There was a goddess in Katmandu named Kumari, a living, breathing incarnation chosen from among the daughters of wealthy Newar families—chosen by oracular sign, some said, and by political necessity, said others—and until she reached the age of puberty and a new incarnation was selected, she lived in a temple on Durbar Square, where she was worshiped and pampered and paraded before the faithful on festival days. It astonished Clement that no one apart from himself found this notable, that people dismissed Kumari’s existence as an atavism left over from a simpler time, from an age when superstition had not yet been overthrown by logic. They seemed to neglect the fact that no matter how completely the phenomenon had been explained away, there was a goddess in Katmandu, an actual goddess whose followers numbered in the hundreds of thousands…and, even more remarkable in Clement’s opinion, scattered throughout the country were thirteen women who had once been Kumari and were now shunned, deemed unlucky and thus unsuitable for marriage.

If there was one overwhelming reason that Clement was so taken with Kumari’s divinity, so insistent upon its importance, it was that he needed something larger than himself on which to focus, something whose nature might afford relief from the grim realities of his profession. He was thirty-eight, a compact muscular man with sandy hair and what seemed a permanent case of sunburn, and blue-gray eyes that in certain lights appeared colorless. His face had a bland, boyish innocence, the face of an aging athlete or a young cleric, of someone to whom duplicity and violence were shameful but minor matters; for the past three years, however, he had served as the CIA station chief in Calcutta, a position that required him to commit duplicity and violence on a grand scale. Many considered him a murderer, while others considered him a man who was doing a nasty but essential job. For his own part, Clement refused to characterize himself, because life had grown too complex for him to accept the emotionality attaching to either label. In his business such uncertainty led inevitably to mental sloppiness and fatal error, and Clement knew he was in danger; but he had a secret that allowed him to defer hopelessness, to believe in salvation of a kind. He wasn’t sure it was a real secret, but it was at the least a mystery, and in order to determine its true nature, every now and then he would take a long weekend, and—accompanied by his wife, Lily—he would travel to small Asian hill towns and wander through the markets and inquire after an elderly foreigner who carved animals out of wood.

It was during one of these trips that Clement learned of Kumari, and he asked the station chief in Katmandu, Carl Rice, to assist him in tracking down the women who had once been incarnations. Within a matter of hours, Rice—a lanky olive-skinned Southerner, whom Clement had known for years—presented him with a list. “Most of ’em are locked away by their families,” he said as they sat in the bar of the Soaltee Oteri, a simulation of a Hilton Lounge, with floors and walls of black marble, a teakwood bar, and a lethargic jazz trio presided over by a busty Japanese singer, whose accent and shrill upper register were turning “That Old Black Magic” into a cryptic lamentation. Rice gazed at her admiringly and waggled his fingers in a clandestine wave.

“Why they do that?” Clement asked.

Rice said, “Huh?”

“The families…how come they lock ’em up?”

“They’re embarrassed ’bout ’em bein’ unlucky. They’re delighted to have a goddess in the family, but an ex-goddess…’pears they just as soon be kin to a rat. This ’un”—Rice pointed to a name—“she went insane. Couple of others are prostitutes. They’d just bullshit you. But this un’, now. Cheni Abdurachan. She ran away and got herself educated. Hung out with some Westernized Tibetans. She’s pretty damn Westernized herself, speaks good English. I don’t know if she’ll talk to you, but I can get you to ’er. Fix you up with a plane tomorrow.”

Clement inspected the list and saw that Cheni was thirty years old. “Where’s Tasang-partsi?”

“Mustang. We’d fly you to Ra-lung. That’s a four-hour walk away. I wouldn’t advise takin’ Lily. There’s lotsa hill crime.” Rice sipped his drink and studied the Japanese singer, who was striking centerfold poses. “So you want the tour?”

“Yeah, tomorrow’ll be fine.”

“This isn’t business, is it?” asked Rice, and sipped his drink.

“Just curiosity.”

“Curiosity.” Rice pronounced it syllable by syllable, as if perplexed by the word. “You gettin’ a weird reputation, man. People wonderin’ ’bout you.”

“People?” said Clement.

“You know…people.” Rice wadded a strip of cocktail napkin between his thumb and forefinger. “Y’gotta watch your behavior. It ain’t like you got a spotless record.”

“You talking about D’allessandro?”

Rice shrugged and pegged the wad at the bartender.

“D’allessandro’s dead,” said Clement.

“Now there’s two schools of thought ’bout that, ain’t there?”

“I saw the fucking car blow up, man.”

“Ri-ight,” said Rice with a sardonic drawl.

“You got something on your mind,” said Clement, annoyed, “why don’t you spit it out?”

“Okay.” Rice’s long bony face was imperturbable. “Here we are, six years after D’allessandro pulls off the biggest scam anybody’s ever pulled on our ass. I mean, we’re talkin’ a Barnum & Bailey production. Right before his plot thickens, the man’s terminated. Terrorists, looks like. But a few days later when the shit hits the fan, people start sayin’, ‘All we got here’s bits and pieces. Could be our boy’s done a Houdini. No way to prove it, but we got his right-hand man.’” Rice poked Clement’s shoulder. “Whyn’t we keep him on a string and see which way he jumps?”

“Think I don’t know all that?”

“You don’t act like you do,” said Rice. “You’re becoming a goddamn eccentric. People watch you makin’ these funny moves, and they start seein’ hidden agendas. Anybody else was actin’ like you, their butt would have been sanctioned. But what I’m leadin’ up to is this. Time’s a gonna come when they gonna say, ‘D’allessandro’s probably dead by now, anyway. So what’re we gonna do with this chump we got runnin’ Calcutta?’”

Clement forced a grin. “But that time hasn’t come yet. And being watched but not leashed, that gives a man a certain freedom, doesn’t it?”

Rice leaned back as if trying to see him in a better light. “What’re you up to?”

“Good things.” Clement sucked on a piece of ice to calm his nerves. “If I’m going to keep the assholes off my back, I need to count some coup. So”—he cracked the ice—“I’m going to count me some goddamn coup.”

Rice stared at him deadpan. “Square business?”

“Scout’s honor. I’m going to give ’em a prime-time spectacular.” He fingered out another ice chip. “Since this is official…”

“Wait a minute!” Rice was offended.

“C’mon, pal,” said Clement. “We haven’t had a heart-to-heart like this in years.”

Rice looked down at his drink. “Y’unnerstand it ain’t like I enjoyed this shit. I don’t get off on hasslin’ my friends.”

“That Old Black Magic” ended in a tortured shriek and a drumroll that covered the lack of applause; the Japanese singer announced a break.

“No problema,” said Clement. “But how ’bout doing me a favor? Tell ’em I’m going to do big things real soon. Sell it to ’em, okay?”

“You got it,” said Rice, the soul of sincerity. “I’ll sell it hard.” He glanced at the stage. “I owe you, man.” He stood, patted Clement on the arm. “Hang out…I’ll be back in a flash with the first installment.”

Clement lowered his head, slowly letting out a breath. He was going to have to pull off a big-yardage play, he thought. Find somebody useful to hand over. Somebody with political sex appeal. It was too late in the game for anything else. And probably too late for that.

“Hey, when’s Lily comin’ back from the market?” asked Rice, sitting back down.

“She’s going to meet us for dinner.”

“How you two doin’, anyway? You still in love?”

“Love.” Clement made a derisive noise. “It’s better than love.”

Rice smiled. “Miko!” he called, and the Japanese singer came to stand between the two men. She gave Clement an arch look. “Miko here’s been dyin’ to meet you, Roy,” said Rice. “She’s a…how’d you put it, babe?”

“Pal-ty animal,” said Miko, and inhaled for Clement.

Clement said, “Shit,” laughed, and draped an arm around Miko. He lifted his glass to Rice, who joined him in the toast.

“To good company,” said Rice, placing strong emphasis on the word company. Their eyes engaged over the rims of their glasses. It felt like a moment of bonding, a moment during which assurances were offered and confirmations exchanged. But Clement wasn’t fool enough to trust it.

At twenty-nine, with light brown hair falling to the middle of her back, Lily still looked like a college girl. Willowy; long-limbed; the marks of age—faint lines bracketing her mouth, the hint of crow’s-feet—barely sketched in. Her face was lean, finely boned, a bit horsey, and her features had an assertive refinement that Clement associated with East Hampton and West Palm Beach; she was beautiful, but one only noticed that after noticing her aura of health and style, as if beauty were merely an accessory that she displayed whenever she wished to show to advantage. Moving about the hotel room, preparing for bed, her gestures were eloquent and precise, and this, too, was a quality that Clement associated with the milieu of polo matches and expensive claret, with lives that had the clarity of sparkling water. In the beginning, her elegance had made him painfully aware of the commonality of his own roots, and this had caused him to view her as an acquisition, something he had obtained by nefarious means; sooner or later, he’d believed, she would see through to his essential crudity and leave him. But four years of marriage had erased most of those feelings, and despite his infidelity with Miko—a tactical infidelity to ratify the masculine contract he had made with Rice—he loved her. And more importantly, he trusted her.

Trust, to Clement’s mind, was better than love, a thing of far greater rarity and consequence. He had only trusted one other person in his life—Robert D’allessandro—and he realized that the strain of emotion he’d felt for D’allessandro was akin to what he felt for Lily. In each instance he had surrendered himself not like a lover, but like a child, sensing that the object of his affections was more competent than he in a sphere of existence to which he could only aspire, an altitude of feeling denied him by the abuses of an orphaned childhood. He had permitted D’allessandro to steer him through this unfamiliar medium, and after the old man had died, he had been lost until Lily had come along and reoriented him. She had been doing graduate work in economics and had interviewed him in regard to the financial resurgence of Calcutta, a matter of sensitivity to Clement, since it had been instrumental in stalling his career. He’d had her investigated, and during the course of the investigation, he had become fascinated by her. With her Vassar education and aristocratic bloodlines, she had seemed alien, unfathomable, and it had taken him a long time to accept that she could sympathize with his work. But the upshot had been that she had renewed his enthusiasm for the Company by imbuing him with a sense of his own worth. And that had been the beginning of trust.

She dimmed the lights and slipped into bed, turning to face him, her breasts flattening against his chest. He grew hard against her belly, and he started to pull away, knowing that she was worn out from her day in the market; but she hooked her fingers into his back and kept him close.

“Thought you were too tired,” he said.

She kissed his chest. “I just want you inside me a minute, okay?” She rested a knee on his hip, letting him slip between her legs.

“A minute, huh?”

“Maybe two.”

Her breath quickened, warming his cheek, and when he entered her, she tensed until he had gone deep.

“God,” she said. “God, you feel good.”

He fucked her heavily, watching her face grow slack, slivers of white showing beneath her eyelids. After a few seconds he stopped, content to hold her and touch her breasts. The knowledge that he was possessing a rich man’s woman, having her in a rich man’s hotel, with its cool sheets and androgynous luxury…this never failed to give him a venal satisfaction.

“I want you to finish,” she said, her eyes still closed.

“You’re falling asleep.”

“It’s nice…falling asleep like that.” She ran a hand along his arm. “Roy?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you want to see that woman?”

“The one in Mustang? I just want to find out what it was like to be a goddess.”

“Oh.” She sounded distressed.

“What’s the matter?”

“I was hoping it was business. I wouldn’t be jealous of business.”

“You’ve got no reason to be jealous.”

She opened her eyes; in the half-light they were small puzzles of gleam and shadow. “Maybe not.”

“Definitely not.”

“I don’t know. You’re always looking for something else…like with D’allessandro. You say he’s dead, and still you keep looking for him.”

“That’s not real,” he said. “I know he’s dead, but I just keep hoping that somebody’ll beat the game. It’s got nothing to do with us.”

“Yes, it does. It’s like saying I’m not enough.” She twisted her head away, stared at the ceiling. “Christ, that sounds stupid!”

Clement was losing his erection, and wanting to maintain intimacy, he pulled her hard against him. “Would you like me to cancel the trip?”

“Of course I would. You’re going to see a goddess.”

“An ex-goddess. She probably looks like a fucking yak.”

“It isn’t just that I’m jealous,” she said after a bit. “All this with D’allessandro, and now Kumari, it’s covering up something else. You’ve got a problem, and you’re using this to avoid dealing with it. That’s not like you.”

He slipped out of her, and she gasped, tried to guide him back in.

“I’ve kinda lost the mood,” he said.

“Are you angry with me?”

“Nah. I’m a little screwed up right now is all.” He flopped onto his back. He wanted to be open with her, but openness seemed arduous, a chore demanding too much energy. “I need a couple of days to sort things out. When I get back, we’ll talk about it…all right?”

“All right,” she said, disappointment in her voice. She settled against him, her head tucked into the join of his neck and shoulder, an arm flung across his chest. Her breathing soon became deep and regular.

Clement felt he had passed some crisis and realized that although he had been giving evasive answers to Lily’s questions, he had believed every word he’d said. That was SOP, lying to oneself. It had taken him a while to understand that the name The Company referred as much to an acting company as to a business concern. Agents were accomplished actors. They went from role to role, less interpreting than inhabiting them, and by doing so they often lost track of their identities. But that was a survival trait. If you had no solid identity, you could shrug off morality with the same ease that you removed a costume, and that immunized you to an extent against pain. Clement’s problem was that he had begun to remember who he was, and he blamed Robert D’allessandro for this.

He recalled sitting with D’allessandro and watching the old man—as slow and ponderous as a gray bear—carve his toy animals, his form of stress therapy, and talking about how he wished he could get away and live up in the hills. Malaysia, maybe. Thailand. On one occasion he had laughed and said, “Y’know, Roy, I used to want to own a goddamn country, and now all I want is to sit somewhere peaceful and learn how to get these bastards right.” He’d held up a half-finished tiger, regarding it sourly. “Fuckers always turn out looking like striped dogs.”

It occurred to Clement that D’allessandro had carved him into shape just as he had his wooden animals, and that he had done as clumsy a job on him as he had with the tigers. He had taken a rough chunk of human material and created a new man, one with a conscience and the capacity for love, and so had rendered him totally unfit for his job. What Rice had said, that he was becoming an eccentric…no doubt about it. Lately he had been screwing up everything, and he didn’t much care. It was as if he had admitted his sins, and by that admission had lost the ability to endure them. And maybe Lily had been right, too. Maybe in searching for D’allessandro, for Kumari, he was really searching for an alternative to supplant every facet of his life.

He tried to answer Lily’s question about why he wanted to see Cheni Abdurachan; but instead he began to assemble a portrait of the Newar woman, giving her a slim body and large eyes and black hair braided into a pigtail, seeing her as neither beautiful nor ugly, but passable, with delicate features obscured beneath a mask of grime. Once he had finished, she hovered at the center of a diffuse golden light, an island of Buddhist glow, and appeared to be staring directly into his eyes. He had the impression that she was afraid, that although she possessed a core of strength, she was losing a battle against some menacing force. His sense of her grew more specific, so intense and individual that he became unnerved and the image flew apart. He lay blinking, confused. Everything, the shadowed drapes, the dim reflection in the mirror, even Lily, seemed ghostly by comparison to his apprehension of Cheni. This was more than eccentricity, he thought; he was slipping badly. He’d given lip service to the idea of sorting things out, but that might be exactly what he should do. Take the trip and try to get a grip on his life. He almost laughed out loud. His life. Christ! Life had never been his. From orphanage to Army to CIA, he’d always been part of a bureaucratic nightmare, always owned, controlled.

Lily stirred, her arm tightening about his chest. “You say something?”

He stroked her hair. “Go back to sleep.”

She was silent a few seconds and then said, “I’m scared, Roy. I know something’s going on with you, and it scares me.”

He started to reassure her, but didn’t think he could be convincing. He felt very fragile in his head, very shaky. If there were one problem, one wall against which to hurl himself, he might be able to pull it together. But everything was becoming a problem now, and he had no idea what to do.

An hour from Tasang-partsi. The air was bitter cold, unbelievably clear, the dark blue of the sky overhead shading down toward the horizon on every side to a band of pale turquoise. Miles to the east, the crevasses of glaciers on the slopes of a snowy peak looked as defined as the folds of the dun-colored rock above him. He was negotiating a trail along the flank of a hill; below, at the base of a cliff, a thin torrent of silvery water coursed down the center of a wide gravel bed and flowed off into a cut between the hills. Stunted thistles and gray brushes of wormwood sprouted alongside the trail; ahead lay pinnacles of reddish rock, their eastern faces shadowed to purple. D’allessandro would have loved this country, Clement thought. Clean and empty, yet with a feel of spiritual fecundity. Maybe he would have learned how to carve a tiger by now.

Clement had been twenty-eight when he had been assigned to D’allessandro, who was living then in Costa Rica, unable to leave for fear of being extradited on charges of fraud and extortion; however, D’allessandro had devised a plan that had engaged the favorable attention of the CIA. It was at heart altruistic, though he hid that fact from almost everyone; but eventually it became apparent that he wanted to leave a legacy, something to absolve his sins. The plan took seven years to implement and incorporated—among other elements—a bogus breakthrough in cinematic technology, an effective synthetic cocaine, a string of gambling resorts built in the Maldives and along the Malabar Coast, and, most importantly, a foundation whose purpose was to create low-cost housing outside Calcutta and stimulate the economy of the city. The foundation, fronted by respectable Hindu businessmen who had no idea of the skulduggery taking place around them, served as the holding company for the various properties; the foundation’s accounts, seeded by a sizable investment of CIA funds, were swelled by investments in the billions solicited from every major criminal organization in the world. The CIA believed they were pulling off the greatest sting in history, an operation that would throw the criminal world into chaos and increase American influence on the subcontinent by a thousand percent. The criminal organizations had been led to believe that they would wind up in control of the world’s entertainment industry, that their own political influence would increase. The plan was a masterpiece of misdirection, a work of genius depending upon dozens of lesser plans and ruthless covert maneuvers, most engineered by Clement, whom D’allessandro had at last taken into his confidence and revealed the ultimate misdirection—that at some point a series of traps would be sprung and the foundation’s funds would be channeled into several UN agencies, who were ready with schemes for their charitable disposition.

D’allessandro’s recruitment of Clement to be his accomplice had been a beautifully managed seduction. He’d played upon Clement’s orphaned childhood in Wyoming and an attendant sympathy for the disenfranchised, and had made himself into a father figure. Clement had genuinely loved the old man, and D’allessandro, he believed, had loved him; he had certainly taken pains to make sure that Clement had not been implicated. As he scrambled up a rise, it seemed for the first time that he could feel how large a space the old man had filled in his life; he had been father, brother, friend…and creator. By contrast, the space filled by Lily, that of lover, was small indeed. Thinking this hurt Clement, and because he was no longer a competent actor, he was unable to disregard his feelings, but could only force himself to walk faster and faster, until the aching of his muscles overwhelmed thought.

It was late afternoon by the time he reached Tasang-partsi. Ridges of leaden cloud seamed with tin-colored glare draped the hills. The wind blew in fitful gusts, whirling up a pale grit that appeared to sparkle as it vanished. The village consisted of about thirty black sod houses with slate roofs that sheltered against a cliff, mired in its shadow; a hill rose from the summit of the cliff, resembling more a pile of granitic rubble than an actual geologic formation. The river had narrowed to a fouled trickle that meandered over a gravelly flat, and a couple of mangy yaks with paper flowers tied to their horns were drinking from it; they looked as unreal to Clement, cumbersome and stupid as dinosaurs. Comic-strip beasts. They twitched their tails and gazed mournfully at him as he passed. The row of houses paralleled the stream, and the path that ran alongside them was of deeply rutted frozen mud; protruding from a glaze of cracked yellowish ice at its center was the decaying body of a mastiff, and this added a hint of cloying mustiness to the fearsome stink of the place. Two ravens perched atop the carcass had the look of bizarre ornaments until they spread their wings and flapped away toward the clifftop. Garbage and offal had been banked against the walls of the houses to the level of the first-floor windows, which were framed with rickety match-boarding; holes had been chopped in the filth to permit access to the doors. The squalor was appalling, yet was so absolute, so in keeping with the gloomy sky and bleak surround, it lent a kind of morbid grandeur to the village, as if Tasang-partsi were an outpost on the border of some doomed mythical kingdom.

A young boy guided Clement to a house at the far end of the village, and after paying the boy, he stood staring at the door—three blackened planks and a huge brass padlock, a construction that seemed at once simple and complex, like a child’s puzzle. He knocked, feeling foolish now at having come all this way on a whim. The instant before the door opened, he recalled the portrait he’d conjured of Cheni Abdurachan back in Katmandu—a slim woman with doe eyes and a pigtail—and when she appeared in the doorway, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, she was so like that portrait, he was stunned and a little afraid of what this might mean. She was prettier than he had imagined, and less dirty, her skin bronzed by a fine layer of soot; but the resemblance was startling, nonetheless. Her hair was tied back with a piece of red velvet.

She met his eyes for a second or two, then, pinching the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, lowering her head, gestures that spoke to him of impatience and weariness, she said, “You’re from the university?”

He had the impression that unless he came up with a good excuse, he would be turned away. “My name’s Roy Clement,” he said. “And I’m not from the university. I had a dream about you…a hallucination or something. I saw your face, I pictured it just like you are now. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought it was important to come visit you.”

“You think you’re lying,” she said after giving him a searching look. “That’s interesting. You’re telling the truth, and you think you’re lying.”

She stepped aside to let him enter and laughed—the laughter had a distressed, erratic quality.

The front room was choked with bluish haze that seeped from a stone oven, and was dimly lit by butter lamps—brass bowls with floating wicks—resting on a table at the back. A wooden trapdoor was inset into the ceiling. Every visible surface was coated with sooty residue, even the brass cooking utensils hung on pegs above the oven. Tips of yak bones and horns used to strengthen the construction stuck out from the walls like gray blunted teeth. Clement took a chair at the table, and Cheni removed a wheel of bread from the oven. She set it on the table, handed him a knife, and dropped into the chair opposite him. The bread was hot and crusty, but the stink of burning yak dung was so powerful, it ruined the taste. Clement chewed stoically, watching Cheni’s face. Her features were, he decided, all too voluptuous for her delicate bone structure. Huge eyes, prominent nose, full mouth. They made it appear that something behind the face, some terrible pressure, was causing her skin to bulge. And yet viewed in another light, with an eye for the overall effect, that voluptuousness was her most attractive quality. It was hard to look at her, he thought; the dissonant values of her face forced you to choose a way of seeing, to decide whether or not she was pretty.

“You want to learn about Kumari,” she said after a while.

“Everybody asks you about her, huh?”

Again, that disturbing laugh. It had the rhythm of a fading echo and conveyed no feeling of amusement.

“Not at all,” she said. “The anthropologists come here and ask what I had to eat in the temple, who instructed me, who cared for me. They’re not interested in Kumari.”

“Then why assume that’s what I want?”

“Because it’s true,” she said. “Would you like me to make up a lie and pretend that’s true instead?”

“The plain truth’ll do just fine.”

She plucked at a splinter on the table’s edge. She was, he realized, always fidgeting, picking at something.

“I know all about you,” she said with a hint of defiance. “I know who you are.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” he said, but felt a trace of alarm.

“You’re a violent man,” she said. “You’ve never had any qualms about it until lately. Now you’ve developed qualms, and you’re in a position where they’re a liability. But that’s not your biggest problem.” She planted her hands palms-down on the table, glanced back and forth between them as if gauging their relative size. “The trouble is you haven’t changed enough. It’s as if you’re half-formed. Violence is ingrained in you, and you haven’t been able to exorcise it. And now you’ve been led here…but not to learn about Kumari. I can’t help you with that, anyway.”

The possibility of clairvoyance and all that she had said threatened him. He felt compelled to deny at least part of it.

“I wasn’t led here,” he said. “I’m just taking a few days off.”

She shrugged; a silence lengthened between them.

“Why can’t you tell me about Kumari?” he asked.

“Oh, I can tell you a little, but it won’t be enough for you,” she said. “It seems I woke up one day and discovered I was twelve years old, a little girl being led out of the temple. Before that, my memories are vague. Whispers, golden rooms…and fighting. I remember always fighting. Kumari was dark, though there was light at her heart. Not evil. Dark by necessity…because she dealt with darkness. The only thing I’m sure of is that she was with me for a while.”

She pried at the splinter, peeling it back, working with what seemed fierce stubbornness; she cut her eyes toward him, then looked away.

“Am I making you uncomfortable?” he asked.

“No more than most people.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to upset you.”

She shook her head wildly as if trying to shake bees from her hair.

“You won’t listen,” she said. “I can’t talk with you if you won’t listen.”

“I’m not sure what you’re telling me.”

She nodded, a twitch as much as an affirmation, and when she spoke again, she bit off each word as if restraining herself from a more forceful expression.

“I’m uncomfortable around people because I’m unlucky for them. I’m not talking about the kind of luck that brings a bad run at cards or a streak of household accidents. There’s death in me.” She glanced up at him. “You may not believe that, but you should heed it. There’s virtually no difference between how the two of us think. I say you were led here, and you claim that you were curious. I tell you I’m unlucky, and you might say that what happens to those around me is merely fate. What you consider ordinary seems magical to me. Where I see the workings of gods or devils, you may see the actions of logical consequence. For me the world is a vast spell, for you an intricate coincidence. There’s scarcely any distance between those poles. So when I tell you something, don’t belittle it. If you have to justify it in logical terms, that’s all right. But you have to accept what I say, or else we can’t talk.”

She leaned back, her hands at rest on the tabletop, and this sudden transition from tension to calm, more than any of the other signs, made it apparent to Clement that she was fighting for control, that she was traveling along the same path of madness down which he had been sliding. And he remembered that had been part of his original vision of her…though back in Katmandu he had assumed that she was struggling against an external adversary. Maybe he had been led here, he thought, maybe her knowledge of him was no more explicable than his knowledge of her, no less real.

She gave another of her unsettling laughs, and he had the idea that she knew what he had been thinking.

“It’s a matter of seeing,” she said. “You either see things or you don’t. Perhaps that’s why you’re here—to learn to see.”

He could not be sure if what she had said was responsive to what he had thought, or if he had worked himself up into such an excited and delusionary state that anything she said would seem responsive. He had, he realized, no clue as to what they had really been discussing, and he decided to change his tack, to force her to talk about herself, and not him.

“Why do you live here?” he asked. “There can’t be very much to interest you.”

“It’s an unlucky place, it suits me. And I have a great deal to do. I read, I walk, I practice chod.”

“Is that a religion?”

She hesitated. “It’s a ritual of Tibetan Buddhism, a test of the soul against demons.”

“You fight the demons?”

“I confront them. There’s no point in fighting, they always win.”

“Then why bother?”

“It’s Kumari,” she said. “Everything I do relates to her. To some part of her. Chod…I don’t know. There’s part of her I never understood. It seemed different, somehow. Not really her, but joined to her. Her ally, her shield against the darkness. The chod, I think, relates to that part.”

“Why would a goddess need an ally?”

“Not even Kumari can stand alone against the demons.” Cheni gave a wave of dismissal as if to erase what she had said. “It’s as I told you, I don’t remember much.”

From the corner she took a pole with a rope loop at one end and pushed up the trapdoor in the ceiling. Where the door had been was now a square of rich deep blue and stars and a half-moon. Silence seemed to pour into the room along with the chill air. Laughter came from an adjoining house, sounding unnaturally bright. And then from somewhere high above, a man’s voice chanting. Cheni scowled and appeared to be listening to the voice.

“What is it?” Clement asked.

“A crazy man,” she said. “A hermit. He lives up there.” She gestured toward the hilltop. “In the old monastery. The villagers think he’s a shaman. And the children dote on him…they call him ‘uncle.’ But he’s just crazy.”

“Maybe he’s a children’s shaman.”

Cheni sniffed. “He’s afraid of everything. He won’t say a word to anybody. Sometimes he helps me, but mostly he just hides in the ruin.”

“He sounds harmless.”

“Is that one of your American virtues?” she said with heavy sarcasm. “Harmlessness?”

Thin glowing clouds began to pass across the moon, and gazing at them, Clement recalled having had a similar feeling of isolation during his childhood, the nights after he had run away from the orphanage and hidden in culverts, in abandoned houses, in the woods. It suddenly seemed strange that he could have come so far from those empty nights, that he had lived and fought and killed and wound up in Mustang with a woman who had once been the goddess Kumari. Thinking this made him feel vulnerable, open to unseen influences, and for a moment he entertained the paranoid notion that the clouds overhead might be edging close to the light that shined him into being, threatening to blot him out. He turned to Cheni. She was staring at him, aghast; she pushed back her chair and came to her feet.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She felt behind her, groping for the door to the back room. “Don’t come near me!” she said. “Do you understand? I see you now! Keep away from me.” She darted into the room and closed the door. Clement heard the latch click.

“Hey!” he shouted. “What’s wrong? What’d I do?”

No response.

He got up and went to the door. “Hey, are you all right?” When she refused to answer, he said, “Is it okay if I sleep out here?”

Nothing.

“Fuck,” he said mildly, less disappointed than confused. The chanting from the hilltop began to annoy him. He reached for the pole and pulled the trapdoor shut. He stood awhile, nourished by the silence, unsure whether to go or to stay. His eyes caught on the bones sticking from the walls, and he pictured himself a crazy little man in a barbarous black house with walk of teeth and dirt, a miniature resting on a dusty shelf behind toy mountains. It pleased him to think of himself as inconsequential, as lost and small, and he decided that he would stay. For a night, at least. Cheni might come around, he thought. He sensed an unalloyed place inside her that madness had not touched, a place where her being was intact, as if madness were not central to her, but rather a kind of corruption infecting her from without…like his own madness. Kumari, perhaps. This persuaded him to conclude what he had been tempted to conclude ever since meeting her, that there was a bond between them, a basic compatibility, and he imagined lying down beside her amid the stench of burning yak dung, becoming one with her unluckiness and engaging a cosmic doom.

At length he snuffed out the butter lamps and spread his sleeping bag on the floor; he took out his automatic, wormed into the bag, and zipped it shut. The darkness closed in around him. He lay there alert, unable to sleep. Every few minutes he checked his watch, worried about insomnia. After an hour he heard a keening sound, and because of its complex modulation, he thought it must be an animal voicing pain or loneliness; but when the cry came again, he realized it was only the voice of the land in its emptiness, the white violin whisper of the wind flowing through the passes. He listened to it sounding over and over, hypnotized by its eerie music, and soon began to feel that he too was being drawn thin and fine and pure, reduced to a melody winded from the cuts and notches of his life, from the wasted and cratered terrain of his endless war, becoming a cold song that drifted into silence.

He dreamed about murders, but the murders were not dreams, though they had the artful lucidity of the imagined. He dreamed of knives and the feeling of knives, the tremor that preceded the rush of the blood, and he dreamed of explosive truth, of tiny figures blowing up into heaven, and he dreamed of the incisive meaning of hollow-points, of breast pockets centered by cross hairs, and of an old Hindu man riddled with cancer, strapping a bomb to his waist, shaking Clement’s hand, thanking him for the benefits paid to his family…and that waked him. At first he thought the sight of Cheni going through the front door was part of the dream, but once he realized it was not, he scrambled up, gun in hand, and pulled on his jacket and went out into the street, heavy with sleep yet curious about what she could be up to at such a late hour. He followed her along a trail that ascended the cliffside and then wound around the hill surmounting it, picking his way among loose rocks, slipping on gravel. The moon was still high, and he remembered other moonlit nights spent tracking a target; from those nights he appropriated a feeling of icy competence and calculation that dissipated the residue of dreams and transformed his pursuit into a logistical game. On several occasions he had the notion that he was being followed himself, but this he chalked up to a need to experience danger and an overactive imagination. At the summit of the hill, barely distinguishable from the pitch of stones beneath it, a jumbled patchwork of shadows and grays, stood a large ruin—the monastery—and it was toward this that Cheni was heading. The final ascent was rough going. Clement had to proceed along rocky defiles and up steep faces, and by the time he had reached the base of the walls, he was thoroughly winded.

The walls were about thirty feet high, crumbled away in sections, and the gate consisted of two massive wooden doors hanging askew, many of the planks shattered inward as if by an enormous fist. Flat mani stones with prayers graven in Tibetan script were propped beside the gate, and Clement sat down on one to catch his breath. He came to appreciate the hushed atmosphere, the imposing blankness of the walls, the resounding emptiness, the edged appliqués of shadow, and he began to feel akin to this irrational heap of stone, to the fundamental denials of hope and joy at its heart, with its echoes of animism and droning chants, old insect gods brought low to buzz among the haze of butter lamps and the fumes of ghastly revelation rising from the machineries of prayer. He laughed, alight with his own irrationality, his mind firing on all circuits as with the first rush of a cocaine high, and when he looked out over the village toward the snowy moonstruck peaks of the Himalayas, he felt the accomplished tranquillity of a conqueror, as if he had just completed an assault on some heretofore untraveled height. Everything he saw he claimed for his own; he named the foothills after old girlfriends and the highest mountain after Lily. He was Clement pukkah sahib, Clement of Nepal. At last, still chuckling, he dusted himself off and went inside the ruin.

He crossed a courtyard toward a windowless building of grayish white limestone that resembled an oversized bunker. Strung above the entrance were a number of tattered prayer flags: pale blue pennons inscribed with spidery characters, lashing and snapping in the wind. He climbed a flight of steps and entered a wide corridor lined with musty cells. The moonlight penetrated only a short way into the corridor, illuminating faded frescoes that depicted flayed bodies, skulls filled with blood, heaps of entrails, and demons standing among them—squat, muscular, with fanged mouths and glaring round eyes. Even the fiercest of them had a cartoonish aspect that reminded Clement of creatures created to represent tooth decay or bad breath. He was intrigued by them, and as he inspected the frescoes, he recognized that they were staring out over their terrestrial kingdom, and that he was at the forefront of a vast throng whose individual natures became evident to him, for he seemed to see them reflected in the demons’ eyes, an intricate conceit of contorted limbs and twisted sinews and tears and droplets of blood glistening like gemmy fruit, the whole mass seething in ferment as with a constant pour of wind, and beetles were feasting in the eyes of these damned, and women mated with serpents, and men with cancers that had consumed half their faces were clawing at their bellies, trying to dig out some vital organ that would end their suffering, and here a fat man was feeding on gobbets of his own flesh, and here an addict was injecting fire into his genitals, and behind this host of humanity were the legions of the netherworld, hunchbacks whose humps had spindly arms and bony hands, and flies with female mouths, and creatures such as griffins and chimeras and basilisks in whose eyes were registered the enigmatic record of entropic decay, and they were crowding forward, forcing mankind toward its doom, toward the terrible negative fates rendered on the corridor wall, and Clement tried to claw his way back from the brink, drawing moans from those whom he shoved aside, and…He pushed away from the wall, realizing that he had been in the process of losing it and that the moaning was real, coming from farther along the corridor. Still unsteady, he switched off the safety of his automatic, held it barrel-up beside his jaw, and eased along the wall, seeing tag ends of his hellish vision floating on the darkness. As he reached a corner of a cross-corridor the moan sounded again, and at the far end of it he spotted a vertical seam of moonlight. He moved quickly toward it. The way was blocked by a curtain of stringy dark hair that was coarse and dry and stiff to the touch. Yak hair, he realized. He twitched the curtain aside with the gun barrel. Directly opposite, some twenty yards away across an expanse of broken flagstones, was a doorway flanked by two stone columns. Cheni was spread-eagled between the columns, her arms and legs secured by ropes. She had sagged, her head hung down, face veiled by the black shawl of her hair. Clement assumed that she was unconscious, but then she lifted her head and stared through the strands of her hair at a point somewhere above him.

His instincts were to go to her, but it was such a strange and unexpected development that he held back. It was the perfect setup for an assassin. He recalled his feeling of being followed and wondered if Rice’s warning had not been merely a general caution, if he’d been hinting that definite action was being contemplated. He opened the curtain a few inches wider to get a view of the rest of the interior courtyard. It was a long notch between buildings, closed in by the monastery’s outer walls—a little stage of bone-white and ebony shadow. Apart from Cheni, it was deserted. Dark stems of dead nettles poked from the cracks. Clement glanced back along the corridor, but could detect no sign of movement. He turned again to the courtyard. Cheni had slumped, her head lolling drunkenly. He was, he decided, being overly paranoid. There had been a hundred opportunities for someone to take him since he’d left Katmandu, and he could see no reason why they would want to involve Cheni.

He stepped out into the courtyard, crossing toward her, wondering who could have done this, training his automatic on the darkness at her rear. Before he had gone halfway, she began to struggle against her ropes, and—her eyes rolling up to the strip of starry sky between the buildings—she let out a wild scream. In reflex, Clement looked up. Part of Orion was visible, and there was a feathery cloud passing off to the south. Then an almost imperceptible rippling like heat haze that disappeared within seconds. Some form of condensation, he thought.

“Take it easy,” he said to Cheni, who was thrashing about, spitting out phrases in Newari. Yet he did not think that her struggles were fearful, but were bent at getting at something, and it seemed that her scream, too, had been enraged, not frightened. He reached for the knot that secured her right arm. The second his fingers touched it, he was overcome by dizziness. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and in doing so had a fleeting impression of something towering fifteen or twenty feet above him, something huge and indistinct that was gradually assuming a coherent shape, that of a demon similar to those on the walls of the corridor. Colorless, a mere outline, as if—like the frescoes—it had faded with time and hard weather. Thick-legged, barrel-chested. Talons tipped with moonlight. A fleshy tongue caged by fanged jaws. Its silence was terrifying, and Clement wanted to run, but weakness prevailed. He fell back, striking his head against the base of the column. His heart felt sluggish and hot, a flabby muscle whose weakness made a sick pressure in his chest. The demon’s form began to solidify, to acquire traces of color and detail, and lifting his gun hand—a tremendous effort, because the pull of gravity seemed to have increased—Clement fired at the thing.

Firing had been an act of desperation, and he had not expected it to have the least effect, believing that the demon was a hallucination or else immune to earthly deterrents. But there was an effect…though it was not one he would have cared to elicit. The bullet traced a fiery line through the dusky light, impacting with a splash of vivid gold at the center of the demon’s chest; then from the edges of the splash an inky darkness began to spread like oil throughout the demon’s form, until it appeared that a hole had been punched through into interstellar space, a hole that had roughly a human shape and was figured by a single golden star. It looked to be inset into the air, to give out onto a great depth, and it had for Clement the chill allure of a gorge that had suddenly opened at his feet. He scrambled back from it, clawing at the flagstones, but the blackness bulged toward him like a membrane under pressure. Then the membrane burst, and the undammed blackness flowed forth and swept over him.

As he fell—and it was a fall, slow yet out of control, pinwheeling down and down—he understood that he was passing along the channel that the bullet was forging through the demon’s flesh. He could see the bullet ahead of him—a golden dot maintaining its distance. He was terribly cold, and an aching emptiness was filling him the way that blackness had filled the outline of the demon. He cried out, but the cry offered no release. It seemed rather a spewing forth of the petty details of his life, as if life itself were no more than a cry. All his specifics, every violence, every affection, were—he realized—emblems of the horrid vacuum through which he had been falling for thirty-eight years. He touched and tasted each one, and was harrowed by their vacancy. He wanted to hide from the knowledge of what they were, what he was, but he could not. The golden light of the bullet was dwindling, and he saw that he would soon be trapped inside the demon, that his own hellish emptiness would become the bars of his prison. He twisted about, hoping to straighten out his fall, to move toward the light, but made no progress. Even if he managed to escape, he thought, what purpose would it serve? Emptiness and failure were everywhere, and the particulars of his life were demons in themselves. He had no choice but to confront them.

Reaching that accord, accepting it, acted to calm him, and when he tried once again to straighten out his fall, this time he succeeded. The cold began to diminish, the darkness seemed to be thickening, to be providing a resistance that slowed him, and he discovered that he could use this resistance to guide himself, to shift direction. The golden light acquired a gravity that drew him faster and faster; it became a diffuse golden circle, a sun toward which the darkness was funneling him, and soon, with the barest sense of transition, he found himself at its center, lying on a pallet, staring at a butter lamp set into a niche in a black wall from which the tips of bones protruded.

Cheni was kneeling beside him. He struggled to sit up, bewildered, unable to accept that he was safe, back in her bedroom; but she forced him to lie down and adjusted the pillow beneath his head. Her face was like the face of a gopi girl, one of those women who danced and played the flute for Krishna. Almost a parody of femininity, too sensuous by a degree. Yet he was drawn to her, attracted in much the way that he had been attracted to the demon and then to the light, physically compelled, and he shifted his right hand so that it pressed against her leg. She tensed, but did not move away.

“What happened up there?” he asked. “You were tied up.”

“Chod,” she said. “The hermit helps me with the ropes. He helped carry you down, too.” She glanced behind her. “He gave me something for you. I must have left it in the other room.”

“I don’t get why you have to tie yourself up,” Clement said.

“You saw the demon?”

“I saw something.” He laughed. “Way it’s been lately, I’m liable to see anything.”

“Demons thrive on fear. To practice chod you must put yourself in a position that forces you to confront them. If you have nowhere to run, you have to make a stand.”

Nothing she said made any sense…or if it did, it was not the sort of sense that mattered to him. He ran his hand along her thigh, and the contact warmed him. He wanted her to take away all the cold inside him, to be a new meaning, a new level of pleasure. He sensed this was possible, that she would no longer reject him.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

He turned on his side and put his other hand on her hip. He waited for her to resist, and when she did not, he pulled her down next to him. Her face was stoic, impossible to read. He touched her breasts, let the soft weight of one settle in his palm. Her eyelids drooped.

“Last night you locked yourself away from me,” he said. “And now you’re…you’re letting me get close.”

“I saw that we might be lovers. I needed a lover, but I was afraid for you. Then at the monastery you were courageous. It wasn’t necessary, but you didn’t know that.”

“And this is my reward?”

“It’s no reward,” she said. “I know why you’re here now. I saw it at the monastery.”

The light from the butter lamps seemed to be melting over them, thickening into a languorous atmosphere. Clement tugged down the zipper of her jeans, worked his hand beneath the stiff denim, his fingers pushing into silky hair. She was already wet, open, and she arched against the pressure of his hand, making a scratchy noise in the back of her throat. Despite his arousal, he felt odd touching her so intimately. It was as if their sexuality was purely genital, as if their closeness was unemotional, a kind of intricate fitting together, satisfying in the sense that solving a puzzle is satisfying.

“Why am I here?” he asked, easing her jeans down past her hips.

“Kumari led you,” she whispered.

“I don’t understand.”

“Kumari,” she said, and repeated the name several times, her tone growing frantic, the rhythm of her speech effecting a counterpoint to the clumsy struggle they made of shedding their clothes. It seemed that her inability to explain things was unsettling her, and Clement told her that it was all right, that he had no need to understand.

“You’re going to know Kumari…her light,” she said. “Luck doesn’t matter for you anymore.”

He pushed her onto her back, propped himself above her, and thought how fine it was that a kid from a Wyoming orphanage was about to fuck a goddess.

“It never did,” he said.

As he entered her, he imagined himself engaging bad luck, terrible luck, and something cold trickled along his spine; yet even the thought of death was arousing now, inspiring, enlisting his adventurousness, and for a few moments it was good with her. Her fingernails raked his sides, her ass churned beneath him. In the hazy, buttery light her face was a lover’s face, softened and rapt, and her words were the breathy affirmatives of passion, the broken phrases and hissed endearments of a tender madness. It had been a long time for her between lovers—he knew that from the way her body responded—and this pleased him. But though clinically fulfilling, their lovemaking never matched his expectations. It remained clumsy, tentative, curiously uninvolving, never attaining the ease of a true compatibility, and afterward he felt that he had taken advantage of a sick woman and was ashamed. He left her sleeping, then dressed and went into the front room. It seemed that all his emotion and tumult had come to no result, and he had needed a result; he believed he had been promised a result by the place and the woman and his desire for resolution. Maybe, he thought, he should spare them both embarrassment and leave while she was still asleep.

He lit a butter lamp and sat down, resting an elbow on the table, cupping his chin. His elbow nudged against something, and he cocked an eye toward it. At first he could scarcely believe what he was seeing, and even after he had picked the thing up, he half-expected it to vanish, to prove to be another hallucination. But it was solid, real. A cunningly carved wooden tiger. Painted orange and black, with a red mouth and white fangs and eyes of vivid green. Flawless. A feral talisman. The hermit, he thought, recalling what Cheni had said about the man giving him a gift. D’allessandro was the hermit, he was up there right now…up in the monastery. Clement felt so much, he could not put a name to any of his emotions. He got to his feet, clutching the tiger, and paced back and forth, wondering if this could be a trap. If D’allessandro was there, why would he choose to make his presence known? He’d be afraid…even of Clement. And that, Clement realized, must be the answer. D’allessandro would figure that Clement would find him sooner or later, and he wanted to arrange a meeting on his own terms. He wouldn’t have risked firing at Clement in front of Cheni, and he couldn’t kill Cheni without arousing the suspicions of the villagers. This way, however, he could discover how many people knew of his whereabouts. And he’d give Clement a chance to prove himself—Clement was sure of that. Exhilarated, he looked about for his coat and spotted it crumpled in a corner. He grabbed it, and the automatic fell from the pocket. He scooped it up. The gun reminded him of what had happened the previous night, and he had second thoughts about returning. But no, he realized, it had been Cheni who had brought the demon—if the demon had really been there—and that if D’allessandro could live in the monastery, then he—Clement—would be all right. He shrugged into his coat, tucked the gun into his belt at the small of his back, and stepped out into the street. The sun was high, shining whitely through fraying storm clouds, and Clement set out walking briskly, enlivened by the cold thin air and the prospect of seeing D’allessandro.

Bad luck, my ass, he said to himself.

By day, the courtyard where Cheni had been tied up seemed more abandoned and ruinous than it had by night. Wind whirled up dust from the flagstones, and the outer wall showed itself to be deeply pocked, with fist-sized chunks of rock and mortar lying at its base. The clouds had moved on, and the strip of sky between the two buildings was a bright burning blue. Clement called out to D’allessandro, and the name seemed to stir a little something in the shadows. He shivered, took out the wooden tiger, and examined it again. Plush red jewel box of a mouth, and painted muscles flowing. The cunning white teeth were absolutes of biting. He closed his fist around it, feeling anger and love and frustration.

“It’s me!” he shouted. “It’s Roy!”

A snick, a small solidity among the whisperings of wind.

He squeezed the tiger more tightly; its pointed ears pricked his palm.

“D’allessandro!”

He had a sense of presence nearby, and he laughed, a cracked laughter that trailed away and left him empty. A bird, visible as a black incision in the blue void, soared overhead, and the sight caught at Clement, filling him with longing. He walked into the courtyard, out of the shadows and into the glittering silence.

“C’mon, man!” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you!”

He listened, but heard only the wind. He stood straight, hands clasped at his back, and faced the curtain of yak hair covering the doorway from which he had come.

“Know what I can’t figure, man? Why you didn’t convince me you were dead. You could convince people of anything, you were a fucking genius at that. It’s like you wanted me to know you were alive…isn’t that right?”

The wind fluted through the ruins, cutting a thin breathy passage of melody.

“Well,” Clement said, “if you’re not going to come out, I’ll just talk, okay?” He let out a sigh and that weakened him, opened him to greater emotion. “Remember what I did for you? All the killings, all the bloody detail work? I hated it, y’know. But I owed you, man. I really appreciated what you’d done for me. Really! I wouldn’t know shit if it wasn’t for you. And when all the shit I know is screwing me up, I’m still very appreciative.” He scuffed his heel against the flagstones. “I guess this must sound a little…uh…a little confused. I realize that. But what can I tell you? I probably am a little confused. That’s how you gotta be if you want to keep the assholes off-balance, right? You taught me that, too, remember? You said I had to learn to act irrationally for rational reasons.” The silence was eroding his control; the sun seemed to be making a fuming noise. “What is this crap! If you’re paranoid, man, do what you gotta do! Otherwise get your grimy ass out here!”

A faint scraping sound.

“For Christ’s sake!” Clement was suddenly close to tears. “I’m not going to hurt you, okay? I’ve missed you!”

Another stretch of silence, and then a hoarse baritone said, “Put your hands on top of your head, Roy.”

Clement did as ordered, his heart racing.

A massive figure in a maroon robe pushed through the curtain of yak hair to stand at the top of the stairs leading down into the courtyard. Wearing sandals and carrying an Uzi. Filthy gray hair twisted into strands that fell to his shoulders. Jowly, glum face dyed mahogany. Six years had worn new lines in the face, but Clement would have known it anywhere, no matter how effective its disguise. He felt eager and anxious like a child hoping for approval, and he couldn’t think what to say. D’allessandro’s dark eyes, set amid folds and pouches of skin, were narrowed, fixed on him, and he shifted uncomfortably.

“You look like a fucking gypsy,” he said at last, and laughed.

His expression solemn, D’allessandro came down the stairs, keeping the Uzi trained on Clement. “What am I going to do with you, Roy?”

“Do with me? What the fuck you mean, do with me?” He held up the wooden tiger. “Finally got ’em right, huh?”

D’allessandro ignored this. “Are you alone?”

“Hell, yes! You know I wouldn’t bring anybody else.”

“Why did you come here?”

Nothing was going as Clement had anticipated. He had thought that the emotion of their reunion would overwhelm suspicion; he had expected that D’allessandro would have grown simple and beatific like Gepetto, reduced to his saintly essentials; he had pictured them embracing, weeping.

“You look terrific,” he said. “Really terrific.”

“Answer me.” D’allessandro gestured with the Uzi. “Why did you come?”

“Kumari…I wanted to learn about Kumari. Jesus, I couldn’t believe it when I saw the tiger. I couldn’t fucking believe you were here.”

He started forward, but D’allessandro waved him back.

“Are you certain you’re alone? I thought I saw someone else.”

“Fuck, yeah! I’m alone, all right?”

After a pause D’allessandro said, “It’s good to see you.” But his tone was neutral, and he did not lower the gun.

“I’ve been looking all over hell for you!” Clement said, his frustration boiling over. “Six goddamn years! And all you got to say is, ‘It’s good to see you?’ Shit!”

“You should have left well enough alone.”

“Damn it! You wanted me to find you!”

D’allessandro gave an exasperated sigh and glanced up to the sky as if seeking guidance. “Roy,” he said sadly.

“How are you?” Clement asked. “Are you happy?”

D’allessandro appeared startled. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

“That’s good, that’s good.” Clement searched for something else to say, wanting to gain the old man’s trust. “So what do you do here? Just hang out and carve the animals?”

“I have books, music…a cassette recorder.” D’allessandro wore a bemused look. “It may sound austere to you, but it’s a welcome simplicity.”

“Great,” said Clement, still at a loss for words, but beginning to think that they were going to get past this moment, that they would soon be sitting in the sun and talking about the future, being like father and son, clear of their bloody convoluted history, and they would make new plans, achieve tremendous successes, and D’allessandro would teach him the secrets of absolution and forgetfulness; and that was important, for without absolution and forgetfulness, he was not going to make it, but seeing how contented the old man was, he knew those secrets must exist, that there must be a way to lift memory from the brain as easily as those magical little screens that kids draw on; and when they peel back the plastic sheet, what they had drawn would be erased.

“Roy!”

Clement realized that D’allessandro had been speaking. “Yeah, what?”

“Put your hands back on your head!”

Clement was surprised to find his hands dangling at his sides. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just…”

A little sound like the whiff of a vacuum can being punctured, and D’allessandro’s head exploded. Sprays of blood painted the wall behind him, bone fragments clittered on the flags. As the old man toppled, Clement threw himself into a shoulder roll toward the wall, digging for his automatic, and came up firing at the curtain of yak hair. Continuing to fire, he crawled over to the body, plucked up D’allessandro’s Uzi; then he sent a burst of fire into the curtain, making it jerk and dance. He got to his feet, edged along the wall toward the curtain; he lifted the braided edge away with the barrel of the Uzi, and return fire tore through the hair. He glanced around, searching for an option to the corridor. The outer wall. By using the pitted sections for handholds, he should be able to scale it. Whoever had shot D’allessandro would pull back, knowing that Clement would have to make a break sooner or later. They would take cover in the boulders outside the gate. At least that was how Clement himself would handle the situation. They would not be looking for him atop the wall. And even if they did, he wouldn’t present much of a target.

He sent another burst through the curtain, screaming his rage at the assassin; then he sprinted for the wall, hit it running, hooking his fingers into the rotten stone, digging in with his toes. Less than twenty seconds, and he had reached the top. It was barely a foot wide and planed away to a sheer drop, to the roofs of Tasang-partsi several hundred feet below. The wind tugged at him, his guts seemed to squirm, his balls shriveled. He looked down at the body. Blood had pooled beneath the head, its scarlet startling against the bleached flagstones; strands of gray hair lifted in the breeze with the dreamlike irresolution of kelp. Clement’s eyes filled. They had been so close, so goddamn close. Everything would have been all right—he knew it. They would have come to an accord, they would have reminisced and made plans. His anger was consolidated by the sight of the blood. The bastards were going to pay. Not just the assassin, not just Rice. He knew it had to be Rice behind this particular move. But he wouldn’t stop with Rice. All the major assholes. They were going to rue the fucking day.

He gripped the wall with his knees, and pushing the Uzi ahead of him, he started inching his way along. By the time he reached the corner where the wall angled toward the gate, the wind had nearly dislodged him twice. His hands were scraped raw, his shoulders ached. But he felt very clear, very controlled. Absorbed in the play, at one with his character, artless in the single-mindedness of his intent. He lay flat atop the wall, scanning the pitch of boulders. About seventy-five feet downslope from the gate—a slice of bright blue. Seconds later, the slice expanded to include a speck of white. A wool hat, he thought. And the blue must be a down parka. He aimed, but the target disappeared. The assassin kept shifting, exposing different sections of his body, never remaining still long enough for Clement to be sure of a hit. He edged forward again, trying for a better angle and closer range. After about thirty feet he stopped and assumed his firing position, waiting for the right moment. He relaxed and regulated his breathing. He drew a breath and held it. Sliver of white. Too little exposure. Sliver of blue. No, no, not yet. He released his held breath, took in another. Finally there it was—a perfect blue ace centering a gray blur. He squeezed the trigger and heard a shrill cry above the popping of the Uzi. He saw an upflung arm and more blue exposed. Gleeful, he poured round after round into the target. Painting it with speckles of red. And then he listened. Only the humming vibration of the ruins and the ghosting of the wind.

He was pretty sure the assassin was dead, but as he clambered down the broken slanting planks of the gate, he maintained his readiness. He went in a crouch among the boulders until he came to the body. There was too much blood, too many holes in the parka, for any life to remain. He nudged the body onto its back with his toe. Long chestnut hair spilled out as the wool hat slipped off. Lily’s eyes stared at him jellied and unseeing above the wreckage of her jaw. Unable to move, to react, Clement stared back at her, revulsion growing in him, trying to probe with his mind inside the bullet holes and stroke something back to life. But the next moment, though he had begun to cry, he would have liked to smoke her again.

The goddamn Company!

Oh, man! What a great little actress, a fucking natural for the part!

You feel so good in me, you fit me so perfectly, I love your mouth on me.

Clement’s fury erupted in a scream. He fired into the sky, picturing black holes stitched in blue flesh. The clip emptied, and he flung the Uzi aside. He felt huge with grief, towering over the events of the morning…events that had been contrived especially for him. They had really gotten his ass, they had. He had never seen it coming.

“But you fucked up, guys,” he said. “You really should have left me something to care about…just in case.”

He went for a little stroll through the boulders. He would have to deal with the bodies, he knew that. He didn’t want anyone getting suspicious before he had his innings. But now…now he just wanted to pretend that he could walk away and feel nothing.

“Aw, Jesus,” he said, remembering Lily on their last morning together, stepping from the shower. Something wrapped long curving talons around his heart and squeezed.

Nothing to do except face the demons.

Things were stirring behind him, the corpse was getting to its feet, combing its beautiful chestnut hair, tossing it back, smoothing down its lace peignoir, preparing for bed.

Baby, it said, darling, just come inside me for a minute, that’ll be long enough for you to know all my moves, all my sweet tricks, all the honey in my groin, come on in, killer, we’ll do it slow and forever, glistening and slick, a new kind of sex, writhing and choking, tongues slippery with cyanide and kisses that sting.

“Shut the hell up!” Clement said. “I don’t care anymore.”

Lily, Lily…damn!

She must have loved me, she really must have, she had been too good an actress not to buy her act.

So, she loved you, so what’s that mean?

Nothing, I guess.

Right you are, chump. All that truefine feelgood, all that midnight clutch and tumble, it was just cheap sugar.

A tear trickled into the corner of his mouth. It had no taste.

He had an option, he realized. Tasang-partsi. Maybe something for him there, some new reason for caring.

Naw, un-uh, he didn’t understand what that had been about, Cheni, their desultory sex, and maybe it had not been worthy of understanding, just a little wasted treat, a kind of mystical sloppy seconds.

He stared out over the boulders, over the flats and the foothills toward the Himalayas, deriving strength from their distant grandeur. No answers there, however. No alternatives. The assholes had started something that he would have to finish.

“Stupid fuckers,” he said to the mountains. “You write yourself a great play, get yourself prime talent, then you blow the ending.”

But that was cool.

He had an idea for a terrific third act.

A week after Clement’s return from Tasang-partsi, a week during which fires bloomed in American embassies all over Asia, he broke into Rice’s home in Katmandu and prowled about the place, digging into drawers, discovering little of interest apart from several handguns and a variety of sexual aids. He unloaded all of the guns except for a .44 Magnum, which he fitted with a silencer. Then he sat down to wait for Rice in the den. Rice had fixed the room up with walnut paneling, a green shag carpet, bookshelves, a wet bar, leather chairs and sofa, and Clement liked the American ambience, although the lighting was a touch too yellow for his tastes. He laid the gun on the arm of a chair, leafed through some old Time magazines, and having exhausted these, opened the latest Robert Ludlum thriller. Shouts and laughter and music came from the street—it was a festival night, and the city was thronged with celebrants. Listening to them, Clement felt lighthearted and clear in his mind; but this was mostly because he knew he was cutting his final ties with a world in which he had lived his entire life, that once the night was done he would be irrevocably disconnected. The thought sobered him, yet was not in the least displeasing. He went to the bar, poured himself a bourbon on the rocks, and toasted his freedom. Then he sat down again and reopened the Ludlum. He was three murders into the book when he heard Rice’s car pulling up.

He killed the lights and went into the darkened living room; through the window he saw Rice and a heavyset balding man in a tweed overcoat, whom he recognized as Clark Settlemyre, an assistant to the Director. That Settlemyre was along both gladdened his heart and rekindled his anger. The more the fucking merrier, he thought. He went back into the den and stood behind the door, certain that they would be having a nightcap. A minute later the door opened, the lights were switched on, and the two men entered and walked over to the bar. Hidden by the door, watching through the crack below one hinge, Clement enjoyed the feeling of cold implacability that the sight of their backs gave him.

“Have a seat,” said Rice, shrugging out of his overcoat.

“I’ve been sitting all day,” said Settlemyre; he had a deep presidential voice that matched the blunt strength of his features. He ran his eye along the bookshelves.

Rice mixed, poured. “I think you’re wrong about Clement.”

Settlemyre shrugged as if Rice’s opinion were unimportant.

“Clement’s a doer,” said Rice. “Not a schemer. I can see him gettin’ in a snit and blowin’ somebody’s brains out. But whoever’s been mailin’ these bombs has…”

“Whoever it is,” said Settlemyre, “knows security procedures like the back of his hand. It has to be someone with Clement’s level of clearance.”

“True,” said Rice. “But I’m gonna withhold judgment till I hear from Lily.”

“If we hear from her.”

“I think I can clear this up, fellas,” said Clement, stepping from behind the door. “It was me what did for all yer buddies.”

Rice’s hand darted toward the inside of his coat. Clement blew a wine decanter at his elbow into a shower of icy splinters, and Rice ducked, then froze.

“A wise choice, pal,” said Clement. “Because I’m crazy to kill. So why don’t you take the gun out with your left hand and toss it over here?”

“What is this shit, man?” said Rice.

Clement aimed the Magnum at Rice’s forehead, and Rice did as he’d been told.

“How ’bout you, Clark?” said Clement. “Are we packing tonight, or are we dressed for success?”

“I don’t have a weapon,” said Settlemyre.

“Let’s be certain, now,” said Clement brightly. “The punishment for wrong answers is lots and lots of pain.” He injected menace into his tone. “I mean it.”

“I have no weapon.”

“Know what, Clark? I believe you. I bet you’d rather die than fib. But why don’t we just open our coat…just to make me happy.”

Settlemyre complied; his face was unreadable, but Rice looked anxious.

“You gonna tell us what this is alla ’bout?” he asked.

Clement arched an eyebrow. “You don’t know? Golly, I would have bet you had to know.” He ordered his face into a solemn mask and affected a Southern accent. “Miz Lily has met with a tragic fate.” Saying that hurt him, and he covered his emotion with a laugh. “As has that dastard D’allessandro. In both instances, it was not a fate worse than death…get my meaning?”

Rice said, “Jesus,” and Settlemyre said, “D’allessandro is in Mustang?”

“Was,” said Clement, restraining his anger.

“I think…” Settlemyre began.

“You motherfucker,” said Clement. “I’m going to go easy on Rice. But you, I’m going to do you slow. Know why? Because you’re the one wanted D’allessandro. It was your pride on the line. You and all the major assholes in McLean. That’s all it was…goddamn pride.”

“You should take time to examine the situation, Clement,” Settlemyre said. “Things may not be quite so cut-and-dried as they seem.”

“Terrific idea! Clark, why don’t you sit down over there.” Clement gestured with the gun to one of the leather chairs. “And you”—he looked at Rice—“you come over here.”

“C’mon, man,” said Rice. “I…”

“Over here!” said Clement. “Now!”

He directed Rice to stand at the right of the leather chair opposite the one in which Settlemyre had taken a seat; then he sat down and jammed the silencer into Rice’s groin. He could feel Rice quivering.

“Please,” said Rice. “Please, don’t.”

“Everybody comfy?” asked Clement. “Good.” He smiled at Settlemyre. “Okay…talk.”

“You have to be a realist about all this,” said Settlemyre. “I know you’re upset, and I realize you don’t particularly want to hear that. But you know that’s how you should deal with it.”

“Roy,” said Rice plaintively.

“Shut the fuck up!” Clement glanced up at him. “This could be an important lesson for you…that is, if you believe in reincarnation. You believe in reincarnation, man?”

“Don’t do this, Roy.”

“All you’re going to hear, pal, is a little whiff. Pffft! Then you’re going to blow backwards into the wall and slide down like a dead snake. I don’t know if you’ll feel any pain. Gunshot wounds were never my best subject. But I bet your balls will be dead before you are.”

Rice started to plead his case again, but Settlemyre told him to keep quiet.

“Do you want retribution?” he said to Clement. “Or would you prefer to live?”

“You mean I dare hope?”

“Your sarcasm is amusing,” said Settlemyre. “But this situation surely merits more than sarcasm.” He crossed his legs, pulling his features into a grave expression. “Now I realize, of course, that you can’t trust me. But you’re aware of my power, and you must know that with the use of a little acumen you can win guarantees from me that I won’t be able to rescind until you’ve reached safety. You can survive this if you decide to be a realist. If, however, you insist on playing the role of grief-stricken avenger, then there’s nothing I can do for you.”

Rice was easing back from the gun, and Clement prodded him hard to keep him still.

“I can understand how you’ve become such a mover and shaker, Clark,” said Clement. “That was nicely spoken, nicely done…the way you tried to turn the tables on me. Under any other circumstance, it would have been incredibly effective. Really, I mean it. But the problem is, I just don’t give a fuck about alternatives. I’m not playing anymore, and there’s not a thing you can do for me except die. Besides, I might have a few moves that would surprise you.”

“Oh?” said Settlemyre, maintaining his poise. “What might they be?”

“I could tell you, Clark. I know you’d keep it to yourself. But I don’t care that much about satisfying your curiosity. I hate your guts. You’re the kind of slug that makes nights like this an inevitability.” He looked up at Rice, who was staring ahead, his chin trembling. “So how you doing there, pal?”

Rice’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and he let out a sobbing breath; his hands shook, his fingers curled.

“No shit…that bad, huh?”

With a marked effort, Rice steadied himself. “Lemme go, man. You know none of this was my decision.”

“Lily,” said Clement, his heart aching with hatred. “That one hurt.”

“I’m just a fuckin’ soldier, man…like you.”

“How long?” asked Clement. “How long was she working for you?”

When Rice seemed reluctant to answer, Clement jabbed with the gun, doubling him over, and repeated the question. Rice sucked in air, tears spilled from his eyes. “Was it from the beginning?” asked Clement. “Just nod.”

Rice nodded.

“From the beginning.” Clement was having a problem holding on to his train of thought. “This was all about D’allessandro? That’s all?”

Settlemyre said, “What would you expect?”

“I’ll be right with you, Clark,” said Clement; then, to Rice: “Remember what I said about learning a lesson?”

“What? No…yeah. I…”

“Don’t strain yourself, pal. The lesson is, free will can be fun.”

Rice blinked, swallowed. He kept his eyes on the wall, his mouth opening and closing.

“Remember that little sound I told you about? Pffft?”

“Roy…Christ!”

“Listen,” said Clement, and fired.

As Rice flew backward, Clement caught movement out of the corner of his eye and threw himself sideways in the chair. He felt a tremendous jolt high in his chest that added to his momentum, heard an explosive report, and he went over onto the floor, firing in the general direction of Settlemyre. After a bit he sat up, his back to the wall. He blinked, trying to focus; but though his vision cleared, nothing in the room seemed to fit together—it was as if true clarity were a product of some indefinable strata underlying the visual, one whose dissolution preceded that of the six accredited senses. He blinked again. Better. Sofas on rugs, rugs on floors, walls containing light and bodies. The usual arrangement. One of the bodies, Settlemyre, was still sitting in his chair. The upper portion of his skull was missing…or not exactly missing. Most of it had gone to create a Jackson Pollock effect in reds and grays on the wall behind him. Despite this grotesque insult to his flesh, he had maintained something of his basic imperturbability; his mouth set in lines of stern disapproval, as if death had struck him as an example of unsatisfactory policy. Rice was curled beside the bookcase, his head wedged upright. He appeared to be gazing with intent interest at the lowest shelf, hunting for some pertinent reference work. Islands of his blood figured the tangles of a green shag sea. Clement closed his eyes. He probed his wound gingerly, feeling the ridged-up flesh of the bullet hole just under the collarbone.

You should have patted down the bastard, he told himself, you should have known he’d use Rice to make a move.

A fuckup to the last.

He probed his wound again.

Couldn’t have been much of a gun. Fucking sissy gun. The shithead had probably carried it tucked in his garter belt.

But ’tis enough, t’will serve.

He had another look at the room. Hell, he thought, would open like this. Under the sickly yellow lights, a flat of carnage and gore, dapplings of red and gray, a still life with corpses painted upon a curtain that, once lifted, would allow the everlasting blackness to flow out over the audience.

Goddamn! Fuck, that hurts!

He gritted his teeth, pushed against the edges of the wound, trying to stifle the pain.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

After a minute he hauled himself to his feet. He wavered, almost fell. Black nebular shapes floated before his eyes. Pain was beating inside him, the steady beat of oarsmen. Stroke, stroke. Once it had subsided a bit, he wobbled over to the bar and poured a double bourbon. He slugged it down. Poured another. He repeated the process twice more and felt much better. Maybe, he thought, he could make it back to Tasang-partsi.

Not hardly, bozo, not without you growing wings.

The funny thing, though, was why he should keep wanting to return there. He wouldn’t have minded seeing Cheni again. Birds of a feather, that sort of thing. And they’d had something going, something that had seemed of importance. What it was, he had no way of telling. Maybe it was merely a delusion.

Delusion was always a possibility.

But he could have sworn there had been something, some unity, some tie. Nothing mystical…or if it was, then mystical in a nuts-and-bolts sort of way, in a pragmatic sense.

What the hell was he doing, just standing here and thinking about this dumb crap?

Time to flee, to hie thee hence, to make tracks.

The whiskey had steadied him, and he thought it would be good to get away from the house. Take a walk somewhere.

Been a long time since you’ve had a chance just to walk around and feel the breeze without having mean things on your mind.

Not since…shit! Not since Eddie Lavigne.

Eddie, Christ! How long’s it been, man?

Twenty-three years, pal. What the fuck you been doing with yourself?

Dying, Eddie. I’ve been dying all that time.

You always were a morbid asshole. Hey, remember when we busted out of the orphanage?

Fucking A…it was great!

Great? You ran out on me!

What’d you expect, man? You freaked out!

The hell I did!

Hell you didn’t, Eddie! We were crossing a field, remember, and we saw this old horse grazing, and you said we should steal the fucker…ride it. But we were too short to get up on it, so you started jumping up and down, waving your arms, and the son of a bitch just keels fucking over. Dead. You claimed you’d killed it, that you had vast mental powers. You said if I didn’t do what you told me, you’d zap me with your mind rays.

Clement.

A cold, intimidating voice snapped him back to an awareness of Rice’s den. He spun about, the Magnum at the ready.

I need you, Clement.

“Oh, man,” he said, easing out of the room into the darkened corridor. “I don’t need this shit!”

You have done evil, but your heart is pure.

“Who the fuck’s there?” he shouted, dropping into a crouch.

Kumari.

Cold, black, deep as forever.

Clement laughed giddily, realizing that he was starting to lose it in a big way. Time to flee. Yes, indeed. He stepped back into the den. His shirtfront was soaked with blood. He grabbed Rice’s overcoat, pulled it on, and buttoned it to cover the mess. He shoved the Magnum into his belt, then poured another bourbon. He glanced down at Settlemyre and Rice. Brothers in the bond, no matter how despicable. He toasted them and wondered how it would feel to be innocent and clean and full of hope.

This world is a shadow, Clement. What you have done is cause for neither contrition nor pride.

“No lie?” said Clement, and giggled; the bourbon was doing its job.

Purity is a condition of fate. It has been your fate to be a child at war and pure. Thus you can be useful to me.

“Sorry,” he said. “Got a previous engagement.”

He went staggering through the house, out onto the street. Swarthy wild-eyed men in loose white cotton shirts and trousers milled everywhere, going arm-in-arm, singing drunkenly. The night was music and incense and shrieks, the darkness slashed by channels of torchlight and glitter. As Clement moved with the crowd toward the heart of the city, he spotted three men in suits. They had the cut of Company men. They were craning their necks, peering in every direction, and Clement thought that they might have been watching Rice’s house in hopes that he would show up; they probably had seen him leaving. He worked his way to the middle of the crowd in order to hide from the men, and then, feeling weaker, disoriented, he let the press carry him along, turning this way and that, and finally pouring into a wide street lined by wooden stalls with hotly lit interiors and necklaces of light bulbs that illuminated signs lettered in both English and Newari. Like little stages in which dozens of two- and three-character plays were being performed. Tinsmiths, basketsellers, men hunched over sewing machines, cobbler’s benches, men hammering inlay into copper plates, offering scarves and rings and silver charms. The jostling of the crowd had worn away Clement’s reserves. He pushed toward the nearest of the stalls, a place no larger than a toolshed in which a pudgy man wearing an old tweed coat and a green turban was embroidering a shirt; he slumped against the wall, slid down into a sitting position, and stared at the forest of legs moving past, growing numb and thoughtless. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. The stallkeeper, his face crimped by a frown. He shook a finger under Clement’s nose.

“No stay here!” he said, shaking his head. “No!”

Clement fumbled in his pockets, hauled out a handful of bills and thrust them at the man. “Just a few minutes, okay? I just want to rest up for a few minutes.”

The money vanished along with the frown.

“Okay!” said the stallkeeper, beaming. “No problem, no big deal.”

The music swirled around Clement, no longer seeming an assault on his senses, but rather comforting him, supporting him on billows of sound, and he began to feel at peace. This troubled him. By all rights, he thought, he should not be granted peace, he should be tormented for his crimes.

But peace was cool with him if it was cool with everyone else.

How ’bout it, guys? Little time-out? Little King’s X?

Beyond the market stood a three-story building of crumbling friated brick, with slices of light leaking through shuttered windows. Shadows were hundreds of deaths passing behind them.

Can’t scare me, man.

I live with those fucking shadows.

Hey, Cheni! There’s worse than being unlucky.

“Right, D’allessandro?”

Absolutely, Roy.

You know how it goes…Born under a bad sign, I been down since I began to crawl, if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.

No luck at all, Cheni, that’s really the pits.

But no luck wasn’t an excuse, he wasn’t going to hide behind excuses, not at this point.

He fingered the wooden tiger from his pocket and looked it in the eyes. “What do you think?”

You were hard wood to work, Roy, but I finally got you right.

I loved you, old man.

Please, Roy…love?

The stallkeeper tapped him on the shoulder again and handed him a cup. Tea. Clement thanked him and set the cup down.

Can’t drink it, might spring a leak.

I’m a little teapot, short and stout, just tip me over and pour me…

Fuck that shit!

He put the tiger down beside the cup.

You stay there, pal, and keep watch for demons.

His wound throbbed like a sick heart.

Clement.

That cold voice again.

“Go away,” he said.

Look at me, Clement.

Wearily, he lifted his head. Torchbearers were approaching, and the crowd parted before them. Following the torchbearers came a platform borne on the shoulders of six men, and seated on it was a Newar girl of about twelve, clad in embroidered gilt cloth. Her black eyes opened like tunnels through golden flesh, and he flowed along them, passing through the bleak serenity of the girl’s presence, a presence that struck him as being both masculine and feminine, until he touched a more erratic presence, touched it briefly, but for long enough to acknowledge an intimacy that was better than love, better than trust, one he had been too earthbound to accept and Cheni had been too distraught to convey, a unity that was too individual to have a name. Then the contact was broken and he found himself looking up at the Newar girl. She had descended from her platform. Her eyes were swelling, pushing toward him, threatening to burst and loose a flood of blackness.

“No,” he said, “no, I don’t want this.”

Then, before he had time to doubt what was happening, the blackness of Kumari’s eyes poured over him, and he saw, mounted upon a field of darkness, like a rip in the fabric of night, a Tibetan man, a soldier weary of war who joined company with an anguished, distraught woman, an unlucky woman, and shortly thereafter, wounded by his enemies, lay dying at the feet of a little girl dressed in gilt cloth.

Clement felt a searing pain that did not seem associated with his wound. He ignored the pain and watched the Tibetan tumbling through the darkness toward a golden light, and knew that the man was melding with the blackness of Kumari, becoming part of an ancient process, and when the blackness penetrated the light, it would be wedded to the soul of a newborn girl child, and soon priests would come for her and bear her away to the temple where she would be pampered and paraded before the faithful on festival days, and do battle with the fuming emptinesses who menaced all and everything, aided by that soldierly essence with whom she had allied herself, until the time arrived when a new incarnation would be chosen and the worn scrap of the Tibetan man’s soul would be granted release, and the girl stood in the market of Katmandu above a dying American and instructed him on the nature of his fate.

I need you, Clement.

He recalled what Cheni had told him about Kumari’s ally. More craziness, he thought. More delusion. Why, after all, would he be the one chosen?

It’s no reward.

Oh, yeah…right.

He wanted to pull back from the vision, but discovered that he could not, that he was falling toward a distant golden light. Frightened, he twisted and turned, but had no option other than to confront the pain that assaulted him from every side, huge ebony shadows veering close to tear at him, and it wasn’t fair, he thought, it just wasn’t fair for him to have to keep on fighting, even though he recognized that there was a certain justice involved. He fixed on the golden light, hoping that concentrating would help ease his pain. It didn’t look much like an opening, he thought. It was solid and serene, like a fat autumn moon floating over the emptiness of a Wyoming night, and he remembered having seen it before from this same angle, hiding in a barn on the night he split from Eddie Lavigne, wondering what monster might come out of the dark to rend him with its teeth, wondering if there would ever be an end to solitude, to grief.

Clement!

Another cold voice, or was it the same one?

Coincidence or magic?

And then his grief was subsumed into the light, and it felt strange to be free of grief, as if half his weight had been taken away, and he drifted toward the golden moon, drowsing, afraid that something would snatch him if he slept, but too sleepy to sustain fear.

Clement! Goddamn you!

His thoughts eddied, and he gazed at the wooden tiger that somebody had given him, liking the way it stood there, facing the battles ahead with a fierce frozen glare. Seeing it gave him courage.

C’mon, Clement! Talk to me!

Courage made anything bearable. Sorrow, pain, even being shaken…shaken hard. And he thought someday he would look back on this night, this one night that seemed emblematic of the entire character of his life, with the clean smell of hay and the sound of semis hitting the spacers on the highway down through the mountains, and loneliness fitting around him like a heavy coat, muffling emotion…yeah, someday he might think back on this night and realize that it had been a pretty good time.

Clement!

More shaking.

The pain had started again. His eyes blinked open, and he saw a man in a suit kneeling beside him, another man standing above him, holding a machine pistol.

Demons.

No doubt about it.

Their suits and pale skins were containers of emptiness and cold.

Behind them, the celebrants had cleared a space about the three men, formed a loose rank, and were looking on with sober expressions. Some were whispering one to another. Clement could no longer see Kumari. Her keepers must have hustled her away, but he could feel her off somewhere in the midst of the crowd.

Her Serene Darkness, waiting for him.

He focused on the man with the gun. Deep within the black tunnel of the barrel a golden full moon was shining.

“Oh,” he said, and gave a feeble laugh.

The man with the gun laughed, too, and said, “Hey, dying must be fun, huh, Clement?”

“I don’t think he’s dying, I think we might be able to patch him up,” said the man kneeling. He had a receding hairline and curly brown hair and the lined, rugged face of a sympathetic counselor, like a football coach or a juvenile probation officer; his tone, however, was anything but sympathetic. “Hear that, asshole? You might just live to do a little suffering.”

“You’re not such bad guys,” Clement said. “You’re just in a lousy play.”

The two men exchanged glances, then the kneeling man asked Clement a question. Clement paid it no attention.

The pain was getting very bad. He stared at the shining moon within the gun barrel.

If you have nowhere to run, you have to make a stand.

Shut your ass, bitch!

Clement tried to collect himself, to gather his thoughts into a coherent pattern and make a judgment. This was all wrong, this shit about goddesses and soldiers, this crazy bullshit about demons. He was going to live. Okay. What then? Figure a way to buy some time. Tell them a tall tale, a Tru-Life Adventure.

There I was, guys, surrounded by an old man and my wife, with only my body for a weapon.

What for? Why make the effort?

The faces of the crowd glistened, flat and unreal, facades pressured by the blackness behind them. Screams of joy and deliverance, wild men drunk on holiness.

Swirling music and moonlit clouds on fire.

Aw, what the hell!

He wanted to remember something, something sustaining, enabling, something that would shore him up, but he realized that there had never been anything of the sort in his life. His world had consisted of the apparent, the illusory, of moments whose vividness and poignancy had been the product of a misapprehension or a sleight of hand. He could conjure sweet words, the softness of a woman’s breast, the feeling of accomplishment, of conquest, but they were all funded by lies or a lying sensibility. He could see in his mind’s eye Lily’s lips curving up as he touched her, that sly, sexy way she’d had, he could see into the heart of a thousand such moments, and they were all wormwood, all betrayal and dust. What did it matter if his ending was colored by another lie, by a clever delusion, a delusion so clever that it didn’t matter if it was real, because it offered nothing but pain?

You’ve always been a sucker for punishment, right, slugger?

Bet your ass!

Pretty goddamn remarkable, he said to himself, I mean this is very tricky how you’ve managed to work the whole deal in Tasang-partsi and everything since into a nifty little metaphysical gig, a nice job opportunity out on Fifth Dimension Avenue.

Well, ready or not, here I come.

The man kneeling beside Clement asked another question, but Clement only smiled. He squeezed the wooden tiger tightly in his fist, imagining that his soul was shrinking to fit within that lethal compact shape.

I love you, he said under his breath, talking to Lily, to D’allessandro, to Cheni, to anyone who might receive with understanding the minute spark of love that he had nourished, the spark that had weakened and killed him.

What’s next? There must be something next, some final formality.

Any last words, pal?

Forgot about that.

Clement searched out the eyes of the kneeling man. Watery blue eyes, little humid puddles empty of feeling.

“I give,” he said to him.

He focused on the tiny golden moon within the barrel of the machine pistol. Then, summoning all his strength, he kicked the man, sending him onto his back, and made a quick, crafty move toward the Magnum tucked inside his overcoat. For an instant he was dismayed, thinking that he might have moved so quickly, he had caught the other man by surprise.

Then he fell through darkness into the light.