"A guy who came into a bar waving a gun around," Larry said, "I'd have figured they'd put some charges on him, but I guess with Faro bleeding out on Ike's floor, n.o.body was thinking much about that. Undertaker looked like a better bet than the paramedics. Anyway, there's no mug shot or prints. The only thing I find from the case is Faro's gun and the shirt they stripped off him in surgery"still inventoried in evidence, actually. I thought if I send the pistol over to Mo d.i.c.kerman, it's possible he can pick up a print on it. Maybe with that, we find Faro under another name."

d.i.c.kerman was the Chief Fingerprint Examiner and as good as anyone in the country. Muriel liked that idea.

"And if you want to pop for it out of the P.A.'s budget," Larry said, "we can do DNA on the blood on the shirt, too. See if he's in CODIS." CODIS stood for Combined DNA Index System, but that was a $5,000 long-shot. Larry, however, wanted to pull out all the stops, and she didn't fight him.

"Happy?" she asked, as she had last week. Once again Larry hesitated.

"I'm still missing something," he said.

"Maybe you miss me, Larry." She found that line hilarious, but she didn't linger on the phone to see if he, too, was laughing.

Chapter 29.

July 2001 Together THEY WERE TOGETHER whenever they were not at work. For Gillian, who had defied the inclination to cling even in junior high, the experience was otherworldly. Arthur stayed in the office until she was done at the store, then picked her up for dinner at eight or nine. Usually she'd shopped at the gourmet counter at Morton's and was waiting with a heavy shopping bag when Arthur's round sedan cruised to the curb. At his apartment, they made love and ate and made love again. Most nights she slept there and returned to her place at Duffy's for a few hours once Arthur left for work.

Consuming physical pa.s.sion had never really been part of any of her prior relationships. Now Arthur and the stimulation of s.e.x remained at the periphery of her mind throughout the day. Often some stray a.s.sociation she could not even name sent a pleasing throb through her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and pelvis. Arthur and she seemed stuck in the sweet valley of sensation. The strong stalk that grew from Arthur was like some secret self. Real life commenced here. This was the moist cellar of being, the dark mysterious foundation rooms. If she"or Arthur"had previously made the descent they might have an idea how to rise up from time to time, but now they seemed melted together at the core of pleasure.

"I'm an addict," she said one night, and was immediately struck dumb by her carefree remark. There were a thousand thoughts she was unwilling to explore.

Their languor was reinforced by Gillian's reluctance to carry their affair beyond Arthur's bedroom. It seemed impossible to her that their relationship could survive once they began to mix with others, once they inserted themselves in the context of history and expectations and endured judgment and gossip. Like some enchantment, what existed between them would perish in the light of day.

Arthur, on the other hand, would have been just as happy to take out front-page advertis.e.m.e.nts announcing his dedication to her, and he was frequently frustrated by her unwillingness to venture out together, even to visit the homes of his high-school and college friends who he insisted would be discreet and accepting. Instead, the only consistent company they kept was with Arthur's sister, Susan. Every Tuesday, they drove to the Franz Center for Susan's injection and the subsequent trip to the apartment. On the way back, Arthur narrated the events of his day, pretending Susan was keeping track. At the lights, she would glance to the backseat, almost as if she were checking that Gillian was still there.

In the apartment, the agenda was always identical to their first evening together. Gillian remained largely an outsider as Arthur and Susan cooked, then Susan retreated with her plate to the television set. She spoke to Gillian infrequently. But when she did, the salvaged Susan, the coherent personality which collected inside her, the asteroid in a belt of s.p.a.ce dust and gravel, was in charge. She never confronted Gillian with her madness.

One night Arthur had to reset a circuit breaker in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Seeking another cigarette, Susan approached Gillian on her kitchen stool. She now trusted Gillian to trigger the lighter for her, and she took in the first breath as if she hoped to reduce the entire cigarette to ash with a single drag.

"I don't understand you," Susan said. Shielded by the bluish veil she'd released between them, Susan darted her pretty green eyes toward Gillian.

"You don't?"

"I keep changing my mind. Are you a Compliant or a Normal?"

Gillian was taken aback, not by what Susan was suggesting, but because on her own, Susan had adopted the same coinage Gillian had applied at Alderson to the travelers on the trains that clattered past the prison boundary. They were Normals to Gillian not due to any inherent superiority, but because they were free of the stigma of confinement. That, undoubtedly, was how Susan regarded the so-called sane.

"I'm trying to be a Normal," Gillian said. "Sometimes it feels as if I am. Especially when I'm with Arthur. But I'm still not sure."

There was no more to the conversation, but a few nights later, Arthur called out to Gillian in excitement. She found him in the apartment's second bedroom, where the only light was the cool glow from his office laptop, which he lugged home every evening.

"Susan sent you an e-mail!"

Gillian approached the screen with caution. As she read, she sank slowly to Arthur's knee.

Arthur give this to Gillian. DON'T READ IT. It's not for you.

Hi, Gillian.

Please do not get too excited about this. I have been working on this e-mail for three days now and Valerie has given me some help. Usually, I cannot put down more than a sentence or two. There are only so many moments in the day when I'm able to hold on to words long enough to write them, especially when they are about me. Either I can't remember the term for the feeling, or the feeling disappears when I recall the word. Most of the time, my mind is fragments. Normals don't seem to understand that, but for me the usual state in my head is images jumping up and disappearing like the flames over a burning log.

But I am having good days and I had some things I could never tell you face-to-face. Conversation is so hard for me. I cannot handle everything at once. Just the look in someone's eyes can be distracting. Let alone smiling or joking. Questions. A new saying is enough to send me off for several minutes, wherever it leads. It is better for me like this.

What did I mean to say?

I like you. I think you know that. You don't look down on me. You have been to some bad places"I can feel that. But the more I see you, the more I realize we are not the same, even though I wish we were. I'd really like to think I can make it back the way you have. I want you to know how hard I try. I think to Normals it appears as if I just want to succ.u.mb. But it takes a lot of strength to hold my own. I am afraid whenever I see a radio, or hear one. I go down the street all the time saying Don't listen, Don't listen. And the sight of people on the bus with headphones may be my undoing. I hear only the voices I don't want to whenever I see those pads over somebody's ears. Even as I am typing these words, I can literally feel the electricity coming out of the keyboard, and there is no way to turn off the certainty that someone like the Great Oz is out there at the heart of the Net, waiting to take me over. All my strength goes into resisting. I'm like those people in movies I remember from childhood, where there is a shipwreck and huge waves, and the survivors are paddling desperately in the water holding on to a life ring or a piece of floating junk, so they don't go down.

I can see you are trying every day, too. Keep trying. Keep trying. It would be harder for me if I ever saw someone like you give up. You make Arthur happy. It is easier for me when he is happy. I don't have to feel I've ruined his life. Please do your best to keep him happy. Not just for me. For him. He deserves to be happy. It would be horrible if you weren't with him. It is better with three.

Your friend, Susan Gillian was devastated. It was like receiving a letter from someone held for ransom, someone you knew would never be freed. When she allowed Arthur to read the screen, he, predictably, wept. The messages he got were seldom more than ten or twenty words, produced in the isolated moments of coherence that fell upon Susan briefly every day, like a magic spell. But he was not envious so much as moved by his sister's concern for him"and also, to Gillian's eye, suddenly frightened.

"What is she worried about?" Arthur asked. Gillian refused to answer. But she felt a pall encroaching. Even someone as perpetually hopeful as Arthur had to consider a peril that was obvious to a madwoman.

That night, when they made love there was an absence"still tender but more anch.o.r.ed here on earth. Afterwards, as Gillian reached to the bedside table for a cigarette, Arthur asked the question neither of them had ever ventured aloud.

"What do you think will happen with us?"

At the inception, she'd made her predictions, and much as she would have it otherwise, her view had not changed.

"I think in time, you'll move on, Arthur. Perhaps build on what you've learned about yourself with me and find someone your own age. Marry. Have babies. Have your life." She was startled to find how fully she'd envisioned the outcome. Arthur, naturally, was taken aback and pulled himself up on an elbow to glower.

"Don't pretend you don't understand, Arthur. This would have been far better for you at another stage."

"What stage is that?"

"If you were twenty-five or fifty-five the difference in our ages might matter less. But you should have children, Arthur. Don't you want children? Most people do."

"Don't you?"

"It's too late, Arthur." That was the ultimate calamity of the penitentiary: it had taken the last of her childbearing years. But that thought was down there in the valley with the broken bodies of a million regrets.

"Why is it too late?" he demanded. "Are we talking about biology? The world is full of children who need someone to love them." In her presence these days, Arthur was often impetuous, even inspired. Was there any difference greater among human beings than between the abject fatalist who had been run down by living, and those determined to shape their lives to the contours of a large idea? And she was his idea. Oh, she willed herself to reject that, to cross her wrists before her face and forbid his exhilaration in her company, as her father forbade blaspheming. But it was far too wonderful, far too much of what she had a.s.sumed she would never have again. He did not see her yet. And when she came chillingly into focus, he would be gone. But she was determined to savor the moment. She took him into a lingering embrace, before she resumed the slow march to the truth.

"Don't you see, Arthur, you're already trying to find a way to have with me everything you want in your life. This is an adventure for you, this entire period. But when it ends, you won't be able to abandon what you've always imagined for yourself."

"Are you saying you'd never want to be a parent?"

It was inconceivable. Her own survival still required her full attention.

"It would be an enormous change, Arthur."

"But that's the point of life, isn't it? Changing? To be happier, more perfect? Look how much you've changed. You believe you've changed for the better, don't you?"

She had never thought of it that way.

"I really don't know," she said. "I like to believe I have. I like to believe I wouldn't make the same mess of my life. But I'm not certain."

"I am. You're sober."

"Yes."

"And you've had no trouble doing that."

She felt a superst.i.tious reluctance to agree. But Arthur was correct. Formally, she adhered to the mantra of one day at a time. Yet except for her most dismal moments of panic, she had not felt even a remote yearning. Clarity, in fact, seemed much more her quest. The completeness of her release from addictive hungers was troubling at times, because it seemed at such odds with the reports of other persons who battled dependencies. One night she'd asked Duffy if she was fooling herself. He'd taken his time looking at her. 'No, Gil,' he finally said, 'I think you already accomplished everything you meant to.'

She repeated Duffy's answer to Arthur now, but he was too intent on his own point to linger over the meaning of the remark.

"So you're free, then," Arthur said.

No. That was the word. She was different. But not free.

"Have you changed, Arthur?"

"Are you kidding? This is the happiest I've ever been. It's not close."

"Truly, Arthur, wouldn't you be happier with someone your age?"

"No. Never. I mean, I'm an old-fashioned guy. I like things that are against all odds. Love as destiny. I still watch '30s movies and cry."

"I'm not that old, Arthur."

He poked her but continued. "I'm happy," he insisted. "Nothing could make this better, Gillian. I'd like to break into song."

She groaned at the thought. Challenged, Arthur, round and short, stood up naked in the center of the bed and crooned.

I dreamed of someone like you. You seem too marvelous for it to be true.

The second line was like a stake through her heart. But he continued. Typical of Arthur's ability to surprise, he had a fine voice, and he had clearly spent hours listening to schmaltzy show tunes. At peak volume, he sang every line, every chorus, until Gillian, for the first time in years, had lost herself in laughter.

Chapter 30.

July 24, 2001 Bad For Me FOR ERNO ERDAI, the deathwatch had begun. Even as a state prisoner, Erno had been granted the benefit of many of the latest high-tech treatments over at the University Hospital, not only surgical procedures but alpha interferon and experimental forms of chemo-therapy. But an ancient enemy had caught him at a low point. In the midst of a new round of chemo, Erno had contracted pneumonia, and despite enormous intravenous doses of antibiotics, his lungs, already compromised by the cancer, did not seem healthy enough to recover. The doctors with whom Pamela and Arthur had spoken were increasingly pessimistic.

Erno was again in the jail ward in County Hospital. Effectively, Arthur needed the consent of both the Superintendent of the House of Corrections and Erno's family before he could see him, and one party or the other had been holding him off for weeks. Finally, Arthur had threatened to go to Judge Harlow. Harlow would not order Erno to speak, but he would forbid any obstruction by those who either were doing Muriel's bidding or thought they had her interests at heart. Arthur had twice won delays for filing a response to Muriel's motion in the Court of Appeals to terminate Rommy's habeas by claiming that farther time was needed for investigation, which basically meant seeing Erno. The court had given him a final deadline of Friday this week, which had added to the urgency of getting to Erdai.

After more than an hour in the ward vestibule, Arthur was admitted at last. He was searched cursorily and escorted back along the linoleum corridors, where the light of the schoolhouse fixtures spread generously before him.

The deputy a.s.signed to Erno explained that the family was agitated because their visit had been interrupted to make way for Arthur. Drawing close to the room, he saw two women in the hallway. One was shorter than the other and somewhat dowdier. She proved to be Mrs. Erdai. Her nose was red and a balled-up Kleenex grew from her fist. The other, wearing a straight skirt perhaps too short for a woman of her age, was Erno's sister, Ilona, the mother of Collins, the man whom Erno had started out to save. She was tall and st.u.r.dy, with long hands and light hair losing color, overall a better-looking version of Erno"the same thin face, and a hardness that crept through it. With little said, the two women made clear that they resented everything about Arthur, his intrusion and, worse, the humiliation he'd wrought for Erno, which would survive for them long after his pa.s.sing, even as it went for naught. Ilona, who had her brother's piercing light eyes, delivered a haunting, magisterial look of reproof. Arthur promised to be only a moment.

On the phone, the nurse had said Erno was feverish but usually lucid. His condition was complicated by the fact that his cancer had reached his bones and was causing great pain. At this point, the princ.i.p.al problem in his care was balancing the opiates against a respiratory system on the verge of collapse.

When Arthur entered, Erno was asleep and looked very much a man about to die. He'd lost more weight since his court appearance. The new round of chemo had killed off about half his hair, leaving little weedy patches here and there. Several IV's ran into his arms, and his nosepiece had now been replaced by a plastic oxygen mask that clouded with each shallow breath. Erno was also experiencing some kind of liver involvement. His skin was virtually the same color as a legal pad. Another yellow man, Arthur thought.

Pulling up a chair, he waited for Erno to awaken. In his mind, Arthur had tried out a hundred scenarios in the hopes that Erno would redeem his credibility, but Arthur hadn't seen yet how both Genevieve and Erno could be telling the truth. Muriel, who had called Arthur yesterday to remind him that she would oppose any further extensions in the time to respond to her motion, had a new theory about Erno's motive for lying.

'He's against the death penalty now,' she said. 'He fingered Rommy for execution and now he's gone through this big Catholic revival and won't die in mortal sin, so he's trying to prevent it the only way he can.' It was not very persuasive, but Arthur regarded it as an improvement over Muriel's earlier approach in that it didn't make Erno out to be a monster. In fact, as he sat here, Arthur felt quite a bit of tenderness toward Erdai. He could not fathom why at first, but as the minutes pa.s.sed with the nurses' voices and the bells and beeps resounding from the hall, he realized that Erno looked a good deal like Harvey Raven had in his final days. The thought of his father and the valor of his supposedly ordinary existence as always filled Arthur with sentiment, but the chasm seemed less deep now that Gillian was in his life.

Returning to the present, he realized that Erno was staring at him through the horizontal bars of the bed rail. Arthur had been asked to wear a paper face mask and he pulled it down so Erdai could recognize him. Erno's disappointment was plain.

"Hoped you were. My nephew," Erno said. His voice had been whittled to a husk and he had no breath. Nonetheless, Erno smiled faintly at the recollection of Collins. "Coming tonight," he said. "Good boy. Turned out fine. Hard time. But fine. Beautiful kids." Erno closed his eyes, content with that thought.

Arthur gave him a second, then asked if Erno had heard about Genevieve. He nodded. Suddenly, after waiting weeks for this conversation, Arthur could not figure out the next question.

"Well, s.h.i.t," he finally said, "is it true?"

"Course," whispered Erno. "Why I. Blamed Squirrel."

"Because you knew he'd threatened to kill Luisa?"

"Right." Every effort at communication seemed to require a tautening of Erno's whole body, but he appeared to be tracking well. Erno was saying he'd pinned Luisa's murder on Squirrel in the first place because he'd known about the threat. Erno had killed Luisa for his own reasons, but Squirrel had made himself a scapegoat in advance.

"Told Larry. Subpoena Genevieve." Erno wiggled his chin side to side, chagrined by Larry's stupidity. "Should have figured this out. Ten years ago."

"The tickets, you mean?"

"Not tickets. Not good for me."

"Because you were head of security?"

Erno nodded and tossed his hand around. It was an involved story, apparently, but Arthur was close enough for the purposes of a man without breath to explain.

"Genevieve." He coughed weakly, swallowed, and closed his eyes to contend with pain that had arisen from somewhere. When he recovered, he seemed to have lost his place.

"Genevieve," said Arthur.

"Didn't think she knew. About tickets."

"Why?"

"Wouldn't have told me about Squirrel. Bad for her friend." Bad because of the peril to Luisa of getting caught for pilfering tickets. Thinking it over, Arthur realized Erno had been close to correct. Genevieve hadn't known about the ticket scam when she reported Rommy's threat. She learned of it only afterwards when Luisa had upbraided her for involving Erdai.

"Right," said Arthur. "So what was Larry supposed to figure out?"

"Luisa. Squirrel. Threat." Erno wove his fingers and tied all ten together. "The rest"" He whittled his face in the air again, to indicate it wouldn't matter. The most likely conclusion, if Genevieve had reported only Rommy's threat to Larry, was that crazy Squirrel had been disappointed in love. It would do fine for a motive.

"Christ, Erno. Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"Complicated." Erno waited out some kind of spasm. "Bad for Squirrel." He was right about that, too. A story that started with Squirrel threatening to kill Luisa would never have gotten much further. Yet even accepting the good intentions, Arthur could feel his heart falling, for it was clear how conniving Erno had been with the truth.