'See, this isn't free,' she said. 'They charge your credit card every time you enter a library. Like now, I logged on into his account.'

'How?'

'The account number's right here on the bank card statement. But to make sure that I'm really authorized to use it, we need his pa.s.sword.'

'What's the pa.s.sword? "Rosebud"?'

'A kid's name. Birthday. Anniversary.'

'Great,' I said again. I sat hunched, watching little iridescent squiggles radiate on the screen, as if the letters were burning, fascinated as ever by the thought of fire. This might be why Bert had the card, so he could rack up Infomode charges in another name. I grabbed her arm.

'Try Kam Roberts.' I spelled it.

The screen lit up again: welcome to infomode!

'Whoa,' I said. Once an art student, always an art student. How I love color.

'Do Billing,' she typed. The listing that scrolled up looked like the bank card statement, a log of charges incurred every day or two, which included the length of use and the cost. It was just what you'd expect of Bert. It was all for something called 'Sportsline,' or for another service they referred to as 'Mail-box.' I figured Sportsline reported the scores of games. I asked about Mailbox.

'It's what it sounds like. Get messages from people who are on-line. Like electronic mail.'

Or, it turned out, you could leave messages behind, little memos to yourself or to someone who logged into your account with your permission. That was what Bert had done. The note we found was dated three weeks ago and seemed to make no sense.

It read: Hey Arch-- SPRINGFIELD Kam's Special 1.12--U. five, five Cleveland.

1. 3--Seton five, three Franklin.

1. 5--SJ five, three Grant.

NEW BRUNSWICK 1.2--S.F. eleven, five Grant.

Lena grabbed a yellow pad out of another carrel and wrote it down.

'Does this mean anything to you?' she asked.

Not a thing. Baseball scores in January? Map readings? The combination for a safe? We both stared desolately at the screen.

I heard my name from the PAs in the ceiling: 'Mr Malloy, please go to Mr Thale's office.' The announcement was repeated twice, somehow more ominous with each rendition. I felt trouble darken my heart. What were we going to tell Jake? I rose, thanking Lena. She clicked off the machine so that Bert's message, whatever it was, vanished in a little star of light that lingered on the dull screen.

B. Washing Relieved to have found me, Wash welcomed me to his office with a warmth you'd expect if you were entering his home. George Washington Thale III has the sort of charm meant to reflect breeding, a steady geniality he radiates even with the secretaries. When he turns all his attention and smooth manners on you, you feel like you've met somebody out of Fitzgerald, scion of an old rich world to which all Americans once aspired. Still, I never can forget the term 'stuffed shirt'. He has this big bag belly that seems to push up to his chest when he is seated. With his bow ties and his horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, his liver-spotted face and his pipe, he is a type, one of those used-up emblems of prosperity whose very sight makes you think that somewhere there's a kid waiting for his inheritance.

Wash asked after my well-being, but he was still fretting about Jake, and he promptly dialed Martin's extension on his speakerphone. In Wash's grand corner office, decorated in dark woods, with colonial objects brightened by dabs of gold or red, the practice of law generally has an easy, elegant air, a world where men of importance make decisions and minions at a distance carry them out. He has filled this s.p.a.ce with memorabilia of George Washington -portraiture and busts, little mementos, things that G.W. was alleged to have touched. Wash is some ninth- or twelfth-hand relation, and his hapless attachment to this stuff always seems secretly pitiful to me, as if his own life will never measure up.

'I'm with Mack,' Wash said when Martin came on.

'Good,' he replied. 'Just the men I'm looking for.' I could tell from Martin's tone, a quart over on oil, that he too was in the company of someone else. 'Mack, I just b.u.mped into Jake and we began to talk about the progress on some of the 397 cases Bert's been handling. I invited him to stop in. I thought we all might want to talk about this together.'

'Jake's with you?' Wash asked. He only now grasped what Martin had meant when he said we all should get together.

'Right here,' Martin answered. Upbeat. Strong tone. Martin is like Brushy - like Pagnucci - like Leotis Griswell in his day, like many others who do it well, a lawyer every waking hour. He manages the firm; he plans the renewal of the river and the buildings on the sh.o.r.e. He counsels clients and gets fourteen younger attorneys in a room and plays war games on all his bigtime cases. He flies here and there and engages in endless conference calls with parties strung out across most of the world's time zones, during which he listens, opines, edits briefs, and reads his mail. Something in the law is always at hand and on his mind. And he adores it - he is like a gourmet gorging down an endless meal, eating every goody on his plate. With Jake there, with crisis looming, he sounded chipper and self-confident, raring to go. But when Wash looked back, his aging, pale face was stricken and he looked more scared than me.

C. Introducing the Victim of the Crime If you've ever seen The Birth of Venus with the G.o.ddess on the half-sh.e.l.l and all the seraphim bent back with the vapors because she is so great, then you've seen big-firm lawyers when the General Counsel of their major client arrives. During our first few minutes with Jake Eiger in Martin's vast corner office, getting coffee and waiting as Martin quelled the usual urgent calls, about half a dozen partners stuck their heads in to tell Jake how fit he looked, or that his latest letter on the Suchandsuch matter reflected the same pith and sensibility as the Gettysburg Address; they threw out offhand invitations to dinner, theater, and basketball games. Jake, as ever, accepted this attention with grace. His father was a politician and he knows the way, waving, laughing, parrying with various skilful jests.

I have known Jake Eiger most of my life. We went to high school together at Loyola, Jake two years ahead. You and I, Elaine, we were the kind of Catholics who grew up thinking we were a minority group, the mackerel snappers who ate fish on Friday and wore ash on our foreheads and made way for the ladies in black sheets; we knew we were regarded by Protestants as a clandestine organization with foreign loyalties, like the Freemasons or the KGB. Jack Kennedy of course was our hero, and in his aftermath America for Catholics, I think, truly was different. But you are ever the child, and I'll never really be sure there is a place at the table for me.

But Jake was a Catholic boy, German-Irish, who thought he'd joined the white man's country club. I envied him that and many other things, that his father was rich and that Jake was easy with people. Very good-looking, a movie-star type, he has smooth coppery blond hair that never leaves its place and is only now, with Jake a year or two past fifty, beginning to show less of the radiance that always made you think he was under a spotlight. He has prepossessing eyes - the kind of abundant lashes that you seldom see on a man and which gave Jake, since an otherwise unimpressive childhood, the misleading look of a worldly adult depth. There were always lots of girls after him, and I suspected him of treating them cruelly, wooing them in his soft way and rebuffing them once he'd gotten between their legs.

Still, when I was on my fourteenth version of who I would be, having decided against Vincent Van Gogh, Jack Kerouac, and d.i.c.k Tracy, and figured I'd give my dad's idea, law school, a try, Jake, of all people, became a kind of ideal. Our paths had split after high school but my role as Nora's intended brought us back in contact at little family dos, and Jake took it on himself to give me pointers and advice about law school and practice. Then when I got started at BAD he called upon me for a rather auspicious favor which he felt obliged to repay years later by bringing me here.

A rational person would be grateful to Jake Eiger for that. I made $228,168 last year, and that was after they cut my points for the third time in a row. Without Jake, I'd probably be in some interior office s.p.a.ce with cheap paneling, practicing on my own, scrambling around to the police courts and otherwise looking hungrily at the silent telephone. But Jake flies and I float. He's still soaring for the stars and on his way has cut me loose to go to cinders as I plummet back through the atmosphere. A lesser type might be bitter, because without me Jake Eiger would be a handsome middle-aged guy looking for ways to explain why he gave up the practice of law many years ago.

'Wash, Mack -' Martin had clapped down the phone, dispensing with the last interruption, and his secretary had finally closed the door. 'About Brother Kamin.'

'Ah yes.' I smiled brightly and waited to watch Martin dance this tightrope.

'Jake's aware, of course, that Bert is on another of his self-declared sabbaticals.'

'Right.' Smiles. Wash laughed out loud. Martin's such a card.

'And I thought, frankly, that it would make more sense just to share with Jake everything that we've been concerned about. Everything. I don't want any misunderstandings down the line.'

Martin went on in a mood of impressive gravity. The room was quiet as he spoke, windowed on three sides, full of abstract paintings and the kind of kooky objets d'art that Martin adores - funny clocks, a side table whose gla.s.s top overlay an entire city carved of exotic woods, a shaman's crook that makes the sound of a waterfall when you turn it upside down. Rather than the standard photo of the family, a small soft-sculpture that rendered Martin and his wife and three kids in the mode of Cabbage Patch Kids was perched on his credenza. Martin was behind the desk toward which all the room's furnishings subtly angle, a broad barely finished burl from the trunk of some thousand-year-old oak.

I saw where Martin was going long before Wash, who was in one of the Barcelona chairs that form a proscenium about Martin's desk. When Wash finally realized that Martin was detailing our suspicions about Bert, he made a vague move to object. But Wash clearly had no time to think it through and instead contained himself.

Martin removed his credenza key - he had it hidden in the rubber belly of a clock set in a hula dancer - and displayed the folder of doc.u.ments I'd seen yesterday. He explained to Jake that we had found no paper trail authorizing these checks. As Jake began to sense that something had gone wrong, he started to fidget. But Martin, the man of principles and solid commitments, showed no wavering. It couldn't have been easy for him. G & G has been life to Martin since his days at Leotis Griswells right hand, and he adores the hurly-burly, the business of bringing everyone together. That's his faith, that the team is greater than the sum of the parts. He's my Chinaman here, the man I admire, and he was being admirable now. Only yesterday the Committee had made its decision to wait before the client was informed. Yet Martin was manifesting his allegiance to something more significant than law firm Hoyle: Values. Duty. The lawyer's code. The client, unexpectedly, had asked a question which clearly invited the truth and Martin would not be party to withholding it.

By now Martin was explaining the Committee's plan, how I was searching for Bert in the hope he could be persuaded to relent. From Jake, Martin asked brief forbearance, a couple of weeks, with the promise that at the end I'd provide a full report. To sum up, he came and sat on the forward edge of his desk.

'If we can tell Bert that you, that TN, is looking at this in an understanding way,' he said to Jake, 'I think there's a chance, a real chance, to get the money back. If we do, we can, perhaps, avoid the scandal. That truly strikes me as best for everyone.'

He stopped. Martin had made his appeal, all his formidable charm and powers turned on Jake. Now we waited. It was, on the whole, a moment of high daring. Gage & Griswell was probably about to join the lost city of Atlantis as a civilization that fell into the sea. I thought Wash might black out, and even my skin was crawling, antic.i.p.ating Jake's reaction. Jake, for his part, looked worse than I'd ever seen him, the fatal gray of a man in shock.

'Unbelievable.' That was the first thing Jake said. He got to his feet and walked a circle one way and then the other around his chair. 'How am I ever going to handle this upstairs?' He asked this question mostly of himself, fingertips at his lips, and it was clear he did not know the answer. He stood there, visibly pained, not quite willing to discuss the repercussions, as if they were lexically beyond him, like a man who could not bear to utter dirty words.

'We're here to help you,' Wash said.

'Oh, you've helped a lot,' said Jake and winced at the thought.

TN lately had been on hard times, if a company with gross earnings of four billion every year can be described that way. Almost everything they own - the hotels, the rent-a-car companies, the airlines - is sensitive to fluctuations in travel, of which there had been d.a.m.n little since our warlette against Sod.a.m.n Insane. No surprise either, since anybody with a college business course could have told you that covey of enterprises would move cyclically. To diversify, TN a decade ago bought a traveler's check business and from that made an entry into the world of Sunbelt banking, just in time to watch their loan portfolio go to h.e.l.l. After the suicidal fare wars of last summer, the company lost about 600 million bucks, the third bad year in a row. To stem the bleeding, the outside directors brought in Tadeusz Krzysinski as CEO, the first person ever to advance above the level of vice-president who was not homegrown. Among many reforms, Tad has cracked the whip on expenses and by all accounts has been prodding Jake about his relationship with G & G, on the theory that there should be more compet.i.tion for TN's legal work. Krzysinski has been heard to speak warmly of a 200-lawyer firm in Columbus he grew to like when he was in his last incarnation, as president of Red Carpet Rental Car.

This, to say the least, is a subject of concern at Gage & Griswell, since TN has never been less than 18 percent of our revenues. Martin and Wash have been trying to convert Krzysinski, lunching with him, inviting him to meetings, reminding him repeatedly how expensive it would be to replace our knowledge of TN's structure and past legal affairs. In response, Krzysinski has emphasized that the decision is Jake's - his General Counsel, like most, must have free rein to choose the outside lawyers he works with - a deft move since both Jake and G & G have their supporters on TN's board. But Jake has a seasoned corporate bureaucrat's l.u.s.t for terrain. He covets a seat on the board, the t.i.tle of Vice-Chairman, which only Krzysinski can award him, and evinces a toadying willingness to please his new Chairman, with whom in truth he seems frequently ill at ease. As often happens in corporation land, there's been more talk than action. Jake has sent only a few morsels to Columbus, as he does with many other firms. But in business, like baseball, senior management is often behind you right up to the day you get the ax.

Jake by now had turned to me. 'This is very sensitive.

Mack, I want to know about everything you're doing. And for G.o.d's sake,' he added, 'be discreet.'

Jake is accustomed to being an executive. He stood a moment, medium height and lean, a hand placed over his eyes. He was wearing a smart double-breasted suit, a subtle glen plaid, and his initials - J.A.K.E.: John Andrew Kenneth Eiger - a favored decorative element, had showed on his shirtsleeve when he pointed at me. 'Jesus Christ,' Jake said in final reflection and with nothing further left.

Wash rose in his wake. In extremis his aging face had taken on the texture of a gourd, and he hung there, a mystery to himself, torn between remonstrating with Martin and comforting Jake, and finally chose the latter. A grade-schooler knew what he was going to say: Give us time. Don't be rash. Once we find Kamin, this can be worked out.

Behind the thousand-year oak, Martin watched them vanish and asked me, 'So what do you think?' He had his hands across his tummy, his face tucked down shrewdly between the matching braces, so that his chin rested on his fancy handmade shirt of jazzy vertical stripes.

'I'll let you know as soon as I get feeling again in my limbs.' My heart was still flapping. 'I thought we weren't going to say anything.'

Martin is one of those men who abound in the legal profession whose brains seem to make them a quarter larger than life. His mind is always zipping along at the speed of an electron. You sit down with him and feel surrounded on all sides. Jesus Christ, you wonder, what is this fellow thinking? I know he's turned over every word I've said three times before I get another one out of my mouth. Accompanying this kind of intellectual handspeed is a canny grasp of human nature. To what uses all of this is put is not necessarily clear. Martin would not be mistaken for Mother Teresa. Like anybody else who has whizzed along the fast track in the practice of law, he can cut your heart out if need be. And talking to him, as I say, is a kind of contest, in which his clever, warm remarks, his conveyed sense that he knows just what you mean, is somehow never mutual. I know you; you don't know me. His true residence is out-of-bounds, somewhere in the neighborhood of Mount Olympus. But Martin was rarely as mystifying as he was now. He seemed unshaken by anything that had occurred here. He met my inquiry with an inscrutable little tip of the hand, as if he could not alter bygones.

'What do you think Krzysinski's going to say when Jake tells him about this?' I asked.

Martin closed his eyes to weigh the inquiry, as if it had not occurred to him yet, and when he looked back a little wrinkle of something close to humor, an embracing irony, briefly crossed his worn face. He stood to regard me, as another of his funny clocks began to chatter like a chipmunk somewhere in the room.

I think you'd better find Bert,' he told me.

VI. THE SECRET LIFE OE KAM ROBERTS.

A. Good News Most of the time as I am recording this, talking it through, I do not see the faces of Carl and Wash and Martin. I can't really imagine them with the pages in their hands. So there must be someone else I mean to talk to, sitting here in my rummage-sale bedroom late at night. In the stillness the voice seems to be the spirit, the way a candle is best represented by a flame. Maybe the Dictaphone's a medium, then, a way to enhance communication with the dear departed. Maybe this is really an extended message to sweet Elaine, with whom I used to speak three times a day. Today I've felt her absence starkly, the willing ear to whom I've muttered stray remarks, even as I sat in my office, shiftless and sour, feeling perplexed by the hunt for Bert.

I stared again at the statement from the Kam Roberts bank card. My feet were on my desk, a large period piece with the formidable tiered look of a steamship, its rosy surface lost in a patchwork of discarded telephone messages, throwaway memos, and various briefs and transcripts that I was yet to file. When I came in at G & G with Jake Eiger's backing and made partner during those initial years when Jake drowned me in work, I had the option to redecorate this room but never got around to it, too drunk to care I guess. I've lived all this time with what is in reality second-hand stuff, the big walnut desk, the gla.s.spaned bookcases, two leather gooseneck chairs with bra.s.s studs, a nice, if worn, Oriental rug, a personal computer, and my own clutter. The only object I care much about is on the wall, a terrific Beckmann print - the usual dissipated people in a cafe. By daylight I have a fine view of the river and the west edge of Center City, girded by the Interstate, US 843.

I thought sullenly about how I was going to make Martin happy and find Bert. I still wanted to talk to the flight attendant in the apartment above his, but I didn't have her name - she hadn't left it on the mailbox - and the notion of putting myself in the vicinity of that stiff again gave me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s. I phoned long-distance information for Scottsdale and after two calls found Bert's sister, Mrs Cheryl Moeller, whom I'd met when the ma was buried. She didn't know where her brother was and had not heard from him in months, which was par for the course. She couldn't remember any pal of Bert's named Archie either. She didn't sound as if she liked her brother any better than she ever had and ended up rea.s.suring me that Bert was going to turn up, as usual.

Fellas, Elaine - whoever I'm talking to - I have to tell you, your investigator was stumped. I went over the statement one more time. Why was Bert booking hotel rooms on game nights when he had an empty apartment a mile away? Purely on a flyer, I called U Inn. I got the hotel operator and did what we used to refer to in Financial as a pretext call. I said I was trying to get information on a guy I'd had a business meeting with at U Inn on December 18. I'd lost my entire file in a taxi and was hoping maybe they had a forwarding address or phone for him.

'What's this gentleman's name?' the hotel operator asked.

'Kam Roberts.' I was looking for any clue to Bert's present whereabouts. I heard a few computer keys click, then spent most of eternity on hold, but finally got a fellow named Trilby who said he was the a.s.sociate Manager. He asked first thing for my name and number, which I gave him.

'I'll check our records, Mr Malloy, and ask Mr Roberts to call you.'

Wrong idea. Bert didn't figure to stick around for an encounter with any of his partners.

'I'm on vacation after today. I really need to reach him. Any chance of that?'

'Just a moment.' It was a good deal longer than that, but Trilby sounded quite pleased with himself when he returned. 'Mr Malloy, you must have ESP. He's a guest in the hotel.'

My heart stopped.

'Kam Roberts is? You're sure?'

He laughed. 'Well, I wouldn't say that anybody here knows him, but there's a gentleman by that name checked in to Room 622. Should I have him call you? Or can we tell him when you'll be coming by?'

I thought. 'Can I talk to him?'

He returned after I'd heard an extended symphonic version of 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head'.

'There's no answer there, Mr Malloy. Why don't you stop by at the end of the day and we'll get him a message you'll be here.'

'Sure,' I said. 'Or I'll call.'

'Call or come by,' said Trilby. He was writing a note.

After I put down the phone, I sat a long time looking at the river. There was one building across the way, still wearing Yuletide festoonery, lights and a skirt of holly across the roof. It didn't make much sense. Bert had reason to be laying low - his partners, the police, and maybe even whoever had stuffed that bug-eyed businessman in his refrigerator were all after him. But why hide in Kindle, where sooner or later he'd run into somebody he knew? Whatever, I had to get down there fast, before Bert got this lame-brained message in which I'd used my actual factual name, the sight of which undoubtedly would lead him to scoot once more.

I took the elevator down and crossed the street to the health club where I play racquetball with Brushy. I jumped into my sweats and shoved my wallet in a pocket, then started jogging. It was 28 degrees so I hauled my broad Irish backside down the avenues with some dispatch, but I ran out of wind after about four blocks and went back and forth, running till my smoked-up lungs felt like I'd breathed in bleach, then stopping and letting sweat freeze up on my nose.

I cruised out of Center City into the neighborhoods where the two-family houses roosted like hens behind the frozen lawns and the leafless trees, stark and black, loomed above the parkways. Lured by my mood, I jogged a few blocks out of my way into the edges of the ghetto, so I could pa.s.s St Bridget's School. It is a stucco building split by long cracks the shape of lightning. There, for more than thirty-one years, Elaine was the school librarian - 'feeding the starving,' as she put it. This was a person of iron convictions. With our ma, I turned myself into a sort of human tetherball, always close enough to be pounded back in another direction when she'd go off her nut and rage about one thing or another, but Elaine was smarter and held her distance. She developed, through this exercise, I suppose, a strongly contrary temperament. When everyone was sitting, Elaine was standing; she wandered around the kitchen when the family dined. She preferred her solitary self to any company, and that never seemed to change.

She ended up one of those Catholic spinsters, a spiritual type who never quite joined the secular world, at 5:00 a.m. Ma.s.s every morning, always palling around with the nuns and identifying people, and even store locations, throughout the tri-cities by their parish. She had her worldly moments, some gentlemen friends with whom she sinned, and she was a terrific card too, one of these clever old Irish gals with a bracing wit. All Ma's sharpness was still resident in her, but where Bess took to the cudgel of spiteful words and judgments, Elaine's humor was aimed princ.i.p.ally at herself. These little muttered cracks as you left your seat, turned your back, and always an arrow to the heart. Her only failing she came by naturally - she drank a bit. The night she left our house, goofy from plum brandies, and turned up the off ramp and headed onto US 843 was the final drunken evening of my life.

In AA, where I've lapsed just like I have in the Church, impressed by the faith but unwilling to engage in the required daily rituals - in AA they told me to submit myself to a power outside myself. Don't count on beating the demon on your own. The help I ask for, Elaine, is yours. And sometimes as I do it, as I ran down the bleak streets toward the U Inn or sit here in the night whispering into the Dictaphone, I puzzle on what strikes me as a piece of nasty truth.

I miss you ten times more than Nora.

B. Bad News Eventually I reached the outskirts of the U, with its handsome progressive neighborhood, integrated since early in the century, its bookstores and vague bohemian air. U Inn was at the corner of Calvert and University, and I did a long tour of the parking lot, then jogged right through the front door, waving to the doorman, playing today's role as another hotel guest, a traveling business type living on snacks from the mini-bar and morning aerobics. I ran all the way to the elevator, hopped in with a fat woman who was whistling to herself, and rode up to 6.

Room 622 was quiet. I stuck my ear to the door and rattled the k.n.o.b. As I figured, there were not going to be any of Pigeyes's tricks in a mid-city hotel. The doors were reinforced and the locks had been replaced with those solid-state electronic gizmos, little bra.s.s boxes with lights that required sliding in some plastic card they give you these days instead of a key. I knocked hard. Nothing doing. A suspect fellow in a lizard-skin jacket came by and I kept my eye on him until he got some ice and disappeared under the exit sign at the other end of the dim hall. The hotel corridor was quiet, except for the whine of a vacuum inside one of the rooms.

I'd planned the next move. The guy on the phone had told me n.o.body here knew Kam on sight. I had some second thoughts, but I had to count on sliding by. That was the point of leading a perilous life. I needed to find what in the h.e.l.l Bert'd been up to. And I'd be a lot better off sneaking up on him than announcing myself. I took the Kam Roberts credit card out of my wallet.

At the reception desk in the lobby, I talked to a cute blonde, a student, I imagined, like many of the employees.

'I'm Mr Roberts in 622. I went out for a little trot and like a fool I grabbed my credit card when I left instead of my room pa.s.s.' I showed her the credit card casually, tapping an edge on the counter. 'If you could just get me another.'

She disappeared in back. This was frankly a pretty rummy place, especially after the big-bucks life where you get used to going first cla.s.s. The shabbiness of course was excused by a convenient location - there wasn't another hotel within a mile of the university - and an atmosphere of self-conscious boosterism. The U Inn, as you would expect, is pretty rah-rah. Everything was roped in U colors, vermilion and white, and near the desk there were pennants and pom-poms and U sweatshirts tacked to the walls. The Hands basketball schedule, a cardboard poster featuring a color photo of Bobby Adair, this year's wannabe star, was pinned up on either side of the desk, and as I studied it I realized that a Hands basketball game probably would have brought Bert back to town no matter what.

But there was none today. Not even last night. Or tomorrow. In fact, a lot of things didn't fit. The home games were set on the schedule in vermilion, the away games in black. I didn't have Kam's bank card bill with me, but I'd been staring holes in it for eighteen hours and I was pretty sure that I had committed most of the entries to memory. What bothered me was that the days didn't match. December 18, the last time Kam was here, the Hands were at home. But according to the schedule, they'd been in Bloomington and Lafayette and Kalamazoo since then, and on different dates than the ones when Kam had rung up charges in the same towns.

'Mr Roberts?' The blonde had returned. 'Can I see your credit card again for a moment?' I'd kept it out and she removed it from my hand. I had some instinct to start running, but the girl looked like she'd rolled in off a haywagon, with those sweet eyes the color of cornflowers. One of America's twenty million blondes with looks too standard to conceal any scam. She disappeared again into the office, but was gone just a second.

'Mr Roberts,' she said when she returned, 'Mr Trilby would like to see you for one minute in back.' She opened a door for me and pointed to the small rear office, but I hung on the threshold, heart fluttering like a moth.

'Is there a problem?'

'I think he said he had a message.'

Ah yes. Me old bud Mack Malloy had called. A perceptive fellow, Trilby probably wanted to tell me that Mack sounded like a phony. There were three men in back, a black man behind a desk who I took to be Trilby and the wormy-looking guy I'd seen upstairs in the hall. The third one turned to face me last.

Pigeyes.

I was in deep.

C. Would You Care If Your Partners Did This to You?

This is not an especially pretty story, Elaine. Pigeyes and I worked tac nearly two years, life and death and plenty of whiskey, lots of laughs, I'm the former college-boy art student, wet behind the ears, he's the guy who's been street-smart since he was seven. I'm talking out loud about Edward Hopper and Edvard Munch when we drive down city streets at night and he's feeling up every hooker. Some team.

Working with this guy was always an adventure. Pigeyes was one of those cops in the old style, who think parents take care of kids, you go to church and pray to G.o.d to save your soul, and everything after that sort of depends on where you stand, how you look at it, right and wrong, you know, sometimes you have to squint. I'd been riding with him about eighteen months when we hit a dope house, just a small packaging factory in a dismal apartment building. We had followed some little s.h.i.tb.u.m off the street, pretty sure we'd seen him swapping packages, and then, afraid we'd got made, decided to go through the door in the name of hot pursuit before any backup arrived. Pigeyes was always that kind of cowboy - he thought he was in the movies, strung out on the rush of danger as bad as if he were sticking a spike in his arm.

Anyway, you've seen the next scene at the Odeon: We come through with guns drawn, a lot of yelling and carrying on in two or three different languages, people jumping out the windows and onto the fire escapes, and some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d running first one way, then the other with a seal-a-meal under one arm and a scale under the other. I kick in the door of the John and there's a gal sitting on the can with her print skirt around her belly, holding a baby in one hand, using the other to push a baggy full of powder up herself.