My father was a king and the son of kings. He was a short man, as most of us were, and built like a bull, all shoulders. He married my mother when she was fourteen and sworn by the priestess to be fruitful. It was a good match: she was an only child, and her father’s fortune would go to her husband.

He did not find out until the wedding that she was simple. Her father had been scrupulous about keeping her veiled until the ceremony, and my father had humored him. If she was ugly, there were always slave girls and serving boys. When at last they pulled off the veil, they say my mother smiled. That is how they knew she was quite stupid. Brides did not smile.

When I was delivered, a boy, he plucked me from her arms and handed me to a nurse. In pity, the midwife gave my mother a pillow to hold instead of me. My mother hugged it. She did not seem to notice a change had been made.

Quickly, I became a disappointment: small, slight. I was not fast. I was not strong. I could not sing. The best that could be said of me was that I was not sickly. The colds and cramps that seized my peers left me untouched. This only made my father suspicious. Was I a changeling, inhuman? He scowled at me, watching. My hand shook, feeling his gaze. And there was my mother, dribbling wine on herself.

I am five when it is my father’s turn to host the games. Men gather from as far as Thessaly and Sparta, and our storehouses grow rich with their gold. A hundred servants work for twenty days beating out the racing track and clearing it of stones. My father is determined to have the finest games of his generation.

I remember the runners best, nut-brown bodies slicked with oil, stretching on the track beneath the sun. They mix together, broad-shouldered husbands, beardless youths and boys, their calves all thickly carved with muscle.

The bull has been killed, sweating the last of its blood into dust and dark bronze bowls. It went quietly to its death, a good omen for the games to come.

The runners are gathered before the dais where my father and I sit, surrounded by prizes we will give to the winners. There are golden mixing bowls for wine, beaten bronze tripods, ash-wood spears tipped with precious iron. But the real prize is in my hands: a wreath of dusty-green leaves, freshly clipped, rubbed to a shine by my thumb. My father has given it to me grudgingly. He reassures himself: all I have to do is hold it.

The youngest boys are running first, and they wait, shuffling their feet in the sand for the nod from the priest. They’re in their first flush of growth, bones sharp and spindly, poking against taut skin. My eye catches on a light head among dozens of dark, tousled crowns. I lean forward to see. Hair lit like honey in the sun, and within it, glints of gold—the circlet of a prince.

He is shorter than the others, and still plump with childhood in a way they are not. His hair is long and tied back with leather; it burns against the dark, bare skin of his back. His face, when he turns, is serious as a man’s.

When the priest strikes the ground, he slips past the thickened bodies of the older boys. He moves easily, his heels flashing pink as licking tongues. He wins.

I stare as my father lifts the garland from my lap and crowns him; the leaves seem almost black against the brightness of his hair. His father, Peleus, comes to claim him, smiling and proud. Peleus’ kingdom is smaller than ours, but his wife is rumored to be a goddess, and his people love him. My own father watches with envy. His wife is stupid and his son too slow to race in even the youngest group. He turns to me.

“That is what a son should be.”

My hands feel empty without the garland. I watch King Peleus embrace his son. I see the boy toss the garland in the air and catch it again. He is laughing, and his face is bright with victory.

Beyond this, I remember little more than scattered images from my life then: my father frowning on his throne, a cunning toy horse I loved, my mother on the beach, her eyes turned towards the Aegean. In this last memory, I am skipping stones for her, plink, plink, plink, across the skin of the sea. She seems to like the way the ripples look, dispersing back to glass. Or perhaps it is the sea itself she likes. At her temple a starburst of white gleams like bone, the scar from the time her father hit her with the hilt of a sword. Her toes poke up from the sand where she has buried them, and I am careful not to disturb them as I search for rocks. I choose one and fling it out, glad to be good at this. It is the only memory I have of my mother and so golden that I am almost sure I have made it up. After all, it was unlikely for my father to have allowed us to be alone together, his simple son and simpler wife. And where are we? I do not recognize the beach, the view of coastline. So much has passed since then.

My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. People called me Sue. I know the year I was born in, but for many years I did not know the date, and took my birthday at Christmas. I believe I am an orphan. My mother I know is dead. But I never saw her, she was nothing to me. I was Mrs Sucksby’s child, if I was anyone’s; and for father I had Mr Ibbs, who kept the locksmith’s shop, at Lant Street, in the Borough, near to the Thames.

This is the first time I remember thinking about the world and my place in it.

There was a girl named Flora, who paid Mrs Sucksby a penny to take me begging at a play. People used to like to take me begging then, for the sake of my bright hair; and Flora being also very fair, she would pass me off as her sister. The theatre she took me to, on the night I am thinking of now, was the Surrey, St George’s Circus. The play was Oliver Twist. I remember it as very terrible. I remember the tilt of the gallery, and the drop to the pit. I remember a drunken woman catching at the ribbons of my dress. I remember the flares, that made the stage very lurid; and the roaring of the actors, the shrieking of the crowd. They had one of the characters in a red wig and whiskers: I was certain he was a monkey in a coat, he capered so. Worse still was the snarling, pink-eyed dog; worst of all was that dog’s master—Bill Sykes, the fancy-man. When he struck the poor girl Nancy with his club, the people all down our row got up. There was a boot thrown at the stage. A woman beside me cried out,

‘Oh, you beast! You villain! And her worth forty of a bully like you!’

I don’t know if it was the people getting up—which made the gallery seem to heave about; or the shrieking woman; or the sight of Nancy, lying perfectly pale and still at Bill Sykes’s feet; but I became gripped by an awful terror. I thought we should all be killed. I began to scream, and Flora could not quiet me. And when the woman who had called out put her arms to me and smiled, I screamed out louder. Then Flora began to weep—she was only twelve or thirteen, I suppose. She took me home, and Mrs Sucksby slapped her.

‘What was you thinking of, taking her to such a thing?’ she said.

‘You was to sit with her upon the steps. I don’t hire my infants out to have them brought back like this, turned blue with screaming. What was you playing at?’

She took me upon her lap, and I wept again. ‘There now, my lamb,’ she said. Flora stood before her, saying nothing, pulling a strand of hair across her scarlet cheek. Mrs Sucksby was a devil with her dander up. She looked at Flora and tapped her slippered foot upon the rug, all the time rocking in her chair—that was a great creaking wooden chair, that no-one sat in save her—and beating her thick, hard hand upon my shaking back. Then, ‘I know your little rig,’ she said quietly. She knew everybody’s rig.

‘What you get? A couple of wipers, was it? A couple of wipers, and a lady’s purse?’

Flora pulled the strand of hair to her mouth, and bit it. ‘A purse,’ she said, after a second. ‘And a bottle of scent.’

‘Show,’ said Mrs Sucksby, holding out her hand. Flora’s face grew darker. But she put her fingers to a tear at the waist of her skirt, and reached inside it; and you might imagine my surprise when the tear
turned out to be not a tear at all, but the neck of a little silk pocket that was sewn inside her gown. She brought out a black cloth bag, and a bottle with a stopper on a silver chain. The bag had threepence in it, and half a nutmeg. Perhaps she got it from the drunken woman who plucked at my dress. The bottle, with its stopper off, smelt of roses. Mrs Sucksby sniffed.

‘Pretty poor poke,’ she said, ‘ain’t it?’

Flora tossed her head. ‘I should have had more,’ she said, with a look at me, ‘if she hadn’t started up with the sterics.’

Mrs Sucksby leaned and hit her again.

‘If I had known what you was about,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t have had none of it at all. Let me tell you this now: you want an infant for prigging with, you take one of my other babies. You don’t take Sue. Yo you hear me?’

Flora sulked, but said she did. Mrs Sucksby said, ‘Good. Now hook it. And leave that poke behind you, else I shall tell your mother you’ve been going with gentlemen.’

Then she took me to her bed—first, rubbing at the sheets with her hands, to warm them; then stooping to breathe upon my fingers, to warm me. I was the only one, of all her infants, she would do that for. She said, ‘You ain’t afraid now, Sue?’

But I was, and said so. I said I was afraid the fancy-man would find me out and hit me with his stick. She said she had heard of that particular fancy-man: he was all bounce. She said,

‘It was Bill Sykes, wasn’t it? Why, he’s a Clerkenwell man. He don’t trouble with the Borough. The Borough boys are too hard for him.’

I said, ‘But, oh, Mrs Sucksby! You never saw the poor girl Nancy, and how he knocked her down and murdered her!’

‘Murdered her?’ she said then. ‘Nancy? Why, I had her here an hour ago. She was only beat a bit about the face. She has her hair curled different now, you wouldn’t know he ever laid his hand upon her.’

I said, ‘Won’t he beat her again, though?’

She told me then that Nancy had come to her senses at last, and left Bill Sykes entirely; that she had met a nice chap from Wapping, who had set her up in a little shop selling sugar mice and tobacco.
She lifted my hair from about my neck and smoothed it across the pillow. My hair, as I have said, was very fair then—though it grew plain brown, as I got older—and Mrs Sucksby used to wash it with vinegar and comb it till it sparked. Now she smoothed it flat, then lifted a tress of it and touched it to her lips. She said, ‘That Flora tries to take you on the prig again, you tell me—will you?’

I said I would. ‘Good girl,’ she said. Then she went. She took her candle with her, but the door she left half-open, and the cloth at the window was of lace and let the street-lamps show. It was never quite dark there, and never quite still. On the floor above were a couple of rooms where girls and boys would now and then come to stay: they laughed and thumped about, dropped coins, and sometimes danced. Beyond the wall lay Mr Ibbs’s sister, who was kept to her bed: she often woke with the horrors on her, shrieking. And all about the house—laid top-to-toe in cradles, like sprats in boxes of salt—were Mrs Sucksby’s infants. They might start up whimpering or weeping any hour of the night, any little thing might set them off. Then Mrs Sucksby would go among them, dosing them from a bottle of gin, with a little silver spoon you could hear chink against the glass.

On this night, though, I think the rooms upstairs must have been empty, and Mr Ibbs’s sister stayed quiet; and perhaps because of the quiet, the babies kept asleep. Being used to the noise, I lay awake. I lay and thought again of cruel Bill Sykes; and of Nancy,dead at his feet. From some house nearby there sounded a man’s voice, cursing. Then a church bell struck the hour—the chimes came queerly across the windy streets. I wondered if Flora’s slapped cheek still hurt her. I wondered how near to the Borough was Clerkenwell; and how quick the way would seem, to a man with a stick.

I had a warm imagination, even then. When there came footsteps in Lant Street, that stopped outside the window; and when the foot- steps were followed by the whining of a dog, the scratching of the dog’s claws, the careful turning of the handle of our shop door, I started up off my pillow and might have screamed—except that before I could the dog gave a bark, and the bark had a catch to it, that I thought I knew: it was not the pink-eyed monster from the theatre, but our own dog, Jack. He could fight like a brick. Then there came a whistle. Bill Sykes never whistled so sweet. The lips were Mr Ibbs’s. He had been out for a hot meat pudding for his and Mrs Sucksby’s supper.

‘All right?’ I heard him say. ‘Smell the gravy on this…’

Then his voice became a murmur, and I fell back. I should say I was five or six years old. I remember it clear as anything, though. I remember lying, and hearing the sound of knives and forks and china, Mrs Sucksby’s sighs, the creaking of her chair, the beat of her slipper on the floor. And I remember seeing—what I had never seen before—how the world was made up: that it had bad Bill Sykeses in it, and good Mr Ibbses; and Nancys, that might go either way. I thought how glad I was that I was already on the side that Nancy got to at last.—I mean, the good side, with sugar mice in.

It was only many years later, when I saw Oliver Twist a second time, that I understood that Nancy of course got murdered after all. By then, Flora was quite the fingersmith: the Surrey was nothing to her, she was working the West End theatres and halls—she could go through the crowds like salts. She never took me with her again, though. She was like everyone, too scared of Mrs Sucksby. She was caught at last, poor thing, with her hands on a lady’s bracelet; and was sent for transportation as a thief.

We were all more or less thieves, at Lant Street. But we were that kind of thief that rather eased the dodgy deed along, than did it.

I moved away, along the ward. The woman’s thin petitions, the matron’s scolds, were made sharp and strange by the acoustics of the gaol; every prisoner I passed had raised her head to catch them—though, when they saw me in the ward beyond their gates, they lowered their gazes and returned to their sewing. Their eyes, I thought, were terribly dull. Their faces were pale, and their necks, and their wrists and fingers, very slender. I thought of Mr Shillitoe saying that a prisoner’s heart was weak, impressionable, and needed a finer mould to shape it. I thought of it, and became aware again of my own heart beating. I imagined how it would be to have that heart drawn from me, and one of those women’s coarse organs pressed into the slippery cavity left at my breast…

I put my hand to my throat then and felt, before my pulsing heart, my locket; and then my step grew a little slower. I walked until I reached the arch that marked the angle of the ward, then moved a little way beyond it—just far enough to put the matrons from my view, but not enough to take me down the second passage. Here I put my back to the limewashed prison wall, and I waited.

And here, after a moment, came a curious thing.

I was close to the mouth of the first of the next line of cells; near to my shoulder was its inspection flap or ‘eye’, above that the enamel tablet bearing the details of its inmate’s sentence. It was only from this, indeed, that I knew the cell was occupied at all, for there seemed to emanate from it a marvellous stillness—a silence, that seemed deeper yet than all the restless Millbank hush surrounding it. Even as I began to wonder over it, however, the silence was broken. It was broken by a sigh, a single sigh—it seemed to me, a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story; and the sigh being such a complement to my ownmood I found it worked upon me, in that setting, rather strangely. I forgot Miss Ridley and Mrs Jelf, who might at any second come to guide me on my way. I forgot the tale of the incautious matron and the sharpened spoon. I put my fingers to the inspection slit, and then my eyes. And then I gazed at the girl in the cell beyond—she was so still, I think I held my breath for fear of startling her.

She was seated upon her wooden chair, but had let her head fall back and had her eyes quite closed. Her knitting lay idle in her lap, and her hands were together and lightly clasped; the yellow glass at her window was bright with sun, and she had turned her face to catch the heat of it. On the sleeve of her mud-coloured gown was fixed, the emblem of her prison class, a star—a star of felt, cut slant, sewn crooked, but made sharp by the sunlight. Her hair, where it showed at the edges of her cap, was fair; her cheek was pale, the sweep of brow, of lip, of lashes crisp against her pallor. I was sure that I had seen her likeness, in a saint or an angel in a painting of Crivelli’s.

I studied her for, perhaps, a minute; and all that time she kept her eyes quite closed, her head perfectly still. There seemed something rather devotional about her pose, the stillness, so that I thought at last, She is praying!, and made to draw my eyes away in sudden shame. But then she stirred. Her hands opened, she raised them to her cheek, and I caught a flash of colour against the pink of her work-roughened palms. She had a flower there, between her fingers—a violet, with a drooping stem. As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow…

She did that, and I became aware of the dimness of the world that was about her—of the wards, the women in them, the matrons, even my own self. We might have been painted, all of us, from the same poor box of watery tints; and here was a single spot of colour, that seemed to have come upon the canvas by mistake.

But I didn’t wonder, then, about how a violet might, in that grim-earthed place, have found its way into those pale hands. I only thought, suddenly and horribly, What can her crime have been? Then I remembered the enamel tablet swinging near my head. I let the inspection close, quite noiselessly, and moved to read it.

There was her prison number and her class, and beneath them her offence: Fraud & Assault. The date of her reception was eleven months ago. The date of her release was for four years hence.

Four years! Four Millbank years—which must, I think, be terribly slow ones. I meant to move to her gate then, to call her to me and have her story from her; and I would have done it, had there not come at that moment, from further back along the first passage, the sound of Miss Ridley’s voice, and then of her boots, grinding the sand upon the cold flags of the ward. And that made me hesitate. I thought, How
would it be, if the matrons were to look at the girl as I had, and find that flower upon her? I was sure they would take it, and I knew I should be sorry if they did. So I stepped to where they would see me, and when they came I said—it was the truth, after all—that I was weary, and had viewed all I cared to view for my first visit. Miss Ridley said only, ‘Just as you wish, ma’am.’ She turned on her heel and took me back along the passage; and as the gate was shut upon me I looked once over my shoulder to the turning of the ward, and felt a curious feeling—half satisfaction, half sharp regret. And I thought: Well, she will still be here, poor creature! when I return next week.

The matron led me into the tower staircase, and we began our careful, circling descent to the lower, drearier wards—I felt like Dante, following Virgil into Hell. I was passed over first to Miss Manning, then to a warder, and was taken back through Pentagons Two and One; I sent a message in to Mr Shillitoe, and was led out of the inner gate and along that wedge of gravel. The walls of the pentagons seemed to part before me now, but grudgingly. The sun, that was stronger, made the bruise-coloured shadows very dense.

We walked, the warder and I, and I found myself gazing again at the bleak prison ground, with its bare black earth and its patches of sedge. I said, ‘There are no flowers grown here, warder? No daisies, no—violets?’

No daisies, no violets, he answered; not even so much as a dandelion clock. They would not grow in Millbank soil, he said. It is too near the Thames, and ‘as good as marshland’.

At the corner of Adelaide Road, where the paving sparkled in the morning sun, Mr. Mack waited by the newspaper stand. A grand day it was, rare and fine. Puff-clouds sailed through a sky of blue. Fair-weather cumulus to give the correct designation: on account they cumulate, so Mr. Mack believed. High above the houses a seagull glinted, gliding on a breeze that carried from the sea. Wait now, was it cumulate or accumulate he meant? The breeze sniffed of salt and tide. Make a donkey of yourself, inwardly he cautioned, using words you don’t know their meaning. And where’s this paper chappie after getting to?

In delicate clutch an Irish Times he held. A thruppenny piece, waiting to pay, rolled in his fingers. Every so often his hand queried his elbow — Parcel safe? Under me arm, his hand-pat assured him.

Glasthule, homy old parish, on the lip of Dublin Bay. You could see the bay, a wedge of it, between the walls of a lane, with Howth lying out beyond. The bay was blue as the sky, a tinge deeper, and curiously raised-looking when viewed dead on. The way the sea would be sloping to the land. If this paper chappie don’t show up quick, bang goes his sale. Cheek of him leaving customers wait in the street.

A happy dosser was nosing along the lane and Mr. Mack watched with lenient disdain. Any old bone. Lick of something out of a can. Dog’s life really. When he came to the street Mr. Mack touched a finger to his hat, but the happy dosser paid him no regard. He slouched along and Mr. Mack saw it puddling after, something he had spilt in the road, his wasted civility. Lips pursed with comment, he pulled, squeezing, one droop of his bush mustache.

“Oh hello, Mrs. Conway, grand day it is, grand to be sure, tip-top and yourself keeping dandy?”

Nice class of lady, left foot, but without the airs. Saw me waiting with an Irish Times, twice the price of any other paper. They remark such things, the quality do. Glory be, I hope she didn’t think — his Irish Timesdropped by his side — Would she ever have mistook me for the paperman, do you think?

Pages fluttered on the newspaper piles, newsboards creaked in the breeze. Out-of-the-way spot for a paper stand. Had supposed to be above by the railway station. But this thoolamawn has it currently, what does he do only creeps it down, little by little, till now he has it smack outside of Fennelly’s —

Mr. Mack swivelled on his heels. Fennelly’s public house. The corner doors were propped wide where the boy was mopping the steps. Late in the morning to be still at his steps. The gloom inside gave out a hum of amusement, low mouths of male companionship, gathered by the amber glow of the bar. Mr. Mack said Aha! with his eyes. He thrust his head inside the door, waved his paper in the dark. “‘Scuse now, gents.” He hadn’t his hat back on his head before a roar of hilarity, erupting at the bar, hunted him away, likely to shove him back out in the street.

Well, by the holy. He gave a hard nod to the young bucko leaning on his mop and grinning. What was that about?

Presently, a jerky streak of anatomy distinguished itself in the door, coughing and spluttering while it came, and shielding its eyes from the sun. “Is it yourself, Sergeant?”

“Hello now, Mr. Doyle,” said Mr. Mack.

“Quartermaster-Sergeant Mack, how are you, how’s every hair’s breadth of you, what cheer to see you so spry.” A spit preceded him to the pavement. “You weren’t kept waiting at all?” This rather in rebuttal than inquiry. “Only I was inside getting of bronze for silver. Paper is it?”

The hades you were, thought Mr. Mack, and the smell of drink something atrocious. “Fennelly has a crowd in,” he remarked, “for the hour.”

“Bagmen,” the paperman replied. “Go-boys on the make out of Dublin. And a miselier mischaritable unChristianer crew — “

Ho ho ho, thought Mr. Mack. On the cadge, if I know my man. Them boys inside was too nimble for him.

“Would you believe, Sergeant, they’d mock a man for the paper he’d read?”

“What’s this now?” said Mr. Mack.

The paperman chucked his head. “God be their judge and a bitter one, say I. And your good self known for a decent skin with no more side than a margarine.”

Mr. Mack could not engage but a rise was being took out of him. The paperman made play of settling his papers, huffling and humphing in that irritating consumptive way. He made play of banging his chest for air. He spat, coughing with the spittle, a powdery disgruntled cough — “Choky today,” said he — and Mr. Mack viewed the spittle-drenched sheet he now held in his hand. This fellow, the curse of an old comrade, try anything to vex me.

“I’m after picking up,” choosily he said, “an Irish Times, only I read here — “

“An Irish Times, Sergeant? Carry me out and bury me decent, so you have and all. Aren’t you swell away with the high-jinkers there?”

Mr. Mack plumped his face and a laugh, like a fruit, dropped from his mouth. “I wouldn’t know about any high-jinkers,” he confided. “Only I read here ’tis twice the price of any other paper. Twice the price,” he repeated, shaking his cautious head. A carillon of coins chinkled in his pocket. “I don’t know now can the expense be justified.”

“Take a risk of it, Sergeant, and damn the begrudgers.” The paperman leant privily forward. “A gent on the up, likes of yourself, isn’t it worth it alone for the shocks and stares?”

Narrowly Mr. Mack considered his man. A fling or a fox-paw, he couldn’t be certain sure. He clipped his coin on the paper-stack. “Penny, I believe,” he said.

“Thruppence,” returned Mr. Doyle. “Balance two dee to the General.”

Mr. Mack talked small while he waited for his change. “Grand stretch of weather we’re having.”

“‘Tisn’t the worst.”

“Grand I thought for the time of year.”

“Thanks be to God.”

“Oh thanks be to God entirely.”

Mr. Mack’s face faltered. Had ought to get my thanks in first. This fellow, not a mag to bless himself with, doing me down always. He watched him shambling through the pockets of his coat. And if it was change he was after in Fennelly’s it was devilish cunning change for never the jingle of a coin let out. A smile fixed on Mr. Mack’s face. Barking up the wrong tree with me, my merry old sweat. Two dee owed.

At last the paperman had the change found. Two lusterless pennies, he held them out, the old sort, with the old Queen’s hair in a bun. Mr. Mack was on the blow of plucking them in his fingers when the paperman coughed — “Squeeze me” — coughed into his — “Squeeze me peas, Sergeant” — coughed into his sleeve. Not what you’d call coughing but hacking down the tracts of his throat to catch some breath had gone missing there. His virulence spattered the air between, and Mr. Mack thought how true what they say, take your life in your hands every breath you breathe.

He cleared his own throat and said, “I trust I find you well?”

“Amn’t I standing, God be praised?” With a flump then he was down on the butter-box he kept for a seat.

Bulbous, pinkish, bush-mustached, Mr. Mack’s face lowered. He’d heard it mentioned right enough, that old Doyle, he was none too gaudy this weather. Never had thought to find him this far gone. That box wouldn’t know of him sitting on it. He looked down on the dull face, dull as any old copper, with the eyes behind that looked chancy back. Another fit came on, wretched to watch, like something physical had shook hold the man; and Mr. Mack reached his hand to his shoulder.

“Are you all right there, Mick?”

“Be right in a minute, Arthur. Catch me breath is all.”

Mr. Mack gave a squeeze of his hand, feeling the bones beneath. “Will I inquire in Fennelly’s after a drop of water?”

“I wouldn’t want to be bothering Fennelly for water, though.”

Them chancy old eyes. Once upon a time them eyes had danced. Bang goes sixpence, thought Mr. Mack, though it was a shilling piece he pulled out of his pocket. “Will you do yourself a favor, Mick, and get something decent for your dinner.”

“Take that away,” Mr. Doyle rebuked him. “I have my pride yet. I won’t take pity.”

“Now where’s the pity in a bob, for God’s sake?”

“I fought for Queen and Country. There’s no man will deny it.”

“There’s no man wants to deny it.”

“Twenty-five years with the Colors. I done me bit. I went me pound, God knows if I didn’t.”

Here we go, thought Mr. Mack.

“I stood me ground. I stood to them Bojers and all.”

Here we go again.

“Admitted you wasn’t there. Admitted you was home on the boat to Ireland. But you’ll grant me this for an old soldier. That Fusilier Doyle, he done his bit. He stood up to them Bojers, he did.”

“You did of course. You’re a good Old Tough, ’tis known in the parish.”

“Begod and I’d do it over was I let. God’s oath on that. We’d know the better of Germany then.” He kicked his boot against the newsboard, which told, unusually and misfortunately for his purpose, not of the war at all but of beer and whiskey news, the threat and fear of a hike in the excise. “I’d soon put manners on those Kaiser lads.”

“No better man,” Mr. Mack conceded. Mr. Doyle tossed his head, the way his point, being gained, he found it worthless for a gain. Mr. Mack had to squeeze the shilling bit into his hand. “You’ll have a lotion on me whatever,” he said, confidentially urging the matter.

The makings of a smile lurked across the paperman’s face. “There was a day, Arthur, and you was pal o’ me heart,” said he, “me fond segotia.” The silver got pocketed. “May your hand be stretched in friendship, Sergeant, and never your neck.”

Charity done with and the price of a skite secured, they might risk a reasonable natter. “Tell us,” said Mr. Mack, “is it true what happened the young fellow was here on this patch?”

“Sure carted away. The peelers nabbed him.”

“A recruitment poster I heard.”

“Above on the post office windows. Had it torn away.”

“Shocking,” said Mr. Mack. “Didn’t he know that’s a serious offense?”

“Be sure he’ll know now,” said Mr. Doyle. “Two-monthser he’ll get out of that. Hard.”

“And to look at him he only a child.”

“Sure mild as ever on porridge smiled. Shocking.”

Though Mr. Mack could not engage it was the offense was referred to and not the deserts. “Still, you’ve a good few weeks got out of this work.”

“They’ll have the replacement found soon enough.”

“You stuck it this long, they might see their way to making you permanent.”

“Not so, Sergeant. And the breath only in and out of me.” An obliging little hack found its way up his throat. “There’s only the one place I’ll be permanent now. I won’t be long getting there neither.”

But Mr. Mack had heard sufficient of that song. “Sure we’re none of us getting any the rosier.” The parcel shifted under his arm and, the direction coming by chance into view, Mr. Doyle’s eyes squinted, then saucered, then slyly he opined,

“Knitting.”

“Stockings,” Mr. Mack elaborated. “I’m only on my way to Ballygihen. Something for Madame MacMurrough and the Comforts Fund.”

“Didn’t I say you was up with the high-jinkers? Give ’em socks there, Sergeant, give ’em socks.”

Mr. Mack received this recommendation with the soldierly good humor with which it was intended. He tipped his hat and the game old tough saluted.

“Good luck to the General.”

“Take care now, Mr. Doyle.”

Baker is wearing her least favorite pair of knee socks. Hannah can tell even from here—even from halfway up the bleachers, where she stands between Wally and Luke and looks down to where Baker stands in the center of the gym floor—because Baker keeps reaching down when she thinks no one is looking and tugging her knee socks up her calves. Hannah knows that Baker must have woken up this morning and realized that none of her good pairs of knee socks were clean—perhaps they were still in her laundry basket, untouched since before Christmas break—and that she must have dug into her sock drawer, her nimble fingers brushing against the cherry wood, and pulled out the old cotton pair, the ones she swore back in 9^th grade that she would never wear again because they were always falling down.  

            “They’d better hurry up,” Wally says, glancing at his wristwatch. “It’s 2:17 already.”

            “It’s Friday, Wall,” Hannah says. “No one’s gonna care if we have to stay an extra minute.” She scans the gym and spots their ill tempered vice principal brooding beneath one of the basketball hoops. “Except maybe Manceau. He looks like he’s gonna faint if he doesn’t get his end-of-the-day sticky bun soon.”

            “I feel him, for once,” Luke says. “I’m starving and I want a burrito.”

            Hannah’s about to respond when a deafening buzzing sound swells outward into the gym. Students all around the bleachers jerk their hands up to their ears. Then there’s the distant sound of a microphone falling over, and Hannah, clutching her ears, sees Mr. Gauthier, the half-blind old technical director, raising his palms in apology. Several feet away from him, Mrs. Shackleford, the principal, rolls her eyes up into her head.

            “Think they finally got it?” Hannah says.

            “Mr. Gauthier looks confused,” Wally says.

            “He looks the same as ever,” Luke says. “Like he’s high and doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Gotta love old Goach.”

            “—say something to test it?” a clear voice says through the speakers, and they all swing their eyes to Baker, who stands at the half court line holding a cordless microphone in her hand. “Oh,” she says, half-laughing at herself, her earnest expression visible even from the bleachers. “I guess it’s working now—”

            “’Bout time!” one of the football players in the lower bleachers yells. From where Hannah stands, it sounds like Clay.

            Baker laughs along with the rest of the gym. She runs a hand through her hair, her smile relaxed and unguarded like it is when she tells Hannah stories late at night. “Hi, y’all,” she says.

            “Hi,” the hundreds of students laugh.

            “Thanks, Mr. Gauthier,” Baker says, with no trace of irony in her voice. “Okay—so should we have this pep rally?”

            The student body breaks into whooping and applause. It starts in Hannah’s section, with the senior class, and moves all around the gym as the juniors, sophomores, and freshmen echo their older peers. “Yeah!” Luke shouts amidst all the cheering. “Bring on the burritos!”

            Several of the seniors on the bleachers below them turn around with quizzical smiles on their faces, but Luke just grins and pumps his hands in the air, making everyone around them laugh.

            “Before we start,” Baker says, and at her words, the gym falls quiet again, “Father Simon is going to lead us in prayer.”

            The energy in the gym turns restless and agitated. Boys crack their necks; girls pull their shirtsleeves over their wrists. Father Simon steps toward the microphone, his neck straining against his white clerical collar.

            “Kill me now,” Hannah says under her breath. The seniors all around her shoot her conspiratorial smirks.

“Let us bow our heads and pray,” Father Simon says. The mass of freshmen to Hannah’s left obeys his order, their skinny, acne-heavy faces tilted toward the bleachers. Across the gym, most of the sophomores and juniors follow suit. It is only here, in the senior section, that Hannah senses resistance. The anxious resistance of young adults, of people caught between the crayon drawings of Sunday school and the cognitive dissonance of grown-up theology.

“Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day…”

Hannah doesn’t listen to him. She lets her mind wander as she picks at the chipped green nail polish on her thumb. Next to her, Wally scratches at his forearm, his calloused knuckles hinting at too many nights spent wrestling with his little brothers.

Hannah’s mind slips back to the pep rally they had in August, when everyone had fresh haircuts and neatly pressed skirts and slacks, and when she, Baker, Wally, Clay, and Luke had organized a surprise skit for the student body in which their teachers had dressed up as the more memorable students in the senior class. She can still see Mr. Akers’ impression of Clay’s cocky strut, can still hear Mrs. Paulk’s attempt at Baker’s laugh, can still remember the thrill she felt when Ms. Carpenter—her favorite teacher—adopted Hannah’s own mannerisms and spoke with her phrases.

“…We thank you for our athletes, these young men who will represent our school tonight and who will seek to glorify You with their performance,” Father Simon says. “We know You have endowed them with a special gift—”

“Hagh,” Luke says, shaking his head. “Jeeze. Sorry, everyone. Got a little cough here.”

The seniors all around them snicker and brush their hands over their mouths. Hannah tries in vain to stop her shoulders from shaking with laughter.

“…In Your name we pray. Amen.”

“Amen,” Hannah mutters, tossing the word into the great rush of “Amen” that sweeps across the gym. She raises her hand to her forehead to make the same Sign of the Cross that everyone else is making, the words and actions ingrained in her brain, her movements mirroring those of every other person in the gym.

“Thanks, Father Simon,” Baker says, taking the microphone back. She pivots toward the senior class and her mouth twitches with a smile, like she can read their discomfort all too plainly. “Alright,” she says. “So. Does anyone want me to bring out our St. Mary’s football team?”

            The energy in the gym changes instantly: the crowd erupts, the band launches into the school fight song, and the center of the gym is flooded with color as the football players, decked out in their blood red St. Mary’s jerseys, spill onto the gym floor and throw up their hands at the crowd around them.

“Don’t you just love when we hero-worship our own classmates?” Luke says.

“You know, I actually do,” Hannah says. “I’ll probably ask Clay for his autograph after this.”

“He’ll think you’re serious,” Wally laughs.

             Baker holds the microphone low in her right hand and cranes her neck to talk to some of the football players. The rest of the student body, watching from the bleachers, continues to shout and stomp and cheer, until Mrs. Shackleford pats her hands over the air to indicate that she wants quiet. The gym falls into a relaxed silence, and Baker redirects her attention to the student body, biting her lip as she transitions from a smile to a serious face.

            “Tonight’s expo game will be a crucial event in the race for the Diocesan Cup,” she says. “We’re already leading the pack with community service hours and our Adoration log, but winning this football game will really put us over the top. And I think the leaders of this diocese know exactly what they’re doing in pitting us against Mount Sinai, because there is no better rivalry in Baton Rouge. So tonight, let’s set ourselves up for a Diocesan Cup victory and ensure that the St. Mary’s legacy continues to grow stronger.

            “Those of us who are seniors—” she pauses to wait for the inevitable hollering from the senior class—“first set foot on this campus three and a half years ago, back when the football team had an overall losing record, most of us still had braces, and Clay Landry was about four-foot-seven.”

There’s a great outburst of laughter, particularly from the senior class section of the gym. Clay, who stands at the front of the football team, laughs good-naturedly while several guys hit his arm.

“All of that has changed now,” Baker says.  “We had an overall winning record this past fall, all of our seniors are braces-free and beautiful, and Clay now stands at—what are you, four-foot-eight?”

Everyone laughs again, as does Clay, his smile huge and bright. “Pretty close,” he calls to Baker.

Baker’s smile stretches up to her eyes. She tips the microphone away from herself and lets out a series of short, repeated laughs, the kind that always overtake her when she’s trying not to find something funny. She casts a look behind her before speaking into the microphone again. “Sorry,” she laughs. “Mrs. Shackleford wanted me to use that joke—Sorry! Sorry! Anyway. We beat Mount Sinai back in the fall, and tonight we’re going to beat them again, right here in our own stadium, with the whole diocese watching. We’re going to show them what it means to be a St. Mary’s player, student, fan, and believer, and what it means to be the very best school in this diocese. So, before I turn the mic over to Clay, I just want to say: Geaux Tigers!”

And again, the crowd of students roars, stomps, and throws their hands in the air. Some of the girls near Hannah are practically shrieking. The teachers sitting along the first row of bleachers on the other side of the gym shake their heads and laugh, and Mr. Gauthier actually pulls his hearing aids out of his ear. Ms. Carpenter claps her hands and leans over to say something to Mrs. Shackleford, and they both laugh. 

The noise dies down as Baker beckons Clay over to the microphone. He hugs her and whispers something into her ear, earning a smile from her, and then he takes the microphone and pivots his body so he can address the entire gym.

“Our student body president, everyone,” he says in his deep, rumbling voice. “Hey, y’all know it’s her birthday today, right?”

Suddenly the whole gym swells with an impossible level of cheering and shouting. Baker smiles big and tugs on her earring, tilting her head to the floor. Clay lowers the microphone and turns back to look at the football team, holding his fingers in the air—3-2-1—and then the team begins to sing Happy Birthday. Within a half-second, the whole school is singing with them.

Hannah sings quietly under her breath, keeping her eyes on Baker the whole time, watching her tuck her hair back behind her ear. Toward the end of the song, Baker raises her eyes to the bleachers. She meets Hannah’s eyes, and Hannah waggles her eyebrows and grins as big as she can, and Baker shakes her head and fights a smile just as the song ends.

It’s a standard pep rally after that. Clay pumps up the crowd until the cheering around the gym is so amplified and everyone’s emotions are so heightened that Hannah feels almost delirious with excitement. Luke starts to crow where he stands, his eyes wide and his cheeks flushed, and then he sets his hands on Hannah’s shoulders and shakes her back and forth until Wally leans forward and jabs him in the stomach to make him stop.

“Dude!” Luke rasps.

“You deserved that,” Hannah laughs, shoving Luke’s shoulder.

“Joanie would have hit you harder,” Wally says, hiking his eyebrows high above the rims of his glasses.

Luke pulls up his t-shirt in a fit of mania so that the red Tiger Spirit! imprint catches around his armpits and his white undershirt is on full display to everyone across the gym. He makes to take the shirt all the way off, but Hannah elbows him and points down at Mr. Manceau, whose small, beady eyes are glaring daggers at Luke from beneath the basketball hoop.

“Alright, alright,” Luke says, pulling his shirt down and holding his palms up in surrender.

The cheerleaders take to the floor to lead everyone in organized cheers while the band plays the fight song again. Clay holds the microphone in his left hand and grins out at the display like it’s entirely for him. The band reaches the end of the fight song, allows for a minute-long intermission, and then plays the fight song all over again.

The pep rally ends when the costumed school mascot—a yellow tiger sporting a red St. Mary’s shirt, and whom the administration officially refers to as “Mr. Tiger” but whom the entire student body calls “Hot Little Mary”—bursts onto the center of the gym floor and dances to the fourth repeat of the fight song. The gym goes crazy with cheers and shouts to the costumed tiger, and the noise level peaks so high that Hannah’s ears ache.

Then the music abruptly stops, and the cheerleaders and football players and students look around for the source of the disruption. Mrs. Shackleford stands on the court sidelines, slicing her hands back and forth over the air in an Enough kind of gesture, and then she walks to the center of the gym and takes the microphone from Clay.

“What are y’all on today?” she says. “Save some of this energy for the game tonight! Let’s all bid farewell to Mr. Tiger, and then we’ll start dismissal with the freshmen.”

“Bye, Hot Little Mary!” “We love you, Hot Little Mary!” “Get it, Hot Little Mary!” the students around the gym shout, and Mrs. Shackleford frowns at the bleachers, her mouth pulled tight in disapproval.

ONE SUMMER NIGHT I FELL ASLEEP, HOPING THE WORLD would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same. I threw off the sheets and lay there as the heat poured in through my open window.

My hand reached for the dial on the radio. “Alone” was playing. Crap, “Alone,” a song by a group called Heart. Not my favorite song. Not my favorite group. Not my favorite topic. “You don’t know how long . . .”

I was fifteen.

I was bored.

I was miserable.

As far as I was concerned, the sun could have melted the blue right off the sky. Then the sky could be as miserable as I was.

The DJ was saying annoying, obvious things like, “It’s summer! It’s hot out there!” And then he put on that retro Lone Ranger tune, something he liked to play every morning because he thought it was a hip way to wake up the world. “Hi-yo, Silver!” Who hired this guy? He was killing me. I think that as we listened to the William Tell Overture, we were supposed to be imagining the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding their horses through the desert. Maybe someone should have told that guy that we all weren’t ten-year-olds anymore. “Hi-yo, Silver!” Crap. The DJ’s voice was on the airwaves again: “Wake up, El Paso! It’s Monday, June fifteenth, 1987! 1987! Can you believe it? And a big ‘Happy Birthday’ goes out to Waylon Jennings, who’s fifty years old today!” Waylon Jennings? This was a rock station, dammit! But then he said something that hinted at the fact that he might have a brain. He told the story about how Waylon Jennings had survived the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and Richie Valens. On that note, he put on the remake of “La Bamba” by Los Lobos.

“La Bamba.” I could cope with that.

I tapped my bare feet on the wood floor. As I nodded my head to the beat, I started wondering what had gone through Richie Valens’s head before the plane crashed into the unforgiving ground. Hey, Buddy! The music’s over.

For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.

Chapter 1

Allison McFadden walked slowly in the cool night air, her arms tightly wrapped around her slim body to keep the wind from whipping at her Acoat. The man with her saw her shiver and gently put his arm around her, sending an electric jolt of anticipation through her.

She laughed softly, slightly giddy from the dirty martinis he had bought for her all night. He’d actually taken her to Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel; it was possibly the most romantic place she had ever been, complete with live piano music and a sophisticated, old-fashioned ambiance that had seduced her just as completely as he had.

He was witty and charming, and he was good-looking and chivalrous almost to a fault. He hadn’t even stolen a kiss yet.

Allison smiled as she remembered how he’d taken her up to the murals that lined the walls of Bemelmans and told her about them; how some writer who had lived in the hotel had painted them and they’d been part of some children’s books. She had tried to listen, but she had only been able to concentrate on his hand, resting just a little lower on her back than it had been earlier in the evening, and his lips moving next to her cheek as he spoke. She only remembered that the paintings were of animals in Central Park. There had been an elephant skating. And he had pointed out an armed rabbit stalking its fellow bunnies with an automatic weapon in one of the cartoon-like murals.

They’d both laughed at the morbid humor of it, and Allison loved the way he laughed.

Now, he was walking her home, like a true gentleman. He had asked the cab driver to stop several blocks away from her building to have the privilege of doing so. It was only their first date, and Allison couldn’t believe that she was going to do what she was planning.

“Do you … would you … I mean, would you like to come up? For coffee, or ….”

He smiled, and Allison was lost in the way it made his eyes warmer.

He reached up and ran his hands through her hair, watching the way the blond strands glimmered in the artificial light of the street lamps.

“Is your roommate home?” he asked her softly, his intimate voice cutting through the chilly wind and right into her.

She licked her lips and nodded. “But she won’t bother us,” she insisted quickly, her words almost breathless as she reached out and smoothed her hand over his lapel, feeling his badge under the material.

“Then lead the way,” he murmured with a smile.

It would have been the perfect time for him to kiss her, she thought, as she took his hand and led him into the building. It would have been just as ridiculously romantic as the rest of the night. But, she supposed, nothing could be perfect.

Hours later, as Allison struggled for her last breath, she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d never kissed her because it would leave his DNA behind.

THE phone call could not have come at a worse time. FBI Special Agent Ty Grady was still pissed off and cursing about its unfortunate timing two days later as he sat alone in his living room.

Four weeks of undercover work—round-the-clock surveillance, phone taps, wires, bribing informants, and some high-speed tailing—all shot to shit because some rookie hotshot forgot to leave his cell phone at home.

Bums begging on the street do not ring to the tune of a Mozart orchestra, and unfortunately for the team of tired undercover FBI agents tailing Antonio de la Vega, their target was aware of that particular bit of random information.

He’d disappeared just as quickly as the rats on the New York sidewalks as Ty and his team had scrambled.

The operation had been blown, their target was now in some other country where they had no jurisdiction, and all their evidence would be bagged, tagged, and stuffed in a box in a basement, never to be seen again.

The fact that most of what they’d done had been under Ty’s direction and slightly irregular, depending on a high-profile collar in order to keep them from getting their asses fired and thrown in jail, was not helping Ty’s mental state.

He sprawled on his sofa, still covered in sweat from his attempts to work out his frustration at the Bureau’s Baltimore gym, and stared out at the city through the large windows on either side of the television. He could see his own reflection in the black screen of the plasma TV on the opposite wall, and he looked even more exhausted than he felt. He needed a shave; most of his handsome face was covered in three days’ worth of beard, and his dark hair could probably use a trim. He was a large man, nearly three inches over six feet, and he usually carried his frame like a large cat, lithe and easy.

Tonight, though, there was a slump to his broad shoulders as he sprawled. He had no intention of moving any time soon.

Not until his cell phone began to trill demandingly. With a heavy sigh, he snapped it off his waistband and flipped it open. “Grady,” he answered curtly, his West Virginia drawl still pronounced after all the years he’d spent away from home.

“Special Agent Grady, Assistant Director Burns would like to see you,” a clipped, professional voice informed him.

“When?” Ty asked flatly.

“Special Agent Grady, the Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigations Branch does not call to make appointments. He expects you in thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes!” Ty blurted. “Do you have any idea where I am?”

“In your dirty underwear, no doubt. Be here in thirty,” the voice answered in the same flat, businesslike tone before hanging up.

Ty closed his eyes and mentally kicked something. Thirty minutes to get into DC was going to require the flashy blue lights. Ty fucking hated the flashy blue lights.

“GREAT job, Special Agent Garrett. You are a credit to the Bureau,” the Division Director said as he shook the man’s hand. “A commendation will go in your file for your work, of course.”

“Thank you, sir,” FBI Special Agent Zane Garrett answered curtly as the other agents murmured quiet, slightly reluctant congratulations.

“And I get to reward you for your work well-done,” the Director continued smoothly. “You’re being promoted out of the division. I’m very sad to see you go,” he said smoothly, still pumping Zane’s hand vigorously.

Zane shook his hand somberly, his face a mask of pure professionalism that covered the brutally honest thoughts he harbored beneath it. “I’ve enjoyed working for you, sir. But you know me; always looking to be where I can do the most for the Bureau.”

“That’s a good man. Say goodbye and get yourself upstairs. Assistant Director Burns wants to see you in ten.”

Showing no hint of a smile—or the disdain for the praise over doing his boring-ass desk job—Zane turned and walked through the other agents he’d worked with in the division that pursued cybercrimes. He’d gotten along with them fairly well, considering he did his job, and sometimes theirs as well, with complete and utter focus. Zane knew many of his co-workers were just as happy to see him go as stay; his strict adherence to the rules and logical, single-minded work to achieve his goals were often tiring to those around him. He had goals, several of them, and they were all that mattered.

None of them included working with this division any longer than necessary.

Looking around the open office, Zane knew with complete certainty he wouldn’t miss it. While his obsessive attention to detail had steered him perfectly while on these assignments, he knew he was worth far more to the Bureau than serving on this mind-numbing, numbers-crunching detail. Now he would get his chance to prove it.

Shaking some hands and enduring a few “so sorry to see you go”

back slaps, he waved off his soon-to-be-former co-workers, told the office administrator he would be back later to clear out his desk, and walked out the door. He looked forward to seeing what the Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Branch had in store for him. He had worked damn hard for this promotion. It had to be good, since the man wanted to see him immediately.

Zane stopped into the bathroom to straighten his tie and check to make sure his close-cropped brown hair lay down neatly. The suit he wore was sharply tailored to his 6’5” frame, but it didn’t hide the bulky muscles that moved under the fabric. His was not a body you’d expect to see riding a desk, a fact he was reminded of daily looking at the slightly pudgy agents who worked around him. He frowned slightly, surveying the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes and the ridges of his twice-broken nose. With a displeased twitch, he ran his hands over his close-shaven cheeks and dismissed his image before buttoning his suit jacket and heading upstairs.

THE secretary gave Ty Grady a look over her glasses that clearly said she disapproved of the air he breathed. She lifted her chin and looked him up and down, wrinkling her nose at his appearance. “You’re early,” she announced with a touch of surprise to her voice.

Ty looked her up and down in return and cocked his head to the side.

“I used the flashy blue lights,” he told her with a helicopter motion of his finger.

She sniffed as she glanced over his unshaven face, scuffed leather jacket, jeans, and dirty cowboy boots. His T-shirt seemed to be particularly appalling to her sensibilities, even though it was clean. It was black and had the words Cocke County FBI in large white print on the front. Upon closer inspection, there were smaller words between the larger ones, and when she squinted she was able to read the entire shirt: “I was probed in Cocke County by the FBI.” She made a small, insulted noise as she looked back up at him.

Ty ignored her, leaving her looking slightly scandalized as he headed for the Assistant Director’s door.

“You can’t go in there yet!” she hissed as she stood from her desk and pointed at him.

He stopped at the door and turned around to look at her, blatantly putting his hand on the door handle and pushing it down with a smirk. Her mouth worked soundlessly, and she turned and scrambled for her intercom to announce him before he could get inside.

Assistant Director Richard Burns looked up at him in surprise and annoyance as Ty stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. “You wanted to see me, sir,” Ty greeted, the words perfectly professional, but the tone somehow just as insolent as it always was.

“Sit down,” the man ordered with a jab of his pen at one of the seats across from his desk. “We’re waiting for one more person.”

Ty moved to the seat and sat, his leather jacket sending up a tiny little cloud of dust as he flopped into the seat. He did a fairly good job of concealing his surprise. “Someone else?” he inquired evenly. “Am I being lynched?”

“If you keep your mouth shut for the next thirty minutes, you may not spend the night in jail. How about that?” Burns answered seriously without looking up from the papers he was signing.

Ty cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Later!” The word, the voice, the attitude.

I’d never heard anyone use “later” to say goodbye before. It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled in- difference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again.

It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later!

I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy, so many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab, billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere. Suddenly he’s shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home.

It might have started right there and then: the shirt, the rolled-up sleeves, the rounded balls of his heels slipping in and out of his frayed espadrilles, eager to test the hot gravel path that led to our house, every stride already asking, Which way to the beach?

This summer’s houseguest. Another bore.

Then, almost without thinking, and with his back already turned to the car, he waves the back of his free hand and utters a careless Later! to another passenger in the car who has probably split the fare from the station. No name added, no jest to smooth out the ruffled leave-taking, nothing. His one-word send-off: brisk, bold, and blunted—take your pick, he couldn’t be bothered which.

You watch, I thought, this is how he’ll say goodbye to us when the time comes. With a gruff, slapdash Later!

Meanwhile, we’d have to put up with him for six long weeks. I was thoroughly intimidated. The unapproachable sort.

I could grow to like him, though. From rounded chin to rounded heel. Then, within days, I would learn to hate him.

This, the very person whose photo on the application form months earlier had leapt out with promises of instant affinities.

Taking in summer guests was my parents’ way of helping young academics revise a manuscript before publication. For six weeks each summer I’d have to vacate my bedroom and move one room down the corridor into a much smaller room that had once be- longed to my grandfather. During the winter months, when we were away in the city, it became a part-time toolshed, storage room, and attic where rumor had it my grandfather, my name- sake, still ground his teeth in his eternal sleep. Summer residents didn’t have to pay anything, were given the full run of the house, and could basically do anything they pleased, provided they spent an hour or so a day helping my father with his correspon- dence and assorted paperwork. They became part of the family, and after about fifteen years of doing this, we had gotten used to a shower of postcards and gift packages not only around Christ- mastime but all year long from people who were now totally de- voted to our family and would go out of their way when they were in Europe to drop by B. for a day or two with their family and take a nostalgic tour of their old digs.

At meals there were frequently two or three other guests, sometimes neighbors or relatives, sometimes colleagues, lawyers, doctors, the rich and famous who’d drop by to see my father on their way to their own summer houses. Sometimes we’d even open our dining room to the occasional tourist couple who’d heard of the old villa and simply wanted to come by and take a peek and were totally enchanted when asked to eat with us and tell us all about themselves, while Mafalda, informed at the last minute, dished out her usual fare. My father, who was reserved and shy in private, loved nothing better than to have some precocious rising expert in a field keep the conversation going in a few languages while the hot summer sun, after a few glasses of rosatello, ushered in the unavoidable afternoon torpor. We named the task dinner drudgery—and, after a while, so did most of our six-week guests.

Maybe it started soon after his arrival during one of those grind- ing lunches when he sat next to me and it finally dawned on me that, despite a light tan acquired during his brief stay in Sicily earlier that summer, the color on the palms of his hands was the same as the pale, soft skin of his soles, of his throat, of the bot- tom of his forearms, which hadn’t really been exposed to much sun. Almost a light pink, as glistening and smooth as the underside of a lizard’s belly. Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete’s face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night. It told me things about him I never knew to ask.

It may have started during those endless hours after lunch when everybody lounged about in bathing suits inside and outside the house, bodies sprawled everywhere, killing time before some- one finally suggested we head down to the rocks for a swim. Rela- tives, cousins, neighbors, friends, friends of friends, colleagues, or just about anyone who cared to knock at our gate and ask if they could use our tennis court—everyone was welcome to lounge and swim and eat and, if they stayed long enough, use the guesthouse.

Or perhaps it started on the beach. Or at the tennis court. Or during our first walk together on his very first day when I was asked to show him the house and its surrounding area and, one thing leading to the other, managed to take him past the very old forged-iron metal gate as far back as the endless empty lot in the hinterland toward the abandoned train tracks that used to connect B. to N. “Is there an abandoned station house somewhere?” he asked, looking through the trees under the scalding sun, probably trying to ask the right question of the owner’s son. “No, there was never a station house. The train simply stopped when you asked.” He was curious about the train; the rails seemed so narrow. It was a two-wagon train bearing the royal insignia, I explained. Gypsies lived in it now. They’d been living there ever since my mother used to summer here as a girl. The gypsies had hauled the two derailed cars farther inland. Did he want to see them? “Later. Maybe.” Polite indifference, as if he’d spotted my misplaced zeal to play up to him and was summarily pushing me away.

But it stung me.

Instead, he said he wanted to open an account in one of the banks in B., then pay a visit to his Italian translator, whom his Italian publisher had engaged for his book.

I decided to take him there by bike.

The conversation was no better on wheels than on foot. Along the way, we stopped for something to drink. The bartabaccheria was totally dark and empty. The owner was mopping the floor with a powerful ammonia solution. We stepped outside as soon as we could. A lonely blackbird, sitting in a Mediterranean pine, sang a few notes that were immediately drowned out by the rattle of the cicadas.

I took a long swill from a large bottle of mineral water, passed it to him, then drank from it again. I spilled some on my hand and rubbed my face with it, running my wet fingers through my hair. The water was insufficiently cold, not fizzy enough, leaving behind an unslaked likeness of thirst.

What did one do around here? Nothing. Wait for summer to end. What did one do in the winter, then?

I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said, “Don’t tell me: wait for summer to come, right?”

I liked having my mind read. He’d pick up on dinner drudgery sooner than those before him.

“Actually, in the winter the place gets very gray and dark. We come for Christmas. Otherwise it’s a ghost town.”

“And what else do you do here at Christmas besides roast chestnuts and drink eggnog?”

He was teasing. I offered the same smile as before. He understood, said nothing, we laughed.

I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same. We will ride through the same changing countryside northward, leaving behind the olive trees and the sea and all of the glory of the stormy southern sky, into the mist and rain of Paris. Someone will offer to share a sandwich with me, someone will offer me a sip of wine, someone will ask me for a match. People will be roaming the corridors outside, looking out of windows, looking in at us. At each stop, recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compartment door to ask Complet? We will all nod Yes, like conspirators, smiling faintly at each other as they continue through the train. Two or three of them will end up before our compartment door, shouting at each other in their heavy, ribald voices, smoking their dreadful army cigarettes. There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her, who will be set on edge by the presence of the recruits. It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.

And the countryside is still tonight, this countryside reflected through my image in the pane. This house is just outside a small summer resort — which is still empty, the season has not yet begun. It is on a small hill, one can look down on the lights of the town and hear the thud of the sea. My girl, Hella, and I rented it in Paris, from photographs, some months ago. Now she has been gone a week. She is on the high seas now, on her way back to America.

I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too fast, and laughing, and watch- ing the men. That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint- Germain-des-Pres, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with. That was how it began, that was all it meant to me; I am not sure now, in spite of everything, that it ever really meant more than that to me. And I don’t think it ever really meant more than that to her — at least not until she made that trip to Spain and, finding herself there, alone, began to wonder, perhaps, if a lifetime of drinking and watching the men was exactly what she wanted. But it was too late by that time. I was already with Giovanni. I had asked her to marry me before she went away to Spain; and she laughed and I laughed but that, somehow, all the same, made it more serious for me, and I persisted; and then she said she would have to go away and think about it. And the very last night she was here, the very last time I saw her, as she was packing her bag, I told her that I had loved her once and I made myself believe it. But I wonder if I had. I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached — it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

I was thinking, when I told Hella that I had loved her, of those days before anything awful, irrevocable, had happened to me, when an affair was nothing more than an affair. Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. Hella would not be on the high seas. And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine.

I repent now — for all the good it does — one particular lie among the many lies I’ve told, told, lived, and believed. This is the lie which I told to Giovanni but never succeeded in making him believe, that I had never slept with a boy before. I had. I had decided that I never would again. There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard — the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

I have not thought of that boy — Joey — for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight. It was several years ago. I was still in my teens, he was about my age, give or take a year. He was a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing. For a while he was my best friend. Later, the idea that such a person could have been my best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me. So I forgot him. But I see him very well tonight.

It was in the summer, there was no school. His parents had gone someplace for the weekend and I was spending the weekend at his house, which was near Coney Island, in Brooklyn. We lived in Brooklyn too, in those days, but in a better neighborhood than Joey’s. I think we had been lying around the beach, swimming a little and watching the near-naked girls pass, whistling at them and laughing. I am sure that if any of the girls we whistled at that day had shown any signs of responding, the ocean would not have been deep enough to drown our shame and terror. But the girls, no doubt, had some intimation of this, possibly from the way we whistled, and they ignored us. As the sun was setting we started up the boardwalk towards his house, with our wet bathing trunks on under our trousers.

And I think it began in the shower. I know that I felt something — as we were horsing around in that small, steamy room, stinging each other with wet towels — which I had not felt before, which mysteriously, and yet aimlessly, included him. I remember in myself a heavy reluctance to get dressed: I blamed it on the heat. But we did get dressed, sort of, and we ate cold things out of his icebox and drank a lot of beer. We must have gone to the movies. I can’t think of any other reason for our going out and I remember walking down the dark, tropical Brooklyn streets with heat coming up from the pavements and banging from the walls of houses with enough force to kill a man, with all the world’s grownups, it seemed, sitting shrill and dishevelled on the stoops and all the world’s children on the sidewalks or in the gutters or hanging from fire escapes, with my arm around Joey’s shoulder. I was proud, I think, because his head came just below my ear. We were walking along and Joey was making dirty wisecracks and we were laughing. Odd to remember, for the first time in so long, how good I felt that night, how fond of Joey.

When we came back along those streets it was quiet; we were quiet too. We were very quiet in the apartment and sleepily got undressed in Joey’s bedroom and went to bed. I fell asleep — for quite a while, I think. But I woke up to find the light on and Joey examining the pillow with great, ferocious care.

“What’s the matter?”

“I think a bedbug bit me.”

“You slob. You got bedbugs?”

“I think one bit me.”

“You ever have a bedbug bite you before?”

“No.”

“Well, go back to sleep. You’re dreaming.”

He looked at me with his mouth open and his dark eyes very big. It was as though he had just discovered that I was an expert on bedbugs. I laughed and grabbed his head as I had done God knows how many times before, when I was playing with him or when he had annoyed me. But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.

Soldiers—1980-1989
1980 Chapter I—The Sum of All Evil August 1980, Kabul

Vadim Krasnorada’s nostrils flared at the smell of smoke on the wind. A whole lot better than the dust and sand of the open plain, or as open as it ever got in this place. Standing on his own two feet was better than sitting on a rolling, grinding, howling tank like a parasite on a bucking animal.

He took a deep swig of vodka and let some drops run down his chin. Fuck, yeah. They had arrived. Greeted with tea and shit, those goat-fuckers didn’t have the beginning of a clue, but that was how Vadim liked them. Jump them full force when they didn’t expect it. The city was in for a hazing. His lips spread into a grin, and he hitched a ride on a truck, downtown (or what counted as downtown in Kabul), where he knew the boys were already setting up a place to crash.

They had used a tank to smash open a house. It must have been a shop, Vadim reckoned, they only had to tear out part of the front. Set up some moonlight vodka, and plenty of soldiers. After the ride, Vadim was itching to get trashed. The curled up energy, the power, the tension, and he had expected, no, wanted a fight, more than anything in his life. After weeks of being ready, waiting for the deployment back to Kabul, his skin was crawling with the need to do something, anything, but Kabul wouldn’t do him that favour. Instead, Kabul welcomed the reinforcements he was officially a part of. Liberators. And as nice as it was not to get shot at, he felt like a wild bull that had been penned in for too long. He absolutely needed a fight, and there was this time-honoured tradition in the Red Army: Where there’s vodka, there’s trouble.

He headed into the bar, pulled off the rag that covered his head and rubbed his face. Sunburn. If the sun kept going like that, he’d get skinned alive. What a shithole.

The din of soldiers having fun. Drinking games, tall tales, everybody had seen action, been shot at, yeah, right. Losers. If those tales were to be believed, there was no goat-fucker alive between Tajikistan and here. Vadim grunted with displeasure and headed towards the makeshift bar. The sight of his dog tags and some roubles bought him a bottle. Turning around, he watched the patrons and started drinking. Back in the corner were some of his boys, he could see the same itch in their eyes. He headed over, was greeted, and they drank, warming up. Just warming up for the welcome party.

Here is the boy, drowning. 

In these last moments, it’s not the water that’s finally done for him; it’s the cold It has bled all the energy from his body and contracted his muscles into a painful uselessness, no matter how much he fights to keep himself above the surface. He is strong, and young, nearly seventeen, but the wintry waves keep coming, each one seemingly larger than the last. They spin him round, topple him over, force him deeper down and down. Even when he can catch his breath ion the few terrified seconds, he manages to push his face into the air, he is shaking so badly he can barely get half a lungful before he’s under again. It isn’t enough, grows less each time, and he feels a terrible yearning in his chest as he aches, fruitlessly, for more. 

He is in full panic now. He knows he’s drifted just slightly too far from the shore to make it back, the icy tide pulling him out farther and farther with every wave, pushing him toward the rocks that made this bit of coast so treacherous. He also knows there is no one who’ll notice he’s gone in time, no one who’ll raise the alarm before the water defeats him. He won’t be saved by chance, either. There are no beachcombers or tourists to dive in from the shoreline to save him, not this time of year, not in these freezing temperatures.

It is too late for him. 

He will die.

And he will die alone.

The sudden, gasping horror of knowing this makes him panic even more. He tries again to break the surface, not daring to think that it might be his last time, not daring to think much at all. He forces his legs to kick, forces his arms to heave himself upward, to at least get his body the right way round, to try and grasp another breath just inches away –– 

But the current is too strong. It allows him tantalizingly near the surface but spins him upside down before he can get there, dragging him closer to the rocks. 

The waves toys with him as he tries again. 

And fails.

Then, without warning, the game the seas seems to have been playing, the cruel game of keeping him just alive enough to think he might make it, that game seems to be over. 

The current surges, slamming him into the killingly hard rocks. His right shoulder blade snaps in two so loudly he can hear the crack, even underwater, even in this rush of tide. The mindless intensity of the pain is so great that he calls out, his mouth instantly filling with freezing, briny seawater. He coughs against it, but only drags more into his lungs. He curves into the pain of his shoulder, blinded by it, paralyzed by its intensity. He is unable to even try and swim now, unable to brace himself as the waves turn him over once more. 

Please, is all he thinks. Just the one word, echoing through his head. 

Please.

The current grips him a final time. It rears back as if to throw him, and it dashes him headfirst into the rocks. He slams into them with the full, furious weight of an angry ocean behind him. He is unable to even raise his hands to try to soften the blow.

The impact is just behind his left ear. It fractures his skull, splintering it into his brain, the force of it also crushing his third and fourth vertebrae, severing both his cerebral artery and his spinal cord, an injury from which there is no return, no recovery. No chance. 

He dies. 

Damen went over to the goblet and lifted it. A shallow slide of liquid remained in the cup. It was water, surprisingly, not wine. That was why the thin rim of pinked colour on the inside of the cup was visible. It was the distinctive mark of a drug Damen knew well.

“It’s an Akielon drug,” said Damen. “It’s given to pleasure slaves, during training. It makes them—”

“I am aware of the effect of the drug,” Laurent said, in a voice like cut glass.

Damen looked at Laurent with new eyes. The drug, in his own country, was infamous. He had sampled it himself, once, as a curious sixteen-year-old. He had taken only a fraction of a normal dose, and it had provided him with an embarrassment of virility for several hours, exhausting three cheerfully tumbled partners. He had not bothered with it since. A stronger dose led from virility to abandonment. To leave residue in the goblet, the amount had been generous, even if Laurent had taken only a mouthful.

Laurent was hardly abandoned. He was not speaking with his usual ease, and his breathing was shallow, but these were the only signs.

Damen realised, suddenly, that what he was witnessing was an exercise in sheer iron-willed self- control.

“It wears off,” said Damen. Adding, because he was not above enjoying the truth as a form of minor sadism, “After a few hours.”

He could see in the look Laurent leveled at him that Laurent would rather have cut off his own arm than have anyone know about his condition; and further, that he was the last person Laurent wished to know, or be left alone with. Damen was not above enjoying that fact either.

“Think I’m going to take advantage of the situation?” said Damen.

Because the one thing that emerged clearly from whatever tangled Veretian plot had unfolded this evening was the fact that he was free of restraints, free of obligations, and unguarded for the first time since his arrival in this country.

“I am. It was good of you to clear your apartments,” said Damen. “I thought I’d never have the chance to get out of here.”

He turned. Behind him, Laurent swore. Damen was halfway to the door before Laurent’s voice turned him back.

“Wait,” said Laurent, as though he forced the word out, and hated saying it. “It’s too dangerous. Leaving now would be seen as an admission of guilt. The Regent’s Guard wouldn’t hesitate to have you killed. I can’t . . . protect you, as I am now.”

“Protect me,” said Damen, flat incredulity in his voice.

“I am aware that you saved my life.” Damen just stared at him.

Laurent said: “I dislike feeling indebted to you. Trust that, if you don’t trust me.”

“Trust you?” said Damen. “You flayed the skin from my back. I have seen you do nothing but cheat and lie to every person you’ve encountered. You use anything and anyone to further your own ends. You are the last person I would ever trust.”

Laurent’s head tipped backwards against the wall. His eyelids had dropped to half-mast, so that he regarded Damen through two golden-lashed slits. Damen was half-expecting a denial, or an argument. But Laurent’s only reply was a breath of laughter, which strangely showed more than anything else how close to the edge he was.

“Go, then.”

Damen looked again at the door.

With the Regent’s men on heightened alert, there was real danger, but escape would always mean risking everything. If he hesitated now and waited for another chance . . . if he managed to find a way out of the perpetual restraints, if he killed his guard or got past them some other way . . .

Right now Laurent’s apartments were empty. He had a head start. He knew a way out of the palace. A chance like this one might not come again for weeks, or months, or at all.

Laurent would be left alone and vulnerable in the aftermath of an attempt on his life.

But the immediate danger was past, and Laurent had lived through it. Others had not. Damen had killed tonight, and witnessed killing. Damen set his jaw. Whatever debt was between them had been paid. He thought, I don’t owe him anything.

The door opened beneath his hand, and the corridor was empty.

He went.