The Blot

In his extreme youth Alexander Bruno had imagined life to have a top side and an underneath. The underneath was embodied by all he saw around him in San Rafael, then in Berkeley, in People’s Park and on Telegraph Avenue; it was populated by his mother and by the two plaster-pediment artisans in their sea of white dust, berating his mother; by the landlord evaded in his visits to the apartment on Chestnut Street; by the barely coping public-school teachers who corralled Bruno, and the other children they corralled; by the pitying volunteers filling trays at the soup kitchens to which June too frequently resorted for their meals.

Bruno had at first only clawed his way into a vibrant layer of that underneath: the realm of dishwashers and waiters at Spenger’s, then Chez Panisse, their cheap white drugs and horny remarks transacted just out of sight and earshot of those who sat at the tables they serviced. It was at the tables where, as if through a one-way mirror, the top layer was made visible to those below. That zone of privilege and luxury, the only destination worth attaining. Or so Bruno had thought at the time. If this view was one he’d never questioned, now, on return from the near-death of surgery, it dissolved in a new understanding. Keith Stolarsky might be emperor of the plastic facade of Telegraph Avenue—its top layer, which held no allure—but Garris Plybon was king of Telegraph’s underneath. It was to this layer that Bruno had sunk, or been reduced, gladly. This wasn’t a matter of embracing a past he’d once discarded as if it were something stuck to his shoe. Bruno was done wondering what had become of June, or schoolmates beyond Stolarsky, or other waitstaff, or even Konrad. Bruno didn’t need Berkeley to remember him. At Kropotkin’s, he felt reinstated in a timeless freakish demimonde to which he’d always belonged.

The restaurant was a theater. On leaving, Bruno shoved the mask and noose into an unused drawer full of potholders. On the street he was anonymous to the same students who’d gleefully addressed him as “dead man” at the counter. He’d retired his medical mask now, too, become one with his scarred face. It still startled him, caught in passing, reflected in a storefront window. Yet his old face would have startled him just as badly. It was startling, to a dead man, to be alive.

Beth Dennis returned from Chicago and reappeared at Garris Plybon’s. On leave from the Rhetoric Department, shorn of her own retail perch at Zodiac, Beth’s slicked-back hair and angry glasses seemed less drolly ironic, more dangerous. Sexier, too, in the manner of a 1950s gang girl, or cellblock boss in a female prison movie. She was like Bruno, another soldier in Plybon’s secret cadre. At her first chance, hunkering around Plybon’s fathomless soup, Beth latched on to Madchen Abplanalp. They were joined in ironic conspiracy, Madchen the passenger on the airplane ticket whose purchase had gotten Beth canned. And Beth spoke German. The women vanished into talk Bruno couldn’t follow even if they hadn’t been shrouded in mutual admiration. “Alexander wäre perfekt für dein Bankautomatenprojekt. Das Blöde ist nur, dass er kein Girokonto hat …”

Bruno, happy to be invisible, dredged material from his bowl, trying to parse the soup’s theme. He found carrots and celery, as always, but also miniature tentacles, yellow beardy mussels, caraway seeds. The soup is a picture of my life now, Bruno thought. The soup is me. At any moment a baby sea monster … yet now, here, a soft lump of potato … Plybon, meanwhile, had returned from the kitchen bearing a small Tupperware container loaded with the recycled joints he’d gathered from Tira Harpaz’s passenger’s-side footwell. Everywhere in his new life Bruno traveled in a fog of pot, the sole drug that had never interested him in the slightest. No matter: He no longer identified with his own preferences but with those of his natural homes in the world, Kropotkin’s and the Jack London. The smell of ancient dope lay deep in the boards and millwork of the apartment building—you could probably smoke the moldings if your supply ran out.

“Er kann meine Karte benutzen, um Geld abzuheben. Es ist völlig egal, wessen Konto das ist.”

“What the hell are you two on about?” Plybon’s tone of maximum irritation made no impression on Beth and Madchen, who sat entwined. Bruno had heard no mention of Alicia, but he wouldn’t presume their relationship excluded one behavior or another: Among lesbians, among humans generally, there was always so much you didn’t understand. As for Madchen, though his German roommate had transformed number 25 into an intimate shrine of incense and candles, she and Bruno hadn’t consummated their nightly spooning. Bruno wasn’t jealous. They were all in it together, whatever it was.

Anyway, in his guilty heart he desired Tira Harpaz. Yet there was no evidence of Tira and Stolarsky anywhere that Bruno could tell. Regular abdication was a feature of Stolarsky’s reign over Telegraph, an imperial refusal to appear. Or was Stolarsky a scientist, peering in from a hidden vantage while mice worked his maze?

“I was just getting Madchen up to speed on your ATM action,” Beth explained lazily. “She thinks Alexander would be perfect.”

“Garris is part of the East Bay Countersurveillance Group,” said Beth. “They’re planning this thing with the banks. I want to film it.” She hefted an imaginary palm video recorder, aimed at Bruno. “You explain, Garris.”

Plybon concluded a draft on a joint. “A little how-do-you-do to the cameras at the ATMs, that’s all …” The slider cook detailed the scheme: At noon on May 15, the anniversary of the People’s Park Riots, dozens in masks would each withdraw twenty dollars from every automatic teller machine in Berkeley. A coordinated action and totally legal, but calculated to alarm the authorities into an overreaction. “The girls have a point,” said Plybon. “You’ve already got your Lon Chaney thing going.” The joint passed to Beth, then Madchen, the room clouding.

“You’ll use my card,” said Beth. “With your medical thing, you’ve got full deniability, it’ll be a cause célèbre. Plus for the cameras, you’re intense. Tall and weird, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I don’t mind. I am tall and weird.” His hand drifted up to fondle the scars parenthesizing his nose. Once, the blot had been something only Bruno could see, forever between him and the world. Now that his disfigurement was visible to others, Bruno often forgot it was there.

“It is brilliant, I think,” said Madchen. “I would enjoy to go to one of the bank machines too.”

Plybon shook his head. “As a foreign national you’d be assuming too much risk.”

“Ja.” Madchen stretched from her cushions to return what remained of the joint.

Plybon mopped his hands hurriedly on a dish towel, placed the remnant on his tongue, and gulped. “Waste not, want not.”

“Tell them about the Million Masked, Garris,” said Beth, her tone seductive. Bruno was overtaken by a vision of Plybon as a kind of pimp, his apartment a harem with its cushions and red wine in jam jars.

Plybon flipped his hand. Civilian, he still wielded a phantom spatula. “Just a little concept I was fooling with. Since Seattle they’ve employed facial recognition tech in protest surveillance, you know.”

“Black bloc and Zengakuren and Anonymous, they all rely on concealment. Sikhs remove their turbans at airports, we persecute black kids in hoodies and women in burkas. So, what about a Million Masked March?”

“Sure, but it’ll never happen. That committee’s all green-flag Bookchinite types. Not a Situationist bone in their bodies.” Plybon hovered over Bruno. “You gonna eat that soup or just stare into it?”

Plybon made a face and went into the kitchen. The wiry counterman’s dissidence was like an epileptic upwelling within his body, possibly the result of pressure on some lobe. If you were Noah Behringer, the essential fact of anyone might be lopped out, leaving the patient to reconfigure around its absence. Bruno, for instance, had forsaken luxury, possessiveness, wagering, everything that made him himself. Yet he still existed, custodian of a tall, weird body on a rudderless voyage through time.

“Wir sollten ihn davon überzeugen, auch am Millionen-Maskierte-Marsch, teilzunehmen.” The women resumed their conspiracy. Bruno didn’t need to understand their words. Whether it was a baseline condition of telepathy or the background hum of the pot, he felt embraced in the sanctum of Plybon’s soup-scented harem.

Madchen smiled at Bruno. He smiled back, blinked at her. Having crossed to the Kladow landing and kissed across her bicycle, bounced their voices off lonely satellites, flown thousands of miles to lotion each other’s scarred and spangled bodies, his and the German’s intimacy was still opaque, inchoate.

“It might be hard to persuade the women in burkas,” said Beth, still working on Plybon’s march.

“It wouldn’t matter who was underneath,” said Plybon from the kitchen. “You chicks could volunteer, for instance.”

“Ja, why not?” said Madchen. Her air suggested she’d been a burka protester many times before. Madchen and Plybon drifted together in Bruno’s mind’s eye: The lanky, smooth German, with her undemolished innocence, her eruptions of glitter. The pale wretched anarchist, his elbows like branches of a diseased tree, eyes blinking like a mole’s the moment he laid aside his Coke-bottle spectacles. Impossible and yet not, since all human conjunctions were possible, after all.

The idyll eased Bruno’s guilt. He wanted to tumble into the abyss of Tira Harpaz’s contemptuous wit and chunky nipples, the magic cyst at her inner thigh. Having retired his backgammon board he mentally shifted the humans before him, like checkers, to favorable positions. Madchen might be a trailing runner, a piece he’d ushered a wild distance against titanic odds. She had to be played safe, for Bruno’s own absolution. Bruno himself could be left uncovered, Bruno was the stray, always. He was the blot.

“And you’d be perfect,” said Beth. “The Nooseman, at the head of the column.”

“I’m perfect for anything,” said Bruno. “That’s why nobody knows what to do with me.”

Beth, with the help of Alicia and Madchen, groomed Bruno for a star turn in her video. She armed him with her debit card and password, and a stack of tiny photocopied slips, to be presented to any authority, reading:

I am a participant in a nonviolent social experiment, with no wish or intention to harm anyone or any institution in any way whatsoever. Thank you for your interest, and have a nice day.

They chose his outfit, too, the tuxedo and dress shoes he’d sidelined in favor of sweatpants and ABIDE shirts. His medical mask, in place of the burlap and noose. The action wasn’t a comedy, shouldn’t fall under the sign of the Hanged Food Worker. Madchen worked on him again with her shears, perfecting the line of his ears and neck, her chaste ministrations not unlike Oshiro’s. Then Bruno showered, carefully shaved, and tried on his outfit, dress rehearsal for Beth’s camera. Privately, he guessed he’d disappoint their hopes for photogenic catastrophe. The tuxedo made Bruno unapproachable, as unlikely to be arrested as a stage magician in mid-performance. He’d used it to withdraw untaxed income from protectorates and emirates; it was hard to imagine that withdrawing twenty dollars in broad daylight would be the downfall of its Teflon privilege.

Wearing it, though, was agreeable. On Plybon’s soup and pilfered sliders Bruno had fleshed out, regained his form, and the tuxedo fit. He was healing, he supposed. He glanced once at his abandoned backgammon set, but there was no one to play. Instead, toes creaking in Italian leather for the first time since he’d bought the cheap sneakers, he reached to pull Madchen to him, hand gently pressuring the small of her back as in a tango. She laughed as he dipped her. He had an erection. He didn’t care if the lesbians saw.

He’d wear the mask for their nonviolent social experiment, yes. But it was the last time. Overnight Bruno had become cruelly handsome, more striking than before the opening of his face’s door. He wished to hear someone call him Flashman, though there was no way to explain this. When Garris Plybon returned late from his closing shift at Kropotkin’s, Bruno changed again, into an ABIDE shirt, and removed the shoes. In bare feet he joined the women for an anticipatory celebration in Plybon’s apartment, more red wine and salvage pot. By the time he and Madchen tottered back to 25 these new energies were dissipated, and they only slept. But he wouldn’t forget.

As Beth and Alicia trailed him with their video camera from the Jack London, Telegraph was already like a muddied pond. The People’s Park Riot anniversary had roiled the street’s psychosis from underneath, mixing the park’s population, the righteous aggrieved and forlornly traumatized, the recyclable-gleaners, with the frat boys and tourists, the midmorning vomiters. Someone with a bullhorn recited an ancient speech on the subject of speech, words lying in bunches in this district to be seized up at any moment. No one listened. The words had triumphed and failed entirely, a puzzle impossible to solve. Traffic was halted while someone rolled a wheeled pallet bearing a fifteen-foot-tall puppet down the center of the avenue.

Bruno kept his medical mask in his tuxedo jacket’s right pocket, though he passed others with their faces covered, likely sharers in his own conspiracy. Others wore only a mask of pain. In his breast pocket, Bruno carried his cell phone and forty dollars, all that remained; in his pants pocket, for luck, the Berlin paving stone. If he’d taken the backgammon case, too, he might have discharged the apartment to its rightful owner, along with the phone charger and the supply of soiled T-shirts and sweatpants. Another opportunity to keep walking and never return.

Beth backed her way through the swirling confusion on the sidewalks, capturing the tuxedoed man’s approach, while Alicia set picks in the crowd, protecting her girlfriend’s back. Madchen wasn’t with them, instead off on her own small adventure, manning the Kropotkin’s counter alone, freeing Plybon to join in the action.

At the point of noon Bruno fell into alignment with the others at the row of seven ATMs facing campus. The other six wore Guy Fawkes masks. Looking to have been drinking all night, they careened and roared and drew hoots from passersby, hardly the ideal of serene provocation Plybon had described. In their company, Bruno’s tall overdressed presence was as invisible as he’d predicted. He formed the opposite of a sensation, a blinding outline, a vacancy of light. He Velcro-fitted the medical mask over his face but it added hardly anything, possibly subtracted. He might have done better with the noose but it lay in the drawer at Kropotkin’s.

Bruno entered the code, then handed Beth her card and receipt, with the twenty-dollar bill, but she palmed the cash back into his hand.

He and Alicia backed across the street, through more halted traffic. Beth kept her camera trained on the site. Two of the Guy Fawkes had gotten into a shoving match with a Wells Fargo guard, a short Mexican, hardly a strikebreaking Pinkerton type. It was unlikely that this took place near enough to the teller machines’ cameras to matter—but it had been explained to Bruno that urban surveillance was omnipresent, as in a casino. The little tableau of unrest might conceivably become a matter of public record and outcry, though rival unscripted disruptions were unfolding close by. Bruno was relieved, in any case, to have completed his assignment. He removed his mask, shoving it into his pocket beside the Berlin stone.

Alicia offered her warmest gold-toothed smile. She stroked Bruno’s sleeve. “You did good.”

“We’re gonna circulate,” Alicia said. Beth craned on her toes, trying to point her lens above the milling scene. No one had been arrested at the teller machines, a disappointment. The new energy seemed to be locating a little ways into campus, near Sather Gate. “Soak up some of the vibrations.”

Now Bruno was alone, to be drawn into and repulsed by the street’s air of incipient chaos. His primordial knowledge of Telegraph suggested that what would happen waited for nightfall. He wasn’t certain he cared. What mattered was to make his way to Kropotkin’s, to discover how Madchen had managed the grill, rescue her if she needed rescue. A roadblock of orange cones had appeared at the mouth of Telegraph, whether official or not, Bruno couldn’t tell. He wasn’t the only one confused. Someone plopped an amplifier at the barricade of cones, then plugged in an electric guitar.

Bruno knew the Kropotkin’s regulars by now, but in his tuxedo and scars he moved unseen among them. The scheduled riot had had no dampening effect on the lunchtime rush. If anything, it flushed more slider types from the woodwork. Servicing this demand with his usual panache was Garris Plybon, with Madchen nowhere in sight. Plybon wore a semitransparent Ronald Reagan mask, souvenir of his own turn in the ATM-withdrawal action.

Plybon-Reagan shrugged. “She got a better offer. Happens to me all the time.”

Plybon rustled thumb and forefinger together, tipping his head knowingly. “When in doubt, follow the money.”

“Big Chief Come Take Kraut Squaw.” Now Plybon jerked his thumb over his shoulder, a gesture familiar from his references to his raids on Tira Harpaz’s Volvo. “The Folks That Live on the Hill,” he’d once called them. Bruno’s heart lurched.

“Yeah. His Jaguar was double-parked when I turned up. The Pharaoh self-soothes by eating his way through a pyramid of sliders from time to time, but he never puts bubkes in the tip jar.”

“They were talking when I came in. He asked if she’d step outside for a word, so I took over. About ten minutes later he comes back in alone, hands me the sack”—Plybon poked with his spatula to point out a to-go bag, crushed whole atop the garbage bin—“and said they were going off to lunch.”

“Let him? His Excellency Lord of all the Beasts of Earth and Fishes of the Sea wasn’t asking my permission.”

“Madchen’s a grown-up, from what I can see. Anyhow, comrade, do I look like I’m in the business of telling other people what to do?” All the while Plybon flipped, chopped, cheesed, and bunned, managing the line’s progress with minute nods and scowls. Plybon’s business might be acting as dictator of the tiniest possible nation on earth.

Plybon again shrugged. “He’s probably pouring a sequence of martinis into her, at the Paragon bar at the Claremont. It’s the best place around here for saying, ‘Look, baby, someday all this could be yours.’”

“Look at you, the great stone face. Your scars are turning red. Was he alone? He was until he led her out of here like a cat on a leash, yes. Then he was no longer alone.”

“In my experience those two don’t travel together. She’s no Kropotkin’s devotee, either.”

Plybon arched his eyebrows above his glasses, then gestured at the mob of eaters stretching through the door. “Even if I had the first idea where to look, I’m on here until the kid comes in at six. Why don’t you just go cool your jets? I bet Stolarsky’ll drop her back at the apartments, especially the minute he gets a load of her conversation.”

Standing aloof in his tuxedo, Bruno imagined vaulting the counter to strangle Plybon backward against the grill. But this was the impulse of someone wholly other than himself—one of the young men now agitating to the condiment shelf for mustard or ketchup, say—and so it evaporated.

He sat alone in number 25, facing not the door but the open windows. Distant bullhorns and the thud of reggae were punctuated by the sporadic crackle of laughter or sirens. The sky darkened slowly, low and orange, as if hills burned somewhere. His thoughts remained opaque. Not so much waiting, since he’d guessed Madchen wouldn’t return, or told himself he’d guessed it. She didn’t. He waited for Plybon, perhaps. Bruno had accustomed himself to the sound of Plybon’s bicycle clanking out of the elevator, through their corridor. Plybon didn’t return, either.

He went back to Kropotkin’s. Two bicycles were chained to the lamppost now. Plybon had been joined by his fresh-faced protégé, Robin to his Batman. Bruno went inside. The younger counterman did all the work, serving the excitable rabble, the would-be revolutionaries and vicarious lookers-on, while Plybon berated them.

“So this is what passes for the People’s Park Riot anniversary nowadays. Like twitches in Freedom’s corpse. It boils down to an excuse to break windows and steal bongs and leather and distressed-denim keepsakes. You probably lack the wherewithal to invert even a single police car. Kids these days.”

“It seems like I should stick around,” said Plybon. “Things look to get a little feisty around here tonight.”

Plybon made a long, sour face, his eyes like two magnified oysters. Bruno wasn’t certain his blackmail amounted to much, but Plybon appeared to reconsider. He smoothed his sweaty dome with both hands, then extended and interwove them to crack his knuckles. He looked to his protégé. “You cool for half an hour or so?”

“Can Alexander borrow your bike?” Perhaps it had been Bruno’s purposeful tone. Or maybe Plybon’s imagination had caught the scent of something, another action he didn’t want to miss out on.

“Sure.” The young counterman dug in his pocket for the padlock key and tossed it to Plybon. “Look out on the downgrades, the rear brake is shot.”

“It’s not the downgrades I’m worried about,” said Plybon. “You capable of climbing a mile up Euclid? The Sultan’s residence is almost up to Lake Anza.”

“Sure.” Bruno’s bluff was double. He had no notion of his capabilities nor of the location of Lake Anza.

III

The house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face. In the darkness it presented as a lip of driveway, beneath which the tails of the Jaguar and the Volvo were just visible, tipped up on a slanted driveway that terminated in a barred garage door and a high wooden gate. The low roof was blurred on one side in dark leaves, the other in pink blossoms glowing in the moonlight; beyond it lay the hint of hills, carving to the canyon below. The two men approached on, or with, bicycles. The first, the rangy bespectacled bald man, wore a bike helmet, and scythed efficiently up the grade to the driveway’s lip, where he dismounted. The second, the tall man in the tuxedo, who’d refused a helmet, arrived with shoulders bent, walking his bicycle, heaving it before him like a dogless sled.

Cicadas chirped—either that, or some transformer high on a telephone pole shorted in a circular rhythm in the silence.

The hill-etched homes opened to the rear, with picture windows and sliding doors, with decks and patios; at the street side they presented like bunkers. If the two men had picked their way up from the canyon, like coyotes, they could have gained an element of surprise. Alexander Bruno might have suggested it, if he hadn’t been winded and bleeding, his tuxedo both sweated through and torn at the knees. It was enough to have arrived.

Garris Plybon leaned his bike into the springy hedge. Bruno did the same. His knuckles bled, too, from his tumble from the bicycle—fortunately, he’d missed the road, or the parked cars along Euclid, with his bare head. He hardly noticed his knees or knuckles for the tight burning band of his ribs, the effect not of falling but of the climb, before he’d abandoned the pedals and begun pushing the bike uphill. Something, maybe blood, trickled in his lungs.

Bruno gripped the Berlin stone, deep in his pocket. An element of riot, perhaps, in this placid, implacable dominion. But he could see no window through which to toss the stone. Then he spotted it, a small triangle, just above the dark door and beneath the roof’s pitch, its glass reflecting blue night and black leaf cover. Another of Stolarsky’s one-way mirrors. Bruno hefted the stone, curled his wrist, and heaved. A perfect strike, it dashed the reflection with a thin, tinkling sound. Bruno’s Berlin talisman vanished inside. The house was unimpressed.

“What are you doing?” hissed Plybon, who’d just then opened the passenger’s-side door of Tira Harpaz’s unlocked Volvo.

“Announcing myself,” Bruno managed, his breath stolen by pedaling what had seemed miles.

“Thank you.” Bruno stood at the top of the drive, peering down at the house. The street behind them was still. The bay, necklace of bridges, distant towers, all they’d glimpsed at the curve of the Rose Garden, lay concealed behind the rise. The Berkeley of the flats, People’s Park, as distant from this preserve as Neukölln from Kladow. Bruno had fired his one shot, was bankrupt. Stolarsky’s compound had no reason to acknowledge him. Could he release the Jaguar’s brake, roll it through the garage door? Not only hadn’t Stolarsky left the keys in the ignition—unlikely after all—but the car was locked.

Bruno had missed the click of the door. Stolarsky stood half hidden behind it, in darkness. Plybon didn’t speak.

“There isn’t any, Keith.” Plybon slid into the Volvo’s passenger seat and left the door open, to make himself visible in the car’s interior light. He raised his hands.

“Who’s that with you? Your radical cohort, shit-squirrel? Is this your big play, finally? Two dudes and a rock? Is there a note tied to it reading ‘Eat the rich’?”

“It’s me.” Bruno spoke feebly, his voice shredded. He stepped down the drive, moving around the Volvo’s open door.

“Holy shit, look at you, putting on the Ritz, covered in blood and guts and French cuffs. You look like Frankenstein and his own monster, all stitched together.”

As Bruno neared, Stolarsky stepped from behind the door. His feet and legs were bare. He held a pistol, loosely, and wore nothing but a thin T-shirt. The darkness beneath its hem revealed as a scribble of genitals and hair, his penis like a second sarcastic nose.

“Why don’t you gather your harvest and get lost, shit-squirrel.” Stolarsky’s voice had turned, grown mossy and insinuating. He twitched his gun to give direction, as casually as if sliding an image from a screen.

Plybon shamelessly loaded his pockets with joints. “I’ll be needed down at the shop now.”

Bruno followed the half-naked man down a corridor illuminated here and there by the tiny red and blue lights at baseboard sockets, toward an open area lit only by the sky’s pale shadows. Bruno heard his own rasping breath. The picture window widened before them as they reached the corridor’s end, expected but still startling: dense treetops, rooted beneath the limit of view on the vertiginous pitch of hillside, then the stark rise on the far side of the canyon. There, the dirt and rock was yellow, clung with scrubby growth, sideways trees like cartoon witchy fingers. The three-quarter moon reached in and silvered the room’s contents: couch and chairs, low bookshelves, framed prints, free-standing bar littered with bottles, ice bucket, and balled-up napkins, a podlike device that might have been a humidifier or ion generator, Stolarsky’s hairy-pudding buttocks, the low modernist coffee table on which he’d carelessly placed the pistol, first rotating it with a flourish as if proposing a round of spin the bottle.

Bruno wanted water, but wanted more to accept nothing from Stolarsky. He shook his head.

“Ah, sorry, she can’t talk, she’s in-this-pose at the moment.” Stolarsky buckled his knees and grabbed his genitals with both hands, briefly lolled his head and stuck out his tongue. “Get it, in-this-pose?” Stolarsky snorted and went to the bar and refilled a glass from a bottle of scotch. “Just pulling your leg, Flash. She’s doing great. I think I scored myself a new personal assistant, in fact. These German people are so organized, it’s like a compulsion with them. She’ll help me get my shit in order. Here, take a load off.” Stolarsky, gesturing at the couch, caught Bruno’s glance at the gun. He added, “Don’t mind that, I guess I must have heard a bird or bat going through the attic window. I got spooked.”

Stolarsky’s bullshit was a fog, making it hard for Bruno to think. “She’s really going to … work for you?”

“Sure, why not?” Stolarsky turned his back, moving toward the broad window. “I mean, I said that off the top of my head, but she already does, if you look at it a certain way.”

“Nah, she took a powder. She’s got this little cottage up in Sonoma, she likes to disappear up there—”

“That’s where she told me you go.” Bruno was strung between them, Tira and Stolarsky and possibly Plybon, in a mad web of untruths. Perhaps Stolarsky had never been out of town—now that Bruno had laid eyes on the compound’s interior, it seemed possible Stolarsky had been squatted on this hill as trolls dwelled beneath bridges. Perhaps there was no winery, no such place as Glen Ellen to begin with.

Stolarsky pointed at Bruno. “You got me. She’s actually in a trench at the property line, I was just going to the shed for a bag of quicklime.” He smacked his forehead theatrically. “The car! Why didn’t I think of that, such an obvious fucking clue.”

Bruno measured his nearness to the gun against Stolarsky’s. The toadlike man stood almost pressed to the window now, to make a black blot against the glinting foliage and pale sky, the moonlight outlining his bandy legs in a halo of coarse hairs. Bruno could reach the weapon. Then Stolarsky beckoned to him, and the opportunity, if it was one, had passed. “Look.”

“You wanted to see she’s okay, right? So come see. It’s a nice view, anyhow. She hasn’t aged too bad.”

Bruno stepped forward, and felt as if he were plummeting into the picture window’s expanse. The room, which Bruno had taken for the whole house, was a matchbox perched atop a larger structure, impossible to guess from the bungalow visible from the street. He and Stolarsky stood pitched over a house nested half underground, with a long, low wing running down the steep hill, joining there to a smaller house, a guest quarters or studio, far below. The windows of the smaller house were lit.

Between these, in the hive of patios and miniature gardens below, sat a built-in redwood hot tub, steam whispering into the trees, disheveled clothing and flip-flops and empty tumblers scattered on the neighboring planks. Half immersed, leaning dreamily on her elbows, nipple-deep in foam, was Madchen. She didn’t look up.

“I’d invite you to join us for a soak, but forgive me, it’s a water-recycling system and the introduction of blood and cum and bodily substances generally just wrecks the pH for weeks, I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.”

Bruno had to hand it to Stolarsky: Madchen liked her baths. If it had only been Plybon’s soup into which she’d fallen, Bruno could have reached down with his spoon and ladled her out. He wondered if she’d even hear if he shouted her name. He didn’t try.

“You want to know the funny thing, though? It handles cocaine just fine, no problem. You could practically use it instead of chlorine, even.”

Bruno had quit breathing through his mouth, and the constriction at his ribs had loosened. But he had no voice.

“That lady sure likes her drugs, though. Slowing her down could end up somebody’s full-time job.”

Bruno wasn’t listening, just gazing at the ferry angel he’d found no use for, and who’d found no use for him.

“Here, I found these in her bag, I think they might belong to you.” Stolarsky had reached to grab something off the bar—three blue vials, childproof-capped, which he now pushed into Bruno’s hands. Bruno recognized the labels: the prescription painkillers given to him by Oshiro, those he’d failed to exhaust before quitting the regimen. Bruno shoved them into his pocket where the Berlin stone had been.

But Bruno looked past Madchen in her tub to the windows of the small house below, nearly shrouded in foliage—was it motion there, behind the curtains? Tira Harpaz? If only he’d made that coyote-approach from the canyon below, Bruno would have encountered the little house first, found Tira there. Then—what? Would they have absconded together, never looked back, Bruno junking his naïve gallantry and leaving Madchen behind? Or would Tira have enmeshed him in further bewilderment, claimed to have murdered Stolarsky, or Stolarsky and Madchen both? Bruno’s purposes were in tatters, yet he still cared what Tira thought of him, would have been ashamed of his bleeding knees and the nude German cooking in Stolarsky’s pot, of his foolish mistakes. Just as well that he’d approached the house from the front.

“Just thinking what you’d say as you set the dish on the table, Mr. Chez Panisse.”

“Like reading a Bazooka Joe comic,” said Stolarsky. “Doesn’t take more than a glance, but good for a quick laugh. Then you crumple it up and hope it doesn’t get stuck to your shoe …” He quit, for a slurp of scotch. Otherwise, Stolarsky surely could have amused himself in this vein indefinitely.

“The surgery, it brought my telepathy back. Did you … know this from before?”

“As a child, I mean. Did I confess it to you? There’s a lot I’ve forgotten.”

“Confess you had telepathy?” Stolarsky scratched his bulging stomach, under the dirty T-shirt, exposing himself further.

“Flashman, get serious. You might be the least telepathic creature stalking the earth. You think being easy to see through adds up to some kind of superpower, or what?”

“It’s unreliable,” Bruno admitted. “I’ve never cultivated the gift. For years I avoided it—that’s how I formed this block, this blot in my skull. From the desire not to hear the voices—”

“No, it’s true. When Dr. Behringer removed the growth, he freed the flow of … thoughts, back and forth.”

“I’ve just about discharged my fascination with you, Flashman. But tell me, how can somebody so shallow be so deeply fucked up?”

“Don’t you see, it might be the source of your fascination.” Bruno, immune to insult, only wished to break through. “You sensed I was like you. That’s why you remembered me all this time—”

“Nah, you and me have nothing in common. Except, I guess … you know.” Stolarsky winked lewdly and tipped his head at the window, the cottage beyond. “She gave you a feel of her secret cyst, huh?”

“But you are a mind reader, yes?” He’d bow to Stolarsky, in exchange for the satisfaction of an answer.

“Where do we even start? When’s the last time you recall being on top of one single human situation, instead of it being on top of you? You had no idea the ding-a-ling was abusing your cancer drugs, did you? And she was sleeping right there in your bed, though apparently unfucked, poor thing. What, was she too wrinkled-up around the edges for you?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot, I’m supposed to talk in euphemisms around you. What should we call it, your growth? Your little friend? The drugs for that thing that was pushing your eyeballs out of your head—that better?”

In the interval of Bruno’s hesitation, Stolarsky retrieved his gun. He weighed it casually, in both hands. “Trundle onto your Schwinn and roll out of here now. Schadenfreude has its limits, even for me.”

“I won’t leave without her.” It might have been the most hopeless phrase Bruno had ever heard himself utter.

“What are you going to do, break all my windows? It looks to me like you’re out of rocks.”

“Grow up. I was watching on the security cameras the minute you and that shit-squirrel crossed the motion detector. Or maybe I used my telepathy, who knows?”

Stolarsky shrugged. “I dunno. ‘Keep your friends high, keep your enemies higher’?”

“Let’s not kid around. If you’d brought one of your own we could duel, ten paces, then pow, it’s settled. Too bad. I guess we could’ve played backgammon over her, but you didn’t bring your set either, did you?”

“Go ahead, she’ll never hear you over the roar of the bubbles, including the ones in her head. Or don’t bother, just take one last look, then find the horse you rode in on.”

“You go help shit-squirrel flip burgers, maybe after getting cleaned up a little.”

They’re not burgers, they’re sliders, Bruno almost said. Instead he asked, “What about Madchen?”

“Here, we’ll test your powers. You see if you can read my mind while I tell you the exact same fucking words with my mouth, okay? Madchen’s gonna practice her craft, since unlike you she didn’t forget the one thing she was good at, until she’s in the black and I’m bored and then she’s gonna get a plane ticket and a nice tip. Beats sitting around eating Cheerios on Haste Street, wouldn’t you say? So quit worrying about her and focus on your own situation.”

Stolarsky shut the door unceremoniously, stranding Bruno with the cars, his borrowed bicycle, the indifferent moon. Bruno supposed even Stolarsky drew the line at raving around his own driveway half dressed. He surely wasn’t the only one among his neighbors possessing surveillance apparatus. Bruno’s medical mask remained bundled in his pocket, not that it would have disguised him from the cameras he presumably acted for, having bumbled at the proscenium of Stolarsky’s curb for so long. Could he pick his way around the back, the coyote raid? But no. Having steeped in Stolarsky’s humiliation bath, Bruno couldn’t imagine facing Tira Harpaz.

Lacking a rear brake, Bruno crashed the bicycle twice more on Euclid’s steep grade. He managed to land upright the first time, to clatter to a stop leaning sideways against a parked car the second, so added only scraped palms and a twisted ankle to his woes. Even in this, there was consolation; downhill he could coast, rather than exhaust himself pedaling.

He reentered the barricaded street, vacated of cars and lit by the flares of a police occupation. Telegraph’s riot had come as scheduled. The sight stirred a primal and incoherent memory: the tang of a childhood tear-gas canister; huddling for shelter with June in a feminist bookstore. Now, carousers milled, waiting for something to happen. The crowd was too dense to thread on the bicycle, so Bruno dismounted to push it, as he had up the hill.

Certain shopwindows boasted fitted-plywood shields, a routine, even ritual precaution. Not Stolarsky’s, however. Zodiac Media’s glass edifice was lit like a beacon, brazening it out. The store might rely on its monolithic aura for a certain inviolability; that, and the security guards. Beyond, Zombie Burger, that meat sculpture, glowed out its obdurate unholy weirdness. It still featured a tail of patrons, mingled into throngs crossing from the pavement into the roadway, a confusion of hungers that might be unimportant to sort out.

“It’s the Dude, man, I almost didn’t recognize you in that monkey suit. Where’s your mask? You’re looking bad.”

Bruno turned off Telegraph, up Durant. Filtering through the crowds to Kropotkin’s, he found the shop alive with eaters, some tucked at the narrow counter, some arrayed on the sidewalk, even seated on the curb, all wild-eyed and chomping sliders. Inside, Plybon and his ward appeared to have quit charging for the meals they handed out, making the shop a protein-distribution cell for the larger unrest. Plybon, his back turned, used his spatula to scour carbon detritus from the grill. Bruno went unnoticed. He leaned the bicycle, only scuffed and with a few spokes bent, against the lamppost.

Kropotkin’s was safe from rioters, since no one knew the shop belonged to Keith Stolarsky. It struck Bruno that he might owe his presence in Berkeley, the whole joke of his current existence, to Stolarsky’s Stalin impulse to arrange for a thorn in his own paw. Garris Plybon might be right, righter than he knew. Bruno was meant to replace him, not at the slider counter, no, but as Stolarsky’s antagonist. Stolarsky’s local adversaries were too easily vanquished, Plybon included. So Stolarsky had plucked Bruno up from afar, a new enemy to stem his boredom.

Bruno had failed the test. He could have had the gun when Stolarsky first put it down. He could have saved his Berlin stone for the picture window, or smashed the glass with a piece of furniture. But no, the glass would have rained down into the hot tub. On the hill Bruno had been paralyzed by the matter of Madchen, a checker he never ought to have shifted from its place of safety. Here, at street level, he could see more clearly: She’d never been the point. If Bruno had rescued Madchen, Stolarsky would have answered with a shrug. The ugly man had no vanity to destroy. To make Stolarsky regret stirring the Flashman part of him to life, Bruno had to rob him of something that actually counted.

Plybon only had to first be brushed aside. He deserved it for his cowardice on the hill. Bruno stepped swiftly in behind the counter and opened the drawer of potholders in which he’d stashed the burlap mask. A last hurrah for this face, to stir his audience, which might not know him without it. He turned to rinse his bloody knuckles and stinging palms in the small stainless-steel sink. The counter concealed his ragged knees, and the mask took care of the rest, covered the general disaster and despair that was his face, his person now.

“He should chain his bicycle,” said Bruno. “And he might be due for a break, don’t you think?” He pulled the mask over his face.

“The Martyr of Anarchism,” Bruno corrected quietly. He felt animated by a calm ferocity. “Garris, will you hand me your implement, please?” Plybon’s protégé had gone, to protect his bicycle, perhaps also sensing trouble.

“I’m just scraping the flattop here,” said Garris, puzzled. “Then you can help me put on onions and start a batch.”

“Okay, then, how about you take your cryptic ominous shit out of here and let me do my work?”

“I’ll tell them you’re Stolarsky’s employee,” said Bruno in a low voice. “His patsy, is that the word?”

“Oh, I think it’s very much the night. Here, allow me.” Bruno hadn’t brought himself to seize Stolarsky’s gun from a table but had no trouble wrenching the spatula from Plybon’s grip. Perhaps it was the power of the mask. “I’ll give you a fighting chance. Do you play backgammon?”

“Board games, opium of the masses? As a lonely child lost in the bourgeois dream, I played ’em all. What’s your point?”

“I’ll refresh you on the rules.” Bruno spilled out the aluminum bin of chopped onions, to blanket the grill. The vegetable matter began its gentle sizzling. With the keen edge of the spatula, Bruno chopped and sluiced, sketching in onions a rudimentary game board, twenty-four points and a central bar. Bruno skipped the broth—too much moisture and the onions would swim, wrecking the playing field.

“You move your pieces in this direction,” he explained to Plybon, using the spatula as a pointer. “I pass you, the opposite way.” Seizing up a tall stack of raw patties, he laid them into the starting positions on the onion-points. “The goal is to move your men off first.”

“Hey, it’s too soon for cheese—” Plybon protested as Bruno began laying the orange squares onto one set of meat-checkers.

“It’s necessary to tell our men apart. You’ll play the bare patties, I’ll play the cheesed ones. Is it coming back? A simple, elegant game. Like riding a bicycle, once you’ve learned you can hardly fail to pick it up again, that is unless the brakes are out of order.”

“Sure, I remember.” Plybon eyed the slider-board with his grim nerd’s intensity. He was drawn, despite himself, to anything cultish. “But what are we supposed to do for dice?”

“The register,” Bruno improvised. “We’ll hit the keys blind. The first two numbers of the total make up a dice roll—skipping zeroes, of course.”

“Zeroes don’t occur in the wild, you know, they’re abstractions, a step toward the denaturing of human labor.”

“Good then, we’ll do away with them.” Bruno put last touches on the opening positions, the raw pink checkers already starting to singe and brown atop the frying onions. The cheese had relaxed, to drape securely over his own pieces.

“Here I come.” Plybon punched at the register’s keys theatrically. It was true the counterman frequently operated the device without glancing; with rapid enough addition in his head, he might be able to dictate his throws. But no. Bruno saw Plybon had to squint at the total to learn his numbers. A six-two wasn’t anyone’s idea of an advantageous opening. Plybon plucked up a fork and stuck it in one of his back men, then counted steps, one-two-three-four-five-six, no sense of where his man would land, hallmark of a rube. The back man secured on the eighteen-point, Plybon moved his second two spaces, further confession of cluelessness.

Bruno tapped at the register’s keys. It was easy to use the register-dice honestly, thanks to the mask’s narrowing of his peripheral vision. A six-one. He hit and covered. An innocuous play, yet the three-prime was already advantage enough that Bruno would have doubled, had he a doubling cube. He could mash one together out of the softened buns, but no. Bruno didn’t look to win but to play. He sought some deeper outcome from these meat-checkers than Plybon’s surrender. The scent rising from the brothless grill was crucially sharp and dangerous, the meat-game a kind of oracular device, a Ouija board or Magic 8 Ball. No rush to see what it unveiled.

Plybon held up a stern hand. “Wait.” He worked the register again and drew up a four-three, to bring his man off the bar, then open another random blot in his backfield. He smirked at Bruno, daring critique with the same inverted defensiveness with which he plopped down bowls of his latest soup.

The onion-points at the hot end of the grill began to smolder. Plybon switched the overhead exhaust fan to high, a gentle roar.

Bruno hit Plybon three more times in the next three rolls, a punishing surplus of good fortune. Plybon’s men danced on the bar, then trickled onto Bruno’s home points in unruly clusters, so many it was nearly annoying—the game might only take an hour to win at this rate.

“You’ve fallen into my little trap,” Plybon crowed with maximum irrelevance.

They’d gathered a fair crowd, including Plybon’s apprentice, who’d taken it as his task to hush the viewers and stall demands for food. The sliders on the grill were carbon-checkers now, inedible. Bruno found it harder to shift his shrunken men with the giant spatula, so he followed Plybon’s example, traded for a fork. As the distinguishing cheese had boiled off in rank smoke, Bruno laid fresh orange squares atop the remains. The heat rising off the grill forced him to lay his tuxedo jacket aside—it was nearly spoiled anyhow. He sweated heavily under his burlap but left it on, just tugged the noose upward to momentarily ventilate his neck. Plybon pressed Play on his infernal Sonny Sharrock CD, cranking the volume to drown the roar of the exhaust and the clamor of the gallery.

It was just as Plybon reached in to fork another captured patty off the bar, that two of Bruno’s checkers—his prime at the nineteen-point—burst into flame. The counterman only grunted, unimpressed, and smothered the fire with forkfuls of spare onions, enough for the moment.

“Better hurry!” Plybon shouted over the noisy music. “I’ve got you right where I want you.”

They had to lean back against the counter between moves, for oxygen. Bruno, already playing down to Plybon’s Cro-Magnon level, now struck at near random, opening blots in his home board simply in order not to have to stretch over the noxious fumes of the backfield. Both players had men on the bar when the captured pieces exploded into blue-hot fire.

“I’d accept your resignation at this point!” shouted Plybon, reaching for the ladle to apply broth to extinguish the flames. “Ow, FUUUCCCK!” The stainless-steel ladle, extended over the silo of heated air drawn upward into the exhaust, was impossible to touch; Plybon shook his scalded hand over his head in a mad dance. All the sliders were on fire now.

“Let it burn,” said Bruno. “It wasn’t a high-quality contest to begin with.”

The watchers had sagged out beyond the doors for air. Bruno rushed to join them. Only Plybon remained inside, barely visible in the smoke. Fumbling under the counter, perhaps for a fire extinguisher, the counterman had come up instead with Bruno’s tuxedo jacket, which he flipped out above the flames like a toreador. Too late: the coat exploded. Plybon’s protégé rushed inside and dragged his mentor free and to the curb, where the slider cook sat stunned. He removed his glasses, dazedly. The thick lenses had protected his eyes. Around them, a blast pattern of instant sunburn, eyebrows that might crisp off into dust if touched. The tiny shop blazed, black flumes coursing to the roofline and into the night sky, reverse waterfalls.

“It belonged to Keith Stolarsky,” Bruno said, to whomever had levied the accusation.

The loose arrangement of bodies resolved into two parties: those fleeing the arriving sirens and others at Bruno’s back, as he drifted through the debris along Durant’s car-vacated white center line toward Telegraph. The burlap mask spotlit Bruno’s next destination, sparing distraction at what lay behind, either the ruin of the shop—now the theatrical crash and screams as the manifesto-plastered plate glass splintered and gave way—or the number or character of the loose army gathered in thrilled fascination as he marched.

A phalanx of policemen greeted them at Durant and Telegraph, behind roadblocks and flares seemingly meant to steer any rioters southward, away from the sanctuary of campus, back in a loop toward People’s Park, the long-conceded ground. Zodiac Media blazed like a lampfish lure behind this defense, made unreachable.

“To Zombie,” suggested Bruno. He barely had to speak to lead his followers, whatever sort of rats or children made up his parade.

Zombie Burger lay undefended by any official presence. Instead, the tower, like some horrific Dr. Seuss drawing, steamed away at its gross purposes, humans steadily plunging through its cavelike entrance, reemerging handcuffed to giant narcotic sandwiches, a method of crowd control far more effective than plastic shields and batons. Should Bruno elbow past the line to invade the overpopulated kitchen and incinerate the pumpkin palace from within, by its own fire and grease? Or burn it from the outside? Before he’d settled on an approach, the students who’d trailed him from Kropotkin’s were at work, busy shattering a wooden sawhorse with high-flying kicks and idiotic kung fu yells, taking turns as if at a piñata.

“Fuck tinder! Fuck kindling!” Another masked body wheeled up, dancing maniacally, and jetted copious lighter fluid from a tin held provocatively low, between his legs. The liquid fell in pissy loops along the Zombie’s hammered-metal exterior, and down onto the smashed remnants of the barricade, the splintered blue two-by-fours that had been hurriedly kicked up in a ragged heap against the wall.

Were these forces really under Bruno’s command? A pointless question. Another somebody struck a series of matches and tossed them at the cold pyre. One finally sparked the lighter fluid, but the result was less than explosive. The sawhorse began to burn, yes, but Zombie’s outer surface was indifferent to the little fire. One of the burger girls appeared in the doorway, apparitional in the nimbus of her black-lit uniform. A massive fire extinguisher on her back—she gave the appearance of an angel or scuba diver—from which she casually blew cascades of chunky white foam on the flames. One of Bruno’s foot soldiers, masked with a train-robber’s bandanna, ran at her, in chaotic defense of the hard-won, pitiable blaze. She raised the extinguisher’s nozzle threateningly in his direction and he sheared off sideways, as if dodging a policeman’s Taser.

Zombie’s odor of char was nearly unbearable, its upper stories beaming lasers into the void, too much a totem of fire to succumb. The building might have been specially formulated as riot-proof, perhaps even to survive a nuclear war, after which it would remain standing in Berkeley’s blasted desert, an ironic emblem of human voraciousness.

“I know another Stolarsky building.” Bruno barely had to whisper it. “This way.” He started off down Channing Way, circling the block—a longer route, but it put the rising sirens and uncomfortable scrutiny of a fevered crowd likely full of undercover policemen behind him. There was no need to glance, his lieutenants stayed at his heels, an effective cell of four or five, no more than was called for. Plybon, advocate for the value of small audiences, would have been proud. He strolled downhill in the cool and quiet, People’s Park at his back. He no longer felt his knees or knuckles. Numbness, always among Bruno’s talents. Another chance, perhaps, to wander out of his own wearisome destiny? But no, he turned the corner on Dana Street. Then again, up Haste.

As the door shut behind them, the Jack London’s inlaid-wood lobby formed a temple of caramel light and calm. The riot seemed miles and possibly years removed. It was as if Bruno and his followers had snuck off, a posse of Samurai, to invade some European drawing room. Or—what had Madchen called them?—the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe. One member, still in kung fu mode, howled and leaped to kick at one of the foyer’s blond panels, which instantly stove in.

Lighter fluid soaked its graffiti into the raw-surfaced wooden interior, sadly un-refinished for years. The first lit match, touched to each of the car’s three walls, took easily too.

The doors closed and the elevator rose like a burning paper lamp into the throat of the building.

It was only then that Bruno turned to search out the masked face of the bestower of lighter fluid: another burlap-nooseman like himself. Stolarsky had said he had dozens of the masks, if not hundreds. Bruno had never been out of sight of Stolarsky’s operatives, he realized too late. He might even be an operative himself.

Near as he’d come, in so many exotic locales, he’d never spent a night in jail before. It had taken California policemen to bring him to ground. They’d shepherded him the brief and familiar distance to Berkeley’s jail, on Martin Luther King Jr. Way—for a moment Bruno imagined they were dragging him back to high school, but they passed it by.

It might be a lesson in the gravity of native places, their ability to demolish pretensions; never mind the interlude between, in which you’d dreamed some weightless escape. What remained of Bruno’s jacketless tuxedo—grease-spattered shirt with cuffs rolled up and singed, pants with tatterdemalion knees—held no sway with the authorities, either during his arrest outside the burning apartment building or through the night and morning in various holding pens. There, Bruno blended more or less gratefully into the derelict population, much as he had on the broken sidewalk in the shadow of the Berlin Hauptbanhof. No one had said anything about his face. There were worse faces to be seen.

In fogged dawn, he’d suffered a bus ride to Oakland for arraignment and bail hearing. Tira Harpaz had paid his bail and waited at the courthouse door as Bruno stumbled into grainy, headache-inducing daylight, a humbling rescue. Her Volvo’s passenger seat was no cleaner, though perhaps more than ever he felt suited to its squalor.

She drove in silence. It wasn’t the reunion he’d dreamed of, their puppets traveling aligned but quiescent on the car seats. Bruno’s powers were bankrupt, dissolved in Stolarsky’s mockery, his energies spent in arson and bicycle spills. He thought secret cyst, he thought eat or be eaten, he thought let’s double resign, but the messages floated off like banners untethered from the aircraft that had hoisted them, they furled and tumbled from the sky of his mind.

Bruno didn’t ask where they were going. Her route made it obvious. This time there was no pit stop at Zuni for oysters and roast chicken. Tira veered off the bridge southward, over Potrero, to run the gauntlet of billboards, the sun-glinting hills studded with houses like little pink boxes—it was June who’d always called them that. Bruno had spent the night in jail thinking of her—not Tira but June. He’d recalled walks home from Berkeley High while he’d still needed those, up MLK, then past the University Avenue Indian groceries and sari shops, into the flats, to the Chestnut Street apartment before she’d been evicted from it.

Tira surprised him, however, pulling into the airport’s cell-phone lot, a desolate sunny asphalt island opposite the ancient United hangar.

“You can change your clothes. Your stuff’s in the trunk, pick out what you like.” She groped beneath the steering wheel to pop the trunk’s latch.

He bumbled out to see what she meant. A piece of soft luggage lay centered inside, one he didn’t recognize.

Bruno unzipped it to find the contents of his Charlottenburg hotel-room closet, long since abandoned as ballast in his escape from the unpaid bill. He handled the shirts, the sharp-pressed trousers, in wonder. In the nylon compartment opposite the hanging clothes he found clean tube socks, still-tagged underwear, sweatpants, T-shirts.

“All your favorites.” Tira laughed bitterly. She’d gotten out of the car to stand with him at the trunk. Now she gestured at his passenger seat. “Get dressed, I’ll avert my eyes, I promise.”

He selected a sharkskin two-piece suit, deep mustard brown, an oddity he’d cherished and had believed lost. Underneath it, not a button shirt but ABIDE. His two selves spliced into one. Assuming the correct number was two, rather than a hundred, or zero. He changed in the passenger seat, slipping out of the shredded tuxedo pants and shirt, rolled the pants gingerly over his crusted knees, and helped himself into the fresh costume. Tira leaned her back against the car, smoking a joint, her customary two drags before tossing it aside.

“Here, I almost forgot.” She opened his door and reached into the glove compartment to hand Bruno two items: his Berlin stone and a neat paper folder, imprinted with the same travel agent’s emblem that had decorated the e-ticket paperwork which got Beth Dennis fired. Did everyone in Berkeley use the same travel agency? Or perhaps Beth and Alicia, too, had unwittingly followed a script authored by Stolarsky. Or was it someone else who’d moved the checkers around? Bruno felt the answer lay before him, in the raw circle of understanding from which the blot had been lifted, like a garden stone.

Maybe it wasn’t important to know. The ticket inside was in the name Alexander B. Flashman. The stiff new passport tucked into the paper jacket opposite the ticket and receipt featured the same name. The photo showed Bruno’s current face—the picture Keith Stolarsky had snapped in his office, that day he’d awarded Bruno the burlap mask.

Bruno put the ticket into his interior breast pocket and balanced the stone in his palm. He looked at Tira.

“He said you could make soup with it, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got one more surprise for you.” She slid back into the driver’s seat, checked her phone to confirm a text, then shoved it into her purse.

She pointed across the lot. Bruno followed the line of her finger and discovered Stolarsky’s Jaguar, just now scooting up parallel to their position, aimed at the exit. Madchen peered at him through the passenger window. She raised her hand, looking intact and chastened. Stolarsky’s Toad-in-motorcar shadow was visible at the wheel, but for once he seemed willing to play the silent caddy.

“The German said the same thing as you,” said Tira. “She demanded proof you were safe. It’s nauseatingly cute.”

The arrangement was like a cold war exchange of spies in a neutral zone, or some sulky prom-night-chaperone standoff between aggrieved families. Had Madchen been there waiting, to see him exit the car and browse his luggage at the Volvo’s trunk? He supposed she’d had a suitcase packed for her as well, by the same unseen hand.

“He’s bored with everything.” Tira’s voice was flat. “She made a good alibi, though. Proof he was up the hill when the blaze started. He’s wanted the insurance on that firetrap for twenty years—everyone knew except you, apparently.”

“I’m bored with seeing him get every fucking thing he wants, if that’s what you’re asking. I thought you might do better, Alexander.”

“You served a few purposes.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It came cheap enough.”

In the international terminal, once he was checked in and freed of his bag and through security—no one wanted to detain poor A. B. Flashman, a scarred man with a scarred passport photo, and limping slightly besides—Bruno found a Lufthansa nonstop to Frankfurt on the big board. But by the time he’d threaded his way to the distant gate, Madchen had boarded and was gone.

Gammon

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