He nodded.

"You've apparently been seeing Dianne at Duke?" Mr. Eaglebury asked.

"Yes, sir," Tom said.

"He came there with an A Team and blew up the campus," Dianne said. "They made a leak in the water tower."

"That's what you're doing, Tom?" Mr. Eaglebury asked. "Training young people? Like you trained Ed?"

"No, sir," Ellis said, and then thought it over. "No, sir, twice. Commander Eaglebury and I trained together. I was training the people I had at Duke. And I'm not doing that anymore.

"He's General Hanrahan's aide," Dianne said proudly as she handed him a cup of eggnog. "Daddy made that. Be careful."

"General Hanrahan?" Mr. Eaglebury asked. "Is he the fellow who was here for the funeral?"

"Yes, sir," Tom said. "He was promoted."

"If you're driving onto New York," Mrs. Eaglebury said, "that eggnog may not be such a good idea. Do you have to be there tonight? Could you stay over? We have more than enough room."

The fucker's going to accept. He's actually going to intrude on our family Christmas.

"I really have to go," Tom refused politely. "But thank you anyway.

"Anytime you're here, Tom," Mrs. Eaglebury said, "we'd love to have you."

"Thank you very much," he said. "I'll take a rain check."

"Are you hungry?" Dianne asked.

He shook his head.

"Don't be bashful, Tom," Mrs. Eaglebury said. "We have more food than we know what to do with."

"There was a McDonald's when I came off the interstate," he said. "I had coffee and a whatever they call the big one."

"That's indecent on Christmas Eve," Suzanne said. "You should have waited until you got here."

"I thought it would be quicker," Tom said. "I'm a little pressed for time." He looked at his watch. "I just wanted to say Merry Christmas."

You just wanted to see Dianne. Who do you think you're kidding?

"I'll walk you to your car," Dianne said.

"You'll catch your death of cold," Mr. Eaglebury said.

"Ed!" Mrs. Eaglebury said.

"Ed, what?"

"Ed, mind your own damned business," she said.

"It was nice to see you all," Tom said, and went to Suzanne and Mrs. Eaglebury, who kissed his cheek. He picked up Little Ed.

"He looks like the commander," he said.

"Doesn't he?" Suzanne agreed.

That's not really a compliment; you really didn't have to say that.

He shook Mr. Eaglebury's hand.

"It was nice to see you," Mr. Eaglebury said dutifully. "Sure you can't stay over?"

"Thank you, no, sir," Tom said.

A minute later Edward Eaglebury, Sr." pushed aside the curtain.

"He's kissing her," he announced.

"No!" Suzanne said in mock horror.

"I told you before," his wife said, "Ed, mind your own damned business."

"She's nineteen years old, she is my business."

"He's a very nice boy," Mrs. Eaglebury said.

"You think so?" he said. "I was wondering what she saw in him. He's sort of a runt, actually. And "

"I know what she sees in him, Dad," Suzanne said. "What I saw in Ed. There's something special about people like that, people who do what they do."

"You're not suggesting there's anything serious going on between them, are you?"

"No, I think he came all the way out here because he had nothing better to do on Christmas Eve," Suzanne said. "Didn't you see the way she looked at him?"

"No," he said flatly. "I didn't see anything like that at all."

"What's wrong with him?" his wife asked. "He's nice, and he's pleasant, and he already has a career."

"Did I say anything was wrong with him?"

He looked out the window again. Ellis still hadn't left. He was still kissing Dianne.

"If she doesn't come in here in a minute, I'm going out and get her," he said.

"You'll do no such thing!" his wife said.

"What's wrong with him, Dad?" Suzanne said.

"I told Mother, there's nothing wrong with him," he said.

What's wrong with ham is what you said, Suzanne. There's something special about people like that. You saw it in Ed, and you married him, and now you're a thirty-year-old widow with two kids. I'll see Dianne make the same mistake over my dead body.

(Three) Tom Ellis parked the Jaguar on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel and took the bus to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Forty-first Street. If he took the Jaguar home, he could count on losing the wheels and tires, and possibly the whole car. But it was Christmas Eve, and perhaps he was being too cynical. Perhaps, full of joyous yuletide season spirit and goodwill, the punks would only run a knife blade through the roof and down the fenders.

He had trouble with the cabbie. The cabbie said there was no way he was going "up there."

"You either take me up there' or down to the cop on the corner," Tom said. "The law says you have to take me."

"It's Christmas Eve, for Christ's sake! Give me a break!"

"I don't want to ride the subway up there on Christmas Eve," Tom said. "Give me a break. Do we go talk to the cop, or what?"

"Sonofabitch!" the cabbie said. "On Christmas Eve!"

But he put the hack in gear and did a U-turn and headed uptown.

Cars lined both sides of the street in front of the three-story brownstones in Spanish Harlem. The cabbie drove past the number Tom had given him and stopped instead at the far corner, before the plate-glass windows of a bar and grill. The cabbie was afraid that if he stopped where he was supposed to on the dark street, drug-soaked spies with flip-blade knives or guns would appear out of the darkness and relieve him of both his money and his life.

Tom took all the bills out of his wallet, paid the cabbie, and put the rest of the bills in his sock. Then he got out of the cab and started walking down the street to his mother's apartment. He was carrying a small blue canvas bag, the kind people carry gym clothes in. The cab was gone before he had taken a dozen steps.

He had gone twenty-five yards when he heard the footsteps behind him.

"Excuse me, sir," a voice asked with exaggerated courtesy.

Tom stopped and turned.

There were three of them. A tall, thin one with sunken eyes, a stocky one who looked nervous, and a little, wiry one, who looked both vaguely familiar and dangerous.

"Merry Christmas, sir," the tall thin one said. He was wearing a nylon zipper jacket and a too-small hat with the brim turned down all around. He was probably freezing his ass, Tom thought.

When Tom didn't reply, the tall thin one said, "You got a match, sir?"

Tom's hand came out of his pocket. There was a click as his switchblade opened.

"No, but if you want that cigarette cut in half, I'll be happy to do that for you," he said in Spanish.

Two switchblades and a length of chain were produced.

"You are not very friendly," the tall thin one said.

"No, I am not," Tom said.

"What have you got in the bag?"

"Let me tell you something, my friend," Tom said. "What I have in the bag is none of your business."

"What are you doing in this neighborhood?"

"My mother lives in 333," Tom said, "with her husband the policeman."

"I know this man," the little wiry one said. "He lived here."

"Then you know of my mother's husband the policeman," Tom said.

"He's not a policeman, he is a Transit Authority cop."

"But he has a gun, and if he should hear screaming, as if someone had their belly slit open, he would come with his gun."

"Who would have their belly slit?" the little wiry one asked.

"You," Tom said. "Maybe you and me, but you for sure, because you know who I am, and it is not nice to rob your neighbors on Christmas Eve."

The intentions and tactical capability of the enemy were being evaluated, Tom thought. The enemy was not what he at first appeared, a white alien, sure to be unarmed and unsure of himself on foreign territory. They had challenged instead a local who could be presumed to know the territory and who might not be worth the trouble that attempting to relieve him of his goods and money might provoke.

"We don't rob our neighbors," the tall thin one said, having on due deliberation reached his decision. "We just don't like strange people on our turf, you understand."

"I am a neutral passing through," Tom said.

"Yeah," the tall thin one said. "You know how it is, my man."

"Say Merry Christmas to your mother," the little wiry one said.

They turned and walked away with a swagger.

Tom's stomach hurt, and he was aware of a chill, clammy sweat. He folded the switchblade against his leg and put it back in his pocket, and walked down the street to 333.

His mother's husband opened the door. He was a tall and paunchy black man, a Puerto Rican.

"Well," he said in Spanish, "the lieutenant."

He stepped out of the door.

"Hello, Philip," Tom said. "How are you?"

Tom's mother was Philip's second wife. His first wife lived a couple of blocks away with their four children, on sixty percent of what the New York City Transit Authority paid Philip to ride the subways forty hours a week.

Tom's mother was Puerto Rican and white. Or at least, he thought, mostly white. His father had been another Transit Authority policeman, an Irishman, who had started beating up Tom's mother after they had been married long enough to produce him. He was now living in Staten Island with his second wife, an Irishwoman, and their three children. Tom's father saw in Tom shameful proof of the one great big mistake he had made in his life: marrying a spic. Tom had not seen his father in years.

Tom's mother's husband saw in Tom shameful proof that his wife was so dumb that she had married an Anglo. The Anglo, predictably, had thrown her out.

Two days after he had turned eighteen, his father being no longer required to pay child support, Tom had enlisted in the army. The recruiting sergeant had told him the army would send him to cooks and bakers school, where he would learn all there was to know about cooking and baking, so that when he got out of the army, he would have a trade. He also told him that the union had a special rule for veterans, so that he could get into the union.

When he had been at the reception center, they had made him take the Army General Classification Test twice. When they saw the scores he had made on it the first time, they thought it was either a mistake, or that he'd cheated, or that he had just been incredibly lucky just guessing where to put the pencil mark on the test form.

He hadn't understood what that meant then, but when he was in cooks and bakers school at Fort Lee, Virginia (Christ, what a mistake that was!), the company commander had called him m and said that he'd been going over his AGCT scores and that Tom was in Category I, thus qualifying him to apply for OCS. He hadn't really understood what OCS was, and the idea of becoming an officer was incredible, but he figured what the hell, it would get him out of the kitchen.

In OCS at Benning, his tactical officer had called him in and asked whether hs mother was a member of a Spanish Surnamed Hispanic Minority Group, and Tom told him she was. The tactical officer was a good guy, a little guy like Tom, who had explained that the army was leaning over backward to make sure that all the opportunities the army had to offer were made available without regard to race, creed, or national origin. And what that meant, his tac officer said, was that if Tom claimed status as a member of the Hispanic minority group, he could forget getting commissioned in the Quartermaster Corps and counting canteen cups and get a commission in a combat arm: infantry, artillery, or armor. He could also probably get jump school right out of OCS, which meant another $150 a month, and get himself assigned to the Eightysecond Airborne Division.