBI driver. “Tell your headquarters to get in touch with my people. Tell them which way he’s going, and to pick up the tail on him.” Then he ran across the street to Finchley, who was dead.

7

The hotel on Bleecker Street had a desk on the ground floor and narrow stairs going up to the rooms. The entrance was a narrow doorway between two stores. The clerk sat behind his desk, his chair tipped back against the stairs, and sleepily drooped his chin on his chest. He was an old, worn-out man with gray stubble on his face, and he was waiting for morning so he could go to bed.

The front door opened. The clerk did not look up. If somebody wanted a room, they’d come to him. When he heard the shuffling footsteps come to a stop in front of him, he opened his eyes.

The clerk was used to seeing cripples. The rooms upstairs were full of one kind or another. And the clerk was used to seeing new things all the time. When he was younger, he’d followed things in the paper. It had been no surprise to him when the Third Avenue El was torn down, or cars came out with four headlights. But now that he was older, things just drifted by him. So he never was surprised at anything he hadn’t seen before. If doctors were putting metal heads on people, it wasn’t much different from the aluminum artificial legs that often stumped up and down the stairs behind him.

The man in front of the desk was trying to talk to him. But for a long while, the only sound he made was a series of long, hollow, sucking sounds as air rushed into his mouth. He held onto the front edge of the desk for a moment. He touched the left side of his chest. Finally he said, laboring over the words, “How much for a room?”

“Five bucks,” the clerk said, reaching behind him for a key. “Cash in advance.”

The man fumbled with a wallet, took out a bill, and dropped it on the desk. He did not look directly at the clerk, and seemed to be trying to hide his face.

“Room number’s on the key,” the clerk said, putting the money in the slot of a steel box bolted through the floor.

The man nodded quickly. “All right.” He gestured self-consciously toward his face. “I had an accident,” he said. “An industrial accident. An explosion.”

“Buddy,” the clerk said, “I don’t give a damn. No drinking in your room and be out by eight o’clock, or it’s another five bucks.”

8

It was almost nine o’clock in the morning. Rogers sat in his cold, blank office, listening to the telephone ring. After a time, he picked it up.

“Rogers.”

“This is Avery, sir. The subject is still in the hotel on Bleecker. He came down a little before eight, paid another day’s rent, and went back to his room.”

“Thank you. Stay on it.”

He pushed the receiver back on the cradle and bent until his face was almost touching the desk. He clasped his hands behind his neck.

The interoffice buzzer made him straighten up again. He moved the switch over. “Yes?”

“We have Miss DiFillipo here, sir.”

“Would you send her in, please.”

He waited until the girl came in, and then let his hand fall away from the switch. “Come in, please. Here’s — here’s a chair for you.”

Angela DiFillipo was an attractive young brunette, a trifle on the thin side. Rogers judged her to be about eighteen. She came in confidently, and sat down without any trace of nervousness. Rogers imagined that in ordinary circumstances, she was a calm, self-assured type, largely lacking in the little guilts that made even the most harmless people turn a bit nervous in this building.

“I’m Shawn Rogers,” he said, putting on a smile and holding out his hand.

She shook it firmly, almost mannishly, and smiled back without giving him the feeling that she was trying to make an impression on him. “Hello.”

“I know you have to get to work, so I won’t keep you here long.” He turned the recorder on. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about last night.”

“I’ll be glad to help out.”

“Thank you. Now — your name is Angela DiFillipo, and you live at thirty-three MacDougal Street, here in New York, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Last night — that would be the twelfth — at about ten-thirty p.m., you were at the corner of MacDougal and an alley between Bleecker and Houston Streets. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me how you got there and what happened?”

“Well, I’d just left the house to go to the delicatessen for some milk. The alley’s right next to the door. I didn’t particularly notice anybody, but I did know somebody was coming up MacDougal, because I could hear his footsteps.”

“Coming toward Bleecker? On the west side of the street?”

“Yes.”

“Go on, Miss DiFillipo. I may interrupt you again, to clarify the record, but you’re doing fine.” And the record’s piling up, he thought. For all the good it does.

“Well, I knew somebody was coming, but I didn’t take any special notice of it, of course. I noticed he was walking fast. Then he changed direction, as if he was going to go into the alley. I looked at him then, because I wanted to get out of his way. There was a streetlight behind him, so all I could see was that it was a man — a big man-but I couldn’t see his face. From the way he was walking, I didn’t think he saw me at all. He was headed straight for me, though, and I guess I got a little tensed up.

“Anyhow, I took a short step back, and he just brushed my sleeve. That made him look up, and I saw there was something odd about his face.”

“How do you mean ‘odd,’ Miss DiFillipo?”

“Just odd. I didn’t see what it was, then. But I got the feeling it had something wrong with it. And I guess that made me a little bit more nervous.”

“I see.”

“Then I saw his face. He stopped, and he opened his mouth — well, his face was metal, like one of those robot things in the Sunday paper, and it was where a mouth would be — and he looked surprised. And he said, in a very peculiar voice, ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ ”

Rogers leaned forward in surprise. “Barbara — it’s I — the German? Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, sir. He sounded very surprised, and — ”

“What is it, Miss DiFillipo?”

“I just realized what made me scream — I mean, what really did it.”

“Yes?”

“He said it in Italian.” She looked at Rogers with astonishment. “I just realized that.”

Rogers frowned. “He said it in Italian. And what he said was ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ That doesn’t make sense, does it? Does it mean anything to you?”

The girl shook her head.

“Well.” Rogers looked down at the desk, where his hands were tapping a pencil on the blotter. “How good is your Italian, Miss DiFillipo?”

“I speak it at home all the time.”

Rogers nodded. Then something else occurred to him. “Tell me — I understand there are a number of regional Italian dialects. Could you tell which one he was using?”

“It sounded pretty usual. You might call it American Italian.”

“As if he’d been in the country a long time?”

“I guess so. He sounded pretty much like anybody around here. But I’m no expert. I just talk it.”

“I see. You don’t know anyone named Barbara? I mean — a Barbara who looks a little like you, say?”

“No…no, I’m sure I don’t.”

“All right, Miss DiFillipo. When he spoke to you, you screamed. Did anything else happen?”

“No. He turned around and ran into the alley. And then a car followed him in there. After that, one of you FBI men came up to me and asked if I was all right. I told him I was, and he took me home. I guess you know all that.”

“Yes. And thank you, Miss DiFillipo. You’ve been very helpful. I don’t think we’ll need you again, but if we do we’ll be in touch with you.”

“I’ll be glad to help if I can, Mr. Rogers. Goodbye.”

“Good-bye, Miss DiFillipo.” He shook her hand again, and watched her leave.

Damn, he thought, there’s a kind of girl who wouldn’t get upset if her man was in my kind of business.

Then he sat frowning. “Barbara — it’s I — the German.” Well, that was one more thing to check out.

He wondered how Martino was feeling, holed up in his room. And he wondered how soon-or long-it would be before they came upon the kind of evidence you could put on record and have stand up.

The interoffice buzzer broke in on him again.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Rogers? This is Reed. I’ve been running down some of the people on the Martino acquaintance list.”

“And?”

“This man, Francis Heywood, who was Lucas Martino’s roommate at MIT.”

“The one who got to be a big gun in the ANG Technical Personnel Allocations Bureau? He’s dead. Died in a plane crash. What about him?”

“The FBI just got a package on him. They pulled in a net of Soviet people in Washington. A really topnotch bunch, that’d been getting away with it for years. Sleepers, mostly. When Heywood was in Washington for the American government, he was one of them.”

“The same Francis Heywood?”

“Fingerprints and photos check with our file, sir.”

Rogers let the air seep out between his lips. “All right. Bring it here and let’s have a look at it.” He hung up slowly.

When the FBI file came in, the pattern it made was perfect, with no holes anyone couldn’t fill with a little experienced conjecture, if he wanted to.

Francis Heywood had attended MIT with Lucas Martino, sharing a room with him in one of the small dormitory apartments. Whether he was a Soviet sleeper even that far back was problematic. It made no significant difference. He was definite]y one of them by the time he was transferred out of the American government into the ANG. Working for the ANG he was hired to assign key technical personnel to the best working facilities for their specific purposes. He had been trained for this same kind of work in the American government, and was considered the best expert in the specialty. At some point near this period, he could have turned active. The natural conclusion was that he had been able to maneuver things so that the Soviets could get hold of Martino. Heywood, in effect, had been a talent scout.

He might, or might not, have known what K-Eighty-Eight was. He was supposed to have only a rough idea of the projects he found space for, but it would certainly have been easier for him to make specific guesses than for most people. Or, if it was felt he ought to take the risk, he could have taken steps to find out. In any case, he had known what kind of man, and how important a project, he could deliver over the border.

That, again, was secondary. What mattered most was this:

A month after Lucas Martino had disappeared over the border, Francis Heywood had taken a transatlantic plane from Washington, where he had been on a liaison mission that might actually have been a cover for almost anything. The plane had reported engine explosions in mid-ocean, sent out a crash distress call, and fallen into the sea. Air rescue teams found some floating wreckage and recovered a few bodies, Francis Heywood’s not among them. The plane had crashed — sonar mapping found its pieces on the bottom. And, at the time, that had been that. Simple engine trouble of some kind. No report whatsoever of Soviet fighter planes sent out to create an incident, and the radio operator sending calm, well-trained messages to the last.

But now Rogers thought of the old business of dropping a man into the water at a prearranged spot, and having a submarine stand by to pick him up.

If you wanted to vary that so the man wouldn’t be missed, then you could crash a whole commercial flight — who’d think it strange to miss one body? — and the submarine could make sure only that one man didn’t drown. It was a little risky, but with the right kind of prearranged crash, and your man set for it, it was well within the kind of chance you took in the business.

He looked at Heywood’s dossier statistics:

Height: 6 feet. Weight: 220. He’d been a heavyset man, with a dark complexion. His age was almost exactly the same as Martino’s. While in Europe, he had learned to speak Italian — presumably with an American accent.

And Rogers wondered just how much Lucas Martino had told him, through three years in the same room. How much the lonely boy from New Jersey had talked about himself. Whether he might not have had a picture of his girl, Edith, on his desk. Or even of a girl called Barbara, for Heywood to have seen every day until it was completely soaked into his memory. Maybe Heywood could have explained what Angela DiFillipo had heard last night on MacDougal Street.

How good an actor was their man? Rogers wondered. How good an actor do you believe a man can be?

God help us, Finch, he thought.

1

Edmund Starke had become an old man, living alone in a rented four-room bungalow on the edge of Bridgetown. He had dried to leathery hardness, his muscles turning into strings beneath his brittle skin, his veins thick and blue. The hair was gone from the top of his skull, revealing the hollows and ridges in the bone. His glasses were thick, and clumsy in their cheap frames. His jaw was set, thrust forward past his upper teeth, and his eyes were habitually narrowed. Like most old men, he slept little, resting in short naps rather than for very long at any one time. He spent his waking hours reading technical journals and working on an elementary physics textbook which, he felt suspiciously, was turning out to resemble every elementary physics text written before it.

Today he was sitting in the front room, twisting the spine of a journal in his fingers and peering across the room at the opposite wall. He heard footsteps on the dark porch outside and waited for the sound of the bell. When it came, he got up in his night robe and slippers, walked slowly to the door and opened it.A big man stood in the doorway, his face bandaged bulkily, the collar of his coat pulled up and his hat low over his eyes. The light from the room glittered blankly on dark glasses.

“Well?” Starke rasped in his high, dry-throated voice.

The man wagged his head indecisively. The bandages over his jaw parted once, showing a dark slit, before he said anything. When be did speak, his voice was indistinct. “Professor Starke?”

“Mister Starke. What is it?”

“I…don’t know if you remember me. I was one of your students. Class of sixty-six at Bridgetown High School. I’m Lucas Martino.”

“Yes, I remember you. Come in.” Starke moved aside and held the door, pushing it shut carefully behind the man, disgusted at having to be so careful of drafts. “Sit down. No, that’s my chair. Take the one opposite.”

The chief impression his visitor was giving was one of embarrassment. He sat down gingerly, unsure of himself, and opened his coat with clumsy, gloved fingers.

“Take off your hat.” Starke lowered himself back into his chair and peered at the man. “Ashamed of yourself?”

The man pulled the hat off, dragging it slowly. His entire skull was bandaged, the white gauze running down under his collar. He gestured toward it. “An accident. An industrial accident,” he mumbled.

“That’s none of my concern. What can I do for you?”

“I— I don’t know,” the man said in a shocked voice, as though his plans had extended only to Starke’s front door and he had never thought, till now, of what to do after that.

“What did you expect? Did you think I’d be surprised to see you? Or see you all wrapped up like the invisible man? I’m not. I know all about you. A man named Rogers was here and said you were on your way.” Starke cocked his head. “So now you’re caught flatfooted. Well — think. What’re you going to do now?”

“I was afraid Rogers would find out about you. Did he bother you?”

“Not a bit.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me you might not be who you say you are. He wanted my opinion.”

“Didn’t he tell you not to let me know that?”

“He did. I told him I’d do this my way.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“How would you know?,’

The man sighed. “Then you don’t think I’m Lucas Martino.”

“I don’t care. It’s no longer important whether you used to be in my class or not. If you’re here for help of any kind, you’ve wasted your time.”

“I see.” The man began putting his hat back on.

“You’ll wait and hear any reasons.”

“What reasons?” the man asked with dull bitterness. “You don’t trust me. That’s a good reason.”

“If that’s what you think, you’d better listen.”

The man sank back. “All right.” He seemed not to care. His emotional responses seemed to reach him slowly and indistinctly, as if traveling through cotton wool.

“What would you want me to do?” Starke rasped. “Take you in here to live with me? How long would that last — a month or two, a year? You’d have a corpse on your hands, and you’d still have no place to go. I’m an old man, Martino or whoever you are, and you ought to have taken that into account if you were making plans.”

The man shook his head.

“And if that’s not what you wanted, then you wanted me to help you with some kind of work. Rogers said it might be that. Was that it?”

The man raised his hands helplessly.

Starke nodded. “What made you think I was qualified? What made you think I could work on something forty years advanced over what I was taught at school? What made you think I could have kept up with new work in the field? I don’t have access to classified publications. Where did you think we’d get the equipment? What did you think would pay for it and — ”

“I have some money.”

“ — what did you think you’d gain by it if you did think you could answer those objections? This nation is effectively at war, and wouldn’t tolerate unauthorized work for a moment. Or weren’t you planning to work on anything important? Were you planning to drop corks into mousetraps?”

The man sat dumbly, his hands trailing over his thighs.

“Think, man.”

The man raised his hands and dropped them. He hunched forward. “I thought I was.”

“You weren’t.” Starke closed the subject. “Now — where’re you going to go from here?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t know. You know, I had decided you were my last chance.”

“Don’t your parents live near here? If you are Martino?”

“They’re both dead.” The man looked up. “They didn’t live to be as old as you.”

“Don’t hate me for that. I’m sorry they’re dead. Life wasn’t meant to be given up gladly.”

“They left me the farm.”

“All right, then you’ve got a place to stay. Do you have a car?”

“No. I took the train down.”

“Muffled in your winding sheet, eh? Well, if you don’t want to sleep in the hotel, take my car. It’s in the garage. You can return it tomorrow. That’ll get you there. The keys are on the mantelpiece.”

“Thank you.”

“Return the car, but don’t visit me again. Lucas Martino was the one student whose brains I admired.”

2

“So you’re not sure,” Rogers said heavily, sitting in the chair where the man had sat the night before.

“No.”

“Can you take an educated guess?”

“I think in facts. It’s not a fact that he recognized me. He might have been bluffing. I saw no purpose in laying little traps for him, so I answered to my name. My picture has appeared in the local newspaper several times. ‘Local Educator Retires After Long Service’ was the most recent caption. He had my name to begin with. Am I to judge him incapable of elementary research?”

“He didn’t visit the newspaper office, Mr. Starke.”

“Mr. Rogers, police work is your occupation, not mine. But if this man is a Soviet agent, he could easily have had the way prepared for him.”

“That’s occurred to us, Mr. Starke. We’ve found no conclusive proof of anything like that.”

“Lack of contrary proof does not establish the existence of a fact. Mr. Rogers, you sound like a man trying to push someone into a decision you want.”

Rogers rubbed his hand along the back of his neck. “All right, Mr. Starke. Thank you very much for your cooperation.”

“I was a good deal more satisfied with my life before you and this man came into it.”

Rogers sighed. “There’s nothing very much any of us could do about that, is there?”

He left, made sure his surveillance teams were properly located, and went back to New York, driving up the turnpike at a slow and cautious rate.

3

Matteo Martino’s old farm had stood abandoned for eight years. The fences were down, and the fields overgrown. The barn had lost its doors long ago, and all the windows of the house were broken. There was no paint left on the barn, and very little on the house. What there was, was cracked, peeling, and useless. The inside of the house was littered, water-soaked, and filthy. Children had broken in often, despite the county police patrol, and scrawled messages on the walls. Someone had stolen the sinks, and someone else had hacked the few pieces of furniture left in it with a knife, at random.

The ground was ditched by gullies and flooded with rain-washed sand. Weeds had spread their tough roots into the soil. Someone had begun a trash pile along the remains of the back fence. The apple trees along the road were gnarled and grown out, their branches broken.

The first thing the man did was to have a telephone installed. He began ordering supplies from Bridgetown: food, clothes — overalls and work shirts, and heavy shoes — and then tools. No one questioned the legality of what he was doing; only Rogers could have raised the issue at all.

The surveillance teams watched him work. They saw him get up before dawn each morning, cook his meal in the improvised kitchen, and go out with his hammer and saw and nails while it was still too dark for anyone else to see what he was doing. They watched him drive fence posts and unroll wire, tearing the weeds aside. They watched him set new beams into the barn, working alone, working slowly at first, and then more and more insistently, until the sound of the hammer never seemed to stop throughout the day.

He burned the old furniture and the old linoleum from the house. He ordered a bed, a kitchen table, and a chair, put them in the house, and did nothing more with it except to gradually set new panes in the windows as he found spare moments from re-shingling the barn. When that was done, he bought a tractor and a plow. He began to clear the land again.

He never left the farm. He spoke to none of the neighbors who tried to satisfy their curiosity. He did no trading at the general store. When the delivery trucks from Bridgetown filled his telephone orders, he gave unloading instructions with his order and never came out of the house while the trucks were in the yard.