MEYER TOOK care of practically everything. I couldn't have managed. I was too listless and too depressed. We both remembered that after her brother's death at Timber Bay, Gretel said she preferred cremation, just as he had. Cremation and maybe a small nondenominational memorial service for close friends. Not many people had attended John Tuckerman's memorial service in Timber Bay. He had been too closely a.s.sociated with Hubbard Lawless, the man who had taken all the money and tried to run.

I did not think there would be many people who would want to come to Gretel's memorial service. Meyer arranged it at a small chapel up beyond South Beach Park, at eleven in the morning on Sat.u.r.day, ten days before Christmas.

Ten or so people came in from Bonnie Brae. And a lot of people from the Bahia Mar area. Meyer calls it a subculture, the permanents. The great waves of tourists and boat people flood the area and recede, leaving the same old faces, most of them, year after year. I did not see all of them come in. When it was over and we walked out irito December sunshine, they were there, moving toward me to touch, to shake hands, to kiss, to say some fumbly words. We're sorry. That's what it was about. Together we form a village. And share the trouble as much as we can. Take its much of it upon ourselves as is possible, and we know it is not very much. Okay?

There was Skeeter, and there were Gabe and Doris Marchman-Gabe's metal crutches glinting in the sun. From charter-boat row there were Billy Maxwell, Lew and Sandy Barney and Babs, Roxy and his nephews. There was the Alabama Tiger, and Junebug was with him, looking strangely subdued. Raul and Nita Tenero were there, up from Miami, with Merrimay Lane. There were Irv Deibert and Johnny Dow, and Chookie and Arthur Wilkinson, back together again. And there were others, from the hotel and the shops, the boatyards and the tethered fleet.

My village and my people. They seemed to know what I needed most, a sense of place, the feeling of belonging to some kind of resilient society A man can play the game of being the loner, moving unscathed through an indifferent world, toughened by the diminished expectations of his place and time. I spoke to them, thanked them, managing to keep myself together. As I did so, I thought of the ones who weren't there any more. Lois, of course. Puss Killian. Mike Gibson, of the world before I came to the marina. Nora Gardino, Barni Baker, who went down with her 727 into the swamp short of the airfield. Too d.a.m.n many of them. I could just barely stand losing them, but I couldn't handle having Gretel gone too. She was destined to be a part of the life that would come after the marina. But she was gone and I was fixed there, embedded in time, embedded in a life I had in some curious way outgrown. I was an artifact, genus boat b.u.m, a pale-eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lampshade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon. They don't make grails the way they used to. She had deserted me here, left me in this now unbreakable mold, this half-farcical image, trapped me in my solitary fussy, bachelor hang-ups from now until they turned me off too. I shook hands, I hugged and was hugged, and I tried to smile into reddened eyes, and they left, slowly, car doors chunking, driving away from the sunlit ceremony of farewell to my girl.

I had parked Miss Agnes two blocks away. An electric-blue Rolls hand-hewn into a pickup truck seemed too conspicuous and frivolous for a memorial service for my dead.

After we got in and I waited for the chance to move out from the curb, Meyer said, "Did it go all right? Did he pick the right things to read?"

"It was fine."

"I tried to ask you ahead of time, but I couldn't seem to get through."

"It was fine."

I thought of the fine running we had done, Gretel and I, on the beach near the shack where her brother was living. I thought of making love with her on the sun deck at dusk, in a hard warm summer rain. I had never really told her how much it all meant. There was going to be plenty of time for that. All the rest of her life. I could make a list of the things we were going to Inllc about someday. When we had the time.

"Good turnout," Meyer said.

"For G.o.d's sake!"

"So I'll keep my mouth shut."

"Fine."

I wanted to apologize, but couldn't find the right way to begin, and so the rest of the ride was silent.

He sat beside me like a gloomy bear. I knew his feelings weren't hurt. He was sad because I had lost Gretel, and because we had lost Gretel.

"I picked out an urn," he said, as we pulled into the parking place. "Nothing ornate. Bronze, tihough. Seventy-two something, including tax. He wrapped it up in a box and brown paper, ready for mailing."

"I might take it out there."

"I told him you might do that," he said. "I've got the box at my place. I'll bring it over. Unless you'd like to have me go on out there with you."

"I'll let you know, Meyer. Keep it for now. And, thanks."

He headed over to the newsstand to see if his copy of Barron's had come in, and I walked back to the Busted Flush, anxious to get out of the suit and get the necktie off. And anxious to see how much Boodles gin I could fit into a king-size oldfashioned gla.s.s.

Two men had boarded my houseboat. They were on my little back porch aft the lounge, one sitting on a folding stool, the other leaning against the rail. They were of a size and age, middle height, middle forties, a tailored three-piece gray suit, with white shirt, black shoes, blue necktie with a white figure; a tailored three-piece chocolate-brown suit, with white shirt, brown shoes, tan necktie with a small figure. Gray Suit wore a gray tweed snapbrim hat, and Brown Suit wore a dark brown hound's-tooth tweed hat. Soft jowls, pale faces, horn-rim gla.s.ses on one, metalrim gla.s.ses on the other. One stood up and the other pushed off from the rail as I came aboard. "Mr. McGee?" said Gray Suit.

The brain is a swift and subtle computer. I have perhaps become more sensitive to the clues which exist in mannerisms, stance, expression, hand gestures, and dress than-most people. If you are in a line of work where a bad guess can give you a pair of broken elbows, you tend to become a quick study.

They were not going to try to sell me anything. They did not have the twinkle, the up-front affability. They were not here to enforce one of the idiot rules of a bureaucracy that grows like highspeed cancer. They did not have that look of fatuous satisfaction and autocratic, patronizing imlifierence of fellows who come to tell you that you forgot to file Form Z-2324, as amended. Or to tell you that you can't cut down your pine tree without enlisting the services of an approved, accredited licensed tree surgeon.

They looked important. As if they had come to buy the marina and put up a research inst.i.tute. Lawyers? Executives? They were not very fit. They moved heavily. They looked out of place aboard my houseboat, as if it was a little closer to the outdoor life than they cared to be.

"I am not exactly cheered up by people coming aboard without being asked," I said.

"Forgive the intrusion, please," Gray Suit said. He had been the one sitting. "I am not familiar with marine protocol, Mr. McGee. We were told this is your houseboat, and we have been waiting for you. My name is Toomey. This is Mr. Kline."

"I am not in the mood for visitors or transactions or conversation about anything."

"We are anxious to talk to you," Kline said. He had picked up a dispatch case I had not noticed before. It matched his suit color. "I think it would all go more smoothly if you did not put us in the position where we would have to insist."

I studied him. "You are telling me that if you have to insist, you have the leverage to make it stick?"

"We do indeed," said Toomey. "And we would rather not."

So I unlocked and we went into the lounge. I have played respectable poker over the years. I won my houseboat on a broken flush, four pink ones up and a stranger down. I can sense when a bluff is a bluff is a bluff. They had the leverage, and the clothes and manner to go with it.

Before I invited them to sit down while I changed, I asked to see credentials. They looked vaguely like pa.s.sports, small with the dark blue cover and great seal of the U. S. of A. Inside were the color ID pictures, the thumbprint, and the name of an agency I had never heard of before. "We do not usually go out into the field," Toomey said. "We have access to another agency for investigative matters. But after a conference with our superior, it was suggested that we take a firsthand look."

"At what?"

"Excuse me. I thought you'd guessed."

"Guessed what?"

"We want to ask you what you know about Gretel Tuckerman Howard."

"I just came back from her memorial service."

"We know that," Kline said.

"Sit down. I'll be back in a minute."

I took my time changing into old flannel slacks, Mexican sandals, and an old wool shirt. There was a small chill spot at the nape of my neck. A warning of some kind.

They had moved a couple of chairs close to the coffee table. Kline had a little Sony TC-150 opened up, and he was breaking the seal on a new ca.s.sette. "I hope you won't mind that I tape this."

"Go right ahead."

He put the tape in, put it on Record and counted to ten, rewound, played it back, rewound again, and said, "December fifteenth, one-ten P.M., initial interview by Toomey and Kline with Travis McGee aboard his houseboat moored at Slip F-Eighteen, Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida."

Toomey took over. "Please describe your relationship to the decedent. Wait. Excuse me. Where and when did you meet her?"

"Earlier this year. May. At a beach shack where her brother was living. John Tuckerman. South of Timber Bay, over on the west coast of Florida. The northwest coast. Her brother died a little while later. I went with Gretel when she flew out to California to have his ashes buried in a little cemetery in Petaluma. We flew back to Timber Bay and, sometime in June, we left Timber Bay in this houseboat and came down around the peninsula and back up here to Lauderdale. We made it a leisurely trip. We got here in August. She lived aboard until she located the job at Bonnie Brae in early November and moved out there, to one of the model houses."

With great delicacy Toomey asked, "Would you say that you and she had a... a significant relationship?"

"I didn't care what rules we went by, as long as we both agreed that it would be a permanent thing. Why do you have to know stuff like this?"

"We want to know whether the relationship was such that she would confide in you."

"Confide what?"

"Let us just say details of her workday, her life out there. That sort of thing."

"Are you looking into something fishy at Bonnie Brae?"

"Did Mrs. Howard say something fishy is going on at Bonnie Brae?"

"No. No, she didn't. I mean, she called up last Sat.u.r.day morning before she got sick to tell me about one of the owners, Mr. Ladwigg, dying in an accidental fall on his bicycle, if that's what you mean."

Kline took over. "Let me set up a hypothesis, Mr. MCGee, and see if that helps. Suppose Mrs. Howard, in the course of her employment out there, learned that something curious was going on. Say that part of the operation was a cover for something else, like gambling or smuggling or something of that nature. Would she have confided in you?"

"Of course."

"Would she have confided something like that to anyone other than you? Or as well as you?"

"I can't see that happening."

"And she talked to you about her work?"

"Certainly. About her exercise cla.s.ses of fatties, and the tennis lessons she was giving to children, and the forms she had to complete on each sale of land, houses, and so forth. She liked her work." The two men looked at each other, and Kline reached over and punched the key to turn off the recorder. Toomey said, "We do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. McGee."

"Wouldn't you say you owe me some kind of explanation... why you are interested in Gretel Howard?"

Toomey smiled sadly. "I wish we could. I really wish we could. There was a possibility she could have acquired some information which would have been useful to us. Unfortunately she became ill before we had a chance to speak with her."

"If I happen to remember something later on, how do I get in touch with you?" I asked. "I'm pretty upset right now and I'm not thinking too clearly."

Kline tore a sheet out of a small spiral notebook and wrote a number on it: (202) 661-7007. I thanked him. They put the recorder away in the dispatch case, smiled politely, put on their hats, and marched off, down my little gangplank and off toward the parking area, in step, arms swinging in unison.

Three minutes later Sue Sampson arrived, bearing a ca.s.serole of hot beef stew. She apologized for having to miss the service and took off just as Meyer arrived.

I made the delayed drinks. Meyer set the stew over low heat while we sat and he listened to the saga of Toomey and Kline.

"All right," he said, "so you sidestepped. You left out Brother t.i.tus and the blue airplane and the twenty-acre sale to a syndicate in Brussels. But you make them sound very authentic."

"While they were boring in, I was deciding several things. First, that I am not in very good emotional shape to spar with anybody about anything. Second, that I could get in touch with them later. Third, that they were almost too perfect. Too cold and clean. They had no regional accent that I could detect. They said they did not usually go out into the field. That implied some importance to talking to me. But it never came off as important. They wanted some hearsay about what might be going on at Bonnie Brae. Colloquial American p.r.o.nunciation, but a stilted kind of sentence structure. Almost like you when you are at your most professorial."

"Didactic is a better word. The tendency to lecture others."

"Kline made those little continental crossbars on the sevens in the phone number. See?"

"But that came after you had decided to hold off."

"Before that, their pants were too long. Long enough almost to step on the back of the cuffs.

Like Kissinger. The necktie knots were wrong. Frenchmen tie them that way. When Kline cleaned his gla.s.ses and held them up to the light, I looked through them too, and I saw no distortion."

"So the gla.s.ses were a very minor correction. So both of them have lived and worked abroad. So they spoke another language before they learned English."

"I know. I know. But, dammit, it seemed like such an invasion of my personal privacy to have strangers here asking me to talk about Gretel. I am not ready to talk about Gretel to anybody. I am not impressed by official credentials. Nor by Mr. Robert A. Toomey or Mr. Richard E. Kline, on the staff of the Select Committee on Special Resources in the Senate Office Building."

"Are you sure you remember that accurately?"

"I'm sure."

Meyer wrote it down on Kline's piece of paper. "No great problem to check it out on Monday, if you'd like."

"I'd like."

"Ready for stew?"

"Right after the next drink. If it all checks out, I'll forget my paranoia and phone them and tell all."

"And what if it doesn't check out? What if your instincts were accurate?"

"Then I'm going to have to try to figure out what they were really after. The cover story was very elaborate. I wouldn't think they'd have gone to all that trouble just for me. I would be incidental to something more important to them, or to someone."

I had one drink more than I needed. Meyer dished out the stew. I managed almost half of what he served me. He wanted to clean up, but I shooed him out, sent him home.

After I washed the dishes, I locked up and went over the pedestrian bridge to the beach. A high gray overcast had moved in, pushed by a cool fitful breeze off the sea. I had put on good shoes for walking, and I headed north on packed damp sand, lunging along, carrying with me my sorrow, my mild headache, my sour stomach, and the dull pain in my right thigh which cold and damp will cause. I plodded along the beach all the way up to Galt Ocean Mile, and from there on I alternated between the beach and A-1-A, depending on obstacles. The cold and the oncoming dusk had emptied the beaches. The gla.s.sy facades of the condominiums glittered down at me.

I pushed hard, but even so it had been dark a long time when I crossed back over to the mainland on the Atlantic Boulevard bridge at Pompano Beach. I walked the seven short blocks to North Federal Highway. They were promoting Christmas carols at the big shopping center, pumping them out into the night wind. Jangle bells. And the silent stars go by.

When I found a saloon, I had a small draft beer and phoned a cab. One Oscar Lopez arrived in a rattle-bang rig that smelled strongly of cigar and faintly of vomit. He was dubious about the length of the trip compared with the appearance of the pa.s.senger, and I had to show him that I had money. Though he played loud rock and drove badly, he did not have to be told to turn east at Sunrise. He let me off at the marina. I walked to my houseboat, let myself in. It was empty. I had gotten used to a certain amount of emptiness after she had moved way out there to Bonnie Brae. But it had been a conditional emptiness. She could and would return. But now it was a hollowness beyond belief. Even the promise of life and warmth had been drained out of that clumsy old hull. She was hollow, brittle, tacky and old, sighing in a night wind, smelling faintly of onion, unwilling to admit that Gretel had ever lived here with me. My legs were leaden with fatigue. The small beer was caught in the back of my throat. Gretel was turned to ash and confined in bronze. The green ripper sailed by on the night wind, looking for more customers. I suggested, politely, that I would give him no big argument this time. But there were others with a higher priority tonight.

Four.

I GOT through Sunday-with a little help from my friends. It was a day of cold December rain. I uncrated and hooked up my new speakers. They had been delivered ten days ago. Once they were positioned and adjusted, I tied them down. I had been going to give the old ones to Gretel to give to a friend, but I couldn't remember the friend's name.

The new ones had a great big full rich sound for such small enclosures. They worked all day long. Big music and b.l.o.o.d.y Marys. People came by and brought bottles and food and stayed for a time and left again. When it would begin to get too noisy, somebody would remember that too much merriment was probably in bad taste, and things would quiet down, but not for long. It was a party related to a wake.

At the bitter end of the day there was but one guest left aboard. I had heard about her but had never met her. She was the third or fourth wife of some old party from Long Island whose hundred-and-twenty-foot ocean-going yacht was moored at one of the big berths, with a permanent crew of five. The Madrina, meaning "G.o.dmother," a nice enough name for a ship. The Madrina had been at the marina for a month because her owner had a very bad stroke the day before they were to sail for Bermuda. I did not know who brought the wife aboard my vessel, or left her there with me. Smallish, dark-haired, and very nice to look upon, she was a creature of many subtle perfections. Named Anna. An accent I could not place. Some Portuguese, she said, and Chinese, and a lot of White Russian, born in Hong Kong, and with a degree in engineering from the University of Alabama.

Anna wore a woolly white jump suit with a turtleneck, a heavy-duty gold zipper all the way down the front of it, and some little marine flag signals embroidered over the pocket. At five of midnight, after the others had left, there we were. She was curled into a corner of my yellow sofa, brandy gla.s.s in hand, looking over at me out of dark eyes under dark brows under the wing of smooth jet hair across her forehead. She stared with a total focus of her attention, watchful as a cat. The white outfit fitted so closely no one with figure flaws could have managed it. I couldn't remember who had brought her into the group.

"We have very much the same kind of trouble, Travis," she said.

"We do?"

"They told me the day before yesterday, at the hospital, that Harvey won't live."