"Come on," he said to me. "I'll give you five dollars if you can tell me the name of the dorm you lived in."

His eyes were riveted on mine; they were bright with a horrible relish. I said something incoherent and then in consternation got up and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Leaning on the sink, I held the glass to my temple; from the living room, Francis whispered something indistinct but angry, and then Bunny laughed harshly. I poured the water down the sink and turned on the tap so I wouldn't have to listen.

How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny's eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter? I still think about this sometimes. If what Bunny really wanted was revenge, he could have had it easily enough and without putting himself at risk. What did he imagine was to be gained from this slow and potentially explosive kind of torture, had it, in his mind, some purpose, some goal? Or were his own actions as inexplicable to him as they were to us?

Or perhaps they weren't so inexplicable as that. Because the worst thing about all of this, as Camilla once remarked, was not that Bunny had suffered some total change of personality, some schizophrenic break, but rather that various unpleasant elements of his personality which heretofore we had only glimpsed had orchestrated and magnified themselves to a startling level of potency. Distasteful as his behavior was, we had seen it all before, only in less concentrated and vitriolic form. Even in the happiest times he'd made fun of my California accent, my secondhand overcoat and my room barren of tasteful bibelots, but in such an ingenuous way I couldn't possibly do anything but laugh. ("Good Lord, Richard," he would say, picking up one of my old wingtips and poking his finger through the hole in the bottom. "What is it with you California kids? Richer you are, the more shoddy you look. Won't even go to the barber. Before I know it, you'll have hair down to your shoulders and be skulking around in rags like Howard Hughes.") It never occurred to me to be offended; this was Bunny, my friend, who had even less pocket money than I did and a big rip in the seat of his trousers besides. A good deal of my horror at his new behavior sprang from the fact that it was so similar to the old and frankly endearing way he used to tease me, and I was as baffled and enraged at his sudden departure from the rules as though-if we had been in the habit of doing a little friendly sparring-he had boxed me into the corner and beaten me half to death.

To compound this-all these unpleasant recollections to the contrary-so much remained of the old Bunny, the one I knew and loved. Sometimes when I saw him at a distance-fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk-I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. It seemed impossible then that one could ever be angry at him, no matter what he did. Unfortunately, these were often the moments when he chose to attack. He would be amiable, charming, chatting in his old distracted manner when, in the same manner and without missing a beat, he would lean back in his chair and come out with something so horrendous, so backhanded, so unanswerable, that I would vow not to forget it, and never to forgive him again. I broke that promise many times. I was about to say that it was a promise I finally had to keep, but that's not really true. Even today I cannot muster anything resembling anger for Bunny. In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: "Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?"

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Camilla he tormented simply because she was a girl. In some ways she was his most vulnerable target-through no fault of her own, but simply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures, better seen than heard. This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.

Bunny, through no impulse towards Hellenic purity but simply out of mean-spiritedness, championed this view. He didn't like women, didn't enjoy their company, and even Marion, his self-proclaimed raison d'etre, was tolerated as grudgingly as a concubine. With Camilla he was forced to assume a slightly more paternalistic stance, beaming down at her with the condescension of an old papa towards a dimwit child. To the rest of us he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship. We all found this pretty funny. To be honest, none of us, not even the brightest of us, were destined for academic achievement in subsequent years, Francis being too lazy, Charles too diffuse, and Henry too erratic and generally strange, a sort of Mycroft Holmes of classical philology. Camilla was no different, secretly preferring, as I did, the easy delights of English literature to the coolie labor of Greek. What was laughable was that poor Bunny should display concern about anyone else's intellectual capacities.

Being the only female in what was basically a boys' club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn't compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; a girl as bewitching, and clever, as any girl who ever lived. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not at all the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof. Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

If I found the twins so fascinating, I think it was because there was something a tiny bit inexplicable about them, something I was often on the verge of grasping but never quite did. Charles, kind and slightly ethereal soul that he was, was something of an enigma but Camilla was the real mystery, the safe I could never crack. I was never sure what she thought about anything, and I knew that Bunny found her even harder to read than I did. In good times he'd often offended her clumsily, without meaning to; as soon as they turned bad, he tried to insult and belittle her in a variety of ways, most of which struck wide of the mark. She was impervious to slights about her appearance; met his eye, unblinking, as he told the most vulgar and humiliating jokes; laughed if he attempted to insult her taste or intelligence; ignored his frequent discourses, peppered with erudite misquotations he must have gone to great trouble to dig up, all to the effect that all women were categorically inferior to himself: not designed-as he was-for Philosophy, and Art, and Higher Reasoning, but to attract a husband and to Tend the Home.

Only once did I ever see him get to her. It was over at the twins' apartment, very late. Charles, fortunately, was out with Henry getting ice; he'd had a lot to drink and if he'd been around things would almost certainly have gotten out of hand. Bunny was so drunk he could hardly sit up. For most of the evening, he'd been in a passable mood, but then, without warning, he turned to Camilla and said: "How come you kids live together?"

She shrugged, in that odd, one-shouldered way the twins had.

"Huh?"

"It's convenient," said Camilla. "Cheap."

"Well, I think it's pretty damned peculiar."

"I've lived with Charles all my life."

"Not much privacy, is there? Little place like this? On top of each other all the time?"

"It's a two-bedroom apartment."

"And when you get lonesome in the middle of the night?"

There was a brief silence.

"I don't know what you're trying to say," she said icily.

"Sure you do," said Bunny. "Convenient as hell. Kinda classical, too. Those Greeks carried on with their brothers and sisters like nobody's-whoops," he said, retrieving the whiskey glass which was about to fall off the arm of his chair. "Sure, it's against the law and stuff," he said. "But what's that to you. Break one, you might as well break 'em all, eh?"

I was stunned. Francis and I gaped at him as he unconcernedly drained his glass and reached for the bottle again.

To my utter, utter surprise, Camilla said tartly: "You mustn't think I'm sleeping with my brother just because I won't sleep with you."

Bunny laughed a low, nasty laugh. "You couldn't pay me to sleep with you, girlie," he said. "Not for all the tea in China."

She looked at him with absolutely no expression in her pale eyes. Then she got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Francis and me to one of the more tortuous silences I have ever experienced.

Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants-too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive. To ascribe it to such a motive would be easy enough. There was one, certainly. But the instinct for self-preservation is not so compelling an instinct as one might think. The danger which he presented was, after all, not immediate but slow and simmering, a sort which can, at least in the abstract, be postponed or diverted in any number of ways. I can easily imagine us there, at the appointed time and place, anxious suddenly to reconsider, perhaps even to grant a disastrous last-minute reprieve. Fear for our own lives might have induced us to lead him to the gallows and slip the noose around his neck, but a more urgent impetus was necessary to make us actually go ahead and kick out the chair.

Bunny, unawares, had himself supplied us with such an impetus. I would like to say I was driven to what I did by some overwhelming, tragic motive. But I think I would be lying if I told you that; if I led you to believe that on that Sunday afternoon in April, I was actually being driven by anything of the sort.

An interesting question: what was I thinking, as I watched his eyes widen with startled incredulity ("come on, fellas, you're joking, right?") for what would be the very last time? Not of the fact that I was helping to save my friends, certainly not; nor of fear; nor guilt. But little things. Insults, innuendos, petty cruelties. The hundreds of small, unavenged humiliations which had been rising in me for months. It was of them I thought, and nothing more. It was because of them that I was able to watch him at all, without the slightest tinge of pity or regret, as he teetered on the cliff's edge for one long moment-arms flailing, eyes rolling, a silent-movie comedian slipping on a banana peel-before he toppled backwards, and fell to his death.

Henry, I believed, had a plan. What it was I didn't know. He was always disappearing on mysterious errands, and perhaps these were only more of the same; but now, anxious to believe that someone, at least, had the situation in hand, I imbued them with a certain hopeful significance. Not infrequently he refused to answer his door, even late at night when a light was burning and I knew he was at home; more than once he appeared late for dinner with wet shoes, and windblown hair, and mud on the cuffs of his neat dark trousers. A stack of mysterious books, in a Near Eastern language which looked like Arabic and bearing the stamp of the Williams College Library, materialized in the back seat of his car. This was doubly puzzling, as I did not think he read Arabic; nor, to my knowledge, did he have borrowing privileges at the Williams College Library. Glancing surreptitiously at the back pocket of one of them, I found the card was still in it, and that the last person to check it out was an F. Lockett, back in 1929.

Perhaps the oddest thing of all, though, I saw one afternoon when I'd hitched a ride into Hampden with Judy Poovey. I wanted to take some clothes to the cleaners and Judy, who was going into town, offered to drive me; we'd done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King, and we were stopped in the Corvette at a red light, listening to terrible music ("Free Bird") on the Manchester radio station, and Judy rattling on, like the senseless cokehead she was, about these two guys she knew who'd had sex in the Food King ("Right in the store! In the frozen food aisle!"), when she glanced out her window and laughed. "Look," she said. "Isn't that your friend Four Eyes over there?"

Startled, I leaned forward. There was a tiny head shop directly across the street-bongs, tapestries, canisters of Rush, and all sorts of herbs and incense behind the counter. I'd never seen anyone in it before except the sad old hippie in granny glasses, a Hampden graduate, who owned it. But now to my astonishment I saw Henry-black suit, umbrella and all-among the celestial maps and unicorns. He was standing at the counter looking at a sheet of paper. The hippie started to say something but Henry, cutting him short, pointed to something behind the counter. The hippie shrugged and took a little bottle off the shelf. I watched them, half-breathless.

"What do you think he's doing in there, trying to harass that poor old Deadhead? That's a shitty store, by the way. I went in there once for a pair of scales and they didn't even have any, just a bunch of crystal balls and shit. You know that set of green plastic scales I-Hey, you're not listening," she whined when she saw I was still staring out the window. The hippie had leaned down and was rummaging under the counter. "You want me to honk or something?"

"No," I shouted, edgy from the cocaine, and pushed her hand away from the horn.

"Oh, God. Don't scare me like that." She pressed her hand to her chest. "Shit. I'm speeding my brains out. That coke was cut with meth or something. Okay, okay," she said irritably, as the light turned green and the gas truck behind us began to honk.

Stolen Arabic books? A head shop in Hampden town? I couldn't imagine what Henry was doing, but as disconnected as his actions seemed, I had a childlike faith in him and, as confidently as Dr. Watson observing the actions of his more illustrious friend, I waited for the design to manifest itself.

Which it did, in a certain fashion, in a couple of days.

On a Thursday night, around twelve-thirty, I was in my pajamas and attempting to cut my own hair with the aid of a mirror and some nail scissors (I never did a very good job; the finished product was always very thistly and childish, a la Arthur Rimbaud) when there was a knock at the door. I answered it with scissors and mirror in hand. It was Henry. "Oh, hello," I said. "Come in."

Stepping carefully over the tufts of dusty brown hair, he sat down at my desk. Inspecting my profile in the mirror, I went back to work with the scissors. "What's up?" I said, reaching over to snip off a long clump by my ear.

"You studied medicine for a while, didn't you?" he said.

I knew this to be a prelude to some health-related inquiry. My one year of pre-med had provided scanty knowledge at best, but the others, who knew nothing at all of medicine and regarded the discipline per se as less a science than a kind of sympathetic magic, constantly solicited my opinion on their aches and pains as respectfully as savages consulting a witch doctor. Their ignorance ranged from the touching to the downright shocking; Henry, I suppose because he'd been ill so often, knew more than the rest of them but occasionally even he would startle one with a perfectly serious question about humors or spleen.

"Are you sick?" I said, one eye on his reflection in the mirror.

"I need a formula for dosage."

"What do you mean, a formula for dosage? Dosage of what?"

"There is one, isn't there? Some mathematical formula which tells the proper dose to administer according to height and weight, that sort of thing?"

"It depends on the concentration of the drug," I said. "I can't tell you something like that. You'd have to look it up in a Physicians' Desk Reference."

"I can't do that."

"They're very simple to use."

"That's not what I mean. It's not in the Physicians' Desk Reference."

"You'd be surprised."

For a moment there was no sound except the grinding of my scissors. At last he said: "You don't understand. This isn't something doctors generally use."

I brought down my scissors and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

"Jesus, Henry," I said. "What have you got? Some LSD or something?"

"Let's say I do," he said calmly.

I put down the mirror and turned to stare at him. "Henry, I don't think that's a good idea," I said. "I don't know if I ever told you this but I took LSD a couple of times. When I was a sophomore in high school. It was the worst mistake I ever made in my-"

"I realize that it's hard to gauge the concentration of such a drug," he said evenly. "But say we have a certain amount of empirical evidence. Let's say we know, for instance, that x amount of the drug in question is enough to affect a seventy-pound animal and another, slightly larger amount is sufficient to kill it. I've figured out a rough formula, but still we are talking about a very fine distinction. So, knowing this much, how do I go about calculating the rest?"

I leaned against my dresser and stared at him, my haircut forgotten. "Let's see what you have," I said.

He looked at me intently for a moment or two, then reached into his pocket. When his hand opened, I couldn't believe my eyes, but then I stepped closer. A pale, slender-stemmed mushroom lay across his open palm.

"Amanita caesaria," he said. "Not what you think," he added when he saw the look on my face.

"I know what an amanita is."

"Not all amanitae are poisonous. This one is harmless."

"What is it?" I said, taking it from his hand and holding it to the light. "A hallucinogen?"

"No. Actually they are good to eat-the Romans liked them a great deal-but people avoid them as a rule because they are so easily confused with their evil twin."

"Evil twin?"

"Amanita phalloides," said Henry mildly. "Death cap."

I didn't say anything for a moment.

"What are you going to do?" I finally asked.

"What do you think?"

I got up, agitated, and walked to my desk. Henry put the mushroom back in his pocket and lit a cigarette. "Do you have an ashtray?" he said courteously.

I gave him an empty soda can. His cigarette was nearly finished before I spoke. "Henry, I don't think this is a good idea."

He raised an eyebrow. "Why not?"

Why not, he asks me. "Because," I said, a little wildly, "they can trace poison. Any kind of poison. Do you think if Bunny keels over dead, people won't find it peculiar? Any idiot of a coroner can-"

"I know that," said Henry patiently. "Which is why I'm asking you about the dosage."

"That has nothing to do with it. Even a tiny amount can be-"

"-enough to make one extremely ill," Henry said, lighting another cigarette. "But not necessarily lethal."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, "that strictly in terms of virulence there are any number of excellent poisons, most of them far superior to this. The woods will be soon full of foxglove and monkshood. I could get all the arsenic I needed from flypaper. And even herbs that aren't common here-good God, the Borgias would have wept to see the health-food store I found in Brattleboro last week. Hellebore, mandrake, pure oil of wormwood.... I suppose people will buy anything if they think it's natural. The wormwood they were selling as organic insect repellent, as if that made it safer than the stuff at the supermarket. One bottle could have killed an army." He toyed with his glasses again. "The problem with these things-excellent though they are-is one, as you said, of administration. Amatoxins are messy, as poisons go. Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions. Not like some of the little Italian comfortives, which are relatively quick and kind. But, on the other hand, what could be easier to give? I'm not a botanist, you know. Even mycologists have a hard time telling amanitae apart. Some handpicked mushrooms ... a few bad ones get mixed in the lot ... one friend gets dreadfully ill and the other ...?" He shrugged.

We looked at each other.

"How can you be sure you won't get too much yourself?" I asked him.

"I suppose I can't be, really," he said. "My own life must be plausibly in danger, so you can see I have a delicate margin to work with. But still, chances are excellent that I can bring it off. All I have to worry about is myself, you know. The rest will take care of itself."

I knew what he meant. The plan had several grave flaws, but it was brilliant at its heart: if anything could be relied upon with almost mathematical certainty, it was that Bunny, at any given meal, would somehow manage to eat almost twice as much as anyone else.

Henry's face was pale and serene through the haze of his cigarette. He put his hand in his pocket and produced the mushroom again.

"Now," he said. "A single cap, roughly this size, of A. phalloides is enough to make a healthy seventy-pound dog quite ill. Vomiting, diarrhea, no convulsions that I saw. I don't think there was anything as severe as liver dysfunction but I suppose we will have to leave that to the veterinarians. Evidently-"

"Henry, how do you know this?"

He was silent for a moment. Then he said: "Do you know those two horrible boxer dogs who belong to the couple who live upstairs?"

It was dreadful but I had to laugh, I couldn't help it. "No," I said. "You didn't."

"I'm afraid I did," he said dryly, mashing out his cigarette. "One of them is fine, unfortunately. The other one won't be dragging garbage up on my front porch anymore. It was dead in twenty hours, and only of a slightly larger dose-the difference perhaps of a gram. Knowing this, it seems to me that I should be able to prescribe how much poison each of us should get. What worries me is the variation in concentration of poison from one mushroom to the next. It's not as if it's measured out by a pharmacist. Perhaps I'm wrong-I'm sure you know more about it than I do-but a mushroom that weighs two grams might well have just as much as one that weighs three, no? Hence my dilemma."

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a sheet of paper covered with numbers. "I hate to involve you in this, but no one else knows a thing about math and I'm far from reliable myself. Will you have a look?"

Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions. Mechanically, I took the sheet of paper from him. It was covered with algebraic equations, but at the moment algebra was frankly the last thing on my mind. I shook my head and was on the point of handing it back when I looked up at him and something stopped me. I was in the position, I realized, to put an end to this, now, right here. He really did need my help, or else he wouldn't have come to me; emotional appeals, I knew, were useless but if I pretended that I knew what I was doing I might be able to talk him out of it.

I took the paper to my desk and sat down with a pencil and forced myself through the tangle of numbers step by step. Equations about chemical concentration were never my strong point in chemistry, and they are difficult enough when you are trying to figure a fixed concentration in a suspension of distilled water; but this, dealing as it did with varying concentrations in irregularly shaped objects, was virtually impossible. He had probably used all the elementary algebra he knew in figuring this, and as far as I could follow him he hadn't done a bad job; but this wasn't a problem that could be worked with algebra, if it could be worked at all. Someone with three or four years of college calculus might have been able to come up with something that at least looked more convincing; by tinkering, I was able to narrow his ratio slightly but I had forgotten most of the little calculus I knew and the answer I wound up with, though probably closer than his own, was far from correct.

I put down my pencil and looked up. The business had taken me about half an hour. Henry had got a copy of Dante's Purgatorio from my bookshelf and was reading it, absorbed.

"Henry."

He glanced up absently.

"Henry, I don't think this is going to work."

He closed the book on his finger. "I made a mistake in the second part," he said. "Where the factoring begins."

"It's a good try, but just by looking at it I can tell that it's insolvable without chemical tables and a good working knowledge of calculus and chemistry proper. There's no way to figure it otherwise. I mean, chemical concentrations aren't even measured in terms of grams and milligrams but in something called moles."

"Can you work it for me?"

"I'm afraid not, though I've done as much as I can. Practically speaking, I can't give you an answer. Even a math professor would have a tough time with this one."

"Hmn," said Henry, looking over my shoulder at the paper on the desk. "I'm heavier than Bun, you know. By twenty-five pounds. That should count for something, shouldn't it?"

"Yes, but the difference of size isn't large enough to bank on, not with a margin of error potentially this wide. Now, if you were fifty pounds heavier, maybe ..."