"I wouldn't worry about it," I said. "Parks doesn't seem to be that with it. Even if he finds it, he'll think it's like the bear; a gift from his mother."

"I hope so," said Antony. "Hey, how's the boss?"

"He's in the bug room doing his card thing. He'll probably be at it all night." The next morning, Antony and I had already eaten breakfast and washed the dishes by the time Sch.e.l.l appeared. He poured himself a cup of coffee and joined us at the table.

"Get much sleep?" asked Antony.

Sch.e.l.l shook his head.

"I guess we really mucked it up yesterday, huh?" asked the strongman.

"On the contrary," said Sch.e.l.l, "I think we improvised like true pros. Your downing Parks was actually a stroke of genius. Diego and I set it right with him, and all's well that ends well. Don't worry, you'll not get out of reprising your role as his mother."

"Christ," said Antony.

"Why were you so silent last night?" I asked.

Sch.e.l.l took a sip of his coffee and then reached across the table to steal one of Antony's cigarettes. It was a rare happenstance when the boss smoked and usually signaled something was awry. He lifted the lighter, used it, and returned it to the table. After taking a long drag, he seemed to compose himself before answering. "You two have to be honest with me," he said. Antony and I both nodded.

"Were you playing a game with me last night?"

"What do you mean?" asked Antony.

"Don't get defensive," said Sch.e.l.l. "I simply need to discount that possibility. Yes or no: were you two up to some scam last night?"

"No," I said, and Antony said, "Never on a job, Boss."

"As I thought," said Sch.e.l.l.

"Why do you ask?" I said.

"Because I saw something last night I can't explain," said Sch.e.l.l. "I've gone over it and over it in my mind, but there's just no explanation, unless of course Parks was playing us, which I hardly would believe possible."

There was a silence during which Sch.e.l.l took another drag of the cigarette.

"Well," said Antony, "are you gonna tell us or do we have to guess?"

"After Diego and I ran the levitation with the bear, and Mrs. Parks stopped by to gently tongue-lash her son a bit," said Sch.e.l.l, "we got up and moved toward the gla.s.s doors to watch your command performance amid the hedges. Diego was to the front and left of Parks as we approached, and I was behind and to the right. As we came up to the doors, I distinctly saw, on the right-hand panel of gla.s.s, the image of a child. It was as if she was inside inside the gla.s.s. About six or seven, somewhere around that age, curly, chestnut hair, large eyes, wearing a simple dress with a flower pattern." He stubbed out the cigarette and rubbed his forehead with his opposite hand. the gla.s.s. About six or seven, somewhere around that age, curly, chestnut hair, large eyes, wearing a simple dress with a flower pattern." He stubbed out the cigarette and rubbed his forehead with his opposite hand.

"What was she doing?" asked Antony.

"Just standing there, looking at me," said Sch.e.l.l, a vacant look in his eyes.

"Eerie," I said.

"She remained there until Parks finally flung open the doors and took off after Antony. How do I explain that?" he asked.

"Now I know why you didn't react," I said.

"It's really no excuse," said Sch.e.l.l, shaking his head. "I should have stayed with the job at hand, no matter what."

"So what do you think it was?" asked Antony.

Sch.e.l.l shrugged.

"Maybe with all of our seance business we actually called over a ghost," I said.

"It's almost too easy to believe that," said Sch.e.l.l, "but I don't buy it. There are no such things as ghosts. Houdini may have been someone who could have made life very difficult for us if he'd ever caught wind of our operation. But I have to say I had the utmost respect for him, because he was right: the spiritualist phenomenon is all sleight of hand, relying one hundred percent upon gullibility. I dare say it doesn't end there, but you can throw in religion, romantic love, and luck as well. No, this was something else." I was timid about bringing it up, but I offered, "Maybe your mind played a trick on you." Sch.e.l.l turned, and I thought at first he was going to rebuke my suggestion, but instead he said, "I've considered that. It seems the only thing possible."

"Look," said Antony, "we've done a dozen jobs in the last two months. That's an awful lot."

"True," said Sch.e.l.l.

"Hows about a vacation?" said Antony.

"Not a bad idea," said Sch.e.l.l, "but it seems rather criminal to take a vacation in the midst of a depression."

I threw caution to the wind and said, "By depression, you mean the economic crisis or your own?" Antony winced and said, "Oo-faa."

"Crisis, me?" said Sch.e.l.l, wearing an expression of incredulity.

"Boss," said Antony, "I wouldn't have brought it up, but now that the kid's mentioned it...He's right, you've been d.o.g.g.i.ng around here like some kind of ghost yourself lately." Sch.e.l.l reached over to pat me on the shoulder. "I confess," he said, turning his gaze toward the table. "I know what you're saying. Things have been very...how shall I put it?...sodden for me lately. I can explain it less than my seeing the image of that girl."

"How about we go to the city, like in the old days, get a couple of rooms at the Waldorf, catch a show, meet some ladies, grab a rasher of c.o.c.ktails? The kid can stay here and keep an eye on the b.u.t.terflies."

"Hey," I said, "how come I have to stay home?"

"There could be some dubious rigmarole," said Antony.

"Let me think about it," said Sch.e.l.l.

INNOCENT.

In the days that followed, I made it my mission to get to the bottom of Sch.e.l.l's predicament. This, of course, was easier said than done. Wandering around like a somnambulist, he skipped meals, slept late, and forsook his usual work of perfecting new seance techniques. The cla.s.sical dirges never stopped flowing from his Victrola. More than once I found empty wine bottles in the kitchen garbage. Whatever time he did spend employed in some conscious task was spent in the Bugatorium, away from Antony and me.

I knew I couldn't get him to discuss his feelings (I'd have had more success with Wilma the snake were she still alive), and whenever through the years I'd tried to get him to talk about his past, he'd always slyly change the subject. Instead, I decided to pump Antony for information, thinking that the key to the trouble lay somewhere back in the caterpillar stage of Sch.e.l.l's life. It made sense to me that the grim aspect that had recently emerged and spread its dark wings had its origin sometime in those early years before I knew him. Otherwise, I was sure I'd have understood. I didn't agree with Antony's a.s.sessment that it had to do with the " unhonestness unhonestness" of our present occupation. I'd read Freud just the previous year and rather believed the issue was something more fundamental.

On the third day following our engagement with Parks, I asked Antony to take a walk with me. Sch.e.l.l was holed up with his b.u.t.terflies. We left the house through the back door and struck out on the path that led through thick woods to a cliff overlooking the sound. I carried a notebook and pencil with me. He was amused by my earnest nature, but I didn't care.

"Who are you, Walter Winch.e.l.l?" he asked.

I cut him a look, and he knew from then on I meant business.

We came to the end of the trail-an awe-inspiring vista of the sound framed by two huge oak trees, their gnarled roots growing out of the cliff-side into thin air. He sat down on a fallen log and lit a cigarette. I took up a position on a flat rock some few feet across from him. It was a clear, windy day. Branches swayed and leaves fell around us.

It had struck me at the wake, when Sch.e.l.l had told me a s.n.a.t.c.h of how Morty had taken him in from time to time when he was a kid, that I had never heard the story of his early years.

"I'll tell you what I know," said Antony, "but I'm not saying it's the truth. Sch.e.l.l's a strange cat. The man has secrets."

I nodded.

"Okay," he said, "here goes. What I know is he was born in Brooklyn, I think. His mother died when he was a babe-two, three maybe. Only kid. His old man was a piece a work, a gambler. I'm not just talking like a poker game here and there, I mean a real gambler, a shark and a sharp. A legend with the cards. You see the stuff that Sch.e.l.l does with a deck? Child's play compared to what his old man could do. I never saw it, but it was said he knew how to throw a single card with such force and accuracy, it could paralyze a man.

"I'd heard his name before I even met Sch.e.l.l. Magus Jack was what they called him. He did some sleight-of-hand stuff too, worked a smooth con from time to time, would bet on just about anything, knew everyone from Legs Diamond to Jimmy Walker when they were all on the way up.

"So he had this kid. He took good care of the kid. Everything was slicker than snot on a doork.n.o.b until he got involved in one particular con. I don't know, I think him and a couple of other guys were trying to blackmail this businessman. They set him up with a young down-and-out actress that they hired. The usual-caught him up in a compromising situation and then threatened to have the tart spill to the guy's wife. It was low stuff, not the kind of thing that Magus Jack usually got involved with. Stupid. I don't remember the details, but it ended with this milquetoast businessman going on a rampage and shooting the young actress, the wife, and himself to finish it off. A f.u.c.king bloodbath. Now, almost n.o.body knew Magus Jack was behind it, but he did. He was offstage, so to speak.

"Anyway, after that disastrous con, Magus Jack started to slip into the bottle, if you know what I mean. The kid was older now, maybe around eight, and the old man would take off and leave him in the apartment for a couple a days at a time. Whenever Jack would return, he'd make amends by spending time with the kid, but instead of going to a ball game or something normal, what he did was teach the kid how to work the cards. Instead of taking the kid to church on Sunday, he'd take him out to the park and show him how to con people.

"By the time he was twelve, Tommy was basically on his own, running the streets, involved in all kinds a cons and games and shenanigans. That's around the time that he met Morty. I think he tried to scam him on the street one day with a three-card monte or something, and Morty just took him apart. But Mort saw potential in the kid and took him under his wing somewhat. The old man came home less and less and the kid was left more and more on his own until he was paying for the apartment himself and living there like it was his own place when he was fifteen.

"I know he's not really your old man, but he might as well be. He's got a brain like you do, you know, for book study, and it was Morty turned him on to books. Mort was a kind of scholar, I guess you could say. Sch.e.l.l taught himself everything he knows. I think he only got up to about the first year in high school and then bagged it. But when he was seventeen, around there, he got himself hooked into some deep trouble. I don't know what it was, but the cops had the nippers on him, and he was drug before a judge. The judge gave him a choice: join the service or go to jail. So, the army not being good enough for him, he joined the marines and went to war.

"He wound up in France and saw the real s.h.i.t. I know for a fact he was at this famous battle at a place called the Balleau Wood. I met a guy who knew him then, was there with him. The Germans were held up in this wood, and the good guys didn't know how much firepower they had. They could've just sh.e.l.led the whole thing to splinters but they didn't. Tommy's regiment, division, whatever it was, was made to charge the wood across a wheat field. The Huns just tore them to ribbons with machine guns. I heard it was the worst beating we took in the war.

"Sch.e.l.l survived and came back home to find that his old man was killed, rubbed out by some shady characters he got involved in a card game with. Magus Jack was a has-been by then, squeezed through the end of a whiskey bottle. He got sloppy and took these mooks' dough too fast. They caught him crimping cards, put a bullet in his head, and threw him in the East River. I'll say no more about this but that Sch.e.l.l later caught up with them and settled the score.

"Afterward, he figured for a while he needed a bodyguard. Hal, you know, the dog man, sent him to me. I was looking to get out of the strongman trade. You can only have so many cars run over your head before it gets tiresome tiresome. I couldn't bring myself to bend another iron bar with my teeth, but I didn't mind busting heads if I had to. That's easy, almost a pleasure sometimes. So me and Sch.e.l.l hooked up, became partners sort of and worked together ever since. How's that?" I looked down at my notebook and realized I hadn't written a word. Antony's recounting of Sch.e.l.l's life had been as complete as I could ask for, but nothing in it, although it was turbulent, led me to see why he'd envision a little girl on the pane of a gla.s.s door.

"Thanks," I said.

"What's your diagnosis?" he said.

I shook my head, "I'm more confused than before," I told him.

He smiled and lit another cigarette.

"What about the b.u.t.terflies?" I asked.

"Who the f.u.c.k knows?" he said. "The guy likes b.u.t.terflies."

"There's got to be a reason," I said.

"Yeah," said Antony, getting up. "'Cause he does. Come on, kid, I gotta get back and start dinner. I'm making stew tonight. No comments, please."

"I'm glad to find out about him. I never knew that stuff, but I thought it would tell me something about why he's down now."

"Look, Diego," he said, putting a hand on my shoulder as we walked along. "This ain't f.u.c.king geometry. It makes sense that when he goes loopy he sees a kid. He had no childhood. That's why he took you in. Why's a guy without a wife, a con man no less, take in a Mexican kid off the street? He's making up for what his old man didn't do. Makes sense, right?"

"It does, actually," I said.

"When you see things, when your eyes play tricks on you, what you see is what you want. Maybe Parks is a screwball, but in a way Sch.e.l.l wants his mother too. Or at least he wants his childhood, get it? He grew up hard and doesn't believe in anything but the con, or so he says. He's taken people six ways to Sunday for years. So he sees a little girl. What's a little girl?"

"What?" I asked.

"Innocent," he said.

"Antony," I said, "you should move to Vienna and hang a shingle."

"Hang my a.s.s," he said.

EXCEEDINGLY STRANGE.

There's a certain species of parasitic wasp that attaches itself to the hind wings of female b.u.t.terflies. When those females lay eggs, the minuscule moochers disengage and drop onto the nascent clutch to feed. The North Sh.o.r.e of Long Island, with its mansions and fabulously wealthy citizens, the Vanderbilts, the Coes, the Guggenheims, was like some beautiful b.u.t.terfly, floating just above the hard scrabble life of most Americans after the crash in '29. We, of course, were the parasitic wasps, thriving upon the golden grief of our betters.

As Sch.e.l.l had explained, "To our benefit, death isn't affected by an economic failure, and it never takes a holiday. In addition, a bereaved rich man is easier to con than a poor one in the same condition. A poor man, straightaway, understands death to be inevitable, but it takes a rich man some time to see that the end can't be circ.u.mvented with the application of enough collateral." I considered this equation as I watched, from the train window, the pa.s.sing signs that held the names of those towns comprising that stronghold where the rich hid out against a spreading plague of poverty. There had even been news recently of foreclosures among some of the elite families, but there was still plenty of affluence to sustain three enterprising parasites the likes of Sch.e.l.l, Antony, and myself. It might have been true that Death never took a holiday, but we were. To his credit, Antony had been persistent with his suggestions of a week off in the city. Sch.e.l.l vacillated, unable to make a commitment. He was obviously weary from whatever emotional or intellectual issue he'd been obsessing over for the past few months. The death of Morty had hit him hard. Still, he'd continued to take calls from new marks for seances and used the list of prospective patrons as his main defense against getting away.

"What's the rush?" Antony had asked. "It's not like the dead are going anywhere in the next week." Sch.e.l.l almost lost his temper one morning in the face of the constant barrage and then threw his hands up and agreed to two days in New York. Antony knew to take what he could get, and even said okay when Sch.e.l.l insisted that I be allowed to come along. The b.u.t.terflies would survive on their own for forty-eight hours. Once it had been decided we were going, we had to move quickly before he changed his mind. I'd dressed in my Indian traveling garb-high-collared shirt, mystical medallion of the many-armed Shiva, baggy pantaloons, and sandals. I gave the turban a rest.

Sch.e.l.l sat next to me on the aisle, dozing, and Antony took up his own seat directly facing us, reading an old newspaper someone had left behind on an earlier journey.

With a sudden start, Sch.e.l.l roused and sat forward, as if waking from a nightmare. He shook his head and then slowly eased back into the seat, rubbing his eyes. "What else is in there?" he asked Antony. "I haven't bothered with a newspaper in days."

Antony kept scanning whatever it was that had his attention and at the same time said, "Looks like we're headed for a Yankees/Cubs series. Otherwise, the usual bulls.h.i.t." Then he looked up and said, "Let's go see the Marx Brothers' new one while we're in town."

"What's the name of it?" I asked.

" Horse Feathers Horse Feathers," said Antony.

"Sounds enlightening," said Sch.e.l.l.

"I know, Boss, you're holding out for Marlene Dietrich."

Sch.e.l.l gave a weak smile.

"I want to go see Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," I said.

"Fredric March downs the giggle juice and turns into me," said Antony. "Forget that." Sch.e.l.l turned to me. "Did you cancel your tutoring appointments?" he asked. I nodded. "All but Mrs. Hendrickson, she doesn't have a phone."

"That should be good for a half hour of admonition next week," he said.

"Mrs. Hyde," said Antony and grimaced. He turned the paper over, folded it, and went back to his reading.

I was about to fill Sch.e.l.l in on the work she'd been having me do, Chaucer in Middle English, when he lunged forward and s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper out of Antony's hands and brought it up close to his face.

"What gives, Boss?" said Antony.

Sch.e.l.l shook his head and held one hand up to silence us. It was obvious he was heatedly reading some article. Antony looked at me with a quizzical expression. All I could do was shrug. Eventually Sch.e.l.l turned the paper around and held it out to show us. He pointed at a photograph on the side of the page he'd been reading. He was as pale as when he'd go under in his medium trance, and his hand trembled slightly.

"There she is," he said.