He twisted around a bit, lay at an angle to the building, his head and one arm over the edge of the setback.

Far below, an ambulance moved cautiously on Lexington Avenue, its lights flashing. Even from the thirty-third floor, the street was not entirely visible. He could barely make out the lines of the ambulance in the wash of its own emergency beacons. It drew even with the Bowerton Building, then drove on into the snowy night.

He found a mortar seam even without removing his bulky gloves, and he started to pound in a piton.

Suddenly, to one side, two floors below, movement caught his eye. A window opened inward. One of two tall panes. No one appeared at it. However, he sensed the man in the darkness of the office beyond.

A chill pa.s.sed along his spine; it had nothing to do with the cold or the wind. it had nothing to do with the cold or the wind.

Pretending that he had seen nothing, he finished hammering the piton in place. Then he slid away from the edge, stood up. "We can't go down here," he told Connie.

She looked puzzled. "Why not?"

"Bollinger is below us."

"What?"

"At a window. Waiting to shoot us-or at least you-as we go past him."

Her gray eyes were wide. "But why didn't he come here to get us?"

"Maybe he thought we'd already started down. Or maybe he thought we'd run out of his reach along this setback the moment he came into an office on this floor."

"What now?"

"I'm thinking."

"I'm scared."

"Don't be."

"Can't help it."

Her eyebrows were crusted with snow, as was the fringe of fur lining that escaped her hood. He held her. The wind moaned incessantly.

He said, "This is a corner building."

"Does that matter?"

"It faces on another street besides Lexington."

"So?"

"So we follow the setback," he said excitedly. "Turn the corner on the setback."

"And climb down the other face, the one that overlooks the side street?"

"You've got it. That's no harder to climb than this wall."

"And Bollinger can only see Lexington Avenue from his window," she said.

"That's right."

"Brilliant."

"Let's do it."

"Sooner or later, he'll figure out what we've done."

"Later."

"It had better be."

"Sure. He'll wait right where he is for a few minutes, expecting to pick us off. Then he'll waste time checking this entire floor."

"And the stairwells."

"And the elevator shafts. We might get most of the way down before he finds us."

"Okay," she said. She unhooked her safety tether from the window post.

38.

At the open window on the thirty-first floor, Frank Bollinger waited. Apparently they were preparing the rope which they would hook to the piton that Harris had just pounded into place.

He looked forward to shooting the woman as she came past him on the line. The image excited him. He would enjoy blowing her away into the night.

When that happened, Harris would be stunned, emotionally destroyed, unable to think fast, unable to protect himself. Then Bollinger could go after him at will. If he could kill Harris where he chose, kill him cleanly, he could salvage the plan that he and Billy had devised this afternoon.

As he waited for his prey, he thought again of that second night of his relationship with Billy....

After the wh.o.r.e left Billy's apartment, they ate dinner in the kitchen. Between them they consumed two salads, four steaks, four rashers of bacon, six eggs, eight pieces of toast, and a large quant.i.ty of Scotch. They approached the food as they had the woman: with intensity, with singlemindedness, with appet.i.tes that were not those of men but those of supermen.

At midnight, over brandy, Bollinger had talked about the years when he had lived with his grandmother.

Even now he could remember any part of that conversation he wished. He was blessed with virtually total recall, a talent honed by years of memorizing complex poetry.

"So she called you Dwight. I like that name. " "

"Why are you talking that way?"

"The Southern accent? I was born in the South. I had an accent until I was twenty. I made a concerted effort to lose it. Took voice lessons. But I can recall it when I want. Sometimes the drawl amuses me. "

"Why did you take voice lessons in the first place? The accent is nice. "

"n.o.body up North takes you seriously when you've got a heavy drawl. They think you're a redneck. Say, what if I call you Dwight?"

"If you want. "

"I'm closer to you than anyone's been since your grandmother. Isn't that true?"

"Yeah. "

"I should call you Dwight. In fact, I'm closer to you than your grandmother was. "

"I guess so. "

"And you know me better than anyone else does. "

"Do I? I suppose I do. "

"Then we need special names for each other. "

"So call me Dwight. I like it."

"And you call me-Billy. "

"Billy?"

"Billy James Plover. "

"Where'd you get that?"

"I was born with it. "

"You changed your name?"

"Just like I did the accent. "

"When?"

"A long time ago. "

"Why?"

"I went to college up North. Didn't do as well as I should have done. Didn't get the grades I deserved. Finally dropped out. But by then I knew why I didn't make it. In those days, Ivy League professors didn't give you a chance if you spoke with a drawl and had a redneck name like Billy James Plover. "

"You're exaggerating. " "How would you know? How in the h.e.l.l would you know? You've always had a nice white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Northern name. Franklin Dwight Bollinger. What would you know about it?"

"I guess you're right. "

"At that time, all the Ivy League intellectuals were involved in a conspiracy of sorts against the South, against Southerners. They still are, except that the conspiracy isn't so broad or so vicious as it once was. Back then, the only way you could succeed in a Northern university or community was to have an Anglo-Saxon name like yours-or else one that was out-and-out Jewish. Frank Bollinger or Sol Cohen. You could be accepted with either name. But not with Billy James Plover. " be accepted with either name. But not with Billy James Plover. "

"So you stopped being Billy. "

"As soon as I could. "

"And did your luck improve?"

"The same day I changed my name. "

"But you want me to call you Billy. "

"It wasn't the name that was wrong. It was the people who reacted negatively to the name. "

"Billy ..."

"Shouldn't we have special names for each other?"

"Doesn't matter. If you want. "

"Aren't we special ourselves, Frank?"

"I think so. "

"Aren't we different from other people?"

"Quite different. "

"So we shouldn't use between us the names they call us by. "

"If you say so. "

"We're supermen, Frank. "

"What?"

"Not like Clark Kent. "

"I sure don't have X-ray vision. "

"Supermen as Nietzsche meant. "

"Nietzsche?"

"You aren't familiar with his work?"

"Not particularly. "

"I'll lend you a book by him."

"Okay. "