Candy picked up the binoculars and was training them on the end of the street. "Lookie who's here."

"Who?"

"Old Clive. See that bookstore? It's got books outside in those carts. Don't the owner know it's snowing?"

"It's stopping. Put down the binoculars, Christ's sake. You want another coffee?"

"Uh-huh. Maybe a latte this time."

"It's hard getting just plain coffee anymore. It's coffee with an att.i.tude." Karl stood with the cups in his hand, shaking his head. "What I want to know, where's our Ned get his ideas? I mean he never goes anyplace or does anything. Relatively speaking, I mean. How can he think up stuff to write about?"

Candy picked up the binoculars. "He came to Pitts-f.u.c.king-burgh, didn't he?"

Karl said, "Yeah, lucky us." He turned to go to the counter for refills, but stopped. He was looking again at the tall fellow across the street who had stopped to look in the window of a florist's. "C? You don't really suppose that crazy Mackenzie put out more than one contract?"

This truly startled Candy, who looked up, wide eyed. "What the f.u.c.k, K, why would he do that?"

"Because he's an arrogant son of a b.i.t.c.h and a publisher. And remember we were very clear about the way we worked."

"So he goes and hires somebody else to cap him? Some slob without any fastidiousness or principles-"

"If so, it means Ned could get smeared all over the pavement anytime now. Maybe we ought to forget the coffee and get out of here."

Clive had never realized how few transactions good writers made with the physical world. The bad ones, like Dwight Staines, were in constant contact with the world outside because they lacked boundaries, like babies. Everything was theirs. They were the world and everything in it.

What was it that made the crucial difference? He would have to ask Tom Kidd-wait a minute! He never spoke to Tom Kidd beyond an unenthusiastic "h.e.l.lo" if he pa.s.sed Tom in the hall; it was further evidence of his psyche's crumbling if he could say almost automatically "Ask Tom Kidd."

Clive shuddered and looked up the street. Ned had been standing there in front of that ice cream store for nearly twenty minutes, halfway between Clive and the two goons down there at the other end of the pavement. He didn't have to get any closer to know they were Candy and Karl.

There were the usual people going about their business: a tall man walking out of the florist's a few doors up, a woman into a laundromat; a blonde hanging in the doorway of a beauty shop; and the token beggar sitting near the bookstalls.

Where the h.e.l.l was Pascal? What was he paying her for? To play f.u.c.kall with Ned Isaly in her free time? Clive was feeling put upon as he wandered into the used-book store, comforting in its smell of old bindings and page rot. Clive fussed around in the fiction shelves looking for Mackenzie-Haack authors, found a couple of Dwight Staines and a copy of Ned's Solace. He had never read it, but he had certainly never advertised that fact at his workplace. One by Dwight Staines he took up to the cash register to a waif of a clerk who looked as if putting in the energy to read one book would fell her where she stood. He paid for the book, returned to hide among the shelves, where he took out a penknife and cut a square in the center pages big enough to deposit the handgun he'd been carrying in his pocket. It was small, a .22, and fit nicely.

He had a vague and shifting scene in his mind of police trolling by after somebody had shot somebody and Clive didn't want them to know he was carrying a .22. Good thinking, Clive. (His addresses to himself had grown increasingly sarcastic ever since Bobby's "plan" had been put into operation.) Good thinking. You hold the book the wrong way and the gun falls out at their feet.

So n.o.body's perfect, big deal.

He ran a finger along the row of P s, looking for that book of Saul Prouil's that had received so much praise. Here it was in the first edition and it was expensive. That didn't surprise Clive, given the landslide of awards it had won, that and the fact that Saul Prouil had up to now not published another book. It probably took him decades to write one, and no wonder.

Clive walked up to the cash register where now a beetle-browed old man was taking money from a woman with a coil of dark red hair. He was about to tap her on the shoulder and ask her how she could keep her eye on her mark when she turned and looked at him blankly, as if he were indeed not worth the change the old man returned to her. He had been so certain that she was Pascal.

He paid for his Prouil book, the old man fussing over the AmEx card and finally putting the books in a worn paper bag and handing them over.

Clive took them and left, glancing at the beggar woman and taking out some coins-even this act of mild kindness surprised him. He thought of a line of Yeats-"the rag and bone-shop of the heart"-and dropped the coins in a little metal box. The clothes fairly swarmed on the old woman, layers and layers of cloaks and scarves. There were additional garments in a baby carriage nearby.

"Seventy-seven cents, geez, thanks a lot."

Sarcasm? Clive was about to say "Ungrateful wretch!" when he realized it was Pascal who'd said it. "Ah, Pascal. This is truly a marvel of disguise; who'd ever have thought of a beggar?"

"f.u.c.k you. A cigarette? I'm all out." She held out her mittened hand, and he handed her the pack that he carried for emergencies (though hard to explain to himself what const.i.tuted a smoking emergency). She took one from the tight pack and wiggled it for a light. "Thanks. Nice talking to you."

Clive walked on by, shaking his head. He should write a book.

Purchasing a red Porsche was not one of his better ideas, but Saul had gotten tired of standing in the snow and trying to hail a cab, so the WHITE GLOVE SERVICE sign over the Porsche showroom had seduced him. Lord, but weren't those beautiful cars! He had entered the showroom with a view toward renting a car for the day and had become more and more enamored of them.

Put it this way: he might need to yank Ned from the sidewalk where he was so determinedly standing but that would be difficult in a cab, even if he could find one. One needed one's own vehicle if one were rescuing somebody. That still didn't explain buying one.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a figure moving in Ned's direction. But when Saul turned his head, the person was gone. It had looked almost as if he were shadowing Ned.

Ned was at the end of Separation and didn't know what to do about it. He was walking around Shadyside, stalling. All of Pittsburgh was a stall. Or maybe not, maybe not. Maybe Nathalie was thinking what to do as he stood staring at the ice cream store before going in. He had found another Isaly's.

Sally watched from the doorway of a hairstylist's, fingering her wig as if the stylist had misplaced the curls.

In the bookstore down the block she had bought Pittsburgh: Little Known Facts. She was hoping a knowledge of arcane facts would make her appear more interesting to Ned, if not more lovable. Another red sports car-was everybody in Pittsburgh driving one?-came out of an alleyway up ahead and turned onto this street. Where did all these Porsches come from? It could be the same one-she couldn't see the driver-but she didn't think so; no Porsche owner would drive about aimlessly at 25 mph. He wouldn't be caught dead.

Personally, Clive disliked ice cream but it served as rather a good cover, he thought. He was licking a cone of vanilla, that being the blandest of all in those tubs at the Isaly place. He was clutching the book. It made him sn.i.g.g.e.r when he thought of asking Dwight Staines to autograph it, and Staines opening it and finding the center cut out (minus the gun, of course).

He was keeping a good way back from Ned, thinking he must be wrong, that Candy and Karl had had several opportunities to plug Ned and if they hadn't done it by now, they probably wouldn't. They must have decided Ned was okay and they'd let him live. G.o.d, he hoped so. Never having handled a gun in his life, the idea of having to shoot one made his adrenaline pump.

"K, is there something about all this that strikes you as awful peculiar?" Candy was looking up and down the street.

Karl was looking, too, but he was watching through the binoculars. "What do you mean?" Funny that there weren't more people around, but that's the only thing he thought at all peculiar. There was Clive over there doing G.o.d knows what, in and out of that bookstore, then the ice cream place (another one of those!), now carrying a cone and a book. The blonde they'd seen in Schenley Park leaving a hairdresser's where he didn't think they'd done much of a job on her. A woman in dark gla.s.ses, pushing a baby carriage along their side of the street, and now here came that G.o.dd.a.m.ned red Porsche again. He sighed. "Sweet ride," he said.

"What?"

"That Porsche."

"Again? Uh."

Candy was reaching beneath his jacket to one of his rear trouser pockets to get his Juicy Fruit gum when he felt something sting him. He slapped his face. "G.o.dd.a.m.ned mosquitoes this cold-?"

Karl stared. Had the binoculars not been on a strap around his neck, he would have dropped them to the ground. There was a red streak, a blood streak across Candy's face. "No mosquito, C. Look."

Candy pulled his hand from his face and saw blood. "Wha-"

Their hands went for their guns, Karl's to his shoulder holster, Candy's hand dove to the belt at his back. They didn't fire because they weren't sure what they should be firing at.

Then their mouths fell open.

The woman several yards away sent the baby carriage flying toward them, just after she'd pulled a gun from beneath the blanket and rags. The blonde on the other side was pointing a small gun in their direction; even old Clive had pulled a gun out of the book he was carrying, and in the course of doing so shot the book, which made a wide spiral in the air before landing.

Candy's voice was just flirting with hysteria. "What kinda city is this, Chrissakes, everybody's packin' heat?"

The red Porsche, as if it had lost both driver and direction, was coming straight at them, its erratic path from street to pavement to street again forcing everyone to drop back into doorways and press against walls.

Guns went back into purses, holsters, baby carriages, and books.

Ned came out of Isaly's with his ice cream cone (pistachio again). He stood there licking it and meditating on the end of Separation. He was walking along the street, away from this block of businesses when he heard what sounded like a shot, but turned too late to see (it was over in five seconds) anything but the aftermath of this brief melee. He did see the fleeing Porsche, however, and thought he'd seen it before. Whoever was driving had to be drunk or crazy or both.

There were Candy and Karl, and there was the woman he'd spent a blissful hour with last night-Rhoda? Rhonda? She was righting a baby carriage that must have fallen on the pavement. My G.o.d, had a baby been killed?

THIRTY-THREE.

Back in his room, Ned packed his duffel bag. He disliked leaving the packing until the morning as it made him feel rushed, even though all he'd brought along was an extra shirt, shorts, socks, and an electric razor. He never packed more than would take five minutes to repack, yet he always felt pressured. No matter whether he liked the place or not, knew it well or not at all, there was the same sense of loss.

Finished with the packing, he sat on the edge of the bed thinking about Pittsburgh, the usual signs of anxiety creeping over him. It was anxiety about something left undone, unfinished; something attempted but not, in the end, accomplished, as if he had failed to do what he had come to do.

Maybe he should stay another day.

Solace, Ned had thought, would be somehow cathartic and would relieve him of such feelings. It had done, while he was writing it. It was a story of a man and a woman who, by all the rules of life, should have fallen in love, married, had children. Yet they kept touching and slipping away, pa.s.sing and not stopping. They were kept apart both by their failure to see how important it was that they meet and by an inability to rise above conventions. One day the brown paper bag of groceries she was carrying broke, spilling cans and boxes. He was there; he helped her pick up the groceries. They smiled at each other; she thanked him sincerely. It was a situation wherein the next thing said could easily have been, "Let's have coffee," but he didn't. She didn't. They recognized in each other's glance something familiar, something they had lost, although neither could have put it that way because each was self-involved, no more than the average person, perhaps, but then the average person is much too caught up in himself. They did not recognize signs and portents. They could literally have fallen over each other and still wouldn't have figured it out. Their solace was forgetting.

Saul was wondering if people had epiphanies in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh seemed such an unlikely place for them.

He was standing at his bedroom window, which overlooked the Point. He was watching the water, the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, where they became the Ohio River. The Ohio flowed into the Mississippi. Never ending but becoming something else.

This was, Saul told himself, hardly a novel idea. But in a way it was, too. It set off a train of thought that was not unpleasant, that was, for him, rather startling. He thought of the woman in his book, his protagonist. "And why-?"

"Where then was she going? She asked herself this question. And why-?"

This was the end: "And why-?"

In his room, washing up, Clive thought about writing. All editors felt it now and again, that creepy feeling one was already ghosting for a writer, was already writing rather than rewriting. The thought I ought to write a book: he wondered if Tom Kidd ever had this compulsion-for it was beginning to feel like that-compulsion and just a few steps away from obsession.

No, Tom Kidd was too happy doing just what he was doing. But if he had ever had to edit a book by Dwight Staines, he wouldn't be so smug about writing!

Clive had stopped his electric razor to look in the mirror. That was definitely a middle-aged face, and not early middle age, either. The best he could do was middle middle age.

He felt a spikelike pain in the area of his stomach, which split apart and moved upward, that he could take for a heart attack except he knew it wasn't. Perhaps gas, perhaps loss.

In spite of her having read Solace every year since its publication, this was the first time she had looked up wonderingly from the page and thought that if, at that moment while she was sitting here in the lobby, Ned had appeared, Sally knew she'd be bold enough to do what his protagonist, Ruthie, had failed to do: she would ask him, "Is she me?"

THIRTY-FOUR.

Candy and Karl had their elbows on the Hilton bar and their hands tight around double shots of Kentucky bourbon.

"Never have I seen anything like it," said Karl. It wasn't the first time he'd said it, more like the fifteenth. Candy just shook and shook his head in silent agreement. "I mean," Karl went on, "in our checkered-you could say-careers we've seen some weird things, but never a bunch of strangers on the sidewalk suddenly go for guns."

"Maybe it's the area. I mean, maybe it's a high crime rate area."

"What? Did it look like one? No bars on the windows, no grates on the doors." Karl shook his head, disbelievingly. "A mother with a little baby packing heat? Some dumb blonde just got her hair done with a .22 stashed in her bag? That maniac running his car up on the sidewalk? Come on, stuff like that? You don't see stuff like that in your high crime areas. In the movies maybe, but not in a real high crime rate area."

"And who the f.u.c.k were they gonna shoot, K? One another? Not even I could say where that shot came from, so how could any of them?" Candy delicately touched the two Band-Aids on his cheek. It had been a purely surface wound, but they still wondered, Who the h.e.l.l?

"Us?"

"What? Shoot us? We weren't doin' nothin'."

"I'm just saying"-Karl tilted his gla.s.s to drain it-"it looked to me like one or two of those guns were pointing in our direction. Didn't it you?"

"It makes no sense. This whole f.u.c.king city makes no sense."

"Well, gentlemen!"

A new voice came from behind and both of them had a hand placed on a shoulder. They whirled around, going instinctively for their guns, but stopping the movement just in time.

"Arthur!" said Candy.

"Mordred!" said Karl, at the same time.

"What in f.u.c.k you doing in Pitts-b.l.o.o.d.y-burgh?" asked Candy.

They gave each other a slap-hand handshake and Arthur said, "Visiting. Another round," he said to the bartender, circling his finger above the two gla.s.ses. "I'll have a Perrier." He turned back to them. "What about yourselves? What brought you here?"

Karl shrugged. "Same thing."

"h.e.l.l," said Candy, "we haven't seen you in ten, fifteen years."

Arthur hitched a stool out from under the counter. "I'm in Vegas now."

"You're f.u.c.king kidding me," said Candy.

"What? You don't like Vegas?"

"You get enough action there?"

"Christ, yes. You know it."

"Used to," said Karl. "Used to have a lot of grit, Vegas. Then people with too much money and no sense, these financiers, started building all of these 'theme' hotels and the place went to h.e.l.l. It's all families now. h.e.l.l, you couldn't get off a round there without hitting six kids under twelve." Karl said thanks to Arthur and raised his fresh drink and clicked gla.s.ses with the other two.

"It's not so bad, I mean you get used to stumbling over babies and so forth. But what brings you two here?"

"Work." Candy shrugged.

"It went okay?" asked Arthur.

"Sure, except this is one f.u.c.king crazy city." Candy was about to recap the afternoon for Arthur when Clive came up to the bar.