And when they were gathered in the cavern of the Hood drawing room Ellery peered at plump Penelope and lean Lyra and he croaked: “Which one of you is intending to marry Dr. Benedict?”

And then he said, “Oh, yes, it has to be that. Only Penelope and Lyra benefit from their stepmother’s murder, yet the only person who could physically have committed the murder is Dr. Benedict... Did you ask how, Doctor?” asked Ellery.

“Why, very simply. Mrs. Hood experienced her first poisoning attack the day after her semiannual medical checkup — by you, Doctor. And thereafter, you announced, you would examine Mrs. Hood every day. There is a classic preliminary to every physician’s examination of a patient. I submit, Dr. Benedict,” said Ellery with a smile, “that you introduced the poison into Mrs. Hood’s mouth on the very thermometer with which you took her temperature.”

The helicopter pilot tapped Patrick Drake’s shoulder and pointed downward out the port-side window.

“There it is, Doc. That’s the Brandon Ice Shelf.”

Drake looked down on a plateau of frozen gravel surrounded on three sides by blue-white glaciers, and on the fourth, three thousand feet below it, by the frigid waters of the Antarctic Circle.

“Little different from Tahiti, huh, Doc?” the pilot said with a wicked grin.

“Little bit,” Drake allowed.

“Say, what’s a big-shot biologist like you coming up here for, anyway?” the pilot asked. “I thought biologists studied trees and plants and things. Nothing green up here for hundreds of miles.”

“Doesn’t have to be green,” Drake replied. “Biology is the science of life. Any living organism. Doesn’t have to be a plant or even an animal. It can be algae, fungus, anything.” With one gloved fingertip, he wiped a tiny spot of mold from the instrument panel. “This is alive,” he said.

The pilot shrugged dubiously. “Say, did you know there’s two women on the team down there? One’s about a four, the other’s an eight, easy. Trouble is, the eight’s married. But not to worry, after you been down there awhile, the four’ll start looking like a ten.”

Drake suppressed a smile. “I won’t be there that long.”

“Say, Doc, do the gals in Tahiti really run around topless, like in the movies?”

“Just the ones under thirty,” Drake told him.

“Damn!” said the pilot. “What the hell am I doing down here close to the South Pole?” Sighing in disgust, he pointed down again and added, “Well, there’s the blockhouse and tent city, Doc. Have you on the ground in about ten minutes.”

The International Science Foundation research team was housed in a dozen small thermal tents pitched in a loose circle around a cement-walled Quonset hut with a fiberglass-lined corrugated steel roof. Half of the permanent building held two huge generators fueled by natural-gas tanks behind the structure. The rest of it was divided into a laboratory, offices, storage rooms, and a recreation/dining area with a small kitchen.

When Drake lugged his duffel bag inside and set it down, he was met by a thin woman with stringy, dishwater-blond hair, wearing glasses. “Hi,” she said, extending a hand. “Sally Gossett. Welcome to what we call the blockhouse. I have the inside duty today. And I’m the four, in case you’re wondering.”

“Hello. I wasn’t wondering.” He shook her hand. “I’m Pat Drake.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Drake.” She tilted her head an inch. “Think you can save the project?”

“I’ll try. How cold is it out there anyway?”

“We’re having a little heat wave. It’s twelve.”

“Above or below?”

She smiled wryly. “Below. We don’t measure above. Take off your gear and come on back to the rec room. I’ve got coffee on.”

Drake zipped off his outer thermal suit and walked back into the rec room wearing threadbare jeans and a brightly flowered Polynesian shirt.

“Didn’t have time to shop, huh?” Sally said, eyeing the shirt.

“Didn’t have time to change,” he explained. “The foundation had the duffel waiting for me in Ushuaia; I imagine there are some more suitable clothes in it.” He accepted the mug of coffee she offered. “What’s your specialty, Dr. Gossett?” he asked.

“Nematodes,” she said. Drake nodded. Microscopic worms in a dry, almost lifeless state of anhydrobiosis. “The others will be in from the field any time now,” Sally said. “Didn’t the foundation give you a background list on us?” he said.

“It’s probably in the duffel with my assignment papers and contract,” he said.

Just then the front door opened and two men entered and began shedding their thermals. When they were down to corduroys and flannel shirts, they walked back toward Drake and Sally.

“Looks like the Bounty has docked,” said one, a round-faced little man who swaggered, but smiled at Drake’s shirt.

“Either that, or summer’s here at last,” replied the other, a big, bearded man who lumbered, but also smiled.

“Edward Latham, ecology,” said the shorter one. “It’s an honor, Dr. Drake.”

“Paul Green, geology,” said the bigger man. “Likewise.”

Drake shook hands with both of them.

Within the next few minutes, two other members of the expedition returned from their day in the field. Harley Neil, a slight, academic-looking young man, was a glaciologist, and Emil Porter, tall and hawkish, was the team’s medical doctor. Bottles of scotch, gin, and vodka were produced and cocktails poured all around in metal cups. The first sips were barely taken when two final people came in and Drake heard a voice say, “Hello, Pat.”

He didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. The voice was one he had heard dozens of times on lazy mornings and soft rainy afternoons, and hundreds of times in subsequent dreams. Turning, he looked at a pale redhead with freckles going down the front of a scoop-necked sweatshirt, and a set of direct, tawny eyes that, as always, riveted him.

“Claire,” he said. “Hello. I had no idea you were up here.”

“Didn’t the foundation give you a background list?” she asked.

“It’s probably in my duffel,” he said. “The assignment came up so quickly, I haven’t had a chance to look at the specs.”

“Pat, this is my husband—” Claire began, but she was not quick enough and the man with her stepped forward without offering his hand and said, “I’m Owen Foster. Biology, same as you. And team leader. I’ve heard a lot about the famous Dr. Patrick Drake.”

“You have me at a disadvantage then, Dr. Foster,” Drake said evenly, lowering the hand he had half offered. “I haven’t heard of you at all.”

A moment of stony silence followed, after which Foster smirked and turned to pour drinks for himself and his wife. Then he looked back at Drake and said, “I take it you’re here to rescue us from our inefficiency?”

“I’m here to speed up the schedule if I can,” Drake said, “before the expedition funding runs out. If there’s a problem with inefficiency, I wasn’t told about it. Is there?”

“Perhaps you should determine that for yourself,” Foster said, shrugging. “Are you officially taking over the team?”

“My contract and specific assignment are in my duffel,” Drake said. “Perhaps I’d better go read it before getting into any details.” Quickly swallowing what was left of the gin in his metal cup, Drake looked at Sally Gossett and said, “Since you’ve got the duty today, how about showing me where I bunk.”

“Sure, glad to.” Sally put down her own cup, warning, “Nobody touch that.”

She and Drake dressed in thermals and she led him outside and across the frozen brown gravel to a small, single-occupancy arctic dome tent with an insulated floor, furnished with a cot, camp chair, small desk, and utility storage wall with drawers. A natural-gas camp stove was already burning.

“Heat and electricity never go off,” Sally told him. “Sleeping bag on the cot has quad-flaps, depending on how warm-blooded you are. Snacks, liquor, and other goodies are in the drawers there. Direct phone line connects you to the other tents and the blockhouse; there’s a list of numbers next to it.”

She paused, out of breath, but managed to get in, “So, where do you know Claire from?”

“University of Minnesota,” Drake replied, unzipping his parka. “We were on several projects together over about a four-year period.”

“I take it you didn’t know she was married to Foster?”

“I didn’t know she was married to anybody. She was Claire Dunn when I knew her.”

“She still goes by Dr. Claire Dunn,” Sally said. “Her husband doesn’t like that much; he wants her to be Dr. Claire Dunn-Foster, with a hyphen. I think I should warn you: He’s very possessive.”

“I appreciate the courtesy,” Drake said, “but there’s no need for it. I’m up here to do a job and get back home to Tahiti as soon as I can. I have no time for personalities.”

“Okay, you’re the boss. I think you are, anyway. I’m on duty until nine if you need anything. If not, breakfast is at six. Everybody cooks their own. Except Foster, of course. Claire cooks for him. See you when I see you.”

“Thanks, Sally.”

When he was alone, Drake opened the duffel and found his assignment packet from the foundation. With the official letter of contract and statement of what he was expected to accomplish was a list of the other members of the expedition and their education and experience backgrounds. Her name was at the top of the alphabetical list: DUNN, CLAIRE MARIE; B.S., UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN; M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA; DOCTORATE, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING. BIOLOGIST. SPECIALTY: WILDLIFE.

Drake shook his head wryly. There was a time, he thought, when that specialty could have been two words instead of one. Wild life. He wondered if she had changed much.

I suppose, in the circumstances, it was not surprising that Claude’s opening speech should have been a little distracted, at times incoherent, but the strength of the case against Poppy emerged strongly. Love had clearly died between her and Charley on the morning they took the boat out. When she returned alone, fellow members of the yacht club remembered shouting matches between the couple in which an irate Poppy had often wished her husband dead and had told him that she’d kill him if he got into another financial or amorous scrape, because Charley’s ratlike appearance didn’t stop him pursuing, and sometimes even catching, other women. She discussed, with various “friends,” cases in which wives who had done in their husbands escaped because of extreme provocation. Further police searches revealed Poppy’s diaries, to which she had confided her frequent temptations to enter a happy state of premature widowhood. Charley had left a sample of blood during the checkup at the doctor’s, and his group was found to correspond to bloodstains on a heavy winch handle on board the good ship Love’s Young Dream, and on the life jacket Poppy was wearing at the time of her husband’s disappearance. It was the prosecution case that Poppy, taller and beefier than her husband, had stunned him with the winch handle and pushed him overboard. The boat wasn’t far out when he vanished, and if he had fallen in by accident he might well have been able to swim ashore.

Poppy’s account was rather different. It was true that she had quarrelled with her husband on the high seas, some dispute about an alien pair of knickers found in the washing machine after Poppy had been away for a weekend in Ealing, but she had gone down to the galley to make herself a cup of tea to calm her fury. When she returned to the deck, Charley had vanished into the ocean mists. After calling for a long time, she had steered Love’s Young Dream back to harbour. She could think of no explanation for the blood on the winch handle and her life jacket.

I know a former trial lawyer who gave it up to write courtroom thrillers. He claims he prefers the fictional kind because he gets to control the judge, the lawyers, the witnesses, and, best of all, the outcome. I think of him with envy whenever I have to deal with In Re the Estate of Mendel Sofer. It’s definitely real, and I’ve long since lost control.

Back in the beginning, back when all I knew was that an eighty-two-year-old widower named Mendel Sofer had died of a heart attack, it had seemed a simple case. Indeed, those were the very words Phil Rosenberg used when he called.

“It’s a simple case, Rachel,” he assured me. “Even better, you’ll be doing a mitzvah.”

Phil and I had been classmates at Harvard and teammates on the Equitable Estoppels, a law-school coed softball team. Phil had grown up in New York City and moved back there after graduation to join a midtown firm. I moved to Chicago, started as an associate at Abbott & Windsor, and eventually left that LaSalle Street sweatshop to go solo. Two years ago, shortly after my father died, I returned home to St. Louis and opened the Law Offices of Rachel Gold on the first floor of a renovated Victorian in the Central West End.

“A mitzvah?” I repeated. “Who was this guy, Phil?”

“A Holocaust survivor. Real tragedy. Lost his family in the concentration camps — mother, father, two brothers, a wife, two kids. All killed. Came to this country in nineteen forty-eight. Married again in fifty-six. She died of cancer eleven years ago. No children. He lived alone in an apartment downtown.”

“Where do I fit in?”

“You’ll represent Shalom Aliyah. It’s an international organization that helps Jews emigrate to Israel. They’ve resettled thousands of black Jews from Ethiopia. They’ve helped Jews get out of Iran and Iraq and Red China and Bosnia. They also give financial assistance to hundreds of impoverished Jews in America who want to move to Israel. It’s a great outfit. We’re their general counsel.”

“What’s the connection with Mr. Sofer?”

“He left his entire estate to Shalom Aliyah — all but a hundred grand.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“Seven figures. The guy was a cobbler. Literally. Shoe repair. Never made much, but whatever he had he put into stocks. One share here, one share there — it adds up. Guy died a millionaire.”

Phil explained that after Mendel Sofer’s death the public administrator conducted a search of his apartment and found a copy of the will in his desk. He contacted Shalom Aliyah, Shalom Aliyah contacted Phil’s firm, and Phil contacted me. Tinker to Evers to Chance. I was Chance, and my role was to get the will admitted to probate and expedite the distribution of the assets.

“I don’t do much probate work, Phil.”

“No problem, Rachel. This one’s a no-brainer.”

And so it had seemed back when I sketched the outline of the petition. A simple but compelling story. The document itself was extraordinary. Mr. Sofer’s last will and testament dispensed with the usual legal gobbledygook for an impassioned style exemplified by the first sentence:

In the Jewish calendar, the fifteenth day of Nisan is the first day of Passover, the festival of freedom celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from their oppression under Pharaoh. The Bread of Affliction is the unleavened bread known as matzah that the Jews eat throughout the holiday to remind us that our ancestors, in their hasty exodus from Egypt, hadn’t had time to let their bread dough rise. The Passover allusions in Mr. Sofer’s will added another layer of poignancy to the story of a man who had suffered the atrocities of a modem pharaoh named Adolf Hitler, who’d lost his loved ones in the ovens of Auschwitz as his ancestors had lost theirs in the misery of bondage. The link between the ancient and the modem seemed to transform his gift to Shalom Aliyah into a sacred bequest.

“Who’s the other beneficiary, Phil?”

“A cleaning lady named Pearl Jefferson. Apparently, she cleaned his apartment for years.”

That bequest seemed a wonderful final touch, and even more so after I met her. Pearl Jefferson was a heavyset black woman in her early forties who cleaned homes six days a week and lived in a tiny, dilapidated house in north St. Louis with her three adolescent sons and her husband Earl. Earl was on complete disability from a forklift accident; he spent his days in a wheelchair reading the Bible and doing needlepoint. Pearl almost fainted when I explained Mendel Sofer’s bequest. $100,000 was more than five times her annual income. Afterwards, I strolled down her front walk feeling like a fairy godmother.

Unfortunately, I’d forgotten what happens to gifts from fairy godmothers when the clock strikes midnight.

The chimes began sounding the following week when Mendel Sofer’s bank opened his safe-deposit box. Among his various personal papers were two sheets of bond paper. They were the original pages one and two of his will. Although they were stapled together, there was an additional pair of staple holes in the upper left corner of each page. Those additional holes confirmed what was already obvious: We had a significant problem. Mendel Sofer’s will was six pages long. The last four pages of the original were missing. They weren’t in his safe-deposit box and they weren’t in his apartment, which the landlord had kept secured since the morning that Pearl Jefferson had found Mr. Sofer’s corpse facedown on the bedroom floor. Three days after she discovered his body, the public administrator performed an official search of the apartment and prepared a meticulous inventory of its contents, right down to the trash in the trash cans.

I did my own search the day after I learned of the missing pages. I found plenty of documents in the apartment — all duly noted on the public administrator’s inventory — but no sign of pages three through six of his will.

Those missing pages were a potential disaster. Although I had a copy of the entire will in mint condition, there are certain rules of law that predate the era of high-speed photocopiers, one of which states that if the testator had custody of his will before his death and it cannot be found among his belongings after his death, he is presumed to have destroyed the will with the intent to revoke it. If that rule governed here, Mr. Sofer would be deemed to have died without a will, which would void his bequests to my client and to Pearl Jefferson. Instead, his estate would be distributed according to the ancient laws of descent — assuming that any blood heirs could be found. That was a big if, since all of the family on Mr. Sofer’s side had perished in the concentration camps. As for his second wife, she had been the only child of two only children — now all deceased. Unfortunately, though, the lack of heirs would not resurrect the bequests in his will; instead, the money would escheat to the State of Missouri.

Nevertheless, the absence of heirs gave me some hope, since it also meant an absence of adversaries. Our judicial system operates on the adversary process. Just as inadmissible hearsay will be allowed if no one objects, my petition for admission of the will to probate might be allowed if no one opposed it. Accordingly, I was guardedly optimistic as the hearing date approached.

And that’s when more midnight chimes sounded. Specifically, the Grubbs appeared. All twelve of them — residents of Montana and distant blood relatives of Mendel Sofer’s second wife on her father’s side. Her father had not been Jewish, and neither were the Grubbs. Even worse, two of them were members of the Aryan Jesus Regiment, a white-supremacist militia outfit headquartered in Montana. None of the Grubbs had ever heard of Mendel Sofer, or his second wife, or her parents. They learned of his estate the old-fashioned way: through an heir tracer. Heir tracers make their living by spotting lucrative estates with no known heirs. They go out and locate potential heirs and offer to help them pursue an undisclosed inheritance somewhere in America in exchange for a piece of the action. Here, if the judge upheld the presumption that Mr. Sofer revoked his will, the Grubbs would net approximately one million dollars after paying the tracer. Needless to say, they jumped at the deal, and the tracer quickly retained an attorney to challenge the will.

That attorney was Myron Dathan, and as far as I was concerned his appearance in the case was the final stroke of midnight. Dathan was one of the creepiest lawyers in St. Louis — cuddly as a tarantula, affable as a moray eel. Unfortunately, he was also one of the best lawyers in town — a brilliant litigator with an uncanny ability to detect his opponent’s pressure points. Among Dathan’s many unpleasant qualities was the way he exploited his religion for strategic advantage. He used his encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish law to cancel hearings, halt depositions, terminate meetings, and otherwise refuse to cooperate; when challenged, he would curtly cite an obscure Jewish holiday or custom that purportedly created the scheduling conflict. It was a technique that incapacitated gentiles. Although he generally wore a yarmulke, many fellow Jews questioned the depth of his convictions. He could, for example, be spotted at the trendier restaurants in town, usually in the company of one of his series of blond, leggy shiksas and generally dining on meals that were no more kosher than a Big Mac and milkshake. So, too, he often observed the Jewish sabbath aboard one of the riverboat casinos.

“Rachel,” Dathan said, shaking his head in amusement, “the man tore up his will. You’re in denial here. Face it: Your claim is dreck.”

We were meeting in his sleek office — chrome-and-glass furniture, contemporary leather chairs, huge abstract paintings on the walls. Dathan gazed at me with an expression that hovered somewhere between pity and disdain — it was hard to tell which because his eyes were veiled behind the tinted lenses of his aviator glasses. The tint also made it hard to tell which part of my anatomy he was inspecting at the moment — although with Dathan you could safely narrow it to a few specific locations.

The way he lounged in his chair and languidly stroked his goatee made me feel as if I were in a carnivore’s lair.

“Wrong, Myron,” I told him. “Mr. Sofer simply made an innocent mistake. Don’t forget that he grew up in an era of carbon copies. Carbon copies look like copies. Photocopies look like originals.”

“Ah, but they feel like copies.”

“Doesn’t matter. He signed the photocopy in original ink. I’ll argue that he thought he was signing the original of the will.”

He chuckled. “You don’t need me to tell you that one’s a loser, Rachel. You already know it yourself.”

He was right, but I’d never let on. “You’re overconfident, Myron.”

“No, I’m simply confident, and with excellent reason. But I’m also practical.”

He leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands beneath his goateed chin. “The hearing is in two weeks. If we can settle this now, we can both save ourselves and our clients the time and expense of trial preparations. Let’s talk some reality here, okay?”

“I’m listening.”

“Under the will, your client will get about one point five million dollars. The rest goes to the schvartza.”

I stiffened. “Her name is Pearl Jefferson.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Whatever. The point is: When the will gets revoked, you both get bupkes.” He glanced at his watch. “Whoops, I’ll make this short. Well have to leave soon.”

I checked my watch. 3:20 P.M. I gave him a puzzled look. “Why?”

“Come, come, Rachel. It’s the thirteenth day of Nisan.”

“So?”

He gave me a patronizing look. “Tonight is bedikat chametz, remember?”

It took a moment to connect the words with the fuzzy memory from childhood. “Oh, right.”

Tomorrow was Passover eve. In traditional Jewish homes (as I confirmed later that night by checking the Guide for the Jewish Homemaker that my Aunt Becky gave me when I graduated law school), an important preparation for the holiday is to eliminate all chametz (leaven) from the home. The ceremony is known as the bedikat chametz (search for leaven) and takes place immediately after sunset on the night before Passover eve. The head of the house searches for chametz while carrying a wooden spoon, a feather, and a lighted candle. I remember, as a child, following my father around the kitchen and breakfast room. He let me carry the feather. When he found some chametz — bread crumbs, for example — we used the feather to sweep them into the spoon while reciting a special blessing. The crumbs, along with the feather and spoon, were burned the following morning. Frankly, I had trouble envisioning Myron Dathan playing Hide the Chametz with his current main squeeze, a giggly St. Louis Rams cheerleader with big hair and bigger boobs.

He stroked his goatee. “Here’s our proposal: seventy-five grand to your client, seventy-five grand to the schvart — to the cleaning lady. I’ve already taken the liberty of conveying the offer to her. After all, she isn’t represented by counsel.” He paused and gave me a wink. “I was gratified by her reaction. She agrees that seventy-five thousand dollars is a lavish offer. She’s quite eager to accept it. Unfortunately, I had to explain that the offer is contingent upon your client’s acceptance. We either settle with both of you or we settle with neither of you.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “I have to leave. Perhaps you do, too.”

SATURDAY 18:00 HRS — 24:00 HRS

In the morning the killings were front-page news, and Ellery found them the lead story on the television news as well. There were even photographs of the three male and two female victims. The stories revealed that they’d all been shot with the same gun, but made no mention of the ink circle on the back of their hands. One of the tabloids had provided a map of the Upper West Side with each crime scene marked with a convenient X. It showed that the killings formed a rough circle with the university at the center.

Perhaps that was all the killer intended. Perhaps the murders would stop now.

But Ellery wasn’t betting on it. Just before noon he took the subway up to Morningside Heights.

The neighborhood had always been an area in transition, for as long as Ellery could remember. Old brick apartment houses from the ’twenties and earlier now served as off-campus housing for undergraduates, and an abandoned armory had been turned into the Morningside Shopping Mall. As he was approaching this solid-looking structure, a familiar figure came hurrying out, past the food vendors that surrounded the entrance. He realized it was Virgil Meadler, his host at the university the previous day. The professor, carrying no obvious purchases, headed in the opposite direction and Ellery decided to take a look at Manhattan’s version of a shopping mall.

His first impression was of a welter of signs proclaiming everything from Flowers and Plants for Your Terrace Gardens to Supplies for the Student and Home Office. There was even one that read Your Parking Free Next-Door if You Make a Purchase! The mammoth armory had been converted into a warren of small and medium-sized shops serving just about any need. A fortuneteller announced her trade with a neatly lettered sign: Madame Beatrice — Reader Advisor — No Appointment Necessary. A bald man in a turtleneck sweater was just leaving as Ellery strolled by. Further along he found a sporting-goods store that sold .22-caliber target pistols. He looked them over for several minutes and inquired about buying one but was told he needed a permit to purchase a handgun in New York state, even for target practice. He’d known that, of course, but he was just testing the market. “I got to obey the laws,” the clerk told him. “Too bad these goons selling guns on every street corner don’t have to.”

On his way back to the entrance, Ellery saw a tall, slender woman standing in the open doorway of the fortuneteller’s shop, by a beaded curtain. She had long gray hair and was probably close to sixty. He noticed her watching him and strolled over. “Would you like a free reading?” she asked, extending a deck of cards.

Ellery smiled. “I thought fortunetellers used crystal balls.”

“I have one if you’d prefer,” she answered. “Made of the finest Waterford.”

He knew she was playing with him then and he followed her inside. “Aren’t fortunetellers unusual in Manhattan these days?” he said.

“There are hundreds of us if you know where to look. I’ve been doing it for over thirty years. Check the phone book sometime.” She’d seated herself behind a small, plain table and placed the cards there. Behind her, a dark velvet drape hid the wall of the shop, and a few pillows were scattered on the floor.

“I suppose I don’t get out as much as I should,” Ellery murmured. “What do you want me to do, pick a card and you’ll tell me its meaning?”

Madame Beatrice smiled wisely. “Oh, I’m certain you know the meaning of all the cards, Mr. Queen. You wrote a mystery novel about it once.”

He was momentarily at a loss for words. This woman had not only recognized him but remembered a novel he’d written decades earlier. He recovered enough to ask, “Is my face that well known in these parts, or are you a mind reader as well as a fortuneteller?”

She pulled aside the velvet drape to reveal bookshelves lined with modem novels, predominantly mysteries. He recognized at least a dozen of his titles among them. “On slow days I do lots of reading,” she admitted. “You’ve always been one of my favorites, and your photo is on the jackets. I have to hide them from my clients, though. They would expect me to be reading something far more esoteric.”

“You’d make a fine detective,” Ellery told her. “You probably encounter all classes of people.”

“I do indeed,” Madame Beatrice told him. She seemed to hesitate and then went on. “My last client, not ten minutes ago, is a violent man awaiting sentencing for assaulting a taxi driver. He wondered if the cards could indicate the length of his prison stay.”

Ellery remembered the bald man in the turtleneck. “I imagined your customers to be young girls wondering when they’d marry.”

The fortuneteller snorted. “More likely young girls wondering if they are with child, although those have fallen off with the popularity of home pregnancy tests.”

He nodded, a smile playing about his lips. “Much more accurate than a deck of cards.” He started to leave. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Madame Beatrice.”

“Will you sign one of your books before you go?”

“Certainly.” He took out a pen. “Whichever one you’d like.”

“I suppose it should be the one about the cards,” she decided, taking down The Four of Hearts.

The demi-Chinoise in the color snapshot was as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen in a long lifetime of admiring — sadly, in most cases, from all too great a distance — beautiful girls. An obvious half-Tahitian, half-Chinese, she sat in a round deck chair set against a bamboo wall, her long, bare, golden legs tucked beneath her. Glossy black hair framed an oval face and hung down over breasts that were concealed by a slinky, form-fitting dress almost the color of her skin. Her lips were half-parted, and her almond eyes gazed wistfully, almost adoringly, at the young man sitting beside her. She was, I judged, somewhere in her late teens, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she was no more than sixteen or seventeen. As well as being ethereally beautiful, she also radiated total innocence.

Not only that, in some strange way she also seemed tantalizingly familiar...

I fell instantly in love with her.

“That’s some girl,” I said in the rough but serviceable French I had picked up in the company of various Germans, Hungarians, and other non-Frenchmen in my years as a sergeant major in the Foreign Legion.

“Yes. That’s me she’s talking to.”

“It is?”

I glanced at the man on the other side of my desk in dismay. This old geezer — he was the relatively good-looking young guy sitting there with Miss Galaxy? My love turned to bitter ashes. If this was true, then my inamorata had begun her reign thirty or forty years ago and was now most likely a toothless old granny who, on a relentlessly starchy diet of taro, breadfruit, and plantains, had swollen into a 300-pound Mama Ruau.

“Bien sûr, that’s me!” snapped my prospective client indignantly. “You can’t see the resemblance?” He peered at me suspiciously. “You are a detective, aren’t you? That’s what the sign says.”

The sign he was referring to is epoxied to the front of the building three flights below and says, in discreet gold letters on black:

“Of course, of course,” I reassured him. “The demoiselle in the picture is so ravishing that I simply hadn’t had eyes for anyone else.”

This sort of flowery garbage goes down better in French than in English, of course, and it seemed to satisfy the man across from me, whose French, in any case, was even more peculiar-sounding than mine, being of the French-Canadian persuasion and so heavily accented as to be nearly impenetrable.

“Can you find her for me?”

I just managed to keep from demanding how anyone could possibly misplace so stunning a creature and grunted noncommittally. “Just how old is this picture?”

“Almost forty years old,” he admitted reluctantly. “It was taken at the old Matavai Hotel sometime in nineteen sixty-one, back when they still had bungalows.”

“It’s a very clear picture — hard to believe it wasn’t taken yesterday. That’s a bungalow you’re sitting in front of?” I tapped the glossy lines of polished bamboo in the left side of the picture.

“Yes. We were sitting outside the bungalow of one of the MGM people who were here making the Bounty. I was drinking Hinano beer, and she was drinking limonade blanc.”

“That’s a pretty good memory of something thirty-seven years old.”

“She was the first girl I’d ever fallen in love with...”

“Yes.” I examined my potential client a little more carefully. He wasn’t really an old geezer, just a multi-chinned guy in his mid- to late-fifties who’d let his belly expand and his gray hair recede and had yellowing teeth and wore tight-fitting shorts and a flowery pareo-cloth shirt that made him look even chubbier than he was. I turned back to the photo.

The boy in the picture was probably eighteen or nineteen, and although his face was in sharp profile against a black background he had a full head of dark brown hair and a bony jaw. Even for a highly trained operative like Joe Caneili, with his advanced degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Detectology, it was impossible to say with certainty that it was really the same guy who had plunked himself down in my little office three minutes earlier. Once again I let my eyes flicker between the two. Some people do change more in thirty-five years than others...

And photos can be deceiving...

I couldn’t make up my mind. Call it a tossup.

“Okay, Monsieur—”

“Duchamps, Hippolyte.”

“—Duchamps, what’s the name of this girl you want me to find?”

“Tara. Tara Héréhéré.”

“Héréhéré?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged. Maybe Duchamps was joshing me about his love goddess’s name, maybe he wasn’t. If I had a crusty brown baguette for every lie or piece of misinformation that my clients have told me over the years...

“If I do find her for you, then what?”

“Then what?” Clearly this was not a matter Duchamps had fully considered. “Why... why, you tell me where she is, or point her out to me, and I pay you, and that’s it. And... and I go ask her if she remembers me.”

I considered the round-faced French-Canadian carefully. He blinked back at me with earnest brown eyes that seemed mirrors of candor, but in my profession it’s always better to be safe than sorry. “Well, I regret infinitely, Monsieur Duchamps, but there have been some unfortunate stalking incidents recently, here, and in the States, and in France, that everyone is aware of, and I really think we’d have to modify your intentions if I were to accept trying to find your friend.”

Now he scowled, with bushy gray eyebrows that didn’t seem to be much in evidence in the picture. “How do you mean, modify?”

“It’s no big deal. If I find her, I’ll take a written or oral message from you to her, or ask her if she’ll meet you somewhere public. She’ll say yes, you’ll meet her, and I’ll go to bed with a clear conscience. What could be simpler?”

Hippolyte Duchamps didn’t like it, but after another couple of minutes of batting it back and forth he discovered that there really was no choice in the matter. Either he agreed to my terms or he got shown the door.

“Before I take your down payment,” I said, “I’ll give you three minutes’ worth of free detective work.”

“How do you mean?” he muttered sullenly.

“I’ll look through the phone book for any Héréhérés.”

“I’ve already done that.”

“For all of the different islands?”

“Mmm, maybe not.”

“See, that’s why it’s always wise to invest in professional help in time of need.”

As it turned out, however, even a rank amateur like Hippolyte Duchamps could have done the job: There was absolutely no person of any sex whatsoever listed in any of the 112 islands of French Polynesia with the name of Héréhéré.

“All right,” I sighed, “now I’ll need some money, and some more information. Where are you staying?”

“The Hotel Tahara’a, the one up on the hill.”

“Ah. When was the last time you actually saw this girl?”

He gestured at the picture in my hand. “Probably about July of sixty-one — I only knew her for a couple of weeks.”

“And you don’t know anything about her except her name?”

“I think she was born on the island of Rimatara in the Australes. Her mother was Tahitian, she said, her father Chinese. She was working as a salesgirl in a perfume store in the old Vaima block.”

I nodded in resignation. Her father had probably been the owner of one of the ubiquitous Chinese general stores that were still the lifeblood of the outer islands and was now most likely dead. And the old Vaima block had been torn down twenty years ago. Two almost certain dead ends. “You say you met her during the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty?”

“Yes. Our bicycles ran into each other in town one day.”

I let my eyes linger again with pleasure upon the girl in the picture. “Anyone as beautiful as this must have been in the movie.”

“No. She was too Chinese-looking, they said, not Tahitian enough. This photo was taken with a flash at night and shows her Tahitian side. If you saw her in the daylight she generally looked a lot more Chinese.”

I sighed audibly. Now I was looking for a gorgeous girl who also was a master of disguise. “How old was she? What would she be now?”

“I think she said she was eighteen. So that would make her fifty-five, more or less.”

“Was she just a girlfriend that you dated, or did you actually live with her for a while?”

“Both. She lived at the old Hotel Moorea with me for about ten days.”

“And you don’t know anything more about her than what you’ve just told me?”

“No.”

Once again I sighed. That was the old-time Tahiti for you: live with a girl for ten days and just barely manage to learn her name. Of course, as far as I knew, that was probably the new-time Tahiti also...

I rose to my feet. “All right, Monsieur Duchamps, I’ll do my best. I may find her this afternoon, or I may never find her. A girl as beautiful as that is probably married to the Directeur-Général of the Bank of France and living in a chateau on the Loire.” I paused. “By the way, what were you doing in Tahiti when you met her? July of nineteen sixty-one was pretty old-time Tahiti. Was the jet-strip even here?”

“I was just a tourist, Monsieur Caneili, a tourist who met a beautiful girl that he’s never forgotten...”

I watched Hippolyte Duchamps’s ample derriére waddle down the shabby concrete steps to the next landing and wondered if anything he had told me was true beyond the fact that the girl in the picture was undeniably beautiful.

The three other guests were men also. At first Ellery suspected that the absence of ladies might be significant. But it turned out that Franklin Lang was a bachelor, Rob Packard was a widower, and Martin Overbrook’s wife was entertaining an uninvited spring virus and had insisted on her husband not disappointing the Bauenfels on their anniversary party.

Of the three, Ellery had met only Lang. A tall weedy man with an occupational tic under his eye and bottle-fed veins in his nose, Lang was managing editor of the Record; Ellery’s visits to Wrightsville, which the Record considered news, had brought them into contact from time to time. The newspaperman had always struck Ellery as rather indrawn. There was nothing indrawn about Franklin Lang this evening. He punched Mr. B.’s heavy shoulder and then threw a long arm around it.

Ellery knew Rob Packard by hearsay. He was a one-time real estate broker who had blossomed overnight into a general building contractor and had actually succeeded in supplanting that hardy Wrightsville perennial, J. C. Pettigrew, as chairman of the town’s Realty Board. Packard was a red-haired man in an Italian silk suit and a bow tie, with a handshake like an oil salesman.

He, too, embraced his host.

Martin Overbrook Ellery did not know at all, although he recalled that one of the old red-brick buildings in Low Village bore the white-on-black stencil Overbrook Paperbox Factory on its grimy side walls. Overbrook was a feisty little fellow who came bursting in like the White Rabbit, glancing at his watch and crying, “Am I late, Mr. B.? I hope I’m not late — Jinny couldn’t come, she’s down sick — oh, she phoned Zelda, I forgot — congratulations,” beaming all the while, the reports of his Yankee voice bouncing around the room like shellfire.

There were hail-fellow introductions and lively conversation, a good deal of it concerned with the unexpected presence of Wrightsville’s self-adopted son; then Zelda Bauenfel came flying downstairs, everything bobbing, and there was more embracing, and some jokes about first anniversaries, and much laughter; whereupon Mrs. B. dug her elbow into Mr. B.’s meaty ribs and said, “You’re a fine host, you are! Weren’t you supposed to do something the very first thing?”; and Ernst Bauenfel seized his head and exclaimed, “Ach, I forgot! Excuse me a minute,” and trotted out to return a moment later pushing a bar cart with a bucketed bottle of champagne on it and a queerly shaped liqueur bottle, six wine glasses, and a liqueur glass (and now he does look like a bier gar ten waiter, Ellery grinned to himself).

“Well, open it, Ernst,” said Mrs. B., “what are you standing there for?”; and Mr. B. with a sly smile said, “Before the very first thing comes the very first thing, Zelda,” and he took from the pocket of his jacket a jewel box and offered it to her, saying, “As a jeweler, I know that the first-anniversary gift should be a clock. But how could a clock express my feeling? Open it, liebchen”; and Zelda Bauenfel opened the box, and gasped, and held high a magnificent emerald bracelet, and burst into tears. Then she rushed into her husband’s arms, and he said softly, “I wish I could give you the whole world, Zelda,” and it was said with such simplicity that no one was embarrassed, not even Ellery, who was allergic to clichés.

And when Zelda had blown her nose, and tried on the bracelet, and everyone had exclaimed over it, Ernst Bauenfel cried, “To work!” and he began struggling with the champagne cork, popping it unexpectedly and drenching himself, his young wife laughing so hard that every curve in her body described a parabola.

Then Mr. B. was filling the wine glasses and passing them around; and when Ellery said, “You’ve left yourself out, Mr. Bauenfel,” Mr. B. shook his head and said, “Zelda will tell you I am no drinker, Mr. Queen. I never drink anything but the liqueur, and this only on very special occasions, like tonight,” and he opened the liqueur bottle and poured himself a critical quantity of its topaz-colored contents, as if each drop was precious; and then he held up his glass and said, “My friends, a toast. I give you a German proverb: When an old man marries a young wife, death laughs. To my Zelda!” and the guests echoed, “Zelda!” and drank their champagne, and Ernst Bauenfel raised his liqueur glass to his lips and looked at his blushing wife over the rim, and chuckled, and threw his head back and drained the glass — which was not, in Ellery’s view, the respectful way to imbibe a prized liqueur, even in a toast — and then the jeweler’s eyes opened wide, and he clutched his throat with a hoarse cry and groped with the other hand as if seeking something to hang onto, and finally fell heavily to the floor, where he lay, incredibly, writhing.

And Ellery found himself on his knees beside the stricken man, saying, “Poison, poison. Anse, call Conk Farnham — hurry!” and while Chief Newby ran to phone Dr. Farnham, Franklin Lang led an open-mouthed young wife away, and Rob Packard and Martin Overbrook hovered over their recumbent friend with popping eyes. The writhings had stilled and the breathing had become shallow and very rapid. The complexion was already that of a corpse. “Mr. Bauenfel — Ernst,” Ellery said urgently. “Can you hear me? Do you know who did this? Who poisoned your liqueur?”

The cyanosing lips tried desperately to tell him. But they could not. Then an odd thing happened. The dying man’s left hand fumbled its way to his abdomen and found the lower left-hand pocket of his brocaded vest. With his forefinger and thumb he made his way in little stabs into the pocket. Then he withdrew his fingers and stretched out his hand as if offering something, and his heavy body arched like a drawn bow, and released its arrow.

And there he lay.

“Dead,” said Ellery bitterly. “I swear I’ll never set foot in Wrightsville again.”

But then he opened Ernst Bauenfel’s left hand. In it lay a large unset diamond.

Bruce March had a dilemma. He had a secure job selling ad space for a newsletter and magazine published by a printing trade association in Philadelphia; at the same time, he and his wife Bonnie, and their children Andrew, Barbara, and Charlie, had long outgrown their two-bedroom apartment in the city. Working, playing, eating, and sleeping this close together fostered not a togetherness of spirit but a tightness of mind. An apartment with a single extra bedroom would’ve nearly doubled their rent, however, so it was finally decided — accepted is more like it — that it would be better to acquire a mortgage and commute than to throw a son or daughter or wife or husband out the window.

The house they ended up with was located only eighty-something miles west of the city. It had three bedrooms, a full basement, and came at a lower price tag than expected. At first. Built thirty-five or forty years earlier, it needed roof shingles, windows replaced, doors rehung, electrical and plumbing repairs, not to mention aluminum siding. These unanticipated expenditures forced the Marches to be more budget-wise than they had been in the city, and if they didn’t want to trip over cables and pipe they had to move about as carefully as they’d had to in their old apartment. Nevertheless, the added space seemed to improve their dispositions: Mom and Dad argued less, and the children rarely threw punches at one another. As the workmen cleaned up and cleared out, and as the family slowly began to catch up with their bills, they took to roasting hot dogs in a hibachi in the little yard out back. Life hadn’t been this relaxed since they were just starting out together, before the kids had arrived. There was a catch, however, for there is always a catch.

Driving to the station, boarding a train, and being able to read the newspaper en route to work — sometimes abetted by coffee in a paper cup (when he’d gotten to the station early enough to line up at the snack wagon) — was a pleasing change from pushing into a subway car with crowds of strangers, some of whom pressed up against him in a most personal way. But it didn’t take him very long, perhaps half a year, to see this adventure for what it really was: a very long haul which, under the continual pressures of the clock, and a continual rattling of one’s organs, wearied the mind and body. It took him somewhat longer to learn what it did to the soul.

Each weekday morning Bruce March would fall out of bed at 6 A.M., pull on his trousers in the chilled dimness, gulp down a cup of stale coffee, peck his wife’s sour mouth, race the car fifteen miles to the railroad station, and leap into the train just as it was pulling away. In the city he used to get up at 8, sometimes 8:15, and he still got in around 9 A.M. via the subway — except when they had a derailment or a fire in one of the tunnels. Nowadays he used so many forms of transportation in the course of a single trip that he never knew when he’d arrive, nor in what condition.

First there were the mornings when the four cylinders in the maroon 1990 Dodge refused to kick over. But assuming it did get going, then the train might be held up due to “signal trouble,” or the “lights and heat went down,” or a “shortage of rolling stock” would force many of them to stand. These verbal vaguenesses were delivered by men in dark blue uniforms, near as Bruce could tell, to keep passengers off balance, as if the railroad believed the less the passengers knew, the better. Even when the car started, and the train got through without mishaps or a “labor action,” Bruce still had to deal with the subway, which had its own tendencies toward instability — and for reasons that were kept equally secret via worthless statements over staticky loudspeakers: “We have encountered a red signal.” Bruce March now understood why conductors on trains and subways wore zookeepers’ hats.

The distances involved should’ve meant a two-hour journey in each direction; usually it worked out, door-to-door, to around two and a half hours and, on rarer occasions — a snowstorm, power outage, or a train farther up (or down) the line had flattened a car (and its driver) at a crossing — it could be as long as four hours one way. One morning when the train showed up fifty-four minutes late, a brooding Bruce March tallied the average commuting time and found he was spending five to five and a quarter hours in transit nearly every weekday — about twenty-six hours a week, or more than three eight-hour work days. He was astonished, and immediately shared these findings with the attorney for a collection agency, a regular on the train, seated next to him. Slowly the man shifted his gray eyebrows away from the lined yellow pad he was scribbling on and inquired of Bruce: “How long have you been on this route?”

“About a year.”

The attorney laughed with regulated condescension. “There is a woman in the first car who has been riding this line every day for thirty years.”

This news stunned Bruce. Pulling the thin calculator out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket, he began poking the yellow buttons with his index finger and figured that the tenacious woman who rode in the first car had been traveling no fewer than 39,000 hours, and had used up the equivalent of four and a half years, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in a train or subway car! And when he thought of how many things could be done with one thousand, six hundred and forty-two days of one’s life — the love to be made, the books to be read, the stamps to be put in his album, the movies to be watched on the VCR, the recreation room to be paneled, the camping trips to be taken with the kids... or just that extra hour or two of shut-eye in the morning, Bruce lowered his lids so he could be depressed in private.

A few weeks before Bruce had completed the second year of his tour of duty, the 5:33 P.M. diesel broke down between stations, halfway home. Everyone was ordered to get off; they had to wait for another engine to arrive and pull the dead locomotive out of the way and then to hook up with the passenger cars. Standing out on the large, unstable chunks of railroad gravel in the bleakness, leaning into the damp, raspy wind with several hundred icy-lipped commuters, he questioned whether it was all worth it. Late that night — when he finally threw his briefcase down on the sofa at home, tired and hungry and frustrated — he complained sharply to his wife (his children had already gone to bed) about the “constant torture” and “financial drain” of commuting. “One trip takes more out of me than a full day of selling those lousy one-inch ads!”

Bonnie was surprised, and slightly alarmed; her mind had entirely foreclosed on those four rooms back in the city, and she could not have moved back into an apartment any more than she could have gone to work in a coal mine. Patting her brown (beginning to gray) hair nervously, she quickly scraped the stiff pink spaghetti out of the pot onto a plate and said, “But honey, look at all the space we have.”

Bruce made the mistake of aiming his bloodshot eyes through the archway into the living room: The armchairs and end tables were cluttered with shampoo bottles and pens and used tissues and earrings and dirty socks and magazines and dog biscuits. It seemed to him that the house was closing in on them, that more space merely created the need for more things they couldn’t afford in order to fill that space. Peering down at the sticky jumble of spaghetti before him, he declared, “That’s not space, that’s chaos!”

“You have to get up early,” Bonnie replied. “Why don’t you go to bed?”

Next morning, even before unfolding his Philadelphia Inquirer on the train, Bruce March said to Jim Bulge, “Our lives are not made of inches or dollars. Our lives are made of minutes and hours.”

This comment, out of nowhere, smacked a little too much of philosophy to suit a man who sold hardware wholesale all day, so Jim grew defensive: “The bums on skid row have all the time in the world, but not a nickel to spend or a square foot of their own to stand in.”

Although they never had the time to get together “on the outside,” Bruce and Jim considered themselves good friends — confidants and advisors who shared the trials of selling goods and services along with the tribulations of the daily commute, and whose perspective, therefore, could be trusted. Just like that Jim had enabled Bruce to see that he was a lot better off than a lot of other people. From that day on Bruce complained less and less about “the grind,” as the regulars affectionately called the round-trip, and thought less and less about returning to the city. Anyway, the rents had tripled since his family had moved out, and he really did enjoy having a yard and basement and all that went with it. On his workbench sat a Stanley plane, plus a circular saw from Sears; he had a dream of one day building his own pool table. Unfortunately, he rarely seemed to have the time to use his tools — at least not for making things. Weekends he spent recovering from the week of travel and repairing whatever had gone wrong with the house and car during the week. By 6 A.M. Monday he was exhausted.

On a bright spring morning, a young man whom Bruce did not know sat down beside him in the train. Bruce was a little put off because the regulars liked to sit with regulars. But the younger man, who seemed as free and easy as a traveling salesman, started talking to him in a friendly way and, to Bruce’s surprise, turned out to be fairly agreeable. Employed at a stock brokerage, he was hoping to get his broker’s license one day so he could live comfortably without working too hard, he said with a smile. At one point in the conversation about their jobs and homes, however, the younger man said something that made Bruce wary: “How long have you been doing this commute?”

Without flinching, Bruce replied, “Five years.”

“Phew!”

Bruce cranked up a superior smile. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I doubt it.”

“There’s a woman in the first car who’s been riding these rails thirty-five years.”

The younger man looked at Bruce with stretched, stricken eyes, and then grew untalkative. Bruce remembered how he’d felt years earlier, before his hair had acquired a salt-and-pepper look, but it didn’t seem so terrible any longer. It was just something that had to be done, so he did it. Besides, he had made some lifelong friends on the train — they played cards, analyzed the Eagles football games, discussed the accomplishments (or failures) of their kids, told bitterly amusing anecdotes about their mothers-in-law, read racy passages from paperbacks aloud, described in detail how they’d told off their bosses, rehashed some grisly murder they’d seen reported on television, complained of how increasingly difficult it was getting to sell whatever it was they happened to sell, and in general managed to kill the time very effectively; five or six hours only seemed like two or three at most.

At the end of a long day at the office, Bruce would look forward to pulling himself up on the 5:33 to be reunited with his comrades, to find out how certain situations — the stories put on hold when they’d reached the station in the morning — had turned out for them during the day. Or to resume their card game. Or to tell a hot new joke. Or to hear how someone had landed (or lost) a huge sale. Since the regulars spent the best part of their days and evenings with each other, stimulated by their conversations, as well as by the beer and wine and whiskey some brought on board, by the time they lowered themselves off the train, somewhere between 7 and 9 P.M., depending upon their particular destination and how late the train was, their vitality and imagination and equilibrium were shot. After a luke-warm — often cold — dinner, and an hour or so of TV, a quick shower, and another sexless night, the process was begun all over again.

At home on Saturdays, Bruce would keep jumping up out of his armchair, as if late for an appointment. “Why don’t you relax?” Bonnie would say with annoyance. This only made him more nervous, and he would stomp around the house barking for no apparent reason, making unreasonable demands on his wife and ordering his children about. Once he even kicked the dog: Andrew, Barbara, and Charlie stared at him as if he were one of those escaped lunatics who chatter to themselves on city streets. Since he loved all of them, including Dusty the dog, Bruce knew he was behaving badly. But he didn’t know why, having come to believe he’d gotten used to the relentless travel required to enable him to peddle trade advertising all day long.

Each of the regulars expressed this frustration in his or her own special way. Quite a few became functioning alcoholics or got into cocaine (the cocaine crowd, according to his pal Jim, occasionally shared a snort with Nicko, the train’s engineer). Some beat their wives and children. One accountant, it was rumored, started embezzling funds from her company, hoping to amass enough to escape the grind permanently. Several tried to write books (in transit) that were loaded with sex and violence. Yet others fell in love on the train, carrying on more or less complete relationships on the plastic-covered coil-springs without, as far as anyone knew, meeting in the world beyond the railroad car. And two or three gave their lives in the line of duty. Such was the fate of the woman who had been riding the train thirty-seven years. As the story was told on the 5:33, the regulars in the first car had simply assumed she was sleeping, as she often did, until her stop came and they couldn’t wake her up. A newcomer (only fourteen months on track) in Bruce’s car had joked that she’d died at the office and simply showed up on the 5:33 out of habit.

The next morning Harry stood in the second-floor bathroom of McCall Tower, two minutes before class. He was checking himself in the mirror, mussing his bristled hair — to perfection. He seldom neglected this show-business responsibility, if only because his audience always included girls. He was more nervous than usual, though, worried about seeing Jamison. Like most other A students Harry had seen, Jamison made class attendance a steady habit even if it wasn’t an honest passion.

When he walked in, Harry looked instinctively to the back row, to the third seat from the door. He wasn’t there. A black pall lifted from the room. Harry thought he might see Jamison anyway, an hour later, in his office, but now at least he might enjoy this last class meeting before the final exam. With a sudden respite, as it were, from ominous circumstances, Harry felt a rush of gladness fill his throat: glad to be teaching at a university, glad to teach a subject he loved, glad he had tried hard, for the most part, to be the best teacher he could. Midst a swelling optimism, Harry decided Jamison meant nothing by his threats, that he was just an overwrought perfectionist having a bad day. If Jamison came to his office again, he would probably apologize to Harry for the tantrum. Harry would accept the apology. He understood pride and ambition well enough. After all, these had been giant motivations in his own career, despite all the romantic opportunities that had presented themselves, quite unforeseeably, on his first entering the ranks of college teaching.

Harry stood behind a long table at the front of the room, surveying the class while removing a textbook and his grade book from the backpack. There was no denying it: The scenery this time of year was exquisite. From now until October most of the girls would be about half dressed: sandals, shorts, and assorted upper pieces often shrinking by summertime to beachwear. In their own way even the few grunge chicks, usually as pretty as normal girls, liked to show what they could, replacing boots with Birkenstocks, leather jackets with gaping smocks, and rolling up their dungarees or swapping them for ratty cutoffs barely clinging to a jutting pelvic bone. The grunge girls never made a play for Harry. Besides being old, he wasn’t wild enough. At his age he didn’t catch much serious attention from the straight ones either, even if he did look younger than his years. He still enjoyed looking, though; and there were always a few marginally normal ones out there who simply liked older men, or who tolerated old age because they saw other qualities they liked. Most classes had one or two such girls. This class appeared to have two.

Jennifer Mobley, a petite and pretty brunette, had sat front and center since day one. Her friend Lisa Randolph, a jovial blonde more cute than pretty, sat to Jennifer’s left. Both appeared to like Harry very much. Jennifer mostly just stared up at him, smiling sweetly. Lisa liked to ask questions and make funny remarks. She liked to ask Harry what he’d been doing, and she had a running joke with him about Shakespeare. Harry liked Lisa plenty, but he liked Jennifer better. Whenever he bantered with Lisa, he felt Jennifer’s dark eyes watching him. Her face drove Harry to distraction. But he was attracted to Lisa too. He would welcome time alone with either of them.

He leaned over the table, checking attendance, still relieved by Jamison’s absence. As he placed the lower-case “a” by Jamison’s name, Lisa spoke to him: “So what have you been doing?”

“I’ve been doing my best,” Harry said, glancing back and forth between the names in his grade book and the palpable presences, or absences, corresponding to them. “What have you been doing?”

“Oh, you know, I reread Shakespeare’s plays last night. I can’t get enough of him.”

“So what did you do the rest of the evening?”

“I wrote a couple of research papers.”

“For college credit, or just for fun?”

“For fun.” Harry grinned at Lisa, who grinned back. Then he looked at Jennifer, who was grinning too. He told the class to open their books to page 2420, to Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. Lisa said, “Can’t we just watch the video?” Two other students, both males, asked if the class could go outside. Harry remarked that these were excellent questions, and he promised satisfactory answers to them by final-exam time. Throughout his forty-minute lecture he made repeated eye contact with every student. Occasionally he glanced at the floor, at Jennifer Mobley’s white sandals. It was a good lecture, and a beautiful time of year. He let the class go two minutes before the bell.

“Choosing neighbours isn’t normally a proposition, Mrs. Rigby. In your situation, it’s pretty well impossible, you I being the existing resident,” the dapper, middle-aged Terence Snell explained with too much finality. Realising this, he compensated by adopting a look of profound concern — though frustration was what he was really feeling. “Naturally I’ll do everything I can to help you. But, really, my hands are tied,” he completed in the well-bred accent that was a little less contrived than the facial expression. Leaning forward over his desk in the manner of a benign clergyman, he brought his hands together in a prayerful kind of way.

As senior partner of Upshot and Snell, the larger of the two real-estate agencies in the thriving commuter village of Comer, Snell was always at pains to accommodate even the most eccentric wishes of the locals. He tried even harder with older locals, whose properties, in the natural order of things, were likely to come on the market sooner rather than later — whether at their owners’ instigation or that of their executors. And not to put a finer point on it, Phyllis Rigby was well over ninety.

“My late husband used to say that nothing is impossible until someone else has done it, Mr. Snell, by which time it’s too late,” the lady responded in a high, even voice, each consonant emerging with exquisite clarity.

The patrician Edith Rigby was a tall, slight, but prepossessing figure, still unbending, with a parched, weather-beaten face, alert, pale blue eyes, and steel-grey hair pulled back tightly into a bun that was presently sheltering under a narrow-brimmed, tip-tilted straw hat. The plucked eyebrows had been replaced with perfectly arched, auburn pencilling, and the thin mouth was just as clearly defined with bold red lipstick. She was wearing a calf-length, short-sleeved lilac silk dress with a pleated skirt, white cotton gloves, and court shoes to match. The dress was now hardly the height of fashion, but it had been three decades earlier when Mrs. Rigby had bought it — at Harrods.

“And your husband was right, Mrs. Rigby, as he so often was. What a brilliant man. And still sorely missed in the community.” Snell paused to allow the compliment to be savoured. “The success of this business confirms the very comment you’ve quoted,” he continued confidently, gazing with pride around his private office and absently smoothing a finger across his moustache, while still making up his mind how to cope with a delicate and, if he wasn’t careful, promisingly loss-making situation. “I’ve stopped counting the times we’ve been told by clients that we’ve achieved the impossible. But that’s why they retain us. To do what others can’t. Not surprisingly, we do twice the business of our competitors.”

“Indeed, Mr. Snell. Then I still fail to see why you can’t make sure that Richmount isn’t sold to a Japanese buyer. As I’ve said, if the opposite should happen, I’d never again be able to sleep in my bed at Foresters.”

In which case, dear lady, Snell mused silently, the best course would be for me to sell up for you, while you move to an expensive retirement home. His more realistic second thought was that if Mrs. Rigby was impelled to move, she’d hardly be likely to have him act for her if he’d been involved in the impelling. That was where the potential loss-making came in.

Richmount was the only property that shared a boundary with Foresters, Mrs. Rigby’s own house, which occupied a corner site on the internationally renowned Comer Golf Course Estate — one of the most exclusive residential areas in the English Home Counties.

Set high on its own sloping five acres, Richmount had just been expensively refurbished and enlarged, prior to its being offered for sale with vacant possession.

Mrs. Rigby’s Foresters was bounded by roads to the north and west, and by a woodland belt to the south. A smaller building than the neighbouring one, it occupied more land, but, in greater contrast, had been slowly decaying for the quarter of a century since the death of Mrs. Rigby’s spouse. When the place eventually changed hands, it would almost certainly be knocked down and rebuilt — but would fetch a handsome price all the same.

The estate agent gave a sickly smile intended to imply the reassurance he couldn’t offer in words. “As I said, we’ve had more than a dozen prospective buyers looking at Richmount, Mrs. Rigby. Naturally a number have been well-to-do people from abroad. Directors of foreign companies working in this country. Comer deservedly gets the pick of such people, of course, being so close to London...” He had intended adding more from his standard sales patter about the attractions of the golf, the frequent train service to London, the relative closeness of the M40 motorway, Heathrow Airport, Windsor, Ascot, and even Oxford, all of them attractive features to a foreign buyer — information Mrs. Rigby knew as well as he did, which was one of the reasons she interrupted him.

“I am not troubled with the numbers of possible buyers, Mr. Rigby. I am deeply concerned that Godlock, my gardener, saw a...” She took a long breath... “a Japanese couple going over the house yesterday.” Mrs. Rigby clutched harder at her white leather handbag, as though there was a sudden and immediate danger of its being snatched from her.

Snell moved uncomfortably in his chair. He knew Godlock, a lazy, gossipy fellow, who was long past retirement age and who spent more time leaning on garden implements than using them, a shortcoming evidenced by the state of the Foresters garden, or what could be seen of it down the overgrown, crumbling driveway. “I believe there was a Japanese couple there yesterday,” he offered with calculated vagueness. “Also some Russians, and, the day before, an American, as well as two lots of prospective buyers from Hong Kong...”

“Only the Japanese concern me, Mr. Snell,” the lady broke in again impatiently. “As neighbours of that... of that specific nationality would certainly concern you, if you and your wife had spent three and a half years in Malayan prison camps from nineteen forty-two to nineteen forty-five, as my husband and I did.”

“Of course, that must have been a... a harrowing experience for you both,” the estate agent offered solemnly.

“Harrowing, Mr. Snell? Harrowing?” Mrs. Rigby repeated in a rising, scandalised voice. “It was hell on earth. An experience you can’t begin to understand if you didn’t go through it. An experience I relive vividly every time I set eyes on... on one of those people.”

“But nowadays, surely, there are any number of Japanese members of the golf club, Mrs. Rigby?”

“Whom I never see because my trees shield the house and grounds from a view of the course. I presently go about very little, and I’ve long since given up my club membership,” the lady explained shortly, then continued: “It’s the prospect of having a Japanese family living next door that fills me with horror. Yes, horror, Mr. Snell. Understand that and you will understand why I am here.” A slight tremble went through her body before she added, in a more rational voice: “I am willing to pay you.”

There was a moment’s silence while Snell dismally reflected on a further disappointment. “You mean if I arrange for the house not to be sold to a Japanese?”

“Certainly. We can call it a consultant’s fee. In cash, if you wish. A private arrangement between us.” Mrs. Rigby had outlined the somewhat discreditable terms of her offer with an indifference implying that while they were alien to her own standards they probably met Snell’s well enough — assuming he possessed standards.

All of which might have constituted a licence for her listener to print money for himself. In fairness, he’d have had scruples about meeting Mrs. Rigby’s request, at least in quite the blatant form in which she had put it. But there might have been a creative way around that — if only she had come to him sooner.

He shook his head. “But what you suggest wouldn’t be ethical. I’d never do such a thing.” Making virtue out of necessity was also part of Snell’s stock in trade. But there was no joy in his mouthing what amounted to cant on this occasion.

If only he hadn’t promised the property developers who had entrusted him with the sale of Richmount that he could get such a high price for the house. It had been so outrageously high that, despite his bragging, countless viewers had either been frightened off by it or had made offers well below it. The only potential buyer the asking price hadn’t fazed was the one who had agreed to accept it the day before, and who had already had his deposit notarised, which legally secured him the property.

The buyer’s name was Isamu Nakashima.

“Mr. Bass tells me I can’t fire you,” said Elinor Sykes.

Callie Darrow cracked her gum. “You lead a hard life.” The older woman narrowed her eyes, visibly trying to figure out a way to handle this recalcitrant employee. “Why do you stay here? You don’t like the work.”

Callie shrugged. “It’s a living.”

“And a very good one. I’ve never known Mr. Bass to pay an entry-level salary as high as yours. But then, he isn’t the one who has to deal with you on a daily basis.”

Big grin. “A real hard life.”

“Oh, stop it!” Elinor snapped. “Do you think that’s clever? Acting like a smart-mouth adolescent? Grow up, Callie. You have a job to do here, and I’m trying to teach you how to do it.”

Callie snorted. I’m twenty-eight years old, I’ve done time, and I’ve outlived two husbands. What are you going to teach me? “Look, this was supposed to be Tom Ferguson’s case. I was assigned to him.”

“No, you were not assigned to a detective,” Mr. Bass’s assistant explained with a show of great patience. “You were assigned to a case. The case is now being handled by Kevin Craig. Report to him and get your instructions.”

“Kevin Craig is a moron.”

“Live with it,” Elinor said shortly. “If you do not report to Kevin right now, I’m going to inform Mr. Bass that he’s paying you for doing nothing. I don’t know what kind of bargain you two have, but I do know you’re not keeping your end of it. Well? Do I call him?” She reached for the phone on

“Hell.” Callie stood up quickly, trying to knock over her leather chair — but the damned thing was too heavy. “I’m going, I’m going. You got a real knack for blackmail, Elinor.” She snatched her backpack up off the floor.

“Thank you,” the other woman said coolly.

Callie would have liked to stomp noisily out of the office, but the thick carpet made that impossible; she did manage to slam the door, though. Elinor Sykes was only doing her job; Callie’s real enemy here was Mr. High-and-Mighty-Bow-to-Me Bass. Telling herself that didn’t help.

Besides which, she couldn’t stand Kevin Craig. He was the only one of the detectives at the Bass Agency she wanted to hold by the heels and dip into the Wolfe River. The rest of them were just people, none of them particularly interested in prying into her life. She almost never saw Mr. I-Am-God Bass. But now she was going to have to work with that nitwit Kevin Craig.

The door to his office was standing open. Kevin himself was seated at his desk, facing a semicircle of six chairs crowded close together, one of them empty. The other five were occupied by operatives, all men. The detective’s expensive suit and impeccable grooming made the operatives look shabby... which they weren’t, particularly. Kevin was only a few years older than Callie, but he liked to think of himself as a kewl dude who was more in the know than mere lowly operatives. Which he was, unfortunately. Sometimes.

Kevin looked up and saw her. “Ah, Callie, I’ve been waiting for you. Close the door, will you?” Not we’ve been waiting for you, she noticed, already in a bad mood.

Callie closed the door and made her way to the empty chair, careful to avoid any eye contact. She sat and stared at her sneakers, waiting to be told what her next job would be. The man to her left was breathing noisily; asthma, sounded like.

Kevin placed the palms of his hands flat against his desktop. “This is an important case, so I want you to pay careful attention to what I say.” All of Kevin’s cases were important, to hear him tell it.

“Tail job?” one of the men asked.

Callie looked up to see Kevin’s mouth twitch: annoyed at being interrupted. “An especially discreet tail job. Our client is Memotek Systems, and they’re convinced they have a smuggler working for them. Recently they developed a new computer chip that was supposed to put the Pentium to shame. But before they’d finished testing, a German firm came out with the same identical chip. Memotek lost the European market... much to their relief.” He waited for their reaction.

No one said a word.

“Why were they relieved, you ask?” the detective went on imperviously. “Because the chip had a flaw. Memotek’s testing procedures uncovered it just days before the German chip appeared on the market. So when the same chip shows up in Europe with the same flaw, the only possible explanation is that Memotek’s chip was pirated.”

“But now they’ve licked the problem,” one of the operatives said.

The detective glowered at him for stealing his punch line.

“The flaw has been corrected, yes. If Memotek can go into the European market with their superchip and show it works, they’ll put the German firm that stole from them out of business. If the new chip isn’t smuggled out as well.”

“Security at the plant?” someone asked. “Metal detectors?”

Instead of answering directly, Kevin opened the lap drawer of his desk and pulled out a black plastic container about the size of a jeweler’s ring box. He opened the container and showed them a microchip smaller around than the tip of a pencil eraser and no thicker than a piece of paper. “This is an early prototype. The finished version is even smaller, I’m told. You see the problem? You could put something that small inside any personal item made of metal and no security check would catch it. The latch of a briefcase, or the handle of a pocket knife. Anything.”

The man with asthma was nodding vigorously.

“So you’re going to have to be especially sharp-eyed on this job. A thing that small could be exchanged in a handshake.” The phone rang; Kevin answered by saying his name and listened. “Yes, she’s here... all right, yes.” He replaced the handset and smiled nastily at Callie. “Elinor Sykes, checking up on you. Have you been naughty, Callie?”

She went back to staring at her sneakers.

“Memotek’s CEO informed me,” Kevin continued importantly, “that only six people had access to the flawed chip at the time it must have been smuggled out. And those are the six you’re going to follow. You’re to stick with your subjects from the time they leave work until they’re tucked in for the night. Mr. Bass himself reorganized Memotek’s internal security for surveillance during working hours. Write down everything, even when they go to take a leak. I don’t want any of these half-assed reports with big gaps of unaccounted-for time. Is that understood?”

No one answered.

“I said, is that understood?”

One of the men cleared his throat. “I don’t think any of us here has ever turned in a report like that, Mr. Craig.”

“Well, make sure that you don’t!” Kevin jerked open a desk drawer and pulled out six large manila envelopes. “Read these before you leave. If there are any questions, ask them now.” He distributed the six envelopes.

Callie opened hers and looked at a picture of a smiling, open-faced man in his mid thirties. Hal Stanwyck.

“Oh, Callie,” Kevin purred, “your man likes to haunt the waterfront dives during his off-hours. That’s your special turf, isn’t it? Slums and sailors?”

She cracked her gum.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that. Callie, look at me.” She raised her head and stared directly at his right earlobe. “I don’t want you chewing gum in this office,” Kevin said, trying vainly to catch her eye, “and you could do with a little attitude-adjustment if you want to work for me.”

The other operatives were pretending not to hear. Callie smiled, keeping her eyes fixed on his earlobe. “I don’t mind not working for you.”

“You’ll do the job you were assigned to!” The earlobe trick was working; he was getting tetchy. From Kevin’s point of view, she was facing him and appeared to be looking directly at him... but wasn’t quite, somehow.

“Whatever you say, Kevin.” He liked being called Mr. Craig.

None of them had any questions about their jobs or the people they were to follow. “Then you’d better get started,” Kevin said. “Memotek’s workday ends at five, and you have to drive out to Gilchrist Road. Callie, check everybody out at the front desk, that’s a good girl.”

She glared at his earlobe. “Check ’em out yourself, that’s a good boy.”

Kevin sighed. “All these bad vibes today. Callie, I’m asking as a favor. Will you save us a little time and check everyone out? Please?”

Amazing what a little courtesy could do. “Okeydoke.”

The six operatives trooped out, the men heading toward the underground parking garage of the Atlantic Building while Callie stopped by the front desk. Behind the desk was a somewhat disturbing presence, a hunk named Julian Woolrich who always made her smile when she saw him.

“Hello, Callie,” he said softly, almost intimately. “I hoped you’d be stopping by today.”

“Oh? Any special reason?”

“I just like seeing you, that’s all.”

Right answer. Callie glanced over at the security guard also seated behind the semicircular desk: He was watching a bank of monitors and paying no attention to Callie and Julian. But she didn’t follow through on the opening, tempting though it was; even hunks had to be kept at a distance if they worked at this place. Callie told him what she and the other five operatives would be doing.

“Let me check these names.” Julian read them back to her from the list he’d made.

“Right. And none of us is to be called after five P.M. — be sure to make a note of that, will you?”

Julian dutifully wrote it down. “May I ask why?”

Callie blinked. “Because it’s kind of hard to tail a guy unnoticed when your cell phone keeps ringing.”

He nodded, made a further note. “Yes, I see. I believe someone mentioned that before.”

“And Julian, check us out every day at five until Kevin Craig or I tell you otherwise.”

“Got it. Checked out every day at five until further notice, and no phone calls.”

“No phone calls after five.”

“Ah... yes, after five. That’s while you’re actually on surveillance, right?”

“That’s right.” She smiled a regretful goodbye and headed toward the elevator. Gawjus man, Julian Woolrich, but a bit of a dim bulb.

The first thing Callie did in the parking garage was get rid of her gum. No need to keep up the unreachable-adolescent act here.