II

“Hell holds no horrors for one who has seen that battlefield. Could Dante have walked beside me across that dreadful place, which had been transformed by human agency from a peaceful countryside to a garbage heap, a cesspool, and a charnel-house combined, he would never have written his Inferno, because the hell of his imagination would have seemed colourless and tame. The difficulty in writing about it is that people will not believe me. I shall be accused of imagination and exaggeration, whereas the truth is that no one could imagine, much less exaggerate, the horrors that I saw upon those rolling, chalky plains.”

—E. Alexander Powell, Vive la France, 1916
*Describing the First Battle of the Champagne*

HE LAY WITHOUT SLEEP. WELL BEFORE THE SUN WOULD RISE, HE continued to trace the cracks and shadows of his ceiling, intermittent light cast from the neon sign of an all-night diner across the street. After an hour of searching for the cool spots in his bed, he got up and walked the walls of his apartment. Another hour later, he poured his third cup of coffee. At ten minutes past six, the telephone rang.

“Joe.” It was Fleming, his editor at the Beacon, a man with a loud and gravelly voice much larger than his actual stature.

“Yes.” Joe leaned forward, his cup of coffee on the kitchen table between his elbows. He waited for Fleming to continue. While he waited he rubbed his finger into the old cigarette burns on the table’s Formica top. He knew what Fleming wanted. He knew what Fleming would probably ask and what Fleming would not ask.

Joe pressed the first two fingers of his free hand into his temple and rubbed, lightly at first and then harder as he listened to the protracted silence fill with his and Fleming’s breathing. He had hoped that with the new day, some revelation would present itself, some discovery of the sheriff’s that would solve Gresham’s murder. From the rigid tone of Fleming’s voice, however, Joe knew that his own innocence may have been further drawn into question.

“I just talked with Sheriff Jackson,” rasped Fleming’s cigarette-stained voice. “What’s this about Gresham?”

“He’s dead,” Joe sighed.

“Murdered, the sheriff told me.”

“Murdered.” Joe nodded his head.

“What about it?”

“I don’t know any more than you do.”

“The sheriff said you were there. That maybe you even had something to do with it.”

Joe felt his anger rise and he spoke with heat. “What do you want me to say? Gresham was shot, killed. That’s what I know, all I know.”

“Ee-zee,” said Fleming, and Joe had the image of Fleming raising his hands, palms outward, as though calming a young boy.

“Damn, man, I found the body,” Joe said. “That’s all.” He continued to knead his temple, even though the pain in his head was much deeper and darker. His short outburst left him vaguely nauseous.

“So he said,” Fleming said and coughed, then held a hand over the mike of his telephone and said something to another person. He spoke back into the telephone, “Jackson also asked a lot of questions, about you and Gresham. Mostly about you. He seems to think that you are involved in this somehow. You and some Frenchmen from an automobile wreck. How about that?”

“The sheriff’s wrong.” Joe let that sit for a moment before adding, “I have the information on the wreck, and I’ll type that up this morning before coming in later.”

“First thing,” Fleming snapped, “and I mean first thing. As in an hour. Seven-thirty at the latest. And I’ll want something on Gresham for this afternoon. You give me what you know from last night, and I’ll have someone else begin working on any new angles.”

Covering me, Joe thought. He hung up and read through his notes.

Nothing. Just notes. They told what had happened. As to the meanings of the events, they might as well have been written in an ancient language. He decided, then, to follow the simple patterns of his life, the patterns that he had adopted since the war. Walk a straight path, write the articles, cover the stories, hope the loose ends of his life did not hitch around his neck like a bowknot.

Joe found his notebook and pen on the dresser, a Mont Blanc, green with his initials on the side. Rolling the capped pen between thumb and fingers, he thought momentarily of the woman, still almost a girl, who had given it to him. Alice Bright, freckled nose and light brown hair always pulled back but always some having escaped to flutter in the wind. They were high school sweethearts and had promised to each other in the way that kids do. Only a few months before he was set to return from France, he had received the letter from her. She had fallen in love, deep and real love, and was marrying and she hoped that he understood and she would always remember him with fondness.

He had received the letter while on R&R in some nameless French town, and with a few days before returning to the front he slipped past the guards and went into town. His sergeant, seeing him leave, called out, “Remember, Joe, an hour with Venus brings a month with Mercury,” but he did not stop Joe. Neither did Joe stop for the Padre who called to him. Religion had never been much in his life and following the deaths of his parents and the slaughterland of the war, he could not see a reason to talk with a God that allowed such things to happen. He found a French woman who could speak no English but could do other things.

As he sailed back from the war, he had come to realize how little was left for him in Terceo. His memories had become like smoke in a cracked jar, eventually emptying to nothing. He felt no pull to return to that high desert along the New Mexico border. He would one day, he knew, for there did remain a distant tug of a truth unknown.

He uncapped the pen and sat with his third cup of coffee to compose his stories, two brief articles that answered all of the questions he knew, but it was the questions he did not know that haunted him. As he wrote, he could feel himself slip into that comfortable world of absolutes that excluded any complications of life. It was a world as numbing as any drug.

Joe checked his clothes drying in the bathroom. After finding them still too wet to wear, he put on his other suit. Once the suit finally dried, he’d take it to the cleaners and get the blood off the pants. He finished his coffee. Then he rolled his copy and stuck it in the inside pocket of his overcoat and left for the Beacon’s offices downtown.

He drove the same streets he had driven for the past three years, wet with streams of rainwater in the gutters and dark under a hovering fog. Dark buildings, wetted by the previous night’s rain and snow, frowned on either side of the wet road as he drove through Greenwich. The buildings slumped together as though huddling for warmth, dark and ominous in the clouded day. He drove through the streets as though he drove through a shadowed valley.

The Beacon was housed in a tile building covering an entire city block and rising a half-dozen stories above the street and two below. The white tile had long ago faded gray from years of sun and rain and pigeon droppings. One corner tile, four-foot square, had broken in half sometime before Joe had first seen the building. The dark hole left after its falling looked like a vacant eye. Eleven soiled steps mounted from the sidewalk to the large double doors. The clamorous music of the streets, automobiles and streetcars and vendors, slowly faded behind those wood and glass doors as they swung closed behind Joe.

He walked up two flights of stairs to the newsroom, stopping just outside the doors to catch his breath. He could hear the steady clack of typewriters broken by loud talk and laughter. Footsteps danced across the fatigued and timeworn oak floor.

Joe opened the door and walked in. A pall fell over the room like a black curtain. Typewriters skipped a beat, loud talk muffled, laughter stopped, the dancing feet slid back against the outer walls of the room.

Nobody looked at him. That was what Joe noticed first. Some people looked his way while some waved their hands in imitation of a greeting. Even those few who waved quickly averted their eyes as though even looking at this leper might infect them. He walked through the room to the desk he had shared with Gresham and felt the blind scrutiny from everyone he passed. Heads turned and whispers swirled in his wake, rippling murmurs that placed him in the tension of having become a story. News travels fast.

He and Gresham had sat facing each other at the large double-sided desk. Gresham sat on the south with Joe the northsider. The side of the desk hugged the wall for both to pin ideas onto the bare wood. Pen lines bisected the wooden desktop at odd angles and a particularly deep line broke the plain until it fell in suicide over the desk’s edge. Joe trailed the tip of his finger along its ruinous course. He hung his overcoat on the rack and stood over the desk, fingering the piles of papers and opening the drawers with the feeling that he was at someone else’s desk. Everything remained not quite neat but also not messy, almost like he kept things. The stacks, however, were just off, the drawers a little more disorganized.

The door opened and the room’s muted noise fell off even further. Fleming’s unsteady gait approached. The man kept his office upstairs, one flight above the newsroom. Fleming likened himself as a bird of prey soaring above his hacks, but Joe had always thought of Fleming as a pigeon on the roof, ready to shit upon any writer with whom he was displeased.

Fleming would walk into the newsroom three times a day, the clockwork of a neurotic, seldom speaking during his tours but often pausing to look at individual reporters long enough to make the person nervous. That was his form of supervising, a nervous worker was a hungry worker, a hungry worker was a productive and compliant worker. Gresham was the only reporter who could not be intimidated by Fleming. Everyone knew it, especially Fleming, who avoided the desk whenever Gresham was working.

“Joe,” Fleming said.

Joe turned and looked up from his seat. Fleming wore the same white shirt he may have worn the day before or the week or decade before that. Heavy suspenders held up the man’s pants and made his shirt bulge like a tattered flag. He had a ruddy face and veined nose, eyes bloodshot and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth with a perpetual half-inch of ash.

Joe nodded.

“You got the copy?” he asked, standing near Joe, attempting to loom over Joe.

Joe pointed to the papers he had placed on the desk.

“Mind if I take a look?” He did not wait for Joe’s answer but reached over Joe’s shoulder, picked up the papers and rounded the desk to sit in Gresham’s chair to read while Joe watched.

Dust motes floated in the muted light that came through the window above them. Joe stood and looked out the window at the morning fog that had been trapped in the shadows of the buildings across the street and at the small birds huddled on the glazed branches of empty trees, which stood like stick-figured prisoners in sidewalk planters.

He sat again and tapped his fingers on the arms of his chair as he watched Fleming read, comforted in being able to watch someone else. That was the life he knew and had become familiar with. He watched other people. He recorded their actions and asked for their thoughts. He witnessed the remains of people’s lives as though they were projected upon a screen. He preferred that, the distance and the reconstruction of the lost days and ways of other people’s lives.

Fleming nodded as he read. “Good,” he said. “Good. A dozen inches each? Good. I’ll take ’em right down and have ’em set for this afternoon’s edition.”

Joe nodded.

“You okay?” Fleming asked.

“Fine as silk,” Joe lied.

“Why don’t you work on something else after you finish with the piece on Gresham. Maybe that road project Gresham started last week.”

“Yes. Maybe that,” Joe said, looking hard at Fleming and feeling himself close to losing his temper.

“Easy, Joe. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Joe could see in the man’s eyes all of the questions he wanted to ask, but he met Fleming’s inquisitive stare with as flat a gaze as he could offer.

“No,” he said. “Nobody means shit about anything. I know that.”

Fleming blinked and said, “Check Gresham’s desk for notes. You know him, he always kept a stack of notes.”

Joe nodded. He looked at the piles on his desk and asked, “Did the police come by today?”

“Not unless they came by in the middle of the night, but I think Sheriff Jackson would have mentioned it when he called this morning. Why?”

“No reason. You don’t think the sheriff’d be too upset if I went through the desk and took work notes?”

“Don’t see why,” Fleming answered and winked. “Work goes on after all.”

For a moment, Joe thought to attack Fleming, kick his bloody ass and slap his winking face. Not for any specific reason. Just to hit someone.

Fleming walked away. While his footsteps receded into the din of hushed voices, Joe once again surveyed his desk. He could see that someone had looked through his papers. Piles had been rifled, drawers emptied and replaced. Had nothing happened to alter the flow of his day, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the disturbances. He would have sat down to lay out his copy for correction or began making calls or jotting notes. But the day had been disturbed, and the disturbance had caused him to notice things not quite right.

He rounded the desk to sit in Gresham’s chair. All that populated the top of that side was a black Corona #3 typewriter with a clean sheet of white paper rolled in along with carbons between three sheets of paper. Everything in triplicate for Gresham.

He pulled open the center drawer. Cheap newspaper pens and worn down number two pencils stuffed the bottom of an old cigar box, old clippings yellowed in the drawer’s back, opened envelopes and read letters and undefined notes from past stories littered the drawer.

He pushed aside the cigar box of spent writing utensils. Underneath it was a sealed envelope. He looked up to see if anyone was watching. Nobody was. He turned the envelope over to find a scrap of paper gem-clipped to the envelope. On the paper was a list in Gresham’s handwriting.

He bobbed his eyes once again to check the room, but those in the room looked to have filled their curiosities and to have found a rhythm in their own work. Hunched over Coronas or Remingtons or huddled in small groups discussing racing forms or how long it would take Tunney to dispose of Charlie Weinert next week in New York, laying bets in either case on a hunch or an overheard tip.

Joe slipped the paper from its clip and read the handwritten list:

Champagne—25 Sep 15

Paul Dillard

Paris—Pl St Andre d Arts

Joe took the unopened envelope out of the drawer and slid it across the desk. He read the list again. He stared at it. He knew the Champagne as one of the bloody battles that Gresham had been a part of, one that had killed twenty thousand English and French soldiers in a single morning and several hundred thousand men over a matter of weeks. That he knew, but anyone who had been in the war or had read about the war knew about the Champagne. It was discussed in London and Paris in the same hushed tones that Texans reserved for the Alamo or veterans of the Civil War reserved for Antietam or Pickett’s Charge. Along with Verdun and the Somme and a dozen others from Belgium to Gallipoli, the Champagne had lived on in Europe as an example of the utter waste that was the Great War. It seemed as though every Brit knew someone whose life was shattered by the battle; the stain of blood left an etched image on the landscape of France. The death and the stench that rose from its muddy no-man’s land and the supposed treachery that initiated the slaughter had inscribed that September morning in the world’s unconscious.

The name and address on the paper, however, meant nothing to Joe. His next thought was that the list might extradite him from the sheriff’s hard glare. Give it to Sheriff Jackson and turn from under the microscopic eye of Greenwich’s constabulary. He smiled.

“Okay,” he muttered as he pocketed the list. A weight lifted, he closed the middle drawer and foraged through the side drawers. No manuscript. In the bottom drawer he found an address book, which he also slid across the desk to his side.

Joe walked through the tracers of clouded light from the window above, welcoming the slight stab of warmth as he rounded his chair. Before he could sit, however, he caught the cold stare of Sheriff Jackson. The sheriff, hunched a little more than the last time Joe had seen him, was followed into the room by Bernie, the day janitor, and a uniformed police officer Joe recognized from the night before, a tall and thin man who walked as though he could fill out his undersized uniform but not his oversized self-perception.

Joe felt the sheriff’s eyes lock on him and could not shake the sensation of having once again ended up at the intersection of the man’s crosshairs. However, he did have the list and the address book and that might ease Jackson’s concerns, so he reached to pull the list from his shirt pocket.

Driven by his own intentions, the sheriff turned and said something to Bernie, and Bernie, walking quickly to keep pace, nodded his head and said something back.

“Joe,” Sheriff Jackson said in a terse and monotone voice as he stepped near. Bernie stood at the sheriff’s shoulder. The uniform stepped to the side of the desk, effectively sealing in Joe. Once again, the newsroom buzz dropped off and Joe again felt the spotlight of sudden notoriety.

“Sheriff.” Neither man offered a hand to the other. Sitting on the edge of his desk, Joe met the sheriff’s eyes on the level. They each took a moment to gauge the other. He ran a finger along the list’s paper edge.

“I’m glad you stopped by, Sheriff. I have something for you,” he said and handed the piece of paper to Sheriff Jackson. “This as well,” he said, lifting the address book from the desktop.

Jackson looked at them and handed them to the uniform standing next to him. The uniform huffed and handed them back to the sheriff, who pocketed the address book without a second, or even first, look.

“What is this, Joe?” the sheriff asked flashing the paper.

“I’m not sure, but it might have something to do with what happened last night.” Joe had the feeling that what he saw on the piece of paper as important, the sheriff saw in a completely different light and would be more than happy to ignore it.

Joe watched Jackson finger the paper as though it were gluepaper populated with flies, and realized, not for the first time, that the sheriff was no Sherlock Holmes deducing a solution to the crime. No, Jackson was working in the opposite direction. He had his theory and only needed to fashion whatever facts necessary in order to come to his preordained answer. If he were to run across a square peg, he just needed a bigger hammer to fit it into that round hole.

“I see.” The sheriff folded and pocketed the list and rubbed his eyes. He stood close to Joe, close enough for Joe to smell the man’s pomade and see the tiny nick on his jawline from the morning’s shave. “This the desk you shared with Gresham?” he asked, changing the subject.

Joe looked down, said, “Yes.”

The sheriff nodded.

“That paper,” Joe said.

“We’ll get to that,” Jackson said.

“For damn-sake, Sheriff,” Joe said. “Look at the paper.”

Jackson pursed his lips but said nothing. He pulled the paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and looked at it again. The plug of tobacco worked inside his cheek. He looked back at Joe. “What d’you want me to see?”

Joe thought to reach out and slap the man twice, palm then backhand, and say, “Open your damned eyes.” But he just sighed. The blindest of men are those who don’t look, he thought.

“The date there. That’s the Champagne,” Joe said, his finger pointing toward the piece of paper in the sheriff’s hand. “Look in the library and read on it. And there’s an address in Paris and a name. I don’t know who it is, but that’s the name I’d begin with.”

Jackson studied the paper. He looked at the uniform standing next to him and Joe thought he might have actually winked. The uniform smirked. Jackson nodded and said, “You think I should take a visit to Paris—”

“Maybe take the missus with you,” the uniform added.

Jackson’s smile dissolved. “The murder happened here, and here I am.” He paused, then, as though starting over, repeated, “Now, this the desk you shared with Gresham.”

Joe muttered, “Two-by-fours.” As in dumb as. . . .

“What?” Jackson asked. “I didn’t catch your meaning.”

“Nothing,” Joe said. “Not a damn thing.” He paused, adjusted his weight. “Yes. It’s the desk we shared.”

Bernie nodded his head enthusiastically. Joe liked Bernie. He was a good man, always did his job, never bothered anyone while they did theirs. Joe could not help but notice, however, how Bernie enjoyed having his presence elevated. “That’s theirs,” he agreed.

“Another coincidence,” the sheriff said as though talking to himself, making mental notes. “Which side was his?”

“The other side,” said Bernie. “He’s sittin’ on his. A right neat worker, that Mr. Gresham is. For all the notes and writin’ he does, he don’t leave a big mess like most of the rest of the room. He keeps his place clean. I always ’preciated that.”

Joe smiled at Bernie offering his observations of the newsroom. He wondered what bits the man had to offer about him and the others while at home with his wife over the dinner table or at some Northside speakeasy on Saturday night.

“You been here long?” the sheriff asked Joe.

“Today or in this job?”

“Both,” Jackson said, then added, “and can the sarcasm.”

Joe smiled. “I’ve worked for the Beacon about three years, since I returned from France. Gresham let me have this side of his desk.”

“What do you mean, ‘He let you’?”

Joe shrugged. “He wasn’t an easy man to get next to.”

Bernie nodded as though in agreement. “Ain’t that the damn truth.”

“So why’d he favor you?”

“I didn’t ask. He read a piece I had written on men returning from the war and he liked it, or maybe he liked the fact that I was the only other person in this room who had any notion of what he saw in the trenches. I didn’t have to ask him about it, I already knew well enough. He liked that.”

The uniform snorted. Joe looked the uniform up and down and shook his head. He had seen the type plenty since his return, someone who had wanted the glory of war but had been turned down for one reason or another, maybe a bad eye or maybe a boil on his butt or maybe his testicles had yet to drop, and now the uniform had to prove his manhood in another way, including the mockery of a war vet.

“You had no troubles with him?” Sheriff Jackson asked.

“Me? No. Everybody argued with Gresham, me no more than anyone else.”

“What did you argue about?”

“Copy mostly. Gresham was a perfectionist. He would comment on my previous day’s work. I appreciated his interest, if not always his honesty, but I learned a lot from him.”

“I see,” the sheriff said. Joe felt like saying that the sheriff saw a lot for a blind man.

The sheriff took a moment to look around at the faces trying hard not to look back at him.

The uniform stepped around the sheriff and removed a framed photograph from the wall as though it were his. After glance at the image, he placed it face up on the desk. He stepped back to keep the symmetry of the odd circle complete, blocking any escape attempt.

The sheriff sighed. “Back to my question. You been here long. . . today?”

Joe put his chin to his chest and smiled and shook his head. He raised his head and said, “Not long. Less than an hour, I’d say. Why?”

“Just asking.” The sheriff took a leather pouch from his back pocket, opened it and added a two-fingered pinch of tobacco to the masticated wad already stretching his cheek.

Joe asked, “Did you already go through my desk?”

The sheriff stopped his action and looked at Joe from the corner of his eye, a furrowed line across his forehead. “Why?”

“Just asking.”

“No,” Bernie interrupted. He stepped closer. “It weren’t the sheriff. Least not according to Francis.” He looked at the sheriff. “That’s the night janitor. He said some guy come ’round early last night askin’ for Mr. Gresham’s desk but he coun’t hardly understan’ the fella’. Francis said this guy said he was a cop, policeman, and he just pointed him over here and the guy comes over and picks around for a few minutes in Mr. Henry’s desk here but din’t take nothin’.”

“Probably one of the Frenchmen you found in the accident,” Joe added.

The other three men looked at Joe as though he were speaking some foreign tongue unknown in their world.

“I see,” said the sheriff to Bernie, wiping a piece of tobacco from his lip.

Jackson scratched his head and suppressed a yawn and looked at Joe. “You haven’t been picking around in Gresham’s desk this morning, have you, Joe?”

Joe said, “Yes, and I found the list—”

Before he could finish, Sheriff Jackson waved him off and said, “So you’ve been rutting around. And you just happen to find this paper.”

“Listen, Sheriff—”

“No,” Jackson said, cutting Joe short. He pointed a finger at Joe’s face. “You listen here. I just talked with Gresham’s lawyer today and had me a look at Gresham’s will. You know what it said?”

Joe said nothing.

The sheriff drew a breath. “He left his worldly goods to you. Now why is that?”

Joe closed his mouth. “I don’t know, Sheriff. He didn’t have any family and—”

The sheriff cut him off once again, “And ain’t it just another coincidence. Those coincidences just keep building up around you, don’t they?”

“Like a high gallows,” the uniformed offered.

“Maybe he knew his life was in danger and—”

“Maybe shit,” the uniform laughed. “His life was most definitely in danger.” He laughed again.

The four men waited through a silence, an uncomfortable silence like that which follows a single bullet shot. The uniform lifted the photograph he had taken from the wall. “This you?” he asked.

Joe looked at the photograph held loosely in the man’s stubby fingers, a photograph of Joe standing alone amid a rubble of stones. Silhouetting Joe in the photograph were the skeletal remains of a church’s empty and ruined windows held within a blackened and truncated wall. The sky behind was hazy and indistinct. Joe remembered that the photograph did not capture the tears that had welled over in his eyes.

“Yes,” Joe said. “That’s me.”

“Pretty.” The uniform placed the photograph on the desk and smiled down at Joe. All Joe could think of was that here stood a man whose only importance in life was inside the confines of his own small brain.

The uniform held a crooked smile on his face and asked, “You guys have a lot of time to take pretty pictures over there?” He stressed the last two words with heavy sarcasm.

Joe looked at him long enough to force him to divert his eyes. Joe said, “Yes. It was like a festival over there. Everyday a holiday; every meal a picnic.”

He looked at the photograph with its fold marks and creases and torn edges. He remembered how the war was brought home through camera work; mostly, though, and especially in the beginnings, the camera had lied, telling the story only politicians and generals wanted told and mothers wanted to hear. The French and English had been first to use photography as propaganda. Early on in 1914, they had dedicated photography units to chronicle life in the trenches. Let those back home see that their loved ones in the front lines were well off. When the American doughboys arrived, special units of the Signal Corps accompanied them, clicking their cameras to record haircuts, hot meals, clothes-washing days, and mail delivery.

Very soon, though, the photographers saw that the real picture of war was elsewhere and turned their lenses on the felon scenes of death and destruction. The photographs might never be published, but they could not ignore what was right in front of them. A photographer accompanying Joe’s unit had wandered upon Joe standing in the rubble of the ruined church and asked to take a picture. He sent Joe a copy, which Joe had kept wrapped and tucked inside his war bag until his return from Europe.

The sheriff returned to his game of cat-and-mouse and said, “If you’re wondering whether we’re ready to make any arrests, the answer is ‘No,’ but you’ll be the first to know.”

The uniform snorted a laugh and had to wipe his nose on the inside of his shirt sleeve. “We got our suspects,” he said. The man talked as though he held a secret that he wanted badly to let loose from behind his smothered smile. The secret wasn’t difficult to decipher.

Joe looked at the floor, at the hardwood both scarred and polished by decades of scuffing shoe leather. He couldn’t blame the sheriff for suspecting him. The coincidences were close enough to damning that an ungenerous man with a minimum of imagination might easily add them up on his tally sheet. And Jackson was as ungenerous and unimaginative as a broken fencepost.

The sheriff continued, “I stopped by your apartment this morning to talk with you.”

“Must have just missed you,” the uniform added.

“I was probably here.”

Bernie looked at his pocket watch and nodded his head.

“Most likely you was,” the sheriff said. “But I let myself in to make sure you weren’t hurt or nothing.”

“You broke into my apartment?”

“No, hell-no.” He held out his hands defensively. “Your landlord—nice fellow—let me in. After I explained that I was concerned for your safety, he was more than happy to help.”

Joe shook his head. “He’s a saint.”

The sheriff smiled and nodded in agreement. “While I was relieving my concerns over your safety—”

“Concerns for my safety?”

“Yes. While I was relieving my concerns,” he smiled again, “I found your clothes hanging in the bathroom.”

“They were wet,” Joe said. “I only have two suits. When one gets wet, I hang it up to dry.”

“Yes. I figured so.” He nodded and added as though they were buddies talking about the weather, “I’ve had to change my clothes every day for the past few weeks, it’s been so wet. You too?”

“Yes,” Joe said, uncomfortable with the false intimacy.

“I see. So you changed since yesterday. Those were your clothes you wore last night?”

“Yes,” Joe said, hesitantly.

“I see.” He nodded. “Well Snyder, here,” he motioned toward the uniform standing next to Joe. “Snyder notices this dark spot on your pants. He and I looked at it pretty damn close and, by God, it sure looked like blood. Now where did you happen to get blood on you last night?”

Joe felt tired and small, small and tired enough to hang his feet over the side of a thin dime. He scratched his chin and frowned as though he did not understand how a collection of trifles could build into something important. The whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.

The sheriff did not wait for Joe’s answer. He stepped closer to Joe and said, “You keep showing up in my sights, Joe. I don’t like it, but there you are. I don’t know why you might have killed Gresham. His inheritance?” He shrugged. “The oldest motive in the world. Where the Frenchies might fit in, I don’t know that either. That relationship is what I need, and maybe this here list will help provide that. I still hope that what I’m thinking is bunk, but I keep inching closer to charging you. I need all them ducks in a row before I pull the trigger. So to speak.”

“So to speak,” Joe echoed.

The pit Joe had fallen into kept collapsing around him. His mind flashed suddenly on an English trench he had waded through during one of his first days on the Western Front. The mud and excrement had clung to his pants and shoes. As he had felt then, he again felt wrapped inside the paranoia of having wandered into his own grave.

“Why would I kill my best friend?”

The deputy, Snyder, snorted sarcastically.

“Why does anyone kill anyone?” asked Jackson.

Joe sighed. He couldn’t argue with that. “You’re looking in the wrong bucket. You should look a little more closely at the Frenchmen in that accident and the names on that list.” However, he could not shake the feeling that all he was doing was circling the drain.

The sheriff nodded his head and moved the wad of tobacco from cheek to cheek. “I didn’t say they weren’t involved. They were. In their automobile, I found a box that held a bunch of papers.”

“They had Gresham’s manuscript?”

Joe saw the sudden flash in the sheriff’s eyes, the wattage turn up as he put two and two together and came up with MOTIVE—another piece Jackson thought he needed to complete his puzzle. Joe watched those eyes move and brighten. There are times in one’s life when you just want to knock your head against the wall, hard. This was one of those times.

“What about this manuscript?” the sheriff asked, leaning forward toward Joe. “What I found might be something Gresham was writing, but it got all wet and muddy. I only got me a few pages with good writing on them.”

And Joe remembered Jackson spilling the paper contents of a box in the snow and rain and mud. That would be at the top of his stir list.

The uniform said, “That’s what he went back to the house for, to find that manuscript.” He stabbed at Joe with his finger.

“What about it, Joe?” Jackson asked.

Joe wiped his brow. “I don’t know that much about it,” he said, his words flat. “Gresham had mentioned it to me but never really talked about it. I believe it was about a battle that he was in, the Champagne.”

He looked at the sheriff and then at Snyder, the uniform, and met blank stares from each. The empty eyes of the ignorant. Anyone who was there, even if not in the battle itself, would know. Anyone in western Europe would know. Separated by four thousand miles of water from France, however, Americans didn’t have the visceral attachment to the war that those in Europe had, especially with a president whose campaign had rested on a plank of forgetting—putting the war in the past, forgetting it like it was just a child’s bad dream.

He continued, “If the Frenchmen had taken it, it must have been important. Whatever’s in it might tell you who killed him.”

“I think we know that already,” Snyder said under his breath.

“Maybe I can make something of those pages you saved, and maybe we should go back and see if any of the other pages are still readable.”

The sheriff rocked back on his heels as though he might actually consider Joe’s idea. He pulled a loose piece of tobacco from his upper lip and rolled it between finger and thumb, and he squinted at Joe, his jaw working at the wad in his cheek and greasing the rusty wheels of his mind to make all the cogs mesh.

After a moment of silence filled with the whispers of others in the room, the surrounding gallery of newsmen, Snyder offered his views, stretching over the sheriff’s shoulder to look down on Joe. He spoke quickly, as though he feared he might lose the words before they reached his lips. “Is that why you was driving out to meet the Frenchies after they killed Gresham? You hired them to murder him because you couldn’t do it yourself, and they were supposed to meet you out on the road and exchange the papers for money? Them being Frenchies, though, they don’t drive so good and your whole plan goes to hell.”

Joe withheld the impulse to show Snyder exactly how shallow violence remained beneath his surface and said to the sheriff, “I told you that I never saw the manuscript. I don’t know what was in it, but those Frenchmen obviously did.”

“I see,” said the sheriff, “and how do I know you never saw this manuscript?”

“Because I’m telling the truth.”

Another snort from Snyder.

“I see,” the sheriff said, nodding and pulling at his chin. He cocked an eyebrow and smiled. “Only thing, though, a man who’d kill someone certainly wouldn’t shy from a little lie, now would he?”

“Shit,” said Snyder with a grunt. “You as much as did it yourself.”

Joe ignored him, a big man with a little-man problem.

“We talked with Willie,” the sheriff added, working himself into Snyder’s groove. “He said that when you left, you said you were headed home to sleep.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Shit,” said Snyder again. “He changed his mind. I think you was laying down an alibi.” He added derisively, “Gee, Sheriff, I was home asleep. Just go ask Willie and he’ll tell ya’.” He offered a staccato laugh.

The sheriff waved his hand for Snyder to calm down. “Like I said, Joe, when I do finally figure this whole mess out, I hope it’s not what it looks like. Either way, though, you and I will talk more. Until then, I don’t want to see your vehicle heading out of town. Understand?”

Joe did not respond.

The sheriff walked away, followed closely by his small entourage. In their wake a void quickly filled with the tale-bearing babble of men whose lives were spent observing other people’s worlds.

After the door closed behind them and the sound of their heels faded, Joe continued to listen. The room felt as though it had turned alien to him. He remained sitting on the edge of the desk, his nerves risen with the room’s noise and his ears shaking from the unforgotten din of distant cannonades. He felt as though he had once again been let down in a wasteland. He had not felt that way in years, not since the war, but the feeling was as raw as the previous night.

He pushed himself from the desk onto unsteady legs. Under his coat, the back of his shirt felt cold and damp. He flexed his muscles involuntarily. How good a whiskey would taste, how good any liquid would taste but especially a double whiskey, flashed through his brain. His mouth had dried completely. He could not work any moisture into it and he considered going to Willie’s for a snort or ten. He decided to postpone that surrender until the evening.

He stood in the light from the window but the light no longer held any warmth. Clouds had veiled the sun, dropping a flat gray through the room, the reflected gray like that of water-filled shell holes echoing a bleak and hollow sky, the gray of empty and pitted helmets lost in the avid mud, the gray of a dead man’s face.

He sat in his chair with his back to the hum of the newsroom. The envelope lay on his desk. He fingered it open. A first-class ticket on a Cunard liner to Cherbourg leaving New York on Monday, the next day. Joe rubbed the ticket between his fingers as though testing its validity. He again checked the date against a wall calendar and exhaled a long breath as he sat heavily in the wooden chair.

Gresham had planned a trip to France. Joe’s first thought was to open the window, to call down to the sheriff, ask him to come back up, and then show him the ticket. Joe’s second thought, however, was that the sheriff was peering through blinders. Anything that did not point toward Joe in a noose would be bent in such a way that it would. He sat back, his finger rubbing a trail along the ticket as though divining truths. He wondered why Gresham would so suddenly want to explore his past, a past that for Joe, at least, was still raw in its wounds.

Gresham’s trip may have been a simple return to the land where he and Joe and so many other young men had lost their innocence and youth. Joe had read of others returning to France’s growing expatriate population, American soldiers whose lives had been formed in the furnal fires of the war and who had returned to find what had been removed from them in that dark time. Like him, they had gone to war in support of the hollow words of the last century only to find an obscenity in those words. Now they returned in search of something to fill their resulting voids—jazz and drink and sex. However, Joe doubted any such thing in Gresham’s visit, for Gresham had been a man who held concrete reasons for the things he did. Joe knew that Gresham would not have returned to France on an errant desire for recapturing a lost youth.

Holding the ticket in the fingertips of both hands, rubbing the coarse and heavy paper, he could not shake the feeling that Gresham had planned his trip for a very specific reason and that reason had gotten him killed.

The man’s secrets may have killed him and Joe wondered whether the intended dinner the night before, had it occurred, would have pulled Joe into the swirl of murder, a swirl he had been pulled into anyway. Gresham had wanted to talk about his manuscript, a book about the war, and Joe had supposed that it was another in a long line of journalist rehashes of what had been gained and what had been lost in a war that meant nothing other than a great deal of death. Sitting across from Gresham’s empty chair, Joe knew he had been wrong.

He wondered where copies of the manuscript might have ended up. The dead Frenchmen had one copy, which left at least one more and probably two for Gresham would have carboned copies somewhere. He knew two things for certain: If he had the manuscript he might be able to find the real killer, and, second, he had only guesses as to where another copy might exist.

Joe closed his eyes and conjured the piece of paper that had been clipped to the envelope. Champagne and the date. A name—Paul something. He concentrated. Something like Dullard. Dillard. A place, maybe an address. Paris. Place André des Arts No numbers, no address numbers. He wrote it all down on the envelope.

Before leaving the newsroom, Joe pocketed the enveloped ticket safe inside its folds. It was his now.

If I am to be a fool, he thought, I am to be my own fool.

A small puddle from the morning’s rain had formed around the base of the coat rack, having fallen in drips from his overcoat. He stepped to avoid the water as he lifted his coat from the rack to walk swiftly from the room.

Just before the door, he turned to look once more at the desk with the sense that he had overlooked something telling. As though a broken light shined on it, he saw the typewriter with its triple pages rolled and waiting for the next beat of metal keys.

Early in Gresham’s mentoring of him, Gresham had told him always to carbon his pages, always make a copy of everything he wrote. He closed his eyes. Joe could think of only three places Gresham might have left a copy of his manuscript—in his desk at home, in his desk at work, in his box at the bank. That left two places for Joe to look.

He pulled the watch from his pocket and checked the time—9:56. Noon would be the best time to search Gresham’s bank box, for only the newest and least experienced bank workers would be at their desks. That, at least, would provide two hours to find the appropriate keys. Those would be somewhere in Gresham’s home.

The gray day became a cold drizzle of snow as Joe pulled his Hudson across lanes and headed out of town. He checked his mirror and watched as another vehicle, a black Ford like every other black Ford in America, fell in behind him, keeping a discreet distance but turning when he turned and slowing when he slowed.

Joe changed his plans.

At the next intersection, he turned north, away from Gresham’s house and parked in front of the National Bank, a brick building three stories high with sandstone framing the windows and a large double door.

Even though he knew the answer, Joe asked the receptionist for directions to the bank’s box vault, setting the hook for when his tails asked. She pointed him to the stairs at the rear of the building. Instead of walking down the stairs to the basement, however, he went up one flight and waited for two policemen, Snyder and another uniform, to follow his lead. He watched from the railing above as they descended before he walked back down and back through the bank’s lobby and out the front.

He drove past their black Ford, which was parked a block down the street and had the city’s insignia painted on its doors in white paint. He double parked in the road. Ignoring the horns of others on their way to or from work, he used his pocket knife to loosen the valve stem in one of the front Firestones before driving off, watching his mirrors the entire distance but seeing no other cars following him.

A wet and heavy snow began to fall in earnest, coming down in sheets and again sending alley cats inside to chase basement rats. Joe wondered whether he was the chasing cat or the fleeing rat.

Gresham’s home was drenched in a pall. The morning had been pulled down around the house to lay soggy on the structures and ground. Water dripped from the corners of the roof. The driveway was still muddy from the previous rains and was beginning to be layered in white. The air was colder than in town, offering a promise of a full winter’s snow.

Joe saw no new tracks in the mud of the long driveway and parked out of sight behind the brick garage, hoping the snow would turn full enough to erase his own tire tracks. With his overcoat wrapped around his shoulders, he pulled his fedora down tight and ran from the garage to the overhang of the front porch.

The front door was closed but not locked. Joe felt the unpleasantly familiar feeling of having been there before. Not just the previous night. The sudden vision of death the night before mixed in kaleidoscope quickness with deaths from a further past.

The first step into Gresham’s foyer echoed in the silence of the house as well as memory. The hush of death. The rain dripping outside, the mantel clock ticking down, the haunted sounds of emptiness. Joe listened to the absence of life sounds, his ears warm as though from a low-grade fever, until he felt certain that he was alone. He walked through the foyer and into the room where Gresham had been killed, draping his wet overcoat on the back of a chair.

A faint light of day from behind drawn curtains was all that lit the room. Joe stood for a moment before he pushed the wall button to turn on the ceiling light. The room appeared much as he had last seen it. Small stains of blood had dried on the sofa and wood floor. The sofa, however, had been pulled farther from the wall as the sheriff’s deputies had been searching for something behind it. An imprint of death remained in the cushions of the sofa as though a ghost still lay there. Everything else in order. Joe thought that there should be something, some marker, some monument to signal the death of a good man. But the room was empty and it left him feeling hollow.

The desk drawer which had been open the night before had been closed. He opened it and found a lidless cigar box of pencils, stacks of writing paper and carbon paper. Beneath that was a single letter with a French postmark. He pocketed the letter without opening or reading it. An empty space in the drawer the size of a ream of paper signaled the absence of something. Gresham’s manuscript. The original had been taken from there, that he was certain of. The Frenchmen had lifted the manuscript from the desk drawer and left without closing it.

Joe rubbed his mouth, thinking how he had become so familiar with death that he would even notice whether an assassin should stop to close a desk drawer after murdering a man. During the war, he had known men who ate meals in between sniper shots, killing a man then having a spoonful of weak stew, and he knew one man who had sung lullabies during the pitch of battle, killing other men while he sang “The Land of Nod.” The infinities and incongruities of violence had cauterized the world’s emotions.

The other drawers held books from the public library in Greenwich about the Great War, a war fought to end all wars except those still fought in the spectral memories of young men.

Folded pieces of paper marked pages in several of the books, all noted pages concerned with the same battle in Northern France at the Champagne in which Gresham had participated. That was where Gresham had watched as so many of his comrades charged to their death in a day that had netted no land. Joe had heard rumors of incompetence and of treason surrounding that battle, but he had heard that about many battles, along with the tales of angels in the trenches and ghost spies and cannibal traitors and vampires who populated the cratered no-man’s land between the trench lines. Since the war, he had paid little attention to any of the rumors, knowing that the true cannibals were the old men in politician’s suits who had sent young men to their deaths.

Mostly, though, he preferred to think of anything other than France. He was often unsuccessful in that.

He closed the books back inside their drawers and turned to walk out before remembering the engravings on Gresham’s notepad, the indented lettering left from the previous page’s words. The notepad was still on the end table near where Gresham’s head had fallen on the sofa, and Joe tilted the paper in the light to expose the phantomic outline of pressed words. Other than recognizing the page as a list of names, however, he could not read what had been written.

He turned on the electric lamp next the sofa and tore the page from the pad and held it closer against the light, turning it in every direction and angle to the light of the floor lamp, but he could read little more than before. From the desk, he took a page of carbon paper and placed it over the note page, rubbing lightly over the imprint. He felt like a young boy discovering the mystery map to a long lost treasure as the list of names with simple marks next to each formed in relief, white against black. He read them out loud, as though the act of speaking the names would reveal their identities. Then he placed the page on the table and looked at it.

Rene Marcel

Jean Marcel **

Thomas Wilde **

Frederick Gadwa

Paul Dillard—

None of the names meant anything to him, no Churchills or Hydes or Pershings among them, except that of Dillard which he recognized from the paper he had given to the sheriff. He copied the names into his own notepad, folded the original, and put them both into his shirt pocket. He looked again at the desk. There was nothing to explain what the names meant nor why Gresham had written them.

He wondered if Gresham might have kept another copy of his manuscript in the house. Not in the desk, but maybe upstairs in his dresser or boxed in the spare room. He took the stairs to the second floor singly and slowly, feeling the presence of death hovering in the house like Banquo’s ghost.

All he found in the spare room were traces of the Great War—worn uniforms, a mess kit and bed roll, tarnished medals, a pitted and rusted helmet, other helmets and knives and a Lugar pistol stolen from dead or captured Germans, an Austro-Hungarian flag. He pocketed the Lugar for no better reason than he had no gun and its weight felt reassuring. Searching through the boxes was like returning to the trenches, for as he searched the things of war he could hear the distant terrors of injured or blinded men, the shrieks of dying horses, the necrotic hum of circling flies.

He walked to the bedroom, turned on the floor lamps, opened drawers in the night stand and dresser, searched the closet and under the bed. He opened a packed steamer trunk left in the middle of the room filled with clothes ready for the trip. On top of the trunk was Gresham’s passport and a safe deposit key, which he might be able to use if given time and opportunity. Before he could search the trunk, however, he heard another automobile in the drive outside.

An engine stopped. Two car doors slammed shut.

Joe looked through a crack in the window shades, knowing while he looked that whoever it was could see all of the lights on in the house as well as his silhouetted figure in the upstairs window. Two uniformed policeman jogged through the increasing snow and mud from the garage to the house, their heads down and shoulders hunched inside yellow slickers, their hands tight on their hips holding holstered weapons from bouncing. Neither seemed to notice the rear bumper of Joe’s Hudson beyond the back wall of the garage. For once Joe was happy about the rain and snow, for it kept the two officers’ eyes looking down at their feet and the muddy driveway.

Joe took the stairs two and three at a time, then started toward the kitchen door in the rear of the house before remembering his overcoat draped over a chair, leaving a wet spot on the front room floor. As the front door opened to send a flare of light across the entry, Joe lifted his overcoat from the chair. He had few choices and only one that he had time to try. In those wet winter months of Connecticut, people kept furniture eight to ten inches from the wall to allow for air circulation and keep mold and mildew from growing along the baseboards. The previous night someone had pulled the sofa an extra couple of inches out, looking for some clue. He slid behind it, feeling much like a man crawling into his trench.

Two sets of footsteps stopped in the entry before continuing into the lighted front room.

“And look here, Will.” Joe recognized the voice of the tall uniform, Snyder. Joe listened as Snyder’s disembodied voice trailed into a whisper.

“I see it,” said Will, the other uniform, his voice graveled and low. “He was here for sure. Lights on, wet floor. Gone upstairs, you think?”

“Maybe. Most likely he’s already gone, though, else we’d have seen his car.”

“Probably right.”

“Damn but I was wishing he was here. After that little stunt in town, I was looking forward to taking a little air out of his tires.”

“I’ll check upstairs anyway.”

“Okay. You have a look-see and I’ll check around down here.”

Joe heard the sound of snaps unlocking and the rub of something against leather, the sounds of a pistol being drawn. He pulled closer into himself, compressing into his small trench as much as he could. He listened to both sets of footsteps, hearing them in a parallax of sound, one ear following the feet of those that ascended the stairs and with the other ear those of Snyder’s shuffling from front room to hallway to kitchen and back.

Echoing from the second floor landing came Will’s voice, “Nothing up here ’cept a few drips of water.”

“Nothing down here either.”

A silence followed in which Joe felt each second pass, listening to the shuffles and movements of the two men and hearing the loud beat of his own pulse. He knew they had found him and that they were training their pistols on the sofa, ready to kiss it and him with a flurry of bullets. He readied himself against the wall in order to push the sofa into the two men and dash for the door.

He heard Will speak, “There was some boxes open upstairs.”

“They weren’t open last night. Let’s go back up and see if we can find anything missing.”

Another silence filled with the rush of blood through Joe’s ears.

“First, though, let me call the sheriff and let him know what’s what.”

One set of boots walked to and up the stairs. The other crossed the room to the desk. A phone lifted from its hook and four numbers dialed on the rotary.

“Sheriff Jackson.”

A desk drawer opened. Some papers were crumpled and others shuffled. Something was lifted from the wall and after a moment was placed on the desk. Snyder mumbled, “Damn if those doughboys sure liked to photograph themselves. Like they was on a world tour or—” His words stopped short and Joe held his breath.

“Sheriff? Snyder. Me and Will are out here at Gresham’s house. . . . Yes, he was, but he must have left just before we arrived. Lights were on and there’s puddles of water on the floor and a wet spot on the back of a chair. . . . Probably from his coat. . . . Yes. Some opened boxes up there. Will’s looking through them now. . . . Yes. . . . No. I’ll go have a look with him. . . . Yes . . . Like I told you, this guy’s the one. We should have. . . . Yes, I know. Sorry, sheriff. . . . We parked in the garage, so if he comes back he won’t see us. . . . Okay. We’ll wait, and if he comes back we got him. If he runs, I’ll just have to shoot his sorry ass. . . . Yessir.”

The phone slapped down.

“Stupid son-of-a-bitch,” Snyder said and walked off to join Will upstairs.

Joe poked his head from behind the sofa, ready to recoil if he saw Snyder looking back like some sniper in the woods. He was alone but he knew not for long and crawled from his spider hole. Out of a pen box on the desk, Joe took scissors with which he clipped the phone line.

He took the copy of Joyce’s novel and a framed photograph of five men standing in a muddy trench, the object he had heard Snyder remove from the wall and place on the desk. He walked quickly into the kitchen, conscious of the pad of his heavy-soled shoes on the old wood floor. He slipped out the back door, and without looking back, he ran first into the garage to pull loose the spark plug wires from Snyder’s car. Then he rounded the garage on the opposite side from the house, started his car’s engine, and jumped the Hudson through the mud and down the driveway. He caught a mirrored glimpse of Snyder raising his weapon before Snyder and the house disappeared behind a line of trees. A shot rang out, but the noise—like the bullet and the house and the shooter—was lost in the woods.

Nobody lived within three miles of Gresham, so Joe figured he had at least forty minutes before Snyder could slosh through the mud and find a telephone to call the sheriff. He hoped the sheriff would first drive to Gresham’s home. That would give him another thirty minutes to get to his apartment and grab a few things and leave. If the sheriff went to his apartment first, Joe figured he might have only five extra minutes. Forty-five total, and half those taken up driving to town. He pressed on the accelerator, wheels sliding a little before taking purchase.

The clouds had settled even more fully since Joe had left town. With the snow falling hard and heavy, the day was settling into darkness. He turned on the small box heater in his automobile, but he was still cold, shivering. The trees lining the road passed like brief shadows.

He parked in an alley a block away from his apartment building and ran to the building, not at all concerned that someone might take notice. He hoped that people would think he was running to get out of the snow and would not see the unstable look in his eyes. So he ran, his fedora pulled tight on his forehead, overcoat open and flapping wildly in the wind and snow. He did not bother jumping slush puddles or looking at traffic and barely slowed at the building’s door. He bounded the stairs, taking two and three in a stride, and stopped once inside only for a quick breath after closing and locking the door behind him.

He spared no time taking note of his up-turned apartment, the product of the sheriff’s intense curiosity. With his breath coming in gasps, he pulled clothes and shoes from the bedroom dresser and closet to stuff into a tattered canvas duffel bag. On top of those clothes he spilled toiletries from his bathroom and the suit he had hung to dry, its incriminating blood stain still marking the pant leg.

He started from the bathroom back into the front room when he heard a key tickling the front door lock to his apartment. He stepped back against the bathroom wall, pressing himself as tight as possible against the wainscoting.

“Thank you,” the sheriff told someone, probably the building manager. “No need to worry. I’ll just wait here until he returns.” The door closed. Joe again listened to the sound of someone walking.

The sound of the steps grew then receded into the bedroom.

Joe’s jaw tightened. He found it difficult to swallow. He wished that the water falling from his overcoat would stop hitting the floor with such loud drips, drips loud enough to eclipse the sounds of his breathing and heart pulsing through his ears.

He looked around the bathroom for a place to hide. Nowhere and no chance of making it to the front door without being caught or shot. The window was too small for him to shimmy through, so he pushed himself tighter into the cracks of the wainscoting.

The sheriff’s steps returned from the bedroom, moving with quickened and tightened spacing. The sheriff had found the emptied drawers and the emptied closet.

“Shit-almighty,” the sheriff swore beneath his breath as he stepped into the bathroom.

Joe punched the sheriff in the temple, a cold-cocked sucker punch that sent the little man straight down quick and hard and face first on the tile floor.

Joe turned him over and sat him against the bathtub like a stringless marionette and stopped the bleeding from his nose, then tied his arms and legs tight with a telephone cord from the front room. He thought of gagging him, but worried that, with his nose probably broken, he may need his mouth to breath.

“Sorry, Sheriff,” he said.

He took the sheriff’s gun, a Smith & Wesson .45 revolver with a short barrel, balanced it in his hand for a moment, thinking how he was accumulating a nice arsenal of small guns. Lifting his bag of clothes through the bedroom window and out onto the fire escape, he took one last look at his home before slipping out and down the metal staircase and then the alley to his car.

The bank was on his way out of town. He stopped long enough to close out his own bank account. He knew the police would have already placed a stop on Gresham’s accounts after the morning’s escapade. The teller hesitated giving him so much cash. Following an okay from a manager, Joe pocketed nearly $500 in large bills.

He drove out of Greenwich with his lights on and not a single look in the mirror until he had almost reached the limits of the small city. Pointing the Hudson toward New York City meant passing Gresham’s house one more time and possibly meeting Snyder driving back into town. His luck had held through the day, either by a cable or by a thread but held nonetheless. He just hoped that there was enough elasticity to it that it would hold a while longer.

He passed a Ford truck coming into town. Through the driving rain, he could just make out Will sitting between the driver and Snyder. The two men were engaged in a heated argument and the driver was watching the road. Joe slid back far enough in the shadows of his car to not be seen. He watched as the three faces in the farmer’s truck passed. None of them paid notice to the traffic leaving the city; the deputies’ faces turned in anger to one another and the driver having a hard enough time in the snow and looking through discordant windshield wipers and distorted glass. Joe held his breath and watched the truck disappear into the veil of snow behind him. Neither their Ford nor his Hudson slowed or wavered.

Joe pulled quickly into Gresham’s driveway to take the steamer trunk with him. He could easily do without Gresham’s clothes, even if they might fit, but he did not want to draw attention to himself checking into a first class cabin on a Cunard liner with no major luggage in tow. As he left, he offered one last salute to his friend, “To the Lost, brother.”

As he neared the wreckage of last night’s crash, he slowed and stopped on the road’s narrow shoulder. He wandered for a few minutes through the mired and snow-covered ground. The only papers he found not already turning to mulch in the snow and mud were sodden, with the inked words running together as though speaking an ancient rune. With no help there, he left.

Driving to New York, through the intermittent changes of snow and rain, he stopped once in Mamaroneck to fill his gas tank. The rain there had stopped and the air smelled heavily of wet grass and sulfur. The clouds were marbled, gray and black, and threatening another storm. A pair of large oak trees near the garage were thick with birds clinging to the skeletal frame of branches. Stripped of his overcoat and coat, Joe’s shirt clung to his back wet from sweat. The air was electric. He knew that the storm was not yet over.

He took a hotel room a few blocks from the Fourteenth Street dock before driving back up to the Bronx, leaving the car parked near the new Yankee Stadium, the keys swinging in the driver’s door. He then rode the subway back downtown to his hotel.

The next morning he woke early, well before the sun had risen. With the reflections of the city’s lights, the sky was a blue-black, the color of singed steel. A dream of his father had woken him fully from his sleep. The sudden crack. His father’s slow roll into death and the absolute lack of anything he could do except watch, which he did in his dream, though he had not in his youth. No bells, no tears, no priest, no church.

Joe blinked and sighed. A shiver went through his body. He rose and dressed, preparing to return to the place where his generation and the last century had died.