From a distance of thirty feet, he appeared to be handsome, with bold features, a proud Roman nose. His barrel chest, broad shoulders, slim hips, and trim figure made him an imposing man, lionesque.

Although his hair was coal black and though he appeared to be no older than forty-five, I knew this must be Virgilio Vivacemente, for from him radiated the pride of a king, a master, a paterfamilias.

Because even in 1974 he had been the patriarch and the brightest star of a famous circus family, father of several children, including his twenty-year-old daughter Natalie, he must have been seventy or older this night in April. He not only appeared much younger, but had just proven himself to be athletic and extraordinarily limber.

The circus life seemed to be his fountain of youth.

One by one, the other performers dropped from high flight into the net.

They bounced, descended to the ground, and lined up in a crescent behind Virgilio.

When they were all earthbound, they raised their right arms high overhead. Then, theatrically lowering their arms to point at me and Jimmy, they said in unison, "The Flying Vivacementes fly for you!"

Jimmy and I started to applaud, but caught ourselves, and also stopped grinning like children.

Members of the troupe were male and female, all good-looking, including a girl who appeared to be eight or nine and a boy of ten. They bounded out of the tent like gazelles, gamboling together as though the demonstration high in the big top had required' no serious effort, had been mere play.

Through the performers' entrance where the group made their exit came a tall muscle-bound man with a scarlet robe over his arm. He went to Vivacemente and held this garment while the star slipped his arms into the sleeves.

The carrier of the robe had a brutal, scarred face. Even at a distance, his eyes seemed as menacing as those of a viper.

Although he departed, leaving us alone with his boss, I was glad we were carrying pistols. I wished we'd thought to bring attack dogs.

The heavy yet beautifully draped robe was of a luxurious fabric, perhaps cashmere, with padded shoulders and wide lapels. In it, the aerialist had the air of a 1930s movie star, when Hollywood still had glamor instead of glitz.

Smiling, he approached us, and the closer he drew, the clearer it became that he had taken measures to stave off the effects of time.

The glossy black shade of his hair was too inky to be real; it had come from a bottle. Perhaps he had earned his physique with vigorous and relentless exercise-and with steroids for lunch every day-but age had been trimmed from his face by battalions of scalpels.

We have all seen unfortunate women who began having extensive face-lifts much too young and who submitted to subsequent surgeries too frequently, until by their sixties-sometimes even sooner-their faces have been stretched tight to the point of snapping. Their Botoxed brows look like plastic. They cannot completely close their eyes even to sleep. Their nostrils have a permanent flare, as though they are perpetually testing the air for an offensive odor, and their enhanced lips are pulled and puckered into a permanent pouty half-smile that inevitably reminds us of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker in Batman.

But for the fact that he was a man, Virgilio Vivacemente looked like one of those unfortunate women.

He came so close that Jimmy and I involuntarily backed up a step or two, which elicited a sharky smile from our host. Apparently, part of his manipulative style was to invade the space of others.

When he spoke, he had a baritone voice closer in register to bass than to tenor. "Of course you know who I am."

"We've got a pretty good idea," Jimmy said.

Because the ten-year-old boy who delivered the box of money had been terrified of having the crap beat out of him by this man, and because of the offensive implications of the money itself, we refused to extend to him courtesy that he had not earned. He'd chosen to play a game called Who's the Big Dog?and we could bark as loud as he could.

"In every corner of the world," said the patriarch, "everyone knows who I am."

"At first we thought you were Benito Mussolini," I said, "but then we realized he'd never been an aerialist."

"Besides," Jimmy said, "Mussolini's been dead since the end of World War II."

I said, "And you don't look like you've been dead nearly that long."

Virgilio Vivacemente smiled more broadly, and his smile even less resembled a smile than it did a knife wound.

Although the tightness of his face made the nuanced meaning of his various smiles impossible to read, I recognized the glaze that came over his eyes as he listened to Jimmy and me. He was a man who possessed no sense of humor whatsoever. Zero. Zip. Zilch.

He didn't realize that we were joking between ourselves, and because he didn't grasp our tone and intent, he also didn't realize that we were insulting him. To his ear, we were talking gibberish, and he was wondering if we might be mentally retarded.

"Many years ago, the Flying Vivacementes became stars of such worldwide renown," he said with sonorous self-importance, "that I was able to buy the circus of which I had once been an employee. And now today there are three Vivacemente circuses playing at all times in every significant venue in the world!"

Pretending suspicion, Jimmy said, "Real circuses. You even have elephants?"

"Of course we have elephants!" Vivacemente declared.

"One? Two?"

"Many elephants!"

"Do you have lions?" I asked.

"Prides of lions!"

"Tigers?" Jimmy asked.

"Snarling hordes of tigers!"

"Kangaroos?"

"What kangaroos? No circus has kangaroos."

"No circus is a circus without kangaroos," Jimmy insisted.

"Absurdity! You know nothing of circuses."

I said, "Do you have clowns?"

Vivacemente's stiff face froze entirely. When he spoke, his baritone voice issued between teeth set edge to edge like the jaws of a nutcracker: "Every circus must have clowns to draw the weak-minded and silly little children."

"Ah," said Jimmy. "So you don't have as many clowns as other circuses do."

"We have all the clowns we need and more. We are infested with clowns.

But no one comes primarily for clowns."

"Lorrie and me, all our lives, we're crazy about clowns," Jimmy said.

"Or is it," I proposed, "that all our lives, clowns have been crazy about us?"

"Crazy is in there somewhere," Jimmy said.

The aerialist blustered on: "Our biggest draw is always the immortal Flying Vivacementes, the greatest circus family in all of history. In all three of my shows, every member of every aerialist troupe is a Vivacemente, related by blood and by talent that makes lesser performers weep with jealousy. I am the father of some, the spiritual father of all."

To me, Jimmy said, "For a man who has achieved so much, you might expect his pride to be overweening, but how wrong you'd be."

"Humble," I agreed. "Remarkably humble."

"Humility is for losers!" Vivacemente thundered.

"I've heard that somewhere," Jimmy said.

"Gandhi?" I suggested.

Jimmy shook his head. "I think it was Jesus."

Eyes glazing again with the conviction that we were idiots, Vivacemente said, "And of all the Flying Vivacementes, I am supreme. On the trapeze, I am poetry in motion."

Jimmy said, "Poetry In Motion," Johnny Tillotson, top ten, back in the early '60s. Good beat, you could dance to it."

Ignoring him, Vivacemente boasted, "Transiting the high wire, I am moonlight walking, the love of every woman, the envy of every man." He drew a breath, expanded his big chest, and continued: "And I am rich enough and determined enough always to get what I want. In this case, I am certain that what I want is what you will want, because it will bring wealth and great honor to you as you otherwise would never have known."

"Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money," Jimmy said, "but it isn't wealth."

Vivacemente winked to the extent that his trimmed eyelids were capable of completing a wink. "Fifty thousand is just earnest money, proof that I am sincere. I have calculated the full sum to be three hundred and twenty-five thousand."

"And what do you expect in return for that?" Jimmy asked.

"Your son," Vivacemente said. } immy and I could have left the big top and driven home without another word to the maniac aerialist. Having walked out, however, we would not have understood his reasoning, and we would not have had peace, wondering what his next move might be.

"His name is Andy," said Vivacemente, as though we needed to be reminded of our only son's name. "But I will create a better name, of course, something classic, less plebeian. If I am to shape the boy into the greatest star of his generation, I must begin instructing him before his fifth birthday."

As darkly funny as all this might be, it had also become too scary to play his game any longer.

I said, "Andy, which will always be his name, has no talent as an aerialist."

"He must. He has Vivacemente blood. He's my Natalie's grandson."

"If you know about that, then you also know he's Konrad Beezo's grandson, too," Jimmy reminded him. "Surely you'll be the first to admit he's too much clown for the high wire."

"He is not tainted," the patriarch said. "I've had him watched. I've studied the films of him. He is a natural."

Films of him.

Although the night was mild, my heart had gone cold.

"People do not sell their children," I said.

"Oh," Vivacemente assured me, "people do. I myself have bought the children of certain Vivacemente cousins in Europe, whose family lines were strong enough to produce fine aerialists. I have bought some of them from the cradle, some at the age of two and three, but always before the fifth birthday."

With revulsion that no doubt eluded our host as much as did our humor, Jimmy pointed to the box on the ground. "We brought your money back.

That's the end of it."

"Three hundred seventy-five thousand," Vivacemente offered.

"No."

"Four hundred thousand."

No.

"Four hundred fifteen thousand."

"Stop it," Jimmy demanded.

"Four hundred twenty-two thousand five hundred, and that's my final offer. I must have this special boy. He's my last chance, my best chance, to create another like me. The blood of aerialists is concentrated in him as never before."

As Vivacemente's tucked and tightened face tried to express the operatic emotions that raged in him, I half expected it to crack at every corner and peel up from the bone.

He pressed his hands together as if in prayer, and he began to beseech Jimmy instead of bullying him: "If I had known in 1974 or any time during the years immediately after that Natalie had given birth to twins, that you had been given to the baker and his wife"-the word baker issuing from him with the acidic disdain of a blue-blood snob"I would have come for you, I swear. I would have bought you back or rescued you one way or another. I always get what I want. But I thought I had only one son and that the vicious Beezo had fled with him."

Icily, Jimmy rejected this bizarre protestation of fatherly love: "You aren't my father even in the sense that you might call yourself the spiritual father of everyone in your troupe. Punchinello and I aren't in your troupe, and we're not your sons in any sense. We're technically your grandsons, God help us. But I don't accept even that relationship. I deny you the right to be my grandfather, I refuse you, I renounce you, I repudiate you."

The beseeching hands that had been pressed together abruptly separated.

They formed into white-knuckled fists.

Although Vivacemente had no sense of humor, he had a rare capacity for hatred, which sharpened his eyes into knife points and which expressed itself unmistakably in the tightly screwed features of his carved face.

The old man's voice was hypodermic, his words poisonous: "Konrad Beezo never had a child with any woman he ever laid with. He was the husk of a man, sterile."

With a jolt, I remembered-and I'm certain Jimmy did, too-Konrad Beezo in our kitchen, the Porter Carson identity cast aside, just before he shot me. He wanted Andy as recompense for our sending Punchinello to prison, as "something for something." He hadn't known that Jimmy was Punchinello's twin, hadn't realized that Andy might be of his bloodline. He just wanted quid pro quo, his "makeweight." When I had asked Konrad why he didn't lie down with some desperate hag who might have him and make a baby of his own, he flinched from my words and could not meet my eyes. Now I knew why.

This venomous filth before us, this walking worm in a scarlet robe, drew himself to his full height and with demented pride said, "I wanted to concentrate the aerialist genes as they had never before been concentrated. And my dream was conceived in the biblical sense.

But she fled me for Beezo, and denied me what was mine. Natalie was my daughter, but I am your grandfather and your father."

Whoa.

Having adjusted to the creepy discovery that he was Konrad Beezo's son and Punchinello's brother, poor Jimmy-sweet Jimmy-now had to get his mind around the even creepier idea that he was still Punchinello's brother but was in fact Vivacemente's son and grandson, the product of incest.

Move over, Johnny Tillotson. The hits just keep on coming. ovement at the perimeter of the tent drew our attention. From outside, the muscle-bound brute with the cobra eyes stepped into the main entrance and stood there with his legs wide apart, looking as if he could deflect a runaway elephant. He was armed with a shotgun.

Another man spookily like the first-except that he had keloid scars across his face and neck, as if he had been cobbled together by Victor Frankenstein-appeared in the performers' entrance. He, too, held a shotgun.

Three others had slipped under the sidewall canvas where it hung loosest between stakes. They were spotted around the big top, beyond the footlights, in shadows but visible. I suspected they had weapons, too, but I couldn't see them well enough to be sure.

"And so you see," Vivacemente continued, "your son Andy is my Natalie's grandson. He is also my grandson and great-grandson. My dream has been delayed one generation, but now it will come to pass. If you don't sell me young Andy for four hundred twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars, I will kill the two of you. I will kill Rudy and Maddy, and I will take all three of your children at no cost to me whatsoever."

Clearly Jimmy didn't want to risk taking his eyes off Virgilio Vivacemente any more than he would have turned his back on a coiled rattlesnake, but he nevertheless looked at me.

Most of the time, I could tell what my Jimmy was thinking. The terrain inside his wonderful head was my backyard; I felt at home there.