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+{"text":"\n\n\n\nProduced by Brett Fishburne, Nikolay Fishburne, Chuck Greif\nand the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at\nhttp:\/\/www.pgdp.net\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHISTORICAL SERIES No. 14\n\nTHE LIFE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN\n\nBY\nM. L. WEEMS\n\nSTREET & SMITH, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK\n\n\n\n\nTHE LIFE OF\n\nBenjamin Franklin\n\nWITH MANY\n\nCHOICE ANECDOTES AND ADMIRABLE SAYINGS OF THIS GREAT MAN\n\nNEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED BY ANY OF HIS BIOGRAPHERS\n\n\n\nBY\n\nM. L. WEEMS\n\nAUTHOR OF \"THE LIFE OF WASHINGTON\"\n\n\n\n\"Sage Franklin next arose in cheerful mien, And smil'd, unruffled, o'er\nthe solemn scene; High on his locks of age a wreath was brac'd, Palm of\nall arts that e'er a mortal grac'd; Beneath him lay the sceptre kings\nhad borne, And crowns and laurels from their temples torn.\"\n\n\n\nNEW YORK\nSTREET & SMITH, PUBLISHERS\n\n238 WILLIAM STREET\n\n\n\n\n_To the Reader_\n\n\nWe trust that you will be thoroughly satisfied with this book. During\nthe long period of time that the publications of Street & Smith have\nbeen familiar to the reading classes (somewhat more than half a\ncentury) it has always been our aim to give to the public the very best\nliterary products, regardless of the expenditure involved. Our books\nand periodicals are today read and re-read in a majority of the homes\nof America, while but few of our original competitors are even known by\nname to the present generation. No special credit is due for antiquity,\nbut we hold it to be a self-evident fact that long experience, coupled\nwith enterprise and the ability to maintain the front rank for so many\nyears, proves our right to the title of leaders. We solicit your\nfurther valued patronage.\n\nSTREET & SMITH.\n\n\n\n\nLIFE OF FRANKLIN.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I.\n\n\nDR. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL\nSOCIETY; FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH, LONDON AND PARIS;\nGOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA; AND MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY\nFROM THE UNITED STATES TO THE COURT OF FRANCE, was the son of an\nobscure tallow-chandler and soap-boiler, of Boston, where he was born\non the 17th day of January, 1706.\n\nSome men carry letters of recommendation in their looks, and some in\ntheir names. 'Tis the lot but of few to inherit both of these\nadvantages. The hero of this work was one of that favoured number. As\nto his physiognomy, there was in it such an air of wisdom and\nphilanthropy, and consequently such an expression of majesty and\nsweetness, as charms, even in the commonest pictures of him. And for\nhis name, every one acquainted with the old English history, must\nknow, that Franklin stands for what we now mean by \"Gentleman,\" or\n\"CLEVER FELLOW.\"\n\nIn the days of AULD LANG SYNE, their neighbours from the continent\nmade a descent \"_on the fast anchored isle_,\" and compelled the hardy,\nred-ochred natives to buckle to their yoke. Among the victors were\nsome regiments of Franks, who distinguished themselves by their valor,\nand still more by their politeness to the vanquished, and especially\nto the females. By this amiable gallantry the Franks acquired such\nglory among the brave islanders, that whenever any of their own people\nachieved any thing uncommonly handsome, he was called, by way of\ncompliment, FRANKLIN, _i.e._ a little Frank. As the living flame does\nnot more naturally tend upwards than does every virtue to exalt its\npossessors, these little Franks were soon promoted to be great men,\nsuch as justices of the peace, knights of the shire, and other such\nnames of high renown. Hence those pretty lines of the old poet\nChaucer--\n\n    \"This worthy Franklin wore a purse of silk\n    Fix'd to his girdle, pure as morning milk;\n    Knight of the shire; first justice of th' assize,\n    To help the poor, the doubtful to advise.\n    In all employments, gen'rous just he prov'd;\n    Renown'd for courtesy; by all belov'd.\"\n\nBut though, according to Dr. Franklin's own account of his family,\nwhose pedigree he looked into with great diligence while he was in\nEngland, it appears that they were all of the \"_well born_,\" or\ngentlemen in the best sense of the word; yet they did not deem it\nbeneath them to continue the same useful courses which had at first\nconferred their titles. On the contrary, the doctor owns, and indeed\nglories in it, that for three hundred years the eldest son, or heir\napparent in this family of old British gentlemen, was invariably\nbrought up a blacksmith. Moreover, it appears from the same\nindubitable authority, that the blacksmith succession was most\nreligiously continued in the family down to the days of the doctor's\nfather. How it has gone on since that time I have never heard; but\nconsidering the salutary effects of such a fashion on the prosperity\nof a young republic, it were most devoutly to be wished that it is\nkept up: and that the family of one of the greatest men who ever lived\nin this or any other country, still display in their coat of arms, not\nthe barren _gules_ and _garters_ of European folly, but those better\nensigns of American wisdom--the SLEDGE-HAMMER and ANVIL.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II.\n\n    \"Were I so tall to reach the pole,\n      And grasp the ocean in my span,\n    I must be measur'd by my soul;\n      For 'tis the MIND that makes the man.\"\n\n\nFrom the best accounts which I have been able to pick up, it would\nappear that a passion for learning had a long run in the family of the\nFranklins. Of the doctor's three uncles, the elder, whose name was\nThomas, though conscientiously brought up a blacksmith, and subsisting\nhis family by the din and sweat of his anvil, was still a great\nreader. Instead of wasting his leisure hours, as too many of the trade\ndo, in tippling and tobacco, he acquired enough of the law to render\nhimself a very useful and leading man among the people of Northampton,\nwhere his forefathers had lived in great comfort for three hundred\nyears, on thirty acres of land.\n\nHis uncle Benjamin, too, another old _English gentleman_ of the right\nstamp, though a very hard-working man at the silk-dying trade, was\nequally devoted to the pleasures of the mind. He made it a rule\nwhenever he lighted on a copy of verses that pleased him, to\ntranscribe them into a large blank book which he kept for the purpose.\nIn this way he collected two quarto volumes of poems, written in short\nhand of his own inventing. And, being a man of great piety, and fond\nof attending the best preachers, whose sermons he always took down, he\ncollected in the course of his life, _eight_ volumes of sermons in\n_folio_, besides near _thirty_ in quarto and octavo, and all in the\naforesaid short hand! Astonishing proof, what a banquet of elegant\npleasures even a poor mechanic may enjoy, who begins early to read and\nthink! 'Tis true, he was a long time about it. His piety afforded him\na constant cheerfulness. And deriving from the same source a regular\ntemperance, he attained to a great age. In his seventy-third year,\nstill fresh and strong, he left his native country, and came over to\nAmerica, to see his younger brother Josias, between whom and himself\nthere had always subsisted a more than ordinary friendship. On his\narrival in Boston, he was received with unbounded joy by Josias, who\npressed him to spend the residue of his days in his family. To this\nproposition the old gentleman readily consented; and the more so as he\nwas then a widower, and his children, all married off, had left him.\nHe had the honor to give his name, and to stand godfather to our\nlittle hero, for whom, on account of his vivacity and fondness for\nlearning, he conceived an extraordinary affection. And Ben always took\na great delight in talking of this uncle. Nor was it to be wondered\nat; for he was an old man who wore his religion very much to win young\npeople--a pleasant countenance--a sweet speech--and a fund of\nanecdotes always entertaining, and generally carrying some good moral\nin the tail of them. His grandfather before him must have been a man\nof rare humour, as appears from a world of droll stories which uncle\nBenjamin used to tell after him, and which his New England descendants\nto this day are wont to repeat with great glee. I must let the reader\nhear one or two of them. They will amuse him, by showing what strange\nthings were done in days of yore by kings and priests in the land of\nour venerable forefathers.\n\nIt was his grandfather's fortune to live in the reign of Queen Mary,\nwhom her _friends_ called _holy_ Mary, but her enemies _bloody_ Mary.\nIn the grand struggle for power between those humble followers of the\ncross, the catholics and the protestants, the former gained the\nvictory, for which 'Te Deums' in abundance were sung throughout the\nland. And having been sadly rib-roasted by the protestants when in\npower, they determined, like good christians, now that the tables were\nturned, to try on them the virtues of fire and <DW19>. The Franklin\nfamily having ever been sturdy protestants, began now to be in great\ntribulation. \"What shall we do to save our Bible?\" was the question.\nAfter serious consultation in a family caucus, it was resolved to hide\nit in the close-stool; which was accordingly done, by fastening it,\nopen, on the under side of the lid by twine threads drawn strongly\nacross the leaves. When the grandfather read to the family, he turned\nup the aforesaid lid on his knees, passing the leaves of his Bible, as\nhe read, from one side to the other. One of the children was carefully\nstationed at the door, to give notice if he saw the priest, or any of\nhis frowning tribe, draw near. In that event, the lid with the Bible\nlashed beneath it, was instantly clapped down again on its old place.\n\nThese things may appear strange to us, who live under a wise republic,\nwhich will not suffer the black gowns of one church to persecute those\nof another. But they were common in those dark and dismal days, when\nthe clergy thought more of creeds than of Christ, and of learning\nLatin than of learning love. Queen Mary was one of this gnostic\ngeneration, (who place their religion in the _head_, though Christ\nplaces it in the HEART,) and finding it much easier to her _unloving_\nspirit, to burn human beings called heretics, than to mortify her own\nlust of popularity, she suffered her catholic to fly upon and worry\nher protestant subjects at a shameful rate. Good old uncle Benjamin\nused to divert his friends with another story, which happened in the\nfamily of his own aunt, who kept an inn at Eaton, Northamptonshire.\n\nA most violent priest, of the name of Asquith, who thought, like Saul,\nthat he should be doing \"_God service_\" by killing the heretics, had\nobtained letters patent from queen Mary against those people in the\ncounty of Warwick. On his way he called to dine at Eaton, where he was\nquickly waited on by the mayor, a strong catholic, to ask how the\n_good work went on_. Asquith, leaping to his saddle-bags, drew forth a\nlittle box, that contained his commission, which he flourished before\nthe mayor, exclaiming with high glee, \"_Aye! there's that that will\nscorch the rogues!_\" Old Mrs. Franklin, under the rose a sturdy\nprotestant, overhearing this, was exceedingly troubled; and watching\nher opportunity when the priest had stepped out with the mayor,\nslipped the commission out of the box, and put in its place a pack of\ncards, wrapped in the same paper. The priest returning in haste, and\nsuspecting no trick, huddled up his box, and posted off for Coventry.\nA grand council of the saints was speedily convoked to meet him. He\narose, and having with great vehemence delivered a set speech against\nthe heretics, threw his commission on the table for the secretary to\nread aloud. With the eyes of the whole council on him, the eager\nsecretary opened the package, when in place of the flaming commission,\nbehold a pack of cards with the knave of clubs turned uppermost! A\nsudden stupefaction seized the spectators. In silence they stared at\nthe priest and stared at one another. Some looking as though they\nsuspected treachery: others as dreading a judgment in the case. Soon\nas the dumb-founded priest could recover speech, he swore by the HOLY\nMARY, that he once had a commission; that he had received it from the\nqueen's own hand. And he also swore that he would get another\ncommission. Accordingly he hurried back to London, and having procured\nanother, set off again for Coventry. But alas! before he got down,\npoor queen Mary had turned the corner, and the protestants under\nElizabeth got the rule again. Having nothing now to dread, our\nquizzing old hostess, Mrs. Franklin, came out with the knavish trick\nshe had played the priest, which so pleased the protestants of\nCoventry that they presented her a piece of plate, that cost fifty\npounds sterling, equal, as money now goes, to a thousand dollars.\n\nFrom an affair which soon after this took place there, it appears that\nCoventry, however famous for saints, had no great cause to brag of her\npoets.--When queen Elizabeth, to gratify her subjects, made the tour\nof her island, she passed through Coventry. The mayor, aldermen, and\ncompany hearing of her approach, went out in great state to meet her.\nThe queen being notified that they wished to address her, made a full\nstop right opposite to a stage erected for the purpose, and covered\nwith embroidered cloth, from which a ready orator, after much bowing\nand arms full extended, made this wondrous speech--\"We men of Coventry\nare glad to see your royal highness--Lord how _fair_ you be!\"\n\nTo this the maiden queen, equal famed for fat and fun, rising in her\ncarriage, and waving her lily white hand, made this prompt reply--\"Our\nroyal highness is glad to see you men of Coventry--Lord what FOOLS you\nbe!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III.\n\n_Our hero, little Ben, coming on the carpet--Put to school very\nyoung--Learns prodigiously--Taken home and set to candle-making--\nCurious capers, all proclaiming \"the Achilles in petticoats.\"_\n\n\nDr. Franklin's father married early in his own country, and would\nprobably have lived and died there, but for the persecutions against\nhis friends the Presbyterians, which so disgusted him, that he came\nover to New England, and settled in Boston about the year 1682. He\nbrought with him his English wife and three children. By the same wife\nhe had four children more in America; and ten others afterwards by an\nAmerican wife. The doctor speaks with pleasure of having seen thirteen\nsitting together very lovingly at his father's table, and all married.\nOur little hero, who was the fifteenth child, and last of the sons,\nwas born at Boston the 17th day of January, 1706, old style.\n\nThat famous Italian proverb, \"_The Devil tempts every man, but the\nIdler tempts the Devil_,\" was a favourite canto with wise old Josias;\nfor which reason, soon as their little lips could well lisp letters\nand syllables, he had them all to school.\n\nNor was this the only instance with regard to them, wherein good\nJosias \"_sham'd the Devil_;\" for as soon as their education was\nfinished, they were put to useful trades. Thus no leisure was allowed\nfor bad company and habits. Little Ben, neatly clad and comb'd, was\npack'd off to school with the rest; and as would seem, at a very early\nage, for he says himself that, \"_he could not recollect any time in\nhis life when he did not know how to read_,\" whence we may infer that\nhe hardly ever knew any thing more of childhood than its innocency and\nplayfulness. At the age of eight he was sent to a grammar school,\nwhere he made such a figure in learning, that his good old father set\nhim down at once for the church, and used constantly to call him his\n\"_little chaplain_.\" He was confirmed in this design, not only by the\nextraordinary readiness with which he learned, but also by the praises\nof his friends, who all agreed that he would certainly one day or\nother become a mighty scholar. His uncle Benjamin too, greatly\napproved the idea of making a preacher of him; and by way of\nencouragement, promised to him all his volumes of sermons, written, as\nbefore said, in his own short hand.\n\nThis his rapid progress in learning he ascribed very much to an\namiable teacher who used gentle means only, to encourage his scholars,\nand make them fond of their books.\n\nBut in the midst of this gay career in his learning, when in the\ncourse of the first year only, he had risen from the middle of his\nclass to the head of it; thence to the class immediately above it; and\nwas rapidly overtaking the third class, he was taken from school! His\nfather, having a large family, with but a small income, and thinking\nhimself unable consistently with what he owed the rest of his\nchildren, to give him a collegiate education, took Ben home to assist\nhim in his own humble occupation, which was that of a SOAP-BOILER and\nTALLOW-CHANDLER; a trade he had taken up of his own head after\nsettling in Boston; his original one of a DYER being in too little\nrequest to maintain his family.\n\nI have never heard how Ben took this sudden reverse in his prospects.\nNo doubt it put his little stock of philosophy to the stretch. To have\nseen himself, one day, on the high road to literary fame, flying from\nclass to class, the admiration and envy of a numerous school; and the\nnext day, to have found himself in a filthy soap-shop; clad in a\ngreasy apron, twisting cotton wicks!--and in place of snuffing the\nsacred lamps of the Muses, to be bending over pots of fetid tallow,\ndipping and moulding candles for the dirty cook wenches! Oh, it must\nhave seem'd a sad falling off! Indeed, it appears from his own account\nthat he was so disgusted with it that he had serious thoughts of going\nto sea. But his father objecting to it, and Ben having virtue enough\nto be dutiful, the notion was given up for that time. But the ambition\nwhich had made him the first at his school, and which now would have\nhurried him to sea, was not to be extinguished. Though diverted from\nits favourite course, it still burned for distinction, and rendered\nhim the leader of the juvenile band in every enterprize where danger\nwas to be confronted, or glory to be won. In the neighbouring\nmill-pond, he was the foremost to lead the boys to plunge and swim;\nthus teaching them an early mastery over that dangerous element. And\nwhen the ticklish mill-boat was launching from the shore laden with\nhis timid playmates, the paddle that served as rudder, was always put\ninto his hands, as the fittest to steer her course over the dark\nwaters of the pond. This ascendancy which nature had given him over\nthe companions of his youth, was not always so well used as it might\nhave been. He honestly confesses that, once at least, he made such an\nunlucky use of it as drew them into a scrape that cost them dear.\nTheir favourite fishing shore on that pond was, it seems, very miry.\nTo remedy so great an inconvenience he proposed to the boys to make a\nwharf. Their assent was quickly obtained: but what shall we make it\nof? was the question. Ben pointed their attention to a heap of stones,\nhard by, of which certain honest masons were building a house. The\nproposition was hailed by the boys, as a grand discovery; and soon as\nnight had spread her dark curtains around them, they fell to work with\nthe activity of young beavers, and by midnight had completed their\nwharf. The next morning the masons came to work, but, behold! not a\nstone was to be found! The young rogues, however, detected by the\ntrack of their feet in the mud, were quickly summoned before their\nparents, who not being so partial to Ben as they had been, chastised\ntheir folly with a severe flogging. Good old Josias pursued a\ndifferent course with his son. To deter him from such an act in\nfuture, he endeavoured to reason him into a sense of its immorality.\nBen, on the other hand, just fresh and confident from his school, took\nthe field of argument against his father, and smartly attempted to\ndefend what he had done, on the principle of its _utility_. But the\nold gentleman, who was a great adept in moral philosophy, calmly\nobserved to him, that if one boy were to make use of this plea to take\naway his fellow's goods, another might; and thus contests would arise,\nfilling the world with blood and murder without end. Convinced, in\nthis simple way, of the fatal consequences of \"_doing evil that good\nmay come_,\" Ben let drop the weapons of his rebellion, and candidly\nagreed with his father that what was not _strictly honest_ could never\nbe _truly useful_. This discovery he made at the tender age of _nine_.\nSome never make it in the course of their lives. The grand angler,\nSatan, throws out his bait of _immediate gain_; and they, like silly\nJacks, snap at it at once; and in the moment of running off, fancy\nthey have got a delicious morsel. But alas! the fatal hook soon\nconvinces them of their mistake, though sometimes too late. And then\nthe lamentation of the prophet serves as the epilogue of their\ntragedy--\"_'Twas honey in the mouth, but gall in the bowels._\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV.\n\n_Picture of a wise father--To which is added a famous receipt for\nhealth and long life._\n\n\nThe reader must already have discovered that Ben was uncommonly blest\nin a father. Indeed from the portrait of him drawn by this grateful\nson, full fifty years afterwards, he must have been an enviable old\nman.\n\nAs to his person, though that is but of minor consideration in a\nrational creature--I say, as to his person, it was of the right\nstandard, _i.e._ medium size and finely formed--his complexion fair\nand ruddy--black, intelligent eyes--and an air uncommonly graceful and\nspirited. In respect of _mind_, which is the true jewel of our nature,\nhe was a man of the purest piety and morals, and consequently cheerful\nand amiable in a high degree. Added to this, he possessed a\nconsiderable taste for the fine arts, particularly drawing and music;\nand having a voice remarkably sonorous and sweet, whenever he sung a\nhymn accompanied with his violin, which he usually did at the close of\nhis day's labours, it was delightful to hear him. He possessed also an\nextraordinary sagacity in things relating both to public and private\nlife, insomuch that not only individuals were constantly consulting\nhim about their affairs, and calling him in as an arbiter in their\ndisputes; but even the leading men of Boston would often come and ask\nhis advice in their most important concerns, as well of the town as of\nthe church.\n\nFor his slender means he was a man of extraordinary hospitality, which\ncaused his friends to wonder how he made out to entertain so many. But\nwhenever this was mentioned to him, he used to laugh and say, that the\nworld was good natured and gave him credit for much more than he\ndeserved; for that, in fact, others entertained ten times as many as\nhe did. By this, 'tis thought he alluded to the ostentatious practice\ncommon with some, of pointing their hungry visitant to their grand\nbuildings, and boasting how many thousands this or that bauble cost;\nas if their ridiculous vanity would pass with them for a good dinner.\nFor his part, he said, he preferred setting before his visitors a\nplenty of wholesome fare, with a hearty welcome. Though to do this he\nwas fain to work hard, and content himself with a small house and\nplain furniture. But it was always his opinion that a little laid out\nin this way, went farther both with God and man too, than great\ntreasures lavished on pride and ostentation.\n\nBut though he delighted in hospitality as a great virtue, yet he\nalways made choice of such friends at his table as were fond of\nrational conversation. And he took great care to introduce such topics\nas would, in a pleasant manner, lead to ideas useful to his family,\nboth in temporal and eternal things. As to the dishes that were served\nup, he never talked of them; never discussed whether they were well or\nill dressed; of a good or bad flavour, high seasoned or otherwise.\n\nFor this manly kind of education at his table, Dr. Franklin always\nspoke as under great obligations to his father's judgment and taste.\nThus accustomed, from infancy, to a generous inattention to the\npalate, he became so perfectly indifferent about what was set before\nhim, that he hardly ever remembered, ten minutes after dinner, what he\nhad dined on. In travelling, particularly, he found his account in\nthis. For while those who had been more nice in their diet could enjoy\nnothing they met with; this one growling over the daintiest breakfast\nof new laid eggs and toast floated in butter, because his _coffee was\nnot half strong enough!_--that wondering what people can mean by\nserving up a round of beef when they have _no mustard!_--and a third\ncursing like a trooper, though the finest rock-fish or sheep's-head be\nsmoking on the table--because there is no _walnut pickle or ketchup!_\nHe for his part, happily engaged in a pleasant train of thinking or\nconversation, never attended to such trifles, but dined heartily on\nwhatever was set before him. In short, there is no greater kindness\nthat a young man can do himself than to learn the art of feasting on\nfish, flesh, or fowl as they come, without ever troubling his head\nabout any other sauce than what the rich hand of nature has given; let\nhim but bring to these dishes that good appetite which always springs\nfrom exercise and cheerfulness, and he will be an epicure indeed.\n\nHe would often repeat in the company of young people, the following\nanecdote which he had picked up some where or other in his extensive\nreading. \"A wealthy citizen of Athens, who had nearly ruined his\nconstitution by gluttony and sloth, was advised by Hippocrates to\nvisit a certain medicinal spring in Sparta; not that Hippocrates\nbelieved that spring to be better than some nearer home; but exercise\nwas the object--\" \"_Visit the springs of Sparta_,\" said the great\nphysician. As the young debauchee, pale and bloated, travelled among\nthe simple and hardy Spartans, he called one day at the house of a\ncountryman on the road to get something to eat. A young woman was just\nserving up dinner--a nice barn-door fowl boiled with a piece of fat\nbacon. \"You have got rather a plain dinner there madam,\" growled the\nAthenian. \"_Yes, sir_,\" replied the young woman blushing, \"_but my\nhusband will be here directly, and he always brings the sauce with\nhim_.\" Presently the young husband stepped in, and after welcoming his\nguest, invited him to dinner. \"I can't dream of dining, sir, _without\nsauce_,\" said the Athenian, \"and your wife promised you would bring\nit.\" \"_O, sir, my wife is a wit_,\" cried the Spartan; \"_she only meant\nthe good appetite which I always bring with me from the barn, where I\nhave been threshing_.\"\n\nAnd here I beg leave to wind up this chapter with the following\nbeautiful lines from Dryden, which I trust my young reader will commit\nto memory. They may save him many a sick stomach and headache, besides\nmany a good dollar in doctor's fees.\n\n    \"The first physicians by debauch were made;\n    Excess began and sloth sustains the trade.\n    By chace, our long liv'd fathers earn'd their bread;\n    Toil strung their nerves and purified their blood:\n    But we, their sons, a pamper'd race of men,\n    Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.\n    Better hunt in fields for health unbought,\n    Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.\n    The wise for health on exercise depend;\n    God never made his works for man to mend.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V.\n\n\nBen continued with his father, assisting him in his humble toils, till\nhis twelfth year; and had he possessed a mind less active might have\nremained a candle-maker all the days of his life. But born to diffuse\na light beyond that of tallow or spermaceti, he could never reconcile\nhimself to this inferior employment, and in spite of his wishes to\nconceal it from his father, discontent would still lower on his brow,\nand the half-suppressed sigh steal in secret from his bosom.\n\nWith equal grief his father beheld the deep-seated disquietude of his\nson. He loved all his children; but he loved this young one above all\nthe rest. Ben was the child of his old age. The smile that dimpled his\ntender cheeks reminded him of his mother when he first saw her, lovely\nin the rosy freshness of youth. And then his intellect was so far\nbeyond his years; his questions so shrewd; so strong in reasoning; so\nwitty in remark, that his father would often forget his violin of\nnights for the higher pleasure of holding an argument with him. This\nwas a great trial to his sisters, who would often intreat their mother\nto make Ben hold his tongue, that their father might take down his\nfiddle, and play and sing hymns with them: for they took after him in\nhis passion for music, and sung divinely. No wonder that such a child\nshould be dear to such a father. Indeed old Josias' affection for Ben\nwas so intimately interwoven with every fibre of his heart, that he\ncould not bear the idea of separation from him; and various were the\nstratagems which he employed to keep this dear child at home. One\nwhile, to frighten his youthful fancy from the sea, for that was the\nold man's dread, he would paint the horrors of the watery world, where\nthe maddening billows, lashed into mountains by the storm, would lift\nthe trembling ship to the skies; then hurl her down, headlong plunging\ninto the yawning gulphs, never to rise again. At another time he would\ndescribe the wearisomeness of beating the gloomy wave for joyless\nmonths, pent up in a small ship, with no prospects but barren sea and\nskies--no smells but tar and bilge water--no society but men of\nuncultivated minds, and their constant conversation nothing but\nribaldry and oaths. And then again he would take him to visit the\nmasons, coopers, joiners, and other mechanics, at work: in hopes that\nhis genius might be caught, and a stop put to his passion for\nwandering. But greatly to his sorrow, none of these things held out\nthe attractions that his son seemed to want. His visits among these\ntradesmen were not, however, without their advantage. He caught from\nthem, as he somewhere says, such an insight into mechanic arts and the\nuse of tools, as enabled him afterwards when there was no artist at\nhand, to make for himself suitable machines for the illustration of\nhis philosophical experiments.\n\nBut it was not long before this obstinate dislike of Ben's to all\nordinary pursuits was found out; it was found out by his mother.\n\"Bless me,\" said she one night to her husband, as he lay sleepless and\nsighing on his son's account, \"why do we make ourselves so unhappy\nabout Ben for fear he should go to _sea!_ let him but go to _school_,\nand I'll engage we hear no more about his running to sea. Don't you\nsee the child is never happy but when he has a book in his hand? Other\nboys when they get a little money never think of any thing better to\nlay it out on than their backs or their bellies; but he, poor fellow,\nthe moment that he gets a shilling, runs and gives it for a book; and\nthen, you know, there is no getting him to his meals until he has read\nit through, and told us all about it.\"\n\nGood old Josias listened very devoutly to his wife, while she uttered\nthis oration on his youngest son. Then with looks as of a heart\nsuddenly relieved from a heavy burden, and his eyes lifted to heaven,\nhe fervently exclaimed--\"O that my son, even my little son Benjamin,\nmay live before God, and that the days of his usefulness and glory may\nbe many!\"\n\nHow far the effectual fervent prayer of this righteous father found\nacceptance in heaven, the reader will find perhaps by the time he has\ngone through our little book.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI.\n\n_Ben taken from school, turns his own teacher--History of the books\nwhich he first read--Is bound to the printing trade._\n\n\nAt a learned table in Paris, where Dr. Franklin happened to dine, it\nwas asked by the abbe Raynal, _What description of men most deserves\npity?_\n\nSome mentioned one character, and some another. When it came to\nFranklin's turn, he replied, _A lonesome man in a rainy day, who does\nnot know how to read._\n\nAs every thing is interesting that relates to one who made such a\nfigure in the world, it may gratify our readers to be told what were\nthe books that first regaled the youthful appetite of the great Dr.\nFranklin. The state of literature in Boston at that time, being like\nhimself, only in its infancy, it is not to be supposed that Ben had\nany very great choice of books. Books, however, there always were in\nBoston.[1] Among these was Bunyan's Voyages, which appears to have\nbeen the first he ever read, and of which he speaks with great\npleasure. But there is reason to fear that Bunyan did no good: for, as\nit was the reading of the life of Alexander the Great that first set\nCharles the Twelfth in such a fever to be running over the world\nkilling every body he met; so, in all probability, it was Bunyan's\nVoyages that fired Ben's fancy with that passion for travelling, which\ngave his father so much uneasiness. Having read over old Bunyan so\noften as to have him almost by heart, Ben added a little boot, and\nmade a _swap_ of him for _Burton's Historical Miscellanies_. This,\nconsisting of forty or fifty volumes, held him a good long tug: for he\nhad no time to read but on Sundays, and early in the morning or late\nat night. After this he fell upon his father's library. This being\nmade up principally of old puritanical divinity, would to most boys\nhave appeared like the pillars of Hercules to travellers of old--a\nbound not to be passed. But so keen was Ben's appetite for any thing\nin the shape of a book, that he fell upon it with his usual voracity,\nand soon devoured every thing in it, especially of the lighter sort.\nSeeing a little bundle of something crammed away very snugly upon an\nupper shelf, his curiosity led him to take it down: and lo! what\nshould it be but \"_Plutarch's Lives_.\" Ben was a stranger to the work;\nbut the title alone was enough for him; he instantly gave it one\nreading; and then a second, and a third, and so on until he had almost\ncommitted it to memory; and to his dying day he never mentioned the\nname of Plutarch without acknowledging how much pleasure and profit he\nhad derived from that divine old writer. And there was another book,\nby Defoe, a small affair, entitled \"_An Essay on Projects_,\" to which\nhe pays the very high compliment of saying, that \"_from it he received\nimpressions which influenced some of the principal events of his\nlife_.\"\n\n          [1] You never find presbyterians without books.\n\nHappy now to find that books had the charm to keep his darling boy at\nhome, and thinking that if he were put into a printing office he would\nbe sure to get books enough, his father determined to make a printer\nof him, though he already had a son in that business. Exactly to his\nwishes, that son, whose name was James, had just returned from London\nwith a new press and types. Accordingly, without loss of time, Ben,\nnow in his twelfth year, was bound apprentice to him. By the\nindentures Ben was to serve his brother till twenty-one, _i.e._ _nine_\nfull years, without receiving one penny of wages save for the last\ntwelve months! How a man pretending to religion could reconcile it to\nhimself to make so hard a bargain with a younger brother, is strange.\nBut perhaps it was permitted of God, that Ben should learn his ideas\nof oppression, not from reading but from suffering. The deliverers of\nmankind have all been made perfect through suffering. And to the\ngalling sense of this villanous oppression, which never ceased to\nrankle on the mind of Franklin, the American people owe much of that\nspirited resistance to British injustice, which eventuated in their\nliberties. But Master James had no great cause to boast of this\nselfish treatment of his younger brother Benjamin; for the old adage\n\"foul play never thrives,\" was hardly ever more remarkably illustrated\nthan in this affair, as the reader will in due season be brought to\nunderstand.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII.\n\n_Ben in clover--Turns a Rhymer--Makes a prodigious noise in Boston\n--Bit by the Poetic Tarantula--Luckily cured by his father._\n\n\nBen is now happy. He is placed by the side of the press, the very mint\nand coining place of his beloved _books_; and animated by that delight\nwhich he takes in his business, he makes a proficiency equally\nsurprising and profitable to his brother. The field of his reading too\nis now greatly enlarged. From the booksellers' boys he makes shift,\nevery now and then, to borrow a book, which he _never fails to return_\nat the promised time: though to accomplish this he was often obliged\nto sit up till midnight, reading by his bed side, that he might be as\ngood as his word.\n\nSuch an extraordinary passion for learning soon commended him to the\nnotice of his neighbours, among whom was an ingenious young man, a\ntradesman, named Matthew Adams, who invited him to his house, showed\nhim all his books, and offered to lend him any that he wished to read.\n\nAbout this time, which was somewhere in his thirteenth year, Ben took\nit into his head that he could write poetry: and actually composed\nseveral little pieces. These, after some hesitation, he showed to his\nbrother, who pronounced them _excellent_; and thinking that money\nmight be made by Ben's poetry, pressed him to cultivate his _wonderful\ntalent_, as he called it; and even gave him a couple of subjects to\nwrite on. The one, which was to be called the LIGHT-HOUSE TRAGEDY, was\nto narrate the late shipwreck of a sea captain and his two daughters:\nand the other was to be a sailor's song on the noted pirate\nBlackbeard, who had been recently killed on the coast of North\nCarolina, by Captain Maynard, of a British sloop of war.\n\nBen accordingly fell to work, and after burning out several candles,\nfor his brother could not afford to let him write poetry by daylight,\nhe produced his two poems. His brother extolled them to the skies, and\nin all haste had them put to the type and struck off; to expedite\nmatters, fast as the sheets could be snatched from the press, all\nhands were set to work, folding and stitching them ready for market;\nwhile nothing was to be heard throughout the office but constant calls\non the boys at press--\"_more sheets ho! more Light-house tragedy! more\nBlackbeard!_\" But who can tell what Ben felt when he saw his brother\nand all his journeymen in such a bustle on his account--and when he\nsaw, wherever he cast his eyes, the splendid trophies of his genius\nscattered on the floor and tables; some in common paper for the\nmultitude; and others in snow-white foolscap, for presents to the\nGREAT PEOPLE, such as \"HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR.\"--\"The HON. THE\nSECRETARY OF STATE.\"--\"The WORSHIPFUL THE MAYOR.\"--\"The ALDERMEN, and\nGENTLEMEN OF THE COUNCIL.\"--\"The reverend the _clergy_, &c.\" Ben could\nnever tire of gazing at them; and as he gazed, his heart would leap\nfor joy--\"_O you precious little verses_,\" he would say to himself,\n\"_Ye first warblings of my youthful harp! I'll soon have you abroad,\ndelighting every company, and filling all mouths with my name!_\"\nAccordingly, his _two poems_ being ready, Ben, who had been both poet\nand printer, with a basket full of each on his arm, set out in high\nspirits to sell them through the town, which he did by singing out as\nhe went, after, the manner of the London cries--\n\n    \"Choice Poetry! Choice Po-e-try!\n    Come BUY my choice Po-e-try!\"\n\nThe people of Boston having never heard any such cry as that before,\nwere prodigiously at a loss to know what he was selling. But still Ben\nwent on singing out as before,\n\n    \"Choice Poetry! Choice Poetry!\n    Come, buy my choice Poetry!\"\n\nI wonder now, said one with a stare, if it is not _poultry_ that that\nlittle boy is singing out so stoutly yonder.\n\nO no, I guess not, said a second.\n\nWell then, cried a third, I vow but it must be _pastry_.\n\nAt length Ben was called up and interrogated.\n\n\"_Pray, my little man, and what's that that you are crying there so\nbravely?_\"\n\nBen told them it was poetry.\n\n\"_O!--aye! poetry!_\" said they; \"_poetry! that's a sort of something\nor other in metre--like the old version, isn't it?_\"\n\n\"_O yes, to be sure_,\" said they all, \"_it must be like the old\nversion, if it is poetry_;\" and thereupon they stared at him,\nmarvelling hugely that a \"_little curly headed boy like him should be\nselling such a wonderful thing_!\" This made Ben hug himself still more\non account of his poetry.\n\nI have never been able to get a sight of the ballad of the Light-house\nTragedy, which must no doubt have been a great curiosity: but the\nsailor's song on Blackbeard runs thus--\n\n    \"Come all you jolly Sailors,\n      You all so stout and brave;\n    Come hearken and I'll tell you\n      What happen'd on the wave.\n    Oh! 'tis of that bloody Blackbeard\n      I'm going now for to tell;\n    And as how by gallant Maynard\n      He soon was sent to hell--\n                        With a down, down, down derry down.\"\n\nThe reader will, I suppose, agree with Ben in his criticism, many\nyears afterwards, on this poetry, that it was \"wretched stuff; mere\nblind men's ditties.\" But fortunately for Ben, the poor people of\nBoston were at that time no judges of poetry. The silver-tongued Watts\nhad not, as yet, snatched the harp of Zion, and poured his divine\nsongs over New-England. And having never been accustomed to any thing\nbetter than an old version of David's Psalms, running in this way--\n\n    \"Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,\n      Your Maker's praises spout!\n    Up from your sands ye codlings peep,\n      And wag your tails about.\"--\n\nThe people of Boston pronounced Ben's poetry _mighty fine_, and bought\nthem up at a prodigious rate; especially the LIGHT-HOUSE TRAGEDY.\n\nA flood of success so sudden and unexpected, would in all probability\nhave turned Ben's brain and run him stark mad with vanity, had not his\nwise old father timely stepped in and checked the rising fever. But\nhighly as Ben honoured his father, and respected his judgment, he\ncould hardly brook to hear him attack his beloved poetry, as he did,\ncalling it \"_mere Grub-street_.\" And he even held a stiff argument in\ndefence of it. But on reading a volume of Pope, which his father, who\nwell knew the force of contrast, put into his hand for that purpose,\nhe never again opened his mouth in behalf of his \"_blind men's\nditties_.\" He used to laugh and say, that after reading Pope, he was\nso mortified with his _Light-house Tragedy, and Sailor's Song_, which\nhe had once thought so fine, that he could not bear the sight of them,\nbut constantly threw into the fire every copy that fell in his way.\nThus was he timely saved, as he ingenuously confesses, from the very\ngreat misfortune of being, perhaps, a miserable jingler for life.\n\nBut I cannot let fall the curtain on this curious chapter, without\nonce more feasting my eyes on Ben, as, with a little basket on his\narm, he trudged along the streets of Boston crying his poetry.\n\nWho that saw the youthful David coming up fresh from his father's\nsheep cots, with his locks wet with the dews of the morning, and his\ncheeks ruddy as the opening rose-buds, would have dreamed that this\nwas he who should one day, single handed, meet the giant Goliah, in\nthe war-darkened valley of Elah, and wipe off reproach from Israel. In\nlike manner, who that saw this \"_curly headed child_,\" at the tender\nage of thirteen, selling his \"_blind men's ditties_,\" among the\nwonder-struck Jonathans and Jemimas of Boston, would have thought that\nthis was he, who, single handed, was to meet the British ministry at\nthe bar of their own house of Commons, and by the solar blaze of his\nwisdom, utterly disperse all their dark designs against their\ncountrymen, thus gaining for himself a name lasting as time, and dear\nto liberty as the name of Washington.\n\nO you time-wasting, brain-starving young men, who can never be at ease\nunless you have a cigar or a plug of tobacco in your mouths, go on\nwith your puffing and champing--go on with your filthy smoking, and\nyour still more filthy spitting, keeping the cleanly house-wives in\nconstant terror for their nicely waxed floors, and their shining\ncarpets--go on I say; but remember it was not in this way that our\nlittle Ben became the GREAT DR. FRANKLIN.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII.\n\n\n'Tis the character of a great mind never to despair. Though glory may\nnot be gained in one way, it may in another. As a river, if it meet a\nmountain in its course, does not halt and poison all the country by\nstagnation, but rolls its gathering forces around the obstacle, urging\nits precious tides and treasures through distant lands. So it was with\nthe restless genius of young Franklin. Finding that nature had never\ncut him out for a poet, he determined to take revenge on her by making\nhimself a good prose writer. As it is in this way that his pen has\nconferred great obligations on the world, it must be gratifying to\nlearn by what means, humbly circumstanced as he was, he acquired that\nperspicuity and ease so remarkable in his writings. This information\nmust be peculiarly acceptable to such youth as are apt to despair of\nbecoming good writers, because they have never been taught the\nlanguages. Ben's example will soon convince them that Latin and Greek\nare not necessary to make English scholars. Let them but commence with\n_his_ passion for knowledge; with _his_ firm persuasion, that wisdom\nis the glory and happiness of man, and the work is more than half\ndone.\n\nHonest Ben never courted a young man because he was rich, or the son\nof the rich--No. His favourites were of the youth fond of reading and\nof rational conversation, no matter how poor they were. \"_Birds of a\nfeather do not more naturally flock together_,\" than do young men of\nthis high character. This was what first attracted to him that\ningenious young carpenter, Matthew Adams: as also John Collins, the\ntanner's boy. These three spirited youth, after finding each other\nout, became as fond as brothers. And often as possible, when the\nlabours of the day were ended, they would meet at a little\nschool-house in the neighbourhood, and argue on some given subject\ntill midnight. The advantages of this as a grand mean of exercising\nmemory, strengthening the reasoning faculty, disciplining the\nthoughts, and improving a correct and graceful elocution, became daily\nmore obvious and important in their view, and consequently increased\ntheir mutual attachment. But from his own observation of what passed\nin this curious little society, Ben cautions young men against that\n_war of words_, which the vain are too apt to fall into, and which\ntends not only to make them insupportably disagreeable through a\ndisputatious spirit, but is apt also to betray into a fondness for\n_quizzing_, _i.e._ for asserting and supporting opinions which they do\nnot themselves believe. He gives the following as a case in point.\n\nOne night, Adams being absent, and only himself and Collins together\nin the old school-house, Ben observed that he thought it a great pity\nthat the young ladies were not more attended to, as to the improvement\nof their minds by education. He said, that with their advantages of\nsweet voices and beautiful faces, they could give tenfold charms to\nwit and sensible conversation, making heavenly truths to appear, as he\nhad somewhere read in his father's old Bible, \"like apples of gold set\nin pictures of silver.\"\n\nCollins blowed upon the idea. He said, it was all _stuff_, and no pity\nat all, that the girls were so neglected in their education, as they\nwere naturally incapable of it. And here he repeated, laughing, that\ninfamous slur on the ladies,\n\n    \"Substance too soft a lasting mind to bear,\n    And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.\"\n\nAt this, Ben, who was already getting to be a great admirer of the\nladies, reddened up against Collins; and to it they fell, at once, in\na stiff argument on the education of women--as whether they were\ncapable of studying the sciences or not. Collins, as we have seen, led\noff against the ladies. Being much of an infidel, he took the Turkish\nground altogether, and argued like one just soured and sullen from the\nseraglio. _Women study the sciences indeed!_ said he, with a sneer; _a\npretty story truly! no sir, they have nothing to do with the sciences.\nThey were not born for any such thing._\n\nBen wanted to know what they _were_ born for?\n\nBorn for! retorted Collins, why to _dress_ and _dance_; to _sing_ and\n_play_; and, like pretty triflers, to divert the lords of the\ncreation, after their toils and studies. This is all they were born\nfor, or ever intended of nature, who has given them capacities for\nnothing higher. Sometimes, indeed, they look grave, and fall into such\nbrown studies as would lead one to suppose they meant to go deep; but\nit is all _fudge_. They are only trying in this new character to play\nthemselves off to a better effect on their lovers. And if you could\nbut penetrate the bosoms of these fair Penserosoes; you would find\nthat under all this affectation of study they were only fatiguing\ntheir childish brains about what dress they should wear to the next\nball: or what  ribands would best suit their new lutestrings.\n\nTo this Ben replied with warmth, that it was extremely unphilosophical\nin Mr. Collins to argue in that way against the MIND--that in fixing\ntheir destination he had by no means given them that high ground to\nwhich they were entitled. You say, sir, continued Ben, that the ladies\nwere created to amuse the men by the charm of their vivacity and\naccomplishments. This to be sure was saying something. But you might,\nI think, have said a great deal more; at least the Bible says a great\ndeal more for them. The Bible, sir, tells us that God created woman to\nbe the helpmate of man. Now if man were devoid of reason he might be\nwell enough matched by such a monkey-like helpmate as you have\ndescribed woman. But, sir, since man is a noble God-like creature,\nendued with the sublime capacities of _reason_, how could woman ever\nmake a helpmate to him, unless she were rational like himself, and\nthus capable of being the companion of his thoughts and conversation\nthrough all the pleasant fields of knowledge?\n\nHere Collins interrupted him, asking very sarcastically, if in this\nfine flourish in favour of the ladies he was really _in earnest_.\n\nNever more so in all my life, replied Ben, rather nettled.\n\nWhat, that the women are as capable of studying the sciences as the\nmen?\n\nYes, that the women are as capable of studying the sciences as the\nmen.\n\nAnd pray, sir, continued Collins, tauntingly, do you know of any\n_young woman_ of your acquaintance that would make a Newton?\n\nAnd pray, sir, answered Ben, do you know any young man of your\nacquaintance that would? But these are no arguments, sir,--because it\nis not every young man or woman that can carry the science of\nastronomy so high as Newton, it does not follow that they are\nincapable of the science altogether. God sees fit in every age to\nappoint certain persons to kindle new lights among men.--And Newton\nwas appointed greatly to enlarge our views of celestial objects. But\nwe are not thence to infer that he was in all respects superior to\nother men, for we are told that in some instances he was far inferior\nto other men. Collins denied that Newton had ever shown himself, in\nany point of wit inferior to other men.\n\nNo, indeed, replied Ben; well what do you think of that anecdote of\nhim, lately published in the New England Courant from a London paper?\n\nAnd pray what is the anecdote? asked Collins.\n\nWhy it is to this effect, said Ben.--Newton, mounted on the wings of\nastronomy, and gazing at the mighty orbs of fire above, had entirely\nforgotten the poor little fire that slumbered on his own hearth below,\nwhich presently forgot him, that is in plain English, went out. The\nfrost piercing his nerves, called his thoughts home, when lo! in place\nof the spacious skies, the gorgeous antichamber of the Almighty, he\nfound himself in his own little nut-shell apartment, cold and dark,\ncomparatively, as the dwelling of the winter screech-owl. He rung the\nbell for his servant, who after making a rousing fire, went out again.\nBut scarcely had the servant recovered his warm corner in the kitchen,\nbefore the vile bell, with a most furious ring, summoned him the\nsecond time. The servant flew into his master's presence. _Monster!_\ncried Newton with a face inflamed as if it had been toasting at the\ntail of one of his comets, _did you mean to burn me alive? push back\nthe fire! for God's sake push back the fire, or I shall be a cinder in\nan instant!_\n\nPush back the fire! replied the servant with a growl, zounds, sir, I\nthought you might have had sense enough to push back your chair!\n\nCollins swore that it was only a libel against Sir Isaac.\n\nBen contended that he had seen it in so many different publications,\nthat he had no sort of doubt of its truth; especially as Sir Hans\nSloan had backed it with another anecdote of Newton, in the same\nstyle; and to which he avers he was both eye and ear witness.\n\nAnd pray what has that butterfly philosopher to say against the\nimmortal Newton? asked Collins, quite angrily.\n\nWhy, replied Ben, it is this: Sloan, stepping in one day, to see Sir\nIsaac, was told by his servant that he was up in his study, but would\nbe down immediately; _for there, sir, you see is his dinner, which I\nhave just set on the table_.--It was a pheasant so neatly browned in\nthe roasting, and withal so plump and inviting to the eye, that Sloan\ncould not resist the temptation; but venturing on his great intimacy\nwith the knight, sat down and picked the delicious bird to the bone;\nhaving desired the cook in all haste to clap another to the spit.\nPresently down came Sir Isaac--was very glad to see his friend\nSloan--how had he been all this time? and how did he leave his good\nlady and family? you have not dined?\n\nNo.\n\nVery glad of it indeed; very glad. Well then, come dine with\nme.--Turning to the table, he sees the dish empty, and his plate\nstrewed with the bones of his favourite pheasant.--_Lord bless me!_ he\nexclaimed, clasping his forehead, and looking betwixt laughing and\nblushing, at Sloan--_what am I good for? I have dined, as you see, my\ndear friend, and yet I had entirely forgot it!_\n\nI don't believe a syllable of it, said Collins; not one syllable of\nit, sir.\n\nNo, replied Ben; nor one syllable, I suppose, of his famous courtship,\nwhen sitting by an elegant young lady, whom his friends wished him to\nmake love to, he seized her lily white hand. But instead of pressing\nit with rapture to his bosom, he thrust it into the bowl of his pipe\nthat he was smoking; thus making a tobacco stopper of one of the\nloveliest fingers in England; to the inexpressible mortification of\nthe company, and to the most dismal scolding and screaming of the dear\ncreature!\n\n'Tis all a lie, sir, said Collins, getting quite mad, all a confounded\nlie. The immortal Newton, sir, was never capable of acting so much\nlike a blockhead. But supposing all this slang to be true, what would\nyou infer from it, against that prince of philosophy?--Why I would\ninfer from it, replied Ben, that though a great man, he was but a man.\nAnd I would also infer from it in favour of my fair clients, that\nthough they did not make Sir Isaac's discoveries in astronomy, they\nare yet very capable of comprehending them. And besides, I am\nastonished, Mr. Collins, how any gentleman that loves himself, as I\nknow you do, can thus traduce the ladies. Don't you consider, sir,\nthat in proportion as you lessen the dignity of the ladies, you lessen\nthe dignity of your affections for them, and consequently, your own\nhappiness in them, which must for ever keep pace with your ideas of\ntheir excellence.--This was certainly a home thrust; and most readers\nwould suppose, that Ben was in a fair way to crow over his antagonist;\nbut, Collins was a young man of too much pride and talents to give up\nso easily. A spirited retort, of course, was made; a rejoinder\nfollowed, and thus the controversy was kept up until the watchman\nbawling twelve o'clock, reminded our stripling orators that it was\ntime for them to quit the old school-house; which with great\nreluctance they did, but without being any nearer the end of their\nargument than when they began.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX.\n\n\nThe shades of midnight had parted our young combatants, and silent and\nalone, Ben had trotted home to his printing-office; but still in his\nrestless thoughts the combat raged in all its fury: still burning for\nvictory, where truth and the ladies were at stake, he fell to\nmustering his arguments again, which now at the drum-beat of\nrecollection came crowding on him so thick and strong that he felt\nequally ashamed and astonished that he had not utterly crushed his\nantagonist at once. He could see no reason on earth why Collins had\nmade a drawn battle of it, but by his vastly superior eloquence. To\ndeprive him of this advantage, Ben determined to attack him with his\npen. And to this he felt the greater inclination, as they were not to\nmeet again for several nights. So, committing his thoughts to paper,\nand taking a fair copy, he sent it to him. Collins, who, \"was not born\nin the woods to be scared by an owl,\" quickly answered, and Ben\nrejoined. In this way several vollies had passed on both sides, when\ngood old Josias chanced to light upon them all; both the copies of\nBen's letters to Collins, and the answers. He read them with a deep\ninterest, and that very night sent for Ben that he might talk with him\non their contents. \"_So Ben!_\" said he to him as he pressed his\nbeloved hand, \"_you have got into a paper war already, have you?_\"\n\nBen blushed.\n\nI don't mean to blame you, my son, continued the old gentleman. I\ndon't blame you; on the contrary I am delighted to see you taking such\npains to improve your mind. Go on, my dear boy, go on; for your mind\nis the only part that is worth your care: and the more you accustom\nyourself to find your happiness in _that_, the better. The body, as I\nhave a thousand times told you, is but nicely organized earth, that in\nspite of the daintiest meats and clothes, will soon grow old and\nwithered, and then die and rot back to earth again. But the MIND, Ben,\nis the HEAVENLY part, the IMMORTAL inhabitant, who, if early nursed\nwith proper thoughts and affections, is capable of a feast that will\nendure for ever.\n\nThis your little controversy with your friend Collins is praiseworthy,\nbecause it has a bearing on that grand point, the improvement of your\nmind.\n\nBut let me suggest a hint or two, my son, for your better conduct of\nit. You have greatly the advantage of Mr. Collins in correctness of\nspelling and pointing; which you owe entirely to your profession as a\nprinter; but then he is as far superior to you in other respects. He\ncertainly has not so good a cause as you have, but, he manages it\nbetter. He clothes his ideas with such elegance of expression, and\narranges his arguments with so much perspicuity and art, as will\ncaptivate all readers in his favour, and snatch the victory from you,\nnotwithstanding your better cause. In confirmation of these remarks,\nthe old gentleman drew from his pocket the letters of their\ncorrespondence, and read to him several passages, as strong cases in\npoint.\n\nBen sensibly felt the justice of these criticisms, and after thanking\nhis father for his goodness in making them, assured him, that as he\ndelighted above all things in reading books of a beautiful style, so\nhe was resolved to spare no pains to acquire so divine an art.\n\nThe next day, going into a fresh part of the town, with a paper to a\nnew subscriber, he saw, on the side of the street, a little table\nspread out and covered with a parcel of toys, among which lay an odd\nvolume, with a neat old woman sitting by. As he approached the table\nto look at the book, the old lady lifting on him a most pleasant\ncountenance, said, \"_well my little man do you ever dream dreams?_\"\n\nBen rather startled at so strange a salutation, replied, that he had\n_dream't_ in his time.--_Well_, continued the old woman, _and what do\nyou think of dreams; do you put any faith in 'em?_\n\nWhy, no, madam, answered Ben; as I have seldom had dreams except after\ntaking too hearty a supper, I have always looked on 'em as a mere\nmatter of indigestion, and so have never troubled my head much about\n'em.\n\n_Well now_, replied the old lady, laughing, _there's just the\ndifference between you and me. I, for my part, always takes great\nnotice of dreams, they generally turn out so true._ And now can you\ntell what a droll dream I had last night?\n\nBen answered that he was no Daniel to interpret dreams.\n\nWell, said the old lady, I dreamed last night, that a little man just\nlike you, came along here and bought that old book of me.\n\nAye! why that's a droll dream sure enough, replied Ben; and pray,\nMadam, what do you ask for your old book?\n\n_Only four pence halfpenny_, said the old lady.\n\nWell, Madam, continued Ben, as your dreaming has generally, as you\nsay, turned out true, it shall not be otherwise now; _there's your\nmoney_--so now as you have another reason for putting faith in dreams,\nyou can dream again.\n\nAs Ben took up his book to go away, the old lady said, stop a minute,\nmy son, stop a minute. I have not told you the whole of my dream yet.\nThen looking very gravely at him, she said, But though my dream showed\nthat the book was to be bought by a _little_ man, it did not say he\nwas always to be little. No; for I saw, in my dream, that he grew up\nto be a GREAT man; the lightnings of heaven played around his head,\nand the shape of a kingly crown was beneath his feet. I heard his name\nas a pleasant sound from distant lands, and I saw it through clouds of\nsmoke and flame, among the tall victor ships that strove in the last\nbattle for the freedom of the seas. She uttered this with a raised\nvoice and glowing cheek, as though the years to come, with all their\nmighty deeds, were passing before her.\n\nBen was too young yet to suspect who this old woman was, though he\nfelt as he had read the youthful Telemachus did, when the fire-eyed\nMinerva, in the shape of Mentor, roused his soul to virtue.\n\nFarewell, Madam, said Ben with a deep sigh, as he went away; you might\nhave spared that part of your dream, for I am sure there is very\nlittle chance of its ever coming to pass.\n\nBut though Ben went away to attend to his brother's business, yet the\nold woman's looks made such an impression on his mind, that he could\nnot help going the next day to see her again; but she was not there\nany more.\n\nOn leaving the old woman, he opened his book, when, behold, what\nshould it be but an odd volume of the Spectator, a book which he had\nnot seen before. The number which he chanced to open was the vision of\nMirzah; which so caught his attention that he could not take it off\nuntil he had got through. What the people thought of him for reading\nin that manner as he walked along the street, he knew not; nor did he\nonce think, he was so taken up with his book. He felt as though he\nwould give the world to write in so enchanting a style; and to that\nend he carried his old volume constantly in his pocket, that by\ncommitting, as it were, to memory, those sweetly flowing lines, he\nmight stand a chance to fall into the imitation of them. He took\nanother curious method to catch Addison's charming style; he would\nselect some favourite chapter out of the Spectator, make short\nsummaries of the sense of each period, and put them for a few days\naside; then without looking at the book, he would endeavour to restore\nthe chapter to its first form, by expressing each thought at full\nlength.\n\nThese exercises soon convinced him that he greatly lacked a fund of\nwords, and a facility of employing them; both of which he thought\nwould have been abundantly supplied, had he but continued his old\ntrade of _making verses_. The continual need of words of the same\n_meaning_, but of different _lengths_, for the _measure_; or of\ndifferent sounds, for the _rhyme_, would have obliged him to seek a\nvariety of _synonymes_. From this belief he took some of the papers\nand turned them into verse; and after he had sufficiently forgotten\nthem, he again converted them into prose.\n\nOn comparing _his_ Spectator with the original, he discovered many\nfaults; but panting, as he did, for perfection in this noble art,\nnothing could discourage him. He bravely persevered in his\nexperiments, and though he lamented that in most instances he still\nfell short of the charming original, yet in some he thought he had\nclearly improved the order and style. And when this happened, it gave\nhim unspeakable satisfaction, as it sprung the dear hope that in time\nhe should succeed in writing the English language in the same\nenchanting manner.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X.\n\n\nAbout this time, which was somewhere in his sixteenth year, Ben\nlighted on a very curious work, by one _Tryon_, recommending vegetable\ndiet altogether, and condemning \"_animal food as a great crime_.\" He\nread it with all the avidity of a young and honest mind that wished to\nrenounce error and embrace truth. \"_From start to pole_,\" as the\nracers say, his conscience was under the lash, pointing at him as the\ndreadful SARCOPHAGIST, or MEAT-EATER alluded to by this severe writer.\nHe could not, without horror reflect, that, young as he was, his\nstomach had yet been the grave of hundreds of lambs, pigs, birds, and\nother little animals, \"_who had never injured him_.\" And when he\nextended the dismal idea over the vast surface of the globe, and saw\nthe whole human race pursuing and butchering the poor brute creation,\nfilling the sea and land with cries and blood and slaughter, he felt a\ndepression of spirits with an anguish of mind that strongly tempted\nhim, not only to detest man, but even to charge God himself with\ncruelty. But this distress did not continue long. Impatient of such\nwretchedness, he set all the powers of his mind to work, to discover\ndesigns in all this, worthy of the Creator. To his unspeakable\nsatisfaction he soon made these important discoveries. 'Tis true, said\nhe, man is constantly butchering the inferior creatures. And it is\nalso true that they are constantly devouring one another. But after\nall, shocking as this may seem, it is but _dying_: it is but giving up\nlife, or returning a something which was not their own; which for the\nhonour of his goodness in their enjoyment, was only lent them for a\nseason; and which, therefore, they ought not to think hard to return.\n\nNow certainly, continued Ben, all this is very clear and easy to be\nunderstood. Well then, since all life, whether of man or beast, or\nvegetables, is a kind loan of God, and to be taken back again, the\nquestion is whether the way in which we see it is taken back is not\nthe _best way_. It is true, life being the season of enjoyment, is so\ndear to us that there is no way of giving it up which is not shocking.\nAnd this horror which we feel at the thought of having our own lives\ntaken from us we extend to the brutes. We cannot help feeling shocked\nat the butcher killing a lamb, or one animal killing another. Nay,\ntell even a child who is looking with smiles on a good old family\nhorse that has just brought a bag of flour from the mill, or a load of\nwood from the forest, that this his beloved horse will by and by be\neaten up of the buzzards, and instantly his looks will manifest\nextreme distress. And if his mother, to whom he turns for\ncontradiction of this horrid prophecy, should confirm it, he is struck\ndumb with horror, or bursts into strong cries as if his little heart\nwould break at thought of the dismal end to which his horse is coming.\nThese, though very amiable, are yet the amiable weaknesses of the\nchild, which, it is the duty of man to overcome. This animal was\ncreated of his God for the double purpose of doing service to man, and\nof enjoying comfort himself. And when these are accomplished, and that\nlife which was only lent him is recalled, is it not better that\nnature's scavengers, the buzzards, should take up his flesh and keep\nthe elements sweet, than that it should lie on the fields to shock the\nsight and smell of all who pass by? The fact is, continued Ben, I see\nthat all creatures that live, whether men or beasts, or vegetables,\nare doomed to die. Now were it not a greater happiness that this\nuniversal calamity, as it appears, should be converted into an\nuniversal blessing, and this _dying_ of all be made the _living_ of\nall? Well, through the admirable wisdom and goodness of the Creator,\nthis is exactly the case. The vegetables all die to sustain animals;\nand animals, whether birds, beasts, or fishes, all die to sustain man,\nor one another. Now, is it not far better for them that they should be\nthus continually changing into each other's substance, and existing in\nthe wholesome shapes of life and vigour, than to be scattered about\ndying and dead, shocking all eyes with their ghastly forms, and\npoisoning both sea and air with the stench of their corruption?\n\nThis scrutiny into the economy of nature in this matter, gave him such\nan exalted sense of nature's Great Author, that in a letter to his\nfather, to whom he made a point of writing every week for the benefit\nof his corrections, he says, though I was at first greatly angered\nwith Tryon, yet afterwards I felt myself much obliged to him for\ngiving me such a hard nut to crack, for I have picked out of it one of\nthe sweetest kernels I ever tasted. In truth, father, continues he,\nalthough I do not make much noise or show about religion, yet I\nentertain a most adoring sense of the GREAT FIRST CAUSE; insomuch that\nI had rather cease to exist than cease to believe him ALL WISE AND\nBENEVOLENT.\n\nIn the midst, however, of these pleasing speculations, another\ndisquieting idea was suggested.--Is it not cruel, after giving life to\ntake it away again so soon? The tender grass has hardly risen above\nthe earth, in all its spring-tide green and sweetness, before its\nbeauty is all cropped by the lamb; and the playful lamb, full dressed\nin his snow-white fleece, has scarcely tasted the sweets of existence,\nbefore he is caught up by the cruel wolf or more cruel man. And so\nwith every bird and fish: this has scarcely learned to sing his song\nto the listening grove, or that to leap with transport from the limpid\nwave, before he is called to resign his life to man or some larger\nanimal.\n\nThis was a horrid thought, which, like a cloud, spread a deep gloom\nover Ben's mind. But his reflections, like the sunbeams, quickly\npierced and dispersed them.\n\nThese cavillers, said he, in another letter, are entirely wrong. They\nwish, it seems, _long life_ to the creatures; the Creator wishes them\na _pleasant_ one. They would have but a few to exist in a _long_ time;\n_he_ a great many in a _short_ time. Now as youth is the season of\ngaiety and enjoyment, and all after is comparatively insipid, is it\nnot better, before that pleasant state is ended in sorrow, the\ncreature should pass away by a quick and generally easy fate, and\nappear again in some other shape? Surely if the grass could reason, it\nwould prefer, while fresh and beautiful, to be cropped by the lamb and\nconverted into his substance, than, by staying a little longer, to\ndisfigure the fields with its faded foliage. And the lamb too, if he\ncould but think and choose, would ask for _a short life and a merry\none_, rather than, by staying a little longer, degenerate into a\nragged old sheep, snorting with the rattles, and dying of the rot, or\nmurrain.\n\nBut though Ben, at the tender age of sixteen, and with no other aid\nthan his own strong mind, could so easily quell this host of\natheistical doubts, which Tryon had conjured up; yet he hesitated not\nto become his disciple in another tenet. Tryon asserted of animal\nfood, that though it gave great strength to the body, yet it\ncontributed sadly to grossness of blood and heaviness of mind; and\nhence he reasoned, that all who wish for cool heads and clear thoughts\nshould make their diet principally of vegetables. Ben was struck with\nthis as the perfection of reason, and entered so heartily into it as a\nrare help for acquiring knowledge, that he instantly resolved, fond as\nhe was of flesh and fish, to give both up from that day, and never\ntaste them again as long as he lived. This steady refusal of his to\neat meat, was looked on as a very inconvenient singularity by his\nbrother, who scolded him for it, and insisted he should give it up.\nBen made no words with his brother on this account.--Knowing that\navarice was his ruling passion, he threw out a bait to James which\ninstantly caught, and without any disturbance produced the\naccommodation he wished. \"Brother,\" said he to him one day as he\nscolded; \"you give three shillings and six pence a week for my diet at\nthis boarding-house; give me but _half_ that money and I'll diet\nmyself without any farther trouble or expense to you.\" James\nimmediately took him at his word and gave him in hand his week's\nration, one shilling and nine pence, which after the Boston exchange,\nsix shillings to the dollar, makes exactly thirty-seven and a half\ncents. Those who often give one dollar for a single dinner, and five\ndollars for a fourth of July dinner, would look very blue at an\nallowance of thirty-seven and a half cents for a whole week. But Ben\nso husbanded this little sum, that after defraying all the expenses of\nhis table, he found himself at the end of the week, near twenty cents\nin pocket--thus expending not quite three cents a day! This was a\njoyful discovery to Ben--twenty cents a week, said he, and fifty-two\nweeks in the year; why, that is upwards of ten dollars in the twelve\nmonths! what a noble fund for books! Nor was this the only benefit he\nderived from it; for, while his brother and the journeymen were gone\nto the boarding-house to devour their pork and beef, which, with\nlounging and picking their teeth, generally took them an hour, he\nstayed at the printing-office; and after dispatching his frugal meal,\nof boiled potatoe, or rice; or a slice of bread with an apple; or\nbunch of raisins and a glass of water, he had the rest of the time for\nstudy. The pure fluids and bright spirits secreted from such simple\ndiet, proved exceedingly favourable to that clearness and vigour of\nmind, and rapid growth in knowledge which his youthful soul delighted\nin.\n\nI cannot conclude this chapter without making a remark which the\nreader has perhaps anticipated--that it was by this simple regimen,\nvegetables and water, that the Jewish seer, the holy Daniel, while a\nyouth, was of PROVIDENCE made fit for all the learning of the East;\nhence arose his bright visions into futurity, and his clear pointings\nto the far distant days of the Messiah, when the four great brass and\niron monarchies of Media, Persia, Grecia, and Rome, being overthrown,\nChrist should set up his last golden monarchy of LOVE, which, though\nfaint in the beginning as the first beam of the uncertain dawn, shall\nyet at length brighten all the skies, and chase the accursed clouds of\nsin and suffering from the abodes of man and beast.\n\nIn like manner, it was on the simple regimen of vegetables and water,\nthe easy purchase of three cents a day, that the same PROVIDENCE\nraised up our young countryman to guard the last spark of perfect\nliberty in the British colonies of North America. Yes, it was on three\ncents' worth of daily bread and water, that young Ben Franklin\ncommenced his collection of that blaze of light, which early as 1754,\nshowed the infant and unsuspecting colonies their RIGHTS and their\nDANGERS--and which afterwards, in 1764, blasted the treasonable stamp\nact--and finally, in '73 and '74, served as the famed star of the\nEast, to guide Washington and his wise men of the revolution, to the\ncradle of liberty, struggling in the gripe of the British Herod, lord\nNorth. There rose the battle of God for an injured people; there\nspread the star-spangled banner of freedom; and there poured the blood\nof the brave, fighting for the rights of man under the last republic.\nO that God may long preserve this precious vine of his own right hand\nplanting, for his own glory and the happiness of unborn millions!\n\nBut the reader must not conclude that Ben, through life, tied himself\nup to a vegetable diet. No. Nature will have her way. And having\ndesigned man partly carnivorous, as his canine teeth, his lengthened\nbowels, and his flesh-pot appetites all evince, she will bring him\nback to the healthy mixture of animal food with vegetable, or punish\nhis obstinacy with diarrhoea and debility. But she had no great\ndifficulty in bringing Ben back to the use of animal food. According\nto his own account, no nosegay was ever more fragrant to his\nolfactories than was the smell of fresh fish in the frying pan. And as\nto his objection to such a savory diet on account of its stupifying\neffects on the brain, he easily got the better of that, when he\nreflected that the witty queen Elizabeth breakfasted on beef-stake;\nthat sir Isaac Newton dined on pheasants; that Horace supped on fat\nbacon; and that Pope both breakfasted, dined, and supped on shrimps\nand oysters. And for the objection taken from the cruelty of killing\ninnocent animals, for their flesh, he got over that by the following\ncurious accident:--On his first voyage to New-York, the vessel halting\non the coast for lack of breeze, the sailors all fell to fishing for\ncod, of which they presently took great numbers and very fine. Instead\nof being delighted at this sight, Ben appeared much hurt, and began to\npreach to the crew on their \"injustice,\" as he called it, in thus\ntaking away the lives of those poor little fish, who, \"_had never\ninjured them, nor ever could_.\" The sailors were utterly dum-founded\nat such queer logic as this. Taking their silence for conviction, Ben\nrose in his argument, and began to play the orator quite outrageously\non the main deck. At length an old wag of a boatswain, who had at\nfirst been struck somewhat aback by the strangeness of this attack,\ntook courage, and luffing up again, with a fine breeze of humour in\nhis weather-beaten sail, called out to Ben, \"_Well, but my young\nMaster preacher, may not we deal by these same cod here, as they deal\nby their neighbours._\"\n\n\"To be sure,\" said Ben.\n\n\"Well then, sir, see here,\" replied the boatswain, holding up a stout\nfish, \"see here what a whaler I took just now out o' the belly of that\ncod!\" Ben looking as if he had his doubts, the boatswain went on, \"O\nsir, if you come to that, you shall have _proof_;\" whereupon he laid\nhold of a large big-bellied cod that was just then flouncing on the\ndeck, and ripping him open, in the presence of Ben and the crew,\nturned out several young cod from his maw.\n\nHere, Ben, well pleased with this discovery, cried out, Oho! villains!\nis that the game you play with one another under the water! Unnatural\nwretches! What! eat one another! Well then, if a cod can eat his own\nbrother, I see no reason in nature why man may not eat him. With that\nhe seized a stout young fish just fresh from his native brine, and\nfrying him in all haste, made a very hearty meal. Ben never after\nthis, made any more scruples about animal food, but ate fish, flesh,\nor fowl, as they came in his way, without asking any questions for\nconscience sake.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI.\n\n\nExcept the ADMIRABLE CRICHTON, I have never heard of a genius that was\nfitted to shine in every art and science. Even Newton was dull in\nlanguages; and Pope used to say of himself, that \"he had as leave hear\nthe squeal of pigs in a gate, as hear the organ of Handel!\" Neither\nwas our Ben the \"_omnis homo_\" or \"_Jack of all trades_.\" He never\ncould bear the mathematics! and even arithmetic presented to him no\nattractions at all. Not that he was not capable of it; for, happening\nabout this time, still in his sixteenth year, to be laughed at for his\nignorance in the art of calculation, he went and got himself a copy of\nold Cocker's Arithmetic, one of the toughest in those days, and went\nthrough it by himself with great ease. The truth is, his mind was at\nthis time entirely absorbed in the ambition to be a finished writer of\nthe English language; such a one, if possible, as the SPECTATOR, whom\nhe admired above all others.\n\nWhile labouring, as we have seen, to improve his style, he laid his\nhands on all the English Grammars he could hear of. Among the number\nwas a treatise of that sort, an old shabby looking thing, which the\nowner, marking his curiosity in those matters, made him a present of.\nBen hardly returned him a thankee, as doubting at first whether it was\nworth carrying home. But how great was his surprise, when coming\ntowards the close of it, he found, crammed into a small chapter, a\ntreatise on the art of disputation, after the manner of SOCRATES. The\ntreatise was very short, but it was enough for Ben; it gave an\noutline, and that was all he wanted. As the little whortle-berry boy,\non the sands of Cape May, grabbling for his breakfast in a turtle's\nnest, if he but reaches with his little hand but one egg, instantly\nlaughs with joy, as well knowing that all the rest will follow, like\nbeads on a string. So it was with the eager mind of Ben, when he first\nstruck on this plan of Socratic disputation. In an instant his\nthoughts ran through all the threads and meshes of the wondrous net;\nand he could not help laughing in his sleeve, to think what a fine\npuzzling cap he should soon weave for the frightened heads of Collins,\nAdams, and all others who should pretend to dispute with him. But the\nuse which he principally had in view to make of it, and which tickled\nhis fancy most, was how completely he should now confound those\nignorant and hypocritical ones in Boston, who were continually boring\nhim about religion. Not that Ben ever took pleasure in confounding\nthose who were honestly desirous of _showing their religion by their\ngood works_; for such were always his ESTEEM and DELIGHT. But he could\nnever away with those who neglected JUSTICE, MERCY, and TRUTH, and yet\naffected great familiarities with the Deity, from certain conceited\nwonders that Christ had wrought _in_ them. As no youth ever more\nheartily desired the happiness of man and beast than Ben did, so none\never more seriously resented that the religion of love and good works\ntending to this, should be usurped by a _harsh, barren puritanism,\nwith her disfigured faces, whine and cant_. This appeared to him like\nDagon overturning the Ark of God with a vengeance. Burning with zeal\nagainst such detestable phariseeism he rejoiced in his Socratic logic\nas a new kind of weapon, which he hoped to employ with good effect\nagainst it. He studied his Socrates day and night, and particularly\nhis admirable argumentations given by Xenophon, in his book, entitled\n\"MEMORABLE THINGS OF SOCRATES;\" and in a little time came to wield his\nnew artillery with great dexterity and success.\n\nBut in all his rencontres with the _false_ christians, he adhered\nstrictly to the spirit of Socrates, as being perfectly congenial to\nhis own. Instead of blunt contradictions and positive assertions, he\nwould put modest questions; and after obtaining of them concessions of\nwhich they did not foresee the _consequences_, he would involve them\nin difficulties and embarrassments, from which they could never\nextricate themselves. Had he possessed a vanity capable of being\nsatisfied with the triumph of wit over dulness, he might long have\ncrowed the master cock of this Socratic pit. But finding that his\nvictories seldom produced any practical good; that they were acquired\nat a considerable expense of time, neglect of business, and injury of\nhis temper, which was never formed for altercation with bigots, he\nabandoned it by degrees, retaining only the habit of expressing\nhimself with a modest diffidence. And not only at that time, but ever\nafterwards through life, it was remarked of him, that in argument he\nrarely used the words _certainly_, _undoubtedly_, or any others that\nmight convey the idea of being obstinately conceited of his own\nopinion. His ordinary phrases were--_I imagine_--_I suppose-_-or, _it\nappears to me, that such a thing is so and so_--or, _it is so, if I am\nnot mistaken_. By such soothing arts he gradually conciliated the good\nwill of his opponents, and almost always succeeded in bringing them\nover to his wishes. Hence he used to say, it was great pity that\nsensible and well-meaning persons should lessen their own usefulness\nby a positive and presumptuous way of talking, which only serves to\nprovoke opposition from the passionate, and shyness from the prudent,\nwho rather than get into a dispute with such self-conceited\ncharacters, will hold their peace, and let them go on in their errors.\nIn short, if you wish to answer one of the noblest ends for which\ntongues were given to rational beings, which is to _inform_ or to be\n_informed_, to _please_ and to _persuade_ them, for heaven's sake,\ntreat their opinions, even though erroneous, with great politeness.\n\n    \"Men must be taught as though you taught them not,\n    And things unknown propos'd as things forgot,\"\n\nsays Mr. Pope; and again\n\n    \"To speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence;\n    For want of modesty is want of sense.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XII.\n\n\nSo late as 1720, there was but one newspaper in all North America, and\neven this by some was thought one too many so little reading was there\namong the people in those days. But believing that the reading\nappetite, weak as it was, ran more on newspapers than any thing else,\nJames Franklin took it into his head to _start_ another paper. His\nfriends all _vowed_ it would be the ruin of him; but James\npersevered, and a second newspaper, entitled \"THE NEW ENGLAND\nCOURANT,\" was published. What was the number of subscribers, after\nso long a lapse of time, is now unknown; but it was Ben's humble lot to\nfurnish their papers after having assisted to compose and work them\noff.\n\nAmong his friends, James had a number of literary characters, who, by\nway of amusement, used to write for his paper. These gentlemen\nfrequently visited him at his office, merely for a little chat, and to\ntell how highly the public thought of their pieces Ben attended\nclosely to their conversation, and happening to think they were no\ngreat wits, he determined to cut in and try his hand among them. But\nhow to get his little adventures into the paper was the question, and a\nserious one too; for he knew very well that his brother, looking on him\nas hardly more than a child, would not dream of printing any thing that\nhe knew had come from his pen. Stratagem of course must be resorted to.\nHe took his time, and having written his piece pretty much to his mind,\nhe copied it in a disguised hand, and when they were all gone to bed,\nslyly shoved it under the door of the office; where it was found next\nmorning. In the course of the day, his friends dropping in as usual,\nJames showed them the stranger paper; a caucus was held, and with\naching heart Ben heard his piece read for their criticism. It was\nhighly applauded: and to his greater joy still, among their various\nconjectures as to the author, not one was mentioned who did not hold a\ndistinguished reputation for talents! Encouraged by such good success\nof this his first adventure, he wrote on, and sent to the press, in the\nsame sly way, several other pieces, which were equally approved,\nkeeping the secret till his slender stock of information was pretty\ncompletely exhausted, when he came out with the real author.\n\nHis brother, on this discovery, began to entertain a little more\nrespect for him, but still looked on and treated him as a common\napprentice. Ben, on the other hand, thought that, as a brother, he had\na right to greater indulgence, and sometimes complained of James as\nrather too rigorous. This difference in opinion rose to disputes, which\nwere often brought before their father, who either from partiality to\nBen, or his _better_ cause, generally gave it in his favour. James\ncould not bear these awards of his father in favour of a younger\nbrother, but would fly into a passion and treat him with abuse even to\nblows. Ben took this tyrannical behaviour of his brother in extremely\nill part; and he somewhere says that it imprinted on his mind that\ndeep-rooted aversion to arbitrary power, which he never lost, and which\nrendered him through life such a firm and unconquerable enemy of\noppression. His apprenticeship became insupportable, and he sighed\ncontinually for an opportunity of shortening it, which at length\nunexpectedly offered.\n\nAn article in his paper, on some political subject, giving great\noffence to the assembly, James was taken up; and because he would not\ndiscover the author, was ordered into confinement for a month. Ben also\nwas had up and examined before the council, who, after reprimanding,\ndismissed him, probably because deeming him bound, as an apprentice, to\nkeep his master's secrets.\n\nNotwithstanding their private quarrels, this imprisonment of his\nbrother excited Ben's indignation against the assembly; and having now,\nduring James' confinement, the sole direction of the paper, he boldly\ncame out every week with some severe pasquinade against \"_The little\ntyrants of Boston_.\" But though this served to gratify his own angry\nfeelings, and to tickle James, as also to gain himself the character of\na wonderful young man for satire; yet it answered no good end, but far\ncontrariwise, proved a fatal blow to their newspaper; for at the\nexpiration of the month, James's enlargement was accompanied with an\norder from the assembly, that \"JAMES FRANKLIN SHOULD NO LONGER\nPRINT THE NEWSPAPER ENTITLED THE NEW ENGLAND COURANT.\"\n\nThis was a terrible thunder-clap on poor James and his whole scribbling\nsquad; and Ben could find no lightning rod to parry the bolt. A caucus,\nhowever, of all the friends was convoked at the printing-office, to\ndevise ways and means of redress. One proposed this measure and another\nthat; but the measure proposed by James himself was at length adopted.\nThis was to carry on the newspaper under Ben's name. _But_, said\nsome, _will not the assembly haul you over the coals for thus\nattempting to whip the d----l round the stump?_\n\nNo, replied James.\n\nAye, how will you prevent it?\n\nWhy, I'll give up Ben's indentures.\n\nSo then you'll let Ben run free?\n\nNo, nor that neither; for he shall sign a new contract.\n\nThis was to be sure a very shallow arrangement. It was however carried\ninto immediate execution, and the paper continued in consequence to\nmake its appearance for some months in Ben's name. At length a new\ndifference arising between the brothers, and Ben knowing that James\nwould not dare to talk of his new _contract_, boldly asserted his\nfreedom!\n\nHis numerous admirers will here blush for poor Ben, and hide their\nreddening cheeks. But let them redden as they may, they will hardly\never equal that honest crimson which glows in the following lines from\nhis _own pen_:\n\n\"It was, no doubt, very dishonourable to avail myself of this\nadvantage, and I reckon this as the _first_ error of my life. But,\nI was little capable of seeing it in its true light, embittered as my\nmind had been by the blows I had received. Exclusively of his\npassionate _treatment_ of me, my brother was by no means an ill\ntempered man. And even here, perhaps, my _manners_ had too much of\nimpertinence not to afford it a very natural pretext.\"\n\nGo thy way, honest Ben. Such a confession of error will plead thy\nexcuse with all who know their own infirmities, and remember what the\ngreatest saints have done. Yes, when we remember what young Jacob did\nto his brother Esau, and how he came over him with his mess of pottage,\nrobbing him of his birthright; and also what David did to Uriah, whom\nhe robbed not only of his wife, but of his life also, we surely shall\npity not only Ben, but every man his brother for their follies, and\nheartily rejoice that there is mercy with Christ to forgive _all_,\non their repentance and amendment.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIII.\n\n\nFinding that to live with James in the pleasant relations of a brother\nand a freeman was a lost hope, Ben made up his mind to quit him and go\non journey-work with some of the Boston printers. But James suspecting\nBen's intentions, went around town to the printers, and made such a\nreport of him, that not a man of them all would have any thing to say\nto him. The door of employment thus shut against him, and all New\nEngland furnishing no other printing office, Ben determined, in quest\nof one, to push off to New-York. He was farther confirmed in this\nresolution by a consciousness that his newspaper squibs in behalf of\nhis brother, had made the governing party his mortal enemies. And he\nwas also afraid that his bold and indiscreet argumentation against the\ngloomy puritans, had led those crabbed people to look on him as no\nbetter than a young atheist, whom it would be doing God service to\nworry as they would a wild cat. He felt indeed that it was high time to\nbe off.\n\nTo keep his intended flight from the knowledge of his father, his\nfriend Collins engaged his passage with the captain of a New-York\nsloop, to whom he represented Ben as an amorous young blade, who wished\nto get away privately in consequence of an intrigue with a worthless\nhussy, whom her relations wanted to force upon him. Ben had no money.\nBut he had money's worth. Having, for four years past, been carefully\nturning into books every penny he could spare, he had by this time made\nup a pretty little library. It went prodigiously against him to break\nin upon his books. But there was no help for it. So turning a parcel of\nthem back again into money, he slipped privately on board of a sloop,\nwhich on the third day landed him safely in New-York, three hundred\nmiles from home, only seventeen years old, without a single friend in\nthe place, and but little money in his pocket.\n\nHe immediately offered his services to a Mr. Bradford, the only printer\nin New-York. The old gentleman expressed his regret that he could give\nhim no employment; but in a very encouraging manner advised him to go\non to Philadelphia, where he had a son, a printer, who would probably\ndo something for him. Philadelphia was a good hundred miles farther\noff; but Ben, nothing disheartened by that, instantly ran down to the\nwharf, and took his passage in an open boat for Amboy, leaving his\ntrunk to follow him by sea. In crossing the bay, they were overtaken by\na dreadful squall, during which a drunken Dutchman, a passenger, fell\nheadlong into the raging waves. Being hissing hot and swollen with rum,\nhe popped up like a dead catfish; but just as he was going down the\nsecond time, never to rise again, by a miracle of mercy, Ben caught him\nby the fore-top, and lugged him in, where he lay tumbled over on the\nbottom of the boat, fast asleep, and senseless as a corpse of the\nfrightful storm which threatened every moment to bury them all in a\nwatery grave. The violence of the wind presently drove them on the\nrocky coasts of Long Island; where, to prevent being dashed to pieces\namong the furious breakers, they cast anchor, and there during the rest\nof the day, and all night long, lay riding out the gale. Their little\nboat pitching bows under at every surge, while the water constantly\nflying over them in drenching showers, kept them as wet as drowned\nrats; and not only unable to get a wink of sleep, but also obliged to\nstir their stumps, baling the boat to keep her from sinking.\n\nThe wind falling the next day, they reached Amboy about dark, after\nhaving passed thirty hours without a morsel of victuals, and with no\nother drink than a bottle of bad rum; the water upon which they had\nrowed, being as salt as brine. Ben went to bed with a high fever.\nHaving somewhere read that cold water, plentifully drank, was good in\nsuch cases; he followed the prescription, which threw him into a\nprofuse sweat, and the fever left him. The next day, feeble and alone,\nhe set out, with fifty wearisome miles to walk before he could reach\nBurlington, whence he was told that a passage boat would take him to\nPhiladelphia. To increase his depression, soon as he left the tavern,\nit set in to rain hard. But though wet to the skin, he pressed on by\nhimself through the gloomy woods till noon, when feeling much fatigued,\nand the rain still pouring down, he stopped at a paltry tavern, where\nhe passed the rest of the day and night. In this gloomy situation he\nbegan seriously to repent that he had ever left home; and the more, as\nfrom the wretched figure he made, every body was casting a suspicious\neye upon him as a runaway servant. Indeed, from the many insulting\nquestions put to him, he felt himself every moment in danger of being\ntaken up as such, and then what would his father think on hearing that\nhe was in jail as a runaway servant, four hundred miles from home! And\nwhat a triumph to his brother. After a very uneasy night, however, he\nrose and continued his journey till the evening, when he stopped about\nten miles from Burlington, at a little tavern, kept by one Dr. Brown.\nWhile he was taking some refreshment, Brown came in, and being of a\nfacetious turn, put a number of droll questions to him; to which Ben\nretorted in a style so superior to his youthful looks and shabby dress,\nthat the Doctor became quite enamoured of him. He kept him up\nconversing until midnight; and next morning would not touch a penny of\nhis money. This was a very seasonable liberality to poor Ben, for he\nhad now very little more than a dollar in his pocket.\n\nOn reaching Burlington, and buying some gingerbread for his passage, he\nhastened to the wharf. But alas! the boat had just sailed! This was on\nSaturday; and there would be no other boat until Tuesday. Having been\nmuch struck with the looks of the old woman, of whom he had just bought\nhis cargo of gingerbread, he went back and asked her advice. Her\nbehaviour proved that he had some skill in physiognomy. For the moment\nhe told her of his sad disappointment and his doubts how he should act,\nshe gave him the tender look of a mother, and told him he must stay\nwith her till the next boat sailed. Pshaw! Don't mind these little\ndisappointments, child, said she, seeing him uneasy; they are not worth\nyour being troubled about. When I was young, I used to be troubled\nabout them too. But now I see that it is all but vanity. So stay with\nme till the boat goes again; and rest yourself, for I am sure you must\nbe mighty tired after such a terrible walk. The good old lady was very\nright; for what with his late loss of sleep, as also his fever and long\nwalk in the rains, he was tired indeed; so he gladly consented to stay\nwith her and rest himself. Having shown him a small room with a bed in\nit, for him to take a _nap, for she saw clear enough_, she said,\nthat _he was a dying for sleep_, she turned with a mother's\nalacrity to get him something to eat. By and by she came again, and\nfrom a short but refreshing doze, waked him up to a dinner of hot\nbeef-steaks, of which she pressed him to eat _heartily_, telling\nhim that _gingerbread was fit only for children_. While he was\neating, she chatted with him in the affectionate spirit of an aged\nrelative; she asked him a world of questions, such as _how old_ he\nwas--and what was his _name_--and whether his mother was\nalive--and how far he lived from Burlington? Ben told her every thing\nshe asked him. He told her his name and age. He also told her that his\nmother was alive, and that he had left her only seven days ago in\nBoston, where she lived. The old lady could hardly believe him that he\never came from Boston. She lifted up her hands, and stared at him as\nthough he had told her he had just dropped from the North Star. From\nBOSTON! said she with a scream, _now only to think of that!\nO dear, only to think of that!_ And then, O how she pitied his\nmother. _Poor dear soul!_ She, all the way yonder in Boston, and\nsuch a sweet looking, innocent child, wandering here at such a distance\nby himself: how could she stand it?\n\nBen told her that it was a great affliction to be sure; but could not\nbe helped. That his mother was a poor woman, with sixteen children, and\nthat he the youngest boy of all, was obliged to leave her to seek his\nlivelihood, which he hoped he should find in Philadelphia, at his\ntrade, which was that of a printer.\n\nOn hearing that he was a printer, she was quite delighted and pressed\nhim to come and set up in Burlington, for that she would be\n_bound_ for it he would do mighty well there. Ben told her that it\nwas a costly thing to set up printing; that it would take two hundred\npounds, and he had not two hundred pence.\n\nWell then, said she, now that you have got no money, it will give me\nmore pleasure to have you stay with me till you can get a good\nopportunity to go to Philadelphia. I feel for your poor mother, and I\nknow it would give her such a pleasure if she knew you were here with\nme.\n\nSoon as Ben had enjoyed his beef-steaks, which he did in high style,\nhaving the double sauce of his own good appetite and her motherly\nwelcome, he drew out his last dollar to pay the good old lady. But she\ntold him to _put it up, put it up, for she would not take a penny of\nit_. Ben told her that he was young and able to work, and hoped to\ndo well when he got into business, and therefore could not bear that\nshe who was getting old and weak should entertain him for nothing.\n\n_Well_, said she, _never mind that, child, never mind that. I\nshall never miss what little I lay out in entertaining you while you\nstay with me. So put up your money._ However, while she was busied\nin putting away the dishes, he slipped out and got a pint of ale for\nher: and it was all that he could prevail on her to accept.\n\nFrom the pleasure with which Ben ever afterwards spoke of this good old\nwoman, and her kindness to him, a poor strange boy, I am persuaded as\nindeed I have always been, that there is nothing on which men reflect\nwith so much complacency as on doing or receiving offices of love from\none another.\n\nBen has not left us the name of this good old woman, nor the sect of\nchristians to which she belonged. But it is probable she was a Quaker.\nMost of the people about Burlington in those days were Quakers. And\nbesides such kindness as her's seems to be more after the spirit of\nthat wise people, who instead of wrangling about _faith_, which\neven devils possess, give their chief care to that which is the\n_end_ of all faith, and which the poor devils know nothing about,\nviz, \"_love_ and _good works_.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIV.\n\n\nBen now sat himself down to stay with this good old woman till the\nfollowing Tuesday; but still Philadelphia was constantly before him,\nand happening, in the impatience of his mind, to take a stroll along\nthe river side, he saw a boat approaching with a number of passengers\nin it. _Where are you bound?_ said he.\n\nTo PHILADELPHIA, was the reply.\n\nHis heart leaped for joy. Can't you take a passenger aboard? I'll help\nyou to row. O yes, answered they, and bore up to receive him. With all\nhis heart he would have run back to his good old hostess to bid her\nfarewell, and to thank her for her kindness to him, but the boat could\nnot wait; and carrying, tortoise-like, his all upon his back, in he\nstepped and went on with them to Philadelphia, where, after a whole\nnight of hard rowing, they arrived about eight o'clock next morning,\nwhich happened to be Sunday.\n\nSoon as the boat struck the place of landing, which was Market-street\nwharf, Ben put his hand into his pocket, and asked, what was the\ndamage. The boatmen shook their heads, and said, _oh no; he had\nnothing to pay. They could never take pay from a young fellow of his\nspirit, who had so cheerfully assisted them to row all the way._ As\nhis own stock now consisted of but one Dutch dollar, and about a\nshilling's worth in coppers, he would have been well content to accept\nhis passage on their own friendly terms; but seeing one of their crew\nwho appeared to be old, and rather poorly dressed, he hauled out his\ncoppers and gave them all to him. Having shaken hands with these\nhonest-hearted fellows, he leaped ashore and walked up Market-street in\nsearch of something to appease his appetite, which was now abundantly\nkeen from twenty miles' rowing and a cold night's air. He had gone but\na short distance before he met a child bearing in his arms that most\nwelcome of all sights to a hungry man, a fine loaf of bread. Ben\neagerly asked him where he had got it. The child, turning around,\nlifted his little arm and pointing up the street, with great simplicity\nand sweetness said, _don't you see that little house--that little\nwhite house, way up yonder?_\n\nBen said, yes.\n\n_Well then_, continued the child, _that's the baker's house;\nthere's where my mammy sends me every morning to get bread for all we\nchildren._\n\nBen blessed his sweet lips of innocence, and hastening to the house,\nboldly called for _three pence_ worth of bread. The baker threw\nhim down three large rolls.\n\nWhat, all this for three pence! asked Ben with surprise.\n\nYes, all that for three pence, replied the baker with a fine yankee\nsnap of the eye, all that for _only_ three pence! Then measuring\nBen from head to foot, he said with a sly quizzing sort of air, and\npray now my little man where may you have come from?\n\nHere Ben felt his old panic, on the runaway servant score, returning\nstrong upon him again. However, putting on a bold face, he promptly\nanswered that he was from Boston.\n\nPlague on it replied the man of dough, and why did'nt you tell me that\nat first; I might so easily have cabbaged you out of one whole penny;\nfor you know you could not have got all that bread in YANKEE-TOWN for\nless than a good four-pence? Very cheap, said Ben, three large rolls\nfor three-pence: _quite dog cheap!_ So taking them up, began to stow\nthem away in his pockets; but soon found it impossible for lack of\nroom--so placing a roll under each arm, and breaking the third, he\nbegan to eat as he walked along up Market-street. On the way he passed\nthe house of that beautiful girl, Miss Deborah Read, who happening to\nbe at the door, was so diverted at the droll figure he made, that she\ncould not help laughing outright. And indeed no wonder. A stout fleshy\nboy, in his dirty working dress, and pockets all puckered out, with\nfoul linen and stockings, and a loaf of bread under each arm, eating\nand gazing around him as he walked--no wonder she could not help\nlaughing aloud at him as one of the greatest gawkies she had ever seen.\nVery little idea had she at that time that she was presently to be up\nto her eyes in love with this young gawky; and after many a deep sigh\nand heart-ache, was to marry him and to be made a great woman by him.\nAnd yet all this actually came to pass, as we shall presently see, and\nwe hope greatly to the comfort of all virtuous young men, who though\nthey may sometimes be laughed at for their oddities; yet if, like\nFranklin, they will but stick to the _main chance_, _i.e._ BUSINESS and\nEDUCATION, they will assuredly, like him, overcome at the last, and\nrender themselves the admiration of those who once despised them.\n\nBut our youthful hero is in too interesting a part of the play for us\nto lose a moment's sight of him; so after this short moral we turn our\neyes on him again, as there, loaded with his bundles and his bread, and\neating and gazing and turning the corners of the streets, he goes on\nwithout indeed knowing where he is going. At length, however, just as\nhe had finished his first roll, his reverie was broken up by finding\nhimself on Market-street wharf, and close to the very boat in which he\nhad come from Burlington. The sight of the silver stream, as it whirled\nin dimpling eddies around the wharf, awakened his thirst; so stepping\ninto the boat he took a hearty draught, which, to his unvitiated\npalate, tasted sweeter than ever did mint-sling to any young drunkard.\nClose by him in the boat sat a poor woman with a little ragged girl\nleaning on her lap. He asked her if she had breakfasted. With a sallow\nsmile of hunger hoping relief, she replied _no_, for that she had\nnothing to eat. Upon this he gave her both his other loaves. At sight\nof this welcome supply of food, the poor woman and her child gave him a\nlook which he never afterwards forgot.\n\nHaving given, as we have seen, a tythe of his money in gratitude to the\npoor boatman, and two thirds of his bread in charity to this poor woman\nand her child, Ben skipped again upon the wharf, and with a heart light\nand gay with conscious duty, a second time took up Market-street, which\nwas now getting to be full of well-dressed people all going the same\nway. He cut in, and following the line of march, was thus insensibly\nled to a large Quaker meeting-house. Sans ceremonie, he pushed in and\nsat down with the rest, and looking around him soon felt the\n_motions_, if not of a devout, yet of a pleasantly thoughtful\nspirit. It came to his recollection to have heard that people must go\nabroad to see strange things. And here it seemed to be verified.\n_What, no pulpit! Whoever saw a meeting-house before without a\npulpit?_ He could not for his life conceive where the preacher was\nto stand. But his attention was quickly turned from the meeting-house\nto the congregation, whose appearance, particularly that of the young\nfemales, delighted him exceedingly. Such simplicity of dress with such\nan air of purity and neatness! He had never seen any thing like it\nbefore, and yet all admirably suited to the gentle harmony of their\nlooks. And then their eyes! for meekness and sweetness of expression,\nthey looked like dove's eyes. With a deep sigh he wished that his\nbrother James and many others in Boston were but gentle and good as\nthese people appeared to be. Young as he was, he thought the world\nwould be a great deal the happier for it. As leaning back he indulged\nthese soothing sentiments, without any sound of singing or preaching to\ndisturb him, and tired nature's soft languors stealing over him too, he\nsunk insensibly into sleep. We are not informed that he was visited\nduring his slumber, by any of those benevolent spirits who once\ndescended in the dreams of the youthful patriarch, as he slept in the\npleasant plains of Bethel. But he tells us himself, that he was visited\nby one of that benevolent sect in whose place of worship he had been\novertaken by sleep. Waked by some hand on his shoulder that gently\nshook him, he opened his eyes, and lo! a female countenance about\nmiddle age and of enchanting sweetness, was smiling on him. Roused to a\nrecollection of the impropriety he had been guilty of, he was too much\nconfused to speak; but his reddened cheeks told her what he felt. But\nhe had nothing to fear. Gently shaking her head, though without a\nfrown, and with a voice of music, she said to him \"_My son, thee\nought not to sleep in meeting._\" Then giving him the look of a\nmother as she went out, she bade him farewell. He followed her as well\nas he could, and left the meeting-house much mortified at having been\ncaught asleep in it; but deriving at the same time great pleasure from\nthis circumstance, because it had furnished opportunity to the good\nQuaker lady to give him that _motherly look_. He felt it sweetly\nmelting along his soul as he walked. _O how different, thought he,\nthat look from the looks which my brother and the council men of Boston\ngave me, though I was younger then and more an object of sympathy!_\n\nAs he walked along the street, looking attentively in the face of every\none he met, he saw a young Quaker with a fine countenance, whom he\nbegged to tell him where a stranger might find a lodging. With a look\nand voice of great sweetness, the young Quaker said, they receive\ntravellers _here_, but it is not a house that bears a good\ncharacter; if thee will go with me, I will show thee a better one.\n\nThis was the _Crooked Billet_, in Water-street. Directly after\ndinner, his drowsiness returning, he went to bed and slept, without\nwaking till next morning.\n\nHaving put himself in as decent a trim as he could, he waited on Mr.\nBradford, the printer, who received him with great civility, and\ninvited him to breakfast, but told him he was sorry he had no occasion\nfor a journeyman. There is, however, continued he in a cheering manner,\nthere is another printer here, of the name of Keimer, to whom if you\nwish it, I will introduce you. Perhaps he may want your services.\n\nBen gratefully accepting the offer, away they went to Mr Keimer's. But\nalas, poor man! both he and his office put together, made no more than\na miserable burlesque on printing. Only one press, and that old and\ndamaged! only one font of types, and that nearly worn out! and only one\nset of letter cases, and that occupied by himself! and consequently no\nroom for a journeyman.\n\nHere was a sad prospect for poor Ben--four hundred miles from home--not\na dollar in his pocket--and no appearance of any employment to get\none.--But having, from his childhood, been accustomed to grapple with\ndifficulties and to overcome them, Ben saw nothing here but another\ntrial of his courage, and another opportunity for victory and triumph.\n\nAs to Keimer, suspecting from his youthful appearance, that Ben could\nhardly understand any thing of the printing art, he slyly put a\nCOMPOSING STICK into his hand. Ben saw his drift, and stepping\nto the letter cases, filled the stick with such celerity and taste as\nstruck Keimer with surprise, not without shame, that one so inferior in\nyears should be so far his superior in professional skill. To complete\nthis favourable impression, Ben modestly proposed to repair his old\npress.--This offer being accepted, Ben instantly fell to work, and\npresently accomplished his undertaking in such a workman-like style,\nthat Keimer could no longer restrain his feelings, but relaxing his\nrigid features into a smile of admiration, paid him several flattering\ncompliments, and concluded with promising him, that though, for the\npresent, he had no work on hand, yet he expected an abundance shortly,\nand then would _be sure_ to send for him.\n\nIn a few days Keimer was as good as his word; for having procured\nanother set of letter cases, with a small pamphlet to print, he sent in\nall haste for Ben, and set him to work.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XV.\n\n\nAs Keimer is to make a considerable figure in the early part of Ben's\nlife, it may gratify the reader to be made acquainted with him. From\nthe account given of him by Ben, who had the best opportunity to know,\nit appears that he possessed but little either of the amiable or\nestimable in his composition. A man he was of but slender\ntalents--quite ignorant of the world--a wretched workman--and worse\nthan all yet, utterly destitute of religion, and therefore very uneven\nand unhappy in his temper, and abundantly capable of playing the knave\nwhenever he thought it for his interest. Among other evidences of his\nfolly, he miserably envied his brother printer, Bradford, as if the\nAlmighty was not rich enough to maintain them both. He could not\nendure, that while working with him, Ben should stay at Bradford's; so\nhe took him away, and having no house of his own, he put him to board\nwith Mr. Read, father of the young lady who of late had laughed so\nheartily at him for eating his rolls along the street. But Miss Deborah\ndid not long continue in this wind. For on seeing the favourable change\nin his dress, and marking also the wittiness of his conversation, and\nabove all, his close application to business, and the great respect\npaid him on that account by her father, she felt a wonderful change in\nhis favour, and in place of her former sneers, conceived those tender\nsentiments for him, which, as we shall see hereafter, accompanied her\nthrough life.\n\nBen now began to contract acquaintance with all such young persons in\nPhiladelphia as were fond of reading, and spent his evenings with them\nvery agreeably: at the same time he picked up money by his industry,\nand being quite frugal, lived so happy, that except for his parents, he\nseldom ever thought of Boston nor felt any wish to see it. An affair,\nhowever, turned up, which sent him home much sooner than he expected.\n\nHis brother-in-law, a captain Holmes, of a trading sloop from Boston to\nDelaware, happening at Newcastle to hear that Ben was in Philadelphia,\nwrote to him that his father was all but distracted on account of his\nsudden elopement from home, and assured him that if he would but\nreturn, which he earnestly pressed him to do, every thing should be\nsettled to his satisfaction. Ben immediately answered his letter,\nthanked him for his advice, and stated his reasons for quitting Boston,\nwith a force and clearness that so highly delighted captain Holmes,\nthat he showed it to all his acquaintance at Newcastle, and among the\nrest to sir William Keith, governor of the province, with whom he\nhappened to dine. The governor read it, and appeared surprised when he\nlearnt his age. \"_Why, this must be a young man of extraordinary\ntalents, captain Holmes_,\" said the governor, \"_very extraordinary\ntalents indeed, and ought to be encouraged; we have no printer in\nPhiladelphia now worth a fig, and if this young man will but set up,\nthere is no doubt of his success. For my part, I will give him all the\npublic business, and render him every other service in my power._\"\n\nOne day as Keimer and Ben were at work near the window, they saw the\ngovernor and colonel French cross the street, and make directly for the\nprinting-office. Keimer not doubting it was a visit to himself, hurried\ndown stairs to meet them. The Governor taking no notice of Keimer, but\neagerly inquiring for young Mr. FRANKLIN, came up stairs, and with a\ncondescension to which Ben had not been accustomed, introduced himself\nto him--desired to become acquainted with him--and after obligingly\nreproaching him for not having made himself known when he first came to\ntown, invited him to the tavern where he and colonel French were going\nto break a bottle of old Madeira.\n\nIf Ben was surprised, old Keimer was thunderstruck. Ben went, however,\nwith the governor and the colonel to the tavern, where, while the\nMadeira was circulating in cheerful bumpers, the governor proposed to\nhim to set up a printing-office, stating at the same time the great\nchances of success, and promising that both himself and colonel French\nwould use their influence in procuring for him the public printing of\nboth governments. As Ben appeared to doubt whether his father would\nassist him in this enterprize, sir William said that he would give the\nold gentleman a letter, in which he would represent the advantages of\nthe scheme in a light that would, he'd be bound, determine him in his\nfavour. It was thus concluded that Ben should return to Boston by the\nfirst vessel, with the governor's letter to good old Josias: in the\nmean time Ben was to continue with Keimer, from whom this project was\nto be kept a secret.\n\nThe governor sent every now and then to invite Ben to dine with him,\nwhich he considered as a very great honour, especially as his\nexcellency always received and conversed with him in the most familiar\nmanner.\n\nIn April, 1724, Ben embarked for Boston, where, after a fortnight\npassage, he arrived in safety. Having been absent seven months from his\nrelatives, who had never heard a syllable of him all that time, his\nsudden appearance threw the family into a scream of joy, and excepting\nhis sour-faced brother James, the whole squad gave him a most hearty\nwelcome. After much embracing and kissing, and some tears shed on both\nsides, as is usual at such meetings, Ben kindly inquired after his\n_brother James_, and went to see him at his printing-office, not\nwithout hopes of making a favourable impression on him by his dress,\nwhich was handsome far beyond what he had ever worn in his brother's\nservice; a complete suit of broad cloth, branding new--an elegant\nsilver watch and chain--and his purse crammed with nearly five pound\nsterling--all in silver dollars. But it would not all do to win over\nJames. Nor indeed is it to be wondered at; for in losing Ben he had\nlost a most cheerful, obliging lad, whose rare genius and industry in\nwriting, printing, and selling his pamphlets and papers, had brought a\nnoble grist to his mill.\n\nBen's parade therefore of his fine clothes, and watch, and silver\ndollars, only made things worse with James, serving but to make him the\nmore sensible of his loss; so after eyeing him from head to foot with a\ndark side-long look, he turned again to his work without saying a\nsyllable to him. The behaviour of his own journeymen contributed still\nthe more to anger poor James: for instead of taking part with him in\nhis prejudices against Ben, they all appeared quite delighted with him;\nand breaking off from their work and gathering around him, with looks\nfull of curiosity, they asked him a world of questions.\n\nPHILADELPHIA! said they, O dear! have you been all the way\nthere to Philadelphia!\n\nBen said, yes.\n\nWhy Philadelphia must be a _tarnal nation way off_!\n\nFour hundred miles, said Ben.\n\nAt this they stared on him in silent wonder, for having been four\nhundred miles from Boston!\n\nAnd so they have got a printing-office in Philadelphia!\n\nTwo or three of them, said Ben.\n\nO la! why that will starve us all here in Boston.\n\nNot at all, said Ben: their advertising \"_lost pocket\nbooks_\"--\"_runaway servants_\" and \"_stray cows_\" in\nPhiladelphia, can no more starve you here in Boston, than the catfish\nof Delaware, by picking up a few soft-crabs there, can starve our\ncatfish here in Boston harbour. The world's big enough for us all.\n\nWell, I wonder now if they have any such thing as _money_ in\nPhiladelphia?\n\nBen thrust his hand into his pocket, and brought up a whole fist full\nof dollars!\n\nThe dazzling silver struck them all speechless--gaping and gazing at\nhim and each other. Poor fellows, they had never, at once, seen so much\nof that precious metal in Boston, the money there being nothing but a\npoor paper proc.\n\nTo keep up their stare, Ben drew his silver watch, which soon had to\ntake the rounds among them, every one insisting to have _a look at\nit_. Then, to crown all, he gave them a shilling to drink his\nhealth; and after telling them what great things lay before them if\nthey would but continue _industrious_ and _prudent_, and make\nthemselves _masters of their trade_, he went back to the house.\n\nThis visit to the office stung poor James to the quick; for when his\nmother spoke to him of a reconciliation with Ben, and said how happy\nshe should be to see them like brothers again before she died, he flew\ninto a passion and told her such a thing would never be, for that Ben\nhad so insulted him before his men that he would never forgive nor\nforget it as long as he lived. But Ben had the satisfaction to live to\nsee that James was no prophet. For when James, many years after this,\nfell behind hand and got quite low in the world, Ben lent him money,\nand was a steady friend to him and his family all the days of his life.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XVI.\n\n\nBut we have said nothing yet about the main object of Ben's sudden\nreturn to Boston, _i.e._ governor Keith's letter to his father, on the\ngrand project of setting him up as a printer in Philadelphia. The\nreader has been told that all the family, his brother James excepted,\nwere greatly rejoiced to see Ben again. But among them all there was\nnone whose heart felt half such joy as did that of his father. He had\nalways doted on this young son, as one whose rare genius and\nunconquerable industry, if but conducted by prudence, would assuredly,\none day, lead him to greatness. His sudden elopement, as we have seen,\nhad greatly distressed the old man, especially as he was under the\nimpression that he was gone to sea. And when he remembered how few that\ngo out at his young and inexperienced age, ever return better than\nblackguards and vagabonds, his heart sickened within him, and he was\nalmost ready to wish he had never lived to feel the pangs of such\nbitter disappointment in a child so beloved. He counted the days of\nBen's absence; by night his sleep departed from his eyes for thinking\nof his son; and all day long whenever he heard a rapping at the door,\nhis heart would leap with expectation: \"who knows,\" he would say to\nhimself, \"but this may be my child?\" And although he would feel\ndisappointed when he saw it was not Ben who rapped, yet he was afraid,\nat times, to see him lest he should see him covered with the marks of\ndishonour. Who can tell what this anxious father felt when he saw his\nson return as he did? Not in the mean apparel and sneaking looks of a\ndrunkard, but in a dress far more genteel than he himself had ever been\nable to put on him; while his beloved cheeks were fresh with\ntemperance, and his eyes bright with innocence and conscious well\ndoing. Imagination dwells with pleasure on the tender scene that marked\nthat meeting, where the withered cheeks of seventy and the florid bloom\nof seventeen met together in the eager embrace of parental affection\nand filial gratitude:\n\n\"_God bless my son!_\" the sobbing sire he sigh'd.\n\n\"_God bless my sire!_\" that pious son replied.\n\nSoon as the happy father could recover his articulation, with great\ntenderness he said, \"but how, my beloved boy could you give me the pain\nto leave me as you did?\"\n\n\"Why you know, my dear father,\" replied Ben, \"that I could not live\nwith my brother; nor would he let me live with the other printers; and\nas I could not bear the thought of living on an aged father now that I\nwas able to work for myself, I determined to leave Boston and seek my\nfortune abroad. And knowing that if I but hinted my intentions you\nwould prevent me, I thought I would leave you as I did.\"\n\n\"But why, my son, did you keep me so long unhappy about your fate, and\nnot write to me sooner?\"\n\n\"I knew, father, what a deep interest you took in my welfare, and\ntherefore I resolved never to write to you until by my own industry and\neconomy I had got myself into such a state, that I could write to you\nwith pleasure. This state I did not attain till lately. And just as I\nwas a going to write to you, a strange affair took place that decided\nme to come and see you, rather than write to you.\"\n\n\"Strange affair! what can that mean, my son?\"\n\n\"Why, sir, the governor of Pennsylvania, sir William Keith--I dare say,\nfather, you have often heard of governor Keith?\"\n\n\"I may have heard of him, child--I'm not positive--but what of governor\nKeith?\"\n\n\"Why he has taken a wonderful liking to me, father!\"\n\n\"Aye! has he so?\" said the old man, with joy sparkling in his eyes.\n\"Well I pray God you may be grateful for such favours, my son, and make\na good use of them!\"\n\n\"Yes, father, he has taken a great liking to me sure enough; he says I\nam the only one in Philadelphia who knows any thing about printing; and\nhe says too, that if I will only come and set up in Philadelphia, he\nwill make my fortune for me in a trice!!\"\n\nOld Josias here shook his head; \"No, no, Ben!\" said he, \"that will\nnever do: that will never do: you are too young yet, child, for all\nthat, a great deal too young.\"\n\n\"So I told him, father, that I was too young. And I told him too that I\nwas certain you would never give your consent to it.\"\n\n\"You were right there, Ben; no indeed, I could never give my consent to\nit, that's certain.\"\n\n\"So I told the governor, father; but still he would have it there was a\nfine opening in Philadelphia, and that I would fill it so exactly, that\nnothing could be wanting to insure your approbation but a clear\nunderstanding of it. And to that end he has written you a letter.\"\n\n\"A letter, child! a letter from governor Keith to me!\"\n\n\"Yes, father, here it is.\"\n\nWith great eagerness the old gentleman took it from Ben; and drawing\nhis spectacles, read it over and over again with much eagerness. When\nhe was done he lifted his eyes to heaven, while in the motion of his\nlips and change of countenance, Ben could clearly see that the soul of\nhis father was breathing an ejaculation of praise to God on his\naccount. Soon as his _Te Deum_ was finished, he turned to Ben with\na countenance bright with holy joy, and said, \"Ben, I've cause to be\nhappy; my son, I've cause to be happy indeed. O how differently have\nthings turned out with you! God's blessed name be praised for it, how\ndifferently have they turned out to what I dreaded! I was afraid you\nwere gone a poor vagabond, on the seas; but instead of that you had\nfixed yourself in one of the finest cities in the country. I was afraid\nto see you; yes, my dear child, I was afraid to see you, lest I should\nsee you clad in the mean garb of a poor sailor boy; but here I behold\nyou clad in the dress of a gentleman! I trembled lest you had been\ndegrading yourself into the low company of the profane and worthless;\nand lo! you have been all the time exalting yourself into the high\nsociety of great men and governors. And all this in so short a time,\nand in a way most honourable to yourself, and therefore most delightful\nto me, I mean by your virtues and your close attention to the duties of\na most useful profession. Go on, my son, go on! and may God Almighty,\nwho has given you wisdom to begin so glorious a course, grant you\nfortitude to persevere in it!\"\n\nBen thanked his father for the continuance of his love and solicitude\nfor him; and he told him moreover, that one principal thing that had\nstirred him up to act as he had done, was the joy which he knew he\nshould be giving him thereby; as also the great trouble which he knew a\ncontrary conduct would have brought upon him. Here his father tenderly\nembraced him, and said, \"Blessed be God for giving me such a son! I\nhave always, Ben, fed myself with hopes of great things from you. And\nnow I have the joy to say my hopes were not in vain. Yes, glory to God,\nI trust my precious hopes of you were not in vain.\" Then, after making\na short pause, as from fullness of joy, he went on, \"but as to this\nletter, my son; this same letter here from governor Keith; though\nnothing was ever more flattering to you, yet depend upon it, Ben, it\nwill never do; at least not yet awhile.--The duties of the place are\ntoo numerous, child, and difficult for any but one who has had many\nmore years of experience than you have had.\"\n\n\"Well then, father, what's to be done, for I know that the governor is\nso very anxious to get me into this place, that he will hardly be said\nnay?\"\n\n\"Why, my dear boy, we must still decline it, for all that: not only\nbecause from your very unripe age and inexperience, it may involve you\nin ruin; but also because it actually is not in your power. It is true\nthe governor, from his letter, appears to have the greatest friendship\nin the world for you; but yet, it is not to be expected that he would\nadvance funds to set you up. O no, my dear boy, that's entirely out of\nthe question. The governor, though perhaps rich, has no doubt too many\npoor friends and relations hanging on him, for you to expect any thing\nfrom that quarter. And as to myself, Ben, with all my love for you, it\nis not in my power to assist you in such an affair. My family you know,\nis very large, and the profits of my trade but small, insomuch that at\nthe end of the year there is nothing left. And indeed I never can be\nsufficiently thankful to God for that health and blessing which enables\nme to feed and clothe them every year so plentifully.\"\n\nSeeing Ben look rather serious, the old gentleman, in a livelier tone,\nresumed his speech, \"Yes, Ben, all this is very true; but yet let us\nnot be disheartened. Although we have no funds now, yet a noble supply\nis at hand.\"\n\n\"Where, father,\" said Ben, roused up, \"where?\"\n\n\"Why, in your own virtues, Ben, in your own virtues, my boy--There are\nthe noblest funds that God can bestow on a young man. All other funds\nmay easily be drained by our vices and leave us poor indeed. But the\nvirtues are fountains that never fail: they are indeed the true riches\nand honours, only by other names. Only persevere, my son, in the\nvirtues, as you have already so bravely begun, and the grand object is\ngained. By the time you reach twenty-one, for every friend that you now\nhave, you will have ten; and for every dollar an hundred; and with\nthese you will make thousands more. Thus, under God, you will have the\nglory to be the artificer of your own fame and fortune: and that will\nbring ten thousand times more honour and happiness, to you, Ben, than\nall the money that governors and fathers could ever give you.\"\n\nBen's countenance brightened as his father uttered this; then heaving a\ndeep sigh, as of strong hope that such great things might one day be\nrealized, he said, \"Well father, God only knows what I am to come to;\nbut this I know, that I feel in myself a determination to do my best.\"\n\n\"I believe you do, my son, and I thank God most heartily that I have\nsuch good reason to believe you do. And when I consider, on the one\nhand, what a fine field for fame and fortune this new country presents\nto young men of talents and enterprise: and on the other hand, what\nwonders you, a poor unknown and unfriended boy have done in\nPhiladelphia, in only six months, I feel transported at the thought of\nwhat you may yet attain before my gray hairs descend to the grave. Who\nknows, Ben, for God is good, my son, who knows but that a fate like\nthat of young Joseph, whom his brethren drove into Egypt, may be in\nreserve for you? And who knows but that old Jacob's joys may be mine?\nthat like him, after all my anxieties on your account, I may yet hear\nthe name of my youngest son, my beloved Benjamin, coming up from the\nSouth, perfumed with praise for his great virtues and services to his\ncountry? Then when I hear the sound of his fame rising from that\ndistant land, like the pleasant thunders of summer before refreshing\nshowers, and remember how he used to stand a little prattling boy by my\nside, in his rosy cheeks and flaxen locks filling the candle moulds, or\ntwisting the snow white cotton wicks with his tender fingers, O how\nwill such remembrance lighten up the dark evening of my days, and cause\nmy setting sun to go down in joy!\"\n\nHe spoke this in tones so melting, that Ben, who was sitting by his\nfather's side, fell with his face on his bosom, without saying a word.\nThe fond parent, hearing him sob, tenderly embraced him, and with a\nvoice broken with sighs, went on, \"Yes, my son, the measure of my joys\nwill then be full. I shall have nothing to detain me any longer in this\nvale of troubles, but shall gladly breathe out my life in praise to God\nfor this his last, his crowning act of goodness--for this his blessing\nme in my son.\"\n\nAfter a moment's pause, the feelings of both being too deliciously\naffected for speech, Ben gently raised his face from his father's\nbosom, and with his eyes yet red and wet with tears, tenderly looking\nat him, said, \"I would to God, father, you would go and live in\nPhiladelphia.\"\n\n\"Why so, my son?\"\n\n\"Because, I don't want ever to part with you, father, and I am, you\nknow, obliged to go back to Philadelphia immediately.\"\n\n\"Not immediately, my son, I cannot let you go from me immediately.\"\n\n\"Father, I would never go from you, if I could help it; but I must be\ndoing something to make good your fond hopes of me; and I can't stay\nhere.\"\n\n\"Why not, my son?\"\n\n\"Father, I can't stay with those who hate me; and you know that brother\nJames hates me very much.\"\n\n\"O! he does not hate you, I hope, my son.\"\n\n\"Yes, he does, father, indeed he does; because I only differed from him\nin opinion and ventured to reason with him, he kindled into passion and\nabused me even to _blows_, though I was in the right, as you told\nhim afterwards. And because I told him I did not think he acted the\npart of a brother by me in wishing to make me a slave so many years, he\nwent about town and set all the printers against me, and thus drove me\naway from home, and from you, my father, whom I so much love. And just\nnow, when I went to his office to see him, instead of running to meet\nme and rejoicing to see me returned safe and sound and so well dressed\nand a plenty of money in my pocket, he would not even speak to me, but\nlooked as dark and angry as though he would have torn me to pieces. And\nyet he can turn up his eyes, and make long prayers and graces, and talk\na great deal about JESUS CHRIST!\"\n\nThe old man here shook his head with a deep groan, while Ben thus went\non, \"No, father, I can't stay here; I must be going back to\nPhiladelphia and to my good friend governor Keith; for I long to be\nrealizing all the great hopes that you have been forming of me. And\nshould God but give me a good settlement in Philadelphia, then you will\ncome and live with me. O say, my father, wont you come and live with\nme?\"\n\nBen spoke this, looking up to his father with that joy of filial love\nsparkling in his youthful eyes which made him look like all that we\nfancy of angels.\n\nThe old man embraced him and said, \"I will, my son, I will; but stay\nwith me a little while, at the least three days, and then you may\ndepart.\" Ben consenting to this, the old gentleman wrote a polite\nletter to governor Keith, thanking him very heartily for that he, so\ngreat a man, should have paid such attentions to his poor boy: but at\nthe same time begged his pardon for declining to do any thing for him,\nnot only because he had very little in his power to do; but also\nbecause he thought him too young to be intrusted with the conduct of an\nenterprise that required much more experience than he possessed.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XVII.\n\n\nOf the three days which Ben, as we have seen above, had consented to\nstay at home, he spent the chiefest part with his father, in his old\ncandle manufactory. 'Tis true, this happy sire, whose _natural_\naffection for Ben as a _son_, was now exalted into the highest\nrespect for him as a youth of _talents_ and _virtues_; and\n_perhaps_ too, looking up to him as a young mountain oak, whose\ntowering arms would soon protect the parent tree, insisted that Ben\nshould not stay in _that dirty place_, as he called it. But\nknowing that his father could not be spared from his daily labour, Ben\ninsisted to be with him in the old shop, and to assist in his labours,\nreminding his father how sweetly the time passes away when at work and\nconversing with those we love. His father at length consented: and\nthose three days, now spent with Ben, were the happiest days he had\nspent for a long time. His aged bosom was now relieved from his six\nmonths' load of fears and anxieties about this beloved child; nor only\nso, but this beloved child, shining in a light of his own virtues, was\nnow with him, and as a volunteer of filial love was mingling in his\ntoils--eagerly lending his youthful strength to assist him in packing\nand boxing his candles and soap; while his sensible conversation,\nheightened all the time by the charm of that voice and those eyes that\nhad ever been so dear to him, touched his heart with a sweetness\ninexpressible, and made the happy hours fly away as on angels' wings.\n\nOn the afternoon of the third day, as they were returning from dinner,\nwalking down the garden, at the foot of which the factory stood, the\nold gentleman lifting his eyes to the sun, suddenly heaved a deep sigh\nand put on a melancholy look.\n\n\"High, father!\" said Ben, \"I see no cloud over the sun that we should\nfear a change of weather.\"\n\n\"No, Ben, there is no cloud over the sun, but still his beams throw a\ncloud over my spirits. They put me in mind that I shall walk here\nto-morrow, but with no son by my side!\"\n\nThe idea was mournful: and more so by the tender look and plaintive\ntones in which it was conveyed.--It wrung the heart of Ben, who in\nsilence glanced his eyes on his father. It was that tender glance of\nsorrowing love which quickest reaches the heart and stirs up all its\nyearnings. The old gentleman felt the meaning of his son's looks. They\nseemed to say to him, \"_O my father, must we part to-morrow?_\"\n\n\"Yes, Ben, we part to-morrow, and perhaps never to meet again!\"\n\nAfter a short pause, with a sigh, he thus resumed his speech--\"Then, O\nmy son, what a wretch were man without religion? Yes, Ben, without the\nhopes of immortality, how much better he had never been born? Without\nthese, his noblest capacities were but the greater curses. The more\ndelightful his friendships the more dreadful the thought they may be\nextinguished for ever; and the gayer his prospects the deeper his\ngloom, that endless darkness may so quickly cover all. We were\nyesterday feeding fond hopes, my son; we were yesterday painting bright\ncastles in the air: you were to be a great man and I a happy father.\nBut alas! this is the last day, my child, that we may ever see each\nother again. And the sad reverse of all this may even now be at the\ndoor; when I, instead of hearing of my son's glory in Philadelphia, may\nhear that he is cold in his grave. And when you, returning--after years\nof virtuous toils, returning laden with riches and honours for your\nhappy father to share in, may see nothing of that father but the tomb\nthat covers his dust.\"\n\nSeeing the moisture in Ben's eyes, the old gentleman, with a voice\nrising to exultation, thus went on. \"Yes, Ben, this may soon be the\ncase with us, my child; the dark curtain of our separation soon may\n_drop_, and your cheeks or mine be flooded with sorrows. But\nthanks be to God, that curtain will rise again, and open to our view\nthose scenes of happiness, one glance at which is sufficient to start\nthe tear of transport into our eyes. Yes, Ben, religion assures us of\nall this; religion assures us that this life is but the morning of our\nexistence--that there is a glorious eternity beyond--and that to the\npenitent, death is but the passage to that happy life where they shall\nsoon meet again to part no more, but to congratulate their mutual\nfelicities for ever. Then, O my son, lay hold of religion, and secure\nan interest in those blessed hopes that contribute so much to the\nvirtues and the joys of life.\"\n\n\"Father,\" said Ben with a sigh, \"I know that many people here in Boston\nthink I never had any religion; or, that if I had I have apostatized\nfrom it.\"\n\n\"God forbid! But whence, my son, could these prejudices have arisen?\"\n\n\"Why, father, I have for some time past discovered that there is no\neffect without a cause. These prejudices have been the effect of my\nyouthful _errors_. You remember father, the old story of the pork,\ndon't you?\"\n\n\"No, child; what is it, for I have forgotten it?\"\n\n\"I thought so, father, I thought you had been so good as to forget it.\nBut I have not, nor ever shall forget it.\"\n\n\"What is it, Ben?\"\n\n\"Why, father, when our pork, one fall, lay salted and ready for the\nbarrel, I begged you to say grace over it all at once; adding that it\nwould _do as well_ and save _a great deal of time_.\"\n\n\"Pshaw, Ben, such a trifle as that, and in a child too, cannot be\nremembered against you now.\"\n\n\"Yes, father, I am afraid it is. All are not so loving, and so\nforgetful of my errors as you. It was at the time inserted in the\nBoston NEWS LETTER, and is now recollected to the discredit of\nmy religion. And they have a prejudice against me on another account.\nWhile I lived with you, father, you always took me to meeting with you;\nbut when I left you and went to live with my brother James, I often\nneglected going to meeting; preferring to stay at home and read my\nbooks.\"\n\n\"I am sorry to hear that, Ben; very sorry that you could neglect the\npreachings of Christ.\"\n\n\"Father, I never neglected them. I look on the preaching of Christ as\nthe finest system of morality in the world; and his parables, such as\n\"The Prodigal Son\"--\"The Good Samaritan\"--\"The Lost Sheep,\" &c. as\nmodels of divine goodness. And if I could only hear a preacher take\nthese for his texts, and paint them in those rich colours they are\ncapable of, I would never stay from meeting. But now, father, when I\ngo, instead of those benevolent preachings and parables which Christ so\ndelighted in, I hardly ever hear any thing but lean, chaffy discourses\nabout the TRINITY, and BAPTISMS, and ELECTIONS, and REPROBATIONS, and\nFINAL PERSEVERANCES, and COVENANTS, and a thousand other such things\nwhich do not strike my fancy as religion at all, because not in the\nleast calculated, as I think, to sweeten and ennoble men's natures, and\nmake them love and do good to one another.\"\n\n\"There is too much truth in your remark, Ben; and I have often been\nsorry that our preachers lay such stress on these things, and do not\nstick closer to the preachings of Christ.\"\n\n\"Stick closer to them, father! O no, to do them justice, sir, we must\nnot charge them with not _sticking to the text_, for they never take\nChrist for their text, but some dark passage out of the prophets or\napostles, which will better suit their gloomy education. Or if they\nshould, by some lucky hit, honour Christ for a text, they quickly give\nhim the _go-by_ and lug in Calvin or some other angry doctor; and then\nin place of the soft showers of Gospel pity on sinners, we have nothing\nbut the dreadful thunderings of eternal hate, with the unavailing\nscreams of little children in hell not a span long! Now, father, as I\ndo not look on such preaching as this to be any ways pleasing to the\nDeity or profitable to man, I choose to stay at home and read my books;\nand this is the reason, I suppose, why my brother James and the\ncouncil-men here of Boston think that I have no religion.\"\n\n\"Your strictures on some of our ministers, my son, are in rather a\nstrong style: but still there is too much truth in them to be denied.\nHowever, as to what your brother James and the council think of you, it\nis of little consequence, provided you but possess true religion.\"\n\n\"Aye, TRUE RELIGION, father, is another thing; and I should\nlike to possess it. But as to such religion as theirs, I must confess,\nfather, I never had and never wish to have it.\"\n\n\"But what do you mean by _their_ religion, my son?\"\n\n\"Why, I mean, father, a religion of gloomy forms and notions, that have\nno tendency to make men good and happy, either in themselves or to\nothers.\"\n\n\"So then, my son, you make _man's happiness_ the end of religion.\"\n\n\"Certainly I do, father.\"\n\n\"Our catechisms, Ben, make _God's glory_ the end of religion.\"\n\n\"That amounts to the same thing, father; as the framers of the\ncatechisms, I suppose, placed God's glory in the happiness of man.\"\n\n\"But why do you suppose that so readily, Ben?\"\n\n\"Because, father, all wise workmen place their glory in the perfection\nof their works. The gunsmith glories in his rifle, when she never\nmisses her aim; the clockmaker glories in his clock when she tells the\ntime exactly. They thus glory, because their works answer the ends for\nwhich they were made. Now God, who is wiser than all workmen, had, no\ndoubt, his ends in making man. But certainly he could not have made him\nwith a view of getting any thing from him, seeing man has nothing to\ngive. And as God, from his own infinite riches, has a boundless power\nto give; and from his infinite benevolence, must have an equal delight\nin giving, I can see no end so likely for his making man as to make him\nhappy. I think, father, all this looks quite reasonable.\"\n\n\"Why, yes, to be sure, Ben, it does look very reasonable indeed.\"\n\n\"Well then, father, since all wise workmen glory in their works when\nthey answer the ends for which they designed them, God must glory in\nthe happiness of man, that being the end for which he made him.\"\n\n\"This seems, indeed, Ben, to be perfectly agreeable to reason.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, not only to _reason_, but to _nature_ too: for\neven nature, I think, father, in all her operations, clearly teaches\nthat God must take an exceeding glory in our happiness; for what else\ncould have led him to build for us such a noble world as this; adorned\nwith so much beauty; stored with such treasures; peopled with so many\nfair creatures; and lighted up as it is with such gorgeous luminaries\nby day and by night?\"\n\n\"I am glad, my son, I touched on this subject of religion in the way I\ndid; your mode of thinking and reasoning on it pleases me greatly. But\nnow taking all this for granted, what is still your idea of the true\nreligion?\"\n\n\"Why, father, if God thus places his glory in the happiness of man,\ndoes it not follow that the most acceptable thing that man can do for\nGod, or in other words, that the true religion of man consists in his\nso living, as to attain the highest possible perfection and happiness\nof his nature, that being the chief end and glory of the Deity in\ncreating him?\"\n\n\"Well, but how is this to be done?\"\n\n\"Certainly, father, by imitating the Deity.\"\n\n\"By imitating him, child! but how are we to imitate him?\"\n\n\"In his goodness, father.\"\n\n\"But why do you pitch on his GOODNESS rather than on any other\nof his attributes?\"\n\n\"Because, father, this seems, evidently, the prince of all his other\nattributes, and greater than all.\"\n\n\"Take care child, that you do not blaspheme. How can one of God's\nattributes be greater than another, when all are infinite?\"\n\n\"Why, father, must not that which moves be greater than that which is\nmoved?\"\n\n\"What am I to understand by that, Ben?\"\n\n\"I mean, father, that the power and wisdom of the Deity, though both\nunspeakably great, would probably stand still and do nothing for men,\nwere they not moved to it by his goodness. His goodness then, which\ncomes and puts his power and wisdom into motion, and thus fills heaven\nand earth with happiness, must be the greatest of all his attributes.\"\n\n\"I don't know what to say to that, Ben; certainly his power and wisdom\nmust be very great too.\"\n\n\"Yes, father, they are very great indeed: but still they seem but\nsubject to his _greater benevolence_ which enlists them in its\nservice and constantly gives them its own delightful work to do. For\nexample, father, the wisdom and power of the Deity can do any thing,\nbut his benevolence takes care that they shall do nothing but for good.\nThe power and wisdom of the Deity could have made changes both in the\nearth and heavens widely different from their present state. They\ncould, for instance, have placed the sun a great deal farther off or a\ngreat deal nearer to us. But then in the first case we should have been\nfrozen to icicles, and in the second scorched to cinders. The power of\nthe Deity could have given a tenfold force to the winds, but then no\ntree could have stood on the land, and no ship could have sailed on the\nseas. The power of the Deity could also have made changes as great in\nall other parts of nature; it could have made every fish as monstrous\nas a whale, every bird dreadful as the condor, every beast as vast as\nthe elephant, and every tree as big as a mountain. But then it must\nstrike every one that these changes would all have been utterly for the\nworse, rendering these noble parts of nature comparatively useless to\nus.--I say the power of the Deity could have done all this, and might\nhave so done but for his benevolence, which would not allow such\ndiscords, but has, on the contrary, established all things on a scale\nof the exactest harmony with the convenience and happiness of man. Now,\nfor example, father, the sun, though placed at an enormous distance\nfrom us, is placed at the very distance he should be for all the\nimportant purposes of light and heat; so that the earth and waters,\nneither frozen nor burnt, enjoy the temperature fittest for life and\nvegetation. Now the meadows are covered with grass; the fields with\ncorn; the trees with leaves and fruits; presenting a spectacle of\nuniversal beauty and plenty, feasting all senses and gladdening all\nhearts; while man, the favoured lord of all, looking around him amidst\nthe mingled singing of birds and skipping of beasts and leaping of\nfishes, is struck with wonder at the beauteous scenery, and gratefully\nacknowledges that benevolence is the darling attribute of the Deity.\"\n\n\"I thank God, my son, for giving you wisdom to reason in this way. But\nwhat is still your inference from all this, as to true religion?\"\n\n\"Why, my dear father, my inference is still in confirmation of my first\nanswer to your question relative to the true religion, that it consists\nin our imitating the Deity in his goodness. Every wise parent, wishing\nto allure his children to any particular virtue, is careful to set them\nthe fairest examples of the same, as knowing that example is more\npowerful than precept. Now since the Deity, throughout all his works,\nso invariably employs his great power and wisdom as the ministers of\nhis benevolence to make his creatures happy, what can this be for but\nan example to us; teaching that if we wish to please him--the true end\nof all religion--we must imitate him in his moral goodness, which if we\nwould but all do as steadily as he does, we should recall the golden\nage, and convert this world into Paradise.\n\n\"All this looks very fair, Ben; but yet after all what are we to do\nwithout FAITH?\"\n\n\"Why, father, as to Faith, I cannot say; not knowing much about it. But\nthis I can say, that I am afraid of any substitutes to the moral\ncharacter of the Deity. In short, sir, I don't love the fig-leaf.\"\n\n\"Fig-leaf! I don't understand you, child: what do you mean by the\nfig-leaf?\"\n\n\"Why, father, we read in the Bible that soon as Adam had lost that true\nimage of the Deity, his MORAL GOODNESS, instead of striving to\nrecover it again, he went and sewed fig-leaves together to cover\nhimself with.\"\n\n\"Stick to the point, child.\"\n\n\"I am to the point, father. I mean to say that as Adam sought a vain\nfig-leaf covering, rather than the imitation of the Deity in moral\ngoodness, so his posterity have ever since been fond of running after\nfig-leaf substitutes.\"\n\n\"Aye! well I should be glad to hear you explain a little on that head,\nBen.\"\n\n\"Father, I don't pretend to explain a subject I don't understand, but I\nfind in PLUTARCH'S LIVES and the HEATHEN ANTIQUITIES, which I read in\nyour old divinity library, and which no doubt give a true account of\nreligion among the ancients, that when they were troubled on account of\ntheir crimes, they do not seem once to have thought of conciliating the\nDeity by _reformation_, and by acts of benevolence and goodness to be\nlike him. No, they appear to have been too much enamoured of lust, and\npride, and revenge, to relish moral goodness; such lessons were too\nmuch against the grain. But still something must be done to appease the\nDeity. Well then, since they could not sum up courage enough to attempt\nit by imitating his goodness, they would try it by coaxing his\nvanity--they would build him grand temples; and make him mighty\nsacrifices; and rich offerings. This I am told, father, was _their_\nfig-leaf.\"\n\n\"Why this, I fear, Ben, is a true bill against the poor Heathens.\"\n\n\"Well, I am sure, father, the Jews were equally fond of the fig-leaf;\nas their own countrymen, the Prophets, are constantly charging them.\nJUSTICE, MERCY, and TRUTH had, it seems, no charms for them. They must\nhave fig-leaf substitutes, such as tythings of _mint_, _anise_, and\n_cummmin_, and making '_long prayers in the streets_,' and deep\ngroanings with '_disfigured faces in the synagogues_.' If they but did\nall this, then surely they must be Abraham's children even though they\ndevoured widows' houses.\"\n\nHere good old Josias groaned.\n\n\"Yes, father,\" continued Ben, \"and it were well if the rage for the\nfig-leaf stopped with the Jews and Heathens; but the Christians are\njust as fond of substitutes that may save them the labour of imitating\nthe Deity in his moral goodness. It is true, the old Jewish hobbies,\nmint, anise, and cummin, are not the hobbies of Christians; but still,\nfather, you are not to suppose that they are to be disheartened for all\nthat. Oh no. They have got a hobby worth all of them put together--they\nhave got FAITH.\"\n\nHere good old Josias began to darken; and looking at Ben with great\nsolemnity, said, \"I am afraid, my son, you do not treat this great\narticle of our holy religion with sufficient reverence.\"\n\n\"My dear father,\" replied Ben eagerly, \"I mean not the least reflection\non FAITH, but solely on those hypocrites who abuse it to\ncountenance their vices and crimes.\"\n\n\"O then, if that be your aim, go on, Ben, go on.\"\n\n\"Well, sir, as I was saying, not only the Jews and Heathens, but the\nChristians also have their fig-leaf substitutes for _Moral Goodness_.\nBecause Christ has said that so great is the DIVINE CLEMENCY, that if\neven the worst of men will but have faith in it so as to repent and\namend their lives by the golden law of '_love and good works_,' they\nshould be saved, many lazy Christians are fond of overlooking those\nexcellent conditions 'LOVE AND GOOD WORKS,' which constitute the moral\nimage of the Deity, and fix upon the word FAITH for their salvation.\"\n\n\"Well, but child, do you make no account of faith?\"\n\n\"None, father, as a fig-leaf cloak of immorality.\"\n\n\"But is not faith a great virtue in itself, and a qualification for\nheaven?\"\n\n\"I think not, sir; I look on faith but as a _mean_ to beget that _moral\ngoodness_, which, to me, appears to be the only qualification for\nHeaven.\"\n\n\"I am astonished, child, to hear you say that faith is not a virtue in\nitself.\"\n\n\"Why, father, the Bible says for me in a thousand places. The Bible\nsays that _faith without good works is dead_.\"\n\n\"But does not the Bible, in a thousand places, say that without faith\nno man can please God?\"\n\n\"Yes, father, and for the best reason in the world; for who can ever\nhope to please the Deity without his moral image? and who would ever\nput himself to the trouble to cultivate the virtues which form that\nimage, unless he had a belief that they were indispensible to the\nperfection and happiness of his nature?\"\n\n\"So then, you look on faith as no virtue in itself, and good for\nnothing unless it exalt men to the likeness of God?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, as good for nothing unless it exalt us to the likeness of\nGod--nay, as worse; as utterly vile and hypocritical.\"\n\n\"And perhaps you view in the same light the IMPUTED RIGHTEOUSNESS, and\nthe Sacraments of BAPTISM and the LORD'S SUPPER.\"\n\n\"Yes, father, faith, imputed righteousness, sacraments, prayers,\nsermons; all, all I consider as mere barren fig-leaves which will yield\nno good unless they ripen into the fruits of BENEVOLENCE and GOOD\nWORKS.\"\n\n\"Well, Ben, 'tis well that you have taken a turn to the printing\nbusiness; for I don't think, child, that if you had studied divinity,\nas your uncle Ben and myself once wished, you would ever have got a\n_licence_ to preach.\"\n\n\"No, father, I know that well enough; I know that many who think\nthemselves mighty good Christians, are for getting to heaven on easier\nterms than imitating the Deity in his moral goodness. To them, faith\nand imputed righteousness, and sacraments, and sour looks, are very\nconvenient things. With a good stock of these they can easily manage\nmatters so as to make a little morality go a great way. But I am\nthinking they will have to _back out_ of this error, otherwise\nthey will make as bad a hand of their barren faith, as the poor\nVirginia <DW64>s do of their boasted freedom.\"\n\n\"God's mercy, child, what do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"Why, father, I am told that the Virginia <DW64>s, like our\nfaith-mongers, fond of ease and glad of soft substitutes to hard\nduties, are continually sighing for freedom; '_O if they had but\nfreedom! if they had but freedom! how happy should they be! They should\nnot then be obliged to work any more. Freedom would do every thing for\nthem. Freedom would spread soft beds for them, and heap their tables\nwith roast pigs, squealing out, 'come and eat me.' Freedom would give\nthem fine jackets, and rivers of grog, and mountains of segars and\ntobacco, without their sweating for it_.' Well, by and by, they get\ntheir freedom; perhaps by running away from their masters. And now see\nwhat great things has freedom done for them. Why, as it is out of the\nquestion to think of _work_ now they are _free_, they must give\nthemselves up like gentlemen, to visiting, sleeping, and pastime. In a\nlittle time the curses of hunger and nakedness drive them to stealing\nand house-breaking, for which their backs are ploughed up at\nwhipping-posts, or their necks snapped under the gallows! and all this\nbecause they must needs live easier than by honest labour, which would\nhave crowned their days with character and comfort. So, father, it is,\nmost exactly so it is, with too many of our FAITH-MONGERS. They have\nnot courage to practise those exalted virtues that would give them the\nmoral likeness of the Deity. Oh no: they must get to heaven in some\neasier way. They have heard great things of faith. Faith, they are\ntold, has done wonders for other people; why not for them? Accordingly\nthey fall to work and after many a hard throe of fanaticism, they\nconceit they have got faith sure enough. And now they are happy. Like\nthe poor Virginia <DW64>s, they are clear of all _moral working now_:\nthank God they can get to heaven without it; yes, and may take some\nindulgences, by the way, into the bargain. If, as jovial fellows, they\nshould waste their time and family substance in drinking rum and\nsmoking tobacco, where's the harm, _an't they sound believers_? If they\nshould, as _merchants_, sand their sugar, or water their molasses, what\ngreat matter is that? Don't they keep up family prayer? If, as men of\nHONOUR, they should accept a challenge, and receive a shot in a duel,\nwhat of that? They have only to send for a priest, and take the\nsacrament. Thus, father, as freedom has proved the ruin of many a lazy\nVirginian <DW64>, so I am afraid that such faith as this has made many\nan hypocritical christian ten times more a child of the devil than he\nwas before.\"\n\nGood old Josias, who, while Ben was speaking at this rate, had appeared\nmuch agitated, sometimes frowning, sometimes smiling, here replied,\nwith a deep sigh, \"Yes, Ben, this is all too true to be denied: and a\nsad thing it is that mankind should be so ready, as you observe, to go\nto heaven _in any other way_ than by imitating God in his _moral\nlikeness_. But I rejoice in hope of you, my son, that painting this\nlamentable depravity in such strong colours as you do, you will ever\nact on wiser and more magnanimous principles.\"\n\n\"Father, I don't affect to be better than other young men, yet I think\nI can safely say, that if I could get to heaven by playing the\nhypocrite I would not, while I have it in my choice to go thither by\nacquiring the virtues that would give me a resemblance to God. For to\nsay nothing of the exceeding honour of acquiring even the _faintest\nresemblance_ of him, nor yet of the immense happiness which it must\nafford hereafter, I find that even here, and young as I am, the least\nstep towards it, affords a greater pleasure than any thing else; indeed\nI find that there is so much more pleasure in getting knowledge to\nresemble the Creator, than in living in ignorance to resemble brutes;\nso much more pleasure in BENEVOLENCE and DOING GOOD to resemble him,\nthan in _hate_ and _doing harm_ to resemble demons, that I hope I shall\nalways have wisdom and fortitude sufficient even for my own sake, to\nspend my life in getting all the useful knowledge, and in doing all the\nlittle good I possibly can.\"\n\n\"God Almighty confirm my son in the wise resolutions which his grace\nhas enabled him thus early to form!\"\n\n\"Yes, father, and besides all this, when I look towards futurity; when\nI consider the nature of that felicity which exists in heaven; that it\nis a felicity flowing from the smiles of the Deity on those excellent\nspirits whom his own admonitions have adorned with the virtues that\nresemble himself; that the more perfect their virtues, the brighter\nwill be his smiles upon them, with correspondent emanations of bliss\nthat may, for aught we know, be for ever enlarged with their ever\nenlarging understandings and affections; I say, father, when I have it\nin my choice to attain to all this in a way so pleasant and honourable\nas that of imitating the Deity in WISDOM and GOODNESS, should I not be\nworse than mad to decline it on such terms, and prefer substitutes that\nwould tolerate me in _ignorance_ and _vice_?\"\n\n\"Yes, child, I think you would be mad indeed.\"\n\n\"Yes, father, especially when it is recollected, that if the ignorant\nand vicious could, with all their pains, find out substitutes that\nwould serve as passports to heaven, they could not rationally expect a\nhearty welcome there. For as the Deity delights in the wise and good,\nbecause they resemble him in those qualities which render him so\namiable and happy, and would render all his creatures so too; so he\nmust proportionably abhor the STUPID and VICIOUS, because deformed with\nqualities diametrically opposite to his own, and tending to make both\nthemselves and others most vile and miserable.\"\n\n\"This is awfully true, Ben; for the Bible tells us, that the _wicked\nare an abomination to the Lord; but that the righteous are his\ndelight_.\"\n\n\"Yes, father, and this is the language not only of the BIBLE, which is,\nperhaps, the grand class book of the Deity, but it is also the language\nof his first or _horn_ book, I mean REASON, which teaches, that if\n'_there be a God, and that there is all nature cries aloud through all\nher works, he must delight in virtue_,' because most clearly conducive\nto the perfection of mankind; which must be the chief aim and glory of\nthe Deity in creating them. And for the same reason he must abhor vice,\nbecause tending to the disgrace and destruction of his creatures.\nHence, father, I think it follows as clearly as a demonstration in\nmathematics, that if it were possible for bad men, through _faith_,\n_imputed righteousness_, or any other leaf-covering, to get to\nParadise, so far from meeting with any thing like cordiality from the\nDeity, they would be struck speechless at sight of their horrible\ndissimilarity to him. For while he delights above all things in giving\nlife, and the duellist glories in destroying it; while he delights in\nheaping his creatures with good things, and the gambler triumphs in\nstripping them; while he delights in seeing love and smiles among\nbrethren, and the slanderer in promoting strifes and hatreds; while he\ndelights in exalting the intellectual and moral faculties to the\nhighest degree of heavenly wisdom and virtue, and the drunkard delights\nin polluting and degrading both below the brutes; what cordiality can\never subsist between such opposite natures? Can infinite purity and\nbenevolence behold such monsters with complacency, or could they in his\npresence otherwise than be filled with intolerable pain and anguish,\nand fly away as weak-eyed owls from the blaze of the meridian sun?\"\n\n\"Well, Ben, as I said before, I am richly rewarded for having drawn you\ninto this conversation about religion; your language indeed is not\nalways the language of the scriptures; neither do you rest your hopes,\nas I could have wished, on the _Redeemer_; but still your idea in\nplacing our qualification for heaven in resembling God in _moral\ngoodness_, is truly evangelical, and I hope you _will one day become_ a\ngreat christian.\"\n\n\"I thank you, father, for your good wishes; but I am afraid I shall\nnever be the christian you wish me to be.\"\n\n\"What, not a christian!\"\n\n\"No, father, at least not in the _name_; but in the nature I hope to\nbecome a christian. And now, father, as we part to-morrow, and there is\na strong presentiment on my mind that it may be a long time before we\nmeet again, I beg you to believe of me that I shall never lose sight of\nmy great obligations to an active pursuit of knowledge and usefulness.\nThis, if persevered in, will give me some humble resemblance of the\ngreat Author of my being in loving and doing all the good I can to\nmankind. And then, if I live, I hope, my dear father, I shall give you\nthe joy to see realized some of the fond expectations you have formed\nof me. And if I should die, I shall die in hope of meeting you in some\nbetter world, where you will no more be alarmed for my welfare, nor I\ngrieved to see you conflicting with age and labour and sorrow: but\nwhere we may see in each other all that we can conceive of what we call\nANGELS, and in scenes of undeserved splendour, dwell with those\nenlightened and benevolent spirits, whose conversation and perfect\nvirtues, will for ever delight us. And where, to crown all, we shall\nperhaps, at times, be permitted to see that UNUTTERABLE BEING, whose\ndisinterested goodness was the spring of all these felicities.\"\n\nThus ended this curious dialogue, between one of the most amiable\nparents, and one of the most acute and sagacious youths that our\ncountry, or perhaps any other has ever produced.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XVIII.\n\n\nThe three days of Ben's promised stay with his father being expired,\nthe next morning he embraced his parents and embarked a second time for\nPhiladelphia, but with a much lighter heart than before, because he now\nleft home with his parents' blessing, which they gave him the more\nwillingly as from the dark _sanctified_ frown on poor James' brow\nthey saw in him no disposition towards reconciliation.\n\nThe vessel happening to touch at Newport, Ben gladly took that\nopportunity to visit his favourite brother John, who received him with\ngreat joy. John was always of the mind that Ben would one day or other\nbecome a great man; \"_he was so vastly fond_,\" he said, \"_of his\nbook_.\"\n\nAnd when he saw the elegant size that Ben's person had now attained,\nand also his fine mind-illuminated face and manly wit, he was so proud\nof him that he could not rest until he had introduced him to all his\nfriends. Among the rest was a gentleman of the name of Vernon, who was\nso pleased with Ben during an evening's visit at his brother's, that he\ngave him an order on a man in Pennsylvania for thirty pounds, which he\nbegged he would collect for him. Ben readily accepted the order, not\nwithout being secretly pleased that nature had given him a face which\nthis stranger had so readily credited with thirty pounds.\n\nCaressed by his brother John and by his brother John's friends, Ben\noften thought that if he were called on to point out the time in his\nwhole life that had been spent more pleasantly than the rest, he would,\nwithout hesitation, pitch on this his three days' visit to Newport.\n\nBut alas! he has soon brought to cry out with the poet,\n\n    \"The brightest things beneath the sky,\n      Yield but a glimmering light;\n    We should _suspect some danger nigh_,\n      Where we possess _delight_.\"\n\nHis thirty pound order from Vernon, was at first ranked among his dear\nhonied delights enjoyed at Newport; but it soon presented, as we shall\nsee, a roughsting. This however, was but a flea bite in comparison of\nthat mortal wound he was within an ace of receiving from this same\nNewport trip. The story is this: Among a considerable cargo of live\nlumber which they took on board for Philadelphia, were three females,\na couple of gay young damsels, and a grave old Quaker lady. Following\nthe natural bent of his disposition, Ben paid great attention to the\nold Quaker. Fortunate was it for him that he did; for in consequence\nof it she took a motherly interest in his welfare that saved him from\na very ugly scrape. Perceiving that he was getting rather too fond of\nthe two young women above, she drew him aside one day, and with the\nlooks and speech of a mother, said, \"Young man, I am in pain for thee:\nthou hast no parent to watch over thy conduct, and thou seemest to be\nquite ignorant of the world and the snares to which youth is exposed.\nI pray thee rely upon what I tell thee.--These are women of bad\ncharacter; I perceive it in all their actions. If thou dost not take\ncare they will lead thee into danger!!\"\n\nAs he appeared at first not to think so ill of them as she did, the\nold lady related of them many things she had seen and heard, and which\nhad escaped his attention, but which convinced him she was in the\nright. He thanked her for such good advice, and promised to follow it.\n\nOn their arrival at New-York the girls told him where they lived, and\ninvited him to come and see them. Their eyes kindled such a glow along\nhis youthful veins that he was on the point of melting into consent.\nBut the motherly advice of his old quaker friend happily coming to his\naid, revived his wavering virtue, and fixed him in the resolution,\nthough much against the grain, _not to go_. It was a most blessed\nthing for him that he did not; for the captain missing a silver spoon\nand some other things from the cabin, and knowing these women to be\nprostitutes, procured a search warrant, and finding his goods in their\npossession, had them brought to the whipping-post.\n\nAs God would have it, Ben happened to fall in with the constable and\ncrowd who were taking them to whip. He would fain have run off. But\nthere was a drawing of sympathy towards them which he could not\nresist: so on he went with the rest. He said afterwards that it was\nwell he did: for when he beheld these poor devils tied up to the\nstake, and also their sweet faces distorted with terror and pain, and\nheard their piteous screams under the strokes of the cowhide on their\nbleeding backs, he could not help melting into tears, at the same time\nsaying to himself--\"now had I but _yielded to the allurements of these\npoor creatures, and made myself an accessary to their crimes and\nsufferings, what would now be my feelings_!\"\n\nFrom the happy escape which he had thus made through the seasonable\nadvice of the good old quaker lady he learned that acts of this sort\nhold the first place on the list of charities: and entered it as a\nresolution on his journal that he would imitate it and do all in his\npower to open the eyes of all, but especially of the young, to a\ntimely sense of the follies and dangers that beset them. How well he\nkept his promise, will, 'tis likely, gentle reader, be remembered by\nthousands when you and I are forgotten.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIX.\n\n\nOn the arrival of the vessel at New-York, Ben went up to a tavern, and\nlo! who should he first cast his eyes on there, but his old friend\nCollins, of Boston!\n\nCollins had, it seems, been so charmed with Ben's account of\nPhiladelphia, that he came to the determination to try his fortune\nthere also; and learning that Ben was shortly to return by the way of\nNew-York, he had jumped into the first vessel, and was there before\nhim, waiting his arrival. Great was the joy of Ben at the sight of his\nfriend Collins, for it drew after it a train of the most pleasant\nrecollections.--But who can describe his feelings, when flying to\nembrace that long esteemed youth, he beheld him now risen from his\nchair equally eager for the embrace, but alas! only able to make a\nstaggering step or two before down he came sprawling on the floor,\ndrunk as a lord!\n\nTo see a young man of his wit--his eloquence--his education--his\nhitherto unstained character and high promise, thus overwhelmed by a\nworse than brutal vice, would have been a sad sight to Ben, even\nthough that young man had been an entire stranger. But oh! how tenfold\nsad to see such marks of ruinous dishonour on one so dear, and from\nwhom he had expected so much.\n\nBen had just returned from assisting to put poor Collins to bed, when\nthe captain of the vessel which had brought him to New-York, stepped\nup and in a very respectful manner put a note into his hand.--Ben\nopened it, not without considerable agitation, and read as follows:--\n\n\"G. Burnet's compliments await young Mr. Franklin--and should be glad\nof half an hour's chat with him over a glass of wine.\"\n\n\"G. Burnet!\" said Ben, \"who can that be?\"\n\n\"Why, 'tis the governor,\" replied the captain with a smile. \"I have\njust been to see him, with some letters I brought for him from Boston.\nAnd when I told him what a world of books you have, he expressed a\ncuriosity to see you, and begged I would return with you to his\npalace.\"\n\nBen instantly set off with the captain, but not without a sigh as he\ncast a look back on the door of poor Collins' bed-room, to think what\nan honour that wretched young man had lost for the sake of two or\nthree vile gulps of filthy grog.\n\nThe governor's looks, at the approach of Ben, showed somewhat of\ndisappointment. He had, it seems, expected considerable entertainment\nfrom Ben's conversation. But his fresh and ruddy countenance showed\nhim so much younger than he had counted on, that he gave up all his\npromised entertainment as a lost hope. He received Ben, however, with\ngreat politeness, and after pressing on him a glass of wine, took him\ninto an adjoining room, which was his library, consisting of a large\nand well-chosen collection.\n\nSeeing the pleasure which sparkled in Ben's eyes as he surveyed so\nmany elegant authors, and thought of the rich stores of knowledge\nwhich they contained, the governor, with a smile of complacency, as on\na young pupil of science, said to him, \"Well, Mr. Franklin, I am told\nby the captain here, that you have a fine collection too.\"\n\n\"Only a trunk full, sir,\" said Ben.\n\n\"A trunk full!\" replied the governor. \"Why, what use can you have for\nso many books? Young people at your age have seldom read beyond the\n10th chapter of Nehemiah.\"\n\n\"I can't boast,\" replied Ben, \"of having read any great deal beyond\nthat myself; but still, I should be sorry if I could not get a trunk\nfull of books to read every six months.\" At this, the governor\nregarding him with a look of surprise, said, \"You must then, though so\nyoung, be a scholar; perhaps a teacher of the languages.\"\n\n\"No sir,\" answered Ben, \"I know no language but my own.\"\n\n\"What, not Latin nor Greek!\"\n\n\"No sir, not a word of either.\"\n\n\"Why, don't you think them necessary?\"\n\n\"I don't set myself up as a judge. But I should not suppose them\nnecessary.\"\n\n\"Aye! well, I should like to hear your reasons.\"\n\n\"Why, sir, I am not competent to give reasons that may satisfy a\ngentleman of your learning, but the following are the reasons with\nwhich I satisfy myself. I look on languages, sir, merely as arbitrary\nsounds of characters, whereby men communicate their ideas to each\nother. Now, if I already possess a language which is capable of\nconveying more ideas than I shall ever acquire, were it not wiser in\nme to improve my time in getting _sense_ through that one language,\nthan waste it in getting mere _sounds_ through fifty languages, even\nif I could learn as many?\"\n\nHere the governor paused a moment, though not without a little red on\nhis cheeks, for having only a minute before put Ben and the 10th\nchapter of Nehemiah so close together. However, catching a new idea,\nhe took another start. \"Well, but, my dear sir, you certainly differ\nfrom the learned world, which is, you know, decidedly in favour of the\nlanguages.\"\n\n\"I would not wish wantonly to differ from the learned world,\" said\nBen, \"especially when they maintain opinions that seem to be founded\non truth. But when this is not the case, to differ from them I have\never thought my duty; and especially since I studied Locke.\"\n\n\"Locke!\" cried the governor with surprise, \"_you studied Locke!_\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I studied Locke on the Understanding three years ago, when\nI was thirteen.\"\n\n\"You amaze me, sir. You studied Locke on the Understanding at\nthirteen!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I did.\"\n\n\"Well, and pray at what college did you study Locke at thirteen; for\nat Cambridge college in Old England, where I got my education, they\nnever allowed the senior class to look at Locke till eighteen?\"\n\n\"Why, sir, it was my misfortune never to be at a college, nor even at\na grammar school, except nine months when I was a child.\"\n\nHere the governor sprung from his seat, and staring at Ben, cried out,\n\"the devil! well, and where--where did you get your education, pray?\"\n\n\"At home, sir, in a tallow chandler's shop.\"\n\n\"In a tallow chandler's shop!\" screamed the governor.\n\n\"Yes, sir; my father was a poor old tallow chandler, with sixteen\nchildren, and I the youngest of all. At eight he put me to school, but\nfinding he could not spare the money from the rest of the children to\nkeep me there, he took me home into the shop, where I assisted him by\ntwisting the candle wicks and filling the moulds all day, and at night\nI read by myself. At twelve, my father bound me to my brother, a\nprinter, in Boston, and with him I worked hard all day at the press\nand cases, and again read by myself at night.\"\n\nHere the governor, spanking his hands together, put up a loud whistle,\nwhile his eye-balls, wild with surprise, rolled about in their sockets\nas if in a mighty mind to hop out. \"Impossible, young man!\" he\nexclaimed: \"Impossible! you are only sounding my credulity. I can\nnever believe one half of all this.\" Then turning to the captain, he\nsaid, \"captain, you are an intelligent man, and from Boston; pray tell\nme can this young man here, be aiming at any thing but to quiz me?\"\n\n\"No, indeed, please your excellency,\" replied the captain, \"Mr.\nFranklin is not quizzing you. He is saying what is really true, for I\nam acquainted with his father and family.\"\n\nThe governor then turning to Ben said, more moderately, \"Well, my dear\nwonderful boy, I ask your pardon for doubting your word; and now pray\ntell me, for I feel a stronger desire than ever to hear your objection\nto learning the dead languages.\"\n\n\"Why, sir, I object to it principally on account of the shortness of\nhuman life. Taking them one with another, men do not live above forty\nyears. Plutarch, indeed, puts it only thirty-three. But say forty.\nWell, of this full ten years are lost in childhood, before any boy\nthinks of a Latin grammar. This brings the forty down to thirty. Now\nof such a moment as this, to spend five or six years in learning the\ndead languages, especially when all the best books in those languages\nare translated into ours, and besides, we already have more books on\nevery subject than such short-lived creatures can ever acquire, seems\nvery preposterous.\"\n\n\"Well, but what are you to do with their great poets, Virgil and\nHomer, for example; I suppose you would not think of translating Homer\nout of his rich native Greek into our poor homespun English, would\nyou?\"\n\n\"Why not, sir?\"\n\n\"Why I should as soon think of transplanting a pine-apple from Jamaica\nto Boston.\"\n\n\"Well, sir, a skilful gardener, with his hot-house, can give us nearly\nas fine a pine-apple as any in Jamaica. And so Mr. Pope, with his fine\nimagination, has given us Homer, in English, with more of his beauties\nthan ordinary scholars would find in him after forty years' study of\nthe Greek. And besides, sir, if Homer was not translated, I am far\nfrom thinking it would be worth spending five or six years to learn to\nread him in his own language.\"\n\n\"You differ from the critics, Mr. Franklin; for the critics all tell\nus that his beauties are inimitable.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, and the naturalists tell us that the beauties of the\nbasilisk are inimitable too.\"\n\n\"The basilisk, sir! Homer compared with the basilisk! I really don't\nunderstand you, sir.\"\n\n\"Why, I mean, sir, that as the basilisk is the more to be dreaded for\nthe beautiful skin that covers his poison, so Homer for the bright\ncolourings he throws over bad characters and passions. Now, as I don't\nthink the beauties of poetry are comparable to those of philanthropy,\nnor a thousandth part so important to human happiness, I must confess\nI dread Homer, especially as the companion of youth. The humane and\ngentle virtues are certainly the greatest charms and sweeteners of\nlife. And I suppose, sir, you would hardly think of sending your son\nto Achilles to learn these.\"\n\n\"I agree he has too much revenge in his composition.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, and when painted in the colours which Homer's glowing fancy\nlends, what youth but must run the most imminent risk of catching a\nspark of bad fire from such a blaze as he throws on his pictures?\"\n\n\"Why this, though an uncommon view of the subject, is, I confess, an\ningenious one, Mr. Franklin; but surely 'tis overstrained.\"\n\n\"Not at all, sir; we are told from good authority, that it was the\nreading of Homer that first put it into the head of Alexander the\ngreat to become a HERO: and after him of Charles the 12th. What\nmillions of human beings have been slaughtered by these two great\nbutchers is not known; but still probably not a tythe of what have\nperished in duels between individuals from the pride and revenge\nnursed by reading Homer.\"\n\n\"Well, sir,\" replied the governor, \"I never heard the prince of bards\ntreated in this way before. You must certainly be singular in your\ncharges against Homer.\"\n\n\"I ask your pardon, sir, I have the honour to think of Homer exactly\nas did the greatest philosopher of antiquity; I mean Plato, who\nstrictly forbids the reading of Homer in his republic. And yet Plato\nwas a heathen. I don't boast myself as a christian; and yet I am\nshocked at the inconsistency of our Latin and Greek teachers\n(generally christians and DIVINES too,) who can one day put Homer into\nthe hands of their pupils, and in the midst of their recitations can\nstop them short to point out the _divine beauties_ and _sublimities_\nwhich the poet gives to his hero, in the bloody work of slaughtering\nthe poor Trojans; and the next day take them to church to hear a\ndiscourse from Christ on the blessedness of meekness and forgiveness.\nNo wonder that hot-livered young men thus educated, should despise\nmeekness and forgiveness, as mere cowards' virtues, and deem nothing\nso glorious as fighting duels, and blowing out brains.\"\n\nHere the governor came to a pause, like a gamester at his last trump.\nBut perceiving Ben cast his eyes on a splendid copy of Pope's works,\nhe suddenly seized that as a _fine_ opportunity to turn the\nconversation. So stepping up, he placed his hand on his shoulder, and\nin a very familiar manner said, \"Well, Mr. Franklin, there's an author\nthat I am sure you'll not quarrel with; an author that I think you'll\npronounce _faultless_.\"\n\n\"Why, sir,\" replied Ben, \"I entertain a most exalted opinion of Pope;\nbut still, sir, I think he is not without his faults.\"\n\n\"It would puzzle you, I suspect, Mr. Franklin, as keen a critic as you\nare, to point out _one_.\"\n\n\"Well, sir,\" answered Ben, hastily turning to the place, \"what do you\nthink of this famous couplet of Mr. Pope's--\n\n    \"Immodest words admit of no defence,\n    For want of decency is want of sense.\"\n\n\"I see no fault there.\"\n\n\"No, indeed!\" replied Ben, \"why now to my mind a man can ask no better\nexcuse for any thing wrong he does, than his _want of sense_.\"\n\n\"Well, sir,\" said the governor, sensibly staggered, \"and how would you\nalter it?\"\n\n\"Why, sir, if I might presume to alter a line in this great Poet, I\nwould do it in this way:--\n\n    \"Immodest words admit but _this_ defence--\n    That want of decency is want of sense.\"\n\nHere the governor caught Ben in his arms as a delighted father would\nhis son, calling out at the same time to the captain, \"How greatly am\nI obliged to you, sir, for bringing me to an acquaintance with this\ncharming boy? O! what a delightful thing it would be for us old\nfellows to converse with sprightful youth if they were but all like\nhim!--But the d----l of it is, most parents are as blind as bats to\nthe true glory and happiness of their children. Most parents never\nlook higher for their sons than to see them delving like muckworms for\nmoney; or hopping about like jay-birds, in fine feathers. Hence their\nconversation is generally no better than froth and nonsense.\"\n\nAfter several other handsome compliments on Ben, and the captain\nexpressing a wish to be going, the governor shook hands with Ben,\nbegging at the same time that he would for ever consider him as one of\nhis fastest friends, and also never came to New-York without coming to\nsee him.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XX.\n\n\nOn returning to the tavern, he hastened into his chamber, where he\nfound his drunken comrade, poor Collins, in a fine perspiration, and\nconsiderably sobered, owing to the refrigerating effects of a pint of\nstrong sage tea, with a tea-spoonful of saltpetre, which Ben, before\nhe set out to the governor's, had pressed on him as a remedy he had\nsomewhere read, much in vogue among the London topers, to _cool off_\nafter a rum fever. Collins appeared still to have enough of brandy in\nhim for a frolic; but when Ben came to tell him of the amiable\ngovernor Burnet, in whose company, at his own palace, he had spent a\nmost delightful evening; and also to remind him of the golden\nopportunity he had lost, of forming an acquaintance with that noble\ngentleman, poor Collins wept bitterly.\n\nBen was exceedingly affected to see him in tears, and endeavoured to\ncomfort him. But he refused comfort. He said, \"if this had been the\n_first time_, he should not himself think much of it; but he candidly\nconfessed, that for a long time he had been guilty of it, though till\nof late he had always kept it to himself, drinking in his chamber. But\nnow he felt at times,\" he said, \"an awful apprehension that he was a\n_lost man_. His cravings for liquor were so strong on the one hand,\nand on the other his powers of resistance so feeble, that it put him\nfearfully in mind of the dismal state of a poor wretch, within the\nfatal attraction of a whirlpool, whose resistless suction, in spite of\nall his feeble efforts, was hurrying him down to sure and speedy\ndestruction.\"\n\nCollins, who was exceedingly eloquent on every subject, but especially\non one so nearly affecting himself, went on deploring his misfortune\nin strains so tender and pathetic, that Ben, whose eyes were fountains\never ready to flow at the voice of sorrow, could not refrain from\nweeping, which he did most unfeignedly for a long esteemed friend now\ngoing to ruin. He could bear, he said, to see the brightest plumed\nbird, charmed by the rattle-snake, descending into the horrid\nsepulchre of the monster's jaws. He could bear to see the richest\nladen Indiaman, dismasted and rudderless, drifting ashore on the\nmerciless breakers; because made of dust, these things must at any\nrate return to dust, again. But to see an immortal mind stopped in her\nfirst soarings, entangled and limed in the filth of so brutal a vice\nas drunkenness--that was a sight he could not bear. And as a mother\nlooking on her child that is filleted for the accursed Moloch, cannot\notherwise than shed tears, so Ben, when he looked on poor Collins,\ncould not but weep when he saw him the victim of destruction.\n\nHowever, as a good wit turns every thing to advantage, this sudden and\ndistressing fall of poor Collins, set Ben to thinking: and the result\nof his thoughts noted down in his journal of that day, deserves the\nattention of all young men of this day; and even will as long as human\nnature endures.\n\n\"Wit,\" says he, \"in young men, is dangerous, because apt to breed\nvanity, which, when disappointed, brings them down, and by depriving\nthem of _natural_ cheerfulness, drives them to the bottle for that\nwhich is _artificial_.--And learning also is dangerous, when it is\naimed at as an _end_ and not a _mean_. A young man who aspires to be\nlearned merely for _fame_, is in danger; for, familiarity breeding\ncontempt, creates an uneasy void that drives him to the bottle. Hence\nso many learned men with red noses. But when a man from a benevolent\nheart, seeks learning for the sublime pleasure of imitating the Deity\nin _doing good_, he is always made so happy in the spirit and pursuit\nof this godlike object, that he needs not the stimulus of brandy.\"\n\nThis one hint, if duly reflected on by young men, would render the\nname of Franklin dear to them for ever.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXI.\n\n\nThe next day, when they came to settle with the tavern-keeper, and Ben\nwith his usual alacrity had paraded his dollars for payment, poor\nCollins hung back, pale and dumb-founded, as a truant school-boy at\nthe call to recitation. The truth is, the fumes of his brandy having\ndriven all the wit out of his noddle, had puffed it up with such\ninfinite vanity, that he must needs turn in, red faced and silly as he\nwas, to gamble with the cool-headed water-drinking sharpers of\nNew-York. The reader hardly need be informed, that poor Collins'\npistareens, which he had scraped together for this expedition, were to\nthese light-fingered gentlemen as a fry of young herrings to the\nhungry dog-fish.\n\nBen was now placed in a most awkward predicament. To pay off Collins'\nscores at New-York, and also his expenses on the road to Philadelphia,\nwould drain him to the last farthing. But how could he leave in\ndistress a young friend with whom he had passed so many happy days and\nnights in the elegant pleasure of literature, and for whom he had\ncontracted such an attachment! Ben could not bear the idea, especially\nas his young friend, if left in this sad condition, might be driven to\ndespair; so drawing his purse he paid off Collins' bill, which, from\nthe quantity of liquor he had drank, was swelled to a serious amount;\nand taking him by the arm, set out with a heart much heavier than his\npurse, which indeed was now so empty that had it not been replenished\nat Bristol by the thirty pounds for which, as we have seen, Vernon\ngave him an order on a gentleman living there, who readily paid it,\nwould never have carried him and his drunken companion to\nPhiladelphia. On their arrival Collins endeavoured to procure\nemployment as a merchant's clerk, and paraded with great confidence\nhis letters of recommendation. But his breath betrayed him. And the\nmerchants would have nothing to say to him notwithstanding all his\nletters; he continued, therefore, to lodge and board with Ben at his\nexpense. Nor was this all; for knowing that Ben had Vernon's money, he\nwas continually craving loans of it, promising to pay as soon as he\nshould get into business. By thus imposing on Ben's friendship,\ngetting a little of him at one time, and a little at another, he had\nat last got so much of it, that when Ben, who had gone on _lending_\nwithout taking note, came to count Vernon's money, he could hardly\nfind a dollar to count!\n\nIt is not easy to describe the agitation of Ben's mind on making this\ndiscovery; nor the alternate chill and fever, that discoloured his\ncheeks, as he reflected on his own egregious folly in this affair.\n\"What demon,\" said he to himself, as he bit his lip, \"could have put\nit into my head to tell Collins that I had Vernon's money! Didn't I\nknow that a drunkard has no more reason in him than a hog; and can no\nbetter be satisfied, unless like him he is eternally pulling at his\nfilthy swill? And have I indeed been all this time throwing away\nVernon's money for brandy to addle the brain of this poor _self-made_\nbrute? Well then, I am served exactly as I deserve, for thus making\nmyself a pander to his vices. But now that the money is all gone, and\nI without a shilling to replace it, what's to be done? Vernon will, no\ndoubt, soon learn that I have collected his money; and will of course\nbe daily expecting to hear from me. But what can I write? To tell him\nthat I have collected his money, but lent it to a poor, pennyless sot,\nwill sound like a pretty story, to a man of business! And if I don't\nwrite to him, what will he think of me, and what will become of that\nhigh opinion he had formed of me, on which it appeared he would have\ntrusted me with thousands? So you see, I have got myself into a pretty\nhobble. And worse than all yet, how shall I ever again lift up my\nbooby face to my affectionate brother John, after having thus basely\nstabbed him, through his friend, as also through the honour of our\nfamily! O my dear, dear old father; now I see your wisdom and my own\nfolly! A thousand times did you tell me I was too young; too\ninexperienced yet, to undertake by myself.--But no. It would not all\ndo. For the life of you, you could not lead or drive such divine\ncounsel into this conceited noddle of mine. I despised it as the\n_weakness of old age_, and much too _slow_ for me. I wanted to save\ntime, and get three or four years ahead of other young men; and that\ntempted me to disobedience. Well, I am justly punished for it! My\nbubble is broke. And now I see I shall be thrown back as long as if I\nhad continued the apprentice of my brother James!!\"\n\nO young men! young men! you that with segars in your mouths, and faces\nflushed with libations of whiskey, can fancy yourselves _clever\nfellows_, and boast the long list of your _dear friends_, O think of\nthe curses that Ben bestowed on his dear friend Collins, for bringing\nhim in such a scrape; and learn that an idle, drinking rascal has no\nfriends. If you think otherwise, it is only a proof that you don't\neven yet understand the meaning of the word. FRIENDS indeed! you talk\nof friends! What, _you_, who instead of nobly pressing on for VIRTUE\nand KNOWLEDGE and WEALTH, to make yourselves an honour and blessing to\nyour connexions, are constantly, by your drunken and gambling courses,\nmaking yourselves a disgrace and curse to them. And when, like that\nfool in the parable, your all is gone, then, instead of modestly going\nwith him into the fields, to feed the swine, you have the impudence to\nquarter your rags and red noses on your _dear friends_, spunging and\nborrowing of them as long as they'll lend. And if at last, they should\nget wise enough to refuse such unconscionable leechers, as would suck\nevery drop of their blood, instantly you can turn tail and abuse your\n_dear friends_ as though they were pick-pockets.--Witness now master\nCollins.\n\nJust as Ben was in the midst of his fever and pet, on discovering as\naforesaid, the great injury which Collins had done him, who but that\npromising youth should come in, red faced and blowzy, and with extreme\nconfidence, demand of him a couple of dollars. Ben, rather tartly,\nreplied that he had no more to spare. \"Pshaw,\" answered Collins, \"'tis\nonly a brace of dollars I want, just to treat an old Boston\nacquaintance I fell in with at the tavern, and you know Vernon tipt\nyou 'the shiners' t'other day to the tune of a round hundred.\" \"Yes,\"\nreplied Ben, \"but what with two dollars at one time, and two at\nanother, you have taken nearly the whole.\" \"Well, man, and what of\nthat,\" rejoined Collins, swaggeringly; \"suppose I had taken the\n_whole_; yes, and twice as much, sha'nt I get into fine business\npresently, some head clerk's place, or governor's secretary? And then\nyou'll see how I'll tumble you in the _yellow boys_ hand over hand,\nand pay you off these little beggarly items all at a dash.\"\n\n\"_Fair words, Mr. Collins_,\" answered Ben, \"_butter no parsnips_. And\nyou have been so long talking at this rate, and yet doing nothing,\nthat I really am afraid----\"\n\n\"Afraid, the d----l,\" interrupted Collins, insultingly, \"afraid of\nwhat? But see here, Mr. Franklin, I came to you, not to preach to me,\nbut to lend me a couple of dollars. And now all that you have to do is\njust to tell me, at a word, whether you can lend them or not.\"\n\n\"Well then, at a word, I cannot,\" said Ben.\n\n\"Well then, you are an ungrateful fellow,\" retorted Collins.\n\n\"Ungrateful?\" asked Ben, utterly astonished.\n\n\"Yes, an ungrateful fellow,\" replied Collins. \"You dare not deny, sir,\nthat it was I who first took you out of the tallow pots and grease of\nyour old father's candle shop in Boston, and made a man of you. And\nnow after all, when I only ask you to lend me a couple of shabby\ndollars to treat a friend, you can refuse me! Well, keep your dollars\nto yourself and be d----d for an ungrateful fellow as you are!\" then\nwheeling on his heel he went off, blustering and swollen with passion,\nas though he had been most outrageously ill-treated. Soon as Ben had\nrecovered himself a little from the stupefaction into which this\ntornado of Collins had thrown him, he clapped his hands, and rolling\nup his eyes like one devoutly given, exclaimed, \"O Ulysses, well\ncalled wise! You, though a heathen, could lash your sailors to the\nmast to keep them from going ashore to be made hogs of at the _grog\nshops of Circe_, while I, the son of an old presbyterian christian,\nthe son of his old age, and heir elect of all his wisdom, have been\nhere now for weeks together, lending money to brutalize my own friend!\nWould to heaven, I had been but half as wise as you, I should not have\nbeen so shamefully fleeced, and now so grossly insulted by this young\nswine, Collins. But what brain of man could have suspected this of\nhim? After taking him out of the stye of a jug tavern in New-York,\nwhere he was up to the back in dirt and debt--after paying all his\nexpenses to Philadelphia, and here supporting him cheerfully, out of\nmy hard and scanty earnings;--after submitting, for cheapness sake, to\nsleep in the same bed with him every night, scorched with his\nrum-fevered flesh, drenched in his nocturnal sweats, and poisoned with\nhis filthy breath; and still worse, after lending him nearly the whole\nof Vernon's money, and thereby brought my own silly nose to the\ngrindstone, perhaps for many a doleful year, I should now at last be\nrequited with all this abuse: d--n--d for an _ungrateful fellow_!!\nWell, I don't know where all this is to end; but I will still hope for\nthe best. I hope it will teach me this important lesson, never to have\nany thing to do with a _sot_ again, as long as I live. But stop,\nthough I refused him money to get drunk with, I still feel a\nfriendship for this wretched young man, this Collins; and will still\nwork to support him, while he stays with me. It is likely that now,\nthat he can get no more money from me, he will take his departure; and\nthen, if my senses remain, I think I will for ever hereafter shun, as\nI would a beast, the young man who drinks _drams and grog_.\"\n\nFrom his going off in such a pet, Ben had supposed at first, that\nCollins would not return again. But having no money nor friends in\nPhiladelphia, the poor fellow came back at night, to his old roosting\nplace with Ben, by whom he was received with the same good humour as\nif nothing had happened. But though the injured may forgive, the\ninjurer seldom does. Collins never looked straight at Ben after this.\nThe recollection of the past kept him sore. And to be dependent on one\nwhom, in the pride of former days, he had thought his inferior,\nrendered his condition so uneasy, that he longed for an opportunity to\nget out of it. Fortunately an opportunity soon offered. The captain of\na trader to the West Indies, falling in with him one day at a tavern,\nwhere he was spouting away at a most elegant rate, was so charmed with\nhis vivacity and wit, which most young fools, half shaved, are apt to\nfigure in, that he offered him the place of a private tutor in a rich\nfamily in Jamaica. Dame fortune, in her best humour, with all her\ncogged dice in the bargain, could not, as Collins himself thought,\nhave thrown him a luckier hit. Young black eyed creoles, with fourth\nproof spirit, in all its delicious modifications, of _slings, bumbo\nand punch_, dancing before his delighted fancy, in such mazes of\npleasurable promise, that 'tis likely he would hardly have exchanged\nplaces with the grand Turk. With a countenance glowing with joy, he\nhastened to Ben to tell him the glorious news, and to take leave.\nAfter heartily congratulating him on his good fortune, Ben asked, if\nhe would not want a little money to _fit him out_. Collins thanked\nhim, but said that the captain, who had engaged him, was such a\nnoble-hearted fellow, that he had, of his own accord, advanced him\n_three half joes_ to put him into what he called \"_complete sailing\ntrim_.\" Though Ben had of late been so scurvily treated by Collins, as\nto think it very desirable to be quit of him; yet, when the time came,\nhe found it no such easy matter for the heart to dissolve the ties of\na long and once pleasant friendship. He had passed with Collins many\nof his happiest hours, and these too, in the sweetest season of life,\nand amidst pleasures which best lift the soul from earth, and spring\nthose unutterable hopes she delights in. How then, without tears,\ncould he for the last time, feel the strong pressure of his hand, and\ncatch the parting glance? On the other side, through watery eyes and\nbroken accents, poor Collins sobbed out his last adieu, not without\nhearty thanks, for the many favors which Ben had done him, and solemn\npromises of speedily _writing to him, and remitting all his money_.\nCharity would fain believe, that he fully so intended; but alas! nor\nmoney, nor friend did Ben ever hear of afterwards. This elegant victim\nof rum, was no doubt presented by the captain to the wealthy family in\nJamaica. And being introduced, under the genial influence perhaps of a\ncheerful glass, 'tis likely that with his advantages of education and\neloquence, he made such a figure in the eyes of those wealthy and\nhospitable islanders, that they were in raptures with him, and fondly\ncounted that they had got an elegant young schoolmaster who was to\nmake scholars and wits of the whole family. Perhaps too, their darling\nhope, a blooming daughter, was seen to heave the tender sigh, as\nblushing she darted the side-long glance upon him. But alas! the next\nday sees the elegant young schoolmaster _dead drunk!_ and the amiable\nfamily all in the dumps again. 'Tis more than probable, that after\nhaving been alternately received and dismissed from a dozen wealthy\nfamilies, he sunk at length, into tattered garments, and a\ngrog-blossomed face; the mournful victim of intemperance. And now\nperhaps, after all the fair prospects of his youth, and all the fond\nhopes of his parents, poor Collins, untimely buried in a foreign\nchurch-yard, only serves for the pious to point their children to his\nearly tomb and remind them how vain are talents and education without\nthe restraints of religion.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXII.\n\n\nSoon as Ben reached Philadelphia, as aforesaid, he waited on the\ngovernor, who received him with joy, eagerly calling out, \"_Well my\ndear boy, what success? What success?_\" Ben, with a smile, drew his\nfather's letter from his pocket. The governor snatched it, as if all\nimpatient to see its contents, which he ran through with a devouring\nhaste. When he was done, he shook his head and said, \"it was to be\nsure a sensible letter, a vastly sensible letter; _but_--_but_,--it\nwon't do,\" continued he to Ben, \"no, it won't do; your father is too\ncautious, entirely too cautious, sir.\" Hereupon he fell into a brown\nstudy, with his eyes nailed to the ground, as in a profound reverie.\nAfter a moment's pause, he suddenly looked up, and with a countenance\nbright as with some happy thought, he cried out, \"I've got it, my dear\nyoung friend, I've got it exactly. Zounds! what signifies making two\nbites at a cherry? _In for a penny, in for a pound_, is my way. Since\nyour father will do nothing for you, I'll do it all myself. A printer\nI want, and a printer I'll have, that's a clear case: and I am sure\nyou are the lad that will suit me to a fraction. So give me a list of\nthe articles you want from England, and I will send for them by the\nvery next ship, and set you up at once: and all I shall expect of you,\nis that you'll pay me when you are able!!\" Seeing the tear swelling in\nBen's eye, the governor took him by the hand, and in a softened tone\nsaid, \"come, nothing of that my dear boy, nothing of that. A lad of\nyour talents and merit, must not languish in the back ground for lack\nof a little money to bring you forward. So make me out, as I said, a\nlist of such articles as you may want, and I'll send for them at once\nto London.--But stop! would it not be better for you to go to London,\nand choose these things yourself? you could then, you know, be sure to\nhave them all of the best quality. And besides, you could form an\nacquaintance with _some clever fellows_ in the book selling and\nstationary line, whose friendship might be worth a Jew's eye to you,\nin your business here.\"\n\nBen, hardly able now to speak, thanked the governor as well as he\ncould for so generous an offer.--\"Well then,\" continued the governor,\n\"get yourself in readiness to go with the Annis.\" The reader will\nplease to be informed, that the Annis was, at that time, (1722) the\nonly regular trader between London and Philadelphia; and she made but\none voyage in the year! Finding that the Annis was not to sail for\nseveral months yet, Ben prudently continued to do journey work for old\nKeimer; but often haunted with the ghost of Vernon's money which he\nhad lent to Collins, and for fear of what would become of him if\nVernon should be strict _to mark his iniquities_ in that mad affair.\nBut happily for him, Vernon made no demand. It appeared afterwards\nthat this worthy man had not forgotten his money. But learning from a\nvariety of quarters, that Ben was a perfect non-descript of industry\nand frugality, he concluded that as the money was not paid, Ben was\nprobably under the hatches. He therefore, generously, let the matter\nlie over till a distant day, when Ben, as we shall by and by see, paid\nhim up fully, both principal and interest, and thus recovered the high\nground he formerly held in his friendship. Thanks be to God, who has\ngiven to inflexible honesty and industry, such power over the \"_heart\nstrings_,\" as well as \"_purse strings_,\" of mankind.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXIII.\n\n\nBen was naturally comic in a high degree, and this pleasant vein,\ngreatly improved by his present golden prospects, betrayed him into\nmany a frolic with Keimer, to whom he had prudently attached himself\nas a journeyman, until the Annis should sail. The reader will excuse\nBen for these frolics when he comes to learn what were their aims; as\nalso what an insufferable old creature this Keimer was. Silly as a\nBOOBY, yet vain as a JAY, and garrulous as a PIE, he could never rest\nbut when in a stiff argument, and acting the orator, at which he\nlooked on Cicero himself as but a boy to him. Here was a fine target\nfor Ben's SOCRATIC ARTILLERY, which he frequently played off on the\nold pomposo with great effect. By questions artfully put, he would\nobtain of him certain points, which Keimer readily granted, as seeing\nin them no sort of connexion with the matter in debate. But yet these\npoints, when granted, like distant nets slyly hauling round a porpoise\nor sturgeon, would, by degrees, so completely circumvent the silly\nfish, that with all his flouncing and fury he could never extricate\nhimself, but rather got more deeply entangled. Often caught in this\nway, he became at last so afraid of Ben's _questions_, that he would\nturn as mad when one of them was \"_poked at him_,\" as a bull at sight\nof a scarlet cloak; and would not answer the simplest question without\nfirst asking, \"_well, and what would you make of that?_\" He came at\nlength to form so exalted an opinion of Ben's talents for refutation,\nthat he seriously proposed to him one day that they should turn out\ntogether and preach up a NEW RELIGION! Keimer was to preach and make\nthe converts, and Ben to answer and put to silence the gainsayers. He\nsaid a _world of money_ might be made by it.\n\nOn hearing the outlines of this new religion, Ben found great fault\nwith it. This he did only that he might have another frolic with\nKeimer; but his frolics were praiseworthy, for they all \"leaned to\nvirtue's side.\" The truth is, he saw that Keimer was prodigiously a\nhypocrite. At every whip-stitch he could play the knave, and then for\na pretence would read his Bible. But it was not the _moral part_ of\nthe Bible, the sweet precepts and parables of the Gospel that he read.\nNo verily. Food so angelic was not at all to the tooth of his childish\nfancy, which delighted in nothing but the _novel_ and _curious_. Like\ntoo many of the saints now-a-days, he would rather read about the\nWITCH OF ENDOR, than the GOOD SAMARITAN, and hear a sermon on the\n_brazen candlesticks_ than on the LOVE OF GOD. And then, O dear! who\nwas Melchizedeck? Or where was the land of Nod? Or, was it in the\nshape of a _serpent or a monkey_ that the devil tempted Eve? As he was\none day poring over the pentateuch as busy after some nice game of\nthis sort as a terrier on the track of a weazle, he came to that\nfamous text where Moses says, \"_thou shall not mar the corners of thy\nbeard_.\" Aye! this was the divinity for Keimer. It struck him like a\nnew light from the clouds: then rolling his eyes as from an\napparition, he exclaimed, \"miserable man that I am! and was I indeed\nforbidden to mar even the corners of my beard, and have I been all\nthis time shaving myself as smooth as an eunuch! Fire and brimstone,\nhow have you been boiling up for me, and I knew it not! Hell, deepest\nhell is my portion, that's a clear case, unless I reform. And reform I\nwill if I live. Yes, my poor naked chin, if ever I but get another\ncrop upon thee and I suffer it to be touched by the ungodly steel,\nthen let my right hand forget her cunning.\"\n\nFrom that day he became as shy of a razor as ever Samson was. His long\nblack whiskers \"_whistled in the wind_.\" And then to see how he would\nstand up before his glass and stroke them down, it would have reminded\nyou of some ancient Druid, adjusting the _sacred Mistletoe_.\n\nBen could not bear that sight. Such shameless neglect of angel\nmorality, and yet such fidgetting about a goatish beard! \"Heavens,\nsir,\" said he to Keimer, one day in the midst of a hot argument,\n\n    \"Who can think, with common sense,\n    A smooth shaved face gives God offence?\n    Or that a whisker hath a charm,\n    Eternal justice to disarm?\"\n\nHe even proposed to him to get _shaved_. Keimer swore outright that he\nwould never lose his beard. A stiff altercation ensued. But Keimer\ngetting angry, Ben agreed at last to give up the beard. He said that,\n\"as the beard at best was but an external, a mere excrescence, he\nwould not insist on that as so very essential. But certainly sir,\"\ncontinued he, \"there is one thing that is.\"\n\nKeimer wanted to know what that was.\n\n\"Why sir,\" added Ben, \"this turning out and preaching up a NEW\nRELIGION, is, without doubt, a very serious affair, and ought not to\nbe undertaken too hastily. Much time, sir, in my opinion at least,\nshould be spent in making preparation, in which, fasting should\ncertainly have a large share.\"\n\nKeimer, who was a great glutton, said he could _never fast_.\n\nBen then insisted that if they were not to fast altogether, they\nought, at any rate, to abstain from animal food, and live as the\nsaints of old did, on _vegetables_ and _water_.\n\nKeimer shook his head, and said that if he were to live on vegetables\nand water, he should soon die.\n\nBen assured him that it was entirely a mistake. He had tried it often,\nhe said, and could testify from his own experience that he was never\nmore healthy and cheerful than when he lived on vegetables alone. \"Die\nfrom feeding on vegetables, indeed! Why, sir, it contradicts reason;\nand contradicts all history, ancient and profane. There was Daniel,\nand his three young friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who fed\non a vegetable diet, of choice; did they languish and die of it? or\nrather did they not display a rouge of health and fire of genius, far\nbeyond those silly youths who crammed on all the luxuries of the royal\ntable? And that amiable Italian nobleman, Lewis Cornaro, who says of\nbread, that it was such a dainty to his palate, that he was almost\nafraid, at times, it was too good for him to eat; did he languish and\ndie of this simple fare? On the contrary, did he not out-live three\ngenerations of gratified epicures; and after all, go off in his second\ncentury, like a bird of Paradise, singing the praises of Temperance\nand Virtue? And pray, sir,\" continued Ben, \"where's the wonder of all\nthis? Must not the blood that is formed of vegetables be the purest in\nnature? And then, as the spirits depend on the blood, must not the\nspirits secreted from such blood be the purest too? And when this is\nthe case with the blood and spirits, which are the very life of the\nman, must not that man enjoy the best chance for such healthy\nsecretions and circulations as are most conducive to long and happy\nlife?\"\n\nWhile Ben argued at this rate, Keimer regarded him with a look which\nseemed to say, \"Very true, sir; all this is very true; but still I\ncannot _go it_.\"\n\nBen, still unwilling to give up his point, thought he would make one\nmore push at him. \"What a pity it is,\" said he with a sigh, \"that the\nblessings of so sublime a religion should be all lost to the world,\nmerely for lack of a little fortitude on the part of its propagators.\"\n\nThis was touching him on the right string; for Keimer was a man of\nsuch vanity, that a little flattery would put him up to any thing. So\nafter a few _hems_ and _ha's_, he said, he believed he would, at any\nrate, make a trial of this new regimen.\n\nHaving thus carried his point, Ben immediately engaged a poor old\nwoman of the neighbourhood to become their cook; and gave her off\nhand, written receipts for three and forty dishes; not one of which\ncontained a single atom of fish, flesh, or fowl. For their first day's\nbreakfast on the _new regimen_, the old woman treated them with a\nterrene of oatmeal gruel. Keimer was particularly fond of his\nbreakfast, at which a nice beef-stake with onion sauce was a standing\ndish. It was as good as a farce to Ben, to see with what an eye Keimer\nregarded the terrene, when entering the room, in place of his stake,\nhot, smoking, and savory, he beheld this pale, meagre-looking slop.\n\n\"What have you got there?\" said he, with a visage grum, and scowling\neye.\n\n\"A dish of hasty pudding,\" replied Ben, with the smile of an innocent\nyouth who had a keen appetite, with something good to satisfy it--\"a\ndish of nice hasty pudding, sir, made of oats.\"\n\n\"Of OATS!\" retorted Keimer, with a voice raised to a scream.\n\n\"Yes, sir, _oats_,\" rejoined Ben,--\"_oats_, that precious grain which\ngives such elegance and fire to our noblest of quadrupeds, the horse.\"\n\nKeimer growled out, that he was no horse to eat oats.\n\n\"No matter for that,\" replied Ben, \"'tis equally good for men.\"\n\nKeimer denied that any human being ever eat oats.\n\n\"Aye!\" said Ben, \"and pray what's become of the Scotch? Don't they\nlive on oats; and yet, where will you find a people so 'bonny, blythe,\nand gay;' a nation of such wits and warriors.\"\n\nAs there was no answering this, Keimer sat down to the terrene, and\nswallowed a few spoonfuls, but not without making as many wry faces as\nif it had been so much jalap; while Ben, all smile and chat,\nbreakfasted most deliciously.\n\nAt dinner, by Ben's order, the old woman paraded a trencher piled up\nwith potatoes. Keimer's grumbling fit came on him again. \"He saw clear\nenough,\" he said, \"that he was to be poisoned.\"\n\n\"Poh, cheer up, man,\" replied Ben; \"this is your right preacher's\nbread.\"\n\n\"Bread the d----l!\" replied Keimer, snarling.\n\n\"Yes, bread, sir,\" continued Ben, pleasantly; \"the bread of _life_,\nsir; for where do you find such health and spirits, such bloom and\nbeauty, as among the honest-hearted IRISH, and yet for their\nbreakfast, dinner, and supper, the potato is their tetotum; the\n_first_, _second_, and _third_ course.\" In this way, Ben and his old\nwoman went on with Keimer; daily ringing the changes on oat-meal\ngruel, roasted potatoes, boiled rice, and so on, through the whole\nfamily of roots and grains in all their various genders, moods, and\ntenses.\n\nSometimes, like a restive mule, Keimer would kick up and show strong\nsymptoms of flying the way. But then Ben would prick him up again with\na touch of his ruling passion, vanity; \"only think, Mr. Keimer,\" he\nwould say, \"only think what has been done by the founders of _new\nreligions_: how they have enlightened the ignorant, polished the rude,\ncivilized the savage, and made heroes of those who were little better\nthan brutes. Think, sir, what Moses did among the stiff-necked Jews;\nwhat Mahomet did among the wild Arabs--and what you may do among these\ngentle drab-coated Pennsylvanians.\" This, like a spur in the flank of\na jaded horse, gave Keimer a new start, and pushed him on afresh to\nhis gruel breakfasts and potato dinners. Ben strove hard to keep him\nup to this gait. Often at table, and especially when he saw that\nKeimer was in good humour and fed kindly, he would give a loose to\nfancy, and paint the advantages of their new regimen in the most\nglowing colours. \"Aye, sir,\" he would say, letting drop at the same\ntime his spoon, as in an ecstasy of his subject, while his pudding on\nthe platter cooled--\"aye, sir, now we are beginning to live like men\ngoing a preaching indeed. Let your epicures gormandize their fowl,\nfish, and flesh, with draughts of intoxicating liquors. Such gross,\ninflammatory food may suit the brutal votaries of Mars and Venus. But\nour views, sir, are different altogether; we are going to teach wisdom\nand benevolence to mankind. This is a heavenly work, sir, and our\nminds ought to be heavenly. Now, as the mind depends greatly on the\nbody, and the body on the food, we should certainly select that which\nis of the most pure and refining quality. And this, sir, is exactly\nthe food to our purpose. This mild potato, or this gentle pudding, is\nthe thing to insure the light stomach, the cool liver, the clear head,\nand, above all, those celestial passions which become a preacher that\nwould moralize the world. And these celestial passions, sir, let me\nadd, though I don't pretend to be a prophet, these celestial passions,\nsir, were you but to stick to this diet, would soon shine out in your\ncountenance with such apostolic majesty and grace, as would strike all\nbeholders with reverence, and enable you to carry the world before\nyou.\"\n\nSuch was the style of Ben's rhetoric with old Keimer. But it could not\nall do. For though these harangues would sometimes make him fancy\nhimself as big as Zoroaster or Confucius, and talk as if he should\nsoon have the whole country running after him, and worshipping him for\nthe GREAT LAMA of the west; yet this divinity fit was too much against\nthe grain to last long. Unfortunately for poor Keimer, the kitchen lay\nbetween him and his bishobprick: and both nature and habit had so\nwedded him to that swinish idol, that nothing could divorce him. So\nafter having been led by Ben a \"_very d----l of a life_,\" as he called\nit, \"_for three months_,\" his flesh-pot appetites prevailed, and he\nswore, \"_by his whiskers, he would suffer it no longer_.\" Accordingly\nhe ordered a nice roast pig for dinner, and desired Ben to invite a\nyoung friend to dine with them. Ben did so: but neither himself nor\nhis young friend were any thing the better for the pig. For before\nthey could arrive, the pig being done, and his appetite beyond all\nrestraint, Keimer had fallen on it and devoured the whole. And there\nhe sat panting and torpid as an ANACONDA who had just swallowed a\nyoung buffaloe. But still his looks gave sign that the \"_Ministers of\nGrace_\" had not entirely deserted him, for at sight of Ben and his\nyoung friend, he blushed up to the eye lids, and in a glow of scarlet,\nwhich showed that he paid dear for his _whistle_, (gluttony) he\napologized for disappointing them of their dinner. \"Indeed, the smell\nof the pig,\" he said, \"was so sweet, and the nicely browned skin so\ninviting, especially to him who had been _long starved_, that for the\nsoul of him he could not resist the temptation to _taste it_--and\nthen, O! if Lucifer himself had been at the door, he must have gone\non, let what would have been the consequences.\" He said too, \"that for\nhis part he was glad it was a _pig_ and not a _hog_, for that he\nverily believed he should have bursted himself.\"--Then leaning back in\nhis chair and pressing his swollen abdomen with his paws, he exclaimed\nwith an awkward laugh, \"_Well_, I don't believe I was ever cut out for\na bishop!\"--Here ended the farce: for Keimer never after this uttered\nanother word about his NEW RELIGION.\n\nBen used, laughing, to say that he drew Keimer into this scrape that\nhe might enjoy the satisfaction of _starving him out of his gluttony_.\nAnd he did it also that he might save the more _for books and\ncandles:_ their vegetable regimen costing him, in all, rather less\nthan three cents a day! To those who can spend twenty times this sum\non tobacco and whiskey alone, _three_ cents per day must appear a\nscurvy allowance, and of course poor Ben must be sadly pitied. But\nsuch philosophers should remember that all depends on our loves, whose\nproperty it is to make bitter things sweet, and heavy things light.\n\nFor example: to lie out in the darksome swamp with no other canopy but\nthe sky, and no bed but the cold ground, and his only music the\nmidnight owl or screaming alligator, seems terrible to servile minds;\nbut it was joy to Marion, whose \"_whole soul_,\" as general Lee well\nobserves, \"_was devoted to liberty and country_.\"\n\nSo, to shut himself up in a dirty printing-office, with no dinner but\na bit of bread, no supper but an apple, must appear to every epicure\nas it did to Keimer, \"_a mere d----l of a life_;\" but it was joy to\nBen, whose whole soul was on his _books_, as the sacred lamps that\nwere to guide him to usefulness and glory.\n\nHappy he who early strikes into the path of _wisdom_, and bravely\nwalks therein till habit sprinkles it with roses. He shall be led as a\nlamb among the green pastures along the water courses of pleasure, nor\nshall he ever experience the pang of those\n\n    \"Who see the right, and approve it too;\n    Condemn the wrong--and yet the wrong pursue.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXIV.\n\n\nBen, as we have seen, was never without a knot of choice spirits, like\nsatellites, constantly revolving around him, and both receiving and\nreflecting light. By these satellites I mean young men of fine minds,\nand fond of books. He had at this time a _trio_ of such. The first was\nof the name of Osborne, the second Watson, and the third Ralph. As the\ntwo first were a good deal of the nature of wandering stars, which,\nthough bright, soon disappear again, I shall let them pass away in\nsilence. But the last, that's to say, Ralph, shone so long in the same\nsphere with Ben, both in America and Europe, that it will never do to\nlet him go without giving the reader somewhat at least of a telescopic\nsquint at him. James Ralph, then, was a young man of the first rate\ntalents, ingenious at argument, of flowery fancy, most fascinating in\nhis manners, and uncommonly eloquent. In short, he appears to have\nbeen built and equipped to run the voyage of life with as splendid\nsuccess as any. But alas! as the seamen say of their ships, \"_he took\nthe wrong sheer_.\" Hence, while many a DULL GENIUS, with only a few\nplain-sailing virtues on board, such as honest industry, good humour,\nand prudence, have made fine weather through life, and come into port\nat last laden _up to the bends_ with riches and honours, this gallant\nPROA, this stately GONDOLA, the moment he was put to sea, was caught\nup in a Euroclydon of furious passions and appetites that shivered his\ncharacter and peace, and made a wreck of him at the very outset.\n\nAccording to his own account, it appears that Ben was often haunted\nwith fears that he himself had some hand in Ralph's disasters. Dr.\nFranklin was certainly one of the wisest of mankind. But with all his\nwisdom he was still but a man, and therefore liable to err. Solomon,\nwe know, was fallible; what wonder then young Franklin?\n\nBut here lies the difference between these two wise men, as to their\nerrors. Solomon, according to scripture, was sometimes overcome of\nSatan, even in the bone and sinew of his strength; but the devil was\ntoo hard for Franklin only while he was in the _gristle_ of his youth.\nThe case was thus: among the myriads of books which came to his eager\ntooth, there was a most unlucky one on deism, written, 'tis said, by\nShaftesbury, a man admirably calculated to pervert the truth; or, as\nMilton says of one of his fallen spirits, to make \"_the worse appear\nthe better reason_.\" Mark now this imposing writer--he does not utter\nyou a word against religion; not he indeed: no, not for the world.\nWhy, sirs, he's the best friend of religion. He praises it up to the\nskies, as the sole glory of man, the strong pillar of his virtues, and\nthe inexhaustible fountain of all his hopes. But then he cannot away\nwith that false religion, that detestable superstition called\nchristianity. And here, to set his readers against it, he gives them a\nmost horrible catalogue of the cruelties and bloody persecutions it\nhas always occasioned in the world; nay, he goes so far as to assert\nthat christians are the _natural enemies of mankind_; \"vainly\nconceiting themselves,\" says he, \"to be the favourites of heaven, they\nlook on the rest of the world but as 'heathen dogs' whom it is 'doing\nGod service to kill,' and whose goods it is right to seize on, as\nspoil for the Lord's people! Who,\" he asks crowingly, \"filled Asia\nwith fire and sword in the bloody wars of the Crusades? The\nchristians. Who depopulated the fine <DW64>-coasts of Africa? The\nchristians. Who extirpated many of the once glorious Indian nations of\nAmerica? The christians; nay,\" continues he, \"so keen are those\nchristians for blood, that when they can't get their 'heathen dogs' to\nfall on, they fall on one another: witness the <DW7> christians\ndestroying the protestants, and the protestant christians destroying\nthe <DW7>s. And still greater shame,\" says he, \"to these sweet\nfollowers of the Lamb, these <DW7> and protestant christians, when\nthey can no longer worry each other, will worry those of their own\nparty, as in numberless and shameful cases of the calvinists and\narminians; nay, so prone are the christians to hate, that their\ngreatest doctors even in their _pulpits_, instead of exhorting to\npiety and those godlike virtues, that make men honour and love one\nanother, will fix on the vainest speculations; which, though not\nunderstood by one soul among them, yet serve abundantly to set them\nall by the ears; yes, they can hate one another:\n\n    \"For believing that there are three persons in the Godhead; or only\n    one person.\n\n    \"For believing that there are children in hell not a span long; or\n    for not believing it.\n\n    \"For believing that every body will be saved; or for believing that\n    scarcely any body will be saved.\n\n    \"For baptizing in mill ponds; or only out of china bowls.\n\n    \"For taking the sacrament in both elements; or only in the bread.\n\n    \"For praying in Latin; or for praying only in English.\n\n    \"For praying with a book; or for praying without a book.\n\n    \"For praying standing; or for praying kneeling.\n\n    \"For reading the Bible by themselves; or for reading it only with a\n    priest.\n\n    \"For wearing long beards; or for shaving their beards.\n\n    \"For preaching up predestination; or for preaching up free will.\n\n\"Now,\" continues our writer, \"barely to _hate_ one's neighbours for\nsuch notions as these, were enough, one would think, to make any\ncommon d----l blush; but these christians, as if to out-d----l Satan\nhimself, can not only hate, but actually murder one another for these\ncontradictory notions! yes; and oh, horrible to think! not only\nmurder, but even glory in it: at every shower of cruel bullets on\ntheir flying victims; or at every plunge of the reeking spear into the\nbodies of shrieking mothers and infants, they can cheer each other to\n_the glorious spot_ with animating huzzas! and even when the infernal\ntragedy is closed, they can write congratulatory letters, and sing _Te\nDeums_, giving glory to God that the MONSTERS--the BEASTS--the\nHERETICS, are rooted out.\"\n\nSuch was the prince of infidels. And it was the very argument to\nstagger Ben, even the dangerous argument of example, which young as he\nwas, he had learned to consider as a short way of coming at men's real\nprinciples.\n\n    \"Example is a living law, whose sway\n    Men more than all the living laws obey.\"\n\nOr as Hudibras has it,\n\n    \"Men oft prove it by their _practice_:\n    No argument like matter of _fact_ is.\n    And we are, best of all, led to\n    Men's principles, by what they do.\"\n\n'Tis true, that to tax the gospel with these accursed deeds of mad\n<DW7>s and protestants, is just about as good logic as to accuse our\nexcellent civil code with all the crimes of gamblers and horse\nthieves--the very rascals it aims to hang. Or like charging the sun as\nthe cause of _darkness_, which indeed it was given to dispel.\n\nBut Ben was too young yet, to know everything. And besides, led\naltogether as he was by the strongest feelings of sympathy, it is not\nmuch to be wondered at, that this popular argument, \"_the barbarities\nof christians_,\" should have excited so lasting prejudice against\nchristianity. As some men of delicate natures who have taken an\nemetic, though in the best madeira, can never afterwards bear the\nsmell of that generous liquor; so christianity, steeped in tears and\nblood, excited in Ben an aversion that stuck by him a long time. In\nshort, Ben became an unbeliever. And, like Paul of Tarsus, during the\nreign of his unbelief, \"_he thought verily he ought to do many things\ncontrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth, which things he also did_,\"\narguing powerfully for _natural_ religion.\n\nHow many converts he made to infidelity, I have never been able\nexactly to learn. But certain it is, he made two, viz. John Collins\nand James Ralph. As to Collins, we have seen already, that in\nconverting him to scepticism, he soon _drew down an old house over his\nhead_, his pupil quickly turning out a most impudent drunkard and\nswindler. And though he expected better luck from Ralph, yet he\nquickly discovered in him also certain very dismal symptoms of the\ncloven foot.\n\nSome short time before the sailing of the Annis, Ben, in the warmth of\nhis heart, told Ralph of the immense affair which Sir William Keith\nhad engaged him in, viz. to make him the KING'S PRINTER in\nPhiladelphia. And also that he was about to sail in a few days on that\nvery errand for London. Ralph suddenly turned serious; the next day he\ncame and told Ben that he had made up his mind to go with him. \"How\ncan that be,\" said Ben, \"seeing you have a young wife and child?\" To\nthis Ralph replied, with an oath, that \"that should be no obstacle.\"\n\"It was true,\" he said, \"he had married the wench, but it was only for\nher money. But since the old rascal, her father, would not give it to\nhim, he was determined to be revenged on him, by leaving his daughter\nand grandchild on his hands for life.\"\n\nBen, though greatly shocked by this trait in his character, was yet so\nblindly partial to Ralph that he could not find in his heart to spurn\nhim from his acquaintance. But for this, as he afterwards called it,\n_great error in his life_, he received a chastisement, which, though\npretty severe, was not one stripe more than he richly deserved.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXV.\n\n\nThe day at length arrives, the long wished day for the sailing of the\nAnnis; and Ben gladly hails it as the fairest he had ever seen.\n\n    All in the stream the ship she lies,\n      Her topsails loosen'd from above,\n    When Ben to DEBBY fondly flies\n      To bid farewell to his TRUE LOVE.\n\nBut brightly as shone the day, yet in this, as in all the past, he\nfound a canker. If the season served his ambition, it crossed his\nlove. The reader will please be reminded that the _Debby_,\nimmortalized in the lines above, was the beautiful Miss Deborah Read,\nwho had at first so heartily laughed at Ben for munching his roll\nalong the street; but afterwards had fallen very much in love with\nhim. And, on the other hand, living in her father's family, and daily\na spectator of her prudence and sweetness of spirit, he had become\nequally partial to her; and had even asked her in marriage, before he\nset out for London. The old gentleman, her father, was quite keen for\nthe match, it having always been his opinion, he said, that in\nchoosing a husband for his daughter, it was better to get _a man\nwithout money, than money without a man_.\n\nBut old Mrs. Read flatly refused her consent; or, at any rate, until\nhis return, when, as she said, it would be full time enough for \"_such\nyoung people to marry_.\" The truth is, the printing trade, then in its\ninfancy in Pennsylvania, was of such little account that the old lady\nhad her fears that her daughter would _starve_ if she married Ben.\n\nHaving taken leave of his fair sweetheart, with many a vow of love and\nswift return, Ben, accompanied by Ralph, hastened on board the ship,\nwhich fell down the river for Newcastle. Immediately on his arrival at\nthis place, he went on shore to see his dear friend the governor, who\nwas come down to despatch the packet. The governor could not be seen!\nThis was a sad shock to Ben, and would have been much more so, but for\nthe attentions of the governor's secretary, Dr. Bar, who, with the\nfinest smile imaginable, presented the \"GOVERNOR'S _compliments to his\nyoung friend Mr. Franklin--was extremely sorry indeed he could not see\nhim, owing to a press of business, among which was that of writing\nsome letters for his own special service, which should be sent on\nboard to him--but though his_ EXCELLENCY _could not enjoy the pleasure\nof seeing Mr. Franklin, yet he begged he would accept the assurances\nof his eternal friendship, with the best wishes for his prosperous\nvoyage and speedy return; and above all, his earnest hopes that he\nwould continue to improve his extraordinary talents_.\"\n\nThough this was to Ben somewhat like a sugar-plumb to a child after a\ndose of wormwood, yet could it not so entirely take off the bitter,\nbut that he was at first prodigiously in a humour to break with the\ngovernor. His characteristic prudence, however, came to his aid; and\nfortunately recollecting that it was not a common man, but a GOVERNOR,\nhe was dealing with, and that such great men have their ways of doing\nthings quite different from little people, he smothered his\nresentment, and went peaceably on board the ship--not even yet\nsuspecting any fraud on the part of the governor. When we consider how\ndear to the young and virtuous bosom is the glow of gratitude to\nbenefactors, we cannot but mourn that governor Keith should so cruelly\nhave chilled those joys in the bosom of our young countryman. But,\nthough chilled for a moment, they were not extinct. The heavy heart\nwhich he at first felt on being denied the pleasure of seeing the\ngovernor, is already much relieved by his gracious message through the\nsecretary, and afterwards so completely cured by the sublime and\nbeautiful scenes around Newcastle, that he went back to the ship in\ngood spirits again. On the return of the last boat, bringing the mail,\nhe modestly asked the captain for the letters which the governor had\naddressed to his care. To this the rough son of Neptune replied,\n\"_that they were all there_, he supposed, _higglety, pigglety,\ntogether in the letter bag, and that as the ship with a fine breeze\nwas getting under weigh, he could not spare the time now to make a\nsearch for them, but that before they got to London he might overhaul\nthe bag and take 'em out for himself_.\"\n\nBen was perfectly satisfied with this answer. And charmed at thought\nof the great things awaiting him in London, he threw off his coat and\nbravely joined the crew in all their haste and bustle to weigh the\nanchor, and spread the sails before the freshening gale.\n\nBut while the sailors, many of them at least, poor fellows, for lack\nof education, were straining at the clanking windlass, or creaking\nhalyards, as void of thought as the timber-heads of the ship, the\nspirits of Ben were in a constant succession of pleasurable\nreflections on the magnificent scenes around him--the grand floating\ncastle which bore him so high above the foaming billows--the rapid\nflight of the ship, as flying before the stormy winds she left the\nlessening shores behind her--the boundless fields of the blue rolling\nocean, with all her porpoises gathering round in blackening shoals,\nbounding and blowing, as if to greet the monster vessel, and by their\nfurious romps, adding to the crash and foam of the tempest.\n\nThough Ben was no poet, nor ever affected to be \"_religious\novermuch_,\" yet could he not behold such magnificent scenes without\nthat adoring sense of eternal power and goodness which has been so\nelegantly expressed by the sweet voice of Zion:--\n\n    \"Shout to the Lord, ye surging seas,\n      In your eternal roar;\n    Let wave to wave resound his praise,\n      And shore reply to shore.\n\n    \"While monsters sporting on the flood\n      In scaly silver shine,\n    Speak terribly their Maker--God,\n      And lash the foaming brine.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXVI.\n\n_Ben getting into trouble--finds out his old friend governor Keith to\nbe a black sheep--and learns that a good trade and virtuous habits are\nthe best wealth that a father can give his son._\n\n    \"Who dares think one thing and another tell,\n    My soul abhors him like the gates of hell.\"\n\n\nOn the arrival of the ship in the Thames (or London river) the captain,\nlike an honest fellow of his word, ordered the letter-bag on deck, and\ntold Ben he was welcome now to overhaul it and pick out the governor's\nletters to him. After eagerly turning them all over and over again, not\na single letter could he find that had his name on it, either directed\nto himself, or to his care. He picked out however a few that seemed to\nhave some little squinting that way, one especially, that was directed\nto a PRINTER, and another to a BOOKSELLER. These he immediately carried\nto their respective owners. But in place of those smiles and prompt\noffers of money and merchandize, which his illustrious patron, governor\nKeith, had promised him, scarcely were his letters opened before they\nwere nearly thrown back into his face, as coming from a couple of\nscoundrel debtors, who, instead of paying off their old scores, were\nnow impudently asking for new credits.\n\nHere were strong symptoms of treachery on the part of the governor. And\nin spite of all his credulity, Ben was brought to his doubtings. In\nthis dilemma he went back to a worthy Quaker of the name of Denham,\nwith whom he had contracted a great friendship on ship-board, and told\nhim the whole story from beginning to end. With all his professional\ngravity, Denham could not help smiling, as Ben related the history of\nhis credulity: but when he came to tell of governor Keith's LETTERS of\n_Credit_, and the vast supplies of TYPES, and PAPER, and PRESSES, which\nthey were instantly to procure him, he broke into a horse laugh. \"He\ngive thee letters of credit, friend Benjamin! Governor Keith give thee\nletters of credit! Why, man, he has not credit for himself, no not for\na brass farthing, from any one who ever heard of him.\"\n\nPoor Ben was struck \"all in a heap\"--dumb as a codfish. He stood for\nall the world like a shipwrecked sailor boy, who, after dreaming of\ngold and diamond coasts, and black-eyed Polls, and whole seas of\ngrog, and mountains of segars, wakes up all at once, and finds\nhimself, like poor Robinson Crusoe, on a desolate island, with not\neven a scape-goat of hope before him. In silence he rolled his eyes\nin woeful cogitation--for three months he had been feasting on the\nsmiles and promises of his illustrious friend, governor Keith--for\nthree months had been anticipating his grand Printing Establishment,\nin Philadelphia, and his complete triumph over old Keimer and\nBradford--for three months he had been drinking in streams of rapture\nfrom the love-beaming eyes of the beauteous Miss Read, shortly as his\nwife to rustle in silks and roll in her carriage--but dearer still\nthan all, for three months he had been looking forward to the time,\nclose at hand, when his infirm parents should come to enjoy with him,\nin Philadelphia, the welcome repose of their age, in an elegant\nretreat, purchased for them, by his own virtues. But lo! in a moment\nthe whole goodly structure is dissipated in smoke, leaving him\npennyless and friendless, in a strange country, three thousand miles\nfrom home, and at a long, long distance from all these dear objects!\n\nDenham saw in Ben's looks what was passing in his heart; but knowing\nthat it is good for virtuous and heroic minds to bear the cross in\ntheir youth, he suffered him to go on, undisturbed, with his dismal\ncogitations.\n\nBut a young man early trained in the school of wisdom is not long to\nbe depressed. After relieving his bosom with a deep sigh; he turned to\nDenham and said, in a plaintive tone, \"_but was it not cruel in\ngovernor Keith to deceive me so?_\"\n\n\"Yes, Benjamin,\" replied Denham, \"'twas, to our view, very cruel in\nthe governor of Pennsylvania thus to deceive an inexperienced lad as\nthou art.\"\n\nHere Ben turning on him his fine blue eyes, softened by misfortune,\nsaid again to Denham, \"_well, and what would you advise me?_\"\n\n\"Advise thee, Benjamin,\" replied Denham, in a cheerful tone, \"why, I\nwould advise thee not to give thyself one moment's uneasiness about\nthis affair. Thee remembers the story of Joseph, does thee not? how he\nwas betrayed by his brethren into Egypt, not only a poor lad like thee,\nbut indeed a slave too? And yet this event, though at the time highly\ndisheartening, proved to him in the end, one of the happiest incidents\nof his life. So, by good management, Benjamin, this may prove to thee.\nThou art young, very young yet, with a plenty of time before thee; and\nthis is a great city for thy business. Now if thou wilt but seek\nemployment with some printer of distinction, thou mayest make thyself\nmore completely master of thy trade, and also gain friends, that may\nenable thee to settle so much more advantageously in Philadelphia, as\nto make it good for thee that governor Keith ever betrayed thee here.\nAnd this will be a triumph much to thine own honour, as also to the\nbenefit of other youth, who shall ever hear of thy story.\"\n\nAs when a sweet breeze of the ocean suddenly strikes a becalmed ship,\nthat with flapping sails lay tossing on the sluggish flood, instantly\nthe joy-wakened billows roll a brighter foam, and the hearts of the\nsailors spring forward with transport to their native shores. Thus\nexhilarating to Ben's soul was the counsel of his friend Denham.\nWithout a moment's loss of time he went, as his friend Denham had\nadvised, and sought business at the offices of two of the most eminent\nbook-printers in London, Palmer and Watts. With the latter he spent\nmost of his time during his stay in England.\n\nThis Palmer was an amiable man, and in Ben's countenance, now mellowed\nmore than ordinary, by his late disappointment, he saw a something that\ninterested him greatly in his favour. He asked Ben in what part of\nLondon he had learned the art of printing. Ben told him he had never\nset a type in London. \"Aye! where then,\" said Palmer; \"in Paris?\" Ben\nreplied, that he was just from Pennsylvania, in North America; and that\nwhat little he knew of printing he had picked up there. Palmer, though,\nin other respects, amiable, was one of those thorough-gone COCKNEYS,\nwho can't believe that any thing can be learned out of the sound of\n\"_Bow-bell_.\" He stared at Ben on saying he had learned to print in\nNorth America, as would a French petit maitre at one who said he had\nlearned to _dance among the Hottentots_. \"I am afraid, sir,\" said he to\nBen, \"that I cannot employ you, as I really felt a wish to do; for\nthough I now command fifty workmen, I want a _Gabber_, _i.e._ a man\nuncommonly quick, and of a satirical turn. And in neither of these\ncharacters, sir, will you, probably, suit me, sir--however, sir, as it\nis late now, and I have business out, if you will call in the morning,\nwe will see about it.\" Next morning, before sunrise, Ben waited at\nPalmer's office, where numbers of his journeymen, having heard of the\nyoung North American printer, were assembled to see him work. Palmer\nwas not yet up. An apprentice went to inform him that the young printer\nfrom North America, was come. Presently Mr. Palmer made his appearance,\nlooking somewhat confused.\n\n\"And so you are a buckskin, sir,\" said he, rather cavalierly.\n\n\"Yes sir,\" replied Ben, \"I am a buckskin.\"\n\n\"Well sir, I am afraid you'll not make your fortune by that here in\nLondon,\" said Palmer.\n\n\"No sir,\" answered Ben, \"I find it is thought a misfortune here, to\nhave been born in America. But I hope it was the will of heaven, and\ntherefore must be right.\"\n\n\"Aye!\" replied Palmer, a little tauntingly; \"and so you have\n_preaching_ there too!! But do the buckskins generally stir so early as\nthis?\"\n\nBen replied, that the Pennsylvanians were getting to find out that it\nwas _cheap burning sun-light_. Here Palmer and his cockneys stared at\nhim, as country buckskins are wont to do at a monkey, or parrot, or any\nsuch creature that pretends to mimic man.\n\n\"You talk of _sun-light_, sir,\" said the foreman to Ben: \"can you tell\nthe cause of that wide difference between the light of the sun in\nEngland and America?\"\n\nBen replied that he had never discovered that difference.\n\n\"What! not that the sun shines brighter in London than in America--the\nsky clearer--the air purer--and the light a thousand times more\nvivid--and luminous--and cheering--and all that?\"\n\nBen said that he could not understand how that could be, seeing it was\nthe same sun that gave light to both.\n\n\"The same sun, sir! the same sun!\" replied the cockney, rather nettled,\n\"I am not positive of that sir. But admitting that it is the same sun,\nit does not follow that it gives the same light in America as in\nEngland. Every thing, you know, suffers by going to the _West_, as the\ngreat French philosophers have proved; then why not the sun?\"\n\nBen said he wondered the gentleman should talk of the sun going to the\nwest.\n\n\"What, the sun not go to the west!\" retorted the cockney, quite angry,\n\"a pretty story, indeed. You have eyes, sir; and don't these show you\nthat the sun rises in the east and travels to the west?\"\n\n\"I thought, sir,\" replied Ben, modestly, \"that your own great\ncountryman, sir Isaac Newton, had satisfied every body that it is the\nearth that is thus continually travelling, and not the sun, which is\nstationary, and gives the same light to England and America.\"\n\nPalmer, who had much of the honest Englishman about him, equally\nsurprised and pleased to see Ben thus chastise the pride and ignorance\nof his foreman, put a stop to the conversation by placing a composing\nstick in the hands of Ben, while the journeymen gathering around,\nmarvelled hugely to see the young North American take _a composing\nstick in his hand_!\n\nHaving spent a moment or two in running his eyes over the letter cases,\nto see if they were fixed as in the printing-offices in America, and\nglancing at his watch, Ben fell to work, and in less than four minutes\nfinished the following--\n\n\"And Nathaniel said, can there any thing good come out of\nNazareth?--Philip said, come and see.\"\n\nPalmer and his workmen were petrified. Near eighty letters set up in\nless than four minutes, and without a blunder? And then such a delicate\nstroke at their prejudice and nonsense! Ben was immediately employed.\n\nThis was a fine introduction of Ben to the printing office, every\nperson in which seemed to give him a hearty welcome; he wore his rare\ntalents so modestly.\n\nIt gave him also a noble opportunity to be useful, which he failed not\nto improve.\n\nPassing by one of the presses at which a small man, meagre and\nhollow-eyed, was labouring with unequal force, as appeared by his\npaleness and big-dropping sweat, Ben touched with pity, offered to give\nhim \"_a spell_.\" As the pressman and compositor, like the parson and\nthe clerk, or the coffin-maker and the grave-digger are of entirely\ndistinct trades in London, the little pressman was surprised that Ben,\nwho was a compositor, should talk of giving him \"_a spell_.\" However,\nBen insisting, the little pressman gave way, when Ben seized the press,\nand possessing both a skill and spirit extraordinary, he handled it in\nsuch a workman-like style, that the men all declared they should have\nconcluded he had done nothing but _press-work_ all his life. Palmer\nalso, coming by at the time, mingled his applauses with the rest,\nsaying that he had never seen a fairer impression; and, on Ben's\nrequesting it, for _exercise_ and _health sake_, he permitted him to\nwork some hours every day at press.\n\nOn his entrance into Palmer's printing-office, Ben paid the customary\n_garnish_ or treat-money, for the journeymen to drink. This was on the\nfirst floor, among the pressmen. Presently Palmer wanted him up stairs,\namong the compositors. There also the journeymen called on him for\n_garnish_. Ben refused, looking upon it as altogether an unfair demand,\nand so Palmer himself, to whom it was referred, decided; insisting that\nBen should _not pay_ it. But neither justice nor patronage could bear\nBen out against the spite of the journeymen. For the moment his back\nwas turned they would play him an endless variety of mischievous\ntricks, such as mixing his letters, transposing his pages, breaking\ndown his matter, &c. &c. It was in vain he remonstrated against such\ninjustice. They all with one accord excused themselves, laying all the\nblame on RALPH, for so they called a certain evil spirit who, they\npretended, haunted the office and always tormented such as were not\n_regularly admitted_. Upon this Ben paid his garnish--_being fully\nconvinced of the folly of not keeping up a good understanding with\nthose among whom we are destined to live_.\n\nBen had been at Palmer's office but a short time before he discovered\nthat all his workmen, to the number of fifty, were terrible drinkers of\nporter, insomuch that they kept a stout boy all day long on the trot to\nserve them alone. Every man among them must have, viz.\n\n  1 A pint of porter before breakfast,--cost            _d._1-1\/2\n  1 A pint, with his bread and cheese, for breakfast,       1-1\/2\n  1 A pint betwixt his breakfast and dinner,                1-1\/2\n  1 A pint at his dinner,                                   1-1\/2\n  1 A pint betwixt his dinner and night,                    1-1\/2\n  1 A pint after his day's work was done,                   1-1\/2\n  --                                                        -----\n  6  Total, three quarts!--equal to _nine pence\n      sterling per day_!                                    9\n\nA practice so fatal to the health and subsistence of those poor people\nand their families, pained Ben to the soul, and he instantly set\nhimself to break it up. But they laughed him to scorn, boasting of\ntheir beloved porter, that it was \"_meat and drink too_,\" and the only\nthing to give them _strength_ to work. Ben was not to be put out of\nheart by such an argument as this. He offered to prove to them that\nthe strength they derived from the beer could only be in proportion to\nthe barley dissolved in the water of which the beer was made--that\nthere was a larger portion of flour in a penny loaf; and that if they\nate this loaf and drank a pint of water with it, they would get more\nstrength than from a pint of beer. But still they would not hearken to\nany thing said against their darling beer. Beer, they said, was \"_the\nliquor of life_,\" and beer they must have, or _farewell strength_.\n\n\"Why, gentlemen,\" replied Ben, \"don't you see me with great ease carry\nup and down stairs, a large form of letters in each hand; while you,\nwith _both_ hands, have much ado to carry one? And don't you perceive\nthat these heavy weights which I bear produce no manner of change in\nmy breathing, while you, with only half the weight, cannot mount the\nstairs without puffing and blowing most distressingly? Now is not this\nsufficient to prove that water, though apparently the weakest, is yet\nin reality the strongest liquor in nature, especially for the young\nand healthy?\"\n\nBut alas! on most of them, this excellent logic was all thrown away.\n\n    \"The ruling passion, be it what it will--\n    The ruling passion governs reason still.\"\n\nThough they could not deny a syllable of Ben's reasoning, being often\nheard to say that, \"THE AMERICAN AQUATIC (or _water drinker_) as they\ncalled him, was much stronger than any of the beer drinkers,\" still\nthey would drink.\n\n\"But suppose,\" asked some of them, \"we were to quit our beer with\nbread and cheese for breakfast, what substitute should we have?\"\n\n\"Why, use,\" said Ben, \"the substitute that I do; which is a pint of\nnice oat-meal gruel brought to me from your beer-house, with a little\nbutter, sugar and nutmeg, and a slice of dry toast. This, which is\nmore palatable and still less costly than a pint of beer, makes a much\nbetter breakfast, and keeps the head clearer to boot. At dinner I take\na cup of cold water, which is the wholesomest of all beverages, and\nrequires nothing but a little use, to render it as pleasant. In this\nway, gentlemen, I save _nine_ pence sterling every day, making in the\nyear nearly _three thousand pence_! an enormous sum, let me tell you,\nmy friends, to a small family; and which would not only save parents\nthe disgrace of being dunned for trifling debts, but also procure a\nthousand comforts for the children.\"\n\nBen did not entirely lose his reward, several of his hearers affording\nhim the unspeakable satisfaction of following his counsel. But the\nmajor part, \"_poor devils_,\" as he emphatically styled them, \"_went on\nto drink--thus continuing all their lives in a state of voluntary\npoverty and wretchedness!!_\"\n\nMany of them, for lack of punctuality to pay the publican, would often\nhave their porter stopped.--They would then apply to Ben to become\nsecurity for them, _their light_, as they called it, _being out_. I\nnever heard that he upbraided them with their folly; but readily gave\nhis word to the publican, though it cost him the trouble of attending\nat the pay-table, every _Saturday night_, to take up the sums he had\nmade himself accountable for.\n\nThus, by virtue of the right education, _i.e._ a good trade, and early\nfondness for labour and books, did Ben rise, like a young swan of\nheaven, above the dark billows of adversity; and cover himself with\nglory in the eyes of these young Englishmen, who had at first been so\nprejudiced against him. And, better still, when night came, instead\nof sauntering with them to the filthy yet costly ale-houses and\nporter cellars, he hastened to his little chamber at his _frugal_\nboarding-house, (only 1s. 6d. per week) there to enjoy the divine\nsociety of his books, which he obtained on _hire_ from a neighbouring\nbook-store. And commanding, as he always did, through his steadiness\nand rapidity at work, all the _quick off-hand jobs_, generally the\nbest paid, he might have made money and enjoyed great peace; but\nalas! there was a moth in his purse which kept him constantly poor; a\ncanker in his peace which filled his life with vexation. That canker\nand that moth was his young friend Ralph, whom, as we have seen, he\nhad made an infidel of in Philadelphia; and for which good office,\nRalph, as we shall presently see, requited him as might have been\nexpected.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXVII.\n\n    \"Who reasons wisely, is not therefore _wise_;\n    His pride in reasoning, not in acting, lies.\"\n\n\nSome years ago a certain empiric whispered in the ear of a noble lord,\nin the British parliament, that he had made a wonderful discovery.\n\n\"Aye,\" replied the nobleman, staring; \"a wonderful discovery, say\nyou!\"\n\n\"Yes, my lord, a wonderful discovery indeed! A discovery, my lord,\nbeyond Gallileo, Friar Bacon, or even the great sir Isaac Newton\nhimself.\"\n\n\"The d----l! what, beyond sir Isaac?\"\n\n\"Yes, 'pon honour, my lord, beyond the great sir Isaac. 'Tis true his\nATTRACTIONS and GRAVITATIONS and all that, are well enough; very\nclever things to be sure, my lord; but still nothing in comparison of\nthis.\"\n\n\"Zounds, man, what can it be?\"\n\n\"Why, my lord--please come a little this way--now, in confidence, my\nlord--I've been such a lucky dog as to discover the wondrous art of\nraising a breed of sheep _without wool_!\"\n\nThe nobleman, who, it is thought, was not very nearly related to\nSolomon, had like to have gone into fits. \"What sir,\" asked he, with a\ncountenance wild-staring with amazement, \"a breed of sheep without\nwool! impossible!\"\n\n\"Pardon me, my lord, it is very possible, very true. I have indeed, my\nlord, discovered the adorable art of raising a breed of sheep without\na lock of wool on their backs! not a lock, my lord, any more than\nthere is here on the back of my hand.\"\n\n\"Your fortune is made, sir,\" replied the nobleman, smacking his hands\nand lifting both them and his eyes to heaven as in ecstasy--\"Your\nfortune is made for ever. Government, I am sure, sir, will not fail\nsuitably to reward a discovery that will immortalize the British\nnation.\"\n\nAccordingly, a motion to that purpose was made in the _House of\nLords_, and the empiric was within an ace of being created a peer of\nthe realm; when, most unfortunately, the duke of Devonshire, a\ndistrict famed for sheep, got up and begged a little patience of the\nhouse until it could be fully understood what great benefit the nation\nwas to derive from a flock of sheep without wool. \"Why, zounds! my\nlords,\" said the noble duke, \"I thought all along that wool was the\n_main chance_ in a flock of sheep.\"\n\nA most learned discussion ensued. And it being made apparent to the\nnoble lords, that wool is _actually_ the basis of broadcloths,\nflannels, and most other of the best British manufactures--and it\nbeing also made apparent to the noble lords, which was another great\npoint gained, that two good things are better than one, _i.e._ that\nwool and mutton together, are better than mutton by itself, or wool by\nitself, the motion for a TITLE was unanimously scouted: and in place\nof a pension the rascal had like to have got a prison, for daring thus\nto trump up a vile discovery that would have robbed the world of one\nits greatest comforts.\n\nJust so, to my mind at least, it fares with all the boasted\ndiscoveries of our modern atheists. Admitting that these wonderful\nwizards could raise a nation of men and women without religion, as\neasily as this, their brother conjurer, could a breed of Merinos\nwithout wool--still we must ask _cui bono_? that is, what _good_ would\nit be to the world? Supposing they could away at a dash, with all\nsense of so glorious a being as God, and all comfort of so mighty a\nhope as heaven, what benefit would it bring to man or beast?\n\nBut, God be praised, this dismal question about the consequence of\ndiscarding religion need not be asked at this time of day. These\ngentlemen without religion, like bell-wethers without wool, do so\nconstantly betray their nakedness, I mean their want of morality, that\nthe world, bad as it is, is getting ashamed of them. Here, for\nexample, is master Ralph, who, for reasons abundantly convenient to\nhimself, had accompanied Ben to London--Ben, as he himself confesses,\nhad lent a liberal hand to make Ralph a sturdy infidel, that is, to\nfree him from the restraints of the gospel. Now mark the precious\nfruits of this boasted freedom. Getting displeased with the parents of\na poor girl, whom he had married, he determines to quit her for ever,\nas also a poor unoffending child he had by her, whom, by the ties of\nnature, he was bound to comfort and protect! Ben, though secretly\nabhorring this villany of Ralph, yet suffered himself to be so\nenamoured of his vivacity and wit, as to make him an inmate. \"We\nwere,\" says Ben, \"_inseparable companions_.\" Very little cause had he,\npoor lad! as he himself owns afterwards, to boast of this connexion.\nBut it was fine sport for Ralph; for having brought no money with him\nfrom America but what just sufficed to pay his passage, and knowing\nwhat a noble drudge Ben was, and also that he had with him fifteen\npistoles, the fruits of his hard labours and savings in Philadelphia,\nhe found it very convenient to hang upon him; not only boarding and\nlodging at his expense, and at his expense going to plays and\nconcerts, but also frequently drawing on his dear yellow boys, the\npistoles, for purposes of private pleasure.\n\nIf the reader should ask, how Ralph, even as a man of honour, could\nreconcile it to himself, thus to devour his friend, let me, in turn,\nask what business had Ben to furnish Ralph the very alphabet and\nsyntax of this abominable lesson against himself? And, if that should\nnot be thought quite to the point, let me ask again, where, taking the\nfear of God out of the heart, is the difference between a man and a\nbeast? If man has reason, it is only to make him ten-fold more a\nbeast. Ralph, it is true, did no work; but what of that? He wrote such\ncharming poetry--and spouted such fine plays--and talked so eloquently\nwith Ben of nights!--and sure this was a good offset against Ben's\nhard labours and pistoles. At any rate Ralph thought so. Nay, more; he\nthought, in return for these sublime entertainments, Ben ought to\nsupport not only him, but also his concubine. Accordingly he went and\nscraped acquaintance with a handsome young widow, a milliner, in the\nnext street: and what with reading his fine poetry to her, and\nspouting his plays, he got so completely into her good graces, that\nshe presently turned actress too; and in the \"COMEDY OF ERRORS,\" or\n\"ALL FOR LOVE,\" played her part so unluckily, that she was hissed from\nthe stage, by all her virtuous acquaintance, and compelled to troop\noff with a big belly to another neighbourhood, where Ralph continued\nto visit her.\n\nThe reader will hardly wonder, when told that Ralph and his fair\nmilliner soon found the bottom of Ben's purse. He will rather wonder\nwhat sort of love-powder it was that Ben took of this young man that\ncould, for such a length of time, so fatally have befooled him. But\nBen was _first in the transgression_. Like Alexander the coppersmith,\nhe had done Ralph \"_much harm_,\" and \"God, who is wiser than all, had\nordained that he should be \"_rewarded according to his works_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXVIII.\n\n    \"Learn to be wise from others' ill,\n    And you'll learn to do full well.\"\n\n\nAs nothing is so repellant of base minds as poverty, soon as Ralph\nfound that Ben's pistoles were all gone, and his finances reduced to\nthe beggarly ebb of living _from hand to mouth_, he \"_cleared out_,\"\nand betook himself into the country to teach _school_, whence he was\ncontinually writing fine poetical epistles to Ben, not forgetting in\nevery postscript, to put him in mind of his dear Dulcinea, the fair\nmilliner, and to commend her to his kindness. As to Ben, he still\npersevered, after Ralph's departure, in his good old habits of\nindustry and economy--never indulging in tobacco or gin--never\nsauntering to taverns or play houses, nor at any time laying out his\nmoney but on books, which he always visited, as frugal lovers do their\nsweethearts, at night. But still it would not all do. He could lay up\nnothing. The daily postage of Ralph's long poetical epistles, with the\nunceasing application of the poor milliner, kept his purse continually\nin a galloping consumption. At length he obtained a release from this\nunpleasant situation, though in a way that he himself never could\nthink of afterwards without a blush.\n\nAfter very frequent loans of money to her, she came, it seems, one\nnight to his lodgings on the old errand--_to borrow half a guinea_!\nwhen Ben, who had been getting too fond of her, took this opportunity\nto offer freedoms which she highly resented.\n\nThis Ben tells himself, with a candour that will for ever do him\ncredit among those who know that the confession of folly is the first\nstep on the way to wisdom.\n\n\"Having, at that time,\" says he, \"no ties of religion upon me, and\ntaking advantage of her necessitous situation, I attempted liberties\n(_another great error of my life_,) which she repelled with _becoming\nindignation_. She informed Ralph; and the affair occasioned a breach\nbetween us. When he returned to London, he gave to understand that he\nconsidered all the obligations he owed me as annihilated by this\nproceeding; and that I was not to expect _one farthing of all the\nmonies I had lent him_.\"\n\nBen used to say, many years afterwards, that this conduct of his\nfriend Ralph put him in mind of an anecdote he had some where heard,\nof good old Gilbert Tenant: the same that George Whitefield generally\ncalled HELL-FIRE TENANT. This eminent divine, believing _fear_ to be a\nmuch stronger motive with the multitude than _love_, constantly made a\ngreat run upon that passion in all his discourses. And Boanerges\nhimself could hardly have held a candle to him in this way. Nature had\ngiven him a countenance which he could, at will, clothe with all the\nterrors of the tornado. And besides he had a talent for painting the\nscenes of dread perdition in such colours, that when aided by the\nlightning of his eyes, and the bursting thunders of his voice, it was\nenough to start the soul of lion-hearted innocence; what then of\nrabbit-livered guilt? The truth is, he wrought miracles in New-Jersey:\ncasting out devils--the devils of drunkenness, gambling, and lust, out\nof many a wretch _possessed_.\n\nAmong the thousands whom he thus frightened for their good, was a tame\nIndian of Woodbury, who generally went by the name of Indian-Dick.\nThis poor savage, on hearing Mr. Tenant preach, was so terrified, that\nhe fell down in the meeting house, and roared as if under the scalping\nknife.\n\nHe lost his stomach: and even his beloved bottle was forgotten. Old\nMr. Tenant went to see Dick, and rejoiced over him as a son in the\ngospel;--heartily thanking God for adding this INDIAN GEM to the crown\nof his glory.\n\nNot many days after this, the man of God took his journey through the\nsouth counties of New-Jersey, calling the poor clam-catchers of Cape\nMay to repentance. As he returned and drew near to Woodbury, lo! a\ngreat multitude! He rejoiced in spirit, as hoping that it was a\nmeeting of the people to hear the word of God: but the uproar bursting\nupon his ear, put him in doubt.\n\n\"Surely,\" said he, \"this is not the voice of praise; 'tis rather, I\nfear, the noise of drunkenness.\" And so it was indeed; for it being a\nday of election, the friends of the candidates had dealt out their\nbrandy so liberally that the street was filled with sots of every\ndegree, from the simple _stagger_ to the _dead drunk_. Among the rest,\nhe beheld his Indian convert, poor Dick, under full sail in the\nstreet, reeling and hallooing, great as a sachem. Mr. Tenant strove\nhard to avoid him; but Dick, whose quick eye had caught the old\npie-balled horse that Tenant rode on, instantly staggered towards him.\nTenant put forth all his horsemanship to avoid the interview. He\nkicked old Pie-ball in one flank, and then in the other; pulled this\nrein and then that; laid on _here_ with his staff, and laid on\n_there_; but all would not do; unless he could at once ride down the\ndrunken beasts, there was no way of getting clear of them. So that\nDick, _half shaved_ as he was, soon got along side of old Pie-ball,\nwhom he grappled by the rein with one hand, and stretching forth the\nother, bawled out, \"_how do? how do, Mr. Tenant?_\"\n\nTenant could not look at him.\n\nStill, Dick, with his arm full extended, continued to bawl, \"_how do,\nMr. Tenant, how do?_\" Finding that there was no getting clear of him,\nMr. Tenant, red as crimson, lifted up his eyes on Dick, who still,\nbold as brandy, stammered out, \"_High, Mr. Tenant! d-d-d-don't you\nknow me, Mr. Tenant? Don't you know Indian Dick? Why, sure, Mr.\nTenant, you are the man that converted me?_\"\n\n_\"I converted you!\" replied Tenant, nearly fainting._\n\n\"_Yes_, roared Dick, _I'll be d-d-d-nd, Mr. Tenant, if you an't the\nvery man that converted me_.\"\n\n\"Poor fellow!\" said Tenant, with a heavy sigh, \"you look like one of\nmy _handiworks_. Had God Almighty converted you, you would have looked\nlike another guess sort of a creature.\"\n\nFrom Ben's constantly relating this story of old Tenant and Indian\nDick, whenever he mentioned the aforesaid case of Ralph's baseness,\nmany of his acquaintance were of opinion, that Ben thereby as good as\nacknowledged, that at the time he took Ralph in hand, he did not\naltogether understand the art of converting; or, that at any rate, it\nwould have been much better for Ralph, if, as Mr, Tenant said of\nIndian Dick, _God Almighty had converted him_. He would hardly, for\nthe sake of a harlot, have so basely treated his best friend and\nbenefactor.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXIX.\n\n_Ben resolves to return to America.--Anecdote of a rare character._\n\n    \"A wit's a feather, and a chief's a rod,\n    An _honest_ man's the noblest work of God.\"\n\n\nBen used, with singular pleasure, to relate the following story of his\nQuaker friend Denham. This excellent man had formerly been in business\nas a Bristol merchant; but failing, he compounded with his creditors\nand departed for America, where, by his extraordinary diligence and\nfrugality, he acquired in a few years a considerable fortune.\nReturning to England, in the same ship with Ben, he invited all his\nold creditors to a dinner. After thanking them for their former\nkindness and assuring them that they should soon be paid, he begged\nthem to take their seats at table. On turning up their plates, every\nman found his due, principal and interest, under his plate, in shining\ngold.\n\nThis was the man after Ben's own heart. Though he never found in\nDenham any of those flashes of wit, or floods of eloquence, which used\nso to dazzle him in Ralph, yet he contracted such a friendship for\nhim, on account of his honesty and Quaker-like meekness, that he would\noften steal an hour from his books at night, to go and chat with him.\nAnd on the other hand, Ben's steady and persevering industry, with his\npassion for knowledge, had so exalted him in Denham's esteem, that he\nwas never better pleased than when his _young friend Franklin_, as he\nalways called him, came to see him. One night Denham asked Ben how he\nwould like a trip to America?\n\n\"Nothing on earth would so please me,\" replied Ben, \"if I could do it\nto advantage.\"\n\n\"Well, friend Benjamin,\" said Denham, \"I am just a-going to make up a\nlarge assortment of goods for a store in Philadelphia, and if fifty\npounds sterling a year, and bed and board with myself, will satisfy\nthee, I shall be happy of thy services to go and live with me as my\nclerk.\"\n\nThe memory of his dear Philadelphia, and the many happy days he had\nspent there, instantly sprung a something at his heart that reddened\nhis cheeks with joy. But the saddening thought of his total\nunacquaintedness with commerce, soon turned them pale again. \"I\nshould be happy indeed to accompany you,\" replied he, with a deep\nsigh, \"if I were but qualified to do you justice.\"\n\n\"O! as to that, friend Benjamin, don't be uneasy,\" replied Denham: \"If\nthou art not qualified _now_, thou soon wilt be. And then as soon as\nthou art fit; I'll send thee with a cargo of corn and flour to the\nWest Indies, and put thee in a way wherein, with such talents and\nindustry as thine, thee may soon make a fortune.\"\n\nBen was highly delighted with this proposal, for though fifty pounds a\nyear was not so much as he could earn at printing, yet the prospects\nin other respects were so much greater. Added to this, he was getting\nheartily tired of printing. He had tried it five years at Boston,\nthree at Philadelphia, and now nearly two in London. At all these\nplaces he had worked without ceasing; had lived most sparingly; had\nleft no stone unturned; and after all was now, in his twenty-first\nyear, just as indigent as when he began! \"Scurvy, starving business!\"\nthought he to himself, \"'tis high time to quit you! and God be thanked\nfor this fair opportunity to do it; and now we will shake hands and\npart for ever.\" Taking leave now of the printing business, and as he\nbelieved and wished, _for ever_, he gave himself up entirely to his\nnew occupation, constantly going from house to house with Denham,\npurchasing goods and packing them. When every thing was safe on board,\nhe took a little leisure to visit his friends, and amuse himself. This\nwas a rule which he observed through life--to do business first, and\nthen enjoy pleasure without a sting.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXX.\n\n\nOn the 23d of July, 1726, Ben, with his friend Denham, took leave of\ntheir London acquaintance, and embarked for America. As the ebbing\ncurrent gently bore the vessel along down the amber  flood,\nBen could not suppress his emotions, as he looked back on that mighty\ncity, whose restless din was now gradually dying on his ear, as were\nits smoke-covered houses sinking from his view, perhaps for ever. And\nas he looked back, the secret sigh would arise, for the many toils and\nheart aches he had suffered there, and all to so little profit. But\nvirtue, like the sun, though it may be overcast with clouds, will soon\nscatter those clouds, and spread a brighter ray after their transient\nshowers. 'Tis true, eighteen months had been spent there, but they had\nnot been _misspent_. He could look back upon them without shame or\nremorse. He had broken no midnight lamps--had knocked down no poor\nwatchman--had contributed nothing to the idleness and misery of any\nfamily. On the contrary, he had the exceeding satisfaction to know,\nthat he had left the largest printing-houses in London in mourning for\nhis departure--that he had shown them the blessings of temperance, and\nhad proselyted many of them from folly to wise and manly living. And\nthough, when he looked at those eighteen months, he could not behold\nthem, like eastern maidens, dowered with gold and diamonds, yet,\nbetter still, he could behold them like the \"Wise Virgins,\" whose\nlamps he had diligently fed with the oil of wisdom, for some great\nmarriage supper--perhaps that between LIBERTY and his COUNTRY.\n\nAfter a wearisome passage of near eleven weeks, the ship arrived at\nPhiladelphia, where Ben met the perfidious Keith, walking the street\nalone, and shorn of all the short-lived splendours of his governorship.\nBen's honest face struck the culprit pale and dumb. The reader hardly\nneed be told, that Ben was too magnanimous to add to his confusion, by\nreproaching or even speaking to him. But as if to keep Ben from pride,\nProvidence kindly threw into his way his old sweetheart, Miss Read.\nHere his confusion would have been equal to Keith's, had not that fair\none furnished him with the sad charge against herself--of marrying\nduring his absence. Her friends, after reading his letter to her,\nconcluding that he would never return, had advised her to take a\nhusband. But she soon separated from him, and even refused to bear\nhis name; in consequence of learning that he had another wife.\n\nDenham and Ben took a store-house, and displayed their goods; which,\nhaving been well laid in, sold off very rapidly. This was in October,\n1726. Early in the following February, when the utmost kindness on\nDenham's part, and an equal fidelity on Ben's, had rendered them\nmutually dear, as father and son; and when also, by their extraordinary\nsuccess in trade, they had a fair prospect of speedily making their\nfortunes, behold! O, vanity of all worldly hopes! they were both taken\ndown dangerously ill. Denham, for his part, actually made a die of it.\nAnd Ben was so far gone, at one time, that he concluded it was all over\nwith him; which afforded a melancholy kind of pleasure, especially when\nhe was told that his friend Denham, who lay in the next room, was dead.\nAnd when he reflected that now, since his good patron had left him, he\nshould be turned out again upon the world, with the same hard struggles\nto encounter, and no prospect of ever being able to do any thing for\nhis aged father, he felt a secret regret, that he was called back to\nlife again.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXI.\n\n\nSome people there are who tell us that every man is born for a\nparticular walk in life, and that whether he will or not, in that walk\nhe must go; and can no more quit it than the sun can quit his course\nthrough the skies.\n\nThis is a very pleasing part of faith; and really there seems much\nground for it. Certainly scripture, in many places, has a powerful\nsquinting that way. And in the lives of many of our greatest men, we\ndiscover strong symptoms of it. The great Washington was, a dozen\ntimes and more within an ace of getting out of the only track that\ncould have led him to the command of the American armies. But yet\nthere seems to have been always some invisible hand to meet him at the\nthreshold of his wanderings, and to push him back. Dr. Franklin also\nappears, on several occasions, to have been at the very point of\nbreaking off from the printing business. But Heaven has decreed for\nhim that walk in life, and in it he must move. And though blind at\ntimes, as Balaam's ass, he sought to turn out of the way, yet, crouch\nas he would, he still found at every turn a good angel to bring him\nback. First he was to have been a sailor out of Boston--then a\nswimming-master in London--then a merchant in America. But it would\nnot all do. And though in this last brilliant affair, he seemed to\nhave effected his escape, losing the black-fingered printer in the\nsprucely powdered merchant, yet, come back to the WORLD-ENLIGHTENING\nTYPES he must--for Denham dies, and with him all the grand castles\nwhich Ben had built in the air. Still averse to the printing business,\nhe tries hard for another place _behind the counter_, but nobody will\ntake him in. His money at length gone, and every avenue to honest\nbread hedged up against him, he is constrained to take refuge in his\nold trade.\n\nKeimer, his former employer, who well knew his worth, waited on him,\nand made liberal offers if he would take charge of his printing-office.\nIt must have been a sore trial to Ben to come under authority of a man\nwhose ignorance and hypocrisy he so heartily despised; and who, he well\nknew, had nothing else in view, but just to get him to instruct his\nnumerous apprentices, and then pick a quarrel and pack him off. But\nbad as he hated Keimer's vices, he still worse hated idleness and\ndependence, and therefore he accepted his invitation. He found Keimer's\noffice in the old way, _i.e._ quite out of order, and miserably\ndestitute of letters. There being at that time no such thing in\nAmerica, as a type-foundry, this defect appeared at first utterly\nincurable. But Ben soon found a remedy. Having once, while he lived in\nLondon, glanced his eye on the practice of this art, he thought he\ncould imitate it. And, by casting in clay, he presently created a fine\nparcel of letters in lead, which served at least, to keep the press\nfrom stopping. He also, on occasion, engraved a variety of ornaments\nfor printing--made ink--gave an eye to the shop, and, in short, was in\nall respects the factotum of the establishment. But useful as he made\nhimself, he had the mortification to find that his services became\nevery day of less importance to Keimer, in proportion as his\napprentices improved; and when Keimer paid Ben his second quarter's\nwages, he did it very grumblingly, and gave him to understand, that\nthey were too heavy. By degrees he became less civil; was constantly\nfinding fault, and seemed always on the point of coming to an open\nrupture.\n\nBen bore it all very patiently, conceiving that his ill humour was\nowing to the embarrassment of his affairs.\n\nAt length, however, the old wretch insulted him so grossly, and that\nunder circumstances of all others the most provoking to a man of\nhonest pride, _i.e._ in the presence of neighbours, that Ben could\nbear it no longer; but, after upbraiding him for his ingratitude, took\nup his hat and left him, begging a young man of the office to take\ncare of his trunk, and bring it to him at night.\n\nThe name of this young man was Meredith, one of Keimer's apprentices.\nHe had taken a great liking to Ben, because that while Keimer,\nignorant and crabbed, taught him nothing, Ben was every day giving him\nsome useful lesson in his trade, or some excellent hint in morals,\nconducive to the government and happiness of his life. In the evening\nhe came and entreated Ben not to think of quitting the printing office\nwhile he continued in it. \"My dear sir,\" said he to Ben, \"I beg you\nwill take no notice of what this Keimer does. The poor man is always,\nas you see, _half shaved_; and no wonder, for he is over head and ears\nin debt--often selling his goods at prime cost, for the sake of\n_cash_--constantly giving credit without taking any account; and\ntherefore cannot help shortly coming out of the little end of the\nhorn, which will leave a glorious opening for you to make your\nfortune.\"\n\nBen replied that he had nothing to begin with. \"O, as to that\ndifficulty,\" answered Meredith, \"we can easily get over it. My father\nhas a very high opinion of you, and will, I am sure, readily advance\nmoney to set us up, provided you will but go into partnership with me.\nI am no workman, but you are. And so, if you like, I will find the\ncapital and you the skill, and let's go halves in the profits. By\nspring we can have in from London, our press, types, and paper, and\nthen, as my time with Keimer will be out, we can fall to work at once,\nand make our _jacks_.\"\n\nAs this was an offer not to be met with every day, Ben readily agreed\nto it, as also did old Mr. Meredith.\n\nBut the old gentleman had a better motive in view than the pecuniary\nprofits. He had marked, with great pleasure, Ben's ascendancy over his\nson, whom he had already wonderfully checked in his passion for\ntobacco and brandy. And he fondly hoped, that by this connexion his\nson would be perfectly cured.\n\nWith this hope, he desired Ben to make him out the list of a\n_complete_ printing-office, which he immediately took to his merchant,\nwith orders to import it without loss of time. Keimer was to know\nnothing of all this; and Ben, in the interim, was to get work with\nBradford.\n\nOn application, Bradford had no room. Ben, therefore, had to rest on\nhis oars. This, however, was but for a short season: for Keimer\ngetting a hint that he should be employed to print some New-Jersey\npaper money, that would require engravings and types which he knew\nnobody in Philadelphia but Ben could make; and fearful that Bradford,\nby engaging Ben, might deprive him of the job, sent a very civil\nmessage to Ben, telling him that \"_old friends ought not to part on\naccount of a few hasty words dropt in a passion_,\" and concluding with\na pressing invitation to come back.\n\nBen went back; and Keimer met him with a most cordial welcome.\nAlthough there was nothing in this poor old man to excite his esteem,\nyet Ben could not help feeling happy to see smiles of joy brightening\nover his withered face; and he then felt, though not for the first\ntime, that though learning is a pleasant thing, yet one touch of\n\"_kindred sentiment warm at the heart_,\" outweighs, in pure delight,\nall the learning in the world.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXII.\n\n\nKeimer presently obtained what he so ardently wished, the printing of\nthe New-Jersey paper-money, and flew into the office with the news to\nBen, who immediately set about constructing a copper-plate press, the\nfirst that had ever been seen in Philadelphia. He also engraved various\nornaments and devices for the bills; and putting every thing in\nreadiness for their paper-money coinage, he set out with Keimer for\nBurlington, where the New-Jersey legislature held their session.\n\nAt the first sight of Ben's paper-money, every eye was struck with its\nbeauty. \"_Why this Keimer must be a very clever old fellow!_\" was the\ncry. But others who were deeper in the secret, replied, \"not so; young\nFranklin is the man.\" Hereupon great attention was paid to Ben. And he\nwas sensibly taught, that though he had been grievously tried and held\nback in the world, yet he had much cause of gratitude. Presently\nanother affair arose, furnishing him fresh matter of congratulation,\nthat he had ever paid such attention to the improvement of his mind.\n\nFearing that our Philadelphia printers might strike off _more money\nbills_ than they had been desired, the New-Jersey Assembly thought\nproper to send two or three commissioners to superintend the press.\nThese gentlemen, all of the shrewd sort, and constantly with them while\nat work, soon found out the difference between the master and his young\njourneyman. Keimer, though a printer, had never been a reader. Ben had\ndevoted all his leisure hours to reading. The one had ever courted\npleasure in the furniture of his mind: the other, popularity in the\ndecorations of his body. The shape of his whiskers; the cock of his\nhat; the cut of his coat, were great things with Keimer. Every trick at\neasy outside show was caught up by him. Among other dashes at\npopularity, he pretended to be a freemason, and was constantly grinning\nand making his signs. But it would not all do. The New-Jersey\ncommissioners knew nothing of Jachin and Boaz. So that though, while\nBen, stripped to the buff, was heaving at the press, old Keimer would\nstand by, stately as a prince at his levee, his attitude perpendicular\nas the _plummet_, and his feet perfectly on the _square_, with his gilt\nsnuff-box nicely poised in his left hand, and his right, bespangled\nwith rings, tastily carrying the fragrant Maccabau to his nostrils,\ncourting the commissioners--yet, as before said, it would not all do.\nThe commissioners wanted new ideas, and Keimer had none to give them.\nHe had a pompous way of saying yes or no. And this was all they could\nget from him in answer to their questions. Presently they turned to\nBen, whom by the by, they hardly thought it worth while to interrogate,\nconsidering the character of his master, and his own young and raw\nappearance. But in place of the old YES and NO of master Keimer, Ben\ngave them such answers to their questions, as at once surprised and\ndelighted them. He was slow to speak, but when the commissioners,\ncurious to explore his intellect, which had so unexpectedly startled\nthem, purposely put a number of deep questions to him on the subject of\ntheir paper-money, such as its effects on agriculture and commerce, and\nthe laws that should regulate its quantity, he answered all in his own\npeculiar way of sagacious brevity, that made them declare he must have\nstudied nothing else all his life. The reports which these gentlemen\nmade in his favour, produced their natural effect. Ben was invited\nevery where, and treated with the most flattering attention; while\nKeimer, though his employer, was entirely neglected, or invited only as\na compliment to Ben.\n\nAmong the many wealthy and great ones, his admirers, was the inspector\ngeneral, Isaac Deacon, a cunning old fox, and rich as a Jew. He could\nnever rest without Ben at his house. \"_Young man_,\" said he one day, as\nBen was hard at work, \"_I am mightily taken with you_, and let me tell\nyou, I never look at you without thinking of myself, as I was at your\ntime of life. Now, do you know what was my first employment, when I was\na boy?\"\n\nBen replied that that was a question beyond his reach.\n\n\"Well then, I will tell you, sir, if you can but believe me. I'll tell\nyou. My first employment was to carry clay to the brick-makers!\"\n\n\"Impossible!\" said Ben.\n\n\"No, indeed, not impossible at all, but very certain. Yes, many a hot\nday have I carried the clay, and so daubed with it all over, that my\nown mother would hardly have told me from her house pig. Well, after\nthat I became an underling to a surveyor, and dragged his chain many a\nday through the woods; and all the time did not know '_B from a bull's\nfoot_.' But the surveyor was a good man, sir, and taught me to read and\nwrite. Ah! _them were dark times_, sir, _dark times_; all living here\nlike Indians in the woods. A young man, printing his books and pictures\nlike you, would have been looked on as a conjurer. And now let me tell\nyou one thing. Don't you be discouraged, but keep up a good heart. A\n_little_, making every day, makes a great deal in a long life. And I am\nmistaken if you don't make a fortune, and come out a great man yet some\nof these days.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXIII.\n\n\nHaving finished printing the New-Jersey money, Ben, accompanied by\nKeimer, set out for Philadelphia, where he had scarcely arrived before\nin came Meredith, with a face of joy, and taking Ben aside, told him\nthat their press and types were all come. Immediately the two friends\nwent forth in search of a good house and stand, which they were so\nlucky as to find near the market, at twenty-four pounds _a year_! The\nfixing and putting all their things to rights, having consumed every\npenny of their money, our young beginners were at their wit's end what\nto be at. In this extremity, one of their acquaintance, a Mr. George\nHouse, brought them a countryman who wanted some advertisements for a\ncow he had lost. Ben soon had the old cow up for him in a \"_staring_\"\nshape, which so pleased the honest rustic, that he instantly counted\nthem down their _five shillings_. Never did five shillings come more\nacceptably. The gratitude which Ben felt towards George House for this\nlittle kindness, fixed on him a determination from that day, \"_never to\nmiss an opportunity to lend a helping hand to young beginners_.\"\n\nHis favourite young Hercules, the PRINTING-OFFICE, which had been so\nlong labouring in his brain, being now happily brought to birth, Ben\ndetermined immediately to give it the countenance and support of\nanother noble bantling of his own. I allude to his famous club, called\nthe \"Junto,\" a kind of Robinhood society, composed of young men\ndesirous of improving themselves in knowledge and elocution, and who\nmet one night every week, to discuss some interesting question in\nmorals, politics, or philosophy.\n\nThe members at first were but few; but Ben, now a complete master of\nhis pen, made such a dash with their speeches in his _newspaper_, that\nthe Junto soon got to be the talk of the town; and members were added\nto it daily. Ben was unanimously appointed moderator of the club; and\nin reward for the great pleasure and profit derived from this noble,\nmind-improving institution, the members all agreed to support his\nprinting-office. This was of service; but its principal support was\nderived from a still higher source; I mean his own astonishing\nindustry. No sooner was it known in town that Ben had set up a new\npaper and press, under the very nose of two others, Keimer's and\nBradford's, than it became a matter of speculation whether it could\npossibly stand. The generality gave into the negative. But Dr. Bard, a\nshrewd old Scotchman, who well knew the effect of persevering industry\non young men's fortunes, laughed heartily at the doubters. \"_Stand_,\"\nsaid he, \"_gentlemen_! Yes, take my word it _will stand_. The industry\nof that young Franklin will make any thing stand. I see him still at\nwork when I return from my patients at midnight, and he is at it again\nin the morning before his neighbours are out of bed.\" Ben was fairly\nentitled to his praise. He generally composed and corrected ten to\ntwelve thousand m's a day, though it constantly took him till near\nmidnight. But so intent was he on finishing this incredible task, that\nwhen accident had deranged a good half of his hard day's work, he has\nbeen known to fall to work and set it up again before he went to bed.\n\nThe reputation acquired by this industry, made such an impression in\nhis favour, that the merchants, many of them, made him liberal offers\nof their stationary on _credit_. But, not wishing to have \"_too many\nirons in the fire_,\" he declined their offers, which added to his\nreputation of an _industrious_ young man, that of an _upright_ and\n_cautious_ one. This is mentioned, not so much for praise of the\n_dead_, as for a _hint_ to the living.\n\nBusiness began now to make a flood-tide movement in the new\nprinting-office, and Ben made such good use of it, and picked up money\nso fast, that he was in hopes he had nearly thrown all his troubles\nover the \"_left shoulder_.\" But in this he was miserably mistaken; for\npresently, as if there was to be no end to troubles, there leaped out\nanother, more alarming than all before. Old Meredith, finding that Ben\nhad not cured his son of his drunken fits, _took a miff_, and all at\nonce _backed out_ of his promise to pay for their press and printing\nmaterials! and the merchant who imported these costly articles, and who\nhad for some time been expecting his money, commenced a suit, and\nthreatened immediate execution!\n\nPoor Ben! Imagination sees him, at first, standing like a luckless\nmerchant, who, after two noble ventures swallowed up, now beholds the\nbreakers that are to swallow up his third, and _last_ hope--\"Yes,\"\nthought he, \"but a few short weeks and my press and type will be under\nthe hammer; all my delightful hopes annihilated; and myself turned\nadrift on the wide world again!\"\n\nAt this perilous moment, when nothing but infamy and ruin stared him in\nthe face, God was pleased to cause his OWN VIRTUES to leap forth like\nan armed Minerva, with shield and buckler for his defence. His INDUSTRY\nand PRUDENCE having, as aforesaid, been trumpeted through the town, the\npublic feelings were greatly excited by his misfortunes. \"_Shame_,\"\n_said they_, \"_that such a young man should fall. As to that drunken\nfellow, that Meredith, no matter how soon he is stripped and sent to\njail. But this Franklin must not fall for want of a little help. It\nwere a disgrace to the town._\" Accordingly several gentlemen, two at\nleast are recorded, Coleman and Grace, without each other's knowledge,\ncalled on him, and tendered whatever sum he should want!--but hoping at\nthe same time he would, if possible, get quit of Meredith, who only\nserved to disgrace and injure him; being often seen at _taverns_ and\n_gambling tables_.\n\nA relief so unexpected, and in a manner too so flattering, produced on\nthe mind of Ben, a satisfaction beyond expression. After making the\nbest acknowledgments he could to such noble benefactors, he begged they\nwould allow him a day or two to effect, if possible, an honourable\nseparation from Meredith. Fortunately he found no difficulty in this:\nfor Meredith, heartily sick of the business, readily agreed, for a\nsmall consideration, to give him up the printing-office to himself. Ben\nthen called on his two friends, accepted the proffered supply, taking\nexactly one half from each for fear of offending either, and making\nfull settlement with the Merediths, took the whole business into his\nown hands.\n\nBen's extreme alarm from the danger of having his printing-office\nseized, and its fortunate rescue by the amiable Coleman and Grace, has\nbeen very briefly narrated. But transient as this event may seem in our\nnarrative, it produced on his feelings a glow of gratitude which kings\nmight envy; and it led to an _act_ which Angels would glory in. The\nreader shall hear all in good time.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXIV.\n\n\nHaving now got the printing-office in his own hands, Ben began to find\nthe unspeakable advantage of his past labours to acquire ideas, and to\nconvey them handsomely by his pen. The town and country getting at this\ntime prodigiously excited about a PAPER CURRENCY, Ben came out with a\nmost luminous pamphlet, on \"THE ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES of a PAPER\nCURRENCY.\" The pamphlet gave such satisfaction to the legislature, that\nthey rewarded him with the _printing_ of all their money bills. His\npamphlet producing the same effect on the legislature of Delaware, they\nrewarded him in the same way--as also did both these legislatures by\nthrowing into his way several other jobs of public printing.\n\nMoney now coming in, he went at once, and paid his good friends Coleman\nand Grace what they had so nobly lent him. With a light heart he then\nwiped off that old score of VERNON'S, which had given him so much\nuneasiness, but which now receipted in _full_, _principal_ and\n_interest_, made him feel himself the freest, and therefore the\nhappiest man in Pennsylvania. Money still coming in, he fitted up a few\nshelves in the front room of his printing-office, where he spread out\nan assortment of Books, Blanks, Paper and Quills; but all in the small\nway--for he always thought, that though\n\n    \"Vessels large may venture more,\n    Yet little boats should keep near shore.\"\n\nLike a ship that after long tacking against winds and tides, through\ndangerous straits and shallows, has at last got safely out on the main\nocean flood, and at liberty to lay her own course; such was now the\ncondition of Ben; who hereupon felt it his duty immediately to take on\nboard those two grand guides and guardians of his voyage--RELIGION and\na GOOD WIFE.\n\nAs to religion--the grum looks and bitter sectarian animosities of the\nchristians in those wretched days, had early made a deist of him; and\nhe, in turn, had made deists of others, as Collins and Ralph. But on\ncoming to test the thing by its fruits, he found that this new religion\n(deism) was not yet the religion he could admire. He found that poor\nCollins, with all his deism, was but a drunkard--Ralph, an ungrateful\nswindler--governor Keith, a great rascal--and even himself, though a\nprime deist, yet in his treatment of Miss Read, as culpable as any of\nthem all. This led him to a train of thought which resulted in the\nconclusion, that though he could not conceive that _bad actions are\nbad, merely because revelation forbids them; nor good actions good,\nbecause revelation enjoins them_: yet he doubted not but the former\nwere forbidden, because they are _hurtful_, and the latter enjoined\nbecause they are _beneficial_ to us--all things considered. On this\ngrand principle then, the inseparable connexion between VICE and\nMISERY, and VIRTUE and HAPPINESS, he determined from that day to shun\nthe one, and embrace the other; thus summing up his religion in those\nbeautiful lines:--\n\n    \"What CONSCIENCE dictates to be done,\n      Or warns me not to do;\n    This teach me more than HELL to shun,\n      That more than HEAVEN pursue.\"\n\nSo much for his religion. As to his wife, his behaviour in this respect\nseems to have shown that there was some substance in the religious\nground he had taken. Having, at the time of his sad disappointment in\nLondon, and when he despaired of ever marrying her, neglected his old\nsweetheart Miss Read, he resolved, now that he was getting into better\ncircumstances, to make her all the amends in his power. 'Tis true, her\nmother, who had prevented the marriage before he set off for England,\nand during his absence had prevailed on her to marry another lover, was\nmost in fault, and actually acquitted him, laying the blame altogether\nat her own door.--But Ben never acquitted himself; he felt condemned,\nand would therefore accept no _absolution_ while he could make\n_reparation_. He renewed his visits to the family, who were rejoiced to\nsee him. He saw his old sweetheart, Miss Read; but O how altered from\nher who, formerly bright with love and joy, used to fly to the door to\nwelcome his coming! How altered from her, whose rosy cheeks crimsoned\nwith blushes, he so fondly kissed at taking leave for England, with\nsweetest promises of speedy return and blissful marriage. Pale and wan\nwere her looks, where she sat silent, and retired, and often deeply\nsighing, like one much troubled in mind, or crossed in hopeless love.\nShe never reminded him of his \"_troth and broken vows_.\" But such\npatient suffering served but the more to harrow up his feelings. Each\nstifled sigh sounded in his ear as a death bell; and each tender glance\ncarried a point keener than the lightning's fork. In a word, his heart\nwas completely torn, and he had wisdom to seek its only\ncure--_reconciliation with the injured_. 'Tis true, pride whispered\nthat Miss Read, having treated him with great disrespect by marrying in\nhis absence, ought to be _punished_. But how could he think of revenge\non a poor girl, whom his own neglect had driven to that desperate act!\nAvarice, too, remonstrated against marrying a woman, whose last husband\nhad left debts which he might be ruined to pay. But Ben felt resolved,\nthat as he had rendered this dear woman unhappy, he would restore her\npeace, whatever might be the cost. As the coming forth of the sun after\nclouds, such was the shining of conscious virtue on Ben's face, after\nsuch noble resolving. As a flower after long mourning its absent sun,\nrejoices again in his returning beams; so the soul of Miss Read\nrejoiced in the smiles of her returning lover. The hearts of her aged\nparents revived with the cheerful rose once more blooming on her pallid\ncheek; and heaven itself shed choicest blessings on their happy union.\n\nNo debts of the former husband were ever exhibited against them. No foe\nwas permitted to triumph. And while old Keimer, after all his roguery,\nwas fain to run away from his creditors to the West Indies, where he\ndied in poverty--and while his successor, Harry, elated with a puff of\nprosperity, and affecting the FINE GENTLEMAN, soon came out at the\nlittle end of the horn, Ben and his lovely bride, going on in their\nvirtuous toils, prospered together like twin trees planted by the\nrivers of water. Lured by her pleasant looks, the book-store, over\nwhich she presided, was constantly thronged; and equally pleased with\nthe neatness and fidelity of his printing, Ben's press was always at\nwork. Happy in the tender wish to please, \"each was to the other a\ndearer self.\" And whether their duties called them to the kitchen, the\nbook-store, or the printing-office, they still found, in their mutual\nlove, that divine cordial which lightened every burden and sweetened\nevery care. Their table, though frugal, was delicious, because seasoned\nwith smiles of mutual fondness. And doubly welcome the return of night,\nwhere Hymen, unreproved, had lighted up his sacred torch; and where\npressed to the soft bosom of his affectionate spouse, the happy husband\ncould take his fill of pure connubial bliss, without remorse or dread\nof danger. Such were the benefits which Ben derived from his generous\ndealings with the afflicted Miss Read; and as a farther reward, it was\nin this self same year, that Ben was enabled to _incorporate_ his grand\nlibrary-company.\n\nThis first of social blessings, a PUBLIC LIBRARY, was set on foot by\nFranklin, about the year 1731. Fifty persons subscribed forty shillings\neach, and agreed to pay ten shillings annually. The number increased;\nand in 1742, the company was incorporated, by the name of \"The Library\nCompany of Philadelphia.\" It now contains eight thousand volumes on all\nsubjects, a philosophical apparatus, and a good beginning towards a\ncollection of natural and artificial curiosities. The company have\nlately built an elegant house in Fifth street, on the front of which is\nerected a marble statue of their founder, Benjamin Franklin.[2]\n\n          [2] The gift of William Bingham, Esq.\n\nThe beneficial influence of this institution was soon evident. The\ncheapness of terms rendered it accessible to every one. Hence a degree\nof information was extended among all classes of people, which is very\nunusual in other places. The example was soon followed. Libraries were\nestablished in various places, and they are now become very numerous in\nthe United States, and particularly in Pennsylvania. It is to be hoped,\nthat they will be _still more widely extended_, and that information\nwill be every where increased. This will be the best security for our\nliberties. _A nation who has been taught to know and prize the rights\nwhich God has given them, cannot be enslaved. It is in the regions of\nignorance alone that tyranny reigns._\n\nIn 1732, Franklin began to publish POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC.\n\nThe eloquent Charles Fox used to say, that had Doctor Franklin written\nnothing else, his \"Poor Richard's Almanac\" were alone sufficient to\nimmortalize him. Instead of being taken up, as too many Almanacs are,\nwith trifling stories and fool-born jests, it abounds with the finest\nmaxims on Industry, Temperance, and Frugality, thrown together with\nastonishing conciseness, and written with that happy mixture _of\ngravity_ and gaiety that captivates every body, and never tires. It\ntook a wonderful run. From 10 to 15,000 a year were generally sold in\nPennsylvania. And to this Almanac, in a considerable measure, may be\nascribed that wonderful start which Pennsylvania has taken of the\nmiddle and southern states in all the REPUBLICAN VIRTUES, of INDUSTRY\nand ECONOMY, which point the WAY to WEALTH.\n\nEven the finest girls there, worth their thousands, don't think it\nbeneath them, to \"_lay hold on the distaff_,\" like Solomon's\naccomplished daughter, to swell the riches of the family _wardrobe_ and\nto improve the _savoury dishes_ of their parents.\n\nA foppish young fortune-hunter from the south, ventured sometime ago to\npay his respects to the beautiful Miss Dickenson, one of the first\nfortunes in the state. Instead of finding her, as he had expected, idly\nlolling in a room of state, and bedizened in ribbands and laces, like a\nfairy queen, he found her attired in that simple dress of exquisite\nneatness which best sets off the rosy freshness of youthful beauty; and\nhe found her, too, busied in some piece of domestic industry. He\nblushed to find her \"_at work_!\" After a world of compliments, all\ntending to make her out far too _divine a creature_ for such\ndisparaging employments, he gave her to understand that she should not\nthus demean herself if she were in Carolina.\n\n\"_What!_\" replied she, with sarcastic pleasantry, \"_don't the young\nladies with you, read_ POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC?\"\n\nThus was this little annual visitor of Doctor Franklin's, a general\nblessing to the Pennsylvanians, making them all fond of industry. And\nJacob did not more naturally beget Joseph and his twelve brethren than\ndoes industry beget INNOCENCE, and HEALTH, and WEALTH, and\nCHEERFULNESS, and all that lovely train of virtues, which tend to make\nmen happy by driving away their vices. For who, for example, will ever\nget drunk who has no _debts_ nor _duns_ nor vices of any sort to make\nhim _uneasy_? And who will ever _sell his birthright_ of an _honest\nvote_ for an electioneering dinner and a drink of grog, when he has\nfatted calves and wine of his own at home? This is Pennsylvania all\nover.\n\nIn the Almanac for the last year that doctor Franklin ever published,\nhe compressed the choicest sentiments of all the preceding editions,\nand entitled it \"THE WAY TO WEALTH.\" It is not easy to do justice to\nthis little work. American writers need not eulogize it. The British,\nand even the French into whose language it was quickly translated, have\npaid it the most flattering attention. Doctor Knox gave it a place in\nhis \"ELEGANT EXTRACTS;\" and Lewis XV. on hearing it read, was so\ncharmed with the admirable sense and humour of Poor Richard, that he\ngave orders for a new frigate, just launching, to be named, in honour\nof this famous nosegay of Franklin's, LE BON HOMME RICHARD, or \"POOR\nRICHARD.\" I have heard nothing of this frigate or of any exploits of\nher's, while she was a new ship, and in the French service. But this I\nknow, that in her latter days she was covered over with glory. This was\nthe ship on which that gallant Scot, Paul Jones, hoisted the American\nflag in the great war of the revolution. Though the Poor Richard\nmounted but 36 guns, and was old and crazy besides, yet her commander\nhad the audacity to carry her alongside of the SERAPIS, a British 44,\nand a new ship. It is true, the Alliance, an American frigate of the\nsmallest class, was in company with the POOR RICHARD; but as Jones and\nhis officers all declare, rendered him no assistance whatever. But\nthough thus basely deserted by her consort in the hour of conflict with\na mightier foe, yet did not the POOR RICHARD despair, but bravely\ngrappled with her enemy at once, and after one of the bloodiest\ncontests recorded in history, gloriously succeeded in hauling down her\ncolours. The Poor Richard, however, but barely survived this dreadful\nfour hours' conflict with such a heavy adversary. For as if only\nwaiting to see the modest stars of liberty waving where the proud jack\nof tyranny had waved before, she bowed her head beneath a mountainous\nbillow and went down--the glorious tomb of many of her gallant crew,\nembalmed, for dear liberty's sake, in their own heart's blood.\n\nAs the reader might think it hard, after so much said about it to whet\nhis curiosity, if we did not give him a squint at this famous \"POOR\nRICHARD'S ALMANAC,\" we hasten now to do ourselves the pleasure to lay\nit before him, in the last and best form wherein doctor Franklin gave\nit to the public, and under the same title, viz. \"THE WAY TO WEALTH,\"\nor \"POOR RICHARD,\" _improved_--which runs thus:--\n\nCOURTEOUS READER,\n\nI have heard that nothing gives an author so great pleasure as to find\nhis works respectfully quoted by others. Judge, then, how much I must\nhave been gratified by an incident I am going to relate to you. I\nstopped my horse lately, where a great number of people were collected\nat an auction of merchant's goods. The hour of the sale not being come,\nthey were conversing on the badness of the times; and one of the\ncompany called to a plain, clean old man, with white locks, \"Pray,\nfather Abraham, what think you of the times? Will not these _heavy\ntaxes_, quite ruin the country? How shall we be ever able to pay them?\nWhat would you advise us to do?\" Father Abraham stood up, and replied,\n\"If you would have my advice, I will give it you in short; 'for a word\nto the wise is enough,' as poor Richard says.\" They joined in desiring\nhim to speak his mind, and gathering round him, he proceeded as\nfollows:--\n\nFriends, said he, the taxes are, indeed, very heavy; and, if those laid\non by the government, were the only ones we had to pay, we might more\neasily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous\nto some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our _idleness_, three\ntimes as much by our _pride_, and four times as much by our _folly_;\nand from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us, by\nallowing an abatement. However let us hearken to good advice, and\nsomething may be done for us; \"God helps them that help themselves,\" as\npoor Richard says.\n\n  I. It will be thought a hard government that should tax its people\none tenth part of their time, to be employed in its service: but\nidleness taxes many of us much more; sloth, by bringing on diseases,\nabsolutely shortens life. \"Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than\nlabour wears, while the used key is always bright,\" as poor Richard\nsays. \"But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that is\nthe stuff life is made of,\" as poor Richard says. How much more than is\nnecessary do we spend in sleep? forgetting that the sleeping fox\ncatches no poultry, and that \"there will be sleeping enough in the\ngrave,\" as poor Richard says.\n\n\"If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be,\" as\npoor Richard says, \"the greatest prodigality;\" since, as he elsewhere\ntells us, \"lost time is never found again; and what we call time\nenough, always proves little enough;\" let us then up and be doing, and\ndoing to the purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less\nperplexity. \"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy;\nand he that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce over take\nhis business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty\nsoon overtakes him. Drive thy business, let not that drive thee; and\nearly to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,\"\nas poor Richard says.\n\nSo what signifies wishing and hoping for better times? we may make\nthese times better, if we bestir ourselves. \"Industry need not wish,\nand he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains\nwithout pains; then, help hands for I have no lands,\" or if I have they\nare smartly taxed. \"He that hath a trade, hath an estate; and he that\nhath a calling, hath an office of profit and honour,\" as poor Richard\nsays; but then the trade must be worked at, and the calling well\nfollowed, or neither the estate nor the office will enable us to pay\nour taxes. If we are industrious, we will never starve; for at the\nworking man's house, \"hunger looks in but dares not enter.\" Nor will\nthe bailiff or the constable enter, for \"industry pays debts, while\ndespair increaseth them.\" What, though you have found no treasure, nor\nhas any rich relation left you a legacy, \"diligence is the mother of\ngood luck, and God gives all things to industry. Then plough deep while\nsluggards sleep, and you shall have corn to sell and to keep.\"\n\n\"Work while it is called to-day, for you know not how much you may be\nhindered to-morrow. One to-day is worth two to-morrows,\" as poor\nRichard says; and farther, \"never leave that till to-morrow, which you\ncan do to-day.\" If you were a servant, would you not be ashamed that a\ngood master should catch you idle? Are you then your own master? be\nashamed to catch yourself idle when there is so much to be done for\nyourself, your family, your relations, and your country. Handle your\ntools without mittens: remember that \"the cat in gloves catches no\nmice,\" as poor Richard says. It is true, there is much to be done, and,\nperhaps, you are weak-handed; but stick to it steadily, and you will\nsee great effects; for \"constant dropping wears away stones; and by\ndiligence and patience the mouse ate in two the cable; and little\nstrokes fell great oaks.\"\n\nMethinks I hear some of you say, \"must a man afford himself no\nleisure?\" I will tell thee, my friend, what poor Richard says; \"employ\nthy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure; and, since thou art not\nsure of a minute, throw not away an hour. Leisure is time for doing\nsomething useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the\nlazy man never; for, a life of leisure and a life of laziness are two\nthings. Many, without labour would live by their wits only, but they\nbreak for want of stock: whereas industry gives comfort, and plenty,\nand respect. Fly pleasures, and they will follow you. The diligent\nspinner has a large shift; and now I have a sheep and a cow, every body\nbids me good-morrow.\"\n\n II. But with our industry, we must likewise be steady, settled and\ncareful, and oversee our own affairs with our own eyes, and not trust\ntoo much to others; for, as poor Richard says,\n\n    \"I never saw an oft removed tree, Nor yet an oft removed family,\n    That throve so well as those that settled be.\"\n\nAnd again, \"three removes are as bad as a fire;\" and again, \"keep thy\nshop, and thy shop will keep thee;\" and again, \"if you would have your\nbusiness done, go; if not, send.\" And again,\n\n    \"He that by the plough would thrive,\n    Himself must either hold or drive.\"\n\nAnd again, \"the eye of a master will do more work than both his\nhands;\" and again, \"want of care does us more damage than want of\nknowledge:\" and again, \"not to oversee workmen is to leave them your\npurse open.\" Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many;\nfor, \"in the affairs of this world, men are saved, not by faith, but\nby the want of it; but a man's own care is profitable;\" for, \"if you\nwould have a faithful servant, and one that you like, serve yourself.\nA little neglect may breed great mischief; for want of a nail the shoe\nwas lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a\nhorse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy: all\nfor want of a little care about a horse-shoe nail.\"\n\nIII. So much for industry, my friends, and attention to one's own\nbusiness; but to these we must add frugality, if we would make our\nindustry more certainly successful. A man may, if he knows not how to\nsave as he gets, \"keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and\ndie not worth a groat at last. A fat kitchen makes a lean will;\" and,\n\n    \"Many estates are spent in the getting,\n    Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting,\n    And men for punch forsook hewing and splitting.\"\n\nIf you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as of getting. The\nIndies have not made Spain rich because her outgoes are greater than\nher incomes.\n\nAway then with your expensive follies, and you will not then have so\nmuch cause to complain of hard times, heavy taxes, and chargeable\nfamilies; for,\n\n    \"Women and wine, game and deceit,\n    Make the wealth small, and the want great.\"\n\nAnd farther, \"what maintains one vice will bring up two children.\" You\nmay think, perhaps, that a little tea, or a little punch now and then,\ndiet a little more costly, clothes a little finer, and a little\nentertainment now and then, can be no great matter; but remember, \"many\na little makes a mickle.\" Beware of little expenses; \"a small leak will\nsink a great ship,\" as poor Richard says; and again, \"who dainties\nlove, shall beggars prove;\" and moreover, \"fools make feasts, and wise\nmen eat them.\" Here you are all got together to this sale of fineries\nand nicknacks. You call them _goods_, but if you do not take care they\nwill prove _evils_ to some of you. You expect they will be sold cheap,\nand, perhaps, they may, for less than they cost; but, if you have no\noccasion for them, they must be dear to you. Remember what poor Richard\nsays, \"buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy\nnecessaries.\" And again, \"at a great pennyworth pause awhile;\" he means\nthat perhaps the cheapness is apparent only, and not real or the\nbargain, by straitening thee in thy business, may do thee more harm\nthan good. For in another place he says, \"many have been ruined by\nbuying great pennyworths.\" Again, \"it is foolish to lay out money in a\npurchase of repentance:\" and yet this folly is practised every day at\nauctions, for want of minding the Almanac. Many a one, for the sake of\nfinery on the back, have gone with a hungry belly, and half starved\ntheir families; \"silks and sattins, scarlet and velvets, put out the\nkitchen fire,\" as poor Richard says. These are not the necessaries of\nlife, they can scarcely be called the conveniences: and yet only\nbecause they look pretty, how many want to have them. By these, and\nother extravagances, the genteel are reduced to poverty, and forced to\nborrow of those whom they formerly despised, but who through industry\nand frugality have maintained their standing; in which case it appears\nplainly, that \"a ploughman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on\nhis knees,\" as poor Richard says. Perhaps they have had a small estate\nleft them, which they knew not the getting of: they think \"it is day,\nand will never be night;\" that a little to be spent out of so much is\nnot worth minding: but \"always taking out of the meal-tub, and never\nputting in, soon comes to the bottom,\" as poor Richard says; and then,\n\"when the well is dry, they know the worth of water.\" But this they\nmight have known before, if they had taken his advice. \"If you would\nknow the value of money, go and try to borrow some; for he that goes a\nborrowing goes a sorrowing,\" as poor Richard says; and, indeed, so does\nhe that lends to such people, when he goes to get it again. Poor Dick\nfarther advises, and says,\n\n    \"Fond pride of dress is sure a very curse,\n    Ere fancy you consult, consult your purse.\"\n\nAnd again, \"pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more\nsaucy.\" When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more,\nthat your appearance may be all of a piece; but poor Dick says, \"it is\neasier to suppress the first desire, than to satisfy all that follow\nit.\" And it is as truly folly for the poor to ape the rich, as for the\nfrog to swell to equal the ox.\n\n\"Vessels large, may venture more, But little boats should keep near\nshore.\"\n\nIt is, however, a folly soon punished; for, as poor Richard says,\n\"pride breakfasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with\ninfamy.\" And, after all, of what use is this pride of appearance, for\nwhich so much is risked, so much is suffered? It cannot promote health,\nnor ease pain; it makes no increase of merit in the person, it creates\nenvy, it hastens misfortune.\n\nBut what madness must it be to run in debt for these superfluities? We\nare offered, by the terms of this sale, six months credit; and that,\nperhaps, has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare\nthe ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But ah! think what\nyou do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your\nliberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be _ashamed to see\nyour creditor_; you will _be in fear when you speak to him_; you will\nmake _poor, pitiful, sneaking excuses_, and by degrees, come to _lose\nyour veracity_, and sink into _base, downright lying_; for \"the second\nvice is lying, the first is running in debt,\" as poor Richard says; and\nagain, to the same purpose, \"lying rides on debt's back;\" whereas a\nfree American ought not to be ashamed, nor afraid to see or speak to\nany man living. But poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and\nvirtue. \"It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.\" What would you\nthink of that nation, or of that government, who should issue an edict,\nforbidding you to dress like a gentleman or gentlewoman, on pain of\nimprisonment or servitude? Would you not say that you were free; have a\nright to dress as you please, and that such an edict would be a breach\nof your privileges, and such a government tyrannical? And yet you are\nabout to put yourself under that tyranny when you run into debt for\nsuch a dress! your creditor has authority, at his pleasure, to deprive\nyou of your liberty, by confining you in jail for life, or by selling\nyou for a servant, if you should not be able to pay him: when you have\ngot your bargain, you may perhaps think little of payment; but as poor\nRichard says, \"creditors have better memories than debtors; creditors\nare a superstitious set, great observers of set days and times.\" The\nday comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you\nare prepared to satisfy it; or, if you bear your debt in mind, the\nterm, which, at first seemed so long, will, as it lessens, appear\nextremely short; time will seem to have added wings to his heels, as\nwell as his shoulders. \"Those have a short Lent, who owe money at\nEaster.\" At present, perhaps, you may think yourself in thriving\ncircumstances, and that you can bear a little extravagance without\ninjury; but,\n\n    \"For age and want save while you may,\n    No morning suns last the whole day.\"\n\nGain may be temporary and uncertain, but ever while you live, expense\nis constant and certain; and \"it is easier to build two chimneys, than\nto keep one in fuel,\" as poor Richard says: so \"rather go to bed\nsupperless, than rise in debt.\"\n\n\"Get what you can, and what you get, hold, 'Tis the stones that will\nturn lead into gold.\"\n\nAnd when you have got the philosopher's stone, sure you will no longer\ncomplain of bad times, or the difficulty of paying taxes.\n\nIV. This doctrine of my friend's is reason and wisdom; but after all,\ndo not depend too much upon your own industry and frugality, and\nprudence, though excellent things; for they may all be blasted without\nthe blessing of heaven; and therefore ask that blessing humbly, and be\nnot uncharitable to those that at present seem to want it, but comfort\nand help them. Remember Job suffered, and was afterwards prosperous.\n\nAnd now to conclude, \"experience keeps a dear school, but fools will\nlearn in no other,\" as poor Richard says, and scarce in that; for it is\ntrue, \"we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct;\" however,\nremember this, \"they that will not be counselled cannot be helped;\" and\nfarther, that \"if you will not hear reason, she will surely wrap your\nknuckles,\" as poor Richard says.\n\nThus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it and\napproved the doctrine, and immediately practised the contrary, just as\nif it had been a common sermon; for the auction opened, and they began\nto buy extravagantly. I found the good man had thoroughly studied my\nAlmanacs, and digested all I had dropt on those topics during the\ncourse of twenty-five years. The frequent mention he made of me must\nhave tired any one else; but my vanity was wonderfully delighted with\nit, though I was conscious, that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my\nown, which he ascribed to me; but rather the gleanings that I had made\nof the sense of all ages and nations. However I resolved to be the\nbetter for the echo of it; and though I had at first determined to buy\nstuff for a new coat, I went away, resolved to wear my old one a little\nlonger. Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy profit will be as great\nas mine. I am, as ever thine to serve thee.\n\nRICHARD SAUNDERS.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXV.\n\n\n\"_When poverty comes in at the door_,\" said a shrewd observer, \"_love\nflies out at the window_.\" When foolish families, \"_wasting their\nsubstance in riotous living_,\" have fairly run their estates through\nthe girt, and brought a host of hungry sheriffs and constables to the\ndoor, seizing on all their trumpery of fine carpets and curtains, and\nside-boards, and looking-glasses for _auction_, oh what sudden\npalpitations and blank looks ensue! what bitter upbraidings between\nhusbands and wives, parents and children! what lyings, and perjuries,\nand secret transfers of property to _cheat creditors_! with universal\nwreck of character, and conscience, and every thing else that can give\ndignity or pleasure to life!\n\nBut while Franklin, by his famous Almanack \"_poor Richard_,\" was\ngenerously striving to prevent all these curses of _sloth_ and\n_extravagance_, his wide spread newspapers were scattering thousands\nof the finest lectures on that _honest industry_ and _prudence_,\nwhich makes nations wealthy and glorious. And his lecturing, like one\nborn to be the moralist of nations, was in that style of brevity,\nsprightliness, and nerve, that young and old, men, women, and\nchildren were never tired of reading. And to give more value to these\nbeautiful little essays, they were always written under the smarting\nrecollection of what himself had suffered, from the follies which he\nwished to guard others against. Witness first, his celebrated little\nstory, entitled\n\n\nTHE WHISTLE.\n\nA TRUE STORY.\n\nWRITTEN TO HIS NEPHEW.\n\nWhen I was a child, about seven years old, my friends, on a holiday,\nfilled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop, where they\nsold toys for children, and being charmed with the sound of a\n_whistle_, that I met by the way, in the hands of another boy, I\nvoluntarily offered him all my money for it. I then came home, and\nwent whistling all over the house, much pleased with my _whistle_, but\ndisturbing all the family. My brothers, and sisters, and cousins,\nunderstanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times\nas much for it as it was worth. This put me in mind what good things I\nmight have bought with the rest of my money; and they laughed at me so\nmuch for my folly, that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave\nme more chagrin than the _whistle_ gave me pleasure.\n\nThis, however, was afterwards of use to me. The impression continued\non my mind; so that, often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary\nthing, I said to myself, _don't give too much for the whistle_; and so\nI saved my money.\n\nAs I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I\nthought I met with many, very many who _gave too much for the\nwhistle_.\n\nWhen I saw any one too ambitious of court favours, sacrificing his\ntime in attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and\nperhaps his friends, to attain it; I have said to myself, _this man\ngives too much for his whistle_.\n\nWhen I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in\npolitical bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by\nthat neglect; _he pays indeed_, says I, _too much for his whistle_.\n\nIf I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living; all\nthe pleasures of doing good to others, all the esteem of his\nfellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake\nof accumulating wealth; _poor man_, says I, _you do, indeed, pay too\nmuch for your whistle_.\n\nWhen I meet a man of pleasure, sacrificing every laudable improvement\nof the mind, or of his fortune, to mere corporeal sensations--_Mistaken\nman_, says I, _you are providing pain for yourself, instead of\npleasure. You give too much for your whistle._\n\nIf I see one fond of fine clothes, fine furniture, fine equipages, all\nabove his fortune, for which he contracts debts, and ends his career\nin prison; _alas_, says I, _he has paid dear, very dear, for his\nwhistle_.\n\nWhen I see a beautiful sweet-tempered girl, married to an ill-natured\nbrute of a husband; _what a pity it is_, says I, _that she has paid so\nmuch for her whistle_.\n\nIn short, I conceived, that great part of the miseries of mankind were\nbrought upon them, by the false estimates they had made of the value\nof things, and by their giving too much for their _whistle_.\n\n\nThe following admirable satire against _prejudice_, can never be too\noften read by the ill-natured and hypochondrical.\n\nTHE HANDSOME AND UGLY LEG.\n\nThere are two sorts of people in the world, who, with equal advantages\nof life, become, the one happy, and the other miserable. This arises,\nvery much, from the different views in which they consider things, and\nthe effect of those different views upon their own minds.\n\nIn every situation men can be placed, they may find conveniences and\ninconveniences; in every company, persons and conversation more or\nless pleasing; at every table, meats and drinks of better or worse\ntaste; dishes better and worse dressed; in every climate, good and bad\nweather; and under every government, good and bad laws, and a good and\nbad administration of those laws; in every poem, faults and beauties;\nin almost every face, and every person, fine features and sad defects,\ngood and bad qualities.\n\nUnder these circumstances, the two classes above mentioned, fix their\nattention--those who are disposed to be _happy_, on the _conveniences_\nof things, the _pleasant parts_ of conversation, the _well dressed_\ndishes, the _goodness_ of the wine, the _fine weather_, &c. and enjoy\nall with _cheerfulness_. Those who are to be _unhappy_, think and\nspeak only of the contraries. Hence they are continually discontented\nthemselves, and, by their remarks, sour the pleasures of society, and\nmake themselves every where disagreeable.\n\nNobody loves this sort of people; no one shows them more than the\ncommonest civility, and scarcely that; and this frequently puts them\nout of humour, and draws them into disputes. If they aim at obtaining\nany advantage in rank or fortune, nobody wishes them success, or will\nstir a step to favour their pretensions. If they incur public censure\nor disgrace, no one will defend or excuse, and many join to aggravate\ntheir misconduct, and render them completely odious. If these poor\ngentlemen will not change this bad habit, condescend to be pleased\nwith what is pleasing, without fretting themselves and others about\nthe contraries, it is good to avoid an acquaintance with them, which\nis always disagreeable, and sometimes very inconvenient, especially\nwhen one finds one's self entangled in their quarrels.\n\nAn old philosophical friend of mine was grown, from experience, very\ncautious in this particular, and carefully avoided any intimacy with\nsuch people. He had, like other philosophers, a thermometer, to show\nhim the heat of the weather, and a barometer, to mark when it was\nlikely to prove good or bad; but there being no instrument invented to\ndiscover, at first sight, this unpleasing disposition in a person, he,\nfor that purpose, made use of his legs, one of which was remarkably\nhandsome; the other, by some accident, crooked and deformed. If a\nstranger, at the first interview, kept his eyes on his ugly leg more\nthan the handsome one, he doubted him; if he spoke of it, and took no\nnotice of the handsome leg, that was sufficient to determine my\nphilosopher to have no further acquaintance with him. Every body has\nnot this two-legged instrument; but every one, with a little\nattention, may observe signs of that carping, fault-finding\ndisposition, and take the same resolution of avoiding the acquaintance\nof those infected with it. I therefore advise those critical,\nquerulous, discontented, unhappy people, that if they wish to be\nrespected and beloved by others, and happy in themselves, they should\n_leave off looking at the ugly leg_.\n\n\n\"_A good wit will turn every thing to advantage_,\" says Shakespeare;\nand the following will show what a singular passion Dr. Franklin had\nto turn every little cross incident of his own life into pleasure and\nprofit to others. He calls it\n\nSTOOP, AND GO SAFE.\n\n    _To the late Dr. Mather, of Boston._\n\n    REV. SIR,\n\n    When I was a boy, I met with a book, entitled, \"_Essays to do\n    good_,\" which, I think, was written by your father. It had been so\n    little regarded by a former possessor, that several leaves of it\n    were torn out: but the remainder gave me such a turn for thinking,\n    as to have an influence on my conduct through life; for I have\n    always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good than\n    any other kind of reputation; and if I have been, as you seem to\n    think, a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to\n    that book.\n\n    The last time I saw your father was in the beginning of 1724, when\n    I visited him after my first trip to Pennsylvania. He received me\n    in his library; and on my taking leave, showed me a shorter way\n    out of the house, through a narrow passage, which was crossed by a\n    beam over head. We were still talking, as I withdrew; he\n    accompanying me behind, and I turning partly towards him, when he\n    said hastily, \"_stoop! stoop!_\" I did not understand him, till I\n    felt my head hit against the beam. He was a man, who never missed\n    any occasion of giving instruction; and upon this he said to me,\n    \"_you are young, and have the world before you_. STOOP, _as you go\n    through, and you will miss many hard thumps_.\" This advice, thus\n    beat into my head, has frequently been of use to me; and I often\n    think of it, when I see pride mortified, and misfortune brought\n    upon people, by carrying their heads too high.\n\n    I long much to see again my native place; and did hope to have\n    been there in 1783; but could not obtain my dismission from\n    employment here. And now I fear I shall never have that happiness.\n    My best wishes, however, attend my dear country. It is now blessed\n    with an excellent constitution. _May it last for ever!_\n\n    This powerful monarchy continues its friendship for the United\n    States. It is a friendship of the utmost importance to our\n    security; and should be carefully cultivated. Britain has not yet\n    digested the loss of its dominion over us, and has still, at\n    times, some flattering hopes of recovering it. Accidents may\n    increase those hopes, and encourage dangerous attempts. A breach\n    between us and France would infallibly bring the English again\n    upon our backs: and yet, we have some wild beasts among our\n    countrymen, who are endeavouring to weaken that connexion.\n\n    Let us preserve our reputation, by performing our engagements; our\n    credit, by fulfilling our contracts; and our friends, by gratitude\n    and kindness: for we know not how soon we may again have occasion\n    for all of them.--With great and sincere esteem, I have the honour\n    to be--Reverend sir,\n\n    Your most obedient and most humble servant,\n\n    B. FRANKLIN.\n\n    _Passy, May 12, 1784._\n\n\nThe witty little essay that follows, will show how very closely Dr.\nFranklin observed every thing around him, and what gross errors in\neducation yet remain to be corrected.\n\nTHE HUMOUROUS PETITION.\n\nI address myself to all the friends of youth, and conjure them to\ndirect their compassionate regard to my unhappy fate, in order to\nremove the prejudices of which I am the victim. There are twin sisters\nof us, and the two eyes of man do not more resemble, nor are capable\nof being upon better terms with each other, than my sister and myself,\nwere it not for the partiality of our parents, who make the most\ninjurious distinctions between us. From my infancy I have been led to\nconsider my sister as being of a more elevated rank. I was suffered to\ngrow up without the least instruction, while nothing was spared in her\neducation. She had masters to teach her writing, drawing, music, and\nother accomplishments, but if, by chance, I touched a pencil, a pen,\nor a needle, I was bitterly rebuked; and more than once, I have been\nbeaten for being awkward, and wanting a graceful manner. It is true,\nmy sister associated me with her upon some occasions; but she always\nmade a point of taking the lead, calling upon me only from necessity,\nor to figure by her side.\n\nBut conceive not, sirs, that my complaints are instigated merely by\nvanity--no, my uneasiness is occasioned by an object much more\nserious. It is the practice in our family, that the whole business of\nproviding for its subsistence falls upon my sister and myself. If any\nindisposition should attack my sister--and I mention it in confidence,\nupon this occasion, that she is subject to the gout, the rheumatism,\nand cramp, without making mention of other accidents--what would be\nthe fate of our poor family? Must not the regret of our parents be\nexcessive, at having placed so great a distance between sisters who\nare so perfectly equal? Alas! we must perish from distress: for it\nwould not be in my power even to scrawl a suppliant petition for\nrelief, having been obliged to employ the hand of another in\ntranscribing the request which I have now the honour to prefer to you.\n\nCondescend, sirs, to make my parents sensible of the injustice of an\n_exclusive tenderness_, and of the necessity of distributing their\ncare and affection among all their children equally. I am, with\nprofound respect, Sirs,\n\nYour obedient servant,\n\nTHE LEFT HAND.\n\n\nThe following essays strikingly illustrate the admirable wisdom and\nphilanthropy of Dr. Franklin; and, if read _practically_, would, no\ndoubt, greatly lessen the number both of PHYSICIANS and PATIENTS.\n\nTHE ART OF PROCURING PLEASANT DREAMS.\n\nAs a great part of our life is spent in sleep, during which we have\nsometimes pleasing, and sometimes painful dreams, it becomes of some\nconsequence to obtain the one kind, and avoid the other; for whether\nreal or imaginary, pain is pain, and pleasure is pleasure. If we can\nsleep without dreaming, it is well that painful dreams are avoided.\nIf, while we sleep, we can have pleasing dreams, it is so much clear\ngain to the pleasures of life.\n\nTo this end, it is, in the first place, necessary to be careful in\npreserving health--for, in sickness, the imagination is disturbed; and\ndisagreeable, sometimes terrible ideas are apt to present themselves.\nBut for health, our main dependence is on EXERCISE and TEMPERANCE.\nThese render the appetite sharp, the digestion easy, the body\nlightsome, and the temper cheerful, with sweet sleep and pleasant\ndreams. While indolence and full feeding never fail to bring on loaded\nstomachs, with night-mares and horrors--we fall from precipices--are\nstung by serpents--assaulted by wild beasts--murderers--devils--with\nall the black train of unimaginable danger and wo. Temperance, then,\nis all-important to sweet sleep and pleasant dreaming. But a main\npoint of temperance, is to _shun hearty suppers_, which are indeed not\nsafe, even when dinner has been missed; what then must be the\nconsequence of hearty suppers after full dinners? why only restless\nnights and frightful dreams; and sometimes _a stroke of the apoplexy_,\nafter which they sleep till doomsday. The newspapers often relate\ninstances of persons, who, after eating hearty suppers, are found dead\nin their beds next morning.\n\nAnother grand mean of preserving health, is to admit a constant supply\nof _fresh air_ into your chamber. A more sad mistake was never\ncommitted than that of sleeping in tight rooms, and beds closely\ncurtained. This has arisen from the dread of night air. But, after all\nthe clamour and abuse that have been heaped on _night air_, it is very\ncertain that no outward air, that may come in, is half so unwholesome\nas the air often breathed in a close chamber. As boiling water does\nnot grow hotter by longer boiling, if the particles that receive\ngreater heat can escape; so living bodies do not putrify, if the\nparticles, as fast as they become putrid, can be thrown off. Nature\nexpels them by the pores of the skin and lungs, and in a free open air\nthey are carried off; but, in a _close room_, we receive them again\nand again, though they become more and more corrupt. A number of\npersons crowded into a small room, thus spoil the air in a few\nminutes, and even render it mortal, as in the black hole at\nCalcutta.[3] A single person is said to spoil a gallon of air per\nminute, and therefore requires a longer time to spoil a chamber full;\nbut it is done, however, in proportion, and many putrid disorders\nhence have their origin. It is recorded of Methusalem, who, being the\nlongest liver, may be supposed to have best preserved his health, that\nhe slept always in the open air; for when he had lived five hundred\nyears, an angel said to him, \"_arise, Methusalem, and build thee an\nhouse, for thou shalt live yet five hundred years longer_.\" But\nMethusalem answered and said, \"_If I am to live but five hundred years\nlonger, it is not worth while to build me an house--I will sleep in\nthe air, as I have been used to do._\" Physicians, after having for\nages contended that the sick should not be indulged with fresh air,\nhave at length discovered that it may do them good. It is therefore to\nbe hoped that it is not hurtful to those who are in health, and that\nwe may be then cured of the _acrophobia_ that at present distresses\nweak minds, and makes them choose to be stifled and poisoned, rather\nthan leave open the windows of a bed chamber, or put down the glass of\na coach.\n\n          [3] In India, where out of 140 poor British prisoners shut\n          up in a close small room 120 of them perished in one night.\n\nConfined air, when saturated with perspirable matter,[4] will not\nreceive more; and that matter must remain in our bodies, and occasions\ndiseases; but it gives some previous notice of its being about to be\nhurtful, by producing certain uneasinesses which are difficult to\ndescribe, and few that feel know the cause. But we may recollect, that\nsometimes, on waking in the night, we have, if warmly covered, found\nit difficult to get asleep again. We turn often without finding repose\nin any position. This _fidgetiness_, to use a vulgar expression for\nthe want of a better, is occasioned wholly by an uneasiness in the\nskin, owing to the retention of the perspirable matter, the\nbed-clothes having received their quantity, and, being saturated,\nrefusing to take any more.\n\n          [4] What physicians call the perspirable matter, is that\n          vapour which passes off from our bodies, from the lungs, and\n          through the pores of the skin. The quantity of this is said\n          to be five-eighths of what we eat.\n\nWhen you are awakened by this uneasiness, and find you cannot easily\nsleep again, get out of bed, beat up and turn your pillow, shake the\nbed-clothes well, with at least twenty shakes, then throw the bed\nopen, and leave it to cool; in the meanwhile, continuing undrest, walk\nabout your chamber, till your skin has had time to discharge its load,\nwhich it will do sooner as the air may be drier and colder. When you\nbegin to feel the cool air unpleasant, then return to your bed, and\nyou will soon fall asleep, and your sleep will be sweet and pleasant.\nAll the scenes presented by your fancy, will be of the pleasing kind.\nI am often as agreeably entertained with them, as by the scenery of an\nopera. If you happen to be too indolent to get out of bed, you may\ninstead of it, lift up your bed-clothes so as to draw in a good deal\nof fresh air, and, by letting them fall, force it out again. This,\nrepeated twenty times, will so clear them of the perspirable matter\nthey have imbibed, as to permit your sleeping well for some time\nafterwards. But this latter method is not equal to the former.\n\nThose who do not love trouble, and can afford to have two beds, will\nfind great luxury in rising, when they wake in a hot bed, and going\ninto the cool one. Such shifting of beds, would be of great service to\npersons ill in a fever; as it refreshes and frequently procures sleep.\nA very large bed, that will admit a removal so distant from the first\nsituation as to be cool and sweet, may in a degree answer the same\nend.\n\nThese are the rules of the art. But though they will generally prove\neffectual in producing the end intended, there is a case in which the\nmost punctual observance of them will be totally fruitless. This case\nis, when the person who desires to have pleasant dreams has not taken\ncare to preserve, what is necessary above all things--A GOOD CONSCIENCE.\n\n\nON THE ART OF SWIMMING.\n\nThe exercise of swimming is one of the most healthy and agreeable in\nthe world. After having swam for an hour or two in the evening, one\nsleeps coolly the whole night, even during the most ardent heat of\nsummer. Perhaps the pores being cleansed, the insensible perspiration\nincreases, and occasions this coolness. It is certain that much\nswimming is the means of stopping a diarrhoea and even of producing a\nconstipation. With respect to those who do not know how to swim, or\nwho are affected with a diarrhoea at the season which does not permit\nthem to use that exercise, a warm bath, by cleansing and purifying the\nskin, is found very salutary, and often effects a radical cure. I\nspeak from my own experience, frequently repeated, and that of others,\nto whom I have recommended this.\n\nYou will not be displeased if I conclude these hasty remarks by\ninforming you, that as the ordinary method of swimming is reduced to\nthe act of rowing with the arms and legs, and is consequently a\nlaborious and fatiguing operation, when the space of water to be\ncrossed is considerable; there is a method in which a swimmer may pass\na great distance with much facility, by means of a sail. This\ndiscovery I fortunately made by accident, and in the following manner.\n\nWhen I was a boy, I amused myself one day with flying a paper kite;\nand approaching the bank of a pond, which was near a mile broad, I\ntied the string to a stake, and the kite ascended to a very\nconsiderable height, above the pond, while I was swimming. In a little\ntime, being desirous of amusing myself with my kite, and enjoying at\nthe same time the pleasure of swimming, I returned, and loosing from\nthe stake the string, with the little stick fastened to it, went again\ninto the water, where I found, that, lying on my back, and holding the\nstick in my hands, I was drawn along the surface of the water in a\nvery agreeable manner. Having then engaged another boy to carry my\nclothes round the pond to the other side, I began to cross the pond\nwith my kite, which carried me quite over without the least fatigue,\nand with the greatest pleasure imaginable. I was only obliged\noccasionally to halt a little in my course, and resist its progress,\nwhen it appeared that, by following too quick, I lowered the kite too\nmuch, by doing which occasionally I made it rise again. I have never\nsince that time practised this singular mode of swimming, though I\nthink it not impossible to cross, in this manner, from Dover to\nCalais. The packet boat, however, is still preferable.\n\n\nNEW MODE OF BATHING.\n\nThe cold bath has long been in vogue as a tonic, but the shock of the\ncold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too\nviolent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to\nbathe in another element--I mean cold air. With this view, I rise,\nearly every morning and sit in my chamber, without any clothes\nwhatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either\nreading or writing, This practice is not the least painful, but, on\nthe contrary, agreeable; and if I return to bed afterwards, before I\ndress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night's\nrest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be\nimagined. I find no ill consequences whatever resulting from it, and\nthat at least I do not injure my health, if it does not, in fact,\ncontribute much to its preservation. I shall, therefore, call it for\nthe future a _tonic air bath_.\n\n\nThe common saying, \"_lazy people take the most pains_,\" was never more\nclearly exemplified than in the following squib.\n\nSTRENUOUS IDLENESS.\n\nPassing the Schuylkill, one day, he saw a man sitting on the bridge,\nvery earnestly looking on the cork of his fishing line. \"_What luck?\nWhat luck?_\" cried the doctor. \"_O none! none!_\" answered our fishing\nhawk; \"_none yet; I have not been here over a couple of hours or so_.\"\nThe doctor pushed on. Near sun-down he returned. The man was still\nsitting and staring at his cork, like a spaniel at a dead set. \"Well,\"\nsaid the doctor, \"I hope you have had a fine haul among the fish.\"\n\"Not a single one,\" replied the man. \"_Not a single one!_\" quoth the\ndoctor, amazed. \"No, not one, sir,\" answered the fisher, \"not one; but\nI've had a most _glorious nibble_!\"\n\n\nThe following is a fine hint to such as have learned useful trades,\nbut have not learned what is infinitely more valuable, I mean that\ndivine philanthropy which alone can make their trades their delight,\nand thus strew life over with roses.\n\nTHE SILVER HOOK.\n\nDoctor Franklin observing one day a hearty young fellow, whom he knew\nto be an extraordinary blacksmith, sitting on the wharf, bobbing for\nlittle mud-cats and eels, he called to him, \"Ah Tom, what a pity 'tis\nyou don't fish with a _silver_ hook.\" The young man replied, \"he was\nnot able to fish with a silver hook.\" Some days after this, the doctor\npassing that way, saw Tom out at the end of the wharf again, with his\nlong pole bending over the flood. \"What, Tom,\" cried the doctor, \"have\nyou not got the silver hook yet?\"\n\n\"God bless you, doctor,\" cried the blacksmith, \"I'm hardly able to\nfish with an iron hook.\"\n\n\"Poh! poh!\" replied the doctor, \"go home to your anvil; and you'll\nmake silver enough in one day to buy more and better fish than you\nwould catch here in a month.\"\n\n\nBut few have it so much in their power to do good or evil as the\nPRINTERS. I know they all glory in Dr. Franklin as a FATHER, and are\nwont to name his name with _veneration_; happy would it be for this\ncountry if they would read the following with _imitation_.\n\nTRUE INDEPENDENCE.\n\nSoon after his establishment in Philadelphia, Franklin was offered a\npiece for publication in his newspaper. Being very busy, he begged the\ngentleman would leave it for consideration. The next day the author\ncalled and asked his opinion of it. \"Why, sir,\" replied Franklin, \"I\nam sorry to say that I think it highly scurrilous and defamatory. But\nbeing at a loss on account of my poverty whether to reject it or not,\nI thought I would put it to this issue--at night, when my work was\ndone, I bought a two-penny loaf, on which with a mug of cold water I\nsupped heartily, and then wrapping myself in my great coat, slept very\nsoundly on the floor till morning; when another loaf and a mug of\nwater afforded me a pleasant breakfast. Now, sir, since I can live\nvery comfortably in this manner, why should I prostitute my press to\npersonal hatred or party passion, for a more luxurious living?\"\n\nOne cannot read this anecdote of our American sage without thinking of\nSocrates' reply to King Archilaus, who had pressed him to give up\npreaching in the dirty streets of Athens, and come and live with him\nin his splendid courts--\"_Meal, please your majesty, is a half penny a\npeck at Athens, and water I can get for nothing._\"\n\n\nThe letter ensuing was from Dr. Franklin to a friend of his, who\nhaving displeased some of his relatives by marrying very early, wrote\nto him for his opinion on that subject. Young bachelors would do well\nto read it once a month.\n\nON EARLY MARRIAGES.\n\nDEAR JACK,\n\nFrom the marriages that have fallen under my observation, I am rather\ninclined to think that _early_ ones stand the best chance for\nhappiness. The temper and habits of the young are not yet become so\nstiff and uncomplying, as when more advanced in life; they form more\neasily to each other, and hence, many occasions of disgust are\nremoved. And if youth has less of that prudence which is necessary to\nmanage a family, the parents and elder friends of young married\npersons are generally at hand to afford their advice, which amply\nsupplies that defect. By early marriage youth is sooner formed to\nregular and useful life; and possibly some of those accidents or\nconnexions that might have injured the constitution, or reputation, or\nboth, are thereby happily prevented. Particular circumstances of\nparticular persons, may sometimes make it prudent to delay entering\ninto that state; but in general, when nature has rendered our bodies\nfit for it, the presumption is in nature's favour, that she has not\njudged amiss in making us _desire_ it. Late marriages are often\nattended too, with this inconvenience, that there is not the same\nchance that the parents shall live to see their offspring educated.\n\"_Late children_,\" says the Spanish proverb, \"_are early orphans_.\" A\nmelancholy reflection to those whose case it may be! With us in\nAmerica, marriages are generally in the morning of life; our children\nare educated and settled in the world by noon; and thus, our business\ndone, we have an evening of cheerful leisure to ourselves.\n\nBy these early marriages we are blessed with more children; and from\nthe mode among us, founded in nature, of every mother suckling her\nown child, more of them are raised. Thence the swift progress of\npopulation among us, unparalleled in Europe. In fine, I am glad you\nare married, and congratulate you most cordially upon it. You are now\nin the way of becoming a useful citizen; and you have escaped the\nunnatural state of celibacy for life--the fate of many who never\nintended it, but who having too long postponed the change of their\ncondition, find, at length, that it is too late to think of it, and\nso live all their lives in a situation that greatly lessens a man's\nvalue. An odd volume of a set of books bears not the value of its\nproportion to the set: what think you of the _half_ of a pair of\nscissors? it can't well cut anything; it may possibly serve to scrape\na trencher.\n\nPray make my best wishes acceptable to your bride. I am old and\nheavy, or I should ere this have presented them in person. I shall\nmake but small use of the old man's privilege, that of giving _advice\nto younger friends_. Treat your wife always with respect; it will\nprocure respect to you, not only from her, but from all that observe\nit. Never use a slighting expression to her even in _jest_; for\nslights in _jest_, after frequent bandyings, are apt to end in angry\n_earnest_. Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned.\nBe industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and\ntemperate, and you will be healthy. Be virtuous, and you will be\nhappy. At least, you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for\nsuch consequences. I pray God to bless you both!\n\nYour affectionate friend,\n\nB. FRANKLIN.\n\n\nAs next to a GOOD WIFE, there is but \"ONE THING\" to be compared to a\n_handsome fortune_, we advise our young countrymen to read the\nfollowing. It needs but be read to be valued, and it can hardly be\nread and valued enough by all who know the value of INDEPENDENCE.\n\nADVICE TO A YOUNG TRADESMAN.\n\nRemember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day, by\nhis labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though\nhe spends but six-pence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to\nreckon _that_ the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown\naway five shillings besides.\n\nRemember that _credit_ is money. If a man let his money lie in my\nhands, after it is due, he gives me the interest, or so much as I can\nmake of it, during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where\na man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it.\n\nRemember that money is of a very breeding prolific nature. Money\nbegets money; and its offspring can beget more: and so on. Five\nshillings turned is six. Turned again it is seven and three-pence; and\nso on, till it becomes hundreds and thousands of pounds. The more\nthere is of it, the more it produces, every turning; so that the\nprofits rise quicker and quicker. He, who kills a breeding sow,\ndestroys all her offspring, to the thousandth generation. He, who\nmurders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced; even scores\nof pounds.\n\nRemember that six pounds a year is but a groat a day. For this little\nsum, which may be daily wasted either in time or expense, unperceived,\na man of credit may, on his own security, have the constant possession\nand use of an hundred pounds. So much in stock, briskly turned by an\nindustrious man, produces great advantages.\n\nRemember this saying, \"the good paymaster is lord of another man's\npurse.\" He who is known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he\npromises, may, at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money\nhis friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry\nand frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man\nin the world, than punctuality and justice in all his dealings.\nTherefore never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you\npromised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend's purse for ever.\n\nThe most trifling actions, that affect a man's credit, are to be\nregarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or nine at\nnight, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if\nhe see you at a billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when\nyou should be at work, he sends for his money next day; and demands it\nbefore he can receive it in a lump.\n\nIt shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe. It makes you\nappear a careful as well as an honest man; and that still increases\nyour credit.\n\nBeware of thinking all your own, that you possess; and of living\naccordingly. It is a mistake that many people, who have credit, fall\ninto.\n\nTo prevent this, keep an exact account, for some time, both of your\nexpenses and your income. If you take the pains at first to mention\nparticulars, it will have this good effect:--you will discover how\nwonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums; and will\nsoon discern, what might have been, and may for the future be saved,\nwithout occasioning any great inconvenience.\n\nAgain: he, who sells upon credit, asks a price, for what he sells,\nequivalent to the principal and interest of his money, for the time he\nis to be kept out of it. Therefore, he who buys upon credit, pays\ninterest for what he buys; and, he who pays ready money, might let\nthat money out to use. So, that he who possesses any thing he has\nbought, pays interest for the use of it.\n\nYet, in buying goods, it is best to pay ready money; because, he who\nsells upon credit, expects to lose five per cent, by bad debts.\nTherefore, he charges, on all he sells upon credit, an advance that\nshall make up that deficiency.\n\nThose who pay for what they buy upon credit, pay their share of this\nadvance.\n\nHe who pays ready money, escapes, or may escape that charge.\n\n    A penny sav'd is two-pence clear,\n    A pin a day's a groat a year.\n\nIn short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way\nto market. It depends chiefly on two words: _Industry_ and _Frugality_.\nWaste neither _time_ nor _money_; but make the best use of both.\nWithout industry and frugality, nothing will do; but with them every\nthing. He who gets all he can, honestly, and saves all he gets,\nnecessary expenses excepted, will certainly become _rich_; if that\nBeing who governs the world, to whom all should look for a blessing on\ntheir honest endeavours, doth not, in his wise providence, otherwise\ndetermine.\n\nAN OLD TRADESMAN.\n\n\nEvery reader will be diverted with the following.\n\nIDLE CURIOSITY CURED.\n\nOn his first trip, by land, to see his father in Boston, he was worried\nalmost to death by the abominable inquisitiveness of the New England\ntavern-keepers.\n\nNeither man nor beast could travel among them in comfort. No matter how\nwet or weary, how hungry or thirsty, the poor traveller might be, he\nwas not to expect an atom of refreshment from these silly publicans\nuntil their most pestiferous curiosity was first gratified. And then\nJob himself could not stand such questions as they would goad him with;\nsuch as, _where he came from--and where he might be a-going--and what\nreligion he might be of--and if he was a married man_--and so on. After\nhaving been prodigiously teazed in this way for several days, until at\nlast the bare sight of a public house almost threw him into an ague, he\ndetermined to try the following remedy at the very next tavern. Soon as\nhe alighted from his horse he desired the tavern keeper to collect his\nwhole family, wife, children, and servants, every soul of them; for\nthat he had something _vastly important_ to communicate. All being\nassembled and wondering what he had to say, he thus addressed them. \"My\nname is Benjamin Franklin. I am a printer by trade. I live, when at\nhome, in Philadelphia. In Boston I have a father, a good old man who\ntaught me, when I was a little boy, to read my book and say my prayers.\nI have, ever since, thought it my duty to visit and pay my respects to\nsuch a father; and I am on that errand to Boston now. This is all that\nI can at present recollect of myself that I think worth telling you.\nBut if you can think of any thing else that you wish to know about me,\nI beg you to out with it at once, that I may answer, and so give you\nopportunity to get me something to eat; for I long to be on my journey\nthat I may return as soon as possible to my family and business, where\nI most of all delight to be.\"\n\nForty thousand sermons against IDLE CURIOSITY could hardly have driven\nit so effectually out of New England as did this little squib of\nridicule.\n\n\nThe following jeu d'esprit is peculiarly in character with Dr.\nFranklin. It proves that his wit and his benevolence were equal to\nevery emergence, and that if he carried the Old Testament language in\nhis head, he carried the New Testament spirit in his heart.\n\nWIT AND PERSECUTION.\n\nThe conversation turning, one day, on _persecution_, a doctor of\ndivinity, distinguished for his wit, but, unfortunately, a little too\nmuch infected with that acrimony which is caught by reading books of\nreligious controversy, took the part of persecution and contended that\nit was _sometimes_ right to employ it. Franklin said, he could not\nthink of any case wherein _persecution_ was _admissible_ among rational\ncreatures. It might be very excusable in _error_ to persecute, whose\nnature it was to see things wrong, and to get angry; but that for such\na \"_divinity as_ TRUTH,\" to persecute, was, in his opinion, a sin\nagainst the _Holy Ghost, never to be forgiven_. After using, in his\nfacetious manner, a variety of arguments honourable to wit and\nphilanthropy, and the clergyman still remaining unconvinced, Franklin\ncalled out to him with an air of great surprise, \"Why, my dear sir, I\nam astonished that you plead thus for persecution when it is so\ndiametrically opposite to your _Bible_.\"\n\nThe clergyman replied, that he did not know what doctor Franklin meant.\nHe thought, he said, he knew something of his _Bible_, but he did not\nrecollect any chapter in point.\n\n\"_No, sir!_\" answered Franklin, still with the look and voice of\nsurprise, \"_not that memorable chapter concerning Abraham and the poor\nman! Pray, sir, favour us with your Bible a minute or two._\"\n\n\"With all my heart,\" replied the clergyman, \"I should like to see that\n_memorable chapter_.\"\n\nThe company manifested a solicitude for the issue of the pending\ncontroversy--the family Bible was brought and laid on the table by the\nside of doctor Franklin. \"Well, reverend sir,\" said he, looking at the\npreacher, as he took up the Bible, \"shall I read this chapter?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" replied the divine, settling himself in his chair to\nlisten.--The eyes of all were fixed on Franklin; when, opening the\nBible and turning back the leaves as to find the place, he thus audibly\nbegan:--\n\nThe twenty-seventh chapter of the first book of Moses, commonly called\nthe book of Genesis.\n\n 1. And it came to pass, after these things, that Abraham sat in the\ndoor of his tent, about the going down of the sun.\n\n 2. And behold a man, bowed with age, coming from the way of the\nwilderness, leaning on a staff.\n\n 3. And Abraham arose, and met him, and said unto him, turn in, I pray\nthee, and wash thy feet, and tarry all night, and thou shalt arise\nearly in the morning and go on thy way.\n\n 4. But the man said, nay, for I will abide under this tree.\n\n 5. And Abraham pressed him greatly; so he turned, and they went into\nthe tent; and Abraham baked unleavened bread, and they did eat.\n\n 6. And when Abraham saw that the man blessed not God, he said unto\nhim, wherefore dost thou not worship the most high God, Creator of\nheaven and earth.\n\n 7. And the man answered and said, I do not worship thy God, neither do\nI call upon his name; for I have made to myself a God, which abideth\nalways in mine house, and provideth me all things.\n\n 8. And Abraham's zeal was kindled against the man, and he arose and\nfell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the wilderness.\n\n 9. And at midnight God called unto Abraham, saying, where is the\nstranger?\n\n10. And Abraham answered, and said, Lord, he would not worship thee,\nneither would he call upon thy name, therefore have I driven him out\nfrom before my face into the wilderness.\n\n11. And God said, have I borne with him these hundred and ninety and\neight years, and nourished him and clothed him, notwithstanding his\nrebellion against me; and couldest not thou, that art thyself a\nsinner, bear with him one night?\n\n12. And Abraham said, let not the anger of my Lord wax hot against his\nservant; lo, I have sinned: forgive me, I pray thee.\n\n13. And he arose, and went forth into the wilderness, and sought\ndiligently for the man and found him:\n\n14. And returned with him to his tent; and when he had entreated him\nkindly, he sent him away in the morning with gifts.\n\n15. And God spake again unto Abraham, saying, for this thy sin, shall\nthy seed be afflicted four hundred years in a strange land:\n\n16. But for thy repentance, will I deliver them; and they shall come\nforth with power, and with gladness of heart, and with much substance.\n\n\nThat witty but splenetic old bachelor, Dean Swift, used to say, that\n\"there was no dispute which a man of a tolerably good head and heart\nmight not easily avoid falling into, or honourably get out of; and,\ntherefore, as none but fools and rascals fought duels, the sooner\nsuch beasts cut each other's throats, the better for the community.\"\nThis, no doubt, is very true, but still it is too much like striking\nwith a war club, or _tomahawk_, to be allowed among christians. The\nfollowing _impromptu_ on duelling, by Dr. Franklin, claims a far\nhigher admiration. It is an arrow pointed with the diamond of wit,\ndipt in the oil of kindness, that wounds but to heal.\n\nTHE FOLLY OF DUELLING.\n\nThis most pusillanimous practice was one day made the theme of\nconversation in a large party in London, where Doctor Franklin dined.\nThe philosophers and divines of the company joined unanimously to\nexecrate it; and so many sensible and severe things were said against\nit, that everybody seemed willing to give it up to its father, the\ndevil, except a young officer, whose ugly distortions showed plainly\nenough that he did not at all relish their strictures. Soon as they\nwere done, he called aloud, \"well, gentlemen, you may preach as much as\nyou please against duelling, but I'll never pocket an insult for all\nthat. No, if any man affront me, I'll call him to an account, if I lose\nmy life for it.\"\n\nThe philosophers and divines looked at each other in silence, like\nfools who had shot their last bolt.\n\nHere Franklin took up the cudgels; and looking at the young officer\nwith a smile, said, \"This, sir, puts me in mind of an affair that\nlately happened in a Philadelphia coffee-house.\"\n\nThe young fellow, rather pertly, said he should like to hear what had\nlately happened in a Philadelphia coffee-house.\n\n\"Why, sir,\" continued the doctor, \"two gentlemen were sitting together\nin the coffee-house, when one said to the other, for heaven's sake,\nsir, sit further off, and don't poison me; you smell as bad as a\npole-cat.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" resorted the other, \"what do you mean? Draw, and defend\nyourself.\"\n\n\"O, sir,\" quoth the first, \"I'll meet you in a moment, if you insist on\nit; but let's see first how that's to _mend the matter_. If you kill\nme, I shall smell as bad as a pole-cat too. And if I kill you, you will\n_only smell ten times worse_.\"\n\nIn short, that divine motto,\n\n    \"<DW25> sum, nil humani a me alienum puto.\"\n\nIn English thus,\n\n    _A man I am, in man I take a part,\n    And good of man is ever next my heart._\n\nhas seldom been more justly applied than to Dr. Franklin. He seems to\nhave been all eye, all ear, all touch, to every thing that affected\nhuman happiness. Did he, even at the early age of twenty-five, form an\nacquaintance with young persons fond of reading, but unable to\npurchase books? Instantly he suggested the plan for obviating that\ngreat, great misfortune, by founding a PUBLIC LIBRARY; whereby, at a\n_small expense_ in hand, and a much smaller paid annually, a\nsubscriber might have his choice of books, on all subjects, whether of\npleasure or profit. This Library, which was commenced in 1731, by\nFranklin and only thirty-seven members, and no more than one hundred\nvolumes, consisting of much little parcels of books as each subscriber\npossessed, is now, 1820, enlarged to six hundred members, and upwards\nof twenty thousand volumes.\n\nThe great advantages arising from this library became so sensibly felt\nthat others were soon founded; and they have now kindled up their\nsalutary lights not only in several parts of the city, but in almost\nevery county in the state. From the choicest books on Religion,\nMorals, History, Voyages, Travels, &c. thus brought home to their\nfire-sides and constantly lying on their mantlepieces, the citizens\nderive advantages incalculable. Their idle hours, formerly so\ndangerous, were now innocently filled up; solitude was cheered with a\nsuccession of new ideas; company enlivened by witty conversation, and\nlabour itself sweetened by the thought of a beloved book at night.\n\nWith their taste thus exalted to _better pleasures_, the youth of all\nclasses were saved from the brutalizing sensualities that destroy\ncharacter and health. Having their understandings enlightened, they\nwere led to greater virtues and usefulness. And being thus taught to\nenjoy life, they felt the strongest inducements to preserve it. Hence\nthe astonishing prosperity of Philadelphia in industry and morals,\npopulation and wealth.\n\nThe mother Library now displays its twenty thousand volumes, in an\nelegant building, on the corner of Fifth and Chestnut. In a niche on\nthe wall above the door is a fine marble likeness of Dr. Franklin at\nfull length, presented by William Bingham, Esq.\n\nAgain:--Did Franklin catch a glimpse of those poor pusillanimous\ncreatures, who rather than live nobly independent in the pure aired\ncountry, by cultivating their own sweet vegetables, and raising fat\npoultry, will run into the sickly towns to sell whiskey and apples in\nthe summer, and take their chance to starve and freeze in the winter?\nDid he, I say, catch a glimpse of these poor spiritless creatures with\ntheir children, shivering over small fires kindled by a little\n\"_charity wood_?\" Instantly his bowels of compassion were stirred\nwithin him. Although he was no friend to such _lazy self-made\npaupers_, nor to the miserable policy that winks at them, yet it was\nimpossible for him to remain unconcerned at their sufferings. In a\nletter to one of his friends, he says, \"since we can get no more wood\nfor the poor, we must try from that wood to get more warmth for them.\"\nHe set himself to examine the principles of the stoves generally in\nuse. His genius, as usual, discovered such room for amendment, that he\nsoon came out with a stove, which to this day, in honour of him, is\ncalled \"THE FRANKLIN STOVE,\" and wherein one cord of charity oak would\nafford as much heat and comfort to those poor people, as two cords in\nthe old way!\n\nDid he hear the shrill midnight cry of FIRE! and mark the deep\ndistress of the citizens, as with tearful eyes they beheld the flames\nswallowing up their pleasant habitations and furniture? Instantly he\nset himself to call up all the energies of the public against this\ndire calamity, and to point them to the only adequate remedy, MUTUAL\nINSURANCE COMPANIES.\n\n\"_Man_,\" said he, in his calls to the citizens through his popular\nnewspaper, \"_Man separate_ from man, is but a feeble creature; and\nlike the filament of flax before the thread is formed, he is without\nstrength, because without connexion. But UNION will make us strong,\nand _enable us to do all things essential to our safety. The houses\nburnt every year are, compared with all the houses in the city, but\nfew. And were all the housekeepers in the city, joined for mutual\nsecurity, to pay a certain sum; and were that sum put to interest, it\nwould not only cover all the losses by fire, but would bring in every\nyear, clear profit on his money to each subscriber._\"\n\nNumbers of the citizens came into his scheme; and a large \"_Mutual\nInsurance Company_,\" was immediately formed. The great benefits,\nforetold to flow from it, being soon realized, several others were\npresently set on foot: and now (in 1820,) there are, in Philadelphia,\nno fewer than forty engines, with eight thousand feet of hose, (strong\nleather pipes,) to convey the water from the pumps or hydrants to the\nengines; whereby in less than _two minutes_ they are in full play,\npouring their watery cataracts on the flames. Hence, while for lack of\none Franklin, one intelligent and public spirited philanthropist, many\nof our promising young towns are suddenly turned to ashes, and their\nhapless families, driven out naked into the weather; the favoured\ncitizens of Philadelphia, guarded by forty engines, and hundreds of\nwell trained young firemen, seldom suffer any thing beyond a momentary\npang from this most alarming element!\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXVI.\n\n\"_To him who hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance._\"\n\n\nThe life of Dr. Franklin appears to have been one continued\nexemplification of this most animating promise; for scarcely had he\nfinished that noble work just mentioned, before he was called to\nanother which acquired him a still higher reputation, I mean his\nwonderful discoveries in electricity, and his application of them to\nthe preservation of human life and property. The manner in which this\nhonour was conferred on Dr. Franklin, is enough to convince all honest\nminds that there is a kind Providence over the ways of men, that often\nturns their \"_seeming evils into real good_.\"\n\nAmong the many benefits which he derived from the dangerous scenes of\nLondon, where he was so severely tried, and where he so gloriously\ntriumphed, was his acquaintance with a Mr. Collinson, of that city.\nThis gentleman had a soul of uncommon sensibility to the charms of\nvirtue. His first interview with Franklin, was in Watts's\nprinting-office. The sight of a youthful stranger, not yet out of his\nteens, exhibiting such practical lessons of virtue to the deluded\nyoung PORTER DRINKERS of London, filled him with admiration of his\ncharacter. On getting acquainted with him, he was in pleasing doubt,\nwhether most to esteem his heart or admire his head.\n\nWhen Franklin left England, the generous Collinson accompanied him on\nboard the ship, and at parting, the two friends exchanged _canes_,\nwith promises of everlasting friendship and constant correspondence by\nletters. Soon as all London had become filled with the aforesaid rage\nfor electricity, and electrical experiments, Collinson wrote the whole\nhistory of them to Franklin, with a compliment to his genius, and an\nearnest request that he would turn it to that subject, and accompanied\nall with the present of a small electrical instrument. Franklin's\ncuriosity was excited. He immediately set to work; and presently made\ndiscoveries that far exceeded all that Collinson had promised himself.\nHe discovered the power of metallic points to draw off the electrical\nmatter--he discovered a _positive_ and a _negative_ state of\nelectricity--he explained on electrical principles, the phenomena of\nthe famous Leyden vial--he explained the phenomena of the aurora\nborealis, and of thunder-gusts--he showed the striking resemblance in\nmany respects between electricity and lightning.\n\n   1st. In giving light.\n   2d.  In colour of the light.\n   3d.  In crooked direction.\n   4th. In swiftness of motion.\n   5th. In being conducted by metals.\n   6th. In cracking in exploding.\n   7th. In subsisting in water or ice.\n   8th. In rending the bodies it passeth through.\n   9th. In killing animals.\n  10th. In melting metals.\n  11th. Firing inflammable substances.\n  12th. Emitting a sulphurous smell.\n  13th. In being attracted by iron points.\n\n\"We do not, indeed,\" says he, \"know that this property is in\nlightning, but since electricity and lightning agree in so many other\nparticulars, is it not probable that they agree also in this?\"\n\nHe resolved at any rate to make the experiment. But foreseeing what a\nblessing it would be to mankind, to disarm the lightnings of their\npower to harm, he did not in the pitiful spirit of ordinary inventors,\ncautiously conceal the dawnings of a discovery that promised so much\nglory to his name. On the contrary, and with a philanthropy that\nthrows eternal loveliness over his character, he published his ideas,\ninviting all the philosophers to make experiments on this important\nsubject, and even pointed the way, _i.e._ by insulated bars of iron\nraised to considerable heights in the air.\n\nImmediately, metallic bars, some of them forty feet high, were raised\ntowards the heavens, by sundry philosophers, both in France and\nEngland. But God, as if pleased with such disinterested virtue,\ndetermined to reserve to Franklin the honour of confirming the truth\nof his own great theory. His plan to accomplish this, was in that\nsimplicity which characterizes all his inventions.\n\nTo a common kite, made of silk rather than paper, because of the rain,\nhe fixed a slender iron point. The string which he chose for his kite\nwas of silk, because of the fondness of lightning for silk; and for\nthe same reason, at the lower end of the string he tied a key. With\nthis simple preparation, he went out on the commons back of\nPhiladelphia, as a thundergust was coming on, and raised his kite\ntowards the clouds. The lightning soon found out his metallic rod, as\nit soared aloft on the wings of the kite, and greeted its polished\npoint with a cordial kiss. With joy he beheld the loose fibres of his\nstring raised by the fond salute of the celestial visitant.\n\nHe hastened to clap his knuckle to the key, and behold, a smart spark!\nhaving repeated a second, and a third time, he charged a phial with\nthis strange visitor from the clouds, and found that it exploded\ngunpowder, set spirits of wine on fire, and performed in all respects\nas the electrical fluid.\n\nIt is not easy to express the pleasure which this clear confirmation\nof his theory must have given to our benevolent philosopher, who had\nalready counted up some of the great services which he should thereby\nrender to the world.\n\nHe lost no time in communicating these discoveries to his friend\nCollinson in London, by whom they were read with unimaginable joy.\nCollinson instantly laid them before the Royal Society, not doubting\nbut they would be printed among their papers, with the same enthusiasm\nwhich he had felt. But to his great mortification they were utterly\nrejected. Upon this, Collinson went in high dudgeon and printed them\nhimself, which was looked on as a very desperate kind of undertaking,\nespecially as he chose for his book, a title that seemed to carry a\ndeath warrant on its face, _viz._ \"NEW EXPERIMENTS ON ELECTRICITY,\nMADE AT PHILADELPHIA, IN NORTH AMERICA.\" Some ventured however to read\nthe EXPERIMENTS ON ELECTRICITY MADE IN NORTH AMERICA, though with\npretty nearly such motives as usually lead people to see the learned\npig, or to hear a woman preach. But the scoffers were soon turned into\nadmirers. Discoveries so new and astonishing, presented in a manner so\nsimple, struck every reader with admiration and pleasure. The book\nsoon crossed the British channel, and was translated into most of the\nlanguages of Europe. A copy of it, though miserably translated, had\nthe fortune to fall into the hands of the celebrated Buffon, who\nimmediately repeated the experiments and with the most complete\nsuccess. Lewis XV. hearing of these curious exhibitions, expressed a\nwish to be a spectator of them. A course of experiments was made\nbefore him and his court, to their exceeding surprise and diversion,\nby Buffon and De Lor. The history of electricity has not recorded\nthose experiments. But it is probable, that they were not of so comic\na character as the following, wherewith Dr. Franklin would sometimes\nastonish and delight his Philadelphia friends, during the intervals of\nhis severer studies.\n\nI. In the presence of a large party at his house, he took up a pistol\nwhich he had beforehand charged with inflammable air, well stopped\nwith a cork, and presented it to Miss Seaton, a celebrated belle in\nthose days. She took it from the doctor, but could not help turning\npale, as though some conjuration was brewing. \"_Don't be afraid,\nmadam_,\" said he, \"_for I give you my word that there is not a grain\nof powder in it; and now turn it against any gentleman in the room\nthat you are angry with._\" With a sudden blush, she turned it towards\na gentleman whom she soon after married. In the same instant, the\ndoctor drew a charged rod near the mouth of the pistol, the electric\nspark rushed in, and set fire to the inflammable air; off went the\npistol; out flew the cork, and striking her lover a smart shock in the\nface, fell down on the floor, to the exceeding terror at first, but\nafterwards, to the equal diversion of the young lady and the whole\ncompany. This he called THE MAGIC PISTOL.\n\nII. At another time, in a large party at his house, all eager, as\nusual, to see some of his ELECTRICAL CURIOSITIES, he took from the\ndrawer a number of little dogs, made of the pith of elder, with straw\nfor feet and tails, and set them on the table. All eyes were fixed on\nhim. \"_Well, Miss Eliza_,\" said he, addressing the elegant Miss E.\nSitgreaves, \"_can you set these little dogs a dancing?_\" \"_No indeed,\nI can't_,\" replied she. \"_Well_,\" replied he, \"_if I had such a pair\nof eyes as you have, I think I could do it._\" She blushed. \"_However,\nlet us see_,\" continued he, \"_if we can't do something._\" He then took\na large tumbler from the table, which he had previously charged with\nthe electric fluid, and clapped the tumbler over the dogs; whereupon\nthey instantly fell to skipping and jumping up the sides of the\ntumbler, as if they were half mad to get out of it. This he called\n\"THE DANCING DOGS.\"\n\nIII. During something like a _levee_, at his house, one night, a\ncouple of ladies who had been at London and Paris, were speaking in\nrapturous terms of the splendours of those royal courts, and of the\ndiamond stars which they had seen, glittering with more than solar\nlustre on the breasts of the Prince of Wales and the Dauphin. At\nlength one of the fair orators, as if wrought up to a perfect\nadoration of the wondrous stars which she had been so elegantly\ndepicting, turned to the doctor, and smartly asked him if he would not\nlike mightily to have such a star. \"_To be sure, madam_,\" replied he\nwith his usual gallantry, \"_and suppose we order one?_\" She looked\nsurprised. \"_Boy_,\" continued he, \"_bring me down one of my electrical\njars, and put it on the sideboard._\" While the servant was gone, the\ndoctor took a plate of tin, and cutting it into a dozen angles, like a\nstar, poised it on a wire projecting from his prime conductor. \"_Well\nnow, ladies, put out the candles, and you shall see a star not\ninferior to that of the prince of Wales._\" The candles were put out,\nand a turn or two of the jar being made, the lightning flew to the\nplate of tin, and appeared at the extremities of its angles, in a\nblaze of light beautiful as the morning star. This he called \"THE\nELECTRIC STAR.\"\n\nIV. On his sideboard was placed an electrical jar, concealed behind a\nlarge picture of a man dressed in purple and fine linen. At a short\ndistance stood a little brass pillar, in front of which was the\npicture of a poor man lying down ragged and wan as Lazarus. From the\nceiling, and reaching down to the sideboard, was suspended by a fine\nthread, the picture of a boy, with a face benevolent and beautiful as\na youthful cherub. \"_Well, now, gentlemen, do you know who these\nare?--This is the proud, unfeeling Dives; that, the poor dying\nLazarus; and here is a beautiful boy, that for humanity's sake, we\nwill call the son of Dives. Now gentlemen, can any of you make this\nlovely child the minister of Dives' bounty to poor Lazarus?\"_\n\nThey all confessed their inability; regarding him at the same time\nwith an eye of expectation. Without being noticed by his company, he\ncharged the jar behind the picture of Dives with electric fluid from\nhis prime conductor. Instantly, the beauteous youth flew to it, and\ngetting charged flew to the brass pillar behind Lazarus, which\npossessed no electricity, and imparted to it his whole load. He then\nflew back to the jar of Dives, and receiving a second supply, hastened\nto poor Lazarus and emptied himself again. And thus it went on to the\nastonishment of the spectators, alternately receiving and imparting\nuntil it had established a balance between them, and then, as if\nsatisfied, it came to a pause.\n\nSeeing their surprise, the doctor thus went on. \"Well, now, gentleman,\nhere is a fine lesson for us all. This electric fluid, which you saw\nanimating that youth, came down from heaven to teach us that men were\nas assuredly designed to be helpmates to men, as were the two eyes,\nthe two feet, or the two hands, to assist one another. And if all who\nare overcharged with this world's riches would but imitate this good\nlittle electrical angel, and impart of their superabundance to the\nempty and the poor, they would, no doubt, even in this world, find a\nmuch higher pleasure than in hoarding it up for ungrateful heirs, or\nspending it on vanity.\" This he called \"DIVES AND LAZARUS.\"\n\nBut it were an endless task to enumerate all the rare and beautiful\nphenomena, wherewith he would surprise and delight the vast circles of\nfriends and citizens, whose curiosity was so pressing, that, as he\nsays, _it almost wore him out_.\n\nSometimes, in order to show them the force of electricity he would\nturn his wires against a pack of cards, or a quire of paper, and the\nsubtle fluid would instantly dart through, leaving a beautiful\nperforation like the puncture of a large needle.\n\nSometimes, to show the wondrous qualities of electricity, he would let\nthem see it darting, like a diamond bead, through a long cylinder of\nwater, not hurt, like other fires, by that element.\n\nSometimes he would place a young lady, generally the handsomest of the\ncompany, on his electrical stool; then by slily touching her dress\nwith his magic wand, he would so fill her lovely frame with the\nelectric fluid, that, on the approach of any young gentleman to kiss\nher, a spark from her ruby lips would suddenly drive him frightened\nand staggering back. This was called the \"MAGIC KISS.\"\n\nSometimes he would fix figures of horses cut in paper, on wires nicely\npoised, so as to move in circles round his prime conductor, then, from\nhis magic wand, he would dash on them a stream of mimic lightning,\nwhich, potent as the whips and spurs of Newmarket, would set them all\nin full speed, bending and buckling with glorious emulation in the\nbeautiful contest, to the great amusement of the spectators. The\npublic named this the \"ELECTRICAL HORSE RACE.\"\n\nSometimes he would suspend, near the ceiling, a large flock of finely\npicked cotton, or place on a distant table, a paper of gunpowder; then\nfrom his wires, artfully directed, he would send a flash of lightning,\ninstantly exploding the powder, and wrapping the cotton into a blaze.\n\nSometimes he would take the model of a double-geared water mill,\nturning two pair of stones, and placing it near his prime conductor,\ndirect a stream of electric fire against the large wheel, setting it\nin motion, and with it the whole machinery of his mill, to the equal\nsurprise and pleasure of the beholders.\n\nSometimes he would take the figures of the sun, moon, and earth, cut\nin papers, and fix them on wires, nicely balanced. Then, by the force\nof the electric fluid, he would set them a-going in most harmonious\nstyle--the earth revolving round her own axis; the moon round the\nearth; and both round the sun; all exactly according to the course\nwhich the hand of the Creator had prescribed to these mighty orbs.\n\nFor the sake of those who have never considered this wonderful\nattraction of lightning to iron rods, I beg leave to relate the\nfollowing very extraordinary and daring experiments of Dr. Franklin.\n\nIn a large chamber, which he kept for his electrical apparatus and\nexperiments, he suspended a number of bells, all connected by wires,\nand communicating, through the gable end of the house, with the large\nlightning rods that descended along the chimney to the ground. His aim\nin this contrivance was, that he might know whenever a lightning cloud\npassed over his house in the night; and also what freight of\nelectrical fluid it carried about with it. For, as it seldom passes,\nwithout paying a loving visit to his rod, so it always told, with\ngreat honesty, the amount of its inflammable cargo, especially if it\nwas ample; in which case, it was always sure to set the bells a\nringing at a terrible rate.\n\nAnd besides these, he had numbers of men and women of the Lilliputian\nstature, cut in paper, and so artfully attached to the clappers, that\nas soon as the bells began to ring, the men and women began to dance\nalso, and all of them more and more merrily, according as this\nextraordinary kind of music played up more briskly. But though, for\nthe amusement of his friends, Franklin would sometimes set his bells\nand dolls to ringing and dancing, by his electricity, yet his main\nobject was, to invite the lightnings to be the bell ringers, and\ndancing masters to his puppets, that, as before observed, he might\nbecome better acquainted with the nature of lightning, and thus extend\nhis electrical experiments and knowledge.\n\nBut it must be owned, that when the lightnings were drawn down for\nthis purpose among the bells and wires of his chamber, the\nentertainment was almost too terrible to be agreeable to any but\nphilosophers.\n\nThe elegant J. Dickinson, Esq. informed me, that he was at Dr.\nFranklin's one evening, with a large party, when a dreadful cloud\nbegan to rise, with distant thunder and lightning. The ladies, panic\nstruck, as usual, were all in a prodigious bustle for their bonnets,\nto get home. The doctor entreated them not to be frightened; for that\nthey were in the safest house in Philadelphia; and indeed, jokingly\noffered to underwrite their lives at the low premium of a groat a\nhead.\n\nWhen the storm was near its worst, he invited his company up into his\nlarge chamber. A glimmering light faintly showed them his electrical\napparatus of globes, cylinders, bells, wires, and the Lord knows what,\nconveying to those of the superstitious sort, a strong idea of a magic\ncell, or a haunted castle, at least. Presently a dreadful clap of\nthunder shook the house over their heads, the chamber was filled with\nvivid lightnings, darting like fiery serpents, crackling and hissing\nalong the wire all around them, while the strong smell of sulphur,\ntogether with the screams of the poor ladies, and the ringing of the\nbells, completed the terribleness of the scene, inspiring a fearful\nsense of the invisible world.\n\n\"_But all these things, gentlemen_,\" he would say, smiling all the\ntime on his crowding and gaping friends, as a parent on his children,\nwhom he saw surprised at small matters, \"_all these things are mere\nnothings; the childish sportings of an art but yet in its cradle_.\nELECTRICITY, gentlemen, is of the terrible family of lightning, that\nmost powerful of the works of God on this globe, and the chosen\ninstrument of most of his operations here below. It is the electric\nfluid, (passing from a full cloud to an empty one,) that makes his\nvoice, and that, as the scripture says, _a terrible voice_, even the\nTHUNDER, to terrify the guilty, and to increase in the virtuous a\nbecoming reverence of the Creator. For if the electric fluid passing\nfrom a small jar, cause so loud a crack, why should we wonder at the\ndreadful peals of thunder that are occasioned, when thousands and\nmyriads of acres of clouds are throwing off their electric fluid in\nrivers of living fires, sufficient to blow up the globe itself, if the\nAlmighty were but to let loose his hold on these furious agents. And\nthis electric fluid is that same lightning which, as David says,\n_shines out from one end of Heaven to another_, and that so\ninstantaneously, that were all the men, women, and children, on earth,\njoining hands, to form a ring round this great globe, an electric\nshock given to the first person in that ring, would so suddenly reach\nthe last, that they themselves would probably be at a loss to\ndetermine which of them received it first.\n\n\"Thus the electric fluid, in the form of lightning, serves also in the\nhand of heaven as the _red rod_ to restrain the vicious. Does the\nbenevolent governor of the world seek to impress a salutary awe on the\ngambler, the drunkard, and such immoral characters, whose lives are in\nconstant opposition to their own and the happiness of others? He but\nspeaks to his ready ministers, the lightnings. Quickly, from the\nsultry cloud, coming up with muttering thunder, black and terrible as\nnature's approaching pall, the frightening flash bursts forth, rending\nthe trees and houses over their heads; killing their flocks and herds;\nand filling the air with smoking sulphur, a strong memento of that\ndismal place to which their evil practices are leading them. And when,\nto unthinking mortals, he sees fit to read instruction on a wider\nscale, he only needs but beckon to the ELECTRIC FLUID. Straightway\nthis subtle servant of his power rushes forth, clad in various forms\nof terror, sometimes as the roaring WHIRLWIND, unroofing the palaces\nof kings, and desolating the forests in its course. Sometimes with\ndreadful stride it rushes forth upon the 'howling wilderness of\nwaves,' in shape of the funnelled water-spout, with hideous roar and\nfoam, whirling the frightened billows to the clouds, or dashing them\nback with thundering crash into their dismal gulphs; while the hearts\nof the seamen, looking on, sink with terror at the sight, and even\nsharks and sea-monsters fly for refuge to their oozy caverns.\n\n\"Sometimes, with the bolder aim of the earthquake, it strikes both sea\nand land at once, sending the frightened globe bellowing and trembling\nalong her orbit, sadly pondering the coming day, when the measure of\nsin being filled up, she shall be wrapt in these _same electric\nfires_, perhaps, and lose her place for ever among the starry train.\"\n\nBut though the experiments above mentioned are highly curious; and\nalso Dr. Franklin's reflections on them abundantly philosophical and\ncorrect, for what I know, yet the world should learn that the\ngratification of public curiosity formed but a very small part of his\nmany and grand discoveries in electricity. For soon as he had\nascertained that lightning was the same thing with the electric fluid,\nand like it, so passionately fond of iron that it would forsake every\nthing else in its course, to run along upon that beloved metal, he\nconceived the plan of putting this discovery to those beneficent uses\nfor which alone he thought the power of discovery was given to man,\nand which alone can consecrate it to the divine Giver.\n\n\"_The_ GRAND _practical use_,\" says the learned Mr. Immison, who,\nthough a Scotch monarchist himself, had the extraordinary virtue to be\na profound admirer of our republican American,--\"the grand practical\nuse which Dr. Franklin made of this discovery was to secure houses and\nships from being damaged by lightning; a thing of vast consequence in\nall parts of the world, but more especially in North America, where\nthunder gusts are more frequent and their effects, in that dry air,\nmore dreadful than they are ever known to be with us. This great end\nhe accomplished by the cheap, and seemingly trifling, apparatus of a\npointed metallic rod, fixed higher than any part of the building, and\ncommunicating with the ground, or rather the nearest water. This rod\nthe lightning is sure to seize upon preferably to any other part of\nthe building, unless it be very large; in which case, rods may be\nerected at each extremity; by which means this dangerous power is\nsafely conducted to the earth, and dissipated without doing any harm\nto the edifice.\"\n\nHad any thing more been necessary to convince the world of the value\nof lightning rods to buildings, it was abundantly furnished by several\nvery terrible instances of destruction which took place about this\ntime in several parts of America, for no other reason upon earth, as\nevery one must admit who reads the account, but the want of lightning\nrods.\n\nThere, for example, was the affair of the new church, in the town of\nNewberry, New-England. This stately building was adorned on its north\nend with an elegant steeple or tower of wood, running up in a fine\nsquare, seventy feet from the ground to the bell, and thence went off\nin a taper spire of wood, likewise seventy feet higher, to the\nweathercock. Near the bell was fixed an iron hammer to strike the\nhours; and from the tail of the hammer, a wire went down through a\nsmall gimblet hole in the floor that the bell stood upon, and through\na second floor in like manner; then horizontally under the plaistered\nceiling of that floor to a plaistered wall, then down that wall to a\nclock which stood about twenty feet below the bell.\n\nNow come, gentlemen, _you_ who have no faith in lightning rods--you\nwho think it _blasphemy_ to talk of warding off GOD ALMIGHTY'S\nLIGHTNING!--as if it were not just as pleasing to him to see you\nwarding off the lightning by steel rods, as warding off the ague and\nfever by jesuit's bark; come, I say, and see how very visibly he\napprobates our works of wisdom, which make us like himself. You have\nread the structure of this steeple--the top, a _seventy feet spire\nwithout any rod_--then a rod that went down zigzag, about thirty feet;\nthen a plaistered brick and stone wall without any rod, to the ground.\nA dreadful cloud came over the steeple. At the first flash, away went\nthe whole of the seventy foot wooden spire, scattered all over the\nchurch yard in splinters fit to boil the preacher's tea kettle. The\nlightning then found the iron wire which it instantly seized on,\nquitting all things else for that, and darting along with it in so\nclose an embrace, as barely to widen a little the gimblet holes\nthrough which it passed. It then followed the wire in all its\nmeanders, whether perpendicular or horizontal--never turning either to\nthe right or to the left, to hurt the building, but passed through it\nthe whole length of the wire, which was about thirty feet, as\nharmlessly as a lamb. But soon as its dear chain was ended, it assumed\nthe furious lion again; attacking the building with the most\ndestructive rage, dashing its foundation stones to a great distance,\nand in other respects damaging it dreadfully.\n\nNow what can be more reasonable than doctor Franklin's remarks on this\nvery remarkable occurrence?\n\n  \"I. That lightning, in its passage through a building, will leave\nwood, brick, or stone, to pass as far as it can in metal; and not\nenter those again, till the metal conductor ceases.\n\n \"II. The quantity of lightning that passed through this steeple must\nhave been very great, by its effects on the lofty spire, &c., and yet\ngreat as this quantity was, it was conducted by a small wire without\nthe least damage to the building as far as the wire extended.\n\n\"III. Hence it seems probable, that if even such a small wire had been\nextended from the top of the steeple to the earth, before the storm,\nno damage would have been done by that stroke of lightning.\"\n\nA fate exactly similar to this attended the great Dutch church, of New\nYork, in 1750. As far as the wire was extended, which was from the top\nof the steeple, to within a few feet of the earth, the lightning\nclosely accompanied it, passing with it through small holes in the\nfloors, without doing the least damage. But the instant it quitted the\nwire, it commenced its ravages on the building.\n\nThe summer of 1760 was dreadfully hot in Pennsylvania; and the thunder\ngusts frequent and terrible. Several ships at the wharves were struck\nand greatly injured. One of them in particular, a very large ship, had\nher mainmast torn to pieces, and her captain and three seamen killed.\nOf houses, both in town and country, many were struck; and some of\nthem, as barns with large quantities of hay, and warehouses with hemp,\nwere set on fire and destroyed to the great detriment and terror, both\nof the unfortunate sufferers and their neighbours.\n\nThese things, though melancholy in themselves, were not without their\ngood effects. They served to place in the strongest point of view, the\nadmirable efficacy of the newly invented lightening rods. For, while\nbuildings destitute of them, were often struck, and sometimes with\ngreat loss of lives and property, those houses that had them, were\nhardly ever known to be hurt, though the neighbours who saw the dismal\nclouds when they bursted, with such hideous peals of thunder and\nstreams of lightning, were sickened with horrid apprehension that all\nwas lost. And even the house keepers themselves, when recovered from\ntheir terrors and faintings, would fly shrieking from chamber to\nchamber, amidst the clouds of sulphur to see who were _dead_. But\nbehold, to the delicious wonder of themselves and congratulating\nfriends, all were safe. But still the cry was, _certainly the house\nwas struck! the house was surely struck! let us examine the\nconductors_.\n\nThe conductors were resorted to and examined, and behold! the wondrous\nlaws imposed of God on the most powerful of his creatures! The furious\nlightnings had fallen on the houses in torrents of fire, threatening a\nwide destruction. But the iron rods, faithful to their trust, had\narrested the impending bolts, and borne them in safety to the ground.\n\nBut it was found that the cataracts of lightning had proved too\npowerful for the rods; in some instances melting them in two at their\nslenderest parts, and in others entirely consuming them into smoke.\nBut though these GUARDIAN RODS had perished in their conflict with the\nrude lightnings, yet they had succeeded in parrying the dreadful\nstroke with perfect safety to the buildings and their terrified\ninhabitants; thus impressing all men with joy and thankfulness, _that\nGod had given such complete victory over one of the most terrible of\nall our natural enemies_.\n\nIn short, to use the handsome language of president Adams, \"nothing\nperhaps that ever occurred on earth, could have better tended to\nconfer universal celebrity on man, than did these lightning rods of\ndoctor Franklin's. The idea was certainly one of the most sublime ever\nsuggested to the human imagination. That mortal man should thus be\ntaught to disarm the clouds of heaven, and almost snatch from his hand\n'_the sceptre and the rod_!'\"\n\nThe ancients would, no doubt, have enrolled among their gods, the\nauthor of so wonderful an invention. Indeed the reputation which\nFranklin acquired by it, not only in America, but in Europe also, far\ntranscended all conception. His _lightning rods_, or as the French\ncalled them, his \"_paratonerres_,\" erected their heads, not only on\nthe temples of God and the palaces of kings, but also on the masts of\nships and the habitations of ordinary citizens. The sight of them\nevery where reminded the gazing world of the name and character of\ntheir inventor, who was thought of by the multitude as some _great\nmagician_ dwelling in the _fairy lands_ of North America, and to whom\nGod had given controul over the elements of nature.\n\nAnd equally wonderful was the change produced by them in the state of\ngeneral comfort. The millions, who had hitherto trembled at the cloud\nrising in the heat of summer, could now look on it with pleasing awe\nas it rose dark and solemn, with all its muttering thunders. And even\namidst the mingled flash and crash of the earth shaking tornado, the\nvery women and children, if they had but Franklin _paratonerres_ to\ntheir chimnies, would sit perfectly composed, silently adoring God for\nteaching such great salvation to men.\n\nBut the pleasure which doctor Franklin found in these plaudits of an\nhonest world was not without an alloy. Though the end of his labours\nhad been to do good; yet he soon discovered that there were some who\nsickened at his success. Alas!\n\n    \"Among the sons of men, how few are known\n    Who dare be just to merit, not their own.\"\n\nCertain invidious scribblers, in London and Paris, began to decry his\nwell-earned glory, by pretending that it was all due to the Abbe\nNollet, to doctor Gilbert, or some other wonderful Frenchman or\nEnglishman, as the real father of electricity. Franklin took no notice\nof all this impotent malice; nor indeed was it necessary; for soon as\nit dared to present its brazen front in print, it was attacked by the\nfirst-rate philosophers of Europe, who nobly taking the part of\nFranklin, soon showed, to the general satisfaction, that whatever\nothers may have dreamed about the late wonderful discoveries in\nelectricity, they were all due, under God, to the great American\nphilosopher, who for these, and many other important discoveries, had\na good right to share with Newton in the following bold compliment.\n\n    \"Nature and nature's works lay hid in night,\n    God said, let Franklin be, and all was light.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXVII.\n\n\nA curious demonstration of Dr. Franklin's philosophy of lightning.\nAbout thirty-four years after this date, when Doctor Franklin, by his\nopposition to Lord North's measures, had become very unpopular, George\nIII. was persuaded to pull down the _sharp points_ of that \"HOARY\nREBEL,\" and set up the _blunts_ of an impudent quack, because,\nforsooth, he was a _loyal subject_! Scarcely were the _sharps_ taken\ndown from the palace, to which, during thirty four years, they had\nbeen an excellent safeguard, before a dismal cloud rose upon the city,\nblack as midnight, and when right over the palace discharged a\ncataract of electric fluid, with horrid glare and thunder, stunning\nall ears, blinding all eyes, and suffocating every sense with the\nsmell of sulphur. The famous _blunt conductors_ presented no point to\ncatch the bolt, which, dashing at the stately edifice, tore away all\nits gable end, marring the best apartments, and killing several of the\nking's servants.\n\nShortly arrived the packet from New York, with news of a far more\ndreadful thunder-clap which had bursted on poor George in America--the\ncapture of his grand Canada army! which Lord North had promised him\nshould soon bring the rebels to their marrow bones. The next day the\nfollowing pasquinade made its appearance in the newspapers:\n\n    \"While you, great George, intent to hunt,\n    Your sharp Conductors change to blunt,\n            The nation's out of joint;\n    Franklin a wiser course pursues,\n    And all your thunder fearless views,\n            By sticking to the POINT.\"\n\nI cannot quit this subject without observing, that from Dr. Franklin's\nexperiments it appears, that death by lightning, must be the easiest\nof all deaths.\n\n\"In September, 1752,\" says he, \"six young Germans, apparently doubting\nthe truth of the reported force of electricity, came to me to see,\" as\nthey said, \"if there was _any thing in it_. Having desired them to\nstand up side by side, I laid one end of my discharging rod on the\nhead of the first; this laid his hand on the head of the second, that\non the head of the third, and so on to the last, who held in his hand\nthe chain that was attached to the lightning globe. On being asked if\nthey were ready, they answered _yes_, and boldly desired that I would\ngive them a _thumper_; I then gave them a shock; whereat they all\ndropped down together. When they got up, they declared that they had\nnot felt any stroke; and wondered how they came to fall. Nor did any\nof them _hear_ the crack, or _see_ the light of it.\"\n\nHe tells another story equally curious. \"A young woman, afflicted with\nsymptoms of a palsy in the foot, came to receive an electrical shock.\nHeedlessly stooping too near the prime conductor, she received a smart\nstroke in the forehead, of which she fell like one perfectly lifeless\non the floor. Instantly she got up again complaining of nothing, and\nwondering much why she fell, for that nothing of the sort had ever\nhappened to her before.\"\n\nNay, he also tells us of himself, that by accident, he received a\nshock which in an instant brought him to the floor, without giving him\ntime to _see, hear, or feel any thing of the matter_! Hence he\nconcludes, and I think with good reason, that all who dread the idea\nof pain in dying, would do well to pray, if it be God's will, to die\nof _coelataction_, as the ancients called it, or a _touch from\nheaven_.\n\nIt is worthy of remark, that persons thus knocked down, do not\n_stagger_, or fall _lengthwise_, but as if deprived instantaneously\nof strength and firmness, they sink down at once, doubled or folded\ntogether, or as we say, \"_all in a heap_.\"\n\nDr. Franklin seldom suffered any thing to escape him. From the power\nof lightning to dissolve the hardest metals, he caught an idea\nfavourable to cooking and matrimony. First, an old dunghill cock\nkilled in the morning by a shock from his electrical jar, by dinner\nwas become so tender that both the doctor and several of his literary\nfriends pronounced it equal to a young pheasant. Second, an old\nbachelor thought to be far gone in a consumption, had hardly received\nmore than a couple of dozen smart shocks of electricity, before he\nturned into courting with great spirit, and presently got himself a\nwife.\n\nIf electrical jars could be had cheap, this discovery concerning the\nold dunghill cock might prove a good hint to those gentlemen in the\n_tavern-keeping_ line, who are so very frugal that they will not keep\nup a coop full of young poultry, fat and fine, and always ready for\nthe traveller, but prefer giving him the pain, long after his arrival\nat their door, to hear the lean tenants of the dunghill flying and\nsqualling from the pursuit of the barking dogs and noisy servants.\n\nAnd as to the experiment on the other kind of old CAPON, the grunting\nwheezing old bachelor, it clearly points to the wish often expressed\nby Dr. Franklin, viz. \"_that the legislature would order an electrical\nmachine, large enough to kill a turkey cock at least, to be placed in\nevery parish, at the cost and for the benefit of all the old bachelors\nof the same_.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXVIII.\n\n\nI have been told that Dr. Franklin on his death bed often returned\nthanks to God for having so kindly cast his lot of life in the very\ntime when of all others he would have chosen to live for the great\npurposes of usefulness and pleasure. And so indeed it appears; for\nscarcely had he matured, as above, his most useful discoveries in\nelectricity, before a new door was opened to him for another noble\ncharity to his country.\n\nSome there are who for a good work begun by themselves will do every\nthing; but for the same work begun by others will do nothing; and yet\nwill call themselves christians. Franklin lived to set the example of\na better christianity. A notable instance of this occurred about this\ntime, 1754.\n\nA Dr. Thomas Bond, having noticed a number of families so extremely\npoor, as to be in imminent danger not only of suffering grievously in\ncase of sickness, but of actually perishing for want of wholesome food\nand medicine, generously undertook, by subscription, to build a\nhospital for these sufferers. Meeting with but little encouragement,\nand knowing Dr. Franklin's influence and public spirit, he applied to\nhim for assistance. Perfectly indifferent who got the praise, provided\nhe but shared the pleasure of founding so god-like an institution,\nFranklin entered very heartily into the plan with Dr. Bond, and\ninserted in his newspaper, a series of essays, \"_on the great duty of\ncharity to the sick and miserable_,\" which made such an impression on\nthe public mind, that the noble sum of twelve thousand dollars was\nquickly subscribed. With this the trustees bought a lot, and finished\none wing of their hospital, for immediate use. On the foundation stone\nis to be seen the following inscription by Dr. Franklin:\n\n    \"In the year of Christ MDCCLV, George the Second, _happily\n    reigning_, (For he sought the HAPPINESS OF HIS PEOPLE,)\n    Philadelphia _flourishing_, (For its inhabitants were _public\n    spirited_,) This Building By the bounty of the Government And of\n    many private persons Was piously founded For the relief of the\n    _sick_ and _miserable_. MAY THE GOD OF MERCIES BLESS THE\n    UNDERTAKING!\"\n\nNever did benevolence put up an ejaculation more fervent. And never\nwas one more signally answered. Indeed the blessings of heaven have\nbeen so signally showered on this excellent charity, that it now forms\none of brightest ornaments of the fairest city in America, presenting\nto the delighted eye of humanity a noble front, of elevation and\nextent far beyond that of Solomon's temple, even a royal range of\nbuildings, two and three stories high, two hundred and seventy-eight\nfeet long, and forty wide, containing about one hundred and thirty\nspacious well-aired rooms, for the accommodation of the sick, wounded,\nand lunatic of every description; affectionately waited on by skilful\nphysicians and active nurses; comforted by refreshing baths both hot\nand cold; and abundantly supplied with the best loaf bread, nice\nvegetables, fresh meats, soups, wines and medicines.\n\nAnd while other parts of the city have been very sickly; and\nespecially in the summer of 1793, when no fewer than 4000 persons\nperished of the yellow fever, not a single case of disease occurred in\nthis hospital. The destroying angel as he passed along, smelt the\nodour of that precious grace (charity) which embalmed the building,\nand let fall his avenging sword.\n\nGentlemen travellers falling sick in Philadelphia, will please be\ninformed of this famous hospital, that if they wish excellent\nphysicians, experienced nurses, pleasant chambers, pure air, and sweet\nretirement, they may here have all those of the first quality at _half\nprice_; and _even_ THAT a _donation_ to the _Institution_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXIX.\n\n\nDr. Franklin, about this time, 1756, commenced his political career.\n\nWhen we see some peerless _Childers_, (whose figure almost proves the\ndivinity of matter, and who in matchless speed leaves the stormy winds\nbehind him,) bending under the weight of a miller's bag, or tugging at\nthe hames of some drunken carman, how can we otherwise than mourn such\na prostitution of excellences; so how can we but mourn, when we see\nsuch a man as Franklin, born for those divine arts which widen our\nempire over nature, and multiply a thousand-fold the comforts of life,\nwasting his precious time in combatting the unreasonable claims of\nselfish and wicked man?\n\nThis, for a portion of his eventful life, was the sad destiny of Dr.\nFranklin. Scarcely had he passed his first forty years in his\nfavourite philosophical labours, equally useful to the world, and\ndelightful to himself, when he was at once stopped short--stopped by\nthe voice of public gratitude. The wise and virtuous people of\nPennsylvania, chiefly quakers, who estimate a man, not by the fineness\nof his coat, but the _usefulness_ of his life, were not to overlook\nsuch a man as Franklin. His astonishing industry, and his many\nvaluable inventions, had long made him the favourite theme of their\ntalk. But it was not for approbation so general and hearty, to be\nsatisfied with _mere talk._\n\n_What shall be done for the man whom the people delighteth to honour?_\nwas the question in every circle. _God, they said, has lighted up this\ncandle for our use, it must not be hid under a bushel. Let it be\nplaced on the great candlestick of the nation, the_ LEGISLATURE. So\nstrong, indeed, was the public feeling in his favour, that from\nseveral of the wards, deputations were appointed to wait upon him, to\nbeg he would serve the city as their representative in the house of\nburgesses.\n\nThe sight of his name in the papers, as a candidate at the next\nelection, to serve the city of Philadelphia, gave a general joy. Among\nhis opponents were several of the wealthiest citizens, who had long\nserved as representatives, and whose numerous friends could not bear\nthe idea of their being turned out. Great exertions were made on both\nsides; and the polls were uncommonly crowded. But when the contest\ncame to issue, it was found that the Philadelphia printer, and son of\nthe good old psalm-singing Boston tallow-chandler, carried the day\nwith great ease.\n\n_O ye simple ones, how long will you love simplicity!_ you, I mean,\nwho can once a year look sweetly on your constituents, and once a year\ninvite them to barbacues, and make them drunk with whiskey, thus\nignobly begging those votes which you feel you have not the sense to\ndeserve, O learn from this your great countryman, wherein consists the\ntrue art of electioneering; not in ignoble tricks like these, to court\nthe little, but in high qualifications, like Dr. Franklin's, to be\ncourted by the great.\n\nThe exalted expectations formed of him by the public were not\ndisappointed. Heartily a lover of man and the friend of equal rights,\nhe had scarcely taken his seat in the legislature before he had to\nturn the torrent of his honest indignation against the _proprietaries_\nand their creatures the _Governors_.\n\nThe reader will please here be reminded that in the year 1680, that\ngreat GOOD man, William Penn, a quaker, was paid off a large claim\nagainst Charles II. of England, by a grant of lands in North America.\nTo make the best of a bad bargain, honest William gathered together a\ncaravan of his poor persecuted brethren, and taking ship came over to\nNorth America.\n\nThe good angel that guided the steps of pious Jacob as he sojourned\nfrom Padan-aram to the land Uz, seeking a rest, guided Penn and his\ngentle followers to the mouth of the Delaware bay. He followed the\nstately flood in all its wanderings among the green marshes and\nforests of the new found world, until he reached the pleasant spot\nwhere now Philadelphia stands. The majestic grove that shaded the\nextended level on the western bank, bordered on the back by the\nbeautiful serpentine river called by the natives, the SCHUYLKILL,\nstruck his eye as a fine site for his future city.\n\nAbhorring the idea of killing his fellow men, the poor natives, and\ntaking away their lands, he sent around among them the Calumet, or\n_pipe of peace_, inviting them to \"A FRIENDLY TALK.\" Painted in red\nochre, and decked in all the savage pomp of wild skins and feathers,\nthe kings of the soil with all their simple tribes assembled\nthemselves together. The meeting was in the summer of 1681, under the\ntrees near the margin of the great river. The scene was lovely to the\neye of humanity. The red and white men from different continents were\nseen to meet, not as enemies for mutual slaughter, but as brothers for\nloving commerce. The shores were covered with British merchandize. The\neyes of the simple children of nature sparkled on those rich wares,\nthe like of which they had never seen before.\n\nPenn gave them every thing. He gave them precious axes to master the\nforests; and still more magic guns to master the wolves and panthers.\nHe gave them warm clothes for defence against the cold, and\nplough-shares and hoes for plentiful harvests. In return they gave him\nthat large tract of land in their country, which, in honour of this\ngood man, has been called Pennsylvania. Instantly the aged forests\nbegan to resound with the strokes of axes and the crash of falling\ntrees. And the corner stone was laid of the new city, which, with\ngreat propriety, was named of Penn, PHILADELPHIA, or the city of\n_brotherly love_.\n\nHaving thus laid, the foundation of this colony in JUSTICE to the poor\nnatives, and in generosity to his own followers in the great cheapness\nof his lands, in perfect liberty of conscience, and in the exceeding\nmoderation of his government, this wise statesman then looked to God\nfor his blessings. Nor did he look in vain, The fame of \"PENN COLONY\"\nresounded throughout Great Britain. An immense emigration were quickly\non their way to Pennsylvania. The young city grew apace, and farms and\nfair buildings in the country, spread in every direction with a\nrapidity unequalled in history.\n\nBut alas! when honest William fell asleep, there rose after him a race\nof heirs \"_who knew not Joseph_;\" who not content, _like him_, with\nmodest drab, and simple dinners, and aspiring to the true happiness of\nimitating God in godlike loves and deeds, basely prostituted their\nhearts to carnal lusts and pride.\n\nThe worship of these gods, though contemptible, is costly; and to\nthese _wet-quaker_ successors of the good William Penn, nothing\npromised such a swelling revenue as a bold rise in the price of their\nlands. And in this pitiful kind of management they soon gave the\nPennsylvanians to understand that like Rehoboam of old, \"_their little\nfingers were heavier than their father's loins_.\" I have not been able\nto procure any thing like certainty as to the sum that GOOD William\nPenn gave to the natives for the vast tract of land he purchased of\nthem. But that he hardly gave at the rate of a _hatchet_ for what is\nnow a noble farm, may be very fairly inferred. In 1754, which was\nseventy years later than the first purchase, the house of Penn bought\nof the Indians seven millions of acres lying within the ROYAL GRANT.\nAnd what do you suppose they gave for it? what do you suppose they\ngave for seven millions of acres of rich, heavy timbered Pennsylvania\nland? why not quite two thousand dollars! not _three cents_ the\nhundred acres! And what do you suppose they immediately asked for it?\nwhy _fifteen pounds ten shillings!_ near fifty thousand cents per\nhundred acres! And yet with such a bank of millions in hand they were\nnot willing to bear their part of the taxes for public good!!\n\nLike the starched Pharisees of old, they could throw heavy weights on\nother men's shoulders, but not suffer a fly to light on theirs. They\ncould smile when they saw the officer going round with his ink horn\nand pen, noting down the poor man's paddock, but if he but looked at\ntheir princely manors and parks they would make the whole colony ring\nwith it.\n\nGrown beyond calculation rich by the sales and rents of their lands in\nAmerica, they scorned the country of their illustrious predecessor,\nand went over to London, where they mimicked the pride and pageantry\nof princes.\n\nThinking they did the obscure Pennsylvanians honour enough to govern\nthem by _proxy_, they washed their hands of the poor colony\ngovernment, and sent them over deputies. These, hirelings, to augment\ntheir salaries, soon commenced a course of oppressions on the people,\nwhom they treated with great insolence.\n\nIt were too great an honour to those wretches to set the people of the\npresent day to reading their insolent messages to the legislature.\nThey were always, however, very properly chastised by Dr. Franklin;\nsometimes in the columns of his own popular newspaper, and sometimes\nin the assembly. Not, indeed, by long and eloquent orations, for which\nhe either had no talent, or declined it, preferring the pithy and\npungent _anecdote_ or _story_, which was always so admirably\nappropriate, and withal so keen in wit and truth, that like a flash\nfrom his own lightning rods, it never failed to demolish the fairest\nfabric of sophistry, and cause even its greatest admirers to blush\nthat they had been so fascinated by its false glare.\n\nIn 1756, he was appointed deputy post-master general for the British\ncolonies. It is asserted that in _his_ hands, the post-office in\nAmerica yielded annually thrice as much as did that of Ireland. An\nextraordinary proof of our passion for reading and writing beyond the\nIrish. Perhaps it was owing to this that we saved our liberties, while\nthey lost theirs.\n\nSeveral of the middle colonies suffering much at this time from Indian\ndepredations on their frontiers, it was agreed among them to send\ncommissioners to Albany to devise means for mutual defence. Dr.\nFranklin, commissioner on the part of Pennsylvania, had the honour to\ndraw up a plan, which was thought excellent. Knowing the colonists to\nbe the best marksmen in the world, and supposing it infinitely safer\nthat the defence of their own firesides should be entrusted to them\nthan to British hirelings, he had with his usual sagacity recommended\nthat muskets and powder should be put into their hands.\n\nBut when his plan was presented to the KING and COUNCIL for\nratification, it was indignantly rejected. It was thought by some that\nhardly could Satan and his black janisaries have been more seriously\noffended, had a cargo of Bibles and hymn books been recommended for\ntheir pandemonium.\n\nThe truth is, the British ministry had for a long time depressed the\nunfortunate Americans into mere _hewers of wood and drawers of water_,\nby making them bring all their rich produce of tobaccos, furs, &c. to\nEnglish ports, and there give them the meanest prices; sometimes a\npenny, and even half a penny a pound for their brightest tobacco,\nwhich they would the next hour sell to the Dutch merchants for two\nshillings a pound. To preserve such a trade as this, as Lord Howe\ningenuously confessed, from going into any other channel, was a grand\nobject to the ministry. But this they could not long count on, if the\nAmericans were furnished with muskets, cannon, and powder. They\ntherefore, very prudently, determined to leave Dr. Franklin's\n_excellent marksmen_ out of the question, and confide to their own\ncreatures the protection of a country whose trade could so _well repay\nthem for it_.\n\nBut their folly in preferring such troops was soon made evident, as\nFranklin had predicted. In the spring of 1755, two thousand veterans,\nthe elite of the British military, were sent over to drive the French\nfrom the Ohio. One half that number of Virginia riflemen would have\ndone the business completely. But such was the ministerial jealousy of\nthe American riflemen, and so great their dread to embody and arm that\nkind of troops, that they permitted no more than three companies to\njoin the army. And even these were so ludicrously scrimped up by\ngovernor Dinwiddie, in jackets scarcely reaching to their waists, that\nthey became a mere laughing stock of the British army, who never\ncalled them by any other name than the \"VIRGINIA SHORT RUMPS.\" Many\nbelieved that this was done purposely, that by being thus constantly\nlaughed at, they might be _cowed_ thereby, and be led to think meanly\nof themselves, as quite an inferior sort of beings to the MIGHTY\nENGLISH. But blessed be God whose providence always takes part with\nthe oppressed. A few short weeks only elapsed when this motley army\nwas led, by an incautious commander, into a fatal ambuscade of the\nFrench and Indians--general Braddock, at the head of his 2000 British\nveterans, and young George Washington at the head of his two hundred\n\"_Virginia short rumps_.\" Then was displayed the soundness of Dr.\nFranklin's judgment, in the wide difference, as to _self-possession\nand hard fighting_, between these two kind of troops.\n\nThe conceited Englishmen behaved no better than WILD TURKIES; while\nthe despised \"_Virginia short rumps_\" fought like lions, and had the\nglory of saving the wreck of the British army.\n\nThis sad defeat had like to have ruined doctor Franklin, by whose\ncredit with the Pennsylvanians, colonel Dunbar of the rear guard of\nhis army, had been furnished with fifty wagons, which were all burnt\non the retreat. His escape from this danger was owing to the\ngenerosity of governor Shirley, who learning that Franklin had\nincurred this debt on account of the British government, undertook to\ndischarge it.\n\nSeeing no end to the vexation and expense brought on the colony by\nthose selfish beings, the PROPRIETARIES, the assembly came at length,\nto the resolution to petition the king to abolish the proprietary\ngovernment, and take the colony under his own care. Doctor Franklin\nwas appointed to the honour of presenting this petition to his majesty\nGeorge II. and sailed for England, June, 1757.\n\nLearning at last that by obstinately contending for _too much_, they\nmight possibly lose _all_, the proprietaries signified to doctor\nFranklin a willingness that their land should be _taxed_.\n\nAfter the completion of this important business, Franklin remained at\nthe court of Great Britain as agent for the province of Pennsylvania.\nThe extensive knowledge which he possessed of the situation of the\ncolonies and the regard which he always manifested for their\ninterests, occasioned his appointment to the same office by the\ncolonies of Massachusetts, Maryland and Georgia.\n\nHe had now an opportunity of visiting those illustrious Englishmen,\nwhom his useful writings and discoveries had strongly bound to him,\nthough they had never seen his face. The high opinion which they had\nformed of him at a distance, was greatly increased by a personal\nacquaintance.\n\nSuch vastness of mind with such sweetness of spirit and simplicity of\nmanners, formed a spectacle as rare as it was lovely. And as a proof\nthat SUPERIOR SENSE and superior benevolence will always prevail\nagainst prejudice, he was now courted by those learned societies who\nformerly affected to deride his discoveries in philosophy and\nelectricity. The Royal Society of London, which had at first refused\nhis performances admission into its transactions, now deemed it an\nhonour to class him among its fellows. The universities of St.\nAndrews, of Edinburgh, and Oxford, conferred on him the degree of\ndoctor of laws; and the most distinguished philosophers of Europe\nsought his correspondence. In reading his letters to those great men,\nwe are at a loss which most to admire, the majesty of his sense, or\nthe simplicity of his style. While in England, which was from July,\n1757, to July, '62, he suggested to the British ministry the duty of\ndispossessing the French of that great country on the north of our\ncolonies called Canada. To this end, he published his famous _Canada\npamphlet_, exhibiting in strong colours the many mischiefs and murders\ncommitted on his countrymen, even in times of peace, by the Indians in\nFrench pay. This little tract served to rouse the British nation to\nthe pitch he desired.\n\nAn army of English regulars and New-England militia were sent under\nthe command of general Wolfe, who presently succeeded in driving the\nFrench out of a fine country, of which, by their cruelties, they had\nrendered themselves utterly unworthy.\n\nAbout this time the celebrated doctor Cullen, of Scotland, made some\ncurious discoveries in the art of producing cold by evaporation.\nHoping that the genius of Franklin might throw some lights on this\ndawning science, a friend of doctor Cullen's wrote a statement of the\nfacts to Franklin. The American philosopher, though now immersed in\npolitical pursuits, took a little leisure to repeat doctor Cullen's\nexperiments on cold, which he so improved as easily to produce ICE in\nthe _dog days_. But it was one of those discoveries, which, as he\nsays, he _never valued, because it was too expensive to be of general\nutility_.\n\nAbout the autumn of 1761, he rendered himself prodigiously popular\namong the ladies in London, by completing that sweet toned little\ninstrument of music, the HARMONICA.\n\nI have been told that his fame at court on this account, so awakened\nthe recollection of George III. that he caused it to be signified to\nDr. Franklin, that he felt a disposition to \"_do something for him_.\"\nOur philosopher replied, that he wanted nothing for himself,\nbut--that, _he had a son in America_. The king took the hint, and\nimmediately made out a commission of \"_Governor of his colony of New\nJersey, for his beloved subject, Temple Franklin, Esq._\" On such small\nthings are the fortunes of men sometimes founded!\n\nDoctor Franklin was now become so great a favourite that the people of\nall classes seemed to take a pride in talking of him, and his sayings,\ninsomuch that not a word of the brilliant sort could fall from his\nlips but it was sure to be caught up instantly and re-echoed through\nevery circle, from proud St. James to humble St. Giles. The following\nimpromptu made a great noise in London about this time.\n\nOne evening in a large party at his friend Vaughan's he was,\nlaughingly, challenged by a very beautiful girl, a Miss Gun, to make\nher a couplet of verses _extempore_. Well, madam, replied he, with\ngreat gallantry, since every body is offering a tribute to your\ngraces, let me tender the following:\n\n    \"Cupid now to ensure his fun,\n    Quits his _bow_ and takes to _gun_.\"\n\nThis handsome play on her name instantly suffused the cheeks of Miss\nGun with celestial roses, making her look much more like an angel than\nbefore.\n\nI mention this merely to show what an extraordinary mind that man must\nhave possessed, who with such equal ease, could play the _Newton_ or\nthe _Chesterfield_, and charm alike the lightnings and the ladies.\n\nIn the summer of 1762, he took leave of his friends in England to\nreturn to his native country. On his voyage he discovered in oil or\ngrease thrown on the water, a property, which few people ever dreamt\nof. When we learn of _gold_ that it may by beating, be expanded into a\nleaf of such incredible fineness, that a guinea might in that way be\nmade to cover Solomon's temple, or deck Noah's ark, we are filled with\nwonder of such a metal. Doctor Franklin tells us of equal wonders in\noil. He informs us, that a wine glass full of pure oil poured on a\nmill pond, will presently spread over it, with a film inconceivably\nthinner than a cobweb, and so adhesive that the winds shall not excite\nit to mad-caps and breakers. Hence, he infers, that oil might be made\na mean of saving ships during a violent storm at sea.\n\nIn this voyage he made also another discovery, which ought to be known\nto all going by sea, viz. that if persons perishing of thirst on a\nvoyage, would but bathe half a dozen times a day in the sea water,\nwhich they easily might, by using their empty water casks as bathing\ntubs, they would obtain great relief from their thirst, and live\nseveral days longer; thence enjoying a better chance for their lives,\nby getting into port, or falling in with some friendly sail.\n\nOn his arrival in Philadelphia doctor Franklin was welcomed with marks\nof the most flattering respect by the citizens universally--handsome\naddresses and dinners were given him by literary societies and\nclubs--and the assembly, in the most public manner voted him their\nthanks for \"the great honour and services he had rendered the country\nin general during his residence in England; and especially to the\nprovince of Pennsylvania.\" And they accompanied their thanks with a\npresent of five thousand pounds.\n\nYe blind parents who can think hard of laying out a few dollars for\nbooks and education of your children, O think of this, and learn a\ncourse of conduct more to your own credit and to their temporal and\neternal welfare.\n\nIn a few weeks after his return to Philadelphia there occurred in that\nneighbourhood an affair that serves to show the popularity of doctor\nFranklin in a very strong light.\n\nIn consequence of a number of murders committed on the frontiers by\nsome villanous Indians, about a hundred and twenty young men of\nDauphin county, christians in _name_ but perfect savages in nature,\nbound themselves by a horrid oath to exterminate a little tribe of\nabout twenty tame Indians, who lived very harmlessly among the whites\nin York county. Mounted on horses, and with rifles and tomahawks in\ntheir hands, they set off very deliberately on this hellish errand\ntowards the settlements of the poor Indians. The old men, women, and\nchildren, in the cabins, soon fell weltering in their blood. The rest,\nwho were at work, getting notice, fled to Lancaster, and were lodged\nin the jail as in a place of security. The blood thirsty whites broke\nopen the jail and butchered every soul. All smeared with innocent\nblood, and furious as demons, they then pushed off for Philadelphia,\nto massacre the feeble remains of a friendly tribe who had fled into\nthat city for protection. The governor issued his proclamation. The\nrioters paid no regard to it, but moved on rapidly, well armed, and\ndetermined to cut their way to the hated Indians over the bodies of\nall who should oppose them. They are now on this side of Germantown,\nonly one hour's march from Philadelphia. The inhabitants are all in\nterror. The governor quits his palace, and for safety flies to the\nhouse of doctor Franklin. He, calm as he was wont to be amidst the\nlightnings as they darted around him on his rods, went out to meet the\nrioters. We sincerely regret that we cannot give the speech which he\nmade on this memorable occasion. It must have been impressive in a\nmost extraordinary degree; for on hearing it they instantly abandoned\ntheir hellish design and returned peaceably to their homes!\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XL.\n\n\nHad the fatal sisters, even now, put forth their shears and clipped\nhis thread, yet would not the friend of man \"_have fallen without\nhis fame_.\" Admiring posterity would still have written on his\ntomb,\n\n    _Here lies the GREAT FRANKLIN._\n\nBut though great now, he is destined to be much greater still. A\ncrisis is approaching that is to call forth all his talents, and to\nconvince even the most unthinking, that in the dark day of trouble the\n\"_wise shall shine forth like the firmament_.\" By the crisis here\nmentioned, I mean the events leading to the American revolution.\n\nThe British cabinet, as if entire strangers to that divine philosophy\nwhich commands its disciples to be \"_no respecters of persons_,\"\nallowed themselves in the most fatal policy of sparing the British\nsubjects in _England_ at the expense of the British subjects in\n_America_. After having drained much money from them in a variety of\nunconstitutional ways, they came at length to the resolution of taxing\n_the colonies without their consent_.\n\nThis dark design was hinted in 1754, by the minister, to governor\nShirley, of the Massachusetts-Bay colony. The governor, well knowing\nhis extraordinary penetration and judgment, broke this ministerial\nplan to Dr. Franklin; requesting _his_ opinion of it. Dr. Franklin\nanswered this question of the governor, by urging an \"_immediate union\nof the colonies with great Britain, by allowing them representatives\nin parliament_,\" as the only thing that could prevent those ceaseless\nencroachments on the one side, and those bitter animosities on the\nother, which, _he feared_, would one day prove the ruin of both\ncountries. As to the ministerial plan of taxing the colonies by act of\nparliament, where they have no representation, he assured the governor\nthat it would prove utterly abominable. \"His majesty, sir,\" said he to\nthe governor, \"has no subjects in all his wide dominions, who more\nheartily love him than do his American subjects. Nor do there exist on\nearth, the Englishmen who hold more dear the glory of old England than\nthey do. But the same spirit of their gallant forefathers, which makes\nthem ready to lay down their lives and fortunes, in a constitutional\nway, for their king and country, will for ever secure them from being\nslaves. We exult, sir, in the recollection, that of all the\ngovernments on earth, that of Great Britain has long been the\n_freest_; and that more blood has been shed for freedom's sake in\nEngland in one week, than on the whole continent for fifty years. Now,\non the bright face of that government, the first and fairest feature\nis this: that no king can touch a penny belonging to the poorest\nsubject, without his own consent, by his representative in parliament.\nFor, if, say they, '_a king can at pleasure take our money, he can\ntake every thing else; since with that he can easily hire soldiers to\nrob, and then murder us if we but open our lips against him_.' As\nAmericans glory in being Englishmen on the western side of the\nAtlantic, they very naturally claim the common right of Englishmen,\nnot to be taxed without their own consent, by their representatives in\nparliament. But the British ministry, though they obstinately refuse\nto the Americans the sacred rights of representation, yet as wickedly\ninsist on the right of _taxation_; and accordingly have brought into\nparliament the famous _stamp act bill_, whereby no business that\nrequires a record on paper, as _deeds_, _bonds_, _wills_, _marriages_,\n_&c._ can be legally done but on paper that has received the _royal\nstamp_. Now, sir, you well know that the same minister who proposes\nthis most iniquitous and unconstitutional act, would not dare propose\nto any the most drunken tavern-keeper in England, a farthing tax on a\npot of his ale without the consent of his representative in\nparliament; and yet, without being allowed a hearing in parliament,\n_three millions_ of free-born Americans, sons of Englishmen, are to be\ntaxed at the pleasure of a distant minister! Not, honoured sir, that\nthe Americans care a fig for the _pence_ imposed on this bit of stamp\npaper, but for the _principle_. For they well know that if parliament\nclaim a _right_ to take from us a penny in the pound, there is no line\ndrawn to bound that right; and what shall hinder their calling\nwhenever they please for the other _nineteen shillings and eleven\npence_? And besides, sir, where is the necessity for this _most\ndegrading_ measure? Have not the Americans ever shown themselves the\nwarmest friends of their king and country? Have they not, in all cases\nof danger, most readily voted both their men and money to the full\nextent of their means, and sometimes far beyond?\n\n\"And in addition to all this, are they not daily paying large monies\nin secret taxes to Great Britain?\n\n  \"I. We are not _permitted to trade with foreign nations_! All the\ndifference in the price of what we could buy cheaper from them, but\nmust buy dearer from Britain, is a clear _tax_ to Britain.\n\n \"II. We are obliged to _carry our produce to Britain_! All that\nit sells for less _there_ than it would in any other market, is a\nclear _tax_ to Britain.\n\n\"III. All the manufactures that we could make, but are\n_forbidden_ and must buy of British merchants, is a clear\n_tax_ to Britain.\n\n\"And what _freeborn_ Englishman can, without indignation, think of\nbeing so daringly defrauded of his _birthright_, that if he wants a\npipe of good wine, he cannot go to the island of Madeira and get it on\neasy exchange for his bread stuff, and return at once to his home and\nbusiness; but must go a thousand miles farther from his family, even\nto Great Britain, and there run the gauntlet, through so many ruinous\ncharges, as to bring his wine up to almost double what it ought to\nhave cost? And all this most flagrant injustice done to the whole\npeople of the colonies, just to enrich half a dozen British merchants\nengaged in the Portugal wine trade!\n\n\"A similar outrage on another of the dearest rights of Englishmen,\n_i.e._ '_to make the most that they honestly can of their property_,'\nis committed on the British subjects in America, for the sake of\nfavouring a few hatters and nail makers in England. No country on the\nglobe, furnishes better iron or better beaver than does North America.\nBut the Americans must not make a hob-nail or a felt hat for\nthemselves. No; they must send all their iron and fur to England for\nthe hatters and nail makers _there_; who may give them their own price\nfor the raw materials, and ask their own price for the manufactures.\n\n\"All that a wise government wishes, is, that the people should be\nnumerous and wealthy enough to _fight the battles_ of their country,\nand to _pay the taxes_. But they care not so much whether the fighting\nbe done by John or Thomas, or the tax paid by William or Charles.\n\n\"What imports it to the government, whether a merchant, a smith, or a\nhatter, grows rich in Old England or New England? And if, through\nincrease of the people, _two_ smiths are wanted for _one_ employed\nbefore, why may not the _new_ smith be allowed to live and thrive in\nthe _new_ country, as well as the _old_ in the _old_? In short, why\nshould the countenance of a state be _partially_ afforded to its\npeople, unless it be most in favour of those who have most merit?\"\n\nThe whig papers in London soon got this letter, and laid it before the\npublic.\n\nAmong a high-minded people like the British, who pride themselves in\ntheir love of liberty and their perfect scorn of _foul play_, such\nsentiments could not be read without the liveliest emotions. And\nthough some, the ministerial junto for example, with the merchants and\nmanufacturers, did not like such plain truths, yet the nation in\ngeneral gave him great credit both for his singular honesty and\nabilities; and the name of Dr. Franklin became very dear to thousands\nof the most enlightened and virtuous patriots of Britain.\n\nBut the pleasure of admiration was dashed with fear, that the minister\nwould suffer no good to be done to the nation by all this divine\ncounsel, merely because the giver was not an _Englishman_.\n\nThe lights, however, which Dr. Franklin had thrown on this great\nsubject, were pressed upon the minister with such courage by numbers\nof honest English writers, that he prudently delayed ordering the\ncollection of the tax until he could get further information. It was\nnot long before an opportunity was offered him to obtain this\ninformation in a way highly complimentary to Dr. Franklin, _i.e._ by\nsummoning him, then in London as colony agent from Pennsylvania,\nFebruary 2, 1766, _to appear before the Bar of the British House of\nCommons, to answer certain questions, &c._\n\nThe next day, accompanied by Mr. Strahan, afterwards member of\nparliament, with several illustrious Englishmen, his warm friends, he\nwent to the house. The concourse was immense. _To see Dr.\nFranklin_--the American, whose philosophical discoveries and political\nwritings had filled the world with his name, excited universal\ncuriosity. The galleries were filled with ladies of the first\ndistinction, and every seat below was occupied by the members from the\nhouse of lords. At ten o'clock he appeared at the bar before the eager\nwaiting crowd. The profoundest silence ensued. All eyes were fixed on\nhim; and, from their deep regard, it appeared, that though they beheld\nno stars nor garters glittering on his breast, no burning velvets nor\nflaming diamonds adorning his person, yet they were not disappointed.\nThey beheld a spectacle still more interesting and novel.--The\nspectacle of a man whose simple dress evinced that he asked no aid of\nthe tailor and silkworm to recommend him, but stood solely on the\nmajesty of his mind. The hour for examination being come, and the\nattendant officer beckoning him thereto, he arose--\n\n\"And in his rising seemed a pillar of state--deep on his brow engraven\ndeliberation sat and public care. His looks drew audience and\nattention still as night, or summer's noontide air.\"\n\nWho can paint the looks of the minister, as with darkly scowling\neye-balls, he beheld this terror of aristocracy! or who can paint the\nNOBLE LORDLINGS, as lost in equal _stare_, they gazed and gazed at the\nwondrous American, forgetting the while, \"_to quiz_,\" as they were\nwont, \"_his homespun coat and simple shoe-strings_.\"\n\nBut never did the mind-illumined looks of man shine more divinely\nbright than did those, that day, of the generous Barry, the godlike\nChatham, and the high-minded Dunning, when they beheld the noble form\nof Franklin. Though born in North America, he shines before their eyes\nas a true born son of Britain--the luminous and brave interpreter of\nher SACRED CONSTITUTION, and the wise politician who seeks to exalt\nher glory, lasting as the skies, on the broad base of impartial\njustice to all her children. With eyes sparkling with esteem\nunutterable, they hail him as a brother; and breathe the ardent wish\nthat in the impending examination he may succeed in diverting the\nminister from that unconstitutional course which may involve the ruin\nboth of England and America.\n\nThe moment for trial being come, and the minister giving the signal to\nbegin, the speaker thus commenced:--\n\n_Q._ What is your name and place of abode?\n\n_A._ Franklin, of Philadelphia.\n\nHere followed nearly _three hundred questions_ and _answers_, which\nwere once read with exceeding interest by men, women, and children in\nAmerica. But as they turn altogether on that great quarrel which the\nBritish ministry formerly excited in this country; and which God, to\nhis endless glory, was pleased to put asleep in our favour near half a\ncentury ago, then let all these questions and answers lie asleep with\nit. However, it is but justice to Dr. Franklin to observe, that when\nwe consider these questions, what a wide range they take both of the\nBritish and American _relations_ and _interests_--together with the\n_luminous_, prompt, and decisive manner in which they were solved, we\nare lost in astonishment at the extent of his information and the\npowers of his mind, and are almost tempted to believe that the\n_answers_, and not the _questions_ must have been studied with the\nnicest discrimination of circumstances.\n\nCharles Fox, an honest Englishman, and an excellent judge in these\nmatters, being asked his opinion of Dr. Franklin and the _ministers_\nin the late examination, replied, in his strong way, \"_Dwarfs_, sir,\nmere _dwarfs in the hand of a giant_!\"\n\nEdmund Burke used to say, that this examination of Dr. Franklin before\nthe ministers, always put him in mind of a \"_Master examined before a\nparcel of school-boys_.\"\n\nBut though his abilities on this occasion excited the admiration of\ngenerous enemies, while his more partial friends set no bounds to\ntheir praise, yet it would appear from the following that all afforded\n_him_ but little pleasure. In a letter to a friend in Philadelphia, he\nhas these remarkable words: \"You have, no doubt, heard that I have\nbeen examined before the HOUSE OF COMMONS in this country. And it is\nprobable you have also been told that I did not entirely disappoint\nthe expectations of my friends, nor betray the cause of truth. This,\nto be sure, gives me some pleasure; and, indeed it is the only thing\nthat does; for, as to any good being done by my honest statement to\nministers, of what I firmly believe to be the best interests of the\ntwo countries, 'tis all, I fear, _a lost hope_. The people of this\ncountry are too proud, and too much despise the poor Americans, to\nallow them _the common rights of Englishmen_, that is, _a\nrepresentation in parliament_. And until this be done, I apprehend\nthat no taxes laid by parliament, will ever be collected, but such as\nmust be stained with blood. How lamentable it is that two people,\nsprung from the same origin, speaking the same language, governed by\nthe same laws, and worshipping at the same altar of God, and capable,\nby a wise use of the extraordinary means he has now put into their\nhands, of becoming the greatest nation on earth, should be stopped\nshort and perhaps reduced to insignificance by a civil war, kindled by\nministers obstinately contending for what they cannot but know to be\nutterly unconstitutional and eternally inadmissible among the\n_free-born sons of Englishmen_. But I suppose the repeal will not now\nbe agreed to, from what I think a mistaken opinion, that the honour\nand dignity of government are better supported by persisting in a\nwrong measure, once entered into, than by rectifying an error as soon\nas it is discovered.\"\n\nDifferently, however, from the apprehensions of Franklin, the stamp\nact was repealed, and even in the course of the same year!\n\nBut though so little expected by him, yet was this event ascribed, in\na great measure, to Dr. Franklin. His famous examination, printed in a\nshilling pamphlet, had been distributed by myriads throughout Britain\nand America. In America it served to brighten up the _old land marks_\nof their rights as _free-born sons of Englishmen_, and to quicken\ntheir sensibilities to ministerial frauds. In England, it served to\nshow the ignorance of the ministers; the impolicy of their measures\ntowards America; and the utter inexpediency of the stamp act. The\nstamp act of course fell to the ground. The reader, if a good man,\nexults, no doubt, in this as a most fortunate event, and already hails\nthis removal of strife, as a certain prelude to that return of love\nbetween the mother country and her colonies, which will make them\nboth, glorious and happy. He may hope it, but alas! he is never to see\nthe accomplishment of that good hope. Death is whetting his scythe;\nand civil wars and slaughters are now just as near at hand as though\nthe stamp act had never been repealed. For a pamphlet in some popular\nstyle that should unrip the black budget of ministerial injustice and\nlay naked to view the causes of the coming war; that unnatural war\nthat is to sever England and her colonies for ever! Brighter than a\nthousand sermons it would illustrate to politicians that \"_the Lord is\nKing_\"--that the sole end of his government, is to _glorify himself in\nthe happiness of his creatures_--that thereunto he hath _established\nhis throne in justice_--the eternal justice of men \"_doing unto others\nas they would that others should do unto them_,\" and that none,\nhowever great, shall ever violate this blessed order with impunity.\nThe British ministry are destined to illustrate this. They are fond of\npower--to preserve this, they must continue in place--in order\nthereunto they must please the merchants and manufacturers--to\naccomplish this they must favour their trade and lighten their taxes.\nAnd how is this to be done? why, by a little peccadillo of INJUSTICE.\nThey have only to sweat the \"CONVICTS _on their American\nplantations_,\"--the rascals live a great way off, and have no\n_representative_ in parliament to make a noise about it. Accordingly,\nsoon as the Americans were supposed to have gotten a little over their\nfever about the stamp act, the minister, lord North, of famous memory,\ndetermined to try them again. However it was but a small affair\nnow--only a _three penny excise_ on the pound of tea.\n\nWhen Dr. Franklin, our ARGUS, then in London, discovered the designs\nof minister North, he exerted himself to point that purblind gentleman\nto the horrible gulf that was yawning at his feet. He wrote letters to\nseveral members of parliament, his friends; and he published a number\nof luminous pieces in the patriotic gazettes, all admirably calculated\nto rouse the friends of the nation to a sense of the impending\ndangers.\n\nIn three letters to the honourable Mr. W. Strahan, he has, in the\nextract, these remarkable words:--\n\n    \"_London, November, 1768._\n\n    \"DEAR SIR,\n\n    \"With respect to the present dispute between Great Britain and the\n    colonies, there is nothing I wish for more than to see it amicably\n    settled. But _Providence_ brings about its own ends by its own\n    means; and if it intends the downfall of a nation, that nation will\n    be so blinded by its pride and other passions as not to see its\n    danger, or how its fall may be prevented.\n\n    \"The friends of the ministry say that this tax is but a _trifle_;\n    granted. But who does not see what will be the consequence of\n    submitting to it? Is it not the more dangerous for being a trifle?\n    Is it not in this way that the devil himself most effectually works\n    our ruin? If he can but prevail on a poor thoughtless youth to\n    shake hands with innocence, and to _steal_, he is abundantly\n    satisfied. To get the boy's _hand in_, is all he wants. And he\n    would as leave the simpleton should begin with stealing a halter as\n    a horse. For he well knows that if he but begins with the one he is\n    sure to end with the other. Just so the minister, angling for\n    American liberty, artfully covers his hook with this delicate bait.\n    But the truth is, I have talked and written so much and so long on\n    the subject of this unhappy quarrel, that my acquaintance are weary\n    of hearing, and the public of reading, any more of it; which begins\n    to make me weary of talking and writing; especially as I do not\n    find that I have gained any point in either country, except that of\n    rendering myself suspected, by my impartiality, in England of being\n    too much an _American_, and in America of being too much an\n    _Englishman_. However, as in reply to your polite question, \"_what\n    is to be_ done _to settle this alarming dispute?_\" I have often\n    told you what I think the minister _ought_ to do: I now go a step\n    farther, and tell you what I fear he will do.\n\n    \"I apprehend he will, ere long, attempt to enforce this obnoxious\n    tax, whatever may be the consequences.--I apprehend that in the\n    mean time, the colonies will continue to be treated with contempt,\n    and the redress of their grievances be neglected--that, this will\n    inflame matters still more in that country--that, further rash\n    measures there, may create more resentments here--that, their\n    assemblies will be attempted to be dissolved--that, more troops\n    will be sent to oppress them--that, to justify these measures of\n    government, your newspapers will revile them as _miscreants_,\n    _rogues_, _dastards_, and _rebels_--that, this will alienate the\n    minds of the people here from them, and theirs from you--that,\n    possibly too, some of their warm patriots may be distracted enough\n    to do some _mad_ act which will cause them to be sent for\n    hither--and that government may be indiscreet enough to hang them\n    for it--that mutual provocations will thus go on to complete the\n    separation, and instead of that cordial affection which so long\n    existed, and which is so necessary to the glory and happiness of\n    both countries, an implacable malice, dishonourable and destructive\n    to both, may take place. I hope, however, that this may all prove\n    _false prophecy_, and that you and I may live to see as sincere a\n    friendship established between our countries, as has so many years\n    subsisted between W. Strahan, Esq. and his truly affectionate old\n    friend,\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN.\"\n\nBut notwithstanding his prayer to the contrary, every body recollects\nhow, exactly as Dr. Franklin had predicted, the minister continued to\nblunder and blunder on with his face constantly towards war--how\nnothing was trumpeted by the ministerial party, like the ingratitude\nand baseness of the Americans--how _certain_ newspapers perpetually\nvilified them as _miscreants_, _rascals_ and _rebels_--how the public\nmind was so set against them that even the _shoe-blacks_, as Mr.\nWilkes said, talked of the colonies as _their plantations_, and of the\npeople there as if they had been their _overseers_ and _negroes_--how\nthe minister determined at last, to enforce the _tea-tax_--how, on\nhearing the news of this, as of the stamp act, the yankees muffled\ntheir drums, and played the _dead march_--how they took the sacrament\nnever to submit to it--how the minister, to test their valour, sent\nthree ships laden with this three-penny tea--how the yankees, dressed\nlike Mohawks, boarded their ships and destroyed their cargoes--how the\nminister, waxing more in wrath, sent more soldiers to quell the\nrebels--how the rebels insulted the soldiers--how the soldiers fired\non the rebels--how the port of Boston was shut by royal\nproclamation--how, in spite of the royal proclamation, the colonies\nwould trade with her and send monies to her relief--how the LORDS and\nCOMMONS petitioned the king that, any rebel opposing the officers of\nhis sacred majesty, should be instantly hung up without judge or\njury--how the king _thanked_ his noble lords and commons, and was\ngraciously pleased to decree that all rebels thus offending should be\nthus hung up without judge or jury--how that, notwithstanding this\ngracious decree, when his majesty's troops attempted to destroy the\nrebel stores at Concord, the rebels attacked and killed them, without\nany regard to his majesty's decree.\n\nThis unpardonable sin against the \"Lord's anointed,\" which happened on\nthe 19th of April 1775, served as the double bolting and barring of\nthe door against all hope of peace. Throughout America, it struck but\none deep and awful sentiment, \"_the sword is drawn, and we must now\nthrow the scabbard away_.\" In May, the news got to England, where it\nexcited emotions that beggar all description. They somewhat, however,\nresembled the effects of the trumpet of the great angel spoken of in\nthe _Revelations_, that sounded \"_wo! wo! wo! to the inhabitants_\" of\nAmerica, and proclaimed the pouring forth of _fire_ and sword. But,\nreserving this tragedy for the next chapter, we will conclude the\npresent with the following anecdote. It will show at least, that\ndoctor Franklin left no stone unturned to carry his point; and that\nwhere logic failed he had recourse to wit.\n\n\nTHE CAT AND EAGLE.\n\nA FABLE, BY DOCTOR FRANKLIN.\n\nLord Spencer was a great admirer of Dr. Franklin, and never missed\nsending him a card when he intended a quorum of learned ones at his\ntable. The last time that our philosopher enjoyed this honour, was in\n1775, just before he was driven from England by lord North. The\nconversation taking a turn on fables, lord Spencer observed, that it\nhad certainly been a very lucky thing, especially for the YOUNG, that\nthis mode of instruction had ever been hit on, as there was a\nsomething in it wonderfully calculated to touch a favourite string\nwith them, _i.e._ novelty and surprise. They would listen, he said, to\na fox, when they would not to a father, and they would be more apt to\nremember any thing good told them by an owl or a crow, than by an\nuncle or an aunt. But I am afraid, continued his lordship, that the\nage of fables is past. AEsop and Phaedrus among the ancients, and\nFontaine and Gay among the moderns, have given us so many fine\nspeeches from the birds and beasts, that I suspect their budgets are\npretty nearly exhausted.\n\nThe company concluded with his lordship, except Franklin, who was\nsilent.\n\n\"Well, doctor,\" said lord Spencer, \"what is your opinion on this\nsubject?\"\n\n\"Why, my lord,\" replied Franklin, \"I cannot say that I have the honour\nto think with you in this affair. The birds and beasts have indeed\nsaid a great many wise things; but it is likely they will say a great\nmany more yet before they are done. Nature, I am thinking, is not\nquite so easily exhausted as your lordship seems to imagine.\"\n\nLord Spencer, evidently confused, but still with that countenance of\npleasure which characterizes great souls, when they meet superior\ngenius, exclaimed--\"Well, doctor, suppose you give us a fable? I know\nyou are good at an impromptu.\" The company all seconded the motion.\nFranklin thanked them for the compliment, but begged to be excused.\nThey would hear no excuses. They knew, they said, he could _go it_,\nand insisted he should gratify them. Finding all resistance\nineffectual, he drew his pencil, and after scribbling a few minutes,\nreached it to Spencer, saying--\"Well, my lord, since, you will have it\nso, here's a something fresh from the brain, but I'm afraid you'll not\nfind AEsop in it.\"\n\n\"Read it, doctor, read it!\" was the cry of the noble lord and his\nfriends. In a mood, spriteful and pleasant, Franklin thus began--\"Once\nupon a time--hem!--as an Eagle in the full pride of his pinions,\nsoared over a humble farm-yard, darting his fiery eyes around in\nsearch of a pig, a lamb, or some such pretty tit-bit, what should he\nbehold but a plump young rabbit, as he thought, squatted among the\nweeds. Down at once upon him, he pounced like thunder, and bearing him\naloft in his talons, thus chuckled to himself with joy--Zounds, what a\nlucky dog I am! such a nice rabbit here, this morning, for my\nbreakfast!\n\n\"His joy was but momentary; for the supposed rabbit happened to be a\nstout cat, who, spitting and squalling with rage, instantly stuck his\nteeth and nails, like any fury, into the eagle's thighs, making the\nblood and feathers fly at a dreadful rate.\n\n\"HOLD! HOLD! _for mercy's sake, hold!_ cried the eagle, his wings\nshivering in the air with very torment.\n\n\"Villain! retorted the cat, with a tiger-like growl, dare you talk of\n_mercy_ after treating me thus, who never injured you?\"\n\nO, God bless you, Mr. CAT, is that you? rejoined the eagle, mighty\ncomplaisant; 'pon honour, I did not intend, sir. I thought it was only\na rabbit I had got hold of--and you know we are all fond of rabbits.\nDo you suppose, my dear sir, that if I had but dreamt it was you, I\nwould ever have touched the hair of your head? No, indeed: I am not\nsuch a fool as all that comes to. And now, my dear Mr. CAT, come let's\nbe good friends again, and I'll let you go with all my heart.\n\n\"Yes, you'll let me go, scoundrel, will you--here from the clouds--to\nbreak every bone in my skin!--No, villain, carry me back, and put me\ndown exactly where you found me, or I'll tear the throat out of you in\na moment.\n\n\"Without a word of reply, the eagle stooped at once from his giddy\nheight, and sailing humbly down, with great complaisance restored the\ncat to his simple farm-yard, there to sleep, or hunt his rats and mice\nat pleasure.\"\n\nA solemn silence ensued. At length, with a deep prophetic sigh, lord\nSpencer thus replied: \"_Ah! Dr. Franklin I see the drift of your\nfable; and my fears have already made the application. God grant_,\nthat Britain may not prove the eagle, and America the cat.\" This fable\nparaphrased in the WHIG papers of that day, concludes in this way:\n\n      \"Thus Britain thought in seventy-six,\n    Her talons in a hare to fix;\n    But in the scuffle it was found,\n    The bird received a dangerous wound,\n    Which, though pretending oft to hide,\n    Still rankles in his Royal side.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLI.\n\n\nDoctor Franklin now began to find his situation in London extremely\nunpleasant. For twelve years, like heaven's own minister of peace, he\nhad pressed the olive-branch on the British ministry; and yet after\nall, their war-hawks could hardly tolerate the sight of him. They even\nwent so far as to call him \"_the hoary headed villain, who first\nstirred up the Americans to rebellion_.\" As soon as he could obtain\nhis passports he left England.\n\nHis old friend, Strahan, advised him to continue in that country, for\nthat America would soon be filled with tumult and bloodshed. He\nreplied, \"_No, sir, where liberty is, there is my country._\"\n\nUnbounded was the joy of the Americans on the return of so great a\npatriot and statesman. The day following he was elected by the\nlegislature of Pennsylvania, a member of Congress. The following\nletters, in extract, to his constant friend, and the friend of science\nand liberty, the celebrated doctor Priestley, will show how full his\nhands were\n\n    \"_Philadelphia, July 7, 1775._\n\n    \"DEAR FRIEND,\n\n    \"Britain has begun to burn our sea port towns; _secure_, I suppose,\n    _that we shall never be able to return the outrage in kind_. She\n    may doubtless destroy them all. But is this the way to recover our\n    friendship and trade? She must certainly be distracted; for no\n    tradesman out of Bedlam ever thought of increasing the number of\n    his customers by knocking them on the head; or of enabling them to\n    pay their debts, by burning their houses.\n\n    \"My time was never more fully employed. I breakfast before six. At\n    six I hasten to the COMMITTEE of SAFETY for putting the province in\n    a state of defence. At nine I go to Congress, which sits till after\n    four. It will scarcely be credited in Britain, that men can be as\n    diligent with us, from zeal for the public good, as with you, for\n    _thousands_ per annum. Such is the difference between uncorrupted\n    new states, and corrupted old ones.\n\n    \"Great frugality and great industry are now become fashionable\n    here: gentlemen, who used to entertain with two or three courses,\n    pride themselves now in treating with simple beef and pudding. By\n    these means, and the stoppage of our consumptive trade with\n    Britain, we shall be better able to pay our voluntary taxes for the\n    support of our troops. Our savings in the article of trade, amount\n    to near five millions of sterling per annum.--Yours, most\n    affectionately,\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN.\"\n\nIn another letter to the same, dated October 3d, he says:\n\n    \"Tell our dear good friend, doctor Price, who sometimes has his\n    doubts and despondencies about our firmness, that America is\n    determined and unanimous: a very few tories and placemen excepted,\n    who will probably soon export themselves. Britain, at the expense\n    of three millions has killed in this campaign, _one hundred and\n    fifty yankees!_ which is 20,000 pounds sterling a head; and at\n    Bunker's hill she gained half a mile of ground! During the same\n    time she lost, at one place, near one thousand men, and we have had\n    a good sixty thousand children born in America. From these data,\n    with the help of his mathematical head, lord North will easily\n    calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and\n    conquer our whole territory.--\n\n    \"I am yours, B. FRANKLIN.\"\n\nIn another letter to the same, and of the same date, he says:\n\n    \"Britain still goes on to goad and exasperate. She despises us too\n    much; and seems to forget the Italian proverb, that '_there is no\n    little enemy_.' I am persuaded the body of the British people are\n    our friends; but your lying gazettes may soon make them our\n    enemies--and I see clearly that we are on the high road to mutual\n    enmity, hatred, and detestation. A _separation_ will of course be\n    inevitable. It is a million of pities so fair a plan, as we have\n    hitherto been engaged in for increasing _strength_ and _empire_\n    with PUBLIC FELICITY, should be destroyed by the mangling hands of\n    a few blundering ministers. It will not be destroyed: GOD WILL\n    PROTECT AND PROSPER IT: you will only exclude yourselves from any\n    share of it. We hear that more ships and troops are coming out. We\n    know you may do us a great deal of mischief, but we are determined\n    to bear it patiently; but if you flatter yourselves with beating us\n    into submission, you know neither the people nor the country.\n\n    \"I am ever your's, most affectionately,\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN.\"\n\nThis letter of Doctor Franklin's is the first thing I have seen that\nutters a whisper about INDEPENDENCE. It was, however, a _prophetical_\nwhisper, and soon found its accomplishment in the source that Franklin\npredicted--the BARBARITY OF BRITAIN. To see war waged against them by\na power whom they had always gloried in as their MOTHER COUNTRY--to\nsee it waged because as the _children of Englishmen_, they had only\nasked for the _common rights of Englishmen_--to see it waged with a\nsavageness unknown among civilized nations, and all the powers of\nearth and hell, as it were, stirred up against them--the Indians with\ntheir bloody tomahawks and scalping knives--the <DW64>s with their\nmidnight hoes and axes--the merciless flames let loose on their\nmidwinter towns--with prisons, chains, and starvation of their\nworthiest citizens. \"_Such miserable specimens_,\" as Franklin termed\nthem, \"_of the British government_,\" produced every where in the\ncolonies a disposition to _detest and avoid it as a complication of\nrobbery, murder, famine, fire and pestilence_.\n\nOn the 7th of June, resolutions respecting independence, were moved\nand seconded in Congress. Doctor Franklin threw all the weight of his\nwisdom and character into the scale in favour of independence.\n\n\"INDEPENDENCE,\" said he, \"_will cut the Gordian knot at once, and give\nus freedom_.\n\n  \"I. _Freedom from the oppressive kings, and endless wars, and mad\npolitics, and forced religion of an unreasonable and cruel\ngovernment._\n\n \"II. _Freedom to choose a fair, and cheap, and reasonable government\nof our own._\n\n\"III. _Freedom to live in friendship with all nations; and_\n\n \"IV. _Freedom to trade with all._\"\n\nOn the 4th of July, the _Independence_ of the United States was\ndeclared. Immediately on the finishing of this great work, doctor\nFranklin, with a committee of the first talents in Congress, prepared\na number of very masterly addresses to the courts of Europe, informing\nwhat the United States had done; assigning their reasons for so doing;\nand tendering in the most affectionate terms, the friendship and trade\nof the young nation. The potentates of Europe were, generally, well\npleased to hear that a new star had risen in the west, and talked\nfreely of opening their treasures and presenting their gifts of\nfriendship, &c.\n\nBut the European power that seemed most to rejoice in this event was\nthe French. In August, doctor Franklin was appointed by Congress to\nvisit the French court, for the purpose of forming an alliance with\nthat powerful people. It was his friend, Doctor B. Rush, who first\nannounced to him the choice which Congress had made, adding, at the\nsame time, his hearty congratulations on that account.\n\n\"Why, doctor,\" replied he with a smile, \"I am now, like an old broom,\nworn down to the stump in my country's service--near seventy years\nold. But such as I am, she must, I suppose, have the last of me.\" Like\nthe brave Dutch republicans, each with his wallet of herrings on his\nback, when they went forth to negotiate with the proud Dons, so did\ndoctor Franklin set out to court the great French nation, with no\nprovisions for his journey, but a few hogsheads of tobacco. He was\nreceived in France, however, with a most hearty welcome, not only as\nan envoy from a brave people fighting for their rights, but also as\nthe famed American philosopher, who by his _paratonerres_ (lightning\nrods) had disarmed the clouds of their lightnings, and who, it was\nhoped, would reduce the colossal power of Great Britain.\n\nHe had not been long in Paris, before the attention of all the courts\nof Europe was attached to him, by a publication, wherein he\ndemonstrated, that, _the young, healthy, and sturdy republic of\nAmerica, with her simple manners, laborious habits, and millions of\nfresh land and produce, would be a much safer borrower of money, than\nthe old, profligate, and debt-burthened government of Britain_. The\nDutch and French courts, in particular, read his arguments with such\nattention, that they soon began to make him loans. To the French\ncabinet he pointed out, \"THE INEVITABLE DESTRUCTION OF THEIR FLEETS,\nCOLONIES, AND COMMERCE, IN CASE OF A RE-UNION OF BRITAIN AND AMERICA.\"\nThere wanted but a grain to turn the trembling balance in favour of\nAmerica.\n\nBut it was the will of Heaven to withhold that grain a good long\nwhile. And Franklin had the mortification to find, that although the\nFrench were an exceedingly polite people; constantly eulogizing\nGENERAL WASHINGTON and THE BRAVE BOSTONIANS, on every little victory;\nand also for their tobacco, very thriftily smuggling all the fire arms\nand ammunition they could into the United States, yet they had no\nnotion of coming out manfully at once upon the British lion, until\nthey should first see the American Eagle lay the monster on his back.\nDr. Franklin, of course, was permitted to rest on his oars, at Passy,\nin the neighbourhood of Paris, His characteristic philanthropy,\nhowever, could not allow him to be idle at a court, whose pride and\nextravagance were so horribly irreconcileable with his ideas of the\ntrue use of riches, _i.e._ INDEPENDENCE for ourselves, and BENEFICENCE\nto others. And he presently came out in the Paris Gazette with the\nfollowing master piece of WIT and ECONOMICS.\n\n\n    _To the Editors of the Paris Journal._\n\n    GENTLEMEN,\n\n    I was the other evening in a grand company, where the new lamp of\n    Messrs. Quinquet and Lange was introduced, and much admired for\n    its splendour; but a general inquiry was made, whether the oil it\n    consumed, was not in proportion to the light it afforded; in which\n    case there would be no saving in the use of it. No one present\n    could satisfy us on that point; which all agreed ought to be\n    known, it being a very desirable thing to lessen, if possible, the\n    expense of lighting our apartments, when every other article of\n    family expense was so much augmented.\n\n    I was pleased to see this general concern for economy; for I love\n    economy exceedingly.\n\n    I went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight, with\n    my head full of the subject. An accidental sudden noise awaked me\n    about six in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room\n    filled with light; and I imagined, at first, that a number of\n    these lamps had been brought into it; but rubbing my eyes, I\n    perceived the light came in at my windows. I got up, and looked\n    out to see what might be the occasion of it, when I saw the sun\n    just rising above the horizon, whence he poured his rays\n    plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently\n    omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.\n\n    I looked at my watch, which goes very well, and found that it was\n    but six o'clock; and still thinking it something extraordinary\n    that the sun should rise so early, I looked into the almanack;\n    where I found it to be the hour given for its rising on that day.\n\n    Your readers, who, with me, have never seen any signs of sunshine\n    before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the\n    almanack, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of\n    his rising so early; and especially when I assure them _that he\n    gives light as soon as he rises_. I am certain of the fact. _I saw\n    it with my own eyes._ And having repeated this observation the\n    three following mornings, I found always precisely the same\n    result.\n\n    Yet so it happens, that when I speak of this discovery to others,\n    I can easily perceive by their countenances, though they forbear\n    expressing it in words, that they do not quite believe me. One,\n    indeed, who is a learned natural philosopher, has assured me that\n    I must certainly be mistaken as to the circumstance of the light\n    coming into my room; for it being well known, as he says, that\n    there could be no light abroad at that hour, it follows that none\n    could enter from without; and that of consequence, my windows\n    being accidentally left open, instead of _letting in the light_,\n    had only served to _let out the darkness_.\n\n    This event has given rise, in my mind, to several serious and\n    important reflections. I considered that, if I had not been\n    awakened so early in the morning, I should have slept six hours\n    longer by the light of the sun, and in exchange have lived six\n    hours the following night by candle-light; and the latter being a\n    much more expensive light than the former, my love of economy\n    induced me to muster up what little arithmetic I was master of,\n    and to make some calculations, which I shall give you, after\n    observing, that utility is, in my opinion, the test of value in\n    matters of invention, and that a discovery which can be applied to\n    no use, or is not good for something, is good for nothing.\n\n    I took for the basis of my calculation, the supposition that there\n    are 100,000 families in Paris; and that these families consume in\n    the night half a pound of candles, per hour. I think this a\n    moderate allowance, taking one family with another; for though I\n    believe some consume less, I know that many consume a great deal\n    more. Then, estimating seven hours per day, as the medium quantity\n    between the time of the _sun's_ rising and _ours_, and there being\n    seven hours, of course, per night, in which we burn candles, the\n    account will stand thus:\n\n    In 12 months there are nights 365; hours of each night in which we\n    burn candles 7; multiplication gives for the total number of hours\n    2555. These multiplied by 100,000, the number of families in\n    Paris, give 255,000,000 hours spent at Paris by candle-light,\n    which, at half a pound of wax and tallow per hour, give\n    127,750,000 pounds, worth, at 3 livres the pound, 383,250,000\n    livres; upwards of THIRTY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!!\n\n    An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by\n    the economy of using _sunshine_ instead of candles.--If it should\n    be said, that the people are very apt to be obstinately attached\n    to old customs, and that it will be difficult to induce them to\n    rise before noon, consequently my discovery can be of little use,\n    I answer, we must not despair. I believe all, who have common\n    sense, as soon as they have learnt, from this paper, that it is\n    daylight when the sun rises, will contrive to rise with him; and\n    to compel the rest, I would propose the following regulations:\n\n    First. Let a tax be laid of a louis, (a guinea,) per window, on\n    every window that is provided with shutters to keep out the light\n    of the sun.\n\n    Second. Let guards be placed in the shops of the wax and\n    tallow-chandlers; and no family be permitted to be supplied with\n    more than one pound of candles per week.\n\n    Third. Let guards be posted, to stop all the coaches, &c. that\n    would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians,\n    surgeons, and midwives.\n\n    Fourth. Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells\n    in the city be set ringing; and if that be not sufficient let\n    cannon be fired in every street, to awake the sluggards\n    effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true\n    interest.\n\n    All the difficulty will be in the first two or three days: after\n    which the reformation will be as natural and easy as the present\n    irregularity. Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, and, it\n    is more than probable, he shall go willingly to bed at eight in\n    the evening; and having had eight hours sleep, he will rise more\n    willingly at four, in the morning following.\n\n    For the great benefit of this discovery, thus freely communicated\n    and bestowed by me, on the good city of Paris, I demand neither\n    place, pension, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward\n    whatever. I expect only to have the _honour_ of it. And yet I know\n    there are little envious minds, who will, as usual, deny me this,\n    and say that my invention was known to the ancients. I will not\n    dispute that the ancients knew that the sun would rise at certain\n    hours. They possibly had almanacks that predicted it; but it does\n    not follow, thence, that they knew _that he gave light an soon as\n    he rose. This is what I claim as my discovery._ If the ancients\n    knew it, it must long since have been forgotten; for it certainly\n    was unknown to the moderns, at least to the Parisians; which to\n    prove, I need use but one plain simple argument. They are as well\n    instructed and prudent a people as exist, any where in the world;\n    all professing, like myself, to be lovers of economy; and, from\n    the many heavy taxes required from them by the necessities of the\n    state, have surely reason to be economical. I say it is impossible\n    that so sensible a people, under such circumstances, should have\n    lived so long by the _smoky, unwholesome and enormously expensive\n    light of candles, if they had really known that they might have as\n    much pure light of the sun for nothing_. I am, &c.\n\n    An ABONNE.\n\nAnd now, as Dr. Franklin is permitted to breathe a little from his\nherculean toils, let us, good reader, breathe a little too, and amuse\nourselves with the following anecdotes.\n\nNothing can better illustrate the spirit, which Dr. Franklin carried\nwith him to the court of Louis XVI., and the spirit he found there.\n\nOn Dr. Franklin's arrival at Paris, as plenipotentiary from the United\nStates, during the revolution, the king expressed a wish to see him\nimmediately. As there was no going to the court of France in those\ndays without permission of the wigmaker, a wigmaker of course was sent\nfor. In an instant a richly dressed Monsieur, his arms folded in a\nprodigious muff of furs, and a long sword by his side, made his\nappearance. It was the king's WIGMAKER, with his servant in livery, a\nlong sword by _his_ side too, and a load of sweet scented band-boxes,\nfull of \"_de wig_,\" as he said, \"_de superb wig for de great docteer\nFranklin_.\" One of the wigs was tried on--a world _too small_!\nBand-box after band-box was tried; but all with the same ill success!\nThe wigmaker fell into the most violent rage, to the extreme\nmortification of Dr. Franklin, that a gentleman so bedecked with silks\nand perfumes, should, notwithstanding, be such a child. Presently,\nhowever, as in all the transports of a _grand discovery_, the wigmaker\ncried out to Dr. Franklin, that he had just found out where the fault\nlay--\"_not in his wig as too small; O no, by gar! his wig no too\nsmall; but de docteer's head too big; great deal too big._\" Franklin,\nsmiling, replied, that the fault could hardly lie _there_; for that\nhis head was made of God Almighty himself, who was not subject to err.\nUpon this the wigmaker took in a little; but still contended that\nthere must be something the matter with Dr. Franklin's head. It was at\nany rate, he said, _out of the fashion_. He begged Dr. Franklin would\nonly please for remember, _dat his head had not de honeer_ to be made\nin PARREE. No, by gar! for if it had been made in PARREE, it no bin\nmore dan _half such a head_. \"_None of the French Noblesse_,\" he\nswore, \"_had a head any ting_ like his. Not de great duke d'Orleans,\nnor de grand monarque himself had _half such a head as docteer\nFranklin_. And _he did not see_,\" he said, \"_what business any body\nhad wid a head more big dan de head of de grand monarque_.\"\n\nPleased to see the poor wigmaker recover his good humour, Dr. Franklin\ncould not find in his heart to put a check to his childish rant, but\nrelated one of his _fine anecdotes_, which struck the wigmaker with\nsuch an idea of his wit, that as he retired, which he did, bowing most\nprofoundly, he shrugged his shoulders, and with a look most\nsignificantly arch, he said:\n\n\"_Ah, docteer Frankline! docteer Frankline!_ I no wonder your head too\nbig for my wig. By gar I 'fraid your head be too big for _all de\nFrench nationg_.\"\n\n\nTHE BLUE YARN STOCKINGS.\n\nWhen Dr. Franklin was received at the French court as American\nminister, he felt some scruples of conscience in complying with their\n_fashions as to dress_. \"He hoped,\" he said to the minister, \"that as\nhe was himself a very plain man, and represented a plain republican\npeople, the king would indulge his desire to appear at court in his\nusual dress. Independent of this, the season of the year, he said,\nrendered the change from warm yarn stockings to fine silk, somewhat\ndangerous.\"\n\nThe French minister made him a bow, but said, that THE FASHION was too\nsacred a thing for him to meddle with, but he would do himself the\nhonour to mention it to his MAJESTY.\n\nThe king smiled, and returned word that Dr. Franklin was welcome to\nappear at court in _any dress he pleased_. In spite of that delicate\nrespect for strangers, for which the French are so remarkable, the\ncourtiers could not help staring, at first, at Dr. Franklin's\nquaker-like dress, and especially his \"BLUE YARN STOCKINGS.\" But it\nsoon appeared as though he had been introduced upon this splendid\ntheatre only to demonstrate that, great genius, like true beauty,\n\"needs not the foreign aid of ornament.\" The court were so dazzled\nwith the brilliancy of his mind that they never looked at his\nstockings. And while many other ministers who figured in all the gaudy\nfashions of the day are now forgotten, the name of Dr. Franklin is\nstill mentioned in Paris with all the ardour of the most affectionate\nenthusiasm.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLII.\n\n\nImagination can hardly conceive a succession of pleasures more elegant\nand refined than those which Dr. Franklin, now on the shady side of\nthreescore and ten, continued daily to enjoy in the vicinity of\nParis--his mornings constantly devoted to his beloved studies, and his\nevenings to the cheerful society of his friends--the greatest monarch\nof Europe heaping him with honours unasked, and the brightest WITS and\nBEAUTIES of his court vying with each other in their attentions to\nhim. And thus as the golden hours rolled along, they still found him\nhappy--gratefully contrasting his present glory with his humble\norigin, and thence breathing nothing but benevolence to man--firmly\nconfiding in the care of Heaven--and fully persuaded that his smiles\nwould yet descend upon his countrymen, now fighting the good fight of\nliberty and happiness.\n\nWhile waiting in strong hope of this most desirable of all events, he\nreceived, by express, December 1777, the welcome news that the battle\nhad been joined in America, and that God had delivered a noble wing of\nthe British army into the hands of the brave republicans at Saratoga.\nO ye, who, rejecting the philosophy of all embracing love, know no\njoys beyond what the miser feels when his own little heap increases,\nhow faintly can you conceive what this great apostle of liberty\nenjoyed when he found that his countrymen still retained the fire of\ntheir gallant fathers, and were resolved to live free or press a\nglorious grave! He lost no time to improve this splendid victory to\nthe good of his country. In several audiences with the king and his\nministers, he clearly demonstrated that France in all her days of\nancient danger had never known so dark a cloud impending over her as\nat this awful crisis. \"If Great Britain,\" said he, \"already so\npowerful were to subdue the revolted colonies and add all North\nAmerica to her empire, she would in twenty years be strong enough to\ncrush the power of France and not leave her an island or a ship on the\nocean.\" As a sudden flash of lightning from the opening clouds before\nthe burst of thunder and rain, such was the shock produced by this\nargument on the mind of every thinking man throughout France. The\ncourtiers with all their talents for dissembling could not conceal\ntheir hostile feelings from the British minister resident among them.\nHe marked it, not without sentiments of answering hostility, which he\ncould no better conceal, and which, indeed, after the honest bluntness\nof his national character, he did not care to conceal. The increased\nattentions paid to Dr. Franklin, and the rejoicings in Paris on\naccount of the American victories, were but illy calculated to soothe\nhis displeasure. Bitter complaints were presently forwarded to his\ncourt--angry remonstrances to the French cabinet followed--and in a\nshort time the embers of ancient hate were blown up to flames of fury\nso diabolical that nothing but war, with all its rivers of human blood\ncould extinguish it. War, of course, was proclaimed--Paris was\nilluminated--and the thunder of the Royal cannon soon announced to the\nwilling citizens that the die was cast, and that the Grand Monarque\nwas become the Ally of the United States.\n\n\"_While there is any thing to be done nothing is done_,\" said Caesar.\nFranklin thought so too. He had succeeded in his efforts to persuade\nthe warlike French to take part with his oppressed countrymen; but the\nSpaniards and the Dutch were still neutral. To rouse their hostile\nfeelings against Great Britain, and to make them the hearty partisans\nof Washington, was his next study. The event quickly showed that he\nhad studied human nature with success. He who had been the playmate of\nlightnings for the _glory of God_, found no difficulty in stirring up\nthe _wrath of man to praise him_--by chastising the sons of violence.\nThe tall black ships of war were soon seen to rush forth from the\nports of Holland and Spain, laden with the implements of death, to\narrest the mad ambition of Great Britain, and maintain the balance of\npower. How dearly ought the American people to prize their liberties,\nfor which such bloody contribution was laid on the human race!\nImagination glances with terror on that dismal war whose spread was\nover half the solid and half the watery globe. Its devouring fires\nburned from the dark wilds of North America to the distant isles of\nIndia; and the blood of its victims was mingled with the brine of\nevery ocean. But, thanks to God, the conflict, though violent, was but\nshort. And much of the honour of bringing it to a close is to be\nconceded to the instrumentality of Dr. Franklin.\n\nWe have seen that in 1763, he was sent (of Heaven no doubt, for it was\nan act worthy of his all-benevolent character,) a preacher of\nrighteousness, to the proud court of Britain. His luminous preachings,\n(through the press,) on the injustice and unconstitutionality of the\nministerial taxing measures on the colonies, shed such light, that\nthousands of honest Englishmen set their faces against them, and also\nagainst the war to which they saw it was tending. These converts to\njustice, these doves of peace, were not sufficiently numerous to\ndefeat the war-hawks of their bloody purposes. But when they found\nthat the war into which they had plunged with such confidence, had\nnot, instantly, as they expected, reduced the colonies to slavish\nsubmission; but that, instead thereof, one half Europe in favour of\nAmerica, was in arms against them with a horrible destruction of lives\nand property which they had not counted on, and of which they saw no\nend, they seriously deplored their folly in not pursuing the counsel\nof doctor Franklin. The nation was still, however, dragged on in war,\nplunging like a stalled animal, deeper and deeper in disaster and\ndistress, until the capture of lord Cornwallis and his army came like\na thunder-bolt, inflicting on the war party a death blow, from which\nthey never afterwards recovered.\n\nDr. Franklin received this most welcome piece of news, the surrender\nof lord Cornwallis, by express from America. He had scarcely read the\nletters with the tear of joy swelling in his patriot eye, when Mr.\nNecker came in. Seeing the transport on his face, he eagerly asked\nwhat _good news_. \"_Thank God_,\" replied Franklin, \"_the storm is\npast. The paratonerres of divine justice have drawn off the lightning\nof British violence, and here, sir, is the rainbow of peace_,\" holding\nup the letter. What am I to understand by that, replied Necker. Why,\nsir, quoth Franklin, my lord Cornwallis and his army are prisoners of\nwar to general Washington. Doctor Franklin's calculation, on the\nsurrender of Cornwallis, _that the storm was past_, was very correct;\nfor, although the thunders did not immediately cease, yet, after that\nevent, they hardly amounted to any thing beyond a harmless rumbling,\nwhich presently subsided altogether, leaving a fine bright sky behind\nthem.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLIII.\n\n\nThe rest of the acts of doctor Franklin while he resided in France,\nand the many pleasures he enjoyed there, were first, the great\npleasure of announcing to the French court, in 1781, as we have seen,\nthe surrender of lord Cornwallis and his army to general Washington.\nSecond, the still greater pleasure of learning in 1782, that the\nBritish ministry were strongly inclined to \"A PEACE TALK.\" Third,\n1783, the greatest pleasure of all, the pleasure of _burying the\ntomahawk_, by general peace.\n\nThus after having lived to see completely verified all his awful\npredictions to the blind and obstinate British cabinet about the\nresult of this disastrous war; with losses indeed, beyond his\nprediction--the loss of two thousand ships!--the loss of one hundred\nthousand lives!--the loss of seven hundred millions of dollars! and a\nloss still greater than all, the loss of the immense continent of\nNorth America, and the monopoly of its incalculable produce and trade,\nshortly to fly on wings of canvass to all parts of the globe.\n\nHaving lived to see happily terminated, the grand struggle for\nAmerican liberty, which even Englishmen have pronounced \"_the last\nhope and probable refuge of mankind_,\" and having obtained leave from\ncongress to return, he took a last farewell of his generous Parisian\nfriends, and embarked for his native country.\n\nOn the night of the 4th of September, the ship made the light-house at\nthe mouth of the Delaware bay. On coming upon deck next morning, he\nbeheld all in full view and close at hand the lovely shores of\nAmerica, \"_where his fathers had dwelt_.\" Who can paint the\njoy-brightened looks of our veteran patriot, when, after an absence of\nseven years, he beheld once more that beloved country for whose\nliberties and morals he had so long contended? Formerly, with an\naching heart, he had beheld her as a dear mother, whose fame was\ntarnished, and her liberties half ravished by foreign lords. But now\nhe greets her as free again, and freed, through heaven's blessing on\nher _own heroic virtue and valour_. Crowned thus with tenfold glory,\nhe hails her with transport, as the grand nursery of civil and\nreligious freedom, whose fair example of republican wisdom and\nmoderation is, probably, destined of God to recommend the blessings of\nfree government to all mankind.\n\nThe next day in the afternoon he arrived at Philadelphia. It is not\nfor me to describe what he felt in sailing along up these lovely\nshores, while the heaven within diffused a double brightness and\nbeauty over all the fair and magnificent scenes around. Neither is it\nfor me to delineate the numerous demonstrations of public joy,\nwherewith the citizens of Philadelphia welcomed the man whom they all\ndelighted to honour. Suffice it to say, that he was landed amidst the\nfiring of cannon--that he was crowded with congratulatory\naddresses--that he was invited to sumptuous banquets, &c. &c. &c. But\nthough it was highly gratifying to others to see transcendent worth so\nduly noticed, yet to himself, who had been so long familiar with such\nhonours, they appeared but as baubles that had lost their tinsel.\n\nBut there were some pledges of respect offered him, which afforded a\nheartfelt satisfaction; I mean those numbers of pressing invitations\nto accept the presidencies of sundry noble institutions for public\ngood, as\n\n  I. A society for diffusing a knowledge of the best politics for our\nrepublic.\n\n II. A society for alleviating the miseries of public prisons.\n\nIII. A society for abolishing the slave trade--the relief of free\n<DW64>s unlawfully held in bondage--and for bettering the condition of\nthe poor blacks.\n\n\"It was because,\" said the trustees, \"they well knew he had made it\nthe sole scope of his greatly useful life to promote institutions for\nthe happiness of mankind, that they now solicited the honour and\nbenefit of his special care and guardianship.\"\n\nThough now almost worn out with the toils of fourscore years, and\noftentimes grievously afflicted with his old complaint, the gravel, he\nyet accepted the proffered appointments with great pleasure, and\nattended to the duties of them with all the ardour of youth. Thus\naffording one more proof,\n\n    \"That, in the present as in all the past\n    O SAVE MY COUNTRY, HEAVEN! was still his last.\"\n\n\"But though the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak.\" His strength\nwas so sensibly diminished that it could scarcely second his mind,\nwhich seemed as unimpaired as ever.\n\nBut there was still one more service that his country looked to him\nfor, before he went to rest; I mean that of aiding her councils in the\ngrand convention that was about to sit in Philadelphia for the purpose\nof framing the present excellent constitution. He was called to this\nduty in 1787. The speech which he made in that convention has a high\nclaim to our notice, not only because it was the last speech that Dr.\nFranklin ever made in public; but because nothing ever yet placed in a\nfairer light the charm of modesty in a great man; and also the force\nof temperance, exercise and cheerfulness, which could preserve the\nintellectual faculties in such vigour, to the astonishing age of\nEIGHTY-TWO!!\n\n\n_Final Speech of doctor Franklin in the Federal Convention.--George\nWashington, President._\n\nMR. PRESIDENT,\n\nI do not entirely approve this constitution at present, but, sir, I am\nnot sure I shall never approve it; for, having lived long, I have\nexperienced many instances of being obliged, by better information, to\nchange opinions which I once thought right. It is, therefore, that the\nolder I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay\nmore respect to the judgment of others. Most men, indeed, as well as\nmost sects of religion, think themselves in possession of _all truth_,\nand that whenever others differ from them, it is so far error. Steele,\na protestant, tells the pope, that \"the only difference between our\ntwo churches, in their opinion of the certainty of their doctrines,\nis, the Romish church is _infallible_, and the church of England\n_never_ in the _wrong_.\"\n\nBut though many private persons think almost as highly of their own\ninfallibility, as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally\nas a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister,\nsaid, \"_I don't know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody\nbut myself that is always in the right_.\" In these sentiments, sir, I\nagree to this constitution, with all its faults, if they are such;\nbecause I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no\nform of government but what may be a blessing, if well administered;\nand I believe farther, that this is likely to be well administered for\na course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have\ndone before it, when the people shall become so corrupted, as to need\ndespotic government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too,\nwhether any other convention we can obtain, may be able to make a\nbetter constitution. For when you assemble a number of men, to have\nthe advantage of their joint wisdom, you assemble with those men, all\ntheir prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local\ninterests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly, can a\nperfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, sir, to\nfind this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I\nthink it will confound our enemies, who are waiting with confidence,\nto hear that our councils are confounded, like those of the builders\nof Babel, and that our states are on the point of separation, only to\nmeet hereafter for the purpose of cutting each other's throats.\n\nThus I consent, sir, to this constitution, because I expect no better,\nand because I am not _sure that this is not the best_. The opinions I\nhave had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never\nwhispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were\nborn, and here they shall die. If every one of us, in returning to our\nconstituents, were to report the objections he has had to it, and\nendeavour to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its\nbeing generally received, and thereby lose all the great advantages\nresulting naturally in our favour among foreign nations, as well as\namong ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the\nefficiency of any government, in procuring and securing happiness to\nthe people, depends on the general opinion of the goodness of that\ngovernment, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors.\n\nI hope, therefore, that for our _own sakes_, as a part of the people,\nand for the sake of _our posterity_, we shall act heartily and\nunanimously, in recommending this constitution, wherever our influence\nmay extend, and turn our future thoughts and endeavours to the means\nof having it well administered.\n\nOn the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish, that every member\nof the convention, who may still have objections, would, with me, on\nthis occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and making\nmanifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLIV.\n\n    \"When ranting round in pleasure's ring,\n      Religion may be blinded,\n    Or if she give a random sting,\n      'Tis oft but little minded.\n\n    \"But when on life we're tempest driv'n,\n      A conscience's but a canker;\n    A correspondence fix'd with heaven,\n      Is sure a noble anchor.\"\n\n\nThe time is now at hand that Franklin must die. When that time\napproaches, or when only the chilling thought of it strikes the heart,\nhow happy is he who in looking on the withered face or snowy locks of\na dear friend, can enjoy the exulting hope that he is prepared for the\nawful change. This leads us to speak of doctor Franklin on a much\nhigher subject than has yet engaged our attention. I mean his\nreligion.\n\nI have met with nothing in the life of any great man in our country\nabout which there has been such universal inquiry, as about the\nRELIGION OF DR. FRANKLIN.\n\nSome, who in despite of Christ and all his apostles, will \"_judge\ntheir brother_;\" and judge him too by the _letter_ which _killeth_,\nwill not allow that Dr. Franklin had any religion at all, because,\nforsooth, he did not _believe_ and \"_confess Christ before men_,\" in\nthe manner they did. But others, construing the Gospel, as Christ\nhimself commands, by \"_the spirit_;\" which teaches that, \"_with the\nheart man believeth unto salvation, through love and good works_;\" and\nthat the right way of \"_confessing Christ before men_\" is by a _good\nlife_.--These gentlemen tell us, that Dr. Franklin not only had\nreligion, but had it in an eminent degree.\n\nMost people seem inclined to judge of Dr. Franklin by these latter\ncommentators, and wind up with the words of our great moral poet.\n\n    \"For modes of faith, let graceless zealots fight;\n    His can't be wrong, whose Life is in the right.\"\n\nFor my part, after all that I have heard on this subject, and I have\nheard a great deal, I do not know that I have met with any thing that\nexpresses my opinion of Dr. Franklin's religion more happily than the\nfollowing laconic remark by one of our most distinguished senators, I\nmean the honourable Rufus King. Knowing that this gentleman was a\ncompatriot of Dr. Franklin during the revolution, and also sat by his\nside, a member of the grand Convention in 1788, I took the greater\npleasure in asking his opinion of that great man in respect of his\nRELIGION. \"Why, sir,\" replied he, \"my opinion of doctor Franklin has\nalways been, that, although he was not, perhaps, quite so orthodox in\nsome of his notions, he was _very much a Christian in his practice_.\nNor is it indeed to be wondered at,\" continued this able critic, \"that\na man of doctor Franklin's extraordinary sagacity, born and brought up\nunder the light of the Gospel, should have imbibed its spirit, and got\nhis whole soul enriched, and as it were interlarded, with its\nbenevolent affections.\"\n\nAnd I have since found from conversation with many of our most\nenlightened and evangelical divines, that they all agree, with Mr.\nKing, that doctor Franklin's extraordinary benevolence and useful life\nwere imbibed, even _unconsciously_, from the Gospel. For whence but\nfrom the luminous and sublime doctrines of that blessed book could he\nhave gained such pure and worthy ideas of God--his glorious unity, and\nmost adorable benevolence: always, himself, loving and doing good to\nhis creatures; and constantly seeking such to worship him? Whence, we\nask, could he have got all these exalted truths--truths, so honourable\nto the Deity--so consolatory to man--so auxiliary of human virtue and\nhappiness--whence could he have got them, but from the light of the\nGospel? Certainly, you will not say that he might have got them from\nthe light of nature. For, look around you among all the mighty nations\nof antiquity. Look among the Egyptians--the Greeks--the Romans, to\nequal him? Two thousand years have rolled between them and us, and\nyet the immortal monuments of their arts--their poetry--their\npainting--their statuary--their architecture--their eloquence--all\ntriumphant over the wreck of time, have come down to our days, boldly\nchallenging the pride of modern genius to produce their parallels.\nEvidently then, they had among them prodigies of mind equal to our\nFranklin. And yet how has it yet come to pass, that, with all their\nastonishing talents, and the light of nature besides, they were so\nstupidly blind and ignorant of God, while he entertained such exalted\nideas of him? That while they, like the modern idolaters of\nJuggernaut, were disgracing human reason by worshipping not only\n_four-footed beasts and creeping things_, but even thieves,\nmurderers, &c. _deified_, doctor Franklin was elevating his devotions\nto the one all-perfect God, MOST GLORIOUS IN ALL MORAL EXCELLENCE.\n\nAnd how has it come to pass that while _they_, imitating their bloody\nidols, could take pleasure in _sacrificing their prisoners of war!\nbeholding murderous fights of gladiators!_ and even giving up _their\nown children to be burnt alive!_ Franklin, by imitating the moral\ncharacter of God, attained to all that gentle wisdom and affectionate\ngoodness that we fancy when we think of an angel? To what, I ask, can\nwe ascribe all this, but to the very rational cause assigned by Mr.\nKing, viz. his having been _born and brought up in a land of Gospel\nlight and love_? Indeed, who can read the life of doctor Franklin,\nattentively, without tracing in it, throughout, that true Christian\ncharity which bound him, as by the heart-strings, to his fellow\nmen--on every occasion going out of self to take an interest in them.\n\"Rejoicing with them, when they acted wisely and attained to\nhonour.\"--\"Weeping with them when they acted foolishly and came to\nshame.\" Never meeting with any good fortune, through wise doings of\nhis own, but he made it known to them for their encouragement in\nsimilar doings--never falling into misfortunes, by his own folly, but\nhe was sure to publish that too, to deter others from falling into the\nlike sufferings.\n\nNow what was it but this amiable _oneness of heart_, with his fellow\nmen; this _sweet Christian sensibility_ to their interests and\nconsequent generous delight in doing them good, that filled his life\nwith such noble charities. \"_Where love is_,\" said the great William\nPenn, \"_there is no labour; or if there be, the labour is sweet._\" And\nwhat was it but this, that bore him up so bravely under his many toils\nand hardships for his selfish brother James?\n\nWhat made him so liberal of his money and services to the base Collins\nand Ralph?\n\nWhat made him so patient and forgiving of the injuries done him by the\nworthless Keimer and Keith?\n\nWhat made him so importunate with his young acquaintance in London, to\ndivert them from their brutalizing and fatal intemperance?\n\nWhat set him so vehemently against pride and extravagance, which\nbesides starving all justice and hospitality among neighbours, tend to\nmake them demons of fraud and cruelty to one another?\n\nWhat made him, through life, such a powerful orator for industry,\nfrugality, and honesty, which multiplied riches and reciprocal esteem\nand usefulness among men, and would make them all loving and happy as\nbrothers?\n\nIn short, all those labours which doctor Franklin took under the\nsun--labours so various and unending, for public and private good,\nsuch as his fire-engines; his lightning rods; his public libraries;\nhis free schools; his hospitals; his legacies for encouragement of\nlearning, and helping hundreds of indigent young mechanics with money\nto carry on their trades after his death--whence originated all this,\nbut from that love which is stronger than death, subduing all\nobstacles, and overleaping the narrow limits of this mortal life?\n\nWhat but the ingenuity of love, eager to swell the _widow's_ mite of\ncharity into the _rich_ man's talent could have suggested the\nfollowing curious method of making a little do a great deal of good?\n\n\n    \"Received of Benjamin Franklin, ten guineas, which I hereby\n    promise, soon as I get out of my present embarrassments, to lend\n    to some other honest and industrious man, as near as I can guess,\n    he giving his obligation to act in the same way by the next needy\n    honest man; so that by thus going around it may in time, though a\n    small sum, do much good, unless stopped by a thief.\n\n    \"JAMES HOPEWELL.\n\n    \"_Passy, Aug. 10, 1773._\"\n\n\nWhat but the noble spirit of that religion whose sole aim is to\n\"_overcome evil with good_\" could have dictated the following\ninstructions to Paul Jones, and his squadron, who after scouring the\nBritish channel, was about to make a descent on their coasts.\n\n    \"As many of your officers and people have lately escaped from\n    English prisons, you are to be _particularly attentive_ to their\n    conduct towards the prisoners you take, lest resentment of the\n    _more than barbarous_ usage which they have received from the\n    English, should occasion a retaliation, and an imitation of what\n    ought rather to be _detested and avoided for the sake of humanity\n    and the honour of our country_.\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN.\n\n    \"_To Commodore P. Jones._\n\n    \"April 28, 1779.\"\n\n\nWhat but the spirit of that benevolent religion which is the firm\npatroness of all discoveries for human benefit, could have dictated\nthe ensuing letter \"to the commanders of American ships of war,\" in\nfavour of captain Cook.\n\n    \"GENTLEMEN,\n\n    \"A ship having been fitted out from England, before the\n    commencement of this war, to make discoveries of new countries in\n    unknown seas, under the conduct of that celebrated navigator,\n    captain Cook--an undertaking truly laudable in itself, as the\n    increase of geographical knowledge facilitates the communication\n    between distant nations, and the exchange of useful products and\n    manufactures, and the extension of arts, whereby the common\n    enjoyments of human life are multiplied and augmented, and\n    science of other kinds increased, to the benefit of mankind in\n    general.\n\n    \"This is, therefore, most earnestly to recommend to every one of\n    you, that in case the said ship, which is now expected to be soon\n    in the European seas, on her return, should happen to fall into\n    your hands, you would not consider her as an enemy, but that you\n    treat the said captain Cook and his people with all civility and\n    kindness, affording them, as common friends to mankind, all the\n    assistance in your power, which they may happen to stand in need\n    of.\n\n    \"I have the honour to be, &c.\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN,\n\n    \"Minister plenipotentiary from the United States to the court of\n    France.\n\n    \"_Passy. near Paris, March 10, 1779._\"\n\nThe truly christian spirit of doctor Franklin, which dictated this\npassport for captain Cook, was so highly approved by the British\ngovernment, that, when Cook's voyages in three splendid quarto volumes\nwere printed, the lords of the admiralty sent doctor Franklin a copy\naccompanied with the elegant plates, and also a _gold medal_ of\nthat illustrious navigator, with a polite letter from lord Howe,\ninforming him that this compliment was made to doctor Franklin with\nthe _king's express approbation_.\n\n                 *       *       *       *       *\n\nWhat but the religion that brings life and immortality to light \"could\nhave sprung those high hopes and rich consolations,\" which shine in\nthe following letter from doctor Franklin to his niece, on the death\nof her father, his favourite brother John Franklin.\n\n    \"DEAR NIECE,\n\n    \"I condole with you. We have lost a most dear and valuable\n    relation. But it is the will of God that these mortal bodies be\n    laid aside, when the soul is to enter into real life. This is\n    rather an embryo state--a preparation for living. A man is not\n    completely born until he be dead. Why then should we grieve that\n    a new child is born among the immortals--a new member added to\n    their society? We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us,\n    while they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring\n    knowledge, or doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and\n    benevolent act of God. When they become unfit for these purposes,\n    and afford us pain instead of pleasure, and answer none of the\n    intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and\n    benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of\n    them. Death is that way. We ourselves in some cases, prudently\n    choose a partial death. A mangled painful limb, which cannot be\n    restored, we willingly cut off. He who plucks out a tooth parts\n    with it freely, since the pain goes with it; and he who quits the\n    whole body, parts at once with all pains, and possibilities of\n    pains, it was capable of making him suffer.\n\n    \"Our friend and we were invited abroad on a grand party of\n    pleasure, which is to last for ever. His chair was ready first,\n    and he is gone before us. We could not all conveniently start\n    together; and why should you and I be grieved at this, since we\n    are soon to follow, and know where to find him?\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN.\"\n\n                 *       *       *       *       *\n\nWhat but that religion which teaches \"the price of truth,\" could have\nmade him so penitent for having said any thing, in his youthful days\nagainst revelation? And while the popular infidels of Europe, the\nVoltaires, and Humes, and Bolingbrokes were so fond of filling the\nworld with their books against Christ, that they might, as one of them\nsaid, \"_crush the wretch_,\" what but a hearty esteem of him could\nhave led Franklin to write the following pious reproof of a gentleman,\nwho having written a pamphlet against christianity, sent it to him,\nrequesting his opinion of it.\n\nDR. FRANKLIN'S ANSWER.\n\n    \"SIR,\n\n    \"I have read your manuscript with some attention. By the argument\n    it contains against a particular _providence_, though you allow a\n    general _providence_, you strike at the foundation of all\n    religion. For, without the belief of a _providence_, that takes\n    cognizance of, guards, and guides, and may favour particular\n    persons, there is no motive to worship a DEITY, to fear his\n    displeasure, or to pray for his protection. I will not enter into\n    any discussion of your principles, though you seem to desire it.\n    At present I shall only give you my opinion, that though your\n    reasonings are subtile, and may prevail with some readers, you\n    will not succeed so as to change the general sentiments of\n    mankind on that subject; and the consequence of printing this\n    piece will be, a great deal of odium drawn upon yourself,\n    mischief to you, and no benefit to others. He that spits against\n    the wind, spits in his own face. But were you to succeed, do you\n    imagine any good would be done by it? You yourself may find it\n    easy to live a virtuous life, without the assistance afforded by\n    religion; you having a clear perception of the disadvantages of\n    vice, and possessing a strength of resolution sufficient to\n    enable you to resist common temptations. But think how great a\n    portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women,\n    and of inexperienced inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have\n    need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to\n    support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till\n    it becomes habitual, which is the great points of its security.\n    And, perhaps, you are indebted to her original, that is, to your\n    religious education, for the habits of virtue upon which you now\n    justly value yourself. You might easily display your excellent\n    talents of reasoning upon less hazardous objects, and thereby\n    obtain a rank with our most distinguished authors. For among us\n    it is not necessary, as among the Hottentots, that a youth, to be\n    raised into the company of men, should prove his manhood by\n    beating his mother. I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt\n    _unchaining the tiger_, but to burn this piece before it is seen\n    by any other person--whereby you will save yourself a great deal\n    of mortification from the enemies it may raise against you, and,\n    perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so\n    wicked _with_ religion, what would they be _without_ it? I intend\n    this letter itself as a proof of my friendship, and therefore add\n    no professions to it, but subscribe myself simply yours.\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN.\"\n\n\nFor the following, I owe many thanks to the honourable Mr. Rufus King.\n\nAfter having answered my question on that subject, as before stated,\nviz. that he considered Dr. Franklin \"_very much a christian in\npractice_,\" he added with a fine smile, as if happy that he possessed\nan anecdote so honourable to the religious character of his illustrious\nfriend, and the friend of mankind--\"_now, sir, I'll tell you an\nanecdote of Dr. Franklin_.\" The CONVENTION of '88, of which Dr.\nFranklin and myself were members, had been engaged several weeks in\nframing the present CONSTITUTION, and had done nothing. Dr. Franklin\ncame in one morning, and rising in his place, called the attention of\nthe house.--\"We have been here, Mr. Speaker,\" said he, (George\nWashington was in the chair,) \"a long time, trying to act on this\nimportant subject, and have done nothing; and in place of a speedy and\nsuccessful close of our business, we see nothing but dark clouds of\ndifficulty and embarrassment gathering before us. It in high time for\nus, Mr. Speaker, to call in the direction of a wisdom above our\nown.--(The countenance of Washington caught a brightness at these\nwords, as he leaned forward in deepest gaze on Dr. Franklin.) Yes, sir,\nit is high time for us to call in the direction of a wisdom above our\nown. Our fathers before us, the wise and good men of ancient times,\nacted in this way. Aware of the difficulties and perils that attend all\nhuman enterprize, they never engaged in any thing of importance without\nhaving implored the guidance and blessing of heaven. The scriptures are\nfull of encouragements to such practice. They every where assert a\n_particular providence_ over all his works. They assure us that the\nvery hairs of our head are all numbered; and that not even a sparrow\nbut is continually under the eye of his parental care. This, Mr.\nSpeaker, is the language of the gospel, which I _most implicitly\nbelieve_; and which promises the guidance of divine wisdom to _all who\nask it_. We have not asked it; and that may be the reason why we have\nbeen so long in the dark. I therefore move, Mr. Speaker, that it be\nmade a rule to open the business of this house, every morning, _with\nprayer_.\"\n\n\nThe following also will show Dr. Franklin's firm belief in that very\nprecious article of the religion of Christ--A PARTICULAR PROVIDENCE.\n\nTo WILLIAM STRAHAN, Esq. London\n\n_France, August 19th, 1784._\n\nDEAR OLD FRIEND,\n\nYou \"fairly acknowledge that the date war terminated quite contrary to\nyour expectation.\" Your expectation was ill founded; for you would not\nbelieve your old friend, who told you repeatedly, that, by those\nmeasures, England would lose her colonies, as Epictetus warned in vain\nhis master, that he would break his leg. You believed rather the tales\nyou heard of our poltroonery, and impotence of body and mind. Don't you\nremember the story you told me of the Scotch sergeant, who met with a\nparty of forty American soldiers, and, though alone, disarmed them all,\nand brought them in prisoners! A story almost as improbable as that of\nthe Irishman, who pretended to have alone taken and brought in five of\nthe enemy, by _surrounding_ them. And yet, my friend, sensible and\njudicious as you are, but partaking of the general infatuation, you\nseem to believe it. The word _general_ puts me in mind of a general,\nyour general Clark, who had the folly to say, in my hearing, at sir\nJohn Pringle's, that with a thousand British grenadiers, he would\nundertake to go from one end of America to the other, and geld all the\nmales. It is plain, he took us for a species of animals very little\nsuperior to brutes. The parliament, too, believed the stories of\nanother foolish general, I forget his name, that the Yankees never\n_felt bold_. Yankee was understood to be a sort of Yahoo, and the\nparliament did not think the petitions of such creatures were fit to be\nreceived and read in so wise an assembly. What was the consequence of\nthis monstrous pride and insolence! You first sent small armies to\nsubdue us, believing them more than sufficient, but soon found\nyourselves obliged to send greater; these, whenever they ventured out\nof sight of their ships, were either obliged to scamper, or were beaten\nand taken prisoners. An American planter, who had never seen Europe,\nwas chosen by us to command our troops, and continued during the whole\nwar. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best\ngenerals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the\nopinion of their employers. Your contempt of our understandings, in\ncomparison with your own, appeared to be not much better founded than\nthat of our courage, if we may judge by this circumstance, that in\nwhatever court of Europe a Yankee negotiator appeared, the wise British\nminister was routed,--put in a passion,--picked a quarrel with your\nfriends,--and was sent home with a flea in his ear. But after all, my\ndear friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to ascribe our\nsuccess to any superiority in any of those points. I am too well\nacquainted with all the springs and levers of our machine, not to see\nthat our human means were unequal to our undertaking, and that, if it\nhad not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent\ninterposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been\nruined. If I had ever before been an Atheist, I should now have been\nconvinced of the being and government of a Deity! It is HE who \"abases\nthe proud, and exalts the humble.\" May we never forget his goodness to\nus, and may our future conduct manifest our gratitude!\n\nB. FRANKLIN.\n\nNow, can any honest man, after this, entertain a doubt that Dr.\nFranklin was indeed, \"_in practice very much a christian_.\"\n\nI am aware that some, good men have been offended, and I may add,\ngrieved too, that Dr. Franklin should ever have spoken slightingly of\n_faith_, &c. But these gentlemen may rest assured, that Dr. Franklin\ndid this only to keep people from laying such stress on _faith_, &c. as\nto neglect what is infinitely more important, even LOVE and GOOD WORKS.\nAnd in this grand view, do not the holy apostles, and even Christ\nhimself treat these things in the same way? Every where speaking of\n\"_faith_ and _baptism_ and _long prayers_,\" when attempted to be put in\nplace of love and good works, as mere \"_beggarly elements_,\" and even\n\"_damning hypocrisies_.\" However, let honest men read the following\nletter on the subject, by Dr. Franklin himself. While it serves to\nremove their doubts and prejudices, it may go to prove that if he had\nerrors in religion, they were not the errors of the heart, nor likely\nto do any harm in the world; but contrariwise, to make us all much\nbetter christians, and happier men, than we are.\n\nThe letter is in answer to one from an illustrious foreigner; who, on a\ntrip to Philadelphia, made Dr. Franklin a visit. The doctor, for some\nmalady, advised him to try electricity; and actually gave him several\nshocks. He had not long been gone, before he wrote Dr. Franklin a most\nflattering account of the effects of his electricity--begged him to be\nassured he should never forget such KINDNESS--and concluded with\npraying that they might both have grace to live a life of FAITH, that\nif they were never to meet again in this world, they might at last meet\nin heaven.\n\nDR. FRANKLIN'S ANSWER.\n\n_Philadelphia, June 6, 1753._\n\nSIR,\n\nI received your kind letter of the 2d instant, and am glad that you\nincrease in strength; I hope you will continue mending till you recover\nyour former health.\n\nAs to the _kindness_ you mention, the only thanks I desire is, that you\nwould always be equally ready to serve any other person that may need\nyour assistance, and so let good offices go round, _for_ MANKIND ARE\n_all of a family_.\n\nFor my own part, when I am employed in serving others, I do not look\nupon myself as conferring favours, but as paying debts. In my travels,\nand since my settlement, I have received much kindness from men, to\nwhom I shall never have any opportunity of making the least direct\nreturn--and numberless mercies from God, who is infinitely above being\nbenefitted by our services. The kindness from men, I can, therefore,\nonly return on their fellow men, and I can only show my gratitude for\nthose mercies from God, by a readiness to help his other children, and\nmy brethren. For I do not think that thanks and compliments, though\nrepeated weekly, can discharge our real obligations to each other, and\nmuch less those to our Creator. You will see in this, my notion of good\nworks; that I am far from expecting, as you suppose, to _merit heaven_\nby them. By heaven, we understand a state of happiness; infinite in\ndegree, and eternal in duration. I can do nothing to deserve such\nREWARDS. He that, for giving a draught of water to a thirsty person,\nshould expect to be paid with a good plantation, would be modest in his\ndemands, compared with those who think they _deserve_ heaven for the\nlittle good they do on earth. Even the mixed imperfect pleasures we\nenjoy in this world, are rather from God's goodness, than our merit;\nhow much more such happiness as heaven. For my part, I have not the\nvanity to think I deserve it, the folly to expect it, nor the ambition\nto desire it; but content myself in submitting to the will and disposal\nof that God who made me--who has hitherto preserved and blessed me--and\nin whose FATHERLY GOODNESS I may well confide, that he will never make\nme miserable--and that even the afflictions I may at any time suffer\nshall tend to my benefit.\n\nThe faith you mention has, doubtless, its use in the world. I do not\ndesire to see it diminished. But I wish it were more productive of\n_good works_ than I have generally seen it, I mean real good works;\nworks of kindness, charity, mercy, and public spirit; not holiday\nkeeping, sermon reading or hearing, performing church ceremonies, or\nmaking long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments, despised\neven by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity. The\nworship of God is a _duty_; the hearing and reading of sermons _may_ be\nuseful; but if men rest in _hearing_ and _praying_, as _too many do_,\nit is as if a tree should value itself on being watered and putting\nforth leaves, though it never produced any fruit. Your great master\nthought much less of these outward appearances and professions than\nmany of his modern disciples. He preferred the _doers_ of the word to\nthe mere _hearers_; the son that _seemingly_ refused to obey his\nfather, and yet _performed_ his commands, to him that _professed_ his\nreadiness, but _neglected_ the work; the heretical but charitable\nSamaritan, to the uncharitable though orthodox priest and sanctified\nLevite: and those who gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty,\nraiment to the naked, entertainment to the stranger, and relief to the\nsick, though they never heard of his name, he declares they shall in\nthe last day be accepted, when those who cry Lord, Lord, who value\nthemselves on their faith, though great enough to perform miracles, but\nhave neglected good works, shall be rejected. He professed he came\n\"_not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance_,\" which implied\nhis modest opinion, that there were some in his time so _good_, that\nthey needed not to hear even _him_ for improvement; but now-a-days, we\nhave scarce a little parson that does not think it the duty of every\nman within his reach, to think _exactly_ as he does, and that all\ndissenters offend God. I wish to such more humility, and to you health\nand happiness, being\n\nYour friend and servant,\n\nB. FRANKLIN.\n\n\nWhat but the spirit of immortal love, which, not content with doing\nmuch good in life, fondly looks beyond, and feasts on the happiness\nthat others are to derive from us long after we have ceased to live on\nearth; what, I ask, but that love, could have dictated\n\n    DR. FRANKLIN'S WILL.\n\n    _\"When thou makest a feast, call not thy rich neighbours: lest\n    they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee._\n\n    _\"But when thou makest a feast, call the poor; and thou shalt be\n    blessed. For they cannot recompense thee, for thou shall be\n    recompensed at the resurrection of the just._\n\n    \"LUKE, xiv.\"\n\nSentiments divinely sublime!--Who, without emotions indescribable, can\nread them! And yet if they were lost from the Bible, they might be\nfound again in the _Will_ of Benjamin Franklin.\n\nWhile many others \"_rise early, and late take rest, and eat the bread\nof labour and care_,\" that they may \"_die rich_\"--leaving their massy\ntreasures, some scanty legacies excepted, to corrupt a few proud\nrelatives, doctor Franklin acted as though the above text, the _true\nsublime of wisdom and benevolence_, was before him.\n\nAfter having _bequeathed_ his books, a most voluminous and valuable\ncollection, partly to his family, and partly to the Boston and\nPhiladelphia philosophical societies; and, after having divided a\nhandsome competence among his children, and grand children, he goes on\nas follows:\n\n      \"I. Having owed my first instructions in literature to the free\n    grammar schools in Boston, I give one hundred pounds sterling to\n    the free schools in that town, to be laid out in silver medals as\n    honorary rewards for the encouragement of scholarship in those\n    schools.\n\n     \"II. All the debts to my post-office establishment, which I held\n    many years, I leave to the Philadelphia hospital.\n\n    \"III. Having always been of opinion, that in democratical\n    governments, there ought to be no offices of _great_ profit, I\n    have long determined to give a part of my public salary to public\n    uses; and being chiefly indebted to Massachusetts, my _native_\n    state, and Pennsylvania, my _adopted_ state, for lucrative\n    employments, I feel it my duty to remember them; and having from\n    long observation, and my own early experience, discovered that the\n    best objects for assistance are indigent young persons, and the\n    best modes of assistance, a plain education, a good trade, and a\n    little money to set them up; and having been set up in business,\n    while a poor boy, in Philadelphia, by kind loans of money from two\n    friends there, which was the foundation of my fortune and all the\n    usefulness that the world ascribed to me, I feel a wish to be\n    useful, after my death, to others, in the loans of money; I\n    therefore devote, from the savings of my salaries, the following\n    sums, to the following persons and uses:\n\n    \"1. To the inhabitants of Boston and Philadelphia, one thousand\n    pounds sterling to each city, to be let out by the oldest divines\n    of different churches, on a _five per cent. interest_ and good\n    _security_, to indigent young tradesmen, not _bachelors_, (as they\n    have not deserved much from their country and the feebler sex,)\n    but married men.\"\n\n    \"2. No borrower to have more than sixty pounds sterling, nor less\n    than fifteen.\"\n\n    \"3. And in order to serve as many as possible in their turn, as\n    well as to make the payment of the principal borrowed more easy,\n    each borrower shall be obliged to pay, with the yearly interest,\n    one tenth part of the principal; which sums of principal and\n    interest, so paid, shall be again lent out to fresh borrowers.\n\n    \"B. FRANKLIN.\"\n\nIn a late Boston paper, the friends of humanity have read with much\npleasure that doctor Franklin's legacy to the indigent young married\ntradesmen of that town, of $4444 44 cents, is now increased to $10,902\n28 cents, after having been the means of setting up 206 poor young\nmen, besides 75 others, who are now in the use of the capital.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLV.\n\n_The Death of Doctor Franklin._\n\n\nOne cannot read the biography of this great man without being put in\nmind of those sweet though simple strains of the bard of Zion.\n\n    \"Happy the man, whose tender care\n      Relieves the poor distrest;\n    When he's with troubles compass'd round,\n      The Lord shall give him rest.\"\n\n    \"If, he in languishing estate,\n      Oppress'd with sickness, lie,\n    The Lord shall easy make his bed,\n      And inward strength supply.\"\n\nThe latter end of doctor Franklin affords glorious proof that nothing\nso softens the bed of sickness, and brightens the gloom of the grave,\nas a life spent in works of love to mankind.\n\nSee George Washington, who by an active and disinterested benevolence,\nwas called \"THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY.\" See Martha Washington, who by\ndomestic virtues, and extensive charities, obtained to herself the\nhigh character of \"THE MOTHER TO THE POOR.\"--Both of these found the\nlast bed spread as it were with roses; and the last enemy converted\ninto a friend. Such is the lot of all who love; \"not in _word, but in\ndeed and in truth_.\"\n\nThe friends of doctor Franklin never entered his chamber without being\nstruck with this precious text, _\"Mark the perfect man, and behold the\nupright, for the end of that man is peace.\"_ Though laid on the bed\nwhence he is to rise no more, he shows no sign of dejection or defeat.\nOn the contrary, he appears like an aged warrior reposing himself\nafter glorious victory; while his looks beaming with benevolence,\nexpress an air pure and serene as the Heaven to which he is going.\nDeath, which most sick people are so unwilling to mention, was to him\na favourite topic, and the sublime conversations of Socrates on that\ngreat subject, were heard a second time, from the lips of our American\nFranklin, pregnant with \"_immortality and eternal life_.\" No wonder\nthen that with such views doctor Franklin should have been so cheerful\non his dying bed; so self-possessed and calm, even under the tortures\nof the gravel, which was wearing him down to the grave. \"_Don't go\naway_,\" said he to the Rev. Dr. Colline, of the Swedes' church,\nPhiladelphia, who, as a friend, was much with him in his last illness,\nand at sight of his agonies and cold sweats under the fits of the\ngravel, would take up his hat to retire--\"_O no! don't go away_,\" he\nwould say, \"_don't go away_. These pains will soon be over. They are\nfor my good. And besides, what are the pains of a moment in comparison\nof the pleasures of eternity.\"\n\nBlest with an excellent constitution, well nursed by nature's three\ngreat physicians, _temperance_, _exercise_, and _cheerfulness_, he was\nhardly ever sick until after his seventy-sixth year. The gout and\ngravel then attacked him with great severity. He bore their\nexcruciating tortures as became one who habitually felt that he was as\nhe said, in the hands of an infinitely wise and benevolent being, who\ndid all things right.\n\nHis physician, the celebrated Dr. Jones, published the following\naccount of his last illness.\n\n\"The stone, had for the last twelve months confined him chiefly to his\nbed; and during the extreme painful paroxysms, he was obliged to take\nlarge doses of laudanum to mitigate his tortures--still in the\nintervals of pain, he not only amused himself with reading and\nconversing with his family, and his friends who visited him, but was\noften employed in doing business of a public as well as private\nnature, with various persons who waited on him for that purpose, and\nin every instance displayed, not only that readiness of doing good,\nwhich was the distinguishing characteristic of his life, but the\nfullest possession of his uncommon mental abilities; and not\nunfrequently indulged himself in those flashes of wit and entertaining\nanecdotes, which were the delight of all who heard him.\n\n\"About sixteen days before his death, he was seized with a pain in his\nleft breast, which increased till it became extremely acute, attended\nwith a cough and laborious breathing. During this state, when the\nseverity of his pains some times drew forth a groan, he would observe,\nthat, _he was afraid he did not bear them as he ought--acknowledged\nhis grateful sense of the many blessings he had received from the\nSupreme Being, who had raised him from small and low beginnings to\nsuch high rank and consideration among men--and made no doubt but his\npresent afflictions were kindly intended to wean him from a world, in\nwhich he was no longer fit to act the part assigned him_. In this\nframe of body and mind he continued till five days before his death,\nwhen an imposthumation in his lungs, suddenly burst, and discharged a\ngreat quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had\nstrength, but, as that failed, the organs of respiration became\ngradually oppressed--a calm lethargic state succeeded--and, on the 7th\nof April, 1790, about eleven o'clock at night he quietly expired,\nclosing a long and useful life of _eighty-four years and three\nmonths_.\"\n\nCome holy calm of the soul! Expressive silence come! and meditating\nthe mighty talents of the dead, and their constant application to the\n_glory of the giver_, let us ascend with him on the wings of that\nblessed promise, \"_Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord! even so\nsaith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours and their works do\nfollow them._\"\n\nThat Franklin is now enjoying that rest which \"_remaineth_ _for the\npeople of God_\"--and that while many a blood-stained monster who made\ngreat noise in the world, is _followed_ by the cries of thousands of\nwidows and orphans, Franklin dying in the Lord, and followed by the\nblessings of thousands, fed, clothed, educated, and enriched by his\ncharities, is in GLORY, may be fairly inferred from the following most\nvaluable anecdote of him.\n\nNaturalists tell us, that so great is the paternal care of God, that\nevery climate affords the food and physic best suited to the\nnecessaries of its population. What gratitude is due to that goodness,\nwhich foreseeing the dangers impending over this country from British\ninjustice, sent us two such protectors as Franklin and Washington? The\nfirst, (the forerunner of the second,) like the lightning of Heaven,\nto expose the approaching tempest; and the second, like the rock of\nthe ocean, to meet that tempest in all its fury, and dash it back on\nits proud assailants? And how astonishing too, and almost unexampled\nthat goodness, which with talents of wisdom and fortitude to establish\nour republic, combined the cardinal virtues of _justice_, _industry_,\nand _economy_ that alone can render our republic immortal?\n\nHoping that our _youth_ may be persuaded to love and imitate the\nvirtues of the men whose great names they have been accustomed, from\nthe cradle, to lisp with veneration, I have long coveted to set these\nvirtues before them. The grey haired men of other days, have given me\ntheir aid. The following I obtained from the Rev. Dr. Helmuth, of the\nGerman church, Philadelphia. Hearing that this learned and pious\ndivine possessed a valuable anecdote of doctor Franklin, I immediately\nwaited on him. \"Yes, sir,\" said he, \"I have indeed a valuable anecdote\nof doctor Franklin, which I would tell you with great pleasure; but as\nI do not speak English very well, I wish you would call on David\nRitter, at the sign of the _Golden Lamb_, in Front street; he will\ntell it to you better. I hastened to Mr Ritter, and told him my\nerrand. He seemed mightily pleased at it, and said, \"Yes, I will tell\nyou all I know of it. You must understand then, sir, first of all,\nthat I always had a prodigious opinion of doctor Franklin, as the\n_usefulest_ man we ever had among us, by a long way; and so hearing\nthat he was sick, I thought I would go and see him. As I rapped at the\ndoor, who should come and open it but old Sarah Humphries. I was right\nglad to see her, for I had known her a long time. She was of the\npeople called FRIENDS; and a mighty good sort of body she was too. The\ngreat people set a heap of store by her, for she was famous throughout\nthe town for nursing and tending on the sick. Indeed, many of them, I\nbelieve, hardly thought they could sicken, and die right if they had\nnot old Sarah Humphries with them. Soon as she saw me, she said, 'Well\nDavid, how dost?'\"\n\n\"'O, much after the old sort, Sarah,' said I; 'but that's neither here\nnor there; I am come to see doctor Franklin.'\n\n\"'Well then,' said she, 'thou art too late, for he is _just dead_!'\n\n\"'Alack a day,' said I, 'then a great man is gone.'\n\n\"'Yes, indeed,' said she, 'and a _good_ one too; for it seemed as\nthough he never thought the day went away as it ought, if he had not\ndone somebody a service. However, David,' said she, 'he is not the\nworse off for all that now, where he is gone to: but come, as thee\ncame to see Benjamin Franklin, thee shall see him yet.' And so she\ntook me into his room. As we entered, she pointed to him, where he lay\non his bed, and said, '_there_, did thee ever see any thing look so\nnatural?'\n\n\"And he did look natural indeed. His eyes were close--but that you saw\nhe did not breathe, you would have thought he was in a sweet sleep, he\nlooked so calm and happy. Observing that his face was fixed right\ntowards the chimney, I cast my eyes that way, and behold! just above\nthe mantle-piece was a noble picture! O it was a _noble picture_, sure\nenough! It was the picture of our Saviour on the cross.\n\n\"I could not help calling out, 'Bless us all, Sarah!' said I, 'what's\nall this?'\n\n\"'What dost mean, David,' said she, quite crusty.\n\n\"'Why, how came this picture here, Sarah?' said I, 'you know that many\npeople think he was not after this sort.'\n\n\"'Yes,' said she, 'I know that too. But thee knows that many who makes\na great fuss about religion have very little, while some who say but\nlittle about it have a good deal.'\n\n\"'That's sometimes the case, I fear, Sarah,' said I.\n\n\"'Well, and that was the case,' said she, 'with Benjamin Franklin. But\nbe that as it may, David, since thee asks me about this great picture,\nI'll tell thee how it came here. Many weeks ago, as he lay, he\nbeckoned me to him, and told me of this picture up stairs, and begged\nI would bring it to him. I brought it to him. His face brightened up\nas he looked at it; and he said, '_Aye, Sarah_,' said he, '_there's a\npicture worth looking at! that's the picture of him who came into the\nworld to teach men to love one another!_' Then after looking wistfully\nat it for some time, he said, '_Sarah_,' said he, '_set this picture\nup over the mantlepiece, right before me as I lie; for I like to look\nat it_,' and when I had fixed it up, he looked at it, and looked at it\nvery much; and indeed, as thee sees, he died with his eyes fixed on\nit.'\"\n\nHappy Franklin! Thus doubly blest! Blest in life, by a diligent\nco-working with \"THE GREAT SHEPHERD,\" in his precepts of perfect\nlove.--Blest in death, with his closing eyes piously fixed upon him,\nand meekly bowing to the last summons in joyful hope that through the\nforce of his divine precepts, the \"wintry storms\" of hate will one day\npass away, and one \"eternal spring of love and peace encircle all.\"\n\nNow Franklin in his lifetime had written for himself an _epitaph_, to\nbe put upon his grave, that honest posterity might see that he was no\n_unbeliever_, as certain enemies had slandered him, but that he\n_firmly believed_ \"_that his Redeemer liveth; and that in the latter\nday he shall stand upon the earth; and that though worms destroyed his\nbody, yet in his flesh he should see God_.\"\n\n\n    FRANKLIN'S EPITAPH.\n\n                      \"THE BODY\n                          OF\n            _BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, PRINTER_,\n            LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK,\n               _its contents torn out,\n      and stripped of its lettering and gilding,\n              lies here food for worms_.\n        Yet the work itself shall not be lost;\n    for it will, as he believed, appear once more\n                      IN A NEW\n             _and more beautiful edition,\n                corrected and amended_\n                          BY\n                    _THE AUTHOR_.\"\n\nThis epitaph was never put upon his tomb. But the friend of man needs\nno stone of the valley to perpetuate his memory. It lives among the\nclouds of heaven. The lightnings, in their dreadful courses, bow to\nthe genius of Franklin. His magic rods, pointed to the skies, still\nwatch the irruptions of the FIERY METEORS. They seize them by\ntheir hissing heads as they dart forth from the dark chambers of the\nthunders; and cradled infants, half waked by the sudden glare, are\nseen to curl the cherub smile hard by the spot where the dismal bolts\nhad fallen.\n\n\nTHE END.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of Project Gutenberg's The Life of Benjamin Franklin, by Mason Locke Weems\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"OFFICIAL PRIVILEGE\n\n\"A tight story line . . . An attractive combination of murder mystery and naval politics.\"\n\n\u2014 _The New York Times Book Review_\n\n\"P. T. Deutermann has become one of our best thriller writers . . . A keenly entertaining, fascinating mystery.\"\n\n\u2014 _Observer_ (Florida)\n\n\"Superb plotting and characterization are here, as is suspense and a clear awareness of the dangers and dalliances that can thrive in official Washington . . . _Official Privilege_ is more than just a whodunit and a Navy story; it is a suspenseful indictment of power politics.\"\n\n\u2014 _Florida Times-Union_\n\nTHE EDGE OF HONOR\n\n\"One heck of an exciting voyage . . . P. T. Deutermann ships a reader onto the bridge in that special place\u2014where men go down to the sea in ships . . . a first-rate suspense novel.\"\n\n\u2014 _Tampa Tribune and Times_\n\n_\"The Edge of Honor_ is the rare book that addresses the complexities of war at the front and also at home. The author captures the Vietnam period and its confusion perfectly. Particularly interesting\u2014and horrifying\u2014is the culture depicted on the Hood, a real-life ship around which the novel is set.\"\n\n\u2014 _The Baltimore Sun_\n\n_\"The Edge of Honor_ . . . is headed up the bestseller list.\"\n\n\u2014 _The Atlanta Journal-Constitution_\n\n\"A powerful human wartime thriller with a steady flow of action, both military and human. One of the best plots to come our way in years.\"\n\n\u2014 _Neshoba Democrat_\n\n\"Utterly convincing . . . Unlike many technothriller writers, he has as good a grasp of what makes people tick as of what makes a modern warship function. Deutermann's clear mission is to picture Navy life in a depth we have not seen before, and he succeeds brilliantly. His craftsmanship is amazing.\"\n\n\u2014 _The San Diego Union-Tribune_\n**ST. MARTIN'S PAPERBACKS TITLES  \nBY P. T. DEUTERMANN**\n\n_The Cat Dancers_\n\n_The Firefly_\n\n_Darkside_\n\n_Hunting Season_\n\n_Train Man_\n\n_Zero Option_\n\n_Sweepers_\n\n_Official Privilege_\n\n_The Edge of Honor_\n\n_Scorpion in the Sea_\n\n# HUNTING  \nSEASON\n\nP. T. DEUTERMANN\n\nSt. Martin's Paperbacks\n**NOTE** : If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as \"unsold and destroyed\" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this \"stripped book.\"\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents depicted herein are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. The Ramsey Army Arsenal depicted in this story was modeled on the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, near Radford, Virginia, which is still operational and which is _not,_ to the author's best knowledge, an EPA-designated toxic-waste site of any kind.\n\nHUNTING SEASON\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2001 by P. T. Deutermann.\n\nExcerpt from _Darkside_ copyright \u00a9 2002 by P. T. Deutermann.\n\nCover photograph by Ed Holub.\n\nBarbed-wire photograph by Frank Spinelli.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.\n\nLibrary of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-045959\n\nISBN: 0-312-97906-1\n\nEAN: 80312-97906-5\n\nPrinted in the United States of America\n\nSt. Martin's Press hardcover edition \/ February 2001\n\nSt. Martin's Paperbacks edition \/ June 2002\n\nSt. Martin's Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4\n_This book is dedicated to the fond hope that, one fine day, the  \nU.S. Department of Justice will once again represent the epitome  \nof public integrity within the government of the United States._\n\n## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nI would like to express my appreciation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose Web sites and public information agencies were most helpful in writing this book. Thanks as well to my editor, George Witte, and my agent, Nick Ellison, for their usual fine professional help.\n\n## CHAPTER I\n\nRip and Tommy hit the leg traps at the same time. Rip yelled and pitched headfirst into the small stream. Tommy grunted, lurched sideways, and then he, too, slipped over the bank. Lynn, a few steps behind them, stopped in her tracks, her arms windmilling to recover her balance. The grass along the stream was high enough that she couldn't see what was holding the two boys' legs at such an odd angle while they flopped in the shallow water. Whatever it was, it was hurting them a lot. Rip was on his back in the water, groaning and sobbing as he tried to sit up. Tommy was white-faced and tight-lipped, his right leg pointing diagonally up as he struggled against the weight of his backpack.\n\n\"My God!\" Lynn exclaimed. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Something's got my leg,\" Tommy said between clenched teeth. \"I think it's a trap of some kind. Help me.\"\n\nLynn shrugged out of her backpack, knelt down, and pushed aside the grass. What she found made her swallow hard. \"Stop moving,\" she said. \"Let me see how bad this is.\"\n\nRip had stopped crying. As Lynn looked over at him, his eyes were rolling backward as he subsided into the brook. Lynn swore and jumped over Tommy's trapped leg to get to Rip. She splashed through the stream and snatched Rip's face up out of the water. He began to choke and splutter, then yelled in pain. She heaved and pulled until his back was partially supported by the opposite bank. Then she eased him out of his backpack straps, tugged the sodden bundle off his back, and threw it up on the bank. A vicious metallic-snapping sound cracked in the grass. She froze. Oh Jesus, she thought. She stood up very slowly, then tramped back through the icy water to Tommy, being very careful about where she put her feet.\n\n\"I can't feel my foot,\" Tommy whispered.\n\nLynn knelt down. \"That's probably a good thing, Tommy,\" she said, trying to keep up a good front. She was supposed to be the strong one, but her throat was dry and her hands were shaking. She picked up a small stick and pushed aside the wet grass to expose the trap. It was two feet wide and gunmetal gray. It consisted of a heavy base that had been chained to some kind of heavy ground screw. The two snapping arms were solid steel bars, and they had Tommy's leg just above the ankle. There was some bleeding on both sides of his leg, and the fabric of his jeans was indented at least an inch into his flesh. The skin below the jaws of the trap was already purple. She swallowed again as he groaned. She tried not to avert her eyes.\n\n\"Can you get it off?\" he asked. His voice was cracking and beads of sweat stood on his forehead. Lynn reached gingerly for the two solid bars and tried to pry them apart, but it was like pulling on the edge of a building: The only thing that moved was Tommy's leg, and he shouted in pain. Rip was still blubbering behind them, and suddenly Lynn wanted to yell at him, to make him shut up. It had been Rip's idea to sneak onto the abandoned base. She was very scared.\n\n\"I can't move it,\" she said. Just then, there was a thump and rumble of thunder to the west; the afternoon storm clouds that had made them hurry down toward the creek, away from the tall trees, were still coming. Tommy closed his eyes, sighed, and lay back on his pack.\n\n\"Let me see if I can find something to pry it open,\" she said. She stood up and looked around. They were in a small clearing. The streambed ran down an east-west gully that wound between two broad hills covered in dense forest. Across the stream and up the other side of the gully was another stand of trees, through which she thought she could see a smokestack and the top of some kind of building. The sky above the hills behind them was darkening fast, and a flicker of lightning gleamed wickedly at her from within coiling clouds. Tommy tried again to get out of the stream but couldn't manage it. She helped him get his pack all the way off, and then she repositioned his upper body against the opposite bank, the pack under his neck. There was a chunky stick a few feet downstream, which she lifted and then used to beat down all the grass on either side of the creek between the two boys. She found no more traps, although she went no farther than Tommy's backpack. Then the stick broke.\n\nShe told them not to move and then retraced her steps up the side of the gully to the edge of the forest, which was about thirty feet back from the creek. Another crack of thunder boomed along the face of the low hills to the west, and the sky seemed to darken again. The forest ahead of her stirred uneasily, as if the trees knew what was coming. She began working a two-inch-thick limb off a pine tree, when she saw a curtain of gray rain sweep down the gully, pursued by another clap of thunder. Her raingear was rolled up on top of her pack, but she kept working the branch, twisting it back and forth, swearing at it under her breath as it became slippery and her hands grew sticky with pine pitch. Finally, she got it off and then ran back to where Tommy was sitting awkwardly on the side of the stream, one hand under him. The pain in his eyes nearly broke her heart. Rip appeared to have fainted again. His chin was down on his chest, but at least he was well out of the water.\n\nShe took out her camping knife and whittled frantically on the blunt end of the branch, trying to form a wedge point. The rain came down hard and cold, but at least there was no more lightning. And then a single brilliant blue-white bolt punched out an ear-clenching blast that made her scream and drop the knife and the branch. Her ball cap fell off into the stream. The bolt vaporized the top of a nearby tree, showering the gully with flaming embers and enveloping them in a pungent fog of crackling ozone. A bolus of fire flared briefly at the top of the tree, then disappeared in a new roar of rain. She scrambled around, trying to find her knife. Finally, she saw it in the creek, retrieved it, and went back to hacking at the end of the branch. She glanced over at Tommy, but his eyes were closed and the rain was running into his partially opened lips. The rain was so heavy, she almost couldn't see Rip.\n\nWhen she had the base of the limb cleaned off and shaped into a wedge, she knelt back down by Tommy's leg. She cut the fabric back away from his ankle. She was appalled at the swollen purple mess that had been his lower leg. She didn't know how she would be able to wedge the limb into the space between the snapping arms without hurting him. She looked up at Tommy's face. His eyes were open now.\n\n\"Just do it,\" he said, his voice barely audible above the noise of the rain. \"Get it off me.\"\n\nShe nodded and pushed the wedge end of the six-foot-long branch between the two steel jaws as close to the hinge joint as she could get. Then she stood up and planted her right foot in the stream, which she noticed was deeper now, coming up to the tops of her boots. She put her left foot on the base plate and then leaned slowly against the branch. Tommy groaned as the trap moved, but the arms did not budge. Not one inch. She relaxed and then tried again, positioning her hands for maximum leverage. She thought she saw the arms move fractionally, but without her hat, the rain was in her eyes, and then the branch snapped cleanly in two just above the trap and she went tumbling into the grass below where Tommy was trapped. She swore aloud and then realized her cheek was touching metal.\n\nShe gasped, commanding every muscle in her body to freeze. Taking tiny breaths of air, she tried to see through the individual blades of wet grass.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Tommy called through the rain.\n\n\"There's another one. Wait a minute.\"\n\nShe finally mustered the courage to push some of the high grass aside. Her head was on the base plate, her cheek actually touching one of the snapping arms. But not the trigger, a flat spoon-shaped piece of metal between the arms, which she could just see. Moving very carefully, she pulled her head away from the trap and then sat up in the grass. She reached for the broken branch, stood up, and then jammed it furiously into the trap, which slammed shut hard enough to break the pine branch into two additional pieces and sting her hand. She swore and hurried back to Tommy, who was trying to pull himself higher up on the bank. The water was rising, really rising, as all the rain upstream began to invade the gully. Tommy's free leg was completely out of sight, and the water was swirling around his hips. Rip was still passed out, but his lower body was quickly disappearing from sight. She looked at Tommy and found him staring at her face. The rain kept coming, plastering her short hair to her skull. He knew.\n\n\"Tommy, what do I do? I can't open that damn thing.\"\n\n\"See if you can move the chain.\"\n\nShe examined the chain, whose links were at least a quarter-inch thick. The chain was about a foot long. The links on both the base plate and the ground screw were solid, welded in place. She jammed the broken end of the pine branch into the screw eye and tried to turn it, but the chain immediately tightened against Tommy's leg and he groaned. A lightning stroke threw the trees on the far side of the gully into stark relief. She saw the building again.\n\n\"There's a building beyond those trees,\" she said. \"I'm going to go see if I can get help.\"\n\n\"Rip said this place has been shut down for twenty years,\" Tommy said. \"There isn't going to be anyone there.\"\n\n\"There might be a metal bar or something,\" she said, looking upstream. There was an ominous noise coming from the far western end of the ravine, a sound of something substantial, moving. \"Tommy, we don't have much time.\"\n\n\"Okay, go. Go! Jesus Christ, this hurts.\"\n\nShe checked Rip one more time, but he was still fading in and out. The water was swirling around his waist now. She started to step out of the streambed, then wondered if there were more traps on the opposite bank. She grabbed a stick and beat the grass in front of her, but nothing happened. She reached the far side of the gully and glanced back through the driving rain. The creek, which had originally been maybe two feet across, was now almost ten feet wide and becoming a menacing, foaming coil of muddy brown water. Tommy was clutching at a tuft of grass to stay upright. Rip was leaning like a drunk against the bank, his left arm undulating in the current. The rumbling sound that came from behind the trees upstream was more pronounced. She peered through the trees ahead but could no longer see the building. She couldn't bring herself to leave the boys, so she started screaming for help, knowing it was probably hopeless. There wouldn't be anyone there. The boys were going to drown. She yelled again and again, then gave up and climbed back down to Tommy, being careful to stay in her own tracks.\n\nThe water was up to his lower chest now, and he had managed to pull his free leg underneath him so he could kneel and get his face higher. She waded out to him, feeling the force of the current. The stream had spread out in the gully to fifteen feet, submerging the traps and all the grass.\n\n\"Something's coming,\" Tommy said, looking upstream. The rain began to let up, and Lynn felt a surge of hope. But the noise from upstream was definitely still there. Then she saw lights in the trees across the gully.\n\n\"Oh my God! Look!\" she said to Tommy, and then she stood up. \"Over here! Help! Hurry, they're trapped in the water!\"\n\nTwo dark figures were coming through the trees from the direction of the building, their flashlights bobbing in the gloom. The rain was definitely letting up, but the water was still rising. She called again, waving her arms, wondering if she should get out her own flashlight. Then the larger of the two men apparently saw her. He was tall and had a black beard. He put his arm out in a signal for the other man to halt behind him, which he did.\n\n\"Over here,\" she yelled again. Why were they stopping? The rumbling noise from upstream was gaining strength; she imagined she could feel the ground trembling under the water. There was a sound like the rattle of individual boulders and rocks audible above the water noise. She yelled and waved her arms again. The tall, black-bearded man stepped down to the edge of the flooding gully. He was wearing a long rain slicker that came all the way to his boots. His bearded face was partially covered by a large black hat. He looked at her and then upstream. The rain began to intensify.\n\n\"Tommy's trapped,\" she called out. \"So's Rip. Please, can you help me get them out?\"\n\nThe tall man was about fifteen feet from her now, and the water rose up to the hem of his slicker. Tommy coughed and then groaned in pain as the current shifted him sideways. The water covered his shirt pockets, and he was shivering uncontrollably. Behind him, Rip, wild-eyed and wide-awake now, sputtered something as the water came up to his neck. She still could not see the big man's face under his large mountain man-style hat.\n\nHe came forward again, steadying himself against the current. When he reached her, he put out a hand and motioned for her to take it. She was trying to decide what to do when a roaring noise erupted upstream. As she turned to look, a five-foot-high wall of brown water and debris came sweeping around the bend.\n\nShe screamed at the sight of it, knowing what was about to happen. Then he had her by the forearm and was pulling her back toward the tree line. She screamed again, something about Tommy, but the grip on her arm was like a vise and she was literally being dragged by her heels through the water and up the slope. He pulled her the last few feet out of the water as the flash flood roared by, filling the air with the smell of mud and the sound of cracking rocks. She put up a hand to see through the rain, to find Tommy and Rip, but they had disappeared. The surge front was followed by a second, swelling tide, this one as much mud as debris-choked water. It rapidly filled the gully all the way to the tree lines on both sides. There were bushes and small trees sailing by in the rumbling water, but the boys were now five feet down and lost forever. She felt sick.\n\nThe big man did not relax his grip. \"Take her to the nitro building,\" he said in a cold, commanding voice. \"Full restraint. Then we'll come back for the bodies.\"\n\n\"There'll be a vehicle somewhere,\" the other man said. She could not tear her eyes away from the brown river sweeping by them, which only a few minutes ago had been a small brook.\n\n\"Yes, we'll need to find that, too. And their backpacks. Take her, now.\"\n\nTake her? Lynn thought. Take me where? Who are these men? She started to ask them what was going on, when the tall man pulled her arms behind her and held them.\n\n\"Hey!\" she yelled, but then a second set of hands pulled a wet length of fabric across her eyes. Then some kind of gag was taped across her mouth. She tried to struggle, but the man behind her lifted her pinned elbows, causing a lancing pain in her upper back. She gave a muffled yell of pain and stopped fighting.\n\n\"Be still,\" the tall man ordered. She could feel him bending close. His body gave off a scent of wet canvas and leather and something else, some kind of chemical smell. \"You should not have come here,\" he said, his voice ominous above the rumble of the flooded stream. \"You should never have come here.\"\n\nSpecial Agent Janet Carter checked herself out in the ladies' room mirror before going back to her office. She was still smarting over a remark she had overheard that morning down in the deli next to the Roanoke federal building. A new agent, fresh in from the Academy, had asked another agent about her while standing in the coffee line, unaware that Janet was sitting on the other side of the register, just out of sight. She was the only female agent in the Roanoke office, so when the new guy started talking about the cute little redhead in the Violent Crimes Squad, she had naturally paid attention. Then the other guy answering: \"Don't let that little-girl face fool you; she's thirty-something, going on forty, has eight years in the Bureau, and she doesn't date other agents. You figure it out.\"\n\nFigure out what? she thought. Was he saying I'm a lesbian because I won't date other agents? Is that what they think? Or that I'm too old for the newbie? She examined her \"little-girl face.\" Red hair, bright green eyes, okay, a couple of wrinkles here and there, but nothing substantial. Firm chin, healthy skin. So she looked younger than her thirty-seven years\u2014and what was wrong with that? She worked out three, four times a week and was in better shape generally than some of her male coworkers, if the annual physical-fitness test proved anything. There was nothing wrong with the old bod, either. Which was why the newbie had been asking, right? So relax. They're just guys flapping their jaws. In general, she liked the Roanoke crew, and they liked her.\n\nShe sighed and went back to her office. There were four cubicles in their office. One, belonging to Larry Talbot, the squad's supervisor, was slightly larger than the others. The other three were Bureau-issue identical. Each contained a computer workstation, a single chair, and some file cabinets over and under the computer table. It was a four-person squad, with one semipermanent, budget-cut vacancy. The other worker bee in the squad was Billy Smith, who was generally conceded to be RIP, as in retired in place. The RIP designation was a little unfair to Billy, who had a serious blood-pressure problem, for which he would take a pill upon arrival in the office. It would promptly put him to sleep at his desk for an hour or so, and then he would wake up and do paperwork throughout the rest of the morning, until lunch, at which time he would take his next pill and slip back under again. He'd come down from some obscure Washington assignment three years ago and supposedly had two years to go until he was eligible for retirement. Larry Talbot had worked a deal: Billy would do the bulk of the squad's routine paperwork, while Larry and Janet would do the legwork. Everyone figured the Bureau was simply looking the other way until Billy could take his retirement and go away. His repertoire of dark two-liner jokes had become notorious in the office, especially when he could catch someone off guard, as he had Janet when he asked her what it meant that the post office flag was at half-mast: They were hiring. Between those little bombs and handling all the squad's paperwork, Billy had found a home.\n\nShe sat down at her desk, checked E-mail, and grunted. Larry Talbot had left her a message: Today was the day they went out to tell Mr. Kreiss that they were sending the missing college kids' case up to Washington. She was supposed to meet Talbot in the parking garage at nine o'clock. She looked at her watch. She barely had time to finish her coffee. She thought about that guy's remark. Figure it out, huh? As she remembered, the guy talking to the newbie was a married man. She'd go figure him out all right. Maybe drop a dime, speculate to his wife about the guy's sudden interest in redheads. Make his home life a little more interesting. But then she just laughed. Not her style.\n\n## CHAPTER II\n\nEdwin Kreiss waited in the doorway as the FBI car from the Roanoke office ground up the winding drive from the county road down below. He knew why the Bureau was coming: They were going to call off their search. It had been almost three weeks since the kids had vanished, and neither the Bureau nor the local cops had come up with one single clue as to what had happened. No bodies, no sign of foul play, no abandoned vehicles, no credit-card receipts, no phone tips, no witnesses, no sightings, and not the first idea of even where to look for them. His daughter, Lynn, and her two friends, Rip and Tommy, had vanished.\n\nKreiss frankly did not care too much about the two boys, but Lynn was his only child. Had been his only child? He was determined to keep her memory in the present tense, even as he now lived with the sensation of a cold iron ball lodged permanently in his stomach. It had been there since that first call from the university's campus security office. And here was the world's greatest law-enforcement organization coming to tell him they were going to just give up. Special Agent Talbot, who had called that morning, hadn't been willing to come right out and say that, not on the phone, anyway. But Kreiss, a retired FBI agent himself, knew the drill: They had reached that point in their investigation where some budget-conscious supervisor was asking pointed questions, especially since there were no indications of a crime.\n\nKreiss watched the dark four-door Ford sedan swing into the clearing in front of his cabin and stop. He recognized the two agents who had been working the case as they got out, a man and a woman. _Special_ agents, Kreiss reminded himself. We were always special agents in the Bureau. Larry Talbot, the head of the Violent Crimes Squad, was dressed in a conservative business suit and was completely bald. He was heavyset, to the point of almost being fat, which in Kreiss's day would have been very unusual at the Bureau. Special Agent Janet Carter was considerably younger than Talbot. She appeared to be in her early thirties, with a good figure and a pretty but somewhat girlish face, which Kreiss thought would make it difficult for people to take her seriously as a law-enforcement agent. Her red hair glinted in the sunlight. He stood motionless in the doorway, his face a patient mask, waiting for them. He and the other parents had met with these two several times over the past three weeks. Talbot had been patiently professional and considerate in his dealings with the parents, but Kreiss had the impression that the woman, Carter, had been frustrated by the case and was increasingly anxious to go do something else. He also sensed that she either did not like him or suspected him somehow in the disappearance of his daughter.\n\nKreiss's prefab log cabin crouched below the eastern crest of Pearl's Mountain, a 3,700-foot knob that was twenty-six miles west of Blacksburg, in southwest Appalachian Virginia. The mountain's gnarled eastern face rose up out of an open meadow three hundred yards behind the cabin. The sheer rock cliff was dotted with scrub trees and a few glistening weeps that left mossy bright green trails down the crumbling rock. The meadow behind the cabin was the only open ground; otherwise, the hill's flanks fell away into dense forest in all directions. Two hundred feet below the cabin, a vigorous creek, called Hangman's Run, worked relentlessly, wearing down the ancient rock in a deep ravine. A narrow county road paralleled the creek. There was a stubby wooden bridge across the creek, leading into Kreiss's drive.\n\nThe two agents walked across the leafy yard without speaking as they approached the wooden steps leading up onto the porch. \"Mr. Kreiss?\" Talbot said. \"Special Agent Larry Talbot; this is Special Agent Janet Carter.\"\n\n\"Yes, I remember,\" Kreiss said. \"Come in.\"\n\nHe opened the screen door. Talbot always reintroduced himself and his partner every time they met, and he was always politely formal\u2014using _sir_ a lot. If Talbot knew Kreiss had been with the Bureau, he gave no sign of it. Kreiss kept his own tone neutral; he would be polite, but not friendly, not if they were giving up.\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" Talbot said. Kreiss led them to chairs in the lodge room, an expansive area that encompassed the cabin's living room, dining room, and kitchen. Talbot sat on the edge of his chair, his briefcase on his knees. Carter was somewhat more relaxed, both arms on the chair and her nice legs carefully crossed. Kreiss sat down in an oak rocker by the stone fireplace, crossed his arms over his chest, and tried not to scowl.\n\n\"Well,\" Talbot began, glancing over at his partner as if making sure of her moral support. \"As I think you know, the investigation to date has come up empty. Frankly, I've never seen one quite like this: We usually have _something,_ some piece of evidence, a witness, or at least a working theory. But this one . . . \"\n\nKreiss looked from Carter to Talbot. \"What are the Bureau's intentions?\" he asked.\n\nTalbot took a deep breath. \"We've consulted with the other two families. Our basic problem remains: There's no indication of a criminal act. And absent evidence of\u2014\"\n\n\"They've been gone without a trace for three weeks,\" Kreiss interrupted. \"I should think it would be _hard_ to disappear without a trace in this day and age, Mr. Talbot. Really hard.\"\n\nHe stared right at Talbot. Carter was looking at her shoes, her expression blank. \"I'll accept what you say about there being no evidence,\" Kreiss continued. \"But there's also no evidence that they just went off the grid voluntarily, either.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, we acknowledge that,\" Talbot said. \"But they're college kids, and the three of them were known to be, urn, close.\"\n\n_Close_ doesn't quite describe it, Kreiss thought. Those three kids had been joined at the hip in some kind of weird triangular relationship since late freshman year. Tommy and Lynn, his daughter, had been the boy-girl pair, and Rip, the strange one, had been like some kind of eccentric electron, orbiting around the other two.\n\n\"We've interviewed everyone we could find on the campus who knew them,\" Talbot continued. \"Professors, TAs, other students. None of them could give us anything specific, except for two of their classmates, who were pretty sure they had gone camping somewhere. But nobody had any idea of where or for how long. Plus, it was spring break, which leaves almost an entire week where no one would have expected to see them. Sir, they could be literally anywhere.\"\n\n\"And the campus cops\u2014the Blacksburg cops?\"\n\n\"We've had full cooperation from local law. University, city, and county. We've pulled all the usual strings: their telephone records, E-mail accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, school schedules, even their library cards. Nothing.\" He took a deep breath. \"I guess what we're here to say is that we have to forward this case into the Missing Persons Division now.\"\n\n\"Missing Persons.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Until we get some indication\u2014anything at all, mind you\u2014that they didn't just take off for an extended, I don't know, road trip of some kind.\"\n\n\"And just leave college? Three successful engineering students in their senior year?\"\n\n\"Sir, it has happened before. College kids get a wild hair and take off to save the whales or the rain forest or some damn thing.\"\n\nKreiss frowned, shook his head, and got up. He walked to a front window, trying to control his temper. He stood with his back to them, not wanting them to see the anger in his face.\n\n\"That's not my take on it, Mr. Talbot. My daughter and I had become pretty close, especially after her mother was killed.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, in the airplane accident. Our condolences, sir.\"\n\nKreiss blinked. Talbot was letting him know they'd run his background, too. Standard procedure, of course: When kids disappeared, you checked the parents, hard. So they had to know he was ex-FBI. He wondered how much they knew about the circumstances of his sudden retirement. Talbot might; the woman was too young. Unless they'd gone back to Washington to ask around.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kreiss said. \"But my point is that Lynn would have told me if she was going to leave school. Hell, she'd have hit me up for money.\"\n\n\"Would she, sir?\" Talbot said. \"We understood she received quite a bit of money from the airline's settlement.\"\n\nKreiss, surprised, turned around to face them. He had forgotten about the settlement. He remembered his former wife's lawyer contacting Lynn about it, but he had made her deal with it, whatever it was. So far, the money had covered all her college and living expenses, but he still gave her an allowance.\n\nThe woman had her notebook open and was writing something in it. He felt he had to say something. \"My daughter was a responsible young adult, Mr. Talbot. So was Tommy Vining. Rip was . . . from Mars, somewhere. But they would not just leave school. That's something I _know._ I think they went camping, just like those two kids said, and something happened. Something bad.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, that's one possibility. It's just that there's no\u2014\"\n\n\"All right, all right. So what happens now? You just close it and file it?\"\n\n\"Not at all, sir,\" Talbot protested. \"You know that. It becomes a federal missing persons case, and they don't get closed until the persons get found.\" He hesitated. \"One way or another.\" He paused again, as if regretting he had put it that way. \"As I think you'll recall, sir, there are literally thousands of missing persons cases active at the Bureau. And that's at the federal level. We don't even hear about some of the local cases.\"\n\n\"How comforting.\"\n\n\"I know it's not, Mr. Kreiss. But our MP Division has one big advantage: They get to screen every Bureau case\u2014every active case\u2014for any possible links: names, credit-card numbers, evidence tags, telephone numbers. They've even developed special software for this, to screen the Bureau's databases and alert for links to any missing person in the country.\"\n\n\"What did the other parents say when you told them this?\"\n\nTalbot sighed. \"Um, they were dismayed, of course, but I think they understood. It's just that there isn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, you keep saying that. Any of them going to take up a search on their own?\"\n\n\"Is that what you're considering, Mr. Kreiss?\" Carter asked. It was the first time she had spoken at this meeting. Now that he thought of it, he had rarely heard her speak. Kreiss looked at her for a moment, and he was surprised when their eyes locked. There was a hint of challenge in her expression that surprised him.\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" he answered calmly, continuing to hold her gaze. \"Civilians get into police business, they usually screw things up.\"\n\n\"But you're not exactly a civilian, are you, Mr. Kreiss?\" she said.\n\nKreiss hesitated, wondering just what she meant by that. \"I am now, Agent Carter,\" he said softly. \"I am now.\"\n\nTalbot cleared his throat. \"Um\u2014\" he began, but Carter cut him off.\n\n\"What I think Special Agent Talbot was about to say is that we ran a check on you, sir. We always check out the parents when kids go missing. And of course we knew that you had been a senior FBI agent. But your service and personnel records have been sealed. The few people we did talk to would only say that you had been an unusually effective\"\u2014she looked at her notes\u2014\" hunter. That was the term that kept coming up, sir.\"\n\nTime to cut this line of conversation right off, Kreiss thought. He let his face assume a cold mask that he had not used for years. He saw her blink and shift slightly in her chair. He walked over to stand in front of her, forcing her to look up at him. \"What else did these _few_ people have to say, Agent Carter?\" he asked, speaking through partially clenched teeth.\n\n\"Actually, nothing,\" she said, her voice catching. Talbot, beginning to look alarmed, shifted in his chair.\n\nKreiss, arms still folded across his chest, bent forward to bring his face closer to hers. \"Do you have some questions for me that pertain to this case, Agent Carter?\"\n\n\"Not at the moment, sir,\" she replied, her chin up defiantly. \"But if we do, we'll certainly ask them.\"\n\nShe was trying for bluster, Kreiss decided, but even she knew it wasn't working. He inflated his chest and stared down into her eyes while widening his own and then allowing them to go slightly out of focus. He felt her recoil in the chair. Talbot cleared his throat from across the room to break the tension. Kreiss straightened up, exhaled quietly, and went back to sit down in the rocking chair. \"My specialty at the Bureau was not in missing persons,\" he said. \"I was a senior supervisor in the Counterintelligence Division, Far Eastern section.\"\n\nCarter had recovered herself by now and cleared her throat audibly. \"Yes, sir,\" she said. \"So what you said earlier pertains absolutely: Do not go solo on this, please. You find something, think of something, hear something, please call us. We can bring a whole lot more assets to bear on a fragment than you can.\"\n\n\"Even though you're giving up on this case?\"\n\n\"Sir, we're not giving up,\" Talbot protested. \"The case remains in the Roanoke office's jurisdiction even when it goes up to national Missing Persons at headquarters. We can pull it back and reopen anytime we want. But Janet's right: It really complicates things if someone's been messing around in the meantime.\"\n\nKreiss continued to look across the room at Carter. \"Absolutely,\" he said, rearranging his face into as benign an expression as he could muster. For a moment there, he had wanted to swat her pretty little head right through the front window. He was pretty sure she had sensed that impulse; the color in her cheeks was still high.\n\n\"Well,\" Talbot said, fingering his collar as he got up. \"Let me assure you again, sir, the Bureau is definitely not giving up, especially with the child of an ex-agent. The matter is simply moving into, um, another process, if you will. If something comes up, anything at all, pass it on to either one of us and we'll get it into the right channels. I believe you have our cards?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Kreiss said, also getting up. \"I think you're entirely wrong about this,\" he told Talbot, ignoring Carter now.\n\nTalbot gave him a sympathetic look before replying. \"Yes, sir. But until we get some indication that something bad has happened to your daughter and her friends, I'm afraid our hands are somewhat tied. It's basically a resource problem. You were in the Bureau, Mr. Kreiss, you know how it is.\"\n\n\"I know how it _was,_ Mr. Talbot,\" Kreiss said, clearly implying that _his_ Bureau would not be giving up. He followed them to the front door. The agents said their good-byes and went down to their car.\n\nKreiss stood in the doorway, watching them go. He had fixed himself in emotional neutral ever since the kids went missing. He had cooperated with the university cops, then the local cops, and then the federal investigation, giving them whatever they wanted, patiently answering questions, letting them search her room here in the cabin, agreeing to go over anything and everything they came up with. He had attended painfully emotional meetings with the other parents, and then more meetings with Lynn's student friends and acquaintances. He had endured two brainstorming sessions with a Bureau psychologist that aimed at seeing if anyone could remember anything at all that might indicate where the kids had been going. All of which had produced nothing.\n\nSome of Lynn's schoolmates had been a bit snotty to the cops, but that was not unusual for college kids. Engineering students at Virginia Tech considered themselves to be several cuts above the average American college kid. Perhaps they are, he thought: Lynn certainly had been. He noticed again that his thinking about Lynn was shifting into the past tense when he wasn't noticing. But there was no excuse for the students to be rude to the law-enforcement people, given the circumstances. And there had been one redheaded kid in particular who seemed to go out of his way to be rude. Kreiss had decided that either he had been grandstanding or he knew something.\n\nGive all the cops their due, he thought wearily as the Feds drove off. They hadn't just sloughed it off. They had tried. But the colder the trail became, the more he'd become convinced that they would eventually shop it to Missing Persons and go chase real bad guys doing real crimes. The Bureau had budgets, priorities, and more problems on its plate than time in a year to work them. Missing persons cases often dragged on for years, while an agent's annual performance evaluations, especially in the statistics-driven Bureau, were based on that fiscal year's results: case closings, arrests, convictions. Fair enough. And they had been considerate enough to drive all the way up here to tell him face-to-face, even if the young woman had been snippy. So, thank you very much, Special Agents Talbot and Carter. He let out a long breath to displace the iron ball in his stomach as he closed the door. In a way, he was almost relieved at their decision. Now he could do it his way.\n\nTalbot navigated the car down the winding drive toward the wooden bridge at the bottom of Kreiss's property. Janet checked her cell phone, but there was still no signal down here in the hollows.\n\n\"I hate doing that,\" Talbot said as he turned the car back out onto the narrow county road. \"Telling them we're giving up. Parents always feel Missing Persons is a brush-off.\"\n\n\"We do what we have to,\" Janet said. \"Personally, I still think the kids just ran off. Happens all the time, college kids these days. They have it too easy, that's all.\"\n\n\"I thought for a minute he was going to blow up back there. Did you see his face when you started talking about his background? Scary.\"\n\nJanet did not answer. She fiddled with her seat belt as Talbot took the car through a series of tight switchbacks. The road was climbing, but the woods came down close to the road, casting a greenish light on everything. She'd seen it all right. It had taken everything she had to come back at him, and even then, her voice had broken. She'd never seen anyone's face get that threatening, especially when the person was a big guy like Kreiss, with those lineman's shoulders and that craggy face. Talbot had said Kreiss was probably in his mid-fifties, although his gray-white hair and lined face made him look older. He appeared to be keeping the lid on a lot of energy, she thought, and he was certainly able to project that power. She had actually been afraid of him for a moment, when he'd trained those flinty eyes at her with that slightly detached, off-center look a dog exhibits just before it bites you.\n\n\"You know,\" Talbot was saying, \"like if I had some bad guys covered in a room, he'd be the guy I'd watch.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" she said as nonchalantly as she could, trying to dismiss the fact that Kreiss had unsettled her. Get off it, Larry, she thought.\n\n\"I mean, I wouldn't want him on my trail, either. Especially if what Farnsworth said was true.\"\n\nTheir boss, Farnsworth, knew this guy? \"What?\" she said.\n\n\"Kreiss was apparently something special. One of those guys they could barely keep a handle on. Lone wolf type. I've heard that the Foreign Counterintelligence people get that way, sometimes. You know, all that cloak-and-dagger stuff, especially if they get involved with those weirdos across the river in Langley.\"\n\n\"Special how?\" Ted Farnsworth was the Resident Agent in Roanoke. Janet couldn't see a homeboy like Farnsworth consorting with the FCI crowd.\n\n\"He didn't elaborate, but he was shaking his head a lot. Supposedly, Kreiss spent a lot of time apart from the normal Bureau organization. Then something happened and he got forced out. I think they reorganized FCI after he left to make sure there was no more of that lone wolf shit.\"\n\n\"I've never heard of Bureau assets being used that way. It would give away our biggest advantage\u2014we come in hordes.\"\n\nTalbot concentrated on navigating the next set of hairpin turns. \"Yeah, well,\" he said. \"Farnsworth said Kreiss got involved with the Agency's sweepers, who supposedly are all lone wolves.\"\n\n\"'Sweepers'? What do they do?\"\n\n\"They're a group of man-hunting specialists in the Agency Counterespionage Division. They're supposedly called in when one of their _own_ clandestine operatives gets sideways with the Agency. Farnsworth said they were 'retrieval' specialists. Supersecret, very bad, et cetera, et cetera.\"\n\nJanet winced when Talbot went wide on a blind curve. \"Never heard of them,\" she said. \"Sounds like another one of those Agency legends\u2014you know, ghost-polishing for the benefit of the rest of us mere LE types.\"\n\nTalbot looked sideways at her before returning his attention to the winding road. \"I'm not so sure of that. But anyhow, this was four, five years ago. Farnsworth said he was at the Washington field office when Kreiss was stashed over at headquarters, so this is all nineteenth-hand. But, basically, I was relieved when Kreiss said he'd stay out of this case.\"\n\nJanet snorted.\n\n\"What?\" Talbot said.\n\nShe turned to look at him. \"There is no way in hell that guy's going to stay out of it. Didn't you pick up on that back there?\"\n\nTalbot seemed surprised. \"No. Actually, I didn't detect that. I think he's just pissed off. Besides, whatever he used to do at the Bureau, he's retired now. He's a parent, that's all. I think he's just a guy who screwed up at the end of his career, got kicked out, moved down here to be near his kid, and now she's gone missing, and here's the Bureau backing out. He's old, for Chrissakes.\"\n\n\"I think you're wrong,\" she said, shaking her head. \"And he's not that old.\"\n\nTalbot laughed. \"Hey, you attracted to that guy or something?\"\n\n\"Oh, for God's sake, Larry,\" she said, looking away, afraid of what her face might reveal. It hadn't exactly been attraction. She'd been scared and embarrassed. Eight years in the Bureau and some veteran stares her down.\n\n\"Well, just remember, Janet, there's still no evidence of a crime here. You know RA Farnsworth's rules: no crime, no time. He's right: We shop it to Missing Persons and move on. Hey, where do you want to stop for lunch?\"\n\nJanet shrugged and continued to stare out the side window. Gnarly-barked mossy pines, some of them enveloped in strangling vines, stared indifferently back at her. They were going down now, but another steep hill filled the windshield in front of them. It didn't take a huge leap of her imagination to visualize Edwin Kreiss slipping out of that cabin and disappearing into the woods. Her heart had almost jumped out of her chest when he had loomed over her like a tiger examining its next meal. She had never had such a powerfully frightening reaction to a man in all her life. \"Wherever,\" she said. \"I'm not that hungry.\"\n\n## CHAPTER III\n\nBarry Clark got off the shuttle and hurried through the rain toward his apartment building in the student ghetto behind the Kroger shopping center. He held his backpack over his head in a futile effort to keep his flaming red hair dry. It was nearly dark, and he was, as usual, pissed off.\n\nHe reached his ground-floor apartment, checked the battered mailbox cluster, which always got wet when it rained\u2014stupid, dumb damn place to put the damn mailboxes, anyway, mailmen getting lazier and lazier\u2014and then went into the concrete hallway, which stank of fried foods, cat piss, and laundry soap in about equal proportions. A single bulb threw minimal light on the trash accumulated in the hallway corners. He unlocked the flimsy door to his apartment, pushed aside some of the junk and litter that filled his so-called living room, and closed the door behind him. The curtains were drawn to discourage campus thieves, and with the wet gray evening outside, the room was dark and gloomy, perfectly matching his mood. He dumped his wet backpack onto the floor and hit the light switch, which produced absolutely nothing. He swore out loud. The breakers in the kitchen power panel were probably wet again. Jesus! Would nothing go right on this miserable day?\n\nHe ran a hand through his mop of hair and was starting across the room when a very large figure with no head rose up out of a chair and hit him high on the right side of his chest, just inside his right shoulder, so hard that he staggered sideways. The pain was incredible and he almost stopped breathing. Then the headless figure delivered another stunning punch, this one to the same point on his left side. Almost without realizing it, Barry began sinking to his knees, then squatted back on his haunches on the floor, eyes teary, trying to make a sound but only managing a whimper. His arms were paralyzed right down to his fingertips, and the pain was making him sick. When he opened his eyes, the figure was not visible, but then he sensed that some _thing_ was behind him. He tried to turn around, but it wasn't possible with his frozen arms, and then a viselike hand gripped him by his hair and lifted him straight up to his feet. It hurt like hell, but what really scared him was that the man was able to do that with one hand: Barry weighed over 160. The headless man frog-marched him over to the interior living room wall and pushed him back down to the floor, onto his knees, pressing Barry's face to the wall before letting go. When Barry's head came off the wall, the hand pushed his face back against it, hard enough to mash his nose and start a small nosebleed. Even Barry, who wasn't into following orders, understood: Don't move. He stopped moving.\n\nThe fire in his upper arms threatened to envelop him. He tried to understand what he had seen: a large dark figure in a full-length coat, black gloves, and no fuckin' head! Reviewing the image scared him again, and then a very large polished chrome blade flashed up along the right side of his face, its edge resting casually one millimeter from his right eyeball. He flinched automatically, ducking his head away, but that iron hand came back and pushed his nose up against the wall again, where a dark blotch now bloomed. The man pressed the edge of the blade against Barry's right cheekbone and he felt a sting on his skin. He began to tremble uncontrollably. He wanted to say something, but he couldn't figure out what was happening to him, and besides, his throat was dry as paper.\n\n\"We can make this long or short. Your call.\" The man's voice was a hoarse, accentless whisper.\n\nBarry tried again to say something, but he managed only another croak. He felt the man's body settling down behind him, a huge presence, what felt like a knee pressing in against his back. That knife blade had not moved. He suddenly felt an extreme urge to urinate. The pain in his shoulders was getting worse, much worse.\n\n\"Here it is, sonny,\" the man whispered. \"I want to know where Lynn Kreiss and her friends went camping.\"\n\nBarry blinked in the semidarkness. Lynn Kreiss? Who _was_ this fucker? He'd been all over this with the cops. He had blown them off, of course. Barry Clark didn't give cops of any variety the time of fuckin' day, not after all the hassle they gave him with traffic stops and parking tickets. He had also feigned total ignorance because Rip had made him swear not to tell anyone, but then that knife did move and there was a sudden cold draft on his skin as the man sliced open the back of Barry's shirt from waist to collar. As Barry was trying to assimilate this development, the man took him by the hair again, hoisting him all the way up on his toes. This time, Barry yelled with the pain. And then that huge knife pressed for an instant against the small of his back, its cold steel tugging once at his belt line, and then his jeans and underwear were sliding down his thighs. He looked down and saw the tip of that brilliant blade projecting from between his naked legs. He struggled, then stopped when he felt a stinging sensation on the bottom of his scrotum. He made a squeaking noise and went even higher on his toes, teetering almost out of balance, managing to stay upright only because of the man's grip on his hair.\n\n\"Talk to me, wipe,\" the man whispered again. \"Where did they go?\"\n\nBarry was shaking all over now. This giant bastard was going to cut him in half! \"Okay! _Okay_! Jesus _Christ,_ man! Don't! Rip said they were going to break into someplace called Site R. I don't know what that is. _Please,_ man!\"\n\nBarry felt the knife turning between his legs, the edge of the blade scraping against his inner thigh, and then it was withdrawn, its dull edge pressing pointedly into his genitals. The grip on his hair relaxed. As Barry sagged back down onto his feet, something tapped him behind his right ear and he sagged to the floor. He felt almost grateful as he slipped into unconsciousness, glad to be out of it. His last sensation was that of his bladder emptying.\n\nThe Virginia Tech campus police desk sergeant went through the report with Janet Carter. It was 11:30 P.M. and some patrol cop was making a big deal on the radio-circuit speaker about a fender bender.\n\n\"Okay,\" the sergeant said. \"So the complainant is one Barry Clark, third-year civil engineering student. Subject called nine one one at eighteen-fifty-five, semihysterical. Since he lived in the student housing area, we owned it. Responding officers said they found the subject naked on the floor, his clothes sliced up around him, a lump behind his ear and a puddle of piss on the carpet. Subject reported that a very large individual with no head assaulted him, cut his clothes off, threatened to kill him, and then coldcocked him. That's about it.\"\n\n\"Headless?\" Carter asked, looking up from her notebook.\n\nThe sergeant shrugged, looking at his report. \"That's what he said. Subject showed evidence of being hit twice, and then the sleeping pill behind the ear. Can't move his arms. Point contusions. I got Montgomery County hospital to fax their ER report over. States direct blunt-force trauma to the\u2014let's see\u2014brachial nerve tie-in on both sides, causing complete but hopefully temporary paralysis to both arms. No sign of alcohol or drugs in his blood work. Hematoma behind the right ear but no skull fracture. Released after four hours of observation.\"\n\nHe put the report down on the counter. \"We called you people because when the incident report went into our computer, there was a flag tying the subject's name to an interview list on the disappearance of those three Tech kids.\"\n\n\"Right. That was ours. This kid have red hair?\"\n\nThe cop scanned the report. \"Yep.\"\n\n\"I think I remember him. Snot mouth. Lots of attitude. Anything taken?\"\n\n\"Apparently not. Right now, he's on some legal drugs and can't tell us anything\u2014like why this might have happened, or what the headless horseman was after.\"\n\nJanet shook her head. She had just gone to bed when the call came from the Roanoke duty officer to get over to Tech campus security. She had asked if it could wait until morning, but the duty officer said Special Agent Talbot, the first agent they'd called, seemed to think Carter would want to get on it right away. Thank you, Larry Talbot, she thought.\n\n\"Headless,\" she said again. \"Okay, that's a new one.\"\n\nThe sergeant shrugged again. \"College kids, what can I tell you. They've got seriously active imaginations. This isn't the weirdest one we've ever seen, believe me. You want a copy of this report?\"\n\n\"Yes, please,\" she said. \"Did the responding officers see any evidence of a burglary?\"\n\n\"This all went down in the student ghetto. They checked the door lock, said it was easy pickings. It's not in the report, but the guys said the apartment was a double-glove situation. If there was evidence in there, none of them wanted to touch it or catch it.\"\n\nShe nodded again. \"Got it. I think I'll go see Mr. Clark. How do I get there?\"\n\nFifteen minutes later, she was knocking on the door of Clark's apartment. No one answered. She examined the door lock. The cops had been right: She could have taken it with a Q-Tip. She knocked again, then took off a shoe and used that to make enough racket to bring Barry Clark to the door finally. He was wearing an oversized Tech sweatshirt and flip-flops. His eyes were bleary, and she noticed that his arms were not in the armholes of the sweatshirt. She identified herself. She had heard a door open on the other side of the noisome stairwell, but it closed quickly when the name FBI rang out. He stared at her for a long moment, blinking slowly, and then nudged the door open with his foot, letting her in. She left the door cracked and wrinkled her nose at the mess in the apartment.\n\nClark sat down carefully on the only chair in the room and blinked up at her with dilated eyes. There was a single light on in the living room. His arms hung down uselessly inside the sweatshirt. She did remember him. He had been truculent, almost hostile, during the initial round of interviews on the Kreiss case, which was how she thought of it now, after the meeting with Edwin Kreiss earlier that day. She looked at her watch; yesterday, actually. She was pretty sure that either she or Talbot had reinterviewed this one. She definitely remembered the orange-red hair and the pugnosed, freckled-face smirk that begged every passing life-form for a slap. She remained standing and got out her notebook.\n\n\"So,\" she began. \"I've read the campus police's incident report. What'd you leave out?\"\n\n\"Leave out?\" he asked blankly. \"Nothing. I told them what happened. This huge bastard\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, Mr. Clark,\" she interrupted. \"Let's cut to the chase. Why was he here? What did he want? You grope somebody's wife at Kroger's, or what?\"\n\nHe stared at her, trying for a hard look, but then his eyes drifted out of focus. Hell, she thought, closing the book. He's zoning out. She wasn't going to get anything useful here. She looked around. There was a pile of cut-up clothes next to the far wall. There was a dark brown smear on the wall, and some paper towels stuffed under the rug beneath it. The room was such a mess of clothes, papers, athletic gear, bicycles, and tattered books that Sherlock Holmes would not have been able to tell if anything was missing. She could see a desktop PC through the bedroom door, but the bedroom looked even scarier than this room. Her toes curled at the thought of even going into the kitchen, which she could smell from where she stood. She looked back at Clark, who was staring dully at the floor.\n\n\"He scared the piss out of me, man,\" the kid said softly, shaking his head from side to side. Literally, she thought, wrinkling her nose again, trying not to breathe too hard.\n\n\"He had no head,\" Clark said, wincing at the memory. \"And he had this huge fuckin' knife, He lifted me off the floor with one fuckin' hand. Like, I can move my fingers, but I can't lift my arms. One, two, wham, bam. I was fuckin' down on the floor like a rubber chicken. The EMT guys had to put this sweatshirt on for me. Now I can't go to class, can't take a shower, can't do shit. I may lose the whole fuckin' semester.\"\n\nFuckin' awesome, Janet thought. \"So why'd this happen, Mr. Clark? What did this guy want?\" she asked.\n\n\"Don't know,\" Clark said, shaking his head again, but now he was avoiding making eye contact. She gave up. The kid was hurting, but he was also lying. She put away her notebook and headed for the door. She stuffed her card between the door molding and the wall, dislodging a fat roach.\n\n\"Call me when you're ready to talk to me, Mr. Clark. Hopefully, _before_ he comes back.\"\n\nThe kid's head came up as he registered that little comment. She smiled sweetly at him and went out to her car. She sat there for a minute before starting it up. This has to be Kreiss, she thought. That kid knows something about where those kids went, and Kreiss detected it back during the initial activity right after their disappearance. Tonight he came calling. Why now? Because today the Bureau announced it was backing out, of course.\n\nThe physical description didn't fit, of course, but it was a rainy night. He could have simply pulled his raincoat right up over his head, surprised the kid in a dark room, and disabled him with a couple of expert karate strikes. And with his head inside the coat, he would have appeared absolutely huge in the darkness. The question was, What did he get? She was tempted to call Kreiss right now, maybe go roust him at his mountain aerie. But of course, if it had been Kreiss, he'd have himself covered. Despite that, she felt a tingle of satisfaction. Talbot had been wrong.\n\nShe started up the car. Tomorrow, she would go talk to Kreiss. No\u2014first she would find out some more _facts_ about Edwin Kreiss, as opposed to rumors and legends. For some reason, the name Kreiss had been tickling a cord of her memory. But maybe it was just her. She felt him standing in front of her again, all that energy radiating out of him. It had been like standing next to a generator humming at full power. Then her professional side reasserted itself. Get real, Carter. The guy was out of line, hassling some college kid like that. Not that it had never occurred to her to smack the living shit out of Barry Clark. She smiled as she started the car. No more than once a minute, she thought.\n\nEdwin Kreiss relaxed with a short whiskey in front of his fireplace. He felt better than he had in years, especially since now he had something to go on. He hadn't enjoyed beating up on a snot-nosed kid like that, but he had learned long ago that sometimes a direct, physical approach gets the quickest results. He wondered if the kid would go to the cops. Probably. No matter: He still knew how to go somewhere and leave no trace. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. A cold wind from the ridge above his property was stirring the pine trees outside the cabin, causing the fire to flutter for a moment. It was almost springtime, but not up here yet, not at night, anyway.\n\nHe thought about what the kid had said. Site R. The only Site R he had ever heard about was the Alternate National Military Command Center up in the Catoctin Mountains, just north of Washington. That Site R was a self-contained mini-Pentagon. It had been built in a five-story steel box balanced on gigantic springs inside a man-made quartzite cavern. It was the hidey-hole for the president and whichever of his generals could make it out of Washington if nuclear missiles ever heaved over the ballistic horizon. No, this had to be something closer. And the kid had said they were going to _break into_ Site R.\n\nHe closed his eyes and mentally reviewed the map of southwestern Virginia. Assuming they hadn't gone out of the area, as the cops were postulating, then what was around here that might be called Site R? It sounded military. He wondered if it could have anything to do with the Ramsey Army Arsenal, which was fifteen miles south of Blacksburg. He'd never heard that called Site R, although he had lived in this area only since Lynn had come to Tech. He didn't even know if the arsenal was still operational. But . . . _break into?_ That implied a restricted area, so that could be it. _R_ for Ramsey?\n\nLynn, Lynn, Lynn, he thought. What the hell did you get yourself into? The pit in his stomach asserted itself. He had only gotten to be her father, really be her father, for the past six years. Before that, there had been that eleven-year gap, when his ex-wife, Helen, had kept him firmly at arm's length, out of her life and Lynn's.\n\nThe whole sorry episode had been hurtful. Helen had cut him out of their lives with an iron curtain after the divorce\u2014no visitation rights, no contact, no nothing. The judge had gone along with that when Helen refused child support and alimony. His wife and child could not have been more closed off to him if they had gone to another galaxy, even though they'd been right there in Washington the whole time. He had kept track of them, of course, keeping a distant watch on them between postings, until Helen remarried two years later to a coworker at the FBI laboratory. After that, he had pretty much given up and immersed himself in his work, which by that time was taking every bit of his time and energy, right up to the Millwood incident and the end of everything.\n\nAnd then suddenly, just after Lynn turned sixteen, she had called him, right out of the blue. Left a message with the FCI Division central operator that she was Edwin Kreiss's daughter and wanted to talk to him. Just like that. Their first meeting, at a Metro caf\u00e9 in Rosslyn, had been awkward; the second one better. For a year thereafter, they had met secretly, conducting a small conspiracy that was, for Lynn, a fulfillment of the normal teenage rebellion against her mother, as well as a filling of the hole in her heart that yearned for her father. For Kreiss, it had been the best of times, momentary islands of warmth and eager anticipation between sieges of increasingly acrimonious political developments in the Department of Energy Nuclear Laboratory case. Then came the plane crash, later that same year, which took Helen, her second husband, and eighty-eight other souls into the Chesapeake Bay at five hundred miles an hour. After that, it wasn't a secret conspiracy anymore, but Lynn on his doorstep, a pretty, tomboyish, bright-faced young lady with two suitcases, a tennis racket, and trembling lips that were trying hard to be brave and to hide the shock of it all. When she had been accepted at Virginia Tech, Kreiss, recently forced out of the Bureau, had moved down to the area to be near her.\n\nSite R. Tomorrow, he would go investigate the Ramsey Army Arsenal. He recalled the redheaded FBI agent's warning about going solo. He snorted. I'm still Edwin Kreiss, he thought. I'll find her, and if someone's hurt her, I'll find him and his wife and his children and all his other living relatives and send a load of body parts FedEx into the lobby of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Let Missing Persons sort that out.\n\n## CHAPTER IV\n\nOn Friday morning, Janet Carter called Eve Holloway at FBI headquarters. Eve worked in the Fingerprint Division and had been Janet's racquetball partner before Janet's transfer to the Roanoke office. Janet explained that she wanted to find out about a retired senior agent named Edwin Kreiss.\n\n\"Is this official?\" Eve asked.\n\n\"Yes, actually, although we're moving the case to MP. It's a disappearance case\u2014three college kids, but, unfortunately, no evidence of a criminal act. Kreiss retired from the Bureau four, maybe five years ago. He's the father of one of the missing kids, and I have a feeling he knows something he's not telling us.\"\n\n\"Or working it off-line, maybe?\" Eve asked. Eve's husband was a senior supervisory agent in the Professional Standards and Inspection Division. She knew a thing or two.\n\n\"Entirely possible. Supposedly, he worked in FCI, but he crashed and burned, and then he was sent home.\"\n\nEve was silent for a moment. \"Kreiss,\" she said slowly. \"I know that name. Hey, there was a Helen Kreiss who worked in the lab. That's right\u2014she was an electron mis\u2014misc\u2014shit, I can't pronounce it. She ran the electron-microscope facility. Microscopist? Anyway, she and her second husband were killed in that plane crash in the Bay, remember?\"\n\nJanet remembered Talbot mentioning a crash to Kreiss. \"She worked for us? In the Bureau?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I worked a child murder case with her, when she was Helen Kreiss. I remember she was getting a divorce at the time. This was '88, '89 time frame. I think she later married an agent who worked Organized Crime. Nice lady. I remember the plane crash because we lost two people. It was late '94, thereabouts. But she wasn't called Kreiss anymore, of course. I'm thinking it was Morgan?\"\n\n\"Right! Yes, I knew her. Helen Morgan. She worked some taskings for me when I was working in Materials and Devices. I'd been there\u2014what?\u2014just under two years, I think. So she was Kreiss's ex?\"\n\n\"Yep. I think she had a medical degree.\"\n\n\"I would have liked to talk to her,\" Janet said. \"You said she was getting the divorce when you worked that case together. She ever talk about it?\"\n\n\"Not really. She seemed more sad than mad. There was one child involved. That must be your misser. But listen, I think she said she had talked to one of our in-house shrinks. Maybe there's a file?\"\n\nJanet thanked her and then called the Administrative Services Division at headquarters. An office supervisor listened to her question and promised that someone from Employee Counseling would get back to her. Then Janet went to the morning staff meeting.\n\nAt 2:30 that afternoon, the RA of the Roanoke office, Ted Farnsworth, called Janet into his office. The nearest full-scale FBI field office was in Richmond. The Roanoke office was subordinate to the larger Richmond office, and, as such, its boss was not called special agent in charge, but, rather, Resident Agent. Farnsworth was a senior supervisory agent who was nearing retirement age. He was generally a kind and not very excitable boss, but, at the moment, his New England accent was audible, which meant that he was perturbed.\n\n\"Got a call this afternoon from a Dr. Karsten Goldberg, number-two shrink in the headquarters Counseling Division. Says they received a call from this office concerning a Bureau employee, since deceased, named Helen Kreiss Morgan? I thought this missing kid case had been sent up to MP?\"\n\n\"It has,\" Janet said. \"Or it will be, as of Monday. I think Larry Talbot is still finishing up the paperwork.\" She then related the incident involving Barry Clark, and her suspicions that Edwin Kreiss might be going solo in the search for his daughter.\n\nFarnsworth cupped his chin with his left hand and frowned. \"And you're looking for some background on this former special agent, Edwin Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. His ex-wife worked in the lab in Washington. She was killed in that plane crash in the Bay in late 1994. A contact at headquarters told me she'd been to the counselors during her divorce proceedings. I was hoping\u2014\"\n\n\"Close that door,\" Farnsworth said, indicating his office door. Janet was surprised, but she did as he'd asked. In today's supercharged sexual harassment atmosphere, it was a rare male supervisor indeed who would conduct a conversation with a female employee behind a closed door. He had her attention. She sat back down.\n\n\"Now look,\" Farnsworth said. \"What I'm going to tell you is not for general dissemination, despite what you might have heard from Larry. I hesitate even to go into this, because you're not supposed to be working this case anymore.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Janet said. \"But as I understand it, we'll keep a string on it even when it goes to MP? And I haven't been assigned to anything else yet.\" Even as she said that, Janet realized her reply sounded a little lawyerish.\n\nFarnsworth smiled patiently. \"Janet, you're a smart young lady. A Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in materials forensics, right? Almost nine years in the outfit, with two Washington tours and a field office tour in Chicago? And now you're down here with us mossbacks in the hills and hollows doing exactly what with all that specialized knowledge?\"\n\nJanet colored. During her first year back in Washington following the Chicago tour, she had twice managed to embarrass the assistant director over the laboratory by filing dissenting opinions in some high-visibility evidentiary reports. Subsequent reviews proved her right, but, given the rising legal storm over irregularities at the FBI lab, her mentor at headquarters, a female senior supervisory agent, had hustled Janet out of headquarters before she got into any more career-killing trouble. With Farnsworth's acquiescence, she had been transferred to the Roanoke office under the rubric of getting some out-of-specialty, street-level investigative experience. She nodded.\n\n\"Okay,\" Farnsworth said. \"Now, there are two reasons why this case is going to MP. First, because I said so, and SAC, Richmond, agrees. There's no evidence or even any indication that there's been a crime, and we've got other fish to fry. Second, one of the kids was Edwin Kreiss's daughter.\" He paused to see if she would understand.\n\nShe didn't. \"Yes, sir. And?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"Edwin Kreiss was not just a senior field agent who elected to retire down here in rustic southwest Virginia. He was Edwin Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Still is, I suppose, boss. I guess my question is, So what?\"\n\nFarnsworth got his pipe out, which told Janet she was not going anywhere soon. He didn't light it, in deference to the nonsmoking rules, but he did everything but light it. Then he leaned back in his chair.\n\n\"I don't know any of this directly, other than by being an RA and being plugged into that network. Okay? So, like I said, don't quote me on any of this. But Edwin Kreiss was a specialist in the Bureau's Counterintelligence Division. In the mid-eighties, he went on an exchange tour at the Agency. He got involved in that Chinese espionage case\u2014you know, the one where they got into the atomic labs and allegedly stole our warhead secrets.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. It supposedly went on for over ten years.\"\n\n\"Or more. Anyhow, you know that the Agency is restricted to operating _outside_ the continental United States, while the Bureau is responsible for operating primarily _inside_ our national borders.\"\n\n\"Except we do go overseas.\"\n\n\"Only when asked by foreign governments, or when we ask them. But the Agency may _not_ operate here in the States, except when they feel they have a mole, an Agency insider who is spying. Then they sometimes team up with the Bureau FCI people to find him.\"\n\n\"And the Department of Energy case involved a mole? I hadn't heard that.\"\n\n\"Well, not exactly a mole. Our people began to wonder why the DOE's own investigation, as well as the Agency's, seemed to be taking so damn long. It turned out that the Chinese had some help.\"\n\n\"In our government?\"\n\n\"Worse\u2014in the Agency's Counterespionage Division. A guy named Ephraim Glower.\"\n\n\"Never heard of him, either.\"\n\n\"This wasn't exactly given front-page coverage, and, again, I've never seen evidence of all this. But here's the background on Kreiss. While he was on this exchange tour with their CE people, he supposedly uncovered Glower, who, at the time, was an assistant deputy director in the Agency's Counterespionage Division.\"\n\n\"Wow. Talk about top cover.\"\n\nFarnsworth smiled. \"Precisely. The Agency was furiously embarrassed. When Kreiss forced the issue, they got him recalled to the Bureau. J. Willard Marchand was the new ADIC over the Bureau's FCI Division, and he clamped the lid on Kreiss. They stashed him at headquarters for a while, but then the flap about the Chinese government making campaign contributions blew up, and Kreiss resurfaced his accusations. Marchand stepped on Kreiss's neck. Kreiss then apparently decided to go confront this guy Glower.\"\n\n\"You mean Glower still had his job?\"\n\n\"Yes. Kreiss had no proof, or not enough to convince the Agency, so they got rid of Kreiss and left Glower in place.\"\n\n\"That's unbelievable.\"\n\n\"They do it all the time, Janet. Then if it blows up, they cover their asses by saying they were just letting the bad guy run so as to control what he did or gave to the other side. What's important is that the Glower episode ended in a very bloody mess out in a little village called Millwood, Virginia, up in the Shenandoah Valley. Glower ended up dead.\"\n\n\"Wow. Kreiss?\"\n\n\"Well, after he got stepped on the second time, Kreiss went to Millwood and confronted Glower. Glower called for help from Agency security and they forced Kreiss out of the house. But then that night, Glower apparently killed his wife and two kids and then shot himself. The local law said the scene was right out of one of those chain saw-massacre movies. The Agency director called Marchand; for a while, they actually thought Kreiss had done it.\"\n\n\"So he was there?\"\n\n\"Not when that happened, but of course they knew he had been there earlier. Fortunately for Kreiss, one of his subordinates at the Bureau could verify that Kreiss had been back at headquarters, writing up his report, at the time of the actual shootings. There were some questions about Kreiss's alibi, because it was one of his own people providing it. Needless to say, it was a helluva mess, and it became complicated by the fact that Kreiss wasn't done yet. He surfaced new allegations, that there wasn't just one scientist-spy at one lab; that there was a whole network. Based on what I've read since, he may have been right about that.\"\n\n\"Why did Glower kill himself?\"\n\n\"That's unclear. According to Kreiss's theory, Glower was running top cover for the spy network. Being a deputy dog in Agency counterespionage, he could throw a lot of monkey wrenches into the various investigations, which is why it all went on for so long.\"\n\n\"Why would he do that?\"\n\n\"There was the money.\"\n\n\"Money from?\"\n\n\"Money from China, money that went into a certain prominent reelection campaign, which I'm sure you've also read about. Kreiss's theory was that Glower was only doing what he had been told to do\u2014namely, to stymie the investigation at DOE and at the Agency, in return for keeping the Chinese happy, because the Chinese, of course, felt they had bought and paid for happiness.\"\n\n\"Could Kreiss back that up?\"\n\nFarnsworth sucked on his unlit pipe. \"My guess is that if he could have, he would have. But it's kind of hard to tell when you start a fire at that level. Those kinds of fires usually get extinguished in a Mount Olympus-level deal of some kind. Although, from what I've heard, Kreiss was anything but a deal maker, as the Agency bosses found out much too late. Supposedly, this guy Glower came from a very rich family, so money should not have been a likely motive. But who knows? The upshot was that Marchand caught hell, and in turn, he forced Kreiss out administratively, using the bloodbath at Millwood as a pretext, via the Bureau's own professional standards board. That in itself should have defanged anything Kreiss had to say about what or who was driving Glower.\"\n\n\"A bitter end to an interesting career.\"\n\n\"Yes, a very interesting career. There are all sorts of stories about Kreiss. You've met him and I haven't, but he apparently went pretty far a field with some of the Agency's counterespionage specialists, some of whom redefine the notion of 'far a field.' I've been told that he actually trained with some of their people, the ones who are called sweepers.\"\n\n\"Yes, Larry Talbot mentioned that term. Said they were highly specialized operatives, guys who went after their own agents when they went wrong.\"\n\n\"And you think that's all a bunch of Agency bullshit. Ghost-polishing, right?\"\n\nJanet started to reply but then stopped. Those were her very words. Fucking Larry. The RA was still smiling.\n\n\"Let me tell you what I've heard, and let me again stress the word _heard\"_ Farnsworth said. \"A sweeper is 'reportedly' someone our beloved brethren at Langley send when one of their own clandestine operations agents goes off the tracks in some fashion. We're not talking about their regular CE people, the ones who help us chase enemy agents around the streets of Washington. We're talking about a very special operative who hunts, and retrieves\u2014that's the term they use\u2014clandestine operatives who have gone nuts, gone over to the other side, or started running some kind of private agenda\u2014like assassinating bad guys instead of playing by the rules. In other words, someone who is so completely out of control that he or she needs to be 'retrieved' from the field and brought back to a safe house in the Virginia countryside. Someplace where the problem can be attended to, quote unquote.\"\n\n\"'Attended to'?\"\n\n\"Define that as your imagination might dictate,\" Farnsworth said. \"The interesting thing is, if they develop a problem child out on their operational web, they _tell_ the problem child that a sweeper is coming. Supposedly, a sweeper notification is enough to bring said problem child to heel. Coming in is preferable to being brought in.\"\n\nJanet didn't know what to say. \"And Kreiss?\"\n\n\"Kreiss was at the agency on an exchange deal, our FCI with their CE. Word was, he worked with the sweepers, trained with them. Did several years away from the Bureau. I talked to a guy, he's SAC now in Louisville, who knew Kreiss back in those days. Said he basically went native. Really got into the Agency hugger-mugger. His supervisors back in Bureau FCI didn't know what to do, because the one time they borrowed him back to deal with a rogue Bureau agent, the agent turned himself in, requesting protection. He was apparently so scared of Kreiss that he confessed to shit the Bureau didn't even know about. Then, of course, came Millwood. People who knew Kreiss tended to keep their distance.\"\n\n\"I can understand that,\" she said. \"I got an impression of contained violence, I mean. And I found myself wondering about the degree of containment.\"\n\n\"That's the essence of it. Of course, no one knows what really happened at Millwood, or who else might have been involved by that point in the investigation. Once Glower was dead. . .\"\n\n\"What do you mean? Oh, you mean\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah. The Agency protested a lot, but our FCI people speculated that the Millwood bloodbath may have been the Agency itself taking care of business\u2014you know, with one of these sweeper types. But once Kreiss started making accusations about the Chinese government, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the highest levels of our own government, nobody either side of the river wanted it to go any further.\"\n\n\"Wow. And that's whose kid is missing.\"\n\n\"Right. And two others, don't forget.\"\n\n\"Could there be a connection?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. But I've been given specific direction from Richmond to put a lid on this right now and shop it to MP.\"\n\n\"Just because it's Kreiss's kid who's involved?\"\n\nFarnsworth just looked at her with that patient expression on his face, which always made Janet feel like a schoolgirl. \"Or are you saying the _Agency_ is going to work it?\" she asked.\n\nFarnsworth put his pipe away in the desk. \"Don't know, as we Vermonters like to say. Don't know, don't want to know. And neither do you. I am saying that _we,_ the Roanoke office, are _not_ going to work it, other than as a routine missing persons case. And _you_ are going to move on to other things.\"\n\nJanet thought about that for a moment. \"But what if Kreiss works it?\"\n\n\"What if he does? If someone was fool enough to abduct Edwin Kreiss's daughter, then, in my humble estimation, he'll get what's coming to him.\"\n\nJanet sat back in her chair. Her instincts about Kreiss had been more correct than she had realized. Farnsworth was looking at his watch, which was his signal that the interview was over. \"You, on the other hand,\" he said, \"need to forget about making any more calls to Washington, okay? It'll be a lot better for you, all around. And for me, and for probably everyone in this office. Are we clear on that, Janet?\"\n\nShe nodded. Clear as a fire bell, she thought. An image of Edwin Kreissflitted through her mind: coiled silently in that rocking chair, those deep-set gray-green eyes like range finders when he looked at her. Crazy man or fanatic? She exhaled carefully. The few spooks she had met from that other world across the Potomac River, military and civilian, had mostly been pasty-faced bureaucrats. Kreiss was apparently from the sharp end of the spear. \"Yes, sir,\" she said. \"Got it.\"\n\n\"Knew you would,\" Farnsworth said with a fatherly smile. \"You have a great day.\"\n\nJanet went back to her cubicle, grabbing some coffee on the way. The coffee had a slightly stale, oily smell to it, which was typical of the afternoon batch, but she felt the need for a jolt of caffeine.\n\nBilly was still snoring quietly in the next cubicle when Janet sat down at her desk. She was surprised to see a yellow telephone message indicating that a Dr. Kellermann, of the headquarters Counseling Division, wanted to talk to her. Whoops, she thought. Their deputy dog had called Farnsworth but probably had not canceled Janet's original query. She looked at her watch. It was 3:1.5. On a Friday.\n\nShe thought about it. Farnsworth had made things pretty clear: Back out. And yet, she could not get Edwin Kreiss out of her mind. She'd been in southwest Virginia for a year and a half, and had met absolutely zero truly interesting men in Roanoke. She'd been taking some postdoc seminars at Virginia Tech over in Blacksburg to fill the empty hours. And despite the fact that she had married and then divorced an academic before joining the Bureau back in 1991, she knew that she was at least subconsciously hoping she might meet some interesting faculty people. As it turned out, so far at least, everyone old enough to interest her was either married or so completely engrossed in his or her work, S-corporation, or themselves as to bore her to tears. After her first few appearances in the local fitness center, a couple of the married agents in the office had made it clear they wouldn't mind a fling, but she had a firm rule about both married men and dating other agents. It wasn't that Kreiss stirred her romantically, but he sure as hell was interesting.\n\nShe decided to take Kellermann's call. Just to be polite, of course. The case was still theirs, technically, wasn't it? Maybe Kellermann had something that could keep it here in the field. She looked around the office. Talbot wasn't in. It was Friday afternoon; nobody would get back to Farnsworth with the fact that she had called this late in the day.\n\nShe dialed the number. A secretary put her through. \"Dr. Kellermann,\" a woman's voice said. Janet identified herself.\n\n\"Ah, yes, Dr. Carter. Brianne Kellermann. I was Helen Kreiss's counselor. How can I help you?\"\n\nThe voice was educated and kind, and Janet was momentarily flattered to be called doctor again. Here, she was just called Carter. She briefly described the case, then asked if Dr. Kellermann had any opinions, based on her sessions with Kreiss's ex-wife, that might bear on the case.\n\n\"Please, call me Brianne,\" Kellermann said. \"And I'd need to think about that. I need to consider Mrs. Kreiss's privacy.\"\n\n\"I understand that, Brianne,\" Janet said. \"Although she is, of course, deceased.\" She waited for a reply to that, but Kellermann didn't say anything. \"And I should tell you that this case is being sent up to MP because we haven't uncovered any evidence that there has been a crime here\u2014these kids might well have just boogied off in search of spotted owls, you know?\"\n\n\"Let's hope so. But technically, they are missing? I mean, there's no evidence the other way, is that what you're saying?\"\n\n\"Correct. There are three sets of parents involved, and they had no indication that the kids were just going to take off. Given that these kids were senior engineering students, I think it's highly unlikely that they did just take off. But\u2014\"\n\n\"And your boss is looking at his budget and wants you to move on.\"\n\nJanet smiled. This doc knew the score. \"Right. Which I can understand, of course. Even down here in the thriving metropolis of Roanoke, we've got plenty to do.\"\n\nThere was a pause on the end of the line, and Janet wondered if it was Dr. Kellermann's turn to smile. She decided to fill in the silence. \"I'm really calling because one of the parents is Edwin Kreiss. I'm actually more interested in him than in Helen Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Who is now deceased, of course,\" Kellermann said, as if reminding herself.\n\n\"Yes. I understand she remarried before the plane crash.\"\n\n\"Yes, she did. So your interest is really in what Mrs. Kreiss may have said prior to divorcing Edwin Kreiss. Do you suspect he has something to do with the three students' disappearance?\"\n\nJanet hesitated. If she said yes, she'd have some leverage she didn't have now. \"Actually? No. But one of the things I'm learning here in the field is to pull every string, no matter how unlikely.\"\n\n\"I understand, Janet. May I call you Janet? And since this case goes back awhile\u2014I think it was 1989 or even '88\u2014let me review my files, think about it, and get back to you, okay?\"\n\nJanet hesitated. Get back to me when? she thought. As of Monday, the case officially went north. Well, in for a penny. . .\n\n\"That would be great, Brianne. Send me an E-mail when you're ready to talk, and I'll get in touch.\"\n\n\"I'll do that, Janet. Although I may not have much for you. There's the problem of confidentiality, and my focus is usually on the spouse I'm trying to help, not the other party. That way, we can move beyond blame, you see, and on to more constructive planes.\"\n\nJanet rolled her eyes, spelled out her E-mail address, and hung up. She sat back in her chair. She'd given Kellermann her direct E-mail address to avoid any more phone message forms on her desk. Okay, she thought, but let's say Kellermann goes to her boss, who tells her that Roanoke has been told to put the Kreiss matter back in its box. How would she explain her call if Farnsworth asked? Kellermann contacted her _before_ Farnsworth had called her off? She was only being polite in returning the call? Billy, that well-known Communist, did it?\n\nThe Communist woke up with a snort and some throat-clearing noise. He saw Janet.\n\n\"Hey, good-looking,\" he said. \"How do you get a sweet little old lady to yell, 'Fuck'?\"\n\n\"Billy\u2014\"\n\n\"You get another sweet little old lady to yell, 'Bingo!'\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Hey, Billy, why don't you get some of this wonderful coffee and let me run this missing college kids case by you?\"\n\nBrowne McGarand approached the smokeless powder-finishing building from the east side of the complex, staying in the shadows as he walked through the twilight. He had parked his truck well off the fire road that branched to the left off the main entrance road, then had hiked a mile south-west until he intercepted the railroad cut. From there, he had turned northwest, walking along the single track until he reached the security gates that bridged the rail line. When the installation had been shut down, the gates had been padlocked and further secured with metal bars welded top and bottom across, in case someone cut the chains and locks. Browne had left all the bars, chains, and locks on the exterior gate in place. Instead, he had used a portable cutting-torch rig to cut through the tack welds that married the chain-link fence to the round stock frame of the gates. By undoing one bolt, he was now able to lift a corner flap of the chain-link mesh and simply step through.\n\nThere was a second set of gates fifty feet inside, to match the double security fence that surrounded the entire 2,400 acres of the Ramsey Arsenal. These had been locked but not welded, and here he had cut down and replaced the rusty padlock with a rusty one of his own. The Ramsey Arsenal, which was really an explosives-manufacturing complex, had been in caretaker status for almost twenty years. A local industrial-security firm made periodic inspections. He had watched them often, but their people made all their security and access checks from _inside_ the inner perimeter. More importantly, with the exception of the main gates, they never physically got out of their truck, choosing simply to drive around and look at everything from the comfort of their air conditioning.\n\nHe shifted the backpack with the girl's supplies down off his back and onto the ground. The water bottles made it heavy. He unlocked the inner gates, slid the right one back a few feet on its wheels, and stepped through with the pack. He closed the gate but did not lock it. Directly ahead lay the main industrial area, which covered almost one hundred acres. The complex consisted of metal and concrete buildings large and small, many connected by overhead steam and cooling water piping. There were mixing and filling sheds built down in blast-deflection pits, chemical-storage warehouses, metal liquid-storage tanks, the cracking towers of the acid plant, rail- and truck-loading warehouses, and the hulking mass of a dormant power plant with its one enormous stack. The complex was the size of a small town, behind which slightly more than two thousand acres of trees concealed the finished ammunition-storage bunkers. The rail line, a spur of the Norfolk & Western main line that ran through Christiansburg, immediately branched out into sidings that pointed into the complex in six different directions.\n\nHe checked his watch. It was almost sundown. There was just enough light to see where he was going. He did not want to use his flashlight until he was well into the maze of buildings and side streets of the industrial area. The only sounds came from his boots as he walked down the main approach road. A slight breeze stirred dead leaves in the gutters. The largest buildings flanked the main street, which ran from the admin building down to the power plant four blocks away. A series of pipe frames in the shape of inverted U's gave the main street a tunnel-like appearance. At fifty-foot intervals, there were large hinged metal plates in the street, measuring twenty feet on a side. The plates gave access to what had been called \"the Ditch,\" which in reality was a concrete tunnel into which large batches of toxic liquids could be dumped quickly in the event a reaction went wrong. All the buildings were locked and shuttered, and, for the most part, empty. Each building had a white sign with a name and building designation reference number for the use of the security company. With the exception of the power plant, all of the machinery had long since been taken away.\n\nHe reached the nitroglycerine-fixing building. He thought about the girl as he walked toward the building, trying to figure out how she played into his grand scheme. He had only mild regret about the two boys who had been killed by the flash flood. In any event, many more strangers were going to die. The girl and her friends were just a few more innocent bystanders. In the six months that he had been producing the hydrogen, no one had ever intruded into the Ramsey industrial complex. There were long-standing rumors in the nearby towns that Ramsey had produced chemical weapons during World War II. Even a hint that there might be some nerve gas still locked away in the deep bunkers tended to keep people out of the facility, and such rumors had never been officially discouraged by the Army. It was all bunk, of course. The plant had been one of several GOCO facilities: government-owned, contractor-operated by various commercial companies to manufacture artillery propellant and warhead fillers for the Army.\n\nHe could not imagine what the three kids had been doing here, but Jared's traps had done their job. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if the flash flood had taken all three of them. But he could not bring himself to execute her, even though she had seen their faces. In the back of his mind, he thought she might actually become useful down the road, when he got closer to Judgment Day. That was how he liked to think of it: a day of reckoning, with him and his grandson delivering those agents of Satan into God's iron hands for summary judgment.\n\nIt was much darker now. He slowed and then moved sideways into the shadow of a loading dock and sat down to await full darkness. The concrete felt warm against his back. He always did this when he came in: sat down, listened and watched. Made very, very sure no one had followed him in. He closed his eyes and prayed for the strength to carry on, to go through with his mission of retribution. They had manufactured nearly three-quarters of the hydrogen, and the pressure in the truck was starting to register into the double digits for the first time. Not much longer. All they needed was the rest of the copper, and Jared said he had found a new source. There was plenty of acid, thank God. He opened his eyes and listened. There was nothing but the night wind and the ticking sounds of the metal roofs and the piping towers cooling in the darkness. Time to go.\n\nThere were two doors on the nitro building: one large segmented-steel hanging door big enough to admit a truck or railcar, the other a human-sized steel walk-through door. The building's sign was still legible in the gloom: NITRO FIXING. He struck the smaller door once with his fist.\n\n\"Put on the blindfold,\" he ordered.\n\nHe waited for a minute, then unlocked the padlock, removed it, and pushed the door open. The interior of the building was a single huge room, which now was in near-total darkness. With his eyes fully night-adapted, he could just make out the outline of the skylights far above. He could also just see the girl's face in the middle of the room, a pale blur of white hovering above the dark pile of blankets. He pushed the base of the door with his foot so that it swung all the way back against the concrete wall and then turned on the flashlight, fixing the girl's face in its blinding beam. She flinched but said nothing. The blindfold was in place, as he had ordered. The remains of the last food delivery were right by the door. He flipped the light around the open shop floor, illuminating each corner. Metal foundation plates that looked like the stumps in a cutover forest glinted back at him. The room smelled of old concrete, nitric acid, and a hint of sewage. He set the flashlight onto the floor, pointing at the girl.\n\nHe slid the backpack in and emptied it out on the floor. A roll of toilet paper, six plastic bottles of water, two deli-style sandwiches, two apples, and a Gideon's Bible. He picked up the flashlight and swept it around the building again, being careful to keep it low, away from the skylights. He put it back down on the floor so that the beam again pointed at the girl. Then he picked up the bag of trash by the floor and stuffed it into the backpack. She never moved, sitting cross-legged on the blankets as if she was meditating. He had never spoken to her, beyond the command to put on the blindfold, and she had never spoken to him.\n\nHe looked at her for a moment. She appeared to be well made, which was why he had stopped letting Jared bring the food. Jared was not entirely trustworthy when it came to women, a function, no doubt, of his youth. They had prayed together on Jared's womanizing problem several times, but he kept an eye on Jared just the same. He admired the girl's stoicism. She had to be strong, not to whimper and beg and carry on when he came. She must have a great deal of inner fortitude, he thought. The Bible would help sustain that. He should have brought her one a long time ago.\n\nHe picked up the light, swept the room one more time, and then backed out, turning the light off before he closed the steel door. His night vision was gone, of course, but he could put the lock back on and snap it shut without seeing it. He sat down on the steps leading to the door and closed his eyes, letting his other senses scan the surrounding area. Even after all these years, the air in the complex was tainted with the acrid scent of chemicals, as if decades' worth of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, ammonia, mercury, and a host of esters and alcohols had permanently stained the air. It had undoubtedly stained the ground, which was why the whole place was now sealed off. He wondered if all those people fishing that creek below the arsenal had any idea of what was sleeping in the sands of the creek bed, courtesy of some frantic flushes into the Ditch.\n\nHe opened his eyes and the shadows assumed shape as buildings again in the dark. The security company's truck would come tomorrow, even though it would be Saturday. Their contract required them to do at least two weekend checks a month, and it had been two weeks. Which is why he had doped the apples. She should be drowsy and sleep through most of the day. The security people were definitely lowest-bidder types: lazy and incompetent. They never even got out of their little truck. They just drove around the complex for an hour and looked out the windows and then went back out the main gates. He had toyed with the idea of doing something to them, perhaps just before Judgment Day. They deserved to be punished for not doing their jobs.\n\nHe got up, picked up the pack, and started back. The girl did not know anything, other than that they were here, presumably doing something illegal, or they wouldn't have taken her captive. He would have to decide what to do with her. In truth, if she could not contribute to the mission in some way, before or after, he could always just leave her. The walls of the nitro building were three feet thick, reinforced concrete. She would never be found.\n\n## CHAPTER V\n\nJust before dawn on Saturday, Edwin Kreiss parked his pickup truck at the end of a fire road on the eastern edge of the Ramsey Army Arsenal. He shut it down, slid down the windows to listen, and waited. He had spent most of Friday looking for the arsenal, which, considering that it took up a couple of thousand acres, had not been as easy as he had anticipated. The state road map, which showed the installation fronting 1-81 east of Christiansburg, was wrong. Unwilling to be remembered in Christiansburg for asking questions, he'd gone to the public library in the town of Ramsey and found a single book on the history of the arsenal. The reference librarian had told him the Ramsey Arsenal had been shut down for nearly twenty years.\n\nHe'd then found the main entrance south of town, but the intersection that led to what he assumed was a main gate was blocked off with concrete-filled barrels that had obviously been there for a long time. After that, he had followed every paved road, dirt road, and fire lane that seemed to point in toward the installation, trying to construct his own map. Every access that ran up against the arsenal ended the same way\u2014in a firebreak and a tall double chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top, festooned with signs warning that this was a U.S. government restricted area and also a federal toxic-waste site. When he found what he assumed was a rail spur into the installation, he parked the truck out of sight and walked along the rusting rails for nearly two miles before seeing double gates. Assuming there would be surveillance, he had not approached the gates, but backtracked to his truck and continued with his mapmaking of the perimeter.\n\nNow he was parked within two hundred yards of the spot he felt was the most discreet way into the reservation, the intersection of the security fences and a wide, quiet creek flowing out of the interior of the installation. The creek had been routed under the fences through a concrete conduit five feet in diameter that slanted down from the higher ground of the installation. There had been a heavy rebar grating out on the exterior side of the tunnel. It had looked intact, until he inspected it and found that the part below the surface of the water had long since rusted away. The creek widened considerably when it came out of the reservation, and the deep pool below the conduit showed evidence of being a local fishing hole, despite all the TOXIC-WASTE SITE signs decorating the fences.\n\nAccording to the book, the arsenal encompassed about 2,400 acres, but the industrial heart of it appeared to be much smaller than that, if the pictures in the book were accurate. The bulk of the installation's acreage was occupied by the extensive bunker fields, where the Army's freshly minted ammunition had been stored. At least that's what the book implied; one never knew what other things the government might have secreted out here on a restricted area in the southwestern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The place was sufficiently remote and secure as to contain damn near anything. He didn't care about munitions; he wanted to know if the kids had ever come here. There had been no mention in the book of any Site R. He had considered walking the entire perimeter, to see if he could find any better prospects for easy access, but doing that covertly would entail at least several days. No, he had concluded, it was more important to get inside and do his looking there, where, if the kids had run into trouble, he might find signs of it. _If_ this was the place, of course. Knowing his chances were slim to begin with, he sighed and got out. It was better than brooding in the cabin, and a lot more than the Bureau had done.\n\nBirds were beginning to stir in the trees, but there was still little light. The mountains to the east would mask the direct sunrise for another hour and a half yet. The sky was clear and it was almost cold, in the low fifties. If there were Saturday fishermen coming, he should have at least an hour to get through the one very visible access point: the tunnel. He stripped off his shoes, jeans, and shirt and slipped into the wet suit: bottom, top, hood, mask, and boots. He put his street clothes back into the truck and took out a sealed waterproof duffel bag, which had a short lanyard ending in a snap attached to one end. He locked up the truck, put the keys in the exhaust pipe, and then headed for the pool.\n\nThe water was slightly colder than the air, but his only exposure was the skin of his face. He paddled out to the lip of the tunnel, towing the bag behind him. It was dark in the tunnel as he pushed the bag under the rusting teeth of the rebar grate, and then he ducked under and pulled himself up into the stream flowing over the lip of the tunnel. The concrete was slippery with old moss and he immediately found himself sliding backward, catching himself at the last moment against the top half of the grating. The structure swayed ominously, dropping bits of rusted metal all over him. He got one arm onto dry concrete on the side of the tunnel and worked his way back in, away from the grate. He then crawled on all fours through the stream, towing the bag behind him. The other end of the tunnel was about 150 feet away, visible as a pale circle of light against the blackness in the tunnel. He had to fight his way past a tree snag that was jammed across the tunnel about halfway in. Something dropped from the snag and went slithering past him in the dark water, but he pressed on. He knew that a snake's first instinct would be to get away from him. What he didn't know was whether or not the grate on the other end was intact.\n\nThere wasn't a grate at all. The tunnel opening gave onto a concrete-sided high-walled penstock shaped like a broad funnel in reverse. The creek came into the penstock via a waterfall at the far end. He spied a set of rusting steel rungs embedded in the concrete to one side, and he sloshed across the shallow water to get to the ladder. Once up on dry ground, he sat quietly for ten minutes, absorbing his surroundings. He was in a densely wooded area inside the security perimeter. The penstock appeared to be the only man-made structure other than the fences. He scanned the fences in the dawn light for cameras, but did not see any. He had checked the external fence during his reconnaissance yesterday for signs of electrification but had found no evidence of any wiring, not even alarm wires.\n\nHe pulled the duffel bag closer. He extracted a towel and a smaller, camouflaged bag. He stripped out of the diving gear, toweled off, and put all the diving gear into the smaller bag. Since he planned to make his daylight surveillance of the arsenal covertly, he had brought a crawl suit, into which he slipped quickly to avoid becoming chilled. The crawl suit was a one-piece camouflaged jumpsuit, which had padded knees, shoulders, and elbows, a wide elasticized waist, and elasticized arm and leg joints. The fabric at the back of his knees and under his arms was a breathable nylon mesh. The chest and upper back areas had segmented black plastic bands running vertically from just below his collarbone to a line level with his rib cage. The bands were made of Kevlar body armor and were separated by raised vertical strips of Velcro. There were tiny penlights sewn into the wrist cuffs on each arm.\n\nNext, he pulled on a set of dark green high-topped boots, which were lined outside with Kevlar filament mesh to guard against snakebite. They had articulated steel ridges running vertically over a layer of rubber reaching all the way to the top of his calves. The soles were also rubber, with built-in steel shanks and heel cups. The boots were secured with four Velcro straps, and there was a built-in covered knife sheath on the left boot and a covered holster for wire cutters on the right. There were climbing studs embedded into heavy leather pads on the inside of each boot.\n\nNext out of the bag came two flat mottled green packs, one for his chest and one for his back. Each pack was constructed of nylon netting with Velcro attachment pads. One contained two days' worth of food, the other his trekking equipment. He put on the backpack first, then the chest pack. The two packs were connected with Velcro straps under his armpits, preventing them from hobbling around.\n\nHe then pulled a lightweight camouflaged hunter's hood over his head, face, and neck. The hood was also mottled black and green, and heavily padded on top. It revealed only his eyes. His gloves were dark gray gauntlets that were made of cotton, lined outside with Kevlar mesh. He used a built-in bladder pump to inflate partially a two-inch cuff around both forearms, and then he attached a water bladder around his waist. He had not brought a gun; he rarely ever carried or used a gun. The last item out of the bag was a dull black telescoping titanium rod, which he extended to four feet in length before setting the locks. The rod had a broad hook topped by a black bulb on one end and a sharp spear point on the other.\n\nHe took the bags a hundred yards upstream of the penstock, then climbed up the bank to a knoll above the stream. The larger bag contained a low-profile camouflaged one-man tent, a lightweight sleeping bag, four military long-storage rations, a water-purification tube, and some cooking gear if he needed to stay longer. He sealed and then hid both bags in the middle branches of the largest pine tree on the knoll, then melted back into the woods and sat down to watch and listen for a few minutes. He could see the far edges of the fishing pool through the fences in the growing light, but he was confident that no one around the pool would be able to see him, even once the sun came up. He had seen no evidence around the inside penstock area that anyone else had come through the tunnel recently. Besides, Lynn hated confined spaces, so if the kids had come to the arsenal, it wasn't likely they had come through that tunnel. On the other hand, a creek this big probably did not originate within the restricted area, which meant there had to be another water cut through the fence, perhaps over on the higher, western side of the reservation. The creek appeared to run east-west.\n\nHis plan was to follow the south bank of the creek all the way across the arsenal and to look for signs of recent human intrusion along the way. If that effort turned up nothing, he would follow the north bank back and then cut over into the industrial area, which was north of the creek. He wasn't even puffing after the exertion of getting through the tunnel and getting set up in the crawl suit, which was a good sign. He was not in the shape he'd been when he was active, but he hadn't gone entirely soft, either. Except in the head, maybe, he thought. Those two agents had warned him against interfering, and he knew they were right. But since they weren't actually doing anything, he didn't feel too bad about it. He also knew that he might not like what he found. He took one last look around the pool area and then started west into the woods.\n\nBrowne McGarand sat in what had been the main control room of the power plant, watching the band of morning sunlight advance across the control room's wall from the skylights. He was keeping an eye on the pressure gauge of the operating hydrogen generator, which was a five-foot-high glass-lined stainless-steel retort into which he had put a sponge of copper metal. Suspended above the retort was a glass container of nitric acid, which was dripping down a glass tube at a controlled rate into the retort. The nitric acid combined with the copper to produce a slag of copper-nitrite and pure hydrogen gas. The reaction was exothermic, which required that the bottom of the retort be encased in a large tub of cold water to draw off heat. When the pressure in the retort rose to five pounds per square inch, a check valve lifted in its discharge line. The physical movement of the check valve activated a pressure switch, which, in turn, closed a contact connecting a small gas-transfer pump to its power supply. The pump drew the hydrogen gas out of the retort and pumped it through the wall into the tank of a propane truck that was parked in the maintenance bay next to the control room. When the pressure in the retort dropped back down to three pounds, the check valve reseated, shutting off the transfer pump, and then the whole process would wait for hydrogen pressure to rebuild in the retort.\n\nFive pounds of copper took about two hours to produce as much hydrogen as it was going to make. Once the reaction began to decay, indicated by a steady drop in temperature, Browne would open valves to bring a second retort on line while he replenished the first one. He would don a respirator, divert the discharge line of the pump into the atmosphere of the control room, and operate the gas-transfer pump with a manual switch until a small vacuum was established on the retort. He would then close all the transfer valves by hand. He would wait, watching the gauge to make sure that it didn't creep back into the positive pressure range. Once certain that the reaction had stopped, he would open a vacuum-breaker valve on the retort, and then the main cover. He would remove the slag residue using tongs and rubber gloves, add five more pounds of metal, and close up the retort. He would run a short air purge on the retort, using the transfer pump again, until he had onee more established a small vacuum in the retort vessel. Then he would start the nitric-acid drip going again.\n\nIt was slow, painfully slow. But it was a fairly safe way to make hydrogen, and, ultimately, an absolutely untraceable bomb. He had read with great interest all the news reporting on the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, and he knew all about the authorities' increasing scrutiny of all materials that had even the slightest explosive potential. This was why Browne had elected to make a hydrogen-gas bomb instead of using conventional explosives. And the container, well, that was going to be the really clever part. After nearly forty years of being a chemical engineer, assembling his little production lab had not required an elaborate scheme. The retorts he'd bought from a lab that had gone out of business. He'd obtained the small gas pump, as well as the larger one that would be required later to pressurize the truck fully, from a refrigeration and air-conditioning catalog. The small diesel generator, which putted away inside one of the two steam generators out in the boiler hall, was a Wal-Mart special. The rest of the hydrogen setup was conventional plumbing and catalog instrumentation, built into the existing piping of the power plant's boiler-water treatment and testing lab.\n\nJared had stolen the propane truck, with Browne's help. They'd hit a West Virginia propane company's lot one rainy night. While Browne kept watch, Jared hot-wired the truck and drove it away. They'd taken it to the arsenal and parked it out of sight down a fire lane close to the front gates. The next time the security truck came in, Jared had been waiting. The guards were in the habit of leaving the front gate unchained while they did their tour, which allowed Jared to drive the truck in once they were down in the industrial area. He'd hidden it in an empty warehouse until the security people had finished, and then he and Browne had maneuvered it into the power plant maintenance bay. They'd let the propane in the truck boil off to the outside air through its delivery hose for a week before sealing up the maintenance bay again and cleaning the truck tank and putting in new seals.\n\nThe pump came on, making a small racket in the room. Browne worried about the noise, and he knew the bigger pump would be even louder. He walked over to the interior control room door, which had a window in the upper half, and peered out into the cavernous steam-generation hall. The plant was about one-third the size of a commercial power station, but the two boilers were still forty feet high. He was pretty sure that the pump noise could not penetrate to the outside of the power station building, but he made frequent checks. His concern was that one day he would find a couple of deer hunters or college kids standing out there, poking around to see what that noise was. Just like the ones who had drowned in the creek.\n\nBrowne alone ran the hydrogen generator, working at night and on weekends. Jared, his older grandson, provided security. Jared had done his job well. Of his two grandsons, Jared was the one who looked most like his father, William. He was of medium height but strongly built. He worked as a telephone repairmen for the local telephone company, and he had been helping Browne with the bomb-building project right from the beginning. Browne knew that Jared held no great affection for his long-gone father, but, like his grandfather, Jared was sympathetic to the beliefs of the Christian Identity. He hated the government and all its works.\n\nWilliam's death during the Mount Carmel incident had just about shattered Browne. He had loved that boy in spite of everything that had happened\u2014his disastrous teenage marriage, his slut of a wife running off like that, leaving William, and ultimately Browne, to raise the two kids. Jared had been a handful, no doubt about that, but Kenny, Jared's younger brother, had been born mildly retarded, and that had been really difficult. Although he had been angry at the time, he later came to sympathize with his son when he finally bailed out of Blacksburg. A high school education, two squalling kids, the cancer that rose up right about then and claimed Browne's wife, Holly\u2014well, William never had a chance. Browne had had such high hopes. William had been bright enough to go on to college, maybe even Virginia Tech, right there in Blacksburg. With Browne's connections at the arsenal, William would have been a shoo-in for a high-paying job, except, of course, that the goddamned government had seen fit to close the arsenal, hadn't it? Damn near wiped out the town.\n\nJared had survived, which just about described it. He had been a dutiful, if resentful, child after both his mother and father left home. Raised in the orbit of his increasingly embittered grandfather, Jared had been a plodder. He had never talked to Browne about how he felt about being deserted by his parents, and Browne, with troubles of his own, had never raised the issue. He did often wonder how it might have all turned out if William had had a better shot at life. He had been such a great kid, full of life, friendly, easygoing, always trailing a clutch of giggling females, smart enough not to have to work very hard in school, and the _apple_ of Browne's eye. Jared wasn't much like his father, except in one respect: He went through life seemingly obsessed with women. But Jared liked to live dangerously\u2014he only fooled around with married women. Browne thought that this was probably Jared's way of guaranteeing that he would never repeat his own father's sorry family history.\n\nBrowne sighed as he thought about William and what might have been. All of Browne's hopes for the future seemed to have dissolved at the same time, right along with the arsenal. Jared was willing to help with Browne's revenge, not because he loved and missed his father, but because he heartily approved of the idea of the bomb, its target, and especially the timing of it, in the year 2000. Jared's other interest was what Browne called \"the lunatic fringe,\" the militias and some of the more apocalyptic religious groups. One of Browne's continuing worries was that Jared would run his mouth to some of his dumb-ass militia friends over in West Virginia, but so far, security seemed to be intact. Jared was out there now, somewhere nearby, watching for the security people to begin their windshield tour.\n\nThe pump shut off to await the next pressure buildup of hydrogen. Browne crossed the control room and went into the maintenance bay via the connecting door. The power station was the one building on the installation where the government had not stripped out all the equipment. Two four-story-high steam boilers and all their auxiliary equipment still filled the open hall on the other side of the control room, and two locomotive-sized turboelectric generators crouched silently in the generating hall, beyond the boiler hall. Two twenty-four-inch cooling mains, now empty, used to bring water up from a reservoir back in the bunker farm to cool the main steam condensers. But it was all quiet now, quiet and secure, which made it the perfect place for what he was doing, especially since he knew the place like the back of his hand. Browne had been chief chemical engineer of the entire facility up until they shut it down two decades ago.\n\nHe opened the main pressure gauge sensing line and saw that the pressure in the truck tank was unchanged from yesterday's reading. He prayed there wasn't a leak somewhere, then reassured himself that any leak would have emptied the tank long before now. No, it was just going to take time to fill that huge volume. Browne nodded to himself. The mills of God were grinding away here, but they would indeed grind exceedingly fine when the time came. He went back into the control room. It was almost time for the security people to make their tour. When this cycle was done, he would shut off the electric generator until Jared came to tell him they had come and gone.\n\nEdwin Kreiss moved through the woods like a shadow, gliding silently from tree to tree and cover to cover, using the warning cries of birds as his cue to stop and listen. He blended perfectly with all the vertical shadows among the trees. His rubber boots made no sound in the pine needles carpeting the ground. He was staying fifty feet inside the tree line on the south side of the creek, which was getting narrower as he followed it west back across the arsenal. He had crossed two fire lanes and two gravel roads so far, but he had seen no evidence that there had been any persons or vehicles on any of them in some time. He was warm in the jumpsuit, but not overly so, and he was handling with ease the gentle rise in elevation as he moved westward. It was nearly 11:00 A.M., and the sun was bright, creating pin-wheels of light down through the pines.\n\nSo far, he had seen several deer, a raccoon, dozens of squirrels, and one rattlesnake sunning itself on a log. The creek was bordered on his side by a wide expanse of tall green grass, which was littered with branches and other debris, indicating that there had been at least one flash flood in the past month. The north bank, slightly higher and undercut about four feet, showed a tangle of roots and burrows against a face of red clay. Where the terrain allowed, he crept out of the forest and down to the creek bank to examine the watercourse for the signs of human life that seemed to litter every creek and river in America: plastic bottles, polystyrene hamburger wrappers, and aluminum cans. But this creek was pristine by comparison. The water was cold and clear, with waves of moss undulating on the stony bottom.\n\nThe only time he had to break cover was to cross a ravine that joined the creek from the south. It contained a tiny feeder brook, small enough to hop over. He crept down through the grass to the creek, stood up to jump it, and dropped back down into the grass. As he was scrambling up the other side, he thought he heard a vehicle off to his right. He dropped flat into the grass and made like a lizard, crawling carefully on all fours into the tree line at the top of the ravine, where he subsided into the pine needles to listen. He remembered doing this on the Agency training farm down near Warrenton: head down, face down, the smell of the dirt accentuating his other senses.\n\nAt first, he could hear nothing but the sound of a slight breeze soughing through the pines, but then he heard it again: the sound of a vehicle moving in low gear, far off to the right, beyond the pines lining the opposite bank. He lifted himself enough to see over his cover and was just able to catch a glimpse of a single chimney stack about a quarter of a mile or so to the northwest of his position. It looked like the concrete stack of a power plant, although only the very top was showing above the trees. I must be nearing the industrial area, he thought. He closed his eyes and concentrated, again detecting the far-off sound, a sound that came and went, as if the vehicle was changing direction constantly. Assuming it wasn't a trick of sound carrying across empty countryside, he figured there was definitely someone else on the reservation. The good news was that they were not getting any closer. The bad news was that he was not alone.\n\nHe shifted farther into the trees and the sound faded. He checked his wrist compass and then worked his way west through the woods for another fifteen minutes. He turned north to check on the creek and found that it was veering away from him toward a hard dogleg turn to the north. He moved back to his right in the woods until he came to the edge of the trees. He crouched behind a holly bush and examined his situation. Between him and the creek were fifty yards of waist-high bright green grass. He probed the ground with the rod\u2014it was soft. The bright green meant that it was growing in totally saturated ground; he would have to be careful of quicksand and bogs.\n\nAt that moment, he felt the hair on the back of his neck lift. He flattened down onto the ground, the fabric of his face hood catching on the sharp spines of some holly leaves.\n\nHe was being watched. He was certain of it.\n\nHe kept perfectly still and reviewed his movements of the past fifteen minutes. The only open ground he had crossed was that ravine. Had he been spotted then? The woods noises remained normal; there was no sudden shrieking of jays or chatter of squirrels to announce that someone or _something_ was behind him. Which meant that the watcher was probably on the other side of the creek. He waited for fifteen more minutes, listening carefully, and then began to crawl backward, flat on his belly, deeper into the woods. If there were someone watching from the other side, his movement back into the forest should be invisible.\n\nHe had seen something else when he tested the green grass area. Right at the elbow of the creek's turn, there was a massive twenty-foot-high pile of debris: whole tree trunks, shattered limbs, mud-balled roots, large rocks, and desiccated bushes, all caught up on the remains of a giant hardwood that had come down across the creek a long time ago. The huge logjam extended into the woods on his side for a hundred feet or so. On the north side, it had dammed the creek, which was now leaking through the tumbled mess in several small waterfalls.\n\nHe thought about that pile and wondered if he should cross to the north bank\u2014there were bound to be snakes in that mess, and he needed to stay in visual contact with the creek. But there was no cover out there; he would have to crawl through that tall grass to the creek, and if someone was watching, they'd see the grass moving. He lay still for a few minutes, but the background noises did not change. He moved again, forward this time, but at a slight angle to the way he had come. He was aiming for the root ball of a downed pine tree that was fifty feet west of his original position, the place where he had sensed a possible watcher. He moved slowly, still making like a lizard, placing one hand and foot on the soft ground before moving the other one, inching back to the edge of the tree line. He had heard nothing and seen nothing specific that would indicate surveillance, but he had learned years ago to trust this particular instinct absolutely.\n\nWhen he got to the root ball, he flattened himself down into the hole and then probed the roots with his rod. Sure enough, a copperhead lifted its diminutive triangular head three feet in front of him and tested the air with its tongue. He put the hooked end of the rod right in front of the snake's head and it froze. He tapped the snake's body with the rod and it coiled instantly, its delicate black tongue flickering in and out rapidly as it searched for a target. He angled the rod to line up with the snake's line of strike and waited. The snake also waited, its head making small angular displacements as it tried to form a heat image of whatever was in front of it. He moved the rod down to the ground and tapped it. The snake reset its coil and aimed in the direction of the rod. He raised the rod and jabbed at the snake, which struck at the rod straight on. He jammed the hooked end into the snake's maw and pushed hard, pinning the reptile against a thick root. It thrashed briefly and then stopped fighting, its jaws unlocked and wide open around the metal shaft that was stuck down its gullet. With his other hand, he pulled the knife from his right boot and cut down just behind the snake's head, killing it. He extended the rod and ejected the snake's body to his right.\n\nHe probed the root ball again to see if there were any more nasty surprises, but nothing moved. He checked to see that the snake was actually dead and then eased himself farther down into the hollow where the tree had grown. There was now a slight mound of dirt between him and the creek bed. If he lifted his head, the tops of that green grass were just visible over the rim of the mound. The feeling that someone was watching out there returned. He knew he had to be invisible from the other side, but he sensed that this was not the time to stand up and take a look. Using the hooked end of the rod, he began to cut a small groove into the rim of the dirt mound, working slowly and making sure the rod stayed perfectly horizontal. When he had cut a six-inch-deep groove, he widened the outside of it into an arrow slit. Then he produced a long, thin telescope from his front pack. He pushed it through the groove and out into the first strands of grass.\n\nHe raised his head and the telescope just high enough to see down into the area of the creek bed. Then he scanned the tree line on the opposite bank, inch by inch, degree by degree. The front lens was hooded to prevent reflections, and the sun was partially behind him anyway. He detected nothing in the woods opposite, but the sense of danger was strong now. He turned the scope westward, into the huge pile of the logjam. And then he saw it: a dull patch of color, a few feet inside the tangle of flood debris. He pulled the scope back and flattened himself into the root depression. Then he backed out of the hole and into the deeper cover of the woods, listening carefully and moving slowly enough not to scare up the birds. He angled back to the tree line, ten feet away from the root ball, and put the telescope back to the diamond-shaped eyehole in his head hood. He found the patch of color again and held his breath, hoping that he would not be looking into a set of binoculars. He focused the eyepiece. It was a ball cap, snagged on a branch. He felt the blood coming to his face and his breath catching in his throat. The ball cap was purple, with faded white lettering just barely showing. He thought he could make out one mud-splattered letter, the letter _L._\n\nLynn owned a ball cap like that.\n\nShe wore it all the time, perched high up on her hair, the way the kids did now. That same color. With LHS embroidered on the front, for Langley High School.\n\nHe resisted the impulse to break cover, dash across the fifty yards of open grass, and tear into that tangled mess to retrieve the cap. He forced himself to sit perfectly still instead and deliberately slowed his breathing. It _had_ to be hers. He pointed the telescope again, but now the cap was obscured. He closed his eyes and listened hard. Birds. Breeze. Crickets and other insects. Water splashing along the creek. No more vehicle noises. Now he had a decision to make.\n\nHe could go down there and get that cap, which is what he desperately wanted to do. But if there were people watching, he'd be at their mercy. Or he could wait for dusk. But then, if the watchers had a night-vision device, and they also were willing to wait, he would again be at their mercy. He visualized the area of the creek bed again. It was lower than the surrounding woods. He could wait until it was full dark, when the creek bed would subside into even deeper shadow. A night-vision device was a light amplifier: no light, no vision. Not like the infrared devices he'd used when he was active, which worked on contrast between warm objects and colder background. The hat was just inside the tangle of trees and roots, and just to the left of the leftmost waterfall. He memorized its location, took a deep breath, and began looking for a spot to hole up.\n\nHe decided to climb into the dense bottom branches of a big pine for the rest of the afternoon and wait for sundown. He still couldn't be positive someone was watching, but if they lost patience and came out of hiding, well, that would be all right, too. He couldn't think of a reason for someone to be skulking through the woods on this abandoned installation, unless there was something illegal going on, something that might account for the kids' disappearance. _If_ that was Lynn's hat, he reminded himself. Another part of his brain tried not to think of all the possible ramifications of that last thought. Every hunt was a sequence of decisions: when to move, when to wait, where to watch, and when to sleep, which was as close to motionless as one could get. This was a time for sleep.\n\n* * *\n\nJanet Carter was finishing her lunch when the idea hit her. She had stopped for lunch after her Saturday-morning postdoc seminar at Tech. The place was a vegetarian street caf\u00e9. Janet, a devoted carnivore, visited the nuts and twigs scene once in a while to salve her conscience. The seminars weren't terribly interesting, but at least they filled the beginning of the weekend. Over lunch, she had been thinking about Barry Clark. The kid was an insolent, slovenly pup, and Kreiss undoubtedly had applied exactly the right kind of pressure to make the little shit talk. On the other hand, he was probably still immobilized, and perhaps an unexpected act of kindness on her part might spring something loose. So why not take a pizza over there and see if she could get him to tell her what he had revealed to the headless horseman the other night?\n\nShe gathered up the paper plate and her Coke. It had to have been Kreiss, of course. Big bad bogeyman in the dark; in and out without a trace, and the kid scared shitless in the process, paralyzed physically and mentally by an encounter that probably had taken all of ninety seconds. _Professional_ bogeyman. He must have learned some interesting things from those people at the Agency. She dumped her table trash and went across the street to the pizza place, resisting an urge to get some real food.\n\nTwenty minutes later, she was banging on Clark's door. It took him a few minutes to answer the door, and his appearance hadn't changed much since the other night: dirty T-shirt, baggy shorts, flip-flops. His face was sallow and there were pouches under his eyes. The beginnings of a scraggly red beard covered his face. His arms still hung straight down at his sides, although he could move his hands now. He blinked at her for a moment, long enough for her to get a whiff of the apartment within.\n\n\"What?\" he said, screwing up his face, as if the midday sunlight hurt his eyes.\n\n\"I'm Janet Carter,\" she said. \"Still with the FBI. Brought you a pizza.\"\n\nHe blinked again. He must have been asleep, she thought. \"Felt sorry for you,\" she said. \"Want me to cut it up for you?\"\n\n\"Damn,\" he muttered. \"Yeah. Thanks. But, I mean, like, why?\"\n\nShe took her last deep breath of fresh air, toed the door open, and stepped past him into the apartment. It hadn't improved. \"Leave the door open,\" she called over her shoulder. \"You need the fresh air. Where's a knife?\"\n\nHe followed her across the room. She stopped at the kitchen threshold and let him pry a knife out of the sink. He could pick it up in his fingers but not lift his arm. \"Why don't we just wash that?\" she suggested, taking it from his limp fingers and running it under some hot water. He just stood there. She cut the pizza into thin slices, scraped and washed a plate, and set him up in the single living room chair. She put the plate on a stool in front of him and watched him eat hungrily, bending over the stool and slurping it up like a dog. The light streaming in from the open front door showed more of the mess than she wanted to see.\n\n\"Actually,\" she said, \"that's a bribe.\"\n\n\"Cops can do bribes?\" he said around a mouthful. Now there was a hint of his previous insolence in his eyes. Must be the sudden carbo load, she thought. She no longer wanted any pizza.\n\n\"One-way rule,\" she said. \"We can't _take_ bribes; but we can _do_ bribes, especially for information, see?\"\n\nHe kept chewing while he watched her.\n\n\"I still want to know what you told the headless guy the other night,\" she said.\n\n\"Like I said\u2014\" he began.\n\n\"No, wait See, last time I asked you what he wanted. That was the wrong question. This is a different question. What _did you_ say to _him?_ Exact words.\"\n\nHe sucked another piece of dripping pizza into his mouth. His eyes were definitely wary now, seeking some advantage. She pressed him. \"Look, lemme lay it out for you. If you told him what he wanted to know, he's never coming back, so it won't matter if you tell me. If you _didn't_ give him what he wanted, he will come back, and you'll need me to protect you. _Us_ to protect you.\" She gave him a moment to absorb that \"us.\" \"So, what did you say to him? Exact words?\"\n\nHe studied her face. \"For a fuckin' pizza?\" he said.\n\n\"You're out of your league, Barry. Way the hell out of your league. Think about how big he was. How much stronger he was than you, and that's when you had arms. Now think about other parts of your body, Barry. Soft parts.\"\n\nHe blinked at that, licked his lips, and then sighed.\n\n\"Site R,\" he said. \"He wanted to know where Lynn and the guys went camping. All I knew was Site R. That's what I heard Rip say. They were going to 'break into' Site R. I don't know what that means. I told him that. And I still don't fuckin' know, okay?\"\n\nShe looked at him. \"Okay. And has it ever occurred to you that if you'd told someone this a lot sooner, maybe we'd have found them?\"\n\nHe looked away. Janet got up and left.\n\nJust before sundown, Browne McGarand watched the reaction on the last copper sponge fizzle out. The light coming through the four skylights of the control room was turning sunset red. He shut off the acid drip and was beginning the purge sequence when he heard two distinctive taps on the metal door, followed by two more taps. Jared was back. Browne turned out the single work light, got his flashlight, and went to the control room door. He tapped the door once.\n\n\"It's Jared,\" Jared replied from the other side. They had arranged a duress code when the project began. If Jared ever said, \"It's me,\" Browne would know that Jared was not alone and that he should get out of there through the vehicle bays. Browne opened the door and Jared came through.\n\nHis grandson was a hefty-shouldered man with a large paunch and a heavy black beard. His job with the local telephone company had him spending days by himself checking the more remote lines in the county, where he tended to roadside tree falls, so-called backhoe interrupts, when customers or the other utilities unwittingly dug through a phone line, and feeder-box problems in the isolated cabins and trailers off the main county roads. His clothes always smelled faintly of pine needles and tobacco. Jared was perpetually suspicious, and he had a habit of squinting his eyes at people and things as if he expected them to lunge at him. Browne closed and locked the door and turned the work light back on.\n\n\"The security people stop anywhere?\"\n\n\"Nope. Drove around like always. You could hear their damn radio goin' a block away\u2014some damn rock and roll crap. Windows rolled up with the AC goin'.\" He sniffed. \"Some security.\"\n\n\"Be thankful they're not real professionals,\" Browne said. \"I've always wondered when they might start random building checks.\"\n\n\"Not that pair,\" Jared said, easing his heavy frame into one of the console chairs. \"But we may have us another problem.\"\n\nBrowne finished the purge and began to set up the retort for cleaning. \"What kind of problem?\"\n\n\"You know how sometimes you see somethin' outta the corner of your eye? You wonder if you really seen it or you just imaginin' things?\"\n\nBrowne eyed his grandson. \"Things?\"\n\n\"I was watchin' that there security truck from the rail sidin' control tower. I'd a sworn I saw a man crossin' that little ravine, joins the creek just below that big logjam? You know where I'm talkin' about? You can just see that stretch from the sidin' tower. But somethin' was off about it, what I saw, I mean.\" He shook his head. \"Like he was wearin' a hood or somethin'. That's it\u2014wasn't no face. I don't know. I think I saw it. But maybe not.\"\n\nBrowne rubbed his jaw. \"A man, though? Not a deer or other animal?\"\n\nJared nodded thoughtfully. \"That tall grass out there along the creeks? Looked like he'd been down in that there grass, but had to stand up to jump that brook, comes through there. Then he was gone.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"When the security truck went out to the back bunker area, I went down there, to the north side of the creek. Hid out in the tree line. Waited for a coupla hours, see if he came out of the woods or showed himself somehow. But nothin'. And it didn't _feel_ like there was someone there. Not like when you know there's deer movin' around in there, you know? Birds wasn't yellin'. No bushes were movin', no other noises.\" He rubbed the back of his leg. \"Got into some damn chiggers, I think. Hell, I don't know. Prob'ly nothin'.\"\n\n\"A single individual,\" Browne said as he closed the retort back up. \"Those traps still set?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe we'll skip taking the girl her food tonight. Maybe we'll go out there and see what happens. If she ate those apples I fixed for her, she'll still be out of it anyway.\"\n\n\"You want me to go check on her?\" Jared asked, a little too casually.\n\nBrowne wasn't fooled. \"No, I don't think so, Jared,\" he said. \"Besides, we shouldn't go near the nitro building, especially if there's someone here. He might be here because of those kids going missing. Wouldn't want to just lead him to her, would we, now?\"\n\nJared nodded but said nothing. He continued to rub the back of his leg while Browne closed off all the valves to the truck in the next bay.\n\n\"We've got pressure showing on the truck tank,\" Browne announced, trying to distract Jared from thoughts of the captive girl. Jared didn't need to be messing with that girl. \"From now on, we're building power. But I'm almost out of copper.\"\n\n\"Got me some back in the central office yard,\" Jared said. \"Pallet of cracked switch plates. They're flat. We can grind 'em, or just put 'em in there and use more acid.\"\n\nBrowne nodded. Acid they had, in vast quantities. No government agency would be putting a pattern together on missing copper. He thought about the pressure. Maybe another thirty batches, if they could keep the process going. Pretty soon, they'd have to switch to the big pump. He finished up securing the hydrogen generator.\n\n\"All right. Let's go down there and look around,\" he said. \"Maybe it was just a late-season turkey hunter sneaking around; those guys cammo up pretty good.\"\n\nEdwin Kreiss made his move forty-five minutes after the sun went down behind the ridges to the west of the arsenal. He felt refreshed, having slept for a couple of hours in his hiding place. He had crept out to the tree line just before sundown and again memorized the features in the pile that were closest to the cap. Once darkness just about obscured the opposite tree line, he crept down on his belly through the tall grass, moving directly toward the creek. Mindful of that copperhead, he probed ahead with the rod, parting the grass carefully and probing the spongy earth on either side before slithering forward. The ground was not wet, but it was very soft, with occasional round rocks embedded here and there. It took him ten careful minutes to get down to within six feet of the creek bank, where he stopped to absorb the night sounds around him. His plan was to get into the creek itself and move upstream to the logjam, then get out and crawl sideways until he could retrieve the cap.\n\nThe sky above him was clear. A drone of night insects and frogs had begun and the creek burbled peacefully right ahead. What if it isn't Lynn's cap? Wrong question, his brain told him. What if it _is_ her cap? Then what? He forced himself to concentrate on the ground directly ahead of him. He no longer had the sense that someone was watching up in those trees. Even if someone was watching, no one would be able to see him. Had all that been just a spook on his part? He thought maybe he should cross the creek, go up to the opposite tree line, and check it out for watchers. No. Focus. Get the cap.\n\nHe probed ahead with the rod while he inched toward the creek bank. The grass had a muddy smell. The cuff on his right sleeve hung up on something resistant in the grass. He pulled gently and heard a tiny chinking sound, like metal scraping on a rock. He froze. Metal? He backed up a few inches, turned his head very slowly to look into the darkness with his peripheral vision, but it was almost night now and he couldn't see anything at all. His sleeve was free, so he rolled very carefully to the left and began collapsing the rod down to a two-foot-long staff. Then he pointed it into the grass at his right and began parting the thick stems, moving the rod from side to side, advancing it an inch at a time, until he heard another clink. He put down the rod and snapped on one of his cuff lights, which threw a tiny red beam of light into the base stems of the grass. A sheen of steel reflected back at him. He parted more of the grass to expose the trap and gave a mental whistle. Had he been upright and walking through here, he might have stepped into that thing.\n\nHe considered his position. There were traps along the creek, big steel traps, capable of seizing, if not breaking, a man's leg. He directed the tiny bead of light at the trap again and found the step trigger and the tie-down chain. This trap was much too big for small game: These were mantraps. So why in the hell were there mantraps out here? He carefully rolled the other way and began exploring the bank, going upstream until he found another trap. As long as he came at them low and from the side, they posed no threat. But for anyone walking along the creek, or down to the creek, to cross maybe . . . well. . . Then he wondered if there were any _in_ the creek.\n\nBrowne and Jared walked quietly down the path toward the creek. The ghostly buildings of the industrial area were swallowed up behind them by the dense trees. Jared led, with Browne twenty feet behind him. They did not use lights, having used this path before. Browne trusted Jared's woodcraft instincts; his grandson had been hunting the foothills of the Appalachians since he was a young boy and he was a natural woodsman. Browne was also pretty sure that Jared's skills had more than a little bit to do with his penchant for comforting some of the lonelier women back up in those gray hills. Jared was a big boy now, and if he wanted to take chances like that, it was on his own head. If nothing else, fooling around with some of those mountain women had probably sharpened up Jared's defensive instincts. If Jared thought he'd seen something, then they needed to go take a look down along the creek area. That's where those kids had come in.\n\nJared slowed as the trees bordering the path thinned out. They were getting closer to the banks of the creek. Browne patted the Ruger .44-caliber revolver on his hip and began to pay close attention to his surroundings.\n\nKreiss finally reached the edge of the logjam pile and began to feel around for the bole of the big tree that had impounded all the flood debris in the first place. He was thirty feet away from the creek, moving back toward the trees on the south side of the water. The cap ought to be about six feet south of the root ball on the big tree, maybe five feet off the ground and a foot or so back in the tangle. He found the edge of the root ball and retraced his handholds on the trunk, using the rod to estimate the distance. He didn't want to turn on a cuff light until he thought he was very close. When he was finally in position, he paused to look straight up. It was a dark, moonless night, but there was plenty of starlight streaming down through the clear mountain air. He adapted his eyes to use the starlight by looking first up at the stars and then down and sideways at the top objects in the logjam. When he could make out individual branches and snags, he looked down along the logjam until he could make out the tops of individual trees on the other side of the creek. If there was anyone out here tonight, they'd be over there in those trees, where they could see down into the broad ravine cut by the creek.\n\nHe began to scan the dark mass of tangled debris with his peripheral vision, searching for a lighter contrast among all the roots, limbs, packed leaves, and mangled grasses. When he finally thought he had it, he set a cuff light for the dimmest red setting and pointed it into the tangle. The hat was right there. Keeping the light on, he pushed the rod into the tangle, very slowly so as to make no noise, and snagged the hat. He turned off the light, retrieved the cap, and stuffed it quietly into the chest pack without looking at it. Then he subsided to the ground to listen to the night. The mass of the logjam rose up beside him. It felt like an avalanche, poised to drop on him. The hairs were up on the back of his neck again.\n\nBrowne stood to one side of the dim path. He was just able to make out Jared's silhouette as he stood ten feet behind him. Jared was sweeping binoculars down into the ravine. The wedge of night sky showing through a gap in the trees was clear; the air was cooling fast. He didn't really expect anything to happen tonight; if Jared had seen someone, they were at best long gone and at worst huddled around a camp-fire out in the deep storage area somewhere. For a moment, he had a prickly thought that whoever it was might have already gotten behind them and was even now creeping through the streets of the industrial area. The girl, he thought. Is this about the girl?\n\nJared was moving back in his direction. As always, Browne was amazed that such a heavy man as Jared could move so soundlessly through the woods. Not a twig snapped nor bush swished. He just seemed to get closer and closer, until Browne could smell the cigarette smell on him. But then Jared reached for Browne's left hand. He took it gently, turned it palm up, and jabbed one finger down: He'd seen someone or something, and as best he could tell, there was only one of them out there.\n\nBrowne took Jared's hand. He drew the letter _Won_ Jared's palm with his fingernail, followed by the letter _R,_ meaning, Where exactly is he?\n\nJared took Browne's palm. He drew a wiggly line all the way across it. The creek. Then he bisected that line with the flat of his thumb, twice. The logjam, just below where those kids had drowned. Then he did it again, and where the two lines met, he drew his finger lightly up the logjam line and then jabbed his fingertip right _there:_ south of the creek, on the other side, near the logjam, one individual.\n\nBrowne pulled the heavy pistol and pressed it into Jared's hand. Then he tapped Jared once on the chest and squeezed Jared's hand around the pistol grip, indicating he should take the gun. Then he took Jared's other hand, touched his own chest with it, and then his right ear, tapping Jared's fingertips on his ear two or three times, and then he pointed Jared's arm first to his own face and then off to the right, meaning, You take the gun. I'll go to the right and make noise. Jared nodded in the darkness, turned around, and melted back toward the creek.\n\nBrowne waited until he could no longer see the black shape of his grandson, and then he went off the path to the right, moving silently across the carpet of pine needles. When he judged he was about thirty feet away from the path, he felt around for a large stick, picked it up, took a deep breath, and then began yelling, _\"There he is! Get him!\"_ at the top of his lungs while banging the stick against the trees around him and crashing noisily through the underbrush toward the creek.\n\nKreiss had crawled almost back to the edge of the creek when the hullabaloo broke out in the opposite tree line. He felt a stab of panic before his hunting discipline reasserted itself. Instead of springing into a dead run across the field of high grass, toward the safety of his own tree line, he lunged _toward_ the noise and the creek, even as a heavy bullet smacked the bole of the big downed tree and a booming pistol report assaulted his ears from up on the opposite tree line. He rolled into the creek bed in the direction of the gunshot and made a split-second decision. If the watchers had been there for a long time, they'd expect him to run back the way he'd come, down the creek and then out through the tall grass, right into the mantraps. Instead, he scrambled as close to the undercut north bank as he could get and then slipped to his left under the big tree trunk and into the tangle of the logjam. He ended up lying on his belly in wet sand, with one of the small waterfalls pouring ice-cold water onto his back. Using the rod in his left hand and his fingers on his right hand, he moved sand aside like a giant sea turtle about to lay its eggs on a beach. As he wiggled deeper into the sand, he was able to move farther up under the logjam. With any luck, he could get all the way under it to the stream on the back side and get away, but, either way, they couldn't get a shot at him while he was under all this debris. He kept digging and inching his way forward.\n\nWhen Browne heard the shot, he stopped making noise and stood still by the edge of the tree line, keeping one tree between himself and the creek and waiting for Jared. Obviously, Jared had been confident enough of seeing someone that he'd taken a shot. Then, to Browne's left, a bright white flashlight snapped on, its beam traversing the creek bed from right to left quickly, and then much more slowly. He pulled his own light and began doing the same thing, putting his beam where Jared's wasn't. They searched back and forth along the area of the creek bed, and along the downstream edge of the logjam pile. Browne saw the occasional glint of steel as his beam hit one of the traps. He moved left to join Jared.\n\n\"Well?\" he said.\n\n\"Saw him at the edge of the creek and the logjam,\" Jared said, keeping his voice low. \"Blind once the gun went off. Missed him, though; heard the bullet hit that big tree.\"\n\n\"Can you tell which way he went?\"\n\n\"Into the creek. After that. . .\"\n\nBrowne was silent for a long moment. He stopped his light when it illuminated Kreiss's original path through the tall grass leading down to the creek. \"Well, nothing wrong with your instincts. There was someone out here. Question is, Why?\"\n\n\"Way that grass is flattened down, he was crawlin',\" Jared said. \"Whoever it was, he wasn't huntin'. He was creepin' this place.\"\n\n\"This has to be about those kids, then,\" Browne said. \"No way anyone could know about the other. Right, Jared?\"\n\n\"Not from me anyways,\" Jared said as he flicked the powerful beam up to the opposite tree line, hoping to flash some eyes. Nothing shone back at him. \"So that's bad, then.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is.\"\n\n\"You want to keep looking? Maybe go get the dogs?\"\n\nBrowne thought about it. Jared had three mixed-breed hounds he used for hunting wild pigs, but it would be hours before they could get back here with the dogs. \"No,\" he said. \"I think we should get off the reservation for the night. Maybe leave it alone for a couple of days. In case this was just some guy wandering around. Tonight he's scared. Tomorrow he might bring cops.\"\n\n\"He'd have to admit he broke in here,\" Jared said, handing back the heavy Ruger. \"If this wasn't purposeful, then he'll never come back.\"\n\n\"And if it was. . .\"\n\n\"Then I need to start patrollin'. You stay on the generator; I need to start huntin'.\"\n\nBrowne detected the sound of anticipation in his grandson's voice. Above all else, Jared was a hunter. They made a few more sweeps of the ravine with their Maglites, and then Browne switched his off. He brought out a much smaller version of the big light and used it to guide them back up the path toward the industrial area.\n\nBehind them, down in the ravine, Edwin Kreiss broke through the last of the tangle, pulled himself out onto a dry sandbar, sniffed the night air, and listened. Then he smiled.\n\n## CHAPTER VI\n\nOn Monday morning, Janet Carter talked to Larry Talbot and Billy Smith about what she'd learned from Barry Clark. Billy Smith was manfully trying to stay awake, but there was a steady parade of yawns.\n\n\"Am I mistaken, or didn't the boss have a word with you Friday?\" Talbot said.\n\n\"Yes, he did. Warned me off Edwin Kreiss and this whole case. But as I understand it, we get new info, we make sure it gets into the system. Billy, you finished the transmittal letter for the case file?\"\n\n\"Nope, but I'll have it today,\" Billy said, giving another yawn. \"I need to know which one of you is the official case officer.\"\n\nIf Billy wasn't such a nice man, all this yawning would have me yelling at him, she thought. Talbot, however, made a noise of exasperation.\n\n\"Look, Jan,\" he said. She frowned. She hated being called Jan. \"I remember that kid Clark. Redhead, right? Tuck you' sneer on his face all the time? He's an asshole. He could be telling you anything, or the latest thing off the Dungeon Masters of Doom bulletin board. Leave the fucking thing alone. You want to put the campus cops' report and this Site R stuff into that file, fine. But if Farnsworth finds out you're still messing with this thing, he'll have you doing background investigation interviews on Honduran gardeners until the end of time. Okay? Enough already.\"\n\nJanet acquiesced and slunk back to her cubicle. Billy rose up over the divider.\n\n\"What's the difference between a southern zoo and a northern zoo?\" he asked.\n\nShe waited.\n\n\"A southern zoo has a description of the animal on the front of a cage, along with a recipe.\"\n\nHe winked at her over the divider and then did a down periscope. Sweet dreams, Billy, she thought. She started going through her E-mail and remembered that the shrink up in Washington had promised to get back to her, but it was only Monday morning. Then she saw an announcement on internal mail that Farnsworth was going to a conference of eastern region SACs and RAs for three days and wanted any pending action-items brought to him before close of business today. She looked around for Talbot, but he had stepped away from his desk. She cut over to the Web and hit her favorite search engine. She typed in Site R and received the usual avalanche of Web site garbage. So much for that, she thought, and went to refill her coffee cup. To her surprise, Billy was working, not sleeping. She offered to fill his cup, and he accepted. When she returned, she asked him about Site R.\n\n\"Only Site R I ever heard about was the alternate command center for the Pentagon; it's up near Camp David, in Maryland. Probably five, six hours from here, up I-Eighty-one, then east.\"\n\n\"Not a place you'd go camping, then?\"\n\n\"Not unless you like sleeping with a lot of Secret Service agents. It's like that NORAD thing inside Cheyenne Mountain. You know, the command center for the ICBMs. For what it's worth, I took a look through that case file. I noticed something: They didn't take a lot of clothes, like for some long trip. Larry even made a note that Kreiss had questioned that. I don't know about this Site R business, but I'd be looking for something closer to home.\"\n\n\"Like what? Site R sounds military.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, maybe go talk to some of the homesteaders here. Or local law maybe.\"\n\nJanet nodded and went back to her desk. The homesteaders were FBI employees who had been in the Roanoke office for a long time, people who either had low-level technical jobs or were non-career-path special agents. Talbot returned to the office and looked over in her direction; Janet made a show of tackling her in box. She had half a mind to put a call into Edwin Kreiss, see what _he_ knew about Site R. Yeah, right, she thought. Back to work, Carter.\n\nEdwin Kreiss finished cleaning his trekking gear and then restowed his packs in the spare bedroom closet. He was waiting for a return call from Dagget Parsons up in northern Virginia. Kreiss had saved Parsons's life during an Agency retrieval in Oregon, when Dagget had been a pilot for the U.S. Marshals Service. Dagget had retired after the incident, but not before telling Kreiss that if there was ever anything he needed, just call. Kreiss was hoping that Dag was still flying for that environmental sciences company. The phone rang.\n\n\"Edwin Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Well, well, Edwin Kreiss himself. How the hell are you? _Where_ the hell are you?\"\n\n\"Nowhere special anymore, Dag; just another Bureau retiree. I'm down in Blacksburg, near Virginia Tech. What are you up to these days? You still flying for that Geo-Information Services?\"\n\n\"Yeah. It's boring, but boring is what I'm after these days. How can I help you?\"\n\nKreiss told him about Lynn. Then he got right down to it. \"Dag, I need some aerial photography of a place called the Ramsey Army Arsenal. It's outside of a town called Ramsey, here in southwest Virginia. The place is a mothballed Army ammunition-production complex. Got any contacts who could maybe get me copies of some black-and-white overheads, say from about five thousand feet?\" He phrased it that way in case Parsons didn't want to do it.\n\n\"Contacts? No. But I can do it. The company I fly for is over in Suitland, Maryland. Like you said, we do GIS stuff all up and down the East Coast. You know, field condition analyses for farmers, spectrum analysis for crop diseases, pond health, insect infestations, plant pathologies.\"\n\n\"I'm not active anymore, Dag. This is strictly personal. I can cover costs, of course.\"\n\n\"Understood. And you're working with local law, or in spite of local law?\"\n\n\"They've declared it a missing persons case. The Bureau, I mean. The locals will follow the feds' lead on that.\"\n\n\"The locals know you're working it? They know who you are?\"\n\n\"No. Not yet anyway. The local Bureau people do, of course, after my somewhat colorful departure, and I've been duly warned off. But I can't just sit here, Dag.\"\n\n\"Understood, Ed. I'll guarantee I'd be doing the same damn thing. Look, this stuff is all unclassified. We have a humongous database of aerial photography. We probably have coverage. Lemme work on it. How long's she been missing?\"\n\nKreiss told him.\n\n\"Shit. That's rough.\" He paused, not wanting to state the obvious.\n\n\"I have to hope, Dag, but, like I said, the cops and the Bureau have given up looking. The feds say there's no evidence of a crime, so it's a straight missing persons beef now. But I got a tip about this installation, and I then found her hat there. It's not a place where she should have been, and I think there's something going on there.\"\n\n\"You tell your ex-employers all that?\"\n\n\"I'd have to tell them how I found it. That wouldn't be helpful. For a variety of reasons.\"\n\nDagget was silent for a moment. \"But maybe they'd start working it again,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't think so. There's still no crime, except mine. They're working stiffs with a budget and a boss, Dag. Basically, I'm going solo on this.\"\n\n\"Roger that,\" Parsons said. \"I'm slated into southern Pennsylvania this afternoon, but we did some flights on some big apple orchards in the upper valley about six months ago. Let me look at the GPS maps for this Ramsey Arsenal, see if maybe we got coverage.\"\n\n\"I can pay for this, Dag.\"\n\n\"Not me you can't. The only thing that might take some cash is getting your data out of the center. But we're talking black-and-white photo recce here, so that ought not to be a big deal. This place restricted airspace?\"\n\n\"Probably. There's a big double chain-link fence around the whole thing.\"\n\nThere was a moment of silence on the phone. Then he said, \"I'll get it, Ed. Whatever it takes. I owe you big-time.\"\n\n\"No, you don't, but I appreciate it, Dag.\"\n\nThere was another pause. \"Ed,\" Parsons said. \"That incident at Millwood. I heard some bizarre stories about that. Next time we get together, I'd like to hear your side, you feel like it. The official version smelled like cover-up.\"\n\nKreiss didn't want to get into this. \"The official story closed that book, Dag,\" he said. \"Probably best for all concerned.\"\n\n\"A coupla guys made it sound like Custer's last stand, but with the Indians losing.\"\n\nKreiss stared out the window for a moment. \"Ancient history, Dag.\"\n\n\"Yeah. All right. I've got your number. If we have coverage, I'll have something to you by Wednesday. And Ed, anything else\u2014you just screech. You hear me? I've got my own plane, and I can still fly, even if I can't shoot.\"\n\n\"Appreciate it, Dag. More than you know.\" He got Parsons's beeper number, then hung up. He went out the front door to the porch. He looked into what seemed to be a golden green cloud of new leaves. The air was filled with the scent of pollen and fresh loam. The creek down below was just barely audible through the thickening vegetation.\n\nHe had made a mistake going into the arsenal without any idea of the layout. It hadn't occurred to him that there might be people in there, which showed just how much of an edge he'd lost over the past few years. It had taken him an hour to get out of the logjam tangle, and then another hour to traverse just the fifty yards from the creek back into the trees. That shooter had to have had a very good pair of optics or a night scope of some kind to get so close with the first shot. That meant they had been down there looking for an intruder. An intruder into what? What was going on in that place that there were men laying traps along that creek and coming after him with guns? A bunch of bikers running a meth lab, possibly? A hillbilly marijuana farm?\n\nBut then there was the hat. Lynn's hat. Carried down that creek until it got caught up in the logjam. Which meant\u2014what, exactly? Had someone stolen that hat a year ago and gone into the arsenal with it? Or had the kids been camping outside of the complex, and the hat blew away and got carried downstream? There certainly were other plausible explanations. And yet, that kid had said \"break into\" Site R. While he was almost certain that hat was hers, he couldn't remember the last time he'd actually seen her wear it. He should call those FBI people and tell them he'd found the hat. But how would he explain the where part? And even if the Bureau people were sympathetic, would they _do_ anything? Did they even have the case anymore? Did they care? Had they ever cared? He remembered the way that woman agent had looked at him, almost challenging him to interfere: \"Do not go solo on this,\" she'd said. Pretty or not, she wasn't old enough to talk to him like that.\n\nHe sighed in frustration and went back into the house to make some coffee. He was being unfair. Agents were agents. There was an infinite supply of evil out there. Knock off a bad guy and two more rose up in his place. The working stiffs in the Bureau and the other federal law-enforcement agencies tended to work the ones they could, and the others, well, they did what they could until some boss said, Hey, this isn't going anywhere; let's move on, folks. As long as statistics drove the budget, the bosses would prioritize in the direction of closure. This was nothing new. The Agency had been different, but that was because they weren't really accountable to anybody except a committee or two in Congress, where accountability was an extremely flexible concept.\n\nHe stood at the sink, washing out the coffeepot, and considered the other problem, the larger problem\u2014that Washington might find out he'd come out of his cave. The terms of his forced retirement after the Millwood incident had been excruciatingly clear, enunciated through clenched teeth by none other than J. Willard Marchand, the assistant director over Bureau Foreign Counterintelligence himself: Kreiss was never to act operationally again, not in any capacity. Not in private security work, not as a consultant, not even in self-defense. \"Some asshole wants your car, you give it up. Someone breaks into your house at night, you sleep through it. You may not carry a firearm. You may not do any of those things you've been doing for all those years. You will forget everything you learned from those goddamned people across the river, and you will turn in any special equipment you may have acquired while you were there.\"\n\nThe deal had been straightforward: He could draw his pension, go down to Blacksburg, be with his daughter, and contemplate his many sins in the woods. But that was it. He remembered that Marchand had been so angry, he could speak only in short bursts. \"We'll let you keep your retirement package. Despite Millwood, for which the professional standards board could have just fired you. You can live on that. You want to take a civilian job, it had better not be even remotely related to what you did here. And, most importantly, you keep your wild-ass accusations to yourself. In other words, Kreiss, find a hole, get in it, and pull it in after you. And speaking for the deputy attorney general of the United States, if we get even a hint that you're stirring the pot somewhere, any pot, anywhere, we'll ask the Agency to send one of your former playmates down there to retrieve _your_ ass. And we _will_ be watching.\"\n\nAll because of what had happened on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Millwood, Virginia, a tiny village up in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Millwood was home to a restored gristmill, a couple of antique shops, Carter Hall\u2014once the huge estate of the Burwell family, which was now home to the Project Hope foundation\u2014a post office, a private country day school, three dozen or so private homes, and a general store. It also contained the ancestral home of Ephraim Glower, erst-while assistant deputy director for counterespionage operations for the Agency. Ephraim Glower of the Powhatan School, Choate, and Yale University. Whose ancestors had ridden with Mosby's Rangers during the Civil War, partnered with J. P. Morgan in the heyday of the robber barons, and served as an assistant secretary of the Treasury during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt. Ephraim Glower had risen to a position of real power within the Agency, while spending the last of the family's fortune on the family estate, a town house in Georgetown, foxhunting in Middleburg, Washington A-list entertaining, a high-maintenance socialite wife, and a string of young and beautiful \"associates.\" His superior social standing had been matched by an equally superior attitude, and he had not been beloved by his subordinates within CE.\n\nKreiss's team, while working the Energy Department espionage case in collaboration with the Agency CE people and Energy's own security people, had begun to encounter an increasingly resistant bureaucratic field. Someone was subtly inhibiting the investigation. Kreiss eventually suspected Glower. When he checked out a rumor that Glower was almost broke, it turned out that he had been rescued by an infusion of mysterious cash. Kreiss, by then operating mostly on his own initiative, had followed the money trail. He had traced the money from its sources in Hong Kong, through the election campaign finance operations of the newly elected administration, directly to Glower. Who, for sums paid, was apparently obstructing the joint Bureau\/Agency\/Energy Department investigation by spinning a gentle web of bureaucratic and legal taffy over all the efforts to determine if there were Chinese spies at the nuclear-research laboratories. Glower didn't trade secrets for money, as most spies or traitors did. He provided an insidious form of top cover, and he did it so well that Kreiss eventually concluded that Glower must have been getting some help from over in the Justice Department.\n\nAll of this was happening as Kreiss was entering his eighth year of the exchange assignment with the Agency counterespionage directorate. As he and his small team developed the scope and depth of a possible top-level conspiracy, Kreiss, the team leader and prime mover, had been suddenly recalled to the Bureau. The word in the corridors was that Langley had complained about Kreiss, claiming he had begun to overstep his brief. Someone at the highest levels in the Agency had prevailed upon someone in Justice to make the Bureau recall him. He had been given an innocuous position within the Bureau's FCI organization, pending a new assignment. The pending went on for two years, while he watched the joint Energy Department\/FBI investigation stall out completely.\n\nThis had convinced Kreiss that Ephraim Glower had a cohort over at Justice, and possibly within the Bureau itself. His timing turned out to be lousy, since there was already a great deal of bureaucratic acrimony between Justice and FBI headquarters. Since the FBI worked for the attorney general, no one in the Bureau wanted to hear Kreiss's conspiracy theories about any putative Chinese spy ring, and most emphatically, they did not want to hear about a high-level problem over at Justice. The Bureau was much too busy manning its own ramparts over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and, later, some unpleasant revelations about the FBI laboratory. When the story about the Chinese government's attempts to buy influence during and after the 1996 reelection campaign broke in Washington, Kreiss tried again. This time, he was shut down even more forcefully. The FBI director by then had his own problems with the Justice Department as he and the attorney general traded salvos and congressional testimony over independent prosecutors, a laundry list of presidential scandals, and growing talk of a presidential impeachment.\n\nKreiss, totally frustrated, went to Millwood to confront Ephraim Glower, which led to bloody results. He was preparing to challenge his expulsion from the Bureau, when something happened to change his mind: The Agency had threatened his daughter. The threat had been made indirectly, but it had been unmistakable. It had come during a seemingly casual telephone call from one of his ex-associates in the retrieval business. Langley was still furious about Glower, and the word in CE was that the big bosses didn't believe Kreiss's alibi for the time Glower had done all the killing. But they were willing to put the whole incident to bed as long as Kreiss shut up about what Glower had been doing. And if he didn't, Kreiss might get to experience his own family tragedy. Kreiss took the hint and subsided. He had done only one thing right that day in Millwood, and that one thing now constituted his only insurance policy.\n\nSo now he had a big decision to make: He could call Special Agent Larry Talbot, lay out what he'd done and what he'd found, take his licks from Talbot's peppery sidekick for intruding, and then get back out of the way. He could even plead with the Roanoke RA to keep his intrusion into the arsenal a secret from Washington. But that wouldn't work: The Bureau would never change. They'd yell at him and break his balls for going in there, while doing nothing about finding Lynn. So there really wasn't any decision to make, was there? What he had to do was to go back there, armed this time with some decent overheads, and find out what the hell was going on in the Ramsey Arsenal that might hopefully lead to Lynn, or at least to what had happened to Lynn.\n\nHe looked down at the muddy cap, which was lying on the kitchen table. Face it, he thought with a sigh, those kids may be dead. No, not those kids. _Lynn_ might be dead. He couldn't bear to think about that. He himself would certainly have been dead if that big slug had hit him instead of the tree. Those people hadn't come out to talk. The shooter, taking his position up in the tree line, the other one acting as game beater, yelling and crashing forward through the woods to startle Kreiss into motion\u2014that had not been extemporaneous. Those people were hunters and knew what they were doing. If the kids had blundered into people like that, they would have been easy pickings.\n\nHe felt the rage coming then, the familiar heat in his face, the sensation that his blood pressure was rising. He tried to contain it by deep breathing, but it came anyway, a wave of fury, the tingling sensation in his large hands, a scarlet rim to his peripheral vision. If he found out that those people had done something to Lynn, he would introduce them to the true meaning of terror, sweeper-style, and then he would slaughter them all, until there was blood to his elbows. He closed his eyes, savoring the rage. But even his fury could not entirely blank out the other possibility, the one he didn't ever want to think about. That it hadn't been locals who had taken Lynn.\n\nTo Janet's surprise, Brianne Kellermann called her back from headquarters right after lunch. After some more obligatory waffling about privacy issues, she told Janet that the fundamental issue leading to the breakup of the Kreiss marriage had been what Edwin Kreiss did for a living. According to Brianne's notes, the former Mrs. Kreiss implied that she had found out more than she wanted to know about what Kreiss was doing during his exchange tour with the Agency, and that it had not squared with what Kreiss had been telling her. There were also some indications of domestic turbulence, incidents of uncontrolled rage on his part that stopped just short of physical violence. The bottom line was that Kreiss's wife had become afraid of her husband. Four years after he went to the Agency, she sought the divorce.\n\n\"And that's it?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"That's all I have in my file pertaining to him,\" Brianne said. \"That was your focus, right?\"\n\nShe had hoped for more, but she did not want Kellermann to detect that. \"Yes, it was. Thank you very much. You've been very helpful.\"\n\nThere was a momentary pause on the line. \"Have you met Edwin Kreiss?\"\n\nHer instincts told her to deflect any further interest in her call. \"Yes,\" she said. \"When we interviewed the parents. He seemed\u2014I don't know\u2014pretty normal? A lot of anxiety about his missing daughter, of course, and he wasn't thrilled when we told him the case was going to MP. But killer-diller secret agent? No.\"\n\n\"Secret agent?\"\n\nJanet swore under her breath. Damned shrink was quick. \"Well, you know, that time he spent with the Agency.\"\n\n\"I see. Not a killer-diller, but not your run-of-the-mill, quietly retired civil servant, either?\"\n\nJanet had to think about that one. \"No-o, not exactly,\" she said. \"I got the impression that he was immensely self-controlled.\" She remembered all the things Farnsworth had told her, but she doubted Brianne Kellermann was in the loop on any of that. \"I guess I wouldn't want the guy really mad at me, but closet psychopath? No. And he's not a suspect or anything. The kids just vanished. We've been clutching at straws the whole way. That's what pisses me off, I guess.\"\n\n\"Well, I wish I could have told you something significant,\" Brianne said. \"But that's all I have.\"\n\nActually, you did, Doc, Janet thought. \"Well, like I said, we have to pull all the strings. And thanks again for getting back to me. I can close our files now; let MP take it.\"\n\nJanet flopped back in her chair after hanging up. Kreiss had a reputation for being a scary guy. Kreiss's wife had been sufficiently afraid of him to want out. Wait\u2014correct that. Sufficiently afraid to want to go to a Bureau counselor. Having been divorced herself, she knew there was probably a lot more to the Kreiss divorce story than just that, but going to a Bureau counselor had to have been a big step for a senior FBI agent's wife to take.\n\nWith any luck, Kellermann would now just forget the call and move on. Janet had been entirely truthful when she had said she did not figure Kreiss for a part in the kids' disappearance. What concerned her now was the possibility that he might take up the hunt himself. Possibility, hell\u2014probability, if the headless horseman trick was any indication. And, actually, _concerned_ wasn't the right word, either. Face it, she told herself. It's Kreiss and his exotic career that's intriguing you. In fact, if Kreiss was on the move, she wouldn't mind helping him. She laughed out loud at that crazy notion and momentarily woke Billy.\n\n## CHAPTER VII\n\nA FedEx truck found its way to Kreiss's cabin late Wednesday afternoon. Kreiss signed for the package and took it into the cabin. Parsons had done well. There were two wide-area black-and-white overheads of the Ramsey Arsenal. Each had been taken from an oblique angle, because, of course, the aircraft had no business flying directly over the complex. One of them had been taken from a much greater height than the other, and it showed nearly the entire installation, including the creek that ran through it. The other was a shot that centered on the industrial area, and it gave a perspective to the buildings in the central area that allowed Kreiss to size them. There was one additional sheet in the package, which was a copy of the large overall shot with a global positioning system grid superimposed. The title box on the lower right of each sheet identified the site as the Jonesboro Cement Factory in Canton, Ohio.\n\nGood man, Kreiss thought to himself. Parsons had disguised the identity of the prints from prying eyes at his company. There was a note in the package saying that Parsons had the photos in a computer file and that any of them could be blown up on one of their Sun workstations and reprinted to whatever level of detail he wanted. He had been unable to midnight-requisition the processing work, and he apologetically requested a check for fifteen hundred dollars be made out to the company. Kreiss got his checkbook and wrote the check immediately. Then he studied the photos for almost an hour, absorbing details of the industrial area. The individual buildings were blurry in the photograph, which told Kreiss that Parsons had already done some enlargement work.\n\nThe buildings of the industrial area took up no more than a small portion on the eastern side of the military reservation. The photo also showed the rail spur leading off the main line connecting Christiansburg to Ramsey and points north. Kreiss would have loved to get nighttime infrared photos of the entire complex, but that would have been pushing it. Besides, whatever those people were doing, they were probably doing it in the industrial area. The problem was that there appeared to be over one hundred identifiable buildings in the complex. He decided he would make one more reconnaissance intrusion, this time at night, and this time into the industrial area. It looked as if the railroad spur might be a better intrusion position, pointing directly into the industrial area and avoiding all the woods-crawling. It shouldn't be too hard to find his way back to that rail spur. If he could pinpoint where those people were operating, he would back out, come back to the cabin for some of his retrieval equipment, and then go after them. He was looking forward to talking to them, maybe sharing his thinking with them about their itchy trigger fingers.\n\nJust after 6:00 P.M., Jared picked Browne up at his house in Blacksburg. Jared was driving his own pickup instead of his telephone repair van. There was a windowless cap on the back bed of the pickup, where Jared had packed their gear.\n\n\"Get the copper?\" Browne asked.\n\n\"Yep. It's already stashed by the main gates. Coupla hundred pounds.\"\n\n\"We have to strip it?\"\n\n\"No, it's four switch-gear plates. No insulation. Heavy, though.\"\n\nOn days they were going into the installation, Jared would drive the telephone company van to the concrete-filled barrels on the main entrance road of the arsenal. He would pretend to be doing something there. When there were no cars in sight, he would move two barrels slightly, just enough so that when they came later, he could pull off the main highway in the early darkness and drive straight between the barrels. From there, they would drive, lights off, to the actual main gate, about a quarter of a mile back into the trees from the highway. In front of the shuttered security checkpoint gates, they could turn left onto the fence-maintenance and fire-access road, which was a dirt path just big enough for the truck. They would take that around the fence until they intercepted the rail line almost a mile south of the main gate.\n\nTonight they would stop up by the gates, well out of sight of Route 11, to retrieve the bundle of copper plates. Browne planned to run the hydrogen generator for at least four hours. He also had some sandwiches and water for the girl.\n\n\"I think you better go on walking patrol while I do tonight's batch,\" Browne said. \"We still don't know what we had out there the other night.\"\n\n\"We had us an intruder, that's what. Question is, Did he come back, or did that forty-four do the trick?\"\n\nBrowne rubbed his jaw. They had seen the occasional hunter, who tended to stay away from the industrial area because of all the talk about toxic waste. But since the kids hit the traps, Browne was taking no chances. \"No way of knowing that,\" he said, \"without going down there for some tracking. We just need to be careful from here on out. I won't have some nosy sumbitch screwing this thing up, not now.\"\n\nJared didn't say anything for a few minutes, but then he asked Browne if he thought the intruder might be police.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Browne said. \"Cops come in crowds. Plus, they shoot back when shot at. We'd've known by now if that was a cop. Maybe next time, we ought not to go shooting like that.\"\n\n\"Paper said the FBI was lookin' for them kids,\" Jared said.\n\n\"That was almost a month ago; if the FBI thought those kids had come to the arsenal, we'da had a swarm of those sumbitches all over the place. Hasn't been anything like that. We just have to be extra careful for a while. We're getting pressure in the tanker truck now. Won't be much longer, I can do this thing.\"\n\nJared passed a clunker out on Route 11. \"Killin' those kids, that could be some serious heat,\" he said.\n\nBrowne realized that the incident with the intruder must have spooked Jared a little more than he had anticipated. \"We didn't kill anyone. That flash flood got 'em. There wasn't anything we could do about that. And we did save the girl.\"\n\n\"Them was our traps, got them kids,\" Jared said, slowing as he approached the darkened traffic signal marking the entrance intersection to the arsenal.\n\n\"They shouldn't have been in there,\" Browne said. \"The Lord sent that flood. It was their time, that's all.\"\n\nJared was silent as he pulled into the turn lane. There was no one coming the other way, so he was able just to make the turn and douse his lights as he went between the barrels. Browne bit his lip, thinking about what Jared had said. The real question now was, what was he going to do about the girl when Judgment Day came? She's insurance, he kept telling himself. But if the cops came, and they were holding the girl, she could tie them to what had happened to the other two.\n\nJared drove up toward the main gate through a corridor of tall pines, then slowed to make the turn onto the fire-access road. \"The copper is over there,\" he said. \"Behind that there transformer box.\"\n\nHe stopped the truck, and they both got out. The night was still and clear, but with no moon. The only sound came from the night insects and the ticking noise of the truck's engine cooling down. A big semi went whining down the highway below, but they were completely out of sight. They loaded the heavy copper plates into the bed of the truck, closed the tailgate, and then drove on down the access road until they came to the rail spur gates, where they stopped. Jared began to unload the plates while his grandfather went to move the wire and unlock the interior gates. They hauled the plates through the two sets of gates.\n\n\"We've been usin' these here gates for some time now,\" Jared said when all the plates were inside the perimeter. \"Maybe we ought to lay down some things, like we got along the creek.\"\n\nBrowne thought for a moment. That might not be a bad idea. \"Traps, you mean?\"\n\n\"It's all gravel and concrete from here on in. I was thinkin' more along the lines of a counter. One a the guys in the Hats has one, Radio Shack 'lectric-eye deal. Tell us if it's just us chickens walkin' through here.\"\n\nJared belonged to a backwoods militia group, which called itself the Black Hats. They got together up on the West Virginia line to drink beer, tell racist jokes, and shoot up the woods, pretending they were guerrillas. Browne thought they were all a bunch of beer-bellied retards. William would never have stooped to that crowd. Jared, on the other hand, probably fit right in, but he kept that sentiment to himself. \"I agree,\" he said. \"Bring one next time.\"\n\nEdwin Kreiss was making his way from building to building along the shadows of the main street of the upper industrial area, when he heard the truck. He had come up the rail spur from the switch point off the main Norfolk & Western line an hour ago. He had not discovered Browne's arrangements with the rail gates; he had simply climbed the fence a hundred feet from the gates, covering up the barbed wire on the top with the rubber floor mat from his truck. He had come in to make a one-night reconnaissance, so he'd brought only water and a chest pack with some implements of his former trade. His plan was to creep the main industrial area to see if he could find any signs of human activity, especially over toward the ravine on the south side that contained the creek. He stopped when he heard the truck.\n\nThe engine seemed to slow down. The sound was coming from the direction of the rail spur security gates. Kreiss looked around and found a steel ladder leading up the side of a three-story windowless concrete building that faced the main street. There was enough starlight in the clear mountain air to allow him to read the sign on the building, which said AMMONIA CONCENTRATION PLANT. One of the complex's internal rail subspurs ran directly behind the building, and the ladder went up the side of the building to its roof. He listened again. The engine was quiet, or perhaps idling. Then he heard it start back up, rev for thirty seconds or so, and then shut down. They were parking it. And coming in?\n\nHe tested the ladder. It seemed to be firmly mounted. He listened again, but there were only night sounds in the air. He made his decision and hoisted himself up onto the ladder and began to climb. At the top, the ladder rails curved up and over the edge of the roof. He stepped carefully out onto the roof, until he realized that it, too, appeared to be made of concrete. There were three large skylights embedded in the center of the roof, and he went over to one and looked down. The glass was clouded with grime and dust; below, there was only darkness. He thought about using a light, but not if there was the possibility that someone was coming. He felt a slight breeze touch his neck. He went back to the front edge of the roof, where there was a three-foot-high parapet. He knelt down behind the parapet and unzipped his chest pack. He pulled out a stethoscope, a flat cone-shaped object, and a small wire frame. He squeezed the cone open, creating a speaker-shaped object some twelve inches in diameter at the large end and one inch at the small end. He fit the cone into the wire frame and set it up on the parapet, pointing up the main street toward the rail gates, which were some three hundred yards distant. Then he screwed the acoustic diaphragm of the stethoscope into the back of the cone and put the sound plugs into his ears. There was a faint chuffing background-noise sound of the night breeze, but otherwise nothing. He waited, keeping his head down behind the parapet in case someone down below was using a nightscope to scan the darkened buildings.\n\nAfter five minutes or so, he detected the first footsteps, small, regular crunching sounds coming from the direction of the gates. He smiled in satisfaction as he listened. Two sets of steps, walking slowly, close to each other. They stopped, and there was the sound of some heavy objects hitting the ground. He wanted to take a look, but the cone was telling him what he needed to know. The footsteps resumed, coming up the main street, their boots making clopping noises on the concrete, alternating with a clanking cadence when they crossed the big metal plates in the street, until they passed beneath the cone. While he waited for them to pass, he pulled out his own nightscope. He attached its external power cord to a slim battery pack in his chest pack. He gave them another minute and then rose up behind the parapet and swept the street below. He almost missed them as they turned the corner a block away, went between two large buildings, and disappeared. Confirm two, and each of them was carrying something under both arms. One much taller than the other. He swept the street back in the direction of the rail gates, but there seemed to be nothing else stirring. Time to get back down on the ground.\n\nHe packed up the listening cone and his nightscope and climbed back down the ladder on the side of the building. Without making any noise, he moved as quickly as he could to the other side of the street and then down to the corner where they had turned. A quick look around the corner revealed a cross street with large- and medium-sized buildings on both sides. At the end of the street, about three blocks away, was what looked like a power plant. The street and the bottom of the buildings were all in shadow. He pulled out the nightscope and made a quick sweep, but no figures showed up. So they had gone into one of these buildings. He reversed course and crept back across the front of the building on the corner, then down the alley along its side wall. He found a steel ladder, but then he hesitated, because the building next to this one on the side street appeared to be taller than the corner building. He scanned the alley and then went farther down. The alley was almost in full darkness, but it was also empty: There were no trash cans or other debris, just the bare concrete and some weeds here and there. A noticeable chemical smell pervaded all the old concrete, and he was struck by the absence of any living thing.\n\nHe found the ladder at the back of the second building and climbed it. Where the skylights had been on the first building, there was a row of large metal ventilator caps, whose guy wires made it difficult to move around the roof. The parapet was much lower, so he set himself up at the corner of the roof nearest the power plant, from which he ought to be able to see both ways down the cross street. He rigged out the cone device and pointed it directly across the darkened street at the bare concrete wall of the opposite building. Since he didn't know which direction the men had gone, any sounds they made should reflect off the slab-sided building opposite if they reemerged. Just in case he had missed something, he put on the stethoscope and trained the cone to either side, first down the street and then back up toward the corner. He pointed it at each of the buildings, listening for any acoustic indication of humans inside. He did not expect sounds to penetrate all that windowless concrete, but there was always a chance of a machine making some noise. But there was nothing. He pointed the cone back across the street and waited.\n\nTwo men. Just like last time. Now that he knew what he was dealing with, and roughly where they were, this should be entirely manageable.\n\nBrowne got Jared to help him set up the retort for the first generating batch. The copper plates were awkward to move, but they would yield a much longer sustained reaction than the wire he had been using. He would have to cut them in half to get them into the retort.\n\n\"Once we get this going, I want you to take a look around the industrial area, make sure we don't have any close-in visitors. Got your nightscope?\"\n\n\"Yep. And a three fifty-seven in my jacket, too.\"\n\n\"If you see something, try to come back here and get me before you use that. I'd rather catch 'em than shoot 'em. See who the hell they are. Two guns are better than one for that.\"\n\nBrowne set up the pump while Jared used a hacksaw to cut the plates. The soft copper cut quickly. Browne went into the boiler hall to start the generator. He came back and cleared all the lines coming from the retort, then went into the maintenance bay to line up the fill valve on the truck's tank. He came back and opened the acid feed line, and the reaction in the retort became audible. They waited for the pressure switch to activate the transfer pump, but it didn't happen. Browne tapped a gauge, then tapped it again. \"Have to do something here; this thing isn't working.\"\n\n\"Can you jump it?\" Jared asked, eyeing the pressure gauge. The frothing noise in the retort was getting louder. \"That safety valve is fixin' to let go.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Browne said irritably. Sometimes, he thought, Jared was a master of the obvious. William would have been suggesting solutions. He checked the lineup with the transfer pump once more and then hurried to hook a wire directly from the supply side of the pressure switch to the hot terminal on the pump motor. The pump kicked in and the pressure began to fall off in the retort as the hydrogen was sent to the truck next door.\n\n\"Looks like I'm going to have to run this thing manually,\" Browne said. \"Go take the girl her food and water, and then have a look around the immediate area. Check back in an hour.\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\n\"And Jared? No messing around with that girl. Tell her to put the blindfold on, open the door, check the room, make sure she's not hiding behind the door, leave the food, lock back out.\"\n\nJared acknowledged and grabbed up the paper sack. Then the transfer pump began to chatter and Browne swore. \"Go on,\" he said. \"Be back in an hour. This plate should be done by then and we can fix this switch.\"\n\nJared left the control room, an unfathomable expression on his face. He stood outside the power plant walk-through door for fifteen minutes to get his night vision back, and he thought about the girl. They had brought her here that first afternoon, blindfolded and restrained, and simply left her for several hours. Then they had come back, pausing outside the smaller door at the north end while Browne ordered her to put the blindfold back on. That had been the routine since then, each time they brought her food. She never spoke to them. She would just sit there, motionless, with her back to the door and the blindfold on her face, not even acknowledging their presence. And they, in turn, never spoke to her. Jared knew that she had seen both of them, but only that one time. The fact that she wouldn't speak to them kind of pissed him off. She was shining an attitude he wasn't used to.\n\nHe stepped off into the street and headed for the nitro building.\n\nKreiss was wondering if he should give up his listening position and go search for the two men, when the cone picked up something. He strained to listen, but the sounds were very small, almost beneath the threshold of the night sounds. There must have been some clouds coming through, because the ambient light had diminished, throwing the streets below into total darkness. He reached up and turned the cone to the left. Nothing. He turned it slowly to the right. Nothing, and then a sound. A footfall? No. He could not classify it. He wanted to use the nightscope, but that battery was limited, and he normally did not use it until he had a firm directional cue from the cone. If someone was moving around down at the end of the street, there was no way to tell precisely where in this maze of concrete buildings. Then the sounds stopped. He slewed the cone back and forth, trying to regain contact, but now there was only the small breeze. And then there was the unmistakable loud sound of a metal door closing, somewhere out there among all those buildings.\n\nHe took off the earpieces of the stethoscope and sat back on his haunches. That had been a door, which meant they were definitely doing something inside one of the big buildings. Probably a drug lab of some kind. He sniffed the night air, but the breeze was blowing toward that end of the street. He looked into the darkness; the only thing he could make out was the tall stack of the power plant, and that was beyond where he thought the noises had come from. Two men, who knew their way around this complex in the dark, were doing something in one of the buildings. Should he go down and probe that end of the street? And run into some more traps? He had to do something.\n\nAnd then he had an idea. It had sounded as if they had parked that truck. He would back out and go see about that vehicle. It would have a tag, and a tag would lead to a name, and with a name, he could find an address. That would make things a lot simpler than prowling around this place, where they had had time to rig defenses.\n\nJared opened the door and shone the light inside. She was right where she was supposed to be. He flashed the light around the room, which was a hundred feet long, seventy wide, and four stories in overall height. There were several cableways and electrical boxes on the walls, and two large steel garage-type doors at either end. Prominent red NO SMOKING signs were painted every ten feet along the walls. A set of rusting rail tracks was embedded in the concrete floor, right down the middle. The lighting fixtures suspended overhead were devoid of bulbs, so the only light she would ever see was the daylight that came through the grimy skylights. There was a single steel walk-through door to one side of the larger sealed doors at each end of the building. Otherwise, it was empty, the machinery and the workers long gone, with only the smell of chemicals lingering in the old concrete to give any indication of its previous function.\n\nHe shoved the bag of food inside the door and then stepped inside. He put the Maglite down on the floor, pointing at the silent figure in the middle of the room. He pushed the door shut, then backed up against it.\n\n\"Stand up,\" he ordered. She didn't move.\n\n\"You want this water?\" he asked, tapping the plastic bottle with his boot. \"Or you want me to take it back outside? Stand up.\"\n\nSlowly, reluctantly, she got on her hands and knees, and then stood up. The blindfold hid most of her face. The flashlight now pointed at her feet. She was taller than he had remembered, but the loose clothes could not disguise her fine figure. There was definite defiance in her posture, and Jared didn't like that. Jared liked his women compliant.\n\n\"Turn your back to the door,\" he ordered.\n\nShe complied, and he reached for the light and played it over her body.\n\n\"Take your shirt off,\" he said.\n\nShe just stood there. He waited for her to say something, but she remained silent.\n\n\"I said, take your goddamned shirt off.\"\n\nShe did not move. Jared reached down and picked up one of the three water bottles. He twisted the top off with an audible snapping sound, then poured the entire bottle out onto the concrete. It made an unmistakable sound, and he thought he saw her stiffen when he did it.\n\n\"Take your shirt off,\" he said again, discarding the now-empty bottle onto the concrete floor, where it clattered into a corner.\n\nThis time, she did it, pulling the shirt over her head and dropping it onto the floor.\n\n\"Now your halter,\" he said. \"Do it.\"\n\nShe paused for a few seconds, then slipped out of her sports bra. He played the flashlight over her back and ordered her to turn around. She slumped a little and then complied. Her breasts were everything he expected, although her ribs were showing in the harsh white light. Must be the diet here, he thought with a mental guffaw.\n\n\"Now the rest of it\"\n\nShe hesitated again, turning a little bit, as if to shield herself. He picked up another water bottle and shook it. \"The rest of it. Do it! Now!\"\n\nShe complied, bending forward to take off the rest of her clothes. Then she straightened up and took a deep breath. Her hands hung down at her sides.\n\n\"Turn sideways,\" Jared commanded, playing the flashlight over her white body. She did as he ordered, and then he told her to get down on her hands and knees. She bent her head to one side for a moment, as if trying to figure out what he was going to do. But then she got down on her hands and knees, her body in profile to him.\n\nJared walked over to the pile of blankets and then walked all the way around her, enjoying his rising excitement. Damn, she has a great body, he thought. She must work out.\n\n\"Put your head down,\" he said, still walking around her. She sighed, the first sound she'd made. Then she put her head down on the blankets.\n\nJared continued to walk around her, circling her like a predator, reveling in her utterly vulnerable position. He was just about to approach her when he thought he heard something out on the street. He immediately switched off the flashlight.\n\n\"Not bad, girlie,\" he said softly. \"Not bad a-tall. Next time, we'll do something about all that.\"\n\nHe went to the door, listened carefully, and then stepped back through, pulling it shut softly but firmly. He replaced the padlock and closed the bail into the base of the lock as quietly as he could. He turned around and moved sideways to the comer of the building, waiting for his eyes to adjust to darkness again. As his ears strained to detect any noises out on the street, his mind's eye replayed the scene inside, the great-looking girl with her rump in the air, totally helpless, asking for it, he was sure. Not so defiant, was she, not once she was down there on the blankets. His throat thickened. He'd definitely come back, get him some of that. He listened some more, but there was nothing going on, no one here but him and that crazy old man in there, brewing up his bomb.\n\n## CHAPTER VIII\n\nOn Thursday morning, Janet Carter arrived a half an hour late because of a monster traffic jam. She was surprised to find Billy waiting for her at the security desk when she entered the federal building.\n\n\"Thought I ought to warn you,\" he announced as they badged in and bypassed the metal-detector station. \"There are some people upstairs in Farnsworth's office, want to talk to you.\"\n\n\"'Some people'?\"\n\n\"Yeah. One guy's from the FCI Division at Bureau headquarters; the other one, a woman, is from Main Justice, I think. Looks like a pro wrestler in drag. Larry Talbot is acting like he's about to get fired. He thinks it's about that missing college students case.\"\n\nJanet frowned. She'd dropped the Kreiss case after talking to the shrink. She's been busy for the past two days reviewing the evidentiary report on a complicated truck hijacking case that was going to be heavily dependent on physical evidence. It had been almost refreshing to work in her specialty again.\n\n\"Hasn't that whole deal gone up the line to MP?\" she asked as they got on the elevator.\n\n\"Yep. Sent it up Tuesday to Richmond. I thought you were off that thing.\"\n\n\"I am. I haven't touched it since\u2014\"\n\n\"Since?\" Billy asked quietly.\n\n\"Well, I'd already made one call, Friday, before the boss fanged me about it. Lady called back Monday, but it wasn't anything conclusive. Some history about one of the parents.\"\n\n\"Edwin Kreiss perhaps?\"\n\n\"Well . . .\" she said, making a face. She pushed the button for the fourth floor and then swiped her security card. She remembered that she'd briefed Billy on the case.\n\n\"Well, wait till you get a load of the political appointee gorgon from Justice,\" Billy said, suppressing a yawn. \"Serious shit.\"\n\nThey went directly to their office, where they found Larry Talbot pacing around like a nervous cat. His eyes lit up when he caught sight of Janet. \"We need to talk,\" he announced without preamble.\n\n\"What's going on?\" she asked. \"Billy said there're some people from Washington? To see me?\"\n\n\"Yes, indeedy,\" Talbot said, taking her elbow and pulling her to one side of the office. He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. \"I think it's something about that Kreiss character. Is there something you need to back-brief me on?\"\n\nShe explained about the call to the staff psychologist, keeping the exact timing of the calls a little vague. \"But that was it, and Billy's already sent the case file to Washington via the Richmond field office. I've been on the Wentworth Trucking case since then. What's the big deal?\"\n\nTalbot looked around for Billy, but he had left the office. \"Whatever it is, the boss had to leave his conference early and come back here to deal with it.\"\n\nJanet blinked. \"Not to be repetitious, Larry, but what's the problem? I tied off a loose end with a case that's been sent to MP. End of story.\"\n\nTalbot shook his head. \"Farnsworth is pissed. He's acting like you went up to D.C. and burgled the director's office.\" He looked at his watch. \"Shit. You need to get downstairs.\"\n\n\"Jesus, Larry, can't I at least get some coffee?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't advise it, Janet,\" he said. \"This is no time to look routine.\"\n\nJanet rolled her eyes and went back down to Farnsworth's office, which was on the third floor. His secretary, a professionally unpleasant woman who hailed from Arkansas, announced that the RA was in conference with some Washington people. Janet patiently asked her to tell Farnsworth that she was there. The secretary sighed dramatically and buzzed this news into Farnsworth. He appeared at the door to his office a moment later and asked Janet to come in.\n\nThe two Washington visitors were sitting at the conference table. One was a large woman, whose fat face reminded Janet of a recent Russian premier. She was looking at Janet with undisguised suspicion. The other visitor was a man in his fifties, also rather large, almost completely bald, with a reddish face and a permanently scowling expression. Farnsworth made introductions. The woman's name was Bellhouser; the red-faced man's name was Foster.\n\n\"Agent Carter, these folks have driven down from Washington. Ms. Bellhouser is the executive assistant to Mr. Bill Garrette, who, as I'm sure you know, is the deputy attorney general _of_ the United States. Mr. Foster is the principal deputy to Assistant Director Marchand.\"\n\nJanet noted Farnsworth's sudden formality. She knew that Marchand was the assistant director over Counterintelligence at FBI headquarters. She had heard of Garrette, but only in the context of his being acting deputy attorney general without benefit of Senate confirmation for the past four years. She nodded, waiting for Farnsworth to invite her to sit down. Surprisingly, he did not.\n\n\"Agent Carter,\" he said. \"You apparently made recent inquiries about a certain Edwin Kreiss. Ms. Bellhouser and Mr. Foster are interested in why you're interested.\"\n\nJanet took it upon herself to sit down in the only remaining chair. Farnsworth was acting as if he had never heard of Edwin Kreiss, so she decided to play along and speak directly to him, as if bringing him into the picture for the first time. She reviewed the circumstances of her involvement with Kreiss. She glossed over the call to the Counseling Division as tying off a loose end before sending up the case file.\n\n\"Let's dispense with the bullshit, Agent Carter,\" the woman said when Janet was done. Her voice was as harsh as her expression. \"You persisted in asking questions about Kreiss after you were given specific instructions by the RA here to back off that case. We want to know why.\"\n\nJanet looked at Farnsworth as if to say, I thought I just explained that. The RA kept his expression blank. She turned to Bellhouser. \"I wasn't aware that I was indulging in bullshit,\" she said coolly. \"I asked the original question before I was told to drop it. When Dr. Kellermann was courteous enough to call right back, I took her call. What she had to say didn't add anything substantial. It is entirely standard procedure to question parents in some detail when their kids go missing. It's also standard procedure to check them out. What's the problem here, if I may ask?\"\n\n\"The problem is Edwin Kreiss,\" the woman answered. \"Mr. Kreiss was responsible for an incident that deeply embarrassed both the Department of Justice and the Bureau. Inquiries about him or what he did are not authorized, and, in fact, are cause for alarm.\"\n\n\"Well excuse me all to hell,\" Janet said, trying not to lose her temper. \"I was investigating the disappearance of his daughter. He is just another citizen as far as I'm concerned, a parent who's lost his kid. One more time: What's the problem?\"\n\nThe woman sat back in her chair, her expression saying that she wasn't used to being spoken to like this. Foster intervened.\n\n\"Part of the problem is that we did not know Edwin Kreiss's daughter had gone missing,\" he said. \"But\u2014\"\n\nBellhouser held up her hand in an imperious gesture, and Foster stopped. She gave Janet a speculative look. \"Perhaps I should clarify a few things for you, Agent Carter. But I want your word that what I'm going to tell you will not be repeated to anyone.\" She had changed her tone of voice and was now being a lot more polite.\n\n\"Is this something I need to know, then?\" Janet asked. \"Because I'm willing to forget Mr. Kreiss, if that's the order of the day. My interest in him was entirely professional, not personal.\"\n\nBellhouser thought for a moment. Foster was strangely silent. \"I think it is,\" she said. \"Do I have your word?\"\n\nJanet looked again to the RA, but his face remained a study in neutrality. He'd told her all about Kreiss, but now he was acting as if he'd never heard of the guy. She wasn't quite sure what the game was here, but if they wanted to play games, well, hell, she'd play. \"Whatever,\" she said. \"Yes. Fine.\"\n\n\"Very well. For many years prior to the current administration, there was tension between the Counterespionage Division at the Agency and the Foreign Counterintelligence Division in the Bureau. This administration determined that it would be constructive to break down some of those bureaucratic barriers. Edwin Kreiss was selected to be sent on an exchange tour of duty with the Agency, and one of their CE operatives was sent to Bureau FCI.\"\n\nShe paused to see if any of this meant anything to Janet, but Janet pretended this was all news.\n\n\"Kreiss's assignment to the Agency represented a dramatic step toward defusing those tensions. He trained under and worked with some of the best man-hunters in the business. It's fair to say that he participated in some operations that took place, shall we say, out on the less well-defined margins of national policy, with respect to who works where. Do you know what I'm talking about?\"\n\n\"I assume you're talking about the rule that the Agency technically can't work inside the country.\"\n\n\"Yes, precisely, just like the armed forces can't chase criminals inside the borders of the United States. _Posse comitatus._ The problem is that sometimes the bad guys take advantage of this.\"\n\n\"And sometimes the good guys turn out to be the bad guys,\" Janet said, just to throw some shit in the game.\n\nBellhouser blinked, looked at Foster, and then they both looked over at Farnsworth.\n\n\"Um, yes, well, when I received orders to back out of the Kreiss matter, I told her about the Glower case,\" he said, looking uncharacteristically nervous. \"Correction: I told her what I'd _heard_ about the Glower case\u2014I, of course, have no personal knowledge of what happened there.\"\n\nFoster's eyebrows went up. \"Really, Mr. Farnsworth. This is a surprise. Assistant Director Marchand was of the opinion that you knew _nothing_ about the Glower incident.\"\n\nFoster might be a principal deputy, but Farnsworth was still in charge of an operational office, and as such, he didn't have to take very much static from headquarters assistants, especially when they invoked their boss's power. He looked at Foster with an avuncular smile. \"When something gets fucked up as badly as that situation got fucked up,\" he said, _\"everybody_ knows a little something about it, Mr. Foster. You need to remember that if you ever go back to the field.\" Janet felt a smidgen of relief that Farnsworth hadn't been entirely cowed by these two.\n\n\"Let's get back on point,\" Bellhouser said. \"Which is: When Kreiss was forced out of the Bureau following the Millwood incident, he was given some very specific guidance in return for getting retirement instead of outright dismissal. And that was that he was never, _ever_ to act operationally again, especially in those capacities with which he was formerly associated during his time at the Agency.\"\n\n\"So how was he supposed to make a living, then?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"According to Larry Talbot's notes,\" Farnsworth said, scanning a piece of paper, \"he's been teaching remedial math at the Montgomery County junior college. He quit that when his daughter went missing.\"\n\n\"The point is, Agent Carter,\" Bellhouser said, \"that Kreiss was not permitted to engage in _any_ activity related to law enforcement: federal, state, or local, or to have anything to do with the security field\u2014commercial, personal, computer\u2014anything along that line.\"\n\nJanet nodded. \"Okay, and\u2014\"\n\nFoster leaned forward. \"The question is, Agent Carter, Do you think Mr. Kreiss is going to actively search for his daughter now that Roanoke here is sending the case to MP?\"\n\nJanet remembered telling Farnsworth that she thought Kreiss was going solo. She had to assume he had passed this on. \"Yes,\" she said. \"In fact, I think he's already leaned on one of the potential witnesses, but I backed out before I could really follow up on that. And, of course, I can't prove any of that.\"\n\nBellhouser sighed. Foster frowned and began tapping a pen against the edge of the table.\n\n\"I mean,\" Janet said, \"I guess I can understand it. From his perspective, the Bureau was backing out. He knows how MP works.\" No one said anything. \"It's his daughter, after all,\" she concluded.\n\nBellhouser gave her a patient look and then got up out of her chair. She was even bigger standing up. The chair creaked in relief. \"Thank you, Agent Carter,\" she said. \"I think you've told us what we needed to find out. We will brief our respective superiors. We appreciate your cooperation.\"\n\nJanet stood up, looking at Farnsworth. \"Is that it, sir?\"\n\nFarnsworth glanced over at Bellhouser and Foster as if for confirmation and then said, \"Yes.\"\n\n\"And if anything else pops up concerning Mr. Kreiss?\"\n\n\"Inform Mr. Farnsworth here if that happens,\" Foster said. \"We will attend to Mr. Kreiss if that becomes necessary. But we don't anticipate you will have any further interaction with him.\"\n\n\"Either at his initiative or yours, Agent Carter,\" Bellhouser said. All three of them looked at her expectantly to make sure she understood the warning.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said brightly, as if this all were totally insignificant. She left Farnsworth's office, shaking her head, and went back to her own cubicle. Talbot wanted to know what it was all about, but Janet told him only that it concerned Edwin Kreiss and that the matter had been taken care of. Talbot was clearly dissatisfied, so she said she'd been ordered not to talk about it and that maybe Farnsworth would fill him in. Talbot stomped out and Janet went looking for some coffee. She met with some other agents on the trucking case for half an hour, and when she returned, Billy had surfaced from his midmorning snooze. He asked her what all the fuss was about. Remembering her promise, she told him in only very general terms, concluding that she'd been clearly told to stay away from Edwin Kreiss and all his works. Billy got some coffee and they talked about the way headquarters horse-holders threw their weight around.\n\nWhen Talbot reappeared, Janet went back to her cubicle. She pushed papers around her desk while she thought about the meeting with the two principal deputy assistant under-executive pooh-bahs. What had that woman said\u2014they would \"attend to\" Kreiss? For God's sake, the man's only child was missing. An image of Kreiss's face surfaced in her mind. She wondered if the two horse-holders were capable of \"attending to\" Edwin Kreiss. She thought idly about warning him.\n\nEdwin Kreiss had obtained a county road map at the Christiansburg Chamber of Commerce that morning, and he was now nosing his pickup truck down a dirt road five miles west of the town. None of the land around these first geologic wrinkles of the Appalachian foothills was horizontal, and he had to keep it in second gear on the rough and winding lane. He had found their truck unlocked last night at the rail spur branch and retrieved the registration. The vehicle belonged to one Jared McGarand, whose rural postbox address he'd finally found on a rusting mailbox at the head of the dirt road. He came around a final bend in the trees and saw a double-wide trailer at the end of the lane. There were no other trailers or houses nearby, but there were some large dogs raising hell from what looked like a pen behind the trailer. He had anticipated the possibility of dogs and had the cure in a plastic bag on the seat. But first, he would see if the dogs' noise summoned anyone. It was the middle of the day, and the only other trailer he'd seen had been almost a mile back down the county road. It had looked deserted.\n\nHe turned around and then parked his truck in front of the trailer, pointed back out the lane. Then he waited. The dogs, still not visible, continued to bark and howl, but after five minutes, they lost interest. The trailer was mounted up on cinder blocks at one end to level it. The place looked reasonably well kept, with some side sheds, a separate metal carport roof, an engine-hoisting stand, and what looked like a rig for butchering deer. The same pickup truck from which he'd obtained the registration was parked under a tree, but there were no junked cars or other hillbilly treasures stacked in the yard, and there was electric power and a phone line attached to the trailer. Whoever Jared McGarand was, he obviously had a job and was not just another member of the Appalachian recycling elite.\n\nSatisfied that no one was coming, he opened the door, grabbed the plastic bag, and went up to the front door of the trailer and knocked on it. This set off another round of barking from out back. When no one answered, he went around to the back door and tried that, again without result. Then he walked over to the dog pen, which was fifty feet back from the trailer, under some trees. He took out some sugar-coated doughnut holes, into each of which he had put two nonprescription iron-supplement pills. The dogs were some kind of mixed breed, with pit bull predominant, equal parts teeth, bark, and general finy. They were jumping and slavering at the sturdy chain-link fence. He pushed the doughnut holes into the chain link until he was sure each dog had eaten at least one. Then he went back to the truck and waited. The pills would not kill the dogs, but in about fifteen minutes, they would be feeling ill enough to lie down and whimper for the rest of the day. While he was waiting, his car phone rang. Ever since Lynn disappeared he had made a practice of having any calls that came into the cabin automatically forward to the truck if he was out of the house.\n\n\"Kreiss,\" he said, visually checking the trailer and its surroundings. The dogs had stopped their barking.\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss, this is Special Agent Janet Carter.\"\n\n\"You have something on Lynn?\" Kreiss asked immediately.\n\n\"No. I wish we did, but no. This is something else.\" She described the visitation of Bellhouser and Foster.\n\nHe listened without comment, wishing he had been able to observe that little s\u00e9ance. Attend to me, would they? He took a deep breath to calm himself.\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss? Are you still there?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"I'm on my car phone. I appreciate the heads-up, Agent Carter. I really do.\"\n\n\"You didn't get it from me, Mr. Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" He paused for a moment, not sure of what to say next. He was picturing her face, and, after their last meeting, wondering why she was doing this.\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss?\" she said. \"We asked you not to go solo on your daughter's disappearance, remember?\"\n\n\"I remember.\"\n\n\"Well, let me reiterate that request. And of course, if new information does turn up, let me say again that you need to bring it to us.\"\n\nHow would two guys skulking around at night on a closed federal ammunition plant, setting mantraps and shooting at people, strike you? he wondered. \"Of course, Agent Carter.\"\n\n\"Yes. Of course, Mr. Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Thanks again for the heads-up. I owe you one, Agent Carter.\"\n\n\"Hold that thought, Mr. Kreiss.\"\n\nHe grunted, clicked the phone off, and got back out of the truck. He positioned a small motion detector on the hood of the pickup, pointed down the lane in the direction of the county road. It would start beeping if anything came down the dirt road toward the cabin. He took a canvas tool bag out of the passenger side and went behind the trailer. The dogs were circled on the concrete floor of their pen. One was drinking lots of water, while the other two were nipping at their flanks.\n\nFifteen minutes later, he was driving back out onto the county road. On the front seat beside him, he had some personal documents he'd lifted from a desk inside, enough to confirm that the occupant was Jared McGarand, a telephone company repairman. He also had taken a .357 Magnum he'd removed from the bedroom bureau's top drawer. He had found a .45 auto in Jared's night table but left that alone. The man liked big guns. He'd refilled the dogs' water buckets before he left; they were going to be very thirsty later on. He had mounted a cigarette carton-sized battery-operated box on the roof of the trailer, out of sight behind two vent pipes, and installed a listen-and-record device on the lone telephone. He turned onto the county road and headed back toward Blacksburg.\n\nHe had been tempted to tell Carter about the Ramsey Arsenal, except that he thought he could do a better job of finding Lynn than some posse of semi-hysterical feds, at least until he knew what the connection was between these two midnight gomers and Lynn's hat. He would have to find a way to pay Carter back for the favor of that warning; she absolutely did not have to do that, especially after having to take a meeting with Bambi Bellhouser and Chief Red In The Face. She'd probably called him because they pissed her off. He almost hoped they would be stupid enough to come out to his cabin, although he doubted a couple of horse-holders like that would ever venture too far away from an office. In the meantime, he had some preparations to make before returning to the arsenal tonight. He wanted to get into the industrial area just at twilight, because those two had shown up the last time about an hour after sundown, this time, he wanted to be closer to that far end of the main street. Maybe he would be able to track them into a specific building.\n\nThat evening, Browne and Jared were delayed by a traffic accident on the Route 11 bridge over the New River. It was almost eight o'clock before they got to the entrance of the arsenal. Jared was in a bad mood, having found his three hunting dogs sick in their pen when he got home from work.\n\n\"Dog crap all over the place,\" he complained. \"Had to hose it for half an hour. Dogs sick as babies.\"\n\n\"All three? Must have been bad feed.\"\n\n\"They got the same as always. They still ain't right.\" He drove through the concrete barrels and down the fire road with his lights off. There was a sliver of new moon up, which gave enough light to see the road and the high fence.\n\n\"You get that counter put up?\"\n\n\"Yep. It's just inside the inner gates, waist-high.\" He pulled the truck into their regular parking place, between four bushy pines. \"With them side fences, won't be no critters settin' it off. I got a line on some more copper, but it's gonna take some cash money.\"\n\n\"All right. We've got nearly thirty pounds of pressure in the truck tank now. I'll be shifting over to the big pump at fifty psi.\"\n\nThey got out and stood at the edge of the trees to night-adapt their eyes. There was a slight breeze blowing pine scent at them, and the railroad tracks gleamed dully in the dim moonlight.\n\n\"I did one other thing 'sides that counter,\" Jared said. His grandfather looked at him. \"I set me up a deadfall along the main street\u2014wire trigger. Left the wire down for now. We get somethin' on that counter, I'll set the wire when we come out.\"\n\n\"We get a hit on that counter before we even go in, we're not going in,\" Browne said. \"I may come back tomorrow during the day and do some hunting. Can you get some time off? Bring your dogs?\"\n\n\"I can if there ain't a lot of tickets up on the western lines. Don't know about them dogs.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Browne said, picking up the bag of food and water for the girl. \"Let's go check your toy.\"\n\nThey walked up the spur to the security gates, stopping a hundred feet out to watch and listen. Then they stepped through the flap of fencing and Jared walked over to the side fence and squatted down next to a high weed. He straightened back up and came back to where Browne was standing. \"We've got us a visitor,\" he whispered. \"Counter's showin' one.\"\n\n\"And that wasn't you leaving, after you set it?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" Browne said, keeping his voice low. He had been hoping that the intruder the other night had been a onetime thing. \"How far up is your wire?\"\n\n\"Between the ammonia plant and the shell-casin' dip station. There's two hydrants, face each other across the main street. Got some pipe stock racked up on the overhead steam pipe crossovers between them two buildings. He hits that wire, it'll avalanche his ass.\"\n\nBrowne pulled out his gun. \"You go up there, set your wire. I'll follow, fifty feet behind you. Then we'll back out, reset that counter to zero.\"\n\n\"What about the stuff for the girl?\"\n\n\"Not tonight. Not if there's a chance there's someone in there. Let's see what your trap does first. We have to find out who this is, why he's here. We're too close for any mistakes now.\"\n\nKreiss was on the roof of the last building on the right side of the main street, listening to his cone. He was much closer to the power plant this time. The main street came over a low hill and turned slightly to its right as it approached the power plant, so he did not have a perfectly straight acoustic shot all the way to the rail gates at the other end. But if anyone came walking up over that hill, like they did the last time, he would be in position to hear their footfalls and then this time see into which building they went. There was enough moonlight tonight that he could use high-magnification binoculars rather than a night-vision device. He had put the stethoscope up to his ears when he first heard the truck approach the rail gates over the hill.\n\nHe'd been tempted to look around the complex of buildings when he first came in, right at sunset, but decided he would be better off getting set up in a good vantage point. Besides, there were nearly a hundred buildings, large and small, plus several wooden sheds that seemed to have been deliberately built down in circular earthen depressions. A methodical search would take hours, if not days. He was dressed out in a black one-piece overall, with the mesh head hood, gloves, and both packs. His plan was simple: watch to see where they went, creep that building to see how many entrances there were, close all but one, and then get the jump on them. The few buildings he had examined seemed to have only one human-sized door, but he had not had time to really look this place over. Besides, it didn't much matter: These guys had shot at him, which meant they were doing something in here that they should not be doing. If Lynn had worn that hat into the arsenal, these were the guys who would know something about what had happened to her. He settled back down behind the roof parapet to wait some more. They should be coming pretty soon, he thought.\n\nBrowne waited for Jared to pull the fence wire flap closed and to set the clips. \"All right,\" he whispered when Jared joined him. \"If there is someone up there, he heard the truck. We have to make the truck sound like it's leaving. You drive it out to the edge of the main gate plaza, then walk back in. I'm going to wait here and listen.\"\n\n\"This could take all goddamn night,\" Jared said. \"Let's go back in there and find his ass.\"\n\n\"How? And where would you look? He could be anywhere. He could be wandering around, or he could be inside a building, waiting. No\u2014we pretend to leave, he'll move.\"\n\n\"What if he goes into the power plant? Or knocks on that door at the nitro building?\"\n\n\"Why would he knock on a locked door? All those buildings are shut tight, including the power plant. There's nothing to see, especially at night. He'll wait for a while, and then he'll walk out. We were going to be out here until almost eleven anyway. This way, we have a chance of nailing him. We can't let this go on, boy. Not now.\"\n\nJared grunted in the darkness. \"Awright. I'll move the truck. Where'll you be?\"\n\n\"That pine tree over there. That deadfall going to make some noise?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah.\"\n\n\"You hear it, come running, 'cause I'm going back in ff he trips it.\"\n\n\"We take him, what then?\"\n\n\"He goes into the acid tank where those boys went. Get going.\"\n\nKreiss waited for two more hours before giving it up. He'd heard the truck leave and that had bothered him. The last time, they'd shut the truck down and then come right into the complex. Tonight, they'd come, spent about half an hour doing something, and then left. The worst possibility was that they had driven the truck away and then walked back and were waiting for him to move. That would mean they knew someone was here. The best possibility was that they had left and he now had the place to himself. But why the hell would they do that? They were doing something in one of these buildings. Why come and then just leave? Had he left some sign of his intrusion? It was almost eleven o'clock. He was tempted just to curl up and go to sleep up on the roof. Put the motion detector on the parapet to catch anything coming down the street and set it to buzz rather than beep. Then search the place at dawn. But suppose they waited, too? Or came in, set up, and waited? He'd walk right into them at first light. Going in circles here, he thought. He decided to get off the building and look around.\n\nThere were four large buildings at this lower end of the main street, which ended at the big power plant. He went down the ladder and set up the motion-detector box to point back up the street. He set the alarm to chirp like a cricket if it detected anything moving toward it. It wasn't much protection, but better than nothing. Then he spent half an hour circling each of the large buildings, creeping from shadow to shadow in the faint moonlight. The buildings were connected by what looked like steam and other utility lines that ran in bundled pipelines over the street. The musty smell of old chemicals was everywhere. The only identification on the buildings was a number, under which was a name printed onto a white block of paint near the entrance. The four buildings were called Ammonia Concentration, Nitro Fixing, Mercury Mix, and Case Heating. Each of them had large steel industrial cargo doors on the front, with a human-sized walk-through door to one side. None of them had any windows, and three of the four had a rail spur leading under the cargo door. He silently examined all the walk-through doors, but they were locked with massive padlocks. He didn't even bother rattling them.\n\nThen he walked down to the power plant, keeping to the side, not wanting to make noise on those big metal plates out in the street. The power plant's doors were also locked. He was once again struck by the fact that there appeared to be nothing living in the industrial area: He had heard no rats, mice, birds, or insects, and seen little vegetation growing up through the cracks of the concrete. He concluded that not all of the nitro, ammonia, and mercury had remained in the buildings. There were parallel streets on either side of the main street, with more concrete buildings and pipe mazes running overhead. This was hopeless: Unless he could follow those people to a specific building, he could be here for weeks. He had located and identified one of the men, Jared McGarand; maybe he would be better off taking him down at his trailer and finding out what he knew.\n\nHe gathered up his motion detector and started back up the street toward the rail gates. It was now 12:30, and the moon was setting. When his foot hit the taut wire, his instincts propelled him forward and down, since whatever was coming was probably coming from the sides. To his surprise, there was a roar of metal from above him, and then he was pounded flat by an avalanche of steel pipes. One of them connected with the back of his head and he blacked out.\n\nJared dropped his grandfather off at his house in Blacksburg just after midnight and then headed home to his trailer. They'd waited until almost 11:30 before giving up, but nothing had happened up in the industrial area. He still thought his grandfather had been wrong about waiting outside. They should have gone in and rousted that sumbitch, whoever he was. Even if the guy tripped the wire, he could still get away if the pipe deadfall didn't put him down hard enough. But he had learned the hard way not to cross the old man, and especially not now.\n\nHe'd seen Browne McGarand focused before, but never like this. This whole bomb thing was all about William, of course. The old man was positively obsessed with William. That was how Jared thought about his father\u2014William, not Father. Unlike the old man, Jared did not give two shits about William or what had happened to him. His mother, a swelling bride at seventeen, had decamped when Jared was only six, driven to desperation by the responsibilities of a motherhood aggravated by the fact that his younger brother, Kenny, had been born retarded. Not quite three years later, William pulled the plug as well, running off to California initially, and then eventually to beautiful downtown Waco, Texas, where he got himself mixed up with all those nutcases at Mount Carmel.\n\nHe slowed to make the turn into his trailer lot. If only William had just stayed home and done the right thing, none of this shit would be happening. But old Grandpaw Browne, he was a scorekeeper. He had raised both kids with a firm, often biblical hand, and to this day, Jared was still a little afraid of his grandfather, especially when he got some of that Methodist fire up his ass. His grandfather's eyes reminded him of pictures he had seen in history books of Stonewall Jackson or that abolitionist, John Brown. That old man, he wanted to make him a bomb, Brother Jared was not _even_ going to get in the way. Even if it was about Saint William.\n\nHe sniffed as he turned down his own road. He thought he deserved at least some appreciation for helping the old man. He wasn't sure what old Browne would have done to those kids in the traps if that flash flood hadn't come along, but Jared knew he owned at least a piece of their deaths. Not that he cared too much\u2014like the old man said, they shouldn't have come sneaking around like that. But he was now on the hook as at least an accessory, and had the old man even thanked him? He had not.\n\nHe pulled his truck into the yard and shut it down. There was other shit, too. He had stolen that propane truck for him. And hadn't he paid at least lip service to all that Christian Identity bullshit? Now there was another bunch of nut brains, always praying that the world would end when the year 2001 rolled around. Armageddon on demand, yahoo. He and the boys up in the Black Hats always had a great laugh when all those Doomsday Christians and their woolly-headed blood-and-fire predictions came up. Hell, he knew this wasn't about Armageddon or the second coming, or the so-called saints versus the sinners. What Browne was fixing up was pure mountain-style revenge, aggravated by his feelings about an oppressive government, out-of-control taxes, even more out-of-control federal lawmen, and the UN with its secret new world order. He'd told the boys his grandpaw was making a hydrogen bomb, and they'd laughed at that, too. Well, they'd see. The federal government had snuffed Saint William, and now Browne McGarand had gone and set his face against the whole damned government. The government was dead meat walking.\n\nHe got out and locked the truck. What he had to figure out was how to get back in there and get a piece of that pretty naked thing in the nitro building. He knew how to make her behave now, so maybe he'd sweet-talk her this time, talk some sense into her, then give her the ride to glory. He adjusted his considerable sexual equipment, smiled, and then went to check on the dogs. He refilled their water. They were lethargic, but there was no more kennel mess. He had a beer while he checked through the day's mail, and then he went to bed.\n\n## CHAPTER IX\n\nAt just after 2:00 A.M., Jared snapped awake and sat up in bed. He tried to figure out what sound had awakened him. The windows were open, and the night was filled with the normal woods noise of insects and a chirping chorus of tree frogs. He rubbed his face and listened carefully. Maybe he'd been dreaming. Then it came again: the distinct sound of a dry branch breaking, and not far away, either. One of the dogs woofed softly, but they raised no general alarm. Was someone out there in the trees back of the trailer? He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and listened again. A few minutes later, it came again, the distinct crunching sound of someone stepping through the forest undergrowth, then the snap of another dry branch. He got up and went to the edge of the back window. His backyard was bathed in the orange glow from a security light mounted on his power pole. The light illuminated the yard, but it had the perverse effect of making the woods even darker. Keeping an eye out the window, he reached into the drawer of the night table and pulled out his government-model .45 auto. He stepped back from the window, racked in a round, and then crossed to its other side. He could see almost nothing out in the darkness.\n\nHe depended on the dogs to alert him to intruders, and they normally did a noisy job of it. But now there was silence in the woods. He went through the trailer, checking the other rooms and the locks and all the windows. There were no signs of intrusion. Then he went back to bed, leaving the .45 out on the bedside table. He was just about asleep, when he distinctly heard the muffled sound of a portable-radio transmission outside, followed by a distinct squelch of static. He sat back up and listened, wondering again if he had been dreaming. Then he got up and went through the whole trailer again, gun in hand, checking to see if he'd left the television or the radio on this time. It was just past 3:00 A.M., and this was pissing him off. Then he had a cold thought: A radio\u2014were there cops creeping around out there?\n\nHe spent the next half hour going from window to window, looking for any signs of movement in the woods. He could not figure out why the dogs weren't raising hell. There was no wind, so maybe they heard the noises but caught no scent? Then he wondered if there was any connection between their being sick earlier and the possible intruders outside.\n\nHe kept watch for another half hour, and finally went back to bed, this time falling heavily asleep. He would have to tell the old man about this shit in the morning. Except there was always the chance he'd dreamed the whole thing.\n\nKreiss came to and tried to lift his head but could not. He was pinned facedown to the cold concrete, lying now beneath several objects. The moon was down and he couldn't see what had him. His right arm was caught, but his left could move. The back of his head hurt like hell, and there was a wet sensation on the back of his neck. He felt around and closed his fingers over a cold steel pipe, about an inch and a half in diameter. He felt around some more and realized he was under a pile of pipes. He tried to move his legs and found they were both free. After a minute or so of struggling, he was out from under the pile.\n\nHe rolled over on his back, fingered the trip wire at his feet, and looked up at the nest of steam lines looping over the main street between the buildings. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble, climbing up the steel rungs on the pipe crossover structure and piling a couple dozen lengths of steel pipe up there, rigged to the trip wire. The top padding in his head hood and the Kevlar shoulder pads along the top of the jumpsuit had saved him from serious injury. The Kevlar ribs that ran down the jumpsuit on his chest and back had also taken some of the shock, aided by the soft bulk of the chest pack and backpack. Otherwise, a couple of hundred pounds of steel pipe falling from twenty feet might have killed him. He stretched out on the concrete, took some deep breaths, and felt for bruises.\n\nSo they'd known he was in there. He'd walked down that street coming in and had not hit any wire. Plus, they'd gone to some trouble to rig that deadfall, which meant they'd _expected_ him to come back. Not good. He looked at his watch; it was 3:30, Friday morning. The night was perfectly still, with not even the slightest breeze. He had some satisfaction in knowing that the little black box on top of brother Jared's trailer was going to make him lose some sleep tonight, too, unless he was dead drunk in that trailer.\n\nSo, how had they known? He had used the same ingress point twice, the answer must be there. He got up gingerly, brushed himself off, and explored the swelling cut on the back of his head. He got out a military battle dressing and taped it over the cut. Then he walked painfully down to the rail gates, where he quickly found the electric-eye counter. The counter went to 001 when he passed his hand through the beam. He hit the reset button to zero it, then recorded twenty-six hits. Let them think about that. He went over the gates, walked the three miles down the rail line to his truck, got in, and sat there for a minute in the pitch-black. He was no closer to finding Lynn, and he was still in the dark as to what these people were doing in the arsenal. If he went to the Roanoke feds, he would confirm the sharks from Washington's worst suspicions.\n\nMcGarand and his helper had been sure enough about an intruder to set up a deadfall. Hell with it, he thought, as he started up the truck. My objective is to find out what happened to Lynn. I can deal with the likes of Bellhouser and Foster if I have to. They're just admin pukes with fancy titles and privileged access. There was no more point to creeping the arsenal, where those two guys would always have the home-ground advantage. He decided to just go have a little talk with Mr. Jared McGarand. With a little luck, Jared would maybe give him the other one. Hell, Jared will absolutely give me the other one, he thought. And between the two of them, I'll get a line on Lynn. After that, well, with all the unknowns in the equation right now, there was no sense in making long-range plans.\n\nHe drove back toward his cabin west of Blacksburg, which would take almost forty-five minutes. He stopped in an all-night gas and convenience store out on Highway 460 to get some coffee. The clerk gave him a sideways look, and he realized he must look more battered than he knew. While he was refueling the truck, it occurred to him that perhaps the two Washington people had brought along some operational help. Who might be waiting at the cabin for him to return. He finished fueling, paid for his gas and coffee, and then pulled over to one side of the parking lot. He extracted a local county map from the glove compartment and examined the roads surrounding Pearl's Mountain. He knew that there was one paved county road that ran along the stream at the bottom front of his property, and another one that ran along the back slope of Pearl's Mountain. As he remembered, the two firebreaks that bracketed the big hill on either side ran all the way to that back paved road. The map confirmed this. If he could get his truck onto one of the firebreaks, and it wasn't too rough, he could drive partway up the slope and then hike up and over, ending up in a position above his cabin, where he had some toys stashed. He checked his watch. It was 5:15. It would take another half hour to get to the back of the mountain, and then at least forty-five minutes to hike up and over. Sunrise was around 7:00 A.M. With luck, he could be in position just before dawn. If they had been waiting for him all night, they'd come out at daylight to Kreiss's version of the welcome wagon.\n\nJared called Browne at just after seven o'clock Friday morning. He told his grandfather what had happened the night before.\n\n\"And you hadn't been drinking? This wasn't some dream?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I came home, had me one beer, checked on the dogs, and hit the sack. This shit started sometime around two this morning, a little after.\"\n\n\"And the dogs didn't alert on it?\"\n\n\"No, sir. That's the weird part. You know them dogs\u2014someone comes around here, they make like it's dinnertime.\"\n\nBrowne was silent for a moment. \"I don't like the sound of this,\" he said finally. \"We've got someone poking around the arsenal, and now this crap. Tell you what. Go outside when it gets full light and check for sign. Take a dog with you. See if he picks up on anything. Then I think we have to go back out to the site, see if your trap did any good.\"\n\n\"He hit that trap, his ass'11 still be there,\" Jared declared. \"That was a heap of pipe.\"\n\n\"We'll see. Maybe some bastard's just playing games. Call me back before you go to work.\"\n\nKreiss made it up to the south ridge of Pearl's Mountain just before sunrise. He had bought his front slope acreage from the old man who owned the entire mountain. He had permission to hunt all the slopes of the big hill, and he had gone out several times; often with Micah, to hunt deer, grouse, and turkey over its thousand-plus wooded acres. Given his previous career, he had also taken into consideration some defensive measures when siting his prefab cabin, which included arrangements for dealing with the problem of someone getting into the cabin to ambush him. But first, he had to determine if someone was there.\n\nHe crept along the south ridge until he reached the top edge of the tree line on the eastern slope. Below was an open meadow littered with big boulders; it swept all the way down from the tree line to the back of the cabin. He was just able to see the cabin in the morning mist, some two hundred feet in elevation below his position and about three hundred yards distant. There were still large patches of shadow in the dawn light. A pair of early-morning bobwhites were calling across the grass in the meadow. Above them, a solitary hawk was testing for the first updrafts of the morning, but it was too early. It screeched once in frustration, dropped a wing, and slanted out of sight across the rock face of the upper mountain. There were no lights or other signs of life at the cabin, and he didn't see any vehicles. He checked again with his binoculars, and then he did see something: There was a Ford Bronco pulled behind some trees to the right of the cabin, well out of sight of the lower driveway.\n\nWell, all right, he thought. So let's hold a little reveille. He moved along the tree line until the biggest boulder in the meadow shadowed him from view of the cabin, and then he trotted directly down the open meadow, remaining in the sight-line shadow of the boulder until he reached it. He got down on all fours and probed the base of the massive rock until he found the edge of a camouflaged tarp, which he lifted carefully, checking for snakes. Under the tarp was a well-greased five-foot-long steel box. He opened it and extracted a Barrett M82A1 .50-caliber rifle, complete with a Swarovsky ten-by-forty-two scope. The twenty-eight-pound rifle had a ten-round magazine loaded with RauFoss explosive, armor-piercing rounds. It also had a muzzle brake and a bipod. Beneath the rifle box was another, smaller box. From this, he extracted a black plastic device that looked like a television remote, and a battery pack, which he plugged into the device. He closed the boxes but left the tarp to one side. Then he lugged the huge rifle and the remote transmitter back up the slope to the trees, and once again he traversed the slope until he had a clear field of view of the back of the cabin and the clump of trees hiding the Bronco.\n\nHe checked the controller for electrical continuity with the battery pack, then put it down. He moved backward a few feet until he found level ground on which to set up the Barrett. He lay down beside the weapon, nestled the butt into his shoulder, and sighted down to the Bronco, aligning the crosshairs on the right side of the vehicle's engine compartment. Even though it was a .50-caliber rifle, the recoil wasn't too much more than that of a heavy shotgun, because the action was gas-operated and the weapon itself weighed so much. The heavy round would drop substantially at three hundred yards, so he adjusted the scope accordingly and re-sighted. He fitted the magazine and then racked one round into the chamber. He didn't plan to use more than a few rounds. He checked his sight line again. Then he got the remote controller, pulled out a tiny whip antenna, and aimed it at the house. He selected amplifier, power on, volume 9, and hit the red button at the top of the controller. Then he selected program 1, and again hit the red button.\n\nThere were twelve Bose speakers placed strategically down in the cabin, all connected to an antique Fisher vacuum tube-driven 2,000-watt audio-amplifier, which was set up in the attic of the cabin. Connected to the amplifier was a CD player with a single compact disc and the radio transceiver, which accepted commands from the remote. The program he had selected was the recorded sound of roaring lions, which let go at close to 150 decibels. The noise was huge, even at Kreiss's position nearly one thousand feet away. Inside the cabin, it would be earsplitting. He could hear a chorus of dog howling start up from a mile down the country road, where Micah Wall kept a pen of coon hounds. The lion program ran for twenty seconds, and then it switched over to the second program, which erupted with the sound of a machine gun shooting out all the windows in a building. He shut it all down after another fifteen seconds and then sighted back through the scope on the Barrett as he settled himself into firing position.\n\nJust before the machine-gun sounds ended, two men came tumbling out of the cabin's front door, holding their ears and running for the Bronco. He let them get within twenty feet of the vehicle before squeezing off the first round, which went through the right-front fender, the engine block, the left side, and then tore off a tree limb fifty feet downslope from the vehicle. Well, maybe just a tiny bit more recoil than a shotgun, he thought as he fired again, this time moving the aiming point slightly to the left to hit the body, knocking a dent the size of a trash can's lid into the right-front door as the bullet went through the Bronco like butter and spanged off a rock down by the creek before decapitating a pine tree on the other side of the road. The third round he put through the rear axle, blasting both tires down and exploding the differential housing out the back of the vehicle. By then, the two men were flat on the ground, trying to reach China. He stopped firing and rubbed his sore shoulder. He checked the sight line again, but the heavy barrel hadn't moved.\n\nHe traversed the sight to where the men were. One of them sat up, then got up and began brushing off his clothes. He then walked calmly out of the trees and up the hill toward Kreiss's firing position, acting as if nothing had happened. As Kreiss watched through the scope, the other man stayed down on the ground, his hands over his head, one eye visible as he watched the other man go up the hill. Kreiss sat up and took his finger off the trigger. Coming up the hill was a large black man, who grinned when he saw Kreiss.\n\n\"Fuck a duck, Ed, _lions?_ And where the hell did you get a Barrett?\"\n\n\"Hello, Charlie,\" Kreiss said. \"Just something I picked up along the way. And kept. How you doing?\"\n\nCharlie Ransom had been in the Agency's retrieval Field Support Division for almost eight years and had worked for Kreiss from time to time. He was a deceptively agreeable-looking man who was lethally effective in bringing subjects back from urban environments. He stopped when he got ten feet from Kreiss, showed his hands, and then carefully extracted a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Kreiss watched him light up.\n\n\"Bambi bring you guys along?\" he asked finally, once Ransom had his cigarette going.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Ransom said, exhaling a cloud of pungent blue smoke.\n\n\"What's Foster's deal? He still Marchand's toad?\"\n\n\"I think so. The request for our services came from Justice, so I'm not sure what the play is here.\"\n\nKreiss suddenly realized how badly he wanted a cigarette. He had quit smoking when he'd come down to Blacksburg. Now his neck hurt and he was aware that there must be visible bruises on his face. Ransom was looking him over.\n\n\"That was some sound show, man,\" Ransom said. \"I think I pissed my pants when them lions did their thing.\"\n\n\"Who's the penitent down there?\" Kreiss asked. He had not moved from his position behind the Barrett, which still had a round chambered.\n\n\"Nice young white boy,\" Ransom said. \"Name's Gerald Cassidy. Career-minded. Married, too. I suppose that's why he's still grabbin' dirt. What do you think?\"\n\n\"He's taking a reasonable approach to the situation,\" Kreiss said. \"Sorry about the Bronco.\"\n\n\"DEA drug take. Ain't no big deal. But look, Ed. We were supposed to have us a little talk, not a firefight.\" He began to come closer.\n\nKreiss twitched the Barrett's barrel. \"That wasn't a fire-fight. And I can hear you fine from right there.\"\n\nRansom stopped and flashed his palms at Kreiss in a gesture of peace. \"All right, that's cool,\" he said, \"but this isn't what you think.\"\n\nThe rifle wasn't pointed right at him, but it would not have taken much to fix that. Kreiss knew that from Ransom's perspective, the business end of a Barrett light .50 must look like the Holland Tunnel.\n\n\"Right,\" he said. \"Then why were you two laying for me in my own house?\"\n\n\" 'Cause Bellhouser asked Agency CE for some off-line help. Apparently didn't want to use Bureau FCI people. Either that or AD Marchand didn't want the exposure.\"\n\n\"Help with what?\" Kreiss asked patiently.\n\n\"Word is, Bellhouser's principal went postal when he heard that you've come out of retirement, so to speak. Apparently, one of the Roanoke agents told somebody you been operatin'. Word got back.\"\n\nThat would be Carter, Kreiss thought. \"My daughter is missing,\" he said. He was tired and he was hurting. He could hear the edge in his own voice and saw that Ransom was struggling to hold his casual smile. \"The local Bureau people fucked around with it for a little while, then sent it up to Missing Persons. That's not good enough. I know a thing or two about looking for someone. They're not going to look, so I am. You tell Bambi and company that this does not concern them, and to stay out of my way.\"\n\nRansom gave him a peculiar look, started to say something, but then put up his hands again. \"All right, all right,\" he said. \"That's cool. I'll tell 'em. Not saying that's going to go down so good, but I'll certainly tell 'em.\"\n\n\"You do that. You leave anything behind in my house?\"\n\n\"Well, now, you know\u2014\"\n\n\"You go back down there. Take Tonto there with you. Get your insects out of my house, whatever you've done. Take your time; do a thorough job. I'll give you fifteen minutes. Then you come out and walk down the drive to the creek, and then walk south on that road. South is to the right. I'll call someone to come get you.\"\n\n\"Shit, man, we got the modern conveniences. We can take care of that.\"\n\nKreiss did not reply, but he indicated with his chin that Ransom should get going. Ransom gave him a little salute and then walked back down the hill, keeping his hands in sight. They might have cell phones, Kreiss thought, but they won't have a signal. They were in for a long walk. He also knew that their being rousted out of a stakeout was going to look bad enough without him, Kreiss, making the call to come get them.\n\nHe settled in alongside the Barrett and watched Ransom and his partner go back into the cabin. He would certainly have to do a sweep of his own. He swore out loud. This was definitely a development he did not need right now. The number-two guy at Justice had sent his own EA and another horse-holder from Kreiss's old department at the Bureau down here to step on his neck. He wondered where the heartburn was really coming from; the Agency shouldn't\n\ncare. Upon reflection, he realized this probably wasn't about the Glower incident; this was probably about the Chinese spy case. If he had popped up on radar screens at Justice, the Agency, _and_ the Bureau, then somebody very senior must be very nervous. Glower had been a major embarrassment, but his suicide should have long since tempered their pain. He wondered if this was about the money.\n\nJanet Carter was summoned to the RA's conference room just after noon. The call came directly from Farnsworth's office, which once again set Larry Talbot off. To her surprise, the two Washington people were back, along with a large black man and a much younger white man. The two executive assistants were in business suits, but the other two men were wearing slacks, sport shirts, and windbreakers. Farnsworth asked her to join them at the table. He did not introduce the new players, and Janet saw that the RA was looking worried again.\n\n\"Agent Carter,\" Farnsworth announced formally, \"This concerns the Edwin Kreiss matter. I've been requested to put you on special assignment. But first, Mr. Foster here has something to share with you. Mr. Foster?\"\n\nFoster looked down for a moment at some papers he had in a folder in front of him. \"You said the other day that Kreiss went to see one of the people you interviewed about his missing daughter?\"\n\n\"I said that I thought it was _probably_ Kreiss.\" She replayed the story of the headless man for them.\n\n\"And the kid later told you that he told Kreiss they went to a 'Site R'?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"Do you know what that is?\"\n\n\"I never did find out. Nobody here seems to know about any Site R.\"\n\nFoster shuffled his notes for a moment and then looked over at the woman, Bellhouser. Bambi, Janet thought. Perfect.\n\n\"We think Site R refers to the Ramsey Army Arsenal,\" Bellhouser said. \"More properly known as the Ramsey Army Ammunition Plant. It's located south of the town of Ramsey, on the other side of the New River. It's been shut down for almost twenty years and is technically in cadre status.\"\n\n\"Where'd that name come from, that Site R?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"It's an EPA appellation. The industrial area of the site is highly contaminated, but since it's a military complex, the EPA doesn't name it as such on their lists of toxic super-sites. They just called it Site R.\"\n\n\"And?\" Janet asked. She was trying to figure out why the Justice Department cared about an abandoned military installation.\n\n\"There's some history here, Agent Carter. First, let me ask you something: Could you establish a working relationship with Kreiss if you had to?\"\n\n\"Working relationship? With Edwin Kreiss?\"\n\nFarnsworth got into it. \"Yes,\" he said. \"Like if maybe you went to see him. Told him you were personally unhappy with the fact that the Bureau was just dropping his daughter's case like that. That you might be interested in helping him look for his daughter, off-line, so to speak.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He was a special agent for a long time,\" she said, remembering her little confrontation with him in the cabin. \"He would know that's bullshit. Agents don't work off-line and remain agents for very long.\"\n\n\"He's been retired for almost five years,\" Foster said. \"You could play the line that the Bureau has changed a lot since then. And play up the fact that you are an inexperienced agent.\"\n\nJanet cocked her head to one side and gave Foster a \"Fuck you very much\" look, but Farnsworth again intervened. \"I've explained to Mr. Foster that your assignment to the Roanoke office was something of a lateral arabesque, Janet,\" he said. \"Not for doing anything substantively wrong, of course, but for annoying a very senior assistant director at headquarters. You could tell Kreiss about that. Then imply that if you could solve the case, working with him, your career would be rehabilitated.\"\n\nJanet felt her face redden. She sat back in her chair, embarrassed to have Farnsworth air her career problems in front of these people. \"That all would be true, by the way,\" Farnsworth said to no one in particular. \"Let Mr. Foster tell you what's going on before you say anything.\"\n\n\"This involves the BATF,\" he began, and Janet snorted contemptuously. Foster stopped.\n\n\"The _Texas toastmasters?\"_ she exclaimed. \"You've got to be shitting me.\"\n\n\"Janet,\" Farnsworth began, but Foster waved her comment away.\n\n\"This involves a series of bombings that have been going on since the early nineties. Abortion clinics. The Atlanta Olympics bombing. And of course, some major incidents, such as the 1993 World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombings. Three letter bombs to federally funded universities that were _not_ the work of the Unabomber. And three other potentially major federal office building bombings that did not succeed, or were derailed by security people.\"\n\n\"The theory of interest,\" Bellhouser said, \"is that the anti-issue and antigovernment groups suspected to be behind these incidents are not technically qualified to design and construct some of the devices that have been used. Even more interesting is that the explosives used in several of the incidents were chemically similar. Some were identical.\"\n\n\"Basically,\" Foster said, \"the BATF thinks that there is one expert or expert group that these anti-everything groups are using to get their big bombs from, because the kind of people who protest at abortion clinics are more likely to be soccer moms than explosives experts.\"\n\n\"So they use what, a consultant?\" Janet asked.\n\nBellhouser nodded. \"ATF and the Bureau have intercepted communications between some of the groups involved. We're talking one of the more violence-prone 'anti' groups, and some people who might be supporting that guy Rudolph, the one we're all chasing through the North Carolina woods.\"\n\n\"You're implying that there is a national conspiracy among the anti groups?\"\n\nThe two Washington people nodded their heads. \"Actually,\" Foster said, \"there's been an interim national-level task force working that theory since 1994: Justice, the Marshals Service, the Bureau, and ATF. It's focused mainly on the anti-abortion bombings, but the feeling now is that it may be bigger than that. The task force is called the DCB, which stands for Domestic Counterintelligence Board.\"\n\nJanet had never heard of any DCB, but she knew that Washington was full of interim task forces, a sure sign that the permanent organizations had become ineffective. \"So what's this got to do with the Roanoke office?\" she asked.\n\n\"The Board has only one lead on the so-called consultant,\" Foster said. \"And that is, he's supposedly based in southwest Virginia.\"\n\nJanet still didn't see the connection. Foster explained.\n\n\"You've told us Kreiss might be looking for something called Site R. Kreiss hunting anything is something that concerns us very much. We ran the national databases on Site R, and that surfaced the Ramsey AAP, an explosives-manufacturing complex down here in southwest Virginia. Our query brought the DCB staff up on the line, asking what we were looking for. We didn't really want to share our Kreiss problem with anyone, so we waffled. But ATF, which is a full member of the DCB, put an agenda item on the board's next meeting, asking what the Bureau was up to.\"\n\n\"And, of course, nobody at the Bureau wanted to give the ATF the time of day,\" Farnsworth said. Foster nodded. Janet understood, as did everyone in the Bureau, that after the Waco disaster, cooperation at the policy level in Washington between the Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had become a very strained business. The BATF worked for the Treasury Department; the FBI worked for the Justice Department. The competition for federal law-enforcement budget dollars had always been fierce, but the Waco disaster had added an extra dimension of enmity between the two law-enforcement agencies. But there was something she did not understand.\n\n\"If you people or this board think there's something going on at this Ramsey Arsenal that's related to a national terrorist bombing campaign,\" Janet said, \"why doesn't this DCB or whatever just send in the Marines, toss the place?\"\n\n\"Because ATF already had,\" Foster said. \"It did an inspection of all such sites two years ago, and it found nothing at Ramsey but a mothballed ammunition plant. For the Bureau to suggest otherwise now is to imply that ATF screwed up or missed something.\"\n\n\"What a concept,\" Janet muttered.\n\n\"More importantly,\" Bellhouser added, ignoring her gibe, \"the proximate cause for such an allegation would be Edwin Kreiss's unauthorized activities. Speaking for the Justice Department, we do not want our Kreiss problem exposed, and certainly not to Treasury and the BATF.\"\n\n\"I guess I can see that,\" Janet said, although she sensed something was not quite making sense here. \"So now what?\"\n\n\"My principal, Mr. Garrette, has discussed this matter with Assistant Director Marchand. It has been decided that there might be a way to finesse this situation. We've told the ATF at the DCB level that an ex-operative of ours had maybe stumbled onto something related to the bomb-maker conspiracy theory, and that it might, emphasis on the word _might,_ have something to do with the Ramsey Arsenal. We informed ATF that we proposed to let this guy run free for a while and see what, if anything, he turns up.\"\n\n\"But what makes you think there is something going on at this arsenal?\"\n\n\"Because Kreiss recently contacted an old buddy who used to work for the U.S. Marshals Service,\" Foster said. \"He did Kreiss a favor, but then his company security officer asked some questions, and in turn, the company reported the matter to the Bureau. They happen to have a contract with the Bureau, and they found out Kreiss used to work for the Bureau.\"\n\n\"What was the favor?\"\n\n\"The friend is a pilot who does airborne geo-information systems surveys. Kreiss wanted an aerial map of the Ramsey Arsenal. He told his friend that something was going on there that shouldn't be, and that it had something to do with his daughter's disappearance.\"\n\nJanet frowned. This was news. \"Let me get this straight,\" she said. \"You're saying that now you _want_ Kreiss to go operational again, because you think he might lead you to some bomb-making cell operating out of this arsenal?\"\n\n\"Correct,\" Bellhouser said. \"Now, if we can put you alongside Kreiss, we can perhaps achieve two objectives: We can find out what he's doing, and maybe we can catch some serious bombers.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" Foster said, \"nobody knows whether or not the antigovemment groups have organized nationally. It isn't out of the question that they have in a limited way\u2014say in the matter of getting their bombs. But if this works, we might have a chance here to roll up not only the bomb makers but some of their customers.\"\n\nJanet frowned, but then she thought she understood. Foster had an unspoken objective on the table: If the Bureau could unearth a bomber cell where ATF had failed to find them, the Bureau stood to count considerable coup. At the expense of ATF, she reminded herself.\n\n\"And you think that Kreiss acting independently has a better chance to find something than an overt joint ATF\/Bureau operation?\"\n\n\"The last one of those was something less than a signal success,\" Bellhouser pointed out.\n\n\"And Kreiss is that good?\" Janet asked.\n\nThe large black man, who had been listening impassively up to now, snorted. Foster introduced him. \"Janet, this is Mr. Ransom. He is a liaison officer to the DCB. The gentleman with him is Mr. Cassidy. Mr. Ransom here has had some, um, experience with Mr. Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Experience,\" Ransom said. \"Yeah, you might call it that. Remind me to show you our Bronco.\"\n\n\"We're going to downplay this whole thing at the DCB meeting,\" Foster said. \"The last thing we want right now is the ATF charging into the arsenal. Especially if there's nothing there, because that would necessarily bring the focus back to Kreiss.\"\n\nJanet nodded slowly as she tried to work out all the lines in the water. Something was still muddled here. Then an awful idea occurred to her. \"You people aren't holding back information on Kreiss's daughter, are you?\" she asked, looking at Foster and Bellhouser.\n\n\"Oh, for God's sake,\" snapped Bellhouser angrily. There was an embarrassed silence at the table. Farnsworth was shaking his head. Foster took a deep breath before responding.\n\n\"I won't dignify that question with an answer, Agent Carter,\" he said. \"Look, Edwin Kreiss is a tough nut. Even in retirement, as Mr. Ransom discovered earlier this morning. I'll let him brief you after this meeting. This Site R business may be entirely off the mark, in which case we'll break it off and find another way to deal with Kreiss. But the ATF people who went into the Ramsey complex said it would be an absolutely _perfect_ place for someone to set up a covert explosives lab.\"\n\n\"But they found nothing?\"\n\n\"A bunch of big concrete buildings, stripped down and locked up. The Army has some local rent-a-cops under contract. They make routine patrols of the physical plant, and they've never seen anything except signs of the occasional deer hunter back in the bunker area. It seems the central industrial area is known locally to be badly contaminated, which tends to keep intruders out. One of the security guards also said that there are rumors of chemical weapons, nerve gas, that sort of stuff, stored in the complex. We checked with the Army, which says that's total bullshit, but since it helps to keep out intruders, they've always been deliberately coy about denying it.\"\n\n\"Based on his reputation, if something _is_ going on there, Kreiss will uncover it,\" Bellhouser said. \"If and when he does, that's when the DCB would want to reassert control.\"\n\n\"And bring in some more assets, like maybe the ATF?\"\n\n\"Or the appropriate Bureau people,\" Foster said. \"And also because if someone hurt or killed his daughter, and those other two kids, you know\u2014they broke into the arsenal on a lark, stumbled onto something, and somebody took them\u2014Edwin Kreiss is likely to stake them out naked on the forest floor and build small fires on their bellies. For starters.\"\n\n\"Sounds about right to me,\" Janet said.\n\nRansom grinned in the background, but Foster and Bellhouser did not see any humor in it. \"The objective,\" Bellhouser said, \"over and above our Kreiss problem, is to see if we can smash the whole thing\u2014the bomb consultant, his lab, and his conduits into the violent antigovernment groups.\"\n\n\"These are the people who bomb whole buildings full of innocent civilians,\" Foster said. \"Remember OK City? The day-care center?\"\n\nRansom stopped grinning. Janet nodded. That was certainly a worthwhile objective. \"All right, I think I understand. And Kreiss is not to know anything about all this, correct? I offer to help him where I can, and then keep you people informed via our office here?\"\n\n\"You said she was smart,\" Bellhouser murmured to Farnsworth.\n\nPuh-leeze, Janet thought.\n\n\"This all assumes Kreiss will give me the time of day,\" she pointed out. \"He doesn't exactly strike me as a team player.\"\n\n\"He may or may not accept _your_ help,\" Foster said. \"The first thing _we_ want to know is whether or not he's been into the arsenal, and what, if anything, he's found there. How you get that information will be entirely up to you.\"\n\nThis guy's a master of the obvious, Janet thought. \"It's been several days,\" she said. \"Since the incident in that kid's apartment, I mean. We may be a little late here.\"\n\n\"For what it's worth, he was gone all night last night,\" Ransom said. \"And when he came back, he also anticipated that somebody might be waiting there in his cabin.\"\n\n\"How? we wonder,\" Bellhouser asked rhetorically.\n\nJanet kept her face a perfect blank. \"Maybe he _is_ just that good,\" she said. \"Especially if he's working something after you guys told him never to go operational again.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Bellhouser said, giving her a speculative look. \"But for now, this is a Bureau\/Justice Department play. With a little help from our Agency friends here.\"\n\nAgency friends? Janet thought. Then she realized Bellhouser was talking about the two so-called liaison men. \"And ATF doesn't suspect you've got something going?\" she asked.\n\n\"We think not,\" Bellhouser said. \"If Kreiss turns up solid evidence of a bomber cell, we'll take it to the DCB, and, of course, that will fold in ATF. But right now, Kreiss and what he's doing is our focus.\"\n\n\"What this 'we' shit, white woman?\" Ransom murmured. \"Maybe you should go deal with that crazy motherfucker. Him and his fifty-caliber rifle.\"\n\nBellhouser looked over at Ransom. \"I will if I have to, since you failed to deliver the message.\"\n\n\"Didn't need to,\" Ransom said. \"He doesn't think it's you.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" Janet said. \"What message? What are you two talking about?\"\n\nBellhouser ignored her question. \"We'll coordinate this through Mr. Farnsworth. You will report exclusively to him. Think of him as your field controller.\"\n\nField controller, Janet thought with another mental roll of her eyes. Just call me Bond, Janet Bond. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Boss, would you please back-brief Larry Talbot?\" She looked at her watch. \"It's Friday afternoon. I should get in touch with Mr. Kreiss ASAP, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" Foster said.\n\nJanet hesitated, an image of Edwin Kreiss's watchful face in her mind. \"You don't think Kreiss will tumble to all this?\" she asked. \"He seems pretty . . . perceptive.\"\n\n\"Not if it's done right,\" Foster said. \"Think of it as the 'frog in the pot' analogy: You drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, out he comes. Put him in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat? He boils to death without ever realizing he's in trouble.\"\n\nJanet just looked at Foster. From her brief acquaintance with Edwin Kreiss, she saw a hundred things wrong with his little analogy.\n\n\"And Mr. Ransom here has some equipment to show you. Why don't you go with him, while we sort out communications and coordination with Mr. Farnsworth?\"\n\nJanet glanced at Farnsworth, who nodded. She knew she would have to talk to him later, to make sure she understood the real bureaucratic ground rules here. As she got up to leave, the Bellhouser woman was giving her a studied look. It occurred to Janet that their scheme depended entirely on Mr. Kreiss going along with her offer of \"help.\" The woman's expression somehow reminded Janet of a snake who'd just missed a rabbit.\n\nShe followed Ransom out of the conference room and closed the door behind her. The more she thought about this, the more she thought Kreiss would just blow her off. On the other hand, she had warned him about the Agency people showing up. Maybe he would be grateful. Edwin Kreiss grateful. Sure.\n\n\"So,\" she said, \"what's this about a fifty-caliber rifle? And a Bronco?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It's in your impound lot. You know what a Barrett light fifty is?\"\n\n\"I'm a materials forensics nerdette, so, no. What's a Barrett light fifty?\"\n\nThey went down to the basement and then took back stairs out to the multistoried parking garage behind the federal building. A fenced area on the lower level held impounded vehicles. The Bronco was in one corner of the compound, hunkered down in a pool of its body fluids. Ransom walked them over to it.\n\n\"A Barrett light fifty is a big-ass rifle. Currently being used by Navy SEALs as a long-range personal communicator. The Army is using it to detonate land mines. He did this with three rounds.\"\n\n\"Wow. Was he after you guys?\"\n\n\"Kreiss? No way. He normally doesn't use guns on people. He uses guns to scare the shit out of people. Like me and Gerald back there at his cabin. We were playing dive the submarine by the time that second round came down the hill. Somebody lets off a Barrett, you _know_ you're in a world of shit.\"\n\nJanet looked at the car and wondered what she'd gotten herself into. Ransom was watching her. \"I guess I don't understand,\" she said. \"Somebody pops a cap at Bureau agents, the immediate result is that a hundred more agents come kick his ass. Tell me some more about this Kreiss guy. And you work for the Agency? Did you work with Kreiss?\"\n\n\"Nobody worked _with_ Edwin Kreiss. _For_ him, maybe, but never with him. That's part of his charm. And me, I'm just a glorified gofer.\"\n\nJanet looked sideways at him. Ransom's flexible speech patterns were beginning to make her think that he was perhaps being modest. \"Well, look, whatever you are, I'm a regular whizbang in a federal forensics investigation. You want courtroom-ready evidence to lock some wrong guys up, I'm your agent. I'm here in Roanoke to get some out-of-specialty field experience, which means I have next to no field experience. Get the picture?\"\n\n\"Got the picture. Man upstairs said you pissed off some heavy dudes. What you do\u2014tell the truth on 'em?\"\n\n\"I was working in the Bureau laboratory. As you may have read, we've had some problems there. I told them what the evidence said. Not what they wanted to hear. You know, facts getting in the way of preconceived notions. Some of the bigger bosses hate that.\"\n\n\"See, we don't have that problem where I work.\"\n\n\"Oh really?\"\n\n\"Yeah, see, at the Agency, ain't nobody ever asks for facts in the first place. That way, nothing interferes with their preconceived notions. Lot less friction.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I'll bet. Anyway, I do believe I'm out of my league getting mixed up with a guy like this,\" she said, pointing with her chin to the deflated Bronco.\n\n\"We all out of our league, Special Agent Carter. That's why he was so damned effective when he worked for us.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. If he's such a big problem, why don't you all just gang up and take him in, do some spooky number on him?\"\n\nRansom stopped and looked around. \"You really don't know, do you?\" he said.\n\n\"No, I don't.\"\n\nHe looked around again. \"Okay, there's two reasons. The first is because he's Edwin Kreiss. Listen, Gerald and me? We were sent to just have us a little talk with the man last night. Just talk, now, nothing heavy. He don't come home, and next thing I know, it's morning and I'm looking for coffee makings. I'm opening a cupboard door and a fuckin' zooful of goddamn monster-ass _lions_ sound off in that big room.\"\n\n\"Lions.\"\n\n\"Fuckin' right, lions. I never heard a live lion in my fuckin' life outside of the movies, and I not only knew it was lions, but that there was a hundred of them bastards _in_ the house. We talkin' _loud_ motherfuckers, awright? I mean, we talkin' a hundred fifty decibels' worth of roaring lions. Then it was a machine gun, blowing all the windows in the house out, along with our eardrums. I'm talkin' glass flyin', bullets blowin' through walls, dishes breakin'\u2014and it's so loud, I can't hear myself screamin'.\"\n\n\"He shoot at his own house?\"\n\n\"Naw, he didn't shoot nothin'\u2014then. My man Kreiss does sounds. These were just sounds. I knew that\u2014still scared the shit out of me. And Gerald? My man Gerald crapped himself.\"\n\n\"He does this with what\u2014speakers? Tapes?\"\n\n\"Tactical sound. It's a Kreiss trademark. See, if you can hear it but you can't see it, then your imagination automatically comes up with the worst-case monster, right? And if you get your target spooked enough, he's gonna move in straight lines. He put a rattlesnake tape in a guy's car one time\u2014rattles, hiss, ground sounds, the whole nine yards. Dude drove it into a tree tryin' to find that snake. I gotta tell you, I knew all about this, but Gerald an' me? We both out the fuckin' door in about two nanoseconds, all that shit starts up, runnin' for the Bronco, and then, _then,_ here come the crack of doom to split the engine block into four pieces.\"\n\n\"Okay, so he has a bad temper.\"\n\nRansom started laughing. \"Temper? _Temper!_ What are you, Special Agent, a comedienne? _Temper!_ No, no, no, no. Kreiss? He wasn't mad. He cool as a fuckin' cucumber when I go up the hill to pay my respects, you know, say hello, see how _his_ morning is goin'. No, no, see: This the kind of shit he does when he just workin'. Now, rumor has it he does have a teeny little problem with rage. That's when he does the really bad shit, the shit got him retired. And that leads me to the second reason. You sure you don't already know this?\"\n\n\"I've heard a little bit about the Glower incident, if that's what you mean. I'm not sure I want to know any more.\"\n\n\"Well, you better, you be messin' aroun' with those executive back-stabbers in there. Edwin Kreiss, when he flamed out after the Glower thing, he supposedly said some things. Made some accusations. Like he'd been right about Glower, seein' as Glower offed himself and his whole family rather than answer to what was comin'. Some other people where I work thought the same thing, only they couldn't say so, because sayin' so wasn't such a healthy thing to do, careerwise.\"\n\n\"My boss said Kreiss thought there was someone else who had been obstructing the DOE laboratories investigation. Somebody in another agency.\"\n\n\"But that's the thing, Special Agent. That's the reason nobody willin' to order up a gang bang on Mr. Kreiss. Because, the way the jungle drums told it, brother Kreiss just might have some _evidence_ to back up all those accusations he made. You know, _evidence_? Like what got you sent down here to East Bumfuck, Egypt? Me, I'm just a workin' stiff, but my guess is there are some senior people in both your outfit and mine who just might be afraid of Edwin Kreiss.\"\n\nShe stared at the bleeding Bronco. \"Fuck me,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"Now you talkin' like a veteran,\" Ransom said approvingly.\n\nThey headed back toward the building. Janet still felt that there was something wrong with the logic of what Bellhouser and Foster had asked her to do, but she couldn't put her finger on it. \"So where does a retired FBI agent get his hands on a fifty-caliber rifle?\" she asked.\n\n\"Probably got it when he was with Agency CE,\" Ransom said. \"You gotta remember: Kreiss worked with the sweepers, and those are some serious spooks. Those guys can draw on any kind of equipment the CS\u2014that's our Clandestine Services\u2014have in the toy store, along with DOD's toy store. Word is, those dudes go out and get some of their own shit, 'cause the operatin' cash is, shall we say, loosely controlled? When it's time for them to retire, go raise plutonium somewhere, they turn in the issue stuff, but there's no tellin' what kinda shit they got stashed, or where. Ain't nobody asks 'em, either.\"\n\nShe stopped at the door, took a deep breath, and blew it out through pursed lips. \"Maybe I need to go back and talk to Farnsworth. I'm definitely not qualified to do this by myself.\"\n\n\"Who says you be by yourself, Special Agent? You gonna have some top _line_ backup while you on this little vacation.\"\n\nShe looked at him. He was smiling broadly. \"You?\" she said.\n\n\"One and only.\"\n\nThey went through the door and she stopped again. \"And you just walked up the hill to talk to him?\"\n\n\"Couldn't dance, Special Agent. Might as well go see what the man wants, makin' all that noise. Besides, I didn't like the sounds Gerald was makin'.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He okay now?\"\n\nThey started up the stairs. \"I believe Gerald's had a small change of heart,\" Ransom said. \"Brother Gerald has decided he's going into another line of work. He was in the computer-research end of the CS before he came to the retrieval shop. I believe the Barrett influenced his career thinkin' this morning. And maybe the lions, too. Hard to say which.\"\n\n\"Gerald sounds intelligent,\" she said. \"So, what was significant about the message you were supposed to deliver to Kreiss?\"\n\nHe looked down at her for a moment. \"I can't tell you that,\" he said. \"Because I don't know what it means. What I can say is that it involves somethin' way above your pay grade and mine. Now, let's go look at some of my surveillance toys.\"\n\nKreiss spent the rest of the day checking his property's perimeter, retrieving his truck, and then cleaning and restashing the Barrett. Micah Wall wandered up about mid-morning to inquire if everything was all right at the Kreiss homestead. His eyes widened when he saw the Barrett.\n\n\"Been some years since I heard me a fifty-cal,\" he said, looking around for bodies. \"Korea, I believe it was. They didn't look like that.\"\n\n\"Unmistakable, aren't they?\" Kreiss said.\n\nMicah eyed the bandage on Kreiss's neck but said nothing about it. \"Fifty works real good on Chicoms, specially when they bunch up. We gonna have buzzards? You need a mass grave dug or anything?\"\n\nKreiss laughed. \"No, this was just a little domestic dispute. I think we got it all sorted out. For the moment anyway.\"\n\n\"Hate to hear you do a _big_ domestic dispute, neighbor. Oh, and my dogs was inquirin' about them lions?\"\n\n\"The wonders of modern science, Micah. Just a little something to make people move out of their prepared positions.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Micah said, nodding thoughtfully. \"Well, like I've said before, you need me or any of my kinfolk to take a walk in the woods now and then, you just holler. Any word on Lynn?\"\n\n\"I appreciate the offer, Micah. And no, nothing on Lynn from the authorities. I may have found out a couple of things, though.\" He told Micah about finding Lynn's hat inside the Ramsey Arsenal, and that he thought there was something going on in there.\n\n\"What kinda something, you reckon?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. My guess is a meth lab, maybe some other kind of heavy drug thing. Something that made those two guys willing to shoot first and talk about it later. I did find out who one of them is, however. We're going to have a talk.\"\n\n\"You think maybe them kids went in there and ran into the wrong kinda folks?\"\n\nKreiss nodded, sighing. \"It's possible, Micah. And that's not a happy thought.\"\n\n\"You want, I got some kinfolk who can go git this fella, bring him back to our place. We can put him in the caves for a while. Give him time to reflect. Then you can have that there talk in private, you want.\"\n\n\"I appreciate it, Micah, but I better do this one myself. There are some folks who are interested in the fact that I'm stepping out at night, and they're not people you want to meet.\"\n\n\"Like them two boys I seen goin' down the road this mornin'?\"\n\nKreiss nodded his head. Micah thought about that for a moment.\n\n\"They revenuers?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. They are federal. I used to work with one of them. There's some bad history here. I want to focus on finding Lynn, and I don't want them drawn into it.\"\n\nWall nailed a cricket with a shot of chaw. \"Well, you know where we at,\" he said. \"You git into a fix, you call, hear?\"\n\nKreiss thanked him again and Micah trudged back into the forest, keeping a wary eye out for lions. Kreiss made a mental note that maybe he would take Micah up on his offer. Micah's clan had been walking these hills for decades. If Bambi and the Bureau had made some kind of deal with the Agency, there might be more watchers. The Wall clan might actually have some fun with them. Maybe he should lend them some lions, or maybe the tape of an adult male grizzly at full power, complete with noises of crashing through the brush and snapping limbs; that was a beauty for woods and cave work, especially if dogs were in pursuit. Their handlers might know it was a tape, but the dogs would inevitably leave the scene, sometimes with the handlers' arms attached to their leashes.\n\nHe had checked the house out for bugs and other electronic vermin, sanitized his phone line, and disconnected the house electrical power at the breaker box to scan the house wiring for devices that drew power by induction. His computer was strictly a communications device; as far as he was concerned, it was eternally unsecure. Everything that went out on the Net was an open book anyway, so he didn't bother to check it other than to do an occasional cookie scan. Once he was reasonably sure the place was clean, he checked his truck. There, his scanner found two bugs right away. They were so easy, he knew there had to be a third, which he finally found mounted on the inside of the right-rear wheel, where it drew inductive power from axle rotation via magnets fixed to the frame. If the wheel wasn't moving, there was no power signal to be detected by the scanner. Clever. He found it by getting on his back and looking.\n\nThen he took a long, hot shower, dressed the cuts on his neck, ate a sandwich, and lay down for a long nap. He would redo the house sweep in twenty-four hours to pick up any delayed-action devices. He almost hoped they'd left one, because a bug you knew about was a wonderful way to feed back disinformation.\n\nHe was awakened at 3:30 by the phone. It was the FBI lady, Janet Carter.\n\n\"You have something new on Lynn?\" he asked immediately.\n\n\"No, Mr. Kreiss, I don't. But I'd like to meet with you, if I could. Today if possible, before the weekend.\"\n\n\"Today is almost over and weekends don't mean anything to me, Agent Carter. Why do we need to meet?\"\n\n\"To talk about something that shouldn't be heard on a phone, Mr. Kreiss.\"\n\nHe thought about that, trying to wipe the sleep from his eyes. His body was sore all over from his little pipe bath at the arsenal. He had planned to work on Jared McGarand tonight. If the FBI lady didn't have anything on Lynn, he wasn't sure he wanted to waste any time with her. She was pretty enough to look at, but until Lynn was recovered, he wasn't interested in women.\n\n\"Well, that's sufficiently mysterious to make me curious, but I'm busy tonight, Agent Carter. How about some other time?\"\n\n\"Maybe I can help you find Site R; you know, the place Barry Clark told you about?\"\n\nThat sat him up in his bed. She must have gone back to reinterview that little creep. And made him talk. He'd better hear this. \"Okay.\" He sighed. \"Where and when?\"\n\n\"I live in Roanoke. You live well west of Blacksburg. You know where the Virginia Tech main library is? The university has a convention center hotel across the street. Called the Donaldson-Brown Center?\"\n\n\"I know it.\" He'd had lunch with Lynn there a week before she disappeared. The memory of it pinched his heart.\n\n\"The bar at seven?\"\n\n\"All right,\" he said, and hung up. What the hell is this all about? he wondered. First, she had warned him about the Washington people coming to town. Now she said she wanted to help him find Lynn, even though her bosses supposedly had closed the local case. He lay back in the bed. Were the Agency and the Bureau really working together? Not likely, he thought. Especially after the Glower incident. So what had brought Bambi and Chief Red In The Face to beautiful downtown Roanoke, Virginia, if not something to do with him? As further evidenced by the appearance of Charlie Ransom plus one at his cabin. Why? What had brought them now? Carter had just mentioned Barry Clark. She couldn't _know_ that he'd been the headless visitor, but what if she'd reported the incident and named him as the most likely suspect? Would that generate Washington's interest?\n\nHe got up with a grunt and checked the time. It was going on four o'clock. Jared ought not to be home yet. He went to his desk and got out a file marked \"Tax Return.\" He had transcribed all the pertinent numbers from the papers he'd taken from Jared's trailer into what looked like a personal tax record, and then he'd burned the McGarand papers. He got Jared's phone number and dialed it. When the phone had rung three times, he pressed the buttons marked 7 and 5 together for two seconds. This activated the recorder, which diverted the ring signal and initiated a ten-second wait period, in case the owner picked up his phone. Then it activated its playback feature. He listened to Jared's call to someone, pressed the star key, listened to it again, and then pressed 6 and 9. The digits of a phone number were read to him by a robotic voice. He copied down the number. He pressed the buttons 7 and 5 again. There was one incoming call, an older man's voice. It sounded like the same man in the previous call. The man told Jared that they would go out to the site tonight to get set up for tomorrow and to look for their \"visitor.\" He listened to the voice again, memorizing the sound of it. There were no more calls. He pressed the zero button three times and hung up.\n\nHe looked up the number for the Donaldson-Brown Center and called for a room reservation, specifically requesting a room overlooking the parking lot. Then he went back to sleep, setting his clock in time to get cleaned up for his trip into that throbbing metropolis known as Blacksburg, Virginia.\n\n* * *\n\nJanet Carter arrived at Donaldson-Brown at 6:30. She was driving an unmarked tan Bureau Crown Vic, which she parked in the front parking lot. It was twilight, but the parking lot lights weren't on yet. She had had time to go to her townhouse in Roanoke before coming over to Blacksburg, and she was wearing a light wool pantsuit over a plain dark blouse. Earlier, she'd spent an hour with Ransom looking at various surveillance and communications gadgets, and then she had met with Farnsworth alone to nail down the ground rules for her new assignment.\n\nFarnsworth had been pretty specific: All communications regarding what she was doing with Edwin Kreiss were to be via secure means directly to him\u2014preferably via scrambled landline. No cell phones and no clear tactical radio unless it was an emergency. Ransom was to be her distant tactical backup\u2014 _distant_ meaning that Kreiss was not to know that Ransom was operating with her if at all possible. She was not to go anywhere alone _with_ Kreiss without clearance from the RA. If her situation got at all hinky, she was to back out and return immediately to the federal building, day or night, and notify him. They would not establish a response cell in the federal building unless something more than a surveillance operation developed. She was to be armed at all times, and she was to carry an encapsulated CFR\u2014call for rescue\u2014pod at all times. He gave her the phone codes that would forward any call she made to the FBI office in Roanoke directly to him wherever he was, twenty-four hours a day. Finally, Farnsworth told her that there was always the chance that the two horse-holders from Washington might have other assets besides Ransom in the area. If she detected that situation, she was to back out immediately.\n\n\"Unfortunately, all we know about this little deal is what those people have told us, no more, no less,\" he said. \"I've got some calls into the Criminal Investigations operations center at our headquarters to verify this DCB thing\u2014I've never heard of it, although that doesn't necessarily mean anything. And much as I hate the idea of working with ATF, I'm uneasy about cutting them out if this is turning into a bombing case. For all their Washington warts, their field people are pretty good at working bombs.\"\n\n\"I got the impression that those two weren't telling us everything,\" Janet said.\n\n\"You've got good instincts,\" Farnsworth said. \"I've got to be careful here. Foster works for Marchand and the FCI people. As the Roanoke office, we _don't_ work for Marchand. I have the authority to put you on this thing, but I want some top cover before it goes much further. I also want to know more about this purported bomb-making cell operating down here in southwest Virginia, which I damn well _should_ have been told about.\"\n\n\"One final warning, Janet,\" he said. \"I know you've had one previous field tour, but that was in your specialty, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, in Chicago. I didn't do much street work.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"That's what I'm getting at, your lack of street experience, through no fault of yours, of course. But this guy Kreiss is the walking embodiment of street experience, and, apparently, then some. You're a smart young lady, but don't try to use those brains to outwit Edwin Kreiss. Use them to know when to back out and call me. Maintain situational awareness, and keep it simple, okay?\"\n\nAnother \"Yes, sir,\" and then she was out of there. And now she was here. The parking lot was almost full, and there were people unloading bags from cars lined up by the hotel's front entrance. She wondered if Edwin Kreiss was standing under a streetlight nearby, a newspaper in his face, watching her. Yeah, and a brown fedora, tan trench coat, and some shades to complete the ensemble. She smiled and automatically checked her makeup. She had deliberately put on plain clothes, not wanting to put any boy-girl elements into the meeting. He's just a retired Bureau agent, she reminded herself. Which isn't quite true, is it? she thought. Ransom's story of the acoustic attack and then the .50 caliber fire down the hill would have been almost funny except for one thing: Ransom and his partner had been frightened out of their wits. His partner was apparently quitting over what had happened up there. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to imagine what lions roaring at 150 decibels would do to her own presence of mind. A flash-bang grenade was 175 decibels. And, yes, your forebrain would tell you there couldn't be lions in the house, she thought, but she was pretty sure her own instincts would have been to bolt out of that cabin while trying not to leave a trail. This Kreiss was a piece of work.\n\nShe got out of the car and walked directly to the front entrance. She was carrying a leather purse, which held her credentials. She had her Sig Sauer model 225 in a hip holster under her jacket. Farnsworth had asked her if she carried more than one gun, but, like most agents, she did not. She carried the CFR pod, which was the size of a change purse, in her pants pocket. If squeezed hard, it would begin emitting a coded signal on one of the satellite-monitored search and rescue frequencies, which in turn would key a reaction transponder at FBI headquarters. It couldn't pinpoint her precise location, but it would tell the system who was in trouble. Ransom had agreed to follow her to Blacksburg but to stay away from the hotel. She hoped he wouldn't get all independent on her and blow their cover, such as it was.\n\nShe found the lounge located to one side of the lobby and took a table at the back. There was a conventional bar running down one wall, booths along the opposite wall, and smaller tables out in the middle. A couple of men at the bar were looking her over. She went through the looking-at-her-watch pantomime to discourage any walk-ups. C'mon, Kreiss, she thought, and then realized she was the one who was early.\n\nThree floors above, Edwin Kreiss kept watch on the parking lot from his darkened window. The building front faced northeast, so anyone looking up at the windows at sunset should not be able to see in. He had watched Janet drive into the lot in her rather obvious Bureau car, complete with the small whip antenna on the trunk. He had wondered what she'd been doing down there for ten minutes, but then she'd gone inside. He was waiting to see if any more unmarked cars showed up. He had, in fact, been watching the lot since five o'clock, looking for any vehicle that came into the area either to make repeated passes or to park, with no one getting out. His own vehicle was parked almost a mile away, on the other side of the Virginia Tech parade field, behind the main administration building. If Carter was working with a surveillance squad, her backup might try to plant something on his truck while she was inside with him. Assuming she had backup.\n\nHe was still suspicious about her call for a meet. It had to be more than something generated out of the goodness of her heart, and, regrettably, something to do with the firestorm he'd caused when he left the government. He swore quietly. If that's what this was all about, his life could get really complicated. Especially with Lynn missing.\n\nAnd then he saw a minivan come into the parking lot, turn its headlights off, and start to cruise the lanes with just its parking lights on. That was okay, except that it went by two perfectly good parking spaces, and then a third and a fourth. He got out his binoculars, trying for a make on the plate, but the plate light was conveniently not working. The windows must have been tinted, because he could not see inside the van, either. The van cruised down one more lane and then came up past Carter's Crown Vic. There was a brief flare of brake lights, but then the van continued on. Bingo, he thought. The van went out of the parking lot and onto a small side street that led into the main campus. A passing car honked and flashed its lights at the van to get its main lights on. The van complied, then pulled into a handicapped space to one side of the hotel building. As Kreiss watched, a tall man got out and walked purposefully back to Carter's car, where he looked both ways and then bent down to put something under the left-rear wheel well. The man then walked back to the minivan and got in. A moment later, he drove away.\n\nKreiss pulled the drapes closed. It looked like Carter had backup all right, but not necessarily working for her. He slipped on his sport coat, having decided to dress up a little, in deference to the fact that Carter would probably still be in her office clothes. He went downstairs.\n\nJanet saw him come into the bar and raised her hand. He was wearing khaki-colored slacks, a white shirt open at the throat, and a dark blue sport coat. With his gray-white hair and clipped beard, he looked almost professorial, except for the heft of his shoulders and a look in his eye that made other men in the crowded room ease out of his way as he came across to her table. He nodded to her as he sat down and ordered a glass of sparkling water from the waitress.\n\n\"Special Agent Carter,\" he said. \"You called.\"\n\n\"Yes, I did,\" she said. The bar was really filling up now, and the noise level was growing. Up close, his face looked a little puffy on one side and there was a bandage peeking up over his collar.\n\n\"Hurt yourself?\" she asked, looking at the bandage.\n\n\"Let's get to it,\" he said, ignoring her question. \"I want to find my daughter. What do you want?\"\n\n\"I reinterviewed Barry Clark. He said he told you they were going to Site R. I think I can help you identify what that is.\"\n\n\"I already know,\" he said. \"It's the Ramsey Arsenal. What do you want?\"\n\nShe was taken aback and suddenly didn't know what to say. She realized she should have had a plan B. He leaned forward, his eyes intense. \"Listen to me, Special Agent Carter. I want to find my daughter. Three case folders gathering dust up in the MP shop don't cut it. I'm going to do what I'm going to do, regardless of the Bureau. If I determine that she's been abducted and injured or killed, I'll find out who did it and put their severed heads on pikes out on the interstate.\"\n\nShe blinked, desperately trying to think of something clever to say. This wasn't going anything like the way she had anticipated. She had forgotten how intense he was. Focus, she commanded herself. Focus. Then he surprised her.\n\n\"Who would want to plant a bug on your Bu car?\" he asked.\n\n\"W-what? A bug?\"\n\n\"I watched you arrive in the parking lot. Tan Crown Vic? You parked and stayed in the car for a few minutes. Then you walked in. Ten minutes after that, a nondescript minivan came into the lot, cruised all the lanes, paused at your car, left the lot, and then parked long enough for some tall white guy to walk back and put something under your left-rear wheel well. Who would want to bug a Bureau car?\"\n\nWhat the hell is this? she thought. \"I looked for you,\" she said. \"Where were you watching from?\"\n\n\"My room, Special Agent.\"\n\nHis room. \"Oh\" was all she could manage.\n\nHe sat back in his chair and drank some of his water. \"You're obviously not a street agent. What's your specialty?\"\n\nThe look in his eyes was one of calm appraisal. She decided this was no time for bullshit. \"I'm a materials forensics evidence specialist. Most of my assignments have been in support of Washington task forces, qualifying the evidence. I did one field tour in Chicago, but it was in-specialty.\"\n\n\"You do a lot of materials forensics over there in beautiful downtown Roanoke, Virginia?\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said, \"some senior people at the headquarters thought it was time for me to get some field experience.\"\n\n\"You mean you were playing straight-arrow in the lab, upset some prosecutor's preconceived notions about the evidence, and your mentor was concerned enough about your career to get you out of Dodge for a couple of years.\"\n\nShe colored and then nodded. To cover her embarrassment, she drank some Coke. It was watery.\n\n\"What brought Bambi and Marchand's lapdog down here?\"\n\n\"I did, I guess.\"\n\n\"You guess?\"\n\nShe winced mentally. Talking to him was like being back at the damned Academy. She kept forgetting he had been a senior agent with many years of experience.\n\n\"I made a routine inquiry. It's . . . it's perhaps not something you want to hear.\"\n\nHe just looked at her, so she described her conversation with Dr. Kellermann.\n\nHe nodded when she was finished. He had been coming at her like an interrogator. Now his expression softened. \"And that inquiry got back to the Justice Department how, exactly?\"\n\n\"That, I don't know,\" she said. The waitress buzzed by and asked if they needed anything else. Kreiss didn't look at her, just shook his head.\n\n\"I mean, I guess the Counseling Division notified somebody,\" she said. \"Although I don't know why, exactly. My inquiry concerned your ex-wife, not you.\" She was trying to keep the conversation going, but there he was, looking at his watch. She had gotten nowhere. \"Have you been to this Ramsey Arsenal place?\" she asked.\n\nHe sat back in his chair and steepled his hands beneath his chin. \"Who wants to know?\"\n\n\"I do. Why did you ask that?\"\n\n\"Because I don't believe the EA to the deputy AG and her counterpart from Marchand's office came down here to work a missing persons case. I think they came down here to find out what the hell I'm up to. Let me guess: They send you to get close to me?\"\n\nThe question came so directly and so unexpectedly that Janet couldn't keep her expression from revealing the truth. Kreiss smiled wearily. \"They're so damned transparent. They sit around in Washington for years and years, playing all these palace games. They think field people believe their bullshit.\"\n\n\"That's not quite it,\" she said. \"They think there's some kind of bomb-making cell that might be working out of the arsenal. They\u2014\"\n\n\" _Bombs?_ \" he said with a snort. \"The Bureau doesn't work bombs; ATF works bombs. If they thought that, they'd turn loose a herd of ATF agents in there and find out. This isn't about any goddamned bombs. If those two are here, they're here about me. Which is probably why two Agency CE worker bees were waiting at my cabin when I got back this morning.\"\n\nShe thought she saw an opening. \"Got back from where, Mr. Kreiss?\"\n\n\"That's my business, Agent Carter,\" he said, ignoring her gambit. \"Now, I have a daughter to locate. I don't really think there's anything you can do for me. I appreciate your telling me about the Washington interest, but that's between me and them. If I find my daughter, I'll let you know. If I don't, but I find the people responsible for her disappearance, you'll hear about that, too.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said. \"Heads out on I-Eighty-one.\"\n\nHe smiled, but his eyes remained grim. \"It'd be a change from all those billboards,\" he said.\n\n\"Did you really operate alone?\" she asked. She surprised herself, asking the question, but she couldn't imagine what that must be like.\n\nHe thought about it for a moment. \"Not at first, but later, yes. The backup was available, but it was more technical than human. Once I went down a hole after somebody, it was an individual effort.\"\n\n\"But why? Why give away our biggest advantage, our ability to overwhelm a subject, with agents, with data, with surveillance, the whole boat?\"\n\n\"We weren't sent after 'subjects\/Special Agent. We were only activated to retrieve professional clandestine operatives. That's not a game for groups. Besides, we applied a different theory of pursuit.\"\n\n\"Which was?\"\n\n\"A single hunter. One-on-one. That made it personal, which gave us a chance to provoke an emotional reaction.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Emotion distracts. The more emotion, the more distraction. Distraction leads to mistakes. Mistakes lead to capture. This is all news to you, isn't it?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I went through basic agent training. I've just never done it at the street level.\"\n\n\"And you probably never will. You're not tough enough.\"\n\nShe felt herself coloring. \"That something you _know,_ Mr. Kreiss?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is. For instance, could you shoot someone?\"\n\n\"Yes. Well, I think so. To save my life. Or another agent's life.\"\n\n\"Sure about that? Could you pull that trigger and blast another human's heart out his back?\"\n\nShe started to get angry. \"Well, the real answer to that is, I don't know. Probably won't know until the time comes to do it, will I?\"\n\nHe smiled then. \"Well, at least you're not stupid. I think we're done here.\"\n\nHe looked at his watch again, which was when she remembered something during the discussion in Farnsworth's office. \"The Washington people were pretty specific about a bombing conspiracy. But one of them, the woman, said something I didn't understand. She jumped in Ransom's shit because he failed to deliver a message. I asked, 'What message?' but she wouldn't say, and neither would Ransom.\"\n\nKreiss looked away for a moment. \"I don't know,\" he said, finally. \"Like she said, Ransom didn't deliver any message.\"\n\nHe pushed his chair back. She couldn't just let him walk away, but she could not figure out a way of prolonging the conversation. She also wanted to be able to contact him again if something developed. \"Wait,\" she said. She fished in her purse and brought out her Bureau-issue pager. \"Would you take this?\" she said, handing the device across the table. \"In case I need to reach you quickly. You know, in case we get news of Lynn.\"\n\nHe cocked his head. \"You want me to carry your pager?\"\n\n\"It's not what you think,\" she said quickly, too quickly. \"I mean, it's not a tracking device or anything. It's just a plain vanilla pager. Please?\"\n\n\"Sure it is,\" he said, but then he took it and got up. \"You have a good evening, Special Agent Carter. And remember to check out your passenger.\"\n\nHe left a five-dollar bill on the table and walked out. She noticed that all those intelligent-looking men at the bar again moved aside to let him by, moving quickly enough that he didn't have to slow down. Kind of like the Red Sea opening up for Moses, she thought. She took another sip of her Coke, grimaced, and left the bar. Great job, she thought. You co-opted him very nicely. Had him eating out of the palm of your hand, didn't you? You're supposed to be setting up on him, and he has to tell _you_ somebody's put a bug on your car? And in compensation for seeing right through you, he's really going to walk around with your pager on his belt. _Jesus,_ what had she been thinking?\n\nShe went out the front door and walked directly to her Bureau car. She thought about looking for the bug, then decided to take the vehicle directly back to the Roanoke office and let someone from the surveillance squad take a look. It had better not have been Ransom or one of his people planting that thing, she thought, because if it had, this little game was over before it began. She started the car and then just sat there for a moment. Kreiss had touched a nerve when he asked her if she could shoot someone. She was pretty damn sure she could never do that. Even in tactical range training, when the bad guy silhouette popped up right in front of her, she had hesitated. After the final qualifications, the chief instructor had given her a look that spoke volumes. It was probably still in her record. And here was Kreiss, reading her like an open book. She wondered if he was watching her now. She resisted the impulse to look up at the windows. Then she wondered how she was going to break the news to Farnsworth.\n\n\"Hold up a minute,\" Browne McGarand said. It was another cool, clear night, with moonrise not due until around midnight. The arsenal rail gates gleamed dully a hundred yards ahead of them. Jared stopped and looked back at his grandfather, who was scanning the gates and the dark woods around them through a pair of binoculars.\n\n\"You see somethin'?\" Jared whispered.\n\n\"Nope. Just looking to see if anything's different.\"\n\n\"That counter'11 tell the tale,\" Jared said, peering into the nearby trees.\n\n\"Unless he got by your little trap and laid down one of his own. He's been using the same gate as we have. Okay, let's go.\"\n\nWhen Jared finally read the counter, he swore out loud. Browne looked at it and let out a long sigh.\n\n\"Zero it,\" he ordered.\n\n\"And then what? Twenty-six hits means thirteen people been in and out of here. That has to mean cops.\"\n\n\"Or one guy waving his hand twenty-six times across the beam,\" Browne pointed out. \"If he tripped your deadfall, all this means is that he got by it.\"\n\n\"Why not a buncha cops?\"\n\n\"Because there would have been a mess outside. Grass smashed down, vehicle tracks, cigarette butts. Cops come in a crowd; they leave sign. There was no sign out there. Let's go see your trap.\"\n\nThey found the pile of pipes where Kreiss had left it. Browne got down on all fours and searched the concrete of the street until he found the dried bloodstains where Kreiss had lain stunned after the initial fall. \"Here,\" he said. \"This mess got him, but he must have ducked most of it.\"\n\n\"That there's a coupla hunnert pounds a steel,\" Jared said, looking up at the steam pipe overpass. \"I know. I carried it all up there.\"\n\nBrowne was standing back up again, looking up the street, and thinking. \"One guy, not thirteen,\" he mused. \"One guy who doesn't belong here, just like we don't belong here. And for some reason, he hasn't brought cops. Now who could that be? I wonder.\"\n\n\"Hell,\" Jared said. \"After this here, he might be back.\"\n\n\"Yes, he might,\" Browne said. \"Or he might be here now, watching us. Let's go exploring tonight. I want a look at these rooftops, see if he's been laying up, watching us.\"\n\n\"What about the girl?\" Jared said, lifting the sack of food and water.\n\n\"Later. Leave it here in the middle of the street so we don't forget. She'll be out of water by now.\"\n\n\"Rats'll git it,\" Jared said.\n\n\"Chemicals got all the rats twenty years ago,\" Browne said. \"And all the other critters, too. Hasn't been anything living in this area since the place closed down. Come on.\"\n\nThe first thing Kreiss did was to release the dogs. He climbed up on the side of the pen, ignoring the lunging, barking beasts below, and then blew hard on a soundless dog whistle. The dogs shut up immediately and began to run around the pen to get away from the painful noise. Then he tripped the pen's door latch and swung the door open, blowing the whistle hard as he did it. The dogs bolted into the woods and then came back to bark at him. He laid into the whistle again. This time, they yelped and took off into the darkness to do what they liked to do most\u2014hunt. Within minutes, the sound of their baying was coming from over the next hill and diminishing as they went.\n\nHe climbed down off the pen, watching to make sure that one of the dogs hadn't doubled back, and then he went to the trailer. The telephone repair van was there, but Jared's truck was gone, which he hoped meant that he and his partner were up at the arsenal, doing whatever they did up there at night. And trying to figure out the number on that counter, and whether or not he or a posse of cops was waiting for them in the industrial area. He needed about an hour to get set up inside and outside the trailer, and then he would wait for Jared to return from his nocturnal operations. Then he would find out what Jared and his friend knew about Lynn and her friends. He dismissed the possibility that they might not know a damn thing.\n\n* * *\n\nBrowne called it off at around 10:30. They'd looked over several of the buildings and found nothing, although Browne thought that some of the ladder rungs looked scuffed. Someone or -thing had obviously tripped the deadfall. There were some stains on the concrete that could have been dried blood, although the darkness made it difficult to tell. The only other hard indication they had was the gate counter. Jared was still perplexed by the deadfall.\n\n\"That should a got him,\" he kept saying.\n\n\"He might have sensed it coming, or heard something above him and jumped back,\" Browne pointed out. \"Or only part of it got him. If those stains are blood, it didn't do much damage.\"\n\nJared could only shake his head. Browne decided that they should stay away from the site during the day on Saturday. Let the whole area cool off. He told Jared to check the power plant while he took the food and water to the girl. Then they'd leave, and come back two hours after sunset on Saturday night. They'd do a quick night-vision sweep, and then Browne would run the hydrogen generator all night while Jared either patrolled the industrial area or hid out on one of the rooftops to spot any intruders. He told Jared to just leave the pipes out in the street, but Jared pointed out that if the security truck came on Saturday, they would see them and wonder what the hell had happened. Browne concurred, and they spent fifteen minutes moving the pipes into an alley. Then they split up, agreeing to meet up at the main gates in twenty minutes. Jared suggested setting one more trap, in case their intruder came back Saturday.\n\n\"This time, I got just the thing,\" he said.\n\nJanet got back to the Roanoke federal building and drove her Bureau car into the security-lock parking area. She parked it near the vehicle-search rack and shut it down. It was Friday night, so the chances of finding one of the surveillance squad techs were slim to none. She was anxious to see if she could find the bug herself, but she knew she should let the pros have a clear field. If there was a bug under there, she'd have to call the RA. And he, of course, would want to know how the meeting had gone. Oh, just wonderful, sir. He told me that he didn't need any help from me and that I was much too inexperienced even to be out on the street by myself without a nanny. He saw through those two Washington wienies and didn't believe a word about the so-called bomb plot. Other than that, we bonded very well and formed an effective and maybe a productive partnership. And I did manage to get him to take my pager along with him.\n\nShe leaned back in the seat and tried to think it out. They talked, and then he left to do\u2014what? He'd said earlier that he was busy tonight. Doing what? Going where? To Site R? What would he be doing down at the Ramsey Arsenal on a Friday night? Crashing the Anti-Abortion League's underground bomb makers' happy hour at the abandoned munitions factory? The place was a mothballed military installation, for Chrissakes. Why the hell didn't Farnsworth and his new playmates just send in the army and rake through the place with a few hundred guys and see what's what?\n\nBecause Foster and Bellhouser were blowing smoke. Kreiss was right: Their interest was in him, not some outlandish bomb plot and the mysterious message that didn't get delivered. He had ducked her question on that at the bar. There was a lot more going on here than just some simple bomb plot. That was why they didn't want ATF in on it. She exhaled forcefully, trying to clear her mind. For Edwin Kreiss, there was just one point of reality: He was determined to find out what had happened to his daughter. Those oily bastards from headquarters and the AG's office knew that and were trying to leverage his personal tragedy.\n\nShe banged the steering wheel in frustration. She literally did not know what to do. Then she remembered Farnsworth's instructions: \"Any sign of somebody else in this little game, back out and call me.\" When in doubt, why not do what the boss says? What a concept, she thought, as she reached for her purse and her building key card.\n\n## CHAPTER X\n\nJared got back to his trailer just before midnight and parked his pickup next to the telephone company repair van. He went in the back door, as usual. He washed his hands, grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator, slugged it down, thought briefly of taking a quick shower and heading down to Boomers, a local gin mill, and then decided not to. The West Virginia motorcycle crowd usually arrived just about now, and unless some of his own Black Hat buddies were there, he'd probably end up in a one-sided brawl over nothing. He checked his answering machine, and there\u2014thank you, Lord\u2014was a message from Terry Kay. Her husband was out of town until Tuesday and she wanted to know if he would like to come over and make some Saturday-night noises at her place. He grinned, erased the message, and got another beer.\n\nTerry Kay was a thirty-something housewife whom he had met on a service call out on Broward Road. He'd been out there once before, and she'd called in a second service call. Her husband was on the faculty at Virginia Tech and traveled a lot. Terry Kay was about five two, with black hair, teasing brown eyes, and a delectably round body. She had met him at the door wearing a short skirt, a straining cashmere sweater, and a pouty little smile. She was Terry Kay Olson, she said. With an 0, rounding her lips to show him. The problem was in her husband's study; she thought it might be in the floor jack under the desk. When he had knelt down in front of the desk kneehole to examine the floor jack, Terry Kay had slid into the desk chair on the other side in such a fashion as to reveal what her real problem was all about. They had been together a few times after that, always on the spur of the moment, and always with an element of the danger of being discovered involved. Terry Kay liked it hot, hard, and fast, and Jared was just the guy for that. He had no time for the talkers. The prospect of an entire Saturday night with Terry Kay instead of another endless duty night with his grandfather at the power plant, well, hell, no contest. Besides, he was ready for a break. He finished the beer and decided to have just one more.\n\nHe called his grandfather, who always turned his phones off late at night, to leave him an excuse message. To his surprise, Browne answered the phone. Jared swore silently.\n\n\"What?\" Browne said.\n\n\"Uh, I didn't tell you what I set up. In case he comes again and we're not there.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I did the Ditch. You know, those steel plates out on the main street? I set them one of them as a pit trap. Took out them center support bars. Anyone walks on that steel, he's goin' down twenty feet into the Ditch. That's all concrete down there. Break his legs, prob'ly. Then we'll have his ass.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that should do it. Which panel?\"\n\n\"Second up from the power plant. That way, comin' in, he'll walk on several of them, and feel safe. Uh\u2014\"\n\n\"What, Jared? It's late.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow? I'm gonna be runnin' errands all day\u2014laundry, grocery store, stuff like that? Then this lady friend called me. Wants to get together tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"Jared, we're almost finished with this thing. I need you there tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"I haven't had a night off in a long while,\" Jared whined. \"I'm a young man. I've got my needs, for Chrissakes!\" He winced, knowing what was coming next.\n\n\"Do not take the Lord's name in vain, young man. This is your father we are avenging, in case you've forgotten.\"\n\n\"He wasn't my father for very long, was he?\" Jared said, and again winced, waiting for the explosion. But the old man didn't say anything. That was almost worse.\n\n\"Look,\" Jared said, rushing to fill that ominous silence. \"It's just one night. Why don't we leave it all alone, let the place cool off? Let my trap do its job. Go in on Sunday instead, during the day. Change the pattern, screw this guy up, whoever he is.\"\n\n\"Because, for one thing, we're close to finishing. There should be enough copper. The sooner the truck is pressurized, the sooner I can get out of there. And for another, I've got to feed our prisoner.\"\n\nJared formed a quick image of Lynn's taut body. \"Shit, she's in pretty good shape. She'll survive.\"\n\n\"And how would you know that, Jared?\"\n\n\"I just mean, one night ain't gonna kill her,\" Jared said quickly. \"Look, I promised this woman I'd go see her, all right? I'm a man, damn it. I've got needs.\"\n\nThere was an angry silence on the line. \"You've got a short circuit between your brain and your dick is what you've got,\" Browne said. \"Well, go on, you ungrateful pup. I'll do this thing without you. Go hump your slut. I hope her husband comes home with a shotgun and catches the both of you.\"\n\nBrowne slammed the phone in Jared's ear. Jared put the handset back on up on the wall, sighed, and finished his beer. Hell with him, he thought. He'll get over it. He'll want me back when we catch whoever the hell has been fucking around out there. Old man is half-crazy anyway. He felt a surge of resentment. The old man loved the memory of dead William a whole lot more than he loved Jared. He wondered why. Must have something to do with the way everything turned to shit for him after William left. The cancer. The closing of the arsenal. That shit with his pension. He shook his head. Screw it. It was almost over anyway.\n\nHe dropped down into the ratty old recliner and popped the television on. Three fat women in miniskirts were wrestling across a stage while a talk-show host watched with mock alarm and the audience screamed for blood. He smiled as he wondered what kinds of things might be down in that tunnel. The old man himself had probably sent thousands of gallons down there during all those years he'd been working there. Bet there's some regular mutant shit down there by now.\n\nHe settled back to watch the fun, when the lights cut out and the television went black.\n\n\"What the fuck?\" he muttered into the sudden silence, getting up out of his chair. Then he realized he could see, because the orange security light on the power pole was still on. That meant that the power company had not dropped the load. He squinted out the kitchen windows, but there was nothing moving out there in his yard. Or in the dog pen, he realized. He squinted harder but could see no sign of his dogs. Was that pen door shut? They might all three be in their igloos, but usually one was stretched out on the concrete. He tried a light switch in the kitchen, but nothing happened.\n\nHe went to the junk drawer by the sink, resurrected a flashlight, and went outside. He checked the power box, where the overhead wires came down to his meter. There was no sign of trouble. Then he called to his dogs, to see if they were stirring. There was no reaction, so he walked over to the pen and found the door slightly ajar. This time, he swore out loud: \"How the hell did this happen?\" He listened for the sound of baying and rooing in the distance, but the only dog he heard was that little yapper belonging to that crazy old deaf woman who lived a mile down the county road. He was sure he had latched up this gate after feeding them. He was _sure_ of it. Then he remembered the sounds he had heard the other night, and he hurried back into the trailer to get a gun. If somebody was out here fucking around, he wanted to be ready for the bastard.\n\nHe went back into the bedroom, got the .45 out of the bedside table, checked to make sure it was ready to go, and then went into the tiny utility closet to check the power panel. He cycled all the circuit breakers, but nothing happened; the trailer remained dark. Then he distinctly heard the sound of footsteps crunching outside. He backed carefully out of the utility closet, which was in the hallway leading from the living room-kitchen area back to the bedroom, and squatted down in the doorway of the trailer's second bathroom. The footsteps stopped. It sounded like the bastard was outside, right at the back of the trailer. Amazingly, the next sound he heard was that of a Zippo-type cigarette lighter cap being flipped back and the flame ignited. Bold as brass: The guy was lighting up a goddamned cigarette! Which meant at least one hand was occupied. Jared stood up and moved swiftly down the hallway to the edge of the kitchen, where he popped his head quickly around the corner for a look and then withdrew it. Nothing but the orange glow of the security light in the window; no silhouettes.\n\nHe waited. He was beginning to perspire, and his sweat smelled a lot like beer. Maybe he should call his grandfather. The phone was in the kitchen. He would have to go into the kitchen to reach it, but he knew the trailer's squeaky floors would give him away if he tried that. The next sound caught his breath right up in his throat: a shotgun being racked, again, somewhere out behind the trailer. He immediately got down on the floor, really sweating now. What the fuck is this? Then footsteps crunching again, but getting quieter, as if the guy was circling the trailer. After hearing the shotgun, Jared was afraid even to put his head up. Sumbitch had let his dogs loose so he'd be free to walk around out there. _Shit!_\n\nGet to the fucking phone, a voice in his head told him. Call the old man. Hell, call 911! He crept around the corner of the entrance to the kitchen, trying to keep the floor from creaking, and reached carefully for the phone, listening very hard for sounds from outside. It was just out of reach. He grabbed a magazine off the table, rolled it up, and then used it to tip the phone off its wall jack, catching it just before it could clatter onto the floor. Then he hit the red button on the handset and heard the welcome sound of ringing. He felt a wave of relief.\n\n\"Nine one one. What is your emergency?\" a male voice asked.\n\n\"Guy's outside my trailer,\" he whispered as loudly as he dared. \"Bastard's got a gun, I need some help out here.\"\n\n\"Sir? I can't hear you, sir? Give me the address, please, and state the nature of your emergency.\" The voice sounded unnaturally loud, and he squeezed the earpiece to his head to keep the noise down.\n\n\"I need a deputy!\" he said. \"There's a guy with a fuckin' shotgun outside my trailer. One three eight County Line Road.\"\n\n\"Gee, that's too bad,\" the voice said, and then, to Jared's horror, there came the booming laugh of a fun-house scary monster. The huge sound reverberated in his ear as he swore and dropped the handset on the floor like a hot potato. The laughter went on, loud, very loud, as he backed away from the phone, waving the .45 around him, like cops did in the movies, until he was back in the hallway again, down on all fours, scrunching backward like a baby toward his bedroom.\n\nThen a sound. Behind him. _Something_ behind him.\n\nHe whirled around, and there was an enormous figure all in black looming over him. It was wearing a hideous mask, and there were bright round mirrors where the eyes should have been. Jared gasped but didn't hesitate. He brought the .45 up and fired, but all that came out was the pop of a primer. Then from the figure came the loudest sound he had ever heard, a roar, a lion's heart-grabbing, ear-pounding roar. The sound was so loud that Jared dropped the useless gun, clapped his hands to his ears, and scooted backward, flailing his way back into the living room, rounding the hallway corner on his hand and knees, scuttling toward the front door, which he never used, the bottom of his jeans warm and wet. There was a nightmarish scramble to get the door unlocked and open as a second roar came down the hallway, louder than the first. He screamed and then tumbled through the doorway, right into a tangle of wet, rubbery strands. It felt like a huge spiderweb. He fought furiously to get away from it, but the more he fought, the tighter it enveloped him, until he could do little more than twitch, and then the horrible mirror-eyed figure was filling the doorway and pointing something at him, something shiny and bright. He knew he shouldn't look at it, but he couldn't help it. There was an incredibly bright flash of purple light and he was just gone.\n\n* * *\n\nKreiss pocketed the retinal disrupter and stripped off the hood and mirror-eyed horror mask. He looked down from the trailer's doorway at the stunned figure of Jared McGarand, balled up in the capture curtain at the side of the steps. Then he stepped past Jared and picked up a garden hose that was attached to the end of the trailer. He turned it on and sprayed water all over Jared and the curtain until all the sticky strands had dissolved, after which, he dragged Jared under the end of the trailer that was perched up on the cinder blocks. He positioned him so that his body was under the trailer, with his head just outside the metal edge of the trailer's frame. He went over to the engine-hoisting A-frame and brought back a large five-ton hydraulic jack stand, which he positioned under the edge of the trailer, about two feet away from Jared's head. He pumped the jack stand until it engaged the bottom edge of the trailer and then actually lifted it. Keeping an eye on Jared's inert form, he got a four-by-four from a stack of junk lumber and battered down the two cinder-block support columns until the trailer was supported entirely on the jack stand. Then he lowered the stand until the bottom of the trailer came to rest just barely on Jared's chest, pinning him firmly to the ground.\n\nHe went back inside the trailer. In the kitchen, he got the telephone recorder to play back Jared's calls. There was only one: to that second man. He listened to it twice, then disconnected the telephone dial intercept equipment, the recording device from the kitchen phone, the four inside speakers, and the breaker box diversion switch. He turned the lights back on in the trailer. The television boomed to life and he shut the obnoxious noise down. He gathered up all his equipment and Jared's .45, which he had previously disarmed by unloading it, leaving one shell case with no powder or bullet under the hammer. He spotted Jared's truck keys and wallet on the kitchen table, and he took those, too. Then he went out the back door, climbed up to the roof edge, and retrieved the sound box. He listened for the dogs, but the woods were still quiet.\n\nHe took all his equipment and Jared's weapon out to the truck and then took off the disposable blackout suit, under which he had been wearing khaki pants and a plain white shirt. He put on a dark ball cap with an extended brim, which he pulled down low over his face. He put on a pair of blocky black-framed glasses, which had a mildly reflective coating on the outside of the lenses. The glasses were magnifiers, which distorted the image of his own eyes while allowing him to see very well up close. He strapped a voice-distortion box onto his chest, put on a wire headset with a very thin boom mike in front of his lips. He pulled on rubber gloves and retrieved a box-shaped battery lantern from the truck. That's when he noticed the cover on the license plate.\n\nHe swore and bent down to examine it. It was not the plate cover that had been there originally, although it was very damn close. It was too new-looking, the metal too bright. He got out a Phillips screwdriver and took off the plate and its cover frame. He separated the plate from the frame and examined the back of the frame. He found the two stub antennas at once. Son of a bitch, he thought. This is a surveillance tag: Based on those antennas, it probably responds to a satellite interrogation signal. He looked down at the rear bumper. Gets its power from the plate light by induction. There were four rubber buttons glued onto the plate mounting to insulate the plate frame from the truck's frame.\n\nHe stood up. So he'd missed one. The question now was whether or not he'd been followed here. He didn't think so, but he'd better make sure. Jared wasn't going anywhere.\n\nHe slipped into the woods and made a big circle out to the road, where he looked for any signs of vehicles. The road was empty. He knew the plate tag wasn't a device used for following someone down the road. It could give a general location when the satellite transmitted a query signal, but it was not precise enough to do block-by-block surveillance. The question was, then, When would they query it? That would determine how much time he had out here. That tag changed the equation.\n\nHe walked back through the woods to where Jared was pinned under the trailer. He hauled over two cinder blocks and made himself a rough bench. He sat down and watched as Jared started to come around. He was whimpering and trying to move, and then he opened his eyes wide when he realized he could _not_ move. Kreiss switched on the lantern and pointed it into Jared's face. He switched on the voice-distortion box.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" he asked. The box transmitted his words in the softly booming tones of a giant computer-generated voice, atonal and without any accent or inflection.\n\nJared blinked rapidly in the glare of the lantern's beam and tried to move again, pushing himself sideways as he tried to escape the weight of the trailer. Kreiss knew that Jared's vision would be a purple-rimmed haze for a few minutes. He waited motionless, while Jared figured out where he was. Then Kreiss reached over and lifted the handle of the jack stand one notch, which settled the trailer one-eighth of an inch downward. Jared made a terrified noise and stopped struggling. Both his hands were flat against the bottom of the trailer, as if he were going to hold it up. He had to look up and back over his shoulder even to see Kreiss.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" Kreiss asked again.\n\n\"Y-yeah!\" Jared said, but his voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. \"Get it offa me, man. Jesus Christ! Get it offa me. Can't breathe.\"\n\nKreiss leaned closer. \"About a month ago, three college kids disappeared from Virginia Tech. I have evidence that one of them was at the Ramsey Arsenal. What do you know?\"\n\nJared's expression changed from one of fear to one of suspicion. \"Who the fuck are you, man? Why you doin' this?\"\n\n\"I know you go there,\" Kreiss said. \"You and one other. I've been watching you. I found your traps, the ones on the creek and the other one, remember? Do you want to die here?\"\n\nJared's face hardened. \"Don't know what the fuck you're talkin' about.\" He still had his hands in the push-up position. They were white and trembling. The trailer's frame was making ominous creaking sounds along its full length.\n\n\"Sure about that, Jared?\" Kreiss said, reaching for the jack handle.\n\n\"Don't know\u2014what\u2014you're talking about,\" Jared gasped. The muscles in his upper arms were straining as he tried to push up against the trailer.\n\nKreiss lowered the trailer another eighth of an inch, and Jared would have screamed had he been able to muster the breath. He made a sound that was half wheeze, half whimper. His boots were pushing dirt around in an involuntary reflex. The trailer made some more creaking noises.\n\n\"Hope this jack has good O-rings, Jared,\" Kreiss said. \"I want to know about the girl. What did you do with the girl?\"\n\nKreiss thought he saw a flash of recognition in Jared's frightened, sweating eyes. He leaned forward, pushing the light right into Jared's red face. Jared was trying desperately to see around the light. Kreiss moved the lantern slightly, allowing Jared to see the outsized eyes staring back at him. His lips moved as he tried to say something. It looked like he was saying, Fuck you.\n\n\"What?\" Kreiss said. He wiggled the jack handle.\n\n\"You're\u2014one\u2014of\u2014 _them,_ ain't\u2014you?\" Jared wheezed. \"You\u2014killed\u2014my\u2014old\u2014man. So fuck you!\"\n\nKreiss didn't know what Jared was talking about. \"Talk to me, dumb-ass,\" he said, \"or I'm going to squash you flat, right now!\"\n\n\"You\u2014do,\" Jared gasped out, \"she\u2014starves!\"\n\nKreiss experienced a flare of pure rage. He'd been right! Lynn must still be alive! He felt his heart racing and his face getting hot. It took every ounce of control he had not to release the jack and mash this creature into a bloody pulp under the trailer. He put the light completely to one side so Jared could see the fire in his own eyes through those enormous lenses. He adjusted the volume of the synthesizer output. \"Where\u2014are\u2014you\u2014holding\u2014her?\" he asked, enunciating each word very deliberately, letting the anger leak into his own voice.\n\nJared blinked his eyes to get the sweat out of them as he took a series of short, difficult breaths. Then he pushed up with all his might. He relaxed and then did it again, trying to get a rhythm in it, as if he were trying to rock the trailer off of his chest. All the while he kept mouthing the same thing, Fuck you. Fuck you. He actually got the trailer to move a tiny bit, and then, in a blast of adrenaline, he accentuated the rhythm. Kreiss slammed his gloved hand against the metal side of the trailer, trying to shock Jared into stopping it. But before he could say anything, Jared heaved again and the frame member slid just off the lift point of the jack. Instantly, the jack punched through the flimsy metal bottom pan of the trailer and all ten thousand pounds of the structure crunched down to obliterate Jared McGarand in one grotesque sound. Kreiss stared in fury for a second and then slammed his hand against the trailer again and swore out loud. Then he sat back on his haunches, closed his eyes, and took some deep breaths.\n\nControl, control, _control,_ he thought. The dumb son of a bitch had killed himself, and taken with him the one thing Kreiss had to know. But the important thing was that Lynn was _alive_! She was probably being held out there in one of those buildings at the arsenal. He knew there had been at least two men operating out there. Now they were going to be one short. He had to find the other man, and do so before the other man found out about this one.\n\nHe opened his eyes and looked down at the trailer. The only sign of what had just happened was the bent handle of the jack, which was sticking out from the dirt under the edge of the trailer like a broken bone. Then he caught the smell of Jared's corpse releasing itself. He thought about what to do. There probably wasn't another jack available, so he couldn't extract the body. And even if he did, he would be faced with a body-disposal problem. He had not intended for Jared to die, although he wasn't exactly sorry. \"You do, she starves.\" Good news and bad news.\n\nHe stood up and retrieved the lantern. If he left the scene as it was, Jared would eventually be found. By the second man? Could he set up a trap right here? No. If he did that, he would have to wait until the second man showed up, if ever. Meanwhile, Lynn was locked up somewhere and the clock was ticking, assuming Jared's threat about her starving was real. No, he wasn't going to wait. He would _pursue_ the second man. First, sanitize this scene, then go after the bastard. He looked back down at the trailer. He would make it look like Jared had gone under the trailer by himself for some reason, and then the thing had collapsed on him. It would stand a cursory investigation, as long as he set things right. If they got forensics into it, well, that would be another matter.\n\nHe looked at his watch. He had to assume that that tag had been tracked, so he didn't have the rest of the night to set the stage here. The taped conversation indicated the other man wouldn't be going back into the arsenal until Saturday night. He would sanitize this scene and then go out to the arsenal and spend Saturday looking for Lynn. But Jared here had already rigged one trap. He could probably spot another one of those, but what if there were others? Alternatively, he could call in that FBI lady: She had clearly offered collaboration. If the FBI believed him, they could flood the industrial area with people and search all the buildings. But what if Lynn wasn't in a building? What if she was hidden in one of those bunkers back out there in the two thousand acres? Or in a cave somewhere? And what were the chances of the Bureau believing him? Especially in view of the unholy alliance they apparently had going with Justice and the Agency. Charlie Ransom had been supposed to deliver a message, and now Kreiss thought he knew what that message was: We don't have her. He'd thought of that, of course, but he had kept his end of the bargain, and thus he had no reason to think they would not keep theirs. He could, of course, be all wrong about that.\n\nAll his instincts told him that he shouldn't trust anyone from Washington, especially in view of the surveillance tag he'd found. That was sweeper gear. Maybe someone up there had decided to move against him _because_ Lynn had gone missing. He had known all along that the deal might not survive if circumstances changed in Washington.\n\nFocus, he told himself. Ambush the second man, find out where Lynn is hidden, and then retrieve her.\n\nAs he walked back to the truck to get his other gloves, he realized he still had no idea what those two men were doing out there at the arsenal. Then he realized he didn't give a damn. In a little over twenty-four hours, even if he had to pull some guy's limbs off one by one to find out where she was, he would have Lynn back. That was all that mattered. And she had better be unharmed.\n\nShe was _alive_!\n\nJanet Carter was still disappointed with herself when she got up on Saturday morning. She had dutifully called Farnsworth the night before to tell him about the bug. There had been an embarrassed silence on the line for a long moment, and then Farnsworth somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had ordered the Roanoke surveillance squad to put a locator device on her car.\n\n\"Those Agency people made me nervous,\" he said. \"I'm still not a hundred percent sure what the hell they're up to.\"\n\n\"Sir, I know I'm fairly new to street work,\" she said, \"but somebody could have told me.\"\n\nFarnsworth ducked that one. \"I'm curious\u2014how'd you spot it?\" he had asked.\n\n\"I didn't. I'd proposed the Donaldson-Brown Center at Virginia Tech for the meet. Kreiss saw them put it on. He was watching from his hotel room. He told me.\"\n\n\"He took a room in the hotel where you did the meet?\" Farnsworth said with a chuckle. \"Told you, that guy is a pro. Just forget about the locator for the time being, Janet. What did you achieve with Kreiss?\"\n\nJanet had been unwilling to admit total failure. \"He's thinking about it, but he made no commitments. He's focused on finding his daughter.\"\n\n\"Did you get any sense of where he's been looking?\"\n\n\"Locally. He wouldn't admit to going into the arsenal, but he already knew that was Site R. I think he's been there.\"\n\n\"Based on what evidence?\"\n\n\"Based on no evidence.\"\n\n\"And that was it?\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"I gave him my pager. Told him if we got anything on his daughter, we might need to get ahold of him.\"\n\n\"He took your pager? It's probably in the river by now.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure. I'm telling you\u2014he is totally focused on finding his daughter. Why not take the pager? If we get something, he'd want to hear it.\"\n\nShe realized later that Farnsworth hadn't reminded her of the obvious: No one in the Roanoke office was looking for Kreiss's daughter anymore. He did tell her to keep him informed and then hung up. She had gone back down to the parking lot to the Bureau car, where she searched for and found the tracking device. It was a lot bigger than she had expected. She'd pulled it off the frame, and then she went across the parking lot and mounted it on the RA's personal Bureau car. Then she had driven home.\n\nHer Saturday seminar at Virginia Tech began at ten o'clock, after which she grabbed some lunch and then went back to her Bureau car. She found a gas station, where she changed into some outdoor clothes and refueled, then drove south out of Blacksburg through Christiansburg and Ramsey, until she came to the New River bridge on Route 11. From there, according to her map, it was five miles south to the arsenal entrance. She arrived at a little before 2:00 P.M., and discovered that she could not drive directly up to the main gates of the installation because of a concrete-barrel barrier. She got back on Route 11 and spent an hour trying to drive around the arsenal's perimeter, but she got nowhere. Then she went back to the main entrance road, got out, and wrestled one of the barrels out of the way. She drove through, replaced the barrel, and then drove up a short hill through a stand of trees to the main gates, where she came head-to-head with a small white pickup truck that was coming through the gates.\n\nShe pulled to one side, stopped, and parked. The pickup came all the way through the gates and stopped. She got out and identified herself to the two young men in the truck, which had a logo on the door proclaiming FEDERAL SECURITY SYSTEMS. One of them had a bad case of acne, while the other sported multiple earrings on both ears and a diseased-looking metal protrusion behind his lower lip. Judas Priest, she thought, this freak has pierced a _tooth_!\n\nShe told them she wanted to make a windshield tour of the arsenal. They examined her credentials and badge, then told her that she could not drive onto the reservation without prior authorization. She asked them to get it, and they pointed out it was a Saturday. They went back and forth like this for a few minutes, and then they compromised by letting her park outside the main gates and walk in. They would lock the front gates using the chain and combination lock, but they would give her the combination. They warned her gravely that they would change it the next time they came through. They gave her a map of the complex and told her that the industrial area was not a place she wanted to spend much time walking around in without a mask and gloves. She asked why.\n\n\"They made bombs and shit for the Army back there,\" Pimples said. \"Like lots of seriously toxic chemicals, going back to World War One? As in, a long time before there was an EPA or any rules about disposal? We, like, stay in the truck. With the windows up, okay?\"\n\n\"Don't go, like, kicking up any dust,\" the pierced beauty said.\n\n\"You've just made a tour of the entire facility?\"\n\n\"Uh, no, not this time,\" Pierced said, glancing sideways at Pimples. \"We did the bunkers. We did the industrial area last time.\"\n\n\"We want, like, to minimize the time in that area?\" Pimples said. \"That's why we did the bunker fields.\"\n\nShe solemnly thanked them for all their assistance and terrific advice. They waited while she got her FBI wind-breaker, some gloves, a flashlight, and a bottle of water out of her car and locked it up. They stared at the sidearm holstered in her shoulder rig. Pierced made a big deal of writing down her name and badge number before they left, and she thanked them again. They waved as they left. She could hear their radio cranking back up as they drove down the. access road to the main gate. She stared after the dynamic duo for a moment. Like, if that's security, the arsenal is, like, in trouble, man, she told herself.\n\nOnce they were out of sight, she went back and tried the combination. She unlocked the padlock, slid one side of the big chain-link gate back on its wheels, and then brought the car through. She closed the gate but left the heavy padlock unlocked, dangling on its chain. As far as she was concerned, this was a federal reservation and she was federal law. She wasn't about to answer to two postadolescent assholes from some podunk rent-a-cop organization. She put her stuff in the trunk, got back in the car, looked quickly at the map, and drove down the main road toward the industrial area.\n\nKreiss toyed with the idea of splicing together a voice message from Jared to the other man, in which Jared would agree to meet him at the site Saturday night after all. That way, the other man would get there and wait, which would make it easier for Kreiss to take him. But then he discarded the idea: It would take some specialized equipment and a lot of time to lift Jared's voice and words from the recorder and kludge together a workable message. He would just go out there three hours before sunset and set up in the area of the rail gate. And stay away from the steel plates in the main street of the industrial area, he reminded himself.\n\nIn the meantime, he'd learned that the second man was probably a relative. He had looked up the name McGarand in three local phone books and found, in addition to Jared, a B. McGarand located in Blacksburg, with the same phone number intercepted by the recorder. The man had sounded much older. A grandfather? Uncle? The listing gave him an address in Blacksburg, and he toyed with the idea of going over there and starting early. But there was too much he didn't know: Would there be family members? Children? A crowded neighborhood? He didn't want another Millwood, which ordinarily meant that he would have to do a lot of reconnaissance. No, it made more sense to wait for the man at the remote arsenal, in the darkness after sunset. There was always a chance that B. McGarand might call Jared back to convince him to make the rendezvous, but he doubted it: The older man had sounded genuinely angry. That left only one remaining complication: someone discovering Jared's body under the trailer. He thought that unlikely, at least in the next twenty-four hours. The mailbox was up at the head of the dirt road, and unless Mr. B. McGarand went out there himself, Jared would stay put until the buzzards gave him away.\n\nHe spent the early afternoon checking the perimeter of his property for any sign that the Agency people had come back. Then he reswept the cabin for delayed-action bugs. He even went over to Micah's to see if he'd seen or heard anyone creeping around, but Micah said he had people watching and that the woods were empty. If anything federal showed up on the roads or in the woods, Micah would give him warning. He checked out his truck again, but he found nothing other than Special Agent Carter's pager on his front seat. It was just a small black box with an LED readout window. He scanned it for a carrier signal, but it was a receive-only device. He started to turn it off, but then he thought about it: He was probably closer to finding Lynn than they were. But Carter might have another warning for him about the Washington contingent. If he'd successfully swept out all the tags, they might try to come find him. He was so close to recovering Lynn that he would do everything in his power to avoid them just now. So he left the pager on but threw it into the glove compartment. That way, if there was a transmitter in it, being in the glove compartment would attenuate the hell out of any signal that little thing could produce. Then he went back to the cabin to prepare for the night's ops.\n\n* * *\n\nJanet had driven around the entire Ramsey Arsenal for almost two hours, seeing mostly bunkers, more bunkers, and pine trees. Hundreds of bunkers and thousands of pine trees, to be exact. She had crossed and recrossed a creek that must have transected the entire installation, but that seemed to be the only moving thing on the entire reservation. The steel doors on all the bunkers were rusted and securely locked, with no signs or labels to indicate what had been stored there. By four o'clock, she was back at the industrial area, pausing on a street in front of what looked like the site's power plant. Around her, there were dozens of buildings, sheds, tanks, and towers scattered around a maze of streets, alleys, and rail-siding lines.\n\nOkay, she thought, if this is Site R, it might have made an interesting afternoon exploration for three college kids on a camping expedition. But so what? She could well believe that the EPA had listed this site, based on the fact that nothing green was growing within a hundred yards of any of the buildings. Even with the air conditioning going, she could detect the chemical smell in the air. Could the kids have gone into one these big buildings and locked themselves in by accident? She hoped not\u2014it had been four weeks now, and even with some camping supplies, they would be on their way to mummy status by now. None of the buildings appeared to have windows of any kind, and those doors looked like they had been made to restrain powerful forces. That Clark kid said they were going to break into Site R. Break into. So, it fit. Maybe the thing to do was to call out the Army or whoever owned this mausoleum and search every bloody building. She thought of Edwin Kreiss, pictured him sitting out here on the curb and watching a bunch of soldiers search the buildings. It was not a pretty image. Plus, there was all that bomb-cell theory the Washington people had been talking about.\n\nHell with it. This was pointless. Her assignment was to get close to Kreiss, see what he was doing. Find a leverage point. And then she thought once more about the mysterious bombers. She looked around again. Now that _would_ make sense. The ATF was right: This would be an absolutely perfect place to set up a bomb lab. But they'd been through the place and found nothing. Assuming ATF knew what a bomb lab looked like, she was not likely to find something they had not. So go home, regroup. Get a line on Kreiss. Have a drink. Find a life.\n\nShe put the car in gear, went up the street in front of the power plant, turned left, and drove up the hill on what appeared to be the main drag. The car banged noisily over huge steel plates that were spaced every fifty feet or so. She slowed down so as not to hit them so hard, and she was reaching for her purse when the car suddenly banged on something and then tilted down at an impossible angle. She slammed on the brakes, but it was too late\u2014the car was plunging down into a black hole. She started to scream, but the air bag smothered it as the car hit bottom with an enormous crash and all the side windows blew out in a shower of safety glass. The engine shut down at the jolt, and it sounded as if some major components had fallen off the underside of the vehicle.\n\nShe took a moment to recover her breath and to get her hands disentangled from the air bag. The skin on her face and wrists stung from the air bag, and the seat belt had damn near cut her into three pieces. She couldn't see much through a cloud of dust, and then she realized she was in darkness, or semidarkness\u2014there was a cone of light coming from above. The windshield was intact but out of its frame. The concrete flanks of what appeared to be an immense tunnel rose up on either side of the car. Her ribs hurt and her shins were bruised, but she didn't think she'd sustained any major injuries. The car, on the other hand, felt very wrong. It was sitting too low upon whatever it had landed. And the angle was odd, with the back significantly lower than the front. She was in some kind of tunnel, and it felt like the tunnel sloped down behind her. She saw the rungs of a ladder embedded into the concrete wall to one side, so at least there was a way out of here.\n\nAs she reached to release the seat belt, the damn car moved! Backward. She reflexively stomped down on the brakes, but nothing happened except that the brake pedal went all the way to the fire wall. The car gathered velocity and the cone of light, now in front of her, became fainter as the car rolled down an increasingly steep incline. A horrible scraping and screeching sound came from underneath, as if the car was dragging its drive train or exhaust system over concrete. She tried to turn around in her seat, but the damned belt had tightened a lot and she had to fight hard even to get her neck turned, trying to see behind her, but of course it was pitch-black. She yelled almost involuntarily as the car slid faster, but the noise from underneath was incredible\u2014a cacophony of scraping and grinding metal that drowned out even her thoughts. Then came the giddy sensation of launching off a cliff as the car went airborne for a second before crashing down again on something very hard, and then slewing sideways and down into\u2014water!\n\nThe vehicle stopped with a whooshing sound and then tilted ominously toward the driver's side, admitting a tidal wave of ice-cold water over the windowsills. Amazingly, the second impact had activated the cabin dome light over her head, and Janet tried to see where she was as she mashed the seat belt button and rose up in the front seat. The black water engulfed the interior in an incredibly few seconds. Outside was utter darkness, but Janet had no choice. She ejected herself through the driver's side window as the car filled completely and went down behind her, sucking at her legs as she scrambled to get away from it.\n\nThe water was frigid. It went up her slacks and gripped her bare legs and thighs like an ice pack. Her chest felt squeezed and she had trouble catching her breath as she treaded water in the darkness. Both her arms and her right leg stung from small cuts. She thought she saw the glow of the dome light beneath her, but then it was gone. She splashed around in the darkness for a minute before getting control of her panic and slowing everything down. She regulated her breathing and made her strokes more deliberate. Two huge invisible bubbles burst onto the surface nearby, the second one bringing up the stink of gasoline. She felt one of her shoes go and she kicked off the other one. The Sig in her shoulder rig felt like a brick, but she wasn't ready to get rid of that quite yet. Then she remembered her lifesaving courses and took off her slacks. Treading water with just her feet, she brought the waist of the pants up to her face, zipped the zipper, and closed the button. Then she tied an awkward knot in the bottom of each leg of the pants, took a deep breath, ducked her head, and exhaled into the billowing waist of the slacks. She did this five more times before the pants legs inflated enough to hold her up. She moved between the two puffed-up trouser legs and relaxed, bobbing gently in the utter darkness. She caught the smell of gasoline and oil again as the drowned car began to give up some more of its fluids. She yelped when something large moved under the water, but it was just another air bubble. Then there was only silence.\n\nShe tried to determine whether or not she was moving, but, without any visual references, it was impossible to tell. Probably not, she thought\u2014that air bubble had come out of the car from almost directly beneath her. She called out, then listened as her voice reverberated from unseen walls. She knew there were flashlights in the car's trunk, but she had no way of knowing exactly where the car was beneath her, and she was definitely not going to let go of her life preserver in this darkness. From somewhere above her and far away, she heard what sounded like a large piece of sheet metal falling onto concrete. Then silence.\n\nNo, not quite silence. There was the sound of falling water somewhere nearby. Not a huge stream, but certainly a steady one. Dropping from a substantial height. She couldn't tell where the sound was coming from. She began dog-paddling in what she hoped was a straight line, and within a minute, she bumped into what felt like a concrete wall. She stopped and felt the surface. It was smooth and slippery, as if covered in moss. She felt her way along the wall for several feet but encountered no other features. The sound of falling water seemed to be louder in this direction, but still far off. Her limbs were beginning to tremble in the cold, and she knew she had to get out of the water before hypothermia set in. She stopped to think. If this is a tunnel, then the opposite side ought to be straight across from this side. She flattened her back against the wall and then shoved away across the surface, her eyes closed as she tried to visualize a tunnel. She paddled for what seemed like forever before her fingertips touched a hard, slippery surface.\n\nShe stopped. Had she gone in a circle? No, the falling water sound was coming from a different angle. Or at least she hoped so. She started her search again, this time bumping along the wall to her left, hand over hand, looking for a pipe or a ladder or steps\u2014any protruding feature she could use to get her shivering body out of this water. She realized her chin was in the water, which meant it was time to refill her trouser legs. She bobbed under and exhaled five more times until she got her makeshift water wings back. Then she rested. Which way had she been going? The first tendril of despair wrapped around her gut and she wondered if she was just going to drown down here, alone, in this stygian blackness. She reached out for the wall, but it was gone. A lance of panic shot through her and she kicked out forcefully, only to bang her forehead on the wall. She reached out with both hands, bending forward into the Y of her inflated trousers, and rested again.\n\nThink, she told herself. This is a man-made tunnel complex. The car had been climbing a hill when it had fallen through one of those metal-plate sections. The tunnel obviously conformed to the hill's slope, which meant it ran down to some bottom or collection point The tunnel had been big enough to accommodate a Crown Vic, so there _had_ to be some ladders down here somewhere, some means by which the tunnel could be inspected or cleaned out All she had to do was find one, then climb up out of the water. If she could get back to the original tunnel, the one under the main drag, she could get back to the point where the car had fallen through. After that\u2014well, first things first.\n\nShe continued her hand-over-hand search, stopping to listen and look for light. Finally, she realized she could no longer hear the sound of falling water. For some reason, that worried her, so she reversed course and went back the way she had come, going faster now, since this was wall she had already covered. Her legs were getting numb and her feet weren't there at all. She tried to ignore what this meant and kept going. At last, she heard the falling water again, and this time she headed for that sound. She was heartened when she smelled gasoline again, and she actually felt a slipperiness in the water. This meant she was back to the point where the car had come down from that big tunnel. She stopped and looked up, imagining that she could see light, but she knew it was an illusion. She could see nothing.\n\nShe kept going, past the oil slick from the car. The sound of falling water got steadily louder, and then she was in it, a small torrent of cold water dropping down from somewhere above. She stopped and put her head back, grateful to get the oil sheen off her face. Listening to the sound of the water, she realized there was a constant echo. Had she reached the end of this tunnel or pool or whatever it was? She kept going and immediately bumped up against a new wall. She followed it at what seemed like right angles to the direction she had been going for a distance of about twenty feet and then hit another wall, another right turn. So she had been right: This was the end of the cross tunnel. She felt the concrete and noticed that it was slippery underneath the water, although fairly dry above the waterline. She tried to think if this was different from what she had felt originally. It was getting hard to think. It was getting hard to do anything. Her chin was back in the water again, and this time she was less worried about that.\n\nShe snapped out of it and refilled the trouser legs again. She remembered the CFR device, but it was gone, probably slipped out when she'd taken her pants off. She sputtered and blew water out of her mouth forcefully just to make a noise and reached out for her wall. Her wall. That was a laugh. And then there was an ominous rumbling sound that originated somewhere way down to her right, a rumbling that seemed to be approaching. Dear God, what is that? she thought as she grabbed for the concrete, which was moving. Moving?\n\n_Moving!_\n\nNo, it was not moving; _she_ was moving, toward the rumbling sound. She grabbed again, but there was nothing to grab, just that slippery, mossy surface. She felt her fingernails breaking as she tried to stop herself, not wanting to go toward that awful sound. But go she did, faster as the noise got louder, her hand bouncing off the invisible wall, in a palpable current now, a rush of water as something huge happened in the tunnel. She tried to picture what was going on, but it made no difference if her eyes were open or shut\u2014there was only blackness and that end-of-the-world noise. Then there were eddies and large air bubbles swirling around her bare legs, and a vicious sucking sound somewhere up ahead in the darkness. That's when she really panicked, screaming and kicking to get back up the current, her hands and legs flailing desperately as the water became even more violent. As the sucking sound approached, her hand hit on something metal, a vertical _thing,_ which she grabbed for in one final, desperate lunge even as the current turned her whole body horizontal. She hung on with everything she had, grappling frantically to get a second hand on it. Her semi-inflated trousers were swept away in the maelstrom. She closed her eyes and held on with a virtual death grip until she realized the sound was subsiding. She was hanging from the thing she had grabbed. The water was going _away,_ was beneath her, as if some giant had opened the drain on the whole system.\n\nShe probed with her left hand and found the other stanchion of what felt like a steel ladder. She felt for a rung to set her feet on and then let her head fall against another rung while she got control of her breathing. Below her, the water was subsiding into a rumble of air and noxious bubbles, and then it all went quiet, with the only sound being that of her own breathing. Her legs felt suddenly, terribly exposed in the clammy air. She could hear the falling water again, far to her left, but this time it sounded as if it was falling onto concrete instead of into water. She looked up, but there was only darkness. She began to climb, and after fifteen rungs, she came to what seemed like a ledge. The ladder arms arched up over the edge, so that she could continue climbing and pull herself onto the ledge. It wasn't wide, perhaps two, possibly three feet, but she sensed that it was above the water level. There was even a faint breeze, which felt warmer than the air down here.\n\nShe rested for several minutes before she realized she could smell gasoline again. The fumes were strong and seemed to be coming from right below her. The falling water, now to her right as she sat on the ledge, was definitely falling on bare concrete. The tunnel system must be some kind of giant siphon, she thought, remembering that the moss on the wall had been underwater just before the thing emptied itself. The water got to a certain level, and the pressure in the tunnel overcame the pressure in a drain system of some kind and the whole thing dumped. She nodded to herself in the darkness. It was urgently important that she understand how it all worked, because it had been terrifying when the water had started to move. Overcoming panic meant substituting known, man-made things for the huge unknown forces that had taken her down the tunnel.\n\nFumes, she thought. She wondered if perhaps the car had been washed down to this end of the tunnel, and whether or not it had gone out the drain. If the tunnel was empty, maybe she could get to the trunk and retrieve a flashlight. It meant climbing back down the ladder, and then letting go of the ladder as she groped around the bottom of the tunnel for the car. What if she got lost? Or couldn't find the ladder again? She shivered at that thought, because she knew that the falling water was probably going to refill this thing.\n\nSo go now. Do it. You must have light to find your way out of this nightmare.\n\nWith a reluctant sigh, she groped around for the ladder arch and got back on it. She climbed down slowly, the rusty rungs hurting her bare feet. Finally, she reached the bottom, discovered water already standing on the floor of the tunnel. She put her back to the ladder and tried to think of a way to lay down a trail of some kind. The smell of gasoline was even stronger, which meant that the carcass of the car was close. She bent down to feel the bottom, and she discovered a crack or seam in the concrete that led directly away from the bottom rung of the ladder. It felt like old asphalt, hard yet soft when she pushed a finger into it. If she kept her hand on that and never let go, she could follow it back to the ladder.\n\nShe tried it, going out six feet or so, then following it back to the ladder. It was all she had. She realized her eyes were closed, so she opened them. Better closed, she thought, because at least that way she could construct an image of what this place looked like. She stepped away from the ladder again, crouching down to keep her left hand firmly on the seam. She went all the way across the tunnel floor, through water that was getting deeper again, until she hit the opposite wall. No car. She went back, just to make damn sure she returned to the ladder again, and she did. She came back out to what she sensed was the middle of the tunnel, then said, \"Hey!\" She listened to the echo of her own voice, and did it again. This time, she thought she detected an object to her left. She called out again, listening like a bat to the reflected sound. She turned ninety degrees to the left, felt behind her for the seam, and then, taking a deep breath and a major leap of faith, stepped out and away from the seam. She had gone ten steps when she realized that in this direction lay the main drain. Was she walking straight toward it?\n\nShe called out again and sensed that there was something right in front of her. Was it the end of the tunnel, with some huge hole right in front of her? She began to take baby steps, her hands outstretched, trying not to think of how she would find the seam again, and then her hand ran into the smooth side of the car. She almost wept at the feel of it. She felt around until she could determine that the car was upright, with its nose to her right. She felt back along its side to her left until she came to the trunk. Which she was going to open how? She swore. The trunk latch release was a large button under the driver's side armrest. Would it still work? She worked her way back to the front door and tried to open it, but it was jammed shut. She felt the jagged edges of the glass in the window frame. She put her hand through and then her head and chest, until she could retrieve the passenger-side floor mat. She put that over the window coaming and climbed through, trying not to cut her bare legs. The Sig hung up on something, but then she was through and was able to feel her way across the front seat. She was within six inches of the button when she felt the car begin to move, a slow leaning motion toward its left side. She screamed and scrambled back out. She felt the car settle back down.\n\nShe crouched by the window, gasping, and tried to collect her thoughts. Damn thing must be balanced over what\u2014the main drain? Was the drain big enough to suck down the whole car? Apparently not, or it would have already done so, right? Then why had it moved? God, she needed a light, any kind of light. She dared not climb over the hood; if it tilted, she might be thrown down into the drain. She realized the water was up to her midcalves. And rising, she thought.\n\nThink, Janet, think. You need to reach that button. You have to go back in and try it again. She took a deep breath and climbed back into the front seat, being very careful about how quickly she moved. Then she drew the Sig out of its holster, hoping to use it to extend her reach. She knew right where that button was, even in the total darkness. She crept across the front seat, trying to keep her center of gravity over on the passenger side while stretching her arm out as far as it would go. The car didn't move. She stretched another few inches, tapping the Sig under the steering column, then extracting it when it got tangled in limp folds of the deflated air bag. She felt the car just barely sway, at which point she moved two feet back toward the passenger-side window. The car settled. She moved toward the driver's side, carefully, very carefully now, lunged with the Sig, and banged down on where the button ought to be, then scrambled back as the car began to tip again. To her relief, it settled back. She crawled out the window and went to the back of the car. The trunk was still closed.\n\nWas the switch inoperative, or had she just missed it? She crept around the back of the car, keeping her hand on the trunk, until she got to the left-rear corner. She felt with her toes that the concrete dropped off, with the edge just inside the car's flattened rear tire. She erased the image that formed\u2014of some dreadful drop-off into oblivion waiting to swallow up the car and her with it. Have to try again, she thought, and went back to the passenger-side window.\n\nIt took her four more tries before she heard the familiar chunking sound of the trunk hatch opening. She climbed out eagerly, reholstered her weapon, and went hand over hand back to the trunk, where she promptly hit her head on the raised hatch. Inside, everything was a total jumble, but at last her fingers found a rubberized flashlight. Crossing mental fingers, she switched it on. The bright white light hurt her eyes, but she didn't mind one bit. She could _see_! She swept the light around her and saw that she was in a large concrete chamber, with the tunnel she had explored over to her left. It appeared to be about twenty feet square. A pool of black water covered the bottom 10 percent of the tunnel. She swept the light over to the walls of the chamber and found the ladder, and saw the ledge above. She could see nothing above that. She turned the light downward, toward the far side of the car, and stopped breathing. The car was perched on the edge of a monstrous hole, which was already filled to the brim with shimmering black water as the tunnel system refilled. There was nothing holding the car back from tipping over into it; only the turbulence around the siphon drain had probably kept it from going over in the first place.\n\nShe exhaled nervously and went back into the trunk, where she retrieved a soaking-wet blanket, a second flashlight, the first-aid kit, and a plastic bag of green Chem-Lights. She gathered up her treasures in the blanket and followed the bright white beam of the light back to the ladder. She would climb up to the ledge, which would keep her out of the rising water. If that ledge ran all the way back to the intersection with the main tunnel, she could then follow that back to the point where her car had crashed through the street. Assuming the ledge was high enough for her to get back into the main tunnel.\n\nBut first she would have to rest. Her legs barely supported her, and her upper body was beginning to tremble. She knew she was close to exhaustion, as much because of her immersion in the cold water as from the fear, and she wasn't sure she could make the climb back up to the ledge. But even wet, that blanket would be warmer than nothing. She could use the Chem-Lights to provide ambient light and save the flashlight batteries for later. The main thing was that she could _see._ That made up for damn near everything. The water rising to her shaking knees reminded her that she needed to get a move on. She walked over to the ladder rungs and began the long climb up.\n\nBrowne McGarand pulled his truck through the barrels just after sundown. He was still furious that Jared had gone chasing skirt when they were so close to finishing the hydrogen project. The intruder was an unwanted complication, but Browne wasn't willing to forgo another day. There was pressure in the truck tank now, which meant he was getting close. The target wasn't going anywhere, but if someone was snooping around, his setup here on the arsenal might be in jeopardy. He drove up the entrance road toward the main gates, slowed when he got there, turned off his headlights, and then turned onto the fire-access road as usual. And then he stopped. Something about the main gates was different.\n\nHe put the truck into reverse, backed up in the direction of the gates, stopped, set the hand brake, and got out. He left it in reverse so that the glow of the taillights illuminated the guard shed and the rolling chain-link gates. They were closed and locked as usual. No, not locked. That was it. The padlock and its chain were hanging on the center post of the gates. That's what had caught his eye.\n\nNow what the hell? Were those security twerps in there? At night? He stared at the padlock. Then he went up and tested the gates, which, in fact, rolled back when he tugged on them. He walked over to his truck, shut it completely down, and listened for the sound of their truck, which he could usually hear when it was in the industrial area. There was nothing but the sounds of occasional traffic out on Route 11. Had they come in and then left, leaving the place unlocked? Not likely\u2014he had never seen them do that.\n\nThe intruder? He got his flashlight and examined the padlock, but there were no signs of damage. Whoever had opened it had known the combination, and that had to mean the security people. Logically, then, they were in there. He looked down the main road inside the arsenal. It led through dense trees for about two miles before getting to the industrial area. The road curved as soon as it got into the trees, so there was no way to see headlights. For that matter, they might be on their way back to the front gate right now, having gotten a late start on their tour, or had trouble with their truck. He decided to go in this way and save himself a long walk up the rail line. He really wished Jared was here.\n\nHe went back to his truck, got the food for the girl and his night pack, and brought the stuff through the main gate, where he stashed it out of sight. Then he drove his pickup as quietly as he could back down the access road to the main gate, through the barrels, and out onto Route 11. He drove a mile south on Route 11 to a Waffle House, where he parked his pickup at the far end of the diner's parking lot. Waffle Houses were open twenty-four hours a day, so there were always vehicles in the lot. Then he walked back along Route 11 to the arsenal, waited for all traffic to disappear from sight, and turned back up the main access road. If anyone was in there, listening, and they'd heard his truck, they should now think he had come up to the gates and then gone away.\n\nHe walked to the gate and let himself through, rolling the gates shut again as quietly as he could. He hefted his pack and started walking down the side of the main road, stopping every few minutes to listen for any signs of the security truck. He still couldn't believe they were in here at night, but he would have to be careful, especially if they suspected intrusion and were waiting to see if anyone showed up. He thought about going back home, but that would mean admitting Jared had been right about waiting awhile to let the place cool off. He was damned if he was going to wait. He'd do a thorough look around the main street of the industrial area and then\u2014he stopped dead.\n\nJared had left a trap.\n\nDamnation, he thought. Those fools might have driven their little pickup truck over that steel plate and gone down into the Ditch. Great God, he thought, now that would be a real complication. They'd made their required weekend tour the previous weekend, so they should not have been here yesterday. But there was no getting around that padlock. And that would certainly account for their still being here, dead or injured in their little pickup truck at the deep end of the siphon chamber. He would have to check it out as soon as he went in, and then he might have to move the whole operation the hell out of here, like tonight. If the security patrol failed to report in, there would be a mob of cops and maybe even federal people out here pretty quick. Or would they? It was early Saturday night. He might have twenty-four, thirty-six hours. Appalled, he hurried down the dark road.\n\nKreiss listened to the vehicle noise on the access road and rechecked his position. There was a small concrete switch house just inside the interior rail-line gate, and he had set up shop behind it. The night was dark and clear, with decent ambient starlight. He planned to take the guy down right after he came through the interior rail gates, probably while he was occupied with looking at the electric-eye counter. When the vehicle noises subsided, he became still and listened hard. The sounds had stopped short of where those two had been parking their truck before. Now what the hell were they\u2014no, not _they_ anymore\u2014what was _he_ doing?\n\nHe waited for fifteen minutes. He was dressed out in the same crawl-suit rig he'd used on his first reconnaissance of this place. He'd thought about bringing Jared's .45, then decided against it. Guns were just extra weight, and he shouldn't need any firearms once he took this guy down, especially since he _knew_ there would be only one of them this time. If Jared did show up, Kreiss thought with a grim smile, it would, definitely be time to get the hell out of here. He closed his eyes to concentrate on what he was hearing. There were the usual night sounds coming from the forest outside the arsenal fence, but no more man-made sounds. Was this guy taking extra precautions because of the counter hits? Or had he discovered Jared? Kreiss wanted to go up the rail line into the industrial area. He decided instead to wait some more, and he concentrated on the rail line outside the gates, from which direction he expected the man to come. Assuming he hadn't changed his mind and driven away.\n\nJanet crawled to the intersection of the main tunnel and the siphon chamber by the faint green light of a Chem-Light stick, only to discover that the ledge was at least ten feet below the lip of the main tunnel. There were no ladders visible, nor any other apparent way to climb up to the main tunnel. She sighed out loud and lay down on the ledge, wrapping the soggy blanket around her. Below, the water, invisible several feet down, was rising again. She hoped it stayed down there.\n\nAfter what seemed to her like a few minutes, she looked at her watch and found it was almost 7:00 P.M. Her eyes opened wide\u2014she must have slept for almost two hours. She shivered at the thought: What if she'd rolled off the ledge? The trusty Chem-Light was still going, so she held it out over the siphon chamber, and gasped. There was the water, right there, perhaps two inches below the ledge. The surface was smooth, but the great cold bulk of it felt as if it were compressing the air around her. She switched on the flashlight and pointed it to the left. The water level was almost up to the top of the siphon chamber, which should mean it would not rise all the way up to the ledge. _Should_ mean.\n\nShe switched off the flashlight, shed the blanket, and got to her hands and knees. Holding the Chem-Light in one hand, she crawled along the ledge, past the intersection with the tunnel up above, looking for any way to get up there. Fifty feet beyond the tunnel intersection, she found a single vertical pipe anchored to the concrete wall. She held up the Chem-Light to try to see where it went, but it simply disappeared into the darkness above. She grabbed it. It was maybe two, three inches in diameter and seemed pretty solid. Could she shinny up this thing? To go where? It wasn't anywhere near the main tunnel.\n\nJust then came the deep rumbling sound she'd heard before as the siphon pressures equalized and the chamber began to drain. She breathed deeply in relief, knowing that the water was going down now. The rumbling grew louder and louder, and the air pressure changed in the chamber, making her ears pop a little. She looked at the pipe again, and had an idea.\n\nBrowne stepped into a clump of trees when he got to the edge of the industrial area. The main road from the front entrance went straight down the hill into the main street of the building complex, but there was an open space of perhaps three hundred yards between the tree line and the buildings. He wanted to wait and watch before crossing that space. The buildings were slightly downslope from his position. Their normal way in, along the rail line, came from his left front as he looked down on the complex. The majority of the buildings fell away on a broad hillside that ended up in the tree line above the creek, almost half a mile away.\n\nAll those white concrete buildings looked like a ghost town in the starlight, and, of course, that's what it was now, ever since the government had shut it down with no warning. Were those security boys waiting down there, parked in a dark alley? Or had they driven into Jared's trap and were now dead or injured down in the Ditch? He kicked himself mentally for not anticipating that possibility; he should have told Jared to set up a different trap. He well remembered the Ditch. Each of the eight main chemical-processing buildings had a twenty-four-inch emergency drain main leading from the batch machinery to the Ditch, which in reality wasn't a ditch at all, but an enormous concrete dump channel built under the main chemical complex. He remembered the night he had ordered six thousand gallons of nitro-toluene dumped into the Ditch after the night-run manager lost temperature control of the TNT process. That was back before the days of all this environmental sensitivity, when the nation's armaments took clear priority over its air and water quality. The Ditch had been designed to flush any spills into a second tunnel, designed as a siphon chamber, which led to a natural cavern under the hillside. The cavern's depth was shown as being over five hundred feet on the plant's schematics, so where the spill ultimately went was anyone's guess. It went \"away,\" as one of the company's managers had told him when he first started working there.\n\nHe concentrated on listening. He closed his eyes and let the night sounds sweep over him, searching for any noises that didn't belong. If those security people had gone into the Ditch, he had, at best, thirty-six hours. Was that enough time to finish pressurizing the truck? If he worked straight through Sunday night, it might be enough. Then he'd drive the truck out those front gates, take it to Jared's place. Then to the target. At least that part of the operation was already\" planned out.\n\nAnd what about that girl? Leave her? Take her? He hadn't thought that one through well. She was insurance, but against what? A getaway hostage after he completed the attack? He had a vague plan of taking her to the target with him in the truck. If things went wrong, he would have something to bargain with. At least up to the point where the bomb went off. After that, all those very special agents would probably be in something less than a negotiating mood. The ones who were still alive, he thought, a savage grimace covering his face. He'd decide about the girl when the bomb was finished. And when he saw what, if anything, was down in the Ditch. He listened some more.\n\nAfter half an hour, Kreiss decided to move up into the industrial area. Either the guy wasn't coming after all or he was coming in a different way. It had sounded as if that vehicle had stopped closer to the main gates. They had been operating on the arsenal for some time; it was conceivable they had cracked the front gates. He would move as quickly as he could up to the main complex of buildings, beyond the place where the pipe trap had been set, and climb a building. That would give him a vantage point from which to listen. This time he would stay off the main street and move through the alley behind the largest buildings. He checked his packs and then moved out, walking quietly but quickly up the rail line, past the first switch points, toward the cluster of the biggest buildings.\n\nWhen he got into the alley behind the first building, he stopped to listen. There was some creaking and cracking going on as the buildings and the nests of pipes above the street contracted in the cool night air. The by-now-familiar chemical smell rose up from between his feet. He flattened himself against the still-warm concrete side of the building and crept around to the front corner to take a look-and-listen into the main street. He tried to remember where the main road from the front gates entered the complex, but then he realized he didn't know. He did remember a building that looked like it was more administrative than industrial. Probably the front road led to that building first. The main street appeared to be empty. It was much darker between the buildings, and he wished he had his cone set up. He could barely make out the big steel plates interspersed at regular intervals along the dusty white concrete surface of the street. Except\u2014were his eyes playing tricks on him? Down toward the power plant, about a third of the way up the hill in his direction, it looked like there was a massive hole in the street. He remembered Jared's description of the trap: second plate up from the power plant. Step on it and fall twenty feet into some ditch. Break your legs. Sweet people. Who are holding Lynn. Well, he was holding one of _them_ now, wasn't he, in a manner of speaking?\n\nHe slipped back away from the corner and found the ladder to the roof. He stopped to listen again, then climbed swiftly to the top of the building. This roof was flat and covered in graveled asphalt. There were steel ventilator cowlings spaced randomly around the top, with guy wires anchored into the asphalt. He made his way through the maze of guy wires to the front of the building, rigged the cone, and conducted a quick acoustic sweep of the main street. There was a single, very faint sound coming from the direction of the opened plate in the street, some hundred yards away. He concentrated but could not identify it. Whatever it was, it was steady and not rhythmic. He repositioned the cone, but he still could not identify the noise. He sat back, then trained the cone in the opposite direction, hoping to catch the second man coming up from the rail line. But there was nothing. He swung the cone back toward the hole in the street. The noise was still there. What the hell was that? If it's not a human walking up the street, he told himself, disregard it and focus on finding bad guy number two. And Lynn. He dismantled the cone and put the apparatus back into his pack.\n\nJanet stood at the bottom of the siphon chamber, listening to the water drip off the concrete walls, while she worked the section of pipe back and forth in a slow, tedious arc. She had waited for the water to drain out before going down the ladder and then coming all the way back to the pipe, which terminated, as she had hoped, on the bottom of the chamber. Some kind of instrument conduit, she assumed. She'd torn the bottom of it loose from its rusted bracket and was now attempting to break off a section by causing metal fatigue. It appeared to be working. Each arc was getting a little bigger. She was working by the light of her trusty Chem-Light, which was plenty bright down here in the absolute darkness of the tunnels. She actually felt as if she knew her way around the siphon chamber now, and the cold, clammy air swirling around her bare legs felt almost normal. Better air than water, she realized. The Sig was still hanging in her shoulder rig, and she giggled when she thought what she must look like, half-naked, with that big automatic under her arm. Despite its awkwardness, she was glad she still had it. Because if this worked, and _if_ she got out of here, there was no telling what or who was up there in the ammunition plant complex.\n\nShe felt water around her ankles as the siphon chamber began to fill again, and she realized she did not have all night. She pushed harder on the pipe, putting her legs into it now, and felt it giving way somewhere up there in the darkness. Then suddenly, the weight of it was in her hands and she jumped back as she lost control of it. The pipe clattered to the floor of the chamber with a huge ringing noise of steel on concrete, barely missing her feet. She picked one end up and found she was able to move it. She put the end down and took a rough measurement. About twenty feet. Good. It had broken off about where she had intended it to. Now, she had to get it to the ladder, haul it up to the ledge, and then see if she could position it somehow on the ledge and shinny up the damn thing to the main tunnel. The trick was going to be locking the bottom end into something long enough for her to make the climb. She began dragging the pipe down the siphon chamber toward the ladder rungs.\n\nBrowne heard something. He opened his eyes, shocked to realize he'd been drifting off to sleep. What was that noise? He leaned forward and cupped his good ear, straining to hear it again. He swore silently to himself. His hearing was fair, for his age, but it was still the product of too many years working in an industrial environment without hearing protection. He looked at his watch; it was a little after 8:00 P.M. He was wasting time; he _had_ to get going. He decided to wait another fifteen minutes, see if he heard the noise again, and, if not, go down to the main street and check out the plates. If nothing appeared to have happened, he would go to the power plant, start up the hydrogen generator, and get to work.\n\nKreiss got down off the roof as quietly as he could and began moving from building to building, staying in the deepest shadows and hugging the still-warm concrete sides of the structures. He stopped at each corner, listening carefully but hearing nothing except a slight breeze blowing down the empty street. When he was two buildings away from the power plant, he did hear something, a metallic scraping noise, like a pipe being dragged on concrete. He was about to go up on top of the nearest building to set up the cone, when he realized the noise was coming from the street\u2014no, from that big hole in the street. He stopped where he was, and he heard it again. Definitely coming from that big hole, where the steel plate appeared to be missing. The guy must have come in the front entrance after all and was now doing something down below the street. Or had he fallen into his own trap?\n\nKreiss moved quickly to the edge of the hole. He listened. Definitely something going on, but at a distance\u2014the sound was echoing up what had to be a tunnel, a really big tunnel, under the street. He pointed his finger light into the hole but could barely see the bottom. Something glinted back at him\u2014glass? He heard another noise, coming up out of the tunnel from the direction of the power plant. His light illuminated the ladder rungs embedded into the concrete on one side. He decided to go down. He went over to the far edge of the hole, pointed the tiny light down, and saw where hinges had been ripped out of the concrete right above the ladder. He thought about that for a minute. A man walking out onto one of those big steel plates and falling through because the support was gone wouldn't have ripped the hinges off. He moved quickly around the perimeter of the hole until he found what he was looking for: scrape marks on the down-street edge of the hole, and a tire scuff on the concrete behind the edge. A vehicle had fallen through, not a human. He pointed his tiny finger light down the hole again. So where was it?\n\nHe listened again, but there were no more sounds. He went back to the ladder and climbed over the edge and started down. A cool draft eased by his face as he went down, one rung at a time, with pauses to listen. When he finally reached bottom he stepped away from the ladder and crunched on what turned out to be auto glass, a whole carpet of it, covering two large fluid stains. The steel plate was lying upward from the point of impact. The next thing he noticed was the slope: The tunnel angled down toward the power plant at a surprisingly steep angle. He turned on his finger light and examined the floor. Heavy metal scrape marks went down the tunnel. He stood up. The tunnel was big, its floor perhaps twenty feet down from street level and a bit over fifteen feet square. It smelled of chemicals and stagnant water, and the stream of air coming up from the bottom was heavy with moisture.\n\nOkay. A vehicle had crashed through the plate, hit bottom here, and then slid down the tunnel into\u2014what? Another metallic clank, this one much clearer than when he had been up on the street. From way down there, in the darkness. He stepped away from all the broken glass as carefully as he could and started down the tunnel, using the finger light in spot mode to sweep the tunnel floor directly in front of him. The farther he went, the steeper it seemed to get, until he had to walk alongside the tunnel wall with one hand on the sloping concrete sides to keep from sliding down out of control.\n\nAfter going a couple of hundred feet, he thought he saw a faint green glow ahead. The smell of water was much stronger, and then he could hear falling water. He kept going, taking smaller steps now to maintain his balance. He must be near or even past that power plant building. The green glow was getting stronger, and then he realized he was listening to someone working, working hard, huffing and puffing a little, doing something with a metal object. Based on the shape of the glow, the tunnel he was in ended up fifty feet ahead, and whatever was going on was happening below the level of the tunnel. He decided to get down flat and crawl the rest of the way. As he got closer to the edge, he suddenly froze in place as a swaying snakelike object rose over the edge, backlit by the green glow from below. In silhouette, it looked like a large cobra.\n\nBrowne crept down the main street from the administration building, keeping to the sides of the buildings and walking as quietly as he could. He stopped frequently to listen for any more of the mysterious sounds, but there was only the normal nighttime silence. He'd probably imagined it. When he got to the hole in the street where the plate had been, he shook his head. He broke out his flashlight and played it around the edges of the hole, saw the scrapes and scuffs on the concrete, and then pointed the light straight down into the Ditch. He saw the steel plate, which had been torn off its hinges. The carpet of smashed automobile glass gleamed back at him, and he saw the drag marks leading down toward the power plant. He swore softly. They'd driven right into it. Right into it. He snapped the light off and sat back on his haunches. There was a ladder of steel rungs built into the concrete wall. Should he go down there? Confirm what had happened? What if they were still alive? He thought he heard distant noises from the tunnel, but then decided he was imagining things. He went to the up-slope side of the hole and shined the light as far down the tunnel as he could, but there was nothing visible. That cinched it: Their vehicle was probably down in the siphon chamber, so even if they'd survived the fall, they were gone. Really gone. Swallowed up by the endless caverns under the arsenal.\n\nHe stood up, wishing the plate had not come off its hinges. But it had and that was that. The clock was running. As of Monday morning, at the latest, someone would be in here looking for those two, and he would have to be gone. He and the truck would have to be gone. Time to get to the power plant. He had between twenty-four and thirty-six hours to finish pressurizing the truck. He grabbed the girl's supply bag and headed down the street.\n\nThe water was swelling in the siphon chamber below as Janet struggled with the heavy pipe, determined not to drop it. It had taken nearly all her strength to pull the damn thing up to the ledge, and now she was trying to stand it on end to reach the main tunnel up above. She had braced herself against the rusty steel ladder rails that arched onto the ledge and was trying to direct the swaying end of the pipe to the lip of the tunnel above. She had to get it perfectly vertical or it would simply roll off and she'd have to start again, and the Chem-Light gave off barely enough light. She was very conscious of how narrow the ledge was, and that her strength was waning. She had to get this right, then summon the strength to shinny up the pipe.\n\nShe landed the top of the pipe on the concrete above, made sure it would stay there, and then took a moment to rest. She kept one hand on the pipe as she closed her eyes and slumped against the ladder rails, breathing deeply. Her legs were getting cold again as the clammy air rose up to the ledge, driven by the rising water. She _had_ to get out of here. Then she felt the pipe moving and she jumped to steady it. She stood up too quickly, lost her balance, and reflexively grabbed the pipe with both hands to steady herself and keep from falling over backward into the siphon chamber. But of course the pipe wasn't attached to anything, and she cried out as she realized she was going to fall. And then the pipe stopped moving. She swayed out over the edge for a terrifying instant, recovered her footing, and hugged the pipe. She looked up. There in the green glow from the Chem-Light, a frightening black-masked face was looking down at her. Blazing dark eyes framed in a horizontal oval of black fabric like a ninja.\n\n_Kreiss?_\n\n\"Special Agent Carter,\" Kreiss said. \"What in hell are you doing down there?\"\n\nShe closed her eyes and started to laugh, although, even to herself, she sounded more than a little hysterical.\n\nBrowne had the hydrogen generator up and running in fifteen minutes. As pressure built in the retort, he went through the connecting door to the truck. He found the battery charger on the front seat and pulled in an extension cord from the power strip so that he could begin to trickle-charge the truck's two batteries. The propane truck had been parked here for a long time now, and he wanted it ready to go when the time came to get out of here. The pressure gauge on the main propane tank had been shut off to prevent leakage. He cracked it open and saw it registered forty-two pounds. For weeks, it had registered nothing at all, but now that there was pressure, it ought to build faster. The copper supply should be sufficient; if not, he would tear down some of the circuit breakers in the turbogenerator hall. But he knew what his major constraint was now: time.\n\nHe went back into the control room and saw that the low-pressure pump had activated, sending pure warm hydrogen gas into the propane truck's tank. The retort was boiling happily away, with a chunk of copper still visible. He could hear the _putt-putt_ sound of the little diesel generator next door. Nothing to do now but wait for this lump of copper to dissolve, switch over to the second one, flush this retort, and reload it. Once he began using the larger pump, the volume transfer would be smaller, but he might be able to get it up to three, maybe four hundred pounds before he had to get out of here. It all depended on when an alarm would be raised about the missing security truck. He was almost certain it would not be until Monday, or at least no one would come here until Monday. If he could generate straight through until early Monday morning, he might make his target pressure. He wondered if he could stay awake. Maybe Jared would come in Sunday morning. He checked to see that the row of five-gallon nitric-acid bottles were full, felt the side of the retort to make sure it wasn't getting too hot, and then picked up the food sack.\n\nHe switched off the single lightbulb and slipped out the door into the loading bay. The street was just outside. He stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. When the street became visible as a pale avenue in the darkness, he walked out toward the nitro building. He still had not decided what to do with the girl. If it came to it, though, he could just leave her.\n\nKreiss steadied the pipe while the semihysterical woman down below on the ledge caught her breath. His question had not been rhetorical: What in hell was she doing down here? Or at the arsenal, for that matter? He looked over the side of the tunnel lip again. There was a Chem-Light sitting on the ledge next to her. She appeared to be in her underwear, except for her blouse and her gun rig. He called her name. She looked up, her face a pale mask of fatigue.\n\n\"I have a rope. Have you looked for any other way up?\"\n\n\"There isn't one.\" Her voice was dull. She was right on the edge of exhaustion.\n\n\"All right. I'm going to tie a harness into the rope and pass it down. Put it on, wrap your legs around the pipe, and I'll pull you up.\"\n\nShe nodded but said nothing. She still had a death grip on the pipe. He sensed there was water rising in the chamber beneath the ledge. He peeled the Velcro straps off the packs he wore on his chest and back and then shrugged out of the harness. He pulled the fifty-foot-long coil of six-hundred-pound test nylon line out of the backpack, then attached it to the harness using a bowline. He passed it down to her on the ledge. He had to instruct her on how to put on the harness, and her movements were unnaturally slow. Finally, she had it. He felt the lip of the main tunnel and found a segment of steel angle iron. Good. No concrete edges to fray the rope.\n\n\"Wrap your ankles and hands around the pipe,\" he ordered. \"Pull yourself up like an inchworm, hands, then ankles. If the pipe starts to go, let it go, and hold on to the rope.\"\n\nShe didn't say anything. He said it all again and made her acknowledge. She did, but her voice was faint. The harness would hold her, but it would help a lot if she could assist. He wasn't sure if he was strong enough to pull up a deadweight, not with the way this tunnel sloped. He was very glad he'd worn the rubber-soled boots.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said. \"Go.\"\n\nHe had wrapped the end of the rope around his hips and belayed it once over his right shoulder. Each time he felt the tension come out of the rope, he pulled gently by backing up the tunnel. He concentrated on the rope, feeling what she was doing: arm pull, hold, ankles, up, grip, arm pull, hold. He kept a steady tension on the rope, more to steady the pipe than to pull her up. He was alert for a slip, because that's what he expected. She'd get halfway up and then run out of steam. He was ten feet back from the edge now, keeping the tension on.\n\n\"Talk to me,\" he said. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"A third,\" she gasped.\n\n\"Rest when you get halfway up,\" he said. \"Grip with hands and feet. Relax the rest of your body. Deep breathing. The pipe and I have your weight.\"\n\nShe didn't say anything.\n\n\"Acknowledge,\" he barked.\n\n\"All right. Halfway. Rest. Got it.\"\n\nHe kept the tension steady, waiting until he felt her ankles grip and then pulling a little to help her. He had to save his own energy in case she slipped.\n\n\"Halfway,\" she said. \"But I think I'm done.\"\n\n\"Grip with hands and feet. Deep breathing for two minutes.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nHe tried to picture her as he held tension in the line. The pipe at about an eighty-degree angle, almost straight up and down. She was halfway up the pipe, trying not to spin around on it. That would be a real disaster, because he couldn't get her over the lip if she was upside down. His own footing wasn't that solid as he backed uphill. He tried to think of another way to help her, but the pipe was about all they had. He looked around the tunnel for a projection to anchor the rope, but there wasn't anything visible in the green gloom.\n\n\"The pipe stable?\"\n\n\"So far,\" she said.\n\n\"Can you climb any farther?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" she said. \"I'm afraid of rolling on the pipe.\"\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"You concentrate on staying upright. I'm going to pull you the rest of the way. Ready?\"\n\n\"Very,\" she said. Good, he thought. A little wisecrack meant she was still in charge of herself. He set his feet, took a second belaying turn around his shoulders, and then pulled back with his arms and his upper body, leaning backward at the same time. The rope moved. She must be 140, 150, he thought, and I'm losing some pull to friction at the lip. He stepped backward, leaning way back so as not to lose ground. Then he felt a slight slack in the line, which meant she was trying to help, probably using her legs on the pipe.\n\nIt took him fifteen minutes of excruciatingly slow effort to get her to the lip of the tunnel, and even then, it wasn't over. In fact, this was the dangerous bit, because he had to get her over the lip, and her whole body would add to the friction.\n\n\"Put your hands up on the top of the pipe,\" he called. He watched as she slid first one hand and then the other up to the top of the pipe, about four feet above the lip.\n\n\"Lock them there. When I tell you, try a chin-up.\"\n\n\"You've got . . . to be . . . shitting me,\" she said. It sounded as if talking was almost beyond her.\n\n\"No. Do it. The pipe's going to go when I pull again. Push off from it, let it go, and then let me do the rest. Now, deep breathing. One minute.\"\n\n\"Me or you?\" she asked.\n\nHe almost grinned, except that his whole body was straining to hold her at the top of the pipe. But she had a point. He went into deep breathing, his body bent backward, his knees bent and flexing like springs, his hands hurting where he had the rope, the palms of his gloves actually hot with the pressure.\n\n\"Okay, stand by,\" he said. He needed her help to get some of her body weight over the lip. \"One long pull on the top of the pipe, both hands, then let it go when it moves and stretch out with your arms, like you're diving. Then we're done.\"\n\nShe didn't answer and her head was hanging down. Her hands were visibly white at the top of the pipe. She was done. He had to go _now._\n\n\"Pull!\" he commanded. \"Pull! Pull!\"\n\nHe saw her try to pull up on the top of the pipe, and he laid into it, pulling back with all his might, jerking her right off the pipe, which disappeared behind her. Her head, chest, and arms came over the lip, but the heavy part, her lower body, stuck on the edge, just above her waist. Her head was down and he couldn't see her face. The pipe clanged softly once on something hard and then fell into some water down behind her. She was a deadweight now and he couldn't move her. He felt the line start to go backward, small tugs toward oblivion down the inclined floor of the tunnel.\n\nBrowne went through the procedure at the steel door into the nitro building, telling her to put the blindfold on, to turn around. He waited, unlocked the door, and shone the flashlight at her. She was right where she was supposed to be. He stepped in and put the food sack down. He didn't bother to pick up the remnants of the last food delivery. The big room smelled fusty and stale, and the stink of sewage was more pronounced.\n\n\"It's almost over,\" he said, not knowing exactly what he meant by that. She did not reply. He thought for a moment. \"I have two options,\" he said. \"I can either take you with me as a hostage or I can simply leave you here when I go.\"\n\n\"Take me where?\" she asked.\n\nIt was the first time she'd spoken to him, and it surprised him. Her tone of voice was not what he had expected. There was a matter-of-factness about it, almost a tone of defiance. His first reaction was not to tell her anything, but then, why not? She would either be with him in the truck, suitably subdued, or she'd be mewed up here in this concrete building. No, wait: He couldn't leave her alive\u2014if they searched the whole facility for the missing security people, they'd search all the buildings. So he either had to kill her outright or take her with him. He considered the prospect of simply pulling his gun and killing her right now. He shook his head. No, he'd kept her as a bargaining chip, and that's what he would use her for. He rehearsed his mantra: The two boys killed themselves when they stumbled into Jared's traps. They should not have been here. The flash flood had killed them.\n\n\"To Washington,\" he said.\n\nShe didn't answer at first, then coughed and asked him why.\n\n\"With a hydrogen bomb.\"\n\n\"Bullshit,\" she said immediately. \"No individual can make a hydrogen bomb.\"\n\n\"Oh yes I can. In fact, I have.\"\n\n\"It takes a fission device to trigger a hydrogen bomb,\" she said. \"You're going to tell me you made one of those, too?\"\n\n\"I have made a hydrogen bomb,\" he said. \"But it's not what you think.\"\n\n\"I'll bet,\" she said. \"What do you want with me?\"\n\n\"You are insurance. A hostage, in case things go wrong. I don't want to have to kill you.\"\n\n\"If you're taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington, you're going to kill lots of people; I'm supposed to believe you'll spare me?\"\n\n\"That's different,\" he said, shining the light around the interior of the building, making sure she wasn't trying to distract him from something she'd set up. \"This is personal, and as far as I'm concerned, this is an entirely legitimate target. You blundered into this by accident, which is the only reason you're still alive.\"\n\n\"Where's the other one?\" she asked. \"The one who likes to see me naked.\"\n\nBrowne felt a surge of anger. Goddamn Jared. \"Don't worry about him anymore. His part in this is over, and he won't be going along. _I'm_ taking the bomb to Washington.\"\n\n\"I'm hungry,\" she said. \"Why don't you go away, so I can eat?\"\n\n\"I will. But we may be leaving soon. If you cooperate\u2014no, if you simply go quietly\u2014I'll let you live. If I get cornered, I'm going to trade them you for me. If you won't go along, I'll put you out in one of the underground field magazines to starve. If you tell me one thing and then do another, I'll be forced to cut your throat and pitch you out onto the highway. Think about it.\"\n\nHe switched off the flashlight and closed the steel door. Outside, the night was still, only the faint buzz of insects from the nearby woods breaking the silence. He looked at his watch; he had a few minutes before the retort needed changing. He turned away from the power plant and walked up the main street for three blocks, turned right, and then walked down a side street and across an open area of hard-packed dirt to a low-lying concrete bunker that was fenced off from the rest of the industrial area. A dusty sign on the bunker read MERCURY-CONTAMINATED SOIL; KEEP OUT. He looked around and then opened a walk-through gate in the chain-link fence and went through. There were two doors to the bunker: one big enough to admit a front-loader tractor, and the man-sized door on the other end. He unlocked and stepped through the man-sized door, closing it behind him. He switched on his flashlight and checked through his get-away stash. Not even Jared knew about this. This was one of two supply caches he had prepositioned in the arsenal. This one was for his run to Washington. There was some cash, a gun, a fuel-delivery manifest from the company whose name was on the truck, and some spare clothes in a duffel bag. He gathered up what he needed and closed the bunker up again. Then he walked back down the dark side street to the power plant and went inside. He wished Jared was here to patrol against intruders, although there was no sign that anyone was out there.\n\nJanet felt the rope slipping back and tried to do something, anything, but her muscles were turning to jelly and she couldn't force another ounce of strength into her hands. Her hips and bare legs were dangling out over the ledge and the lip of the tunnel was cutting into her middle. Her attempt to hoist herself on the end of the pipe had been a total failure. Despite the cold air in the tunnel complex, her eyes were stinging with sweat and she was having trouble breathing. The rope slipped back another quarter of an inch. He was losing it. She was going to fall, all the way back down into the black waters of the siphon chamber.\n\n\"Can you lift your legs?\" Kreiss called through clenched teeth. His voice was filled with strain.\n\n\"W-what?\" she asked stupidly. She'd heard him just fine, but she didn't understand.\n\n\"Your legs\u2014can you lift a leg, get a knee over the edge?\"\n\nShe tried, but the angle was wrong. Her knee just bumped into the hard concrete, and she crumpled back against the unforgiving wall. Her center of gravity was still below the lip. She knew she did not have the upper-body strength simply to pull herself over. But the effort gave her an idea, a last, desperate idea.\n\n\"Wait,\" she said, bending in the middle so as to get her feet flat against the wall.\n\n\"I can't wait. I can't hold you much longer.\"\n\n\"I'm going to straighten out my legs and then lock them,\" she said, hoping Kreiss would understand. She didn't have energy to waste talking. \"As the rope comes back. Then I'll walk up the wall as far as I can. I think I can do it.\"\n\n\"Go ahead. Tell me when you're ready and I'll give you some slack.\"\n\n\"Just hold what you've got,\" she said. She didn't want him to let go, he was losing ground as it was. As the rope jerked back toward her in quarter-inch increments, she planted her feet firmly against the concrete and willed her legs to straighten. She would have a very brief window of opportunity to fly-walk up the wall, after which, she'd just have to let go and drop. She wondered how deep the water was down in the big chamber. She forced her eyes open but could not turn her head. Her left leg straightened out first, then her right. She locked her knees, but she was still bent like a hairpin. She would have to let him lose more ground.\n\nShe gripped the rope as hard as she could with her left hand and then quickly wrapped the loose end around her right wrist three times. She took up the strain on her right wrist and hand and did the same thing with her left, then equalized it. It gave her a much more solid grip, but then she realized she was losing circulation in both hands. Mistake. Big mistake, but there was nothing to be done. She had to go for it, and do it now, angle or no angle. She slid her right foot up two inches, and then her left foot. It was hard, very hard, and her arms felt like they were coming out of their sockets. She did it again.\n\n\"Hold it if you can,\" she grunted.\n\nKreiss didn't answer from up above, but the rope seemed to steady. She moved her feet again, getting the hang of it now, slide up, hold, slide the other one, hold. Breathe, she told herself; don't forget to breathe. She was hanging out like a wind surfer now, forcing herself to ignore the void below her and concentrating on the green swatch of concrete right in front of her. Her wrists were burning, but her hands were beyond sensation. She slid her feet again and realized she was close, only about two feet to go before they would reach the edge. Slide, plant it, bend the knee a little bit as her back flattened some more, slide the other one, plant it. Hold the fucking rope, Kreiss. Don't let go; don't let go. Thank God I'm barefoot. . . . And then she felt the toes of her right foot engage the smooth steel edge of the lip. She twisted slightly on the rope, trying to get a foot over. Wrong move. She had to get the other foot up to the edge first, then simply pull herself vertical hand over hand.\n\nBut she couldn't go hand over hand because her hands were completely wrapped in the coils of the rope, and paralyzed besides. She gave a small cry of total frustration and looked up the slope at Kreiss, who was barely visible except for the oval patch of white that was his face. She tried to speak, but her lungs were bursting with the effort of holding herself at the edge, her feet pinned against the cold steel, while the rest of her body hung out like some mountain climber enjoying the view. She was trapped, unable to go either up or back without falling. One of them had to do something, but she didn't know what.\n\nThen Kreiss moved. He must have seen her predicament, because he locked his feet and leaned back hard, up the slope of the tunnel, so that the angle of the rope straightened. It produced a small tug, but it was enough to bring her body more vertical. He leaned some more, until his back was at nearly the same angle as hers, and suddenly she was able to simply step up into the tunnel. Kreiss sat down hard with a grunt as Janet sunk first to her knees and then down onto her shins and forearms. She resisted a temptation to kiss the concrete. Then Kreiss was there, unwrapping her hands and wrists.\n\n\"Nice outfit,\" he said softly. \"Especially the Sig.\"\n\n\"They told us never to lose our weapon,\" she replied, unable to straighten up. Every muscle in her abdomen was cramping and her ribs hurt where the harness had cut into her. Then she began to shake as the adrenaline crashed. He turned her around gently so that she was sitting, and wrapped his arms around her chest, below her breasts. She shook like a leaf, uncontrollably, and then realized she had urinated.\n\n\"It's okay,\" he whispered. \"It's okay. Perfectly natural. Doesn't mean a thing. You're safe. Say it for me. I'm safe. _Say_ it.\"\n\nHer teeth were chattering and she was absolutely mortified, but he kept saying it until finally she got the words out.\n\n\"Now, deep breathing,\" he ordered, still holding her from behind, his legs alongside hers, both of them sitting on the cold concrete as if in a luge. He was warm and she was very cold, but there was nothing erotic or sexy about it. The hard ridges and buckles on his crawl suit felt odd, and she was keenly aware of her wet underpants. She suddenly just wanted to go to sleep until it all went away. Then he was lifting her up, strong, large hands under her armpits, dragging her gently to her feet.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said. \"One more climb.\"\n\nAn hour and a half later, he pulled his truck alongside the curb in front of her town house. She had slept in the passenger seat of his truck the whole way into Roanoke, waking only when he asked her for directions. He had covered her up with one of his coats as soon as she got into the truck, and she'd gone down like a stone. Now she appeared to be disoriented, rubbing her eyes and looking out the windows.\n\n\"This it?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied, stifling a yawn. He had taken off his hood and gloves so as not to attract attention on the road. Her eyes were hollow with fatigue. \"Thank you,\" she said. \"For everything.\"\n\n\"I'll get the coat back later,\" he said. \"That was a Bureau car that went down the hole, right? You've still got your own wheels?\"\n\n\"Yes. My car's at the office. I suppose I have a significant paperwork exercise ahead of me.\"\n\nHe didn't reply. He was ready for her to get out of the car, but she wasn't moving. He was about to get out and go open her door, when she asked him why he had been crawling around the arsenal.\n\nHe'd been anticipating that question. \"Because of what that kid said, that my daughter and her friends had gone to explore that place.\"\n\n\"But at night?\"\n\n\"During the day, as much as half of a search area is in shadow. It's easy to miss something. I have a night-vision pack built into this crawl suit. At night, especially when there's ambient starlight or moonlight, almost everything's visible.\"\n\nShe hesitated, then asked, \"You think she's there?\"\n\nHe took a deep breath. He was not going to tell them anything, not until he'd had a chance to hunt down the second man and find out what he needed to know. Plus, now there was the little matter of the Jared pancake flattened under his trailer. \"It's the best lead I've got,\" he said. \"I've been there twice before. I'm going to look until I find something or satisfy myself that there's no trace of them.\"\n\n\"We could help with that, especially after\u2014\"\n\n\"No. I mean, I know I can't stop you, but you can't help without alerting those Washington people. Their focus is on me. That story about a bomb cell is probably bullshit. Besides, I can do this better alone. And it's not like I'm hunting someone you're hunting.\"\n\nShe missed the gibe. \"My boss is suspicious about those people, too,\" she said. \"But it's the weekend. He can't raise anybody in Washington in his chain of command to check them out.\"\n\nHe just looked at her, sitting bare-assed, exhausted, and bedraggled in the front seat of his pickup truck. She had the grace to be embarrassed. If it hadn't been semidark, he would have sworn she was blushing.\n\n\"I can still do it better than anyone you'd send.\" And, he thought, you'd bring a crowd, and then my one lead to Lynn might vanish.\n\n\"Okay, okay, so I'm not in your league,\" she said. \"But surely we have people who are.\"\n\n\"I doubt that, Special Agent Carter,\" he said softly. \"With the Bureau these days, it seems to be a question of quantity over quality. But in any event, I'm going back there tonight. I have nothing else to do. If I do find something concrete, I'll tell you. Would you like an escort to your door?\"\n\n\"I can manage, I think.\" She glanced down at her bare legs. \"Hopefully, my neighbors won't see me in this. . . outfit.\"\n\n\"They'd probably find mine even more interesting. I'd appreciate it if you'd find a way to leave me out of your report on how you got out of the tunnel. Maybe just say you climbed out.\"\n\nShe thought about that for a moment. \"If you wish, yes, I can do that,\" she said finally. \"But you did save my life. That should go into the record.\"\n\n\"Not my record, Carter. My record is closed. I'm just a father searching for his missing daughter now. Nothing more.\"\n\nShe kept looking at him in the dark. \"What was the message that Ransom failed to deliver?\" she asked.\n\nHe looked down at the white oval of her face. Even in the truck, he was taller than she was. He couldn't tell her, not without explaining the whole story. And if he was right about the message, he had little time to lose. He had to find Lynn before they decided to send someone.\n\n\"I can't tell you that,\" he said finally.\n\n\"Funny, that's what Ransom said when I asked him.\"\n\n\"Well, there you go,\" he said.\n\nShe hesitated, as if to see whether or not he would say anything else, but then she got out.\n\n## CHAPTER XI\n\nJanet was sitting in her kitchen, having a badly needed cup of strong coffee, when the phone rang. It was 7:30 on Sunday morning. To her surprise, it was Ransom on the line.\n\n\"So, Special Agent, where you been?\"\n\n\"You miss me, Ransom?\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, after a fashion, yes. Your surveillance folks found our little device on Mr. Farnsworth's car. Very funny, Special Agent. Not too bright, maybe, but very funny.\"\n\n\"I thought that was one of _our_ bugs?\"\n\n\"Let's just say that your boss was, um, agreeable to the notion of tracking your Bu car. Which is why I'm calling, actually: Where is said Bu car?\"\n\n\"In China, somewhere, probably,\" she said. \"Look, I'm just getting my first caffeine of the day. Can this discussion possibly wait?\"\n\n\"You got more of that coffee around? Because I'm sittin' outside your town house right now, as a matter of fact, and we do need to talk. Sooner rather than later, as they say in the coolest circles of government.\"\n\n\"Oh, for God's sake, yeah, sure, all right.\"\n\nShe got another mug down from the cabinet and then went to let him in. He was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt, khaki trousers, wraparound black sunglasses, some expensive-looking boots, and a green windbreaker with a Boy Scouts of America logo. She realized she was naked under her bathrobe, so she tugged the strings around her waist.\n\nHe sat down in the kitchen, took off his sunglasses, and waited while she fixed him a cup of coffee.\n\n\"Nice touch,\" she said, pointing to the Boy Scout logo.\n\n\"Well, you know,\" he said. \"We brave, loyal, thrifty, all that good shit.\"\n\n\"Right. So, what's the big deal about my Bu car on a Sunday morning?\" she said.\n\n\"Where is said Bu car, again?\" he asked, raising his eyebrows. \"You say something about China?\" She hesitated for a moment, then told him what had happened, including the fact that she had been rescued by Edwin Kreiss.\n\nHe whistled softly when he heard about Kreiss. \"And this was basically at night? You sayin' Kreiss was creepin' the arsenal at night? _Last_ night?\"\n\nShe explained what Kreiss had said about night-vision equipment. He nodded, then asked her precisely when Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnel.\n\n\"It was night. I guess I don't remember,\" she said. \"Elevenish, I'd guess.\"\n\nHe said, \"Uh-huh,\" and then looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time. \"You got plans for your Sunday, Special Agent?\" he asked.\n\n\"Uh\u2014\"\n\n\"Now you do. Let me suggest you take that coffee upstairs, make yourself functional, if not too beautiful, and then I need to take you somewhere to show you somethin'.\"\n\nShe just looked at him.\n\n\"It shows better than it tells, Special Agent,\" he said. \"And time, believe it or not, time is a-wastin'. Help if I say please?\"\n\n\"Is this something I should call my boss about first?\" she asked.\n\n\"No-o,\" he said. \" 'Cause he's gonna ask you a million questions, and you won't have any answers whatsoever until I do my show-and-tell. Please?\"\n\nHalf an hour later, they were leaving Roanoke and headed south on 1-81 in his car. He was explaining how they had tagged Edwin Kreiss's truck.\n\n_\"Four_ bugs? Whatever happened to the notion of the private citizen?\"\n\n_\"Private citizen?\"_ Ransom said, slapping the wheel, as if she'd told a wonderful joke. \"No such thing in America anymore. First of all, nobody's a citizen anymore.\"\n\nUh-oh, she thought. Brother Ransom has a hobbyhorse. She decided to go with it anyway. \"Okay, I'll bite.\"\n\n\"Simple,\" he said. \"We are what bureaucracies call us. Like law enforcement? We're 'subjects,' Pollsters? We're 'respondents.' Marketin' people? We're 'focus groups.' Politicians? We're 'voters.' Your Internet provider? You're a 'subscriber.' IRS? We're 'clients.' Clients\u2014do you love it? Ain't no more 'citizens.' Last time there were citizens, in the way you mean it, Special Agent, was during the Roman Empire. And maybe the French Revolution, when they got into their guillotine phase.\"\n\nShe decided to shut up. She was in no shape for a philosophy discussion. The coffee was wearing off and she was still very tired. She settled back in the seat and let him drive. Forty minutes later, they were stopping next to Jared's lonely driveway. Ransom turned in and parked the car out of sight of the county road. They walked down the dirt lane to the trailer, which Janet could see was sitting at an odd angle.\n\n\"This here is the residence of one Jared McGarand,\" Ransom announced.\n\n\"What's that smell?\" Janet asked, although she already had an idea.\n\n\"That is most likely related to brother Jared's final movement, if you get my meanin'. Under that end of the trailer, right there, where you see the jack handle stickin' out. And if you check that vehicle over there, you'll find one very expensive tag tracker on the back bumper.\"\n\n\"The one you put on Kreiss's truck?\"\n\n\"That very one, Special Agent.\"\n\n\"Okay, I give up. I assume there's a dead guy under there. What the hell's going on?\"\n\n\"I was kinda hopin' you could shed some light on that, seein' as you had a meet with subject Edwin Kreiss, apparently right before he came out here and wasted this McGarand individual. Least I think he did. I haven't gone and lifted that trailer up to make sure, but my nose is makin' an educated guess here, okay?\"\n\n\"About a dead body, or Kreiss doing it?\"\n\nHe grinned and shrugged.\n\n\"I got nowhere at that meeting,\" she said. \"I've already told Farnsworth this. Sort of.\"\n\n\"Sort of?\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't want to admit that Kreiss just totally blew me off, but that's what he did. He also saw through the proposition that we might work together, you know, to catch the mysterious bomb makers while I helped him find his daughter.\"\n\n\"Saw through it?\"\n\n\"He said it was bullshit. That Washington being here was about him.\"\n\n\"Oh boy,\" Ransom said, blowing out a long sigh. \"Here we go again.\"\n\n\"It was bullshit? Bellhouser and Foster's bit about the bomb makers?\"\n\n\"Truth?\" Ransom said. \"I don't have any idea. My assignment was to cooperate with those two. And to keep my bosses at the Agency informed as to what was goin' down.\"\n\n\"So if those two were conspiring to trap Kreiss in something, you wouldn't necessarily know about it?\"\n\nRansom hesitated before answering. \"Lemme just say that if somebody managed to take Ed Kreiss off the boards, my bosses wouldn't exactly complain, okay?\"\n\n\"Son of a bitch,\" Janet said softly. \"Kreiss was right.\"\n\n\"What's his state of mind?\"\n\nShe snorted. \"I offered to help him find his daughter, you know, as cover for the other little project. He said he didn't need any help. He also said that if he found out someone had done something to his daughter, he'd catch them and put their severed heads out on pikes on the interstate.\"\n\n\"That's our Edwin,\" Ransom said admiringly. \"Might be interestin' to see if this dude under there is headless. On the other hand,\" he said, squatting down on his haunches, \"might not be much left to mount.\" He stood back up. \"Now, you had this meetin' with Kreiss, he told you to buzz off, then you go home and he comes out here and does a number on this vie here, which we assume is subject Jared McGarand. You go to your weekend class the next mornin', then you go to the arsenal for your little field trip, and you encounter\u2014Edwin Kreiss. Tell you anythin'?\"\n\n\"That Kreiss might have found out something from this Jared whatever about his daughter. And that something points back to the arsenal. But\u2014\"\n\nRansom cocked his head. \"Yeah, but what?\"\n\n\"But Kreiss already suspected the kids had gone to the arsenal.\"\n\n\"At night? Why's he there at night? And didn't he tell you he was goin' back there last night? After he rescued you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The smell was making her queasy. She backed away from the mess under the trailer. \"Can we go now? And shouldn't we call in local law?\"\n\n\"Yes, we can go now and, no, we will not call in local law. _We_ don't have anythin' to do with local law and local homicides, seein' as we _never_ operate domestically.\"\n\n\"Oh, right,\" she said sarcastically. \"But we do.\"\n\n\"And you would tell the cops what, exactly?\"\n\n\"That there's a dead body under this trailer.\"\n\n\"Which you found out about in the company of an Agency person, while investigatin' a missin' persons case that you've already shipped off to Washington. How you feel about explainin' why you did all that to the local shareef? Or to Farnsworth?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath. Ransom was right.\n\n\"See, here's the thing, Special Agent. I buy Kreiss goin' out to that arsenal durin' the day, snoopin' around, lookin' for Injun signs. But if he's goin' at night, he's goin' co-vert. Wearin' some of those nifty black ninja threads, right? . . . Thought so. My guess is that he found _this_ guy out there at the arsenal.\"\n\n\"If he did, and followed him back here, it was because he figured this guy might know what happened to his daughter. He'd want to talk to him, not snuff him.\"\n\n\"Unless he wouldn't talk. Not the first guy who wouldn't talk to Edwin Kreiss had him an accident of some kind.\"\n\n\"You think this was an accident?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yeah. The kind that happens when folks resist a peace officer in the performance of his sworn duties, you know?\"\n\n\"But how do you know it's Kreiss who did this?\"\n\n\"Because our tracker tag is on that piece-a-shit pickup truck over there, maybe?\"\n\n\"Who the hell knows? He could have discovered that while he was shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly and put it on the nearest vehicle. I mean, based on evidence, that's as reasonable an explanation as all this supposition you're coming up with. Those security people weren't alarmed about anything, and I sure as hell didn't see any signs of anything going on out there.\"\n\n\"From your tunnel perspective,\" he said. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with both hands.\n\n\"Look,\" she said. \"You think there's been a murder here. Okay, homicide is serious shit. I want to go back and update my boss, if only because I'm going to have to explain the loss of that car anyway. You come with me. I'll tell my sad tale: you tell yours. Let's see what Farnsworth thinks. Let _him_ fold in your supervisors. If he wants to tell local law, I'm sure he'll give you guys a chance to cobble up a story to keep your precious Agency out of the picture. That's the right way to go here. You know that.\"\n\n\"Tell him today, Sunday.\"\n\n\"He's spoiled a couple of mine.\"\n\n\"And in the meantime, where the hell is Kreiss?\"\n\n\"Who cares, as long as he's out looking for his daughter? Hell, he might find her. But I think all you guys are wrong about this arsenal bomb thing. That place is just a ghost town with a street-maintenance problem.\"\n\nKreiss awoke at dawn on Sunday to the sounds of a single mockingbird rousing the forest from atop a telephone pole. He had to think for a moment to remember where he was _and_ why. His muscles were stiff and sore from his exertions down in that tunnel. He had come in from the direction of the rail spur rather than the main entrance because of what Carter had said about the security people. He'd climbed the rail gates and bedded down in one of the explosives filling sheds three blocks away from the main street.\n\nHe slipped out of his crawl suit and performed morning ablutions with a wet rag. Then he reversed the suit, exposing a tan-and-green camouflage color scheme to replace the all-black night-ops coloration. He reset the packs on his chest and back, put away the hood in favor of a camo watch cap, grabbed his staff, and headed for the back alleys behind the complex of larger buildings.\n\nIf he was correct about the vehicle noises last night, the second man had come and gone without entering the arsenal. Kreiss was now counting on him to show up this morning, because this was when the second man would expect Jared to show up. Since Jared would not be showing up anywhere ever again, the second man would have to make a decision: go to Jared's place to find out why, or come into the arsenal to do whatever they had been doing here. Kreiss planned to listen for sounds of a vehicle and ambush the second man. If no vehicle showed up, he would initiate a thorough door-to-door search. In the meantime, he needed to find a good spot to lay up.\n\nHe walked quietly down a side street between two large concrete buildings. The sun wasn't up yet, but there was plenty of light. As usual, there were no birds or other animals stirring in the main complex. He stopped when he got to the main street. To his right, going up the hill, were the two rows of large buildings. To his left were two more large buildings, an open space of road and rail lines, and then the big power plant building at the end of the street. The big hole out in the street where Carter had lost her bureau car was still there. He didn't relish her prospects for a happy and productive Monday morning. Whatever that tunnel complex was all about, he thought, it must dip down at a much steeper angle than the street. He checked his watch: It was still about forty-five minutes until actual sunrise. The air was still, and he could hear the occasional hum of a car way out on Route 11. He ought to be able to hear any vehicle that approached the arsenal perimeter. He decided to look around for a few minutes before setting up.\n\nHe walked down toward the power plant. It looked to be about five stories high, with one main stack attached to the back side. There were two huge combustion exhaust ducts slanting into the base of the stack, which indicated at least two boilers inside. The turbo generator hall, half the size of the main building, was on the right side, as evidenced by a fenced bank of transformers and high-tension cables that spread out into the complex. There appeared to be skylights at the very top of the boiler hall, but otherwise no windows. There was an admin building of some kind on the left side. Between the admin building and the boiler hall were four very large garage doors, one of which had a rail spur leading under it. There was a single man-sized door to the right of the garage doors, and he tried the handle, but it was locked. The metal garage doors had a row of one-foot-square wire-mesh-reinforced windows at head height, and Kreiss checked them, trying to see in. He could see nothing through most of them because of all the dust and grime, but he was surprised to see through the final one that there was a truck parked inside. It was a tanker truck of some kind. The cab was not as big as a semi, but bigger than a pickup truck, and a green-and-white tank was built onto the body of the truck. Other than that, he couldn't make out any more details. He wondered why a truck would still be here, since the other buildings had all been stripped down when the plant was closed. Probably wouldn't start when they closed the place and they'd just left it. Typical Army solution.\n\nHe walked all the way around the power plant, noting the four huge pipes rising out of the ground that brought water from somewhere to cool the condensers under the generating hall. There was probably an impoundment up on that creek somewhere. There were some steel doors at the back of the plant, but they were windowless and also locked. The stack was easily three hundred feet high, with a line of rusting steel rungs leading all the way to the top. He stopped to listen, and he thought he heard a mechanical noise of some kind, but it was very faint. It was probably far away. Behind the plant building was a tank farm. There were two large fuel-oil tanks, with a rail spur running between them and a pump-manifold house at one end. A third, medium-sized tank was labeled BOILER FEED WATER, a fourth POTABLE WATER. Built into a fenced enclosure were two somewhat smaller tanks, each encased in concrete and plastered with danger signs warning of acid. One tank was labeled H2NO3, the other H2SO4. Nitric acid and sulfuric acid, Kreiss realized. Why would these tanks be back here? he wondered. Because the pumps were in the power plant?\n\nHe continued around the building, sizing it up as a hiding place for a prisoner and then dismissing it: The rooms in the plant would be too big to provide an effective containment place. He came back around to the front of the plant and looked back up the street. Carter's crash hole was about three blocks up, just past the first two large buildings. The street appeared to disappear up the hill into a tunnel of overhead pipes and their support frames. He had a sudden feeling that his mission was hopeless: there were too many buildings, too many hiding places out here. No matter what that guy Jared had said, all this place offered was the silence of the tomb.\n\nThere was a sound behind him and he whirled around. A tall, black-bearded man was standing in the man-sized doorway of the power plant, holding a large revolver down at his side. The man had violent dark eyes and a face out of a Civil War photograph. They stared at each other for a fraction of a second, and then the man raised the pistol and fired from a distance of thirty feet.\n\nKreiss actually felt the bullet go past his head even as the stunning boom of the Ruger hit his ears, but he was already moving, sideways and then sprinting up the street, opening the distance with some broken-field running, knowing that the big .44 became almost useless as the range opened. He zigged close to the corner of the first building and felt, rather than heard, a blast of concrete above his head. He jinked left, using the stick to balance his running, aware that the big man behind him was not firing indiscriminately. He wanted to turn his face, if just for an instant, to see if the shooter was pursuing him, but he knew better than to slow down now, and then he was careening around the far corner of the first building into a side alley. He stopped just past the corner, spun around, and then ran full tilt back across the main street into the alley on the other side. This should surprise the shooter and also give him a chance to look left, but the man was gone, the power plant door closed.\n\nKreiss stopped short in the alley, close to the corner, catching his breath, and wishing now that he'd brought a gun. To do what? he asked himself. Stand there and shoot it out with that guy? The man appeared the next instant at the end of the alley in which Kreiss was standing. Kreiss jumped sideways as the .44 let go again, this time feeling a tug on his backpack. He bolted out into the main street, but with all those concrete walls, there was nowhere to hide, and the big man was pretty handy with that cannon. He ran left into the next side street; considered climbing a building, realized that would be a trap, and then saw the shooter's shadow coming down the back alley. He jumped back into the main street and went left, all those blank concrete walls, nowhere to hide, up the hill again, zigzagging as he ran, and then three more rounds came after him in quick succession, all low, but too close to have been anything but carefully aimed, building-steadied shots. He came to the big hole in the street and didn't hesitate. He scrambled, almost fell down the steel rungs into the darkness of the big tunnel, dropping the stick and retrieving it again when he got down. Knowing that the shooter would be there in a few seconds, he made no attempt to be quiet as he scrambled down the steep slope of the tunnel, using his stick for balance, until he was well down into the darkness. Then he got flat and waited.\n\nAfter a minute, he could hear the sounds of falling water over the thudding of his heart. Getting too old for this shit, he thought. Five shots. One left if the guy kept coming and didn't stop to reload. And yet, so far, this guy hadn't done anything amateurish with that .44, so: safe to bet he'd be reloading. Why not? If he knew anything about the tunnel, he would know Kreiss wasn't going anywhere. Kreiss began to slide farther back down the tunnel, keeping his eyes on that cone of sunlight coming down through the hole in the street. When he thought he saw a change in the light, he stopped and grabbed the hooked end of his stick and twisted it sharply. It made a sound identical to a semiautomatic pistol's slide coming forward to the cocked and locked position.\n\nKreiss waited. Assuming that sound had carried back up the tunnel, the other guy now had a decision to make. The moment he started down into the tunnel, he'd be silhouetted in that cone of light and be fair game for the gun he'd just heard Kreiss cock. Kreiss listened to his own breathing and then started sliding back down the tunnel some more, keeping very quiet this time. The tunnel grew increasingly steeper, until Kreiss was glad he was full length and not trying to stay upright like the last time. At last he felt the tips of his boots go over the ledge, at which point he stopped moving and then rolled off the centerline of the tunnel toward the side wall to his right.\n\nHe was now flattened on the concrete about three hundred feet from the cone of light. As he remembered from his little adventure with Carter, the ledge was below, and below that was a big water chamber. He pointed his finger over the edge and down, flicked it on, and thought he could see water. He had the rope in his pack; all he needed now was an attachment point up here, and then he could safely slip over the wall and down into the water below if he had to. He began exploring with his fingers, first to the right and then to the left, until he found a crumble of loose concrete underneath the steel coaming of the lip. He used the steel point of the stick to dig at that until he had enough room to slip the end of the rope under the coaming and knot it to the stick. He let the rest of the rope out and over the ledge behind him.\n\nStill no sign of his pursuer, so his rack-the-slide noise must have done its job. As it had a couple of times before, he remembered. Having something that could make a noise like a gun was almost as useful as having the gun. But now the guy might still put his gun hand into the hole and empty it down the tunnel in his direction just for grins. He secured the stick, then clipped his chest harness onto the rope and went over the edge until just his head was up over the edge, with the rope belayed around his right hip, leg, and ankle for support. He did this just in time. A volley of random rounds banged down the tunnel at him, the big slugs ricocheting in every direction, with some coming back at him off the tunnel wall behind him and whacking into the concrete above the ledge. It was noisy and scary, but in the end, harmless gunfire, and Kreiss just hung on his rope, his head down now, waiting for it to end.\n\nNow it would be stalemate, he thought. The guy knew he couldn't safely climb down into the tunnel without risking being shot. And he had probably just used up all his carry ammo. Kreiss's only regret was that he hadn't been able to get the jump on this bastard, because this was definitely the man he wanted to interrogate. On the other hand, if this was the other McGarand\u2014and there was a definite resemblance to Jared there\u2014Kreiss knew where he lived. It would have been better out here, but he'd go wherever he had to in order to find out what the hell they'd done with Lynn. He waited, his eyes just back up over the edge, watching the cone of light. Unseen water below him coiled in the siphon chamber, compressing the air around him.\n\nBrowne stood up in the street and jammed the empty gun into his waistband. The barrel was still warm from that last volley. He looked down at the line of steel rungs illuminated in the growing sunlight and knew he couldn't go down there. That guy was a cool customer, running like that and never once turning around. So it would be just like him to be sitting down there in the Ditch, drawing a bead on the ladder and waiting for Browne to screw up. Well, he wasn't going to do the intruder any favors. He looked both ways and then walked up the street to where they had piled the pipes from Jared's trap. He dragged three of them back to the hole in the street, where he placed them quietly over the hole nearest the ladder rungs. Then he got three more pipes and extended the grid, keeping the spacing at about eight inches. Then he rolled two of the heaviest pipes down and laid them crosswise on the grid, anchoring it. Now when the guy tried to crawl out of the tunnel, he'd find a barrier. He couldn't move those pipes without making noise, and Browne would hear him. Meanwhile, he had work to do.\n\nHe went back to the power plant and hooked up the electric motor on the leftmost garage door to the power strip and raised the door, revealing the truck. He had worked all night. He was sweaty and dirty and sand-eye-tired. He had brought the hydrogen pressure in the truck to just over four hundred psi. It wasn't the five hundred he wanted, but it would do, it would do. With those security guards going down the hole and now this lone ranger trapped down in the Ditch, the arsenal was blown as a base of operations. He had to get out of here and begin the final phase, Jared or no Jared. Goddamn kid, going through life with his brain hard-wired to his pecker. There'd be police and probably feds all over this place by morning, but by then he'd be on his way. Jared had painted the truck in the color scheme of a Washington fuel company a month ago from a picture Browne had given him, so now it was just a question of getting it out of here with no witnesses. He wasn't really worried about Washington; he knew those smug bastards would never see this one coming.\n\nHe had hauled the generator out of the boiler housing an hour before dawn and gathered all the other equipment into the control room with the retort. The generator fuel gauge showed it was one-quarter full. Good. Then he had gone around the boiler hall and sealed as many air-inlet points as he could find, including all the boiler fuel-burner registers and the ventilation-duct outlets. It had taken him nearly two hours, but he'd kept the retort chugging, letting the high-pressure gas pump squeeze the last bit of hydrogen into the propane truck. Then he closed all the interior doors in the power plant except the one leading from the control room into the boiler hall. He went to the truck, cranked it, and breathed a sigh of relief when it started up. Now all he had to worry about were the tires, but they seemed to be all right. He drove the truck out through the big door and stopped it out in the street, letting its diesel warm up. He checked the pipe grid on the hole in the street, but nothing had been disturbed. Good. Then he had an idea.\n\nHe went back into the control room, where he reloaded his .44 from a box of ammo he kept there. Then he ran a last flush on the retorts and added all the copper he had left in the room. He disconnected the pump piping from the tops of the retorts and recharged them with a double load of nitric acid. The reactions began immediately and he decided to add one more jug of water to their cooling tubs. Then he walked to the door, took one last look around, closed it, and duct-taped it. He went into the garage bay and taped the door leading back into the control room. He left the generator running and hit the switch to lower the heavy garage door. Then he ducked out under the descending door and went to the truck. The generator would run out of fuel in a little while, but there was now no more need for electrical power. Double-loaded like that, those retorts would generate hydrogen for hours, gradually filling the interior of the power plant with an increasingly explosive mixture of air and hydrogen. When the feds came knocking, there ought to be at least one smoker. That's all it would take.\n\nHe walked back up the street to the hole, knelt down, poked the .44 through the grid of pipes, and emptied it into the tunnel again. The noise down there must be terrific, he thought with satisfaction. And, hell, he might have gotten lucky. Then he went back to the truck and drove it up the hill to the tank farm behind the power plant. Leaving it running, he got out and went to the big valve-manifold station by the acid tanks. He searched around until he found a crow's-foot, a four-foot-long metal bar with three rakelike studs that just fit inside the rim of a big valve wheel and allowed a man to apply the full leverage of his body to turning the wheel. He closed the small valve that had supplied nitric acid to the reservoir bottles in the power plant's water-testing room. From this elevation, the acid would dump into the Ditch above the hole in the street. The other two valves, leading to the main explosive-manufacturing buildings, were already closed. He then opened the much larger dump valve marked EMERGENCY\u2014DITCH. He heard a rumble in an eight-inch-pipe that disappeared into the ground ten feet from the tank. There was probably twenty thousand gallons of the acid left in the tank, which was now going to rain down into the Ditch, onto the intruder and the remains of the security guards. He considered waiting to see if the guy would pop up out of the street, but he imagined he could almost hear cops at the front gate. Every instinct was telling him to get the hell out of there. He got back in the truck and drove it out behind the power plant to the road that led back to the bunker farm and the arsenal's rear gate.\n\n\"Okay, so what the hell's been going on around here?\" Farnsworth growled when he sat down at the head of the conference table. It was 11:20, and he was dressed in his church clothes. He was visibly angry. Ransom and Janet sat on opposite sides of the table near Farnsworth, while two squad supervisors sat down at the other end. They, too, did not look pleased to have been brought in on a Sunday morning. A black triangular teleconferencing speaker sat in the middle of the table, nearest Farnsworth. After listening to Janet's preliminary report, Farnsworth had set up a conference call with Foster at his home in McLean, Virginia, and Foster was now on the line.\n\nJanet began by recounting her meeting with Kreiss in Blacksburg, leaving out the part where Kreiss had expressed suspicion about what Bellhouser and Foster were really up to. Then she detailed her expedition to the Ramsey Arsenal. When she was finished, there was an embarrassed silence at the table. The two squad supervisors were looking studiously at their notebooks, undoubtedly very glad she did not work for them.\n\n\"All right,\" Foster said from the speaker. \"Let me get this straight: Kreiss essentially told you he wasn't interested in any cooperative efforts, and that he already knew what Site R was?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Janet said. She had also left out his threat to put heads on pikes.\n\n\"Which means he _was_ the headless horseman, then,\" Farnsworth said.\n\n\"I'd expect so,\" Janet said.\n\n\"How did he react to the theory that there was a bomb cell operating at the arsenal?\" Foster asked.\n\n\"He thought it unlikely,\" Janet said, casting a quick glance at Ransom. She'd forgotten she'd told him what Kreiss had said. Ransom was looking straight ahead and saying nothing.\n\n\"And the next time you saw him, he was pulling you out of some tunnel?\"\n\n\"That's correct,\" she said.\n\n\"And he said nothing about what he was doing there? Or how he happened to stumble on the fact that you were trapped down in the tunnel?\"\n\nShe hesitated a half beat. \"He said he was looking for his daughter. Which is what he said he would be doing. At our meeting in Blacksburg.\"\n\n\"How did he know you were in the tunnel?\"\n\n\"He heard the noise I was making. I was trying to position a pipe to climb out. He was up on the street above, came to see what was making the noise.\"\n\n\"Did he think it was his daughter?\"\n\nJanet started to answer but then stopped. What had Kreiss been thinking when he heard the noises?\n\nRansom leaned forward to address the speaker. \"This is Ransom,\" he said. \"I think Kreiss _was_ looking for his daughter, but there's another angle here.\" He went on to describe bugging Kreiss's truck, and his discovery of what he suspected was a dead body under a trailer, and the fact that his bug had ended up on the vehicle belonging to one Jared McGarand, whom he further suspected was the corpse under the trailer.\n\n\"So Kreiss had been there?\" Foster asked. \"That what you're saying?\"\n\n\"That's correct.\" Janet noticed that Ransom's street speech was long gone. Enter the professional, she thought. Maybe gofer, maybe more.\n\n\"Local law into this trailer business yet?\" Jim Willson asked. He ran the surveillance squad and was a senior special agent with nearly twenty years' experience in the Bureau. Willson had a reputation for being all business, all the time.\n\n\"We backed out without doing any notifying,\" Ransom said.\n\n\"'We'?\" Farnsworth said. Janet saw Willson whisper something to Paul Porter, the other supervisor.\n\n\"I took Special Agent Carter here out to the trailer this morning,\" Ransom said.\n\n\"Why?\" Farnsworth asked in a tone of voice that Janet recognized as portending a bureaucratic turf fight. I knew this wouldn't work, she thought.\n\nRansom sat back in his chair. \"Because it looked to me like a possible homicide. Domestic homicide isn't our area, is it? Putting electronic surveillance on Kreiss, on the other hand, was done at the Bureau's request. If Kreiss offed some guy, I figured it was time to get the Bureau into it, which is why we're having this meeting, I think.\"\n\nFarnsworth looked like he was about to lose his temper. \"With all due respect, boss,\" Willson said, \"what the fuck is going on here?\"\n\n\"Okay, everybody,\" Foster chimed in from the speaker-phone. \"Let's get back on track here. I'm hearing that Edwin Kreiss is operational. I'm hearing that there's evidence he's been at the scene of a possible homicide, and that he's made at least one illegal intrusion onto a federal reservation, which used to be an explosives-manufacturing plant. Correct so far?\"\n\nNo one answered, so Janet spoke up. \"Yes, that's correct.\"\n\n\"Then may I suggest that our theory might be correct after all? That this Jared Mc-whatever might in fact be connected to a bomb-making network we're all looking for.\"\n\n\"I disagree,\" Janet said immediately. \"Kreiss is looking for his daughter. If there's a connection between Kreiss and the body under the trailer, it has to do with his missing daughter. Kreiss knows nothing about a bomb network. The only reason he went into the arsenal is that a single, some-what questionable witness told him that's where his daughter _might_ \u2014and I emphasize the word _might_ \u2014be going. There's no evidence of a bomb-making cell at the arsenal.\"\n\n\"All right, all right,\" Farnsworth said. \"We need to get local law out to that trailer, and then I think we need to get federal assets out to this goddamned arsenal. From where I stand, we have a missing persons case that might be a kidnapping-abduction case, and now, a possible homicide. One of my agents nearly lost her life, and a Bureau vehicle, in the process of what should have been a routine inspection of a federal facility. Mr. Foster?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"In deference to your bomb theories, I want to call in the local ATF. We'll look into this homicide situation in cooperation with the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department. Any information that develops with regard to Mr. Kreiss will be reported directly to you. How's that sound?\"\n\n\"I'd prefer to keep the ATF out of it until we ascertain whether or not this Jared guy was doing something at the arsenal. For the reasons we discussed previously. I also need to confer with Ms. Bellhouser.\"\n\nJanet saw Willson mouth the name Bellhouser and then shake his head.\n\n\"I can understand that,\" Farnsworth said. \"And I know how much we might like to bust ATF's chops. But there's something wrong here. I've got agents getting hurt, and a possibly related homicide. No one has ever mentioned any southwestern Virginia bombing conspiracy to me before. Now you tell me something: Are you and Bellhouser serious about that, or was that just a ploy to get us to stir up Edwin Kreiss so Marchand and company could whack his ass?\"\n\nWahoo, Janet thought. The boss is back. Willson and Porter were looking on in undisguised fascination. Ransom was hiding his face in his hands.\n\n\"We are absolutely serious about that,\" Foster said. \"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Then we get ATF into it. Right fucking now. I'll make the call. Ken Whittaker is our local liaison guy.\"\n\nThere was a strained silence on the speakerphone. Then Foster said, \"Well, may I at least request that the Kreiss angle be confined to Bureau channels?\"\n\n\"We will try,\" Farnsworth said. \"But if he becomes a suspect in a possible homicide\u2014\"\n\n\"He won't if you neglect to tell the local cops about the switched tracking device.\"\n\nFarnsworth rolled his eyes and began shaking his head.\n\n\"I mean,\" Foster said, \"if _they_ come up with evidence linking Kreiss to the possible victim, then that's that. But in the meantime, I still think Kreiss may have tripped over something. If there's any chance that he has, that's more important to us, and I think to the DCB, than some hillbilly getting squashed under his trailer.\"\n\n\"The guy under the trailer might not agree with that,\" Farnsworth said. \"And that's another thing: I need a phone number for a point of contact at that DCB.\"\n\n\"Uh, well, that may not be possible. I'll have to check with Assistant Director Marchand and the deputy AG's office. The DCB operates at a senior policy level. I'm not sure we can have field offices, ah, interfacing with that level within the interagency process.\"\n\n_Gotcha,_ Farnsworth mouthed silently to the people at the table. \"Okay,\" he said. \"I'll leave that to your discretion, since you're at the policy level. In the meantime, I'm going to send some people out there to that arsenal just as soon as I get some ATF assets folded in. You tell your people that, okay?\"\n\n\"What if we encounter Kreiss?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"We'll just ask the sumbitch what he's fucking doing out there,\" Farnsworth said. \"If we have to, we'll pull his ass in, have an intimate conversation. In the meantime, let's take it one step at a time. It's Sunday. Let's see what we develop down here before everybody gets all spun up, okay? Mr. Foster, we'll get back to you.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Foster said, and hung up. Farnsworth looked at the two squad supervisors. \"Get ahold of Whittaker. Today. Now. Whip a joint team up and go into that arsenal. Notify the Army, and ask them to get their security people out there. Go have a look, see what the hell's going on out there, if anything. Paul, I want you to liaise with Sheriff Lamb's office, get them going on the trailer business.\"\n\n\"What do I tell them when they want to know how we know about this?\" Porter asked. He was an intense, thin man and was a stickler for detail.\n\n\"Hell, I don't know\u2014we had a CI call in? Keep it vague. You plus one go out there\u2014I don't want a crowd. I do want info on the vie as soon as possible.\"\n\nPorter nodded, got up, and left the conference room. Farnsworth turned to Janet and Willson. \"You people be careful out there. If Kreiss killed someone looking for his daughter, then maybe this kidnapping business has driven him over the top. It wouldn't be the first time he has run out of control, and I don't want the Bureau embarrassed again if we can avoid it.\"\n\n\"What was that little phone game you just played with Foster?\"\n\n\"That was an RA fucking with a headquarters horse-holder. That won't keep the heavies off our backs for more than twenty-four hours, if indeed this was all about Kreiss from the git-go, which I'm beginning to think it was. But we have to be sure.\"\n\n\"Why bring in the ATF?\" Janet asked.\n\nFarnsworth sighed. \"Because, Janet,\" he said, \"there's always the chance, remote as this may seem right now, that the people at headquarters know something we don't down here in the toolies of Virginia. And if there _is_ some kind of bomb lab hidden at that arsenal, do you want to be the first through the door? Or shall we let our dear friends from the ATF have that honor? Hmm?\"\n\nJanet saw Willson and Porter grinning. It made her wonder if she was ever going to get ahead of the politics curve in this business. Like there had never been politics in the lab, she thought. Yeah, right.\n\n\"Mr. Ransom,\" Farnsworth said, \"I'd like you to go along in case my team runs into Kreiss. And if you do, I'd like you to talk to him, see if we can keep Pandora's box shut until we see what the bigs in Washington are going to do next. Can you do that?\"\n\nRansom looked down at the table for a moment. \"I can try,\" he said, not very convincingly. Janet thought he actually looked a little scared.\n\nKreiss heard the noise of something happening up in the tunnel about the same time as the siphon chamber began another dump cycle. The roar of the water escaping the dark chamber beneath him overpowered all other sounds and filled the air with a fine wet mist. He decided to pull himself back up to the floor of the tunnel and was doing so when a sharp, noxious smell enveloped him. It was not only hard to breathe; it hurt to breathe. He swallowed involuntarily, causing his eyes to water. He could still hear nothing but the rumble of the chamber emptying into the earth below, but when he got his hands and shoulders up onto the concrete lip of the tunnel, he realized that there was a small, viscous, fuming river headed right for him. He pulled hard right as the stream hit the center of the lip and shot over. The corrosive fumes were so strong now that he dared not breathe, and then he saw a flat branch of the fluid sweep sideways along the lip. His rope disintegrated right in front of his eyes, and the metal on the end of the stick foamed ominously. He knew that smell.\n\nAcid. Nitric acid!\n\nHe buried his nose and mouth in the vee of his crawl suit and took one deep breath, and then he got up and sprinted up the tunnel, trying to ignore the swelling stream of acid, until he reached the cone of sunlight and the ladder rungs. He stopped just outside of the light and took another deep breath, straining air through the tough fabric of the crawl suit. Was the shooter up there, waiting for him to stick his head out? His lungs were bursting, and his eyes were tearing so badly, he could barely see. No more choices here, he thought, and scrambled up the rungs, straining for the bright sunlight of the main street above. The makeshift grid of pipes slowed him down, but not much, and he rolled off the edge of the hole and kept rolling until he was all the way across the street and into a side alley. Finally, he could breathe, and, so far, no one was shooting at him. He lay back on the warm concrete and concentrated on clearing his lungs and eyes.\n\nAcid\u2014a flood of it. Where the hell had that come from? Obviously, the bearded man had initiated that catastrophe. This place wasn't the ghost town it appeared to be. He rolled over onto his side and looked around. There was nothing stirring in the morning sunlight. He could hear a faint slurring sound coming up from the tunnel, but nothing else. He took one final deep breath and got up. He'd lost his stick down in the tunnel, but he was lucky to have escaped. He didn't want to think about what would have happened if the rope had been eaten before he'd made it back up to the tunnel.\n\nHe climbed the nearest building and spent the next fifteen minutes scanning the entire industrial area from the roof, but there was nothing different about it\u2014same collection of concrete buildings, empty streets, and dilapidated sheds on the bare, dusty hillsides. The man who had pursued him from the power plant was nowhere in evidence. The power plant. He studied the front of the building, with its four garage doors and windowless exterior. The man had come out of the power plant, so whatever they were doing here, that's where they were doing it.\n\nHe climbed back down from the building's roof and went down a back alley to the side of the power plant. The tank farm up on its side hill was visible behind its concrete mass, and he wondered for a moment if the acid had been dumped down out of one of those tanks up there. Then he saw what looked like fresh tire tracks coming out of the tank farm's dirt road. Big dual tracks, the kind a truck would leave. He remembered the truck in the garage bay of the power plant. He wanted to take another look into that garage bay, but he did not want to cross the open space between the explosives finishing building and the power plant, in case the man was in there, waiting for him. He'd taken enough chances already. He looked at the tire tracks again, then knelt down and fingered the ridges in the dirt. Fresh indeed.\n\nHe checked his watch. It was almost eleven o'clock. He decided to go back to his own truck and then go to Blacksburg and look up Mr. Browne McGarand. That green-and-white tanker truck should be pretty easy to spot. Find that truck, find his shooter. And, he hoped, find Lynn. This time, maybe he would take a gun. He still had Jared's .45 in his truck. He'd have to find some ammo.\n\nAt 3:30, Janet, Ransom, and Ken Whittaker were waiting out in the bright sunlight on the main street of the arsenal's industrial area. The two young rent-a-cops were finishing unlocking the padlocks on the final two buildings adjacent to the power plant. The Bureau team had arrived at the front gates at just after two o'clock, where they had been met by Ken Whittaker, the local ATF supervisor, and the same two kids in their little rent-a-cop pickup truck. The group had done a quick windshield tour of the bunker area and then descended on the industrial complex. Whittaker, a tall, thin man, wearing oversize horn-rimmed glasses, was in nominal charge. Sunday or not, he was dressed in khaki trousers and shirt, and he had his ATF windbreaker and ballcap on. When Willson had briefed him, he had been all business, and he surprised Janet by asking none of the bureaucratic ground-rule questions that had been swirling around this case from its inception. He agreed that it would be a joint scene, but he insisted on being in charge of any inspection for possible bomb-making facilities. Willson and Porter agreed to this immediately. Willson noticed Janet's bewilderment, and while Whittaker was giving orders, he quietly pointed out that, at the working-stiff level, federal agents were federal agents and tended to focus on the business at hand. It was Washington where winning the turf battles seemed to be as important as the case, he said, which was the reason he was permanently homesteading in Roanoke.\n\nJanet showed them the hole in the street where the car had gone down. There was an eye-stinging smell coming up from the hole, which Janet recognized as being the fumes of nitric acid. The rent-a-cops said they could smell it, too, but they insisted there hadn't been any industrial activity in the arsenal for years. Janet didn't remember all those pipes being near the hole, but then, she didn't remember much about getting out of there, period, after Kreiss had shown up. They had then driven up and down the streets and side alleys in a four-vehicle procession, seeing nothing but bare concrete walls. Ransom suggested that they ought to climb down into the hole in the street, but the fumes were too strong.\n\n\"There was nothing like that when we came out of that hole,\" Janet said, staring down into the darkness. \"That's new.\"\n\n\"What's the purpose of this tunnel?\" Whittaker asked. One of the rent-a-cops said the site maps showed it only as the Ditch. Willson guessed that it was an emergency dump channel for the big buildings lining the street, someplace that an entire batch of chemicals could be dumped if something went wrong while they were making explosives.\n\n\"Wow,\" Whittaker said. \"And I wonder into whose drinking water that would go.\"\n\nNeither of the two kids ventured an answer to that one. Whittaker had asked them if they had keys to all these buildings, and they said, yes, they had the series master-lock keys for every building in the complex. Whittaker had just looked at them until they understood what he wanted. With lots of dramatic sighs, they started at the high end of the street and began taking down padlocks. Whittaker split the joint FBI-ATF team up into groups of two. He briefed them on potential booby traps and told them to go through all the buildings, with orders to stop and back out immediately if something seemed wrong. He kept Janet and Ransom with him.\n\n\"And we're looking for?\" one of the agents had asked.\n\n\"These buildings are supposed to be empty,\" Whittaker said. \"If you come on one that isn't, back out and sing out. And be careful how you open doors: Bomb makers are into booby traps.\"\n\nThe FBI agents looked at one another, and then Willson said, \"Gee, with all that ATF bomb experience, maybe Whittaker ought to be the guy opening doors.\" Whittaker laughed and even agreed, but then Willson said, \"No, we'll do it.\" Whittaker, Ransom, and Janet had remained down near the big hole in the street. One of the rent-a-cops came back to where they were standing.\n\n\"That's all the main process buildings,\" he said. \"How about the power plant?\" He was perspiring, but that hadn't kept him from lighting up a cigarette. Cigarettes and pimples, Janet thought. Don't they just go together.\n\nWhittaker checked back with Willson's team up the street by radio. They were still working their way down, building to building. So far, they had reported seriously empty buildings.\n\n\"Yeah, open it up,\" he said in a tired tone of voice. \"The weekend's shot anyway.\"\n\nThe kid gave a two-finger salute and trudged across the empty space between the last of the big buildings and the looming facade of the power plant. Whittaker followed him halfway down, then stood in the street, talking on his radio to the two team leaders. Janet walked with Ransom over to a building marked NITRO FIXING.\n\n\"Now there's a great name for a building,\" Ransom said. \"How'd you like to work in a place that did\u2014\"\n\nJanet felt rather than saw a great wave of intense heat and pressure on her right side. The blast compressed her body with such strength that her chest, lungs, and extremities felt like they were being stepped on by some fiery giant. She wanted to turn to see what it was, but then she was literally flying through the air and right through a wooden loading-dock fence before rolling like a rag doll out onto the concrete of a side street, until she slammed up against the wall of the next building. She tried to focus, but there was an enormous noise ringing in her ears, and then she felt herself screaming as an avalanche of things began to fall all around her, _big_ things that hit the ground with enough force to make her helpless body bounce right off the ground. The sun had gone out and she could not get her breath. Her right side felt as if she had been kicked by a horse, and she found herself spitting out bits of concrete and lots of dirt and dust. Then a huge mass of reinforced concrete wall, big as a house, crunched into the street right alongside her and she screamed so hard, she fainted.\n\nWhen she came to, her whole body was buzzing with pain. She wasn't able to get a good breath because of her side, and she was dimly aware that there were sounds around her she couldn't quite hear. Her eyes were stuck shut by a coating of concrete dust. When she was able to get them open and focus, she could see that the whole industrial area had been wrecked, with great mounds of concrete rubble piled everywhere\u2014in the street, between the shattered buildings, even on top of the buildings that were still standing. The last two buildings in the row had been partially knocked down, and where the power plant had been, there was only the stump of the main smokestack presiding over two piles of twisted metal that must have been the boilers. She saw Ransom come staggering out into the street from somewhere, his clothes torn to ribbons, bleeding from the head, eyes, ears, and mouth. He tripped over a mound of rubble and went down like a sack of flour, lying motionless in the street. She was horrified to see a rod of metal sticking out of his head like a featherless arrow. A great cloud of dust hung over the entire area, thick enough to turn the daylight yellowish brown.\n\nShe looked around for Whittaker, but he was nowhere in sight. Her knees felt like they were on fire, and she looked down and saw that she had skinned the knees of her pants down to two bloody patches of road rash. She tried to get up, but there was a large piece of concrete with its rebar still embedded lying on her right leg, and her right hand didn't seem to be working. She tried calling out for help, but all she managed was a whimper, and that turned into a coughing fit, which hurt her lungs.\n\nThen someone was there, levering the big chunk of concrete off her leg. It was one of the surveillance squad agents\u2014Harris, she thought his name was, pretty sure that's what it was\u2014and he was saying something to her. She absolutely couldn't hear him. She pointed to her ears and shook her head, which turned out to be a big mistake. She experienced a major lance of pain, followed by a cool rose haze that enveloped her consciousness, and then, blessedly, it all went away.\n\nWhen she regained consciousness the next time, she found herself inside an ambulance, but the vehicle was not moving. Her whole body felt awash in some soothing balm, and she was hooked up to IVs in both arms. A young paramedic was talking urgently on a telephone down near her feet, and she could see out the back doors of the ambulance that it was parked on the main street of the industrial area, looking down toward what had been the power plant. She was shocked by what she saw: The power plant was essentially gone, with nothing remaining but the wrecked boilers on the wide concrete expanse of what had been the floor. The two large buildings at the far end of the street nearest the power plant had been mostly destroyed, with only their uphill side walls still intact. The streets were littered with pieces of concrete, big and small, and there were two body sheets lying out on the street between her and the open space in front of what had been the power plant. The medic turned around and saw that she was conscious. He said something into the phone, which she could not hear, and then hung up. Then he was talking to her, but she could barely hear him. She shook her head, much more carefully, but couldn't move her arms. She was able to read his lips.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" he was asking.\n\nShe winced and mouthed the word _no._ Her lips felt twice their normal size.\n\n\"Can you breathe all right?\"\n\nShe tried out her lungs. It hurt to inhale, and her ribs _ were throbbing under the warmth of the painkiller, but she nodded.\n\n\"How many fingers am I holding up?\" he asked. _Three_ she mouthed, and then she said it out loud: \"Three.\"\n\n\"Okay, good.\" She realized she could hear him now, although his voice was still distant. He saw that she could understand him. \"Your vitals are okay,\" he said. \"Your pupils are a little bit dilated, and I think you've cracked a couple of ribs and maybe your right wrist. I'm guessing a mild concussion, but otherwise, I don't see anything major, okay? The IVs are for pain and shock, and we've got you on a monitor. Just relax. We're gonna transport in just a few minutes.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" she croaked.\n\n\"Looks like an A-bomb to me, lady. There're a million cops out there right now.\"\n\n\"What about. . . them?\" she asked, pointing with her eyes to the body sheets down the street.\n\n\"Don't know, ma'am. I mean who they are. The cops in suits are pretty pissed off, though.\"\n\nAt that moment, Farnsworth's head appeared over the medic's shoulder. His face was a mask of shock and concern. He saw Janet looking at him and tried for a smile. It was ghastly, Janet thought. \"Hey, boss,\" she said weakly.\n\n\"Thank God,\" he said. \"Can she talk to me?\" he asked the medic.\n\n\"Yeah, but she can't hear so good,\" the man said, and then crawled out of the way so that Farnsworth could climb partially into the ambulance.\n\n\"Janet, can you tell me what happened?\" he asked, and then swore. \"Listen to me: Are you okay? Are you hurt badly?\"\n\n\"I took a flying lesson,\" she said, trying for a little wisecrack to get that mortal look off his face. \"We were standing next to some building, down there, called Nitro Fixing. Then the world ended. I don't know what happened.\"\n\n\"The surviving team members said the power plant blew up,\" he said. \"One of them was in the doorway of a building when it went up. Said the whole fucking thing literally disintegrated in a fireball. No warning.\"\n\n\"Who\u2014\" she began, looking past him into the street.\n\n\"Ken Whittaker is dead, and definitely one of the rent-a-cops, if not both of them. They were out in the street, we think.\"\n\nJanet felt her stomach go cold. But Farnsworth wasn't finished. \"Ransom is . . . well, it's gonna be touch-and-go, I'm afraid. He had a bastard of a head injury. They've heloed him out already. Our guys who were up the street inside buildings are pretty much okay. But, listen, we have a development.\"\n\n\"What?\" Despite the pain medication, her side was beginning to really hurt, and it was getting harder to breathe. She tried not to panic. Development?\n\n\"The state police pulled Lynn Kreiss out of that last building down there. She's injured but alive, Janet. She was able to tell us that two guys have been holding her here since those kids disappeared, but then she became incoherent. Started babbling about Washington and a hydrogen bomb. Then she passed out. This is all secondhand\u2014I wasn't here yet. But now we have to find out what the hell happened here.\"\n\n\"Is ATF taking over?\"\n\n\"Oh, hell yes, they've taken over. In force. They're delaminating about Whittaker. Their lead guy is foaming at the mouth about why Washington never told them they suspected this place of being a bomb factory.\"\n\n\"Brilliant,\" Janet muttered. \"This whole place was a bomb factory.\"\n\n\"Sir?\" the medic said, looking at his monitors. \"I think you're all done here, okay? We gotta transport now.\"\n\nFarnsworth nodded and withdrew. \"Get well quick, Janet,\" he called as the attendant began shutting the doors. \"Fucking Kreiss\u2014he was right!\" he added.\n\nAnd Kreiss had known a lot more than he had been letting on, she thought as the attendant slid forward and rapped on the window to the driver. She wondered if Kreiss was out there among all the rubble, or still in pursuit of these people who had been building\u2014what out here, a _hydrogen bomb?_ She was no explosives expert, but she knew that wasn't possible. No way. But assuming Kreiss was alive, somebody did need to tell him that they'd found his daughter. That he could stop chasing the phantoms of the arsenal and come in and talk to them. The ambulance was rolling and the attendant was doing something with one of her IVs. She suddenly felt very sleepy. Have to remember that, she thought as she slipped off again.\n\n## CHAPTER XII\n\nKreiss stood by his daughter's hospital bed and tried to control himself. She looks so thin, he thought. Lynn was an athlete and normally radiated good health and fitness. Now her face was gaunt and slightly jaundiced. He held her hand under the blanket and just watched her breathe. She wasn't on a ventilator, but there was an IV drip going into her left wrist. Her face was bruised, and her normally vibrant hair lay limp on her head like a skullcap. A bank of machines kept score on her vital signs above the bed. Coma, the docs said. As opposed to profound vegetative state. The \"good\" kind of coma\u2014if there was such a thing\u2014where a badly abused body checks out for a while to work on healing itself without having to deal with the outside world. The room lighting was subdued and there was a quiet music stream coming from somewhere.\n\n\"She was conscious at the explosion site?\" he asked.\n\n\"I didn't see her,\" Janet said. \"I was being scraped off the concrete myself.\" Kreiss eyed her, probably noticing for the first time her own puffy face and stiff posture. \"Apparently, she spoke to whoever found her. They got 'hydrogen bomb' and 'Washington' out of her, but that was all.\"\n\n\"Hydrogen bomb and Washington. Sounds good to me. We're at just about the right distance, down here in Blacksburg, and the prevailing winds are on our side.\"\n\n\"Washington is taking a somewhat different view,\" she said. \"But this whole bomb theory is pretty screwed up. One moment, we're all running around at top end because we think some bad guys are on the way, as we speak, to bring an H-bomb to Fun City. The next, we're standing down in the regroup mode. The Bureau is fucking around with the ATF, and the Justice Department is fucking around with the Bureau, and ABC is flicking around with DEF. You know.\"\n\nKreiss nodded. \"Palace games,\" he muttered. He let go of Lynn's hand and smoothed the hair on her forehead. \"Our divorce was unnecessary,\" he said finally. \"Helen got scared of what I was doing while I was with the Agency. She knew more than she should have, and she just wanted out. I could understand that. Accept it, even. But I never wanted to lose Lynn.\"\n\n\"Did your wife poison the well? Set Lynn against you?\"\n\n\"Not deliberately, no,\" he said. \"This wasn't a spiteful separation, adultery, or anything like that. Which made it almost worse, because Helen was so reasonable. She just wanted away from me and what I was doing. Like most men, I thought the career, what I was doing, the things I was learning, were terribly important. I let her go with _my_ pride intact.\"\n\n\"Mine was different,\" she said, surprising herself. \"My husband turned out to be a no-load. He was sort of a career ectopic pregnancy\u2014he was never going to produce anything, but he was determined to stay in the general area of the academic womb. I think that's one of the reasons I joined the Bureau about then; I wanted to be around real men.\"\n\n\"'Real men,'\" Kreiss said. \"Inspector Erskine, where are you?\"\n\nThey both smiled. \"Lynn had to believe that everything her mother was afraid of was true,\" he said, smoothing her hair again. \"Kids can sense bullshit, and Helen was genuinely afraid.\"\n\n\"And you and Lynn were reconciled after the plane crash?\"\n\n\"Just before, actually.\" He told her about Lynn's unexpected visitation. \"And then this mess.\" He sighed. \"You said that the McGarands were probably responsible for the bomb. And that they had been holding Lynn the whole time? At the arsenal?\"\n\nJanet suggested they go outside. He seemed reluctant to leave his daughter, but there was obviously nothing he could do for her that wasn't already being done. He followed Janet down the hall, past the ICU nurses' station. Janet smiled at the nurses and the lone orderly, but they were all staring at Kreiss, whose gaunt face and hulking shape stood out among all the white-coated hospital personnel. He looked as out of place among all the gleaming cleanliness and order of the ICU as a bear fresh out of the woods. It had taken a lot of FBI badge waving and friendly persuasion to get them to let Kreiss in to see his daughter. Kreiss had called back fifteen minutes after she had persuaded Farnsworth to stop and regroup, and she had told him immediately that they had found Lynn, that she was alive and in the Montgomery County Hospital. She had asked him where he was, but he wouldn't tell her. Then she had suggested that she meet him at the hospital, and he had said, \"one hour,\" and hung up.\n\nFarnsworth had been listening. He called her back immediately to say he would send along some backup, just until they knew what they were really dealing with. She had asked that they stay well out of sight, because she was going to be on thin ice when Kreiss showed up. The RA agreed and they set up a surveillance support zone outside the hospital. She would park her car somewhere where it was clearly visible in the lot. The backup agents would set up around that car in two unmarked vehicles. There was no time to equip her with a portable radio, so Farnsworth said that if Kreiss put her under duress in the car, she was to do something with lights. When she went into the hospital with him, there would be two agents inside in hospital orderly clothes who would keep her in sight at all times. Her signal that everything was all right would be to open her purse and touch up her makeup.\n\nThey reached the main elevator bank and waited for a down car. An orderly carrying a bag of what looked like bed linens joined them at the door. They got in and punched the ground-floor button. The orderly punched the basement button. She had told Kreiss the bare outlines of the McGarands' suspected involvement in the explosion at the arsenal, but he had offered no response to that. He had wanted to see his daughter; any discussion of the rest of it could wait.\n\nNo one spoke until they got to the lobby and the door opened. Janet stepped out and Kreiss followed, turning at the last minute to tell the orderly that his shoulder rig was showing. As the elevator doors began closing in front of the surprised agent, Janet made an \"I'm sorry about that\" face, but Kreiss was already headed for the front door and the parking lot. She caught up with him when he stopped under the marquee at the entrance and looked around at the nearly empty parking lot.\n\n\"I have things to do,\" he said as he scanned the lot. \"You. have backup out there?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't want them following me,\" he said.\n\n\"They're out there to protect me,\" she said. \"Not to follow you.\"\n\n\"That something you know, Special Agent?\" he asked, looking directly at her for the first time that evening. Actually, it's this morning, she realized. His eyes were rimmed with fatigue, but there was a fierce determination back there, unfinished business.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"My boss sent them. They may have other orders.\"\n\n\"I don't want that,\" he said, looking around again. \"What did you say about standing down? Earlier, up there in Lynn's room.\"\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss, I need to fill you in on a lot of things. Why don't we go back inside and let me tell you\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll make a deal with you,\" he said impatiently. \"I don't want a war with the Bureau. I do want to leave here without having to take evasive measures. You know what a claymore mine is?\"\n\nShe had been shown a claymore during the training for new agents at Quantico. \"Yes, of course,\" she said. \"But\u2014\"\n\n\"My idea of evasive measures is to strap a couple of claymores to the tailgate of my pickup truck and then get someone to chase me in a car. Get the picture?\"\n\nShe didn't know what to say.\n\n\"I'll make a deal with you,\" he said again. \"I'll tell you something vitally important about your bomb plot, and you make sure no one follows me. Deal?\"\n\nShe looked around at the parking lot. There were islands of trees between the lanes for parking, and about thirty vehicles scattered around the lot, which sloped gently down toward the main hospital building. Tall light standards illuminated the entire lot. Her car was visible, but she had no idea where the other agents were. Kreiss was waiting, staring at her.\n\n\"All right, but there's a lot you don't know. As in, they've tied you to one Jared McGarand, for instance?\"\n\nHe stared at her for a moment but then dismissed with a shrug what she had just said. \"Give them the all-clear signal, and then I'm going back into the hospital. Tell them I've gone back upstairs. I'll take it from there.\"\n\nShe still hesitated.\n\n\"Look,\" he said, \"I'm not armed. And like I said, I don't want trouble with the Bureau, or with you. I'm willing to bet that your superiors weren't going to tell me that Lynn was here, alive. I suspect that you convinced them otherwise. So I owe you. Again. Give them the signal.\" His eyes were boring into hers with a commanding force. She found herself complying, opening her purse, taking out a compact, opening it so that the round mirror caught the marquee light and reflected it out into the parking lot. She pretended to touch up her nonexistent makeup.\n\nKreiss nodded and relaxed fractionally. \"Okay,\" he said. \"Here's my half. You said your people were all spun up about the possibility of a bomb going to Washington but that now they're standing down, right?\"\n\nShe nodded, trying to think of a way to keep him here, to get control of the situation. But this was just like their other meeting, the one at Donaldson-Brown.\n\n\"Well, here's the thing,\" he said. \"It was _me_ driving McGarand's truck south on I-Eighty-one, not McGarand. I believe McGarand's gone north.\" Then, before she had a chance to ask any questions, he spun on his heel and went back into the hospital. She watched him go straight back down the main hallway, until he disappeared through some double doors. She turned and hurried out to her car, where her cell phone was. What was Kreiss trying to tell them? Farnsworth had said the state police tracked McGarand going to North Carolina.\n\nShe stopped, seeing it now. Not McGarand\u2014McGarand's vehicle. Which, for some unknown reason, Kreiss had been driving. She waved her arms at the parked cars, calling in the backup agents to converge on her car. Lights came on in the parking lot as she got to the car and two Bureau vehicles slid into place on either side with a soft screech of tires. Ben Keenan got out of one of them, pulling out his portable radio.\n\n\"Where's Kreiss?\" he asked.\n\n\"He said he was going back in to be with his daughter,\" she said. \"But we need\u2014\"\n\nKeenan ignored her, and he ordered the agents standing around them to go into the hospital and apprehend Kreiss. Then he got on his portable radio and contacted the agents disguised as orderlies inside the building. They reported that they had not seen Kreiss return to the ICU.\n\n\"Shit!\" Keenan exclaimed. He ordered a search of the hospital building, and then he turned to Janet. \"Do you know what he's driving? The state cops want him now, for a felony assault out at a local truck stop.\"\n\n\"That's what I was trying to tell you,\" she said. _\"Kreiss_ was driving McGarand's truck.\"\n\n\"Wonderful. So what is it? A Ford? A Chevy? What?\" And then, with a horrified look, he understood. \"The earlier sighting? That wasn't McGarand?\"\n\n\"No, sir, it was _Kreiss,_ driving McGarand's vehicle.\"\n\nKeenan shook his head. \"What the fuck's with that?\" he said.\n\n\"He didn't really elaborate,\" she replied. \"But it means McGarand could be halfway to anywhere by now. With a bomb.\"\n\nKreiss drove down the street that went along the back side of the hospital parking lot. He had earlier parked McGarand's pickup truck in front of a private residence and walked over to the hospital. Now he was going to go back out to Jared's trailer and switch trucks yet again, leaving McGarand's truck and retrieving his own. Then he was going to go _north_ on 1-81 this time and hunt down that propane truck. Acting on the assumption that the Bureau had requested traffic surveillance out there, he had been careful about what he had and had not told Carter. As for what McGarand was really up to, Kreiss didn't care. His daughter was safe. Jared was dead, and his grandfather on the move. He was going to find this bastard and crush him for what he'd done to his daughter, period. The Bureau wanted McGarand for the explosion at the arsenal; fine. He didn't want the Bureau getting to McGarand before he did. The good news was that the Bureau wouldn't know anything about the propane truck. It took almost five hours to get from Blacksburg to downtown Washington, D.C., and McGarand had a good head start on him. If at all possible, he wanted to be in Washington before they stopped looking for McGarand's pickup truck and started looking for his.\n\nBrowne McGarand turned off the northbound lanes of 1-81 at 2:30 A.M. and eased into a truck stop. He'd been driving for almost three hours and needed a rest break and some more coffee. It had been a long time since he had made a really long drive, especially at night. The propane tanker, thankfully, was holding up just fine. With this refueling, he could make it all the way to the final setup point in Crystal City, on the Virginia side of Washington. He wanted to be there by dawn, and before the major Monday-morning traffic snarl coiled around the Washington Beltway. He would lay up the truck for the day and make a final reconnaissance run to the target. If the situation hadn't changed since the last time he and Jared had scoped it out, he'd make the attack tonight, before all those feds down in Roanoke put two and two together.\n\nHe parked the truck out in the back lot after fueling it and walked into the restaurant-store area. The place was not as dead as he had expected, with several zombie-eyed truckers wandering rubber-legged around the brightly lighted store and half the tables in the caf\u00e9 occupied. He went to use the bathroom and then sat down in a booth and ordered coffee and a bowl of hot cereal. Two Highway Patrol troopers came into the caf\u00e9 and sat down at a table near his booth. Browne felt a tingle of apprehension, but then he relaxed\u2014there should be no reason for anyone to be hunting him. They were sitting close enough that he could hear their shoulder mikes muttering coded calls, although the weary-faced cops weren't paying any attention to anything but their coffee.\n\nHe knew the federal authorities must be elbow-deep in the wreckage of the arsenal by now. They would think they'd broken up a major bomb-making cell of antigovernment terrorists. They would probably never solve the mystery of Jared being under his trailer. Browne felt there were three possibilities: Jared got drunk and went under the trailer for some reason and the jack collapsed; an irate and cuckolded husband who was playing by mountain rules; or the hard-looking man who had been snooping around in the arsenal. He was betting on the second theory. His own conscience was clear on that score: He had warned Jared often enough about his philandering and his boozing. They had both been careful not to have anything at home that could tie them to the arsenal.\n\nThat concrete power plant would have acted like an auto engine's cylinder when the hydrogen ignited: a momentary compression, and then a massive power stroke and vaporization of the building. The only device that could indicate what he had been doing in there was the retort, and it had been made mostly of glass. He had put all the spent cinders of copper-nitrite into the boiler fireboxes, where they would look like ordinary slag. The two pumps would have been smashed to pieces, so they should look like just another piece of wrecked machinery in the power plant. The ATF would be all over the place, but he was betting they were stumped. A hydrogen explosion left no trace other than water vapor, which would dissipate almost immediately. A nice _clean_ explosive.\n\nOne of the cops at the next table was talking into his radio, repeating a license plate number. As Browne listened, the number suddenly registered. The cop was writing down _his_ pickup's plate number.\n\nHe turned away from the cops slightly, not wanting to be seen eavesdropping. The cop had written down the number and was now back to talking to his partner. But it had been his pickup number; he was sure of it. Why? Who wanted him stopped out on the interstate? The Blacksburg cops should not have been all that interested that he was going to Greensboro. He tried to think it through, but he was just too tired. He had parked his pickup truck between the TA truck stop and that motel, out in no-man's-land. The state cops should be looking for it out on the road, somewhere between Blacksburg and the North Carolina line. But he was now 150 miles north of that, thirty miles from the interchange with 1-66, which would take him down into Washington. But you're not in your pickup truck, he told himself. So\u2014so what? He sighed. He was more tired than he'd thought. He rubbed his eyes and signaled the waitress that he needed his thermos filled.\n\nThe cops got up and went to the cashier's stand. He watched them go, as did the other truckers in the room. He might not be thinking all that clearly, but one thing was certain: The only person who had ever seen him at the arsenal was that fire-eyed big guy. Suppose he had been a fed of some kind? They had had signs of an intruder for a couple of days. Suppose it had been the same guy all along, and this guy had been a fed and had somehow survived the nitric-acid dump into the Ditch. If the feds tied the bomb at the arsenal to him and Jared, then his target in Washington might have been alerted. If so, that was going to make his plan very, very difficult to carry out. But maybe not: If he could count on one thing, it was the enduring hubris of federal law-enforcement agencies. He could just as easily see them concluding that some bad guys had been screwing around with explosives and there had been an accident. The key was that there was nothing to tie him to Washington. Jared had known he was going to take a bomb to Washington. Jared may have been a skirt-chaser and a boozer, but the boy could usually keep a secret.\n\nHe got up and went to the cashier's counter to pay up. The cops had gone back out into the night and their interstate patrol. He stepped outside into the cool air and told himself to relax. There was simply no way they would see this coming.\n\nAt 7:30 on Monday morning, Farnsworth called an urgent all-hands meeting in the Roanoke office. Janet had come back to the office by herself after meeting Kreiss at the hospital. Keenan and his agents had gone haring after Kreiss in the night. She had told Keenan about the claymores. Keenan shrugged that off, but the other agents were giving one another uneasy looks. She had given them two chances of finding Kreiss: slim and none. Farnsworth had gone home by the time she got back to the office, so she slept on the couch in the upstairs conference room. She was awakened by agents coming down the hall, talking about the hurry-up meeting, and just had time to wash her face, comb her hair, and find some coffee before going down to the next floor to the big conference room.\n\nWhen she got there, the room was pretty much full. It was easy to tell which of the agents had been out all night and which ones were coming in fresh. The older man who had been with the ATF squad out at the arsenal was sitting next to Farnsworth. This time, there was no sign of Foster. Being a worker bee, Janet stood by the back wall while the supervisory agents took chairs around the table. Her ribs still hurt, but the headache was gone and she could hear much better than yesterday. Farnsworth looked like he'd aged considerably.\n\n\"Okay, people,\" he said, \"let's get going.\" The room quieted right down. He introduced the ATF senior special agent as Walker Travers, who stood up and walked to the briefer's podium.\n\n\"I don't have a formal slide show or anything,\" Travers said. \"But I've got the preliminary results of our NRT's work out at the Ramsey Arsenal.\"\n\n\"What was it?\" Keenan asked. He hadn't shaved and was obviously frustrated by his search for Kreiss, which had turned up empty.\n\n\"It was what's known in the trade as a BFB,\" Travers said with a perfectly straight face. Janet got it about one second before he explained it: a big fucking bomb. There were some chuckles around the room. Janet noticed that neither Keenan nor Farnsworth joined in. The loss of Ken Whittaker was still weighing heavily.\n\n\"We don't know what it was,\" Travers went on. \"We've had our EGIS people on it; they're from our National Laboratory Center. EGIS uses high-speed gas chromatography and chemiluminescent detection systems to identify explosives residue. The weird thing we're finding with this one is that there isn't any. Residue, I mean. And it's complicated by the fact that this was an explosives-manufacturing facility, so once we spread out the search beyond the actual power plant, of course we got the world's supply of residue.\"\n\n\"But nothing in the explosion focus?\" Keenan asked. He had done a tour with ATF five years ago and knew something of their technical procedures.\n\n\"No, sir,\" Travers said. \"The remains of machinery\u2014you know, pumps, pipes, wiring, control instrumentation. Emphasis on the word _remains._ The plans say there was a boiler-water-testing laboratory next to the control room, and we've raised chemical residues in that area, but nothing that points to anything. It was a very hot and powerful blast.\"\n\n\"With no readily identifiable residue,\" Farnsworth said, shaking his head.\n\n\"Which tells a tale, actually,\" Travers said. \"From looking at the wreckage, we see a reinforced-concrete building that was leveled in four directions damn near instantaneously, and it released a wave front that flattened everything nearby. Only one substance does that.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"A gas,\" Travers said. \"An explosive gas. Ever seen a building where somebody left a gas stove on with the pilot light turned off? Or a hot-water heater? Then someone comes home and lights a cigarette?\" There were nods of recognition around the room.\n\n\"A hydrocarbon-based gas, such as propane, so-called producer gas, or natural gas builds up in a structure until the mixture of gas and air becomes an explosive vapor, just waiting for ignition. It doesn't take as much as you might think, depending on the hydrocarbon involved. When it does let go, it creates an instantaneous overpressure on every square inch of the structure's interior. Unlike, say, a truck bomb, which punches a wave front _at_ a building, an internal vapor explosion exerts a huge force on every element of the building from inside. Remember your math: Force equals pressure times the area affected. You take a wall, twenty feet long by eight feet high, that's a hundred and sixty square feet, or a little over twenty thousand square inches. Times a pressure of a hundred pounds per square inch, and you get an impulse force of a little over two million pounds. That is somewhat outside the normal load-bearing specs for buildings.\"\n\n\"So you're saying this explosion might really have been accidental?\" Janet asked from the back of the room, remembering what Farnsworth had told her. Agents turned to look at her. \"Like a natural buildup of methane or some other bad shit left over from when the plant was open, and when that guy went down there to open the building with a cigarette in his mouth, boom?\"\n\n\"That's exactly what I'm saying,\" Travers replied. \"As you may or may not know, that's our official conclusion. Originally issued to choke off media speculation. But that's in fact what it's coming down to\u2014a gas explosion. We found piping connections between the turbine hall and a large underground chamber where cooling water for the turbogenerator condensers was discharged. There are chemical residues of all kinds, including nitric acid, of all things, in that chamber.\"\n\n\"I have some personal knowledge of that chamber,\" Janet said. There were some covert grins around the room. \"I don't remember smelling nitric acid down there.\"\n\n\"Would you recognize it if you did smell it, Agent Carter?\"\n\n\"Yes, I would.\"\n\n\"Well. That's a mystery, then. The explosive vapors may not have originated in the underground area. There are several gases that can become explosive air-gas mixtures, and they have no scent whatsoever. For that matter, the gas in your house comes odorless\u2014the gas company puts the sulfur smell in to alert people to leaks.\" He stopped for a moment to look at his notes.\n\n\"That place has been shut down for a long time. The security company's records don't indicate that they _ever_ went into that power plant. There were rumors of toxic wastes and even chemical weapons going around about the Ramsey Arsenal. A small accretion of methane, which occurs in nature, could build up in that building over the years, creating a huge bomb. Which is what we got, folks.\"\n\n\"And that's how you're calling it?\" Farnsworth asked. \"An act of God?\"\n\n\"Basically, yes, sir, that's what we're calling it. There is no evidence of any chemical or commercial explosive residues, and the way that heavily reinforced-concrete building blew up\u2014it all points to a gas explosion.\"\n\n\"Could it have been hydrogen?\" Farnsworth asked, shooting Janet a cautionary look.\n\nTravers frowned. He had obviously heard about what Lynn Kreiss had said. \"No, sir, I don't think so. I mean, hydrogen would certainly have done the job, but it doesn't occur in nature in concentrations like that. It tends to dissipate, rather than concentrate, due to its molecular structure. No, my guess is methane, and this explosion so completely leveled the building that there was nowhere for any residual gas to pocket. I think it was methane, coming up from that underground cavern, where, I'm told, they used to dump chemically unstable batches of feedstocks when a reaction went out of limits. God only knows what kinds of things are lurking down in that cavern, or in what amounts.\"\n\nThere was a surprised silence in the room. Everyone had been thinking a conventional, chemically based bomb. Farnsworth stood up.\n\n\"Okay, folks, there we have it. These people are the foremost experts in reconstructing explosions in the country. How many bombing incidents has the ATF investigated in the past five years, Mr. Travers?\"\n\n\"Sixty-two thousand and counting,\" Travers said. This produced expressions of surprise and some low whistles.\n\n\"Good enough for us country folks,\" Farnsworth said. \"All right, everybody, it's Monday and there's paperwork to be done. I'll have word about the funeral service this afternoon.\"\n\nThe meeting broke up and Janet started back to her office. She had to wait for the crowd that was bunched up at the elevator. Ben Keenan escorted Travers to the front door of the security area. She was toying with the idea of going home to get fresh clothes and a shower, when Farnsworth gave her the high sign that she was to join him in his office. She had to wait for a few more minutes while some supervisors cornered the RA. When they were finished, she went into his office. Ben Keenan was already there, along with someone she had not expected to see: Foster. Her heart sank when she saw Foster.\n\nThe RA, his deputy, and the Washington executive assistant. This isn't over, she thought. Foster had another man with him, someone she did not recognize. Everyone sat down. Farnsworth looked at Keenan.\n\n\"No word on finding Kreiss?\"\n\n\"No, sir, he plain vanished. We have local law looking for his vehicle, another pickup truck, like McGarand's, but no hits so far.\"\n\n\"And he didn't return home last night?\" Foster asked.\n\n\"No, we had some of our people in position.\"\n\n\"Now that ATF has taken a formal position on this explosion,\" Farnsworth said, \"we've got to find Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"We've got too many pieces to this puzzle: The McGarands are linked to Waco, Kreiss is linked to Jared McGarand's homicide. Jared's truck has been physically linked to the Ramsey Arsenal via samples from his truck's tires. Kreiss has revealed that he was the one the state cops sighted driving the other McGarand's truck south on the interstate, not McGarand. We have a very large explosion that ATF is classifying as an act of God. But now Browne McGarand, ex-chief explosives engineer at the Ramsey Arsenal, is missing, Kreiss is missing, Jared McGarand's dead, and Kreiss's daughter was heard ranting and raving about a hydrogen bomb and Washington, D.C. Mr. Foster thinks we still have a problem here.\"\n\n\"Do we think Kreiss killed Jared McGarand?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Farnsworth said. \"The local cops say that it could have been an accident. They're all hung up about some goo they found on the trailer and also on the body.\"\n\n\"Goo?\" the man with Foster said. \"What color was it?\" He was what Janet would have called \"an M-squared, B-squared\" if she had to describe him: medium-medium, brown-brown, and totally forgettable.\n\n\"I have no goddamn idea,\" Farnsworth replied, obviously exasperated and also still very tired.\n\n\"Purple,\" Keenan said, consulting his notes. \"It was purple and very sticky. And who are you, sir?\"\n\n\"This gentleman is from the Agency,\" Farnsworth said.\n\nThe man nodded as if introductions had been made. \"That 'goo,'\" he said, \"is a substance used in something we call 'a capture web.' It comes in a spray can. It's like a spiderweb, only much thicker. Very sticky. The more you fight, the more you get entangled, until you are immobilized. When you're ready to release your subject, you hose him down\u2014it's totally water-soluble.\"\n\nJared's body had been wet when they found it, Janet remembered. \"Okay, so maybe it was Kreiss who got Jared,\" Janet said. \"But I'm willing to bet that was about his daughter, not any bomb plot. And, Kreiss was right: They did have his daughter. So if they had his daughter captive at the arsenal, the McGarands weren't using that place for a fishing hole. They were doing some bad shit out there. If this is about Waco, we need to warn Washington.\"\n\n\"That's going to present a problem,\" Keenan said, and Farnsworth nodded, obviously already knowing what Keenan was going to say.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The ATF is going on record, as we speak, that this was an explosion resulting from natural causes. Without direct evidence of a bomb, what you suggest is purely supposition. ATF will view any alternative theories we bring up as a challenge to their authority in the area of explosives determination.\"\n\n\"Oh, for crying\u2014\"\n\n\"Think about the state of relations at the Washington level among our respective agencies just now,\" Farnsworth said. \"Which haven't been helped by Ken Whittaker's death, during what was essentially a Bureau deal.\"\n\nJanet took a deep breath and then let it out. \"So if we could find Kreiss,\" she said, \"maybe we could firm this up a little?\"\n\n\"If you find Kreiss, he goes in a box somewhere where nobody can get to him, and that includes ATF,\" Foster said. \"Assistant Director Marchand has those instructions from the deputy AG's office. Edwin Kreiss isn't going to testify to anything. We can't allow it.\"\n\n\"Hell, I suspect he wouldn't allow it,\" Janet said.\n\nThat last remark produced an uncomfortable silence, which Keenan finally broke.\n\n\"Look, boss,\" he said, addressing Farnsworth. \"It's time to elevate this hairball to headquarters. Tell 'em what we know, tell 'em what we think, and then hunker back down in the weeds, where we belong.\"\n\n\"I represent headquarters,\" Foster told him.\n\n\"Not my part of it,\" Farnsworth said. There was a strained silence in the room. Finally, Farnsworth instructed Keenan to keep looking for Edwin Kreiss. He told Janet to notify Keenan if she had any further contact from Kreiss, and to get with the surveillance people to put a locating tap on the hospital lines into the ICU, where his daughter was. The RA and Foster then went into the secure-communications cube to get on the horn to Richmond, which, as the supervisory field office, was directly over the Roanoke RA.\n\nKeenan stopped Janet outside Farnsworth's office. As Farnsworth's deputy, he dealt primarily with the four squad supervisors, so he had not had very much direct contact with Janet. \"You've met this guy Kreiss,\" he said. \"Whose side is he on if this does turn out to be a bomb plot against the seat of government?\"\n\nJanet had to think about that. \"I've met him, but I wouldn't say I know him. All these bomb conspiracies notwithstanding, the only thing Kreiss has ever been focused on was finding his daughter. She is now at least safe, if not fully recovered. I don't know whose side he'd be on.\"\n\n\"You're the last person who spoke directly to him,\" Keenan said gently. \"Take a guess.\"\n\nJanet sighed. \"Well, sir, if Kreiss thinks the older McGarand had a part in kidnapping his daughter and getting her hurt, he'll pursue him and punish him, maybe even kill him. Everything else would be incidental to that objective. I don't think Edwin Kreiss takes sides anymore, and I don't think he takes prisoners, either, or at least not for very long.\"\n\nKeenan nodded thoughtfully. \"Do you understand what Foster and his buddy over at Main Justice are up to?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, sir, I haven't a clue. But if Foster's really acting for Assistant Director Marchand, I think it has something to do with what happened when Kreiss was forcibly retired.\"\n\nKeenan looked away, nodded his head slowly. \"Lord, I hope not,\" he said, and then went back into his office.\n\nKreiss had left the interstate near Harrisonburg and made his way east over to the Skyline Drive, the mountain road. It would be much slower than running the interstate, but it accomplished two things: It got him out of the state police's primary surveillance zone, and the narrow, winding mountain road made it easy to spot a tail. He left the Skyline Drive south of Front Royal and worked the back roads along the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah River into Clarke County until he cut U.S. Route 50, at which point he turned east and joined the morning rush-hour traffic. An astonishing number of cars were headed into Washington at that hour of the morning, but the heavy traffic would be a good place to hide his vehicle in case the northern Virginia cops had been alerted. By the time he'd made it down through Upperville, Middleburg, and Aldie, it was nearing 7:00 A.M. He was now in familiar territory, having lived in northern Virginia for many years, so when he hit Route 58, the Dulles Airport connector, he got off the main highway and stopped at a diner next to a large shopping mall for some coffee and breakfast.\n\nAs he watched the sluggish stream of commuter traffic drag by on the four-lane highway outside, he thought about his next steps. Ideally, he needed another vehicle. Second, he needed a place to stay while he hunted McGarand. Third, he wouldn't mind a nice GPS position on McGarand and the propane truck. He smiled grimly. Actually, finding McGarand shouldn't be all that hard, as long as he stayed with that distinctive green-and-white truck. The Washington area was served by a large metropolitan gas company, which meant that there were not a lot of propane customers in or near the city. Driving something like that downtown, especially in Washington, was strictly regulated, which left the Maryland and northern Virginia suburbs. If he intended to park it, he would most likely use a truck stop along the Beltway. The biggest trucking terminals in the Washington area were in Alexandria, on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, and near the rail yards on the Maryland side. Browne McGarand had come up from southwest Virginia, so Kreiss would begin his search in Alexandria along 1-95 and 1-495.\n\nThe easiest way for him to get a new vehicle would be to rent one. For that, he needed to get to a couple of ATMs. He had brought some cash with him, and there was a motel right behind the diner. He would prepay a room, park his truck in the back somewhere, get cleaned up, and walk over to the mall, where there were bound to be ATMs. Then he would taxi over to Dulles, rent a van, find a trucker's atlas or an exit guide, and get to work. Then it would be a matter of slogging through the Washington-area trucking centers, looking for that propane truck. He remembered that there had been a logo on the truck, but he couldn't recollect what it said. Something about that logo had not been quite right, but he simply could not remember it. So, first a motel room and a shower. Then some scut work.\n\nBrowne McGarand got off the Beltway and made his way up U.S. Route 1 into the rail yards on the Reagan National Airport side of Crystal City. He parked at an all-night diner and got some breakfast. He and Jared had scouted out this phase of the plan some months ago. He would drive into Crystal City proper after rush hour, staying on the old Jefferson Davis Highway until he reached the Pentagon interchange, just before Route 1 ascended onto the Fourteenth Street Bridge over the Potomac. Then he would get back off the elevated highway, loop underneath it, and drive down a small two-lane road that led into the Pentagon parking areas. Just before the turn that would take him into Pentagon South Parking, he would turn into the driveway that led to the Pentagon power plant.\n\nThe power plant had originally been a coal-fired facility, then an oil-fired one, designed to provide emergency power to the huge military headquarters. Now it housed a dozen large gas turbine generators in a fenced yard next to what had been its coal yard. Because the gas turbine emergency generators could be started remotely from the Pentagon, the facility was no longer manned. Its entrances had been chained and locked. All except the parking lot, which was really an extension of the old coal yard. The parking lot had a long chain across it, but no lock, probably to let fire trucks get in. The coal yard, now empty, was surrounded on three sides by high concrete walls, originally used to contain a small mountain of coal. He would back the truck out of sight of the entranceway and shut it down. It had been Jared who had found this spot when he'd gotten lost in the maze of roads around the approaches to the Fourteenth Street Bridge. He'd blown a tire right in front of the power plant, pulled into the driveway to change it, and discovered the perfect hiding place. Someone would have to come into the driveway and then all the way back into the old coal yard ever to see the truck.\n\nFrom the power plant, it was a five-minute walk to the Pentagon Metro station. Browne was dressed in what he hoped were suitably touristy clothes: khaki slacks, short-sleeved shirt, a windbreaker, and a floppy sun hat and some sunglasses. He wished he had a camera to complete the outfit, but, as long as nothing had changed, this would do. The Pentagon Metro station was on the east side of the Pentagon building. He would take a Yellow Line train into the District, then get off at the Mount Vernon Place station. His target would then be within easy walking distance. He ordered another cup of coffee, and, as the caffeine kicked in, wondered if he should bother getting a motel room.\n\nJanet got back into the office at 11:30. She picked up a sandwich at the first-floor deli and took it upstairs to her office. She had just popped open her Coke when the intercom buzzed and Farnsworth's secretary called her down to a meeting in the RA's conference room. She sighed, poured her Coke into her coffee mug, put the sandwich in the office fridge, and went downstairs. Farnsworth was there, along with Keenan, Special Agent Bobby Land from the Roanoke surveillance squad, and two uniformed police lieutenants, one from the Virginia State Police and the other from the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department.\n\nThe person who got her attention, however, was a woman who was sitting by herself at the other end of the conference table from where the men were standing. Janet struggled not to stare at her. She had a striking, witchlike face: intense black eyes under thin eyebrows, a slightly hooked nose, wide cheekbones, and dark red lips. She appeared to be in good physical shape, tall, with wide shoulders and a fit tautness to her skin. She looked to be in her late forties, and the way she was sitting at the table, still as a grave, staring quietly into the middle distance, projected an attitude of total composure that made her utterly unapproachable. As the only other woman in the room, Janet would normally have gone over to introduce herself, but something in this woman's demeanor gave her pause.\n\n\"Okay, gents, this is Special Agent Janet Carter,\" Farnsworth said. \"Let's get going.\" Everyone took a chair, leaving the other woman in semisplendid isolation at the far end of the conference table. Janet forced herself to face Farnsworth, who shuffled some papers before beginning.\n\n\"We've had some developments in the McGarand business,\" he announced. \"Not to be confused with progress, however. Janet, for your benefit, this is Lieutenant Whitney from the Virginia State Police, and Lieutenant Harter from the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department.\"\n\nFarnsworth glanced down at his papers for a second while Janet waited for him to introduce the woman, but he did not. \"There've been some musical chairs with vehicles in the arsenal case,\" he said. \"Browne McGarand's pickup truck has been located at his grandson's house, where it was _not_ present during yesterday's sweep, except for the brief time that Browne McGarand visited there. Jared McGarand's telephone company repair van, which had been parked at Jared's trailer, was found by another phone company crew at the TA truck stop above the Christiansburg interchange. This is the same truck stop where two security guards allege that an unknown subject, later identified as Edwin Kreiss from a Polaroid photograph the security guards took, attacked them without provocation in their office. They'd detained him in the parking lot, where they had been watching him 'case the place,' to use their words.\"\n\n\"'Unprovoked attack'?\" Janet asked.\n\nFarnsworth shrugged. \"Both of them were steroid junkies. One of them nearly died from a partially strangulated larynx, and the other reported being disabled with a . . weapon, I guess, that another branch of government said was something subject Edwin Kreiss might have been carrying. They called it a 'retinal disrupter.'\"\n\n\"A retinal what?\" Keenan asked.\n\n\"They described it as a very powerful flashcube, tuned to the optical frequency of a purple substance in the human eye that can be overloaded by a strong pulse of light. Firing a retinal disrupter into a subject's eyes renders him stunned and immobilized for up to sixty seconds, if not longer, which has its obvious tactical advantages.\"\n\n\"Where can I get me one of those?\" Lieutenant Whitney asked. He was a large-shouldered man in his fifties, with buzz-cut gray hair and a huge pair of mirrored sunglasses hanging down from his perfectly creased shirt pocket.\n\n\"You can't,\" Farnsworth said. \"If it's any comfort, neither can we.\" He gave the lieutenant a second for that to sink in, then continued. \"Kreiss's personal vehicle is also a pickup truck. It is not at his house, nor is Kreiss. Browne McGarand is not at his house, and we have information that he did not go to Greensboro, North Carolina, as he told the local police he was going to do. His other grandson, whom we located in Greensboro, confirmed he had not heard from his grandfather, and he also did not know about Jared McGarand's demise.\"\n\n\"Sir, what's the status on Kreiss's daughter?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"She's stable, comatose, but breathing on her own. The docs now think she'll come out of it, but they can't say when.\"\n\n\"You guys designated a prime suspect for the Jared McGarand homicide?\" Keenan asked.\n\n\"We like this guy Kreiss, based on what you folks have told us,\" Lieutenant Harter said. He was a dark-haired, well-built young man, whose short-sleeved tan uniform shirt fit him like a glove. He had been giving Janet the eye while Farnsworth spoke.\n\nJanet was surprised to hear this: Now what had Farnsworth done? The last thing she'd been told was that they were going to stay quiet about Kreiss. And she was still wondering who the woman was. She was wearing a visitor's badge, but it was not one requiring an escort. She had not moved a muscle, reminding Janet of an exquisitely made Japanese robot she had seen at Disney World several years ago. She did not even appear to be listening to the discussion. Her hands rested motionless on the table. Janet noticed that the outside edge of the woman's right palm was ridged with calluses, which fairly shouted karate training. She jerked her attention back to what the lieutenant was saying.\n\n\"Is there a federal warrant out?\" Harter asked.\n\n\"No,\" Farnsworth said, looking down at the papers in front of him. \"And we've asked the state and local authorities to hold up on obtaining a warrant for right now.\"\n\n\"Because of what happened out at the Ramsey Arsenal,\" Janet said, concentrating again on the discussion.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Farnsworth said. \"The purpose of this meeting is to confirm that we will continue to press our search for Edwin Kreiss and Browne McGarand, but we will do so in conjunction with a larger federal investigation being conducted in cooperation with the ATF.\" Farnsworth shot Janet a quick glance to make sure she wasn't going to blow his cover, but she had caught on\u2014Farnsworth wanted local law to think the Bureau was working hand in glove with the ATF.\n\n\"This is all about that big explosion, out at the arsenal?\" Lieutenant Harter asked. His expression indicated that he wasn't exactly following what was being said.\n\n\"Yes, and we have reason to believe that subject Browne McGarand may be engaged in a bombing conspiracy, which might involve the capital city,\" Farnsworth continued.\n\n\"Do y'all think the explosion at the arsenal was their lab going up?\" Whitney asked.\n\n_\"We_ think it was, but the ATF national response team is leaning toward natural causes. A methane buildup. Given the size of that explosion, we're treating the whole matter very seriously. If there was a bomb-making cell operating out of the arsenal, and they blew themselves up, then end of story. ATF tells us that happens sometimes. But if that explosion was a package left behind to entertain federal authorities who might come snooping, then they're capable of making one hell of a bomb, and we have to assume a clear and present danger.\"\n\n\"We'll play it any way you want to, Mr. Farnsworth,\" Harter said. \"But when it's all over, we're still going to want to have a talk with this Kreiss fella.\"\n\n\"And you'll get it. I guess what I'm saying is that we just want to make sure that there isn't a bigger deal going down here. You know, like an Oklahoma City-scale conspiracy.\"\n\n\"What's this Kreiss guy's role in that theory?\" Harter asked.\n\n\"Kreiss's daughter was one of those college kids that went missing, remember? As we told you, he's been looking for his missing daughter, who turned up at that arsenal.\"\n\n\"And right now, y'all think he's chasing down this Browne McGarand?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHarter and Whitney looked at each other and then back at Farnsworth, who knew what their question was. \"Kreiss used to be pretty good at hunting people. We wouldn't necessarily be upset if he finds McGarand, especially if it prevents another bombing.\"\n\nJanet watched as Whitney nodded his head slowly. Farnsworth was obviously confusing the shit out of the locals \"Oka-a-y,\" Whitney said. \"But how do we get him for this homicide deal?\"\n\n\"His daughter is now hospitalized in Blacksburg. I'm requesting that she be placed under police guard. Eventually, we're pretty sure Kreiss will come back here to see her. Can you help?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he comes back, we can take it from there, I think,\" Harter said. \"And we'll get some assets into that hospital.\"\n\nFarnsworth stood up, and so did the two uniformed cops. They shook hands and Farnsworth asked Agent Bobby Land to escort them out. When they were gone, he sat back down and ran his hands through his hair.\n\n\"Okay, so much for local legends. Janet, we'd been meeting for a while before you got back to the office. That little charade was for purposes of keeping local law occupied while we sort out what we're really going to do. The U.S. attorney for the Southwestern District of Virginia is running top cover for us, but I thought I'd better add my personal reassurances to those guys.\"\n\n\"Sir?\" Janet said. \"I thought we were going to keep the Kreiss angle away from local law?\"\n\nFarnsworth cleared his throat, glancing nervously at the woman at the other end of the table.\n\n\"Yes. Well. We've had some new guidance from Washington on that score.\"\n\nJanet couldn't stand it anymore. \"May I know who _she_ is?\" she asked, pointing with her chin to the woman at the end of the table. The woman did not even look at her.\n\n\"When I'm finished, yes. Now, as usual, there's a turf fight shaping up. ATF headquarters is circling the wagons around their 'natural causes' theory of the arsenal explosion, apparently because their director found out that they had cleared the arsenal during a previous inspection of the place.\"\n\n\"And the Bureau?\"\n\n\"Bureau headquarters is officially deferring to ATF, but somehow, ATF has found out that we're hunting two subjects, McGarand and Kreiss.\"\n\n\"ATF is saying there's no threat to Washington?\"\n\n\"ATF is saying there's no threat unless, of course, _we_ have evidence to the contrary. I think they're looking for a fig leaf, in case it turns out somebody has actual _evidence_ that some bad guys were in fact making bombs down there.\"\n\n\"But we do, sort of\u2014Kreiss. And what his daughter said.\"\n\n\"No, we do not, Janet,\" he said. \"As of this morning, based on guidance I've received through our regular chain of command, we no longer know anything about any Edwin Kreiss, except as the parent of a girl who is no longer missing.\"\n\nJanet sat back in her chair. \"But don't you think he's chasing McGarand? Shouldn't we tell Kreiss that we think McGarand is going to bomb something in Washington? That's there's a tie between McGarand and Waco?\"\n\n\"Officially, I no longer have any opinions on the matter of Edwin Kreiss,\" Farnsworth said, setting his face into a blank bureaucratic mask. Janet, baffled, just looked at him, and then at Keenan, who was now intently studying his hands.\n\n\"But I do,\" the woman at the end of the table said. Her voice was low, but filled with quiet authority.\n\n\"And you are . . .?\" Janet said, turning in her chair.\n\n\"I am the person assigned by an appropriate authority to attend to the problem of Edwin Kreiss,\" the woman said. \"I understand he is or was carrying a pager you gave him?\"\n\n_Attend to_ \u2014Janet remembered those words. She didn't know what to say, but she found herself nodding.\n\n\"Very well,\" the woman said. \"I want you to page him at eighteen hundred tonight, exactly. Then key in a number I'm going to give you. It's a northern Virginia number, but it will bounce back here to this office. Assuming he calls in, I have a message I want you to give him.\"\n\n\"Not until I know who you are, or _what_ you are,\" Janet said. She was beginning to suspect that the \"what\" would be more important than the \"who.\" \"The last guy who wanted me to page Kreiss wanted me to tell him his daughter was dead. And guess what: That didn't happen.\"\n\nFarnsworth looked up at the ceiling. The woman stood up, and Janet was surprised by how tall she was. She was wearing an expensive loose-fitting pantsuit, and she was clearly over six feet tall even in her flat shoes. She picked up a handbag that could have doubled as a briefcase. She asked the two men in the room if they would mind excusing themselves. To Janet's further surprise, both of them stood and left the room without a word, closing the door behind them. Looking at the expression on the woman's face, Janet suddenly found herself wishing she was carrying her sidearm. The woman walked around the conference table and came up next to Janet. She perched one hip on the table and looked down at her, forcing Janet to crane her neck to make eye contact. The woman's expression was disturbing; she was looking at Janet with a flat, slightly unfocused, zero-parallax stare.\n\n\"When we're all done making the page call and delivering the message, I will return to Washington to attend to the matter of Edwin Kreiss,\" the woman said. Her diction was precise and clear. \"Your director has assured my director that you _will_ make the call, and that you _will_ deliver the message. Which goes like this: three words\u2014 _tenebrae factae sunt._ I'll write it down for you, if you'd like. It's church Latin for 'night has fallen.' It will tell Kreiss that I'm coming for him.\"\n\nJanet didn't like the sound of that, so she tried for a little defiance. \"And he'll give a shit? That _you 're_ coming?\"\n\nThe woman's unfocused look went away, and she looked right into Janet's eyes with a wolfish smile that made her own black eyes glow. \"Oh yes, Special Agent Carter. He'll absolutely give a shit. Anyone who knows me would.\" She stood back up, smoothed her clothes, and retrieved her handbag. \"I'll see you in Mr. Farnsworth's office at eighteen hundred. That's six P.M. by the way.\"\n\nThe woman walked calmly out of the conference room, leaving Janet alone at the table, her face burning just a little, and wondering what in the hell this was all about She was tempted to page Kreiss right now and warn him that some female cyborg in an Armani pantsuit was after him, but the woman had mentioned her director and Janet's director. This implied that the woman was an Agency operative of some kind. Another \"sweeper,\" perhaps? What kind of outfit needed to have people like that in their stable? The woman's mention of directors had been deliberate, though. And if the heads of the Bureau and the Agency were involved, it was definitely not time for junior special agents to be taking any sudden initiatives. Then she remembered what Farnsworth had speculated earlier: They were going to let Kreiss hunt McGarand, but the Agency was going to join the hunt for Kreiss.\n\n_Tenebrae factae sunt._ Darkness has fallen. She felt a tingle run up her backbone. Yeah, that would do it for me, she thought. My director and your director. She closed her eyes to think. Something didn't quite add up here: The people originally interested in Kreiss had been Foster, of the Bureau, and Bellhouser, of the Justice Department. FBI counterintelligence and the deputy AG, to be specific. And now the Agency. Why would the FBI director be supporting that ugly little axis?\n\nShe wanted to go talk to Farnsworth again, but he was acting as if he had been stepped on from above and was now in the \"yes, sir, no, sir, whatever you say, sir\" mode most beloved of the Bureau when it was circling its own bureaucratic wagons. What had Farnsworth told her earlier? They'd let Kreiss run free. They didn't _know_ there was a bomb threat, but if Kreiss solved that problem, fine. And if he created bigger problems while he was doing it, there'd be no stink on them. He wasn't their asset. He was the Justice Department's asset. So what did that make Janet? Farnsworth's secretary stepped into the conference room.\n\n\"Agent Carter?\" she said. \"The Blacksburg hospital is calling? About a Lynn Kreiss? Can you take it? I can't find the boss, and I know you were involved with that case.\"\n\nJanet said sure and went into Farnsworth's outer office to take the call. The nurse calling reported that they thought Lynn Kreiss might be coming around. Their log said that the FBI people wanted to be notified when she surfaced. At this very moment, Janet wasn't sure what her current assignment was, but she said she'd be right over. She went back upstairs to collect her sidearm and purse, grab her sandwich, and then go down to the garage.\n\nThere was a street-level sandwich shop diagonally across the street from the office building at 650 Massachusetts Avenue. Browne bought a cup of coffee and a newspaper and sat down at one of the caf\u00e9 tables out on the street itself. It was a warmish day, although nothing like what was to come in the horrific Washington summertime. There was a steady flow of government workers walking by, some stopping in for coffee or to get a ready-made sandwich to take to the office for lunch.\n\nHe studied the ATF headquarters building surreptitiously while pretending to read his newspaper. There did not appear to be any new security cameras on the building or its neighbors, although he could not see what might have been added to the building right above him. He reminded himself to check that when he got up. The attack depended on two factors. The first was that there was a parking garage right next door to his target, separated from the ATF building by a narrow alley. The garage had an outside ramp that led directly up to its roof-level deck. More importantly, that ramp, which was on the side of the garage away from the ATF building, did not appear to be in the field of view of any of the cameras guarding the ATF's headquarters. It was also just wide enough to accommodate the propane truck.\n\nThe second factor had to do with the ATF building's heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. Like those of most office buildings, it was a recirculating system. A small amount of outside air was taken in and passed over the cooling coils of the chiller plant housed in a small HVAC building at the back of the alley between the garage and the ATF building. It was then circulated throughout the building via the duct system, but instead of being exhausted from the building, it was recooled and redistributed again and again, so as to maximize the efficiency of the air-conditioning plant. His plan was simple: Very early tomorrow morning, he would drive the propane truck up the ramp to the top deck of that garage and park it next to the outer wall on the alley side of the building. The ATF headquarters was ten stories high, with a wall of windows overlooking the top deck of the garage. But no cameras looked at the garage; he and Jared had both checked. Instead, a single security camera, mounted on the front corner of that air-conditioning building, looked into the alley, toward the street.\n\nThe propane truck came equipped with a four-inch diameter wire-reinforced 150-foot-long hose, whose fittings he had modified to handle the hydrogen gas. He would park the truck, wait until nearly dawn, and then unreel the heavy hose down into the alley behind the air-conditioning building, a distance of perhaps forty, forty-five feet. A big truck like that in the alley would draw instant attention from the security monitoring office, assuming they were awake at the switch at that hour of the morning. But the hose would come down in the predawn darkness _behind_ the security camera, and so would he.\n\nOnce on the ground, he would spread a large plastic tarp over one of the HVAC building's two air intakes to block it off. He would then drape a second tarp, with a receiver fitting sewn into it, over the remaining air-intake screen. The screens were eight feet high and six feet wide. At that hour, the building's environmental-management system would be running the intake fans at very low speed. They wouldn't speed up the fans until the heat of the day called for more cooling. He had taken rough volumetric measurements of the building by pacing off its length and width on the sidewalk and then multiplying that number by one hundred. Then he had computed the heating\/ventilation\/air-conditioning volume using the _Civil Engineer's Handbook._ The propane truck was designed to hold eight thousand gallons of liquid propane. Now, filled with pure hydrogen gas under nearly four hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, it held more than enough hydrogen to fill the ATF building, using the building's own recycling ventilation system, in about an hour. What made the building most vulnerable to this kind of attack was the fact that none of its windows could be opened. In fact, he had almost twice the hydrogen he needed to achieve an explosive vapor mixture, but he knew there would be small leaks here and there. No man-made gas system was perfect.\n\nHe was going to treat the ATF the same way they and their allies at the FBI had treated the people at Mount Carmel. He would start the odorless, invisible hydrogen injection at around 6:00 A.M. Sometime in the next 60 to 90 minutes, the building would achieve an explosive mixture of air and hydrogen, courtesy of its own closed-cycle ventilation system. Because it was the start of the day, the intake fans would be running slowly, and the recycling air-handler system would keep almost all the air inside the building to achieve maximum cooling. Sometime after that, as the building filled with ATF agents and their bosses, someone, somewhere, would slip into the men's room to sneak a cigarette. Or fumble with an aging light switch. Or turn on an entire floor's worth of fluorescent light fixtures all at once. Or summon the elevator and mash the button several times, making those copper contacts up in the elevator shaft open and close, open and close. He had been a chemist and an explosives engineer for decades. The industrial-safety manuals were filled with stories of how the most mundane objects were capable of producing a static spark: a doorknob in winter, the switch on a desk fan, panty hose on a dry winter day, the keyboard of an electric typewriter, the ringer in a telephone.\n\nIn that silent, invisibly deadly atmosphere, one spark would reproduce what had happened down at Ramsey. Only this time, the building wasn't made of reinforced concrete: It was wall-to-wall windows.\n\n\"Some more coffee, sir?\" a pleasant young woman asked, pausing at his table with a Silex coffee pitcher.\n\n\"Thanks, I'm all done,\" he said, smiling up at her through his dark glasses. His heart was actually thumping with excitement. Today, after months of labor at the arsenal, he was finally here. This afternoon, he would find a motel near the airport to crash and get some sleep. Early in the morning, he would take a taxi to the Pentagon, then go retrieve the truck. There was security-camera surveillance of the Pentagon building itself, but he had seen not one single camera on the old power station building. Then he would drive the truck into the city; he even had an official-looking dispatch ticket, lifted when Jared had appropriated the truck. And sometime early tomorrow morning, all those criminal bastards in that building were going to get a taste of what it must have been like at Waco when they burned William along with those Branch Davidians to death, while their agents stood around the perimeter, drinking coffee and making crispy-critter jokes.\n\nHe hoped there _were_ cameras on that building. They were going to get the shot of a lifetime.\n\nForty-five minutes later, Janet was sitting in Lynn Kreiss's hospital room. A uniformed sheriff's deputy sat outside the door, watching the television in the empty room across the hall. Lynn was still hooked up to an IV, but she actually looked better than the last time Janet had seen her. It's amazing what some sleep can do for you, Janet thought. The girl was tossing and turning a bit in the bed, and making small noises in the back of her throat, as if she were having a bad dream. Her face had some color in it, and the monitors on the shelf above her head were busier than they had been the last time. Janet had talked to the attending physician, who told her that Lynn had started talking\u2014 _babbling_ might be a better word for it\u2014at 3:30 that morning. The collective opinion was that she would be coming around soon. Janet asked how soon was soon. The collective opinion was that it was anybody's guess. The marvels of modern medicine, Janet thought.\n\nAs she watched the girl wrestle with the web of unconsciousness, Janet was struggling with her own dilemma. In her mind, she was coming down on the side of a real human-made explosion out there at the arsenal, if only because of the timing. That thing had gone off when a bunch of people had come in there and started unlocking doors. If there had been a pool of explosive vapors down there in that tunnel complex, her own little adventure should have set it off, especially when that car went scraping along the concrete. Then there were the two civilians, the McGarands, one a possible homicide victim, whose truck tires had traces of arsenal mud on them, and the other a retired chemical explosives engineer. And not just any engineer, but the senior engineer at the Ramsey Arsenal. Both of them were blood relations to a guy who had been incinerated at the Waco holocaust. And now the surviving McGarand had just flat-assed disappeared, with Kreiss apparently hot on his tail. And all three federal agencies involved, two of which had been responsible for what happened at Waco, were busy going head down, tail up in the bureaucratic ostrich position. Oh, and now some shark-eyed dolly with a half-inch-thick karate callus on her hands wanted Janet to relay a love note to Edwin Kreiss.\n\nShe looked up. Lynn Kreiss was staring at her, trying to speak. Janet got up and went over to the bed. The girl's lips seemed to be dry, so Janet poured her a glass of water.\n\n\"I'm Special Agent Janet Carter,\" she said softly. \"I'm with the FBI. Are you thirsty?\"\n\nThe girl nodded and Janet helped her sip some water. Lynn cleared her throat and then asked Janet what time it was.\n\nJanet told her what day it was, what had happened out at the arsenal, and how long she'd been out of touch here in the hospital. The girl drank some more water and then Janet said she was going to summon the nurses but that she needed to talk to Lynn after that, if she was able.\n\n\"Where's my father?\" Lynn asked.\n\n\"We don't know,\" Janet said after a second's hesitation. \"He wasn't involved in the explosion. Personally, I think he's up in Washington chasing down the guy who kidnapped you.\"\n\n\"Guys,\" Lynn said. Her voice was gaining strength, and she sat up a little in the bed. \"There were two of them, a young guy and an older guy, although I only got a quick look at them, when my friends hit the leg traps.\"\n\n\"Leg traps?\"\n\nThe girl explained what had happened to her two friends. She reiterated that she had seen only the two men, one much older than the other. Both guys had black beards and looked like mountain men.\n\n\"Yes, that's what we have,\" Janet said. \"The younger guy's name was Jared McGarand; he's dead. The older guy is his grandfather, Browne McGarand, and he's missing.\" She told Lynn what had happened to Jared, then asked her what had happened to the boys' remains. Lynn didn't know, other than that the water had covered them up. She closed her eyes for a moment, and Janet gave her a minute to rest.\n\n\"The younger one\u2014you said he's dead?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Janet said. \"An apparent homicide.\" She didn't feel it was the time to discuss her father's possible involvement.\n\n\"Good riddance,\" Lynn said. \"That guy was a serious creep.\"\n\n\"Lynn, when the medics picked you up, you were sort of babbling something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington.\"\n\n\"I was?\"\n\n\"Yes. It didn't make much sense, but it got everybody's attention.\"\n\nLynn frowned for a moment, and then her face cleared. \"Oh, yes, I do remember. The other one, the older one, told me he was taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington. I said, Yeah, right, like he could just make a hydrogen bomb with some plans off the Web. He said it wasn't what I thought.\"\n\nOh shit, Janet thought. \"Any indication of what he was going to do with this bomb?\"\n\nLynn frowned again, trying to remember. \"No,\" she said. \"Wait\u2014yes. He said he was going after what he called 'a legitimate target.'\"\n\nJanet studied the girl. There was a toughness there, despite her current physical frailty. Definitely her father's daughter. \"Did he sound like a nutcase?\"\n\n\"Yes and no. He wasn't raving. He was calm, sort of matter-of-fact. But fanatical, maybe\u2014remember, I could only hear him. He said he'd made a hydrogen bomb, that he was taking it to Washington. Like it was a routine deal, something he did every day. That made it kinda scary, you know?\"\n\nJanet nodded, writing it all down in her notebook. \"I wonder why he would tell you,\" she said.\n\n\"He implied I was supposed to be insurance, a hostage or something, if things went wrong. He told me to get ready to go, but then he never came back. The next thing that happened was that the building fell in on me. But that was much later.\"\n\nSomething was playing in the back of Janet's mind. What had that older ATF guy said\u2014that this had been a _gas_ explosion? \"When he said hydrogen bomb, and you challenged that, and he said it wasn't what you thought\u2014I wonder if he meant a hydrogen _gas_ bomb?\"\n\nLynn shrugged and then winced. Janet knew that feeling. She stepped out into the hallway and summoned the nurse. Then there was a crowd and Janet backed out into the hall to let the docs do their thing. She went down the hall to the waiting room, which was empty. She fished out her cell phone but then hesitated. She needed to call her immediate supervisor, Larry Talbot, to tell him what had happened to the two boys. There were parents to be notified, and, of course, remains to be found. But there was a bigger question here: That Agency woman wanted her to page some kind of a warning threat to Kreiss. But here was the daughter confirming that Browne McGarand was up to something that did involve a bomb and Washington, D.C. She should report that immediately, but would anybody listen? Her bosses seemed to be so caught up in protecting their rice bowls right now that there might be nobody listening.\n\nShe called Talbot, got his voice mail, and told him what Lynn had said about the missing kids. Then she put a call into Farnsworth's office. The secretary said he was not available. She asked for Keenan, but he was with Farnsworth. Where was the RA? Out, the secretary said helpfully. Feeling like a child, Janet almost hung up, but then she gave the secretary the news about Lynn Kreiss being awake, and that she, Janet, needed to talk to the RA urgently, as in, Now would be nice. The secretary was unimpressed, but she said she would pass it along. Janet gave her the number for her cell phone.\n\nShe went back down to ICU to talk to Lynn some more, but the doctors were busy and the nurses forbidding. It was now almost three o'clock. She stood there in the busy corridor, thinking, while a stream of hospital tragic parted indifferently around her, as if she were an island. In three hours, she was supposed to page Kreiss for his wake-up call. If he still had the pager, and if he had it turned on. She could just hear him saying, Now what, Special Agent? In that weary voice of his. Now what, indeed. I've got good news and bad news. Your daughter is conscious and apparently doing okay. She says one of the guys who kidnapped her is taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington. If you're interested, that is. Oh, and an old friend of yours stopped by with a message\u2014want to hear it? And Kreiss would go, Nope, busy right now. Bye. Her cell phone rang. It was Farnsworth's secretary: \"Get back here now.\"\n\nKreiss nosed his rented Ford 150 van into the truck stop off the Van Dorn Street Beltway exit in Alexandria. It wasn't much of a truck stop, not compared with the interstate facilities, but he had to check it out. His exit guide listed only two such facilities on or near the Beltway, not counting trucking terminals. This was the third trucking terminal he'd stopped into on his circuit of Washington's infamous 1-495. It was midafternoon, and he knew that in about a half hour or so he would have to quit until after rush hour, because nothing moved during rush hour around Washington.\n\nThere were a dozen trucks parked at this stop, and three more filling up in the fuel lanes. No propane truck was in evidence. It was possible, of course, that McGarand had put the thing in a garage somewhere, and he had made a mental note to look up fuel companies in the area and make the rounds of those if the truck stops came up empty. But there was something so nicely anonymous about a truck stop that he was pretty sure that's where the propane tanker would be. Kreiss believed in the theory that if you want to hide something really well, you hide it in plain sight. He drove the van around the parking lot and behind the store and rest facilities building. No propane tanker. He got back out onto the Beltway and headed east, toward the Wilson Bridge and the crossing into Maryland. He had a terrible feeling he was wasting time.\n\nA stone-faced Farnsworth was waiting in his office when Janet got back to the Roanoke office. Keenan was with him when Janet took a seat in front of the RA's desk. He asked her to debrief him on what Lynn Kreiss had told her. When she was finished, he turned in his swivel chair and looked out the window for a long minute. Janet looked over at Keenan, but his expression was noncommittal. He seemed to be uncomfortable with what was going on, but willing to go along. Farnsworth swiveled his chair back around.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said. \"I'm glad the girl's going to recover. I'm sorry the other two kids didn't make it. Larry Talbot is going to make family notification, and we're sending in some search teams to see if we can find remains.\"\n\n\"The county people are getting up a search team and a canine unit,\" Keenan said. \"Larry's coordinating it.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Farnsworth said. As best Janet could tell, the RA was only minimally interested in the resolution of the case of the missing college kids. \"Now, this other business: You have a page to make at six P.M., right?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's what Mata Hari wanted me to do. I wanted to ask you about\u2014\"\n\nFarnsworth was shaking his head. \"No,\" he said. \"Make the page. If he calls back, give him whatever message she wants. Then I hope we're done with the Edwin Kreiss affair. His daughter's been recovered, and the other two missing persons have been . . . accounted for.\"\n\n\"But what about the girl's statement? That Browne McGarand's going to Washington with a bomb?\"\n\n\"You said she said she was blindfolded,\" Farnsworth said. \"We have no _evidence_ that Browne McGarand has ever even _been_ to the arsenal or that he was the man who abducted Lynn Kreiss.\"\n\n\"Then show her his picture,\" she said. \"She saw them both in the storm. It just about has to be him. She described him as a big man with a huge beard. Looked like a mountain man.\"\n\nFarnsworth and Keenan exchanged looks. \"What we _know_ is that Jared McGarand's truck had been parked _outside_ the arsenal fence. We have no evidence that he himself penetrated that arsenal perimeter, either.\"\n\nJanet frowned. What the hell was this? Farnsworth was sounding like a barracks lawyer. \"There were two people involved in Lynn's abduction,\" she said. \"One young, one much older. She was abducted inside the arsenal. She saw them both and can identify them. We found her inside the arsenal, so they _must_ have been inside the arsenal, too. Doing what? She said that the older man told her he was holding her as a possible hostage, in case things went wrong with his little H-bomb project in Washington. She was found in a building right near that power plant. _What more do we need?\"_\n\nHer voice had risen with that last question, and she became acutely aware of the way her two supervisors were looking at her. Impertinence was not an attribute much admired within the Bureau. Farnsworth leaned forward.\n\n\"We _need_ to adhere to the very explicit guidance we have been given from headquarters. Now, I would very much appreciate it if you would comply with my orders. Make the page. Give Kreiss the message if and when he calls in, nothing more, nothing less.\"\n\nWhat the hell is going on here? she wondered. \"Can I tell him his daughter is back among us?\"\n\nKeenan made a noise of exasperation. \"What part of 'nothing more, nothing less' don't you understand, Carter? How about doing what you're told for a change?\"\n\nJanet had never heard Keenan speak this way, but she had about had it. \"How about telling me what's going on around here?\" she countered. \"Why is this office so hellbent on mind-fucking Edwin Kreiss?\"\n\n\"You've got it wrong, Janet,\" Farnsworth said. \"That page will conclude your involvement in the Edwin Kreiss matter. Then you can help Larry Talbot close out the missing persons case.\"\n\n\"But what about the bomb? Are we just going to sit on that?\"\n\n\"You're talking about wholly uncorroborated information, obtained from a young woman who has just awakened from a coma, as if it were evidence. There is no evidence of a bomb, and if there were, bombs are the business of the ATF, and even they are saying there was no bomb.\"\n\nChrist, Janet thought. This was like being back in the lab: We know the answer we want; how about a little cooperation here? \"But they don't know what we do,\" she protested. \"Of course they're saying there's no bomb!\"\n\nFarnsworth closed his eyes and took a deep breath. \"I am ordering you to drop this matter.\" He opened his eyes. \"And if you can't accept that order, you have an alternative.\"\n\nThat shocked her. She sat back in her chair, unable to think of what she should say next. Both Farnsworth and Keenan were watching her, almost expectantly. Then, surprising herself, she fished out her credentials and leaned forward to put them on Farnsworth's desk. Then she hooked her Sig out of its holster, ejected the clip, and then racked and locked back the slide. A single round popped out onto the floor. Keenan automatically bent to retrieve it. She put the gun on the RA's desk, as well.\n\n\"You guys page Kreiss,\" she said, getting up. \"This is all fucked up, and I quit.\"\n\nShe walked out of the RA's office and went straight upstairs to her cubicle. Larry Talbot and Billy were in the office. Talbot took one look at her face and asked her what was wrong. She told him she'd just quit. He sat there at his desk with his mouth open.\n\n\"You did _what?_ Why? What's happened now?\"\n\n\"There's something way wrong with this Kreiss business,\" she began, but then she stopped. Talbot probably wouldn't know what she was talking about. His expression confirmed that. The intercom phone on his desk buzzed. He picked it up, listened, said, \"Yes, sir,\" and then hung up. \"Mr. Keenan wants to see you.\"\n\n\"He can fuck off and die, too,\" she said. \"He's not my boss anymore. I quit and I meant it. I'll come back later for my desk stuff. They have my piece and credentials. I'm outta here.\"\n\n\"But, Jan, what the hell\u2014\" Larry said, getting up. \"Obviously there's been some misunderstanding. Look\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Larry. The more I think about what I've just done, the better I like it. You got what you need on the missing kids?\"\n\n\"Um, only the basic story of what happened to them; I was on my way to talk to the Kreiss girl before I did the actual notifications. Hey, look, Jan, why don't you just take the rest of the day oil? You've been through a lot. Go home and think about this. Quitting the Bureau\u2014that's a big deal.\"\n\n\"It's the Bureau's loss, as far as I'm concerned. Think of it as a logical consequence of my being sent down here to this . . . this backwater. I'm a Ph.D.-level forensic scientist, for Chrissakes. I'm here because I wouldn't come up with the quote-unquote right answer in an evidentiary hearing. Now here we go again. I should have quit the last time. And for the last goddamned time, don't call me Jan!\"\n\nTalbot put up his hands in mock surrender and left the office. Billy got up and came over to her cube.\n\n\"Hey,\" he said gently. \"What the hell was it they wanted you to do?\"\n\n\"They won't go after this guy who's on his way to D.C. with a big-ass bomb. And they won't let me tell Kreiss that his daughter is in safe hands. It's outrageous!\"\n\n\"What _did_ they want you to do? Quitting is a pretty big step, Janet.\"\n\n\"The Agency sent some gorgon down here to give Kreiss a message. I'm supposed to be the messenger. I'm just tired of all the lies, Billy. First in the lab, now here. This isn't what I signed up for. Nice knowing you.\"\n\nBilly seemed lost for words, so she grabbed her jacket and her purse and left the office. She was home in thirty minutes, and she went directly into the bathroom to take a long shower. As she stood in the streaming water, she reflected on her decision and concluded that it had been the right move. She realized she needed to put it in writing, and that she also needed to get something in that letter referring to the arsenal case. She smiled then: Bureau habits died hard\u2014she was still thinking about covering her ass, even in the process of resignation.\n\nShe turned off the shower, got out, and dried off. She put on fresh underwear and was combing her hair when she heard a noise from the bedroom door. She whirled around and found the Agency woman standing in the doorway. She was wearing slacks and some kind of safari shirt with lots of pockets. Her eyes were invisible behind wraparound black sunglasses.\n\n\"Brought you something,\" the woman said, proffering a shiny object in her outstretched hand. Janet blinked, focused on it, and then there was a shattering pulse of purple light. The next thing she knew, she was on her back in her bed, completely enveloped in a sticky web of some kind. The individual strands were the consistency of raw yarn and smelled of some strong chemical. Her arms were pinned down at her sides, her hands turned palm-in against her hips. Her legs were bent to one side. She made an instinctive move to escape, but the effort only caused the web to contract everywhere it touched her body. She felt as if she were in an elasticized-rubber onion sack. Only her head was free. Everything she looked at had a purple penumbra, and the center focus of her vision was a haze of small black dots. The woman was sitting calmly at Janet's dressing table, watching her, her sunglasses gone now. Janet tried to think of something clever to say, but there was no escaping the fact that she was lying on her bed, in nothing but her underwear, trussed like a deboned turkey. She tried to blink away the haze of purple-black spots. The woman's expression was totally blank.\n\n\"So that's a retinal disrupter?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"Yes. The spots will go away in about an hour. Usually, there's no permanent damage done.\"\n\n\"Usually? That's comforting. And you did this\u2014why?\"\n\n\"To ensure you'd make the page, Agent Carter.\"\n\n\"I'm not Agent anybody anymore,\" Janet said. \"Especially because of that.\" The woman looked at her watch. \"We have a little over an hour. I've arranged for the return call to bounce here, and then you'll give him the message I asked you to give him. Still remember it?\"\n\n\"What if I don't?\" Janet asked. \"What if I simply tell him to run like hell?\"\n\n\"Same difference,\" the woman said. \"That's what my message is designed to do anyway. It's just more effective if he knows it's me. But I think you'll want to do it my way.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because if you don't, I'll go get another capture curtain and wrap it around your throat. Then you could practice some very careful breathing until someone finds you. Think of it as Lamaze with a twist. Whenever that might be, now that you're . . . unattached, shall we say? Why don't you relax now? Attend to your breathing. That stuffs like a boa constrictor: It tightens on the exhale, as I suspect you've discovered.\"\n\nJanet had indeed discovered that. \"Why the hell are you doing this? Taking down another federal agent?\"\n\n\"But you're not a federal agent anymore, are you, Carter?\" the woman said sweetly. \"Not that you ever were. An agent, I mean.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" Janet said.\n\n\"You were a glorified lab rat, Carter. As a street agent, you're a joke. You've got the situational awareness of a tree. I was standing in that doorway the whole time you were taking a shower.\"\n\n\"Enjoy the view?\" Janet asked.\n\nThe woman cocked her head to one side and gave Janet the once-over, staring at her body just long enough for Janet to blush. \"You're nicely made, for a breast-Fed,\" she said. \"Was that why they sent you to get close to Kreiss?\"\n\n\"That probably wasn't their brightest idea,\" Janet said, trying to feel how much give there was in the yarn. Not very damn much.\n\nThe Agency woman laughed once. \"Edwin Kreiss has zero time for amateurs,\" she said. \"Of any stripe. What'd they do\u2014tell you to show a little leg, bat your eyes at him?\"\n\n\"Why are you doing this?\" Janet asked again, trying to strain against the sticky web without showing it.\n\n\"Because now you're just another annoying civilian who's getting in my way. Stop testing the curtain. You can permanently damage your circulation. Lie still. Rest your eyes. Take a nap. I'll wake you when it's time.\"\n\nThe woman left the room, and Janet immediately tried to move her hands. The sticky rubbery substance clung to her skin like shrink-wrap, but it did give when she pushed out with the back of her right hand. But when she relaxed, it tightened, and she realized that it was now noticeably tighter than it had been. She thought about several coils of the chemical yarn around her throat and involuntarily swallowed. Then she remembered the discussion in Farnsworth's office about the capture curtain, and the fact that it was water-soluble. If she could roll off the bed and get to the bathroom without Medusa out there hearing her, she could get it off. She looked around, trying to figure out how to move quietly with her legs bent sideways like that, and saw the three strands that went around the right-hand bedpost. Shit. So much for that idea.\n\nShe closed her eyes. Okay, she thought, so make the call. Do what this bitch says. Hell, Kreiss might not even answer the page. She opened her eyes, suddenly afraid. He'd better answer the page, she thought. She wondered where he was.\n\nKreiss was sitting in the parking lot of a fast-food joint three blocks from the Beltway interchange with U.S. Route 1. He was munching on a lukewarm, well-oiled three-dollar heart attack when he heard the pager chirping in the duffel bag behind his seat. He put the greaseburger down and turned around to get at the pager. He'd forgotten he had it. The number in the window made him sit right up, though: It had been his own unlisted office number when he was at the Agency. Now who the hell was sending this little summons? He didn't have to write the number down, so he simply cleared the pager, which beeped at him gratefully. There was a phone booth at the edge of the parking lot, but there were two very fat teenaged girls hanging on it, so he went back to his gourmet extravaganza. He had been through all the truck stops and terminals on the northern Virginia side and was now working up the nerve to cross the Wilson Bridge, Washington's monument to uncivil engineering. He had planned to wait another half hour for rush hour to subside somewhat and to make sure no big semis had fallen through the bridge deck today.\n\nThe girls finally left the phone booth in gales of laughter, multiple chins jiggling in unison. He started to get out but then hesitated. It was just after 6:00 on a Monday evening. The pager had belonged to Janet Carter, which meant it was Bureau equipment. Now someone had called it and left a northern Virginia phone number on it that no one in the Bureau should have had access to. Ergo, this wasn't a Bureau summons. He turned on the cabin light and examined the pager for signs of a second antenna, something that might transmit his location when he had acknowledged the message. Then it occurred to him that this might be about Lynn. Hell with it, he thought.\n\nHe got out and went over to the phone booth, which reeked of chewing gum and cheap perfume when he cracked open the door. He dialed the number. It rang four times before being picked up, and, to his surprise, it was Janet Carter.\n\n\"Is this about Lynn?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have a message for you,\" Janet said in a wooden voice.\n\n\"From whom?\"\n\n\"The message is as follows: _Tenebrae factae sunt\"_\n\n\"What\u2014\" he said, but the connection had been broken. And then the message penetrated. Almost in slow motion, he put the handset back on the hook and backed out of the booth. He walked back to the van, got in, and started it up. Hamburger forgotten, he drove out of the parking lot, turned left when he came to Route 1, and headed south, away from the Beltway.\n\nWell, well, well, he thought. _Tenebrae factae sunt._ Darkness has fallen. Misty's coming. That was the nickname she'd been given, in memory of the psychotic woman character who kept calling Clint Eastwood to play \"Misty\" for her in that movie. The message was her trademark. It was supposed to spook him, and in a way, it did. Misty was in her fifties, looked forty the last time he had seen her, and had been the preeminent stalker in the stable, bar none. Kreiss had concluded a long time ago that Misty had a Terminator personality. She was either sitting up there on her shelf, like some neighborhood black hole, absorbing light, motion, sound, everything that was going on around her, with those disturbing black eyes staring into infinity with perfect indifference, or she was on the move, morphing through keyholes or running down cars, a human Velociraptor, leading with her teeth. She tracked like a damned adult mamba, moving fast through the bush on a molecular prey trail, its head and upper body occasionally coming up and off the ground, testing the air with its tongue, looking, eager to deliver a fatal strike, hunting because it liked to.\n\nHe had trained under her supervision for two years before getting his first operational assignment, so there was nothing that he knew that she didn't also know. Well, maybe a couple of things, he thought hopefully. But realistically, he was now, officially and irrevocably\u2014put it on the evening news, folks\u2014in deep shit. He would have to abandon immediately his pursuit of Browne McGarand and look to his own defenses. Maybe head out to Dulles and get on the evening flight to Zanzibar, or, better yet, lower Patagonia. That would be about the right distance. Except he'd probably just be finishing the evening meal when she appeared out of the cockpit. The only chance he had was if Misty was going solo and had not brought along a cast of thousands. Given the history, she might well be solo. Misty was a sport.\n\nHe drove down Route 1 for twenty minutes until he came to the entrance to Fort Belvoir, where he turned in. Belvoir was an open post, the home of the Army Corps of Engineers School, so there were no gates or guards. But it was still a military reservation, and it seemed safer to stop there than out on the street. He drove around the campuslike facility for a few minutes before parking the van in front of the main post exchange complex. He shut the van down and closed his eyes, commanding his brain to organize and think about his situation.\n\nMisty was coming. She'd used Janet Carter as her messenger, which meant that Janet was having a bad evening. Daniella Morganavicz was her real name. Her parents had supposedly emigrated from Serbia, and she had clearly inherited the ruthless faculties of that bloody-minded tribe. Somebody at Langley must be really worried if Misty had been put in play.\n\nThen the pager went off again.\n\nHe looked down at the little device and thought about throwing it out the window. The first page had been the warning; was this one Misty making a tracking call? He looked at the number in the window. It was the Roanoke area code and a number he didn't recognize. Carter again? He had rented a cell phone with the van, but wanted to save using that for when he was certain someone was hunting him. How certain do you want it? he thought, remembering the warning. He looked around for a phone booth and finally saw a bank of them by the exchange entrance. He looked at the number again and then turned the pager off without acknowledging the call. He got out, threw the pager into a concrete flower planter, and walked over to the bank of pay phones. He dialed the number, entered his credit-card number, and waited. The credit card would tie him to this place, but he hadn't really begun to run and hide yet, so that shouldn't matter. Emphasis on the _shouldn 't._ It was Carter who answered.\n\n\"Sorry about being rude,\" she said. \"That goddamned woman was here. Do you know whom I mean?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" he said. \"Tallish? Black eyes? Absorbs ambient light?\"\n\n\"That's the one. Said you would understand that message to mean she was coming for you.\"\n\n\"Clear as a bell. Why are you calling me?\"\n\n\"I'm on a pay phone. My phone is being tapped, I think. I called because I need to talk to you, first about your daughter, and second about what's going on.\"\n\nHe felt a clang of alarm when she mentioned Lynn. \"What about Lynn?\"\n\n\"She's awake. I was there when she came around. I think she's going to be fine\u2014no apparent mental damage. We talked. She told me what happened out there at the arsenal. The other two kids apparently got caught in some kind of traps and were drowned by a flash flood.\"\n\n\"Yes, I found leg traps.\"\n\n\"Well, she also told me some stuff about the guy I think you're hunting. It involves a bomb, and I think I know what it is. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Hold on a minute, Carter. I'm not hunting anyone.\"\n\nThere was a moment's hesitation. \"I think you are, or at least you were,\" she said. \"I think you were hunting one Browne McGarand, because he kidnapped Lynn. I also think you did something to his grandson, Jared.\"\n\nShe stopped talking, but he decided to remain silent.\n\n\"This woman\u2014is she a real threat?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"What do you think?\" When she didn't answer, he explained her nickname.\n\n\"Scared me just to look at her,\" Janet said. \"I think she took it as a given that you'd be afraid of her, too.\"\n\n\"Which is why I have to go now, Carter.\"\n\n\"I've quit the Bureau,\" she said.\n\nThat surprised him. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"They wanted me to do something that I didn't want to do. They wanted me to page you for the Dragon Lady.\"\n\n\"But you did anyway.\"\n\n\"Because she showed up here at my house and dazzled me with her personality and some nasty little number you people call a 'retinal disrupter'! Then she trussed me up in some kind of sticky shit and told me that things would go poorly for me if I didn't do what she said. I elected to do what she said.\"\n\n\"That was the correct decision, Carter.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's what I thought. Humiliating, maybe, but ultimately smart. But that was only the half of it. I quit because, originally, they wanted me to tell you they'd found Lynn but that she had _not_ survived.\"\n\nIt was his turn to be silent for a moment. \"Sweet,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, it kind of offended me, too. But I was able to talk Farnsworth out of that. Games like that\u2014not my style. Then this shit with Dracula's daughter. Even Farnsworth wouldn't mess with her.\"\n\n\"Your boss knows the real thing when he sees it,\" he said, looking around at the darkening parking lot. If Misty had been in Roanoke at 6:00 P.M. he had a few hours before she could be here, but no more than that. Unless she had helpers, and of course she might. Time to go. And yet\u2014he owed this woman.\n\n\"You really put a snake in a guy's car?\" Janet asked, seemingly out of nowhere.\n\nRansom, he thought. \"No, a tape of a snake. But you're asking about Misty? She likes things visual. She cut the rattles off a snake and stuffed the thing into the back pocket of a guy's bucket seat. He never heard it buzz, of course, but he did get to see it in his mirror just before it slid over his shoulder and dropped into his lap. What's this about a bomb?\"\n\nJanet filled him in on what she had been doing since Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnels. She emphasized McGarand's ties to the Waco disaster. Kriess didn't say anything when she finished. The bureaucrats never change, he thought. He wondered if he should tell her about the propane truck.\n\n\"Are you still there?\"\n\n\"I have to go,\" he said, cutting her off. \"And I dumped your pager. It's in a flower planter in front of the main exchange at Fort Belvoir, if you're interested.\"\n\n\"Do you think that McGarand's taken a bomb to Washington?\"\n\n\"It's possible. But that's not my problem anymore, Carter. You recovered my daughter, like you said you would. I thank you for that. I've got other problems right now.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Does that woman know about Lynn?\"\n\n\"I don't know. It's possible. She was there in the Roanoke office when I got there. I don't know what Farnsworth told her. But why\u2014oh.\"\n\n\"Yeah, oh.\"\n\nAnother silence. \"Would you like me to go to the hospital? Stay with her until you can get back here?\"\n\n\"I appreciate the offer, but in what capacity? You're not with the Bureau anymore.\"\n\n\"Everybody tells me I was a shitty agent. How about as just a human, perhaps?\"\n\nHe laughed but hesitated. If he went back to Blacksburg, he might walk directly into a trap. But if he didn't, and Misty took Lynn, then he'd have no choices at all. Carter was no match for Misty, but she might be better than no one at all. And Misty would never take Carter seriously, so Carter, suitably warhed, might have a chance to do something.\n\n\"I'll tell you what,\" he said. \"I have a neighbor out there near my cabin. Name's Micah Wall. He has a phone. And he's got lots of kinfolk, as they call them. They're mountain people. They're pretty decent people, although they don't look it. If Lynn can be moved, maybe you could get her out of that hospital and into Micah's hands.\"\n\n\"I can sure as hell try,\" Janet said. \"If they'll release her into my custody.\"\n\n\"Lynn's over twenty-one. Technically, I think she can release herself, as long as there's no medical issue. Take her to my cabin, make sure you're not followed, and then call Micah. I think he'll know what to do, and I'm also pretty sure he and his boys can make it tough for Misty if she tries them on. But you'll have to move fast.\"\n\n\"I will. Now, how's about a quid pro quo: I seem to be the only person down here who thinks McGarand has gone to D.C. on a bombing mission. My bosses, my ex-bosses, are suddenly not interested in hearing that, based, I think, on guidance they're getting from Bureau headquarters. If you have something, some evidence, I can give to Farnsworth, and then maybe I can ask that _they_ protect Lynn in return.\"\n\nKreiss shook his head slowly in the darkness. \"You are depressingly na\u00efve for an ex-special agent,\" he said with a sigh. \"Your boss has been told to _assist_ this woman who is coming after me, not get in her way. Those orders probably came from Bureau headquarters, if not Justice. At this juncture, I'll bet Farns worth won't even take your calls.\"\n\n\"But that explosion at the arsenal was _huge._ If there's anything like that being planned for Washington, we have to do something!\"\n\n\"Look, Carter. If there's a bomb here in Washington, that's your ex-employer's problem. Or actually, it's ATF's problem.\"\n\n\"But they won't even admit the possibility, or at least that's their official stance. They keep saying there's no direct evidence. Please, can't you tell me something?\"\n\nKreiss thought about it. Carter sounded frantic, and she still cared, even if she had left the Bureau. And she was going to help him with Lynn.\n\n\"Okay. Tell 'em this: McGarand left Blacksburg driving a propane truck. I saw that truck at the arsenal, inside the power plant.\"\n\n_\"Propane_ truck?\"\n\n\"I've got to roll, Carter. Listen to me: If Misty needs a distraction to get Lynn out of that hospital, she's most likely to start a fire. So be prepared. Take a gun if you have one.\"\n\n\"I'll give it my best shot,\" Janet said.\n\nHer best shot, he thought, giving a mental sigh. Right through her foot, probably. \"Okay,\" he said. \"And whatever happens with Lynn, thank you. Big-time.\"\n\n\"Can you stop McGarand?\"\n\n\"Stop him? I can't even find him.\"\n\n\"But if you do, you can do better than revenge, Mr. Kreiss. You might prevent a tragedy. You say he has a propane truck. I think he has a truckload of hydrogen. That would make a helluva truck bomb.\"\n\n\"This what you really mean by quid pro quo, Carter? You get my daughter out of harm's way if I'll prevent a bombing?\"\n\n\"I'll try to help your daughter regardless, Mr. Kreiss. But right now, the people who mean you harm are depending on your staying true to form: an eye for an eye, blood for blood, heads on pikes. Why don't you try doing a good deed for once? Think of how badly that would confound your enemies.\"\n\nHe didn't know what to say to that. Impudent goddamn woman.\n\n\"Now that you're a civilian, you're getting devious, Carter,\" he said.\n\n\"Hey?\" she said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You ever going to call me by my first name?\"\n\n\"Don't know you well enough,\" he replied. \"Gotta boogie.\"\n\nHe hung up the phone and strode back to the van, kicking an empty Coke can halfway across the parking lot. He got in and slammed the door shut.\n\nDecision time. Ever since his termination, he had had some pre-planned disappearance arrangements in place. But until he knew that Lynn was safe, he wasn't really free to move. The next twenty-four hours would be crucial. Misty was already in Roanoke, and he had not been exaggerating about her starting a fire. Even in a hospital, it was what he would have done. He hadn't given Carter anywhere near enough information to prepare herself for what Misty might do. He considered calling her back, then decided against it. His using the telephone credit card would bring someone here pretty quick. He had to move. The question of where didn't matter all that much right now.\n\nBut what to do about McGarand? He was not about to indulge in altruism at this late stage in his life. On the other hand, Carter was right from a tactical standpoint: Misty and company would expect him to bolt, to go to ground, possibly to a hidey-hole they already knew about. If instead he continued to hunt McGarand, that would be unexpected. He'd already spun his wheels looking for that truck. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. Instead of looking for a rolling truck bomb, maybe he ought to look for the truck bomb's target. If this was about Waco, that left two possibilities, both of them easy targets for a determined truck bomber. He started up and drove out of the exchange parking lot, heading back to Route 1 and Washington. He thought about Carter. She'd do, for an amateur.\n\nJanet hung up the phone and got back into her car. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater, having had to take a second shower to get all that sticky crap off, once the woman had released her arms and hands. She drove back to her town house from the convenience store. Propane truck, she thought. Hydrogen bomb. She shivered at the thought. That ATF expert had said it had been a gas explosion. Okay: A propane truck was designed to carry gas, or at least she was pretty sure it was. Or was propane a liquid? Damn! But she'd been right: Kreiss _had_ gone after McGarand, which, as far as she was concerned, confirmed that McGarand was already in Washington. With a propane truck full of\u2014what? Propane? Or hydrogen? Either one, she thought. Either one would generate a real crowd-pleaser.\n\nShe got home, parked, and went in. She went through the house to make sure there was no one else there. Situational awareness of a tree\u2014bitch had hurt her feelings. So what was the target? Lynn had said the bearded man claimed to be going after a \"legitimate target.\" As in, I'm going after combatants, not innocent civilians. McGarand had lost his only son at Waco. Son of a bitch, she thought with a sudden cold certainty: He's going after Bureau headquarters. The FBI had been in charge at Waco, at least by the time the Mount Carmel compound had been torched. Aided and abetted by their smaller cousins, the BATF.\n\nShe looked at her watch: It was almost seven o'clock. She went into the kitchen and dialed into the Roanoke FBI office, got the after-hours tape, and hit the extension for the RA's office. There was no answer, then main voice mail. She hung up, remembered he'd given her his home number, but then couldn't find it. The number was in her case notebook, which was in her office. Her ex-office, she reminded herself. She looked Farnsworth up in the phone book for the Roanoke area. Not listed. She called the Roanoke office number back. When the tape came up, she hit three digits and her call was forwarded to the day's duty officer, an agent who worked in the felony fraud squad. His phone was in use, but she did get his voice mail. She groaned, then left a message that she needed to get an urgent message to the RA about a possible bomb threat against Bureau headquarters and gave her home number. Then she hung up and went to make a cup of coffee. The phone rang in five minutes, and it was the duty officer, Special Agent Jim Walker.\n\n\"Got your call,\" he said. \"Called the boss, gave him your message and your phone number. But don't hold your breath. Is it true you resigned today?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did, but I have new information.\"\n\n\"Well, um, what the boss said was, and I quote, 'Janet Carter no longer works for the Bureau, and one of the reasons is that she's become obsessed with this notion of a bomb threat to Washington. I may call her and I may not.' Okay?\"\n\nHis tone was faintly patronizing, with none of the familiar agent-to-agent courtesy. It pissed her off, but she held her anger in check. \"No, not okay,\" she said quickly. \"Please, would you make one more call?\"\n\n\"Hey, Carter\u2014\"\n\n\"Please! I know you think you're dealing with a hysterical female. But look, if there _is_ a bombing, do you want to be the one link in the chain of precursor events that did not pass on vital information? When some independent prosecutor comes investigating? Remember Waco? This involves Waco.\"\n\nWalker didn't say anything, and she knew she'd touched a nerve. These days everyone in the Bureau considered his or her every action in light of what might happen later if the case, investigation, or operation recoiled on them. She pressed him. \"Just call Farnsworth back and tell him that Browne McGarand, that's Browne with an _e,_ went to Washington with a propane truck. That the hydrogen bomb isn't a nuclear device\u2014it's hydrogen gas, which is what probably did the arsenal power plant. Got all that?\"\n\n\"That explosion at the arsenal? _Hydrogen bomb?_ Are you fucking serious?\"\n\n\"Please, Jim, just make the call. Please? Tell him exactly what I just told you.\" She repeated it. \"If he chews your ass for bothering him, tell him you're so sorry, hang up, log the call, and go back to watching TV. But then if something happens, it's on him, not you, right?\"\n\nWalker reluctantly agreed to make the call and hung up. Janet let out a long sigh: She had done the best she could. If they chose to ignore this, then it would indeed be on their heads. She wondered if she shouldn't put a call into Bureau headquarters operations, but then she realized she didn't have the number. It was in her official phone book at her office, at her ex-office, she realized again. She'd get what any civilian who called the Bureau headquarters would get: a polite tape recording introducing the caller to a menu labyrinth. Life was going to be very different now that she wasn't part of the most powerful law-enforcement organization in the country. Those FBI credentials had given her almost automatic entr\u00e9e into any place or situation. Now she was just Janet Carter, unemployed civilian. She almost felt a bit naked. But at least now Kreiss would have to stop calling her \"Special Agent.\"\n\nShe went into the kitchen, wanting a drink, not coffee, but satisfied herself with the coffee. She was hoping the phone would ring again, with Farnsworth on the other end this time. But he didn't call. That damned Kreiss. She started pacing her kitchen floor. How long should she wait? Kreiss had been pretty specific about her moving quickly to protect his daughter. That might end up being a tough play, especially now that she no longer had any standing as a law-enforcement official. On the other hand, Lynn had seemed pretty strong, and stashing the girl with a bunch of mountain hillbillies might be the perfect answer, especially if they were his friends.\n\nShe got out the area phone book and found a number for an M. Wall on Kreiss's road. The phone rang, but there was no answer. She wrote down the number on a scrap of paper, put it in her pocket, finished her coffee, and went back upstairs to her bedroom. She took out the Detective's Special hidden in her sock drawer and then rooted around in the closet until she found the waist holster for it. She checked to make sure it was loaded, then clipped it on her jeans waistband in the small of her back, pulling the sweater down over it. She checked the dial tone of her phone to make sure she hadn't missed a call, grabbed her car keys, and left for Blacksburg.\n\nForty minutes later, she checked in with the main reception desk at the Montgomery County Hospital and learned that Lynn had been moved from ICU to a semiprivate room on the fourth floor. She took the elevator upstairs and was relieved to see that there was no longer a police officer stationed outside the girl's door. Lynn's door was open, and she appeared to be dozing in the semidarkened room. It was after visiting hours, but the nurse who had been in ICU the day before remembered Janet and waved her by. The girl woke up when Janet came into the room and gently shut the door.\n\n\"Hey,\" Janet said. \"How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"Better,\" Lynn said. \"The deputy got me some real food before he left. Made a big improvement over Jell-O.\"\n\n\"Do you feel up to moving?\"\n\n\"Moving? As in out of here?\"\n\n\"Yes. As in checking out and coming with me. Per your father's urgent instructions. There's someone after him, and that someone may try to take you in order to trap your father.\"\n\n_\"What!\"_ Lynn exclaimed, sitting up in the bed. \"But he's retired. Who's after him? And why?\"\n\n\"Lynn, I'll tell you everything once we're in the car. But your old man gave me the impression we have minutes, not hours. Do you have clothes here?\"\n\nThe girl looked around the room with a bewildered expression. \"I don't know\u2014check that closet.\"\n\nJanet got up and looked in the closet, where there were a pair of battered jeans, a shirt, a jacket, and some hiking shoes. There was no underwear or socks. She brought it all out and then turned away to give Lynn some privacy. The girl got dressed, but it was obvious that she was still pretty weak. Janet had to help her tie the laces on her hiking shoes. She explained quickly about the Agency woman, and she also told Lynn she had resigned from the FBI over the handling of the bombing case. Lynn put her hand on Janet's forearm.\n\n\"Describe the woman,\" she said. Janet did, emphasizing the extraordinary black eyes, pale white face, and the detached, almost lifeless expression.\n\n\"Shit,\" Lynn said. \"I think she's been here. But she was dressed like a doctor. She stopped by my door about, oh, I don't know, an hour ago? I was dozing, but I remember that face. There'd been docs coming and going all afternoon. But I distinctly remember that face.\"\n\n\"What did she do?\"\n\n\"Nothing. She stood in the doorway. I was kind of tired of being poked and prodded all day, so I didn't really open my eyes. But when she looked at me, I had the feeling she knew I was watching her. It was creepy.\" Lynn looked pale and drawn, and her clothes appeared to be too big for her. She sat on the edge of the bed and held herself upright with rigid arms.\n\n\"She's apparently pretty dangerous,\" Janet said. \"I'll tell you more in the car. But first we have to get you out of here and not spend three hours doing paperwork. I\u2014\"\n\nJust then, from outside the room, came the jarring blare of an alarm system, which emitted five obnoxious Klaxon noises, followed by an announcement that there was an electrical fire on the second floor and that all floors were to begin evacuation procedures. Then came five more blats, with the announcement repeated. There was an immediate bustle of people and gurneys out in the hallway.\n\n\"Quick,\" Janet said, going to the door, cracking it, and looking out into the corridor. \"Your father said this is how she'd do it\u2014start a fire and grab you in the confusion.\" Two nurses went hurrying by, one pushing two wheelchairs in front of her, while the other consulted a metal clipboard and talked on a cell phone. There was another wheelchair parked across the corridor from Lynn's door. Janet stepped out, grabbed the wheelchair, and pulled it back into Lynn's room. The fire alarm sounded again, repeating the fire announcement. We got it, we got it, Janet found herself thinking. \"Okay, let's go,\" she said.\n\nLynn sat down in the wheelchair. Janet folded a blanket over Lynn's legs and rolled her out into the corridor. Janet knew the elevators would have gone out of service, which meant that everyone would head for the stairs. They joined a procession of nurses and patients, some ambulatory, some in wheelchairs, and a couple of frightened patients being pushed on gurneys. The movement was orderly toward the end of the corridor, where Janet could see red exit signs. But suddenly, the overhead lights went out and there was a wave of concerned noises up and down the corridor. Small emergency lights along the edge of the ceiling came on, which helped until a sudden and very distinct smell of acrid smoke broke into the hallway from the ventilation ducts. Janet couldn't see smoke, but she could sure as hell smell it, and it was getting stronger. The parade of wheelchairs and patients surged forward. If the noise was any indication, the level of anxiety had gone way up. She could also hear the sounds of angry congestion down at the end of the corridor near the exit doors.\n\nThat did it. Janet turned Lynn around and pushed her rapidly back up the darkened hallway, away from the growing traffic jam at the other end. She went past Lynn's room and came to a cross-corridor intersection. She looked both ways but saw no exit doors. The smell of smoke was getting stronger, and now there was a gray pall building along the ceiling. Janet turned around to look back at the original route. There appeared to be one large elevator still working, and everyone appeared to be trying to get in it or into the stairwell. It was genuine bedlam down there, with both patients and hospital staff shouting at one another.\n\n\"There has to be another exit, at least a stairwell,\" Janet said. \"But I sure as hell don't see it.\"\n\n\"Try the passenger elevators?\" Lynn suggested. Her face was still pale, and she was clutching the blanket as if she was cold.\n\n\"They won't work once the fire alarm's gone off. Not until the fire trucks get here. That's probably what's happened down the hall there.\"\n\nThe smoke was getting strong enough to sting Janet's eyes, but the evacuation effort at the other end of the hall sounded as if it was rapidly turning into a disaster as sixty or so people tried to get patients and wheelchairs into the single elevator or down four flights of stairs. Janet decided to look one more time, but after two more minutes of trotting the full length of the cross corridors, she gave up. There really was only one exit down. As she wheeled Lynn back to the intersection, the smoke was thick enough that she could no longer see what was going on down at the exit stairwell. But she could hear it, and it was not a pleasant sound. The smoke stung her eyes and smelled of burning plastic.\n\n\"We're going to have to find a room with an exterior window and wait this thing out,\" she said. \"The fire department will have a ladder truck.\"\n\nShe took Lynn all the way back to the end of the right-hand cross corridor and began looking into every door that wasn't locked. She finally found a small lab room of some sort that had windows, through which the lights in the parking lot were visible. She wheeled Lynn backward into the room and shut the door. There was a stink of smoke in the room, but it was not as strong as out in the corridor. Sirens were audible outside, although she couldn't see fire trucks.\n\n\"You okay?\" she asked Lynn as she searched for towels or rags to stuff under the door.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm good. I'd help, but my head is spinning a little.\"\n\n\"Sit tight. They said the fire was on the second floor. We have one floor between us and the fire. They'll have it out pretty damn quick. If it's electrical, they turn off the power, and that usually stops it.\"\n\nAs if the building were listening, they heard the sound of big vent fans winding down, and then even the emergency lighting system out in the corridor expired in a clatter of relays as the battery-operated lights came on. Janet saw that Lynn was frightened by this. She tried to reassure her. \"That's good, actually. I think the vent system was spreading the smoke. We should be okay up here. This building is mostly concrete.\"\n\n\"I'm glad we're not down there in that corridor. That sounded pretty ugly.\"\n\n\"Amen. As soon as I seal the door cracks, we'll check out the windows.\"\n\nThere were three large windows along the back wall of the lab. Enough light came through these from the streetlights in the parking lot for them to move around the lab benches without running into things. Janet found some paper towels and stuffed them along the bottom crack of the door. With the ventilation system off, the smoke didn't seem to be getting any stronger, so she didn't bother with the rest of the door. She found a fire extinguisher and set it out on a lab table. Then red strobe lights lit up the ceiling as a fire engine came around the building, stopped, and began setting up in the parking lot. She tried to open the windows but could not budge them.\n\n\"See? They'll have this mess under control pretty quick. I think we'll just wait until we hear firemen out in the hall.\"\n\n\"What about that woman?\"\n\nJanet stopped what she was doing. She'd forgotten all about the Terminatrix. Kreiss had said she might do something like this to cause maximum distraction. She'd forgotten that Lynn thought she'd already seen her in the building. Shit.\n\nShe went over to the door and looked for a lock, but it took a key to lock this door. She put her ear to the opaque glass panel in the upper section of the door and listened, but all she could hear were the sounds of fire-fighting commands over the loudspeakers on the truck outside. There were more strobe lights out in the parking lot now. She looked around for a way to block the door, and found a lab table that could be moved. She slid it across the floor, but its top edge was two inches too tall to fit under the knob.\n\n\"Lift it and wedge it,\" Lynn said. She pushed the blanket aside and got out of the wheelchair. She came over to where Janet was standing, steadying herself on the edge of the lab table. The table, which was six feet long and two feet wide, was made of heavy wood, with a zinc top. The two women lifted the far end and slid the end nearest the door under the doorknob, then gently let the table back down. It wedged under the knob, its back legs off the floor about half an inch. Janet went around and tried the knob, which was now jammed.\n\n\"That'll at least make it feel like it's locked,\" Lynn said. Then she wobbled back to the wheelchair and sat down heavily. Janet saw a sheen of perspiration on the girl's forehead.\n\n\"Good thinking,\" Janet said, a little embarrassed that she hadn't thought of it herself.\n\n\"You got a gun?\" Lynn asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Janet said, patting the lump at the small of her back.\n\n\"Good,\" Lynn said. \"After all this, if that woman shows up, you better use it. She's not coming as the fucking welcome wagon, and I'm not going to be abducted again. Had enough of that.\"\n\n\"We'll wait until we hear firemen out there, then open the door.\"\n\n\"Lots of firemen, okay? That creature looked pretty competent to me.\"\n\n\"Let's move to the back of the room. If she opens that door, we might still fool her.\"\n\n\"Not with that table there,\" Lynn said. \"You go find a good shooting position. I'll be at the other end of the room. Give her two directions to cover.\"\n\nJanet nodded. The room wasn't that big, but the girl was making tactical sense. \"Your father give you lessons?\" she asked.\n\n\"He taught me about situational awareness,\" Lynn said. \"I used to go deer hunting with him. You should see him in the woods. He could whack a deer on the ass with a stick before it knew he was there.\" Lynn gave her a studied look. \"Can you do it?\" she asked. \"Shoot someone? Shoot a woman?\"\n\nJanet hesitated. She wanted to say, Of course I can. I'm a big FBI agent now. But she knew that it wasn't a done deal until she pulled that trigger.\n\n\"Because if you can't, give me the gun. I'm the one she wants. And I'm not going to be taken again, by anybody.\" Lynn's face was set in a mask of determination. Definitely her father's daughter, Janet thought.\n\n\"I can do it if I have to,\" she said. \"But I'm not going to just start shooting the moment someone comes through that door, okay? There are rules about that.\"\n\n\"According to my old man, Agent Carter, the only rule those people have is that there are no rules. If you've got reservations, give me the gun.\"\n\nJanet wished Kreiss were here right now. She assessed the room from a tactical standpoint, trying to remember her training at Quantico. The room had four large lab stands, the single table now wedged against the door, several glass-fronted cabinets against the side walls, the window wall overlooking the parking lot, and two desks with PCs. The corridor outside was still darkened, and the room had lots of shadow zones. Lynn had backed her wheelchair into a shadowed corner next to a lab stand. She was doing something with her blanket. Janet moved to the opposite corner, pulled over a trash can, upended it, and sat down behind a bench. She pulled over a stack of notebooks. If she leaned down, her head would be barely visible from the doorway, and she would have the lab bench on which to steady her gun.\n\n\"You're closer,\" Janet said. \"She shows up, comes in, shout or say something, talk to her. I'll keep down. If she has a gun, use the word _surprise._ And if you see something small and shiny in her hand, close your eyes immediately.\"\n\n\"You said you'd tell me what this is all about?\"\n\nIn low tones, Janet explained about the bombing incident out at the arsenal, the palace games going on among the agencies involved, and what little she knew about the woman pursuing Kreiss. Lynn took it all in without saying anything, leading Janet to wonder just how much the girl knew about her father's former professional life.\n\nThe noise level from outside the building was rising as more fire units came into the parking lot. The sounds of tactical radios could be heard above the steady roar of diesel engines. Janet wondered if the fire was indeed out, and, if so, why there were so many more fire units out there. The air in the room wasn't clear, but it wasn't getting any smokier, either.\n\n\"Maybe we ought to get someone's attention out there,\" she said to Lynn. \"Break a window or something. Except I don't think they'd hear us.\"\n\nBut Lynn was pointing urgently at the door. Janet turned and saw a dark silhouette on the other side of the cloudy white glass. She got down on one knee, then realized she couldn't see what was going on with the door handle. She got back up in time to see the table tremble ever so slightly as whoever was out there tried the handle. She reached behind her and drew the .38, checked the loads, and waited, staying upright enough to watch the door handle. The shadow withdrew and she relaxed fractionally, only to yell in surprise when all the glass in the door shattered and a fully masked fireman thrust a hose nozzle through the broken-out window. Janet stood up to get his attention, but she was stunned when he fired a stream of water full force into her face. Her head snapped back and she went flying back into the corner, her gun skittering across the floor into the opposite corner. She tried to get up, but the stream of high-pressure water kept coming, rolling her around in the corner of the room like a dog under a truck, until all she could do was curl into a ball while yelling at the guy to stop it. Until she realized that a fireman wouldn't have done that.\n\nWhen the stream stopped, she tried frantically to get up, but her eyes were totally out of focus, the eyeballs bruised and stinging from the hard stream of water. By the time she got onto all fours, all she could make out were shapes and shadows, so she couldn't find her gun. Then she heard Lynn scream, followed by a rocket sound from the other side of the room. In another moment, Lynn was at her side, grabbing at her, pulling her upright, yelling, \"C'mon, c'mon, we gotta move.\" She stood up, staggered, and then went with Lynn, blindly banging into the lab stands until they got to the door. Janet felt her foot kick the gun, and she reached down to retrieve it. The table had been shoved aside, so they spilled out into the corridor, which now was murky with smoke. A single portable floodlight stood on the floor, illuminating the doorway. Janet grabbed it and they struggled down the cross corridor through the smoke, keeping low, getting away from the lab room.\n\n\"What did you do?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"Got her with the damn fire extinguisher,\" Lynn said. \"Had it under my blanket. She took her mask off and grinned at me, and I shot her right in the face, and then I threw the damn thing at her. Jesus, I can't breathe in this shit.\"\n\n\"Stay low,\" Janet said. \"There's more air down here.\"\n\nThey stumbled over something on the floor\u2014a fireman who appeared to be unconscious, his rubberized coat, breathing rig, and helmet missing. In the distance was a vertical rectangle of light on the wall.\n\n\"The elevator,\" Janet shouted. \"The fireman brought a, passenger elevator up. Go! Go!\"\n\nLynn staggered through the smoke toward the elevator. Janet grabbed the fireman under his armpits and pulled him backward toward the rectangle of light. Lynn helped her pull the man into the elevator, and then Janet was smacking the buttons to close the door, but nothing was happening.\n\n\"Use the key,\" Lynn said. \"The fireman's key\u2014I think it controls the door.\"\n\nJanet peered down at the console, saw the black cylinder sticking out of the control panel, but she was barely able to read the instructions on operating the elevator with a fire key. Finally, she succeeded in keying the door shut and punching the button for the ground floor. The elevator started down. She slipped down the wall to a sitting position, where she faced Lynn over the prostrate body of the fireman. He looked far too young to be a fireman. She blew a long breath out of her lungs, glad for the marginally fresher air in the elevator.\n\n\"Is he breathing?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Lynn said. \"What do we do now?\" She was still pale-faced, but her eyes were bright with excitement.\n\n\"We get off at the ground floor and get out to the parking lot. Tell someone about him.\"\n\n\"What about her?\" Lynn said, indicating upstairs.\n\n\"I hope she fucking cooks up there. But somehow, I doubt it. And she probably has helpers in the building.\" The elevator slowed as it neared the ground floor. She got back up. \"We're two hysterical women who got trapped upstairs,\" she said to Lynn. \"And now we want out and we don't want to be seen to by EMTs, grief counselors, priests, or anybody else, okay?\"\n\nLynn grinned at her. \"I can do hysterical,\" she said as the door opened. There was a pack of firemen standing right there and Lynn screamed when she saw them. Janet grabbed her and pushed through them. \"One of your guys was down on the fourth floor,\" she shouted. \"We got him in and came down. How do we get out of here?\"\n\nThere wasn't as much smoke on the ground floor and there were more portable lights stabbing through the gloom. The biggest fireman pointed her in the direction of the front doors as the rest lunged into the cab to tend to their downed mate. Janet heard one of them ask, \"Where's his fucking air rig?\" before she and Lynn bolted out the front door and into the blessed coolness of clean, fresh night air. Janet's eyes were just about back to normal, except that she couldn't stop blinking. She realized they were on the wrong side of the building: Her car was parked out back of the hospital. It had probably been visible from the lab windows. She told Lynn to wait and said she would go get her car. Lynn said, \"No way in hell,\" and went right along with Janet.\n\nTen minutes later, they were out on the main drag and headed south to intersect Highway 460. She asked Lynn if she knew the number for Micah Wall, but Lynn did not. Then she remembered she'd written it down, and she went fishing for the scrap of paper. It was soaked but still legible. She dialed the number on her cell phone, but there was still no answer.\n\nShe explained her plan, and Lynn nodded. \"We'll be as safe with Micah's clan as with anyone,\" she said. \"But we have to tell him that she's a revenuer.\"\n\n\"We? The idea is to protect you, Lynn. I promised your father I'd keep you out of the clutches of that creature back there.\" She kept an eye on her rearview mirror.\n\nLynn was grinning again. \"And who's going to protect you? Excuse me for saying so, but you're not very good at this shit, are you?\"\n\nJanet felt a spike of irritation, but then she grinned back. Kreiss had said the same thing. \"Believe it or not, I'm getting better,\" she said. \"You have no idea. But I wouldn't mind knowing where your father keeps that fifty-caliber rifle.\"\n\nKreiss drove the van across the Fourteenth Street Bridge into the downtown District of Columbia. Leaving the bridge, he went straight, past the U.S. Mint and toward the Washington Monument grounds, until he cut Independence Avenue, then went right until he came to Tenth Street. A sign on Tenth Street said NO LEFT TURN, but he ignored that and went up to within one block of Constitution Avenue, where he found a parking place. It was just after 10:30, and what traffic there was consisted mostly of cabs and the occasional long black limousine streaking through the nearly empty streets. A Washington Metro cop car was parked across the street; two cops inside appeared to be reading newspapers. They paid him zero attention when he got out of the van, put on a windbreaker, and walked up the street toward Constitution. It was a cloudy night, with a hint of spring rain in the air. He stopped when he got to the corner.\n\nConstitution Avenue was eight lanes wide, in keeping with its ceremonial use, and pedestrians crossed it at night at their considerable peril. By day, the traffic was usually dense enough that it was almost possible for a pedestrian to walk _over_ the cars with impunity. One block away, diagonally to his right, was the FBI headquarters building, the J. Edgar Hoover Building. It was on Constitution Avenue, between Ninth and Tenth streets, and bounded on the north by Pennsylvania Avenue, which went off at an angle from Constitution. Architecturally, it was an oddity, which Kreiss thought lent a certain historical consistency to the design, given some of the stories that had surfaced about Hoover after his demise. From overhead, the building was shaped like a hollow rectangle, with the top of the rectangle cut back at an angle to accommodate the diagonal run of Pennsylvania Avenue as it diverged from Constitution. The upper floors were cantilevered out over the streets below, which made the building look top-heavy. Kreiss wondered if the architect had been having some fun with the Bureau's design committee. The windows were slightly casemented, giving the building's facade a fortresslike character. Most of the windows were still illuminated, although Kreiss could not see people from where he stood. But one thing was for sure: The building was absolutely made for a truck bomb, because that cantilevered overhang would trap any street-level blast and focus its full force directly into the structure.\n\nMcGarand had come up here in a propane truck. His son had been killed at Waco. His grandson, who had apparently been helping him in whatever nastiness they'd been doing out there at the arsenal, was now dead. Given the appearance of feds at the arsenal and the subsequent explosion of the power plant, McGarand would surely link the feds to Jared's death. In a manner of speaking, he'd be right. He looked around. There were no street barriers to prevent McGarand from driving that truck right up alongside the building and throwing a switch, as long as he was willing to die along with everyone in the building. Suppose they'd been brewing some powerful explosive out there at the ammunition plant. That truck could probably carry eight, ten thousand gallons of propane. Having been a chemical explosives engineer, McGarand was surely qualified to construct a truck bomb. Look what McVeigh and company had done in OK City. If they had filled a propane truck with that much C-4 or even dynamite, it would be enough to put the Hoover Building out onto the Beltway.\n\nEven from half a block away, he could see the array of security cameras on the building's corners, and there were probably others right over his head. Most of downtown Washington was covered by surveillance cameras, and the Bureau's headquarters was undoubtedly well covered. Some steely-eyed agent in the security control room could probably see him even now, standing out here on a street corner at 10:30 at night, looking at the headquarters. He started walking down the block toward Ninth Street, trying to act like a tourist, out from his hotel, taking a walk, getting some fresh air. He looked mostly straight ahead, but he was able to scan the Constitution Avenue side of the Hoover Building without being too obvious about it. When he got to Ninth Street, he dutifully waited for the crosswalk signal. If anyone was watching him, that simple act would brand him as a definite out-of-towner. He kept going east, leaving the building behind him, passing the huge National Gallery of Art on his right, until he reached Fourth Street, at which point, he sprinted across Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues and then walked back northwest up Pennsylvania. This would take him along the diagonal segment of the headquarters building, where once again the pronounced overhang of the upper floors made the place look like a fort. But it was a fort with the same terrible vulnerability to a large truck bomb, and McGarand probably knew this. The question was, Did McGarand plan to make this a suicide bombing, or was he going to try to survive the operation?\n\nHe kept going up Pennsylvania, assuming he had been tracked along the sidewalk by the television cameras, until he was out of sight of the building. Then he cut back down along Fifteenth Street, walking by the White House and the Treasury Building, where the security forces were very visible. All the immediately adjacent streets near the White House were blocked off with large concrete objects in all directions, in celebration, no doubt, of the president's popularity among the lunatic fringe. He kept his hands in his pockets and walked briskly down to Constitution, where once again he waited for the crossing signal.\n\nHe had seen dozens of NO TRUCKS signs on the bridges and along the main downtown streets, but he had also seen a large heating-oil tanker truck, bearing the logo of the Fannon Heating Oil Company, maneuvering into an alley behind the Smithsonian Building institution, across the Mall. So the propane truck would not have been an automatic stop for the local cops. McGarand must have known this, too. But getting a heating-oil truck up next to the Hoover Building would require a ton of paperwork and advanced scheduling. Then a cop car swung in alongside the curb, going the wrong way. The driver's window rolled down.\n\n\"Help you, sir?\" the cop asked.\n\n\"Nope,\" he said. \"Out for a walk. Got a big presentation tomorrow and I'm nervous as hell about it. This area's okay, isn't it?\"\n\n\"If it isn't, we're all in big trouble,\" the cop said, nodding his head back toward the White House. \"You have a good evening.\"\n\nThe light changed and Kreiss crossed Constitution and headed back to the van. The Hoover Building might be the target, but, based on what those cops had just done, it was also within the security envelope of the White House. A thought had occurred to him: Given that McGarand's motive might be Waco, there was another possible target.\n\nJanet drove carefully down the darkened mountain road, alert for deer on the road and lights in her rearview mirror. She had seen neither since turning off 460, and she hoped to keep it that way. Lynn was dozing in the passenger seat, the hospital blanket wrapped around her, despite the car's heater being on. Janet's clothes were just about dry, and she had the .38 out on the seat beside her. The girl had saved them both with that fire extinguisher trick, and perhaps had disabled their pursuer, at least for the night. It would depend on what kind of extinguisher that had been. A blast of CO2 in the eyes ought to do some damage.\n\nShe glanced into the rearview mirror again, but it was still dark. She woke Lynn.\n\n\"Do you recognize where we are?\" she asked.\n\nLynn blinked and watched the headlights for a minute. They descended a steep hill and crossed a creek. Green eyes. blazed at them from the creek bed and Janet tapped the brake. \"Yes, we're about ten minutes from Dad's cabin. Micah's is a half a mile beyond. Nobody following us?\"\n\n\"Not so far,\" Janet said, looking in the mirror again. It would have been pretty damned obvious if there had been a vehicle back there. The night around Pearl's Mountain was clear, but there was no moon, and the surrounding forest was dense and dark. She would not have liked to have driven that road without headlights.\n\n\"We'll have to be careful going up to Micah's,\" Lynn said. \"That's sometimes a crowd that shoots first, asks questions later.\"\n\n\"What are they so sensitive about?\"\n\nLynn laughed. \"They're Appalachian mountain people. They distrust anyone who spends more than an hour a day walking on flat ground. They make their own clothes, grow most of their own food, and hunt down the meat they eat. They also make their own whiskey, grow their own dope, and operate a pretty interesting black economy of barter and trade, for which they pay no taxes.\"\n\n\"Sounds pretty good.\"\n\n\"Well. It does, until you get a close look at sanitary conditions, pediatric health, the death rate from cancers caused by chewing tobacco, the infant mortality rate, the prevalence of incest and other self-destructive practices. Paradise it is not. But they hew to their way of life, and treat outsiders poorly.\"\n\n\"How did your father come to fit in?\"\n\n\"Think about it, Agent Carter. Dad was a professional hunter. He's a loner. He's more than a little scary to be around. I think they recognized one of their own. Plus, he saved Micah Wall's youngest son from a bad situation, literally the day he moved into the cabin.\"\n\nJanet braked hard to allow three small deer to bound across the road. \"What's this guy Wall like?\"\n\n\"Micah Wall is a damned hoot. He's got this dog\u2014it's like a Jack Russell terrier mix? The dog's idea of fun is when Micah brings out this huge old western-style Colt .45 and sits on his back porch. The dog takes off and Micah shoots right in front of it, and the dog chases the bullets when they go ricocheting around the back sheds and all the junk out there. He calls the dog Whizbang.\"\n\nThey went down a long, dark hill, crossed another creek, and began to climb again. As they rounded the hairpin turn that came up just before the entrance to Kreiss's cabin, Janet swore and braked hard again, this time to avoid a large white Suburban that was parked partially across the road, with only its parking lights on. There was barely enough room for her to pass the larger vehicle, and she would have to stop first to manage it. As she got her car stopped, two men got out of the Suburban. They were wearing wind-breakers with ATF emblazoned in reflective tape, khaki pants, and ball caps with the ATF logo. She could see a third man inside the vehicle when they opened their doors. There were several aerials on the top of the Suburban, but no police lights.\n\n\"Shit,\" Janet murmured.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Lynn asked, gathering the blanket around her.\n\n\"Hold on to this,\" Janet said, passing the .38 to Lynn as she rolled the window down. Lynn reached under the blanket and put it in her lap. Then Janet reached back into the seat-back pouch and pulled out her own ball cap, which had FBI emblazoned on it. The men came up on either side of Janet's car, but Janet told Lynn not to roll her window down.\n\n\"What's going on?\" she said to the man who came up to the driver's side. He was a large black man, who kept one hand in his coat pocket. She put both hands on the top of the steering wheel so he could see them.\n\n\"Evening, ma'am. We're with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.\" He glanced nervously at Lynn's hands resting beneath the blanket. Then he saw Janet's ball cap. \"You're Bureau?\"\n\n\"That's right. Special Agent Janet Carter, Roanoke office.\" She normally would have asked for his identification, but since she no longer had her own credentials, she had to finesse it. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"We're on orders to apprehend one Edwin Kreiss. Subject's wanted in connection with a federal homicide warrant. Who is this with you, Agent Carter?\"\n\n\"She's my niece, visiting me from Washington.\" The second man was standing three feet back from the right side of her car, in position to handle any sudden emergencies. Lynn was keeping her mouth shut and her hands were still beneath the blanket.\n\n\"And you're going where?\"\n\n\"I'm going to my uncle's house; that's a mile beyond the Kreiss cabin.\"\n\n\"That. . . place? With all the junk? That's your uncle?\"\n\n\"Micah Wall. Her father, my father's sister's brother. We're not necessarily proud of him, but, well, what I can I tell you? Now you know why I'm assigned to the Roanoke office.\"\n\nHe nodded, obviously trying to sort through the father-brother-sister lineage. \"Would you mind waiting right here, please, Agent Carter? I have orders to call in anyone who comes down this road. There's a pretty big manhunt up for this Kreiss guy.\"\n\nJanet shrugged. \"Sure, but can we make it quick? We're late, and I'm tired of dancing through the damned deer on these mountain roads.\"\n\nHe promised that he'd be right back and walked over to the Suburban, taking down her license plate number as he did so. The other man kept his station on the edge of the road, slightly behind her line of vision. She couldn't see the third man inside the Suburban until the black man opened the door on the driver's side.\n\n\"Hand me the cell phone,\" she said quietly, \"and hit the recall button and then the one for send when you do it. Move slowly.\"\n\nLynn did as Janet asked, and Janet put the phone up to her ear. The man outside shifted his position when he saw Janet's hand leave the steering wheel. The phone rang. C'mon, she thought urgently. C'mon. I need you to answer this time.\n\n\"Micah Wall,\" a gnarly voice spoke into her ear.\n\n\"Mr. Wall, this is Janet Carter. You don't know me, but I'm a friend of Edwin Kreiss. I have Lynn Kreiss in the car with me and we're in trouble with the local law. We're about a mile south of your place, and we need somewhere to hide. And we may have some company on our tail when we get there.\"\n\n\"Lynn Kreiss? She gone missin',\" Wall said. Janet handed the phone to Lynn, then leaned over to listen to what he said. \"Micah, it's me. Dad's in trouble and I need a place to hide.\"\n\n\"How'n I know it's you?\"\n\n\"Lions, Micah. Dad's cabin has lions in it.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it does. C'mon, then. You got cops on your tail?\"\n\n\"ATF.\"\n\nThere was a short laugh. \"The revenuers? Bring 'em bastids _on.\"_\n\nThe connection was broken and Janet put the phone down. The black man was half in, half out of the Suburban, talking on either a radio or a phone. She could see him better now because there was suddenly more light, and then she realized there must be a vehicle coming up behind them, and coming fast. Really fast. She saw the man silhouetted in the right mirror moving back, his hands waving, and decided this was the moment. She slammed the car into drive and accelerated right at the Suburban. The black man looked back and then dived into the front seat as she clipped his door and roared past, fish-tailing all over the place. She thought she heard a gunshot but it was hard to tell with all the gravel flying everywhere. She rounded the next curve as the other vehicle's lights flooded her mirror, but then the hillside obscured them.\n\nShe took her foot off the gas momentarily to keep control of the car as she pushed it up the winding road.\n\n\"How far?\" she asked Lynn, but Lynn didn't answer. She glanced over and saw that Lynn was sagging against the opposite door, a confused look on her face. \"I think I've been shot,\" she said in a weak voice. She pulled her right hand out from under the blanket and it was shiny with blood.\n\nJanet swore and accelerated. \"Where are you hit?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Lynn said in a dreamy voice. \"Back, I think. Side, maybe? It's not too bad. Feels like I got kicked by a small horse.\"\n\nThere was a brief flare of bright lights behind her, but then she rounded the next curve and hurtled past Kreiss's driveway. The next turn again blocked out the pursuing headlights. Another half a mile. She took it up as fast as she could. She couldn't believe it\u2014one of those ATF agents had fired at an FBI agent's car? Even if they had found out she'd quit, they shouldn't have been shooting. Unless\u2014\n\nThe bright headlights came up again in her mirror, and she realized the ATF agents could not have gotten that big Suburban turned around and headed after her that quickly. This was the other car, and she had a sinking feeling she knew exactly who this was. She nearly lost it on the next curve, again shooting gravel and other roadside debris out into the woods.\n\n\"Hang in there, Lynn. Can you reach the spot? Can you feel where you're hit?\"\n\n\"No. I can't\u2014can't move my right arm all that well anymore.\" Her voice was drifting. \"Right side. My side is hurting real bad now.\"\n\nA straightaway opened up and Janet accelerated, trying to think of something she could do to slow down her pursuer. But then she came into the next turn, too fast, spinning the wheel, hitting the brakes, anything to get control, but the car spun out and actually rolled backward for a moment, tires squealing, before shooting ahead again back _down_ the way they had come. She was about to slam on the brakes, but then she had an idea. She doused her headlights and braked to slow down. The sharp curve was dead ahead, behind which the loom of bright white lights was rising. She got it stopped right at her side of the curve, found her .38, and rolled the window back down. Holding one hand on the brights switch, she reached out with her left hand, extending the pistol and resting her wrist on the little metal valley formed by the mirror housing. In the next instant, the pursuing vehicle came sweeping around the curve. Janet flipped on her bright lights and opened fire with the .38, deliberately aiming low, right between the approaching headlights, letting off five rounds before diving down behind the steering wheel. There was a screech of brakes, an instant of silence, and then the roar of the other vehicle's engine racing as it went crashing down into the scrub woods, smashing into rocks and small trees and then flipping partially over on its side in a hail of gravel and a spray of window glass.\n\nJanet raised her head to look. The other car was a hundred feet down the embankment. Its headlights were still on, pointing up into the pine trees. Its left front wheel was spinning furiously. Janet did not hesitate. She turned her car around and sped up the hill as fast as she could go, aware that Lynn wasn't making any noise at all.\n\nBrowne McGarand got back to the propane truck at 11:30, after spending the afternoon and early evening asleep in a motel room. He was dressed in a set of dark coveralls that had lots of pockets. All of the equipment he would need was in the cab of the truck. He had made a detailed map of his approach routes to the ATF building, and he had laid out a couple of possible escape routes once he'd abandoned the truck. The fake delivery manifest was on a clipboard by his side.\n\nThe night was cloudy, and the lights on the Pentagon building were fuzzy in the mist blowing in from the river. There had been no traffic in the approach roads to the Pentagon when he had walked over from Crystal City. He looked around the deserted parking lot and sighed. This was the moment he had been working toward all these months. Now there was nothing more to do than to get going. He got in, started up the truck, backed it across the parking area, and drove out onto the approach road, turning right to go under the elevated highway, then taking the tight ramp up to get on the Fourteenth Street Bridge. Big trucks were generally not allowed into the District, but fuel trucks were an exception. He was hoping not to be stopped. The manifest should get him by a cursory police inspection, as long as the cop didn't ask him for the exemption certificate, which he did not have. Shift change for the Metro Police came at midnight, which was why he had chosen this time to make his approach to the target. Most of the District's patrol cars would be in station house parking lots, refueling for the next shift, all the cops inside.\n\nIn the event, he didn't see a single cop car. He made it onto Massachusetts Avenue, where there was zero traffic. The ATF headquarters building loomed to his left as he turned into the ramp gate for the parking garage next door. It was a tight fit and his rear bumper tagged a concrete abutment, but he just made it. There was an attendant's booth at the bottom of the ramp, but it was dark and unoccupied. He had to get out of the cab to extract the ticket from a dispenser. The side ramp was a two-way ramp, and a sign said to give way to vehicles coming down. The gate dutifully opened when he took the ticket, and up he went in first gear, making a lot more noise than he wanted to. At the top of the ramp, he turned right and headed for the back corner nearest the ATF building. There were some SUVs and a couple of pickup trucks up on the roof deck, more than he had expected. He backed the truck into the corner space along the wall and shut it down. First exposure successfully completed, he thought. He looked over at the ATF building. Only a few of the windows facing him were lighted on his side of the building, but the interiors were above his line of sight. He scanned the side face and corners of the building again for video cameras, but the only one he could see was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. He took out a small pair of binoculars and scanned the top edges of the buildings across the street from the ATF building. As he had suspected, there was one camera jutting out of the middle of the office building directly opposite, but it, too, was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. It might conceivably look into the alley, but the back of the alley was in deep shadow. He cracked his window, then nodded his head when he heard the sound of the vent fans down in the alley below.\n\nHe looked at his watch. It was just after midnight. He sat back in the lumpy seat, listening to the ticking sounds of his diesel engine cooling down. The windows of the cars parked around him were already glistening with nighttime dew. There was a flare of yellow light as the stairwell door opened up at the front of the roof deck and a couple stepped out, arm in arm. They appeared to be wine-happy from an evening in one of the local restaurants. They got into a Toyota Land Cruiser and left, going down the exit ramp. Neither of them had given the big truck parked back in the dark corner a second look. Good.\n\nNow he waited. He wanted to begin dropping the hose sometime around 2:30, when most humans were at their low ebb of performance, and then go down to attach it to the air-intake vent screens in the back of the alley between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. Originally, he had planned to shinny down the hose itself, but he might just walk down the interior exit ramps and see if he could hop a wall at the back of the ground-level parking deck, out of sight of any cameras, of course. In the meantime, he would watch the ATF building for any signs of walking patrols or other security features he might have missed. But he didn't expect any: Above all else, these people were bureaucrats. They would pay close attention to the size of their office and whether or not they got a parking space, but he was pretty sure they weren't too concerned about someone attacking them in their own building. If he could permeate that entire building with hydrogen, the explosion would certainly be memorable. Even if he only got a partial ignition, it would still create a two-thousand-degree fireball in every cubic inch of the affected office spaces. Quicker and somewhat more merciful than what these goons had done to those people at Mount Carmel, who had cooked for a while as the burning building melted down around them, helped along by _tanks,_ for God's sake. Maybe next time they'd be a little more careful, those who survived what he was about to do. He settled back against the seat to watch and wait. He wished he could have done the FBI building, but, short of a suicide attack with something like a truckload of Ampho, there were no good approaches that would let him walk away from it. Not like this one. It was wide open.\n\n## CHAPTER XIII\n\nEdwin Kreiss sat in a locked interview room at the Seventh Street police station, wondering how he was going to get out of this one. He had been standing on the corner of Twelfth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, looking at the ATF headquarters building, when the same cops who had seen him down by the White House drove by, on their way into shift change. The cop car had slowed and then stopped. Kreiss had briefly considered bolting, but he didn't know the streets and alleys around this area of office buildings. They would have had him in a heartbeat for taking off. The car had backed up, and this time the cop's partner got out, one hand on his nightstick, the other parking his hat on his head. The cop driving, who had apparently recognized him, stayed in the car but watched over his shoulder. The cop had asked him politely enough what he was doing up there, and Kreiss literally had no answer. Fortunately, he had left the gun in the van, which he had parked in an all-night parking garage right next door to the ATF building. They'd cuffed him, pat-searched him, and put him in the backseat. They brought him into the police station, presumably on a loitering beef. They had not booked him, however, and he had been in the interview room for what he estimated was almost three hours now. He was no longer cuffed, but they had taken his wallet, watch, and his keys. He would have appreciated some coffee.\n\nHe had not had enough time to do a complete reconnaissance of the ATF building, but it had been pretty clear that it was a softer target than the FBI headquarters. The building was much smaller, and though there were surveillance cameras, the approach to the front of the building was a lot more straightforward than driving down Constitution and dealing with all the traffic islands where the major avenues met. Yes, they would see the propane truck pulling up in front of the building, but, by then, it would be too late. In fact, McGarand would probably have time to park it, set a fuse, and run before the security people in the building could really react. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of the options facing a guy at the security desk when he saw a big truck pull up in front of the building and a guy get out and run. Now what? Who goes down to see what's in the truck, and who goes out the back door at the speed of heat? In the meantime, he was stuck in here, and he had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. And who was going to come through that door next.\n\nThe door finally opened and the desk sergeant admitted two men in suits into the room. Kreiss looked up at them and congratulated himself on being right. One of the men, the larger of the two, sat down across the table from him. The other remained standing. The big man was in his forties. He had a round face that needed a shave, impatient blue eyes, and thinning black hair. He produced a credentials wallet and flashed it at Kreiss.\n\n\"Sam Johnstone, FBI,\" he said. \"And you're Edwin Kreiss. The notorious Edwin Kreiss.\"\n\nKreiss said nothing. Johnstone leaned back in his chair.\n\n\"We've been looking for you, Mr. Kreiss. Or rather, the Roanoke RA has. Seems there're some questions they want to ask you about a homicide down in Blacksburg.\"\n\nKreiss maintained his silence. Johnstone looked over at his partner.\n\n\"You not going to speak to me, Mr. Kreiss?\" he asked.\n\n\"You haven't asked me a question yet,\" Kreiss said.\n\n\"Okay, here's one: Why were you loitering around the ATF headquarters building tonight? After being seen loitering around the White House? I guess that's two questions. Well. And you were also seen on our cameras at Bureau headquarters. You got something going tonight, Mr. Kreiss? You're not still mad at us, are you?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nJohnstone continued to stare at him as if he was an interesting specimen. Then his partner spoke. \"I hear you used to be a spooky guy, Kreiss. That you used to go around hunting people down with your pals out in Langley. That true? You a spooky guy?\"\n\nKreiss turned slowly to look at the partner, who was a medium everything: height, weight, build. Even his soft white face was totally unremarkable. He would make a very good surveillance asset, Kreiss thought. Then he turned back to face Johnstone.\n\n\"He gave me the look, Sam,\" the second agent said. \"Definitely spooky. I think I'm supposed to be scared now.\"\n\n\"Better watch your ass, Lanny. I've heard that Mr. Kreiss here was responsible for a guy shooting his wife and his kids and then himself. He must be really persuasive. That was before the Bureau shit-canned you, right, Mr. Kreiss?\"\n\nKreiss smiled at him but said nothing.\n\n\"Damn, there he goes again, Lanny. Won't talk to me. I think I've hurt his feelings. Of course, here _he_ is, in the local pokey, picked up for loitering in downtown Washington. What do you suppose he was looking for, Lanny? A white guy walking the streets at midnight in the District? Looking for some female companionship, maybe? Or maybe some sympathetic _male_ companionship? Is that it, Mr. Kreiss? All those years of playing games with those Agency weirdos, maybe you got a little bent?\"\n\nKreiss relaxed in his chair and looked past Johnstone as if he didn't exist. They had either planned their little act in advance in some effort to provoke him or they were pissed off at having to come over here at all, just because a routine name check had triggered the federal want-and-detain order. Or both. But so far, they weren't talking about a bomb. Apparently, Janet's attempt to warn them about a bomb threat had gone right into the bureaucratic equivalent of the Grand Canyon. He looked at his wrist, then remembered they'd taken his watch.\n\n\"Got somewhere to go, Mr. Kreiss?\"\n\n\"Am I being charged?\"\n\n\"Nope. You're being _held._ As a material witness to a homicide in Virginia. But before you go back down to Blacksburg, we've been informed that the commissars out in Langley want to have a word.\"\n\nShit, shit, _shit,_ Kreiss thought while keeping a studiously indifferent expression on his face. He had managed to evade the best sweeper in the business, and now he had handed himself over to them on a loitering beef. Johnstone was looking at his watch.\n\n\"Anyway, now you're going to come with us, Mr. Kreiss. First we're going to escort you out to Langley, where some people in their Counterespionage Division want to talk to you. Then you'll be brought back to our Washington field office for further transport down to Roanoke. Cuff him, Lanny.\"\n\nKreiss sighed and stood up, putting his two hands out in front of him. He was much bigger than the agent called Lanny, and he almost enjoyed the sudden wary look Lanny had in his eyes when he approached Kreiss to put plastic handcuffs on his wrists.\n\n\"He looked at me again, Sam,\" Lanny said, trying to keep it going, but Kreiss could hear the note of fear in Lanny's voice. The man was physically afraid of him. That was good. They'd already made their first mistake, cuffing his hands in front of him. Now, as long as they had a car and not a van, and as long as they put him in the backseat and they both rode in front, he was as good as free. He'd do it on the G.W. Parkway, with all those lovely cliffs. He looked down at the floor, putting a despondent expression on his face. He let his shoulders slump and his head hang down a little. Defeated. Captured. Resigned to his fate. He heard Johnstone make kissing noises behind him, and both agents laughed contemptuously. Kreiss sincerely hoped that Johnstone would drive.\n\nJanet was afraid of missing the turn into Micah Wall's place, but when she saw all the junked cars, rusting refrigerators, tire piles, and pallets of assorted junk on both sides of a wide dirt road, she knew she'd found it. She turned the car into the driveway and drove through more junk up toward the lights of a long, low cabin on the hillside. Halfway up the hill, her headlights revealed a telephone pole barring the drive. She slowed and then stopped. Several figures came out of the dark, walking toward her car with rifles and shotguns in their hands. She opened the door and got out, leaving it open.\n\n\"That's Lynn Kreiss,\" she said, pointing into the car. \"I think she's been shot. We need some help.\"\n\n\"Who done it?\" an authoritative voice asked from the darkness.\n\n\"A federal agent who was chasing us. I forced her off the road about a half a mile back there. But if she isn't seriously injured, she'll be here very soon.\"\n\n_\"She?\"_ The voice sounded incredulous.\n\n\"That's right. Please? We need to see to Lynn. She's bleeding.\"\n\nMicah Wall materialized out of the darkness and introduced himself while three men went to the other side of the car and lifted Lynn out. Janet told him her name, shook his hand, and then went around the front of the car. The girl groaned but did not resist when they laid her out on the ground on her uninjured side, illuminated by the wedge of light coming from the car's interior. One of them lifted the back of Lynn's shirt, revealing an entrance wound on the lower-right side of her back. A second man grunted and leaned forward, a long knife suddenly glistening in his hand. Before Janet could object, he probed the wound and then lifted out a spent bullet. The bleeding increased immediately, as if blood had been dammed up behind the bullet, but Janet realized that the wound was not significant. The bullet's passage through the car's metal body and the upholstery must have slowed it down.\n\n\"Less'n there's another one, this ain't too bad,\" the man with the knife said. He had a full black beard and a face like a hatchet. He pulled out a handkerchief, folded it, and pressed it against the wound. Janet hoped it was cleaner than the surroundings.\n\n\"Take her up to the house, Big John,\" Wall said. \"Tommy, Marsh, y'all help him. Git some sulfa dust and a real bandage on that. Rest of us, we gotta git ready to meet this lady badass, supposed to be comin' round the mountain any minute now.\"\n\nJanet told him about the fire in the hospital, and her suspicion that the woman had started it deliberately. Micah nodded slowly, looking around at the dark woods. \"Yonder girl's daddy, he kept some interesting company. Why'n't you leave your car here, go on up to the house? See to the girl. Boys'n me, we'll wait and see what comes along.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" Janet said over her shoulder as she stepped past the telephone pole. \"This woman was Edwin Kreiss's instructor.\"\n\n\"That so?\" Micah muttered. \"Well, then, I wish I had me some of her daddy's lions. Or maybe that there Barrett. Spread out, boys.\"\n\nBrowne McGarand awoke at just before 2:00 A.M. and sat up in the seat. The truck's windows were all opaque with dew. He leaned forward and hit the wiper switch for one cycle to clear the windshield, then rolled down his window. The same windows that had been showing lights before in the ATF building were still lighted, which meant that they had simply left the lights on. He reached up and picked the lens cover off the interior cabin light and took out the bulb. Then he opened the door and got out. The temperature had dropped noticeably, and the night was now clearing. There were no traffic sounds coming from Massachusetts Avenue below, and the remaining cars on the roof deck had fully opaque windows.\n\nHe walked to the back of the truck, stretching his knees, and then to the very back corner of the parking deck. He put his head over the low concrete wall and listened. The sound of vent fans coming from the HVAC building in the alley was much reduced. Good, he thought. They had put the system on low speed for the night. Blocking one of the intake screens wouldn't raise any system alarms at that fan speed. He checked the time again and then went back to the truck. The hose reel on the back unrolled in the direction of the ATF building. There was a modified brass connector nozzle on the end he was going to lower. At the truck end, the hose was not connected at all, leaving it open to the atmosphere.\n\nHe began pulling hose off the reel, being very careful not to damage the modified brass connector nozzle. He hefted it over the concrete wall and let it down into the darkness. After a few minutes, the weight of the hose began to pull itself off the reel and he had to go back to the reel and set the brake halfway to keep it from running away. When a white blaze of paint on the hose showed up, he set the reel brake all the way and then checked the hose. The gleaming brass connector was hanging just a few feet above the surface of the alley. He resumed letting it out until a second blaze of paint marked the length he needed to get the nozzle over to the intake screens. He reset the brake.\n\nHe knew that he was entering the period of greatest exposure, because now he would have to go down, enter the alley, attach the plastic tarp to the one screen to blank it off, and then attach a second tarp, with a nozzle-receiver fitting sewn into its center, to the second screen. At that point, all the intake air for the ventilation system would be sucked through that one fitting. If it wasn't big enough, he should see a lot of strain on both tarps. If he had to, he could peel back two or three corners to keep sufficient air moving. Then he would attach the end of the tanker's hose to the fitting on the tarp and trip the discharge lever. As long as the two tarps and the receiver nozzle let in just enough air, he could go on back up. After that, it would be a matter of choosing the best time to begin sending in the hydrogen gas. He wanted as many of those bastards in the building as possible when the hydrogen reached critical volume, but the more people that were around, the higher were the chances of someone discovering the rig.\n\nIdeally, he wanted the blast to take place as close as possible to 8:00 A.M. Based on his calculations it would take around ninety minutes to fill the building with an explosive mixture, so gas injection had to begin no later than 6:30. It would still be dark at 6:30, but not for long. He wished now he had some way to spark the mixture from outside the building, if for some reason it didn't ignite, but they had not been able to devise anything that would do that. Besides, he did not plan to hang around. He checked his watch again: 2:35. The minutes were passing slowly. He wanted to get going, but he knew that he would have to be patient and flexible. Hooking up the hose would be relatively easy: If they hadn't spotted the hose coming down into the alley, they probably would not spot him. Then it would all depend on the whole lash-up remaining invisible until 8:00 A.M. He made sure the hose brake was secured, then unstrapped the five-gallon gasoline can he'd mounted on the back step of the truck. He took it to the cab, set it down in the middle of the bench seat, and taped on the ignition device, setting it for 8:00 A.M. That would take care of the truck if the building explosion didn't. Then he closed the doors, locked them, walked over to the interior exit ramp, and started down into the darkness of the parking garage.\n\nIt was just after 2:00 A.M. when the two agents finally signed Kreiss out of Metro Police custody. After retrieving the envelope with his wallet, watch, and keys, they escorted him out of the building. Then the agents put him into the backseat of their four-door government sedan, which was parked in the lot for patrol cars at the side of the station. They made him sit right in the middle of the backseat, and they kept him cuffed. Lanny buckled both rear seat belts around him, so that if he tried to move, there would be two latches he would have to undo. Kreiss was perfectly happy with this arrangement, and even happier that there had been no hookup wire to which he could have been cuffed in the backseat. While Lanny waited in the car with Kreiss, Johnstone went back into the precinct station and came back out with two coffees. The two G-men sat in the car with their coffee for a few minutes, making a point of enjoying it while Kreiss went without. Then Lanny called into their operations center on the car's radio and reported that they were transporting the subject to Langley, as per previous direction. The ops center acknowledged and told them to report when delivery had been made. Lanny rogered and hung up.\n\nJohnstone drove while Lanny rode shotgun, turned partially in his seat to keep an eye on Kreiss. It was Johnstone who kept peppering Kreiss with mildly insulting questions about why he was in town, what he had done that made the Agency people so anxious to see him, and what his part in the Blacksburg homicide had been. Lanny seemed to enjoy it all, but he didn't say anything. Kreiss remained silent, his eyes closed, as if he were trying to sleep. Johnstone gave up after a while and concentrated on his driving. He took Constitution Avenue down to Twenty-third Street, drove past the Lincoln Memorial, and then went over the Memorial Bridge into Arlington. Kreiss kept track of where they were while he made his mental preparations.\n\nWhen Johnstone turned down the ramp that led to the northbound George Washington Parkway, Kreiss began to reposition himself, adjusting his body in tiny increments. By now, Lanny had turned back around and was bitching to Johnstone about duty schedules back at FBI headquarters. Kreiss, who had driven the G.W. Parkway a few thousand times during his career, needed only an occasional glance out of slitted eyes to know precisely where they were. The G.W. was a four-lane divided parkway, climbing up through the Potomac palisades toward McLean and Langley in northern Virginia. Because they were going northwest up the Potomac River, they were on the river side of the parkway. To the left was the low, stone-walled median and the eastbound roadway, bordered by a band of large trees. To his right were more trees, through which the Potomac was clearly visible, initially right alongside, and then increasingly below them as the parkway climbed some two hundred feet above the river's rocky gorge.\n\nKreiss was not going to allow himself to be taken into the Agency headquarters. He knew what could happen there, and where he might be taken from there. Someone pretty senior in the Bureau must have reached an understanding with the Agency hierarchy. Or perhaps higher, he thought, like maybe someone at Justice. This little trip to Langley wasn't about any bomb plot. This was about payback for Ephraim Glower. It took real juice to launch Misty, so until he knew that Lynn was truly safe, he was going to do whatever it took to remain free and operational. If he could prevent whatever Browne McGarand was planning in the District, fine, although he hadn't actually promised Carter anything. But she promised you something pretty important, he reminded himself. Either way, he would _not_ allow these bozos just to hand him over like a lamb to the slaughter to a government agency that had every motive to make him disappear. He had personally delivered one individual to the federal maximum-security prison in Lewisburg, someone he knew for a fact had never seen the inside of any courtroom, or the outside world, ever again.\n\nWhen they passed the first scenic overlook turnout, he got ready. There was another overlook in exactly one mile, right below the Civil War park where the president's lawyer had been found shot to death in a supposed suicide. Lanny was complaining about getting stuck on midnight-to-eight shifts twice a month when other, more junior agents were getting tagged only once a month, especially if they were female. Johnstone appeared to be tuning out Lanny's monologue, but he kept up a steady stream of uh-huhs while he drove and sipped his coffee. Kreiss could see that he was doing an even sixty-five, ten miles over the posted speed limit, but entirely normal for the parkway, especially at 2:30 A.M. Any Park Police cruiser sitting out there would recognize the sedan as a government car. Johnstone had his left hand on the wheel and his right hand down in his lap, holding the paper coffee cup.\n\nKreiss began surreptitiously tugging on the seat belts, taking out all the slack until they were almost painfully tight around him, the two shoulder straps cutting into his chest in an X configuration. When he saw the sign for the next scenic overlook, he sat way back in the seat and tensed his legs. When he saw the actual turnout coming up on the right, he raised his right leg and, pivoting on his left buttock, leaned left and kicked up to strike Johnstone under his right ear as hard as he could. Johnstone gave a grunt and pitched to the left, against the door, which had the effect of turning the car to the left, directly toward the stone wall in the median. Lanny dropped his coffee, raised both hands, and yelled, \"Look out!\" to the stunned Johnstone, and then grabbed the wheel, yanking it hard right. The car swerved back across the two lanes, tires screeching, until the left-front tire failed and the car whip-rolled three times down the outer northbound lane in a hail of glass and road dust. Then it hit a small tree, spun around the tree on its side, and slid down the embankment and into the scenic-overlook parking lot fifty feet below the level of the roadway. It righted itself as it slalomed into the parking lot and then crunched partially through the low stone wall overlooking a sheer cliff that fell all the way to the Potomac.\n\nKreiss, who had been prepared for the crash and was double-belted, was unhurt. He popped the latches on the seat belts and lunged forward to grab Lanny around the throat with his cuff chain. Lanny, stunned by the violence of the crash and entangled in his deflated air bag, did not resist as Kreiss hauled him back over the seat and stuffed him down into the space between the backseat and the floor. He checked on Johnstone, who appeared to be unconscious and pinned beneath the headliner of the car, which had been smashed down on him in the crash. His face was obscured by his deflated air bag. The front windshield was gone, as were all the windows, and there was a strong smell of gasoline in the car.\n\nKreiss fished in Lanny's suit pockets for the cuff key. When the agent stirred, Kreiss hit him once in the temple with a raised-knuckle fist, and the man sagged. Kreiss got the key, unlocked the cuffs, threw them out the window, and climbed over the front seat to retrieve the envelope with his own wallet and keys from the floor. He reached into Johnstone's suit jacket pocket and took his credentials. He left their guns alone. He turned off the ignition and threw the car's keys over the wall. He tried the right rear door, but it was jammed. He climbed out the right-front window and dropped to the pavement, shaking off bits of glass from his clothes. He found himself standing in a spreading stain of gasoline. He swore and then spent the next five minutes dragging the two unconscious agents out of the car and fifty feet back away from the wreck. Both had been wearing seat belts and neither one appeared to be bleeding or otherwise seriously injured. They are assholes, he told himself, but they are essentially just working stiffs doing their jobs. There is no reason for them to die for their incompetence. He retrieved the handcuffs from the ground and cuffed their wrists together through the iron rail of a park bench that was cemented to the ground. He took their guns and threw them onto the floor of the car's backseat.\n\nHe went back into the car one more time and ripped out the radio handset, throwing it over the cliff. He saw their car phone dangling by its floor-mount wire. The light was still on in the dial. He hesitated and then punched in Janet Carter's number in Blacksburg. The phone rang several times but then hit voice mail. He hung up, ripped out the handset, and threw it over the cliff. Then he brushed himself off again, suddenly aware that there really was a hell of a lot of gasoline on the ground. He started up the overlook exit ramp. He hoped the car would not burn, because that would attract immediate attention, and he needed some time to get back down to the vicinity of Key Bridge. There was a hotel right near the parkway ramps at the bridge, and hopefully he could get a cab back into the District. The good news was that it was all downhill.\n\nHe got up to the parkway and started jogging back down the northbound lane. He would have plenty of time to duck down behind the stone walls if he saw approaching headlights. He would try to get a call through to Carter again from his van. Right now, everything would depend on how long it took for the Park Police to find the wreck. He watched for signs of a fire as he jogged back down the empty roadway, but the woods behind him remained dark.\n\nJanet Carter came out of the tiny bedroom where Lynn lay, relieved that the bleeding had stopped. An elderly woman who smelled of lilacs had cleaned the wound with soap and water, then applied some yellow powder and a clean bandage. There was a large bruise around the wound, but the bullet had apparently hit a rib and stopped. Lynn had remained awake and had gasped when the soap and water hit, but the old woman had given her some hot herbal tea, and now she was asleep.\n\nTo Janet's surprise, the interior of the log house was spotlessly clean, in sharp contrast to all the junk piled around the front entrance and out behind the cabin. She couldn't tell how many people actually lived in the cabin, which appeared to be a central log house with a conglomeration of additions and extensions. It was much bigger than it had appeared from the road. The woman, who had not spoken since Janet had followed the men carrying Lynn into the house, led her back to a kitchen and family room area. The kitchen smelled of coffee and baking bread, and Janet saw three more loaves of bread rising in an oven next to the stove. There was another small bedroom and bath behind the kitchen, and the woman indicated Janet could go in there and clean up. She closed the wooden door behind her and went into the bathroom to wash her hands and face. She had some bloodstains on her hands and her face was sooty. She cleaned up as best she could and then went back into the kitchen. Micah Wall was there, taking off his jacket. A semiautomatic shotgun was parked on the wall next to an ancient-looking refrigerator.\n\n\"What happened?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"Took the pickup down the road, and they was a bunch of mean-lookin' gov'mint boys and some cars pulled up where the other one went into the woods. One of 'em told me to turn around, take my boys, and git outta there. He had him a Steyr machine pistol, so we done like he said. They friends of yours?\"\n\n\"Nope,\" Janet said, surprised to hear this old mountain man talking about Steyr machine pistols. \"How many of them were there and how were they dressed?\"\n\n\"Couldn't rightly tell. They was lotsa of headlights, so most of 'em was in shadow. The one doin' the talkin' was wearin' sunglasses. Big fella.\"\n\n\"But not uniforms? Not deputies?\"\n\n\"No, hell no. We know all the deputies in these parts. No, these boys wasn't from round here. Now your car's got five bullet holes in it. Here's a coupla the rounds we dug out. How's about you tell me what's goin' on here with that girl yonder?\"\n\nJanet explained who she was, and how she came to be flying through the night with federal agents in hot pursuit. The old woman brought them both a cup of coffee and then sliced some fresh bread, which she put on the table with a crock of butter and another one with preserves. Micah indicated Janet should eat something, and she ate three slices of the fresh bread before stopping short of eating all of it. Micah took it all in, nodding his head a couple of times when Janet described Ransom and his partner and told about the incident with the Bronco. When she was finished, he just sat there, staring down at the table, as if lost in thought. Then the phone rang. He looked at Janet with raised eyebrows, but Janet just shook her head. He went over to the wall-mounted phone, answered, and listened for a moment. Then he handed the phone to Janet with an amused expression in his eyes.\n\n\"Yes?\" she said.\n\nThe woman's voice was as cold as she remembered it. \"Not bad for an amateur,\" she said. \"But you can't shoot for shit.\"\n\n\"I was aiming low, between the headlights,\" Janet said. \"Otherwise, you'd be dead.\"\n\n\"You put them all through my windshield. Like I said, you can't shoot for shit. I have some news for you.\"\n\n\"You shot Kreiss's daughter,\" Janet interrupted. There was a second of silence on the line.\n\n\"No, I didn't,\" the woman said. \"I'm not carrying.\"\n\nJanet didn't know what to say. \"Then who\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you recover a bullet?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Good. Keep it. It might give you some leverage later. But in the meantime, I thought you'd want to know. We have Kreiss. The Bureau picked him up in Washington and is delivering him to Langley. So I don't need the daughter anymore. You can relax.\"\n\n\"Relax. Right,\" Janet said.\n\n\"Suit yourself, Carter, I no longer care. But the ATF people whose roadblock you ran might.\"\n\n\"The ones who shot at my car and hit a kid?\"\n\n\"That's why I told you to keep the bullet. If you get your tail feathers in a crack over it, find a reporter, tell your tale. The ATF hates that. And don't let your famous Bureau lab get the bullet; their ballistics work goes to the highest bidder these days. But you probably knew that.\"\n\nThe dial tone came on and the woman was gone. Janet, her face a bit red, slowly hung up the phone.\n\n\"Friend of yourn?\" Micah asked.\n\n\"No,\" Janet said. \"She was the one who set the hospital on fire and then chased us up here. But she says she didn't do any shooting. That it was a bunch of ATF guys who did that.\"\n\n\"Now, that'll please brother Edwin no end,\" Micah said. \"Revenuers shootin' at his little girl.\" He shook his head slowly. \"Mama says the girl's goin' to be all right; we don't have to get a doctor into it, less'n we see proud flesh.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we do that anyway?\"\n\n\"Doc sees a bullet wound, he's obliged to call local law,\" Micah said. \"Might want to wait on that.\"\n\nJanet sat back down at the table. She was aware that there were other men in the cabin, out in the front rooms. She was suddenly very tired. \"They, the feds, already know it was me in that car. They may or may not know who Lynn was.\" She stopped, and then it penetrated\u2014what the woman had said about Kreiss. \"Oh, _hell\"_ she said. \"She said they had Kreiss. Up in Washington, She said the FBI had him and was taking him to Langley. Where _she's_ from.\"\n\nMicah obviously didn't know what she meant by Langley, but then the phone rang again. \"Grand Central Station,\" Micah muttered, reaching for it. He said his name, then smiled. \"She's right here.\" He handed her the phone. This time, it was Kreiss.\n\n\"Where are you?\" she said in a rush.\n\n\"I'm in a pay phone. I don't have much time. Where's Lynn?\"\n\n\"She's here and we're safe, for the moment anyway.\" She saw Micah shaking his head slowly. He was warning her not to tell him his daughter had been shot. She nodded. \"A lot's happened, but we're safe. But that woman just called, said the Bureau had you.\"\n\n\"They had me, and then I had them. Look, I've got to get back to my vehicle, and then I'm coming down there. I don't know where McGarand is. He and his truck have disappeared.\"\n\n\"That woman said she was no longer interested in Lynn because the FBI was bringing you in\u2014to Langley. When she finds out\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's why I'm leaving here. Soon.\"\n\n\"And there's no sign that McGarand is going to bomb something up there? Like Bureau headquarters?\"\n\n\"I looked. I looked for his truck at all the Washington truck terminals. Then I went over into town and looked around the Hoover Building, and then I went up to the ATF headquarters building. There was no sign of the propane truck.\"\n\nJanet gnawed her lip. The warnings. All for nothing, apparently.\n\n\"Let me talk to Micah,\" Kreiss said.\n\nJanet handed the phone back to Micah, who listened for a long minute. \"I can do that,\" he said. \"Keep your powder dry.\" Then he hung up.\n\n\"What?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"We need to clear on outta here,\" Micah said, getting up. \"First, we need to git you and the girl in there some warm clothes.\"\n\n\"Can she be moved?\"\n\n\"Seein' that's just a flesh wound, yes. Even if it wasn't, old Ed says we gotta move. Now. Come with me.\"\n\nKreiss had the cab let him out at an all-night caf\u00e9 one block up from Constitution Avenue, and four blocks away from the parking garage where he'd put the van. It was 5:45 when a yawning waitress brought him black coffee and a stale-looking Danish. He had taken a corner booth back from the door and was yawning himself. Outside, the first headlights of Washington's morning rush hour were starting to appear, and he could see even more vehicles down on Constitution. It didn't surprise him: Washington's traffic was so bad that many office workers went to work in the early-morning darkness just to avoid it. By 7:30 most mornings, a large majority of government workers were already in the office, stalking the coffee pot. His plan was to eat his fat pill, get some caffeine in him, and then go retrieve the rental van. Given the fact of rush hour, his best plan was to sleep in the van until the traffic crush was over, then hit the road south for Blacksburg. He would simply take the van, and leave his pickup truck at the motel. If they were looking for him, the cash-rental van would buy him an extra day, whereas his own truck might be picked up pretty quick.\n\nHe thought about driving down by the Hoover Building and waving to the cameras. Then he thought about Misty getting the word that he'd escaped again. Micah and his boys would provide as much safety as anyone could, especially on their home ground on the slopes and crags of Pearl's Mountain. Misty and her associates were pretty damned lethal in a city, but Micah might be a good match for them in the Appalachian woods, especially once he got them to one of the caves. He decided to get going, before those same two cops came in for morning coffee and busted him again.\n\nHe paid up and went out onto the sidewalk. There were no pedestrians, but definitely a lot more traffic. He walked up three blocks to Massachusetts Avenue and then over one to the parking garage. There was a line of cars turning in to both the street-level entrance and the ramp, probably deskbound revenuers from the ATF building right next door. A bearded and turbaned Sikh carrying a rolled-up _Washington Post_ and a paper cup of coffee was unlocking the ticket booth as Kreiss walked into the garage, but the man ignored him. Kreiss climbed the stairs and came out on the level just beneath the roof. His van was parked in the back-right corner, mostly out of habit. His level wasn't full yet, but it was getting that way. It was 6:50; in another thirty minutes, the Sikh would be putting a GARAGE FULL sign out infront. He unlocked the door, climbed in, and set the locks again. The rear seat folded down, so he was able to create a good-enough sleeping pad back there. The left windows of his van were right up against the outside wall, so incoming vehicles could park only on his right side. He draped a jacket up over that side's window and stretched out. The first light of dawn was coming through the apertures between the concrete support columns, and he could see people moving around in the ATF building right next door. Their offices looked like every other government hive: computer cubes, plants in corners, conference rooms, pacifying pastel dividers, vision-impairing fluorescent lights, and all the coat-and-tie drones, moving slow until their morning caffeine fix took hold. He had spent many, many hours in similar circumstances between operational missions, and he did not miss it.\n\nHe was just closing his eyes when he caught sight of something odd in the space of daylight next to the window. It looked like a hose, a big black reinforced rubber hose, and it was just barely moving from side to side in some invisible updraft. He closed his eyes anyway, then opened them again. What the hell was a hose doing there? He stared at it again, trying to see if he had imagined movement, but it did move, as if it were dangling down from the deck above him. He sat up and looked at it again. There was something familiar about it, but he couldn't place it. Just then a vehicle came by in front of the van, stopped, and then laboriously backed in alongside his vehicle. He lay back down instinctively, but the jacket blocked the view of the people getting out. Obviously a car pool; the men were finishing up an argument about the Washington Redskins, or Deadskins, as one of the men called them. They extracted briefcases, closed and locked the doors, and then disappeared toward the exit stairs. Kreiss sat back up again when they were clear. His eyes were stinging and he was dead tired, but there was something about that hose that bothered him.\n\nHe slid into the front seat, looked around at the nearly full parking deck, and then got out on the driver's side. The hose came straight down from above, within easy hand reach across the low concrete wall. He reached out and touched it, surprised at how cold it was. There was a sheen of moisture on the rubber, and a shiny metal collar just out of reach had a definite rime of white frost on it. When he stretched out to look up, he saw that the hose went up one more level to the roof deck, then disappeared. He looked down. The hose went straight down, then across a small, still, dark alley, and disappeared behind what looked like a small utility building at the back of the alley. The utility building appeared to be connected to the ATF building. As he listened, he heard the low whistling noise of vent fans rising from the alley.\n\nHe leaned back into the garage and looked across the space between the ATF building and the garage. He could see right into a bank of offices. He watched office workers arrive in their cubes, stash lunch bags in office refrigerators, and stand around with cups of coffee, talking to their cell mates. He saw one middle-aged woman come into what was obviously an executive corner office, turn on the lights, close the door, and sit down in her chair, where she proceeded to hike up her skirt and make a major adjustment to her panty hose. None of them so much as glanced out their windows, even though it was now getting light all around. Great situational awareness, he thought. He saw no more vehicles coming up into his parking level, so he went over to the exit stairs and climbed up to the roof. Once out on the roof, he looked around and then remembered where he had seen that hose before: on the green-and-white propane truck driven by Browne McGarand, which was now parked in the corner of the roof deck.\n\nHe didn't bother even going over there. He could see that there was no one in the truck, and he knew instinctively that whatever had been in that truck was probably now inside that office building next door. He ran back to the exit stair on the roof and started down, two steps at a time. He hadn't really figured out what he was going to do when he got down to the street: run like hell, or warn them? And would they listen?\n\nHe was slowed by morning commuters on the stairs as he neared the ground level, and he rudely pushed past them to a chorus of \"Hey, watch it\" from the people he jostled. He kept saying, \"Sorry, sorry,\" but he also kept going. When he got outside to the street level, he stopped. The main entrance to the ATF building was a glass-walled lobby, and he could see the security people at their counter, next to X-ray machines and metal detectors. One of the men whom he had pushed by in the stairwell came abreast and gave him an angry look, but Kreiss ignored him. They were all in coats and ties; he was in slacks, a shirt, and a windbreaker. In about a minute, one of those angry ATF agents was going to ask him what he was doing out here. He looked into the alley. The hose was still there, barely distinguishable from the morning shadows. He wanted to go back there, make sure it had been routed into the ventilation building before calling a warning. But there might not be time.\n\nHe turned around to face the stream of people coming from the garage to the building. When one of the approaching men, who looked like a midgrade bureaucrat, gave him a quizzical look, he put up his hand to stop him and then flashed Johnstone's FBI credentials.\n\n\"Johnstone, FBI,\" he announced to the startled man. \"Would you please ask one of the security guards to come out here? I think there's a problem in that alley.\"\n\nThe man looked into the alley and then back at Kreiss, and then he said, \"Sure, wait here.\" Kreiss stepped out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and watched through the glass as the man went inside and talked to the security people at the counter, who all looked back through the glass at Kreiss. One of them, a young black man, put on his hat and started around the counter while the guard next to him picked up a phone and began talking. Kreiss's messenger put his briefcase on the X-ray machine's belt and stepped through the metal detector, taking one last look at Kreiss before disappearing into the building. The security guard came through the front door and walked over to him, carrying a small radio in one hand and keeping his other hand near the butt of his gun. Kreiss made sure his hands were visible, and he held open the credentials so that the approaching guard could see the big black FBI letters. He closed it before the guard could get a close look at Johnstone's picture, which wasn't even a passing match for Kreiss's face.\n\n\"Back there, in the alley. We've had a report of a possible bomb attack on your building. See that hose?\"\n\nThe guard, who wanted another look at those credentials, locked on to the _b_ word. \"Say what? A bomb? Where?\"\n\n\"See that hose\u2014there, all the way at the back of the alley? Look up\u2014it's coming down from the top deck of the parking garage. There's a truck up there on the top deck. A propane truck. That hose looks like it's going into your building's ventilation system\u2014see it?\"\n\nThe guard looked, frowned, and then nodded. \"Yeah, I see it. But wait a minute. Propane? That shit stinks. We're not smelling anything inside.\"\n\n\"There's a tanker truck on the roof of that garage that's pumping something into your building. It might not be propane. Don't you think you ought to check that out?\"\n\nKreiss stood there while the bewildered guard spoke on his radio to someone inside. As he held the radio up to his ear for a reply, three more guards came running out of the lobby with guns drawn, headed straight for Kreiss. They were not smiling.\n\nJanet held on to Lynn's hand as Micah led them through the rising dawn up into the woods behind the cabin. The forested slopes of Pearl's Mountain rose above them like some brooding dark green mass. The rock face that overlooked Kreiss's place was only partially visible from this angle. Lynn was walking better than Janet had expected. Micah was following a path that led diagonally across the slope into the nearest trees, a kerosene lantern in his hand.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Janet asked.\n\n\"This here's Pearl's Mountain,\" he replied over his shoulder. \"Limestone. Full of caves. We got us a hidey-hole up there.\"\n\n\"But if we can walk to it, so can anyone coming after us,\" she protested.\n\n\"They can, but then they gotta find the right one. Harder'n it looks.\"\n\nThey entered the trees, and the path diverged in three directions. Micah stopped. \"Y'all take that left one there. Follow it 'til it hits the bare rock. Then wait there. I'll be along directly.\"\n\nThey did as he said, arriving at a sheer rock wall fifteen minutes later. Janet looked around for a cave entrance but found nothing. There was a broken segment of dead tree trunk propped against the rock, and they sat down on the log to rest. The climb had been steep, and Janet was a little winded. Lynn was taking deep breaths and holding her side.\n\nMicah showed up five minutes later, dragging his jacket behind him by one of its sleeves. He put the jacket on the ground and grinned at them.\n\n\"See it?\" he asked.\n\nJanet and _\"Lynn_ looked around but saw nothing that looked like a cave entrance. Janet shook her head.\n\n\"Mebbe that's cuz y'all are sittin' on it,\" he said, pointing at the log. They got up and Micah rolled the log sideways, revealing a narrow storm-cellar door laid flat into the ground. He tugged on a rope handle, and the door opened, exposing steps cut into the dirt. Holding the lantern high, he went down into the hole. Janet let Lynn go next and then followed. Micah told her to leave the door open.\n\nThe steps ended eight feet underground in a narrow passage of what felt like packed earth. Janet, less than thrilled to be underground, hurried to keep up with Micah's lantern. The air in the passage was dank and still.\n\nKreiss folded his arms across his chest as the three guards hurried over. One of them appeared to be older and in charge.\n\n\"You the guy claiming to be Special Agent Johnstone of the FBI?\"\n\n\"That's what he said to me, Sarge,\" the man with the radio said. He had backed away from Kreiss.\n\nThe sergeant pointed his gun at Kreiss. \"We called the Bureau ops center,\" he announced. \"And they said Agents Johnstone and West had been involved in a vehicle accident this morning while transporting a prisoner. That would be you, am I right?\"\n\nKreiss nodded but said nothing. The flow of pedestrian traffic parted visibly around the scene on the sidewalk. The sergeant had everybody go into the lobby to get this scene off the street. Once inside the lobby, he directed one of the guards to search Kreiss for weapons.\n\n\"Sarge, he says there's some shit going down in the building. Like a bomb. Says that hose back there is pumping gas into the building.\"\n\n\"What fucking hose?\" the sergeant demanded. The guard took him over to a window and pointed back into the alley. A second guard told Kreiss to raise 'em while he patted him down for weapons. Kreiss obliged, trying to remain oblivious to all the stares from people going through the security checkpoint. He could hear the guard telling the sergeant about the propane truck.\n\nThe sergeant consulted by radio with the main security office upstairs. Kreiss put his hands back down while the guard who searched him examined Johnstone's credentials.\n\n\"Roger that,\" the sergeant said into his radio. He looked at Kreiss. \"Central says there _is_ a tanker truck up on the garage. What do you know about this?\"\n\n\"I told the guard here: I think that truck is pumping an explosive gas into your building's vent supply, via that utility building back there. In a nonzero amount of time your building here is going to vaporize when some idiot lights up a cigarette in a bathroom. Don't you think you ought to clear the building?\"\n\n\"Not on your say-so, bub; you're the one impersonating a feeb.\"\n\nA large gray-headed man stepped out of the gathering crowd and approached the guards. \"What's happening here, Sergeant?\" he asked. The guards all appeared to recognize the man, and people had let him through quickly. The sergeant told him what was going down, including what Kreiss had said about a possible bomb in the building.\n\n\"Not _in_ the building,\" Kreiss said. \"Your building _is_ the bomb. I believe that truck up there is pumping some kind of explosive vapor into your vent system. While we stand here and talk.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" the man asked. He spoke with the authority of someone who was used to getting immediate answers.\n\n\"My name is Edwin Kreiss, and I'm a civilian. Who are you?\"\n\n\"I'm Lionel Kroner, deputy associate director. I've heard your name.\"\n\n\"Perhaps in connection with an explosion investigation down in Ramsey, in southwest Virginia. The power plant? The hydrogen bomb?\"\n\nKroner's eyes widened at the mention of a hydrogen bomb. Some of the people who heard Kreiss use that term were obviously shocked, and a murmur swept the crowd. \"Yes, we sent an NRT on that,\" Kroner said. \"Your name came up in a briefing. What was your involvement?\"\n\n\"Nothing direct, but I know about it. And the guy who did that is probably trying to duplicate what happened down there in your building here. While we stand here and talk.\"\n\nThe sergeant, who had been on the radio some more, said he had asked Central to get the lab people on the fourth floor to turn on an explosimeter to see if there was anything present in the building. \"Nobody smells anything,\" he added.\n\n\"They won't, if he's using hydrogen,\" Kreiss said. \"It's odorless, tasteless, and completely invisible. Mr. Kroner, do you have a public-address system in this building?\"\n\n\"Yes, Central does.\"\n\n\"Can you get everyone to open their windows?\"\n\nKroner blinked but then shook his head. \"We can't,\" he said. \"None of the windows in this building open.\"\n\n\"Then clear the building. Now. And tell people to run like hell once they're out of the building, because there's going to be lots of flying glass. And if you won't clear the building, I'm going to leave.\"\n\n\"Bull _shit_!\" the sergeant said. The other guards still had their weapons drawn; they spread out a little, looking to their sergeant for instructions.\n\n\"Sarge, Sarge!\" the black guard said urgently, pointing to his radio. \"Lab says there's an explosive vapor in the building. They recommend an immediate evacuation.\"\n\n\"You going to pop a cap in here, Sergeant?\" Kreiss asked. \"Make a little flame?\"\n\nHe turned to leave. Some of the guards went into shooting stance, but Kroner waved them down. The sergeant started to protest, but Kroner ordered him to be quiet and get him a microphone patch into the building's PA system. \"Mr. Kreiss,\" he called, as Kreiss neared the doors. He stopped and turned around. \"Thanks for the warning,\" Kroner said. \"But we _will_ see you later. That's a promise.\"\n\n\"If any of you are still alive,\" Kreiss said, which shut everyone up for the moment.\n\nKreiss nodded at him and stepped through the door. See me later? Not if I can help it, he thought. It was all he could do not to run like hell. Behind him, he heard Kroner's voice identifying himself on the building's PA system and ordering an immediate evacuation of the building, instructing people to walk to the nearest stairs and to do nothing\u2014repeat, _nothing_ \u2014that might generate a spark. Kreiss hurried back into the parking garage to retrieve his van. When he reached the street level, the turbaned attendant was out on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what was happening next door. Kreiss told him there was a bomb in the ATF building. The attendant looked at Kreiss, back at the ATF building, and then took off smartly down the street. Kreiss swore, opened his door, and reached into the attendant's booth to trip the gate.\n\nIt took him ten minutes in morning traffic to get three blocks away from the ATF building, at which time he heard the first sirens. Three Metro cop cars with their blue lights flashing came racing past him into Massachusetts Avenue to block off the side streets. He pulled over toward the curb to let them go by. Pedestrians on the sidewalk paused to stare at all the cop cars, wondering if the president was coming. Fucking McGarand, Kreiss thought as he tried to pull back out into traffic, but now everything was stopped. He had damn near pulled it off, and had done so even after Carter had sent in a very specific warning. What the hell was it about Washington bureaucrats that made them think they knew everything, that no one could tell them a single goddamn thing?\n\nHe felt somebody or something bang hard on the back windows of the van, and he looked in the mirror to see if a vehicle had rear-ended his van. Instead, he saw an enormous orange fireball rising with a shuddering roar into the sky over the buildings behind him. The glare was strong enough to be seen through the windows of office buildings that were between him and the blast. Looking a lot like an atomic cloud, the fireball turned to a boiling red color and then was enveloped by a bolus of oily black smoke pulsing up into the early-morning sky over downtown. He heard a woman on the sidewalk scream right beside the van, and moments later, debris began to rain down on the sidewalks and the streets. He put the van in gear and pulled onto the sidewalk as people ran for cover into nearby buildings. Ignoring the sudden hail of metal and concrete bits rattling on the roof of the van, he drove down the sidewalk until he reached the next corner, then pulled past the huddled pedestrians and accelerated down toward the river.\n\nCorrection, correction, he thought. Not damn near. Score one for the clan McGarand. And he knew that as soon as the dust settled, there would be a host of feds hunting one Edwin Kreiss. A regular fugitive hat trick, he thought. He would now have the ATF, FBI, _and_ the fucking Agency on his trail. Good job, Kreiss.\n\nHe turned right when he got to Constitution and headed toward the Memorial Bridge and northern Virginia. He would have to stay off the interstates once he got clear of the Washington area. He probably had twenty, thirty minutes to get out of town, and then someone would remember the speeding van on the sidewalk. The bigger problem would come when he got close to Blacksburg, because there were only so many ways into the foothills west of the town. He thanked God that Micah had Lynn, because Misty would undoubtedly take another shot, and very soon. Behind him, the big black cloud had tipped over in the morning air, casting a pall over the entire downtown area and blocking out the rising sun.\n\nBrowne McGarand felt a wave of deep satisfaction when he heard the monstrous thump and turned to see the black cloud erupting over the federal district. He had walked down Massachusetts Avenue after starting the hydrogen flow, trying to remain inconspicuous until he was able to cross Constitution Avenue and walk out onto the Mall, the wide expanse of trees and lawns fronting the Capitol grounds. Even at that hour of the morning, there was a surprising number of people out and about: joggers, power-walkers, and a tai chi exercise group of elderly people striking exotic attitudes out on the damp grass. He had rested on a park bench for a while, thinking back to 1993 and the similarly dramatic scenes created by the government's immolation of David Koresh and Browne's son, William, at Waco. Both the ATF and the FBI had conspired to cover up the truth of what had happened there, just as they had at Ruby Ridge. Murder will out, he thought, and the government had flat-out murdered those deluded people. Then they lied about it, falsified testimony, concealed evidence, and otherwise acted more like Hitler's SS than agents of a democracy. Goddamned people burned babies for the crime of being different and delusional, while the president of the United States perjured himself with impunity and released bomb-throwing foreign terrorists for his wife's political advantage.\n\nWatching the mushroom cloud, he wished he could have managed two bombs, because the FBI had blood on its hands from Waco, too. But it had been the ATF who set the stage for the ultimate carnage with their pigheaded assault. He didn't hate the agents who had bled and died on the roof of the compound. He blamed the coldhearted bastards here in Washington who had ordered it, and then pretended that they hadn't. Well, that black cloud rising above the federal office buildings would bring the message home right here to those same people: If the government won't hold agencies accountable, then, by God, an avenger will come out of the hills and teach the lesson. When the moral standards disappeared, it was time for the Old Testament rules: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, fire for fire.\n\nHe watched the smoke cloud collapse into itself as the rumble of the explosion died away over the Virginia hills. A wail of sirens and the astonished cries of the people out on the Mall followed. He got up and resumed walking, heading casually but purposefully down the Mall, past the Reflecting Pool, toward the Lincoln Memorial and the Memorial Bridge. His goal was to cross the river and walk to the Arlington Cemetery Metro station. From there, he would take the subway over to Reagan National Airport. He had enough cash to rent a car, and he didn't see any problem with using his own driver's license\u2014all that would prove was that he had been in Washington. Then he was going to drive like hell back down to the Ramsey Arsenal, where he had everything pre-positioned for his imminent disappearance. He rubbed his bare face. He had shaved off his beard in the motel and his face felt naked. He averted his face as he passed by Lincoln's somber statue. He searched his soul for a sign of remorse and found nothing of the kind.\n\nJanet and Lynn were huddled in a tiny wooden hut that had been built into the entrance passage, fifty feet back from the actual entrance. The hut consisted of a single room, containing two bunks, a tiny table, two straight-backed chairs, and a rack where six kerosene lanterns hung on one wall. Micah returned in the early afternoon, calling softly from the tunnel as he approached. He brought some sandwiches and a thermos of hot soup. Lynn was sitting up by now and feeling much better. She said her back and ribs hurt, but Janet was able to report that, thankfully, no infection was showing. Janet had slept like a log on one of the cots for three hours. They were both very grateful for the food.\n\n\"They's a ton of revenuers out there along the road,\" Micah announced as they ate. There was a single railroad-style kerosene lamp on the table, and the light in the tiny wooden room made his skin look like parchment. Janet wondered how old he was. \"Had a passel of 'em come up to the cabin, askin' what we'd seen or heard.\"\n\n\"Which was nothing at all, right?\" Lynn said.\n\nMicah smiled. \"Maybe heard some shootin' last night, heard some vee-hicles rammin' around on the county road. Buncha kids outa West Virginia, playin' thunder road, most like. But otherwise . . .\"\n\n\"They search your place?\"\n\n\"I reckon they will, soon's they git them a warrant,\" Micah said. \"The boss man asked if they could look around. I told 'im no. Told 'im four of my fightin' pit bulls was holed up somewhere's in all that junk. Wouldn't be safe for no strangers to be pokin' around. Boss man said fightin' dogs was illegal; I told 'im they could tell them dogs that, they wanted to go take their chances.\"\n\n\"They'll find my vehicle,\" Janet said.\n\n\"No, ma'am, I don't b'lieve they will,\" Micah said solemnly. Janet just nodded. \"Was there a woman with them?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, ma'am, no women, just a messa revenuers we've never seen before. They surely ain't from around here, way they talkin'.\"\n\nJanet nodded again. Micah probably called any kind of federal law enforcement a revenuer. These people had probably been ATF, with maybe some FBI and possibly even some of that horrible woman's crew sprinkled in.\n\n\"They been to your daddy's cabin,\" Micah said to Lynn. \"Had one a my boys watching the place from the ridge. Buncha vee-hicles, people goin' every which a way. They had some dogs with 'em, too, so they may do some trackin'. If 'n they do, they might could find the entrance to this here cave.\"\n\n\"Is there another way out?\"\n\nMicah smiled. \"Three ways, one sorta easy, two real hard. Meantime, I got one a the boys paintin' some bear fat on that log near the entrance y'all used. Ain't no city dog gonna like that. But if there's a ruckus, that'll be the sign for y'all to move back into the mountain. Whatever y'all do, don't come out the way we come in. We gonna lay down a little trap in that passage. Now, this here's a map.\"\n\nHe unrolled a piece of brown paper cut out of a grocery bag and showed Janet where the hut was. The map showed three passages that led from the hut to various other chambers and passages back into the mountain, and, eventually, to the woods on the west slope. He pointed out the lanterns on the back wall and showed her where extra lanterns were cached along the passages. The way out of the hut was through a concealed door in the back wall. Each of the passages on the map was marked by a number.\n\n\"Number one here, it's the easiest goin',\" he said. \" 'Bout a mile all told, maybe mile and a half. Goes down maybe a hundred feet before climbin' back up and out. Comes out by a dirt road, through a flat door like we came in. You come out thataway, you pile on a buncha rocks on that door once you out if someone's behind you.\"\n\n\"And the others?\"\n\n\"Two and three are longer and deeper, and they's some tight-assed narrow-downs. Three's got a lake. You gotta hand-over-hand along a ledge over on the left side to make it across. That there ledge is 'bout six, eight inches underwater. You don't even want to fall in, 'cause it's deep and cold as hell.\"\n\n\"But if they bring dogs into the cave?\"\n\n\"Then three's the one you want. Be careful when you git to Dawson's Pit.\"\n\n\"Why is it called that?\" Lynn asked.\n\n\"'Cause Dawson's still in it. They's a long, real narrow passage just before the lake; you women will have to be sideways to git through it. A man's gotta hold his breath and grease his ass _and_ his belly to git through it. But you could kill a dog easy, he comes after you in that crack. Here. I brought your wheel gun.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I ran it out of ammo, out there on the road.\"\n\nMicah grinned. \"Got you a refill. Ammo's somethin' we keep aplenty of up here. But looka here: Take one a them hickory sticks over there in the corner. Don't shoot the gun less'n you have to, 'cause you never know what the cave'll do. You follow?\"\n\n\"You mean, as in cave-in?\"\n\n\"Somethin' like that. Specially around that lake. It don't got a bottom, best as we can find out, and the ceiling in the lake cave is way up there. Lots a them stone icicles up there, I reckon. Lantern won't light it. Use the sticks on any dogs; that's why they got points.\"\n\nJanet took a deep breath and thanked him. \"Let's pray for no dogs,\" she said. \"Tell me: When her father comes back, will he contact you?\"\n\n\"I reckon,\" Micah said. \"Them ain't no friends a his at his cabin just now. But we got ways.\"\n\nJanet took the .38 and put it on the table. It didn't seem like much, compared to some of the weapons she had seen in the past twenty-four hours. \"You've saved our skins a couple of times, Mr. Wall,\" she said. \"I surely appreciate it. I don't even know who half the people chasing us are anymore.\"\n\nMicah looked over at Lynn and nodded in the yellow light. \"Ed Kreiss, he did me a real big favor, back when he first moved up here on the mountain. Didn't even know me or none of my kin, and he saved one a my boys. His name's Ben. He's a big'un, but Ben, he's a mite simple. Three old boys from the Craggit bunch over on Moultrie Mountain took it into their rock heads to whup Ben's ass. They caught up with him out on the county road and was fixin' to flat bust his head with some tire irons. Don't rightly know why. Old Ed, he come up on it. Said Ben was rolled up in a ball under his truck, and them bastids was yankin' on him. Old Ed said they was fixin' to kill him, most like. Old Ed, he went after them bastids with his truck, knocked two of 'em clean off the road and down into Hangman's Creek. Third one run off. Then he brung Ben home.\"\n\n\"Tell her about the Craggits,\" Lynn said.\n\nMicah grinned again. \"Oh, yeah, them Craggits came around, goin' to git 'em some ree-venge on Ed Kreiss. He heard 'em comin' somehow, turned that big fifty-cal loose on the Craggits' pickup trucks. They went a-howlin' and a-yellin' out into the woods, and then old Ed, he cut loose with them lion sounds into them woods. Them Craggits laid a trail a loose shit all the way back over to Moultrie Mountain. Time since, goin' on four years now, old Ed'n me become pretty good neighbors.\"\n\n\"I'm probably being impolite,\" Janet said, \"but I have to ask: What do you and all these people do up here, Mr. Wall?\"\n\n\"We git by,\" he said, revealing just a hint of a smile. Janet smiled back, understanding that was all she was going to learn.\n\n\"Well, look, there's probably a warrant out for my arrest right now,\" she said. \"I ran a federal roadblock last night. And I shot at\u2014well, I'm not sure who the hell she was. But I suppose she's federal, after a fashion.\"\n\nMicah spat onto the dirt floor of the hut. \"Them folks out there, they's all gov-mint. Got the smell and the look about 'em. Them people don't belong up here. Never have, never will. One day, they gonna learn that. These the same bastids shot down that woman and chile up on Ruby Ridge. Too many of 'em just killers with badges is all. They chasin' that boy Rudolph down in Carolina?\" He spat again. \"Shee-it. They ain't never gonna find that boy. Mountain folk got 'im hid and hid good.\"\n\nThe agent in Janet got the better of her. \"That guy Rudolph set bombs that killed and maimed some people,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah, that's what _they_ say. But you willin' to bet they gonna take him alive?\"\n\n\"Well, if they catch up with him, he'll certainly get that option,\" she said.\n\n\"You reckon? Them folks at Waco, they didn't git that option,\" Wall said. \"How's a man gonna git his day in court, when them revenuers come a-shootin' first an' askin' questions later?\"\n\nJanet had no answer for that one. Lynn was looking down at the dirt floor of the hut. \"Now I'm sorry we put you in this fix, Mr. Wall,\" Janet said. \"They might try to arrest all of you, take you off the mountain for obstruction of justice.\"\n\nMicah nodded. \"I reckon we'll do the best we can, they come for us.\" He straightened up. \"Meantime, y'all lay low in here, till old Ed comes for you. And, like I said, keep an ear peeled for any dog ruckus up at the front. Trap'll slow 'em down, but y'all gotta go if they hit it.\"\n\n\"What kind of trap is it?\"\n\n\"When I leave, my boys'll take a hornet nest we sacked last night. Set it up in the passage. Them hornets, they gonna go for the lights.\"\n\n\"Big nest?\"\n\n\"'Bout a miyun,\" Micah said, eyes twinkling.\n\nJanet grinned in spite of herself. She could just see it.\n\nHe gathered up the bag. \"Now, lemme show you somethin' else. Them people out there\u2014if they come in a-shootin'? That's different. You open that trapdoor, grab you some lanterns; then you light this fuse right there\u2014you see it? There's the matches. Light it; then pull that trapdoor down. Then y'all git on down that passage till you get to the first turn. They's a dead-end branch passage, goes to the right. Git in that, git down, and stop up your ears.\"\n\nLynn, who had been listening to all this, was nodding her head. Micah checked to see that the lanterns had fuel, then stepped back out the front door of the hut and disappeared into the front passage. Janet examined the fuse, but she wasn't so sure about doing what the old man had recommended. Just last week, she could have been one of the people coming in here. On the other hand, somebody seemed to be rewriting all the rules when it came to Edwin Kreiss and his daughter. Just like they did at Waco, she thought. That fire in the hospital, for instance. That had been _way_ out there. And that guy Browne McGarand, going up to Washington with a truckload of hydrogen to blow something up. This old man could crack wise about it, but these people up here were obviously convinced that the government and all its works could not be trusted. If they came in with tracking dogs, looking, they ran into bear grease and hornets. If they came in with snipers, flash-bangs, and tear gas, as they had proved they could from time to time, they'd get the cave dynamited down on their heads.\n\nLynn said she was going to explore the trapdoor at the back and make sure they could get it open. Janet sat down at the tiny wooden table and put her head in her hands. Her people had to know she was up here in the mountains with Lynn Kreiss. They're not your people anymore, are they? a little voice in her head reminded her. Micah Wall and his people were protecting her until\u2014what? Until Kreiss could get back? She felt as if she were out on the moon somewhere. Last week, she had been a federal agent; now, in the space of a day and a night, she was a federal fugitive. She began to understand the meaning of the phrase \"out in the cold.\" She wondered what Farnsworth and her coworkers at the Roanoke office were doing right now: Combing the hills for the two of them? Sitting back and pretending that she did not exist? Waiting for instructions and the spin d'jour from the bosses in Washington? The same bosses who wouldn't listen to warnings of a bomb plot, and who were apparently more interested in embarrassing another government agency than in protecting people's lives?\n\nWhat she instinctively wanted to do was call into the Roanoke office and check in, talk to somebody, see what the hell was going on. But whom could she call? Not RA Farnsworth. And not Larry Talbot, who would be too scared to take her call. Not Keenan. She didn't know anybody in the ATF. And not Edwin Kreiss, who was God knew where, and who had at least the Bureau hunting for him, if not the ATF. And the Agency, don't forget the blessed Agency.\n\nLynn, who had gone through the trapdoor, squeezed back into the hut. \"I left a couple of lanterns and some matches in the passageway. He wasn't kidding about narrow.\"\n\n\"Make sure we have that map,\" Janet said. \"If we have to escape that way, I want to be able to find my way back out of this mountain.\"\n\n\"I've got it right here, next to the door. You suppose this fuse goes to dynamite or something?\"\n\n\"Yes. It will probably bring this part of the cave down.\"\n\nLynn came over to the table and sat down, wincing when her ribs touched the table. \"I wish I knew where my father was,\" she said. \"And what the hell was going on.\"\n\n\"That makes nine of us,\" Janet said. \"I'm almost tempted to go back out front, see if I can find a phone.\"\n\n\"Whom would you call?\"\n\n\"That's the problem. I don't exactly know who my friends are right now. Or who's chasing us. Where the hell does that woman get off, anyway\u2014starting a fire in a fucking hospital! Those Agency people aren't even supposed to be operating within the United States.\"\n\nLynn nodded slowly. \"I'm not so sure about that,\" she said. \"When my father was working with them, he sometimes went overseas to do what he did. But he also worked here, in the States, too. It kind of depended on whom he was pursuing and what they'd done.\"\n\n\"But if a wrong guy needs pursuing in the States, that's the Bureau's job, not the Agency's.\"\n\nLynn smiled. \"I think that's why the Agency let him stay: he was technically a Bureau man, not an Agency man.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Janet said. \"So if some part of an operation broached, he could flash Bureau creds and people would backoff.\"\n\n\"Something like that. He never gave me details of what he did, but I think that the people they went after had overstepped the bounds. A lot. The big boys just wanted the problem taken care of, and I don't think they really wanted to know too much about how it was taken care of.\"\n\n\"You mean they'd go after some guy and just cap him?\"\n\n\"I don't think so, actually,\" Lynn said. \"Dad says there are some federal prisons where they can put people into the federal corrections system and bury the file. Lewisburg, Fort Leavenworth, for instance; they have lifetime solitary-confinement facilities there. Who's going to go up to a place like that and ask to see the dungeons?\"\n\n\"The ACLU maybe?\"\n\n\"The ACLU would have to know the guy existed in the first place.\"\n\n\"Jesus, you make it sound like Russia.\"\n\nLynn laughed. \"I met a Russian graduate student at Tech last year. He was in the advanced physics program. We got to talking politics\u2014God, how those Russians love to talk politics! He laughs at the proposition that we live in a 'free' country. He told me to go find out how many government police there are now, compared with ten years ago.\"\n\nJanet just looked at her.\n\n\"Well, I tried. Like, do you know how big the Bureau is?\"\n\n\"Well, it's big, I know that. Ten, fifteen thousand people, maybe.\"\n\nLynn shook her head. \"Try twenty-seven thousand employees in the FBI. Ten years ago, it was sixteen thousand. I tried to find out how many federal government police there are, the total number, and do you know I couldn't really do it? Maybe you could.\"\n\n\"There are more cops because there is more crime, and a hundred new mutations of crime every day. Internet crime. Serial killers. Hannibal the Cannibal types. Chat rooms where pedophiles buy and sell children for snuff flicks. Sixty-two thousand bombing incidents in the past five years.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but look at that Waco thing: Sure, those people were a doomsday cult, and they had some weird people there. Koresh and all his 'wives'; all of them waiting around for Judgment Day, praying for it to come, probably, the end of the millennium, the Second Coming. But for that, the government burned them alive? Jesus Christ. Burning people for their beliefs went out with the Inquisition. Supposedly.\"\n\n\"Koresh burned them,\" Janet said. \"Our people didn't do that.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Lynn said. \"But your people gave Koresh the pretext when they drove tanks into the building. Hell, why didn't they just cut the power and the phones and the water and wait for a few months? But no, some cowboy\u2014or maybe cowgirl, huh?\u2014in Washington decides to send _tanks_ in? And then, afterward, they all do the armadillo and try to cover it all up? I mean, the Bureau and the ATF could be telling the absolute truth, but when shit comes out like that business with the incendiary rounds? Nobody believes them anymore. For that matter, how many women and babies did David Koresh ever burn alive before the tanks showed up?\"\n\n\"But we're the good guys,\" Janet said. \"Koresh started those fires. Koresh killed those people. He was wounded and he was dying, and he had nothing more to lose!\"\n\nLynn just looked at her. \"That may be true,\" she said. \"But America is a democracy in the full bloom of the information age. If agencies like the Bureau and the ATF aren't squeaky fucking clean, it will come out. In the past, maybe not, but now? It _will_ come out. And then there's no more trust. If it's perceived to be a cover-up, then it _is_ a cover-up.\"\n\nJanet sighed and looked away. Lynn put her hand on Janet's arm. \"Look,\" she said. \"You're risking your ass to save my ass from some claw of the government we can't even name. Don't think I'm not grateful. But four or five years ago, my father found out something about some very high-level people in the government, a secret bad enough that a senior Agency guy shot himself _and_ his whole family to protect it. I think the only reason they didn't 'disappear' my father is that he was a pretty resourceful operative who might have caused a train wreck or two in the process. When he was quote-unquote 'retired,' it was all done over a pay phone, okay?\"\n\n\"You think that's what this is all about?\"\n\n\"You know, I think it is,\" Lynn said. \"Dad and I have talked about this before. There's been a lot that's come out about the Chinese spy case since then. I think he was afraid he was becoming more and more of a major loose end. He knew firsthand what can happen to a loose end, especially these days.\"\n\nThe kerosene lamp guttered, and Janet got up to light a second one to replace it. \"How do you know all this?\" she asked.\n\nLynn drew her sweater closer about her. \"Dad and I talked a lot after my mom was killed and he was forced out. I sort of made it a condition of our reconciliation. I told him I had to know about him and what he did, not operational details, of course, but why my mother had been so afraid. Why she said some of the things she said.\"\n\n\"Which weren't true.\"\n\nLynn looked up at her. She had Kreiss's intense gray-green eyes, Janet suddenly realized. Eyes that knew too much and had seen too much. \"But that's the point, Agent Carter,\" Lynn said. \"Most of it _was_ true.\"\n\nJanet remembered the hunting woman's face, with eyes like those on a great white shark. Play \"Misty\" for me. She shivered. Then they heard the dogs.\n\nBrowne McGarand rubbed the itchy new stubble rising on his clean-shaven face again as he drove the rental down the back side of the arsenal. It was nearly sundown, and he was looking for the entrance to an old logging road that led back to the western perimeter fence. He planned to drive the little car up the logging road as far as he could and then hide it. Then he would walk to the perimeter fence and go north along the fence until he got to the point where the creek entered the federal reservation. Unlike the creek's exit point, it wasn't very big, and they had just run the fence atop of it, laying down some concrete culverts. Once inside the two fences, it was a mile's walk to the bunker farm and to bunker 887.\n\nHe had prepared his bolt-hole in the bunker field early in the project. It was in the remotest part of the ammunition-storage area. They had cut the rusty series padlock and unsealed the air-circulating ventilator fixture at the back of the bunker, converting the ventilator trunk into an escape hatch. Halfway down the bunker's empty length, he and Jared had constructed a fake partition of studs and plywood, creating a smooth wooden surface that ran from top to bottom. Jared, an able carpenter, had done most of the work, including building in a single flush-mounted door. They then painted the side of the barrier facing the bunker doors a flat black. The idea was to make it look to anyone shining a flashlight quickly into the partially buried bunker that it was as empty as all the rest. He had taken this precaution after watching the security patrols for a few weeks and seeing them occasionally pick a bunker at random, unlock the heavy steel doors, and poke their flashlights in for a moment. The barrier wouldn't stand a thorough search, of course, especially if someone restored electricity to the bunker farm and turned on each bunker's main lights.\n\nJared had then taken the old padlock to a swap meet up in Harpers Ferry, to a guy who claimed to be able to find a key for any lock. Since the Army's padlock was part of a series, the locksmith had been able to produce a master key. Then all they had to do was to lift a padlock from another bunker, well removed, and put it on their hideout. That way, they could keep it locked but not raise flags when security encountered a lock not of the series. If the security patrols ever came upon the bunker that no longer had its lock, they would go in and have a look. But there would be nothing there and then they would simply replace it.\n\nHe had listened to an all-news radio station on the way down from Washington. The ATF headquarters bombing was the center of attention, of course, with excited reports of hundreds killed and major damage to the entire downtown area. Reporters on the scene gave breathless accounts of the shattered building, streets full of glass and office debris, and five fire companies and their EMTs working isolated bloody vignettes up and down Massachusetts Avenue. Spokespersons for the Treasury Department, Justice Department, FBI, and belatedly, the ATF had all made grave pronouncements about the growing threat of domestic terrorists, the need for increased resources, expressions of condolence for the victims, and determination to hunt down the perpetrators. One interview had been most revealing, when a reporter put a microphone in front of the bleeding face of an ATF agent who had been injured up on the roof deck of the parking garage. He had sworn a bloody oath to find the son of a bitch who had done this and blow his\u2014word bleeped\u2014head right off, an hysterical comment his supervisors would undoubtedly regret.\n\nOver the course of the day, however, the reports were toned down significantly. It was revealed that most of the building had been evacuated before the blast. Apparently, there had been a last-minute warning. There were indeed dozens of people injured, but most of these had been hurt in the street, or had not moved far enough away from the building when the top half was blown off. When he finally got to the logging road, they were reporting three civilian security men killed on the roof of the parking garage, twenty-six injured within the vicinity of the building, and the top four floors of the ATF building destroyed. By the time he switched off, speculation as to the source of the bomb and the motives behind it was driving any hard, factual news off the story.\n\nHe was sorry that he had not been able to kill them all, to drive an explosive stake into the heart of that agency and to immolate the Washington policy makers he held responsible for Waco once and for all else. But there had been no disguising the sense of outrage and, behind the outrage, palpable fear in the voices of all those federal law-enforcement agency spokespersons. They probably all thought they had paid for Waco in the Oklahoma City bombing. Now they would know that there were people out there who felt otherwise. He got to the end of the logging road and parked the car as far back into the trees as he could maneuver it. He sat in the darkened vehicle for a moment. If there had been ATF building security people injured in the parking garage, they must have known about the propane truck. In any event, the truck would have survived, but they would trace it back to West Virginia, not here to the Blacksburg area. The gasoline incendiary he'd left behind in the cab should have taken care of any fingerprints. He was taking a mixed chance coming back here to the arsenal, but he still believed in the old rule about hiding things under people's noses. Especially these people.\n\nBy the time the first dog hit the front wall of the hut, Lynn had the back door open and two lanterns lighted and ready to go. She waited in the narrow passage behind the hut while Janet wedged the little table against the front door. They both heard a man shout, \"In here!\" from the front passage, and then there was a huge commotion of dogs and shouting voices as someone brought a light into the passage and the hornets finally had a target. As the voices and screaming dogs withdrew, Janet stepped through the narrow back door and shut it tightly. She had the .38 stuffed into her waistband holster and was straggling into her jacket. She looked for some way to block the back door, but there wasn't one.\n\n\"Let's go,\" she whispered, picking up a lantern. \"They'll be right behind us.\"\n\n\"Not until they figure out a way to get past those hornets,\" Lynn said.\n\nLynn led the way down the narrow passage behind the hut. The passage was seven or eight feet high, and the rock on either side was cold and damp. The trail beneath their feet was hard-packed dirt. Janet had pulled the fuse in the hut out into full view, hoping that whoever was hunting them would see it and slow down to check for booby traps. The passage went straight for fifty feet and then there was a cross passage, with two more caverns opening into the intersection. Lynn consulted the map and chose the left branch. The noise behind them had subsided, but Janet knew the dogs would be coming soon, even if the men did not.\n\nThe passage they were in now was even narrower, and the roof came down the farther they went. The floor had turned to loose gravel, and they had to slow down to keep from turning an ankle. At one point, Janet lost her footing and sat down heavily, sliding on her backside for a yard or so before stopping. She managed to put her lantern out in the process.\n\n\"Leave it out,\" Lynn said. \"We may need the fuel later.\"\n\nJanet got back up and hurried after the girl, who seemed to be doing just fine. She wondered if Lynn had been in the caves before. There was still no sign of pursuit behind them, for which she was very grateful. The air remained dank and oppressive. Janet was not exactly claustrophobic, but she was certainly aware of the mass of the mountain above their heads.\n\n\"Can you follow the map?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes, it's pretty clear. There's a pit coming up. Not sure what that means.\"\n\nThey rounded a dogleg turn in the cave, the lone lantern throwing weird shadows along the ceiling, and Lynn stopped suddenly. They had entered a round chamber, which was about twenty feet wide. The ceiling domed up a similar distance. The path ahead skirted a perfectly smooth conical hole, which disappeared into the depths of the mountain. The top of the hole was almost as wide as the chamber. Lynn kicked a small rock off the trail. It slid down over the smooth edge of the hole and then disappeared without a sound. The bobbing lantern made the walls look like they were moving.\n\n\"That's what _pit_ means,\" Janet whispered. \"Damn thing goes to China.\"\n\n\"And we go that way,\" Lynn said. She pointed with the lantern to the left side of the pit, where an eighteen-inch-wide ledge led around the lip of the hole and into another passage on the far side. The walls of the chamber curved up toward the top of the dome.\n\n\"Shit,\" Janet said. \"Look at that curving wall. What do we hold on to?\"\n\nBehind them came the sounds of something moving down the passageway.\n\n\"Duck-walk,\" Lynn said. \"Now.\"\n\nShe led the way, holding the lantern extended in her left hand to move her center of gravity closer to the wall. She squatted down, facing the hole so as to maximize the room between the side wall and the lip of the pit, then duck-walked sideways out onto the ledge. Janet followed, willing her eyes to look at Lynn's bobbing back and not into the pit. They were halfway across the ledge when they distinctly heard a dog coming, its unmistakable snuffling sounds amplified by the narrow tunnel. There was nothing they could do; they couldn't move any faster, and the dog would be on them in seconds. Suddenly, the lantern went out, and Janet gasped. She froze in place, her left hand scrabbling against the damp rock, searching for something to hold on to. The darkness was absolute, and she was terrified.\n\n\"Don't move,\" Lynn hissed.\n\nThe dog, hearing her voice, barked once and kept coming. Judging by the size of that bark, it had to be a pretty big dog, and Janet could feel its presence when it launched into the chamber, accelerating down the path as it hunted the sound of Lynn's voice and their fresh scent. Then there was an instant of complete silence, followed by a plaintive yelp as the dog sailed over the smooth edge of the pit and fell away into nothingness. Janet heard a scratching sound, and then Lynn had a match going, relighting the lantern. She realized she had been holding her breath and now let it out in a small sob, and then Lynn was moving again, duck-walking across the remainder of the ledge into a small antechamber beyond. Janet followed, her knees and hips hurting. Her mouth was dry as dust and her heart was pounding.\n\nWhen they got to the other side, Lynn stood up and grinned at her. \"Pretty good, huh?\" she said, her eyes alight. Christ on a crutch, Janet thought as she carefully stood up, she's enjoying this. But there was no getting around it: Lynn had done the one thing that eliminated the pursuing dog problem. There were two passages leading out of the chamber, and Lynn consulted the map. \"Left,\" she said. \"We're going on trail three.\"\n\n\"Any more pits on that trail?\" Janet asked in a strained voice. But Lynn was already moving into the smaller of the two passages, ducking her head to get through. Janet took one last look at the pit chamber as Lynn's lantern bobbed away: she shivered, then followed.\n\nThey tried to keep quiet as they pressed into the narrowing passage. It went level for a while, then dipped precipitously. The footing was now slippery clay, and they really had to slow down to keep from pitching headlong down the passage. Janet banged her lantern against the rock wall and thought she heard the glass crack. Lynn, six feet ahead of her, kept going for another fifteen minutes and then stopped and swore.\n\n\"What?\" Janet asked, dreading another pit.\n\n\"No trail,\" Lynn said, consulting the map. \"But I don't see any other way to go.\"\n\nJanet came up alongside her. Lynn lifted her lantern. The passage had opened onto the edge of what looked like a very steep slope that disappeared down into the darkness. There was a faint movement of cold, wet air against her face, and then she realized they had come into a very large cavern, whose vaulted ceiling rose up out of the range of the lantern light.\n\n\"Jesus, this is huge,\" Janet said. Her voice echoed out into space. They stood there for a minute, taking it all in, when they again heard sounds behind them, men's voices and the excited yelping of dogs. They weren't close, but they were certainly back there.\n\n\"That pit will slow them down,\" Lynn said softly. \"But I don't see any other way to do this.\"\n\nJanet looked down. They had forgotten to bring the sticks. The surface of the slope was loose rock and what looked like shale. \"You mean slide?\"\n\n\"Yeah. This has to be the way. It's been a straight shot so far. So it's probably safe. I'll go first. Hold this.\"\n\nShe gave the lantern to Janet, turned around, and let herself out onto the slope. Her feet precipitated a small avalanche of stones and dirt, but she was able to maintain position on the slope. She reached for the lantern. \"You got matches?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Janet said.\n\n\"Okay, light your lantern. I'm going to put this one out while I go down.\"\n\nJanet lit her lantern, and she saw that she had indeed cracked the glass. The flame burned unevenly until she adjusted the wick. Lynn doused her own lantern, then started down the slope, moving carefully to keep from starting a big slide and going with it. Janet held her lantern out as far as she could, while listening for sounds of pursuit. She could just barely hear the men back there, but the cave distorted the sounds and she had no idea of how far back they were. She was more worried about dogs ranging ahead of the men. Then she heard a noise below her. Lynn swore as she lost control of her climb down the slope and began to slide. Janet leaned way out but could no longer see her down the slope. Based on all the noise, Lynn was going for a ride. After a minute or so, the rattling noise of falling stones died out.\n\n\"Lynn?\" Janet called, trying not to make too much noise.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm all right. Lemme get this lantern going. Then you come down. Douse yours before you try it.\"\n\nThere was a flare of light below, and Janet could see that the slope ended about two hundred feet down. There was a glint of water at the base of the cliff. She could see Lynn's light but not Lynn. She doused her own lantern and then listened again. The men's voices were getting louder, but she still had no idea of how close they were. It sounded as if there were lots of them back there. Then she heard a dog barking eagerly, and the dog sounded a whole lot closer. She went backward over the edge and started down, getting into the rhythm of a controlled slide while she protected the lantern. Lynn must have taken the loose stuff with her, because Janet got down to the bottom without going into an uncontrolled slide. She dusted off her hands and knees and got up. She stepped away from the slope and then turned around. In front of her was a vast lake, whose size she could only feel. The lantern light reflected only about fifty feet out onto its surface. She could get no sense of walls or the ceiling.\n\n\"Man, look at that,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah, it's huge,\" Lynn said. \"We go this way.\"\n\nShe turned to their left and began picking her way along the shore of the lake, which was made up of small round stones, some larger boulders, and loose gravel. The mass of the shale cliff rose into total darkness to their left. The shoreline curved around slowly to the right, and they had to go slowly to keep from slipping into the water. Janet listened for sounds of pursuit, but now she heard nothing. They climbed over the treacherous footing for five minutes before arriving at a sheer rock face. The gravel beach disappeared at the foot of the cliff. The water stretched out into darkness on their right, and the shale cliff rose on their left.\n\n\"Now what?\" Janet asked.\n\nLynn studied the map. \"I think this must be the submerged ledge Micah was talking about.\"\n\nSuddenly, from way above and behind them, a dog barked once and then again, excitedly. Lynn took Janet's lantern and raised it as high as she could to see how far across it was, but there was only the black water and the glimmering reflection of the lantern. The cavern wall rose on their left, black and sheer. The dog kept barking, and Janet realized there was no echo down here. This cavern must be really huge.\n\n\"Shouldn't we douse the light?\" Janet whispered urgently.\n\n\"We have to find the ledge,\" Lynn said.\n\n\"We'll find that with our feet. Douse the light. They can't see us without it, not until they come down the slope. We need time to get across this thing and out of range of any guns.\"\n\nLynn complied, and the dog stopped barking. Janet led the way, stepping down into the icy water, her left hand held out on the rock wall. Her feet found the ledge, which was about a foot underwater. She explored with her toe to see how wide it was; not very, she decided. She was wearing sneakers with a hiking tread, which gave her pretty good traction. She started forward, keeping her hand on the wall, leaning into it actually, while trying not to think of what a full-body plunge into that water would feel like. She sensed Lynn was behind her, but she did not turn around. She slid her feet forward, rather than taking steps, to make sure the ledge didn't end suddenly.\n\nThe dog barked once more from the top of the slope, tentatively now that there was nothing to see. Then Janet heard a familiar sound, that of a tactical radio. The sound seemed to be coming from ahead of them, and she hoped that it was just the tricky acoustics of the cavern. If their pursuers had managed to get ahead of them here, they were screwed. She heard Lynn's lantern tap the rock wall.\n\n\"Okay?\" she said softly.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Lynn whispered. \"Cold.\"\n\nThe water was extremely cold, and Janet's ankles were getting numb. She had no idea of how far they had gone, when, from way above and behind them, beams of white light shot out. She looked up out of the corner of her eye but kept going. She thought she could see the ceiling of the cavern, but there was something odd about the shape of it. The dog started barking again, and then there were two dogs, getting excited now. The light beams came down onto the lake and played about, and she could hear men's voices, and more radio noises. Inevitably, one of the light beams found them.\n\n\"Halt!\" a man shouted from up on the slope. \"Halt or I'll shoot.\"\n\n\"Fuck you,\" Lynn said matter-of-factly, her voice carrying clearly over the water. Janet squinted her eyes against the reflection of the flashlight in the water and kept going.\n\n\"Send the goddamn dogs,\" a man ordered.\n\n\"It's straight down,\" protested a second voice.\n\nJanet and Lynn were a good fifty yards off the rock beach by now, but Janet had no idea of how far they had to go. She dared not light a lantern. The men argued, and then there was a yip from one of the dogs, which was followed by the sounds of a small-scale avalanche. Janet realized someone had pushed one of the dogs over the cliff, and it was coming down the slope. There was a loud splash, more yelping, and then the dog was out and casting about on the rock beach. A second dog came crashing down the slope. Janet kept going, taking bigger sliding steps now, determined to get off this ledge. She didn't think the dog could follow them out here, but there was no telling. Then the flashlights came back to them, illuminating them both. Whether the dogs saw them or picked up their scent, they gave cry and came bounding down the gravel beach to the spot where the women had gone into the water.\n\n\"Git 'em, Tiger,\" a third man yelled. \"Go on, boy, git 'em!\"\n\nFrom the sounds of it, the dogs were unwilling to plunge into the water and were milling about on the beach behind them, barking excitedly. Not small dogs, Janet thought as she pressed on. Her front foot slid out onto nothing and she barely got stopped in time. The ledge had ended.\n\n\"What?\" Lynn asked as she came right up on Janet. The man up on the top of the slope was still urging the dogs to go after them. Their lights were weaker now that the women had progressed farther out into the lake.\n\n\"No more ledge,\" Janet whispered. \"I think we're fucked.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Lynn asked. \"I'll hold your hand. Reach way out.\"\n\nJanet leaned against the rock wall and extended her foot as far as she could. She thought she felt something, but she couldn't quite reach. The flashlights were still on them. There was more light reflecting off the black water than shining directly on them.\n\n\"It's a giant step,\" she told Lynn. \"If it's not the ledge, I'll fall in.\"\n\nThere was more noise from up on top of the cliff. And more lights. \"You have to try,\" Lynn said. \"I can't get past you.\"\n\n\"I can't do it with the lantern,\" Janet said. Then she had an idea. \"Give me a match.\"\n\nLynn passed her a match and asked what she was doing.\n\n\"I'm going to light this and set it afloat. That might distract them. It'll look like we're not getting anywhere. I have to ditch it anyway to make this step, so what the hell, okay?\"\n\nShe struck a match and lit the lantern. Immediately, there was more noise up on the cliff, with another voice telling them to halt or he would shoot. Janet set the lantern into the water; the weight of the base kept it upright, the wick assembly just out of the water. She gave it a gentle shove, took a deep breath, and stepped way out. Her foot hit ledge and she took a giant step across the gap. She moved forward one step and then told Lynn to pass her lantern over. The lantern in the water bobbed gently from side to side in the ripples coming from the dogs, who were splashing in and out of the water somewhere behind them. Lynn stepped across the gap, and they hurried on, getting farther from their pursuers and the bobbing lantern. The ledge actually began to get wider, and Janet, greatly relieved, was able to step normally now instead of slide. Lynn picked right up on it, and they made better progress.\n\nThen they heard the sounds of men coming down the slope, accompanied by several avalanches of rocks, sand, and gravel and lots of shouting. It sounded like at least half a dozen men were coming. The dogs stepped up their own noise, eager to continue the hunt but not sure how. Janet bent low after bumping her forehead on an overhang of rock that had appeared out of nowhere. She warned Lynn, but Lynn bumped her head anyway and swore.\n\n\"There's a ledge!\" a voice shouted. \"C'mon. We can follow them.\"\n\nSomeone else back on the gravel beach punched on a much more powerful flashlight, which just reached the two women, and once again warned them to halt or he would shoot. Janet tried to ignore the noises behind them, but it sounded like both men and dogs were coming, the dogs swimming now and the men coming out along the ledge. Then a second light found and pinned them in its beam; at least one of them had remained back on the beach. There was a great splash and some excited yelling behind them as one of the men fell in, swearing furiously about how cold it was. Janet had to duck even farther under the overhang, which now stuck out almost three feet. There were more splashes, and it sounded like most of their pursuers were now in the water, thrashing about, trying to find the ledge in the darkness. The two bright white beams stayed on them, however, and the big voice warned them one more time.\n\n\"Halt or I'll shoot. I mean it, goddamn it. Stop right there!\"\n\n\"Keep going,\" Janet whispered. \"Unless they have rifles, we're too far.\"\n\nShe was wrong, she realized, as a gun boomed behind them and a heavy round spanged off the rock face above them and slashed into the water. The booming sound reverberated in the cavern. The powerful lights never wavered. Janet took two more steps and then a second round came, hitting between them and causing Lynn to cry out in fright. Janet stopped and turned around, blinded now by the bright light. Some of the men were still in the water behind them, apparently thrashing back toward the stone beach. Whoever had the lights on them was definitely down on the beach at the foot of the cliff. The sound of the shot reverberated in the cavern.\n\n\"Now what?\" Lynn whispered.\n\nJanet was about to answer, when there was a sudden noise in the water, about ten feet off. Then another, and another. Janet recognized it as the sound of something heavy and sharp hitting the water like a champion diver, a wicked slashing noise that was instantly covered over in a small boil of foam. Janet flattened herself against the rock wall under the overhang, pulling Lynn back with her. Then it was raining heavy objects, and a man screamed way behind them. A second man screamed, and the lights suddenly went out as a hail of stalactites came down from the ceiling of the cavern like a shower of stone knives. A dog made a horrible noise as it went under, still screaming. The rain of stone intensified for a few seconds, seemingly covering every inch of the lake before it stopped, leaving only an occasional cutting splash way out in the lake. Behind them, all was silent. Janet strained to see in the sudden silence, and she thought she saw a single flashlight pointing out into the water, but it was not moving. Nothing appeared to be moving behind them anymore.\n\n\"Son of a bitch,\" Lynn murmured. She lit her lantern.\n\n\"Micah said not to shoot off a gun down here,\" Janet said. \"Let's get going before they regroup.\"\n\nAs they started forward along the ledge, one last immense stalactite came down, way out in the darkness. Lynn raised her lantern, but the ceiling was still too high to see. Moments later, actual waves washed against their feet. The silence behind them was absolute; Janet didn't think they would be regrouping anytime soon. She pressed forward, shivering, and soon they were at the other side of the lake. Behind them, there were no further signs of pursuit.\n\nWhen Kreiss saw the first road signs for Blacksburg, he pulled into the parking lot of the next convenience store that came along on Route 11 and placed a call to Micah Wall. He used the rented cell phone this time: They could get a number off a tap, but it should trace back to the Washington calling area. He looked at his watch while the phone was ringing: It was 8:30. He had taken back roads all the way down from Washington, and it had nearly doubled the time for the trip. But there were too many people hunting for him now. The Bureau would be after him for what he had done to Johnstone and Lanny boy. The ATF would want to question him further in connection with the bombing of their headquarters building. He had listened to news reports of the blast on Massachusetts Avenue. They had apparently listened to his warning, but McGarand's bomb had done its job. The attack would really shock them, he thought. The ATF was a tiny organization compared to the Bureau, but they had been a pretty high-profile group lately. The field agents he had known were competent people who were sincerely trying to make the country a safer place. But their policy people in Washington were another story, especially when a \"situation\" developed. Then too many of them wanted to play John Wayne.\n\nAnd the Agency? That posed a trickier question. He suspected that some senior devils in Main Justice and Langley had decided to eliminate their Edwin Kreiss problem once and for all. If so, his maneuvering room was shrinking fast. Right now, he needed to know where Lynn was. And his favorite ex-special agent, for that matter. Someone picked up the phone at the other end and he asked for Micah.\n\n\"Who's callin'?\"\n\n\"The lion keeper,\" he answered. The man told him to hold on, and he could hear the sounds of an urgent discussion in the background. Then the man came back.\n\n\"Pap's done gone. Buncha damn revenuers into them caves under Pearl's Mountain. Pap says they's huntin' kin o'yourn. Pap's up on the back ridge, with some a the boys, waitin' on 'em. Ain't had no word back yet.\"\n\nRevenuers? He wondered what the ATF was doing going after Lynn. Unless they were trying what Misty had tried\u2014take the daughter, bag the father. \"Was Janet Carter with her? When they went in?\"\n\n\"Don't rightly know. They was two wimmen, all's I know.\"\n\n\"Did these people show any identification? Warrants?\"\n\n\"Don't know who they was. Pap said they didn't bring no warrants. They was wantin' to come in here, search the whole damn place, but Pap and Uncle Jed took the ten-gauges out, tole 'em to git on out a here. They went on back down to the road. Then they come back, with 'em dogs. It was 'em dogs took 'em to the cave. Ain't seen hide nor hair of 'em since.\"\n\nMicah had shown Kreiss the cave hideout up behind the cabin and the junkyard. He had implied there were passages leading back from the tiny hut, but he hadn't volunteered any further information, and Kreiss hadn't wanted to pry. Now he needed to tell Micah where he would be hiding, but he knew the government people would have put a tap on Micah's line.\n\n\"All right. I appreciate it. Tell Micah I'm back, and that there's a bunch of revenuers after me, too. Tell him I'm going to lay up in that place he and I talked about, last time he heard the lions.\"\n\n\"Awright.\"\n\n\"And one more thing\u2014the government is probably listening to this conversation. Tell your Pap to stay shy.\"\n\nThere was a soft, contemptuous guffaw on the phone, and then the man hung up.\n\nKreiss pressed the button to end the call and turned the phone off. He had to assume there was a government signals intelligence van somewhere, listening to that entire conversation. What had they learned? Kreiss was in the area. He was working with Micah Wall. He was going to lay up somewhere that Micah would recognize. Ergo, they would want to talk to Micah, who would tell them zip-point shit, assuming they could even find him at all. Right now, there was a probably a lanky, bearded figure with a rifle humping it up the ridge to find Micah and deliver the warning.\n\nHe leaned back in the driver's seat and rubbed his eyes. He needed some coffee, but the convenience store was shut for the night, its doors and windows barred, security lights burning, and the gas pumps locked. The Virginia countryside and backwoods were apparently no longer places of safety and sociable trust. And the hills were alive with the sounds of\u2014what? Federal agents, with dogs. Hunting two women, one of them an ex-federal agent. Which government law-enforcement agency was it? The Bureau? The ATF? Or could it even be the Langley crowd? He still wanted to settle accounts with Browne McGarand for what he had done to those kids, but McGarand was probably long gone, or being hunted by the feds himself.\n\nHe took a deep breath, let it out, and started the van. First, he needed to make sure Lynn was safe. For that, he would have to get in touch with Micah. He couldn't exactly go home, and he couldn't go to Micah's. If the feds had real coverage of the Blacksburg-Christiansburg area, he couldn't go to a motel, either. He had stashed the essentials of a base camp at the arsenal the first time he'd gone in. He had his crawl suit in the bag, his sound equipment, and this time he had a gun. He decided to make one stop for a meal and some extra drinking water, and then he'd go to ground in the last place anyone would expect him to go: back to the Ramsey Arsenal.\n\nJanet and Lynn flopped down on the cave floor when they finally reached the flat wooden door. The rising passage had been covered in smelly, slippery clay, and they were both filthy with it. They were also very thirsty, having taken no water with them. The lantern was guttering, which meant it was nearly out of fuel.\n\n\"What time is it?\" Lynn asked.\n\nJanet looked at her watch. She could feel the moisture in the clay seeping into her clothes, but she was so tired, she didn't care. She was already covered in mud from head to toe anyway. The passage up from the subterranean lake had climbed forever, through some incredibly narrow cracks, and one scary part where the ceiling had come down to within two feet of the floor, an area that they'd done on their backs. She blanked that part out of her mind with a shiver. \"Ten-thirty. At night, I think.\"\n\n\"So what do we do now?\" Lynn asked, holding her side. She sounded as exhausted as Janet was. \"Just go out there and see who's waiting?\"\n\nJanet looked over at the girl. She looked like she had been camouflaged for hunting, but there was also some pain showing in her face. \"That wound hurting?\"\n\n\"Ribs, mostly,\" Lynn said. \"Plus, I wasn't a hundred percent when we left that hospital.\"\n\n\"You've done amazingly well. I want to open that door and get out of here, but I have this nightmare that that goddamned woman will be sitting on a stump out there, looking at her watch as if we're late.\"\n\nLynn grinned. \"Then you cap her ass, Special Agent. I need a shower and a hot meal.\"\n\nJanet patted the .38 that was still strapped into her waist holster. \"She'd probably catch it in her teeth and spit it back at me,\" Janet said. \"But actually, it should be Mr. Wall out there. Presumably, no one else knows where this cave comes out.\"\n\n\"They discovered where we went in,\" Lynn pointed out.\n\n\"They had dogs; the dogs followed our trail to the cave.\"\n\n\"Where's my father, I wonder?\" Lynn said, rolling over on her side.\n\n\"Last time I talked to him, he was still in Washington, looking for McGarand. But he said he was coming back down here. Apparently, the Bureau picked him up in Washington, but he got away from them. Which is why I'm worried about that woman being out there when we open the door.\"\n\n\"She doesn't want me\u2014she wants him?\"\n\n\"Yes. But don't ask me why. Whatever it is, my boss got some pretty high-level guidance, because at one point, he wasn't willing to cooperate in moving against your father, and then all of a sudden, he was.\"\n\n\"And that's why you quit?\"\n\n\"Partially. They wanted me to do some things that I thought were wrong. It involved that woman. When Farnsworth\u2014that's my boss in Roanoke\u2014couldn't or wouldn't explain why, I quit.\"\n\n\"What will you do now?\"\n\n\"I have a Ph.D. in forensic sciences from Johns Hopkins. I can do anything with that.\"\n\n\"Wow, I guess you can. The Bureau won't queer the deal for you, will they? Because you quit?\"\n\n\"You mean when I go looking for a job? No, I don't think so. I have pretty damn good performance evaluations, and I also have worked inside the laboratory. I don't think the Bureau would want any more publicity about its laboratory just now.\"\n\n\"Meaning what?\"\n\n\"Meaning the Bureau has a basic problem in its laboratory: The lab rats work for the prosecutors. Sometimes their evidentiary conclusions aren't exactly unbiased. That's where I got into trouble in the first place, and it's the real reason I was sent to Roanoke.\"\n\nLynn thought about that, turned again, and winced. Janet checked her bandage for signs of bleeding, but there was nothing significant. \"You know,\" she said, \"that woman said she didn't shoot you; she said it was the ATF doing that roadblock, that _they_ shot you.\"\n\n\"The ATF? But why? Why were they even doing a roadblock? And, besides, they thought you were FBI. They wouldn't shoot at an FBI agent, would they?\"\n\n\"Some of them would probably like to, actually,\" Janet said. \"But no, I wouldn't have expected that.\"\n\n\"Well, somebody sure as hell did,\" Lynn said, rubbing her side.\n\n\"I have two bullets,\" Janet said, patting her own pocket. \"We'll have to look into that when we get clear of this mess.\"\n\n\"Speaking of which . . . \"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Janet said, getting up. \"I guess it's time to open sesame.\"\n\nLynn dragged herself off the floor of the cave, and together they examined the wooden door. It was horizontal and appeared to be seated in the ceiling of the small chamber they had reached. It was not quite six feet off the floor of the chamber, but Janet couldn't see how they could get it open more than a few inches without something to stand on. There did not appear to be any hinges or connection point. There was a handle on one end.\n\n\"You suppose it's pull instead of push?\" Lynn asked.\n\nThen the lantern went out. \"Your guess is as good as mine,\" Janet said. \"We'll try to do this quietly.\" She pulled down on the handle. The door, which was hinged on the other end, pulled grudgingly down into the chamber, accompanied by a rockfall of dirt and small stones from above. The other side of the door had a set of small boards nailed onto its surface, which they could feel but not see. A draft of cool, clean air filled with the scent of pine trees blew down into their faces. \"All right!\" Janet whispered. \"Up we go.\"\n\nThey clambered up, using the boards as steps, Janet leading, gun in hand. They crawled out onto the forest floor, staying low. The night was clear and moonlit now. They could see that they were on the side of a steep slope covered in tall pines. As soon as Lynn came off the door, it rose from the chamber below and settled back onto the level of the hillside. They sat there for a few minutes, getting their night vision. There was a small breeze blowing up the mountain. It was enough to stir the pines, which, in turn, made it impossible to hear if anyone was moving around them. The ground was covered in a thick bed of pine straw, adding to the sound insulation. Above them, an outcropping of rock rose straight up, gleaming gray-white in the darkness. It looked like the bow of an enormous ship towering above them.\n\nJanet moved closer to Lynn so that she could whisper softly. \"You live here. Where do you think we are?\" she asked.\n\n\"My father lives here. I live in Blacksburg. But we're probably on the back side of Pearl's Mountain. That's the west side. Dad's cabin and Micah's place are on the east side. So now what?\"\n\nJanet put the gun back in its holster. Her damp clothes made her cold. If anybody was waiting out there in the woods, he or she would be able to smell all this cave mud, she thought. \"We need to get to Micah or some of his people,\" she whispered. \"The question is, Up and over, or walk around?\"\n\n\"Up and over is out of the question,\" Lynn said. \"I'm not sure I can even walk around. And the east side has a sheer rock face. I don't know how high we are, but. . .\"\n\n\"We're going to have to do something,\" Janet said. \"We stay out here in these wet clothes, we're going to get hypothermia. We know they had people at your father's cabin. Let's go the other way, north, around the mountain. Micah has to have some scouts out on the mountain. Hopefully, we'll run into one.\"\n\nLynn groaned but got to her feet. Janet wished they had brought along those sticks Micah had pointed out. She had gone hiking several times up on the Appalachian Trail and knew the value of a good stick. The bigger problem was to keep from going in aimless circles in the darkness of the pine forest. They would have to pay attention and keep the top of the mountain to their right. And watch for timber rattlers, stump holes, wait-a-minute vines, deadfalls, loose rocks, and whatever else the mountain slope had in store for them. She tripped over a long stick, picked it up, broke it down to a useful length, and told Lynn to find one, too. Then they set out into the trees.\n\nKreiss established his hideout up behind the wrecked industrial area of the arsenal. He picked a heavily wooded spot upstream of the logjam and near the top of a hill on the opposite bank of the creek. Come daylight, he should be able to look down into most of the industrial area where the power plant had been, and also into the beginning rows of the vast bunker farm. He had driven north on Route 11 past the entrance to the arsenal. The signal lights had still been out, but the barrels were gone and there were floodlights up on the hill where the entrance gates were, which told him that the investigation into the explosion was still going on. He'd driven on into Ramsey, stopped to eat at a drive-through burger joint, and then retraced his route past the arsenal entrance to the place where the rail spur turned off to go into the arsenal. A half a mile beyond was a small shopping mall, where he had parked the van. He then walked back along the highway, carrying one bag of equipment, until he came to the railroad line, and then he turned off to get into the arsenal.\n\nHis plan was to get some sleep and then call into Micah's around midnight. By then, hopefully, there would be news of Lynn. After that, he would have some decisions to make. The only way he could prove his own innocence with respect to the Washington bombing was to bring in McGarand, and that would be tough to do with everybody hunting him. Plus, he had no idea where McGarand was. What he might have to do would be go into permanent hiding for a few years and maybe tell his story through the public press. But that would leave Lynn unprotected. He wasn't worried about the Bureau or even the ATF doing anything to Lynn, but what Misty would do was a very different question.\n\nHeadlights flared down in the industrial area. As he watched from the trees, he could see and then hear a security truck prowling through the littered streets. So there was active security now, he thought. He'd been lucky to get over the fence. The truck turned away and went down a road behind the blank concrete slabs that had been the power plant, then headed into the bunker fields. The headlights disappeared.\n\nHe knew he wasn't thinking clearly. Focus, he told himself. Get some rest. Find out what's happened to Lynn. Then decide.\n\nJanet stepped across the trail before recognizing what it was. Lynn did see it, and she said, \"Hey.\" They examined the trail, which was not much more than a footpath, but it ran up and down the mountain, not across it. It looked to Janet like it was maybe five, six hundred feet to the summit. \"If this goes all the way to the top,\" Janet said, \"we could cut our little hike here in half.\"\n\nLynn groaned and then sat down on a log. \"I'm sorry. You go ahead, and I'll hole up somewhere. I can't make that climb.\"\n\nJanet sat down next to her. \"I'm not going to leave you out here,\" she said. \"Let's rest awhile and then see what we can do.\"\n\n\"I know what I _can't_ do,\" Lynn said. \"I can't climb this frigging mountain.\"\n\nJanet said nothing, just sat there in the darkness. She had regained her night vision, and she could see amazingly well. The sky was full of bright stars and a partial moon. Light-colored objects stood out with sudden clarity against the dark pines. Like the man standing there by that tree, watching them.\n\n_\"Shit!\"_ she shouted, jumping up and fumbling to get her gun out. Lynn saw where Janet was staring and got up slowly, backing in the direction they had come. The man didn't move, but just continued to stand there, motionless. He was very tall, bearded, and was wearing a slouch hat and carrying a long rifle with a scope in the crook of his arm. Finally, he advanced one step and raised the rifle into the air. A single shot blasted out against the night air, followed by two more as he worked the bolt so fast, Janet couldn't see his hands move. The final gunshot reverberated across the rock face of the mountain like an insult against all nature. Back in the forest, a night bird squawked its disapproval. The man put the rifle back into the crook of his arm and stepped forward. Janet kept her own gun ready, but pointed it at the ground. The man approached, his footfalls silent on the pine straw. He was even taller than she had thought. She could smell the gun smoke rising from the barrel of his rifle.\n\n\"Y'all cold?\" he asked in an old man's voice. Janet couldn't really see his face.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. Had he signaled Micah? Or someone else?\n\n\"Them rocks yonder? They still warm. Y'all stay here. Pap's a-comin'.\"\n\nThen he stepped back into the forest and disappeared right in front of their eyes.\n\n\"That mean what I think it means?\" Lynn asked in a low whisper.\n\n\"I sure hope so,\" Janet said. \"Scared the shit out of me. Let's go see if he's right about those rocks.\"\n\nHalf an hour later, they were sitting with their backs up against a smooth wall of rock, which had indeed still been warm from the afternoon sun. They saw a lantern approaching through the trees, and then Micah and the tall man came across the path. The man was still carrying the big rifle, and Micah was carrying what looked like a stubby double-barreled shotgun in one hand, the lantern in the other. He greeted them and then put a finger to his lips, signaling for silence.\n\n\"We're goin' down,\" he began.\n\n\"Thank God,\" Lynn murmured.\n\n\"Cain't talk,\" he said, dousing the lantern. \"They's revenuers aplenty out on the mountain.\"\n\n\"Where are you taking us?\" Janet asked, wondering why the revenuers wouldn't have heard the shots.\n\n\"To ole Ed's cabin. Ain't no one there right now. Where's them folks what came after you in the cave?\"\n\nJanet told him about what had happened on the subterranean lake, and Micah nodded. He put a finger to his lips again and then started down the trail. Janet and Lynn followed, Lynn limping a little. The tall man followed for a while, but then, on Micah's signal, he stepped sideways into the forest and disappeared again.\n\nIt took them forty minutes to get down to the level of the big meadow behind Kreiss's cabin. Micah signaled for them to rest while he went forward to the edge of the woods. He watched for a few minutes. Then he walked carefully out into the meadow until he reached the rock where Kreiss hid his Barrett. He lit the lantern, cropped the flame down to a minimum, and then extended it beyond the side of the huge boulder. As Janet strained to see, an answering flicker of light appeared down among the trees at the cabin. What is this? she thought. He had said there was no one at the cabin. Micah turned around and waved them out of the trees. Had to be some of Micah's people, she concluded. She had to help Lynn get to her feet, and the girl staggered when she first started to walk. All in, Janet thought, giving her an arm for support. \"We're almost there,\" she said.\n\n\"Almost where?\" Lynn asked, which is when Janet noticed Lynn's eyes were closed.\n\n\"Your dad's cabin. Micah got a signal that it was all clear.\"\n\nThey walked across the meadow, going slow to accommodate Lynn's halting footsteps. Janet felt terribly exposed out in the broad expanse of grass between the woods up above and the dark cabin, but Micah proceeded ahead confidently. When they stepped into the shadows of the trees around the cabin, Lynn was stunned to see Farnsworth and five of the Roanoke agents, including Billy Smith, step out of the darkness. They converged on Micah. She was reaching instinctively for her weapon, when she realized from the way he was acting that Micah had known they were there. Farnsworth came over, took one look at Lynn, and instructed two agents to help her into the cabin. Janet just stood there with her mouth hanging open until she saw Farnsworth smile. He had something in his hands, but she couldn't see what it was.\n\n\"Hey, Janet,\" he said. \"Feel like a cup of coffee?\"\n\nJanet looked at Micah, who was standing to one side, looking considerably embarrassed. He had led them directly into the government's hands. \"Mr. Wall, what have you done?\" she asked.\n\n\"Don't blame him, Janet,\" Farnsworth said. \"He's doing what he had to do. Let's get a cup of coffee. I've got some things to tell you.\"\n\nForty-five minutes later, after a hot shower and some dry clothes borrowed from Lynn's closet, Janet sat with Farnsworth in the kitchen, having a cup of coffee. Lynn had been seen by some county EMTs and then had collapsed on her father's bed, where she was now fast asleep. The rest of the Roanoke agents, except for Billy, were outside. Farnsworth put Janet's credentials and her Sig down on the kitchen table. Billy sat at the dining room table, facing a laptop computer that was used for secure communications from the field.\n\n\"First, I want to ask you to take these back,\" Farnsworth said, pointing to them. \"I never sent in any paperwork, and the circumstances surrounding your resignation have changed. A lot.\"\n\nShe looked at the credentials, pulled them toward her, but then she left them on the table between them. \"Tell me about those changes,\" she said. She was physically tired, but the caffeine was working and her mind was alert. She decided that she wasn't going back to the federal fold until she heard Farnsworth's explanation. Billy pulled on a set of headphones and started talking to someone.\n\nFarnsworth sat back in his chair and rubbed his fingers across his chin in his characteristic gesture. \"You were dead right about a second bomb. Somebody went to Washington and parked a propane truck next to the ATF headquarters building and managed to pump several thousand cubic feet of hydrogen gas into the building. Right at the start of the working day.\"\n\n\"Oh my God! The _ATF_ building? Not the Hoover Building?\"\n\n\"Right. The results were very similar to what happened down at the Ramsey Arsenal. Obliterated the top floors of the building, and burned the rest.\"\n\n\"Damn!\" she whispered. \"How many\u2014\"\n\n\"Almost none. They had some warning and got all the people out before it let go. Guess who provided the warning?\"\n\n\"Kreiss.\"\n\nHe cocked his head to one side. \"And you knew that how?\"\n\n\"We've been in touch. As you know, I've been protecting his daughter.\"\n\n\"Yes. Well, Kreiss appeared in front of the building to deliver said warning after having been picked up earlier by two Washington beat cops for loitering in the White House security zone. There'd been a security alert downtown ever since the Ramsey thing. Then\u2014and this is the interesting part\u2014he was transferred to Bureau custody, from which he escaped by causing a car crash out on the G.W. Parkway at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, leaving two agents handcuffed to a park bench to watch their Bu car marinate in gasoline.\"\n\n\"Oh my,\" Janet said, working hard to keep a serious expression on her face. They had me and then I had them. \"Why was he transferred to Bureau custody?\"\n\n\"Because the local cops did a wants-and-warrants check, and the next thing they knew, here came two crackerjacks from the Hoover Building, saying they had instructions to take subject Edwin Kreiss into custody in connection with a homicide down here in Blacksburg. District cops said, Be our guest. Got him off their blotter. But in the meantime, these two superstars took him, on instructions from the Foreign Counter Intelligence Division duty officer, for a midnight ride to Langley, Virginia, where certain people out there wanted to have a word.\"\n\n\"Did _you_ file an apprehend-and-detain order on Kreiss?\"\n\n\"No, I did not. We're all looking into that little mystery.\"\n\n\"This has to involve that horrible woman.\"\n\nHe got up to get more coffee. \"Beats the shit out of me,\" he said. \"I discovered all of this after the fact. The last thing I did before the ATF building changed shape was to call in your warning that FBI headquarters was a possible target, and that that hydrogen bomb business referred to gaseous hydrogen, not nuclear hydrogen.\"\n\n\"What was their reaction?\"\n\nFarnsworth grinned. \"Building security thanked me for my interest in federal law enforcement, then wished me a good night. Several hours later, the world ended up on Mass Avenue. By the way, what did you tell Agent Walker, about forwarding the report?\"\n\n\"I asked him if he wanted to be the one link in the chain that failed to forward warning of a bombing up the line, in the event that there was a bombing.\"\n\nFarnsworth nodded. \"I want you to know that he was very, very insistent. Said he was logging and date-stamping his call to me.\"\n\nJanet smiled. \"We never change, do we?\" she said.\n\n\"CYA forever. Anyway, back to Kreiss: He shows up at ATF headquarters at daybreak, flashing the creds of one of the agents he stranded out on the parkway. While he was warning them, one of the guards checked with our headquarters, and then _they_ apprehended him at gunpoint. This was about the time their gas monitors detected the hydrogen. Kreiss starts to walk away. They give him the usual warning. So Kreiss, cool as a cucumber, asks the guards if they really want to pop a cap in a hydrogen atmosphere. Instant hoo-ha. Fortunately, one of their ADs was there; he let Kreiss walk. But now, of course, they want to have a word, as well.\"\n\n\"Why the trip to Langley? What's up with that, boss?\"\n\nFarnsworth tugged at his shirt collar. \"That's a great deal more complicated, and it's why I'm here with five agents, and why they're outside in tactical gear. And it's also why I leaned on those Hatfields and McCoys to make them bring you and Kreiss's daughter to me.\"\n\n\"How did you know they even had us?\" she asked.\n\n\"That Agency woman? We got word to her that Kreiss had been picked up. She said she had tracked you and the girl in there to the Wall clan, but now that they had Kreiss up in D.C., she was backing out. End of story. Good-bye. That was before Kreiss did his thing on the parkway and got away again, of course.\"\n\n\"And Mr. Wall? He's not a fan of things federal.\"\n\n\"That old man was here when we got here, sitting on the damned porch like he owned the place. I think he had some of his 'boys' out there in the woods. Probably still does. All we got out of him initially was tobacco spit.\"\n\n\"What changed his mind?\"\n\nFarnsworth moved his coffee cup around on the table in a small circle for a moment. \"Well,\" he said, \"Mr. Wall out there is a realist. I told him who I was and that I was not one of his regular revenuers. I told him I'd bring the full weight of every government law-enforcement agency\u2014FBI, DEA, ATF, DCIS, IRS, and even the Secret fucking Service in here and hound him and all the fruits of his two-branch family tree until the end of time. I told him we'd freeze his bank accounts, audit everybody's tax returns, cut off their Social Security and Medicaid, intercept his mail, tap his phones, tail his pickup truck, haul him and everyone he knew into court on a weekly basis, and force him to consort with lots and lots of lawyers. I think the thought of lots and lots of lawyers did it, actually.\"\n\n\"Micah Wall doesn't strike me as a heavy-duty crook,\" she said.\n\n\"Oh, hell, all these hillbillies are fringe, at worst. They make a big deal of being fierce mountain men and the last of the Mohicans, that kind of stuff. But what they really are is a bunch of poor, undereducated white trash making a subsistence living up here in the hills. They work on-again, off-again minimum-wage jobs while making side money salvaging parts out of junked cars and appliances, distilling a little 'shine, fighting their roosters and their dogs, or poaching illegal furs. It's more lifestyle than crime.\"\n\n\"He didn't strike me as someone who scares easily.\"\n\n\"Mostly I convinced him that there are no more refuges from the government, not even for hillbillies. Then, I told him something else.\"\n\n\"Which was?\"\n\n\"That you'd be safer with us than with him, because the person hunting both of you worried even us.\"\n\nJanet put her coffee cup down on the table. \"Last time I checked, you were on her side.\"\n\n\"Because I had specific instructions to that effect. From the executive assistant director over FCI, no less. That was before I went and checked with _my_ SAC in Richmond, and he with our assistant director. Like I said, we now have significantly changed circumstances. Remember that DCB deal?\"\n\n\"That Domestic Counterintelligence Board that Bellhouser was being so coy about?\"\n\n\"Right. Best we can tell, there isn't any such board. Nobody in our chain of command can put a line on it, and the question's been asked at the director's level at headquarters.\"\n\n\"Son of a bitch,\" Janet said. \"That means Bellhouser and Foster had their own agenda. That business about a bomb cell was bullshit.\"\n\n\"Except, as things turned out, it wasn't exactly bullshit, was it? As the ATF found out the hard way. But here's the thing: My boss says AD Marchand was personally involved in Kreiss's termination. What he can't find out is what that was really all about. The Office of Professional Responsibility has the files, and they're not only all sealed but physically over at Main Justice. Now, tell me something. You think Kreiss had a part in that bombing?\"\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" she said. \"Kreiss was not involved in that bombing. He was up in Washington hunting that McGarand guy because of what he did to Lynn.\"\n\nFarnsworth considered that and then nodded. \"Yeah, I buy that.\"\n\n\"Okay. Now, that Agency woman\u2014let me tell you about that piece of work.\" She began with Misty's appearing in her house, then told him what had happened at the hospital and her breaking through the roadblock on the way to Micah's. When she said that they were ATF people, Farnsworth interrupted her. \"We've had no report of that,\" he said. \"And their SAC would have been in my office with his hair on fire if they thought one of my people did that. They _shot_ at your _car?\"_\n\n\"Yes, they did. That's how Lynn was wounded. Then that damned woman came over the hill.\" She told him how she had driven the woman off the road and then made it to Micah's, and then she described the cave expedition that followed. He was shaking his head in amazement when she was done.\n\n\"You think those people were all killed down there?\" he asked. \"In the lake?\"\n\n\"Don't know,\" she said. \"But it got real quiet when the stalactites stopped falling. No dogs, no more lights or voices. I don't know how many men there were back there. But we were not pursued after that.\"\n\n\"Son of a bitch,\" Farnsworth muttered. \"This just doesn't sound right. We'd have been _avalanched_ with calls if the ATF thought they were chasing one of our agents and there was shooting.\"\n\n\"Maybe we're making assumptions,\" she said. \"Maybe this wasn't ATF. Maybe that damned woman just said it was, to throw some shit in the game.\"\n\n\"You're assuming they were her people?\"\n\n\"I'm beginning to think so.\"\n\nFarnsworth got up and paced around the kitchen. One of the agents stepped in through the back door and reported all was secure outside. Farnsworth acknowledged and the man stepped back out. Farnsworth asked Billy to crank up a fresh pot of coffee and get it to the men outside. Billy signed off from the communications terminal and started hunting for coffee makings. The agent, whom Janet knew only slightly, had nodded politely to her before he'd stepped back outside. Back in the fold, she thought.\n\n\"Now I _know_ we need to pick up Edwin Kreiss,\" Farnsworth said finally. \"I mean, headquarters wants his ass for what he did to those two agents, and local law wants him for the Jared McGarand thing. I think we need to bring him in for his own protection. Damn, I think I got snookered here.\"\n\n\"That woman knew all along that it would be damned difficult to trap Kreiss. Once Lynn was recovered, though, she saw her opportunity. She came after his daughter, knowing Kreiss would come in to protect Lynn.\"\n\n\"Right, right, I can see that.\"\n\n\"Once she knew that Kreiss had been picked up in Washington, just before the bombing, she backed off, left us alone at Micah's. Until, of course, she found out that Kreiss had managed to escape.\"\n\n\"Which means she has a source inside the Bureau,\" Farnsworth said. \"I've been making reports up my chain of command since this shit started. Maybe the leak's in Richmond.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" she said, \"we have to move. We need to get Lynn to a safer place, and we need to find Kreiss. Actually, I think I know how to do that.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Let me talk to Micah. Do you have one of your cards? He's still outside?\"\n\n\"You going to take those with you?\" he asked, indicating the credentials and the Sig. When she hesitated, he added, \"How 'bout if I say I'm sorry?\"\n\nShe smiled wearily. \"This wasn't you, boss. This is something slimy and corrupt oozing back out of the ground in Washington. You need to get Lynn to tell you what she knows about her father's termination.\" Then she picked up the credentials and the gun, her badges of office. He passed her one of his cards, and she went outside.\n\nMicah was sitting in the front seat of one of the Bureau cars, his hat on his lap, his face a mask of shame. Janet opened the driver's door and got in.\n\nSeeing his expression, she said immediately, \"You did the right thing.\"\n\n\"Not in my book, I didn't,\" he said. \"Your car's over there.\" He wouldn't look at her. Without the mountain man hat on his head, he looked old and much diminished.\n\n\"Look, Mr. Wall. First, you saved Lynn and me from some seriously bad people. Second, nobody in this country can fight the government anymore, not if they decide to come after you the way Mr. Farnsworth said they would. Everyone knows that.\"\n\n\"Ain't everyone up here knows that,\" he said.\n\nShe sighed and then she saw a way to let him save face. \"I didn't tell you the whole truth, Mr. Wall. Look.\"\n\nHe looked over at her, and she showed him her credentials. \"I'm the government, too, Mr. Wall. I'm one of them. You didn't betray anyone.\"\n\nHis chin rose slightly, and his face cleared. \"I was assigned to protect Lynn Kreiss,\" she continued. \"And that's what I did. With your help. But now we must get in contact with her father. The last he knew, _you_ had Lynn, so we think he's going to call.\"\n\nHe started to shake his head. \"He ain't told me nothin',\" he said. \"And I ain't gonna\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no,\" she interrupted. \"We're not asking you to turn him in to us. But you must tell him that we have Lynn now, and that _I_ said she's safe with us. I need him to contact me. Not anyone else. Just me.\" She turned Farnsworth's card over and wrote her home phone number on the back of it. \"Here's my number.\"\n\n\"What about them revenuers in the cave?\" he asked, taking the card. \"Wasn't they gov'mint?\"\n\nJanet got out of the car. \"What people in the cave, Mr. Wall?\" She looked at him for a moment to make sure he understood, and then she went back into Kreiss's cabin.\n\n\"I don't think he knows where Kreiss is,\" she told Farnsworth. \"But I think he'll put Kreiss in touch with us. For Lynn's sake.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Farnsworth said. \"We'll be safer in Roanoke, I think. Get the girl up and let's get the hell out of these mountains.\"\n\n\"Why don't I take her to my place? Micah has my car right over there. We both need some sleep.\"\n\nFarnsworth thought about it. \"Okay,\" he said. \"And I'll put some agents on your house. Then I think we're going to have to call in the ATF people in the morning; we've got to sort this out.\"\n\n\"Get them to explain the bullet holes in my car, for starters,\" Janet said. \"Goddamn cowboys.\" Billy grinned at her from the kitchen. Then she went to get Lynn up.\n\nKreiss awoke and took a moment to remember where he was, which was in his sleeping bag in a one-man tent on the Ramsey Arsenal. He rubbed his face, looked at his watch, and realized he'd overslept. He had wanted to talk to Micah before 2:30 A.M. He listened to the sounds of night outside. Everything sounded pretty normal. He slipped out of the warm bag and struggled into the crawl suit. He slithered out of the tent, listened again, and then pulled on his boots. It was almost cold, with a clear atmosphere and enough moonlight to define individual trees. There was a steady background noise of crickets and tree frogs. He could barely hear the creek making its way down toward the logjam. He took several deep breaths and watched his exhalations make vapor clouds.\n\nHe had to think carefully about what he would say when he called Micah. He had to assume that someone, and possibly more than one someone, would have Micah's phone line tapped at the local telephone central office. He needed to find out what had happened to Lynn without giving away his current location. Unless the Bureau had set up a very elaborate radio triangulation net, the closest they should be able to get was that he was operating off a Blacksburg or Christiansburg cell-phone tower. That would tell them he was in the area, but not where. He switched the phone on and saw that the battery wasn't at full power. He swore; the damn thing was dependent on being plugged into the rental van. He dialed Micah's number and got a rejection tone because he hadn't used the area code first. He exhaled, tried again, and the phone was picked up on the second ring. It sounded like Micah.\n\n\"It's me,\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah, good. Them federals from Roanoke, they done got your daughter.\"\n\nKreiss felt a surge of alarm. \"Which federals?\"\n\n\"FBI. That woman what was with her? Said she was with the FBI. She done left a message. Says to call her in Roanoke. Says Lynn is safe with her, but you gotta call, and only to her.\"\n\nHe gave Kreiss the number and then there was a moment of silence. Then he asked if Kreiss needed anything. Micah didn't sound quite right, and Kreiss thought that he might be trying to tell him to get off the line. He told him no, thanked him, and hung up abruptly. He got a pen out and wrote down Janet's phone number. He looked at his watch: It was almost 3:00 A.M. Not a terrific time to call anyone, he thought. But Lynn was with Carter, which should keep her safe from Misty, especially if they had her at the federal building in Roanoke.\n\nHe was fully awake now, so he decided to scout his immediate area, and perhaps lay in a few approach-warning devices. He went to the edge of the little grove where he had pitched his camp and looked down at the wrecked industrial area, which was about three-quarters of a mile away. There was no sign of the security patrol vehicle, but there were portable lights rigged to run off a trailer generator around the remains of the power plant. The wreckage of the other buildings looked like a scene from World War II in the dim moonlight.\n\nTo his left was the edge of the vast ammunition bunker field, arrayed in rows and lanes to the visible horizon, secure behind their own double fence line. A single road led from the industrial area to a double gate, which was closed and presumably locked. Each of the bunkers was topped by two galvanized-steel helical ventilator cowls, all of which were motionless in the still night air. The hundreds of partially buried bunkers made the place look like one vast graveyard. Two thousand acres of canned death, Kreiss thought. It was a fitting symbol for what they had once contained. He wondered where McGarand had gone to ground. He set about rigging some motion detectors. He'd call Carter just before daybreak. Between now and then, he'd try to figure out what his next moves were, assuming he had any left.\n\n## CHAPTER XIV\n\nJanet sat straight up in her bed with the worst headache she had ever had, a blinding, throbbing pain behind her eyes and lancing down both sides of her neck. Her mouth was dry as parchment and her skin felt hot all over. She tried to clear her throat, but there was no moisture; even her eyes were sticky and dry. The room was hot, unnaturally hot. There was daylight outside, but not sunlight. She looked at her watch: It was 6:45 on Wednesday morning. Then she realized the heater must be running.\n\nThe heater? She didn't remember turning on the heater. She tried to clear her throat again, but it hurt even to try. She got out of bed, slower than she wanted to, and went into the bathroom. She looked in the mirror and saw that her face was bright red. She blinked her eyes to make sure, then splashed some cold water on her face. It felt wonderful, but the headache hammered away at her temples and she felt a wave of nausea. What the hell is the matter with me? she wondered. And why is the damned heater going full blast?\n\nShe put on her bathrobe and went back into the bedroom to open a window. The cool air from outside felt like she was breathing pure oxygen, and she stood there for a moment taking deep breaths. Then she stopped: Blinding headache. Hot, dry skin. Bright red face. She knew what this was: carbon monoxide.\n\nThe heater.\n\nShe bolted from the bedroom and ran down the hall to Lynn's room, trying not to breathe. To her horror, Lynn's door was wide open, and Lynn was gone.\n\nMaybe she had awakened and gone out of the house. She ran to the stairs and called for one of the agents who had been downstairs. Her voice came out in a dry squeak. Dear God, let her be downstairs, she prayed. She went down, holding on to the banister, her breathing strangely ineffective. She realized she had made a mistake going downstairs, but she was committed now; no way she was going to make it back up those stairs. She focused on the front door and made it, her lungs bursting from holding her breath. She threw open the door and stumbled outside. Then she realized what she had seen out of the corners of her eyes as she ran for the door: the two agents, down on the floor in the living room.\n\nShe took three deep breaths and ran back inside, grabbing the first one she came to and dragging him roughshod over the front threshold and out onto the landing. His face was bright red and he didn't appear to be breathing. She ran back inside and got the other man, dropping him almost on top of the first. Then she fell down to her knees, gagging, as her lungs screamed for oxygen from the exertion of getting them out. After a minute of this, she got up and staggered over to her car, opened the door, and got on the car phone, calling 911. Then she called the Roanoke office and asked the duty officer for backup, agents down. Then she rolled out of the car onto the wet grass and fought off a siege of the dry heaves while she desperately tried to get more oxygen into her damaged lungs. A car drove past. She caught a glimpse of a man's white face gaping at the scene on her lawn, but he didn't stop. Thanks, pal, she thought.\n\nLynn was gone.\n\nJesus, Mary, and Joseph, what would she tell Kreiss?\n\nShe opened her eyes and saw the two agents still lying motionless on the front porch, their red faces looking like grotesque Halloween masks. She forced herself to get up and go back over to the porch, where she checked for heartbeats and then began giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the first agent.\n\nThat goddamned woman had done this. She was certain of it.\n\nShe thought she heard her phone ringing inside, but she ignored it and moved to the other man, alternating between them now, trying to get some oxygen into both of them while waiting for the ambulance to get there. It seemed forever before the sound of sirens rose in the distance.\n\nDeep in the ammunition bunker, McGarand was cold. The whole damn structure is cold as a tomb, he thought as he shivered under two blankets. He had food, water, a cot, blankets, flashlights, several lanterns, and a tiny cookstove, but no way of heating the seventy-five-foot-long portion of the bunker they had closed off. He put a hand out and touched the concrete floor. It was cold as ice. Probably stays that way all year round, he thought.\n\nThere was a faint glow of light at the top of the ladder leading up to the ventilator shaft. Must be coming daylight out there, he thought as he groped for the light on his watch. He had climbed out the ventilator shaft last night to lock the front steel door again after getting set up in the back half of the bunker. He wished they had rigged some way to take the front door's hinges down from inside, but they were much too heavy. The bad news was that there was only one way out; the good news was that there would be no indication outside that this bunker was any different from any other bunker.\n\nHe stretched, wondering what he was going to do to pass the time. He hadn't thought to bring any books or magazines, not even a Bible. He sighed. That had been stupid of him. He realized he must never have really believed he would need this place. He shivered again. There was plenty of kerosene. Maybe if he lit all the lanterns and put them close to his cot, they might warm the place up. The ventilator above his head should take care of any problems with the fumes. He decided to try it.\n\nJanet sat in the back of a Roanoke EMS ambulance, sucking on an oxygen mask while the EMTs worked on the two agents behind privacy screens in the yard. Farnsworth and two more agents had shown up right behind the ambulance and were now in the house. All the windows in her house were open. Out on the street, two county deputies kept traffic moving and curious neighbors from getting too close. Her headache was abating very slowly, and she had downed two bottles of water and wanted another one. Farnsworth came out of the house, his face grim. She put down the oxygen mask.\n\n\"They came in through the basement; through that half window at ground level. Connected the damned furnace exhaust line to the house-supply vents.\"\n\n\"Not they,\" Janet said. \"She.\"\n\n\"We don't know that,\" he said, looking over at the EMTs huddled inside their screens. They'd been there a long time.\n\n\"Yes, we do,\" Janet said, hopping down from the back of the ambulance. \"She took Lynn. You know it's her.\"\n\nFarnsworth kicked an empty water bottle across the yard.\n\n\"How are they doing?\" she asked, indicating the downed agents.\n\n\"Not so good,\" he said. \"They were downstairs, I take it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Lynn and I were sleeping upstairs. They were supposed to keep each other awake and make sure no one got in or upstairs.\"\n\n\"Well, apparently nobody heard a thing,\" he said.\n\n\"I wouldn't have heard a bomb go off, I'm afraid. Once I realized there was something wrong, I checked on Lynn. She was gone. Then I ran downstairs.\"\n\n\"They were already unconscious?\"\n\n\"Yes. I got the front door open and then pulled them out. I gave them mouth-to-mouth until the EMTs got here, but there were two of them. I didn't do a very good job, I'm afraid.\"\n\nHe fixed the scene with an angry glare. \"Goddamned woman disabled all of you with gas. She didn't have to leave it on once she had the girl.\"\n\n\"I think maybe those _were_ her people in the cavern,\" Janet said.\n\nHe looked at her, then nodded slowly. His cell phone went off in his pocket. He snapped it open and answered it. After a minute, he said they would be back shortly.\n\n\"That was my secretary. Abel Mecklen from the ATF is in my office. He was Whittaker's boss. Judy says he's going ballistic. I better get over there.\"\n\n\"Do you need me to come along?\"\n\nHe thought about it. \"No, not at this time. You've had a bad experience, and we've got a lot of things to sort out. One of them involves you and that roadblock. Kreiss hasn't contacted the office; has he contacted you?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Damn. We just about had a handle on this mess. Tell Kreiss we have his daughter, get him to come in, tell us what he knows about McGarand's little expedition.\"\n\n\"Uh, sir? After what happened up in D.C.? He might not be so willing just to come in and talk. Plus, there's the little matter of the Jared McGarand homicide. Although, Lynn told me some things that might mitigate what happened there.\"\n\nFarnsworth looked across the lawn again at the EMTs. \"I'll tell you what,\" he said. \"I'm willing to deal on the G.W. Parkway caper and the McGarand homicide, in exchange for what he knows about the ATF headquarters bombing and his help in catching whoever did this. Because _this\"_ \u2014he pointed with his chin at the EMTs\u2014\" this is personal. Plus, I think there might be something going on at headquarters that's bigger than both of those other two items.\"\n\n\"Can I tell him that if he calls me?\"\n\n\"Janet, you tell him whatever it takes to get him to come in. The trick is going to be to talk to him _before_ that Agency creature does. Because we know the trade she's going to offer.\"\n\nJanet pulled her bathrobe tighter around her. \"I can tell you right now,\" she said. \"He'll focus on that above all else. None of this other stuff matters to him. Everything he's done has been in pursuit of getting his daughter back. That won't change now. Especially now.\"\n\n\"Not if he still thinks she's safe with us,\" he said.\n\nJanet gave him a look and he raised his hands. \"Okay, okay, it was just a thought. You do the best you can, and then notify me the moment he makes contact. Tell him we'll help him get his daughter back\u2014anything he wants. He's all alone now. He's going to need help, and I think he'll realize that.\"\n\n\"Why can't we get our bosses in Washington to go to the Agency and just get this shit stopped?\" Janet asked. \"Why are _we_ dealing with it?\"\n\n\"Because the people at headquarters who are authorized to deal with the Agency are Marchand's people. Fortunately, you and I work for a different directorate. I have very specific orders to leave those people alone until _our_ AD\u2014that's Mr. Greer\u2014finds out who authorized Bellhouser and Foster to start this shit in the first place. If it's Marchand, that's going to be pretty significant. If it's someone in Main Justice, like maybe Bellhouser's boss, that's doubly significant. Right now, everybody's still spun up over the bombing of the ATF headquarters.\"\n\n\"I can just imagine,\" she said.\n\n\"You probably can't, actually. But Greer, and also the director, I'm told, are very interested in why the Agency is targeting a retired FBI agent, and why that effort is being aided and abetted by someone senior in the FBI and possibly over at Justice.\"\n\nJanet rubbed her eyes. The other reason, as she well knew, was that there was no proof that anyone from the Agency had been in her house last night. Or in the cave, now that she thought about it. By now, Micah Wall and his people would have removed any evidence left on the shores by the subterranean lake. Probably into that pit.\n\nAcross the yard, the EMTs were getting ready to transport the two agents. Farnsworth went over there and talked about the agents' condition. His face was grim when he came back over.\n\n\"You need to go to the hospital?\"\n\nShe thought back about that night and her encounter with Misty in the hospital. \"No, sir. No more hospitals just now.\"\n\n\"Okay, then get some rest, if that's possible. And stay here until you hear from Kreiss. He trusts you, I think. Try hard to get him in.\"\n\nShe thought about that for a moment. \"I don't think I want to stay here right now,\" she said. \"Let me get dressed, and then I'll go down to the office. My head hurts too much for me to sleep. We can call-forward my phone line.\"\n\nHe agreed, and she went into the house. A Crime Scene Unit was coming up from the lower level as she went in. The agent in charge told her it was pretty straightforward: They cut the glass out of the window, let themselves into the lower level. They took the hose off the dryer in the utility room, unbolted a section of the smoke pipe from the gas furnace, and then taped the hose to route exhaust gas to the heated-air-supply vent for the whole house.\n\n\"How did they get Lynn out of the house?\" she asked.\n\n\"Through the front door, it looks like. You said in your statement that you yanked it open, but you didn't say anything about unlocking it. I assume it was locked last night?\"\n\n\"Yes, locked and dead-bolted.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, you might want to invest in a dead-bolt that uses a key instead of a knob. The furnace room had a lot of dust on the floor. We found traces of that up here on the hallway rug and also upstairs. They probably had a respirator mask on, waited for twenty minutes or so for everyone in the house to start flopping around on the floor, and then made their move.\"\n\nShe nodded dejectedly. _She,_ Janet thought. Not they. _She_ had come into Janet's house like it was nothing, right under the noses of two agents, grabbed what she wanted, and then left. Hell, she probably had a key from the last time.\n\nThe CSU leader escorted his team out and then stepped back in. \"We're finished up here,\" he said. \"Good moves on getting Williams and Jackson out, by the way. EMTs said they're breathing on their own. They said that was your doing. Glad to have you back, Carter.\"\n\nShe smiled weakly and went upstairs to get dressed. As she was washing her face, she remembered that the phone had rung while she was getting the agents out. Kreiss? She went to her bedside, got a pen and pad out, and then dialed star 69. The robot quoted her a phone number. She hung up and looked at it. It had a 703 area code. Northern Virginia. Shit, she thought. Is Kreiss still up in the Washington area? She started to dial it, then thought better of that. She'd take it to the office, where they could run the number and see what and who it was.\n\nKreiss moved out of his camp at daylight. He'd decided to have a look around the arsenal, mostly to see what kind of activity was going on down in the industrial area, and to walk the fence perimeter to identify alternative ways out in case he had to run for it. He figured the van would be safe for two, maybe three days in that shopping center parking lot before someone noticed it or stole it. He'd walk out and move it before then.\n\nHe was dressed out in the camo-pattern crawl suit, and he had some water, one MRE, the gun, and the cell phone. His call to Carter had not been answered, and he wanted to try again later in the morning. He wasn't sure if the number Micah had given him was her home or office, but she might have call forwarding on it. He went back through the woods in the direction of the railway cut to get to a point high enough to see down into the industrial area. There did not seem to be anyone down there, although there was what appeared to be a tan-colored van parked by the first intact building along the mam street. The blast at the power plant had been powerful enough to knock down all the wooden structures in the low areas, as well as badly damage several of the big concrete buildings. He concluded that the van was an ATF Crime Scene Unit still working the site for evidence. As long as he stayed out of sight and sound, he should be free to move about the rest of the installation.\n\nAn hour later, he was in the bunker farm, which looked to be every bit as big as the overhead photos indicated. He'd gone over the fence rather than fool with the gates, especially with police and ATF people around. The ground inside the bunker farm was rolling, with narrow gravel roads defining the lanes and rows of the partially buried round-topped bunkers. From his vantage point on top of a bunker, he could see perhaps five hundred of the structures, interspersed with clumps of pines. There were no telephone poles, so power and monitoring circuits going to the structures must be underground. He fished the binoculars out of the chest pack and sat down to take a careful look at everything. He knew there were at least that many bunkers, if not more, over the far ridge, and behind that was the section of the perimeter fence he wanted to explore. The day was turning hazy with weak sunlight.\n\nAs he scanned the bunkers to the right of the main road, carefully studying the stands of trees and occasionally turning the glasses back onto the gates to make sure no one was coming, he worried about Lynn. The thought of Misty hunting Lynn had been very much on his mind. Even if she was with Carter, it didn't mean she was safe. Inexperienced as she was, Carter was no match for someone like Misty. Hell, most of the Bureau was no match for Misty. It wasn't just all the gizmos and special toys that made the sweepers so effective; it was their willingness to do very unconventional and dangerous things that made them so lethal, like starting that fire in the hospital. That plus the use of disabling weapons like the retinal disrupter, or psychological measures, like his own use of sounds.\n\nHe could still remember his first training session with Misty: \"If you're going to hunt someone,\" she said, \"there are two ways to go about it. You can hunt your target in secret and attempt to take him by surprise. But, by definition, you'll get only one chance doing it that way; if you fail, the element of surprise is lost. Considering that we are normally dealing with trained operatives when we go hunting, a miss can be permanent. On the other hand, if you subtly let the quarry know you're hunting him, you add the element of fear to all the other weapons at your disposal. The people we hunt are highly trained to pay attention to situational awareness, which is another way of saying they're permanently paranoid. If you choose the second method, you can amplify that existing paranoia with lots of nonlethal means, to the point where you can make the quarry bolt. Once he bolts, his situational awareness is gone, and he's yours for the taking.\"\n\nAfter the first month, he'd realized that Misty truly enjoyed her work. And so, if he thought about it honestly, had he. It hadn't been at all like the Bureau, which tended to throw a wide net of resources around a subject and then slowly, if often not very efficiently, pull it tight. His first boss in the Bureau had explained it well: The Bureau was first and foremost a bureaucracy. The word had two roots: _bureau,_ meaning \"administrative unit,\" and _cracy,_ from the Greek _kratos,_ meaning \"strength\" or \"power.\" We strangle the bad guys with paperwork\u2014research, evidence, legal maneuvers, surveillance, wire-taps, warrants, and laws\u2014while trying not to drown in our own internal paperwork. His work with the sweepers had been the absolute antithesis of the Bureau's approach: Tracking down and retrieving an Agency operative who had gone bad was an intensely personal mission. It was one-on-one ball, an exciting match of professional wits, stamina, cunning, mechanical skills, and, ultimately, the direct psychological engagement of the target. He hadn't liked it; he had _loved_ it.\n\nHe shifted his position on the top of the bunker and scanned the other half of the bunker field, starting from the road and working to his left, looking for anything out of place or different from all the other bunkers. He also scanned the fence line; nothing there except some plastic bags and other windblown trash hung up at the base of the wire. The bunkers all looked much the same: old grayish-green concrete, rusting steel doors facing a ramp that had been cut down into the ground, and two motionless rusting helical ventilators on each structure, looking like little frozen smokestacks.\n\nExcept one was moving. Right there, almost on the visible horizon, to the right of a large stand of trees. A bunker like all the rest, except that the helical cylinder on the back end of the bunker was turning very slowly. Now why is that? he wondered.\n\nHe knew that the helical cowls could provide ventilation two ways. If there was a breeze, it would spin the helix, which in turn would draw warm air out of the bunker. But if there was no breeze, as was the case today, it had to mean there was warm air inside the bunker, rising through the shaft to turn the helix. But the bunkers were supposedly all empty. Empty, cold, man-made tombs.\n\nHe walked carefully down the full length of the bunker roof he was standing on to examine the distant cowl from a slightly different angle. It was definitely moving. It was nearly half a mile away; perhaps there was a breeze over there. But then both cowls ought to be moving. He swung around to scan the fence and the gates behind him, but there was still no one there, and no sound of any vehicles coming. He took a mental bearing on the distant bunker, slid down from the one he had climbed, and headed for the ridge, trotting purposefully down one of the lanes. It was full daylight now, so he tried to keep a line of bunkers between him and the main gate to the bunker farm. He was almost there, crossing into a line of trees from the gravel lane, when the tiny cellular phone in his backpack went off. He moved sideways into the tree line, stood with his back against a tree, opened the phone, and hit the send button.\n\n\"You called me,\" he announced quietly.\n\n\"This is Janet Carter; where are you?\"\n\n\"At the other end of this phone circuit, Special Agent,\" he replied. She sounded upset. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I'm in the office. In Roanoke. That woman\u2014Misty, you called her? She's taken Lynn.\"\n\nHe sat down abruptly, his back to the pine tree. A cold wave settled over his chest.\n\n\"Tell me,\" he said.\n\nShe gave him a brief rundown of everything since the hospital, up to and including Misty's attack with the carbon monoxide. \"My boss wants you to come in, preferably down here to Roanoke. He's\u2014wait a minute.\"\n\nKreiss sat there with his eyes closed, trying not to think of anything. He'd had Lynn, but now he didn't. A man's voice came on the phone.\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss, this is Ted Farnsworth, RA Roanoke. We have a warrant for your apprehension as a material witness regarding a homicide over in Montgomery County. We have a federal warrant for you regarding the little diversion you ran in Washington. The ATF wants to talk to you about the bombing of their headquarters. And a certain Agency apparently just plain wants your ass.\"\n\n\"It's nice to be wanted,\" Kreiss said. \"But not very.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, you were in the business. You know the drill. There's one more want, actually. My AD\u2014that's Mr. Greer, over at Criminal Investigations\u2014wants to know why another AD\u2014that's Mr. Marchand, over FCI\u2014got someone very senior at Main Justice to activate the person who snatched your daughter and damn near killed two of my agents this morning. Three, if Janet hadn't awakened and realized something was wrong.\"\n\n\"Good question,\" Kreiss said. He would have to figure out how to contact Misty. There was no sense in delaying the inevitable. Talking to the FBI was now a waste of time. He knew what Misty wanted: a straight trade. Himself for Lynn.\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss? Are you there?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I don't think we have anything to talk about, Mr. Farnsworth.\" He could just see the ventilator cowl. It was still moving.\n\n\"That's not quite so, Mr. Kreiss. I have authority to deal on the Jared McGarand matter and what happened up on the G.W. Parkway. My chain of command feels that what Bellhouser and Foster set in motion is a hell of a lot more important than anything going on down here in Roanoke. They also feel that this is all connected to something you know.\"\n\nMore than you would ever understand, he thought as he focused on what Farnsworth was saying. And here he was again, facing the same choice he had been given five years ago: \"your silence or your daughter.\"\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss?\"\n\n\"You can't help me do the one thing I must do, Mr. Farnsworth,\" Kreiss said. \"I need to free my daughter. And I don't believe you or your boss or even _his_ boss can fight what's behind all this.\"\n\n\"My SAC is telling me the director's into this one, Mr. Kreiss.\"\n\n\"I rest my case.\"\n\n\"AD Greer says this is about the Chinese espionage case in the nuclear labs. Is he right?\"\n\nKreiss was surprised, very surprised. He forced himself to focus. Nobody knew this. Except _them._\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss? Greer says you came back from your Agency assignment and the Glower incident with information that connects Chinese government campaign contributions to the way the nuclear labs investigations got derailed.\"\n\n\"We are speaking on an open radio circuit,\" Kreiss warned. He was aghast. Nobody could know this.\n\n\"They're telling me you agreed to forced retirement and a vow of silence. What he doesn't know or understand is why. The publicly stated reason was your role in the Glower mass suicides. But now he thinks it was something else.\"\n\nKreiss sat on the ground in the pine straw, his mind reeling. He had kept his end of the bargain. He had not said a word. He had not done anything but come down here to be with and support his daughter while she finished school. If it hadn't been for that total wild card, that lunatic McGarand and his mission of revenge, he'd still be sitting in his cabin watching the trees grow. _They_ had broken the agreement. Unless . . .\n\n\"Mr. Kreiss? My chain of command desperately wants to know what you know, and what you can prove. They are willing to drop all the rest, all of it, in return for that. We think we can help you get your daughter back from those people, but only if we can apply the appropriate pressure at the seat of government. Agency to agency, director to director, if need be.\"\n\n\"You don't know her,\" Kreiss said. A bird started up with a racket way up in the trees above his head.\n\n\"What's that, Mr. Kreiss? Don't know who?\"\n\n\"You don't know the woman who's holding Lynn. Ask Carter; she knows her. This is personal now, between me and her. The only way I _know_ I can get Lynn back safely is to trade myself for my daughter. You and the rest of the Bureau would only get in the way.\"\n\n\"Not true, Mr. Kreiss. If you give my bosses what they need, they can get _her_ controllers to turn your daughter over. Ephraim Glower's dead, so the Agency can admit what he was doing now and shrug their shoulders: He's beyond prosecution, dead five years now. They won't be the ones who'll have the problem. It will be the people at Justice, and whomever they suborned here at the Bureau. The Agency will play ball when they realize our director is going to reveal the connection.\"\n\nKreiss thought about it. Could he take on Misty? Could he even _find_ Misty? And what would happen to Lynn if he did?\n\n\"You were a special agent of the FBI, Mr. Kreiss. You know how we do things. We're the G. We're big. We're huge. We overwhelm. So do they. If the Agency sets its mind to it, they can and will find you and grind you up. If you let them capture you, you'll end up in solitary confinement in a federal pen somewhere, and not necessarily in this country.\"\n\nThen Janet Carter came on the line. \"The last time, when you went along, it was strictly about your daughter, wasn't it?\"\n\nKreiss didn't answer. He didn't have to.\n\n\"Well, this time you have some leverage you didn't have before. Last time, you traded her security for your silence. They broke the deal. So why not use what you've got?\"\n\n\"Because, Special Agent, she might kill my daughter.\"\n\n\"Might? Mr. Kreiss, she already set fire to a _hospital._ What makes you think she won't hurt Lynn now? I told you what happened in the cave, remember?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, we're pretty sure now those were her people. They were not ATF assets. In fact, the local head of the ATF has been in here all morning, yelling at Mr. Farnsworth here to find you. ATF hasn't been conducting any operations down here other than out at that arsenal, after the McGarand thing. So those had to be her people in the cave.\"\n\nHe felt the world constrict. Misty had suffered losses. Would she take that out on Lynn? He had given his word. To leave the Bureau. To admit culpability for precipitating the Glower debacle. To maintain his silence. To submerge completely. In return, they would leave Lynn alone. Every fiber of his being was crying out for him to hunt that woman down, to destroy her. But he knew Carter and Farnsworth were right. The only realistic fix was in Washington, where the fix was the holy grail of modern government. It wasn't about trade-craft anymore, or personal competence. It was about information and evidence. The director had been demonized by his enemies at Justice ever since the campaign contributions scandal had erupted. Now he'd discovered that there might be a way to destroy those enemies. If he could believe Farnsworth, the director himself was willing to use what he, Kreiss, knew, to strike back. And, not coincidentally, to strike at the heart of the corruption that most people in the Bureau believed had consumed the Justice Department. These were monumental issues: How would one college student fare when federal law enforcement went to war with itself?\n\n\"If I do this, how can you guarantee that Lynn remains safe?\"\n\n\"We can't,\" Farnsworth said. The words resounded down the phone line. \"I want to say something different, but that's probably the truth of it.\"\n\nKreiss found himself nodding in agreement. At least Farnsworth was shooting straight.\n\n\"But you can't, either, Mr. Kreiss. From what Janet tells me, Lynn knows more about this than I think you would expect. If she reveals that to them, she becomes expendable, too. The only way this works is if we have information that _forces_ them to let her go. She's a pawn, and that's how you want to keep it. You have to come in. You don't have any workable alternatives.\"\n\n\"All right,\" he said, almost whispering it. \"I'm at the Ramsey Arsenal.\"\n\nThere was an instant of silence, as if Farnsworth was surprised by that. \"Where, exactly?\" Farnsworth asked.\n\nKreiss's eyes snapped open at that question. It didn't fit with everything else Farnsworth had been saying. It was too . . . tactical.\n\n\"Have Carter come alone to the industrial area,\" Kreiss said. \"I'll find her.\"\n\nThere was another pause on the line. Then Farnsworth said, \"Three hours. And not alone\u2014she has to have backup.\"\n\n\"Distant backup.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\"\n\n\"Three hours,\" Kreiss repeated, and switched the phone off. He leaned sideways and let himself settle back into the pine straw, his eyes staring up into the treetops, unseeing. He did, in fact, have what the Bureau wanted. Much more than they needed. Direct corroborating evidence of a deliberate policy to suppress and impede the investigation at the nuclear labs. Not derived from any investigation, but from Ephraim Glower's safe, which he, Kreiss, had rifled after discovering the bodies. He had felt more than a little guilt when he beheld that bloodbath, but that guilt vanished when he read what was in Glower's safe. He smiled for the first time that day, or maybe even that week. They would be expecting him to take them to a safety-deposit box somewhere and produce an envelope. They would positively howl when they found out where it was. And what it was.\n\nThen he remembered that ventilator, spinning quietly in the still air of morning. He looked at his watch. He had three hours. Why not go see?\n\nFarnsworth took Janet with him down to the secure-communications area of the office. To her surprise, Billy Smith was manning the communication console. He winked at her as Farnsworth ordered him to get Assistant Director Greer's office on the line. The operator on the Washington end told him to stand by.\n\n\"This is the biggest thing that you'll ever be involved in,\" he told Janet. \"If we can prove that the Chinese campaign contributions bought breathing room for their spies in the Energy Department, and that someone at Justice helped it happen, the Bureau will be invincible.\"\n\n\"But according to Lynn Kreiss, that 'someone' in Justice had some help in the Bureau,\" Janet pointed out. This comment elicited a gas-pain expression from Farnsworth. Then Assistant Director Greer himself was on the secure link.\n\nFarnsworth briefed him on what had been agreed. Greer immediately overruled the RA's plan to send just Carter and some backup agents to pick Kreiss up. \"You go yourself, and take along every swinging dick in the office,\" he ordered. \"I want nothing going wrong here. The last time you sent people to that goddamned arsenal, it blew up in your faces, literally.\"\n\n\"Sir, Kreiss is nervous,\" Farnsworth said. \"He sees a crowd, he may change his mind.\"\n\n\"Then make sure he doesn't _see_ a goddamned crowd. Now, you think he has evidence? Real evidence? Not just opinions?\"\n\n\"I think if all he had were opinions, he wouldn't have been hammered the way he was five years ago. I think he has something, and now that all that shit about the labs has resurfaced, those people are scared of it. But first and foremost, we must get the daughter back, or nothing good happens. Kreiss without the daughter is useless.\"\n\n\"Then make it happen. Pick him up and get him up here, _with_ his evidence. Quickly, before our dear friends down at Justice figure out what's happening. Once the director evaluates the situation, we'll make the appropriate calls and get the daughter back.\"\n\n\"What if they won't?\"\n\n\"Won't what?\"\n\n\"Give the daughter back. What if they insist we give them Kreiss before they'll let the daughter go?\"\n\n\"Once he gives us his evidence, I don't give a shit about what happens to Kreiss. He embarrassed the Bureau. The spooks can have him. Believe me, we don't have to go public with what we know to achieve the desired effect.\"\n\nFarnsworth opened his mouth to say something but then closed it. Janet was staring at the secure phone in disbelief. Greer told them to get moving and hung up. Farnsworth put the phone down slowly, as if it were very fragile.\n\n\"Son of a bitch,\" he said softly.\n\n\"Amen to that,\" Janet said, sitting down in a chair by the phone console.\n\n\"I never agreed to anything like that with Kreiss,\" he said. \"He shows his evidence, we send it up the line, and they force those people to recall their operative and get the girl back. That's the fucking deal. I never agreed to turn Kreiss over to anybody.\"\n\n\"But in a way, you just did,\" she pointed out.\n\n\"No, I did not,\" the RA said, his jaw jutting out. \"Kreiss used to be one of us. It wasn't like _he_ went dirty. I don't care what he knows or what he did up there in D.C.; I'm not going to be part of just handing him over to some bunch of out-of-control spooks.\"\n\n\"Let's take it one step at a time,\" she said. \"Let's get to Kreiss. See his so-called evidence. I also want to know what happened with Jared McGarand; I think that his getting killed may have been an accident. And what he did up there in that car? Well, considering where they were taking him, I'd have tried the same thing, only I'd have probably screwed it up. But first, let's get Kreiss. Nothing happens until we have him.\"\n\nFarnsworth nodded, staring down at the phone as if it smelled bad. \"Okay,\" he said. \"Find Keenan. We'll need everybody.\"\n\nKreiss approached the bunker from the front, along the gravel road that led between one row of bunkers and the next, staying close to the mounded structures in case a security patrol popped over the hill behind him. The bunker number was still visible, black lettering on a dirty white field: 887. The ramp leading down to the heavy steel doors showed no signs of recent human activity. There was a large rusty-looking padlock on the huge steel airtight door, just like all the rest of the bunkers had. The grass growing around the bunker was a foot deep, starting at the front face of the bunker and growing all the way around it, making it look like the bunker had grown naturally out of the ground. The building appeared to be 150 feet long.\n\nKreiss walked down the gravel and concrete ramp and examined the lock. It was securely made; there were no bright metal scratches to show evidence of any tampering. The steel door was blast-resistant, with heavy airtight seals overlapping its mounting. There was some Army nomenclature on the side of the lock, so it was probably part of a series set. He walked back up the ramp and around to the side of the bunker, climbing through the thick wet grass to stand at the bottom of the rounded top. The front ventilator was still; the rear one was just barely moving, making a repetitive pinging noise as a rusty bearing complained. But it was definitely moving. Stepping softly, he climbed up the rounded concrete top of the bunker, sliding his feet instead of stepping. That concrete was probably a foot thick, but if there was someone inside, he didn't want to be heard. When he got to the rear ventilator cowl, he smelled kerosene smoke. It was very faint, but recognizable. He put his nose to the cowl and the smell was stronger. Kerosene lantern or heater in there.\n\nSomeone was in the bunker. And since the front door was locked tight from the outside, there must be another way in. He slid back down the roof of the bunker and walked all the way around it. It was solid, with no other entrances or exits. He checked the boundary area where the grass met the sloping concrete of the structure, looking for a trapdoor, but it was all solid ground. He looked back up at the ventilator, then went to the front of the bunker and climbed to the front cowl. He sniffed that, but there was no smell of anything but the wet grass on his boots. He studied it, then went to the back cowl to see what was different, and he found it immediately.\n\nThe base of the rear ventilator cowl was hinged. The hinges had been tack-welded on and then painted flat black to match the tar that sealed the cowl flashing to the concrete. The tarred flashing, however, was gone. He put his fingers under the base of the cowling and lifted just a tiny bit. The whole structure moved. He went back to the front cowling and tried the same thing. Solid as a rock. He shuffled back to the rear cowling, looked on the side opposite the hinges, and saw a crude latch. The latch was made so that the ventilator cowling wouldn't move sideways if the turbine head really began to spin. He was willing to bet there was a ladder down there.\n\nHe squatted down on the roof of the bunker. Someone was hiding in there. Now who would be hiding out in the ammunition-storage area of an abandoned military facility? No, not military. Civilian. This place had been a GOCO installation\u2014government-owned, commercially operated. McGarand had run this whole installation as the chief chemical engineer. He had set up his hydrogen laboratory in the most secure building on the site, the one that offered the most sound and physical insulation, the power plant. That must have taken months of effort. He had set up traps along the approach perimeter, and he had rigged the industrial area itself to destruct if anybody came around to take a serious look. Which meant he had had all the time in the world to prepare something like this, for the aftermath of his revenge bombing. If the kids hadn't come along, he would probably still be living in Blacksburg, watching the feds reel from another bombing that, somewhat like the OK City bombing, had no clear motivations. The bunker farm was a perfect place to hide, just like the industrial area had been the perfect place for a bomb factory. It was another case of hiding in almost plain sight: The one place no one would look for McGarand would be back in the damned arsenal. It had to be McGarand.\n\nHe stood up. McGarand had held his daughter prisoner for almost a month, after allowing the other two kids to die in a flash flood like bugs. Then he had simply walked away, leaving Lynn in the nitro building to starve. This was an opportunity for justice such as rarely had come along in his previous life in law enforcement. He walked down the bunker roof and out to the gravel lane, looking along the ditches. He finally found what he was searching for, a piece of thin steel rod, about two feet long. It was rusted but still solid. He climbed back to the top of the bunker and quietly inserted the rod through the latch at the edge of the cowling base. Then he bent the two ends up to form a wide vee, so that the rod could not be shaken out. The hinges were solid steel and mounted on the outside. The cowling surrounding the turbine head was heavy steel, designed to allow a controlled release of combustion gases should the ammunition that had been stored there ever cook off. Rusty, covered in bird lime, but solid steel. Then he went down and found a stick, brought it back up, and jammed it roughly into the turbine housing, stopping the motion. No motion, no reason for anyone else to notice there was anything different about this bunker. And, best of all, McGarand had locked the front steel door from the outside before climbing back in through the ventilator.\n\nHe slid back down the concrete and examined his handiwork. Then he remembered the plastic bags out on the fence line. Even better. He trotted back out to the fence line, gathered up three of the largest plastic trash bags, and returned to the bunker. He climbed back up and hooded the front vent grill with one of the bags. Then he covered the immobilized vent with the other two. Before knotting on the final piece, he fished in his backpack and extracted Lynn's weather-beaten high school ball cap, which he had carried with him ever since recovering it from the logjam. He pushed it through the grill, dropping it into the bunker below, and then finished wrapping plastic over the vent grill. The bunker was now sealed. In twelve hours or so, there would be no more oxygen in there, even less time if McGarand kept a kerosene lamp going.\n\n\"Burn in hell, Browne McGarand,\" he said not so quietly.\n\nAt noon, Janet Carter checked through the arsenal's main gate in a Bureau car and drove down into what was left of the industrial area. The new civilian security guards reported that an ATF forensics team was going to be on the site today, although they had not signed in yet. She told him that there would be four more vehicles with FBI agents coming behind her. She parked her Bureau car near the windowless administrative building at the top of the hill, shut it down, and opened the car's windows. She could see what she assumed to be the ATF CSU van down near the rubble of the power plant, but not the technicians. The hole in the main street, into which she had driven her car, was still visible. Several of the overhead pipe frames had been blown down in the blast and remained where they had fallen, looking like piles of steel spaghetti in the now-cluttered street. The windows in the administrative building had been blown through the building and into the parking lot, which sparkled as if covered in new frost. There was a fifteen-foot-high ring of rubble surrounding the site of the power plant.\n\nFarnsworth and Keenan had worked up a quick plan back in the Roanoke office. They would post two-man teams at the known incursion points, such as the rail spur, the back gates, and the creek penstock. The rest of the tactical squad would go through the main gate and then deploy on foot into the tree line overlooking the open meadow above the industrial area. Farnsworth had briefed Abel Mecklen, the SAC of the Roanoke ATF office, as to what they would be doing at the arsenal, and he had requested that the ATF launch one of their small surveillance planes. The aircraft would be tasked to orbit the arsenal perimeter at ten thousand feet with its engine muffled. A county hospital MedLift helicopter was put on short standby at the hospital pad; after their last exciting visit to the arsenal, Farnsworth was taking no chances.\n\nThe RA had taken AD Greer's direction literally and pulled everyone into the operation, even Billy Smith, who was again assigned to tactical communications. Janet, like the rest of the agents, had changed into tactical gear: jumpsuit, Kevlar vest, tactical equipment belt, and FBI ball cap. She had a portable radio with collar microphone and her SIG was holstered on her right hip. Her personal .38 revolver was in the glove compartment. She looked at her watch: The tactical radio circuit would be established in twenty minutes, after which the various elements of the team would check in on-station. After that, she would be cleared to do whatever she needed to do to find Kreiss. Which was probably nothing, she realized. Kreiss would probably just step out of one of these wrecked buildings and come over to the car. That's when it might get hard.\n\nShe still had a residual headache from the carbon monoxide, and she would have loved to have had a bottle of oxygen to suck on for a while. Goddamned woman. The frustrating thing was that once they had Kreiss and could get what he had into the right channels, they would then all have to wait some more, for the right pressure to be applied and the Agency's black widow to turn loose her hostage. The nagging question in the back of Janet's head hadn't changed: What if Misty wouldn't go along? What if she had gone off the tracks and was now engaged in some personal vendetta against Kreiss? If this didn't work for some reason, and Kreiss didn't get Lynn back, there would be hell to pay. Coupled with the implied treachery in what AD Greer had said, she felt pretty uncomfortable about Kreiss's prospects.\n\nShe shook her head to clear her thoughts and focused on what was going on around her. Too many what it's could be very distracting. The ATF van hadn't moved and there was still no sign of their techs. She wondered where they might be working, since most of the structures at that end were demolished or too badly damaged even to be safe. For that matter, she thought they now pretty much knew what had caused the blast: a concentration of hydrogen. Then she remembered what the civilian gate guard had said: ATF forensics hadn't signed in on-site yet. Then what\u2014\n\nThe radio squawked in her left ear as Keenan came up on channel one, establishing the tactical net. She acknowledged when he polled the various teams. He reported that the ATF's aircraft was still at the local airport, down temporarily with a parts problem, ETA one hour. Here we go, she thought, stuff going wrong before we even get going. She scanned the wrecked buildings down the hill for signs of Kreiss. She had parked the car in plain sight, and he could surely recognize a Bu car. She looked at her watch again: 12:20. They were now in the window.\n\nWhere are you, Kreiss? she thought, beginning to feel exposed out here in the sunlight. She thought of the stark contrast between what he'd been doing for all those years, on his own, and the way the rest of the Bureau did business. Dependent solely on his wits and cunning, with no partners, no backup, no base, and no rules. Every new mission coming with its own fresh hunting license. The silence around her was palpable.\n\nC'mon, Kreiss. This is your only hope of getting Lynn back, this, or giving yourself up to those people. Now you need us. No more Lone Ranger. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The sooner the better, Kreiss.\n\nKreiss was in the trees above the creek, flat on his belly, scanning the entire industrial area through his binoculars. He had seen Carter drive down the main access road and park near the admin building. He was waiting to see if he could detect how much backup there would be and where they would set up. And he was curious about that van down by the flattened power plant. It looked like a CSU van, except there was no lettering of any kind to identify whose CSU might be there. He couldn't see the license plate, either. He knew ATF would work a scene like this for weeks, even if they had already figured out what had happened. They liked to gather a ton of evidence, and bomb sites often yielded literally tons of evidence.\n\nHe scrunched around in the pine needles to get a better visual line on the van. Ford, full-sized, tan. It could be a piece of the FBI backup team, too. Except he was pretty sure he remembered seeing it earlier, when he had gone into the bunker farm. He studied it carefully. The windows facing into the morning sun were clear; the others, toward the back, still had dew on them. It had definitely been there awhile. He scanned up the street to Carter's Bu car; he couldn't make out the details of her face, but it looked like her, sitting alone in the driver's seat.\n\nHe continued to scan right, up into the tree line where the road from the main gate came out into the industrial area. That's where the bulk of the backup team would be, he figured. And probably at the other entrances to the arsenal. He rolled over on his back, looked into the sky, and listened. No airplanes, or not yet anyway. The empty bright sky made his eyes water. It was tempting to close his eyes and just relax there, safe in the pine needles among all these silent trees. The birds had quit worrying about him. So what was he waiting for? He rolled back over. Two things: Farnsworth's question about where he was, exactly, and that van. The RA had probably just been trying to figure out where to deploy his backup team. In any event, he couldn't do anything about Farnsworth. The van was something else. It might be FBI, ATF, or even local law.\n\nOr it might be Misty.\n\nWhy would she be here at the arsenal? She could hide anywhere, and, unlike McGarand, she had not had that much time to prepare a place here. More likely, he thought, she had a source inside the Bureau and knew why Carter was here. Her mission was to bring him in. A straight retrieval. That was the only logical explanation for her taking Lynn hostage: They didn't want Lynn. They wanted him. And Misty would trade. If she was here, and watching, he would have to be very damned careful about getting to Carter's car. He began sliding back into the woods, and then he stopped as it hit him.\n\nFord, full-sized, tan. My God, he thought. Was that the van he'd rented in Washington and left at the strip mall? Wasn't that his van?\n\nJanet acknowledged a second station poll on the tactical net, confirming again that she was in position. It was getting warm in the car, especially in the vest, and she was tempted to move into the tiny bit of shade of the admin building, on the other side from where she was parked now. But that would put the building between her and her backup, and her instincts told her not to do that. Farnsworth came up and asked if she saw anything going on. She reported that there was nothing moving. Then she asked if the ATF Crime Scene people had been backed out during the pickup window.\n\n\"What ATF Crime Scene people?\" Farnsworth asked. She told him about the van down by the power plant. Farnsworth told her to stand by, then, a few minutes later, came back. \"ATF does not have any people or vehicles on the installation. Describe the van.\"\n\nJanet asked him to wait and then got out of the car. She put binoculars on the van and described it to the RA. She could not get a license plate. She asked if he wanted her to go down there. He told her to stand by. She knew that he didn't want to reveal the scope of the backup forces, in case Kreiss was watching and got spooked. She also didn't think he would want her to approach an unknown vehicle on her own. He came back on the net.\n\n\"Move your vehicle to a position where you can get a license plate on that van,\" he instructed. \"Do not get out of your vehicle.\"\n\nShe acknowledged, got back in, and started the car. She rolled up the windows, switched on the AC, and then drove around the admin building and onto the main street. She had to go very slowly as she threaded her way through chunks of concrete and piles of other debris in the street. The toppled overhead pipe racks obstructed her way, so when she reached the first side street, she went left, down around the pushed-over remains of the wooden sheds, and then up a small rise where a water tower lay on its side like a smashed pumpkin. From this vantage, she could get the binocs on the van's back plate. She called it in to Farnsworth. He acknowledged and told her to hold her position and reiterated his instruction to stay in her car.\n\nShe looked around the area where she had parked. Behind her was the line of pine trees, and behind that, she was pretty sure, there was a creek, just over that hill. In front of her, the full scale of the blast was evident, highlighted by the bare concrete swath where the power plant had been, surrounded by a nearly perfect circle of rubble and boiler parts. The two enormous turbogenerators, wrecked and shifted off their foundations, leaned to one side in mute testimony to the force of the explosion. The shredded insulation and shattered flanges on the scattered steam pipes made them look like giant broken bones. Big black holes gaped beneath each turbogenerator, and she wondered if they led down into the water chamber at the end of the Ditch. She put the car in park, shut it down, and rolled her window down. A small building whose roof was gone provided a patch of shadow for the car, for which she was duly grateful.\n\n\"It's a rental,\" Farnsworth reported. \"Rented two days ago in northern Virginia, along with a cell phone. We're waiting now for headquarters to get the info on the driver's license. The contract is in the name of a John Smith, who paid cash.\"\n\n\"I'll bet that's Kreiss's vehicle,\" she said.\n\n\"And you'd be right,\" a voice behind her said softly. She turned and found Kreiss crouching by her door, a finger to his lips. \"Hold your position and report any movement,\" Farnsworth was saying.\n\nShe acknowledged, while Kreiss walked around the back to the other side and let himself into the front seat. He asked her to roll the window down on his side. He was dressed in a camo jumpsuit, head hood, a pack front and back, and a heavy equipment belt, not unlike her own, which was strapped around his waist. A large automatic, probably a .45, was slung under the left side of his chest pack, ready for a cross-draw. He smelled of pine needles and wet mud.\n\n\"Well, Special Agent,\" he said in a tired voice, \"here we are.\"\n\nShe didn't say anything as he took off the hood. His face was gaunt with fatigue, and his normally well-trimmed beard was a little ragged around the edges. His eyes were red-rimmed, but alert, looking at her while keeping a watchful eye on their surroundings, as if he were expecting something dangerous to spring out of the rubble.\n\n\"Do you think she's here?\" Janet asked. \"Not Lynn. That woman?\"\n\n\"It's possible,\" he said. \"That van down there? I left it in a shopping center parking lot last night.\" He patted his front pack. \"I still have the keys.\"\n\n\"So how did it get here?\"\n\n\"Beats the shit out of me, but someone with the right resources could manage it. I thought maybe you guys had moved it here.\"\n\n\"Nope,\" she said.\n\n\"Bad sign,\" he said as he scanned the area again. \"So what happens now?\"\n\n\"I tell them you're here and then we leave,\" she said, getting a little anxious about the possible presence of Misty. \"Sooner rather then later, okay?\"\n\n\"What about Lynn?\"\n\n\"You give headquarters what they need, they pressure the Agency to get that woman to release Lynn.\"\n\n\"And what if she doesn't?\" he asked, echoing her own earlier question.\n\nThen the vehicle's cell phone rang. Kreiss looked at her. She shook her head. \"Moot point now, I suspect,\" he said with a wintry smile. Janet had no idea of who might be calling her vehicle's cell phone when there was a tactical radio net up. She picked it up. \"Carter,\" she said. Her voice cracked and she cleared it.\n\n\"Let me talk to him,\" the woman's voice said.\n\n\"No,\" Janet said.\n\n\"Don't be an ass, Carter. How do you think I knew _when_ to make this call?\"\n\n\"I don't care,\" Janet said.\n\n\"Yes, you do. I'm looking at you through a sniper scope. Want proof?\"\n\n\"Tell me what you want.\"\n\n\"You know exactly what I want. Kreiss.\"\n\nThen Kreiss was reaching for the phone. Janet didn't want to hand it over, but something in his eyes made her yield. Then he slid across the seat so she could listen to both sides of the conversation. She was suddenly very aware of him as the front seat dipped under his weight. She hadn't realized how large he was.\n\n\"Speak,\" he said.\n\n\"I have your daughter. I will release her, now, as long as you get out of that car and go back into the woods until the feebs leave.\"\n\nKreiss was trying to scan the area outside the car without turning his head.\n\n\"I've had a better offer,\" he said. \"I'm going to give these people something, and then they're going to make your people an offer they can't refuse.\"\n\n\"And then what happens to you?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I said, what happens to you?\"\n\n\"I get to live in peace.\"\n\n\"And you believe that?\"\n\n\"Why not? They get the smoking gun and a lock on Justice that even Hoover would love. And your people basically shouldn't care. Your traitor blew his brains out five years ago up in Millwood.\"\n\n\"Palace games, Edwin,\" she said. \"You've never cared for palace games. And you think you can come in from the cold once you've done this, do you? A grateful Bureau welcoming the exiled hero back into the family, right? Listen to this.\"\n\nThere was a pause, and then, to Janet's shocked amazement, Farnsworth's conversation with Howell Greer was playing back to them. She cringed when she heard Greer's words about Kreiss being expendable. She stared rigidly out the windshield, holding her breath, unable to meet his eyes when it was over. That damned woman had someone _in_ the Roanoke office. Someone who had had access to secure communications, _while_ they were being transmitted. Oh shit, _Billy?_\n\nFarnsworth's voice came over her collar radio. Kreiss, not letting go of the phone, ripped the mike off her shoulder and threw it out the window.\n\n\"Edwin,\" the woman said. \"I've been sent to retrieve you. I'm not leaving until I do. Here's the real deal: You get out of that car and walk back up into the woods. If you don't, I'll drop your daughter down one of these deep holes I keep finding here.\"\n\nJanet saw Kreiss's hand close on the phone handset so hard that it began to crack.\n\n\"Edwin,\" the woman continued. \"You get out of the car and she gets to walk away. You have my word, which you now know is a lot more reliable than your precious Bureau's word, isn't it? Then I'll give you an hour or two. Let's wait until dark. Then we'll work it out, you and me. Sound and light, like old times. You can even try to stop me. But this way, what happens to your daughter is up to _you,_ not some faceless bureaucrat in Washington.\"\n\nKreiss said nothing, staring straight ahead.\n\n\"It's a no-brainer, Edwin.\"\n\nHe hesitated, then said, \"I need a minute.\"\n\n\"Take a lot. Take two. I know where to find you.\"\n\nThe phone subsided into a hissing noise. Janet was paralyzed: She absolutely did not know what to do. Kreiss closed his eyes and then the handset shattered in his white-knuckled grip. Janet tried to think of an argument, a reason, _any_ reason for him not to take the woman's deal, but she knew there wasn't one. Not after what he'd heard Assistant Director Greer say. Son of a _bitch_!\n\n\"I'm trying to think of an argument not to do what she wants,\" she said. \"For the life of me, I can't.\"\n\n\"There isn't one,\" he said, dropping the broken handset onto the seat and moving back to his side of the front seat, his hand opening and closing.\n\n\"Can you tell me what it is the bosses want so badly?\" she asked.\n\n\"A graphic file. A picture of a letter. Signed by the deputy AG. Garrette himself. Sent to Ephraim Glower. Telling him that Justice was attaching one of his bank accounts.\"\n\nJanet didn't understand. \"Why is that important?\"\n\nHe rubbed the sides of his face with his hands. Then he turned to look at her, his eyes hollow. His expression scared her. \"Glower didn't kill himself and his family because he was going to be uncovered as a servant of the Chinese government. He killed himself because _they_ took the money back.\"\n\n\"What money? And who is 'they'?\"\n\n\"The money he'd been paid to derail the espionage investigation for all those years. He'd run through the family fortune, but this Chinese money was going to save his ass. When they got caught taking the illegal campaign contributions\u2014you know, the Hong Kong connection money\u2014the reelection committee opted to give it all back. Some of that, a couple of million, had been used to pay off Glower. So they used Justice to get the IRS to attach Glower's bank accounts. That meant Glower was now broke again. That's why he did it.\"\n\n\"The reelection committee knew about Glower? My God! That means\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, scanning the area around the car again. \"Anyone who has that letter can tie the Chinese campaign contributions to a quid pro quo: a fee paid for services rendered. Access to our nuclear weapons secrets in return for several millions in campaign contributions. Not directly, of course. Through the Hong Kong cutout. Basically, anyone who knows the case would recognize the letter as the smoking gun. Only problem was, the political side lost their nerve. What a surprise.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath and tried to get her mind around all this. \"What was your deal?\" she asked. \"When you were terminated?\"\n\n\"Glower called Agency security to have me thrown out of his house that day I went to confront him. But I went back a few hours later. Found him and his entire family slaughtered. Very obvious suicide. Maybe too obvious, now that I think about it. Like that White House lawyer? Anyhow, he had a wall safe. I broke into it, found the letter.\"\n\n\"They found the safe, they knew somebody knew too much.\"\n\n\"Something like that. Initially, they didn't know who, or what. Later, after the investigation, they began to figure it out. They knew it had to be me, so they threatened the only remaining thing of value I had: Lynn. The threat was pretty clear. If I agreed to remain silent, they agreed to leave her alone.\"\n\n\"Why didn't they just move against you?\"\n\n\"Because by then, I had a lock on them: AD Marchand was part of it. He'd been taking care of the FBI end. I let Marchand know that I had documentary evidence on the real reason Glower killed himself. Anything happened to me or Lynn, there was a mechanism in place that would guarantee that information would get to the appropriate congressional committee chairmen. When I told Marchand what it was, he just about fainted. Basically, I had a gun to the administration's head. They had a gun to Lynn's head. A lock.\"\n\n\"And it held until Lynn disappeared,\" she said. \"Oh, _that_ 's why they came, not because of any phony bomb cell. With her gone, you had no more reason to keep quiet.\"\n\n\"Precisely, Special Agent.\" He sighed. \"Only there _was_ a bomb cell, wasn't there? That was the kicker. Browne McGarand and his merry band.\"\n\n\"What would happen if Greer and the director got their hands on this letter?\"\n\n\"They'll burn Marchand and Garrette right down. After that, it's whatever deal the director wants to make with the attorney general herself. Based on all the friction these past five years, they'll have a lot to talk about, don't you think? Problem is, now I can't give it to you.\"\n\n_\"What!_ Why not?\"\n\n\"I've already explained that. Lynn.\"\n\nShe stared out the window for a moment. \"You're wrong, you know,\" she said. \"About the lock. They will have learned from all this. You get Lynn back this time, they'll just send someone else. There's an infinite supply _of them._ Even if you take that woman out there, they'll tap someone else. Someone maybe worse than she is. You have to turn loose of what you know. That's the only thing that'll put this thing to rest.\"\n\nHe started to say something, to argue with her, but then stopped. He was listening. She went for broke.\n\n\"The problem with your so-called lock is that you're just one individual,\" she said. \"Okay, you're Edwin Kreiss. But the G's gotten too big. Too powerful. Trust me, I'm part of it\u2014I know. One man? No chance. Lynn will never be safe until you give up what you have to another government agency. Let _them_ get a lock. Hoover-style. Then everyone will leave you alone. Otherwise, you're condemned to a permanent hunting season.\"\n\nShe stopped. She was almost afraid to look at him. She could feel his anger. The clock on the dashboard advanced silently, each increment increasing the tension between them.\n\n\"You mean give the Bureau the lock.\"\n\n\"Exactly. The organization can make it stick. As a lone individual, you can't. No disrespect intended.\"\n\nHe took a deep breath and let it out in a prolonged sigh.\n\n\"What the hell,\" he said finally through clenched teeth. \"I'm getting too old for this shit. I hid it in Marchand's own archives, FCI Division.\"\n\n\"Sweet Jesus,\" she whispered. \"It's right there? In the fucking Hoover Building?\"\n\n\"Right there. File name: Year of the Rat. Just like that book. Password: Amoral.\" He gave a cold smile. \"Think they'll be embarrassed?\"\n\nJanet could just imagine. \"What happens now?\" she asked.\n\nHe looked at his watch. \"I just made a deal, and now I need to ask another favor. I need you to cover Lynn for a while, once Misty releases her.\"\n\n\"And you?\"\n\n\"She has orders to retrieve me,\" he said, pulling down his hood. \"I have other plans. One of us will prevail. Will you take care of Lynn for me?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course, but\u2014\"\n\nHe opened the door and got out. Then he leaned back in. \"If I survive this, you'll eventually know about it. But I'm going to have to go underground for a while until the elephants sort things out in Washington.\"\n\nKnowing she might not ever see him again, she felt she had to ask. \"What was it like being on your own for all those years? Hunting people down, making up the rules as you went along?\"\n\nHe stared down at her for a moment. \"You mean without the FBI Manual? Without a squad supervisor, and the AS AC and the SAC, and a fistful of teletypes from some ad hoc committee in Washington telling you when to go right, when to go left? What was that like?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It was amazing. It was every G-man's dream, Special Agent. Until I came up with the right answer to the wrong politicians.\"\n\n\"Come in with us,\" she said impulsively. \"Once she lets Lynn go.\"\n\nHis weary eyes smiled at her. \"Can't do that, Special Agent. You know how it is: You can fall in love with the Bureau, but the Bureau never falls in love with you. Take care of Lynn.\"\n\nThen he was gone, loping up the hill and into the trees like some big cat.\n\n\"Wait,\" she tried to say, but the word died in her throat. She got out to look for the speaker microphone, found it, and stuck the jack back into the wiring harness on her left collar shoulder. Farnsworth was yelling. \"Carter? What the hell's going on down there, Carter? _Carter!_ Come in, damn it!\"\n\n\"Kreiss was here; now he's gone,\" she said. Her chest felt constricted by her sense of failure. \"I'm going to wait for Lynn Kreiss. I'm returning to the admin building position. Request you meet me there.\"\n\n\"Goddamn it, Carter, what the hell is going _on?\"_\n\n\"Request you meet me at the admin building,\" she said again. \"For what it's worth, I believe we have achieved AD Greer's objective.\"\n\nKreiss pushed into the tree line, hit the ground, rolled to the right, and then scurried through the underbrush for fifty feet before stopping. He then crawled back to a point from which he could see down into the industrial area. Carter's car was moving back toward the admin building, its tires crunching through gravel and broken glass. The van was still sitting there. He felt his pulse throbbing from the dash up the hill, during which he'd half-expected to hear a rifle shot. But maybe Misty had developed a sporting side. He, on the other hand, would have made that deal and then dropped his quarry as soon as he appeared.\n\nCarter had stopped the car on the power plant side of the admin building. In the distance, he heard other vehicles coming as the Bureau's backup brigade closed in. Then he saw Lynn emerge from the wreckage of the turbo generator building beside the power plant's foundations, hesitantly at first, shielding her eyes against the sunlight, as if she had been blindfolded. She took three steps out into the debris field, stumbled over something, recovered, stopped, and looked around.\n\nMove, goddamn it, _move,_ Kreiss thought. The first of the backup cars reached Carter, spilling agents. Lynn had to see them, but she still wasn't moving and seemed disoriented. He needed to get Lynn out of there. He drew the big .45 from his chest holster and sighted down the stubby barrel at the nearest of the two ruined generators behind her. It was a distance of at least two hundred yards, so he elevated the barrel, pointing it at least a foot over the top of the generator, and fired once. The booming sound of the .45 echoed across all the wrecked buildings in the industrial area, dropping all the agents, including Carter, instantly to the ground. The bullet, partially spent, hit the base of the generator well behind Lynn, causing her to yelp and take off up the main street at a dead run toward the cars and the agents huddling behind them at the top of the street.\n\nKreiss backed away from the tree line. He had accomplished two things: made Lynn move, and told Misty that, for once, he had a gun. He was deciding what to do next when something blasted an entire branch off the tree under which he was hiding, followed by the distinctive _crack-boom_ of a big rifle. Misty answering in kind: I know where you are, and I, too, have a gun.\n\nThe agents must be going nuts down there, he thought with a small smile. Then he squirmed farther back into the woods and began crawling, head down, as fast as he could go, east this time, away from the power plant. His objective was the patch of trees that projected down to the area where the wooden mixing sheds had been. It was about five hundred yards, line of sight, but longer the way he went through the woods. From there, maybe he could get back into the wreckage of the industrial area. Misty was down there somewhere, in among that ring of rubble surrounding the remains of the power plant. She would expect him to stay in the woods, where he was most proficient. He intended to travel in a large circle, staying literally on the ground, moving slow enough to keep the wildlife from revealing his position. He would creep for an hour, then dig in and rest, making his move back into the industrial area right after dark. He didn't think Misty would come out until after dark, either, especially if the Bureau people hung around.\n\nHe hoped they wouldn't linger after Carter told her boss about the archive. Farnsworth should see where his interests lay and invoke standard procedure: They had the hostage clear and a line to the evidence, which was all his bosses really wanted. What happened back at the arsenal after that shouldn't matter, especially to the big guns at Bureau headquarters, where life in the fast lane was probably about to get really interesting.\n\n* * *\n\nJanet didn't hesitate after getting Lynn into her car. She took off, turning the car in a screech of tires and gunning it up the hill toward where Farnsworth and the rest of the backup team were waiting. The other two cars followed, once they were sure she had the hostage out of harm's way. She made Lynn put her head down on the front seat until she thought they were well out of rifle range. Fucking Kreiss, letting off that cannon. But it had done the job.\n\n\"You okay?\" she shouted as she maneuvered noisily around a pile of concrete blocks.\n\n\"Yes,\" Lynn said. \"She had me blindfolded. I didn't see anything useful. Thanks for the rescue. Again.\"\n\n\"My pleasure, but it was your father who got you out, not me.\"\n\n\"Dad? Here? Where is he?\"\n\n\"Up there in the woods somewhere. I think he's going to have it out with that woman, now that you're clear.\"\n\nLynn sat up, biting her lip as Janet pulled up alongside Farnsworth's car. He was sitting in the right-rear seat, with the window open, a radio mike in his hand. His driver had his gun out and was searching the industrial area with binoculars. Janet got out to explain what had happened, while Lynn laid her head on the back of the front seat and closed her eyes.\n\n\"Goddamn it,\" he said. \"We were supposed to bring him in.\"\n\n\"Begging your pardon, sir, we were supposed to bring in the evidence he has.\"\n\nHe gave her an exasperated look. \"So? Where the hell is it?\"\n\nShe leaned forward and whispered what Kreiss had told her. He blinked, then gave a slow whistle of surprise. \"In Marchand's own archive system? Man!\"\n\n\"I believe we can access that archive right here from Roanoke.\"\n\n\"But we're not going to,\" he said, shaking his head. \"I'm gonna let AD Greer and his people go grab that little buzz saw.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to see it? After all this?\"\n\n\"Hell no,\" he said. \"And neither do you. Look what happened to Kreiss for knowing what he knows. Where is he, anyway?\"\n\n\"Out there in the weeds,\" she said. \"And that woman is down there somewhere, in all that rubble around the power plant. That's where that second shot seemed to come from.\"\n\nThe other agents were gathering around, looking for orders. Farnsworth thought for a moment, then announced they were pulling out, that their mission was complete.\n\n\"I thought we were supposed to pick up some guy along with the girl,\" one of the squad supervisors said. Keenan, taking his cue from Farnsworth, gave him a signal to back off, and then Farnsworth told everyone to mount up and get back to Roanoke. He told one of the agents to drive Janet's car; Janet and Lynn Kreiss were to get in his car.\n\nLynn Kreiss stared out the back window of the car as they pulled out. Janet shivered when she thought of what they'd be doing come nightfall. She could never do that. She wondered if Lynn knew what was going to happen back there. Of course she did.\n\nKreiss made his move an hour after sunset, before the chill air of night cooled the ground enough to provide too great an infrared contrast between his body and his surroundings. The sky had clouded over during the afternoon, rendering the darkness almost absolute once the sun went down. But Misty was an active sweeper. She would have a real IR surveillance device, maybe even an illuminator and receiver set, not just a nightscope. IR devices created images based on the contrast between warm objects and a cold background, or vice versa. The greater the contrast, the clearer the image. He crept out of the tree line on his belly and snaked down as fast as he could, hugging the bottom of a swale he had scouted earlier. He was also assuming that Misty was still down in the vicinity of the power plant's ruins. That van was still there, and there now seemed to be a bioluminescent glow emanating from the ring of rubble surrounding the flattened plant. She might have deployed a defensive light ring, which was a thin, flexible tube of clear plastic Lucite, the diameter of a straw, filled with the material contained in Chem-Lights. It created a faint green glow that could be used to illuminate a defensive perimeter for hours without degrading the defender's night vision. He had chosen his vantage point because it put several buildings between him and the rubble around the power plant.\n\nHis immediate objective was a valve pit where a dozen of the big overhead pipes came down into a walled enclosure, which was twenty feet square. There were mounds of rubble from collapsed buildings on three sides, and what looked like a storm drain coming out on the fourth side, pointing down into the swale. The swale, a shallow, grassy ditch, cut across a gentle slope of deep grass. He was able to crawl through it to the storm drainpipe, which was nearly three feet in diameter. He went through the drainpipe for ten feet, sweeping a stick ahead to rustle any lurking snakes out, and emerged out onto the concrete floor of the valve pit. There was a carpet of small rubble on the floor, and he had to sweep some of it out of the way with his forearm as he pulled himself across the floor between the huge steel valve stems. The pipes over his head were large, twelve to twenty inches in diameter. Some were lagged with insulation; others were bare metal. The ones that bent down into the floor of the valve pit pointed in the direction of the Ditch.\n\nHe had chosen the pit because it offered concealment, while remaining escapable. Going into one of the ruined buildings would have been risky; she could trap him in or on top of a building. The big pipes, being metal, would also offer some infrared masking, at least until the cool night air drained all the heat out of the metal. The valve pit was at the end of one of the shorter side streets. It was less than a city block from the main street, and the concrete buildings from that intersection on up the hill toward the admin building remained pretty much intact. All of the buildings below that intersection had been seriously damaged, having lost at least one wall. The four buildings nearest the power plant had been flattened into mounds of broken concrete, surrounded by tangled ropes of steel pipes. The shattered concrete was visible only as big blobs of gray in the near-total darkness.\n\nHe extracted his sound-cone apparatus and assembled it up on the lip of the concrete wall surrounding the pit. He pointed it between the nearest buildings, in the general direction of where the power plant had been. He reminded himself to keep thinking in terms of infrared contrast. He piled some pieces of rubble around the cone to ensure it would blend in with the rest of the structure's IR signature. Then he pulled out another plastic pouch and extracted two golf ball-sized cubes and a coil of very thin wire. He took one of the cubes and crawled along the pit wall, keeping the top of the wall between him and the power plant. He set the cube on the left corner of the pit, placing it between a pipe fragment and a broken concrete block. He connected some wire to it, then brought the other end of the wire back into the pit, burying the wire as best he could. He repeated this procedure with the second cube, taking it in the opposite direction. Once back down in the pit, he connected the two wire ends to a cigarette package-sized plastic box and set it down. Crouching down behind the pit wall, he extracted a small battery pack and attached it to the plastic box. Then he activated the box, illuminating a small red window. In the window was a scrolling menu of sounds stored digitally in the box. He could select a different sound for each of the two channels going out to the miniaturized speakers, or a stereo signal through both at once. He set the box down and turned the digital window down to minimum brightness. Then he took out a pair of silver-mirrored sunglasses and put them on. He couldn't see anything in the darkness anyway, and these would give him some protection in case she got close enough to pop a disrupter in his face. The coating on the glasses was keyed to the color frequency of the disrupter. Then he crawled as quietly as he could around the bottom of the pit, patting the floor with his gloved hands until he found a flat piece of metal about a foot square. He slid this into the back of his chest pack. Then he went back to the wall nearest the power plant, slipped the stethoscope on, crouched down behind the wall as comfortably as he could, and settled in to listen.\n\nHe was able to train the cone across an arc of about fifty degrees, which was sufficient if his assumptions were correct. She could, of course, come from any direction at all, but he had watched the industrial area for most of the afternoon and had seen no sign of her. The light ring meant either that she was there or it was a distraction. Since he couldn't know which, all he could do was make his assumptions. He tried to clear his mind and concentrate on the soundscape in front of him. The air was not moving, and neither was anything else, if the cone was working correctly. He reached up and trained the cone slowly from side to side, straining to detect any differences in the earphones. Nothing. He touched the butt of the .45 hanging in its shoulder holster. He didn't have any spare ammunition. He drank some water, closed his eyes, and listened. He wondered if McGarand was still alive. He hoped so.\n\nHe had no illusions that Misty was coming to talk to him or even to take him in. She was coming to kill him. Those had probably been her orders all along, once the Agency headquarters found out that Lynn was missing. They'd have known full well that if Lynn was dead, and that would have been the logical assumption when a kid had been missing for that long, then the lock was open. Kreiss would have had no incentive to keep quiet anymore. Worse, Kreiss might have thought the Agency had taken Lynn, which would have given him every incentive to reveal what he knew. The solution would have been the same either way they looked at it: This wasn't a retrieval operation. He had become the mother of all loose ends.\n\nSomething clicked in the stethoscope.\n\nJanet stood looking out the window of their fourth-floor room in the Donaldson-Brown Center. Lynn was on the bed, fully dressed, staring at the muted TV screen. The remains of a room-service meal was sitting on the table. Janet could see the Virginia Tech campus stretching before her, a small city of crenellated academic buildings, barrackslike dorms, and streetlights. The sidewalks were surprisingly filled with students moving between the buildings like so many industrious ants. Typical engineering school, she thought. Labs all night. Computer time when you could get it. The streetlights were crowned with fuzzy halos as the evening atmosphere thickened.\n\nFarnsworth had set up a debriefing session with Lynn Kreiss upon return to the federal building and then closeted himself in the secure-communications pod, with no operator this time, for an hour and a half. When he finally came out, he had ordered them into the hotel as a protective measure. There were supposedly four agents downstairs in a loose perimeter.\n\nJanet didn't think they were in any danger, because that woman would be busy. Kreiss was definitely in danger, however, based on the look on his face when he'd left the car. She had argued as vehemently as she could that they ought to go back out there, in force, and retrieve him. Farnsworth had given her a strange look when she used that particular word, but he remained adamant: Their mission was complete. AD Greer and a horde of executive assistants from the director's office were probably combing through the FCI archives as she stood looking out the window. Once they found the document, all hell would break loose, especially with a national election looming. Or, more likely, and as Kreiss had predicted, an extremely private deal would be made at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and the Bureau would enjoy a sudden degree of unprecedented operational freedom.\n\nLynn hadn't said three words since they'd left the federal building. Janet had explained what Kreiss had told her on the way to the hotel, and the girl had just nodded. She was obviously deeply disturbed that the Bureau had chosen to throw her father to whatever wolf was waiting in the ruins of the arsenal. She'd given Farnsworth a look of such reproach that he had actually blushed. Now they had orders to stay at the hotel and wait to see what, if anything, broke loose in Washington. The ATF was still hunting McGarand, but that particular mad bomber had simply disappeared. Janet wondered if he, too, was out there at the demolished arsenal. Probably not.\n\nShe had mixed emotions about what they'd done. It was 11:30, and Leno was doing his monologue. Somehow, none of it seemed very funny tonight. Yes, Kreiss had made this deal, and gotten his daughter out of that woman's clutches. Her own bosses were about to peel back a scab they thought would give them nearly unlimited leverage over their tormentors at Justice. That might or might not be true, she thought, given the fact that the current administration was in its final months, with not too much left to lose in terms of its already-odious legacy. Farnsworth said he was putting Janet in for an award, and he had told her to think about going back to a headquarters assignment in Washington. Janet wasn't so sure about that, either. \"Palace games,\" the woman had said. Pretty fucking lethal palace games, Janet thought. And what Greer had done to Kreiss was just plain dishonorable. She might have made a mistake coming back to the fold.\n\nShe turned around, to find Lynn watching her. Something in the girl's expression reminded her of Kreiss. No drama, just a patient consideration of the situation and a hint, just a hint, of unexpected action if an opportunity presented itself. She and Lynn looked at each other. They had done the wrong thing.\n\n\"What would you think about going back out there?\" Janet asked. \"See if we can find your old man?\"\n\nLynn sat up. \"About fucking time, Special Agent,\" she said. \"You got another gun?\"\n\nKreiss carefully put his gloved hand on the cone to see which way it was pointing. To the right of the direct line between the valve pit and the power plant. He removed the stethoscope, closed his eyes behind the mirrored glasses, and listened hard to the bare susurrations of a night breeze filtering through the piles of debris all around him. The breeze was just enough to obscure the sounds of traffic out on Route 11. It had been three hours since he'd heard the last noise. He'd been dozing since then, which actually was part of his craft. Relax the body and concentrate the mind. Build energy reserves while that part of his brain that did the sound work listened with all the mysterious precision of the subconscious mind. He looked at his watch: 11:40. He shifted his body behind the wall, easing a cramp out of his knee. He put the stethoscope back to his ears.\n\nTen minutes later came another click, followed by what sounded like the rattle of a very small pebble. Something, or someone, moving out there. Misty? He pulled the glasses down again. Black night to the max. _Tenebrae factae sunt._ Darkness has fallen. Got that right.\n\nHe shifted position again, putting his left shoulder in touch with the cooling surface of the wall, his right hand now holding the .45 automatic. The tactical question was, How many people did Misty have with her? They'd sent a crew into the mountain after Janet and Lynn, but they hadn't come back out. Lost them all? That would put Misty in a rare mood, especially being defeated by a redheaded amateur. She wouldn't agree: The cave had done them in, not Janet Carter. But would she have had time to summon more backup? One-on-one against Misty was bad enough, but if she had help, this was probably hopeless.\n\nAnother click, not as loud. He reached up again and swung the cone to the right ten degrees. The faintest movement of air against his cheek told him that the weather might be changing. The night now smelled faintly of moisture against the backdrop of the pine forests surrounding the industrial area. He squeezed the stethoscope earphones harder into his ears. If Misty was moving, she'd be doing so while searching for some visual cue that he was out there. Some small patch of infrared contrast, a blob of green warmth where there shouldn't be one. He reached up again and moved the cone farther to the right. A minute passed, and then another. Then a new sound, a tiny scraping noise. Fabric over concrete? It had seemed marginally louder. He wondered if she'd done the same thing he had\u2014parked herself in a corner and dozed for a few hours before starting the hunt. One thing about a sleeping human: If properly hidden and wedged, the body didn't move. You took a chance, of course, of being caught sound asleep. It depended on how well your subconscious mind had been trained to listen. He took a deep breath, let it out quietly, and then decided it was time to get things under way.\n\nHe took out the piece of metal he had been warming inside his chest pack and placed it up on the top of the side wall. If what the cone had detected was Misty, she shouldn't be able to see the warm piece of metal until she had moved another hundred feet or so farther to his right, because of the buildings. Then he reached down for the control box and selected the third program and entered a fifteen-minute delay. He slipped off the stethoscope, brought the cone down off the wall, and buried them in loose gravel. Then he slithered silently into the big drainpipe. A minute later, he crawled out of the valve pit altogether, rounded the first street corner, and began inching toward the nearest concrete building rising above the side street that led back down to the valve pit. He crawled six feet and then stopped to listen. This was the dangerous bit: If she illuminated the area with the IR system, he was dead meat down here on the street. He repeated these movements until he reached the corner of the building. There he got up, flattened himself against the wall of the building, and went hand over hand until he felt the ladder.\n\nThis was the decision: There was only one ladder. If he went up it, he could not get down again if she detected him up there. But if this worked, and she closed in on the valve pit to investigate the infrared target he'd left for her, he'd be in a position to fire down at her. Especially if she reacted when the sound program let go. He considered the time: He had only a few more minutes to make his decision.\n\nDid she have helpers? He decided that she didn't. Misty was supremely confident in her own abilities. She also knew that Kreiss wouldn't run very far into the woods to prolong this. He figured she was moving and scanning, crawling a few yards at a time and then sweeping the entire debris field with the IR scanner, looking for a point of contrast. Or she could have an illuminator up on some wreckage, bathing the whole debris field in invisible light. Probably had the scanner mounted on an AK-47, based on the sound of that single shot earlier this afternoon. Misty normally didn't carry a handgun, but she had always liked the heavy-duty Eastern Bloc weapons.\n\nThe wind blew in his face again, this time carrying the scent of old chemicals, overlaid with a residual whiff of nitric acid. That has to be coming from the main street, he thought. So she should be upwind of him, then, and, therefore, up-sound. He estimated the time remaining. He had to move, one way or the other, or she'd get close enough to hear him on the ladder. He started up.\n\nJanet shut off her headlights as they coasted quietly down the hill on Route 11. The intersection marking the entrance to the arsenal was a quarter of a mile ahead, the dead traffic lights just visible before she shut off her lights. They had gone out a back fire door of the hotel and circled the block around the library to come into the parking lot from the town side, away from the front entrance. She'd called down to the lobby before they left and told one of the agents that they were going lights-out in the room. He told her to sleep tight. They'd waited a half hour before making their move. Then she and Lynn got into her Bureau car and headed for Ramsey.\n\nJanet pulled the car into the exit lane for the arsenal. The barrels were still there, but they were no longer blocking the ramp. She drove slowly and quietly up the road toward the main gate, stopping just down the hill from the gate itself so as to minimize their engine noise. She parked to the side and shut it down. She rolled down her window and listened. She had been having second thoughts about this little caper ever since leaving downtown Blacksburg, but, given Lynn's enthusiasm, she couldn't think of a way to back out. When Farnsworth found out, she'd probably be a civilian again. Lynn had Janet's .38 in her lap and was rotating the cylinder, click by click.\n\n\"So,\" Janet said. \"This seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm not so sure.\"\n\n\"I say we drive in there, lights and horn going,\" Lynn replied. \"Go in there and make a shitload of noise until Dad pops out of the bushes and yells at us. Then grab him.\"\n\n\"Might not be that simple,\" Janet said. \"If they were going to go after each other, that will be a free-fire zone down there. Open season. We go down there, we might get ourselves killed. You heard that rifle this afternoon. Plus, if you show up, you'll distract your father. Maybe get him killed.\"\n\n\"If you're thinking of leaving me out here,\" Lynn said, \"you can just forget that shit.\"\n\n\"I'm thinking we shouldn't go in there at all,\" Janet said, conscious now of the open window and how their voices might be carrying. She scanned the chain-link fences ahead of them. \"Hell, it may be all over by now. But either way, we know nothing about the tactical situation. I'm saying we probably can't help, and we might even screw things up.\"\n\n\"Then let's call the police. The local cops, I mean. Make some hysterical phone call to nine one one; two women in trouble at the Ramsey Arsenal. Rape. Murder. Frenzied bikers. Bring a mob of cops out here and they'd have to stop it.\"\n\nJanet was shaking her head. Coming out here had been a dumb idea. \"They might stop it tonight, but then it would just go on. That woman and your father would melt away into the woods. I think after all that's happened\u2014in that cave, and with the big explosion we had here\u2014this has become personal now. The matter in Washington is being solved as we speak. I'm just afraid if we go in there now, we might do more harm than good.\"\n\n\"I think you're just plain afraid,\" Lynn said, turning away from Janet and staring through the darkened windshield.\n\nJanet held her tongue. Of course she Was afraid. Anyone who wasn't afraid of both those people down there would be an idiot. But the more she thought about it, the more she knew she was right. Of course Lynn was burning up with worry about her father, but that didn't solve the practical problem: They couldn't just drive down there. What would they do once they got inside? Offer mediation services? Counseling? She could just see herself climbing around the wreckage of the industrial area, calling for them to come out and talk things over. And if they called the local cops, they'd get one deputy sheriff. Whoopee. What they really needed here was an army of feds. No onesies and twosies, but ten Suburbans with federal SWAT troops, helicopters, dogs, tanks\u2014\n\nTanks.\n\nShe picked up the car phone.\n\n\"Now what the hell are you doing?\" Lynn asked.\n\n\"Getting some reinforcements,\" Janet said. She pulled her phone book out of her purse and looked up a number, then dialed it. The phone rang three times. She swore when she thought it was going to voice mail, but a man's voice finally answered.\n\n\"Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Special Agent Rogers speaking.\"\n\n\"This is Special Agent Janet Carter of the Roanoke office, FBI. I've got the gomer who blew up your Washington headquarters building cornered in the Ramsey Army Arsenal. I need some backup down here, and I need it right fucking now! My duty officer isn't picking up. You people interested?\"\n\nKreiss reached the arched top of the ladder and, moving with excruciating care, stepped over the top rung and down\u2014onto nothing at all. He felt himself falling and just barely managed to catch himself on the curved ladder edges. He deliberately let his hands slide down the rusty metal railings right to the mounting brackets in order to soften the noise he was making. It took all his strength just to hang there. He felt the cool night air between his legs and realized that the building's roof must have collapsed when the power plant blew up. What he had thought was a solid building was nothing more than just a side wall, with the rest of the building blown completely away. He couldn't see what was below him, but he was at least forty feet up in the air. He was entirely exposed, dangling in plain sight over the debris field below. If she happened to lift the scanner, she'd probably start laughing. He heard the metal in the railing creaking. But then the sound program saved him.\n\nBack in the valve pit, the tape switched on. A tiny sound of a screwdriver tapping once, very gently against a steel pipe, clinked out into the night. Kreiss heard it, and he hoped like hell Misty heard it too. He tried a two-handed chin-up to pull himself back onto the ladder, but his feet did not connect with anything but air. He couldn't really use his feet without making scuffing noises against the concrete wall. Gripping tightly with his right hand, he shifted his left hand over to the right railing, lifted his left knee, and this time was able to use his knee to lever his upper body onto the parapet at the top, then over to the top outside rung of the ladder. He nearly lost the mirrored glasses off his face in the process. Bits of old concrete dust fell away into the rubble below, sounding to Kreiss like an avalanche.\n\nThen came the sound of a metal buckle hitting the stock of a rifle, a muffled but distinct sound clear enough that he could classify it immediately. It sounded as if it was coming from in front of the valve pit, but he couldn't be sure, not way up here, dangling on the side of a building. He had to get down now, because there was nowhere else to go. If she saw him, she'd just blast him off the ladder like a fly off a window. Then the hair went up on the back of his neck.\n\nShe was here, or at least very near. Down there in the dark.\n\nHe froze on the ladder, willing himself to become invisible. With one finger, he pulled the glasses down his nose and peered down into the side street below. It was pitch-black, darker than dark, but he sensed there was something down there. Something moving.\n\nThe side street pointed directly at the valve pit, which was about twenty-five yards away. The sound program was set to make a noise every three minutes. He waited, dangling on the ladder, afraid even to breathe. Then from the valve pit came the sound of a human sniffing, one little noise, as if a man was clearing his nose while he waited for something. He pushed the glasses back up on his nose. Soon now.\n\nA gust of wind came down the street, and he could feel it along the full length of his body. It was almost strong enough to ruffle his clothes. Was she down there right now, pressed against a building, _this_ building, in the kneeling position, holding the assault rifle and sweeping the IR sight back and forth across the sector from which the tiny noises were coming? Seeing the barely visible fuzzy patch of green in the scope where the warm piece of metal, cooling fast now, would show up against all that cold concrete? Gripping the railing as hard as he could with his left hand, he drew the .45 across his chest and pointed it down into the black void beneath his feet. Virtually blind behind the glasses, he put his thumb on the hammer and then squeezed all thought and sensation out of his forebrain and focused every bit of his energy into listening.\n\nThe next sound came a minute later. This time, it was a barely audible squeak, like the sound a plastic egg carton makes when a human hand pushes down on it. Then something definitely moved down below him, not a whole body in motion, but something less, a human effort, the sound of cloth straining for just a second, and then a brilliant purple flash ignited over the valve pit. The glasses protected him from the full effect, but the soundless, dazzling blaze of light still almost blinded him. He caught a glimpse of a black figure bolting down the street, straight at the valve pit, and then there was a second purple explosion, followed by the thump of a thermite grenade erupting down in the pit, the explosion flaring into a brilliant white bolus of sparks and flame. Then the AK-47 opened up in a roar, blasting rounds directly down into the pit, sending red-and-yellow ricochets off into the night, the sound of the automatic weapon rebounding off the nearby concrete structures. The rifle hammered away on full auto until the magazine was empty. Misty with a gun, Kreiss marveled as he thumbed back the hammer, I'll be goddamned.\n\nHe flipped the glasses off his nose as the thermite fire hit its peak, throwing every feature of the wrecked buildings into searing black-and-white relief. He finally saw Misty silhouetted against the opposite wall, and he didn't hesitate. He twisted his body in midair, took a snap aim at the silhouetted figure, and emptied the .45, the big gun banging painfully back into his wrist with each round. Just as he realized that all the bullets had done nothing more than blast chunks of concrete off the opposite wall, a voice below him said, \"Nice shooting, Edwin, but you just killed an illusion. Now come down from there.\"\n\nJanet saw the familiar purple flare over the hill behind the main gates and instinctively closed her eyes, missing the second one. Then she heard Lynn gasp as an unearthly white glow lit up the trees in front of them, accompanied by the stuttering roar of an assault rifle. They looked at each other for an instant, and then she started the car, slammed it into gear, and punched it up the road, through the police barrier tapes, and right through the chain-link gate at the top of the drive. Accelerating too fast, she nearly lost it on the first curve. They topped the hill leading down into the industrial area, going fast enough to lift the car off its shocks and then bang it down on the concrete. She started braking when she saw the searing glare of burning phosphorus in the valve pit and heard the thumping reports as the .45 let go. The boiling thermite fire turned the wreckage of the arsenal into a vision of hell, throwing grotesque demonlike shadows onto the stark concrete shells of the buildings. She felt the car lose traction on all the loose gravel and concrete bits in the street, the tires scattering debris like shrapnel. She instinctively braked hard, too hard, whipping it around in a 360-degree spin, and then the next thing she saw was that big black hole that led down into the Ditch right in front of them. She started to scream, but then the car hit the pile of pipes, steel straws clattering along the sides of the car, and then it plunged through them and into the hole, slamming both of them into the windshield. Her last thought before she lost consciousness was that she really should have put on her seat belt.\n\nKreiss dropped the empty .45 down into the street and came down the ladder. Misty stood there in full field gear, with an IR goggle headset pushed back up over her hood. She held what looked like a miniature camcorder in her left hand and a Colt Woodsman .22 semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. As he reached the street and dropped onto all fours in the gravel, he saw that the camcorder was really a video projector. A green-lighted human silhouette was bouncing around the adjacent walls as Misty walked over to him.\n\n\"Put out your hands,\" she ordered.\n\n\"Let's just get it done, why don't we?\" he said.\n\n\"Get what done? I'm not going to shoot you. This is a retrieval mission. Put out your hands. Fingers joined together.\"\n\nHe crouched there for a second, considering his options. Her expression confirmed what he already knew: He didn't have any options. He put out his hands. She dropped the projector and brought out a small cylinder, from which she sprayed capture curtain all over his joined hands. It felt cold and then warm. His hands disappeared into a glob of latex.\n\nThey both heard the car coming at the same time. Kreiss turned to look, hoping she would look also, but Misty never moved as she kept that Woodsman pointed at his face. The car sounded as if it were out of control coming down the main street, which was now out of sight behind Misty. They heard the brakes squeal and then the sound of tortured tires losing traction. The car hit something solid. The engine raced for a moment before stalling out. Then silence.\n\n\"Your cavalry?\" she asked.\n\nHe shook his head. He desperately needed to distract her. His hands were globbed up, but he still had his feet. As if she sensed his intentions, she moved back a step. There was an ominous silence behind the building where the car had hit something.\n\n\"Well, it's not mine, either,\" she said. \"So let's go see. Sounds to me like they fucked it up. You first.\"\n\nHe complied, holding his hands out in front of him to keep his arms free. He didn't want the sticky stuff enveloping his hands to touch any other part of his body. He could see from the shadows thrown by the subsiding fire that Misty was behind him, but he could not determine how far back she was. It smelled as if some wooden boards were burning back in the valve pit. The wood smoke was a pleasant contrast to the poisonous stink of burned phosphorus. He kept looking for an opening, but Misty wasn't likely to give him one.\n\nThey came around the shattered front wall of the building and saw the car. It looked to Kreiss like a Bu car, with those two whip antennas on the trunk. It was nosed down into that same big hole Carter had driven into before. Carter? Could Carter have come back here? And then he had a really bad thought: Had she brought Lynn with her? No, she wouldn't have been that dumb.\n\nThey approached the car carefully. He had the sense that Misty was even farther behind him. Maybe he could jump past the car down into the Ditch. But then he remembered how far down it was; he'd break both his legs.\n\n\"Stop there,\" she ordered. He complied.\n\n\"Get down on your knees.\"\n\nHe didn't move. There was nothing moving in the car, which he could see now was held in place by a lone steel pipe bent under its frame. The nose of the car was below street level, kept from falling all the way through into the Ditch by the pipe that was jammed up under its left-front wheel well. No one was visible inside.\n\n\"Get down on your knees or I'll wrap you. Then you'll get to roll all the way to the van.\"\n\nHe sighed and got down awkwardly onto his knees, his hands still held out in front of him. His arms were getting tired, but he was determined not to get his hands tack-welded to his body if he could help it. The firelight behind the building shell was dying out, and the street was slipping back into darkness. Misty was moving around him, staying at least ten feet away, the gun still pointed at his head while she examined the car. Then he thought he heard distant sirens.\n\nJanet awoke into a red haze with a splitting headache. Getting tired of all these goddamned headaches, she thought irrelevantly, and then she tried to open her eyes. They were stuck together by some warm sticky substance, which she finally realized was her own blood. Her forehead was covered in blood, and she could feel it dripping down her chin and onto her chest. She moved sideways and tried to wipe the blood out of her eyes. She wiped the blood off her hands and felt around for her Sig, then remembered it was in her holster. She looked over to see what had happened to Lynn, but the girl was not visible. Then she was, a crumpled white-faced form scrunched into the space between the dashboard and the front seat. No, not white-faced\u2014red-faced. She, too, had hit the windshield and was bleeding profusely from a scalp cut. Janet swore softly and tried to untangle herself from between the front seat and the steering wheel. Then she heard something outside, sat up very carefully, raised her head, and looked through the shattered windshield. There was just enough light coming from the fire to reveal Kreiss on his knees in the street, and a tall black figure with a gun moving slowly toward the car. She recognized that figure, and she moved her hand behind her to draw the Sig. Lynn moaned from under the dashboard, but she did not move.\n\n\"It's your cavalry all right,\" Misty said. \"She drives like she shoots, though. Nice going, Special Agent.\"\n\nJanet shook some more blood out of her eyes as she struggled to get more upright in the seat. She glared at Misty through the open side window. She saw two Mistys, then three, then one, and blinked her eyes rapidly to clear her vision. She held the Sig just out of sight below the windowsill, her fingers sticky with blood. Misty was stepping closer, but her gun hand kept that Colt aimed right at Kreiss's head as if it had its own fire-control system. Janet looked over at Kreiss. He appeared to have a ball of fabric wrapped around his hands, which he held out in front of him as if praying.\n\n\"We've come for Kreiss,\" Janet said.\n\n\"We? _We?_ Got a mouse in your pocket, there, Special Agent?\" Misty was smiling wolfishly.\n\nJanet swallowed to relieve the dryness in her throat. She thought she heard distant sirens, but she dismissed it as wishful thinking. Then she saw Misty's expression change. Damn it, she did hear sirens.\n\n\"Here's the deal,\" Misty said. \"He's going with me. You try to interfere, I'll execute plan B.\"\n\n\"Plan B?\" Janet repeated stupidly.\n\nMisty gave her a patient look but said nothing. Janet figured it out.\n\nJanet tried to think of something to say, a move to make, but she was staring at an impasse here, and she knew it. God, her head hurt. Her teeth hurt and her eyes hurt and she was feeling a little nauseous. She felt the Sig in her hands, and wondered when she'd managed to draw it. Misty smiled as if reading her mind.\n\n\"Whatcha got there, Special Agent?\" she said in a taunting voice. \"Got your gun, do you?\" She stepped closer, her weapon still pointed unwaveringly at Kreiss. Janet definitely heard sirens now, but they were getting closer not nearly as fast as she wanted. Lynn groaned again behind her. Kreiss looked over at the car; he had heard his daughter.\n\n\"Want to try it out, Special Agent?\" Misty asked. She took a fighting stance, extending her arms, crouching, and gripping her weapon with both hands, still keeping it pointed at Kreiss. She was maybe six feet from the car, her body facing Janet but her head turned to watch Kreiss. \"Think you can actually shoot someone? Because I don't think you can. I think I can nail you and then him in the time it'll take you to work up your nerve, because you're just another fucking amateur and always will be. But, hey, Carter, I'm game if you are.\"\n\nKreiss moved then, struggling to his feet. Janet felt her heart start to pound. Her mouth was now absolutely dry and there was a chemical taste in her throat. The Sig suddenly seemed to weigh twenty pounds, and she gripped the butt even harder.\n\nThis was the moment she had dreaded the whole time she had been in the Bureau.\n\n\"Get back on your fucking knees, Kreiss,\" Misty hissed, steadying the gun on him but now watching Janet.\n\n\"No,\" he said, starting to walk toward her. Janet realized what he was doing. He was creating a diversion, forcing Misty to split her concentration. Giving Janet the shot. But only if she did it _right now._\n\nTime slowed down. A rivulet of blood ran into her right eye and she had to blink rapidly to clear her vision. Misty saw Janet blink and smiled. Kreiss kept coming.\n\n\"Watch this, baby face,\" Misty said, snapping her eyes back to Kreiss for a second and then back to Janet. \"Let me show you how this is done.\"\n\nJanet fired right through the car door. She didn't try to aim. She just stared at Misty and forced her hands to track that stare, willing the bullets to slash through the six feet of air between them and tear into that goddamned woman's body. She fired until the Sig wouldn't fire anymore, her fingers burning as the car's insulation caught fire, watching with grim satisfaction as Misty staggered back from the hail of bullets that were tearing into her, still trying to bring the Woodsman around and then dropping it with a wail that was cut off as the final round tore out her throat, spinning her around and down onto the concrete. Janet's last three rounds hit the concrete wall behind, sending two ricochets howling down the ruined street and one back into her own car, inches from her knee.\n\nWhen the noise finally stopped, Janet tried to focus on the scene in front of her. Misty was motionless on the ground. Janet turned her head to locate Kreiss. Oh God, oh God, Kreiss was down, too, face flat on the concrete, not moving, his face buried in the rubble.\n\nShe dropped the Sig by her foot and tried to get the door open, but it wouldn't budge. Lynn was crying behind her now, making a whimpering little-girl sound that surprised Janet. She pushed herself sideways, getting more blood in her face, wiping it off on the seat back, and then started climbing through the window feet first. She felt the car move then, swaying as she changed position. She froze, then resumed her movements, forcing her legs and then her hips out the window, straining her back, and then dropping out of the car onto\u2014nothing.\n\nShe yelped, grabbed the blood-slick windowsill, and hung there for a moment while the car rocked dangerously on the single pipe holding it over the hole. She heard the end of the pipe grinding ominously. She climbed partially back into the car, got another faceful of blood, and then blindly kicked out with her legs until her feet hit solid ground. She arched her back, making a bridge of her body between the rim of the hole and the car, and then stood up, windmilling her arms until she could get her balance. She sat down, then recoiled when she felt Misty's foot move against her back. She rolled away, wiping her eyes clear of blood, and came up on all fours. Misty was also on all fours. Her chest pack was a mass of black blood, and there were bloody holes in her right hand and throat. Her left eye was hanging partially out of its socket. Her face was twisted into a white mask of fury. The hole in her throat was pumping visibly, spattering the concrete and literally drowning out the words she was trying to speak. Janet crawled backward from this horrible apparition as the sweeper brought up a large stainless-steel syringe in her left hand. The needle dripped a fuming substance from its glittering tip, and then Janet, still moving backward, felt a searing lance of pain on her right shoulder as Misty pressed the plunger to fire a jet of acid across the concrete at Janet. Then Janet heard a single shot from her left and Misty's head jerked sideways and she dropped like a stone, the syringe clattering into the street.\n\nJanet tried to get up, but her skin was screaming in pain as the acid melted through her shirt and burned her. She saw Lynn hanging partially out of the car window, her face white, blood streaming from her forehead, still clutching Janet's .38. The car shifted again, the steel pipe under the wheel well beginning to bend up at a dangerous angle. Janet yelled at Lynn to stop moving as she tore away the upper-right part of her smoking shirt and rubbed at her skin, trying to get the acid off her. Then Kreiss was there, telling her to stop moving, and then he was kneeling next to Misty's body and dissolving the capture curtain in the fountain of blood coming out of her throat until his hands came free, flailing away the ropes of the latex hanging off them like a bundle of snakes. He pulled Lynn all the way out of the car, getting her clear just as the steel pipe made a loud creaking noise and then viciously snapped, dropping the car nose-first down into the hole with a terrible crash. After that came a profound silence, into which the sounds of sirens finally penetrated. Kreiss put Lynn down gently, sitting her up against the building's wall.\n\nJanet sat on the concrete, still batting at the skin on her shoulder while trying to keep the blood out of her eyes with her left arm. Kreiss squatted down next to her, rubbed his bloody hands against the jumpsuit, and took her hand.\n\n\"I wasn't sure you could do it,\" he said softly.\n\n\"I wasn't, either,\" she said, looking over at Misty's shattered body, which was draining four distinct streams of blood across the concrete and into the Ditch. Lynn still held Janet's .38 in a virtual death grip while she stared at Misty's inert form. Janet realized she was clutching his hand like a lifeline. Her own legs were trembling.\n\n\"Look,\" he said. \"You've both sustained head injuries. Your memory will be affected. I'm going to take . . . that. . . away. Here's your story: You got here, heard shooting, saw the thermite, and then flicked up and drove into the hole and got out by the skin of your teeth.\"\n\nJanet blinked. The sirens were definitely closer now. \"They'll certainly believe that,\" she said. \"Still the fucking amateur.\"\n\n\"No, not anymore you're not,\" he said. He looked over at Lynn to make sure she was still conscious. \"Who'd you call?\"\n\n\"Would you believe the ATF?\"\n\nHe smiled at that. \"I've got to move,\" he said. \"You remember the crash, but nothing else. Stay close to Lynn, if you can. I'll be in touch when things cool off.\"\n\n\"Will you?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh yes, Janet. But first I'll send you a sign. Now, lie back down, relax. That's just a cut on your head. Scalp wounds bleed. Looks worse than it is, but it will divert any questions for a while.\" He looked up and listened. \"They're almost here.\"\n\n\"Farnsworth is going to be seriously pissed,\" she said, not letting go of his hand.\n\n\"Farnsworth is going to be too busy to be pissed,\" he replied. He squeezed her hand and then he moved to Lynn. She watched him gently put his daughter down on her back in the antishock position, head down, knees raised. He wiped her forehead, took the gun out of her hand, and then held her face in his hands for a moment. He kissed her forehead and stood up. He picked up Misty's gun, and then lifted her inert form, hunched into a fireman's carry, and then he was gone, bent over with the weight of her, like a lion off to hide his kill.\n\nJanet relaxed onto the concrete, hearing the noise of vehicles up by the gate, knowing they'd be down here soon. She let the blood seep over her forehead now without trying to impede it; the bleeding actually seemed to help the headache. The skin along her upper arm and shoulder still burned, but it was more like a really bad sunburn now. She wondered if her shoulder would be scarred forever. She realized she didn't really care.\n\nWhat had he called her? Janet? No more \"Special Agent\"? She smiled at that as headlights flooded the street. It began to rain.\n\n## CHAPTER XV\n\nThree weeks later, Janet Carter waited outside the RA's office for her final meeting with Farnsworth and Keenan before she formally checked out of the office. That morning, she had tentatively accepted a teaching and research position over at Virginia Tech in the materials forensics department of the civil engineering school. The school was developing a postincident forensics program to investigate and determine the cause of catastrophic failures in large structures, such as bridges, streets, or buildings. When the department chair, who had also headed up one of her Saturday seminars, found out she was looking, he had offered her the job immediately, subject, of course, to the appropriate due diligence on her academic degree and an FBI recommendation. Like many government employees leaving federal service, she'd been a bit surprised at how easy it had been.\n\nAs she sat there, she wondered, not for the first time, where Edwin Kreiss was. Based on the way Lynn had been acting lately, she was pretty sure they had been in touch. The past three weeks had been interesting times, in the Chinese sense of that expression. The ATF never did find McGarand, but they had found a vehicle in the woods that had been rented up in Washington at the Reagan Airport, and the driver's license used had been Browne McGarand's. A joint forensics team had spent some time at the scene where they found Janet and Lynn. It had taken a specially equipped fire truck to get the fire in the valve pit out because the thermite grenade had ignited some metal fittings. There had been no trace of human remains in or around the valve pit itself, but they had recovered an IR sight-equipped AK-47, along with evidence that it had been emptied almost indiscriminately into the valve pit. She wondered if anyone had tried to account for all the blood trails out on that street, but the rain had probably washed most of it away.\n\nFarnsworth had had a lot of explaining to do to his bosses in Richmond and Washington, as well as to the ATF. He stonewalled the latter, while trying to explain what one of his agents had been doing there at the arsenal that night, with a civilian in tow. There had been endless meetings and lots of report writing to do over the whole incident. Janet had had time to prep Lynn in the ER, so their story remained fairly consistent: They had gone out there to help Kreiss and ended up crashing the car. End of story, as far as they knew. Never saw Kreiss. Never saw anyone else. Never saw a fire-fight. Janet's acid burns had come somehow from the hole into which they'd crashed the car. Didn't know how they got out, or how they got back up to the street. Both of them had taken a shot to the head, hadn't they? Everything after the crash was a blur. Didn't remember calling the ATF, but must have. Knew they'd come, wasn't sure the Bureau would. That last had hurt Farnsworth's feelings. No, never saw McGarand.\n\nBilly Smith had been recalled to temporary duty in Washington the day after the incident. Janet had been prepared to pursue the theory that he had been an Agency plant all along, put in place to watch Kreiss. But he was gone, and Farnsworth had bigger fish to fry. Three days after the incident, all the hate mail from Washington had suddenly stopped. Word came down directly from the executive assistant director over Criminal Investigations that the incident was officially closed. It had been as if a giant hand had simply wiped all the postincident counterops and turned out the lights on the whole affair. One day, she was in the hot seat; the next day, everyone was suddenly all smiles and happiness and the office was back to business as usual. All she could figure was that larger issues, and one in particular, had finally hit the fan at the senior-executive service level.\n\nLynn Kreiss was back in school, after Janet had explained to the university's finance office why Lynn had been absent and, more important, why her tuition for that quarter ought not to be forfeited. The university's finance office had been incredibly unsympathetic, and it wasn't until Janet had threatened publicity that adult supervision was brought to bear. Lynn had agreed to go with Janet and Larry Talbot to one final meeting with the boys' parents, which had been tense initially and then extremely emotional. Now she was spending her weekends at her father's cabin, waiting and watching for her father to appear out of the woods one night. Janet had been spending her weekends there, too, just to keep an eye on things and to get out of her town house. In the back of her mind, she knew she also wanted to be there when, if, he showed up again, but there had been no sign of Edwin Kreiss.\n\nShe had also been assigned to work out a case-closure report with the Montgomery County detectives on the matter of Jared McGarand. She had written a Bureau memo outlining her theory that Jared McGarand's death had probably been accidental, occurring during the course of a confrontation between Edwin Kreiss and the subject. She appended an evidentiary statement provided by Lynn Kreiss as to the sexual abuse and near rape she had endured while a captive at the hands of the subject. The county people, slaves to the same closure statistics that drove their federal cousins, said they would have to keep the case open, but they allowed informally as to how nobody was going to put a lot of man-hours on a creep like that anytime soon. Because she had named Edwin Kreiss in her report, the paperwork was whisked off to Washington and never seen again.\n\nShe had spent a great deal of time doing some soul-searching about staying in the Bureau. The Roanoke people might all have been told to forget that anything had happened, but, of course, a hell of a lot had happened. The kicker came when Farnsworth put her in for a meritorious service award. The headquarters Professional Awards Division had come back disapproving the recommendation, citing an opinion from OPR that there had been several clear instances where Special Agent Janet Carter had either disobeyed direct operational orders or departed from approved procedures, causing the loss of a Bureau vehicle in two different instances. Farnsworth had loyally driven up to Richmond to raise hell about the disapproval, but when he returned, all he could say was that he had run into an absolute bureaucratic glacier. It apparently had nothing to do with Janet. It had everything to do with the fact that the Edwin Kreiss case was not only closed but positively entombed. \"Chernobylized,\" the SAC in Richmond had said. Images of helicopters dumping concrete on the whole affair.\n\nThat was when Janet had made her decision to leave the Bureau. She could understand how the organization would want to pave over the Edwin Kreiss affair. She could not, however, forget what she had done out there in the arsenal. For that one instant, she had become an instinctive, rather than rational, human being. She could justify the shooting; she could not rationalize emptying the Sig, no matter how much she recited Bureau training about gunfights. She had looked Misty in the eye and emptied the Sig until her hands were on fire, and she would have come out of that car and strangled the woman if she'd been close enough. She could still remember the shock of triumph in her heart when she saw the look of surprise in Misty's face, even as her bullets took that face apart. As far as she was concerned, she'd met the beast, and the beast had looked a lot like her. Once was enough.\n\n\"Mr. Farnsworth will see you now, Special Agent Carter,\" the secretary said, a triumphant look in her eyes. Janet came back to the present and stared at the secretary long enough to make her look away. Then she went into the RA's office. Ben Keenan was already there, and they both appeared to be in an expansive mood. Janet sat down.\n\n\"So I guess this is good-bye,\" she said.\n\nFarnsworth nodded. He had not attempted to talk her out of leaving the Bureau this time, which pretty much confirmed Janet's own suspicions that, careerwise, she had become radioactive. \"Yes, I guess it is, Janet,\" he said. \"I'm sorry it didn't work out better, but I think you understand by now that, knowing what you know about the Edwin Kreiss case, any subsequent assignments would always be . . . uncomfortable? I guess that's the right word. If it makes you feel any better, I'll be following you out the door by year's end.\"\n\n\"They didn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no, but these kind of cases always create a certain amount of fallout. If I go peacefully, the rest of the troops here get a second chance.\"\n\n\"The rest of the troops here just did their jobs,\" she said. \"Why should they suffer over the Kreiss affair?\"\n\n\"You know the answer to that, Janet,\" he said. \"Kreiss was a Bureau man. He embarrassed the outfit. This whole thing reminded everybody of an old rule.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Once a deal is made at the executive level, always clean up any loose ends. Kreiss was a loose end with consequences, and look what happened.\"\n\n\"I would have thought that document would have made them somewhat more grateful,\" she said.\n\n\"What document was that?\" Farnsworth asked. His expression was one of bland disinterest.\n\nJanet cocked her head. \"C'mon now,\" she said. \"The document in AD Marchand's archives. The smoking gun. Which proved\u2014\"\n\n\"Never heard of it,\" Farnsworth said, giving Keenan a questioning look. Keenan shook his head. He'd never heard of it, either.\n\n_\"What!\"_ she exclaimed.\n\n\"Nothing of the sort ever happened,\" he repeated. \"The resignation of the deputy attorney general of the United States was simply a case of a senior political appointee resigning as the administration ended its own term of office. Nothing more.\"\n\n\"And the recent retirement of Assistant Director Marchand and his senior deputy AD, and a certain red-faced EA . . . well, those were driven entirely by personal reasons,\" Keenan said. \"Nothing more.\"\n\n\"And the reappointment of our beloved director for another full term of office had been in the works for, oh, quite a long time,\" Farnsworth said, folding his hands across his chest. \"Don't you think so, Ben?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Keenan chimed in. \"Quite a long time indeed. Absolutely. At least according to the attorney general of the United States, who publicly expressed her continuing full faith and confidence in him.\"\n\n\"As did the president himself. Am I right, Ben?\"\n\n\"He absolutely did,\" Keenan said, beaming. \"Several times. And he loves his Bureau, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, positively. He _loves_ his Bureau. Just like the AG loves her Bureau.\"\n\n\"They fucking better,\" Keenan said. They looked at Janet with straight faces for a moment, and then they all laughed.\n\nJanet shook her head. In a way, it was kind of comforting. The ultimate lock was in place. The big fish could afford to smile about it. Small fry who might know something about the antecedents of such deals were, of course, an embarrassing annoyance. Any offer on said small fry's part to fold her tents and disappear quietly into the desert night would be gratefully and expeditiously accepted, as evidenced by the recommendation Farnsworth sent over to the university. It had been glowing in the extreme, and, just for good measure, it had been warmly endorsed by the same official at the laboratory who had been the proximate cause of her original exile to the Roanoke office. Wonders never ceased.\n\nFarnsworth was about to say something else, when the secretary buzzed in on the intercom.\n\n\"What?\" Farnsworth asked.\n\n\"An urgent telex for you, sir. From the VHP?\"\n\n\"Yeah, go ahead.\"\n\nThe secretary read it over the intercom. It was plain from her tone of voice that she was upset. The Virginia Highway Patrol was reporting that they had found two partially mummified human heads impaled on stakes in the median of Interstate 81 outside of Christiansburg. They were requesting immediate FBI forensic assistance. They reported quite a commotion out on the interstate. Media interest was expected.\n\n\" _Mummified human heads!_ \" Keenan exclaimed. \"On stakes? Christ!\"\n\nJanet turned her face away to conceal the smile she was struggling to control. \"Close,\" she murmured.\n\nShe wondered when he'd call. He probably wouldn't. He'd come shambling down that hill behind the cabin. Maybe with Micah Wall and Whizbang. \"Hey, Special Agent,\" he'd say. \"So where's your Bu car?\" She could just see it.\n\nRead on for an excerpt from\n\nP.T. Deutermann's next book\n\nDARKSIDE\n\nNow available from\n\nSt. Martin's Paperbacks!\n\nSolo\n\nHe floated at the top of the dive for what seemed like forever. Perfect takeoff, his legs delivering just exactly the right amount of spring, his arms balanced level with his chest and slightly behind, fingers webbed together, hands slightly cupped, eyes wide open, grinning nemesis back on the ledge, helpless to hurt him anymore. For what seemed an eternity, he hung suspended, and then, instinctively, as gravity beckoned, he tucked, arcing down through the calm morning air, his body aligning itself perfectly with the gathering slipstream, the darkened windows beginning to blur, a reflexive keening noise rising in his throat as he saw the diamond pattern of the plaza below coming into incredibly sharp focus as he held his breath and his perfectly vertical position in midair, no imbalance this time, no wobble in his legs or hips, statue-straight, rigid, accelerating, his best dive ever, the diamond pattern dissolving into individual segments of polished granite, bits of mica gleaming wonderfully clear, beckoning him to join them in their crystalline perfection, his eyes tearing from the rushing air. Time to go. Close your eyes, time to close your eyes. Inhale for the entry, your most perfect\u2014\n\n## 1\n\nThe ashen-faced cook was close to hyperventilating. He was sitting at the first table inside the mess hall, hands clamped down on spread knees, eyes bulging wide open, staring straight ahead, as if not wanting to see the red stains all over his whites.\n\n\"Hey, man, it's okay,\" Jim Hall said. \"Just take it slow. Breathe. No, slower. Deep breaths. Slower. Yeah. That's it. Take a minute. It's gonna be okay.\"\n\nThe cook, a pudgy white guy in his forties, didn't respond, but he began to get his breathing under control. Jim looked at his shoes. He, too, did not want to dwell on the cook's gore-spattered uniform. He imagined he could smell it, and felt his stomach do a small flop. Finally, the cook looked up at him.\n\n\"'Okay'? _Okay?_ Hell it will,\" he croaked. \"It was like . . . like he was trying to fly.\"\n\n\"Say what?\"\n\n\"The guy? It looked like he was trying to fly. I saw him. One split second. Arms wide, like one of those high divers, you know? His eyes were closed, though. Like he knew.\"\n\nWell, no shit, Jim thought. Of course he knew. Doing a swan dive from six stories onto flagstone? Yeah, the dude probably knew.\n\n\"Young guy?\" Jim asked. He'd seen the body. It was actually a reasonable question.\n\n\"Yeah, probably a plebe. I mean, like, a really young face.\"\n\nJim nodded. He tried again to shut out the image of the wreckage out there in the plaza between the mess hall and the eighth wing. Wait till the breakfast formation gets a load of that. He felt his stomach twitch. People had no idea.\n\nHe made a couple of notes, waiting to see if the cook had anything more to add. Then he heard one of the EMTs outside call in the DOA code. Got that right, he thought. The semirigid cook now had beads of sweat all along his forehead, and his lips were turning a little blue. Jim stepped over to the double doors and called the EMTs to come over. One pushed through the doors of what was formally called King Hall, the Naval Academy's hangarlike mess hall. The cook looked like he was about to flop and twitch on them.\n\nJim motioned with his chin. The medic took one look and went right to work. Then a short, scowling Navy captain came through the doors and signaled that he wanted to talk to Jim. And here we go, Jim thought, closing his notebook. Here we go.\n\nAs he headed back through the doors, he wished the NCIS agents would hurry the hell up. He definitely did not want to deal with Capt. D. Telfer Robbins, the commandant of midshipmen, all by himself, no way in hell. And he really didn't want to see any more of that mess out there in the plaza.\n\nHe scanned the small crowd outside. As the Naval Academy's civilian security officer, he was nominally in charge of the scene until the Naval Criminal Investigative Service people showed up. There were the Academy's own police, a couple of Annapolis cops, and some shocked-looking naval officers. The impatient captain was waiting for him next to his official sedan, rising up and down on the balls of his feet, a cell phone in his hand and anger bright in his eyes. Jim resisted the urge to page the NCIS office again, just as the 6:30 reveille bells began to ring throughout the eight wings of Bancroft Hall. He was pretty sure he knew exactly what the commandant was going to say to him.\n\n## 2\n\nEverett Markham, full professor of international law and diplomacy in the Political Science Department, Division of Humanities and Social Studies, United States Naval Academy, banged his head on an open cupboard door and dropped his coffee mug, all in one graceful move. He swore as he batted the offending door shut, rubbed his head, and groped around the darkened kitchen floor for the mug, which, fortunately, had been empty. He couldn't find it.\n\nThis is what it's like to turn fifty, he thought. Need coffee in the morning just to get stereo vision, and every supposedly inanimate object in the house knows it and lies in wait for you. Or, you could turn on the damned light, he said to himself. But that would hurt my caffeine-deprived eyes. He realized he was doing this a lot these days, talking to himself, even holding some fairly detailed conversations in his head on the most absolutely inane topics. He gave up, turned on the kitchen lights, opened one and then the other eye, and spied the mug lurking next to the center island. He managed to plug in the tiny Krupps coffeemaker without executing himself, rubbed the back of his head again, and went out to the front porch to see where the village idiot had thrown his _Washington Post_ this time.\n\nEv Markham was a widower. He lived alone in a large two-story house overlooking the head of Sayers Creek, which was an inlet of the Severn River just upstream of the Naval Academy. The house had belonged to his parents, and he'd grown up in Annapolis, in the shadow of the Academy. Like more than a few such kids, Ev had been mesmerized from an early age by the proud ranks of midshipmen bedecked in blue and gold, the midweek parades, the boom of the saluting guns, the thunderous Army-Navy game pep rallies, choral recitals in the cathedral-like chapel at Christmas-time, and those big mysterious gray ships anchored from time to time out in the bay. His father, who had served in the Navy during World War II, had been a doctor with good political connections in both the capital and in the Yard, and he'd eased the way for an appointment for Ev, who had graduated from the Academy himself in 1973.\n\nHe retrieved the plastic-wrapped newspaper out of an injured camellia bush, frowned at the broken branches, summoned visions of retribution, and then went back into the house. Maybe if he put up a piece of piano wire across the sidewalk, say about neck-high, Einstein might slow down long enough to put the paper somewhere near the front porch. But then he remembered that the paperboy was no longer a boy on a bike, but an elderly Korean gentleman driving a little Japanese pickup truck. And besides, there never had been sidewalks. He plodded back to the kitchen, poured a mug of coffee\u2014into the cup this time\u2014and went out onto the back porch, which overlooked two hundred feet of lawn and trees descending to the creek. Two sincerely ambitious Yuppies were straining at their oars as they sculled out from the other side in their fancy singles. The water was perfectly still, and they cut through the foot-high mist like competing phantoms under power.\n\nHis lawyer and best friend, Worth Battle, harped incessantly on the subject of Ev's living alone in a house so full of family memories. Worth also kept trying to set him up with lady friends, but, with the possible exception of one really nice lawyer, none of them had raised even a spark of interest. He smiled at the thought of going through life with a name like Worth Battle. Back when they had been plebe-year roommates at the Naval Academy, Ev had appreciated all the hell his roomie caught for having such a name, because it deflected a lot of fire from himself. As early as plebe summer, they had speculated that one day Worth would have to become a lawyer, if only to get even.\n\nThe problem was, Ev loved the old house. He lived in it mortgage-free, and now, with five wooded acres directly overlooking Sayers Creek and within healthy walking distance of the Academy and the state capitol, it was worth a small fortune. But more than that, he'd grown up here. It was the only home he'd ever had. It was also the only home his daughter, Julie, had ever known, and during the past four years, it had allowed him to see much more of her than did most parents of midshipmen. It was a place she could bring her friends and classmates, a place where they could act like normal college kids once in awhile instead of spit-and-polish tin sailors. But since his wife, Joanne, had died, he'd seen less of Julie than he'd have liked. And when she graduated in a few weeks, he'd see nothing of her except for the occasional Christmas leave, as she dropped into that same naval aviation pipe he'd been in for so long. The irony did not escape him. Pretty soon, there'd be nothing but memories here. Good ones and not so good ones. Then he might actually have to decide.\n\nThe phone rang. It was Julie. Midshipman First Class Julie Markham, United States Naval Academy, he reminded himself. Soon to be Ens. Julie Markham, United States Naval Reserve.\n\n\"Dad!\" she said breathlessly, scattering his ruminations with her energy. \"Have you heard?\"\n\n\"Heard what, Jules?\" he asked patiently. Julie seemed to go through life at full burner lately, as commissioning day approached.\n\n\"A plebe. Fell. Or jumped. Off the eighth wing's roof. Into the road between King Hall and Mitscher Hall. Mega-gross. Like, fire-hose city.\"\n\n\"Thanks for sharing, Julie,\" he said, quickly blanking out the gory image. He'd seen the aftermath of a plane captain falling eighty-four feet from the flight deck of a carrier onto the pier below, courtesy of a jet engine turnup. \"What do you mean, fell or jumped?\"\n\n\"Oh, you know. Dark Side is saying that of course he fell; the word in the Brigade is that he jumped.\"\n\n\"You're going to have to lose that 'Dark Side' business once you get out there in the fleet, Julie. Your senior officers won't appreciate that stuff.\"\n\n\"And they do something about it, from what I've been told, which is, of course, why they're called the Dark Side.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but think about this: You go naval air, you're looking at almost a ten-year obligated service. By then, you'll be up for light commander. How do you make the transition to O-four if you've been calling everyone who's an O-four or above the Dark Side?\"\n\n\"Oh, Da-ad,\" she said. \"Ten years? That's eons from now. Hey, I gotta run\u2014it's two-minute chow call.\"\n\n\"Rock and roll,\" he said, but she was already gone. He hung up the phone. It was almost amusing, he thought, how pervasively the fleet junior officer culture infected the brigade, especially the seniors, or firsties. After the naval aviation Tailhook scandals of the early nineties, many junior aviators felt they had been made scapegoats for incidents to which a nonzero number of very senior officers had also been party. Some of these senior officers had been only too willing to offer up an unlimited number of JO careers if that meant they could save theirs from the ensuing feminazi witch-hunts. The JOs had secretly begun calling any officer over the rank of Lieutenant \"the Dark Side,\" with a cultural nod to Darth Vader of the _Star Wars_ films. When this term filtered up to the senior officers, there were immediate and heavy-handed back-channel thunderations, which, of course, only served to cement the appellation.\n\nHe finished his coffee and went upstairs to get ready for work. His first class today was at ten o'clock, so there was plenty of time. One of the bennies of being a full prof. But maybe too much time, because as he entered the bedroom, he was struck again by how quiet the damned house was. It didn't even have the decency to creak and groan, like any self-respecting fifty-year-old house should. He felt the familiar flush of desperate loneliness that seemed all too ready to overwhelm him at moments like this. He took a deep breath and willed it away.\n\nShe was gone.\n\nThat's all, just gone. Just gone. And there was nothing he could do. He had gone through his entire life asserting control over himself and his circumstances. But when that state trooper had come to the door, stone-faced, rain-soaked hat in hand, Ev had known in an instant that those days of even keels and steady, visible purpose had just been hit by a large torpedo. Just like Joanne. Who was just\u2014gone.\n\nThey had had the life they'd had. All the memories were banked, the good ones gaining ground, the not so good ones fading like old newsprint, visible if you really wanted to see it, but disappearing if you were willing to leave it in a drawer somewhere for long enough.\n\nYou do this one day at a time, he told himself. Just like the twelve-steppers down at AA. You concentrate on what you're going to say at the ten o'clock seminar. You focus on doing the next thing\u2014shower, shave, get dressed. He swallowed hard as he stood there in the bedroom. He knew all the standard nostrums by heart, could hear all his friends reciting them so sincerely and earnestly. Meaning well. Trying to help. Breathing silent sighs of relief that it hadn't happened to them.\n\nHe couldn't help wanting to remind some of them.\n\nHe looked at himself in the full-length mirror hanging on the bathroom door. Just over six feet, black hair\u2014well, mostly black\u2014a narrow, lean face with intense brown eyes, a crooked nose, courtesy of an unruly canopy, and more lines than had been there the last time he'd looked. He'd managed to keep himself fit and trim, which, given the physical fitness culture of the Academy, was unremarkable. But the lines were deeper and the shadows under his eyes more pronounced. Funny how living alone changed things, and how the body kept score . . .\n\nHe sighed. Damned house was ambushing him again. Maybe Worth was right. The day after Julie threw her hat in the air at graduation was going to be emotional for them both. The day after that, once she had driven away to Pensacola and her new life, was going to be a genuine bitch.\n\n\"But right now,\" he said out loud, \"it's shower time.\"\n\n> _That's right, it's me. Aren't you glad? Sure you are. I've just been walking down the passageway, yelling at the chow-callers to keep their eyes in the boat, and, just maybe, they won't attract my attention. They don't want to attract my attention, because today I'm Psycho-Shark, man-killer, man-eater._\n> \n> _I love to look at all the pretty plebes, the live ones. Standing rigidly at attention next to the upperclassmen's rooms, clamoring like the sheep they are, counting down the minutes until morning meal formation. As if the superior beings inside the rooms didn't know what time it was._ \"Sir! There are now three minutes until morning meal formation! The menu for this morning is . . . \" _Seriously dumb!_\n> \n> _There was one who didn't get the word about me. I gave him the Look. Let my eyes go blank, opened my mouth just a little, showed all my teeth, slowed my stride fractionally, made it look like I was turning in his direction, just like a big tiger shark, perusing prey, easing past the target, then the sly turn, the effortless dip and bank of pectorals. I love it when their voicespitch up a note or two as they continue to shout out the required formula while pretending_\u2014 _no, hoping, praying_ \u2014 _I'm not coming back to them._\n> \n> _They know, the plebes. They know about me, even if a lot of my so-called classmates don't. It's the nature of prey to recognize a predator, you see. And I am, by God, a predator. A top predator, in every sense. They get a come-around to my room, they don't sleep the night before. Especially the girls._\n> \n> _There's one girl they call Bee-bee, the fat girl. Beebee for Butterball. All quivering chins and heaving bosoms under that flushed face. Trying desperately not to acknowledge that I'm walking past. I can smell the sweat on her from twenty feet away_ \u2014 _we can do that, you know. We have a truly excellent sense of smell. All those tiny, exquisitely tuned dermal receptors. It's a chemical thing. Just kidding, of course. But sharks can do that, so I assume the profile as much as I can. For Bee-bee, I change my sequence. Just a little. Slow down, turn my head, oh so casually in her direction, stare down at her_ \u2014 _belt buckle, yes, and listen to her squeak. What does she think I'm looking at, her crotch? Not with that fat roll hanging over her belt, I'm not._\n> \n> _But you know what? I can smell her fear. She's not going to make it here. The Dark Side hates fat midshipmen. As well they should. Fat people are lazy, unmotivated. Natural prey, by definition. As I've always said, the girls can stay, but only if you remain sleek and strong._\n> \n> _I prowl every day. My grand passage to formation. I leave my room with just less than two minutes to get down the ladder to the zero deck and out onto the formation yard. I have it timed, you see. Right to the second. After almost four years of this bullshit, any competent firstie does. That's how I make it look so effortless, arriving at the edge of the formation just as the bells ring, always supremely casual, totally nonchalant, just like a big shark rising from somewhere down_ _in the deep gloom, appearing miraculously alongside and slightly below a school of underclassmen. Well, what the hell, it is morning meal formation. You know, chow time? Heh-heh._\n> \n> _And I love it when the guys on the team call me the Shark! Let's face it, when it comes to men's freestyle, I AM the team. Six three in my dripping feet, 210 of sprung steel, and shaped like a humanoid manta ray, only I'm faster, much faster. I'm the monster of the freestyle. Fast enough that I actually have time to look sideways and lay dead eyes on anyone who can keep up with me. It's so cool: I give him the Look, show those teeth, watch him stub his stroke for a second or two, or screw up his breathing when he realizes I'm_ not _breathing and I'm still staring right at him. And then I'm gone, accelerating without seeming to change anything. I've heard the norms talking, in the locker room head afterward. 'Tucker just stopped taking air, man. Looked at me like I was meat, like he was gonna slip under the lane divider and, like, fucking bite, man. Freaked my ass out.\"_\n> \n> _It's my teeth. I can't help it. I have really big teeth. One time before a meet, I borrowed some black nail polish from one of my Goth moths and painted my teeth to look like points. Final heat, there was this guy, thought he was pretty good, grinned at me when he realized he could stay with Navy's monster right through the final turn. Then I gave him the Look, and a second later, exactly one stroke later, I showed the teeth. Poor baby did a guppy mouth. Tried to swallow the pool. Made him heavy, I suppose. Shit happens. He was lucky his timer saw him go down. I never saw him, of course. I was too busy winning. I did see the bubble, now that I think of it. Big one, too._\n> \n> _The best part of formation time is when the plebes, all finished with their chow calls, come chopping down the center of the passageway, hands rigid at their sides, eyes in the boat, yes, sir, knowing within a few seconds what time it is, but having to give way to_ _the upperclassmen, because that's how it works here at Canoe U. They had sixty, now fifty seconds to get down the stairwell_ \u2014 _that's ladder to you, plebedweeb_ \u2014 _and into ranks. We don't obstruct them on purpose, although it does happen. And, of course, you bump into me and you get an automatic come-around. On the other hand, if they aren 't in formation by the time the formation bell rings, they 're down on the demerit pad anyway. Can't win, if you're aplebe, can you? No, you can't. That's the beauty of the system. Make it hopeless, see what they do, see who gives up, who doesn 't, and then help the strong ones figure it out. To recognize the system, and, better yet, how to beat the system._\n> \n> _That's how I've done it, only I was doing it long before I got to this place. Beating the system. Every place I've been, since I was a little kid, there's always been a system. Whether in Juvie Hall, the foster homes, the parochial school, there's always been a system. If you truly want to rule, all you have to do is first recognize the system, then beat it by appearing to play by its rules while taking what you want. And you know what? The people who run the system are usually so damned dumb, they can't see you doing it. This place is no different in that regard. They've got all these chickenshit rules, so you focus on those rules. Shine your shoes, polish your brass, keep your room sharp, bounce that dime off the bedspread, man. Study what they tell you to study, excel at all things athletic, stand tall, speak loud, keep your hair short, your body pumped, your abs ripped, and, man, you will be a star. Just like me. Oh, you might not have many friends, but, hell, I didn't come here for friends. I came here to get those wings of gold and that great big Mameluke sword._\n> \n> _See, you don't need friends to select Marine aviation; you only need a certain percentage of your class to stand lower than you do. It's like if you and I were being chased by a big bad bear_ \u2014 _I don't have to outrunthe bear. I only have to outrun you. So my classmates don't like me. Big deal. But they sure as hell know who I am. And the Dark Side, especially the Marines? Hell, they love me. Set me up at attention in a set of tropical whites, take my picture while I'm bellowing out an order, I'm Poster Boy._\n> \n> _Well, it's going on class time. Just a couple more weeks and we get to flee this place. I finally get to join my mighty Corps, and, of course, learn all about a new system. They '11 have one. And being Marines, it '11 be a pretty simple system. Not simple as in dumb, but simple as in clear, pure, strong. But I'll play it and beat it, too. Piece of cake. Easy as slurping down the weekly shit-on-a-shingle breakfast in King Hall. Hope they hose off the plaza over there before noon meal. I saw a fire truck, but there's been no fire that I know about. Something messy on the plaza, I hear. Or was it someone? A plebe, maybe? Hope so_ \u2014 _there 're too many of them._\n\nJust before noon, Ev Markham stood on the front steps outside Sampson Hall, wishing he could have a cigarette. He'd quit smoking when he'd left carrier aviation, but the desire for just one had never been truly extinguished. It was a perfect spring day in Annapolis, with clear blue skies and a vigorous sea breeze coming in off the bay. The trees were in bloom, the lawns were coming green again after the wintry depredations of dark ages, and the Severn River was positively sparkling. The wedge of Chesapeake Bay he could see from Sampson was a vast sheet of silver punctuated by fishing boats and the seemingly motionless silhouette of a black-hulled tanker pushing its way up to Baltimore. It was no wonder the visiting West Point cadets, whose fortresslike academy up on the Hudson was still ice-bound in the early spring, called their rivals' school in Annapolis \"the Country Club.\"\n\nThe last midshipmen were exiting the granite-covered academic building, hustling back to Bancroft for noon meal formation, throwing a chorus of obligatory \"Morning, sir\" at him as they trotted by. He was a popular-enough professor, and it didn't hurt that he taught a subject that was considered non-life-threatening, as compared to, say, advanced organic chemistry. He was finishing his imaginary cigarette and admiring the big houses on the cliffs across the Severn River when Dolly Benson, the Political Science Department's secretary, stuck her head out one of the massive bronze doors and called him in for an urgent phone call from his daughter. Surprised, he followed her back to the departmental offices. A call from his daughter at this time of day, with noon meal formation bells about to ring, was unusual. The Naval Academy was a place of rigid routines. Any break in that routine usually meant trouble.\n\n\"Yeah, Julie: What's up?\"\n\n\"Dad, I think I've got a problem. My company officer came to our room and told me to get into Class-A's and report to the commandant's office.\"\n\n\"Whoa. Why?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. I don't think Lieutenant Tarrens does, either. He just said to get up there ASAP. What should I do?\"\n\n\"Get up there ASAP. And you have no idea of what this is about? Academic? Conduct?\"\n\n\"No, Dad,\" Julie said in a mildly exasperated voice. Rightfully so, too. Julie stood in the top 20 percent of her class academically and had never had a significant conduct demerits problem.\n\n\"Well, then, go find out. If you haven't done anything wrong, just go see the Man. He doesn't bite.\"\n\n\"That something you know, Dad?\" she asked, but her normal bantering tone wasn't there. He realized Julie was scared. He also knew that Captain Robbins, the commandant of midshipmen and a recent flag officer selectee, was not exactly a warm and fuzzy kind of guy.\n\n\"Listen, Jules: The commandant is all about business. Whatever it is, he'll be professional about it. However, if you think you're being accused of something, stop talking and call me right away. On my cell number. And before thirteen hundred, okay? I've got a department staff meeting then. Now hustle your bustle.\"\n\n\"I guess. Shit. I'm going to miss lunch.\"\n\nHe could hear the formation bells ringing out in the halls. \"I believe you already have. Get going. And call me back.\"\n\nHe hung up and stood there for a moment. He was grateful that the departmental office complex was empty. Everyone else, including Dolly now, had gone somewhere, either for lunch or to work out. There were individual offices for the department chair, who was a Navy captain, and for each full professor. There was also a conference room, and some smaller shared offices for newer faculty and visitors. There were no students hanging around, either. Unlike students at a civilian college, midshipmen had their time strictly regulated? They were in Bancroft Hall, out on the athletic fields, or in class in one of the academic buildings. Midshipmen rarely spent time lingering around the departmental offices.\n\nHe walked over to his own office to make sure his cell phone was on, wondering what the hell this was all about. The commandant of midshipmen's office was in Bancroft Hall itself. He and his deputy, Captain Rogers, directly oversaw every aspect of the midshipmen's daily life through a chain of command comprised of commissioned officers who were designated battalion and company officers. The four thousand midshipmen were assigned to six battalions of five companies each. Having been a midshipman, Ev knew that a summons to the commandant's office was trouble, plain and simple. With her high academic standing and her athletic achievements as a competitive swimmer, Julie was one of the stars of her class, so this wasn't likely to be about a conduct offense. Another large-scale cheating episode, perhaps? God, he hoped not. The Academy didn't need another one of those, especially after all the ongoing controversy over the ethics and honor courses.\n\nForty-five minutes later, his suspicions were confirmed. Julie called in on his regular number. She asked in a wooden, stilted voice if he could come over to Bancroft Hall.\n\n\"Certainly,\" he said, not liking her tone of voice. \"But what's going on?\"\n\n\"Can't talk,\" she said, lowering her voice. \"I'll meet you in the rotunda. We can talk there.\"\n\n\"Five minutes,\" he said, and hung up. He left a note for Dolly that he had been called away on an urgent personal matter and would be late for the departmental meeting. Then he grabbed his suit coat and hustled out the door.\n\nJulie was waiting for him in the spacious main entrance to Bancroft Hall, the eight-wing, five-storied marble and granite Beaux Arts dormitory complex that was home to the nearly four thousand midshipmen composing the Brigade. She was standing to one side of the ornate marble-floored entrance, looking small beneath the massive naval murals lining the cavernous rotunda. He felt a small pang in his heart when he looked at his daughter: Julie looked so much like her mother\u2014medium height, dark-haired, pretty, and bright-eyed, except that right now she wasn't so bright-eyed. Her face was rigid with what looked to him like massive embarrassment. Fifty feet above her head was a twenty-foot-wide color mural depicting battleships under air attack in World War II. It somehow seemed appropriate.\n\nHe went to her and saw that she was struggling to contain tears. A couple of passing midshipmen, youngsters, with a single anchor insignia on their shirt collars and arms laden with books, glanced at him in his civilian suit and tie but kept going. Being sophomores, they wouldn't necessarily know he was faculty, so he looked like what he was: a visiting father, here to talk to his daughter. A freestanding wooden privacy partition masked the side hallways leading back into the Brigade hallways. He saw a lieutenant he did not recognize standing next to the executive corridor partition, watching them. Probably someone from the Executive Department. Given the weird acoustics of the rotunda, he was close enough to eavesdrop.\n\n\"Want to go somewhere?\" he asked softly, eyeing the watching officer.\n\n\"Can't,\" she said through clamped jaws. \"They say I have to meet some people from NCIS in a few minutes.\"\n\nThat stopped him. NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Emphasis on the word _Criminal._ \"NCIS? What the hell, Julie?\"\n\nShe looked right at him, keeping her back to the lieutenant and her voice low. \"That plebe who jumped this morning? They're saying it had something to do with me. The commandant just put me through some kind of interrogation. It's almost like they think _I'm_ responsible. You know, for what he did.\"\n\n\"Good Lord. Did you even know him?\"\n\n\"Only sort of,\" she said. \"I mean, he's a plebe. Was a plebe, I guess.\" She turned and glared pointedly at the lieutenant. The young officer finally stepped back behind the partition to give them some privacy. That was his Julie: not one to take crap from anybody.\n\n\"Why do they think that?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"They say there's something that ties him to me.\"\n\n\"Like. . .?\"\n\n\"The dant wouldn't say. It was like 'We'll ask the questions; you answer.'\"\n\nHe started to say something but stopped. The word had gone through the entire Academy like quicksilver before first-period classes. A plebe named William Brian Dell was dead, the victim of a fall from the roof of the eighth wing. And now there was something that tied the victim to Julie?\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n\n\nProduced by Diane Monico and the Online Distributed\nProofreading Team at http:\/\/www.pgdp.net (This file was\nproduced from images generously made available by The\nInternet Archive)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: CLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE.]\n\n\n\n\nTwenty Years a Detective\n\nIN THE WICKEDEST CITY IN THE WORLD.\n\n20,000 ARRESTS MADE\n12,900 CONVICTIONS ON STATE AND CITY LAWS\n200 PENITENTIARY CONVICTIONS\n\nThe Devil and the Grafter\nAND\nHOW THEY WORK TOGETHER TO DECEIVE,\nSWINDLE AND DESTROY MANKIND\n\nAN ARMY OF 600,000 CRIMINALS AT WAR WITH\nSOCIETY AND RELIGION\n\nBY CLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE\nThe World-Famous Criminologist and Detective\n\n\"THE INCORRUPTIBLE SHERLOCK HOLMES OF AMERICA\"\n\nAfter twenty years of heroic warfare and scores of hair-breadth\nescapes, in his unceasing battle with the devil and the grafter,\nMr. Wooldridge tells in a graphic manner how Wildcat Insurance,\nFake Mines and Oil Wells, Turf Swindlers, Home Buying Swindlers,\nFake Bond and Investment Companies, Bucket Shops, Blind\nPools in Grain and Stocks, Pool Rooms and Hand Books, Fake\nMail Order Houses, ordinary Gambling Houses, Panel Houses,\nMatrimonial Bureaus, Fake Underwriting, Fake Banks, Collecting\nAgencies, Fake Medicine Companies, Clairvoyants, Fortune Tellers,\nPalmists and other criminals of all classes operate, and how their\norganizations have been broken up and destroyed by hundreds.\n\nTHE WORK ALSO CONTAINS\n\nDetective Clifton R. Wooldridge's \"Never-Fail\" System\n\n_For Detecting and Outwitting All Classes of\nGrafters and Swindlers_\n\n\n\n\nCOPYRIGHT, 1908,\nBY\nCLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE.\n\n\nChicago Publishing Co.,\n83-91 Plymouth Place,\nChicago.\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE.\n\n\nIn presenting this work to the public the author has no apologies to\nmake nor favors to ask. It is a simple history of his connection with\nthe Police Department of Chicago, compiled from his own memoranda,\nthe newspapers, and the official records. The matter herein contained\ndiffers from those records only in details, as many facts are given\nin the book which have never been made public. The author has no\ndisposition to malign any one, and names are used only in cases in\nwhich the facts are supported by the archives of the Police Department\nand of the criminal court. In the conscientious discharge of his\nduties as an officer of the law, the author has in all cases studied\nthe mode of legal procedure. His aim has been solely to protect\nsociety and the taxpayer, and to punish the guilty. The evidences\nof his sincerity accompany the book in the form of letters from the\nhighest officers in the city government, from the mayor down to\nthe precinct captain, and furnish overwhelming testimony as to his\nendeavors to serve the public faithfully and honestly. No effort has\nbeen made to bestow self-praise, and where this occurs, it is only a\nreproduction, perhaps in different language, of the comments indulged\nin by the newspapers of Chicago and other cities, whose reporters are\namong the brightest and most talented young men in all the walks and\nprofessions of life. To them the officer acknowledges his obligations\nin many instances. Often he has worked hand-in-hand with them. They\nhave traveled with him in the dead hours of the night, in his efforts\nto suppress crime or track a criminal, and have often given him\nassistance in the way of suggestions.\n\nHe now submits his work and his record to the public, hoping it will\ngive him a kindly reception.\n\n\n\n\nTABLE OF CONTENTS.\n\n\nPreface                                                            7-8\n\nTestimonials                                                        11\n\nBiography of the Author                                             27\n\nGraft Nation's Worst Foe                                            51\n\nThe \"Never-Fail\" System to Beat the Get-Rich-Quick Swindles        112\n\nThe Best Rules for Health                                          116\n\nMatrimonial Agents Coining Cupid's Wiles                           119\n\nThe Great Mistake. Our Penal System is a Relic of Early Savagery   192\n\nVagrants, Who and Why                                              204\n\nThe Young Criminals and How They Are Bred in Chicago               230\n\nWiles of Fortune Telling                                           246\n\nWife or Gallows                                                    267\n\nA Clever Shop Lifter (Fainting Bertha)                             272\n\nFront                                                              284\n\nThe Criminal's Last Chance Gone                                    288\n\nBurglary a Science                                                 311\n\nCell Terms for \"Con\" Men                                           341\n\nPanel-House Thieves                                                348\n\nGambling and Crime                                                 358\n\nA Heartless Fraud                                                  401\n\nThe Bogus Mine                                                     409\n\nA Giant Swindle                                                    418\n\nQuacks                                                             426\n\nFabulous Losses in Big Turf Frauds                                 448\n\nFake Drug Vendors                                                  462\n\nBucket-Shop                                                        471\n\nOn \"Sure Things.\" How to Learn Their Real Character                482\n\nHuge Swindles Bared                                                487\n\nThe Social Evil                                                    500\n\nSuppress Manufacture and Sale of Dangerous Weapons                 508\n\nGetting Something for Nothing                                      517\n\nWant Ad. Fakers                                                    527\n\nMillionaire Banker and Broker Arrested                             533\n\nDora McDonald                                                      551\n\nMike McDonald                                                      581\n\n\n\n\nPUBLISHER'S PREFACE.\n\n\nThe two arch enemies of happiness and prosperity are the Devil and the\nGrafter. The church is fighting the Devil, the law is fighting the\nGrafter. The great mass of human beings, as they journey along the\npathway of life, know not the dangers that lie in wait from these two\nsources. Honest themselves, credulous and innocent, they trust their\nfellow man.\n\nStatistics show that four-fifths of all young men and women, and\nnine-tenths of the widows are swindled out of the money and property\nthat comes to them by inheritance. Every year thousands of laboring\nmen spend their hard earnings and beggar their families by falling in\ntraps laid for them. Thousands of innocent girls and women, struggling\nfor a respectable livelihood, fall victims to the demons who traffic\nin human honor.\n\nThe Grafters spend millions upon millions of dollars annually in\nadvertising in America alone. There is not a Post Office in the land\nwhere every mail does not carry their appeals and thieving schemes;\nand they collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the\ntrusting public. The State and National Governments spend millions of\ndollars a year in trying to catch and curb these grafters. Some of\nSatan's worst grafters are found in the church, working the brethren;\nand he has them by thousands in every walk of life.\n\nThe object of this book is to protect the public by joining hands with\nthe church and the government in their work against the Devil and the\nGrafter. The author reveals and exposes the Grafter with his schemes,\nhis traps, his pitfalls and his victims. The reader of this book will\nbe fortified and armed with knowledge, facts and law, that should\nforever protect him, his family and his friends from the wiles of the\nGrafters.\n\nIt is with the confidence that this work fills an imperative need, and\nthat it should be in the hands of every minister, every physician,\nevery teacher and every mother and father in the land, that the author\nand publisher send it forth on what they believe to be a mission of\ngood to the world.\n\n\n\n\nWORDS OF COMMENDATION.\n\n\n=From Chas. S. Deneen, Governor of Illinois:=\n\n     \"It is with pleasure that I am able to say that Detective\n     Wooldridge has conducted all his cases with zeal and\n     intelligence.\"\n\n=J. M. Longenecker, former State's Attorney, says:=\n\n     \"Mr. Wooldridge has thorough knowledge of evidence and is\n     an expert in preparing a criminal case for trial. I have\n     found him to be one of the most efficient officers in the\n     Department.\"\n\n=R. W. McClaughrey, Warden of U. S. Prison at Leavenworth, Kans.,\nEx-Warden of Illinois State Penitentiary and Ex-Chief of Police of\nChicago, says in a letter to the author:=\n\n     \"You were not only subject to bribes, but also frequently\n     a target of perjurers and scoundrels of every degree. You\n     came out from every ordeal unscathed, and maintained a\n     character for integrity and fearlessness in the discharge\n     of your duties that warranted the highest commendation. It\n     gives me pleasure to make this statement.\"\n\n=J. J. Badenoch, Ex-General Supt. of Police, writing Mr. Wooldridge,\nsays:=\n\n     \"Dear Sir--Before I retire from the command of the Police\n     Department, I desire to thank you for your bravery and\n     loyal service. The character of your work being such that\n     bribes are frequently offered by the criminal class, it\n     becomes necessary to select men of perfect integrity for\n     the purpose, and I now know that I made no mistake in\n     selecting you for this trying duty. It affords me great\n     pleasure to commend you for your bravery and fidelity to\n     your duties.\"\n\n=Nicholas Hunt, Inspector Commanding Second Division, says:=\n\n     \"I have known Clifton R. Wooldridge for the last ten years.\n     As an officer he is par-excellent, absolutely without\n     fear and with a detective ability so strongly developed\n     it almost appealed to me as an extra sense. If I wanted\n     to secure the arrest of a desperate man, I would put Mr.\n     Wooldridge in charge of the case in preference to any one I\n     know, as, with his bravery, he has discretion.\"\n\n=Geo. M. Shippy, Chief of Police, of Chicago, writing Mr. Wooldridge,\nsays:=\n\n     \"Your heart is in the right place, and while I have\n     always found you stern and persistent in the pursuit\n     and prosecution of criminals, you were very kind and\n     considerate, and I can truthfully say that more than one\n     evil doer was helped to reform and was given material\n     assistance by you.\"\n\n=Luke P. Colleran, Chief of Detectives, says:=\n\n     \"His book is most worthy and truthful and commendable; and\n     I take pleasure in commending it to all.\"\n\n\nSHERLOCK HOLMES IN REAL LIFE.\n\n_From The Chicago Tribune of November 25, 1906._\n\n     \"Chicago may be surprised to learn that it has a Sherlock\n     Holmes of its own, but it has; and before his actual\n     experiences in crime-hunting, the fictional experiences\n     through which Poe, Doyle, and Nick Carter put their\n     detectives pale into insignificance. His name is Clifton R.\n     Wooldridge.\n\n     \"Truth is stranger even than detective fiction, and in the\n     number of his adventures of mystery, danger and excitement\n     he has all the detective heroes of fiction and reality\n     beaten easily.\n\n     \"He has personally arrested 19,500 people, 200 of them were\n     sent to the penitentiary; 3,000 to the house of correction;\n     6,000 paid fines; 100 girls under age were rescued from\n     lives of shame; $100,000 worth of property was recovered;\n     100 panel houses were closed; 100 matrimonial bureaus were\n     broken up.\n\n[Illustration: Disguised as a JEW IN THE GHETTO]\n\n     \"Wooldridge has refused perhaps 500 bribes of from $500\n     to $5,000 each. He has been under fire forty-four times.\n     He has been wounded dozens of times. He has impersonated\n     almost every kind of character. He has, in his crime\n     hunting, associated with members of the '400' and\n     fraternized with hobos. He has dined with the elite and\n     smoked in opium dens. He has done everything that one\n     expects the detective of fiction to do and which the real\n     detective seldom does.\n\n     \"When occasion requires he ceases to appear as Wooldridge.\n     He can make a disguise so quickly and effectively that even\n     an actor would be astonished. Gilded youth, <DW64> gambler,\n     honest farmer or lodging house 'bum,' it requires but a few\n     minutes to 'make-up,' to run to earth elusive wrong-doers.\"\n\nThe pictures which appear here are actual photographs taken from life\nin the garb and disguises worn by the author in several famous cases.\n\n[Illustration: \"HECK HOUSTON\"--STOCK-RAISER FROM WYOMING\n\nIn this garb the author makes himself an easy mark for the crooks\nand grafters of the Stock-Yard district. The hold-up man--the\ncard-sharp--the bunco-steerer--the get-rich-quick stock-broker fall\n\"easy game\" to the detective thus disguised.]\n\n[Illustration: ASSOCIATING WITH THE STOCK AND BOND GRAFTERS\n\nDisguised as an Englishman who has money and is looking for a good\ninvestment, Mr. Wooldridge is easily mistaken for a \"sucker.\" The\ntrap is set. He apparently walks into it; but, in a few minutes, the\ngrafter finds himself on the way to prison.]\n\n[Illustration: POLICY-SAM JOHNSON\n\nThis is a favorite disguise of the author when doing detective duty\namong the lowest and most disreputable criminals. Unsuspectingly\nthe crooks offer him all sorts of dirty work at small prices for\nassistance in criminal acts.]\n\n[Illustration: WE NEVER SLEEP\n\nDetectives disguised as tramps: \"I am made all things to all men,\"\nsays St. Paul. The Detective must also make himself all things to all\nmen, that he may find and catch the rascals. To be up-to-date it is\nnecessary to be able to assume as many disguises as there are classes\nof people among whom criminals hide.]\n\n[Illustration: POLICY-SAM JOHNSON SHOOTING CRAPS\n\nAn illustration of the way the detective employs himself in the\ngambling dens. It is often necessary to play and lose money in these\nplaces that he may get at the facts. Observe that he is watching\nproceedings in another part of the room while he is throwing the\ndice.]\n\n[Illustration: SHADOWING ONE OF THE FOUR HUNDRED.\n\nSome of the most dangerous grafters in the world hobnob with the\nelite. Here we have our author in evening dress, passing as a man of\nsociety at a banquet of the rich, shadowing a \"high-flyer\" crook.]\n\n[Illustration: CRAPS AND CARDS\n\nThe gambling house is a station on the road to crime. In proportion to\npopulation there are, perhaps, more <DW64> gamblers than of any other\nrace.]\n\n[Illustration: A LITTLE GAME IN THE ALLEY AT NOON\n\nMany boys and young men spend their noon hour in cultivating bad\nhabits that lead to nights of gambling; and then come crimes to get\nmoney that they may gamble more.]\n\n[Illustration: A RESTING PLACE ON THE ROAD TO CRIME.\n\nThe gilded saloon is the club-room of the crook. Here he hatches his\nplots; here he drinks to get desperate courage to carry them out; and\nhere he returns when the crime has been committed to drown remorse and\nharden conscience.]\n\n[Illustration: YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE]\n\n[Illustration: A GAME OF POKER FOR \"A SMALL STAKE\"\n\nThis is a clangorous stop. Many a ruined man traces his downfall\nto the day he began in youth to \"bet\" a little \"to make the game\ninteresting.\"]\n\n[Illustration: Emma Ford (Sisters) Pearl Smith\n\nMary White, Flossie Moore\n\nFOUR FAMOUS <DW64> WOMEN GRAFTERS\n\nAs confidence workers, highway robbers, and desperate criminals they\nwere the terror of officers and courts. Together they stole and robbed\npeople of more than $200,000.00. They were finally run to earth and\nput in prison. Our author followed one of them across the continent\nand back.]\n\n[Illustration: THE DESTINATION OF THE GRAFTER.\n\n\"The way of the transgressor is hard.\" \"Be sure your sin will find\nyou out.\" The penitentiary is full of bright men who might have\nbeen eminently successful--an honor to themselves and a blessing to\nmankind, if they had only heeded the old adage--\"Honesty is the best\npolicy.\"]\n\n[Illustration: WOOLDRIDGE'S CABINET OF BURGLAR TOOLS.\n\nAt the police headquarters in Chicago, one of the most attractive\ncurios is the above cabinet of burglar-tools and weapons taken by the\nauthor from robbers and crooks during his eighteen years of service.]\n\n[Illustration: TURNING THE BOYS FROM CRIMINAL PATHS\n\nThis is a photograph of the Juvenile Court in Chicago, where boys\nwho commit crimes are tried and sent to the Reformatory, instead of\nto prison with hardened criminals. The author claims that our prison\nsystem is filling the country with criminals.]\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration]\n\nCLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE\n\nAMERICA'S FOREMOST DETECTIVE.\n\n\nClifton R. Wooldridge was born February 25, 1854, in Franklin county,\nKentucky. He received a common school education, and then started out\nin the world to shift for himself. From 1868 to 1871, he held the\nposition of shipping clerk and collector for the Washington Foundry\nin St. Louis, Missouri. Severing his connection with that company,\nhe went to Washington, D. C., and was attached to the United States\nSignal Bureau from March 1, 1871, to December 5, 1872. He then took up\nthe business of railroading, and for the following nine years occupied\npositions as fireman, brakeman, switchman, conductor and general yard\nmaster.\n\nWhen the gold fever broke out in the Black Hills in 1879, Mr.\nWooldridge along with many others went to that region to better his\nfortune. Six months later he joined the engineering corps of the\nDenver & Rio Grande railroad and assisted in locating the line from\nCanon City to Leadville, as well as several of the branches. The\nwork was not only very difficult, but very dangerous, and at times,\nwhen he was assisting in locating the line through the Royal Gorge\nin the Grand Canon of the Arkansas, he was suspended from a rope,\nwhich ran from the peak of one cliff to the other, with his surveying\ninstruments strapped to his back. This gorge is fifty feet wide at\nthe bottom and seventy feet wide at the top, the walls of solid\nrock rising three thousand feet above the level of the river below.\nThe work was slow and required a great deal of skill, but it was\naccomplished successfully.\n\nMr. Wooldridge went to Denver in 1880 and engaged in contracting\nand mining the following eighteen months. He then took a position\nas engineer and foreman of the Denver Daily Republican, where he\nremained until May 29, 1883. The following August he came to Chicago\nand took a position with the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railway.\nIn 1886, he severed his connection with the railroad and founded the\n\"Switchman's Journal.\" He conducted and edited the paper until May\n26th, when he was burned out, together with the firm of Donohue &\nHenneberry at the corner of Congress street and Wabash avenue, as\nwell as many other business houses in that locality, entailing a\ntotal loss of nearly $1,000,000. Thus the savings of many years were\nswept away, leaving him penniless and in debt. He again turned his\nattention to railroading and secured a position with the Chicago,\nBurlington & Quincy railroad and had accumulated enough money to\npay the indebtedness which resulted from the fire, when the great\nstrike was inaugurated on that road in February, 1888. The strike\nincluded the engineers, firemen and switchmen, and continued nearly\na year. On October 5th of that year Mr. Wooldridge made application\nfor a position on the Chicago police force, and having the highest\nendorsements, he was appointed and assigned to the Desplaines Street\nStation. It was soon discovered that Wooldridge as a police officer\nhad no superiors and few equals. Neither politics, religion, creed,\ncolor, or nationality obstructed him in the performance of his police\nduties, and the fact was demonstrated and conceded times without\nnumber that he could not be bought, bribed, or intimidated. He\nselected for his motto, \"Right wrongs no man; equal justice to all.\"\nHis superior officers soon recognized the fact that no braver, more\nhonest or efficient police officer ever wore a star or carried a club.\n\nThe mass of records on file in the police headquarters and in the\noffice of the clerk of the municipal and criminal court demonstrate\nconclusively that he has made one of the most remarkable records of\nany police officer in the United States if not in the world. Mr.\nWooldridge has seen twenty years of experience and training in active\npolice work. Ten years of this time he was located in what is commonly\nknown as the Levee district, a territory where criminals congregate\nand where crimes of all degrees are committed.\n\n\nBORN IN KENTUCKY.\n\nMr. Wooldridge is therefore of Southern extraction. And in spite of\nthe \"big stick\" which this terror of the grafters has carried for\ntwenty years, he still \"speaks softly,\" the gentle accent of the old\nSouth. But behind that soft speech there is a determined soul. The\nsmooth-running accents of the South are in this case the velvet which\nhides the glove of iron.\n\nThe following are some of the deeds of valor, work and achievements he\nhas accomplished:\n\n\nAN UNPARALLELED RECORD.\n\n     20,000 arrests made by Detective Wooldridge.\n\n     He keeps a record of each arrest, time, place and\n     disposition of the case.\n\n     14,000 arrests made for violation State and city\n     misdemeanors.\n\n     6,000 arrests made on criminal charges.\n\n     10,500 of these prisoners paid fines.\n\n     2,400 of these prisoners were sent to jail or the house of\n     correction.\n\n     200 of these were convicted and sent to the penitentiary.\n\n     1,000 get-rich-quick concerns were raided and broken up.\n\n     60 wagon loads of literature seized and destroyed.\n\n     A conservative estimate of the sum contributed annually\n     by this highly civilized nation to \"safe investment\" and\n     \"get-rich-quick\" concerns is $150,000,000.\n\n     300 poker, crap and gambling games raided and closed;\n     $1,000,000 lost.\n\n     200 wine rooms closed up. These wine rooms were the\n     downfall and ruination of hundreds of innocent girls.\n\n     185 wildcat insurance companies raided and closed.\n\n     2,500,000 bogus securities and 10 patrol wagon loads of\n     books, papers and literature seized. These companies paid\n     no losses, and there were, it is estimated, 1,000,000\n     persons who had taken out fire insurance policies in these\n     wildcat companies.\n\n     They had sustained fire losses and were not indemnified.\n     The conservative estimated loss by these wildcat insurance\n     companies is $10,000,000.\n\n     $200,000 of lost and stolen property was recovered and\n     returned to the owners by Detective Wooldridge.\n\n     129 slot machines seized and broken up; valued at $10,000.\n\n     130 policy shops raided and closed: $100,000 would be a\n     conservative estimate of the amount lost by the players.\n\n     125 matrimonial agencies raided and broken up.\n\n     4,500,000 matrimonial letters seized and destroyed.\n\n     1,500,000 matrimonial agencies' stock letters seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n     1,400,000 matrimonial stock photographs seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n     500,000 photographs sent to the matrimonial agencies by\n     men and women who were seeking their affinities seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n     40 wagon loads of matrimonial literature seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n     110 turf frauds raided and closed: $8,000,000 lost by the\n     public.\n\n     $20,000 bribe was offered Wooldridge by the turf swindlers\n     to let them run, but he refused to take it.\n\n     105 panel houses raided and closed.\n\n     $1,500,000 was stolen annually from 1889 to October, 1896.\n     At that time there were 64 uniformed officers stationed\n     in front of the panel houses. Detectives Wooldridge\n     and Schubert were assigned to break them, which was\n     accomplished in three weeks' time.\n\n     100 bucketshops raided and closed; $5,000,000 lost through\n     them.\n\n     July 31, 1900, Detective Wooldridge, in charge of 50\n     officers, arrested 415 men and landed them in the Harrison\n     Street Police Station, and dismantled the following\n     bucketshops:\n\n     10 and 12 Pacific avenue, 25 Sherman street, 14 Pacific\n     avenue, 10 Pacific avenue, 210 Opera House Block, 7\n     Exchange court, 19 Lyric Building, and 37 Dearborn street.\n     It was one of the largest and most sensational raids ever\n     made in Chicago, and will be long remembered.\n\n73 opium joints raided and closed; $100,000 spent, and hundreds of\npersons were wrecked and ruined by the use of opium.\n\n75 girls under age rescued from a house of ill fame and a life of\nshame, and returned to their parents or guardians, or sent to the\nJuvenile School or the House of Good Shepherd.\n\n50 home-buying swindles raided and closed; $6,000,000 lost.\n\n48 palmists and fortune tellers raided and closed; $500,000 lost.\n\n45 spurious employment agencies raided and closed; $200,000 lost.\n\n40 bogus charity swindles raided and closed; $300,000 lost.\n\n38 blind pools in grain and stock raided and closed; $500,000 lost.\n\n35 bogus mail order houses raided and closed; $3,000,000 lost.\n\n34 sure-thing gambling devices raided and closed; $2,500,000 lost.\n\n33 fraudulent and guarantee companies raided and closed; $900,000 lost.\n\n30 fraudulent book concerns raided and closed; $1,000,000 lost.\n\n28 panel-house keepers were indicted and convicted.\n\n15 owners of the property were indicted and convicted.\n\nThis broke the panel-house keepers' backbone and they never recovered\nto resume business again.\n\n     Emma Ford, sentenced to the penitentiary April 5, 1902,\n     for five years. Pearl Smith, her sister, sentenced to the\n     penitentiary June 19, 1893, for five years. Mary White, May\n     20, 1893, for two years. Flossie Moore, March 27, 1893, for\n     five years. Seventy-five thousand dollars is said to have\n     been stolen by her in eighteen months.\n\n$8,000 bribe was offered Detective Wooldridge to let Flossie Moore\nslip through his fingers.\n\n$3,000 bribe was offered by the same woman for the address of Sadie\nJorden, who was an eye witness of the robbery of E. S. Johnson, a\nretired merchant, aged 74 years.\n\n28 wire tappers were raided and closed. These men secured the\nquotations from the Board of Trade and pool rooms, and hundreds of\nthousands of dollars were secured from the speculators who were\nvictimized; $200,000 lost.\n\n27 dishonest collecting agencies raided and closed; $200,000 lost.\n\n25 swindling brokers raided and closed; $800,000 lost.\n\n23 lotteries raided and closed; $1,700,000 lost.\n\n$100 per month bribe to run his lottery was offered Detective\nWooldridge, April 21, 1900, by J. J. Jacobs, 217 Dearborn street, who\nconducted the Montana Loan & Investment Co. He was arrested and fined\n$1,500 by Judge Chetlain, June 21, 1903.\n\n22 promoters raided and closed; $1,000,000 lost.\n\n22 salted mines and well companies raided and closed; $2,000,000 lost.\n\n20 city lot swindles raided and closed; $1,000,000 lost.\n\n20 spurious medicine concerns raided and closed; $300,000 lost.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n$30,000 worth of poison and bogus medicines seized October 29, 1904,\nas follows:\n\n     $12,000 worth of spurious medicines seized by Detective\n     Wooldridge from Edward Kuehmsted, 6323 Ingleside avenue.\n\n     $5,000 worth of spurious drugs seized from J. S. Dean, 6121\n     Ellis avenue.\n\n     $2,500 worth of spurious drugs seized from Burtis B.\n     McCann, 6113 Madison avenue.\n\n     $500 worth of spurious drugs seized from J. N. Levy, 356\n     Dearborn street.\n\n     $2,000 worth of spurious medicines seized from W. G. Nay,\n     1452 Fulton street.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n17 women arrested for having young girls under age in a house of\nprostitution.\n\n16 fraudulent theater agencies raided and closed; $100,000 lost.\n\n     15 procurists of young girls for houses of ill fame and\n     prostitution arrested and fined.\n\n     $8,000 bribe offered Detective Wooldridge, September 27,\n     1895, by Mary Hastings, who kept a house of prostitution\n     at 128 Custom House place. She went to Toledo, O., and\n     secured six girls under age and brought them in the house\n     of prostitution.\n\n     One of the girls escaped in her night clothes by tying a\n     sheet to the window. There were six in number, as follows:\n\n     Lizzie Lehrman, May Casey, Ida Martin, Gertie Harris,\n     Kittie McCarty and Lizzie Winzel.\n\n     After Mary Hastings was arrested and she found out that she\n     could not bribe Wooldridge she gave bonds and fled. Some\n     months later she was again arrested, and the case dragged\n     along for two years.\n\n     The witnesses were bought up and shipped out of the state.\n     The case was stricken off, with leave to reinstate. It is\n     said it cost her $20,000.\n\n     Four notorious <DW64> women, footpads and highway robbers,\n     arrested by Detective Wooldridge, whose stealings are\n     estimated by the police to have been over $200,000. The\n     following are the names of the women arrested:\n\n5 mushroom banks raided and closed; $500,000 lost.\n\nDetective Wooldridge has been under fire over forty times, and it is\nsaid that he bears a charmed life, and fears nothing. He has met with\nmany hair-breadth escapes in his efforts to apprehend criminals who,\nby means of revolver and other concealed weapons, tried to fight their\nway to liberty.\n\nHe has impersonated almost every kind of character. He has in his\ncrime hunting associated with members of the \"400\" and fraternized\nwith hobos. He has dined with the elite and smoked in the opium dens;\nhe has done everything that one expects a detective of fiction to do,\nand which the real detective seldom does.\n\nWooldridge, the incorruptible! That describes him. The keenest,\nshrewdest, most indefatigable man that ever wore a detective's star,\nthe equal of Lecocq and far the superior of the fictitious Sherlock\nHolmes, the man who has time and again achieved the seemingly\nimpossible with the most tremendous odds against him, the man who\nmight, had such been his desire, be wealthy, be a \"foremost citizen\"\nas tainted money goes, has earned the title given him in these\nheadlines. And if ever any one man earned this title it is Clifton R.\nWooldridge.\n\nIt is refreshing to the citizenship of America, rich and poor alike,\nto contemplate the career of this wonderful man. It fills men with\nrespect for the law, with confidence in the administration of the law,\nto know that there are such men as Wooldridge at the helm of justice.\n\nThe writer of this article has enjoyed intimate personal association\nwith the great detective, both in the capacity of a newspaper\nreporter, magazine writer and anti-graft worker. The ins and outs of\nthe nature of the greatest secret service worker in Chicago, Clifton\nR. Wooldridge, have been to me an open book. And when I call him\nWooldridge, the incorruptible, I know whereof I speak.\n\nI have seen him when all the \"influences\" (and they are the same\n\"influences\" which have been denounced all over the country of late)\nwere brought to bear upon him, when even his own chiefs were inclined\nto be frightened, but no \"influence\" from any source, howsoever high,\nhas ever availed to swerve him one inch from the path of duty.\n\n\nCANNOT BE BRIBED.\n\nHe has been offered bribes innumerable; but in each and every instance\nthe would-be briber has learned a very unpleasant lesson. For this\nman, who might be worth almost anything he wished, is by no means\naffluent. But he has kept his name untarnished and his spirit high\nthrough good fortune and through bad, through evil repute and good.\n\nWooldridge does not know the meaning of a lie. A lie is something so\nforeign to his nature that he has trouble in comprehending how others\ncan see profit in falsifying. It has been his cardinal principle\nthrough life that liars always come to a bad end finally. And he has\nseen his healthy estimate of life vindicated, both in the high circles\nof frenzied finance and in the low levels of sneak-thievery.\n\n\nTREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF WORK DONE.\n\nBut the most remarkable thing to me about Wooldridge is the work he\nhas done. Consider for a moment the record which heads this article.\nCould anything shout forth the tremendous energy of the man in any\nplainer terms? There are men in the same line of work with Wooldridge,\nwho have been in the service for the same length of time, who have not\nmade one arrest where he has made thousands.\n\nTwenty thousand arrests in twenty years of service, a thousand arrests\nevery year, on an average. A thousand get-rich-quick concerns,\nvictimizing more than a million people, raided and put out of\nbusiness; thirteen thousand one hundred convictions; hundreds upon\nhundreds of wine rooms, gambling houses, bucketshops, opium joints,\nhouses of ill fame, turf frauds, bogus charity swindles, policy\nshops, matrimonial agencies, fraudulent guarantee companies, spurious\nmedicine concerns, thieving theater agencies and mushroom banks\nbrought to the bar of justice and made to expiate their crimes.\n\nThat is the record of the almost inconceivable work done by Clifton\nR. Wooldridge on the Chicago police force. The figures are almost\nappalling in their greatness. It is hard for the mind to comprehend\nhow any one man could have achieved all this vast amount of labor,\neven if he worked twenty-four hours a day all the time. And yet it is\nthe bare record of the \"big\" work done by Wooldridge, aside from his\nroutine.\n\n\nLIFE HISTORY OF WOOLDRIDGE.\n\nDetective Wooldridge from March, 1898, until April 5, 1907, was\nattached to the office of the General Superintendent of Police and\nworked out of his office. During that time over 1,200 letters and\ncomplaints were referred to him for investigation and action.\n\nApril 5, 1907, Detective Wooldridge was relieved of this work and\ntransferred, and crusade and extermination of the get-rich-quick\nconcerns ceased.\n\nSeptember 20, 1889, Detective Wooldridge was placed in charge of\ntwenty-five picked detectives, who were placed in charge of the\nsuppression of hand-books and other gambling in Chicago. He remained\nin charge of this detail for three years.\n\nOn December 13, 1890, at the residence of Charles Partdridge, Michigan\navenue and Thirty-second street, while three desperate burglars were\ntrying to effect an entrance into the house, Detective Wooldridge\nespied them and in his attempt to arrest them was fired upon by the\ntrio. One shot passed through his cap, clipping off a lock of his hair\nand grazing his scalp. The next shot struck him squarely in the buckle\nof his belt, which saved his life.\n\n\nNUMBERLESS HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPES.\n\nAugust 20, 1891, he met with another narrow escape at Thirtieth and\nDearborn streets, while attempting to arrest Nathan Judd, a crazed and\ndesperate <DW52> man. Judd threw a brick at him, striking him over\nhis left temple, and inflicting a wound two inches long.\n\nJudd was shot through the thigh, and afterwards was sent to the house\nof correction for one year.\n\nDetective Wooldridge, alone in a drenching rainstorm at 4 o'clock on\nthe morning of June 23, 1892, at Michigan avenue and Madison street,\nintercepted three horsethieves and hold-up men in a buggy trying to\nmake their escape.\n\nAt the point of a revolver he commanded them to halt. As they\napproached him no attention was paid to him, or to what he was saying.\nSeizing the bridle of the horse, he was dragged nearly a block before\nthe horse was checked. A twenty-pound horse weight was hurled at him\nby one of the robbers, which just missed his head. Another one of the\nrobbers leaped upon the horse and rained blow after blow upon his head\nwith the buggy whip.\n\nDetective Wooldridge shot this man in the leg; he jumped off the horse\nand made good his escape while Wooldridge was engaged in a desperate\nhand to hand encounter with the other two robbers. Wooldridge knocked\nboth senseless with the butt of his revolver. They were taken to the\npolice station and gave their names as John Crosby and John McGinis.\nBoth were found guilty a month later and sent to the penitentiary by\nJudge Baker.\n\n\nSAVES WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN FIRE.\n\nMarch 4, 1892, Detective Wooldridge by his prompt and courageous\nactions, and the immediate risk of his own life, succeeded in rescuing\nfrom the Waverly Hotel (which was on fire), at 262 and 264 S. Clark\nstreet, two ladies who were overcome by smoke on the second floor of\nthe burning building: also a lady and two children, aged two years and\nfive months, respectively, from the fourth floor.\n\nThis act was performed by tying a silk handkerchief around his mouth,\nand on his hands and knees crawling up the winding stairs to the\nfourth floor, where he found Mrs. E. C. Dwyer unconscious. Placing\nthe two children in a bed quilt, he threw it over his shoulder, and\nseizing Mrs. E. C. Dwyer by the hand, dragged her down the stairs to a\nplace of safety, where medical assistance was called.\n\nSept. 21, 1902, Detective Wooldridge was placed in charge of the\nGet-Rich-Quick concerns with which Chicago was infested. He also\nhad charge of the suppression of gambling at parks and other places\nof amusement, the inspection and supervision of picture exhibitions\nin penny arcades and museums, and the inspection and supervision of\nillustrated postal cards sold throughout the city for the purpose of\npreventing the exhibition, sale and circulation of vulgar and obscene\npictures, the work of gathering evidence against and the suppression\nof dealers in \"sure thing\" gambling devices, viz., loaded dice, marked\ncards, roulette wheels, spindle faro layouts, card hold-outs, nickel\nslot machines and many other devices.\n\nOct. 25, 1893, Detective Wooldridge had a narrow escape while trying\nto arrest Charles Sales, a desperate <DW52> man, for committing a\nrobbery at State and Harrison streets. Sales whipped out his gun\nand fired four shots at Wooldridge at short range; two of the shots\npassing harmlessly through his coat. Sales was arrested and given one\nyear in the house of correction.\n\n\nRIDES TO STATION ON PRISONER'S BACK.\n\nJune 6, 1894, Detective Wooldridge arrested Eugene Buchanan for\ncommitting a highway robbery at Polk and Clark streets. A few days\nprior he had held up and robbed Philip Schneider and kicked out one\nof his eyes. Buchanan was met in the alley between Clark street and\nPacific avenue, where he resisted arrest and fought like a demon,\nusing his hands, club and head. In the scuffle he ran his head between\nWooldridge's legs and tried to throw him, but Wooldridge was to quick\nfor him and fastened his legs around Buchanan's neck like a clam.\nBuchanan could not free himself. Wooldridge pulled his gun and placing\nit in the ear of Buchanan compelled him to carry him to the Harrison\nstreet police station on his shoulder. It was one of the most novel\nsights ever witnessed, and will be long remembered by those who saw it.\n\nBuchanan was convicted and sent to the penitentiary for three years.\nUpon his release he applied to Wooldridge to assist him in securing\na position. Wooldridge took him to his home, fed him and secured\nemployment for him with Nelson Morris & Co., where he remained three\nyears. He afterwards committed a highway robbery in Washington Park\nand is now serving an indefinite term in the penitentiary.\n\n\nHANGS ON WINDOW SILL.\n\nMay 16, 1895, Detective Wooldridge, accompanied by Officers Kern,\nO'Connor and Cameron, located Matt Kelly at 411 State street, who was\nwanted for a criminal assault. Kelly was a hold-up man, ex-convict\nand a notorious safe-blower, who several years prior to this shot two\nofficers in St. Louis, Mo. Kelly was found behind locked doors on the\nsecond-floor and refused to open the doors. Detective Wooldridge went\nto the adjoining flat, opened a window and crawled along the ledge\nuntil he had reached Kelly's room; with a revolver in his mouth he\npushed up the sash and was faced by Kelly and his wife.\n\n\"Go back or I'll kill you,\" said Kelly as he pushed his revolver in\nWooldridge's face.\n\nWooldridge had meanwhile secured a good hold on the sill of the\nwindow, but was not in a position to defend himself. The Kelly woman\ntried her best to shove him off; she succeeded in loosening one of\nhis hands, and for an instant Detective Wooldridge thought he would\nhave to fall. With an almost superhuman effort Wooldridge broke in the\nwindow and covering Kelly with his own revolver ordered him to throw\nup his hands, which he did. He was taken to the police station and\nheavily fined.\n\n\nA PLOT TO KILL DETECTIVE WOOLDRIDGE.\n\nA dozen of the highwaymen and robbers on whom Wooldridge was waging a\nrelentless warfare gathered together on the morning of July 4, 1895,\nand formed a plot to kill Wooldridge and get him out of the way.\nThey concluded that the night of July 4, when everyone was firing\noff revolvers and celebrating, would afford the best opportunity.\nThey imagined it would be an easy thing to shoot him from one of the\nwindows or from a housetop while he was on duty patrolling his post,\nand no one would know where the shot came from, as there was shooting\nfrom every direction.\n\nAn oath of secrecy was taken by all present, and lots drawn to see\nwho was to do the deed. In all probability their plan would have been\ncarried out had it not been for a <DW52> woman, who was watching them\nand heard the whole plot, and who went with the information to the\nHarrison Street Police Station.\n\nCaptain Koch and Lieutenant Laughlin were notified and upon\ninvestigation found the report to be true. They took immediate steps\nto protect Wooldridge by placing three additional officers in full\nuniform with him, and also placing six men in citizen's clothes on his\npost. Every man they met was searched for a gun; every crook, vagrant\nand thief that they could lay their hands on was placed under lock\nand key in the station, and by 11 o'clock that night there was no\nsquare in the city quieter than the one this officer patrolled, and\nin two weeks' time \"<DW53> Hollow\" and the whole neighborhood for half\na mile in every direction had undergone the most remarkable change\nknown to police history, and this change was apparent for a long time\nthereafter.\n\nFebruary 11, 1896, Detective Wooldridge, while trying to arrest a\npanel-house keeper and three  hold-up men at 412 Dearborn\nstreet, was fired upon by one of the trio, Kid White, the shot\nstriking the bar of his watch chain, which was attached to the lower\nbutton of his vest. When the bar was struck the bullet was diverted\nfrom entering Wooldridge's stomach, and it glanced off and passed\nthrough his overcoat.\n\n\nDETECTIVE WOOLDRIDGE ROUGHLY HANDLED.\n\nIn 1896 Wooldridge's fiercest fight came when he arrested George\nKinnucan in his saloon at 435 Clark street. A dozen roughs, henchmen\nof Kinnucan, who were in the saloon at the time, came to the\nsaloonkeeper's rescue. The officer was knocked down, his billy taken\nfrom him and himself beaten unconscious with it, and his face and\nhead kicked into one mass of bruises. Through it all he managed to\nhang on to his revolver. This alone saved him. He finally managed to\nshoot Kinnucan through the hand and forearm, and a moment later a\nuniformed man burst in and evened up the battle. Six of the toughs\nwere arrested, and Wooldridge was left alone by them for a long time.\n\n\nFINE WORK IN A THIEVES' RESORT.\n\nIn the same year of 1896, Detective Wooldridge, disguising himself\nas a cheap thief, entered a Clark street criminals' resort and\nfraternized with thieves, murderers and vagabonds of all kinds, in\norder to obtain information, leading Wooldridge into the most amazing\nschool of crime ever witnessed by a Chicago police officer. He was\naccepted in good faith as a proper sneak thief by the brotherhood,\nand for his benefit the \"manager\" of the den put his \"pupils\" through\ntheir \"lessons.\"\n\nThese lessons were in shoplifting, pocket picking, purse snatching\nand other forms of larceny requiring skill and deftness. When he had\nseen enough Wooldridge generously volunteered to \"rush the growler\"\nand went out--and called the patrol wagon. Twenty-three crooks were\narrested this time. Each one of them swore he would have killed the\ndetective had his makeup or conduct for an instant directed suspicion\ntoward him.\n\n\nMAKES HIGH DIVE.\n\nNovember 20, 1896, Detective Wooldridge made a high dive.\n\nTo offset his aerial stunt he took a high dive from the top of a\nbuilding, landing on his head in a pile of refuse with such force as\nto go \"in over his head\" and stick there so tightly that it required\nthe combined strength of two officers to pull him out by the legs.\n\nIt was near Twelfth and State streets while pursuing two women across\na roof that his remarkable stunt took place. The women jumped from\nthe roof into a pile of refuse. They landed on their feet. Wooldridge\ncame after them. He landed on his head. As he landed he grasped a\nwoman with either hand, and held them until the arrival of his brother\nofficers effected his release and their capture.\n\nBut these are only humorous incidents, things to laugh over when the\nday's work is done. In the parlance of the detectives, they belong to\n\"straight police work.\" As a direct antithesis to them is the story\nof the murder and the black cat, which is in real life a weirder and\nmore startling affair than Poe's fantastic tale of the same subject. A\nblack cat helped solve a murder in a way which puts a distinct strain\non the credulity of the uninitiated.\n\n\nSTORY RIVALS POE'S \"BLACK CAT.\"\n\nA rich man had been murdered in a certain part of the city. He was in\nhis library at the time of the crime. His family was in an adjoining\nroom, yet none of them heard any noise, or knew what had been done\nuntil they found him lifeless on the floor. Investigation proved that\nhe had been shot, but not with an ordinary weapon. The missile in\nhis heart was a combination of bullet and dart, evidently propelled\nfrom a powerful air rifle or spring gun. But no clew was left by\nthe perpetrator of the crime, and Wooldridge carried the strange\nmissile in his pocket for several months before a single prospect of\napprehending the murderer appeared. Then it was the black cat that did\nit. What strange coincidence or freak of fate it was that impelled\nthe cat to literally lead the detective to a little pile of dirt in\nan alley that night Wooldridge never has attempted to explain. But\nlead him it did, and when he dug into the disturbed ground he found\nsomething entirely new in the gun line, the weapon that had discharged\nthe fatal bullet in his pocket. Eventually he traced the gun to its\ninventor, and from there to the man who had purchased it, a young\nfellow named Johnson, and a supposed friend of the murdered man's\nfamily. The consequence was that this man proved to be the murderer.\nWhen arrested he at first denied his guilt, broke down under the\nsweatbox ordeal and confessed, and--killed himself in his cell next\nmorning.\n\nFor mystery and good fortune in bringing an apparently untraceable\ncriminal to justice this incident perhaps has never been equaled in\nChicago's police records.\n\n\nON DUTY IN GREAT STRIKE.\n\nIn 1900 Chicago's great building trade strike occurred in which\n60,000 men were thrown out of employment. Many acts of violence were\ncommitted. Several men were killed and many maimed and injured.\n\nDetective Wooldridge was placed in charge of thirty picked detectives\nfrom the detective bureau with orders to suppress these lawless\nacts and arrest the guilty offenders. Through his vigilance and\nuntiring efforts law and order were soon restored, and he was highly\ncomplimented by Chief of Police Joseph Kipley and the public press.\n\nLiterally speaking, the darkest situation into which his experiences\nhave led him was the tunnel by which inmates of Mattie Lee's famous\nresort at 150 Custom House place escaped when the place was raided.\nMattie had decided that it was a nuisance to go to the station every\ntime the police wanted to arrest her, so she had the tunnel dug.\n\nAfter that when the police called on her Mattie greeted them with\nan empty house and a sweet smile, while underground the inmates\nwere crawling on their hands and knees to safety. Wooldridge found\nthe tunnel and, crawling in, \"snaked out\" six <DW52> men and women\nwhom he found in the darkness. Versatility is a requisite with the\nsuccessful detective.\n\n\nREMARKABLE WORK AS A RAGPICKER.\n\nMay 28, 1905, perhaps, his appearance in the role of a ragpicker,\nwhich led to the arrest and conviction of two <DW64> highwaymen,\nHenry Reed and Ed Lane, was his most daring and successful effort at\ndisguise. Lane is at present serving a life sentence in Joliet for the\nmurder of Robert Metcalfe.\n\nThe assault and robbery of a contractor named Anderson was the\noccasion for Wooldridge's assumption of the guise of ragpicker.\nAnderson had described Lane so accurately that the detective was sure\nof recognizing him once he put his eyes upon him, but in those days\na detective to go into the black belt looking for a criminal was to\nspread a wide alarm over the whole district. Consequently he \"made\nup.\" A pair of large, worn overalls, a coat three sizes too large, a\nbunch of papers between his shoulder blades to give him a hunch back,\nburnt cork, a curly wig, a bag and a piece of telegraph wire, and the\nerstwhile shrewd-looking detective was in ten minutes the typical\n<DW64> ragpicker who shambles up and down alleys on the south side in\nhope of picking up enough for his day's bread.\n\nWhile thus pursuing his way Wooldridge not only discovered the\npresence of Reed and Lane, but actually worked through the refuse\nin a garbage box upon which Lane was sitting quarreling with some\nconfederates over the division of the previous night's spoils. He\neven went so far as to pick up an old coat which Lane had discarded.\nThereupon Lane ordered him to get out of the alley or get his throat\ncut from ear to ear. Wooldridge went humbly out, and waited.\n\n\nHERO OF SOME FIERCE FIGHTS.\n\nPresently Lane and Reed appeared and went south on State street.\nWooldridge followed, and at an opportune moment seized them both from\nbehind. The fight that followed is historic. Only sheer luck and the\nthreat to kill both antagonists on the spot if they did not cease\nresistance saved the detective's life. After knocking both men down\nwith his billy he succeeded in holding them until a fellow officer\ncame to his rescue. They were arrested and convicted June 25, 1905,\nand sent to the penitentiary for three years.\n\nMay 19, 1906, Detective Wooldridge raided the following places: H. C.\nEvins, 125 S. Clark street; George Deshone, 64 N. Clark street; E.\nManning Stockton, Bar & Co., 56 Fifth avenue, seizing some $30,000\nworth of gambling paraphernalia.\n\nDisclosures of conditions which so seriously threatened the discipline\nof the United States army and navy that the secretaries of the two\ndepartments and even President Roosevelt himself were called upon to\naid in their suppression.\n\nIt was charged that a coterie of Chicago men engaged in making and\nselling these devices had formed a \"trust\" and had for years robbed,\nswindled and corrupted the enlisted men of the army and navy through\nloaded dice, \"hold-outs,\" magnetized roulette wheels and other crooked\ngambling apparatus.\n\n\nCROOKED GAMBLING TRUST.\n\nThe \"crooked\" gambling \"trust\" in Chicago spread over the civilized\nworld, had its clutches on nearly every United States battleship, army\npost and military prison; caused wholesale desertions, and in general\ncorrupted the entire defensive institution of the nation.\n\n\nTRY TO CORRUPT SCHOOLBOYS.\n\nBesides the corruption of the army, these companies are said to have\naimed a blow at the foundation of the nation by offering, through a\nmail order plan, for six cents, loaded dice to schoolboys, provided\nthey sent the names of likely gamblers among their playmates.\n\nThis plan had not reached its full growth when nipped. But the\ndisruption of the army and navy had been under way for several years\nand had reached such gigantic proportions that the military service\nwas in danger of complete disorganization.\n\nThousands of men were mulcted of their pay monthly. Desertions\nfollowed these wholesale robberies. The war department could not find\nthe specific trouble. Post commanders and battleship commanders were\ninstructed to investigate.\n\nThe army investigation, confirmed after the raid and arrests, showed\nthat the whole army had been honeycombed with corruption by these\ncompanies. Express books and registered mail return cards showed that\nmost of the goods were sold to soldiers and sailors.\n\n\nDETECTIVE WOOLDRIDGE SECURES EVIDENCE IN NOVEL WAY.\n\nIn August, 1890, complaints had been made at the Stanton Avenue Police\nStation for several weeks concerning the establishment of a disorderly\nhouse at 306 Thirty-first street, but try as they would uniformed\nofficers were helpless so far as securing evidence enough to convict\nwas concerned. Wooldridge at that time a uniformed man, was put in\nplain clothes and detailed on the case. One of the great stumbling\nblocks in the way of the police had been the high basement under the\nhouse, which made it impossible for any one to look in the windows of\nthe flat without the aid of the ladder. As the presence of a ladder\nwould arouse suspicion, the problem of viewing the inside of the flat\nwas a difficult one.\n\nOne thing the other men on the case had overlooked. This was the\npresence of a beam jutting out from the top of the building to which\na rope, pulley, and barrel were attached, used as a means of lowering\ngarbage and ashes from the second floor to the alley. Wooldridge saw\nthe possibilities of the rope and barrel trick. Attaching to the rope\na vinegar barrel with holes bored in it at convenient intervals, he\nawaited an opportune time, curled up in the barrel, and had himself\ndrawn up to the level of the windows by two officers. The lowering and\nraising of the barrel being a customary thing in the building, excited\nno suspicion in the minds of those in the flat, and Wooldridge, with\nhis sleuth's eye at one of the holes, saw what served to drive the\nplace out of existence and secure the conviction of its keeper.\n\n\nACTS AS VENDOR OF FIGHTING \"CHICKENS.\"\n\nOne of the last exploits of Detective Wooldridge before his\ncompletion of the twenty years of service, was the breaking up of the\ncock-fighting mains, which infested Chicago during the latter part of\n1906 and the early part of 1907.\n\nThe story savors of the burlesque. Wooldridge obtained information as\nto the whereabouts of a cock-fight which was to be pulled off. Then he\nsought out and purchased a pair of decrepit old roosters, that would\nnot fight an English sparrow, bundled them into a sack and started for\nscene of action. Arrived in what he knew to be the neighborhood of the\nfight, he declared that he had been sent to deliver some \"fightin'\nchickuns.\" He was directed to an old, abandoned building. Here he was\nadmitted and left the antique roosters. Then he said he was going for\nmore birds. Instead he went for a patrol wagon. And that was the end\nof the chicken fight.\n\nThe trapping of the Wildcat Insurance companies furnishes one of the\nmost dramatic chapters in the financial history of the United States,\nif not in the world. It involves millions of stolen dollars, brutal\nfilching from the poor, heartless commercial brigandage and finally\nthe running to earth and conviction of the ringleaders and promoters\nof the \"WILDCAT INSURANCE COMPANIES\" OF CHICAGO, by Detective\nWooldridge.\n\nThe police and postal authorities worked together. Two thousand eight\nhundred letters were sent out asking for information and gathering\nevidence.\n\nAt the trial of Dr. S. W. Jacobs, on one of these cases, there were\n200 witnesses present. Five of these witnesses were victims, and\nlived in tents. Three were living in wagons: One, Samuel James, of\nWestfield, Illinois, a carpenter, 64 years of age, had a wife and six\nchildren. He had built his house morning and evening.\n\n\nBRIBERY TACTICS OF NO AVAIL.\n\nJames accomplished the end of his heart's desire. It cost him $900 and\nhis health, for he was in the clutches of consumption when the cottage\nwas finally paid for. Fearing lest the fruit of his life-work should\nbe swept away by fire, James took out an insurance policy in one of\nDr. S. W. Jacobs' Wildcat Insurance companies. The house burned down\nand he was not indemnified. With his wife and six little children\nJames was forced to take shelter in a chicken coop, where they were\nliving when the broken-hearted father came to Chicago as a witness\nagainst Dr. S. W. Jacobs.\n\nTwenty-five thousand dollars was tendered to an attorney to bribe\nWooldridge in the case.\n\nThe breaking up of the drug ring, however, was a delicate task.\nIt was strongly backed financially, and it was aided and abetted\nthroughout the United States by political rings galore. Chicago was\nthe headquarters.\n\nA ten thousand dollar bribe was offered Detective Wooldridge, October\n29, 1904, by the spurious medicine concerns to return their goods and\nstop the prosecution; this failed. Then false and malicious charges\nwere filed with the Civil Service Commissioners against Wooldridge,\nwhich was taken up and the trial lasted nineteen sessions.\n\nDetective Wooldridge was exonerated by the entire board of\ncommissioners, and complimented by the press and public-spirited\ncitizens.\n\nDetective Wooldridge secured four indictments against the above four\nmen, which was returned by the Cook county grand jury May 25, 1905. J.\nS. Dean turned state's evidence and assisted the prosecution.\n\nJ. H. Carson promoted and run eighteen different matrimonial agencies.\nHe was arrested eighteen times. He offered Wooldridge a bribe of $100\nper month not to arrest him. This failed and he brought suit in the\nSuperior Court against Wooldridge for $5,000 damages, thinking this\nwould stop him. The next day after filing the suit he was arrested\nagain, and was finally driven out of Chicago.\n\nFrom $10,000 to $20,000 has been offered at a time for his discharge\nor transfer by these get-rich-quick concerns. Every political pressure\nwas brought to bear, but to no avail.\n\nEx-Chief of Police Francis O'Neill, in his annual report of 1905,\nstates that Detective Wooldridge accomplished more work in breaking\nup the get-rich-quick concerns in Chicago, in the year 1904, than the\nwhole Chicago police department had in its lifetime. He did equally as\nmuch work, if not more, in the years of 1905, 1906 and 1907.\n\nThe day is never too long nor the night too dark for Detective\nWooldridge to find time to succor or save a young girl who has gone\nwrong or strayed from the path of rectitude.\n\nDetective Wooldridge, without fear or favor, for many years\ninaugurated crusades and waged wars against the hosts of criminal\nenterprise. Whenever a man or concern could not show a \"clear bill\nof health\" he forced him to \"disinfect, depart, or submit to the\nquarantine of the county jail.\"\n\nBy vigilance and hard work he succeeded in obtaining good results.\nUnits, scores, and legions of fraudulent concerns have been exposed\nand driven out of existence. Owners of others, anticipating exposure,\ndid not wait, but closed their places and fled. Many headquarters of\ncontraband schemes have been raided and their promoters arrested,\nfined, and forced to cease operations. During that time retributive\njustice has been visited upon countless heads that were devoted to\ndevising criminal schemes.\n\nDetective Wooldridge permits no creed, color, religion or politics to\ninterfere with him in his sworn duty. He wants and exacts the truth,\nand a square deal for himself, and accords the same to his fellow men.\nHe has never been known to wilfully persecute any man or to lie or\nstrain a point to convict him, neither will he suffer the same to be\ndone by any man if he can prevent it.\n\nWooldridge's motto is equal justice to all--be sure you are right,\nthen go ahead.\n\n          JAMES P. WILSON.\n\n[Illustration: What Are YOU Going to Do About It?]\n\n\n\n\nGRAFT NATION'S WORST FOE.\n\nTHE REIGN OF GRAFT.\n\nRecent Exposures That Show How Strongly It Is Intrenched.\n\nARE YOU A GRAFTER?\n\nThose Shocked at Exposures May Not Be Clean Themselves.\n\n\n\"A 'grafter' is one who makes his living (and sometimes his fortune)\nby 'grafting.' He may be a political boss, a mayor, a chief of police,\na warden of a penitentiary, a municipal contractor, a member of a town\ncouncil, a representative in the legislature, a judge in the courts,\nand the upper world may know him only in his political capacity; but\nif the under world has had occasion to approach him for purposes\nof 'graft' and found him corrupt, he is immediately classified as\nan 'unmugged grafter'--one whose photograph is not in the rogues'\ngallery, but ought to be. The professional thief is the 'mugged\ngrafter'; his photograph and Bertillon measurements are known and\nrecorded.\n\nThe world of graft is whereever known and unknown thieves or\nbribetakers congregate. In the United States it is found mainly in\nthe large cities, but its boundaries take in small county seats\nand even villages. A correct map of it is impossible, because in a\ngreat many places it is represented by an unknown rather than by\na known inhabitant, by a dishonest official or an unscrupulous and\nwary politician rather than a confessed thief, and the geographer\nis helpless until he can collect the facts, which may never come to\nlight. The most that one man can do is to make voyages of discovery,\nfind out what he can and report upon his experiences to the general\npublic.\n\nWithin the last year or two it has become practically a synonym for a\nthief who filches public money and money of large enterprises. It has\nbeen so largely used in the public prints and periodicals, and more\nrecently in books, that it has spread abroad; and London and Paris\nand Berlin, in referring to many American disclosures, adopt the word\nwithout any translation. So today no American word is better known\neither in this country or in Europe.\n\nWhen men in office take a bribe and give away what does not belong to\nthem, it is more than the double crime of extorting and stealing; it\nis treason. Graft is the worst form of despotism. It is a usurpation\nof government by the forces of crime. There have been many virtuous\nkings and honest feudal lords, but the despotism of graft never\nfounded its rule upon a semblance of the moral law.\n\nGraft in its highest personification is the king of the American\nnation in political, commercial and social life.\n\n\nGRAFT IS OVERLORD.\n\nOverlord of 80,000,000 people in the greatest republic of history,\ncommanding his tens of millions of dollars annually as tribute to\ngraft in a million of his impersonations--was Solomon in all his glory\nto be compared with this?\n\nNine states in the union of forty-five states recently have declared\nthat graft exposures have not been in their categories of political\npublicity for a year. They are Maine, North Carolina, Mississippi,\nIowa, Michigan, Colorado, New York, Illinois and California. But who\nshall say what another six months may bring forth?\n\n[Illustration: 30 CENTURIES OF GRAFT LOOKS DOWN UPON ITS HEADLESS\nVICTIMS]\n\nIn industrial, commercial and social life of the American people\nthere is not a state in which King Graft has not his court and his\nfollowing. In the capital of capitals at Washington for generations\nthe powers of government as dreamed of for the republic have been\nsuperseded by King Graft time after time, and the impeachment of his\nprinces, grand dukes and courtiers generally have not threatened his\nreign in future generations.\n\n\nSCORES OF PROUD NAMES SMIRCHED.\n\nWithin the last few years names that have stood honored for a\ngeneration in financial, political and social life have been dragged\ndown from high places perhaps as never before in America. The court of\nKing Graft has been attacked and threatened as never before, and with\ngreater showing. There is war in the open against this pretender king,\nand his legions everywhere are retiring behind their breastworks,\nbroken but not defeated.\n\nGraft in its nakedness, has been exposed and the people are aroused,\nfearing that the grafter has sucked the life blood of the republic.\n\nWhat they have seen is but a glimpse of real conditions--the ulcer\nspots where the rottenness beneath has broken through--but they have\nseen enough to realize the peril and attack it. While the conditions\nrevealed are astounding and alarming, they are signs of improvement.\n\nThe nation is better than it was a decade ago, since tens of thousands\nof grafters have been stamped out, since the leaders of the greatest\ngrafts of the land have been exposed to the withering light of\ncontempt of all decent Americans.\n\n\nLIFE OF NATION IMPERILED.\n\nAlso, born of the conditions, there has arisen a little army of\nleaders willing to engage the enemy and lead the people against the\ngrafters. They have been raised up to meet the crisis of the nation's\nlife, and with every blow they strike new recruits are joining them in\nthe war against graft.\n\nThey are still weak, and King Graft and his votaries are still\nstrong, but during the last year the leaders have won some remarkable\nskirmishes and routed the grafters.\n\n[Illustration: WHICH ROAD SHALL HE TAKE?\n\nA GRAFTER IN EVERY ROAD.\n\nThe Public stands at the crossing of the roads, wondering which way he\nshall go with his money. Wherever he turns he sees a grafter in the\nroad before him. The labels on these seven grafters give the names of\na few of those that beset every honest man's pathway. The grafters\nspend twenty million dollars a year advertising; and they swindle the\npeople out of one hundred and sixty million dollars annually.]\n\n\nNATION, STATES AND CITIES AROUSED.\n\nSenators and congressmen at the national capital have been impeached,\nand indicted, and tried, and convicted of grafting.\n\nBureau officials, as in the cotton scandal, the postoffice frauds,\nand other of the departments, and civil service exposes have been\narraigned by their own democracy for traitor intrigues with King\nGraft, and have been beheaded.\n\nState senators, representatives, treasurers and the innumerable \"small\nfry\" of official life, together with the millionaire briber and his\nhenchmen at state capitals, have been uncovered and convicted of\ndebauching democracy in behalf of a pretender sovereign.\n\nGreat cities have been shaken with the inquisitorial rounds of\ninvestigations. Philadelphia of Independence memories has been\nweighed in the balance and found wanting; in St. Louis the prosecutor\ngovernor, Folk, has stirred corruption to the depths; New York\nhas been moved as it has not been since the overthrow of Tammany;\nMinneapolis has been cleansed; and the spectacular \"graft hunt\" in\nMilwaukee has been a lesson in \"how to do it.\" Perhaps never before\nin the history of America have so many grafters been scattered to the\nwinds, in hiding or locked behind the bars of prisons.\n\n\nPRESIDENT LEADS FOES OF GRAFT.\n\nBut King Graft wears the crown of the pretender still, and there are\nfew of his fighting enemies who are disposed to rest upon their arms\nin either truce or armistice.\n\nThe war against graft is led by the president of the United States,\nwho stands as the foremost foe of grafting--political, financial or\nsocial--in the world, and behind him is a phalanx led by Folk, Jerome,\nRiis, Lawson, Hadley, Miss Tarbell, Deneen, Monnett and others of\ntheir type, fighting the nation's most crucial battle.\n\nThe grafters have declared that the objects of some of these men were\nselfish, but, no matter for what object they fight, they are routing\nthe grafters in many fields and showing to the awakening public the\nperil of the situation; revealing to a commonwealth the worms gnawing\nat the vitals of the republic.\n\n\nFORCES OF GRAFT HARD PRESSED.\n\nNever were the forces of money and commercial and industrial power so\nbewildered and so uncertain of the way to turn as they are now. Graft,\nto their best interests, is still covertly a necessity to them, but\ncovert graft never was so hard to keep covert, now that briber and\nthe bribed are the common quarry of the law. The time was when the\nrich man who bought political power to his uses was unnamed, standing\napart. The grafter legislator was the cause and the consequence.\nBeginning and ending with the corrupt official whose official place\nwas grafted upon corruption, the official became immune from the\nconsequences.\n\n\"Grafting in this state never has cost the taxpayer a dollar,\" was one\nof the slogans of a machine government in its attempts to perpetuate\nthat machine for the purposes of King Graft and his court.\n\nBut this false philosophy slowly was undermined. Not only was it found\nthat graft did cost money to the state, but it became a certainty that\nit was costing something even more valuable than money. Graft became\nthe one object of the political seeker after office. The impersonal\ngraft-giver was a hanger-on at lawmaking centers, and the political\ngraft-seeker was insisting upon election or appointment to the\nmachine positions.\n\n\nHIDEOUS PERIL IS REVEALED.\n\nThe result, first, was a campaign upon the man who had the graft\nto dispense. He was sought out, and was found in high places. His\nlobbyists were more easily marked than was the principal. So the law\nand the law's executive began also to campaign against the lobbyists.\nSuddenly the \"good fellow\" at a state capitol who had with him the\nperquisites of good fellowship in graft measure found himself facing\nthe interrogation:\n\n\"What are you doing here?\"\n\nThe scope of the query has grown, and it is still growing, in some\nquarters even to the point of requiring the man who is elected to\noffice to render the cost figure of his successful campaign. All\nover the country, and touching nearly every relation in official,\ncommercial and financial life, men have been put on the griddle of\npublicity by courts and commissions, and with backs to the wall have\nbeen sitting in the witness chair, holding to the one surly response\nto an irritating, penetrating cross-examination: \"Decline to answer on\nadvice of counsel.\"\n\nBut for all purposes of publicity have not these refusals to answer\ncarried light enough?\n\n\"The public be d----d!\" was the original first utterance of the\nmillionaire, designed to stop interrogations which would not down.\n\n\"What are you going to do about it?\" was the counter question of the\npolitical grafter who once was charged with grafting.\n\n\"Where did he get it?\" came to be a question of the politician\nfor political purposes, and within a year the country has heard\nnon-political bodies asking the same question of the millionaire\nphilanthropist who has been trying to give it away. Under the\ngrowing interrogations of the time, names have been thrown from\npedestals within a year as names never before were juggled by the\nfates.\n\n[Illustration: THE CAVE OF DESPAIR.]\n\n\nIDOLS COVERED WITH SLIME.\n\nDepew, once a candidate for nomination for the presidency, a United\nStates senator still by some grace of toleration, and at one time\nreferred to in European royal circles as a \"representative American\ncitizen.\"\n\nUnited States Senator Mitchell became a derelict, politically and\nsocially.\n\nUnited States Senator Thomas C. Platt was wrecked in the wreckage.\n\nUnited States Senator Burton became blackened in the charges of graft.\n\nDepew is a name no longer to conjure with.\n\nThen followed a long list of the commercially and financially\nprominent civilians, blackened, and with such blackness as never to be\nwhite again by any of the old processes which once sufficed.\n\nGraft is still king. But, truer than of any other monarch, it may be\nrepeated: \"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.\"\n\n\nTHE UNCONSCIOUS GRAFTER.\n\nIt was a rhetorical and sensational sentence in which a recent speaker\nin this city declared that the worst grafter is the man who does not\nvote. But there is much more than a kernel of truth in the words. The\ncitizens of a republic need constant stimulus to the fulfillment of\nthe plainest duties of life. The better the working of the machinery\nof government, the less the average man is affected. He rarely feels\nthe pressure of taxation. He lives in a generation from which no\nmilitary service is demanded. He is permitted freedom of thought,\nspeech and religion, and almost insensibly, as a result, he loses\nsight of the supreme obligation which is due his country. He forgets\nthat that country, in time of public stress, may demand his time, his\nproperty and his life, drafting him for its armies if he does not wish\nto volunteer, governing him under martial law, which sets aside the\nusual privileges accorded him, and exercising over him, if need be, a\ntyranny ordinarily associated with despotism among the older peoples.\n\nThe very fact that the American citizen does not often feel the\nexercise of the sovereign power, and is not called upon to pay the\nsupreme obligation of service, makes him careless of his civic duties,\nwhen, it might be thought, he would feel the utmost gratitude for the\nprivilege of living under such favoring conditions. This carelessness\nbecomes chronic, and there is abundant need for the constant\nreiteration of the call to duty. If, then, a citizen is content to\nenjoy the comforts and the quiet of American life without rendering\nany return therefor, he may justly be called a grafter, and a grafter\nof that worst sort, who robs his benefactor. For, with duty faithfully\nperformed by the citizen, public opinion is readily shaped, laws\nquickly secure enforcement, and public servants are kept clean and\ntrue. It all comes back at last to the individual citizen, upon whom\nmust rest the responsibility for failure or success of government. It\nis easy enough to cry out against the grafter in official position who\nputs his hand into the public treasury. Perhaps, after all, the worst\noffender is the citizen who does not vote, who does not take a lively\ninterest in the selection and election of his rulers, who fails to\nrecognize the underlying obligation of service which his country has a\njust right to demand of him.\n\n\nWAR ON GRAFT JUST BEGINNING.\n\nBut, thus far, only the beginning of the truth has been shown. There\nremains the senate of the United States, the railway companies, the\nStandard Oil Company, the great trusts, the multimillionaires, to be\ninvestigated. All of them now are in the limelight. The courts of\nlaw are under suspicion and must clear themselves by their acts, for\nundoubtedly the revelations of the last year have shaken the faith of\nthe people in their judges.\n\nAfter these, the huge powers of the land, cleansed states, counties\nand cities must join the Augean stable-cleaning, for graft is\neverywhere. The fight against graft is only beginning, and it will end\nonly when a new generation learns that honor is above money, and that\n\"grafting\" is the most disreputable form of theft.\n\n\nWHOLESALE SWINDLING GRAFTERS.\n\nA chain of stores in various cities for no other purpose than the\nobtaining of goods under false pretenses from wholesale merchants is\nthe latest novelty in the swindling line. It has often been remarked\nthat the originators of plans to dupe the public might coin their\nbrains into cash without nearly the draft upon their originality that\nis called for by the devising of a swindling game. But the criminal\ninstinct or incentive seems to lay its hold upon persons who might\notherwise fill a leading and respected place in honorable avocations.\nThe men who conceived the system of credit for goods to the value of\nmany thousands of dollars, which they quickly disposed of in different\ncities by auction and attractive sales, closing up their stores and\ndecamping when they had converted the credited stock into cash, were\nswindlers of unusual calibre.\n\nThe police of several cities now have the task of unearthing the\nfrauds and bringing them to justice. They may or may not succeed in\nso doing, as the scheme was craftily laid and carried out. A harvest\nof $100,000 as the returns for a daring exploitation of the credit\nsystem will be regarded, even by the gilt-edged among the robbing\nfraternity, as a fine stroke of craftsmanship. The ingenuity of these\ncormorants calls for constant readjustment of honest persons to the\nconditions created. The lesson of the so-called bargain-house fraud\nwill be conned, and for a long time to come it may be practically\nimpossible for the same scheme to be worked again. But the feature of\nsuch enterprises is that they are designed only for the one operation.\nAfter that they become worthless to their originators.\n\n\nRELIGIOUS GRAFT PAYS.\n\n\"Fake\" religion as a business may have a fanciful sound, but there are\nplenty of men, and women, too, in this day and age who have found it\nto be an extremely practical, well-paying proposition. The readiness\nwith which a good share of the people are always anxious to receive\nany new religion, or an old religion revamped in new fashion, makes\nthe road of the charlatan whose trade is the promulgation of a fake\nreligion one strewn with roses and money. Women are principally his\nvictims, although there are plenty of men with a penchant for adopting\nstrange religions, and from them the faker manages to reap a harvest\nthat makes the pay of the average minister look like the earnings of\nan office boy. While the manner of securing money through the cloak of\na false new sect is generally so hidden that the votaries of the cult\nare never aware of its existence until after their leader is exposed,\nthe main object is never lost sight of by the leader, and the main\nobject is always, \"Get the money.\"\n\nOut of the great mass of religions or NEW THOUGHT sects started each\nyear in this country, it is declared that but extremely few are\nstarted with any idea other than that of separating a lot of people\nfrom their money. Occasionally there is a man who sincerely believes\nthat he has discovered something new and precious in the way of a\nreligion, and establishes a cult with the motive only to help people\naccording to his own lights. But the mass of the new religions, sun\nworshipers, psychists, Brahmins, Hindus, theosophists, mystics, etc.,\nare promoted with the same object in view as that of the old <DW64>\nvoodoo doctors--get the money.\n\n\nFINANCIAL YIELDS ARE LARGE.\n\nThe financial yields of the new religions are incomparably higher than\nis the voodoo man's gain. His followers, who believe in black art and\nother foolish, old-fashioned things, are nearly always drawn from the\npoorer, even the indigent classes--classes that have but little to\nspend, even on a religion. But the East Indian religionist, or the\nsun worshiper, draws his clientele from the better classes, and his\nfollowers have the money to reward him in a way that is astounding.\nHe dabbles not with the poor--neither, it must be confessed, entirely\nwith the ignorant. His victims come from the upper walks of life,\nsometimes from near the top, and their name is legion.\n\nThere is a Hindu who has now left this country to go back to spend the\nrest of his days in luxurious idleness, the while chuckling over the\ngullibility of the smart American people, who came here with a new\nreligion and made a fortune.\n\nThis man was an educated, cultured man of high caste. Sent at an early\nage to England to attend school, he returned to his native country at\nthe age of 28, wise in the things of two worlds, that of his own and\nthat of the occidentals. For a while he buried himself in the native\nlife of a loathsome colony of Fakers. There he learned much of their\nreligious style by rote, and, putting this along with a smattering of\nBuddhism, psychology and sun worship, he managed to appear in America\nwith a new religion, fairly reeking with the essentials required by\nthose who want mysticism served along with their religious beliefs.\n\n\nMYSTICISM DRAWS MANY CONVERTS.\n\nHe had a new god, a new heaven and forty different and distinct ways\nof torturing one's self while worshiping his deity. Mortifying\nthe flesh through fasting and self-denial, torturing one's self by\nstanding with the hands above the head, etc., all were included in the\nnew creed, besides such things as astral bodies and the other things\nthat go with a new religion. He first held forth in a sumptuously\nfurnished city flat, where he managed to draw to him a small gathering\nof the select who love to dabble in mysterious oriental affairs.\n\nThe flat was a dream in itself, and when to it was added a tall,\nascetic young Hindu, with the look of the fanatic burning brightly\nin his eyes, and mystic rites of a religious nature, the effect was\nirresistible; at least it proved to be to those foregathered under\nthe tutelage of the young oriental. There were incense burnings and\nincantations galore. At first these things did not cost anything.\nNo. The young mystic was simply working for the enlightenment of the\nworld, working to spread light into the stygian darkness of the old\nand false dogmas and creeds.\n\nAfter those who flocked to his standard had been so thoroughly imbued\nwith the sincerity of his teachings that his word was law to them,\nthe money question came to the fore. He, the missionary, wanted\nnothing for himself--oh, no. But there was need for funds for the\nestablishment of the cult in India. A school and home must be founded\nfor the young devotees of the new religion in that country, a place\nwhere they could go and live and be trained in the tenets of the creed\nand prepared to go out in the world and teach. And it was for this\nthat the Hindu had come to this country, to permit the chosen ones\nhere to acquirement with the new deity by subscribing to the school\nfund.\n\nSince the beginning of things, when man first beheld the sun and bowed\nhumbly before it, it has been the custom to heap offerings on the\naltar of worship. So the Hindu went back with funds enough to start\nhalf a dozen schools if he had been at all inclined that way, which he\nwasn't, and the people who were his followers are still living in the\nhope that he will return.\n\n\nAMERICAN FAKER GETS THE COIN.\n\nThen there is another kind of charlatan, the American fake\nreligionist, of which, perhaps, there are just as many as of the\nforeigners with the weird doctrines of the orient. This type of faker\nis coarse compared with the soft-shod, incense-burning Hindu, but\nhe \"gets the money\" without much trouble. He is generally a ranter\nas far as preaching goes. His methods are those of the shouter, his\nreligion includes visitation of spirits, shaking of bodies and other\nmanifestations of divine power. He boldly asks for contributions, not\nfor a school to be established for the training of missionaries for\nhis faith, but for the furtherance of his own work right here in this\ncountry.\n\n\"It takes money to fight the devil,\" is a favorite cry with this type\nof sacrilegist. The stronghold of the religious faker is that the\npeople who follow him believe in him implicitly. One faker recently\nproclaimed himself the son of God, come to revisit earth, and, when\nassailed by a paper for it, stood up in an audience of his believers\nand asked them who they thought him to be and how they regarded him.\nThe answer was that he was the son of God, and his mission was to\nsave all mankind from sin. It is obvious that, when a man with such a\nhold on a clique asks for money, it is sure to be forthcoming without\nquestion. At times he does not have to ask for it, one man of this\nkind having had money showered upon him at a meeting by the hysterical\nwomen of his flock.\n\n\nFAITH IN CHARLATAN STRONG.\n\nThis man has operated in at least four sections of this country, has\nserved a term in state's prison for alienating a wife's affections\nalong with the husband's money, has been driven out of two towns by\nangry husbands; but now he is again in possession of a following which\nbelieves implicitly that through him, and through him only, is it\npossible to obtain eternal salvation.\n\nIn appearance this man is a human shark, long-faced, thin of jaw and\nnose, and with a mouth that is nothing but a straight line cut in the\nface. In repose he might be taken for a shyster lawyer, but when he\nbegins to speak and the artificial frenzy is burning in him it is easy\nenough to see why impressionable women may be drawn to him. Even a\nstrong-willed man, observing his actions and the degree of enthusiasm\nin him, is apt to feel that he can be nothing other than sincere in\nhis beliefs. But, if he is sincere, his sincerity runs only towards\nmaking of his beliefs a good business proposition, and avarice is one\nof his strongest points.\n\nThe persistency with which women will take up and practice the\ncruelest of religious customs is evidenced by the manner in which a\nChicago girl tortured and starved herself to death in an effort to\nobtain salvation through the mortification of the flesh. She was not\nof an ignorant type, either, as might be imagined, but fairly well\neducated and extremely intelligent, with running to intellectuality.\nBut the thrall of a new religion got her in its power, and, believing\nshe was sinful, she strove to cast out her sins and died in the\nattempt.\n\nIt is seldom that pernicious practices of religion fakers carry\npersons to this extreme, but deranged mentalities, wrecked homes and\ndepleted pocketbooks are of such frequent occurrence as to merit a\nwholesale crusade against this type of fraud, even without raising the\nquestion of religious scruples.\n\n\nPAWN TICKETS ON DIAMONDS.\n\nAnother instance: Some working man or washing woman, having saved up\na little money for a rainy day, reads an alluring advertisement in a\nnewspaper that a party was looking for a small loan on valuable family\njewelry and diamonds. The interest offered is much higher than that\nallowed by any savings bank. Diamonds, as everybody knows, are just\nas good as money and offer perfect security. In hopes of profiting\na little more on their savings, such prospective victims respond to\nthe advertisement. The party looking for the loan appears to be a\nwell-dressed, smoothly-talking man, who represents himself to be the\nscion of a wealthy or aristocratic family temporarily in hard luck. He\nproduces a pawn shop ticket, on the face of which appears that some\npawn broker had advanced on certain diamonds a large sum of money, say\n$500.\n\n[Illustration:\n\n    Two minds with but a single thought;\n    Two heads that beat us all.\n]\n\nNow, it is a matter of common knowledge that pawn brokers know their\nbusiness, and that no pawn broker would advance more than one-third,\nor, at the highest, one-half of the actual value of the articles\npledged. It is that common belief which the swindler makes, as it\nwere, the psychic basis for his operations. The victim having once\njumped at the conclusion that the diamonds offered as security must be\nworth at least $1,000 or thereabouts, the rest becomes easy.\n\n\nVICTIM ANXIOUS FOR INTEREST.\n\nThe victim naturally considers a further loan on such diamonds of $200\nor $250 a desirable risk. The offer of 10 per cent or more interest on\nthe loan is another allurement which makes the transaction still more\ndesirable. The pawn broker recognizes his ticket, and the diamonds,\nwhen redeemed, turn out to be worth considerably less than the amount\nwhich the broker was supposed to have advanced on them. The victim\nloses some more by redeeming the diamonds.\n\nComplaints by such victims have been coming thick and fast into the\nstate's attorney's office in Chicago and other large cities. The\nconspiracy between the swindler and his accomplice, the pawn broker,\nis almost self-evident. In some instances indictments have been\nreturned against the perpetrators of the fraud, but the prosecution\ncould not succeed. The reason is obvious. On the face of the\ntransaction everything seemed to be regular, and the defendants could\nnot be made criminally responsible for an erroneous conclusion arrived\nat by the victims as to the business sagacity of the pawn broker or\nthe probable value of the diamonds. And yet who would doubt, in view\nof the many identical complaints, that the plans in connection with\nthe fraudulent transaction had been laid carefully in pursuance of a\nconspiracy to defraud the public?\n\n\nNEW LAW BADLY NEEDED.\n\nOn the civil side of legal practice there is the writ of injunction\nto prevent threatened irreparable injury to property by one person to\nanother. But in case of organized fraud upon the public in general our\nmodern legislatures have not yet grown to the proper appreciation of\nthe wise and ancient saying that comes from the orient, \"The rat hole,\nnot the rat, is the thief.\" Our laws punish the thief when caught, but\nleave the \"hole\" intact and ready to give shelter to other \"rats.\"\n\nThe authorities may know well the fraudulent character of a concern\norganized and existing for the express purpose of fleecing the public,\nand yet, in the absence of a complaining victim, they are absolutely\nhelpless and unable to prevent victims from being ensnared by that\nconcern.\n\nSuppose the legislature would enact a law making it a felony for\npersons to set in operation any scheme to defraud the public and fix\nadequate punishment for such offense, would not such a law enable the\nauthorities to anticipate and prevent a great deal of that misery\nwhich is caused by organized frauds of all kinds and descriptions, to\na class of people that least can afford it?\n\n\nPOSTAGE STAMP GRAFTER.\n\nThe postage stamp grafter is one of the most pestiferous of the\n\"toucher\" genus. He bobs up in offices, on the streets, in hotel\nlobbies, everywhere and at all times. Here is the song he sings:\n\n     \"I'm broke, mister, but I don't want any money. I am\n     looking for work and have just answered an ad. in the\n     paper, but, to tell the truth, I have only got a nickel,\n     and if I break that to buy a postage stamp I can't get a\n     cup of coffee. Just a 2-cent stamp is all I ask.\"\n\nIt is too small a request to refuse, and besides there is a chance\nthat the fellow may be telling the truth. Anyway, it is only a stamp.\nYou produce the stamp, and may give the \"toucher\" several stamps\nso that he can answer more advertisements for work. A half day of\nindustry at this scheme gives any competent \"toucher\" enough stamps\nto buy a little food, a good deal of drink and a night's lodging.\nThere is no difficulty in disposing of stamps thus collected, for the\nsalonkeepers and others that buy them--sometimes at a discount--know\nthey have been given, and not stolen.\n\n\"You are the third man that has tackled me for a stamp today,\" said\na man in the lobby of a downtown hotel recently to a young man who\n\"wanted to answer an advertisement for work.\" \"Here, give me the\nletter; I'll stamp and mail it.\"\n\nWhereupon, to use the vernacular of his kind, the young man made a\nsensational \"getaway\" via the side entrance.\n\nAkin to the postage stamp scheme is the one of \"touching\" for three or\nsome other odd number of pennies to make up the amount necessary \"to\nsend a telegram home for money.\" The \"toucher\" in this case usually\nadmits frankly that he came to Chicago and got drunk, spending all\nhis money. For victims he picks the men that look like they might\nsympathize with a fellow in his predicament.\n\n\nTHE CLERK GRAFTER.\n\nIt may or may not be so that a sucker is born every minute. Doubt as\nto the exactness of this has been expressed, the consensus of opinion\nbeing that the average runs higher than Barnum's estimate. But as to\nthe natural increase of devious and various ways for making, or trying\nto make, suckers out of the world's inhabitants there can be little or\nno just doubt. A new one is born every time the old one gets stale.\nHere is the latest:\n\nThe scene of operation, which is guaranteed to be harmless when\nperformed, but sure to be painful when the reaction sets in, is a\nsmall office, store, or shop, any place where the total number of\nemployees is small.\n\nPreferably it is a place where a young woman stenographer, clerk, or\nother worker is employed, and, preferably, the stenographer, clerk,\netc., is of pleasing and attractive appearance. The more so the\nbetter, though this is not absolutely necessary.\n\n\nPLAYS ON TARDY VICTIM.\n\nIn fact, the only condition actually necessary to the successful\nprosecution of this new game is that one of the employees come\ndown to work later than others. This must be. The operator picks a\nmorning when said employee is late in arriving at his or her place of\nemployment. If the employee is a young woman stenographer, so much\nthe better. Operator may be either male or female, but should be of\nprosperous appearance--sort of money-no-object appearance.\n\n\"Is the Stool Pigeon in?\" he inquires. Of course, he doesn't call this\nparty \"the Stool Pigeon,\" having first carefully informed himself\nas to the individual's Christian name and surname, so as to be in a\nposition to rattle it off with becoming familiarity.\n\n\"Not yet, but soon,\" replies the Fall Guy. He doesn't know that he's\nthe Fall Guy, but he is, unless he happens to possess more than a\nhuman average of suspicion and wariness.\n\n\nFALL GUY TAKES BAIT.\n\n\"Oh, I'm so sorry! Now, I wouldn't have come to deliver this package\nif he hadn't promised to be here at this moment. And he wanted it so\nbadly--and I can't wait!\"\n\n\"That's too bad,\" says Mr. Fall Guy. \"But that's all right; you may\nleave the package in my care and I'll see that he gets it the first\nthing he comes down.\"\n\n\"So kind of you,\" purrs the operator. \"The only difficulty in the way\nof that is that I must see him when I deliver it.\"\n\nNothing coarse or abrupt, you will see; instead the smooth, purring\nround of the wheels that grind artistically and well.\n\nHere the operator begins to bite the under lip and look at the clock\nwith clouded brows.\n\n\"Hm! I can't wait, and he wanted it so much this morning!\"\n\n\nSUCKER DIGS OUT COIN.\n\nFall Guy being a friend of Stool Pigeon's (the operator has picked\nhim because of that qualification), gets solicitous. \"Well, there's\na collection of a dollar on this package; that is all, really.\" If\nFall Guy looks burdened with money the charge may be as high as $2.50.\nHardly more than this. It may run as low as 25 cents. The package\ncontains, according to the operator, anything from a pair of cuff\nbuttons to a pair of shoes.\n\nAnd Fall Guy pays at least often enough to make the game worth playing\nfor the operator.\n\n\nFLEECING INVALIDS AND <DW36>s.\n\nThis is a story of the most despicable graft extant. For, although it\nhas been broken up in Chicago, it still flourishes in nearly every\nother large city in the country. It is not only despicable but it is\nheinous, fiendish, unspeakable. It is the sort of a thing that causes\nthe blood of an honest man or of a manly rogue to boil, and long for a\nchance to clutch its inventor by the throat. It is the letter-copying\nscheme. Real criminals take chances on death, or the penitentiary,\nand on personal encounters with those whose money they unlawfully seek\nto acquire, but the vultures behind the \"ads.\" promising lucrative\nwork at home content themselves with mulcting helpless invalids, aged\nand infirm persons who seek to contribute to their own support and\npersons whom poverty has driven to desperation, and who see in the\ngilded promises of the cormorant an avenue of escape.\n\nThe public is familiar with the advertisements which constantly are\nseen in the newspapers offering employment that will not necessitate\ncanvassing, or peddling, and which can be done in the home with great\nprofit. Occasionally the \"ads.\" explain that the work is that of\ncopying letters.\n\n[Illustration: AN ATTEMPT TO CATCH YOUR EYE]\n\n\nWRITE SMOOTH LETTERS.\n\nThe victim answers the \"ad.\" and in reply receives this stereotyped\nletter--the form is the same in every instance:\n\n     ESTEEMED FRIEND:\n\n     Replying to your application to write letters for us at\n     your home during spare time, we beg to say that your\n     writing is satisfactory, and we have decided to offer you\n     the appointment.\n\n     The work we give out is simply writing letters from a copy\n     which we furnish, for which we pay you direct from this\n     office at the rate of twenty dollars ($20.00) per thousand.\n     You do not have to write any certain number of letters\n     before receiving pay, and all letters you write you return\n     to us. There is no mailing them to your friends, as most\n     other advertisers who advertise for letter writers demand,\n     neither is there any canvassing or selling anything, or\n     anything else to mislead you; you simply write from a copy\n     which we furnish, and we pay you direct. We are an old,\n     reliable firm, always state plainly what is required, do\n     exactly as we promise and treat our employes honestly.\n\n     The work is easy; the letters to be written are the length\n     of the ordinary business letter, and all we require is\n     neatness and correctness. We furnish all materials free of\n     charge, paper, etc., and prepay all costs of delivery to\n     your home. You work only when you desire or have leisure\n     time, and no one need know you are doing the work.\n\n     We pay spot cash for all work done the same day as\n     received. We use thousands of these letters for advertising\n     our business, because we receive better results from using\n     written letters than from plain printed circulars. We have\n     a large number of people all over the country working for\n     us, and if you desire to become one of our regular workers\n     we request that you send us one dollar, for which we will\n     send you our regular dollar package of goods you are to\n     write about.\n\n     This is all you are required to invest, there being no\n     other payments at any further time, and this deposit is\n     returned to you after doing work to the amount of two\n     thousand letters. We are compelled to ask for this small\n     deposit to protect ourselves against unscrupulous persons\n     who do not mean to work and who apply out of idle curiosity.\n\n     We also send you first trial lot of letter paper, copy\n     of letter to be written (as we desire all letters to be\n     written on our own letter paper), also instructions and all\n     necessary information. After receiving the outfit you start\n     to work immediately. More reliable workers are needed\n     at once, and we guarantee everything to be exactly as\n     represented. If you find anything different we will refund\n     the amount invested.\n\n     Fill out the enclosed blank and send it to us with one\n     dollar or express or postoffice money order (stamps\n     accepted), and we will immediately send everything, all\n     expenses prepaid. You can start to work the same day\n     you receive the outfit by simply following our plain\n     instructions.\n\n     Kindly reply at your earliest convenience. Fill out\n     enclosed blank and direct your envelope carefully. Trusting\n     to be favored with your prompt services, we remain,\n\n        Very truly yours,\n            LESLIE NOVELTY COMPANY,\n              Per C. C. KENDALL.\n\n\nROB BED-RIDDEN WOMEN.\n\nIn their investigation of this sort of swindle the police discovered\nthat almost invariably the victims were bed-ridden persons or women\nin straitened circumstances who were in frantic search of some means\nof keeping the wolf from the door. Many instances were found where\nsome unfortunate had taken up a collection in the neighborhood in\norder to raise the necessary dollar to send for the \"outfit.\" Persons\nwere found who were actually starving and who had pawned their last\npossession to get the money that was to start them on the road to\naffluence.\n\nOf all the offices raided Detective Wooldridge did not find record of\none instance where a victim had been able to keep the requirements of\nthe swindlers. The supposed letter sent to be copied was generally\nabout 800 words in length, full of words difficult to spell, of\nrude and complicated rhetorical construction and punctuated in a\nmost eccentric manner. The task imposed was practically a life-time\njob, and even if anyone had fulfilled it there were a hundred\nloop-holes whereby the thieves could escape payment by declaring their\nspecifications had not been heeded to the letter.\n\nThe \"outfit\" consisted of a cheap penholder, a pen and a box of fake\npills.\n\nImagine the joyous anticipation with which a starving <DW36> would\nawait the arrival of the \"outfit\" that was to give him the opportunity\nof prolonging existence! The bright hopes of the work-worn widow who\nexpected by this genteel means to keep her little ones in bread!\n\nThink of the despair of both upon discovering they had paid out\nmoney so sadly needed--money which probably had been begged or\nborrowed--only to discover that they had been victimized instead of\nbenefited!\n\n\n\"OPERATORS\" CRINGING COWARDS.\n\nTrembling, cringing, whining specimens of humanity were found in\ncharge of each of these fakers' dens when Detective Wooldridge swooped\ndown upon them. They were typical of their graft--small, mean,\nsnake-like, cowardly. None among them was found who would bid defiance\nto the officers, who would resist intrusion by the law or who would\ngo into court and fight. All were cheap and dirty in mind, loathsome,\nshrinking, snarling, but not daring to bite.\n\nAmong those driven out of business by Detective Wooldridge were the\nTwain Novelty Company, the Leslie Novelty Company, the Illinois\nIndustrial Company and Blackney & Company.\n\n\"I have raided all classes of swindling institutions,\" said\nWooldridge, \"but it gave me more pleasure to run down these fellows\nthan all the others put together. They did not dare try to get money\nout of people who could afford to lose it, or who were out in the\nworld where they could talk with others of more experience. Their\ndupes were in almost every instance the most pitiable objects of the\ncommunities in which they lived. The facts disclosed by these raids\nwere enough to fill the heart of the blackest grafter with indignation\nand a desire to trounce the perpetrators.\"\n\n\nSHARKS RUIN BUSINESS MEN.\n\nNEW LINE OF FINANCIAL GRAFT.\n\nA new loan shark, or self-styled \"financial agent,\" who preys on the\nbusiness man and manufacturer, robbing him of his money and business\nmore relentlessly than the old-time loan shark ever dared with the\nhelpless wage earner, has made his appearance in Chicago and says he\nhas come to stay.\n\n[Illustration: MR. FIRST MORTGAGE; FIELD OF RISKY INVESTMENTS]\n\nUnder the guise of discounting a manufacturer's accounts at his usual\nrate of discount, the \"financial agent\" secures his first hold on\nthe struggling manufacturer, who sees the opportunity to enlarge his\nbusiness by collecting cash for his merchandise as he sells it. But\nthe first step with the \"financial agent\" means entering the portals\nof bankruptcy.\n\nThe loan shark first finds for his victim an industrious, hard-working\nmanufacturer or wholesaler, who by his push and perseverance has built\na business beyond his capital, and approaches him.\n\n\"You have a good business here,\" remarks the agent. \"If your customers\nall paid cash it would be pretty easy sailing. Life would be one long,\nsweet song if everyone paid for goods as soon as they were ordered,\nwouldn't it?\"\n\n\nOFFER OF CASH AROUSES INTEREST.\n\nEven the largest manufacturer in the country could not but accede to\nthis.\n\n\"I have been watching your business for some time with a great deal\nof interest,\" continues the suave grafter, \"and I would be glad to\ndiscount your bills at the regular rate of discount, so it would cost\nyou nothing and you would have an opportunity to double your business.\n\n\"I presume you give the regular trade discount of 1 per cent a month\nfor cash. On that I can save you a little money and help your credit\nmaterially. You receive 1 per cent a month on your purchases.\n\n\"This you cannot take, as you are cramped for money, because your\ncustomers do not pay their bills promptly. Thus you lose 2 per cent a\nmonth by not buying and selling for cash.\"\n\n\nGETS $800 FOR $1,000.\n\nThe manufacturer begins to see a thriving business on a cash basis\nwithout exposing his weakness, and agrees to allow the banker to\ndiscount his bills.\n\n\"In the morning,\" begins the agent in explanation of his system,\n\"you send us $1,000 worth of duplicate invoices of the goods which\nyou shipped today, with shipping bills attached. You attach to the\ninvoices a note for $1,000, so the account may be kept from the notes,\nand not from the invoices which we hold. In return for the note we\nwill send you a check for $800, less our commission of 2 per cent\na month, just what you are paying now because your business is not\ndone on a cash basis. The $200, or 20 per cent, we have to deposit in\nthe bank which loans us the money which we in turn pass to you. When\nany bills are paid we will refund your 20 per cent which we hold.\nAny bank compels us to have a representative in your store to look\nafter our interests, as a matter of form. We will just appoint your\nbookkeeper--a matter of form entirely. Once a month we will send a man\nover to check up your books. He will see that none of our money has\nbeen overlooked.\"\n\n\nBEGINS TO SHOW HIS TEETH.\n\nAll this sounds businesslike and plausible, and the arrangement runs\nsmoothly for a time, probably six months, to allow the manufacturer\ntime to sell all his open accounts to the financial agent. Then\nthe loan shark sends in a statement of the account, and, if the\nmanufacturer complains, begins to show his teeth.\n\nOn the statement appears all money the manufacturer has received and\nin addition an extra charge for $50 a month to cover the services of\ntheir agent--the manufacturer's own bookkeeper. Also an additional\ncharge of from 1 to 2 per cent for additional service rendered,\nalthough the agency has had absolutely nothing to do with the accounts\nbeyond holding them as security. All overdue accounts are charged\nback to the manufacturer, and a request for a check to take them up\nimmediately accompanies the statement.\n\nAs few accounts, if allowed to mature at all, are received by a\nmanufacturer on the exact day when due, the check called for often is\na formidable one. The manufacturer is at his wits' end. He goes to the\nagency post haste and, after they find it is impossible to hold him\nup for a check, they say:\n\n\"Oh, well, never mind, the bank--always the bank--is pressing us on\nthose overdue accounts, but we can hold up the 20 per cent until these\naccounts are taken care of. That will be satisfactory, we are sure.\"\n\n[Illustration: DEBT]\n\n\nLOSES HIS 20 PER CENT.\n\nAfter this the manufacturer's chance of ever seeing anything more\nof his 20 per cent has vanished. Each day the agency trumps up some\nfictitious charge of stamps, new check books, extra labor, taxes,\nadditional fees or other charges that could originate nowhere but in\nthe brain of a financial crook.\n\nFinally the manufacturer finds he has nothing on his books but\naccounts belonging to the agency, on which he is paying carrying\ncharges of from 5 to 10 per cent a month. The agency refuses to return\nhis 20 per cent, which they claim has been charged off by the bank to\ntake care of the overdue accounts.\n\nThe victim, seeing the plight in which he is placed, demands an\naccounting and threatens legal proceedings. The agency in turn demands\nhe give them an itemized statement of each account, which they have.\nThey agree to check them up, and, if found correct, promise to give\nhim a check for the 20 per cent which they hold. That night the light\nburns late over the bookkeeper's desk in the manufacturer's office.\nIn the morning the statements go to the office of the loan shark, who\nsays:\n\n\"I'll have the auditor check them up and send you a check as soon as\nwe find out everything is straight.\"\n\n\nTRADE STATEMENTS TO CUSTOMER.\n\nThe manufacturer leaves the office. The loan shark gets busy with the\nstatements, and stamps each of them:\n\n\"This account has been transferred to Killem's Mercantile Company. You\nare notified to pay this account to no one else.\"\n\nThese statements are mailed to the customers. When the manufacturer\nreturns the loan shark greets him cordially and remarks:\n\n\"Unfortunately one of my clerks mailed out a lot of your statements\nlast night, but I guess that won't matter. He stamped on them that\nthey had been transferred to us and sent them out as he does everyone\nelse's. He didn't understand. I am sorry.\"\n\nAs expected, the manufacturer, when he sees his business and\nconfidence abused in this manner, flies into a rage. Then the suave\nagent takes the bull by the horns and issues his ultimatum.\n\n\"Our bank\"--always \"our bank\"--\"thinks we are not getting all the\nmoney coming to us from your account. They demand that in the future\nyou deposit all your checks with us. I am sorry, for I know everything\nis straight, but your using us as a bank will last but a few days.\nEverything will then run smoothly again.\"\n\nAnd unless some friend comes to the aid of the manufacturer the\nagency's prophecy comes true, and it does last but a little while.\n\n\nSHREWD BEGGAR GRAFT.\n\n     Pretend to be Deaf, Dumb and Blind, Playing on\n     Sympathy--How Philanthropy is Humbugged--Begging for Money\n     to Reach Home--An Army of Frauds and Vagabonds--Mastering\n     the Deaf Mute Language for Swindling Purposes--The Public\n     Should be Careful in Disbursing Alms.\n\nSpeech is so common, eyesight so precious, that he who would appeal\nfor charity needs no better warrant than that he is dumb or blind.\nIn an age when words are multiplied and golden silence is seldom\nfound, the very fact that lips can give no utterance is so unusual\nthat their mute assertion of misfortune is seldom questioned. There\nis nothing so pitiful in all the world as an asylum for the blind.\nThere is nothing which so draws one to share the burdens of another\nas the appeal of him in whom the wells of speech are all dried up.\nWe sympathize with illness, we grieve at the misfortune which visits\nour friends, we mourn with them when bereavement comes, but all these\nthings are in the course of nature. They are sad, but they may be\nexpected. But then a figure in health rises and asks for charity in\nthe hushed language of the mute, philanthropy halts and humanity gives\nalms. But if the dumb can evoke assistance, assuring of sincerity and\ndisarming doubt, how hushed is the questioning when the blind apply!\nHow much stronger than speech or silence are the sightless eyes that\nstare unblinking at a darkened world! How sad is the fate of that man\nwho was buried by demons when God cried out, \"Let there be light\"!\n\nBut not every man is mute who stretches out his hand in silence.\nLaziness is such an awfully demoralizing vice that some who choose\nto beg a living and decline work are even base enough to feign a\nmisfortune they ought to fear. Fellows who find the winter pinching\nand the ranks of vagabonds full to repletion arm themselves with a\nslate and pencil and haunt the public with appeals for help on the\nuntrue claim that they are dumb. One of the most persistent beggars\nof this kind makes the rounds of residence districts with a printed\ncard on which is stated the bearer's desire to reach his home in some\ndistant city--the destination varies from time to time--together with\na long-primer endorsement by a group of names which no one knows. The\nfraud always asks for some slight money offering--nothing can be too\nsmall--with which to assist him in the purchase of a ticket.\n\nUsually his paper shows that he needs but a very little more, and\nhe asks one, by a series of pantomimic signs, to enroll his name,\ntogether with the sum advanced, in regular order on a blank list\nwhich he tenders with his touching appeal. He is so well drilled as\nnever to be surprised into speech, and looks with such straight,\nhonest eyes into the faces of the women, who form much the larger\nnumber of his victims, that they cannot question him and usually give\nup a dime or a quarter without a struggle. The beggar can readily\ncollect a good day's wages in this manner, and it is a matter of\nsurprise if he does not receive an invitation to partake of food three\nor four times a day. He never lets his list get full. However small a\nmargin he may lack of having raised the sum needed to buy his ticket\nto his home, he never gets quite enough, for nothing is easier than to\nstop in some secluded spot and erase the names of his latest donors,\nthus proving to those on whom he shall presently call that their help\nis not only needed, but will so nearly end the necessity for continued\nappeals. This class of beggar never looks like a dissipated man, is\nalways polite, and bears refusal in so noble a way that nine times\nout of ten the flinty-hearted women who refused him at the back door\nhurry through to the front and give the more generously that they have\nharbored suspicion.\n\nAnother set of leeches have mastered the deaf mute language, and\nalways ask with a pleading, painful face which meets you as your eyes\nlift from his written questions, if anyone in the house can talk with\nhim. He supplements the penciled question and the eloquent glance of\neyes trained by long use in the art with a few rapid passes of his\nhands, a few dexterous wavings of the fingers, in a language you have\nheard of and read about, but cannot understand. If the unexpected\nhappens and a person be present who can converse with him, your beggar\nis sure of some entertainment, and the usual scene of one you know to\nbe honest talking to one who may be equally so, and certainly seems\nneedy, will almost infallibly wring from you the coveted assistance.\nIt is like two minstrels at a Saxon court. You know your own has\nseen the holy land, though you have not, and as he tells you, this\nthread-bare guest talks familiarly and correctly of distant realms.\nThat is all any one can know to a certainty, but you give him the\nbenefit of the chance that he may be honest, and help him with such\nloose change as comes to hand. Time and again the pretended mutes have\nbeen detected in their imposture by men who pitied a misfortune and\ngave money at their homes in the morning to see it spent for drink by\nan arguing, contentious fellow in the evening.\n\nSome beggars even assume the appearance of blindness, and haunt the\nhomes of comfortable people, led by a little girl and asking alms\nin the name of an affliction that is always eloquent of need. He\nwill sometimes carry a small basket full of pencils, or other little\ntrinkets, and glazes over his evident beggary with the appearance of\nsales. But he does not hesitate, once the money is in his hands, to\nask his patron to give back the pencils, as he cannot afford to buy\nany more. These people can sometimes see as well as the child that\nseems to lead them, and yet their eyes, when they choose to assume\ntheir professional attitude, seem covered with a film through which no\nlight can penetrate.\n\nThe public should be chary in bestowing charity, and especially to\nable-bodied men who appear blind, deaf and dumb, or are still claiming\nto be victims of some recent disaster. Most any one who has charity to\nbestow can easily think of some deserving and honest unfortunate in\ntheir own neighborhood.\n\n\nPARALYTIC A BAD ACTOR.\n\nThe most transparent fraud on the streets of the great cities is\nthe pseudo-paralytic. At almost any street corner can be seen what\npurports to be a trembling wreck of a man. His legs are twisted into\nhorrible shapes. The hand which he stretches forth for alms is a mere\nclaw, seemingly twisted by pain into all sorts of distorted shapes,\ntrembling and wavering. The arms move back and forth in pathetic\ntwistings as if the pains were shooting up and down the ligaments\nwith all the force of sciatica.\n\nThe head bobs from side to side as if it were impossible to keep it\nstill. And the words which come from the half-paralyzed mouth are\na mere mumble of inarticulate sounds, as if the tongue, too, were\nsuffering torture.\n\nA more pitiable sight than this could not be conjured up. And the\nextended hat of the victim of what seems to be a complication of St.\nVitus dance, paralysis, sciatic rheumatism, and the delirium tremens,\nis always a ready receptacle for the pennies, nickels and dimes of the\nthoughtless. This is one side of the picture; now look on the other.\n\nIt is dusk. Just that time of day when the lights are not yet\nbrightening the streets, and when the sun has made the great tunnels\nbetween the sky-scrapers, ways of darkness. Detective Wooldridge is\nwatching. He has been watching two of the deplorable fraternity for\ntwo hours. As the dusk deepens he sees them both arise, dart swiftly\nacross the street and board a car. By no mere chance is it that they\nare both on the same car. The detective follows. Before a low saloon\non the West Side the victims of innumerable diseases descend from the\ncar, walking upright as six-year soldiers on parade. They enter the\nsaloon. They seat themselves at a table behind an angle in the back\nwhich conceals them from the street. The detective loiters down to the\nend of the bar and watches. From every pocket, even from the hat rim,\npours a pile of coins.\n\nThe two sort out the quarters, the nickels, the pennies. The heaps are\nvery evenly divided over two or three cheap whiskies or a couple of\nbottles of five-cent beer.\n\nThen the real finale comes. Detective Wooldridge gets busy, and a\ngoodly portion of the spoil finds its way out of the hands of the\nsharpers in the way of a fine.\n\nBut for every one of these paralytic frauds caught there are dozens,\neven scores, who get away unscathed. It is the estimate of the best\ndetectives that not one in a thousand of these paralytic beggars is\ngenuine. It is one of the most bare-faced cases of deception of the\npublic which comes under the notice of the police.\n\n\nEASY MONEY FROM KIND HEARTS.\n\nCharity covers a multitude of sins, almost as many backs, and quite a\nbit of graft.\n\nThoughtless giving is almost a crime. It serve to encourage idleness,\nand idleness is at the bottom of more crime than any other one thing,\nunless it is poverty.\n\nHere is a story, given in the words of the man himself, which shows\nhow the charity graft is worked in a number of ways. It covers several\nfields, and is so dramatic that it is given as the best example of\nall-round charity grafting:\n\n     \"In experience in charitable work last summer I discovered\n     some of these truths. It was the first time in all my life\n     that I ever engaged in any charitable enterprise, and the\n     needy that I sought to relieve was myself.\n\n     \"Any one will beg, borrow, or steal in the name of charity.\n     They may be as personally honest as a trust magnate--and\n     they would be horrified at the idea of begging or stealing\n     for themselves, but charity makes them respectable. At\n     least this is the theory I worked on.\n\n     \"I was broke and far from home. I decided that I would\n     starve or steal rather than beg. Then a fellow I met\n     accidentally put me on to a way of making a living.\n\n\nFOR THE BENEFIT OF THE HEATHEN.\n\n     \"He had a lot of literature either really from a big\n     church, charitable organization, or fraudulently printed,\n     and he explained to me that I was to sell these 25 cents\n     a copy for the benefit of the heathen somewhere, or home\n     missions. I was to get 25 per cent of the money resulting\n     from such sales.\n\n     \"About a week later, when I had received $12 besides a\n     little expense money from him. I discovered that he was\n     keeping all the money. I took the rest of the literature\n     and destroyed it. Three days later, when I was hungry, I\n     rather regretted destroying it.\n\n     \"I joined a circus that was moving toward my home town in\n     Western Iowa, intending to leave it there and quit being\n     a tramp. I was then down in Eastern Pennsylvania. I was a\n     canvas hand. We went west by a tortuous route, and I never\n     could accumulate enough coin to pay my way home, so was\n     forced to stick to the place for many weeks.\n\n     \"The second week one of the canvas hands came to me and\n     asked me to circulate a subscription paper among the men\n     for the benefit of one Will Turner, a member of the band,\n     who, he said, had dropped off the train while running over\n     from the last stop, and badly injured himself.\n\n\nGAVE THE MONEY TO CANVAS BOSS.\n\n     \"I circulated the paper. The man told me he already had\n     collected from the band on another subscription paper, so\n     I needn't go to them. The man subscribed over $40 to help\n     Turner, and I gave the money and the paper to the canvas\n     boss who asked me to make the collection.\n\n     \"He took it, and remarked gratefully that he would make it\n     all right with me. I didn't catch the significance of the\n     remark then. About a week after that the same canvas boss\n     came again with another subscription paper for the benefit\n     of John Kane, who, he said, was a gasoline lamp tender and\n     had been horribly burned and taken to the hospital. He told\n     me a graphic story of the accident that aroused all my\n     sympathy. I took the paper and worked hard on it during the\n     afternoon and evening performances, and, as it was the day\n     after pay day, I collected nearly $100.\n\n\nWORKED THE GAME ONCE A MONTH.\n\n     \"I got a shock when I took the money to the canvas boss. He\n     gave me $50 and said:\n\n     \"'That's your share. We'll work it again next pay day.'\n\n     \"Then I went at him, and we had quite a fight. We were both\n     arrested, and at the hearing next morning I learned that\n     he had been working the game with that same circus about\n     once a month. There were so many with the outfit and so\n     few of them knew each other by name, and accidents were so\n     numerous, that no one suspected him. He had grown afraid to\n     work it for himself and used me for a tool.\n\n     \"The show had pulled out and the boss and two others who\n     had been arrested with us took the first train back to it.\n     I used the $50 to pay my fine and get home, where I found\n     work and honesty--and, as soon as possible, I sent to the\n     chief horseman with the show $50, to be added to the fund\n     for the benefit of the next person really hurt, telling him\n     the entire story. He wrote that he had been among those who\n     helped kick the canvas boss out of the car after he read my\n     letter.\"\n\n\nIN NAME OF CHARITY.\n\nThere are probably more \"touches\" perpetrated in Chicago by\nprofessionals in the name of charity than under any other guise. In\nthis matter, more of the protection of honest charities than for the\nprotection of the public, the police have taken a hand and done a\ngreat deal to weed out and punish the solicitors for fake charities.\nAn imaginary home for epileptics was one of the favorite plans. There\nwas a home for this class of unfortunates that was honestly run, and\nthe peculiar sympathy enlisted by the mention of the word epilepsy was\nseized upon by dishonest schemers. Professional women solicitors were\ngarbed as \"nurses\" and sent forth. They were mostly austere-looking\nwomen and silent. Their work of nursing epileptics was supposed to\nproduce this austere silence. This supposed charity appealed with\nuncommon strength to most people because these \"nurses\" were supposed\nto be performing the most unpleasant work imaginable amidst the most\ngrewsome surroundings. Large sums were collected in this way, the\npromoter keeping everything above the liberal commission paid to\nsolicitors.\n\n[Illustration: RACHEL GORMAN]\n\n\nTHIS ONE MADE FORTUNE.\n\nRachel Gorman was the originator of the \"nurse for epileptics\" graft,\nand raked in thousands of dollars before she finally was rounded up\nby the police. Not one cent of all the money collected by her and\nher garbed and hired solicitors ever got past their pockets. In this\ncase the most shining marks were selected. William Jennings Bryan was\ntouched for $100. as was the Governor of Illinois, and many others.\nThis money for imaginary epileptics came so easily that the Gorman\nwoman confessed that it was almost a shame to take it.\n\nThere is little excuse, however, for Chicago men and women allowing\nthemselves to be talked out of money for charity. In no great city\nare the charity working forces better organized or better known.\nFor virtually every form and case of need there is in Chicago a\ndistinct form of honest, well-organized charity. This condition grew\nout of necessity, and promiscuous giving to \"touchers\" who plead as\nqualification charity cases is dying out as the public comes to know\nmore of the comprehensive systems for the help of the worthy and\nunfortunate.\n\nIt took the hotel detectives years to check the \"toucher\" with the\nfake bank account that operated largely in the hotel lobbies. Now\nhe works in other places. He carries a bank book that has all the\nsuperficial marks of genuineness. He engages you in conversation, and\nat what he considers the right psychological moment, he drops a feeler\nlike this:\n\n\"It's h---- to be without money when you've got plenty, isn't it?\"\n\nIf you have met this type of \"toucher\" before, you instantly see it\ncoming and chase off to a most important engagement. If not, you only\ncan agree. Being without money when you have none is bad; being broke\nwhen you have money is worse.\n\n\"Look here,\" says the \"toucher,\" \"here is my bank book. Look at this\nbalance?\"\n\n\nOFTEN WORTH THE PRICE.\n\nA glance seems to show that the bank owes your new acquaintance\nmany thousands. He then tells how it happened, how he came to be\nwithout a cent when he was so far to the good with his banker. It's a\ncomplicated tale, too long to tell here. There are lost letters, the\ncashing of checks for friends and, confidentially, a touch of the pace\nthat flattens bank accounts. By this time you see your finish. When\nyou seek to escape you find yourself backed up to the wall with no\nchance to sidestep. The best you can do is to scale the original touch\nfrom $1 to 50 cents, thereby making 50 cents for yourself and 50 cents\nfor the \"toucher.\"\n\nTo \"stand for\" all the \"touches\" that are made in Chicago one would\nrequire an income far in excess of that enjoyed by most. Those that\nare responded to are those in cases where the donor generously thinks\nthat the \"toucher\" really needs the money. Probably in the vast\nmajority of cases there is no delusion as to the fiction woven in\norder to drag forth the nickel, the dime, the quarter or the dollar.\nOften it is worth the price to hear the fiction.\n\nBut after all one feels refreshed when a frank but hoarse and\ntrembling hobo says:\n\n\"Say, Mister, me t'roat is baked and me coppers sizzlin'. Gimme de\nprice of a drink. Did you ever feel like jumpin' from de bridge fur\nlack of a stingy little dime fur booze?\"\n\nHere, you feel, is no misrepresentation. Here you may invest a dime\nwithout feeling that you have been stung.\n\n\nRAFFLES BANK ROBBERY.\n\nOne of the most annoying of small grafts is the raffle, as conducted\nfor gain. It is bad enough to be held up for 25 cents or 50 cents for\na ticket which entitles you to a chance on a rug or a clock when you\nreasonably are sure that the proceeds will go to charity, but no man\nlikes to be fooled out of his small change by a cheap grafter, even if\nthe grafter happens to need the money.\n\nA story is told of two printers who lived for a month on a cheap\nsilver watch which they raffled off almost daily until they had\n\"worked\" nearly all the printing offices of any size in town. These\ntypographical grafters are unworthy of the noble craft to which they\nbelong. They pretended to be jobless on account of last year's strike,\nand unable to live with their families on the money furnished by the\nunion.\n\n\nHOW SKIN RAFFLE IS WORKED.\n\nDuring the noon hour, or about closing or opening time, one of the men\nwould saunter into a composing room and put up a hard luck story. He\nhad an old silverine watch that he wanted to raffle off, if he could\nsell twenty tickets at 25 cents each. He usually managed to sell the\ntickets.\n\nAbout the time the drawing was to take place the confederate entered\nand cheerfully took a chance and won the watch without any difficulty.\nThus, they had the watch and the $5 also. They would split the money,\nand on the first convenient occasion the raffle would be repeated at\nanother place, and by some trick known to themselves the drawing was\nmanipulated so that the confederate always won the watch.\n\nA South Side woman recently had 500 raffle tickets printed, to be sold\nat 10 cents each, the drawing to be on Thanksgiving day, for a \"grand\nparlor clock,\" the proceeds to be for the benefit of a \"poor widow.\"\nAs the woman herself happens to be a grass widow, and as the place of\nthe drawing could not be learned, neither could there be obtained a\nsight of the clock, it is not difficult to guess the final destination\nof $50 for which the tickets were sold.\n\n\nPOPULAR GAME IN SALOONS.\n\nAt many saloons and cigar stores there is a continuous raffle in\nprogress for a \"fine gold watch.\" It is well for those who buy chances\nto inspect the time piece with a critical eye. One of these watches\nwas submitted to a jeweler by the man who won it. \"It's what we call\nan auction watch,\" said the expert. \"It is worth about 87 cents\nwholesale. The case is gilded, and the works are of less value than\nthe movement of a 69-cent alarm clock. It was keep time until the\nbrass begins to show through the plate, and it may not.\"\n\nOne of the attractive forms of the raffle ticket game is valuing the\ntickets at from 1 cent up to as high as desired. The man who buys a\nchance draws a little envelope containing his number. If he is lucky\nand draws a small number he is encouraged to try again. This is a\nsort of double gamble, and many men cannot resist the temptation to\nspeculate upon the chances, simply in order to have the fun of drawing\nthe little envelopes.\n\nOf course, many of the raffles are for cases of genuine charity, and\nit is an easy way to raise a fund for some worthy object. Many a\nperson would not accept an outright gift, even in case of sickness\nor death, will permit friends to raffle off a piano or a bicycle for\na good round price in order to obtain a fund to tide him over an\nemergency. To buy tickets for this kind of a raffle is praiseworthy.\n\n\nRAFFLE IS LOTTERY BY LAW.\n\nBut sharpers are not above getting money by the same means. If a\nstrange man, or a doubtful looking woman, wants to sell you a chance\nfor the benefit of \"an old soldier,\" or a \"little orphan girl,\" or a\n\"striker out of work,\" it might pay you to investigate.\n\nBut here is where the easy money comes in for the sharper. It is too\nmuch trouble to investigate, and the tender-hearted person would\nsooner give up the 10, 25 or 50 cents to an unworthy grafter than to\ntake chances of refusing to aid a case of genuine need.\n\nThen, too, there is what might be called a sort of legitimate raffle\nbusiness. Of course, the raffle is a lottery under the law, and,\ntherefore, is a criminal transaction. But in many cases goods of\nknown value, but slow sale, are disposed of through raffles, and\nthe drawings conducted honestly. A North Side man disposed of an\nautomobile in this way. It had been a good wagon in its day, though\nthe type was old. He wanted to get a new one, and as the makers would\nnot allow him anything in exchange for the old. He sold raffle tickets\nto the amount of $500, and the winner got a real bargain--the losers\npaying the bill.\n\n\nRAFFLES THAT ARE STEALS.\n\nA group of young men who wanted to build themselves a little club\nhouse in the Fox Lake region, resorted to a raffle that was almost a\ndownright steal. They had the printer make them tickets, and each one\nwent among his friends and organized a \"suit club,\" selling chances\nfor a $30 tailor-made suit. Of course those who invested understood\nthat the suit probably would be worth about $18, but they were\nsatisfied to help build the club house on that basis, and besides they\nthought they had a fair chance to get the suit.\n\nIt was learned afterward by accident that there were twenty \"series\"\nof tickets sold by these young men, and instead of each series\nstanding for a suit, only one drawing was held, and only a single\nsuit made for the entire twenty series of tickets. In other words,\nthey sold $500 worth of tickets for a $30 suit of clothes. They built\ntheir club house, however, and laughed at the man who kicked because\nhe thought he did not get a square deal for the half dozen tickets he\nbought. They thought it was a good joke.\n\n\nGRAFT OF TRAIN BUTCHER EASY.\n\nIn these days if anything gets past the up-to-date train butcher it\nisn't because the public knows any more than it did in Barnum's time.\nWe get a customer every minute by the birth records.\n\nFor a genuine, all-round, dyed-in-the-wool separator of coin from its\nproud possessor, the train butcher is the limit. Here is a word for\nword story by a train \"butch\" of how the thing is done. He excuses his\ntactics much the same way that the little rogue does who points out\nthat the giant malefactors are doing the same thing, but \"getting away\nwith it.\" Enter Mr. Butch.\n\n     \"I got back yesterday from a two days' trip--out and in.\n     I had $29.65 to the good, and the company satisfied, and\n     nary a kick from the railroad. At one little place down the\n     line, though, a railroad detective got aboard and tried to\n     detect.\n\n     \"'Say, young feller,' he said to me, 'I saw you go through\n     here yesterday lookin' pretty spruce, and I thought I'd\n     better take a look through yer grips as you came back. What\n     yer got in there?'\n\n     \"He kicked my grip, and I opened her up on the minute. He\n     went through it like an old goat through a cracker barrel,\n     but he didn't find anything--see? If he'd looked under the\n     cushion of a seat in the smoker he might have found a whole\n     lot of stuff that didn't look like a prayer meeting layout.\n\n\nWHAT WAS HIDDEN UNDER SEAT.\n\n     \"Say, I bet I had fourteen $2 gold watches, twenty\n     gold-rimmed spectacles that cost me 15 cents apiece, one\n     dozen books, tightly sealed in wrappers, that looked mighty\n     interesting to the jay who couldn't see into the books, and\n     yet who had to do it finally at $2 apiece, and, as a topper\n     of it all, my three-book monte game. Did you ever see the\n     game?\n\n     \"I've got a line of wild west books about two inches\n     thick, each, and costing me 40 cents a volume. They've\n     got some great pictures on the cloth covers, and maybe\n     there's some hot stuff inside--I don't know. But here's my\n     unparalleled offer: I pick out my man and lay these three\n     volumes across his knees in the car seat and go after him\n     with some of the warmest kind of air about their interest,\n     the binding, and the illustrations.\n\n     \"You pay me for the set,\" I explain, \"but in doing it I\n     give you a chance to get the books for nothing and at the\n     same time double your investment.\n\n\nHOW THREE BOOK MONTE IS PLAYED.\n\n     \"I take out three small, thin spelling books, cloth bound,\n     all alike as the bindery and the presses can make them.\n     Then, careless like, I take a $10 bill out of my pocket,\n     fold it across in a sort of V-shape and slip it into the\n     middle of one of the spelling books, so that just one\n     corner will stick out, probably a quarter of an inch. Of\n     course, I haven't seen it! Sometimes the man on the cars\n     will try to say something about it, but I cut in and drown\n     him out with easy talk till he gets the idea that he might\n     as well have that ten and the books for five, and let it go\n     at that.\n\n     \"But one corner all the time is torn off that bill, and\n     about a quarter of an inch of that bill is sticking out of\n     the center of one of the other books. Of course the jay\n     hasn't seen that!\n\n\nSHOWS CORNER OF BILL.\n\n     \"Well, I begin and shuffle the books on the payment of the\n     $5. As they are shuffled the corner of the bill that is\n     still attached gets turned around next to me, while the\n     corner that is torn off gets around next to the passenger,\n     whom I have cornered in the seat in a way that he can't see\n     everything that he really ought to see in order to save his\n     money. When I hold out the three books for the drawing I am\n     in a position where I couldn't possibly see the corner that\n     sticks out, while he is where he can't see anything else.\n\n     \"And he draws the book with the corner sticking out!\n\n     \"I take it from him instantly, and hold it up with the bill\n     corner at the bottom, flipping the leaves through from\n     front to back and forward again. In the act the corner of\n     the bill drops out on the floor, where he doesn't see. 'Not\n     here,' I says. 'You made a bad draw. Here's the bill,' I\n     says, taking up the book that holds it and turning to the\n     $10 bill, just where it lies. He doesn't know how it all\n     happened, but I console him that he has the three wild west\n     books for his library when he gets home.\n\n\nALL SUCKERS NOT IN DAY COACHES.\n\n     \"I don't find all these suckers in the day coaches--not on\n     your life. I found two pretty boys in the smoking room of a\n     sleeping car a week ago, and I had $7.50 from one of them\n     and $5 from the other, and they didn't know a line about it\n     till they got together after I had gone.\n\n     \"Friends of mine have kicked because I get $2, or $3, or\n     $4 apiece for gold-rimmed spectacles that cost me $1.80\n     a dozen. But where is the kick. I know men who have paid\n     $10 or $15 for glasses from an oculist when the glass was\n     cut out of a broken window pane. I save such people money,\n     don't I?\n\n     \"I am not out after the old farmer with hayseed in his hair\n     and leaf tobacco in his mouth, chewing. There are a lot\n     of gay chaps traveling these days who think they've got\n     the bulge on the train butcher by a sort of birthright or\n     something. They are after me, sometimes, till I can't go to\n     sleep after I come in from a run. For instance, the other\n     day a chap got into the train out of a little country town,\n     intending to go to another little town twenty miles away\n     without change of cars. He had $2 cash and a guitar when he\n     got on the train, but I had both when he got off. He wasn't\n     mad at all; he just didn't understand it. For that reason\n     I'll see him again one of these days, and he will buck the\n     game harder than he did the first time. The trouble is he\n     wants to vindicate himself; he's one of these smart alecs\n     that you couldn't down with a crowbar--he don't think!\n\n\nCOUNTRY TOWN \"SPORT\" EASIEST MARK.\n\n     \"Just give me the dead-game sport as he comes from the\n     country and the country town. He's as good as I want. It's\n     a sort of charity to take his money away from him before\n     he gets into real trouble with it. One of them thought he\n     had me the other day when I tried to sell him a pair of my\n     famous $4 glasses with the gold rims. His had silver, only,\n     but he told me mine wouldn't show a full moon after dark.\n\n     \"I asked him to let me see his specs and he handed them\n     over. I had a bit of wax out of my ear on the tip of my\n     little finger. I touched each of the glasses with the wax,\n     smearing them a little with it. That fixed his glasses for\n     good, and don't forget it. You can't get ear wax off a\n     pair of spectacles with anything yet invented; it's got a\n     sort of acid that eats into the glass and won't ever clear\n     up again. The fellow got hot about it, but I didn't know\n     anything, of course, and finally sold him a pair of my\n     $1.80 a dozen glasses for $1.50 cash, net.\n\n     \"O, some people are almost too easy--I get ashamed of my\n     calling!\"\n\n\nWOMEN VICTIMS OF OLD COUPON SCHEME.\n\nThere is another moss-grown swindle, which, like hope, seems to\n\"spring perennial\" in the greater cities.\n\nThis is the old-time coupon swindle. A suave young man appears at the\ndoor, inserts his foot in the crack, if you try to slam it in his\nface, and rapidly begins to explain that he has something to offer\nyou for nothing. The housewife sighs with resignation, and admits the\nsuave young man, thinking that she might as well get it over. But let\nthe housewife herself talk. Here is the story of a good woman who was\ncaught by one of these pettifogging grafters:\n\n     \"Since my husband died I have partly earned my living by\n     renting furnished rooms. This seems to be the first thing\n     a woman thinks of doing when she is left unprovided for,\n     but it isn't a business of large profits, and few of us\n     ever cut 'melons.' My furniture, of course, represented my\n     'plant,' and it was growing shabby.\n\n     \"That is, perhaps, why the glib agent got a hearing from\n     me. He had a lovely proposition. Opening a catalogue he\n     showed me pictures of beautiful pieces of furniture, made\n     from expensive materials, just the kind that would make my\n     rooms attractive and easy to rent.\n\n     \"'Now,' said he, 'I am soliciting subscriptions for a weekly\n     paper. This paper will cost you 10 cents a number, and with\n     each number you get a coupon. When you have accumulated\n     sixty-eight coupons you can bring them to our wareroom and\n     select any one of these elegant pieces of furniture.'\n\n     \"'Why,' said I, 'if these articles are as represented, I\n     couldn't buy them at any store in town for three times what\n     sixty-eight coupons would cost me--$6.80.'\n\n\nTHE OLD \"WAREROOM\" TALE.\n\n     \"'Call at our wareroom, lady, before you sign the contract,\n     and you will see they are just as described.'\n\n     \"Well, I saw the articles, and they were all they were said\n     to be. They explained that they were practically giving\n     them away in order to build up the circulation of the\n     paper. Everything appeared to be all right, and I signed\n     a contract. So did my widowed sister; so did some of my\n     neighbors.\n\n     \"The paper was worthless, but I didn't care. Sometimes I\n     would buy several copies of one issue so as to make haste\n     toward getting my sixty-eight coupons. The time came when\n     I went around to select my furniture. I selected it, all\n     right--a handsome chiffonier.\n\n     \"'This chiffonier calls for 360 coupons,' said the man.\n\n     \"'Why, your agent told me I could have any of these pieces\n     when I had accumulated sixty-eight coupons,' said I,\n     dismayed.\n\n     \"'He couldn't have told you that,' said the man. 'Read\n     your contract. You will see it says that when you have\n     sixty-eight coupons you may select any one of these\n     articles, but that means we will then hold the article for\n     you until you have paid the rest. Why, we have goods here\n     that call for 600 and 700 coupons.'\n\n     \"I saw how I had been swindled, and was furious. I told him\n     what I thought of him and his business, and he offered to\n     tear up my contract (which, it turned out, bound me to more\n     than I had dreamed of), if I would pay him an additional\n     $2.50. I refused. He said he would sue me if I didn't. I\n     told him to go ahead.\n\n     \"Shortly afterward a constable served a summons on me to\n     appear at a justice court at the other end of creation.\n     I didn't go; and I don't know whether the concern got a\n     judgment against me or not.\n\n     \"But I do know I haven't anything to show for the money I\n     paid for those coupons.\"\n\n\nBOOK LOVERS EASY PREY OF FRAUDS.\n\nBOGUS ART WORKS FINE GRAFT.\n\nSome of our citizens are paying a high price for education in art and\nbook swindles. People, generally, are becoming experts in detecting\nsmall frauds and attacks upon their pocketbooks, and are becoming wise\nto pious dodges that run into spiritualism, clairvoyance and fortune\ntelling, but when a large, smooth scheme is broached, they get caught.\nIt may be that we have concentrated our minds upon so many trifling\nschemes to part us from our money, that we have laid ourselves bare\nto big operators in big frauds like that perpetrated upon the Patten\nfamily of Evanston. The clever fakir reached for $40,000 in an \"old\nbook\" game and came very near gathering in the pot. He did get $2,600,\nwhich was a very neat job.\n\nIt appears that there is a wide-spread system under the operations of\nwhich Chicago book lovers, and others all over the country, have been\nbilked out of a sum estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars.\nThe same system is applied to paintings by the \"old masters,\" for\nwhich some Chicago men have paid fabulous sums, only to find them\nimitations. The expert frauds are geniuses in their peculiar calling,\nand would deceive the elect if listened to. A bright, smart, well\ngroomed man with letters of introduction from high quarters, often\nforged, perhaps with a title, breaks into society and bides his time\nto make a big haul. The vanity and foibles of the high-steppers and\nnobility worshipers are pandered to with masterly skill, and then a\nmere suggestion of untold values in books or paintings is breathed in\nsecret. Do the big fish bite? Some of them swallow the bait and it\nhas to be cut out of them before they will give it up. It is becoming\nso easy to gull some people, that the crime should consist in the\nbetrayal of innocence rather than in the successful fraud. While\nguillible people continue to parade their guillibility to the world,\nthere will always be frauds to take advantage of them. If anybody\ndoubts the fact that people can be easily defrauded, let him visit any\nold book store, antique furniture dealer, oriental rug concern, even\njunk shops. He will find an amazing army of faddists, who are willing\nto pay any exorbitant price for some cheap fraud because a gentlemanly\nman, or an opium-smoking Chinaman, tells him it is the real thing.\nWhen business is dull at the shops, agents visit front doors, back\ndoors, or invade society with some bogus job of \"art\" works and\nrealize enormous sums.\n\n\nMISERABLE LITTLE SHORT MEASURE THIEVES.\n\nIn the Municipal Court in South Chicago three extremely mean swindlers\nhave been fined $25 and costs. It is unfortunate that they could not\nhave been sent to the Bridewell without the alternative of paying the\nfine.\n\nFor these swindlers were coal dealers who robbed the poor that bought\ncoal by the basket. They STOLE money from their customers, just as the\nshort-measure milk trust conspirators robbed their patrons. We repeat\nthat they ought to be in the Bridewell.\n\nGiving short measure is the dirtiest, smallest, most cowardly form of\ncommercial rascality. The hold-up man who takes his life in his hand\nand robs on the public highway is a model of decency and courage as\ncompared with the pitiful rascal who steals the pennies of the poor by\nselling coal or milk or any other necessity of life by short weight.\n\nShort weight is larceny. It ought to be treated as larceny by law.\n\n\nCRIME A FINE ART.\n\nLiving by one's wits has become a fine art, and it is a profession\nthat is more liberally patronized than any other by the present\ngeneration. One of America's leading detectives remarked that there\nwere about seventy-five thousand people in a city the size of Chicago\nthat would bear watching. There isn't a bank, insurance office, dry\ngoods store, restaurant or hotel that does not employ men to watch\ntheir customers, and there is hardly a business house in the country\nthat has not some system of watching its employes. Everybody at this\nday seems to be afraid of everybody else.\n\n[Illustration: (Learn to paint)]\n\nProfessional criminals pride themselves quite as much upon their\nability as men engaged in legitimate occupations. A thief, for\ninstance, is as vain of his superiority over other thieves as a\nlawyer, politician, or clergyman might be whose talents had elevated\nhim to a commanding position in the eyes of the people. And the\ntalented thief is as much courted and sought after as the successful\nman in the honest walks of life. The other thieves will say: \"He is\na good man to know; I must make his acquaintance.\" But the thief who\nhas earned a reputation is particular about the company he keeps,\nand is scornful in his demeanor toward another thief whom he does not\nconsider his professional equal. Caste exists among criminals as well\nas among other classes.\n\nMen and women who are not living merely for today must be deeply\ninterested in the efforts which practical philanthropists are making\nto discover the causes of crime and to remedy the mischievous\nconditions which now prevail to such an alarming extent. Hidden away\nto a considerable degree in the great mass of figures which came\ninto being through the operations of the census bureau, are facts\nthat should shock every good citizen. With all the warmth of eulogy\nthe story of wonderful progress has been told again and again, but\nonly a few references have been made to the abnormal growth of what\nmay be termed by the criminal class. Forty years ago there was but\none criminal to 3,500 good or reasonably good citizens. According to\nthe last census the proportion was one in 786.5, an increase of 445\nper cent in a period during which the population increased but 170\nper cent. Never in the nation's history has educational work of all\ndescriptions been nearly so active as at present, yet the increase in\nthe number of those who were confined in penitentiaries and jails and\nreformatory institutions is almost twice as rapid as the growth of\npopulation.\n\n\nCITIES BREEDING SPOTS OF CRIME.\n\nThe true explanation of this unsatisfactory state of things is not\nfar to seek. It is almost entirely to be attributed to the growing\ntendency of the community to become concentrated in large cities. A\nhighly concentrated population fosters lawless and immoral instincts\nin such a multitude of ways that it is only an expression of literal\nexactitude to call the great cities of today the nurseries of modern\ncrime. Statistics of all kinds show this, but it can easily be\nascertained without the aid of any figures. The aggregation of large\nmultitudes within a very limited area must increase the chances of\nconflict, and consequently multiply the occasions for crime.\n\nA population in this crowded condition has also to be restrained and\nregulated at every turn by a huge network of laws, and as every new\nlaw forbids something which was permitted before, a multiplication of\nlaws is inevitably followed by an increase of crime.\n\nThe prevention of crime should be the great object with the\nphilanthropist. The obvious remedy is, if possible, to aid the\nindividual in overcoming the temptation to evil or to crime. The\nremedy must be general, gradual, and constant. It consists in\nreligious, moral, intellectual, and industrial education of the\nchildren, especially of the poor and unfortunate and the weakling\nclasses. The most certain preventive is the early incarnation of good\nhabits in children, which, becoming part and parcel of their nervous\norganization, are an unconscious force when passion, perplexity,\nor temptation tend to make them lose self-control. Little can be\nexpected from palliative remedies for social diseases so long as this\neducational remedy is not thoroughly carried out.\n\n\nAMERICA'S EDUCATED CRIMINAL CLASS.\n\nThe great mass of the American people, aside from those who have had\nexperience in hunting and shadowing criminals, labor under the popular\ndelusion that the most daring criminals of today are a lot of tough,\nignorant men, with little or no education at all, who would do almost\nanything else than work honestly for a living. If people would but\nstop to consider the subject a moment they would readily discover\ntheir error. There are, it is true, a large number of swindlers,\nthieves, pickpockets, thugs and criminals of a like class who have but\na scant knowledge of books, or literature, but they are only to be\nfound among the lower class of criminals. The most notorious criminals\nthe world has ever produced have been men and women of high culture\nand refinement, well educated and thoroughly posted on all that is\ntranspiring. It is this class of people who make the most successful,\nand at the same time most dangerous, criminals. It requires men of\neducation to swindle, crack a safe, rob a bank, jewelry store or forge\na paper. To be a successful confidence operator requires the man to be\nwell educated in matters of all kinds, to be a fluent talker, a person\nof refinement and polite address, and a good judge of character.\n\n\nREFINED CRIMINALS MOST DANGEROUS.\n\nCriminal history shows that the most successful jobs are always\nplanned and executed by men of education; the details of some of the\ngreat forgeries that have taken place, of the numerous bank robberies\nand burglar's exploits, all go to show the direction of a brain of no\nordinary person, being proof positive that the persons planning the\nwork possessed both education and talent. First class criminals are\nexceedingly hard to cope with, and are the most dangerous to handle\nby the officers. They do not generally do things in a rush or by\nhalves. Great care is given to all the minor details of their work,\nand it often takes weeks and months before they are ready to put their\nplans into operation. They study all the possibilities of the job;\nthe chances of success, and the way of escape in case of failure; how\nthey can cover all traces of the work and throw the guilt or suspicion\nupon the more unfortunate of their class who have had reputations and\nwho are likely to be brought up and possibly convicted on suspicion\nof being the guilty parties. Educated crooks are always to be feared,\nnot only by the public against whom they are constantly devising\nways and means to relieve of their valuables, but by detectives of a\nlesser grade. This class of crooks do not hesitate to sacrifice the\ndetective if their desired ends can be successfully accomplished,\nwhile the detective finds it a task of no little moment to gain even\nthe faintest clue to their operations.\n\n\nPRISON POOR CURE FOR CRIME.\n\nLocking a man up for committing a crime does not always cure him. It\nis now proven that affixed penalties to certain crimes accomplishes\npractically nothing, for it is based on a wrong principle. The length\nof confinement ought, confessedly, to be adjusted to the needs of\nthe prisoner. He should not be discharged from his moral hospital\nuntil there is reasonable assurance that he is cured. He certainly\nshould not be turned loose on society, on the mere expiration of a\nformal sentence, when it is known he will begin anew on his old life.\nProtection to society, as well as the reformation of the criminal,\ncall for the retention of the latter until he can be trusted with his\nliberty, and affords proof that he is fitted to take his place in the\nworld as a useful, law-abiding citizen. This system alone permits the\nfullest scope to reformatory methods, and leaves to the court the\nright of sentencing indefinitely, and to the tribunal which has to do\nwith the prisoner's release, to say when there is reasonable ground\nfor faith that if discharged he will not prove either a burden or\nmenace to society. Where conduct and character afford no such grounds\nhe should be incarcerated for life, just as we would retain hopeless\nlunatics in asylums.\n\n\nMACONOCHIE'S EXPERIMENT.\n\nThis form of sentence was first put into operation in a modified form\nby Maconochie, at Norfolk Island, in 1836, with a success in the way\nof reformatory results from the start which was unequalled. Now the\nbest authorities in penology in all countries not only commend it, but\nthe opinion is fast becoming general that it is a necessary feature in\nevery reformatory system of prison discipline. Of course it implies in\nprison management the highest wisdom and integrity, and especially the\nbanishment of partisan politics therefrom. It makes the dominant idea\nof prison administration manhood-making, and not money-making.\n\n\nFACES PORTRAY CHARACTER.\n\nEvery one knows that men's passions, propensities, and peculiarities,\nas well as their calling, are reflected in their faces.\n\nIt is as impossible to disguise a face as a handwriting. When the\nexpert comes the disguise is torn off and the face tells the true\nstory of the spirit inside the body. One only needs to visit the\npenitentiary to realize how undeniably vice writes its sign manual\non the features. It is not the drunkard only whose red nose, flabby\ncheeks and rheumy eyes betray him; it is the senualist whose vice is\nread in his lips, the knave whose propensity is revealed in the shape\nof his mouth; the man of violence is surrendered by his eyes. An\nexperienced detective policeman, or a trained jailer seldom needs to\nask the crime of which the prisoner was guilty. He can tell it by his\nface.\n\nIt is quite evident that in the future the study of physiognomy is\ngoing to be pursued more vigorously than it has been. As a means of\npreventing crime it may prove invaluable. How constantly do we hear of\nmen \"falling from grace,\" as the phrase goes. Yet these men must have\ncarried their crime in their faces for a long time. If any one had\nbeen able to read their features the mischief might have been averted.\nIt is well known that every man's face is more or less stamped by the\npursuit he follows. An experienced observer can generally detect a\nlawyer, or a doctor, or a merchant, or a clerk, or a mechanic, or a\nclergyman, by merely studying his face.\n\nThe instinctive criminal is a social parasite. The conclusion is\nirresistible that he is organically morbid. He will proceed to any\nextreme, and life and property, separating him from the accomplishment\nof his wishes, are but barriers to be overcome. The occasional\ncriminal is largely a negative creature, who yields himself when\ntemptation and the stimulus of opportunity exceed his resistive power.\nThe habitual and professional criminal represents degree rather than\nkind. Criminality is to him a profession, a fine art, and susceptible\nof division into specialties.\n\n\nCRIMINAL HEADS NOT EXTRAORDINARY.\n\nThe average heads of criminals and those of ordinary people probably\ndo not vary much in size. A large brain does not necessarily indicate\ngreat intelligence any more than a small one mental deficiencies,\nthis being true, as little importance can be attached to the weight\nof brains of criminals. The weight of Oliver Cromwell's brain was\n82.29 ounces; Lord Byron's, 79 ounces; Cuvier's, 64 ounces; Ruloff's\n(a thief and murderer), 59 ounces; adult idiot's, 54.95 ounces;\nDaniel Webster's, 53.50 ounces, and Gambetta's, that of the size of a\nmicrocephalic idiot.\n\nA face may either attract or repel; its lines indicate firmness\nand decision, or weakness and sensuousness. In physiognomy may be\ntraced fineness or brutality, surfeit or privation, gentleness or\nirascibility; yet from a consideration of the face it is assuming\ntoo much to predicate the form of criminal tendencies, if any, on\nthe subject. Criminal physiognomy is not yet an exact science. The\npractical criminologist regards criminality as bred in the bone and\nborn in the flesh, and the ethology of crime to be looked for chiefly\nis in heredity and environment, using the word environment in its most\nliberal sense, ante and post-natal, and whatever cause, in whatever\nway, that exerts a deleterious influence upon nutrition and the\nfunctions of organic life, voluntary and involuntary.\n\nLittle is being done in this country in criminal anthropology that can\ncompare with the studies and researches that are being carried on in\nItaly, France, and Germany. The student unacquainted with the language\nof these countries pursues his studies at a disadvantage, owing to the\npaucity of literature in English upon the subject.\n\nThe tide of crime is steadily rising. The level of criminality, it is\nwell known, is rising, and has been rising during the whole of the\nNineteenth and Twentieth centuries, throughout the civilized world.\nIts prevention and cure is a perplexing study, and is engaging the\nthoughts and energies of the best intellects of the world.\n\n\n\n\nDETECTIVE CLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE'S\n\n_\"Never-Fail\" System_\n\n\nTHE ONLY SURE WAY TO BEAT:\n\nTURF FRAUDS.\n\nWILD CAT INSURANCE.\n\nBOGUS SECURITIES, CONFIDENCE GAMES.\n\nCITY-LOT SWINDLES.\n\nHOME-BUYING SWINDLES.\n\nDISHONEST DEBENTURE BOND COMPANIES.\n\nFRAUDULENT PROMOTERS.\n\n\"SALTED\" MINING AND OIL WELLS COMPANIES.\n\nBUCKET SHOPS.\n\nBLIND POOLS IN GRAIN AND STOCKS.\n\nPANEL HOUSES.\n\nBOGUS MAIL ORDER HOUSES.\n\nPOKER, FARO AND OTHER GAMBLING GAMES.\n\nMATRIMONIAL BUREAUS.\n\nCOUNTERFEIT UNDERWRITERS.\n\nFRAUDULENT BOOK CONCERNS.\n\nDISHONEST COLLECTION AGENCIES.\n\nADULTERATED MEDICINE DEALERS.\n\nWIRE TAPPERS.\n\nFAKE BROKERS.\n\nBOGUS CHARITIES.\n\nSPURIOUS EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES.\n\nSWINDLE PROMOTERS.\n\nMUSHROOM BANKS.\n\nCLAIRVOYANTS.\n\nFORTUNE TELLERS.\n\nPALMISTS.\n\n$1,000 REWARD WILL BE PAID TO ANYONE WHO USES DETECTIVE CLIFTON R.\nWOOLDRIDGE'S NEVER-FAIL SYSTEM AND FAILS TO BEAT THE ABOVE SWINDLES.\n\nDO NOT RISK YOUR MONEY WITHOUT HAVING FIRST CAREFULLY INVESTIGATED\nTHE CHARACTER OF THE ENTERPRISE IN WHICH YOU ARE INVITED TO BECOME\nFINANCIALLY INTERESTED.\n\nBE CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASONABLE DOUBT THAT THE MEN CONNECTED WITH\nTHE ENTERPRISE ARE ABOVE SUSPICION.\n\nIF THEIR PROBITY, INTEGRITY OR RELIABILITY CAN NOT BE ESTABLISHED BY\nPAST TRANSACTIONS IT IS CERTAIN THEIR HONESTY WILL NOT BE DISCLOSED BY\nFUTURE DEALINGS.\n\nDO NOT INVEST IN ANY COMPANY, CORPORATION, OR PRIVATE CONCERN UNTIL\nTHE MANAGEMENT HAS FURNISHED INDISPUTABLE PROOF OF ITS ABILITY TO\nFULFILL EVERY PROMISE.\n\nLEAVE SPECULATION TO THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD TO LOSE.\n\nLARGE GAINS ON SMALL INVESTMENTS USUALLY EXIST ONLY IN THE IMAGINATION\nOF GULLIBLE INVESTORS AND UNSCRUPULOUS PROMOTERS.\n\nLARGE RISKS INCUR LARGE LOSSES.\n\nNO MAN WILL \"LET YOU INTO A GOOD THING;\" HE WILL KEEP IT FOR HIMSELF\nAND HIS FRIENDS.\n\nPROMOTERS ARE NOT IN BUSINESS TO MAKE MONEY FOR YOU, BUT \"OUT OF YOU.\"\n\nCONTENT YOURSELF WITH LEGITIMATE INVESTMENTS AND SMALL BUT SAFE\nRETURNS.\n\nRATHER THAN SEEK GREAT PROFITS WITHOUT TOIL STRIVE FOR THE DESERVED\nFRUITS OF INDUSTRY.\n\nNO MAN WILL GIVE YOU A DOLLAR FOR FIFTY CENTS--UNLESS THE DOLLAR IS\nCOUNTERFEIT.\n\nDO NOT PAY OUT YOUR OWN GOOD MONEY FOR ANOTHER MAN'S BOGUS DOLLARS.\n\nIF THE PROMOTER COULD DO ONE-HALF OF WHAT HE CLAIMS, HE WOULD NOT NEED\nYOUR MONEY, BUT SOON WOULD BE RICH BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE.\n\nDO NOT INVEST YOUR HARD-WON SAVINGS IN VANISHING AIR CASTLES.\n\nPROMISES WHICH PROCEED FROM A DESIRE TO GET YOUR MONEY ALWAYS MERIT\nSUSPICION. SUBJECT THEM TO THE MOST CAREFUL AND RIGID EXAMINATION.\n\nADOPT THE BANKER'S RULE THAT: \"ALL MEN SHOULD BE REGARDED AS DISHONEST\nUNTIL THEIR HONESTY IS PROVED,\" RATHER THAN THE SUCKER'S THEORY THAT\n\"ALL MEN ARE HONEST.\"\n\nTHE BANKER WILL END LIFE POSSESSED OF WEALTH WHILE THE CREDULOUS\nOPTIMIST WHOSE FAITH IS UNBOUNDED WILL WIND UP HIS DAYS \"A POORER BUT\nWISER MAN.\"\n\nWHEN IN DOUBT DO NOTHING.\n\nIF A PROMOTER CAN NOT DISPEL YOUR DOUBTS HE IS NOT WORTHY OF YOUR\nCONFIDENCE.\n\nDO NOT FOLLOW SIREN CHANCE. SHE WILL LEAD YOU INTO THE ABYSS OF\nDESPAIR.\n\nBEWARE OF THE DICE; THERE IS BUT ONE GOOD THROW WITH THEM--THROW THEM\nAWAY. THEY WERE USED TO CAST LOTS FOR THE BLOOD-STAINED GARMENTS OF\nJESUS CHRIST; THEY ARE USED TO GAMBLE AWAY THE HONOR OF MEN.\n\nPLAY NOTHING, INVEST IN NOTHING, BUY NOTHING, TRUST NO MAN OR WOMAN\nUNTIL YOU HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THE ENTERPRISE IS LEGITIMATE BEYOND\nQUESTION.\n\nAVOID THE MISTAKE OF THAT GREATEST FOOL OF ALL FOOLS, THE MAN WHO\nTHINKS HE IS TOO SMART TO BE FOOLED.\n\nYOU ARE NOT SHREWD ENOUGH TO BEAT ANY MAN AT HIS OWN GAME; HE HAS\nSTUDIED ITS MANIPULATIONS; YOU ARE A NOVICE.\n\nDON'T LET ANYONE STAMPEDE YOU INTO DOING ANYTHING. THE \"RUSH\" ACT\nIS A FAVORITE TRICK OF GRAFTERS, FROM THE CHEAP CADGER WHO BORROWS\nSMALL CHANGE TO THE INVESTMENT BROKER WHO OFFERS AN OPPORTUNITY TO\nRISK A FORTUNE IN \"THE CHANCE OF A LIFE-TIME\" THAT MUST BE SNAPPED UP\nIMMEDIATELY OR LOST FOREVER.\n\nWHEN A MAN TRIES TO HURRY YOU INTO SPENDING YOUR MONEY PUT IT BACK IN\nYOUR POCKET AND KEEP YOUR HAND ON IT.\n\nUSE CAUTION, REASON AND COMMON SENSE.\n\nDO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU. MOST OTHERS WILL\n\"DO\" YOU IF YOU GIVE THEM A CHANCE.\n\nIF YOU ARE MARKED AS ONE OF THE GEESE READY FOR PLUCKING BY\nGET-RICH-QUICK SWINDLERS THEY WILL SEND YOU LITERATURE THROUGH THE\nMAILS. SAVE EVERY CIRCULAR, LETTER OR OTHER COMMUNICATION TOGETHER\nWITH THE ENVELOPES AND SEND THEM TO THE POSTOFFICE INSPECTOR IN THE\nTOWN FROM WHICH THEY WERE SENT.\n\nBE SURE TO SEND THE ENVELOPES WITH THE LITERATURE AS THE\nCOMMUNICATIONS CANNOT BE ADMITTED AS EVIDENCE UNLESS THE ORIGINAL\nWRAPPERS OR ENVELOPES IN WHICH THEY WERE MAILED ARE OFFERED WITH THEM.\nTHE POSTMASTER WILL INSTRUCT HOW TO FORWARD THE COMPLAINT.\n\nPROSECUTION OF THE SWINDLERS WILL SURELY FOLLOW.\n\nIF YOU ARE IN DOUBT ABOUT THE CHARACTER OF THE CONCERN WHICH INVITES\nYOU TO INVEST YOUR MONEY, CONSULT A LAWYER, BANKER OR REPUTABLE\nCOMMERCIAL AGENCY.\n\nIntending investors should remember that:\n\n\"SURE TIPS\" are sure bait for sure fools.\n\nWhen you hear stocks have gone up and men who bought them cheap have\nsold them at high prices and gained fortunes suspect your informant.\nIf he seeks to induce you to invest be assured he is a GET-RICH-QUICK\ngrafter.\n\nMany swindlers wear the garb of respectability; they even cloak their\nrascality with piety. Many men accepted by the world as honorable\nmembers of society spend their lives living on the credulity of the\nignorant, and when they die go to the grave followed by hordes of\ndupes who mourn their end.\n\nThese swindlers await you at every turn; on the race-track; in the\nsaloon; with the poker deck and the ivory dice; with watered stock\nand fraudulent bonds; with prayers on their lips and designs in their\nminds to defraud you.\n\nTHERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN HONEST GAMBLER.\n\nEvery gambling game is a dishonest scheme. You seek to get the other\nman's money without giving him anything in return.\n\nYou are not entitled to one penny unless you give value in return. If\nyou are in business you know that every promissory note, to be valid,\nmust bear on its face two words, \"value received.\"\n\nINDUSTRY, ENERGY, THRIFT! These are the dice that win. The lesson is\nhard to learn for the young.\n\nHe has anxious days and feverish nights who risks at chance what\nshould be devoted to the nobler ends of life; who \"makes throws\" on\nthe green cloth; who watches the snake-like tape squirm out of the\nticker; or gazes at a bunch of horses running around a ring.\n\nGIVE IT ALL UP AND ADOPT HONEST MEANS OF PROCURING WEALTH!\n\n\n\n\nThe Best Rules for Health, Happiness and Success.\n\nTHEY ARE WORTH THE ATTENTION AND THOUGHT OF ALL READERS.\n\n\n     1. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.\n\n     2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.\n\n     3. Never spend your money before you have earned it.\n\n     4. Never buy what you don't want because it is cheap.\n\n     5. Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold.\n\n     6. We seldom repent of eating too little.\n\n     7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.\n\n     8. How much pain the evils have cost us that have never\n        happened.\n\n     9. Take things always by the smooth handle.\n\n     10. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry,\n         count a hundred.\n\n     11. Watch the small things.\n\n     12. Laziness is a vice--fight it.\n\n     13. Do your honest best--it pays.\n\n     14. Without self-respect you cannot gain respect.\n\n     15. Trickery's triumph is fleeting.\n\n     16. Remember that opportunity waits only on worth.\n\n     17. Cultivate love, loyalty and respect for\n         work--especially your own work.\n\n     18. It is not enough to be honest and lazy.\n\n     19. Try to keep your mind clean--evil and success will not\n         mix.\n\n     20. If responsibility confronts you, seize it. Do not throw\n         it aside--responsibility represents opportunity.\n\nSome of these sayings will strike you as very old and lacking in\nnovelty. But, old as these rules are, human beings have not yet\nlearned to follow them. And they won't learn for many a long year.\n\nWe shall not moralize about them all today, only one or two we want to\nemphasize.\n\n\"Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.\"\n\nIf you work willingly, if you make yourself realize that willing\neffort is easy, AND THE ONLY KIND THAT MAKES YOU GROW AND SUCCEED, you\nwill solve one of your big working problems.\n\nDid you ever see a small boy walking ahead of a band, with the music\nplaying?\n\nAnd did you ever see the same small boy walking half the distance to\nget a newspaper for his father? Walking with the band rests him; it\ndoesn't tire him at all, BECAUSE HE DOES IT WILLINGLY. And the other\nkind of walking takes the very heart out of him and makes him almost\ntoo tired to eat his dinner.\n\nIt is exactly that way with all the work we do in this world. When\nyou do things willingly, with the heart and the nerves and the brain\nacting with one another cheerfully, work is easy AND SUCCESS FOLLOWS.\n\nA willing FOOL may lag behind an unwilling man of intelligence. But\neven a willing fool is happier in the end than an unwilling one, and,\nall things being even, the employe working WILLINGLY will cease being\nan employe and have others working for him sooner than the other man.\n\nPRIDE COSTS MORE THAN HUNGER, THIRST AND COLD.\n\nThis applies to all kinds of foolish vanity. It applies to the young\nman who never does anything, BECAUSE HE IS TOO PROUD TO DO WHAT HE HAS\nTHE CHANCE TO DO.\n\nIt applies to men and women who squander on dress and show the money\nthat they need for more serious purposes.\n\nIt applies to those that in old age have no money saved up, BECAUSE\nPRIDE SPENT THEIR MONEY AS FAST AS THEY GOT IT.\n\nThe pride that keeps men honest, the pride that makes men truthful,\nnever kept a man back or hurt him.\n\nThe bad kind of pride is the pride which can be described as \"the\ncoward's pride.\" Men are foolishly and cowardly proud BECAUSE THEY ARE\nAFRAID OF WHAT OTHER MEN WILL THINK. Money that they cannot afford\nthey spend helping other men to drink too much, BECAUSE THEY ARE\nASHAMED TO BE THOUGHT STINGY OR MEAN.\n\nMen squander in keeping up appearances money that should be saved for\nanother day, for a good business opportunity, because they are too\ncowardly to be guided by their own judgment, and ignore what others\nmay THINK about them.\n\nSelf-respect is one thing; foolish pride, vanity, moral cowardice, are\nvery different. Get rid of them.\n\nAll the advice from these 20 rules is good advice. The man who can\nkeep his temper while he thinks--whether he count ten or a million--is\na lucky man.\n\nA man in a rage is a man whose BRAIN IS NO LONGER WORKING. And the man\nwhose brain isn't working is at the mercy of the man whose brain IS\nworking.\n\nWorry about the FUTURE troubles is a curse with many men. It prevents\ntheir working well TODAY.\n\nOvereating, and especially eating at the wrong time, is a great evil\nin this country. If men would learn to eat heartily only when their\nday's work is done, WHEN THEIR MINDS MUST NO LONGER BE CONCENTRATED,\nTHEY WILL SAVE THEIR STOMACHS AND ACCOMPLISH TWICE THE AMOUNT OF WORK\nIN THEIR LIVES.\n\nRead these rules over, and moralize on them for yourselves and for\nyour children.\n\n\n\n\nCOINING CUPID'S WILES.\n\n     How Matrimonial Agencies Prey on the Public--Their\n     Degeneration Into the Worst Forms of Crime.\n\n     $1,000,000 Secured by These Get-Rich-Quick Schemers\n     Discovered by Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge, Chicago's\n     Famous Police Detective.\n\n     125 matrimonial agencies in Chicago raided and closed in\n     the last five years.\n\n     4,500,000 matrimonial letters seized and destroyed.\n\n     1,500,000 matrimonial agencies' stock letters seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n     1,400,000 matrimonial stock photographs seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n     500,000 photographs sent to the matrimonial agencies by\n     men and women who were seeking their affinities seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n     40 wagon loads of matrimonial literature seized and\n     destroyed.\n\n\nOne of the most insidious forms of crime is the Matrimonial Agency.\nSeemingly harmless, or at most merely foolish, is the Matrimonial\nAgency at its inception.\n\nBut step by step within the past few years we have seen the\nMatrimonial Agency turned into a volcano belching forth fraud,\nswindling, bigamy, desertion, and finally ghastly wholesale murder.\n\nWe have seen the Matrimonial Agency sweep the whole range of the\nworld of crime from the petty thieving of a Carson to the almost\nunbelievable horrors of the Gunness Farm.\n\n[Illustration: THE SORROWS OF CUPID\n\n\"He Does Not See All the Rocks Ahead When He Brings Two Young People\nTogether\"--Beatrice Fairfax.]\n\nAnd this monster is hydra-headed. Stamp it out in one place and it\nimmediately reappears in another. Send a \"manager\" to prison once,\ntwice, ten times, and the minute the prison doors are open he is back\nat the old stand doing business.\n\nSomething of the tremendous efforts being put forth to stamp out\nthis evil may be gained from the headlines of this story, where the\nstrenuous work of Detective Wooldridge of Chicago is summarized.\n\nChicago has been and is today infested by a formidable community of\nmatrimonial agencies who invade all ranks of life. They promote many\nspecious schemes to lure the elusive dollar from the pockets of unwary\nvictims. These operatives are sharp, smooth and unscrupulous--the most\ndangerous of criminal perverts.\n\nWere the census enumerators of the United States to compile a list\nof the \"sucker\" public the gullible ones would aggregate tens of\nmillions. There is not a township in this great nation that does not\ncontain its portion of confiding persons who are ready to believe\nanything, from the rankest catch-penny advertisement to a fallacy in\ntheological dogma.\n\nThey are willing to open up their hearts to unknown matrimonially\ninclined correspondents; to accept as gospel the incredible statements\nof impostors and to pay out money gained by hard toil for something\nwhich the reason of a child should tell them it is beyond the power of\nman to provide.\n\nThey are easy prey alike to religious and political impostors and\nunscrupulous adventurers. Investigations for years past into the\ninnermost secrets of swindlers, and the observations incidental to\nofficial experience disclosing how victims are drawn into the net of\nthe grafter, impel the belief that the faith of many persons passes\nbeyond the bounds of credulity into the domain of imbecility.\n\nMen and women who are engaged in promoting matrimonial agencies are\nguilty of crime. It is opposed to the fundamental principles of\nsociety. Such a practice should under no circumstances be tolerated.\nIt is inconsistent with the highest ideals of what should constitute\nthe proper marriage relations.\n\n\nHUMAN DERELICTS ARE DUPES.\n\nHuman derelicts of a low mental caliber are the dupes of these\nmatrimonial agencies. Few people know that such schemes as these are\ncarried out. Few know that advertisements by men of wealth, women of\nculture and pretty widows who seek matrimonial alliances are merely\nmeans by which scoundrels get a revenue.\n\n\nMATRIMONIAL AGENTS' METHODS.\n\nTo describe adequately the technicalities of the marriage agencies\nand bureau swindlers' methods would be impossible without presenting\nactual copies of documents necessary to the system. Early in the\ninvestigations the discovery was made that the scores of matrimonial\nagencies, \"introduction bureaux\" and \"marriage clubs\" were using\npractically the same literature. Few departed from the stereotyped\nplan for \"pulling the suckers on.\" For the most part the prospectuses\nand \"follow-up\" letters were identical.\n\nAs often happened, however, when a victim was \"landed right\" and\nventured to Chicago from his distant rural retreat prepared to carry\nout in earnest the game that had been worked upon him in a spirit of\nmercenary recklessness, the methods of handling him were varied in\nrespect to both finesse and effectiveness.\n\nAny person familiar with the uses of the typewriter easily could have\ndiscovered that the \"personal\" letters received from time to time were\nnothing more than circulars printed by the thousands. So vast was the\nnumber of the gullible that seldom, if ever, was an actual, bona fide\nletter sent in reply to those from the victims.\n\nSpace was left at the top of the stock letters for the insertion\nof the name of the person to whom it was sent. In their haste the\nswindlers often begrudged the time necessary to change the \"Dear\nSir\" to \"Dear Miss\" or \"Dear Madam\" when a woman was addressed on\nstationery intended for male clients.\n\n[Illustration: (Men on knees, arms stretched towards large image of\na heart-shaped lady)]\n\n[Illustration: NOTICE! SHE'S ENGAGED BUT ENGAGEMENTS HAVE BEEN BROKEN\nSO HURRY BEFORE THE WEDDING BELLS HAVE RUNG.... GOING! GOING! THIRD\nAND LAST CALL!]\n\n\nNO TRUST HERE.\n\nThe general uniformity of the literature was at first thought by\nme to indicate that the matrimonial agencies were banded together\nin a gigantic trust. But later I learned that as they increased in\nnumber the newcomers exhibited conscienceless audacity in copying the\nforms used by their predecessors. It was also found in some cases\nseveral matrimonial agencies were operated from one address and\none or two men, or a man and his wife would represent half a dozen\nconcerns by changing names and locations every thirty or sixty days.\nBecause of these facts and the added fact that whoever compiled the\noriginal forms from which the others copied, realized, he was in an\nillegitimate business, the plagiarists were never prosecuted. Thus the\nbuncombe administered to the suckers became uniform in phraseology.\n\nIf a person desired to make assurance doubly sure for gaining wealth\nand marital bliss and he applied to several agencies at the same\ntime, the same mail would bring him letters from each matrimonial\nagency with which he communicated, worded identically. They would be\nmimeograph copies, and the only difference in their appearance would\nbe in the printed heading indicating the name of the agency. The name\nof the recipient would often be written at the top in ink different in\ncolor from the body of the letter.\n\n\nWORKING THE DOUBLE CROSS.\n\nThe usual beginning is a small subscription fee paid for a\n\"matrimonial\" paper. This paper contains alleged descriptions of men\nand women, principally the latter, who are claimed by the publisher\nto be seeking wives or husbands through the matrimonial agency. The\nsubscriber who becomes interested in any of the descriptions is\nmade to pay a fee for more detailed information and alleged record\nof the financial circumstances of the person. There is sometimes\nan additional fee for a photograph. This picture may or may not be\none of the person described, but that matters little. Almost any\nold photograph will serve the purpose. In all the raids made on\nmatrimonial agencies collections of photographs have been found.\n\nThat tens of thousands of otherwise intelligent men and women\nshould either entrust pictures of themselves to an agency by which\nit is to be sent out to unknown persons, or should even begin such\nnegotiations as those carried on through the matrimonial agency, is\nincomprehensible.\n\nThe money derived in the aggregate from subscriptions to the\nmatrimonial paper, the fees for particulars and those for photographs\nand miscellaneous \"services\" amount to large sums. With many of the\nagencies the services stop at this point, but many others undertake\npersonal introductions of lonesome maids and widows to the invariably\n\"honest and affectionate\" bachelors and widowers, and when this is\ndone there are other fees, depending altogether on how much the\nvictims appear to be willing to stand.\n\nA large number have been found and suppressed in which there was but\none lonesome maid or widow and one honest and affectionate bachelor\nor widower, the former being the woman accomplice of the manager of\nthe agency and the latter the manager himself. They answer love-lorn\ncorrespondents of both sexes and select for victims those believed\nto have the most money. If the assistant to the manager is posing as\nthe possible bride in the case the wife hunter must make satisfactory\nsettlements with the manager for conducting the negotiations, and\nthis amount, with that which the accomplice is able to secure from\nthe victim, amounts often to a considerable sum. After the victim\nis separated from his money something happens to prevent the happy\nconclusion of the marriage negotiations.\n\n\nTWO WELL-DEFINED FORMS.\n\nThere are two well-defined forms of the \"matrimonial agent.\" The one\nis the man who openly runs an agency, who advertises \"golden-haired\nyoung ladies, worth half a million dollars,\" \"blue-eyed widows of\nlanguishing temperaments\" and \"wealthy farmers.\" It is through\nthis class of \"bureau\" that the great crimes of the matrimonial\nbusiness have been engineered. Hoch, Mrs. Gunness, Holmes and other\narch-criminals made good use of this type.\n\nThe other type is just the plain swindler. The man who works along\nthe secondary lines, as they may be called, would scorn to be a\nmatrimonial agent. He is either a reverend gentleman of the cloth,\na minister to whom some languishing widow is looking for spiritual\ndirection, and he thinks that she \"needs she should get married,\" to\nquote the East Side phraseology; or he is a lawyer who has a wealthy\nclient, who, not being a business woman, is incapable of running her\nown affairs, and he again thinks of marriage as a solution; or, again,\nhe is \"an employment agency.\" This secondary type is generally a cheap\nsort, grafting on the gullible for five or ten dollars, or even as\nhigh as $100.\n\n\nCONCRETE EXAMPLES.\n\n\nTYPE NO. 1.\n\nSeptember 8, 1905, John H. Harris, 168 Hamlin avenue, editor and\npublisher of The Pilot, a marriage agency paper, and manager of\na cheap mail order house, was raided and arrested by Detective\nWooldridge.\n\nAmong the letters seized were complaints from his patrons. They\nreceived no returns for money paid him, and averred his paper was\nbeing used to blackmail men and women. Complaints were also made that\nmany of the names which appeared in the paper were not authorized, and\nother names attached to the order were forgeries.\n\nThe following is the copy of a letter dated September 1, 1906, and is\nonly one among hundreds of others sent out by the thousands by Harris.\nMany more thousands were sent through the mail to his sub-agents, who\nworked on a commission. This agent employed other agents, who started\nan endless chain by copying the letter and having the friends do\nlikewise.\n\n          Chicago. Ill., Sept. 1, 1905.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     We have a very recent application from a brown-eyed widow\n     of 41, medium size, musical, has no children. She informs\n     us that she has recently come into possession of a fortune\n     of over FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS, and that she wishes\n     to marry an honest, affectionate gentleman. We also have\n     a recent application from a pretty, blue-eyed lady of 20,\n     who estimates her present means at FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS,\n     and her inheritance at twenty thousand dollars. Her form is\n     graceful, her education good, her disposition gentle and\n     she desires a steady, honest husband. We believe she would\n     start her husband in business. And to accommodate those\n     ladies and quickly find a husband for them we make the\n     following SPECIAL OFFER:\n\n     Fill out the coupon at the bottom, and send it to us with\n     one dollar (and six postage stamps) and enclose a sealed\n     and stamped letter to either or both of the ladies referred\n     to above. We will immediately mail your letter to the lady\n     or ladies, and place your name on our books, and send you a\n     certificate of membership for six months, and send you the\n     full names and addresses of the handsome widow of means,\n     and the handsome blue-eyed maiden of means, and also send\n     you a list of names and addresses of other ladies of means\n     and otherwise. And until you are married, or until the\n     end of six months, we will, on or about the first of each\n     month, mail you a list of descriptions, names and addresses\n     of ladies of means and otherwise, without application from\n     you or any expense to you. We have good reason to believe\n     that either of the ladies mentioned above would make you a\n     good wife, but if they do not meet your approval you can\n     select one who will from the stream of ladies of means\n     and otherwise who are constantly requesting us to secure\n     husbands for them, which enables us to introduce you to\n     those whom you would be pleased to meet with a view to\n     marriage.\n\n        Faithfully yours,\n            JOHN H. HARRIS.\n              _Pub. of The Pilot._\n\n     JOHN H. HARRIS,\n     Chicago, Ill.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     I herewith enclose $1.12 as full payment on the above offer.\n\n     Name---- Postoffice----\n\n     Street, or Box No---- State----\n\nUnited States Inspector of Mails at Chicago Postoffice R. W. McAfee\ncompelled John H. Harris to furnish him with the names and addresses\nof the two women heiresses who were worth $40,000 and $500,000,\nrespectively, who were just dying for the want of a good, kind husband\nto spend their money for them, and were seeking marriage through his\npaper and matrimonial agency.\n\n[Illustration: (Interest in Science; Marriage)]\n\nHarris gave the name of Mrs. H. R. Adams, at Huntington, Md., as the\n$40,000 woman and Jennie Ziehler, Lawrence, Mass., as the $500,000\nwoman. Upon investigation it was found that neither of the women was\nworth a dollar. The $500,000 woman was in the insane asylum.\n\nThis letter, together with The Pilot, marriage paper and its printed\nadvertisements, was plainly intended to draw the unwary and deprive\nthe ignorant of their savings.\n\nJohn H. Harris then appealed to ex-Mayor Edward F. Dunne of Chicago,\nunder the alias of A. Ingird, taxpayer, citizen and reputable business\nman, to have Detective Wooldridge stopped from further interfering\nwith him or his business. Men who operate these frauds pretend to\nbe honest and high-minded; by constant practice of their wiles upon\nothers they develop self-deception and come to believe in their own\nhonesty to such an extent that when questioned they assume a good\ncounterfeit of honest indignation.\n\nMayor Dunne upon investigation learned the large mass of evidence\ngathered, and ordered the investigation to go forward, which, resulted\nin the arrest and holding over of John H. Harris to the Grand Jury.\n\n\nCOMMITS SUICIDE.\n\nThese complaints and evidence were turned over to Colonel James\nStuart, Chief Inspector of the Mails at the Chicago Postoffice, for\nfurther investigation. A fraud order was requested. On August 18,\n1907, Mr. Harris committed suicide by blowing out his brains at 168 N.\nHamlin avenue, Chicago, Illinois, after the mask had been pulled off\nand his methods exposed.\n\nOne is unable to state whether John H. Harris is opening a mail order\nhouse, paper and marriage agency in the other world. When he left he\ndid not leave word where he would make his next stop, but if he went\nto the other world, we are not informed that wireless telegraph or\nballoon companies have as yet perfected the lines of transportation\nor communication.\n\nHarris is a fairly representative and concrete expression of the\nregulation matrimonial agent. It was through such agencies as his that\nthe great crimes eventually were pulled off.\n\n\nSECONDARY TYPES.\n\nBut in the following letters we have an excellent example of the\nsecond type, the little grafter who wants anything you can give, from\n$5 to $100. From the text of the letters it will be observed that this\nman was operating as a minister, a lawyer and an employment agency at\none and the same time, as the letters are all from one source.\n\nIn the case of the lawyer this scoundrel was trading upon the name of\nEdward H. Morris, one of the foremost  attorneys of the United\nStates, a man universally respected and admired by men in all walks\nof life. When the fact of this trading on his name was brought to the\nreal attorney's attention he was furious, and he cheerfully gave all\nthe assistance in his power to Detective Wooldridge.\n\nThis smooth one was afterward arrested in New Orleans, convicted and\nsent to prison for a term.\n\nHere follows the text of the letters:\n\n\nMATRIMONIAL AGENCIES' STOCK LETTERS UNDER THE GUISE OF MINISTRY.\n\n     REV. JOSEPH SPENCER,\n     80 Madison Street.\n     Manager of American Book Concern.\n     Dealer in Religious Books.\n\n          Chicago, Ill., July 26, 1905.\n\n     MR. O. W. ZINK,\n     Marshall, Mo.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     For many years I have been a MINISTER of the GOSPEL and\n     during that time I have not only performed hundreds of\n     marriages, but have arranged many, and there are at the\n     present time among my acquaintances some half dozen wealthy\n     ladies, ranging in age from twenty to forty or fifty years,\n     one of whom is the handsome widow whose photo I enclose\n     herewith.\n\n     She is worth, in actual cash and negotiable securities,\n     fully $50,000, inherited from her worthy husband, who\n     departed this life a year ago and, as she is without\n     friends, relatives or children, her physician, a friend of\n     mine, has on account of her utter loneliness advised her\n     to marry, believing that marriage and change of scene will\n     prove for her a blessing in disguise, and naturally she has\n     turned to me, her spiritual adviser, in whom she has the\n     utmost confidence. I have several times talked the matter\n     over with her, and, knowing that she is very much averse\n     to advertising, I have undertaken to introduce to her some\n     gentleman who would make her a good husband, and to arrange\n     a marriage for her.\n\n     As her physician thinks it advisable for her to reside\n     elsewhere than Chicago, I have been somewhat perplexed as\n     to how to secure for her a suitable introduction and in my\n     dilemma consulted a matrimonial agency and, after several\n     conferences with them, I have decided to submit for your\n     kind consideration my proposition and manner of procedure.\n     I have studied the matter carefully, have gone thoroughly\n     into your description and instructions as filed with the\n     agency of which you are a member, and in my mind there is\n     not the slightest doubt as to you two proving mutually\n     suitable to each other. Of course, you cannot form the\n     proper idea of her from the small photo enclosed, but in\n     age, appearance, circumstances, etc., she is just what you\n     have been seeking in a wife.\n\n     She is in every respect a thoroughly good woman, unusually\n     bright and intelligent, but knows nothing of business, and\n     is in absolute need of a husband to look after her affairs,\n     but, TO BE CANDID WITH YOU, I am getting along in years,\n     and have a large family to support and as I only arrange\n     a few marriages at intervals, I must necessarily have\n     compensation adequate to the service I render.\n\n     Now, I can, by recommending you personally, cause her to\n     enter into a correspondence with you that will undoubtedly\n     lead to your marriage, if you are still desirous of such\n     a marriage, as I presume you are, from the fact that you\n     are registered with a matrimonial agency. I will, for the\n     consideration of $100, introduce you to her by letter and\n     after you have exchanged three or four letters, will have\n     you visit her at her expense, as you may mutually agree, if\n     you will follow my simple instructions.\n\n     I am not making you this proposition on the spur of the\n     moment, for I have spent much time and thought before\n     deciding to write you, and all I ask is that, AS AN\n     EVIDENCE OF YOUR GOOD FAITH and to cover the immediate\n     expense necessary thereto on my part (such as asking her\n     to dinner with me a few times in order that I may during\n     the good cheer that abounds at such times dwell at length\n     upon the matter without any unnecessary delay), that you\n     enclose me immediately upon receipt of this letter BANK\n     DRAFT, REGISTERED LETTER, or EXPRESS MONEY ORDER, for $10;\n     the balance, $90, you need not pay me until after you have\n     married her and assumed the management of her affairs.\n     Upon receipt of this small amount, $10, I will absolutely\n     guarantee your marriage to her within sixty days and, if\n     before that time you should feel that you do not care to\n     pursue the matter to a conclusion, I will positively refund\n     your money upon my honor as a MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL.\n\n     My standing in my profession is such that I could not do\n     otherwise and, as I have stated before, there are several\n     ladies to whom I could introduce you, now that I have\n     really taken the matter up with you, but I consider you two\n     really suited to each other, so will not go into further\n     particulars. Trusting to hear from you AT THE VERY EARLIEST\n     POSSIBLE MOMENT, I am, with assurance of my regards,\n\n          Very respectfully,\n\n\nWANTED A RICH HUSBAND.\n\n          Cedar Rapids, Iowa,\n          July 15, 1905.\n\n     REV. JOSEPH SPENCER,\n     80 Madison Street,\n     Chicago, Ill.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     You asked me in your letter to give you a description of\n     the man that I would like to become acquainted with. I wish\n     him to be as tall as I am, to have dark hair and a very\n     good disposition. I would like him to be rich. His age to\n     be about 45 years, also have a good education. I want him\n     to be a temperate man, and to have a nice appearance, one\n     who is lovely at home, and does not care for society and\n     likes music. I do not care what his occupation is if he is\n     honest.\n\n     Hoping to hear from you soon, I remain\n\n          Yours truly,\n          MISS VERNIE ADAMS.\n\n          Oshkosh, Wis., July 20, 1905.\n\n     REV. JOSEPH SPENCER,\n     Chicago, Illinois.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     You asked me in your letter to give you a description of\n     myself, which I take pleasure in doing: I am a young man 26\n     years of age, 5 feet 6 inches tall, weigh 140 pounds; blue\n     eyes, red hair; I am strictly temperate, do not gamble;\n     kind disposition, a farm hand; have no means; income $15\n     per month.\n\n     I would be delighted to make the acquaintance of several of\n     your prospective rich women who are seeking a husband. Send\n     me a list of those who are worth from $50,000 to $75,000,\n     also their photographs, whereby I can make a selection, and\n     I will send you your fee of $5. I remain,\n\n          Sincerely yours,\n          THOMAS FLINN.\n\n\nMATRIMONIAL AGENCY UNDER THE GUISE OF AN ATTORNEY-AT-LAW.\n\n     EDWARD MORRIS,\n     Attorney-at-Law.\n     82 Madison Street.\n     Trusts and Estates a Specialty.\n\n          Chicago, Ill., Jan. 4, 1905.\n\n     MR. GEO. FERLIN,\n     Los Angeles, Cal.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     I have during my professional career arranged many\n     marriages for ladies of means, and at the present time\n     have among my clients some ten or twelve wealthy ladies,\n     ranging in age from twenty-five to fifty years, desirous of\n     marriage, one of whom is the charming widow whose likeness\n     I herewith enclose.\n\n     She is worth $60,000 ($25,000 in ready cash, the balance\n     in high-class tangible property inherited from her mother,\n     recently deceased). She is alone and childless and her\n     physician, on account of her bereavement, has recommended\n     a marriage and change of scene, and in her dilemma she has\n     consulted me, her legal adviser, and I, in turn, without\n     her knowledge, appealed to a matrimonial agency with which\n     I have for several years had business relations in a\n     professional way.\n\n     Out of the several names submitted to me I have, after much\n     thought and deliberation, selected yours, and I beg that\n     you will consider carefully my proposition and the fact\n     that I am not in business for my health, but for revenue,\n     together with a desire to please my clients and to give\n     them value received.\n\n     This lady, while unusually bright and intelligent, knows\n     little of the ways of the world, and nothing of business,\n     and, to be candid with you, needs a husband to manage her\n     estates, and I can, by recommending you personally, cause\n     her, through me as her attorney, to open negotiations with\n     you for a marriage; so if you desire a wealthy wife, as I\n     presume you do from the fact that you are registered with a\n     matrimonial agency, I will, for the consideration of $100\n     introduce you to her, have you visit her at her expense, as\n     you may mutually agree, and will absolutely guarantee your\n     marriage to her within sixty days, if you will follow my\n     instructions to the letter.\n\n     All that I ask is, as an evidence of your good faith and to\n     cover the immediate clerical expenses necessary thereto,\n     you enclose me immediately upon receipt of this letter,\n     BANK DRAFT OR MONEY ORDER for $10, the balance ($90) to be\n     paid after marriage, and when I have caused her to place in\n     your hands, or under your control, a goodly portion of her\n     worldly possessions.\n\n     Now, if you wish to accept my proposition, enclose me\n     immediately the small retaining fee ($10) and promise me\n     that you will follow carefully my instructions; otherwise\n     do not write me, as I positively will not enter into\n     further correspondence until you have engaged me as your\n     attorney upon the lines I have laid down.\n\n     If before the end of sixty days you feel that you do not\n     care to pursue the matter to a conclusion I will refund\n     your money. My standing as an attorney is ample evidence\n     that I will faithfully carry out my contract. Remember that\n     I have among my clients, as I have stated before, ten or\n     twelve wealthy ladies to my certain knowledge desirous of\n     marriage.\n\n     Awaiting your immediate reply, I am\n\n            Sincerely and professionally yours,\n\n                    EDWARD MORRIS.\n\n     EDWARD MORRIS, Attorney-at-Law.\n\n          Chicago. Ill., Jan. 11, 1905.\n\n     MR. GEO. FERLIN.\n     Los Angeles, Cal.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     Your letter in reply to mine received, and I will say,\n     that as a leading attorney, and a prominent member of the\n     bar, I could not act for you until you have first retained\n     me as your attorney in this matter, and sent me the small\n     retaining fee of $10, as requested.\n\n[Illustration: OH! OH!! OH!!!\n\nAWFUL CONSTERNATION AT PIKES CROSSING! DIRECTORY GOWN IN TOWN. BY\nJIMMINEDDY!!].\n\n     Now, my dear sir, if you really mean business and really\n     want to marry the charming and wealthy young widow in\n     question, I see no earthly reason why you should hesitate\n     for a single instant to retain my services in connection\n     with this matter. You may give me good references, and I\n     can give you the same, but that has no bearing on the case\n     whatever. I cannot, as stated, do any business with you\n     until you first enclose me this small retaining fee, as I\n     must be in a position to truthfully state that you are my\n     friend and client.\n\n     You may have had unfortunate dealings with matrimonial\n     agencies, but as an attorney in high standing, I am not\n     to be compared with such concerns, and on receipt of your\n     small retaining fee, I will guarantee to do my part and\n     arrange a speedy marriage if you adhere strictly to my\n     instructions.\n\n     Trusting to hear favorably from you at once, I am,\n\n          Yours very truly,\n\n          EDWARD MORRIS.\n\n     P. S. I do not ask for the balance of the $100 until after\n     your marriage, and I have caused the lady to place in your\n     hands or under your control a goodly portion of her worldly\n     possessions.\n\n     EDWARD MORRIS, Attorney-at-Law.\n\n          Chicago, Ill., Jan. 23, 1905.\n\n     MR. GEO. FERLIN,\n     Los Angeles, Cal.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     Your favor at hand with enclosure accepting my proposition.\n     Now, I wish to assure you that everything you write to me\n     will be treated in the strictest confidence, and I will say\n     that it will be necessary for you to follow to the letter\n     the instructions which I will from time to time give you.\n\n     In order to break the ice, I would suggest that you address\n     a letter to Mrs. Lucy Kline, in my care, briefly setting\n     forth the fact that you are a friend and client of mine,\n     and that as you are matrimonially inclined. I have advised\n     you to open a correspondence with her. You can say to her\n     that I have favored you with her photograph, and that same\n     meets your approval, and that you would very much desire\n     her acquaintance and what it may lead to. I have already\n     taken up the matter with her, and she is expecting a letter\n     from you, and in reply will send you her private address.\n\n     I would advise you, after receiving her reply, not to\n     write too often or too long letters. In other words, do\n     not appear to be too anxious, for it must devolve upon me\n     to bring you two together. The correspondence you may have\n     with her is simply a preliminary introduction leading to\n     the establishment of congenial relations and eventually,\n     marriage.\n\n     Important business prevents my writing a longer letter to\n     you today, and in order that I may be prepared to take the\n     matter up, I suggest that you write your letter so that it\n     will reach my office in about one week from today.\n\n          Yours truly,\n\n          EDWARD MORRIS.\n\n\nMATRIMONIAL AGENCY UNDER THE GUISE OF EMPLOYMENT EXCHANGE.\n\nPositions for Men and Women. Commercial, Technical, Educational,\nProfessional. Those Hardest to Find and Hardest to Fill.\n\n     G. H. CANNON, Manager,\n     Ohio Block.\n\n          Chicago, Ill., Sept. 21, 1905.\n\n     MRS. A. A. BURROWS,\n     San Fran. Cal.\n\n     Dear Madam:\n\n     I am directed by a client for whom we transact much\n     business, to submit you a proposition, which both he and\n     I sincerely hope you will accept. He is a bachelor of\n     middle age, of fine appearance, and is the owner of a large\n     manufacturing plant, as well as of a magnificent residence,\n     in which he lived until recently with his aged mother, who,\n     greatly to his regret, departed this life some six months\n     ago. Since her death he has felt the need of a woman's\n     guiding hand in the management of his household affairs,\n     and it is to offer you a position as his housekeeper that I\n     am addressing you personally.\n\n     I beg to state that attached to the position is a salary\n     of $75 per month, your board, and an allowance of $25 per\n     month for your clothing, and you will have full charge\n     of his household expenses, including the employment\n     and discharge of servants, consisting of a butler, two\n     housemaids, driver, cook, etc.\n\n     If you accept the position his carriage will be at your\n     disposal at all times, and you will be the actual head of\n     his household, with no restrains of any kind upon you. As I\n     have stated, this client is a bachelor, and on account of\n     his mother's determined opposition to his marriage during\n     her lifetime, he has gone little in society, but since her\n     death he has never ceased to feel the need of a woman's\n     hand and presence in his home.\n\n     His first thought was marriage, but after a lengthy talk\n     with me he very cheerfully acquiesced in the suggestion\n     that has led to the writing of this letter, and now to the\n     point.\n\n     I suggested that he allow me to secure for him a\n     housekeeper who might possess the qualities he most desires\n     in a wife, and then I consulted a matrimonial agency with\n     that end in view. Your description seemed to fit so exactly\n     his idea of true womanhood and appealed to him so strongly\n     that his first impulse was to address you directly, but\n     being of a sensitive and retiring disposition, he came to\n     the conclusion that he should become thoroughly acquainted\n     with you, and could not do better than allow me to carry\n     out my original plan to make your acquaintance.\n\n     To be candid with you, this position is a very lucrative\n     one, and will undoubtedly lead to your marriage with this\n     gentleman, if you see fit to accept the proposition, and\n     for that reason I trust you will give it the consideration\n     it deserves.\n\n     As he secures the help necessary to the running of his\n     large factory through this firm, of which I happen to be\n     the manager, you cannot but understand that I am thoroughly\n     acquainted with him, and am in a position to arrange this\n     matter to your mutual satisfaction.\n\n     It is a custom to charge a fee of $5, but in this instance\n     we would make no charge at all, only our client, insists\n     that we require our usual fee simply as an evidence of good\n     faith, and that there may be no misunderstanding. If you\n     accept the proposition I have submitted kindly fill out the\n     enclosed form and return to us with EXPRESS MONEY ORDER or\n     BANK DRAFT for $5, which amount will be returned to you\n     as soon as you have taken charge of his household affairs,\n     as your good faith will have then been proved.\n\n     As soon as you can start for Chicago I will send you\n     expense, free railroad transportation, and if, after your\n     arrival here, you do not care to accept the position, a\n     return ticket, etc., will be furnished you so that you will\n     not be out one dollar of expense.\n\n     This offer is made to you in the strictest confidence, and\n     I sincerely trust you will so regard it, and not discuss it\n     with any one, at least not until all the details have been\n     arranged.\n\n     No matrimonial agency in the world can do this for you,\n     nor do I think such an opportunity will ever occur to you\n     again, so kindly sign the enclosed form and return it to me\n     immediately with the small fee necessary, or do not write\n     me at all. No harm will have been done by having submitted\n     the proposition to you, but if you cannot take immediate\n     advantage of it, I simply will not correspond further in\n     the matter. Trusting that you will see your way clear, and\n     wishing you well, I am,\n\n          Very sincerely,\n\n          G. H. CANNON.\n\n[Illustration: OPINIONS DIFFER]\n\nThe above are illustrations of the method. Cannon, Rev. Spencer and\nAttorney Edwards are all one and the same man. We now turn to a\nfew special examples of differences of procedure among the various\nbureaux.\n\n\nA PERSISTENT OFFENDER.\n\nOne of the most successful operators who ever invaded Chicago with\nmatrimonial schemes was one John Carson, who, on April 8, 1908, was\nfined $1,000 and costs for misuse of the United States mails after\nhe had plead guilty to the charge, which was preferred by Inspector\nKetcham.\n\nCarson, at one time or another, operated no less than eighteen\nconcerns of this nature. He was first discovered in 1902 in Chicago by\nDetective Wooldridge, operating no less than five matrimonial and fake\nconcerns simultaneously. These concerns were:\n\n     The Loretta Matrimonial Publishing Co., 98 Ogden Ave.\n\n     The Unida Matrimonial Publishing Co., 408 Ogden Ave.\n\n     Mr. John's Matrimonial Publishing Co., 565 West Madison St.\n\n     Mr. J. C. Hills Matrimonial Agency, 565 West Madison St.\n\n     The Chicago Mutual Securities Co., a Chicago Medicine\n     concern, 567 W. Madison St.\n\nCarson evaded arrest and fled to St. Louis, where he was shortly\nafterward arrested by the postal authorities and sentenced to eighteen\nmonths in the State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, in addition to a\nfine of $500.\n\n\nBOBS UP AGAIN.\n\nIn 1904 Carson bobbed up again in Chicago. Since that time his record\nis best given from a report made to Chief of Police John M. Collins\nby Detective Wooldridge, who repeatedly broke up Carson's games. The\nreport, in part, is as follows:\n\n     Feb. 9, J. H. Carson Woods' Advertising Agency, 62 Ada St.\n     Goods confiscated; fined $25.\n\n     March 9, 1904, J. H. Carson, Mill's Advertising Agency, 71\n     W. Lake St. Fined $15.\n\n     May 4, 1904, J. H. Carson, alias J. H. Hayes, 408 Ogden\n     Ave., raided. Literature seized and destroyed by order of\n     court.\n\n     May 4, 1904, J. H. Carson, alias J. H. Hayes, 255 Madison\n     St., raided. Literature seized and destroyed by order of\n     court.\n\n     Nov. 15, 1904, J. H. Carson, alias J. W. Bessie, 480 Ogden\n     Ave., raided. Arrested; released; writ of habeas corpus.\n\n     Nov. 15, 1904, J. H. Carson, alias J. W. Bessie, 67\n     Flournoy St., raided. Arrested; released; writ of habeas\n     corpus.\n\n     Jan. 4, 1905, J. H. Carson and Oscar Wells, promoted and\n     run the J. H. Hunter Matrimonial Agency, 164 East Randolph\n     St. Oscar Wells was arrested and fined $50 by Justice John\n     K. Prindiville.\n\n     April 19, 1905, J. H. Carson and J. R. Ferguson, conducted\n     the Jesse H. Lee Matrimonial Agency, 84 Washington St.\n     Ferguson was arrested and fined $15 by Caverley. The\n     literature seized and destroyed.\n\n\nTURNS CLAIRVOYANT.\n\nMay 27, 1905, J. H. Carson conducted the Clay's American Bureau of\nCorrespondence, 62 Ada St. He was arrested and fined $25 by Justice\nJohn K. Prindiville. The literature seized and destroyed.\n\nAug. 21, 1905, J. H. Carson and J. R. Ferguson conduced the Ferguson\nDirectory, a Matrimonial agency at 171 Washington St. This place was\nraided and Jesse R. Ferguson was arrested and fined $25 by Justice\nJohn K. Prindiville.\n\nMay 27, 1905, J. H. Carson conducted the Jesse Lee Matrimonial Agency,\n84 Washington St. He was arrested and fined $25 by Justice John K.\nPrindiville.\n\nAug. 19, 1905, J. H. Carson was arrested for conducting a Chicago\nMatrimonial Agency at 171 Washington St. and 95 Fifth Ave., under\nthe name of Prof. John C. Hall, Astrologist, Occult, Scientist,\nClairvoyant, Medium, and Lifereader.\n\nWith this record behind him this rascal actually had the nerve to\nbring suit for false arrest against Detective Wooldridge, but quite\nnaturally, he failed to appear when the suit came up for trial.\n\nHe has not been heard from since the fine imposed on April 8, 1908, by\nthe Federal authorities.\n\n\nAGENTS OF THE UNDERWORLD A NEST OF POLE-CATS.\n\nBut crime is not the only long suit of the Matrimonial Agency. Some of\nthese miserable frauds have descended into the depths and wallowed in\nthe slime of the ultimate shame.\n\nWith unbelievable effrontery they have attempted to trade upon the\nbasest instincts in human nature; they have attempted to coin the most\nabominable of the brute passions of men.\n\nNothing can exceed the turpitude, the brazen shamelessness of the\nMatrimonial Agency, when it decides to go the limit.\n\nAttest the following from the literature of the New Era Advertising\nAgency and Introduction Bureau, Curtis, Clark & Co., Props., formerly\nlocated at 112 Clark street, Chicago. This abomination was raided\nby Detective Wooldridge and the following sample from one of the\ncirculars seized shows the nature of the concern:\n\n     \"If you are willing to give your name and protection to\n     one who has fallen and wishes again to enter the ranks of\n     respectability, we have some young women who have led fast\n     lives and accumulated considerable money, and want to marry\n     some respectable man, settle down in a new place and be\n     respected and respectable. THEY ARE HANDSOME, STYLISH,\n     LIVELY AND FULL OF FUN: HAVE MONEY ENOUGH FOR BOTH. They\n     will no doubt make good, loving and true wives for some\n     good-natured fellow who is not particular about their\n     past. Through our efforts several wealthy ladies of the\n     demi-monde have married very poor men in return for their\n     name and protection, given them a life of ease and luxury,\n     and the opportunities are greater today than in the past,\n     considering the fact that the world in general is anxious\n     to lend a helping hand to those who have erred and wish to\n     become respectable again.\"\n\nThis pole-cat literature was being sent broadcast through the United\nStates mails. In some way it evaded the inspectors until the 23rd of\nSeptember, 1902, when Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge descended upon\nthe nest of pole-cats, seized the literature, chased \"Curtis, Clark\n& Co.\" out of Chicago, and made further evil-smelling operations\nimpossible.\n\nThese abominations are now practically impossible, thanks to the\nactivity of the great police detective. But the above illustrations\nshows to what depths the marriage bureaus can descend, once they have\nbecome started on their infamous careers.\n\nNovember 26, 1902, Detective Wooldridge raided the Climax Matrimonial\nAgency, located at 418 LaSalle avenue, which is situated on the North\nSide, in one of the most fashionable places in Chicago.\n\nIt was run not only as a matrimonial agency, but a matrimonial paper\nand mail order house. Among the literature seized was a circular\ncontaining a picture of the manager's wife, and of which he sent out\nover 300,000. which gave the description of her, which read as follows:\n\nSHERIFF DUPED--ATTEMPTS ROLE OF LOTHARIO.\n\n     \"I am 23 years of age, 5 feet 2 inches in height, weigh 120\n     pounds, have a turn-up nose, plain-looking and worth about\n     $147,000. I desire to marry a good, honest, affectionate\n     man. On our wedding day I will give my husband $5,500 in\n     cash, and one year later, if we are still living together,\n     I will make over to him $25,000 more. No milk-and-water man\n     need answer.\"\n\n[Illustration: \"GOT A GOOD HOME ALREADY PAID FOR, AN' MONEY IN DE\nBANK.\"]\n\n[Illustration: \"DES A PLAIN LITTLE ONINTERESTIN' FAMBLY ROW.\"]\n\nOne letter from a Mississippi sheriff shows that the officer of the\nlaw is willing to forsake bachelorhood for a woman who, though plain,\nadvertises that on her wedding day she will give her husband $5,500.\nThis is the gay Lothario's letter:\n\n     Miss Ot--I take pleasure in answering your \"ad\" in the\n     \"Hour at Home.\" You stated in your \"ad\" you were worth\n     $147,000, and would give the man that married you $5,500 on\n     his wedding day. You say you are plain.\n\n     I am good looking, so the people tell me, and if you\n     correspond with me we may come to an understanding. I am\n     willing to marry you if you give me proof you have the\n     money, and will do all that you say in the \"ad.\"\n\n     I will do my best to make your life happy. Awaiting your\n     reply, I remain.\n\n          Yours truly,\n\n          W. M. M., Sheriff.\n\n\nBIGAMY AND THE BUREAU.\n\nWhere the Professional Bigamists Find Wives.\n\nThe matrimonial agencies that have been investigated and suppressed by\nDetective Wooldridge and the postoffice authorities have disclosed an\nalmost incredible phase of woman's nature.\n\nThere are today in the United States no less than 50,000 women who\nhave been married, robbed and deserted by \"professional bigamists.\"\nThis fact represent the most serious phase of the matrimonial agency\nswindle, for it is the history of nearly all noted bigamists that\nthey secured their victims through the matrimonial agencies. Of\nthe thousands who become subscribers to these agencies, however,\ncomparatively few ever proceed far enough to encounter the tragic\nfeatures of the swindle. It might be inferred from this that women\nare much easier to entice into matrimony than men. Probably, however,\nthis is an untenable conclusion. When a woman does start on marrying\nbent, mere men fall before her like grain before the sickle. Miss\nMarion Rapp, arrested at Philadelphia, is known to have secured eight\nhusbands in three years, and is suspected of having captured six or\neight more. Miss Rapp is still young, and if her career had not been\nuntimely cut off she might have made a record that would have done\ncredit (or discredit) to her sex.\n\n[Illustration: PUTS A SNAFFLE BIT ON THE OLD MAN]\n\nThe sad experiences of people who have been victimized by gay\ndeceivers, male or female, perhaps contain a lesson to persons who\ncarelessly contemplate matrimony. When a stranger proposes marriage\nat first sight it may possibly be well to take a look into his or her\nantecedents. This is not the most romantic way to proceed, but it is\na way that may have a great practical advantage. It probably would be\nendorsed by every one of the 50,000 women in this country who are now\nlooking for professional bigamists who married them and ran away with\ntheir cash.\n\nThat the matrimonial agency business is not confined to Chicago and\ndupes of the system are found elsewhere than in rural communities and\namong the poor and humble is demonstrated by recent revelations in\nEurope. During one raid I seized a large quantity of literature in\nthe offices of a swindling concern doing business under the name of\nMason, Brown & Co. The \"firm\" advertised itself as the largest of its\nkind in the world and the only one \"indorsed by press and public and\npatronized by royalty,\" adding that its \"clients and representatives\nwere to be found in every land.\"\n\nIn extra large type the information was conveyed to the victim that\nhe or she need not be ashamed to resort to the agency method in order\nto secure a life partner, as the royalty of Europe used this means\nexclusively in contracting marriages, especially in cases where\nAmerican heiresses were sought as wives for titled but impecunious\nforeigners.\n\nWhen it was casually remarked during an examination of a wagon load\nof Mason, Brown & Company's advertising matter the reference to the\ntitles and heiresses was the only true statement it contained, there\nwere smiles of incredulity. American millionaires were said to be too\nshrewd and level-headed to enter into deals with marriage brokers\nwhen the life happiness of their fair and independent daughters is\nconcerned.\n\n[Illustration: (Divorce Decrees; Spring)]\n\nIt was but a short time after this conversation, however, that the\nfollowing cablegram was published:\n\n\nTHE CASE OF COUNT LARISCH.\n\n     \"Aug. 25th, 1905: The alleged attempt to blackmail Count\n     Franz Joseph Maria Von Larisch Monnich out of 200,000 marks\n     on a pre-nuptial note alleged to have been signed by the\n     count, and the implication of army officers and members of\n     the aristocracy in the marriage brokerage business, has\n     caused more talk in high circles than anything which has\n     happened since the elopement of Crown Princess Louise of\n     Saxony.\"\n\nIt is said the Kaiser had to take a hand in the matter, and insists\nthat this business shall be stopped finally and effectively on the\nground it is bringing the army and nobility into disrepute and\nridicule.\n\nThe harm done by these agencies is almost incalculable. Foolish women\nhaving money at their disposal fall easy victims to the many scheming\nscoundrels who make a practice of subscribing to the matrimonial\nagencies for the purpose of securing the addresses of prospective\nvictims.\n\nAs instances of the harm done by these matrimonial agencies the case\nof Johann Hoch, who married fifty women, and after securing all their\nmoney, either poisoned or deserted them. He was captured in New York\nCity, January 30, 1905, after he had married a woman in Chicago, Mary\nSchultz, alias Brees, alias Bauman, poisoned her, then made love to\nher sister, married her, secured what money she had and deserted her.\nHoch was brought back to Chicago, tried for murder, convicted and hung\nFebruary 23 1906. This is a glaring example.\n\n[Illustration: IN CUPID'S WORKSHOP.]\n\n[Illustration: ROUTING HER THROUGH\n\n\"Ten dollars extra, cabby. If you catch the train with her. She's my\nmother-in-law.\"]\n\nThe case of Fredrick Carlton, indicted on two charges of grand larceny\nin Brooklyn, New York, July, 1905, is another.\n\nIt is stated on what seems to be reliable authority this man made the\nacquaintance of women in various parts of the country through the\nmedium of matrimonial advertisements, married them and decamped with\ntheir money at the first favorable opportunity. Still another:\n\nDr. George A. Witzhoff, champion bigamist, arrested in Bristol,\nEngland, October, 1905, for bigamy and given a long term in prison. He\nwas wanted in many cities in the United States.\n\nWitzhoff confessed to marrying and robbing thirty-two women. Most all\nof the women he married lived in the United States, and were secured\nthrough the matrimonial agencies.\n\n\nWITZHOFF'S CONFESSION--BOUGHT FIFTEEN WIVES FROM ONE AGENT--TAKES\n$4,000 FROM HIS FIRST WIFE.\n\n     \"Then, one night, after indulging in plenty of wine, she\n     confessed she had a child in Pittsburg. I left her there,\n     telling her I was going to bring her child, which was nine\n     years old. Instead, I went to New York with her money\n     ($4,000), and paid my friend part of his money, and started\n     a practice as a dentist in Fourteenth street as Dr. A. R.\n     Houser. I went to see a matchmaker. He introduced me to a\n     widow of means. We got married in two weeks at the City\n     Hall, New York.\n\n     \"She had all her money loaned away, so I was compelled\n     to seek another one, as Sig. Badillo was hard after his\n     balance of $1,000.\n\n     \"I went, to Philadelphia and got a Jewish matchmaker again\n     on Fifteenth street and Fairmount avenue, and he introduced\n     me to a Miss Jocker as Dr. A. Houser.\n\n     \"I got $800 from her. I paid Badillo $500 and left for\n     Springfield, Mass., where a woman answered one of my ads. I\n     inserted an 'ad.' as follows:\n\n     \"'A professional gentleman of nice appearance, aged\n     thirty-two, desires the acquaintance of a sincere,\n     affectionate lady, with some means; object, matrimony;\n     triflers ignored. Give particulars in first letter. Address\n     Busy Bee, the Journal.'\n\n[Illustration: (Man with many wives inside heart)]\n\n     \"I had about twelve answers to this advertisement, and I\n     picked out a boarding house mistress, and ten days after\n     she was Mrs. Westfield, and as she was a vulgar woman,\n     I left her two days after. She had given me $500 before\n     marriage.\n\n     \"I returned to New York to wife No. 2, and a week after I\n     went to St. Louis and inserted an 'ad.' as previously, and\n     got fifteen answers. There I selected a farmer's daughter\n     and married her as Dr. Doesser. I married and left her all\n     within a week.\n\n     \"I came to Detroit, and with her money, $350, I started\n     a dental practice as A. Houser. In answer to my\n     advertisements in a German paper, Mrs. Piser came.\n\n     \"We went to Toledo, O., five days after our first\n     interview, and we got married. I left her six days after.\n\n     \"I came now to Pittsburg, as Dr. Wolfe, got a furnished\n     room in Allegheny. In answer to an 'ad.' in a German paper\n     a sexton's daughter answered, the ugliest I ever had. Three\n     days after we went to the justice of the peace and got\n     married.\"\n\n\nDESERTS WIFE AFTER THE FIRST DAY.\n\n     \"There I slept the first night, and the next morning I\n     was on my way to Cleveland, and started a nice practice\n     with the $150 I had left. I paid the balance to my friend,\n     Badillo, and inserted an 'ad.' in the Plain-Dealer.\n\n     \"I had two answers to my 'ad.,' and selected a Mrs. Moore,\n     a nurse, and a Mrs. Kreidman. I got from the nurse $100,\n     and was making love to Mrs. Kreidman and Mrs. Moore, when I\n     got a letter from wife No. 3, with whom I corresponded all\n     the time, telling her I traveled for a firm.\n\n     \"So I left, and forgot that I left in Cleveland a paper\n     under the tablecloth which had my address in Brooklyn. One\n     morning (ten days after I left Cleveland) two detectives\n     came to the house in Brooklyn and arrested me. As there\n     was no bail for my offense (obtaining money under false\n     pretenses), I returned to Cleveland a week later, and there\n     I married a bad woman in jail, Mrs. Kreidman.\n\n     \"She gave $200 bond, but I left her four days after, as she\n     was a bad woman. I slept one night at her house, and three\n     days after I went to Chicago and went to see a matrimonial\n     agent at 55 Washington street.\n\n\nIDENTIFIED IN CHICAGO; WEDDING STOPPED.\n\n     \"He introduced me to a nice Jewess, and her father gave me\n     $400. I started an office on Fourteenth street, when a man\n     from Philadelphia recognized me, and told her father, a rag\n     dealer, that I was a married man, named Hausen, just in\n     time to prevent the marriage.\n\n     \"I left Chicago as Dr. Weston and went to St. Louis, where\n     I started an office in Olive street as Dr. A. Dresser, and\n     there I advertised and selected from a number of letters\n     that of a farmer's daughter that had $1,000, and married\n     her (Katie). Six days after I left her and left America and\n     went to Roumania, and married a girl, a Jewess, in Pitest,\n     and lived in Roumania as Dr. F. A. Shotz.\n\n     \"Happy six months; I got 3,000 francs, and we left for\n     Germany. There we had a quarrel, and she returned to her\n     parents.\"\n\nDr. Witzhoff further states that the number of all the girls and women\nhe merely promised to marry and secured money from would reach over\none hundred.\n\nOne of the women Witzhoff married lived in Chicago, Ill.\n\nMay 13, 1903, John J. Marietta (alias Homer C. Reid, Harold C. Mills,\nA. S. Anderson, C. H. Huston, C. B. McCoy, H. C. Jones, Harold C.\nReed) was arrested through exposure by Laura E. Strickler, a beautiful\nyoung girl from Cincinnati, Ohio, who boarded at the Young Women's\nAssociation, Chicago. She had been lured to the Newport Hotel, 73\nMonroe street, where he proposed marriage and attempted liberties.\nMiss Strickler became frightened, jumped from the second story window\nand was badly injured.\n\nMarietta married no less than six women, three of whom, Sophia\nHeadley, Marie Butler and Flora Beals, appeared in court to prosecute\nhim September 28. He was convicted. Judge Brentano's court of bigamy,\nand given five years in the Joliet penitentiary.\n\n[Illustration: TITLES ARE CONSIDERED GREAT ORNAMENTS \"For as it was in\nthe beginning, the American girl came over and energetically pursued\nthe Lords.\"]\n\n[Illustration: (Men appealing to lady sitting on chair)]\n\nMarietta said he secured most of his wives through the marriage\nagency. Mills said to Miss Headley, after meeting her the second time:\n\"How anxious are you to marry me? Make me an offer in cash of the\nsum you are willing to settle on me.\" \"Three thousand dollars,\" she\nanswered. \"All right,\" he replied, \"but you know I am from Missouri,\nyou will have to show me.\" She gave him the $3,000 and they were\nmarried.\n\nAt the time of his conviction Marietta had in the bank $25,000, said\nto have been secured in the above manner.\n\n[Illustration: (Man and two women in fancy clothes)]\n\n\nBREAKING INTO THE NOBILITY.\n\n\nHOW TITLED RAKES USE THE AGENCIES.\n\nThe marriage bureau is not a distinctly American institution.\nThey know the animal in Europe, only there the operators refer to\nthemselves as marriage brokers, and are decidedly more careful than\ntheir American prototypes to steer clear of crime.\n\nThe idea of marriage broking has thoroughly permeated the effete\nnobility of Europe. The broken-down \"nobles,\" out at heels and buried\nunder a mountain of debt, look to America for a rich heiress to whom\ntheir titles may be sold. For many years they looked to the brokers\non their own side of the water to provide them with golden girls; but\nof late years they have been mixing with the American Matrimonial\nAgencies, sometimes to their sorrow, as attest the case of Count\nLarisch.\n\n\nWOES OF COUNT LARISCH.\n\nThe story of the attempt on Count Larisch is not an unusual one.\nBriefly, the count, who is an Austrian, but who has estates in\nPrussia, was anxious to replenish his treasury by marrying an\nheiress. A syndicate composed of the men now under indictment, it is\nsaid, financed him. He set out to marry the daughter of Faber, the\nmulti-millionaire pencil manufacturer of Nuremberg, giving his notes\nfor $50,000, payable upon his marriage to Fraulein Faber. The venture\nwas a failure, for Fraulein Faber did not care to become Countess\nLarisch. The noble fortune-hunter then went to America in quest of a\nbride. Whether it was on his own account, or under the auspices of\nanother marriage syndicate, does not appear, though it is hinted the\nlatter is the case. In any event, he was successful, and married Miss\nSatterlee, of Titusville, Pa.\n\nOn his return the members of the first Faber syndicate demanded\npayment, and presented a note purporting to have been given by Larisch\nwithout the qualification that it was payable only after his marriage\nto the pencil manufacturer's daughter. Larisch, regarding the Faber\naffair a closed incident, and declaring the note presented a forgery,\nrefused to pay. The matter got before the public prosecutor and the\nexpos\u00e9 resulted.\n\n\nLORD BERTIE CAVENDISH--CHAMPION MATRIMONIALIST.\n\nOct. 24, 1905, Miss Gladys Simmons, Hot Springs, Ark., married Lord\nBertie Cavendish after two days' acquaintance. He represented himself\nto be of noble birth, son of the late Marquis of Queensbury, and to\nhave immense possessions in South Africa and Mexico, which he was\nunable to obtain on account of his banishment from England for serving\nagainst the British in the Boer war, due to the activity of British\narmy officers against him.\n\nMiss Simmons' mother received information that her son-in-law's name\nwas not Lord Bertie Cavendish, but Douglass. By photographs and\nfurther investigation his identity was established as that of an\nadventurer.\n\nFollowing is a partial list of his wives, several of whom have asked\nthe court to grant them divorces:\n\n     Miss Louisiana Hobbs, Lambert Point, Va., near Norfolk.\n\n     Mrs. Mabel Duncan, Denver, Colo.\n\n     Mrs. Scott, South Bend, Ind.\n\n     Mrs. Beatrice E. Anderson, Fort Worth, Texas.\n\n\nMARKET FOR AMERICAN HEIRESSES.\n\nThere has been more than one similar scandal involving members of the\nhigh nobility and rich American girls.\n\nIt will be remembered last year there was a stir created by The\nbroadcast announcement that Prince Hugo Von Hohenche-Oehringen,\nPrince Heinrich Von Hanan and Baron Berhard-Muenhausen, accused\nan Englishman, O'Brien, who was alleged to be the agent of Berlin\nmarriage brokers, of attempted blackmail.\n\n[Illustration: IDLENESS, TITLES, MONEY, UNHAPPINESS, NOTORIETY,\nDIVORCE]\n\nAmong the Americans whose names are said to be on the list of this\nmarriage syndicate, without their personal knowledge or consent,\nare the Misses Angelica and Mabel Gerry, the Misses Nora and Fannie\nIselin, the Misses Adeline and Electra Havemeyer, Mrs. Lewis\nRutherford Morris, formerly Miss Katherine Clark, daughter of Senator\nClark, of Montana; Mrs. Francis Burton Harrison, formerly Miss Mary\nCrocker, daughter of Mrs. George W. Crocker; Miss Dorothy Whitney,\nthe Misses Beatrice and Gladys Mills, Miss Gwendolyn Burden, and the\nMisses Florence and Ruth Twombly.\n\n\nGOVERNMENT OFFICIALS ROUSED TO MANY FRAUDS BY THE MATRIMONIAL AGENCIES\nAND BUREAUX THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY, \"AGENCIES\" TO PUT UNDER BAN THE\nSWINDLING OPERATIONS.\n\n\nMRS. JENNIE SCOTT, ARRESTED BY POSTAL INSPECTORS, TELLS SECRETS OF HER\nMATRIMONIAL AGENCY.\n\nThe second blow has been struck against the affinity trust, of\nChicago, and the second member of the alleged trust in Chicago, Mrs.\nJennie Scott, a woman of many aliases, by Postoffice Inspector James\nE. Stuart.\n\nThis woman was arrested at her home, at 214 Thirty-second street, her\n\"Cupid shop,\" where she received thousands of letters, descriptions\nand photographs of affinity seekers from all over the United States\nand Canada. She received them in the name of \"Glinn's International\nCorresponding Association,\" to join which from $2 to $5 was drawn from\neach affinity. Thousands joined.\n\n\nSAME LITERATURE USED AS IN MARION GREY CASE.\n\nPostoffice Inspectors A. E. Germer and Frank Sheron worked up the case\nagainst the woman and discovered that the same literature was used by\nthis woman as was used by Marion Grey, convicted for the misuse of the\nmails in operating an affinity matching business at Elgin.\n\nThere were some changes, however, in the method. This is shown in the\nliterature sent out by this woman. Her literature explains to the\naffinities that the business is absolutely honest and above board, and\nmust be kept so. Under \"special reduced rates,\" she drew in hundreds\nof women clients, many of whom sent in their pictures.\n\n[Illustration: MRS. JENNIE SCOTT]\n\n[Illustration: TYPES OF \"AFFINITIES\" FOUND BY MARION GRAY, SKETCHED IN\nCOURT WHERE BEAUTY IS ON TRIAL]\n\nMrs. Scott operated also at 2208 Wabash avenue, where she had a room\nfor receiving mail. She was known not only as Mrs. Scott, but as E. L.\nGlinn, Mrs. Jennie Call, Mrs. A. M. Harvey and Mrs. E. L. Glinn. She\nlived on Thirty-second street, with her young daughter.\n\n\nCLIENTS ALL WEALTHY; TAKE THEIR WORD FOR IT.\n\nAlmost every client on the books of this marriage-fostering concern\nclaimed to be worth from $5,000 to \u00a31,000,000 sterling.\n\nMany of them were alleged to have large incomes. Some were said to\nhave children and are not to be divorced, but still seek life partners.\n\n\nWITNESSES NEED A SHEPHERD.\n\nThen, from among the queer little party huddled together on the\nbenches at the rear of the big court room--a helpless, shepherdless\nflock--Mr. Shirer began to call out his witnesses.\n\nFirst of the hungering souls who sought life companions through Mrs.\nScott came Mrs. Mary Quinn, of Trenton, Ill., a short, dumpy little\nperson of about thirty-five or forty, who was chiefly remarkable for\nthe white hat she wore.\n\n\"I saw the ad.,\" she whispered--it was with the greatest difficulty\nthat Judge Bethea induced her to talk so she could be heard ten\nfeet away--\"and I answered it. They sent me back a circular and a\nphotograph of a nice-looking fellow who was said to be rich.\n\n\"I sent my $2 and wrote that I would like to get into correspondence\nwith him. They sent me back word that he was corresponding with\nanother lady just then, and didn't want any more names at present, but\nthere was another one just as good.\n\n\nNICE LETTERS LACK RICH TONE.\n\n\"I corresponded with him until three weeks before I remarried my\ndivorced husband, last December. He wrote very nice letters, but he\ncertainly didn't sound rich.\"\n\n\"You got what you asked for, didn't you?\" asked Mr. Murphy.\n\n\"Oh, yes, I guess so; I'm not complaining.\"\n\nThe uncomplainingness of the alleged victims is the odd feature of the\ncase.\n\n[Illustration: JAIL FOR CUPID'S AID\n\nMarion Grey, Pretty Love Broker, Who Was Sentenced to a Year in\nPrison]\n\nDr. Montgomery Porter, a graduate of the University of Arkansas, came\nall the way from his home in Pine Bluff, to say that he had answered\none of Mrs. Scott's advertisements but had not paid the $5 fee, \"which\nshe charged the men members.\"\n\nPorter C. Dyer, a graduate of the Ohio State University, who lives in\nAustin, O., said that he paid the fee and was disappointed, \"because\nthe names sent were not those of refinement and culture, as promised\nin the circulars.\"\n\nMrs. Flora Scott, a restaurant keeper at Middleport, O., tall and not\nparticularly stylish, couldn't recall what any of the circulars said,\nbut she was quite sure she hadn't landed a rich husband yet.\n\n\nSOUTHERN BEAUTY SENDS $2.\n\nThe handsomest of the witnesses was Miss Avis Christenberry, a stately\nbrunette from Memphis, who rather liked the looks of the rich young\nman's photograph used for bait and sent in $2.\n\n\"They told me he was corresponding with some one else just then,\" she\ntestified, \"and I corresponded with two substitutes, but they didn't\nentertain me much.\"\n\nWilson Schufelt, a real estate man, said that he had rented the\nmatrimonial headquarters to \"Mrs. A. M. Harvey\" for a mail order\nhouse business. Mrs. Harvey got her mail under the names of Glinn and\nHill, and when the postal authorities became interested in her she\ntold Schufelt that her name was Jennie Scott. At her home, 214 East\nThirty-second street, she is known as Mrs. Jennie Call.\n\nShe was indicted under the name of Glinn. It was testified by E. J.\nBeach, superintendent of the Twenty-second street sub-postal station,\nthat the matrimonial agency received from 50 to 200 letters every day.\n\nShe was arraigned before Judge Bethea and found guilty, on April 25,\n1908, and was sentenced to one year in the House of Correction, and\nwas fined $500.\n\n\nTHE HORRIBLE GUNNESS FARM.\n\n\nTHE RIPENED FRUIT OF THE MATRIMONIAL AGENCY.\n\nBut the giant blossom of this plant of hell is not bigamy, not\nswindling, not desertion; it is murder, wholesale, ghastly murder.\nFor it is the matrimonial agency, nothing else, which is directly\nresponsible for the unbelievable horrors of the Gunness Murder Farm,\nat Laporte, Ind., the revelation of the existence of which shocked the\nentire civilized world as it has not been shocked since the time of\nthe Borgias.\n\nThis wholesale murderess invariably lured her victims to their fate\nthrough advertisements in a \"matrimonial paper,\" or through an agency.\nShe would insert the usual stereotyped \"ad.\" of the wealthy widow lady\nwho desired a mate, but always a mate with money.\n\nAlways being able to produce proof that she was well-to-do, it was\nan easy matter for her to persuade her victims to visit her at the\nLaporte farm. She invariably stipulated that they should bring a\nsubstantial sum with them.\n\nArriving at the Gunness farm, the prospective suitors were invariably\nimpressed with the evidences of wealth and luxury. After a stay of a\nfew days, during which time the cunning murderess would find out how\nmuch money her victim had, and whether he could immediately procure\nmore in the form of cash, the victim would be invited to supper and\nhis food drugged.\n\nHe would then be escorted to his room, where he would soon become\nunconscious. Chloroform was then administered, the body hurled through\na chute to the basement, where it would be dismembered and placed in a\ngunnysack.\n\nThe sack would then be taken out and buried in a convenient spot on\nthe farm. It was an inquiry from the brother of one of the victims,\nAndrew Helgelein, which revealed the whole horrible affair.\n\n[Illustration: THE DEATH HARVESTER.\n\nA Crop on the Gunness Farm.]\n\nIt is estimated that this woman, through the aid of the matrimonial\nagencies, murdered more people than any other human being that ever\nlived. She exceeded the records of the <DW12>s, Holmes, and even those\narch-assassins of the middle ages, the Borgias.\n\n\nLOMBROSO DISCUSSES MONSTER.\n\nDr. Cesare Lombroso, of the University of Milan, the world's greatest\ncriminologist, in discussing this woman, said:\n\n     \"In general the moral physiognomy of the born female\n     criminal approximates strongly to that of the male. The\n     female criminal is exceedingly weak in maternal feeling,\n     inclined to dissipation, astute and audacious, and\n     dominates weaker beings sometimes by suggestion, and at\n     other times by muscular force; while her love of violent\n     exercise, her vices and even her dress, increase her\n     resemblance to the stronger sex.\n\n     \"Added to these virile characteristics are often the\n     worst qualities of women; namely, an excessive desire for\n     revenge, cunning cruelty, love of dress and untruthfulness,\n     forming a combination of evil tendencies which often\n     results in a type of extraordinary wickedness. Needless\n     to say these different characteristics are not found in\n     the same proportion in everybody. One criminal will be\n     deficient in intelligence, but possessed of great strength,\n     while another, who is weak physically, triumphs over this\n     obstacle by the ability with which she lays her plans.\n\n     \"But when, by an unfortunate chance, muscular strength and\n     intellectual force meet in the same individual, we have a\n     female delinquent of a terrible type, indeed.\n\n     \"In short, we may assume that if female-born criminals are\n     fewer in number than the males; they are usually much more\n     ferocious.\n\n     \"What is the explanation? We observe that the normal\n     woman is naturally less sensitive to pain than a man, and\n     compassion is the offspring of sensitiveness. If the one be\n     wanting, so will the other be.\n\n     \"We also find that women have many traits in common with\n     children; that their moral sense is deficient; that they\n     are revengeful, jealous, inclined to vengeances of a\n     refined cruelty.\n\n     \"In ordinary cases these defects are neutralized by piety,\n     maternity, want of passion, by weakness and an undeveloped\n     intelligence. But when a morbid activity of the psychical\n     centres intensifies the bad qualities of women, and\n     induces them to seek relief in evil deeds; when piety and\n     maternal sentiments are wanting, and in their place are\n     strong passions, much muscular strength and a superior\n     intelligence for the conception and execution of evil, it\n     is clear that the innocuous semi-criminal present in the\n     normal woman must be transformed into the born criminal\n     more terrible than any man.\n\n     \"What terrific criminals would children be if they\n     had strong passions, muscular strength and sufficient\n     intelligence; and if, moreover, their evil tendencies were\n     exasperated by a morbid intellectual activity! And women\n     are big children; their evil tendencies are much more\n     numerous and more varied than men's, but generally remain\n     latent. When they are awakened and excited they produce\n     results proportionately greater.\"\n\n\nLIST OF THE VICTIMS.\n\nBelow is given a partial list of the victims of this inhuman monster,\nas it appeared in the Chicago American, Sunday, April 26, 1908:\n\nPARTIAL CATALOGUE OF MRS. GUNNESS' 180 VICTIMS.\n\n     1. Max Sorenson, Mrs. Gunness' first husband--whom she\n     poisoned.\n\n     2. Peter S. Gunness, second husband, whom she killed with a\n     meat axe.\n\n     3. Her infant child, whom she strangled to death.\n\n     4. Miss Justina Loeffler, of Elkhart, Ind., believed to\n     have been married to Johann Hoch and sent by him to Mrs.\n     Gunness to be murdered and buried.\n\n     5. Olaf Limbo, Norwegian farm hand.\n\n     6. Ole Budsberg, a hired man, from Iola, Wis.\n\n     7-9. Three well-known men of Fort Wayne, Ind., who have\n     disappeared in the last two years.\n\n     10. A horse trader from Montana.\n\n     11. Jennie Olsen, eighteen years old, adopted daughter of\n     Mrs. Gunness.\n\n     12. Henry Gurholt, left Scandinavia, Wis., on March 12,\n     1906, saying he was going to marry Mrs. Gunness.\n\n     13. George Bradley, forty years old, of Tuscola, Ill., went\n     to La Porte, Ind., October 20 of last year.\n\n     14. Olaf Lindboe, farm laborer, of Chicago, employed by\n     Mrs. Gunness.\n\n     15. Lee Porter, of Bartonville, Okla., quarreled with his\n     wife and answered one of Mrs. Gunness' matrimonial \"ads.\"\n\n     17. Crippled man from Medina, N. D.\n\n     18-20. Three children of Mrs. Gunness killed or burned in\n     house--Myrtle, aged 11; Lucy, 9; Philip, 5.\n\n     21. Body of unidentified woman found in ruins of burned\n     house.\n\n     22. Strange baby left last fall by man and woman, as told\n     by Ray Lamphere, arrested as accomplice of Mrs. Gunness.\n\n     23. John O. Moe went to La Porte from Elbow Lake, Minn.,\n     day before Christmas, 1906, with $1,000.\n\n     24. Armat Hartoonan, wealthy Armenian rug merchant of\n     Binghamton, N. Y., who went to La Porte in 1906 in answer\n     to a matrimonial \"ad.\"\n\n     25. Charles Neuberg, of Philadelphia, took $500 and went to\n     visit Mrs. Gunness in June, 1906.\n\n     26. George Berry, of Tuscola, Ill., went to work for Mrs.\n     Gunness July, 1905. He took $1,500, expecting to marry the\n     widow.\n\n     27. John A. Lefgren, aged forty-eight, disappeared from the\n     Chicago Club, and is believed to have gone to Mrs. Gunness'\n     farm.\n\n     28. E. J. Tiefland, retired railroad man, of Minneapolis.\n\n     29-30. A Los Angeles college professor and wife--names not\n     yet ascertained.\n\n     31. Andrew K. Helgelein, Aberdeen, S. D., ranchman, the\n     last victim, whose fate led to the discovery of Mrs.\n     Gunness' crimes.\n\n     32. Charles Edman, farm laborer, from New Carlisle, Ind.\n     Took $3,000 in savings to Mrs. Gunness' home.\n\n     33. Frank Riedinger, young German farmer, of Delafield,\n     Wis., went to La Porte in February, 1907.\n\n     34. Babe seen by a neighbor, Mrs. William Diesslen, which\n     afterward disappeared.\n\n     35. Unknown young woman visitor, seen to go to Gunness\n     house; never accounted for afterward.\n\n     36. Unknown man, a widower, and his young son, went to Mrs.\n     Gunness' house a year ago--never seen again. One of the\n     bodies found on farm was that of a small boy.\n\n     37-57. Twenty-one babies entrusted to Mrs. Gunness' care\n     while she was running a \"baby farm\" on the outskirts of\n     Chicago all disappeared mysteriously.\n\n     57-180. Other unknown men, women and babies, who went to\n     Chicago and La Porte homes of Mrs. Gunness, and were never\n     seen again, are estimated to bring the grand total of\n     victims up to 180.\n\nThis, then, is the crowning work of the matrimonial agency; this\nhorrid burying ground of dismembered bodies, this ghastly charnel pit\non an Indiana hillside. By their fruits ye shall know them. In the\ndread Gunness Farm behold the ripened fruit of the matrimonial agency.\n\n[Illustration: RIDES OUT OF THE CLUTCHES OF MATRIMONY]\n\n[Illustration: She Steers Him Straight for the Lily Pond.]\n\n\nIN LIGHTER VEIN.\n\nThe Funny Side of the Matrimonial Business.\n\nThere is necessarily the amusing side in all this miserable trading\nupon the affections of fools. Some of the letters sent in to the\nmatrimonial agencies are little less than \"screams.\"\n\nImagine, if you can, a big, husky farmer, a collarless, coatless son\nof the Utah deserts, gushing forth that he \"could live and die on\nlove.\" Think of a staid and sober trained nurse who has arrived at the\nripe age of forty pouring into the ears of the matrimonial agent that\nshe \"wants a man who is a flower,\" and also saying confidingly that\nshe believes that she requires a few more years in which to prepare\nfor the \"solemn step.\"\n\nOne who is 39 and dark, blushingly admits that she is a \"young girl\"\nof loving disposition, and, since love is the destiny of us all, prays\nfor a husband of fifty or thereabouts.\n\nOne who describes herself as \"lively and frolicsome\" frankly admits\nthat she is out for the money and can get along without the love end\nof it at all. It is needless to say that this letter comes from the\nPennsylvania Dutch regions.\n\nHere are a few of the gems:\n\n\nCOULD LIVE AND DIE ON LOVE.\n\n          Huntsville. Utah,\n          Dec. 27. 1902.\n\n     MRS. ELLEN MARION.\n     Grant Works, Ill.\n\n     My Dear Lady:\n\n     I wish to beg your pardon if I appear rude in trying to\n     personally introduce myself, but allow me to assure you\n     that I am sincere in my quest for a kind friend, and it is\n     nothing but the purest and holiest motives of the human\n     heart that prompts the intrusion.\n\n     I saw your advertisement in the Valley Farmer, and in it\n     I seem to behold the image of an ideal lady, who is well\n     worthy of the highest esteem and admiration from a true\n     gentleman, and how happy and thankful should the man be\n     who is so fortunate as to captivate the love and heart of\n     so noble a prize. Among many others your advertisement to\n     me seemed to be the most suitable and impressive. While it\n     would not be within good taste to express a great love for\n     you at present, yet I believe that I could come as near\n     living and dying on love as the next one. My object in\n     writing you is to find if there should be a chord within\n     our natures that could be touched mutually to harmonize\n     with the word love.\n\n     I have been married and know of the joy and happiness of a\n     kind and loving companion. Two years ago death robbed me of\n     my greatest prize in life. Since then I have been baching\n     it. I am tired of roughing it alone, and if there were only\n     some one to meet me with a kind smile of approval I could\n     work much harder and be a better man for it, and I do most\n     earnestly and sincerely solicit your correspondence with a\n     view to closer ties should our natures prove congenial.\n\n     Should you feel inclined to favor me I would certainly feel\n     highly flattered.\n\n\nNOT A FLIRT.\n\n     Please do not rank me with the ordinary flirts and\n     adventurers, for I assure you that I am honest in my\n     intentions and would not mislead or advise anyone\n     wrongfully. My age is thirty-seven, height five feet nine\n     inches, weight 175 pounds, have a good moral character\n     in every respect, honest and industrious, without any\n     bad habits, total abstainer from liquor and tobacco,\n     move in the best society, am of a quiet, kind and loving\n     disposition. Home is the dearest place to me on earth and\n     I know how to make it happy. I can appreciate and know the\n     real value of a kind and loving wife, and the dear lady\n     that becomes my wife will find in me a true and honest\n     husband, a kind and loving companion, one whose greatest\n     aim and object will be to make his home and loved ones\n     happy.\n\n     To you the above may have a smattering of self-praise and\n     flattery, but the facts are wholly true, which I hope in\n     due time will be fully demonstrated. Should you wish to\n     hear further from me I shall be quite pleased to furnish\n     any information desired.\n\n     Anxiously awaiting your acquaintance, I am,\n\n          Yours sincerely,\n          JENS WINTER.\n\n     With best wishes and compliments of the season.\n\n[Illustration: AROUND THE CLOCK WITH A \"HOME HUSBAND\"]\n\n\nLOVELORN WAILS.\n\nI want a man who is a flower, with love and affection oozing from all\nits petals. Maybe, however, I need a few more years' preparation for\nthe most solemn of steps--matrimony. I admire a man of good physique,\nkind, gallant, conscientious, of good morals as can be expected\nnowadays, home-loving, and fond of children.--Application for a\nhusband from Catherine M. Barnes, trained nurse, aged 40, Indianapolis.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nLove is the destiny of us all. At times it seems it is going to\nside-track and pass us. Therefore, I ask you to help me to find a\nhandsome man of 50 or over who has some money and can make more.\n\nI am a young girl of loving disposition; do not powder, except on\nspecial occasions; can cook, and know how to dress on nothing or\nlittle. I want love and fidelity. Do not send me the name of any\ntraveling men.\n\nI am 39 and dark.--Miss Ella Miller, 837 Spring Garden street,\nPhiladelphia.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIntroduce me to a widow with money who wants a good entertainer and\nhonest man. I have no funds, but don't tell her that. I play, sing and\nrecite well.--Adam Werker, Glen Ellyn, Ill.\n\n\nHER IDEAL HUSBAND.\n\n\"My ideal must be tall,\" suggests Miss Mary Hester, from Wayland,\nN. Y., \"and a gentleman in every sense of the word. He must be of\ngood standing socially and morally. He must be of temperate habits,\nkind, generous, affectionate, devoted--a man of ability, who would\nbe a companion socially, intellectually and morally to a true, pure,\ndevoted wife.\"\n\nShe says she would ask for no more.\n\n[Illustration: (Letter, first part)]\n\n[Illustration: (Letter, second part)]\n\n[Illustration: (Second letter, first part)]\n\n[Illustration: (Second letter, second part)]\n\n[Illustration: \"READ US 'BOUT WHUT DE FOLKS IN PITTSBURG AN' NEWPORT\nIS UP TO.\"]\n\n[Illustration: \"I'D RUTHER BE MARRIED TO A WOMAN WHO WAS REFORMIN'\nTHINGS OUTSIDE DE HOUSE DAN IN HIT.\"]\n\n\nTHIS ONE IS REAL FRANK.\n\nHere is another letter from Reading, Pa:\n\n     Dear Sir: I notice by Sunday's paper that you are looking\n     for a wife. Now, strange to relate, I am looking for a\n     husband. I don't know what your requirements are, but I do\n     know mine, and the chief ones of them are money, a good\n     home, less work and worry, and happiness. If love comes,\n     too, I shall not object, although I have lived long enough\n     to realize that there can be a sort of lukewarm happiness\n     without love.\n\n     Be that as it may, I judge my capacity is sufficiently\n     large to satisfy the sort of a man I judge you to be. Now,\n     for the next item of importance--myself. I am tall and\n     slender, five feet six inches high, and quite \"figuresque,\"\n     as one of my girl friends tells me. I am of the\n     Irish-American type; hair medium in shade and profuse as to\n     quantity; deep-set, very bright gray eyes; good carriage,\n     on account of which strangers often consider me haughty--an\n     entirely erroneous idea.\n\n     Am of a lively, frolicsome nature. I am full of fun, and\n     no matter how black things are I always find something\n     to laugh at. I am twenty-three years old, and decidedly\n     domestic, that being, in fact, my only accomplishment. I\n     am artistic only along some lines; have no musical talent\n     and am not an artist, but I love both devotedly. Am very\n     practical, in fact, and a good housekeeper. There is lots\n     more I might tell you, but we will call this enough for the\n     present. Should like to know something about you, and hope\n     you will be as truthful and frank as I have been.\n\n          Sincerely yours,\n          MARY ANDERSON.\n\n\nONE OF THE LUCKY ONES.\n\nA Matrimonial Agent Captures a Rich Husband and Retires from Business.\n\nMamie Marie Schultz, a matrimonial agent, outwits the police and\npostal authorities after being raided and broken up, moves to other\nquarters, continues business, finds a rich man seeking a wife among\nher patrons and marries him.\n\nSeptember 11, the German-American Agency, run by Mamie Marie Schultz,\n3150 Calumet avenue, was raided by Detective Wooldridge, the\nliterature seized and destroyed. Mamie Marie Schultz was fined $25\nby Justice Hurley. The evidence obtained was submitted to the postal\nauthorities for action.\n\nMamie Marie Schultz fled to Oak Park, where she continued her\nmatrimonial agency. After she moved to Oak Park she was notified \"by\norder of the town board\" to vacate, but she laughed at the order and\nenjoyed the newspaper notoriety she attained, for it only increased\nher business. It is said she made thousands of dollars out of her\nmatrimonial agency.\n\nWith a stealth that is characteristic of his art, Cupid has\naccomplished what Oak Park officials had been trying to do for two\nyears. He has closed out the Oak Park matrimonial agency by making a\nvictim of his promoter in that vicinity, Marie Schultz, manager of the\nmatchmakers' concern.\n\nThe postmaster, United States marshal and several of the town officers\nyesterday received letters signed \"Mrs. J. D. Edwards,\" announcing\nthat Marie Schultz \"had been caught in her own net\" and had deserted\nthe village for a \"palatial\" home in Seattle, Wash., where her new\nhusband, J. D. Edwards, is a wealthy lumber dealer.\n\n\nSWIFT COURTSHIP BY EDWARDS.\n\nEdwards, it is said, arrived in Oak Park on Tuesday, and after a\nwhirlwind courtship this \"Lochinvar who came out of the West\" had won\nthe whole matrimonial agency.\n\n\"Marie,\" the name in which all her extensive advertising was done,\nhas defeated the officials of Chicago, Oak Park, and even the United\nStates postoffice inspector, in every effort they made to suppress her\nenterprise.\n\nTo Postmaster Hutchinson she wrote requesting that all letters\naddressed to the agency be returned to the writers, as she didn't\n\"want any more of their money.\" The postoffice force was burdened with\nthe task of mailing back to some 500 lovelorn men and maidens the\nletters which had accumulated in \"Marie's\" postoffice box.\n\nBut the bleatings of the overgrown calf from Utah, and the wails of\nthe maiden lady who desires a \"flower\" for a mate are both eclipsed by\nthe mushy outpourings of a Chicago business man.\n\nThis fellow evidently possesses the artistic temperament. Not only\nis he moved to write prose poetry, \"to bay the moon of love,\" but he\ninsists on inserting illustrative sketches of an ardent wooing.\n\nHe has forged the white heat of his passion, which evidently puts Ella\nWheeler Wilcox at her fiercest to shame, into pictures. Here we behold\nhim, hand in hand with his beloved, under the kindly stars. There,\nmore prosaic, it is true, but still quite passionate, is the drawing\nroom scene, with the lady seated on his knee. Behold the works of\ngenius when love impels.\n\n\nTHE FESTIVE FARM HAND FRIVOLS.\n\nAmong the hundreds of applications for a wife Detective Wooldridge\nfound one from Jacob C. Miller, of Martinsville. Pa. Miller filled out\nthe application blank as follows:\n\n     Q. Where born? A. Lancaster, Pa.\n\n     Q. What language do you speak? A. English.\n\n     Q. Nationality? A. White.\n\n     Q. Weight? A. 130.\n\n     Q. Color of eyes? A. Greenish blue.\n\n     Q. Color of hair? A. Brown on a little patch.\n\n     Q. Complexion? A. Fair.\n\n     Q. Circumference of chest? A. 36 inches.\n\n     Q. Circumference of waist? A. 36 inches.\n\n     Q. Circumference of head (just above ears)? A. 13 inches.\n\n     Q. Circumference of neck? A. Wear 15-1\/2 collar.\n\n     Q. Profession? A. Farm hand.\n\n     Q. Income per year? A. Nothing.\n\n     Q. Extent of education: common, high school or university?\n     A. Common.\n\n     Q. Do you use tobacco or liquor? A. I use a little tobacco,\n     but no liquor.\n\n     Q. How much real estate do you own? A. Nothing.\n\n     Q. Do any of the pictures we have submitted to you suit,\n     and will you marry? A. Yes, the one with the turned-up nose.\n\n     Q. If we secured you a wife worth $250,000 would you be\n     willing to pay us a small commission for our trouble? A.\n     Yes.\n\n\nTHE FAKER AND THE PRESS.\n\n\nSOME NEWSPAPERS ARE BUNCOED, WHILE OTHERS WILLINGLY ASSIST RASCALS.\n\nStrangely enough, the abomination known as the \"matrimonial agency,\"\nbureau or what-not, has succeeded in hoodwinking the great American\npress to a certain extent.\n\nAdvertisements appear in leading journals all over the country.\nWithout this the great fraud could not exist ten minutes. There are\nnumberless instances, we are quite sure, where the publishers have no\nsuspicion that they are furthering the cause of scoundrels. In others,\nwe regret to say, the motive for accepting these advertisements is\ntraceable to nothing more or less than just the plain greed of the\npublisher.\n\nIt is impossible for a private citizen to prophesy whether the entire\npower of the government of the United States can purify the columns of\nsome of our greedy newspapers.\n\n[Illustration: HOW TO TRAIN A HUSBAND]\n\nThese matrimonial agencies are frauds. The newspaper man knows this\nand takes their money for the advertisements, and becomes a messenger\nof a crime for a paltry sum, and if I were the District Attorney\nI would get busy and call the attention of the Postmaster General\nto these alleged newspapers for the purpose of shutting off their\ndistribution through the mails.\n\nHere are a few samples of the ads appearing in the reputable daily\npress of the country:\n\n\nMATRIMONIAL AGENCIES' ADVERTISEMENTS FOR RICH WIVES AND HUSBANDS.\n\nThey Appear in All the Leading Newspapers Throughout the Country.\n\nThis is a very select list of ten ladies picked at random from our\nbooks by one of the leading newspaper reporters of this city, February\n1, 1904:\n\n     Minnesota Maiden--30 yrs., 5 ft. 2 in., weight 128 lbs.;\n     brown hair, blue eyes; has $10,500.\n\n     Missouri Maiden--28 yrs., 5 ft. 7 in., weight 150 lbs.;\n     blonde, blue eyes, German; has $4,800.\n\n     Pennsylvania Maiden--20 yrs., 5 ft. 4 in., weight 132 lbs.;\n     light hair, blue eyes; will inherit $30,000, provided she\n     is married on her 21st birthday.\n\n[Illustration: Can a Man or Woman Know Each Other Before Marriage?\n\nBEFORE.\n\n\"When he was wooing her, Romeo devoted his time to thinking of\ndelicate little attentions that he could pay Juliet, and of things he\ncould do to make her happy.\"\n\nAFTER.\n\nOn Christmas he is liable to shove a dollar or two at his wife,\nremarking: \"Get yourself something. I don't know what you want, and I\nhaven't time to fool with it.\"]\n\n[Illustration: \"ONE HOUR OF IT IS WORTH LIVIN' FOR AN' DYIN' FOR.\"]\n\n[Illustration: \"AN' DAT WOMEN'S CLUBS IS DE CAUSE OF ALL DE PO' LITTLE\nNEGLECTED CHILLEN.\"]\n\n     Wisconsin Widow--49 yrs., 5 ft. 3 in., weight 130 lbs.;\n     black hair, black eyes; no children; worth $15,000. Will\n     marry elderly man.\n\n     Indiana Maiden--29 yrs., 5 ft. 4 in., weight 122 lbs.;\n     brown hair, blue eyes; pretty and worth $7,000. Would marry\n     farmer.\n\n     Illinois Maiden--21 yrs., 5 ft. 8 in., weight 140 lbs.;\n     chestnut hair, blue eyes; worth $40,000; is a <DW36>. Will\n     marry kind man who will overlook her misfortune.\n\n     New Jersey Widow--28 yrs., 4 ft. 11 in., weight 150 lbs.;\n     brown hair, blue eyes, one child; worth $35,000. Will marry\n     and assist husband financially.\n\n     Ohio Farmers Daughter--Orphan, 25 yrs., 5 ft. 7 in.;\n     brown hair, gray eyes; has large farm. Alone, will marry\n     immediately, farmer preferred.\n\n     Montana Maiden--Half-breed Indian, age 25, 5 ft. 4 in., 130\n     lbs.; black hair, black eyes; has large ranch. Will marry\n     honest white man.\n\n     Illinois Bachelor Girl--Age 35, 5 ft. 7 in., 160 lbs.;\n     black hair, brown eyes; owns fine estate, valued at\n     thousands. Would marry gentleman of equal wealth.\n\n     PENNSYLVANIA.\n\n     Beautiful maiden lady, refined and well educated; American;\n     blonde, age 37 years, height 5 ft. 4 in., weight 106\n     pounds; worth $30,000.\n\n     NEBRASKA.\n\n     Stylish young brunette, fond of society; American; age 28\n     years, height 5 ft. 3 in., weight 135 pounds; Baptist, and\n     worth $25,000; income $3,000 a year.\n\n     OHIO.\n\n     Stately widow, age 49 years, handsome and remarkably\n     well preserved; height 5 ft. 6 in., weight 160 lbs.; no\n     children; worth $5,000; wants elderly husband.\n\n[Illustration: (Man and woman pointing at each other through heart)]\n\n     KENTUCKY.\n\n     Beautiful blonde Southern girl, educated and refined; age\n     21, height 5 ft. 2 in., weight 115 lbs.; American, and\n     worth $10,000; wants nice-looking husband.\n\n     Pretty little girl, age 19 years, height 5 ft. 3 in.,\n     weight 112 lbs.; American; worth $10,000. Says she is very\n     anxious to marry.\n\n     BOSTON, MASS.\n\n     Fine-looking lady, age 37 years, height 5 ft. 3 in., weight\n     140 lbs.; American, Protestant, and worth $20,000.\n\n     Young lady, blonde, age 25 years, weight 128 lbs., height 5\n     ft.; American, Methodist; income $720 a year; worth $25,000.\n\n     CHICAGO, ILL.\n\n     Maiden, age 26 years, height 5 ft. 4 in., weight 140 lbs.;\n     Scotch, Protestant, Methodist; income $1,200 per year;\n     worth $75,000.\n\n     MONROE CO., PA.\n\n     Young lady, age 23 years, very pretty, height 5 ft. 5 in.,\n     weight 150 lbs.; German, Methodist; worth $12,000.\n\n     DOVER, N. H.\n\n     Stylish, brown-eyed lady, age 24 years, height 5 ft. 6 in.,\n     weight 135 pounds; American, Methodist; worth $50,000.\n\n     NEW YORK CITY.\n\n     Young widow, age 32 years, height 5 ft. 5 in., weight 140\n     lbs.; Irish Catholic; worth $40,000.\n\n     UTAH.\n\n     Maiden lady, age not mentioned, height 5 ft., weight 120\n     lbs.; worth $35,000.\n\nAnd all this, ridiculous, murderous and otherwise, is all outside the\npale of the law. The matrimonial agency is a crime _per se_. It is a\ncriminal institution. It has been pronounced to be such by the best\nand foremost judges of the United States, Germany and Great Britain.\n\nJudge Klerbach, sitting in the case of a marriage broker at\nGoettingen, Germany, in 1903, declared that the marriage broker was a\ncriminal in intent, from the very nature of his business.\n\nIn the celebrated case of Alan Murray vs. Jeanie McDonald at\nEdinburgh, Scotland, in 1898, Justice Grahame pronounced from the\njudicial seat one of the most scathing arraignments of the marriage\nbureau ever delivered. \"Leeches upon the body social, blood-suckers,\ndestroyers of womanhood, abominations of the bottomless pit,\" were\nsome of the phrases used by Justice Grahame in denouncing Murray.\n\nIn the petty sessions at Tinahely, Ireland, Justice O'Gorman in\nMay, 1905, is reported in the Wicklow People, a newspaper which has\na wide circulation in the South of Ireland, as fiercely denouncing\nthe marriage broker business. The Justice declared that the marriage\nbroker was a wolf, \"preying upon the weaknesses of humanity, a\npander to the lowest instincts\"; that he had no right to demand the\ninterference of the law in his behalf, but rather that the law should\nalways be exercised for the suppression of his nefarious traffic.\n\n\nSAME THING NEARER HOME.\n\nTo get nearer home. In the Chicago American, February 12, 1903, Judge\nNeely, in the case of the State vs. Hattie Howard, declared from the\nbench that to \"sell men and women in marriage is the height of crime.\"\nJudge Neely further said:\n\n     \"Men and women who engage in this business of promoting\n     matrimony for money are guilty of crime. It is opposed to\n     the fundamental principles of society. Such a practice\n     should under no circumstances be tolerated. This practice\n     should be stopped. The trade should be killed. The courts\n     should make it their business to discourage this thing in a\n     way that may be easily understood.\"\n\nJudge Kohlsaat, of Chicago, has inveighed against the practice in\nequally vehement terms. Judge Kohlsaat declares that \"the Police\nDepartment of Chicago is entitled to great credit for what it has done\nin discouraging this business. I hope it will continue its vigilance\nuntil every promoter of marriages of this character has been compelled\nto leave the city. They should make such criminals give the city a\nwide berth.\"\n\nThere, then, is the law. The business is a crime in its very nature.\nIt leads to bigamy and wholesale murder. It is made the instrument of\nthe thief, the swindler and the murderer. How much longer will the\nAmerican people look with calmness upon these practices, upon these\nabominations, which make a stench of the very air of the great and\nfree country in which we live? The answer is up to you.\n\n\n\n\nTHE GREAT MISTAKE.\n\nOUR PENAL SYSTEM IS A RELIC OF EARLY SAVAGERY.\n\n\nOur whole penal system needs changing. It is a relic of barbarism, and\nstands a monument to the early savagery of the human race.\n\nHow is it possible for a man or woman to lead an upright, useful life\nafter they once come under the ban of the law? Society combines to\nhound them down. They are forbidden to place themselves on an equality\nwith others by narrow, human prejudice--the \"holier than thou\"\nattitude of that portion of the public which has not yet been \"found\nguilty.\"\n\nWe are Pharisees, all, and sit in judgment on our fellowman, because\nwe do not yet realize the mixture of evil and good that is in every\nman--none are exempt--only some are caught and punished.\n\nMen have come to us, desperate, despairing men, crying: \"For God's\nsake, what are we to do? If we get a job someone will tell our\nemployers we have 'done time,' and we are fired. If they find us on\nthe street, we're arrested. Where can we go and what can we do?\"\n\nA man may commit murder and not be a criminal, and yet a sneakthief is\nalways a criminal and every burglar a potential murderer.\n\nSocial conditions produce criminals. As well expect a rose to bloom in\na swamp as human nature to flower in the slums.\n\nAll our prisons are hotbeds of tuberculosis and most prison physicians\nhold their positions through political pull.\n\nIn our opinion a greater distinction should be made between the\npenitentiary and house of correction. Petty misdemeanants should not\nbe branded with the prison stigma. We also favor suspended sentence\nfor first offenders.\n\nThe crime and its punishment should be separated. At present the\npersonal equation does not enter into the case when a judge imposes\nsentence. The man's environment, what leads him to break the law, and\nhow best to help this particular man, all are questions that should be\ncarefully considered before sentence is pronounced.\n\n\nINTELLIGENCE IN PUNISHING CRIME.\n\nA student of prison affairs once said that the prison population\nconsists of two classes--people who never ought to have been sent to\nprison and people who never ought to be allowed to leave it. It is\nunfortunate that students interested in either one of these classes\nare too often apt to forget the importance of the other.\n\nThere are many habitual criminals, weak persons readily giving way\nto temptation, who should not be classified as professionals. The\nprofessionals are only those who deliberately set about supporting\nthemselves by crime. These are the ones who are among all criminals\nmost unlikely to change their ways, and it was for their control that\nDetective Wooldridge suggested some years ago that after several\nconvictions such criminals should be given a special trial to decide\nwhether they were true professionals or not, and if they were, they\nshould be imprisoned for life.\n\nIf more attention were given to professional crime and if harsher\nmethods were used in protecting society from it, the result would be\nmerciful in the end--merciful both to the citizens protected from such\ncrime and to the men who, as conditions now are, graduate every year\ninto such careers.\n\n\nTHE \"SILENT SYSTEM\" IS A CRIME AGAINST CRIMINALS.\n\nThe penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, at\nPhiladelphia, in 1907, was the only prison in America conducted on\nwhat is known as the \"silent system.\"\n\nIn this grim edifice a man sentenced to twenty years imprisonment\nmight pass all of that time buried from sight in his cell, seeing only\nhis keeper, the chaplain, the doctor and the schoolmaster, and for\ntwenty minutes in every six weeks he would be allowed to talk with a\nnear relative.\n\nThis man loses his identity the moment he enters the prison gates. A\nblack cap is drawn over his head and he is led to a cell in one of the\nmany corridors that radiate from the central tower like spokes from\nthe hub of a wheel. He is known thereafter by a number.\n\nThe cell in which he eats and sleeps and works is a little larger than\nthe average prison cell, and more completely furnished--as it must\nhold his bed, his lavatory, his dishes and a place for eating, his\nwork, his every possession, and such books as he may secure from the\nprison library.\n\nHis front door opens on a corridor and is kept ajar on a heavy chain\nso the prison guards may watch him.\n\nHis back door opens on a plot of ground about 8\u00d710 feet. It is\nsurrounded and cut off from all communication from every living human\nbeing by a brick wall. Only the watchman in the central tower and the\nbirds that wing their way over the prison can see him in his little\nyard. Robinson Crusoe on his deserted island could not be more utterly\nlonely.\n\nIn this tiny yard is a circular path worn smooth and pressed deep into\nthe soil by the feet of despairing men--his predecessors.\n\nThe prisoner is forbidden even the negative pleasure of going out into\nthis God-forsaken walled plot of bare ground except for one hour a day.\n\nIn his gloomy cell the prisoner drags out the \"task\" given him to\nescape insanity. He fears to be idle without the sound of a human\nvoice in his ear or the sight of a human face to relieve his awful\nloneliness.\n\nTo lengthen these \"tasks\" the State of Pennsylvania has provided\nprimitive hand-looms, some 100 years old, and other discarded\nmakeshifts of man's industrial infancy.\n\nNot for him has the world progressed beyond the caveman's day.\nPerhaps he is a skilled mechanic, a man accustomed to the swift\nplay of machinery, the grip of tool on material. He is condemned to\nmanufacture by primitive methods the clothes he wears to keep him from\nquite going mad.\n\n\nEXTREME METHODS FAULTY.\n\nAs between the abominable \"contract\" and \"lease\" systems and this\nreversion to blind seclusion, is there no human method to be found of\napportioning the convict's labor?\n\nYet No. 99, locked away in his solitary cell in the Philadelphia\nprison, must toil laboriously, denying his brain and hand their\ncunning, with a pretense at occupation. He is not sharing in the\nworld's work. He knows this child's play of making something that\nno one needs on an instrument left over from the twelfth century is\nfutile and foolish.\n\nHow shall he meet and battle with the great world of commerce and\nlabor after twenty years of this? In what way is this make-believe\nfitting him for liberty?\n\nSome few in the Philadelphia prison escape the fate mapped out for\nthem. There are 800 cells, and there are at present about 1,100\nprisoners. Naturally, some must \"double up.\" And then the regular\ndomestic work of the institution must be done, tasks at which it would\nbe impossible to keep prisoners separated or wholly silent.\n\nAnd so the \"silent system\" is not entirely silent. But, we protest,\nthat is not the fault of the prison management, nor is it that of\nthe good citizens who seventy-eight years ago devised and built this\nprison, the only one of its kind in America.\n\nMen are unfitted for after-life under the \"silent system.\" They come\nout of prison at the end of their terms with shuffling gait and\nincoherent speech and unskilled hands.\n\nCut off from all obligation to family or friends, the prisoner's whole\nspiritual nature is bound to deteriorate. Will he be a better citizen,\na more loving father or husband or son, when he is released?\n\nThe prison at Philadelphia is a model of cleanliness, management,\ndiscipline and sanitation. The warden, Charles C. Church, is humane\nand intelligent; the guards above the average in character.\n\nAnd yet Pennsylvania's crime against her criminal population is\nappalling. All she does for her unfortunate offender is to guard him\nsecurely, shelter him in cleanliness, feed and clothe him--and hold\nhim against the day of his release.\n\nThese are necessary things, but it is more necessary that the state\nturn back the criminal at least no worse than she found him when\ncommitted to her care.\n\nShe could turn him out a better man morally, better equipped to gain\na livelihood, in fair physical health, and certainly without mental\ntaint or bias due to his imprisonment.\n\n\nJAILS MAKE 50,000 CRIMINALS A YEAR.\n\nIf the jails and lockups in our country--4,000 or 5,000 in number--are\nin truth, as they have been often aptly termed, in most cases\ncompulsory schools of crime, maintained at the public expense, we\nshall have from this quarter alone an accession to the criminal\nclasses in each decade of perhaps 50,000 trained experts in crime.\nSurely, almost any change in dealing with the young, with the\nbeginners in lawbreaking, would be an improvement on the prevailing\nsystem. Jails and prisons, so constructed and managed as to keep\nseparate their inmates, would afford an adequate remedy for the evil.\nUntil this can be done it would be far better to cut down largely the\nnumber of arrests and committals of the young.\n\n[Illustration: United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas; the\nbest and most modern Penitentiary in the United States if not in the\nworld.]\n\n\"It is absurd to argue that life in the penitentiary is conducive to\nmoral betterment, for all the conditions are against this cheerful\ntheory. In jail a man meets criminals. The whole system makes for\ngreater criminality on the release of the prisoner. He has time to\nplan fresh onslaughts on society. His incarceration further embitters\nhim against the world. He looks with malicious envy on those who\nhave escaped the punishment which he has had to suffer. When he is\nturned out of prison he is ready for further felonies--only now he has\nlearned more caution, and for this reason he is more dangerous than he\nwas when he entered the institution.\"\n\nWhen a man has served two prison sentences without being convinced of\nthe futility of the attempt to live without honest work, it is evident\nthat he has abandoned all idea of being a good citizen and has made up\nhis mind to prey upon society.\n\n\"Then,\" says Mr. Wooldridge, \"moderate sentences having produced no\ngood effect upon him, either to deter or reform, why should he not be\ntaken permanently out of society and put where he cannot harm others\nor wrong himself by committing crime? No objection,\" he concluded,\n\"can be found to this method.\"\n\n\nCRIME BASED ON SUGGESTION.\n\nThe man who has declared war upon the world, as every man has done who\nis not reformed by two successive prison sentences, should be seized\nand permanently imprisoned. Modern thought does not sanction the\nliteral translation of this idea, but that does not interfere with the\npossibility of carrying it out for the benefit of society.\n\nThe world spends millions of dollars every year in the business of\nprotecting itself against the criminal and in caring for him. But that\nis because no serious attempt has ever been made to solve the problem\nof crime.\n\nCrime is largely a matter of suggestion and therefore if all the\nhabitual criminals in the country were segregated where their\ninfluence would no longer be able to exert itself, crime would not\npropagate itself so fast. The young men would not have presented to\nthem so often or so forcibly the example which causes most of them\nto take the crooked path. Thus the expense of prevention would be\nenormously diminished at once.\n\n\nSUGGESTS GREAT PRISON FARM.\n\nWith segregated criminals supporting themselves, as they might be\nmade to do under our plan, the enormous cost of penitentiaries would\nat one step be done away with. A penal colony such as Mr. Wooldridge\nproposed would be placed in such a situation that the convicts could\nbe compelled to raise every bit of food they put into their mouths\nand every bit of clothing they put upon their backs. Out in one of\nthe western states or territories a reservation might be made of\nseveral thousand acres of land, around the rim of which the convicts\ncould be made to build a great wall shutting themselves away from\nthe rest of the world. On its surface would be built in the same way\nhabitations for them, and they would live there, tilling the soil and\nmanufacturing their necessities, until death.\n\nThe time will come when this plan will be carried out. The law-abiding\ncitizens of the United States will not continue forever to be taxed\nenormously for the support of a class of persons who are enemies of\npublic order and decency.\n\n\nIMPROVING THE PUBLIC HEALTH.\n\nCan a nation be said to be civilized that spends billions of dollars\nevery year in the detection and punishment of crime, and not one cent\nfor the prevention and cure of disease, which kills thousands of\npersons who might otherwise have retained their health and strength?\n\nSuppose only a billion dollars a year, that now goes to the support\nof criminals in jails and penitentiaries, were to be saved by the\nestablishment of a national penal colony where criminals would be made\nto support themselves; and suppose the billion dollars thus saved\nwere to be spent on free hospitals and medical treatment, would the\ncountry not be much better off?\n\nSuch a use of the money would result in cutting down the death rate\nin the United States at least one-half. The death rate in England,\nthrough the exercise of care and the assistance of the government, has\nbeen reduced from one-half to two-thirds in many diseases, and ten\nto twelve years have been added to the expectation of life between\nthe ages of one year and forty-five years. A similar state of affairs\nshould exist in this country, where the waste of life and health\nthrough preventable diseases is incalculable.\n\nOur enormous expense on account of criminals, most of which might\nbe avoided if brains were really brought to bear upon the problem,\nwill not always be endured. The future will force the criminal to\nsupport himself, and the money now expended on him will be devoted to\nthe preservation of health and life among honest men, for the time\nwill certainly come when free hospitals and medical service will be\nprovided by the government for every citizen who needs them.\n\n\nROAD WORK FOR CONVICTS.\n\nCriminology, on its humanitarian side, seeks new methods of employment\nfor criminals. It seeks to regenerate convicted criminals morally, as\nwell as care for their physical well-being.\n\nIndoor prison trades have a deadly monotony. In most cases they\nare carried on without sunlight, and with too little fresh air.\nConfinement within walls is alone a heavy punishment, but when allied\nwith conditions that breed disease and possibly death, society exacts\nmore than just retribution.\n\nModern criminology leans toward both moral and physical care in\nallotting the daily tasks of criminals. It assumes that the state has\nno right to make the criminal a worse or a weaker member of society\nthan when he entered the prison walls.\n\nThis explains why most experts in criminology are strongly in favor of\nputting criminals to work at road-making. Here is employment in God's\nsunlight and air, where criminals can do useful work, and still be\nunder watchful guard. They will be giving the state better highways,\nand at the same time escape the deadly indoor prison grind.\n\nCriminologists are studying a hundred speculative methods of\nbenefiting the criminal. They all agree on one point--namely, that\nuseful work in the open air is beneficial to the average criminal,\nmorally and physically.\n\nIf there can be a large benefit to the state, at the same time that\nthe state is benefiting the criminal, there is a double advance along\nthe lines of rational, humane treatment of criminals.\n\nThe sordid idea that criminals should pay the cost of their own\nincarceration is secondary. And yet, in applying convict labor to the\nsolution of the good roads problem in the United States, the public\nwould get back at least a portion of the enormous drain on public\nrevenues for the support of criminals.\n\n\nSOLVES \"GOOD ROADS\" PROBLEM.\n\nThis is the only complete solution of the good roads problem. It is\none that all farmers or other rural residents should insist upon. It\nis the one practical way of gridironing the states, old and new, with\ngood roads. It is especially vital in the newer states, where the\nabsence of good roads is the heaviest tax on industry that individual\ncommunities must suffer.\n\nIt is far better for the criminals themselves that they should\nbe employed in this useful outdoor labor. The greatest clog on\nthe science of criminology is the aversion to breaking away from\ntraditions. The housing of criminals in penitentiaries, where\nexpensive idleness alternates with desultory forms of industry, has\nceased to be a method abreast of the times. There is enormous waste in\nthe orthodox prison systems.\n\nGet all able-bodied convicts into road-making for a single generation,\nand what would result? The productiveness of agricultural states would\nbe vastly increased. Markets, for the average farmer, would be easier\nof access. Instead of virtual isolation for three or four months of\nthe year, agricultural life would be more evenly balanced.\n\nThe actual financial benefits to farmers would aggregate a vast total.\n\nIn European countries, it took several generations to solve the\ngood-roads problem. But they have solved it. The rural roads in the\naverage European state or principality are a national blessing. They\nare not only a joy to transient travelers, but form the bulwark of\nagricultural industries. European governments have wisely considered\nno cost too great for good roads.\n\nAs distances are immeasurably greater in America than in thickly\nsettled European states, the good roads problem takes on a different\naspect here. American roads are, on the average, worse than in any\nother civilized country. Therefore, they must be built up, slowly and\npatiently, perhaps, but with increasing energy as population grows\ndenser.\n\nWith European methods it would take a hundred years to give the\nwestern states good roads. With the convict labor, the problem would\nbe solved in twenty years or less. This would suffice, at least, for a\ngreat national system of highways.\n\n\nEXTEND THE PAROLE SYSTEM.\n\nThe fear is expressed that an extension of the parole system as\nregards adults would open a velvet path for criminals to continue\npreying upon society. There was a loud hue and cry raised against\nthe idea as administered recently by one of our Municipal Court\nJudges. Still, there is no denying that there is a great deal of good\nresultant from this plan. It is a safe, sane and conservative one,\nespecially so when in the hands of judges who can feel for the man\nwho has committed his first offense.\n\nChicago has some peculiar problems to contend with. It is the stopping\noff place for all traveling from south to north, and from north to\nsouth, and from west to east. Many of these transient visitors live\na hand-to-mouth life. Oftentimes they are driven to crime by sheer\nforce of necessity. Again, the father or son may be out of work, and\nchance may place in his way the opportunity to commit some petty\ntheft, tempting him on to his first crime. If such offenders show\nsigns of desiring to do better and are susceptible of reformation,\nthey ought to be given another chance. On the other hand, those who\nare unmistakably guilty and evidence no signs of repentance should be\npunished without any undue delay.\n\nMany families have been driven to disgrace and ruin when their heads\nwere sent to prison. Surely among these there were some who had\nmanifested repentance and shown indications of a desire to be given\nanother opportunity to start anew; surely had they but been shown\nlenience they might have proved good citizens and worthy of the\nconfidence reposed in them.\n\nOf course, there are a lot of drawbacks to the parole system as it\napplies to juveniles in Chicago. But free from politics and in the\nhands of fair-minded, square-leading men it would prove a splendid\nscheme worthy of the highest praise. In its infancy it might look like\na failure, but as time passed it would be perfected, so that in the\nlong run it would prove a godsend to humanity.\n\nWhen a criminal returns from penitentiary or prison he is shunned by\nsociety; he is under the eternal vigilance of our police force--he is\nwalked upon and pushed down. Finally, tired with trying to earn an\nhonest living, he again resorts to crime. Probably had he been paroled\nhe might have turned out a deserving citizen and the father of a happy\nfamily.\n\n\n\n\nVAGRANTS; WHO AND WHY.\n\nWHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE VAGRANT AND TRAMP?\n\n\n[Illustration: Raggles--\"Why did yer refuse what she offered yer?\"\n\nWeary--\"Cause I never heard of it before and de name was too much for\nme. Why when she said 'chop suey' cold chills run down me back, 'cause\ndat word chop reminds me too much of de time when I had ter chop three\ncords of wood looking into de face of two shotguns.\"]\n\nThe vagrant is the most elusive man among us. He is always with us,\nyet we can never locate him. No one wants him, yet we always send him\nto someone else. We make laws to get rid of him, but succeed only in\nkeeping him a little longer in custody at our own expense. Most of\nus laugh at him and some of us cry over him by turns. We draw funny\npictures of him in our newspapers and in our billboard advertisements,\nbut we are really afraid of him. We blame the police for not keeping\nhim off the streets, or at least out of sight, and yet we feed him\nat our own doors. We fear to meet him after dark, and nevertheless\nwe give him a nickel or a dime to keep him in town over night. He is\nan object of charity, or a criminal, just as we happen to feel. He\nis sometimes the hero of our melodrama at the theater, who gets our\ntearful applause. At the same time he stands for all that we brand as\nmean and vile. We spend money lavishly to support him without work by\ncharity, or imprison him in idleness by law.\n\nThe problem is to understand vagrancy so well that we can deal with\nit on a large enough scale both to restore the vagrant to the working\nworld or to keep him in custody, and to prevent the accidental or\noccasional vagrant from becoming a habitual mendicant. The English\nand European governments have dealt with their problems of vagrancy\nmore effectively than we have. This is due to the fact that they have\ninvestigated the causes and conditions of vagrancy more widely than\nwe, and dealt with it on a larger scale by uniform legislation and by\nmore persistently following up the measures in which the public and\nprivate resources combine to treat the evil.\n\n\nTRAMP A RAILROAD PROBLEM.\n\nThus the tramp cuts no figure as a railroad problem, much less menace,\nabroad. But with us it is the fact that railroads representing more\nthan half the total mileage operated in the United States and Canada\ntestify almost without exception to depredation, thieving, injuries,\ndeaths, accidents to passengers or rolling stock, enormous aggregate\ncosts to railroads or society, caused by the habitual illegal use of\nthe railroads by vagrants. The number of \"trespassers,\" from one-half\nto three-quarters of whom were vagrants, who are killed annually\non American railroads exceeds the combined total of passengers and\ntrainmen killed annually. Within four years 23,964 trespassers were\nkilled and 25,236 injured, thus furnishing the enormous total of\n49,200 casualties, with all the cost they involve.\n\nOnly by the co-operation of the railroads with one another and of\ntowns and cities with the railroads can this waste of life and\nproperty and this increasing peril to the safety of the traveling\npublic be prevented. Much more stringent laws will have to be both\nenacted and enforced to prevent the trespassing, which puts a premium\non vagrancy.\n\nOne of the best effects of the strict prevention of free riding on\nrailroads would be to keep boys from going \"on the road\" and becoming\ntramps. It is simply amazing to find little fellows of from 12 to 17\nyears of age, who have never been farther away from home than to some\noutlying freight yards, disappearing for several weeks and returning\nfrom Kansas City, or Cleveland, Omaha or New York, having all alone,\nor with a companion or two, beaten their way and lived by their wits\nwhile traveling half way across the continent. Once the excitement\nof the adventure is enjoyed, the hardship it costs does not seem so\nhard to them as the monotony of home or shop. The discipline of the\nUnited States navy has been the only regulation of this wandering\nhabit which the writer has known to be successful. But the habit is\nmore easily prevented than regulated. Massachusetts has taken the most\nadvanced legislative action of all the states to this end. The Wabash\nand the New York Central railways suggest fine and imprisonment for\ntrespassing upon railway tracks or rolling stock.\n\n\nBETTER LODGINGS FOR HOMELESS MEN.\n\nFar better provision for lodging homeless men must be made by cities\nin municipal lodging houses of their own, such as Chicago effectively\nconducts, and by far stricter public regulation and supervision\nof lodging houses maintained for profit or for charity. The\nanti-tuberculosis crusade shows that this supervision and regulation\nshould be shared by the health authorities with the police. Within a\nperiod of five years 679 consumptives were taken from only a portion\nof Chicago's lodging house district to the Cook County Hospital, most\nof them in the most dangerously infectious stages of the disease. An\ninvestigator of Chicago's 165 cheap lodging houses and their 19,000\nbeds declares that \"the unfortunate man forced to sojourn in them for\na while may enter sound and strong and come out condemned to death.\"\n\nThe New York City Charity Organization Society and the Association\nfor Improving the Condition of the Poor have rendered a country-wide\npublic service in furnishing the report on \"Vagrancy in the United\nStates\" by their joint agent, Orlando F. Lewis. It may well be the\nbasis for better public policy here and everywhere.\n\nStartling figures and facts were presented at the State Conference\nof Charities and Corrections at Albany by Arthur W. Towne, secretary\nof the Illinois State Probation Commission, regarding the extent of\nvagrancy and the habits of tramps in this state.\n\nMore than 31,000 persons, mainly vagrants, received free lodgings in\nNew York State, in town and city lockups, during 1906, and the number\nin 1907 was larger. Seventy-five cities and towns thus provide for\ntheir wandering visitors. Half of these towns and cities also feed the\nwanderers free of charge.\n\nA large number of places give lodgings also to boys, many of them as\nyoung as 10 or 12 years, thus encouraging the wandering spirit that\nmakes the later tramp. With only one slight exception, not a single\ntown or city required any work at all from the lodgers in return for\nthe lodging or the food provided, thus giving absolutely no incentive\nto the wanderer to work for his board or meals.\n\nIt is urged that the system of allowing the police authorities to give\nthese free lodgings, as well as the similar practice in some jails and\nalmshouses, be abolished as a most direct encouragement to vagrancy,\nand that in their stead such free lodgings as are necessary should be\nfurnished by the overseer of the poor, but only when repaid by some\nform of work, such as chopping wood or breaking stone.\n\n\nTRAMPS LIKE JAIL.\n\nMr. Towne also brought out the fact that tramps like to go to jail in\nwinter. Instead of considering a jail sentence for that part of the\nyear as a form of punishment, they welcome it as a chance to keep warm\nand loaf at the public expense. Forty-three per cent of the commitment\nof tramps occurs between November 1 and February 1. In short, the\njail or the penitentiary becomes a sort of winter vacation resort for\ntramps. Many chiefs of police with whom Mr. Towne communicated said\nthat tramps in winter would ask to be sent to jail, and that if this\nwere not done they would sometimes commit offenses for the express\npurpose of being arrested and sent there.\n\nIt is declared to be significant that in the tramp's slang the word\n\"dump\" is applied to both lodging houses and jails.\n\nWith a cold winter the number of vagrants in penitentiaries and jails\nincreases. In 1906 there were more than 10,000 tramps and vagrants\nin penitentiaries and jails, while in 1904, which was a very cold\nwinter, there were more than 14,000. On the average, about one-third\nof the prisoners are tramps and vagrants. This means that the public\nis annually paying several hundred thousand dollars for the avowed\npurpose of punishing men for vagrancy, but in reality it amounts only\nto furnishing a free place of winter rest. Most of the chiefs of\npolice believe that jails and penitentiaries do little good, if any,\nin their treatment of tramps. Another fact is that the sentences for\nthis class of offenders are too short to accomplish any results. About\n85 per cent of the sentences are from only one to sixty days.\n\n[Illustration: THE TRAMP OF FICTION]\n\n[Illustration: Tore Purse from the Hobo.]\n\n[Illustration: (Tramp dropping bucket)]\n\n\nHOBOS CLASSIFIED BY RACES.\n\nIn a vague way the veteran hobos, classified by the various\nnationalities, are fairly representative of the make-up of the\nwhole American nation, in accordance with the number of hobos each\nnationality turns out. After taking into consideration the fact that\ncertain parts of the United States are dominated by people of one\nnationality, and the bulk of tramps in that part of the country would\nnecessarily come from that nationality, the following classification\nwas given as doing justice to all:\n\nThe Irish and British elements lead in the number of hobos. They are\nclosely followed, however, by the German element. The nations of\nEastern Europe, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians and others, are next in\nline. Then follow, in smaller numbers, Scandinavians, French, Italians\nand Jews. The French come mostly from Canada, the Scandinavians from\nthe northwest and the Italians from the largest cities in the country,\nlike New York and Chicago, and also from the southern states. Here and\nthere one finds a stray Servian or Bulgarian who drifted into trampdom\nand has never been able or has never cared to drift out of it again.\n\nGreeks are seldom found among tramps because they have not yet a\n\"second generation\" of Greeks to any extent in the United States.\nChinese and Japanese likewise are not found in the hobo class. Of\nthe <DW64> race, many would not be averse to becoming professional\ntramps were it not for the risk which a <DW64> tramp generally runs. A\n\"stray <DW64>,\" according to the hobos interviewed, is regarded with\napprehension and is apt to be shot on mere suspicion.\n\n\nNEW FOREIGNER NOT A HOBO.\n\nYou will hardly ever find a foreigner in the first five or ten years\nof his American life among tramps and hobos. \"He may be near tramp,\nhe may be apparently 'down and out,' but he is not a genuine hobo,\"\nsaid one of the men. \"You will find plenty of foreigners in the\nlodging houses, plenty of them who starve and suffer, but they are not\nhobos. They have had hard luck, and now in their old age they live by\ndoing two or three and some even one day's work a week. But they work\nmore or less. They have not the parasitic philosophy of one who is a\nfull-fledged hobo. They fall more in the class of European vagabonds,\nsuch as one finds in Germany or Russia. They work now and then; they\nhave some trade, or know a smattering about a number of trades.\"\n\nThe American hobo falls in an entirely different category from these.\nWork with him is said to be a disgrace. Neither does he relish crime\nmuch if he can get along without it. He will beg from door to door and\nwill commit a crime only as a last resort. The hobo primarily has no\nwill power, or rather, he destroys it.\n\nThe majority of hobos became such because of their false conception\nof freedom and of wrong inter-relations between parents and children.\nTheir parents have been held in many cases in semi-savage conditions\nby their landlords in the old world. When they come to America\nthey naturally appreciate their freedom. They speak of it to their\nchildren. They are lax with them, and this spoils them.\n\n\nJEW RECRUIT IN TRAMPDOM.\n\nPolish tramps and tramps from other nations of Eastern and Southern\nEurope were declared to be more apt to turn to petty crimes when\npressed to it by want. They are, however, according to statements of\ntramps, easily found out. They somehow are hasty in their actions, and\njust as they brandish their knives and pistols thoughtlessly they\nfall into the hands of the police simply and easily.\n\nThe Jewish tramp was a rarity until recently. However, the large\nnumber of Jews which poured into this country from oppressed countries\nin Europe since 1881 have also furnished a \"first generation,\" many\nof whose members have found their way to the barrel houses and slums\nof all large cities. The Jewish tramp, however, was declared to be\nentirely of the class of the petty criminal. Out of the penitentiary\nfor some petty crime committed, or having been a go-between for\nthieves and the person who buys the goods stolen, the Jewish youth for\nthe time being takes to trampdom.\n\nHis commercial instinct, however, together with the wide system of\ncharity which the Jews maintain in every city where they are found,\nsoon enables him to get out of the hobo class. He becomes a trader of\nsome sort and soon leaves the barrel house and his hobo companions\nbehind him.\n\n\nTALKS OF THE TRAMP--WHY DILAPIDATED GENTLEMAN DOES NOT\nGIVE UP WANDERING AND SETTLE DOWN--LIKES THE CARE-FREE\nLIFE--MINGLES AMONG THE PEOPLE AND GETS TO KNOW THEM\nWELL--CHANGES IN COMMUNITY.\n\n\"Why don't I give it up and settle down in city or village and become\na respectable member of the community?\" echoed the dilapidated\ngentleman as he pocketed his usual fee. \"I have been asked that\nquestion a thousand times, it seems to me, and my answer has always\nbeen the same. I tramp as a profession, and I stand at the head of\nit. I like it. There's a good living in it. I come in contact with\nhuman nature at every turn. I am respectable as it is. The cities and\nvillages are overcrowded, and the man who butts in has little chance\nof success. I have less to worry about and sleep more soundly than any\nbusiness man in America. You newspaper fellers think you know it all,\nbut you'd take a drop to yourselves if you were on the tramp for a\nmonth. You'd see more human nature with the bark on in that time than\nyou can find on the East Side in New York in five years.\n\n\"Say, now,\" continued the man, \"can you name me one single newspaper\nin the state of New York that felt sure of Roosevelt's election as\ngovernor? No, you can't. I hit his majority within 2,000. Why? Because\nI was among the people and knew how they talked. Plenty of politicians\nand newspapers said he'd be elected as president when he ran, but\nno man or no newspaper came within a thousand miles of the popular\nmajority. I don't say that I hit it, but I could have given pointers\nto a hundred editors.\n\n[Illustration: SHOWING A \"MEMBER\" GETTING INTO THE FIGHT LAST NIGHT.\n\nRoaming Rowley--\"I've just gotter break inter that nice, warm jail fer\nde winter. Here goes dat old shell I found on de battlefield.\"\n\n(Bang! Flash! Boom!)\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Sheriff, it wus me did it! I'm a desprit dynamiter and jail\nbird.\"\n\nSheriff--\"Git out of this township, quick! I won't have you blowin' up\nmy nice, clean jail! Gwan, git!\"]\n\n\nGET OUT AMONG THE PEOPLE.\n\n\"Before the next national convention of either party meets I'll have\ntramped over three or four states, and I'll be ready to wager my life\nag'in a nickel that I can name the victorious candidate. I'll wager\nthat I can predict it far closer than any newspaper in the land. If\nyou want to know what this country is thinking about, my boy, don't\nbox yourself up in a sanctum and read a few exchanges. Get out and\nrub elbows with the people. It isn't the few big cities that settle\nthe great political questions. It's the farmer and the villager, and\nthey come pretty near being dead right every time. When I had tramped\nacross seven counties of New York state I shouted for Hughes. A\npolitician in Syracuse who heard me had me thrown out of a meeting and\nwanted the police to arrest me. I heard that he had a bet of $5,000\non another candidate and was predicting Hughes' defeat by 50,000. But\nenough of this. I'll switch off and tell you something that has hurt\nme for the last three or four years.\n\n\nBARNS NOW LOCKED.\n\n\"Do you know that a few men, comparatively, have almost changed the\nnature of the country and village population? No, you don't, but\nyou'll learn of it some day through some magazine writer who gathers\nup his points in the way I have. Time was when not one farmer in ten\nin the land locked his house or barn at night. Now ninety out of a\nhundred do it. When a stranger came along they welcomed him. When a\nman talked with them they accepted his statement. What they saw in the\nnewspapers they believed without cavil. Well, they have got over all\nthis. The patent medicine faker, the mine exploiter, the bucketshop\nman and the hundreds of other swindlers have destroyed the confidence\nof the farmer and villager in human nature. They have been bitten so\noften and so hard that they come to doubt if such a thing as honesty\nexists. They won't take a stranger's word for anything. They have got\nthrough believing that there is an honest advertiser. They have even\nbecome distrustful of each other. It has become the hardest kind of\nwork to sell a windmill, piano or other articles direct.\n\n\nVICTIMS OF FAKERS.\n\n\"You can't get out into the country and walk five miles without\nfinding a victim of the fakers. The farmer has invested in bogus\nmines, bogus oil wells, bogus stock and bogus other things, and not\nonly lost his money, but come to know that he was as good as robbed of\nit. The villager has been trapped the same way. It has hardened their\nhearts and given them the worst view of mankind. You can know nothing\nof this by telling, nor of the ruin wrought until you get among the\npeople.\n\n\"Up to a year or so ago it was seldom that a farmer turned me down.\nIf he had nothing for me to do to earn a meal or lodging he would not\nturn me away. He most always took me on trust and had no fear that I\nwas a rascal in disguise. It's all changed now. This last summer I\nwas paddling the hoof in Connecticut and Massachusetts, making a sort\nof grand farewell tour, and it was hard work for me to even get a few\napples of the farmers. They used to be full of 'chin' and gossip.\nThey used to hold me for an hour in order to hear all the news. I\nfound them last summer sullen and sulky and calling to me from the\nfields to move on. In other years the village landlord would set me at\nwork in the stables or with a pail of whitewash in some of the rooms,\nand in that way I'd pay for my stay. I found a change there.\n\n\nHARDENED BY LOSSES IN \"PROSPERITY\" TIMES.\n\n\"Three years ago, if you had started out for a day's tramp with me\nalong a country road every farmer we met would have had a 'Howdy'\nfor us, and perhaps stopped for a chin. You'd have heard whistling\nor singing from every man at work, and the farmer's wife would have\ncalled to you that she had some fresh buttermilk. Take such a tramp\ntoday and you'll find a tremendous change. I can't estimate the sum\nthe farmers and villagers have been robbed of during the past years\nof prosperity, but it is something appalling for the whole country.\nAs much and more has been taken out of victims in the cities, but the\ncase is different. The man in the city doesn't pin his faith to an\nadvertisement. He speculates on chance. He is where he can use the\nlaw, if needs be. If he loses here he goes at it to get even there.\nWith the other class it is a dead loss, and the swindler can give them\nthe laugh. Take almost any highway you will, leading through almost\nany state, and eight farmers out of ten have been made victims. Even\nthe man who has not lost above $10 has been hardened by it.\n\n\nHIS FEELINGS HURT.\n\n\"I said that this change hurt me, and so it does. You may be surprised\nto hear that anything can hurt the feelings of a tramp, but that is\nbecause you don't know him. He is looked upon as an outlaw in the\ncities, but ever since he took the road there has been a sort of\nbond between him and the dwellers outside. He has paid his way or\nbeen willing to. He has asked for little and done little harm. The\nnewspapers have made thousands of farmers tell hard stories about the\ntramp, but it has been in the newspapers alone. The two have worked\ntogether harmoniously.\n\n\"Have you got any idea of how the professional conducts himself on\nthe road? No? Well, it won't happen once in a week that you will find\none without a little money. It has been earned by hard work. When he\nstops at a farmhouse he offers to work for a meal. If there is no work\nhe pays cash for what he gets. If he has been padding along for three\nor four days he will stop and work for half a week if the chance is\noffered him. In his work he keeps up with the hired man. He washes\nbefore he eats. He knows what forks are made for. He carries a clean\nhandkerchief oftener than the man he works for. The average tramp can\ndress a chicken, kill a pig, empty and fill a straw bed, whitewash\na kitchen, paint the house or fence, hoe corn, dig potatoes, run a\ncultivator, drive a team, split fence rails, dig a well, shingle a\nroof or rebuild a chimney. He is a handy man. He eats what he gets,\nsleeps where he is told to and brings the farmer a bigger budget of\nnews than any two of his county papers. When his work is finished he\nslings his hook and is told to stop again. That's the tramp and that's\nthe farmer just as they have been for the last forty years, and that's\nthe reason I bemoan this change in the farmer. He has been victimized\nby men he thought were honest, he has been robbed where he trusted,\nand in changing his feelings toward mankind he must include the tramp,\nwho has never wronged him.\n\n\nDRIVEN TO THE CITIES.\n\n\"Take a walk and you will find those same green meadows, those same\nbrooks, those same lambs, but you won't find Uncle Josh and Aunt Mary\nany more. A city like this seems a hard-hearted and cruel place, and\nyou shiver at the idea of being dead broke. Let me just tell you that\ntramps are driven into the cities to recuperate. All the clothing I\nhave had for the last five years has been begged in the city. All\nthe money I have had has come from the dwellers therein. The only kind\nwords I have heard have come from the hurly-burly. Makes you open your\neyes, doesn't it? You are still clinging to the old-fashioned ideas of\nthe country.\n\n\"My friend, let me tell you something. There isn't today a harder man\nto deal with than the average farmer. There isn't a woman with less\nsentiment than his wife. There's been a mighty change in the last\ntwenty years. Indeed, it is a change that was forced on the farmer\nto protect himself. In years gone by, in tramping over the highways,\nI have met lightning-rod men, windmill men, piano men, hay-fork men,\ncommission men, peddlers, chicken buyers and horse traders. All were\nafter the farmer. Each and every one intended to beat him, and did\nbeat him. He was beaten when he sold his produce and he was beaten\nwhen he bought his goods. He was considered fair game all around. It\nwas argued that his peaceful surroundings made him gullible, and I\nguess they did.\n\n[Illustration:\n\n    Maud Muller on a summer's day\n    Raked the meadows sweet with hay;\n    This heavy work upon the farm\n    Gave Maud a very strong right arm.\n\n    In Chicago just the other day\n    She raked the muck heaps without pay.\n    \"Near food\" and \"curealls\" went up in smoke.\n    Maud deserves credit, and that's no joke.\n]\n\n\nTHINGS ARE CHANGED NOW.\n\n\"Well, Uncle Josh and Aunt Mary died twenty years ago, and their\nchildren took hold. The babbling brook babbles for cash now. The green\nmeadows mean greenbacks. The lambkins frisk, but they frisk for the\ndough. The watchdog at the gate can size up a swindler as well as a\nman. The farmer holds on until he gets the highest price, and the\nmerchant who sells him shoddy has got to get up early in the morning.\nSay, now, but I'd rather start out to beat ten men in a city than\none farmer. I'd rather be dead broke here than to have a dollar in\nmy pocket out in the country. If taken ill here I'm sent to a free\nhospital; if taken sick in the country, the Lord help me.\n\n\"I'm not blaming the farmer in the least. For a hundred years he was\nthe prey for swindlers and was taken for a fool. If he's got his\neyes opened at last and is taking care of himself, and I assure you\nthat such is the case, then so much the better for him. It is the\ndilapidated gentleman who suffers most from this change.\n\n\"Why is a sailor a sailor? Nineteen times out of twenty it is because\nhe wants to rove the seas. Why is a tramp a tramp? Nineteen times out\nof twenty it is because he wants to rove the land. It is a nervous,\nrestless feeling that he cannot withstand. He wants to get somewhere,\nand he is no sooner there than he wants to get somewhere else. The\nmajority of them are sober men. They are as honest as the average. Not\none in twenty will refuse to work for a meal or for pay. Not one in\ntwenty commits a crime for which he should be jailed. You can't make\nstatistics talk any other way. The whining, lying, vicious tramp has\nhis home in the city and stays there.\n\n\nFARMERS DOWN ON TRAMPS.\n\n\"It is the press of the country that has got the farmer down on the\ntramp. You may drive for fifty miles and interview each farmer as you\ncome to him and you won't find five to say that a tramp ever caused\nthem any trouble. In summer the tramp may steal a few apples or\nturnips. Anyone driving along the highway is free to do that. Should\nhe steal an ax, shovel, plow, sheep, calf or break into the house and\nsteal a watch or clothes, what is he going to do with his plunder? The\ninstant he tries to realize on it he is nabbed. The tramp who entered\na house and stole $50 in cash would be worse off than if he hadn't a\ncent.\n\n\"I can walk into that bakery over there and say that I am hungry and\nthe woman will give me a stale loaf. I can tackle most any man passing\nhere for a dime for lodgings and get it. I can wander down most any\nresidence street and raise a hat, a coat or a pair of shoes. How is\nit out in the country? We'll say I've hoofed it all day, making about\nfifteen miles. I've stopped to rest now and then and view the scenery.\nDon't you make any mistake about that scenery feature. If any art\ncompany wanted to publish a thousand views it couldn't do better than\nto ask the tramps where to find the best ones. For lunch I pull two\nturnips from a field. My drink is from a brook. Along about 6 o'clock\nI hunger for cooked victuals, and as it looks like rain I would like\nto get lodgings in a barn. I turn aside to a farmhouse. The farmer\nis washing his hands at the well to go in to supper. Out of the tail\nof his eye he sees me approaching, but he pays no heed until I stand\nbefore him and say:\n\n\"'Mister, I can milk a cow, chop wood, mow weeds or hoe If you will\ngive me supper and lodgings on the haymow I will work an hour at\nanything you wish.'\n\n[Illustration: \"WHEN DID YOU GET OUT OF JAIL?\" HE ASKS.]\n\n\nSUSPICIOUS OF CALLER.\n\n\"'When did you get out of jail?' he asks.\n\n\"'I have never been in jail.'\n\n\"'But you look like a durned skunk who stole a pitchfork from me last\nyear.'\n\n\"'Last year I was in California.'\n\n\"'Want to set my barn afire with your old pipe, do you?'\n\n\"'I don't smoke.'\n\n\"He stands and thinks a moment and then grudgingly tells me to take a\nseat on the kitchen doorsteps. The wife brings me out a stingy supper.\nThere's an abundance on the table and part of it will go to the hogs,\nbut she cuts me short, thinking to get ahead of me. I have cleared my\nplate in ten minutes and then I am set to work and buckle in until too\ndark to see longer. My bed is on the hay, and twice during the night\nthe farmer comes out to see if I haven't stolen the shingles off the\nroof. In the morning if I want a meager breakfast I must put in a good\nhour's work for it. That means an hour and a half, and when I thank\nthe farmer for his generosity and get ready to go on, he says:\n\n\"'Goin', eh? Well, that's the way with you durned critters. I've\nfilled you up and lodged you, and now you want to play the sneak on\nme.'\n\n\"My friend, don't look for much sentiment in humanity these days, and\ndon't look for a bit of it out in the country. You won't find it. The\nfarmer can't afford it. He has been beaten by sharpers and squeezed\nby trusts until he has lost faith in everyone. He has buttermilk, but\nit's for sale, and before selling it to you he wants a certificate\nthat you have never stolen a haystack or run away with a field of\nbuckwheat.\"\n\nIt was hard to suspect that the clean-cut, energetic and rapid-fire\ntalker was a tramp, but when he produced credentials from one end of\nthe country to the other, and promised and threatened to produce them\nfrom Brazil, Hungary, New Zealand and the Klondike regions to prove\nhis statement, it had to be credited.\n\n\"I'm A No. 1, the well-known hobo, tramp, author and traveler,\" he\nsaid, in a speed of diction that would have made the late lamented\nPete Daily or Junie McCree green with envy. \"Everywhere you've seen\nthe marks 'A. No. 1,' on railroad fences, in railroad yards, or\nanywhere else, and you must have seen them if you've been over this\ncountry much; you'll know I've been there.\"\n\n\nHOBO LOOKS LIKE BUSINESS MAN.\n\nA No. 1 had uttered this sentence in almost one breath, and was\nproceeding with such rapidity that it was impossible to follow his\nflow of ideas. He was a medium-sized but lithe and powerfully built\nman, attired in a neat tailor-made brown suit, with highly polished\nshoes, and looking something like a prosperous business man in a small\nway. Under his arm he carried a pair of blue overalls, and as he laid\nthem on the table he remarked: \"My traveling rig.\"\n\n[Illustration:\n\n\"Say, Jack, have some more nice hot coffee.\"\n\n\"Gee, Bill, I was jus' thinkin' o' that myself. Talk about great\nminds--\"\n\n\"Come on, Jack, be game. Please have some more o' this nice turkey.\"\n\n\"Turkey! Great Scott! When have I heard that word before? Hain't it a\ncountry out in Asia some place?\"\n\n\"No. Jack, turkey is vittles. You get it if you love your teacher.\nBetter let me give you a few nice slivers off the breast.\"\n\n\"Say, Bill, on the dead, you're sure generous, all right, all right.\nHere you are, sharin' your last turkey.\"\n\n\"Old man, don't you know it's Thanksgivin' day? Don't you hear the\nbells ringin'? Do you reckon I'd dine alone on a day like this? No,\nsiree, not much. Pass your plate fer some more o' this nice hot\nturkey, and some nice hot scolloped oysters, an' some o' these nice\nhot biscuits, an' some nice cranberry sauce, an'--\"\n\n\"There you go. Bill, robbin' yourself. You won't have any left.\"\n\n\"O, there's plenty here. I like to see a man eat till he's plum\nfoundered.... When I used to go home fer Thanksgivin' mother wasn't\nhappy unless I et enough to stall a hired hand. If I didn't eat four\nhelpin's of everything she thought I didn't like her cookin'. Had to\ntry ever'thing--choc'late cake, turkey, sage dressin', hot gravy,\nmince pie, an'--\"\n\n\"Say. Bill, you might gimme a piece o' that mince pie while you're\nabout it. I got a nice, cozy little place fer a piece o' mince pie.\"\n\n\"Sure, Jack. I'll give you a whole quarter section. How do you like\nthis celery? Awful hard to get good celery these days.\"\n\n\"Yep, celery and servants. One's hard to get an' the other's hard to\nkeep.\"\n\n\"Say, Jack.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Shall we have our cigars and coffee here or in th' drawin' room?\"\n\n\"O, let's have James bring 'em in th' drawin' room.\"]\n\n\"Maybe I don't look like a tramp to you,\" he continued, \"but I'm\nthe genuine article, not the tomato-can or barrel-house bum type,\nbut a real, up-to-date, twentieth-century tramp who respects his\nprofession. Why am I a tramp? Because I like it. When did I start?\nWhen I was 11 years old. What is my name? None but myself knows it. I\ncall myself A No. 1 because I'm an A. No. 1 tramp.\"\n\n[Illustration: DID YA SEEN IT HEN? NAW--WHAT WAS IT? (HONK)]\n\nHe had a most convincing way with him and proceeded to spin off a tale\nof his adventures which differed somewhat from the ordinary story\nthat the average tramp will tell you; how he had been hounded by the\npolice, or released from jail and couldn't get work, or had bad luck\nin business, being crushed out by the heartless trusts until he had\nto tramp or starve, ending up with an appeal for the \"price of a bed,\nmister.\"\n\n\"I've kept a record of the towns I've been in ever since I've been on\nthe road,\" continued A. No. 1. \"and up to date I've traveled 445,405\nmiles, and it's cost me just $7.61. Out of that distance there's been\n92,000 miles of it by water. In 1906 I traveled 19,335 miles for 26\ncents, and in the year 1907 I traveled between Stamford and West\nHaven, Conn. I jumped a street car and the conductor made me pay my\nfare. Oh, I always have a little money, and I'm honest, too, and\nthat's saying a good deal for a tramp. Of course, once in a while I go\nhungry, but that's when I can't get a potato.\"\n\n[Illustration: \"Dese awnings is handy t'ings.\n\n\"Wot's de matter wit' fixin' one up on meself?\n\n\"It would be a good umbreller----\n\n\"An' if a cop bothered yer----\n\n\"Youse could let de water off de top.\n\n\"It makes a bully tent, or----\n\n\"A screen for yer fire.\n\n\"But when it's windy----\n\n\"Yer wanter look out cause----\n\n\"Yer might go sailin'!\"]\n\n\"Is that your staple article of diet?\"\n\n\"No, I don't eat them except in restaurants,\" said A. No. 1,\nseriously. \"Here is what I do with them.\" He pulled a good-sized\ntuber from his pocket, opened a large clasp knife and speedily had it\npeeled. Then he proceeded to cut and carve, and in about three minutes\nhad fashioned a grotesque human face on the potato, the lines coarse,\nto be sure, but nevertheless well outlined.\n\n\nTRAMP AN ARTIST.\n\n\"I make these and can carve anyone's face, and I can sell them\nanywhere from 25 cents to $2,\" said the tramp. \"I'm the only man\nin this country who can do such work, and there's a demand for it\neverywhere I stop long enough to do it. I only stop to do it when I\nhave to, so that I can get a little money for a meal and pay little\nexpenses, although my living doesn't cost me much. Then, again, I\nnever drink or smoke, so that item is cut off. They don't know so much\nabout me in Chicago as in other places, because I never stopped here\nlong enough to get acquainted; but they know me back East, all right,\nand out in the West.\"\n\nThen A. No. 1 paused long enough to draw his breath and showed a medal\ncertifying that in 1894 he had hoboed his way across the continent in\neleven days and six hours in company with the representative of an\nEastern paper and had been given $1,000 for doing it.\n\n\"That's how I first became famous,\" he said, \"but I took good care of\nthe money. I went and bought myself a lot in a graveyard at Cambridge\nSprings, Pa., so I could be buried respectably when I die, and I paid\npart of the premium on a sick benefit so that I can be taken care of\nin case I fall sick suddenly. I'm a member of the Chamber of Commerce\nof that town, too. I believe in looking out for A. No. 1, and that's\nwhy I've been so prosperous in the tramping way.\"\n\nThen A. No. 1 launched into a long and picturesque description of the\nways of tramps in general and himself in particular.\n\n\"I've always been particular about some things,\" said he, \"and one is\nto keep clean. I find that in asking for a handout the man who looks\nup-to-date is the man who gets it. I always wear a suit of overalls\nwhen I'm tramping, for I find that it prevents me from being annoyed\nby watchmen in railroad yards. I am generally taken for an engineer.\nWhile I was down in a yard here in Chicago one man came and asked if\nI had a car lock, thinking I was a railroad man. I told him I did not\nhave one and walked off. I have prevented a number of train wrecks,\ntramping about, probably at least one every year. The last one, as\nyou see by this letter, was a few months ago. I saw a freight running\nalong with a broken truck dragging. I jumped aboard and gave the\nwarning, as you can see by this clipping. I have also been in a number\nof wrecks myself, and have never been injured. I always carry a little\nbottle of cyanide of potassium in my pocket so that in case I am\never fatally injured and in great agony I can take it and end all my\ntrouble in about 20 seconds.\"\n\n\nCOLONIES FOR TRAMPS.\n\nTeaching Vagrants a Trade.\n\nThe vagrancy problem, growing so great in every part of the country,\nhas caused the authorities of Massachusetts to make a trial of the\nGerman plan of farm colonies for quasi-criminals. Vagrants are sent to\nsuch farms under indeterminate sentences, forced to support themselves\nby honest labor and made to stay there until they give evidence that\nupon release they will become useful and self-respecting citizens.\n\nThis is a modification of the penal colony idea, which is to send\nconfirmed criminals to such a place for life. It is a great advance\nupon the plan in use in Chicago, which is to send vagrants to the\nBridewell for a stipulated time and let them out again. While they are\nconfined they are an expense to honest citizens, they acquire more\nextensive knowledge of crime, and when released they are less likely\nthan they were beforehand to go to work and support themselves.\n\nThe Massachusetts scheme promises well, so far as it goes. The\ntrouble with it is that in this climate a farm provides work for only\na small part of the year. From November to March other work would have\nto be found for inmates, and up to this time society has failed to\nagree upon any that would be satisfactory.\n\nPersons interested in charities and prison reforms are indorsing a\nplan for \"tramp colonies,\" \"forced colonies\" and \"free colonies.\"\nInto the one put criminals, or incurable tramps who are unwilling to\nwork. The other would contain tramps who are unable to find work,\nneuropaths, <DW36>s and those who are judged to be curable. Both\nkinds of colonies would be strictly agricultural, and their products\nwould pay all expenses of operation and relieve the country of the\nenormous sums now required to be spent.\n\nBut why confine this plan, admirable and satisfactory as it is, to\ntramps? Why not extend it so as to include criminals? Criminals cost\nhonest taxpayers millions of dollars every year. Why not reorganize a\nsystem of confinement in such a way as to compel criminals to support\nthemselves?\n\nBut financial relief is not the only advantage. If habitual\ncriminals--that is to say, criminals who have served two terms in the\npenitentiary, and then have committed another crime--were placed in a\npenal colony, remote from society and kept there for life, the moral\ntone of the country would at once be raised. The bad example of such\nmen, which leads youths into crime, would be removed. The knowledge\nthat there was no escape, that return was impossible, once an offender\nwas sent to the penal colony, would deter many would-be criminals. The\npossibility that hardened criminals might propagate themselves would\nend.\n\nThe penal colony is the one rational solution of the crime problem,\nwhich becomes more difficult and menacing each year. It will be\nadopted, sooner or later.\n\n\n\n\nTHE YOUNG CRIMINAL\n\nHOW HE IS BRED IN CHICAGO.\n\n\nChicago Raises Its Own Criminals.\n\nThere is material in this subject for earnest thought. Men under\ntwenty-five are responsible for 75 per cent of crimes committed in\nChicago, and 50 per cent of robberies and burglaries are done by boys\nunder nineteen.\n\nIf that is true, then the idea many people have had that crimes in\nthis city are mostly committed by a roving army of criminals, alien\nto Chicago and attracted hither by one cause or another, must be\nabandoned. If it is true, then Chicago itself is responsible for most\ncrimes committed here. The men who are guilty have grown up in this\nenvironment, which has given them the evil impetus under which they\nact.\n\nThe thought that Chicago boys are the criminals who terrorize the\ncity, rob houses and flats, hold up citizens on the streets and\nassault women is distressing. It was much pleasanter to attribute\nthese crimes to desperate men from elsewhere, descending upon Chicago\nlike raiders and leaving the city again as soon as possible. But that\nis a misconception. We ourselves have reared most of our criminals.\nThey are a Chicago product. They have received their notions of right\nand wrong here among us. We are responsible for them.\n\nWhat is the matter with Chicago? What are the elements in its life\nthat breed criminals? What causes thousands of young boys to take up a\ncriminal life? What must we do to change conditions?\n\nThese are questions that should engage every good citizen in anxious\nendeavor to find answers to them. If we are to reform criminals and\nlessen crime, we must first learn how to reform our own city.\n\n\nPREVENTING CRIME BETTER THAN CURE.\n\nInstead of attempting to prevent crime, we wait until after the crime\nis committed, then burden ourselves with the expense of apprehending,\ntrying, convicting and imprisoning the criminal.\n\nOur first duty is to adopt those measures that will prevent the\nfurther commission of crime.\n\nAmong the problems of Chicago there is no one, perhaps, that is more\nbaffling than that of the vicious boy.\n\nHis years protect him from the rigors of the law, and it is a\ndifficult matter to know just what to do with him.\n\nThere are all sorts of organizations formed for his aid and his\nreformation. There is the Juvenile Court, for instance, and there are\ninnumerable homes and shelters, and still the problem is not solved.\nThe boy looms large in the public eye these days, when he is sent\nto prison for life for murder and spends long years in durance for\nburglary and other serious crimes.\n\nThe story of the car-barn bandits and their tragic end is too recent\nto need more than a passing reference.\n\nThe car-barn bandits met an ignominious death on the gallows. Rudolph\nGamof will spend the remainder of his years behind prison bars and\nit is quite likely Alfred Lafferty will know what hard work means\nin Pontiac or some other such institution before he is once more at\nliberty.\n\n\nTHE END OF THE GAMIN.\n\nIt will be remembered that little Gavroche, the gamin in \"Les\nMiserables,\" came to his death on a barricade in the streets of Paris.\nIt was during the fatal insurrection of 1830. The lad allied himself\nwith the insurrectionists and found he was in his element. He did\nprodigies of valor and was robbing the dead bodies of the enemy of\ncartridges when he was shot. Even after he had been shot once and had\nfallen to the earth he raised himself to a sitting posture and began\nto sing a revolutionary song.\n\n\"He did not finish,\" says Hugo. \"A second bullet from the same\nmarksman stopped him short. This time he fell face downward on the\npavement and moved no more. This grand little soul had taken flight.\"\n\nThus it is to be seen that Hugo has made a hero of this lad. But what\nof the little gamins that throng Chicago's streets? Will they find any\nsuch glorious end? It is not likely.\n\nJacob Leib is but 17 years old, and Alfred Lafferty, accused of\ntwenty-three burglaries, is only 16. The John Worthy School is full\nof boys who have been gathered in by the police; the Junior Business\nClub, another reform organization, has a big membership, and the\nJuvenile Protective League is hard at work trying to do something to\narrest the boy in his mad race to the reform school, prison and the\npenitentiary.\n\nIn looking about for the causes of crime among boys I found that\npoverty, liquor, divorce, yellow newspapers, cigarettes and bad\ncompany played important parts. Certain streets of Chicago are schools\nof crime, where boys are taught the rudiments of larceny and soon\nbecome adepts.\n\nHardened criminals use the more agile youths they find idle to do work\nthey are unable to do. Certain sections of the city swarm with boys\nwho are steeped in vice and crime and are in embryo the murderers, the\nburglars and the forgers of tomorrow.\n\n\nCHICAGO HAS HER CHILDREN.\n\nTurning again to the pages of \"Les Miserables,\" the story of Gavroche,\nthe gamin of Paris, may easily be found, and the tale of this youth\nis not far different from that of the \"kid\" of Chicago. Here is what\nVictor Hugo says of Gavroche in that section of his great novel called\n\"Marius\": \"This child was muffled up in a pair of man's trousers, but\nhe did not get them from his father, and a woman's chemise, but he did\nnot get it from his mother.\n\n\"Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still he\nhad a father and a mother. But his father did not think of him and his\nmother did not love him.\n\n\"He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all; one\nof those who have father and mother and who are orphans nevertheless.\n\n\"This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The\npavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.\n\n\"His parents had dispatched him into life with a kick. He simply took\nflight.\n\n\"He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wideawake, jeering lad, with\na vicious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played, scraped\nthe gutters, stole a little, but like cats and sparrows. He had no\nshelter, no bread, no fire, no love. When these poor creatures grow\nto be men the millstones of the social order meet them and crush\nthem, but so long as they are children they escape because of their\nsmallness.\"\n\nThis is a true picture of the urchin of Chicago. These tiny atoms\nof humanity are sponges that absorb all the filth, the vice, the\nsin and the crime of the streets. They pick up all that is evil and\nnothing that is good. They are nurtured at the breast of poverty and\nviciousness, and are reared on a diet of depravity and degradation.\nThere is nothing they do not know of crime and of wickedness. They are\nthoroughly saturated with everything that is evil, unprincipled and\ndebased.\n\nIs it any wonder, then, that the city brings forth an appalling annual\ncrop of criminals? There may be heroes among the gamins in Chicago,\nbut most of them are only heroes so long as they remain uncaught.\n\nWhen they fall into the hands of the police and are taken to jail they\nare sorry-looking heroes.\n\nAnd in the meantime the problem of the boy is still unsolved.\n\n\nGRADUATE OF THE STREETS.\n\nThis, then, is a good specimen of the kind of boy the schools of the\nstreet graduate. From these petty classes of crime they go to the high\nschool, the prison, where they are further grounded in the knowledge\nof wickedness, and as like as not return to Chicago once more,\nfull-fledged criminals, ready for anything. But this is only one of\nhundreds of such cases that are brought to the attention of the police\nand the public every year.\n\nMost of the boys who come here are either orphans or half orphans.\nDrink has wrecked their homes, perhaps, and they are thrown out on the\nworld to shift for themselves. If they get into bad company they soon\nmake their appearance in the Juvenile Court or in jail.\n\n\n10,000 BOYS WORSE THAN HOMELESS.\n\nA charitable worker who has come in touch with the young of the poorer\ndistricts, whence comes the tough lad, estimates that there are over\n10,000 boys in Chicago who are worse than homeless. In other words,\nthey are in direct line of becoming criminals or public charges, under\nthe teaching of the trained criminal who makes the city his refuge.\n\nAnderson, the stickup youth who operated extensively on the north\nside, choosing women for his victims, is but 23 years old. The men who\nrelieved Alderman C. M. Foell at the point of a gun are less than 20,\nand thus it goes down the line.\n\nThey laugh at the efforts of the police to catch them. For the most\npart they live at home or with relatives, and in the neighborhoods\nare known as dissipated and tough boys, but not as hold-up men. With\ncompanions they sally out at night to isolated sections of the city\nwhere they know the police protection to be inadequate. They choose\nsecluded spots offering the protection of darkness and lay in wait.\n\nThen, with plenty of time deliberately to stop the victim and take\nfrom him valuables, they operate until it is time for the policeman\nto be in the vicinity, or until the profits of the expedition are\nsufficient to satisfy their spirit of revelry and riot.\n\n\nSCHOOLS FOR PICKPOCKETS.\n\nThere are numerous places in Chicago where boys are taught to become\npickpockets. Poolrooms are gathering places for such young criminals\nand certain saloons of a low order harbor others. There is one saloon\nin West Madison street, for instance, not far from Canal street, where\na lot of pickpockets are in the habit of congregating. They are young\nfellows for the most part and adepts in their particular field.\n\nThey find a sort of home in this saloon, where they can get a big\nglass of beer and a generous free lunch for 5 cents. They are in and\nout of this place day and night and manage to keep out of the clutches\nof the law through their sleekness and cleverness. There is one young\nman in there at least who has made a good living by forging orders for\ngoods. So far he has escaped detection.\n\nHis method is to forge an order on some big business house and get\ncertain goods. One day he got a lot of belting from a well-known firm\non a forged order. He sold this later and realized $4.50 on the deal.\nThis he spent freely in the saloon mentioned and made no bones of how\nhe got the money. Others run out, snatch a pocketbook and make for\ncover. Later on they look up their cronies at the saloon and spend the\nmoney for beer and cheap whisky, and eat free lunch provided by the\nmanagement.\n\nThere are numerous other such places, more especially on South Clark\nnear Van Buren street. Some of the saloons in that section are alive\nwith young fellows who prey upon the public for a living. They do not\nalways beg their way, either, for they often take a run out and stick\nup somebody, filch a purse or break into a store. When one of them has\nbeen up to some devilment his companions can usually detect it, for he\nwill come back and be very flush for a few hours, or a few days, all\ndepending, of course, upon how much he was able to steal.\n\n[Illustration: (Children outside junk shop)]\n\n\nMODERN BOYS ARE GAMBLERS.\n\nBut it is not only in the slums that the tendencies of the modern boy\nmay be studied. In the more respectable parts of town, in the vicinity\nof schools and in the neighborhood of churches may be seen evidences\nof what the youth of today think play.\n\nTime was when boys were content to play marbles. Some of them, of\ncourse, had the temerity to play for keeps. Others were taught it was\nwicked, and even at the risk of being called \"sissy\" refrained from\ndisobeying their mothers. But now marbles are a thing of the past. As\nsoon as spring comes boys want to shoot \"craps.\" They want to play for\nmoney. They want to gamble.\n\nA visit to almost any school playground during recess or the noon hour\nwill convince any person that the modern boy is a very wise youth. His\nconversation is not a well of English pure and undefiled by any manner\nof means. In the first place, his profanity is something shocking,\nand, in the next place, his knowledge of the world and its wickedness\nis thorough.\n\nThere is nothing the modern schoolboy does not know. He is conversant\nwith all sorts of vice and crime, even if he does not take an actual\npart in it. If this sort of thing obtains among schoolboys and youths\nof that class it is little wonder, then, that the boys of the slums\nare what they are. And the pictures is not overdrawn. The conversation\nof boys of ten and a dozen years will bring the blush of shame even to\na grown man.\n\nJust how to cure all this is a question that is bothering a good many\npeople. Societies are being organized right and left. Homes for boys\nare being established, schools are being started and other efforts are\nbeing made to reclaim the delinquents. It has been found that good\nplaygrounds in the tenement districts have been beneficial. The boy\nis exuberant. He must let out some of his animal spirits. If he has\na good place in which to play he will not be half as apt to get into\nmischief.\n\n\nREMEDIES SUGGESTED BY SOME.\n\nThere are some who insist that moral suasion should be used at all\ntimes in an attempt to reform the juvenile. But this has been found\nto fall short in many instances in Chicago. Even the Juvenile Court,\nwith all its benefits, is found to come somewhat short of doing\neverything for the vicious lad. It is found that boys who are herded\ntogether in penal institutions are inclined to leave such places much\nworse than when they entered. The bad boys dominate. The evil spreads\nand the good is suppressed. One bad boy is able to do much, while the\ninfluence of one good boy amounts to almost nothing.\n\nThose who have made a study of the matter aver that the only\ntrue solution of the boy problem is individual work. The lad's\ncharacteristics must be studied, the conditions under which he has\nbeen living must be scrutinized and all the influences that have\nbeen brought to bear upon his particular case must be looked into.\nUnder these circumstances it would take a reformer for every dozen\nboys, and so far the money has not been forthcoming to support so\nmany reformers, for even a reformer must live. A good many of the\ndelinquent youths of Chicago have been reared in squalid surroundings\nand have been nurtured in filth and unloveliness. They have been\nsurrounded from babyhood by poverty, drunkenness and depravity. These\nboys take to crime as naturally as a duck does to water.\n\nIn order to reach boys and try to help them individually a movement\nis now on foot to form juvenile protective leagues in all parts of\nthe city. One organization is now working in the vicinity of Halsted\nand Twenty-second streets to put a stop to race wars between school\nchildren. It is thought by some that this new movement will fill a\nlong-needed want. It is admitted by those who have given the matter\nclose study that something must be done.\n\nThe records of the Juvenile Court and the books of the John Worthy\nSchool emphatically bear out this contention.\n\n\nFAILURE TO RULE CHILDREN MAKES CRIMINALS.\n\nWhat are you doing with your child's sense of right and wrong? Are\nyou certain that you are not training a criminal, beginning with him\nat two years old? What is your boy at six years of age? Is he liar,\nthief--perhaps of insane ego as he was when he first toddled from his\nmother's arms? Inferentially President Roosevelt may have complimented\nyou on the acquisition of a large family, but rather than this, has\nit occurred to you that the father and mother of one child, brought\nup in the light of wisdom, may be deliverers of mankind against the\nnumerical inroads of the other type of parent?\n\nInsanity is the mental condition out of which it is impossible for\nthe person of any age to recognize the rights of others in any form.\nThis insanity may be due wholly to the overdevelopment of the primary\nego in the child. At one year old the infant may be a potential\ncriminal of the worst type. It lies to the mother by screaming as if\nin pain in order that she may be brought to its bedside. If the adult\nshould steal personal property as this babe steals food wilfully,\nthe penitentiary would be his end. Angered, this same babe might\nattempt murder in babyhood, the spirit fostered by the same selfish\nintolerance that is filling jails and crowding gallows traps.\n\n\nRESPECT RIGHTS OF OTHERS.\n\nEgo in the community life is the basis of all ill or all good, even\nto the dream of Utopia. The basis of all ill is the primary ego which\nis inseparable from the child until teaching has eliminated it. The\nbasis of all good is that secondary ego which recognizes the rights of\nothers.\n\nMorality--good--virtue--all that is considered desirable in the best\ntype of citizenship develop out of the community life. Even in the\nlower orders of animals a greater intelligence marks the creatures\nthat live community existences than is to be seen in the isolated\ncreatures. And this is from the development of the secondary ego which\nexacts rights for others.\n\nThe child has no knowledge of this secondary virtue save as it is\ntaught it. The mother who, by responding out of a mistaken affection\nto every wail of the infant, encouraging all, no longer is susceptible\nto home influences in teaching the lesson. If this youth shall become\nentangled in the toils of the law and the mistaken parents intercede\nfor him, gaining their ends in saving him from all punishment for his\nmisdeeds, the boy receives through it only another selfish impetus\ntoward more and greater offenses against society.\n\n\nREFORMATORY AFTER FIRST CRIME.\n\nHere in this first offense of magnitude sufficient to call for\nthe intervention of the law the parents have their opportunity,\nif only they would see. The place for such a youth at this period\nis a reformatory in which are sufficient educational facilities\nand the strictest discipline, which in justice visits the full\npenalty of community transgressions upon the head of the offender.\nIn this reformatory environment the offending one finds none of\nthe intercessions that may have been made for him in his home.\nIn sterner fashion than he ever dreamed before he discovers that\nas he transgresses the community laws he receives a full penalty\nfor the offense. Young enough, he may be led to discover that his\ntransgressions are not worth while. Too old for these teachings, he\nbecomes the persistent lawbreaker, or, on the other hand, degenerates\nto the asylum for the insane.\n\nHow intimately some of the fundamentals of training are associated\nwith everyday lives in the home, and yet not recognized, is shown\nin the college life of the country. \"Sophomore\" is a class term in\nschools which needs interpreting. As a word, it is from the Greek,\nmeaning \"wise fool.\" Its application in the higher education is to the\nsecond-year \"men\"--to those students who are in that period of mental\nand physical stress after the age of fifteen is reached. In school\nparlance the word associates itself with the flamboyant youth who\nprates, and preaches, and struts, and lays down the law of all things\nas he sees it. Until twenty-five years old, indeed, the \"Sophomoric\"\nperiod is not fully passed.\n\nBroadly stated for all men, it may be reiterated that in the parents'\nfailure to enforce the subjection of the selfish first nature in the\nchild lies the seed of his destruction. Encouraging the infant to wail\nagain when nothing ails it is already catering to this criminal ego.\nLater, when a parent humors its every whim, he is stunting its growth\ntoward good citizenship. And later still, in that crisis in physical\nlife, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five years, such a parent\nmay awaken suddenly to a realization of the criminal which he has made.\n\nEgo in the child mind prompts it to take instantly anything which it\ndesires and which it can take. Unchecked by training, this primary ego\ngrows with that upon which it feeds. At two years old the child should\nhave had its lessons in the rights of others administered in any way\nin which it can be reached, but always in all justice. Justice in this\nlesson should be the first consideration. At six years of age these\nlessons are of special significance. It is an age in the development\nof the child when they may be taught with especial emphasis, with\nlasting results.\n\n\nGUIDE CHILD OF FIFTEEN CAREFULLY.\n\nAt fifteen years old a new condition arises in the life of the child.\nAt this time the race condition and the individual condition are\nat war. It is at the beginning of this period that an unbridled,\nuntrained youth may take his first step toward crime, simply because\nthe primary ego in him has not been set toward the background by the\nlessons of his duty toward the rights of others. Here it is that the\nheedless, ignorant parents may come to the first realization of what\nhis own sins of omission have been.\n\nIf for any of the reasons suggested a youth's parents have not given\nhim this necessary training in recognition of the rights of others,\nthe age brings with it a condition making it impossible in ordinary\ncases for the parental conscience and home environment to avail.\n\n[Illustration: (DO IT NOW scenario)]\n\nFor example, the fact that the boy becomes a thief, or burglar,\nindicates in any or many things that disregard for the rights of\nothers which is destructive to all law and order. Properly handled in\nthe home he would have been amenable to all of these conditions.\n\nRaise the child like a plant, care for it as you do for the rarest\nspecimen of vegetation, bring it up in an atmosphere of love. Child\nraising and plant development are akin.\n\nIf the child has but the smallest trace of some characteristic you\ndesire to develop, take hold of it, care for it, surround it with\nproper conditions and it will change more certainly and readily than\nany plant quality.\n\n\nCHILD LIKE A PLANT.\n\nThe child in nature and processes of growth is essentially the same as\nthe plant, only the child has a thousand strings instead of but a few,\nas has the plant.\n\nWhere one can produce one change for the betterment of the plant one\ncan produce a thousand changes for the betterment of the child.\n\nSurround the child with the proper environment to bring out certain\nqualities and the result is inevitable.\n\nWorking in the same way as one does with the plant, the development of\nthe individual is practically unlimited.\n\nTake the common daisy and train it and cultivate it by proper\nselection and environment until it has been increased in size, beauty\nand productiveness at least four hundred fold.\n\nDo our educational methods do as much for our children? If not, where\nis the weakness?\n\n\nREAR CHILD IN LOVE.\n\nHave the child reared for the first ten years of its life in the open,\nin close touch with nature, a barefoot boy with all that implies for\nphysical stamina, but have him reared in love.\n\nTake the little yellow California poppy and by selecting over and over\nagain the qualities you wish to develop you have brought forth an\norange poppy, a crimson poppy, a blue poppy. Cannot the same results\nbe accomplished with the human being? Is not the child as responsive?\n\n\nTHE GREATEST REFORM MOVEMENT OF THE DAY IS THE CHICAGO JUVENILE COURT.\n\nThe statistics show conclusively that the operation of the Juvenile\nCourt is an advance step in the treatment of the young and helpless.\nIt shows that not only are the dependents helpless, but that the\ndelinquents are helpless to extricate themselves from a life of\nidleness and crime, for most criminals are made, not born, and the\nsooner time is devoted to changing the environments of the young, the\nsooner will be solved the problem of criminology.\n\n\nILLINOIS IN THE LEAD.\n\nVarious claims have been put forth from time to time as to the State\nwhich was the first to inaugurate the Juvenile Court idea.\n\nThe Juvenile Court Law went into effect July 1, 1899, and immediately\nthe Juvenile Court was established. The Judges of the Circuit Court\nassigned one of their members to preside in the Juvenile Court.\n\nThe law gave the court jurisdiction of all dependent and delinquent\nchildren who are under seventeen and eighteen years of age, and\ndefines dependents and delinquents. The word \"dependent\" shall mean\nany child who for any reason is destitute or homeless or abandoned,\nor dependent upon the public for support, or has not proper parental\ncare or guardianship, or who habitually begs or receives alms, or\nwho is found living in any house of ill-fame or with any vicious or\ndisreputable persons, or whose home, by reason of neglect, cruelty or\ndepravity on the part of its parents, guardian or other persons whose\ncare it may be, is an unfit place for said child, and any child under\nthe age of ten years who is found begging, peddling or selling any\narticle, or singing or playing any musical instrument upon the street,\nor giving any public entertainment, or who accompanies or is used in\naid of any person so doing.\n\nThe word \"delinquent\" shall mean any boy under seventeen or any girl\nunder eighteen years of age who violates any law of this State or any\ncity or village ordinance, or who is incorrigible, or who knowingly\nassociates with thieves, vicious or immoral persons, or who is growing\nup in idleness or crime, or who knowingly frequents a house of\nill-fame, or who knowingly patronizes any policy shop or place where\nany gaming device is or shall be operated.\n\nA boy of seventeen is at a period of life where he is neither a boy\nnor a man. In many cases he has the mind of the boy and the impulses\nof the savage; his ideals are force, and his ambitions that of the\nwild, erratic western rover. Why the wise head and steady hand of the\ncourt and probation officer should be withdrawn at this period is not\nexplainable on any reasonable theory.\n\nIt may be contended that a boy of seventeen years is too advanced in\nthe knowledge of crime, but it can also be contended that the boy of\nfifteen years is too old in crime. Just what standard can be used to\nfind the responsibility of a boy when measured by his age and physical\nproportions I am unable to discover. The only just standard is mental\ncapacity. The Judge and probation officers, who are familiar with the\nboy, know his parents or guardians and his environments, should be\nallowed to exercise their judgment as to the moral responsibility of\nthe boy, for there are many boys at fifteen who are more responsible\nfor their acts than others at eighteen.\n\nIn many cases where children were committed to an institution the\nparents were placed under the care of a probation officer and the\nnumber of failures to reform the parent are few.\n\nIn cases where the parents are responsible for the dependency of\nexistence those parents mean well, but they are unfitted for the\nduties they have assumed. The father thinks he has fulfilled his whole\nduty to his family when he provides food, shelter and clothing; the\nmother thinks she has fulfilled her whole duty when she does her house\nwork and attends to the mending and washing. The children are masters\nof both parents before the parents take cognizance of the actual\nmental state of the child.\n\nWhat should be done when the boy's home is the case of his delinquency\nis to provide for him a place where every home impulse would be\ndeveloped and where industry and economy would be practiced. He should\nlive in this home under the jurisdiction of the court until he has\nreached his eighteenth year.\n\nWhat is said of the boys is equally true of the girls, and, in many\ncases, more important. Where the father is directly responsible for\nthe downfall of the girl, the girl should not be allowed to return to\nher parental home.\n\n\n\n\nWILES OF FORTUNE TELLING.\n\nFORTUNE TELLERS HAVE EXISTED SINCE RECORDS OF EVENTS BEGAN TO BE KEPT.\n\n     Some of Their Methods--Charlatans Have a Great Hold on the\n     Poorer Classes of Big Cities, Much Alike--Schools of Crime\n     Run Full Blast--Silly and Ignorant People Undone by Vicious\n     and Wide-Open Fraud.\n\n\nWar against the swindlers, impostors and blackmailers who operate\nin Chicago under the guise of clairvoyants, trance mediums,\nastro-psychics, palmists, magicians and fortune tellers, of whom there\nare about 1,500 in Chicago, should be driven out of the city and never\nallowed to return.\n\nThere exist in Chicago a horde of these brazen frauds, who ply their\ntrade in the most open and unblushing manner. Few of them are other\nthan organized schools for the propagation of crime, injustice and\nindecencies that would make an unjailed denizen of the red light\ndistrict blush to even mention. We particularly refer to the army\nof fortune tellers, clairvoyants, Hindoo fakers, mediums, palmists,\nhypnotists and other skillful artists, whose sole occupation is to rob\nand mislead the superstitious, foolish and ignorant. The business is a\npaying industry, realizing, it is said, an enormous sum of money every\nmonth in Chicago, all of which is obtained by false pretenses.\n\nHere is a very large field for police investigation. The practices\nof these people are of the most demoralizing tendency. Can there be\nanything worse than holding out love potions to married women to\ncompel other women's husbands to love them? Those dens of iniquity\noffer their services and even actually aid in the procuring of\nabortions, and in showing how and where a good haul can be made by\nrobbery or burglary. They bring together the depraved of both sexes.\nMany of them are purveyors to our brothels and stews.\n\nThey flaunt their profession, their \"spiritual mysteries,\" brazenly in\npublic in our busy thoroughfares, even invading some of our hotels.\nThey are the hotbeds of vice and crime, from the robbing of orphans\nto the deflowering of innocent girls. They fall into \"trances\" and\ncall up spirits from the vaults of heaven, or elsewhere, to testify to\ntheir truth, and in the turn-up of an ace of spades they see a \"dark\nlady\" or a \"dark gentleman\" who is pining for you, and furnish the\naddress of either.\n\n[Illustration: Famous Artist's Explanation of Scientific Ghost\n\nUpper Row (left) Real Ghost. (right) Marx's Imitation.\n\nLower Row (left) Fake Ghost & drawings by von Marx Showing Make up]\n\n\nPANDERERS TO DEPRAVITY.\n\nWhy these panderers to depravity in all its most hideous forms are\npermitted to continue their depredations among every rank of society\nwithout attracting the attention of \"reformers\" or the grand jury is\nsomething beyond the ken of human knowledge. And as a block is a small\ncityful in some parts of the town, the reading of palms, the casting\nof horoscopes and the looking into seeds of time through the backs\nof a greasy pack of thumb-marked, tear-stained cards is a profitable\ncalling. Perhaps it should be explained that the tears are not shed\nby the prophets of the tenements, but by the patrons who go to the\noracle to learn if they are to be dispossessed next month or if their\nambitious children will sometime learn a little Yiddish, so that they\nmay talk with their own parents in their own homes, are sources of\ninformation for the settlement workers and others who try to learn the\nhopes and fears and ambitions, the real life of such places. But the\nfortune tellers are the real custodians of the Ghetto's secrets. In\ntheir little back rooms, some of which are cluttered with the trash\nthat suggests the occult to the believer, some as bare as the room\nof a lodger who has pawned the last stick of furniture, they hear\nconfessions that court interpreters never have a chance to translate,\nand listen to tales of hard luck that are never told to the rabbis.\n\n[Illustration: Chair with open back stuffed with disguises]\n\n[Illustration: (Drawing of costumes)]\n\n[Illustration: Supposed \"Medium\" Sitting in the Chair.]\n\n\nPROGNOSTICATIONS ARE VAGUE.\n\nBut they don't use the mails to drum up trade, and they have no\nbarkers at the doorsteps to cajole the credulous to step inside to\nlearn what the future has in store for them. And so, in a legal sense,\nthey are guilty of no fraud. They are not very serious frauds in any\nsense, for their tricks are harmless and their prognostications are\nvague as the weather predictions of an almanac and as probable as the\nsayings of the cart-tail orators who hold forth at the street corners\nin campaign time.\n\n\"About this time, look for cold winds, with some snow,\" sagely remarks\nthe almanac writer, stringing the ten words of his prediction down the\nentire column of the month.\n\n\"In a few years,\" says the fortune teller, solemnly, \"you will have\ngood friends and more money than you have now.\"\n\n\"If you vote for this man,\" shrieks the cart-tail orator, \"rents will\nbe lower and the street cleaner and you will get jobs. The other\nticket stands for graft and greed. Vote for it if you want your\nchildren to run in the streets, because there is no room for them in\nthe schools.\"\n\n\nPREDICTS LIKE A SPELLBINDER.\n\nLike the spellbinder, the oracle frequently builds on the\nlook-on-this-picture-and-then-on-that plan.\n\n\"This is a strong line,\" mumbles the palmist. \"You will meet a man\nwith blue eyes who will help you, but beware of a man with dark hair.\"\n\nSometimes the helper has light hair and the man to be avoided black\neyes. But invariably the good friend of the future is blond and the\ndevil is brunette. No seer would any more think of changing that\ncolor scheme than the writer of a melodrama would dare stage a villain\nwho didn't have hair and mustache as black as night. That prediction\nis one of the traditions of the art, and no future has ever been\ncomplete without the dark and the light men or the dark and the light\nwoman, as the case might be.\n\nOne of the most famous of fortune tellers, a woman, died suddenly. She\nhad been reading cards in the same house for forty years, and on the\nday of her funeral her house was crowded with mourners, whose future\nshe had foreseen with so much shrewdness that not one of the 200 or\nmore men and women who filed by the coffin, to view the body had any\nfault to find with the services she had rendered. On the contrary,\nthey compared notes, each trying to pay the best tribute to the dead\nby telling the most wonderful story of her predictions.\n\n\nWARNED OF THE ENEMY.\n\n\"I was sitting right in this room at that table where the flowers are\ntoday,\" said one mourner, \"and she said to me: 'You have an enemy.\nIt is here on this card where you can see it plainly. But here is a\nfriend, a tall, light man, who will come between you and your enemy.\nPut your trust in the tall, light man, but keep away from a dark man.\nThere is a dark-haired woman who pretends to be your friend, but lies\nabout you.'\"\n\nCompare that prediction of the oracle with this forecast of Daniel\nDefoe's famous deaf and dumb predictor, Duncan Campbell.\n\n\"To Mme. S----h W----d; I see but one misfortune after the year of\n1725. A black man, pretty tall and fat, seems to wish you no good.\nNever tell your secrets to any such persons, and their malice cannot\nhurt you.\"\n\nAnd that warning wasn't original when Mme. S----h W----d called at\nDuncan Campbell's lodging in London to learn what was what. No doubt\nit could be traced beyond Delphi. That's almost as safe a guess as to\nassume that Mme. S----h W----d was a Sarah Wood. She might have been a\nWedd or a Weld, but that is doubtful.\n\n\nPREDICTIONS CHANGE LITTLE.\n\nSo, although the seer of Randolph street and all the rest probably\nnever heard of Duncan Campbell or Nostradamus, or of their\npredecessors at Delphi, they have kept the profession of forecasting\nremarkably free of innovations.\n\n\"This art of prediction,\" reads Defoe's Life and Adventures of Duncan\nCampbell, \"is not attainable any otherwise than by these three ways.\n1. It is done by the company of familiar spirits and genii, which are\nof two sorts (some good and some bad), who tell the gifted person\nthe things, of which he informs other people. 2. It is performed by\nthe second sight, which is very various and differs in most of the\npossessors, it being only a very little in some, very extensive and\nconstant in others; beginning with some in their infancy and leaving\nthem before they come to years, happening to others in a middle age,\nto others again in an old age that never had it before, and lasting\nonly for a term of years, and now and then for a very short period of\ntime; and in some intermitting, like fits, as it were, of vision that\nleave them for a time, and then return to be strong in them as ever;\nand it being in a manner hereditary in some families, whose children\nhave it from their infancy (without intermission) to a great old age,\nand even to the time of their death, which they even foretell before\nit comes to pass, to a day--nay, even to an hour. 3. It is attained by\nthe diligent study of the lawful part of the art of magic.\"\n\n\nMAKE ENOUGH TO RETIRE.\n\nNowadays the prophets see to it that their miraculous power does not\ndepart from them for any cause whatsoever until their own palms have\nbeen crossed with enough silver to enable them to retire in comfort.\nA certain Fatima who told fortunes on Madison street for years removed\nher card from the front window and disappeared altogether. She had\nbought a farm up the state, where she is now living and raising fancy\nbreeds of poultry. There is no mortgage on the farm, and the hens have\ngrain three times a day.\n\nJust which one of Duncan Campbell's three methods a certain\npractitioner uses is not apparent, but he was one of the most noted\nand successful fortune tellers, and his men patrons set more store by\nwhat he said than in the promises of the district leaders.\n\n\nANSWERS QUESTIONS FOR A DOLLAR.\n\nHe has reduced his business to a fine system, and all the questions\nthat anybody could possibly think of are set down in a book with\nnumbers opposite them. And these books, printed in Yiddish, English\nand German, anticipate all the hopes and fears of the tenements. The\nquestions, all of a strong local flavor, are all answered by the\nfortune teller off-hand for $1, notwithstanding the fact that they\npresent some of the toughest problems that the philanthropists who\nsupport the Educational Alliance and the settlement houses have been\ntrying for years to solve. To illustrate, take this group of questions\nunder the general classifications \"Home and Children\":\n\n     \"Can I learn English?\"\n\n     \"Can I make my son or daughter learn Yiddish?\"\n\n     \"Shall my children play with Christians?\"\n\nThe book printed in Yiddish shows the most wear. It is divided under\nthese heads: \"Travel and Letters,\" \"Love and Marriage,\" \"Home and\nChildren,\" \"Business,\" \"Work,\" \"Luck and Losses.\"\n\nSome of the questions make interesting reading and supplementary to\nthe reports and papers of the various Hebrew charity organizations.\nOne of the more recent of these reports gave statistics of desertions\nof wives, and \"other women\" was put down as the cause in a large\nnumber of cases.\n\n\nMARRIED TWO WIVES; WHAT WILL HAPPEN?\n\nThe first question in the fortune tellers book under \"Travel and\nLetters\" is, \"Where did my husband elope to?\" The identity of the\nother woman in the case seems to be secondary in importance to the\nwhereabouts of the deserter.\n\nUnder \"Love and Marriage\" are these questions, among many others:\n\n     \"Is my bride's dowry as big as she says it is?\"\n\n     \"I have married two wives; what will happen?\"\n\n     \"Shall I be married in court?\"\n\nThose who are in doubt about work have many questions to select from,\nthe list starting off like this:\n\n     \"Shall I be a letter carrier?\"\n\n     \"Shall I be a conductor?\"\n\n     \"Shall I be a street cleaner?\"\n\n     \"Shall I be an actor?\"\n\n     \"Shall I be a lady-figure?\"\n\nA lady-figure is undoubtedly a cloak model.\n\nUnder \"Business\" some of the questions are:\n\n     \"Shall I remain a peddler or keep a store?\"\n\n     \"Shall I sue my partner?\"\n\n     \"Will my partner sue me?\"\n\n     \"Shall I take my wife into the store as a partner?\"\n\n     \"Shall I take my husband into the store as a partner?\"\n\n     \"Shall I buy the goods?\"\n\n     \"Will the bank fail?\"\n\nUnder \"Luck and Losses\" are:\n\n     \"Was I robbed by friends or strangers?\"\n\n     \"Does anybody look in my pockets nights?\"\n\n     \"Will the landlord put me out?\"\n\n\nROOMFUL OF PATRONS.\n\nThe deviser of these books keeps his office in a rear tenement open\nfrom early morning till late at night, and there is generally a\nroomful of anxious patrons awaiting their turns.\n\nAt a single sitting, price $1, the man or woman who wants to know\nmay select three questions. She puts the number corresponding to the\nquestions on a slip of paper. The numbers do not run in regular order\nthrough the book or through any section of it.\n\nThe slip of paper is kept concealed by the questioner, and later on,\nwhen she is in the actual presence of the oracle, she writes those\nnumbers again on another slip of paper, hidden from the fortune teller\nby a book cover. She also writes her name on two pieces of paper,\nwhich she places in two Bibles, opened at random by the fortune teller\nafter she has named any three words she happens to see on the page.\n\n\nGETS POINTERS FROM CUSTOMER.\n\nThen the books are closed, the soothsayer tells his customer what\nher name is (he is not often absolutely accurate in that part of\nthe game), and then he begins to talk about the past and future in\nsuch a rambling, comprehensive way that he is almost sure to hit\nupon, directly or indirectly, the questions she has in mind. If he\nis too far off the trail he asks the woman from time to time if she\nunderstands him, and from her replies and questions gets a further\nclew as to just which three questions she had selected from the lists.\nThen the rest is simple.\n\n\nSPOOKS RAIDED.\n\nDETECTIVES WOOLDRIDGE AND BARRY DESCEND ON A WEST SIDE MEDIUM'S PLACE.\n\n     Lively Fight Before the Officers Succeed in Making\n     Arrests--One of the Number Set Upon and Severely Beaten\n     Before Aided--Spectators at the Seance Take Part and the\n     Row Becomes General--Search of the Premises Reveals a\n     Systematic Plan to Deceive--Anger of the Dupes Turns to\n     Chagrin at the Revelations Made by the Police.\n\nSeptember 2, 1906, Catherine Nichols, Sarah Nichols and Jennie\nNichols, 186 Sebor street, fake exponents of materialization of\nspirits and general \"spook\" grafters, were arrested, the seances\nraided and the game closed, by Detectives Wooldridge and Barry.\n\nThe scene of the raid was a brick building at 184 Sebor street, which\nis just east of Halsted and a block south of Harrison street.\n\nThe medium arrested was Miss Jennie Nichols, who, with her mother,\nMrs. Catherine Nichols, and her sister, Sarah, had been gleaning a\nharvest of dollars from guillible residents, mostly of the West Side\nof the city, during the last two years. The establishment of the\nNichols family occupies parts of two buildings, the mother and her two\ndaughters living at 186 Sebor street, next door to 184. On the second\nfloor of the latter address was located the hall which they used for\ntheir public seances.\n\n\nPLANS ARE WELL LAID.\n\nThe raid was made on the authority of a warrant which was applied\nfor by Miss Muriel Miller, a young woman who was induced by the\nblandishments of other mediums to come to Chicago from her home in\nPortland, Ore. Miss Miller, who is employed in a barber shop in Clark\nstreet, is slightly deaf. She became interested in Spiritualism, and\nthus came in touch with the Nichols' outfit.\n\n[Illustration: \"SPIRIT PICTURES\" OF WOMEN HELD AS BOGUS MEDIUMS, AND\nSCENE SHOWING FIGHT BETWEEN PUGILISTIC SPOOKS AND DETECTIVES.\n\nCATHERINE NICHOLS, JENNIE NICHOLS]\n\nShe had written to another Chicago medium, and received letters in\nanswer signed \"Professor Venazo.\"\n\nIt was explained to Miss Miller that the wonderful cures which the\nmedium professed to be able to make were brought about while the\npatient was in a trance. In a letter which had been turned over to\nthe police, \"Professor Venazo,\" which is the name with which an\naccomplice of certain Chicago mediums signed such communications,\nexplained that because of stress of business it would be impossible to\nundertake to cure Miss Miller of her deafness unless she was prepared\nto put up at least $50 in cash.\n\nThe letter stated that if she would send to \"Professor Venazo\" $100\nthe medium would undertake to go to her home and cure her there. If\nshe did not wish to pay that much money she could come to Chicago, pay\nthe medium $50, and be cured \"while in a trance.\"\n\nDetectives Barry and David Carroll were detailed to assist Wooldridge\nin serving the warrants and making the raid.\n\n\nDETECTIVES ATTEND SERVICE.\n\nBarry and Carroll planned to effect an entrance to the \"seance.\"\nInspector Revere was informed and asked to give a detail of six\nofficers, who, headed by Detective Wooldridge, went to the hall on\nSebor street. Barry and Carroll had preceded them and succeeded in\nconvincing Jennie Nichols, who was the master of ceremonies, that\nthey were interested in spiritualism and desired to witness the\nmaterializations.\n\nWhen they went to the hall, Detective Barry walked in and found\ntwenty-eight or thirty others there before him. Jennie Nichols was\nbusy arranging the spectators in seats. She took a great deal of care\nabout placing them. Carroll and Barry entered and signed their names\non the register. This was a book in which everyone who is admitted to\na seance is requested to place his name and place of residence. Barry\nsigned as \"John Woods\"; address, 142 Ashland boulevard.\n\n\nCALLING UP THE SPIRITS.\n\nWhen the seance opened Jennie Nichols conducted those who were in the\nhall through the main room and the one at the rear, before which the\ncurtain was placed. Everything was all right, so far as Detectives\nBarry and Carroll could see. The cabinet from which the spirits were\nto come stood across one corner, and opposite it was a door leading\ninto one of the two rooms in the rear of the hall.\n\nThey examined the cabinet and the rooms carefully, but found\neverything all right. After they had been through everything the doors\nwere locked and they returned to their seats, Miss Nichols making some\nother changes in the arrangements of the seats, and then the place was\ndarkened.\n\nWhen the place had been made almost entirely dark, Jennie Nichols,\nthe medium, began pacing back and forth in front of the curtain. She\nrubbed her hands over her head and eyes a number of times, and began\nto chant: \"Come, O queen, O queen.\"\n\nWhen she began to call on the \"queen\" the spectators began to get\nexcited. Most of them appeared to be thoroughly familiar with the\nproceedings, and several of them said: \"Oh, I hope it's the king.\"\n\nThen the medium pulled a cord which was attached to a light enclosed\nin a sheet-iron case, the one small opening of which was covered with\nseveral thicknesses of green tissue paper. When she pulled the string\nthe room became darker than ever.\n\n\nSPIRITS BEGIN TO MOVE.\n\nBefore she began her incantations the medium had requested everyone\npresent not to cross their feet, and to try to assist her to bring the\nspirits before them. She said that it would probably not be possible\nto bring a spirit for everybody, but that if all helped her, the\nspirits wanted by many in the audience would surely appear.\n\nThen she asked them all to sing \"Nearer, My God, to Thee,\" which they\ndid, and after a few more passes over her temples and in front of her\neyes the spirit began to move. The detectives could see it, and they\nbegan to think they had been wrong in thinking there was nothing in\nspiritualism. It certainly appeared real. First one form would glide\nback and forth in front of the curtain, then an entirely different\none would appear. Altogether there were spirits of about ten men and\nchildren materialized.\n\nAs the apparitions moved slowly in front of the curtain, in the\nspectral light which made it impossible to detect more than a faint\noutline of the form, women rushed forward crying out that it was their\nhusband, or their child, that they saw. They stretched out their hands\nto clasp the forms of their departed, but Jennie Nichols and her male\nassistant would take them by their hands and tell them they must not\ntouch the spirit or it would fade away. You could get within six\ninches of the figures, and peer into the faces as they passed to and\nfro, but everyone was restrained from attempting to touch them. In the\nghostly light of the room the closest inspection could not determine\nthat the figures were frauds, so clever were they disguised.\n\n\nKEYS UP THE SPECTATORS.\n\nWhile the detectives were waiting for the materialization, a woman\nthey knew entered the room. Barry put his handkerchief up to his\nface for fear she would recognize him. They wanted to know what was\nthe matter with him, and Barry said that he guessed he had something\nin his eye. They wanted to take it out, and he had to put his\nhandkerchief away. He thought he was discovered, but the woman, Mrs.\nElla Hoobler, 319 West Madison street, said nothing about him. After\nthey had arrested the Nichols woman, Mrs. Hoobler told Barry she had\nrecognized him when she first entered the room, but she thought he was\n\"bug\" in the game, and said nothing.\n\nAfter about ten materializations of husbands and children had keyed\nthe spectators up to a high pitch, Mrs. Hoobler asked for the spirit\nof her daughter, Helen. In a few minutes the figure of a young girl,\nclad in white from head to foot, appeared before the curtain.\n\n\"Oh, Helen, my Helen!\" Mrs. Hoobler exclaimed, rushing to the\napparition. \"Oh, mamma!\" came the answer in a shrill falsetto voice.\n\n[Illustration: Medium's Paraphernalia Seized by Police in Raid.]\n\nJennie Nichols and the big assistant seized Mrs. Hoobler's hands just\nas she was about to clasp what she believed to be the spirit of her\ndaughter in her arms.\n\n\"You must not touch it,\" Jennie Nichols told her, \"or the spirit will\ngo away.\"\n\nThe poor, almost frantic woman kneeled before the apparition. Barry\nthought it was time to get busy, and he whispered softly to Carroll:\n\"Watch out, there's going to be a pinch.\" Then he threw on the\nflashlight and whistled for the squad outside to come in.\n\nJust as he did this the \"spook\" in front of him looked so realistic\nthat for the life of him he couldn't decide whether he was going up\nagainst a real spirit or not. But he took a chance and grabbed for it.\nEven when he had hold of it and knew it must be flesh and blood, it\nseemed so slimy, with the white stuff rubbed over it, that he felt his\nhair rising.\n\nJust about that time the medium outfit got busy. The big man who had\nbeen helping Jennie Nichols hold the hands of the people who were\ntrying to grab the spirits of their dead hit Barry over the head with\nsome sort of a club that knocked him to the floor. Jennie Nichols put\nout the light entirely, grabbed Barry's flashlight and began pounding\nhim over the head with it. They went to the floor in a rough and\ntumble scrimmage, the crowd on top of them, yelling and screaming.\n\nIn the next room Carroll was busy, too. He got hold of Mrs. Catherine\nNichols, the mother, who had been helping with the show, and he was\nbeset by spectators who were incensed because the seance had been\nbroken up.\n\n\nWOOLDRIDGE TAKES A HAND.\n\nWhen Detective Wooldridge and his detail broke down the doors of the\nhall and made their entrance into the place it was pitch dark, and\nthey had to strike matches before they could separate the combatants.\n\nAfter a semblance of order had been restored in the place the\npremises were searched, and a most astounding outfit of disguises\ndiscovered. Before this development the spectators, who had been held\nin the place, were very angry with the officers, saying that they had\nbeen attending the seances for the last two years; that they knew\nJennie Nichols as a medium had shown them the spirits of their dead.\nWhen the officers produced Sarah Nichols, to whom Detective Barry had\nheld when he seized the \"spook,\" they discovered that she had been\nwearing a pair of sandal slippers with felt five inches thick for\nsoles; a pair of men's black trousers and the white shroud and painted\npicture face of a young girl.\n\nAttached to a pole in front of her was a paper head, around which was\na white shroud four feet in length. Those in attendance believed this\nimage to be the spirit of a believer's dead relative. The \"medium\" had\n\"spook\" images of men, women and children, and could produce them as\ncircumstances demanded. The light was turned up, and the contemptible\nimposition on credulity was exposed to twenty-six dupes, who had\nbeen paying $1 apiece for the privilege of attending meetings of the\n\"spook\" grafters for years. It was the greatest expos\u00e9 of \"spooks\"\nthat has been made in many years. A wagon load of masks, wigs, false\nwhiskers, tin horns, gowns with safety pins in them, skulls and\nskeletons with cross-bones to match, were seized.\n\n\nWOMEN REFUSE TO TALK.\n\nAt the station the women refused to talk. Sarah Nichols, the \"spook,\"\nhad donned a house dress before she was taken to the station. Jennie\nNichols, the \"medium,\" was dressed in a neat black gown of rich\nmaterial. The mother appeared in a black skirt and a white shirtwaist.\nThe latter is a gray-haired woman apparently about 50 years old. She\nwept copiously. Sarah Nichols also wept. In the scrimmage after the\narrest her ear had been injured, and it was bleeding when the trio was\nbooked at the station.\n\nJennie Nichols was the most composed of all. She held a palm leaf fan\nin front of her face and above it twinkled a pair of shrewd blue eyes.\nAs she and her relatives were led from the private room at Harrison\nstreet she even laughed, although her mother and her sister were in\ntears, and her victims were denouncing her for having robbed them,\nthrough their credulity, of hundreds of dollars, which many of them\ncould ill afford to lose.\n\n\nWOOLDRIDGE MAKES GHOST WALK IN POLICE COURT.\n\nA \"spook\" sat on the bench with Justice Prindiville. He made ghosts\nwalk and graveyards yawn.\n\nThe \"spook\" was Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge.\n\nWhen Miss Sarah Nichols, \"the ghost,\" Miss Jennie Nichols, \"the trance\nmedium,\" and Mrs. Catherine Nichols, mother of the other two known as\nthe \"overseer,\" appeared in court to answer to charges of obtaining\nmoney by false pretenses through spiritualistic seances, Detective\nWooldridge crowded to the center of the stage.\n\nHe bore a great board, on which were tacked white shrouds, grinning\nskulls and cross-bones, the costume of an Indian, and other\ninstruments of the medium's trade.\n\n\"For the benefit of the public at large,\" he said, addressing\nthe court, \"I ask permission to expose the methods of these fake\nspiritualists.\"\n\nThe permission was given, and \"Spook\" Wooldridge took the wool sack.\n\n\n\"SPOOK\" WOOLDRIDGE DEMONSTRATES.\n\nHe lit the punk with which the mediums were wont to light up the\nskull. He burned incense. He put on a white gown.\n\n\"This is Carrie's garment,\" he said, pointing to where \"Ghost\" Carrie,\ntwenty-four years old and buxom, stood.\n\nHe went through the whole performance, save the grease paint. He\nstarted to daub his face with the stuff, which gave a ghostly hue,\nwhen the justice interrupted:\n\n\"You needn't dirty your face, Friend Spook. You've scored your points\nalready.\" The \"Spook\" had, indeed.\n\nDespite the exposures, many women and a few men who had come to hear\nthe cases, expressed their devotion to the persons arrested and to the\n\"cause.\"\n\nThey finally became so demonstrative that Justice Prindiville ordered\nthe court room cleared of the \"devotees.\"\n\n\"This is not a matinee, a spiritualists' meeting or a circus,\" said\nthe Justice. \"Let the devotees meet in the outer hall.\"\n\nFifty women, of all ages and many conditions of life, stood with\nmouths wide open and eyes bulging as Wooldridge went through his\nperformance. They were the victims of the Nichols women.\n\nJennie Nichols and Sarah Nichols were fined $100 each.\n\n\nARREST SOUTH SIDE MEDIUMS.\n\nTo conclude the record of the day, Detectives Wooldridge and Barry,\naccompanied by two officers from the Cottage Grove station, visited\na seance given by Clarence A. Beverly and Mrs. M. Dixon at Arlington\nhall, Thirty-first street and Indiana avenue. The officers bought\ntickets and awaited the performance. After a lecture on psychic\nproblems by \"Dr.\" Beverly and a programme of music rendered by\nchildren, \"Dr.\" Dixon took the rostrum and went through a series of\nclairvoyant discoveries.\n\nAmong the things which she professed to predict while in her\n\"trance\" was a prognostication which had not a little to do with the\ndevelopments of the evening. After she had pointed out a number of\npersons in the audience and told what they had done or should do, she\ndiscovered Wooldridge and singled him out.\n\n\"I see a man with glasses who has his hands crossed over his knees,\"\nshe said. \"I am governed by the spirit of John Googan, an Irishman. He\ngives you a message,\" pointing to Wooldridge, \"and says that whatever\nJohn orders must be done.\"\n\nAt this Wooldridge, arising from his seat, advanced to the rostrum.\n\n\nOFFICER SERVES PAPERS.\n\n\"John Collins, chief of police, says, Mrs. Dixon, that I am to put you\nunder arrest under a state warrant charging you with receiving money\nby a confidence game. I also have a warrant charging the same offense\nagainst Clarence A. Beverly. Dr. Beverly, please come forth.\"\n\nDr. Beverly presented himself, and both he and Mrs. Dixon were taken\nto Harrison street, where strenuous efforts on their behalf on the\npart of \"Dr.\" Harry H. Tobias, spiritual mental healer, with offices\nat 118 East Thirty-third street, and others, failed to procure them\nbonds.\n\nThe arrest of Beverly and Mrs. Dixon was made on a warrant signed\nby Miss Miller, who had entered into correspondence with them from\nher home in Portland, Ore. The fee in Chicago was to have been $50,\naccording to the letters she received from the mediums, as in the\npreceding instance. She borrowed money to come to Chicago, and had\nbut $25 to pay the \"healers.\" When she received no benefit from their\ntreatment she made complaint and was threatened with violence, she\nalleges. Thereupon she laid her case before Chief Collins, resulting\nin the raid and the closing up of this place.\n\nThus did the sleuth a-sleuthing vanquish the ubiquitous \"spook,\" the\n\"ghost,\" the \"spirit,\" the re-incarnation, the Mahatma, the \"sending,\"\nand all the hosts of the immaterial world, whose immaterialism was\nbeing converted into good hard material cash by the producers of the\nevanescent shapes from beyond the veil.\n\nThus did Clifton R. Wooldridge and his able assistants make \"spooking\"\na dangerous business in Chicago.\n\n\n\n\nWIFE OR GALLOWS?\n\nPREFERS HANGING TO LIVING WITH HIS WIFE.\n\n\nHugo Devel prefers being hanged to living with his wife.\n\nUnable to escape her in any other way, lacking the courage or nerve to\nkill himself, and shuddering at the idea of life imprisonment with the\nwoman he had promised to love and cherish, he confessed to a murder\nhe did not commit, and was ready to go upon the gallows or to penal\nservitude for life in the stead of the real murderer.\n\n[Illustration: HE'D RATHER BE HANGED THAN LIVE WITH HIS WIFE.]\n\nNow he is free, and miserable, and in his home at Lubeck, in Germany.\nHe is envying Franz Holz, who is awaiting the gallows.\n\nDevel admits sadly that he had a double purpose in wanting to die on\nthe gallows. First, that he would escape his wife; and, second, that,\nby being hanged he would make it improbable that any other man should\nmeet his fate--not his fate on the gallows, but his fate in having\nwedded Frau Devel.\n\nThe case, which was cleared up by the Hamburg police, furnished a\nproblem that would have defied the cunning of Sherlock Holmes and all\nhis kindred analysts. Briefly stated, the facts in the case, which is\nthe strangest one ever given to a detective department to solve, are\nthese:\n\n\nWOMAN WAS ROBBED AND MURDERED.\n\nA few months ago a certain Frau Gimble, of Munich, was cruelly\nmurdered by a man. The evident motive of the deed was robbery, and\nthat the crime was planned and premeditated there was sufficient\nevidence. Every clew and circumstance pointed to Franz Holz. He\nwas known to have been at or near the scene of the murder shortly\nbefore its commission. He knew the woman, and had knowledge that she\nkept a considerable sum of money in her home. He was known to have\nbeen without money for days prior to the murder, and immediately\nafter the deed, and before the body was discovered, he had appeared\nwith a quantity of money, made some purchases, bought drinks for\nacquaintances, and then disappeared.\n\nThe police were on his trail within a short time after the finding\nof the body of the murdered woman. Holz had fled toward Berlin, and\na warning was sent in all directions, containing descriptions of the\nfugitive.\n\nThe awfulness of the deed attracted the more attention because of\nthe locality and the ruthless and cruel manner of its commission.\nWhile the police were making a rapid search for the fugitive Holz,\nHugo Devel, a well-to-do tradesman in Lubeck, surrendered himself to\nthe police of his home town and confessed that he, and not Holz, had\ncommitted the crime. Devel had been in Hamburg at the time the crime\nwas committed. His confession, which destroyed all the evidence and\nall the theories implicating Holz, staggered the detectives.\n\n\nDEVEL CONFESSES TO THE CRIME.\n\nAlthough apparently saved from a remarkable network of circumstantial\nevidence, and no longer wanted for the murder of the Gimble woman,\nthe German police reasoned that Holz, if he had not fled because\nof that crime, must have fled because of some other crime. So\nthe department, which has a name a couple of feet long, which in\nEnglish would mean, \"the department for finding out everything about\neverybody,\" kept on the trail.\n\nMeantime the police of Hamburg got possession of Devel and examined\nhim. From the first they were uneasy. He confessed that he murdered\nthe woman to get her money, and beyond that would not tell anything.\nIt is not customary for the police to insist that a man who confesses\nthat he is guilty of murder shall prove it, but there were facts known\nto the police which made them wonder how it was possible for Devel to\nhave killed the woman. They used the common police methods, and made\nthe prisoner talk. The more he talked the more apparent it became to\nthe police that he was innocent, although he still claimed vehemently\nthat he, and he alone, killed the Gimble woman.\n\n\nPOLICE LEARN HE IS NOT GUILTY.\n\nSome of his statements were ridiculous. For instance, he did not know\nwhat quarter of the city the woman lived in. He did not know how she\nhad been murdered. He said he climbed through a window and killed the\nwoman. When pressed, he said the window was the dining-room window.\nIn view of the fact that she was killed while working in a little\nopen, outdoor kitchen when murdered, the police became satisfied that\nDevel was not the man, and ordered the pursuit of Holz resumed by all\ndepartments.\n\nThe case even then was a remarkable one, and one which would have\ndefied any theoretical detective. The police proved that it was\nimpossible that Devel should be confessing in order to shield\nHolz--first, because he never knew Holz; and second, because the\npolice had informed him that the real murderer was in custody, in\norder to discover a reason for his confession. It was suspected that\nDevel was partly insane and seeking notoriety. Everything in his life\nrefuted that idea. He was a quiet, orderly citizen, who seldom read\nnewspapers, and who neither was interested in crime or criminals.\nHe owned a small business in Lubeck, attended to it strictly, drank\nlittle, and apparently was as sane as any one.\n\n\nSEARCHING FOR MOTIVE OF CONFESSION.\n\nThe case worried the police officials. The absolute lack of reason for\nDevel's confession stimulated their curiosity. He was held in custody\nfor weeks, and then the police gave up in despair, and, as Holz had\nbeen arrested and had confessed to everything, the release of Devel\nwas ordered. The order of release proved the move that revealed the\ntruth. When he was told that he was free to return home, Devel broke\ndown and begged the police to keep him in prison, to hang him, to\npoison him, but not to send him home.\n\nIn his agony he confessed that the only reason he confessed the murder\nwas that he desired to get hanged, and that he preferred hanging to\nlife with his wife.\n\nThe hard-hearted police set him free--literally threw him out of the\nprison, and he returned to his wife in Lubeck. The following day he\nresumed charge of his business.\n\nAn English correspondent visited Devel in his shop and made certain\ninquiries of him regarding the case. As the hanging editor would say,\n\"the condemned man was nervous.\" He was afraid his wife would read\nwhat he said, but the correspondent finally got him to tell.\n\n\"I desired to be hung,\" said Devel, mournfully. \"Life is not worth the\nliving, and with my wife it is worse than death. If I had been hanged\nno other man would marry my wife, and I would save them from my fate.\nMany times have I planned to kill myself to escape her. That is sin,\nand I lack the bravery to kill myself, besides. If they will not hang\nme I must continue to live with my wife.\"\n\nDevel states, among other things, that these are the chief grievances\nagainst married life in general, and his wife in particular:\n\n     She was slender, and became fat and strong.\n\n     She was beautiful, and became ugly and coarse.\n\n     She was tender, and grew hard.\n\n     She was loving, and grew virulent.\n\n     She grew whiskers on her chin.\n\n     She called him \"pig.\"\n\n     She wore untidy clothes, and her hair was unkempt.\n\n     She refused to give him beer.\n\n     Her breath smelled of onions and of garlic.\n\n     She threw hot soup upon him.\n\n     She continually upbraided him because there were no\n     children.\n\n     She scolded him in the presence of neighbors.\n\n     She refused to permit him to bring his friends home.\n\n     She came into his store and scolded him.\n\n     She accused him of infidelity.\n\n     She disturbed him when he slept in the garden on Sundays.\n\n     She made him cook his own dinners.\n\n     She spilled his beer when he drank quietly with friends.\n\n     She told tales about him among the neighbors, and injured\n     his business.\n\n     She served his sausages and his soup cold, and sometimes\n     did not have his meals for him when he came home.\n\n     She did not make the beds nor clean the house.\n\n     She took cards out of his skat deck.\n\n     She talked continually, and scolded him for everything or\n     nothing.\n\n     She opened the windows when he closed them, and closed them\n     when he opened them.\n\n     She poured water into his shoes while he slept.\n\n     She cut off his dachshund's tail.\n\nThese things, he said, made him prefer to be hanged to living with her.\n\nIncidentally Holz, who is awaiting execution, expresses an earnest\ndesire to trade places with Herr Devel.\n\nThere is no accounting for tastes.\n\n\n\n\nA CLEVER SHOPLIFTER.\n\nDETECTIVE WOOLDRIDGE FINDS A FAIR CRIMINAL.\n\n\nWhile passing through the Fair, one of the largest retail dry goods\nestablishments in Chicago, Detective Wooldridge noticed one of the\ncleverest shoplifters that ever operated in Chicago, Bertha Lebecke,\nknown as \"Fainting Bertha.\"\n\nShe was standing in front of the handkerchief counter, where her\nactions attracted Wooldridge's attention, and he concluded to watch\nher. She called the girl's attention to something on the shelf and as\nshe turned to get it Bertha's hand reached out and took a half dozen\nexpensive lace handkerchiefs, which disappeared in the folds of her\nskirt.\n\nThe act was performed so quickly and with such cleverness that it\nwould have gone unnoticed unless one were looking right at her and saw\nher take the handkerchiefs.\n\nFrom the handkerchief counter she went to the drug department, where\nshe secured several bottles of perfume. As she was leaving this\ncounter she met a Central detective who had arrested her before\nfor the same offense. He stopped a few yards from her to make some\ntrifling purchases. She, thinking he was watching her, left the store.\n\nFrom the Fair she went to Siegel-Cooper's, another large dry goods\nstore several blocks away. Detective Wooldridge followed her. She was\nseen to go from counter to counter, and from each one she succeeded in\ngetting some article.\n\nAs she was leaving the store she was placed under arrest by Detective\nWooldridge and taken to the Police Station.\n\nWhen she was arrested she fainted, and a great crowd gathered around\nher, and many of the women cried and implored Detective Wooldridge not\nto arrest her, but he would not be moved by any of them to let her go\nfree.\n\n[Illustration: \"_FAINTING BERTHA_\"]\n\nWhen she arrived at the Police Station she was searched, and beneath\nthe folds of her skirt was found a strong waist pocket which looked\nlike a petticoat. It consisted of two pieces of material gathered\nfull at the top with a strong cord or puckering string run through,\nand sewed together around the edges. In front of this great bag was a\nslit two feet long opening from the top to within a few inches of the\nbottom. This petticoat was worn under the dress skirt. On each side\nof the outside skirt was a long slit concealed by the folds of the\nskirt, and with one hand she could slip the stolen articles in through\nthe slit in the inside of her dress and into the petticoat bag to the\nopening in front. The capacity of the bag was enormous. She had stolen\nsome $40 or $50 worth of goods when arrested. The following morning\nshe was arraigned in the Police Court and heavily fined, and the goods\nwere restored to the merchants.\n\nBertha Lebecke, 27 years old, is conceded by Illinois state\nauthorities to be the most troublesome person who ever crossed the\nstate line from any direction at any time.\n\nJust how large a cash bonus the state treasury today might be willing\nto advance could it be assured of Bertha's deportation forever beyond\nthe confines of Illinois is something difficult to estimate, but it\nis certain that in the asylums for the insane at Kankakee, Elgin\nand Bartonville, and in the state penitentiary at Joliet there are\nattendants on salaries who would make personal contributions to help\nswell the possible fund.\n\nYet \"Fainting Bertha\" Lebecke is one of the prettiest, blondest,\nmost delicate handed little bits of well-developed femininity that\never made a marked success in deceiving people of both sexes and all\nconditions in public, afterwards deceiving officials of jails, asylums\nand penitentiaries until bars and gates and frowning walls were as\ncobwebs before her.\n\n\nSLEEPS ALL DAY; MAKES NIGHT HIDEOUS.\n\nGates of steel never have held her in jail or asylum. In the mightier\npenitentiaries she has made herself such an uncontrolled fury\nby night--sleeping calmly all day long and resting for the next\nseance--that penitentiary gates have opened for her in the hope of\nhaving her maintained as an asylum ward. After which \"Fainting Bertha\"\nhas secured keys to asylum doors and gone her untrammeled way straight\nback to a police record which for years has shown her to be one of the\nmost remarkable pickpockets, diamond snatchers and shoplifters of her\ntime.\n\nMaking such a nuisance of herself in the penitentiary as no longer to\nbe tolerated in a refined convict community, she proves her madness.\nIn the locked, barred, asylum she proves her cunning at escape. And,\nonce more at liberty, the abandon with which she goes after personal\nproperty in any form, at any time and under any circumstances, proves\nher skill as a thief and her unbalance in the \"get away.\"\n\nThere is her escape from the asylum at Elgin on the night of December\n25, 1904. Christmas eve she had fainted in the arms of an attendant\nand in the scurrying which followed had secured the keys to the gates.\nOn the night of Christmas she went out of the Elgin asylum, boarded an\nelectric car for Aurora and bought a railroad ticket to Peoria.\n\n\nSTOLE $1,000 WORTH OF GOODS IN TWO DAYS.\n\nOn the way to Peoria she relieved the conductor of $30 in bills,\nsecreting them in her hat. In Peoria, within forty-eight hours, she\nhad stolen a thousand dollars' worth of goods from stores, registered\nat three hotels under assumed names, and was in a chair car with a\nticket for Omaha when the Peoria police had followed her easy tracks\nthrough the city. Perhaps the broadest, most easily identified track\nwas that which she left in a barber shop in the National Hotel, where\nshe appeared for an egg shampoo. Two eggs had been broken into her\nshiny hair when Bertha promptly fainted and rolled out of the chair.\nAs a count of shop equipment showed nothing missing an hour later, the\nbarber shop proprietor was at a loss as to the purpose of the faint.\n\nThis girlish young woman, with the baby dimples and skin of peach and\ncream, the innocent blue eyes, and the smiles that play so easily over\nher face as she talks vivaciously and with keen sense of both wit and\nhumor, is a study for the psychologist. There is no affectedness of\nspeech--for the moment it is childishly genuine. She could sit in a\ndrawing room and have half a dozen admirers in her train.\n\nBut reform schools, asylums and penitentiaries are institutions\nthrough which this young woman has graduated up to that pinnacle of\nnotorious accomplishment which today is centering upon \"Fainting\nBertha\" Lebecke the official attentions of a great state. What to do\nwith her is the question.\n\n\nKEPT AT SOUTH BARTONVILLE WITHOUT LOCKS.\n\nDr. George A. Zeller, superintendent of the asylum for the incurable\ninsane at South Bartonville, having fought for the care of Bertha in\nhis institution, purposes to make her a tractable patient and willing\nto remain. He has the history of his institution back of him, from\nwhose doors and windows he has torn away $6,000 worth of steel netting\nand steel bars.\n\nIn the first place, \"Fainting Bertha\" will have nothing to gain by\nfainting at Bartonville; she is promised merely a drowning dash of\ncold water when she falls. She can secure no keys by fainting, for the\nreason that there are no keys to doors. A nurse, wideawake for her\neight-hour nursing duty, is always at hand and always watchful.\n\n\"Take away the show of restraint if you would have a patient cease\nfighting against restraint,\" is the philosophy of Dr. Zeller. \"Human\nvigilance always was and always will be the greatest safeguard for the\ninsane.\"\n\nIf \"Fainting Bertha\" Lebecke were a grizzled amazon, even, she might\nbe a simpler proposition for the state. She is too pretty and plump,\nhowever, to think of restraining by the harsher methods, if harsh\nmethods are employed. She can pass out of a storm of hysterical tears\nin an instant and smile through them like a stream of sunshine. Or\nas quickly she can throw off the pretty little witticism and airy\nconceit of her baby hands and become a vixen fury with blazing blue\neyes that are a warning to her antagonist.\n\nAnd at large, exercising her charms, she can become the \"good fellow\"\nto the everlasting disappearance of half a dozen different valuables\nin one's tie or pockets.\n\n\nHISTORY OF \"FAINTING BERTHA.\"\n\nBertha Lebecke says she was born in Council Bluffs, Ia., in 1880. Save\nfor the trick of raising her brows while animated, thus wrinkling her\nforehead before her time, she might pass easily for twenty-three years\nof age. In these twenty-seven years, however, Bertha Lebecke has kept\nthe institutions of four states guessing--to some extent experimenting.\n\nHer father was a cobbler, and there were five children, only one other\nof them living. The father is dead. The mother, with the one sister,\nis living in Council Bluffs. Seven asylums and one state's prison\nhave held her--for a time; Kankakee three times and Elgin twice, with\ntwo escapes from each place credited to her childish cunning. But\ntoday the face of Bertha Lebecke in trouble anywhere in Christian\ncivilization would draw helping funds for less than her asking.\n\n\"Don't write that I am the awful creature that the papers have\npictured me,\" she exclaimed, with a tragic movement of her little\nhands. \"Oh, I have been a bad girl--I know that--but not as bad as\nthey accuse me of being,\" burying her face in her arm.\n\nBut in a moment she was sitting up, dry eyed, stitching on the bit\nof linen \"drawn work\" which she said was intended for Gov. Deneen at\nSpringfield.\n\n\nCRITICISES THE LINEN PURCHASED BY THE STATE.\n\n\"But what awful linen!\" she exclaimed, holding it out to Dr. Zeller as\nshe sat in a ward with twenty other women inmates regarded as among\nthe hardest to watch and control among the 1,900 inmates of the great\ninstitution. \"I'm surprised at you! Can't you buy better linen than\nthat?\"\n\nBut while she talked and the doctor smiled, a small key fitting\nnothing in particular was laid by Dr. Zeller close at hand and it\ndisappeared in ten seconds. Likewise a pencil from the doctor's pocket\nfound its way almost unnoticed into \"Fainting Bertha's\" blonde hair.\nHer smiling face all turned to frowns when finally, one at a time, he\ntook the key from her waist and the pencil from its hiding place in\nher hair.\n\n\"Did you ever know a man named Gunther?\" asked Dr. Zeller suddenly.\n\n\"Yes--what of it?\" she asked quickly, with a show of nervousness.\n\n\"He is in the penitentiary.\"\n\n\"Good! Good!\" exclaimed the girl. \"I'm delighted to hear it. He ought\nto have been there long ago, and he ought to stay there the rest of\nhis life!\"\n\nThis was the man whom Bertha charged with responsibility for her\nfirst wrong step as a girl, sending her first to the Glenwood (Ia.)\nHome for the Feebleminded. Later she charges that this man taught\nher the fainting trick, by which she faints in the arms of a man or\nwoman wearing jewelry or carrying money and in the confusion biting\nthe stone from a pin and swallowing it, or with small, supple hand\ntaking a purse from a pocket or a watch from its fob, perhaps with\ninnocent eyes and dimpled face assisting the loser in the search for\nthe missing valuable.\n\n\nBERTHA SAYS GUNTHER PROMISED TO MARRY HER.\n\n\"That man Gunther promised to marry me,\" she said, lowering her voice.\n\"He sent me out to steal and when I wouldn't do it he used to beat me\nwhen I came home. Do you wonder I'm what I am?\"\n\nThere was a burst of what might have been tears. Her face was buried\nand her figure shook with sobs. But in five seconds the dimpled face\nappeared again, dry eyed, and at a remark on the moment she turned\ntoward her auditors, winking an eyelid slyly.\n\n\"Fainting Bertha\" Lebecke has almost lost consecutive track of the\nasylums and prisons in which she has been locked.\n\nFrom this Glenwood home for the feebleminded she was released. She\ngot into trouble again and was sent to the Clarinda State Hospital\nfor the Insane. Here, in the words of the superintendent, she was\nlooked upon as a case of \"moral imbecility, with some maniacal\ncomplications.\" Here an operation was performed, and, in the opinion\nof the superintendent, she was eligible to discharge soon afterwards\nas improved.\n\nSt. Bernard's Asylum at Council Bluffs cared for her for a time, but\nshe succeeded in escaping from it and was not returned.\n\nIn Asylum No. 3 at Nevada, Mo., in spite of the close watch kept upon\nher, \"Fainting Bertha\" escaped several times, but was caught soon\nafter and returned to the institution. On December 21, 1901, she was\ndischarged as not insane and returned to Omaha, where she had lived\nfor a time. Here Bertha remained about two years, acting as a maid\nof all work in households. Her experience in Chicago and Illinois is\nstranger than any fiction.\n\n\nMOST UNRULY PRISONER IN JOLIET.\n\nOn a charge of shoplifting she was given an indeterminate sentence of\none to ten years in the penitentiary at Joliet.\n\nRecords of Joliet prison show her to have been the most unruly\nprisoner ever confined in that institution. Her conduct was such that\nPrison Physician Fletcher declared that she was insane and she was\nsent to the asylum at Kankakee.\n\nTwice she escaped from Kankakee, once, she says, with the aid of an\nemployee of the institution, whom she refuses to name. This first\nescape was made within four months of her arrival at the institution;\nthe second after a year. On her return to that institution for\ncriminals her actions were such that the hospital authorities decided\nthat she was not insane and sent her back to Joliet prison.\n\nOn this second imprisonment \"Fainting Bertha\" showed what she could\ndo in making herself impossible even in a prison. Her cell was in\nthe north wing of the building, overlooking the street. She would\nappear in the window with her clothing torn to ribbons, shrieking\nthat she was being murdered. According to prison officials, there was\nno language too impossible for her glib tongue. Her furies of temper\ncaused her to heap unspeakable abuse upon matrons and guards alike.\nDeputy Warden Sims, responsible for order and discipline, says he has\nbeen abused by her beyond belief. Her plan was to sleep in daylight\nand make the whole night hideous with her screams and cries and\nunspeakable language.\n\n\nPENITENTIARY GLAD TO BE RID OF HER.\n\nAs a last resort the tortured prison officials at Joliet, taking\nthe diagnosis of Physician Fletcher, sent her to the care of Supt.\nPodstata at the Elgin asylum. There, after consultation of the asylum\nphysicians, it was found that she should have been confined in an\nasylum for the feebleminded when she was younger; that, lacking this\ntreatment, she had grown and developed such destructive tendencies\nthat a hospital for the insane was the only haven for her.\n\nBut Bertha escaped from the asylum, which has for its safeguards\nthe lock and the steel bar. Locks and bars are nothing to \"Fainting\nBertha\"! She was recaptured and returned, only that she might escape\nagain on Christmas night, finding her way to Peoria, where her\nescapades in going through the town were marvels to the Peoria police.\nThe conductor on the Peoria train from whom she took $30 has not\nclaimed his money. But half a dozen stores in which she operated and\nthe salesman from whose samples in the Fey Hotel she took hundreds of\ndollars worth of silks, jewelry, clothing and perfumes got back some\nof the plunder, which detectives found piled around her in a chair car\nin an Omaha train.\n\nThe Peoria police locked her up, and while the charges rested Dr.\nZeller, of the asylum for the incurable insane at South Bartonville,\nasked of Dr. Podstata and the penitentiary authorities the custody\nof \"Fainting Bertha.\" Warden Murphy at Joliet was delighted at the\nidea. Supt. Podstata at Elgin was as greatly pleased. Dr. Zeller at\nSouth Bartonville Asylum for the Incurable Insane, receiving the young\nwoman, was conscious of having a unique addition to the 1,929 other\ninmates of his barless cottages of detention. In the history of the\nSouth Bartonville asylum only one female inmate has escaped, and she\nwas found dead soon afterwards in a ravine into which she had fallen.\n\n\nPALE BLUE COLOR SCHEME OF BERTHA'S WARD.\n\n\"If Bertha escapes here it will be the test of vigilance as opposed\nto locks and steel bars,\" is the summing up of the situation by Dr.\nZeller. Bertha is not wholly satisfied where she is. The food is not\nall she desires. She refers to her ward and its environment as \"the\ndump.\" Yet her particular \"dump\" is decorated in pale blue--part of\nthe color scheme of the asylum management,--the color scheme of her\nward being adapted to her particular temperamental degree of insanity.\nBut while Bertha has been gnawing diamonds from tie pins, one of her\nfraternity in ward classification has a record of gnawing the woodwork\nfrom at least a dozen other insane wards in as many institutions for\nthe insane.\n\nHow subtly conscious of her position \"Fainting Bertha\" may be on\noccasion was demonstrated the other day when it was arranged with Dr.\nZeller that she should go with two nurses and the staff member in\nPeoria in order that her picture might be taken in a local gallery.\n\n\nDELIGHTED AT CHANCE OF GOING TO TOWN.\n\nWith $9 to her credit in the asylum's system of personal accounts,\nBertha wanted some of this sum for \"shopping,\" but when it was refused\nshe accepted the situation without particular protest. The idea of\ngoing uptown, five miles from South Bartonville, was delightful. Her\nspirits rose high at the idea, and when her nurses had brought her\nover to the administration building she dropped into the office chair\noccupied by Dr. Zeller, and in mock seriousness turned to the little\ngroup, asking what she could do for them.\n\nOn the Pekin and Peoria electric road she was banked in next the\nwindow by her escorts, and was the pink of propriety until Peoria was\nreached, save as occasionally she turned backward toward the conductor\nand smiled. And invariably the conductor smiled in return!\n\n\"Honey\" was her designation of Nurse Quick. \"I'm a perfect lady,\nain't I, Honey?\" she repeated a score of times on the trip. In the\nphotographer's gallery the snap of the camera shutter brought a start\nfrom the object of the lens, and the first picture in six years, save\nas the police authority of the state had insisted that she pose for it.\n\nBut after the ordeal at the photographer's Bertha wanted most of all a\n\"square meal.\" Miss Quick knew of a restaurant where quiet prevailed\nand where there would be little incentive to Bertha to faint, and\nthere the little party adjourned for the \"square meal.\" Pie--apple or\nmince--was the dessert.\n\n\nTOOK PIE AND CANDY BACK \"HOME.\"\n\n\"You won't mind, honey, if I take a pie home, will you?\"\n\nMiss Quick didn't mind at all. And not minding the pie, Miss Bertha\npromptly buttered four rolls liberally and included in the package\na bunch of celery which had been left over after she had passed it\naround insistently, time and again. At the candy counter just outside\nthe dining room Bertha balked amiably.\n\n\"I don't like to presume on your good nature, but I know you won't\nobject to a small box of candy?\" she purred.\n\nThe nurse didn't object to the 25-cent box; which was an inspiration\nto \"Fainting Bertha.\"\n\n\"But don't you think this is ever so much nicer?\"\n\nThe nurse had to admit that it was. It was a half-dollar box of mixed\ncandies!\n\n\"But I'm afraid it looks like imposing on your good nature just a\nlittle?\" she smiled, as the cashier proceeded to wrap it up. \"And you\ndon't mind, honey?\" to Miss Quick, who smiled indulgently, and with\nthe pie, rolls, and celery in one hand and the box of candy in the\nother, Bertha started back to the Asylum for the Incurable Insane at\nSouth Bartonville, five miles away.\n\n\nDETENTION RECORD OF \"FAINTING BERTHA.\"\n\n     Asylum for the Feeble Minded, Glenwood, Ia. Discharged.\n\n     Insane asylum, Glenwood, Ia. Discharged.\n\n     Insane asylum, Nevada, Mo. Discharged after several escapes.\n\n     St. Bernard's asylum, Council Bluffs, Ia. Discharged.\n\n     Indeterminate sentence at Joliet penitentiary.\n\n     Kankakee, Ill., Asylum for the Insane. Escaped.\n\n     Kankakee, Ill., Asylum for the Insane. Escaped.\n\n     Kankakee, Ill., Asylum for the Insane. Returned to Joliet\n     penitentiary.\n\n     Elgin, Ill., Asylum for the Insane. Escaped.\n\n     Elgin, Ill., Asylum for the Insane. Escaped.\n\n     Present address, Asylum for the Incurable Insane, South\n     Bartonville, Ill.\n\nBut even the genial Dr. Zeller and his barless windows and lockless\nprison proved in time to be enervating to such a restless being as\n\"Fainting Bertha.\" So, during June, 1908, she made no less than three\nattempts to escape. She was, however, apprehended in each case before\nshe reached Peoria, and returned to the asylum. The authorities\ndeclare that she was really playing for theatrical effect rather than\nfrom any desire to get away from Bartonville. Be that as it may,\nthe fact remains that if she desires to get out of Bartonville she\nprobably will, as she is the most resourceful criminal of her sex\nknown to the authorities.\n\n\n\n\nFRONT.\n\n\nA good front is a distinct asset. A good front is made up of neat,\nclean clothes, on a clean body, the whole housing a clean mind. A man\nwith clean clothes on a dirty body, or dirty clothes on a clean body,\nis not wanted anywhere in the business world; and there is no place in\nthe heavens above or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth,\nthat has room for the man with the dirty mind.\n\nBut with the clean mind inside the clean body, and neat, simple, clean\nclothes on the outside of it, the young man has all the essentials\nof a good front. Anything more is superfluous and tends to make him\nridiculous. Simplicity is the keynote.\n\nThis moralizing on the value of front is suggested by observations\nand comparisons of the habits of certain Chicago millionaires, and\nthe ways of some of their cheap clerks, the latter having exaggerated\nideas of putting up a false appearance of prosperity.\n\nThese comparisons were so striking that they attracted the attention\nof Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge, and during the course of his\nregular work he found time to tabulate a little, with startling\nresults.\n\nThe detective found that there are in Chicago many young men living\non very meager salaries, who have such exaggerated notions of the\nvalue of a prosperous appearance that they overshoot the mark, and\nfrequently, as result of trying, as they think, to \"look like a\nmillionaire,\" they often succeed in looking very much like the famous\nanimal with very long ears and a loud voice which one spoke to the\nprophet Baalam.\n\n[Illustration: (Man in top hat walking next to man in buggy)]\n\n\"It is easy to distinguish the real millionaire,\" said the great\ndetective, in discussing this subject. \"If he wants to get anywhere\nin a great city and his automobile happens to be engaged, he takes\nthe same means of getting there as does the toiler in the mills or\nfactory; he walks, or he rubs elbows on the street cars with the\nlaboring men, many of whom never know that they are brushing against\nthe owner of millions.\"\n\n\nSTANLEY FIELD'S BUGGY.\n\n\"Stanley Field runs around town in a crazy old country buggy, just\nlike a farmer. He took this method of going about when the great\nteamsters' strike was on, and he was a member of the Merchants'\ncommittee.\n\n\"But I will bet you a good cigar that there are any number of little\nsnippety ten-dollar clerks in the great establishment of which Stanley\nField is the head, who would feel themselves eternally disgraced if\nthey were seen in that buggy.\n\n\"Not for little mister-ten-dollar clerk! No, sir. He must go out\nand spend three dollars for a cab if he wants to get down town to a\ntheatre. It is just this silly pride that makes forgers and embezzlers.\n\n\"My advice to young men would be, 'Keep your mind clean, your body\nclean and your clothes neat and clean. Never mind about fancy show.\nMen will respect you more if you follow this advice than they will if\nyou squander money foolishly in the effort to put up a false front\nwhich deceives no one.'\"\n\nOut of hundreds of cases which Wooldridge has run down, where\nembezzlement, forgery and theft, even of the pettiest sort, was at the\nbottom of the crime, the great detective declares that fully half of\nthe cases had their origin in this silly attempt to appear something\nmore than the real thing. Silly pride is a teacher of crime, and a\nsure school mistress she is.\n\nAnd the absurdity, the bally foolishness of it all, is that these\npitiful attempts deceive no one. Every one knows solidity when they\nsee it, just as they know sham when they see it. A self-respecting\nyoung man cannot afford to make of himself a sham, even by taking a\ncab when the millionaires walk or take the street car.\n\n\nFAKE PRIDE LEADS TO CRIME.\n\nOn the other hand, many young men have plunged into a life of crime\nthrough over-spending their salaries, in the effort to convince every\none who looked at them that they were on the directorate of the\nStandard Oil Company. Where the millionaire walks these silly young\njackasses take a cab, and pay half a day's salary in order to ride two\nor three blocks.\n\n\"I have seen John J. Mitchell, the president of the Illinois Trust\nand Savings Bank, and one of our foremost financiers, walk from the\nNorthwestern station to the bank building, while right behind him a\nyoung donkey, who was working for $25 a week in that very bank, would\npay a cabby a dollar to drive him the seven short blocks from that\nsame station to the bank.\n\n\"It is just such young pinheads as that who afterwards turn out to be\nour embezzlers, forgers and financial criminals.\"\n\nThe man who has made a name which is known in every corner of the\nUnited States as an authority on all kinds of frauds, snorted his\nindignation as he thought of the silly bank clerk. Then he continued:\n\n\"Does anybody ever see Arthur Meeker take a cab to ride a few blocks?\nNot on your life. He walks. So does Cyrus McCormick, Harold McCormick,\nR. Hall McCormick, Frank Lowden, and any number of the other men whose\nnames stand at the top of Chicago finance. I see Frank Lowden on the\nIndiana avenue cars, the line I take myself, time after time. He is\none of the most democratic of men.\"\n\n\n\n\nLAST CHANCE GONE.\n\nIDENTIFICATION BUREAU AIDED BY NATURE.\n\nThe Criminal and the Crooked Members of the Human Race Have a New and\nDangerous Enemy in the Finger Print Method of Identification.\n\n\nThe last hope of the enemies of society, the habitual criminals, is\ngone. The Bertillon system sounded the death knell of the criminal so\nfar as capture was concerned. The finger print system, as first set\nforth by Sir Francis Galton and elaborated by Sir Edward Henry, has\nmade possible the absolute identification after capture.\n\nOne of the first men to see the tremendous possibilities of the\nfinger print system, as applied to the identification of suspects,\nwas Detective Clifton E. Wooldridge of Chicago. Through his efforts\nand that of others equally interested in the exact identification of\ncriminals, the Chicago Police Department established the finger print\nmethod of identification in 1905, as a Supplement to the Bertillon\nsystem which was established in 1887.\n\nThe Bertillon system catches the suspect. The finger print system\nmakes sure that he is the criminal. The Bertillon system, while a\nsplendid thing for catching the thief, still left some loop-holes\nwhich needed strengthening. This was supplied by the finger print\nsystem. Like the man and woman referred to in Longfellow's Hiawatha it\nis a case of \"useless each without the other.\" When the two systems\nare worked together there is absolutely no possible escape for the\napprehended suspect.\n\nThe Chicago Police Bureau of Identification is the second largest in\nthe world, and contains over 70,000 pictures.\n\n[Illustration: Trunk Measurement, Head Length Measurement, Left Middle\nFinger Measurement, Right Ear Measurement. Measurement of the Stretch\nand the Left Foot.\n\nThe Bertillon System of Identification by Measurement.]\n\nBy combining the Bertillon measurements with the finger-print system\nthe police department has woven a network of identification around\nthe criminal which makes it practically an impossibility for him ever\nto disguise himself should he at any future time fall into the hands\nof the officials of the law.\n\n[Illustration: (Fingerprint form)]\n\nThe finger print method was discovered about forty years ago by Sir\nWilliam Herschell, then an English official in India. Sir Francis\nGalton, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was the first to systematize\nit, and the first to establish the fact that the papillary ridges of\nthe fingers did not change through life. This was nearly twenty years\nago. Sir Francis Galton made the calculation that the chance of any\ntwo sets of finger prints being the same is one in 16,400,000,000, and\nas an article from which the writer quotes states, \"there are only\n1,600,000,000 people in the world,\" its population would have to be\nincreased ten times before two people were identical and means that a\nfinger print as a mark of identification is practically infallible.\n\n\nPERFECTED IN LONDON.\n\nSir Edward Henry, Chief Police Commissioner, London, England, is the\nman who perfected the system, as it is now used, classifying finger\nprints by signs and numerals, so that it is now considered perfect.\n\nThe finger prints of women are the same as men, except in size, while\nthe prints of <DW64>s are the clearest and strongest, owing to the\nthickness of skin and moisture from perspiration, and it has not yet\nbeen demonstrated that finger prints are any indication of character.\n\nWhile quite a large number of cities and penal institutions in the\nUnited States have adopted and are now using the Bertillon system\nof criminal identification, it is to be regretted that it has not\nbeen more generally adopted by all cities of a population not less\nthan 5,000, and by all penitentiaries, reformatories and county\njails. Universally applied under competent instructors, nearly every\nprofessional criminal would, in a few years, be recorded, so that it\nwould only become necessary to keep up with the new additions to the\nranks of the criminal classes.\n\nIt has been thoroughly established that the papillary ridges of\nfingers never change during life. From infancy to senility and until\nlong after death no change ensues in the fingers. Though partially\ndestroyed by injury, the original lines retain their pristine\ncharacteristics when healed.\n\nThis is nature's method of identification, and no record can be found\nof the digits of two persons having exactly the same characteristics.\nNumerous instances could be cited of twins and triplets whose finger\nprints afforded the only means of distinguishing one from the other.\n\n[Illustration: MAGNIFIED FINGER PRINT\n\nThe above is an enlarged print of a right index finger, which we\nclassify as an Ulnar Loop. Loops on different fingers are not all\nalike, but vary in many important characteristics, so it is a very\neasy matter to distinguish one from another.]\n\n[Illustration: FINGER PRINT OUTFIT]\n\n\nINSTRUCTIONS FOR TAKING FINGER PRINTS.\n\nInstruments required: A piece of tin, ordinary printer's ink, and a\n10-cent rubber roller are all the tools necessary for getting the\nimpression. It requires no special training to take finger impression,\nand any rural constable can, with ten minutes' practice, take a set of\ngood finger prints in five minutes. After having a week's practice he\ncould take them in three minutes.\n\n\nSCOTLAND YARD METHOD.\n\nAt Scotland Yard a metallic brace is in use for the purpose of forcing\nrefractory prisoners to leave correct impressions upon the records.\nOne application of this brace is persuasive enough to cause the\nculprit to hasten to comply with a request for his signature.\n\nA small slab stone is covered with ink, which is distributed with a\nsprayer, and the prisoner is compelled to place his fingers in the ink\nand then firmly implant them upon paper.\n\nOn a regular prescribed form impressions are taken so that the flexure\nof the last joint shall be at a given point on the record.\n\nThe digits are taken singly and then an imprint is made of all of them\nsimultaneously.\n\nWhen the prisoner has finished imprinting the record he is called upon\nfor his signature, and immediately underneath the name, as written by\nhimself, an imprint is left of the right forefinger.\n\nFor the edification of American police, Mr. Ferrier demonstrates that\nupon a sheet of paper you may sprinkle some charcoal dust and press\nit upon the paper with your thumb and then blow the dust off and the\nimprint of the digit will remain.\n\n\nMOST POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION.\n\nBut this thumb print possibility in commercial papers has its\ngreatest future in the positive identification which either thumb or\nfinger print carries with it. Criminologists all over the world have\nsatisfied themselves of the absolute accuracy of the finger print\nidentification. It would be hard to figure just how many Constantines\nwere arrested or kept under surveillance following the horrible\nmurder in Chicago, the suspicions aroused by personal resemblances\nto the criminal's photograph and especially by the prominent gold\ntooth of the man. But in a criminal's finger print the merest novice\nanywhere in the world may take an ink impression of the fingers of\nthe suspected criminal, and if these prints should be in the bureau\nof identification at Scotland Yard, with its 100,000 records of\nindividuals, the man would be identified positively within half\nan hour--identified not only by the experts of the bureau, but an\nordinary citizen would be an authority in attesting the proof.\n\nThis is a suggestion of the absolute accuracy of identifications on\ncommercial paper. At the present time traveling salesmen who spend\nmuch money and who wish to carry as little as possible of cash with\nthem, have an organized system by which their bankable paper may be\ncashed at hotels and business houses over the country.\n\n\nAPPLIED TO IMMIGRANTS.\n\nMajor R. W. McClaughry, warden of the federal prison at Leavenworth,\nsees in the finger print system a possibility which might be taken\ncognizance of by the government at Ellis Island. With the millions of\nimmigrants who have come and who still are to come to these shores,\nthe finger print requirement would simplify many of the tangles of\nmany kinds which result from this inrush of foreign population.\n\nAside from the fact that many of this country's criminals are foreign\nborn, it remains that civil identifications of such people are matters\nof great moment. Titles and estates have hung in the balance of\nincomplete identifications of persons who are claimants in the United\nStates. Fifty years after a finger print is registered that same\nfinger, or group of fingers, will prove the personality of the one\nregistering. In case of accidents of many kinds one hand or the other\nis most likely to escape mutilation, and a post-mortem imprint of the\nfingers still is proof of identity.\n\nThe finger print system is being taken up more rapidly than was\nthe Bertillon, largely owing to the fact that police departments,\nrecognizing that a scientific system gives far greater results and can\nin no way be compared with the old method of describing criminals, by\ncolor, age, height, weight, eyes, hair, etc., are more willing than\nformerly to intelligently investigate and test new methods.\n\nUnder the Bertillon system it is contended that the bones of the\nhuman anatomy stop growing after the age of twenty-one years. In\nconsequence measurements taken of juvenile offenders under that age\nare practically of little use, as they show too wide a variance with\nmeasurements taken in after years, and are not a certain source of\nidentification.\n\nThe identification from imprint taken from the finger tips of both\nhands can be recorded as soon as the child is born, and no matter at\nwhat time of life a record is again taken of the subject, absolute\nidentification can be had, as the papillary ridges of the palmer\nsurface of the finger tips present the same formation until death,\nand even though some of the fingers become mutilated, amputated or\nlost, sufficient prints would remain on the other fingers to produce\nidentification.\n\nWhile it is claimed that the finger print system is sufficient unto\nitself for all identification, after working each system side by side\nfor a number of years, I believe that both systems should be installed\nin all cities, penitentiaries, etc., especially as they both will be\ngiven an impartial and thorough test here, with the result that it\nwill be the survival of both, or of the fittest.\n\n\nKEEP BAD MEN OUT OF SERVICE.\n\nIn these government departments it is expected that the finger print\nrecords will serve to keep undesirable people out of the service, as\nwell as to afford a complete method of identifying every member, or\npast member, in years to come.\n\nBoth branches of the War Department, the army and navy, had first\ninstalled the Bertillon system, and within the last year the finger\nprint system, thereby recognizing both, but apparently giving the\nfinger print system the preference; owing to the many ways it can be\napplied in the service, and especially as to recording all enlisted\nmen and to the identification of those who might be maimed or killed\nin battle, whose identity might be sought afterward, or to identify\ndeserters; or if a soldier or sailor has lost his honorable discharge\npaper, he can go to any enlisting office, have his finger prints\ntaken, his identity established, and new papers issued, thereby\navoiding red tape or having about one dozen affidavits from different\npeople to substantiate his claim.\n\nNot only as a means of detecting and identifying criminals may the\nfinger print be used, but its usefulness in various ways is easily\ndemonstrated.\n\nIt is clearly within the range of possibility that the traveler a few\nyears hence may be called upon to imprint an identifying finger mark\nupon his letter of credit or certified check.\n\n[Illustration: (Fingerprints on check.)]\n\nAs a means of preventing-fraud or securing the signatures of those who\ncannot write, the finger print system is invaluable, as the mark may\nbe easily forged, but the finger's impress can be only made by the\nproper party and cannot be duplicated by others.\n\nThe thumb or finger tips will leave an imprint upon glass, polished\nmetal or wood, owing to the moisture and natural oil oozing from the\ncuticle. It is a simple matter to procure such imprints when wanted,\nand they can be turned over to the authorities for identification of a\nsuspect.\n\n\nSECURE PRINTS OF ALL CRIMINALS.\n\nIf peace officers throughout the country would secure finger prints\nof all criminals passing through their hands and forward them to a\ncentral bureau it would facilitate the apprehension and identification\nof malefactors.\n\nAs a preventive of repeating at elections, the finger print\nidentification would serve an admirable purpose. When an elector\nregistered he could leave an imprint of his fingers upon the\nregistration book, and when he went to vote a glance at the\nregistration list and comparison of the imprint made at the polls\nwould readily establish his identity if the prints tallied.\n\nThe natives of India decline to recognize the validity of any document\nbeneath the signature of which is not imprinted a reproduction\nof the whorls or loops of the thumb of the signer, alleging that\na person might deny his own signature, but that the finger prints\nafford incontrovertible evidence, as no two people can make the same\nimpression with their thumbs upon paper.\n\nUpon opening an account with a bank in India the depositor leaves the\nimpress of his right thumb upon the roll of depositors and none of his\npaper will be honored unless checks are thus imprinted.\n\nIn the same country pensioners are compelled to imprint their thumbs\nupon receipts for pension money, and thus obviate the likelihood of\nother persons drawing the stipend rightfully belonging to the veteran.\n\nThe best test of a system is its practical use and the results\nderived, and one of the most important matters is uniformity in\nall branches of work, classification, filing, size of cards, etc.,\nso that, as the system becomes universal, it will be operated on\nidentical lines in all countries. From my observation of the practical\nworkings of the system, I believe that at New Scotland Yard, London,\nto be the best.\n\n\nFINGER PRINT SYSTEM FURNISHES COMPLETE IDENTIFICATION.\n\nIn Paris a public house or saloon was broken into one morning, and it\nwas found that the owner had been murdered and that apparently there\nwas no clew to the murderer.\n\nOn arriving at the saloon they found a table on which drinks had\nbeen served, and on which were found a number of glasses. On close\ninvestigation finger prints were discovered on each. Finger prints\nwere also found on a knife by the side of the body and on a decanter.\nOn comparison it was found that the prints were made by the same\nperson. On causing the arrest of the different people who had been\nseen to visit the saloon they were finger-printed and a comparison\nmade, with the result that the murderer was arrested and a confession\nobtained within ten days, followed by conviction.\n\nAt New Scotland Yard, London, a little boy was brought in and two sets\nof his finger prints taken and filed away in separate steel deposit\nvaults. The boy was an orphan and an heir to a very large fortune\nin Africa. His finger prints were taken as a protection, so that if\nanything happened to him, or he disappeared, or he had to prove his\nidentity to claim his estate, or provided he died and proof of the\nidentity of the body was required, such proof could be shown with\nabsolute certainty.\n\nAn interesting case nearer home is that of a recent arrest in Chicago\nof a man that the authorities were convinced was a professional\ncriminal, and from his accent and other indications they believed him\nto be an English professional crook.\n\nHis Bertillon measurements and finger prints were taken at the Bureau\nof Identification by Captain M. P. Evans, superintendent of the\nbureau, and a copy of the photograph and finger prints given to Mr.\nWilliam A. Pinkerton, of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.\n\nMr. Pinkerton, who is a personal friend of Frank C. Froest,\nsuperintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department of New\nScotland Yard, London, mailed the finger prints to him without any\nother memorandum, data or the picture, simply making the test on the\nfinger prints. He received a reply from Inspector Frank C. Froest,\ngiving the name of the criminal, and a long record of some fourteen\narrests and the picture, so as to authenticate the identification, and\nalso a statement from Superintendent Froest that the identification\nwas made inside of three minutes from a collection of over 70,000\nrecords.\n\nThe identification was absolutely correct. The prisoner, on being\nshown the letter, admitted his guilt.\n\nIf a clerk handles papers or letters on his employer's desk, it is a\nvery easy matter of detection. By means of a little syringe filled\nwith a powder blown on the paper, the finger prints are reproduced\nwith startling clearness.\n\n\nBROKEN GLASS PROVES GUILT.\n\nSome pieces of broken glass had been taken to Scotland Yard, four days\nprevious to the Ward, Lock & Co. burglary. These fragments of glass\nhad been picked up at the London City Mission, where a burglar had\nbroken through a window and carried off a clock and other articles. No\none could be connected with the crime after a most thorough detective\nhunt.\n\nThe one remaining source was a bit of glass on which finger prints\nhad been noticed. These were photographed and compared with the\nfinger prints of all the recent records. Surprisingly enough, they\ncorresponded exactly with those of the young clerk who had been found\nstealing books from the publishers' warehouse. Instead of being a\nclerk, he was a very adept young burglar. On this new evidence the\nprisoner was sentenced to twelve months at hard labor.\n\nAbout a month before this a similar case occurred in London. A man was\narrested on Tower Hill carrying a pair of boots wrapped up in a brown\npaper. He said he had been employed to carry the parcel to Fenchurch\nStreet Station. He was held on suspicion. Later in the day it was\ndiscovered that the boots had been stolen from a neighboring store,\nand that on the transom, which had been broken, there was a perfect\nimprint of a man's finger.\n\nInspector Collins, superintendent of the finger print department at\nNew Scotland Yard, examined the print and found it corresponded to the\nmark of the suspected man's left forefinger made on the brown paper\nparcel in which the boots were wrapped. The evidence was conclusive,\nthe man pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to nine months at hard labor.\n\nAbout the same time another interesting case occurred in\nStaffordshire, England. There had been a wholesale burglary of a large\njeweler's shop. The perpetrator had left distinct finger marks on a\nplate glass shelf in a window. These marks were photographed and sent\nto New Scotland Yard. They were identified as belonging to William\nDavis, a notorious burglar who had been confined at Wakefield prison\nin 1901.\n\nThe man was hunted up. He was found living near the place of the\nrecent robbery under the name of John McNally. He at first denied the\nrecent offense, but afterward made a full confession. But for these\ntell-tale finger marks, he might have continued to ply his trade\nunsuspected under his new name, in a district where the local police\ndid not know him.\n\nIn one of the large banks where the finger print system was\nintroduced, they make it a rule that when a depositor cannot read or\nwrite, he shall, in addition to making his mark in the old way on\nchecks or documents, place the finger print of the thumb or index\nfinger on them.\n\n\nIMPORTANT IN WILL CONTESTS.\n\nFinger prints are also used in the making of wills, so that while the\nsignature of the testator may be contested, it is almost impossible\nto contest the signature of the fingers, for so long as the skin of\nthe fingers of the dead person can be taken up, just so long can the\nfinger print impression be obtained to verify the living imprint.\n\nIt is only a question of time before all large transportation\ncompanies, like express and railways, whose employes handle packages\nof money or other valuables, will be required to place their finger\nprints on file, so that when money or valuables are missing the cover\nof the package will indicate who handled or tampered with it.\n\n\nHOW TO DETECT A FORGER.\n\nHow to detect a forger as one of the cleverest of operating criminals\nhas been solved by the \"thumb print\" method of identification now\nspreading through the rogues' galleries of the world.\n\nIt is quite as interesting as the suggestion that through the same\nthumb print method in commercial and banking houses the forger is\nlikely to become a creature without occupation and chirographical or\nother means of support.\n\nThe system is not only a great aid in preventing the forgeries of\ncommercial brigands, but the easiest of all means for a person in a\nstrange city to identify himself as the lawful possessor of check, or\nnote, or bank draft which he may wish to turn into cash at a banker's\nwindow.\n\n\nUSED IN ANCIENT TIMES.\n\nA thousand years ago the Chinese were using the thumb print signatures\nin commercial business. Its practical adaptation today is explained\nat a glance in the check reproduced here, as it was filled out by Mr.\nMcClaughry himself. In this check the design is that the maker of the\ncheck, before leaving home for a distant city, shall draw the check\nfor the needed sum and, in the presence of the cashier of his bank,\nplace one thumb print in ink somewhere over the amount of the check\nas written in figures. Thereupon the cashier of the bank will accept\nthe check as certified by his institution. With this paper in his\npossession the drawer of the check may go from his home in New York to\nSan Francisco, stranger to every person in the city, but at the window\nof any bank in that city, presenting his certified check to a teller\nwho has a reading glass at his hand, the stranger may satisfy the most\ncareful of banks by a mere imprint of his thumb somewhere else upon\nthe face of the check.\n\nHad this simple thumb print been used in the Stensland bank, no\nhandwriting expert would have been needed to establish the genuineness\nof any note under question.\n\nWith the ink thumb print of the cashier of a bank placed on a bank\ndraft over his signature and over the written amount of the draft,\nchemical papers and the dangers of \"raising\" or counterfeiting the\ndraft would be an impossibility. The thumb prints of the secretary\nof the United States treasury, reproduced on the face of greenback,\nsilver certificate and bank note of any series, would discourage\ncounterfeiting as nothing else ever has done.\n\n\nSAFEGUARD ON SEALS OF LETTERS AND MONEY PACKAGES.\n\nAs an aid in the transmission of sealed packages, the thumb print is\ninvaluable. The print will determine absolutely whether the wax has\nbeen broken in transit, and it will also establish the identity of the\nperson putting on the seal.\n\nPackages so protected have been left by train robbers where all other\npackages in the safe were taken. The thumb print was too suggestive of\ndanger to make tampering with such packages safe.\n\nIn the ordinary usage of the thumb print on bankable paper, the city\nbank having its country correspondents everywhere, often is called\nupon to cash a draft drawn by the country bank in favor of that bank's\ncustomer, who may be a stranger in the city. The city bank desires to\naccommodate the country correspondent as a first proposition.\n\nThe unidentified bearer of the draft in the city, may have no\nacquaintance able to identify him. If he presents the draft at the\nwindow of the big bank, hoping to satisfy the institution and is\nturned away, he feels hurt. By the thumb print method he might have\nhis money in a moment.\n\n\nIDENTIFYING STRANGERS.\n\nIn the first place, even the signature of the cashier of the country\nbank will be enough to satisfy its correspondent in the city of the\ngenuineness of the draft. Before the country purchaser of the draft\nhas left the bank issuing the paper he will be required to make the\nink thumb print in a space for that purpose. Without this imprint the\ndraft will have no value. If the system should be in use, the cashier\nsigning the draft will not affix his signature to the paper until this\nimprint has been made in his presence.\n\nThen, with his attested finger print on the face of the draft the\nstranger in the city may go to the city bank, appearing at the window\nof the newest teller, if need be. This teller will have at hand his\nink pad, faced with a sheet of smooth tin. He never may have seen the\ncustomer before. He never may see him again. But under the magnifying\ninfluences of an ordinary reading glass he may know, past the\npossibility of doubt, that in the hands of the proper person named in\nthe draft, the imprint which is made before him has been made by the\nfirst purchaser of the draft.\n\n\nSIGNING BONDS AND STOCKS.\n\nIn the more important and complicated transactions in bank paper one\nbank may forward from the bank itself the finger print proofs of\nidentity. The whole field of such necessities is open to adapted uses\nof the method. Notes given by one bank to another in high figures\nmay be protected in every way by these imprints. Stock issues and\ninstitution bonds would be worthy of the thumb print precautions,\nas would be every other form of paper which might tempt either the\nforger or the counterfeiter. In any case, where the authenticity of\nthe paper might be questioned the finger print would serve as absolute\nguarantee. In stenographic correspondence, where there might be\ninducements to write unauthorized letters on the part of some person\nwith wrong intent, the imprint of finger or thumb would make the\npossibility of fraud too remote for fears. For, in addition to the\nsecurity of signatures in real documents, the danger in attempting\nfrauds of this kind is increased.\n\nThe beauty of the finger print system is that there is absolutely\nno chance for error. The finger prints of the child of eighteen\nmonths will be the same as the finger prints of the man of eighty. No\nlaceration, wound, or mutilation can disturb the essentials of the\noutline of the finger print. The only escape for the criminal is to\ncut off all of his fingers, and even then the toe prints would be as\neffective.\n\nAs to the physical necessities in registering finger prints, they are\nsimple and inexpensive. A block of wood faced with smooth tin or zinc\nthe size of an octavo volume, a small ink roller, and a tube of black\nink are all that is required. For removing the ink on the thumb or\nfinger a towel and alcohol cleanser are sufficient. A tip impression\nor a \"rolled\" finger signature may be used. Only a few seconds are\nrequired for the operation.\n\n[Illustration: The Bertillon System of Identification\n\nInstruments used in the measurement of criminals by the Bertillon\nsystem of measurements.]\n\n\nOBJECTS TO HAVING FINGER IMPRESSIONS RECORDED.\n\nIn one of our prisons recently, a man who had just been sentenced\nwas brought up, and while he made no opposition to being measured\nby the Bertillon system, he objected strongly to having his finger\nimpressions recorded. This caused the identification expert to be\nsuspicious, and he submitted a duplicate record to the Scotland Yard\npolice, in London, with the result that the man was at once identified\nas a murderer who had escaped from a prison in England, and was taken\nback there. When confronted with the English record, the convict at\nonce admitted his identity.\n\nAn express company lost a large sum of money which was being sent from\none point to another in a sealed package. During transmission the\nseals were broken, the money abstracted and the package resealed with\nwax. At first the express company were absolutely unable to locate the\nthief, but later on it was discovered that in resealing the package,\nthe thief had wet his finger and pressed it on the warm wax, leaving\na distinct imprint. The finger impressions of all the agents through\nwhose hands the package passed, were taken, with the result that the\nthief was easily identified, a confession obtained and the money\nrecovered.\n\nA jewelry store was entered and valuable diamonds that were on display\non glass trays in the windows were stolen. In doing this the thieves\nleft the imprints of their fingers on the glass. An expert, on making\ninvestigation with a powerful magnifier, discovered the imprints\nand by a careful photographic process was able to reproduce them on\npaper. A research being made among a collection of 20,000 finger-print\nrecords revealed the fact that the prints left on the glass tray were\nthose of a well-known professional burglar, whose record had been\ntaken some two years previously, while undergoing sentence in State\nprison. As a result the man was arrested and, through him, his partner\nin the crime, resulting in a conviction and the recovery of most of\nthe goods.\n\nThe London police in investigating a burglary discovered in the\npantry of a house a partly empty bottle of ale, which had been full\nthe previous day. There were finger prints on the bottle, which was\nprotected by a cardboard shield and taken to Scotland Yard, where\nthe prints of the photograph, afterwards, were found to correspond\nwith those of McAllister, who had just previously been released from\njail. McAllister, on his arrest, in some way learned that they had\nhis finger prints, and, realizing their value as evidence, made a\ncircumstantial admission which led to the recovery of the goods and\nthe conviction of his partner, Alexander Harley, on whose premises the\nproperty was found.\n\nA half-empty bottle of wine was discovered in the room of an old woman\nat Asnieres, France, she having been murdered. A close examination\nof the bottle revealed finger prints, which were submitted to\nM. Bertillon, the great identification expert, who caused large\nphotographs to be made, and who, after research, declared they were\nthe imprints of a hospital attendant named Gales, who has since been\narrested, charged with the murder, and convicted.\n\n\nMURDER REVEALED BY FINGER PRINTS.\n\nRecently in London a murder was committed, and in order to destroy any\nchance of detection, the murderer took the tin of his shoe lace and\ncut the tips of his fingers in all directions. He was suspected of the\ncrime and arrested. The officers found blood prints on the furniture\nand other things in the house where the murder was committed, and\nwhen the man's fingers healed his prints were taken and corresponded\nexactly with those discovered by the officers; conviction followed.\n\nWhere large bodies of Chinese or <DW64>s are employed on government\nor public work it is often difficult to stop men from representing\nthemselves as being other men and signing the pay roll to obtain the\nwages due others. Nowadays the thumb print of each employee is taken\nand when he comes up to draw his money and there is any doubt as to\nhis identity he makes a fresh imprint, which easily disposes of the\nmatter. Rich men disposing of their property by will, in addition to\ntheir regular signature, also place the finger prints of both hands on\nthe paper, thereby insuring the authenticity of the document. An easy\nway to protect a check is to put the thumb print where the figures are\nwritten in.\n\nAmong the most noted of these is the case of Thomas Wilson, who a few\nyears ago committed a burglary and most atrocious murder near Windsor,\nEngland.\n\nBesides the bludgeon with which he felled his unsuspecting victim,\nWilson carried a lantern which was blackened by smoke, and, after\naccomplishing his design of robbery, the fiend took his departure.\n\nAs he made his escape after the foul murder, Wilson picked up the\nsmoke-begrimed lantern and left upon it an imprint of a thumb wet with\nthe blood of his victim.\n\n\nSENT TO GALLOWS BY BLOODY THUMB PRINT.\n\nWith the cunning of the criminal he covered his tracks, and as a last\nresort Chief Henry of Scotland Yard secured the lantern bearing the\ntell-tale print and resolved to try the efficiency of the ancient\nChinese method of fixing responsibility by finger tracks.\n\nThis astute detective had paid some attention to the fact that no two\nhands would leave a similar imprint, and, working upon this theory,\nhe pursued a still hunt until he found a man whose right thumb made\nan imprint identical with that upon the lantern. When found, vigorous\ndenial followed accusation, but measurements were drawn to such a fine\npoint that the culprit finally confessed and expiated his heinous\ncrime upon the gallows.\n\nRecently the perpetrator of an extensive burglary in the jewelry\nshop of Mr. Bickley, Lord Mayor of Staffordshire, England, left the\nimprint of his fingers upon a plate glass shelf. The shelf was sent\nto Scotland Yard and the finger-print record disclosed a duplicate in\nthe records left by the digits of William Davis, well known to the\nauthorities. When confronted with the mute evidences of guilt the\nculprit confessed.\n\nIn a police court at London a few months ago a man appeared who\ndeclined to give any name or address. A detective thought he\nrecognized him as John White, wanted for a jewel robbery some time\nbefore, though his facial appearance had changed and did not tally\nwith photographs held by the police. However, the imprint left by his\nfingers when in custody before had not changed a particle and his\nidentity was established.\n\nAfter the success attained in numerous instances the authorities at\nScotland Yard decided to adopt the system and have now so perfected\nit that no malefactor who leaves a finger print can hope to escape\nultimate punishment.\n\nMr. Wm. A. Pinkerton, of the famous Pinkerton's National Detective\nAgency, and without doubt one of the greatest criminal experts, on his\nreturn from Europe, in an interview published recently, says: \"During\nmy visit at New Scotland Yard, London, I was greatly interested\nin the high state of efficiency which the finger print system of\nidentification has reached in the police service of London. The Bureau\nof Finger Prints there is one of the most marvelous departments I ever\nexamined. Identification of criminals has been reduced practically to\na matter of bookkeeping. You get the finger print and then simply turn\nup your indexes, and you know your man at once. A criminal may shave\nor grow his beard, become stout or thin, alter his appearance to a\nconsiderable extent, but the one constant feature of his makeup is his\nfinger prints.\n\n\"The only safe way for criminals nowadays is to wear gloves when they\ngo out on a job, for the impressions they leave of the fingers are\nfound by detectives on glasses, newspapers, dusty tables, and the\nslightest impression of the fingers on a damp table or paper can,\nby the process in use at the Yard, serve as an adequate means of\nidentification.\"\n\n\nGOVERNMENT TO KEEP WATCH ON CRIMINALS.\n\nThe United States government at Washington, D. C., has established a\ncriminal identification bureau, or what may be called an \"Habitual\nCriminal Registry,\" for keeping the records of all men convicted of\ncrimes against the federal laws, and also all indicted by grand\njuries of the United States courts. The bureau is to be under the\nsupervision of the department of justice, and all prisons in the\nUnited States where government prisoners are or have been confined\nhave been directed to send their records, consisting of photographs,\nBertillon measurement cards and finger-print identification sheets\nimmediately to the department of justice.\n\nThis bureau is intended to be used for the identification of federal\nlawbreakers. It has been urged for some time by criminologists.\nHeretofore each prison in the United States has kept its own records,\nand a federal lawbreaker could serve a term in one prison and be freed\nwithout the fact ever becoming known that he had served a previous\nterm for a similar offense in another penitentiary.\n\nNow all records are to be classified in Washington, and not in any of\nthe federal jails or prisons. The Bertillon measurements, photographs\nand _finger prints_ of the convicts are to be taken and sent to the\ncentral bureau.\n\nAlso, the records of all men suspected of being yeggmen, train or\npostoffice robbers are to be taken. Those held in federal jails under\nindictment, etc., are to be sent there.\n\nThis bureau will ascertain the record of each man from the date he\nhas, and if one not yet given trial proves to be an habitual criminal,\nthis fact will be made known to the prosecuting attorney and the judge\nprevious to the hearing, and if the man is convicted it will mean that\nhe will be given the limit sentence.\n\nAt the present time there are about 8,000 known criminals who violate\nthe government laws, and a close tab is to be kept upon these in the\nfuture. It will go hard on a known criminal convicted in a United\nStates court hereafter.\n\n\n\n\nBURGLARY A SCIENCE.\n\nUp-To-Date Professional Burglar Must Be Skilled in Latest Methods.\n\n\nELECTRICITY NOW A FACTOR.\n\nIt Has Taken the Place of Dynamite and the Jimmy in Advanced Safe\nLooting.\n\nScientific Equipment of Burglar Includes High-Class Automobile.\n\nJobs at Country Houses Usually Planned Far in Advance, and With\nIntimate Knowledge of Loot To Be Gained.\n\n[Illustration: _HOW BURGLAR UNLOCKS DOORS._\n\nUnlocking a door is one of the easiest tasks of the professional\nburglar. His ingenuity defies the efforts of locksmiths to invent\nsafety devices. The picture shows how an expert turns a key in the\nlock, and also a simple device to prevent this.]\n\nThe up-to-date burglar must have a motor car, the use of which is\nonly a part of his scientific equipment. That the modern burglar\ndoes not consider that he is properly equipped unless he possesses a\nmotor car is an incontrovertible fact. House-breaking nowadays has\nbeen reduced to a science. The use of gloves renders detection by\nfinger prints impossible. Besides, the modern burglar's tools are most\nscientifically made. The men who make it their business to manufacture\nthese tools are first-class workmen.\n\nThe majority of large country burglaries are planned for days in\nadvance, and every detail is most carefully arranged. In some\nmysterious manner the word is conveyed to the gang that a visit will\nbe made on a certain day, by a member of the household which it is\nintended to rob, to a jeweler's shop. The train is met at the terminus\nand the person followed to the jeweler's or wherever they go.\n\nWhen they enter the shop a man strolls in casually and makes some\ninquiries. While an assistant is attending to his supposed wants it\nis very easy for him to see what the person at the same counter is\npurchasing and, having obtained all the necessary information, the man\nleaves and imparts all his information to his confederates.\n\nBefore a county ball or such function a visit to the jeweler's is\noften necessary to get the family diamonds, and the fact that this\nvisit is going to be made is either communicated or anticipated, and\nthe same system of following is put in operation. Equipped with all\nthe desired information, the modern burglar then brings his motor car\ninto operation. There is no tedious waiting for trains; he simply\ndrives down to the \"crib\" and avoids the old-fashioned way of taking a\ntrain at a small wayside station, with the chances of being arrested\non his arrival in the metropolis.\n\nIf he is noticed on the road he is taken for a rich man touring in\nhis car, and if a great social function is in progress he is regarded\nas a belated guest. The car is carefully stalled in an obscure place\nwhile the robbery takes place. The booty is subsequently placed in it\nand a quick trip back to town is made. The police are left practically\nwithout a single clew.\n\nThose members of the community who make a business, or a profession,\nrather, of burglary keep up with the march of science quite as closely\nas do people in a more legitimate calling.\n\nThe burglar of today is a vastly differently equipped individual from\nthe one of a generation ago. He must of necessity be an enterprising\nand daring man, and in addition to that if he would make a success\nof safe cracking in this twentieth century he must be something of\na scientist as well. The great progress made in the manufacture of\nsafes for the storage of valuables has brought about this revolution\nin the burglar's methods, and it is a regrettable fact to note that no\nmatter how strong and secure safes may be made, the ingenuity of the\nscientific burglar is pretty sure to devise some method to overcome\ntheir security.\n\nThe most recent development in the burglar's advancement is the use of\nelectricity to open safes in place of the old-time jimmy and the more\nrecent dynamite.\n\n\nOLD-TIME STRONG BOX.\n\nYears ago the old-fashioned strong box was considered quite an\nadequate protection for hoarded wealth and was the legitimate\nsuccessor of the stocking in which the gold pieces were carefully\nstored and hidden away. The strong box of wood bound with iron\nand with ponderous locks proved but child's play for the burglar\nthoroughly intent upon obtaining its contents. Then came the more\nmodern iron and steel safe, with its thick plates of highly tempered\nmetal and ingeniously complicated time locks.\n\nSafe breakers have more than kept pace with improvement in safes,\nincluding time locks, chilled steel chests of eight or nine inches\nthicknesses and electric protective attachments. Their tools are made\nby some of the finest mechanics and inventive geniuses of the world. A\nfull kit of the most approved modern safe workers' tools costs about\n$5,000.\n\nThe modern burglar is like love in one respect; he \"laughs at\nlocksmiths.\" Yet he is not much of an artist, although he is rapidly\nimproving. The simple tools of the burglars' trade indicate how easily\nthe contrivances made to bar his progress are overcome. Yet these\ntools give no mark of great mechanical genius. They are as crude as\nthe average burglar is. They are in keeping with his practices of\nforce and brutality. The destructive power of the best pieces of\nhandiwork is their main advantage, and doubtless an illustration\nof the house-breaker's stunted idea, that the best way to overcome\nobstacles is in all cases to break them down.\n\nThe tools used by the burglar are supplied to him. They are made by\nmen after his own heart, and who make for him what is most effective\nin his hands. No doubt there are smart men engaged in the business of\ndefying law and setting the rights of honest people at naught. Some of\nthe methods they employ might be used to their credit in a commendable\nindustry.\n\n\nJIMMY IS NECESSARY.\n\nThere are places where the jimmy is absolutely indispensable to the\nburglar. Front doors, which a house proprietor usually has doubly\nbolted and barred and supplied with improved locks, are the last\napertures in the world a night marauder would seek to enter.\n\nIt must be an amusing thing to the burglar, after noting the\nprecautions taken to prevent his entrance by the street door, when\nhe has walked through the skylight on the roof without the slightest\nresistance, or dropped through the coal-hole leading to the cellar\nfrom the sidewalk, to find that no doors bar his passage from there to\nthe rooms above.\n\nThose are the popular ways of getting into many banks and business\nhouses. The basement door, at the rear, if there is one, is another.\nIn such case the jimmy is the magic wand that opens the way. It\nis more useful to the burglar than any half dozen of his other\nimplements, and is the first thing he purchases when getting an outfit.\n\nHow do safe burglars get their tools? Why, every man of any account in\nthat line has what he calls \"his man,\" who is a practical mechanic,\nand makes everything in the shape of jimmies, punches, etc., that the\nburglar uses. A safe blower's outfit consists of many curious tools,\nsome of them being of special design for some particular class of work\nof which the owner is the originator. Scarcely any two men work alike,\nand some of the clever ones invent instruments to do a certain part\nof their work. When a well-known notorious crook was arrested several\nyears ago in his room, the officers found one of the finest kits\nof burglars' tools that was ever brought into police headquarters.\nTalk about ingenuity--if that man had applied but one-third of the\nintelligence to a legitimate business that he had spent in devising\ntools for robbery, he would have been a millionaire today.\n\nTwenty years ago when burglars started out to rob a safe they filled\na carpet sack with highly tempered drills, copper sledges, sectional\njimmies, dark lanterns, powder and a fuse. On the way they stole\na horse and wagon, filling the latter with the greater portion of\nthe tools of a country blacksmith shop. They would work on the safe\nfrom four to six hours, and finally blow it open with a fine grade\nof ducking powder. Usually the shock would break all the glass in\nthe building, arouse the town, and the burglars would often have\nto fight for their lives. In those days the men had to be big and\npowerful, because the work was extremely laborious. If the burglar\nwas an ex-prize fighter or noted tough, so much the better, for he\ncould make a desperate resistance in case he was caught in the act, or\nimmediately after it.\n\nWith the modern safe burglar it is almost totally different. Although\nmuch more skillful and successful than his predecessor, he is more\nconservative. He seldom runs his own head into danger, and therefore\nseldom endangers the head of a law-abiding citizen by permitting his\nhead to come into contact with him or the job while it is under way.\nEvery precaution is taken against being surprised, and it is seldom\nthe robbery is discovered until the cashier's appearance the next\nmorning. The modern safe burglar is an exceedingly keen, intelligent\nman. He can open a safe having all modern improvements in from ten\nminutes to two hours without the aid of explosives and by only\nslightly defacing the safe. Sometimes he leaves scarcely a mark.\n\nA first-class modern safe, whether large or small, generally has\ndouble outside and inside doors, with a steel chest in the bottom,\nforming really a safe within a safe, the inside being the stronger.\nThe outside door is usually either \"stuffed\" or \"skeleton.\" The\ninside one is made of eight or nine sheets, of different temper,\nof the finest steel. These sheets are bolted together with conical\nbolts having left-hand threads, after which the heads of the bolts\nare cut off, leaving what is virtually a solid piece of steel, which\nno drill can penetrate. The best locks are of the combination type,\nwith time lock attachment. In many cities and town safes containing\nthe valuables have an electric alarm attached. Any tampering with it\nwill communicate the fact to the owners or the safe's guardian, which\nin cities is either an electric protective bureau or a central police\nstation. A recent invention in France is a photographic attachment. As\nsoon as the safe is touched this device will light an electric lamp,\nphotograph the intruder and give the alarm at the electric protective\ncompany's office. As a consequence safe-breaking is going out of date\nin France, as the cleverest criminals have so far failed to find a way\nto circumvent the camera.\n\nThe first thing considered by a gang of the finest experts is a\ndesirable bank's location and the chances for getting safely\naway with the plunder. Every transportation facility is\ncarefully considered. As the work is almost invariably done at the\nseason of the year when wagon roads are impassible, railroad time\ntables are carefully considered. In these days of the telegraph and\ntelephone the gang must be under cover in a large city or concealed\nwith friends by the time the crime is discovered, which, at the\nutmost, is about six hours after the crime has been committed.\n\nFrom November 1 to March 1 is the safe burglar's harvest time,\nbecause then the nights are longest and the chances of detection\nless, as fewer people are on the streets and houses adjoining, being\ntightly closed to exclude the cold, exclude noises also. A man can,\nfurthermore, carry tools in an overcoat without attracting attention,\nthat he could not wear with a summer suit. The remainder of the year\nis spent in \"marking\" the most desirable banks for future operations.\nFour men, who compose the ordinary safe mob, will put up from thirty\nto forty \"jobs\" for a winter's work, allowing for all contingencies.\nFrom six to ten of these will be carried out. A bank safe will be\nbroken into in a small town in Maine, and in ten days the gang will be\noperating in Texas.\n\n[Illustration: (Burglar blowing up safe, part 1)]\n\n[Illustration: (Burglar blowing up safe, part 2)]\n\n[Illustration: (Burglar blowing up safe, part 3)]\n\n[Illustration: (Burglar blowing up safe, part 4)]\n\n[Illustration: (Burglar blowing up safe, part 5)]\n\n[Illustration: (Burglar blowing up safe, part 6)]\n\nHaving decided on a bank, the habits of the cashier and other chief\nemployees are carefully studied; but, above all, of those who visit\nthe bank after working hours, chief of whom is the watchman, if the\nbank has one. If the watchman drinks, or spends time visiting women\nwhen he should be at the bank, the bank is an easy prey. Weeks, and\nsometimes even months, are spent in putting up a job of magnitude, and\na number of smaller jobs are done to carry out one where the proceeds\nmay run into the tens of thousands of dollars.\n\nMen visit the town who have a legitimate business as a \"blind.\" They\nmake all preliminary preparations. The greatest ingenuity is employed\nto obtain exact information, such as the evenings the cashier or\nteller is likely to visit the bank and the exact time.\n\n\nSCIENTIFIC BURGLARY.\n\nBurglars whose chief qualification is the mechanical ability to open\nbank vaults and safes and steal thousands of dollars in bonds or cash\ncannot be classed with those who break open a store door and filch a\nlot of buckets, brooms or dry goods.\n\nThe man who makes the defects of a combination lock, safe or vault a\nstudy must have intelligence and mechanical knowledge equal to that\nof a man who draws a big salary for what he knows. Whenever any new\ncombination lock is brought in the market for vault or safe use the\nscientific burglar obtains one, and by patient study discovers its\nweakness or defect, something which every safe or vault has.\n\nThe combination of a safe or vault has often been learned by these\nburglars by obtaining an entrance to the banking house after banking\nhours, removing the dial of the combination and placing a sheet of\ntin foil behind it. Then, replacing the dial, the turning of the\ncombination in opening or closing makes the impression of letters or\nnumbers on the soft foil, which is removed by the burglar at the first\nchance he has to get into the banking house. Having the combination\nimpressed on the tin foil, he and his accomplices open the vault or\nsafe, secure the contents, and then often change or put out of order\nthe combination, so the doors of the vault or safe cannot be opened\nfor some hours after the regular time for opening, and then only by\nan expert of that particular safe company. This, of course, gives the\nthieves several hours of valuable time in which to effect their escape.\n\nThe tools required by the mechanical burglar who forces open safes\nare the air pump, putty, powder, fuse, sectional jimmy, steel drills,\ndiamond drills, copper sledges, steel-faced sledges (leather covered),\nlamp and blow pipe, jack screw, wedges, dynamite and syringe, brace\nwith box slide, feed screw drills, steel punches, small bellows, blank\nsteel keys, skeleton keys, nippers, dark lantern, twine and screw\neyes. The latest, most dangerous set of tools manufactured is the\nsecond power in mechanics--the screw.\n\nThe method of work with the screw is to first rig a brace, and then\ndrill a hole in the safe, cut a thread in the hole and then insert\na female screw. Then, with a long steel screw with a handle so long\nthat two men can turn it, the screw is inserted in the female screw,\nand by turning it goes in until it strikes the back of the safe. Then\neither the back or the front must give way. In nearly all cases it is\nthe latter, as that is the weakest, and it gives enough to insert the\nsectional jimmy, which the screw handle is part of. The jimmy is then\ninserted in the part forced out, and the safe is then torn asunder and\nits contents easily appropriated. This work is accomplished without\nmuch noise.\n\n\nINVENT NEW DEVICES.\n\nHowever, these new one-piece safes have not discouraged the\nmalefactors. They have only suggested to them the creation of special\nappliances which enable them, without stopping to pick the lock, to\nremove from the side wall of the safe a circle of the metal large\nenough to allow of an arm to be put inside.\n\nOne of the most important of these new devices for assisting the\nsafe-crackers in their crime is formed of an iron hoop furnished with\nwell-tempered steel teeth, which is fixed by means of a simple pivot\non the safe after a screw worm has been previously driven in. The\ninstrument is then turned on its pivot and plows a groove in the safe\nwall each time it revolves.\n\nScience has not left the burglar weaponless, however. The progress\naccomplished has merely compelled him to obtain higher qualifications,\nand in the continuous strife between the armor plate and the desperado\nwho would pierce it the thieves have had hitherto the last word. For\nmany years dynamite was their chief reliance, and then a product was\ndiscovered some years ago by a chemist, who gave it the name of\n\"thermit,\" by which the cracksman was able to melt sheet metal, inches\nthick, with comparatively little trouble.\n\n\nMELTS HARDEST STEEL.\n\nThis substance known as \"thermit\" is in current use for repairing,\nheating or soldering large pieces of metal and consists of a mixture\nof aluminum and oxide of iron, the latter being replaced, according to\nthe requirement, by oxide of lead, peroxide of sodium or peroxide of\nbarium. This composition is thoroughly mixed together, or is used in\nthe form of cartridges or tablets, which ignite by means of a piece of\nmagnesium fixed in the substance like a wick. The heat developed is\nmore than sufficient to cause the hardest steel to melt.\n\nAlthough this process is rapid and silent and really marvelous from\nthe point of view of the result obtained, it is not without much\ndanger to those using it, for at the high temperature produced by it\nan inexperienced operator runs the risk of being seriously burned.\nIn consequence the prudent and careful burglar uses accessories\nwhich render him secure against such accidents. He protects his eyes\nby means of heavy dark glasses, wears shields of aluminum over his\nhands and applies the mixture through a small hole in the bottom of a\ncrucible. When the reaction takes place it lasts long enough to allow\nthe operator to charge the crucible again and again in proportion as\nthe melting of the metal plate is effected, thus making an opening of\nthe desired size in the safe. It is a simple enough operation for a\nskilled burglar, but a very dangerous one for an amateur.\n\n\nTESTS WITH ELECTRICITY.\n\nBut even this has been discounted by an experiment before a United\nStates government commission, showing that electricity can be so\napplied as to give the scientific cracksman a greater field for\noperation than ever before. The experiment was made by an expert\nburglar, who, having retired from business after amassing a\nsufficient competency, was requested to favor the commission by\ncontributing the light of his knowledge.\n\nHe demonstrated that by the aid of electricity he could, within a\nshort time, reduce safes of the highest repute to old iron. For this\npurpose he took out of his pocket a style in the form of retort\ncarbon, similar to those used for arc lamps; a few yards of electric\nwire, black eyeglasses and a plate pierced in the middle. It was with\nthis simple outfit he pierced in less than three minutes a circle of\nholes in a cast steel safe with walls one and a half inches thick.\n\nHis method of procedure was simplicity itself. To the electric supply\ncurrent of the chandelier overhead he connected two wires, one of\nwhich he fixed on the safe, and the other at the extreme of his carbon\nstyle. It was suitably insulated by a wooden handle. Then, having\ninserted this pencil in the hole of the plate, whose purpose was to\nprotect him against the heat and light, he produced a voltaic arc of\nimmense power between the point of his style and the wall of the safe,\nthus melting the metal with the greatest ease.\n\n\nSOME CONCRETE EXAMPLES.\n\nBURGLARS USE ACETYLENE FLAME TO OPEN SAFE DOOR.\n\nIn Paris, January 4, 1908, burglars broke into the premises of Martin\nand Baume, colonial traders, at Marseilles, and stole money and goods\nto the value of $20,000. Most of their booty they took from a safe,\nthe door of which they burnt through with an apparatus giving an\nacetylene flame of sufficient heat to melt the metal.\n\nThe case recalls one at Antwerp recently, when the thieves melted a\nsafe with a combined oxygen and acetylene flame.\n\nThe police believe that the Marseilles burglars are past masters\nof the art, and that probably not more than a dozen possess such\napparatus for melting safes. One or more of the burglars may probably\nhave been employed at a motor factory, where acetylene lamps are in\nfrequent use.\n\nIn any case, even the finest lock or the best steel safe can't resist,\nif burglars take to using oxygen and acetylene lamps with blow-pipes.\nSafe manufacturers have a new problem to solve.\n\n\nTHE BANK SNEAK.\n\nThe bank sneaks of the country were formerly among the most\ntroublesome criminals with whom the police had to deal. The money and\njewelry stolen by them aggregated hundreds of thousands of dollars\nannually.\n\nThe bank sneak is the cleverest of crooks, and as bold and daring\nas any of them. But modern police methods, the system of exchanging\nBertillon photographs, and the organization of bankers' and jewelers'\nassociations, together with perfect burglar alarm equipment, have\ncombined to put him out of business, and his work nowadays is on a\nlimited scale.\n\nDuring the past ten years not more than five good bank sneak games\nhave been pulled off, while there has been a similar reduction in the\nraids on jewelry shops.\n\nThe Bertillon photographs facilitate the identification of the sneak\nand the bankers' and jewelers' organization put up the money with\nwhich to pursue him remorselessly, and soon catch him. Concerning the\nbank sneak and his mode of operating:\n\nAn expert professional bank \"sneak\" thief and his associates study\nthe habits of all employes to determine when the greatest number\nare absent (which generally happens at the noon hour), decide how\nmany confederates will be necessary to engage the attention of the\nremaining employes, while the sneak thief noiselessly enters a vault,\nteller's cage, or goes to a safe, and commits the robbery.\n\nConfederates are usually of good appearance, understand business\nmethods, can discuss loans, mortgages, sale of securities, etc., long\nenough to allow the \"sneak\" to operate without discovery. A \"sneak\"\nthief, wearing rubber-soled shoes, will frequently pass within a few\nfeet of the official or clerk in charge, enter a vault or teller's\ncage, or rob a safe or money drawer, without creating the slightest\nnoise.\n\nA ruse to make the way clear for the \"sneak\" is for a confederate to\ndrive in a carriage to the bank or store to be robbed, as a pretext\nexhibiting a crutch, or accompanied by a female, requesting some\npasser-by to ask the cashier or some other official to step out to the\ncarriage, which usually occurs when few of the employes are in the\nplace.\n\nAnother device is to hold a large blue print of some property on which\nis pretended a loan is desirable, or a bundle of maps offered for\nsale, in such position that the view of the official being interviewed\nis obstructed, thereby covering the \"sneak\" and giving him opportunity\nto operate.\n\nAnother more recent artifice is the telephone; the confederate of the\n\"sneak\" at an appointed minute \"calls up\" the bank and requests that\nthe paying teller be sent to the 'phone, and there detains him in\nconversation while the \"sneak\" thief operates; confederates, as may be\nnecessary, engaging the attention of other employes.\n\n\nCIRCUS DAY BRINGS A HARVEST.\n\nMany sneak robberies were formerly committed in medium-sized towns\non circus days, while most of the employes were at windows or\ndoors watching the circus parade. This offered \"sneak\" thieves the\nopportunity to enter the building by some unguarded door or window,\nor having, prior to the parade, concealed themselves in the bank or\nstore, to commit the robbery while the parade is passing, virtually\nbehind the backs of the employes.\n\nA favorite scheme, especially in savings banks, is for one thief to\nattract the attention of a customer who is counting money, to have a\nbill purposely dropped in front of him on the floor by the thief and,\nwhile he stoops down to pick it up, believing it part of his money,\nanother thief steals the then unprotected money he, the customer,\nwas counting. Often professional \"sneak\" thieves have posed as bank\nclerks or porters, wearing office coats or porter's uniforms and, when\nthe opportunity presents itself, committed robberies of considerable\nmagnitude.\n\nSome of the old-time \"sneaks\" used specially made steel instruments\nof various shapes to move packages of money from one section of the\nteller's cage to a point nearer the teller's window, so that it could\nbe more readily extracted. This practice, while the utmost caution is\nnecessary to avoid suspicion, has been quite successful.\n\nAt times thieves have used large satchels or dress-suit cases to stand\nupon and, with a long wire hook, extracted money by reaching over the\nwire screen surrounding a paying teller's cage.\n\nA method sometimes used to commit money drawer or \"till\" robberies\nin stores is to select some innocent-appearing storekeeper, usually\na foreigner, whom one of the thieves wearing a silk hat would\napproach, informing him that they had just made a wager that the hat\nwould not hold more than a gallon of molasses, and requesting that\nthe storekeeper measure a gallon of molasses into the hat at their\nexpense, to decide the wager.\n\n\nBLINDING VICTIM WITH MOLASSES.\n\nSeeing the prospect of a sale, even if the wager was a peculiar one,\nthe groceryman would concede to this request. The hat being partly\nfilled, one of the thieves would place it quickly on the merchant's\nhead, blinding him with the molasses, while they stole the contents of\nthe money drawer.\n\nThe \"sneak\" who commits the robbery, to be successful, usually is\nof small stature, active, alert and noiseless, as upon him mainly\ndepends the success or failure of the venture. He must judge from\nthe operations of his associates when the opportunity to commit the\nrobbery has arrived. There are no signals or conversations between the\nconfederates and the \"sneak\" designating the moment for him to act.\nHe must decide this from observation of what his confederates have\naccomplished in preparing a safe way for him. If there is a suspicion\nor a discovery by employes, it devolves upon his confederates to do\ntheir utmost to confuse and obstruct the pursuers.\n\nI once asked an old-time professional \"sneak\" thief how he was first\nintroduced into a band of first-class bank \"sneaks.\" He explained\nthat he was raised in a small village having a general store presided\nover by a widow; that she at times would go to the cellar for certain\nmerchandise, leaving the store unguarded. This suggested to him how\neasy it would be to rob the money drawer during her absence in the\ncellar, which he afterward did, and which was his first successful\n\"sneak\" robbery. Afterward he stole from a small window in the same\nstore, packages of chewing tobacco, pipes, etc., also occasionally\nagain robbing a bakery of pies and cakes, and occasionally again\nrobbing the \"till.\" But one afternoon, before a Fourth of July, in\nattempting to steal some packages of fire-crackers and some loose\ntorpedoes, a couple of the torpedoes dropped to the floor, causing\nan explosion and resulting in his discovery and arrest and final\nimprisonment. In jail he met with other criminals, and finally became\none of them, joining with the first-class \"sneak\" band of professional\ncriminals. This man for years was a most successful leader of \"sneak\"\nthieves, stealing fortunes, finally dying in prison and leaving a\nfamily in actual want.\n\n\nRARELY USE PISTOLS.\n\nAmong the old-timers were some of the most remarkable criminals\noperating in any part of the world; their thefts requiring, in almost\nevery instance, dexterity and great presence of mind, a quick eye\nand unflinching courage, yet few of these \"sneaks\" used firearms or\nweapons of any kind in the commission of their crimes.\n\nAmong the younger element appear the names of the cleverest thieves\nof today, some of whom have operated extensively in this country and\nabroad.\n\n\nTHE LORD BOND ROBBERY.\n\nOne of the largest \"sneak\" robberies ever committed in the United\nStates occurred late in the sixties, and has always been referred to\nas the \"Lord bond robbery.\" Lord was a wealthy man, and had an office\nat 22 Broad street, New York City. He had invested $1,200,000 in 7-30\nUnited States bonds, all being coupon bonds, payable to bearer, which\nany one with a knowledge of finance could easily dispose of at this\ntime. A band of \"sneak\" thieves, consisting of \"Hod\" Ennis, Charlie\nRoss, Jimmie Griffin and \"Piano\" Charlie Bullard, planned to steal\nthese bonds.\n\nAwaiting their opportunity until a morning arrived when Mr. Lord was\nabsent from his office, they entered it when it was in charge of only\ntwo clerks.\n\nBullard and Ross engaged these clerks in conversation, while Ennis\n\"sneaked\" into the vault, seized the tin box containing the bonds,\nand walked out with it. While these thieves were expert in their\nparticular line, they did not fully understand the negotiating of the\nbonds, and for this called in George Bidwell, since renowned as the\nBank of England forger, who went to England and disposed of a large\npart of them. The thieves were at the time suspected, and Ennis fled\nto Canada, but was subsequently extradited to the United States and\nconvicted of a crime committed some time before. He was sentenced\nto a long term of imprisonment. Charlie Bullard settled in Paris,\nbut afterward returned to the United States, and with Adam Worth,\nsuccessfully committed the Boylston Bank robbery, after which both\nreturned to Paris and opened the celebrated American bar under the\nGrand Hotel, 2 Rue Scribe, which flourished for many years. Bullard\nafterward was arrested for an attempted bank burglary in Belgium, and\nwas sentenced to prison for a long term. Bullard, Ross, Ennis and\nWorth all stole millions of dollars in their day and died poor.\n\n[Illustration: BLIND.\n\nJUSTICE--\"I CAN'T SEE IT.\"]\n\n\nONE MAN'S BOLD OPERATIONS.\n\nAnother celebrated robbery was on January 7, 1878, of $500,000 in\nbonds and securities from the office of James H. Young, a banker and\nbroker at 44 Nassau street, New York City, by \"sneak\" thieves headed\nby \"Rufe\" Minor, alias \"Little Rufe,\" exceptionally clever in his\nline, and who had with him George Carson, Horace Hovan and \"Billy\"\nMarr. They were located at Petersburg, Va., on March 23, 1878, and\nfound all of the stolen property in Minor's trunk. Minor was a\nBrooklyn-raised boy, small of stature, of good appearance and engaging\nmanners, a most expert \"sneak\" leader, and was in his lifetime\nconcerned in many great \"sneak\" robberies, among them being: $80,000\nfrom the Commercial National Bank, Cleveland, Ohio, 1881; $12,000\nin bonds from the Bank of Baltimore, Md.; $114,000 in bonds from\nthe Erie County Savings Bank, in 1882; $73,000 from the Middletown\nBank, Middletown, Conn.; $32,000 from the Detroit Bank, Detroit,\nMich.; $70,000 from the Boston Safe Deposit Co., and $71,000 from the\nGuarantee Safe & Safety Deposit Co.'s vaults, Philadelphia, Pa.\n\nIn Chicago, many years ago, a band of professional bank \"sneaks\"\nplanned to rob the Subtreasury, then located in the Arcade Court.\nPhilip A. Hoyne, a leading republican politician in those days,\nhad an office in this building. He was also a candidate on the\nrepublican ticket for some local office. At a ball game \"Joe\" Parrish,\na professional pickpocket and bank sneak, picked the pocket of a\nclerk. Among other articles found in the pocketbook was a key and\nthe personal card of the clerk, which showed he was employed in the\nSubtreasury.\n\nParrish imparted this information to Walter Brown, Sam Perry, Little\nJoe McCluskey and Jimmy Carroll, all members of a noted bank \"sneak\"\nband, then operating.\n\n\nHIRE A BAND TO HELP THEM.\n\nAfter several visits to the Arcade Court and trying the key in\ndifferent doors, it was finally found to open a rear door to the\nSubtreasury office. On the day the robbery was planned to be\ncommitted, the thieves hired a brass band to play in the Arcade Court\nas a serenade to Candidate Hoyne, the plan of the thieves being to\nstart cheering for Mr. Hoyne, expecting that the band and the cheering\nwould attract the attention of the Subtreasury clerks from their\ndesks to the windows, giving Little Joe McCluskey, the \"sneak,\" an\nopportunity of using the key to the bank entrance, passing into the\noffice at the back of the clerks and stealing as much money as he\ncould carry. About the time the plans of the thieves were completed\nMr. Pinkerton learned of them, and communicated with Elmer Washburn,\nthen chief of the United States Secret Service at Washington.\n\nOn the day the robbery was to occur the band appeared as arranged,\nthe Arcade soon filled with people, and there was prolonged cheering\nfor Mr. Hoyne. Not one clerk left his desk, and when McCluskey tried\nto open the door with the key he found it would not fit. Through\nprecautions taken by Mr. Washburn, the lock had been changed and\ninstructions given to all clerks to remain at their desks when the\nband played, which prevented what would have been a very heavy loss to\nthe government. Owing to the way the information had been obtained,\nand not wishing to expose the source, no arrests were made.\n\nWalter Sheridan, known under many aliases, an accomplished \"sneak\"\nthief, was a Southerner by birth and of gentlemanly, dignified\nappearance. In addition to being a sneak, he was also a general\nall-round thief, counterfeiter and forger.\n\n\nIMPORTANCE OF BEING ON GUARD.\n\nOne night in 1873, at Chicago, while Mr. Pinkerton was on his way\nhome, he recalls seeing Walter Sheridan, \"Philly\" Pearson and Charlie\nHicks on a street car. He followed them to the Chicago & Alton\nRailroad station, where he saw them purchase tickets for Springfield,\nIll. The following day the vault of the First National Bank of\nSpringfield was robbed of $35,000 by Pearson, while Sheridan engaged\nthe attention of the bank officials, and Hicks remained on guard\noutside. Later Hicks was arrested, taken to Springfield, convicted and\nsentenced to eight years in Joliet prison. Pearson fled to Europe.\nLater Sheridan was arrested at Toledo, O., for this robbery, at which\ntime Mr. Pinkerton identified him, and $22,000 of the stolen money was\nrecovered. Sheridan was mixed up in a great many crimes, but in the\nlast years of his life was looked upon as being cleverer as a first\nclass bank \"sneak\" than in any other line, although he has been a\nsuccessful leader of bands of note counterfeiters.\n\n\"Billy\" Coleman, undoubtedly one of the most expert \"sneaks\" of modern\ntimes, who, between 1869 and 1904 was arrested thirteen times, and\nwho spent almost half of his lifetime in prisons, is now serving in\nthe Auburn, New York, state prison, a four and one-half-year term for\nthe theft of $30,000 worth of jewelry from a safe in the Clark Estate\nbuilding at Cooperstown. The stolen jewelry belonged to Mrs. Ambrose\nClark, a daughter-in-law of Mrs. Potter, wife of Bishop Potter.\n\n\nLOOKED LIKE COLEMAN'S WORK.\n\nMrs. Clark arrived at Cooperstown to spend the summer only a few days\nbefore the robbery, and placed the jewelry in a safe in the Clark\nEstate building for safety. Investigation showed the thief had entered\nthis building, which in many respects resembles a bank, at the noon\nhour, when all the employes were absent, opened the vault, the lock\nof which had been left on the half-turn, taking therefrom a tin box,\nwhich he carried to the cellar of the building and pried open with\ntools found on the premises, taking therefrom all the jewelry and\nalso valuable papers. From descriptions of the thief we obtained from\nwitnesses who had seen him loitering in the vicinity of the Estate\noffice, and from the manner in which the robbery was committed,\nwe believed it bore the earmarks of Coleman's work. Subsequent\ndevelopments satisfied us that our conclusions were correct, and we\ncaused Coleman's arrest, two weeks after the robbery, in New York, by\nPolice Headquarters' detectives.\n\nThe tin box left by the thief in the cellar was covered with blood.\nFrom this an incorrect inference was drawn, that the thief had cut\nhis hands with one of the instruments used to open the box. A careful\nexamination of Coleman showed no cuts or bruises of any kind, on any\npart of his person, from which blood would have flowed. The grand\njury refused to indict him for the crime.\n\nOn his release, knowing that Coleman had most mysterious ways\nof hiding the proceeds of his robberies, he was placed under\nsurveillance, which continued for some time without result, but\neventually he was traced and found quite early one morning, digging at\nthe side of a building through the snow into the ground, whereupon he\nwas re-arrested and, in uncovering the spot where he had been digging,\nmost of the stolen jewelry was found in an ordinary fruit jar, buried\nin the ground about two feet.\n\n\nDIAMONDS BURIED IN JAR.\n\nIn the jar were found several settings from which some of the diamonds\nwere missing; sixty-nine of these were found in Coleman's home, hidden\nin a small pasteboard box in the earth at the bottom of a rubber plant\njar, and one of the largest diamonds removed from the ring was found\nsewn in a ready-made four-in-hand necktie. After his second arrest\nColeman acknowledged committing the robbery, and explained that a year\nprevious he had made a tour through several New York State counties to\nlocate a bank which would not be difficult to \"sneak\" in the daytime.\nHe found the Clark Estate building in Cooperstown, which he believed\nwas a bank. He visited it at that time, while the employes were\nabsent, but did not obtain anything, although he made a note of it as\nan easy place to rob some time in the future.\n\nWhen he did commit the robbery, and did not find any money in sight,\nhe picked up the tin box, little suspecting it contained a fortune in\nvaluable jewelry. When Coleman was questioned about the blood stains\non the tin box, he explained that, as the day of the robbery was very\nhot, and he had to work quick, in his great excitement his nose bled\nfreely, covering the tin box as it was found. Coleman has been a\nprofessional bank \"sneak\" all his life, and in times past was renowned\nfor entering bank vaults and paying-tellers' cages in the day time\nwithout being observed. He never used firearms, and there is no record\nof his having shed blood of anyone in the commission of a crime. After\nall of his years of successful stealing, he is again in Auburn (N. Y.)\nprison, without means.\n\n\nJOE KILLORAN'S SMOOTH WORK.\n\n\"Joe\" Killoran, alias \"Joe\" Howard, a rather picturesque type of\ncriminal, came from good old New York stock, was a rather brainy\nplanner of bank robberies, and was usually the one of a band to engage\nan employe in conversation while the \"sneak\" committed the robbery.\nKilloran had the appearance of a well-to-do business man, such as\nmight negotiate a loan from the bank, representing himself as from\nsome firm of brokers. He has frequently played the part of the sick\nman seated in the carriage with a crutch, and not able to go into the\nbank. He is notorious as escaping from the Ludlow Street jail, July\n4, 1895, with Harry Russell and Charles Allen, then United States\nprisoners. He was in many \"sneak\" robberies in the United States, and\none which I especially recall was the theft of $22,000 by him from\nthe First National Bank, Plainfield, N. J., on July 2, 1895. He was\naccompanied by George Carson, \"Sid\" Yennie and Little Patsy Flannigan.\nYennie, Carson and Killoran held the attention of the employes while\nFlannigan committed the robbery. After Killoran's escape from Ludlow\nStreet jail he fled to Europe, and, strangely enough, met with an\naccident which necessitated the amputation of one of his legs, which\nmade him in reality carry a crutch until those he operated with\nsupplied him with a wooden leg.\n\nHe was arrested about two years ago in New York City, decidedly broken\nin health, and was sent to Illinois to serve a term for robbing the\ngovernment postoffice at Springfield. After his release he returned to\nEurope, and was, in September, 1905, arrested at Vienna for stealing\n$100,000 from a depositor in front of the paying teller's window in\nthe bank in that city, and was, on March 19, 1906, sentenced to six\nyears in an Austrian prison. It looks as though he had committed his\nlast robbery, and that this crime will cause him to end his days in\nprison.\n\n\nTHE HOTEL SNEAK.\n\nTHE USE OF FALSE KEYS.\n\n\"Hod\" Bacon is an illustration of the professional \"sneak\" who\nconfines his operations more particularly to the rooms of hotel\nguests. He works systematically and prepares his plans as the skilled\ndetective works to capture the expert criminal. This thief frequently\nwould follow a victim thousands of miles to commit a successful\nrobbery. He would watch hotel guests continuously for several days,\nuntil he observed them purchase theater tickets or going out for\nthe evening, first determining how many (if a family) occupied the\napartment, and how many servants they had, and assuring himself before\ncommitting the robbery they were all absent. He enters the rooms with\nfalse keys, locks himself in, and works at his leisure; also unlocks,\nwith false keys, the trunks, bureau drawers, etc., abstracting from\nthem such valuables as he considers worth taking. He invariably takes\nfrom the ladies' trunks some ladies' wearing apparel, endeavoring\nto cast the suspicion that the theft was committed by a chambermaid\nor other employes in the hotel having access to the apartment. On\none occasion Bacon robbed a traveling jewelry salesman's trunk in a\nChicago hotel. Not satisfied with the valuable loot of jewelry he\nobtained, he stole the salesman's overcoat, after which he secured\nsleeping car passage from Chicago to Pittsburg via Pennsylvania\nrailroad. On the same evening's train, it so happened that the\nsalesman he robbed was then enroute east, and, peculiarly enough,\nhad been assigned a berth opposite the thief, in the same car. After\nthe train left Chicago, observing his stolen overcoat hanging in the\nthief's section, he telegraphed to Pittsburg, and on arrival of the\ntrain the thief was arrested, and identified as \"Hod\" Bacon.\n\n[Illustration: CASE OF TOOLS AND RELICS COLLECTED BY DETECTIVE\nWOOLDRIDGE\n\nCAPTURED BURGLARY IMPLEMENTS AT CENTRAL POLICE STATION]\n\n\n\n\nCELL TERMS FOR \"CON\" MEN.\n\n\nFOUR ARE SENTENCED FOR LONG \"GRAFT\" RECORDS.\n\n     P. L. Tuohy, Philip Bulfer and L. E. Burnett Are\n     Found Guilty of Systematic Fraud by Means of \"Fake\"\n     Contracts--Their Clerk Is Fined $250--Many Poor People\n     Appear As Witnesses on Fraudulent Employment Bureau Also\n     Operated.\n\n\nJune 11, 1907, one of the most persistent and systematic \"confidence\"\ngangs that ever operated in Chicago was broken up for a few years at\nleast, when Patrick L. Tuohy, Philip Bulfer, L. E. Burnett, and J. C.\nDaubach were found guilty of obtaining money under false pretenses by\na jury in Judge Ball's court.\n\nThese men were organizers and managers of the Chicago Mercantile and\nReporting Agency, with offices at 171 Washington Street. It was a\n\"fake\" employment agency with a side line of swindling by means of\ngetting contracts on carbon paper. Bulfer, Tuohy and Burnett were\nsentenced to the penitentiary, while Daubach, who was only a clerk,\nwas fined $250. The sentence in prison is from one to five years.\n\n\nTRIUMPH FOR WOOLDRIDGE.\n\nThe conviction was a triumph for Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge who\nhas followed the men for years. The raid which resulted in the present\ntrial was made by Wooldridge and his men on February 11, 1906.\n\nPhilip Bulfer. Bulfer's pedigree from his home town is interesting.\nPhilip Bulfer was born and raised at Marshalltown, Iowa. His parents\nlive there and have for forty years. The young man was educated,\nand when still a young man left for Omaha, Neb. There he started in\nbusiness with his brother, and in a short course of time they were\ndoing a good business, but finally broke up in a dispute with his\nbrother, resulting in a \"skin.\"\n\nLater on he became a messenger for some express company, operating on\nB. 7 M. in Nebraska, and he ran through the State of Iowa for a good\nmany years. He left that job or was discharged.\n\nHe left there anyway and finally came to Chicago and married a school\nteacher by the name of Mrs. Crary, from Goshen, Ind. After marriage\nhe moved to Chicago Heights and edited a paper there for some time.\nMoved back to Chicago and became a reporter on the Chicago Times, and\nfinally started in a loan shark business, loaning money at reduced\nrates and making it a business to fight loan sharks, loaning money on\npersonal property, afterward going into court and enjoining them.\n\nHe finally was arrested on many charges before Justice of the Peace\nFred E. Eldred, at Logan Square, on charges of obtaining money by\nfalse pretenses, embezzlement, larceny and on many other counts.\n\nWas held to the grand jury and indicted in the case of Detrich,\nwhich was finally nolle prossed before Judge Stein, after making a\nsettlement with Detrich, who promised not to prosecute and was taken\ncare of so he could not be compelled to appear as a witness in the\nCriminal Court. This occurred about 1897 or 1898.\n\nHe was also indicted one time for assault or attempt to kill Oscar\nor Frank Arnold. Another compromise was made. Many times he was\narrested before different justices: Underwood, Wolff, Hogland,\nWoods, Prindiville, Caverly and many others. Cases were disposed of\nin some way. He was held to the grand jury many times, and finally\nwas arrested charged with conspiracy to cheat and defraud a school\nteacher. Was indicted and had an accomplice--Theodore D. Courtney.\n\nHe was convicted and sentenced for three years. Was taken to the\npenitentiary and there served as bookkeeper and tally-man for about\nfive months. Later was released from the penitentiary on a writ of\nhabeas corpus by Judge Farlin Q. Ball. Was taken to the county jail,\nhis case being continued from time to time, meanwhile was obliged to\nremain in jail for about a year. Arrangements were made that if he\ngave evidence to indict John W. Ronksley, Thomas D. Courtney and Isaac\nA. Hartman, the State's Attorney's office would in some way be lenient\nwith him, and this he did. He gave evidence that caused the indictment\nof the aforesaid persons.\n\nThey were afterwards placed on trial. Ronksley was fined $100 and\nsentenced to six months in the county jail by Judge Horton.\n\nHartman was indicted several times in the same proceeding and placed\non trial before Judge Horton and was acquitted. Many indictments\nagainst Bulfer have been nolle prossed, due to a settlement of some\nkind.\n\nThe records will show that they have been nolle prossed. The Detrich\ncase will show dismissal for want of prosecution, but it was really on\naccount of settlement having been made. After these defendants were\nconvicted he was released without ever having a hearing on the habeas\ncorpus matter and gained his liberty on account of the state losing\njurisdiction. Since organizing the Landlords' Protective Association\nhe was arrested on complaint of A. D. Smeyer before either Caverly or\nPrindiville at the Harrison Street Police Station and there discharged\non account of no prosecution. It was brought about by a settlement.\n\nThe arrest was made on account of his taking $3 appearance fee, which\nhe should have paid and filed appearance in the Circuit Court in the\ncase of Chicago Press, R. D. Smeyers vs. Barry Transportation Co. He\nwas arrested a great many times for obtaining money by false pretenses\nfrom poor and ignorant people, who gave him $2 to get them a job, but\nhe failed to do so.\n\nPatrick L. Tuohy was born in Ireland; came to Chicago about forty\nyears ago and located in Rogers Park.\n\nHe was a member of the School Board at one time. He is a politician.\nHe is a professional bondsman and is manager of the Chicago Mercantile\n& Reporting Agency, also an employment and collection agency and\nprofessional bond agency at 171 Washington street. They take a fee of\nfrom $2 to $3 and agree to get employment, but few are ever employed.\nThis money is put into his pocket.\n\nHe has been engaged in many questionable concerns. Among them he and\nhis pals secured a charter for the United States Express Company and\ntried to shake down the company and prohibit them from doing business\nin the State of Illinois. The matter was taken into court and a\nFederal injunction issued against them.\n\nThey have a habit of looking up firms, for instance, say the\nBlackenberg Express Company, and get someone to do business with them,\nthen they will go in and see if they use a corporate title and force\nthem to settle in some way.\n\nBulfer and Tuohy were proprietors of the Chicago Mercantile &\nReporting Agency: Daubach was a clerk in the office and Burnett was a\nsolicitor for the company.\n\nBulfer was the apparent head of the concern--in fact the brains and\ndominating spirit.\n\nTuohy's name appeared as manager on the letterheads of the company and\nhe was plaintiff in all suits brought upon alleged contracts.\n\nBurnett, as solicitor, called upon small merchants and solicited\naccounts for collection upon representation that the Chicago\nMercantile & Reporting Agency would deduct 25 per cent in case of\ncollection.\n\nIf a merchant gave Burnett some bills to collect he (Burnett) would\nask the merchant to sign his name on a piece of paper giving authority\nto the Chicago Mercantile & Reporting Agency to collect. Or if a\nmerchant upon whom Burnett called would say he had no bills, Burnett\nwould secure his signature upon representation that he must show his\ncompany that he had called upon him and solicited.\n\nEach witness with but one exception testified that no contract was\nshown him and that he was not told by Burnett that in signing his name\nhe was putting it to a contract to furnish the company with at least\n25 valid claims during the next thirty days following and to pay the\ncompany a fee of $20.\n\nLouis Perlman, the complainant-witness in the case tried, testified\nthat he gave Burnett a claim for $2 to collect and at the solicitation\nof Burnett signed his name to a paper giving authority (as explained\nby Burnett) to the company to collect. Nothing was said to him about\na contract, but at the expiration of 30 days he received a letter\nfrom the Chicago Mercantile & Reporting Agency, signed P. L. Tuohy,\nmanager, that he was indebted to the company in the sum of $20. Upon\ncalling at their offices to ascertain the cause of such indebtedness\nhe was shown a contract signed by himself, agreeing to furnish the\ncompany 25 claims and obligating himself to pay $20 on that day. The\nvictims were all men and women of the poorer classes, mostly small\nshopkeepers, and such tradesmen in the outlying districts.\n\nPerlman said that was the first time he had ever seen the contract,\nfor when he signed his name at the request of Burnett there was no\nprinting in sight and nothing was said about a contract. Although\nPerlman had given but one claim to the agent of the company, and that\nfor the sum of $2, which had never been collected, he was threatened\nwith suit by Bulfer when he called at the office of the company, and\nfinally compromised by the payment of $5. No service had been rendered\nhim whatever and yet he was compelled to give up $5 to have the\nalleged contract canceled.\n\nThe state called about 17 witnesses, all of whom had similar\nexperiences to that of Perlman. Several testified that they told\nBurnett they had no bills to give him, but at his request signed\ntheir names so that the company could know how many people he had\ncalled upon in the course of a day, and yet each was notified at the\nexpiration of 30 days that he or she was indebted to the Chicago\nMercantile & Reporting Agency in the sum of $20, and each was\ncompelled to pay from $5 to $12 to have the alleged contract canceled,\nalthough no service had been rendered to any of them.\n\nOne witness testified that he had refused to compromise and he was\nsued before a justice of the peace friendly to the company and\njudgment was rendered against him for $20 and costs, amounting in all\nto $20.50, for which no services were performed and for which he got\nnot the slightest return.\n\nDaubach was merely a clerk in the office, but when a victim called at\nthe office in response to a letter signed by Tuohy, Daubach would tell\nhim the amount must be paid, although the victim would declare to him\nno service had been rendered to him and that he had no knowledge that\nhe had signed a contract. The victim would then ask to see Mr. Tuohy\nand Daubach would take him to Bulfer's desk and say, \"This is Mr.\nTuohy,\" and the victim would have to settle or submit to a judgment on\nthe alleged contract at the hands of the justice of the peace friendly\nto the company.\n\nAlthough the indictment charged a conspiracy to obtain the signature\nof one Louis Perlman to a written instrument, the state introduced\nevidence, and rightfully so, to show similar acts of the conspirators.\n\nIt was demonstrated clearly, by the evidence that Bulfer was the\nleading spirit of the conspiracy; that Tuohy's name appeared on\nthe letterheads as manager and all letters sent to victims bore his\nsignature; that Burnett got signatures by means of false pretenses,\nfor each witness claimed that the \"contract was covered up and they\nwere shown just the part of the paper on which was the space for\nsignature; and Daubach performed many acts in furtherance of the\nconspiracy.\n\nBulfer and Tuohy did not go upon the witness stand. Burnett testified\nthat he always showed the full contract to prospective clients, but\nwas not called upon to explain its contents; he testified further that\nhe received from the Chicago Mercantile & Reporting Agency $2.50 for\neach contract he brought in and he secured as high as six a day.\n\nDaubach testified that when the objectors came into the office and\ncomplained he would tell them they could compromise and get off\ncheaper and admitted turning them over to Bulfer when they asked for\nTuohy.\n\nSo that it appeared conclusively that each in his turn performed some\nact in furtherance of the conspiracy.\n\nThe case was called for trial on the 6th of May, 1907, and was\nconcluded on the 8th of May, 1907. The jury returned a verdict of\nguilty as to each and fixed the punishment of Bulfer, Tuohy and\nBurnett at imprisonment in the penitentiary, and fixed the punishment\nof Daubach at a fine of $250.\n\n\n\n\nPANEL HOUSE THIEVES.\n\n\nAmong the many dangerous and curious characters who live by their\nwits in a great city none is more interesting to the outsider than\nthe blackmailer. To the reader of sensational literature the ideal\nis a person who holds some great family secret which he turns into\nmoney at rapidly narrowing intervals. Although this character is\ngenerally overdrawn, no one familiar with city life pretends to doubt\nhis existence. The blackmailer is a well known character in all large\ncities, and certainly the arch swindler of the day.\n\nBlackmailers are ever on the alert to learn anything detrimental to\na person's character, and let them once obtain this, they fatten on\nit. Men's passions are taken advantage of by that particular class\nof thieves known as \"badgers,\" and their operations are very rarely\nfollowed by exposure or punishment. A pretty woman is the bait used\nby these thoughtful rascals, who know full well that where a hundred\nmen will resist a burglar, scarcely one will resist a robbery where\ndisgraceful publicity must surely follow.\n\nBriefly the mode of procedure is as follows: A house is rented in a\nquiet side street, not far from the principal thoroughfare. One man,\noccasionally two men, run the house--that is, they do the actual\nstealing, while they have from three and often as high as a dozen\nwomen out on the street picking up the victims.\n\n\nMUST HAVE PRETTY WOMAN.\n\nThe qualifications necessary for the woman to have is to be pretty,\nplump, wear good clothes, and understand the art of making herself\nattractive. It is an understood thing that she shares one-third the\nproceeds of the robbery. The house is arranged especially for the\npurpose. The rooms on each floor are fixed so that the door separating\nthem has the panels cut out and put in again on hinges, and fastened\nwith a small button not noticeable. The hinges are well oiled, and a\nsmall hole is bored through the door, so that the thief can see into\nthe room, or hear any slight signal given by the woman. The house\nrented has a front and rear entrance, the latter for the thief or\nthieves, who always station themselves on a corner of the street near\nthe house, by which the woman will always bring the victim, so her pal\ncan see him.\n\nThe woman goes out in the evening past the principal hotels and\nthrough the principal streets, never speaking to a man, but if she\nnotices one who looks like a stranger and well-to-do, she will give\nhim a coquettish glance and pass on, looking sideways to see if she\nis followed. If so, she will continue slowly, turning the first quiet\nstreet, until the man who follows her has a chance to overtake her.\nThe chances are ten to one that he will address her. She will appear\nshy at first, and not inclined to speak, but after a short time she\nwill talk, and after some conversation she will convey the idea to the\nman that she is a married woman; that her husband is out of town and\nno one is at home. If he will be discreet he may accompany her home,\nshe says, and have a talk. The pair then walk to the house, passing\nthe corner where the male accomplice is lying in wait, and the woman,\npulling out her latch-key, will open the door; and the fly is in the\nparlor of the spider.\n\nThe male thief waits a few moments, and then makes his way into the\nhouse through the rear. As soon as he enters he takes off his shoes\nand in his stocking feet stations himself in the adjoining room,\nand there bides his time. The woman is all smiles and affection.\nShe betrays an affected nervousness, which makes her all the more\nattractive. She talks about the sudden fancy she took to the gentleman\nwho was weak enough to be inveigled, and in a thousand and one ways\nmanages to give the idea that he is, above all others, the very man\nshe could love. All this time she is gradually disrobing, and at the\nexpiration of about ten minutes she is ready to do her part in the\nrobbery.\n\n\nMALE ACCOMPLICES GET BUSY.\n\nMeantime her male accomplice has put on his shoes. He goes around to\nthe front of the house, opens the front door noisily, and, walking\nheavily, he knocks loudly at the room door, and calls out, \"Mary!\" or\nany name that may suggest itself. The woman will at once exclaim. \"Oh,\nthat is my husband! Dress yourself quickly, and be ready to go out as\nsoon as I get him away from the room door.\"\n\nThe victim will hastily put on his clothes, and as soon as the woman\nslips out and gives him the signal he escapes, only too glad not to\nbe caught. Before he goes, however, and while he is talking to the\nwoman, her pal has opened the panel, put his hand in all the victim's\npockets--(his clothes having been put in front of the door), and\nnearly all his money is taken. A portion is left, so that he may not\nimmediately discover his loss. Jewelry is never disturbed, as it would\nbe missed at once. The favorite methods is to take out the middle of a\nroll of notes, if in a roll, or if in a pocket book, the bottom notes\nare removed, so that when the victim examines his purse hurriedly he\nwill not discover that he has been robbed. If the amount stolen is\nlarge the house is vacated, and the woman skips the town for a time.\n\nThe women who work for these badger houses work in one city for a\ntime, then go to the next large city with a note to the chief who\nruns the house there. The women generally wear wigs, so in case the\nman reports his loss to the police he will, perhaps, describe a\nfair-haired woman, when perhaps her hair is black. A blonde wig is\ndiscarded, the case is fixed.\n\nA female badger and her lover may be poor and unable to rent a house.\nIn this event they will rent a furnished room in a furnished-room\nhouse. The bolt on the door is fixed by simply taking out the screws\nfrom the nose of the bolt, and the screw holes are enlarged. The\nscrews are well greased and then put back, the key taken out of the\nlock, so when the time comes for the thief in go in, as previously\ndescribed, he pushes in the door easily and quietly, as the hinges\nare well oiled, and the victim is robbed while he is making violent\nlove to the supposed \"married woman.\"\n\n\nTHE PHOTOGRAPHIC CATCH.\n\nOnly a downright fool or egotist can become the victim of this scheme.\nHe deserves to lose whatever he has if he is foolish enough to be\ntaken in. The only way to protect yourselves against the work of these\nthieves is to mind your own business.\n\nThe new panel and blackmail swindle called the \"Photographic Catch\"\nis one by which dupes are frightened into paying hush-money, and\notherwise putting themselves in the hands of unscrupulous and\ndesigning people.\n\nThe old panel game has been brought up to date and is being worked\nvigorously. This new swindle is one of the coolest \"bluffs\" ever\nattempted to be worked upon an unsuspecting person.\n\nThe victim selected by the coterie of choice spirits who work this\nfraud is always a married man. The blackmailers learn about his\nhabits, and if his wife and family have removed to the country they\nimmediately set about landing him in their net. If the family remains\nin town the swindlers spot their man and wait until his wife and\nchildren go to the country or seashore, leaving him to \"work himself\nto death\" in the bad, wicked city.\n\nThe bait used is a handsome young woman. She soon finds an opportunity\nto attract the attention of the victim, who is always a business man,\ngenerally of middle age and wealthy, for upon handsome but penniless\nclerks they do not waste a moment of their time.\n\nAs soon as the intended victim has taken the bait he is enticed to\nsome luxuriously furnished apartment. It makes not the slightest\ndifference how long he may stay there, and it is not even important\nwhat he may do there.\n\nIn the course of a day or two the victim is called upon at his place\nof business by a tall, well-dressed young man of gentlemanly manners,\nbut with much firmness. This is one of the conspirators. He secures\na private interview with his unsuspecting victim, and as soon as the\ndoor is closed he proceeds to outline his little game.\n\nHe pulls from his pocket an alleged instantaneous photograph\nshowing the victim in a compromising position, and for the sake of\nappearances, make some broad hints about his outraged feelings as a\nhusband. It very soon develops that these outraged feelings can be\nassuaged by the payment of money, and the sum mentioned is always a\nlarge one.\n\n\nSCARE MONEY OUT OF VICTIM.\n\nThe victim is thrown into a state of fright by threats of exposure\nliberally made by the conspirators, and freely \"gives up\" in order to\nput a stop to the matter. He gets a considerable reduction upon the\noriginal sum demanded by paying down the cash.\n\nNow, while this game is nearly always successful, it requires but a\nmoment's reflection on the part of any intelligent man to see that\nit is a swindle, pure and simple, the exposure of which would put a\nstop to it. The payment of the money is compelled by displaying a\nphotograph, with threats of sending it to the victim's wife.\n\nAnybody who knows anything about photography will see at once that\nsuch a photograph must be fraudulent. It is impossible to take an\ninstantaneous photograph in a room without a flashlight. It is\nlikewise impossible to photograph the interior of a room lighted by\ngas without a very long exposure, and generally extending over hours.\nNo court of law would place any reliance upon an alleged instantaneous\nphotograph, of the inside of a house professing to show people who\nwere unconscious that they were being photographed. If any such\npicture were to be used as a means of establishing evidence in court\nit is not unlikely that the person so producing it would get into\nprison as an impudent impostor.\n\nThe photograph which is used by the gang working this new panel game\nis, of course, a fraud made up by the conspirators. It is an easy\nenough thing for them to secure a picture of the interior of the\nroom, showing another person. But in order to get the victim into the\npicture it is necessary that a photograph be taken of him elsewhere;\nprobably in the street.\n\nThen his features are pasted on the photograph of the room, which is\nagain placed before the camera and reproduced complete. No matter how\nskillfully such piecing is done, it always shows to the practiced eye,\nand any professional photographer can detect the fraud.\n\nWith the guilty knowledge of such swindling in mind, the conspirators\nwho impudently produce such pictures can easily be \"turned down\" by a\nbrief explanation of their criminal proceedings and a threat to turn\nthem over to the police. They confine their operations to gentlemen\nwho have been indiscreet and who can be easily frightened into paying\nmoney to prevent a scandal.\n\n\nBLACKMAIL THE WIFE AS WELL.\n\nBlackmailing the wives of business men is carried on to quite an\nextent, and it is astonishing how many of them will pay blackmailers\nto hush up something that really amounts to nothing if the game were\nexposed. If you refuse to pay blackmail, that usually ends it. They\nwant money, and when they fail to get it, the matter drops.\n\nThe blackmailer operates on women in this manner: A man has an\naccomplice, a woman who passes as, and probably is, his wife. She is\nwell educated, of refined appearance, and dresses fashionably and\nwell. The two work together. As the summer season comes on the wives\nof business men, who cannot leave business themselves, start for\neastern resorts and watering places, the woman blackmailer joins the\nexodus. She knows the people who are wealthy, and these she spots. She\nwatches their every movement, and if the slightest indiscretion is\ncommitted it does not escape her eye. She knows the names, business,\nand homes of all the gentlemen they meet, and when and where they meet\nthem.\n\nThe season ended, the facts she has obtained are in the hands of the\nmale partner, and he studies them. Selecting his victim, he arranges\nto meet her, as if by chance, usually in one of the leading retail\nestablishments of the city where she resides. He approaches and\naddresses her with the greatest cordiality, expressing surprise at the\nunexpected meeting. She is generally surprised, and, of course, fails\nto recognize him. Then he uses the name of one of the gentlemen she\nhas met in the east, recalls who introduced them, where the meeting\noccurred, and, in fact, all about it. Then she recalls it, or thinks\nshe does, and it ends in her inviting him to call at her home. Here is\nthe web quite complete.\n\nHe calls, and, of course, when her husband is out, and may repeat the\ncall several times. Then he springs the trap. During one of his visits\na note arrives for the lady threatening disclosures unless paid, say,\n$100. Even if innocent of any wrong, the woman is alarmed and shows\nthe blackmailer the note. He appears greatly alarmed also, declares\nthat he is a married man, and that to have his visits known would ruin\nhim. He argues that the money would better be paid. He has only $40\nabout him, but if the hostess will advance the balance of course she\nshall lose nothing. She does it, and is thereafter in the power of the\nblackmailer.\n\n\n\"BOGUS DETECTIVE\" GAME.\n\nA scamp, claiming to be a detective, often visits a reputable business\nman, having gained knowledge of indiscretion early in life. To hush\nit up they will demand from time to time money, under threats of\nexposure, thus causing the person to commit crime after crime to\nsatisfy the heartless leech, who never stops until his victim is\nruined.\n\nIn a similar manner does the alleged detective blackmail a man who has\ncommitted a crime and who has been imprisoned for it. Upon his release\nthe man may feel like reforming and becoming a good citizen if given\nthe chance, but this the detective will not permit, for as soon as\nhe notices the ex-convict he will say, \"Look here, young fellow, you\nknow my name and address, and when I am in of an evening I want you\nto come and see me or I'll have you run in.\" The fear of being \"run\nin\" forces the man who has a desire to do right to steal to satisfy\nthe blackmailing demands of this corrupt class of people. If the\nex-convict obtains employment he is worked in a similar manner, under\nthreats of exposure to his employer, and so forced to steal, and then\nthe smart detective will exclaim, \"There is no reformation in that\nfellow; I knew he would steal. He will never stop.\"\n\n\nSTOREKEEPER SCAMPS.\n\nOne of the most contemptible of creatures is the storekeeper who has\ncaught some one (who has the appearance of having money), stealing\nsome trifling article, and will exclaim, \"Here, here! I have had\nstolen three hundred dollars' worth of goods by some one, and if you\nwill settle for all I have had stolen, I will let up on you, and not\nprosecute.\"\n\nThese cowardly methods are simply mentioned to show to what depths\nof meanness some men will descend, and are not to be classed with\nthe professional thief, with whom stealing is a trade. As to how the\nfemale blackmailer can be foiled, the remedy is obvious, and no man\nwho possesses proper self-respect will ever become a victim.\n\n\nHOW FAKE \"JOURNALISTS\" WORK.\n\nThe blackmailer first obtains some information about the early life of\nthe person he intends to approach, and there are very few men who have\nnot, in their youthful days, committed some indiscretion which might\nbe brought against them after reaching maturer years. An escapade with\na woman, or a mischievous boyish prank which proved more serious than\nwas intended, are the usual indiscretions selected, and there can\nalways be found plenty of gossips who are only too willing to relate\nfull particulars. The information thus obtained is written up in a\nsensational style, and is taken to a cheap printing office, where it\nis put in type for a trifling cost.\n\nA slip, or what is known in a printing office as a \"proof,\" is then\nprinted, and armed with this the blackmailer pays a visit to the\nperson he intends to fleece. He represents himself as being connected\nwith a reputable newspaper, and says that he has been sent to get\nthe \"other side of the story,\" at the same time producing the slip\non which is printed the startling tale, which, if made public, would\nin all probability seriously effect the social standing and the\ncommercial integrity of the intended victim. In the majority of cases\nthe person approached will at once inquire how much the newspaper\nwould pay for such an article, and the reply usually is, \"From twenty\nto twenty-five dollars.\" \"Suppose I pay for the article instead of the\nnewspaper?\" says the victim, \"and I give you fifty dollars, wouldn't\nthat repay you for your trouble in writing the article?\" This is\njust what the blackmailer has been waiting for. He hems and haws for\nawhile, so as not to appear too anxious, or for the purpose of getting\na higher bid, but the interview usually winds up in his securing a sum\nof money to suppress the information.\n\nAs he is leaving the house it may occur to the victim that as long\nas the story is known to the editor of the paper there may be a\npublication anyhow, and on this point he makes inquiry. \"Oh,\" says\nthe blackmailer, \"there will be no danger of that. I will report that\nI have fully investigated the story, and that there is not a word of\ntruth in it, and, of course, they will not dare to run the risk of\nbeing sued for heavy damages for printing it.\"\n\n\nFEW \"BEATS\" AMONG REPORTERS.\n\nThere is no necessity for any man being victimized by the \"newspaper\nbeat.\" In the first place, no reputable newspaper ever puts a\ndamaging story in type before every side of it has been thoroughly\ninvestigated. The very fact of a man exhibiting a \"proof\" is\nevidence that he is a fraud and has no newspaper connection. It can\nbe said with truth that the repertorial profession of America has\nfewer \"beats\" in it than any other profession or business that can\nbe mentioned. The majority of reporters are ambitious to gain higher\npositions, and it is a rare thing to find a man regularly connected\nwith a newspaper descending to such trickery. If he is a genuine\nreporter he will exhibit his credentials, and should he be assigned\nto investigate a story that effects the standing of a respectable\ncitizen, and be offered a bribe, he would undoubtedly publish that\nfact as an additional proof of the truth of what he has written. The\ntreatment for this kind of a blackmailer is to kick him out of the\nhouse, and bid him do his worse. Depend upon it, the \"scandal\" will\nnever become public.\n\n\nTHE NEW YORK WAY.\n\nThey watch some disreputable resort of the higher order until they see\nsome respectable looking man or woman coming out of it. Suppose it is\na woman, who may or may not have gone there for an improper purpose.\nThe blackmailer follows her home, thus ascertaining her place of\nresidence. The next day he calls upon her. He puts on an air of deep\nsolemnity.\n\n\"I am an agent,\" says he, \"employed by a society to ascertain the\ncharacter of certain suspected houses. I saw you enter one of them\nyesterday and know that you remained there more than an hour. You know\nits character, and I shall, therefore, subpoena you as a witness.\"\nThen he puts his hand in his inside pocket, as if to get the subpoena.\n\nOf course he hasn't any, but the woman usually faints about this time,\nand on her recovering is usually willing to take the jewels off her\nwrists and fingers, if she has no money, to buy her immunity from the\nsubpoena. Once she makes a payment she is lost and has to continue it\nmonth after month, and year after year, till some kind of a scandal\nbreaks out and she finds, with shame and sorrow, that her previous\npayments have only put off the evil day.\n\n\n\n\nGAMBLING AND CRIME.\n\nBEST CURE FOR GAMBLING: TEACH PUPILS IN SCHOOL LAWS OF CHANCE.\n\n     Gambling Device Swindle Is Exposed in the Army and\n     Navy--The Scope of Fraud Is World-Wide.\n\n     There Is No Such Thing As An Honest Gambler--Suicides Are\n     Common--Gambling Kings Go Broke, and Often Die in the\n     Poorhouse--It Is a Hard, Cold, Brutal Road the Gambler\n     Travels--It Ends Badly.\n\n\nWe do not believe that many young men DELIBERATELY take up the\ngambler's career. They drift into it through weakness, temptation or\naccident. If any young man DOES imagine that in the gambler's life\nhe can find more money, less work and more happiness than in honest\nliving and honest work, he is the victim of a dangerous delusion.\n\nA most miserable creature is the gambler. He knows himself, and\ntherefore he hates himself.\n\nNo man can gamble and be honest, even with his friends, even with his\nfamily. The idea of the gambler is to get from another man what he has\nnot earned from that man, giving nothing in exchange. And when a man\nspends his time trying to get away the money of others with no return\nhe soon drifts into throwing aside ALL honesty, even the gambler's\nbrand.\n\nThe unsuccessful gambler is one of the worst of wrecks. He runs his\nlittle course of dissipation, dishonesty, cheating and swindling. He\nis over-matched and eliminated by the bigger, keener, self-controlled\ngambler, who eats him up as the big spider eats up the little spider.\nHanging around saloons, begging for a little money with which to\nbet, doing the dirty work of the bigger gamblers--that is the fate of\nthe little gambling cast-off. He is not worth talking about.\n\n[Illustration: THE FOOLISHLY HAPPY LIFE.\n\nARTIST PALENSKE herewith forcefully presents the lamentable contrast\nof the man who delights to play poker when his boon companions call,\nand his other self when the wife pitifully and hopelessly pleads for\nmoney to meet household expenses. The \"poker fiend\" will lose his\nweek's wages in a night. Sometimes, to boot, he loses money not his\nown, but he thinks it the part of the \"game sport\" if he hides his\nmisfortunes behind the mask of a smile. \"Be a good loser\" is his\nnever-failing motto. In the long run it is the neglected wife and\nfamily that are the REAL LOSERS.]\n\nThe gambler's life is simply the life of a criminal. And, like every\nother successful criminal, the successful gambler has got to work\nvery hard. What the burglar gets, what the pickpocket gets, what the\ngambler gets, is money painfully accumulated. The successful burglar,\nor pickpocket, or gambler must work hard and be forever on the alert.\nHe must be remorselessly cruel in taking money from those that cannot\nstand the loss. He must be indifferent to all sense of decency, for he\nknows that he is robbing women and children.\n\nThe criminal in ANY line, gambler or other, cannot be a self-indulgent\nman if he is to be successful. The young man who imagines that the\ngambler's life is a gay and easy one is badly mistaken. If he tries it\nhe will live to envy ANY honest man who has a right to look other men\nin the face.\n\n\nWHY GAMBLING MAKES MEN COMMIT CRIMES.\n\nThe statistics of crime prove beyond all cavil that gambling is the\nking's highway to fraud and theft. This is not merely because it\nloosens general morality and in particular saps the rationale of\nproperty, but because cheating is inseparably associated with most\nactual modes of gambling. This does not imply that most persons who\nbet are actually cheats or thieves; but persons who continue to be\ncheated or robbed, half conscious of the nature of the operations, are\nfitting themselves for the other and more profitable part if they are\nthrown in the way of acquiring a sufficient quantity of evil skill or\nopportunity. The \"honor\" of a confirmed gambler, even in high life,\nis known to be hollow commodity, and where there is less to lose in\nsocial esteem even this slender substitute for virtue is absent. What\npercentage of \"men who bet\" would refuse to utilize a secret tip of\na \"scratched\" favorite or the contents of an illegally disclosed\nsporting telegram? The barrier between fraud and smartness does not\nexist for most of them.\n\n[Illustration: (Gamblers cheating at cards)]\n\n\nNO BASIS FOR LIVELIHOOD.\n\nSerious investigation of the gambling process discloses the fact\nthat pure gambling does not afford any economic basis of livelihood,\nsave in a few cases where, as at the roulette table or in a lottery,\nthose who gamble know and willingly accept the chances against them.\nAnd even in the case of the roulette table the profits to the bank\ncome largely from the advantage which a large fund possesses in play\nagainst a smaller fund; in the fluctuations of the game the smaller\nfund which plays against the bank is more than likely at some point in\nthe game to be absorbed so as to disable the player from continuing\nhis play.\n\nIf a man with $5,000 were to play \"pitch and toss\" for $5 gold pieces\nwith a number of men, each of whom carried only $50, he must, if they\nplayed long enough, win all their money. So, even where skill and\nfraud are absent, economic force is a large factor in success.\n\n\nTEMPTATION TO EMBEZZLE.\n\nSince professional gambling in a stock broker, a croupier, a\nbookmaker, or any other species involves some use of superior\nknowledge, trickery, or force, which in its effect on the \"chance\"\namounts to \"loading\" the dice, the non-professional gambler\nnecessarily finds himself a loser on any long series of events. These\nlosses are found, in fact, to be a fruitful cause of crime, especially\namong the men employed in business where sums of money belonging to\nthe firm are passing through their hands. It is not difficult for a\nman who constantly has in his possession considerable funds which he\nhas collected for the employer to persuade himself that a temporary\nuse of these funds, which otherwise lie idle, to help him over a brief\nemergency, is not an act of real dishonesty. He is commonly right in\nhis plea that he had no direct intention to defraud his employer.\nHe expected to be able to replace the sum before its withdrawal was\ndiscovered. But since legally a person must be presumed to \"intend\"\nthat which is a natural or reasonable result of his action, an\nindirect intention to defraud must be ascribed to him. He is aware\nthat his act is criminal as well as illegal in using the firm's money\nfor any private purpose of his own. But in understanding and assessing\nthe quality of guilt involved in such action, two circumstances which\nextenuate his act, though not the gambling habit which has induced it,\nmust be taken into account. A poor man who frequently bets must sooner\nor later be cleared out and unable, out of his own resources, to meet\nhis obligations. He is induced to yield to the temptation the more\nreadily for two reasons. First, there is a genuine probability (not so\nlarge, however, as he thinks) that he can replace the money before any\n\"harm is done.\" So long as he does replace it no harm appears to him\nto have been done; the firm has lost nothing by his action.\n\n\nHOW COMMERCE CONDONES CRIME.\n\nThis narrower circumstance of extenuation is supported by a broader\none. The whole theory of modern commercial enterprise involves using\nother people's money, getting the advantage of this use for one's self\nand paying to the owner as little as one can.\n\nA bank or a finance company is intrusted with sums of money belonging\nto outsiders on condition that when required, or upon agreed notice,\nthey shall be repaid. Any intelligent clerk in such a firm may be well\naware that the profits of the firm are earned by a doubly speculative\nuse of this money which belongs to other people; it is employed by the\nfirm in speculative investments which do not essentially differ from\nbetting on the turf, and the cash in hand or other available assets\nare kept at a minimum on the speculative chance that depositors will\nnot seek to withdraw their money, as they are legally entitled to\ndo. In a firm which thus lives by speculating with other people's\nmoney, is it surprising that a clerk should pursue what seems to him\nsubstantially the same policy on a smaller scale? It may doubtless be\nobjected that a vital difference exists in the two cases: the investor\nwho puts his money into the hands of a speculative company does so\nknowingly, and for some expected profit; the clerk who speculates\nwith the firm's money does so secretly, and no possible gain to the\nfirm balances the chance of loss. But even to this objection it is\npossible to reply that recent revelations of modern finance show that\nreal knowledge of the use to which money will be put cannot be imputed\nto the investor in such companies, and that, though some gain may\npossibly accrue to him, such gain is essentially subsidiary to the\nprospects of the promoters and managers of these companies.\n\n[Illustration: (Group of gamblers commuting)]\n\n\nWHEREIN SPECULATION DIFFERS.\n\nIt is true that these are not normal types of modern business; they\nare commonly designated gambling companies, some of them actually\ncriminal in their methods. But they only differ in degree, not in\nkind, from a large body of modern businesses, whose operations are so\nhighly speculative, their risks so little understood by the investing\npublic, and their profits apportioned with so little regard to the\nbody of shareholders, as fairly to bring them under the same category.\nIn a word, secret gambling with other people's money, on the general\nline of \"heads I win, tails you lose,\" is so largely prevalent\nin modern commerce as perceptibly to taint the whole commercial\natmosphere. Most of these larger gambling operations are either\nnot illegal or cannot easily be reached by law, whereas the minor\ndelinquencies of fraudulent clerks and other employes are more easily\ndetected and punished.\n\nBut living in an atmosphere where secret speculation with other\npeople's money is so rife, where deceit or force plays so large a\npart in determining profitable coups, it is easy to understand how an\nemploye, whose conduct in most matters is determined by imitation,\nfalls into lax ways of regarding other people's money and comes in an\nhour of emergency to \"borrow\" the firm's money. This does not excuse\nhis crime, but it does throw light upon its natural history.\n\n\nWHEN IT WILL CEASE.\n\nPublicity and education are, of course, the chief instruments for\nconverting illegitimate into legitimate speculation, for changing\ncommercial gambling into commercial foresight. This intelligent\nmovement toward a restoration of discernible order and rationality\nin business processes, by eliminating \"chances\" and placing the\ntransfer of property and the earning of industrial gains on a more\nrational foundation, must, of course, go with other movements of\nsocial and industrial reforms which aim simultaneously at the basis of\nreformation of the economic environment. Every step which places the\nattainment of property upon a sane rational basis, associating it with\nproportionate personal productive effort, every step which enables men\nand women to find orderly interests in work and leisure by gaining\nopportunities to express themselves in art or play under conditions\nwhich stimulate new human wants and supply means of satisfying them,\nwill make for the destruction of gambling.\n\n\nGAMBLING DON'T PAY.\n\nTwo-fifths of all the crimes committed every year are estimated to be\nattributable to race tracks. Five men have been convicted this year\nof stealing money from the United States postoffice, and every one\nof them confessed he lost the money at race tracks. The mania for\ngambling is growing stronger, and as it grows the defenses of honesty\ncrumble away.\n\nWhat may be called gambling thieves are not so numerous in Chicago as\nin some other cities, for the reason that no race tracks are permitted\nto exist in Cook county. But there are many gambling swindlers in\nthis city. A large proportion of the men in the county jail are there\nbecause gambling wrecked morals in them, and hardly a week passes\nthat does not find at least one person before the courts charged with\nrobbery because money was wanted to bet.\n\nThis is not all of the injury that gambling does to the community.\nBecause the state's attorney's office and the police have not\nsuppressed gambling the city is full of sharpers who make their living\nout of men foolish enough to think that they can get rich by betting\non horse races, faro or roulette. These sharpers are an organized band\nof law breakers, preying on society, disorganizing it as far as is\npossible, their whole existence a menace to decency and order.\n\nThe passion for gambling can probably never be eradicated from human\nnature. But civilization should be able to prevent rogues and rascals\nfrom profiting by it in the way usual in Chicago. Professional\ngamblers--professional swindlers, should be sent to the penitentiary\nand kept there. There should be some means under the law to send all\nsuch to the penitentiary and keep them there.\n\n\nHOW TO END RACE-TRACK GAMBLING.\n\nRace-track gambling has unexpectedly become an issue of importance in\nNew York, and widespread discussion of means to rid the city of its\nrace tracks is taking place.\n\nDiscussion, however, is unnecessary. The way to end the plague of\nbetting on races is plain. Let the grand jury indict officials of\nthe Western Union Telegraph Company for complicity in bookmaking and\nsend them to jail. Without gambling race tracks would be deserted.\nWithout the aid of the Western Union there would be no gambling worth\nmentioning. Strike at the Western Union and the race tracks would go\nout of existence.\n\nThe Western Union Company is the one great encourager of gambling in\nthis country. But for its reports of races, hundreds of thousands of\nyoung men would be saved from ruin every year. It is in partnership\nwith sharpers who fleece the foolish. It shares their gains in payment\nfor the use of its wires. The money that flows into its coffers from\nthat source is taken by trickery from the public. The race track\nswindlers rob a man and hand over a part of their loot to the Western\nUnion, because without the Western Union's assistance they could not\nhave robbed him.\n\n[Illustration: Do they think about us at home? We air having such a\ngood time hear a lone.]\n\nBut for the Western Union Telegraph Company not a single race track\nwould be in operation in the United States, for without the Western\nUnion's aid race tracks would not be profitable.\n\nThe way to stop race tracks gambling and drive race courses out of\nexistence is to compel the Western Union to observe the law which\nforbids just such practices as those of which it is guilty every day.\nThat can be done only by sending a few Western Union officials to\njail and keeping them there until their company concludes to dissolve\npartnership with crooks.\n\n\nLEARN EARLY NOT TO GAMBLE; TEACH PUPILS LAW OF CHANCE.\n\n    Mere driftwood on a restless wave;\n      A shuttlecock that's tossed by Fate;\n    Year follows year into the grave,\n      Whilst thou dost cry, \"Too late! Too late!\"\n\n    A life that's but a wintry day,\n      Whilst chilling storms blow thee about;\n    A tempter thou durst not say nay;\n      A conscience long since put to rout.\n\n    Who gets by play a loser is;\n      The gambler stakes his very heart;\n    What's prodigally won's not his;\n      Who wagers takes the knave's foul part.\n\n    Thou shouldst not steal nor covet what\n      Another hath by labor earned;\n    No man who hath with wisdom wrought\n      But this base sport hath ever spurned.\n\n    Why haggard thus thy fair, young face\n      With vigils, passions, aimed at gain?\n    Is this thy mission in this place--\n      This idleness which brings disdain?\n\n    Be not a weakling, nor of wax;\n      Let mind be master over thee;\n    See that its shaping of thy acts\n      Prepares thee for eternity!\n\nArt thou thy brother's keeper?\n\nMost emphatically, yes, if he be not sufficiently strong to refrain\nfrom doing that which is injurious to himself and those dependent upon\nhim.\n\n\nPUBLIC LAX; GAMBLERS ACTIVE.\n\nWhen the law declares against gambling, and advertisement and sale\nof even \"fair\" gambling paraphernalia, why is it that the righteous\nmajority, which would not stoop to this form of speculation, sits\ninertly by, allows crooked devices to be advertised and sold, permits\nhundreds of men to waste their time and substance, and dozens to blow\nout their brains as a consequence?\n\nWhy do \"good\" men prate on \"personal liberty,\" which is merely their\nway of washing their hands of the responsibility for good government.\n\nDoes it eradicate the evil to say a man is a free moral agent and need\nnot lose his money gambling unless he wants to; that \"virtue is its\nown reward;\" that \"honesty is the best policy,\" or that taking without\ngiving return is a sin?\n\nWould it not be better for this inactive majority of talkers to elect\nincorruptible men who can do something besides talk--men who would\nenforce the laws and provide heavy punishments for concerns which make\ngambling machines in which the unsuspecting have absolutely no chance\nto win?\n\n\nARE WE FOLLOWING ROME TO THE PIT?\n\nAre we going the way of Greece and Rome? Is there a menace in the\nrapid increase of wealth in the United States? Are we allowing the\nmoral tone of society to sink?\n\nThe present tendency is toward speculation, even from childhood. In\nmost cities the child barely able to walk can find slot machines in\ncandy stores and drug stores from which he is made to believe he\ncan get something for nothing. Is this the proper training to give\nchildren? Is it right to get something for which no return of money\nor labor is given? And is it right to thus lure children when adults\nknow that their pennies more than pay for what they get--premiums and\nall?\n\nChildren in school should be taught to calculate probabilities as a\npart of their course in elementary arithmetic. Then they would know\nbetter than to play slot machines or buy prize packages. And when they\ngrew up they would shun the bookmaker, the lottery, and the roulette\nwheel.\n\nThe ordinary gambler speculates partly because he loves the excitement\nand thrill of the game, but mainly, he will assure you, as he assures\nhimself, he is buoyed up by the hope of winning. He does not stop\nto figure out his chances. If he sees a hundred to one shot he will\nplay it, seeing only that by risking a dollar he has a chance to win\na hundred. If he had been taught in school to see that really the\nchances were 200 to 1 against him, and that he was betting a dollar\nagainst fifty cents, he would keep his money in his pockets. Of course\nthe man who plays the races knows the odds of the book are against\nhim. He prides himself, however, that he is a wise reader of the \"dope\nsheet,\" and that can overcome the odds by a superior cunning.\n\nHe knows that he can't win on his luck, for this \"breaks even\" in the\nlong run.\n\n\nFATE'S CARDS ALWAYS STACKED.\n\nBut the man who plays against a machine, if he has taken the\nelementary course in the law of probabilities, can suffer under no\ndelusions and cannot give himself any reasonable excuse. He is bound\nto lose. The odds on the machine are against him. And even if they\nwere not, it is entirely likely that the machine would win. An old\ngambler contends that if a man matched pennies all day every day for a\nmonth against a purely mechanical device he would quit a heavy loser.\nThe only way he could keep even would be to start out with \"heads\"\nor \"tails,\" and then go away and leave the machine at work, never\nchanging his bet. If he remained to watch the operation he would,\nbe sure to lose his head and begin to \"guess\" against the relentless\nmechanism, and then he would lose.\n\nIn the ordinary coin-paying slot machine, the dial shows alternate\nreds and blacks, interspersed here and there with quarters, halves\nand, perhaps, $1. The player wins 5 cents on the black, 20 cents on\nthe quarter, 45 cents on the half, and 95 cents on the dollar. The\ndials differ, but suppose there are thirty reds, thirty blacks, ten\nquarters, five halves, and one dollar. The chances are against you,\nthen, on the red or black, 46 to 30; on the quarter, 66 to 24; on the\nhalf, 71 to 24, and on the dollar, 75 to 19. Most players, it is said,\nprefer the larger sums as a hazard in the coin machines, although the\nprobabilities against them are much greater. Again, they are dazzled\nby the chance of winning a large sum at a small risk. Really, they are\nbetting their nickel against 3 cents on the red or black, and against\n2 cents or less on the larger sums.\n\n\nCHILDREN THROW AWAY MONEY.\n\nIf the children knew this they would not fool away their money in\nthe machines when they go for a boat ride on the lake, and it is\nreasonable to suppose that grown men and women would beware of them\nif they had learned to figure chances when they were in school. In\nthe penny machines in the cigar stores the probabilities are harder\nto figure. You play a cent in the machine, and if you get two pairs\nfrom a revolving pack of cards, always exposing the faces of five, you\nwin a 5-cent cigar. In most of the machines you must get \"jacks up\nor better\" in order to win. Any poker player will bet you a chip on\nany deal that you will not have as good as a pair of trays, and the\nchances that you will have two pairs as good as jacks up must be at\nleast twenty to one.\n\nSome of the machines consist of wheels of fortune which revolve from\nthe weight of the penny dropped in the slot. In any event the child\ngets a penny's worth of goods, and there are chances to get two or\nfive cents' worth. Gum machines give an alleged cent's worth of gum,\nwith a chance for a coupon, which is good for a nickel's worth without\nextra charge.\n\n[Illustration: (Men playing slot machine)]\n\nHow many steps is this apparently harmless form of amusement removed\nfrom the deceptive slot machines in cigar stores? And, in turn,\nhow many steps are these cigar machines removed from those in the\nsaloons? The boy who wins five cents worth in the candy store will\ntake cigarette tobacco or a cigar, if the dealer be unprincipled.\nNext he tries for a cigar in a cigar store, and then for a cigar in a\nsaloon. If he is lucky in the last named, he is asked to a friendly\ngame of poker. Beyond asking if it is a pleasure to either lose to or\nwin from a friend, and to express the opinion that even though the\ngame be perfectly square, and there be no rake-off, it still remains\ntrue that the time lost, and money spent for drinks and cigars, far\noutweigh in value any pleasure that may be experienced.\n\n\nCONFEDERATES USED.\n\nMen who make a business of conducting and playing poker games stop at\nnothing to get the money. The expenses of running the place, and the\nfree lunches, drinks and cigars dispensed must be paid for by some\none, and the proprietor is not in business to lose money. The game in\nwhich there is no rake-off cannot possibly be square, and where there\nis a rake-off the odds against you are prohibitive, if you play fair.\nWith seven men in a game of \"draw,\" three of whom are \"house\" men, the\namount which goes into the \"kitty\" nightly is usually about equal to\nthe losses of the other cheat who dares not be found out.\n\n\nCHEATING DEVICE IN A SLOT MACHINE.\n\nOrdinarily the owners and saloonkeepers divide the winnings of all\nslot machines. In a fair machine the winnings fall into the receptacle\nA. Most of the money gambled by players found its way into this\ndepository. It did not please the owner of this machine to share his\nprofits equally with the saloonkeeper. The winning player was paid\nfrom the nickels which lined a zig-zag chute ending at C. The owner\nchanged this scheme by inserting the secret bag B. Then he cut a hole\nin the chute at D. and arranged a spring which diverted one out of\nthree nickels into B. As long as the chute was empty below the point\nof entrance of A the nickels kept on filling the zig-zag runway.\n\n[Illustration: Slot Machine Proves a Fraud.]\n\nWhen the machine was seized, in the box where all the gains were\nsupposed to be, $60.20 was found. These two sums represented the total\nproceeds of a day.\n\nConfederates, mirrors, words, signs and hold-outs are used. A player\ndealing from a stacked deck will inform his confederate how many cards\nto draw by uttering a sentence containing that number of words. Men\nlounging behind a player will \"tip off\" his hand. Cards are marked in\na manner imperceptible to the eye of the novice, and sometimes liquid\nrefreshment is spilled on the table in front of the dealer, so that\nhis opposite can read the reflections of the cards as they are dealt\nface downward across the board. The last-named scheme is used where\nthe table has no covering.\n\nThere are many who believe that talks of crookedness at card tables\nare only sermons by \"goody-goodies,\" who know not whereof they speak.\nLet the following advertisement, recently sent broadcast over the\ncountry by a large concern located in the business center of one of\nAmerica's largest cities, refute such claims:\n\n     HOLD OUTS.\n\n     \"CORRESPOND WITH US BEFORE BUYING OF OTHERS.\"\n\n     We have the finest line in the country, and every machine\n     is made to get the money--not for ornament, and accuracy.\n     Is as perfect as a watch. Works with a knee movement, and\n     by a slight movement everything disappears. If they have\n     played cards all their lives they will stand it.\n\n     Our price only $125.00.\n\nThe circular also mentioned dozens of other crooked devices at lesser\nprices, and contained illustrations showing how the machines work. Can\nthere be any doubt these are used when concerns devote their entire\ntime to manufacturing them and can get such high prices?\n\n[Illustration: FIG. 27.--Showing card held under the arm.]\n\n[Illustration: FIG. 28.--Ring Hold-out.]\n\n[Illustration: FIG. 20. '_Table-reflector._--Fastens by pressing steel\nspurs into under side of table. A fine glass comes to the edge of\ntable to read the cards as you deal them off. You can set the glass at\nany angle or turn it back out of sight in an instant.']\n\n[Illustration: (Reflector reflecting card)]\n\nThe sleeve hold-out above mentioned, is made of a hair cloth sideway,\nabout the same size as a deck of cards, with its narrow sides laid\nin fine, plaited folds, so that it will either lie flat or expand.\nThis is sewed in the sleeve of the coat or shirt and reaches from the\ncuff to the elbow joint. One of the wide sides is sewn or pasted to\nthe cuff, both ends being open. At the elbow a strap fits around the\narm, to which is attached a metal tube that reaches down to the near\nend of the sleeve, with a pulley attached to the end. A short wide\nelastic is also attached to the strap, and to the elastic is fastened\na metal clamp that holds the cards. A cord is attached to this clamp,\nwhich runs down and over the pulley, then back to the elbow through\nthe metal tube, thence to the shoulder, through the clothing to the\nbody, thence down through the loop at the heel, with a hook attached\nto the end. The cord passes through a flexible tube from the elbow to\nthe ankle. This tube will bend easily, but will not flatten, and is\nattached to the clothing with string ties to keep it in line with the\nbody. Its use is to prevent the cord from ticking or binding.\n\nTo work this hold out the hook at the end of the cord is fastened to\nthe loop of the shoe on the opposite foot. When the feet are spread\napart the act causes the cord to draw the clamp referred to down\nthrough the sideway and to the near end of the sleeve. Any cards that\nare in it will reach into the palm of the hand, where they can be\ntaken out or placed back into the clamp. By drawing the feet together\nagain the cord relaxes, and the elastic will draw the clamp and the\ncards it contains back up the slideway to its place near the elbow.\nThere are other similar hold-outs. Don't let them hold you up.\n\n\nMARKED CARDS.\n\nMarked cards are known among gamblers as \"Paper,\" and are considered\nan article of utility in draw poker. The dealer, should he be a second\ndealer, will deal second to himself instead of reading the hand of his\nopponent's, thus giving himself a pair, two pair, threes or whatever\nhe wishes. Marked cards are used by those who are not second dealers,\nas they are often able to fill a hand by holding a card in the hand\nto correspond to the card on the top of the pack, and in any case\nenabled to read opponent's hands and play accordingly. They are\nperhaps the greatest advantage to a professional second dealer, as by\ndrawing a bob-tail card of any kind he can spoil the chances of an\nhonest player, however, skillful. People at large are becoming aware\nof many of the schemes used in swindling, but so fast as the public\nbecomes acquainted with a scheme, the shark invents something to take\nits place or practices the old one until he has it so fine under his\nmanipulation it is hardly recognizable. A professional gambler is soon\nknown. Even if he is never detected cheating, he is given credit for\nit.\n\n[Illustration: Caught Working the Sleeve Hold-out.]\n\n[Illustration: FIG. 31. Hold-outs.]\n\n\nCARDS MARKED WITH FINGER NAILS.\n\nThis is a mark put on the cards during the progress of the game, with\nfinger nail or thumb nail. It is put on so that the gambler may know\njust what his opponent holds. The ace is marked with a straight line\nor mark in upper right hand corner. The king, is a straight line\nabout one-half inch long in the center of the card. The queen is a\nstraight line a half inch longer than the king. The jack is a straight\nline about the center of the card. The ten spot is designated by a\nstraight line or mark in the same position as the ace. The nine spot\nis a slanting line in position of king. The eight is a slanting line\nin position of queen. Seven is a slanting line in position of jack.\nThe six is denoted by a straight line in position of ace, running\nacross the card at right angles to the ace mark. The five is same\nas six in position of king. The four is the same as five and six in\nposition of queen. The tray is same mark in position of jack. Deuce is\na cross below the jack sign. The mark denoting the suit of the card is\nplaced in the center of the top of the card. Hearts are designated by\na perpendicular line at the center end of the card. Clubs are shown\nby a horizontal line in the same position. Diamonds are shown by a\nslanting line in the same position. And of course, as hearts, clubs\nand diamonds are marked, a card without a mark would be a spade. This\nis one of the most dangerous tricks, as it is done during the progress\nof the game, and unless some one knows something about it, it would\nnever be detected.\n\n\nTHE DOUBLE DISCARD.\n\nThis is used by many of the gamblers, and is done through the neglect\nof the players. The man doing this will always draw three cards, no\nmatter what he may hold in his hand. It is done by placing the cards\nhe wishes to keep on top of the ones he wishes to discard, and laying\nthem down beside him, ostensibly discarding them. As he is given his\nthree cards he looks them over and has eight cards out of which to\npick his hand. Suppose in his original hand he held three diamonds and\na club; he places the three diamonds beside him and calls for three\ncards, holding one diamond and the club in his hand. When his cards\nare dealt him he has five cards out of which to pick two diamonds. He\nselects two cards and discards three cards; at the same time he picks\nup the three cards that he discarded first. Very few are expert enough\nto this trick without detection.\n\n\nCHECK SIGNS.\n\nThis is a set of signs made with the use of checks. In making these\nsigns a white check counts one, a piece of silver or a  check\ncounts five; often when  checks or silver are not handy,\nmatches are used instead. The count of checks corresponds to the size\nof the cards. One  check would denote a pair of fives, or three\nfives, when used in a certain way, which I will endeavor to explain\nfully. Of course, all these different signs are used between two men,\nwho are in league with each other in order to cheat a game. The first\nsign in this set is the sorting of cards, which means that the hand\nis no good. Should this sign not be given, the partner will look for\nthe sign denoting what is held. When one man wishes to show that he\nhas a pair, he holds the check or cards in the right hand, slightly to\nthe left of his body. For instance, a white cheek held in the right\nhand, nearly in front of the heart, would denote that a pair of aces\nwere held. Two checks, a pair of deuces, and so on to eleven, which\nsignifies jacks; twelve, queens, and thirteen, kings. For two pair,\nthe head pair is shown, the checks being held squarely in front. For\ninstance, aces up would be shown by holding one white check up in\nfront of the body. For three of a kind, the same sign is used, merely\nthe check is held a little to the right of the body. Three  and\none white would signify that a straight was held; four  and one\nwhite would signify that a flush was held; five  and one white\ncheck would signify that a full house was held; six  and one\nwhite would mean four of a kind; two  checks, together in the\npalm of the hand, means a straight flush.\n\n\nUSES TO WHICH A PACK OF CARDS MAY BE PUT.\n\nA pack of cards may be used as a Bible, a prayer book, and an almanac.\nAs a Bible and prayer book, the ace should remind you that there is\none God; the deuce, of the Father and Son; the tray, of the Father,\nSon and Holy Ghost; the four, of the four evangelists--Matthew, Mark,\nLuke and John; the five of the five virgins, who had filled and\ntrimmed their lamps; the six, of the command to labor six days a week;\nthe seven, of the seventh day, which God blessed and hallowed; the\neight, of the eight righteous persons who were saved in the ark, Noah,\nhis wife and three sons and their wives; the nine, of the nine lepers\nwho were cleansed by our Savior and never thanked Him for it; the\nten, of the ten commandments; the king, of the Great King Almighty:\nthe queen, of Sheba, who visited Solomon; Solomon was the wisest man\nliving, and she was as wise a woman as he was a man; the knave, of\nJudas Iscariot, who betrayed our Savior.\n\nAs an almanac, count the spots, and you have three hundred and\nsixty-five, the number of days in a year. Count the cards, and you\nhave fifty-two, the number of weeks in a year. Count the suits, and\nyou have four, the number of weeks in a month. Count the face cards,\nand you have twelve, the number of months in a year. Count the tricks,\nand you have thirteen, and you have the number of weeks in a quarter.\n\n\nTHE BILL HAND.\n\nYou have often seen a lot of poker players playing with a lot of\nchecks stacked up in front of them and a few bills or greenbacks\nspread out in front of them, between checks and themselves. A player\nhaving his checks in this manner needs watching, for it is easy to\nslide a full hand or four of a kind under those bills whenever an\nopportunity occurs. Whenever a good fat pot appears he can use this\nhand which he has under the bills by simply putting his hand on top\nof the bills and turning them over, which brings the good hand on top\nand poor ones under the bills. He always makes a practice of laying\nhis cards down on the bills, and other players see it at different\ntimes and will think nothing of it. The only way to detect this is by\nmissing the five cards out of the pack, and one has to be a expert\nto miss five cards out of fifty-two without counting them, and after\nplaying a good hand in this way he must get rid of the deal hand,\nwhich is under the bills, in order to get ready to collect another\nhand for the next play. The principal thing about this work is to do\nit at the right time and with the right people.\n\n\nTOOTHPICK OR CIGAR SIGNS.\n\nA gambler will use a set of signs made with a cigar, pipe or toothpick\nto show his partner what he holds in his hand. The signs are as\nfollows: The cigar, pipe or toothpick placed in the left side of the\nmouth signifies a pair. On the right side two pair; in the center of\nthe month means threes. To signify that a straight is held the cigar\nis moved up and down with the fore finger. Working in the same manner\nwith the first and second finger denotes a flush. With the third\nfinger denotes a full house. With fourth finger means four of a kind.\nTo show the size of the hand the fingers are placed on the cigar,\npipe or toothpick in the following manner: Suppose a pair of aces are\nheld, the cigar is placed in the left hand corner of the mouth and\ntouched with the first finger of the right hand. Aces up or three aces\ncan be shown in the same way. The first finger denoting aces, the\nsecond kings, the third queens and the fourth jacks.\n\n\nGAMBLING DEVICE SWINDLE IN ARMY AND NAVY.\n\nScope of Fraud World-Wide--Soldiers and Sailors Victims of\nContrivances.\n\nOn May 19, 1906, Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge, with ten men,\nswooped down on: H. C. Evans, 125 South Clark street; George De Shone,\n462 North Clark street; Barr & Co., E. Manning Stockton, 56 Fifth\navenue. The offices were raided and sure-thing gambling devices valued\nat $5,000 seized and destroyed. H. C. Evans was arrested and fined\n$200; George De Shone was arrested and fined $100, and E. Manning\nStockton arrested and fined $25. Afterwards E. Manning Stockton was\nindicted, arrested and gave bonds, which he forfeited and then fled.\n\nDisclosure of conditions which so seriously threatened the discipline\nof the United States army and navy that the secretaries of the two\ndepartments, and even President Roosevelt himself, were called upon\nto aid in their suppression, were made in the Harrison Street police\ncourt following this arrest.\n\nIt was charged that a coterie of Chicago men engaged in making and\nselling these devices had formed a \"trust,\" and had for years robbed,\nswindled, and corrupted the enlisted men of the army and navy through\nloaded dice, \"hold-outs,\" magnetized roulette wheels, and other\ncrooked gambling apparatus.\n\n[Illustration: Electric Dice]\n\n[Illustration: The Way Some Cards Are Marked.]\n\nThe \"crooked\" gambling \"trust\" in Chicago spread over the civilized\nworld, had its clutches on nearly every United States battleship, army\npost, and military prison; caused wholesale desertions, and in general\ncorrupted the entire defense of the nation.\n\n[Illustration: REWARD TO THE PARTY BRINGING BACK CHICAGO'S GAMBLING\nKINGS.--GRAND JURY.]\n\n\nTRY TO CORRUPT SCHOOL BOYS.\n\nBesides the corruption of the army, these companies are said to have\naimed a blow at the foundation of the nation, by offering, through a\nmail order plan, for six cents, loaded dice to school boys, provided\nthey sent the names of likely gamblers among their playmates.\n\nThis plan had not reached its full growth when nipped. But the\ndisruption of the army and navy had been under way for several years,\nand had reached such gigantic proportions that the military service\nwas in danger of complete disorganization.\n\nThousands of men were mulcted of their pay monthly.\n\nDesertions followed these wholesale robberies. The War Department\ncould not find the specific trouble. Post commanders and battleship\ncommanders were instructed to investigate.\n\nThe army investigation, confirmed after the raid and arrests, showed\nthat the whole army had been honey-combed with corruption by these\ncompanies. Express books and registered mail return cards showed that\nmost of the goods were sold to soldiers and sailors.\n\n\nFORTS INFECTED BY EVIL.\n\nFort Riley, Cavite, P. I., Manila, P. I., Honolulu, the Alaskan army\nposts, Fort Leavenworth, Fort Reno, Fort Logan, Columbus Barracks,\nFort McPherson, were among the posts where hundreds of dollars worth\nof equipment was sent, and where thousands upon thousands of dollars\na month was the booty obtained by the Chicago trust on a commission\nbasis.\n\nBattleships in every squadron, the naval stations of this nation\nall through the world, navy yards, and other points where marines are\nstationed, have been loaded with the devices.\n\nIt was found, upon investigation, that \"cappers\" were selected from\nthe enlisted men. Agents, who ran the games on commission, were also\nfound. These men, dazzled by financial prospects, deserted in droves.\n\n\nMANY VICTIMS SUICIDES.\n\nThe men who were fleeced and had their small pay taken from them month\nafter month, became reckless. Some ended as suicides. Hundreds became\nunruly and were subjected to guard-house sentences. They deserted in\ntheir despair. The conditions in the navy were even worse. Scores of\nthe battleship crews would be in irons at a time.\n\nTo the honor of the service, it was found that no officers had ever\nparticipated in the corrupting vocation. It was the rank and file\nwho \"fell for it,\" as the gamblers said. They became either tools or\nvictims, to the extent, it was estimated, of 60 per cent.\n\n\nKING DEATH.\n\nAN AVERAGE OF 200 SUICIDES A YEAR AT MONTE CARLO--MANY BODIES ARE\nSECRETLY THROWN INTO SEA BY AUTHORITIES OF THIS, THE WORLD'S GREATEST\nGAMBLING HOUSE.\n\nPARIS, Nov. 20.--Three thousand known suicides and murders have been\ncommitted in Monte Carlo in the space of fifteen years. The known\nsuicides average fully 200 a year, and some weeks there have been as\nmany as three a day. The Casino authorities do everything to hush up\nscandals and news of tragedies. A large force of plain-clothes men are\nengaged to either prevent suicides or to hurry the body of the dead\nunfortunate out of the way. It is estimated that more than one-half of\nthe tragedies of Monte Carlo are never heard of except by the Casino\nstaff. The corpse is rushed quietly to the morgue--a secret morgue.\nHere it is kept some time to see whether relatives or friends are\ngoing to interfere or kick up a row.\n\n[Illustration: THE END OF THE ROAD]\n\n\nBODIES THROWN IN OCEAN.\n\nEvery once in a while a small steamer slips out of the harbor at dead\nof night. Its cargo is secured at the secret morgue. At sea the bodies\nare thrown overboard, duly weighted, without toll of bell or muttered\nprayer. There are countless graves of unknown dead in the Monte Carlo\ncemetery. But these are only those whose death has become known to the\npublic. The Casino authorities have a special bureau, whose duties\nare to relieve persons ruined at the tables. The ruined gambler can\nget from this bureau enough money to take him to his home, or to some\nspot far from Monaco. Few know of this, perhaps, or there would not\nbe so many deaths. The \"dead-broke\" gambler is taken through many\ninner chambers and before stern-faced men, to whom he has to tell his\nhistory in detail. He is also confronted with the different croupiers,\nwho testify as to whether he really lost as much as he may claim.\n\n\nBANISH THE DEAD BROKE.\n\nThen the wretched man has to sign a document banishing himself forever\nfrom Monaco. His name and particulars are written in the \"black\nbook,\" his photograph is taken and given to the doorkeepers and other\nofficials to study, and then the man is taken to the railway station,\na ticket bought, a few dollars given him, and an official escorts him\nas far as the frontier. Should he return it would not avail him. The\npolice would turn him back again into France or Italy. It is related\nthat an American who was \"broke\" and anxious to get back to the United\nStates heard of this feature of Monte Carlo. He had not gambled there\nbecause he had no money, but he managed to make his way to Monte Carlo\nand demanded to see the authorities. He coolly asked for a steamer\nticket to New York. Inquiries revealed that he had only just arrived\nin Monaco, and had never put a foot inside the Casino, but despite\nthis the authorities gave him a steerage ticket to New York and saw\nhim on his way.\n\n\nBONAPARTES BIG STOCKHOLDERS.\n\nThere is also the case of an important Indian army officer who went\nbroke. The authorities gave him first-class passage to Calcutta, and\n$250 expense money. He had lost several thousands. As much as $2,500\nhas been paid out to a big loser so that he could settle up his hotel\nbill and take himself and family home. Should such money be paid back\nthe Casino might again welcome the man. The sums usually paid range\nfrom $25 to $200, and an average of 1,000 people a year apply for this\nrelief. The profits of the Casino are immense. Last year they were\n$7,500,000, an increase of $760,000 over the previous year. Seventy\nper cent was paid to the shareholders. The majority of the shares are\nheld by the Blanc family, the leading member of which is the Princess\nMarie Bonaparte, whose father was Prince Roland Bonaparte, and mother\nthe daughter of M. Blanc, the founder of Monte Carlo. She is the\nwealthiest princess in the world, and was lately married to Prince\nGeorge of Greece, who is an impecunious princeling and needs the money.\n\n\nPRINCE OWNS NO STOCK.\n\nThe prince of Monaco has not a single share in the enterprise. But\nhe derives his entire income from the sum paid him by the Gamblers'\nCompany for the lease of Monaco. The prince is of especial interest to\nAmericans, because of his American wife. She was Miss Alice Heine of\nNew Orleans. When she married the prince she was a widow, the Dowager\nDuchess of Richelieu. The prince is a \"divorced\" man. He first married\nLady Mary, the daughter of the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, and a son\nand heir was born. But eleven years after the marriage the pair were\nso unhappy that an appeal was made to the pope. The Catholic church,\nof course, does not recognize divorces, but the pope issued a special\npronouncement declaring his 11-year-old marriage invalid, for the\nreason that the Lady Mary's mother \"over-persuaded her to marry.\"\n\n\nRECEIVES ENORMOUS INCOME.\n\nThe prince, in return for the gambling concession, has been getting an\nannual income of a quarter of a million dollars and all the expenses\nof running the State of Monaco, including the maintenance of the\narmy and the royal palace. He recently granted a further contract to\nthe \"Monaco Sea-Bathing Company,\" or to give the gambling concerns\nthe full title \"La Societ\u00e9 Anonyme des Bains de Mer et Cercle des\nEtrangers \u00e0 Monaco.\"\n\nThis concession now extends to 1947, and the annual income of the\nprince has been raised $100,000. Every ten years it will be raised an\nadditional $50,000. In six years time the Casino will also have to pay\nhim a lump sum down of $3,000,000. It is stated that the prince of\nMonaco is by no means in favor of the Casino, and that he abhors the\ngambling and the consequent scandal in his state, and that could he do\nso, he would at once stop it. But in the old original contract it was\nagreed that the concession should be extended to 1947, and the prince\nis not rich enough to break this contract and pay the indemnity which\nthe law would quickly assess.\n\n\nGAMBLING KINGS GO BROKE; OFTEN DIE IN THE POORHOUSE.\n\nSome one has advanced the statement that every human being is\na gambler at heart. Yet for a man to go into the business of\nestablishing a card gambling house under modern conditions is to\nattempt one of the riskiest businesses in the world. Recently one\nof the most noted gaming-house keepers in the country seems to have\nsuggested a further anomaly in the situation in his utterance in a\ncourt of record:\n\n\"When I conduct a house on a 10 per cent basis of profit it is only a\nmatter of time until my steady patron 'goes broke.'\"\n\nIn the face of this statement, however, the innocent layman may be\nstill further at sea when it is recalled by old habitues of the gaming\ntable that nearly every gambling king of modern history has finished\nclose to the poorhouse and the potter's field! How is it possible that\nthe gambler with the insidious, certain 10 per cent which inevitably\nwrecks the man who goes often enough to the green table almost\ninvariably dies in poverty?\n\n\nMUST HAVE FORTUNE TO INVEST.\n\nToday it is the gambler king who at least has an ephemeral show to\ngain fleeting riches. But in order that these riches shall approach\nriches as they are measured in other businesses, the man who opens the\ngambling house must have a fortune for the investment. His outlawed\nbusiness itself will make it certain that he pays the maximum rental\nor the highest price for the property which he chooses for occupancy.\nTo sustain this he will need to seek out the wealthy patron who not\nonly has money to lose, but who may have a certain influence which may\ntend toward immunity for keeper and player alike. The \"establishment\"\nwill need to have the best cuisine and the best cellars, with palatial\nfurnishings and a retinue of servants in full keeping.\n\nAnd somewhere money will be necessary in blinding officials to the\nexistence of an institution which is visible to the merest tyro in\npassing along the street.\n\nA constitution of iron, the absence of a nervous system, the\ndiscrimination of a King Solomon and the tact of a diplomat are\nrequisites for the successful gambling king. Considering the\nqualification of the man for such a place and the final ending of the\ngambling king's career, it might be a sociological study worth while\nto determine where, on a more worthy bent, such capacities in a man\nmight land him.\n\nIn real life, however, it must be admitted that the gambler king is\nlooked upon in exaggerated light. Almost without exception the big\ngambler is posing always. Conventionality has demanded it of him.\nBut for more than this, in order to command the following which\nhe desires, he must have a certain social side which is not too\nprominent, but which with tact and judgment he may bring out on\ndress parade. To the layman the gambler is the dark, sinister figure\npictured in melodrama. He bears the same relation to gambling that\nSimon Legree bore to the institution of slavery of fifty years ago.\n\n\nSTORY OF ONE GAMBLER KING.\n\nOne of the noted gamblers of his time in this country passed from\nlaboring on the docks into the prize ring. When his ring work was\nended the gambling house was an easy step onward in illegitimate\nfields. On the docks his reputation was not above a bit of \"strong\narm\" work in separating a man from the money which the dock walloper\nwanted. Naturally, under the Queensberry rules, there were things in\nthe ring which he could not do in overcoming an antagonist, and he\nlearned to make concessions to fairness--which was education.\n\nOpening a gambling house that was adapted to the wants of a rich\nclientele, it was a necessity that he preserve this educational\nregard for his patrons, and that he should add to it. Soon he was\nin a position where it was imperative that his reputation for fair\ndealing be kept intact. He became the \"gentleman gambler\" whose \"word\"\ncarried all the accepted concomitants of his gentleman's business. In\nthe course of events he attained a high legislative office under the\ngovernment. But it may be said for those who knew the man as a man,\nnot one ever ceased to regard him at heart as the dock walloper, with\nthe inherent and unreconstructed disposition to regard other men as\nlegitimate prey. Had other conditions and circumstances made a card\nsharp of him, he would have held to the promptings of his nature.\n\nIn the conduct of a gambling house of the first class, the gambling\nking needs for himself and for his patrons the assurance of\nuninterrupted play. Men of money and position will not go to a\nhouse where there is menace of a police raid. The small gambler may\nsubsidize the policeman on the beat in which his house stands, but he\ncannot placate the whole Police Department. And even when it is\nthought that the gambler king is impregnable in his castle someone may\nbreak over the barriers and raid the place in the name of the law and\norder.\n\n[Illustration: (Gambler passing card to partner by foot)]\n\n[Illustration: (Man getting caught passing card)]\n\nWithin a few years New York has given to the world some of the inside\nworking of the gambling business. When Jerome raided the place of\nplaces which had been considered immune, the proprietor of the house\nwas considered worth a million dollars. Before the litigation was done\nand the fine paid the gambler king was out $600,000, his \"club-houses\"\nwere closed, and he had been branded officially as a common gambler,\npursued in the courts for payment of lawyers' fees, which he\ndesignated as outrageous and a \"shrieking scandal.\" Yet this man was\nof the type whose word had been declared as good as his bond.\n\n\nDICE, FARO AND ROULETTE.\n\nDice, faro and roulette are the principal games of the gambling house\nand, considering these, the experienced player will tell you that he\nis suspicious of a \"petey\" in the dice box, a \"high layout\" in faro,\nand a \"squeezed wheel\" in roulette, in just the proportion that the\ngambling house keeper has not recognized that he cannot indulge them\nbecause of the fear of detection. The gambler holds to the gambler's\nview of the gambler--and it is not complimentary to the profession.\n\nThat the gentleman gambler is justified in his attitude toward the\ngentleman player, too, has been shown in the New York revelations.\nThere one gentleman player, loser to the extent of $300,000.\ncompromised with the \"bank\" for 130 bills of $1,000 denomination.\nThere a gentleman player who had lost $69,000 to the bank tried to\ncompromise on $20,000, but was in a position where the bank could\nhold him. How much the gambler king may loan and lose in the course\nof a year scarcely can be approximated. The gambling debt is \"a debt\nof honor,\" and even in business not all such debts are paid. Whether\na borrowed debt or a debt of loss to the bank, this honor is the\nsecurity, unless in emergency the gambler king discovers that he can\nblackmail with safety to his interests as a whole.\n\nIn general, the gambler who is \"on the square\" operates on a 10 per\ncent basis for his bank. In addition there is the \"unknown per cent\"\nwhich is his at the end of the year. The roulette wheel, for example,\npresents to the player just one chance in thirty-seven of winning on a\nsingle play, while the winning on that play is paid in the proportion\nof only 34 to 1.\n\n\nMORE NERVE TO WIN THAN LOSE.\n\nThe one great characteristic in human nature on which the gambler\ncounts is the fact that it requires more nerve in a man to win than\nis required of him to lose! It is startling for the layman to be told\nthat $5,000 in a night is a big winning for a player, while $5,000 is\nonly an ordinary loss in a big establishment.\n\nThis fact is based on subtle psychology. There are two types of\nplayers, one of which gambles when it is in a state of elation and\nthe other when in a state of depression. With either of these types\nwinning, it is a gambler's observation that the man who will play\nuntil he has lost $25,000 when luck hopelessly is against him cannot\nhold himself to the chair after he is $5,000 winner.\n\nGamblers have made money--fortunes--in times past, only to be buried\nin the potter's field. There are several reasons assignable for this\nend. Extravagant living appeals to the gambler, and when he has left\nhis own special line of gaming it does not appeal to him strongly as\neither pastime or means for recouping his fortune. If he turns to\ngaming at all it is likely to be in fields where he does not know the\ngame. Sometimes he goes to the Board of Trade--sometimes to the stock\nmarket. Playing there he is without system and without knowledge of\nconditions. He is likely to bull the grain market two days after the\nweather conditions have assured the greatest grain crop in history.\n\nOnce a gambler, always a gambler, is his condition; and it is only a\nmatter of time until someone has a game which beats him out.\n\n\nIT'S UP TO YOU, YOUNG MAN.\n\n    There are two trails in life, young man.\n      One leads to height and fame,\n    To honor, glory, peace and joy,\n      And one to depths of shame;\n    And you can reach that glorious height--\n      Its honors can be won--\n    Or you can grope in shame's dark night.\n      It's up to you, young man.\n\n    Stern duty guards the upper trail--\n      Exact obedience, too--\n    And he who treads it cannot fail\n      To win if he be true.\n    But tickle folly, gay with smiles,\n      Rules o'er the other one,\n    And leads to ruin with her wiles.\n      It's up to you, young man.\n\n    At parting of the trails you stand.\n      At early manhood's gate;\n    Your future lies in your own hand--\n      Will it be low or great?\n    If now you choose the trail of Right.\n      When you the height have won,\n    You'll bask in Honor's fadeless light--\n      It's up to you, young man.\n\n\n\n\nA HEARTLESS FRAUD.\n\nSCHOOLS TO TEACH SHOW-CARD WRITING CATCH MANY VICTIMS AMONG THE POOR\nGIRLS.\n\n\nDecember 5, 1905, J. H. Bell, the proprietor of a SHOW-CARD COLLEGE at\n21 Quincy St., was arrested and the place closed. Bell advertised for\nstudents to learn to write show-cards and signs. He is said to charge\n$1 for a course and to promise positions at large salaries as soon as\nthe course is completed.\n\nAfter the course has been finished and the tuition paid Bell is\ndeclared to have refused to give the graduates employment on the\nground that their work is unsatisfactory.\n\nA great many girls are attracted to the scheme, and sign contracts\nto pay Bell for the instruction in the belief that they will be\nbenefited. Bell tells them that he has customers who will purchase all\nthe cards they can make. They are to receive a few cents for each card\nas soon as they learn the business, but they are required to pay a\nfine of 2 cents for each card they spoil.\n\n\"They are set to work painting gold borders such as are seen in the\nwindows of the department stores, but the task is so difficult that\nonly a finished artist can do the work. Bell has a woman accomplice\nwho hustles into the office when it is filled with women and girls and\ntells how she makes from $25 to $30 a week painting cards. Her talk\nencourages the girls to keep on spoiling Bell's cards and increasing\nhis income.\n\n\nSWINDLER JUMPS BAIL.\n\n\"When taken before the court, Bell made a hard fight for freedom,\nbut he was held to the Criminal Court on five charges of obtaining\nmoney under false pretenses. Bonds were placed at $300 in each case by\nJustice Prindiville.\n\n\"He was unable to do the work he was requiring the girls to do, so\nwhen the grand jury saw through his scheme the five indictments were\npromptly returned.\n\n\"J. H. Bell jumped his bail, fled to Minneapolis, where he conducted\nthe same business. Here he was again arrested, fined and given so many\nhours to leave the city.\"\n\nMilwaukee, Wisconsin, was the next place Bell opened his Show-Card\nCollege. On the 28th of September, 1906, he was again arrested for\noperating a confidence game and fined $80.\n\nHe then went to St. Louis, Mo., and opened an office in the Century\nBuilding, under the name of the Clark Institute. Charges of swindling\nwomen who applied to learn card-writing were made against him and he\nwas arrested, but later released through some technicalities set up\nin the warrant of his arrest; also lack of evidence to support the\ncharges made in the warrant.\n\nThe newspapers published his swindling operations and on this account\nBell threatened to sue both the publishers and the police officials.\n\nDetective Wooldridge located him through an article which appeared\nin the St. Louis paper, which gave a description of his Show-Card\nCollege, which was being carried on there.\n\nJohn M. Collins, General Superintendent of Police, sent Bell's picture\nand his Bertillon system of measurements to the Chief of Police in St.\nLouis, and requested him to make the arrest. On the following day John\nM. Collins. Superintendent of Police, Chicago. Illinois, received the\nfollowing letter from E. P. Creecy, Chief of Police, St. Louis, Mo.:\n\n          St. Louis, Mo.,\n          Dec. 22, 1906.\n\n     JOHN M. COLLINS, ESQ.\n     Superintendent of Police,\n     Chicago, Ill.\n\n     Dear Sir:\n\n     Replying to your letter of Dec. 21, relative to J. H.\n     Bell, wanted in your city for obtaining money by means of\n     a confidence game, will say that W. H. Clark, office 354\n     Century Building, this city, was in the Court of Criminal\n     Correction this morning charged with larceny by trick, and\n     a _nolle prosequi_ was entered by the prosecuting attorney.\n     He answers the description of Bell and is undoubtedly the\n     same person, but I would suggest that you send someone to\n     identify him before the arrest is made, as he is making a\n     fight here on his case. Clark is carrying on the same kind\n     of business here as he did in your city.\n\n          Very respectfully,\n               E. P. CREECY,\n               Chief of Police.\n\nDetective Harry Harris of Chicago was sent to St. Louis to identify\nBell, and swore that in his belief Clark was Bell. The detective\ndepartment wanted the case continued until Friday, but Clark insisted\nupon immediate trial. Judge Sale held that the detective had not been\npositive enough in his identification.\n\nDetective Wooldridge arrived on the scene as Bell was leaving the\ncourt room after being discharged the second time by the court.\nDetective Wooldridge seized Bell and turned him over to a St. Louis\npolice officer and filed a new affidavit of positive identification\nthat Clark was Bell.\n\nHis lawyer demanded an immediate trial, but Detective Wooldridge\nsecured a two-day continuance to bring witnesses from Chicago to prove\nthe identity of Bell. This so enraged the attorney that he turned upon\nWooldridge and informed him that he would again free Bell and even\noffered to bet $200.\n\nHe further stated that he had asked Governor Folk not to grant\nrequisition papers for his client. Detective Wooldridge replied, \"Do\nyou remember Admiral George Dewey at Manila Bay who told Captain\nGridley to fire when he got ready?\"\n\nWooldridge further told him he didn't care any more for him than the\ndew that dropped on the jackass' mane. Wooldridge told the attorney\nthat Bell had defrauded over two hundred working girls in Chicago,\nIllinois, and that the Cook County grand jury had investigated the\nmatter, and returned five indictments against Bell, and the Honorable\nCharles S. Deneen, Governor of the State of Illinois, had caused to\nbe issued requisition papers for the arrest and apprehension of J. H.\nBell, and he had made Detective Wooldridge a special messenger to go\nto St. Louis, Mo., and bring Bell to Chicago where he could be placed\non trial to answer to the indictments that had been brought against\nhim.\n\nDetective Wooldridge stated that he had come three hundred miles\nto perform that mission and he intended that Bell should return to\nChicago with him.\n\nThe attorney replied \"he hardly thought the Honorable Governor Folk of\nMissouri would grant requisition papers on Bell.\"\n\nDetective Wooldridge told the attorney that he came for J. H. Bell\nand was fully determined to take him back to Illinois to stand trial\nand that he would cross the bridges as he came to them and burn them\nbehind him. He told Bell's attorney if the Honorable Governor Folk\nrefused to grant the first requisition papers, he would try on each of\nthe other indictments asking for requisition papers.\n\nIf this failed there was five forfeited bonds by which Bell could be\nbrought back to the State of Illinois on extradition papers.\n\nIf all this failed he had made arrangements to have him brought\nback by the strong arm of the United States Government, through an\nInspector of Mails and United States Deputy Marshal for using the\nmails for fraudulent purposes.\n\nWooldridge called up John M. Collins, General Superintendent of\nPolice, Chicago, Ill., by the long distance telephone and requested\nthe second set of requisition papers, certified copies of the five\nforfeited bonds, and that the bondsman be sent to St. Louis at once,\nwhich was done.\n\nThirty minutes after he left Bell's angry attorney, Wooldridge was\naboard a Missouri Pacific fast train, bound for Jefferson City,\nMo., to see Honorable Jos. Folk and lay before him the reason why\nrequisition papers should be granted. Arriving at Jefferson City at\n10 P. M., the following morning (which was Sunday morning) he made a\ndemand upon Jailer Dawson for the body of Bell. Jailer Dawson referred\nhim to Judge Sale. Wooldridge found Judge Sale at his home, who, after\nexamining his papers, found them all right and ordered the jailer to\nturn over Bell to Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge.\n\nBell was again brought to the office of the Chief of Police and\nconfronted by Wooldridge and Harris who arrested him.\n\nWhen J. H. Bell was arrested in Chicago December 5, 1905, Mr. Turner\ndefended him and afterwards went on Bell's bond for $1,500. Bell was\nturned over to Wooldridge who slipped a pair of handcuffs on him as he\nwas boarding a street car, landed him in East St. Louis, Ill., none\ntoo soon, as Bell's attorney had sent out a writ of _habeas corpus_\nand would watch all trains and stop the detective from taking Bell\nfrom the State of Missouri.\n\nWooldridge requested the Chief of Detectives to inform Bell's lawyer\nthat both he and Bell were now in the State of Illinois and their\naddress would be in Chicago, Ill., if he wished to see either of them.\n\nOne of the police officers at East St. Louis overheard Bell tell his\ncell-mate he would make his escape before he reached Chicago, and told\nhim to watch the newspapers the next day.\n\nThis information was given to Wooldridge.\n\nDetective Wooldridge had tickets over the Chicago and Eastern Illinois\nRailroad.\n\nThis train left at 11 P. M. at night and the first stop it made was\ntwenty miles north on the Missouri side of the river.\n\nWooldridge could not take his prisoner and board the train there on\naccount of _habeas corpus_ writs for Bell. Officers were watching all\ntrains expecting him to leave St. Louis. Wooldridge outwitted them\nby taking interurban street car, traveling some twenty-five miles in\ncompany with two officers whom the Chief of Police had sent along with\nhim. Upon arriving at the station in a heavy rainstorm he found the\nagent had deserted his post and gone home.\n\nThe headlight on the Eastern Illinois fast express train showed up\nin the distance. What was to be done to bring the train to a stop so\nthat they could board it? At this important moment Wooldridge's eye\nrested upon a switch lamp under a switch only a few yards from him;\nwith one leap across the track he secured the lamp and began to swing\nit across the track to and fro with a red light pointed towards the\napproaching train. This was a signal for the engineer to stop. But\nwould the engineer see the signal in time, or would the rain which was\nbeating down in torrents prevent the engineer from seeing the signal?\nIt was an exciting few seconds to pass through. But the engineer\ndid see the signal to stop, he blew one long blast of his whistle,\nreversed his engine, applied the air-brakes which brought the train to\na stand-still right at the station door.\n\nA conductor and brakeman had alighted and run forward on the sudden\nstop of the train as they thought some accident had happened, inquired\nof Wooldridge what was the trouble. He replied, \"Nothing but two\npassengers for Chicago.\" At this time he and Bell were aboard the\ntrain. The conductor told Wooldridge that he had no right to flag\nthe train. Wooldridge told him that he had purchased two tickets\nto Chicago with the understanding that the train stopped there to\nlet on and off passengers, furthermore the card stated that this\ntrain stopped there, and arriving there he found that the agent had\nabandoned his post and gone home, and he had taken it upon himself\nto act as station agent for the time being and stopping a train. He\ntold the conductor that he had to be in Chicago the following morning\nas his business was urgent, furthermore he could not afford to stand\nthere all night in the rain without shelter because the station agent\nhad neglected to do his duty.\n\nOn gaining admission to the car Bell was made comfortable: By turning\ntwo seats together he had two big pillows on which he might rest his\nhead.\n\nWooldridge then stooped down and unlaced Bell's shoes so he could rest\nhis tired feet, he then called the porter and gave Bell's shoes to him\nwith orders to shine them up and keep them until the detective called\nfor them next morning.\n\nWooldridge then reached down into his traveling bag, took out a pair\nof leg-irons which he placed around Bell's legs, and locked them\nsecurely. Bell made a protest and assured the detective that he would\nnot give him any trouble or make any attempt to get away. Wooldridge\ntold him the first law of human nature was self-protection and he was\nexercising that precaution in this case.\n\nOnly a few weeks prior to this time an officer was returning from New\nYork with a prisoner and neglected to take these precautions, dosed\noff into a little sleep, the train had just then stopped to take on\ncoal, the prisoner only had handcuffs on, and in the twinkling of an\neye passed the officer who was asleep and succeeded in getting off the\ntrain just as it started. His escape was not noticed by the officer\nuntil they had gone several miles; it was then too late, the bird\nhad flown, and having money in his pocket found a man who filed the\nshackles off his hands. He made good his escape and the officer lost\nhis job.\n\nAfter Bell had been securely shackled and made as comfortable as\npossible, Wooldridge turned two seats together on the opposite side\nof the car, never closed his eyes until they reached Chicago the\nfollowing morning, taking Bell to the Bureau of Identification, had\nhis measure and picture taken. He was then turned over to Cook County\nSheriff.\n\nA few months later J. H. Bell was arraigned for trial and confronted\nby over thirty angry women, whom he had robbed, as witnesses. After a\nlong trial he was found guilty of obtaining money under the confidence\ngame. He asked for a new trial which was denied and on March the 9th,\n1907, he was sentenced to Joliet Penitentiary for an indefinite time\nby Judge Brentano. His counsel asked for the arrest of judgment so he\nmight have time to write up the record and present it to the\n\nThen the Bell luck, which could beat even detectives, broke Bell's\nway. Also the Bell honesty suffered a recrudescence. It so happened\nthat while Bell was in the County Jail a plot was set on foot to make\na big jail delivery.\n\nIt was planned, and the plans seemed to have been well arranged, to\nsmuggle enough dynamite into the jail to wreck even that formidable\nbuilding. The plot was hatched by George Smith, Eugene Sullivan,\nMorris Fitzgerald and Alfred Thompson.\n\nOn March 2, 1907, this precious crew had been arrested for robbing a\nmail wagon. They were apprehended and taken to the County Jail. There\nthey hatched the plot for the introduction of the dynamite. Many other\nprisoners were admitted to their secret, among them Bell.\n\nSmith, who was as big and powerful as Bell was little and\ninsignificant, threatened to choke Bell to death in his cell if he\ntold of the dynamite plot.\n\nBell's spirit appeared to be as big as the other man's body. This\nmay have been due to the fact that he saw that \"peaching\" on his\nconfederates was the only method of escape. Anyway Bell \"peached.\"\nHe told of the dynamite plot and the dynamite was seized. Dr. J.\nA. Wesener afterward declared that there was enough of it to have\ndestroyed the whole building.\n\nIt was so undoubtedly true that Bell had been of service to the state\nin revealing this plot that a plea for clemency was made for him and\nso he escaped the penalty for his crimes.\n\nBut the experiences of Bell, and the fear of Detective Clifton R.\nWooldridge had the salutary effect of putting a stop to the \"Show-Card\nWriting\" fraud in Chicago.\n\n\n\n\nTHE BOGUS MINE.\n\n$100,000,000 EACH YEAR LOST BY INVESTMENTS IN FAKE MINING SCHEMES.\n\n\nTo what extent investment swindlers have operated in Illinois will\nnever be known, for some of them have so thoroughly covered up their\ntransactions that it will be impossible to disclose them. This is\nespecially true of a class of mining companies, the promoters of\nwhich remained in the background while their dupes were gathered\nin by seemingly respectable residents. These concerns operated by\ngiving blocks of stock into the hands of unscrupulous men with good\nor fairly good reputations, and the latter disposed of it to such\nunsophisticated acquaintances as could be easily gulled.\n\nGold and silver mines in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah furnished the\nbasis for most of these swindles. Sometimes the company really had an\nold mine or claim that had been abandoned, sometimes it had a lease\non some worthless piece of property that was \"about to be developed,\"\nbut frequently it had nothing more than its gaudy prospects and its\nhighly decorated shares of stock to give in return for the money it\nreceived. Money-grasping church deacons were the favorite agents for\nthese swindles and widowed women without business judgment their most\ncommon victims.\n\nIt is estimated that in this country every year nearly $100,000,000\nare taken out of the savings of people of limited means by financial\nfakers, especially mining and oil fakers. During the last five years\nDetective Wooldridge has observed the \"financiering\" of several\nthousand fake companies, each of which secured a great deal of money\nfrom ignorant people.\n\nBands of swindlers repair to mining camps and establish branches\nthere. They expend a few hundred dollars for shreds and patches of\nground void of present or prospective value.\n\nThey then form a mining corporation, place its capital stock at some\nenormous figure--a million, two or three million dollars--appoint\nthemselves or some of their confederates, or even their dupes,\ndirectors, and sell the worthless claims to the company for a large\nproportion, or perhaps, all of the capital stock of the company.\n\nThe stock must be disposed of with a rush. It must all go within a\nyear or shorter time. When it is gone the suckers who get the stock\nfor good money may take the property of the company. They always find\nan empty treasury, worthless claims, and the rosy pictures that led\nthem astray, smothered in the fog.\n\nDuring the last five years the advertising columns of leading\nnewspapers have been full of offers of mining stocks as \"sure roads to\nfortune.\" Nearly all of these mining companies, into whose treasuries\nthe public has paid millions, have either been abandoned or the\nproperties have been sold for debts, and invariably they bring very\nlittle. The major portion of receipts of these companies from the\nsales of stock is stolen by their promoters.\n\nOfficial statistics of the mining industry show that out of each one\nhundred mines, only one has become a success from a dividend-paying\npoint of view. About five earn a bare existence, while the balance\nturn out utter failures.\n\n\nPROMOTER'S WORD VALUELESS.\n\nInvestors will do well to consider that stocks of mines which are\nonly prospective are the most risky form of gambling. In buying\nstocks of the undeveloped mines offered to the public on the strength\nof statements the only substance of which is the imagination of\npromoters, one runs up against a sure-thing brace game.\n\nDon't take the promoter's word for it. When you wish to place money\nwhere it can work for you, don't bite at the first \"good thing\" you\nsee advertised. It is to the interest of the man who wants to sell you\nstock to place it before you in the rosiest light. Otherwise he knows\nyou would not buy it. If you want to buy stock, don't rely upon what\nthe seller says, but consult others.\n\nBefore consulting persons whom you think may be able to express an\nhonest and intelligent opinion, ask the promoter to furnish you a\nstatement of the condition of the company, showing its assets and\nliabilities, profits and losses, and an accurate description of its\nproperty.\n\nYou will then be able to judge whether the company is\nover-capitalized; whether it is incumbered with debts (for debts may\nlead to a receivership), and if its earnings may lead to permanent\ndividends.\n\nAlso ask for a copy of the by-laws of the company. If, with such\ninformation at your disposal, you cannot get a correct idea as to\nwhether the stock is desirable or not, consult your banker or somebody\nelse in your community who may be able to advise you.\n\nIf some one offered you a mortgage on a certain piece of property,\ncommon sense would tell you to ascertain whether the property is\nsufficient surety for the loan, or if the title to the property is\ngood and there are not prior incumbrances on it.\n\nThe man who would buy a mortgage without ascertaining the value and\ncondition of the surety, would be considered an idiot.\n\nWhy not use the same precaution when buying stock? Don't believe what\nthe promoter tells you about the value and prospects of the stock he\nwants to unload on you. Don't take it for granted the stock offered\nyou will turn out a great money-maker and dividend-payer because the\npromoter tells you so.\n\nThe promoter, generally a person from another city and entirely\nunknown to you, has no interest in you, but is prompted by his own\nselfish interest to sell you something which, in many cases, he\nhimself would not buy. He may Offer you a good thing, but it is up to\nyou to find it out.\n\n\nINVESTIGATION NECESSARY.\n\nIn most cases, an intelligent investigation will prompt you to let\nalluring offers of great wealth for little money severely alone.\nThe observation of the common-sense rules outlined above will save\ninvestors bitter disappointments and heavy losses.\n\nIt is safe to say seventy-five per cent of the so-called \"Mining,\nPlantation and Air Line\" schemes and \"Security\" companies now paraded\nbefore the public in flaring advertisements in the daily papers, and\nthrough glittering prospectuses sent through the mails, are vicious\nswindles. Men who operate these frauds pretend to be honest and\nhigh-minded. By constant practice of their wiles upon others they\ndevelop self-deception and come to believe in their honesty to such an\nextent that when questioned, they assume a good counterfeit of honest\nindignation.\n\nMost of them do not own the furniture in the offices they occupy\nwhile swindling the public. It is a common practice for them to rent\noffices in national bank buildings and to furnish them with rich\nfurniture bought on the installment plan, to make the necessary\n\"front.\" They spend their cash capital for flaring advertisements,\nsell as much stock as they can induce the gullible public to buy,\nand then decamp, leaving unpaid bills for advertising, if they can\nget credit after their cash is exhausted, and their furniture bill\nunpaid. The absconding swindler is usually succeeded by an \"agent\" or\n\"manager,\" who repudiates the bills against his rascally predecessor\nand continues the work of fleecing the gullible under some new title\nor by means of some new trick.\n\n\nKEEP LISTS OF SUCKERS.\n\nEvery well-equipped fraudulent concern acquires the names and\naddresses of susceptible persons. Painstaking revisions of the\nlists made up of these names and addresses form an important part\nof the labor of the principals or employes. The lists grow as each\nadvertisement brings inquiries from persons who, either through\ncuriosity or desire to invest, write for particulars. Affiliated\nswindles operated in succession by a gang of \"fakers\" use the same\nlist of \"suckers.\"\n\nIn affiliated swindles if the \"sucker\" does not succumb and remit\nhis money on the inducements offered by one concern, his name is\ntransferred to the lists of another, and he is then bombarded with\ndifferent literature. Thus a man must pass through the ordeal of\nhaving dozens of tempting offers made him before he demonstrates that\nhe is not a \"sucker,\" or has not got the money. His name is then\nstricken from the list.\n\nThere are so many \"get-rich-quick\" operators at present that\ncompetition between them has become strenuous. They are now infesting\nthe entire country with local solicitors, who frequent saloons,\nhotels, and even residence districts, where victims are found in\nforeigners, ignorant servant girls and inexperienced widows.\n\nThese solicitors get 50 per cent commission on all sales of stock.\nThis fact in itself is evidence that the propositions are rank\nswindles. When the swindling operator finds things getting too hot he\ndisappears from his office and bobs up in some new place with a new\nproposition.\n\n\nPECKSNIFFIAN TEARS DELUDE.\n\nA few attempts have been made to prosecute the swindlers, but for the\nmost part the local officials have failed. In but few instances have\nthe victims been able to give anything like intelligent statements of\nthe representations made to them. Where the right sort of agents have\nbeen used the people who have lost their money have not awakened to\nthe fraud passed upon them. A few Pecksniffian tears have deluded them\ninto the belief that the swindlers as well as themselves were victims\nof some third party who is in another state and out of reach.\n\nWhere cases have been brought to trial it has been a difficult matter\nfor juries to understand how the persons aggrieved could have been\ncaught with the sort of chaff thrown to them, and there has been\nlittle disposition to show charity for the victims. Then, too, the men\nhauled before the courts have always made it appear they were in the\nsame boat with the complaining witness, and that the culprit was many,\nmany miles away. So, usually, they have escaped.\n\n\nDIFFICULT TO CONVICT.\n\nEven in the most flagrant cases and where every advantage was taken\nof the ignorance, inexperience or trustfulness of the person deluded\nit has been difficult to bring the offense under the state statutes.\nIt requires more than ordinary misrepresentation and lying to make\nout a criminal case, and under the rules of evidence which prevail\nit is almost impossible to overtake a cheat who has not put his\nmisrepresentation into writing or made them in the presence of third\nparties.\n\nWhere the swindlers have used the mails, however, it is not such\na difficult matter to convict. The United States is scrupulously\njealous of its postal service, and under its statutes every fellow who\nundertakes to utilize it for improper purposes can be brought to book.\nHe can not hide behind some one in another state, for the federal\njurisdiction is general and the other man can be brought in. Nor can\nhe plead that the business was legally licensed in another state, or\nthat its incorporation was regular. If it was a cheat and the mails\nwere used in furtherance of its design, no corporate cloak thrown\naround it by any of the commonwealths can save the promoters.\n\n\nPOWER OF UNCLE SAM.\n\nAn example of the power of the federal authorities was given when\nSecretary of State Rose of Illinois was trying to keep the swindling\ninvestment companies out of the state. This was before the enactment\nof the present law regulating the licensing of corporations. A\nnumber of concerns had been formed in southern states, and they\nwere insolently demanding licenses to do business in Illinois. The\nsecretary of state was powerless under the Illinois statutes, but when\nthe matter was called to the attention of the federal authorities they\nwiped out the whole lot of companies with a postal fraud order.\n\n\nWOOLDRIDGE FINDS SMOOTH SCHEME.\n\nDetective Wooldridge, in looking into many of these mining frauds,\ndiscovered one or two which proved quite a revelation even to the\nUnited States authorities. This was a system of \"kiting\" stocks, just\nas other fraud concerns have been known to kite checks. The method is\nvery simple.\n\nJames Johnson, of Indiana, is \"roped in\" by one of the smooth young\nmen who operate for the schemers. James buys 500 or 1,000 shares in\nthe Holy Moses mine, located in or near Goldfield, Reno, Rawhide,\n<DW36> Creek, or some other well known mining camp. The \"Holy Moses\"\nis a hole dug in the side of a hill, and all that will ever come out\nof it is soil. But that part does not matter. Under certain strict\nlaws now prevailing only so much stock can be issued even by the\nschemers.\n\nJames Johnson holds his thousand shares for three months. By this time\nall the stock has run out and the firm is at the end of the rope,\napparently; but no, they have found a way to stretch that rope.\n\nWilliam Wilson, of Michigan, is clamoring for a thousand shares of\nthe \"Holy Moses.\" There is no stock to sell him, and if any more is\nprinted and issued the waiting detectives will swoop down at once, for\nword has gone forth that the \"Holy Moses\" is a non-producer. How to\nget that thousand shares for Wilson is the problem.\n\n\n\"HOLY MOSES\" RISES?\n\nAha; it is easy. A letter is drafted to James Johnson, bearing to him\nthe gladsome news that \"Holy Moses\" has gone up, away up, and that the\nstock is mounting by leaps and bounds. Does James Johnson wish to sell\nhis stock at a substantial advance? James Johnson does.\n\nWell, the philanthropic owners of the \"Holy Moses\" will put that stock\non the market for him at once and send him the proceeds, if he will\nkindly send in his stock with authority for transfer in blank.\n\nThe Indiana sucker bites at the bait and sends in his thousand\nshares to be sold. No sooner do they reach the office than they are\nimmediately started off to Michigan to Wilson, after the precaution\nhas been taken to remove Johnson's name from the face of the stock and\nsubstitute Wilson's. The authority for transfer in blank, and the fact\nthat the transaction is a transfer of stock, is thus kept from Wilson.\n\nIn due course of time a fat check from Wilson finds its way into the\ncoffers of the \"Holy Moses\" promoters. And also, in due course of\ntime, Johnson wants to know something about that sale.\n\n\n\"HOLY MOSES\" FALLS.\n\nHe is met with the doleful news that while his stock was on the way\nto Chicago, or elsewhere, the stock in \"Holy Moses\" had experienced\nsuch a decided slump that it was impossible for them to sell it at a\nprofit. If he desires, they will hold the stock for a raise, which\nthey expect as soon as the present unfortunate financial panic has\npassed, or until industrials begin to go up. The drop in \"Holy Moses\"\nis not due to any slump in the production of the mine; far from it. It\nis only the unfortunate financial depression which is to blame, and\nthere is no doubt but that \"Holy Moses\" will go up a-whooping very\nsoon.\n\nNaturally Johnson bites again, and says hold the stock for that raise.\nMeanwhile the stock has been procured again from Wilson and sent to\nBaker, in Kentucky. And so on, indefinitely. It is only when some of\nthe swindled ones become particularly savage that their stock is\nreturned to them. And then it is not their original stock at all, but\na new thousand shares which some sucker has sent in.\n\nOne block of stock in one company was sold in this way in 1907 by a\nChicago mining company, no less than twelve times.\n\nThe activities of Detective Wooldridge afterward put this firm out\nof business, and the head promoter was arrested in the West by the\nfederal authorities.\n\nIt is well that all these facts should be taken into consideration by\nthe public before investing in mining shares.\n\n\nFIRST PRINCIPLES IN MINING PURCHASES.\n\nHere are a few good leads to follow in buying mining stock. First\nmake sure that there is a producing mine. Then make sure that the\nstock you get is not kited stock. But, above all, make sure of the\nresponsibility, respectability and solidity of the firm from which you\nmake the purchase.\n\n\n\n\nA GIANT SWINDLE.\n\nBANKS IN CHICAGO, NEW YORK AND LONDON BADLY FLEECED.\n\n     Bogus Notes and Stock--Many Firms Are Victims--Prisoners\n     Said to Have Practiced Frauds Under Titles of\n     Corporations--Chicago, September 14, 1906, Detectives\n     Wooldridge and John Hill Uncover the Fraud--Five Men\n     Arrested.\n\n\nA remarkable story of swindling which, extended to many cities in\nAmerica and to England, was disclosed, uncovering a gigantic forgery\nand check kiting plot as well as several fraudulent stock selling\nschemes.\n\n\nCHICAGO CONCERNS ARE VICTIMS.\n\nBanks and business concerns, especially in Chicago, suffered through\nthe operations of the men. Their methods came to the attention of John\nHill, Jr., connected with the Board of Trade, and Detective Wooldridge\nlearned enough to convince them and the men behind institutions the\nobjects of which were to obtain money fraudulently.\n\nSome of the places which have been mulcted are:\n\nCommercial National Bank, August 15; bogus note for $1,078. Stromberg,\nAllen & Co., printers, 302 Clark street; bogus note for $206. R. B.\nPadgham & Co., packing boxes, 59 Dearborn street; bogus note for $300.\nMatthew Hallohan, 42 River street, September 12; bogus note for $190.\n\n\nLOSES ALL OF SAVINGS.\n\nJulius Radisch, 2509 South Halsted street, a German who lost $700 in\nthe wreck of the National Fireproofing Company, told the police of the\nunique methods used by Johnston in selling him the stock. He asserts\nthat Johnston told him that the stock would pay at least 8 per cent\ndividends, and as proof of the prosperity of the company took him\nto the downtown district and showed him several skyscrapers which he\nclaimed were owned by the corporation. Radisch also says that Johnston\nalso pointed out a bank where he said the company had immense sums on\ndeposit. The story told by Radisch is peculiarly a sad one, as the\nmoney lost by him in the crash of the Fireproofing company represented\nthe savings of a lifetime of hard labor. Shortly after the discovery\nthat his money was lost his wife died.\n\n[Illustration: _FORGED NOTES CAUSE FIVE ARRESTS_\n\n$10,000 STOLEN FROM BANKS\nTHROUGH PLOT OF SWINDLERS\n\nPrisoner accused as principal in mammoth swindling plot in which many\nbanks are victims, and a facsimile of one of the notes by which money\nwas obtained.\n\n_BOND USED BY THE SWINDLER._ GEORGE F. JOHNSON]\n\n\nONE CAPITALIZED AT $1,000,000.\n\nThe concerns most frequently used by the men in their transactions,\nthe police say, were known as National Fire Proofing Company of New\nYork and the Federal Trust Company of South Dakota. The fire proofing\ncompany was stated to be capitalized at $1,000,000 and the trust\ncompany at $100,000.\n\nOffices for each concern were at 1138 Broadway, New York. From there,\nit is charged, circulars and pamphlets were sent out to investors\nin all parts of the country, and it was also a practice of these\nconcerns, it is alleged, to open accounts with banks and exchange\nbogus notes for good ones.\n\n\nSHERIFF IN CHARGE OF AFFAIRS.\n\nAbout one week before the arrest the concerns were placed in the\nhands of the sheriff of New York County, and, following this, it is\ndeclared, disclosures were made which hastened the arrest of the men\ninvolved.\n\nBanks and firms in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and London, it is\ndeclared, are known to have suffered through the alleged operations of\nthe men, who were aided by companions in the different cities.\n\nMost of the concerns, of which there are at least twelve, all declared\nto be fraudulent, are in Chicago.\n\n\nLIST OF BOGUS FIRMS.\n\nThe following is a list of the concerns, the names of which have been\nlearned by the police:\n\n     National Fire Proofing Company, New York and Chicago.\n     Federal Trust Company, New York and Chicago.\n     Keystone Structure Cleaning Company, Philadelphia.\n     McGuire, Johnston & Co., New York and Chicago.\n     Hessley, Johnston & Co.\n     Hessley & Johnston, Chicago.\n     A. A. Hessley, Chicago.\n     George F. Johnston, Chicago.\n     C. F. McGuire, Chicago.\n     F. L. Cunningham, Chicago.\n     Chester E. Broughn, Chicago.\n     Lincoln Gas Light & Coke Company, Lincoln, Neb.\n\nAnother concern dealing with alleged spurious bonds of Custer County,\nIdaho, the police declare, was under the direction of these men.\n\nIt was the old-time favorite method of kiting checks and drafts\namong the banks and private individuals of the city and country that\nwas used, and there is no doubt that it proved successful in this\ninstance. Although it is believed the men did not obtain great riches\nin their operations in Chicago, it would have been only a question of\ntime when they would have become wealthy, so apparently easy was it\nfor them to get funds.\n\n\nOPENED MANY BANK ACCOUNTS.\n\nAccounts in banks in Chicago and other cities were opened and then\nexchanges of checks were made among them. Only the over-boldness of\ntheir operations caused their downfall.\n\nAn instance of their methods would be the following: The Federal\nTrust Company, one of their \"paper\" concerns, would deposit a check\nin a Chicago bank made by the Keystone Structure Cleaning Company of\nPhiladelphia, another of their alleged firms. The check would be sent\neast for collection, and in a few days it would be returned marked \"No\nfunds.\"\n\n\nOFFER BOND IN A SETTLEMENT.\n\nMeanwhile the trust company had checked against its account, to which\nthe Keystone Structure Cleaning Company's check had been credited.\nWhen the check was returned from the eastern bank the Chicago bank\nwould notify the Federal Trust Company of the non-payment of it. The\nChicago firm would then offer explanation and apologies and give a 5\nper cent to concerns that cashed the checks.\n\nWhen they came back, the men who got the money were shocked beyond\nmeasure and at once offered stock and bonds of twice the face value of\nthe money involved as security. This quieted the fears and enabled the\nschemers to go on.\n\n\nFIVE MEN ARE ARRESTED BY DETECTIVES WOOLDRIDGE AND BARRY.\n\nFive men were arrested by Detectives Wooldridge and Barry, charged\nwith operating twelve concerns. The Commercial National Bank was one\nof the victims. The men arrested are as follows:\n\n    Chester A. Broughn, broker, 218 LaSalle street.\n\n    S. L. Cunningham, 56 years old. 1009 West Jackson boulevard.\n\n    C. F. McGuire, 40 years old, arrested at the Great Northern Hotel.\n\n    George F. Johnston, 36 years old, arrested at 185 Dearborn St.\n\n    Alvin A. Hessley, 48 years old, arrested at 185 Dearborn St.\n\n\nTOOL TELLS TRUTH--USHER OF CHURCH IN CRIME CLOUD.\n\nAt the age of 50 years, S. L. Cunningham, vestryman and Sunday School\nteacher and chief usher in the Jackson Boulevard Christian Church, has\ncome to the conclusion that he is \"just an old fool, after all.\"\n\nMr. Cunningham was arrested recently on the charge of being one of\na gang of forgers and \"get-rich-quick\" men who have been swindling\nChicago and New York business houses and banks during the last few\nmonths. He says his only connection with the gang was in selling stock\nuntil a short time ago for the National Fireproof Paint Company, one\nof the concerns raided, and lending his bank account to George F.\nJohnston, said to have been one of the prime movers in the gang.\n\nMr. Cunningham looks like a bishop. His hair is white and his\nappearance distinguished. His story is an illustration of the manner\nin which swindling concerns procure one or two men of weight and\nrespectability in a community to act as their advance agents and\nestablish confidence.\n\nAs he sat on the white-pillared porch of his residence, surrounded by\nhis wife and sympathetic neighbors and church members, his face in the\ngaslight showed the marks of grief through which he has passed since\nhis arrest.\n\n\nCUNNINGHAM TELLS THE STORY.\n\n     \"Yes,\" he said, \"we of the fold often go astray, but I am\n     innocent. I have a Sunday School class of young girls that\n     I am going to take out into Lincoln Park tomorrow. I hardly\n     know what to say to them. I can't bear to think of taking\n     my place as head usher on Sunday, although my pastor tells\n     me to march down the aisle with my head erect. I am getting\n     to be an old man, you see, and I have never wilfully\n     wronged a person in my life.\" His voice trembled, but his\n     wife laid her hand on his arm and he straightened up.\n\n     \"I know nothing of these men except Mr. Johnston,\" he said.\n     \"I was introduced to him by a friend of mine three months\n     ago. I have sold stock and insurance for the last twenty\n     years, and I thought he had a good thing in the National\n     Fireproof Paint Company, so I started selling stock for\n     him. I could not sell the stock, as I could not show enough\n     assets, so I quit two weeks ago. I was a fool, and a dupe,\n     all right.\n\n\nBANK ACCOUNT OVERDRAWN.\n\n     \"Johnston, a young man, told me he was hard up and asked\n     to use my bank account at the Commercial National. I let\n     him and endorsed his checks. My wife told me not to do it,\n     but I thought he was all right then. Well, he overdrew the\n     account, the check was protested, and when my name was\n     found they arrested me. I never knew any of the other men,\n     although I saw them around the office. They did too much\n     whispering, and I thought it did not look well.\"\n\nThen, in a simple way, he went on to tell of his wife and his work in\nthe church. He produced a letter from the pastor of his church, the\nRev. Parker Stockdale:\n\n     \"This introduces Mr. Cunningham, a member of my church. He\n     enjoys among us the reputation of a thorough gentleman and\n     a conscientious business man. He is a highly respected and\n     useful citizen. His honesty is beyond question.\"\n\nHe also had a letter from Col. Jonathan Merriam, former United States\npension agent, which was along the same lines.\n\n\nOFFER OF BRIBE ALLEGED.\n\nBroughn, the broker, is a man of a different stripe, according to\nDetective Barry, who arrested him. When he was informed of his arrest\nhe is said by the detective to have replied:\n\n     \"Come down to the saloon next door. I will settle the case\n     at once. Name your price.\"\n\nWhen arraigned before Justice Cochrane the cases were continued until\nSeptember 24. All the men were released on $1,200 bonds each, with\nthe exception of Broughn, whose bail was fixed at $800. The bonds\nwere signed by a professional bondsman at the Harrison Street Police\nStation.\n\nC. F. McGuire forfeited his bond and fled to New York City, where he\nwas apprehended and arrested by New York authorities at the request\nof John M. Collins, the Chief of Police. The information which led to\nhis arrest was secured by Detective Wooldridge, WHO WAS MADE A SPECIAL\nMESSENGER BY CHARLES S. DENEEN, GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS.\n\nC. F. McGuire was a powerfully built man, weighing 240 pounds and\nstanding over 6 feet tall. He was turned over by the New York\nauthorities to Detective Wooldridge, who slipped on him a pair of\nhandcuffs and crossed over to Jersey City on a ferry, and from there\ntook a section in a Pullman car on a fast train on the Pennsylvania\nRailroad.\n\nMcGuire was put to bed in the upper berth, after he undressed.\nDetective Wooldridge told him he was bringing him back like a\ngentleman, but the first law of nature was self-protection. The\ndetective then requested him to turn over all his clothes except his\nnight shirt, which was done. Wooldridge then placed the clothes under\nthe mattress in the berth below, which he was to occupy. He then took\nout a pair of leg irons, tied a strong cord to them, placed the leg\nirons on McGuire, threw the cord back behind the berth below, and\nthis was tied to his hands after he had buttoned the berth curtains\nand pinned them with safety pins all the way down. The curtains were\nthen stuffed in under his mattress. After all this was done Wooldridge\nthen laid down with his clothes on and laid awake until morning, but\nmanaged to get some rest by laying down.\n\nChicago was reached in safety. After taking McGuire to the bureau,\nwhere Bertillon measurements were taken and his finger prints\nrecorded, he was turned over to the sheriff of Cook County.\n\nThe trial was set, which lasted five days. Witnesses were brought from\nthe banks in New York City and Philadelphia which had been victimized.\n\nFebruary 7, 1908, found guilty.\n\n\nCHECK \"KITERS\" HEAVILY FINED--GEORGE F. JOHNSTON AND C. F. MCGUIRE\nASSESSED $2,000 EACH.\n\nA jury in Judge Kersten's court later returned a verdict finding\nGeorge F. Johnston and C. F. McGuire guilty of swindling and imposed\na fine of $2,000 each. If the fine be not paid the defendants will\nbe compelled to serve the amount at the rate of $1.50 a day in the\nBridewell. Chester A. Broughn and A. H. Hessley entered pleas of\nguilty at the last minute and their cases will be disposed of later by\nJudge Kersten. State's Attorney John J. Healy and Assistant State's\nAttorney Barbour expressed themselves as pleased over the outcome of\nthe trial.\n\n\n\n\nQUACKS.\n\nRASCALS WHO PREY UPON THE IGNORANT.\n\nThe \"Specialist,\" the \"Optician,\" the \"Doctors' College\"; All Frauds.\n\nBlackmail Helps Medical Scamps--Poor Girls Victims of \"Doctor\" Thieves.\n\n\nThe history of quacks and quackery includes some of the most glaring\nfrauds ever perpetrated on a credulous people. In all ages of the\nworld's history down to the present day, these humbugs have cut an\nimportant figure in their day and generation. They are numerous in\nalmost every line of business, serving God when it pays them to do it,\nand assisting the devil when their interests demand it. In these pages\nI propose to deal with medical quacks only.\n\nThe advent of every discovery in medicine, slight though it may be,\nhas brought to the front a ring of pretenders in the healing art.\nThese fellows catch the multitude. The poor, the ignorant and the\ncredulous are their followers. It has been so in every age of the\nworld's history. The man or woman with broken health will catch at\nevery straw that offers hope of recovery, and so they drift from one\nquack to another, until ruined in fortune and oftentimes made worse\nin their physical ills, they at last pass to the silent home where\nthe pain and joy the cunning and simplicity of the world are alike of\ninsignificance.\n\nThe desire to live lurks in the heart of nearly every human being.\nAnd no matter how wretched they may be, how poor in pocket, broken in\nspirit, whether suffering from real or imaginary ills, thirsting for\nrelief, they have gone from quack to quack, giving of their meager\nsavings for some vaunted elixir which in all probability only hastens\ntheir journey to the grave.\n\nOne reason why quackery flourishes is the fact that medicine is not\na science. Ask any honest physician and he will tell you the same. A\ndrug that will help one person will have no effect on another. There\nare in the realm of medicine no such things as \"cures.\" People who are\nsick recover, but they would do so whether they took \"dope\" or not.\nAll disease is self-limited. The doctor who talks of curing smallpox,\nmeasles, typhoid fever, is a fool. Natures cures, not the doctor.\nPeople get well of these complaints, and many others who take no\nmedicines and employ no physicians.\n\n\nPHYSIC TO THE DOGS.\n\nFollowers of the late \"Elijah Dowie\" relegated physic to the dogs,\nwhere it properly belongs, and yet enjoyed good health. Mrs. Eddy's\nconverts take no drugs, not even simple household remedies.\n\nHere is a body of people numbering millions, entirely repudiating\nphysicians, yet their health is as good, if not better, than those who\ncontinually take drugs. Doctors make war on them. Why? It interferes\nwith the medical graft.\n\nDon't think for a minute that advertising doctors are the only\ngrafters in the medical profession. Many of them are bad, very bad,\nbut there are men right here in Chicago, as well as other big cities,\nwho never advertise in papers, yet they are as notorious swindlers,\nand will as quickly take advantage of the ignorant and credulous, as\nthe man who flaunts his skill in the daily press. To fall into the\nhands of these fellows is to be despoiled in pocket and ruined in\nhealth. Operations that are uncalled for and not needed are performed\nalmost daily.\n\nOnly a short time ago I heard a doctor boast of having removed the\novaries of two thousand women. How many of these operations were\nactually necessary? Probably very few, but each case enriched him to\nthe extent of several hundred dollars.\n\nWomen more frequently than men are the victims of unscrupulous\ndoctors. People do not often question the skill or the opinion of the\nfashionable physician; they take for granted the truth of all he may\nsay, forgetting for the time that he has a pecuniary interest in the\nwork that may possibly result in the death of the patient.\n\n\nUNNECESSARY OPERATIONS.\n\nHow many people die from wholly unnecessary operations? Only the\nhospital records and the immediate friends of the patient can tell.\n\nThese words are written to put people on their guard. Dishonest\ndoctors are everywhere, especially in big cities. Chicago is full\nof them. They may be strictly ethical and affect to despise the\nadvertiser. They do so, however, only from a business standpoint. They\nhate opposition, and somehow the advertising doctor manages to get a\ngoodly share of the business, and is oftentimes the superior in skill\nin his particular line or specialty to his ethical brother.\n\nThere are good doctors and bad ones, just as there are good and bad\nmen in every walk and business of life.\n\nIn my experience as a detective I have met with both kinds. In these\npages I will deal with the advertising doctor only. I will do, and\nhave done, what I can to drive the dishonest ones out of the business.\n\nThe eye doctor, professing to cure blindness or other diseases of the\neye without the knife, is one of the most dangerous and dishonest men\nin the medical profession. Chicago has its full quota of this form of\nquackery. There are two men in this city--Dr. M---- and Dr. O----, who\nare national advertisers.\n\nBoth have been exposed in a recent New York weekly paper at the\ninstigation of the American Medical Association. It is noteworthy,\nhowever, that this same paper accepted a full-page advertisement from\nDr. O---- only a few months before the expose, thus deluding thousands\nof its readers. The price paid for one page and one issue was fifteen\nhundred dollars. This sum, paid to but one paper, will give the reader\nsome idea of the vast expense to which the quack is put to place his\nname before the public in his effort to rob the blind. This same Dr.\nO---- pays out annually sixty thousand dollars for advertising alone.\nHe employs twenty typewriters--mostly girls. The correspondence is\nhandled entirely by the clerks, the doctor rarely ever seeing a letter.\n\nHe employs but one assistant, a young man fresh from college. No\npersonal interviews with patients are asked for or desired. It is a\nmail order business almost exclusively. Occasionally a patient comes\nto the city to see this great oculist.\n\nDr. O---- himself is hardly ever in evidence. He spends most of his\ntime in summer resorts and European capitals.\n\nThe only medicine used is a solution of boric acid in water. The same\ncan be bought at any drug store for a few cents. His charges are ten\ndollars per month.\n\nThis man's mail is enormous. I have known him to take in twenty\nthousand dollars a month. One of the catchy lines in his advertisement\nsays he cures crossed eyes without the use of the knife. This is true,\nbut he uses scissors instead. Cross-eye can only be straightened by\nsevering the muscles of the eye. All physicians know this, but the\npeople do not; hence the success of this robber of the blind.\n\nDr. O---- is a devout church member. He is one of the largest\ncontributors to the Christian Church, to which he belongs. Nearly all\nchurch papers carry his advertisements, though they must know him to\nbe a fraud of the first water.\n\n\nSLEEK AND UNCTUOUS CHURCH MEMBER.\n\nPersonally he is sleek and unctuous, is always found among the godly,\ntakes more interest in foreign missions than the every-day affairs of\nlife, and fully expects to occupy a seat in the parquet of the New\nJerusalem.\n\nThe money wrung by the basest of false pretenses from his poor\nunfortunate blind victims, does not disturb his slumbers. If he has\nany conscience at all he fortifies himself with the thought that\n\"Jesus will bear it all,\" and lets it go at that.\n\nBlind people, or those with failing eyesight, beware.\n\nA close second to the above-named grafter, and in the same nefarious\nbusiness, is Dr. M----.\n\nThis man's advertisements read very much like those of others in the\nsame line of work. He also cures without the knife, but uses the\nscissors. His treatment is the same--boric acid and water.\n\nThis can do no possible good except in slight inflammations. It\ncannot cure cataract. It may be set down as a truth (ask any honest\nphysician) that cataract is incurable except by surgical operations.\nYet these men continue to advertise its cure, claiming to have a\nspecific remedy that will absorb it. Dr. M---- is wealthy, all made\nout of the blind. While other men are giving of their wealth to ease\nthe lives of these poor unfortunates, they are being systematically\nrobbed in the most heartless and shame-faced manner.\n\nPriceless is sight. A man or woman threatened with loss of it will\ngive up their last dollar for a prospective cure. In this way these\nso-called \"eye doctors\" fatten on the credulity of their victims,\ndoing them absolutely no good and quite often a serious injury.\n\nDr. M---- is also a devout church member. He can be seen hanging over\nthe pew of a fashionable West Side church every Sunday. There he is\nhailed as a good brother by his fellow members, many of whom are as\ngreat, if not as successful, a grafter as he is. They use the cloak of\nreligion in which to serve the devil.\n\n\nTHE \"OPTICIAN\" FAKE.\n\nIn connection with this subject let me warn you of the existence of an\narmy of \"Opticians.\" These men are often swindlers of the first water.\nTheir misrepresentations as to the money value of glasses amounts\nto grand larceny. They charge all the way from ten to seventy-five\ndollars for a pair of lenses that usually cost seventy-five cents\neach. There are honest men in the business, but beware of the grafter.\n\nThere are many lesser lights engaged in the eye business, but the\nexamples given above will serve to place you on your guard. Take no\ntreatment by mail. Less can be done for the eye than any other organ\nof the body, unless it is the ear. Both are so complex in their\nanatomy and the symptoms so obscure that it is an impossibility to\nmake a correct diagnosis without seeing the patient and using the best\ninstruments that science can bring to the aid of the physician.\n\n\nCONSUMPTION CURES.\n\nA few years ago Dr. Koch, of Berlin, Germany, announced that he had\ndiscovered a cure for consumption. The same announcement has been made\nthousands of times before by more or less illustrious physicians.\n\nDr. Koch's cure was a gas, requiring more or less elaborate apparatus.\nSeveral years' trial of this supposed cure convinced the medical\nprofession, and Dr. Koch himself, that he was mistaken.\n\nHe retracted his statements and acknowledged he had been in error.\nYet in every large city of the country, Chicago, of course, included,\nthere are established \"Koch Institutes\" for the cure of consumption.\n\nA more brazen fraud was never perpetrated on an ignorant public than\nthe claims which these so-called institutes advertise. They are\npatronized chiefly by the poor--those who have been told by honest\nphysicians that they are incurable. Having no means with which to take\ntrips to the mountain or sea shore, they grasp at every quack medicine\nor institute that offers hope of recovery.\n\nI have visited the Chicago branch of this miserable fraud. Invalids\nwho can scarcely walk are to be seen there daily inhaling mixtures of\nnauseous gases that have no more effect on the germ of consumption\nthan a popgun on one of Uncle Sam's ironclads. By means of paid-for\ntestimonials and a couple of \"cappers,\" people from all parts of the\ncountry are brought here, oftentimes taking the last dollar of the\nfamily exchequer to pay for the so-called treatment. These frauds\nhave been exposed time and again. However, a new crop of victims are\ngathered in every day and the game goes merrily on.\n\n\nHUMAN GHOULS.\n\nThe human ghouls in the guise of doctors are meantime living in\nluxury, and fattening on the misfortunes of their already half-dead\nvictims. You might ask why does not the law step in and protect the\nsick. If you had seen as much of the law as I have you would discover\nthat it too frequently protects the doctors and not the patients.\n\nThe men running this and other similar frauds are all licensed\nphysicians, and have the authority of the great State of Illinois to\npursue their calling. If you have consumption spend your money in\ngetting good air, not dope. Drugs never yet cured consumption. That is\nthe testimony of all honest doctors, and there are still a few of them\nleft.\n\n\nTHE MORPHINE CURE.\n\nForty years ago Dr. C----, of Laporte, Indiana, a bricklayer by\nprofession, conceived the idea of selling morphine as a cure for the\nopium habit. Morphine is the essence of opium, just as cocaine is\nthe essence of the coca leaf. It was a brilliant idea and brought\nDr. C---- (he afterward bought diplomas galore) a mint of money.\nC---- constructed himself a mansion in Laporte, which stands today, a\nsplendid specimen of the builders' art. He was the first man to put on\nthe market an opium cure.\n\nThe poor wretches who are addicted to this habit would make any kind\nof a sacrifice for a cure. The whiskey habit is not a circumstance\nto the opium or morphine fiend. There is no habit which so enslaves\nthe victim as the drug habit, and they are seldom cured. C---- ran\nalong for many years with but few imitators. The many victims of\nmorphine whom he has gathered into his net were pouring in their\nwealth until it amounted to thousands daily. As long as they took the\nC---- remedy they had no desire for morphine. The \"remedy\" contained\nmorphine--more, usually, than they had been taking before.\n\n\"Dr.\" C---- had thousands under treatment, but made no cures. At last\nthe so-called remedy was analyzed and its true nature discovered.\n\nAt once an army of imitators sprang into existence in all parts of\nthe country, and morphine cure became as common as other cures. They\nall had and have as a basis opium or some of its salts. The extent of\nthese drug addictions is hardly realized. Chicago alone has thirty\nthousand of these unfortunates, and the trade in opium and allied\ndrugs is immense.\n\n\nENCOURAGING THE MORPHINE HABIT.\n\nMany of these victims date their downfall from some sickness in which\na physician prescribed the drug--perhaps to allay pain or produce\nsleep. When they recovered they found they still had to have it. The\nhabit grew and finally fastened itself with such a deathlike grip\nthat they were unable to shake it off, and so they totter through\nlife, unfitted for anything except to beg, borrow or lend some of the\ndope. Men and women once high in the business and social world are\nfrequently found in the police dock accused of some petty theft in\norder to satisfy their craving for these destructive drugs.\n\nChicago has its quota of doctors who \"cure\" the morphine habit, but\nalways in the way that \"Dr.\" C---- did. Most of them are \"fiends\"\nthemselves who eke out a living selling the drug to other victims in\nthe form of a \"cure.\" If by any chance you have contracted the habit\nsteer clear of all so-called cures. The remedy is worse than the\ndisease.\n\n\nTHE CANCER CURE.\n\nOne can hardly pick up a paper or magazine that does not carry\nthe advertisement of Dr. B----, of Indianapolis, Ind., with branch\ninstitutes at Kansas City and other places. Dr. B----'s remedy is an\noil for which he claims wonderful properties.\n\nIn reply to an inquiry the doctor sends out a little book, filled\nwith testimonials from grateful patients, dependent preachers and his\nfellow church members. The book tells you that the doctor has even\nbuilt a church all by himself and maintains it at his own expense,\neven paying the salary of the pastor out of his own pocket.\n\nIt will be noticed that all successful quacks appeal to the religious\nelement of the community. A man who is really religious is honest;\nhaving no tinge of dishonesty himself, he suspects none in others. He\ntherefore falls easily into the net of the charlatan.\n\nThe quack knows this, hence his use of the religious press in which to\nexploit the virtues of his medicines.\n\nDoes Dr. B---- cure cancer? Yes. There are seven varieties of cancer;\ntwo malignant, which all physicians agree are incurable, and five\nnon-malignant, of which the wart and wen are good examples. Dr. B----\ncures the non-malignant varieties only, and you can do the same\nyourself by the application of a few drops of glacial acetic acid to\nthe growth once a day.\n\nThis is the whole secret of the so-called cures wrought by these men.\nDr. B---- never cured a genuine malignant cancer in his life, and\nnever will until a specific is discovered that will combat it. He has\ngrown very rich, is known as a public-spirited gentleman and to say\naught against him in his native town is to bring down on one's head\nthe wrath of the business community. Why?\n\nPATIENTS FROM EVERYWHERE.\n\nDr. B---- has patients coming from all parts of the country. They\nbring and spend money at his sanitariums. It is \"business,\" and I am\nonly sorry to say that what is known as business is too often larceny.\nIf you have a growth you do not understand, trust it to your family\nphysician, if he is an honest man, rather than to one of the many\ncancer sharks that infest the country.\n\n\nTHE RUPTURE CURE.\n\nThis, when offered by mail, as it is in almost every magazine that\naccepts medical advertisements, is also a glaring fraud upon a most\nhelpless class of people. While it is true that a well fitted truss\nwill retain and often cure a rupture, yet the quacks who advertise the\nrupture cure propose to cure you by mail, then by application of a\nwonderful oil which they sell at ten dollars per bottle, they propose\nto close up the opening through which the rupture descends and effect\na permanent cure. A few years back the surgical treatment of rupture\nwas not always a success, hence people so afflicted had reason to\navoid operations.\n\nToday the cure of rupture is not attended by any danger. Surgery has\nmade many advances in the past few years. People who are ruptured\nshould avoid any other means of cure than the operations.\n\nThere are not less than twenty-five advertising specialists in Chicago\nwho profess to cure rupture without operation.\n\nThey only succeed in separating you from your money. My advice is not\nto go near them, lest you regret it.\n\n\nFEMALE DISEASES.\n\nIt is well known among the readers of the daily press that all the\nadvertisements of a medical nature addressed to women are meant to\ncover the nefarious business of the abortionist.\n\nThe commissioner of health in a recent interview stated that not less\nthan fifty thousand abortions are committed yearly in Chicago. It\nis well to state that only a small number of these are performed by\nthe advertising abortionists. Most of them are the work of regular\nphysicians.\n\nIndeed, in no other way could this immense destruction of infant life\ntake place. I know of physicians here in Chicago who have and do no\nother business. I have in mind one palatial residence on Michigan\navenue patronized exclusively by the rich. It is presided over by a\nstrictly ethical physician. This man's fee is from one thousand to\nfive thousand dollars.\n\nThe poor content themselves with less pretentious places and prices.\nI know of physicians on the north side and the west side who do this\nwork for five and ten dollars. They have as many as ten and twelve\ncases a day.\n\nUp to a few weeks ago all of the Chicago papers contained a list of\nadvertisements under the classification of medical, about as follows:\n\n     \"Maternity Hospital--Ladies taken care of before and after\n     confinement.\"\n\n     \"Mrs. Dr. B----, licensed midwife, takes ladies for\n     confinement, etc.\"\n\n     \"Dr. Anna B---- Elegant home for ladies expecting\n     confinement, etc.\"\n\nThe above are only samples of a long list of advertisements of similar\ntenor which appeared daily in the Chicago press for twenty-five years.\nThese advertisements attracted the attention of people in the country.\nThey were not designed to attract city people. People residing here\nseldom patronize them on account of the high prices usually charged.\nThey know cheaper doctors. Girl from the smaller towns and the farms\nare the ones sought.\n\nThe girl applying for relief at any of these places was usually told\nthat abortions were unlawful and dangerous to life. She was strongly\nadvised to stay in the hospital, which offered perfect seclusion,\nuntil the full period when the child would be naturally born and\nwithout danger to either of them. This advice was generally accepted\nand the price agreed upon paid. This was always all the girl had with\nher, and the promise of more. The amount ranged from one hundred to\nfive hundred dollars.\n\nThe money paid over, the girl was shown to a pleasant room, and\ninvited to make herself at home. There were always other girls there,\nusually under assumed names. They kept coming and going every few\ndays. None remained longer than ten days.\n\nAfter the girl had been there a couple of days the madam announced\nthat the doctor would call on her that day and make an examination, so\nas to approximate the time of baby's arrival.\n\nWith a very small instrument the abortion was produced while making\nthe examination, the patient knowing nothing of it. This is done\nso deftly that labor pains do not come on for sometimes two days\nafterwards.\n\nIn ten days the patient is ready to leave the hospital. The fee having\nbeen paid, both parties are usually satisfied, and the girl, if she is\nwise, makes her misfortune a stepping stone to something better.\n\nIf the amount paid has been too small to satisfy hospital funds, an\neffort is made to collect more, but usually not from the girl.\n\nThe madam gets the patient's confidence and discovers, if she can, the\nman responsible for the girl's condition. A bill is then sent him for\nseveral hundred dollars. Should he ignore it or refuse to pay, he is\npolitely told that the account will be placed in the hands of a lawyer\nin the town where he resides and the matter can be adjusted by a \"jury\nof his fellow citizens.\"\n\nImagine the consternation of some business man or church deacon in a\nsmall community over the receipt of such a letter.\n\nIf guilty, and they are as a general thing, they take the next train\nfor Chicago and pay the bill. Parties running these establishments are\nmoney makers. I know of one on West Adams street whose owner has made\na fortune of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all accumulated\nin twenty years.\n\n\nTHE ELECTRIC BELT FRAUD.\n\nThis is another one of the many humbugs that seem to have fastened\nthemselves on the country. Chicago is the center for this as well as\nevery other fake of a medical character.\n\nThese belts are of the cheapest construction and are made at a cost\nof twelve and one-half cents each. They sell for anything, up to\nthree hundred and even five hundred dollars. There may be virtue in\nelectricity, properly applied, but there certainly is none in the belt.\n\nDr. McL---- is located in Chicago, and has branch offices in almost\nevery state in the union. He takes pages in the daily press to tell of\nthe virtues of his belt. It cures everything from lumbago to corns.\nHe usually pictures a man in a half-stooping position, holding his\nback with one hand, while with the other he is getting a belt from a\nsympathizing doctor.\n\nDr. McL---- has made big money duping his fellow men. Recently he\nopened an office in the City of Mexico. There the government protects\npeople somewhat from their own folly.\n\nA Mexican bought a belt, guaranteed to cure his disease: it failed.\nThe doctor was promptly arrested for obtaining money under false\npretenses. He was sent to jail, where he remained sixteen months.\n\nThe offices were closed and have not since been reopened. The best\nevidence that electric belts are a useless article is to be found in\nthe fact that physicians neither use nor prescribe them. They are an\nadjunct to quackery.\n\n\nTHE VARICOCELE CURE.\n\nTo begin with, varicocele is a surgical disease and is only cured by\nan operation. Yet the daily papers teem with advertisements offering\ncures by drugs, appliances and external washes.\n\nIt is needless to say that all of these are fakers. Chicago has more\nthan twenty specialists who profess to cure varicocele. Only two of\nthem fulfill their promises. The rest take your money and render you\nno service.\n\nNearly every paper advertises these men, such headlines as \"Cured in\nFive Days,\" \"Cured Without Pain.\"\n\n\"Five-day varicocele cure\" meets the eye of the reader on nearly every\npage. It is true that varicocele can be cured in five days; it can and\nis cured in one treatment, but always by surgical means. The headlines\nabove are simply baits for the afflicted.\n\nThe main idea of the so-called specialist is to get the victim into\nhis office. Here he will tell him that he has two methods of cure. One\nis an operation, which necessitates the patient going to a hospital,\nremaining there for five days in order to effect the cure. The other\nis a suspensory and a liniment which, applied daily, will do just as\nwell, but it requires three or four months to get the cure.\n\nThe patient wishes, of course, to avoid an operation. He is always\ntold there is some danger from the chloroform. He usually takes the\n\"slow cure,\" parting at the same time with a good, fat fee, usually a\ngood deal more than he would have had to pay a reputable man for an\noperation. At the end of the period fixed for the cure the patient\nfinds himself no better and finally in disgust places himself in the\nhands of a man who does operate and is promptly cured.\n\nAmong the many men engaged in the cure of varicocele is Dr. Mark\nK----, of Cincinnati and Denver. This man's advertisements adorn every\npage of papers that will take them. His fee is $2.00; his remedy a\nsuspensory and a wash. Both are utterly useless. After you have paid\nyour money your name or original letter is sold to someone in the same\nbusiness.\n\nIn a little while you are surprised to receive mail from all parts\nof the country--all wanting you to purchase a varicocele cure. This\napplies to vacuum pumps, the superior system, the Parisian system and\nother fakes of a like nature. They are all frauds. In the past few\nyears I have raided their places many times, seized their literature,\nwhich is always obscene and indecent, and arrested the proprietors.\nThe game, however, still goes on.\n\n\nTHE \"NERVOUS DEBILITY SPECIALIST.\"\n\n\"Lost Manhood Restored\" is probably the greatest of all medical\ngrafts. These men succeed simply because of the total ignorance of the\npeople on matters pertaining to the sexual system.\n\nIf sexual physiology was a part of the studies in the public schools\nfor pupils at the age of fourteen there would be no cases of nervous\ndebility, and the \"lost manhood\" physician would have to seek other\nfields for the display of his talents.\n\nOne of the saddest of all the habits that young men drop into at some\nperiod of their lives is the secret vice. Until quite lately prudery\nhas prevented its proper discussion and about the only literature on\nthe subject was to be found in that issued by advertising doctors who\ntreat the effects.\n\nOne thing is certain--no one ever acquired the habit by reading one\nof these \"scare\" or quack books. John Stuart Mill, in speaking of\nthis vice, says: \"The diseases of society can be no more checked or\nhealed without publicly speaking of them than can those of the body.\"\nTo ignore or deny the prevalence of the evil is sometimes honest\nignorance, but is more often hypocrisy.\n\nA little scientific discussion on this subject is not out of place\nhere. It will put young men on their guard against themselves, and cut\noff in some degree the income of that class of doctors who live on\ntheir credulity.\n\nSo far as I have been able to trace its origin it has always been\nwith us. According to Ovid, Horace and Aristophanes, it was a curse\nin ancient Greece and Rome. Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine\n380 years before Christ, considered it a subject worthy of his pen. Of\nmodern writers the greatest was Tissot, in 1760, who issued a classic\non this subject whose object was to stay, if possible, the abuses and\nvices which threatened the ruin of the French people. Lurid as the\nlittle book distributed by specialists usually is, the effects of this\nvice depicted by Tissot puts them all into the shade. If not exactly\nscientific, it at least exerted a large moral influence which was\nbeneficial in the then state of public and private morals.\n\nIn the discussion of secret sin let us make it plain that the evil\neffects are not immediate, as is often thought and frequently\ntaught by school teachers and writers. The brain is not palsied at\nonce. Dementia, palsy and sudden death are not likely to occur. The\nerroneous idea that it does, accounts in a great measure for the\nterror, the bashfulness and the love of solitude exhibited by this\nclass of sufferers.\n\nIt is enough for the purpose of this article that in the course of\nphysical decay, gray hair, baldness and enfeebled gait, weakness\nof the muscular and nervous system, in fact, a general lowering of\nthe tone of the bodily health, appear. Life has been lived out with\nabandon, its energies have been overdrawn and its wheels have run down\nlike the mainspring of a clock whose regulator has been lost.\n\nThe sporty and fast life led by reckless youth is making him pay the\npenalty. And what is the penalty? Look at the daily papers, see the\nbrazen medical advertisements, \"Manhood Restored\" staring at you from\nevery page. These advertisements are costly. They run up into the\nthousands of dollars a month. One man, a doctor of Chicago, formerly\npaid the daily press eight thousand dollars a month for advertising;\nhis \"Lost Manhood, Varicocele and Hydrocele Cured\" appeared in almost\nevery paper in this city.\n\nAnd the people who needed the treatment paid the bills. So powerful\nwas this man's influence that he was enabled to stave off undesirable\nlegislation at Springfield. In this he was aided by the newspapers,\nwho did not wish to lose this princely revenue from quack doctors.\n\nThis doctor is still in business, but on a small scale compared to\nformer times. Competition and the advent of more mendacious liars have\nreduced his income to more modest proportions than it once was.\n\n\nA MONUMENTAL SWINDLE.\n\n     MEN who need treatment or advice concerning their health\n     or any weakness or private disease should, before taking\n     any treatment whatever, go to Dr. S. for consultation,\n     examination and advice; free.\n\n     DR. S.--Longest Established, Most Successful and Reliable\n     Specialist in Diseases of Men, as Medical Diplomas,\n     Licenses and Newspaper Records Show.\n\nDr. S. first came to Chicago about the time of the World's Fair. His\nhome office was supposed to be in Philadelphia. While Philadelphia has\nthe reputation of being slow, yet the methods of Dr. S. were decidedly\nswift, so much so that he almost took the breath away from the Chicago\nspecialists.\n\nHe was the first to charge for medicine in addition to his fees. It is\na well-known fact that a man having been under the treatment of Dr. S.\nfor a week or a month never seeks the aid of another one.\n\nHe has been cured? Not on your life. He has been robbed. I have known\nthis \"Doctor\" to charge as much as one hundred dollars for two small\nbottles of dope. This is in addition to a fee of twenty-five to five\nhundred dollars. He always operates a \"drug store\" in connection with\nhis office.\n\nThe patient, having undergone an examination and having been\nthoroughly frightened, is told what the fee will be. This being paid,\nhe is given a prescription and sent to the \"drug store.\"\n\nThis is so written that no other drug store can fill it. In a\nshort time he is handed two or three small bottles, and on asking\n\"how much\" is told a sum varying from ten to one hundred and fifty\ndollars. Surprised and indignant, he hastens back to the \"Doctor\" and\ncomplains. He is told that the medicines are cheap at that price; that\nthey are expensive drugs and very necessary in his case.\n\nIf the patient has the money he pays it, resolving that he will have\nno more to do with Dr. S. If he lives in the country he is surprised\nthe following week by getting notice from the express company that a\nC. O. D. package awaits him at the office.\n\nIt is the second week's supply of medicine. Charges from twenty-five\nto ninety-eight dollars. He at once writes to the \"Doctor\" and says he\ndoesn't want the stuff.\n\nThe first supply has done him no good. It's too expensive and he can't\nafford to continue it.\n\nThe \"Doctor\" writes back and says that he must pay for it. It will\nrequire three months to effect a cure, and the whole treatment has\nbeen prepared. If he does not take it the office will be subject to a\nloss of many hundreds of dollars. They also threaten him with a suit\nfor the recovery of the amount.\n\n\nBLACKMAIL AN ADJUNCT.\n\nThe poor victim, almost frightened to death at the prospect of\nexposure, usually compromises and pays all the money he can raise,\ntaking the three months' \"treatment\" which he is assured has been\nspecially prepared for his case.\n\nIt is not an uncommon thing for Dr. S. to get several thousand dollars\nout of one patient. Men have been known to mortgage their farms to\nget out of the clutches of these cormorants. They never let go until\nthe last dollar has been extracted from the poor patient. After his\nexperience with Dr. S. he wants no more. He thinks that they are all\nalike and carefully avoids them in the future.\n\nDr. S. himself is not in Chicago. He is said to live in Philadelphia.\nHe operates offices in this city and several other places. Three men\ncomprise the office staff--one man who \"takes\" the case, another a\nphysician, usually a dummy engaged at a salary of fifteen to twenty\ndollars a week, and a druggist.\n\nThe main guy of every medical quack office is the \"case taker.\" He is\nalways a \"confidence man\" skilled in the business. He plays upon the\nfears and credulity of his victims. He pictures the most dreadful\nfate awaiting the unfortunate patient. If a case of private disease,\nhe knows that the patient will rot on his feet and become a charnel\nhouse of infection.\n\nIf a \"Lost Manhood\" case, he pictures the horrors of impotency, a\ntrusting girl deceived, a divorce, together with the scandals that\nprecede and follow.\n\n     The old Reliable B---- Doctors Cure Men--Men only.\n\n     NO PAY UNTIL CURED. $5 FEE FOR CURE, $5. NEWLY CONTRACTED\n     SPECIAL DISEASES.\n\n     Consultation and Examination Free Whether You Take\n     Treatment or not. Come to Expert Specialists.\n\n     We cure Varicocele, Nervous Debility, Urethral Troubles,\n     Blood Poison, Private Diseases, Phimosis, Piles, Skin\n     Diseases, Rupture and other Wasting Diseases of Men.\n\n     Call or send for free question list. Hours--Daily. 9 to 8;\n     Sundays, 10 to 2. J. B. McG----, M. D., Medical Director.\n\n          B---- MEDICAL INSTITUTE.\n          Chicago, Ill.\n\nThe above advertisement appears right along in the Chicago dailies. If\nDr. S---- is the \"Prince of swindlers\" the B---- Medical Institute is\na good second.\n\nIt is owned and run by a Bohemian, who changed his name from an\nalmost unpronounceable one to that of Hansen. He employs cheap\ndoctors--mostly dope fiends--men who could not get employment\nelsewhere. His pay is about fifteen dollars per week. This man also\nruns a \"dental\" Institute where equally cheap dentists are employed.\nBoth institutes rob the unsuspecting.\n\nHansen was sued by a former patient and nearly four hundred dollars\nrecovered, quite recently. The man was absolutely free from any\ndisease, but was frightened into paying that amount to get rid of an\nimaginary one.\n\nHe is a common, cheap, medical swindler.\n\n     These are Positive Facts.\n\n     MEN $10.\n     CURES YOU.\n     \"DON'T PAY MORE.\"\n\n     Under scientific treatment all diseases peculiar to men are\n     thoroughly cured.\n\n     Nervous Debility, Blood Poisoning, Lost Vitality,\n     Prostatic, Bladder and Kidney Troubles, Varicocele,\n     Hydrocele, Contracted Diseases, Urethral Obstruction, Male\n     Weakness.\n\n     Dr. C----'s Medical Offices are the most reliable and\n     permanently established specialists in Chicago. See them\n     before commencing treatment elsewhere. Advice, consultation\n     and examination FREE.\n\n     Dr. C---- MEDICAL OFFICES,\n\n     Hours: 8 a. m. to 8 p. m.\n     Sunday, 10 to 3 only.\n\n          Chicago, Ill.\n\n\nSWINDLER A \"DOPE\" FIEND.\n\nThe above advertisement is that of Dr. C----. C---- himself is out of\nthe game. He is a dope fiend. A few months ago he narrowly escaped the\npenitentiary for taking $225 from a sixteen-year-old child. He was\nfined $200 in the Municipal Court, paid it and quit the business.\n\nPreviously, however, he had sold the use of his name to Dick Williams,\nowner of several of the so-called medical offices along State street.\nWilliams changes his doctors every few days, so that a patient hardly\never sees the same man twice. Each man makes an effort to \"re-fee\"\nthe patient--that is, they try to extract more money in the way of\nfees, claiming that the other \"doctor\" did not grasp the severity of\nthe case. It is not unusual for a patient to pay half a dozen fees\nin the same office before he drops onto the fact that he is being\nsystematically robbed.\n\nThe main object of advertising cheap is to get the people into the\noffice and started on the treatment. Money is demanded at every visit\nand new \"diseases\" discovered as long as the credulity of the patient\nlasts.\n\n     CONSULT DR. R----\n\n     A graduate and Regular Licensed Physician. Dr. R---- is\n     qualified through twenty-one years of practical experience\n     to give you the best medical advice and treatment in\n\n     ALL DISEASES AND WEAKNESSES PECULIAR TO MEN.\n\n     The oldest established and most reliable specialist,\n     who sees and treats patients personally. Dr. R----'s\n     Home Treatment Cures Weak Men. If you have Varicocele,\n     Hydrocele, Weakness, Drains, Lost Vigor, Losses, Blood\n     Poison, Kidney, Bladder or Any Chronic Nervous, Private or\n     Urinary Disease, consult the reliable specialist, who will\n     cure you quickly, permanently and cheaply.\n\n     CONSULTATION FREE AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL, as the doctor\n     never makes a professional charge unless you desire him to\n     treat your case until cured. Remember, you see Dr. R----\n     personally. If you cannot call, write a description of your\n     case and he will send you symptom blank and book, \"VITAL\n     FACTS FOR MEN,\" FREE.\n\nDr. R---- is no better and no worse than others who have similar\nadvertisements. They all practice the same game.\n\nHe is not, however, on very friendly terms with other specialists.\nA few years ago when some adverse legislation was threatened at\nSpringfield it was necessary to raise a fund to check it. R----\nsubscribed one hundred dollars, but never paid it. There must be honor\neven among thieves.\n\n     I CURE IN FIVE DAYS VARICOCELE AND HYDROCELE without\n     Knife or Pain. I want to cure every man suffering with\n     Varicocele, Stricture, Contagious Blood Poison, Nervous\n     Debility, Hydrocele or a disease peculiar to men.\n\n     This liberal offer is open to all who have spent large sums\n     of money on doctors and medicines without any success,\n     and my aim is to prove to all those people who were being\n     treated\n\n     CONSULT DR. R----\n\n     by a dozen or more doctors, also without any success, that\n     I possess the only method, by means of which I will cure\n     you permanently.\n\n     DON'T PAY FOR UNSUCCESSFUL TREATMENT, ONLY FOR PERMANENT\n     CURE.\n\n     I will positively cure diseases of the stomach, lungs,\n     liver and kidneys, even though very chronic.\n\n     PRIVATE DISEASES OF MEN cured quickly, permanently and with\n     absolute secrecy. Nervous Debility, Weakness. Lost Vigor,\n     Strains, Losses, Urinary Losses.\n\n     DISEASES PECULIAR TO WOMEN--Pains in the Back. White\n     Discharge and other ailments cured permanently.\n\n     BLOOD POISON--And all kinds of skin diseases, like Pimples,\n     Swollen Glands, Wasting Diseases, Lingering Diseases.\n\n     CONSULTATION AND EXAMINATION FREE.\n     CURE ONCE FOR ALL.\n\n     DR. L. E. Z----, Chicago.\n     Office Hours: 8 a. m. to 8 p. m.\n     Sundays: 9 a. m. to 4 p. m.\n\n\"I cure in five days.\" So says Dr. Z---- and several others in the\nsame business. However, when you offer to take the five-day cure\nyou are told it is an operation. \"I have a slow cure,\" say the oily\n\"doctors,\" \"just as good, which requires three months.\" As the one\noperation itself is a little alarming, most men take the \"slow cure.\"\n\nAt the end of three or six months they find they have been victimized.\nThey are no better, and often worse.\n\n\nJUST PLAIN FRAUD.\n\nAmong other advertisers are Dr. L. R. W----, Dr. H. J. T---- and Dr.\nD----. The last named was recently arrested and held to the grand jury\non the charge of defrauding a patient. It might be asked in the light\nof the above expos\u00e9s of so-called specialists, are there no honest\nones? Detective Wooldridge says yes, there are several in Chicago who\ndeliver the goods. To any earnest seekers after the truth he will be\nglad to give the names of several men of whom he can say, \"They do not\nmisrepresent.\"\n\n\n\n\nFABULOUS LOSSES IN BIG TURF FRAUDS.\n\n\"INVESTMENT\" COMPANIES OF LAST FEW YEARS NETTED $10,162,000.\n\n\nThis is a sad, sad story, because it is an obituary, the death notice\nof one of the meanest and most abominable frauds that has ever taken\nthe hoarded pennies of children and working girls, the \"late lamented\"\n\"turf syndicate.\"\n\nSeveral years ago the turf syndicate was in its glory. A poor girl,\nfresh from the old country, would scrub floors for a week or take in\nwashing for a month in order to pour money into the pockets of these\nswindlers. Thanks to the efforts of Detective Clifton E. Wooldridge,\nof Chicago, and others, this particular fraud is now a thing of the\npast.\n\n[Illustration: (Horses racing)]\n\nBut the enormity of this tremendous crime against the poor may be\nappreciated from a study of the following figures.\n\nTurf \"investment\" companies that have failed, absconded or have been\ndriven to the wall by prosecutions during the last few years and the\namount of money estimated to have been lost in the swindles give the\nfollowing astonishing record:\n\nE. J. Arnold & Co.                                         $ 4,000,000\n\nJohn J. Ryan & Co., St. Louis, Mo.                           1,500,000\n\nBrolaski & Co., Chicago                                        200,000\n\nBenedict & Co., Chicago                                        200,000\n\nThe Mid-Continent Investment Company, Chicago                  150,000\n\nThe Mason-Teller Company, Chicago                               50,000\n\nThe Douglas-Daly Company, R. S. Daly and N. C. Clark,\n  Chicago                                                      125,000\n\nThe Armstrong-Baldwin Turf Commission, J. P. McCann\n  and O. L. Wells, Chicago                                     100,000\n\nThe Money-Maker, C. A. Pollock, manager, Chicago                15,000\n\nGulf Pacific Trust Co., F. Lehman and R. G. Herndon,\n  Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco                        50,000\n\nInvestors' Profit-Sharing and Protective Association, Chicago   12,000\n\nJ. J. Shea & Company, Chicago                                   10,000\n\nStandard Investment Bureau, Chicago and San Francisco           25,000\n\nThe Security Savings Society, W. R. Bennett, Chicago         1,500,000\n\nThe Investors' Protective Association, Frank E. Stone,\n  Chicago                                                      200,000\n\nD. W. Moodey & Co., Chicago                                     50,000\n\nCo-Operative Trust Co., L. M. Morrison, Chicago                150,000\n\nEdward L. Farley & Co., Chicago                                 75,000\n\nInter-Ocean Commission Co., J. T. Mitchell, Chicago             75,000\n\nHugo Morris & Co., Chicago                                      50,000\n\nAl Fetzer & Co., Co-Operative Turf Pools, Hammond, Ind.        500,000\n\nCo-Operative Investment Association, L. H. Myers, New York     150,000\n\nAmerican Stock Co., W. M. Nichols, New York                    100,000\n\nMutual Security Co., C. Dudrey, New York                       100,000\n\nHenshall, Bronner & Co., New York                               75,000\n\nW. W. O'Hara & Co., Cincinnati                                  50,000\n\nCrawford & Co., New York                                        35,000\n\nPaul Pry's Investments                                          70,000\n\nThe Belt Company, N. S. Goodsill, Hammond, Ind.                150,000\n\nDrake, Allison & Co., Hammond, Ind.                            175,000\n\nMcClellan & Co., John McClellan and John Murphy,\n  proprietors, New Orleans, absconded                           50,000\n\nNew York Co-Operative Company, New York                         20,000\n\nW. J. Keating Company, New York                                 20,000\n\nThe Fidelity Trust, Wm. J. Young, San Francisco                 25,000\n\nC. E. Cooper & Co., Cincinnati                                  15,000\n\nC. E. Cooper & Co., Covington, Ky.                              10,000\n\nC. E. Collins & Co., George D. Jones and Charles\n  Thompson, New York                                            30,000\n                                                          ------------\n    Total                                                  $10,162,000\n\n\nGIGANTIC TURF SWINDLE.\n\nAmong the first of the get-rich-quick schemes into which the public\npoured millions was the \"turf investment\" concern. The \"literature\"\nof probably no other class of swindle was so plausible as this. The\npromise was to pay 5 and in some cases 10 per cent on the investment\neach week. The method by which the promise was to be fulfilled was\nthis: The money invested was to be placed in a pool and used as\ncapital in playing the races. A standard bet of a certain amount was\nto be made. If this wager was lost, enough money out of the pool was\nto be bet on the horse picked by the managers of the concern in the\nnext race, to recoup the loss on the first race, win the amount set\nout to win on the first race, together with a like amount on the\nsecond race. If this wager was lost, the process was to be repeated\non the next race, and so on until a wager was won. Each time there\nwas a winning, a large enough sum would have been bet to recoup all\nlosses on previous races and win a fixed amount on each of the races\nplayed. Some concerns claimed to play the favorite horses in the\nbetting, others the second choices to win and others to bet according\nto \"inside information\" derived from horse owners and jockeys.\n\nRegardless of the variations of the scheme, the general plan was the\nsame. The prospectuses, in a most plausible way, set forth the claim\nthat \"beating the races\" was merely a matter of having a large enough\ncapital at hand to continue the progressive betting plan.\n\nBy the claim that horse racing was as legitimate a calling as dealing\non the Board of Trade or Stock Exchange and possessed the additional\nadvantage of being open to persons of small means, a strong appeal was\nmade to the poor.\n\nOf course, none of the money that poured in ever was bet. Had 5 per\ncent a week on all the millions contributed by the public to this form\nof swindle been actually derived from the bookmakers, every penciler\nin the country would have been bankrupted in a month. The remarkable\nfeature of the \"turf\" investment scheme is that this phase of the\nmatter seemed never to occur to investors, and the other palpably\nimpossible phases of the operators' claims were also overlooked in the\neffort to secure 260 per cent a year on the investment made.\n\n\nGET-RICH-QUICK SCHEMES.\n\nAs in the horse swindles, the older investors were paid their\ndividends from funds sent in by new ones. No attempt was made to win\ndividends in the market. As the gullibility of the \"suckers\" became a\nlittle dulled, innovations to increase the plausibility of the schemes\nwere made and new forms of bait devised.\n\n\"Turf swindles\" have flourished, while the victims, who number tens\nof thousands, dare not raise their voices in protest or complaint,\nwell knowing that they would not only be the butt of ridicule in their\ncommunity, but also that the world at large would rather rejoice\nat their losses, and courts and juries would probably waste little\nsympathy on them. Consequently the safest swindles operated today are\nthose having race-track betting for their basis.\n\nIn the latter part of 1902 there were upwards of twenty-five of these\nschemes in operation in the United States. New York City was the\nheadquarters for about ten, and the balance were located in St. Louis,\nChicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, Cincinnati and Brooklyn.\n\nTheir prosperity was evidenced by the ability of managers to buy\nadvertising space in the leading newspapers, to pay the printers\nfor the most elaborate booklets, circulars, etc., and Uncle Sam for\npostage stamps, with which they were extremely liberal, usually\nsending a stamped envelope, for reply, to prospective investors.\n\nExtracts which I give below from the literature of five of these\nconcerns offer a fair criterion for the whole mass which I have before\nme, and demonstrate the turf swindlers' method of extracting money\nfrom the unsophisticated. Fully 25 per cent of their \"investors\" are\nwomen, while the whole number who contribute to their scheme is made\nup of persons who would not be seen betting at a race track or pool\nroom, but who have consciences that will permit them to make money\n\"honestly or otherwise.\"\n\n[Illustration: WHO SAID I LOST TWENTY DOLLARS?]\n\n\nHERE ARE PLAUSIBLE ARGUMENTS.\n\nThis is one argument of a firm of so-called \"Expert Handicappers\" of\nNew York City, who bet on the races:\n\n     \"There has never been a week since we started in business\n     when we did not pay a dividend. The smallest dividend we\n     have ever paid for any one week was $6.50 for every $100\n     invested. We average about $9.50 per week on each $100.\"\n\n     \"An investment with us is safer and brings better returns\n     than bookmaking or any other form of speculation.\"\n\nHere is an argument of a firm of so-called \"Turf Commissioners\" of San\nFrancisco, which claimed to be betting on the races, guaranteeing 4\nper cent weekly:\n\n     \"There is no kind of speculation that affords so great an\n     opportunity for making money rapidly on a small capital as\n     playing the races on a business-like and systematic basis.\n     Our average weekly profits usually range from 4 to 8 per\n     cent.\"\n\nAnother argument, that of a so-called \"Bookmaker\" of St. Louis, who\nguarantees 5 per cent weekly dividends to investors:\n\n     \"We make books and allow the betting public to place the\n     money. The man who bets has one horse running for him--the\n     bookmaker has the rest. For this reason the odds are all in\n     favor of the bookmaker and if he understands his business\n     he is certain to make money.\"\n\nArgument of a firm of so-called \"Turf Commissioners\" of Chicago, who\nclaim to make books on the races:\n\n     \"Our plan insures a steady income on a small capital, such\n     as no other company offers, and far eclipses any mining,\n     oil, or other stock investment.\"\n\nArgument of so-called racing stable concern of St. Louis, guaranteeing\n3 per cent per week to investors of $50 and upward:\n\n     \"We have a large stable of race horses, which we run at all\n     tracks, winter and summer; we make books wherever racing\n     is conducted, and the proposition we manage pays so well\n     because we know how to run it to that end.\"\n\nOne of the variants of the old turf scheme is the venerable \"Two-Horse\nSpecial,\" a fraud that is so old that its whiskers drag about its\nknees. Here is a sample of the two-horse literature:\n\n     \"MY TWO-HORSE SPECIAL PLAN.\"\n     (Send this slip with remittance.)\n\n     NO ACCOUNT RECEIVED OF LESS THAN $50.\n\n     GEORGE F. STONE,\n     Turf Specialist.\n     Brooklyn, N. Y.\n\n     I hand you ---- Dollars to be used by you in speculating\n     for me, according to your TWO-HORSE WIRE plan of Turf\n     Speculation. You are to play one-fifth of the amount of\n     capital on each special, placing the money to win and also\n     for place. You are to mail for me your selections each\n     day, mailing the same NOT LATER than 1 P. M. You agree to\n     operate the account, MAKING NO CHARGE until winnings equal\n     capital invested. After that 20 per cent of all winnings\n     you are to deduct, and send me the balance by money order,\n     with statement, each week. I can close my account and\n     withdraw any balance due me on demand. My liability is\n     strictly limited to above amount.\n\n\nTHE POLICE, AROUSED BY TURF SWINDLERS, RAID AND CLOSE UP THEIR PLACES.\n\nDetective Wooldridge led the officers on February 23, 1900, when the\nfollowing concerns were raided and closed up:\n\n     Co-Operative Trust Company, 80 and 84 Adam street.\n\n     Turf Investment Company, 84 Adams street.\n\n     Inter-Ocean Commission Company, 66 Wabash avenue.\n\n     Security Savings Company, Madison street and Fifth avenue.\n\n     Investors' Protective Association, 510 Realty Building.\n\n     D. W. Moody, 182 and 184 Dearborn street.\n\nThe papers, books and \"big-dividend\" circulars of these concerns\nfilled several wagons. The police estimated that over $500,000 had\nbeen lost by the investors in these concerns, which, notwithstanding\nsome of the high-sounding names adopted by them, were all turf\nswindlers. Raid after raid has resulted in practically ridding Chicago\nof these vampires, but they seem to thrive wherever they are permitted\nto exist.\n\n\nFAKE TURFMEN INDICTED.\n\nGambling and Bookmaking Charged Against the \"Get-Rich-Quick\"\nSyndicates, Including Bennett's.\n\nTrue bills were voted against proprietors of \"get-rich-quick\" turf\nconcerns by the grand jury. Indictments were returned in court, and\ncapiases for the arrest of the accused persons placed in the hands of\nthe sheriff. Those against whom bills were voted are:\n\nFrank E. Stone, alias Eddie Dunne, Security Savings Society, for\nbookmaking. W. R. Bennett, Security Savings Society, for bookmaking.\nW. I Bennett, Security Savings Society, for bookmaking. D. W. Moody,\nSecurity Savings Society, for bookmaking. Louis Morrison, alias L. M.\nMorrison, Co-Operative Trust Company, for bookmaking. Edwin E. Farley,\nfor keeping a common gaming house and poolroom. Charles Carroll, for\nkeeping a common gaming house and poolroom. J. W. Turner, alias J. W.\nTaylor, for keeping a common gaming house and poolroom. Miss S. Beck,\nstenographer for W. R. Bennett, for bookmaking.\n\nOne puzzling feature of the prosecution of the turf people is that\nalthough the bills accuse them of keeping common gaming houses and\noperating poolrooms, officers and lawyers interested in the cases say\nthe promoters of the concerns never really attempted to win their\nadvertised profits by betting on the races. It has been alleged that\nnot one of them speculated with deposits, but simply sent dividends\nback to investors out of their own money. It is now suggested that\nthe accused persons will either have to admit they were gambling or\nconfess that their alluring statements about winnings on the race\ntracks were glittering frauds.\n\nThe turf swindle was prosperous until February, 1903, when the crash\namong the St. Louis contingent precipitated a \"run\" on all of the\nconcerns then in operation. As it was not the policy of the swindlers\nto pay, they either closed their doors and fled or the police\nconveniently interfered with their business.\n\nPrior to the crash at St. Louis there were several notable failures\nand disappearances. On July 9, 1902, the Al Fetzer Co., of Hammond,\nInd., \"failed,\" and about a week prior Turf Commissioner W. W. O'Hara,\nof Cincinnati, absconded. Both of these events shattered many dreams\nof riches. In the Fetzer case heavy rains were said to have broken the\nsure-thing combination by which the company was to win fortunes from\nbookmakers on the race tracks.\n\nThe amounts lost by the credulous investors in Fetzer's scheme,\nwhich, it was declared, \"could not lose,\" reached into the hundreds\nof thousands. The towns that suffered the most were Hammond, Ind.,\nand Appleton, Wis. It was reported that the people of the latter town\nhad suffered to the extent of $50,000, and dozens of small cities are\nbelieved to have fared almost as badly.\n\nThe clients of the concern in Appleton included a number of well-known\nbusiness men and people of all classes. They lost from $25 to $200\neach. A poor widow who had put in all her savings was left penniless\nand was obliged to seek aid from the city authorities.\n\nFetzer conducted a large part of his business through the mails. He\nadvertised extensively in the newspapers and found many who were\nwilling to \"play the game.\" Dividends of $5 a week for $100 invested\nwere promised and were paid punctually up to about July 1, 1902. He\nsaid he had a system of playing the races that could not be beaten,\nand the success of the early investors convinced the doubting ones\nthat his system was all right. The information of the \"snap\" spread\nrapidly and Fetzer's business increased accordingly. No one thought\nthat dividends of 260 per cent were improbable when they read of the\n\"long shots\" that won races on the Chicago tracks.\n\nFetzer attributed the downfall of his business to the rainy weather\nand said that he had been unsuccessful in picking \"mudders.\" His\nsystem of betting, which was to make everyone rich by the end of the\nsummer, went to pieces with each succeeding thunder shower, and the\ninvestors received the doleful information that the company had lost\nits own capital, as well as the money entrusted to it.\n\nAn investigation into the affairs of O'Hara at Cincinnati revealed a\nstate of affairs almost beyond belief. More than 4,000 letters which\nwere received within a week after O'Hara's disappearance were opened.\nThey were from every state in the country, and many were from Canada.\nAmounts from $5 to $500 in checks and mail and express orders were\nenclosed. The total amount of the money in the letters opened was\n$5,518, and Inspector Holmes stated that O'Hara got away with $7,500\nwhich came in the mail the same week, making a total of over $12,000\nfor one week's business. O'Hara's books showed that from July, 1900,\nwhen he commenced operations, until he skipped out in June, 1902, he\nhad received from credulous \"investors\" the enormous sum of $465,000.\n\nThe inevitable crash came early in February, 1903, and the police\nand grand juries at Chicago, St. Louis, New York and other cities\ngot busy, but the money had been transferred to the pockets of the\nswindlers, who had the choice of paying lawyers and possible fines or\ntraveling in foreign climes until the excitement blew over.\n\nFebruary, 1903, Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge raided and closed the\nfollowing named turf investment companies in Chicago:\n\n     H. B. Blackstone, E. J. Arnold, 95 Dearborn street.\n\n     Harry Brolaski, \"Brolaski & Co.,\" 356 Dearborn street.\n\n     Henry Thompson, \"Brolaski & Co.,\" 356 Dearborn street.\n\n     Mattie Woodin, \"Benedict & Co.,\" 225 Dearborn street.\n\n     M. J. Beck, \"Benedict & Co.,\" 225 Dearborn street.\n\n     W. J. Mason, \"Benedict & Co.,\" 225 Dearborn street.\n\n     \"Mid-Continent,\" 185 Dearborn street.\n\n\nPREY ON CHICAGO TEACHERS.\n\nFrom papers found in the Mid-Continent offices it appears this company\nhad been doing a loan as well as an investment business. A letter\naddressed to Chicago school teachers invited deposits for investment\non which 2-1\/2 per cent monthly interest was guaranteed.\n\nIf the teachers needed money it was offered them at 3 per cent a\nmonth. The company's methods and those of the banks were compared in\nthe letter, to the disadvantage of the banks.\n\nMedical students, stenographers, maids in hotels, women of various\nclasses, farmers in many sections of the country and hundreds of men\nin different employments in the city were disclosed as the dupes.\n\nThe following telegram from St. Louis to a Chicago paper briefly\noutlines the situation on the second day of the raiding there:\n\n     St. Louis, Mo., Feb. 11, 1903.--Runs were made on the\n     E. J. Arnold Turf Investment Company, the International\n     Investment Company, The Christie Investment Company and\n     John J. Ryan & Co. yesterday by hundreds of men and women\n     who during the last six months have invested their savings\n     with these co-operative bookmaking concerns in the hope of\n     enormous profits. The International and Christie companies\n     paid all the stockholders who appeared, at first. Then they\n     decamped.\n\n     Arnold & Co., in accordance with their announcement which\n     caused the panic among the \"turf speculators\" yesterday,\n     refused to pay back any stock certificates, although still\n     claiming to be perfectly solvent, and determined to pay the\n     usual weekly dividends until affairs of the company are\n     wound up.\n\n     At the offices of John J. Ryan, owner of the Newport (Ky.)\n     Race Track, a riot was averted by the presence of the\n     police; and the excited investors, who were reminded that\n     their stock certificates are payable only on thirty days'\n     notice, went off in a state of rage and anxiety at once\n     amusing and pitiful.\n\n\nHOW ARNOLD INSPIRED CONFIDENCE.\n\nArnold was a wise one. He knew how to work the game. First he sent\nto New York and bought the famous race horse Gold Heels. This horse\nhad won many of the great Eastern classics. He broke a tendon and was\nuseless, but Arnold's investors did not know that. They would swear\nby Gold Heels. Then he caused his \"bank\" to issue a letter along the\nfollowing lines:\n\n     American Central Trust Company.\n\n     Capital--$1,000,000.      Surplus--$500,000.\n\n     S. Schnurmacher, President.\n     Wm. S. Simpson, First Vice-President.\n     Joseph Wachtel. Second Vice-President.\n     Franklin P. Hunkins, Third Vice-President.\n     Edward Bauder, Secretary and Treasurer.\n\n     DIRECTORS.\n\n     Shepard Barclay,\n     Edward Bauder,\n     G. A. Bauder,\n     John N. Drummond, Jr.,\n     Henry W. Gehner,\n     Morris Glaser,\n     Frank Griesedieck,\n     G. A. Gurner,\n     Franklin P. Hunkins,\n     John D. Manley,\n     H. I. Mills,\n     John A. Nies,\n     H. F. Powitzhy,\n     Leo S. Rassieur,\n     B. Schnurmacher,\n     Wm. S. Simpson,\n     Joseph Wachtel.\n\n          St. Louis, Mo., May 15, 1902.\n\n     TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:\n\n     The firm of E. J. Arnold & Company, of this city, is one\n     of our largest depositors, and we consider them amply\n     responsible for every obligation they may assume.\n\n          AMERICAN CENTRAL TRUST COMPANY,\n          By EDWARD BAUDER,\n          Sec'y & Treas.\n\nThe disaster was brought about by the appointment of a committee\nby the Missouri legislature to investigate the \"get-rich-quick\"\nsituation. St. Louis had become the haven of every conceivable class\nof swindlers, who swarmed there in such numbers that the legislature\ndeemed it wise to look into the matter. What motive inspired it to\ntake this action was a mystery. Sufficient, however, to observe that\nwhen it came to following out its own recommendation to pass laws that\nwould drive the \"get-rich-quick\" companies of all kinds out of the\nstate something stopped the legislation.\n\nThe investigation of the \"get-rich-quick\" concerns in Missouri by the\nState Senate Committee resulted in an elaborate report, which was\npresented March 3, 1903. This report had the following to say of the\nturf investment companies:\n\n     \"These institutions are of modern origin. The pioneer\n     in this field, especially in this state, seems to have\n     been E. J. Arnold & Co. Then followed Ryan & Co., the\n     International, The Christian Syndicate, Brolaski, Thomas\n     Walsh, Maxim-Gay and others.\n\n     \"These concerns were presumably prosperous until the\n     examination which was begun by the grand jury, instigated\n     by the circuit attorney of St. Louis, Hon. Joseph W. Folk,\n     and your present committee. When the crash came, company\n     after company closed its doors or refused to pay back\n     to depositors on demand, and upon examination of these\n     companies, we found them to be mere shells, with little\n     or no money or available assets on hand, and the millions\n     of dollars handled by them either paid out in dividends,\n     squandered and gambled away on race tracks, or absorbed by\n     the officers and managers of the said companies.\n\n     \"The evidence discloses the fact that E. J. Arnold is\n     supposed to be in Mexico, the books of said company being\n     in the hands of the grand jury. So far as the search under\n     legal process has developed, no assets of Arnold & Co.,\n     except a stock farm and stock thereon, office furniture and\n     fixtures, and a few hundred dollars in cash, were found.\n\n     \"Ryan & Company claim that they have on hand $200,000,\n     which has been attached and garnisheed, in the hands of the\n     depositories, and the same process has been used to take\n     possession of the real estate holdings and other personal\n     property.\n\n     \"George A. Dice, inspector of the postoffice, in charge of\n     the St. Louis department, testified that he had made an\n     examination of E. J. Arnold & Co. and John J. Ryan & Co.,\n     and that on their showing Arnold & Co. had on hand $160,000\n     more assets than their liabilities; that two different\n     examinations of these concerns were made by him and his\n     deputies, and that in the last report of November and\n     December, 1902, his report to the department recommended\n     that they be cited to appear before the department and\n     answer as to their liability for criminal use of the mails,\n     and that so far as his report went they were notified\n     that there was a case pending against them; that the\n     ruling of the department was not in accordance with his\n     recommendation; that from the evidence it appears that\n     the department at Washington, by some process or other\n     unknown to your committee, overruled the recommendations of\n     the inspector, dismissed the cases pending against these\n     companies, and they were allowed to proceed with their\n     process of absorbing the people's money. Had the department\n     at Washington acted promptly and properly upon the\n     recommendation of the inspector, millions of dollars would\n     have been saved to the people of the State of Missouri and\n     other states.\n\n     \"In order to protect the people who are attracted by the\n     fair promises and the payment of extraordinary profits\n     or dividends, and to prohibit the improper and vicious\n     misapplication and absorption of the money of the people\n     who confide in the representation of investment companies,\n     your committee recommends that a law be passed which will\n     prohibit the doing of business by said turf investment\n     companies or other like institutions in this state.\"\n\nIf one should moralize on the turf swindles it would only be to repeat\nthe old story--avarice. Nothing else explains why they are permitted\nto flourish and rob, and then a newspaper story and no more.\n\nJustice, blind and decrepit, is unable to scale the insurmountable\nbarrier of the swindlers' \"bank roll.\" But there is still hope, for\nfrom Washington we hear from day to day that another boodler has been\nlanded in the grand jury net--thanks to President Roosevelt, who, if\nhe knew all, would do more.\n\nWhen the last paragraph was written the finale had not been reached.\nBut the strong arm of the federal government has at last been felt\nand the turf investment companies are no more. It is impossible for\neven the veriest sucker to be taken in by them any more, and their\nliterature would be barred from the mails in an instant. It is all\nover with the turf investment companies. \"_Requiescat in pace._\" May\nthey rest in peace.\n\n\n\n\nFAKE DRUG VENDORS.\n\nA MOST DANGEROUS FORM OF RASCALITY.\n\nDrugs Worth $30,000 Seized.\n\nWar on Makers of Imitations of Medicines Begun by the Chicago Police\nin Charge of Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge.\n\n\nIn all the history of fraud, imposture and graft, there is no story to\nparallel that of the \"fake drug clique.\" There is no means of finding\nout how many thousands of lives are annually sacrificed in consequence\nof its nefarious practices, and the strong arm of the law while it can\nreach out and prevent further crime, can not call back to life those\nwho have been offered up on the altar of greed.\n\nSensational raids made in the effort to clear Chicago of its numerous\n\"Fake\" patent medicine concerns, occurred on the morning of Nov. 29,\n1904.\n\nThe raids followed a long conference between Chief of Police Francis\nO'Neill and Col. James E. Stuart, Chief Inspector of Chicago Postal\nDepartment, and for the first time in the history of the city, the\nFederal and City forces worked in unison. They decided that Chicago\nshould be cleared of \"Fake\" Patent Medicine Concerns which for years\nhad been using the mails to defraud hundreds of thousands of sick and\nweak persons.\n\nGeorge G. Kimball, U. S. Inspector of Mails, and Detective Clifton R.\nWooldridge were assigned to gather the evidence and prepare the cases\nfor prosecution. The work was no easy task. Both officers went about\nthe work of gathering the evidence in a thoroughly systematic manner.\n\nInspector Kimball discovered the mails were employed extensively by\nthe agents in disposing of their spurious drugs. Investigation proved\nthat large orders were sent to small suburban towns and cities weekly.\nThe correspondence, circulars and goods were secured.\n\nThe breaking up of the drug ring, however, was a delicate task. It was\nstrongly backed financially, and it was aided and abetted, throughout\nthe United States, by political rings galore. Chicago was the\nheadquarters, and it was natural that to the police department of this\ncity, ever-famed for its hatred of \"grafts\" big and little, should\nfall the lot of exterminating the traffic.\n\nDetective Wooldridge gathered the information in Chicago, the names of\nthe firms, location and the men who owned them.\n\nThe men are charged with making and selling a spurious preparation of\naristol, a product made in Germany, and valued as a substitute for\niodoform. Their products were represented as genuine, were said to\ndiffer from those handled by the wholesale drug trade, only in the\nfact that they were imported from Canada and England instead of from\nGermany.\n\nHere are a few of the things discovered in the course of the\ninvestigation by Detective C. R. Wooldridge. The statements are\nprinted from an interview with the great detective.\n\n     \"As we have progressed the work has broadened and grown\n     to proportions never anticipated at the start. Among the\n     goods seized were found boxes, the labels of which bore the\n     chemical name and formula of trional, and which gave an\n     exact description of the chemical and physical properties\n     of trional and the medicinal indications of this drug.\n\n     \"On examination it was found that these boxes contained\n     pure acetanilid. The dosage of drugs recommended upon the\n     label was fifteen to twenty grains, and it was stated 'that\n     night sweats of phthisis are promptly arrested by eight\n     grains.\"\n\n     \"I am informed that it is within the professional knowledge\n     of every druggist as well as every physician that the\n     substitution, grain for grain, of acetanilid, for trional,\n     is a most reprehensible fraud, which might cause the death\n     of the patient to whom the drug was administered.\n\n     \"As indicating the commercial fraud connected with this\n     substitution, it should be stated that the price charged\n     for this drug by the defendants in this case, as shown by\n     the price list, was 95 cents per ounce, commercial value of\n     acetanilid is one and one half cents per ounce.\n\n     \"But by far the largest fraud found was in the counterfeit\n     label business. There were 2,400 metal caps for bottles\n     stamped with the name of a Swiss manufacturer. There were\n     also labels purporting to be German or Swiss labels. A\n     number of half filled bottles, waiting for the adulterants,\n     showed conclusively the use to which these labels were to\n     be put.\n\n     \"We were fortunate enough to find certain cards and bills\n     in this place indicating that the makers of these metal\n     caps and labels had never been nearer Switzerland or\n     Germany than Clark and Harrison streets. Acting upon this\n     information we secured evidence that these articles were\n     made in Chicago and never imported.\n\n     \"These entire preparations including the mixing, boxing,\n     labeling and placing upon the market was done by these\n     parties here in Chicago, and the goods, much of it\n     undoubtedly, placed in the hands of innocent purchasers,\n     who were deceived by the external appearance of\n     genuineness, into purchasing the adulterated and fraudulent\n     goods, without analysis or investigation of any kind.\n\n     \"The great public, the individuals who use these drugs when\n     prescribed by their physician, are themselves in total\n     ignorance of the fact, not only that they have defrauded\n     and cheated, but perhaps placed in jeopardy of their lives.\n\n     \"There were found among these boxes seized, certain\n     receptacles which bore labels stating that aristol was\n     contained therein. On examination by reputable chemists at\n     the Columbus Laboratories, the powder in these boxes was\n     found to be fullers earth,  with oxide of iron,\n     not containing a single trace of aristol. The aristol,\n     which was quoted on the price lists as 'equal to Bayer's'\n     was sold at 80 cents per ounce, at which almost a ton of\n     fullers earth and oxide of iron could be purchased.\n\n     \"The evidence was procured and chemical tests made which\n     proved the presence of alien matter in the prescriptions\n     which called for pure drugs. In nearly 20 per cent of the\n     samples obtained there was not even a trace of the drug\n     called for in the prescription; Acetanilid as a substitute\n     for trional-aristol, which is an antiseptic wash much used\n     by surgeons.\n\n     \"Prescriptions were sent to 139 druggists signed by Dr. J.\n     Scott Brown, calling for pure aristol. Dr. J. A. Wesener of\n     the Columbus Laboratories conducted the tests.\n\n\nWHAT THE TEST SHOWED.\n\n     (The results) Dr. Wesener showed the following:\n\n     23 prescriptions       No trace of aristol\n     66 prescriptions      80 per cent impurity\n     10 prescriptions      20 per cent impurity\n      9 prescriptions      10 per cent impurity\n     31 prescriptions                      pure\n\n     \"Druggists have been misled into purchasing this substitute\n     for aristol by unscrupulous salesmen, who have palmed off\n     on them a substance which in many cases is nothing more\n     than 'fuller's earth,' said Dr. Wesener. This stuff was\n     sold to them cheap.\n\n     \"The druggist can have no excuse for selling this stuff,\n     which is injurious, because it is an easy matter for him to\n     test it to find out whether it is aristol or not. Aristol\n     is soluble in either, and makes a dark brown solution. Some\n     of the powder which we have obtained on these prescriptions\n     is not soluble at all. We have not completed the chemical\n     analysis of all the precipitates, but those which we have\n     tried consist of chalk mixed with an iron oxide to give it\n     the color, or some other mineral substance.\"\n\nThe two leading imitations are as follows: Spurious preparation of\naristol, and an imitation of triethylate which is a substitute for\ntrional.\n\nAristol sells at $1.85 an ounce and triethylate retails at $1.50 an\nounce. The cost of manufacturing the two imitations is about 2 cents\nan ounce.\n\n\nDANGER TO THE PATIENT.\n\n     \"The adulteration of aristol is liable to be fraught with\n     serious consequences to the patient. It is extremely\n     dangerous to introduce a mineral substance into an open\n     wound, and many surgeons who have used this adulterated\n     antiseptic, having bought it in good faith for the pure\n     drug, have been at a loss to know why the wounds have\n     suppurated. It is possible this adulterated drug may have\n     caused numberless cases of blood poison with consequent\n     loss of life.\"\n\n\nHASTENED McKINLEY'S DEATH.\n\nIt is even whispered that one of the products sold by this gang as\na counterfeit of a standard article hastened the death of President\nWilliam McKinley. The story goes that when the physicians sent to the\nnearest drug store for a certain kind of medicine they were given a\nsubstance which resembled it in every way but which was spurious. It\nis said the drug had exactly the opposite effect upon the president\nfrom what the doctors had reason to suppose it would have. Some there\nare who even declare that the application of the genuine article at\nthat critical time would have saved the life of William McKinley.\n\nOtta G. Stoltz, druggist at 60 Rush street, Chicago, Ill., assisted by\nhis porter, manufactured the spurious drugs in his basement for E. A.\nKuehmsted.\n\nIn manufacturing the standard remedy of aristol, he used fifty per\ncent of various ingredients, and fifty per cent of rosin. It was\ncalled \"Thymistol, manufactured by the Mexican Chemical Company,\"\nand substituted for aristol. There was no such a company in Mexico.\nThe goods, boxes and labels were made in Chicago, Illinois, and the\nstuff was sold to the druggists for one half the price of the genuine\naristol.\n\nThe gang was ostensibly engaged in selling to the retail drug trade\ninfringements of a large number of patented drugs, manufactured in\nGermany. Their products were represented to be genuine, differing\nfrom those handled by the legitimate wholesale drug trade only in\nthe fact that they were imported by them direct from Canada and\nEngland, thereby evading payment of royalty to the American patentees.\nAs a matter of fact, the peddlers used the cry of monopoly under\nthe patents merely as a pretext for ingratiating themselves with\nthe retail druggists, and then foisted upon them many adulterated\nand spurious imitations of the imported preparations. The drugs\nimitated are standard medical preparations, dispensed on physician's\nprescription by every retail pharmacist. These remedies are in so\ngeneral use that at least one-half the prescriptions written by\nphysicians call for one or other of them.\n\n\nLETTER FROM EDWARD A. KUEHMSTED, THE PRINCIPAL DEALER IN SPURIOUS\nDRUGS; IT IS SELF-EXPLANATORY.\n\n          Chicago, Ill.,\n          July 24, 1902.\n\n     MR. M. R. ZAEGEL.\n     Sheboygan, Wis.\n\n     My Dear Mr. Zaegel:\n\n     Although I have been selling bogus Phenacetine and a lot of\n     other bogus goods for over three years. I have never had\n     the pleasure of selling you any of them. I should very much\n     like to do so, and feel that I can give you satisfaction\n     both in goods and prices.\n\n     Some time ago I perfected arrangements to get my supplies\n     direct from Europe, where the supply is not so limited as\n     in Canada, and I can do much better in price.\n\n     The enclosed list gives my complete line. All items with\n     prices attached I have in stock and can supply without\n     delay. Other items are continually arriving.\n\n     The prices I have made you are, I think, exceptionally\n     low, and I trust they will induce you to give me a trial.\n     Express charges I prepay. Trusting I may be favored with\n     your valued orders, I am,\n\n          Very respectfully,\n          EDWARD A. KUEHMSTED.\n\n     6323 Ingleside Ave.,\n     Chicago, Ill.\n\n\nTHE STATE LAWS COVERING THE FRAUDULENT ADULTERATION OF DRUGS AND\nMEDICINES FOR THE PURPOSE OF SALE, READS AS FOLLOWS.\n\n     \"Section 10, Chapter 38 of Hurd's Revised Statutes of\n     Illinois for 1903. Whoever fraudulently adulterates, for\n     the purpose of sale, any drug or medicine, or sells or\n     offers or keeps for sale any fraudulently adulterated drug\n     or medicine, knowing the same to be adulterated, shall be\n     confined in the County Jail not exceeding one year, or\n     fined not exceeding $1,000, and such adulterated drugs and\n     medicines shall be forfeited and destroyed.\"\n\nAfter the great mass of evidence had been gathered it was submitted to\nthe Chief of Police, Francis O'Neill, who instructed Detective Clifton\nR. Wooldridge to lay the matter before John K. Prindiville, Justice\nof Peace, and if he would issue warrants to go ahead and search the\npremises and make arrest.\n\nDesk Sergeant Mike White looked upon as an expert by the police\nDepartment drew the complaints and warrants which were duly signed and\na detail of 20 picked men was assigned to Detective Wooldridge with\ninstructions to go ahead, and on Oct. 29, 1904, they were divided into\nfour squads and they swooped down on the five Medicine concerns at one\ntime without giving them any warning.\n\nThe following is a list of the parties arrested:\n\nW. G. Nay, alias S. B. Soper, 1452 Fulton street; over $2,000 worth of\nspurious stuff seized. Nay and wife arrested.\n\nBurtis B. M'Cann, alias George A. Barton, 6113 Madison avenue, $2,500\nworth of stuff seized. McCann arrested.\n\nJ. J. Dean, 6123 Ellis avenue; $5,000 worth of spurious medicines\nseized; Dean and wife arrested.\n\nJ. N. Levy, 359 Dearborn street; $500 worth seized.\n\nEdward A. Kuehmsted, 6323 Ingleside avenue, and Isabella Kuehmsted\nwere arrested; over $12,000 worth of spurious drugs were seized by\nDetective Clifton R. Wooldridge, Sergeant William M. McGrath, Sergeant\nThomas Fitzpatrick, Officers Terence N. Kelly, Mathew J. Reilly,\nMichael O'Neill, Thomas Ready, Michael McGuire, August C. Dolan,\nPatrick Quinn, Thomas Daly, Bernard Conway.\n\nV. Goldberg, a partner of Edward Kuehmsted, appeared on the scene and\ntried to prevent the officers from taking the goods. He was locked\nup on the charge of disorderly conduct and on the following morning\nentered a plea of guilty before Justice John R. Caverly and was\nfined $1 and cost. John G. Campbell, alleged attorney for Edward A.\nKuehmsted, appeared upon the scene and tried to force his way into the\nhouse while the drug was being removed. He also tried to prevent the\nofficers from taking the drugs and threatened to whip them, pulled his\ncoat off and assaulted Detective Wooldridge. He too was sent to the\nHarrison Street Station and locked up.\n\nThe prisoners arrested in the raid were sent to the Harrison Street\nPolice Station together with eleven wagonloads of drugs seized, which\nwere valued at $30,000.\n\nUpon the arrival of the prisoners and the drugs, a United States\nwarrant was served upon them, charging the defendants with using the\nmails to defraud, also a duces tecum subpoena was served for the\ndrugs seized in the raid to be brought into the United States court\nforthwith, was served upon Detective Wooldridge, and other officers by\nUnited States Marshal.\n\nThe two ex-convicts were Levy, who was also known under the aliases\nof Charles Meyers, R. Waldron, and R. Cassat and George Edwards.\nUnder the latter name he served a year in Joliet. Hass was the\nother ex-convict. His Sing Sing number was B 5574. Yet under the\nadministration of the law under the justice shop system these men,\nwho sold chalk and water mixed with idorn oxides for an antiseptic,\nfinally managed to get out of the clutches of the law on a compromise\nadjudication, concerning which the State's Attorney alone knew the\ndetails.\n\nThen the insolent vendors of fake drugs thought they saw a chance\nto get back at the officers of the law. They found a nice little\nloop-hole in the fact that when the raids were made a few chemicals,\nwhich were not contraband had been seized, in the rush and scurry of\nthe raid.\n\nTherefore a suit was brought against Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge,\nCharles M. Carr, editor of the N. A. R. D. Notes, a police\npublication, Henry D. Morton, Chief of Police Francis O'Neill, the\nFarbenfabriken Co. and Wooten. The suit called for heavy damages.\nAfter going over the evidence the court of first resort awarded\ndamages of $1.00. Rather than be put to the cost of an appeal this\n$1.00 was paid by the defendants.\n\nBut the business of vending fake drugs in the city of Chicago had been\nbroken up and the city made unsafe for this most detestable class\nof swindlers, who prey upon the sick and wounded and endanger human\nlife by the sale of their nostrums. \"It was worth $1.00 to put the\nrascally crew out of business,\" said Detective Wooldridge afterward in\ndiscussing the matter. \"It is surely worth a dollar to a man to know\nthat he has been instrumental in saving thousands of human lives.\" And\nthere the matter rested.\n\n\n\n\nBUCKET-SHOP.\n\n\nEvery day the American people squander $100,000 in fictitious\nspeculation in grain.\n\nThere are 1,000 bucket shops operating in the United States at this\ntime, their geographical distribution marked by the boundaries of the\ncountry.\n\nFor each of these 1,000 shops an average of $100 a day gross income is\nnecessary to meet its expenses, chief of which are for wire and ticker\nservice and blackboard writers.\n\nThus, in order that 1,000 of these shops may live and remain open,\nthey must have $100 a day each, which, in a year of 300 days, means\nan income of $300,000,000 annually. Many of these bucket shops fail\nfor lack of money, while others \"fail\" in order that they may keep\nthe money of the investor. While $100,000 a day as the losses of the\npeople in the illegitimate speculation in grain is very conservative,\none must add another $100,000 a day as tribute which the gullible\npay to the fake \"get-rich-quick\" and kindred sharper concerns of the\ncountry.\n\n\n\"SPECULATION\" AN UNMEANING TERM.\n\nYet with this $100,000 a day going into the hopper of frenzied\nspeculation of all kinds, Bradstreet's for the year 1907 showed\nbusiness failures from speculation as one-eighth of 1 per cent of the\ntotal failures of the country.\n\nWhatever may be Bradstreet's definition of the word \"speculation,\"\nas used in his lists, the word to the average business man who\nknows whereof he talks is as unmeaning as any other in the business\ndictionary. Suppose a man somewhere in a country town loses money in\nany speculative venture anywhere under the sun. If it is a few dollars\nonly, he may not speak of it at all. If it is enough to embarrass\nhim, perhaps he may have to speak. Under these circumstances the best\npossible thing to do is to explain that he lost it \"on the Chicago\nBoard of Trade.\" If he has no credit at stake in the matter, and is\nsore, he may yell murder over his losses \"on the board.\" But hundreds\nof such men have lost their money in bucket shops, and scores of them\nhave lost it at poker or some other gambling game.\n\n\n\"BOARD OF TRADE\" FALSELY BLAMED.\n\nEvery little while a banker somewhere goes wrong with funds that are\nintrusted to him, and in the telling of the story the \"Chicago Board\nof Trade\" is the secret of his undoing.\n\nOne of the marked cases of the kind was that of the Aurora banker who\ndefalcated with $90,000, \"lost on the Board of Trade.\"\n\nBut when the story was run down it was discovered that his money was\nlost in a bucket shop in Hammond, Ind., which had been driven out of\nChicago through the efforts of the Chicago Board.\n\nWhen $100,000, at a conservative estimate, every day, is lost by the\nAmerican public in bucket shops, just the thing that such a shop is\n\"in being\" should be of economic interest and consideration.\n\nWithin the knowledge of tens of thousands of citizens some\nacquaintance or person of whom they have had personal knowledge has\ngone \"broke\" in grain speculation.\n\nYet to find a man who has lost his fortune on the race tracks or in a\ngambling den is not at all an easy task.\n\nWithout a question the gambling losses in the bucket shop are more\nserious in consequences the country over than the losses in any other\none kind of gaming, for the reason that the man who could afford to\nconfess losses at horse racing or at cards may retain his character\nas a business man to a far greater extent by having lost at a \"little\nflyer in grain.\"\n\n\nWHAT IS A BUCKET SHOP.\n\nI have frequently been requested to define bucket shops--a most\ndifficult task, owing to the variety of disguises which they assume\nand the outward similarity which they bear to legitimate brokerage.\nThe following definition covers the essential features of bucket shops\nfrom the standpoint of an expert.\n\nA bucket shop is an establishment conducted nominally and ostensibly\nfor the transaction of a grain, cotton or stock exchange business.\n\nThe proprietor, with or without the consent of the patron, takes one\nside of every deal that is made in his place, the patron taking the\nother, no article being bought or sold in any public market.\n\nBucket shops counterfeit the speculative trading on exchanges.\n\nContinuous market quotations of an exchange are the essence, the very\nsinew of the gambling business carried on in a bucket shop, being used\nas dice are used, to determine the result of a bet.\n\nThe market quotations posted in a bucket shop are exactly similar to\nthose posted in a legitimate broker's office, but they are displayed\nfor a different purpose. The broker posts the quotations for the\npurpose of showing what the market has been on the exchange as a\nmatter of news.\n\nThe bucket shop posts them as the terms upon which its patrons may\nmake bets with the keeper. A bucket shop is destroyed if it loses its\nsupply of quotations.\n\nMargins deposited with the bucket shop proprietor by the patrons are\nnothing but the patrons' stakes to the wager, and are appropriated\nby the proprietor when the fluctuations of the price on the exchange\nwhose quotations are the basis of the bet, reach the limit of the\ndeposit, one party (the proprietor) to the bet acting as stakeholder.\nThe commissions charged by the bucket shopkeepers are odds in its\nfavor, and necessary in order to maintain their pretense of being\nlegitimate brokers making the transaction on an exchange.\n\n\nREADY TO MAKE ALL DEALS.\n\nThe bucket shop proprietor is ready to make all deals offered in any\ncommodity that fluctuates in price. He may call himself banker and\nbroker, or commission merchant, or disguise his business under the\nform of an incorporated enterprise or exchange. But he is still a\ncommon gambler. The interest of the proprietor of a bucket shop is at\nall times opposed to that of his patrons, as the profits of the shop\nare measured by the losses of the patrons.\n\nBucket shops should not be confounded with the great public markets\nof the world, where buyer and seller, producer and consumer, investor\nand speculator meet in legitimate trade; for the pretended buying of\nmillions of bushels of grain in bucket shops will not add a fraction\nof a cent to the price of the product of the farm, nor will the\npretended selling of as much increase the supplies of the consumer or\nlessen the cost of his loaf a farthing. Nor should they be confounded\nwith the offices of legitimate brokers which they endeavor to imitate\nin appearance.\n\n\nNAME COINED IN LONDON.\n\nThe term \"bucket shop,\" as now applied in the United States, was\nfirst used in the late '70s. It was coined in London fifty years ago,\nwhen it had absolutely no reference to any species of speculation or\ngambling. Beer swillers from the East Side (London) went from street\nto street with buckets, draining every keg they came across and\npicking up cast-off cigar butts. Arriving at a den they gathered for\nsocial amusement around a table and passed the bucket as a loving cup,\neach taking a \"pull\" as it came his way.\n\nIn the interval were smoking and rough jokes. The den came to be\ncalled a bucket shop. Later the term was applied, both in England and\nthe United States, as a byword of reproach to small places where grain\nand stock deals were counterfeited.\n\nYet the bucket shop is a gambling den par excellence, with all the\nparaphernalia necessary for the deception of the unsuspecting. One may\nplace a $10 bet in the bucket shop, pay a commission of 25 per cent to\nthe \"bucket shopper,\" who may so shuffle the \"cards\" that the bettor\nmay have to lose, even after he has won. As an example:\n\n\nGAME NEATLY FIXED.\n\nThe one thing absolutely necessary to the bucket shop are quotations,\nnever from a legitimate board of trade, but through leased wires, or\nwire tappings, or from some other fake source. For the instant that\nthe \"quotations\" cannot be written upon the blackboards the betting\nmust cease. The bet of the customer is that before a certain grain\ndrops off a point against him, it will advance a point or more in\nhis favor, and the bucket shopper takes the bet, holding the stake\nhimself. Frequently the bettor may realize that he has won a point, or\ntwo, or three, and may insist upon the bucket shop selling for him.\nPerhaps the victim lives at a distance from the shop and must write or\nwire his \"broker.\" He wires for the \"broker\" to sell, and perhaps gets\na message in reply to the effect that the market must go much better\nthan that; that he refuses to sacrifice his patron's best interests in\nthat way, and will hold on for the certain rise. In most cases this\npatron is immensely flattered, until within a few days the market is\n\"off\" again, wiping out not only his profits, but his original margins\nas well.\n\n\nHOW THE SUCKERS ARE SKINNED.\n\nOr if on a certain day the customer takes advantage of a rise in the\ncommodity bet upon, and insists upon closing out the deal, it is most\nfrequently settled by the bucket shop upon the lowest figure for the\nday. Occasionally, indeed, where a bucket shop keeper has allowed one\nor more customers to \"win\" a considerable figure from it through some\nuntoward turn in figures, the whole shop closes up and disappears,\nleaving the victims no redress at law for the reason that they have\nleft the money voluntarily in the hands of the sharpers. Occasionally\nthe country branch office of one of these central bucket shops may\nclean out a town of its currency until the scarcity of money in the\nplace may demoralize the every-day business of the town.\n\nThat the man who tries to beat the bucket shop has an impossible task\nin front of him in investigating the $10 bet, the commonest in the\nshop. The man with the bill steps up to the window and asks to buy ten\nshares of American Sugar at $110 a share, paying 25 per cent out of\nthe $10 as commission. Then, counting that the bucket shop might be\nas nearly straight as such an institution can be, remember that the\ndecline of Sugar three-quarters of a point will wipe out the bettor's\n$10, while for him to win another $10, Sugar will have to advance to\n$111.25. In short, the customer is betting against a proposition which\nwill lose him $10 if Sugar declines 75 cents, while to win $10 it must\nadvance $1.25, in either case the bucket shop holding his money and\ntaking 25 cents in tolls.\n\n\nOTHER \"FAKES\" \"BOOST\" THE GAME.\n\nIn the machinations of the bucket shop interests and those of kindred\nconcerns that are garnering this $100,000 a day from the American\npeople, the fake trade journal has had much to do; the fake mercantile\nagency, reporting extravagantly upon the responsibility and wealth\nof the schemers, has played extensively upon the credulity of men\nand women; fake banks and bankers have come into existence for the\ncompletion of the work of the others, and have been by no means the\nleast in the category of rascality; the whole aggregation has been\nlending back and forth the \"sucker lists,\" which is an interchangeable\nlists of names and addresses of men and women who have \"bitten\" at one\nscheme and may be promising of a rise to another of different type\nunder a new title.\n\nOn file in the office of a Chicago man of affairs at the present\nmoment is a series of interesting letters, which he shows occasionally\nto a friend. These letters are especially eloquent of a spirit of\ninvestment which is in the country today and which prompts the\n\"biting\" at almost any sort of flaunting announcement of quick riches.\nThe letters are from a young man holding an official job under the\ngovernment at Washington.\n\n\nBIG DIVIDEND PROMISES FALSE.\n\nThe first letter is apologetic for reminding the addressee that he is\nan old friend of the writer's family; but it recites that the young\nman has about $200 in bank which he has saved from his salary, and\nwhich he is disposed to invest with a certain company if his friend\nin Chicago thinks the prospects are in line with good business and\nresponsibility.\n\nEvidently the Chicago man does not regard the concern as dependable,\nfor the next letter expresses thanks for saving the writer loss, but\nasks a further question of a concern that promises 20 per cent a month\non cash investments in grain.\n\nThe third letter, recognizing all that the old friend from Chicago\nhas done, explains that he has only a fair salary from which it is\nhard to save much money, and this fact has led him to the necessity of\nconsidering an investment of his savings that promise large returns,\nand yet at the same time promise the maximum of safety. Having\nestablished his reasons for such ventures, he suggests to the friend:\n\"Perhaps you can answer all I want to know in a single reply. 'Are any\nof these concerns promising dividends of 50 per cent and such to be\ndepended on'?\"\n\nAnd the Chicago man's letter, in substance, reads: \"No!\"\n\n\n\"OUTSIDER\" HAS NO CHANCE.\n\nSpeculation, for the most part, as in the case of this young man,\nmeans for the average intelligence a possibility for placing money in\na side line where quick and profitable returns may be expected, wholly\nindependent of the person's occupation. To the man who knows what the\nbest of the speculative market is, the necessity for all of the time\nand attention and best judgment of the speculator is imperative. It is\na business in which only the best business methods succeed.\n\nOn the boards of trade the commission merchants may be wholly apart\nfrom any risk in even the legitimate trading, taking the commission\nof one-eighth of a cent a bushel in buying and selling. On the Board\nof Trade of Chicago the designated leading speculative articles, in\ntheir order, are wheat, corn, oats, rye, barley, mess pork, lard,\nshort ribs, live hogs and cotton.\n\nA year's grain crop may be 650,000,000 bushels of wheat, 2,500,000,000\nbushels of corn, 900,000,000 bushels of oats, 150,000,000 bushels of\nbarley, and 30,000,000 bushels of rye.\n\nBucket shops have been condemned by statutes as criminal and\npernicious in many states in the Union, but anti-bucket shop laws are\nrarely enforced by public servants whose duty it is to enforce them.\nProsecutions thus far, except in Illinois, have been left to private\ncitizens or associations for the suppression of gambling.\n\nThe \"bucket shop\" has, within a few years past, sprung from\ncomparative inconsequence into an institution of formidable wealth and\nthreatening proportions. There are nearly a thousand in the United\nStates. Every large city in the west has at least one. Having banded\ntogether in a strong combination they sneer at legislation. Opulent\nand powerful they scoff at antagonistic public opinion.\n\n\nON LEVEL WITH LOTTERY AND FARO BANK.\n\nThe \"bucket shop,\" like the lottery and the faro bank, finds its\nprofits in its customers' losses. If its patrons \"buy\" wheat and wheat\ngoes up, the \"bucket shop\" loses.\n\nMany a bucket shop commission merchant would hardly know wheat from\noats, and none of their grain and produce \"exchanges\" ever had a\nsample bag on its counters. Their transactions are wagers and their\nexistence is an incitement to gambling under the guise of commercial\ntransactions. The pernicious influences of the gaming house are,\nin the bucket shop, surrounded by the allurement of a cloak of\nrespectability and the assumption of business methods.\n\nThe legitimate exchange is a huge time and labor saving machine. Its\nbenefits are universal. While its privileges are valuable they have\nbeen rendered so only by hard work, and its members are entitled to\nthe protection of the state against thieves. The \"bucket shop\" is\na thief. The quotations upon which the \"bucket shop\" trades are the\nproduct of the labor and intelligence and information of the exchange.\nThe exchange gathers its news at great cost from all over the globe\nand disseminates it for public advantage. But its quotations should\nbe its own property. They are the direct product of its energy, its\nforesight and its business sagacity.\n\nThe \"bucket shop,\" at no parallel cost, usurps the functions of the\nexchange and endeavors to secure for itself the returns for a labor\nperformed by others. Were it to use honorable methods with its patrons\nit would be a dishonorable institution. Using the methods it does, the\n\"bucket shop\" is twice dishonored.\n\nAs a matter of fact, all other forms of gambling or swindling are\ncommonplace and comparatively innocent when compared to the \"bucket\nshop\" which has caused more moral wrecks, more dismantled fortunes and\nmade more of the innocent suffer than any other agency of diabolism.\nJust why so brazen an iniquity in the guise of speculation should be\nallowed to exist it is difficult to explain.\n\n\nOPEN GAMBLING UNDER BAN.\n\nOpen gambling has been placed under the ban of civic reform. While the\npolicy shop, the lottery and other less dangerous methods of swindling\nhave been effectively stamped out of most cities, the \"bucket shop\ntiger\" continues to rend the ambitions of young and old, dragging them\ndown to forgery, embezzlement, suicide,--or that which is quite as\nbad,--broken spirit for legitimate endeavor. Under the circumstances\nthe sympathy of the public should be with the movement to drive\n\"bucket shops\" out of business, to close them along with all other\ngambling institutions.\n\nIt is time that something was done to check the growing evil of\ngambling on produce, cotton and stock exchange quotations. A beginning\nhas been made, but the movement has not gone far enough. These\nexcrescences on the body politic have multiplied rapidly and so\ndangerously near do they come to being popular that the mercantile\ncommunity owes it to itself to apply the knife at once.\n\nMoreover, there is no form of gambling more disastrous to the player\nthan \"bucket shop\" gambling. Its semi-respectability and likeness in\nmany outward features to regular and reputable commission houses makes\nit the most insidious of all temptations to the young speculator and\naspirant for wealth. It is the open door to ruin.\n\n[Illustration: THAT NEW LEAF]\n\n\nOPEN DOOR TO RUIN.\n\nMen do not blush at being seen in a \"bucket shop\" as they would if\ncaught in a faro bank or poker room though they are drawn thither by\nthe same passion for gambling that takes them to the regular gambling\nden. The \"bucket shop\" successfully carries on a worse swindling game\nthan the \"blacklegs.\" The wealth the chief \"bucket shop\" men of the\ncountry have acquired proves this. Men can be pointed out in Chicago,\nNew York and other cities of the country who have amassed fortunes at\nthe business while their thousands of victims are impoverished and\nruined.\n\nPersons desiring to speculate or invest can avoid \"bucket shops\" and\n\"fake\" brokers by making a preliminary and independent investigation\ninto the character of the broker and the merits of the enterprise.\nIf they accept the statements and references of promoters of schemes\nwithout making such investigations they are not entitled to sympathy\nif they are robbed.\n\nLegitimate brokers do not resort to sensational advertising; they do\nnot guarantee profits; nor do they solicit funds to invest on their\njudgment. The functions of a broker or commission merchant are to\nreceive and execute the order of his customers. When he offers to do\nmore (except in the way of giving market news, advice or conservative\nopinions) he should be avoided. Promoters of pools and syndicates and\ndisseminators of advance information should be carefully avoided.\n\n\n\n\nON \"SURE THINGS.\"\n\nHOW TO LEARN THEIR REAL CHARACTER.\n\n\nThe cleverness and boldness with which the up-to-date investment\nswindler plies his craft are almost incredible. Wherever you find a\nfraudulent scheme you will find both of these elements present in\nsome degree--but the comparative proportion of one to the other is\ngenerally determined by the element of time of operation.\n\nFor example, if the projectors of a scheme are old hands at the game\nand have established records of the wrong sort, then the idea of quick\nresults is not only attractive, but often imperative. There are many\n\"old offenders\" in the profession of investment swindling who have\nbeen convicted and have \"done time\" in jails and penitentiaries, but\nhave not yet learned to prefer straight to crooked finance.\n\nMen of this character realize that a \"quick getaway\" is a cardinal\nessential of success; they must complete the transaction and get in\nthe harvest before there is time for the public to wake up and do any\ninvestigating.\n\nThe length to which the bolder spirits in this class will go almost\nsurpasses credibility. Here is an example, discovered by Detective\nWooldridge of Chicago, of the tricks to which they will resort in\norder to create the impression of having the backing of men or\ninstitutions of strength and character:\n\nThrough introduction by social friends, the local representative of an\ninvestment scheme was able to open a checking account with a banking\nand trust company in a big city--a company of such high standing\nthat it is very widely known outside of financial circles and among\npeople of small means. Its endorsement was worth \"ready money\" to\nany enterprise, and the fact was keenly appreciated by the \"fiscal\nagents\" of the Brite & Fair Bonanza Company.\n\nAfter the opening of his personal checking account the fiscal agent\nlost no time in cultivating the acquaintance of the trust officer\nof the banking institution, which did a very large business in the\ndischarge of trusts. One day the depositor came to this officer and\nexplained that he had a very simple little trust which he wished to\nhave executed. Finding it necessary to leave the city for a few days,\nhe wished to provide for the delivery of a sealed package, containing\n\"valuable papers,\" to a man whose name and personal description was\ngiven. The person to call for the package would leave a certified\ncheck, in the amount of $1,000, which was to be placed to the credit\nof the \"fiscal agent\" of the Brite & Fair Bonanza Company, whose\nbusiness connections were unknown to the trust officer of the banking\nand trust company.\n\n\nALL \"BRITE & FAIR.\"\n\nWeeks later the trust officer was astonished to receive from an old\npersonal friend, who was knocking about in the west, a circular of\nthe Brite & Fair Bonanza Company, in which the big trust company was\ndesignated as \"trustee\" for the \"B. & F.\" stocks. As the friend who\nforwarded the circular knew something of the wildcat nature of the\nBrite & Fair enterprise, his comments on the folly of the bank's\naccepting such a \"trust\" had an edge on them.\n\nWhen the matter was investigated it was found that the whole plot had\nbeen carefully concocted and worked up; that the circulars had been\nprinted and put in directed envelopes ready for mailing in advance of\nthe placing of the so-called \"trust,\" and that when the trust officer\nof the solid financial institution had given his receipt for the\n\"sealed package said to contain valuable papers,\" a telegram had been\nsent by the \"fiscal agent\" to \"mail out trustee circulars.\" The man in\nthis scheme, of course, believed that, as the circulars were being\nmailed out into a territory about a thousand miles from the city in\nwhich the banking and trust company was located, the trust officer who\nhad been imposed upon would never hear of the misuse of his receipt\nfor a \"dummy\" package which actually contained certificates of the\nmining company's stock.\n\nWhy did the men who worked this scheme to steal the moral support of\nthe big trust company go to so great pains to get it? Because fake\ninvestment operators have found it profitable to take every precaution\nto give the color of legality to their acts, they have found it\nprofitable to hire shrewd legal pilots to tell them just how far\nthey may go in a given direction without running upon the reefs of\nthe United States postoffice's \"fraud order\" or upon the rocks of a\n\"conspiracy\" prosecution.\n\n\nDODGE UNCLE SAM AND CONSPIRACY LAWS.\n\nTake it in the incident above related: Had these men been prosecuted\nfor falsely using the name of the trust company or for obtaining money\nby misrepresentation (the claim that the trust company was acting as\ntrustee for the Brite & Fair securities), an able lawyer could have\nmade out of the \"trust\" to transfer a package of unknown contents a\nvery plausible defense. Again, the mining company was able to make\nvaluable use of the trust company's receipt for the package by having\nfac similes of the receipt printed and distributed among solicitors\nfor the stock who were canvassing persons not at all familiar with\nlegal documents--and who, under the statements and arguments of the\nagent, would see in the receipt an acknowledgment that this great\ntrust company and its millions were behind the securities of the Brite\n& Fair Company.\n\nThis brings us straight to the practical point in the matter. Never go\ninto an investment until you first find out for yourself, by direct\nand first-hand investigation, what the \"references\" named in the\nliterature or advertising matter of the company have to say about it,\nand how much the references themselves amount to.\n\n\nWILDCATS GIVE GOOD REFERENCE.\n\nPromoters of wildcat investment enterprises have used hundreds\nof names as references which they had not the shadow of right to\nuse--calculating that persons credulous enough to be interested in the\nproposition would also be credulous enough to say, \"These references\nwill speak well enough for the enterprise, else their names would\nnot be given out for this purpose,\" and to act without making any\ninquiries of them.\n\nAgain, some man of prominence and great faith may have been, at the\nstart, a believer in the enterprise and willing to say, within certain\nlimitations, that he believed the venture could be made a success if\nconducted according to certain plans and under given restrictions.\nThis does not signify that he will continue to retain that confidence\nor that he is willing to be understood as giving the venture his\nunqualified endorsement, or to say to the public which respects his\nname and position:\n\n\"Come and share this enterprise with me; put your money into it, for\nit's a good thing.\"\n\nDetective Wooldridge, who has examined many of these concerns, desires\nto place special emphasis upon the crafty use which these companies\nmake of the names and services of reputable \"trust\" companies. He uses\nthe word \"services\" because a trust company may execute a \"trust\"\nin connection with bonds, stocks, property or securities without\nreally assuming any general financial or moral responsibility for\nthose securities or without becoming a sponsor for them. In a word,\nthe trust company may engage to act as an escrow agent to see that a\ncertain technical transaction is completed, and nothing more. That\nmeans this: The trust company consents to hold the stakes between two\nparties, but without the slightest responsibility as to the value of\nthose stakes or what may be done with them after the stipulations as\nto the conditions precedent to delivery have been fulfilled.\n\nBecause a trust company acts as the trustee of a certain bond issued\nthere is no warrant for a prospective investor to feel that the\nresources of the trust company are in any sense behind these deeds as\na guarantee of values.\n\nAnother word of caution: Whenever you see the name of an educator, a\npastor or a popular politician, or any other leader having a hold on\nthe sentiment of a community used in connection with an investment\noffering, look into it carefully and take no step until the person\nmentioned has been questioned directly by you.\n\n\n\n\nHUGE SWINDLES BARED.\n\nOfficers of Four Underwriting and Guarantee Companies Arrested by\nDetective Clifton R. Wooldridge.\n\nCharges Are Bogus Underwriting and Fraudulent Inspection of Properties.\n\n\nAll the officers of the four biggest underwriting and guarantee\ncompanies in the west, with headquarters in Chicago, were arrested.\nThey were charged with having engineered the boldest and most\ncomprehensive swindle ever exposed in this country.\n\n[Illustration: GETT, RICH & CO. PROMOTERS OF \"GOOD THINGS\"]\n\nThe following are the names of the men arrested for running The\nCentral State Underwriting and Guarantee corporation room 1306,\nTribune building:\n\nW. H. Hulbert, H. B. Hudson, Francis Owings, M. J. Roughen, W. H.\nTodd, were arrested for running a confidence game. W. H. Todd jumped\nhis bond and fled to St. Louis, Mo., where he was apprehended and\nbrought back by Detective Wooldridge.\n\n\n$300,000,000 CAPITAL.\n\nThe book of the Central State Underwriting and Guarantee corporation\nhad promoted 300 corporations and companies which were capitalized at\n$300,000,000. Stock bonds were issued which was guaranteed by this\ncompany. This company further agreed to sell these bonds and stocks to\nraise the money to financier these companies.\n\nThe complaint was made by the Compensating Pipe Organ Company, through\nC. V. Wisner. The firm is located at Battle Creek, Mich.\n\nW. H. Todd & Co. was employed by the Pipe Organ Company to make a bond\nissue of $150,000. The brokerage firm, he said, demanded a 1 per cent\ndeposit, amounting to $1,500.\n\nThis was paid, according to Wisner's complaint, and Todd & Company\nundertook to deposit the money with another underwriting company.\n\nThen, he asserts, the bond issue was never made, and Todd & Company\nfailed to repay the $1,500.\n\nThe firm conducts a banking, brokerage and underwriting business at\nroom 803, 112 Dearborn street.\n\n\nDID HEAVY BUSINESS.\n\nRare oriental rugs, the most costly tables and chairs, and elaborate\ngrandfather clocks, together with an amazing amount of polished brass\nwork and plate glass, were found in each of the imposing offices\nraided by the deputy marshals.\n\nThe Central States Underwriting & Guarantee Company did a business\ncommensurate with the costly environment. The books of the concern\nshow that from February 1, 1903, to August 5, 1906, 643 corporations\nthroughout the United States paid money to the Central States concern,\nand the aggregate amount paid was $340,000.\n\n[Illustration: AT LAST!]\n\nAdvertisements were placed in all the leading papers throughout the\ncountry, circulars were distributed broadcast with propositions\nthat capital could be obtained for corporations and manufacturing\nenterprises by addressing this company.\n\nThe officers of corporations replying to these advertisements would be\nasked to call at the Chicago offices of the companies.\n\nThe brokers acquainted with the scheme would then introduce the\ncorporation officials to alleged capitalists who represented they had\navailable capital to finance business propositions, and would buy the\nunderwritten stock, provided the corporation officers would have them\nunderwritten by responsible guarantee companies.\n\nIt is asserted that these alleged capitalists would then advise that\nthe work be done by the Central States Underwriting & Guarantee\nCompany, the American Corporation & Securities Company, or the\nNational Stock & Guarantee Company of San Francisco.\n\n\nSCHEME OF THE COMPANY.\n\nThe brokers in the alleged fraudulent transactions would represent\nto the proposed victim that they would get no returns for their work\nunless they actually sold the stocks, and that they would be content\nwith a commission of from one-half to 1 per cent on such stock as\nthey sold. They assured the victims that there could be no doubt that\nthe stock underwritten would be sold, as the capitalists to whom the\nvictims had been introduced would be certain to buy them.\n\nThe brokers would then take the men seeking the underwriting to the\noffices of the guarantee companies and arrange for guaranteeing the\nbonds on payment of a fee of 1 per cent of the amount of underwriting.\n\nThe men arrested never entered into a proposition on which less\nthan $100,000 was involved, and that they, in some cases, obtained\n$5,000,000 worth of stock to underwrite.\n\nDetective Wooldridge secured proof that the application fee which\nwas paid by the officers of the corporations to the underwriting\ncompanies was always divided among those companies and the fraudulent\nbrokers who had sent the corporation's officers to the supposed\nunderwriters.\n\n\nTHE GUARANTEE CO. METHODS.\n\nThe Guarantee Company system is a new phase of \"promotion\" that has\ncome to the surface during the past two years, but which, through\npolice and legal investigation, has about reached its limit.\n\nA strictly legitimate guarantee company is modeled much after the\nFidelity and Insurance Bond corporations. They issue secured bonds for\nall necessary business purposes, and are reputable and responsible.\nAbout 1903 a promotion gang in Chicago stole the name \"Guarantee,\" and\nhalf a dozen fake guarantee companies were started.\n\nIn all the phraseology of tricky finance there is no word so\noverworked as \"guarantee.\" And this means that experience has proved\nit to be highly effective in the hooking of \"suckers.\" Depend upon it,\nthat no word or phrase achieves marked popularity in the literature\nof the \"small investments\" appeal which has not demonstrated its rare\neffectiveness as an agency of deception; the phrase that does not draw\nthe money is promptly thrown out by these shrewd fishers of men, who\ncheck up their returns as accurately and systematically as the most\nlegitimate mail order business.\n\nIf the small investors of this country could reach anything like a\nfair knowledge of just how much and how little there is in each of\nthese appealing \"catch words\" in each phrase, the plausibility of\nwhich has been scientifically tested, they would be well on the way\ntoward being able to protect themselves against the cleverest and most\nconvincing of these appeals. Perhaps the writer can do the public more\nservice in analyzing a few of these \"star phrases\" than by any amount\nof denunciation of the wildcat schemes and schemers which deserve as\nharsh a characterization as any man can frame.\n\n[Illustration: RURAL RESIDENTS CANNOT BE TOO PROMPT IN TYING DOWN\nTHEIR PROPERTY.]\n\nBut, to return to the word \"guarantee,\" which has attained first rank\nin the terminology of the investment trickster, there is scarcely a\ncircular, folder or advertisement, or any other piece of literature\nput out by the pot hunters of small savings which does not display\nthe word \"guarantee\" in big type, and with reiterated emphasis. If\nthis institution chances to be of a financial character itself, rather\nthan a mining, oil or industrial concern, the word \"guarantee,\" or its\ntwin, \"security,\" will be found incorporated in the name chosen for\nthe company.\n\nGet a list of 100 wildcat investment schemes which are dead beyond\nhope of resurrection, and it is a safe prediction that one-half the\nnames will contain the word \"guarantee\" or \"security.\" These two words\nare as common to the eye in the graveyard of fake investment schemes\nas is that of Smith, Jones or Brown in any country cemetery; they\nadorn practically every other tombstone in the last resting place of\ndefunct financial frauds.\n\nThe question of the value of either of these words in the title of\na corporation or concern is disposed of by the statement that there\nis no legal restriction in the choice of names of companies; the\norganizers are as free to name their flimsy creation \"The Rock of\nGibraltar Guarantee Security Company\" as the parent is to saddle a\nweak, under-sized male child with the name of Samson. And, as a rule,\nthere is as much license or propriety in giving the name of the mighty\nenemy of the Philistines to a stunted boy as there is for applying\nthe name \"guarantee\" or \"security\" to a company which is brought into\nbeing for the purpose of going out after the savings of the \"small\ninvestor.\"\n\nWhy? Because the companies which are really warranted in making either\nof these words a part of their corporate name do not have to go into\nthe highways and hedges and beat the bushes for their business; it\ncomes to them by force of their \"financial strength.\" They have no\nneed to drum it up.\n\n\nGOOD ADVICE ON \"GUARANTEE.\"\n\nHowever, scores of oil, mining and investment companies which do not\nuse either of these clever catchwords in their corporate titles cannot\nbe charged with undervaluing the \"pulling power\" of such phrases; in\ntheir literature this kind of bait is employed with the greatest skill\nand plausibility.\n\nOne of the most common ways in which this idea is dressed is this:\n\"We guarantee you, under all conditions and at all times, to get\nyou, without cost to yourself, the highest market price for your\nholdings.\" This sounds very assuring; it carries with it a protective\nand almost paternal atmosphere and seldom fails to inspire in the\ntrusting investor the feeling that there is a strong hand always ready\nto take the investment off his shoulders the moment it threatens to\nbecome a burden.\n\nThis particular phrase is especially fortunate and typical, by way of\nillustration, for the reason that it couples with the word \"guarantee\"\nanother term which is a warm favorite with the word artists of the\nget-rich-quick studies. I allude to the phrase, \"highest market value.\"\n\nWherever either of these clever signals to credulity is displayed the\npossible investor should invariably remember these points:\n\n=First--A guarantee is never stronger than the guarantor.=\n\n=Second--A security only has a \"market value\" in the fair and true\nsense of the term where a large demand for it meets a large supply;\nthere, and there only, exists an active market and a genuine \"market\nvalue.\"=\n\nLet these two propositions (which any reputable banker or broker\nwill tell you are axiomatic) be considered separately. There is no\nvirtue in the word \"guarantee.\" If this simple fact could have been\nfirmly fixed in the minds of the small investors of this country\nthey would have been saved the loss of millions of dollars since\nour present period of wonderful prosperity began. In these days of\nhighly perfected business organization the process of finding out the\nresponsibility of any financial or business concern has been reduced\nto an exact science and made available to all. Is it reasonable to\nsuppose, under these conditions, that any company or corporation\nwhich cannot stand on its own feet can get any responsible concern\nto guarantee its bonds or other so-called securities? Never! Such a\nsupposition is absurd on the face of it, and an instance where it has\nbeen done is not, so far as is known, to be found in actual practice.\n\nDig down under the \"guarantee\" of the company which asks you to\ninvest your savings and what do you find? That if you do invest you\nand your fellow victims are really your own guarantors; that the\nfinancial strength of the concern is really the money which you and\nyour associates pour into it; that its only financial life blood comes\nfrom the purses of the small investors, and that when the stream\nof vitality from this source begins to dry up, the services of the\nfinancial undertaker are in near and inevitable demand.\n\nReduced to its last analysis, the blacktype declaration of a\n\"guarantee\" in the literature of the \"get-rich-quick\" concern simply\nmeans that it has something to sell you. Generally, it is also an\ninvitation to you to pay in advance for the flowers to adorn your own\nfinancial funeral.\n\nAs to the other pet phrase, \"highest market value,\" or market value of\nany kind, for that matter, a very few words will suggest the situation:\n\nExcepting where a very large demand meets an insufficient supply in\na free, open and comparatively unmanipulated market, where sales are\nregularly made of record and those records command the respect and\nconfidence of the legitimate financial public, there is no \"market\nvalue\" save that which is arbitrarily made by the broker. He is the\nmarket; he makes the price by the simple process of \"thumbs up\" or\n\"thumbs down.\"\n\nThe man who is on the \"sucker\" list of a wildcat concern receives an\nannouncement that \"all indications point to the conclusion that next\nweek the stock of the Honor Bright Company will sell at not less than\nfive points advance of the present price.\"\n\nThe next week he gets notice that the prediction of an advance\nhad proved true. If he is unsophisticated enough he receives the\nannouncement with solemn credulity and credits the author of the\npromotion literature with great acumen and shrewd prophetic powers. He\nfigures up the profits he would have made on the advance and condemns\nhimself for not heeding the \"confidential\" advice to \"buy quick.\"\n\nWhat he does not consider is the fact that he is dealing with a\nfictitious market, where the seller simply makes up his mind how much\nhe will advance the stock in question and then, when the time comes,\nmarks it up and makes the announcement of the \"sharp advance.\" This\ntrick is turned not only for the purpose of getting a larger price per\nshare, but mainly to tickle the cupidity of hesitating investors and\nmaking sales which otherwise could not have been made.\n\nIn order to understand how these companies operate, the actual\nexperience of one victim will serve to explain the whole system.\n\nA country manufacturer, rated at $50,000, read an advertisement in a\nfinancial journal about as follows:\n\n     \"Capital Supplied--We have the means of furnishing\n     any amount of capital for any meritorious industrial\n     proposition. Address Lock Box XX, Chicago.\"\n\nThe manufacturer wrote he wanted to raise $100,000 to increase his\nbusiness, and offered to put in all his effects, stock and good will.\nHe received a letter asking him to come to Chicago and visit the\nfirm, which, for convenience, shall be described as \"Cold Cash & Co.\"\nHe did so. Cash received him in an elegant office with open arms.\nThe manufacturer there re-stated his necessities. The affable broker\ninformed him his proposition was a fine one, and said he could have\nthe desired $100,000 within thirty days.\n\n\"What would be the broker's fee?\" he inquired. Only 5 per cent when\n$100,000 was in the hands of the manufacturer. Certainly an alluring\nprospect. But how was the money to be raised? The manufacturer was to\nincorporate his business for $200,000, and the broker would sell half\nof its capital stock at par.\n\nAs the delighted \"sucker\" was about to leave the broker's office\nthe latter, in the most off-hand manner, said: \"Oh, by the way, Mr.\nManufacturer, what arrangements have you made to guarantee your\ncapital stock?\" \"Guarantee it? I don't understand you,\" replied the\nvictim.\n\n\"Bless you!\" said the broker, \"modern methods demand that all stock be\nguaranteed--quite the new order of things. We couldn't sell a share of\nstock nowadays unless it was guaranteed.\"\n\n\"Explain!\"\n\n\"I will. You go to some guarantee company and have them agree to\nguarantee the payment of the principal of each share of stock sold\nat thirty years. Don't you see that makes your stock as solid as a\ngovernment bond?\n\n\"The guarantee company takes a certain portion of the proceeds of\nthe stock, invests it for thirty years. With interest and compound\ninterest, in 1935 the stock has accumulated its par sum. It is a\nbeautiful system.\"\n\n\nDO BOOMING BUSINESS.\n\n\"Very plausible, but where are these guarantee companies?\"\n\n\"Why, there are The National, The States, and The Industrial. We hear\nThe States is doing a booming business. Go and see them. They are at\nsuch a number.\"\n\nThe victim went to the richly furnished suite of offices occupied by\nthe guarantee company and met its dignified \"president,\" to whom he\nexplained the purpose of his visit.\n\n\"Very good,\" said that official. \"We will accept your risk. We will\nissue you an option agreeing within one year to issue you bonds\nagainst your stock as sold, you to pay us an advance fee of $1,000.\"\n\nThe \"sucker\" demurred. He had only $500 spare cash. The president\nsuggested that as the broker would make a liberal commission out of\nthe deal he might put up the other $500. The manufacturer 'phoned the\nbroker, who promptly agreed to pay one-half of the fee. The broker\ngave the victim a worthless check for $500, which he gave, together\nwith $500 of his own good money, into the hands of the \"guarantee\"\ncompany. The company thereupon issued a certificate, or option, for\nbonds that were never called for because the broker never sold any of\nthe stock.\n\nThe victim went home loaded down with promises. The broker \"strung\"\nhim along for a month or two, but sold no stock. Finally the\nmanufacturer realized he was buncoed. The broker and the \"guarantee\"\ncompany divided the $500, and proceeded to find other suckers.\n\nMarch 17, 1906, E. C. Talmage, who conducted the National Underwriting\n& Bond Co., of San Francisco, Cal.; the Pacific Underwriting & Trust\nCo., of San Francisco, Cal.; the Imperial Bond & Trust Co., of New\nJersey City, New Jersey; the International Trust Co., of Philadelphia;\nthe Chicago National Bonding Co., of Chicago, at 52 Dearborn street;\nE. C. Talmage; E. S. Barnum, 103 Randolph street; and M. J. Carpenter,\nof the First National bank, were arrested.\n\nGeorge D. Talmage, another member of the firm located at Kansas City,\nMo., was afterwards arrested and brought to Chicago, charged with\nobtaining money under the confidence game. The warrants on which they\nwere arrested were taken out by E. J. Denison and Rev. Peter A. Baart,\na Methodist minister of Marshall, Mich., who were officers of the La\nVaca mines and mills, of Joplin, Mo.\n\nRev. Mr. Baart first went to E. C. Talmage.\n\nTalmage sent him to E. S. Barnum to have the stock guaranteed. Barnum\ncharged him a fee of $500 and agreed to sell the bonds, which he\nfailed to do. They just simply divided this fee between them and made\nno effort to float the bonds.\n\nAmong the persons alleged to have suffered losses are the following:\n\n     Victoria A. Toole, 396 55th street                 $500\n     Dr. C. J. Grey, 103 State street                    250\n     Miss Frances Mason, sister of Hon. W. E. Mason    1,000\n     A. C. Nelson, 1057 Addison avenue                   150\n     J. W. Wilson, Opera House block                     100\n     G. G. Eustis, Melrose, Ia.                          100\n     Lalorena Gold and Copper Mining Company             100\n     Wortham Bros. Company                               150\n     Golden Ranch Sugar and Cattle Company             9,000\n     Frank McCuddy, Clinton, Ia.                       7,500\n     Dr. E. Hall and J. Brown                            125\n\nE. C. Talmage, S. D. Talmage and E. S. Barnum were indicted by the\nCook county grand jury.\n\nGeorge D. Talmage fled to Kansas City, Mo., where he conducted a\nbranch office in the same business. He was arrested at Kansas City,\nMo., on request of the chief of police of Chicago, for operating\nthe confidence game. Extradition papers were secured and Detective\nWooldridge brought him back. When his father's office was raided, at\n52 Dearborn street, a number of letters was seized, among them were\nseveral written from George D. Talmage, at Kansas City, Mo.\n\nThe following extracts are taken from George D. Talmage's letter to\nhis father:\n\n     \"Saw old Blank today. He was easy. Inclosed find his check\n     for $1,000\"; and, \"When I mentioned bonds to old Tightwad\n     he fell over backwards and swallowed a set of false teeth.\"\n\n     One from a town in Kansas is said to have read: \"Nothing\n     doing in this joint. The people here wouldn't buy gold\n     dollars for 90 cents.\"\n\nOne letter which reflected particularly upon the cupidity of our K.\nC., U. S. A. citizens, runs: \"I am giving it to these little Kansas\nCity suckers strong. I expect to be able to send you $1,000 the last\nof the week.\"\n\nE. C. Talmage, George D. Talmage and E. S. Barnum were placed on trial\nbefore Judge Brentano for swindling the Rev. Peter A. Baart, Marshall,\nMo., out of $500.\n\nE. S. Barnum was discharged and the Talmages found guilty.\n\nA new trial was secured for George D. Talmage. His father, E. C.\nTalmage, on May 10, 1907, was sentenced to an indefinite term in the\nJoliet penitentiary.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SOCIAL EVIL.\n\n\nThe treatment of the social evil is one of the most difficult problems\nwith which society has ever been confronted. Until society is\nthoroughly regenerated and the consequent purity, both of manhood and\nwomanhood, has become a permanent fact, illicit relationship between\nman and woman will exist.\n\nThe attraction of the sexes is as mighty as it is mysterious. No\nlegislation will weaken its inherent force.\n\nThe man who can come forward with a cure for this great curse is, I\nfear, yet to be born.\n\n[Illustration: (People running by heart)]\n\nIn common with other vices the so-called \"social evil\" is as old as\nmankind, and it will probably remain as long as vice and sin are\nfound in the human heart. Its complete eradication will, perhaps,\nnever be accomplished solely through the process of law, yet it seems\nto me that the law and its administrators should not lessen their\nefforts to destroy this evil.\n\nIn Norway, and in Switzerland, are the conditions most favorable to\nvirtue and independence, the absence of extreme wealth and poverty.\nBoth countries are comparatively isolated from the rest of the world.\nIn Switzerland, as well as Norway, there is an absence of large masses\npent up together in cities, the population being distributed in small\nnumbers about the country. Sir John Bowring, sent from England to\ninvestigate Swiss society, found that \"a drunkard is seldom seen,\nand illegitimate children are rare.\" As a people these Swiss are\na testimonial to the doctrine of equal distribution of wealth and\ntemperate habits as preventive of immorality.\n\n\nAMERICA FOLLOWS OLD LINES.\n\nThe history of the United States is the history of all countries\nas regards prostitution. The population is made up of all nations,\ncivilized and semi-civilized. In the majority of cases poverty is\nthe greatest incentive to prostitution. Permanent prostitution has a\nnumerical relation to the means of occupation.\n\nAt the present time in all parts of the United States the lower strata\nof men and women are deprived of the results of their labor except\nin quantities barely sufficient to retain life in their bodies. They\nare huddled together indiscriminately as to sex, in close, crowded\nquarters, so that the ordinary delicacies of life cannot be practiced\neven if there should be a desire.\n\nThe chiefest and often the only form of pleasure within their reach is\nthat given by nature for the purest and best use in life, but which\ncomes to be the veriest debauchery. Children and youth growing up\namong adults, depraved because no ray of light was shed to show the\nway for moral and physical uplifting, must naturally imbibe the miasma\nof social impurity. From the very cradle through life their influence\nis to further degrade themselves.\n\nOn the other hand are the extreme rich, who, not being compelled to\nlabor for sustenance, spend their time and money in selfish enjoyment.\nIn contrast with the extreme poor, they have every possibility to\ncultivate the good in themselves, but will not, and it grows pale and\nsickly among the rank weeds of their selfishness.\n\nChiefly, among self-gratifications, are social evil habits, especially\non part of the men of wealth. Their manner of life, the food they eat,\ncreates a fictitious force which must expend itself. They may have a\nchivalrous regard for the women of their class, but consider all women\nbelow them to be legitimate prey.\n\nRelying on their wealth to insinuate themselves into the good graces\nof young women by supplying them with such things as will gratify\nvanity, the offspring of rich parentage find fascination in pursuit\nof their object. When she is at last won, and her virtuous scruples\novercome, she is thrown aside like the wilted flower which has yielded\nall its perfume. The brothel is open to receive all such, particularly\nif she be handsome of face or form.\n\n\nONLY BURNED ORPHAN ASYLUM.\n\nNew York, Chicago, St. Louis, any great city will furnish examples\nby the thousands. Where one girl enters this life from choice\n(through sensuality inherited from the lust of her father, no doubt),\nninety-nine are sucked into its whirlpool by force of circumstances.\nThe young woman who is a clerk is paid an amount which will barely\ncover the cost of living. She is expected to dress well, and if she\nprotests that she can not, is told to rely on some \"gentleman friend\"\nfor other expenses. Likewise in factories and shops. Only she who is\nprotected by home associations, and whose labor is done to add to the\ngeneral home comfort, can hope to escape, and then not always.\n\nThe grim, irrefutable facts in connection with the thrusting of the\nworking girl into prostitution by the wealthy owners of department\nstores, was never better expressed than in a recent story by O. Henry,\nin McClure's Magazine.\n\nHenry dreamed that he had been dead a long while, and that he had\nfinally arrived at the Judgment Day. An Angel policeman was haling\nhim before the Great Court of Last Resort. As he was forced into the\nwaiting room the Angel policeman asked him kindly if he belonged with\na certain crowd which he saw near him. The members of this coterie\nwere dressed in frock coats, gray trousers, spats, patent leather\nshoes, and all of them boasted of high silk hats.\n\n\"Who are they?\" asked the trembling Henry. \"Oh, they are the men who\nran big department stores and paid their poor girls five dollars a\nweek in order that they themselves might belong to clubs, go to Europe\nand own fine residences and automobiles,\" replied the angel.\n\n\"Not on your life,\" replied Henry. \"I'm only the feller that murdered\na blind man for his pennies and burned down the orphan asylum. I don't\nbelong with that bunch.\"\n\nWith the present system of government, each year tends to annihilate\nthe middle class, in which lies a nation's strength.\n\n    \"Ill fares the Hand, to hastening ills a prey,\n    Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.\"\n\nWhile extreme poverty exists on the one hand, and extreme wealth on\nthe other, it would be as plausible to dam up Niagara Falls as to stop\nprostitution by legislating against it. The current, checked in one\ncourse, is bound to break out in another, and with all its pent-up\nforce. Human life, like the river, is bound to flow in the channel of\nthe least resistance.\n\nNature planned the association of the sexes as surely and as\ninevitably as any other of her laws. Whenever her laws are trespassed\nupon in any way there is suffering. The wretched conditions of the\npoor and the perverted natures of the wealthy turn sex association\ninto social evil.\n\n\nGIVE ALL HONEST CHANCE.\n\nGiving to all young men and women honest means of livelihood with\nextra times and resources for the cultivation of their talents\nand their better selves, honorable marriage would be preferred to\nprostitution in nearly every case.\n\n[Illustration: THE PACE THAT KILLS]\n\nThere is no hope for moral purification among the wealthy until such\ntime as they will use their time and talents in useful work. An\nenormous field for missionary work would be for some one of ability\nto convert the wealthy world to the religion of useful work. As a\nself-evident truth, no able-bodied person has the right to live off\nthe labor of another person. Instead of the many working to the last\nnotch of human endurance that the few may live in luxury and idleness,\nthere should be labor for all, and enough for all. Money, however,\nis without love, or patriotism, or kindness--is all-powerful, and\nis fawned upon, and catered to by those possessing it in limited\nquantities.\n\nThe remedy for prostitution, as well as other evils, lies in the hands\nof the American people themselves, if they only knew it. Just a few\nyears of intelligent voting and legislating for better conditions for\nthe many, instead of for the few extremely wealthy, would tend to\novercome all injustice and inequality. The social evil would be weeded\nout because people would then have time to obey the injunction, \"Know\nThyself.\"\n\n\nAVERAGE EVIL LIFE VERY SHORT.\n\nAccording to statistics the average life of a prostitute is four years\nafter entering the maelstrom of such a career. The life is never such\nas to be recommended even by its followers. It is moral as well as\nphysical death when followed, and is well-nigh impossible to escape\nonce having bowed to its seeming fascination.\n\nAs to the libertine, he \"sells himself for what he buys.\" He may\nenjoy pleasure, but not happiness. Happiness comes from within, in\nthe consciousness of doing right. Pleasures come from without, in the\ngratification of self. In addition to the hollowness of the enjoyment\nin the lives of prostitute and libertine, is always the danger of\nloathsome disease which tortures body and brain, lowering them in\ntheir own minds. It is about the only ill in the category that does\nnot command sympathy, but it should.\n\nThe evils of drunkenness, theft, or prostitution are on the same basis\nas far as the \"necessity\" for their existence. All are more or less\nthe result of a badly adjusted economic condition of whatever nation.\nThey can be reduced to a minimum, if not eradicated, by removing the\ncause.\n\n\nARGUMENT AGAINST SEGREGATION.\n\nThe first and most convincing argument against the segregation of vice\nis found in the fact that the law expressly condemns crime of all\nkinds and requires its relentless prosecution in order to effect its\ndestruction. Besides, vice districts would shortly become breeding\nspots for the propagation of crime of every kind. Here would be\nattracted the criminal classes from all parts of the country, because\nhere they would be protected by the very law which they violate.\n\nNot only would the inhabitants of such districts regard themselves\nwithin the law, but others, who now fear to enter these resorts\nbecause of the probability of arrest and public exposure, would\npatronize the district, armed with the knowledge that non-arrest was a\ncertainty and exposure highly improbable. The locality and extent of\nsuch districts would soon become a matter of common information, and\nyoung men would thus find easy access to disreputable resorts which\notherwise they might never find.\n\n\nEVIL NOT NECESSARY.\n\nMany advance the argument that the evil is a necessary one and must be\ntolerated, else the safety of virtuous women upon our streets would\nbe seriously threatened and imperiled. The fallacy and absurdity of\nthis contention is proved by the conditions which exist in many of the\nlarge cities of Great Britain and Canada, where houses of ill-fame\nare practically unknown, and where women are as safe as in cities\nwhere the segregation of vice prevails. This result has been obtained\nby persistent effort on the part of officials whose duty it is to\nsuppress and punish crime. Such a condition can never be secured here\nif districts are established where this particular form of vice may\nflourish with the tacit approval of our public officers. Surely we in\nChicago are not willing to admit that which has been done elsewhere\ncannot be done here.\n\nChicago could not legally license or regulate this evil, for our state\nlaw forbids license. The moral sentiment of our people is also against\nit. Several years or so ago, when a resolution was introduced into\nthe city council looking toward segregation, medical examination and\nlicense, a vigorous protest was made by the Chicago Woman's Club, the\nEvanston Woman's Club, and other such organizations. The good women of\nChicago will not tamely submit to such additional degradation of their\nwronged sisters.\n\n\nNOBLER WOMANHOOD THE GOAL.\n\nChicago women are working hard to protect innocent women from lives\nof infamy and to help the repentant to a nobler womanhood. If there\nwere men working among their own sex with equal devotions there would\nbe a lessening of the social evil. If physicians would teach men the\nsafety of chastity and the horrors of licentiousness, if preachers\nwould train their guns against impurity, if popular clubs would expel\nlicentious men, if the mayor would order the arrest of every person,\nman or woman, found in these houses, apparently so well known to the\npolice, and have such arrests continued night after night, these\nmethods would cause a marked lessening of the social evil.\n\nThe police of Chicago have done much in recent years to make it a\nbetter city. To them is due the credit more than to anyone else for\nbetter conditions in our moral life. If they are encouraged and\nallowed to work out these problems in their own practical way they\nwill do more for our city's good than all the theoretical reformers\ncombined.\n\nMany conditions ought not to exist, but they must and will remain\nfor the present. Your reformer, so-called, writes and pleads for the\nideal. The police force deals with what is and knows best what can be\ndone.\n\n\n\n\nSUPPRESS MANUFACTURE AND SALE OF DANGEROUS\nWEAPONS--THEY ARE A CONSTANT MENACE TO LIFE AND GOOD ORDER.\n\nMADE SOLELY FOR UNLAWFUL USE--ENGENDER CRIME, INCREASE ACCIDENTS\nAND MAKE SUICIDE EASY--CARRYING CONCEALED WEAPONS A VICIOUS AND\nINEXCUSABLE HABIT.]\n\n\n[Illustration: LAW TO REGULATE SALE OF FIREARMS]\n\nThe \"lid\" should be put upon deadly weapons--pistols, revolvers, dirk\nknives, brass knuckles--not merely to hide them, but to prevent their\nmanufacture and sale.\n\nWhile serving as police officer I could not fail to observe that\nsubstantially all of the crimes committed with the pistol or\nrevolver resulted from the practice of carrying the weapon upon the\nperson. There would be a controversy in a bar-room, on the street or\nelsewhere, followed by a fight and ending with a shooting by someone\npresent who had the weapon conveniently concealed upon his person. But\nfor the presence of the weapon on the scene there would have been no\nshooting.\n\nI recall but one case where the defendant left the scene of the\ncontroversy to procure a weapon. Murder committed by lying in wait\nor with premeditation for any length of time is extremely rare. In\nninety-nine cases out of a hundred the crime is committed on the spur\nof the moment.\n\nStatistics furnished by the police department show startling facts.\nCitizens do not realize the number of persons who are either wounded\nor killed every year by shooting with the revolver. One can hardly\npick up a metropolitan paper without finding an account of a shooting,\neither by accident or design. We have laws forbidding the carrying of\nconcealed weapons, which are to a certain extent effective, but to\na very small extent, because it is practically impossible to search\nevery man on the street--and keep him searched. The law, no matter how\nrigidly enforced, can do but little substantial good.\n\nWe must also consider other deadly weapons, such as dirk knives and\nbrass knuckles. So far as these are concerned, they are manufactured\nsolely to be used as instruments of crime. The brass knuckle is never\nused as a weapon of defense, but always as one of offense. The dirk\nknife has no use other than as a weapon to be used against human\nbeings. It is not used either in war or for any domestic purpose.\n\nSo far as the revolver is concerned, it has no proper use anywhere in\nthe world. It is carried either as a weapon of offense or defense;\nbut as a weapon of defense it is only possibly effective when there\nis a revolver in the hands of the antagonist. If he has none, none is\nneeded for defense.\n\nAn attack made upon a man at close quarters by the use of a sandbag\nor any other weapon in the hands cannot be met practically with a\nrevolver. There is no time or opportunity for its use.\n\nThe proposition is therefore sound that, if no one carried a pistol\nfor offense, none would be needed for defense.\n\nShotguns and rifles are used in hunting, but not the revolver.\nThe ordinary revolver of commerce, the one which a man can carry\nconcealed, has no use in modern warfare. There is no legitimate use\nanywhere for such a weapon.\n\nSeptember, 1907, officials of the New York police department, acting\nunder Commissioner Bingham's orders, took 5,000 revolvers out to sea\nbeyond Sandy Hook and threw them overboard. The literary secretary of\nthe commissioner said it reminded him of the Doges who used to wed the\nsea with rings. If the New York ceremony was not so richly symbolical\nit certainly was vastly more sensible.\n\nThese revolvers were the results of eighteen months of police\nseizures. Some of them were automatic weapons in the $28 class, and\nothers were of the common variety used by small boy initiates in\ncrime. Together they were worth at least $15,000. Not so very long\nago New York City held an auction sale every year just before the\nFourth of July at which all confiscated weapons were sold. Thereby\nFourth of July killings were made easy and cheap, and crime at all\nother times of the year was encouraged, for most of the weapons went\nto pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers, who put them back in the hands\nthat would use them worst. The police have one instance of a revolver\nthat to their knowledge came back into their possession four times in\nthis way.\n\nIt is wise to destroy these weapons, but consider how little good is\naccomplished compared with what might be accomplished by original\ncontrol of the sale of weapons. The city sacrifices the $15,000 or\nsomething less which it might have got for these weapons, but if it\nwould take $15,000 and spend it vigorously in regulating the sale\nof weapons, in licensing and perhaps heavily taxing all dealers, in\nrequiring the keeping of complete records of sales and in prosecuting\nall persons carrying concealed weapons, it would accomplish very much\nmore to the same end.\n\nChicago is a city in which unlimited laxity is allowed dealers\nin pistols. The way is made easy for the criminal who wants to\narm himself. Despite the successful experience of other cities in\nregulating the sales of weapons, the council is reluctant to give the\ncity a stronger ordinance.\n\nSuicide with the revolver is a favorite method of self-destruction\nwith men. Press the muzzle against the head or heart, a slight\npressure of the forefinger--instant oblivion follows.\n\nThe bandit who holds up the railroad train and robs the passengers\nalmost invariably uses a revolver. With this small weapon he\nterrorizes and robs an entire trainload of travelers.\n\nThe vicious carry pistols with criminal intent, but there is also\na very large class, which might be designated as a \"weak\" class,\nwhich carries the pistol without any criminal intent, but under\nthe influence of a fascination for the handling of deadly weapons.\nAmong certain classes of <DW64>s it is the habit to carry pistols or\nother deadly weapons to balls, parties or other places where they\ncongregate, and they carry them, apparently, to a certain extent, as\na matter of ornament, something on the principle of our gentlemanly\nforefathers of a few hundred years ago, who considered no full-dress\nequipment complete without the rapier. The very fact that these\nweapons are present leads to brawls and quarrels, which result only\ntoo frequently in killing, or an attempt to kill.\n\nIt is dangerous to put into the hands of a weak person a weapon which\nmay carry death and destruction by the small pressure of the finger.\nThe very handling of such weapons seems to breed the desire to use\nthem. The situation is something similar to that of a man who gazes\nover the brink of a precipice and to whom there comes an almost\nirresistible desire to throw himself over.\n\nThere would be some force in the argument that the law-abiding citizen\nhas the right to carry a revolver to protect himself from thugs if\nhis pistol were any real protection; but it is not. The attack from\nthe thug on the highway comes so suddenly and unexpectedly that there\nis rarely an opportunity to use a weapon in defense; and, even if\nit should occasionally happen that a man would be at a disadvantage\nbecause he had no pistol, this loss to the community is outweighed a\nthousand to one by the evils which follow its use.\n\nWhy should we permit men to manufacture and sell instruments of\ncrime--weapons which are designed for no other purpose? We do have\nlaws which prevent the free sale of poisons, based upon the fact\nthat poisons may be used as a means of self-destruction or in the\ndestruction of others. But we have no safeguards against the purchase\nand use of these other deadly agencies.\n\nA brilliant display of deadly weapons may be found in any first-class\nhardware store, one which is peculiarly tempting to the young, the\nweak and the vicious. Pawnshops are heavily stocked with weapons of\nthis character.\n\nThere are a hundred places on the streets of Chicago, particularly on\nClark and State streets, where may be found in cases standing in front\nof stores a display of brass knuckles, dirks and revolvers, which\ncan be purchased at a very small price--and without restrictions of\nany kind. Yet they are purchased, almost exclusively, to be used as\ninstruments of crime.\n\nExperience has demonstrated that the laws which forbid the carrying of\nconcealed weapons are not effective; and it is not possible that, in\nthe very nature of things, they can be entirely so. There is only one\nsure and effective way of preventing the criminal use of these deadly\nweapons--that is, to make it impossible for men to get hold of them.\nThis can be done only by forbidding their manufacture and sale. The\nState, in the exercise of its police power, has authority to pass laws\nof this character.\n\nI submit that it is the duty of the community to demand the passage\nof such laws. There seems to be no answer to this proposition when\nyou consider that these articles are not manufactured to sell for\nany legitimate purpose, and that to deprive men of the privilege of\nmanufacturing and selling deadly weapons does not, in any degree,\ndeprive the community of anything which may be of any real use or\nbenefit.\n\nIt is the duty of the State to prevent as well as to punish crime\nand to protect its weak and vicious citizens, so far as it can,\nfrom the temptation to do wrong. We would not tempt men to steal by\naffording them easy opportunities for theft, especially if we knew\nthat they were either weak or wicked. And yet, we make absolutely no\neffort to keep deadly weapons out of dangerous hands. We do attempt\nto forbid their concealment. Practically this attempt is a failure\nand, in effect, we permit men to carry deadly weapons which may be\nsuccessfully concealed until the very moment they are brought into use.\n\nA great deal of the lurid literature has grown up around the\npistol. The cowboy with his gun play has always been an attractive\ncharacter in fiction. No doubt there is a time in the pioneer life\nof a community when there seems to be some excuse for the use of the\nrevolver. But a dispassionate view of this subject, having in mind\nthe welfare of a settled, organized State, every part of which is\npervaded by law and within its restraining influence, points to the\nconclusion that the time has come to legislate revolvers, dirks and\nbrass knuckles out of existence.\n\n\nQUEERS THE TOWN.\n\nThe elaborate display of revolvers, dirks and brass knuckles in shop\nwindows creates a most unfavorable impression on visitors. Many\ntravelers like to walk to their hotels for the exercise after the long\njourney from the east.\n\nThey get their first impression of Chicago from a walk up Clark or\nState street.\n\nOn all sides they see revolvers, bludgeons, sandbags and slung-shots.\n\"Ah! This is the West at last,\" say many. \"Now look out for Indians\nand grizzy bears.\"\n\nUpon Chicagoans who witness these exhibitions of criminal tools daily\nthe effect is most depressing. It makes them think that civilization\nis still far off. In New York there is an ordinance forbidding\npawnshops to display such weapons in the window.\n\nThe accidental shootings, alone, caused by the careless handling of\npistols, would justify a law preventing their manufacture and sale.\nWhat possible benefit can be suggested to offset the evils which we\nhave spoken of? Certainly the idea of individual liberty cannot be\ncarried to the extent of making it the duty of a State to afford a\nman the facilities for the commission of crime. There is no right\ninvolved in the matter which is worthy of respect. Let me give you a\nfew illustrations:\n\nA <DW64> carried his revolver with him to a ball. This was customary.\nDuring a lull in the dance, while talking with his companions--men\nand women--he pulls out this revolver and shows it around for the\nadmiration of his friends. He is under the impression that it is not\nloaded. He places it playfully at the head of his sweetheart, pulls\nthe trigger, and she drops dead.\n\nThat chamber happened to be loaded. It was determined to be a case of\nwanton carelessness on his part and he was sentenced to two years in\nthe penitentiary. Why should a man like that be allowed to carry a\npistol at all? Under what possible circumstances could he use it in\nany legitimate way?\n\nA few months ago the cashier in a bank, a valuable citizen, in a\nneighboring town, sat down at his desk in a despondent moment. He\nopened the drawer, saw the revolver lying there, and, overcome by an\nirresistible impulse, he placed the muzzle to his head, pulled the\ntrigger and--he is a dead man! There is not one chance in a thousand\nthat this man would either have taken poison, with its lingering\nagonies, cut his throat, hung himself or jumped off the bridge.\n\nThe other day, in the country near by, a man with his hands in his\npockets stepped up to a wagon standing in front of his door and said\nto the driver: \"You made an insulting remark about me to my wife a few\nweeks ago. Will you apologize?\" The driver replied: \"I do not know\nthat I made such a remark.\" \"Well,\" the man replied, \"your time has\ncome.\" He pulled out his pistol, which he had held concealed all the\ntime in his hand, and fired the shot; the driver of the wagon fell\nover the dashboard--dead. Here, without warning, without the slightest\nground to expect such an act, the man, who might, under any other\ncircumstances, have had some possible chance for defense, was hurled\ninto eternity, apparently, to gratify the mere desire to kill.\n\nA few nights ago a lone robber boarded a railroad train and with a\nrevolver compelled the conductor and porter to walk through the car in\nfront of him and demanded of the passengers that they surrender their\nmoney and jewels--which the passengers promptly proceeded to do. The\nentire train was held up by a single pistol, a thing which would be\nabsolutely impossible with any other weapon. A revolver enables the\nhighwayman to use one of his hands free, which he could not if he had\neither a shotgun or a rifle.\n\nAnd so it goes. Instance after instance is within the recollection of\neveryone where crime is made possible by the easy possession of this\ndeadly weapon--the revolver. The point I wish to emphasize is, that\nthere is no legitimate use for the revolver anywhere in the world; no\nreason for its existence; no legitimate use for the dirk knife or the\nbrass knuckles.\n\nAll these things are manufactured and sold as instruments of crime.\nAnd, although their deadly use is familiar to everybody, yet we\nseem to take it for granted that the right to manufacture and sell\nthem and the right to own them are rights which the law is bound\nto protect. We seek only to impose a restriction that is vain and\nineffective.\n\nPistol carrying is an American habit; one which is comparatively\ninfrequent abroad, and there is in Europe--particularly in\nEngland--compared with us, a proportionately small fraction of\nshooting affairs. Even policemen in London do not carry revolvers.\n\nIt is time for us to take this evil seriously in hand and effect a\ncure, which, to be effective, must be radical.\n\nI favor a law restricting the display and sale of firearms. Carrying\na loaded revolver concealed ought to be made a felony. For carrying a\nconcealed weapon--firearm, dirk, brass knucks, razor, knife, etc.--the\npenalty cannot be too severe. I would cut out the fine and make the\npenalty for carrying a concealed weapon three to twelve months in the\nWorkhouse and from two to five years in the penitentiary.\n\nA severe penalty would help the police to break up this criminal\nhabit. It would help to tame the ex-convict who returns to a life of\ncrime. It would aid in overcoming the influence of the cheap novel\namong light-minded youth. Sale of weapons which can be concealed on\nthe person ought to be restricted to officers of the law. If permits\nare issued at all, they ought to be given by a responsible officer of\nthe law.\n\nConcealed weapons are the cause of a large per cent of the crimes\ncommitted in which weapons are used. There were many arrests for\ncarrying concealed weapons in the last official year. Thousands of\npeople carry them. Every man with a concealed weapon, unless he has\na right to carry it to serve the public peace, is a danger to the\ncitizens of Chicago. Men who carry concealed weapons imagine they\nwould protect themselves with them; often they would, but more often\nthe weapons serve no good purpose. Make the law against promiscuous\nsale and carrying of concealed weapons so severe that it will be\nnecessary for the officers of the law only to carry them.\n\n\n\n\nGETTING SOMETHING FOR NOTHING.\n\nHOW THE WORTHLESS CERTIFICATE WORKS.\n\nStock Transfers From Worthless Stock to Worthless Stock a Game That\nFools the Uninitiated.\n\nHow the Rhodus Boys Worked the Old \"Come-On.\"\n\n\nOne of the most open frauds, one which should not for a minute have\ndeceived any investor in \"securities\" and things, was unearthed by\nDetective Clifton R. Wooldridge, and the results of his work were\nshown in Chicago when Thomas Rhodus and Birch F. Rhodus were indicted\nby the federal grand jury.\n\nThe Central Life Securities Company in Chicago was apparently a sound\nconcern. The managers were always careful to keep money in the bank\nand any insinuation that this was not a sound company was immediately\nrefuted by bankers who were handling the Rhodus money.\n\nBut Detective Wooldridge had seen so much of \"guaranty\" and \"security\"\nthat he was suspicious of all companies which made this name a\nrallying point in their literature.\n\nAlso the Rhodus brothers seemed to be using the same old catch-words\nwhich had beguiled men into the fake underwriting schemes. So the\ndetective was not impressed by \"security\" or \"guarantee.\" He proceeded\nto investigate the record of the Rhodus brothers.\n\nAnd ere the great scandal began to open out and assert itself,\nWooldridge found that the Rhodus brothers had been in the lottery\nbusiness in Denver in 1889 and 1890. Now it does not conduce to belief\nin the soundness of a firm to find that its managers have been\ncommon, cheap lottery workers. So Wooldridge went into the record.\n\nIn the course of his examinations he discovered that the Chicago\nIndependent in January, 1899, contained the following notice:\n\nIn 1889 and 1890, Thos. Rhodus and Birch F. Rhodus were operating the\nDenver Lottery Company, later called the Denver State Lottery. The\nfollowing are extracts from the Chicago Independent, January, 1899,\nnumber: \"The attention of the postoffice authorities was attracted to\nthis scheme by seeing circulars of the Denver Lottery Company about\nAugust 20, 1890, saying, 'All remittances to be addressed to A. C.\nRoss & Co.,' who were none other than Thomas F. Rhodus, Jr. Ross, or\nRhodus, Jr., was arrested by postoffice authorities October 5, 1889,\nfined $100 and costs, which was paid November, 1889. A. C. Johnson,\nalias A. C. Ross, alias Thomas F. Rhodus, Jr., was arrested March,\n1890, and was at that time running what was called the Denver State\nLottery Company, having changed its name from Denver Lottery Company.\nThey kept arresting him daily for over forty days. The federal grand\njury found five indictments, with over one hundred counts, against A.\nC. Johnson, alias Thomas Rhodus, Jr., for fraudulent use of the United\nStates mails. He then changed his business to the name of Bank of\nCommerce. Was arrested several times, and then sold out, or pretended\nto do so, to Birch F. Rhodus.\n\n\nTRYING THEIR HAND AT LIFE INSURANCE.\n\n\"The Western Mutual Life Association of this city has been weighed in\nthe balance by the Missouri and Michigan State Insurance Commissioners\nand found wanting. An examination of the concern by these officials,\nmade as of August 31, 1898, has recently been reported upon. On that\ndate a deficiency of assets under the most favorable showing of\n$55,635.36 was shown to exist. In other words, the association was\nimpaired that amount.\n\n\"President Thomas F. Rhodus and Vice-President Birch F. Rhodus each\nreceived a salary of $10,000 a year, and there seems to have been\na handsome expense allowance besides. Secretary Charles S. Johnson\nreceived $7,000 annually; Second Vice-President John B. Kirk, of James\nS. Kirk & Co., and Treasurer J. V. Clarke, President of the Hibernian\nBank, under an arrangement, the annual sum of $27,000.\"\n\nThe facts here cited were disclosed by the investigation made by the\nInsurance Commissioners mentioned above. The association did not long\nsurvive this incident, and its assets were soon taken over by the\nIllinois Life Insurance Company.\n\nWhen the records of these men are considered, it is believed that\nthe boldness of their operations, the ease with which they have\nobtained the endorsement of representative business men in Chicago and\nelsewhere for their various schemes, and the way in which, unchecked,\nthey have personally profited from their operations in the name of\nlegitimate business, are absolutely without a parallel in the history\nof this city.\n\nAny number of stockholders in the different companies stand ready to\ntestify to the correctness of the foregoing. Every company started\nand operated by these men appears to have been exploited for the sole\nbenefit of themselves. The stockholders have, with a few insignificant\nexceptions, lost every dollar invested.\n\nThis was the opening gun in the Rhodus campaign. When Detective\nWooldridge began boring in he found that in addition to the Central\nLife Securities Company (whatever that might mean), the Rhodus\nbrothers were promoting the moss-grown mining proposition, and that\nthe Mina Grande Mining Company, with certain holes in the ground\nlocated in the State of Sonora, Mexico, was also a Rhodus Company.\n\nThe Mercantile Finance Company, which was capitalized at the sum of\n$1,000 in the State of Maine, Maine being almost as easy as New Jersey\nas a corporation state, was the basis for the manipulation of all the\nother companies. Even Maine would not stand for a big capitalization\nof penniless adventurers, so to make the capitalization bug the\nservices of the Mina Grande and the State of Sonora, where things are\nstill easier than in Maine, were called in and the capitalization of\nthe Mina Grande was rated at $2,000,000.\n\nThis did not look nice to the detective. There was too much hunting\nof easy ground. He bored in further. Then he discovered the true\ninwardness of the situation. Around Joplin, Webb City, Carterville\nand other cities in Southwest Missouri, are certain very fine lead\nand zinc mines. Joplin is the first zinc producing city in the world.\nIt has been known as such for a number of years. The lead from this\ndistrict is second only in output to that of Leadville, Colo. Here was\nanother easy chance.\n\nOf course any one who knew anything at all about the lay of the land\nin Jasper County, Mo., knew that all the possible lead and zinc lands\nhad been snapped up years ago; that \"Pat\" Sullivan of Joplin had been\na political boss on the strength of his turning monopolist of the very\ndistricts which produced the lead and zinc. But the public did not\nknow it. At least not the great, gullible public. They only knew that\nJasper County was full of lead and zinc and they in some way formed\nthe conclusion that the whole county was underlaid with the precious\nmetals.\n\nTherefore it was easy for the Rhodus \"companies\" to start the\n\"Independent Zinc Securities Company,\" bore a few holes in the ground\nwhich would produce fish-worms and black ants and nothing else, and\n\"transfer the stock of the 'Mina Grande' to the 'Independent Zinc'.\"\nThis only was used as a safeguard where a stockholder of Mina Grande\nbegan to get peevish because the holes in the hillsides of Sonora\nproduced nothing.\n\nBut the Rhodus game was not yet complete. The Mercantile Finance\nCompany, with its thousand-dollar capitalization in the State\nof Maine, might get into difficulties transferring stock to the\n\"Independent Zinc,\" because somebody might know enough about Jasper\nCounty to realize that there was not enough lead in that county\noutside the control of the lead trust to make a small-sized pea.\n\nTherefore it needed another company to \"transfer\" the peevish\nstockholder to. So the Mexican Development Company was formed by the\nMercantile, the capital of the new company being $1,000,000, and its\nassets 90,000 shares of the \"Mina Grande\" stock, the par value of\nwhich would not buy a cigarette paper.\n\nThe literature of the new company also carried the literature of the\n\"Mina Grande,\" with a glowing account of how the new company was\ngoing to turn Mexico upside down and enrich the whole world from the\nscorpion holes in the Sonora hillsides.\n\nThe stockholders in the Mexican Development are still waiting for\nreturns on their investment. But the American people were getting\nwise to the mining game, even when the magic name of Jasper County\nwas used. So to supplement Mexico and Jasper County the Mercantile\nFinance Company, the old reliable thousand-dollar concern, organized\nin rapid succession the Boise King Placers Company, which was going to\nwash fortunes out of the inoffensive mud of Idaho rivers, the Moose\nCreek Placer Company, which had the same end in view, the American\nFibre Company, which had about as much fibre about it as a paper candy\nbox, The Illinois Finance Company (frenzied finance, all right), The\nIndiana Securities Company, which \"secured\" the money of the investor,\nbut secured nothing else, The Minnesota Securities Company, and then\nwith a great play to the galleries, The Finance Company of America.\n\nFrom one to another of these absolutely bankrupt and worthless\nconcerns the investor was thrown back and forth like a shuttlecock. If\nhe was sore on Independent Zinc he got American Finance. If he became\nconvinced that American Finance was worthless paper he got Idaho mud\nin the shape of \"Moose Creek Placers.\"\n\nInterest-bearing bonds with coupons attached were floated on a number\nof these companies and sold largely through the mails.\n\nJust here Uncle Sam, urged on by reports made to the Chicago\nPostoffice Inspectors by Wooldridge, took a hand. When Wooldridge\nbegan boring in the bankers and other influential friends of the\nRhodus people, who had been wise enough to get good political\naffiliations as an adjunct to their business, became extremely busy\nand influences were brought to bear to call Wooldridge off the case,\nbecause he was the most feared man in America on a fraud game.\n\nWooldridge accepted the recall gracefully, but immediately stepped\nover the way to the Federal Building, and called upon Postoffice\nInspector William Ketcham, who is acknowledged by everyone in the\nsecret service of the United States and the general public to be the\nshrewdest, most astute, and most indefatigable man in the service\nof the United States Government. Wooldridge convinced the great\ninspector that there was something doing in the \"Rhodus\" line. Ketcham\ncomplimented Wooldridge highly on the manner in which he had gathered\nthe data together. Then Ketcham got busy himself. When two such men\nas Wooldridge and Ketcham get busy it is not long until the explosion\ncomes.\n\nNor was it long coming in the Rhodus case. First came the receivership\nof the Central Life Securities Company. And here another big man\nand an incorruptible one got into the game--none other than John C.\nFetzer, founder of the \"Fetzer System\" of receiverships that receive\nfor the victims of defunct concerns, in place of and for the receiver.\nThis man was fresh from the great Stensland Bank fraud, where as\nreceiver he had paid 72 cents on the dollar and wound up a record\nreceivership in less than one year, whereas the usual time taken in\nsuch cases was ten years.\n\n[Illustration:\n\n    With some of the water out of her food,\n      All profits milked out, too,\n    With little to eat and going dry,\n      What is the poor beast to do?\n]\n\nWhen Fetzer's name appeared as receiver there was dismay in the\nRhodus camp. The triple combination was enough to frighten anyone,\nespecially where the guilty conscience was a factor. Fetzer\nimmediately went to work. He called in his fighting aids. He told\nKetcham and Wooldridge to \"keep it up.\" When the Rhodus people began\nto give evasive answers before the Referee in Bankruptcy, it was a\nshort step, with the information which had been gathered, to bring\nthe matter before the Federal Grand Jury. And the indictments of the\nRhoduses followed.\n\nThe investigation of the Rhodus manner of doing business showed\nthat the shrewd manipulators of fish-worm holes and scorpion nests\nhad not neglected the feminine element. The treasurer of the old\nthousand-dollar stand by hailing from the pine tree state, the\nMercantile Finance Company, was Mary C. Scully, who had been with the\nRhodus gang since 1894. Katherine T. Scully, a very young woman, who\nhad recently appeared on the scene, was listed as treasurer of the\ngood old \"thousand-dollar\" medium. She came into the secretaryship as\na result of a shuffle of officers of the Rhodus companies, the shuffle\nof officials being found to be as necessary as that of the shuffled\nstock.\n\nIt was also found that the Rhoduses came to Chicago about 1894 and\norganized the Western Mutual Life Association. This company had a\nstormy career and was finally merged into the Illinois Life Insurance\nCo. The methods of the Rhoduses were severely criticised in connection\nwith this company and all confidence in it was destroyed.\n\nPrior to coming to Chicago, Thomas and Birch F. Rhodus operated a\nlottery at Denver, Colo., and in 1889 came in conflict with the\nFederal authorities. Indictments are on record against them and it is\nclaimed that they used various aliases. Thomas Rhodus was convicted at\nDenver in November, 1889, and fined.\n\nDuring the past four or five years the Mercantile Finance Co. has\noffered the stock of numerous mining schemes, none of which has shown\nany merit, but were officered and owned by the Rhoduses and their\nassociates. The methods employed to sell stock in these enterprises\nwere (according to bills filed in court by the persons victimized)\nthose of the ordinary swindler, and a close study of the schemes and\nthe manner in which they are floated leads to the conclusion that the\nRhoduses are not entitled to any confidence.\n\nAt the time of going to press the Rhodus brothers are still under\nindictment. The tangle in their affairs seems to show conclusively\nthat the matter will be long and bitterly fought, but the facts that\nhave come to light make matters look very dark for the manipulators of\nthe moss-grown stock-kiting game.\n\nSamples of the literature secured by Wooldridge and Ketcham prove very\nenlightening to the general public as to the methods of the Rhodus'\nand kindred concerns. Here are a few of them:\n\n\"It is a rule of this company,\" one pamphlet of the company reads,\n\"not to act as fiscal agent for any corporation unless this company is\nprominently represented in the management, so as to be able to protect\nthe interests of our clients.\"\n\n\nASSURANCE GIVEN INVESTORS.\n\nThe cover of the pamphlet bears the assurance:\n\n     \"Are your interests protected? They are if made through\n     the Mercantile Finance Company. Avoid risk of loss; make\n     certain of gain.\"\n\nOn another page is a list of high-class railroad stocks to the amount\nof $100,000 which the company is declared to be the possessor of in\naddition to assets in stocks, mortgage loans, cash on hand and other\ncollateral. Careful reading of the pamphlet, however, shows that these\nstocks are not a part of the exchange list.\n\nAn explanation of the system, which probably will be a part of the\ntestimony submitted to the grand jury in conjunction with the tales of\nluckless investors, as printed, is:\n\n     \"Its plan is to create profits for its customers by aiding\n     in the intelligent development and working of legitimate\n     mining enterprises. Through this system its customers\n     become careful and conservative investors. Furthermore,\n     they are given an opportunity to participate in the vast\n     wealth created in these industries, having at the same\n     time such assurance against loss as would not otherwise\n     be possible. It is a rule of this company never to handle\n     as a fiscal agent stock in any property until after a\n     careful and thorough examination has been made. It rejects\n     those properties which do not come up to the high standard\n     required. This accomplishes for the customers what the\n     individual investor by himself, unaided, cannot afford to\n     do, for his own investment is usually too small to justify\n     his having this done on his own account.\n\n\nPURCHASES \"GUARANTEED.\"\n\n     \"The Mercantile Finance Company positively guarantees to\n     allow its customers the privilege of exchanging any stock\n     purchased from it for stock of any other company which may\n     be in the said guarantee fund. Such exchange may be made\n     and repeated as often as desired during a period of five\n     years following the date of the original purchase.\"\n\nThe tremendous activity of Inspector Ketcham, ably assisted by\nWooldridge, has been at the bottom of the exposure of this whole\nabominable swindle. But this is by no means the first case in\nwhich these two men have joined hands and caused an upheaval in\npseudo-financial circles.\n\nThese two men first began to work together in the famous Wild Cat\nInsurance raids. These raids furnish one of the most dramatic chapters\nin the financial history of the United States if not of the world.\nThe Wild Cats had stolen millions of dollars. Their methods involved\nbrutal filchings from the poor, heartless commercial brigandage and\nfinally the running to earth and conviction of the ringleaders and\npromoters of the concerns. The work was all done by Wooldridge and\nKetcham.\n\nIt would be improper to close the story of the great Rhodus frauds\nwithout some mention of Attorney Patrick H. O'Donnell, who, by his\nwise counsel and careful review of the matters submitted in evidence,\nmaterially assisted the two men who had most to do with the unearthing\nof the frauds.\n\n\n\n\nWANT AD. FAKERS.\n\nTHE PETTY DOLLAR SWINDLERS PUT OUT OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO BY DETECTIVE\nCLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE.\n\n\nThe cheap little grafter who takes dollars, dimes, nickels and pennies\nfrom the poor, while not exactly a great financier, is one of the\nsmoothest propositions with which secret service men and federal\ninspectors are confronted. His main hold is on the public press,\nbecause he operates through the seemingly innocuous want advertisement.\n\nThe statements of some advertisers may be taken literally; some should\nbe taken with caution, and some should not be taken at all. In the\npostoffice department at Washington, in the files of the assistant\nattorney general, one may study the methods of the black sheep of the\nadvertising fold against whom fraud orders have been issued. A fraud\norder is an order directed to a postmaster forbidding him to deliver\nletters to a certain person or concern or to cash money orders for\nthem.\n\nIf a man swindles his neighbor without using the mails the postoffice\ndepartment will not interfere with him, although the police may, but\nif he attempts to make Uncle Sam a party to the swindle, the old\ngentleman lets loose on him a horde of postoffice inspectors, who\nnot only put a stop to the business, but frequently put the swindler\nhimself behind the bars. The department issues year in and year out an\naverage of one fraud order a day, and an examination of the reports of\nthe inspectors who have investigated these cases is apt to convince\none that the long-accepted estimate that there is a sucker born every\nminute is much too low. The schemes most commonly employed are here\nset forth.\n\n\nHOME WORK SCHEME CATCHES MANY.\n\nThe chance to earn a few dollars a week without leaving home appeals\nto many women whose household duties occupy the greater part of their\ndaylight hours. Unfortunately the work-at-home scheme catches not only\nthe woman whose object is merely to earn a little pin money and who in\nmany cases can afford to lose a dollar or two without suffering any\nhardship as a consequence, but it gathers in as well the working girl\neager to add to her scanty earnings by engaging in some remunerative\nwork at home.\n\nThe work-at-home scheme is operated in a variety of ways, but the\nunderlying principle is the same in all cases. Sometimes the work to\nbe done consists in embroidering doilies or in making lace, and in\nother cases it consists in filling in with gilt paint price tickets\nprinted in outline. In all cases the work is described as easy, the\nadvertisements assuring the reader that experience is unnecessary.\nIn all cases, too, the victim is obliged to buy, from the promoters\nof the scheme, \"materials\" or a lace-making machine or some other\nobject before she is given any work. The following description of\na scheme against which a fraud order was issued last May will make\nclear the methods pursued by all fakers of the work-at-home class. The\nadvertisement in this case reads as follows:\n\n     Home Work, $9 to $15; No Canvassing.\n\n     $5 to $6 weekly working evenings; experience unnecessary.\n     Inclose stamps for instructions, sample, etc. Address B.\n     Wilson & Co., 603 Walnut street, Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n\nMONEY CHARGED FOR FAKE \"OUTFITS.\"\n\nTo those who reply to this advertisement a circular letter is sent\nstating that the work required consists in filling in with bronze\npaint store-window price tickets printed in outline, one of which,\npartly filled in, is inclosed as a sample.\n\n[Illustration:\n\nIf you don't know just where to go\nOr how to do the thing that you\nMay have in mind--or if you find\nThat you can't rise--then advertise,\nA \"Business Chances\" ad advances\nYour desires to many buyers--\nAnd our Want Ads, if you use them,\nBring so many--you can choose them.\n]\n\nThe circular states that the work is easily done, requires no previous\nexperience, and that all that is necessary, is to do the work in a\nneat manner. Two dollars and a half a hundred is offered for tickets\nfilled in as described, and the prospective victim is assured that\nshe can easily gild at least 100 tickets a day. She will require an\n\"outfit,\" of course, the cost of which is generously put at the\nremarkably low price of $1.10.\n\nIn return for her $1.10 the victim receives a handful of window\ntickets, a small bottle of bronze paint, and a brush for applying\nit--the actual value of the articles furnished, including postage,\nbeing fully covered by the extra 10 cents.\n\nThe worst is yet to come. When the woman, having parted with her money\nand having spent her time in filling in the handful of tickets sent\nher, returns them, at her own expense, she receives, not a check in\npayment for the work done, but a circular letter stating that her work\nis \"unsatisfactory.\" She may possess the talent of a Rosa Bonheur and\na department store ticket writer rolled into one, but she will never\nsucceed in selling a cent's worth of bronzed price tickets to the\nfakers who sold her the \"outfit.\" Their business is not to buy but\nto sell, and her fate is not to sell but to be sold. Similar to the\nwork-at-home scheme is what may be described as the letter-writing\ndodge. The following is a typical advertisement of its class:\n\n     LADIES--Earn $20 per hundred writing short letters. Stamped\n     envelope for particulars. Gem Manufacturing Company,\n     Cassopolis, Mich.\n\nWhen the woman anxious to earn an honest penny replies to this ad. she\nreceives the following letter:\n\n     Dear Madam:\n\n     We pay at the rate of $20 per hundred or 20 cents for each\n     letter sent us in accordance with our printed circular of\n     instructions, and make remittances to you of all money\n     earned by you at the end of each week. The letter which we\n     send you to copy contains only eighty words, and can be\n     written either with typewriter or with pen and ink, as you\n     prefer, and you can readily see that you can write a number\n     of letters during your leisure time each day.\n\n     You do not pay us one penny for anything, except $1 for\n     the instructions and for packing and mailing the Ideal\n     Hoodwinkem which we send you.\n\n     There is no canvassing connected with the work, and if you\n     follow our instructions you can earn good wages from the\n     start.\n\nWhen the victim sends her dollar for the instructions and for the\nIdeal Hoodwinkem (or whatever the name of the article the fakers are\nselling happens to be), she discovers that the 20 cents is not to be\npaid merely for writing a letter. Oh, no! The 20 cents will be paid\nonly for such letters as induce some other woman to part with a dollar\nfor one of \"Our Ideal Hoodwinkems.\" The following letter, which is\nsent after the unsuspecting one's dollar has been safely salted down,\nlays bare the true inwardness of the scheme:\n\n     Dear Madam:\n\n     We herewith hand you trial blanks, also copy of letter\n     which you are to write. You are to send these letters out\n     to ladies, and for every letter which you write and send\n     out and which is returned to us with $1 inclosed for one of\n     our Ideal Hoodwinkems, with your number on the letter, we\n     will send you a cash commission of 20 cents.\n\nIt is needless to say that the fakers do not expect their victim to\nbe so stupid as to send out the letters on the terms indicated. The\nobject of the plan is accomplished when \"dear madam\" parts with her\ndollar for the letter of instructions and the Hoodwinkem, which would\nbe dear at 10 cents.\n\n\nA SMOOTH SCHEME.\n\nOne of the simplest and most effective schemes for hooking new\n\"suckers\" was adopted by a Dearborn street \"investment\" concern.\nThis consisted in sending to a prospective victim a check for $100,\nmade payable to some other man, and accompanied by a brief letter\ntelling that recipient would find inclosed his weekly dividend on\nhis investment of $1,000. Of course the marked \"sucker\" knew nothing\nof the deal, and, believing a mistake had been made would return the\ncheck and letter. He at once received in reply an apologetic letter,\nstating that the first letter and check had been inserted in the wrong\nenvelope through the carelessness of a clerk, it having been the\nintention to mail to the recipient a circular instead of another man's\ncheck for dividends. It was enough. Ten per cent a week was not to be\nresisted. The \"sucker\" almost invariably opened negotiations on his\nown initiative and was landed.\n\n\nFINANCIAL \"JOURNAL\" FRAUDS.\n\nThe multiplicity of these schemes led to the establishment of the\n\"financial paper,\" designed, according to the publisher's statement,\nto guard investors against get-rich-quick frauds. To the police these\npapers are known as \"special form papers.\" The editor comprises the\nstaff. The contents consist of financial matter usually stolen from\nreputable journals, a formidable array of financial advertising, and,\nmost important, \"reports\" on investment concerns. For a consideration\nthe \"special form\" paper tells its readers that the \"Cotton Mutual\nInvestment Company\" is sound and reliable. The manager of the \"Cotton\nMutual\" buys as many copies of the paper as he wants, as it has no\nregular time of publication, and can be run off in any quantity at any\ntime with the article boosting the \"Cotton Mutual.\" The get-rich-quick\nmanager then sees to it that the paper finds its way into the hands\nof his \"sucker list,\" or list of names of persons whom he hopes to be\nable to induce to \"invest.\"\n\nTherefore, when reading want ads. in the newspapers, consider\ncarefully the nature of the promises made. If they are too rosy, too\nhigh-flown, have nothing to do with that ad. or the man who inserted\nit. You may depend upon it that it is a fake. There are no great\narmies of persons walking about this country seeking to give away\nsomething for nothing.\n\n\n\n\nMILLIONAIRE BANKER AND BROKER ARRESTED.\n\nRamifications of the Bucket Shop System Revealed by Detective Clifton\nR. Wooldridge.\n\n\nGeorge T. Sullivan, the millionaire stock, bond, grain and cotton\nbroker at 159-161 LaSalle street, Chicago, Illinois, was arrested May\n23, 1906, with 60 inmates. Twelve patrol wagon loads of books, records\nand papers were seized and carted off to the Harrison Street Police\nStation.\n\nMr. Sullivan at the time had one of the finest, best-equipped offices\nin Chicago, which was located in the Traders' Building, opposite the\nChicago Board of Trade. He occupied several floors, and they were very\nelaborately furnished. Part of the third floor was used as a telegraph\noffice, where forty men were constantly at work at the telegraph keys.\nHis private telegraph wires reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific\nocean, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the British possessions in the\nnorth.\n\nMr. Sullivan paid to the Western Union Telegraph Company for the\nprivilege of using their wires and services $150,000 per year.\n\nMr. Sullivan had 111 branch offices, located in the principal cities\nof the United States. Each of these branch offices evidently was\nequipped with all the paraphernalia used in the bucketshop, and was in\ncharge of one of Mr. Sullivan's representatives.\n\nMr. Sullivan owned the entire equipments of the offices and dictated\nthe policy and work to each manager, which had to be carried out\nto the letter. The following is a list of the branch offices and\nlocations which were operated by Mr. Sullivan:\n\n[Illustration: GEORGE T. SULLIVAN]\n\n[Illustration: OFFICES OF GEORGE T. SULLIVAN AFTER THE RAID]\n\n\nLIST OF BRANCH OFFICES.\n\nThe Sullivan letterhead gives branch offices in the following cities:\nAltoona, Pa., Arcola, Ill.; Aurora, Ill.; Avoca, Ia.; Boston,\nMass.; Buda, Ill.; Burlington, Ia.; Cambridge, Ill.; Chicago,\nIll.; Cleveland, O.; Davenport, Ia.: Decatur, Ill.; Des Moines,\nIa.; Detroit, Mich.; Earlville, Ill.; Effingham, Ill.; Elkhart,\nInd.; Fairfield, Ind.; Fostoria, O.; Fort Madison, Ia.: Galesburg,\nIll.; Geneseo, Ill.; Gibson City, Ill.; Goshen, Ind.; Grand Rapids,\nMich.; Greenville, Ill.; Grinnell, Ia.; Iowa City, Ia.; Ivesdale,\nIll.; Johnstown, Pa.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; Keokuk, Ia.; Kewanee, Ill.;\nLancaster, Pa.; Mansfield, Ill.; Mattoon, Ill.; Michigan City, Ind.;\nMilwaukee, Wis.; Monmouth, Ill.; Monticello, Ill.; Morris, Ill.;\nMount Pleasant, Ia.; New Castle, Pa.; New York, N. Y.; Niles, O.;\nOmaha, Neb.; Peoria, Ill.; Pittsburg, Pa.; Plano, Ill.; Princeton,\nIll.; Racine, Wis.; Roberts, Ill.; Saybrook, Ill.; South Bend, Ind.;\nSheffield, Ill.; St. Louis, Mo.; Tolono, Ill.; Tiffin, O.; Toledo, O.;\nTuscola, Ill.; Waukegan, Ill.; Wyanet, Ill.\n\n\nEXCLUSIVE OFFICES FOR LADY SPECULATORS.\n\nChicago--225 Dearborn street, National Life Building, 16 Imperial\nBuilding, 51 Dexter Building, 84 Adams street, South Chicago--9138\nCommercial avenue.\n\nMr. Sullivan had his correspondents and solicitors in all of the\nleading stock, bond, grain and cotton markets of most of the foreign\ncountries. On May 23, 1903, he was doing a business of from $300,000\nto $500,000 per year. His weekly expenses ran from $15,000 to $20,000.\n\nMr. Sullivan advertised extensively in the leading newspapers\nthroughout the United States and in foreign countries. Many of his\nadvertisements would cover an entire page. These advertisements\nbrought him many inquiries from persons either through curiosity or\ndesire to invest, saying nothing of the cash customers secured.\n\n[Illustration:\n\nSULLIVAN'S\n\nRED\nLETTER\nTIPS\n]\n\nMr. Sullivan made special effort to buy or acquire every mailing\nlist to be found in the entire country which had been used by other\nfraudulent and get-rich-quick concerns.\n\nIt is said that he had secured over 20,000 names, which he had on\nhis mailing list. These men were bombarded from day to day with his\nliterature and his _red-letters_, giving the forecast of the market.\nThese letters were very ingeniously gotten up by himself and a\nclairvoyant fortune teller named Madame Dunbar.\n\nHis methods were absolutely devoid of even a pretense of sound\nbusiness ethics, sensationalism and red ink being his only stock in\ntrade.\n\nThe class of literature and telegrams he sent broadcast and regardless\nof expense is well illustrated by the following:\n\nTelegram sent January 1, 1903, to hundreds of persons throughout the\ncountry:\n\n     \"Am going to run three-cent turn in May wheat. Let me act\n     for you heavy. I will take loss if any. Mail three-cent\n     margin.\n\n          George T. Sullivan.\"\n\nIn his \"Red Letter\" of May 18 he makes the following statement:\n\n     \"There is only one thong about this wheat, and that is, a\n     bull market is at hand; and those who buy cannot lose, and\n     if they buy on my advice and buy quickly, I will pay the\n     loss if there should be any.\"\n\nHe had four offices in Chicago aside from his main office, these being\ndesignated by him as \"Exclusive Offices for Lady Speculators.\" When\nabout to open one of these offices he addressed a circular letter to\nthe wives of many prominent citizens announcing the opening of same.\nThe first paragraph of this letter reads as follows:\n\n     \"I have opened superbly appointed offices on the ground\n     floor of the National Life Building, Room 120, where I\n     accept accounts from ladies of $100 or upwards for marginal\n     speculation in stocks, bonds, grain and cotton.\n\n          \"George T. Sullivan.\"\n\nGeorge T. Sullivan, who frequently signs himself \"Red Letter\nSullivan,\" is by occupation a telegraph operator. He was first heard\nof in Boston during the year 1899 and the early part of 1900.\n\n\nON THE \"OIL EXCHANGE.\"\n\nOn May 17, 1900, Sullivan was admitted as a member of the Consolidated\nStock and Petroleum Exchange of New York and under the firm name\nof Sullivan & Sullivan advertised extensively and had a system of\nwires through New England. It was noticed that his business on the\nexchange was very small and upon the complaint of a customer his\ntrading methods were investigated, with the result that on the 11th of\nOctober he was adjudged guilty of obvious fraud or false pretenses and\nexpelled from membership in the exchange. He made some threats of a\nsuit against the exchange, but the firm of Sullivan & Sullivan failed\nin November and nothing was heard of him in New York. His customers\nand correspondents never received any statements of their accounts and\nSullivan fled the state.\n\nHe seems to have come direct to Chicago, and was employed for several\nmonths by bucketshops and private-wire houses as a telegraph operator.\n\nIn the fall of 1901 he associated himself with E. F. Rowland,\nostensibly to do a commission business in stocks, grain and cotton.\nHis methods of advertising were extremely lurid, and he flooded the\ncountry with literature and letters printed in red ink. The employee,\nSullivan, soon forced Rowland out of business and continued under the\nname of Rowland until the first of January, 1903, when by degrees\nhe had worked the name of Sullivan into prominence and the name of\nRowland had gradually been eliminated from his signs and literature.\n\n\nREASONS WHICH CAUSED INVESTIGATION, RAID AND ARREST.\n\nThe raid by Detective C. R. Wooldridge on the Lincoln Commission\nCompany, a race track scheme, in the Portland Block, 115 Dearborn\nstreet, May 14, 1903, developed the peculiar relations between this\nconcern and Sullivan, and the police department was somewhat astounded\nto find among the papers of the Lincoln Commission Company conclusive\nevidence, in the shape of telegrams and correspondence, proving that\nSullivan's agents on his private wires were acting as the agents of\nthe turf scheme, and that the employees and private wires of the\nSullivan concern were used in common by the Lincoln Commission Company\nwith the consent and approval of Sullivan.\n\nMore than twenty of Sullivan's agents were posting in his various\noffices the tips sent out by the Lincoln Commission Company and\naccepting bets which were transmitted over Sullivan's wires to be\nplaced ostensibly by the Lincoln Commission Company on the horses\nwhich they tipped off as sure winners.\n\nThe mixing up of a turf scheme with a so-called grain and stock\nbusiness was something new to the police, and Detective Wooldridge\nprosecuted the investigation, and, upon becoming fully acquainted\nwith Sullivan's methods, concluded that he was not only running a\nbucketshop, but was interested in the turf scheme to a greater extent.\n\nThe evidence gathered in the raid on the Lincoln Commission Company\nfully established the fact. The Cook County Grand Jury was in session\nat the time and the evidence was presented to them. Detective\nWooldridge was ordered to make a full investigation and report to\nthem, which he did.\n\nThe Grand Jury instructed Wooldridge to lay the matter before the\nGeneral Superintendent of Police, Francis O'Neill, and say: \"The Grand\nJury requested immediate action should be taken by the police to\nenforce the state law, which was being violated.\"\n\nWooldridge submitted the case to Chief O'Neill. He asked if\nWooldridge had secured the necessary evidence to prove that Sullivan\nwas conducting an illegitimate business. He was answered in the\naffirmative.\n\n\nWOOLDRIDGE'S RAID.\n\nOn the morning of May 23, 1903, ten picked detectives were secured\nfrom the Detective Bureau to accompany Wooldridge in the raid on\nGeorge T. Sullivan, which turned out to be one of the largest as well\nas one of the most sensational raids and arrests that had occurred in\nChicago for years.\n\nSullivan did an extensive business. The offices of the company which\nwere raided were elaborately furnished, and there was a complete\nassortment of tickers, blackboards and like paraphernalia. At the time\nof the raid the offices were crowded, the operations on the open board\nand the Board of Trade being remarkably exciting. The officers who\nassisted Wooldridge in the raid were Detective Sergeants Howe, Mullen,\nQuinn, Qualey, Miskel, McLaughlin, Weber, Flint and McLane.\n\n\nOFFICES FILLED WITH PATRONS.\n\nIt was at 10 o'clock in the morning, when the largest throng of\nspeculators can be found in the offices at 259-261 LaSalle street,\nopposite the Board of Trade, that Wooldridge and his men swooped down\non the place and proclaimed \"every one there a patron of a bucketshop\nand under arrest.\"\n\nThe wildest excitement prevailed. Telegraph operators, messenger boys,\npit men and persons of every station in life were caught. Some of the\ntraders, thinking of their wives and children, pleaded frantically\nfor their freedom. Some attempted to force their way from the betting\nrooms, but, meeting with armed resistance, they desisted.\n\n\"I don't belong here,\" said one man, indignantly. \"I only dropped in\nhere to see a friend.\" His plea was unavailing.\n\nAnother man, attired in a frock coat and a silk hat, attempted to\nbribe one of the detectives. \"I can't have it get out that I was\narrested,\" said he. \"State your price and I will give it to you\ngladly.\"\n\n[Illustration: He'll have to act faster, or somebody will slip between\nhis fingers.]\n\nThe only persons allowed to escape were three women stenographers, who\nfled through a rear window.\n\nAdvertising matter, private correspondence, telephones, tickers,\ntelegraph instruments and everything of consequence was seized and\nloaded into twelve patrol wagons and taken to the Harrison Street\nPolice Station.\n\nFour hundred and twenty telegraph wires were cut which connected\nSullivan's bucketshops in Chicago and through the country. It took the\nWestern Union Telegraph Company two weeks to get the wires in working\norder.\n\n\nNAMES OF PRISONERS ARRESTED.\n\nAt the Harrison Street Police Station those arrested in the raid gave\ntheir names as follows:\n\nG. T. Sullivan, W. D. Hart, John Conway, L. J. Hoff, Charles Barth,\nWilliam Wilson, E. E. Matwell, J. A. Hogadorn, E. L. Wilson, T. N.\nLamb, R. J. Brennan, Ralph Cunningham, Fred Boller, John Whitmar, E.\nF. Black, John A. Manley, Ernest Gerard, John Lawson, J. K. West,\nGeorge Rodger, Henry Miller, J. A. Crandall, Y. R. Pearson, George\nWilson, Harry Van Camp, George T. Kelly, J. P. Morgan, Joseph Cohen,\nButler Coleman, Arthur McLane, George Frederick, A. L. Kramer, M. J.\nFranklin, Edward O'Connell, Oren Mills, W. H. Kelley, O. S. Reed, F.\nFoley, I. J. Kennedy, Robert Delaney, Joseph Bowers, John Black, L.\nFrederick, B. C. Cover, George Johnson, G. Weightman, H. C. Boder,\nSamuel E. Brown, Joseph Smith, C. E. Tracy, W. Jones, J. W. Kennedy,\nJohn P. Garrison, Al. Dewes, Elmer C. Huntley, T. A. Duey.\n\n\nCROWD GATHERS.\n\nThe fact that a raid was being made became known outside the offices\nand in a short time several thousand persons gathered. Crowds peered\nthrough the windows and doors. The Chicago Open Board of Trade is\ndirectly across the alley in the rear of Sullivan's offices, and\nbusiness there was at a standstill for a time. The traders gathered\nabout Sullivan's offices and remained until the last prisoner had been\ntaken away in the patrol wagon.\n\nSullivan himself was in his private office when the raid was made.\nWooldridge broke open the door and faced the man at the desk.\n\n\"You are under arrest, Mr. Sullivan,\" said the detective. Sullivan\ngrew pale and then reached his hand to the telegraph instrument which\nstood on the table. He started to work it.\n\n\"Stop that!\" ordered Wooldridge. But Sullivan continued. Wooldridge\nmade a leap for the trader and forced him away from the instrument.\nBut the trader was not to be thwarted. He reached over the detective's\nshoulder, and again the click began. Wooldridge then seized the\ninstrument and hurled it into the desk.\n\n\"Cut all telephone and telegraph wires,\" was the order given by\nWooldridge, and the frenzied occupants of the place were thrown into\nterror. There was a mad rush for the door, but the detectives stood\nin the way. Every inducement was offered the policemen, but efforts\nfailed.\n\nThen Sullivan claimed that he had an injunction issued by Judge\nElbridge Hanecy forbidding the police from raiding his place.\n\n\"I have an injunction from Judge Hanecy to stop you!\" yelled Sullivan.\n\"Show me the injunction, then,\" replied Wooldridge, \"and I will obey\nit. If not, I am an officer of the court and have warrants here\ncharging you with keeping a bucketshop and gambling house.\"\n\nThe injunction which Sullivan claimed to have was found by the police\nin one of his drawers in blank form, without any signature, together\nwith the following letter to one of his managers:\n\n                    May 19, 1903.\n\n     MR. CHARLES A. WARREN,\n     New York.\n\n     Dear Mr. Warren:\n\n     Your friend Wooldridge was in all day Monday. We had\n     four detectives here all day investigating my guarantee\n     plan, and they showed up again today and held several\n     conversations with Miss Lorentzen before we realized who\n     they were. It looks like they were trying to make a case.\n\n     In looking up the injunction papers, find you neglected\n     to change them to read The George T. Sullivan Company and\n     The George T. Sullivan Elevator & Grain Co. I took them to\n     Morris and he rehearsed them, patched them, etc., and they\n     are now ready to play ball with.\n\n     Morris is very busy and it looks as if we might need\n     someone else on the scene of action to watch things.\n\n     Hope you arrived O. K., and with best wishes, I remain,\n\n          Yours very truly,\n          GEORGE T. SULLIVAN.\n\nHowever, it was not until 11 o'clock and more than an hour after the\nraid had been made that Attorney Edward Morris filed the injunction\nbill in the Circuit Court.\n\nThe injunction was finally issued by Judge Abner Smith at 12:30\no'clock. It restrained Chief O'Neill and Detectives Hertz and\nWooldridge from interfering in any way with the property contained in\nthe offices occupied by the concern or cutting the telegraph wires\nleading to them. It is represented in the bill that the company has\noffices at 259 LaSalle street, Bush Temple of Music, 60 LaSalle\nstreet, 16 Imperial Building and 84 Adams street; but the damage had\nalready been done.\n\nSullivan was practically out of business, and was being bombarded and\nseized by a horde of infuriated patrons who demanded their money,\nentrusted to him to invest. Sullivan could not return the money, as he\nhad spent it and was bankrupt.\n\n\n\"RED LETTER\" WELL KNOWN.\n\nPATRONS TOLD THEY WOULD NOT LOSE IF ADVICE WAS FOLLOWED.\n\nIn Sullivan's office the detectives found great quantities of\nadvertising matter. This matter was thoroughly gone over in the search\nfor evidence against the grain and stock broker. Pile after pile of\nSullivan's \"red letter\" circulars were found.\n\nSullivan's \"red letter\" was issued daily, and printed in red ink.\nThe circulars were written in a manner characteristic of all the\nadvertisements, printed matter and correspondence to patrons.\n\nIn telegrams to patrons and the \"red letters\" Sullivan often made the\nproposition that he would make good all loss sustained by patrons\nwhile they were making purchases upon his advice.\n\nThe detectives were somewhat surprised when they saw at the top of\nthe circular in bold, red type that \"four exclusive offices for lady\nspeculators\" were being operated in Chicago, one in South Chicago and\none in St. Louis. The addresses given for the Chicago offices were 225\nDearborn street, 159 LaSalle street, 260 Clark street and 84 Adams\nstreet. Women speculators of South Chicago had the opportunity of\nmaking their purchases at 9138 Commercial avenue.\n\nWooldridge was asked by the press what justification he had in making\nthe raids, and by whose orders they were made. He said that he raided\nthe Lincoln Commission Company at 115 Dearborn street, May 14, 1903,\nwhich was conducting a turf investment company, and found that George\nT. Sullivan was operating the same in connection with his bucketshop;\nthat George T. Sullivan and 60 inmates were arrested, and eleven wagon\nloads of books, letters, papers and records taken to the Harrison\nStreet Police Station. Wooldridge said that he had evidence to indict\nthem on 50 charges, and he intended to deliver the goods, and he would\nnot be pulled off by any man in the State of Illinois.\n\nWooldridge immediately took steps to get his evidence in shape.\nHe called on John Hill, Jr., who had charge of the Board of Trade\nquotations and who was an expert on bucketshop methods.\n\nWooldridge, Hill and two clerks went to work gathering evidence for\nthe trial; eleven wagon loads of books, papers, letters and records\nhad to be gone through, which was done in the most careful, systematic\nmanner.\n\nThey worked from 2 p. m. until 12 o'clock and the evidence gathered\nwas placed in a vault.\n\nAfter they had secured something to eat in a nearby restaurant and\ntaken two hours' sleep, they resumed their work, which was carried\non until 7 o'clock Sunday morning. This evidence which was secured\nwas locked up in another vault for safe keeping. After they had eaten\ntheir breakfast they resumed work again and worked until 6 p. m. This\nevidence gathered was placed in another vault. After they had eaten\ntheir supper they resumed work again and worked until 1 o'clock Sunday\nnight, when they succeeded in going through every scrap of paper which\nwas seized in the raid. This evidence gathered was placed in another\nvault.\n\nThe placing of this evidence in different vaults was for the purpose\nof preventing George T. Sullivan or any of his friends from securing\nit on a writ of replevin.\n\nWooldridge slept until 5 o'clock, then went to the residence of\nCharles S. Deneen, State's Attorney. Arriving at his house and finding\nthat he had not arisen from bed, Wooldridge pulled up a settee which\nhe found on the veranda and placed it in front of his door where it\nwould be impossible for him to get out of his house without first\nawaking Wooldridge.\n\nWooldridge laid down and went fast asleep and was found there when\nState's Attorney Deneen was making his departure next morning for\nhis office. Wooldridge, upon being aroused from his sleep, told Mr.\nDeneen of the raid made and the evidence gathered and showed him some\n10 or 15 telegrams from reputable Board of Trade men who were worth\nover $20,000,000 collectively. The substance of the telegrams was as\nfollows:\n\n     \"Officer Clifton R. Wooldridge: We are informed that you\n     raided George T. Sullivan's bucketshop. You have done your\n     duty and been criticised and assailed for doing it. My name\n     is ---- and my attorneys name is ---- and we are at your\n     service night or day, without any expense to you.\"\n\nMr. Deneen asked Wooldridge how soon he would be ready to present his\nevidence to the Grand Jury. Wooldridge replied that he had two cases\nalready prepared before he made the raid and would be ready in six\nhours with a number of additional cases.\n\nMr. Deneen told Wooldridge to accompany him to his office, which was\ndone. He called Assistant State's Attorneys Albert C. Barnes, F. L.\nBarnett and Howard O. Sprogle and instructed them to assist Wooldridge\nin preparing the cases for the Grand Jury and give him a clean road\njust the minute he was ready. They were further instructed to give him\nall the assistance and advice he should need in the matter.\n\nThe special complaints were drawn, the telegraph wires became busy and\nat 10 o'clock Wooldridge and witnesses went before the Grand Jury and\nGeorge T. Sullivan was indicted for keeping a bucketshop and common\ngaming house.\n\nGeorge T. Sullivan was also active from Saturday until Monday morning.\nHe had prepared writs of replevin and warrants for larceny for\nWooldridge and officers who were with him.\n\nWooldridge was called up over the telephone by Sullivan's friends and\noffered a bribe of $5,000 if he would release and turn over the books,\nletters and records which were seized in the raid, so Sullivan could\nresume business. This offer was refused by Wooldridge and the matter\nreported to the State's Attorney.\n\nSullivan then resorted to sending various friends and powerful\npoliticians for the paraphernalia seized. Still Wooldridge turned a\ndeaf ear to their requests and entreaties.\n\nWooldridge was a very busy man at the County Court Building on Monday.\nBefore the George T. Sullivan bucketshop raid and the indictment\nbefore the Grand Jury, Wooldridge had the case of J. J. Jacobs,\nmanager of the Montana Mining, Loan & Investment Company, which was a\nlottery, on trial before Judge Chetlain.\n\nWhile in the courtroom he was informed by officers that they had a\nwrit of replevin for the goods seized in Sullivan's bucketshop; that\nthey also held warrants for Wooldridge and the officers who were with\nhim, but if he would surrender the goods seized they declared the\nwarrants would not be served and there would be no trouble.\n\nWooldridge called on the State's Attorney and informed him of the\ndemand made upon him. State's Attorney Deneen called the officers in\nhis office and told them that Wooldridge was there in attendance in\nthe court and he would not permit the warrants to be served on him\nuntil after court adjourned. Further, he had instructed Wooldridge not\nto turn over any of the property.\n\nSullivan during the meantime had learned that there was an indictment\nagainst him by the Grand Jury and withdrew the order for serving of\nthe warrants. He was indicted, convicted and paid a $500 fine.\n\nAfter the police had secured the evidence, his books, letters and\nrecords were returned to him. He tried to start up in business again;\nalso to get other parties interested with him who had money, but in\nthis he failed. He was forced to refund $150,000 to his patrons who\nhad advanced money to him to speculate in grain and stock. He expected\nfinancial assistance and hoped to resume business, but nothing\nmaterialized.\n\nThere were thousands of other creditors throughout the country who\nwere not so fortunate in obtaining a settlement. These creditors\ncombined and forced him into bankruptcy.\n\nHe was then cited in the United States Court for violating a federal\ninjunction.\n\nHe quietly folded his tent at night and left Chicago without leaving\nhis address. He was next heard of in England six months later. All\ntraces of him were lost until, in August, 1907, at Pittsburg, Pa., he\nwas arrested for running a bucketshop.\n\nGeorge T. Sullivan, of George T. Sullivan & Co., brokers, with\noffices in the Bijou Building, Pittsburg, and was arraigned before\nMagistrate F. J. Brady at Central Police Station, charged with a\nmisdemeanor and violating a city ordinance.\n\n\nSULLIVAN HAS RECORD.\n\nThe misdemeanor was based on Sullivan's doing business without being\nproperly registered at Harrisburg, and he was charged with violating\na city ordinance for running a brokerage office without taking out a\ncity license. He was held, for court in $1,000 bail on the misdemeanor\ncharge and was fined $25 on the other.\n\nGeorge T. Sullivan, the Napoleon of frenzied finance, cut a large\nfigure in Chicago. From a telegraph operator in the pool rooms and\nbucketshops at a salary of $18 per week, he acquired enough in the\nshort space of two years to own and operate the largest bucketshop in\nthe United States.\n\nHe soared high in the money circles, but at last was brought crashing\nto the earth, a financial wreck. He was convicted of keeping a\nbucketshop and gambling house. He went bankrupt, hounded to death by\nhis creditors, many of whom he had wrecked.\n\nHe was cited to appear in the United States Court for violating an\ninjunction, and warrants had been sworn out by the postal authorities\nfor using the mails to defraud the public.\n\nHe took his freight from Chicago to new fields of pasture. Wine, women\nand high financing brought his downfall.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: DORA McDONALD.]\n\nDORA McDONALD.\n\nMILLION-DOLLAR GAMBLER'S WIFE ARRESTED FOR MURDER.\n\n     Webster Guerin Murdered February 21, 1906--The Arrest\n     of Dora McDonald for the Murder by Detective Clifton R.\n     Wooldridge and J. F. Daugherty a Few Minutes After the\n     Tragedy.\n\n     Spectacular Case--Battle Bitterly Waged.\n\n\nImportant Dates in Mrs. McDonald's Life Tragedy.\n\nImportant dates in the trial of Mrs. Dora McDonald:\n\n     February 21, 1907--Webster Guerin shot to death in room\n     703, Omaha Building, where he was closeted with Mrs. Dora\n     McDonald.\n\n     March 5, 1907--The Coroner's jury returned an open verdict,\n     failing to find Mrs. McDonald responsible for Guerin's\n     death.\n\n     March 30, 1907--Mrs. McDonald released from the County Jail\n     under bonds of $50,000.\n\n     August 9, 1907--Michael McDonald died, reconciled to his\n     first wife through the efforts of the church.\n\n     August 12, 1907--\"Mike\" McDonald's funeral, one of the\n     largest ever known, held.\n\n     January 20, 1908--Mrs. McDonald placed on trial before\n     Judge Brentano.\n\n     January 25, 1908--Jury completed and sworn.\n\n     February 11, 1908--The jury returned a verdict of not\n     guilty.\n\n[Illustration:\n\nJudge Theodore Brentano\nWebster S. Guerin\nAssistant State's Attorneys Edwin S. Day and William A. Rittenhouse\nSam Berkley\nDetective Clifton R. Wooldridge\nCol. James Hamilton Lewis and P. H. O'Donnell\nMichael C. McDonald\nDora McDonald]\n\nThe murder of Webster Guerin occurred on the morning of February 21,\n1906, at his office, room 703 Omaha Building, 134 Van Buren street.\n\nDetectives Clifton R. Wooldridge and J. P. Daugherty were on their\nway to see Guerin about a complaint made against him when they ran\ninto the shooting. They had been there before, but were not able to\nfind the man. Under the name of Fisher, Guerin had another office in\nthe same building. The complaint was from Mrs. G. Boynton, 903 East\nFifty-fifth street, who said she had been forced into buying a picture\nframe through the promise of the managers of the Harrison Art Studio\nthat they would enlarge the picture free of charge.\n\nUpon reaching the building Detectives Wooldridge and Daugherty heard a\npistol shot ring out which sounded as if coming from the upper story\nof the building. Springing into the elevator, they soon reached the\ntop floor, where they were directed to room 703, where a number of the\ntenants of the building had already gathered. Stretched upon the floor\nlay the body of Webster Guerin with the blood oozing from his mouth\nand a bullet wound from a 32-caliber revolver on the left side, just\nabove the heart; the bullet had passed through his lungs and caused a\nhemorrhage; from his mouth came nearly one-half gallon of blood.\n\nWhen Wooldridge and Daugherty reached the side of Guerin he was past\nhuman aid.\n\n\nNO WITNESSES OF KILLING.\n\nThere were no witnesses of the killing of Guerin. He was in his office\nwith Mrs. Dora McDonald. Several persons heard a shot, and a moment\nlater the glass door was broken and the head of Mrs. McDonald came out.\n\nThe condition of the studio, in room 703 of the Omaha Building, shows\nthat a violent quarrel took place between Guerin and Mrs. McDonald.\nMrs. McDonald left her residence shortly after breakfast. She arrived\nat the building about 11:45 o'clock. Guerin expected her, for he told\nhis office boy, Thomas Hanson, who lives at 265 West Ohio street,\nto leave the room and not come back until 1 o'clock. Before the boy\nleft the room Mrs. McDonald entered and the two immediately began\nquarreling, it is said. Guerin shouted to Hanson to leave and nothing\nmore was heard until the shooting at 11:50 o'clock.\n\n[Illustration: Persons and Places Involved in the Killing of Crayon\nArtist Guerin by Mrs. \"Mike\" McDonald.\n\nMRS. M. C. McDONALD\nWEBSTER S. GUERIN\nROOM IN OMAHA BUILDING IN WHICH SHOOTING OCCURRED.\nDETECTIVE WOOLDRIDGE IN CHARGE.\nTHE McDONALD RESIDENCE\n4501 DREXEL BOUL.]\n\nLorenzo Blasi, who lives at 73 West Ohio street, and who is employed\nin room 608 of the same building, heard the shot and the sound of\nbreaking glass. He was in the corridor on the seventh floor. He\nhurried to the scene and on the way heard the glass breaking again and\na woman screaming: \"He shot himself! He shot himself!\"\n\n\nWOMAN CUT BY BROKEN GLASS.\n\nWhen Blasi reached the studio he found Mrs. McDonald with her head\npartly thrust through the broken glass. Her face was bleeding from\ncuts. In her hand she held a revolver. She was trying to break more of\nthe glass with her revolver and escape.\n\nA moment later Eric Allert and Charles B. Williams, who work across\nthe corridor, rushed out to Blasi's aid.\n\nMrs. McDonald was pulled through the door and the revolver was\nsecured. In the office, men found Guerin lying dead in the room\nleading off from the main part of the office.\n\nA torn picture and some hatpins were on the floor. There were finger\nmarks on her throat.\n\nWhen Dora McDonald recovered consciousness she shrieked: \"Oh, God! Get\na doctor; he has shot himself.\"\n\nWhere the revolver may have been at that time it was difficult to say.\nSeveral witnesses said that it was lying at the right side of Guerin,\nwho was dying. Others said that the woman held it in her hand, waving\nit above her head as she screamed out: \"He has shot himself.\"\n\nWho this strong, handsomely garbed woman was who had either witnessed\na suicide, committed a murder or participated in an accident no one\nknew, but she was hurried off to the police station by Detective\nWooldridge.\n\n\"Daddy, oh, daddy, forgive me!\" she kept screaming out. She was\nrecognized, however, and it was found that \"Daddy\" could be none other\nthan the big gambler and political boss, Mike McDonald. So they sent\nfor Mike, and he gathered into his arms the woman who in that moment\nbroke his heart and sent him to his grave in sorrow.\n\nAn inquest was begun before Coroner Peter J. Hoffman in the Harrison\nStreet Station on March 1, 1906. After five days an open verdict was\nreturned, in which the jurors declared themselves unable to determine\nthe cause of the death of Guerin.\n\nThe Coroner's jury consisted of the following named persons:\n\nJoseph Willis, 43 Cass street; Frank O. Borhyar, 6142 Madison avenue;\nWilliam Merker, 263 Seminary avenue; William C. Hollens, 6418 Rhodes\navenue; David A. Smith, 3843 California avenue; George F. Cram, 4166\nDrexel boulevard.\n\nOn March 16, Municipal Judge Newcomer went to the jail hospital, where\nDora McDonald, still in bed, was formally arraigned and held on a\ncharge of murder. Two weeks later she was indicted by the Grand Jury.\n\nAll of the evidence so gathered was embodied in the report of the\nCoroner, and the names of the witnesses were thereto attached, all of\nwhich were made public at the time. The State and the defense secured\na copy of the same.\n\n\nMYSTERY TOO MUCH FOR CORONER.\n\nAll the additional evidence and the preparation of the case was made\nby the State's attorneys, William H. Rittenhouse. Edwin S. Day, Frank\nComerford, City Police Attorney, and other officers. All the names of\nnew witnesses (some twelve or fifteen in number) and the evidence were\nconcealed from Detective Wooldridge, and at no time was he present, or\ndid he hear to what the witnesses would testify. Therefore, he had no\nknowledge of any new facts when the case was called for trial.\n\nThe mystery of Guerin's death proved too much for a Coroner's jury.\nMore than two weeks after the artist was slain the Coroner's panel\nreturned an open verdict. It merely found that Guerin had died from a\nbullet wound in a manner which the jury was unable to determine. This\nsame verdict Colonel Lewis sought to introduce at the trial in Judge\nBrentano's court. Such a move was new in criminal annals, and it was\nsome time before the court decided that it should be ruled out.\n\nMrs. McDonald was meantime transferred to the County Jail from the\nHarrison Street Station. She was broken in health and a confirmed\ninvalid. Two persons, however, were faithful to her, Mike McDonald and\nMiss Amanda Beck, her nurse.\n\n\nFRIENDS GET BUSY QUICKLY.\n\nA few hours after the tragedy of Webster Guerin all the influences\nand machinery at the command of Mike McDonald were brought to bear\nto save the life of Dora McDonald. A. S. Trude, one of the greatest\ncriminal attorneys in Chicago, was employed, besides several other\nnoted lawyers, to defend Dora McDonald. Mike McDonald's political\nfriends soon became active. Everything was done to gather evidence in\nDora McDonald's case, and everything was done that could be done to\nsuppress any evidence that was injurious to her.\n\nThere was one witness who was greatly feared, and that was Detective\nClifton R. Wooldridge, who made the arrest.\n\nSeveral days after the shooting A. S. Trude, Mike McDonald's attorney,\nmet Wooldridge in the Criminal Court and shook hands with him. He said\nthat he was very glad that Wooldridge was interested in the case for\none reason, for he knew he would get a square deal. He also stated\nthat there was another reason why he was sorry that Wooldridge was in\nthe case, because he had too many eyes and too many feet to be on the\nopposite side of any case in which he (Trude) was interested. This\nview was shared by Mike McDonald and his friends, who became active to\nget Wooldridge out of the way.\n\nMike McDonald first paid a visit to John M. Collins, then General\nSuperintendent of Police, and one of his warm personal friends, and\nFrank Comerford, City Police Attorney. What occurred in that office\nwill never be known, unless Collins chooses to make a statement, as\nMcDonald has since died.\n\nDetective Wooldridge was called to the office of John M. Collins,\nGeneral Superintendent of Police, and told not to talk to any\nnewspaper men or anyone else about the McDonald case. He was further\ntold not to make himself too officious, and not to be too active in\nthe case.\n\nSeveral days later he was again called to Chief Collins' office and\ntold that Frank Comerford, then acting as City Police Attorney, and\na warm friend of Mike McDonald's, was to take charge of the case, so\nthat he need not bother himself further with the matter.\n\nMr. Comerford became very active, securing the names of all the\nwitnesses and all evidence to which they would testify, together with\nother facts. All this matter eventually found its way into the hands\nof the defense long before the trial.\n\nMike McDonald and his friends thought that Wooldridge would become\nactive again in the case. Therefore Mike proceeded to get busy\nhimself. No one seems to know the ins and outs of the case, but\nit is nevertheless a fact that soon after the election of April,\n1907, Wooldridge was transferred from the office of the General\nSuperintendent of Police, where he had served since 1889, to the\nCottage Grove Avenue Station. No reason was assigned for this transfer.\n\n\nGUERIN'S LIFE STORY.\n\nWebster Guerin, who lived at 655 West Harrison street, was well known\non the West Side, where he was born thirty years ago. He kept a\nhaberdashery on West Madison street a few years before the murder, but\nleft it to go to California. On his return he went into the picture\nbusiness. Guerin was a tall, splendid-looking fellow more than six\nfeet in height.\n\nGuerin was known at the offices in the Omaha Building as Louis\nFisher, and it was under that name that he operated the Harrison Art\nCompany.\n\n\nDORA MCDONALD DIVORCED WIFE OF \"SAM\" BARCLAY.\n\nDora McDonald, 35 years old, was the divorced wife of \"Sam\" Barclay, a\nformer professional ball player and Chicago saloonkeeper. They had one\nson, Harold Barclay, who was later legally adopted by \"Mike\" McDonald,\nand who was at school in Florida at the time of the murder. He was 15\nyears old.\n\nShe had separated from Barclay shortly prior to her divorce and had\nbeen on the stage for a short time under the name of Mme. Alberta. She\nwas married to Mike McDonald a week after her divorce and was taken by\nhim to his home at Harrison street and Ashland avenue.\n\n\nBEAUTY OF WEST SIDE.\n\nDora McDonald was one of the beauties of the West Side in her day, and\nmany admirers hovered about her threshold. The lights of the midnight\nhours charmed her then, and she dashed off to marry Sam Barclay, a\nprofessional baseball player.\n\nInto that home came Michael Cassius McDonald. He was a gambler and a\npolitician and a man of great wealth.\n\nFor the second time his wife had left him; run away, people said, with\na man who had been a guest at their home.\n\nMike was lonesome. He saw the bride of Sam Barclay and loved her. He\ndined with her, and perhaps he paid for her divorce trial. At least\nshe separated from Barclay and when Mike went a-wooing again he won\nthis pretty woman.\n\nIn a west side home of some pretensions Mike established his new wife.\nHe thought so much of her that he sent his sons away when she could\nnot agree with them. He gave her money and finery and servants and\ncarriages, and thought that she ought to be happy.\n\n\nBOY OF 14 ENTERS.\n\nWebster Guerin lived across the street. He was a boy of attractive\nmanners and he won the affection of Dora McDonald.\n\nSlander gives one reason for that affection; the woman gives another.\n\n\nSTOLE HIM AS A BOY, SLEW HIM AS A MAN, SAYS ARCHIE GUERIN.\n\nArchie Guerin, Webster Guerin's brother, told how Mrs. Dora McDonald\nhad taken a violent fancy to Webster when he was a boy of 14, and\nArchie 13, or thereabouts; how she would meet them on their way home\nfrom school and whisk Webster into the mansion, keeping him two,\nthree or four hours; how she used to waylay Webster on his way home\nfrom church; how she followed him through the years until she got\nthe notion that he was falling in love with Avis Dargan; how she put\ndetectives on the boy's trail and sat for hours in a cab opposite the\nOmaha Building to see whether Miss Dargan entered; how she threatened\nto shoot him; how she would break out into wild and vehement\ndeclarations of her love, wailing that she \"worshiped every hair of\nhis head,\" and that she would kill him before she would lose him.\n\nHow she came into the studio on the day Webster was shot, asserting\nthat she had \"told that old slob everything\" (meaning her husband),\nand said she was going to New York; how Webster had replied that he\nwas \"through with her,\" to which she retorted, \"I am not through\nwith you; do you think I would kill myself without first putting a\nbullet into your head?\" How Mrs. McDonald had requested him to leave\nthe studio, and how he had refused to do so until Webster joined his\nrequest to hers; how Archie and the two boys employed in the studio\nhad gone away and left them to act out the tragedy by themselves\nbehind doors that were closed and locked; how Archie had gone to\nthe Windsor Clifton Hotel to meet Harry Feldman, with whom he had a\nbusiness appointment; how Feldman had become alarmed when he heard\nthat Mrs. McDonald and Webster were alone in the studio, urging\nArchie to call Webster on the telephone; how he and Archie stepped\nto the 'phone, called up the studio, and after a gruff \"hello\" from\na policeman got back the staggering news: \"Your brother has been\nmurdered.\"\n\n\nMIKE MCDONALD DELUDED BY WIFE.\n\n\"Mike\" seemingly was deluded. He may have had suspicions of his wife,\nbut his suspicions seem to have been quieted by the woman.\n\nEven when Guerin followed her to California she dared to wire Mike:\n\"Web Guerin is coming; fear I shall be compromised; shall I come back?\"\n\nIt was such a frank admission that the gambler urged her to have\nmettle. \"Stick,\" he sent back word. \"Don't let anyone bluff you.\"\n\nThings went on this way until the morning of February 21, 1906. Then\nsomething happened, the climax occurred and Guerin was shot.\n\n\nPROVIDES FOR THE DEFENSE.\n\nAfter the arrest of his wife, \"Mike\" McDonald announced that he\nbelieved in her integrity and declared he would spend every cent of\nhis fortune to save her. The former gambling dictator was almost 70\nyears old and his health was failing rapidly. Four months after the\nevent he was taken to the St. Anthony de Padua Hospital, where he\nremained until his death, August 9, 1907.\n\nMcDonald was still passing to his death when there crept into his room\na little, white-haired woman who had come from Newark, N. J. There\nshe was known as Mrs. Grashoff and a great charity worker, especially\nin the interest of fallen girls in the Crittenden homes. Years before\nMike McDonald had called her his first wife.\n\n\nDRAMATIC MEETING OF MCDONALD AND FIRST WIFE.\n\nBy the laws of the church she was still his wife, no matter what the\nyears had brought forth. So Mike took her hand and held it and spoke\nsoftly to her in a breath of full forgiveness and passed away. Without\nthe door sat the woman whom he had called his wife--Dora, whom he had\nwon from a husband and to whom he had been faithful until he stepped\nto the brink of his grave.\n\nThis was the last straw that crushed the spirit of Dora McDonald.\n\nThe body of Webster Guerin was removed to McNally & Duffy's\nundertaking rooms at 516 Wabash avenue.\n\nDetective Wooldridge took up the work of gathering the evidence and\nprepared the case for the Coroner and Grand Jury.\n\nThe Grand Jury indictment placed Dora McDonald seemingly beyond the\npale of bail, but Mike worked assiduously and finally secured her\nrelease from prison on $50,000 bonds. Then Mike became ill and died in\nSt. Anthony's Hospital.\n\nBefore he gave way to his broken heart McDonald drew up a will. He\nset aside a defense fund with which the woman might be given adequate\nchance for freedom in the court, and left her \"such rights and only\nsuch rights as she may be entitled to as widow.\"\n\n\nTRIAL BEGINS.\n\nMrs. McDonald was put on trial January 20. The jury was completed\nJanuary 25 and the taking of testimony began at once. The case of\nthe State was made as complete as possible and the defense began\nan exhaustive array of testimony. The defense, however, came to a\nsurprisingly sudden end. It had been feared that Mrs. McDonald might\nnot live through the trial and there was every desire to have a\nverdict before she might give way to heart trouble.\n\nThe case was heard before Judge Theodore Brentano, and it lasted\ntwenty-one days.\n\nDora McDonald was represented by Colonel James Hamilton Lewis, Chief\nAssistant Patrick H. O'Donnell, Attorneys Benjamin M. Shaffner, Frank\nR. Cain, Gabriel Norden, Clarence Shaffner and Forest G. Smith.\n\n[Illustration: LOVE TRAGEDY JURY\n\nHARRY CORCORAN.\nJOSEPH KOEHLY.\nARNE PETERSON.\nCHARLES R. JOHNSON.\nHERBERT R. GARN.\nCHARLES M'GRATH.\nHUGH H. FULTON.\nGEORGE W. MILLER.\nROLAND F. GRAHAM.\nJAMES J. NOONAN.\nOTTO H. NELSON.\nJOHN C. ANDERSON.\n]\n\nThe State was represented by Assistant State's Attorneys William A.\nRittenhouse and Edward S. Day.\n\n\nNAMES OF THE JURY.\n\nHarry Corcoran, Joseph Koehy, Arne Peterson, Hugh H. Fulton, George W.\nMiller, Roland F. Graham, James J. Noonan, Otto H. Nelson, Charles R.\nJohnson, Herbert R. Garn, Charles McGrath, John C. Anderson.\n\n\nPACKED COURTROOM.\n\nWith the courtroom packed to the doors and several hundred men\nand women struggling to gain admission, the actual trial of Mrs.\nDora McDonald, widow of Mike McDonald, commenced. Assistant State's\nAttorney Edward S. Day made an opening statement of the case.\nTrembling and his eyes flashing, he pointed a finger at Mrs. Dora\nMcDonald and in a ringing voice denounced her as the murderess of\nGuerin.\n\n\"Dora McDonald became acquainted with Guerin, who was about 14 years\nold. His parents lived a short distance from the McDonald home.\n\n\"A friendship between Mrs. McDonald and the boy began, which his\nmother and other relatives later tried to end. Three years later the\nMcDonalds removed to the Drexel boulevard home, but the intimacy of\nWebster Guerin and Mrs. McDonald continued.\n\n\"At any event, as time passed on, dealing meantime gently with the\nwoman and developing Web into a young man of more than six feet in\nheight, the two were seen frequently together. Relatives of both\ntestified that the two kissed each other; that at times Mrs. McDonald\ngrew jealous, in all apparent intent, over him; that she wrote poems\nand set them to music to show what seemed to be the very depths of a\ndespairing heart.\n\n\"The woman was insanely jealous over him.\" \"He had wandered out from\nher love into the light of other women's eyes. Driven to distraction\nby the thought that the boy she had taught to love had grown up to\nlove another, she murdered him.\"\n\n\"No,\" said the defense. \"This woman was the victim of blackmail. First\nshe had been hounded until she gave way to the big youth, and then\nshe had paid him money from her hoard in the hope that she might free\nherself of him.\"\n\nTestimony on the blackmail point was clouded by the maze of\nrecrimination, but the State could not deny that Mrs. McDonald had on\nseveral occasions given the young man money with which to leave the\ncity, but that each time he had returned \"broke\" within a few days.\n\nMr. Day's denunciation of Mrs. Dora McDonald was bitter, but the\ndefendant appeared to take no notice of what the lawyer was saying.\n\nDora McDonald sat quietly as if in a trance; the bitterness of\nfailure, the weariness of defeat, was expressed in every flutter of\nher purple-shadowed eyelids as she came before the bar to answer for\nthe murder of Webster Guerin, January 20, 1907.\n\nDora McDonald presented a pathetic appearance before the jury.\n\nShe was dressed all in black. Not a single bit of lace or white\nrelieved the somber effect of her funereal widow's garb. In arranging\nher hair Mrs. McDonald exhibited a novel idea. The long, deep-auburn\nstrands were braided into one plait and this was wound over her\ntemples in a single coil and fastened with coral pins.\n\nIn its unaffected artlessness Mrs. McDonald's entry into the courtroom\nand her removal of her hat as she sank into her chair was an act of\nalmost girlish grace. Her long black cloak, satin lined, was thrown\ncarelessly on a chair.\n\nWhen she had removed her hat and cloak she looked squarely into the\nfaces of the jury.\n\n\nDRAMATIC SCENE IN COURTROOM.\n\nThe face that was turned piteously toward the jury was deeply lined\nwith the furrows of physical and mental suffering.\n\nThe eyes drooped constantly, and there were times when she closed them\nfor a full minute.\n\nEvery movement of the lips or eyelids, every arrangement of dress and\ncostume, was either studiously planned or pathetically dramatic.\n\nThe weariness and bitterness were marked in the droop of her mouth,\nin the perplexed wrinkling of her forehead, in the stoop of her\nshoulders, in the relaxation of her hands, lying heavily on the table\nbefore her.\n\nA long, long line of battles she has behind her, with her good name\ntorn to shreds in the fight; and nobody can guess at the scars and\nopen wounds in her soul. No matter how great may have been her fault,\nhow untrammeled her impulses and wishes, how wild and defiant her\nspirit toward the law and society, now she is a tired, broken woman,\nwho has lost the day.\n\n\nBLOOM GONE FROM CHEEK.\n\nThere are many who say that the beauty of which Dora McDonald was\nonce so proud has departed entirely. The eyes were heavy, the skin no\nlonger showed the pink of health, but was a dead white, her figure had\nfallen away until she was almost emaciated, but there was a beauty in\nher sadness and despair that the triumphant woman never possessed.\n\nShe seldom looked at the veniremen, nor did she appear to be following\nthe questions put to them. Occasionally she glanced at a possible\njuror as he stepped up to be sworn, but for the most part she sat with\nher head resting on her hand, or looking ahead at some mental vision.\nIs it the face of young Webster Guerin she sees, as he lay dead, or\nthe face of old \"Mike\" McDonald as he smoothed her hair and loaded her\nwith caresses? Is it remorse for a crime, or longing and grief for a\ndead admirer? Or is it despair for a wasted life, a hopeless future, a\nthousand lost opportunities?\n\n\nNO MADNESS IN HER EYES.\n\nIf the defense expected to utilize the plea of insanity it would have\nhad some difficulty in inducing a jury to believe that Mrs. McDonald\nwas greatly deranged. There was no gleam of madness in her eyes. They\nwere dark-circled and languid, but not at all staring or strange. She\nseemed unusually self-poised and collected.\n\nWithout any artifices of dress or cosmetics, without any gleam of\ngaiety or vivacity, it was not impossible to understand why this woman\nwielded the great influence in the lives of three men that she did. In\nthe first place, her features were regular and fine. Her eyebrows were\ndelicately penciled and her eyes large and dark.\n\n\nTRACES OF SIREN LEFT.\n\nThe contour of her cheeks was soft and round. But one can imagine,\nin happier days, that there was a captivating play of expression, an\nesprit, a beaut\u00e9 de diable, that would be particularly fascinating\nto a man like old \"Mike\" McDonald. And upon such a woman would the\nself-made man, the gambler, uncultivated and rough, fast approaching\nold age, delight to heap luxury and adoration, as there is no doubt\n\"Mike\" McDonald did.\n\nAnd is it not easy to imagine that such a woman would have a powerful\nattraction for a young man, with her sophistication and experience\nmatched against his ignorance? And now one of the men is dead of a\nbroken heart, and the other struck down in the very first flush of his\nyouth, and the instrument of pleasure and destruction stands at the\nend of a shattered life.\n\nUntil a jury should decide, in so far as human fallibility may decide,\njust whether or how Dora McDonald shot down Webster Guerin, that\nvictim of tangled love and jealousy, a waiting city hung expectant on\nevery incident bared since the day that the artist toppled before a\npistol ball in his studio with a woman of furs and furbelows standing\nsobbing above him.\n\n\nA \"SAPPHO\" AND \"SALOME.\"\n\nA \"Sappho\" in a grimy city she was called because her heart was\ntouched by the strength of youth; a \"Salome\" because she planted a\nkiss on his dying lips, but whether she was victim or vampire, sinner\nor sinned against, was solely for the jury to say.\n\nCries of blackmail, of bribery, of frenzied jealousy, of shameless\nlove and daring intrigue, rang around the courtroom for the long days\nof the trial, but for the jury it was only to look behind the locked\ndoor of the artist's studio and see whether the revolver with which\nGuerin was shot down was held by the woman or the young man; whether\nthere was malice or accident or self-destruction, and what the motive\nfor either might be.\n\nThe shot that sounded his death was the climax to an\nattachment--guilty or not, as the case might be--that began when Dora\nMcDonald was a wonderfully beautiful and younger woman, the wife of a\nwealthy gambler, and the lady of a mansion, and Webster Guerin was a\nmere lad, just old enough to doff short trousers for manly attire.\n\nAffection, money and attention were lavished on the young man by this\nwoman. At banquet board and in the theater box they passed their hours\ntogether. Of this there was no dispute. The sole question was whether\nthe woman gave way to the lure of a boy, or whether the boy was\nimportuned by the woman; whether in after years that boy blackmailed\nthat same woman, or whether she loved him to a distraction that\nbrought the madness of jealousy and the revolver.\n\nAnd what of the love attachment? the police wondered. But as they\ndelved a little they unearthed strange and tender things, but nothing\nmore strange than poems written by the woman and apparently dedicated\nto the youth.\n\nThe tragedy of a soul was bared when Assistant State's Attorney Day\nread to the jury poems of passion found in the reticule taken from\nMrs. McDonald on her arrest.\n\nThe State regarded the declarations contained in the verse as\ndisclosing a dual motive of murder and suicide, and introduced them as\ncircumstantial evidence. One entitled \"Mistakes\" was written on the\nday of the Guerin love tragedy.\n\nHere is the first one read:\n\nTRAGEDY OF A SOUL IN POEMS OF PASSION BY DORA MCDONALD.\n\n    Put the word \"finish\" down by my name:\n    I played for high stakes, but I lost the game;\n    I played for life, for honor and love:\n    Well, I am not the first mortal who has lost all.\n    I have made up my mind to care not a bit;\n    Let honor and love sink to the bottomless pit.\n    Pull down the curtains, bring in the lights,\n    Put from my memory horrible sights\n    Of treachery where there should have been love,\n    Of red blood where should have been whiteness of dove;\n    The past, the present and the future are done:\n    How different, O God! had it been had I won.\n\nWRITTEN AS TRAGEDY APPROACHED.\n\n    We are drifting apart,\n    Though from no change of heart:\n    But we cannot agree,\n    And the end we can see,\n    So the bonds of our love we will sever;\n    And I wonder if we\n    Will, alas! too late see\n    That our happiness lay in each other.\n    For when soul finds its mate\n    It is often too late\n    To struggle and fight against conquering fate.\n    And what does it mean?\n    This parting, I ween;\n    I'll leave you, but, well.\n    Neither heaven nor hell\n    Will make me forget you.\n    Nor save you should I find\n    Another holds the place that was and is mine.\n\nPOEM WRITTEN ON DATE OF THE GUERIN TRAGEDY.\n\nThis poem, entitled \"Mistakes,\" is dated February 21, 1907. 11:20 a.\nm.:\n\n    Said he: \"Where is my sin?\n    I'm only as men have ever been.\n    I'm not so bad, I'm not so good,\n    And I'd be as you'd have me if only I could.\n    But you are strong and good and brave.\n    Surely for me a road you can pave,\n    A road which shall be my happiness, my very soul save.\n    After all, it's for you and you only that I crave.\"\n    She waited a moment, then came her reply:\n    \"To the old adage, that women are weak, you can give the lie.\n    Not only you, others as well,\n    All through life have the same tale to tell.\n    I didn't mean to do it--I didn't, I swear,\n    But you can forgive me; your loss I cannot bear.\n    Can I forgive you? Well, that's not so clear,\n    Though you certainly were to me very dear.\n    I think, after all, now that I am awake.\n    I think it was I who made the mistake.\n    I thought of you ever as a flower rare.\n    With whom other flowers could not even compare.\n    Alack and alas! I find, after all,\n    You are only a sunflower, of which there are many,\n    Who take all the elements have to give\n    And give nothing that creates or causes happiness to live.\"\n\n\"KILL ME IF YOU WILL,\" SHE SAYS IN A VERSE.\n\nAnother of Mrs. McDonald's poems, written on the day of the killing,\nis as follows:\n\n    Kill me if you will, for all is well.\n    I know that to Satan your soul you can't sell,\n    And I've saved you from everlasting hell.\n    I had lifted you up, when, lo! I found\n    Slowly but surely you were dragging me down.\n    Out of space thus came a warning\n    Soft and clear as the breath of the morning.\n\nPEARLS BEFORE SWINE.\n\n    Have you learned the old saying of pearls before swine?\n    I gave every pearl that ever was mine.\n    I've nothing more to give.\n    And it's hardly worth while for me to live.\n    More blessed to give than receive, they say.\n    I followed that teaching in my poor way.\n    I wanted returns, I'll have to confess,\n    And I had to be cool, and firm and brave,\n    For I knew 'twas my duty your soul to save.\n    And I've set your feet on the path of right,\n    And from now till the end you shall see but the light\n    And turn from it to pitfalls and terrors of night.\n    Turn to the right, to the wrong you may sway.\n    From black imps' vile rottenness I've snatched you away,\n    And though I fall slain at your feet with a moan,\n    I care not, for evil from you has flown;\n    And, by all the glory of God above,\n    I've proven the strength of a weak woman's love,\n    And I thought my pearls would bring love that was blessed.\n    I did so want love that was loyal;\n    'Twas more to me than a diadem royal.\n    But I found too late that I was wrong,\n    That love but existed in hopes and in song.\n    What became of those pearls of mine?\n    Oh, nothing! I just threw my pearls to the swine.\n\nANOTHER POEM OF PASSION.\n\n    I waged a battle fierce and long,\n    I fought to know the right from wrong.\n    Did I succeed? I cannot tell,\n    Yet when I met sin I knew full well\n    That fight's not over. 'Tis scarcely begun,\n    And I struggle again to win, one by one,\n    Steps on the ladder that mounts to great deeds,\n    Where the path to the right unfailingly leads.\n    As I gazed at the battlefield, flooded with gore,\n    Where the path to the right unfailingly bore,\n    I knew that the wounds came from contact with sin.\n    'Twas demons let loose that float in the air;\n    But the fight's worth the while, for when\n    Misery and heartaches shall all pass away\n    Right has full sway.\n\nThe reading of the poems was followed intently by the big crowd in\nJudge Brentano's courtroom. Mrs. McDonald appeared uninterested.\n\nFrom poetry the step was easy into song. Accomplished and educated as\nDora McDonald was, with time hanging, sometimes, heavy on her hands,\nwhat more natural than that she should set her verses to music of her\nown composing?\n\nNEVER AGAIN.\n\n(Song written, composed and published by Mrs. Michael C. McDonald.)\n\n'Twas only a story of a woman's love, a tale that has often been told.\nShe gave a love that knew no bounds; the rest of the story is old.\nAgain he had strayed, and this time had made a mistake she could never\n   forget;\nIn a voice that was dense with a grief intense she mournfully did say:\n\n    I gave you sweetest love, you gave me naught but pain;\n    Oh, I forgave you more than once but to be hurt again.\n    This time it means the end, for I could never forget.\n    I shall never see you again, although I love you yet.\n\nWith tears in his eyes the man replied: \"I know that I have gone astray;\nRemorse will last till life is passed; forgive me, don't send me away.\nOh, let me atone, live for you alone; just once more have pity on me.\"\nBut, bowing her head, with its look of one dead, she softly but firmly\n   said:\n\n      I gave you sweetest love, etc.\n\nThe mother of the woman, an aged orthodox Hebrew, never went near Dora\nMcDonald until the trial was nearly done, though that same old woman\nbent her knees as she day and night raised her voice to Jehovah in\nlamentations.\n\nIll health, mental and physical, followed. All the sorrows of a\nshattered life befell her.\n\n\nSOUGHT VINDICATION TO SPARE HER AGED MOTHER.\n\nFor Dora McDonald, life had been lived when Guerin died. It mattered\nnot after that whether she went to the gallows or to freedom. But for\none reason she would not have cared a whit whether her case was fought\nbefore a jury or not. The one reason was vindication that her mother\nmight be spared something of shame.\n\nThe vindication, however, was sought at a costly price--the price of a\nlife and heart and love bared to a gaping world. It was an expensive\neffort to wash off the stain of an indictment.\n\nAt the trial Assistant State's Attorneys Edward S. Day and William\nH. Rittenhouse wrangled with their own witnesses and tried one after\nanother to have them testify to things they never saw or heard.\n\nThey attacked Inspector John Wheeler, Officer J. G. S. Peterson,\nThomas F. McFarland, Detective Wooldridge, Police Matron Elizabeth\nBelmont, Charles Freudenberg, an old soldier 60 years old, and\nthreatened him with an indictment; Louis Jacobs, Lorenzo Blasi, Herman\nHanson and Charles B. Williams.\n\nAll of those accused except Detective Wooldridge considered the\nfulminations of Attorneys Day and Rittenhouse a good joke. They\nregarded them as the vaporings of temporarily disordered intellects,\nminds that had become rattled by a case which was too big for them.\n\nOwing, however, to the peculiar position in which he was placed as the\nofficer who made the arrest, Wooldridge was forced to take cognizance\nof the matter.\n\nWooldridge denied the statements made against him and branded them as\nmalicious lies manufactured out of whole cloth. He asked for a hearing\nbefore the Civil Service Board, which was granted to him after the\ntrial was over.\n\nIt was fully shown at the investigation how Wooldridge had been\ntreated in the matter, and the motive for his transfer; it was also\nshown that he knew no new facts, neither did he meet or know any\nwitnesses except those who had testified to the Coroner and Grand Jury.\n\nThe motives for his transfer and the reports were fully uncovered and\nexposed.\n\nDetective Wooldridge was exonerated by the entire Board of Civil\nService Commissioners.\n\nDay and Rittenhouse simply sewed up the case in criminations and\nrecriminations.\n\nAssistant State's Attorneys Day and Rittenhouse were outgeneraled,\noutclassed and whipped, and wanted to throw the blame for the\nacquittal of Dora McDonald on the Police Department and failed. They\ndid everything but try the case.\n\n\nSTRONG DEFENSE BY LEWIS.\n\nColonel Lewis said that the State had not denied that the revolver\nwith which Guerin was shot was his own. He called for the weapon and\nshowed the jury how Guerin might have shot himself if Mrs. McDonald,\nin her struggle with him, had merely pushed the revolver around in the\npalm of his hand.\n\nAgain he called for the blood-stained coat that Guerin wore when he\nwas killed. It was too good an opportunity to be overlooked by the\nfine dramatic eye of the Colonel.\n\n\"You remember the speech of Mark Anthony,\" he said; \"how he produced a\ntremendous effect with the robe of the great C\u00e6sar? I will not ask for\nmore than the robe that this C\u00e6sar wore.\"\n\nThereupon he spread out the grewsome relic on the railing on the jury\nbox to show what he said were powder marks. In his mind, there was no\ndoubt about how the tragedy worked out. Guerin, enraged and terrified\nwhen Mrs. McDonald told him that she had told her rich and influential\nhusband everything, attacked her. He got the revolver out of his\ndrawer, probably to frighten her. Mrs. McDonald, half choked, saw it\ngleam and pushed it away from her.\n\n\nSTRIKES HARD AT ARCHIE GUERIN.\n\nMore striking than the beautiful imageries and the wealth of quotation\nfrom ancient and modern authors with which the Colonel embellished\nhis speech was his strong play upon \"that fifteen minutes,\" which,\naccording to his interpretation of the evidence, elapsed between the\ntime the boys in Guerin's studio were ejected and the time when Archie\ncame out, leaving his brother and Mrs. McDonald alone, behind locked\ndoors.\n\n\"There need be nothing else in this case for you,\" exclaimed the\nspeaker, \"than this fifteen minutes unaccounted for. Archie Guerin\nknew what was going on there, and before God he should tell, but\nhe did not. He hurried away and cleared the corridors. Nervous and\nconfused, he hunted up Harry Feldman in the Windsor-Clifton Hotel, so\nthat if anything happened, he could say:\n\n\"'I didn't do it. You know I didn't, Feldman. I was right here with\nyou.'\"\n\n\nO'DONNELL MOVES TO TEARS.\n\nThere were wet eyes in the courtroom as the real Dora McDonald\nwas brought to life in the closing address of Mr. O'Donnell. The\nbickerings and the charges and the abuse that had made the courtroom\nlike a pothouse brawl all day were forgotten. The woman's black clad\nfigure and her white, despairing face became the living picture of the\nworld-old tragedy of the judgment and the problem of pardon.\n\n\"The tragedy was in that room,\" said Mr. O'Donnell, pointing to a plat\nof room 703 of the Omaha building, \"and no one knows how the life of\nGuerin was ended.\n\n\"I am not going to place a wreath upon the brow of this woman. She is\nnot all that a man would wish his wife to be. She has traveled the\ndevious pathways and her eyes have fallen upon the shifting scenes of\nlife.\n\n\"The Sabbath is coming on. Her ancestral people lit the candles at\nsundown last night. Somewhere in this city a light is burning where a\nJewish mother is praying and hoping for her erring daughter. You are\napproaching the moment when you must do your great duty. You are here\nonly to say whether she killed Guerin with a criminal intent in her\nheart.\n\n\nQUOTES THE GOSPEL.\n\n\"A daughter of Israel coming to judgment. She may have been wayward,\nbut we are not here to judge her past life. In a temple of Jerusalem\nmany years ago the Saviour of us all stood before the multitude and\nthey brought him a woman and said:\n\n\"'She has been taken in sin and she must die.' And he said:\n\n\"'Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.' And they\nwalked away and left him with the woman. Then the Master said to the\nwoman:\n\n\"'Go and sin no more.'\n\n\"Let us pass judgment upon this woman as the Son of Man passed it upon\nthe woman of old that we may expect mercy when we stand at last where\nthe fallen woman of Jerusalem stood.\"\n\nMr. O'Donnell created a scene of profound dramatic features when he\nbased his contention that Guerin blackmailed Mrs. McDonald upon a\nletter written by Guerin. He called the ghost of Guerin to take the\nwitness stand and testify against the state's attorneys.\n\n\nACQUITTAL CREATES THRILLING SCENES.\n\nThese were the scenes which attended the rendition of the Dora\nMcDonald verdict:\n\n\"Bring in the jury,\" said Judge Brentano, as he dropped into the big\nleather-upholstered chair behind the bench.\n\nBradley was waiting for the word at the door to the Judge's right.\nLooking very solemn and sphinx-like, the twelve men filed in and took\ntheir usual places.\n\nAt the same time Mrs. McDonald came through the corridor from the\ncustodian's room, accompanied by her nurse, Miss A. K. Beck. Miss Beck\nwas trembling, but there was not a tremor in Mrs. McDonald's hands or\na movement of the facial muscles to indicate that she felt the least\nexcitement.\n\nAttorney Norden pulled out her armchair for her and pushed it under\nher again as she sat down. Every man in the courtroom felt a choke in\nhis throat, but if Mrs. McDonald felt it she gave no evidence of it.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" said the judge, turning toward the jury, \"have you agreed\nupon a verdict?\"\n\nAt first there was no answer, and the judge had to repeat the\nquestion. That interval was like a lapse of a week or a month.\n\nMrs. McDonald, who had not been asked to rise, sat facing the jury and\nlooking straight at them. She considered it only polite to keep awake\nand to forego those beloved \"dreams\" of hers in honor of the verdict,\nwhatever it might be.\n\n\nSUSPENSE FRIGHTFUL.\n\n\"Have you agreed upon a verdict?\" repeated Judge Brentano, a little\nimpatiently.\n\n\"We have,\" replied the foreman, Hugh H. Fulton, rising and displaying\na paper which he held in his right hand.\n\n\"Let the Clerk of the Court read it.\"\n\nA. J. Harris, the Clerk, was already in front of the railing to\nreceive the paper. He took it to his desk, and holding it under an\nincandescent lamp, for the courtroom was dark, he read, in a loud\nvoice:\n\n\"We, the jury, find the defendant, Dora McDonald, not guilty.\"\n\nIt was as though you had touched a match to a pile of gunpowder. The\npeople in the courtroom seemed to explode. They did not cheer, or\napplaud, or shout, and yet they appeared to be doing all of them. The\ntension was broken and a sort of bubbling effervescence took its place.\n\n\nMCDONALD JURORS TELL OF THE VERDICT.\n\n\"The jury found Mrs. McDonald innocent because they could not feel\nsure that she did not act in self-defense, and, following the\ninstructions of the court, gave her the benefit of the doubt.\"\n\nThis was the opinion voiced by Juror Charles McGrath. Mr. McGrath said\nthat the jury presumed the defendant sane, and that the matter of\npossible insanity was not considered at any time.\n\n\"I think that the jury attached a great deal of importance to the\ntestimony of Dr. McNamara,\" continued Mr. McGrath.\n\n\"He was the only physician that had made a thorough physical\nexamination of the defendant subsequent to Guerin's death. We\nespecially paid a great deal of attention to that portion of his\ntestimony that told of the marks found on Mrs. McDonald's neck,\nindicating that she had been choked. This evidence, taken with that\nrelative to the finding of the hairpins on the floor, showed that\nthere had been a struggle, and the court had instructed us that if we\nfound that there had been a struggle we would be justified in finding\na verdict of acquittal.\n\n\"Although I, perhaps, ought to speak only for myself, I will say that\nI do not think that the members of the jury were much impressed with\nthe expert testimony.\"\n\nAnother juror said that those favoring an acquittal based their\narguments largely on the fact that most of the evidence in the case\nwas circumstantial, and that there was no absolute proof that Mrs.\nMcDonald fired the fatal shot at all, and that if she did it was not\nshown that it was not in self-defense.\n\n\"It was mostly by argument along these lines that the conviction men\nwere won over, one by one,\" said this juror. \"The subject of the\nunwritten law was not gone into at all.\"\n\n\nWOMAN SERENE AS VERDICT IS READ.\n\nDora McDonald, in a state of serenity and composure that is baffling\neven to those who are nearest her, was surrounded after her acquittal\nby friends and relatives, who were weeping for very joy at her\nacquittal.\n\nShe seemed quite unconcerned about it all, but when they took her\nto one side and asked her how she felt about it, she said, in the\namazingly simple way she has:\n\n\"I am pleased. Do you want me to tell you the five reasons why?\"\n\nThey said yes, and though she lost herself several times in the\nattempt, for she was very tired--these were the reasons she gave:\n\n     1--Because no Jewish woman could ever do a deed like that\n     of which I had been accused.\n\n     2--Because it removes the stigma from dad's (Michael C.\n     McDonald's) name.\n\n     3--Because of my boy.\n\n     4--Because of my darling old mother.\n\n     5--Please believe it, last and least--absolutely least of\n     these--because of myself.\n\n\"The only real disappointment to me is that dad did not live to hear\nthat verdict, and that is my bitterest disappointment.\"\n\nIt had been the belief generally among those who followed the case\nthat the woman would not outlive the verdict long, no matter what\nit might be. The original plans were that she would be sent to a\nsanitarium in case of acquittal. She herself is said to have planned\nthat if let go she would make a journey to Jerusalem, and there end\nher days in prayer with her chosen people, in an effort to blot out\nher past. \"Life can never have any more meaning for her,\" Colonel\nLewis said when the jury first retired. \"No matter what the verdict,\nit is of little consequence to her, though she will die happier,\nmaybe, if she is acquitted.\"\n\nIn Jerusalem there is what is known as the \"Wall of the Wailing of\nthe Jews.\" In the Valley of Tyron, at the foot of Mount Moriah, on\nwhich now stands the Mosque of Omar, but where formerly the Temple of\nSolomon stood, there are five enormous stones built into the foot of\nthe hill. A little courtyard beside these stones, which Solomon laid\nas the foundations of his Temple, is set aside for the Jewish race.\nEach Friday this courtyard is filled with Jews wailing for the sorrows\nof Israel. Every type of Jew, from the hunted Russian to the wealthy\nAmerican, may be found there, reading from the Book of Lamentations,\nand sending the cry of sorrow to the skies. It was here that Dora\nMcDonald proposed to weep out her ruined life.\n\nBut no, it is not the Place of Wailing in Jerusalem to which Dora\nMcDonald has gone. Hard as it is to believe of the woman who so\nbravely passed through this tremendous ordeal, she has stooped,\nstooped lower than one would believe humanly possible. She has\nreturned to the stage. She is now engaged in attempting to have a\nplay based upon the tremendous tragedy of her life placed on the\nboards in New York.\n\nShe is attempting to lay bare to the gaping audiences of cheap\ntheatres the sores upon her soul. She has been calloused to publicity\nto such an extent that she now hungers for the public eye. She has\nplaced herself in the same class with the lepers outside the walls of\nJerusalem who display their horrid sutures and demand a penny before\nthey replace the bandages. To this petty end has come this greatest\nand most spectacular of modern trials, this heart-shaking romance of\nlove and life.\n\n[Illustration: THE VAMPIRE\n\nFROM THE PAINTING BY BURNE-JONES]\n\nThe Vampire.\n\nAfter Painting by\nSIR ED. BURNE-JONES\n\nVerses by\nRUDYARD KIPLING.\n\n    A fool there was and he made his prayer--\n        (Even as you and I.)\n    To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair--\n        (We called her the woman who did not care)\n    But the fool he called her his lady fair--\n        (Even as you and I.)\n\n    Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste--\n        And the work of our head and hand\n    Belong to the woman who did not know--\n        (And now we know that she never could know)\n    And did not understand.\n\n    A fool there was and his goods he spent--\n        (Even as you and I.)\n    Honor and faith and a sure intent--\n    (And it wasn't the least what the lady meant)\n    But a fool must follow his natural bent\n        (Even as you and I.)\n\n    Oh, the toil we lost and the spoil we lost--\n        And the excellent things we planned\n    Belong to the woman who didn't know why--\n    (And now we know she never knew why)\n        And did not understand.\n\n    The fool was stripped to his foolish hide--\n        (Even as you and I.)\n    Which she might have seen when she threw him aside--\n    (But it isn't on record the lady tried)\n    So some of him lived but the most of him died--\n        (Even as you and I.)\n\n    But it isn't the shame, and it isn't the blame\n        That sting like a white hot brand--\n    It's coming to know that she never knew why--\n    (Seeing at last she could never know why)\n        And could never understand.\n\n\n\n\nMIKE McDONALD.\n\n\"King of Gamblers,\" Supreme in His Day, Relentless\nNemesis of Old \"Clark Street Gang,\" Brings\nHis Gray Hairs to Grave\nWith Broken Heart.\n\nRises From Newsboy to Gambling King and Becomes Millionaire.\n\n\nMike McDonald's career in Chicago has been spectacular and sensational\nto a degree.\n\nThe present-day generation in Chicago cannot appreciate what the name\nMichael C. McDonald meant twenty years ago in Chicago. There is not a\nsingle man today in Chicago, or in any city in America who occupies\nrelatively the position that Mike McDonald did in the old days in\nChicago.\n\nHe never held office, but he ruled the city with an iron hand. He\nnamed the men who were to be candidates for election; he elected them;\nand then, after they were in office, they were merely his puppets.\n\nWhile in recent years Michael C. McDonald has shown little activity\nin Chicago political and sporting circles, living quietly at Drexel\nboulevard and Forty-fifth street, in a costly mansion, his name twenty\nyears ago was a power in both.\n\nBorn in 1840 in Niagara county, New York, he came to Chicago in 1854\nand was a newsboy with John R. Walsh and other pioneers, in the city's\ninfancy. Before the war a business venture took him to New Orleans,\nand when the south began to become inflamed he returned to Chicago\nwith enough money to purchase the sample room of the Richmond House,\nMichigan avenue and South Water street.\n\nHere a spectacular career began. McDonald became the big gambler of\nall the host of gamblers that were then growing rich in Chicago. He\nalso became one of the leaders in the democratic organization. He made\nmoney hand over fist.\n\n[Illustration: Michael C. McDonald's wheel of fortune, showing his\nprogress from bootblack to gambling king, and the woman's face that\nbrought him to the tragic present, causing him to exclaim: \"My riches\nhave brought me only sorrow.\"]\n\n\nBEGINS LIFE AS \"CANDY BUTCHER.\"\n\nMike McDonald began life as a \"candy butcher\" on railroad trains\nbefore the war. He sold peanuts and popcorn and mysterious packages\nnot to be opened on the train, and fine gold watches at $3.75 apiece.\n\nMike ran on many different railroads, although it must be said for\nthe sake of truth that his customers were often very sorry to board a\ntrain and find that the energetic little candy butcher who had sold\nthem jewelry on the last trip they had made had left and gone over to\nsome other railroad. Mike's old customers used to beg him to return to\nthem. They even dared him to come back.\n\n\nPATRIOTIC FOR A PRICE.\n\nThe candy butcher made money and saved it, and during the war he\nsettled down in Chicago. Mike was very patriotic. He sent many men\naround to the enlistment offices, especially when big bounties were\noffered for volunteers. The trouble with the gallant soldiers that\nMike put into the service was that after they got their bounty money\nthey lost their enthusiasm and faded from view, like an evanescent\nmist.\n\nMike made much money out of his bounty-jumpers, but lost a good deal\nof it gambling. At this time he trained with \"Tip\" Farrell, Charley\nMiller, John Sutton and Matt Duffy, who figured more or less in the\npolice records of that time. Sutton was shot and killed in front of\nPete Page's saloon, on Clark street, in 1864.\n\nToward the close of the war McDonald and a notorious St. Paul crook\nlost $600 in the famous game that Colonel Cameron was running in\nChicago. McDonald found out that the cards were stocked against him,\nand it discouraged him with having anything more to do with poker\nplaying from the front of the table. Colonel Cameron had taught him,\nat the expense of $600, that the money in gambling was in running the\ngame, not playing it. From that day Mike McDonald never gambled. He\nstraightway opened his own game.\n\nWith Dave Oaks he started a game of faro at 89 Dearborn street. It was\na nice, little, modest game, with only those two as the entire crew of\nthe place. They took turn alternate days as dealer and roper in. The\nsuckers who played the game used to complain frequently that the firm\nof Oaks & McDonald worked sleight-of-hand tricks with the faro deck,\nand the unkind police used to raid the game every day.\n\n\nSOLVED GAMBLING PROBLEM.\n\nThis frequent raiding cut frightfully into the profits of the\nenterprising firm of Oaks & McDonald, and set the junior member\nthinking again. He had already solved the great problem that it is\nbetter to run a brace game than to play one, but he found there were\nthorns even in running a game. Therefore he set to work to discover\nhow these thorns could be removed.\n\nThe thorns that beset his career as a gambler were the police. But\nthe police acted under instructions from the chief of police. The\nchief of police acted under instructions from the administration.\nTherefore, McDonald figured out that he would have to control the\nadministration. So he straightway blossomed out as a politician, and\ngrew in importance until finally he ruled Chicago, and realized the\ngreat ambition of his life, to make and unmake things like chiefs of\npolice, with a curt nod of his head.\n\n\nONCE RULED ALL CHICAGO.\n\nMike McDonald never got over his hatred for the police that was born\nin the days when they used to raid his little game at 89 Dearborn\nstreet. He probably would have abolished the police department\nentirely when he finally found himself on the throne of Chicago,\nhad it not been that he found the police useful in making the other\nfellows behave, while he could do as he pleased. And then, it was such\na joy to make the police bend the knee and acknowledge him as Lord and\nMaster.\n\nGenerally the superintendents of police knew what was expected of them\nbefore they accepted the office, but once in a while one of them had\nfoolish notions about duty and law, and had to be taught his place.\nPoor old Simon O'Donnell, when he became superintendent of police,\nin the days when Mike McDonald ran \"The Store\" and ruled Chicago,\ngot the idea, because of numerous complaints of many patrons of the\ngambling games in \"The Store,\" that the place should be raided. So he\nraided it.\n\nIt was a most impious act. It was like laying hands on the Ark of the\nCovenant. Superintendent Simon O'Donnell lost his job so quickly it\nmade his head ache, and William J. McGarigle, whom McDonald afterward\nmade warden of the county hospital, and who was indicted and convicted\nof boodling, was installed as superintendent of police in place of the\nsimple-minded Mr. O'Donnell.\n\nMike McDonald's hatred and contempt for the police is preserved in\na joke that the few minstrel companies still left on earth continue\nto cherish as one of their best beloved jests. It originated with\nMcDonald. One day, when he was in the zenith of his power, a man came\ninto \"The Store\" with a subscription list.\n\n\"The boys are raising a little money, Mike,\" said the man. \"We'd like\nto have you give something. We are putting our names down for $2 a\npiece.\"\n\n\"What's it for?\" asked Mike, suspiciously.\n\n\"Why,\" answered the man, considerably confused, \"We're burying a\npoliceman.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said Mike. \"Here's $10; go and bury five of 'em.\"\n\n\nNEAR TO PENITENTIARY.\n\nWhile Mike was running the place at 89 Dearborn street he became\ninvolved in an affair that put him in jail for three months and made\nthe portals of the penitentiary loom up largely across his path. It\nlooked for a time as if his career was about to be nipped in the young\nbud.\n\nIn 1869 Charles Goodwin, assistant cashier of the Chicago Dock\nCompany, was found to be a defaulter to the extent of $30,000. He fled\nfrom Chicago and went to California, but in a few months came back and\nsurrendered himself to the authorities.\n\nHe testified that McDonald had lured him into the game at 89 Dearborn\nstreet, where he had played and lost his money in a series of brace\ngames that lasted during a period of several weeks. At first he lost\na few hundred dollars, and he was persuaded to go back to the Dock\ncompany's office and get money out of the safe in order that he could\nreturn the next evening and win back the money he had lost.\n\nHe never won anything back, but kept getting in deeper. At length the\npoor, deluded victim was told to make a big haul and skip the town.\nHe made a last pull at the strong box for $15,000 or $18,000, and his\nfriends at 89 Dearborn street let him play one last farewell game, at\nwhich they took the trouble to see that the boy should not be bothered\nin his flight from justice by lugging a big bag full of money around\nwith him.\n\n\nCASE FINALLY \"FIXED.\"\n\nMcDonald was arrested, and the Dock company also proceeded against him\ncivilly, as it was not certain he could be held on a criminal charge\nowing to the guarded manner in which he had conducted his operation.\nMcDonald was put under bail of $60,000, and, being unable to supply\nit, remained in jail for several months. Things were finally \"fixed\"\nall right, though. A few days before his trial he was released from\njail, John Corcoran and Alderman Tom Foley going on his bail bond.\n\nThe trial was a farce. All the gamblers, \"con\" men, bunko steerers\nand strong-arm men in Chicago lined up in court and told how the\ndefaulting clerk had begged to be permitted to play the brace game,\nwith tears in his eyes, and that most of his money had been spent on\nwine, women and song. The jury solemnly declared McDonald innocent.\n\nThe expense of his trial on the charge of stealing the Dock company's\n$30,000 had made McDonald poor, and he had to get out and do a\nlittle \"hustling.\" Soon after his release from the county jail John\nDonaldson, a California gambler and a high roller, made a winning in\nMcDonald's place of $2,200 at poker. He took the money back to the\nhotel with him and was robbed of it and $500 besides before he had\nbeen in bed ten minutes.\n\nA cracksman by the name of Travers was convicted of the crime.\n\nDonaldson used to go to Joliet every day or two to interview Travers.\nFinally he came back from Joliet and never ate nor slept until he had\nrun McDonald down. Tweaking his nose he shouted:\n\n\"Travers has confessed. You are a thief. You are a coward. Within\ntwenty minutes after I was robbed you were dividing my $2,700 with\nTravers and his pal.\"\n\nMcDonald did not deny the charge or strike back at Donaldson, as the\nlatter apparently hoped he would. Donaldson was a slight man, almost\ndead with consumption, but he was famous as a man killer, and while\nwith one hand he tweaked McDonald's nose, the other hand was jammed\ndown in his coat pocket, and McDonald knew that if he made a move or\nsaid a word he was a dead man.\n\nDonaldson's hatred for McDonald became a mania with him. He was a\ndoomed man, anyhow, and he wanted to kill McDonald before he went. So\nfor the three years before death finally claimed him he would drag\nhimself about the streets until he could stand in front of his enemy\nand slap him in the face and curse him, and beg him to raise his hand\nor say a word, or give him the slightest pretext for killing him.\nIt was a great relief to McDonald when grim death finally claimed\nDonaldson.\n\n\nRISES IN HIS PROFESSION.\n\nAfter the fire McDonald opened a place on State street, in partnership\nwith Nick Geary, a celebrated thief, who was subsequently killed in\nPhiladelphia. McDonald next moved to the West Side, and was taken\nin by John Dowling, who gave him a third interest in his game in\nconsideration of indemnity against police interference, McDonald's\npolitical star at this time being on the rise. The firm cleared\n$100,000 in less than a year.\n\n[Illustration: (gambling with skeleton)]\n\nAbout this time McDonald formed a partnership with Harry Lawrence and\nMorris Martin, and for four or five years they had supreme control of\nthe bunko business. None others could work excepting those who took\nthe trouble to see the firm of McDonald, Martin & Lawrence. Among the\ngang who worked under the protection of the firm were Tom Wallace,\nJohn Wallace, \"Snitzer, the Kid,\" John Martin, \"Snapper Johnny,\"\n\"Kid Miller,\" \"Sir James\" Arlington, or Gannon, \"Appetite Bill,\" and\n\"Hungry Joe.\"\n\nThere is no telling how much money these individuals took away from\nthe unsuspecting public, but it is estimated at over $1,000,000. Of\nthis, 20 per cent went to the police, 40 per cent to the roper, and\n40 per cent to the firm. The latter furnished straw bail, witnesses\nand juries, and other protection, and the confidence gangs reported to\nit and received orders. In 1875 \"White Pine\" Martin shot and killed\n\"Sir James\" Gannon in front of \"The Store\" while quarreling over the\ndivision of the proceeds of some job.\n\n\nTHRONE IN \"THE STORE.\"\n\nThe firm of McDonald, Lawrence and Martin had opened up the resort\nknown as \"The Store\" on Clark street, on the northwest corner of\nMonroe street, where the Hamilton Club stands today. The first floor\nwas operated as a saloon, and the floors above as gambling rooms.\nAfter public sentiment became aroused over the bunko business of the\nfirm, Lawrence and Martin drew out, leaving McDonald to run \"The\nStore\" alone.\n\n\"The Store\" was the most famous place in Chicago in those days. It\nwas not only the rendezvous of all the sporting men, politicians and\ndenizens of the underworld in Chicago, but it was virtually the city\nhall, for from his little office in \"The Store\" McDonald managed the\naffairs of the city.\n\nEvery form of gambling known flourished on that wonderful second\nfloor. The most expert manipulators of cards that ever dealt a second\nor shifted a cold deck sat behind the tables. They were Clif Doherty,\nFrank Gallon, Billy Tyler, Charles Winship and George Noyse.\n\nHigh-ball poker, in which the roller holds the high ball in his fist\nand rolls it to the cappers continuously, and faro, with fifty-three\ncards in the deck, so that the odd could be dealt, were said to have\nalways prevailed in \"The Store.\"\n\n\"There never was an honest card dealt in the place,\" is the epitaph\none old-time gambler has written on its dead proprietor.\n\nBig as the place was, it was always crowded. McDonald is said to have\ncoined a very common phrase when, on one occasion, one of his dealers\nprotested against putting in more tables and increasing the size of\nthe gambling rooms.\n\n\"I tell you, Mike,\" he said, \"we won't have enough players to fill up\nall the games.\"\n\n\"Ah, don't worry,\" McDonald is said to have replied, \"there's a sucker\nborn every minute.\"\n\nIn politics McDonald's first great triumph was when he elected Colvin\nmayor on the democratic ticket. Then he put the elder Harrison in the\nmayoralty chair, and after that he had plain sailing. His control\nlasted during the entire Harrison administration of eight years. In\nall that time there was no bigger man in Chicago than Mike McDonald.\n\nThe only time he met with a serious set-back was in 1882, when he\ntried to elect William J. McGarigle, then chief of police, sheriff of\nCook county.\n\n\nTHE BIG COURTHOUSE \"JOB.\"\n\nAnother disappointment of McDonald's political career was when he got\na bill past the county commissioners and city aldermen authorizing\nHarry Holland to paint the outside of the City Hall and County\nBuilding with a mixture which was guaranteed to prevent the stone from\ndecaying.\n\nHolland applied his marvelous preparation, but when the time came\nto pay the bill a newspaper man, John J. Lane, who died only the\nother day in St. Louis, had dug up evidence tending to show that\nHolland's preparation was nothing but water and chalk, and not quite\nso efficacious in preventing the decay of stone as prune juice or ice\ncream would have been, but much cheaper. The county has never yet paid\nthe $80,000 that Holland wanted for the job on the county building.\n\nAfter the close of the Harrison administration a new day began in\nChicago. The independent voter broke the power of party bosses. Mike\nMcDonald's rule was broken. He could no longer do what he pleased with\ncity administrations and be unofficial chief of police.\n\nHe bowed pleasantly to the inevitable, and stepped down and out. He\nwas wise in that he saw the handwriting on the wall, and gracefully\nsubmitted instead of \"kicking against the pricks\" and wasting his\ntime and his money, as did other gamblers and sports, who were\nfinally crushed out simply because they could not recognize that new\nconditions and new men had come.\n\nMcDonald quit every sphere of his old life and went into business.\n\nIt was he who, with William Fitzgerald, built the first elevated road\nin town, the Lake street \"L.\" Then, in 1891, he thought he would like\nto be an editor. He bought control of the Globe, a daily morning\npaper, and ran it for over two years. It was not a financial success,\nand finally McDonald gave it up. \"I guess I was never cut out for a\nliterary man,\" was his laughing remark. \"There are other things I know\nmore about.\"\n\n\nDOMESTIC LIFE ROUGH.\n\nA great deal has been said about McDonald's domestic unhappiness, but\nit was not until his body had been buried that the truth was known.\n\nHis first wife was Mary Noonan, whom he married in the days when \"The\nStore\" was the sporting and political Mecca of Chicago.\n\nIt was a great scandal in the community later when she suddenly\ndisappeared, and it was reported that she had run away with \"Billy\"\nArlington, a minstrel man. It was the greater shock because her\ndevotion and loyalty to McDonald had been the talk of the town.\n\nOne time she had stood, with a pistol, in her husband's gambling\nhouse, and defied the police when they raided the place under\ninstruction of some blundering chief of police, who did not realize\nthat he was toying with the lightning when he laid violent hands\non anything that belonged to McDonald. Mary McDonald had held her\nground at the door in \"The Store,\" and declared she would shoot the\nfirst policeman that attempted to enter. She was as good as her word,\nand one of the officers was carried to a hospital with a bullet\nthrough his arm. Mrs. McDonald, through her husband's pull, was never\nprosecuted.\n\nMcDonald went to San Francisco and brought his wife back and installed\nher in the house he had built at Ashland avenue and Harrison street,\nconsidered in those days a veritable palace. McDonald gave it out to\nthe world that he had built the mansion for his wife, and his taking\nher back after she was reputed to have run away with another man\nwas accepted as a wonderful instance of his great-heartedness and\nmagnanimity.\n\n\nSAM BARCLAY TELLS \"HOW MIKE MCDONALD'S COIN WON DORA AWAY.\"\n\n\"Sam\" Barclay (Harry is supposed to have been his baptismal name) was\none of the great ball players of the long ago, and the shadows of the\ndrama that wrecked his life are, therefore, interwoven with the world\nof sport, and even with the career of Charles Comiskey, \"the master of\nthe White Sox.\"\n\nBarclay, a trim and graceful fellow, came into prominence twenty years\nago and played with Pittsburg and St. Louis. At St. Louis he was under\nthe command of Comiskey, who therefore knew him well, and was always\ninterested in his doings.\n\nOn two or three occasions quarrels over the contracts of Sam Barclay\nnearly wrecked organized base ball. He was a wonderful second baseman,\nand one of the fastest and most scientific players of the day.\n\nIn 1889 Barclay's knee went back on him, and, while he regained full\nuse of the leg, he was never fast enough to play his former game. He\nalso began to take on flesh, and was glad to retire from the diamond.\n\n[Illustration: HOME MCDONALD BUILT FOR HIS FIRST WIFE HARRISON ST. AND\nASHLAND BLD.]\n\n\nOPENS SALOON IN CHICAGO.\n\nComing to Chicago, Barclay opened a saloon on West Madison street.\nBack in 1894, West Madison, from Halsted to Elizabeth, was the real\nred-light district, full of saloons and concert halls. Barclay's place\nwas the headquarters of revelry, but Sam himself kept a good name for\npersonal honesty and unbounded generosity to his friends.\n\nWhen the red-lights went out on Madison street, Sam leased a saloon at\n15 North Clark, where for some time he held the same kind of sway he\nhad maintained west of the river. This place was ultimately lost, and\nhe went over in Garfield park district, without much success.\n\n\"Sam\" Barclay, former husband of Mrs. \"Mike\" McDonald II, 451 West\nLake street, freely discussed his life with Mrs. McDonald.\n\nIt was an interesting story, in which he told of Mrs. McDonald's\nattempt to commit suicide once in Kansas City, of brawls in his\nsaloon, the \"Half Moon,\" and of how \"Mike\" McDonald, assisted by\n\"Bunk\" Allen, lured his wife away from him. Here is what he said:\n\n     \"They have printed stories that are not true about this\n     case. Mrs. McDonald's mother was a Mrs. Feldman, who at one\n     time lived at 619 Harrison street. At the time I knew her\n     Mrs. Feldman had been divorced from her husband and he was\n     living in the Ghetto.\n\n\nLIKELY LAD OF 200 POUNDS.\n\n     \"It was in '89 that I met Dora. I was in the Kansas City\n     ball team, and was a likely lad. I weighed 200 pounds,\n     trained down, and it was a good man who was able to floor\n     me.\n\n     \"Dora came to visit her brother-in-law in Kansas City. He\n     is Dick Vaughn, and a very good 'pal' of mine. I met her\n     there at his house.\n\n     \"We took a liking to each other, so I used to have her in\n     the best seat every day at the games when we played on home\n     grounds.\n\n     \"And she never was slow, I tell you, of giving me credit\n     when I made a double play or lined out a hot one.\n\n\nNOTHING LIKE REAL LOVE.\n\n     \"Well, the season came to a close. I liked the kid, but I\n     didn't feel nothing like real love for her. I was going to\n     leave Kansas City, and nothing was said about taking her\n     with me. I noticed that big tears came in her eyes when I\n     told her, but she didn't say much. That night they sent for\n     me. They told me that Dora was dying.\n\n     \"I got to Vaughn's house and found her unconscious. She\n     had taken laudanum, the doctor said. She was in a stupor.\n     The first chance I got, I asked her what was the matter,\n     and she said to me, as the tears rolled down her cheeks:\n\n     \"'I don't want to be left alone.'\n\n     \"That, you know, touched me. We got married. I've got the\n     license right here. It was all doped up by a fellow in the\n     Washingtonian Home, who thought he owed a lot to me. He\n     certainly did some fine pen and ink decorating with birds,\n     and shadings and such things.\n\n     \"So, after I quit the national game, I went into the saloon\n     business at 292 West Madison street, first, and then\n     started the 'Half Moon.'\n\n     \"I'll tell you the truth about how Dora met Mike McDonald.\n     She went to McVicker's theater one day with Harry Summers,\n     who is now treasurer of the Illinois theater.\n\n     \"Dora was with Mrs. Elliott. She used to be a model in\n     Ryan's store, at Madison and Peoria streets. Summers\n     introduced Dora to Mike McDonald, and that's the way they\n     started.\n\n\nDAY OF HARRISON FUNERAL.\n\n     \"Well I remember the time--it was on the day that Carter\n     Harrison's funeral went past the house, at 319 Washington\n     boulevard, where we were living at that time.\n\n     \"'I met an old gentleman today who has lots of money,' Dora\n     said to me, as we looked out of the window.\n\n     \"'It's funny how a man gets up in the world and then loses\n     it all when he's laid away in the narrow box,' I said,\n     keeping my eyes on the hearse.\n\n     \"I was thinking, then, but not about what my wife said.\n     Afterward the words came to me, but I didn't realize the\n     meaning of her expression or what it had in store for me\n     then.\n\n\nDEEP GAME WELL PLAYED.\n\n     \"A few years passed. They went quick, then. Money made the\n     time fly, and Dora certainly was a spender. Then one night\n     they pulled off the game that was to separate us and give\n     Mike McDonald a young wife.\n\n     \"I was boozy with wine. Bill Hoffman and 'Bunk' Allen were\n     masters of the ceremonies. They bundled me in a cab and\n     drove me to a place on Wood street. Detectives came in, and\n     my wife, too, and they there and then laid the basis of the\n     divorce suit which ended the game between Dora and I.\"\n\nBarclay then told of a fight in his saloon, in which one man was\nalmost killed and another badly wounded. Then he said:\n\n     \"That's how they wound up the 'Half Moon.' Jimmy Quinn said\n     he was my friend, but he stabbed me in the back. I was\n     getting too strong in politics, so he got me and I was put\n     down and out.\"\n\nBarclay had seemed perfectly happy with her, but one night when he was\nliving in rooms over his saloon at 15 North Clark street he learned\nthat Mike McDonald had come into her life, and it was not long before\nthe ball player's romance was ended.\n\n\nWIFE GETS DIVORCE.\n\nMrs. Barclay obtained a divorce--with McDonald's money, so Barclay\nalways said--and the ball player was left alone. The blow proved his\nutter undoing. Barclay lost ambition and energy. He spent hours in his\nrooms, gazing mutely at a huge crayon portrait of his wife, taken a\nyear before she left him, and he seemed to have no desire or ability\nleft for business.\n\n\nSECOND WEDDING IN MILWAUKEE.\n\nMrs. Barclay was married to McDonald in Milwaukee. At the time she was\nin the chorus of the Chicago Opera House. Her mother is Mrs. Fanny\nFeldman, 338 South Marshfield avenue. She has two brothers, Harry and\nEmil Feldman, both known in West Side political circles. Harry Feldman\nwas employed in the city clerk's office during William Loeffler's term.\n\nWhen McDonald took his new wife to his house on Ashland boulevard\nthere was a red-hot family row. Guy, the elder of the two sons of\nMcDonald, had a pitched battle with her, and the fight was carried\ninto the street. The boy was victorious at first, but his father sided\nwith the stepmother, and eventually the boy left home.\n\nHarold Barclay, 10 years old, Mrs. McDonald's son by her first\nmarriage, was adopted by McDonald, and with his two sons, Cassius and\nGuy McDonald, has an equal share in the estate.\n\n\nINDUCES HUSBAND TO DISINHERIT SON.\n\nShortly after her marriage to McDonald, Dora became angry at her\nhusband's son, Harley. The latter objected to his father contracting\nfurther matrimonial alliances, and did not hesitate to say so. Mrs.\nMcDonald prevailed upon her husband to disinherit the son, and later,\nof her own initiative, caused the arrest of the young man.\n\nThe charge was threats against her life. The case came up at the old\nArmory police court, and the young man was placed under bonds to keep\nthe peace.\n\nThe breach between father and son is said never to have healed. Young\nMcDonald went into the sign painting business soon after the episode.\n\nGuy married Miss Pearl Flower, and lives in Chicago. Mrs. McDonald\nonce had Guy McDonald arrested on the charge of writing threatening\nand obscene letters.\n\nThe case was hotly fought in the United States court. A juryman, and\nwarm personal friend of Mike McDonald, saved him from conviction,\nwhich would have carried with it a penitentiary sentence.\n\n\nTHE STING AND CURSE OF ILL-GOTTEN MONEY.\n\n\"Mike\" McDonald, the king of gamblers, was buried like a king of men.\nThere were flowers, tears, friends, orations and processions. But as\nclothes are not, neither is a funeral, an index to character--nor even\nis the obituary column.\n\nStrangers, reading the story of the last day above the sod of\nMcDonald's body, might has thought that Chicago had lost a leading\ngood citizen. They were told that McDonald had amassed wealth, but\nthey were not told how he got it. They read of the great men whom he\nhad befriended, but they were not told of the men whom he had ruined.\nThey were not told that Mike McDonald living, had violated the laws\nof the land, of society and of the home.\n\n\"Mike\" McDonald died worth a million dollars. A young man beginning\nlife, familiar only with the post-mortem, story of McDonald, and\nseeing no condemnation of his method of getting rich, might feel\nencouraged to hold to the idea that the accumulation of money bars all\ncriticism for the way it is acquired.\n\nThough the publicity of cold type has put no brand on the dead\nMcDonald, the story of \"Mike\" McDonald's life and fortune is not yet\nfinished.\n\nSuppose he did die worth a million dollars, whom will it benefit? What\ngood will it do?\n\nThere will be a fight in every dollar, a quarrel in every penny.\n\nThere will be a strife among men and women over this fortune.\n\nMuch of it will go to lawyers to defend a woman charged with murder.\nMuch more of it will go to other lawyers who will try to break his\nwill. As McDonald's money was ill-gotten, so will it be spent to no\ngood purpose.\n\nIn a few years McDonald will be forgotten except by those whom in life\nhe ruined. His fortune will be gone. No one will remember him for the\ngood he did, if he did any good.\n\nLet not \"Mike\" McDonald's success in securing money encourage you to\nfollow his method.\n\nIf you, young man, had an opportunity of entering a gambling venture,\nwith a certainty of securing for yourself a fortune of a million\ndollars, you would be a fool to take advantage of that opportunity.\n\nThere is nothing in the life of even a successful gambler worth\nimitating and nothing that he does worth admiring.\n\n\"Mike\" McDonald may have been better than the ordinary class of\ngamblers, but the occasional good deeds that men of his character do\nare always exaggerated.\n\nNinety-nine gamblers out of a hundred that amass fortunes die paupers.\nThe money that a few accumulate, even as McDonald did, is, as a rule,\na curse to those that inherit it.\n\nBut if McDonald had sense--and we believe he did have sense--in the\nclosing years of his life he cursed the day when he started on a\ncareer that wrecked him, socially and morally, and left him in his\ndying hour a bankrupt in everything but the possession of a few\nhundred thousand dollars, which he could not take beyond the grave.\n\nAnd what has happened after McDonald's death, and what will happen in\nthe courts of law, will prove to men that ill-gotten money carries a\nsting to its possessor and a curse to those who inherit it.\n\n\nWIFE NO. 1, WIDOW; NO. 2, REPUDIATED.\n\nBURIAL OF \"MIKE\" MCDONALD SERVES TO OPEN NEW CHAPTER IN HIS\nTROUBLES--OLD SCANDALS DENIED.\n\nMARY NOONAN NOW CLAIMS INNOCENCE AND FIGHTS TO PROVE DIVORCE ILLEGAL.\n\nThe grave out at Mount Olivet that closed over the body of \"Mike\"\nMcDonald refused a final sanctuary to the life-tragedy of the\npolitical boss and millionaire gambling king.\n\nThe same hand of death that closed his eyes on his triumphs and\nafflictions raised the curtain on an unforseen last act in this drama\nof Chicago life.\n\nIn this new part of the plot Mrs. Dora Feldman McDonald, who turned\nthe old gambler's head and broke his heart through the shooting of\nWebster Guerin, appears as a wife solemnly repudiated in death-bed\nrites. At the same time Mrs. Mary Noonan McDonald, the divorced and\nexiled first wife, steps upon the scene to cleanse her name of the\nscandals to which it has been linked for twenty years.\n\nWhile the two wives and the relatives stood before the coffin it came\nout that McDonald, shortly before his death at St. Anthony de Padua\nhospital, had uttered a formal repudiation of his second marriage, in\nthe presence of the Rev. Maurice J. Dorney, pastor of St. Gabriel's\nCatholic Church, and several witnesses, in the persons of hospital\nattendants. This having been done, McDonald was permitted the last\nsacraments of the church and burial under the Roman ritual.\n\n\nFIRST WIFE DENIES CHARGES.\n\nAs the second wife passed under the ban, the first one came forward\nto claim that of which she had been dispossessed by human passion.\nSitting in her apartment last night at the Vincennes hotel, Vincennes\navenue and Thirty-sixth street. Mary Noonan McDonald gave her version\nof the romance and tragedy that have measured forty years of her life.\n\n     \"For the sake of my two boys, it is now my duty to tell the\n     world the truth about the slanders with which my name has\n     been blackened,\" she said. \"I am not perfect, and I have\n     done things for which I am sorry, but I am guiltless of the\n     charges with which I have been hounded about the world for\n     twenty years. This I can prove, and to do so I shall remain\n     in Chicago as long as necessary.\"\n\n\nREPUDIATION OF SECOND WIFE.\n\nIt was after the solemn requiem mass over McDonald's body in the\nChurch of the Presentation that the Rev. Father Dorney consented to\ntell the story of the gambler's dying repudiation of his second wife.\n\n     \"I told 'Mike' McDonald before his death,\" said Father\n     Dorney, \"that in the eyes of the Roman Catholic church\n     there was no such thing as divorce; that he had but one\n     wife, the mother of his children--Mary Noonan. I told him\n     he must publicly repudiate this other woman, and only when\n     he said he did so could he receive the last sacraments,\n     penance, holy eucharist, and extreme unction.\n\n     \"Although he was critically ill, he said, firmly, that he\n     would do as the church wished: that he was sorry for his\n     sins, and he wanted to receive the last sacraments. Then,\n     in the presence of witnesses, as is required, he made the\n     repudiation. Later he went to confession, but what he told\n     there I can never reveal.\n\n     \"Afterwards the other woman, Dora Feldman, came to see\n     him at the hospital, but if he was conscious he never\n     recognized her. He was true to his promise, true to his\n     resolution to put her out of his life.\"\n\n\nCHURCH NOT INTERESTED IN WILL.\n\nFather Dorney's attention was called to the fact that McDonald\nprobably had left a considerable portion of his estate to his second\nwife.\n\n     \"I suppose he did, but this is a legal matter in which the\n     church is not interested. Mike McDonald and Mary Noonan\n     were legally married in the eyes of the law, and the\n     church, in a Catholic church edifice. We never recognize\n     divorce. Of course, we know it is impossible at times for\n     men and women to live together, and the church permits them\n     to reside apart, but remarriage is impossible as long as\n     both of the parties are still alive.\n\n     \"McDonald never remarried in the eyes of the church,\n     because his first wife was not dead. By his actions with\n     Dora Feldman he gave great scandal, but before his death\n     he repented of it. If Dora Feldman followed Mike McDonald\n     to his grave, she could not do so from an ecclesiastical\n     standpoint, and in my sermon this morning when I referred\n     to the wife of the dead man I meant Mary Noonan McDonald,\n     the mother of his children.\"\n\n\nMRS. MARY MCDONALD CHANGED.\n\nNo greater contrast could be conceived than that between the woman\nreputed to have deserted her husband in turn for a renegade French\npriest and a minstrel, and the woman who rose to greet the interviewer\nwho called at the Vincennes hotel for Mrs. Mary Noonan McDonald.\nTwenty years of sorrow have left snow white hair that still crowns her\nhead with the same wealth as that of younger days, and twenty years\nof struggle to support herself have dulled the fire of those gray\neyes that once looked over a smoking revolver with which the girl wife\nheld at bay the police raiders of her husband's gambling house. But\nthe slender figure appeared as erect as ever, though standing forth\nwith an added frailty beside her stalwart, brown-faced son, Guy, and\nher face, though pale and sad, scarcely confessed to her 60 years of\nage.\n\n[Illustration: MARY NOONAN McDONALD, MICHAEL C. McDONALD, MRS. MICHAEL\nC. McDONALD]\n\nThis is the woman who began her career in Chicago as the helpmate\nof an old-time gambling king, and is ending her days in the work of\nrescuing wayward girls; this is the woman who was driven to abandon\nthe name of McDonald and bury her identity for the last fifteen years\nunder the alias of Mrs. Grashoff, holding communication only with her\nchildren and secretly visiting Chicago periodically to see them.\n\n\nTELLS HER STORY AT LAST.\n\n     \"It is sixteen years since I have talked to a newspaper\n     reporter,\" said Mrs. Mary Noonan McDonald. \"Again and\n     again have I been besought to tell my story, but long ago\n     I determined to remain silent until after the death of Mr.\n     McDonald. For the sake of my children's relations with\n     their father I held my peace, and now, for the sake of my\n     children's name, I have decided to give my story to the\n     world.\n\n     \"The lies that have been printed about me for the last\n     twenty years are but a feeble testimonial of the tremendous\n     power wielded by Mr. McDonald and his friends. None knows\n     better than I how he made and unmade public officials, set\n     judges on the bench, determined public politics in the old\n     days, and fought his enemies with a ruthlessness that made\n     him feared far and wide. When I became his enemy, I, too,\n     began to feel his power, as it was manifested in the public\n     press.\n\n     \"The lies have multiplied day by day, but I have so far\n     refused to answer them. Only during the last week the\n     papers have said that Dora McDonald, who ruined Mike\n     McDonald's life, and I, met at the bedside of the dying\n     man. We have never met. The only time I ever saw her was\n     in a Providence (R. I.) hotel, ten years ago, where I was\n     stopping while at a convention of charities. We sat at the\n     same table, and I heard her say to a girl with her that I\n     looked like Guy's mother. Then I knew who she was. I have\n     not seen her since, not even at the grave today, though I\n     was told she was there.\"\n\nGuy McDonald interposed to explain that his stepmother had not been\nallowed to attend the funeral service at the church, being taken\ndirectly to the cemetery.\n\n\nSAYS CHARGES WERE INVENTED.\n\n     \"The statement I want to make to the world,\" resumed Mrs.\n     McDonald, \"is that all the stories told of my conduct at\n     the time I was separating from Mr. McDonald, are absolutely\n     false, and were maliciously invented and circulated.\n     The trouble between my husband and me grew out of his\n     brutality. He was a big, red-blooded man, but when under\n     the influence of liquor he was rough and disorderly. He\n     often struck me at such times, and mistreated me in other\n     cruel ways.\n\n     \"I finally came to the conclusion that I could stand the\n     life no longer. So I ran away. But I went alone, and not\n     with Billy Arlington, the minstrel, as the story was told\n     afterwards. I went to San Francisco and visited with\n     friends, and while there I met Arlington. He was only a\n     casual acquaintance, and I never saw him after I left San\n     Francisco. I went from there to Cincinnati, and thence to\n     New York, with friends. We stopped at the Gilsey house, and\n     there William Pinkerton, Al Smith, the old-time gambler,\n     who had a resort at 86 Clark, and Mr. McDonald, coaxed me\n     to come back home.\n\n     \"But it was not long before the old trouble began again.\n     Mr. McDonald was extremely abusive when in liquor, and Mr.\n     A. S. Trude will tell you that I went to his office one\n     day and asked him to get me a divorce. He tried to smooth\n     matters over, and succeeded for a time.\n\n\nNO CHAPEL IN HOUSE.\n\n     \"Then we went to live in the new house at 308 Ashland\n     avenue. There my troubles began afresh, and grew until\n     1888. The newspaper stories have dwelt at great length on\n     insinuations of my conduct with a priest for whom I was\n     said to have built a chapel in my house. Nothing could be\n     more preposterous on the face of it, as any Roman Catholic\n     will tell you. The church does not sanction the erection\n     of altars, the giving of communion, and the receiving of\n     confessions in private homes. Dispensations for temporary\n     masses can be obtained in rare instances.\n\n     \"There was a priest named Father Price, from Asheville, N.\n     C., who was raising money for his church in Chicago. We\n     gave a recital that netted him $500, after which he was a\n     guest for two weeks at our house.\n\n     \"He obtained a dispensation to say mass a few times, and\n     did so before a temporary saint's altar set on a bureau.\n     When he departed the altar went with him, and that is as\n     close as we ever came to having a private chapel in our\n     house.\n\n     \"The French priest with whom I was said to have eloped was\n     Father Moysant. He never said a mass in our house, and I\n     never knew him except as one of the priests of the parish\n     who were entertained frequently by Mr. McDonald.\n\n\nLEAVES HUSBAND; GOES TO SISTER.\n\n     \"I did not run away with Father Moysant or any other\n     person, the fact being that, unable to stand Mr. McDonald's\n     treatment, I left his house in the fall of 1887 and went to\n     live with Mrs. Peter McGuire, whose house stood on the site\n     of the present Studebaker building. I begged Mr. McDonald\n     to let my boys come to me, but he refused. At the end of\n     three weeks I went to New York alone, sailed for Havre,\n     still alone, and went to visit my sister, Mrs. Catherine\n     Phillpot, who lived in Paris.\n\n     \"I remained there eleven months and returned to New York.\n     At the Fifth Avenue hotel, where I stopped, I found\n     Pinkerton detectives, hired by Mr. McDonald, watching me.\n     I complained to Mr. Philips, the house detective, of the\n     annoyance, as he will tell you. I was traveling under\n     the name of Armstrong, my mother's maiden name--she was\n     English and my father, Irish, you know. The annoyance of\n     the detectives became so great that I returned to Paris on\n     the same boat on which I had come to America. That was the\n     middle of October, 1888.\n\n     \"After six months with my sister in Paris I returned\n     directly to Chicago. When I arrived I found my daughter\n     dead and with my own hands I buried her baby the next day.\n     I found also that I had been divorced by Mr. McDonald in\n     proceedings before Judge Jamieson, though no notice ever\n     was served on me.\"\n\n\nPAWNS HER DIAMONDS.\n\nMrs. McDonald spread out her ringless fingers significantly, and\ncontinued:\n\n     \"I went to a pawnbroker that day and sold my diamond\n     rings, ear-rings, and cross, and with the proceeds opened\n     a rooming house at 1235 Wabash avenue. Mr. McDonald often\n     came to see me and dine there, and it looked as if there\n     might be a reconciliation. But soon after that he met Dora\n     Barclay, and from that time we were friends no longer, but\n     bitter enemies.\n\n     \"The reputation of my house was ruined by the arrest of\n     Mike Coleman, alias Charles Wilson, the safe-blower, who\n     had lived there a few weeks, and at first I thought Mr.\n     McDonald was behind this plot to ruin me. I went to the\n     Animosa, Pa., penitentiary, saw Coleman, and learned that\n     Mr. McDonald was innocent. But after that a story was\n     started that I lived with Coleman for years. I never saw\n     him after that time at the penitentiary.\n\n     \"After the World's Fair I removed to St. Louis and\n     started a boarding house at 2686 Locust street. But soon\n     Mr. McDonald's detectives were hounding me there, the\n     newspapers began to print stories of our troubles, and my\n     business was ruined.\n\n\nDRIVEN TO HIDE IDENTITY.\n\n     \"I saw that if I was to live peacefully I must bury my\n     identity, and so, assuming the name of Mrs. Grashoff, I\n     went to New York, and obtained employment with the Board\n     of Charities at Fourth avenue and Twenty-third street, of\n     which Mr. Van Vordenberg was the head. For fifteen years I\n     have been in charitable work. I founded the Destitute Old\n     Ladies' Home at Paterson, N. J., and at present my work is\n     with the Crittenden Rescue Homes for Unfortunate Girls. It\n     is not the least solace for my many misfortunes that I have\n     been able to save many girls from continuing their wayward\n     careers.\n\n     \"So much for the lies circulated about me for twenty years.\n     I never saw Father Price after he left Chicago, nor Father\n     Moysant after I went to Mrs. McGuire's. Both are living, so\n     far as I know, but where, I do not know.\"\n\nBut the records show, according to Mrs. Mary McDonald, that her\nhusband repented of the wrongs he had heaped upon her, and called her\nto his bedside when he was dying, acknowledging her as his wife, and\nbegging her forgiveness. They were reunited, and a few days later\nMcDonald died.\n\n\nOPPOSED BY DOCUMENTS.\n\nFor Mrs. Dora McDonald, on the other hand, an entirely different\ncase is made out by her attorney, Colonel James Hamilton Lewis. He\nsaid that he had procured new evidence in the shape of affidavits\nand sworn statements of witnesses in the suit for divorce brought by\n\"Mike\" McDonald against Mary C. McDonald in 1889, and letters in the\nhandwriting of Mary McDonald, and others.\n\nThe divorce bill, according to Colonel Lewis, was filed in the\nSuperior Court of Cook County on September 11, 1889. In the complaint,\nMcDonald alleged that he married his first wife November 20, 1870,\nand lived with her until May 1, 1889. He alleged misconduct in the\ncomplaint, naming Joseph Moysant, or Father Moysant, a renegade\npriest, and gave dates and places of alleged misconduct. He also\nalleged that Mrs. McDonald had fled to France with Moysant, and that\nshe was not a resident of Chicago, or the State of Illinois.\n\n\nJOINT LETTERS IN EVIDENCE.\n\nLetters were offered in evidence which were alleged to have come from\nMrs. McDonald to women friends. Some of these are said to have been\nsigned Mrs. J. Moysant, and to have been partly in the handwriting of\nMrs. McDonald and partly in the handwriting of Moysant. These letters\nare said to have shown that Mrs. McDonald had a knowledge of the\ndivorce suit pending against her.\n\nAn attempt was also made to prove that Mrs. McDonald was deeded\ncertain property by McDonald in connection with the divorce\nproceedings, and that she negotiated and disposed of that property in\npart, thus, acquiescing in the terms of possession and establishing\nthe legality of the divorce.\n\nMrs. Mary McDonald, now a white-haired woman upward of sixty, declares\nthat she has brought suit to establish her legal status as the widow\nof \"Mike\" McDonald for the sake of her two sons, Guy and Cassius, for\nwhom she desires to clear her name of any stain. Her petition for an\ninjunction restraining the trustees of the estate from paying to Mrs.\nDora McDonald any money as dower rights was heard by Judge Barnes on\nNovember 18.\n\nThe contest was long and bitter between the attorneys. Crimination and\nrecrimination flew thick and fast. In the end, however, Judge Barnes\ndecided that the divorce of Mike McDonald from Mary Noonan McDonald\nwas legal, that the law could not go back of the records, and that,\ntherefore, Mary Noonan McDonald was not entitled to any share of the\nMcDonald estate.\n\nBut the sordid contest over the ill-gotten money of the gambling king\nwas not yet at end. Dora McDonald failed to pay her attorney's fees,\nand the estate was again brought into the courts on an injunction\nobtained by James Hamilton Lewis, who threatens to throw the estate\ninto involuntary bankruptcy.\n\nThus the long battle over tainted gain goes on. Let those who think\ngambling an easy way to wealth and power read aright the lesson of\nthe life of Mike McDonald; one continual tissue of law-breaking,\nimprisonment, divorce, scandal upon scandal, murder, adultery, leaving\na name covered over and associated with all vileness, all the mud and\nslime of society, to go down to the grave with a broken heart. Is that\nan alluring spectacle? Is such a life worth living? Who would emulate\nit?\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: The DEVIL and THE GRAFTER]\n\nHAVE YOU READ\n\nThe Devil and the Grafter\n\nAnd how they work together to Deceive, Swindle and Destroy Mankind. A\nThrilling and Graphic Story of Truth Stranger than Fiction.\n\nHow a great army of 600,000 criminals in America, under the influence,\nguidance and leadership of Satan wage continued war with justice, law,\nsociety and religion.\n\nBY\n\nClifton R. Wooldridge\n\nThe World's Great CRIMINOLOGIST AND DETECTIVE\n\nAfter twenty years of heroic warfare and scores of hair breadth\nescapes, in which he suffered wounds and bruises by the hundreds, and\nbaffled death so often that his criminal enemies declare \"he leads a\ncharmed life.\" Mr. Wooldridge, while still \"in the harness,\" has given\nthis volume to the public with the belief that he is sending forth a\nbook with a mission of good to the world.\n\nNo man in all our country is so feared by evil doers of all classes\nas the author of this revelation of the ways and wiles of wicked men\nand women, who graft and swindle, rob and corrupt their fellows in\ndefiance of law and justice.\n\n\"The Incorruptible Sherlock Holmes of America\" is the title by which\nMr. Wooldridge is favorably known. Hundreds of times large and\ntempting bribes have been offered him by wealthy criminals; thousands\nof dollars at a time might have been his for a \"wink\" at a nefarious\npractice, or for the loosing of his hold upon a rich criminal's\nwrist. But like C\u00e6sar's wife, he stands \"above suspicion.\" He is\nstill a poor man, but deeply and earnestly studying the science of\ncriminology, laboring and lecturing for the cure of crime by wise laws\nand scientific means--declaring himself to be the enemy of crime, but\nthe friend of the criminal, whose disease of crime he believes can be\ncured, and that it is his mission to help the world suppress crime and\nfind out the way for its elimination.\n\nWith an aim so lofty, and a motive so pure, the good people of every\nreligion, all trades, all professions and all classes are in hearty\nsympathy, and the circulation of this book will not only serve to\nwarn the people against the snares and pitfalls of the Devil and the\nGrafter (into which thousands of new victims fall and one hundred and\nsixty millions of dollars of the people's money are lost every year),\nbut it will tend to make Grafting impossible and turn the Grafters\ninto honest, legitimate channels and good citizenship.\n\nThis Book should be in the Hands of Every Minister, every doctor,\nevery student, every teacher, farmer, business man, mechanic and\nlaborer, every wife and widow--statistics show that ninety widows out\nof every hundred are swindled out of what their husbands leave them.\nIt should be in the reach of all, male and female, for there is not a\npostoffice in all the land where the mail, every time it comes, does\nnot bring the alluring literature of the Grafter to swindle or tempt\nthe unwary.\n\nPRICE CLOTH, ILLUSTRATED $1.00\n\n\n[Illustration: HANDS UP! IN THE WORLD OF CRIME]\n\nHANDS UP\n\nIN THE WORLD OF CRIME OR 12 YEARS A DETECTIVE\n\nby CLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE\n\nChicago's Famous Detective\n\nA BOOK OF\n\nThrilling descriptions about the capture of Bandits, Robbers, Panel\nHouse Workers, Confidence Men and hundreds of other criminals of all\nkinds.\n\nTELLS IN GRAPHIC MANNER\n\nHow Criminals of all classes operate, illustrations showing arrests of\nMurderers, Safe Blowers, Diamond Thieves, Procuresses of Young Girls,\netc., etc.\n\nThe contents of this book is a narrative of the authors twelve years'\nexperience on the Chicago police force. His long and successful\nexperience with the criminal classes justly fitted him for the work\nof bringing before the public in presentable form the many and\ninteresting features of a detective's life.\n\nIn detail he tells the story of his life, and without coloring of any\nkind produces an accurate account of his twelve years' experience,\nmany times under fire; his famous efforts to apprehend criminals, who,\nby means of revolvers and other conceivable methods tried to fight\ntheir way to liberty.\n\n=The book contains over 500 pages=, is profusely illustrated from\nspecially drawn pictures and photographs of desperate criminals and\nlaw-breakers, such as murderers, highwaymen, safe blowers, bank\nrobbers, diamond thieves, burglars, porch climbers, shop lifters,\nbicycle thieves, box car thieves, lottery swindlers, gamblers,\nwomen footpads, panel-house thieves, confidence men, pickpockets,\nprocuresses of young girls for immoral purposes, women gamblers, levee\ncharacters, etc.\n\nThis great production is not a ponderous volume filled with dry\nstatistics, but made up of thrilling accounts which depict the most\nnoteworthy incidents in the lives of criminals in large cities.\n\nDuring Detective Wooldridge's service on the force he has made 20,000\narrests, secured 125 penitentiary convictions, recovered $75,000\nworth of lost and stolen property, which was returned to its rightful\nowners; seventy-live girls under age were rescued by him from houses\nof ill-fame and a life of shame and returned to their parents or\nguardians or sent to the Juvenile School or House of the Good Shepherd.\n\nIt is well known in police circles that Detective Wooldridge has\nrefused at many different times, bribes of from $500 to $4,000;\n$10,000 was offered for his discharge or transfer from the levee\ndistrict by criminals against whom he had waged a warfare.\n\n_He has letters from Carter H. Harrison, the mayor, three state's\nattorneys, eight chiefs of police, three assistant chiefs, six\ninspectors, nine lieutenants, six police justices and others too\nnumerous to mention, which testimonials are printed in the book\ntogether with their autographs. The book contains all the General\nSuperintendents of Police of Chicago from 1855 to 1901._\n\nDetective Wooldridge has a wonderful record in police annals.\n\nPRICE\n\nCLOTH, ILLUSTRATED $1.00\nPAPER, ILLUSTRATED   50c\n\n\n\n\nTranscriber's Notes\n\n\nMinor punctuation errors have been silently corrected. Some\nillustrations have descriptions added for the benefit of the plain\ntext version readers.\n\nTitle Page: Changed \"COVICTIONS\" to \"CONVICTIONS.\"\n  (Orig: 200 PENITENTIARY COVICTIONS)\n\nTitle Page: Changed \"CRIMINAL\" to \"CRIMINALS.\"\n  (Orig: AN ARMY OF 600,000 CRIMINAL AT WAR WITH SOCIETY AND RELIGION)\n\nTable of Contents: Added listings for the last 15 chapters.\n  Changed \"Wails\" to \"Wiles\" and \"Tellers\" to \"Telling\" to match the\n  chapter title: \"Wiles of Fortune Telling.\"\n  (Orig: Wails of Fortune Tellers)\n\nPage 28: Changed \"acomplished\" to \"accomplished.\"\n  (Orig: it was acomplished successfully.)\n\nPage 28: Changed \"connetion\" to \"connection.\"\n  (Orig: he severed his connetion with the railroad)\n\nPage 32: Women's names omitted in original book after the sentence:\n  (Orig: The following are the names of the women arrested:)\n\nPage 38: Changed \"rerevolver\" to \"revolver.\"\n  (Orig: he pushed his rerevolver in Wooldridge's face.)\n\nPage 46: Changed \"Woolridge\" to \"Wooldridge.\"\n  (Orig: One of the last exploits of Detective Woolridge)\n\nPage 51: Opening quotes retained; no closing quotes in original.\n  (Orig: \"A 'grafter' is one who makes his living (and sometimes his\nfortune) by 'grafting.')\n\nPage 71: Retained \"salonkeepers,\" possible typo for \"saloonkeepers.\"\n  (Orig: salonkeepers and others that buy them)\n\nPage 92: Changed \"phychological\" to \"psychological.\"\n  (Orig: what he considers the right phychological moment,)\n\nPage 97: Changed \"knowns\" to \"knows.\"\n  (Orig: it isn't because the public knowns any more than)\n\nPage 110: Retained \"senualist;\" possibly a typo for \"sensualist.\"\n  (Orig: it is the senualist whose vice is read in his lips,)\n\nPage 114: Changed \"POSSSESED\" to \"POSSESSED.\"\n  (Orig: THE BANKER WILL END LIFE POSSSESED OF WEALTH)\n\nPage 115: Changed \"OFERED\" to \"OFFERED.\"\n  (Orig: IN WHICH THEY WERE MAILED ARE OFERED WITH THEM.)\n\nPage 125: Changed \"allegitimate\" to \"illegitimate.\"\n  (Orig: he was in an allegitimate business,)\n\nPage 134: Changed \"weathy\" to \"wealthy.\"\n  (Orig: ten or twelve weathy ladies,)\n\nPage 136: Changed \"Los Angelese\" to \"Los Angeles.\"\n\nPage 137: Changed \"is\" to \"it.\"\n  (Orig: give it the consideration is deserves.)\n\nPage 140: Retained \"Caverley,\" possible typo for \"Caverly.\"\n  (Orig: was arrested and fined $15 by Caverley.)\n\nPage 173: Changed \"shoudl\" to \"should.\"\n  (Orig: to find if there shoudl be a chord)\n\nPage 203: Changed \"vigliance\" to \"vigilance.\"\n  (Orig: he is under the eternal vigliance of our police)\n\nPage 222: Changed \"snoke\" to \"smoke.\"\n  (Orig: I don't snoke.)\n\nPage 240: Changed \"nof\" to \"not.\"\n  (Orig: \"Sophomoric\" period is nof fully passed.)\n\nPage 283: Changed \"Dicharged\" to \"Discharged.\"\n  (Orig: Insane asylum, Nevada, Mo. Dicharged after several escapes.)\n\nPage 294: Changed \"indentification\" to \"identification.\"\n  (Orig: the finger print indentification.)\n\nPage 296: Changed \"lot\" to \"lost.\"\n  (Orig: sailor has lot his honorable discharge paper)\n\nPage 301: Changed \"rougues\" to \"rogues.\"\n  (Orig: spreading through the rougues' galleries)\n\nPage 347: Opening quotes retained; no closing quotes in original.\n  (Orig: each witness claimed that the \"contract was covered up and\nthey were shown just the part of the paper on which was the space for\nsignature; and Daubach performed many acts in furtherance of the\nconspiracy.)\n\nPage 351: Changed \"slighest\" to \"slightest.\"\n  (Orig: It makes not the slighest difference)\n\nPage 360: Changed \"is\" to \"it.\"\n  (Orig: This is not merely because is loosens general morality)\n\nPage 370: Changed \"cildhood\" to \"childhood.\"\n  (Orig: toward speculation, even from cildhood.)\n\nPage 373: Changed \"nickle's\" to \"nickel's.\"\n  (Orig: good for a nickle's worth)\n\nPage 378: Retained \"sideway,\" possible typo for \"slideway.\"\n  (Orig: clamp referred to down through the sideway)\n\nPage 382: Sentence possibly missing \"do\" after \"to.\"\n  (Orig: Very few are expert enough to this trick without detection.\n\nPage 387: Changed \"sailers\" to \"sailors.\"\n  (Orig: the goods were sold to soldiers and sailers.)\n\nPage 406: Changed \"torents\" to \"torrents.\"\n  (Orig: the rain which was beating down in torents)\n\nPage 408: Incomplete sentence in original book.\n  (Orig: His counsel asked for the arrest of judgment so he might\nhave time to write up the record and present it to the)\n\nPage 419: Changed \"mammonth\" to \"mammoth.\"\n  (Orig: Prisoner accused as principal in mammonth swindling plot)\n\nPage 462: Changed \"numerious\" to \"numerous.\"\n  (Orig: clear Chicago of its numerious \"Fake\" patent medicine)\n\nPage 465: Changed \"Lavatories\" to \"Laboratories.\"\n  (Orig: Columbus Lavatories conducted the tests.)\n\nPage 465: Retained \"either,\" possible typo for \"ether.\"\n  (Orig: Aristol is soluble in either, and makes a dark brown)\n\nPage 467: Changed \"sppply\" to \"supply.\"\n  (Orig: I have in stock and can sppply without delay.)\n\nPage 468: Changed \"Sargeant\" to \"Sergeant.\"\n  (Orig: Desk Sargeant Mike White)\n\nPage 471: Retained original 300,000,000 but the math is incorrect.\n\nPage 494: Changed \"felling\" to \"feeling.\"\n  (Orig: the trusting investor the felling that there is a strong hand)\n\nPage 514: Retained \"grizzy,\" possible typo for \"grizzly.\"\n  (Orig: look out for Indians and grizzy bears.)\n\nPage 563: Retained Joseph Koehy\/Koehly variations.\n\nPage 565: Changed \"answr\" to \"answer.\"\n  (Orig: to answr for the murder of Webster Guerin)\n\nPage 568: Changed \"women\" to \"woman.\"\n  (Orig: Dora McDonald was a wonderfully beautiful and younger women)\n\nRetained spelling variations: R. W. McClaughrey and R. W. McClaughry.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Twenty Years a Detective in the\nWickedest City in the World, by Clifton R. Wooldridge\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n## There was one more attacker\n\nAnnja whirled, expecting her final opponent to be closing the distance between them while her attention was elsewhere.\n\nBut that wasn't the case. The other man hadn't moved.\n\nHe stood watching her, hands held behind his back, like an instructor evaluating her performance.\n\n\"Who are you and what do you want?\" Annja asked, and was surprised at the depth of anger she heard in her voice.\n\nHer opponent said nothing.\n\n\"I'll give you one last\u2014\"\n\nShe never finished the sentence.\n\nOne second her opponent was standing in front of her with both hands behind his back, and in the next he was leaping forward, a Japanese long sword suddenly appearing in his hands.\n\nAnnja just barely managed to deflect the strike as she brought her own sword up.\n\nWhere the hell had that sword come from?\n\nIt was almost as if he'd conjured the thing out of thin air....\n\n## Titles in this series:\n\nDestiny\n\nSolomon's Jar\n\nThe Spider Stone\n\nThe Chosen\n\nForbidden City\n\nThe Lost Scrolls\n\nGod of Thunder\n\nSecret of the Slaves\n\nWarrior Spirit\n\nSerpent's Kiss\n\nProvenance\n\nThe Soul Stealer\n\nGabriel's Horn\n\nThe Golden Elephant\n\nSwordsman's Legacy\n\nPolar Quest\n\nEternal Journey\n\nSacrifice\n\nSeeker's Curse\n\nFootprints\n\nParadox\n\nThe Spirit Banner\n\nSacred Ground\n\nThe Bone Conjurer\n\nTribal Ways\n\nThe Dragon's Mark\nRogue Angel\u2122\n\n## Alex Archer\n\n## THE DRAGON'S MARK\n\n## THE LEGEND\n\n...THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN'S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.\n\nThe broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.\n\nSmoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.\n\nJoan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn...\n\n## Contents\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nChapter 15\n\nChapter 16\n\nChapter 17\n\nChapter 18\n\nChapter 19\n\nChapter 20\n\nChapter 21\n\nChapter 22\n\nChapter 23\n\nChapter 24\n\nChapter 25\n\nChapter 26\n\nChapter 27\n\nChapter 28\n\nChapter 29\n\nChapter 30\n\nEpilogue\n\n## 1\n\nIse Province, Japan  \n1603\n\nSengo Muramasa stormed about the room in a fit of rage. The furnishings around him bore silent witness to the strength of his anger; the black lacquer tea table had been smashed repeatedly against the floor until it shattered into pieces. The tatami mats had been ripped to shreds with his bare hands. The paintings on the walls had been torn down and stomped upon until the images they bore were unrecognizable. When one of his servants unwittingly entered the room, Muramasa had beat him to within an inch of his life and left him lying unconscious in one corner of the room.\n\nThe old swordsmith barely noticed the injured boy as his thoughts were on the edict that had arrived earlier that morning and the demands it had contained.\n\nHe still couldn't believe it. That bastard Tokugawa Ieyasu had actually gone through with it!\n\nHe'd heard rumors about the shogun's proposed stance for months, but had never actually believed he would put it into effect.\n\nThe words of the edict echoed around and around in his head.\n\nAll weapons crafted by the swordsmith Muramasa have been deemed illegal and banned from use by direct order of the shogun. Carrying such a weapon is now considered a crime and is punishable by death. Anyone caught possessing, hoarding, or transporting a weapon fashioned by Muramasa faces the same penalty.\n\nHe could not let this happen.\n\nDeny his art? Banish his work? Never!\n\nAlready the germ of a plan was beginning to form in the back of his mind and he gave it free reign to grow and expand. He had no doubt the shogun's men would be coming for him, to take his inventory and destroy his forge, to prevent him from creating any new blades. But with winter swiftly approaching, the mountain passes would soon be blocked and it would take months for them to thaw enough to be passable again.\n\nMonths he could put to good use.\n\nHe had just enough time to produce one final sword\u2014the culmination of his career. He would create a sword to be feared and held in awe in equal measure, a blade to master all other blades, one that would strike terror in the hearts of those against whom it was drawn.\n\nHe would call it Juuchi Yosamu\u2014Ten Thousand Cold Nights.\n\nIgnoring the destruction behind him, Muramasa stalked out of the house and across the courtyard to his workshop. His heart was full of feelings of anger and vengeance and Muramasa intended to use them fully.\n\nEntering the forge, he paused a moment to say a prayer at the small Shinto shrine in the corner. The forge was a sacred place and to deny the gods their due would only ensure that his blade would come out weak and brittle. He took the time to ask for blessings and to make the proper offering. When he was finished, he rose and got to work.\n\nMuramasa had been preparing to produce a blade for a customer and so his smelting furnace had already been built. His apprentices had created a thick layer of ash and charcoal as a base and then had surrounded it with carefully made bricks of local clay, until they had a structure that was roughly three feet high with walls nearly one-foot thick. They were ready to begin the smelting process.\n\nThe master swordsmith shouted at his apprentices and they came running, eager to begin. Word of the master's fall from favor had already passed through the household and they were as keen as he was to stand in defiance of the shogun's order. After all, their livelihoods were at stake, as well\u2014for who would commission a weapon from their hands when it was revealed that they learned the art at Muramasa's knee? Their futures were at stake, too, and they took to their tasks with all of the energy and attention at their disposal.\n\nFor the next three days they stoked the fire, ensuring that it burned at a steady temperature of fifteen hundred degrees. Shovels of iron sand were fed into the mouth of the furnace every thirty minutes\u2014nourishment for the hungry beast\u2014the iron mixing with the carbon and charcoal already in the smelter to create a unique kind of steel. Muramasa watched over the proceedings with an eagle eye, carefully monitoring the molten slag that was vented through the holes at the bottom of the furnace, waiting for just the right consistency and color to appear.\n\nWhen at last he was satisfied, he ordered his apprentices to tear down the walls of the furnace, revealing a large mass of molten steel in the center, known as the kera. Roughly six feet long by one foot wide and weighing nearly two tons, the kera was carefully moved by rolling it atop a series of logs to the other side of the workshop where it would be allowed to cool. Once it had, his apprentices would break up the massive block into fist-size fragments that he would personally scrutinize, searching for those that shone with a silvery brightness from the outer edge. The selected pieces would then be hammered flat by his workers, coated with a thin mixture of clay and charcoal to prevent oxidation, and then reheated to thirteen hundred degrees to melt them all together into a single block. After that he would begin the process of forming the blade, hammering the steel and folding it over, again and again and again, making the steel uniform throughout. Eventually he would combine the softer, more flexible core with an outer edge of harder steel, then heat the blade all over again to meld the two layers into one. Later would come the grinding and polishing.\n\nFor now, however, it was enough that he had begun.\n\nIT WAS FINISHED.\n\nMuramasa stared at the highly polished blade and could almost feel it watching him, in turn. For three months he had poured his soul into its creation, imbuing it with all the hatred, anger and desire for vengeance he felt toward the shogun, giving it a personality of its own, one that would devour any weapon that dared to stand against it. Like the dragon for which it had been named.\n\nIt was the culmination of his life's work.\n\nThe door to his workshop burst open and a servant rushed in. Muramasa recognized him as one of those who had been tasked with keeping an eye on the pass in the mountains above. The boy's face was ruddy from the cold and a long gash ran across his brow.\n\nPausing to catch his breath, the boy finally gasped out the message he'd rushed there to deliver.\n\n\"The shogun's troops...\"\n\nThat was all that was necessary.\n\nThe spring thaw had come early and Muramasa had been expecting word of their arrival for days. It wouldn't take them long to negotiate the pass and descend down to the valley floor. He had one hour, two at the most.\n\nBut it would be enough.\n\nJuuchi Yosamu was finished. All he needed was to see to its delivery.\n\nAfter that, let them come.\n\nThe old swordsmith sprang into action.\n\n\"Quickly,\" he shouted to the boy. \"Find me Yukasawi!\"\n\nStill struggling to catch his breath, the boy turned and rushed out the door, intent on doing what his master commanded.\n\nWhile he waited for his man, Muramasa crossed the room and selected a worn and battered saya from a barrel in the corner of the room. He lifted the blade, intent on securing it safely inside the scabbard.\n\nAs he did so the weapon seemed to twist in his hands of its own accord and he felt the sting of its bite as the razor edge sliced cleanly along the underside of his forearm. Blood dripped onto the floor and gleamed wetly against the edge of the blade. But rather than being angry at his carelessness, if that was indeed what caused the injury, Muramasa simply smiled.\n\nThe sword hungered for blood, just as it had been created to. Who better than to provide its first taste than the man who had fashioned it?\n\nA noise at his back caused him to turn and he saw Yukasawi enter the workshop. Muramasa took a moment to study him.\n\nThe man was a ronin, one of those samurai from the lesser houses who had recently lost his station when his master had gone down in defeat at the hands of the shogun. This is a man who has almost as much reason to hate Tokugawa as I do, the swordsmith thought. It was for this reason that he had been selected. If anyone could get the weapon to safety, Yukasawi could.\n\nIt would be the soldier's job to take the sword out of the mountains, past the shogun's troops and into the hands of the samurai in Kyoto Muramasa had selected to receive it.\n\nThe man in question, Ishikawa Toshi, was ruthless and wanted nothing more than to ascend to the position of shogun. He was already amassing his army against Tokugawa and his allies, and Muramasa was confident that his gift would be put to good use in the future. All the swordsmith had to do was get it to him.\n\n\"Is it time?\" Yukasawi asked, his face tight with concern for his benefactor.\n\nMuramasa nodded. \"The shogun's troops have been sighted at the top of the pass. They will be here shortly.\"\n\n\"Then there is still time. If we leave now, we can\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" The swordsmith cut him off. \"There is no time left for running. Nor will I give that dog Tokugawa the satisfaction. By remaining behind I will delay them long enough to allow you to escape and deliver Juuchi Yosamu as we discussed.\"\n\nHe thrust the now-sheathed weapon into the hands of his vassal. \"On your honor and your life, do not fail me.\"\n\n\"Hai!\" the ronin shouted. Taking the weapon in hand, he bowed low, then rushed out of the workshop to where his horse was waiting.\n\nThe trip down the mountain would be hazardous, but Muramasa was confident his man could handle the task. His other creations might be rounded up and destroyed, but in the depths of his heart he knew that this one would survive.\n\nAs his blood continued to drip onto the floor beneath his feet, the swordsmith knew that the world would not soon forget the savage bite of a Muramasa blade.\n\nHis legacy would live on.\n\nAnd Juuchi Yosamu would devour the hearts of his enemies.\n\nA shout sounded from outside and Muramasa knew that that the shogun's troops were near. It was time to meet death.\n\nThe old man reached out and picked up a sword. He gave it a few experimental swings, getting the feel for this particular blade, and then turned toward the door with a spring in his step that he hadn't felt for years.\n\nTHE BATTLE HAD BEEN SHORT but brutal. His men had fought well and the snow was stained crimson with their blood and the blood of their foes. Of the thirty-eight men who had remained behind to face the shogun's troops, only Muramasa himself still lived. He had intended to die with a sword in his hands, but apparently the shogun had ordered otherwise. His men had surrounded the swordsmith and attempted to overwhelm him, a move that had cost ten of them their lives before the older man had been beaten into unconsciousness.\n\nNow, with his hands bound behind his back, Muramasa stood before his enemies and waited for the end.\n\nThe captain of the shogun's troops had been apologetic. This was no way to die for a man of Muramasa's stature, he'd said, but he had his orders and if he did not carry them out as intended, his own life would be forfeit. Muramasa assured him that he understood.\n\n\"Do as you must,\" he'd told the man, and had meant it.\n\nIt didn't matter. The resistance, the pronouncement of the verdict against him, the execution to come\u2014none of it mattered, really. It was all stage dressing, anyway\u2014a deliberate attempt to get the shogun's men to focus their attention on what was going on around them rather than searching the countryside for those who might have gotten away. Every hour he delayed them meant another hour that Yukasawi could use to get over the mountains and escape with his precious cargo.\n\nMuramasa had given him as much time as he could.\n\nTwo soldiers approached. They each took an arm and led him forward to the clearing in the center of the compound, where what was left of his household staff were assembled as witnesses in front of the massed arrangement of the shogun's troops.\n\nAs they drew closer, Muramasa shook off the guards and walked forward on his own. He was not afraid to meet death and he would not go forward to face it looking as if he did not have the courage to do so on his own.\n\nThe captain he'd spoken to earlier was waiting for him, naked steel in hand. Muramasa had requested that he be allowed to commit seppuku, but apparently even that last honor was to be denied him.\n\nSo be it, he thought. He would still have the last laugh.\n\nWithout waiting to be told Muramasa knelt in the snow at the captain's feet.\n\n\"Do not worry,\" the younger man said, whispering so that those assembled around him would not overhear. \"I will make certain that the blade strikes deep. There will be no need for a second blow.\"\n\nMuramasa bowed his head, exposing his neck.\n\nHe ignored the long recital of his supposed crimes and the pronouncement of his sentence\u2014death. He'd heard it all before.\n\nAs he waited for that final blow, something caught his eye in the distance.\n\nHe raised his head slightly, just enough so that he could lift his gaze toward the mountain slopes in the distance. On the side of the mountain, where the trail led to the pass that was used to exit the valley and travel to the world outside, a dark speck moved against the snow. It was barely visible at this distance, and had Muramasa not turned his head at precisely the right moment, he might never have seen it. But he had and deep in his heart he had no doubt at all as to what that speck represented.\n\nYukasawi had made it. He had managed to work his way past the blockade of the shogun's troops and climb the mountain to the pass high above. From there it would be easy for the ronin to lose himself in the open country on the other side while he made the journey to Kyoto and delivered the blade.\n\nAnd with that delivery, Muramasa's revenge would begin.\n\nSuddenly filled with satisfaction, Muramasa barely noticed as the captain of the guard brought his sword high above his head.\n\nI curse you with ten thousand cold nights, the swordsmith thought. As the blade descended in a swift, razor-sharp blow designed to separate his head from his shoulders, a smile crossed the old man's face.\n\n## 2\n\nParis, France\n\nAnnja took the steps two at a time, calling her sword to her hand as she went. The weapon responded, emerging from the otherwhere fully formed and fitting neatly into her grasp as if it had been fashioned for her alone. She remembered the first time she'd seen the sword. It had been in this very house, lying in pieces in the case Roux had fashioned for it. She remembered the heat coming off the fragments of the broken blade and the rainbow-colored light that had exploded from it when she grasped the hilt and lifted it free of its case, somehow reformed. Then, as now, she knew the sword was hers; knew it down to the core of her very soul. Just having it with her made her feel more confident about the confrontation that lay ahead.\n\nShe kept her eyes on the landing above, not wanting to be surprised by the sudden appearance of an intruder. She made it to the top of the staircase without incident. She found herself faced with a long corridor that ran in opposite directions. She knew the area to the right held a series of guest bedrooms, for she had stayed there in the past and was even using one of them now. The left side of the hallway held a bathroom, an office and a small gallery for some of Roux's art. She ignored all of them; the crashing sound had come from the room at the far end of the hall, the one now facing her, and as she moved toward it, she tried to remember just what it was used for.\n\nA spare bedroom? Another office? Maybe a study?\n\nThen it came to her.\n\nA display room.\n\nThe room held a portion of the weapons collection Roux had accumulated over the course of his extended lifetime. There were many more rooms just like it scattered throughout his home. But this room was special, Annja recalled. She had spent some time in it during a previous visit, for it contained a certain type of weapon that she had grown rather attached to lately.\n\nSwords.\n\nThe collection contained both working blades and a few museum-quality relics, but nothing that was overly valuable and certainly not much that could be moved easily on the open market. The thieves, if that was indeed what they were, were in for a rude surprise if they thought differently.\n\nAnd they still had to contend with her.\n\nShe raced to the door and flattened herself against the wall beside it. She put her head against the wall, listening, but Roux's mansion had been built in the days when they had used quality building materials rather than the cheap substitutes that had become so common today. She couldn't hear anything but her own breathing.\n\nShe was going to have to do this the hard way.\n\nGripping her sword in one hand, Annja grabbed the doorknob with the other, took a deep breath and then pulled it open, slipping inside with barely a sound.\n\nShe'd been right; it was one of the display rooms. Swords lined the walls by the hundreds\u2014long swords, short swords, broadswords, cutlasses, \u00e9p\u00e9es, scimitars\u2014every make, model and size, it seemed. The carefully polished blades shone in the spotlights that had been artfully arranged to draw attention to the weapons, and here and there the wink of precious gems gleamed back at her from scabbards or hilts.\n\nBut Annja barely noticed the swords on the walls, for her attention was captured by those held in the hands of the intruders facing her.\n\nOne week earlier\n\nANNJA WAS CARRYING SEVERAL bags of groceries up the stairs to her Brooklyn loft when her cell phone rang.\n\n\"Hang on, hang on...\" she said to it as she juggled the bags, managed to get the key in the lock and kicked the door open with her foot.\n\nHer phone continued to ring.\n\n\"I'm coming, just hang on!\" she told it again, as if the inanimate hunk of metal and plastic could actually hear her. She rushed to the island in the kitchen, dumped the bags on the counter and grabbed for her phone.\n\nJust as she managed to pull it from the front pocket of her jeans it stopped ringing.\n\n\"You have got to be kidding!\" She scowled at it, ready to fling it across the room in a pique of anger, only to have it ring again.\n\n\"Hello?\" She practically shouted it into the tiny device.\n\nA deep, rich voice answered her back. \"Annja, did I catch you at a bad time?\"\n\nThere was no mistaking the voice. That teasing tone, that undercurrent of danger\u2014only one man in her life sounded like that.\n\n\"What do you want, Garin?\"\n\nAll that rushing? For him? It said something about her social life, that was for sure, she thought.\n\n\"Now is that any way to treat an old friend?\"\n\n\"Old, yes. Friend, that remains to be seen.\"\n\n\"You wound me, Annja, you really do.\"\n\nShe kicked off her shoes, wandered into the living room and dropped onto the couch.\n\nGarin Braden. Empire builder, artifact hunter, rogue\u2014he had a thousand different faces. The problem was, you never really knew which one you were dealing with, and by the time you did, it was often too late to save yourself. Annja had seen him ruthlessly kill more than one individual and yet had also known him to be charming and tender. She still wasn't sure just what she felt about him; he was larger than life, with his rakish good looks, thick black hair and piercing gaze, but at the same time he had the heart of a devil.\n\n\"So be wounded,\" she said. \"Then when you've finished feeling sorry for yourself maybe you could tell me what you want.\"\n\nGarin swore under his breath and the sound of his frustration made Annja smile. She wasn't the only one with mixed feelings, she realized.\n\n\"I am calling,\" he said, \"to invite you to Paris.\"\n\nParis? That was a surprise.\n\n\"What for?\" she asked.\n\n\"Can't I just invite you to Paris?\"\n\n\"You could, but you know I wouldn't come, so what's the real reason?\"\n\nGarin was silent for a moment, and then grudgingly said, \"It's the old man's birthday.\"\n\nAnnja knew there was only one individual Garin could legitimately refer to that way.\n\nRoux.\n\nOld was right, she thought. More than five hundred years old, if the truth were told. Garin himself wasn't that far behind, for only a few decades separated the two men. The same mystical force that had preserved the sword of Joan of Arc, the sword that Annja now carried as her own, had also given the two of them an extended lifetime. One measured in centuries, rather than decades.\n\n\"It's Roux's birthday?\"\n\n\"I just said that, didn't I?\"\n\nYes, yes, he had. Despite Roux's long life, Annja knew that he wasn't the type to celebrate birthdays, so that only increased rather than eased her suspicions.\n\n\"You're going to throw Roux a birthday party?\" She couldn't mask the incredulity in her voice.\n\nGarin had apparently lost his patience with her for he let loose a stream of curses that could have burned the hair off a pirate's chest.\n\nAnnja waited him out and then said, \"Okay. I'm in. When is it?\"\n\nStill grumbling, he named a date only three days away.\n\n\"Nothing like giving a girl time to think it over,\" she said.\n\n\"What? Like you've got something else on your social calendar?\" Garin shot back and from his tone Annja knew he was rather pleased with himself for that one. Before she could think of a retort, he went on. \"I have tickets reserved in your name on the 9:00 p.m. flight out of Kennedy on the twelfth. My driver will pick you at DeGaulle, take you to Roux's for the party and drive you back to your hotel afterward.\"\n\nAnd with that, he hung up.\n\n\"Garin? Garin!\"\n\nHanging up the phone, she went back to putting away the groceries. While doing so she glanced at her calendar. The bare white spaces stared back at her. Well, what did you expect? she asked herself. Given your lifestyle, it is amazing you have any friends at all.\n\nShe had to admit, she'd never been one to stay in one place for long before she'd taken up Joan's sword, never mind afterward. If she wasn't headed off to some remote spot to film a new episode of Chasing History's Monsters, the cable television show she cohosted, then she was off volunteering at some dig site in the back end of nowhere just to satisfy her love of history and her need to feel the thrill of discovery. That didn't leave much time for friendships, never mind romantic entanglements longer than a few days in length.\n\nWhile she occasionally wondered what it would be like to have a normal life, when she really got down to it, she found that she didn't mind all the craziness. After all, boring was the last thing you could call her life.\n\nThe party was on the thirteenth. On the sixteenth she was due in studio to shoot some green-screen work for her next episode and to wade through the piles of footage she'd brought back from her last trip. Both would be necessary to cut the raw material into a show worth watching, and while she knew the guys in the editing room could do it without her, she preferred to keep an eye on them to help tone down the inevitable \"suggestions\" her producer, Doug Morrell, was constantly trying to fill their ears with. Doug was a good guy, but he'd be just as happy to have a show revolving around blood-sucking alien chupacabras as he would some ancient civilization most people had never heard of. He'd once gone so far as to produce and distribute a memorial video of her final moments when she'd lost touch with him during a tsunami in India. That fact that she'd called in shortly thereafter, clearly alive and well, had only added fuel to his marketing efforts and had him envisioning a second volume highlighting her \"miraculous\" survival. If she'd been closer at the time she might have strangled him herself.\n\nSo she'd make the party, but had to be sure to be back in New York by the sixteenth, come hell or high water.\n\nANNJA WAS FIVE FEET TEN inches tall with chestnut hair and amber-green eyes. She had an athlete's build, with smooth rounded muscles and curves in all the right places. Dressed as she was in a pair of jeans, leather boots and a lightweight tank top, she knew she probably made quite a sight rushing helter-skelter through the airport with her long hair flying out behind her, but it just couldn't be helped. She'd gotten absorbed in research and hadn't left herself enough time. If she didn't make it to the gate on time, Garin would never let her forget it.\n\nAs was her usual luck, after convincing her cab driver to set new land-speed records in making it to the airport and then dashing through the terminal after clearing security, she reached the gate only to discover that her flight had been delayed due to a mechanical problem. At least the ticket was for first class, which let her pass the time in the executive lounge while she waited. Once she did board the plane almost an hour later, she popped on her iPod, stretched out and slept through most of the trip, determined to arrive ready to enjoy Roux's party.\n\nGarin had a driver and car waiting, just as he'd said he would, and as she relaxed in the backseat and she watched the Paris streets roll by out her window, she had to admit that the whole thing made her feel a bit special.\n\nUntil she remembered just who was waiting for her on the other end.\n\nIt's for Roux, she reminded herself, for Roux.\n\nAs they drove, she thought about the circumstances that were bringing the three of them\u2014Roux, Annja and Garin\u2014together again. Despite her misgivings, she had to admit to being surprised, pleasantly so, that Garin was going out of his way for Roux; that wasn't something Garin was particularly known for. Ruthlessness, arrogance, a sense of entitlement ten miles wide\u2014yes, he had more than his share of those qualities. But doing something just because it would make another person happy? Not so much.\n\nStill, anyone could turn over a new leaf and in the past several months it was obvious that Garin was trying, in his own way, to smooth over some of the damage from the past, so she supposed she had to give him credit. It wasn't easy for anyone to change, least of all someone so set in their ways as Garin Braden.\n\nThe party they were throwing for Roux was, of course, a surprise. Or rather, Garin was throwing the party, with Annja and Henshaw, Roux's butler and majordomo, as the only guests. It pained Annja to think that after such a long life they were the only people Roux could claim as friends, but she didn't consider it too deeply lest she see the glaring similarities with her own life.\n\nThat the party was all Garin's idea was equally unusual, given the history between the two men. After all, they'd tried to kill each other on more than one occasion and no doubt would try again at some point in the future. On any given day they could go from friends to enemies in the space of a heartbeat. Still, there was a bond between them that transcended such petty squabbles, and as fate would have it, Annja had become part of their inner circle.\n\nAfter all, who better to understand just what it meant to carry the sword that had belonged to Joan of Arc than the two men who had once been responsible for protecting Joan herself from the hands of her enemies? The same mystical force that had preserved the sword and ultimately brought it into Annja's possession had also given them their extended life span. It was also part of the discord between them. Neither of them knew what would happen should the sword somehow come to harm. Would they at last be able to live out the rest of their natural lives, free from the influence of the sword, or would time suddenly catch up to them, exacting its toll then and there for all the years they'd escaped its grasp? They didn't know and so, as a result, they had different ideas about how to handle the situation. Roux wanted the sword to remain with Annja, its chosen bearer, while Garin had made it clear he felt the sword should be locked away and protected. If that was even possible.\n\nAnnja shifted her attention from the scenery outside the car to the sword itself. It rested there in the otherwhere, just as it always did, glimmering faintly as it waited for her to call it forth with just a thought. For a moment she was tempted, for she loved to feel its weight in her hand, loved the sensation it gave her as she carried it forth into battle, but her good sense reasserted itself before she did so; having a huge broadsword suddenly appear in the back of the limousine probably wouldn't be a good thing for the upholstery, never mind the driver's sense of reality.\n\nIt was enough that it was there, waiting for her, and that she could claim it when necessary. She'd had to do so more times than she could count since taking possession of it and she knew that there would be plenty of other such situations in the future. It had become a part of her and she could no more give it up now than she could marry a pig farmer and retire to the country.\n\nThe celebration was being held at Roux's estate outside of Paris and it took them about half an hour to reach their destination.\n\nRoux's house was huge, so huge that the word home just didn't seem to do it justice. Palace might have been better. Ivy clung to the stone walls and helped the structure blend into the trees that surrounded it. It butted up against a hill and the overall effect was as if the house itself were a part of the natural environment around it, and from past experience Annja knew that the design was deliberate. Roux was a man who liked his privacy and went to some lengths to see that it remained protected.\n\nThe driver must have called ahead, as Garin was waiting for her on the front steps when they pulled up. Standing with him was Henshaw.\n\n\"Welcome back, Ms. Creed,\" Henshaw said, giving her a small nod of welcome as she stepped from the car.\n\nShe grinned. That was Henshaw, positively overwhelming with his emotional displays, she thought.\n\n\"Good to see you,\" she told him. She turned her attention to his companion. \"Hello, Garin.\"\n\n\"Annja,\" he answered just as solemnly, but his eyes twinkled with mischief behind his unruffled exterior.\n\nWith her ever-present backpack slung over her shoulder, Annja entered the house with Garin while Henshaw got her overnight bag from the trunk. She could already imagine his scowl as he saw the size of her suitcase. She wasn't the type to travel with more than the few basic items she needed, while he was a firm believer in a woman's right to be prepared for anything and to travel with a wardrobe large enough to let her do so, especially a woman as attractive as Annja. He'd never come right out and said so\u2014the sun would stop revolving around the earth when that happened\u2014but she'd managed to piece together the gist of his viewpoint from the few comments and frowns he'd made to her over the years.\n\nThe knowledge that he'd scowl all the more should he discover that she intentionally packed as light as she could just to tease him when coming here made her laugh aloud.\n\nMaybe this was going to be a fun three days, after all.\n\nAnnja stepped into the foyer, with its vaulted ceiling and Italian marble floors. No matter how many time she visited, it never ceased to amaze her at the luxury Roux had surrounded himself with over the years. He seemed to be trying to forget the long, hard years he'd served in the field with nothing more than his arms and armor for material possessions and she had to admit he was doing an excellent job of it.\n\nGarin led her through the lower floor to Roux's personal study, one of the largest rooms in the entire house. It was two stories tall and stuffed to the gills with shelves full of books, artifacts and artwork. Stacks of paper streamers rested on a nearby table, along with a pile of balloons. A tank of helium gas stood beside it.\n\n\"Roux is out at a high-stakes poker game for the afternoon,\" Garin told her. \"Henshaw will be picking him up around dinnertime, which means we only have a couple of hours to get the place decorated and...\"\n\nHe trailed off at seeing her expression. \"What?\" he growled.\n\nAnnja laughed; she couldn't help it. Imagining him with those blue and yellow streamers in his huge hands was just too much. It was so not Garin. From cold-blooded killer to interior decorator\u2014would wonders never cease?\n\nWhen at last she could find her voice again, she said, \"I'm sorry, Garin, really, I am. I just never expected you to go to so much trouble for Roux and the change is a bit, um, unexpected. Nice, but unexpected.\"\n\nHe accepted her apology with a shrug and the two of them got to work. By the time Henshaw came in an hour later to check on them, they had finished strewing paper streamers throughout the room, even draping them on the massive stone sarcophagus that occupied one corner and wrapping them around the stuffed and mounted corpse of an Old West gunfighter that stood in the other, turning him from a cigar-store Indian-style display to a blue-and-yellow mummy. They were getting started on tying the balloons together into bunches.\n\nHenshaw gave the room a once-over, his only discernible reaction the slight raising of an eyebrow as he took in the steamerwrapped gunfighter in the corner. Turning back to his partners in crime, he said, \"I'm off to get Mr. Roux. I shall return in approximately one hour. We shall dine shortly after that.\"\n\nGarin had several phone calls to make so Annja spent the time wandering through Roux's house, looking at the variety of artifacts that he had on display. While she might not agree with his methods of acquisition, since he had several items that were on current lists of objects either stolen or banned from being removed from their countries of origin, she could appreciate the beauty of the collection itself. She was examining a vase that had apparently been discovered in the remains of Knossos, the king's palace on the island of Crete, when her phone chirped. Pulling it out of her pocket, she saw that she had a text message from Garin.\n\nThey're here, was all it said.\n\nShe dashed back through the halls, slipping through the main foyer only seconds before Henshaw and Roux entered the house, and joined Garin in the study. There they waited for the guest of honor.\n\n\"Surprise!\" they shouted when Henshaw led Roux into the room.\n\nThe older man started, then scowled first at the two of them and then back over his shoulder at Henshaw.\n\n\"Traitor!\" he said, \"I suppose you're in on this, too, then? What are they doing here?\"\n\nHenshaw gave one of his rare smiles. \"Celebrating your birthday, of course, sir.\"\n\nGarin smiled easily, ignoring Roux's brusque manner. \"Did you think we'd forget?\"\n\n\"It's not a question of forgetting. You've never bothered with my birthday before. What's so different this year?\"\n\nBut he accepted the surprise good-naturedly and even began to enjoy himself as the evening wore on. They ate together in the dining room down the hall\u2014braised duck in a pear chutney, which Annja thought was exquisite\u2014then returned to the study for drinks and conversation.\n\nGarin and Roux had lived so long and seen so much that Annja could listen to them for hours. Roux was entertaining them all with a tale of the time he'd slipped inside a royal palace for a rendezvous with a visiting princess when what sounded like gunfire split the night air outside.\n\n\"Did you hear that?\" Annja asked.\n\nThe other three had for they were already in motion. A lifetime spent in dangerous situations had fine-tuned their senses, including Henshaw's, and they all recognized the sound of guns when they heard them. Annja did, too; she was just surprised to be hearing them at Roux's secluded estate.\n\nHenshaw went straight to the computer sitting on a nearby desk. As he settled into the seat in front of it an alarm began to sound throughout the house. He silenced it with the touch of a button and then pressed another. A section of the wall to the left of where he sat split apart as a result, revealing sixteen security monitors in four rows of four. Each of them showed a different part of the manor grounds and on several of them Annja saw gray shapes racing across the lawn, firing at the hired security force as they came.\n\nThe hiss of hydraulics captured Annja's attention and she turned away from the monitors to see both Roux and Garin waiting impatiently for the vault at the back of the room to finish opening. Annja hadn't been inside that room since her first visit to the estate but remembered the treasure trove of multiple currencies and weapons it contained.\n\nRoux could have armed and financed a small private army with what was in room.\n\nIt was the weapons stored in the vault that her two companions were going for. Garin armed himself with a pair of heavy pistols while Roux took a rifle for himself and then carried another over to Henshaw.\n\nGarin held up a pistol for Annja. \"Here, take this.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Thanks but I'm already carrying all the weaponry I need.\"\n\n\"Suit yourself,\" Garin replied, then joined the others at the security station where Roux was trying without much success to reach the head of his security detail on the radio.\n\nWhen he was unable to get a response, Henshaw gestured to the escape tunnel at the back of the vault. \"If we leave now, sir, there will still be time to get you off the estate.\" Annja knew that it led up to the third floor and from there out onto the slope of the hill against which Roux's mansion had been built. A Jeep waited on the road above, ready to take the master of the house to safety at a moment's notice. Once before, when the estate had come under attack, all four of them had used the tunnel to get to safety. It sounded like a good plan to her now.\n\nRoux was silent for a moment, considering, and then looked over at Garin for his opinion.\n\nThe other man hefted the weapon he carried and grinned at Roux. \"It's your call, but if I were in your shoes, I'd be a little pissed. After all, it is your birthday.\"\n\nThere was no missing the challenge in Garin's answer and Annja bristled to hear it. He was practically daring Roux to make a stand! And of course, given the history between the two men, there was almost no way Roux was going to ignore that and do the right thing, which was to get the hell out of there while they still had a chance.\n\nShe was opening her mouth to advise against taking on the intruders themselves when Roux did precisely what she expected him to.\n\n\"Garin's right. This is my home and I'll be damned if I'm going to run like a rabbit at the first sign of trouble.\"\n\nAnd that was that. Annja knew any further discussion was futile. Roux had made up his mind and, being the good manservant that he was, Henshaw would carry out his instructions to the last. With it being three against one, there wasn't even any sense in arguing.\n\nAnnja shot a murderous look in Garin's direction, but he was studying the images on the monitor and didn't see it. Or if he did, he chose to ignore it, which would certainly be in keeping with his usual behavior.\n\nIf something happens to Roux...\n\nShe would just have to ensure that it did not.\n\nThey quickly devised a plan that, when it came down to it, was pretty basic. The four of them would take up position inside the foyer and defend the house against anyone who tried to enter.\n\nAnnja just hoped it would work.\n\nThey left the study and quickly made their way through the house toward the front entrance. Roux led the way, followed by Henshaw and Garin, with Annja bringing up the rear. They were just passing a wide staircase that led to the second floor when Annja skidded to a halt.\n\nThe others ran on, but her attention was caught by the landing on the second floor. Her intuition was calling to her, telling her the problem was above her, on the second floor, rather than out front where the others were headed. Ever since taking possession of the sword she'd been subject to heightened senses and her intuition was just one of them. Right now it was telling her that there was a problem on the second floor, one that would come back to bite them in the ass if they didn't deal with it right away, and she had learned to trust such instincts.\n\nWere they too late? she wondered. Were the intruders already inside the manor house?\n\nLeaving a potential enemy at their backs could prove disastrous, so when she shouted at the others to come back and received no response, she made the decision to check things out on her own.\n\nTurning away from the others, Annja charged up the stairs.\n\n## 3\n\nThere were six of them.\n\nThey were dressed in dark, loose-fitting outfits with hoods pulled up right around their heads and ninja masks covering the lower parts of their faces, making it impossible for her to identify them.\n\nFive of them stood in a rough semicircle facing the door, swords in hand. The sixth stood behind the first group, watching, and Annja didn't need to be told that this was their leader. If she was going to get some answers, Annja suspected she was going to have get past the first ranks and confront him herself.\n\nSo be it.\n\nThey didn't give her time to think, never mind formulate a plan. No sooner had she taken it all in, then they were upon her, the first three rushing forward while the other two closed up ranks in front of their commander.\n\nIt was almost as if they had been waiting for her.\n\nThe lead swordsman was quicker than the other two, eager for the chance to confront her. As he came forward she sized him up, her mind processing a hundred tiny details in the space of an eye blink, from the position of the sword in his hands to the angle of his hips to the length of his stride.\n\nShe moved to meet him.\n\nHe struck as soon as he was in range, intending to overpower her with his strength and speed. The tip of his sword came slashing in at her side, then rose at the last second in an attempt to reach her neck.\n\nAnnja brought her own sword up in her standard two-handed grip, parried his blow and, using his momentum against him, jammed an elbow into his face as his speed prevented him from stopping in time.\n\nThere was an audible crack, blood spurted from the intruder's nose and he dropped to the floor.\n\nAnnja kept going, moving in on the other two.\n\nThey were a bit more cautious than their comrade, splitting up and moving to either side as she continued forward. Annja knew they intended to force her to confront one of them and allow the other to strike at her exposed back, so she didn't hesitate, choosing instead to rush the one closest to her.\n\nSword met sword, the blows ringing in the air, as they flew through a flurry of exchanges. From the corner of her eye Annja could see the other intruder getting ready to make a strike, so when her current foe used a horizontal strike to parry her blow, she went with the motion, pivoting on one foot and driving the other directly into her attacker's gut, knocking him to the floor.\n\nEven as he was falling backward, Annja was continuing the turn and bringing her sword around in a sweeping arc, taking the third attacker's blow along its length and letting it slide harmlessly to the side. She let her momentum carry her into a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, swiveling sharply around to smack the intruder on the side of the skull with the flat of her blade.\n\nHe went down without a sound.\n\nThree down, three to go, she thought.\n\nGunfire sounded from downstairs, indicating that Roux and the others had encountered the enemy themselves, but Annja couldn't worry about them right now; she had her hands full.\n\nSeeing how well their comrades had done against her, the two attackers now facing her chose a different strategy. With a sudden shout they rushed her as one, blades out and ready to strike from either side.\n\nAnnja waited until they were nearly upon her and then jumped upward with one powerful shove of her muscular legs.\n\nThe swords passed harmlessly beneath her as she somersaulted over their heads, twisting in midair to land behind them, facing their exposed backs. Her sword was already in motion as she landed on catlike feet and she slashed the backs of their legs without a second thought, taking them out of the fight.\n\nOne more...\n\nShe whirled, expecting her final opponent to be closing the distance between them while her attention was elsewhere.\n\nThat wasn't the case.\n\nThe other man hadn't moved.\n\nHe stood watching her, his hands held calmly together behind his back, like an instructor evaluating her performance.\n\n\"Who are you and what do you want?\" Annja asked and was surprised at the depth of anger she heard in her voice.\n\nHer opponent said nothing.\n\n\"I'll give you one last\u2014\"\n\nShe never finished the sentence.\n\nOne second her opponent was standing in front of her with both hands behind his back and in the next he was leaping forward, a Japanese katana suddenly appearing in his hands. He lashed out in a vicious strike even before he landed, using his forward momentum to add force to the blow.\n\nAnnja just barely managed to deflect the strike as she brought her sword up, backpedaling as she did to give her some much-needed room, her mind grappling all the while at what she thought she'd just seen.\n\nOne minute his hands were empty and the next...\n\nWhere the hell had that sword come from? It was almost as if he'd conjured the thing out of midair....\n\nThe very notion was unthinkable.\n\nShe didn't have time to dwell on it as her opponent pushed his attack forward, the ferocity and force of his blows driving her backward across the floor as she sought to defend herself.\n\nShe had faced off against talented swordsmen before, but this guy was in another league. It was all she could do to protect herself from harm as she twisted and turned, keeping her weapon between her body and her opponent's deadly blade. Several times he managed to get the tip of his weapon past her defenses, leaving minor wounds in its wake. It didn't take her long to realize that he was toying with her; that, had he chosen to do so, he could have dispatched her more than once during their engagement. In no time at all she found herself backed into a corner, fighting for her life.\n\nShe could see several of the fighters she had already dispatched getting back to their feet and she knew it wouldn't be long before she was again horribly outnumbered.\n\nIf you're going to do something, Annja, you'd better do it now, she thought.\n\nShe gave a shout, putting everything she had into it. It distracted her opponent for the split second she needed to duck his current blow and strike out with her own.\n\nFor a moment she thought she'd done it, that she'd punctured his defenses and would score a strike against him, perhaps even a fatal one, but then his weapon came around impossibly fast and caught the hilt of her own. Annja was left watching in dismay as her sword spun out of her hands and away from her, tumbling through the air to clatter against the floor several yards to one side.\n\nAs soon as the sword struck the ground that it vanished into the otherwhere.\n\nBut even as Annja called it to hand once more, she realized that her assailant's strike was already inside her defenses and time seemed to slow as she caught sight of that shining steel blade arcing toward her.\n\nThe gleaming blade grew in her vision, descending in a lightning-quick strike aimed at her exposed neck. But rather than take her head off at the shoulders, as Annja fully expected it to do, the sword was diverted at the last second so that it merely cut free a lock of her hair.\n\nFor a moment Annja's gaze met that of her opponent and she could have sworn the other was silently laughing at her. I could have taken you at any time, those eyes said. And for the first time since taking up Joan's sword, Annja felt outclassed.\n\nThen Garin was looming in the doorway, pistols in hand, and gunfire filled the room. He mercilessly cut down those Annja had been unwilling to slay only moments before, their bodies twisting and jerking like marionettes as the bullets thundered into them. He was firing with both hands, so he wasn't as accurate as usual and a few stray shots whined in Annja's direction, forcing her to dive to the floor to avoid being hit.\n\nWhen she looked up again, her attacker had turned from her and was already halfway across the room, headed for an open casement window that she had failed to notice when she'd first arrived.\n\nSo that's how they got inside, she thought. And apparently that's how they intended to get out again. But not if she could help it.\n\n\"Garin! The window!\" she shouted.\n\nGarin spun in her direction and brought his arms up, the guns roaring in the small confines of the room. Bullets split the air and slammed into the area all around the window, but Annja's attacker managed to slip through the opening without being hit.\n\nAnnja wasn't ready to let him get away that easily.\n\n\"Oh, no, you don't,\" she said through gritted teeth, angry at having been bested so handily. With her sword in hand she ran for the window herself, trusting Garin to stop firing when he saw her move.\n\nGarin shouted something at her, but Annja didn't hear. She was almost to the window itself when a hand appeared from outside and tossed something dark into the room in front of her.\n\nIt hit the floor and rolled toward her.\n\nShe had a split second to think, Grenade! and throw herself to the side before the explosive device went off.\n\n## 4\n\nIt felt as if a giant hand picked her up and threw her against the floor, the concussion hammering her senses until her head reeled. She bounded off the marble floor and slid into the wall with enough force to nearly knock her senseless.\n\nOnly the fact that it had been a concussion grenade, rather than an explosive one, saved her life. She was still trying to figure out which way was up when Garin rushed to her side.\n\n\"Annja! Are you all right?\" he asked, his voice seeming to come from miles away as the roaring in her ears continued.\n\nShe nodded, still too caught up in the emotion of the moment to speak. Her heart was beating like crazy and she fought to get her breathing under control as Garin helped her into a sitting position.\n\nAt last she found her voice.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"Yes, I'm all right.\"\n\nUsing his arm for support she pulled herself all the way to her feet and then stood on still-wobbling legs. Her gaze landed on the lock of hair that the intruder's sword had cut from her head.\n\nToo close.\n\nShe glanced over at the intruders. Or rather, what was left of them. Garin hadn't spared any ammunition it seemed; every body was riddled with bullet holes and blood leaked across the marble floor beneath them.\n\n\"Did you have to kill them all?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nNow why didn't that surprise her? \"But if you had managed to only wound one or two, we might have been able to question them. Learn who they were and why they were here.\"\n\nGarin grunted. \"Or they might have managed to kill us both. Thank you, but I'll take the safer way out every time, particularly where my life is concerned.\"\n\nAnnja did not doubt that in the slightest. When it came to protecting his long life, Garin was exceedingly ruthless.\n\nAt any rate, it was too late now to argue about it.\n\nGarin stepped over to the window and cautiously looked out, but the intruder must have been long gone for he turned away, shaking his head. He was on his way back to Annja's side when Roux and Henshaw arrived.\n\n\"Is everyone all right?\" Roux asked as he stepped into the room, surveying the death and destruction before him.\n\n\"We're fine,\" Annja replied as Garin nodded in assent.\n\n\"What happened up here?\" Roux asked.\n\nAnnja explained how she'd arrived to find the intruders already in the room and what had happened after that. She didn't mention her near defeat at the hands of the final swordsman; that was for her and her alone. No one was too surprised at the realization that Annja had held off six attackers on her own; they had all seen her wield Joan's sword at one time or another in the past and they knew just how deadly she could be with the weapon in hand.\n\n\"Did they say anything? Do anything that gave you some idea what they might have been after?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head.\n\n\"I don't get it,\" Roux said. He glanced around the room, a puzzled expression on his face. \"The assault force at the front of the house seems to have been a diversion. They made no attempt to take the manor itself and only put up just enough of a fight to keep the security force occupied.\"\n\n\"Given what we know at this point, I'd say the whole thing was a diversion to allow this group to enter the house from the back,\" Henshaw suggested.\n\n\"A logical assumption, I agree, but why? What was it they were after?\" Roux glanced at the weapons decorating the walls and Annja could see him silently cataloging each one, gauging whether there was something valuable enough among them to warrant such an attempt. By the confused look on his face she could guess that the answer to that question was a solid no.\n\nAs the others looked on, Garin squatted next to one of the bodies. Reaching out, he pulled off the dead man's ninja mask and hood, revealing his face.\n\nThe man was Asian. Somewhere in his thirties or so, was Annja's guess. He was dressed in a dark blue coverall, similar to those worn by special forces units all around the world, with dark combat boots on his feet. A quick check showed that any identifying tags or markings had been stripped from the uniform.\n\n\"Recognize him?\" Annja asked, only half-jokingly.\n\nGarin scowled at her, annoyed by the comment apparently. \"No, I don't recognize him,\" he replied. \"Do you?\"\n\nAnnja snorted. She wasn't the one who dealt in the shadow world of dirty tricks and ruthless competition.\n\nNeither Roux nor Henshaw had ever seen the man. With Henshaw's help, Garin lined the bodies up next to one another and then he began to methodically search them for information while the other three looked on. He stripped them of their masks and pulled back their hoods, gazing at each face as if it might be able to tell him something. He went through their pockets, checked the labels on their clothing and even looked inside the boots they all wore.\n\nFinally he stood, a disgusted look on his face.\n\n\"Nothing,\" he said. \"They're as clean as a whistle.\"\n\n\"Professionals, eh?\" Henshaw asked, and the expression on his face told Annja how he felt about that revelation. A random break-in was one thing, but the knowledge that this had been planned and executed to within a fair chance of success was something else entirely.\n\nGarin nodded. \"Seems to be,\" he replied. \"Though that doesn't tell us what they were after.\"\n\n\"Or whom,\" Roux added.\n\nAnnja had been content to listen in on the exchange but broke in at this point. \"What do you mean 'whom'?\"\n\n\"Seems rather obvious, doesn't it?\" Garin answered for him. \"They slip a group in the back door while the security team is otherwise occupied dealing with the assault out in front. With all of our attention in that direction, the second group would have had the opportunity to move through the house at will. Probably could have ambushed any one of us before we even knew they were there.\"\n\nHenshaw glanced over at Annja. \"Seems you saved the day, Ms. Creed.\"\n\n\"But that still doesn't tell us what they were after.\" Roux scowled down at the bodies in front of him. From his expression Annja knew he would have killed them himself had they lived through the assault.\n\nShe caught Garin staring at their host and recognized that mischievous expression in his eye.\n\nUh-oh.\n\n\"Pissed anyone off lately, Roux?\" he asked, perhaps with a bit more force than he'd intended.\n\nThe damage was done, however. Roux noticeably stiffened, then shot back with, \"No more than usual. Perhaps they were after someone with a bit less scrupulous business dealings.\"\n\nNow it was Garin's turn to bristle. \"And what's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"Just what I said. You have a far greater capacity for annoying others than I do! Maybe they were here to settle a debt with you.\"\n\nThe younger man threw up his hands in annoyance and took a step toward his former companion. \"Oh, I get it. It is your home that is attacked, your security that is penetrated, but suddenly I'm the one to blame.\"\n\nRather than back down, Roux moved to meet him. \"You're right\u2014it is my home that was attacked, my security that was penetrated. And I suppose it is just a strange coincidence that it happened on the evening that you planned a surprise party for me, now, isn't it?\"\n\nAnnja watched as Garin's face grew red with anger. \"You think I had something to do with this? That I would stoop so low as that? To try and kill you in your own home?\" He was shouting now, and Roux was shouting right back, throwing accusations back and forth like some misguided game of catch.\n\nHenshaw stepped between the two men, hands up, holding them back, trying to dissipate the anger before the two went after each other with more than words. The goodwill generated earlier in the evening was gone. If she didn't do something quickly, Annja realized, there would be blood on the floor soon.\n\n\"Stop it, both of you!\" she said sharply, and much to her surprise, they actually did.\n\n\"Given the incredible number of artifacts and pieces of art inside this house, the most reasonable assumption is that this was nothing more than a well-staged robbery. Lucky for us and unlucky for them, they just happened to choose the wrong night.\"\n\nBoth men backed off but it was clear that no one was happy with the situation. After a few minutes of angry silence, Roux pulled Henshaw aside and spoke to him quietly, occasionally casting glances in Garin's direction.\n\nGarin, on the other hand, pretended to ignore him, then announced that he was returning to the study downstairs. Annja went with him. It was a good ten minutes before Roux joined them, which was probably for the best as it gave both men some time to cool down.\n\nWithin minutes of his arrival it was clear that the night was over. What had made the evening enjoyable was gone and the chances were slim that they would be able to recapture it. It wasn't so much the armed assault on Roux's home, though that would normally be enough to put anyone off their game, but the suspicions that had been tossed around afterward that made their continued conversations strained and uncomfortable. After a short period of time Garin excused himself, claiming a business engagement early in the morning, and offered to give Annja a ride back to her hotel.\n\nWhen she refused, he said, \"Suit yourself,\" and left the estate without even a goodbye to their host.\n\nWhat had started so well had ended badly and Annja couldn't help but wonder how many times over the years the same thing had happened.\n\nNo wonder the two of them were reluctant to spend any time together, she thought.\n\nTo fill the silence after Garin's departure, Annja asked Roux whether he had called the local authorities or those in Paris. \"Detectives from the city would probably be better equipped to handle this kind of thing,\" she reasoned.\n\nRoux stared at her. \"Why on earth would I want to do something so...counterproductive?\"\n\nAnnja was almost certain that the word on his lips had been stupid, not counterproductive, but she let it go in order to deal with the issue at hand. \"Your estate has been attacked. People have died. How can you not call the police?\"\n\n\"Quite simply, really. We'll deal with this internally, just as we always do.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nHe cut her off. \"I said no police, Annja. I don't need incompetent idiots poking around my house, touching my things, when my staff is perfectly capable of handling this on their own.\"\n\nAt that moment Henshaw stuck his head in the door. \"The room's been cleared, sir. The cleaning crew will be in first thing in the morning to scrub the blood off the floor and to patch the bullet holes by the window.\n\n\"Very good, Henshaw. Thank you.\"\n\nAnnja was aghast. \"You can't just destroy evidence like that!\"\n\nRoux laughed and this time it was an ugly sound. \"This is my home, Annja. I can do whatever I want in it, including shooting armed intruders foolish enough to enter it. You and your friend Garin would do well to remember that I am not the feeble old man you appear to think I am.\"\n\nWith that he got up and left the room, leaving Annja staring openmouthed in amazement that he had felt the need to threaten her, of all people. Just what had this night come to?\n\nDeciding she'd had her share of five-hundred-year-old egos for the evening, she strode through the house and back to the second floor, intending to collect her backpack from the room she'd stored it in and get the heck out of there before she said something she would regret later.\n\nBut once on the second floor, she felt herself drawn back to the room where she'd come close to losing her life, as if called there by the secrets they were trying so hard to figure out.\n\n## 5\n\nAnnja Creed stood inside the doorway and let her gaze just wander about, without focusing on anything in particular. Her thoughts kept returning to those few moments just before the fight, when she'd first entered the room. She could still see them in her mind's eyes, the first five men arranged in two precise rows, their swords out and ready, providing the most protection possible for their leader. They had all been standing still, eyes forward, almost as if they had been...\n\nWaiting.\n\nThat was what was bothering her.\n\nThey hadn't been moving throughout the room. They hadn't been actively looking through the artifacts on the walls or heading toward the door to join their colleagues at the front of the house.\n\nThey'd been standing still.\n\nWaiting.\n\nBut for what?\n\nShe didn't have a clue.\n\nShe looked past the bloodstains on the floor and the pile of extra sheets that had been set there in case more were needed to transport the bodies out of the house, and tried to see the place through fresh eyes.\n\nShe was missing something and she knew it. It hovered there, on the edge of her mind, like a presence felt but not seen, a watcher in the darkness. There was something here for her to find, something important, but all she could see was row upon row of swords and the fragments of the window scattered across the floor thanks to the combination of Garin's bullets and the concussion wave of the grenade.\n\nFinally, frustrated and more than a bit annoyed at everyone involved, she turned away, intending to arrange a ride back to her hotel and call it a night.\n\nThat was when her eye caught something out of place, a slight anomaly in the otherwise orderly arrangement of the collection.\n\nShe turned back and began going over the rows of weapons again, one item at a time, piece by piece, until she could rule each out.\n\nThere!\n\nStanding on the hilt of a broadsword that was remarkably similar to the one that had come to her through the centuries was a small figure. When she stepped closer to get a better look, she discovered that it was made from paper. The origami figure was in the shape of a dragon, with swept back wings and a long winding tail.\n\nShe stared at it, trying to figure out how it had gotten there.\n\nAnnja had been around Henshaw enough times to know that he ruled the cleaning staff with an iron hand. None of them would have dared leave something like the origami dragon behind, no matter how innocuous it seemed. Certainly Henshaw would never do such a thing himself.\n\nThe lack of dust on the weapons meant that the display had been cleaned recently, probably in the past day or two. In turn, logic dictated that the paper figurine could only be that old, as well; after all, had the cleaning crew found it they would have thrown it away, if only to save themselves from Henshaw's ire if he found it himself.\n\nWhile there was certainly nothing innately threatening about a small piece of paper folded into the shape of a mythical creature, something about this one made Annja distinctly uncomfortable.\n\nIt was so unexpected and so out of place that it made her skin crawl, the same way hearing a voice in a darkened room when you think you are alone will.\n\nIt was almost as if it had been purposely left behind. A small token to remind them that someone other than themselves had been here, in this place, where no outsider should be.\n\nShe reached out to pick it up and then thought better of it and swiftly withdrew her hand. If it had been left by the intruders, then she needed to take care to preserve whatever evidence might have been left behind.\n\nShe needed to treat it as carefully as she might a thousand-year-old artifact just recently exposed to the light.\n\nAnnja left the display room and walked down the hall to the room, where she'd left her backpack. Retrieving her digital camera, she returned to the display room.\n\nShe half expected the origami dragon to be gone when she got back\u2014having it disappear would be about par for the course that evening\u2014but it was still there, right where she left it. She turned on her camera and went to work. She took close-up pictures of the figure from as many angles as possible and then made certain to get some positioning shots, as well, to illustrate just where on the wall the sword on which it stood was hung.\n\nWhen she was finished, she used a pair of tweezers to lift the paper sculpture off the shelf.\n\nNow it was time to do some serious research.\n\nRoux had already refused to bring the intrusion to the attention of the Paris police, but that didn't mean that Annja was out of options.\n\nFar from it, in fact.\n\nFROM A PUBLIC PAY phone in Paris the call was routed through a number of middlemen and cutouts, designed to hide the origin of the contact should anyone be listening in, until it was at last picked up via cell phone in the back of a limousine.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"She's an interesting opponent. Perhaps even a worthy one.\"\n\n\"I didn't hire you to evaluate her abilities. Can you carry out the task we discussed or not?\"\n\nThere was a soft, mocking laugh. \"Of course I can. Am I not the Dragon, myth incarnate and legend made flesh?\"\n\n\"Don't be overconfident. She's survived far too often when the odds were arrayed against her. You'd do well to remember that.\"\n\nAgain the laugh. \"Let me worry about the odds. You just be sure the money is in the account as agreed. You have the hotel information?\"\n\n\"Yes. She's staying at the Four Seasons.\"\n\n\"Oh, fancy. Nothing but the best, I see.\"\n\nThe other ignored the jibe. \"Remember, she must give up the sword voluntarily. Anything else will defeat our purposes.\"\n\n\"I know the details. You remember the money and we won't have any issues.\"\n\nThe call ended as quickly and as anonymously as it had begun.\n\nJust the way both parties preferred it.\n\n## 6\n\nBecause Henshaw was still involved in the cleanup at the estate, Roux had one of his other men drive Annja back to her hotel in the city. She was fine with that; if she had seen Henshaw again that night she would have had to tell him just what she thought of his participation in eradicating a crime scene and that wouldn't have gone over well with either of them.\n\nOnce back at the hotel, she checked her messages at the front desk and then rode the elevator to the sixth floor. Not satisfied with anything as simple as a basic hotel room, Garin had booked her into a three-room suite, complete with a spa bath, a comfortable sitting room and a separate bedroom.\n\nAs soon as she was safely ensconced inside, Annja fired up her laptop and hooked her digital camera to it, downloading the pictures she'd taken of the origami dragon. Once she was finished she chose four of the best images and then attached them to an e-mail to her friend, Bart McGille.\n\nA Brooklyn detective who was also a dear friend, Bart had helped her in the past when she needed information, and he was as good a source as any to start with.\n\nDear Bart,\n\nAttached are several photos of an origami figure that was left behind by a thief who broke into a friend's apartment in Paris. Due to the owner's reluctance to involve the police, I can't have the authorities here examine the figure but it has certainly sparked my curiosity. Can you do an Interpol search for me and let me know if anything similar has turned up at other crime scenes?\n\nThanks,  \nAnnja\n\nHer explanation seemed plausible enough to her and she was hopeful Bart would take it at face value and do some digging on her behalf. If he came up with anything, she'd use that to get to the bottom of the attack on Roux's estate. She knew there was more going on there than met the eye, but with Garin and Roux on the outs with each other it was going to take a crowbar to get either of them to talk more about it.\n\nFinished, she suddenly realized how tired and sore she was. Her body ached from a combination of the effort of hand-to-hand combat and the physical hammering she'd taken from the concussion grenade. Never mind the long flight from New York. A hot bath and a decent night's sleep would do her some good, she decided.\n\nThe hotel had kindly supplied a selection of bath crystals and she selected one jar at random and threw a handful in while the water was running. Soon the sweet scent of jasmine filled the room.\n\nAnnja sighed as she slid naked into the hot water and for the next twenty minutes did nothing but bask in its heated embrace.\n\nOnce she had managed to soak some of the soreness from her bones, she got out, dried off and wrapped herself in one of the big, fluffy bathrobes the hotel provided. Not wanting to go to sleep with wet hair, she took the time to comb it out and blow it dry. When she finished, she slipped into a pair of comfortable cotton pajamas and climbed into bed.\n\nSleep came quickly.\n\nTHE LATCH ON THE French doors that led to the balcony in the sitting room snapped open with a soft click about an hour later. The door opened silently from the outside. A shadow detached itself from the others that hugged the exterior wall and slid inside the room without making any more noise than the door had.\n\nThe intruder stood to one side once inside the room, waiting for eyes to adapt to the level of light and listening for any sound or sense of movement.\n\nThere was none.\n\nThe guest slept on in the bedroom next door.\n\nThe intruder crossed the sitting room with a few quick, sure steps, almost as if passing from shadow to shadow. At the bedroom door the intruder paused, listening again.\n\nThe door to the bedroom swung open and a shadow slipped inside the room as swiftly and quietly as it had entered the suite itself.\n\nOn the bed, the sleeping form of Annja Creed could be seen in the dim light coming in through the window's half-drawn curtains.\n\nThe intruder carefully walked around the bed until Annja's face was in sight and stared down at it for several long moments.\n\nWhy you?\n\nWhat makes you so special?\n\nAnnja did not reply.\n\nAs the intruder looked on, Annja mumbled something in her sleep and flailed about with one arm.\n\nThe Dragon watched for a long time, a wraith standing in the darkness beside the bed, eyes alert and ready.\n\nIt would be so easy to end it here, the Dragon thought silently. A sudden thrust and it would all be over but the dying. The Dragon could then search the suite in a leisurely manner; no doubt the sword was here somewhere.\n\nBut the sensei's instructions had been clear. The sword must be given voluntarily or it was useless to him. Disappointing the sensei was not something the Dragon wanted to do, ever.\n\nIt would seem that the easy solution was off the table for now. The Dragon would have to wait to claim its next victim.\n\nThe intruder bent close.\n\n\"Until next time, Annja Creed.\"\n\nA SWORD CAME WHISTLING in toward her unprotected throat and Annja knew that this was it. She was about to die...\n\nShe awoke, bolting upright in bed, her heart hammering like a thousand kettledrums all at once, a thunderous booming sound. Her eyes were already searching the interior of the room for her opponent, her hand tight on the hilt of her sword as she called it into existence from the otherwhere.\n\nBut there was no one there.\n\nThe room was empty.\n\nRealization came roaring in.\n\nA dream, just a dream, she told herself.\n\nShe pushed back the sheets and got out of bed. With the tip of her sword she checked to see if anyone was hidden behind the curtains, then turned to look out the window, expecting at any moment for a face to press itself up against the glass, horror-movie style, and announce that it was coming for her. But the glass remained empty, the space around her silent.\n\nSatisfied that no one was in the room with her, Annja turned, intending to investigate the rest of the hotel suite, only to come up short when she saw the door leading from the bedroom to the living area was open.\n\nHer mind whirled as she tried to remember\u2014had she left it open or closed it behind her?\n\nShe was certain that she had closed it before going to bed.\n\nOr, at least, ninety-five percent certain that she had.\n\nShe moved toward it with panther-light steps and carefully eased past, taking in the sitting room just beyond.\n\nIt, too, was empty.\n\nThe hotel room door was securely shut and locked, as were the French doors leading to the balcony outside.\n\nDespite what her gut was telling her, it appeared that no one had been in the room.\n\nStill, just to be safe, she took another few minutes to search the entire suite, including the closets, the bathroom and even under her bed.\n\nThen and only then, satisfied that she was indeed alone, did she release the sword back into the otherwhere and return to bed.\n\nThis time she made certain to shut the bedroom door firmly.\n\nHer last thought, as she drifted off to sleep, was that someone was watching.\n\n## 7\n\nWhen she checked her e-mail late the next morning, she discovered a very succinct note from Bart in reply to her.\n\nCall me, was all it said.\n\nA glance at the clock told her that it was early back in the States but she picked up the phone and dialed his number.\n\nA sleepy male voice answered. \"McGille.\"\n\n\"Hi, Bart. It's Annja.\"\n\n\"Hey! How's Europe?\"\n\n\"Not too bad.\" They chatted for a few moments about what they'd been up to recently and then Bart turned the conversation to the reason she had called.\n\n\"So what's this about a robbery?\"\n\nAnnja gave him the fake story she'd concocted about how her friend's apartment had been vandalized by a thief who'd left behind the origami figure as \"payment\" for what he'd stolen.\n\n\"Sounds like a job for the Paris police. Why send the pictures to me?\"\n\n\"My friend is subletting the place from the current tenant without the owner's permission. If she goes to the police, the owner finds out and that will be that.\"\n\nAnnja knew that was all she had to say. As a veteran New Yorker, Bart would understand the need to keep the sublet a secret; real-estate prices were so outrageous that subletting rent-controlled apartments had become a thriving black market in the Big Apple and Bart would no doubt believe the same about Paris. For all Annja knew, the situation in Paris might even be the same.\n\n\"Say no more,\" he said good-naturedly.\n\nOn the other end of the line Annja breathed a sigh of relief. \"So what did you find out?\"\n\n\"To tell you the truth,\" Bart replied, \"not much. I made a few phone calls, had some folks check some records for me, and what they came up with were all negatives. No similar crimes in your area. No record of origami figures being involved in any crime, regardless of the type, in more than seven years. Basically they found nothing to tie this burglary to any other, in France or elsewhere. Maybe your cat burglar just has a sense of humor.\"\n\nAnnja digested that for a moment, knowing that she was partially hampering Bart's ability to get her information by not telling him the entire story. Still, it couldn't be helped.\n\nSomething Bart said jumped out at her. \"What do you mean you didn't find any link to crimes committed in the past seven years? Were there some before that with the same M.O.?\" she asked.\n\nBart laughed. \"That's where you nearly gave me a heart attack. Ever hear of the Dragon?\"\n\nAnnja frowned. \"Wasn't there a Bruce Lee movie with that name?\"\n\n\"No, that was Enter the Dragon. Great movie, too. But that's not the Dragon I'm thinking of. This one is an international assassin who likes to leave little folded origami figures at the scenes of his kills.\"\n\nHe said it so matter-of-factly that at first Annja didn't think she'd heard him correctly.\n\n\"Did you just say 'assassin'?\"\n\n\"Yeah, an international hit man, if you can believe that. Responsible for more than eighteen deaths in half a dozen countries, including France. Real son of a you know what.\"\n\nAnnja felt her stomach do a slow roll as she remembered Garin's words from last night. Probably could have ambushed any one of us before we even knew they were there.\n\nBart wasn't finished, though. \"And talk about someone who loves their job, this guy managed to get up close and personal to each and every one of his victims. They say he took it as a personal challenge. He'd get in, do the deed and vanish before anyone even knew he'd been there. The police had nothing on him for years, except for those stupid little paper dragons he would leave behind with the bodies in his wake.\"\n\nBart laughed. \"You sure there wasn't a dead body lying next to that origami, Annja?\n\nAnger flared. \"Jeez, Bart, that's not funny!\"\n\n\"What? Okay, come on, Annja, lighten up a little. Do you think I'd still be yammering away on this end of the phone if I thought you and your friend were being targeted by some crazed international assassin?\"\n\nThat was the problem. He thought they were still talking about some harmless burglary.\n\nShe couldn't tell him the truth now; he'd be worried sick. \"No, I guess you wouldn't,\" she said instead, laughing it off, while inside she was burning to know more.\n\nLuckily Bart was a talker. \"And talk about old-fashioned. Guy manages to pull off eighteen major hits and not once does he use a gun? Come on! What is he, stupid?\"\n\nA shiver ran up Annja's spine. Hesitantly she asked, \"If he didn't use a gun, what did he use?\"\n\n\"A big-ass sword apparently. One of those curved Japanese blades, like the one Sean Connery carried in Highlander.\"\n\nAnnja hadn't seen the movie, but there was no mistaking what Bart was talking about. \"A katana?\" she asked, dreading the answer but needing to know, anyway.\n\n\"Yep, that's it. A katana. Can you imagine getting close enough to a major political figure to try and take him out with a freakin' sword? When everybody else has guns? What a maniac!\"\n\nThis was getting worse by the minute.\n\n\"Did they ever catch him?\"\n\n\"Of course they did. Why do you think I'm not worried about you, given the kind of trouble you get yourself into?\"\n\nShe had to admit he was right; ever since taking possession of the sword, she had a knack for getting herself into the biggest messes possible.\n\nLike now.\n\n\"So what happened to him?\"\n\nBart snorted. \"Got blown up when he tried to take out the British prime minister at a summit in Madrid back in 2003. There wasn't enough left of him to fill a Baggie.\"\n\nJust when she started to feel better about the situation Bart had go and ruin things again.\n\n\"So they never found a body?\"\n\n\"What did I just say? There wasn't anything left of him to bury, Annja. But trust me, you and your friend can rest easy. Whoever it was that broke into your friend's flat was probably just trying to be funny.\"\n\n\"Some sense of humor,\" she said, and laughed along with him while inside she was getting more and more nervous by the minute.\n\nShe made small talk for a couple of moments more, thanked Bart for what he had dug up and then got off the phone as quickly and as gracefully as she could without raising his suspicions.\n\nAs soon as she had, she headed for her laptop.\n\nA quick search online turned up a decent number of feature stories and news reports from the eighties through the nineties that talked about the mysterious Dragon. All of them told the same basic story Bart had\u2014assassin for hire, no one knew his background or what he looked like, or even if the Dragon was a man or a woman, only that he always killed with his weapon of choice, a katana, and would leave a piece of rice paper folded into the shape of a dragon at the scene of every killing. The press had given him the moniker \"the Dragon\" when word of the origami figures leaked out, and to this day it was the only name they had for him. The Dragon's identity vanished in the same explosion that had claimed his physical body.\n\nShe sat back, staring off into space, as she pondered the similarities. An international assassin who killed with a Japanese katana and left origami figures in his wake, and an unknown intruder who broke into a rich man's home, carried a katana and left an origami figure in his wake. They were too alike to be just a coincidence. Either someone had decided to take up the killer's mantle or the killer himself had never actually died.\n\nAfter all, there hadn't been a body, she reminded herself.\n\nMaybe the Dragon had spent the past few years in hiding, recovering from injuries sustained from his last assassination attempt, and had only recently chosen to come out of hiding.\n\nBut why would a political assassin be after Roux? she wondered.\n\nThe most logical answer would be that he wasn't. After all, Roux took considerable effort to stay out of the limelight and something like politics was anathema to a man like him. But what if the Dragon had decided to forgo political assassinations in favor of a mercenary lifestyle? Killing for hire, perhaps? That was a different story entirely.\n\nGarin had been right; Roux had angered enough people over the years that a list of those who held a grudge strong enough to try and kill him would be very long indeed.\n\nMore than a few of them had the means to do it, too.\n\nThis was not good\u2014not good at all.\n\n## 8\n\nGiven that she was starting to suspect the attack on the estate might actually have been an attempt to assassinate Roux, Annja decided that she was going to take another stab at discussing it with him and see if she could learn anything further that might help her fend off what she was beginning to see as a growing threat to his life.\n\nBut when she called the estate, she was informed by Henshaw that Roux was out and wouldn't return until evening. Annja explained that she needed to talk with him, but the majordomo guarded his boss's whereabouts like a mother grizzly guards her cubs and wouldn't tell her where he had gone or exactly when he was expected to return. Rather than spend any time arguing with him, she simply made an appointment to see Roux that evening and that was that.\n\nShe spent the next hour pacing back and forth in her hotel room, watching the minute hand creep around the clock and wishing it would go faster. When she couldn't stand it anymore, she decided to get out of the hotel and play tourist for a bit\u2014try to take her mind off her pending meeting with Roux. It had been some time since she'd had the opportunity to wander through the city at her leisure and she vowed that she'd make good use of what little time she had; after all, who knew when she'd be back this way again?\n\nAfter a quick shower she threw on a pair of khaki shorts, a deep blue T-shirt and her usual pair of low-rise hiking boots, grabbed an apple out of the fruit basket on the table and headed for the concierge's desk in the lobby. Arranging for a rental car to be available upon her return took only a few minutes thanks to the concierge's help, and with that taken care of, she was ready to enjoy the day.\n\nHer first stop, she decided, was going to be Sainte-Chapelle, the palatine chapel in the courtyard of the royal palace on the \u00cele de la Cit\u00e9. Originally built by Louis IX to store the many holy relics he had purchased from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, Baldwin II, including the supposed Crown of Thorns worn by Christ during his crucifixion, the chapel was best known for its fifteen stained-glass windows, each one nearly fifty feet high and picturing Biblical stories from Genesis to Revelation. Annja was as interested in the architecture of the restored chapel\u2014the original having been heavily damaged during the French Revolution\u2014as she was in the artifacts it had once contained. She had always wanted to visit, but had never found the time.\n\nAnnja was thankful that the cab ride was reasonably short, for the traffic was terrible and terrifying. When the driver announced that they had arrived, she practically leaped out of the cab and had to suppress a smile at his bewildered expression. She thanked him for the speedy arrival and paid the fare, then turned her attention to the ominous-looking building behind her, with its dark stone towers and conical roofs circa the thirteenth century, known as the Palais de Justice. Now housing several French courts, this wing of the building had once been home to the Conciergerie, the oldest prison in Paris, and had held such infamous prisoners as Robespierre and Marie Antoinette. It was now a museum, but that didn't do much to change the vibe that Annja picked up off the place. Just looking at it made her shiver, as she imagined what it must have been like to be a prisoner there, locked away in a cold, dark, vermin-infested cell.\n\nShe walked down the street until she came to the entrance that served the majority of the complex. After buying an admission ticket, she slipped through the gates and made her way in the direction of the chapel.\n\nThe royal palace had once stood on the spot the Palais de Justice now occupied and Annja knew it had connected directly to the chapel via a narrow corridor. It was designed that way to allow King Louis IX to pass directly into it without leaving the palace, in much the same way the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople had been able to enter the Hagia Sophia from his own residence. The king, who had died of a plague while on crusade, had been canonized by the pope and was now known as Saint Louis. The palace itself had disappeared ages ago, leaving the two-level church on its own, surrounded by the less sophisticated buildings of the Palais de Justice.\n\nThere was a fair-size crowd in attendance. Annja worked her way through it, intent on pursuing her own agenda and not wanting to get caught up in any of the guided tours that were taking place. Once inside the lower chapel, she pushed her way past the souvenir stand that seemed to occupy most of the space near the entrance and made her way out into the center of the floor. The high vaulted ceilings rose above her, the beams covered in red and gold, which provided a sharp contrast with the deep royal blue of the ceiling panels. The soft lighting gave the place a gentle and welcoming atmosphere. Annja knew that the lower chapel had served as a parish church for the inhabitants of the palace. It was rather plain, at least in comparison to the grandeur of the upper chapel, but she found a sense of peace and tranquility wrapping about her as she stood, gazing about. There was almost a sense of humility about the place, as if it knew not to overshadow its more famous cousin above, and Annja found that she liked the place despite its lack of sophistication.\n\nEnjoying what she had seen so far, Annja made her way toward the stairs to the upper chapel.\n\nUNNOTICED AMID THE CROWD by the souvenir tables, the Dragon watched Annja as she crossed the chapel floor, headed for the stairs to the upper level. The decision to follow her from the hotel had been an impulsive one. Watching her the night before had generated a certain amount of curiosity and, after some deeper reflection, it seemed that a bit of prudent observation might be in order at this point.\n\nBut so far, the target hadn't done anything but play tourist, something the Dragon found rather annoying.\n\nWhy would anyone waste time on such ridiculousness? Time was too precious to be squandered away in fruitless pursuits; every moment wasted here could have been spent accomplishing something of value.\n\nStill, there was something intriguing about the woman and when Annja at last reached the stairwell to the upper level, the Dragon headed in that direction, as well.\n\nHALFWAY UP THE STEPS Annja felt a chill wash over her. Bone deep, it seared her with its intensity. It felt as if Death himself had suddenly taken a particular interest, his gaze pausing on her for a heartbeat too long, letting some of the coldness of the grave seep into her flesh as a result, and instinct told her to run, to get away as fast as she could.\n\nShe shuddered, trying to shake off both the uncomfortable feeling as well as the solution that it had evoked, and then she casually turned to look back down the stairs behind her. She let her gaze travel across the floor of the lower chapel, searching for the source of that feeling, but as far as she could tell no one was looking at her and nothing seemed out of place. The interior of the church was just as it had been moments before, full of tourists taking in the sights and spending their money on souvenirs and cheap baubles.\n\nHer hand twitched and the image of the sword formed in her mind, but she quickly banished it away, disturbed that her first thoughts had been of violence. Equally disturbing, however, was the persistent feeling that she was in danger, and she had learned to trust those feelings. They had saved her life on more than one occasion.\n\nAnnja reached the top of the stairwell and moved to the side in order to let those behind her continue forward into the upper chapel. As they did, she watched their faces, but she didn't see anyone who looked even vaguely familiar.\n\nShrugging it off, she went back to enjoying her visit.\n\nThe upper chapel was far more ornate than the lower one; after all, this had practically been the king's private worship area. Supported by slender piers, the ceiling seemed to float high above the collection of magnificent stained-glass windows, giving the whole place a feeling of fragile beauty. The brochure she had been given along with her entrance ticket told Annja that there was more than six and a half thousand feet of stained glass around her, and within the deep reds and blues of the glass were some eleven hundred illustrated figures from the Bible.\n\nAnnja spun in a circle, drinking it all in. It was truly beautiful, there was no doubt about that, and her only regret was that she hadn't come to see it in the late afternoon when the setting sun would have been blazing through the colored glass, setting the room alight with its glow.\n\nThe huge rose-shaped window at the back of the church drew her attention and she was headed in that direction when that cold, uncomfortable feeling from several minutes before swept over her again, making her skin tingle.\n\nDetermined to get to the bottom of it, Annja stopped where she was and spun in another slow circle, ostensibly drinking in the view but actually checking out the area on all sides.\n\nAcross the chapel, in the shadow of one of the pillars that lined the walls, someone stood watching her.\n\nWhoever it was\u2014and from this distance she couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman\u2014wore a gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. The hood on the sweatshirt was pulled up, hiding the person's face, but even through the shadows Annja could feel the other's eyes upon her.\n\nAs if sensing her attention, the watcher suddenly stepped back and disappeared behind the column.\n\nAlmost before she'd thought about it, Annja found herself in motion, headed across the church at an angle, trying to intercept whoever it was that she had seen. There was only one exit from the upper level, the stairs by which she'd entered, and so she knew if she could reach them first she'd have a chance.\n\nThe gray sweatshirt flashed into view again. Her watcher was hugging the rear wall, headed for the stairs just as she'd suspected, and she quickened her own pace, trying not to lose sight of her quarry in the process.\n\nShe was almost upon him when a group of tourists spilled out of the stairwell onto the main floor, obscuring her view and making it difficult to move forward as quickly as she had been. She pushed her way through, ignoring the looks she was getting in return. No way was she letting him get away at this point!\n\nBut when she reached the stairs she was alone.\n\nHer quarry was nowhere to be seen.\n\nShe turned slowly about, searching through the crowd, ignoring the stares and the resentful looks as she tried to figure out just where he could have gone.\n\nShe saw a flash of gray slipping between two tourists and rushed to catch up.\n\n\"Hey!\" she shouted, startling those around her. \"Hold it right there!\"\n\nAnnja pushed her way through the crowd, determined not to let him get away a second time. She was going to get to the bottom of this right now!\n\nShe could see him, just a few people in front of her. He had not once looked back, which in itself was suspicious to her. Didn't he hear her calling? If he was innocent, wouldn't he look back and see what she was shouting about, just like so many of the others around them were now doing?\n\nThey were only a few steps away from the staircase when Annja put on a little extra burst of speed, pushed past a family of four who suddenly froze directly in her path like a bunch of deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car and reached out.\n\n\"Hey!\" she said, grabbing his arm and spinning him around. \"I said, hold it!\"\n\nShe had been expecting resistance and so was surprised when the other person turned suddenly toward her, nearly throwing them both off balance. A kid of about eighteen stared out at her in bewilderment from under the hood of the sweatshirt he wore. He shrugged her off and let out a stream of rapid-fire French. Although fluent in French Annja didn't need to know the language to understand what he was saying. \"What the hell is wrong with you?\" sounded pretty much the same in any dialect, given the tone and the look that went along with it.\n\nAnnja stepped back, holding her hands up as if to show they were empty and that she wasn't a threat. Clearly she had made a mistake. This wasn't the guy.\n\n\"Uh, sorry,\" she said, and then repeated it in French. \"Pardon, pardon. I thought you were someone else.\"\n\nA male voice spoke up immediately behind her. \"Mademoiselle? Is there something wrong?\"\n\nAnnja jumped at the sound, not having seen anyone approach, and turned to find a gendarme standing nearby, his gaze on both of them. The officer's hand was uncomfortably close to his pistol and it didn't seem to be the kid who had him upset.\n\nShe smiled and tried to look embarrassed, which wasn't hard to do, considering. \"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"There's no problem. None at all. I thought I saw an old friend and was trying to get his attention. I didn't mean to make anyone upset.\"\n\nThe kid spouted off an angry stream of French, determined to tell his side of the story. As the gendarme listened to the kid's explanation of what had happened, which included more than one reference to the \"crazy American lady,\" Annja stared over their heads at the crowd, searching for the person she had seen.\n\nBut aside from a number of bewildered tourists, there wasn't anyone there.\n\nDUMPING THE SWEATSHIRT INTO a nearby trash bin was all it took to transform the Dragon into someone else. Disguises work best if they are simple and this was as simple as it got. Looking like a completely different individual now, the Dragon was even able to walk directly past the Creed woman without her being the slightest bit the wiser.\n\nWith that kind of anonymity, the Dragon could have stepped right up and slipped a knife into her back without her even suspecting that anything was wrong until the cold blade pierced her flesh. It gave the Dragon a certain sense of heady power and it was only the orders that precluded the woman's death that prevented it from happening.\n\nAnother time, the Dragon thought, and reveled in the superior feeling all the way down the stairs, across the complex and out into the street.\n\nExiting the tourist attraction, the Dragon hailed a cab and went directly back to the Creed woman's hotel, intending to take a good look around the room while she was still dealing with the gendarme.\n\nThe Dragon had long ago learned that looking as though you belonged allowed you to get away with being somewhere you didn't almost ninety percent of the time. It was all about acting the part and having the right attitude. The employees at the hotel where the Creed woman was staying were no different than those anywhere else in the world; the Dragon marched straight through the lobby and into the elevator as if it were the most natural thing in the world and no one said a word.\n\nOnce inside the hotel, it was a simple matter to \"accidentally\" bump into a maid and pick the passkey right out of the pocket of her uniform. A quick trip up the stairs, a knock on the door to be certain no one was in the room and not ten minutes after entering the hotel the Dragon was standing inside the Creed woman's suite, just as easily as the night before.\n\nThis time, however, the Dragon didn't waste any time pondering the situation but set to work immediately to try to find the sword. The weapon had been described as a plain, unadorned broadsword and something like that could only be hidden in a few areas. The safe was out of the question; it was far too short and shallow. The shelf above the safe, on the other hand, was long enough and that was where the Dragon began.\n\nFrom there the search progressed through the room. Under the bed. Under the mattress. Behind the curtains in the corner of the room. Under the cushions of the sofa. Inside the entertainment center. Behind the bathroom door.\n\nThe Dragon looked everywhere that made sense, even taking the time to stand on a chair and look inside the heating vent, but it was no use.\n\nThe sword was nowhere to be found.\n\nA glance at the clock said it was time to get out of there; almost half an hour had already passed and the Creed woman might return at any moment.\n\nBut still the question nagged.\n\nWhat had she done with the sword?\n\nANNJA SAT IN THE BACK of a cab, trying to decide what to do next. The misunderstanding in the chapel had put her on edge, that was for sure, but Annja was determined not to let it ruin the rest of her day. She'd have enough tension once she had the opportunity to speak with Roux, she knew; for now, she needed to stop being so paranoid and enjoy herself. It wasn't as if the Dragon was after her, anyway; it was Roux who should be worried.\n\nHaving satisfied her need for architecture, she decided to take in some of the city's art. She directed the cabbie to take her to the Mus\u00e9e d'Orsay, overlooking the Louvre along the left bank of the River Seine. The building itself had once been a railway station serving Paris-Orl\u00e9ans, so she hadn't fully escaped the tug of form and design, but it now housed one of the more formidable displays of art in all of Paris, short of the Louvre itself. Once there she spent hours wandering up and down the long rows of displays, drinking in the creative talents of Renoir, Degas, Monet and van Gogh, just to name a few.\n\nHer visit was marred, however, by the memory of the figure she'd seen in the chapel and the now-constant feeling that she was under observation. More than once she tried to catch someone in the act, but each time she looked, she was unable to see anything or anyone out of the ordinary. No one turned away too quickly. No one let their gaze linger too long. The museum was full of patrons and they had their eyes on the paintings, not on her. Yet the feeling persisted and made her uncomfortable enough that she eventually decided to call it a day.\n\nShe returned to the hotel around sunset, took some time to freshen up and to calm her nerves and then, after picking up her rental car, she headed out of the city for her rendezvous with Roux.\n\nThe drive south passed without incident and it wasn't too long before she was pulling up in front of the massive gates that guarded the entrance into the estate.\n\nAs usual, once inside the house, Henshaw led her to the study, where she found Roux seated in the leather chair behind his desk, reading the day's copy of Le Monde.\n\nSeeing her, he rose and smiled. \"Annja, to what do I owe the pleasure?\"\n\nShe had already decided to play it straight. \"I wanted to talk to you about last night.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Roux ushered her over to a pair of leather armchairs and offered one to her while settling into the other one himself. \"Before you say anything else, let me apologize for my boorish behavior at the end of the evening. My remarks were totally uncalled for and I hope you let them pass as the angry grumblings of a man whose home had just been invaded by thieves.\"\n\nHe smiled pleasantly and Annja realized that he was being sincere; he really did feel bad for the things he had said to her. She gracefully accepted his apology and moved quickly past it to the reason she'd made the drive all the way out here.\n\nReaching into her backpack she withdrew a cardboard box in which she had safely tucked away the paper dragon, then withdrew the latter from inside the box. She stood the little paper dragon on the table between herself and her host.\n\n\"What's this?\" Roux asked, picking up the dragon and turning it over in his hands. \"What a marvelous specimen. I didn't know that you did origami.\"\n\n\"I don't,\" Annja replied. \"I discovered it in the display room last night while helping to clean up in the wake of the attack.\"\n\nRoux stopped looking at the figure and turned his head in her direction instead. She wasn't surprised by his carefully blank expression\u2014after all, he was a world-class poker player\u2014but the very fact that it was there told her what she needed to know.\n\nRoux understood the significance of what he was holding.\n\nHe wasn't going to make it easy, though. \"I'm sorry?\" he said, as if he hadn't heard her correctly.\n\nShe relayed the tale as quickly as possible\u2014how she'd gone back to the display room looking for something, she didn't know what; how she'd found the paper dragon and what she'd done afterward to try and understand just what the simple figure might mean. She told him of her suspicion that it had been left there intentionally, as a type of calling card, to let them know that this wasn't yet over and that they were up against a foe who made your typical hired gunman look like a schoolboy compared to the skills the other could bring to bear.\n\n\"I think your life is in great danger,\" she told him finally, and then sat back to await his reaction.\n\nRoux had been silent throughout, had let her get her facts on the table and had patiently waited through her explanation as she pointed out the things she'd done and the thought process she'd used to arrive at her conclusion.\n\nWhen she was finished, he sat quietly for a moment before speaking.\n\n\"You can't be serious,\" he said at last.\n\nIt was not the reaction Annja was hoping for.\n\n\"Of course I'm serious! Did you think I would drive all the way out here to talk to you just for the heck of it?\"\n\n\"But, Annja, seriously. Do you really think an international assassin, this mysterious Dragon, a hired gun who specialized in political killings, is really trying to kill me? Whatever for? What possible reason could he have? And let's not forget the fact that this Dragon is supposed to be dead.\"\n\n\"I don't know what reason he might have. That's what I was hoping you could tell me,\" she answered.\n\nRoux scowled and waved his hand in dismissal. \"Now you sound like Garin, for heaven's sake. 'Pissed anyone off lately, Roux?'\" he mimicked, in a passable imitation of the other man's voice. \"I'm the least likely man ever to be involved in politics, Annja.\"\n\n\"I know that, Roux. But what if it's something more? What if the Dragon is no longer interested in political killing but has decided to branch out, handle contract work, for instance?\"\n\nRather than convince him of her sincerity, her plea only made him laugh. \"Now you sound like something out of a spy novel, Annja. Political killing? Contract work? It was a simple robbery, nothing more.\"\n\n\"If that's the case, then what were they after?\" she asked hotly.\n\nFor just a second she thought she saw a triumphant gleam in Roux's eye. It was there and gone again in less than a second, so she couldn't be sure, but something deep down inside said she'd just played into his trap.\n\n\"While you were gone we were doing our homework, too, Annja. And we think we've found the answer to that very question.\"\n\nThe older man rose and walked over to his desk. From behind its massive bulk, he lifted a sword box and carried it back to Annja. Handing it to her, he said, \"Go on, open it.\"\n\nAnnja did so, revealing the long curved blade of a U.S. cavalry saber, circa the late eighteen hundreds, with a leather-wrapped hilt and brass guard. It was pitted in a few places, but she could still make out the initials GAC etched into the blade just above the guard.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked.\n\n\"The saber worn by General George Armstrong Custer the day he fell in battle at the Little Bighorn,\" Roux answered proudly.\n\nAnnja winced. \"I wouldn't be so quick to defend that claim.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Roux said, taking the box back from her and closing it up tight. \"I can assure you that the provenance of this blade is without blemish. Custer carried this sword the day he died and it has hung on my wall in that display room ever since I acquired it at a very private auction. It was the only item of any serious value in that room last night.\"\n\nRoux's idea of \"serious value\" was enough to bankroll a small country, but that didn't mean he was right. Annja would have bet her left arm that no one had come looking for that sword, namely because it wasn't worth the steel from which it was made. She knew Custer hadn't worn a saber at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and neither had any of the other officers in the Seventh Cavalry. Popular art showed him holding his cutlass aloft as the Indians surrounded him, but eyewitness accounts from that terrible day told a different story.\n\nShe tried to point this out to Roux, but he wanted nothing to do with it. Nor did he accept her arguments that a single experienced thief would have had an easier time breaking into the display room to steal the sword than a group the size of the one she'd encountered there. He had convinced himself that there wasn't any real danger and it seemed that nothing she said would sway him from that conclusion.\n\nWhen she finally left, hours later, she had gotten exactly nowhere. Her instincts were telling her that Roux was in danger, but he refused to see it.\n\nAs she climbed into her rental car, she was already trying to figure out what to do next. One thing was for sure, she wouldn't leave one of her friends in danger.\n\nROUX WATCHED THROUGH THE window as Annja descended the front steps, climbed into her rental car and drove off toward the gates. He heard someone enter the room behind him and without turning, he said, \"You heard?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Henshaw said. He never would have dreamed of listening in on his own accord, but Roux had ordered him to do just that.\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, sir. I don't think we have enough information.\"\n\n\"Even with the rumors we've been hearing about the Dragon's interest in a certain sword?\"\n\n\"Even so, sir. After all, as you say, they are just rumors. The Dragon, if that indeed was who it was, could have been here for an entirely different reason.\"\n\nRoux thought about that for a moment and then shook his head. \"I don't see how. If the Dragon had been hired to kill me he wouldn't have gone about it the way he had. The assault was staged and I think we both know why.\"\n\n\"If you say so, sir.\"\n\nAfter a moment, Roux made up his mind and said, \"I want her kept under surveillance twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Here and in the States, until I say otherwise. And she isn't to know that you are there unless there is trouble.\"\n\nHenshaw nodded. \"Understood\u201424\/7, no interference unless her life is threatened.\"\n\nAs Annja's car finally disappeared from sight around a bend in the road, Roux turned to face his employee. \"I want you to find me everything you can on the Dragon's movements in the past two months. Use whatever resources are necessary. If he's after Annja, I want to know how and why. In the meantime your people have authorization to do whatever needs to be done to keep her safe.\"\n\n\"And you, sir?\" Henshaw asked.\n\n\"Me?\" Roux replied. \"I'll be perfectly fine, Henshaw. I'm not the target.\"\n\nHenshaw hoped those words wouldn't come back to haunt either of them.\n\n## 9\n\nKyoto, Japan  \n1993\n\nThose who knew better disappeared like rats from a burning ship the moment the two men appeared at the mouth of the alley. Seen with the naked eye, there wasn't anything noticeably strange about them, but those who had been on the street long enough developed senses different than the usual and something about the pair screamed danger like an air-raid siren.\n\nIt was a feeling that spread quickly, like a virus passed from one street hustler or teen runaway to another, and those who encountered it made themselves scarce if they knew what was good for them. Those who were too sick or stoned or weak to move on their own were grabbed, swiftly examined and then either tossed aside like garbage or trussed up like turkeys headed for slaughter and left where they lay for collection once the men were finished.\n\nMost of them ran, but the girl near the end of the alley in the large cardboard box did not.\n\nShe'd only left home a few days before and already she was bone weary from all the hiding and running and scavenging. Life just shouldn't be this hard, she'd told herself time and time again, and at last she had begun to believe it. Life that was this hard just wasn't worth living, it seemed. When the owner of the box, a thick-faced Chinese boy named Wu, suddenly deserted his home, she wasted no time rushing in to get out of the rain. Flopping down among the discarded cushions and bags of trash that did double duty as Wu's bed, Shizu sat there, waiting for the newcomers to get to her, too tired and worn out to care anymore.\n\nIt didn't take them long.\n\nMuch to her surprise, when they reached into the box, seized her about the ankle and began to drag her back out into the rain, she discovered that she wasn't so tired, after all.\n\nSuddenly she wanted to live.\n\nShe kicked and screamed, fought them tooth and nail, threw everything she had into getting away, and none of it did the least amount of good.\n\nWhen she got to be too much to handle, one of the men simply reared back and smashed her in the face with his huge, meaty fist, sending her plunging into the swirling darkness of unconsciousness.\n\nSHIZU HAD BEEN IN THE cage for just shy of a week when the big man arrived to claim her. She didn't know that yet, of course, being kept in a room all alone, without light, and inside a six-by-six-foot steel cage, but she would meet him soon enough as it turned out.\n\nThe guards came for her sometime after breakfast but before lunch, if you could call the cold gruel they fed them anything even close to the definitions of those words. Still, despite its horrible taste, she ate it when she could; every ounce of energy was important in a place like this. They dragged her out of the cell and stripped her clothes from her, an act which required several of them to hold her arms and legs down while they cut the material off her bucking form. If she had been a little older, if she had learned of such things at home the way most young girls do, she might have been afraid for her virtue, but these men were acting under orders and the thin, featureless body of a twelve-year-old girl did not excite them in any way.\n\nWhen they were finished removing her clothes they dragged her into another room, still kicking and screaming, and left her on the floor in a heap.\n\nThey were gone only long enough to get the fire hose.\n\nThe water shot out of the nozzle, slashing across her body, pushing her about the floor like a discarded toy until she smashed into a nearby wall. She'd been through this once before, on the night she'd been brought here, and she understood what was happening enough to force herself to her feet and brace herself against the wall with her back to the water to keep from drowning. Her captors apparently took this as a good sign, for the force of the water eased off a little and she was scrubbed clean by the pounding water without too much difficulty.\n\nWhen they were finished they gave her a light smock to wear over her naked form and led her down a series of hallways to another room. Inside were ten or twelve others girls who were dressed just like her in pale-colored smocks and bare feet. None of them said anything to her, their eyes cast dutifully downward as weeks of captivity had taught them was correct, and so Shizu didn't bother speaking to them, either. Instead, she took the time to examine her surroundings and to wonder just why they were all gathered here.\n\nShe didn't have long to wait to find out.\n\nThe guards came back a few minutes later and ordered the girls to line up shoulder to shoulder, facing one wall. From the door before them came an overweight man in his mid-fifties, surrounded by bodyguards. Shizu figured, rightly so, that this was the man in charge of kidnapping them in the first place.\n\nWith him was a tall gaijin, or foreigner, dressed like a sariman in a gray suit the color of river rock. His hair was long and he wore it loose about his face, his eyes alight with curiosity and fire.\n\nShizu couldn't stop looking at him.\n\nShe hadn't seen many gaijin before and so for that reason alone he was a curiosity in her eyes, but it was the sense of power that emitted from him that truly caught her attention. This was a man used to being in control, used to having his every word obeyed without question; even Shizu's young mind could figure that out quickly enough. This man was a predator, her instincts screamed, and all that was left to determine was the identity of the prey.\n\nHe sensed her interest, though he didn't acknowledge it in any way. Instead, he walked with the fat man to the end of the line and slowly began to move along it, looking at each of the girls, in turn. Sometimes he would ask them to do simple things\u2014stand on one foot, touch their fingers to their noses\u2014and other times he would examine them the way a doctor might, turning them this way and that, looking into their eyes, asking them to open their mouths and feeling their teeth.\n\nWhen he got to her, he stopped and looked her over, just as he had the others. But rather than ask her to do any of the things she'd seen so far, he spoke to her in passable Japanese instead.\n\n\"What is your name?\" he asked.\n\nAfraid, she did not speak.\n\n\"Come, come, girl. I'm not here to hurt you. What is your name?\"\n\nThis time she told him. \"Shizu.\"\n\n\"Would you like to leave this place, Shizu?\"\n\nDaring to meet his gaze, she said, \"Very much.\"\n\n\"Would you like to go away with me, Shizu?\" he asked, softly this time.\n\nShe felt tears welling up at his kindness, something she hadn't experienced in a long time, and she could only nod.\n\nWhen she had dried her eyes and dared look again, she found him still standing in front of her, waiting patiently. He smiled and extended his hand.\n\n\"Come, Shizu. It's time to go.\"\n\nShe let him lead her out of that place and off to a different life.\n\n## 10\n\nNow\n\nConcerned that Roux wasn't taking things seriously enough, Annja woke the next day determined to get some answers. She knew there was more going on than met the eye. If Roux didn't want to talk, there was still one other person who might be able to tell her what she needed to know.\n\nGarin Braden.\n\nShe had his cell number\u2014or one of them, at least\u2014and used it to call him that morning.\n\n\"I need to see you,\" she told him when he answered the phone.\n\nHe laughed, a low, throaty chuckle. \"Just how much of me would you like to see?\"\n\nHe sounded like the cat who'd just eaten the canary, positively delighted that she'd chosen to call him and propose such an unusual request. She, however, didn't have time for his antics.\n\n\"Cut the crap, Garin. Roux is in trouble and I need to talk to you about it immediately.\"\n\nAs she snarled at him she did her best to ignore the mental image his response had called to mind. Seeing more of Garin wouldn't be such a bad thing, at least in an aesthetic sense....\n\nBut Garin apparently didn't hear her reprimand or he simply chose to ignore it. He was still laughing when he said, \"I'm free for lunch, if that will suffice.\"\n\nIt was good enough. They agreed on a place and time, with Garin suggesting he send a car and Annja firmly stating she'd get there on her own.\n\nShe had the concierge arrange a cab and she settled into the back, prepared to enjoy the ride. Paris had always been one of her favorite cities and it was particularly lovely on a spring day like this one. The streets and open-air cafes were full of Parisians enjoying the day, and the ride, short though it was, cheered her in a way that she hadn't expected.\n\nAs it turned out, the restaurant Garin had chosen was only a few blocks from her hotel. It was also one of the most popular luncheon spots in all of Paris, judging by the line that waited at the door to get inside. She began scanning the crowd for a sign of her host even as she exited the cab.\n\n\"Ms. Creed?\"\n\nShe turned to find a good-looking, curly haired man dressed in a sharply pressed gray suit standing nearby.\n\n\"I am Michel, the ma\u00eetre de'\" he said. \"If you would be so kind...\" He indicated the entrance with the sweep of his hand.\n\nIgnoring the daggerlike looks she received from those waiting in line, particularly the women, Annja walked to the front doors, stepped inside and then allowed Michel to take the lead.\n\n\"This way, please,\" he said, and then headed across the dining room floor. He led her to a small, private dining room in the far corner of the building, opened the door and ushered her inside.\n\nGarin was waiting for her at the room's only table. He stood, a smile on his face, as she entered and took her seat, then he sat across from her.\n\n\"It's good to see you again, Annja,\" he said, after Michel left the room.\n\n\"The dining room would have been perfectly fine,\" she replied, uncomfortable with the situation. This wasn't a date, for heaven's sake.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Garin replied. \"You wanted to talk about Roux and this way we are free to do so without fear of being overheard.\" He poured her a glass of wine from the bottle on the table, the red liquid a sharp contrast against the perfectly pressed white linen tablecloth.\n\n\"Now what's on your mind?\" he asked.\n\nAnnja looked at him over the top of her glass and spoke without preamble. \"I'm worried about him.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" he said, leaning back and enjoying a sip from his own glass.\n\nShe told him everything she had told Roux the night before, from the discovery of the origami figure to her belief that the intruder at Roux's estate had been none other than the Dragon himself. She brought it back to Roux, saying, \"He's acting like the attack on his estate was an afternoon lark, rather than a possible attempt on his life. He refuses to involve the authorities and ignores me when I try to discuss it with him.\"\n\nGarin laughed. \"I'm surprised at you, Annja. The man's home has been invaded, and with it his pride, and you act as if he should be happy to chat about it. With a woman, no less! That is not the Roux we know and love.\"\n\nHe had a point; she knew that. But given the possibility that the intruder actually was the Dragon, Roux should've been able to set aside such things in favor of protecting himself and, by extension, those around him.\n\nShe said as much to Garin. \"For an old soldier, he's not acting with much tactical sense. If the intruder was the Dragon, Roux could be putting himself, and those around him, in serious danger,\" she concluded.\n\nGarin waved one hand in dismissal. \"One does not need tactics to deal with a pack of common thieves,\" he said, but Annja saw it for what it was\u2014a poor attempt to distract her from the truth.\n\nShe'd seen him stiffen when she'd mentioned the Dragon, just as Roux had. They knew something, something she did not. This time she wouldn't be distracted so easily.\n\n\"What aren't you telling me?\" she asked.\n\nHe tried to brush it off with a laugh. \"I don't have any idea what you are talking about, Annja.\"\n\nShe wasn't buying it. She had a sudden suspicion that Garin knew far more about what was going on than he wanted to admit. \"That's a load of bull and you know it. Spit it out, Garin, or so help me, I'll...\"\n\n\"You'll what?\" he teased, still smiling. \"Skewer me in a public restaurant?\"\n\nWithout a second thought she called forth her sword and poked him with it beneath the table. \"Damn right, I will. Now talk!\"\n\nHe glanced down to where the tip of the blade rested against his thigh and shook his head at what she assumed was her audacity. She didn't care, as long as he told her what she needed to know.\n\n\"All right, all right. Calm down and put away the pig-sticker. No need to get unfriendly.\"\n\nWith a quick thought the sword was back in the otherwhere, where it would be ready when she needed it again. \"What do you know about the Dragon?\" she asked again.\n\nGarin leaned back, staring at the wineglass in his hand, as if the answers they sought might be found in the depths of that ruby liquid.\n\n\"What do I know?\" he repeated. \"Nothing. I know nothing. But I do have certain suspicions that I am willing to share.\"\n\nThe waiter came in at that moment and their talk was put on hold as Garin ordered for both of them. Normally this would have annoyed Annja to no end\u2014she could order her own lunch, thank you very much\u2014but she cared more about what Garin had to say than eating at this point and so she let it go.\n\nWhen the waiter left the room, Garin continued. \"A man in my position, a man with business interests as diverse as my own, is always conscious of security to one degree or another. Political leaders are not the only ones who get assassinated, you know.\"\n\nAnnja rolled her eyes.\n\n\"Given that, I employ people to keep me abreast of developments in certain areas. And it was through them that I first learned of the Dragon.\n\n\"No one seems to know who he was or where he came from. He just announced his availability for hire by assassinating the French Deputy Minister of Defense one evening in Paris, killing the man so quietly that his sleeping wife never even stirred in her sleep. The Dragon departed as silently as he had arrived, leaving the wife to wake up next to her dead husband several hours too late to save him.\n\n\"From that point, he seemed to be everywhere at once. The next decade was like the rest of us had stumbled onto his personal playing field. Diplomats. Ambassadors. Bankers and lawyers. Powerful people create powerful enemies and there is always someone willing to pay an exorbitant sum to keep others down. The Dragon didn't care about their political affiliations or issues. He killed them all\u2014every race, color, creed and political party\u2014provided those hiring him could pay his price.\"\n\nAnnja frowned. \"You seem to know a lot about him,\" she said.\n\nHe shrugged, unconcerned with her suspicions. \"No more than anyone else in my position. For all I knew I could have been next on his list, as my unflinching approach to business has earned me more than a few enemies along the way.\"\n\nUnflinching, Annja thought, try bloodthirsty. And the idea that you've generated a \"few\" enemies has to be the understatement of the century.\n\n\"What made the Dragon so unusual was that he always killed his targets by hand, usually with a Japanese katana, and if the sword wasn't strange enough he would also leave behind a token of his presence at every murder scene.\"\n\n\"Let me guess,\" Annja said. \"An origami dragon.\"\n\n\"Always said you were as intelligent as you are beautiful, Annja.\"\n\nShe ignored his comment and took a moment to think over what he'd just told her. Something didn't make sense. Why would an assassin renowned for killing with a sword suddenly decide to use explosives? \"So what happened in 2003?\"\n\nGarin grinned. \"I see I'm not the only one who knows a little something about the Dragon.\"\n\nIgnoring her scowl, he went on. \"I've heard a hundred different theories over the years as to what happened that day and I don't agree with any of them. Killing is an art form, particularly for a man like we're talking about. For him to resort to a suitcase full of plastic explosives when every single one of his victims before that date were killed by his own hand is simply ludicrous.\n\n\"What happened in 2003 is that the Dragon, the real Dragon, had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of the British prime minister. It was someone else.\"\n\nThe waiter came in with their meals at that point, giving Annja some time to digest what Garin had said. She barely noticed what she was eating as the implications of what he had just told her poured through her mind.\n\n\"You think the Dragon is still alive,\" she said after a few minutes.\n\nAgain the shrug. \"For the past year or so there have been rumors that the Dragon has returned. Nothing more solid than that, understand, just rumors. Given what you found at Roux's, however, I'd say the possibility just grew a little more distinct.\"\n\n\"Why would the Dragon be after Roux?\"\n\n\"Who said he was?\" Garin shot back, and that brought Annja up short.\n\n\"You think the Dragon is after you?\" she asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nIf not Roux, or Garin, then who?\n\n\"No,\" she said flatly when she realized what he was suggesting.\n\nHe looked at her with a strange gleam in his eye. \"Not Roux. Not me, though I must admit to being a bit concerned over that last one for a little while. No, I don't think the Dragon is after either of us. I think he is after you.\" He leaned forward, holding her gaze in his own. \"And after what I've heard recently about the sword the Dragon always carries, I think I know why.\"\n\nHer frown deepened, her lunch all but forgotten. \"You are going to tell me, right?\"\n\nHe paused, gathering his thoughts, and Annja had the distinct impression that he was trying to figure out just what to tell her and what to keep close to the chest.\n\nAfter a moment, he continued. \"Everything has an opposite, a dark twin on the cosmic scale of balance, if you will. The world itself is built on duality. How could we recognize white without black? Laughter without sorrow? Goodness without evil?\"\n\nHe looked at her, as if to gauge whether she was following the argument, and she nodded to show that she was.\n\n\"The sword that you now carry is a symbol of truth, of justice, of all that is good in the world. It emulates the moral and emotional qualities of the one who bore it into battle all those years ago. And because you represent those things, as well, the chain continues, like an heirloom passed down through the generations.\n\n\"You, me, Roux\u2014we are all bound to that sword in one way or another. For Roux and me, our association with it, and with its original bearer, has resulted in a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades. In your case, the sword has given you increased agility, speed, strength\u2014even your senses are better than they once were.\"\n\nThere was little there for her to argue with. It was true; the sword had certainly changed her in ways that she hadn't thought possible. Knowing that Garin was aware of the changes as well, made her a little uneasy, but she buried the thought as he went on with his explanation.\n\n\"You know better than anyone else that the sword comes with a certain set of responsibilities. Defend the weak. Protect the innocent. Stand as a barrier against the evil in the world around you, just as its original bearer strove to do so many years ago.\"\n\nHe was right again. Her life had become far more complicated since taking possession of the sword. Where she might have turned away from a difficult situation in the past, maybe even told herself that it wasn't any of her business, now she practically leaped into the fray whenever the opportunity presented itself.\n\nGarin continued. \"So it stands to reason that if all things have an opposite, a yin to the yang, then there must be another weapon out there somewhere that represents the side of darkness as much as your weapon stands for the cause of light.\"\n\nBiting back her unease, she forced herself to follow his line of thought.\n\n\"You're saying the Dragon has such a sword.\"\n\nHer companion shook his head. \"No. I'm saying that there are rumors that the Dragon, if he is still alive, has such a weapon. I don't know for sure.\"\n\nAnnja thought back to the swordsman she had faced in the display room and the way his sword had suddenly seemed to appear in his hands, a sword she would have sworn he hadn't had moments before.\n\nOf how it mirrored the way she handled her own so perfectly.\n\n\"But you believe it, don't you?\" she pressed.\n\nGarin thought about it for a moment, and then nodded at her. \"Yes,\" he said, \"I do.\"\n\nHis admission sent Annja's pulse skyrocketing.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"For the past year or two I have been hearing rumors about a sword, one that is supposed to have considerable power, being carried by a man available for hire. Not just any man, but one with an impressive r\u00e9sum\u00e9, full of what has euphemistically been called 'wetwork.' At first I thought that the rumors were about you and the weapon you carry, that those who passed it along simply couldn't imagine that it was a woman in such a role, but it only took a little bit of investigation to learn that the sword in question was not a broadsword, like your own, but a Japanese katana.\n\n\"After that, it wasn't hard to put two and two together. I think the Dragon is back. I think somewhere, somehow, he learned about you and the sword that you carry. And I think he is curious to discover whether you are like-minded individuals or incompatible opposites.\"\n\nHe took a long sip of his drink. \"If the former, I suspect he just wants to talk with you. If the latter,\" he said rather bluntly, \"then I'm quite sure he won't hesitate to kill you.\"\n\nABOUT THE SAME TIME that Annja and Garin were sharing lunch, Henshaw was walking into a meeting in a pub along the docks by the Seine. It was a far cry from the restaurant that Garin had selected, but then again, the people that Henshaw was meeting were more concerned about anonymity than they were about how many varieties of wine were available to go with their meal.\n\nMarco was already in the booth at the back when he arrived.\n\n\"It's been a while,\" Henshaw said when he reached the table.\n\n\"That it has, mate, that it has.\" The two men eyed each other warily for a moment and then Henshaw abruptly laughed and wrapped the other man in a bear hug. Had Roux seen such a display of emotion from him, Henshaw was certain his employer would have assumed he'd suddenly lost his mind, but he and Marco went back quite a ways and had literally saved each other's lives more than once over the years.\n\nOf course, Henshaw didn't talk about those days.\n\nMarco hadn't changed much since then; his hair was long, but his grip was still as strong as steel and his gaze never stayed in one place too long as he was constantly assessing the situation around him, alert for whatever was to come.\n\nThe two sat down at the booth opposite each other and waited a moment while the waitress brought them a couple of pints. Then they got down to business.\n\n\"So what's this gig that you've got for us?\" Marco asked.\n\nHenshaw had thought long and hard about how to convince his old friend to take the job and had finally settled on playing it as straight as possible. \"Executive protection,\" he told him, slipping a photograph out of his coat pocket and passing it across the table.\n\nThe picture showed Annja striding across the street, her hair flowing back behind her in the slight breeze. The jeans and T-shirt she wore hugged her body in all the right places, which was one of the reasons Henshaw had specifically chosen this one. As he'd hoped, Marco's eyes lit up at the sight of her.\n\n\"Good God, isn't she gorgeous,\" he said, pulling the photo up for a closer look. \"Who is she? And what's she do? Recording artist? Film star?\"\n\n\"Her name is Annja Creed. And she is an archaeologist, actually.\"\n\nHenshaw met his gaze squarely when the other man glanced up to see if he was pulling his leg.\n\n\"You're kidding me, right?\"\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\nThe photo was tossed back down on the table. \"Okay, this I gotta hear. You wanna hire around-the-clock surveillance and executive protection for an archaeologist? What'd she do, piss off the Vatican by discovering the tomb of Jesus or something?\"\n\nNothing like that, Henshaw thought. She's just the current bearer of a mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc and is now being pursued by one of the world's most dangerous assassins.\n\nBut he couldn't say that.\n\nInstead, he explained that Annja's work had made certain terrorist groups aware of her as a potential target of opportunity and that his employer was interested in protecting the investment he had made in her work without her knowing the extent of the danger she was in. As stories went, it was a decent one, and certainly good enough to pull Marco and his team into the mix. Henshaw felt bad about deceiving his old friend, but what else could he do? It wasn't as though he could just come out and tell the man the truth.\n\nThey spent a few minutes discussing terms and pay rates and concluded the deal over a handshake. Both men knew the other was good for it.\n\nWhen they were finished with their beers, Marco said, \"Come on, I'll introduce you to the rest of the team.\"\n\nThe left the pub, climbed into Marco's old sedan and drove a few blocks deeper into the warehouse district, stopping at a small nondescript building to the west of the pub. Marco pulled out a set of keys, unlocked the door and ushered Henshaw inside.\n\nThis was where the rest of the team waited for them.\n\nThere were three women and four men. Marco introduced them to Henshaw one at a time\u2014Dave, a cheery, good-natured sort who couldn't have been more than twenty-five; Olivia, a dark-haired beauty with a background in demolitions; Jessi, a former SAS commando; Arthur, a quiet, unassuming man who was the group's electronics expert; Clive, a former U.S. Marine who had turned his skills to the private sector; Glen, the team's covert infiltration expert; and last, but not least, Sara, a short, pudgy woman who could shoot the cap off of a soda bottle at four hundred yards.\n\nThey looked like a good, solid unit. Henshaw was pleased. After Marco introduced him, Henshaw laid out the requirements and expectations of the job in a clear, concise manner. There were a few questions, but none that he couldn't answer and certainly none that might have brought his explanation into question. Not surprisingly, none of the team members recognized Annja. Chasing History's Monsters just wasn't their cup of tea.\n\nFrom inside his briefcase Henshaw produced a thick dossier of information on Annja, including her usual habits and preferences, the hotel she was currently staying in, address and layout of her loft in Brooklyn. Essentially anything he could think of that might help them do their job. After all, Annja's life was possibly at stake and he wasn't going to cut any corners. He informed them of her prowess in martial arts and commented that she often practiced with various types of weaponry, just in case they witnessed her with sword in hand.\n\nWhen he was finished, he left them to their perusal of the documents and joined Marco off to the side, where he passed him an envelope.\n\n\"My employer will spare no expense,\" Henshaw told him. \"Inside the envelope you'll find the access information for a bank account you can use for expenditures. Do whatever you need to in order to keep her alive.\"\n\nMarco looked at him for a long moment. \"This isn't a hypothetical, is it? You really think someone is going to make a go at her.\"\n\nHenshaw nodded. \"I do. And I'm counting on you to stop them from succeeding.\"\n\nMarco smiled. \"That's what they pay me the big bucks for, mate. Don't you worry. We've got it handled.\"\n\n## 11\n\nAfter her lunch with Garin, Annja decided to walk back to her hotel rather than catch another cab. It would give her some time to digest what she had just learned and she could do with some fresh air and a bit of thought.\n\nShe suspected that the individual she'd fought the other night was, indeed, the Dragon. When you combined the stealth with which they had infiltrated Roux's estate, the skill the swordsman had displayed when wielding his weapon and the presence of the origami dragon left behind at the scene of the attack, there weren't too many other conclusions that made sense. She'd been so focused on figuring out why an international assassin was after her mentor and friend that she never stopped to consider the other possible targets in the picture, namely herself and Garin.\n\nIf what Garin was telling her was true, then she had reason enough to be concerned.\n\nShe'd been hunted before. That was nothing new. Since taking up the sword it seemed that everywhere she went she ran into some psycho with an ego the size of California who saw her as an obstacle to their plans for world domination or whatever this week's fiendish plot might be. She fought back against them, each and every time, and had always managed to come out on top.\n\nThis time, though, she wasn't so sure.\n\nShe'd never faced off against an international assassin for hire before.\n\nAnd to make matters worse, he'd already beaten her once.\n\nHer thoughts turned to the rest of what Garin had said. Rumors about a mystical sword were all well and good, but she was probably one of the few people on earth who had the personal experience to actually take them seriously. The very idea that there might be another sword with powers similar to her own was extremely unsettling to her. Where had it come from? What was its purpose? How had the Dragon gained possession of it?\n\nGarin had once told her that her discovery of the last piece of the sword that had been missing for so long was nothing short of a miracle. At first she had believed it to be the fortune of fate, the result of a chance earthquake that occurred while she was in the vicinity. Later, after hearing the stories related to her by Garin and Roux about the long search for the pieces of the sword, she began to question the validity of her early theory.\n\nMaybe the sword had recognized something in her and had done what it needed to do to bring them together. Could the same thing have happened to the Dragon?\n\nNot knowing was going to drive her crazy; she knew herself well enough to see that coming from a mile away.\n\nSince she didn't have enough information yet to come up with a decent answer for the questions that were bothering her about the sword, she decided to try to focus on the Dragon himself. What did he want with her? And how did he know about her in the first place?\n\nShe had to admit that she'd had a few close calls; she'd been forced to use her sword now and then when other people were nearby. But she'd always thought she'd done a good job of keeping it out of sight. People had seen her with it\u2014there was no doubt about that\u2014but she'd been confident that no one had ever seen her draw the sword out of the otherwhere. Or, at least, no one had seen her draw it and lived to tell the tale.\n\nSo how had the Dragon known to come looking for her? Did his sword act like her own, providing the occasional flash of intuition or gentle nudge in the right direction? Had the Dragon come to Roux's estate for some other reason, only to turn his attention to her after he recognized a kindred spirit?\n\nShe had too many questions without answers.\n\nAnnja had only walked a few blocks when the feeling of being watched fell over her. She recognized it right away, that creeping sensation at the base of her spine that let her know she was under someone else's scrutiny.\n\nShe casually stopped and looked around, making note of those in her immediate vicinity, but she didn't see anyone who looked familiar. Still, she spent a few minutes checking out those she did see, trying to remember their faces and what they were wearing so that if she did see them again she would know it.\n\nAfter a few minutes she continued on her way.\n\nShe was just starting to think the whole thing had been a figment of her imagination, just a result of the conversation she'd had with Garin, when the feeling returned. At the same moment she caught a mental glimpse of her sword, hanging there in the middle of the otherwhere, gently glowing, and that seemed enough of a warning for her not to brush aside her intuition.\n\nThere was a bank ahead\u2014she'd seen it on the way to the restaurant\u2014and its windows were made from reflective glass. She waited until she drew abreast of them and then stopped, pretending to be searching through her pockets for something while actually using the glass to watch those who were coming up behind her. She was looking for someone who stopped suddenly, or who turned away abruptly, anything that might give them away as the watcher she knew was back there somewhere.\n\nBut aside from an elderly woman on an electric cart, no one seemed to be paying her the least bit of attention.\n\nIf they were out there, they were good\u2014she had to give them that.\n\nShe set off at a brisk pace, nearly twice what she'd been doing before. She cut down a side street, using the opportunity to look back in the direction she'd come for anyone cutting through the sidewalk crowd quickly enough to catch up to her, but again, no one seemed to be giving her any undue attention. She headed north at the next intersection, then cut back east at the next side street, bringing her back to her original route. Each time she changed direction she used the opportunity it presented to take a quick look at those behind her, watching for familiar faces, but there were none.\n\nShe hadn't seen them at first the other day, either, though. Just because she couldn't see them didn't mean they weren't out there.\n\nShe decided to try one more trick. She was approaching an intersection and as she got close she kept a near watch on the lights, waiting for her chance.\n\nJust as the lights turned green, Annja shot out into the street, across the flow of automobiles and one very large city bus, rushing to get to the other side before any of them could move. More than one driver blew their horns, but she didn't care; she was too busy reaching the opposite sidewalk and then looking back the way she had come to see if she'd left anyone flat-footed on the other side, trapped behind a wave of vehicles.\n\nThere was no one paying the least bit of attention to her.\n\nMaybe I imagined it all, she thought.\n\nWhile it might have been a possibility, Annja didn't think it was a very likely one.\n\nShe stood on the corner for a long pause, watching those behind her, wondering.\n\nWhere are you?\n\nHIGH ABOVE, ON THE ROOFTOP of the building adjacent to the corner where Annja stood, the very individual she was searching for at ground level watched her through a pair of military-grade binoculars.\n\nFrom Annja's erratic movements over the past few minutes, the Dragon knew that Annja suspected she was being watched again, but without any hard evidence to confirm the suspicion she would have no choice but to brush it off. Not once in the past few hours had the target looked up, so the Dragon was confident Annja would not be able to locate where the surveillance was coming from. The decision to use the rooftops, rather than put a team on the ground, was apparently paying off.\n\nMaybe you're not as good as you think you are, Annja Creed.\n\n## 12\n\nThat night Annja spent hours on the computer, trying to learn everything she could about the Dragon. Unfortunately, as Bart and Garin had both explained, there really wasn't much available out there that could tell her anything of value. Rumors abounded\u2014about the Dragon's background, personal tastes, business partners, weapons of choice, even what kind of women he preferred. But it was all nothing more than will-o'-the-wisps in the night, suppositions, maybe an occasional educated guess, but certainly nothing that could be labeled as cold, hard fact. She hadn't seen anything so far that even assured her the Dragon was a man, though the general consensus seemed to be that he was.\n\nShe also wasted a fair amount of time trying to track down any rumors about a mystical sword on the various conspiracy Web sites and newsgroups that she knew about, but aside from half a dozen spontaneous sightings of Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur, that was a dead end, too.\n\nFinally conceding defeat, she decided to call it a night and get some sleep.\n\nAN INSISTENT BEEPING woke her.\n\nShe reached out with one hand, fumbling for the switch, trying to remember just what on earth she had set the alarm for, where she was supposed to be this morning, when she discovered the alarm clock wasn't where it was supposed to be.\n\nRather than resting on the bedside table where it had been when she'd gone to sleep the night before, it now stood across the room on the window sill.\n\nThat's weird.\n\nShe had no memory of moving the alarm clock, but she'd been pretty tired when she'd finally tried to get some sleep, so maybe she'd done it so that she'd be forced to get out of bed and therefore had no chance of sleeping through the alarm.\n\nBut why had she set it in the first place?\n\nHer eyes caught site of something on the pillow next to her and she turned her head to get a better look at what it was.\n\nThe origami figure of a dragon stood atop the pillow, its wings unfurled, staring at her with its featureless face.\n\nAnnja recoiled, throwing herself back off the bed in order to get as far away from the little paper figurine as possible. At the same time she called her sword to her, holding it out in front like a symbol of protection as she scrambled frantically to get her back to a wall and ensure that she couldn't be attacked from at least one direction.\n\nThen, and only then, did she look around.\n\nSunlight streamed in through the thin gossamer curtains over the windows, lighting up the room and showing her immediately that no one else was standing in the room with her.\n\nShe could hear the cars in the street below going about their early-morning business, but the noisy growl of their engines and the squeal of their brakes sounded as if they were from another country. She could see the curtains blowing in the morning breeze coming in the open window, could feel the shafts of sunlight reaching out across the room, intent on blanketing her in their warmth. But all she could feel was the icy touch of dread crawling about inside her mouth like a pair of disembodied fingers.\n\nOne thought kept repeating itself over and over again in her head, blotting out everything else.\n\nThe Dragon had been in her hotel room last night.\n\nHad been standing there, right beside her bed.\n\nWatching her sleep!\n\nBeing watched in public at the Chapelle was one thing. Being followed on the streets of the city was another. But having a killer there in her bedroom while she was fast asleep?\n\nIt was almost too much to take.\n\nOnly the thought that she might not be alone, that the intruder could still very well be there, inside her hotel room, perhaps in the bathroom or the sitting room, just waiting for his chance to strike, released her from her frozen state and got her moving again.\n\nJust as she had the night before, she searched through the entire hotel suite, looking for an intruder. No one was there, not now, but the big smiley face with the X drawn through it in red lipstick on her bathroom mirror was enough to show that the Dragon had been in there, as well.\n\nShe stared at it, momentarily numb, and then, making up her mind, swung into action.\n\n## 13\n\nAnnja packed as quickly as possible, throwing what little clothing she had with her into her bag and jamming her computer into her backpack. She made sure to keep a low profile and not stand in front of any of the windows or the French doors while moving about the room. Just because the Dragon had never used a high-powered rifle before didn't mean he couldn't suddenly change his mind. She had no interest in being taken out before the fight had actually begun.\n\nRather than grab a cab at the taxi stand outside her hotel, she slipped out a side door and hustled down the street, cutting down the occasional alley, until she reached the main thoroughfare one block over. Then and only then did she flag down a passing cab and ask him to take her to the airport. The front door of the hotel was sure to be watched, but maybe she had avoided giving herself away by taking the alternate route.\n\nShe went straight to Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle International Airport and traded in her first-class seat to New York on the next day's flight for the first available seat that morning. She ended up riding coach, and paying a hundred-dollar change fee, but it was all Garin's money, anyway, and there was no way she was staying in Paris given the Dragon's interest in her. She hoped the sudden flight back home would throw him off her track, at least for a little while. That should give her time to figure out just what she intended to do about the whole mess. If she could discover more information about the sword he carried, maybe she could divine his intent or at least find a way to neutralize his abilities.\n\nShe grabbed her cell phone and called her producer, Doug Morrell, while she waited for her flight to be called. She wasn't worried about him being busy or asleep. It was a Tuesday, the show was his life and, without her finishing off the edits for the episode slated to run later that week, he was sure to be at home panicking.\n\nRight, she was.\n\n\"Annja!\" he said when he recognized her number on his caller ID. \"Tell me you're finished and the show's ready to go.\"\n\n\"Not yet, Doug, but it's close.\" The truth was she hadn't even thought about it, but what was a little hedging between friends? \"But I'm stuck and need some help.\"\n\n\"Are you having trouble with the editing boys again? Need me to come down there and knock some sense into them?\"\n\nFor his young age, Doug took his authority pretty seriously\u2014or at least, challenges to his authority\u2014and he didn't like folks in other departments giving his hosts a hassle. Not that he'd ever actually leave his office to deal with the troublemakers, but it was the thought that counted, Annja told herself with a sigh.\n\n\"No, Doug,\" she said. \"I'm just fine and the editing team is great.\"\n\n\"Aren't they, though? You should have seen how they handled that Jamaican zombie stuff last week. Totally class act, I tell ya.\" A bright thought suddenly hit him. \"Hey, any chance of zombies in this one? We could do a two-part special, you know? Zombies from...\"\n\n\"No, Doug, no zombies.\" She cut him off before he could go any further. Doug was her friend, but still, sometimes it took a bit more patience than she had to listen to him when he got on a roll.\n\n\"But I need your help in getting me in to see a hypnotist ASAP.\"\n\n\"A hypnotist? Whatever for?\"\n\nAnnja winced; she hadn't thought of a decent excuse. She went for the mystery line. \"I can't tell you that yet.\"\n\n\"Can't tell me? Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I'm not sure if I can use it or not. I have to talk to the hypnotist first.\"\n\nDoug was silent for a minute. \"All right. I think I can line somebody up. There was this guy we used for the office party last year who might work. Lenny the Magnificent or something.\"\n\nIf she'd been in the same room she would have reached out and swatted him across the back of the head. It served her right for trying to pull a fast one, she thought, but she was in too deep to back out now.\n\n\"No, Doug. I need a real hypnotist. Preferably a doctor or at least a licensed therapist.\"\n\n\"Lenny won't work?\"\n\n\"Definitely not. No Lenny.\"\n\nShe could hear him flipping through some paper, maybe an address book or even the yellow pages. She didn't care as long as he came through.\n\n\"All right, all right. Let me think. This might take me a little bit. How about I call you back when I have something?\"\n\n\"I'm just about to catch a flight so can you leave me a message on the voice mail?\"\n\n\"Catch a flight? Annja, where are you?\"\n\nOops.\n\n\"They're calling me, gotta run! Thanks, Doug!\" she said, and hung up before he could ask her anything further. Just to be safe, she also turned off her cell phone.\n\nShe had more than an hour to kill before they boarded her flight and she spent the entire time holed up in a corner of the waiting area with her back to the wall, watching everyone who came even remotely close or showed the slightest interest in her. Was that man in the janitor outfit watching her too intently? How about that woman with the stroller? Was that even a real baby? Maybe it was just a doll, designed to throw her off the scent? Or how about that businessman two rows over who kept looking in her direction and smiling? Was that smile a little too forced? His gaze a little too intent?\n\nEvery loud noise made her jump, every person she saw was a potential enemy, and it kept ratcheting her anxiety level higher and higher until she realized that the flight crew and gate attendant were constantly looking her way.\n\nIf you want to get on this flight, you'd better relax, she told herself. Closing her eyes, she tried to do just that.\n\nWhen at last she got on the plane, Annja settled into her seat and then carefully scrutinized each and every passenger who had gotten on behind her. She had no idea what she was checking for; she just expected to know it when she saw it. She was still looking when the flight attendants gave the all clear and shutting the main door, prepared for takeoff.\n\nFinally she managed to calm down.\n\nBACK AT THE GATE IN Paris, the watcher approached the attendant, looking anxious and concerned.\n\n\"Excuse me? That wasn't the plane to Chicago, was it?\"\n\nThe attendant smiled. \"No worry, love. That was New York, not Chicago.\"\n\nThe watcher pretended to be relieved. \"Oh, thank goodness, for a moment there I thought I'd missed it.\"\n\nTurning away, the watcher wandered back down the concourse and over to the ticket counters.\n\nNew York, it is, then. Now when is the next flight?\n\nANNJA SPENT MOST OF THE flight either dozing fitfully or watching the people around her, trying to find one who was watching her, in turn, but she had no luck.\n\nBy the time she got off the flight in New York, she was nearly numb with fatigue.\n\nShe was too exhausted to take the train, so she splurged for a cab, asking the driver to take her to her address in Brooklyn. A long fare was a good thing and the cabbie, a tall, thin, bald fellow with a Ukrainian accent, was more than happy to oblige.\n\nAnnja lived in a run-down neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn. She liked to think of it as lived-in, but that kind of rationalization was also what made die-hard Manhattanites call an apartment the size of a postage stamp a one-bedroom studio. Still, it was home and when the cabbie pulled up in front of her four-story building, one of the oldest on the block, she breathed a sigh of relief.\n\nIn practically no time at all she stood in front of her door, the wood scarred and chipped but still strong. The 4A was written in small white figures and affixed to the varnished surface of the door.\n\nShe dragged her keys from her pocket, disengaged the five locks that prevented access, then stepped inside and locked them all over again, just to be safe.\n\nOne thing was sure, if the Dragon had followed her here, he was going to have a bit harder time getting inside than he had in Paris. For one, there weren't any balconies. For another, this was her home and she would brook no one inside its walls that didn't belong.\n\nThe big room had a fourteen-foot ceiling. Shelves lined the walls and many of them sagged under the weight of the books or rocks and artifacts that filled them nearly to overflowing. A desk sat in one corner, all but buried by the sketch pads, books and file folders scattered across its surface.\n\nStacked haphazardly around, and in one case under, her desk was a veritable sea of electronics, from the hollowed out shell of an Xbox video console to a brand new LCD projector the size of a cigarette pack she'd gotten on loan from a company that was looking to have her test it in the field.\n\nAll the nervous energy she'd been expending since she'd left her hotel room in Paris finally caught up with her. She dropped her bag and backpack by the bed, toppled into it and was asleep in less than a minute.\n\n## 14\n\nTrue to his word, Doug had called back and left a message on her voice mail, which she found when she finally returned to the land of the living early the next morning.\n\n\"Hi Annja, it's me, Doug. I managed to call in a few favors and get you an appointment to see Dr. Julie Laurent. She's in the Village, on Houston, and can fit you in for a nine-thirty tomorrow morning. You might want to call her ahead of time and give her a little bit more information about how she can help you, as she had a lot of questions that I just couldn't answer, but otherwise you're all set. You owe me one. How about dinner on Friday at Domenico's? Talk to ya later.\" He rambled off the address and then hung up.\n\nJust as he'd suggested, Annja called the doctor ahead of time and gave her the story she'd come up with to explain why she wanted to be hypnotized. Dr. Laurent took it all pretty well, only asking a question here and there that focused on her family history and the state of her insurance, then said she'd see her soon.\n\nAnnja took the subway to Manhattan, changed trains at Thirty-second Street and then rode another train the rest of the way to the Village.\n\nOnce on the street, it didn't take her long to find the building, sandwiched as it was between a deli and an office park.\n\nThe doctor's office had its own entrance with a buzzer, but the gate was unlocked and the door to the foyer open, so she didn't bother ringing and instead climbed the steps just inside the door to the narrow landing at the top. A small brass plaque was tacked to the wall next to the only door in sight. Dr. Julie Laurent, Hypnotherapy.\n\n\"Well, here goes nothing,\" Annja said to the silence around her. Reaching out, she knocked on the door.\n\n\"Coming, coming\" came a voice from within, and a moment later the door opened to reveal a gray-haired woman in her mid-sixties, dressed in cream-colored pants and a pale blue sweater. A pair of wire-framed glasses hung on a silver chain about her neck. Her dark eyes sparkled with intelligence.\n\n\"Are you Annja?\"\n\n\"That's me,\" Annja replied, and extended her hand.\n\nThey shook and the doctor led her inside the office and over to an arrangement of leather couches and chairs that occupied one side of the room.\n\n\"Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,\" Annja said as she sat down, taking in the room around her as she did so.\n\nIt was a bright and airy place, despite its small size, and Annja was immediately charmed by it. French doors made up the external wall and beyond their gossamer curtains she could see a tiny balcony, with just enough room for a wicker chair and a table. In the far corner of the room, cloaked in shadow, was a masculine-looking desk that appeared to serve more as a storage depot than a work area.\n\n\"Not quite what you were expecting?\" Dr. Laurent asked, startling Annja out of her examination.\n\nAnnja laughed. \"No, not quite. I was expecting something a bit more doom and gloom, I guess.\"\n\nLaurent nodded knowingly. \"My clients bring enough of that with them on their own,\" she said. \"So I try to give them something a bit less intimidating. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head. \"No, I'm fine, thanks.\"\n\n\"All right, then. Tell me what I can do for the star of Chasing History's Monsters,\" the doctor said as she leaned back in her chair.\n\nAnnja relayed the same story that she'd given over the phone\u2014how she had been plagued for months with this recurring dream of a swordsman, the blade he wielded with such skill and fervor, and the hand-to-hand combat they ultimately engaged in. She knew the dream was trying to tell her something, she said, for she'd never had one with such intensity or frequency before. Except every time she woke up, all she could remember was the fact that she dreamed of a man wielding a sword, and nothing about who he might be or what he might want. Annja hoped the dream story would cover any slipups she might make under hypnosis.\n\n\"Our dreams are often a way for our subconscious mind to try to tell us something\u2014you are certainly correct about that. And given your line of work, I'm not surprised that your subconscious is using metaphors like the ones you describe to try to reach you. After all, if it had manifested in your dreams as an overweight clown with bright red hair, you might have simply brushed it off, no?\"\n\nIf it were only that easy, Annja thought.\n\n\"It's possible that something about the man's face, the clothes he is wearing or even the weapon he carries is a symbol for something else in your life, something that is bothering you. No worries, we'll get to the bottom of it for you.\n\nDr. Laurent took a sip from her glass of water, then asked, \"Have you ever been hypnotized before?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head. \"I almost did so at a comedy club once, but chickened out at the last minute.\"\n\nThe doctor smiled, trying to put her at ease. \"That's fine. The process is pretty simple, actually. First, I'll take you through a series of muscle relaxation techniques that are designed to put you in the right frame of mind for phase two, which is the trance itself.\n\n\"While in the trance, you'll relive the dream, but you will have complete control over it this time. You can speed it up or slow it down, even bring it to a complete stop if you like, just like using the pause button on your DVD player.\"\n\n\"Will I remember what I see in the dream when I wake up?\" Annja asked.\n\nDr. Laurent shook her head, saying, \"You're not actually asleep, but I know what you mean and the answer is no. You won't remember any of the session consciously. However, I will be recording your responses the entire time and you'll be able to sketch anything you see during the trance, so between the two we should be able to capture the essence of what your subconscious mind is trying to tell you, all right?\"\n\nIt sounded as if that was the best she was going to get so Annja agreed. There had to be some detail she could uncover that would help her find the Dragon.\n\n\"Shall we begin, then?\"\n\nAs Annja settled back on the couch, something strange happened.\n\nOnce several years earlier, she'd come face-to-face with a king cobra while working a dig in southern India. She hadn't even known the snake was there until it reared up beside her as she knelt by the supply chest. Hood spread, it had stared at her with alien eyes and she'd felt the cold hand of dread squeeze her spine in its iron grip.\n\nLying back, as the gentle grip of the couch shifted beneath her frame, Annja felt the very same sense of fear creep over her as she had that day at the dig. Something deep in her soul was telling her to get out of there, to make her apologies and slink out the door with her metaphorical tail between her legs.\n\nHer heart began to hammer in her chest and her breath came in quick, short gasps. She felt her right hand flex in just the same way it always did as she settled her grip around the hilt of her sword. Miraculously she managed to stay in control and didn't call it to her; it would have been a little difficult explaining to the doctor just where she'd been hiding a massive broadsword, never mind what she intended to do with it.\n\nWhat's wrong with you? she asked herself. Get a grip, for heaven's sake.\n\nAnnja willed herself to calm down and take a few deep breaths. As she did so, her anxiety began to recede. Fortunately, Dr. Laurent had stepped over to her desk to start the tape recorder and hadn't noticed her difficulty. By the time the doctor returned, sketch pad and pencil in hand, Annja had managed to get herself under control.\n\n\"Here,\" Dr. Laurent said, handing her the pad and pencil. \"Hold these loosely in your lap. When we encounter something important, I'll tell you to draw it on the pad.\"\n\nThanks to her work as an archaeologist, Annja had been sketching things\u2014ancient artifacts, dig sites, even fellow workers\u2014for years and felt confident that she could capture whatever images she needed to in this fashion.\n\nJust as she'd said, Dr. Laurent took Annja through a series of relaxation exercises. She was instructed to take a deep breath, hold it and squeeze the muscles in her toes for the count of five before releasing them, breathing out while she did so. Then her toes and the soles of her feet. Then her toes, the soles of her feet and the muscles in her calves, squeezing, holding and then letting them relax. Muscle by muscle, body part by body part, they worked up her entire body\u2014up her legs, across her torso, down her arms and finally to her jaw and face. All the while Dr. Laurent spoke to her in a soft, soothing voice, helping her to relax mentally as well as physically.\n\nBy the time they were finished, Annja rested in a gentle trance, aware of her surroundings, able to listen to and respond to the doctor's questions.\n\n\"Can you hear me, Annja?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja's voice sounded distant, muted, as if it were coming through a thick blanket or maybe from a room down the hall. It was the sign Dr. Laurent was waiting for and it let her know that Annja was deep in the trance state.\n\n\"Very good, Annja, very good. Remember\u2014nothing can harm you here. You are the one in control. Whatever you see or hear or feel during our session are just memories. They do not have the power to hurt you in any way. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Okay, now I want you to think back to last night, before you went to bed. Let's say about dinnertime. Can you tell me what you were doing?\"\n\nBit by bit, Dr. Laurent led Annja through the early evening and then into the beginning stages of the dream. When she felt Annja was ready, she said, \"Now I want you to focus on the swordsman. Do you see him?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Very good. Can you tell me what he is wearing?\"\n\n\"It's a black jumpsuit. The kind that Air Force aviators wear.\"\n\n\"Okay, Annja, that's good. Very good, in fact. Now I want you to look at his face for me, Annja. Can you tell me what he looks like?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nDr. Laurent frowned. \"Why not, Annja?\"\n\n\"I can't see it.\"\n\n\"What do you mean you can't see it?\"\n\n\"His face is covered up. I can't see it.\"\n\n\"Covered up? As in bandaged?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head. \"No. Just covered. He's wearing a black face mask and a dark hood. All I can see is a thin stretch of skin around his eyes.\"\n\n\"What color are his eyes, Annja?\"\n\n\"Black. A deep brown that looks like black.\"\n\nDr. Laurent made a note on her pad. \"Okay, you are doing very well, Annja. Let's forget his face for now\u2014we'll come back to it later. Can you see any insignia on the jumpsuit? A patch or a name tag, maybe?\"\n\nAnnja was quiet for a moment, as if she were examining the individual standing before her in the landscape of her memories.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Okay, that's not a problem. Not a problem at all. What's happening now? What is the swordsman doing?\"\n\nEven as the doctor watched, Annja physically shrank back from what she was seeing in her memory.\n\n\"Rushing toward me with his sword already drawn. I have to be ready with my own!\"\n\nRecognizing the rising concern in her patient's voice, the doctor stepped in quickly. \"It's all right, Annja. Remember, you are in control. Nothing can happen that you don't want to happen. I want you to pretend you have a great big pause button right there beside your hand and I want you to press it. Right now, press the pause button, Annja.\"\n\nAnnja stabbed at a spot on the couch with her left hand.\n\nSeeing this, Dr, Laurent said, \"Now the swordsman is standing completely still, isn't that right, Annja?\"\n\nAnnja nodded, then answered aloud. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"And he will only move when you are ready to let him do so, right?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" The doctor thought about the situation for a moment, wanting to be certain to avoid accidentally tripping over Annja's obvious anxiety again. \"Here's what I want you to do, Annja. I want you to make the swordsman come toward you, just as he does in your dreams, but I want you to have him do it one step at a time. Imagine you are watching a movie and the swordsman is the star. He doesn't have the remote control, you do. The movie can only play when you want it to\u2014you are in control. And right now you are advancing the movie frame by frame, so the swordsman appears to be moving toward you in slow motion.\"\n\nAfter a moment, the doctor asked, \"Where is he now, Annja?\"\n\n\"Just a few feet away.\"\n\nStep by step the doctor walked her through the scene\u2014the swordsman's approach, the battle between them.\n\nThen came the final, crucial moments.\n\n\"I see the sword, sweeping toward me,\" Annja said. \"I'm trying to get out of the way but I'm not fast enough. The blade is getting closer and closer\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop,\" the doctor said.\n\nAnnja's hand stabbed at the couch again. \"It's stopped.\"\n\n\"Can you see the sword clearly?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Describe it to me, please.\"\n\n\"It is a katana. Fifteenth, maybe sixteenth-century. The blade must have been recently polished for it reflects the light in the room, except where the etching is located.\"\n\nDr. Laurent sat up straighter in her chair. \"What does the etching say, Annja?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. They're kanji characters, I think.\"\n\n\"Is that all?\"\n\n\"No. A dragon is there, as well, above the kanji.\"\n\n\"Can you draw them for me?\"\n\nAnnja's hands found the pad and pencil she'd been given and she began to sketch, the tip of her pencil moving swiftly over the blank page without hesitation. The first sketch only took her a few minutes and when she was finished she flipped the page and went right to work on the next.\n\nAnd the next.\n\nAnd the next.\n\nBy the time Annja started in on the fifth drawing, Dr. Laurent couldn't contain her curiosity any longer. Getting up out of her seat, she stepped behind the couch and looked over Annja's shoulder at the sketch pad.\n\n\"Oh, my!\" she said when she saw what Annja was drawing.\n\nANNJA CAME BACK TO HERSELF to find Dr. Laurent sitting in her chair nearby, watching her closely, a tight expression on her face.\n\n\"How are you doing, Annja?\" she asked when she saw that her patient had emerged from the trance.\n\nI feel good, was Annja's first thought, and she truly did. She felt rested in a way she hadn't for a long time, as if she'd laid down for a quick nap and had awoken a dozen hours later instead. Her physical and emotional batteries felt recharged and ready for whatever was to come next.\n\n\"Is it over?\" she asked, glancing around for a clock. Just how long was I out, anyway? she wondered.\n\n\"Yes, it's over,\" Dr. Laurent said. Realizing what Annja was looking for, she answered her unspoken question. \"You've been in a trance for just about an hour, give or take a few minutes.\"\n\n\"And did it work?\"\n\n\"I believe so.\" The doctor picked up the sketch pad off her lap and handed it Annja. \"Does this look familiar?\"\n\nWhile the drawing wouldn't win any awards for its artistic merits, it was immediately clear what it was she had drawn\u2014the face of the swordsman she'd encountered at Roux's. The figure in the picture stared out at her from behind the concealment of a hood and face mask, but she would recognize the look of superiority in those eyes anywhere. She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up as she stared at the image and had the eerie sense that the image was looking back at her at the same time.\n\n\"Yes, that's the man from my dreams,\" she said in reply to Dr. Laurent's question, and gave herself a quick shake to dispel the lingering sense of disquiet the image was giving her.\n\n\"That's what I thought. How about what's on the next page?\"\n\nAnnja flipped the page and found the image of a katana. But it was the two images she'd sketched onto the blade itself, just above the tsabo, or hilt guard, that really caught her attention. The first was a set of Japanese characters that she couldn't read so she had no idea what they said. The second was easily recognizable, however; it was an elegantly drawn image of a dragon straight out of Japanese mythology. The beast had been rendered standing on its hind legs, its wings outstretched to their full extent and its long whiskers drooping past an open mouth full of teeth.\n\nAnnja was surprised, as the drawing was not only well done but extremely detailed. It was considerably better than the first one, as if she had tapped into some long-forgotten well of artistic talent deep in her soul. \"I did this?\" she asked.\n\n\"You did that,\" the doctor replied. \"Perhaps you have a second career as an artist.\"\n\n\"Yeah, maybe so.\" As she stared at it, Annja realized the etching had been on the sword that the Dragon had wielded, the one that had almost taken her head off. Her unconscious mind had seen and made note of the details even in the midst of the fight that her conscious mind and body was trying frantically not to lose.\n\nAnnja also knew that just as artisans today signed their creations, so, too, did the ancient swordsmiths, etching small sets of kanji characters into their blades to show evidence of their craftsmanship. You could tell the provenance of a blade from those tiny images, and once you knew what type of blade it was, you had a shot at tracking it down as the ownership and heritage was often carefully cataloged.\n\nFor the first time since her search started, she'd found a solid lead.\n\nDr. Laurent asked her something, but Annja missed it.\n\n\"I'm sorry. What was that?\" she said, looking up from the drawing.\n\nThe doctor's eyes were filled with sorrow.\n\n\"I asked if you were ever injured in a fire.\"\n\nNo sooner had the words left the doctor's mouth than the sense of fear and danger that had reared its head at the start of the session came sweeping back in like a tsunami. Cold fingers scurried up her spine and her breath caught in her throat. It was as if her entire system had been shocked into immobility; she couldn't have responded to Dr. Laurent even if her life had depended on it.\n\nThen, as quickly as it had come, the feeling passed and she could breathe again.\n\n\"No,\" she managed to whisper back in answer to the question.\n\n\"Lose a loved one to a fire, then? Maybe when you were younger?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, more firmly this time. \"I was raised at an orphanage in New Orleans. I never knew any of my family.\" The doctor hadn't asked if she'd ever had nightmares about dying in a fire, so Annja had no intention of mentioning them. Besides, she'd outgrown that long ago.\n\nDr. Laurent leaned forward in her chair and said, very gently, \"Turn the page, Annja.\"\n\nAs she did as she was asked, Annja said, \"I don't know what this\u2014\"\n\nThe rest of the sentence died. She stared at the page in complete shock.\n\nShe'd drawn an executioner's fire straight from the history books\u2014a central pole surrounded by a heaping pile of bound hay and wood that burned out of control, the flames reaching for the edges of the page as if hungry for more. A great cloud of smoke and ash filled the space around the image and Annja had the sense of figures standing there, watching the spectacle as if enjoying an afternoon at the movies.\n\nBut what made her heart pound and her thoughts freeze like ice was the suggestion of a figure at the center of the image, the thin slender shape of a woman, just the whisper of a ghost at the heart of the inferno.\n\n\"Oh, my God,\" she breathed.\n\nFrantic, she flipped the page, only to find the exact same image on the next sheet in the pad.\n\nDr. Laurent was speaking to her, but Annja's head was filled with a great roaring noise, a curtain of sound that blotted out everything else, and she didn't hear anything that was said. All she could do was stare at the pages in front of her, astounded at what had come bubbling up from her subconscious like some ancient beast waiting to devour the unwary.\n\nPage after page, the sketches were the same, until she came to the very last page of the drawing pad. Maybe her subconscious mind had recognized that this was it, there were no more pages to draw upon, for a small detail had been added to this image that was not present in any of the others.\n\nIn the right-hand corner of the page, almost lost in the swirling cloud of ash and smoke that covered the area, the image of a dove had been added to the scene, wings spread as it soared toward the heavens.\n\nIt was too much for Annja. With the pad clutched to her chest, she mumbled her apologies and got out of there as fast as she could.\n\n## 15\n\nThailand 1996\n\n\"No!\" old man Toshiro barked. \"Feel the pattern, do not think it.\"\n\nShizu nodded at her instructor and returned to the starting position, ready to run through the kata again from the beginning, all two hundred specific moves, despite her exhaustion and pain. She'd been at it for two straight days and the lack of food and drink was starting to take its toll on her concentration and on her fifteen-year-old body. And Toshiro would brook no error; if she made a mistake, she would start again from the beginning, just as she was now. A single complaint or groan of pain would only prolong the session; Toshiro had once kept her going for five straight days, when she'd voiced an argument over why she shouldn't have to practice the basics with such fervor and repetition, until she'd finally passed out from exhaustion.\n\nIt had been three years since she had first arrived here at Toshiro's. She remembered that morning as though it was yesterday. The old man had been waiting outside when she and Sensei had arrived. She had clung to Sensei in the limousine, scared of the wizened little man waiting outside the car.\n\nSensei had spoken to her gently, but firmly. \"You are going to stay here with Toshiro for the next few years, Shizu, and he is going to teach you many things. When you are finished, when you have learned all you need to know, then I will return for you. Your destiny awaits you, but destiny is a harsh mistress and you must be strong if you are going to bend her to your will. Can you do that, Shizu?\"\n\nShe remembered staring into his eyes, seeing the challenge there, and knowing deep down in her heart that if she did not get out of the car and do as she was asked, then the second chance at life that she had been granted when this man walked into the warehouse in Kyoto would be finished. He would abandon her as quickly as he had taken her in.\n\nWith a trembling hand, she had opened the car door and presented herself to Toshiro.\n\n\"Again! Begin!\"\n\nFocusing her concentration, Shizu started the sequence of movements that began the kata, letting her thoughts drift as she felt the proper movements more than thought about them. Katas had been developed to allow a martial artist to practice against an imaginary opponent\u2014or, in this case, opponents\u2014and as Shizu moved through the sequence she concentrated so strongly that she could picture them before her. She could see their strikes, feel the passage of their limbs, as they punched and kicked and spun, trying to defeat her. Shizu was a good pupil, probably one of the best Toshiro had ever trained, though he'd never tell her that, and she moved from defense to attack and back again with almost effortless ease.\n\nToshiro had been a harsh taskmaster over the years, but a fair one as well. He had taught her so much\u2014art and language, history and culture, math and science. She took to it with an aptitude and a hunger that had surprised both of them, and in a very short time she had surpassed even his brightest students.\n\nIt was in the second year of her residence that the physical training began. Strength conditioning to prepare her body. Meditation to train her mind. Martial arts to prepare her for what was to come in the years ahead. Karate. Tae kwon do. Brazilian jujitsu. Thai boxing. Wing Chun kung fu. Ninjitsu. A mishmash of styles and disciplines, all designed for one end\u2014to prepare her for the destiny that Sensei said awaited her.\n\nShe had learned much, it was true, but even she knew there was more to come. Toshiro was not done with her yet. This was just another of his seemingly endless tests, but Shizu welcomed it as she had all the others.\n\nBesides, this day was different.\n\nSensei was there.\n\nShe did not know how she knew; she just did. She had not seen him, had not heard Toshiro speak of his presence, but she could feel him, out there, somewhere, watching.\n\nAnd so she strove to perform the kata without error.\n\nSeeing the near perfection of her movements, Toshiro decided to show his unseen guest just how good his pupil actually was. With a nod at the doorway in the back of the room, the martial-arts master summoned those he had handpicked for the occasion.\n\nFive darkly clad warriors rushed into the room, armed with a variety of weapons, from a bo staff to a katana. Without hesitation they rushed across the room and attacked Shizu, who was still moving through the sequence of her kata.\n\nThe young prodigy felt them coming, could sense them in her mind's eye, and she waited for them to reach her.\n\nThen, once they had, she fell on them like a lightning storm.\n\nIt didn't matter that they were armed and she was not. It didn't matter that they were warriors who had been studying for decades, well versed in their particular disciplines, while she had been studying for only three years. It didn't matter that she had been enduring a grueling training session for forty-eight hours without a break while they were well rested, well fed and eager to show Toshiro what they could do.\n\nNone of that mattered.\n\nWhat mattered was the heart of the warrior, and Shizu had that in spades.\n\nShe made it look easy.\n\nOne by one, her opponents were disarmed, beaten, battered and tossed aside like leaves before a gale-force wind. Even as they lay there groaning, trying to figure out what had just hit them with such ferocity, Shizu continued with her previous exercise, flowing into the next step in the kata as smoothly as if she had never been interrupted.\n\nBehind her, out of sight, the old teacher smiled in grim satisfaction.\n\nWhen she had finished all two hundred steps of the form with perfect execution and flawless precision, she turned to her teacher and bowed low, just as she'd been taught on the very first day.\n\nBut then Shizu did a surprising thing.\n\nAs Toshiro watched, his pupil turned to face the wall behind which their guest stood, observing the session. With just as much respect as she had shown her teacher, Shizu bowed to their unseen guest.\n\nThe move brought a bark of laughter from Toshiro, something his students heard so seldom that it caused Shizu to spin around and stare at him in surprise.\n\nTOSHIRO SAT AT THE FEET of his guest and served him tea prepared the old way, the only way that mattered. As any true warrior would, the man accepted the proffered cup and then offered it back again to Toshiro, indicating that the elder should be the one to drink first. Back and forth it went until honor had been satisfied and his guest took a long drink from the tiny cup.\n\nWith the ceremony out of the way, the two men could get down to business.\n\n\"You saw?\" Toshiro asked.\n\nThe other man nodded. He'd been watching from behind a hidden slot in one of the studio's shoji screens, the same one Shizu had so impertinently bowed toward, and was privately thrilled with how far his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 had come. \"She has learned well, yes?\"\n\n\"She is a good student. Still thinks too much, but we'll drive that out of her yet.\"\n\nToshiro's guest frowned. \"You think she needs to remain here longer?\"\n\nThe shorter man beamed. \"Oh, yes. Another year, maybe two. She is not yet ready.\"\n\n\"But I thought you just said she was a good student. That she was ready.\"\n\nThe grizzled old warrior shook his head. \"Not ready. Still has not learned the path of the lotus flower, the way of the crane, the\u2014\"\n\nHis guest held up his hands. \"Okay. Enough. I will not argue. You are the master here, not I.\" Still seated, he bowed low to show his respect and to apologize for his doubt.\n\nThe older man slapped him on the knee, an affectionate move that one might not have expected for a man of his reputation, but the two of them had known each other for a long time, a long time indeed.\n\n\"You shouldn't worry. I will forge for you a weapon with such precision that not even Death will know she is coming.\"\n\nThe other man smiled. \"I know you will, Toshiro, I know you will.\"\n\n## 16\n\nNow\n\nFeeling very flustered by what she had experienced in the hypnotherapist's office, Annja wandered the streets for a bit, keeping her mind purposely blank. She didn't want to think about the drawings on the pad in her hands, didn't want to think about the possible implications, how it all might be interpreted. Not yet, at least. She just wanted to calm her racing heart and get her pulse back under control.\n\nShe found herself standing before a quaint little caf\u00e9 on the corner of Bleaker and Main. The place was only half-full, with several of the tables outside under the canopy empty. She sat at one and glanced over the menu until a waiter came to see what she wanted.\n\n\"What can I get for you today?\" he asked.\n\nShe ordered lunch\u2014a glass of water and a chef's salad\u2014even though she wasn't all that hungry. It was more about giving her something to focus on, something for her hands to do, rather than needing to fill her stomach.\n\nOnce she had relaxed she pulled out the sketch pad she had taken with her from Dr. Laurent's office and flipped it open to one of the pages where she had drawn the execution scene. With the detached eye of a scientist she studied it.\n\nHad she seen the image before? she wondered. When she had first acquired the sword she'd done a tremendous amount of research into the woman who had once carried it\u2014could she have seen it then? In a museum or an art book? Maybe a research site on the Internet?\n\nThere was really no way to know.\n\nThe other solution\u2014that it wasn't something she had seen, but a memory from another time and another place\u2014freaked her out more than she expected. She had always known that there was a reason the sword had chosen her, but having it do so because she was...what? A descendant? A distant blood relative? Or even crazier yet, the reincarnation of Joan herself?\n\nHeaven only knew and right now it didn't seem to want to tell her.\n\nTired of chasing down streets that seemed to have no end, Annja gave up on those images and turned to the other set that she had drawn, marveling again at the detail she'd been able to capture.\n\nShe was examining the image of the sword itself when someone said, \"Excuse me?\"\n\nAnnja looked up to find an Asian woman standing beside her table. She wore ripped jeans, a black concert T-shirt, and a jean jacket that had been drawn on with Magic Marker so many times that the words had long since blended into an incoherent stream of letters. Her long black hair hung freely down her back.\n\n\"Excuse me, but are you Annja Creed, from Chasing History's Monsters?\" the young woman asked.\n\nNot now, Annja thought, but it was too late. Might as well get it over with.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, a bit abruptly.\n\nThe woman couldn't help but notice the tone. She dropped her eyes to the ground and began backing away. \"I'm sorry to have bothered you. Sorry.\"\n\nWay to go, you coldhearted idiot! Annja berated herself. Probably took all her courage just to come over and say hello.\n\nAs she turned to go, Annja said, \"No, I'm the one who should be sorry. Please, don't go.\"\n\nThe woman hesitated, clearly uncertain what to do.\n\n\"Come on, join me for a minute,\" Annja said, forcing a smile to show that she meant it. Her audience was small enough; she didn't need to go chasing off any of her viewers, no matter how badly her day had been going.\n\nThe fan sat down and, smiling shyly at her, held out her hand.\n\n\"I'm Shizu,\" she said.\n\n\"Annja, though you already know that.\"\n\n\"Right. And, like, don't worry about it, by the way.\"\n\nAnnja was confused. \"Don't worry about what?\"\n\n\"That you were going to dis me like that. I mean, you're a celebrity, right? You must get people interrupting you all the time\u2014like, what a bummer. I completely understand.\"\n\nAnnja stared at her as if she was from another planet.\n\nSomeone up there must hate me, she thought, but she smiled graciously and said, \"Thanks. For letting me apologize, that is.\"\n\n\"Like, no problem.\"\n\nOnce she got beyond Shizu's annoying speech habits, Annja actually began to enjoy herself. She discovered that Shizu was going to New York University, was majoring in philosophy and had lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to the Big Apple. The girl was actually quite well-read and Annja began to suspect that the vapid airhead exterior was really just a front she'd developed through the years to allow her to fit in with others her age.\n\nAnnja, in turn, answered her questions about what it was like to work on a cable television show, how she'd gotten involved in archaeology, and whether or not she thought her cohost, Kristie Chatham, was any good at her job.\n\nLunch passed quickly and for a short while Annja actually forgot about the disturbing events in Dr. Laurent's office.\n\nEventually Annja excused herself to go to the restroom and when she returned she saw that the waiter had left the check on the table in one of those black plastic sleeves. She was in the process of reaching for it when Shizu jumped to her feet and grabbed her hand.\n\n\"Oh, my God, like, I totally didn't realize what time it was!\" Shizu exclaimed. \"I was supposed to meet my boyfriend twenty minutes ago! Thanks for talking with me for so long. My friends are never going to believe this!\"\n\nThey shook hands and Annja watched her disappear into the crowd moving past at the corner. Still laughing over the uniqueness of the whole encounter, she picked up the small plastic folder with her bill inside and opened it up, intending to pay, only to recoil in surprise.\n\nThe bill had been folded into the shape of a dragon.\n\nAlarm bells blared in her mind.\n\nShe shoved back from the table and managed to restrain herself from calling on her sword right then and there. Only the thought that drawing it in public might be just what the Dragon wanted her to do kept her from actually doing it; she didn't need to be on the five-o'clock news wielding a sword in a public restaurant. She was already notorious enough as it was.\n\nHeads turned in her direction as she surged to her feet and she glared at them all, mentally wrapping each face in a ninja hood and mask, searching for a pair of eyes that looked familiar to her, but none of them were.\n\nShe knew she had only seconds to pinpoint just where the origami had come from and every second wasted was another that the Dragon could use to either prepare for an attack or fade into the background, only to disappear once more.\n\nShe wasn't going to let that happen this time.\n\nHaving eliminated those around her, Annja realized that the Dragon must be inside the caf\u00e9. After all, that was where the bill had come from and no one but her and her waiter had touched it.\n\nShe focused on the waiter.\n\nShe hadn't even looked at him when he'd taken her order, not really. She'd been too wrapped up in her turmoil over the sketches. So for all she knew he could be the Dragon himself, though it was more likely that he had simply given the other man access to her check case. Either way, the waiter would have some answers.\n\nLike an enraged lioness, Annja stormed inside the caf\u00e9 itself and then, not seeing the waiter anywhere in the room, she pushed her way through the small crowd of customers near the bar and slipped into the kitchen.\n\nA man in a dishwasher's apron intercepted her just inside the doors. \"I'm sorry, miss, but you can't be in here.\"\n\n\"Where is he?\" she snarled, and watched in satisfaction as the help quickly backed away from her. She followed, deeper into the kitchen, until she could see the guy who had served her. He was in one corner, talking to the chef.\n\nHands reached out for her, trying to stop her, but she pushed past and cornered the waiter against the wall.\n\nWith one fist wrapped in his white shirt and the other holding the folded-up bill in front of his face, she shouted, \"Who did this? Did you do this?\"\n\nThe guy shrank back from her. \"Lady, I don't know what you are talking about! Who did what?\"\n\n\"Folded my bill up like this! Did you do it?\" She shook him a little, being none too gentle about it.\n\nHis eyes grew even wider, if that was at all possible. \"Easy, lady! Take it easy! I can't even fold a napkin right, never mind do something like that!\"\n\nThere were murmurs of assent from the group that was gathering around her. Looking into his eyes, she could see he was being honest. He had no idea what she was talking about.\n\nShe released him and turned away, her thoughts racing. If the waiter hadn't done it himself, nor allowed it to happen in the back before it reached her table, then it had to be someone else on the staff.\n\nBut who?\n\nShe replayed the final minutes of the meal in her mind: she was sitting talking to Shizu, the waiter had come by and placed the check on the tabletop, she'd gotten up to use the restroom. When she had returned, Shizu had thanked her and raced off to meet her boyfriend.\n\nAnnja stopped the mental replay and backed it up again, watched as the waiter placed the check folder on the edge of the table between Shizu and her, watched as she excused herself to go to the restroom.\n\nThinking it through, an uncomfortable suspicion was starting to form in her mind. The only time the bill folder had been within anyone else's sight was during those few moments that it had rested on the tabletop. And the only person within reach of it at the time, aside from herself, was...\n\nShizu.\n\nAnnja was already in motion by the time her conscious mind caught up with her intuition. She threw some cash at the waiter, ran out of the caf\u00e9, vaulted the small iron fence that surrounded the outdoor terrace and rushed into the nearby intersection, her eyes already scanning the crowd for any sign of the girl who had shared a drink with her over lunch.\n\nThe girl worked for the Dragon.\n\nAnnja hunted up and down those streets for more than an hour, hoping she might show herself, might give Annja the chance she needed to grab her and ask a few, all-important questions, but it was no use.\n\nThe young woman, whoever she had really been, was gone.\n\n## 17\n\nAs Annja was confronting the waitstaff at the caf\u00e9 and trying to determine just who had left the folded paper dragon in her bill folio, the Dragon was headed for the offices of Dr. Julie Laurent, hypnotherapist.\n\nSomething had happened to Annja there. Her agitated state had been proof of that and the Dragon wanted to find out what had riled her so badly.\n\nFinding the office was easy. The Dragon climbed the steps and knocked on the doctor's front door.\n\n\"Coming!\" said a faint voice from behind the door.\n\nThe Dragon put a finger over the peephole, preventing the doctor from looking out and seeing anything.\n\nA moment passed. The Dragon heard the locks being turned on the other side, and then the door was opened to the extent the security chain allowed it. The Dragon reared back and slammed a foot into the door right next to the handle.\n\nThe door flew open, knocking the older woman behind it backward into the office and down onto the floor. The Dragon followed swiftly. A knife was put to the doctor's throat.\n\n\"Scream and not only will I kill you, but I'll carve you up before I do,\" the Dragon said.\n\nWisely, the doctor clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out.\n\nThe Dragon kicked the door shut, relocked it and turned back to face the woman still cowering silently on the floor.\n\n\"You and I are going to have a little chat, all right?\"\n\nDr. Laurent nodded.\n\n\"If you answer my questions, you'll be fine. If you do not answer them, I'm going to have to hurt you. Do you understand?\"\n\nWith tears streaming down her face, the doctor nodded.\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nThe Dragon instructed her to get up off the floor and to take a seat in one of the nearby chairs. Dr. Laurent immediately did so. That was a good sign; a submissive attitude was much better than the defiance that had been expected.\n\nTaking out a photograph of Annja, the Dragon handed it to Dr. Laurent.\n\n\"The woman in the photo was in here earlier this morning. What did you talk about?\"\n\nA little bit of the doctor's uncertainty came back at the idea of breaching her client's privacy. \"I can't possibly give you that information. It is covered by doctor-client confidentiality and\u2014\"\n\nStill smiling, the Dragon reached out, grabbed the doctor's left pinkie and brutally snapped it.\n\nDr. Laurent let out a short, sharp yelp of pain that was quickly cut off as the Dragon slapped a hand over her mouth.\n\nLeaning close to her ear, the Dragon said, \"Next time I'll break all of the fingers on that hand. And then I'll go to work with my knife. Now answer the question!\"\n\nThe doctor's bluster seemed to have fled in the wake of the violence and she answered the best she could around her sobs of pain.\n\n\"Ms. Creed came in for a consultation. She's been having the same dream for several nights and she...she wanted to understand just what it was trying to tell her.\"\n\n\"See? That wasn't so hard, now, was it?\" the Dragon asked. \"What kind of dream?\"\n\n\"A man...attacking her with a sword.\"\n\n\"Did she describe this person?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because all she could see was the swordsman's eyes. The rest was covered up with some kind of mask.\" Dr. Laurent cradled her injured hand in her other one and glared at the Dragon.\n\nIn response, the Dragon smiled and then nearly laughed aloud as Dr. Laurent recoiled in fear, pulling her hands against her body as if that would protect them from harm.\n\nLittle good that will do when the time comes, the Dragon thought.\n\n\"What else can you tell me?\"\n\nDr. Laurent explained how her patient had been focused on identifying the swordsman and had even drawn images of the sword that he carried in the dream. When asked if she had these drawings in her possession, the doctor admitted that she did; there were copies in the file with her written notes.\n\n\"And the file is here, in the office?\" the Dragon asked.\n\nDr. Laurent sighed at this further violation of a client's privacy but had learned her lesson the first time and didn't object. Instead, she showed the Dragon where she kept the file.\n\nThe images were well done, surprisingly so since they had been created while the artist was in the midst of a hypnotic trance. The Dragon stared at the face in the picture; it was an excellent likeness.\n\nThe image of the sword, however, was more disturbing.\n\nThere wasn't enough detail in the portrait for the Dragon to be worried about being identified through it. But the image of the sword was another story. It was close enough to the real etching and signature that Annja Creed might be able to trace it back to the Dragon's master and that would never do.\n\n\"Is this the only copy of the drawing?\" the Dragon asked.\n\nDr. Laurent nodded.\n\nSomething passed between them, a feeling, a premonition, maybe. Whatever it was, the doctor suddenly realized the purpose of the question, her eyes going wide with the recognition of what was to come. She gave a frightened little squeal and tried to run, bolting from her chair and heading for the door.\n\nThe Dragon let her get close to the door, let her hope rise as she realized freedom was only a few steps away, and then bounded across the room, seizing the doctor by her hair and spinning her around to face the interior of the room. With a flick of the wrist a blade appeared in the Dragon's hand, a blade that was used seconds later to slash the doctor's throat.\n\nIt happened so fast that the doctor never had time to scream.\n\nBlood fountained up from the wound and the Dragon shoved the body away to avoid being splashed.\n\nDr. Laurent tumbled forward, collapsing across the sofa, her hands going to her throat as she tried to staunch the flow of blood.\n\nIt took less than a minute for her to die.\n\nMessy, but unavoidable, the Dragon thought.\n\nBeing careful to avoid the splatters of blood across the floor, the Dragon walked to the desk and picked up the photocopies of the drawings the Creed woman had made, as well as the file containing the doctor's impressions about the patient and her condition. The doctor's final few patients would automatically come under suspicion if the police followed their normal procedures, and the last thing the Dragon wanted was to have the police trailing the target. By taking the materials the Dragon hoped to eliminate any connection between the doctor and the target, which, in turn, would throw the police off the track.\n\nJust to be certain that all traces of the Creed woman's appointment had been dealt with accordingly, the Dragon stole the doctor's appointment book and erased the tape on the answering machine.\n\nStepping over to the window to be certain of better reception, the Dragon took out a cell phone and dialed a number. When it was answered, the Dragon said, \"I need some men. A combination of muscle and general surveillance experience would be best. I'll meet them in the location we discussed previously.\"\n\nWith that, the Dragon hung up, took one last glance around and then left the office behind, carefully locking the door with the doctor's own set of keys.\n\nTHE MEN ASSEMBLED AT THE warehouse two hours later.\n\nThe Dragon looked all six of them over. They were average looking, nondescript. Several had short haircuts that suggested prior military service. A few had prison tattoos. None of them would stand out in a crowd and even the tallest among them wasn't so tall as to be memorable.\n\nIt was a good group.\n\n\"This is your target,\" the Dragon said, handing them each a photograph of Annja, taken as she came out of her apartment building. It was a good shot, with a clear view of her features, and they would have no trouble identifying her from it.\n\nThe Dragon gave them a minute to look it over, and then said, \"There are two addresses on the back. One for her home, the other for her place of employment. I want her watched. I need to know where she goes, who she sees and what she does.\"\n\nThe men nodded. One of them had the audacity to make suggestive comments regarding what he'd like to do to her. That wouldn't do. The Dragon walked over and without warning slammed the blunt side of one hand into the man's throat.\n\nHis eyes bulged; his hands went to his neck as he realized his windpipe had been crushed and his air supply cut off. He reached out in his panic, but the Dragon stepped back and let him fall to the floor, calmly watching as he suffocated to death.\n\nIt took several minutes.\n\nThe rest of the men looked on in silence.\n\nWhen it was over, the Dragon turned to the group and asked, \"Anyone else like to offer their opinion of the target?\"\n\nNo one said anything.\n\nThe Dragon knew that men like this were influenced by two things\u2014fear and money. With the first established, it was time to move onto the second.\n\nStepping over the dead man's body, the Dragon walked back up the row, examining each man in turn. \"If the opportunity presents itself, or if you are made and she knows you are following her, I want you to stage a confrontation. She is in possession of a certain sword, one that is worth a hefty sum of money. If any of you get the location of that weapon, or the sword itself, I will provide you with a reward above and beyond the fee for the job itself.\"\n\nThere were murmurs of appreciation.\n\nThe Dragon looked them over. \"Do you understand?\"\n\nThere was a chorus of agreements.\n\nThe Dragon handed them all a slip of paper.\n\n\"Here is a cell number. Memorize it. When you have completed the assignment, call me.\"\n\nAfter a moment, the Dragon collected the slips of paper and then dismissed the men.\n\nThe plan had been set in motion. It was time to wait to see if it bore any fruit.\n\n## 18\n\nBetween the events in Dr. Laurent's office and the encounter at the caf\u00e9, Annja had had enough excitement for one day. She caught a cab and headed home, but not until she'd had the driver make a few sudden turns and run a red light or two. At this point, it made sense to be cautious.\n\nJust because you can't see them, Annja thought, doesn't mean they aren't out there.\n\nShe had the cabbie drop her off a block from her loft and ducked into a local Chinese restaurant for some takeout. Once back at home, she sat down and looked at the drawings, trying to make some sense of them.\n\nShe stared again at the face of the swordsman, searching her memory for a familiar face, trying to determine if she had ever seen him before. With only the eyes and the upper half of the nose to work from, it was like trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks. It could be anybody, really.\n\nShe turned her attention to the images of Joan of Arc's execution. Recalling her thought that she might have been reproducing a painting or an image she'd seen somewhere before, she turned to her laptop. A search turned up nearly ninety thousand images.\n\nIt would take days to go through them all.\n\nStill, she glanced through the first few pages of images, looking for something that resembled her drawing. But, aside from the fact that they all showed a young woman being burned at the stake, none of them were a match.\n\nThe mystery remained and Annja decided to leave it that way.\n\nLater that night, while she was trying to get organized for the work she needed to do in the studio the next day, her phone rang.\n\nAnswering it, Annja said, \"Hello?\"\n\nOnly silence greeted her.\n\n\"Hello? Is anyone there?\" she asked.\n\nStill nothing.\n\nAssuming it was a wrong number, she hung up.\n\nA few minutes later the phone rang again.\n\nA feeling of unease swept over her as she stared at the receiver. It rang twice, and then a third time. On the fourth ring she overcame her reluctance and snatched it up.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\nSilence greeted her a second time, but this time it was different. This time there was a depth to it, a sense that someone was there, even if they weren't answering her.\n\nThat silence angered her.\n\n\"I know you can hear me. I don't know who you are or what you want, but I'm not the type of person you want to mess around with. I suggest you leave me alone.\"\n\nWhen she still didn't get an answer, Annja hung up the phone.\n\nNo sooner had she done so, then it rang again.\n\nGrabbing the phone for the third time, she snarled, \"Now you are asking for trouble.\"\n\nA man's laugh echoed down the line. \"And here I thought you just didn't understand me, Annja.\"\n\n\"Garin?\" Finding him unexpectedly on the line startled her.\n\n\"I'm headed out of town for a week and thought I'd check in before I left. You returned to the U.S. rather abruptly, after all.\"\n\nIt took Annja a moment to focus on what he was saying; the prior calls had unnerved her more than she had expected. Finally she said, \"After your little altercation with Roux I saw no sense in staying, not when I had work that needed to be done here.\"\n\n\"And does that work pertain to the information we discussed before you left?\"\n\nAnnja was about to say yes, but bit her tongue at the last minute to keep from doing so. If there really was an international assassin after either her or Roux, she suddenly didn't want Garin to know about it.\n\n\"No, nothing like that. Just some editing for the show that needed to be done.\" She tried to change the subject. \"So where did you say you were going?\" she asked.\n\nGarin answered with a laugh. \"I didn't say, actually, but if you must know I'm visiting some of my electronic plants in Japan for the next few days. No luck tracking down the Dragon, then?\"\n\nSo much for her change of subject.\n\n\"I spent a day or two looking into it, but I haven't found anything solid. Why? Have you learned something new?\"\n\nGarin shouted something unintelligible to someone on his end, then said to Annja, \"No, nothing new. Just thought you might have. You're so good at that kind of thing, after all.\"\n\nAnother shout, though this time he covered the mouthpiece of his receiver so that it came out muffled.\n\n\"Sorry, Annja, gotta run. They're holding the plane for me. Best of luck and let me know if you find anything.\"\n\nBefore she had a chance to say anything back, he hung up.\n\nShe stared at the receiver in her hand for a minute, muttered, \"Idiot,\" and hung up.\n\nGarin's call made her uneasy for a reason she couldn't quite put her finger on, and she lay in bed wondering about it long into the night.\n\nTHE NEXT MORNING SHE ROSE early and prepared for her day at the studio. Doug Morrell was counting on her and the editing team to cut nineteen hours of video down to a thirty-minute segment, a task that was never easy for Annja. She wanted her viewers to get as much information as possible and there was only so much she could jam into a lousy half hour.\n\nStill, it had to be done and she didn't trust anyone else to work on her shows if she was available to do so. The few times she'd let Doug handle the chore, he'd stuffed so much garbage into the show that it had looked like one of Kristie's episodes. And if there was one person in the world Annja couldn't stand, it was her cohost, Kristie.\n\nWhile she would just normally take the subway over to Manhattan, today she decided to splurge on a cab. Along the way she tried to shake any tail she might have picked up by having the cabbie make half a dozen turns at the last minute and double back a time or two down the same streets. When she was at last satisfied that no one was following them, she let him take her the rest of the way to her destination by a more direct route.\n\nThe editing team was already assembled in the cutting room when she arrived and for the rest of the day Annja threw herself into the work in front of her. She didn't think about the Dragon. She didn't think about a mystical sword, hers or anyone else's. All she did was focus on making her next episode of Chasing History's Monsters the best it could be. They had less than an hour of work to go when quitting time arrived, and Annja convinced the others to stay around and finish up so they wouldn't have to come back in the next morning. To make the decision easier for them, she offered to have pizza and beer brought in for dinner.\n\nThat did the trick.\n\nBy seven o'clock they were finished. The video had been cut, the still shots selected and Annja had even recorded the necessary voice-overs that were needed to pull the whole thing together as a cohesive unit.\n\nWhen Doug came into work the next morning, he'd find the entire package on his desk, ready to go down to production for the final assembly.\n\nNot bad for a day's work, Annja thought.\n\nPerhaps more importantly, it left her next day free so she could look into a few of the details she'd uncovered earlier that morning, which had been the entire point of the exercise in the first place.\n\nShe said goodbye to the three technicians, grabbed her backpack and the precious drawings it contained and headed down the street toward the subway station where she intended to catch a train back to Brooklyn.\n\nShe had only walked a few blocks before she felt a stranger's eyes upon her again, just as she had the other day. In the middle of the block she abruptly stopped and bent down to tie her shoe, glancing backward as she did so. Maybe it was because it was getting dark and they didn't think they'd be seen or maybe they just didn't expect her to be as aware of her surroundings as she was, Annja didn't know, but whatever the reason, her little stunt worked.\n\nAbout a block and a half back, two men abruptly stopped and turned away from her. One pretended to be examining a magazine stand and the other pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and acted as if he was answering a call.\n\nAnnja knew the truth, though. She'd seen how intent they were on watching her in those first few seconds before they'd turned away.\n\nShe was being followed. There was no doubt about it.\n\nThe man in front was short and thick, with shoulders that looked as if they belonged on an NFL linebacker. His shaved head gleamed in the streetlights. His partner was taller and thinner, with a thick head of wavy hair and a goatee. Both were dressed in dark pants, shirts and jackets.\n\nAnnja stood and continued walking, but this time she glanced back over her shoulder a few times, watching the men behind her.\n\nThey clearly weren't from New York, as they hadn't yet developed a New Yorker's odd talent for moving through a crowded sidewalk without disturbing the slower pedestrian traffic moving around them. Where Annja slipped through the crowd, moving easily with the changing patterns of those around her, her pursuers plowed their own path and it was this disturbance in the natural flow that had caught her eye and let her know that they were still back there.\n\nEven as she watched, the two men quickened their pace, obviously trying to close the distance between themselves and Annja.\n\nShe wasn't about to let that happen.\n\nLet's see if I can flush the foxes out of the henhouse, she thought, and then broke into a run. Her sudden move caught them off guard and her long legs allowed her to widen the distance between them in those first few seconds, giving her some precious lead time.\n\nShe raced across the traffic against the light. Horns blared, people shouted, but she didn't stop, counting on a little bit of luck and a lot of divine provenance to get her through. She barged through the crowd standing on the opposite corner and shot down the street perpendicular to the direction she'd been traveling in, headed for the subway station on Broadway a block and a half away.\n\nBy the time she reached it, she had widened her lead to almost two whole blocks. Unfortunately, her pursuers had doubled in number, as well, for as she stopped for a moment at the top of the steps leading down to the subway station, she could see four men shoving their way through the crowd toward her.\n\nTime to go, she told herself, and raced down the steps two at a time.\n\nAt the bottom she caught sight of a couple of transit cops standing around chatting and she momentarily considered getting them involved, but decided against it at the last minute. If it was the Dragon's men behind her\u2014and really, who else could it be?\u2014then she didn't want to drag them into her mess.\n\nInstead, she charged forward, vaulted the turnstile and dashed down the steps in front of her, headed for the center platform. The station serviced four different sets of tracks, two northbound and two southbound. The center platform would give her access to one of each, which seemed her best bet at the moment. When she had managed to lose her pursuers, she could always get off at another stop, cross over to the opposite platform and head back the other way, if necessary.\n\nOnce on the platform she slowed her pace and began to mix in with the crowd around her. The little magazine-and-snack stand was selling Mets caps for fifteen bucks, so she hurriedly bought one and, stuffing her hair up underneath it, jammed it on her head. She thought about grabbing a pair of sunglasses while she was at it, but decided against it. She didn't want anything to hinder her vision of the people around her.\n\nThere was a commotion on the stairs and Annja turned away, not wanting to be caught gawking and give herself away. She moved down the platform and then looked back the way she had come.\n\nHer original pursuers were coming down the stairs, shoving people out of the way when they didn't move fast enough. As she watched, a young college student angrily tried to push back and ended up being tossed down the stairs for his trouble.\n\nThat got people's attention and they cleared a path, allowing her pursuers to descend that much faster.\n\nA glance to her right to the northbound platform showed that her other two pursuers were already amid the crowd over there, searching for her.\n\nWhere the heck was the train?\n\nShe looked down the tracks, hoping to see the telltale glow of the oncoming light, but only the darkness stared back at her.\n\nFor a second she thought about jumping off the platform and disappearing into the tunnels, but she wasn't desperate enough yet to take a chance of getting caught on the tracks with an inbound train.\n\nWhen she turned back toward the crowd, she saw that her pursuers had reached the bottom of the steps and were on the platform itself. They stopped for a moment, talking it over, and then one headed her way while one went the other.\n\nIf she was going to reach the stairs, she was going to have to confront at least one of them.\n\nAnnja knew she couldn't count on the crowd to keep her hidden forever. Sooner or later one of them was going to catch a glimpse of her and then she'd have to deal with all four of them together. Going on the offensive, while they were still separated from each other, seemed like a smart move and it didn't take her long to decide to do just that.\n\nShe began to work her way through the crowd back in the direction that she'd come from, keeping her face averted as much as possible. As she drew closer to where the bald man stood searching for her, she gradually drifted in his direction. When she was only a few feet away she stopped and waited for him to close the distance.\n\nHe was trying to see over the heads of the people around them when Annja stepped up beside him.\n\n\"Looking for me?\" she asked.\n\nAs he spun to face her, Annja delivered a massive punch to his right temple, stunning him. She followed it with a left cross that started somewhere around her waist and ended up catching him right beneath the chin, slamming his head back.\n\nHe dropped to the ground like a felled tree.\n\nThe crowd around them suddenly backed away, the typical New York response to trouble\u2014stay out of it. Annja was ready to deliver another blow but realized she didn't need to; he was out cold, at least for the time being.\n\nHer frontal assault had an unintended consequence, however. From the platform across the way she could see a number of commuters gesticulating in her direction. Aware of the movement of the crowd, her pursuers glanced in the direction the commuters were pointing.\n\nThey saw Annja at the same time she saw them.\n\nTime to go, she thought to herself.\n\nShe turned, ready to make a dash for the stairs and the freedom they represented, only to find herself looking down the barrel of a very ugly handgun.\n\n\"I don't think so, Ms. Creed,\" the man with the goatee said, shoving the gun closer to her. \"You're coming with me.\"\n\nNo way, she thought. The minute she gave in to them she was signing her own death warrant. Better to go down fighting than to be led like a lamb to the slaughter.\n\nBesides, the gunman had already made a fatal mistake.\n\nHe'd underestimated her.\n\nAnnja was already in motion by the time the \"No!\" came rolling off her lips. She used her shout to distract him; all she needed was a few seconds. Her left hand came up in an arc, the outer edge crashing into the gunman's arm just above the wrist, sending the gun away from her face. In the same motion her hand locked on to his wrist, pulling him forward and down.\n\nThe gun went off, the sound deafening so close to her ear, but she was already out of the line of fire thanks to her deflection strike. The bullet bounced off the concrete beneath her feet, disappearing somewhere into the crowd. Annja was still in motion, pivoting on the balls of her feet and using the swing of her hips to bring her right arm around vicious arc that ended against the side of his head.\n\nNo sooner had she connected with that blow than she delivered another, a hammer strike to the face with her left hand as she completed the circle she'd started with the first blow.\n\nHer assailant staggered, but did not go down.\n\nThe crowd around her was screaming, a result of the gunfire and the violence that had suddenly broken out in their midst, but even that was drowned out as a northbound train roared into the station on the tracks next to her.\n\nAbout time! she thought.\n\nIf she could get on that train before they did, she had a chance of getting away.\n\nThe gunman was shaking his head, trying to clear it, as he brought his arm back up, searching for a target.\n\nAnnja didn't give him any time to find one.\n\nHer right foot came up in a scissor kick, delivering a thunderous blow to the exact same place she'd already struck him twice.\n\nApparently the third time was the charm, for he dropped to the ground, the gun spinning out of his hand across the platform.\n\nAnnja turned, intent on going after it, but was prevented from doing so when several bullets cracked off the floor near her feet.\n\nAs she dove to the side, desperately trying to get out of the line of fire, she saw the other two gunmen standing at the top of the stairs, firing down at her.\n\nShe hit the ground and rolled for cover behind a nearby column. Several other people were already huddled there and Annja knew that if she didn't get out soon it wouldn't be long before some innocent bystander was caught in the cross fire and seriously injured or killed. For all she knew, it could have happened already. Those bullets had to end up somewhere and she could just imagine them finding a home in some commuters' unprotected flesh.\n\nThe train across the platform had discharged its passengers out the opposite side and now the doors on her side swished open. She could hear the conductor's voice indicating what the next stop would be and giving the all-clear announcement, but a fresh barrage of gunfire designed to keep everyone in place and under cover, trembling with fear, prevented anyone from heading for the open doors.\n\nAnnja knew she didn't have the same choice. She had to get on that train, had to take the battle out of the station to keep any more innocents from getting hurt.\n\nAnother volley of gunfire echoed around the station. Expecting a hail of bullets, Annja was shocked when none came her way.\n\nShe chanced a look around the pillar she was using as cover and was astounded to see a second group of men shooting at the first set from the cover of the magazine stand at the other end of the platform.\n\nWho the heck are they? she wondered.\n\nIt didn't matter. While they kept the first group distracted, Annja saw her chance.\n\nShe surged to her feet and raced for the doors of the subway car even as the bell sounded and they began to close.\n\nA fresh volley of gunfire, from both grounds, filled the air with lead but Annja was committed. There was no turning back.\n\nShe was halfway across the platform when she realized it was going to be tight. The doors were closing and even if she got her hand in the door it wouldn't do her any good; they wouldn't just pop back open like an elevator's doors did. It would take some time and she'd be stuck there with one arm in the door and the rest of her standing exposed against the unyielding surface of the train car outside, for too long.\n\nIt would be like shooting ducks in a barrel for anyone with an ounce of experience with a firearm. And from what she had seen so far, they probably had a better than even chance of hitting a nonmoving target.\n\nAll this went through Annja's mind in a split second, and in that time she realized she really only had one course of action left available to her if she wanted to get out of this alive.\n\nWith a final burst of speed and a huge downward thrust of her long athletic legs, Annja launched herself like a missile at the closing doors of the subway car.\n\n## 19\n\nAnnja shot through the opening just as the doors closed behind her. She tucked herself into a ball to cushion the impact she knew she was about to experience.\n\nShe careered into a metal pole, bounced off that and then slammed to a stop against the closed doors on the other side of the train.\n\nShe felt the car lurch into motion beneath her as she climbed cautiously to her feet. Several passengers were staring at her openmouthed and she was sure she looked quite the spectacle after a stunt like that, but Annja didn't care. She'd survived; that was all that mattered.\n\nNo sooner had she risen to her feet, however, than she was throwing herself back down to the floor as the windows in the subway doors shattered under a hail of gunfire. Safety glass went flying, and through the opening Annja could see her two pursuers racing toward her, guns extended. Behind them she could also see her first assailant, the bald man, back on his feet and closing the distance as well.\n\nWhat do they think they're going to do, jump on the moving train? she wondered.\n\nNo sooner had she thought it than the lead gunman threw himself against the door and hung on, letting the train carry him with it. With the glass in the windows gone, he was able to stick his arm inside the train and point his gun at her.\n\nYou have got to be kidding me! Annja thought, even as she hurled herself down the center aisle and away from the door.\n\nGunfire followed her and several passengers went down in a shower of blood.\n\nWith so many passengers watching, Annja didn't dare draw her sword, so she scrambled forward on hands and knees, trying to reach the door to the next car, while around her the other passengers huddled in terror.\n\nThe gunplay stopped, as her pursuer turned his attention to getting inside the subway car before the motion of the train or some hanging piece of equipment swept him off the outside. She could hear him swearing and hollering at the person closest to him to help him haul open the doors, but Annja didn't stick around to see the results of his efforts. Instead, she rose to her feet, hauled back the lever to open the door and stepped onto the narrow platform connecting her car to the next.\n\nWhile in that no-man's-land between cars, Annja summoned her sword from the otherwhere. Its presence made her feel almost instantly better; she always felt as if she could take on any challenge with the sword by her side and this time was no different.\n\nShe stepped across to the next car, hauled open that door and disappeared inside.\n\nAs one, the passengers in the next car turned to see what all the commotion was about and more than a handful started screaming the moment she stepped into the car, sword in hand.\n\n\"Stay down!\" she shouted at them and they did, cowering in their seats. Annja had been concerned that a stray bullet might injure them, but then she realized they weren't afraid of being shot at all. They were afraid of her!\n\nCome on, now, she thought, it's just a broadsword. I'd be far more afraid of the dudes with guns.\n\nShe kept moving forward, rushing for the other end of the car as fast as she could and counting on the passengers to get out of her way.\n\nTo a one, they all did.\n\nMust be the sword, Annja thought with a smile.\n\nShe guessed she was seven, maybe eight, cars from the end of the train. She made it through six of those cars before her pursuers caught up to her, which was pretty damn good, all things considered.\n\nIt just wasn't good enough.\n\n\"Hold it right there!\" a man's voice shouted, and Annja didn't need to look to know who it was. The sound of the slide on the gun was extraloud in the current silence of the subway car.\n\nSlowly, so as to not be mistaken for making any heroic moves, Annja turned to face her assailant.\n\nThree of them stood there\u2014the bald man, the guy with the goatee and one of the newcomers. The fourth man wasn't there, but Annja didn't bother to ask where he was.\n\n\"Put down the sword and kick it over here,\" the bald man said.\n\nKnowing she'd reached the end of the line, Annja did as she was told. She bent down and put the sword on the floor. Then, before she could change her mind, she kicked it along the length of the car toward him. She wasn't sure what would happen next.\n\nWhen she looked up again, over their shoulders, Annja saw an astounding sight. The second group of gunmen she'd seen at the subway station was cautiously making their way toward the group ahead of them. Annja had no idea who they were or what they wanted; all she knew was that their guns were pointed at the other shooters, rather than at her, and that was good enough for now.\n\nThe gunmen hadn't noticed them yet.\n\nPointing behind them, Annja said to them, \"I see you invited a few more guests to the party.\"\n\nMaybe it was the way she said it. Maybe it was the half smile of satisfaction on her face. Whatever it was, it seemed to do the trick. The gunmen turned as one to look behind them.\n\nWith the speed of thought, Annja made her sword vanish back into the otherwhere. Then she turned to escape.\n\nThe sound of gunfire filled the car, the crack of the shots and the buzz of the bullets echoing in the narrow confines of the car. Annja instinctively ducked into a crouch to present a smaller target, but she needn't have worried. The two groups were blazing away at each other and weren't paying attention to her.\n\nShe ran for the last car.\n\nOn the other side of the door a few scattered passengers were watching the gunplay behind them as if it were a spectator sport and Annja grimaced.\n\nOnly in New York.\n\nCrossing the car, she came to the final door on the train. Looking through its window, she could see a small platform on the other side and, just beyond it, the tunnel itself.\n\nIf she could get off the train...\n\nThe door, of course, was locked, to prevent people from doing the very thing she was about to do. Not that that was going to be a hindrance to her.\n\nWhile everyone's attention was on the gun battle going on in the car behind her, Annja called her sword into being and shoved it right through the lock.\n\nThere was a tearing, grinding sound and then the door popped open.\n\nRather than trying to haul her sword back out of the splintered steel of the door, Annja simply let it go, willing it back into the otherwhere as she did so. The sword vanished, leaving a gaping hole in the lock.\n\nAnnja stepped out onto the tiny platform at the end of the train. A small metal railing that came up to her midthigh was all that kept her from falling off the back of the train. The wind whipped all around her and the tunnel was filled with the roar of the moving train and the squeal of its brakes as the conductor tried to slow it down and bring it to a stop as a result of all the shooting. There was a ladder bolted to the subway car on her left, but since it led to the roof of the train she ignored it. With the ceiling of the tunnel so low, climbing up there was practically suicide, which meant she didn't have many options available to her. She could either go back the way she had come or she could get off the train.\n\nA quick glance back into the car showed her pursuers passing through the door at the other end. They would figure out where she had gone in just a few seconds, and if they caught her on the platform it was all over.\n\nKnowing that if she gave it any real thought she'd chicken out, Annja backed up a few steps until she was against the door, then took a running start and launched herself over the rail and off the train.\n\nShe hit the ground hard and rolled, her arms and legs tucked in tight to avoid hitting the rails nearby. She sprang to her feet and headed down the tunnel as fast as she could run. In the back of her mind she marveled at the fact that she had just jumped off a moving train and survived, but the other half of her chalked it up to the sword's influence on her physical abilities and left it at that. The important thing was that she had gotten away.\n\nA bullet bounced off the wall next to her in the split second before the report of the shot reached her ears, echoing in the narrow confines of the tunnel.\n\nThe tunnel curved to the right a few feet ahead and she ran for all she was worth, praying she could get around the bend before a bullet found her flesh.\n\nTwo more bullets bounced around her, ricocheting in the dim light and then she sped past the curve and was out of range, at least for a few minutes.\n\nBetween now and the time the gunmen reach you, you have to come up with a plan. And it had better be a good one, she told herself.\n\nThe tunnel smelled of dirt and exhaust and a thousand other things she couldn't identify. It was dimly lit by a series of bare bulbs hanging on the left-hand wall every ten feet. There was just enough light for her to see so she hurried along as fast as she could, staying to the middle of the tracks and trying to be careful where she put her feet.\n\nFrom behind her came the sound of running footsteps.\n\nAt least one of her pursuers, maybe more, as still back there.\n\nAnnja pushed herself, trying to put as much distance between them and herself as she could. The tunnel branched several times and she let intuition be her guide, making a left here, a right there, until she realized that she was no longer certain she was even on the same track. At that point she slowed down to a walk to try to figure things out.\n\nShe hadn't yet come upon another subway station, so she had no way of knowing where she was. Common sense told her to keep moving in one direction; eventually she had to hit another station and from there she could gain access to the street. So far she hadn't seen any trains, either\u2014maybe traffic control had shut them down temporarily.\n\nShe kept walking.\n\nAfter a few more minutes the earth around her began to vibrate with a steady rhythm and she knew that the trains were up and running again. That made her more nervous than she wanted to admit; if something happened, there wasn't anyplace she could go. She had to find a subway station and soon.\n\nAnnja was just starting to wish she'd headed in the other direction at one of the previous forks she'd encountered when a pursuer caught up to her.\n\nHe charged her out of the darkness, ramming his shoulder into her midriff and lifting her with his forward momentum. They careered across the width of the tunnel until he slammed her bodily against a nearby column supporting the roof above.\n\nShe took the impact badly, not having had time to prepare herself and thought she heard a rib crack as she was crushed between his massive shoulders and the concrete behind her. He kept the pressure on, trying to suffocate her while using his arms to pummel her sides with his massive fists.\n\nAs she hadn't had time to grab a lungful of air, she was already fading quickly, and Annja knew that if she didn't do something drastic she was going to be in serious trouble.\n\nShe brought her right knee up sharply, hammering it into his stomach, but it was like hitting a concrete block with a rubber mallet. She did it again and again, but had no greater luck with her subsequent blows than she'd had with the first. They just bounced off him; the man was a human tank, it seemed. All the while he kept up the punishment with his fists.\n\nAir started to become a scarce commodity and she knew she had to make a move or she was going to pass out. Once that happened it was all over; she'd be completely at her attacker's mercy.\n\nHer arms were free so she considered boxing him about the ears, but with his head pressed against her side she would have only be able to get to one. She needed something a bit more powerful than that.\n\nHer vision began to dim around the edges, a gray haze floating at the periphery of her sight and slowly moving toward the center. He must have sensed her distress, for he suddenly shifted his feet and shoved forward, driving his shoulder another inch into her solar plexus, sending a wave of dizziness washing through her.\n\nNow or never, Annja, she told herself.\n\nHer hands moved spiderlike over his face, searching. He twisted his head, trying to get away, but she managed to find an eye socket with one hand and rammed her thumb into it.\n\nHe let out a howl of pain that filled the air around them like the death knell of some strange beast.\n\nThe pressure on her gut relaxed as the man stumbled backward, his hands going to his face. Annja sucked in a great lungful of breath and stumbled away, fighting to clear her head, knowing that he would be on her again in seconds.\n\nAnnja straightened up, blinking back the darkness that had threatened to overwhelm her. The bald man stood a few feet away, shaking his head like a dog, trying to clear the fluids running down his face.\n\n\"I'm going to kill you for that,\" he said, and charged forward.\n\nAnnja dropped into a crouch, ready for him, and as he rushed forward, she grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and went over backward, using her hands and feet to toss him up and over her head as she rolled.\n\nHe slammed to the ground, dazed, and Annja didn't waste any time. She was already there, sword in hand, the point at his throat.\n\n\"Who sent you?\" she asked, still trying to suck in enough air to calm her screaming lungs. \"What do you want?\"\n\nShe never heard his answer, however, for it was drowned out by the shriek of a train whistle.\n\nShe spun around, looking down the tunnel. A light flared there in the depths. As she watched, it drew closer.\n\nA train was coming down the tracks.\n\nRight toward them.\n\nAnnja didn't hesitate, didn't wait to see what her opponent was doing or how quickly the train might be coming. She knew she had only moments to get out of the danger zone or none of that was going to matter at all.\n\nAnnja ran like the devil himself was on her heels.\n\nWhile moving through the tunnels she'd noticed a shallow niche in the wall every hundred yards or so. She knew these were emergency nooks designed for the transit workers to use in the event that they were accidentally caught in the tunnel with a moving train. The niches weren't much more than hollowed out spaces in the walls, roughly half a foot deep, if that, but she figured they were enough if you kept your head about you and stayed put until the train passed.\n\nOf course, she had to find one first.\n\nThe train whistle wailed again, warning her to get off the tracks, and this time the sound was much closer. She chanced a look back, noting that her opponent was up and on his feet, chasing after her as fast as he could go and that the train had closed half the distance between them already, with no sign of slowing down.\n\nThey had two minutes, maybe less, before the train would be upon them.\n\nShe faced forward and kept going, her gaze frantically scanning the walls on either side.\n\nThere had to one here somewhere! There had to be!\n\nThe train closed in.\n\nAnnja had only seconds left.\n\nCome on! Where the hell is it?\n\nThen she saw it, barely visible amid the darkness of the tunnel, a shadowy outline that suggested depth.\n\nShe flung herself into the emergency niche against the far wall, squeezing her body in as deep as she could get it, worried that the effect of the passing train might be enough to pull her out again into the danger zone.\n\nThe man pursuing her was still ten feet away and his body was suddenly silhouetted in the harsh light of the train roaring toward them.\n\n\"Run!\" Annja screamed, but she couldn't even hear herself over the roar of the train's whistle. She had a moment to see his face plainly in the light of the train, could see the terror that distorted his features, could see his outstretched arm as it reached for her...\n\nAnnja turned her face away at the last instant, pressing her cheek against the cold concrete behind her and trying to shrink back into the wall itself.\n\nThe train flashed by just inches from her face. She could feel the hot breath of its passage like the exhalations of a wild beast come to devour those that didn't belong, as it had devoured her pursuer only seconds before. Her nerves were screaming and all she wanted to do was run away, but she knew if she left the niche she would be splattered from here to Pennsylvania Station. It took all of her willpower to stand still and not move. Her ears were filled with the howl of the train's brakes as the conductor realized that there had been something more than just the usual rats in the tunnel and he tried to bring the train to a stop, but he was far too late.\n\nIt swept past her and Annja sucked a great gasp of air into her lungs, not even aware until that moment that she had been holding her breath.\n\nThat was too close.\n\nAS ANNJA WAS RUNNING FROM her pursuers in the tunnels beneath Midtown Manhattan, a Gulfstream aircraft under private ownership arrived at Kennedy International Airport. Aboard were Henshaw, Roux and a half dozen of Henshaw's operatives he'd decided to bring over to help supplement the team that was already in place.\n\nThey passed through customs without difficulty and then split into two groups. Henshaw accompanied Roux to the car he had waiting outside, while his men headed for the safe house in Brooklyn overlooking Annja's loft apartment. Henshaw would meet up with them later, once he was satisfied that Roux had been safely ensconced in his usual hotel.\n\nFor a man like Roux, nothing but the Waldorf-Astoria would do. He'd been staying there under a variety of names for more than one hundred years and saw no reason to change now. Exquisite accommodations, superb service and a devotion to the privacy of their guests were the attributes Roux looked for in a hotel and the Waldorf did not disappoint.\n\nReaching the car, Henshaw dismissed the driver and took over that chore himself, not trusting anyone else to do it when he was personally available. He waited until Roux was buckled in and then eased out into traffic, ready for the hour-long drive through the Queens\u2013Midtown Tunnel and across Manhattan to where the hotel stood on Park Avenue and Fiftieth.\n\nAlong the way, Roux asked for an update on the intelligence that Henshaw had been gathering on the Dragon.\n\n\"What little information we've been able to obtain seems to indicate that the Dragon became operational again about three years ago. He has done odd jobs here and there during that time\u2014nothing too flashy and certainly nothing along the lines of his previous activity. It is almost as if he was injured for a long while and is now testing his skills, learning again just what he is capable of.\"\n\n\"But it is him for certain?\" Roux asked.\n\nHenshaw nodded. \"I believe so, sir. The hallmarks are there. The risky, maybe even reckless, nature of the contracts he takes on. The precision in which they are carried out. The telltale symbol\u2014the paper dragon\u2014left behind at each scene.\"\n\n\"Damn!\" Roux said, and Henshaw mentally agreed. If the Dragon was after Annja, and it was looking more and more as if that were the case, then they were going to have to step up their security in order to keep her safe.\n\nAnnja was a fiercely independent person; he didn't want to think about how angry she'd be when she found out that she was being followed, even if it was in her best interest.\n\nHenshaw had spoken to his people on the ground right after deplaning and now he shared what he had learned with Roux.\n\n\"She went where?\" the older man exclaimed, after hearing what Henshaw had to say.\n\n\"To see a hypnotherapist,\" his butler repeated.\n\n\"Whatever for?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Shall I have one of the men break into the therapist's office to obtain the records of her visit?\"\n\nRoux shook his head. \"No, that's not necessary. At least, not yet. Annja will probably tell us herself.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Henshaw said, and put down the cell phone he'd just picked up. He wasn't sure Roux was correct, but he'd learned a long time ago that it wasn't his place to argue with his employer.\n\nJust as he disconnnected, though, it rang. He answered it, listened for several minutes, thanked the caller and then hung up again.\n\n\"There's been a new development,\" he said grimly. \"A team was waiting outside the television studios where Ms. Creed is employed. She was chased into the underground and there was apparently a bit of a scuffle.\"\n\n\"Was she injured?\" Roux asked. Henshaw was the master of the understatement. A \"scuffle\" in his view was other people's idea of a major combat engagement.\n\nHenshaw shook his head. \"No, sir. Our people involved themselves in the confrontation as soon as they were able to and in the resulting confusion, she slipped away from both groups.\"\n\n\"So she still doesn't know that we are watching her?\"\n\nHenshaw shrugged. \"She clearly knows someone is watching, sir, but whether or not she has figured out that it is us is another question entirely. If I had to guess, I'd say no, though it won't take her long to figure it out if we have to interfere again.\"\n\nHe waited a moment while Roux digested the new information and then asked, \"Shall I call off the surveillance?\"\n\n\"Heavens, no! Clearly she needs it. Tell your people to stay close.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir.\"\n\nThey passed the rest of the ride in silence. Arriving at the Waldorf, Roux stepped out of the car and walked into the hotel, heading directly for the main dining room, intent on a late supper. He knew Henshaw would deal with the various details while he ate\u2014take care of checking him into the usual suite he reserved each time he stayed there, seeing that his bags were brought up and unpacked properly, even arranging for breakfast at the proper time in the morning. After all, it was what he paid Henshaw for and Roux was not stingy with his personal comfort.\n\nLater, Roux was relaxing with an after-dinner brandy when he heard the door to the suite open. A moment later Henshaw entered the room.\n\nHis majordomo had changed out of his usual perfectly pressed suit into casual slacks and a windbreaker, both of which, as well as his athletic shoes, were a very deep blue in color. Roux nodded appreciatively. The color wouldn't look entirely out of place in a crowd and the deep shade would actually help him to better blend in with the shadows than a pure black outfit.\n\n\"Are you all set, sir?\" Henshaw asked.\n\nRoux nodded. \"I take it you are off to see our girl?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"We need to find this Dragon character before he finds Annja, Henshaw. Her life may depend on it.\"\n\nHenshaw nodded. \"We're working on it.\"\n\nRoux waved a hand in dismissal. \"All right, I won't keep you.\"\n\n\"Good night, sir.\"\n\nTHERE WAS LITTLE TRAFFIC AT this time of night and Henshaw made good time crossing from Manhattan over to Brooklyn. He located the correct street, then parked in the garage below the apartment building where his team had set up shop two days earlier.\n\nHe rode the elevator to the fifth floor and knocked on the entrance to apartment nine. After a moment the door opened slightly and Henshaw found himself looking down the barrel of a 9 mm handgun. Its owner recognized him and let him through the door.\n\nThe surveillance team of eight individuals allowed them to box the target and handle the job properly. If one of them was in danger of being seen, then another member of the team could either step up or fall back, preventing them from blowing their cover because Annja had made some sudden move or change of direction.\n\nThey thought she might have seen them the day before, because she'd suddenly gone crazy, sprinting down side streets and dashing across traffic. But when she stopped right next to Olivia, and didn't realize that she was part of the surveillance team, they knew she must have caught wind of someone else. That was when they figured out they weren't the only team on the job.\n\nThey had relayed the information to Henshaw before he'd left France and he'd given them explicit instructions what to do should they discover who, besides themselves, was following her.\n\nAs it turned out, it was a good thing he had.\n\nHe went into the kitchen where several of the team were congregating around a fast-food dinner. Pulling up a chair next to Marco, his team leader, he said, \"Give me an update, please.\"\n\nMarco did. He took Henshaw through the entire evening's operation, from when they had picked up Annja that morning outside her loft, all the way to their involvement in the confrontation between Annja and the Dragon's hit team in the subway tunnels hours later.\n\n\"Where is she now?\"\n\n\"She's back in her apartment. You can see her from in there,\" Marco said, nodding at the closed bedroom door on the other side of the living room.\n\n\"Who's got the watch?\" Henshaw asked, getting up.\n\n\"Jessi and Dave.\"\n\n\"All right, good.\" Henshaw addressed everyone around the table, and not just Marco, when he said, \"Good job, everyone. Get some rest while you can, as I think things are going to start heating up and we want to be ready.\"\n\nWith a chorus of \"yes, sirs\" at his back, Henshaw crossed the darkened living room, knocked once on the bedroom door and then slipped inside.\n\nThe lights in the room were off, to prevent what they were doing from being backlit and allowing someone outside to see in, but there was a little light coming in through the window, at least enough to see the shapes of Jessi and Dave over by the window.\n\n\"How's it going?\" he asked.\n\nJessi's soft voice came floating out of the darkness and over to him. \"That woman's obsessed. You'd think she'd be exhausted after what happened down in the subway, but she acts as if it was just a walk in the park. She started practicing those crazy martial-arts moves she does the minute she returned and she hasn't stopped since.\"\n\nHenshaw joined the two of them on the other side of the room. Without saying anything, Dave handed him the binoculars he'd been using to keep their charge in sight.\n\nAnnja's building was across the street and one over from the one they occupied. They were on the fifth floor and she was on the fourth, giving them an excellent downward viewpoint into the loft she called home. She had the curtains open at the moment and through them Henshaw could see her working out in the large open space in the middle of the room. She was dressed in a white tank top and a pair of gray sweatpants, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail and her feet bare. In her hands she held her sword and even as he watched she threw herself into another sword kata with deadly concentration.\n\nHenshaw remembered the way she'd handled it that night at Roux's and for the first time he realized just how good with it she had become. It was like an extension of her body and as she twisted, turned and flowed around the room in the midst of her practice; he sometimes had a hard time recognizing where the sword ended and she began.\n\nKeep it up, Annja, he told her silently. You might just need it.\n\nAnd she did keep it up.\n\nLong into the night.\n\nWith only her silent, watchful guardians to keep her company.\n\n## 20\n\nSwitzerland, 2003\n\nShizu entered the room with more than a bit of trepidation. It had been several years since Toshiro had pronounced her ready to take her place in the world and she had used the time as she'd been instructed, traveling and learning. She had grown up considerably in those years, her core toughened and her edge sharpened by what she had seen and done, just like a sword that is tested again and again until it is pronounced ready.\n\nLess than a week earlier she had received a message through the special channels that had been set up just for that purpose, a series of dead drops and hidden Internet communications. The message had asked her to travel to Switzerland. Sensei had a new mission for her. The summons had filled her with excitement, had shaken off the lethargy she'd been feeling for the past few months, and she quickly made the necessary arrangements.\n\nThe address turned out to be a small, private chateau in the Alps, hidden at the end of a long road that she would have missed if she hadn't known what to look for to find the turnoff from the main road. She arrived late at night and had been met at the door by a manservant who led her to her room, stating that Sensei would see her in the morning.\n\nAfter breakfast she'd been asked to join Sensei in the study. She entered the room to find him seated behind his desk, reading through a report. He pointed at a chair in front of the desk and went on reading without looking up.\n\nObedient to his wishes, Shizu sat.\n\nAfter a few minutes he put the report down and looked at her.\n\n\"You are well, Shizu?' Sensei asked, smiling in welcome.\n\nHearing his voice sent a thrill of delight through her body. It had been years since she had heard him speak to her aloud, but she heard his voice in her dreams each evening and knew she would never forget the sound of it.\n\n\"Yes, Sensei,\" she replied. She did not ask how he was doing in return, as a Westerner might, for he was the master and she was the servant. He would tell her if he wanted her to know.\n\n\"Do you know why I have asked you here today?\"\n\n\"No, Sensei.\"\n\n\"I have a mission for you, Shizu.\"\n\nShe remained silent, patient, content to sit there with him until he chose to tell her more or not. Either one would be okay with her, if that was what he decided to do.\n\nIt wasn't hero worship; it was far beyond that. The man had saved her from slavery. He had given her purpose. Trained her, schooled her. He had made her into who she was today. He'd done it all from a distance, through a menagerie of teachers, but that didn't matter. He was still the one who made it all happen, and long ago Shizu had pledged her heart and soul to him.\n\nShe would die for him.\n\nIn fact, she had no doubt that some day she would do just that. She couldn't think of a more fitting way to end her life.\n\nSensei stood behind the desk, looming over her in his height. \"As you no doubt have guessed, I have been preparing you for a specific purpose. Like clay in the potter's hands, I have molded and shaped you to fit that purpose, to let you live the life that you were born to live.\n\n\"Now the time has come to set you on your way, to make you the light burning in the wilderness, the key for every lock, the whisper behind every door. To set you free so that you can become all that you are destined to become.\"\n\nHe paused, and she could feel his eyes on her, looking her over. \"Are you ready, Shizu?\n\n\"Only if you say I am, Sensei.\"\n\n\"You are a weapon, Shizu, and it is time to point you at a target.\"\n\nShizu's heart raced and her blood sang. It was finally time to put all she had learned to the test.\n\n\"Come,\" he said. \"Let me show you your purpose.\"\n\nHe led her across the room and into the next, which was set up like a command center\u2014the walls were covered with charts and photographs and long stretches of dates and names; the tables were littered with boxes of files and computers running massive database searches.\n\nSensei stepped into the center of the room. Raising his hands, he gestured at the information gathered around him.\n\n\"A man died recently. His name is not important. In fact, I doubt we could find three people outside of those who have been in this room who could tell you what it actually was. He acquired a new identity long ago, one that he built into a legend, and it is that legend that I am interested in. Go on, take a look around.\"\n\nIt soon became apparent that the man, whatever his name, had been an international assassin of no little skill. His long list of targets included ambassadors, government ministers, diplomats, even bankers and prominent businessmen. They were from more than a dozen countries. He had been like a ghost, infiltrating heavily guarded locations to deliver death by his own hand rather than with a bullet or a bomb, and the more she read, the more respect and admiration Shizu felt for this man. The work he had done. The skill with which he had done it.\n\nSensei must have noted her reaction. He said, \"He was known as the Dragon and he elevated killing to an art form. You, Shizu, are going to take his place and be his successor.\"\n\nShizu spun around, shock and surprise flooding her system.\n\n\"Successor?\" she asked.\n\nSensei nodded. \"The man was unimportant, but the legend he created, the symbol he represented, that is something too precious to be lost. For the past ten years, Shizu, I have been training you to revive the legend, to become the new Dragon.\"\n\nHe gestured at the information around him again. \"Study what is here. Learn who he was. How he killed. What it was that let an ordinary man, a cheap killer, become the myth that the world feared. This chateau will be your home, your base of operations. The staff has been instructed to serve your every need and there is money in an account to cover any expenses you might have.\n\n\"And when at last you are ready, I have a very special target for you.\"\n\n## 21\n\nThe news the next morning was full of stories about the shoot-out in the subway. Only one of the television stations mentioned the mysterious woman who, they claimed, was at the heart of it all, Annja was relieved. The last thing she needed was to be in the middle of a major news story, never mind have someone recognize her as the host of Chasing History's Monsters. If they did, she'd have paparazzi camped out up and down her street. The police would certainly want to hear her side of the story as well, to say the least. She was happy to see the majority of the news channels were calling it a gang-related event, which she knew would sink people's interest in it faster than the Titanic.\n\nBesides, she had more important things to concentrate on. She knew that the sword the Dragon carried was the key to the whole situation. If she could understand the weapon, she could understand its bearer. So as soon as it was late enough the following morning, she made a series of phone calls and arranged to meet with Dr. Matthew Yee, curator of the Asian Hall at the American Museum of Natural History and the closest thing that New York City had to an expert on samurai culture.\n\nHe agreed to see her when she mentioned a Japanese sword with a dragon emblem etched into the blade. He had some free time late in the afternoon where he could fit her in, which meant that she had the whole morning to kill while she waited.\n\nShe decided to pay a visit to the New York Public Library, specifically the research section, and see if they had any information on the Dragon's past or present that she might not yet be aware of.\n\nThe New York Public Library actually consisted of eighty-nine separate libraries\u2014four nonlending research libraries, four main lending libraries, a library for the blind and physically handicapped and seventy-seven neighborhood branch libraries in the three boroughs it served. But it was the building on Fifth Avenue between Fourtieth and Forty-second streets that most people thought of when the library came to mind. The two stone statues of the lions outside the main entrance, named Fortitude and Patience, seemed to guard the entrance from unwanted troublemakers and were the public face of the library the world over. As Annja walked past them on her way into the building, she gave the closest one a quick pat on the head.\n\n\"Good kitty,\" she said, and laughed aloud at her own joke.\n\nThe library held in excess of fifty million items, from books to periodicals to film and video. She hoped that somewhere, in all that data, she could find something new to help her understand just why the Dragon had taken an interest in her.\n\nShe started with the periodicals first. The assassinations had occurred in different countries, but the targets had all been prominent enough that the American media had reported on them, as well. Unfortunately, the reports were dry, devoid of all but the most basic of facts, and Annja gleaned little from them that she didn't already know. Her fluency in several languages allowed her to check out some of the foreign editions, too, but the end result was the same.\n\nAfter an hour Annja decided to switch tactics. If she couldn't find anything specific about the Dragon, maybe she could track down the Dragon's sword.\n\nMuch of what she uncovered in the next hour was material she already knew, such as the fact that Japanese swords were classified by the length of the blade, with the shortest being a tanto and the longest being a katana, and that the majority of them came from five houses, or schools, of craftsmanship. She discovered a catalog of signatures for swordsmiths all the way back to the twelfth century, but none of the images matched the one she had drawn while in her trance. There were a few that were close, and she made a note to ask Dr. Yee about them later.\n\nTHE DRAGON HAD NOTED THE watchers of Annja's apartment the day before. They were good, just not good enough, and sometimes it was that little bit that made all the difference in who came out on top.\n\nLike now.\n\nDressed as a plumber in a grease-stained coverall and driving a battered old van, the Dragon showed up outside Annja's apartment building about fifteen minutes after she had departed. The building had a security gate, but getting inside was just a matter of pressing several of the buttons on the directory and waiting for someone to hit the buzzer without bothering to ask who it was.\n\nIt didn't take more than two tries. It rarely did.\n\nOnce inside the building, the Dragon went directly to Annja's apartment on the fourth floor, knocked and pretended to be waiting for someone to answer the door. A long look around showed that the hall was empty, so out of the tool bag the Dragon was carrying came a crowbar. The locks themselves might be sturdy, but the wood around them was as old as the rest of the building. It didn't take long to pop the locks and gain entry.\n\nThe loft was an open floor plan, with a large window occupying one entire side. Thankfully the curtains had been left drawn and the Dragon didn't have to worry about the observers across the way taking note of what was happening.\n\nAt first, the Dragon just stood there in the center of the room, soaking up the atmosphere of the place, trying to get a feeling for the woman who lived there. There was a sense of a life lived in constant motion, of comings and goings without any real time in between. It felt more like a way station than a home to the Dragon\u2014a not-unfamiliar feeling.\n\nAfter that the loft was searched quickly, efficiently and with the kind of care that would make it nearly impossible to prove that anyone had gone through the place. If cabinets were opened, they were closed again. If objects were moved, they were put back in the exact position as before.\n\nThe Dragon wasn't looking for anything in particular\u2014just the opposite, in fact. The goal was to learn as much about the target as possible and the best place to do that was in the target's own home. That was where people felt safe, where they were free to let their hair down and be themselves, where all the secrets they kept hidden from the world were revealed. The types of clothing they wore, the magazines they read, the shows they recorded on their DVRs\u2014all these things could reveal important character quirks that might help the Dragon complete the assignment.\n\nThere were some interesting facts on display in this apartment. The clothing in the closet and in the wardrobe indicated a woman who was comfortable in her appearance; she didn't need fancy clothing to make her feel more feminine or attractive. The books scattered throughout the place indicated a curious mind, one that was able to compartmentalize a whole host of topics at the same time, if the number of volumes that held bookmarks were any indication of her current reading habits. The food in the pantry\u2014or rather, the lack thereof\u2014gave mute witness to that fact that this was a woman who rarely cooked for herself.\n\nIn one corner of the apartment the Dragon found a padded workout area and a wall covered with a collection of martial-arts weapons\u2014a sai, a pair of bokken, a bo staff, assorted throwing knives of different lengths and weights, even two different sets of samurai swords.\n\nThe weapons came from a variety of countries and a mix of styles. Forget being proficient, if she even had a working knowledge of all of them she would be an opponent worth fighting.\n\nThe mix of ancient pottery, artifacts and mementos from dig sites across the world supported the Dragon's view of the woman as being a modern nomad. She was in so many other places that she did not have time to be at home.\n\nNearly half an hour had passed since the Dragon had entered the apartment and that was pushing it. The target might come back at any moment, so it was time to finish and get out of there.\n\nThe final bits of stage dressing didn't take long. The tool bag was a bit heavier upon exiting than it had been on entry, but that couldn't be helped.\n\nThe Dragon left the building, climbed back inside the van and drove off. The items that had been taken from the apartment would be tossed into various Dumpsters a few blocks away; they were just window dressing, after all.\n\nANNJA STEPPED AWAY FROM the stairs and noticed the damaged door right away. It hung slightly open and even from this distance she could see the gouges in the frame where a crowbar or tire iron had been used to force the locks.\n\n\"Crap!\"\n\nAnnja considered returning to the street and calling the cops. After all, the thief might still be inside. But she'd faced down much worse than a punk involved in a little breaking and entering, so she decided to have a look around first. If she still needed the cops, then she'd make the call.\n\nShe approached her apartment and cautiously pushed the door open the rest of the way. She stood in the doorway, listening for sounds of someone moving about inside, but didn't hear anything.\n\nEmboldened, she stepped inside the apartment, and closed the door behind her with her foot.\n\nShe called forth her sword and, with it in hand, she made a thorough search of the premises. When she was satisfied that she was alone, that the thief had long since fled, she sent the sword away and tried to make a list of what was missing.\n\nIt didn't take long. Her Blu-ray player, her Xbox console and a few other assorted electronics, stuff that could be pawned off easily without too much of a hassle. Her passport and other documentation were still in the desk drawer where she normally left them and none of the artifacts in her collection had been disturbed, which led her to believe that this was a simple smash and grab.\n\nThe fact that the thief had chosen her apartment rather than the one on the third floor was pure chance, it seemed.\n\nOr was it? She wondered if there might be a connection between the events of the past few days and the break-in, but after giving it some thought she dismissed the idea as being just a bit too paranoid. Unless the Dragon had suddenly taken a liking to Guitar Hero 4, she couldn't see any reason for her stuff to be missing.\n\nNo, she decided, it had to be a simple B and E.\n\nAnd the truth was that break-ins like this happened all the time in New York, and Annja had been around long enough to know that the cops wouldn't be able to do much about it. Maybe her stuff would turn up, maybe it wouldn't; they weren't going to go out of their way to track down a petty thief with all the other problems the city had.\n\nA glance at the clock told her it was getting late. She didn't have much time before she had to get to her meeting with Dr. Yee. The police report could wait, she decided. It was only for insurance purposes, anyway. She had to get the door fixed.\n\nIt cost her extra to get the guy to come out immediately, but inside of an hour she had the doorframe fixed and new locks installed. By then it was time for her to leave for her appointment.\n\nAS ANNJA PULLED UP IN a cab in front of the museum's entrance on Central Park West, with its towering white columns and its bronze statue of President Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, Annja was hopeful that Dr. Yee's expertise could fill in the missing pieces that her research that morning had not. With his help, maybe she could identify the sword.\n\nThe museum was one of the largest in the country, with forty-two permanent exhibits and a handful of temporary ones at any given time. Its massive stone edifice stretched out over several city blocks, attracting tourists just for its architecture alone. Even in midweek it was busy, and Annja stood in the foyer for a moment, trying to decide the best course of action to take in order to find Dr. Yee. As it turned out, he found her, having been waiting in the area and overhearing her tell the guard that she had an appointment.\n\nDr. Yee turned out to be a good-looking guy in his mid-thirties, with a quick smile and an encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese culture from the early Heian period to the Meijii Restoration and the dismantling of the samurai class.\n\n\"It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Creed,\" he said, shaking her hand and looking her over with an openly appraising eye. \"I must say that you are not quite what I was expecting.\"\n\n\"Annja, please. And why is that?\" she asked, curious.\n\n\"While all geeks might dream of meeting a beautiful woman with knowledge about a legendary sword, very few of us actually believe it will ever happen and even fewer get to fulfill that dream. And you can call me Matthew, by the way.\" He said it all rather lightly, with a just the right hint of self-deprecation, and Annja couldn't help but laugh.\n\nGood looking and a sense of humor. An interesting combination.\n\n\"Come on. We can talk in my office.\"\n\nHe led her down the hall to a door marked Staff and removed a plastic key card from his pocket, which he swiped through a security reader next to the door. There was a click as the lock disengaged. He pulled the door open and held it for her, then resumed his position beside her as they walked through the maze of corridors on the other side. Annja had done a few odd jobs for the museum and had been there before, but she still couldn't help but peer inside each room as they passed, looking to see what treasures they were unearthing elsewhere in the world.\n\nThey finally reached their destination\u2014a corner office overlooking the park\u2014and Annja's estimation of the power Dr. Yee held within the museum hierarchy rose a few notches. Then she noticed the beautifully restored yoroi, or samurai battle armor, standing in one corner. The black leather and gleaming iron was set off by the glaring aspect of the battle mask, or mempo, that sat atop the figure. She stepped closer, intrigued.\n\nNoting her admiration, Dr. Yee asked, \"Like it?\"\n\n\"It's gorgeous,\" she breathed, unable to take her eyes off it.\n\nYee stepped closer. \"Isn't it, though? See the butterfly pattern?\" he asked, pointing at the gold filigree that formed the shadow of a butterfly in the center of the chest piece.\n\nAnnja nodded.\n\n\"It's the symbol of one of the minor houses of the Taira clan, who favored it for its elegant symmetry and delicate design. Unfortunately, they were wiped out by the Minamoto clan at the battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185 and very few of their arms and armor remain intact. It took me fourteen months of around-the-clock work to restore this one to the shape it is in today, but it was worth every second.\"\n\nShe could hear the pride in his voice over a job well done and she knew that she had found a kindred spirit, at least when it came to an appreciation of history and the lessons they could teach.\n\n\"I've been meaning to add it to the Hall of Asian Peoples all week, but somehow, every time I go to do so, I find some excuse to keep it here a few days longer. Silly of me, I know, but I just love to look at it.\"\n\nAnnja could totally relate.\n\nAfter a moment, Yee finally tore himself away from his admiration of the armor and said, \"I'm sorry. Where are my manners? Please, have a seat,\" indicating a chair in front of his desk. As Annja sat, he walked around to the other side of his desk to the room's only other chair.\n\n\"Now, what can I do for you?\"\n\nAnnja explained that in order to help support her time in the field, she occasionally took on privately funded work confirming the provenance of various items for museums, auction houses and the like.\n\n\"About a week ago I was asked to investigate a man's claims that the katana he had in his possession was of a unique nature, with serious historical value. He plans on auctioning it off in a few weeks and wanted to get a better understanding of the market value before doing so.\"\n\n\"This is the weapon you mentioned on the phone?\"\n\n\"Yes. I've never seen anything like it and I'm concerned by that. My knowledge of weaponry is fairly extensive and I can recognize many of the primary swordsmiths from the period, but this is one I've never seen before.\"\n\nYee smiled. \"Given the number of swordsmiths who have practiced the art through the years, it's not surprising that you didn't recognize one of the minor houses. There were literally hundreds of them, though they could all be traced back, eventually, to the big five.\"\n\nAnnja had studied martial arts, particularly sword arts, long enough to be able to recite them from memory and she did so now, to show Yee she really wasn't a complete novice. \"Right, the Yamato, Yamashiro, Bizen, Soshu and Mino.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Yee said, and Annja noted that he at least had the decency to blush at little at the professorial air he had assumed.\n\n\"The collector in question wouldn't turn over the sword even temporarily for an independent examination, nor would he allow any photographs to be taken for fear that they would leak on to the Internet, but I took the time to recreate the etching and the mei by hand and I have that for you to examine.\"\n\nThe mei was the set of kanji characters on the end of the blade just above the hilt, the signature of the artist who created it. She'd tried to identify it through the usual channels, but hadn't had any luck.\n\nShe took the page from her backpack that contained the drawing of the sword and passed it over to Dr. Yee. A little self-consciously he removed a pair of wire-framed glasses from his pocket, put them on and then took the drawing from her to have a look.\n\nAnnja watched as his expression grew more intent and he pulled the picture closer to his face for a better look.\n\nHis voice was tight when he asked, \"This is the mei exactly as you saw it on the blade?\"\n\nAs exact as you can be when the blade is trying to take your head off, was Annja's first thought, but she didn't say that. Instead, she replied, \"The mark was worn and faded, so I'm not one hundred percent certain. Why?\"\n\nDr. Yee looked up at her. \"We're faced with two possibilities here. If the mark is complete as it is, then I have to admit that I am not familiar with the swordsmith who fashioned it, either. That would mean he would have been a very minor player and would disprove your client's claim that the weapon was of serious historical value.\"\n\nDr. Yee got up and came back around his desk to stand next to her, holding the drawing so she could see it. \"However, if we assume that the mei is, in fact, incomplete due to the condition of the blade and we add one little mark here\u2014\" he drew a single short line extending outward from the edge of the rest \"\u2014well, then, I'd have to say that not only is this sword of rather important historical significance, but it just might be the archaeological find of the century with regard to Japanese history. Never mind, for all practical purposes, priceless.\"\n\nAnnja felt her heartrate quicken and it had nothing to do with the nearness of the good-looking doctor. \"Okay, I'll play along. Let's say that I did miss that little mark. It is small, as you said, and it is in an area of the blade that is rather worn, so it's possible that's exactly what happened. What does that mean? Who created the sword?\"\n\nYee straightened, a big smile on his face, as if he had just won the lottery not once, but twice.\n\n\"I'd bet my career that Sengo Muramasa fashioned that sword. And if he did, it isn't just any sword, but the last sword he ever produced, the famed Juuchi Yosamu, Ten Thousand Cold Nights.\"\n\nAs Yee pronounced the sword's name, a chill ran down Annja spine. Totally appropriate, she thought, for the weapon that had nearly decapitated her. She didn't know much about Muramasa. She'd heard the name, but she wasn't sure where or in what context. She said as much to Yee.\n\n\"I'm not surprised,\" he replied. \"There was a definite campaign to eradicate his work from history and most of the references that survive today are so fanciful in nature that most think he is just a figure of myth and folklore. They couldn't be farther from the truth.\n\n\"Come on, let's go down to the hall so I can show you a few things and I'll tell you about Muramasa along the way.\"\n\nYee went on to explain that Muramasa had been one of the most accomplished swordsmiths in all of Japanese history, second only to Soshu Masamune himself. Both men lived and worked in the Kamakura period. \"In fact, there is a legend that a contest was organized between the two to see who could produce the finer blade. The contest was designed so that each man would dip his sword into a small stream with the cutting edge facing the current. Muramasa went first, plunging his weapon into the flow of the river. Anything and everything that passed by the weapon, from the drifting leaves in the current to the fish that swam in the depths to the very air hissing by the blade, was cut in two.\"\n\nThey stopped for a moment while Yee negotiated locked set of doors with a pass card and a key ring, and the continued.\n\n\"Next it was Masamune's turn. He lowered his sword into the water and waited patiently. Everything that came toward the blade was redirected around it, unharmed and undamaged. From the leaves to the fish to the air itself\u2014all of them passed around the blade without resistance.\n\n\"As you can imagine, Muramasa was certain that he had won the challenge\u2014after all, his sword had cut everything, and wasn't that the purpose of a sword? He began to insult Masamune for his poor weapon. But a wandering monk had witnessed the whole affair and he offered his own conclusions. 'The first blade is, of course, a worthy blade, but it is a bloodthirsty, evil blade that does not discriminate between who it will cut and who it will spare. The other blade, on the other hand, was clearly the finer of the two, for it did not needlessly cut or destroy that which is innocent.'\"\n\nAnnja smiled. \"An interesting tale.\"\n\n\"Ah, but it gets better, it really does,\" Yee said. \"The reason that you are most likely not familiar with Muramasa blades is that they gained a reputation for being evil swords that lusted after blood. Some even thought that such a blade should not be resheathed until it had drawn blood. Doing anything less was terribly bad luck.\"\n\n\"So what about the dragon etching?\" Annja asked. \"What does that tell us?\"\n\n\"That is how I recognized the sword as possibly being the Juuchi Yosamu. You see, Muramasa's name has not enjoyed the fame it deserved because the shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, ordered his blades outlawed and destroyed whenever found. Regardless of whether or not the blades were actually evil, they did seem to have a negative effect on the Tokugawa House. Kiyoyasu, the grandfather of the first shogun, was cut in two in 1535 when his retainer attacked him with a Muramasa blade. Ieyasu's father, Matsudaira, was killed by another man wielding a Muramasa blade, and even Ieyasu cut himself severely on his own wakizashi, or short sword, which was also made by Muramasa. When his own son was beheaded with a Muramasa blade, the shogun had finally had enough. He banned their creation, possession and use throughout the empire.\"\n\nBy now they had entered the public areas of the museum and Yee had to speak louder in order to be heard as they cut across a busy exhibit hall.\n\n\"The response to the shogun's edict was mixed. Many went out and sold off their Muramasa blades hoping that no one else had yet heard the news that they were about to become worthless. Others defaced the blades, scraping off the mei so that no one could tell that it was a Muramasa blade. A few hoarded the weapons, believing they might bring them personal power and financial gain. Those who were found to be hiding Muramasa blades were often executed on the spot, including the magistrate of Nagasaki who, in 1634, was discovered to be hoarding more than twenty-four Muramasa blades.\"\n\nAt last they reached the Asian Hall, which, as fortune would have it, was actually closed until the morning for renovations of the existing displays. With his pass card, Yee let them inside and the noise level dropped considerably.\n\n\"So what makes the Juuchi Yosamu so special? Just the fact that it is a Muramasa blade?\" Annja asked.\n\nYee shook his head. \"Not just any blade, but the blade. The last weapon he ever produced.\n\n\"You see, legend has it that it was just before winter when Muramasa found out about the shogun's edit. He knew that the imperial troops would be coming soon to destroy his forge and seize any weapons he had produced. But the swordsmith lived in a small valley between three major mountain ranges. The shogun's men did not make it up the mountains in time before the winter snows came and so they were forced to wait another three months until the pass cleared enough for them to reach the swordsmith's home.\n\n\"Muramasa used those months wisely, creating his ultimate masterpiece, blending every bit of his anger, jealousy, hatred and desire for vengeance into the blade until the blade itself took on a darker hue than normal. Some say it even gleamed with hunger whenever it drew close to its enemies.\"\n\nAnnja turned her eye inward until she could see Joan's sword, her sword, hanging there in the otherwhere, waiting for her to need it again. The blade glowed with a faint luminescence. Did the Dragon's blade do that? she wondered.\n\n\"Unlike other swordsmiths, Muramasa never etched designs into the blades of his katana. He felt that it was doing the weapon a disservice to deface it in such a manner. But he made an exception with his final masterpiece. That one, legend has it, had the image of a rampant dragon added to the blade just above the hilt, its claws stretching downward along the length of the sword as if reaching for the sword's target, a visual representation of all the darkness he had poured into its construction.\n\n\"I would suspect it probably looked very much like the dragon in the drawing you just showed me.\"\n\nThey were deep in the Hall of Asian Peoples and Yee steered them over to a large display focused on the samurai eras of ancient Japan.\n\nStopping in front of a particular case that held several different types of sword, he said, \"Ah, here we are!\"\n\nHe took a katana from its stand inside the case and withdrew the blade so that Annja could see it.\n\n\"Look here,\" he said, pointing at a line that ran down the middle of the blade from the narrow tip toward the hilt. \"This is known as the hamon. It is the point where the sharper steel, which forms the blade's edge, meets the softer steel at its core, which gives the blade its exceptional flexibility. During the sword-making process, the smith would paint over this line with a very thin mixture of clay and ash and then heat it all over again, to help bond the two sections together. What was unique about a sword fashioned by Muramasa was the identical hamon that could be found on either side of the blade. It was one of his trademarks.\"\n\nHe flipped the sword over to show her that the line tracing down the opposite side of the blade was identical to the former. Annja gasped when she realized that the blade in his hand was a Muramasa.\n\n\"May I?\" Annja asked.\n\n\"Certainly,\" Yee said. \"But be careful because the blade is very sharp.\"\n\nAnnja had stopped listening, however. She had taken the sword, leaving the scabbard in Yee's hands, and had stepped into the center of the room where there was more open space than by the displays. She wanted to get a feel for this blade, get a sense of what she was facing in the presence of its more famous cousin. She slid into the first of several moves of an advanced sword kata, testing the weapon. It was lighter than her own sword, and more maneuverable, but did not have the kind of reach that she liked. She realized quickly, in fact, that she preferred the heavier blade of her broadsword. Still, there was no doubting the craftsmanship inherent in the katana; it was perfectly balanced and cut the air with precision.\n\nShe stopped what she was doing and turned, only to find Dr. Yee staring at her with an open mouth.\n\n\"That was so incredibly sexy,\" he breathed, as if afraid to break the spell, then blushed scarlet when he realized that he had said it aloud.\n\nAnnja laughed. \"Look out, Uma Thurman, here I come,\" she said, knowing Yee would get the Kill Bill reference.\n\nShe brought the sword closer to her face so that she could get a look at the mei near the hilt. Yee had been right; it was identical to the one on the sword used by the Dragon, if you added in the missing crosspiece on the H-like character.\n\nShe walked over to her companion, accepted the scabbard from his hands and moved to slide the sword back inside. As she did, she felt a sharp pain in her finger and looked down to find she had nicked herself on the edge of the blade. A drop of blood welled up as she stuck her finger in her mouth.\n\n\"The curse of Muramasa strikes again,\" Yee said, with a little something in his voice that said he was more than familiar with the bloodthirsty nature of that particular weapon.\n\nTalking around the finger in her mouth, Annja got back to her cover story. \"So, how do I tell if my client's sword is really the Juuchi Yosamu?\"\n\n\"The first thing I would do is check the hamon. If they are identical, front and back, you will have your first bit of proof. Then see if the owner will let you examine the mei under magnification or after it has been polished and cleaned. That might help bring out the missing crossbar to confirm it.\n\n\"I have to say this, however. If it is the Yosamu, your client is going to be hard-pressed to sell it for what it is worth. That weapon would be considered by many to be a cultural treasure of the Japanese and I, for one, would want to see it returned to its rightful government. It should not be in the hands of a private individual.\"\n\nAnnja was in total agreement with him. Relieving the Dragon of the sword was her highest priority.\n\n\"I couldn't agree with you more, Dr. Yee,\" she said.\n\n## 22\n\nThat night, Annja dreamed of the Dragon.\n\nShe was being hunted through the woods by the scaled beast from which the assassin had derived his nickname and it would only be a matter of moments before the creature found her.\n\nAnnja ran frantically through the thick underbrush while behind her the beast closed in. She could hear its breathing, could smell its sulphurous stench, and knew that it was gaining ground faster, that she wouldn't be able to outrun it.\n\nShe ran on until the trail she was following opened up into a canyon in the midst of the woods, a canyon with only one way out.\n\nShe was trapped!\n\nA shriek filled the sky around her and sent her heart hammering into overdrive. Slowly Annja turned to face the beast...\n\nShe woke up.\n\nIt was just a dream, she told herself as her heart beat frantically and she fought to catch her breath.\n\nShe was about to roll over and take a sip of water from the glass on her bed stand when she realized that she wasn't alone.\n\nThere was someone in the room with her!\n\nShe lay still on the bed, doing what she could to keep her breathing steady, and looked around through eyes that were barely open.\n\nThere was a shadowy form off to her right, slowly crossing the room and moving closer to her bed.\n\nWait, Annja said to herself.\n\nThe intruder didn't make a sound, crossing the floor like a ghost in the night. He stood at the very foot of the bed, looking down at her. Annja could feel the other's gaze, could see eyes gleaming in the morning half-light. Whoever it was, he was dressed to disguise his appearance, in dark clothing and a hooded mask.\n\nJust as the Dragon and his men had worn back in Paris.\n\nWait...\n\nAs Annja lay there, doing all she could to make it seem as if she were still asleep, the intruder slowly brought a hand out from behind his back, revealing the long gleaming blade in it. Slowly the weapon was raised over the intruder's head, ready for the strike.\n\nNow!\n\nAs the intruder's sword came whistling down toward where she lay in the bed, Annja threw herself to the side, summoning her own sword as she went.\n\nThe intruder's blade slashed through the mattress of her bed, but Annja wasn't there any more. She was on her knees beside the bed and was already in motion, her sword swinging toward the other in a well-executed counterattack.\n\nThe intruder reacted with lightning-sharp reflexes, dancing backward out of reach of her weapon.\n\nThe move, however, gave Annja the space she needed to get to her feet and brace herself for the next attack.\n\nNo sooner had she gotten into a defensive stance than the intruder rushed forward. They exchanged several blows, their swords ringing in the early-morning quiet.\n\nAnnja lunged, hoping to slip her sword past the other's guard, but the intruder was too quick for her, jumping on top of the bed and then trying to use the extra foot or so in height he had gained by doing so to his advantage. A vicious overhead stroke nearly took Annja's arm off at the shoulder; she saved herself only by throwing her body backward out of the way and then was forced to scramble to defend against a blistering rain of blows.\n\nShe knew the apartment's layout instinctively, something the intruder did not, and so she gained a moment's respite when she managed to put the length of her sofa between them.\n\nThat's when the intruder spoke.\n\n\"Give it to me and I'll let you live.\"\n\nThe voice was thick and gruff, but obviously disguised as well, and didn't tell her anything about her opponent.\n\nShe didn't know what the intruder wanted. Nor was she naive enough to believe the offer. If she were to lower her guard for even a moment she'd be run through without hesitation. And then he would be free to do whatever he had come here to do.\n\nFat chance, buddy.\n\nThey circled the room, keeping the furniture between them for the moment, each of them preparing for another onslaught. As they did so, the light from the rising sun shot through the window and illuminated the sword held in the intruder's hand. Annja's gaze was immediately drawn to the etching on the blade, just above the hilt.\n\nThe etching of a dragon, rampant.\n\nHer eyes widened in shocked recognition and her gaze shifted from the intruder's sword to his face. He wore a mask, but familiar eyes stared back at her from out of its depths.\n\nShe was facing the Dragon for a second time!\n\nThe Dragon must have seen the recognition in her eyes, for he suddenly rushed forward, intensifying his efforts to catch her in an error and slip a thrust past her guard.\n\nBut she was ready for him this time, and it was actually Annja who drew first blood. She feinted to the left, drawing his thrust, and then spun about, her sword slashing out and drawing a furrow down the length of his thigh.\n\nThe scent of fresh blood hit the air.\n\nThe Dragon faltered, perhaps surprised at having been so marked, and Annja used that moment to put a little more space between them. She was ready and waiting for the next onslaught when he did a surprising thing.\n\nThe Dragon abruptly turned and rushed across the loft, headed for the front door.\n\nBy the time Annja had managed to recover from her surprise, the other had made it halfway across the apartment.\n\nOh, no, you don't, Annja thought. You're not getting away that easily.\n\nAnnja rushed after the intruder. As she did, she switched the position of the sword in her hands, until she was holding the blade like a spear.\n\nWhen the intruder was forced to slow down for a second to negotiate the door, which had been closed again behind him, Annja wound up and let fly.\n\nThe sword whistled through the air across the remaining space of the apartment.\n\nThe intruder managed to get the door partially open and was trying to slip through it just as the sword slammed point first into its surface.\n\nIt had been a good throw, and if the door hadn't come open right at that second, the sword might have buried itself in the intruder's back. As it was it managed to grab a piece of his sleeve, pinning his arm against the door.\n\nAs Annja charged forward, the intruder looked back in her direction, and for the first time she got a good look at the intruder's face.\n\nEven covered by a hood and mask that left only the eyes free, Annja recognized the face she was staring at. She'd been staring at her drawing of that face for days. She'd been seeing it in her dreams. She had absolutely no doubt that she was gazing at the face of the Dragon.\n\nAfter all she'd been through trying to find him, she couldn't let him get away!\n\nThe Dragon pulled on his sleeve, trying to free himself, but the sword had driven itself deep into the wood and there was no way he was going to be able to pull himself free.\n\nAnnja was closing in fast, thinking she just might reach the door before anything else could happen, when the Dragon raised his sword and brought it down sharply on edge of his sleeve where it was nailed to the door.\n\nAs Annja reached for him, he used his now-rescued limb to fling the door open, directly into her path. When she skidded to a stop to keep from colliding with the door, the Dragon slipped through into the hallway beyond.\n\nRather than spending precious seconds to yank the sword free, Annja simply willed it back into the otherwhere, freeing it from the door.\n\nShe followed the intruder into the hallway.\n\nShe turned left outside her apartment, assuming her uninvited guest would head for the ground floor, and as a result she lost a few precious seconds before she realized that he had gone the other way, toward the staircase leading to the roof instead.\n\nAnnja skidded to a halt and turned around, heading back in the other direction. She could hear footsteps on the stairs, just above her head. By the time she reached the steps, a crash echoed from above. Annja knew that sound; the door to the roof had just been thrown open.\n\nShe took the steps two at a time and as she reached the landing above she summoned her sword again.\n\nThe door to the rooftop was directly in front of her. She grabbed the handle, said a quick prayer to lady luck, and, yanking the door open, threw herself forward in a somersault onto the rooftop.\n\nThe Dragon was standing on the small structure that covered the stairwell door to the roof and would have cut Annja's head from her shoulders had she gone through the door upright.\n\nRolling to her feet, Annja realized that she was standing on the rooftop in her pajamas with nothing on her feet while waving a large sword around in the air.\n\nIf any of her neighbors caught sight of her...\n\nThe Dragon wasn't waiting around, however. As dawn's red light burst over the horizon, he was silhouetted there for the briefest of moments and then he jumped off and raced across the rooftop, intent on making the leap to the next building.\n\nAnnja gave chase.\n\nThe rough surface of the rooftop cut into her feet, but she was so close to catching the Dragon and getting some answers that she wasn't about to stop. She released her sword, knowing she could call it again. She needed the extra speed she could gain by sending it away.\n\nThe edge of the roof loomed ahead of the Dragon.\n\n\"WHAT THE HELL?\"\n\nDave bolted upright in his chair, frantically rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He had the watch, but apparently he'd dozed off a little because one moment he was watching the darkened windows of Annja Creed's apartment and the next thing he knew there was a sword battle going on inside.\n\n\"Hey, guys! We've got a situation in here!\"\n\nA moment later the door to the bedroom that served as their observation post burst open and Marco rushed inside, Jessi right on his heels.\n\n\"What have we got?\" Marco asked.\n\nDave simply pointed.\n\nThe two of them, Annja and whoever the guy in the black mask was, were racing around the bedroom, and not in a good way. It was still pretty dark, the sun just starting to peek over the horizon, but because of their position they had a pretty good view inside the apartment and could see them hacking and slashing away at each other.\n\nSuddenly the intruder made a break for the door and they all watched in near awe as Annja reversed the sword she was using and hurled it, spearlike across the room to pin her opponent in place.\n\n\"Son of a... Did you see that?\" Dave gasped.\n\nMarco was already headed out the door, rallying the troops as he went. \"Code Red!\" he yelled. \"Code Red.\"\n\nThey'd worked out a system for all their problems when they had first come together as a team. Code Red was the highest warning level they had, reserved for when a principal was in deep trouble.\n\nMarco stuck his head back in the door to the room where Dave was. \"Keep watch,\" he said sternly. \"Don't turn this into a fiasco.\"\n\nDave waved him away. \"Yeah, yeah, get going!\"\n\nAs Marco rallied the troops, Dave kept watch. Like Annja had done only moments before, he thought the intruder would go down instead of up.\n\n\"They're on the roof!\" Dave yelled when he realized what was happening. Marco and the others charged out the door. Dave couldn't run, not with a lame leg from a previous operation, so he always got left behind. But this time he didn't mind, because out of all of them, he was the one with the front-row seat.\n\nHe sat back and watched the battle unfold on the rooftop.\n\nDespite the danger to their principal, one thing kept running through his mind.\n\nDamn, does she look good in pajamas!\n\nAS THE DRAGON SPED toward the edge of the roof, Annja realized his intent. The next building was close enough to reach with a decent leap and it looked as if that was exactly what he intended to try.\n\nIf she could catch him when he came down...\n\nAnnja reached deep and found a bit more speed, ignoring the added pain she felt as her feet cut deeper into the gravel covering the rooftop.\n\nWorry about your feet later, she told herself.\n\nWhen the Dragon jumped, Annja was only a step behind.\n\nShe slammed into him in midleap and rode his body down onto the adjacent rooftop. The impact knocked her clear, but she was up again in a heartbeat, already moving in with hands and feet at the ready.\n\nThe Dragon stood and Annja waded in, throwing a jab, uppercut, jab combination, but the Dragon blocked all three. He lashed out with a side kick, designed to cave in a rib or two, but Annja skipped away and his foot hit only empty air.\n\nThey circled each other, hands weaving back and forth, both a distraction and a means to stay loose, ready to respond no matter what the strike.\n\nThis time it was the Dragon who attacked first, coming in hard and fast with a wave of punches followed by a high kick to the head. Annja blocked the punches and then dropped to the ground, swinging her legs around in a scything motion, trying to cut the Dragon's feet out from under him. Anticipating the move, the Dragon leaped over backward in a somersault that put him a few feet away from her.\n\nAgain they closed, trading blow after blow. Annja blocked most of what came at her, though a few strikes did manage to get through. She took one to the ribs and then caught a glancing blow off the side of the head that momentarily stunned her.\n\nShe shook it off, but the damage was done. That blow had given the Dragon a few precious seconds to break away and start the run for the next rooftop.\n\nDoggedly, Annja went in pursuit.\n\nMARCO AND THE REST of the surveillance team spilled out onto the street, headed for Annja's building. They kept looking upward, waiting for one of the combatants to make a wrong move and end up splattered on the sidewalk after a four-story fall.\n\nBack in the observation room, Dave continued to give them the play-by-play over the radio.\n\nTHE DRAGON REACHED THE edge of the roof and jumped. He did it without hesitation, without a second thought, and so Annja followed suit.\n\nUnfortunately, the blow to the head had slowed her down a bit, and the cuts on her feet dropped her speed even more. When she reached the edge of the roof she planted one foot on the small ledge that ran around the top and launched herself into space, only realizing that she didn't have enough speed when she was halfway across the gap.\n\nShe wasn't going to make it.\n\nAs she watched, the Dragon touched down on the other side and kept going, widening the distance between them without looking back.\n\nThe edge of the roof was coming up fast and Annja could tell she was going to be an inch, maybe two, short. She stretched as far as she could, reaching out with her fingers, praying all the while.\n\nOne hand caught the edge of the roof, barely grabbing on with just the tips of her fingers.\n\nHer body slammed into the side of the building, the force of the impact almost jarring her loose, but Annja held on with all her strength, crimping her fingers the way she'd once been shown in rock-climbing class. By some miracle she managed to remain hanging on to the edge of the building, though by only the thinnest of margins.\n\nHaving originally been worried that the Dragon was going to get away, now all Annja could do was hope that he didn't come back. If he wanted to kill her, now would be the perfect time. All it would take would be a little tap on the fingers and she'd plunge to the concrete below.\n\n\"LOOK!\" JESSI SHOUTED AND as one the group turned to follow her pointed finger. Above their heads, between the buildings, they could see someone hanging off the edge of the roof.\n\nMarco radioed Dave. \"Can you tell who it is?\" he asked.\n\n\"No. They're out of my sight now, behind the next building over.\"\n\nTerrified that Creed was going to die on his watch and he'd have to explain how it had all gone wrong to Henshaw, Marco rushed for the entrance to the building, praying he'd be in time.\n\nSLOWLY, EVER SO SLOWLY, Annja reached up with her other hand, being careful not to twist and pull herself off the roof. Gradually, inch by inch, she managed to get her other hand over the edge of the rooftop.\n\nShe rested there a minute, then began to pull herself upward, as if doing a chin-up, intending to get herself high enough to throw an elbow over the edge and secure some leverage to pull the rest of her body back to safety.\n\nUnfortunately, the roof had other ideas.\n\nThe low wall that lined the outer edge of the roof had seen more than its share of harsh winters, acid rain and time's steady but corroding hand. The section Annja was clinging to chose that moment to voice its displeasure at the conditions it was forced to endure by crumbling beneath her weight.\n\nOne minute she was pulling herself upward, the next she was twisting in the wind again, barely hanging on with one hand, while chunks of masonry plummeted to shatter on the street far below.\n\nShe wanted to kick her legs and flail about with her arms, but she fought the instinctual motion that her body cried out for and willed herself to hold still. Any extraneous motion at this point could pull her right off the roof.\n\nTo make matters worse, her left hand was starting to slip, as well. She could feel her fingers slowly sliding backward, one millimeter at a time.\n\nShe guessed she had less than a minute before her hand would slide totally free.\n\nAfter that, it was all over.\n\nMARCO DASHED UP THE STAIRS three at a time, muttering under his breath all the while.\n\n\"Hold on,\" he was saying. \"Hold on, hold on.\"\n\nHe kept a sharp eye out for whoever it had been that Annja had been chasing, but he didn't meet anyone on the stairs, and by the time he burst onto the rooftop his attention was solely on rescuing the woman whose life he was supposed to be protecting.\n\nHe couldn't see her from where he stood and he didn't have time to search every side.\n\nHe keyed the radio.\n\n\"Which way?\" he asked, nearly frantic with worry.\n\nDave was immediately on the line with an answer. \"Left. In the middle.\"\n\nMarco rushed over to the edge.\n\nANNJA TRIED TO SWING her right arm up and over the edge, but the motion only served to make her other hand slip faster. She wrapped her thumb over the tops of her fingers, bearing down, but it was too late\u2014she'd slid too far and couldn't find any traction to keep from slipping farther.\n\n\"I am not going to die like this!\" she said through gritted teeth, and was about to call her sword, thinking she could jam it into the masonry or something as a last-ditch effort, when she heard footsteps charging in her direction.\n\nThe Dragon.\n\nApparently letting her fall to her death wasn't good enough; he had to help her along the way.\n\nWell, two could play at the game.\n\nAs her fingers began to slip faster, Annja brought forth her sword. If she was going to die, she would do what she could to take the Dragon with her.\n\nMARCO RUSHED OVER TO the edge. As he drew closer he saw her hand, and watched in dismay as her fingers slid backward.\n\n\"No!\" he shouted, and dove forward, arms outstretched.\n\nThe fingers of his left hand touched something soft, something alive, and he seized it with all the desperation he could muster.\n\nHe felt her fingers wrap around his wrist in return, locking them into a mountain climber's grasp.\n\nThen her weight asserted itself and he felt himself being dragged forward.\n\nHis head popped over the edge the roof and he found himself staring into those amber eyes he'd first noted in that photograph back in Paris.\n\nThe sword that was suddenly thrust upward at his face was a shock.\n\nHe closed his eyes and instinctively jerked his head back, while simultaneously trying to brace himself against the pressure that was pulling him forward.\n\n\"Hold on, lady!\" he shouted, trying to preserve his cover without even thinking about it, so ingrained was the instinct to keep from revealing who he was or what he was truly doing there.\n\nHe got his knees braced against the wall and planted his feet, stopping their forward slide. Now all he had to do was pull her up.\n\nANNJA HAD NO IDEA WHO the guy was or where he had come from, but she was suddenly glad she hadn't skewered him when he'd poked his head over the edge. Jabbing her sword into his chest might have ended his rescue attempt a bit prematurely.\n\nAs it was she was starting to doubt that he had the strength to pull her up, but she'd let him worry about that because she could barely feel her arm.\n\nThe minute she'd realized he wasn't the Dragon she'd released her sword back into the otherwhere, and now she used her right hand to reach up and grab on to his wrist from the opposite side, trapping his arm between both of her hands.\n\nWell, if you're going to fall, at least you won't be going alone, she thought grimly.\n\nHer Good Samaritan was stronger than he looked and with a few heaves backward he managed to pull her up and over the ledge and back onto the rooftop.\n\nThen he collapsed onto the ground and tried to catch his breath.\n\nAnnja didn't blame him; her heart was racing a bit wildly at that moment, as well.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he gasped out eventually.\n\n\"Yeah. Thanks to you,\" she said.\n\nHe shrugged it off, apparently not the prideful type.\n\nBut something wasn't feeling quite right to Annja and she wanted to know more. \"How did you know I was in trouble?\" she asked, and despite nearly falling off the roof she watched him closely.\n\nHe waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the stairwell. \"I was on the stairs, headed for my apartment, when I saw you through the window. I knew there was no way you were going to make that jump,\" he sucked in another lungful of air. \"So I ran up the stairs.\"\n\n\"And here you are.\"\n\nHe nodded, and then turned to look at her for the first time since he'd pulled her to safety. \"Yep. Here I am.\"\n\nGood enough, she thought. So far he hadn't said anything about the sword, so maybe she should get out of there while the going was still good.\n\nShe climbed shakily to her feet, thanked him again for saving her life and quickly left the roof, and his protests, behind.\n\nIt was only when she was halfway down the stairs that it occurred to her to wonder what he was doing up and about at that hour of the day.\n\nJust be thankful he was, she thought, and left it at that.\n\nMARCO MADE SEVERAL HALFHEARTED protests to keep Annja from leaving, but he was relieved when she did. If she had started asking any more questions he would have been hard-pressed to answer them. This way, he at least had a shot at keeping the surveillance team from being compromised.\n\nHe waited a good half hour before making his own way back down to street level. Annja Creed was nowhere in sight, so he kept his head down and headed for the preplanned rendezvous point.\n\nMarco wanted to have a long talk with Dave. If he found out he'd been sleeping on watch again...\n\nEXHAUSTED FROM THE FIGHT and from the release of all that adrenaline, Annja returned to her loft just long enough to pack a change of clothes, grab a first-aid kit and throw on a pair of shoes. The Dragon had been in her apartment once, possibly more than that, so it wasn't safe for her to stay there anymore. She knew a decent hotel a few blocks away and she decided to hole up there for the time being until she could figure out just what to do.\n\nShe checked in, took a shower and then, using the supplies in the medical kit, tended to her torn and bloody feet.\n\nRemind me never to do that again, she told herself, wincing as she applied hydrogen peroxide to the cuts and then wrapped them in soft gauze to help them heal.\n\nWhen she was finished, she collapsed onto the bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.\n\nShe awoke later that morning to the insistent buzzing of her cell phone.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Annja! Thank God I found you. You've got to come down to the studio and fix this!\"\n\nShe sighed; Doug in a frenzy was really not what she needed right now. \"Fix what, Doug?\"\n\n\"The episode! We've got to trim another six minutes and thirty seconds from the footage. Maybe we could...\"\n\nAnnja let him drone on for a moment, then cut in when she could. \"I'll be down within the hour, Doug. Don't do anything until I get there.\" She hung up before he could protest further.\n\nSpending a few hours in the editing room with Doug wasn't her idea of a fun time, but she needed to take her mind off the Dragon and her close call from earlier that morning.\n\nFighting with her producer might be just the thing.\n\n## 23\n\nMost of Annja's day was taken up with correcting the issues that had come up after Doug had begun to do the final edits on the episode. She spent the afternoon working with him and by the time she was done night had fallen and the streets were full of commuters trying to get home from work. People pushed past on both sides, but she barely noticed, her focus completely inward.\n\nThe past few days had been a blur of action and reaction. She was being stalked by an international assassin for reasons unknown, though she was pretty sure it had to do with the sword she carried. She'd been attacked twice in the past forty-eight hours, more than likely by men in the assassin's employ. The assassin himself had broken into her hotel room, sent someone to interrupt her lunch and was, more likely than not, out there, somewhere, right now, watching.\n\nShe'd seen a hypnotist, allowed herself to be put in a trance and been able to draw a perfect replication of the emblem on the assassin's own sword, a sword that was most likely cursed and just as mystical as her own. She'd even watched a man die only inches away from her, and she couldn't imagine that death by subway was an easy way to go. Last but not least, the assassin himself broke into her loft and tried to kill her while she slept.\n\nFrankly it was a lot to take in.\n\nAnnja walked down the street, lost in thought. She had lots of questions but few answers. What did the Dragon want? How had he found out about her? What did he know about the sword she carried? How did her sword compare to his?\n\nWhat made it all the more frustrating was that she felt as though the answers were all right there in front of her and she just wasn't seeing them clearly enough to put everything together into a coherent whole. Like having all the pieces of a puzzle but, without a picture to work from, she didn't know if the blue pieces represented the ocean, the sky or some other colored object.\n\nAs a scientist, she was used to looking at things through a logical progression that more often than not was based on a cause-and-effect relationship between two items. In order to sort through the mess she found herself in, she decided to apply the same elemental logic and see where that got her.\n\nSo what did she know?\n\nShe knew there had once been an international hit man known as the Dragon, who apparently had survived the explosion everyone else thought had killed him, and he was following her around New York City.\n\nGarin had claimed that the Dragon carried a sword that was the mystical opposite of her own, the dark to her light. The information she'd managed to haul out of her subconscious while under hypnosis had provided her with the image she'd seen etched onto the Dragon's sword, and her visit to Dr. Yee had revealed that the sword itself might be the fabled Juuchi Yosamu, Ten Thousand Cold Nights, the final katana produced by the master swordsmith, Sengo Muramasa. The sword was said to have been instilled with all the bloodthirsty madness that had characterized Muramasa's final days. All of which confirmed what Garin had been suggesting.\n\nThe Dragon had passed up the opportunity to kill her on two different occasions; first, during the assault at Roux's estate, and later while she lay sleeping in her hotel room in Paris. Since then his agents had not only followed her about New York, but had tried to kidnap her, as well.\n\nClearly he wanted something from her.\n\nAnd there was only one thing, she knew, that was possibly valuable enough for him to go through all the trouble. One thing that he wouldn't be able to get his hands on simply by killing her outright.\n\nHer sword.\n\nIt came when she called. It existed to do her bidding and her bidding alone. While she wasn't positive, she suspected that killing her would leave the sword lost in the otherwhere until it chose another bearer, and who knew when that might be?\n\nIt was the only thing that made sense.\n\nThe Dragon wanted Joan's sword.\n\nWith that realization the Dragon's demands from the night before finally made sense. \"Give it to me!\" he'd said. At the time she'd had no idea what he was referring to. She had, in fact, assumed that he'd been mistaken in thinking that she had some rare or unusual artifact in her possession.\n\nYou were right, in a way, she told herself. Except the artifact in question was none other than her sword.\n\nAnnja had no intention of giving it to him.\n\nShe found herself at the Eighty-first Street entrance to Central Park and decided that a walk through the park would be a nice way to end the evening. The thought of going back to her apartment, the one the Dragon himself had been in on more than one occasion, just wasn't all that appealing at the moment. If she had to, she could always catch a cab back to Brooklyn when she got to the other side, on Fifth Avenue.\n\nThere were quite a few people still in the park, despite the fact that evening had come and the sun had already set, and Annja enjoyed the sensation of getting lost among them, anonymous even if only for a few stolen minutes.\n\nShe had been wandering the grounds for about fifteen minutes when she saw him.\n\nHe was hanging back, not making it too obvious, but there was no doubt that he was keeping her in sight, lingering in her wake.\n\nHe was wearing a dark windbreaker and slacks, with a hat pulled low over his face so that she wasn't able, especially from this distance, to get a good look at his features.\n\nIt was at least the second time in as many days that she had been followed and she was starting to resent the attention. They hadn't been shy about chasing her through the subway system and she had the same feeling now; the tourists around her would not be a deterrent to her capture, if that was indeed what he wanted.\n\nFor a moment she was tempted to confront him directly, to shout, \"Hey, you!\" and start striding determinedly toward him, just to see what he would do. Only the idea that he might just pull a gun and simply shoot her, prevented her from such a brash course of action.\n\nInstead of a direct confrontation, she opted for a more covert approach.\n\nROUX WAS BORED.\n\nHe'd only been in the hotel for a little over twenty-four hours, but laying low and staying out of sight was not something he was interested in doing. For a man who had lived as long as he had, he had surprisingly little patience.\n\nHe knew Henshaw had things under control with regard to the Dragon's sudden interest in Annja. That wasn't the problem. The problem lay in the fact that if he had to sit there and stare at those same four walls for another minute he was going to go nuts. Why did Henshaw have him hiding out anyway? Annja was the one in danger, not him!\n\n\"Enough of this!\" he said to himself, and got up to dress for dinner. Roux had old-fashioned tastes and one of the things that he appreciated about the Waldorf was that you were expected to be properly dressed for dinner. None of this casual-dress nonsense that seemed to have become the norm, and thank the heavens for that, he thought.\n\nAttired in a crisp blue suit and matching tie, Roux headed for the main dining room.\n\nTwo hours later he was relaxing after his meal over a glass of brandy when he spotted the most exquisite young woman sitting alone several tables away. She was Asian, looked to be in her twenties, and was dressed in a figure-hugging black dress that highlighted her every curve. She had that classic porcelain-doll look\u2014pale skin, full red lips, her long hair as dark as oil at midnight.\n\nHer beauty wasn't what had attracted his attention, however, but rather the fact that she had been casting surreptitious glances in his direction throughout his meal.\n\nIt appeared he'd found something that would make a worthwhile diversion for the evening.\n\nRoux's success with young women was matched only by his skill at the poker table. The trick, he knew, was to make them think it was all their idea.\n\nHe caught and held her glance for a long moment, then signaled for his bill. When the waiter brought it, he signed it to his room and, taking his drink with him, he moved across the restaurant to the bar on the other side of the room.\n\nHe intentionally chose a seat several chairs away from anyone else and waited, knowing the conclusion was already a foregone one.\n\n\"Is anyone sitting here?\" a feminine voice asked.\n\nRoux turned to find the young beauty from the restaurant indicating the chair beside him, a smile on her face and a spark in her eyes.\n\n\"Please,\" he replied, smiling back. \"Be my guest.\"\n\nShe slid deftly onto the seat, managing to look extraordinarily graceful and at the same time giving him a flash of tanned and supple thigh through the slit in the side of her dress as she did so.\n\nRoux couldn't help but smile.\n\nIt was going to be an interesting evening, after all.\n\nThe bartender wandered over. Roux's new companion glanced at his glass and said, \"I'll have one of what he's having.\"\n\nRoux raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything.\n\nShe turned to face him. \"Aren't you even going to ask me my name?\" she asked with a smile.\n\n\"No. If you want me to know it I'm sure that you'll tell me eventually.\"\n\n\"And if I don't?\" There was amusement in her voice.\n\n\"Then our lovemaking will be all the more passionate for the mystery.\"\n\nShe laughed aloud at that one. \"That's rather forward of you. What gives you the idea that I intend to sleep with you?\"\n\n\"Because a woman like you can't resist a challenge.\" Roux grinned and extended his hand. \"But if it will set you at ease, my name is Roux.\"\n\nHer grip was strong. \"Hello, Roux.\"\n\nNow it was Roux's turn to laugh when she didn't give her name in return. \"I take it that puts the ball firmly in my court?\"\n\nThe bartender returned with her drink and she took a healthy swallow of the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old brandy as if she had it every day.\n\n\"Do you think you are up to it?\" she asked.\n\n\"We'll never know unless we give it a try, now, will we?\"\n\nHer eyes smoldered. \"What did you have in mind?\"\n\nRoux shrugged. \"How about we retire to my suite and see what we can do with a full bottle of this fine brandy?\"\n\n\"An excellent suggestion.\" Her smile turned mischievous. \"Maybe, if you're good, I'll tell you my name when we're finished.\"\n\n\"Whatever the lady desires,\" Roux replied.\n\nHe signed the check, asked for a bottle to be delivered to his suite and then extended an arm to the gorgeous young creature by his side.\n\nThey didn't say much in the elevator, though more than a few sidelong glances passed between them. They made some small talk about nothing of consequence on the way to his suite and arrived to find room service already waiting outside with their order.\n\nRoux opened the door, let his guest inside and then dealt with the room-service waiter. He left the cart in the entrance hallway where it wouldn't be in their way and, drinks in hand, Roux returned to living room, only to find it empty. The bedroom door was open and a pair of high heels lay discarded in the entrance. Just beyond, her cast-off dress lay in a pool of silk.\n\nHer voice floated out of the darkened bedroom. \"Bring me that drink, Roux. I'm thirsty.\"\n\nNever one to deny a beautiful woman, he did as he was told, an I-told-you-so grin on his face.\n\nThe lights were off in the bedroom, but there was enough illumination coming through the thin curtains covering the windows to reveal his guest, now naked, languishing across his sheets. The light cast dappled shadows across her sensuous form and as she rolled to face him the tattoo of the dragon that covered much of her taut young flesh seemed to ripple and writhe, as if the creature was rising to life from the surface of her skin.\n\n\"Come to bed, Roux.\"\n\nAs uncharacteristic as it was of him, Roux again did as he was told.\n\n## 24\n\nAnnja kept walking, but began to steer herself toward one of the side paths, away from the crowds. She knew the layout of the park pretty well and was counting on the fact that her mysterious follower more than likely did not. It would give her the chance to spring the trap that she was getting ready to set.\n\nThe direction she chose led the two of them along a paved footpath through a thick copse of trees. A few hundred yards into the trees was an old discarded construction pipe, the kind that was large enough to drive a truck through. At night it would be a haven for drunks and junkies, a place to avoid the police patrols that routinely went through the park, but at this hour it would more than likely be empty.\n\nIt was there that Annja intended to spring her ambush.\n\nThe trail took a quick little dogleg before it reached that particular point in the walkway, and as soon as she knew she was out of sight, Annja broke into a jog. Reaching the construction pipe, she slipped inside, her back to the wall.\n\nIt took a few minutes but soon she heard the hurried pace of her pursuer. Annja waited until he stepped past the mouth of the pipe and then she struck.\n\nStepping out of the shadows, she grabbed him by the shirtfront and hauled him back into the pipe, using her momentum to slam him against the nearby wall hard enough to make his teeth rattle. Half a second later she had the tip of her sword against his throat.\n\n\"You've got ten seconds to start talking,\" she said, applying a little pressure to the blade for emphasis.\n\n\"No need for violence, Ms. Creed,\" a familiar voice said in response.\n\nLowering her sword, Annja stepped back, surprise and annoyance vying for dominance on her face. \"Henshaw! What are you doing here?\"\n\nIn his typically unruffled kind of way, Roux's man replied, \"Following you.\"\n\nHe glanced down at the sword in her hand. \"And not very well apparently.\"\n\nAnnja released the sword. She wasn't in any danger. Not from Henshaw.\n\n\"Following me? Why would you do that?\"\n\nHenshaw didn't say anything.\n\nIt didn't take her long to figure out what his silence meant. Henshaw would be acting on orders and those orders came from one person only. \"Roux,\" she said.\n\nBut why?\n\nHenshaw didn't know. Or if he did, he wasn't saying. When she asked, he simply shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"Was it your people in the subway the other night?\"\n\nAgain the shrug.\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, and she let the heat show in her voice. If Henshaw wouldn't tell her, she'd just have to ask Roux himself. \"Give me your phone and I'll speak to Roux myself.\"\n\nHe handed it over without objection and perhaps the slightest trace of relief.\n\nShe hit the redial button, figuring that Henshaw would have been in constant contact with Roux as he followed her through the city streets. She waited for her mentor to answer.\n\nThe phone rang several times.\n\nShe began to get an uneasy feeling as it went on and on. If Roux had said he would wait for Henshaw's call, then that was what he would do.\n\nShe hung up and handed the cell phone back to Henshaw. \"No answer,\" she told him. \"Are you sure he's waiting for your call?\"\n\nHenshaw looked concerned. He immediately pressed Redial and waited through a set of rings. The longer it went on without an answer the more concerned Annja became.\n\nSomething wasn't right, an inner voice told her.\n\nThe longer she watched Henshaw waiting for Roux to answer the phone, the more certain of it she became.\n\nSomething had happened to Roux.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said, and headed for the exit to the park. Once on Fifth Avenue she flagged down a passing cab, waited for it to come to a stop and then climbed inside with Henshaw at her heels.\n\n\"Waldorf-Astoria,\" Henshaw said as the cab pulled away from the curb and headed into traffic. \"Please hurry.\"\n\nAnnja's anxiety ratcheted up a notch. She'd never seen Henshaw in a hurry, not even when under fire. Apparently his inner alarms were going off, too.\n\nThe cabbie got them through the city streets in record time. Henshaw shoved a handful of bills through the slot and the two of them were out the door and rushing into the hotel before the doorman could even get out his usual \"Good evening.\"\n\nThe elevator seemed to take forever and Annja was grateful that no one else tried to get on board with them. Henshaw was practically vibrating with tension and she didn't think listening to the prattle of civilians, for lack of a better word, was going to do him any favors.\n\nWhen they hit the eighth floor, Henshaw drew a gun from his jacket and led the way down the hall, toward the suite at the other end where Roux was staying for the duration of his visit to New York.\n\nThey were still a half dozen rooms away when they saw that the door to the suite was partially open.\n\nAnnja called her sword to her, getting a firm grip on the hilt with two hands, ready to deal with whatever might be waiting for them inside.\n\nHenshaw glanced back, saw that she was ready for a confrontation if it came to that and crept down the corridor to the room itself. Reaching out with his free hand, he silently pushed the door the rest of the way open.\n\nThere was a short corridor between the front door and the living area and this naturally limited what they could see from outside in the hall, but even from there they could tell that a struggle had taken place inside the room. Cushions had been pulled off the coach and a chair had been knocked to the ground.\n\nCautiously they stepped forward.\n\nThe living room looked as though it had been the scene of a fight. In addition to the furniture that had been knocked over, the glass top of the coffee table had a starred crack in the center, as if someone had driven the heel of their foot into it, and the television had been knocked out of the entertainment cabinet to lay shattered in a heap on the floor.\n\nSeeing the damage, they quickly checked the rest of the suite, doing it as a team so that they could provide cover for each other if they found someone or something unexpected.\n\nIn the end, they didn't find anything more.\n\nThe suite was empty.\n\nRoux was gone.\n\n\"Maybe he wasn't here,\" Annja suggested, trying to see the bright side. \"Maybe he's down in the bar or in the dining room right now.\"\n\nShe could tell by his face that Henshaw didn't think it was very likely, but he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and called down to the front desk where he asked to speak to the manager. They spoke for a few minutes and then Henshaw thanked the man and hung up.\n\nHe did not look happy with what he had learned.\n\n\"Roux left the restaurant in the company of a young Asian woman around nine. The manager says he'd never seen her before, so that reduces the possibility she was one of the professionals that they're used to seeing who use the hotel as a meeting place. They tend to be known quantities in a place like this. Then he checked with room service and they confirmed that they delivered a bottle of brandy to an older gentleman and a younger woman here in this room about an hour ago.\"\n\nAnnja's mind went immediately to her encounter at the caf\u00e9 with the mysterious Shizu. Was that who Roux had been seen with? If so, how had she found him? Had the Dragon had them all under surveillance without their knowing it? Could they be under observation even now?\n\nShe was just about to say something along those lines to Henshaw when she was startled into silence by the ringing of a telephone.\n\nThe two of them immediately checked their individual cells, but neither one was receiving a call, which left the hotel phone somewhere beneath all the debris. Luckily the caller just let the phone ring until, at last, Annja was able to locate it.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Ms. Creed. What a surprise to find you there.\"\n\nThe voice seemed to be older, deeper, but Annja recognized it nonetheless.\n\nShizu.\n\n\"You're not surprised and you know it. Where's Roux?\"\n\nAt the mention of his employer's name, Henshaw walked into the bedroom next door and Annja soon heard him searching around in the debris, looking for another extension to listen in on.\n\n\"The old goat is fine. For now,\" Shizu said.\n\nAnnja heard a gentle click and knew Henshaw had found the other phone.\n\n\"Whether or not he remains that way depends on you, however.\"\n\nAnnja frowned. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"I thought that would have been obvious by now. I want the sword.\"\n\nThe bold statement left her at a momentary loss for words.\n\nShizu laughed. \"My, my, my. Has the proverbial cat got your tongue?\"\n\nAt last Annja found her voice. \"I don't know what you're talking about. What sword?\"\n\nShizu said something to someone else in Japanese and in the background there came a sudden wail of pain. When silence returned she said to Annja, \"I can do this all night, if you'd like, but I don't think your friend Roux is up to it. Are you sure you want to play it this way?\"\n\nAnnja bit down on her lip, fighting for control. \"I told you, I don't know what you are talking about,\" she said again, trying to stall for time as she fought to figure out just what to do.\n\nThis time Roux let out a long mewling cry of such pain and terror that it didn't even sound human. Annja felt her stomach churn at the thought of what they had to do to a man, particularly one as tough as Roux, to get him to make a sound like that, never mind keep it going for several very long minutes. In the other room, she thought she could hear Henshaw retching.\n\nYeah, you and me both, buddy.\n\nTo Shizu, she said sharply, \"All right. Lay off. I know what sword you mean.\"\n\n\"Of course you do. Seems you're not so tough, after all, Ms. Creed.\"\n\nWe'll see about that, she thought.\n\n\"Bring the sword with you to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden tomorrow at sunset. Come alone. Walk to the viewing pavilion inside the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. I will meet you there with the old man and we'll do an exchange, your sword for your friend's life. Understood?\"\n\n\"Yes, I understand. I'll be there,\" Annja said.\n\n\"Good,\" Shizu said, her voice dripping with satisfaction. \"And one other thing. Be sure to leave that British bastard, Henshaw, behind. You don't need him trying to be a hero and messing up what should be a simple exchange.\"\n\nWith that parting shot, Shizu hung up the phone.\n\n## 25\n\nHenshaw came out of the bedroom, his face set in a mask of fury. \"I can have that garden flooded with men inside of twenty-four hours. We'll grab her and...\"\n\nAnnja wasn't listening. A sudden suspicion had swept over her, one that would change everything if it was correct. She dug through her backpack for the drawing pad that she'd been carrying around with her since her session with Dr. Laurent. When she found it, she pulled it out and flipped to the first image, the one of the swordsman's face.\n\nShe stared at it intently, trying to see beyond the mask and hood. She studied the bridge of the nose, the shape of the eyes, the overall sense of what the picture was telling her, trying to answer a single question.\n\nCould the Dragon be a woman instead of a man?\n\n\"What is it?\" Henshaw asked, noting the intensity of her study and the way she'd stopped listening to him.\n\n\"I'm not sure yet....\" She trailed off, not ready to explain. Her thoughts went back to that day in the caf\u00e9, to the young woman she'd met. Shizu. Could she have been far more than she appeared to be? Annja had been convinced she was an agent of the Dragon, sent to harass her, throw her off balance, just like those who had been following her and the men who'd been sent to try to kidnap her on the streets later that night.\n\nBut what if she was something more than just a foot soldier?\n\nWhat if she was the Dragon?\n\nIt would certainly explain a few things.\n\nAnnja summoned up a memory of Shizu's face and tried to mentally impose it over the image of the swordsman she'd drawn on the pad.\n\nAs best as she could tell, the two were a match.\n\nAnnja explained her theory to Henshaw, showing him the drawing and explaining how she'd arrived at her conclusion.\n\nHe was shaking his head before she was finished. \"That can't be right, Annja. The Dragon has been operating since the late seventies. Every single scrap of information about him points to the fact that he is a man.\"\n\nShe moved to interrupt him and he held up a hand. \"Hell, even if that was all a front, even if she cleverly used misinformation to throw everyone off track for decades, you've still got a problem with the time frame. The girl you saw couldn't have been more than thirty, yet the Dragon has been claiming credit for political assassinations for more than three decades.\"\n\nBut Annja had already considered that. \"She's his successor,\" she said, and the act of verbalizing it made the theory crystalize into fact in her mind. She was right; she knew it.\n\n\"I'm sorry, she's what?\"\n\n\"His successor.\" Annja began to pace back and forth. It helped her think things through sometimes, just like walking did. \"Most everyone, and by that I mean the various law-enforcement agencies, believes that the Dragon, the real Dragon, died in that explosion in Madrid, right?\"\n\nHenshaw nodded.\n\n\"Okay, so let's assume that is true. The Dragon did die. And I'll bet that your intelligence information would support that theory, too, wouldn't it? For years there was no further activity associated with the Dragon after the failure in Madrid.\"\n\nAgain, the nod. \"Word that the Dragon had resurfaced didn't start up again until about three years ago,\" Henshaw said.\n\nAnnja stopped pacing and turned to face him. \"You see, that's the key. Someone else has taken up the mantle of the Dragon, has suborned his identity and has been using it as their own for the past several years.\"\n\n\"But why? What would be the point?\"\n\nAnnja shrugged. \"Fame. Fortune. A sense of adventure. Who knows?\"\n\n\"And the rumors about the sword?\"\n\nAnnja didn't have an answer for that and it was the one part of her theory that was bothering her. Had it been the sword that had influenced Shizu to pick up the tattered image of the Dragon and wrap it about herself? Had the sword somehow guided her actions, given her the skills she needed to step into the role, to fool the law-enforcement community for so long?\n\nIf so, then it was all the more important for Annja to stop her and destroy the sword.\n\nPerhaps even more important than rescuing Roux.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" she replied. \"But I think I know the reason.\"\n\nShe explained about the conversation she'd had with Garin and his theory that the Dragon and her weapon were a polar opposite to Annja and the sword she carried.\n\nFor the second time that day Annja was treated to a view behind the mask that Henshaw usually wore. She could see the wonder of it all on his face.\n\n\"Two swords, created for cross-purposes, one representing the light and one representing the dark,\" he said, his thoughts distant and his gaze focused on something far away.\n\nHe shook his head as if to clear it and asked, \"So what do we do now?\"\n\n\"We get Roux back, whole and in one piece,\" she said, letting her anger at how one of her friends had been treated in order to influence her show through. \"And then we deal with the Dragon once and for all.\"\n\nIt didn't take them long to come up with a plan. Using Annja's laptop they discovered that the park opened up at eight every morning and closed again at six. Sunset would happen just a few minutes before closing, so they should have the park to themselves at that point and they intended to use that to their advantage.\n\nHenshaw would go in shortly after the park opened the next morning. He'd find a suitable position where he wouldn't be stumbled upon by park visitors, but one that at the same time would allow him to keep the pavilion itself under observation.\n\nThey had little doubt that Shizu would have the park under surveillance, but they hoped she wouldn't have it in place that early. Just to be safe Henshaw agreed to wear a disguise when he made the entrance attempt.\n\nBy arriving so far in advance of their scheduled meeting time, Annja hoped to be able to spot Shizu's people getting into position. Once Henshaw knew where they were, he could relay that information via directional radio to Annja. It would be a lot easier for her to take them out once she knew where they were.\n\nHenshaw would be armed with a high-powered rifle and he would keep Annja in view at all times. When the Dragon appeared, hopefully with Roux in tow, it would be Henshaw's job to deal with anyone who posed a threat to Roux's continued well-being. Annja, on the other hand, would focus her energy and attention on the Dragon. If things got too dangerous, she'd call in a little extra help from Henshaw.\n\nIn order to pull it off, they were going to need a communication system that would be difficult to intercept. Henshaw knew where to get one. Just in case the phone in Roux's suite had been bugged, Henshaw went down to the lobby and used a pay phone to make arrangements.\n\nWhile he was gone, Annja tried to clean up things a little; she put the cushions back on the couch, put the chairs in their places and swept up the loose glass from the smashed coffee table and television set.\n\nWhen Henshaw returned half an hour later, he had a well-built dark-haired man who looked a bit like Antonio Banderas with him.\n\nSeeing him, another piece of the puzzle fell into place in Annja's mind.\n\n\"Well, if it isn't my rooftop savior,\" she said. She shouldn't have been surprised, but she was. Score one for Henshaw, she thought.\n\nThe newcomer at least had the grace to look sheepish about the deception. \"Sorry I couldn't say anything to you then. Operational parameters and all that.\"\n\nIf there had been even a trace of smugness in his response she would have made him regret it, but since he sounded entirely sincere, Annja let it go.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said.\n\n\"You're welcome.\"\n\nHenshaw made the formal introductions. \"Annja, meet Marco. Marco, Annja. Now let's get on with this.\"\n\nMarco explained that he was there to show Annja how to wire herself up with a microphone and receiver for the next night. \"Have you ever used anything like this before?\" he asked.\n\nShe shook her head. \"I know how to use a walkie-talkie. Does that count?\"\n\nMarco laughed. \"Technology has come a long way since then, but at least the principle is the same.\"\n\nHe walked over to the desk and took several small black cases the size of jewelry boxes from the pockets of his light coat.\n\nHe opened one of them and removed two flesh-colored pieces of plastic from inside. To Annja they looked like earbud headphones minus the wires.\n\nMarco handed one to Annja and one to Henshaw.\n\n\"This is your receiver,\" he said. \"It sits inside your ear just like a hearing aid does, except it is so small it is practically invisible to anyone standing nearby. They would need to actively look inside your ear to spot it. Go on and try it\u2014we need to make sure we get the fit right.\"\n\nHenshaw had obviously used one before. He popped it, tugged on his earlobe for a moment and announced that it was fine.\n\nAnnja, on the other hand, had to twist and turn hers for a moment before she got a good fit.\n\nMarco picked up one of the other boxes, opened it and showed them both the wafer-thin piece of flesh-colored plastic it contained. \"This is a microphone disk. Peel away the protective covering to expose the adhesive and then just press it firmly against your skin. Somewhere near your neck or upper chest is usually the best place. It's extremely sensitive, but I wouldn't count on it picking up your words if you stick it on your calf, for instance.\"\n\nMarco picked up the mini-walkie-talkie from the pile of gear on the table in front of him. \"Go ahead and put on a mike, then we'll give them a test.\"\n\nHe waited to be certain they both followed the instructions he'd given and then walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.\n\nA moment later Annja could hear Marco's voice in her ear. \"Testing, one, two, three. Can you hear me, Annja?\"\n\n\"Yes, I can hear you.\"\n\n\"All right, hang on a minute while I check Henshaw's gear.\"\n\nHe repeated the sequence with her partner and then returned to the living room. He collected their equipment, put the each set of earpieces and corresponding mikes into a single case and handed a case to each of them.\n\n\"They have a battery life of twenty-four hours, so don't put them on until you're ready to go\u2014\" he hesitated for a moment \"\u2014wherever it is you're going.\"\n\nAnnja eyed the box in her hand thoughtfully. \"What about interception or interference?\"\n\nMarco shrugged. \"The radios use a pretty rare frequency and the signals are encrypted automatically, so you won't pick up anyone else's traffic, nor will they pick up yours. The transmitter might be small but it's powerful. You should be able to remain in contact with each other up to two miles away. It will even penetrate solid rock up to five hundred feet thick, so the walls of a building or even an entire house shouldn't be any kind of problem for you. That's the best I can do on short notice.\"\n\nAnnja nearly laughed. If that was what he could do on short notice, she wasn't sure she wanted to know what he'd be capable of when given more time. Probably reroute the NSA's supersecret satellites just to get his voice mail, she thought.\n\nWith the communications issues resolved, Henshaw saw Marco out the door. He was gone for a few minutes, and when he came back Annja was waiting for him with an annoyed look on her face.\n\n\"Let me guess. He's an old friend who just happened to be hanging around down the street when you called. Out with it, Henshaw.\"\n\nHe mumbled something about not knowing what she was talking about.\n\nBut after all that had happened, there was no way she was going to settle for a feeble excuse.\n\n\"I said, spill it!\"\n\nHenshaw hesitated for another moment or two, then sighed. \"No sense in keeping things a secret now, is there?\" he asked.\n\nAnnja chose to take that as a rhetorical question and simply waited for him to continue.\n\n\"We've had you under surveillance ever since the day you left the estate,\" he said.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Roux was worried. He knew about the Dragon\u2014knew what he was capable of, how far he would go to get something he wanted. At the same time he'd heard rumors about an artifact the Dragon was supposed to possess.\"\n\n\"You mean Muramasa's sword?\"\n\n\"Yes, right, the sword.\" Henshaw tried but failed to hide his surprise that she knew about the weapon.\n\nOf course she knew about the weapon. Did they think she was an idiot?\n\n\"And then what?\" she prompted, feeling her anger rise. \"Did he think he was going to just dangle me out there as bait? Wait and see what happened?\"\n\nHenshaw's face went still. \"I wasn't privy to all his plans, Ms. Creed.\"\n\nSo they were back to Ms. Creed now, were they? \"I have half a mind to just leave him there, Henshaw. He was playing games with my life!\"\n\nWisely her companion remained silent.\n\nAfter several minutes, Annja said, \"Okay, we both know that I can't leave him in her hands any more than you can, no matter how angry I am. So let's figure out the rest of this plan and call it a night.\"\n\nThey talked for another hour, getting everything straight so that when the time came they both knew what they were supposed to be doing and when. It was a reasonable plan, straightforward, without too many things that could trip them up. Of course, she thought, there was always the unexpected, but that couldn't be helped.\n\nAfterward they made arrangements with the manager to have a cab waiting for them in the hotel's underground garage so they could slip away from the hotel without being seen.\n\nAssuming that Annja's loft was being watched, they staged an argument just outside, with Annja yelling at Henshaw through the cab's window, telling him she didn't want anything to do with him and that she would handle things on her own, all in an attempt to convince the watchers they knew were out there that Annja was following the Dragon's instructions to the letter.\n\nSleep was a long time in coming for Annja that night.\n\n## 26\n\nSeveral months earlier\n\nShizu eyed the lodge in front of her through the curtain of falling snow. Inside that building was the man she had come to kill. All she had to do in order to complete her contract was to enter the house, kill its occupant and get out again without being caught.\n\nNot a problem, she thought with a grin.\n\nShe circled the property, noting the position of the security cameras and how often they moved in their preset arcs, and laughed silently. Whoever was in charge of security was an idiot; the cameras moved in defined, repeatable patterns. All she had to do was wait for the right moment.\n\nWhen it came, she raced across the lawn directly toward the house in front of her. She was dressed in white, from her head to her feet, blending perfectly with the snow all around her. Even if someone had chosen that moment to look out through the windows, they wouldn't have been able to pick out her form in the midst of the swirling snow.\n\nShe reached the side of the building without incident and flattened herself against it. The cameras only faced outward, so she was beyond their reach, but she wasn't certain yet if there were armed guards wandering the property and she didn't want to make herself a visible target.\n\nThere was a door several yards farther along. From the plans she had stolen from the contractor who'd built the place she knew that it led into a utility room.\n\nIt was as good a choice as any to provide her entrance.\n\nShe removed an electric lock pick from the pocket of her coat. It resembled a pistol but instead of a barrel it had a long thick tongue sticking out of the front end. She shoved the tongue into the lock and then pulled the trigger. There was a brief rattle as the pick vibrated inside the lock, causing the pins to fall into place, and then the door was opening before her. She shoved the pick back inside her jacket and stepped forward.\n\nSlipping inside, she shut the door quietly behind her and listened, making certain that the rattle of the pick, quiet as it was, had not attracted undue attention.\n\nShe left her coat and shoes behind, not wanting the heavy fabric or wet soles to give her away. On stocking feet she moved deeper into the house.\n\nThe utility room door opened to a short corridor, which, in turn, led into the kitchen. That was where she found the first guard. He was standing at the island making a sandwich, a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise open on the counter in front of him. He never heard her as she crept up behind him, covered his mouth with one hand and, with the other, drove a knife deep into his brain through the base of his skull.\n\nShe held him as he died and then lowered him quietly to the floor.\n\nWiping the blade of her knife on his shirt, she moved on.\n\nThe next guard was standing in a pool of light at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor, his arms crossed in front of him.\n\nHer sword barely made a sound as she drew it from the scabbard she wore on her back.\n\nBreathing deeply to fill her lungs with oxygen, the Dragon burst out of the hallway, a shadow moving through the dimly lit room. By the time the guard's mind managed to receive the message from his eyes that he was under attack, it was too late. He died with his hands still reaching for the weapon on his hip, the Dragon's sword thrust through his heart.\n\nPulling her sword free from his chest, she was already moving past the body and up the stairs as it crumpled to the carpet behind her with a thump.\n\nShe could see the floor plan in her mind, knew that the bedroom she wanted was the third door on the left, and she was already passing through it into the room itself when she heard the first shouts of alarm from downstairs.\n\nSomeone had found the body in the kitchen.\n\nBut that didn't matter; she was where she needed to be. She could see the man's sleeping form on the bed in front of her and she moved forward confidently.\n\nOne more thrust would be all it took.\n\nThree steps from the bed the lights suddenly flared to life around her and Shizu found herself looking down the barrel of the pistol held in the hand of the man on the bed.\n\nThe one she had been sent here to kill.\n\nStaring at him, Shizu nearly died of shock.\n\nThe man on the bed was Sensei.\n\n\"Hello, Shizu,\" he said gently.\n\nShe could say nothing; it was as if she had lost the capability of speech.\n\nSensei did not lower the pistol. \"You did exceptionally well. While I know your skills are extraordinary, I did not think you could penetrate my security so easily. My hat is off to you and your teachers.\"\n\nShizu still said nothing.\n\nThe pistol did not waver. \"I am sorry I had to test you this way, but it was necessary. I needed to be certain that you had developed the skills for what comes next and this was the only way to do that.\"\n\nHe paused, watching her closely for a moment. \"Do you understand that this was just a test? You are not to complete the mission as instructed, now that you know it is a test.\"\n\nShizu slowly nodded.\n\n\"Let me hear you say it,\" Sensei told her.\n\n\"This mission is aborted. You are not the target,\" she said softly, the tension of the previous moments still in her voice.\n\nHe nodded in reply. \"Very good, Shizu.\"\n\nThen and only then did he lower the pistol and place it on the bed beside him. Rising, he said, \"Well done, Shizu. Well done indeed.\"\n\nFinding her voice at last, Shizu spoke up. The fact that she did so was a testament to how unnerved she was by what had just happened. \"But I could have killed you!\" she gasped, appalled at the very idea.\n\nSensei smiled, but there was little humor in his eyes. \"You could have tried. I'll give you that.\"\n\nHe reached out and pressed a button on the intercom beside the bed. A moment later the door behind Shizu opened, revealing a muscular man in a dark suit.\n\nAddressing the newcomer, Sensei said, \"Show her to her room and see to it that she has anything she needs.\"\n\nThe man nodded.\n\nTurning back to Shizu, he said, \"Get some rest. I'm sure your exertions tired you out. We will talk in more detail in the morning.\"\n\nMystified, but obedient as always, Shizu did what she was told.\n\nBY THE TIME SHE AWOKE the next morning, the damage to the estate had been repaired. She walked through the central room and saw no sign that she had killed a man there the night before. Even the bloodstains were gone from the thick carpet.\n\nHungry, she wandered into the kitchen. There she found breakfast prepared\u2014a buffet-style table laid out with fruit, eggs, meat\u2014on the same island the guard had been using to make a sandwich the night before. A place setting had been laid out and next to her plate was a small card.\n\n\"Join me in the dojo when you are finished,\" it read, and included a few additional instructions. It was unsigned, but Shizu had no problem recognizing the handwriting. She hadn't seen it in some time, but that didn't matter. One does not forget the signature of the man you consider to be your personal savior.\n\nThe dojo was in a separate wing of the house and it didn't take her long to find it. She moved directly to the changing room as she'd been instructed. There she found a large tub filled with water and a pure-white kimono made from the finest silk hanging on a rack nearby. A full-length mirror stood next to the tub beside a small table holding a silver pitcher, a folded towel, a natural sponge and another card. \"Cleanse yourself and meet me on the floor when you are ready,\" it read.\n\nIf Sensei wills, so be it, she thought.\n\nShe stripped out of her clothing and carefully placed it off to the side so it wouldn't get wet. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she did so, her tattoo rippling across her muscles as she moved. She was not a vain woman, however, and the idea of standing in front of a mirror admiring herself was so out of her frame of reference that the thought didn't even occur. Picking up the pitcher, she poured the contents\u2014water hot enough to still be steaming\u2014all over her head and body. She endured it stoically, not flinching once at the pain. She put the pitcher down, picked up the sponge and scrubbed herself clean.\n\nShe turned to the tub. A stool stood nearby and she used it to get up over the edge of the waist-high tub, then dropped down into the water.\n\nAs she had expected, it was icy cold. She dunked beneath the surface three times, then climbed back out again, drying off with the towel before putting on the kimono.\n\nIt fit as if it had been tailored for her and Shizu had no doubt that was, indeed, the case. She spent a few minutes clearing her head and preparing for what was to come before stepping through the door into the dojo proper.\n\nIn the middle of the room, Sensei waited, kneeling on a mat in front of a traditional Japanese tea set. He wore a black silk kimono the same color as his hair, which was loose around his face. It made him look younger, less harsh.\n\nBehind him, on a wooden rack, was a sword in a wooden scabbard.\n\nShizu's curiosity burned at the sight of the weapon, but she knew better than to ask about the sword. It wasn't the way these things were done. She would remain quiet until Sensei mentioned it or until she was given permission to speak freely.\n\nShe crossed the floor on bare feet and settled down lotus style next to the tea set. As she reached out to begin the tea service, Sensei shook his head, indicating that she should leave the service alone.\n\nWhen she sat back, he shocked her by preparing the tea himself, something he had never done in front of her before. First, he added hot water to the delicate porcelain cups and then added some green tea leaves. Next, he whisked the mixture together to produce a foamy green tea. Turning the cup to face her, Sensei bowed low and offered her the first taste. She took it, then offered it back to him, as was traditional, but he declined, indicating she should drink. Once she had, he repeated the process, taking a sip for himself before putting the cup down on the table.\n\nThey passed another moment in silence, and then Sensei spoke.\n\n\"You have done well, Shizu. I am proud of your accomplishments.\"\n\nIt was high praise for her and she sat a little taller before him, honored to have him think so highly of her.\n\n\"Now at last, we come to the reason for all you have done over the past several years. I have a specific mission for you, a mission I am now convinced you can carry out successfully.\"\n\nShizu bowed her head. \"Whatever you wish, Sensei.\"\n\nHe was smiling when she looked up again. \"You have always been faithful, Shizu, and I admire you for that. Such dedication is a rare and powerful thing. Because you have been so devoted, so unflinching in all that you have done for me, today I want to return that dedication. I have a gift for you, a gift fitting for one known as the Dragon.\"\n\nSensei stood and turned to the sword rack behind him. He bowed low, then picked up the scabbard in both hands and returned to his former position, the sword resting across his knees.\n\n\"Like you, this sword was crafted for a purpose. The artisan who fashioned it poured everything he had into its creation. He gave it a destiny and then turned it loose in the world to carry out its ends. So it is fitting that on this day, when you, too, are turned loose to carry out your mission, you should receive a gift of equal value.\"\n\nTo Shizu's shock and surprise, Sensei bowed once, short and sharp, and then handed her the sword.\n\nShe cradled it lovingly in her hands, not trusting herself to speak. Holding the scabbard in one hand and grasping the hilt in the other, she drew the sword out slightly, revealing about four or five inches of the blade.\n\nThe katana was old; she could tell just by looking at it. The blade was too sharp, the etching too exquisite, for it to have been made in the modern era. Toshiro had taught her to recognize the old blades, those actually fashioned during the samurai period itself, and she had no doubt that this one originated from that time frame.\n\nJust beneath the hilt, a dragon had been etched lovingly into the blade's surface. It was lunging forward, its front claws reaching toward the pointed end of the blade, smoke pouring from its mouth and between its whiskers.\n\n\"It hungers, Shizu. Hungers for death and destruction and misery, hungers for everything its creator wished upon his enemies.\"\n\nThat last was said quietly, almost reverently, and she wondered for a moment if there were hidden meanings behind the words.\n\n\"It is the sword carried by your predecessor, the original Dragon. Now it is yours.\"\n\nShizu stared at the blade in her hands and vowed to do the gift justice. She would be better than the original Dragon; she would make the legend live as it never had before.\n\nSensei gently took the weapon from her, sliding the blade back into the scabbard and returning the sword to the rack behind him.\n\n\"It is there for you when you need it,\" he told her.\n\nHe moved to stand before her again, his gaze capturing her own.\n\n\"I have one more gift for you,\" he said.\n\nStepping in close, he bent his head and kissed her passionately on the lips.\n\nFor a moment she froze in shock and then the hunger and passion she had been hiding inside for years exploded. She clung to him, losing herself in his touch and his taste and his very closeness. Her love for him knew no bounds and she had prayed for years that this day would come, but had never actually believed that it would.\n\nHis hands found the ties of her kimono and deftly released them, sliding the garment off her shoulders to let it pool on the floor at her feet. His lips traced their way down her neck and Shizu nearly screamed in delight.\n\nSensei took her on the floor of the dojo and every move of his body upon hers cemented her allegiance to him. When he was finished he left her alone. He had won her over, heart, mind and soul. She would do whatever he asked, whenever he asked, without hesitation or doubt.\n\nWHEN HE SUMMONED HER to his study a few hours later, he gave no indication that anything out of the ordinary had happened between them.\n\nRecognizing what she thought was his need for discretion, Shizu did not refer to it, either.\n\nIt would be their secret.\n\nSensei handed her a file folder. Inside was a color photo of a stunningly beautiful woman with chestnut hair and amber-green eyes. A name had been printed across the bottom of the photograph.\n\n\"That woman carries a certain sword that I wish to possess. I want you to get that sword for me,\" Sensei said.\n\nShizu nodded. \"She'll be dead before the week is out,\" she replied, displaying a sense of newfound confidence that was as surprising to her as it was to her master.\n\n\"No!\" he said sharply, and then calmed himself. To Shizu it seemed as if he was embarrassed at having shown even that little emotion.\n\n\"No,\" he repeated, this time in a calmer tone. \"She is not to come to any harm, nor can the sword be taken from her by force. It must be given of her own free will. Anything less and my plans will be ruined. Do you understand?\"\n\nShizu hid the confusion she was feeling and simply nodded. She had been trained to kill, to eliminate her enemies as ruthlessly and as quickly as possible. The woman had something Sensei wanted and she was not allowed to use the one skill she could most easily bring to bear on the problem? Was this another test?\n\nSensei saw her confusion. \"The sword is an item of considerable power, but that power is only available if its current bearer still lives and if the sword has been given freely, rather than taken under duress. She must remain alive,\" he explained.\n\n\"Hai!\" Shizu said, bowing to show her complete agreement.\n\nSensei pointed at some materials in a file folder. \"Everything you need is in here\u2014habits, locations, even her travel schedule for the next several weeks. An account has been opened for your use\u2014the access codes are in the folder, as well. Once you have the sword, reach me through the usual channels.\"\n\nHe moved out from behind the desk and Shizu understood that her audience was over. It was time for her to leave.\n\n\"I will await word that you have succeeded,\" he said, \"as I have no doubt that you will do so. Good hunting.\"\n\nLater, in her own room, Shizu stared at the photograph, studying the woman. Her gaze drifted to the name at the bottom of the image.\n\n\"What secrets are you hiding, Annja Creed?\" the Dragon asked. \"And why is preserving your life so important to Sensei?\"\n\nShe did not know the answers, but she was certain she would find out.\n\nMaybe then she could quench the fire of jealousy that was suddenly burning in her heart.\n\n## 27\n\nNow\n\nAnnja slept badly that night, her dreams plagued by faceless samurai soldiers and a massive feathered dragon that breathed fire in great scorching arcs. Roux appeared more than once, as well\u2014a gagged and bound captive who endured torture after torture at the hands of a beautiful porcelain doll with long dark hair.\n\nBy the time she awoke for the fifth time, heart pounding, Annja decided that it wasn't worth trying to sleep any more. She got up to greet the sun.\n\nShe ran through a series of katas to get her blood flowing and her head clear, then settled down in front of the windows for some meditation and deep breathing. The sun kissed the rooftops nearby, then rose high enough to shine its light directly into her loft, illuminating her as she sat lotus style on the floor.\n\nSatisfied she was ready for what was to come later that day, Annja got up, showered and ate a hearty breakfast, knowing she was going to need the energy reserves later.\n\nAll the while, her thoughts were on her sword. The plan called for her to give it up to the Dragon and do what she could to hold it here in this world as she and Henshaw tried to free Roux. Then she would call the sword back to her, ultimately returning it to the otherwhere.\n\nIt wasn't half-bad as plans go.\n\nThere was only one thing wrong with it.\n\nThey had no idea what would happen when she voluntarily gave up the sword. Would it still be bonded to her at that point? Would the link between them be shattered? Would she ever be able to command the sword again?\n\nShe didn't know.\n\nAnd not knowing scared her.\n\nHENSHAW ARRIVED AT THE park just after it opened. He carried a backpack over one shoulder and had several cameras slung around his neck, emulating the look of just another picture-obsessed photographer come to document the beauty of the garden in bloom. A tour bus with New Jersey license plates was unloading passengers as he approached the entrance to the park so he merged with the crowd and struck up a conversation with one of the tour's patrons as they waited to buy their entrance tickets.\n\nIf the park was under surveillance as Annja suspected, then they would be looking for a solitary individual and might not pay too much attention to the group as it entered the park.\n\nHe stayed with his newfound friend until they had moved through the entrance pavilion and into the park itself, then wandered away on his own.\n\nWhen he was certain that no one was taking an undue interest in him, Henshaw took out the little map he'd been given when he'd bought his ticket and quickly located the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden.\n\nHe'd entered off Flatbush Avenue, which was on the opposite end of the park from where he needed to be. It seemed a prudent move; the two entrances off Washington were certainly closer, but were also more likely to be watched for just that reason. In order to get to the Japanese garden, he was going to have to stick to the outer walkway, past the Steinhardt Conservatory, the Lily Pool Terrace and the Magnolia Plaza Visitor Center before he was even close. From there he could cut through the Celebrity Path or the Fragrance Garden to reach his destination.\n\nHenshaw took his time, using his cameras on a regular basis, doing what he could to remain in character and not appear out of place. Several passersby smiled and said hello. He nodded or waved hello in return, but kept his mouth shut at all times. He didn't want people to remember the man with all the cameras and the British accent, just in case something went wrong later.\n\nAt last he reached the southern edge of the lake. The viewing pavilion was directly in front of him; this was the location of the meet.\n\nHe had to find a suitable watching place.\n\nHe consulted his map and tried to match it up with his surroundings. He could see that on the other side of the narrow lake the land began to rise toward a wooded ridgeline. A second path wound along about halfway up the hillside and he decided to follow that to see what he might find.\n\nAnother ten minutes of walking found him looking directly back across the lake at the viewing pavilion from that second, higher walkway. This is the place, he thought.\n\nHe left the path and climbed through the trees, emerging on a narrow ridge above the edge of the Japanese garden. From there he could look across the lake to the viewing pavilion, as well as both walkways, the one on this side of the lake and the other that led up to and away from the pavilion itself.\n\nHe found a small copse of trees that provided him with a clear line of sight to the pavilion, as well as some shade. Setting his pack on the ground, he walked fifty paces in every direction, looking back at his selected spot from a variety of locations. He was pleased to find that he couldn't see the backpack no matter how hard he tried; the position was a good one and would provide the cover he needed to carry out his part of the plan. Later, when the sun was setting, the whole area would be layered with shadows and he'd be almost invisible.\n\nReturning to his chosen location, he removed a pair of binoculars from his pack, found a comfortable sitting position with his back to a tree and settled in to start his watch.\n\nBY MIDMORNING ANNJA WAS going stir-crazy. When something needed to be done she was the type who just went out and did it, so waiting around was driving her nuts. She paced the floor of her loft like a caged lioness, back and forth, until she just couldn't take it anymore.\n\nShe had to get out of there.\n\nShe threw on her sweats and went for a jog, sticking to the main streets and avoiding any of the alleys or shortcuts she might have used. She wanted to be certain she was around people in case the Dragon's goons tried to make another move ahead of the meet.\n\nWhen she returned to her apartment she showered for the second time that morning and then dropped in front of the television in her bathrobe for some mindless entertainment. Halfway through whatever show it was that she was watching\u2014it was that interesting\u2014she decided to call Garin.\n\nIf there was one thing Garin was good at, it was self-preservation. Since both he and Roux were tied to Joan's sword in some indefinable way, she knew he would want to be kept abreast of what was happening. He'd also want to know what had happened to Roux; just because their last encounter had ended badly didn't mean that they wanted nothing further to do with each other. If that was the case, they would have stopped talking to each other hundreds of years ago.\n\nAnnja dialed the cell number she had for Garin and listened to it ring several times before the call was finally routed to a general voice-mail system. There wasn't even a message; it just beeped to indicate that it was recording.\n\nShe left a message, explaining that Roux was in trouble and that she needed Garin's help. After that, there wasn't anything more she could do.\n\nTHE HOURS PASSED SLOWLY.\n\nThe park had a fair number of visitors and Henshaw watched them all in turn, looking for that one telltale sign that something was out of place, the one little detail that would give them away for who they really were, but he didn't see anything that made him suspicious.\n\nHe found himself admiring the tranquility of the place\u2014the calmness of the lake waters, the gentle cascade of the landscape. Even the soft breeze that wafted over the garden seemed to have been designed to enhance its very features.\n\nSeveral times he saw solitary figures showing interest in the lake and the viewing pavilion. One even took the time to pace off the inside of the structure, but when the bride and groom showed up fifteen minutes later for the picture-taking ceremony, Henshaw knew the photographer was just that, a photographer, and not a threat.\n\nAround noon two men in a small boat paddled out across the surface of the lake to where an odd-looking wooden gatelike structure floated. Henshaw had noted it when he'd first caught sight of the lake and the brochure he'd been given with his entrance ticket had told him that it was known as a torii. It had been painted such a brilliant shade of red that the eye couldn't help but be drawn to it amid the deep emerald green of the surrounding trees.\n\nThe men in the boat seemed to be checking something at the base of the torii. Probably a pair of maintenance men, he thought, and after growing tired of watching them eventually dismissed them as unimportant. He barely noticed when they left a few minutes later.\n\nHe made sure to shift positions occasionally so that his limbs didn't go to sleep, and when he needed to relieve himself he did so with a bottle he had brought along for just that purpose.\n\nNot once during the long afternoon did anyone glance in his direction, never mind leave the path and climb up toward the ridge where he might have been in danger of being seen. Nor did he see anything suspicious. If the Dragon or her people were out there, they were doing one hell of a job of staying hidden.\n\nEventually the sun began to set and the time for Annja's arrival drew near. Confident that the shadows now hid him sufficiently well that he wouldn't be seen even if he stood, Henshaw reached for his backpack. He removed what he needed and then assembled it carefully. When he was finished he took the spotting scope out of the pocket of his shirt where he had been carrying it all day and clamped it on to the barrel of the now-reassembled rifle.\n\nHe was ready.\n\n\"Hang in there, sir,\" he whispered to the wind. \"We're coming.\"\n\n## 28\n\nWhen the time had come, Annja dressed in a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved jersey and her usual low-cut hiking boots. She put the receiver in her ear and attached the microphone to the space between her breasts, just below her collarbone. Then she caught a cab over to the garden.\n\nFounded in 1910 on the site for a former ash dump, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden occupied fifty-two acres between Washington and Flatbush avenues near the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn. It held more than ten thousand varieties of plants and welcomed more than seven hundred thousand visitors per year.\n\nAt least, that's what the sign near the ticket booth read. In all the years Annja had lived in Brooklyn, she'd never been to the gardens.\n\nI have to get out more, she told herself sternly.\n\nShe paid for her ticket and passed through the gates, examining the little map they handed out in the process. She found the section of the park containing the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden and headed in that direction. Wandering down the path a short way from the entrance she found an isolated spot and, pretending she needed to retie her shoe, she squatted and tried to reach Henshaw.\n\nShe knew the microphones were sensitive, that they could pretty much pick up anything, even a whisper, so Annja kept her voice low and her head turned away so no one could see her seemingly talking to herself.\n\n\"Henshaw, you out there?\"\n\nThere was a long moment of silence and then, \"Right here, Ms. Creed.\"\n\nAnnja breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn't realized until just that moment how much she was depending on the radio system to keep her in touch with Henshaw. Or how much his presence helped calm her nerves. She'd already faced off against the Dragon and lost; the idea of doing so a second time was in the forefront of her mind. But this time, her life and Roux's depended on her success.\n\nIt was a heavy burden to bear.\n\n\"All right, I'm inside the park. I'll make my way around to the pavilion and we'll see what's what,\" Annja said.\n\nIt took her fifteen minutes to reach the Japanese garden. This particular one was the first Japanese garden built within an American public garden, and its creator, Takeo Shiota, had done the city proud. It blended the ancient hill-and-pond style with the more modern stroll-garden style and managed to carry it off wonderfully. Annja thought the beauty of the place was amazing. Evergreen trees and bushes dominated the landscape, and here and there bright splashes of color from flowering plants were used with restraint. Annja could see a wooden bridge extending out to a small hump of an island that reminded her of a turtle's back, but it was the building standing right at the water's edge that drew her like iron to a magnet.\n\nThe viewing pavilion was a large, wooden pagoda-like structure made in typical Japanese fashion. The wood had been stained a deep brown and stood out against the trees without being conspicuous or seeming to be out of place. A vermilion-colored torii, or floating gateway, could be seen in the middle of the lake. Annja knew that the torii indicated the presence of a shrine somewhere nearby, but when she looked around for it she couldn't see it.\n\nShe walked over to the pavilion and entered. It appeared to be empty, just one large room without furniture but which offered several places from which one could look out upon the lake.\n\n\"Still with me?\" she whispered.\n\n\"I'm here. Looks like you're about to get company. Someone is approaching from the opposite entrance.\"\n\nAnnja waited a moment, then turned to face that direction just in time to see Shizu enter the Pavilion\n\nHENSHAW BROUGHT THE RIFLE to his shoulder and centered the sights on the Dragon as she approached Annja.\n\nA twig snapped behind him.\n\nHenshaw whirled around, thinking he'd find a stray hiker or a runaway dog. Instead, he saw a figure standing in the shadows not half a dozen yards away. The gun in his hand was a dead giveaway that he didn't have Henshaw's best interests at heart. Henshaw couldn't believe what he was seeing; he'd been so careful all day long, so intent on making certain he wasn't seen, that his mind just couldn't accept that someone else had gotten the drop on him. He made an effort to get his gun up and around in the right direction, but the other man fired before he made it.\n\nHenshaw was close enough to see both muzzle flashes as the pistol in the man's hand went off. What a sledgehammer slammed into his chest, followed immediately by another one, and as he went over backward, the darkness already closing in, Henshaw had a moment to wonder about the lack of the sound of the gunshots.\n\nThen the darkness closed in and he knew no more.\n\nANNJA WATCHED AS THE Dragon seemed to step right out of the shadows as she entered the building. Shizu glanced around, saw Annja and began walking toward her.\n\n\"Here she comes, be ready,\" Annja whispered into her microphone.\n\nBut she didn't get the reply she expected. Instead, from her receiver, came a harsh grunt, then nothing else.\n\n\"Henshaw?\" she asked, doing what she could to keep the look of concern off her face. She was supposed to be alone and didn't want to jeopardize the meeting.\n\nThere was no reply.\n\nBy that time the Dragon was too close for Annja to take a chance with another message. She'd just have to hope that he'd heard.\n\nIt wasn't an auspicious beginning.\n\nThe Dragon stopped about ten feet away from Annja and the two women looked each other over. Gone was the slightly over-the-top fan from the other day. Annja could see that in her place was a stone-cold killer with dead-flat eyes. She was dressed in loosely fitting dark clothing that Annja knew had been chosen not just to allow for ease of movement but also to hide her amid the shadows that were settling all around them now. The hilt of a sword rose up over the edge of one shoulder.\n\n\"Where's Roux?\" Annja asked, leaning to the side to look past the Dragon, as if he might be waiting back there in the darkness from which she had emerged.\n\nShizu laughed. \"He's here. You'll be reunited with him in a moment. Where's the sword?\"\n\nKnowing that only one of them was going to make it out of this encounter alive, Annja didn't care about the Dragon seeing the truth and so she reached into the otherwhere and drew forth the sword.\n\nOne moment her hand was empty and the next it was filled with the hilt of an ancient broadsword, the tip of the blade pointed directly at the Dragon's throat.\n\nShizu's face showed surprise, though it was masked very quickly.\n\nAnnja had seen it, though, and she wondered about it. Did the Dragon's sword operate differently? Is that why she wore it openly on her back rather than letting it rest in the otherwhere? Or was it all just a trick to throw her off the track, to lull her into making a mistake?\n\nThe Dragon made a strange flicking motion with her hand and suddenly there was a pistol in it. She pointed it at Annja.\n\n\"Put the sword down on the ground.\"\n\nAnnja stood resolute. \"No, not until I know where Roux is.\"\n\n\"I told you, he's nearby. You'll see him soon enough.\" The pistol rose slightly, until the barrel was level with her face. \"It would be a shame to mess up those pretty features,\" Shizu said.\n\nAnnja clicked her tongue twice, one of the pre-arranged signals she and Henshaw had come up with for when they were in the thick of things. This particular one meant that he was to put a warning shot right across her bow, to show the Dragon that she wasn't the only one with arms and support.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nShe did it again.\n\nClick, click.\n\nStill nothing.\n\nApparently she was on her own.\n\nAnnja suddenly felt very inadequate for the situation she faced.\n\nThe Dragon chambered a round into the barrel of the pistol. \"I said, put the sword down.\"\n\nNot seeing any other alternative, Annja did as she was told.\n\nAs she prepared for the sword to leave her hand she had a momentary flash of panic. She didn't know what it was that made the sword bond to her in the first place, nor did she know what it took for it to remain in this world. She had always assumed that it would stay in her possession until she died, but here she was voluntarily relinquishing it to another. Would the sword pass on to its new owner as a result? Would it abandon her in the mistaken belief that she was abandoning it?\n\nEasy, Annja, she told herself. The sword will understand. Have faith.\n\nAt this point, that was all she had left\u2014faith.\n\nShe put the sword on the ground and willed it to remain and not vanish into the otherwhere.\n\n\"Now, move over there,\" the Dragon said, pointing with the barrel of the gun to where a screen in the side of the pavilion had been pulled back, revealing a small balcony overlooking the lake.\n\nSlowly Annja did as she was told. She never took her gaze off the Dragon. If this was going to be it, she wanted to meet death with her eyes open and spit into the face of her adversary. While she watched her enemy, she also continued concentrating on keeping the sword in the here and now; having it disappear into the otherwhere would probably earn her a bullet in the head.\n\nThe Dragon kept her distance as she circled toward where the sword rested on the ground. By the time Annja reached the balcony, the Dragon was standing over the sword. She bent over, slid it into a cloth sheath that she'd produced from somewhere on her person and slung the entire package over her back, next to her own weapon.\n\n\"We had a deal,\" Annja said. \"The sword for Roux.\"\n\nFor a moment Annja thought the Dragon was just going to run off, but then she realized the woman was enjoying this. Whatever was about to happen, it would probably not be pleasant for Roux or Annja.\n\n\"Look to your left,\" Shizu said. \"Do you see the line tied to the railing?\"\n\nAnnja looked that way and then quickly back again. \"Yes, I see it.\" It was a narrow piece of fishing line, nearly invisible in the fading sunlight, tied off at the railing and disappearing out into the pond.\n\n\"Untie it and pull on it,\" the Dragon said.\n\nAnnja eyed her warily but made no move toward the line.\n\nThe gun swiveled in her direction again. \"I said, pull on it.\"\n\nAnnja didn't see that she had a choice, so she stepped closer and began to work at the knot. While she did so, she tried reaching out to Henshaw again.\n\n\"Are you out there?\" she whispered.\n\nShe heard nothing but static.\n\nWhen the line was finally untied, she gave it a good yank. Behind her, out on the water, something splashed.\n\n\"Reel it in,\" Shizu ordered.\n\nAgain, Annja did as she was told, but this time a cold sense of foreboding was stealing across her body. Something had gone very wrong; it seemed likely that both Henshaw and Roux were already dead, which left her alone to escape the Dragon's clutches.\n\nIt only took a few seconds to reel in the line and when she did she discovered that it was attached to a long hollow reed that resembled nothing so much as a wet piece of narrow bamboo. As she stared at it, something began to churn and splash at the base of the floating Torii marker in the middle of the lake.\n\n\"I promised I'd deliver Roux alive and unharmed,\" the Dragon said, with a vicious smile. \"I always keep my promises. It's just too bad that you're the one who just took his air hose out of his mouth. Old guy like that, he probably won't last two minutes.\"\n\nAs Annja made the connection between the long narrow reed in her hand and the churning commotion in the middle of the pond, her mind screamed at her to act before it was too late.\n\nShe backed up, took three running steps and dove over the railing into the lake, all thought of the Dragon forgotten. She struck the water in a shallow dive and let her momentum carry her along as far as it could before she surfaced and swam toward the floating torii with hard strokes of her arms and legs. The cold water sucked the heat from her limbs and her wet clothing threatened to drag her down, but she knew she had only minutes to save Roux from drowning so she fought her way forward.\n\nBehind her, unnoticed by all but the gun-toting watcher on the ridge above, the Dragon walked briskly out of the pavilion.\n\nAs she drew closer to the floating signpost, Annja ducked below the surface. The torii wasn't actually floating, she discovered, but was held in place by a long shaft that was sunk several feet into the muck-covered bottom of the pond.\n\nRoux was tied to that shaft.\n\nHe was flailing, trying desperately to get himself free. Air bubbles streamed away from him as he fought to hold his breath and his eyes were wide with the sense of impending death. Annja couldn't even be sure if he saw her, nor did she have time to find out.\n\nShe surfaced, grabbed another lungful of air and then shot back down to help Roux.\n\nUp close she discovered she'd been wrong; Roux wasn't tied to the shaft.\n\nHe was chained.\n\nA shiny steel chain was attached to the pole and then wrapped around his body several times, securing him in place. It was all held together by a thick, brass lock.\n\nThere was no way she could pick that lock in the time she had, nor could she smash it open with anything at hand. She was going to have to focus her efforts on the chain and hope for the best. But when she tried to pull the long loops away from Roux's body enough for him to slip free, she found they were wrapped too tightly to budge even an inch.\n\nRoux continued to thrash frantically beside her and one of his feet lashed out, connecting with her thigh, sending a wave of numbness shooting down its length, but she ignored the injury and swam in close against the shaft. She held on to the chain with her left, opened her hand and summoned her sword.\n\nShe felt the solid weight of it against her palm. She jammed the blade down between the first loop of the chain and the pole itself and then pulled against it with all her strength.\n\nFor a moment she thought it wouldn't work, that she wouldn't be able to get enough torque, but she was surprised when the link snapped quickly.\n\nAnnja wanted to shout for joy, despite being several feet underwater, but she knew she wasn't out of the woods yet. She still had several more lengths to go before it would be loose enough to free Roux.\n\nShe shot for the surface, filled her lungs with another gulp of cool spring air, and then dove back down. Annja could see that Roux had stopped struggling; he was just hanging there in the chains, his mouth open and filled with water.\n\nAnnja had run out of time.\n\nShe wasn't ready yet to give up the fight, however.\n\nShe repeated what she had done before, sliding the sword between the pole and the links of chain. Planting her feet against the pole, she hauled down on the sword with all of her might.\n\nAs if in answer to her prayer, several links of chain parted and Roux's body began to slip downward toward the bottom of the pond.\n\nAnnja dropped her sword and grabbed for him before he could drift out of reach. Hugging him to her, she kicked for the surface.\n\nBelow her, the sword flickered and was gone.\n\n## 29\n\nWith her arms wrapped around his chest from behind and his head resting in the crook between her shoulder and neck, Annja struggled to get Roux to shore. The minute she stopped kicking with her feet, their combined weight would start to drag them down and she'd have to heave him upward with her arms to keep his head from going under again. It was tough, tiring work. Eventually her feet found the bottom and she stood, relieving her back of some of the burden. She dragged him up and onto the shore and laid him flat on the ground.\n\nHe was a mess. His face had been severely beaten and the right side was so swollen that his eye was barely visible. The fingers on one hand were broken and it felt as though his shoulder was dislocated, as well, though whether that happened before he went into the water or when struggling against the chains that bound him, Annja didn't know.\n\nIt had taken so long to get him across the pond and out of the water that she feared for the worst. Would CPR even work after this long? If she did get his heart beating again, would his brain be damaged by the lack of oxygen it had sustained? What was the longest someone could go without oxygen, anyway?\n\nShe didn't know and, as usual, it was the lack of knowledge that scared her the most. Things did not look good. Still, she would give it her best. She wasn't one to quit before she even began.\n\nShe rolled him on his side to let some of the water drain out of his lungs and then set to work. It had been a while since she'd had any formal CPR training, so she quickly found herself repeating the steps aloud to be sure she didn't miss anything.\n\n\"Tilt the head, pinch the nose and breathe.\"\n\nHis lips were cold and hard beneath her own. She could taste the brackishness of the pond water.\n\n\"Check for air.\"\n\nShe put her ear in front of his nose, hoping for an exhale.\n\nNothing.\n\n\"Hands on the chest. Pump one, two, three, four,\" Annja continued the count to fifteen.\n\nNothing.\n\n\"Come on, old man.\"\n\nShe went back to breathing again.\n\nTears streamed down her face as she worked, afraid that for once she hadn't been good enough, hadn't been quick enough.\n\n\"Pump one, two, three...\"\n\nRoux couldn't die like this. Not drowned while chained to a pole in a public park. Not sacrificed so that someone else could be the new bearer of Joan's sword. Not because she had failed him when he needed her most.\n\n\"Breathe.\"\n\nShe was crying so hard that she couldn't even see. Not that she needed to. Her whole world had devolved down to three simple activities.\n\nBreathe.\n\nPump.\n\nCheck for air.\n\n\"Don't die on me, Roux. Not yet.\"\n\nIn a way she was surprised at the depths of her grief. Roux could be an infuriating, stubborn, old-fashioned pain in the butt, but he was also her friend and her mentor and until now she really hadn't understood what he meant to her.\n\nShe pumped harder.\n\n\"Breathe, damn you!\" she said.\n\nAs if in response, Roux suddenly convulsed, coughing up what looked to her to be half the water in the pond behind them.\n\nShe quickly rolled him on his side and pounded his back, helping him evacuate the water from his lungs. He gasped for breath several times and then settled into a more normal rhythm.\n\nAfter a moment, he opened his eyes and blinked up at her.\n\nAs always, he was direct and to the point.\n\n\"Did you kill her?\" he croaked.\n\n\"Not yet,\" she said, and the cold gleam of justice danced in her eyes. It wasn't a question of if, but simply a question of when. She would not let this go unpunished.\n\nRoux went through another fit of coughing, then said, \"I heard them talking. Before they...\"\n\nHe waved his hands vaguely at the water and Annja understood. Before they tried to drown me, he was saying. Continuing, he said, \"The shrine is the rendezvous.\"\n\n\"The one behind us here in the woods?\"\n\nHe nodded, then turned his head and spent a few minutes spitting up more pond water.\n\nWhen he had cleared his throat and realized she was still there, watching him, he asked, \"Well, what are you waiting for?\"\n\nAnnja nearly laughed. Save him from drowning, drag him out of a lake, pound on his chest until he starts breathing again and he wants to be critical of her choice in priorities?\n\n\"You sure you'll be all right?\" she asked.\n\n\"Fine,\" he said, and then retched up more pond water.\n\nShe reached for him but he waved her off. In between coughs, he said, \"Go. She has to be stopped.\"\n\nHe was right.\n\nAnnja went.\n\nThe sun had set while she had been in the water with Roux and it was fully dark. The old-fashioned street lamps that lined the walkways had come on with the growing dark and now lit the path with a soft light. Yet despite their ambience, the calm, tranquil feeling she'd experienced earlier was gone, replaced by a sense of imbalance, a disruption in the flow, as if the landscape around her was reacting to the events playing out upon its surface.\n\nShe followed the path a short distance until she came to a fork in the road. A little sign stood nearby, with an arrow pointing down each arm of the fork. The first was directed to the right and the word Shrine had been etched into its surface. The second pointed farther along in the direction she'd been traveling and read, Esplanade.\n\nAnnja chose the right-hand fork.\n\nIt didn't take her long to spot the small structure set back in its own nook amid the white pines. It was made from wood and had a green tiled roof that made it seem as if the structure itself had simply grown out of the ground rather than having been built by human hands.\n\nLeaving the pathway, Annja crept through the trees until she had a clear view of the front of the shrine. Four steps led up to the entrance. Beside the steps was a pair of stone foxes, symbols of Inari, god of the harvest. The Dragon was nowhere to be seen.\n\nAnnja moved forward.\n\nWhen she reached the side of the shrine, she stopped and listened. She could hear the Dragon's voice from inside the structure, though she couldn't make out what was being said.\n\nIt didn't really matter though, she'd found what she was looking for.\n\nAnnja walked to the front of the building, calmly climbed the steps and entered through the front door.\n\nThe interior of the shrine was lit by an entire wall of candles. By their light Annja could see the Dragon speaking to two men dressed in the uniforms of the park maintenance crew.\n\nAs one, they turned to look at her.\n\n\"You can't have the sword,\" Annja said, looking directly at Shizu.\n\nThe Dragon laughed. \"Do you think you can take it from me?\"\n\nAnnja smiled, and by the way the two men stepped back upon seeing it, she knew she had conveyed her intent clearly enough. \"Oh, I think so,\" she said.\n\nReaching into the otherwhere, she summoned her weapon.\n\nThe Dragon's eyes fell on the sword and then on the wrapped bundle she had set aside several minutes before. Annja could almost see her playing it back in her mind, wondering how Annja could have managed to regain possession of the sword when it had been in the Dragon's custody since she'd left the pavilion.\n\nChew on that one a bit, Annja thought, and now it was her turn to laugh.\n\nFury seized Shizu in its iron grip. \"Kill her!\" she screamed, even as she drew her own sword with a lightning quick maneuver.\n\nThe men were already in motion, rushing toward Annja with their own weapons drawn.\n\nShe didn't wait for them to reach her, but moved to intercept instead. She was done running; it was time to stand and fight.\n\nShe would avenge what they had done to Roux and most likely Henshaw, as well.\n\nShe met the first of the Dragon's henchmen in the center of the room. She knew right away he was no match for her; he held his blade poorly and relied on his brute strength to get him through. He came forward with clumsy, overhand attacks that Annja had no problem avoiding. Annja gave back a little ground, forcing him to move closer to keep her in range, and when he followed she made her move.\n\nAnnja deflected the swing of his sword and continued to turn, spinning around to bring her left elbow smashing upward toward his face. When she hammered him on the temple, he stumbled backward, dropping his sword in the process. Annja moved in on him, kicking his sword away as she did so. When he turned to run, she slashed her blade across the backs of his knees, cutting his hamstrings and effectively taking him out of the fight.\n\nA knife whistled by her head, taking her attention away from the downed man at her feet. The other man was standing where he'd been originally, but rather than facing her with sword in hand, he was pulling knife after knife from slots on his belt and hurling them at her.\n\nShe used her sword to knock them out of the air as she advanced. Just like swatting a fly, she thought. When she reached him, he drew his own sword and put up an inspired defense, but the end result was the same.\n\nAnnja shortly found herself standing over his dying form, the blade of her sword slick with the man's blood.\n\nAnnja looked around. Where did the Dragon go?\n\nThe notion occurred to her just as the Dragon came running out of the shadows, sword in hand, and almost managed to cut her head off at the shoulders. Only the fact that Annja stumbled over something on the floor kept her from losing her head.\n\nThey moved around the interior of the shrine, trading blow after blow. Eventually the battle began to wear on Annja. Where Shizu was fresh, Annja was not. She'd fought to save Roux's life, and the events in the pond and the effort to deliver CPR afterward had sapped her strength. Her timing was off; her attacks were a split second too slow and getting slower all the while.\n\nSensing this, the Dragon pressed her attack, driving Annja back. Step after step, blow after blow, Annja could do nothing but retreat. Her sword was heavier than her opponent's, bulkier, and if this went on for much longer her ability to fight back would be severely hampered by fatigue. At that point, it would be all but over. The Dragon would be able to deliver the coup de gr\u00e2ce whenever she felt like it.\n\nAs Annja's strength ebbed, her doubts began to creep in.\n\nShe couldn't do it, a voice in the back of her head whispered. Who did she think she was, anyway? Joan had been a hero, a true warrior. But her? She was nothing more than a glorified trench digger looking for broken bits of pottery and other garbage. She didn't deserve to carry Joan's sword.\n\nHer mind flashed to the first fight between them, the one at Roux's estate. The Dragon had bested her then and was sure to do so now. What did she have that the Dragon did not?\n\nThe answer was at the heart of all she did.\n\nAnnja did have faith in her own destiny, in her right to bear the sword.\n\nAnd that faith was enough to silence the voice of doubt in her head.\n\nThe Dragon chose that moment to smile at her, just as she had during their first encounter, as if to say, See? You can't face me and expect to win.\n\nThat little grin, that slight quirk of the mouth, was enough to turn the tide of the battle.\n\nAnnja felt a newfound strength pour through her limbs as adrenaline flooded her system, and she used it to her advantage, her blade like a dervish whirling in the dim light.\n\nThis time it was the Dragon who was forced back. This time it was the Dragon who came out of the exchange bleeding as the tip of Annja's sword slashed her skin when she failed to move fast enough.\n\nThis time it looked as if it would be the Dragon who lost the battle, and apparently the Dragon thought so, too. She maneuvered her way around the building until she stood in front of the stairs leading back down to ground level.\n\nAfter delivering a powerful blow, she turned and ran down the stairs.\n\nAnnja gave chase.\n\n## 30\n\nBy the time Annja managed to get outside, the Dragon had disappeared into the trees. Annja caught the barest glimpse of her just before she was lost from sight and without hesitation Annja raced to catch up.\n\nThere was no path, no easy route, and Annja was forced to push her way through. Branches tore at her, brambles cut her flesh, and when she came out on the other side she was certain she was bleeding from a dozen new wounds. She could imagine she looked quite the sight, covered with cuts and blood and gore-stained clothing.\n\nAnnja emerged on a grassy hill above a walkway and once she reached it she realized that it was the continuation of the left-hand path she'd encountered earlier. Since the path was well lit and would provide both her and the Dragon the fastest and most direct escape route, Annja chose to follow it.\n\nEventually she emerged from the trees and found herself standing near what could only be the Cherry Esplanade.\n\nIt was a wide-open area on which seventy-six individual cherry trees had been planted in four identical rows, leaving a wide carpet of green grass in the center. Large spotlights had been set up all around the edges of the esplanade, illuminating it even though the park was closed.\n\nThe cherry blossoms were in full bloom, their bright pink and purple petals transforming the space into a riot of color. They rustled, like the whisper of a thousand voices, in the cool evening breeze.\n\nIn their midst, death awaited her.\n\nThe Dragon stood in the center of the grass. In her hand she held the Muramasa blade\u2014the Ten Thousand Cold Nights\u2014that Garin claimed was the dark counterpart to Annja's own sword. Maybe it was her imagination, but to Annja the steel seemed to gleam with eagerness for the blood that was about to be spilled. The sword and the Dragon expected her to fall.\n\nAnnja had no intention of letting that happen.\n\nWith a thought her sword materialized in her hand and she stalked forward onto the field, coming to a halt several yards away from her enemy. She could see Shizu almost vibrating with fury. Good, she thought, maybe she'll make a mistake.\n\nAnnja kept her own anger bottled up and locked away behind a wall in her mind. The woman in front of her had almost killed Roux, and had probably taken care of Henshaw, too. She had more than likely broken into her home, chased her through the streets and had endangered her life. But Annja knew she couldn't think about that now. There was no place in a sword fight for anger\u2014just attack and counterattack, thrust and parry, until only one was left standing on the battlefield.\n\nThe Dragon looked at her through narrowed eyes. \"Surrender the sword and I shall let you live,\" she said.\n\nAnnja shook her head but did not say anything in return. She knew the Dragon's words were meant as a distraction and when she sensed her opponent shift her weight from her rear foot to her front, Annja knew what they were supposed to conceal.\n\nWithout another word the Dragon launched herself at Annja, in a spinning whirlwind of an attack, her sword coming around and down toward Annja's unprotected flesh.\n\nBut Annja was no longer standing there, she had moved several feet to the right. She'd seen the shift in weight, had known what it signified, and had reacted by twisting to her right, away from the deadly blade.\n\nThe Dragon was on her in an instant, trying to overwhelm her with the sheer ferocity of her attack, using the same tactics she had utilized that night in Paris when they had first crossed blades. Slash and parry, cut and jab. Back and forth they went, neither of them gaining any significant advantage, their blades ringing in the night air.\n\nThey broke apart, gaining a momentary respite.\n\nAnnja tried circling to her left, watching Shizu closely, searching for some opening in her guard that she might exploit, when the opportunity presented itself.\n\nThe Dragon was doing the same, however, and apparently saw one before Annja.\n\nShizu exploded in movement, her weapon swinging toward Annja's midsection in a vicious strike, and the assassin was faster than Annja had expected her to be.\n\nAnnja dropped the point of her sword and met Shizu's blade with the edge of her own, channeling the energy of her attacker's strike away from her and toward the ground instead. She twisted and brought her own weapon around in an arc that was aimed at the Dragon's midsection.\n\nBut Shizu was gone before the blow landed, dancing out of range on nimble feet.\n\nBack and forth they went, blow after blow, twisting and turning, moving across the grass while cherry blossoms drifted through the air around them, each of them striving to gain the upper hand and deliver the winning blow.\n\nIt was Shizu who drew first blood, cutting in beneath Annja's guard and slashing the tip of her sword across Annja's shoulder. Blood flowed, staining her jersey, and Shizu grinned in triumph.\n\n\"The beginning of the end,\" she mocked.\n\nAnnja ignored her and the wound, as well. She could tell it wasn't too deep and she wasn't in any real danger from it at the moment, though eventually the blood loss would take its toll, she was sure.\n\nShe'd just have to redouble her efforts and put an end to this before that happened.\n\nShizu came at her again and they traded another series of blows, the sound of their swords colliding ringing out across the field. This time, when the Dragon stepped in close, Annja took advantage of the situation and lashed out with her leg, striking the Dragon straight in the chest and causing her to stumble backward.\n\nAnnja kept up her forward momentum, driving the Dragon back across the field with a combination of sword fighting and martial-arts moves, throwing out strikes and kicks between sword blows.\n\nFinally the Dragon began to tire and came in with a new overhand blow, trying to end it all.\n\nSeeing it coming out of the corner of her eye, Annja shifted her hold on her weapon and struck out at the hilt of her enemy's.\n\nTheir swords slammed together and the Muramasa blade rang like a crystal bell in the second before it flew out of Shizu's grasp, tumbling through the air.\n\nAnnja hadn't expected the maneuver to work. The Dragon was shocked. She turned her head to watch the blade go flying from her.\n\nAfraid that Shizu would simply call her weapon back again, just as Annja regularly did with her own sword, she didn't hesitate but drove home a short, sharp thrust.\n\nLooking the other way, the Dragon never even saw it coming.\n\nThe broadsword entered Shizu's body between the third and fourth ribs and exited out the back just to the right of her spine.\n\nAnnja released her sword and stepped back.\n\nThe Dragon tottered for a moment and then sank slowly to her knees, her bloody hands searching for and finding the hilt of Annja's weapon but without the strength to pull it free.\n\n\"How did you take the sword from me?\"\n\nHer eyes glazed over and she crumpled to the ground.\n\nThe Dragon was dead.\n\nAnd with her death Annja's sword, which just a moment before had been shoved horizontally through the Dragon's body, vanished back into the otherwhere, ready for the next time Annja would need it.\n\nAnnja knew she should have felt satisfaction at the end result, but all she could think about was that final question.\n\nShe didn't understand. She knew instinctively that the Dragon had not been talking about her own weapon, but about how Annja's sword had vanished right out of the Dragon's very hands. And that didn't make any sense.\n\nHow could the Dragon not know about the sword's ability to vanish and reappear at will? Surely the weapon the Dragon carried had been able to do the same?\n\nAnnja looked across the field, expecting the Dragon's weapon to have vanished the minute its wielder died, only to find it right where it had fallen, jammed point first into the earth about ten feet away.\n\nFor a long moment, Annja couldn't look away.\n\nThe sword was still there.\n\nHer thoughts churning at the implications, Annja climbed to her feet and cautiously approached it.\n\nThe sword was as she remembered it, right down to the etching of the dragon on the surface of the blade just below the hilt. Even now the etching seemed to be snarling in defiance.\n\nReaching out, afraid of what might happen should she touch it but needing to know nonetheless, she wrapped her hand around the hilt.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nWhere she expected to feel something from the blade, some sense of its bloody history and evil reputation, she felt nothing.\n\nIt was just a sword.\n\nAn inert piece of metal.\n\nWhile it might have historical value, there was nothing otherwise special about the weapon.\n\nGarin and Roux had been wrong.\n\nPriceless historical artifact it might be, but that was all. The only mystical sword Annja knew of was the one she carried.\n\n## Epilogue\n\nFrom the shadows beyond the rows of cherry trees at the edge of the esplanade, Garin Braden watched the woman he had selected and trained specifically for this day, for this very battle, fall beneath the point of Annja's sword.\n\nThis was not the way things were supposed to end.\n\nNo longer content to leave the sword, and hence his future, in the hands of anyone other than himself, Garin had carefully planned and orchestrated events for years to arrive at this point in time. Originally created to eliminate Roux, the training of his beautiful assassin had been redirected when Annja had reunited the pieces of Joan's shattered sword, irrevocably changing the status quo. Garin had adapted, however, and modified his goals. His intent to steal the sword for himself and eliminate both his former mentor and his mentor's new prot\u00e9g\u00e9 had seemed flawless, but apparently he'd done something that he kept telling himself, and even the Dragon, not to do.\n\nHe'd underestimated Annja Creed.\n\nBoth she and Roux still lived, while the blood of Garin's carefully groomed champion pooled upon the ground at Annja's feet beneath the beauty of the cherry blossoms.\n\nHow poetic, he thought in disgust.\n\nTo add insult to injury, he'd even let that bastard Henshaw live. His two shots had been true, but when he'd checked the body he'd discovered that Henshaw had been wearing a protective vest; he was unconscious rather than dead. All Garin had to do to eliminate a future threat was put one more bullet through the man's skull, but the previous shot had ruined his silencer and he hadn't wanted to alert Annja that her partner was in trouble.\n\nHe'd let the man live and might someday regret it.\n\nNo matter, he thought.\n\nThere will be another time, another opportunity.\n\nHe was sure of it.\n\nJust as he was sure that he and Annja Creed would one day face each other over that sword.\n\nAnd on that day, Garin Braden intended to come out on top.\nISBN: 978-1-4268-6626-5\n\nTHE DRAGON'S MARK\n\nSpecial thanks and acknowledgment to Joe Nassise for his contribution to this work.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2010 by Worldwide Library.\n\nAll rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\n\u00ae and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Enterprises Limited. Trademarks indicated with \u00ae are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n# _Acclaim f_ _or_ JONATHAN LETHEM' _s_  \nMOTHERLESS BROOKLYN\n\n\"Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own 'wheels within wheels.' \"\n\n_\u2013The New York Times Book Review_\n\n\"Who but Jonathan Lethem would attempt a half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome?... The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.... Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist.\"\n\n_\u2013The Boston Globe_\n\n\"Part detective novel and part literary fantasia, [ _Motherless Brooklyn_ ] superbly balances beautiful writing and an engrossing plot.\"\n\n_\u2013The Wall Street Journal_\n\n\"Intricately and satisfyingly plotted.... Funny and dizzying and heart-breaking.\"\n\n\u2013Luc Sante, _Village Voice Literary Supplement_\n\n\"A tour de force.... With one unique and well-imagined character, Jonathan Lethem has turned a genre on its ear. He doesn't just push the envelope, he gives it a swift kick.\"\n\n_\u2013The Denver Post_\n\n\"Aside from being one of the most inventive writers on the planet, Lethem is also one of the funniest.\"\n\n_\u2013San Francisco examiner_ & _Chronicle_\n\n\"In Essrog.... Jonathan Lethem has fashioned a lovably strange man-child and filled his cross-wired mind with a brilliant, crashing, self-referential interior monologue that is at once laugh-out-loud funny, tender and in the honest service of a terrific story.\"\n\n_\u2013The Washington Post Book World_\n\n\"A true risk-taker.... Lethem uses a familiar genre as the backdrop for his own artistic flourishes.\"\n\n_\u2013The Hartford Courant_\n\n\"Wildly inventive.... Jonathan Lethem has a knack for pushing commonplace ideas to absurdly literal ends.\"\n\n_\u2013City Pages_\n\n\"Marvelous.... _Motherless Brooklyn_ is, among other things, a tale of orphans, a satire of Zen in the city and a murder mystery.\"\n\n_\u2013Time Out New York_\n\n\"Finding out whodunit is interesting enough, but it's more fun watching Lethem unravel the mysteries of his Tourettic creation.\"\n\n_\u2013Time_\n\n\"Wonderfully inventive, slightly absurdist.... [ _Motherless Brooklyn_ ] is funny and sly, clever, compelling and endearing.\"\n\n_\u2013USA Today_\n\n\"Utterly original and deeply moving.\"\n\n_\u2013Esquire_\n\n_\"Motherless Brooklyn_ is a whodunit that's serious fiction.... Lethem is a sort of Stanley Kubrick figure... stopping off in flat genres to do multidimensional work, blasting their hoary conventions to bits.\"\n\n\"A pure delight.\"\n\n_\u2013The New York Observer_\n\n\"A detective story, a shrewd portrait of Brooklyn, a retold _Oliver Twist_ and a story so baroquely voiced (the hero has Tourette's syndrome) that Philip Marlowe would blush. And tip his fedora.\"\n\n_\u2013Newsweek_\n\n\"Wildly imaginative.\"\n\n_\u2013Minneapolis Star Tribune_\n\n\"Funny, delightfully complicated and so outrageously inventive that no pitch could do it justice.\"\n\n_\u2013Baltimore Sun_\n\n\"A multi-layered novel that's fast-paced, witty and touching.... Prose diatpunches its way down the page, every word loaded with energy and ready to explode.\"\n\n_\u2013The Oregonian_\n\n\"Compulsively readable.... Genuinely entertaining.... Improbably hilarious.... Lethem is at his peak Nabokov-meets-Woody-Allen verbal frenzy.\"\n\n_\u2013Bookforum_\n\n\"Most rewarding.... Delightfully oddball.\"\n\n_\u2013The New Yorker_\n\n_\"Motherless Brooklyn_ is Lethem's finest work yet-exciting, strange, original, hilarious, human and soulful.\"\n\n_\u2013The Memphis Commercial Appeal_\n\n\"A staggering piece of writing.... On the edge of genius.... The accents, class distinctions, highways, neighborhoods, grocery stores, flavors, scents and, yes, car services in a certain corner of [Brooklyn] are made vividly tangible, arising from these pages as if scratch-and-sniffs were embedded in the margins.\"\n\n_\u2013San Jose Mercury News_\n\n\"Imagine the opportunities to explore language that arise when the narrator of a novel has Tourette's syndrome.... Unforgettable.\"\n\n_\u2013Los Angeles Times_\n\n#    \nJONATHAN LETHEM  \nMOTHERLESS BROOKLYN\n\nJonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers _The Fortress of Solitude_ , which was a _New York Times Book Review_ Editors' Choice for one of the best books of 2003, and _Motherless Brooklyn_ , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named novel of the year by _Esquire_. His stories and essays have appeared in _The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, McSweeney's, Tin House, The New York Times_ , the _Paris Review_ , and a variety of other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Maine.\n\n# _Books_ _by_ JONATHAN LETHEM\n\n_Men and Cartoons_\n\n_The Fortress of Solitude_\n\n_This Shape We're In_\n\n_Motherless Brooklyn_\n\n_Girl in Landscape_\n\n_As She Climbed Across the Table_\n\n_The Wall of the Sty, the Wall of the Eye_ (Stories)\n\n_Amnesia Moon_\n\n_Gun, with Occasional Music_\n\nWITH CARTER SCHOLZ\n\n_Kafka Americana_\n\nAS EDITOR\n\n_The Vintage Book of Amnesia_\n\n_The Years Best Music Writing 2002_\n\nFIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2000\n\n_Copyright \u00a9 1999 by Jonathan Lethem_\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.\n\nVintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.\n\nThe Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:  \nLethem, Jonathan.  \nMotherless Brooklyn \/ by Jonathan Lethem.  \np. cm.  \nI. Title.  \nPS3562.E8544M68 1999  \n813\u2032.54-dc21 99-18194\n\neISBN: 978-0-307-78912-9\n\n_Authorphotograph \u00a9 Mara Faye Lethem_\n\nwww.vintagebooks.com\n\nv3.1\n_For my Father_\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_About the Author_\n\n_Other Books by This Author_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\nChapter 1 - Walks Into\n\nChapter 2 - Motherless Brooklyn\n\nChapter 3 - Interrogation Eyes\n\nChapter 4 - Bad Cookies\n\nChapter 5 - One Mind\n\nChapter 6 - Auto Body\n\nChapter 7 - Formerly Known\n\nChapter 8 - Good Sandwiches\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\n# WALKS INTO\n\nContext is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. _I've got Tourette's_. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone. (If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I'd have to be Mumbles.) In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They're an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they're smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle. Only\u2014here's the rub\u2014when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks into the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear. That's when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It's an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah's flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.\n\n\"Eat me!\" I scream.\n\n\"Maufishful,\" said Gilbert Coney in response to my outburst, not even turning his head. I could barely make out the words\u2014\"My mouth is full\"\u2014both truthful and a joke, lame. Accustomed to my verbal ticcing, he didn't usually bother to comment. Now he nudged the bag of White Castles in my direction on the car seat, crinkling the paper. \"Stuffinyahole.\"\n\nConey didn't rate any special consideration from me. \"Eatmeeatmeeatme,\" I shrieked again, letting off more of the pressure in my head. Then I was able to concentrate. I helped myself to one of the tiny burgers. Unwrapping it, I lifted the top of the bun to examine the grid of holes in the patty, the slime of glistening cubed onions. This was another compulsion. I always had to look inside a White Castle, to appreciate the contrast of machine-tooled burger and nubbin of fried goo. Kaos and Control. Then I did more or less as Gilbert had suggested\u2014pushed it into my mouth whole. The ancient slogan _Buy 'em by the sack_ humming deep in my head, jaw working to grind the slider into swallowable chunks, I turned back to stare out the window at the house.\n\nFood really mellows me out.\n\nWe were putting a stakeout on 109 East Eighty-fourth Street, a lone town house pinned between giant doorman apartment buildings, in and out of the foyers of which bicycle deliverymen with bags of hot Chinese flitted like tired moths in the fading November light. It was dinner hour in Yorktown. Gilbert Coney and I had done our part to join the feast, detouring up into Spanish Harlem for the burgers. There's only one White Castle left in Manhattan, on East 103rd. It's not as good as some of the suburban outlets. You can't watch them prepare your order anymore, and to tell the truth I've begun to wonder if they're microwaving the buns instead of steaming them. Alas. Taking our boodle of thusly compromised sliders and fries back downtown, we double-parked in front of the target address until a spot opened up. It only took a couple of minutes, though by that time the doormen on either side had made us\u2014made us as out-of-place and nosy anyway. We were driving the Lincoln, which didn't have the \"T\"-series license plates or stickers or anything else to identify it as a Car Service vehicle. And we were large men, me and Gilbert. They probably thought we were cops. It didn't matter. We chowed and watched.\n\nNot that we knew what we were doing there. Minna had sent us without saying why, which was usual enough, even if the address wasn't. Minna Agency errands mostly stuck us in Brooklyn, rarely far from Court Street, in fact. Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill together made a crisscrossed game board of Frank Minna's alliances and enmities, and me and Gil Coney and the other Agency Men were the markers\u2014like Monopoly pieces, I sometimes thought, tin automobiles or terriers (not top hats, surely)\u2014to be moved around that game board. Here on the Upper East Side we were off our customary map, _Automobile_ and _Terrier_ in Candyland\u2014or maybe in the study with Colonel Mustard.\n\n\"What's that sign?\" said Coney. He pointed with his glistening chin at the town house doorway. I looked.\n\n\" 'Yorkville Zendo,' \" I read off the bronze plaque on the door, and my fevered brain processed the words and settled with interest on the odd one. \"Eat me Zendo!\" I muttered through clenched teeth.\n\nGilbert took it, rightly, as my way of puzzling over the unfamiliarity. \"Yeah, what's that _Zendo?_ What's that?\"\n\n\"Maybe like Zen,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't know from that.\"\n\n\"Zen like Buddhism,\" I said. \"Zen master, you know.\"\n\n\"Zen master?\"\n\n\"You know, like kung-fu master.\"\n\n\"Hrrph,\" said Coney.\n\nAnd so after this brief turn at investigation we settled back into our complacent chewing. Of course after any talk my brain was busy with at least some low-level version of echolalia salad: _Don't know from Zendo, Ken-like Zung Fu, Feng Shui master, Fungo bastard, Zen masturbation, Eat me!_ But it didn't require voicing, not now, not with White Castles to unscrew, inspect and devour. I was on my third. I fit it into my mouth, then glanced up at the doorway of One-oh-nine, jerking my head as if the building had been sneaking up on me. Coney and the other Minna Agency operatives loved doing stakeouts with me, since my compulsiveness forced me to eyeball the site or mark in question every thirty seconds or so, thereby saving them the trouble of swiveling their necks. A similar logic explained my popularity at wiretap parties\u2014give me a key list of trigger words to listen for in a conversation and I'd think about nothing else, nearly jumping out of my clothes at hearing the slightest hint of one, while the same task invariably drew anyone else toward blissful sleep.\n\nWhile I chewed on number three and monitored the uneventful Yorkville Zendo entrance my hands busily frisked the paper sack of Castles, counting to be sure I had three remaining. We'd purchased a bag of twelve, and not only did Coney know I had to have my six, he also knew he was pleasing me, tickling my Touretter's obsessive-compulsive instincts, by matching my number with his own. Gilbert Coney was a big lug with a heart of gold, I guess. Or maybe he was just trainable. My tics and obsessions kept the other Minna Men amused, but also wore them out, made them weirdly compliant and complicit.\n\nA woman turned from the sidewalk onto the stoop of the town house and went up to the door. Short dark hair, squarish glasses, that was all I saw before her back was to us. She wore a pea coat. Sworls of black hair at her neck, under the boyish haircut. Twenty-five maybe, or maybe eighteen.\n\n\"She's going in,\" said Coney.\n\n\"Look, she's got a key,\" I said.\n\n\"What's Frank want us to do?\"\n\n\"Just watch. Take a note. What time is it?\"\n\nConey crumpled another Castle wrapper and pointed at the glove compartment. \"You take a note. It's six forty-five.\"\n\nI popped the compartment\u2014the click-release of the plastic latch was a delicious hollow sound, which I knew I'd want to repeat, at least approximately\u2014and found the small notebook inside. GIRL, I wrote, then crossed it out. WOMAN, HAIR, GLASSES, KEY. 6:45. The notes were to myself, since I only had to be able to report verbally to Minna. If that. For all we knew, he might want us out here to scare someone, or to wait for some delivery. I left the notebook beside the Castles on the seat between us and slapped the compartment door shut again, then delivered six redundant slaps to the same spot to ventilate my brain's pressure by reproducing the hollow thump I'd liked. Six was a lucky number tonight, six burgers, six forty-five. So six slaps.\n\nFor me, counting and touching things and repeating words are all the same activity. Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain\u2014same thing) appoints me _it_ , again and again. So I tag back.\n\nCan _it_ do otherwise? If you've ever been _it_ you know the answer.\n\n\"Boys\" came the voice from the street side of the car, startling me and Coney both. \"Frank,\" I said.\n\nIt was Minna. He had his trench-coat collar up against the breeze, not quite cloaking his unshaven Robert-Ryan-in- _Wild-Bunch_ grimace. He ducked down to the level of my window, as if he didn't want to be seen from the Yorkville Zendo. Squeaky cabs rocking-horsed past over the pothole in the street behind him. I rolled down the window, then reached out compulsively and touched his left shoulder, a regular gesture he'd not bothered to acknowledge for\u2014how long? Say, fifteen years now, since when I'd first begun manifesting the urge as a thirteen-year-old and reached out for his then twenty-five-year-old street punk's bomber-jacketed shoulder. Fifteen years of taps and touches\u2014if Frank Minna were a statue instead of flesh and blood I've have buffed that spot to a high shine, the way leagues of tourists burnish the noses and toes of bronze martyrs in Italian churches.\n\n\"What you doing here?\" said Coney. He knew it had to be important to not only get Minna up here, but on his own steam, when he could have had us swing by to pick him up somewhere. Something complicated was going on, and\u2014surprise!\u2014we stooges were out of the loop again.\n\nI whispered inaudibly through narrowed lips, _Stakeout, snakeout, ambush Zendo_.\n\n_The Lords of Snakebush_.\n\n\"Gimme a smoke,\" said Minna. Coney leaned over me with a pack of Malls, one tapped out an inch or so for the boss to pluck. Minna put it in his mouth and lit it himself, pursing his brow in concentration, sheltering the lighter in the frame of his collar. He drew in, then gusted smoke into our airspace. \"Okay, listen,\" he said, as though we weren't already hanging on his words. Minna Men to the bone.\n\n\"I'm going in,\" he said, narrowing his eyes at the Zendo. \"They'll buzz me. I'll swing the door wide. I want you\"\u2014he nodded at Coney\u2014\"to grab the door, get inside, just inside, and wait there, at the bottom of the stairs.\"\n\n\"What if they come meet you?\" said Coney.\n\n\"Worry about that if it happens,\" said Minna curtly.\n\n\"Okay, but what if\u2014\"\n\nMinna waved him off before he could finish. Really Coney was groping for comprehension of his role, but it wasn't forthcoming.\n\n\"Lionel\u2014\" started Minna.\n\nLionel, my name. Frank and the Minna Men pronounced it to rhyme with _vinyl._ Lionel Essrog. _Line-all_.\n\nLiable Guesscog.\n\nFinal Escrow.\n\nIronic Pissclam.\n\nAnd so on.\n\nMy own name was the original verbal taffy, by now stretched to filament-thin threads that lay all over the floor of my echo-chamber skull. Slack, the flavor all chewed out of it.\n\n\"Here.\" Minna dropped a radio monitor and headphones in my lap, then patted his rib pocket. \"I'm wired. I'll be coming over that thing live. Listen close. If I say, uh, 'Not if my life depended on it,' you get out of the car and knock on the door here, Gilbert lets you in, two of you rush upstairs and find me quick, okay?\"\n\n_Eat me, dickweed_ was almost dislodged from my mouth in the excitement, but I breathed in sharply and swallowed the words, said nothing instead.\n\n\"We're not carrying,\" said Coney.\n\n\"What?\" said Minna.\n\n\"A piece, I don't have a piece.\"\n\n\"What's with _piece?_ Say _gun_ , Gilbert.\"\n\n\"No gun, Frank.\"\n\n\"That's what I count on. That's how I sleep at night, you have to know. You with no gun. I wouldn't want you chuckleheads coming up a stairway behind me with a hairpin, with a harmonica, let alone a gun. I've got a gun. You just show up.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Frank.\"\n\n\"With an unlit cigar, with a fucking Buffalo chicken wing.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Frank.\"\n\n\"Just listen. If you hear me say, uh, 'First I gotta use the bathroom,' that means we're coming out. You get Gilbert, get back in the car, get ready to follow. You got it?\"\n\n_Get, get, get, GOT!_ said my brain. _Duck, duck, duck, GOOSE!_\n\n\"Life depended, rush the Zendo,\" was what I said aloud. \"Use the bathroom, start the car.\"\n\n\"Genius, Freakshow,\" said Minna. He pinched my cheek, then tossed his cigarette behind him into the street, where it tumbled, sparks scattering. His eyes were far away.\n\nConey got out of the car, and I scooted over to the driver's seat. Minna thumped the hood once, as if patting a dog on its head after saying _stay_ , then slipped past the front bumper, put his finger up to slow Coney, crossed the pavement to the door of One-oh-nine, and hit the doorbell under the Zendo sign. Coney leaned against the car, waiting. I put on the headphones, got a clear sound of Minna's shoe scraping pavement over the wire so I knew it was working. When I looked up I saw the doorman from the big place to the right watching us, but he wasn't doing anything apart from watching.\n\nI heard the buzzer sound, live and over the wire both. Minna went in, sweeping the door wide. Coney skipped over, grabbed the door, and disappeared inside, too.\n\nFootsteps upstairs, no voices yet. Now suddenly I dwelled in two worlds, eyes and quivering body in the driver's seat of the Lincoln, watching from my parking spot the orderly street life of the Upper East Side, dog-walkers, deliverymen, girls and boys dressed as grownups in business suits shivering their way into gimmicky bars as the nightlife got under way, while my ears built a soundscape from the indoor echoes of Minna's movement up the stair, still nobody meeting him but he seemed to know where he was, shoe leather chafing on wood, stairs squeaking, then a hesitation, a rustle of clothing perhaps, then two wooden clunks, and the footsteps resumed more quietly. Minna had taken off his shoes.\n\nRinging the doorbell, then sneaking in? It didn't follow. But what in this sequence did follow? I palmed another Castle out of the paper sack\u2014six burgers to restore order in a senseless world.\n\n_\"Frank,\"_ came a voice over the wire.\n\n_\"I came,\"_ said Minna wearily. _\"But I shouldn't have to. You should clear up crap on your end.\"_\n\n_\"I appreciate that,\"_ went the other voice. _\"But things have gotten complicated.\"_\n\n_\"They know about the contract for the building,\"_ said Minna.\n\n_\"No, I don't think so.\"_ The voice was weirdly calm, placating. Did I recognize it? Perhaps not that so much as the rhythm of Minna's replies\u2014this was someone he knew well, but who?\n\n_\"Come inside, let's talk,\"_ said the voice.\n\n_\"What about?\"_ said Minna. _\"What do we have to talk about?\"_\n\n_\"Listen to yourself, Frank.\"_\n\n_\"I came here to listen to myself? I can do that at home.\"_\n\n_\"But do you, in fact?\"_ I could hear a smile in the voice. _\"Not as often, or as deeply as you might, I suspect.\"_\n\n_\"Where's Ullman?\"_ said Minna. _\"You got him here?\" \"Ullman's downtown. You'll go to him.\"_\n\n_\"Fuck.\"_\n\n_\"Patience.\"_\n\n_\"You say patience, I say fuck.\"_\n\n_\"Characteristic, I suppose.\"_\n\n_\"Yeah. So let's call the whole thing off.\"_\n\nMore muffled footsteps, a door closing. A clunk, possibly a bottle and glass, a poured drink. Wine. I wouldn't have minded a beverage myself. I chewed on a Castle instead and gazed out the windshield, brain going _Characteristic autistic mystic my tic dipstick dickweek_ and then I thought to take another note, flipped open the notebook and under WOMAN, HAIR, GLASSES wrote ULLMAN DOWNTOWN, thought Dull Man Out of Town. When I swallowed the burger, my jaw and throat tightened, and I braced for an unavoidable copralalic tic\u2014out loud, though no one was there to hear it. \"Eat shit, Bailey!\"\n\nBailey was a name embedded in my Tourette's brain, though I couldn't say why. I'd never known a Bailey. Maybe Bailey was everyman, like George Bailey in _It's a Wonderful Life_. My imaginary listener, he had to bear the brunt of a majority of my solitary swearing\u2014some part of me required a target, apparently. If a Touretter curses in the woods and there's nobody to hear does he make a sound? Bailey seemed to be my solution to that conundrum.\n\n_\"Your face betrays you, Frank. You'd like to murder someone.\"_\n\n_\"You'd do fine for a start.\"_\n\n_\"You shouldn't blame me, Frank, if you've lost control of her.\"_\n\n_\"It's your fault if she misses her Rama-lama-ding-dong_.\n\n_You're the one who filled her head with that crap.\"_\n\n_\"Here, try this.\"_ (Offering a drink?)\n\n_\"Not on an empty stomach.\"_\n\n_\"Alas. I forget how you suffer, Frank.\"_\n\n_\"Aw, go fuck yourself.\"_\n\n\"Eat shit, Bailey!\" The tics were always worst when I was nervous, stress kindling my Tourette's. And something in this scenario was making me nervous. The conversation I overheard was too knowing, the references all polished and opaque, as though years of dealings lay underneath every word.\n\nAlso, where was the short-dark-haired girl? In the room with Minna and his supercilious conversational partner, silent? Or somewhere else entirely? My inability to visualize the interior space of One-oh-nine was agitating. Was the girl the \"she\" they were discussing? It seemed unlikely.\n\nAnd what was _her Rama-lama-ding-dong_? I didn't have the luxury of worrying about it. I pushed away a host of tics and tried not to dwell on things I didn't understand.\n\nI glanced at the door. Presumably Coney was still behind it. I wanted to hear _not if my life depended on it_ so we could rush the stairs.\n\nI was startled by a knock on the driver's window. It was the doorman who'd been watching. He gestured for me to roll down the window. I shook my head, he nodded his. Finally I complied, pulling the headphones off one ear so I could listen.\n\n\"What?\" I said, triply distracted\u2014the power window had seduced my magpie mind and now demanded purposeless raising and lowering. I tried to keep it subtle.\n\n\"Your friend, he wants you,\" said the doorman, gesturing back toward his building.\n\n\"What?\" This was thoroughly confusing. I craned my neck to see past him, but there was nobody visible in the doorway of his building. Meanwhile, Minna was saying something over the wire. But not _bathroom_ or _depended on it_.\n\n\"Your friend,\" the doorman repeated in his clumsy Eastern European accent, maybe Polish or Czech. \"He asks for you.\" He grinned, enjoying my bewilderment. I felt myself knitting my brow exaggeratedly, a tic, and wanted to tell him to wipe the grin off his face: Everything he was seeing was not to his credit.\n\n\"What friend?\" I said. Minna and Coney were both inside\u2014I would have noticed if the Zendo door had budged.\n\n\"He said if you're waiting, he's ready,\" said the doorman, nodding, gesturing again. \"Wants to talk.\"\n\nNow Minna was saying something about _\"... make a mess on the marble floor...\"_\n\n\"I think you've got the wrong guy,\" I said to the doorman. _\"Dickweed!\"_ I winced, waved him off, tried to focus on the voices coming over the headphones.\n\n\"Hey, hey,\" the doorman said. He held up his hands. \"I'm just bringing you a message, friend.\"\n\nI zipped down the power window again, finally pried my fingers away. \"No problem,\" I said, and suppressed another _dickweed_ into a high, chihuahuaesque barking sound, something like _yipke!_ \"But I can't leave the car. Tell my _friend_ if he wants to talk to come out and talk to me here. Okay, _friend?\"_ It seemed to me I had too many friends all of a sudden, and I didn't know any of their names. I repeated my impulsive flapping motion with my hand, an expedient tic-and-gesture combo, trying to nudge this buffoon back to his doorway.\n\n\"No, no. He said come in.\"\n\n_\"... break an arm...\"_ I thought I heard Minna say.\n\n\"Get his name, then,\" I said, desperate. \"Come back and tell me his name.\"\n\n\"He wants to talk to you.\"\n\n\"Okay, _eatmedoorman_ , tell him I'll be right there.\" I powered up the window in his face. He tapped again, and I ignored him.\n\n_\"... first let me use your toilet...\"_\n\nI opened the car door and pushed the doorman out of the way, went to the Zendo door and knocked, six times, hard. \"Coney,\" I hissed. \"Get out here.\"\n\nOver the headset I heard Minna shut the bathroom door behind him, begin running water. _\"Hope you heard that, Freakshow,\"_ he whispered into his microphone, addressing me directly. _\"We're getting in a car. Don't lose us. Play it cool.\"_\n\nConey popped out of the door.\n\n\"He's coming out,\" I said, pulling the headphones down around my neck.\n\n\"Okay,\" said Coney, eyes wide. We were in the thick of the action, for once.\n\n\"You drive,\" I said, touching my fingertip to his nose. He flinched me away like a fly. We hustled into the car, and Coney revved the engine. I threw the bag of cooling Castles and paper wreckage into the backseat. The idiot doorman had vanished into his building. I put him out of my mind for the moment.\n\nWe sat facing forward, our car shrouded in its own steam, waiting, vibrating. My brain went _Follow that car! Hollywood star! When you wish upon a cigar!_ My jaw worked, chewing the words back down, keeping silent. Gilbert's hands gripped the wheel, mine drummed quietly in my lap, tiny hummingbird motions.\n\nThis was what passed for playing it cool around here.\n\n\"I don't see him,\" said Coney.\n\n\"Just wait. He'll come out, with some other guys probably.\" _Probably, gobbledy_. I lifted one of the headphones to my right ear. No voices, nothing but clunking sounds, maybe the stairs.\n\n\"What if they get into a car behind us?\" said Coney.\n\n\"It's a one-way street,\" I said, annoyed, but glancing backward at this cue to survey the parked cars behind us. \"Just let them pass.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" said Coney.\n\nThey'd appeared, slipping out the door and rushing ahead of us on the sidewalk while I'd turned: Minna and another man, a giant in a black coat. The other man was seven feet tall if he was an inch, with shoulders that looked as though football pads or angel wings were hidden under his coat. Or perhaps the petite short-haired girl was curled under there, clutching the tall man's shoulders like a human backpack. Was this giant the man who'd spoken so insinuatingly? Minna hurried ahead of the giant, as if he were motivated to give us the slip instead of dragging his heels to keep us in the game. Why? A gun in his back? The giant's hands were hidden in his pockets. For some reason I envisioned them gripping loaves of bread or large chunks of salami, snacks hidden in the coat to feed a giant in winter, comfort food.\n\nOr maybe this fantasy was merely my own self-comfort: a loaf of bread couldn't be a gun, which allotted Minna the only firearm in the scenario.\n\nWe watched stupidly as they crossed between two parked cars and slid into the backseat of a black K-car that had rolled up from behind us in the street, then immediately took off. Overanxious as we were, Coney and I had at some level timed our reactions to allow for their starting a parked car, and now they were getting away. \"Go!\" I said.\n\nConey swerved to pull the Lincoln out of our spot, batted bumpers, hard enough to dent. Of course we were locked in. He backed, more gently thumped the rear end, then found an arc sufficient to free us from the space, but not before a cab had rocketed past us to block the way. The K-car tucked around the corner up ahead, onto Second Avenue. \"Go!\"\n\n\"Look,\" said Coney, pointing at the cab. \"I'm going. Keep your eyes up.\"\n\n\"Eyes up?\" I said. \"Eyes out. _Chin_ up.\" Correcting him was an involuntary response to stress.\n\n\"Yeah, that too.\"\n\n\"Eyes open, eyes on the road, ears glued to the radio\u2014\" I suddenly had to list every workable possibility. That was how irritating _eyes up_ had been.\n\n\"Yeah, and trap buttoned,\" said Coney. He got us right on the tail of the cab, better than nothing since it was moving fast. \"What about gluing your ears to Frank while you're at it?\"\n\nI raised the headphones. Nothing but an overlay of traffic sounds to substitute for the ones I'd blotted out. Coney followed the cab onto Second Avenue, where the K-car obligingly waited in a thicket of cabs and other traffic for the light to change. We were back in the game, a notion exhilarating and yet pathetic by definition, since we'd lost them in the space of a block.\n\nWe merged left to pull around the first cab and into position behind another in the same lane as the car containing Minna and the giant. I watch the timed stoplights a half mile ahead turn red. Now there, I thought, was a job for someone with obsessive-compulsive symptoms\u2014traffic management. Then our light turned green and we lurched all together, a floating quilt of black- and dun-colored private cars and the bright-orange cabs, through the intersection.\n\n\"Get closer,\" I said, pulling the phones from my ears again. Then an awesome tic wrenched its way out of my chest: _\"Eat me Mister Dicky-weed!\"_\n\nThis got even Gilbert's attention. \"Mister Dicky-weed?\" As the lights turned green in sequence for us the cabs threaded audaciously back and forth, seeking advantage, but the truth was the lights were timed for twenty-five-mile-an-hour traffic, and there wasn't any advantage to be gained. The still-unseen driver of the K-car was as impatient as a cabbie, and moved up to the front of the pack, but the timed lights kept us all honest, at least until they turned a corner. We remained stuck a car back. This was a chase Coney could handle, so far.\n\nI was another story.\n\n\"Sinister mystery weed,\" I said, trying to find words that would ease the compulsion. It was as if my brain were inspired, trying to generate a really original new tic. Tourette's muse was with me. Rotten timing. Stress generally aggravated tics, but when I was engaged in a task the concentration kept me tic-free. I should have done the driving, I now realized. This chase was all stress and no place for it to go.\n\n\"Disturbed visitor week. Sisturbed.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I'm getting a little _sisturbed_ myself,\" said Coney absently as he jockeyed for an open spot in the lane to the right.\n\n\"Fister\u2014\" I sputtered.\n\n\"Spare me,\" groused Coney as he got us directly behind the K-car at last. I leaned forward to make out what I could of the interior. Three heads. Minna and the giant in the backseat, and a driver. Minna was facing straight ahead, and so was the giant. I picked up the headphones to check, but I'd guessed right: no talk. Somebody knew what they were doing and where they were going, and that somebody wasn't even remotely us.\n\nAt Fifty-ninth Street we hit the end of the cycle of green lights, as well as the usual unpleasantness around the entrance to the Queensborough bridge. The pack slowed, resigning itself to the wait through another red. Coney sagged back so we wouldn't be too obvious pulling in behind them for the wait, and another cab slipped in ahead of us. Then the K-car shot off through the fresh red, barely missing the surge of traffic coming across Fifty-eighth.\n\n\"Shit!\"\n\n\"Shit!\"\n\nConey and I both almost bounced out of our skins. We were wedged in, unable to follow and brave the stream of crosstown traffic if we'd wanted to try. It felt like a straitjacket. It felt like our fate overtaking us, Minna's losers, failing him again. Fuckups fucking up because that's what fuckups do. But the K-car hit another mass of vehicular stuff parked in front of the next red and stayed in sight a block ahead. The traffic was broken into chunks. We'd gotten lucky for a minute, but a minute only.\n\nI watched, frantic. Their red, our red, my eyes flicked back and forth. I heard Coney's breath, and my own, like horses at the gate\u2014our adrenalinated bodies imagined they could make up the difference of the block. If we weren't careful, at the sight of the light changing we'd pound our two foreheads through the windshield.\n\nOur red did change, but so did theirs, and, infuriatingly, their vehicular mass surged forward while ours crawled. That mass was our hope\u2014they were at the tail end of theirs, and if it stayed densely enough packed, they wouldn't get too far away. We were almost at the front of ours. I slapped the glove-compartment door six times. Coney accelerated impulsively and tapped the cab in front of us, but not hard. We veered to the side and I saw a silver scrape in the yellow paint of the cab's bumper. \"Fuck it, keep going,\" I said. The cabbie seemed to have the same idea anyway. We all screeched across Fifty-ninth, a madcap rodeo of cabs and cars, racing to defy the immutable law of timed stoplights. Our bunch splayed and caught up with the rear end of their splaying bunch and the two blended, like video spaceships on some antic screen. The K-car aggressively threaded lanes. We threaded after them, making no attempt to disguise our pursuit now. Blocks flew past.\n\n\"Turning!\" I shouted. \"Get over!\" I gripped the door handle as Coney, getting fully into the spirit of things, bent topological probability in moving us across three crowded lanes full of shrieking bald rubber and cringing chrome. Now my tics were quieted\u2014stress was one thing, animal fear another. As when an airplane lands shakily, and all on board concentrate every gram of their will to stabilize the craft, the task of imagining I controlled things I didn't (in this case wheel, traffic, Coney, gravity, friction, etc.), imagining it with every fiber of my being\u2014that was engagement enough for me at the moment. My Tourette's was overwhelmed.\n\n\"Thirty-sixth,\" said Coney as we rattled down the side street.\n\n\"What's that mean?\"\n\n\"I dunno. Something.\"\n\n\"Midtown Tunnel. Queens.\"\n\nThere was something comforting about this. The giant and his driver were moving onto our turf, more or less. The boroughs. Not quite Brooklyn, but it would do. We bumped along with the thickening traffic into the two dense lanes of the tunnel, the K-car safely tied up two cars ahead of us, its windows now black and glossy with reflections from the strips of lighting that laced the stained tile artery. I relaxed a bit, quit holding my breath, and squeaked out a teeth-clenched, Joker-grimacing _eat me_ just because I could.\n\n\"Toll,\" said Coney.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"There's a toll. On the Queens side.\"\n\nI started digging in my pockets. \"How much?\"\n\n\"Three-fifty, I think.\"\n\nI'd just put it together, miraculously, three bills, a quarter, a dime and three nickels, when the tunnel finished and the two lanes branched out to meet the six or seven toll booths. I balled the fare and held it out to Coney in a fist. \"Don't get stuck behind them,\" I said. \"Get a fast lane. Cut someone off.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Coney squinted through the windshield, trying to work an angle. As he edged to the right the K-car suddenly cut out of the flow, moving to the far left.\n\nWe both stared for a moment.\n\n\"Whuzzat?\" said Coney.\n\n\"E-Z Pass,\" I said. \"They've got an E-Z Pass.\"\n\nThe K-car slid into the empty E-Z Pass lane, and right through the booth. Meanwhile Coney had landed us third in line for EXACT CHANGE OR TOKEN.\n\n\"Follow them!\" I said.\n\n\"I'm trying,\" said Coney, plainly dazed by this turn of events. \"Get over to the left!\" I said. \"Go through!\"\n\n\"We don't got an E-Z Pass.\" Coney grinned painfully, displaying his special talent for rapid reversion to a childlike state.\n\n\"I don't care!\"\n\n\"But we\u2014\"\n\nI started to pry at the wheel in Coney's hands, to try and push us to the left, but it was too late by now. The spot before us opened, and Coney eased the car into place, then rolled down his window. I plopped the fare into his open palm, and he passed it over.\n\nPulling out of the tunnel to the right, we were suddenly in Queens, facing a tangle of indifferent streets: Vernon Boulevard, Jackson Avenue, Fifty-second Avenue. Et cetera.\n\nThe K-car was gone.\n\n\"Pull over,\" I said.\n\nChagrined, Coney parked us on Jackson. It was perfectly dark now, though it was only seven. The lights of the Empire State and the Chrysler loomed across the river. Cars whirred past us out of the tunnel, toward the entrance to the Long Island Expressway, mocking us in their easy purposefulness. With Minna lost, we were nobodies, nowhere. _\"Eatmepass!\"_ I said.\n\n\"They could of just been losing us,\" said Coney. \"I'd say they were, yes.\"\n\n\"No, listen,\" he said feebly. \"Maybe they turned around and went back to Manhattan. Maybe we could catch them\u2014\"\n\n\"Shhh.\" I listened to the earphones. \"If Frank sees we're off his tail, he might say something.\"\n\nBut there was nothing to hear. The sounds of driving. Minna and the giant were sitting in perfect silence. Now I couldn't believe that the man in the Zendo was the same as the giant\u2014that garrulous, pretentious voice I'd heard couldn't have shut up this long, it seemed to me. It was surprising enough that Minna wasn't chattering, making fun of something, pointing out landmarks. Was he scared? Afraid to let on he was miked? Did he think we were still with him? Why did he want us with him anyway?\n\nI didn't know anything.\n\nI made six oinking sounds.\n\nWe sat waiting.\n\nMore.\n\n_\"That's the way of a big Polish lug, I guess,\"_ said Minna. \" _Always gotta stay within sniffing distance of a pierogi.\"_\n\nThen: _\"Urrhhf.\"_ Like the giant had smashed him in the stomach. \"Where's Polish?\" I asked Coney, lifting away one earphone.\n\n\"Wha?\"\n\n\"Where around here's Polish? _Eat me pierogi lug!_ \"\n\n\"I dunno. It's all Polish to me.\"\n\n\"Sunnyside? Woodside? Come on, Gilbert. Work with me. He's somewhere Polish.\"\n\n\"Where'd the Pope visit?\" mused Coney. It sounded like the start of a joke, but I knew Coney. He couldn't remember jokes. \"That's Polish, right? What's it, uh, Greenpoint?\"\n\n\"Greenpoint's Brooklyn, Gilbert,\" I said, before thinking. \"We're in Queens.\" Then we both turned our heads like cartoon mice spotting a cat. The Pulaski Bridge. We were a few yards from the creek separating Queens and Brooklyn, specifically Greenpoint.\n\nIt was something to do anyway. \"Go,\" I said.\n\n\"Keep listening,\" said Coney. \"We can't just drive around Greenpoint.\"\n\nWe soared across the little bridge, into the mouth of Brooklyn.\n\n\"Which way, Lionel?\" said Coney, as if he thought Minna were feeding me a constant stream of instructions. I shrugged, palms up toward the roof of the Lincoln. The gesture ticcified instantly, and I repeated it, shrug, palms flapped open, grimace. Coney ignored me, scanning the streets below for a sign of the K-car, driving as slow as he could down the Brooklyn side of the Pulaski's slope.\n\nThen I heard something. Car doors opening, slamming, the scuff of footsteps. Minna and the giant had reached their destination. I froze in mid-tic, concentrating.\n\n_\"Harry Brainum Jr.,\"_ said Minna in his mockingest tone. _\"I guess we're gonna stop in for a quick installation, huh?\"_\n\nNothing from the giant. More steps.\n\nWho was Harry Brainum Jr.?\n\nMeanwhile we came off the lit bridge, where the notion of a borough laid out for us, comprehensive, had been briefly indulgeable. Down instead onto McGuinness Boulevard, where at street level the dark industrial buildings were featureless and discouraging. Brooklyn is one big place, and this wasn't our end of it.\n\n_\"You know\u2014if you can't beat 'em, Brainum, right?\"_ Minna went on in his needling voice. In the background I heard a car horn\u2014they weren't indoors yet. Just standing on the street somewhere, tantalizingly close.\n\nThen I heard a thud, another exhalation. Minna had taken a second blow.\n\nThen Minna again: _\"Hey, hey_ \u2014\" Some kind of struggle I couldn't make out.\n\n_\"Fucking\u2014\"_ said Minna, and then I heard him get hit again, lose his wind in a long, mournful sigh.\n\nThe scary thing about the giant was that he didn't talk, didn't even breathe heavy enough for me to hear.\n\n\"Harry Brainum Jr.,\" I said to Coney. Then, afraid it sounded like a tic to him, I added, \"Name mean anything to you, Gilbert?\"\n\n\"Sorry?\" he said slowly.\n\n\"Harry Brainum Jr.,\" I repeated, furious with impatience. There were times when I felt like a bolt of static electricity communing with figures that moved through a sea of molasses.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of his window. \"We just passed it.\"\n\n\"What? Passed what?\"\n\n\"It's like a tool company or something. Big sign.\" My breath caught. Minna was talking to us, guiding us. \"Turn around.\"\n\n\"What, back to Queens?\"\n\n\"No, Brainum, wherever you saw that,\" I said, wanting to strangle him. Or at least find his fast-forward button and push it. \"They're out of the car. Make a U-turn.\"\n\n\"It's just a block or two.\"\n\n\"Well, go, then. _Brain me, Junior!_ \"\n\nConey made the turn, and right away there it was. HARRY BRAINUM JR. INC. STEEL SHEETS., in giant circus-poster letters on the brick wall of a two-story plant that took up a whole block of McGuinness, just short of the bridge.\n\nSeeing BRAINUM on the wall set off a whole clown parade of associations. I remembered mishearing _Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus_ as a child. Barnamum Bailey. Like Osmium, Cardamom, Brainium, Barnamum, Where'smymom: the periodic table of elements, the heavy metals. Barnamum Bailey might also be George and Eat Me Bailey's older brother. Or were they all the same guy? Not now, I begged my Tourette's self. Think about it later.\n\n\"Drive around the block,\" I said to Coney. \"He's here somewhere.\"\n\n\"Quit shouting,\" he said. \"I can hear you.\"\n\n\"Shut up so I can hear,\" I said.\n\n\"That's all I said.\"\n\n\"What?\" I lifted an earphone.\n\n\"That's all I said. Shut up.\"\n\n\"Okay! Shut up! Drive! Eat me!\"\n\n\"Fucking freakball.\"\n\nThe block behind BRAINUM was dark and seemingly empty. The few parked cars didn't include the K-car. The windowless brick warehouse was laced with fire escapes, wrought-iron cages that ran the length of the second floor and ended in a crumpled, unsafe-looking ladder. On the side street a smallish, graffitied Dumpster was tucked halfway into the shadow of double doorway. The doors behind were strapped with long exterior hinges, like a meat locker. One lid of the Dumpster was shut, the other open to allow some fluorescent bulbs sticking up. Street rubbish packed around the wheels made me think it hadn't moved in a while, so I didn't worry about the doors behind it. The other entrance was a roll-up gate on a truck-size loading dock, right out on the brightly lit boulevard. I figured I would have heard the gate sing if it had been raised.\n\nThe four stacks of the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant towered at the end of the street, underlit like ancient pylons in a gladiator movie. Fly an inflatable pig over and you'd have the sleeve of Pink Floyd's _Animals_ album. Beneath its shadow we crept in the Lincoln around all four corners of the block, seeing nothing.\n\n\"Damn it,\" I said.\n\n\"You don't hear him?\"\n\n\"Street noise. Hey, hit the horn.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Do it.\"\n\nI concentrated on the earphones. Coney honked the Lincoln's horn. Sure enough, it came through.\n\n\"Stop the car.\" I was in a panic now. I got out onto the sidewalk, slammed the door. \"Circle slow,\" I said. \"Keep an eye on me.\"\n\n\"What's the deal, Lionel?\"\n\n\"He's here.\"\n\nI paced the sidewalk, trying to feel the pulse of the blackened building, to take the measure of the desolate block. It was a place made out of leftover chunks of disappointment, unemployment and regret. I didn't want to be here, didn't want Minna to be here. Coney paced me in the Lincoln, staring dumbly out the driver's window. I listened to the phones until I heard the approach of my own steps. My own heart beating made a polyrhythm, almost as loud. Then I found it. Minna's wire had been torn from his shirt and lay tangled in a little heap on the curb of the side street, at the other end of the block from the Dumpster. I picked it up and pushed it into my pants pocket, then ripped the headphones off my neck. Feeling the grimness of the street close around me I began to half-run down the sidewalk toward the Dumpster, though I had to stop once and mimic my own retrieval of the wire: hurriedly kneel at the edge of the sidewalk, grab, stuff, remove phantom headphones, feel a duplicate thrill of panic at the discovery, resume jogging. It was cold now. The wind punched me and my nose oozed in response. I wiped it on my sleeve as I came up to the Dumpster.\n\n\"You jerks,\" Minna moaned from inside.\n\nI touched the rim of the Dumpster and my hand came away wet with blood. I pushed open the second lid, balanced it against the doorway. Minna was curled fetally in the garbage, his arms crossed around his stomach, sleeves covered in red.\n\n\"Jesus, Frank.\"\n\n\"Wanna get me out of here?\" He coughed, burbled, rolled his eyes at me. \"Wanna give me a hand? I mean, no sooner than the muse strikes. Or possibly you ought to get out your brushes and canvas. I've never been in an oil painting.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Frank.\" I reached in just as Coney came up behind me and looked inside.\n\n\"Oh, shit,\" he said.\n\n\"Help me,\" I said to Coney. Together we pulled Minna up from the bottom of the Dumpster. Minna stayed curled around his wounded middle. We drew him over the lip and held him, together, out on the dark empty sidewalk, cradling him absurdly, our knees buckled toward one another's, our shoulders pitched, like he was a giant baby Jesus in a bloody trench coat and we were each one of the Madonna's tender arms. Minna groaned and chuckled, eyes squeezed shut, as we moved him to the backseat of the Lincoln. His blood made my fingers tacky on the door handle.\n\n\"Nearest hospital,\" I breathed as we got into the front.\n\n\"I don't know around here,\" said Coney, whispering, too.\n\n\"Brooklyn Hospital,\" said Minna from the back, surprisingly loud. \"Take the BQE, straight up McGuinness. Brooklyn Hospital's right off DeKalb. You boiled cabbageheads.\"\n\nWe held our breath and stared forward until Coney got us going the right way, then I turned and looked in the back. Minna's eyes were half open and his unshaven chin was wrinkled like he was thinking hard or sulking or trying not to cry. He saw me looking and winked. I barked twice\u2014\"yipke, yipke\"\u2014and winked back involuntarily.\n\n\"Fuck happened, Frank?\" said Coney without taking his eyes off the road. We bumped and rattled over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, rottenest surface in the boroughs. Like the G train, the BQE suffered from low self-esteem, never going into citadel Manhattan, never tasting the glory. And it was choked with forty- or fifty-wheel trucks, day and night.\n\n\"I'm dropping my wallet and watch back here,\" said Minna, ignoring the question. \"And my beeper. Don't want them stolen at the hospital. Remember they're back here.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but what the fuck happened, Frank?\"\n\n\"Leave you my gun but it's gone,\" said Minna. I watched him shuck off the watch, silver smeared with red.\n\n\"They took your gun? Frank, what happened?\"\n\n\"Knife,\" said Minna. \"No biggie.\"\n\n\"You're gonna be all right?\" Coney was asking and willing it at once.\n\n\"Oh, yeah. Great.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Frank.\"\n\n\"Who?\" I said. \"Who did this?\"\n\nMinna smiled. \"You know what I want out of you, Freakshow? Tell me a joke. You got one you been saving, you must.\"\n\nMinna and I had been in a joke-telling contest since I was thirteen years old, primarily because he liked to see me try to get through without ticcing. It was rare that I could.\n\n\"Let me think,\" I said.\n\n\"It'll hurt him if he laughs,\" said Coney to me. \"Say one he knows already. Or one that ain't funny.\"\n\n\"Since when do I laugh?\" said Minna. \"Let him tell it. Couldn't hurt worse than your driving.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said. \"Guy walks into a bar.\" I was watching blood pool on the backseat, at the same time trying to keep Minna from tracking my eyes.\n\n\"That's the ticket,\" rasped Minna. \"Best jokes start the same fucking way, don't they, Gilbert? The guy, the bar.\"\n\n\"I guess,\" said Coney.\n\n\"Funny already,\" said Minna. \"We're already in the black here.\"\n\n\"So guy walks into a bar,\" I said again. \"With an octopus. Says to the bartender 'I'll bet a hundred dollars this octopus can play any instrument in the place.' \"\n\n\"Guy's got an octopus. You like that, Gilbert?\"\n\n\"Eh.\"\n\n\"So the bartender points at the piano in the corner says, 'Go ahead.' Guy puts the octopus on the piano stool\u2014 _Pianoctamus! Pianoctamum Bailey!_ \u2014octopus flips up the lid, plays a few scales, then lays out a little \u00e9tude on the piano.\"\n\n\"Getting fancy,\" said Minna. \"Showing off a little.\"\n\nI didn't ask him to specify, since if I had he'd surely have said he meant me and the octopus both, for the _\u00e9tude_.\n\n\"So guys says 'Pay up,' bartender says 'Wait a minute,' pulls out a guitar. Guy gives the octopus the guitar, octopus tightens up the E-string, closes its eyes, plays a sweet little fandango on the guitar.\" Pressure building up, I tagged Coney on the shoulder six times. He ignored me, driving hard, outracing trucks. \"Guy says 'Pay up,' bartender says 'Hold on, I think I've got something else around here,' pulls a clarinet out of the back room. Octopus looks the thing over a couple of times, tightens the reed.\"\n\n\"He's milking it,\" said Minna, again meaning us both.\n\n\"Well, the octopus isn't good exactly, but he manages to squeak out a few bars on the clarinet. He isn't going to win any awards, but he plays the thing. _Clarinet Milk! Eat Me!_ Guy says 'Pay up,' the bartender says 'Just wait one minute,' goes in the back rummages around finally comes out with a bagpipes. Plops the bagpipes up on the bar. Guy brings the octopus over, plops the octopus up next to the bagpipes. _Octapipes!_ \" I paused to measure my wits, not wanting to tic out the punch line. Then I started again, afraid of losing the thread, of losing Minna. His eyes kept closing and opening again and I wanted them open. \"Octopus looks the bagpipes over, reaches out lifts one pipe lets it drop. Lifts another lets it drop. Backs up, squints at the bagpipes. Guy gets nervous, comes over to the bar says to the octopus\u2014 _Accupush! Reactapus!_ \u2014says to the octopush, _fuckit_ , says _gonnafuckit_ \u2014says 'What's the matter? Can't you play it?' And the octopus says 'Play it? If I can figure out how to get its pajamas off, I'm gonna fuck it!' \"\n\nMinna's eyes had been closed through the windup and he didn't open them now. \"You finished?\" he said.\n\nI didn't speak. We circled the ramp off the BQE, onto DeKalb Avenue.\n\n\"Where's the hospital?\" said Minna, eyes still shut.\n\n\"We're almost there,\" said Coney. \"I need help,\" said Minna. \"I'm dying back here.\"\n\n\"You're not dying,\" I said.\n\n\"Before we get in the emergency room, you want to tell us who did this to you, Frank?\" said Coney. Minna didn't say anything.\n\n\"They stab you in the gut and throw you in the fucking garbage, Frank. You wanna tell us who?\"\n\n\"Go up the ambulance ramp,\" said Minna. \"I need help back here. I don't wanna wait in some goddamn walk-in emergency room. I need immediate help.\"\n\n\"We can't drive up the ambulance ramp, Frank.\"\n\n\"What, you think you need an _E-Z Pass_ , you stale meat loaf? Do what I said.\"\n\nI gritted my teeth while my brain went, _Guy walks into the ambulance ramp stabs you in the goddamn emergency gut says I need an immediate stab in the garbage in the goddamn walk-in ambulance says just a minute looks in the back says I think I've got a stab in the goddamn walk-in immediate ambuloaf ambulamp octoloaf oafulope_.\n\n_\"Oafulope!\"_ I screamed, tears in my eyes.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Minna, and now he laughed, then moaned. \"A whole fucking herd of 'em.\"\n\n\"Someone ought to put you both out of your misery,\" muttered Coney as we hit the ambulance ramp behind Brooklyn Hospital, driving against the DO NOT ENTER signs, wheels squealing around a pitched curve to a spot alongside double swinging doors marked with yellow stencil EMS ONLY. Coney stopped. A Rastafarian in the costume of a private security guard was on us right away, tapping at Coney's window. He had bundled dreadlocks pushing sideways out of his hat, chiba eyes, a stick where a gun should be, and an embroidered patch on his chest indicating his first name, Albert. Like a janitor's uniform, or a mechanic's. The jacket was too big for his broomstick frame.\n\nConey opened the door instead of rolling down the glass.\n\n\"Get this car out of here!\" said Albert.\n\n\"Take a look in the back,\" said Coney.\n\n\"Don't care, mon. This for ambulances only. Get back in the car.\"\n\n\"Tonight we're an ambulance, Albert,\" I said. \"Get a stretcher for our friend.\"\n\nMinna looked terrible. Drained, literally, and when we got him out of the car you could see what of. The blood smelled like a thunderstorm coming, like ozone. Two college students dressed as doctors in green outfits with rubber-band sleeves took him away from us just inside the doors and laid him onto a rolling steel cart. Minna's shirt was shreds, his middle a slush of itself, of himself. Coney went out and moved the car to quiet the security guard pulling on his arm while I followed Minna's stretcher inside, against the weak protests of the college students. I moved along keeping my eyes on his face and tapping his shoulder intermittently as though we were standing talking, in the Agency office perhaps, or just strolling down Court Street with two slices of pizza. Once they had Minna parked in a semiprivate zone in the emergency room, the students left me alone and concentrated on getting a line for blood into his arm.\n\nHis eyes opened. \"Where's Coney?\" he said. His voice was like a withered balloon. If you didn't know its shape when it was full of air it wouldn't have sounded like anything at all.\n\n\"They might not let him back here,\" I said. \"I'm not supposed to be here myself.\"\n\n\"Huhhr.\"\n\n\"Coney\u2014 _Eatme, yipke!_ \u2014Coney kind of had a point,\" I said. \"You might want to tell us who, while we're, you know, waiting around here.\"\n\nThe students were working on his middle, peeling away cloth with long scissors. I turned my eyes away.\n\nMinna smiled again. \"I've got one for you,\" he said. I leaned in to hear him. \"Thought of it in the car. Octopus and Reactopus are sitting on a bench, a fence. Octopus falls off, who's left?\"\n\n\"Reactopus,\" I said softly. \"Frank, who did this?\"\n\n\"You know that Jewish joke you told me? The one about the Jewish lady goes to Tibet, wants to see the High Lama?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"That's a good one. What's the name of that lama? You know, at the end, the punch line.\"\n\n\"You mean Irving?\"\n\n\"Yeah, right. Irving.\" I could barely hear him now. \"That's who.\" His eyes closed.\n\n\"You're saying it was someone named\u2014 _Dick! Weed!_ \u2014Irving who did this to you? Is that the name of the big guy in the car? Irving?\"\n\nMinna whispered something that sounded like \"remember.\" The others in the room were making noise, barking out instructions to one another in their smug, technical dialect.\n\n\"Remember what?\"\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"The name Irving? Or something else?\"\n\nMinna hadn't heard me. A nurse pulled open his mouth and he didn't protest, didn't move at all. \"Excuse me.\"\n\nIt was a doctor. He was short, olive-skinned, stubbled, Indian or Pakistani, I guessed. He looked into my eyes. \"You have to go now.\"\n\n\"I can't do that,\" I said. I reached out and tagged his shoulder.\n\nHe didn't flinch. \"What's your name?\" he asked gently. Now I saw in his worn expression several thousand nights like this one.\n\n\"Lionel.\" I gulped away an impulse to scream my last name.\n\n\"Tourette's?\"\n\n_\"Yessrog.\"_\n\n\"Lionel, we're going to do some emergency surgery here. You must go wait outside.\" He nodded his head quickly to point the way. \"They'll be needing you to handle some papers for your friend.\"\n\nI stood stupefied, looking at Minna, wanting to tell him another joke, or hear one of his. _Guy walks into_ \u2014\n\nA nurse was fitting a hinged plastic tube, like a giant Pez dispenser, into Minna's mouth.\n\nI walked out the way I'd come in and found the triage nurse. Thinking _arbitrage, sabotage_ , I told her I was with Minna and she said she'd already spoken to Coney. She'd call out when she needed us, until then have a seat.\n\nConey sat crossed-legged and cross-armed with his chin clamped up angrily against the rest of his face, corduroy coat still buttoned, filling half of a kind of love seat with a narrow shelfload of splayed dingy magazines attached to it. I went and filled the other half. The waiting area was jammed with the sort of egalitarian cross-section only genuine misery can provide: Hispanics and blacks and Russians and various indeterminate, red-eyed teenage girls with children you prayed were siblings; junkie veterans petitioning for painkillers they wouldn't get; a tired housewife comforting her brother as he carped in an unceasing stream about his blocked digestion, the bowel movement he hadn't enjoyed for weeks; a terrified lover denied attendance, as I'd been, glaring viciously at the unimpressible triage nurse and the mute doors behind her; others guarded, defiant, daring you to puzzle at their distress, to guess on behalf of whom, themselves or another, they shared with you this miserable portion of their otherwise fine, pure and invulnerable lives.\n\nI sat still for perhaps a minute and a half, tormented images of our chase and the Brainum Building and Minna's wounds strobing in my skull, tics roiling in my throat.\n\n_\"Walksinto,\"_ I shouted.\n\nA few people looked up, confused by my bit of ventriloquism. Had the nurse spoken? Could it have been a last name? Their own, perhaps, mispronounced?\n\n\"Don't start now,\" said Coney under his breath.\n\n\"Guywalks, walksinto, guywalksinto,\" I said back to him helplessly.\n\n\"What, you telling a joke now?\"\n\nVery much in the grip, I modified the words into a growling sound, along the lines of _\"whrywhroffsinko,\"_ \u2014but the effort resulted in a side-tic: rapid eye blinks.\n\n\"Maybe you ought to stand outside, you know, like for a cigarette?\" Poor dim Coney was just as much on edge as I was, obviously.\n\n\"Walks walks!\"\n\nSome stared, others looked away, bored. I'd been identified by the crowd as some sort of patient: spirit or animal possession, verbal epileptic seizure, whatever. I would presumably be given drugs and sent home. I wasn't damaged or ailing enough to be interesting here, only distracting, and slightly reprehensible in a way that made them feel better about their own disorders, so my oddness was quickly and blithely incorporated into the atmosphere.\n\nWith one exception: Albert, who'd been nursing a grudge since our jaunt up the ambulance ramp and now stood inside to get away from the cold, perhaps also to keep a bloodshot eye on us. I'd given him his angle, since, unlike the others in the waiting room, he knew I wasn't the patient in my party. He stepped over from where he'd been blowing on his hands and sulking in the doorway and pointed at me. \"Yo, mon,\" he said. \"You can't be like that in here.\"\n\n\"Be like what?\" I said, twisting my neck and croaking _\"Sothisguysays!\"_ as an urgent follow-up, voice rising shrilly, like a comedian who can't get his audience's attention.\n\n\"Can't be doing _that_ shit,\" he said. \"Gotta take it else _where.\"_ He grinned at his own verbal flourish, openly pleased to provide this contrast to my lack of control.\n\n\"Mind your own business,\" said Coney.\n\n_\"Piece! Of! String!\"_ I said, recalling another joke I hadn't told Minna, also set in a bar. My heart sank. I wanted to barge in and begin reciting it to his doctors, to his white intubed face. _\"String! Walks! In!\"_\n\n\"What's the matter with you, mon?\"\n\n_\"WEDON'TSERVESTRING!\"_\n\nI was in trouble now. My Tourette's brain had shackled itself to the string joke like an ecological terrorist to a tree-crushing bulldozer. If I didn't find a way out I might download the whole joke one grunted or shrieked syllable after another. Looking for the escape hatch I began counting ceiling tiles and beating a rhythm on my knees as I counted. I saw I'd reattracted the room's collective attention, too. _This guy might be interesting after all_.\n\nFree Human Freakshow.\n\n\"He's gotta condition,\" said Coney to the guard. \"So lay off.\"\n\n\"Well, tell the mon he best stand up and walk his condition out of here,\" said the guard. \"Or I be calling in the armada, you understand?\"\n\n\"You must be mistaken,\" I said, in a calm voice now. \"I'm not a piece of string.\" The bargain had been struck, at a level beyond my control. The joke would be told. I was only a device for telling it.\n\n\"We stand up we're gonna lay a condition on _your_ ass, Albert,\" said Coney. \"You unnerstand that?\"\n\nAlbert didn't speak. The whole room was watching, tuned to Channel Brooklyn.\n\n\"You gotta cigarette for us, Albert?\" said Coney.\n\n\"Can't smoke in here, mon,\" said Albert softly.\n\n\"Now, that's a good, sensible rule,\" said Coney. \" 'Cause you got all these people in here that's concerned about their _health.\"_\n\nConey was occasionally a master of the intimidating non sequitur. He certainly had Albert stymied now.\n\n\"I'm a _frayed knot,\"_ I whispered. I began to want to grab at the nightstick in Albert's holster\u2014an old, familiar impulse to reach for things dangling from belts, like the bunches of keys worn by the teachers at St. Vincent's Home for Boys. It seemed like a particularly rotten idea right now.\n\n\"Afraid of what?\" said Albert, confused, though understanding the joke's pun, in a faint way.\n\n\"Afrayedknot!\" I repeated obligingly, then added, \"Eatmestringjoke!\" Albert glared, unsure what he'd been called, or how badly to be insulted.\n\n\"Mr. Coney,\" called the triage nurse, breaking the stalemate. Coney and I both stood at once, still pathetically overcompensating for losing Minna in the chase. The short doctor had come out of the private room. He stood behind the triage nurse and nodded us over. As we brushed past Albert I indulged in a brief surreptitious fondling of his nightstick.\n\n_Half a fag_ , that's what Minna used to call me.\n\n\"Ah, are either of you a relative of Mr. Minna's?\" The doctor's accent rendered this as _misdemeanors_.\n\n\"Yes and no,\" said Coney before I could answer. \"We're his immediates, so to speak.\"\n\n\"Ah, I see,\" said the doctor, though of course he didn't. \"Will you step this way with me\u2014\" He led us out of the waiting area, to another of the half-secluded rooms like the one where they'd wheeled Minna.\n\n_\"I'mafrayed,\"_ I said under my breath.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said the doctor, standing oddly close to us, examining our eyes. \"There was little we could do.\"\n\n\"That's okay, then,\" said Coney, not hearing it right. \"I'm sure whatever you can do is fine, since Frank didn't need so much in the first place\u2014\"\n\n_\"I'mafrayedknot.\"_ I felt myself nearly choke, not on unspoken words for once but on rising gorge, White Castle\u2013flavored bile. I swallowed it back so hard my ears popped. My whole face felt flushed with a mist of acids.\n\n\"Ahem. We were unable to revive misdemeanor.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" said Coney. \"You're saying unable to revive?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's right. Loss of blood was the cause. I am sorry.\"\n\n\"Unable to revive!\" shouted Coney. \"He was _revived_ when we brought him in here! What kind of a place is this? He didn't need to be revived, just patched up a little\u2014\"\n\nI began to need to touch the doctor, to deliver small taps on either shoulder, in a pattern that was absolutely symmetrical. He stood for it, not pushing me away. I tugged his collar straight, matching the line to his salmon-colored T-shirt underneath, so that the same margin showed at either side of his neck.\n\nConey stood in deflated silence now, absorbing pain. We all stood waiting until I finally finished tucking and pinching the doctor's collar into place.\n\n\"Sometimes there is nothing we can do,\" said the doctor, eyes flicking to the floor now.\n\n\"Let me see him,\" said Coney.\n\n\"That isn't possible\u2014\"\n\n\"This place is full of crap,\" said Coney. \"Let me see him.\"\n\n\"There is a question of evidence,\" said the doctor wearily. \"I'm sure you understand. The examiners will also wish to speak with you.\"\n\nI'd already seen police passing through from the hospital coffee shop, into some part of the emergency room. Whether those particular police were there to detain us or not, it was clear the law wouldn't be long in arriving.\n\n\"We ought to go, Gilbert,\" I told Coney. \"Probably we ought to go right now.\"\n\nConey was inert.\n\n\"Problyreallyoughttogo,\" I said semicompulsively, panic rising through my sorrow.\n\n\"You misunderstand,\" said the doctor. \"We'll ask you to wait, please. This man will show you where to go\u2014\" He nodded at something behind us. I whipped around, my lizard instincts shocked at having allowed someone to sneak up on me.\n\nIt was Albert. The Thin Rastafarian Line between us and departure. His appearance seemed to trigger comprehension in Coney: The security guard was a cartoon reminder of the real existence of police.\n\n\"Outta the way,\" said Coney.\n\n\"We don't serve string!\" I explained.\n\nAlbert didn't look any more convinced of his official status than we were. At moments like this I was reminded of the figure we Minna Men cut, oversize, undereducated, vibrant with hostility even with tear streaks all over our beefy faces. And me with my utterances, lunges, and taps, my symptoms, those extra factors Minna adored throwing into the mix.\n\nFrank Minna, unrevived, empty of blood in the next room.\n\nAlbert held his palms open, his body more or less pleading as he said, \"You better wait, mon.\"\n\n\"Nah,\" said Coney. \"Maybe another time.\" Coney and I both leaned in Albert's direction, really only shifting our weight, and he jumped backward, spreading his hands over the spot he'd vacated as if to say _It was someone else standing there just now, not I_.\n\n\"But this is a thing upon which we must insist,\" said the doctor.\n\n\"You really don't wanna insist,\" said Coney, turning on him furiously. \"You ain't got the insistence required, you know what I mean?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I do,\" said the doctor quietly.\n\n\"Well, just chew it over,\" said Coney. \"There's no big hurry. C'mon, Lionel.\"\n\n# MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN\n\nI grew up in the library of St. Vincent's Home for Boys, in the part of downtown Brooklyn no developer yet wishes to claim for some upscale, renovated neighborhood; not quite Brooklyn Heights, nor Cobble Hill, not even Boerum Hill. The Home is essentially set on the off-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, but out of sight of Manhattan or the bridge itself, on eight lanes of traffic lined with faceless, monolithic civil courts, which, gray and distant though they seemed, some of us Boys had seen the insides of, by Brooklyn's central sorting annex for the post office, a building that hummed and blinked all through the night, its gates groaning open to admit trucks bearing mountains of those mysterious items called letters, by the Burton Trade School for Automechanics, where hardened students attempting to set their lives dully straight spilled out twice a day for sandwich-and-beer breaks, overwhelming the cramped bodega next door, intimidating passersby and thrilling us Boys in their morose thuggish glory, by a desolate strip of park benches beneath a granite bust of Lafayette, indicating his point of entry into the Battle of Brooklyn, by a car lot surrounded by a high fence topped with wide curls of barbed wire and wind-whipped fluorescent flags, and by a redbrick Quaker Meetinghouse that had presumably been there when the rest was farmland. In short, this jumble of stuff at the clotted entrance to the ancient, battered borough was officially Nowhere, a place strenuously ignored in passing through to Somewhere Else. Until rescued by Frank Minna I lived, as I said, in the library.\n\nI set out to read every book in that tomblike library, every miserable dead donation ever indexed and forgotten there\u2014a mark of my profound fear and boredom at St. Vincent's and as well an early sign of my Tourettic compulsions for counting, processing, and inspection. Huddled there in the windowsill, turning dry pages and watching dust motes pinball through beams of sunlight, I sought signs of my odd dawning self in Theodore Dreiser, Kenneth Roberts, J. B. Priestley, and back issues of _Popular Mechanics_ and failed, couldn't find the language of myself, as I failed to in watching television, those endless reruns of _Bewitched_ and _I Dream of Jeannie_ and _I Love Lucy_ and _Gilligan_ and _Brady Bunch_ by which we nerdish unathletic Boys pounded our way through countless afternoons, leaning in close to the screen to study the antics of the women\u2014women! exotic as letters, as phone calls, as forests, all things we orphans were denied\u2014and the coping of their husbands, but I didn't find myself there, Desi Arnaz and Dick York and Larry Hagman, those harried earthbound astronauts, weren't showing me what I needed to see, weren't helping me find the language. I was closer on Saturday mornings, Daffy Duck especially gave me something, if I could bear to imagine growing up a dynamited, beak-shattered duck. Art Carney on _The Honeymooners_ gave me something too, something in the way he jerked his neck, when we were allowed to stay up late enough to see him. But it was Minna who brought me the language, Minna and Court Street that let me speak.\n\nWe four were selected that day because we were four of the five white boys at St. Vincent's, and the fifth was Steven Grossman, fat as his name. If Steven had been thinner, Mr. Kassel would have left me in the stacks. As it was I was undersold goods, a twitcher and nose-picker retrieved from the library instead of the schoolyard, probably a retard of some type, certainly a regrettable, inferior offering. Mr. Kassel was a teacher at St. Vincent's who knew Frank Minna from the neighborhood, and his invitation to Minna to borrow us for the afternoon was a first glimpse of the glittering halo of favors and favoritism that extended around Minna\u2014\"knowing somebody\" as a life condition. Minna was our exact reverse, we who knew no one and benefited nothing from it when we did.\n\nMinna had asked for white boys to suit his clients' presumed prejudice\u2014and his own certain ones. Perhaps Minna already had his fantasy of reclamation in mind, too. I can't know. He certainly didn't show it in the way he treated us that first day, a sweltering August weekday afternoon after classes, streets like black chewing gum, slow-creeping cars like badly projected science-class slides in the haze, as he opened the rear of his dented, graffitied van, about the size of those midnight mail trucks, and told us to get inside, then slammed and padlocked the doors without explanation, without asking our names. We four gaped at one another, giddy and astonished at this escape from our doldrums, not knowing what it meant, not really needing to know. The others, Tony, Gilbert and Danny, were willing to be grouped with me, to pretend I fit with them, if that was what it took to be plucked up by the outside world and seated in the dark on a dirty steel truck bed vibrating its way to somewhere that wasn't St. Vincent's. Of course I was vibrating too, vibrating before Minna rounded us up, vibrating inside always and straining to keep it from showing. I didn't kiss the other three boys, but I wanted to. Instead I made a kissing, chirping sound, like a bird's peep, over and over: \"Chrip, chrip, chrip.\"\n\nTony told me to shut the fuck up, but his heart wasn't in it, not this day, in the midst of life's unfolding mystery. For Tony, especially, this was his destiny coming to find him. He saw more in Minna from the first because he'd prepared himself to see it. Tony Vermonte was famous at St. Vincent's for the confidence he exuded, confidence that a mistake had been made, that he didn't belong in the Home. He was Italian, better than the rest of us, who didn't know what we were (what's an Essrog?). His father was either a mobster or a cop\u2014Tony saw no contradiction in this, so we didn't either. The Italians would return for him, in one guise or another, and that was what he'd taken Minna for.\n\nTony was famous for other things as well. He was older than the rest of us there in Minna's truck, fifteen to my and Gilbert's thirteen and Danny Fantl's fourteen (older St. Vincent's Boys attended high school elsewhere, and were rarely seen, but Tony had contrived to be left back), an age that made him infinitely dashing and worldly, even if he hadn't also lived outside the Home for a time and then come back. As it was, Tony was our God of Experience, all cigarettes and implication. Two years before, a Quaker family, attendees of the Meeting across the street, had taken Tony in, intending to give him a permanent home. He'd announced his contempt for them even as he packed his clothes. They weren't Italian. Still, he lived with them for a few months, perhaps happily, though he wouldn't have said so. They installed him at Brooklyn Friends, a private school only a few blocks away, and on his way home most afternoons he'd come and hang on the St. Vincent's fence and tell stories of the private-school girls he'd felt up and sometimes penetrated, the faggy private-school boys who swam and played soccer but were easily humiliated at basketball, not otherwise Tony's specialty. Then one day his foster parents found prodigious black-haired Tony in bed with one girl too many: their own sixteen-year-old daughter. Or so the story went; there was only one source. Anyway, he was reinstalled at St. Vincent's the next day, where he fell easily into his old routine of beating up and befriending me and Steven Grossman each on alternating days, so that we were never in favor simultaneously and could trust one another as little as we trusted Tony.\n\nTony was our Sneering Star, and certainly the one of us who caught Minna's attention soonest, the one that fired our future boss's imagination, made him envision the future Minna Men inside us, aching to be cultivated. Perhaps Tony, with his will for his Italian rescue, even collaborated in the vision that became The Minna Agency, the strength of his yearning prompting Minna to certain aspirations, to the notion of having Men to command in the first place.\n\nMinna was barely a man then himself, of course, though he seemed one to us. He was twenty-five that summer, gangly except for a tiny potbelly in his pocket-T, and still devoted to combing his hair into a smooth pompadour, a Carroll Gardens hairstyle that stood completely outside that year of 1979, projecting instead from some miasmic Frank Sinatra moment that extended like a bead of amber or a cinematographer's filter to enclose Frank Minna and everything that mattered to him.\n\nBesides me and Tony in the back of Minna's van there was Gilbert Coney and Danny Fantl. Gilbert then was Tony's right hand, a stocky, sullen boy just passing for tough\u2014he would have beamed at you for calling him a thug. Gilbert was awfully tough on Steven Grossman, whose fatness, I suspect, provided an uncomfortable mirror, but he was tolerant of me. We even had a couple of odd secrets. On a Home for Boys visit to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, two years before, Gilbert and I had split from the group and without discussion returned to a room dominated by a enormous plastic blue whale suspended from the ceiling, which had been the focus of the official visit. But underneath the whale was a double gallery of murky, mysterious dioramas of undersea life, lit and arranged so you had to press close to the glass to find the wonders tucked deep in the corners. In one a sperm whale fought a giant squid. In another a killer whale pierced a floor of ice. Gilbert and I wandered hypnotized from window to window. When a class of third- or fourth-graders were led away we found we had the giant hall to ourselves, and that even when we spoke our voices were smothered by the unearthly quiet of the museum. Gilbert showed me his discovery: A munchkin-size brass door beside the penguin diorama had been left unlocked. When he opened it we saw that it led both behind and into the penguin scene.\n\n\"Get in, Essrog,\" said Gilbert.\n\nIf I'd not wanted to it would have been bullying, but I wanted to desperately. Every minute the hall remained empty was precious. The lip of the doorway was knee-high. I clambered in and opened the flap in the ocean-blue-painted boards that made the side wall of the diorama, then slipped into the picture. The ocean floor was a long, smooth bowl of painted plaster, and I scooted down the grade on my bended knees, looking out at a flabbergasted Gilbert on the other side of the glass. Swimming penguins were mounted on rods extending straight from the far wall, and others were suspended in the plastic waves of ocean surface that now made up a low ceiling over my head. I caressed the nearest penguin, one mounted low, shown diving in pursuit of a delectable fish, patted its head, stroked its gullet as though helping it swallow a dry pill. Gilbert guffawed, thinking I was performing comedy for him, when in fact I'd been overwhelmed by a tender, touchy impulse toward the stiff, poignant penguin. Now it became imperative that I touch _all_ the penguins, all I could, anyway\u2014some were inaccessible to me, on the other side of the barrier of the ocean's surface, standing on ice floes. Shuffling on my knees I made the rounds, affectionately tagging each swimming bird before I made my escape back through the brass door. Gilbert was impressed, I could tell. I was now a kid who'd do anything, do crazy things. He was right and wrong, of course\u2014once I'd touched the first penguin I had no choice.\n\nSomehow this led to a series of confidences. I was crazy but also malleable, easily intimidated, which made me Gilbert's idea of a safe repository for what he regarded as his crazy feelings. Gilbert was a precocious masturbator, and looking for some triangulation between his own experiments and generic schoolyard lore. Did I do it? How often? One hand or two, held this way, or this? Close my eyes? Ever want to rub up against the mattress? I took his inquiries seriously, but I didn't really have the information he needed, not yet. My stupidity made Gilbert grouchy at first, and so he'd spend a week or two both pretending he hadn't spoken, didn't even know me, and glowering to let me know what galactic measures of pain awaited if I ratted him out. Then he'd suddenly come back, more urgent than ever. Try it, he'd say. It's not so hard. I'll watch and tell you if you do it wrong. I obeyed, as I had in the museum, but the results weren't as good. I couldn't yet treat myself with the tenderness I'd lavished on the penguins, at least not in front of Gilbert (though in fact he'd triggered my own private explorations, which were soon quite consuming). Gilbert became grouchy again, and prohibitively intimidating, and after two or three go-arounds the subject was permanently dropped. Still, the legacy of disclosure remained with us, a ghostly bond.\n\nThe last boy in Minna's van, Danny Fantl, was a ringer. He only looked white. Danny had assimilated to the majority population at St. Vincent's happily, effortlessly, down to his bones. In his way he commanded as much respect as Tony (and he certainly commanded Tony's respect, too) without bragging or posing, often without opening his mouth. His real language was basketball, and he was such a taut, fluid athlete that he couldn't help seeming a bit bottled up indoors, in the classroom. When he spoke it was to scoff at our enthusiasms, our displays of uncool, but distantly, as if his mind were really elsewhere plotting crossover moves, footwork. He listened to Funkadelic and Cameo and Zapp and was as quick to embrace rap as any boy at the Home, yet when music he admired actually _played_ , instead of dancing he'd stand with arms crossed, scowling and pouting in time with the beat, his expressive hips frozen. Danny existed in suspension, neither black nor white, neither beating up nor beaten, beautiful but unfazed by the concept of girls, rotten at schoolwork but coasting through classes, and frequently unanchored by gravity, floating between pavement and the tangled chain-mesh of the St. Vincent's basketball hoops. Tony was tormented by his lost Italian family, adamant they would return; Danny might have coolly walked out on his parents one day when he was seven or eight and joined a pickup game that lasted until he was fourteen, to the day Minna drove up in his truck.\n\nTourette's teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive\u2014it teaches you this because you're the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way. Once I sat on an Atlantic Avenue bus a few rows ahead of a man with a belching tic\u2014long, groaning, almost vomitous-sounding noises, the kind a fifth-grader learns to make, swallowing a bellyful of air, then forgets by high school, when charming girls becomes more vital than freaking them out. My colleague's compulsion was terribly specific: He sat at the back of the bus, and only when every head faced forward did he give out with his masterly digestive simulacra. We'd turn, shocked\u2014there were fifteen or twenty others on the bus\u2014and he'd look away. Then, every sixth or seventh time, he'd mix in a messy farting sound. He was a miserable-looking black man in his sixties, a drinker, an idler. Despite the peekaboo brilliance of his timing it was clear to everyone he was the source, and so the other riders hummed or coughed reprovingly, quit giving him the satisfaction of looking, and avoided one another's gaze. This was a loser's game, since not glancing back freed him to run together great uninterrupted phrases of his ripest noise. To all but me he was surely a childish jerk-off, a pathetic wino fishing for attention (maybe he understood himself this way, too\u2014if he was undiagnosed, probably so). But it was unmistakably a compulsion, a tic\u2014Tourette's. And it went on and on, until I'd reached my stop and, I'm sure, after.\n\nThe point is, I knew that those other passengers would barely recall it a few minutes after stepping off to their destinations. Despite how that maniacal froglike groaning filled the auditorium of the bus, the concertgoers were plainly engaged in the task of forgetting the music. Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble. The belching man ruptured it so quickly and completely that I could watch the wound instantly seal.\n\nA Touretter can also be The Invisible Man.\n\nSimilarly, I doubt the other Boys, even the three who joined me in becoming Minna Men, directly recalled my bouts of kissing. I probably could have forced them to remember, but it would have been grudgingly. That tic was too much for us to encompass then, at St. Vincent's, as it would be now, anytime, anywhere. Besides, as my Tourette's bloomed I quickly layered the kissing behind hundreds of other behaviors, some of which, seen through the prism of Minna's rough endearments, became my trademarks, my Freakshow. So the kissing was gratefully forgotten.\n\nBy the time I was twelve, nine months or so after touching the penguins, I had begun to overflow with reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges\u2014those compulsions emerged first, while language for me was still trapped like a roiling ocean under a calm floe of ice, the way I'd been trapped in the underwater half of the penguin display, mute, beneath glass. I'd begun reaching for doorframes, kneeling to grab at skittering loosened sneaker laces (a recent fashion among the toughest boys at St. Vincent's, unfortunately for me), incessantly tapping the metal-pipe legs of the schoolroom desks and chairs in search of certain ringing tones, and worst, grabbing and kissing my fellow Boys. I grew terrified of myself then, and burrowed deeper into the library, but was forced out for classes or meals or bedtime. Then it would happen. I'd lunge at someone, surround him with my arms, and kiss his cheek or neck or forehead, whatever I hit. Then, compulsion expelled, I'd be left to explain, defend myself, or flee. I kissed Greg Toon and Edwin Torres, whose eyes I'd never dared meet. I kissed Leshawn Montrose, who'd broken Mr. Voccaro's arm with a chair. I kissed Tony Vermonte and Gilbert Coney and tried to kiss Danny Fantl. I kissed Steven Grossman, pathetically thankful he'd come along just then. I kissed my own counterparts, other sad invisible Boys working the margins at St. Vincent's, just surviving, whose names I didn't know. \"It's a game!\" I'd say, pleadingly. \"It's a game.\" That was my only defense, and since the most inexplicable things in our lives were games, with their ancient embedded rituals\u2014British Bulldog, Ringolevio, Scully and Jinx\u2014a mythos handed down to us orphans who-knew-how, it seemed possible I might persuade them this was another one, The Kissing Game. Just as important, I might persuade myself\u2014wasn't it something in a book I'd read, a game for fevered teenagers, perhaps Sadie Hawkins Day? Forget the absence of girls, didn't we Boys deserve the same? That was it, then, I decided\u2014I was single-handedly dragging the underprivileged into adolescence. I knew something they didn't. \"It's a game,\" I'd say desperately, sometimes as tears of pain ran down my face. \"It's a game.\" Leshawn Montrose cracked my head against a porcelain water fountain, Greg Toon and Edwin Torres generously only shucked me off onto the floor. Tony Vermonte twisted my arm behind my back and forced me against a wall. \"It's a game,\" I breathed. He released me and shook his head, full of pity. The result, oddly enough, was I was spared a few months' worth of beatings at his hands\u2014I was too pathetic and faggy to touch, might be better avoided. Danny Fantl saw my move coming and faked me out as though I were a lead-footed defender, then vanished down a stairwell. Gilbert stood and glared, deeply unnerved due to our private history. \"A game,\" I reassured him. \"It's a game,\" I told poor Steven Grossman and he believed me, just long enough to try kissing our mutual tormentor Tony, perhaps hoping it was a key to overturning the current order. He was not spared.\n\nMeantime, beneath that frozen shell a sea of language was reaching full boil. It became harder and harder not to notice that when a television pitchman said _to last the rest of a lifetime_ my brain went _to rest the lust of a loaftomb_ , that when I heard \"Alfred Hitchcock,\" I silently replied \"Altered Houseclock\" or \"Ilford Hotchkiss,\" that when I sat reading Booth Tarkington in the library now my throat and jaw worked behind my clenched lips, desperately fitting the syllables of the prose to the rhythms of \"Rapper's Delight\" (which was then playing every fifteen or twenty minutes out on the yard), that an invisible companion named Billy or Bailey was begging for insults I found it harder and harder to withhold.\n\nThe kissing cycle was mercifully brief. I found other outlets, other obsessions. The pale thirteen-year-old that Mr. Kassel pulled out of the library and offered to Minna was prone to floor-tapping, whistling, tongue-clicking, winking, rapid head turns, and wall-stroking, anything but the direct utterances for which my particular Tourette's brain most yearned. Language bubbled inside me now, the frozen sea melting, but it felt too dangerous to let out. Speech was intention, and I couldn't let anyone else or myself know how intentional my craziness felt. Pratfalls, antics\u2014those were accidental lunacy, and more or less forgivable. Practically speaking, it was one thing to stroke Leshawn Montrose's arm, or even to kiss him, another entirely to walk up and call him Shefawn Mongoose, or Lefthand Moonprose, or Fuckyou Roseprawn. So, though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.\n\nAnd I was lying low, I thought. For every tic issued I squelched dozens, or so it felt\u2014my body was an overwound watchspring, effortlessly driving one set of hands double-time while feeling it could as easily animate an entire mansion of stopped clocks, or a vast factory mechanism, a production line like the one in _Modern Times_ , which we watched that year in the basement of the Brooklyn Public Library on Fourth Avenue, a version accompanied by a pedantic voice-over lecturing us on Chaplin's genius. I took Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, whose _The General_ had been similarly mutilated, as models: Obviously blazing with aggression, disruptive energies barely contained, they'd managed to keep their traps shut, and so had endlessly skirted danger and been regarded as cute. I needn't exactly strain to find a motto: silence, golden, get it? Got it. Hone your timing instead, burnish those physical routines, your idiot wall-stroking, face-making, lace-chasing, until they're funny in a flickering black-and-white way, until your enemies don policeman's or Confederate caps and begin tripping over themselves, until doe-eyed women swoon. So I kept my tongue wound in my teeth, ignored the pulsing in my cheek, the throbbing in my gullet, persistently swallowed language back like vomit. It burned as hotly.\n\nWe rode a mile or two before Minna's van halted, engine guttering to a stop. Then a few minutes passed before he let us out of the back, and we found ourselves in a gated warehouse yard under the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in a ruined industrial zone. Red Hook, I knew later. He led us to a large truck, a detached twelve-wheel trailer with no cab in evidence, then rolled up the back to reveal a load of identical sealed cardboard crates, a hundred, two hundred, maybe more. A thrill went through me: I'd secretly count them.\n\n\"Couple you boys get up inside,\" said Minna distractedly. Tony and Danny had the guile to leap immediately into the truck, where they could work shaded from the sun. \"You're just gonna run this stuff inside, that's all. Hand shit off, move it up to the front of the truck, get it in. Straight shot, you got it?\" He pointed to the warehouse. We all nodded, and I peeped. It went unnoticed.\n\nMinna opened the big panel doors of the warehouse and showed us where to set the crates. We started quickly, then wilted in the heat. Tony and Danny massed the crates at the lip of the truck while Gilbert and I made the first dozen runs, then the older boys conceded their advantage and began to help us drag them across the blazing yard. Minna never touched a crate; he spent the whole time in the office of the warehouse, a cluttered room full of desks, file cabinets, tacked-up notes and pornographic calendars and a stacked tower of orange traffic cones, visible to us through an interior window, smoking cigarettes and jawing on the telephone, apparently not listening for replies\u2014every time I glanced through the window his mouth was moving. The door was closed, and he was inaudible behind the glass. At some point another man appeared, from where I wasn't sure, and stood in the yard wiping his forehead as though he were the one laboring. Minna came out, the two stepped inside the office, the other man disappeared. We moved the last of the crates inside. Minna rolled down the gate of the truck and locked the warehouse, pointed us back to his van, but paused before shutting us into the back.\n\n\"Hot day, huh?\" he said, looking at us directly for what might have been the first time.\n\nBathed in sweat, we nodded, afraid to speak.\n\n\"You monkeys thirsty? Because personally I'm dying out here.\"\n\nMinna drove us to Smith Street, a few blocks from St. Vincent's, and pulled over in front of a bodega, then bought us beer, pop-top cans of Miller, and sat with us in the back of the van, drinking. It was my first beer.\n\n\"Names,\" said Minna, pointing at Tony, our obvious leader. We said our first names, starting with Tony. Minna didn't offer his own, only drained his beer and nodded. I began tapping the truck panel beside me.\n\nPhysical exertion over, astonishment at our deliverance from St. Vincent's receding, my symptoms found their opening again.\n\n\"You probably ought to know, Lionel's a freak,\" said Tony, his voice vibrant with self-regard.\n\n\"Yeah, well, you're all freaks, if you don't mind me pointing it out,\" said Minna. \"No parents\u2014or am I mixed up?\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Finish your beer,\" said Minna, tossing his can past us, into the back of the van.\n\nAnd that was the end of our first job for Frank Minna.\n\nBut Minna rounded us up again the next week, brought us to that same desolate yard, and this time he was friendlier. The task was identical, almost to the number of boxes (242 to 260), and we performed it in the same trepidatious silence. I felt a violent hatred burning off Tony in my and Gilbert's direction, as though he thought we were in the process of screwing up his Italian rescue. Danny was of course exempt and oblivious. Still, we'd begun to function as a team\u2014demanding physical work contained its own truths, and we explored them despite ourselves.\n\nOver beers Minna said, \"You like this work?\"\n\nOne of us said _sure_.\n\n\"You know what you're doing?\" Minna grinned at us, waiting. The question was confusing. \"You know what kind of work this is?\"\n\n\"What, moving boxes?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Right, moving. Moving work. That's what you call it when you work for me. Here, look.\" He stood to get into his pocket, pulled out a roll of twenties and a small stack of white cards. He stared at the roll for a minute, then peeled off four twenties and handed one to each of us. It was my first twenty dollars. Then he offered us each a card. It read: L&L MOVERS. NO JOB TOO SMALL. SOME JOBS TOO LARGE. GERARD & FRANK MINNA. And a phone number.\n\n\"You're Gerard or Frank?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Minna, Frank.\" Like _Bond, James_. He ran his hand through his hair. \"So you're a moving company, get it? Doing moving work.\" This seemed a very important point: that we call it _moving_. I couldn't imagine what else to call it.\n\n\"Who's Gerard?\" said Tony. Gilbert and I, even Danny, watched Minna carefully. Tony was questioning him on behalf of us all.\n\n\"My brother.\"\n\n\"Older or younger?\"\n\n\"Older.\"\n\nTony thought for a minute. \"Who's L and L?\"\n\n\"Just the name, L and L. Two L's. Name of the company.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but what's it mean?\"\n\n\"What do you need it to mean, Fruitloop\u2014Living Loud? Loving Ladies? Laughing at you Losers?\"\n\n\"What, it doesn't mean anything?\" said Tony.\n\n\"I didn't say that, did I?\"\n\n_\"Least Lonely,\"_ I suggested.\n\n\"There you go,\" said Minna, waving his can of beer at me. \"L and L Movers, Least Lonely.\"\n\nTony, Danny and Gilbert all stared at me, uncertain how I'd gained this freshet of approval.\n\n_\"Liking Lionel,\"_ I heard myself say.\n\n\"Minna, that's an Italian name?\" said Tony. This was on his own behalf, obviously. It was time to get to the point. The rest of us could all go fuck ourselves.\n\n\"What are you, the census?\" said Minna. \"Cub reporter? What's your full name, Jimmy Olsen?\"\n\n_\"Lois Lane,\"_ I said. Like anyone, I'd read Superman comics.\n\n\"Tony Vermonte,\" said Tony, ignoring me.\n\n\"Vermont-ee,\" repeated Minna. \"That's what, like a New England thing, right? You a Red Sox fan?\"\n\n\"Yankees,\" said Tony, confused and defensive. The Yankees were champions now, the Red Sox their hapless, eternal victims, vanquished most recently by Bucky Dent's famous home run. We'd all watched it on television.\n\n\"Luckylent,\" I said, remembering. \"Duckybent.\"\n\nMinna erupted with laughter. \"Yeah, Ducky fucking Bent! That's good. Don't look now, it's Ducky Bent.\"\n\n_\"Lexluthor,\"_ I said, reaching out to touch Minna's shoulder. He only stared at my hand, didn't move away. \"Lunchylooper, Laughyluck, Loopylip\u2014\"\n\n\"All right, Loopy,\" said Minna. \"Enough already.\"\n\n_\"Lockystuff\u2014\"_ I was desperate for a way to stop. My hand went on tapping Minna's shoulder.\n\n\"Let it go,\" said Minna, and now he returned my shoulder taps, once, hard. \"Don't tug the boat.\"\n\nTo _tugboat_ was to try Minna's patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. _Tugboating_ was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one: Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art (and it was a given that you wanted to push it as near as possible\u2014missing an opportunity to score a laugh was deeply lame, an act undeserving of a special name).\n\nYears before the word _Tourette's_ was familiar to any of us, Minna had me diagnosed: Terminal Tugboater.\n\nDistributing eighty dollars and those four business cards was all Minna had to do to instate the four of us forever\u2014or anyway, for as long as he liked\u2014as the junior staff of L&L Movers. Twenty dollars and a beer remained our usual pay. Minna would gather us sporadically, on a day's notice or no notice at all\u2014and the latter possibility became incentive, once we'd begun high school, for us to return to St. Vincent's directly after classes and lounge expectantly in the schoolyard or recreation room, pretending not to listen for the distinctive grumble of his van's motor. The jobs varied enormously. We'd load merchandise, like the cartons in the trailer, in and out of storefront-basement grates all up and down Court Street, borderline shady activity that it seemed wholesalers ought to be handling themselves, transactions sealed with a shared cigar in the back of the shop. Or we'd bustle apartmentloads of furniture in and out of brownstone walk-ups, legitimate moving jobs, it seemed to me, where fretting couples worried we weren't old or expert enough to handle their belongings\u2014Minna would hush them, remind them of the cost of distractions: \"The meter's running.\" (This hourly rate wasn't reflected in our pay, of course. It was twenty dollars whether we hurried or not; we hurried.) We put sofas through third-story windows with a makeshift cinch and pulley, Tony and Minna on the roof, Gilbert and Danny in the window to receive, myself on the ground with the guide ropes. A massive factory building under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, owned by an important but unseen friend of Minna's, had been damaged in fire, and we moved most of the inhabitants for free, as some sort of settlement or concession\u2014the terms were obscure, but Minna was terrifically urgent about it. When a couple of college-age artists objected to our rough handling of a pile of damaged canvases the firemen had heaped on the floor, he paced and seethed at the delay; the only meter running now was Minna's own time, and his credibility with his friend-client. We woke at five one August morning to collect and set up the temporary wooden stages for the bands performing in the Atlantic Antic, a massive annual street fair, then worked again at dusk to tear the stages down, the hot avenue now heaped with a day's torn wrappers and crumpled cups, a few fevered revelers still staggering home as we knocked the pine frames apart with hammers and the heels of our shoes. Once we emptied an entire electronics showroom into Minna's truck, pulling unboxed stereos off shelves and out of window displays, disconnecting the wires from lit, blinking amplifiers, eventually even taking the phone off the desk\u2014it would have seemed a sort of brazen burglary had Minna not been standing on the sidewalk in front, drinking beer and telling jokes with the man who'd unpadlocked the shop gates for us as we filed past with the goods. Everywhere Minna connived and cajoled and dropped names, winking at us to make us complicit, and everywhere Minna's clients stared at us Boys, some wondering if we'd palm a valuable when they weren't looking, some trying to figure the angle, perhaps hoping to catch a hint of disloyalty, an edge over Minna they'd save for when they needed it. We palmed nothing, revealed no disloyalty. Instead we stared back, tried to make them flinch. And we listened, gathered information. Minna was teaching us when he meant to, and when he didn't.\n\nIt changed us as a group. We developed a certain collective ego, a presence apart at the Home. We grew less embattled from within, more from without: nonwhite Boys sensed in our privilege a hint of their future deprivations and punished us for it. Age had begun to heighten those distinctions anyway. So Tony, Gilbert, Danny and myself smoothed out our old antipathies and circled the wagons. We stuck up for one another, at the Home and at Sarah J. Hale, our local high school, a required stop except for those few who'd qualified for some special (i.e., Manhattan) destination, Stuyvesant or Music and Art.\n\nThere at Sarah J. we St. Vincent's Boys were disguised, blended with the larger population, a pretty rough crowd despite their presumably having parents and siblings and telephones and bedroom doors with locks and a thousand other unimaginable advantages. But we knew each other, kept an eye on each other, bad pennies circulating with the good. Black or white, we policed one another like siblings, reserved special degrees of scorn for one another's social or institutional humiliations. And there we mixed with girls for the first time, about as well as chunks of road salt in ice cream, though ice cream might be a generous comparison for the brutal, strapping black girls of Sarah J., gangs of whom laid after-school ambushes for any white boy daring enough to have flirted, even made eye contact, with one inside the building. They comprised the vast majority there, and the handful of white or Latin girls survived by a method of near-total invisibility. To pierce their cone of fear and silence was to be met with incredulous glares of resentment. Our lives are led elsewhere, those looks said, and yours ought to be too. The black girls were claimed by boyfriends too sophisticated to bother with school, who rode by for them at lunch hour in cars throbbing with amplified bass lines and sometimes boasting bullet-riddled doors, and their only use for us was as a dartboard for throwing lit cigarette butts, a frequent sport. Yes, relations between the sexes were strained at Sarah J., and I doubt any of us four, even Tony, so much as copped a feel from the girls we were schooled with there. For all of us that would wait for Court Street, for the world we would come to know through Minna.\n\nMinna's Court Street was the old Brooklyn, a placid ageless surface alive underneath with talk, with deals and casual insults, a neighborhood political machine with pizzeria and butcher-shop bosses and unwritten rules everywhere. All was talk except for what mattered most, which were unspoken understandings. The barbershop, where he took us for identical haircuts that cost three dollars each, except even that fee was waived for Minna\u2014no one had to wonder why the price of a haircut hadn't gone up since 1966, nor why six old barbers were working, mostly not working, out of the same ancient storefront, where the Barbicide hadn't been changed since the product's invention (in Brooklyn, the jar bragged), where other somewhat younger men passed through constantly to argue sports and wave away offers of haircuts; the barbershop was a retirement home, a social club, and front for a backroom poker game. The barbers were taken care of because this was Brooklyn, where people looked out. Why would the prices go up, when nobody walked in who wasn't part of this conspiracy, this trust?\u2014though if you spoke of it you'd surely meet with confused denials, or laughter and a too-hard cuff on the cheek. Another exemplary mystery was the \"arcade,\" a giant storefront paneled with linoleum, containing three pinball machines, which were in constant use, and six or seven video games\u2014Asteroids, Frogger, Centipede\u2014all pretty much ignored, and a cashier, who'd change dollars to quarters and accept hundred-dollar bills folded into lists of numbers, names of horses and football teams. The curb in front of the arcade was lined with Vespas, which had been in vogue a year or two before but now sat permanently parked, without anything more than a bicycle lock for protection, a taunt to vandals. A block away, on Smith, they would have been stripped, but here they were pristine, a curbside Vespa showroom. It didn't need explaining\u2014this was Court Street. And Court Street, where it passed through Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, was the only Brooklyn, really\u2014north was Brooklyn Heights, secretly a part of Manhattan, south was the harbor, and the rest, everything east of the Gowanus Canal (the only body of water in the world, Minna would crack each and every time we drove over it, that was 90 percent guns), apart from small outposts of civilization in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, was an unspeakable barbarian tumult.\n\nSometimes he needed just one of us. He'd appear at the Home in his Impala instead of the van, request someone specific, then spirit him away, to the bruised consternation of those left behind. Tony was in and out of Minna's graces, his ambition and pride costing him as much as he won, but he was unmistakably our leader, and Minna's right hand. He wore his private errands with Minna like Purple Hearts, but refused to report on their content to the rest of us. Danny, athletic, silent and tall, became Minna's trusted greyhound, his Mercury, sent on private deliveries and rendezvous, and given early driving lessons in a vacant Red Hook lot, as though Minna were grooming him for work as an international spy, or Kato for a new Green Hornet. Gilbert, all bullish determination, was pegged for the grunt work, sitting in double-parked cars, repairing a load of ruptured cartons with strapping tape, unfastening the legs of an oversize dresser so as to fit it through a small doorway, and repainting the van, whose graffitied exterior some of Minna's neighbors had apparently found objectionable. And I was an extra set of eyes and ears and opinions. Minna would drag me along to back rooms and offices and barbershop negotiations, then debrief me afterward. What did I think of that guy? Shitting or not? A moron or retard? A shark or a mook? Minna encouraged me to have a take on everything, and to spit it out, as though he thought my verbal disgorgings were only commentary not yet anchored to subject matter. And he adored my echolalia. He thought I was doing impressions.\n\nNeedless to say, it wasn't commentary and impressions, but my verbal Tourette's flowering at last. Like Court Street, I seethed behind the scenes with language and conspiracies, inversions of logic, sudden jerks and jabs of insult. Now Court Street and Minna had begun to draw me out. With Minna's encouragement I freed myself to ape the rhythm of his overheard dialogues, his complaints and endearments, his for-the-sake-of arguments. And Minna loved my effect on his clients and associates, the way I'd unnerve them, disrupt some schmooze with an utterance, a head jerk, a husky _\"Eatmebailey!\"_ I was his special effect, a running joke embodied. They'd look up startled and he'd wave his hand knowingly, counting money, not even bothering to look at me. \"Don't mind him, he can't help it,\" he'd say. \"Kid's shot out of a cannon.\" Or: \"He likes to get a little nutty sometimes. Forget about it.\" Then he'd wink at me, acknowledge our conspiracy. I was evidence of life's unpredictability and rudeness and poignancy, a scale model of his own nutty heart. In this way Minna licensed my speech, and speech, it turned out, liberated me from the overflowing disaster of my Tourettic self, turned out to be the tic that satisfied where others didn't, the scratch that briefly stilled the itch.\n\n\"You ever listen to yourself, Lionel?\" Minna would say later, shaking his head. \"You really are shot out of a fucking cannon.\"\n\n_\"Scott Out of the Canyon!_ I don't know why, I just _\u2014fuckitup!_ \u2014I just can't stop.\"\n\n\"You're a freak show, that's why. Human freak show, and it's free. Free to the public.\"\n\n\"Freefreak!\" I hit him on the shoulder.\n\n\"That's what I said: a free human freak show.\"\n\nWe were introduced to Matricardi and Rockaforte at their brownstone on Degraw Street one day in the fall, four or five months after meeting Minna. He'd gathered the four of us in the van in his usual way, without explaining our assignment, but there was a special degree of agitation about him, a jumpiness that induced a special ticcishness in me. He first drove us into Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, then underneath the bridge, to the docks near Fulton Street, and I spent the whole time imitating the nervous jerks of his head as he negotiated traffic. We parked in the middle of a concrete yard in front of one of the piers. Minna disappeared inside a small, windowless shack made of corrugated steel sheets and had us stand outside the van, where we shivered in the wind coming off the East River. I danced around the van in a fit, counting suspension cables on the bridge that soared over us like a monstrous steel limb while Tony and Danny, chilliest in their thin plaid jackets, kicked and cursed at me. Gilbert was nicely insulated in a fake down coat which, stitched into bulging sections, made him look like the Michelin Man or the Red Queen from _Alice in Wonderland_. He stood a few feet from us and methodically tossed chunks of corroded concrete into the river, as though he could earn points by cleaning the pier of rubble.\n\nMinna emerged just as the two small yellow trucks drove up. They were Ryder Rental vans, smaller than Minna's, and identically decorated, one pristine, the other dingy. The drivers sat smoking cigarettes in the cabs, with the motors running. Minna unlatched the backs of the trucks, which weren't padlocked, and directed us to move the contents into his van\u2014quick.\n\nThe first thing I laid hands on was an electric guitar, one shaped into a flying V and decorated with enameled yellow and silver flames. A cable dangled from its socket. Other instruments, guitars and bass guitars, were in their hard black cases, but this one had been unplugged and shoved into the van in a hurry. The two trucks were full of concert gear\u2014seven or eight guitars, keyboards, panels full of electronic switches, bundles of cable, microphones and stands, pedal effects for the floor, a drum kit that had been pushed into the truck whole instead of being disassembled, and a number of amplifiers and monitors, including six black stage amps, each half the size of a refrigerator, which alone filled the second Ryder truck and each took two of us to lift out and into Minna's van. The amplifiers and hard cases were stenciled with the band's name, which I recognized faintly. I learned later they were responsible for a minor AM hit or two, songs about roads, cars, women. I didn't grasp it then, but this was equipment enough for a small stadium show.\n\nI wasn't sure we could fit the whole contents of the two trucks into the van but Minna only egged us to shut up and work faster. The men in the trucks never spoke or got out of the cabs, just smoked and waited. No one ever appeared from the corrugated shack. At the end there was barely room for Gilbert and me to crowd in behind the doors to ride with the band's calamitously piled equipment while Tony and Danny shared a spot up front with Minna.\n\nWe crossed the bridge back to Brooklyn like that, Gilbert and I fearing for our lives if the load shifted or toppled. After a few breathless turns and sudden stops Minna double-parked the van and freed us from the back. The destination was a brownstone in a row of brownstones on Degraw Street, red brick, stone detailing flaking to powder, genteel curtained windows. Some canny salesman had ten or twenty years before sold the entire block on defacing these hundred-year-old buildings with flimsy tin awnings over the elegant front doors; the only thing special about Matricardi and Rockaforte's house was that it lacked one of these.\n\n\"We're gonna have to take apart those drums,\" said Tony when he saw the doors.\n\n\"Just get it inside,\" said Minna. \"It'll fit.\"\n\n\"Are there stairs?\" said Gilbert.\n\n\"You'll see, you chocolate cheesepuffs,\" said Minna. \"Just get it up the stoop already.\"\n\nInside, we saw. The brownstone which appeared so ordinary was an anomaly just through the doors. The insides\u2014typical narrow halls and stairs, spoked banisters, high ornate ceilings\u2014had all been stripped and gutted, replaced with a warehouse-style stairwell into the basement apartment and upstairs. The parlor floor where we stood was sealed off on the left by a clean white wall and single closed door. We ferried the equipment into the upper-floor apartment while Minna stood guarding the rear of the van. The drums went easily.\n\nThe band's equipment tucked neatly into one corner of the apartment, on wooden pallets apparently set out for that purpose. The upper floors of the building were empty apart from a few crates here and there and a single oak dining table heaped with silverware: forks, spoons in two sizes, and butter knives, hundreds of each, ornate and heavy, gleaming, bundled in disordered piles, no sense to them except that the handles all faced in one direction. I'd never seen so much silverware in one place, even in St. Vincent's institutional kitchen\u2014anyway, those St. Vincent's forks were flat cutouts of dingy steel bent this way to make tines, that way to make a handle, barely better than the plastic \"sporks\" we were issued with our school lunches. These forks were little masterpieces of sculpture in comparison. I wandered away from the others and obsessed on the mountain of forks, knives and spoons, but especially those forks, as rich in their contours as tiny thumbless hands, or the paws of a silver animal.\n\nThe others shifted the last of the amplifiers up the stairs. Minna reparked the van. I stood at the table, trying to look casual. Jerking your head was good cover for jerking your head, I discovered. Nobody watched me. I pocketed one of the forks, trembling with lust and anticipation, joy in my fear, as I did it. I only just got away with it, too: Minna was back.\n\n\"The clients want to meet you,\" he said.\n\n\"Who's that?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Just shut up when they talk, okay?\" said Minna.\n\n\"Okay, but who are they?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Practice shutting up now so you'll be good at it when you meet them,\" said Minna. \"They're downstairs.\"\n\nBehind that clean, seamless wall on the parlor floor lay hidden the brownstone's next surprise, a sort of double-reverse: The front room's old architecture was intact. Through the single door we stepped into a perfectly elegant, lavishly fitted brownstone parlor, with gold leaf on the ceiling's plaster scrollwork, antique chairs and desks and a marble-topped side table, a six-foot mirror-lined grandfather clock, and a vase with fresh flowers. Under our feet was an ancient carpet, layered with color, a dream map of the past. The walls were crowded with framed photographs, none more recent than the invention of color film. It was more like a museum diorama of Old Brooklyn than a contemporary room. Seated in two of the plush chairs were two old men, dressed in matching brown suits.\n\n\"So these are your boys,\" said the first of the two men.\n\n\"Say hello to Mr. Matricardi,\" said Minna.\n\n\"Yo,\" said Danny. Minna punched him on the arm.\n\n\"I said say hello to Mr. Matricardi.\"\n\n\"Hello,\" said Danny sulkily. Minna had never required politeness. Our jobs with him had never taken such a drab turn. We were used to sauntering with him through the neighborhood, riffing, honing our insults.\n\nBut we felt the change in Minna, the fear and tension. We would try to comply, though servility lay outside our range of skills.\n\nThe two old men sat with their legs crossed, fingers templed together, watching us closely. They were both trim in their suits, their skin white and soft wherever it showed, their faces soft, too, without being fat. The one called Mr. Matricardi had a nick in the top ridge of his large nose, a smooth indented scar like a slot in molded plastic.\n\n\"Say hello,\" Minna told me and Gilbert.\n\nI thought _mister catch your body mixture bath retardy whistlecop's birthday_ and didn't dare open my mouth. Instead I fondled the tines of my marvelous stolen fork, which barely fit the length of my corduroy's front pocket.\n\n\"It's okay,\" said Matricardi. His smile was pursed, all lips and no teeth. His thick glasses doubled the intensity of his stare. \"You all work for Frank?\"\n\nWhat were we supposed to say?\n\n\"Sure,\" volunteered Tony. Matricardi was an Italian name.\n\n\"You do what he tells?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nThe second man leaned forward. \"Listen,\" he said. \"Frank Minna is a good man.\"\n\nAgain we were bewildered. Were we expected to disagree? I counted the tines in my pocket, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four.\n\n\"Tell us what you want to do,\" said the second man. \"Be what? What kind of work? What kind of men?\" He didn't hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we'd unloaded.\n\n\"Talk to Mr. Rockaforte,\" urged Minna.\n\n\"They do what you tell them, Frank?\" said Rockaforte to Minna. It wasn't small talk, somehow, despite the repetitions. This was an intense speculative interest. Far too much rested on Minna's reply. Matricardi and Rockaforte were like that, the few times I glimpsed them: purveyors of banal remarks with terrifying weight behind them.\n\n\"Yeah, they're good kids,\" said Minna. I heard the hurry in his voice. We'd overstayed our welcome already.\n\n_\"Orphans,\"_ said Matricardi to Rockaforte. He was repeating something he'd been told, rehearsing its value.\n\n\"You like this house?\" said Rockaforte, gesturing upward at the ceiling. He'd caught me staring at the scrollwork.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said carefully.\n\n\"This is his mother's parlor,\" said Rockaforte, nodding at Matricardi.\n\n\"Exactly as she kept it,\" said Matricardi proudly. \"We never changed a thing.\"\n\n\"When Mr. Matricardi and I were children like yourselves I would come to see his family and we would sit in this room.\" Rockaforte smiled at Matricardi. Matricardi smiled back. \"His mother believe me would rip our ears if we spilled on this carpet, even a drop. Now we sit and remember.\"\n\n\"Everything exactly as she kept it,\" said Matricardi. \"She would see it and know. If she were here, bless her sweet pathetic soul.\"\n\nThey fell silent. Minna was silent too, though I imagined I could feel his anxiety to be out of there. I thought I heard him gulp, actually.\n\nMy throat was calm. Instead I worked at my stolen fork. It now seemed so potent a charm, I imagined that if I had it in my pocket I might never need to tic aloud again.\n\n\"So tell us,\" said Rockaforte. \"Tell us what you're going to be. What kind of men.\"\n\n\"Like Frank,\" said Tony, confident he was speaking for us all, and right to be.\n\nThis answer made Matricardi chuckle, still toothlessly. Rockaforte waited patiently until his friend was finished. Then he asked Tony, \"You want to make music?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You want to make music?\" His tone was sincere.\n\nTony shrugged. We all held our breath, waiting to understand. Minna shifted his weight, nervous, watching this encounter ramble on beyond his control.\n\n\"The belongings you moved for us today,\" said Rockaforte. \"You recognize what those things are?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" said Minna suddenly. \"You can't do that.\"\n\n\"Please don't refuse our gift,\" said Rockaforte.\n\n\"No, really, we can't. With respect.\" I could see this was imperative for Minna. The gift, worth thousands if not tens of thousands, must absolutely be denied. I shouldn't bother to form nutty fantasies about the electric guitars and keyboards and amplifiers. Too late, though: My brain had begun to bubble with names for our band, all stolen from Minna: _You Fucking Mooks, The Chocolate Cheeseballs, Tony and the Tugboats_.\n\n\"Why, Frank?\" Matricardi. \"Let us bring a little joy. For orphans to make music is a good thing.\"\n\n\"No, please.\"\n\n_Jerks From Nowhere. Free Human Freakshow_. I pictured these in place of the band's logo on the skin of the bass drum, and stenciled onto the amplifiers.\n\n\"Nobody else will be permitted to take pleasure in that garbage,\" said Rockaforte, shrugging. \"We can give it to your orphans, or a fire can be created with a can of gasoline\u2014it would be no different.\"\n\nRockaforte's tone made me understand two things. First, that the offer truly meant nothing to him, nothing at all, and so it could be turned away. They wouldn't force Minna to allow us to take the instruments.\n\nAnd second, that Rockaforte's strange comparison involving a can of gasoline wasn't strange at all to him. That was now exactly what would happen to the band's equipment.\n\nMinna heard it too, and exhaled deeply. The danger was past. But at the same moment I turned a corner in the opposite direction. My magic fork failed. I began to want to pronounce a measure of the nonsense that danced in my head. _Bucky Dent and the Stale Doughnuts_ \u2014\n\n\"Here,\" said Matricardi. He raised his hand, a gentle referee. \"We can see it displeases, so forget.\" He fished in the interior pocket of his suit jacket. \"But we insist on a measure of gratitude for these orphan boys who have done us such a favor.\"\n\nHe came out with hundred-dollar bills, four of them. He passed them to Frank and nodded at us, smiling munificently, and why not? The gesture was unmistakably the source for Frank's trick of spreading twenties everywhere, and it instantly made Frank seem somehow childish and cheap that he would bother to grease palms with anything less than a hundred.\n\n\"All right,\" said Minna. \"That's great, you'll spoil them. They don't know what to do with it.\" He was able to josh now, the end in sight. \"Say thanks, you peanutheads.\"\n\nThe other three were dazzled, I was fighting my syndrome.\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Mr. Matricardi.\"\n\n\"Arf!\"\n\nAfter that Minna got us out of there, hustled us through the brownstone's odd hallway too fast even to glance back. Matricardi and Rockaforte had never moved from their chairs, just smiled at us and one another until we were gone. Minna put us all in the back of the van, where we compared hundred-dollar bills\u2014they were fresh, and the serial numbers ran in sequence\u2014and Tony immediately tried to persuade us he should caretake ours, that they weren't safe in the Home. We didn't bite.\n\nMinna parked us on Smith Street, near Pacific, in front of an all-night market called Zeod's, after the Arab who ran it. We sat and waited until Minna came around the back of the van with a beer.\n\n\"You jerks know about forgetting?\" he said.\n\n\"Forgetting what?\"\n\n\"The names of those guys you just met. They're not good for you to go around saying.\"\n\n\"What should we call them?\"\n\n\"Call them nothing. That's a part of my work you need to learn about. Sometimes the clients are just the clients. No names.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\"\n\n\"They're nobody,\" said Minna. \"That's the point. Forget you ever saw them.\"\n\n\"They live there?\" said Gilbert.\n\n\"Nope. They just keep that place. They moved to Jersey.\"\n\n_\"Gardenstate,\"_ I said. \"Yeah, the Garden State.\"\n\n_\"Garden State Brickface and Stucco!\"_ I shouted. Garden State Brickface and Stucco was a renovation firm whose crummy homemade television ads came on channels 9 and 11 during Mets and Yankees games and during reruns of _The Twilight Zone_. The weird name of the firm was already an occasional tic. Now it seemed to me that Brickface and Stucco might actually be Matricardi and Rockaforte's secret names.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n_\"Garden State Bricco and Stuckface!\"_\n\nI'd made Minna laugh again. Like a lover, I loved to make Minna laugh.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said. \"That's good. Call them Bricco and Stuckface, you goddamn beautiful freak.\" He took another slug of beer.\n\nAnd if memory serves we never heard him speak their real names again.\n\n\"Makes you think you're Italian?\" said Minna one day, as we all rode together in his Impala.\n\n\"What do I look like to you?\" said Tony.\n\n\"I don't know, I was thinking maybe Greek,\" said Minna. \"I used to know this Greek guy went around knocking up the Italian girls down Union Street, until a couple their older brothers took him out under the bridge. You remind me of him, you know? Got that dusky tinge. I'd say half Greek. Or maybe Puerto Rican, or Syrian.\"\n\n\"Fuck you.\"\n\n\"Probably know all your parents, if you think about it. We're not talking the international jet set here\u2014bunch of teen mothers, probably live in a five-mile radius, need to know the goddamn truth.\"\n\nSo it was, with this casual jaunt against Tony's boasts, that Minna appeared to announce what we already half suspected\u2014that it was not only his life that was laced with structures of meaning but our own, that these master plots were transparent to him and that he held the power to reveal them, that he did know our parents and at any moment might present them to us.\n\nOther times he taunted us, playing at knowledge or ignorance\u2014we couldn't know which it was. He and I were alone when he said, \"Essrog, Essrog. That name.\" He crunched up his mouth and squinted, as if trying to remember, or perhaps to read a name inscribed on the distant Manhattan skyline.\n\n\"You know an Essrog?\" I said, my breath short, heart pounding. _\"Edgehog!\"_\n\n\"No. It's just\u2014You ever look it up in the phone book? Can't be more than three or four Essrogs, for chrissakes. Such a weird name.\" Later, at the Home, I looked. There were three.\n\nMinna's weird views filtered down through the jokes he told and liked to hear, and those he cut short within a line or two of their telling. We learned to negotiate the labyrinth of his prejudices blind, and blindly. Hippies were dangerous and odd, also sort of sad in their utopian wrongness. (\"Your parents must of been hippies,\" he'd tell me. \"That's why you came out the superfreak you are.\") Homosexual men were harmless reminders of the impulse Minna was sure lurked in all of us\u2014and \"half a fag\" was more shameful than a whole one. Certain baseball players, Mets specifically (the Yankees were holy but boring, the Mets wonderfully pathetic and human), were half a fag\u2014Lee Mazzilli, Rusty Staub, later Gary Carter. So were most rock stars and anyone who'd been in the armed services but not in a war. Lesbians were wise and mysterious and deserved respect (and how could we who relied on Minna for all our knowledge of women argue when he himself grew baffled and reverent?) but could still be comically stubborn or stuck up. The Arabic population of Atlantic Avenue was as distant and unfathomable as the Indian tribes that had held our land before Columbus. \"Classic\" minorities\u2014Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Puerto Ricans\u2014were the clay of life itself, funny in their essence, while blacks and Asians of all types were soberly snubbed, unfunny (Puerto Ricans probably should have been in this second class but had been elevated to \"classic\" status single-handedly by _West Side Story_ \u2014and all Hispanics were \"Ricans\" even when they were Dominicans, as they frequently were). But bone stupidity, mental illness, and familial or sexual anxiety\u2014these were the bolts of electricity that made the clay walk, the animating forces that rendered human life amusing and that flowed, once you learned to identify them, through every personality and interaction. It was a form of racism, not respect, that restricted blacks and Asians from ever being stupid like a Mick or Polack. If you weren't funny, you didn't quite exist. And it was usually better to be fully stupid, impotent, lazy, greedy or freakish than to seek to dodge your destiny, or layer it underneath pathetic guises of vanity or calm. So it was that I, Overt Freak Supreme, became mascot of a worldview.\n\nI called the Brooklyn directory's Essrogs one day when I was left alone for twenty minutes in a warehouse office, waiting for Minna to return, slowly picking out the numbers on the heavy rotary dial, trying not to obsess on the finger holes. I'd perhaps dialed a phone twice at that point in my life.\n\nI tried _F. Essrog and Lawrence Essrog and Murray and Annette Essrog_. F. wasn't home. Lawrence's phone was answered by a child. I listened for a while as he said \"Hello? Hello?,\" my vocal cords frozen, then hung up.\n\nMurray Essrog picked up the phone. His voice was wheezy and ancient.\n\n\"Essrog?\" I said, and whispered _Chestbutt_ away from the phone. \"Yes. This is the Essrog residence, Murray speaking. Who's this?\"\n\n\"Baileyrog,\" I said.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Bailey.\"\n\nHe waited for a moment, then said, \"Well, what can I do for you, Bailey?\"\n\nI hung up the phone. Then I memorized the numbers, all three of them. In the years that followed I would never once step across the line I'd drawn with Murray or the other telephone Essrogs\u2014never show up at their homes, never accuse them of being related to a _free human freak show_ , never even properly introduce myself\u2014but I made a ritual out of dialing their numbers and hanging up after a tic or two, or listening, just long enough to hear another Essrog breathe.\n\nA true story, not a joke, though it was repeated as often, tugboated relentlessly, was of the beat cop from Court Street who routinely dislodged clumps of teenagers clustered at night on stoops or in front of bars and who, if met with excuses, would cut them off with \"Yeah, yeah. Tell your story _walking.\"_ More than anything, this somehow encapsulated my sense of Minna\u2014his impatience, his pleasure in compression, in ordinary things made more expressive, more hilarious or vivid by their conflation. He loved talk but despised explanations. An endearment was flat unless folded into an insult. An insult was better if it was also self-deprecation, and ideally should also serve as a slice of street philosophy, or as resumption of some dormant debate. And all talk was finer on the fly, out on the pavement, between beats of action: We learned to tell our story walking.\n\nThough Gerard Minna's name was printed on the L&L business card, we met him only twice, and never on a moving job. The first time was Christmas Day, 1982, at Minna's mother's apartment.\n\nCarlotta Minna was an Old Stove. That was the Brooklyn term for it, according to Minna. She was a cook who worked in her own apartment, making plates of saut\u00e9ed squid and stuffed peppers and jars of tripe soup that were purchased at her door by a constant parade of buyers, mostly neighborhood women with too much housework or single men, young and elderly, bocce players who'd take her plates to the park with them, racing bettors who'd eat her food standing up outside the OTB, barbers and butchers and contractors who'd sit on crates in the backs of their shops and wolf her cutlets, folding them with their fingers like waffles. How her prices and schedules were conveyed I never understood\u2014perhaps telepathically. She truly worked an old stove, too, a tiny enamel four-burner crusted with ancient sauces and on which three or four pots invariably bubbled. The oven of this herculean appliance was never cool; the whole kitchen glowed with heat like a kiln. Mrs. Minna herself seemed to have been baked, her whole face dark and furrowed like the edges of an overdone calzone. We never arrived without nudging aside some buyers from her door, nor without packing off with plateloads of food, though how she could spare it was a mystery, since she never seemed to make more than she needed, never wasted a scrap. When we were in her presence Minna bubbled himself, with talk, all directed at his mother, banking cheery insults off anyone else in the apartment, delivery boys, customers, strangers (if there was such a thing to Minna then), tasting everything she had cooking and making suggestions on every dish, poking and pinching every raw ingredient or ball of unfinished dough and also his mother herself, her earlobes and chin, wiping flour off her dark arms with his open hand. She rarely\u2014that I saw, anyway\u2014acknowledged his attentions, or even directly acknowledged his presence. And she never once in my presence uttered so much as a single word.\n\nThat Christmas Minna had us all up to Carlotta's apartment, and for once we ate at her table, first nudging aside sauce-glazed stirring spoons and unlabeled baby-food jars of spices to clear spots for our plates. Minna stood at the stove, sampling her broth, and Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce. But we drank it. It was Christmas, after all. We splashed, gobbled, kneed one another under the table. Privately, I polished the handle of my spoon, quietly aping the motions of her fingers on my nape, and fought not to twist in my seat and jump at her. I focused on my plate\u2014eating was for me already by then a reliable balm. All the while she went on caressing, with hands that would have horrified us if we'd looked close.\n\nMinna spotted her and said, \"This is exciting for you, Ma? I got all of Motherless Brooklyn up here for you. Merry Christmas.\"\n\nMinna's mother only produced a sort of high, keening sigh. We stuck to the food.\n\n_\"Motherless Brooklyn,\"_ repeated a voice we didn't know.\n\nIt was Minna's brother, Gerard. He'd come in without our noticing. A fleshier, taller Minna. His eyes and hair were as dark, his mouth as wry, lips deep-indented at the corners. He wore a brown-and-tan leather coat, which he left buttoned, his hands pushed into the fake-patch pockets.\n\n\"So this is your little moving company,\" he said.\n\n\"Hey, Gerard,\" said Minna.\n\n\"Christmas, Frank,\" said Gerard Minna absently, not looking at his brother. Instead he was making short work of the four of us with his eyes, his hard gaze snapping us each in two like bolt cutters on inferior padlocks. It didn't take long before he was done with us forever\u2014that was how it felt.\n\n\"Yeah, Christmas to you,\" said Minna. \"Where you been?\"\n\n\"Upstate,\" said Gerard.\n\n\"What, with Ralph and them?\" I detected something new in Minna's voice, a yearning, sycophantic strain.\n\n\"More or less.\"\n\n\"What, just for the holidays you're gonna go talkative on me? Between you and Ma it's like the Cloisters up here.\"\n\n\"I brought you a present.\" He handed Minna a white legal envelope, stuffed fat. Minna began to tear at the end and Gerard said, in a voice low and full of ancient sibling authority, \"Put it away.\"\n\nNow we understood we'd all been staring. All except Carlotta, who was at her stove, piling together an improbable, cornucopic holiday plate for her older son.\n\n\"Make it to go, Mother.\"\n\nCarlotta moaned again, closed her eyes.\n\n\"I'll be back,\" said Gerard. He stepped over and put his hands on her, much as Minna had. \"I've got a few people to see today, that's all. I'll be back tonight. Enjoy your little orphan party.\"\n\nHe took the foil-wrapped plate and was gone.\n\nMinna said, \"What're you staring at? Eat your food!\" He stuffed the white envelope into his jacket. The envelope made me think of Matricardi and Rockaforte, their pristine hundred-dollar bills. Brickface and Stucco, I corrected silently. Then Minna cuffed us, a bit too hard, the bulging gold ring on his middle finger clipping our crowns in more or less the same place his mother had fondled.\n\nMinna's behavior with his mother oddly echoed what we knew of his style with women. I'd say girlfriends, but he never called them that, and we rarely saw him with the same one twice. They were Court Street girls, decorating poolrooms and movie-theater lounges, getting off work from the bakery still wearing disposable paper hats, applying lipstick without missing a chew of their gum, slanting their heavily elegant bodies through car windows and across pizza counters, staring over our heads as if we were four feet tall, and he'd apparently gone to junior high school with each and every one of them. \"Sadie and me were in the sixth grade,\" he'd say, mussing her hair, disarranging her clothes. \"This is Lisa\u2014she used to beat up my best friend in gym.\" He'd angle jokes off them like a handball off a low wall, circle them with words like a banner flapping around a pole, tease their brassieres out of whack with pinching fingers, hold them by the two points of their hips and lean, as if he were trying to affect the course of a pinball in motion, risking _tilt_. They never laughed, just rolled their eyes and slapped him away, or didn't. We studied it all, soaked up their indifferent femaleness, that rare essence we yearned to take for granted. Minna had that gift, and we studied his moves, filed them away with silent, almost unconscious prayers.\n\n\"It's not that I only like women with large breasts,\" he told me once, years later, long after he'd traded the Court Street girls for his strange, chilly marriage. We were walking down Atlantic Avenue together, I think, and a woman passing had caused his head to turn. I'd jerked my head too, of course, my actions as exaggerated and secondhand as a marionette's. \"That's a very common misunderstanding,\" he said, as if he were an idol and I his public, a mass audience devoted to puzzling him out. \"Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of _muffling_ , you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.\"\n\n_Wheels within wheels_ was another of Minna's phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we Boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he'd dated behind each other's backs, he'd bug his eyes and intone, _wheels within wheels_. No Met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away _\u2014wheels within wheels_. The barber, the cheese man, and the bookie were all named Carmine\u2014oh yeah, _wheels within wheels_ , big time. You're onto something there, Sherlock.\n\nBy implication we orphans were idiots of connectivity, overly impressed by any trace of the familial in the world. We should doubt ourselves any time we imagined a network in operation. We should leave that stuff to Minna. Just as he knew the identity of our parents but would never reveal it to us, only Frank Minna was authorized to speculate on the secret systems that ran Court Street or the world. If we dared chime in, we'd surely only discovered more _wheels within wheels_. Business as usual. The regular fucking world\u2014get used to it.\n\nOne day in April, five months after that Christmas meal, Minna drove up with all his windows thoroughly smashed, the van transformed into a blinding crystalline sculpture, a mirrorball on wheels, reflecting the sun. It was plainly the work of a man with a hammer or crowbar and no fear of interruption. Minna appeared not to have noticed; he ferried us out to a job without mentioning it. On our way back to the Home, as we rumbled over the cobblestones of Hoyt Street, Tony nodded at the windshield, which sagged in its frame like a beaded curtain, and said, \"So what happened?\"\n\n\"What happened to what?\" It was a Minna game, forcing us to be literal when we'd been trained by him to talk in glances, in three-corner shots.\n\n\"Somebody fucked up your van.\"\n\nMinna shrugged, excessively casual. \"I parked it on that block of Pacific Street.\"\n\nWe didn't know what he was talking about.\n\n\"These guys around that block had this thing about how I was uglifying the neighborhood.\" A few weeks after Gilbert's paint job the van had been covered again with graffiti, vast filled-in outlines of incoherent ballooning font and an overlay of stringy tags. Something made Minna's van a born target, the flat battered sides like a windowless subway car, a homely public surface crying for spray paint where both private cars and bigger, glossier commercial trucks were inviolate. \"They told me not to park it around there anymore. Then after I did it a couple of times more, they told me a different way.\"\n\nMinna lifted both hands from the wheel to gesture his indifference. We weren't totally convinced.\n\n\"Someone's sending a message,\" said Tony.\n\n\"What's that?\" said Minna.\n\n\"I just said it's a message,\" said Tony. I knew he wanted to ask about Matricardi and Rockaforte. Were they involved? Couldn't they protect Minna from having his windows smashed? We all wanted to ask about them and never would, unless Tony did it first.\n\n\"Yeah, but what are you trying to say?\" said Minna.\n\n_\"Fuckitmessage,\"_ I suggested impulsively.\n\n\"You know what I mean,\" said Tony defiantly, ignoring me.\n\n\"Yeah, maybe,\" said Minna. \"But put it in your own words.\" I could feel his anger unfolding, smooth as a fresh deck of cards.\n\n_\"Tellmetofuckitall!\"_ I was like a toddler devising a tantrum to keep his parents from fighting.\n\nBut Minna wasn't distractable. \"Quiet, Freakshow,\" he said, never taking his eyes from Tony. \"Tell me what you said,\" he told Tony again.\n\n\"Nothing,\" said Tony. \"Damn.\" He was backpedaling.\n\nMinna pulled the van to the curb at a fire hydrant on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt. Outside, a couple of black men sat on a stoop, drinking from a bag. They squinted at us.\n\n\"Tell me what you said,\" Minna insisted.\n\nHe and Tony stared at one another, and the rest of us melted back. I swallowed away a few variations.\n\n\"Just, you know, somebody's sending you a message.\" Tony smirked.\n\nThis clearly infuriated Minna. He and Tony suddenly spoke a private language in which _message_ signified heavily. \"You think you know a thing,\" he said.\n\n\"All I'm saying is I can see what they did to your truck, Frank.\" Tony scuffed his feet in the layer of tiny cubes of safety glass that had peeled away from the limp window and lay scattered on the floor of the van.\n\n\"That's not all you said, Dickweed.\"\n\nThat was the first I heard Minna use the term that would become lodged thereafter in my uppermost tic-echelon: _dickweed_. I didn't know whether he borrowed the nickname or invented it himself on the spot.\n\nWhat it meant to me I still can't say. Perhaps it was inscribed in my vocabulary, though, by the trauma of that day: Our little organization was losing its innocence, although I couldn't have explained how or why.\n\n\"I can't help what I see,\" said Tony. \"Somebody put a hit on your windows.\"\n\n\"Think you're a regular little wiseguy, don't you?\"\n\nTony stared at him.\n\n\"You want to be Scarface?\"\n\nTony didn't give his answer, but we knew what it was. _Scarface_ had opened a month before, and Al Pacino was ascendant, a personal colossus astride Tony's world, blocking out the sky.\n\n\"See, the thing about Scarface,\" said Minna, \"is before he got to be Scarface he was _Scabface_. Nobody ever considers that. You have to want to be Scabface first.\"\n\nFor a second I thought Minna was going to hit Tony, damage his face to make the point. Tony seemed to be waiting for it too. Then Minna's fury leaked away.\n\n\"Out,\" he said. He waved his hand, a Caesar gesturing to the heavens through the dented roof of his refitted postal van.\n\n\"What?\" said Tony. \"Right here?\"\n\n\"Out,\" he said again, equably. \"Walk home, you muffin asses.\" We sat gaping, though his meaning was clear enough. We weren't more than five or six blocks from the Home anyway. But we hadn't been paid, hadn't gone for beers or slices or a bag of hot, clingy zeppole. I could taste the disappointment\u2014the flavor of powdered sugar's absence. Tony slid open the door, dislodging more glass, and we obediently filed out of the van and onto the sidewalk, into the day's glare, the suddenly formless afternoon.\n\nMinna drove off, leaving us there to bob together awkwardly before the drinkers on the stoop. They shook their heads at us, stupid-looking white boys a block from the projects. But we were in no danger there, nor were we dangerous ourselves. There was something so primally humiliating in our ejection that Hoyt Street itself seemed to ridicule us, humble row of brownstones, sleeping bodega. We were inexcusable to ourselves. Others clotted street corners, not us, not anymore. We rode with Minna. The effect was deliberate: Minna knew the value of the gift he'd withdrawn.\n\n_\"Muffin ass,\"_ I said forcefully, measuring the shape of the words in my mouth, auditioning them for tic-richness. Then I sneezed, induced by the sunlight.\n\nGilbert and Danny looked at me with disgust, Tony with something worse.\n\n\"Shut up,\" he said. There was cold fury in his teeth-clenched smile.\n\n\"Tellmetodoit, muffinass,\" I croaked.\n\n\"Be quiet now,\" warned Tony. He plucked a piece of wood from the gutter and took a step toward me.\n\nGilbert and Danny drifted away from us warily. I would have followed them, but Tony had me cornered against a parked car. The men on the stoop stretched back on their elbows, slurped their malt liquor thoughtfully.\n\n_\"Dickweed,\"_ I said. I tried to mask it in another sneeze, which made something in my neck pop. I twitched and spoke again. _\"Dickyweed! Dicketywood!\"_ I was trapped in a loop of self, one already too familiar, that of refining a verbal tic to free myself from its grip (not yet knowing how tenacious would be the grip of those particular syllables). Certainly I didn't mean to be replying to Tony. Yet _dickweed_ was the name Minna had called him, and I was throwing it in his face.\n\nTony held the stick he'd found, a discarded scrap of lath with clumps of plaster stuck to it. I stared, anticipating my own pain as I'd anticipated Tony's, at Minna's hand, a minute before. Instead Tony moved close, stick at his side, and grabbed my collar.\n\n\"Open your mouth again,\" he said.\n\n\"Restrictaweed, detectorwood, vindictaphone,\" said I, prisoner of my syndrome. I grabbed Tony back, my hands exploring his collar, fingers running inside it like an anxious, fumbling lover.\n\nGilbert and Danny had started up Hoyt Street, in the direction of the Home. \"C'mon, Tony,\" said Gilbert, tilting his head. Tony ignored them. He scraped his stick in the gutter, and came up with a smear of dog shit, mustard-yellow and pungent.\n\n\"Open,\" he said.\n\nNow Gilbert and Danny were just slinking away, heads bowed. The street was brightly, absurdly empty. Nobody but the black men on the stoop, impassive witnesses. I jerked my head as Tony jabbed with his stick\u2014tic as evasive maneuver\u2014and he only managed to paint my cheek. I could smell it, though, powdered sugar's opposite made tangible, married to my face.\n\n_\"Stickmebailey!\"_ I shouted. Falling back against the car behind me, I turned my head again, and again, twitching away, enshrining the moment in ticceography. The stain followed me, adamant, on fire. Or maybe it was my cheek that was on fire.\n\nOur witnesses crinkled their paper bag, offered ruminative sighs.\n\nTony dropped his stick and turned from me. He'd disgusted himself, couldn't meet my eye. About to speak, he thought better of it, instead jogged to catch Gilbert and Danny as they shrugged away up Hoyt Street, leaving the scene.\n\nWe didn't see Minna again until five weeks later, Sunday morning at the Home's yard, late May. He had his brother Gerard with him; it was the second time we'd ever laid eyes on him.\n\nNone of us had seen Frank in the intervening weeks, though I know that the others, like myself, had each wandered down Court Street, nosed at a few of his usual haunts, the barbershop, the beverage outlet, the arcade. He wasn't in them. It meant nothing, it meant everything. He might never reappear, but if he turned up and didn't speak of it we wouldn't think twice. _We_ didn't speak of it to one another, but a pensiveness hung over us, tinged with orphan's melancholy, our resignation to permanent injury. A part of each of us still stood astonished on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen, where we'd been ejected from Minna's van, where we'd fallen when our inadequate wings melted in the sun.\n\nA horn honked, the Impala's, not the van's. Then the brothers got out and came to the cyclone fence and waited for us to gather. Tony and Danny were playing basketball, Gilbert perhaps ardently picking his nose on the sidelines. That's how I picture it anyway. I wasn't in the yard when they drove up. Gilbert had to come inside and pull me out of the Home library, to which I'd mostly retreated since Tony's attack, though Tony had shown no signs of repeating it. I was wedged into a windowsill seat, in sunshine laced with shadows from the barred window, when Gilbert found me there, immersed in a novel by Allen Drury.\n\nFrank and Gerard were dressed too warmly for that morning, Frank in his bomber jacket, Gerard in his patchwork leather coat. The backseat of the Impala was loaded with shopping bags packed with Frank's clothes and a pair of old leather suitcases that surely belonged to Gerard. I don't know that Frank Minna ever owned a suitcase in his life. They stood at the fence, Frank bouncing nervously on his toes, Gerard hanging on the mesh, fingers dangling through, doing nothing to conceal his impatience with his brother, an impatience shading into disgust.\n\nFrank smirked, raised his eyebrows, shook his head. Danny held his basketball between forearm and hip; Minna nodded at it, mimed a set shot, dropped his hand at the wrist, and made a delicate O with his mouth to signify the _swish_ that would result.\n\nThen, idiotically, he bounced a pretend pass to Gerard. His brother didn't seem to notice. Minna shook his head, then wheeled back to us and aimed two trigger fingers through the fence, and gritted his teeth for _rat-a-tat_ , a little imaginary schoolyard massacre. We could only gape at him dumbly. It was as though somebody had taken Minna's voice away. And Minna was his voice\u2014didn't he know? His eyes said yes, he did. They looked panicked, as if they'd been caged in the body of a mime.\n\nGerard gazed off emptily into the yard, ignoring the show. Minna made a few more faces, wincing, chuckling silently, shaking off some invisible annoyance by twitching his cheek. I fought to keep from mirroring him.\n\nThen he cleared his throat. \"I'm, ah, going out of town for a while,\" he said at last.\n\nWe waited for more. Minna just nodded and squinted and grinned his closemouthed grin at us as though he were acknowledging applause.\n\n\"Upstate?\" said Tony.\n\nMinna coughed in his fist. \"Oh yeah. Place my brother goes. He thinks we ought to just, you know. Get a little country air.\"\n\n\"When are you coming back?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Ah, coming back,\" said Minna. \"You got an unknown there, Scarface. Unknown factors.\"\n\nWe must have gaped at him, because he added, \"I wouldn't wait underwater, if that's what you had in mind.\"\n\nWe were in our second year of high school. That measure loomed suddenly, a door of years swinging open into what had been a future counted in afternoons. Would we know Minna whenever it was he got back? Would we know each other?\n\nMinna wouldn't be there to tell us what to think of Minna's not being there, to give it a name.\n\n\"All right, Frank,\" said Gerard, turning his back to the fence. \"Motherless Brooklyn appreciates your support. I think we better get on the road.\"\n\n\"My brother's in a hurry,\" said Frank. \"He's seeing ghosts everywhere.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I'm looking right at one,\" said Gerard, though in fact he wasn't looking at anyone, only the car.\n\nMinna tilted his head at us, at his brother, to say _you know_. And _sorry_.\n\nThen he pulled a book out of his pocket, a small paperback. I don't think I'd ever seen a book in his hands before. \"Here,\" he said to me. He dropped it on the pavement and nudged it under the fence with the toe of his shoe. \"Take a look,\" he said. \"Turns out you're not the only freak in the show.\"\n\nI picked it up. _Understanding Tourette's Syndrome_ was the title, first time I'd seen the word.\n\n\"Meaning to get that to you,\" he said. \"But I've been sort of busy.\"\n\n\"Great,\" said Gerard, taking Minna by the arm. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\nTony had been searching every day after school, I suspect. It was three days later that he found it and led us others there, to the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at the end of Kane Street. The van was diminished, sagged to its rims, tires melted. The explosion had cleared the windows of their crumbled panes of safety glass, which now lay in a spilled penumbra of grains on the sidewalk and street, together with flakes of traumatized paint and smudges of ash, a photographic map of force. The panels of the truck were layered, graffiti still evident in bone-white outline, all else\u2014Gilbert's shoddy coat of enamel and the manufacturer's ancient green\u2014now chalky black, and delicate like sunburned skin. It was like an X ray of the van that had been before.\n\nWe circled it, strangely reverent, afraid to touch, and I thought, _Ashes, ashes_ \u2014and then I ran away, up Kane, toward Court Street, before anything could come out of my mouth.\n\nOver the next two years I grew larger\u2014neither fat nor particularly muscular, but large, bearlike, and so harder for the bantamweight Tony or anyone else to bully\u2014and I grew stranger. With the help of Minna's book I contextualized my symptoms as Tourette's, then discovered how little context that was. My constellation of behaviors was \"unique as a snowflake,\" oh, joy, and evolving, like some micro-scoped crystal in slow motion, to reveal new facets, and to spread from its place at my private core to cover my surface, my public front. The freak show was now the whole show, and my earlier, ticless self impossible anymore to recall clearly. I read in the book of the drugs that might help me, Haldol, Klonopin, and Orap, and laboriously insisted on the Home's once-weekly visiting nurse helping me achieving diagnosis and prescription, only to discover an absolute intolerance: The chemicals slowed my brain to a morose crawl, were a boot on my wheel of self. I might outsmart my symptoms, disguise or incorporate them, frame them as eccentricity or vaudeville, but I wouldn't narcotize them, not if it meant dimming the world (or my brain\u2014same thing) to twilight.\n\nWe survived Sarah J. Hale in our different ways. Gilbert had grown, too, and grown a scowl, and he'd learned to sneer or lurch his way through difficulties. Danny coasted elegantly on his basketball skills and sophisticated musical taste, which had evolved through \"Rapper's Delight\" and Funkadelic to Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes and Teddy Pendergrass. If I saw him in certain company, I knew not to bother saying hello, as he was incapable of recognizing us others from deep within his cone of self-willed blackness. Tony more or less dropped out\u2014it was hard to be officially expelled from Sarah J., so few teachers took attendance\u2014and spent his high-school years on Court Street, hanging out at the arcade, milking acquaintanceships made through Minna for cigarettes and odd jobs and rides on the back of Vespas, and getting lucky with a series of Minna's ex-girlfriends, or so he said. For a six-month stint he was behind the counter at Queen Pizzeria, shoveling slices out of the oven and into white paper bags, taking smoking breaks under the marquee of the triple-X theater next door. I'd stop in and he'd batter me with cheap insults, un-Minna-worthy feints for the amusement of the older pizza men, then guiltily slip me a free slice, then shoo me away with more insults and maybe a slap on the head or a too-realistic fake jab to the spleen.\n\nMe, I became a walking joke, preposterous, improbable, unseeable. My outbursts, utterances and tappings were white noise or static, irritating but tolerated, and finally boring unless they happened to provoke a response from some unsavvy adult, a new or substitute teacher. My peers, even the most unreachable and fearsome black girls, understood instinctively what the teachers and counselors at Sarah J., hardened into a sort of paramilitary force by dire circumstance, were slow to get: My behavior wasn't teenage rebellion in any sense. And so it wasn't really of _interest_ to other teenagers. I wasn't tough, provocative, stylish, self-destructive, sexy, wasn't babbling some secret countercultural tongue, wasn't testing authority, wasn't showing colors of any kind. I wasn't even one of the two or three heedless, timid, green-mohawked and leather-clad punk rockers who required constant beatings for their audacity. I was merely crazy.\n\nBy the time Minna returned Gilbert and I were about to graduate\u2014no great feat, mostly a matter of showing up, staying awake, and, in Gilbert's case, of systematically recopying my completed homework in his own hand. Tony had completely stopped showing his face at Sarah J. and Danny was somewhere in between\u2014a presence in the yard and the gym, and in the culture of the school, he'd skipped most of his third-year classes and was being \"held back,\" though the concept was a bit abstract to him, I think. You could have told him he was being returned to kindergarten and he would have shrugged, only asked how high the hoops were placed in the yard, whether the rims could hold his weight.\n\nMinna had Tony in the car already when he drove up outside the school. Gilbert went to the yard to pull Danny out of a three-on-three while I stood on the curb, motionless in the rush of students out of the building, briefly struck dumb. Minna got out of the car, a new Cadillac, bruise-purple. I was taller than Minna now, but that didn't lessen his sway over me, the way his presence automatically begged the question of who I was, where'd I come from, and what kind of man or freak I was turning out to be. It had everything to do with the way, five years before, I'd begun discovering myself upon Minna's jerking me out of the library and into the world, and with the way his voice had primed the pump for mine. My symptoms loved him. I reached for him\u2014though it was May, he was wearing a trench coat\u2014and tapped his shoulder, once, twice, let my hand fall, then raised it again and let fly a staccato burst of Tourettic caresses. Minna still hadn't spoken.\n\n\"Eatme, Minnaweed,\" I said under my breath.\n\n\"You're a laugh and a half, Freakshow,\" said Minna, his face completely grim.\n\nSoon enough I would understand that the Minna who'd returned was not the same as the one who'd left. He'd shed his old jocularity like baby fat. He no longer saw drolleries everywhere, had lost his taste for the spectrum of human comedy. The gate of his attention was narrowed, and what came through it now was pointed and bitter. His affections were more glancing, his laugh just a wince. He was quicker to show the spur of his impatience, too, demanded less _tell your story_ , more _walking_.\n\nBut at that moment his austerity seemed utterly particular: He wanted us all in the car, had something to say. It was as though he'd been away a week or two instead of two years. He's got a job for us, I felt myself think, or hope, and the years between fell instantly away.\n\nGilbert brought Danny. We took the backseat; Tony sat in front with Minna. Minna lit a cigarette while he steered with his elbows. We turned off Fourth Avenue, down Bergen. Toward Court Street, I thought. Minna put his lighter away and his hand came out of his trench-coat pockets with business cards.\n\nL&L CAR SERVICE, they read. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. And a phone number. No slogan this time, and no names.\n\n\"You mooks ever get learners' permits?\" said Minna.\n\nNobody had.\n\n\"You know where the DMV is, up on Schermerhorn? Here.\" He dug out a roll, scrunched off four twenties onto the seat beside Tony, who handed them out. For Minna everything had the same price, was fixed and paid for by the quick application of twenty dollars. That hadn't changed. \"I'll drop you up there. First I want you to see something.\"\n\nIt was a tiny storefront on Bergen, just short of Smith Street, boarded so tightly it looked like a condemned building. But I, for one, was already familiar with the inside of it. A few years earlier it had been a miniature candy store, with a single rack of comics and magazines, run by a withered Hispanic woman who'd pinioned my arm when I slipped a copy of _Heavy Metal_ into my jacket and ducked for the door. Now Minna gestured at it grandly: the future home of L&L Car Service.\n\nMinna had an arrangement with a certain Lucas, at Corvairs Driving School, on Livingston Street\u2014we were all to receive lessons, free of charge, beginning tomorrow. The purple Caddy was the only vehicle in L&L's fleet, but others were on their way. (The car smelled poisonously new, vinyl squeaking like an Indian burn. My probing fingers investigated the backseat armrest ashtray\u2014it contained ten neatly clipped fingernails.) In the meantime we'd be busy getting our licenses and rehabilitating the ruined storefront, fitting it with radios, office equipment, stationery, telephones, tape recorders, microphones (tape recorders? microphones?), a television and a small refrigerator. Minna had money to spend on these things, and he wanted us along to see him spend it. We might look for some suitable clothes while were at it\u2014did we know we looked like rejects from _Welcome Back, Kotter_?\u2014the only thing to do was drop out of Sarah J. immediately. The suggestion didn't ruffle any feathers. In a blink we'd fallen into formation, Pavlov's orphans. We listened to Minna's new tonalities, distrusting and harsh, as they warmed into something like the old, more generous music, the tune we'd missed but not forgotten. He rolled on: We ought to have a CB-radio setup, this was the twentieth fucking century, had we heard? Who knew how to work a CB? Dead silence, punctured by _\"Radiobailey!\"_ Fine, said Minna, the Freak volunteers. Hello? Hello? We almond-studded cheeseballs were staring like we didn't know English\u2014what exactly _had_ we been doing for two years anyway, apart from researching how many times a day we could clean out our fish tanks? Silence. Spank our monkeys, rough up our suspects, _jerk off_ , Minna meant\u2014did he have to spell it out? More silence. Hello? Hey, had we ever seen _The Conversation_? Best fucking movie in the world, Gene Hackman. We knew Gene Hackman? Silence again. We knew him only from _Superman_ \u2014Lex Luthor. It didn't seem likely Minna meant _that_ Gene Hackman. ( _Lexluthor, text-lover, lostbrother_ , went my brain, plumbing up trouble\u2014where was Gerard, the other L in L&L? Minna hadn't said his name.) Well, we ought to see it, learn a thing or two about _surveillance_. Talking all the while, he drove us up to Schermerhorn, to the Department of Motor Vehicles. I saw Danny's eyes dart to the Sarah J. boys playing basketball in the park across the street\u2014but now we were with Minna, a million miles away. We ought to get limousine-operator's licenses, he went on. They only cost ten dollars more, the test is the same. Don't smile for the picture, you'll look like the Prom Date Killers. Did we have girlfriends? Of course not, who'd want a bunch of jerks from nowhere. By the way, the Old Stove was dead. Carlotta Minna had passed two weeks ago; Minna was just settling her affairs now. We wondered what affairs, didn't ask. Oh, and Minna had gotten married, he thought to mention now. He and his new wife were moving into Carlotta's old apartment, after first scouring the thirty-year-old sauce off the walls. We jarheads could meet Minna's bride if we got ourselves haircuts first. Was she from Brooklyn? Tony wanted to know. Not exactly; she grew up on an _island_. No, you jerks, not Manhattan or Long Island\u2014a real island. We'd meet her. Apparently first we had to be drivers who operated cameras, tape recorders and CB radios, with suits and haircuts, with unsmiling license photos. First we had to become _Minna Men_ , though no one had said those words.\n\nBut here, here was _the beauty part_. By Minna's own admission, he'd _buried the lead:_ L&L Car Service\u2014it wasn't really a car service. That was just a front. L&L was a _detective agency_.\n\nThe joke Minna wanted to hear in the emergency room, the joke about Irving, went like this:\n\nA Jewish mother\u2014Mrs. Gushman, we'll call her\u2014walks into a travel agency. \"I vant to go to Tibet,\" she says. \"Listen lady, take my word for it, you don't want to go to Tibet. I've got a nice package tour for the Florida Keys, or maybe Hawaii\u2014\" \"No,\" says Mrs. Gushman, \"I vant to go to _Tibet.\"_ \"Lady, are you traveling alone? Tibet is no place\u2014\" \"Sell me a ticket for Tibet!\" shouts Mrs. Gushman. \"Okay, okay.\" So she goes to Tibet. Gets off the plane, says to the first person she sees, \"Who's the greatest holy man in Tibet?\" \"Why, that would be the High Lama,\" comes the reply. \"That's who I vant to see,\" says Mrs. Gushman. \"Take me to the High Lama.\" \"Oh, no, you don't understand, American Lady, the High Lama lives on top of our highest mountain in total seclusion. No one can see the High Lama.\" \"I'm Mrs. Gushman, I've come all the vay to Tibet, and I must see the High Lama!\" \"Oh, but you could never\u2014\" \"Which mountain? How do I get there?\" So Mrs. Gushman checks into a hotel at the base of the mountain and hires sherpas to take her to the monastery at the top. All the way up they're trying to explain to her, nobody sees the High Lama\u2014his own monks have to fast and meditate for years before they're allowed to ask the High Lama a single question. She just keeps pointing her finger and saying \"I'm Mrs. Gushman, take me up the mountain!\" When they get to the monastery the sherpas explain to the monks\u2014crazy American lady, wants to see the High Lama. She says, \"Tell the High Lama Mrs. Gushman is here to see him.\" \"You don't understand, we could never\u2014\" \"Just tell him!\" The monks go and come back and they're shaking their heads in confusion. \"We don't understand, but the High Lama says he will grant you an audience. Do you understand what an honor\u2014\" \"Yes, yes,\" she says. \"Just take me!\" So they lead her in to see the High Lama. The monks are whispering and they open the door and the High Lama nods\u2014they can leave him alone with Mrs. Gushman. And the High Lama looks at Mrs. Gushman and Mrs. Gushman says, \"Irving, when are you coming home? Your father's worried!\"\n\n# INTERROGATION EYES\n\nMinna Men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna, hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men carry money. Minna Men collect money. Minna Men don't ask questions. Minna Men answer phones. Minna Men pick up packages. Minna Men are clean-shaven. Minna Men follow instructions. Minna Men try to be like Minna, but Minna is dead.\n\nGilbert and I left the hospital so quickly, and drove back in such a perfect fog of numbness, that when we walked into L&L and Tony said, \"Don't say it. We already heard,\" it was as though I were learning myself for the first time.\n\n\"Heard from who?\" said Gilbert.\n\n\"Black cop, through here a few minutes ago, looking for you,\" said Tony. \"You just missed him.\"\n\nTony and Danny stood furiously smoking cigarettes behind L&L's counter, their foreheads pasty with sweat, eyes fogged and distant, teeth grinding behind their drawn lips. They looked like somebody had worked them over and they wanted to take it out on us.\n\nThe Bergen Street office was as we'd renovated it fifteen years before: divided in two by the Formica counter, thirty-inch color television playing constantly in the \"waiting area\" on this side of the counter, telephones, file cabinets and computer on the rear wall, underneath a massive laminated map of Brooklyn, Minna's heavy Magic Marker numerals scrawled across each neighborhood, showing the price of an L&L ride\u2014five bucks to the Heights, seven to Park Slope or Fort Greene, twelve to Williamsburg or Borough Park, seventeen to Bushwick. Airports or Manhattan were twenty and up.\n\nThe ashtray on the counter was full of cigarette butts that had been in Minna's fingers, the telephone log full of his handwriting from earlier in the day. The sandwich on top of the fridge wore his bite marks. We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centerpiece, as incoherent as a verbless sentence.\n\n\"How did they find us?\" I said. \"We've got Frank's wallet.\" I opened it up and took out the bundle of Frank's business cards and slipped them into my pocket. Then I dropped it on the counter and slapped the Formica five times to finish a six-count.\n\nNobody minded me except myself. This was my oldest, most jaded audience. Tony shrugged and said, \"Him croaking out _L and L_ as his dying words? A business card in his coat? Gilbert giving out names like a fucking idiot? You tell _me_ how they found us.\"\n\n\"What did this cop want?\" said Gilbert stoically. He would deal with one problem at a time, the plodder, even if they stacked up from here to the moon.\n\n\"He said you weren't supposed to leave the hospital, that's what he said. You gave some nurse your _name_ , Gilbert.\"\n\n\"Fuck it,\" said Coney. \"Fuck some fucking black cop.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, you can express that sentiment in person, since he's coming back. And you might want to say, 'Fuck some fucking black homicide detective,' since that's actually what you're dealing with here. Smart cop, too. You could see it in his eyes.\"\n\n\"Fuckicide,\" I thought to add.\n\n\"Who's going to tell Julia?\" said Danny quietly. His mouth, his whole face, was veiled in smoke. Nobody answered.\n\n\"Well, I won't be here when he comes back,\" said Gilbert. \"I'll be out doing his work for him, catching the motherfucker who did this. Gimme a coffin nail.\"\n\n\"Slow down, Sherlock,\" said Tony, handing him a cigarette. \"I wanna know how'd it even happen in the first place? How'd the two of you even get involved? I thought you were supposed to be on a stakeout.\"\n\n\"Frank showed up,\" said Gilbert, trying to flick his depleted lighter again and again, failing to make it catch. \"He went inside. Fuck. Fuck.\" His voice was clenched like a fist. I saw the whole stupid sequence playing behind his eyes: parked car, wire, traffic light, Brainum, the chain of banalities that somehow led to the bloody Dumpster and the hospital. The chain of banalities now immortalized by our guilt.\n\n\"Inside _where?\"_ said Tony, handing Gilbert a book of matches. The phone rang.\n\n\"Some kinda kung-fu place,\" said Gilbert. \"Ask Lionel, he knows all about it\u2014\"\n\n\"Not kung fu,\" I started. \"Meditation\u2014\"\n\n\"You're trying to say they killed him with _meditation_?\" said Tony. The phone rang a second time.\n\n\"No, no, we saw who killed him\u2014 _Viable Guessfrog!_ \u2014a big Polish guy\u2014 _Barnamum Pierogi!_ \u2014I mean _really_ big. We only saw him from behind.\"\n\n\"Which one of us is going to tell Julia?\" said Danny again. The phone rang a third time.\n\nI picked it up and said, \"L and L.\"\n\n\"Need a car at One-eighty-eight Warren, corner of\u2014\" droned a female voice.\n\n\"No cars,\" I said by rote.\n\n\"You don't have any cars?\"\n\n\"No cars.\" I gulped, ticking like a time bomb.\n\n\"How soon can you get a car?\"\n\n_\"Lionel Deathclam!\"_ I shouted into the phone. That got the caller's attention, enough that she hung up. My fellow Minna Men glanced at me, jarred only slightly from their hard-boiled despair.\n\nA real car service, even a small one, has a fleet of no fewer than thirty cars working in rotation, and at the very least ten on the street at any given time. Elite, our nearest rival, on Court Street, has sixty cars, three dispatchers, probably twenty-five drivers on a shift. Rusty's, on Atlantic Avenue, has eighty cars. New Rel\u00e1mpago, a Dominican-run service out of Williamsburg, has one hundred and sixty cars, a magisterial secret economy of private transportation hidden deep in the borough. Car services are completely dependent on phone dispatches\u2014the drivers are forbidden by law to pick up customers on the street, lest they compete with medallioned taxicabs. So the drivers and dispatchers litter the world with business cards, slip them into apartment foyers like Chinese take-out menus, leave them stacked beside potted plants in hospital waiting rooms, palm them out with the change at the end of every ride. They sticker pay phones with their phone number, writ in phosphorescent font.\n\nL&L had five cars, one for each of us, and we were barely ever available to drive them. We never handed out cards, were never friendly to callers, and had, five years before, removed our phone number from both the Yellow Pages and the sign over the Bergen Street storefront.\n\nNevertheless, our number circulated, so that one of our main activities was picking up the phone to say \"no cars.\"\n\nAs I replaced the receiver Gilbert was explaining what he knew about the stakeout, doggedly. English might have been his fourth or fifth language from the sound of it, but you couldn't question his commitment. As _Bionic Dreadlog_ was my likely contribution\u2014my mourning brain had decided renaming itself was the evening's assignment\u2014I was in no position to criticize. I stepped outside, away from the chainsmoking confusion, into the cold, light-washed night. Smith Street was alive, F train murmuring underneath, pizzeria, Korean grocer, and the Casino all streaming with customers. It could have been any night\u2014nothing in the Smith Street scene required that Minna have died that day. I went to the car and retrieved the notebook from the glove compartment, doing my best not to glance at the bloodstained backseat. Then I thought of Minna's final ride. There was something I'd forgotten. When I steeled myself to look in the back I saw what it was: his watch and beeper. I fished them out from under the passenger seat where they'd slid and put them in my pocket.\n\nI locked the car and rehearsed a few imaginary options. I could go back to the Yorkville Zendo by myself and have a look around. I could also seek out the homicide detective, earn his trust, pool my knowledge with him instead of the Men. I could walk down Atlantic Avenue, sit in an Arabic storefront where they knew me and wouldn't gape, and drink a tiny cup of mudlike black coffee and eat a baklava or Crow's Nest\u2014acid, steam and sugar to poison my grief.\n\nOr I could go back into the office. I went back into the office. Gilbert was still fumbling with the end of his account, our race up the ambulance ramp, the confusion at the hospital. He wanted Tony and Danny to know we'd done all we could do. I laid the notebook flat on the counter and with a red ballpoint circled WOMAN, GLASSES and ULLMAN, DOWNTOWN, those crucial new players on our stage. Paper-thin and unrevealing as they might be, they had more life than Minna now.\n\nI had other questions: The building they'd spoken of. The doorman's interference. The unnamed woman Frank lost control of, the one who missed her _Rama-lama-ding-dong_. The wiretap itself: What did Minna hope I'd hear? Why couldn't he just tell me what to listen for?\n\n\"We asked him, in the back of the car,\" said Gilbert. \"We asked him and he wouldn't tell us. I don't know why he wouldn't tell.\"\n\n\"Asked him what?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Asked him who killed him,\" said Gilbert. \"I mean, before he was dead.\"\n\nI remembered the name Irving, but didn't say anything.\n\n\"Somebody's definitely going to have to tell Julia,\" said Danny.\n\nGilbert grasped the significance of the notebook. He stepped over and read what I'd circled. \"Who's Ullman?\" said Gilbert, looking at me. \"You wrote this?\"\n\n\"In the car,\" I said. \"It's the note I took in the car. 'Ullman, downtown' was where Frank was supposed to go when he got into the car. The guy in the Zendo, who sent him out\u2014that's where he was sending him.\"\n\n\"Sent him where?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" I said. \"He didn't go. The giant took him and killed him instead. What matters is who sent him\u2014 _Failey! Bakum! Flakely!_ \u2014the guy inside the place.\"\n\n\"I'm not telling Julia,\" said Danny. \"I don't care what anyone says.\"\n\n\"Well, it ain't gonna be me,\" said Gilbert, noticing Danny at last.\n\n\"We ought to go back to the East Side\u2014 _TrickyZendo!_ \u2014and have a look around.\" I was panting to get to the point, and Julia didn't seem to me to be it.\n\n\"All right, all right,\" said Tony. \"We're gonna put our fucking heads together here.\"\n\nAt the word _heads_ I was blessed with a sudden vision: Lacking Minna, ours, put together, were as empty and tenuous as balloons. Untethered by his death, the only question was how quickly they would drift apart, how far\u2014and whether they'd burst or just wither.\n\n\"Okay,\" said Tony. \"Gilbert, we gotta get you out of here. You're the name they've got. So we'll get you out doing some hoofwork. You look for this Ullman guy.\"\n\n\"How am I supposed to do that?\" Gilbert wasn't exactly a specialist in digging up leads.\n\n\"Why don't you let me help him?\" I said.\n\n\"I need you for something else,\" said Tony. \"Gilbert can find Ullman.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Gilbert. \"But how?\"\n\n\"Maybe his name's in the book,\" said Tony. \"It's not so common, Ullman. Or maybe in Frank's book\u2014you got that? Frank's address book?\"\n\nGilbert looked at me.\n\n\"Must still be in his coat,\" I said. \"Back at the hospital.\" But this triggered a compulsive self-frisking anyway. I patted each of my pockets six times. Under my breath I said, _\"Franksbook, forkspook, finksblood\u2014\"_\n\n\"Great,\" said Tony. \"That's just great. Well, show some initiative for once and find the guy. That's your _job_ , Gilbert, for chrissakes. Call your pal, the garbage cop\u2014he's got access to police records, right? Find Ullman and size him up. Maybe he's your giant. He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.\"\n\n\"The guy upstairs set Frank up,\" I said. I was frustrated that Gilbert and his jerk friend from the Sanitation Police were getting the assignment to track Ullman. \"They were in it together, the guy upstairs and the giant. He knew the giant was waiting downstairs.\"\n\n\"Okay, but the giant could still be this guy Ullman,\" said Tony irritably. \"And that's what Gilbert's going to find out, okay?\"\n\nI raised my hands in surrender, then snatched an imaginary fly out of the air.\n\n\"I'll go up to the East Side myself,\" said Tony. \"Take a look around. See if I can get into this building. Danny, you mind the store.\"\n\n\"Check,\" said Danny, stubbing out his cigarette.\n\n\"That cop's gonna come back around,\" said Tony. \"You talk to him. Cooperate, just don't give him anything. We don't want to look like we're panicking.\" Implicit in this assignment was the notion of Danny's superior rapport with the _fucking black cop_.\n\n\"You make it sound like we're the suspects,\" I said.\n\n\"That's how this cop made it sound,\" said Tony. \"It isn't me.\"\n\n\"What about me?\" I said. \"You want me\u2014 _Criminal Fishrug!_ \u2014to go with you? I know the place.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Tony. \"You go explain to Julia.\"\n\nJulia Minna had come back with Frank from wherever he'd gone between the dissolution of the moving company and the founding of the detective agency. She might have been the last and greatest of the Minna girls, for all we knew\u2014she sure looked the part: tall, plush, blond by nurture, defiant around the jaw. It was easy to imagine Minna joshing with her, untucking her shirt, taking an elbow in the stomach. But by the time we got to meet her the two had initiated their long, dry stalemate. All that remained of their original passion was a faint crackle of electricity animating their insults, their drab swipes at one another. That was all that showed anyway. Julia terrified us at first, not for anything she did, but because of her cool grip on Minna, and also how tense he was around her, how ready to punish us with his words.\n\nIf Julia and Frank had still been animated, quickened with love, we might have remained in infantile awe of her, our fascination and lust still adolescent. But the chill between them was an opening. In our imaginations we became Frank and loved her, unchilled her, grew to manhood in her arms. If we were angry or disappointed with Frank Minna we felt connected to his beautiful, angry, disappointed wife, and were thrilled. She became an idol of disillusionment. Frank had shown us what girls were, and now he'd shown us a woman. And by failing to love her, he'd left a margin for our love to grow.\n\nIn our dreams we Minna Men were all Frank Minna\u2014that wasn't news. But now we shot a little higher: If we had Julia we would do better than Frank, and make her happy.\n\nOr so went dreams. I suppose over the years the other Minna Men conquered their fear and awe and desire of Julia, or anyway modulated it, by finding women of their own to make happy and unhappy, to enchant and disenchant and discard.\n\nAll except me, of course.\n\nIn the beginning Minna had Julia installed in the office of a Court Street lawyer, in a storefront as small as L&L's. We Men used to drop in on her there with little deliveries, messages or gifts from Frank, and watch her answering phones, reading _People_ , making bad coffee. Minna seemed eager to show us off to her, more eager than he was to drop in himself. Similarly, he seemed pleased to have Julia on showcase there, under glass on Court Street. We all intuitively grasped Minna's instinct for human symbols, for moving us around to mark territory, so in this one sense Julia Minna had joined the Men, was on the team. Something went wrong, however, something soured between Julia and the lawyer, and Minna dragged her back to Carlotta Minna's old second-story apartment on Baltic Street, where she'd stayed for most of fifteen years, a sulking housewife. I could never visit without thinking of Carlotta's plates of food being carried down the stairwell by Court Street's assorted mugs. The old stove itself was gone, though. Julia and Frank mostly ate out.\n\nI went to that apartment now, and knocked on the door, rolling my knuckles to get the right sound.\n\n\"Hello, Lionel,\" Julia said after peering at me through the peephole. She left the door unlatched and turned her back. I ducked inside. She wore a slip, her ripe arms bared, but below it she was already in stockings and heels. The apartment was dark, except for the bedroom. I shut the door behind me and followed her in, to where a dusty suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by heaps of clothing. It wasn't going to be my privilege to be first with the news anywhere, apparently. In a mass of lingerie already inside the suitcase I spotted something dark and shiny, half smothered there. A pistol.\n\nJulia rummaged in her dresser, her back still turned. I propped myself in the closet doorframe, feeling awkward.\n\nI could make out her labored breathing as she fumbled through the drawers.\n\n\"Who told you, Julia? _Eat, eat, eat_ \u2014\" I ground my teeth, trying to check the impulse.\n\n\"Who do you think? I got a call from the hospital.\"\n\n_\"Eat, ha ha, eat_ \u2014\" I revved like a motor.\n\n\"You want me to eat you, Lionel?\" Her tone was grimly casual. \"Just come out and say it.\"\n\n\"Okayeatme,\" I said gratefully. \"You're packing? I mean, I don't mean the gun.\" I thought of Minna reprimanding Gilbert at the car, a few hours before. _You with no gun_ , he'd said. _That's how I sleep at night_. \"Packing your clothes\u2014\"\n\n\"Did they tell you to come over here and comfort me?\" she said sharply. \"Is that what you're doing?\"\n\nShe turned. I saw the redness in her eyes and the heaviness and softness of the flesh around her mouth. She groped for a pack of cigarettes that lay on the dresser, and when she put one between her grief-swollen lips I checked myself for a lighter I knew I wasn't carrying, just to make a show of it. She lit the cigarette herself, chopping at a matchbook angrily, throwing off a little curl of spark.\n\nThe scene stirred me in about twelve different ways. Somehow Frank Minna was still alive in this room, alive in Julia in her slip with her half-packed suitcase, her cigarette, her gun. The two of them were closer at this moment than they had ever been. More truly married. But she was hurrying away. I sensed that if I let her go, that essence of him that I detected would go, too.\n\nShe looked at me and flared the end of the cigarette, then blew out smoke. \"You jerks killed him,\" she said.\n\nHer cigarette dangled in her fingers. I fought off a weird imagining: that she'd catch her slip on fire\u2014it did seem flammable, practically looked aflame already\u2014and that I'd have to put her out, drench her with a glass of water. This was an uncomfortable feature of Tourette's\u2014my brain would throw up ugly fantasies, glimpses of pain, disasters narrowly averted. It liked to flirt with such images, the way my twitchy fingers were drawn near the blades of a spinning fan. Perhaps I also craved a crisis I could master, now, after failing Minna. I wanted to protect someone, and Julia would do.\n\n\"It wasn't us, Julia,\" I said. \"We just didn't manage to keep him alive. He was killed by a giant, a guy the size of six guys.\"\n\n\"That's great,\" she said. \"That sounds great. You've got it down, Lionel. You sound just like them. I hate the way you all talk, you know that?\" She went back to stuffing clothes anarchically into the suitcase.\n\nI mimed her striking of the match, one long motion away from my body, more or less keeping my cool. In fact, I wanted to run my hands through the clothes on the bed, snap the suitcase latches open and shut, lick the vinyl.\n\n\"Jerktalk!\" I said.\n\nShe ignored me. A police siren sounded out on Smith Street and Baltic, and I shuddered. If the hospital had phoned her, the police couldn't be too far behind. But the sirens stopped half a block away. Just a traffic stop, a shakedown. Any given car on any given evening on Smith Street fit a profile, some profile. The cop's red light strobed through the margin of window under the shade, to throw a glow over the bed and Julia's glossy outline.\n\n\"You can't go, Julia.\"\n\n\"Watch.\"\n\n\"We need you.\"\n\nShe smirked at me. \"You'll manage.\"\n\n\"No, really, Julia. Frank put L and L in your name. We work for you now.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Julia, interested now, or feigning interest\u2014she made me too nervous to tell. \"All I see before me is mine? Is that what you're telling me?\"\n\nI gulped, jerked my head to the side, as though she were looking behind me.\n\n\"You think I should come down and oversee the day-to-day business of a _car service_ , Lionel? Have a look at the _books?_ You think that might be a good occupation for the widow?\"\n\n\"We're\u2014 _Detectapush! Octaphone!_ \u2014we're a detective agency. We're going to catch whoever did this.\" Even as I spoke, I tried to order my thoughts according to this principle: detectives, clues, investigation. I should be gathering information. I wondered for a moment if Julia were the _her_ Frank had lost control of, according to the insinuating voice on the wire at the Zendo.\n\nOf course, that would mean she missed her _Rama-lama-ding-dong_. Whatever that was, I couldn't really picture Julia missing it.\n\n\"That's right,\" she said. \"I forgot. I'm heir to a corrupt and inept detective agency. Get out of my way, Lionel.\" She set her cigarette on the edge of the dresser and pushed past me, into the closet.\n\n_Inupt and corrept_ , went the brain of Essrog the Idiotic. _You are corrept, sir!_\n\n\"God, look at these dresses,\" she said as she poked through the rack of hangers. Her voice was suddenly choked. \"You see these?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"They're worth more than the car service put together.\"\n\n\"Julia\u2014\"\n\n\"This isn't how I dress, really. This isn't how I look. I don't even like these dresses.\"\n\n\"How do you look?\"\n\n\"You could never imagine. I can barely remember, myself. Before Frank dressed me up.\"\n\n\"Show me.\"\n\n\"Ha.\" She looked away. \"I'm supposed to be the widow in black. You'd like that. I'd look really good. That's what Frank kept me around for, my big moment. No thanks. Tell Tony no thanks.\" She swept at the dresses, pushing them deeper into the closet. Then she abruptly pulled two out by the hangers and threw them onto the bed, where they spread over the suitcase like roosting butterflies. They weren't black.\n\n\"Tony?\" I said. I was distracted, my eagle eye watching the ash burn longer, the glowing end of the abandoned cigarette inching toward the wood of the dresser.\n\n\"That's right, Tony. Fucking Frank Minna Junior. I'm sorry, Lionel, did you want to be Frank? Did I hurt your feelings? I'm afraid Tony has the inside track.\"\n\n\"That cigarette is going to burn the wood.\"\n\n\"Let it burn,\" she said.\n\n\"Is that a quote from a movie? 'Let it burn'? I feel like I remember that from some movie\u2014 _Burnamum Beatme!_ \"\n\nShe turned her back to me, moved again to the bed. Untangling the dresses from their hangers, she stuffed one into the suitcase, then held the other open and stepped into it, careful not to snag the heels of her shoes. I gripped the closet doorframe, stifling an impulse to bat like a kitten at the shimmery fabric as she slid the dress up around her hips and over her shoulders.\n\n\"Come here, Lionel,\" she said, without turning around. \"Zip me up.\"\n\nAs I reached out, I was compelled to tap each of her shoulders twice, gently. She didn't seem to mind. Then I took hold of the zipper tab, eased it upward. As I did she took her hair in her hands, raised her arms above her head and turned, so that she rolled into my embrace. I kept hold of the tab, halfway up her back. Up close I saw how her eyes and lips looked like something barely rescued from drowning.\n\n\"Don't stop,\" she said.\n\nShe rested her elbows high on my shoulders and gazed up at my face while I tugged at the zipper. I held my breath.\n\n\"You know, when I met Frank I'd never shaved my armpits before. He made me shave.\" She spoke the words into my chest, her voice dopey now, absent-sounding. All the anger was gone.\n\nI got the zipper to the nape of her neck and dropped my hands, then took a step back and exhaled. She still held her hair bunched above her head.\n\n\"Maybe I'll grow the hair back. What do you think, Lionel?\"\n\nI opened my mouth and what came out, soft but unmistakable, was \"Doublebreasts.\"\n\n\"All breasts are double, Lionel. Didn't you know that?\"\n\n\"That was just a tic,\" I said awkwardly, lowering my eyes.\n\n\"Give me your hands, Lionel.\"\n\nI lifted my hands again, and she took them.\n\n\"God, they're big. You have such big hands, Lionel.\" Her voice was dreamy and singsong, like a child, or a grownup pretending to be a child. \"I mean\u2014the way you move them around so quickly, when you do that thing you do, all that grabbing, touching stuff. What's that called again?\"\n\n\"That's a tic, too, Julia.\"\n\n\"I always think of your hands as small because they move so fast. But they're big.\"\n\nShe moved them to her breasts.\n\nSexual excitement stills my Tourette's brain, not by numbing me, dimming the world like Orap or Klonopin, those muffling medications, but instead by setting up a deeper attentiveness in me, a finer vibration, which gathers and encompasses my urgent chaos, enlists it in a greater cause, like a chorus of voices somehow drawing a shriek into harmony. I'm still myself and still in myself, a rare and precious combination. Yes, I like sex very much. I don't get it very often. When I do, I find I want to slow it down to a crawl, live in that place, get to meet my stilled self, give him a little time to look around. Instead I'm hurried along by the conventional urgencies, by those awkward, alcohol-fueled juxtapositions of persons that have so far provided my few glimpses of arousal's haven. But oh, if I could have just spent a week or so with my hands on Julia's breasts, then I could think straight!\n\nAlas, my very first straight thought guided my hands elsewhere. I went and plucked the smoldering cigarette off the dresser, rescuing the finish, and since Julia's lips were slightly parted I stuck it there, filter end first.\n\n\"Double, see?\" she said as she drew on the cigarette. She combed her hair with her fingers, then straightened her slip under her dress where I'd held her.\n\n\"What's double?\"\n\n\"You know, breasts.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't make fun of\u2014 _Lyrical Eggdog! Logical Assnog!_ \u2014you shouldn't make fun of me, Julia.\"\n\n\"I'm not.\"\n\n\"Did something\u2014Is there something between you and Tony?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Screw Tony. I like you better, Lionel. I just never told you.\" She was hurt, erratic, her voice straying wildly, searching for a place to rest.\n\n\"I like you, too, Julia. There's nothing\u2014 _Screwtony! Nertscrony! Screwtsony! Tootscrewny!_ \u2014sorry. There's nothing wrong with that.\"\n\n\"I want you to like me, Lionel.\"\n\n\"You're\u2014you're not saying there could actually be something between us?\" I turned and slapped the doorframe six times, feeling my face curdle with shame, regretting the question instantly\u2014wishing, for once, that I'd ticced instead, something obnoxious to obliterate the conversation's meaning, to smother the words I'd let myself say.\n\n\"No,\" she said coldly. She set the cigarette, what was left of it, back on the dresser. \"You're too strange, Lionel. Much too strange. I mean, take a look in the mirror.\" She resumed crushing her clothes into the suitcase, more than seemed possible, like a magician stuffing a prop for a trick.\n\nI only hoped the gun wouldn't go off. \"Where are you going, Julia?\" I said tiredly.\n\n\"I'm going to a place of peace, if you must know, Lionel.\"\n\n\"A\u2014what?\" _Prays of peach? Plays of peas? Press-e-piece?_ \"You heard me. A place of peace.\" Then a horn sounded outside.\n\n\"That's my car,\" she said. \"Would you go and tell them I'll be out in a minute?\"\n\n\"Okay, but\u2014 _pressure pees_ \u2014that's a strange thing to say.\"\n\n\"Have you ever been out of Brooklyn, Lionel?\"\n\nBreasts, underarm hair, now Brooklyn\u2014for Julia it was all just a measure of my inexperience. \"Sure,\" I said. \"I was in Manhattan just this afternoon.\" I tried not to think about what I'd been doing there, or failing to do.\n\n\"New York City, Lionel. Have you ever been out of New York City?\"\n\nWhile I considered this question I eyed the cigarette, which had at last begun to singe the dresser top. The blackening paint stood for my defeat here. I couldn't protect anything, maybe least of all myself.\n\n\"Because if you had, you'd know that anywhere else is a place of peace. So that's where I'm going. Would you please go hold my car for me?\"\n\nThe car service double-parked in front of the building was Legacy Pool, the furthest upscale of the Brooklyn competitors, with all-black luxury models, tinted windows, cell phones for the customers, and built-in tissue-box holders under the rear window. Julia was running in style. I waved at the driver from the stoop of her building, and he nodded at me and leaned his head back on the rest. I was trying out his neck motions, _nod, lean_ , when the gravely voice appeared behind me.\n\n\"Who's the car for?\"\n\nIt was the homicide detective. He'd been waiting, staking us out, slumped to one side of the doorway, huddled in his coat against the chilly November night. I made him right away\u2014with his 10 P.M. Styrofoam cup of coffee, worn tie, ingrown beard, and interrogation eyes, he was unmistakable\u2014but that didn't mean he had any idea who I was.\n\n\"Lady inside,\" I said, and tapped him once on the shoulder. \"Watch it,\" he said, ducking away from my touch.\n\n\"Sorry, friend. Can't help myself.\" I turned from him, back into the building.\n\nThe elegance of my exit was quickly thwarted, though\u2014Julia was just then galumphing down the stairs with her overstuffed suitcase. I rushed to help her as the door eased slowly shut on its moaning hydraulic hinge. Too slowly: The cop stuck out his foot and held the door open for us.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" he said with a sly, exhausted authority. \"You Julia Minna?\"\n\n\"I was,\" said Julia.\n\n\"You were?\"\n\n\"Yes. Isn't that funny? I was until just about an hour ago. Lionel, put my bag in the trunk.\"\n\n\"In a hurry?\" the detective asked Julia. I watched the two of them size one another up, as though I weren't any more a factor than the waiting limo driver. _A few minutes ago_ , I wanted to say, _my hands_ \u2014Instead I hoisted Julia's luggage, and waited for her to move past me to the car.\n\n\"Sort of,\" said Julia. \"Plane to catch.\"\n\n\"Plane to where?\" He crushed his empty Styrofoam cup and tossed it over his shoulder, off the stoop, into the neighbor's bushes. They were already decorated with trash.\n\n\"I haven't decided yet.\"\n\n\"She's going to a _precipice, pleasurepolice, philanthropriest_ \u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up, Lionel.\"\n\nThe detective looked at me like I was crazy.\n\nMy life story to this point:\n\nThe teacher looked at me like I was crazy.\n\nThe social-services worker looked at me like I was crazy.\n\nThe boy looked at me like I was crazy and then hit me.\n\nThe girl looked at me like I was crazy.\n\nThe woman looked at me like I was crazy.\n\nThe black homicide detective looked at me like I was crazy.\n\n\"I'm afraid you can't go, Julia,\" said the detective, shaking off his confusion at my utterances with a sigh and a grimace. He'd seen plenty in his day, could cope with a little more before needing to bust my chops over it\u2014that was the feeling I got. \"We're going to want to talk to you about Frank.\"\n\n\"You'll have to arrest me,\" said Julia.\n\n\"Why would you want to say that?\" said the detective, pained.\n\n\"Just to keep things simple,\" said Julia. \"Arrest me or I'm getting in the car. Lionel, please.\"\n\nI humped the huge, unwieldy suitcase down the stoop and waved at the driver to pop the trunk. Julia followed, the detective close behind. The limo's speakers were oozing Mariah Carey, the driver still mellow on the headrest. When Julia slid into the backseat, the detective caught the door in his two meaty hands and leaned in over the top.\n\n\"Don't you care who killed your husband, Mrs. Minna?\" He was plainly unnerved by Julia's blitheness.\n\n\"Let me know when you find out who killed him,\" she said. \"Then I'll tell you if I care.\"\n\nI pushed the suitcase in over the top of the spare tire. I briefly considered opening it up and confiscating Julia's pistol, then realized I probably didn't want to emerge with a gun in front of the homicide cop. He was liable to misunderstand. Instead I shut the trunk.\n\n\"That would involve us being in touch,\" the detective pointed out to Julia.\n\n\"I told you, I don't know where I'm going. Do you have a card?\"\n\nAs he straightened to reach into his vest pocket she slammed the door, then rolled down her window to accept his card.\n\n\"We could have you stopped at the airport,\" he said severely, trying to remind her of his authority, or remind himself. But that _we_ was weaker than he knew.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Julia. \"But it sounds like you've decided to let me go. I appreciate it.\" She palmed his card into her purse.\n\n\"Where were you this afternoon when Frank was killed, Mrs.\n\nMinna?\"\n\n\"Talk to Lionel,\" said Julia, looking back at me. \"He's my alibi. We were together all day.\"\n\n_\"Eat me alibailey,\"_ I breathed, as quietly as I could. The detective frowned at me. I held my hands open and made an Art Carney face, pleading for a common understanding between us\u2014women, suspects, widows, whattayagonnado? Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em, eh?\n\nJulia powered her tinted window back up into place and the Legacy Pool limousine took off, idiot radio trickling away to silence, leaving me and the detective standing in the dark of Baltic Street by ourselves.\n\n\"Lionel.\"\n\n_Alibi hullabaloo gullible bellyflop smellafish_ , sang my brain, obliterating speech. I waved a farewell at the detective and started toward Smith Street. If Julia could leave him flat-footed, why couldn't I?\n\nHe followed. \"We better talk, Lionel.\" He'd blown it, let her go, and now he was going to compensate with me, exercise his deductive and bullying powers.\n\n\"Can't it wait?\" I managed, without turning\u2014it took a considerable effort not to swivel my neck. But I felt him right on my heels, like a pacing man and his shadow.\n\n\"What's your full name, Lionel?\"\n\n\"Lullaby Gueststar\u2014\"\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"Alibyebye Essmob\u2014\"\n\n\"Sounds Arabic,\" said the detective as he pulled even with me. \"You don't look Arabic, though. Where were you and the lady this afternoon, Alibi?\"\n\n\"Lionel,\" I forced myself to say clearly, and then blurted _\"Lionel Arrestme!\"_\n\n\"That's not gonna work twice in the same night,\" said the cop. \"I don't have to arrest you. We're just taking a walk, Alibi. Only I don't know where we're going. You want to tell me?\"\n\n\"Home,\" I said, before I recalled that he'd been to the place I called home once already this evening, and that it wasn't in my best interests to lead him there again. \"Except actually I'd like to get a sandwich first. I'm starving. You want to get a sandwich with me? There's a place on Smith, called Zeod's, if that's okay, we'll get a sandwich and then maybe part ways there, since I'm kind of shy about bringing people back to my place\u2014\" As I turned to deliver my speech my shoulder-lust was activated, and I began reaching for him again.\n\nHe knocked my hand away. \"Slow down, Alibi. What's the matter with you?\"\n\n\"Tourette's syndrome,\" I said, with a grim sense of inevitability. Tourette's was my other name, and, like my name, my brain could never leave the words unmolested. Sure enough, I produced my own echo: \"Tourette is the shitman!\" Nodding, gulping, flinching, I tried to silence myself, walk quickly toward the sandwich shop, and keep my eyes down, so that the detective would be out of range of my shoulder-scope. No good, I was juggling too much, and when I reticced, it came out a bellow: _\"Tourette Is the Shitman!\"_\n\n\"He's the shitman, huh?\" The detective apparently thought we were exchanging up-to-the-minute street jargon. \"Can you take me to him?\"\n\n\"No, no, there's no Tourette,\" I said, catching my breath. I felt mad for food, desperate to shake the detective, and choked with imminent tics.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said the detective, talking down to me. \"I won't tell him who gave out his name.\"\n\nHe thought he was grooming a stool pigeon. I could only try not to laugh or shout. Let Tourette be the suspect and maybe I'd get off the hook.\n\nOn Smith Street we veered into Zeod's Twenty-Four-Hour Market, where the odors of baloney and bad coffee mingled with those of pistachio, dates, and St. John's bread. If the cop wanted an Arab, I'd give him an Arab. Zeod himself stood on the elevated ramp behind the Plexiglas-and-plywood counter. He saw me and said, \"Crazyman! How are you my friend?\"\n\n\"Not so good,\" I admitted. The detective hovered behind me, tempting me to turn my head again. I resisted.\n\n\"Where's Frank?\" said Zeod. \"How I never see Frank anymore?\"\n\nHere was my chance to deliver the news at last, and my heart wasn't up to it. \"He's in the hospital,\" I said, unable now to keep from glancing nervously at the homicide detective. _\"Doctorbyebye!\"_ recalled my Tourette's.\n\n\"Some crazyman you are,\" said Zeod, smiling and arching his hedge of eyebrows knowingly at my official shadow. \"You tell Frank Zeod asks, okay, partner?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said. \"I'll do that. How about a sandwich for now? Turkey on a kaiser, plenty of mustard.\"\n\nZeod nodded at his second, an indolent Dominican kid, who moved to the slicer. Zeod never made sandwiches himself. But he'd taught his countermen well, to slice extraordinarily thin and drape the meat as it slid off the blade so it fell in bunches, rather than stacking airlessly, to make a sandwich with that fluffy compressibility I craved. I let myself be hypnotized by the whine of the slicer, the rhythm of the kid's arm as he received the slices and dripped them onto the kaiser roll. Zeod watched me. He knew I obsessed on his sandwiches, and it pleased him. \"You and your friend?\" he said magnanimously.\n\nThe detective shook his head. \"Pack of Marlboro Lights,\" he said.\n\n\"Okay. You want a soda, Crazyman? Get yourself.\" I went and got a Coke out of the cooler while Zeod put my sandwich and the cop's cigarettes into a brown paper bag with a plastic fork and a sheaf of napkins.\n\n\"Charge it to Frank, yes, my friend?\"\n\nI couldn't speak. I took the bag and we stepped back out onto Smith Street.\n\n\"Sleeping with the dead man's wife,\" said the detective. \"Now you're eating on his tab. That takes some gall.\"\n\n\"You misunderstand,\" I said.\n\n\"Then maybe you better set me straight,\" he said. \"Gimme those cigarettes.\"\n\n\"I work for Frank\u2014\"\n\n\"Worked. He's dead. Why didn't you tell your friend the A-rab?\"\n\n_\"Arab-eye!_ \u2014I don't know. No reason.\" I handed the cop his Marlboros. _\"Eatmebailey, repeatmebailey, repeatmobile_ \u2014could we continue this maybe another time? Because\u2014 _retreatmobile!_ \u2014because now I really urgently have to go home and\u2014 _eatbail! beatmail!_ \u2014eat this sandwich.\"\n\n\"You work for him where? At the car service?\"\n\nDetective agency, I silently corrected. \"Uh, yeah.\"\n\n\"So you and his wife were, what? Driving around? Where's the car?\"\n\n\"She wanted to go shopping.\" This lie came out so blessedly smooth and un-tic-laden it felt like the truth. For that reason or some other, the detective didn't challenge it.\n\n\"So you'd describe yourself as, what? A friend of the deceased?\"\n\n_\"Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats!_ \u2014sure, that's right.\"\n\nHe was learning to ignore my outbursts. \"So where are we going now? Your house?\" He lit a cigarette without breaking stride. \"Looks like you're headed back to work.\"\n\nI didn't want to tell him how little difference there was between the two.\n\n\"Let's go in here,\" I said, jerking my neck sideways as we crossed Bergen Street, letting my physical tic lead me\u2014navigation by Tourette's\u2014into the Casino.\n\n_The Casino_ was Minna's name for Smith Street's hole-in-the-wall newspaper shop, which had a single wall of magazines and a case of Pepsi and Snapple crammed into a space the size of a large closet. The Casino was named for the lines that stretched each morning to buy Lotto and Scratchers and Jumble 6 and Pickball, for the fortune being made on games of chance by the newsstand's immigrant Korean owners, for the hearts being quietly broken there round the clock. There was something tragic in the way they stood obediently waiting, many of them elderly, others new immigrants, illiterate except in the small language of their chosen game, deferring to anyone with real business, like the purchase of a magazine, a pack of double-A batteries, or a tube of lip gloss. That docility was heartbreaking. The games were over almost before they started, the foil scraped off tickets with a key or a dime, the contrived near-misses underneath bared. (New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom.) The sidewalk just outside the Casino was strewn with discarded tickets, the chaff of wasted hope.\n\nBut I was hardly in a position to criticize lost causes. I had no reason for visiting the Casino except that I associated it with Minna, with Minna alive. If I visited enough of his haunts before news of his death spread along Court and Smith Street, I might persuade myself against the evidence of my own eyes\u2014and against the fact of the homicide cop on my heels\u2014that nothing had happened.\n\n\"What're we doing?\" said the detective.\n\n\"I, uh, need something to read with my sandwich.\"\n\nThe desultory magazines were shelved two deep in the rack\u2014there weren't more than one or two customers for _GQ_ or _Wired_ or _Brooklyn Bridge_ per month around here. Me, I was bluffing, didn't read magazines at all. Then I spotted a familiar face, on a magazine called _Vibe:_ The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Before a blurred cream background he posed resting his head against the neck of a pink guitar, his eyes demure. The unpronounceable typographical glyph with which he had replaced his name was shaved into the hair at his temple.\n\n\"Skrubble,\" I said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Plavshk,\" I said. My brain had decided to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph, a linguistic foray into the lands _On Beyond Zebra_. I lifted up the magazine.\n\n\"You're telling me you're gonna read _Vibe_?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"You trying to make fun of me here, Alibi?\"\n\n\"No, no, I'm a big fan of _Skursvshe.\"_\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The Artist Formerly Known As _Plinvstk.\"_ I couldn't quit tackling the glyph. I plopped the magazine on the counter and Jimmy, the Korean proprietor, said, \"For Frank?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I gulped.\n\nHe waved my money away. \"Take it, Lionel.\"\n\nBack outside, the cop waited until we'd turned the corner, into the relative gloom of Bergen Street, just past the F-train entrance and a few doors from L&L's storefront, then collared me, literally, two hands bunching my jacket at my neck, and pushed me up against the tile-mosaic wall. I gripped my magazine, which was curled into a baton, and the bag from Zeod's with sandwich and soda, held them protectively in front of me like an old lady with her purse. I knew better than to push back at the cop. Anyway, I was bigger, and he didn't really frighten me, not physically.\n\n\"Enough with the double-talk,\" he said. \"Where's this going? Why are you pretending your man Minna's still with us, Alibi? What's the game?\"\n\n\"Wow,\" I said. \"This was unexpected. You're like good cop and bad cop rolled into one.\"\n\n\"Yeah, used to be they could afford two different guys. Now with all the budget cuts and shit they've got us doing double shifts.\"\n\n\"Can we go back to _\u2014fuckmeblackcop_ \u2014back to talking nice now?\"\n\n\"What you say?\"\n\n\"Nothing. Let go of my collar.\" I'd kept the outburst down to a mumble\u2014and I knew to be grateful my Tourette's brain hadn't dialed up _nigger_. Despite the detective's roughhousing, or because of it, our frenzy had peaked and abated, and we'd earned a quiet moment together. He was close enough to invite intimacy. If my hands hadn't been full I would have begun stroking his pebbly jaw or clapping him on the shoulders.\n\n\"Talk to me, Alibi. Tell me things.\"\n\n\"Don't treat me like a suspect.\"\n\n\"Tell me why not.\"\n\n\"I worked for Frank. I miss him. I want to catch his killer as much as you.\"\n\n\"So let's compare notes. The names Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte mean anything to you?\"\n\nI was silenced.\n\nMatricardi and Rockaforte: The homicide cop didn't know you weren't supposed to say those names aloud. Not anywhere, but especially not out on Smith Street.\n\nI'd never even heard their first names, Alphonso and Leonardo. They seemed wrong, but what first names wouldn't? Wrongness surrounded those names and their once-in-a-blue-moon uttering. Don't say Matricardi and Rockaforte.\n\nSay \"The Clients\" if you must.\n\nOr say \"Garden State Brickface and Stucco.\" But not those names.\n\n\"Never heard of them,\" I breathed.\n\n\"Why don't I believe you?\"\n\n\"Believemeblackman.\"\n\n\"You're fucking sick.\"\n\n\"I am,\" I said. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"You should be sorry. Your man got killed and you're not giving me anything.\"\n\n\"I'll catch the killer,\" I said. \"That's what I'll give you.\"\n\nHe eased off me. I barked twice. He made another face, but it was clear it all would get chalked up to harmless insanity now. I was smarter than I knew leading the cop into Zeod's and letting him hear the Arab call me Crazyman.\n\n\"You might want to leave that to me, Alibi. Just make sure you're telling me all you know.\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" I made an honorable Boy Scout face. I didn't want to point out to _good cop_ that _bad cop_ hadn't learned anything from me, just got tired of asking.\n\n\"You're making me sad with your sandwich and your goddamn magazine. Get out of here.\"\n\nI straightened my jacket. A strange peace had come over me. The cop had caused me to think about The Clients for a minute, but I pushed them out of view. I was good at doing that. My Tourette's brain chanted _Want to catch him as much as miss him as much as a sadwich_ but I didn't need to tic now, could let it live inside me, a bubbling brook, a deep well of song. I went to the L&L storefront and let myself in with my key. Danny wasn't anywhere to be seen. The phone was ringing. I let it ring. The cop stood watching me and I waved at him once, then shut the door and went into the back.\n\nSometimes I had trouble admitting I lived upstairs in the apartment above the L&L storefront, but I did, and had since the day so long ago when I left St. Vincent's. The stairs ran down into the back of the storefront. Apart from that inconvenient fact, I tried to keep the two places separated in my mind, decorating the apartment conventionally with forties-style furniture from the decrepit discount showrooms far down Smith Street and never inviting the other Minna Men up if I could help it, and adhering to certain arbitrary rules: drinking beer downstairs and whiskey upstairs, playing cards downstairs but setting out a board with a chess problem upstairs, Touch-Tone phones downstairs, a Bakelite dial phone upstairs, et cetera. For a while I even had a cat, but that didn't work out.\n\nThe door at the top of the stair was acned with a thousand tiny dents, from my ritual rapping of my keys before opening the door. I added six more quick key-impressions\u2014my counting nerve was stuck on six today, ever since the fatal bag of White Castles\u2014and then let myself in. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I left my lights off, not wanting to signal to the detective, if he was still outside watching, the connection between upstairs and down. Then I crept to my front window and peered out. The corner was empty of cop. Still, why take a chance? Enough light leaked in from the streetlamps for me to make my way around. So I left the lamps dimmed, though I had to run my hands under the shades and fondle the switches, ritual contact just to make myself feel at home.\n\nUnderstand: The possibility that I might at any time have to make the rounds and touch every visible item in my apartment dictated a sort of faux-Japanese simplicity in my surroundings. Beneath my reading lamp were five unread paperbacks, which I would return to the Salvation Army on Smith Street as soon as I'd finished them. The covers of the books were already scored with dozens of minute creases, made by sliding my fingernails sideways over their surfaces. I owned a black plastic boom box with detachable speakers, and a short row of Prince\/Artist Formerly Known As CDs\u2014I wasn't lying to the homicide cop about being a fan. Beside the CDs lay a single fork, the one I'd stolen from Matricardi and Rockaforte's table full of silverware fourteen years before. I placed the _Vibe_ magazine and the bag with the sandwich on my table, which was otherwise clean. I wasn't so terribly hungry anymore. A drink was more urgent. Not that I really liked alcohol, but the ritual was essential.\n\nThe phone downstairs went on ringing. L&L didn't have a machine to pick it up\u2014callers usually gave up after nine or ten rings and tried another car service. I tuned it out. I emptied my jacket pockets and rediscovered Minna's watch and beeper. I put them on the table, then poured myself a tumblerful of Walker Red and dropped in a couple of ice cubes and sat down there in the dark to try to let the day settle over me, to try to make some sense of it. The way my ice shimmered made me need to bat at it like a cat fishing in a goldfish bowl, but otherwise the scene was pretty calm. If only the phone downstairs would stop ringing. Where was Danny? For that matter, shouldn't Tony be back from the East Side by now? I didn't want to think he'd go into the Zendo without some backup, without letting us other Minna Men in on the score. I pushed the thought away, tried to forget about Tony and Danny and Gilbert for the moment, to pretend it was my case alone and weight the variables and put them into some kind of shape that made sense, that produced answers or at least a clear question. I thought of the giant Polish killer we'd watched drive our boss away to a Dumpster\u2014he already seemed like something I'd imagined, an impossible figure, a silhouette from a dream. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I thought about Julia, how she'd toyed with the homicide detective and then flown, how she'd almost seemed too ready for the news from the hospital, and I considered the bitterness laced into her sorrow. I tried not to think of how she'd toyed with me, and how little I knew it meant. I thought about Minna himself, the mystery of his connection in the Zendo, his caustic familiarity with his betrayer, his disastrous preference for keeping his Men in the dark and how he'd paid for it. As I gazed past the streetlight to the flickering blue-lit curtains of the bedrooms in the apartments across Bergen Street, I lingered over my paltry clues: Ullman downtown, the girl with glasses and short hair, \"the building\" that the sardonic voice in the Yorkville Zendo had mentioned, and Irving\u2014if Irving really was a clue.\n\nWhile I thought about these things, another track in my brain intoned brainyoctomy brainyalimony bunnymonopoly baileyoctopus brainyanimal broccopotamus. And the phone downstairs kept on ringing. Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate, went back downstairs and picked up the phone.\n\n\"No cars!\" I said forcefully.\n\n\"That you, Lionel?\" said Gilbert's friend Loomis, the sanitation inspector\u2014the garbage cop.\n\n\"What is it, Loomis?\" I disliked the garbage cop intensely.\n\n\"Gotta problem over here.\"\n\n\"Where's here?\"\n\n\"Sixth Precinct house, in Manhattan.\"\n\n_\"Dickweed!_ What are you doing at the precinct house, Loomis?\"\n\n\"Well, they're saying it's too late, no way they're gonna arraign him tonight, he's gonna have to spend the night in the bullpen.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Who'd you think? Gilbert! They got him up on killing some guy name Ullman.\"\n\nHave you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.\n\nI felt some version of this thrill at the news that the garbage cop delivered, of Ullman's demise. But too, I felt its opposite: a panic that the world of the case was shrinking. Ullman had been an open door, a direction, a whiff of something. I couldn't spare any grief for the death of Ullman the human being\u2014especially not on The Day Frank Minna Died\u2014but I mourned nonetheless: My clue had been murdered.\n\nA few other things I felt:\n\nAnnoyed\u2014I would have to deal with Loomis tonight. My reverie was snapped. The ice would melt in my glass of Walker Red upstairs. My sandwich from Zeod's would go uneaten.\n\nConfused\u2014let Gilbert glower and lurch all he wanted, but he'd never kill a man. And I'd watched him blink dumbly at the name Ullman. It had meant nothing to him. So no motive, unless it was self-defense. Or else he'd been set up. Therefore:\n\nFrightened. Someone was hunting Minna Men.\n\nI took an agency car into Manhattan and tried to see Gilbert at the precinct house, but didn't have any luck. He'd already been shifted out of the front cage, to the back, where he'd been grouped with a bunch of other fresh arrests for a night of what the cops euphemistically called \"bullpen therapy\"\u2014eating baloney sandwiches, using the toilet in the open if he had to go, shrugging off petty advances on his watch and wallet, and trading cigarettes, if he had any, for a razor blade to protect himself. Industrious Loomis had already exhausted the cops' patience for Gilbert's rights and privileges: He'd had his phone call, his moment's visitation at the cell bars, and nothing more would be allowed to happen to him until the next morning at the soonest. Then he could hope to be arraigned and sent out to the Tombs to wait for someone to bail him out. So my effort was rewarded by learning nothing yet being saddled with driving Loomis back to Brooklyn. I took the opportunity to try to find out what the garbage cop had heard from Gilbert.\n\n\"He didn't want to say much without a lawyer, and I don't blame him. The walls have ears, you know? Just that Ullman was dead when he got there. The homicides picked him up coming out the place like they'd been tipped. Time I saw him, he'd mouthed a little and been roughed around, asked for a lawyer, they told him he had to wait for tomorrow. I guess he tried to call L&L but you weren't picking up, fortunately I was around\u2014Hey, sorry about Frank, by the way. It's a shame a thing happens. Gilbert didn't look too good about it either I can tell you. I don't know what he said or didn't but the guys weren't too happy with him by the time I showed. I tried reasoning with the guys, let them see my badge, but they treat me like I was lower than a fucking prison guard, you know? Like I couldn't make the fucking cut.\"\n\nGilbert had befriended Loomis somewhere near the end of high school, when they both were hanging around the Carroll Street park watching the old men play bocce. Loomis called to Gilbert's lazy, sloppy side, the nose-picker and cigarette-grubber, the part of him that didn't want to always have to keep up with Minna and us other Men. Loomis wasn't sharpened up the way even the most passive and recalcitrant of us orphans had to be\u2014he was a sort of shapeless inadvertent extension of his parents' couch and television set and refrigerator, and he assumed independent life only grudgingly. At Gilbert's side he'd come slouching around L&L in the formative days and never show a glimmer of interest in either our cover-story car service or the detective agency lurking just underneath\u2014we might have an open packet of Sno-Balls or Chocodiles sitting on the counter, though.\n\nLoomis was nudged by his parents toward police work. He struck out twice at the civil-service qualification test to become a regular beat cop, and some kindhearted career counselor nudged him again, gently downward, to the easier test for the sanitation police, which he squeaked past. Before he was the Garbage Cop, though, Minna used to call him _Butt Trust_ , a term he would apply with a measure of real tenderness.\n\nMe and the other Boys let it go the first five or six times, thinking an explanation would be offered, before finally asking Minna what he meant.\n\n\"You got your brain trust, your most-valued,\" said Minna. \"Then you got the rest of them. The ones you let hang around anyway. That would be the butt trust, right?\"\n\nI was never overfond of the butt trust. In fact, I hated Loomis\u2014let me count the ways. His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts\u2014his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: _game over_. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing\u2014so it was my duty to loathe him instead.\n\nTonight, as we roared across the metal grating of the Brooklyn Bridge's roadway, he settled into his usual dull riff: The sanitation force gets no respect. \"You think they'd know what it's like for a cop in this city, me and those guys are on the same team, but this one cop keeps saying, 'Hey, why don't you come around my block, somebody keeps stealing my garbage.' If it weren't for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it\u2014\"\n\n\"What time did Gilbert call you?\" I interrupted.\n\n\"I don't know, around seven or eight, maybe nine almost,\" he said, succinctly demonstrating his unfitness for the force.\n\n\"It's\u2014 _Tourette is the stickman!_ \u2014only ten now, Loomis.\"\n\n\"Okay, it was just after eight.\"\n\n\"Did you find out where Ullman lived?\"\n\n\"Downtown somewhere. I gave Gilbert the address.\"\n\n\"You don't remember where it was?\"\n\n\"Nah.\"\n\nLoomis wasn't going to be any help. He seemed to know this as well as I, and immediately launched into another digression, as if to say, _I'm useless, but no hard feelings, okay?_ \"So you heard the one about how many Catholics does it take to screw in a lightbulb?\"\n\n\"I've heard that one, Loomis. No jokes, please.\"\n\n\"Ah, come on. What about why did the blonde stare at the carton of orange juice?\"\n\nI was silent. We came off the bridge, at Cadman Plaza. I'd be rid of him soon.\n\n\" 'Cause it said 'concentrate,' get it?\"\n\nThis was another thing I hated about Loomis. Years ago he'd latched on to Minna's joke-telling contests, decided he could compete. But he favored idiot riddles, not jokes at all, no room for character or nuance. He didn't seem to know the difference.\n\n\"Got it,\" I admitted.\n\n\"What about how do you titillate an ocelot?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Titillate an ocelot. You know, like a big cat. I think.\"\n\n\"It's a big cat. How do you titillate it, Loomis?\" \"You _oscillate its tit a lot_ , get it?\"\n\n_\"Eat me Ocelot!\"_ I screamed as we turned onto Court Street. Loomis's crappy punning had slid right under the skin of my symptoms. \"Lancelot ancillary oscillope! Octapot! Tittapocamus!\"\n\nThe garbage cop laughed. \"Jesus, Lionel, you crack me up. You never quit with that routine.\"\n\n\"It's not a\u2014 _root\u2014ocelot_ ,\" I shrieked through my teeth. Here, finally, was what I hated most in Loomis: He'd always insisted, from the time we met as teenagers to this day, that I was elaborately feigning and could keep from ticcing if I wanted to. Nothing would dissuade him, no example or demonstration, no program of education. I'd once shown him the book Minna gave me; he glanced at it and laughed. I was making it up. As far as he was concerned, my Tourette's was just an odd joke, one going mostly over his head, stretched out over the course of fifteen years.\n\n\"Tossed salad!\" he said. \"Gotcha!\" He liked to think he was playing along.\n\n\"Go touchalot!\" I slapped him on the thickly padded shoulder of his coat, so suddenly the car swerved with my movement.\n\n\"Christ, look out!\"\n\nI tapped him five more times, my driving steady now.\n\n\"I can't get over you,\" he said. \"Even at a time like this. I guess it's sentimental, like a way of saying, _if Frank were still here_. Since that routine always did keep him busted up.\"\n\nWe pulled up outside L&L. The lights in the storefront were on. Somebody had returned since my jaunt to the Sixth Precinct.\n\n\"I thought you were driving me home.\" Loomis lived on Nevins Street, near the projects.\n\n\"You can walk from here, _gofuckacop.\"_\n\n\"C'mon, Lionel.\"\n\nI parked in the open spot in across from the storefront. The sooner Loomis and I were out of each other's presence, the better.\n\n\"Walk,\" I said.\n\n\"At least lemme use the can,\" he whined. \"Those jerks at the station wouldn't let me. I been holding it.\"\n\n\"If you'll do one thing for me.\"\n\n\"Whuzzat?\"\n\n\"Ullman's address,\" I said. \"You found it once. I need it, Loomis.\"\n\n\"I can get it tomorrow morning when I'm back at my desk. You want me to call you here?\"\n\nI took one of Minna's cards out of my pocket and handed it to him. \"Call the beeper number. I'll be carrying it.\"\n\n\"Okay, all right, now will you lemme take a leak?\"\n\nI didn't speak, just clicked the car locks up and down automatically six times, then got out. Loomis followed me to the storefront, and inside.\n\nDanny came out of the back, stubbing a cigarette in the countertop ashtray as he passed. He always dressed the prettiest of us Minna Men, but his lean black suit suddenly looked like it had been worn too many days in a row. He reminded me of an out-of-work mortician. He glanced at me and Loomis and pursed his lips but didn't speak, and I couldn't really get anything out of his eyes. I felt I didn't know him with Minna gone. Danny and I functioned as expressions of two opposed ends of Frank Minna's impulses: him a tall, silent body that attracted women and intimidated men, me a flapping inane mouth that covered the world in names and descriptions. Average us and you might have Frank Minna back, sort of. Now, without Minna for a conduit between us, Danny and I had to begin again grasping one another as entities, as though we were suddenly fourteen years old again and occupying our opposite niches at St. Vincent's Home for Boys.\n\nIn fact, I had a sudden yearning that Danny should be holding a basketball, so that I could say \"Good shot!\" or exhort him to dunk it. Instead we stared at one another.\n\n\" 'Scuse me,\" said Loomis, scooting past me and waving his hand at Danny. \"Gotta use your toilet.\" He disappeared into the back.\n\n\"Where's Tony?\" I said.\n\n\"I was hoping you could tell me.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know. I hope he's doing better than Gilbert. I just left him in the lockup at the Sixth.\" I realized it sounded as if I'd actually seen him, but I let the implication stand. Loomis wouldn't call me on it, even if he heard from the bathroom.\n\nDanny didn't look all that surprised. The shock of Minna's death made this new turn unimpressive by comparison, I supposed. \"What's he in for?\"\n\n\" _Ullmanslaughter!_ \u2014the guy Tony sent Gilbert to find, he turned up dead. They pinned it on Gilbert.\"\n\nDanny only scratched at the end of his nose thoughtfully.\n\n\"So where were you?\" I said. \"I thought you were minding the store.\"\n\n\"Went for a bite.\"\n\n\"I was here for forty-five minutes.\" A lie\u2014I doubted it was more than fifteen, but I felt like pushing him. \"Guess we missed each other.\"\n\n\"Any calls? See that _homosapien, homogenize, genocide, can'tdecide, candyeyes_ , homicide cop?\"\n\nHe shook his head. He was holding something back\u2014but then it occurred to me that I was too.\n\nDanny and I stood pensively regarding each other, waiting for the next question to form. I felt a vibration deep inside, profounder tics lurking in me, gathering strength. Or perhaps I was only feeling my hunger at last.\n\nLoomis popped out of the back. \"Jesus, you guys look bad. What a day, huh?\"\n\nWe stared at him.\n\n\"Well, I think we owe Frank a moment of silence, don't you guys?\"\n\nI wanted to point out that what Loomis had interrupted _was_ a moment of silence, but I let it go.\n\n\"Little something in the way of remembrance? Bow your heads, you turkeys. The guy was like your father. Don't end the day arguing with each other, for crying out loud.\"\n\nLoomis had a point, or enough of one anyway, to shame me and Danny into letting him have his way. So we stood in silence, and when I saw that Danny and Loomis had each closed their eyes I closed mine too. Together we made up some lopped-off, inadequate version of the Agency\u2014Danny standing for himself and Tony, I for myself, and Loomis, I suppose, for Gilbert. But I was moved anyway, for a second.\n\nThen Loomis ruined it with a clearly audible fart, which he coughed to cover, unsuccessfully. \"Okay,\" he said suddenly. \"How's about that ride home, Lionel?\"\n\n\"Walk,\" I said.\n\nHumbled by his own body, the garbage cop didn't argue, but headed for the door.\n\nDanny volunteered to sit by the L&L phone. He already had a pot of coffee brewing, he pointed out, and I could see he was in a pacing mood, that he wanted the space of the office to himself. It suited me well enough to leave him there. I went upstairs, without our exchanging more than a few sentences.\n\nUpstairs I lit a candle and stuck it in the center of my table, beside Minna's beeper and watch. Loomis's clumsy pass at ritual haunted me. I needed one of my own. But I was also hungry. I poured out the diluted drink and made myself a fresh one, set it out on the table too. Then I unwrapped the sandwich from Zeod's. I considered for a moment, fighting the urge just to sink my teeth into it, then went to the cabinet and brought back a serrated knife and small plate. I cut the sandwich into six equal pieces, taking unexpectedly deep pleasure in the texture of the kaiser roll's resistance to the knife's dull teeth, and arranged the pieces so they were equidistant on the plate. I returned the knife to my counter, then centered plate, candle and drink on the table in a way that soothed my grieving Tourette's. If I didn't stem my syndrome's needs I would never clear a space in which my own sorrow could dwell.\n\nThen I went to my boom box and put on the saddest song in my CD collection, Prince's \"How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore.\"\n\nI don't know whether The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, but I know for certain he is deeply so in the life of his work. Music had never made much of an impression on me until the day in 1986 when, sitting in the passenger seat of Minna's Cadillac, I first heard the single \"Kiss\" squirting its manic way out of the car radio. To that point in my life I might have once or twice heard music that toyed with feelings of claustrophobic discomfort and expulsive release, and which in so doing passingly charmed my Tourette's, gulled it with a sense of recognition, like Art Carney or Daffy Duck\u2014but here was a song that lived entirely in that territory, guitar and voice twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented, squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.\n\n\"Turn that shit down,\" said Minna.\n\n\"I like it,\" I said.\n\n\"That's that crap Danny listens to,\" said Minna. _Danny_ was code for _too black_.\n\nI knew I had to own that song, and so the next day I sought it out at J&R Music World\u2014I needed the word \"funk\" explained to me by the salesman. He sold me a cassette, and a Walkman to play it on. What I ended up with was a seven-minute \"extended single\" version\u2014the song I'd heard on the radio, with a four-minute catastrophe of chopping, grunting, hissing and slapping sounds appended\u2014a coda apparently designed as a private message of confirmation to my delighted Tourette's brain.\n\nPrince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger. When I listened to him I was exempt from my symptoms. So I began collecting his records, especially those elaborate and frenetic remixes tucked away on the CD singles. The way he worried forty-five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition.\n\n\"How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore\" is a ballad, piano strolling beneath an aching falsetto vocal. Slow and melancholy, it still featured the Tourettic abruptness and compulsive precision, the sudden shrieks and silences, that made Prince's music my brain's balm.\n\nI put the song on repeat and sat in the light of my candle and waited for the tears. Only after they came did I allow myself to eat the six turkey-sandwich portions, in a ritual for Minna, alternating them with sips of Walker Red. _The body and the blood_ , I couldn't keep from thinking, though I was as distant from any religious feeling as a mourning man could be. _The turkey and the booze_ , I substituted. A last meal for Minna, who didn't get one. Prince moaned, finished his song, began it again. The candle guttered. I counted _three_ as I finished a portion of sandwich, then _four_. That was the extent of my symptoms. I counted sandwiches and wept. At _six_ I killed the music, blew out the candle and went to bed.\n\n# (TOURETTE DREAMS)\n\n(in Tourette dreams you shed your tics)\n\n(or your tics shed you)\n\n(and you go with them, astonished to leave yourself behind)\n\n# BAD COOKIES\n\nThere are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own toothbrush in the mirror. I mean, the object looks strange, oddly particular in its design, strange tapered handle and slotted, miter-cut bristles, and I wonder if I've ever looked at it closely before or whether someone snuck in overnight and substituted this new toothbrush for my old one. I have this relationship to objects in general\u2014they will sometimes become uncontrollably new and vivid to me, and I don't know whether this is a symptom of Tourette's or not. I've never seen it described in the literature. Here's the strangeness of having a Tourette's brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot\u2014coulda been a contender!\u2014at centrality. Personalityness. There's a lot of traffic in my head, and it's two-way.\n\nThis morning's strangeness was refreshing, though. More than refreshing\u2014revelatory. I woke early, having failed to draw my curtains, the wall above my bed and the table with melted candle, tumbler quarter full of melted ice, and sandwich crumbs from my ritual snack now caught in a blaze of white sunlight, like the glare of a projector's bulb before the film is threaded. It seemed possible I was the first awake in the world, possible the world was new. I dressed in my best suit, donned Minna's watch instead of my own, and clipped his beeper to my hip. Then I made myself coffee and toast, scooped the long-shadowed crumbs off the table, sat and savored breakfast, marveling at the richness of existence with each step. The radiator whined and sneezed and I imitated its sounds out of sheer joy, rather than helplessness. Perhaps I'd been expecting that Minna's absence would snuff the world, or at least Brooklyn, out of existence. That a sympathetic dimming would occur. Instead I'd woken into the realization that I was Minna's successor and avenger, that the city shone with clues.\n\nIt seemed possible I was a detective on a case.\n\nI crept downstairs past Danny, who was sleeping on his arms on the countertop, black suit jacket shrugged up around his shoulders, small patch of drool on his sleeve. I switched off the coffee machine, which was roasting a quarter inch of coffee into sour perfume, and went outside. It was a quarter to seven. The Korean keeper of the Casino was just rolling up his gate, tossing his bundles of the _News_ and the _Post_ inside. The morning was clarifyingly cold.\n\nI started the L&L Pontiac. Let Danny sleep, let Gilbert wait in his cell, let Tony be missing. I'd go to the Zendo. Let it be too early for the monks or mobsters hidden there\u2014I'd have the advantage of surprise.\n\nBy the time I'd parked and made my way to the Zendo, the Upper East Side was warming into life, shopkeepers rolling fruit stands out of their shops, sidewalk vendors of stripped paperbacks unloading their boxes, women already dressed for business glancing at their watches as they hustled their dogs' waste into Baggies. The doorman at the entranceway next door was someone new, a kid with a mustache and uniform, not my harasser from yesterday. He was probably green, without tenure, stuck working the end of the overnight shift. I figured it was worth a shot anyway. I crooked a finger at him through the glass and he came out into the cold. \"What's your name?\" I said.\n\n\"Walter, sir.\"\n\n\"Walter sir-what?\" I broadcast a cop-or-employer vibe.\n\n\"Walter is, uh, my last name. Can I help you with something?\" He looked concerned, for himself and his building.\n\n_\"Helpmewalter_ \u2014I need the name of the doorman working last night, about six-thirty, seven. Older gentleman than yourself, maybe thirty-five, with an accent.\"\n\n\"Dirk?\"\n\n\"Maybe. You tell me.\"\n\n\"Dirk's the regular man.\" He wasn't sure he should be telling me this.\n\nI averted my gaze from the his shoulder. \"Good. Now tell me what you know about the Yorkville Zendo.\" I indicated the bronze plaque next door with a jerk of my thumb. \"Dirkweed! Dirkman!\"\n\n\"What?\" He goggled his eyes at me.\n\n\"You see them come and go?\"\n\n\"I guess.\"\n\n\"Walter Guessworth!\" I cleared my throat deliberately. \"Work with me here, Walter. You must see stuff. I want your impressions.\"\n\nI could see him sorting through layers of exhaustion, boredom, and stupidity. \"Are you a cop?\"\n\n\"Why'd you think that?\"\n\n\"You, uh, talk funny.\"\n\n\"I'm a guy who needs to know things, Walter, and I'm in a hurry. Anyone come and go from the Zendo lately? Anything catch your eye?\"\n\nHe scanned the street to see if anyone saw us talking. I took the opportunity to cover my mouth with my hand and make a brief panting sound, like an excited dog.\n\n\"Uh, not much happens late at night,\" said Walter. \"It's pretty quiet around here.\"\n\n\"A place like the Zendo must attract some weird traffic.\"\n\n\"You keep saying Zendo,\" he said.\n\n\"It's right there, etched in brass.\" _Itched in Ass_.\n\nHe stepped toward the street, craned his neck, and read the plaque. \"Hmmm. It's like a religious school, right?\"\n\n\"Right. You ever see anyone suspicious hanging around? Big Polish guy in particular?\"\n\n\"How would I know he was Polish?\"\n\n\"Just think about big. We're talking really, really big.\"\n\nHe shrugged again. \"I don't think so.\" His numb gaze wouldn't have taken in a crane and wrecking ball going through next door, let alone an outsize human figure.\n\n\"Listen, would you keep an eye out? I'll give you a number to call.\" I had a stash of L&L cards in my wallet, and I fished one out for him.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he said absently, glancing at the card. He wasn't afraid of me anymore. But he didn't know what to think of me if I wasn't a threat. I was interesting, but he didn't know how to be interested.\n\n\"I'd appreciate hearing from you\u2014 _Doorjerk! Doorjam! Jerkdom!_ \u2014if you see anything odd.\"\n\n\"You're pretty odd,\" he said seriously.\n\n\"Something besides me.\"\n\n\"Okay, but I get off in half an hour.\"\n\n\"Well, just keep it in mind.\" I was running out of patience with Walter. I freed myself to tap his shoulder farewell. The dull young man looked down at my hand, then went back inside.\n\nI paced the block to the corner and back, flirting with the Zendo, seeking my nerve. The site aroused reverence and a kind of magical fear in me already, as though I were approaching a shrine\u2014 _the martyrdom of Saint Minna_. I wanted to rewrite their plaque to tell the story. Instead I rang the doorbell once. No answer. Then four more times, for a total of _five_ , and I stopped, startled by a sense of completeness.\n\nI'd shrugged off my tired old friend _six_.\n\nI wondered if it was in some way commemorative\u2014my counting tic moving down a list, subtracting a digit for Frank.\n\n_Somebody is hunting Minna Men_ , I thought again. But I couldn't be afraid. I wasn't game but hunter this morning. Anyway, the count was off\u2014four Minna Men plus Frank made five. So if I was counting heads, I should be at four. I had an extra aboard, but who? Maybe it was Bailey. Or Irving.\n\nA long minute passed before the girl with the short black hair and glasses opened the door and squinted at me against the morning sun. She wore a T-shirt, jeans, had bare feet, and held a broom. Her smile was slight, involuntary, and crooked. And sweet.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Could I ask you a few questions?\"\n\n\"Questions?\" She didn't seem to recognize the word.\n\n\"If it's not too early,\" I said gently.\n\n\"No, no. I've been up. I've been sweeping.\" She showed me the broom.\n\n\"They make you clean?\"\n\n\"It's a privilege. Cleaning is treasured in Zen practice. It's like the highest possible act. Usually Roshi wants to do the sweeping himself.\"\n\n\"No vacuum cleaner?\" I said.\n\n\"Too noisy,\" she said, and frowned as if it should be obvious. A city bus roared past in the distance, damaging her point. I let it go.\n\nHer eyes adjusted to the brightness, and she looked past me, to the street, examining it as though astonished to discover that the door opened onto a cityscape. I wondered if she'd been out of the building since I saw her enter the evening before. I wondered if she ate and slept there, whether she was the only one who did or whether there were dozens, foot soldiers of Zen.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"What were you saying?\"\n\n\"Questions.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\"About the Zendo, what you do here.\"\n\nShe looked me over now. \"Do you want to come inside? It's cold.\"\n\n\"I'd like that very much.\"\n\nIt was the truth. I didn't feel unsafe following her into the dark temple, the Deathstar. I would gather information from within the Trojan Horse of her Zen grace. And I was conscious of my ticlessness, didn't want to break the rhythm of the conversation.\n\nThe foyer and stairwell were plain, with unadorned white walls and a wooden banister, looking as if it had been clean before she began sweeping, clean forever. We bypassed a door on the ground floor and went up the stairs, she carrying the broom ahead of her, turning her back to me trustingly. Her walk had a gentle jerkiness to it, a quickness like her replies.\n\n\"Here,\" she said, pointing to a rack with rows of shoes on it.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I said, thinking I was supposed to select from among the motley footgear.\n\n\"No, take yours off,\" she whispered.\n\nI did as she told me, removed my shoes and pushed them into an orderly place at the end of one of the racks. A chill went through me when I recalled that Minna had removed his shoes the evening before, presumably at this same landing.\n\nNow in my socks, I followed her as the banister wrapped around through a corridor, past two sealed doors and one that opened onto a bare, dark room with rows of short cloth mats laid out across a parquet floor and a smell of candles or incense, not a morning smell at all. I wanted to peer inside but she hurried us along, up another flight.\n\nOn the third landing she led me to a small kitchen where a wooden table and three chairs were arranged around a thwarted back window, through which an emaciated shaft of sunlight negotiated a maze of brick. If the massive buildings on either side had existed when this room was built they might not have bothered with a window. The table, chairs and cabinets of the kitchen were as undistinguished and homely as a museum diorama of Cree or Shaker life, but the teapot she set out was Japanese, and its hand-painted calligraphic designs were the only stretch, the only note of ostentation.\n\nI seated myself with my back to the wall, facing the door, thinking of Minna and the conversation I'd heard through the wire. She took water off a low flame and filled the pot, then put a tiny mug without a handle in front of me and filled it with an unstrained swirling confetti of tea. I warmed my chapped hands around it gratefully.\n\n\"I'm Kimmery.\"\n\n\"Lionel.\" I felt _Kissdog_ rising in me and fought it back.\n\n\"You're interested in Buddhism?\"\n\n\"You could say that.\"\n\n\"I'm not really who you should talk to but I can tell you what they'll say. It's not about getting centered, or, you know, _stress reduction_. A lot of people\u2014Americans, I mean\u2014have that idea. But it's really a religious discipline, and not easy at all. Do you know about zazen?\"\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\n\"It'll make your back hurt a _lot_. That's one thing.\" She rolled her eyes at me, already commiserating.\n\n\"You mean meditation.\"\n\n_\"Zazen_ , it's called. Or _sitting_. It sounds like nothing, but it's the heart of Zen practice. I'm not very good at it.\"\n\nI recalled the Quakers who'd adopted Tony, and their brick meetinghouse across eight lanes of traffic from St. Vincent's. Sunday mornings we could look through their tall windows and see them gathered in silence on hard benches. \"What's to be good at?\" I said.\n\n\"You have no idea. Breathing, for starters. And thinking, except it's not supposed to _be_ thinking.\"\n\n\"Thinking about not thinking?\"\n\n\"Not thinking about it. One Mind, they call it. Like realizing that everything has Buddha nature, the flag and the wind are the same thing, that sort of stuff.\"\n\nI wasn't exactly following her, but _One Mind_ seemed an honorable goal, albeit positively chimerical. \"Could we\u2014could I sit with you sometime? Or is it done alone?\"\n\n\"Both. But here at the Zendo there's regular sessions.\" She lifted her cup of tea with both hands, steaming her glasses instantly. \"Anyone can come. And you're really lucky if you stick around today. Some important monks from Japan are in town to see the Zendo, and one of them is going to talk this evening, after zazen.\"\n\n_Important monks, imported rugs, unimportant ducks_ \u2014jabber was building up in the ocean of my brain like flotsam, and soon a wave would toss it ashore. \"So it's run out of Japan,\" I said. \"And now they're checking up on you\u2014like the Pope coming in from Rome.\"\n\n\"Not exactly. Roshi set the Zendo up on his own. Zen isn't centralized. There are different teachers, and sometimes they move around.\"\n\n\"But Roshi did come here from Japan.\" From the name I pictured a wizened old man, a little bigger than Yoda in _Return of the Jedi_.\n\n\"No, Roshi's American. He used to have an American name.\"\n\n\"Which was?\"\n\n\"I don't know. _Roshi_ just basically means teacher, but that's the only name he has anymore.\"\n\nI sipped my scalding tea. \"Does anyone else use this building for anything?\"\n\n\"Anything like what?\"\n\n_\"Killing me!_ \u2014sorry. Just anything besides sitting.\"\n\n\"You can't shout like that in here,\" she said.\n\n\"Well, if\u2014 _kissing me!_ \u2014something strange was going on, say if Roshi were in some kind of trouble, would you know about it?\" I twisted my neck\u2014if I could I would have tied it in a knot, like the top of a plastic garbage bag. _\"Eating me!\"_\n\n\"I guess I don't know what you're talking about.\" She was oddly blas\u00e9, sipping her tea and watching me over the top of the cup. I recalled the legends of Zen masters slapping and kicking students to induce sudden realizations. Perhaps that practice was common here in the Zendo, and so she'd inured herself to outbursts, abrupt outlandish gestures.\n\n\"Forget it,\" I said. \"Listen: Have you had any visitors lately?\" I was thinking of Tony, who'd ostensibly called on the Zendo after our conference at L&L. \"Anyone come sniffing around here last night?\"\n\nShe only looked puzzled, and faintly annoyed. \"No.\"\n\nI considered pushing it, describing Tony to her, then decided he must have visited unseen, at least by Kimmery. Instead I asked, \"Is there anybody in the building right now?\"\n\n\"Well, Roshi lives on the top floor.\"\n\n\"He's up there now?\" I said, startled.\n\n\"Sure. He's in _sesshin_ \u2014it's like an extended retreat\u2014because of these monks. He took a vow of silence, so it's been a little quiet around here.\"\n\n\"Do you live here?\"\n\n\"No. I'm cleaning up for morning zazen. The other students will show up in an hour. They're out doing work service now. That's how the Zendo can afford to pay the rent here. Wallace is downstairs already, but that's basically it.\"\n\n\"Wallace?\" I was distracted by the tea leaves in my cup settling gradually into a mound at the bottom, like astronauts on a planet with barely any gravity.\n\n\"He's like this old hippie who hardly ever does anything but sit. I think his legs must be made of plastic or something. We went past him on the way up.\"\n\n\"Where? In the room with the mats?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. He's like a piece of furniture, easy to miss.\"\n\n\"Biggish, you mean?\"\n\n\"Not so big. I meant still, he sits still.\" She whispered, \"I always wonder if he's dead.\"\n\n\"But he's not a really _big_ person.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't say that.\"\n\nI plunged two fingers into my cup, needing to unsettle the floating leaves again, force them to resume their dance. If the girl saw me do it she didn't say anything.\n\n\"You haven't seen any really big people lately, have you?\" Though I'd not encountered them yet, Roshi and Wallace seemed both unpromising suspects to be the Polish giant. I wondered if instead one might be the sardonic conversationalist I'd heard taunting Minna over the wire.\n\n\"Mmmmm, no,\" she said.\n\n_\"Pierogi monster,\"_ I said, then coughed five times for cover. Thoughts of Minna's killers had overwhelmed the girl's calming influence\u2014my brain sizzled with language, my body with gestures.\n\nIn reply she only refilled my cup, then moved the pot to the countertop. While her back was turned I stroked her chair, ran my palm over the warmth where she'd been sitting, played the spokes of the chair's back like a noiseless harp.\n\n\"Lionel? Is that your name?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You don't seem very calm, Lionel.\" She'd pivoted, almost catching my chair-molestation, and now she leaned back against the counter instead of retaking her seat.\n\nI didn't ordinarily hesitate to reveal my syndrome, but something in me fought it now. \"Do you have something to eat?\" I said. Perhaps calories would restore my equilibrium.\n\n\"Um, I don't know,\" she said. \"You want some bread or something? There might be some yogurt left.\"\n\n\"Because this tea is corked with caffeine. It only looks harmless. Do you drink this stuff all the time?\"\n\n\"Well, it's sort of traditional.\"\n\n\"Is that part of the Zen thing, getting punchy so you can see God?\n\nIsn't that cheating?\"\n\n\"It's more just to stay awake. Because we don't really have God in Zen Buddhism.\" She turned away from me and began rifling through the cabinets, but didn't quit her musings. \"We just sit and try not to fall asleep, so I guess in a way staying awake _is_ seeing God, sort of. So you're right.\"\n\nThe little triumph didn't thrill me. I was feeling trapped, with the wizened teacher a floor above me and the plastic-legged hippie a floor below. I wanted to get out of the Zendo now, but I hadn't figured a next move.\n\nAnd when I left I wanted to take Kimmery with me. I wanted to protect her\u2014the impulse surged in me, looking to affix to a suitable target. Now that I'd failed Minna, who deserved my protection? Was it Tony? Was it Julia? I wished that Frank would whisper a clue in my ear from the beyond. In the meantime, Kimmery would do.\n\n\"Here, do you want some Oreos?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" I said distractedly. \"Buddhists eat Oreos?\"\n\n\"We eat anything we want, Lionel. This isn't Japan.\" She took a blue carton of cookies and put it on the table.\n\nI helped myself, craving the snack, glad we weren't in Japan.\n\n\"I used to know this guy who once worked for Nabisco,\" she said, musing as she bit into a cookie. \"You know, the company that makes Oreos? He said they had two main plants for making Oreos, in different parts of the country. Two head bakers, you know, different quality control.\"\n\n\"Uh\u2014\" I took a cookie and dunked it in my tea.\n\n\"And he used to swear he could tell the difference just by tasting them. This guy, when we ate Oreos, he would just go through the pack sniffing them and tasting the chocolate part and then he'd put the bad ones in a pile. And like, a really good package was one where less than a third had to go in the bad pile, because they were from the wrong bakery, you know? But sometimes there wouldn't be more than five or six good ones in a whole package.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute. You're saying every package of Oreos has cookies from _both_ bakeries?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\nI tried to keep from thinking about it, tried to keep it in the blind spot of my obsessiveness, the way I would flinch my eyes from a tempting shoulder. But it was impossible. \"What motive could they possibly have for mixing batches in the same package?\"\n\n\"Well, easy. If word got out that one bakery was better than the other, they wouldn't want people, you know, _shunning_ whole cartons, or maybe even whole truckloads, whole deliveries of Oreos. They'd have to keep them mixed up, so you'd buy any package knowing you'd probably get some good ones.\"\n\n\"So you're saying they ship batches from the two bakeries to one central boxing location just to mix them together.\"\n\n\"I guess that's what it would entail, isn't it?\" she said brightly.\n\n\"That's stupid,\" I said, but it was only the sound of my crumbling resistance.\n\nShe shrugged. \"All I know is we'd eat them and he'd be frantically building this pile of rejected cookies. And he'd be pushing them at me saying, 'See, see?' I could never tell the difference.\"\n\nNo, no, no, no.\n\n_Eatmeoreo_ , I mouthed inaudibly. I crinkled in the cellophane sleeve for another cookie, then nibbled off the overhang of chocolate top. I let the pulverized crumbs saturate my tongue, then reached for another, performed the same operation. They were identical. I put both nibbled cookies in the same pile. I needed to find a good one, or a bad one, before I could tell the difference.\n\nMaybe I'd only ever eaten bad ones.\n\n\"I thought you didn't believe me,\" said Kimmery.\n\n\"Mushytest,\" I mumbled, my lips pasty with cookie mud, my eyes wild as I considered the task my brain had set for my sorry tongue. There were three sleeves in the box of Oreos. We were into just the first of them.\n\nShe nodded at my pile of discards. \"What are those, good ones or bad ones?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" I tried sniffing the next. \"Was this guy your boyfriend or something?\"\n\n\"For a little while.\" \"Was he a Zen Buddhist too?\"\n\nShe snorted lightly. I nibbled another cookie and began to despair. I would have been happy now for an ordinary interruptive tic, something to throw my bloodhoundlike obsessions off the scent. The Minna Men were in shambles, yes, but I'd get to the bottom of the Oreo conundrum.\n\nI jumped to my feet, rattling both our teacups. I had to get out of there, quell my panic, restart my investigation, put some distance between myself and the cookies.\n\n_\"Barnamum Bakery!\"_ I yelped, reassuring myself.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" I jerked my head sideways, then turned it slowly, as if to work out a kink. \"We'd better go, Kimmery.\"\n\n\"Go where?\" She leaned forward, her pupils big and trusting. I felt a thrill at being taken so seriously. This making the rounds without Gilbert could get to be a habit. For once I was playing lead detective instead of comic\u2014or Tourettic\u2014relief.\n\n\"Downstairs,\" I said, at a loss for a better answer.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said, whispering conspiratorially. \"But be quiet.\"\n\nWe crept past the half-open door on the second landing, and I retrieved my shoes from the rack. This time I got a look at Wallace. He sat with his back to us, limp blond hair tucked behind his ears and giving way to a bald spot. He wore a sweater and sweatpants and sat still as advertised, inert, asleep, or, I suppose, dead\u2014though death was not a still thing to me at the moment, more a matter of skid marks in blood and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Wallace looked harmless anyway. Kimmery's idea of a hippie, apparently, was a white man over forty-five not in a business suit. In Brooklyn we would have just said _loser_.\n\nShe opened the front door of the Zendo. \"I've got to finish cleaning,\" she said. \"You know, for the monks.\"\n\n_\"Im_ portantmonks,\" I said, ticcing gently.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I don't think you should be alone here.\" I looked up and down the block to see if anyone was watching us. My neck prickled, alert to wind and fear. The Upper East Siders had retaken their streets, and walked obliviously crinkling doggie-doo bags and the _New York Times_ and the wax paper around bagels. My feeling of advantage, of beginning my investigation while the world was still asleep, was gone.\n\n\"I'm _con-worried,\"_ I said, Tourette's mangling my speech again. I wanted to get away from her before I shouted, barked, or ran my fingers around the neck of her T-shirt.\n\nShe smiled. \"What's that\u2014like confused and worried?\"\n\nI nodded. It was close enough.\n\n\"I'll be okay. Don't be conworried.\" She spoke calmly, and it calmed me. \"You'll come back later, right? To sit?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek. Startled, I couldn't move, stood instead feeling her kiss-print burning on my flesh in the cold morning air. Was it personal, or some sort of fuzzy Zen coercion? Were they that desperate to fill mats at the Zendo?\n\n\"Don't do that,\" I said. \"You just met me. This is New York.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you're my friend now.\"\n\n\"I have to go.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. \"Zazen is at four o'clock.\"\n\n\"I'll be there.\"\n\nShe shut the door. I was alone on the street again, my investigation already at a standstill. Had I learned anything inside the Zendo? Now I felt dazed with loss\u2014I'd penetrated the citadel and spent my whole time contemplating Kimmery and Oreos. My mouth was full of cocoa, my nostrils full of her scent from the unexpected kiss.\n\nTwo men took me by the elbows and hustled me into a car waiting at the curb.\n\nThe four of them wore identical blue suits with black piping on the legs, and identical black sunglasses. They looked like a band that plays at weddings. Four white guys, assortedly chunky, pinched in the face, with pimples, and indistinct. Their car was a rental. Chunky sat in the backseat waiting and when the two who'd picked me up crushed me into the back beside him, he immediately put his arm around my neck in a sort of brotherly choke hold. The two who'd picked me off the street\u2014Pimples and Indistinct\u2014jammed in beside me, to make four of us on the backseat. It was a bit crowded.\n\n\"Get in the front,\" said Chunky, the one holding my neck.\n\n\"Me?\" I said.\n\n\"Shut up. Larry, get out. There's too many. Go in the front.\"\n\n\"Okay, okay,\" said the one on the end, Indistinct or Larry. He got out of the back and into the empty front passenger seat and the one driving\u2014Pinched\u2014took off. Chunky loosened his hold when we got into the downtown traffic on Second Avenue, but left his arm draped over my shoulders.\n\n\"Take the Drive,\" he said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Tell him take the East Side Drive.\"\n\n\"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"I want to be on the highway.\"\n\n\"Why not just drive in circles?\"\n\n\"My car is parked up here,\" I said. \"You could drop me off. \"\n\n\"Shut up. Why can't we just drive in circles?\"\n\n\"You shut up. It should look like we're going somewhere, stupid. We're really scaring him going in circles.\"\n\n\"I'm listening to what you say no matter how you drive,\" I said, wanting to make them feel better. \"There's four of you and one of me.\"\n\n\"We want more than listening,\" said Chunky. \"We want you scared.\"\n\nBut I wasn't scared. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and we were fighting traffic on Second Avenue. There weren't even any circles to go in, just honking delivery trucks tied up by pedestrians. And the closer I looked at these guys the less I was impressed. For one thing, Chunky's hand on my neck was soft, his skin was soft, and his hold on me rather tender. And he was the toughest of the bunch. They weren't calm, they weren't good at what they were doing, and they weren't tough. None of them, as far as I could tell, was wearing a gun.\n\nFor another thing, all four of their sunglasses still bore price tags, dangling fluorescent orange ovals reading $6.99!\n\nI reached out and batted at Pimples's price tag. He turned away, and my finger hooked the earpiece and jerked the shades off his face, into his lap. \"Shit,\" said Pimples, and hurried the glasses back onto his face as if I might recognize him without them.\n\n\"Hey, none of that,\" said Chunky, and hugged me again. He reminded me of my long-ago kissing tic, the way he was crowding me close to him in the car.\n\n\"Okay,\" I said, though I knew it would be hard not to bat at the price tags if they came within reach. \"But what's the game here, guys?\"\n\n\"We're supposed to throw a scare into you,\" said Chunky, distracted, watching Pinched drive. \"Stay away from the Zendo, that sort of thing. Hey, take the fucking Drive. Seventy-ninth Street there's an on-ramp.\"\n\n\"I can't get over,\" complained Pinched, eyeing lanes of traffic.\n\n\"What so great about the FDR?\" said Indistinct. \"Why can't we stay on the streets?\"\n\n\"What, you want to pull over and rough him up on Park Avenue?\" said Chunky.\n\n\"Maybe just a scare without the roughing-up will do,\" I suggested. \"Get this over with, get on with the day.\"\n\n\"Stop him talking so much.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but he's got a point.\"\n\n_\"Eatmepointman!\"_\n\nChunky clamped his hand over my mouth. At that moment I heard a high-pitched two-note signal. The four of them, and me, began looking around the car for the source of the noise. It was as if we were in a video game and had crossed up to the next level, were about to be destroyed by aliens we couldn't see coming. Then I realized that the beeping issued from my coat pocket: Minna's beeper going off.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\nI twisted my head free. Chunky didn't fight me. \"Barnamum Beeper,\" I said.\n\n\"What's that, some special kind? Get it out of his pocket. Didn't you chumps frisk him?\"\n\n\"Screw you.\"\n\n\"Jesus.\"\n\nThey put their hands on me and quickly found the beeper. The digital readout showed a Brooklyn-Queens-Bronx prefix on the number. \"Who's that?\" said Pimples.\n\nI frowned and shrugged: didn't know. Truly, I didn't recognize the number. Someone who thought Minna was still alive, I guessed, and shuddered a little. That scared me more than my abductors did.\n\n\"Make him call it,\" said Pinched from the front.\n\n\"You want to pull over to let him call?\"\n\n\"Larry, you got the phone?\"\n\nIndistinct turned in his seat and offered me a cell phone.\n\n\"Call the number.\"\n\nI dialed, they waited. We inched down Second Avenue. The airspace of the car hummed with tension. The cell phone rang, _dit-dit-dit_ , a miniature, a toy that effortlessly commanded our focus, our complete attention. I might have popped it in my mouth and gulped it down instead of holding it to my ear. _Dit-dit-dit_ , it rang again, then somebody picked up.\n\nGarbage Cop.\n\n\"Lionel?\" said Loomis.\n\n\"Mmmmhuh,\" I replied, squelching an outburst.\n\n\"Get this. What's the difference between three hundred sixty-five blow jobs and a radial tire?\"\n\n_\"Don'tcare!\"_ I shouted. The four in the car all jumped.\n\n\"One's a Goodyear, the other's a _great_ year,\" said Loomis proudly. He knew he'd nailed the riddle, no faltering this time, not a word out of place.\n\n\"Where are you calling from?\" I asked. \"You called me.\"\n\n\"You beeped me, Loomis. Where are you?\"\n\n\"I don't know\"\u2014his voice dimmed\u2014\"hey, what's the name of this place? Oh, yeah? Thanks. Bee-Bee-Que? Really, just like that, three letters? Go figure. Lionel, you there?\"\n\n\"Here.\"\n\n\"It's a diner called B-B-Q, just like barbecue, only three letters. I eat here all the time, and I never even knew that!\"\n\n\"Why'd you beep me, Loomis?\" _Beep and Rebeep are sitting on a fence_ \u2014\n\n\"You told me to. You wanted that address, right? Ullman, the dead guy.\"\n\n\"Uh, that's right,\" I said, shrugging at Chunky, who still held my neck, but lightly, leaving me room to place the phone. He scowled at me, but it wasn't my fault if he was confused. I was confused, too. Confused and conworried.\n\n\"Well, I got it right here,\" said the Garbage Cop pridefully.\n\n\"What's the good of driving him around watching him make a phone call?\" complained Pimples.\n\n\"Take it away from him,\" said Pinched from the driver's seat.\n\n\"Just punch him in the stomach,\" said Indistinct. \"Make him scared.\"\n\n\"You got someone there with you?\" said Loomis.\n\nThe four in the car had begun to chafe at seeing their faint authority slip away, devolve to the modern technology, the bit of plastic and wire in my palm. I had to find a way to calm them down. I nodded and widened my eyes to show my cooperation, and mouthed a just-wait signal to them, hoping they'd recall the protocol from crime movies: pretend they weren't there listening, and thus gather information on the sly.\n\nI couldn't help it that they _weren't_ actually listening.\n\n\"Tell me the address,\" I said.\n\n\"Okay, here goes,\" said Loomis. \"Got a pen?\"\n\n\"Whose address?\" whispered Chunky in my other ear. He'd caught my hint. He was schooled enough in the clich\u00e9s to be manipulable; his compatriots I wasn't so sure of.\n\n\"Tell me _Ullman's_ address,\" I said for their sake. _Man-Salad-Dress_ went my brain. I swallowed hard to keep it from crossing the threshold.\n\n\"Yeah, I got it,\" said the Garbage Cop sarcastically. \"Whose else would you want?\"\n\n\"Ullman?\" said Chunky, not to me but to Pimples. \"He's talking about _Ullman?\"_\n\n_\"Whose! A! Dress!\"_ I shrieked.\n\n\"Aw, quit,\" said Loomis, jaded by now. My other audience wasn't so blas\u00e9. Pimples ripped the cell phone out of my hand, and Chunky wrestled my arm behind my back so I was wrenched forward nearly against the back of the driver's seat, and down. It was like he wanted me draped in his lap for a spanking. Meanwhile, up front, Pinched and Indistinct began arguing fiercely about parking, about whether they'd fit in some spot.\n\nPimples put the phone to his own ear and listened, but Loomis hung up, or maybe just got quiet and listened back, so they were silent together. Pinched managed to park, or double-park\u2014I couldn't tell which from my strained vantage. The two up front were still muttering at one another, but Chunky was quiet, just turning my arm another degree or two, experimenting with actually hurting me, trying it on for size.\n\n\"You don't like hearing the name _Ullman,\"_ I said, wincing.\n\n\"Ullman was a friend,\" said Chunky.\n\n\"Don't let him talk about Ullman,\" said Pinched.\n\n\"This is stupid,\" said Indistinct, with consummate disgust.\n\n\"You're stupid,\" said Chunky. \"We're supposed to scare a guy, let's do it.\"\n\n\"I'm not so scared,\" I said. \"You guys seem more scared to me. Scared of talking about Ullman.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, if we're scared you don't know why,\" said Chunky. \"And don't guess either. Don't open your trap.\"\n\n\"You're scared of a big Polish guy,\" I said.\n\n\"This is stupid,\" said Indistinct again. He sounded like he might cry. He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.\n\nPimples finally quit listening to the silence Loomis had left behind on the cell phone, shut it down, and put it on the seat between us.\n\n\"What if we are scared of him?\" said Chunky. \"We ought to be, take it from us. We wouldn't be working for him if we weren't.\" He loosened his grip on my arm, so I was able to straighten up and look around. We were parked outside a popular coffee shop on Second. The window was full of sullen kids flirting by working on tiny computers and reading magazines. They didn't notice us, carful of lugs, and why should they?\n\nIndistinct was nowhere to be seen.\n\n\"I sympathize,\" I said, to keep them talking. \"I'm scared of the big guy, too. It's just you can't throw a scare so good when you're scared.\"\n\nI thought of Tony. If he'd come to the Zendo last night shouldn't he have triggered the same alarm I had? Shouldn't he have drawn these would-be toughs, this clown car loaded with fresh graduates from Clown College?\n\n\"What's so not scary about us?\" said Pinched. He said to Chunky, \"Hurt him already.\"\n\n\"You can hurt me but you still won't scare me,\" I said distractedly. One part of my brain was thinking, _Handle with scare, scandal with hair_ , and so on. Another part was puzzling over the Tony question.\n\n\"Who was that on the phone?\" said Pimples, still working on the problem he'd selected as his own.\n\n\"You wouldn't believe me,\" I said.\n\n\"Try us,\" said Chunky, twisting my arm.\n\n\"Just a guy doing research for me, that's all. I wanted Ullman's address. My partner got arrested for the murder.\"\n\n\"See, you shouldn't _have_ a guy doing research,\" said Chunky. \"That's the whole problem. Getting involved, visiting Ullman's apartment, that's the kind of thing we're supposed to scare you about.\"\n\n_Scare me, skullman_ , sang my disease. _Skullamum Bailey. Skinnyman Brainy_.\n\n\"Hurt him and scare him and let's get out of here,\" said Pinched. \"I don't like this. Larry was right, it is stupid. I don't care about who's doing research.\"\n\n\"I still want to know who was on the phone,\" said Pimples.\n\n\"Listen,\" said Chunky, now trying to reason with me, as his gang's morale and focus\u2014and actual numbers\u2014were dwindling. \"We're here on behalf of the big guy you're talking about, see? That's who sent us.\" He offered the morphic resonance theory: \"So if he scares you you ought to be scared by us, without us having to hurt you.\"\n\n\"Guys like you could _kill_ me and you still wouldn't scare me,\" I said.\n\n\"This was a bad idea,\" concluded Pinched, and he, too, got out of the car. The front seats were empty now, the steering wheel unmanned. \"This isn't us,\" he said, leaning back in, addressing Pimples and Chunky. \"We're no good at this.\" He raised his eyebrows at me. \"You'll have to forgive us. This isn't what we do. We're men of peace.\" He shut the door. I turned my head enough to see him scooting down the block, his walk like a hectic bird's.\n\n_\"Scaredycop!\"_ I shouted.\n\n\"Where?\" said Chunky, immediately releasing my arm. They both swiveled their heads in a panic, eyes wild behind the dark glasses, orange price tags dancing like fishing lures. Freed at last, I turned my head too, not searching for anything, of course, instead for the pleasure of aping their movements.\n\n\"Screw this,\" muttered Pimples.\n\nHe and Chunky both fled the rental car, hot on Pinched's heels, leaving me alone there.\n\nPinched had taken the car keys, but Indistinct's cell phone sat abandoned on the seat beside me. I put it in my pocket. Then I leaned over the seat, popped the glove compartment, and found the rental agency's registration card and receipt. The car was on a six-month lease to the Fujisaki Corporation, 1030 Park Avenue. The zip code, I was pretty sure, put it in the same zone as the Zendo. Which is where I was, as it happened. I rapped on the rental car's glove compartment door five times, but it wasn't particularly resonant or satisfying.\n\nOn my walk over to 1030 Park I flipped open the cell phone and rang L&L. I'd never made a street call before, and felt quite Captain Kirk\u2013ish.\n\n\"L&L,\" said a voice, the one I'd hoped to hear.\n\n\"Tony, it's me,\" I said. \"Essrog.\" That was how Minna always started a phone call: _Lionel, it's Minna_. You're the first name, I'm the last. In other words: You're the jerk and I'm the jerk's boss.\n\n\"Where are you?\" said Tony.\n\nCrossing Lexington at Seventy-sixth Street was the answer. But I didn't want to tell him.\n\nWhy? I wasn't sure. Anyway, I let a tic do my talking: \"Kiss me, scareyman!\"\n\n\"I got worried about you, Lionel. Danny said you went off with the Garbage Cop on some kind of a mission.\"\n\n\"Well, sort of.\"\n\n\"He with you now?\"\n\n_\"Garbage cookie,\"_ I said seriously.\n\n\"Why don't you head back here, Lionel? We ought to talk.\"\n\n\"I'm investigating a case,\" I said. _A guess tic eating a vest_. \"Oh, yeah? Where's it taking you?\"\n\nA well-coiffed man in a blue suit turned off Lexington ahead of me. He had a cell phone pressed to his right ear. I aligned myself behind him and imitated his walk.\n\n\"Various places,\" I said.\n\n\"Name one.\"\n\nThe harder Tony asked, the less I wanted to say. \"I was hoping we could, you know, triangulate a little. Compare data.\"\n\n\"Give me an example, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Like did you\u2014 _Vesticulate! Guessticalot!_ \u2014did you get anything out of that, uh, Zendo place last night?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you about it when I see you. Right now there's something important, you ought to get back here. What are you, at a pay phone?\"\n\n_\"Vestphone!\"_ I said. \"By any chance did a carful of guys try to warn you off?\"\n\n\"Fuck you talking about?\"\n\n\"What about the girl I saw go in before Minna? Did you find out about her?\" Even as I asked I got the answer to the question I was asking, the real question.\n\nI didn't trust Tony.\n\nI felt the truth of it in the pause before he replied.\n\n\"I learned a few things,\" he said. \"But at the moment we need to pool our resources, Lionel. You need to get back here. Because we got some problems coming up.\"\n\nNow I could hear the bluff in his voice. It was casual, easy. He wasn't straining particularly. It was only Essrog on the line, after all.\n\n\"I know about problems,\" I said. \"Gilbert's in jail on a murder charge.\"\n\n\"Well, that's just one.\"\n\n\"You weren't at the Zendo last night,\" I said. The man in the blue suit turned onto Park Avenue, still gabbing. I let him go, and stood in a crowd at the corner, waiting for the light to change.\n\n\"Maybe you ought to worry about your own fucking self and not me, Lionel,\" said Tony. \"Where were _you_ last night?\"\n\n\"I did what I was supposed to do,\" I said, wanting to provoke him now. \"I told Julia. Actually, she already knew.\" I left out the part about the homicide cop.\n\n\"That's interesting. I've been sort of wondering where Julia goes off to. I hope you found out.\"\n\nAlarms went off. Tony was trying to make his voice casual, but it wasn't working. \"Wondering when? You means she goes out of town a lot?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Anyway, how'd you know she went anywhere?\"\n\n\"Fuck you think we do around here, Lionel? We learn things.\"\n\n\"Yeah, we're a leading outfit. Gilbert's in jail, Tony.\" My eyes were suddenly full of tears. I knew I should be trying to focus on the Julia problem, but our betrayal of Gilbert felt more immediate.\n\n\"I know. He's safer there. Come in and talk, Lionel.\"\n\nI crossed with the crowd but stopped halfway, at the traffic island in the middle of Park Avenue. The thumbnail of garden was marked with a sign that read VALIANT DAFFODIL (N. AMERICA), but the ground was chewed and pocked and vacant, as if someone had just dug up a plot of dead bulbs. I sat on the wooden embankment there and let the crowd pass by, until the light turned red again and the traffic began to whiz past me. A strip of sunshine laced the avenue and warmed me on the bench. Park Avenue's giant apartment buildings were ornate with shadow in the midmorning light. I was like a castaway on my island there, in a river of orange cabs.\n\n\"Where are you, Freakshow?\"\n\n\"Don't call me Freakshow,\" I said.\n\n\"What should I call you\u2014Buttercup?\"\n\n\"Valiant Daffodil,\" I blurted. \"Alibi Diffident.\"\n\n\"Where are you, Daffodil?\" said Tony rather sweetly. \"Should we come get you?\"\n\n\"Goodcop, buttercup,\" I said, ticcing on through my tears. By calling me Freakshow\u2014Minna's nickname\u2014Tony had cued my Tourette's, had cut right through the layers of coping strategies and called out my giddy teenage voice. It should have been a relief to tic freely with one who knew me so well. But I didn't trust him. Minna was dead and I didn't trust Tony and I didn't know what it meant.\n\n\"Tell me where your little investigation led you,\" said Tony.\n\nI looked up at Park Avenue, the monolithic walls of old money stretched out, a furrow of stone.\n\n\"I'm in Brooklyn,\" I lied. _\"Eatmegreenpoint.\"_\n\n\"Oh, yeah? What's in Greenpoint?\"\n\n\"I'm looking for the\u2014 _Greenpope!_ \u2014the guy who killed Minna, the Polish guy. What do you think?\"\n\n\"Just wandering around looking for him, huh?\"\n\n\"Eatmephone!\"\n\n\"Hanging out in Polish bars, that sort of thing?\"\n\nI barked and clicked my tongue. My agitated jaw jerked against the redial button and a sequence of tones played on the line. The light changed and the cabs crossing Park blared their horns, working through gridlock. Another raft of pedestrians passed over my island and back into the river.\n\n\"Doesn't sound like Greenpoint,\" said Tony.\n\n\"They're filming a movie out here. You should see this. They've got Greenpoint\u2014 _Greenphone! Creepycone! Phonyman!_ \u2014Greenpoint Avenue set up to look like Manhattan. All these fake buildings and cabs and extras dressed up like they're on Park Avenue or something. So that's what you're hearing.\"\n\n\"Who's in it?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Who's in the movie?\"\n\n\"Somebody said Mel _\u2014Gisspod, Gasspoint, Pissphone\u2014\"_\n\n\"Mel Gibson.\"\n\n\"Yeah. But I haven't seen him, just a lot of extras.\"\n\n\"And they really got fake buildings out there?\"\n\n\"Did you sleep with Julia, Tony?\"\n\n\"Why'd you want to go and say that?\"\n\n\"Did you?\"\n\n\"Who you trying to protect, Daffodil? Minna's dead.\"\n\n\"I want to know.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you in person when you get in here already.\"\n\n\"Dickety Daffodil! Dissident Crocophile! Laughable Chocodopolus!\"\n\n\"Ah, I heard it all before.\"\n\n\"Likable lunchphone, veritable spongefist, teenage mutant Zendo lungfish, penis Milhaus Nixon tuning fork.\"\n\n\"You fucking Tugboat.\"\n\n\"Good-bye, Tonybailey.\"\n\nTen-thirty Park Avenue was another stone edifice, unremarkable among its neighbors. The oak doors split the difference between magnificence and military sturdiness, tiny windows barred with iron: French Colonial Bomb Shelter. The awning showed just the numerals, no gaudy, pretentious building name like you'd see on Central Park West or in Brooklyn Heights\u2014here nothing remained to be proved, and anonymity was a value greater than charisma. The building had a private loading zone and a subtle curb cut, though, which sang of money, payoffs to city officials, and of women's-shoe heels too fragile to tangle with the usual four-inch step, too expensive to risk miring in dog shit. A special curb man stood patrolling the front, ready to open car doors or kick dogs or turn away unwanted visitors before they even tarnished the lobby. I came down the block at a good clip and swiveled to the door at the last minute, faking him out.\n\nThe lobby was wide and dark, designed to blind an unfamiliar visitor coming in from the sunlight. A crowd of doormen in white gloves and familiar blue suits with black piping on the legs surrounded me the minute I stumbled through the doors. It was the same uniform worn by the lugs in the rental car.\n\nSo they hadn't been lugs by training\u2014that much was obvious. They were doormen, no shame in that. But _men of peace_?\n\n\"Help you with something?\"\n\n\"Help you sir?\"\n\n\"Name?\"\n\n\"All visitors must be announced.\"\n\n\"Delivery?\"\n\n\"Have you got a name?\"\n\nThey encircled me, five or six them, not on special assignment but instead doing exactly what they were trained to do. Loom in the gloom. In their white gloves and their right context they were much scarier than they had been loaded into a rental car and fumbling as hoods. Their propriety was terrifying. I didn't see Pinched, Pimples, Chunky or Indistinct among them, but it was a big building. Instead I'd drawn Shadowface, Shadowface, Shadowface, Tallshadowface, and Shadowface.\n\n\"I'm here to see Fujisaki,\" I said. \"Man, woman or corporation.\"\n\n\"There must be a mistake.\"\n\n\"Wrong building, surely.\"\n\n\"There is no Fujisaki.\"\n\n\"Name?\"\n\n\"Fujisaki Management Corporation,\" I said.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"No. Not here. That isn't right.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Name? Who's calling, sir?\"\n\nI took out one of Minna's cards. \"Frank Minna,\" I said. The name came easily, and I didn't feel any need to distort it the way I would my own.\n\nThe band of doormen around me loosened at the sight of a business card. I'd shown a first glimmer of legitimacy. They were a top grade of doorman, finely tuned, factoring vigilance against hair-trigger sycophantic instincts.\n\n\"Expected?\"\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\n\"Expected by the party in question? Appointment? Name? Contact?\"\n\n\"Dropping in.\" \"Hmmm.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nAnother minute correction ensued. They bunched closer. Minna's card disappeared.\n\n\"There may be some confusion.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Probably there is.\"\n\n\"Wrong building completely.\"\n\n\"Should there be a destination for a message, what would a message be?\"\n\n\"On the chance that the destination in question is this one. You understand, sir.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"No message,\" I said. I tapped the nearest doorman's suit breast. He darted back, scowling. But they were penguins now. I had to touch them all. I reached for the next, the tallest, tried to high-five his shoulder and just grazed it. The circle loosened around me again as I spun. They might have thought I was staining them with invisible swatches of blacklight paint for future identification or planting electronic bugs or just plain old spreading cooties, from the way they jumped.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Look out.\"\n\n\"Can't have this.\"\n\n\"Can't have this here.\"\n\n\"Out.\"\n\nThen two of them had me by the elbows, and I was steered out onto the sidewalk.\n\nI took a stroll around the block, just to glean what I could from the north face of the building. I was shadowed by the curb man, of course, but I didn't mind. The staff entrance smelled of a private dry-cleaning service, and the disposal bins showed signs of bulk food orders, perhaps an in-house grocery. I wondered if the building housed a private chef, too. I thought about poking my head in to see but the curb man was muttering tensely into a walkie-talkie, and I figured I'd probably better distance myself. I waved good-bye and he waved back involuntarily\u2014everyone's a little ticcish that way sometimes.\n\nBetween bites of hot dog and gulps of papaya juice I dialed the Garbage Cop's office. The Papaya Czar on Eighty-sixth Street and Third Avenue is my kind of place\u2014bright orange and yellow signs pasted on every available surface screaming, PAPAYA IS GOD'S GREATEST GIFT TO MAN'S HEALTH! OUR FRANKFURTERS ARE THE WORKING MAN'S FILET MIGNON! WE'RE POLITE NEW YORKERS, WE SUPPORT MAYOR GIULIANI! And so on. Papaya Czar's walls are so layered with language that I find myself immediately calmed inside their doors, as though I've stepped into a model interior of my own skull.\n\nI washed down the tangy nubbin of the first dog while the phone rang. Papaya Czar's product did emulate an expensive steak's melting-in-your-mouthiness, frankfurters apparently skinless and neither bun nor dog crisped in the cooking, so they slid together into hot-dog cream on the tongue. These virtues could be taken in excess and leave one craving the greater surface tension of a Nathan's dog, but I was in the mood for the Czar's today. I had four more laid out in a neat row on the counter where I sat, each with a trim line of yellow mustard for an exclamation\u2014 _five_ was still my angel.\n\nAs for papaya itself, I might as well be drinking truffula seed nectar or gryphon milk, for all I knew\u2014I'd never encountered the fruit in any form except the Czar's chalky beverage.\n\n\"Sanitation Inspector Loomis,\" answered the Garbage Cop.\n\n\"Listen, Loomis. I'm working on this Gilbert thing.\" I knew I needed to tie it in to his friend's plight to keep him focused. In fact, Gilbert was now the furthest thing from my mind. \"I need you to pull up some information for me.\"\n\n\"That you, Lionel?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Listen. Ten-three-oh Park Avenue. Write that down. I need some records on the building, management company, head of the board, whatever you can find out. See if any names you recognize pop up.\"\n\n\"Recognize from where?\"\n\n\"From, uh, around the neighborhood.\" I was thinking _Frank Minna_ , but I didn't want to say it. \"Oh, one in particular. Fujisaki. It's Japanese.\"\n\n\"I don't know any Fujisaki from around the neighborhood.\"\n\n\"Just look up the records, Loomis. Call me back when you get something.\"\n\n\"Call you back where?\"\n\nI'd gotten the beeper and the cell phone mixed up. I was collecting other people's electronics. In fact, I didn't know the number of the phone I'd borrowed from the doorman in sunglasses. I wondered for the first time who I'd find myself talking to if I answered the incoming calls.\n\n\"Forget it,\" I said. \"You've still got Minna's beeper number?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Use that. I'll call you.\"\n\n\"When do we bail out Gilbert?\"\n\n\"I'm working on it. Listen, Loomis, I'd better go. Get back to me, all right?\"\n\n\"Sure thing, Lionel. And, buddy?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Good stature, man,\" said Loomis. \"You're holding up great.\" \"Uh, thanks Loomis.\" I ended the call, put the cell phone back into my jacket pocket.\n\n\"Kee-rist,\" said a man sitting on my right. He was a guy in his forties. He wore a suit. As Minna said more than once, in New York any chucklehead can wear a suit. Satisfied he wasn't a doorman, I ignored him, worked on dog number three.\n\n\"I was in this restaurant in L.A.,\" he started. \"Great place, million-dollar place. All the food is tall, you know what I mean? Tall food? There's this couple at a table, both of them talking on fucking cell phones, just like you got there. Two different conversations through the whole meal, yakking all over each other, what _Cindy_ said, get away for the _weekend_ , gotta work on my _game_ , the whole nine yards. You couldn't hear yourself think over the racket.\"\n\nI finished dog three in five evenly spaced bites, licked the mustard off my thumb tip, and picked up number four.\n\n\"I thought L.A., fair enough. Chalk it up. You can't expect any different. So couple months ago I'm trying to impress a client, take him to Balthazar, you know, downtown? Million-dollar place, take it from me. Tall food, _gangly_ food. So what do I see but a couple of bozos at the bar talking on cell phones. My water's getting hot, but I figure, bar, fair enough, that's showing decent respect. Adjust my standards, whatever. So we get a table after waiting fifteen fucking minutes, sit down and my client's phone rings, he takes it out at the table! Guy I was with! Sits there yakking! Ten, fifteen minutes!\"\n\nI enjoyed dog four in Zen-like calm and silence, practicing for my coming _zazen_.\n\n\"Never thought I'd see it in here, though. Fucking California, Balthazar, whatever, all these guys with crap in their hair and million-dollar wristwatches like Dick Tracy I guess I gotta adjust my standards to the modern universe but I thought at the very least I could sit here eat a fucking hot dog without listening to yak yak yak.\"\n\nI'd apportioned a fifth of my papaya juice for rinsing down the last dog. Suddenly impatient to leave, I stuffed a wad of napkins in my jacket pocket and took the dog and the drink in hand and headed back out into the bright cold day.\n\n\"Fucking people talking to themselves in a public place like they got some kind of illness!\"\n\nThe beeper went off just as I got to the car. I drew it out for a look: another unfamiliar number in 718. I got into the car and called from the cell phone, ready to be irritated with Loomis.\n\n_\"DickTracyphone,\"_ I said into the mouthpiece.\n\n\"This is Matricardi and Rockaforte,\" went a gravelly voice. Rockaforte. Though I'd heard them speak just two or three times in fifteen years, I would have known his voice anywhere.\n\nThrough the windshield I viewed Eighty-third Street, midday, November. A couple of women in expensive coats mimed a Manhattan conversation for my benefit, trying to persuade me of their reality. On the line, though, I heard an old man's breathing, and what I saw through the windshield wasn't real at all.\n\nI considered that I was answering Minna's beeper. Did they know he was dead? Would I have to deliver the news to The Clients? I felt my throat constrict, instantly throbbing with fear and language.\n\n\"Speak to me,\" rasped Rockaforte.\n\n\"Larval Pushbug,\" I said softly, trying to offer my name. Did The Clients even know it? \"Papaya Pissbag.\" I was tic-gripped, helpless. \" _Not_ Minna,\" I said at last. \" _Not_ Frank. Frank's _dead_.\"\n\n\"We know, Lionel,\" said Rockaforte.\n\n\"Who told you?\" I whispered, controlling a bark.\n\n\"Things don't escape,\" he said. He paused, breathed, went on. \"We're very sorry for you in this time.\"\n\n\"You found out from Tony?\"\n\n\"We found out. We find out what we need. We learn.\"\n\n_But do you kill?_ I wanted to ask. _Do you command a Polish giant?_\n\n\"We're concerned for you,\" he said. \"The information is that you are running, going here and there, unable to sit still. We hear this, and it concerns.\"\n\n\"What information?\"\n\n\"And that Julia has left her home in this time of mourning. That nobody knows where she has gone unless it is you.\"\n\n\"Nojulia, nobody, nobodyknows.\"\n\n\"You still suffer. We see this and we suffer as well.\"\n\nThis was somewhat obscure to me, but I wasn't going to ask.\n\n\"We wish to speak with you, Lionel. Will you come and talk to us?\"\n\n\"We're talking now,\" I breathed.\n\n\"We wish to see you standing before us. It's important in this time of pain. Come see us, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Where? New Jersey?\" Heart racing, I allowed soothing permutations to course through my brain: _Garden state bricko and stuckface garbage face grippo and suckfast garter snake ticc-o and circus_. My lips rustled at the phone, nearly giving the words breath.\n\n\"We're in the Brooklyn house,\" he said. \"Come.\"\n\n_\"Scarface! Cigarfish!\"_\n\n\"What's got you running, Lionel?\"\n\n\"Tony. You've been talking to Tony. He said I'm running. I'm not running.\"\n\n\"You sound running.\"\n\n\"I'm looking for the killer. Tony's trying to stop me, I think.\"\n\n\"You have a problem with Tony?\"\n\n\"I don't trust him. He's acting\u2014 _Stuccotash!_ \u2014he's acting strangely.\"\n\n\"Let me speak,\" came a voice in the background of the call. Rockaforte's voice was replaced with Matricardi's: higher, more mellifluous, a single-malt whiskey instead of Dewar's.\n\n\"What's wrong with Tony?\" said Matricardi. \"You don't trust him in this matter?\"\n\n\"I don't trust him,\" I repeated dumbly. I thought about ending the call. Again I consulted my other senses: I was in the sunshine in Manhattan in an L&L vehicle talking on a doorman's cell phone. I could discard Minna's beeper, forget about the call, go anywhere. The Clients were like players in a dream. They shouldn't have been able to touch me with their ancient, ethereal voices. But I couldn't bring myself to hang up on them.\n\n\"Come to us,\" said Matricardi. \"We'll talk. Tony doesn't have to be there.\"\n\n\"Forgettaphone.\"\n\n\"You remember our place? Degraw Street. You know where?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Come. Honor us in this time of disappointment and regret. We'll talk without Tony. What's wrong we'll straighten.\"\n\nWhile I considered what to do I used the doormen's phone again, called information and got the number of the _Daily News'_ obituary page and bought a notice for Minna. I put in on a credit card of Minna's to which he'd added my name. He had to pay for his own notice, but I knew he'd have wanted it, considered it fifty bucks well spent. He was always an avid reader of the obituaries, studying them each morning in the L&L office like a tip sheet, a chance for him to pick up or work an angle. The woman on the line did it all by rote, and so did I: billing information, name of deceased, dates, survivors, until we got to the part where I gave out a line or two about who Minna was supposed to have been.\n\n\"Beloved something,\" said the woman, not unkindly. \"It's usually Beloved something.\"\n\nBeloved Father Figure?\n\n\"Or something about his contributions to the community,\" she suggested.\n\n\"Just say detective,\" I told her.\n\n# ONE MIND\n\nThere were only and always two things Frank Minna would not discuss in the years following his return from exile and founding of the Minna Agency. The first was the nature of that exile, the circumstances surrounding his disappearance that day in May when his brother Gerard hustled him out of town. We didn't know why he left, where he went or what he did while he was gone, or why he came back when he did. We didn't know how he met and married Julia. We didn't know what happened to Gerard. There was never again any sign or mention of Gerard. The sojourn \"upstate\" was covered in a haze so complete it was sometimes hard to believe it had lasted three years.\n\nThe other was The Clients, though they lurked like a pulse felt here or there in the body of the Agency.\n\nL&L wasn't a moving company anymore, and we never again saw the inside of that hollowed-out brownstone on Degraw. But we were as much errand boys as detectives, and it wasn't hard, in the early days, to sense Matricardi and Rockaforte's shadow in some percentage of our errands. Their assignments were discernible for the deep unease they provoked in Minna. Without explanation he'd alter his patterns, stop dropping in at the barbershop or the arcade for a week or so, close the L&L storefront and tell us to get lost for a few days. Even his walk changed, his whole manner of being. He'd refuse to be seated anywhere but in the corners of restaurants, his back to the wall. He'd turn his head on the street for no reason, which I of course cobbled into a lifelong tic. For cover he'd joke harder but also more discontinuously, his stream of commentary and insult turned balky and riddled with grim silences, his punch lines become non sequiturs. And the jobs we did for The Clients were discontinuous too. They were fractured stories, middles lacking a clear beginning or end. When we Minna Men tracked a wife for a husband or watched an employee suspected of pilferage or cooking the books we mastered their pathetic dramas, encompassed their small lives with our worldliness. What we gathered with our bugs and cameras and etched into our reports was true and complete. Under Minna we were secret masters, writing a sort of social history of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens into our duplicate files. But when the hand of Matricardi and Rockaforte moved the Minna Men we were only tools, glancing off the sides of stories bigger than we understood, discarded and left wondering at the end.\n\nOnce in the early days of the Agency we were dispatched to stand guard in broad daylight around a car, a Volvo, and we picked up a scent of The Clients in Minna's stilted, fragmentary instructions. The car was empty as far as we could tell. It was parked on Remsen Street near the Promenade, at a placid dead-end traffic circle overlooking Manhattan. Gilbert and I sat on a park bench, trying to look casual with our backs to the skyline, while Tony and Danny idled at the mouth of Remsen and Hicks, glaring at anyone who turned onto the block. We knew only that we were supposed to give way at five o'clock, when a tow truck would come for the car.\n\nFive o'clock stretched into six, then seven, with no truck. We took pee breaks in the children's park at Montague Street, ran through cigarettes, and paced. Evening strollers appeared on the Promenade, couples, teenagers with paper-bagged bottles of beer, gays mistaking us for cruisers. We shrugged them away from our end of the walk, muttered, glanced at our watches. The Volvo couldn't have been less conspicuous if it were invisible, but for us it glowed, screamed, ticked like a bomb. Every kid on a bike or stumbling wino seemed an assassin, a disguised ninja with aims on the car.\n\nWhen the sun began to set Tony and Danny started arguing.\n\n\"This is stupid,\" said Danny. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\n\"We can't,\" said Tony.\n\n\"You know there's a body in the trunk,\" said Danny.\n\n\"How am I supposed to know that?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Because what else would it be?\" said Danny. \"Those old guys had someone killed.\"\n\n\"That's stupid,\" said Tony.\n\n\"A body?\" said Gilbert, plainly unnerved. \"I thought the car was full of money.\"\n\nDanny shrugged. \"I don't care, but it's a body. I'll tell you what else: We're being set up for it.\"\n\n\"That's stupid,\" said Tony.\n\n\"What does Frank know? He just does what they tell him.\" Even in rebellion Danny obeyed Minna's stricture against speaking The Clients' names.\n\n\"You really think it's a body?\" said Gilbert to Danny.\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"I don't want to stay if it's a body, Tony.\"\n\n\"Gilbert, you fat fuck. What if it is? What do you think we're doing here? You think you're never gonna see a body working for Minna? Go join the garbage cops, for chrissakes.\"\n\n\"I'm cutting out,\" said Danny. \"I'm hungry anyway. This is stupid.\"\n\n\"What should I tell Minna?\" said Tony, daring Danny to go.\n\n\"Tell him what you want.\"\n\nIt was a startling defection. Tony and Gilbert and I were all problems in our various ways, while Danny in his silence and grace was Minna's pillar, his paragon.\n\nTony couldn't face this mutiny directly. He was accustomed to bullying Gilbert and me, not Danny. So he reverted to form. \"What about you, Freakshow?\"\n\nI shrugged, then kissed my own hand. It was an impossible question. Devotion to Minna had boiled down to this trial of hours watching over the Volvo. Now we had to envision disaster, betrayal, rotting flesh.\n\nBut what would it mean to turn from Minna?\n\nI hated The Clients then.\n\nThe tow truck came grinding down Remsen before I could speak. It was manned by a couple of fat lugs who laughed at our jumpiness and told us nothing about the car's importance, just shooed us off and began chaining the Volvo's bumper to their rig. Less Men than Boys in suits, we felt as though this had been designed as a test of our fresh-grown nerves. And we'd failed, even if Minna and The Clients didn't know about it.\n\nWe grew tougher, though, and Minna became unflappable, and we came to take the role of The Clients in the life of the Agency more in stride. Who had to make sense of everything? It wasn't always certain when we were acting for them anyway. Seize a given piece of equipment from a given office: Was that on The Clients' behalf or not? Collect this amount from such and such a person: When we passed the take to Minna did he pass it along to The Clients? Unseal this envelope, tap this phone: Clients? Minna kept us in the dark and turned us into professionals. Matricardi and Rockaforte's presence became mostly subliminal.\n\nThe last job I felt certain was for The Clients was more than a year before Minna's murder. It bore their trademark of total inexplicability. A supermarket on Smith Street had burned and been razed earlier that summer, and the empty lot was filled with crushed brick and turned into an informal peddlers' market, where sellers of one fruit\u2014oranges, say, or mangoes\u2014would set up a few crates and do a summer afternoon's business, alongside the hot-dog and shaved-ice carts that began to gather there. After a month or so a Hispanic carnival took over the site, setting up a Tilt-a-Whirl and a miniature Ferris wheel, each a dollar a ride, along with a grilled-sausage stand and a couple of lame arcades: a water-gun balloon game and a grappling hook over a glass case full of pink and purple stuffed animals. The litter and smells of grease were a blight if you got too close, but the Ferris wheel was lined with white tubes of neon, and it was a glorious thing to see at night down Smith Street, a bright unexpected pinwheel almost three stories high.\n\nWe'd been so bored that summer that we'd fallen into working regularly as a car service, taking calls when they came, ferrying dates home from nightclubs, old ladies to and from hospitals, vacationers to La Guardia for the weekend flight to Miami Beach. Between rides we'd play poker in the air-conditioned storefront. It was after one-thirty on a Friday night when Minna came in. Loomis was sitting in on the game, losing hands and eating all the chips, and Minna told him to get lost, go home already.\n\n\"What's the matter, Frank?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Nothing's the matter. Got something for us to do, that's all.\"\n\n\"Something what? For who?\"\n\n\"Just a job. What do we have in here that's like a crowbar or something?\" Minna smoked furiously to mask his unease.\n\n\"A crowbar?\"\n\n\"Just something you can swing. Like a crowbar. I've got a bat and a lug wrench in my trunk. Stuff like that.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you want a gun,\" said Tony, raising his eyebrows. \"If I wanted a gun I'd get a gun, you diphthong. This doesn't take a gun.\"\n\n\"You want chains?\" said Gilbert, meaning to be helpful. \"There's a whole bunch of chains in the Pontiac.\"\n\n\"Crowbar, crowbar, crowbar. Why do I even bother with you mystic seers anymore? If I wanted my mind read I'd call Gladys Knight for chrissakes.\"\n\n\"Dionne Warwick,\" said Gilbert.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Psychic Hotline's Dionne Warwick, not Gladys Knight.\"\n\n_\"Psychicwarlock!\"_\n\n\"Got some pipe downstairs,\" mused Danny, only now laying down the hand he'd been holding since Minna barged into the office. It was a full house, jacks and eights.\n\n\"It's gotta be swingable,\" said Minna. \"Let's see.\"\n\nThe phone rang and I grabbed for it and said, \"L&L.\"\n\n\"Tell them we don't have any cars,\" said Minna.\n\n\"This needs all four of us?\" I said. I was courting fond notions of missing the crowbar-and-lug-wrench project, whatever it was, and driving someone out to Sheepshead Bay instead.\n\n\"Yes, Freakboy. We're all going.\"\n\nI got rid of the call. Twenty minutes later we were loaded up with pipes, lug wrench, car jack and a souvenir Yankee bat from Bat Day in Minna's old Impala, the least distinguished of L&L's many cars, and another bad sign if I was trying to read signs. Minna drove us down Wyckoff, past the projects, then circled around, south on Fourth Avenue down to President Street, and back toward Court. He was stalling, checking his watch.\n\nWe turned on Smith, and Minna parked us a block below the empty supermarket lot. The carnival had shut down for the night, plywood boards up over the concessions, rides stilled, the evening's discarded beer cups and sausage wrappers glowing against the moonlit rubblescape. We crept onto the lot with our implements, following Minna wordlessly now, no longer chafing at his leadership, instead lulled into our deep obedient rhythm as his Men. He pointed at the Ferris wheel.\n\n\"Take it out.\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"Destroy the wheel, you candied yams.\"\n\nGilbert understood soonest, perhaps because the task suited his skills and temperament so well. He took a swing at the nearest line of neon with his chunk of pipe, smashing it easily, bringing a rain of silver dust. Tony and Danny and I followed his lead. We attacked the body of the wheel, our first swings tentative, measuring our strength, then lashing out, unloading. It was easy to damage the neon, not easy at all to impress the frame of the wheel, but we set at it, attacked any joint or vulnerable weld, prying up the electrical cable and chopping at it with the sharpest edge of the wrench until insulation and wire were bare and mangled, then frayed. Minna himself wielded the Yankee bat, splintering its wood against the gates that held riders into their seats, not breaking them but changing their shape. Gilbert and I got inside the frame of the wheel and with all our weight dragged at one of the chairs until we ruptured the hinge. Then we found the brake and released the wheel to turn so that we could apply our malicious affection to the whole of it. A couple of Dominican teenagers stood watching us from across the street. We ignored them, bore down on the Ferris wheel, hurrying but not frantic, absolutely Minna's to direct but not even needing direction. We acted as one body to destroy the amusement. This was the Agency at its mature peak: unquestioning and thorough in carrying out an action even when it bordered on sheer Dada.\n\n\"Frank loved you, Lionel,\" said Rockaforte.\n\n\"I, uh, I know.\"\n\n\"For that reason we care for you, for that reason we are concerned.\"\n\n\"Though we have not seen you since you were a boy,\" said Matricardi.\n\n\"A boy who barked,\" said Rockaforte. \"We remember. Frank brought and you stood before us in this very room and you barked.\"\n\n\"And Frank spoke of your sickness many times.\"\n\n\"He loved you though he considered you a freak.\"\n\n\"He used that very word.\"\n\n\"You helped him build, you were one of his boys, and now you are a man and you stand before us in this hour of pain and misunderstanding.\"\n\nMatricardi and Rockaforte had looked sepulchral to me as a teenager and they looked no worse now, their skin mummified, their thin hair in a kind of spider-web sheen over their reflective pates, Matricardi's ears and scarred nose dwarfing his other features, Rockaforte's face puffier and more potatolike. They were dressed as twins in black suits, whether consciously in mourning or not I couldn't know. They sat together on the tightly upholstered couch and when I stepped through the door I thought I saw their hands first joined on the cushions in the space between them, then jerking to their laps. I stood far enough back that I wasn't tempted to reach out and play pattycake, to slap at their folded hands or the place their hands had been resting.\n\nThe Degraw Street brownstone was unchanged, outside and in, apart from a dense, even layer of dust on the furniture and carpet and picture frames in the parlor. The air in the room swam with stirred dust, as though Matricardi and Rockaforte had arrived just a few moments before. They visited their Brooklyn shrine less often than in the past, I supposed. I wondered who drove them in from Jersey and whether they took any pains not to be seen coming here or whether they cared. Perhaps no one alive in Carroll Gardens knew them by sight anymore.\n\nA neighborhood's secret lords could also be Invisible Men.\n\n\"What is between you and Tony?\" said Matricardi.\n\n\"I want to find Frank's killer.\" I'd already heard myself say this too many times, and meaning was leaking out of the phrase. It threatened to become a sort of moral tic: _findfrank'skiller_.\n\n\"Why don't you follow Tony in this? Shouldn't you act as one, as brothers?\"\n\n\"I was there. When they took Frank. Tony\u2014 _Hospitabailey!_ \u2014Tony wasn't there.\"\n\n\"You're saying then that he should follow you.\"\n\n\"He shouldn't get in my way. _Essway! Wrongway!_ \" I winced, hating to tic now, in front of them.\n\n\"You're upset, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Sure I'm upset.\" Why should I confess my distrust to those I distrusted? The more Matricardi and Rockaforte spoke Tony's name, the more certain I was they were tangled together in this somehow, and that Tony was far more familiar with The Clients than I'd been in the years since our first visit to this crypt, this mausoleum. I'd come away with a fork, he with something more. Why should I accuse one half of a conspiracy to the other? Instead I squinted and turned my head and pursed my lips, trying to avoid the obvious, finally acceded to The Clients' power of suggestion and barked once, loudly.\n\n\"You are afflicted and we feel for you. A man shouldn't run, and he shouldn't woof like a dog. He should find peace.\"\n\n\"Why doesn't Tony want me looking into Frank's murder?\"\n\n\"Tony wishes this thing to be done correctly and with care. Work with him, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Why do you speak for Tony?\" I gritted my teeth as I spoke the words. It wasn't exactly ticcing, but I'd begun to echo The Clients' verbal rhythms, the cloistered Ping-Pong of their diction.\n\nMatricardi sighed and looked at Rockaforte. Rockaforte raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"Do you like this house?\" said Matricardi.\n\nI considered the dust-covered parlor, the load of ancient furnishing between the carpet and the ceiling's scrollwork, how it all hung suspended inside the shell of the warehouse-brownstone. I felt the presence of the past, of mothers and sons, deals and understandings, one dead hand gripping another\u2014dead hands were nested here on Degraw Street like a series of Chinese boxes. Including Frank Minna's. There were so many ways I didn't like it I didn't know where to begin, except that I knew I shouldn't allow myself to begin at all.\n\n\"It's not a house,\" I said, offering the very least of my objections. \"It's a room.\"\n\n\"He says it's a room,\" said Matricardi. \"Lionel, this is my mother's house where we sit. Where you stand so full of fury it makes you like a cornered dog.\"\n\n\"Somebody killed Frank.\"\n\n\"Are you accusing Tony?\"\n\n_\"Accusatony! Excusebaloney! Funnymonopoly!\"_ I squeezed my eyes shut to interrupt the seizure of language.\n\n\"We wish you to understand, Lionel. We regret Frank's passing. We miss him sorely. It is a soreness in our hearts. Nothing could please us more than to see his killer torn by birds or picked apart by insects with claws. Tony should have your help in bringing that day closer. You should stand behind him.\"\n\n\"What if my search brings me to Tony?\" I'd let The Clients lead me to this pass in the conversation, and now there wasn't any reason to pretend.\n\n\"The dead live in our hearts, Lionel. From there Frank will never be dislodged. But now Tony has replaced Frank in the world of the living.\"\n\n\"What does that mean? You've replaced Frank with Tony?\"\n\n\"It means you shouldn't act against Tony. Because our wishes go with him.\"\n\nI understood now. It was Tony's Italian apotheosis at last. I was thrilled for him.\n\nUnless it had been this way for years without my knowing. Maybe Tony Vermonte and The Clients ran deeper than Frank Minna and The Clients ever had.\n\nI considered the word _replaced_. I decided it was time to go.\n\n\"I need your permission\u2014\" I began, then stopped. Who were The Clients, and what did their permission consist of? What was I thinking?\n\n\"Speak, Lionel.\"\n\n\"I'm going to keep looking,\" I said. \"With or without Tony's help.\"\n\n\"Yes. We can see. And so we have an assignment for you. A suggestion.\"\n\n\"A place for you to apply your passion for justice.\"\n\n\"And your talent for detection. The training instilled.\"\n\n\"What?\" Just a measure of the day's angled brightness penetrated the heavy curtains of the parlor. I glared back at a row of thuggish midcentury faces staring out from picture frames, wondering which was Matricardi's mom. The hot dogs I'd eaten were rumbling in my stomach. I longed to be outside, on the Brooklyn streets, anywhere but here.\n\n\"You spoke with Julia,\" said Matricardi. \"You should find her. Bring her in as we brought you. Let us speak with her.\"\n\n\"She's afraid,\" I said. _A frayed knot_.\n\n\"Afraid of what?\"\n\n\"She's like me. She doesn't trust Tony.\"\n\n\"Something is wrong between them.\"\n\nThis was exhausting. \"Of course something's wrong. They slept together.\"\n\n\"Making love brings people closer, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Maybe they feel guilty about Frank.\"\n\n\"Guilty, yes. Julia knows something. We called her to see us. Instead she runs. Tony says he doesn't know where.\"\n\n\"You think Julia has something to do with Frank's murder?\" I let my hand trace a vague line in the dust on the marble mantelpiece. A mistake. I tried to forget I'd done it.\n\n\"There's something on her mind, something weighing. You want to help us, Lionel, find her.\"\n\n\"Learn her secrets and share them with us. Do this without telling Tony.\"\n\nLosing control somewhat, I inserted my finger into the grooved edge of the mantel and pushed, gathering a shaggy clot of dust.\n\n\"I don't get it,\" I said. \"Now you want me to go behind Tony's back?\"\n\n\"We listen, Lionel. We hear. We consider. Questions occur. If your suspicions are grounded the answers may lie with Julia. Tony has been less than clear in this one area. However strange and damaged, you'll be our hands and feet, our eyes and ears, you'll learn and return to us and share.\"\n\n_\"Founded,\"_ I said. I reached the end of the mantel and thrust the accumulated dustball past the edge, following through like a one-fingered shot-putter.\n\n\"If they are,\" said Matricardi. \"You don't know. That's what you'll find out.\"\n\n\"No, I mean founded, not grounded. Suspicions _founded.\"_\n\n\"He's correcting,\" said Rockaforte to Matricardi, gritting his teeth.\n\n\"Find her, Essrog! Founder! Grounder! Confessrub!\" I tried to wipe my finger clean on my jacket and made a gray stripe of clingy dust.\n\nThen I belched, really, and tasted hot dogs.\n\n\"There's a little part of Frank in you,\" said Matricardi. \"We speak to that part and it understands. The rest of you may be inhuman, a beast, a freak. Frank was right to use that word. You're a freak of nature. But the part of you that Frank Minna cared for and that cares so much for his memory is the part that will help us find Julia and bring her home.\"\n\n\"Go now, because you sicken us to see you playing with the dust that gathers in the home of his beloved mother, bless her sweet dishonored and tormented soul.\"\n\nConspiracies are a version of Tourette's syndrome, the making and tracing of unexpected connections a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close. Like Tourette's, all conspiracies are ultimately solipsistic, sufferer or conspirator or theorist overrating his centrality and forever rehearsing a traumatic delight in reaction, attachment and causality, in roads out from the Rome of self.\n\nThe second gunman on the grassy knoll wasn't part of a conspiracy\u2014we Touretters know this to be true. He was ticcing, imitating the action that had startled and allured him, the shots fired. It was just his way of saying, Me too! I'm alive! Look here! Replay the film!\n\nThe second gunman was tugging the boat.\n\nI'd parked in the shade of an elderly, crippled elm, trunk knotted and gnarled from surviving disease, with roots that had slowly nudged the slate sidewalk upward and apart. I didn't see Tony waiting in the Pontiac until I nearly had my key in the door. He was sitting in the driver's seat.\n\n\"Get in.\" He leaned over and opened the passenger door. The sidewalk was empty in both directions. I considered strolling away, ran into the usual problem of where to go.\n\n\"Get in, Freakshow.\"\n\nI went to the passenger side and slid into the seat beside him, then reached out disconsolately and caressed his shoulder, leaving a smudge of dust. He raised his hand and slapped me on the side of the head.\n\n\"They lied to me,\" I said, flinching away.\n\n\"I'm shocked. Of course they lied. What are you, a newborn baby?\"\n\n_\"Barnamum_ baby,\" I mumbled.\n\n\"Which particular lie are you worrying about, Marlowe?\"\n\n\"They warned you I was coming here, didn't they? They set me up. It was a trap.\"\n\n\"Fuck did you _think_ was going to happen?\"\n\n\"Never mind.\"\n\n\"You think you're smart,\" said Tony, his voice twangy with contempt. \"You think you're Mike fucking Hammer. You're like the Hardy Boys' retarded kid brother, Lionel.\" He slapped my head again. \"You're Hardly Boy.\"\n\nMy home borough had never felt so like a nightmare to me as it did on this bright sunlit day on Matricardi and Rockaforte's block of Degraw: a nightmare of repetition and enclosure. Ordinarily I savored Brooklyn's unchangeability, the bullying, Minna-like embrace of its long memory. At the moment I yearned to see this neighborhood razed, replaced by skyscrapers or multiplexes. I longed to disappear into Manhattan's amnesiac dance of renewal. Let Frank be dead, let the Men disperse. I only wanted Tony to leave me alone.\n\n\"You knew I had Frank's beeper,\" I said sheepishly, putting it together.\n\n\"No, the old guys have X-ray vision, like Superman. They don't know shit if I don't tell them, Lionel. You need to find a new line of work, McGruff. Shitlock Holmes.\"\n\nI was familiar enough with Tony's belligerence to know it had to run awhile, play itself out. Me, I slid my hands along the top of the dashboard at the base of the windshield, smoothing away the crumbs and dust accumulated there, riffling my fingers over the plastic vents. Then I began buffing the corner of the windshield with my thumb tip. Visiting Matricardi's mother's parlor had triggered a dusting compulsion.\n\n\"You idiot freak.\"\n\n\"Beepmetwice.\"\n\n\"I'll beep you twice, all right.\"\n\nHe lifted his hand, and I flinched again, ducking underneath like a boxer. While I was near I licked the shoulder of his suit, trying to clean off the smudge of dust I'd left. He pushed me away disgustedly, an ancient echo of St. Vincent's hallway.\n\n\"Okay, Lionel. You're still half a fag. You got me convinced.\"\n\nI didn't speak, no small achievement. Tony sighed and put both hands on the wheel. He appeared to be through buffeting me for the moment. I watched my saliva-stripe evaporate into the weave of his jacket.\n\n\"So what did they tell you?\"\n\n\"The Clients?\"\n\n\"Sure, The Clients,\" said Tony. \"Matricardi and Rockaforte. Frank's dead, Lionel. I don't think he's gonna, like, spin in his grave if you say their names.\"\n\n\"Fork-it-hardly,\" I whispered, then glanced over my shoulder at their stoop. \"Rocket-fuck-me.\"\n\n\"Good enough. So what did they tell you?\"\n\n\"The same thing the\u2014 _Duckman! Dogboy! Confessdog!_ \u2014same thing the doormen told me: Stay off the case.\" I was mad with verbal tics now, making up for lost time, feeling at home. Tony was still a comfort to me in that way.\n\n\"What doorman?\"\n\n\"Door _men_. A whole bunch of them.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nBut Tony's eyes said he knew perfectly well where, only needed to measure what I knew. He looked a little panicked, too.\n\n\"Ten-thirty Park Avenue,\" I said. _Energy pocket angle. Rectangle sauce!_\n\nHis hands tightened on the wheel. Instead of looking at me, he squinted into the distance. \"You were there?\"\n\n\"I was following a lead.\"\n\n\"Answer my question. _You were there?_ \"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Who'd you see?\"\n\n\"Just a lot of doormen.\"\n\n\"You discuss this with Matricardi and Rockaforte? Tell me you didn't, you goddamn motormouth.\"\n\n\"They talked, I listened.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah, that's likely. Fuck.\"\n\nOddly, I found myself wanting to reassure Tony. He and The Clients had drawn me back to Brooklyn and ambushed me in my car, but some old orphans' solidarity worked against my claustrophobia. Tony scared me, but The Clients scared me more. And now I knew they still scared Tony, too. Whatever deal he'd struck was incomplete.\n\nIt was cold in the car, but Tony was sweating.\n\n\"Be serious with me now, Lionel. Do they know about the building?\"\n\n\"I'm always serious. That's the tragedy of my life.\"\n\n\"Talk to me, Freakshow.\"\n\n_\"Anybuilding! Nobuilding!_ Nobody said anything about a building.\" I reached for his collar, wanting to straighten it, but he batted my hands away.\n\n\"You were in there awhile,\" he said. \"Don't fuck with me, Lionel. What was said?\"\n\n\"They want me to find Julia,\" I said, wondering if it was a good idea to mention her name. \"They think she knows something.\" Tony took a gun out from under his arm and pointed it at me.\n\nI'd returned to Brooklyn suspecting Tony of colluding with The Clients, and now\u2014sweet irony!\u2014Tony suspected me of the same thing. It wasn't that much of a leap. Matricardi and Rockaforte didn't have any motive for humoring me. If they trusted Tony, they wouldn't have required him to wait and bag me outside in the car afterward. He would have been hidden inside, behind the proverbial curtain, soaking up the whole conversation.\n\nI had to give The Clients credit. They'd played us like a Farfisa organ.\n\nOn the other hand, Tony had a secret from The Clients: the building on Park Avenue. And despite his fears his secret seemed intact. No point of this particular quadrangle had a monopoly on information. Tony knew something they didn't. I knew something Tony didn't, didn't I? I hoped so. And Julia knew something neither Tony nor The Clients knew, or else she knew something Tony didn't _want_ The Clients to know. Julia, Julia, Julia, I needed to figure out the Julia angle, even if Matricardi and Rockaforte wanted me to.\n\nOr was I outsmarting myself? I knew what Minna would have said.\n\nWheels within wheels.\n\nI'd never faced Tony at gunpoint before, but at some level I'd been preparing for this moment all my life. It didn't feel at all unnatural. Rather it was a sort of culmination, the rarefied end point of our long association. Now, if I'd had a gun on him, _that_ would've freaked me out.\n\nThe gun also served splendidly to concentrate my attention. I felt my ticcishness ease, and a flood of excess language instantly evaporate, like cartoon blemishes in a television commercial. Gunplay: another perfectly useless cure.\n\nTony didn't seem all that impressed by the situation. His eyes and mouth were tired. It was only four in the afternoon and we'd been sitting in the parked car too long already. He had questions, urgent, particular, and the gun would help move things along.\n\n\"You talk to anyone else about the building?\" he asked.\n\n\"Who would I talk to?\"\n\n\"Danny, say. Or Gilbert.\"\n\n\"I was just up there. I haven't seen Danny. And Gilbert's in jail.\" I left out the part about the Garbage Cop, and prayed Minna's beeper didn't go off anytime soon.\n\nMeanwhile, with his questions Tony was telling me more than I was telling him: Danny and Gilbert weren't with him in the Park Avenue caper. Yes, this Hardly Boy was still on the case.\n\n\"So it's just you,\" Tony said. \"You're the jerk I've gotta deal with. You're Sam Spade.\"\n\n\"When someone kills your partner you're supposed to do something about it,\" I said.\n\n\"Minna wasn't your partner. He was your sponsor, Freakshow. He was Jerry Lewis, and you were the thing in the wheelchair.\"\n\n\"Then why'd he call for me instead of you when he was in trouble yesterday?\"\n\n\"He was an idiot bringing you up there.\"\n\nA shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.\n\n\"Tell me about Julia, Tony\u2014 _Tulip Attorney!_ \" The magic curative of being at gunpoint was beginning to fade.\n\n\"Shut up a little. I'm thinking.\"\n\n\"What about Ullman?\" I said. As long as he was allowing my questions I might as well ask. \"Who was Ullman?\u2014 _Doofus Allplan!_ \" I wanted to ask about the Fujisaki Corporation, but I figured the extent of what I knew was one of the only things I knew and he didn't. I needed to preserve that advantage, however minuscule. Besides, I didn't want to hear what hay my syndrome would make of the word _Fujisaki_.\n\nTony made a particularly sour face. \"Ullman's a guy who didn't figure numbers right. He's one of a little group of somebodies who tried to make themselves rich. Frank was another one.\"\n\n\"So you and the Polish killer took him out, huh?\"\n\n\"That's so wrong it's funny.\"\n\n\"Tell me, Tony.\"\n\n\"Where would I start?\" he said. I heard a note of bitterness, and wondered if I could play on it. Tony likely missed Minna in his way, and missed the Agency, no matter how he'd been corrupted or what poisonous information he knew that I didn't.\n\n\"Be sentimental for a change,\" I said. \"Make me know you didn't kill him.\"\n\n\"Go fuck yourself.\"\n\n\"That was persuasive,\" I said. Then I made a sour face like an uptight British butler: _\"Per-shwoosh-atively!\"_\n\n\"The problem with you, Lionel, is you don't know anything about how the world really works. Everything you know comes from Frank Minna or a book. I don't know which is worse.\"\n\n\"Gangster movies.\" I fought to keep the butler-face from reappearing.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I watched a lot of gangster movies, like you. Everything we both know comes from Frank Minna or gangster movies.\"\n\n\"Frank Minna was two guys,\" said Tony. \"The one I learned from and the chucklehead who thought you were funny and got himself killed. You only knew the chucklehead.\"\n\nTony held the gun floppily between us, using it to gesture, to signal punctuation. I only hoped he understood how literally it could punctuate. None of us had ever carried guns so far as I knew, apart from Minna. He'd rarely allowed us even to see his. Now I wondered what private teaching had gone on when I wasn't around, wondered how seriously I should take Tony's notion of the two Minnas.\n\n\"I suppose it was the smart Frank Minna who taught you to wave guns around,\" I said. It came out a bit more sarcastic than I'd intended, then I yelled, _\"Frankensmart!\"_ which pretty much undercut my delivery. Tony really was waving the gun, though. The only thing it never pointed at was himself.\n\n\"I'm carrying this for protection. Like I'm protecting you with it right now, by convincing you to shut up and quit asking questions. And stay in Brooklyn.\"\n\n\"I hope you don't have to protect me\u2014 _Protectmebailey! Detectorbaby!_ \u2014by pulling the trigger.\"\n\n\"Let's both hope. Too bad you weren't clever like Gilbert, to get himself put under police protection for a week or so.\"\n\n\"Is that the current sentence for murder? A week?\"\n\n\"Don't make me laugh. Gilbert didn't kill anybody.\"\n\n\"You sound disappointed.\"\n\n\"I'm long over my disappointment that Frank liked to surround himself with a cavalcade of clowns. It was a way of life. I won't be making the same mistake.\"\n\n\"No, you'll think up a whole bunch of new ones.\"\n\n\"Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.\"\n\nAt that moment there came a tap on the window, driver's side. It was a gun muzzle that tapped. The arm holding the gun extended from behind the trunk of the elm tree. A head poked out too: the homicide detective.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" he said. \"Do step out of the car\u2014slowly.\"\n\nAmbushes within ambushes.\n\nHe still had that threadbare, jaded, coffee-isn't-working-anymore air about him, even in daylight. It didn't look like he'd gotten out of his suit since the night before. I believed him with a gun better than I did Tony, though. He waved us over to the front of the car and had us spread our legs, to the wonderment of a couple of old ladies, then took away Tony's gun. He had Tony open his jacket and show the open holster and lift his pant legs to prove there was nothing strapped to his ankles. Then he tried to pat me down and I began to pat him back.\n\n\"Goddamn it, Alibi, cut that out.\" He was still fond of that nickname he'd invented for me. It made me fond of him.\n\n\"I can't help it,\" I said.\n\n\"What's that? A phone? Take it out.\"\n\n\"It's a phone.\" I showed him.\n\nTony looked at me strangely, and I just shrugged.\n\n\"Get back in the car. Give me the keys first.\" Tony handed over the keys and we got back into the front seat. The homicide detective opened the back doors and eased into the seat behind us, training his gun on the backs of our heads.\n\n\"Hands on the wheel and the dash, that's good. Face forward, gentlemen. Don't look at me. Smile like they're taking your picture. They will be soon enough.\"\n\n\"What did we do?\" said Tony. \"A guy can't show another guy a gun anymore?\"\n\n\"Shut up and listen. This is a murder investigation. I'm the investigating officer. I don't care about your goddamn gun.\"\n\n\"So give it back.\"\n\n\"I don't think so, Mr. Vermonte. You people make me nervous. I found out a few things about this neighborhood in the last twenty-four hours.\"\n\n\"Mister Gobbledy Gun.\"\n\n\"Shut up, Alibi.\"\n\n_Shut up shut up shut up!_ I kneaded the petrified foam of the Pontiac's dashboard like a nursing kitten, just trying to keep still and shut up. Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.\n\n\"I got this case because you jokers brought Frank Minna into Brooklyn Hospital. That's where he died and that's in my jurisdiction. I don't get to work this side of Flatbush Avenue that often, you get me? I don't know all that much about your neighborhood, but I'm learning, I'm learning.\"\n\n\"Not so many murders over here, eh, Chief?\" said Tony.\n\n\"Not so many _niggers_ on this side of Flatbush, that what you're trying to say?\"\n\n\"Whoa, slow down,\" said Tony. \"You're leading the witness. Isn't that against the rules?\" Tony kept his hands on the steering wheel and grinned into the windshield. I don't think the homicide cop had really meant to inspire such a smile.\n\n\"Okay, Tony,\" said the cop, his voice a little husky. I heard him breathing heavily through his nose. I suppose unsheathing his gun had gotten him a bit worked up. I imagined I could feel its muzzle centering first on my ear, then on Tony's. \"Tell me what you meant,\" he said. \"Set me straight.\"\n\n\"All I meant was not so many murders\u2014am I right?\"\n\n\"Yeah, you got the lid clamped down pretty tight around here. No murders and no niggers. Nice clean streets, nothing but old guys carrying around racing forms and tiny pencils. Makes me nervous.\"\n\nIt was honest of him to admit it. I wondered what Mafia horror stories he'd gathered in his day-old investigation.\n\n\"Around here people watch out for each other,\" said Tony.\n\n\"Yeah, right up until you off each other. What's the connection between Minna and Ullman, Tony?\"\n\n\"Who's Ullman?\" said Tony. \"I never met the guy.\"\n\nThat was a Minna-ism: _never met the guy_.\n\n\"Ullman kept the books for a property-management firm in Manhattan,\" said the homicide detective. \"Until your friend Coney shot him through the skull. Looks like tit for tat to me. I'm impressed with how quick you guys get to work.\"\n\n\"What's your name, Officer?\" said Tony. \"I get to ask that, don't I?\"\n\n\"I'm not an officer, Tony. I'm a detective. My name is Lucius Seminole.\"\n\n\"Luscious? You gotta be kidding me.\"\n\n\"Lucius. Call me Detective Seminole.\"\n\n\"What is that, like an Indian name?\"\n\n\"It's a Southern name,\" said Seminole. \"Slave name. Keep laughing, Tony.\"\n\n_\"Detectahole!\"_\n\n\"Alibi, you are not making me happy.\"\n\n_\"Inspectaholic!\"_\n\n\"Don't kill him, Superfly,\" said Tony, grinning broadly. \"I know it's pitiful, but he can't help himself. Think of it as a free human freak show.\"\n\n_\"Licorice Smellahole!\"_ Not turning my head was driving me crazy: I had to rename what I couldn't see.\n\n\"You a car service or a comedy team?\" said Seminole.\n\n\"Lionel's just jealous because you're asking me all the questions,\" said Tony. \"He likes to talk.\"\n\n\"I already heard from Alibi last night. He near about drove me crazy with his talk. Now I'm looking for answers from you, straight man.\"\n\n\"We're not a car service,\" I said. \"We're a detective agency.\" The assertion fought its way out of me, a tic disguised as a common statement.\n\n\"Turn around, Alibi. Let's talk about the lady who ran to Boston\u2014\n\nMrs. Deadguy.\"\n\n\"Boston?\" said Tony. _\"We'readetectiveagency,\"_ I ticced again.\n\n\"She booked the flight under her own name,\" said Seminole. \"It's not the first time either. What's in Boston?\"\n\n\"Beats me. She goes up there a lot?\"\n\n\"Don't play stupid.\"\n\n\"It's news to me,\" said Tony. He scowled at me, and I made a dopey face back, stumped. Julia in Boston? I wondered if Seminole had his information straight.\n\n\"She was ready to fly,\" said Seminole. \"Somebody tipped her.\"\n\n\"She got a call from the hospital,\" I said.\n\n\"Nope,\" said Seminole. \"I checked that. Try another one. Maybe your boy Gilbert gave her a call. Maybe Gilbert took out Frank Minna before he took out Ullman. Maybe he and the lady are in this together.\"\n\n\"That's crazy,\" I said. \"Gilbert didn't kill anybody. We're _detectives.\"_ I finally got Seminole's attention. \"I looked into that rumor,\" he said. \"None of you carry investigators' credentials, according to the computer. Just limousine operators' licenses.\"\n\n\"We work for Frank Minna,\" I said, and heard my own unconcealed nostalgia, my pining. \"We assist a detective. We're, uh, operatives.\"\n\n\"You do stooge work for a penny-ante hood, according to what I can see. A _dead_ penny-ante hood. You were in the pocket of a guy in the pocket of Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte, two relatively deep old dudes. Only it appears the pocket got turned inside out.\"\n\nTony winced: These clich\u00e9s hurt. \"We work for the clients that come in,\" he said, oddly sincere. For a moment Minna again came alive in Tony's voice. \"We don't ask questions we shouldn't, or we wouldn't have any clients at all. The cops do the same, don't try to tell me any different.\"\n\n\"Cops don't have _clients,\"_ said the homicide detective stiffly. I would have liked to see the real Frank Minna handle Seminole.\n\n\"What are you, Abraham Jefferson Jackson?\" said Tony. \"You running for office with that speech? Give me a break.\"\n\nI snorted. Despite everything, Tony was cracking me up. I threw in a flourish of my own:\n\n_\"Abracadabra Jackson!\"_\n\nThe gun, and Seminole's status as a law-enforcement officer, didn't matter\u2014he was losing control of this interview. What happened was this: Tony and I, so deeply estranged, had been drawn together by the point of the detective's gun. In this post-Minna era we Men were a little panicked and raw at facing one another head on. But triangulated by Seminole we'd rediscovered the kinship that lurked in our old routines. If we couldn't trust each other, Tony and I were at least reminded we were two of a kind, especially in the eyes of a cop. And Tony, seeing chinks in the detective's confidence, was turning on him with his old orphan's savagery. A bully knows the parameters and half-life of a brandished threat\u2014the only thing weaker than a gun so long ignored was no gun at all. The cop had had to arrest us or hurt us or turn us against each other by now, and he hadn't. Tony would cut him apart with his tongue for the mistake.\n\nIn the meantime I considered what Seminole had been saying, and tried to sift the information from his dingbat theories. If Julia didn't get a call from the hospital how did she know about Minna's death?\n\nAgain I wondered: Was it Julia who missed her _Rama-lama-ding-dong?_ Did she keep it in Boston?\n\n\"Listen, you scumbags,\" said Seminole. He was compensating desperately for his plummeting authority. \"I'd rather tangle with _homies_ doing _drive-bys_ all day than wade into this Italianate mobster shit. Don't get big-headed, now\u2014I can see you're just a couple of fools. It's the wiseguys pulling your strings I'm worried about.\"\n\n\"Great,\" said Tony. \"A paranoid cop. _Wiseguys pulling strings_ \u2014you read too many comic books, Cleopatra Jones.\"\n\n\"Clapperdapper Bailey Johnson!\"\n\n\"You think I'm stupid,\" continued Seminole, on a real tear now. \"You think a dumb black cop is going to stumble into your little nest and take it on face value. Car service, detective agency, give me a break. I'm going to push this murder bag just far enough to turn it over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then I'm going to get my ass out of here for good. Might even take a vacation, sit on the beach and read about you losers in the Metro section.\"\n\n_Stumble, wade:_ Seminole's choice of words betrayed him. He really and truly feared he'd already gotten in further than was good for him. I wanted to find a way to allay his fears, I really did. I sort of liked the homicide detective. But everything out of my mouth sounded vaguely like a racial slur.\n\n\"Federal Bureau of what?\" said Tony. \"I never met those guys.\"\n\n\"Let's go upstairs and see if Uncle Alphonso and Uncle Leonardo can explain it to you,\" said Seminole. \"Something tells me they've got a working familiarity with the FBI.\"\n\n\"I don't think the old guys are home anymore,\" said Tony.\n\n\"Oh yeah? Where'd they go?\"\n\n\"They went through a tunnel in the basement,\" said Tony. \"They had to get back to their hideout, since they've got James Bond\u2014or Batman, I can't remember which\u2014roasting over a slow fire.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Don't worry, though. Batman always gets away. These supervillains never learn.\"\n\n\"Uncle Batman!\" I shouted. They couldn't know how much work it was for me to keep my hands on that dashboard, my neck straight. \"Unclebailey Blackman! _Barnamum Bat-a-potamus!_ \"\n\n\"That's enough, Alibi,\" said Seminole. \"Get out of the car.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Get lost, go home. You annoy me, man. Tony and me are going to have a little talk.\"\n\n\"C'mon, Blacula,\" complained Tony. \"We've been talking for hours. I've got nothing to say to you.\"\n\n\"Every name you call me I think up a couple more questions,\" said Seminole. He waved at me with his gun. \"Get lost.\"\n\nI gaped at Seminole, incredulous.\n\n\"I mean it. Get.\"\n\nI opened the door. Then I thought to find the Pontiac's keys and hand them to Tony.\n\nTony glared at me. \"Go back to the office and wait for me.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure,\" I said, and stepped out onto the curb.\n\n\"Close the door,\" said Seminole, training gun and gaze on Tony.\n\n\"Thanks, _Count Chocula_ ,\" I said, and skipped away, literally.\n\nHave you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette's? Yup, you guessed it, it's a tic. Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tic _plus ultra_. I've got meta-Tourette's. Thinking about ticcing, my mind racing, thoughts reaching to touch every possible symptom. Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking. Mentioning mentioning Tourette's. It's sort of like talking about telephones over the telephone, or mailing letters describing the location of various mailboxes. Or like a tugboater whose favorite anecdote concerns actual tugboats.\n\nThere is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.\n\nThough at each step I felt the gaze of an army of invisible doormen on my neck, I was nevertheless exultant to be back on the Upper East Side. I hurried down Lexington from the Eighty-sixth Street station, with only ten minutes to spare before five o'clock: zazen. I didn't want to be late for my first. While I was still on the street, though, I took out the cell phone and called Loomis.\n\n\"Yeah, I was just about to call you.\" I could hear him chewing a sandwich or a chicken leg, and pictured his open mouth, smacking lips. Hadn't he been at lunch two hours before? \"I got the goods on that building.\"\n\n\"Let's have it\u2014quick.\"\n\n\"This guy in Records, he was going on and on about it. That's a sweet little building, Lionel. Way outta my class.\"\n\n\"It's Park Avenue, Loomis.\"\n\n\"Well, there's Park Avenue and then there's this. You gotta have a hundred million to get on the waiting list for this place, Lionel. This kind of people, their other house is an _island.\"_\n\nI heard Loomis quoting someone smarter than himself. \"Right, but what about Fujisaki?\"\n\n\"Hold your horses, I'm getting there. This sort of place, there's a whole staff\u2014it's like a bunch of mansions stacked together. They got secret passages, wine cellars, a laundry service, swimming pool, servants' quarters, private chef. Whole secret economy. There's only five or six buildings like this in the city\u2014the place where Bob Dylan got killed, what's it, the _Nova Scotia_? That's a doghouse in comparison. This place is for the old-money people, they'll turn down Seinfeld, _Nixon_ , doesn't matter. They don't even give a shit.\"\n\n\"Include me in that category,\" I said, unable to discern any useful information in the Garbage Cop's jabber. \"I'm looking for names, Loomis.\"\n\n\"Your Fujisaki's the management corporation. Whole bunch of other Jap names in there\u2014guess they own half of New York if you started digging. This is a serious money operation, Lionel. Ullman, far as I can tell, he was just Fujisaki's accountant. So clue me in: Why would Gilbert go after an accountant?\"\n\n\"Ullman was the last guy Frank was supposed to see,\" I said. \"He never got to him.\"\n\n\"Minna was supposed to kill Ullman?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Or vice versa?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Or did the same guy kill them both?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Loomis.\"\n\n\"So you aren't learning much besides what I'm digging up for you, huh?\"\n\n\"Eat me, Loomis.\"\n\n\"I'm so glad you're here,\" said Kimmery when she opened the door to me. \"You're just in time. Mostly everybody's sitting already.\" She kissed me on the cheek again. \"There's a lot of excitement about the monks.\"\n\n\"I'm feeling a lot of excitement myself.\" In fact, I felt an instant euphoria at Kimmery's alleviating presence. If this was the prospect of Zen I was ready to begin my training.\n\n\"You'll have to take a cushion right away. Just sit anywhere but up at the front of the line. We'll work on your posture some other time\u2014for now you can sit and concentrate on your breathing.\"\n\n\"I'll do that.\" I followed her up the stairs.\n\n\"That's really everything anyway, breathing. You could work on just that for the rest of your life.\"\n\n\"I'll probably have to.\"\n\n\"Take off your shoes.\"\n\nKimmery pointed, and I added my shoes to a neat row in the hallway. It was a bit disconcerting to surrender them and with them my street-readiness, but in fact my aching dogs were grateful for the chance to breathe and stretch.\n\nThe second-floor sitting room was gloomy now, overhead track lighting still dark, the fading November daylight insufficient. I spotted the source of the heavy smell this time, a pot of smoldering incense on a high shelf beside a jade Buddha. The walls of the room were covered with undecorated paper screens, the glossy parquet floor with thin cushions. Kimmery led me to a spot near the back of the room and sat beside me, folded her legs and straightened her back, then nodded wide-eyed to suggest I imitate her moves. If only she knew. I sat and worked my big legs into position, grabbing my shins with both hands, only once jostling the sitter ahead of me, who turned and quickly glared, then resumed his posture of grace. The rows of cushions around us were mostly full with Zen practitioners, twenty-two when I counted, some in black robes, others in beatniky street clothes, corduroy or sweatpants and turtlenecks, not one in a suit like me. In the dimness I couldn't make out any faces.\n\nSo I sat and waited and wondered exactly what I was there for, though it was tough to keep my back straight as those I saw around me. I glanced at Kimmery. Her eyes were already peacefully shut. In twenty-four hours\u2014it was only slightly more than that since Gilbert and I had parked at the curb outside the day before\u2014my confusion at the Zendo's significance had doubled and redoubled, become veiled in successive layers. The conversation I'd heard on the wire, those sneering insinuations, now seemed impossible to fix to this place. Kimmery's voice, ingenuous, unconspiring, was all I heard now. That, of course, against a background of my own interior babble. As I sat beside Kimmery, sheltered inside her tic-canceling field, I felt all the more keenly the uneasy, half-stoppered force of my own language-generator, my Multi-Mind, that tangle of responses and mimickings, of interruptions of interruptions.\n\nI gazed at her again. She was _sitting_ sincerely, not wondering about me. So I shut my eyes and, taking my own little crack at enlightenment, tried to unify my mind and get a fix on my Buddha nature.\n\nThe first thing I heard was Minna's voice: _I dare you to shut up for a whole twenty minutes sometime, you free human freakshow_.\n\nI pushed it away, thought _One Mind_ instead.\n\nOne Mind.\n\n_Tell me one, Freakshow. One I don't already know_.\n\n_I vant to go to Tibet_.\n\nOne Mind. I focused on my breathing.\n\n_Come home, Irving_.\n\nOne Mind. Sick Mind. Dirty Mind. Bailey Mind.\n\nOne Mind.\n\nOreo Man.\n\nWhen I opened my eyes again, I'd adjusted to the gloom. At the front of the room was a large bronze gong, and the cushions nearest the gong were empty as if readied for celebrity sitters, perhaps the _important monks_. The rows of heads had developed features, though mostly I was looking at ears and napes, the neckline of haircuts. The crowd was a mix of sexes, the women mostly skinny, with earrings and hairstyles that cost something, the men on average more lardish and scruffy, their haircuts overdue. I spotted Wallace's ponytail and bald spot and furniture-stiff posture up near the front. And a row ahead of me, closer to the entrance, sat Pinched and Indistinct, my would-be abductors. At last I understood: They _were_ men of peace. Was there a severe shortage of human beings on the Upper East Side, so the same small cast of doormen was required to pose in costume, here as goons, there as seekers after serenity? At least they'd shed their blue suits, made a greater commitment to this new identity. Garbed in black robes, their postures were admirably erect, presumably earned by extensive training, years of sacrifice. They hadn't been working all that time on their strong-arm patter, that was for sure.\n\nSo much for my breathing. I managed to check my voice, though. Pinched and Indistinct both had their eyes shut, and I'd arrived last, so I had the drop on them. They weren't exactly my idea of big trouble anyway. But I was reminded that the stolen cell phone and borrowed beeper in my jacket might shatter this ancient Eastern silence at any moment. Moving quietly as possible, I drew them out and turned off the cell phone's ringer, set Minna's beeper to \"vibrate.\" As I slipped them back into my jacket's inner pocket an open hand slapped the back of my head and neck, hard.\n\nStung, I whipped around. But my attacker was already past me, marching solemnly between the mats to the front of the room, the first in a file of six bald Japanese men, all draped in robes revealing glimpses of sagging brown skin and threads of white underarm hair. Important monks. The lead monk had swerved out of his way to deliver the blow. I'd been reprimanded or perhaps offered a jolt of enlightenment\u2014did I now know the sound of one hand clapping? Either way, I felt the heat of blood rushing to my ears and scalp.\n\nKimmery hadn't noticed, just placidly Zenned right through the whole sequence. Maybe she was further along on her spiritual path than she realized.\n\nThe six moved to the front and took the unoccupied mats near the gong. And a seventh entered the room, a little behind the others, also robed, also with a polished bald skull. But he wasn't small and Japanese and his body hair wasn't white and it wasn't limited to his underarms. He had silky black plumes of back and shoulder hair, rising from all sides to circle his neck with a fringe. It wasn't a look the designer of the robe had likely had in mind. He moved to the front of the room and took the last of the VIP spots before I could see his face, but I thought of Kimmery's description and decided this must be the American teacher, founder of the Zendo, the Roshi.\n\n_Irving_. When are you coming home, Irving? _Your family misses you_.\n\nThe joke nagged at me, but I couldn't put it to work. Was that Roshi's original name, his American name: Irving? Was Roshi-Irving the voice on the wire?\n\nIf so, why? What linked Minna to this place?\n\nThey settled into quietude up front. I stared at the row of bald heads, the six monks and Roshi, but discerned nothing. Even Pinched and Indistinct were meditating serenely. Minutes crept past and I was the only set of open eyes. Someone coughed and I faked a cough in imitation. If I kept one eye on Kimmery I was mostly calm, though. It was like having a bag of White Castles beside me on the car seat. I wondered how deep her influence over my syndrome could run if given the chance, how much of that influence I could hope to import. How close I could get. I shut my eyes, trusting Pinched and Indistinct to stay planted obliviously on their cushions, and drifted into some pleasant thoughts about bodies, about Kimmery's body, her nervous elegant limbs. Perhaps this was the key to Zen, then. _We don't exactly have God_ , she'd said. _We just sit and try to stay awake_. Well, I wasn't having any trouble staying awake. And as my penis stiffened it occurred to me I'd found my One Mind.\n\nI was jostled from my reverie by a sound at the door. I opened my eyes and turned to see the Polish giant standing in the entrance to the sitting room, filling the doorway with his square shoulders, holding in his fist a plastic produce bag full of kumquats and gazing at the roomful of Zen practitioners with an expression of absolute and utter serenity. He wasn't in a robe, but he might have been Buddha himself for the benignity of his gaze.\n\nBefore I could figure a plan or response there came a commotion at the front of the room. A commotion by the local standards anyway: One of the Japanese monks stood and bowed to Roshi, then to the other monks in his party, then to the room at large. You still would have heard a pin drop, but the rustling of his robe was signal enough, and eyes opened everywhere. The giant stepped into the room, still clutching his kumquats like a bag of live goldfish, and took a mat\u2014a couple actually\u2014on the other side of Kimmery, between us and the door. I reminded myself that the giant hadn't seen me, at least not yesterday. He certainly wasn't giving me any special notice\u2014or anyone else for that matter. Instead he settled into his spot, looking ready for the monk's lecture. Quite a gathering we made now, the various mugs and lugs attending to the wise little men from the East. Pinched and Indistinct might be real Zen students playing at thuggishness, but Pierogi Monster was undoubtedly the opposite. The kumquats, I was pretty sure, were a giveaway\u2014weren't they a Chinese fruit, not Japanese at all? I wanted to hug Kimmery toward me, away from the killer's reach, but then I wanted to do a lot of things\u2014I always do.\n\nThe monk bowed to us again, searched our faces briefly, then began speaking, so abruptly and casually it was as if he were resuming a talk he'd been having with himself.\n\n\"Daily life, I fly on an airplane, I take a taxicab to visit Yorkville Zendo\"\u2014this came out _Yolkville-ah_ \u2014\"I feel excitement, thoughts, anticipations, what will my friend Jerry-Roshi show me? Will I go to a very good Manhattan restaurant, sleep on a very good bed in New York City hotel?\" He stomped his sandaled foot as though testing out a mattress.\n\n_I vant to go to Tibet!_ The joke insisted itself upon me again. My calm was under pressure from all sides, the goons everywhere, my echolalia provoked by the monk's speech. But I couldn't turn and gaze and refresh my dose of Kimmery without also taking in Minna's titanic killer\u2014he was so big that his outline framed her on all sides despite his being farther away, an optical trick I couldn't afford to find fascinating.\n\n\"All these moods, impulses, this daily life, nothing wrong with them. But daily life, island, dinner, airplane, cocktail, daily life is not Zen. In zazen practice all that matters is the sitting, the practice. American, Japan, doesn't matter. Only sitting.\"\n\n_I vant to speak to the Lama!_ The American monk, Roshi, had half turned in his spot to better contemplate the master from across the ocean. The profile below Roshi's gleaming dome stirred me unexpectedly. I recognized some terrible force of authority and charisma in his features.\n\nJerry-Roshi?\n\nMeanwhile the giant sat disrespectfully pinching the skin of a kumquat, pressing it to his monstrous lips, sucking its juice.\n\n\"It is easy practice zazen in its external form, sit on the cushion and waste time on the cushion. So many forms of nothing-Zen, meaningless Zen, only one form of true Zen: actual making contact with own Buddha-self.\"\n\n_The High Lama will grant you an audience_.\n\n\"There is _chikusho_ Zen, Zen of domesticated animals who curl up on pillows like cats in homes, waiting to be fed. They sit to kill time between meals. Domesticated animal Zen useless! Those who practice chikusho should be beaten and thrown out of the zendo.\"\n\nI obsessed on Jerry-Roshi's face while the monk sputtered on.\n\n\"There is _ningen_ Zen, Zen practiced for self-improvement. Ego-Zen. Make skin better, make bowel movement better, think positive thoughts and influence people. Shit! Ningen Zen is shit Zen!\"\n\n_Irving, come home_ , went my brain. _No soap, Zendo. Tibettapocamus. Chickenshack Zen. High Oscillama Talkalot_. The monk's wonky syllables, the recursions of the Tibet joke, my own fear of the giant\u2014all were conspiring to bring me to a boil. I wanted to trace Roshi's enthralling profile with my fingertip\u2014perhaps I'd recognize its significance by touch. Instead I practiced Essrog Zen, and stifled myself.\n\n\"Consider also _gaki_ Zen: the Zen of insatiable ghosts. Those who study gaki Zen chase after enlightenment like spirits who crave food or vengeance with a hunger can never be satisfied. These ghosts never even enter the house of Zen they are so busy howling at the windows!\"\n\nRoshi looked like Minna.\n\n_Your brother misses you, Irving_.\n\nIrving equals Lama, Roshi equals Gerard.\n\nRoshi was Gerard Minna.\n\nGerard Minna was the voice on the wire.\n\nI couldn't say which got me there first, his profile in front of me or the joke's subliminal nagging. It felt like a dead heat. Of course, the joke had been designed to get me there sooner, spare me figuring it out while in the belly of the whale. Too bad.\n\nI tried to quit staring, failed. Up front, the monk continued to enumerate false Zens, the various ways we could go wrong. I personally could think of a few he probably hadn't come across yet.\n\nBut why had Minna buried the information in a joke to begin with? I thought of a couple of reasons. One: He didn't want us to know about Gerard _unless_ he died. If he survived the attack he wanted his secret to survive as well. Two: He didn't know who among his Men to trust, even down to Gilbert Coney. He could be certain I'd puzzle over the Irving clue while Gilbert would write it off as our mutual inanity.\n\nAnd he felt, rightly, that no conspiracy around him could possibly include his pet Freakshow. The other Boys would never let me play. I could be flattered at the implied trust, or insulted by the dis. It didn't really matter now.\n\nI stared at Gerard. Now I understood the charismatic force of his profile, but it inspired only bitterness. It was as though the world imagined it could take Minna away and offer this clumsy genetic substitution. A resemblance.\n\n\"California Roll Zen. This is the Zen of sushi so full of avocado and cream cheese might as well be a marshmallow for all you know. The pungent fish of zazen smothered in easy pleasures, picnics, get-togethers, Zendo becomes a dating service!\"\n\n_\"Zengeance!\"_ I shouted.\n\nNot every head turned. Gerard Minna's did, though. So did Pinched's, and Indistinct's. And so did the giant's. Kimmery was among those who practiced their calm by ignoring me.\n\n\"Ziggedy zendoodah,\" I said aloud. My erection dimmed, energy venting elsewhere. _\"Pierogi Monster Zen master zealous neighbor_. Zazen zaftig Zsa Zsa go-bare.\" I rapped the scalp of the sitter in front of me. \"Zippity go figure.\"\n\nThe roomful of gurus and acolytes came to agitated life but not one of them spoke a word, so my burst of verbiage sang in the silence. The lecturing monk glared at me and shook his head. Another of his posse rose from his cushion and lifted a wooden paddle I hadn't previously noticed from a hook on the wall, then started through the rows of students in my direction. Only Wallace sat immobile, eyes shut, still meditating. I began to appreciate his reputation for imperturbability.\n\n\"Pierogi kumquat sushiphone! Domestic marshmallow ghost! Insatiable Mallomar! _Smothered pierogiphone!\"_ The flood came with such force, I twisted my neck and nearly barked the words.\n\n\"Silence!\" commanded the lecturing monk. \"Very bad to make disturbance in the Zendo! Time and place for everything!\" Anger wasn't good for his English. \"Shouting is for outside, New York City full of shouting! Not in Zendo.\"\n\n\"Knock knock Zendo!\" I shouted. \"Monk monk goose!\"\n\nThe monk with the paddle approached. He gripped it cross-handed, like Hank Aaron. The giant stood, shoved his baggie of kumquats into the pocket of his Members Only jacket and rubbed his sticky hands together, readying them for use. Gerard turned and stared at me, but if he recognized in me the twitchy teenager he'd left behind at the St. Vincent's schoolyard fence nineteen years before, he didn't show any sign. His eyebrows were delicately knit, his mouth pursed, his expression bemused. Kimmery put her hand on my knee and I put my hand on hers, reciprocity-ticcing. Even in a shitstorm such as I was in at this moment, my syndrome knew that God was in the details.\n\n\"Keisaku is more than ceremonial implement,\" said the monk with the paddle. He applied it to my shoulder blades so gently it was like a caress. \"Unruly student can do with a blow.\" Now he clouted my back with the same muscular Buddhist glee his colleague had applied to my scalp.\n\n\"Ouch!\" I fished behind me for the paddle, snagged it, tugged. It came out of the monk's grasp and he staggered backward. By now the giant was headed in our direction. Those between us rolled or scuttled out of his path, according to their ability to unlock their elaborately folded legs. Kimmery darted away just as he loomed over us, not wanting to be crushed. Pierogi Man hadn't checked his shoes at the door.\n\nThat was when I saw the nod.\n\nGerard Minna nodded ever so slightly at the giant, and the giant nodded back. That was all it took. The same team that had doomed Frank Minna was back in the saddle. I would be the sequel.\n\nThe giant wrapped me in his arms and lifted, and the paddle clattered to the floor.\n\nI weigh nearly two hundred pounds, but the giant didn't strain at all moving me down the stairs and out onto the street, and when he plumped me onto the sidewalk I was more shaken and winded than he by far. I straightened my suit and confirmed the alignment of my neck with a string of jerks while he unloaded his bag of kumquats and got back to sucking out their juice and pulp, reducing their bodies to husks that looked like orange raisins in his massive hands.\n\nThe narrow street was nearly dark now, and the dog-walkers were far enough away to give us privacy.\n\n\"Want one?\" he said, holding out the bag. His voice was a dull thing where it began in his throat but it resonated to grandeur in the tremendous instrument of his torso, like a mediocre singer on the stage of a superb concert hall.\n\n\"No, thanks,\" I said. Here was where I should grow large with anger, facing Minna's killer right at the spot of the abduction. But I was diminished, ribs aching from his squeezing, confused and worried\u2014conworried\u2014by my discovery of Gerard Minna inside the Zendo, and unhappy to have left Kimmery and my shoes upstairs. The pavement was cold through my socks, and my feet tingled oddly as they flushed with the blood denied them by Zen posture.\n\n\"So what's the matter with you?\" he said, discarding another of the withered kumquats.\n\n\"I've got Tourette's,\" I said.\n\n\"Yeah, well, threats don't work with me.\"\n\n\"Tourette's,\" I said.\n\n\"Eh? My hearing's not so good. Sorry.\" He put the bag of fruit away again, and when his hand reemerged it was holding a gun. \"Go in there,\" he said. He pointed with his chin at the three steps leading to the narrow channel between the Zendo and the apartment building on the right, a lane filled with garbage cans and darkness. I frowned, and he reached out and with the hand not holding the gun shoved me backward toward the steps. \"Go,\" he said again.\n\nI considered the giant and myself as a tableau. Here was the man I'd been hunting and wishing to go up against, howling for a chance at vengeance like an insatiable ghost or marshmallow\u2014yet had I planned a way to take advantage of him, a method or apparatus to give me any real edge, let alone narrow the immense gap in force his size presented? No. I'd come up pathetically empty. And now he had a gun to ice the cake. He shoved me again, straight-armed my shoulder, and when I tried, ticcishly, to shove his shoulder in return I found I was held at too great a distance, couldn't brush his shoulder even with long-stretched fingertips, and it conjured some old memory of Sylvester the Cat in a boxing ring with a kangaroo. My brain whispered, _He's just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse_.\n\n\"Apocamouse,\" I mumbled, language spilling out of me unrestrained. \"Unplan-a-canal. Unpluggaphone.\"\n\n\"I said get in there, Squeaky.\" Had he caught my mouse reference, even with his impaired hearing? But then, who wouldn't be squeaky to him? He was so big he only had to shrug to loom. I took a step backward. I had Tourette's, he had threats. \"Go,\" he said again.\n\nIt was the last thing I wanted to do and I did it.\n\nThe minute I stepped down into the darkness he swung the gun at my head.\n\nSo many detectives have been knocked out and fallen into such strange swirling darknesses, such manifold surrealist voids (\"something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope\"\u2014Philip Marlowe, _The Big Sleep_ ), and yet I have nothing to contribute to this painful tradition. Instead my falling and rising through obscurity was distinguished only by nothingness, by blankness, by lack and my resentment of it. Except for grains. It was a grainy nothing. A desert of grains. How fond can you be of flavorless grains in a desert? How much better than nothing at all? I'm from Brooklyn and I don't like wide-open spaces, I guess. And I don't want to die. So sue me.\n\nThen I remembered a joke, a riddle like one the Garbage Cop would tell, and it was my lifeline, it sang like a chorus of ethereal voices beckoning me from the brink of darkness:\n\nWhy don't you starve in the desert?\n\nBecause of the _sand which is_ there.\n\nWhy didn't I want to die or leave New York?\n\nThe sandwiches. I concentrated on the sandwiches. For a while that's all there was, and I was happy. The sandwiches were so much better than the desert of grains.\n\n\"Lionel?\"\n\nIt was Kimmery's voice.\n\n\"Mhrrggh.\"\n\n\"I brought your shoes.\"\n\n\"Oooh.\"\n\n\"I think we should go. Can you stand?\"\n\n\"Rrrrssp.\"\n\n\"Lean against the wall. Careful. I'll get a cab.\"\n\n\"Cabbabbab.\"\n\nI flickered awake again and we were slicing through the park, East Side to West, in that taxicab channel of tree-topped stone, my head on Kimmery's bony shoulder. She was putting my shoes back on, lifting my leaden feet one after the other, then tying the laces. Her small hands and my large shoes made this an operation rather like saddling a comatose horse. I could see the cabbie's license\u2014his name was Omar Dahl, which invited tics I couldn't muster in my state\u2014and a view upward through the side window. For a moment I thought it was snowing and everything seemed precious and distant\u2014Central Park in a snow globe. Then I realized it was snowing inside the cab, too. The grains again. I closed my eyes.\n\nKimmery's apartment was on Seventy-eighth Street, in an old-lady apartment building, gloriously shabby and real after the gloss of the East Side, the chilling dystopian lobby of 1030 Park Avenue especially. I got upright and into the elevator on my own steam, with only Kimmery to hold the doors for me, which was how I liked it\u2014no doormen. We rode to the twenty-eighth floor in an empty car, and Kimmery leaned against me as if we were still in the cab. I didn't need the support to stand anymore, but I didn't stop it from happening. My head throbbed\u2014where Pierogi Man had clubbed me, it felt as though I were trying to grow a single horn, and failing\u2014and the contact with Kimmery was a kind of compensation. At her floor she parted from my side with that nervous quick walk I already considered her trademark, her confession of some kernel of jerkiness I could cultivate and adore, and unlocked the door to her place so frantically I wondered if she thought we'd been followed.\n\n\"Did the giant see you?\" I said when we were inside.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The giant. Are you afraid of the giant?\" I felt a body-memory, and shuddered. I was still a little _unsteady on my pins_ , as Minna would have said.\n\nShe looked at me strangely. \"No, I just\u2014I'm an illegal sublet here. There are people in this building who can't mind their own business. You should sit down. Do you want some water?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" I looked around. \"Sit where?\"\n\nHer apartment consisted of a brief foyer, a minuscule kitchen\u2014really more an astronaut's cockpit full of cooking equipment\u2014and a large central room whose polyurethaned floor mirrored the vast moonlit city nightscape featured in its long, uncurtained window. The reflected image was uninterrupted by carpet or furniture, just a few modest boxes tucked into the corners, a tiny boom box and a stack of tapes, and a large cat that stood in the center of the floor, regarding our entrance skeptically. The walls were bare. Kimmery's bedding was a flattened mattress on the floor of the foyer where we stood now, just inside the apartment's door. We were almost on top of it.\n\n\"Go ahead and sit on the bed,\" she said, with a nervous half smile.\n\nBeside the bed was a candle, a box of tissues, and a small stack of paperbacks. It was a private space, a headquarters. I wondered if she hosted much\u2014I felt I might be the first to see past her door.\n\n\"Why don't you sleep in there?\" I said, pointing at the big empty room. My words came out thickened and stupid, like those of a defeated boxer in his dressing room, or a Method actor's, while playing a defeated boxer. My Tourette's brain preferred precision, sharper edges. I felt it waking.\n\n\"People look in,\" said Kimmery. \"I'm not comfortable.\"\n\n\"You could have curtains.\" I gestured at the big window.\n\n\"It's too big. I don't really like that room. I don't know why.\" Now she looked like she regretted bringing me here. \"Sit. I'll bring you some water.\"\n\nThe room she didn't like was the whole of the apartment. She lived instead in the foyer. But I decided not to say anything more about it. There was something anyway that suited me in her use of the space, as though she'd planned to bring me here to hide, knew I'd have something to fear from the skyline, the big world of conspiracies and doormen that was Manhattan.\n\nI took a seat on her bed, back against the wall, legs straightened to cross the mattress, so my shoes reached the floor. I felt my tailbone meet the floor through the pancake-thin mattress. Now I saw that Kimmery had double-knotted my laces. I lingered awkwardly over this detail, used it to measure my returning consciousness, allowing my obsessiveness to play over the intricacy of the knots and my stroboscopic memories of Kimmery tugging at my feet in the cab. I imagined I could feel the dented place in my skull and the damaged language flowing in a new direction through this altered inner topography and the words went _sandwiches sandwiches I scream for ice cream dust to dust_ and so on.\n\nI decided to distract myself with the books stacked near the bed. The first was called _The Wisdom of Insecurity_ , by Alan Watts. Tucked into it as an oversize bookmark was a pamphlet, a glossy sheet folded in thirds. I pulled out the pamphlet. It was for Yoshii's, a Zen Buddhist retreat center and roadside Thai and Japanese restaurant on the southern coast of Maine. The phone number beneath the schematic road map on the back was circled with blue ballpoint. The heading on the front of the pamphlet said A PLACE OF PEACE.\n\nPleasure police.\n\nPressure peas.\n\nThe cat walked in from the main room and stood on my outstretched thighs and began kneading them with its front paws, half-retracted claws engaging the material to make a _pocka-pocka-pocka_ sound. The cat was black and white with a Hitler mustache, and when it finally noticed I had a face it squeezed its eyes at me. I folded the pamphlet into my jacket pocket, then took off my jacket and put it on the corner of Kimmery's bed. The cat went back to working my thighs.\n\n\"You probably don't like cats,\" said Kimmery, returning with two glasses of water.\n\n_\"Chickencat,\"_ I said, ticcing stupidly. _\"Cream of soup salad sandwich.\"_\n\n\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" I said, though maybe I was. \"And I like cats fine.\" But I kept my hands away, not wanting to begin obsessing on its body\u2014kneading back or mimicking its uneven, cackling purr.\n\nI can't own a cat, because my behaviors drive them insane. I know because I tried. I had a cat, gray and slim, half the size of Kimmery's, named Hen for the chirping and cooing sounds she made, for the barnyard pecking motions her initial sniffing inspections of my apartment reminded me of. She enjoyed my attentions at first, my somewhat excessive fondling. She'd purr and push against my hand as I tapped her, taking her pleasure. I'd refine my impulses toward her as well as I could, stroking her neck smoothly, rubbing her cheeks sideways to stimulate her kittenish memories of being licked, or whatever it is that makes cats crave that sensation. But from the very first Hen was disconcerted by my head-jerks and utterances and especially by my barking. She'd turn her head to see what I'd jumped at, to see what I was fishing for in the air with my hand. Hen recognized those behaviors\u2014they were supposed to be _hers_. She never felt free to relax. She'd cautiously advance to my lap, a long game of half measures and imaginary distractions before she'd settle. Then I'd issue a string of bitten-off shrieks and bat at the curtain.\n\nWorse, her bouts of joy at my petting hands became a focal point for Tourettic games of disruption. Hen would purr and nudge at my hand, and I'd begin stroking her smooth, sharklike face. She'd lean into the pressure, and I'd push back, until she was arched into my hand and ready to topple. Then the tic\u2014I'd withdraw my hand. Other times I'd be compelled to follow her around the apartment, reaching for her when she'd meant to be sly or invisible; I'd stalk her, though it was obvious that like any cat her preference was to come to me. Or I'd fixate on the limits of her pleasure at being touched\u2014would she keep purring if I rubbed her fur backward? If I tickled her cheeks would I be allowed to simultaneously grasp her sacrosanct tail? Would she permit me to clean the sleep from her eyes? The answer was often yes, but there was a cost. As with a voodoo doll, I'd begun investing my own ticcishness in my smaller counterpart: Tourette's Cat. She'd been reduced to a distrustful, skittish bundle of reactions, anticipatory flinchings and lashings-out. After six months I had to find her a new home with a Dominican family in the next building. They were able to straighten her out, after some cooling-off time spent hidden behind their stove.\n\nThe big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro. Meanwhile Kimmery had placed the two glasses of water on the floor near my feet. Though the room was dim\u2014we were lit as much by the reflected skyline in the big room behind us as by the faint bulb there in the foyer\u2014she'd removed her eyeglasses for the first time, and her eyes looked tender and small and searching. She slid down to seat herself against the wall, so we were arranged like clock hands on the face of the floor, our shoes at the center. According to the clock of us it was four o'clock. I tried not to root for midnight.\n\n\"Have you been living here long?\" I asked.\n\n\"I know, it looks like I'm camping out,\" she said. \"It's been about a month. I just broke up with this guy. It's pretty obvious, isn't it?\"\n\n\"The Oreo Man?\" I pictured a weather-beaten cowboy in front of a sunset, holding a cookie to his lips like a cigarette. Then, in frantic compensation, I conjured a tormented nerd in goggle-glasses, peering at cookie crumbs through a microscope, trying to discern their serial numbers.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" said Kimmery. \"A friend was moving out and she gave me this place. I don't even like it. I'm hardly ever here.\"\n\n\"Where instead\u2014the Zendo?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Or the movies.\"\n\nI wasn't ticcing much, for a couple of reasons. The first was Kimmery herself, still an unprecedented balm to me this late in the day. The second was the day itself, the serial tumult of unsorted clues, the catastrophe of my visit to the Zendo; that extra track in my brain had plenty of work to do threading beads together, smoothing the sequence into order: Kimmery, doormen, Matricardi and Rockaforte, Tony and Seminole, Important Monks, Gerard Minna and the killer. Minna's killer.\n\n\"Did you lock your door?\" I said.\n\n\"You're really afraid,\" said Kimmery, widening her eyes. \"Of the, uh, giant.\"\n\n\"You didn't see him?\" I said. \"The big guy who took me outside?\" I didn't mention what happened next. It was shameful enough that Kimmery had had to mop it up.\n\n\"He's a _giant_?\"\n\n\"Well, what do you call it?\"\n\n\"Isn't gigantism a genetic condition?\"\n\n\"I'd say it is. He didn't _earn_ that height.\" I touched the delicate spot on my head with one hand, kept the other calm at my side, ignoring every impulse to return the cat's pulsing and pawing at my legs. Instead I fingered the homely, hand-stitched coverlet on Kimmery's mattress, traced its inelegant, lumpy seams.\n\n\"I guess I didn't notice,\" she said. \"I was, you know\u2014sitting.\"\n\n\"You've never seen him before?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"But I never met you before today either. I guess I should have told you not to bring anyone like that to the Zendo. And not to make noise. Now I missed practically the whole lecture.\"\n\n\"You're not saying the lecture went on?\"\n\n\"Sure, why not? After you and your friend _the giant_ were gone.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you stay?\"\n\n\"Because my concentration isn't that good,\" she said, bitterly philosophical now. \"If you're really Zen you sit right through distractions, like Roshi did. And _Wallace.\"_ She rolled her eyes.\n\nI was tempted to remind her that she'd moved to avoid being trampled, but it was just one objection among thousands.\n\n\"You don't understand,\" I said. \"I didn't bring him to the Zendo. Nobody knew I was coming there.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess he followed you.\" She shrugged, not wanting to argue. To her it was self-evident that the giant and I were dual phenomena. I'd caused his presence at the Zendo, was likely responsible for his very existence.\n\n\"Listen,\" I said. \"I know Roshi's American name. He's not who you think he is.\"\n\n\"I don't think he's anyone.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I didn't say, like, _Roshi's really Johnny Carson_ or something. I just said I didn't know.\"\n\n\"Okay, but he's not a Zen teacher. He's involved in a murder.\"\n\n\"That's silly.\" She made it sound like a virtue, as though I'd meant to entertain her. \"Besides, anyone who teaches Zen is a Zen teacher, I think. Probably even if they were a murderer. Just like anyone who sits is a student. Even you.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with me?\"\n\n\"Nothing's wrong with you, at least according to a Zen outlook. That's my whole point.\"\n\n\"Taken.\"\n\n\"Don't be so sour, Lionel. I'm only joking. You sure you're happy with that cat?\"\n\n\"Doesn't it have a name?\" Feline Hitler had settled ponderously between my thighs, was purring in broken measures, and had begun to feature tiny bubbles of drool at the corners of its mouth.\n\n\"Shelf, but I never call him that.\"\n\n_\"Shelf?\"_\n\n\"I know, it's completely stupid. I didn't name him. I'm just catsitting.\"\n\n\"So this isn't your apartment and this isn't your cat.\"\n\n\"It's sort of a period of crisis for me.\" She reached for her glass of water, and I immediately reached for mine, grateful: The mirroring scratched a tiny mental itch. Anyway, I was thirsty. Shelf didn't budge. \"That's why I got involved with Zen,\" Kimmery went on. \"For more _detachment.\"_\n\n\"You mean like no apartment and no cat? How detached can you get?\" My voice was irrationally bitter. Disappointment had crept over me, impossible to justify or perfectly define. I suppose I'd imagined us sheltered in Kimmery's childlike foyer, her West Side tree house, three cats hiding. But now I understood that she was rootless, alienated in this space. The Oreo Man's house was her home, or possibly the Zendo, just as L&L was mine, just as Shelf's was elsewhere, too. None of us could go to those places, so we huddled here together, avoiding the big room and the forest of skyscrapers.\n\nNow, before Kimmery could reply, I ticced loudly, _\"Detach-me-not!\"_ I tried to block myself, interrupt my own ticcing with the glass of water, which I moved to my lips just in time to shout into the glass, fevering the surface of the water with my breath, _\"Go-shelf-a-lot!\"_\n\n\"Wow,\" said Kimmery.\n\nI didn't speak. I gulped down water and fondled the stitching of her coverlet again, seeking to lose my Tourette's self in texture. \"You say really weird stuff when you get angry,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm not\u2014\" I turned my neck, put the glass of water down on the floor. This time I jostled Shelf, who looked up at me with jaded eyes. \"I'm not angry.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with you, then?\" The question was delivered evenly, without sarcasm or fear, as though she really wanted an answer. Her eyes no longer looked small to me without the black frames around them. They felt as round and inquisitive as the cat's.\n\n\"Nothing\u2014at least from a Zen outlook. I just shout sometimes. And touch things. And count things. And think about them too much.\"\n\n\"I've heard of that, I think.\"\n\n\"You're the exception to the rule if you have.\"\n\nShe reached into my lap and patted Shelf's head, distracting the cat from its interrogative gaze. Instead it squeezed its eyes together and craned its neck to press back against her palm. I'd have craned as far.\n\n\"Don't you want to know Roshi's real name?\" I said. \"Why should I?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Unless you're really going to shock me and say he's, like, J. D. Salinger, what's the difference? I mean, it's just going to be Bob or Ed or something, right?\"\n\n\"Gerard Minna,\" I said. I wanted it to mean as much to her as Salinger, wanted her to understand everything. \"He's Frank Minna's brother.\"\n\n\"Okay, but who's Frank Minna?\"\n\n\"He's the guy who got killed.\" Strangely, I had a name for him now, a name flat and terrible and true: _the guy who got killed_. When before I could never have answered that question, or if I started answering it I'd never have finished. Frank Minna is the secret king of Court Street. Frank Minna is a mover and a talker, a word and a gesture, a detective and a fool. _Frank Minna c'est moi_.\n\n\"Oh, that's terrible.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I wondered if I could ever share with her how terrible it was. \"I mean, that's got to be one of the worst things I've ever heard, practically.\"\n\nKimmery leaned closer, comforting the cat, not me. But I felt comforted. She and I were drawn close within her dawning understanding. Perhaps this foyer had only waited for this moment, for me and my story, to become a real space instead of a provisional one. Here Minna would be properly mourned. Here I'd find surcease for my pain and the answer to the puzzle of Tony and The Clients and why Minna and Ullman had to die and where Julia was and who Bailey was, and here Kimmery's hand would move from Shelf's head to my thigh and I would never tic again.\n\n\"He sent his brother out to die,\" I said. \"He set him up. I heard it happen. I just don't know why yet.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. How did you hear?\"\n\n\"Frank Minna was wearing a bug when he went into the Zendo. I heard him and Gerard talking. You were there too, in the building.\" I recalled revising my surveillance note, trying to decide whether to declare Kimmery _girl_ or _woman_ , and my writing hand twitched, reenacting my crossing-out across the soft threads of her coverlet.\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Yesterday,\" I said, though it seemed a long time ago now.\n\n\"Well, that's impossible. It must have been someone else.\"\n\n\"Tell me why.\"\n\n\"Roshi is under a vow of silence.\" She whispered, as if she were breaking such a vow at this moment. \"He hasn't said a word for the last five days. So you couldn't have heard him talk.\"\n\nI was tongue-tied for once. It was the logic of the Oreo Man, invading my moral puzzle. Or another Zen conundrum: What's the sound of a silent monk condemning his brother to death?\n\n_The quieter the monk, the gaudier the patter_ I thought, remembering the conversation on the wiretap.\n\n\"I can't believe you go around _bugging_ people,\" she said, still whispering. Perhaps she imagined there was a bug in the room now. \"Were you trying to frame this Frank person?\"\n\n\"No, no, no. Frank wanted me to listen.\"\n\n\"He wanted to be caught?\"\n\n\"He didn't _do_ anything,\" I said. \"Except get bumped off by his brother, the silent monk.\"\n\nThough she regarded me skeptically, Kimmery went on rubbing the cat's neck and head while it nestled in my lap. I had more than the usual panicky reasons to ignore the captivating sensations, the fricative purring and chafing down there. I was suppressing two different kinds of response, two possible ways of poking back. I kept my eyes level on Kimmery's face.\n\n\"I think you've got a few things mixed up,\" she said gently. \"Roshi's a very gentle man.\"\n\n\"Well, Gerard Minna's a punk from Brooklyn,\" I said. \"And they're positively the same guy.\"\n\n\"Hmmm. I don't know, Lionel. Roshi once told me he'd never been to Brooklyn. He's from Vermont or Canada or something.\"\n\n\"Maine?\" I asked, thinking of the pamphlet I'd secreted in my jacket, the retreat center by the water.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I don't know. You should take my word for it, though, he isn't from _Brooklyn_. He's a very important man.\" She made it sound as if the two were mutually exclusive.\n\n_\"Eat me Brooklyn Roshi!\"_\n\nI was ticcing out of sheer frustration. In squaring her perceptions to mine I not only had a world of knowledge to build up but a preexisting one to tear down. Anyone faintly Zen was to her beyond reproach. And Gerard Minna, for the cheap act of shaving his likely-already-balding head, was secure in a pantheon of the holy.\n\nAnd Gerard had a lot of damn gall to renounce the borough.\n\n\"Lionel?\"\n\nI grabbed for my glass, took another sip of water, averted my eyes from Kimmery's.\n\n\"How does it feel when you do that?\" she said. \"I mean, what are you thinking?\"\n\nShe was close enough now, and I succumbed completely and reached for her shoulder, tapped it five times quickly with paired fingertips. Then I moved my water glass to the floor and leaned forward, forcing Shelf to make another bleary, pleasure-addled adjustment to his position in my lap, and straightened Kimmery's collar with both hands. The material was floppy, and I tried to prop it up as if it were starched, put the collar-tips on point like a ballerina's toes. And my brain went, _How are you feeling and how are you thinking and think how you're feeling_ , and that became the chorus, the soundtrack to my adamant necessary collar-play.\n\n\"Lionel?\" She didn't push my hands away.\n\n\"Liable,\" I said softly, my gaze lowered. \"Think-a-mum Feely.\"\n\n\"What do the words mean?\"\n\n\"They're just words. They don't mean anything.\" The question depressed me a little, took the wind out of my sails, and this was a good thing: I was able to release her collar, still my wriggling fingers.\n\nKimmery touched one hand, just briefly, as I withdrew it. I was numb to her now, though. She no longer soothed my tics, and the attention she'd begun to give them was humiliating. I needed to get this interview back on an official basis. Sitting here purring and being purred at wasn't going to accomplish anything. In the city on the other side of the door a giant killer lurched around unafraid, and it was my job to find him.\n\n\"What do you know about ten-thirty Park Avenue?\" I said, resuming my investigation, the legitimate inquiry.\n\n\"Is that that big apartment building?\" Her hand was back riffling Shelf's fur, her body ever closer to mine.\n\n\"Big building,\" I said. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"A lot of Roshi's students do their work service there,\" she said lightly. \"Working in the kitchen, cleaning up, that kind of thing. I was telling you about it, remember?\"\n\n\"Doormen? Any\u2014doormen?\" My syndrome wanted to call them dogshirts, doorsnips, diphthongs. I gritted my teeth.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I think so. I never went there myself. Lionel?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"You didn't really come to the Zendo because you were interested in Buddhism, did you?\"\n\n\"I guess I thought that was obvious by now.\"\n\n\"It is obvious.\"\n\nI wasn't sure what to say. I was narrowed to a fine point, thinking only of Frank and Gerard and the places I might have to go to finish my investigation. I'd shuttered myself against Kimmery's tenderness toward me, even shuttered away my own tenderness toward her. She was an incompetent witness, beyond that a distraction. And I was an investigator who supplied plenty of my own distractions, too many.\n\n\"You came to make trouble,\" she said.\n\n\"I came _because_ of trouble, yes.\"\n\nKimmery rubbed the fur of Shelf's flank in the wrong direction, aggravating my senses. I put my hand on the cat for the first time, nudged Kimmery's fingers away from the chaos of up-sticking fur she'd caused, and smoothed the fur back into place.\n\n\"Well, I'm glad I met you anyway,\" she said.\n\nI made a sound, half dog, half cat, something like _\"Chaarff.\"_\n\nOur hands collided in Shelf's fur, Kimmery's moving to rough up the area I'd just smoothed into sense, mine preemptively slipping underneath to preserve my work. It took a big indifferent loaf of a cat like Shelf to withstand it; Hen would have been across the room reordering herself with her own tongue by now.\n\n\"You're strange to me,\" said Kimmery.\n\n\"Don't feel bad about it,\" I said.\n\n\"No, but I mean strange in a good way, too.\"\n\n\"Uh.\" She was tugging on my fingers, and I tugged systematically back, so our hands were tangling, squirming, the cat a benign mattress underneath, one vibrating like a cheap hotel's.\n\n\"You can say whatever you want,\" Kimmery whispered.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The words.\"\n\n\"I don't really need to when you're touching my hand like that.\"\n\n\"I like to.\"\n\n\"Touch?\" Touch shoulders, touch penguins, touch Kimmery\u2014who didn't like to touch? Why shouldn't she? But this vaguest of questions was all I could manage. I wasn't only strange to her, I was strange to myself at that moment: tugging, lulled, resistant. Conworried.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"You. Here\u2014\"\n\nShe groped at the wall behind her head and switched off the light. We were still outlined in white, Manhattan's radiation leaking in from the big room. Then she moved closer: It was a minute after twelve. Somewhere as she fit herself in beside me the cat was jostled loose and wandered ungrudgingly away.\n\n\"That's better,\" I said lamely, like I was reading from a script. The distance between us had narrowed, but the distance between me and me was enormous. I blinked in the half-light, looking straight ahead. Now her hand was on my thigh where the cat had been. Mirroring, I let my fingers play lightly at the parallel spot on her leg.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said.\n\n\"I can't seem to interest you fully in my case,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh, I'm interested,\" she said. \"It's just\u2014It's hard to talk about things that are important to you. With a new person. Everyone is so strange, don't you think?\"\n\n\"I think you're right.\"\n\n\"So you have to trust them at first. Because everything makes sense after a while.\"\n\n\"So that's what you're doing with me?\"\n\nShe nodded, then leaned her head against my shoulder. \"But you're not asking me anything about myself.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I said, surprised. \"I guess\u2014I guess I don't know where to start.\"\n\n\"Well, so you see what I mean, then.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nI didn't have to turn her face to mine to kiss her. It was already there when I turned. Her lips were small and soft and a little chapped. I'd never before kissed a woman without having had a few drinks. And I'd never kissed a woman who hadn't had a few herself. While I tasted her Kimmery drew circles on my leg with her finger, and I did the same back.\n\n\"You do everything I do,\" she whispered into my mouth.\n\n\"I don't really need to,\" I said again. \"Not if we're this close.\" It was the truth. I was never less ticcish than this: aroused, pressing toward another's body, moving out of my own. But just as Kimmery had somehow spared me ticcing aloud in conversation, now I felt free to incorporate an element of Tourette's into our groping, as though she were negotiating a new understanding between my two disgruntled brains.\n\n\"It's okay,\" she said. \"You need a shave, though.\"\n\nWe kissed then, so I couldn't reply, didn't want to. I felt her press her thumb very gently against the point of my Adam's apple, a touch I couldn't exactly return. I stroked her ear and jaw instead, urging her nearer. Then her hand fell lower, and mine too, and at that moment I felt my hand and mind lose their particularity, their pointiness, their countingness, instead become clouds of general awareness, dreamy and yielding with curiosity. My hand felt less a hand than a catcher's mitt, or Mickey Mouse's hand, something vast and blunt and soft. I didn't count her where I touched her. I conducted a general survey, took a tender sampling.\n\n\"You're excited,\" she breathed.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's okay.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"I just wanted to mention it.\"\n\n\"Okay, yes.\"\n\nShe unbuttoned my pants. I fumbled with hers, with a thin sash knotted at her front for a belt. I couldn't undo it with one hand. We were breathing into one another's mouths, lips slipping together and apart, noses mashed. I found a way in around the knotted sash, untucked her shirt. I put my finger in her belly button, then found the crisp margin of her pubic hair, threaded it with a finger. She tremored and slid her knee between mine.\n\n\"You can touch me there,\" she said.\n\n\"I am,\" I said, wishing for accuracy.\n\n\"You're so excited,\" she said. \"It's okay.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's okay. Oh, Lionel, that's okay. Don't stop, it's okay.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"It's okay.\" _Okay, okay:_ Here was Kimmery's tic, in evidence at last. I couldn't begrudge it. I turned my whole hand, gathering her up, surrounding her. She spilled as I held her. Meanwhile she'd found the vent in my boxer shorts. I felt two fingertips contact a part of me through that window, the blind men and the elephant. I wanted and didn't want her to go on, terribly.\n\n\"You're so excited,\" she said again, incantatory.\n\n\"Uh.\" She jostled me, untangled me from my shorts and my self.\n\n\"Wow, God, Lionel you're sort of huge.\"\n\n\"And bent,\" I said, so she wouldn't have to say it.\n\n\"Is that normal?\"\n\n\"I guess it's a little unusual-looking.\" I panted, hoping to be past this moment.\n\n\"More than a little, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Someone\u2014a woman once told me it was like a beer can.\"\n\n\"I've heard of that,\" said Kimmery. \"But yours is, I don't know, like a beer can that's been crushed, like for recycling.\"\n\nSo it was for me. In my paltry history I'd never been unveiled without hearing something about it\u2014freak shows within freak shows. Whatever Kimmery thought, it didn't keep her from freeing me from my boxer shorts and palming me, so that I felt myself aching heavily in her cool grasp. We made a circuit: mouths, knees, hands and what they held. The sensation was okay. I tried to match the rhythm of her hand with mine, failed. Kimmery's tongue lapped my chin, found my mouth again. I made a whining sound, not a part of any word. Language was destroyed. Bailey, he left town.\n\n\"It's okay to talk,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Uh.\"\n\n\"I like, um, I like it when you talk. When you make sounds.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"Tell me something, Lionel.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I mean, say something. The way you do.\"\n\nI looked at her open-mouthed. Her hand urged me toward an utterance that was anything but verbal. I tried to distract her the same way.\n\n\"Speak, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" It really was all I could think to say.\n\nShe kissed me gaspingly and drew back, her look expectant.\n\n\"One Mind!\" I said.\n\n\"Yes!\" said Kimmery.\n\n_\"Fonebone!\"_ I shouted.\n\nAnother key contributor to my Tourette's lexicon was a cartoonist named Don Martin, first encountered in a pile of tattered _Mad_ magazines in a box in the Ping-Pong room in the basement of St. Vincent's when I was eleven or twelve. I used to pore over his drawings, trying to find what it was about his characters, drawn with riotously bulging eyes, noses, chins, Adam's apples and knees, elongated tongues and fingers and feet that flapped like banners, named Professor Bleent, P. Carter Franit, Mrs. Freenbeen and Mr. Fonebone, that stirred such a deep chord in me. His image of life was garish and explosive, heads being stretched and shrunk, surgeons lopping off noses and dropping brains and sewing hands on backward, falling safes and metal presses squashing men flat or into boxlike packages, children swallowing coat hangers and pogo sticks and taking on their shapes. His agonized characters moved through their panels with a geeky physicality, seeming to strain toward their catastrophic contact with fire hoses, whirring blades, and drawbridges, and his sophomoric punch lines mostly hinged on reversals or literalizations\u2014\"The kids are upstairs with their ears glued to the radio\"\u2014or else on outright destruction. _Mad_ often held the concluding panel of a Don Martin cartoon to the following page, and part of the pleasure of his work was never knowing whether the payoff would be a visual pun or verbal riff or merely the sight of a man in a full-body cast falling out a window into the path of a steamroller. Mostly, though, I recall the distortion, the torque in the bodies he drew: These characters had met disaster in being born onto the page, and their more extreme fates were only realizations of their essential nature. This made sense to me. And Fonebone made sense, too. He had a name I could get behind. For a while he almost supplanted Bailey, and he was lastingly traceable in my tendency to append _phone_ or _bone_ to the end of a phrase.\n\nWhen I had sex with another person and my body began to convulse and move faster, my toes to curl, my eyes to roll, I felt like a Don Martin character, a Fonebone, all elbows and bowlegs and boomerang penis and gurgling throat in a halo of flung-off sweat drops and sound effects: _Fip, Thwat, Zwip, Sproing, Flabadab_. More than Daffy Duck, more than Art Carney, more than any other icon of my discomfort. Don Martin's drawings throbbed with the suggestion that disruptive feeling was all sexual. Though his venue denied him any overt reference his characters overflowed with lewd energies, which had to be manifested instead in tics and seizures, eruptions and deformations. His poor doomed Fonebones seemed to chart my path from twitch to orgasm, the way sex first smoothed away tics, then supplanted them with a violent double: little death, big tic. So perhaps it was Don Martin's fault that I always expected a punishment after sex, cringed in anticipation of the steamroller or plummeting anvil to follow.\n\nPossibly Kimmery sensed it in me, this dread of a page about to be turned, revealing some ludicrous doom on the last panel of my cartoon. Another fact about Don Martin: He never used the same character twice\u2014each was an innocent pawn with no carry-over from one episode to the next, no understanding of his role or fate. A Fonebone was a placeholder, a disposable clone or stooge. A member of the Butt Trust.\n\n\"Is something the matter?\" she said, stopping what she was doing, what I was doing.\n\n\"Everything's fine. I mean, better than fine.\"\n\n\"You don't look fine.\"\n\n\"Just one thing, Kimmery. Promise me you won't go back to the Zendo. At least for a few days.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Just trust me, okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nWith that, her magic word, we were done talking.\n\nOnce Kimmery was asleep I dressed and tiptoed to her phone, which was on the floor in the big room. Shelf followed me in. I tapped his head five times, instantly reigniting his ragged purring, then pushed him away. The phone showed a number under its plastic window. I fed the number into the speed dial of the doormen's cell phone, wincing at the beeping tones, which echoed in the silent empty room like musical gunshots. Kimmery didn't stir on her mattress, though. She lay splayed like a child making a snow angel. I wanted to go and kneel and trace her shape with my fingertips or my breath. Instead I found her key ring and separated the five keys. The key to the apartment was easy to identify, and that was the only one I left behind\u2014she'd have to deal with her suspicious neighbors to get into the lobby downstairs. I took the other four, figuring one would get me into the Zendo. The last two probably unlocked Oreo Man's place. Those I'd lose.\n\n# AUTO BODY\n\nSee me now, at one in the morning, stepping out of another cab in front of the Zendo, checking the street for cars that might have followed, for giveaway cigarette-tip glows through the windows of the cars parked on the deadened street, moving with my hands in my jacket pockets clutching might-be-guns-for-all-they-know, collar up against the cold like Minna, unshaven like Minna now, too, shoes clacking on sidewalk: think of a coloring-book image of the Green Hornet, say. That's who I was supposed to be, that black outline of a man in a coat, ready suspicious eyes above his collar, shoulders hunched, moving toward conflict.\n\nHere's who I was instead: that same coloring-book outline of a man, but crayoned by the hand of a mad or carefree or retarded child, wild slashes of idiot color, a blizzard of marks violating the boundaries that made _man_ distinct from _street_ , from _world_. Some of those colors were my fresh images of Kimmery, flashing me back to the West Side an hour before, crayon stripes and arrows like flares over Central Park in the night sky. Others weren't so pretty, roaring scrawls of mania, _find-a-man-kill-a-phone-fuck-a-plan_ in sloppy ten-foot-high letters drawn like lightning bolts or Hot Wheels race-car flames through the space of my head. And the blackened steel-wool scribble of my guilt-deranged investigation: I pictured the voices of the two Minna brothers and Tony Vermonte and The Clients as gnarled above and around me, in a web of betrayal I had to penetrate and dissolve, an ostensible world I'd just discovered was really only a private cloud I carried everywhere, had never seen the outside of. So, crossing the street to the door of the Zendo, I might have appeared less a single Green Hornet than a whole inflamed nest of them.\n\nMy first act was to drop in next door. I found the original doorman, Dirk, asleep on his stool.\n\nI lifted his head up with my hand and he jerked awake and away from my grasp. \"Hello!\" he shouted.\n\n\"You remember me, Dirk?\" I said. \"I was sitting in a car. You told me I had a message from my 'friend.' \"\n\n\"Oh? Sure, I remember. Sorry, I was just doing what I was told.\"\n\n\"Sure you were. And I suppose you never saw the guy before, did you\u2014 _dirtyworker, dirketyname?\"_\n\n\"I never saw the guy before.\" He breathed out, wide-eyed.\n\n\"He was a very big man, yes?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" He rolled his eyes upward to show it. Then he held his hands out, begging my patience. I backed off a little and he stood and neatened his coat. I helped him with it, especially around the collar. He was too sleepy or confused by my questions to object.\n\n\"He pay you or just scare you into giving me the bum steer?\" I asked more gently. My anger was wasted on Dirk. Anyway, I felt vaguely grateful to him for confirming the giant's existence. My only other sure witness was Gilbert, in jail. Kimmery had begun to make me doubt my eyes.\n\n\"A man that big doesn't have to pay,\" said Dirk honestly.\n\nOne of the stolen keys got me inside. This time I held on to my shoes as I passed the sitting room and headed upstairs, past the floor where Kimmery and I had sat at tea, up to the Roshi's private quarters\u2014a.k.a. Gerard Minna's hideout. The halls were darker the higher I climbed, until at the top I could only grope my way toward a thin margin of light squeezed out underneath a sealed door. I turned the handle and pushed the door open, impatient with my own fear.\n\nHis bedroom had the integrity of his self-reinvention. It was bare of furnishings except for a long low shelf against the wall, a board, really, propped on bricks and bearing a few candles and books, a glass of water and a small bowl of ashes, decorated with Japanese script, presumably some kind of tiny shrine. The spareness reminded me of Kimmery's empty studio apartment but I resented the echo, not wishing to see Kimmery as influenced by Gerard's Zen pretensions, not wishing to imagine her visiting his private floor, his lair, at all. Gerard sat propped on pillows on a flat mattress on the floor, his legs crossed, the book at his knees shut, his posture calm, as though he'd been waiting for me. I faced him head on for what might have been the first time\u2014I don't know that I'd ever addressed him directly, stolen more than a glance as a teenager. In the candlelight I first made out his silhouette: He'd thickened around the jaw and neck, so that his bald head seemed to rise from his round shoulders like the line of a cobra's hood. I might have been overly influenced by that bald head but as my eyes adjusted I couldn't keep from understanding the difference between his features and Frank Minna's as the same as that between Brando's in _Apocalypse Now!_ and _On the Waterfront_.\n\n_\"Thehorrorthehorror,\"_ I ticced. _\"Icouldabeenacontender!\"_ It was like a couplet.\n\n\"You're Lionel Essrog, aren't you?\"\n\n_\"Unreliable Chessgrub,\"_ I corrected. My throat pulsed with ticcishness. I was overly conscious of the open door behind me, so my neck twitched, too, with the urge to look over my shoulder. Doormen could come through open doors, anyone knew that. \"Is there anyone else in the building?\" I said.\n\n\"We're alone.\"\n\n\"Mind if I close this?\"\n\n\"Go ahead.\" He didn't budge from his position on the mattress, just gazed at me evenly. I closed the door and moved just far enough into the room not to be tempted to grope behind me for the door's surface. We faced each other across the candlelit gloom, each a figure out of the other's past, each signifying to the other the lost man, the man killed the day before.\n\n\"You broke your vow of silence just now,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm finished with my sesshin,\" he said. \"Anyway, you brought silence to a rather conclusive finish during today's sitting.\"\n\n\"I think your hired killer had something to do with that.\"\n\n\"You're speaking without thinking,\" he said. \"I recall your difficulties in that area.\"\n\nI took a deep breath. Gerard's serenity called out of me a storm of compensatory voices, a myriad possible shrieks and insults to stanch. A part of me wanted to cajole him out from behind his Zen front, expose the Lord of Court Street lurking, make him Frank's older brother again. What came out of my mouth was the beginning of a joke, one from the deepest part of the made-Frank-Minnalaugh-once archive:\n\n\"So there's this order of nuns, right?\"\n\n\"An order of nuns,\" Gerard repeated.\n\n_\"Ordinary nunphone!_ \u2014an order of nuns. Like the Cloisters. You know, a monastery.\"\n\n\"A monastery is for monks.\"\n\n\"Okay, a nunastery. _A plannery, a nunnetarium!_ \u2014a nunnery. And they've all, these nuns, they've all taken a vow of silence, a lifetime vow of silence, right?\" I was driven, tears at the edges of my eyes, wishing for Frank to be alive to rescue me, tell me he'd heard this one already. Instead I had to go on. \"Except one day a year one of the nuns gets to say something. They take turns, one nun a year. Understand?\"\n\n\"I think I understand.\"\n\n\"So the big day comes\u2014 _Barnamum-big-nun! Domesticated ghost-phone!_ \u2014the big day is here and the nuns are all sitting at the dinner table and the one who gets to talk this year opens her mouth and says 'The soup is terrible.' And the other nuns all look at each other but nobody says anything because of the vow of silence, and that's it, back to normal. Another year of silence.\"\n\n\"A very disciplined group,\" said Gerard, not without admiration.\n\n\"Right. So a year later the day comes and it's this other nun's turn. So they're sitting and the second nun turns to the first and says 'I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I don't think the soup's that bad'\u2014and that's it, silence. Another year.\"\n\n\"Hmmm. Imagine the states of contemplation one could achieve in such a year.\"\n\n\"I never thought about it myself. Anyway, so the calendar pages flip, and the special day\u2014 _Flip-a-thon! Fuck-a-door! Flipweed! Fujisaki! Flitcraft!_ \u2014the special day comes around again. This third nun, it's her turn\u2014 _Nun-fuck-a-phone!_ \u2014so this third nun, she looks at the first nun and the second nun and she says 'Bicker, bicker, bicker.' \"\n\nThere was silence, then Gerard nodded and said, \"That would be the punch line.\"\n\n\"I know about the building,\" I said, working to catch my breath. \"And the Fujisaki Corporation.\" _Unfuckafish_ whispered under my palate.\n\n\"Ah. Then you know much.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know a thing. And I've met your killing machine. But you saw that, when he dragged me out, downstairs. The kumquat-eater.\"\n\nI was desperate to see him flinch, to impress him with the edge I had, the things I'd learned, but Gerard wasn't ruffled. He raised his eyebrows, which got a lot of play across the empty canvas of his forehead. \"You and your friends, what are their names?\"\n\n\"Who? The Minna Men?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014Minna Men. That's a very good description. My brother was very important to the four of you, wasn't he?\" I nodded, or not, but anyway he went on.\n\n\"He really taught you everything, I suppose. You sound just like him when you speak. What an odd life, really. You realize that, don't you? That Frank was a very odd man, living in a strange and anachronistic way?\"\n\n\"What's _cartoonistic_ about it?\"\n\n\"Anachronistic,\" said Gerard patiently. \"From another time.\"\n\n\"I know what it means,\" I said. \"I mean what's so _akakonistic_ about it?\" I was too wound up to go back and repair the tic-pocked surface of my speech. \"Anyway, _enactoplasmic_ as opposed to what? A million-year-old mystical Japanese cult?\"\n\n\"You wear your ignorance as aggressively as Frank,\" said Gerard. \"I suppose you're making my point for me.\"\n\n\"Point being what?\"\n\n\"My brother taught you only what he knew, and not even all of that. He kept you charmed and flattered but also in the dark, so your sense of even his small world was diminished, two-dimensional. Cartoonistic, if you like. What's astonishing to me is that you didn't know about the Park Avenue building until just now. It really must come as a shock.\"\n\n\"Enlighten me.\"\n\n\"Surely you've got my brother's money in your pocket even as we speak, Lionel. Do you really believe that it came from detective work, from those scuffling little assignments he contrived to keep you children busy? Or perhaps you imagine he _crapped_ money. That's just as likely.\"\n\nWas _crapped_ a chink in Gerard's Zen fa\u00e7ade, a bit of Brooklyn showing through? I recalled the elder monk proclaiming the worthlessness of \"Bowel Movement Zen.\"\n\n\"Frank consorted with dangerous people,\" Gerard went on. \"And he stole from them. The remuneration and the risk were high. The odds that he would flourish in such a life forever, low.\"\n\n\"Talk to me about _fool-me-softly_ \u2014Fujisaki.\"\n\n\"They own the building. Minna had a hand in managing it. The money involved would dazzle your senses, Lionel.\" He gave me an expectant look, as though this assertion ought to dazzle me in the money's stead, ought to astonish me right out of my investigation, and his bedroom.\n\n\"These people, their other home is an island,\" I said, quoting the Garbage Cop\u2014not that the phrase was likely to have originated with him.\n\nGerard smiled at me oddly. \"For every Buddhist, Japan is his other home. And yes, it is an island.\"\n\n\"Who's a Buddhist?\" I said. \"I was talking about the money.\"\n\nHe sighed, without losing the smile. \"You are so like Frank.\"\n\n\"What's your role, Gerard?\" I wanted to sicken him the way I was sickened. \"I mean, besides sending your brother out into the Polack's arms to die.\"\n\nNow he beamed munificently. The worse I attacked him, the deeper his forgiveness and grace would be\u2014that's what the smile said. \"Frank was very careful never to expose me to any danger if he could help it. I was never introduced to anyone from Fujisaki. I believe I have yet to make their acquaintance, apart from the large hit man you led here yesterday.\"\n\n\"Who's Ullman?\"\n\n\"A bookkeeper, another New Yorker. He was Frank's partner in fleecing the Japanese.\"\n\n\"But you _never met the guy_.\"\n\nI meant him to hear the sarcasm, or rather Frank Minna's sarcasm in quotation. But he went on obliviously. \"No. I only supplied the labor, in return for consideration equal to my mortgage here on the Zendo. Buddhism is spread by what means it finds.\"\n\n\"Labor for what?\" My brain tangled on _spread by means it finds, fed in springs by mimes, bled by mingy spies_ , but I shook it off.\n\n\"My students performed the maintenance and service work for the building, as part of their training. Cleaning, cooking, the very sort of labor they'd perform in a monastery, only in a slightly different setting. The contract for those services in such a building is worth millions. My brother and Ullman tithed the difference mostly into their own pockets.\"\n\n\"Doormen,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes. Doormen, too.\"\n\n\"So Fujisaki sicced the giant on Frank and the bookkeeper.\"\n\n\"I suppose that's right.\"\n\n\"And he just happened to use the Zendo as his trap yesterday?\" I aired out another Minna-ism: \"Don't try to hand me no two-ton feather.\" I was dredging up Minna's usages on any excuse now, as though I could build a golem of his language, then bring it to life, a figure of vengeance to search out the killer or killers.\n\nI was aware of myself standing in Gerard's room, planted on his floor, arms at my sides, never moving nearer to him where he sat beaming Zen pleasantness in my direction, ignoring my accusations and my tics. I was big but I was no golem or giant. I hadn't startled Gerard in deep sleep nor upended his calm with my griefy hostility. I wasn't holding a gun on him. He didn't have to answer my questions.\n\n\"I don't really believe in sophisticated killers,\" said Gerard. \"Do you?\"\n\n_\"Go-fisticate-a-killphone,\"_ I ticced.\n\n\"The Fujisaki Corporation is ruthless and remorseless\u2014in the manner of corporations. And yet in the manner of corporations their violence is also performed at a remove, by a force just nominally under their control. In the giant you speak of they seem to have located a sort of primal entity\u2014one whose true nature is killing. And sicced him, as you say, on the men who they feel betrayed them. I'm not sure the killer's behavior is explicable in any real sense, Lionel. Any human sense.\"\n\nGerard's persuasiveness was a variant of the Minna style, I saw now. I felt the force of it, moving me authentically. Yet his foray against the notion of a sophisticated killer also made me think of Tony mocking Detective Seminole with jokes about Batman and James Bond supervillains. Was it a giveaway, a clue that Gerard and Tony were in league? And what about Julia? I wanted to quote Frank's conversation with Gerard the night he died: _She misses her Rama-lama-ding-dong_ , find out what he meant. I wanted to ask about Boston, and I wanted to ask about Frank and Julia's marriage\u2014had Gerard been at the ceremony? I wanted to ask him about whether he missed Brooklyn, and how he got his head so shiny. I searched for a single question that could stand for my thousands and what popped out was this:\n\n\"What's human sense?\"\n\n\"In Buddhism, Lionel, we come to understand that everything on this earth is a vessel for Buddha-nature. Frank had Buddha-nature. You have Buddha-nature. I feel it.\"\n\nGerard allowed a long minute to pass while we contemplated his words. _Buddha nostril_ , I nearly blurted. When he spoke again, it was with a confidence that sympathy flowed between us untrammeled by doubt or fear.\n\n\"There's another of your Minna Men, Lionel. He's pushing his way into this, and I fear he may have aroused the killer's ire. Tony, is that his name?\"\n\n\"Tony Vermonte,\" I said, marveling\u2014it was as if Gerard had read my mind.\n\n\"Yes. He'd like to walk in my brother's footsteps. But Fujisaki will be keeping a keener eye on their money from this point, I'd think. There's nothing to be gained and everything to be lost. Perhaps you'll have a word with him.\"\n\n\"Tony and I aren't exactly... communicating well, since yesterday.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\nI felt a surge of care in me, for Tony. He was only a heedless adventurer, with a poignant urge to imitate Frank Minna in all things. He was a member of my family\u2014L&L, the Men. Now he was in above his head, threatened on all sides by the giant, by Detective Seminole, by The Clients. Only Gerard and I understood his danger.\n\nI must have been silent for a minute or so\u2014a veritable sesshin by my standards.\n\n\"You and Tony are together in your pain at the loss of my brother,\" said Gerard softly. \"But you haven't come together in actuality. Be patient.\"\n\n\"There's another factor,\" I said, tentative now, lulled by his compassionate tones. \"Someone else may be involved in this somehow. Two of them, actually\u2014 _Monstercookie and Antifriendly!_ \u2014uh, Matricardi and Rockaforte.\"\n\n\"You don't say.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"You can't know how sorry I am to hear those names.\" _Never say those names!_ warned Minna in the echo chamber of my memory. Gerard went on, \"Those two are the prototype, aren't they, for my brother's tendency to dangerous associations\u2014and his tendency to exploit those associations in dangerous ways.\"\n\n\"He stole from them?\"\n\n\"Do you recall that he once had to leave New York for a while?\"\n\nDid I recall! Suddenly Gerard threatened to solve the deepest puzzles of my existence. I practically wanted to ask him, _So who's Bailey?_\n\n\"I'd hoped they were no longer in the picture,\" said Gerard reflectively. It was the nearest to thrown I'd seen him, the closest I'd come to pushing his buttons. Only now I wasn't sure I wanted to. \"Avoid them, Lionel, if you can,\" he continued. \"They're dangerous men.\"\n\nHe returned his gaze to my face, batted his lashes, moved his expressive eyebrows. If I'd been in striking distance I'd have tried to span his head with my hands and stroke his eyebrows with my thumb tips, just to soothe this one small worry I'd raised.\n\n\"Can I ask one more thing?\" I nearly called him Roshi, so complete was my conversion. \"Then I'll leave you alone.\"\n\nGerard nodded. _The High Lama will grant you an audience, Mrs. Gushman_.\n\n\"Is there anyone else _\u2014Zonebone_!\u2014anyone else at the Zendo who's involved in this thing? Anyone\u2014 _Kissmefaster! Killmesooner! Cookiemonster_!\u2014anyone the killer might target? That old hippie, Wallace? Or the girl _\u2014Kissingme_!\u2014Kimmery?\" I tried not to divulge the special freight of tenderness and hope behind this query. Whether the string of shrieks I issued in the course of its delivery made me appear more or less blas\u00e9, I couldn't say.\n\n\"No.\" Gerard spoke benevolently. \"I compromised myself personally, but not my students or my practice as a teacher. Wallace and Kimmery should be safe. It's kind of you to be concerned.\"\n\n_I'm concerned about Pinched and Indistinct, too_ , I wanted to say. I doubted students could get any more compromised than that.\n\nAnd then there was that nod of complicity I saw pass between Gerard and the giant.\n\nThe three of them\u2014Pinched, Indistinct, and the nod\u2014were three sour notes in a very pretty song. But I kept my tongue, feeling I'd learned what I could here, that it was time to go. I wanted to find Tony before the giant did. And I needed to step outside the candle glow of Gerard's persuasiveness to sort out the false and the real, the Zen and the chaff in our long discussion.\n\n\"I'm going now,\" I said awkwardly.\n\n\"Good night, Lionel.\" He was still watching me as I closed the door.\n\nOn second thought, there _is_ a vaguely Tourettic aspect to the New York City subway, especially late at night\u2014that dance of attention, of stray gazes, in which every rider must engage. And there's a lot of stuff you shouldn't touch in the subway, particularly in a certain order: this pole and then your lips, for instance. And the tunnel walls are layered, like those of my brain, with expulsive and incoherent language\u2014\n\nBut I was in a terrible hurry, or rather two terrible hurries: to get back to Brooklyn, and to sort out my thinking about Gerard before I got there. I couldn't spare a minute to dwell in myself as a body riding the Lexington train to Nevins Street\u2014I might as well have been tele-ported, or floated to Brooklyn on a magic carpet, for all that I was allured or distracted by the 4 train's sticky, graffitied immediacy.\n\nThe lights were burning in the L&L storefront. I approached from the opposite sidewalk, confident I was invisible on the darkened street to those in the office\u2014I'd been on the other side of that plate of glass only two or three thousand nights in preparation for the act of spying on my fellow Men from the street. I didn't want to go waltzing into a trap. Detective Seminole might be there or, who knew, maybe Tony and a passel of doormen. If there was something to learn at a distance, I'd learn it.\n\nIt was almost two-thirty now, and Bergen Street was shut up tight, the night cold enough to chase the stoop-sitting drinkers indoors. Smith Street showed a bit more life, Zeod's Market lit up like a beacon, catering to the all-night cigarette cravings, to the squad-car cops in need of a bagel or LifeSaver or some other torus. Four L&L cars were scattered in parking spots near the storefront: the Minna death car, which hadn't moved since Gilbert and I returned from the hospital and parked it, the Pontiac in which Tony had shanghaied me in front of The Clients' brownstone, a Caddy that Minna had liked to drive himself, and a Tracer, an ugly modernistic bubble of a car that usually fell to me or Gilbert to pilot. I slowed my walk as I drew up even with the storefront, then turned my neck. It was pleasing to have a good solid reason behind turning my neck for once, retroactive validation for a billion tics. As I passed, I made out the shapes of two Men inside: Tony and Danny, both in a cloud of cigarette smoke, Danny seated behind the counter with a folded newspaper, radiating cool, Tony pacing, radiating cool's opposite. The television was on.\n\nI walked past, to the corner of Smith, then swiveled and went back. This time I set up shop on the brief stoop of the big apartment building directly across from L&L. It was a safe outpost. I could duck my head and watch them through a parked car's windows if I thought they were in any danger of spotting me. Otherwise I'd sit back in the wings and study them in the limelight of the storefront until something happened or I'd decided what to do.\n\nDanny\u2014I gave Danny Fantl a moment of my time. He was sliding through this crisis as he'd slid through life to this point, so poised he was practically an ambient presence. Gilbert was in jail and I was hunted high and low and Danny sat in the storefront all day, refusing car calls and smoking cigarettes and reading sports. He wasn't exactly my candidate for any plot's criminal mastermind, but if Tony conspired with or even confided in anyone inside L&L's circle, it would be Danny. In the present atmosphere, I decided, there was no way I could take Danny for granted, trust him with my back.\n\nWhich meant I wasn't going inside to talk with either one of them until they were apart. If then\u2014the image of Tony pulling his wobbly gun on me was fresh enough to give pause.\n\nAnyway, something happened before I'd decided what to do\u2014why was I not surprised? But it was a relatively banal something, reassuring, even. A tick of the clock of everyday life on Bergen Street, an everyday life that already felt nostalgic.\n\nA block east, on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt, was an elegantly renovated tavern called the Boerum Hill Inn, with a gleaming antique inlaid-mirror bar, a CD jukebox weighted toward Blue Note and Stax, and a Manhattanized clientele of professional singles too good for bars with televisions, for subway rides home, or for the likes of the Men. Only Minna ever visited the Boerum Hill Inn, and he cracked that anyone who drank there was someone else's assistant: a district attorney's, an editor's, or a video artist's. The dressed-up crowd at the inn gabbled and flirted every night of the week until two in the morning, oblivious to the neighborhood's past or present reality, then slept it off in their overpriced apartments or on their desks the next day in Midtown. Typically a few parties would stagger down the block after last call and try to engage an L&L car for a ride home\u2014sometimes it was a woman alone or a newly formed couple too drunk to throw to the fates, and we'd take the job. Mostly we claimed not to have any cars.\n\nBut the inn's bartenders were a couple of young women we adored, Siobhain and Welcome. Siobhain was properly named, while Welcome bore the stigma of her parents' hippie ideals, but both were from Brooklyn and Irish to their ancient souls\u2014or so had declared Minna. They were roommates in Park Slope, possibly lovers (again according to Minna), and bartending their way through graduate school. Each night one or the other was stuck with closing\u2014the owner of the inn was stingy and didn't let them double up after midnight. If we weren't actually busy on some surveillance job we'd always drive the closer home.\n\nIt was Welcome, at the door of L&L, now going inside. I saw Tony nod at Danny, then Danny stood and stubbed out a butt, checked in his pocket for the keys and nodded too. He and Welcome moved to the door and out. I lowered my head. Danny led her to the Caddy, which sat at the front of the row of parked cars, on the corner of Smith. She went around to the front passenger seat, not like the usual ride who'd sit in the back. Danny slammed his door and the interior light shut off, then he started the engine. I glanced back to see that Tony was now going through the drawers behind the L&L counter, searching for something, his desperado's energy suddenly lashed to a purpose. He used both hands, his cigarette stuck in his mouth, and unpacked papers onto the countertop hurriedly. I'd gathered a piece of vague information, I supposed: Tony didn't trust Danny with everything.\n\nThen I saw a hulking shadow stir, in a parked car on L&L's side of the street, just a few yards from the storefront.\n\nUnmistakable.\n\nThe Kumquat Sasquatch.\n\nThe car was an economy model, bright red, and he filled it like it had been cast around his body. I saw him lean sideways to watch the Cadillac with Danny and Welcome inside round the corner of Smith and disappear with a pulse of brakelights. Then he turned his attention back to the storefront; I read the movement in the disappearance of a nose from the silhouette, its replacement by an elephantine ear. The giant was doing what I was doing, staking out L&L.\n\nHe watched Tony, and I watched them both. Tony was a lot more interesting at the moment. I hadn't often seen him reading, and never this intently. He was searching for something in the sheaf of papers he'd pulled from Minna's drawers, his brow furrowed, cigarette in his lips, looking like Edward R. Murrow's punk brother. Now, unsatisfied, he dug in another drawer, and worked over a notebook I recognized even from across the street as the one containing my own stakeout jottings from the day before. I tried not to take it personally when he thrust this aside even more hastily and went back to tearing up the drawers.\n\nThe large shadow took it all in, complacent. His hand moved from somewhere below the line of the car window and briefly covered his mouth; he chewed, then leaned forward to dribble out some discarded seeds or pits. A bag of cherries or olives this time, something a giant would gobble in a handful. Or Cracker Jack, and he didn't like peanuts. He watched Tony like an operagoer who knew the libretto, was curious only to gather details of how the familiar plot would play out this time.\n\nTony exhausted the drawers, started in on the file cabinets.\n\nThe giant chewed. I blinked in time with his chewing, and counted chews and blinks, occupying my Tourette's brain with this nearly invisible agitation, tried to stay otherwise still as a lizard on the stoop. He had only to turn this way to spot me. My whole edge consisted of seeing without being seen; I had nothing more on the giant, had never had. If I wanted to preserve that wafer-thin edge I needed to find a better hiding place\u2014and it wouldn't hurt to get in out of the stiff, cold wind.\n\nThe three remaining L&L cars were my best option. But the Pontiac, which I would have preferred, was up ahead of the giant's car, easily in his line of sight. I was sure I didn't want to face whatever ghosts or more tangibly olfactory traces of Minna might be trapped inside the sealed windows of the Death Car. Which left the Tracer. I felt in my pocket for my bunch of keys, found the three longest, one of which was the Tracer's door and ignition. I was preparing to duckwalk down the pavement and slip into the Tracer when the Cadillac reappeared, hurtling down Bergen, with Danny at the wheel.\n\nHe parked in the same spot at the front of the block and walked back toward L&L. I slumped on the stoop, played drunk. Danny didn't see me. He went inside, surprising Tony in his filework. They exchanged a word or two, then Tony slid the drawer closed and bummed another cigarette from Danny. The shadow in the little car went on watching, sublimely confident and peaceful. Neither Tony nor Danny had ever seen the giant, I suppose, so he had less to worry about in attracting attention than I did. But reason alone couldn't account for the giant's composure. If he wasn't a student of Gerard's, he should have been: He possessed true Buddha-nature, and would have surpassed his teacher. Three hundred and fifty-odd pounds instill a cosmic measure of gravity, I suppose. _What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?_ was the joke I remembered now, one of Loomis's measly riddles. _Make me one with everything_. I would have been happy to be one with everything at that moment.\n\nHeck, make me one with anything.\n\nI was pretty hungry, too, if I thought about it. A stakeout was customarily a gastronomic occasion, and I was beginning to get that itch for something between two slices of bread. Why shouldn't I be hungry? I'd missed dinner, had Kimmery instead.\n\nWith thoughts of food and sex my attention slipped, so that I was startled now to see Tony pop out of the storefront, his expression still as fierce as it had been when he was poring over the paperwork. For a moment I thought I'd been spotted. But he turned toward Smith Street, crossed Bergen, and disappeared around the corner.\n\nThe giant watched, unimpressed, unworried.\n\nWe waited.\n\nTony returned with a large plastic shopping bag, probably from Zeod's. The only thing I could discern was a carton of Marlboros sticking out of the top, but the bag was heavy with something. Tony opened the passenger door of the Pontiac and put the bag on the seat, glanced quickly up the street without spotting either me or the giant, then relocked the car and went back to L&L.\n\nFiguring it was status quo for the time being, I made my way back down Bergen, up Hoyt Street, and around the block the long way, and checked into Zeod's myself.\n\nZeod liked to work the late hours, do the overnight, check in the newspaper deliveries at six and then sleep through the bright hours of the morning and early afternoon. He was like the Sheriff of Smith Street, eyes open while we all slept, seeing the drunks stagger home, keeping his eye on the crucial supplies, the Ding Dongs and Entenmann's cookies, the forty-ounce malt liquor and the cups of coffee \"regular\" with a picture of the Parthenon on the cup. Except now he had company down the street at L&L, Tony and Danny and the giant and myself enacting our strange vigil, our roundelay of surveillance. I wondered if Zeod knew about Minna yet. As I slipped up to the counter the groggy counter boy was punishing the slicer with a steaming white towel, replenishing the towel in a basin of hot suds, while Zeod stood exhorting him, telling him how he could be doing it better, squeezing some value out of him before he quit like all the others.\n\n\"Crazyman!\"\n\n\"Shhh.\" I imagined that Tony or the giant could hear Zeod bellow through the shop window and around the corner of the block.\n\n\"You're working so late for Frank tonight? Something important, eh? Tony just came.\"\n\n\"Important Freaks! Important Franks!\"\n\n\"Ho ho ho.\"\n\n\"Listen, Zeod. Can you tell me what Tony bought?\" Zeod screwed up his face, finding this question sensational. \"You can't ask him yourself?\"\n\n\"No, I can't.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Six-pack of beer, four sandwiches, carton of cigarettes, Coca-Cola\u2014whole picnic.\"\n\n\"Funny picnic.\"\n\n\"Wasn't funny to him,\" said Zeod. \"Couldn't make him smile. Like you, Crazyman. On a very serious case, eh?\"\n\n\"What\u2014 _becausewhich, besideswhich_ \u2014what sandwiches did he buy?\" It was my suddenly ravenous appetite that steered this inquiry.\n\n\"Ah!\" Zeod rubbed his hands together. He was always ready to savor his own product on someone else's behalf. \"Turkey with Thousand, very nice on a kaiser roll, pepperoni-and-provolone hero with peppers inside, two roast beef with horseradish on rye bread.\"\n\nI had to clutch the counter to keep from falling over, this storm of enticements was so heady.\n\n\"You like what you hear, I can see that,\" said Zeod.\n\nI nodded, turned my head sideways, took in the fresh-gleaming slicer, the elegant curve of the fender that sheathed the blade.\n\nZeod said, \"You want something, Crazyman, don't you?\"\n\nI saw the counter boy's eyes roll in weary anticipation. The slicer rarely saw this much action at two or three in the morning. They'd have to sluice it down with suds again before the night was done.\n\n\"Please _\u2014ghostradish, pepperpony, kaiserphone_ \u2014please, uh, the same as Tony.\"\n\n\"You want the same? All four the same?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I gasped. I couldn't think past Tony's list of sandwiches. My hunger for them was absolute. I had to match Tony sandwich for sandwich, a gastronomic mirroring-tic\u2014I'd understand him by the time I was through the fourth, I figured. We would achieve a Zeod's mind-meld, with Thousand Island dressing.\n\nWhile Zeod rode his counter boy to complete the large order I hid in the back near the beverage cases, picked out a liter of Coke and a bag of chips, and reorganized and counted a disorderly shelf of cat-food cans.\n\n\"Okay, Lionel.\" Zeod was always most gentle with me when handing over his precious cargo\u2014we shared that reverence for his product. \"Put it on Frank's tab, right?\" He gathered my soda and chips in a large bag with the paper-wrapped sandwiches.\n\n\"No, no\u2014\" I rustled in my pockets for a tight-folded twenty.\n\n\"What's the matter? Why not the boss man pick it up?\"\n\n\"I want to pay you.\" I pushed the bill across the counter. Zeod took it and arched his eyebrows.\n\n\"Very funny business,\" he said, and made a _chuck-chuck-chuck_ sound with his tongue in his cheek.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Same thing as Tony, before you,\" he said. \"He says he wants to pay. Same thing.\"\n\n\"Listen, Zeod. If Tony comes back in here tonight\"\u2014I fought off a howling sound that wanted to come out of me, the cry of a sandwich predator over fresh kill he has yet to devour\u2014\"don't tell him you saw me, okay?\"\n\nZeod winked. Somehow this made sense to him. I felt a thing that was either a nauseous wave of paranoia\u2014perhaps Zeod was an agent of Tony's, absolutely in his pocket, and would be on the phone to him the minute I was out of the shop\u2014or else my stomach spasming in anticipation of food. \"Okay, Chief,\" said Zeod as I went out the door.\n\nI came around the block the long way again, quickly confirmed that the giant and Tony were still in their places, then swerved across the street and slipped up beside the Tracer, key in hand. The giant's compact was six cars ahead, but I couldn't see his clifflike silhouette from where I stood as I unlocked the car. I only hoped that meant he couldn't see me. I plopped Zeod's bag on the passenger seat, jumped inside, and slammed the door shut as quickly as I could, praying that the brief flash of the interior light hadn't registered in the giant's rearview. Then I slumped down in my place so I'd be invisible, on the slight chance he did turn and could make anything out through a thickness of twelve darkened windshields. Meanwhile I got my hands busy unfurling the paper around one of Zeod's roast beef and horseradish specials. Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.\n\nNow it was a proper stakeout\u2014if only I could figure what it was I was waiting to see happen. Not that I could see much from inside the Tracer. The giant's car was still in its place but I couldn't confirm his existence inside it. And at this extreme angle all I could see was a thin slice of bright L&L window. Twice Tony paced to the front of the store, just long enough for me to identify his form in shadow and a flash of an elbow, a left-behind plume of cigarette exhalation across the edge of Minna's destination map, the Queens airports at the left margin showing Minna's Magic Marker scrawl: $18. Bergen Street was a void in my rearview, Smith Street only marginally brighter ahead of me. It was a quarter to four. I felt the F train's rumble underneath Bergen, first as it slowed into the station and paused there, then a second tremor as it departed. A minute later the 67 bus rolled like a great battered appliance down Bergen, empty apart from the driver. Public transportation was the night's pulse, the beep on the monitor at the patient's bedside. In a few hours those same trains and buses would be jammed with jawing, caffeinated faces, littered with newspapers and fresh gum. Now they kept the faith. Me, I had the cold to keep me awake, that and the liter of Coca-Cola and my assignment, my will to influence the outcome of the night's strange stalemate. Those would have to slug it out with the soporific powers of the roast-beef sandwich, the dreamy pull of my fresh memories of Kimmery, the throb of my skull where the giant had clubbed me with his gun.\n\nWhat was the giant waiting for?\n\nWhat did Tony want to find in Minna's files?\n\nWhy were his sandwiches in the car?\n\nWhy had Julia flown to Boston?\n\nWho was Bailey anyway?\n\nI opened my bag of chips, took a slug of my cola, and put myself to work on those new and old questions and on staying awake.\n\nInsomnia is a variant of Tourette's\u2014the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance\u2014as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.\n\nI've spent long nights in that place. This night, though, consisted of summoning up that state I'd so often worked to banish. I was alone now, no Minna, no Men, my own boss on this stakeout with who-knew-what riding on its outcome. If I fell asleep the little world of my investigation would crumble. I needed to find my insomniac self, to agitate my problem-solving brain, if not to solve actual problems, then to worry at them for the purpose of keeping my dumb eyeballs propped open.\n\nAvoiding becoming one with everything: that was my big challenge at the moment.\n\nIt was four-thirty. My consciousness was distended, the tics like islands in an ocean of fog.\n\nWho needed sleep? I asked myself. _I'll sleep when I'm dead_ , Minna had liked to say.\n\nI guess he had his chance now.\n\n_I'll die when I'm dead_ , my brain recited in Minna's voice. Not a minute sooner, you kosher macaroons!\n\nA diet of bread. A guy on a bed.\n\nNo, no bed. No car. No phone.\n\nPhone.\n\nThe cell phone. I pulled it out, rang the L&L number. It rang three times before a hand picked it up.\n\n\"No cars,\" said Danny lazily. If I knew him, he'd been sleeping with his head on the counter, weary of pretending to listen to whatever Tony was ranting about.\n\nI'd have given a lot, of course, to know what Tony was ranting about.\n\n\"It's me, Danny. Put Tony on.\"\n\n\"Yo,\" he said, unsurprisable. \"Here you go.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Tony.\n\n\"It's me,\" I said. _\"Deskjob.\"_\n\n\"You fucking little freak,\" said Tony. \"I'll kill you.\"\n\nI outweighed Tony only by about fifty pounds. \"You had your chance,\" I heard myself say. Tony still brought out the romantic in me. We'd be two Bogarts to the end. \"Except if you'd pulled that trigger, you might have blown a hole in your foot, or in some far-off toddler on his bike.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'd of straightened it out,\" Tony said. \"I wish I had put a coupla holes in you. Leaving me with that fucking cop.\"\n\n\"Remember it any way you like. I'm trying to help you at the moment.\"\n\n\"That's a good one.\"\n\n_\"Eat me St. Vincent!\"_ I held the phone away from my face until I was sure the tic was complete. \"You're in danger, Tony. Right now.\"\n\n\"What do you know about it?\"\n\nI wanted to say, _Going out of town? What's in the files? Since when do you like horseradish?_ But I couldn't let him know I was outside and have him rush into the giant's arms. \"Trust me,\" I said. \"I really wish you would.\"\n\n\"Oh, I trust you\u2014to be Bozo the Clown,\" he said. \"The point is, what can you tell me that's worth the time to listen?\" \"That hurts, Tony.\"\n\n\"For chrissake!\" Now he held his receiver away from his mouth and swore. \"I got problems, Freakshow, and you're A-number one.\"\n\n\"If I were you, I'd worry more about Fujisaki.\"\n\n\"What do you know about Fujisaki?\" He was hissing. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I know\u2014 _undress-a-phone, impress-a-clown_ \u2014I know a few things.\" \"You better hide,\" he said. \"You better hope I don't catch you.\" \"Aw, Tony. We're in the same situation.\"\n\n\"That's a laugh, only I'm not laughing. I'm gonna kill you.\"\n\n\"We're a family, Tony. Minna brought us together\u2014\" I caught myself wanting to quote the Garbage Cop, suggest another _moment of silence_.\n\n\"There's too long a tail on that kite, Freakshow. I don't have the time.\"\n\nBefore I could speak he hung up the phone.\n\nIt was after five, and bakery trucks had begun to roll. Soon a van would come and deliver Zeod's newspapers, with Minna's obituary notice in them.\n\nI was in a comalike state when Tony came out of L&L and got into the Pontiac. A sentinel part of my brain had kept a watch on the storefront while the rest of me slept, and so I was startled to find that the sun was up, that traffic now filled Bergen Street. I glanced at Minna's watch: It was twenty minutes to seven. I was chilled through, my head throbbed, and my tongue felt as if it had been bound in horseradish-and-cola-soaked plaster and left out on the moon overnight. I shook my head and my neck crackled. I tried to keep my eyes on the scene even as I worked my jaw sideways to revive the mechanism of my face. Tony steered the Pontiac into Smith Street's morning flow. The giant poked his compact into the traffic a moment later, first allowing two cars to creep in behind Tony. I turned the Tracer's ignition key and the engine scuffed into life, and I followed, keeping my own safe distance behind.\n\nTony led us up Smith, onto Atlantic heading toward the waterfront, into a stream of commuters and delivery trucks. In that stream I lost sight of Tony pretty quickly, but held on to the giant's pretty red compact.\n\nTony took the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at the foot of Atlantic. The giant and I slid onto the ramp behind him in turn. Greenpoint, that was my first guess. I shuddered at recalling the Dumpster behind Harry Brainum's, off McGuinness Boulevard, where Minna had met his finish. How had the giant contrived to lure Tony out to that spot?\n\nBut I was wrong. We passed the Greenpoint exit, heading north. I saw the black Pontiac in the distance ahead as we rounded the expressway's curve toward the airports and Long Island, but I kept dropped back, at least two cars behind the red compact. I had to trust the giant to track Tony, another exercise in Zen calm. We threaded the various exits and cloverleafs out of Brooklyn, through Queens toward the airport exits. When we turned momentarily toward JFK I generated a new theory: Someone from Fujisaki was disembarking at the Japan Air Lines terminal, some chief of executions, or a courier with a ticking package to deliver. Minna's death might be the first blow in an international wave of executions. And a flight to meet explained Tony's long, nervous overnight wait. Even as I settled on this explanation, I watched the red car peel away from the airport option, to the northbound ramp, marked for the Whitestone Bridge. I barely made it across three lanes to stay on their vehicular heels.\n\nFour sandwiches, of course. If I weren't prone to multiple sandwiches myself I might have made more of this clue. Four sandwiches and a six-pack. We were headed out of town. Fortunately I _had_ rounded up my clone version of Tony's picnic, so I was outfitted too. I wondered if the giant had anything to eat besides the bag of cherries or olives I'd seen him gobbling. Our little highway formation reminded me of a sandwich, actually, a Minna Man on either side of the giant\u2014we were a goon-on-orphan, with wheels. As we soared over the Whitestone I took another double shot of cola. It would have to stand in for morning coffee. I only had to solve the problem of needing to pee rather badly. Hence I hurried to finish the Coke, figuring I'd go in the bottle.\n\nHalf an hour later we'd passed options for the Pelhams, White Plains, Mount Kisco, a few other names I associated with the outer margins of New York City, on into Connecticut, first on the Hutchinson River Parkway, then on something called the Merritt Parkway. I kept the little red car in my sights. The cars were thick enough to keep me easily camouflaged. Every now and again the giant would creep near enough to Tony's Pontiac that I could see we were still three, bound like secret lovers through the indifferent miles of traffic.\n\nHighway driving was maximally soothing. The steady flow of attention and effort, the nudging of gas pedal and checking of mirrors and blind spots with a twist of the neck subsumed my ticcishness completely. I was still bleary, needing sleep, but the novelty of this odd chase and of being farther out of New York City than I'd ever been worked to keep me awake. I'd seen trees before\u2014so far Connecticut offered nothing I didn't know from suburban Long Island, or even Staten Island. But the _idea_ of Connecticut was sort of interesting.\n\nThe traffic tightened as we skirted a small city called Hartford, and for a moment we were bricked into a five-lane traffic jam. It was just before nine, and we'd caught Hartford's endearing little version of a rush hour. Tony and the giant were both in view ahead of me, the giant in the lane to my right, and as I cinched forward a wheel-turn at a time, I nearly drew even with him. The red car was a Contour, I saw now. I was a Tracer following a Contour. As though I'd taken a pencil and followed the giant's route on a road map. My lane crept forward while his stood still, and soon I'd nearly pulled up even with him. He was chewing something, his jaw and neck pulsing, his hand now moving again to his mouth. I suppose to maintain that size he had to keep it coming. The car was probably brimful with snacks\u2014perhaps Fujisaki paid him for his hits directly in food, so he wouldn't have to bother converting cash. They should have gotten him a bigger car, though.\n\nI braked to keep him in front of me. Tony's lane began to slide ahead of the others and the giant merged into it without signaling, as though the Contour conveyed the authority of his brutish body. I was content to let some distance open between us, and before long Hartford's miniature jam eased. _Heartfood handfoot hoofdog horseradish_ went the tinny song in my brain. I took a cue from the giant's chewing and rustled in the bag of sandwiches on the passenger seat. I groped for the hero, wanting to taste the wet crush of the Zeod's marinated peppers mixed with the spicy, leathery pepperoni.\n\nI had the hero half devoured when I spotted Tony's black Pontiac slowing into a rest area, while the giant's Contour soared blithely past.\n\nIt could mean only one thing. Having reached this point behind Tony, the giant didn't need to trail him anymore. He knew where Tony was going and in fact preferred to arrive sooner, to be waiting when Tony arrived.\n\nIt wasn't Boston. Boston might be on the way, but it wasn't the destination. I'd finally put _men of peace_ and _place of peace_ together. I'm not so slow.\n\nAnd appropriate to the manner of the evening's stakeout and the morning's chase, I still stood in relation to the giant as the giant stood to Tony. I knew where the giant was going\u2014 _a freakshow chasing a context_ \u2014I knew where they were both going. And I had reasons to want to get there soonest. I was still seeking my edge over the giant. Maybe I could poison his sushi.\n\nI pulled into the next rest stop and gassed up the car, peed, and bought some ginger ale, a cup of coffee and a map of New England. Sure enough, the diagonal across Connecticut pointed through Massachusetts and a nubbin of coastal New Hampshire to the entrance of the Maine Turnpike. I fished the \"Place of Peace\" brochure out of my jacket and found the place where the Turnpike left off and the brochure's rudimentary map took over, a coastal village called Musconguspoint Station. The name had a chewy, unfamiliar flavor that tantalized my syndrome. I spotted others like it on the map. Whether or not Maine's wilderness impressed me more than suburban Connecticut, the road signs would provide some nourishment.\n\nNow I had only to take the lead in this secret interstate race. I was relying on the giant's overconfidence\u2014he was so certain he was the pursuer he'd never stopped to wonder whether he might be pursued. Of course, I hadn't spent a lot of time looking over _my_ shoulder either. I twitched the notion off with a few neck-jerks and got back in my car.\n\nShe answered on the second ring, her voice a little groggy. \"Kimmery.\"\n\n\"Lionel?\"\n\n_\"Yessrog.\"_\n\n\"Where did you go?\"\n\n\"I'm in\u2014I'm almost in Massachusetts.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, almost? Is that like a state of mind or something, Massachusetts?\"\n\n\"No, I mean almost there, literally. I'm on the highway, Kimmery. I've never been this far from New York.\"\n\nShe was quiet for a minute. \"When you run you really run,\" she said.\n\n\"No, no, don't misunderstand. I had to go. This is my investigation. I'm\u2014 _invest-in-a-gun, connect-a-cop, inventachusetts_ \u2014\" I mashed my tongue against the cage of my gritted teeth, trying to bottle up the flow.\n\nTiccing with Kimmery was especially abhorrent to me, now that I'd declared her my cure.\n\n\"You're what?\"\n\n\"I'm on the giant's tail,\" I said, squeezing out the words. \"Well, not _actually_ on his tail, but I know where he's going.\"\n\n\"You're still looking for your giant,\" she said thoughtfully. \"Because you feel bad about that guy Frank who got killed, is that right?\"\n\n\"No. Yes.\"\n\n\"You make me sad, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You seem so, I don't know, guilty.\"\n\n\"Listen, Kimmery. I called because\u2014 _Missmebailey!_ \u2014because I missed you. I mean, I miss you.\"\n\n\"That's a funny thing to say. Um, Lionel?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Did you take my keys?\"\n\n\"It was part of my investigation. Forgive me.\"\n\n\"Okay, whatever, but I thought it was pretty creepy.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean anything creepy by it.\"\n\n\"You can't do that kind of thing. It freaks people out, you know?\"\n\n\"I'm really sorry. I'll bring them back.\"\n\nShe was quiet again. I coursed in the fast lane with a band of other speeders, every so often slipping to the right to let an especially frantic one go by. The highway driving had begun to inspire a Tourettic fantasy, that the hoods and fenders of the cars were shoulders and collars I couldn't touch. I had to keep adequate distance so I wouldn't be tempted to try to brush up against those gleaming proxy bodies.\n\nI hadn't seen any sign of either Tony or the giant, but I had reason to hope that Tony at least was already behind me. The giant would have to stop for gas if he hadn't, and that was when I would pass him.\n\n\"I'm going to a place you might know about,\" I said. \"Yoshii's. A retreat.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea,\" she said grudgingly, curiosity winning over her anger. \"I always wanted to go there. Roshi said it was really great.\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Maybe sometime we'll go together.\"\n\n\"I should get off the phone, Lionel.\"\n\nThe call had made me anxious. I ate the second of the roast-beef sandwiches. Massachusetts looked the same as Connecticut.\n\nI called her back.\n\n\"What did you mean by _guilty_?\" I said. \"I don't understand.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"I don't know, Lionel. It's just, I'm not really sure about this _investigation_. It seems like you're just running around a lot trying to keep from feeling sad or guilty or whatever about this guy Frank.\"\n\n\"I want to catch the killer.\"\n\n\"Can't you hear yourself? That's like something O. J. Simpson would say. Regular people, when someone they know gets killed or something they don't go around trying to _catch the killer_. They go to a _funeral_.\"\n\n\"I'm a detective, Kimmery.\" I almost said, _I'm a telephone_. \"You keep saying that, but I don't know. I just can't really accept it.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"I guess I thought detectives were more, uh, subtle.\"\n\n\"Maybe you're thinking of detectives in movies or on television.\" I was a fine one to be explaining this distinction. \"On TV they're all the same. Real detectives are as unalike as fingerprints, or snowflakes.\"\n\n\"Very funny.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to make you laugh,\" I said. \"I'm glad you noticed. Do you like jokes?\"\n\n\"You know what _koans_ are? They're like Zen jokes, except they don't really have punch lines.\"\n\n\"What are you waiting for? I've got all day here.\" In truth the highway had grown fat with extra lanes, and complicated by options and merges. But I wasn't going to interrupt Kimmery while things were going so well, ticless on my end, bubbly with digressions on hers.\n\n\"Oh, I can never remember them, they're too vague. Lots of monks hitting each other on the head and stuff.\"\n\n\"That sounds hilarious. The best jokes usually have animals in them, I think.\"\n\n\"There's plenty of animals. Here\u2014\" I heard a rustle as she braced the phone between her shoulder and chin and paged through a book. I'd had her in the middle of the big empty room\u2014now I adjusted the picture, envisioned her with the phone stretched to reach the bed, perhaps with Shelf on her lap. \"So these two monks are arguing over a cat and this other monk cuts the cat in half\u2014Oh, that's not very nice.\"\n\n\"You're killing me. I'm busting a gut over here.\"\n\n\"Shut up. Oh, here, this is one I like. It's about death. So this young monk comes to visit this old monk to ask about this other, older monk who's just died. Tendo, that's the dead monk. So the young monk is asking about Tendo and the old monk says stuff like 'Look at that dog over there' and 'Do you want a bath?'\u2014all this irrelevant stuff. It goes on like that until finally the young monk is enlightened.\"\n\n\"Enlightened by what?\"\n\n\"I guess the point is you can't really say anything about death.\"\n\n\"Okay, I get it. It's just like in _Only Angels Have Wings_ , when Cary Grant's best friend Joe crashes his plane and dies and then Rosalind Russell asks him 'What about Joe?' and \"Aren't you going to do anything about Joe?' and Cary Grant just says, 'Who's Joe?' \"\n\n\"Speaking of watching too much movies and television.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" I liked the way the miles were flying past for me now, ticless, aloft on Kimmery's voice, the freeway traffic thinning.\n\nThe moment I observed the way our talk and my journey were racing along, though, we lapsed into silence.\n\n\"Roshi says this thing about guilt,\" she said after a minute. \"That it's selfish, just a way to avoid taking care of yourself. Or thinking about yourself. I guess that's sort of two different things. I can't remember.\"\n\n\"Please don't quote Gerard Minna to me on the subject of guilt,\" I said. \"That's a little hard to swallow under the present circumstances.\"\n\n\"You really think Roshi's guilty of something?\"\n\n\"There's more I need to find out,\" I admitted. \"That's what I'm doing. That's why I had to take your keys.\"\n\n\"And why you're going to Yoshii's?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nIn the pause that followed I detected the sound of Kimmery believing me, believing in my case, for the first time. \"Be careful, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Sure. I'm always careful. Just keep your promise to me, okay?\"\n\n\"What promise?\"\n\n\"Don't go to the Zendo.\"\n\n\"Okay. I think I'm getting off the phone now, Lionel.\"\n\n\"You promise?\"\n\n\"Sure, yeah, okay.\"\n\nSuddenly I was surrounded by office buildings, carports, stacked overhead freeways clogged with cars. I realized too late I probably should have navigated around Boston instead of through it. I suffered through the slowdown, munched on chips and tried not to hold my breath, and before too long the city's grip loosened, gave way to suburban sprawl, to the undecorated endless interstate. I only hoped I hadn't let Tony and the giant get ahead of me, lost my lead, my edge. _Gotta have an edge_. I was beginning to obsess on _edge_ too much: edge of car, edge of road, edge of vision and what hovered there, nagging and insubstantial. How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.\n\nDon't hover in my blind spot, Fonebone!\n\nI felt as though I would begin ticcing with the body of the car, would need to flirt with the textured shoulder of the highway or the darting, soaring bodies all around me unless I heard her voice again.\n\n\"Kimmery.\"\n\n\"Lionel.\"\n\n\"I called you again.\"\n\n\"Aren't these car-phone calls kind of expensive?\"\n\n\"I'm not the one paying,\" I burbled. I was exhilarated by the recurrent technomagic, the cell phone reaching out across space and time to connect us again.\n\n\"Who is?\"\n\n\"Some Zen doormat I met yesterday in a car.\"\n\n\"Doormat?\"\n\n\"Doorman.\"\n\n\"Mmmm.\" She was eating something. \"You call too much.\"\n\n\"I like talking to you. Driving is... boring.\" I undersold my angst, let the one word stand in for so many others.\n\n\"Yeah, mmmm\u2014but I don't want anything, you know, crazy in my life right now.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by crazy?\" Her tonal swerves had caught me by surprise again. I suppose it was this strange lurching dance, though, that kept my double brain enchanted.\n\n\"It's just\u2014A lot of guys, you know, they tell you they understand about giving you space and stuff, they know how to talk about it and that you need to hear it. But they don't really have any idea what it means. I've been through a lot recently, Lionel.\"\n\n\"When did I say anything about giving you space?\"\n\n\"I just mean this is a lot of calls in a pretty short period is all.\"\n\n\"Kimmery, listen. I'm not like other, ah, people you meet. My life is organized around certain compulsions. But it's different with you, I feel different.\"\n\n\"That's good, that's nice\u2014\"\n\n\"You have no idea.\"\n\n\"\u2014but I'm just coming out of something pretty intense. I mean, you swept me off my feet, Lionel. You're kind of overwhelming, actually, if you don't already know. I mean, I like talking to you, too, but it isn't a good idea to call three times right after, you know, _spending the night.\"_\n\nI was silent, unsure how to decode this remarkable speech. \"What I mean is, this is exactly the kind of craziness I just got through with, Lionel.\"\n\n\"Which kind?\"\n\n\"Like this,\" she said in a meek voice. \"Like with you.\"\n\n\"Are you saying Oreo Man had _Tourette's syndrome_?\" I felt a weird thrill of jealousy. She collected us freaks, I understood now. No wonder she took us in stride, no wonder she damped our symptoms. I was nothing special after all. Or rather my fistlike penis was my only claim.\n\n\"Who's Oreo Man?\"\n\n\"Your old boyfriend.\"\n\n\"Oh. But what's the other thing you said?\"\n\n\"Never mind.\"\n\nWe were silent for a while. My brain went, _Tourette's slipdrip stinkjet's blessdroop mutual-of-overwhelm's wild kissdoom_ \u2014\n\n\"All I mean is I'm not ready for anything too intense right now,\" said Kimmery. \"I need space to figure out what I want. I can't be all overwhelmed and obsessed like the last time.\"\n\n\"I think I've heard enough about that for now.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" I gathered myself, made a plunge into territory far stranger to me than Connecticut or Massachusetts. \"I think I understand what you mean about space. About leaving it between things so you don't get too obsessed.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"Or is that the kind of talk you don't want to hear? I guess I'm confused.\"\n\n\"No, it's okay. But we can talk about this later.\"\n\n\"Well, okay.\"\n\n\"Bye, Lionel.\"\n\n_Dial and redial were sitting on a fence. Dial fell off. Who was left?_\n\nRing.\n\nRing.\n\nRing.\n\nClick. \"You've reached two-one-two, three-oh-four\u2014\"\n\n\"HellokimmeryIknowIshouldn'tbecallingbutIjust\u2014\"\n\nClunk. \"Lionel?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Stop now.\"\n\n\"Uh\u2014\"\n\n\"Just stop calling now. It's way too much like some really bad things that have happened to me, can you understand? It's not romantic.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Okay, bye, Lionel, for real now, okay?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n_Redial_.\n\n\"You've reached\u2014\"\n\n\"Kimmery? Kimmery? Kimmery? Are you there? Kimmery?\"\n\nI was my syndrome's dupe once again. Here I'd imagined I was enjoying a Touretteless morning, yet when the new manifestation appeared, it was hidden in plain sight, the Purloined Tic. Punching that redial I was exhibiting a calling-Kimmery-tic as compulsive as any rude syllable or swipe.\n\nI wanted to hurl the doorman's cell phone out onto the grassy divider. Instead, in a haze of self-loathing, I dialed another number, one etched in memory though I hadn't called it in a while.\n\n\"Yes?\" The voice was weary, encrusted with years, as I remembered it.\n\n\"Essrog?\" I said.\n\n\"Yes.\" A pause. \"This is the Essrog residence. This is Murray Essrog. Who's calling, please?\"\n\nI was a little while coming to my reply. \"Eat me Bailey.\"\n\n\"Oh, Christ.\" The voice moved away from the phone. \"Mother. Mother, come here. I want you to listen to this.\"\n\n\"Essrog Bailey,\" I said, almost whispering, but intent on being heard.\n\nThere was a shuffling in the background.\n\n\"It's him again, Mother,\" said Murray Essrog. \"It's that goddamned Bailey kid. He's still out there. All these years.\"\n\nI was still a kid to him, just as to me he'd been an old man since the first time I called him.\n\n\"I don't know why you care,\" came an older woman's voice, every word a sigh.\n\n\"Baileybailey,\" I said softly.\n\n\"Speak up, kid, do your thing,\" said the old man.\n\nI heard the phone change hands, the old woman's breathing come onto the line.\n\n\"Essrog, Essrog, Essrog,\" I chanted, like a cricket trapped in a wall.\n\nI'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both\u2014I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose. My whole life exists in the space between those words, tight, loose, and there isn't any space there\u2014they should be one word, tightloose. I'm an air bag in a dashboard, packed up layer upon layer in readiness for that moment when I get to explode, expand all over you, fill every available space. Unlike an airbag, though, I'm repacked the moment I've exploded, am tensed and ready again to explode\u2014like some safety-film footage cut into a loop, all I do is compress and release, over and over, never saving or satisfying anyone, least myself. Yet the tape plays on pointlessly, obsessive air bag exploding again and again while life itself goes on elsewhere, outside the range of these antic expenditures.\n\nThe night before, in Kimmery's alcove, suddenly seemed very long ago, very far away.\n\nHow could phone calls _\u2014cell-phone calls_ , staticky, unlikely, free of charge\u2014how could they alter what real bodies felt? How could ghosts touch the living?\n\nI tried not to think about it.\n\nI tossed the cell phone onto the seat beside me, into the wreckage of Zeod's sandwiches, the unfurled paper wrapping, the torn chip bag, the strewn chips and crumpled napkins gone translucent with grease stains in the midmorning sun. I wasn't eating neatly, wasn't getting anything exactly right, and now I knew it didn't matter, not today, not anymore. Having broken the disastrous flow of dialing tics, my mood had gotten hard, my attention narrow. I crossed the bridge at Portsmouth into Maine and focused everything I had left on the drive, on casting off unnecessary behaviors, thrusting exhaustion and bitterness aside and making myself into a vehicular arrow pointed at Musconguspoint Station, at the answers that lay waiting for me there. I heard Minna's voice now in place of my incessant Tourettic tongue, saying, _Floor it, Freakshow. You got something to do, do it already. Tell your story driving_.\n\nRoute 1 along the Maine coast was a series of touristy villages, some with boats, some with beaches, all with antiques and lobster. A large percentage of the hotels and restaurants were closed, with signs that read SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER! and HAVE A GREAT YEAR! I had trouble believing any of it was real\u2014the turnpike had felt like a schematic, a road map, and I in my car a dot or a penpoint tracing a route. Now I felt as if I were driving through the pages of a calendar, or a collection of pictorial stamps. None of it struck me as particular or persuasive in any way. Maybe once I got out of the car.\n\nMusconguspoint Station was one with boats. It wasn't the least of these towns, but it was close to it, a swelling on the coast distinguished more than anything by the big ferry landing, with signs for the Muscongus Island Ferry, which made the circuit twice a day. The \"place of peace\" wasn't hard to find. Yoshii's\u2014MAINE'S ONLY THAI AND SUSHI OCEANFOOD EMPORIUM, according to the sign\u2014was the largest of a neat triad of buildings on a hill just past the ferry landing and the fishing docks, all painted a queasy combination of toasted-marshmallow brown and seashell pink, smugly humble earth tones that directly violated Maine's barn-red and house-white scheme. This was one shot that wasn't making the calendar. The restaurant extended on stilts over a short cliff on the water, surf thundering below; the other two buildings, presumably the retreat center, were caged in a fussy, evenly spaced row of pine trees, all the same year and model. The sign was topped with a painted image of Yoshii, a smiling bald man with chopsticks and waves of pleasure or serenity emanating from his head like stink-lines in a Don Martin cartoon.\n\nI put the Tracer in the restaurant lot, up on the hill overlooking the water, the fishing dock, and the ferry landing below. It was alone there except for two pickup trucks in staff spots. Yoshii's hours were painted on the door: seating for lunch began at twelve-thirty, which was twenty minutes from now. I didn't see any sign of Tony or the giant or anyone else, but I didn't want to sit in the lot and wait like a fool with a target painted on his back. An edge, that's what I was after.\n\n_Edgerog, 33, seeks Edge_.\n\nI got out of the car. First surprise: the cold. A wind that hurt my ears instantly. The air smelled like a thunderstorm but there wasn't a cloud in the sky. I went over the barrier of logs at the corner of the parking lot and clambered down the grade toward the water, under the shade of the jutting deck of the restaurant. Once I'd dipped out of sight of the road and buildings, I undid my fly and peed on the rocks, amusing my compulsiveness by staining one whole boulder a deeper gray, albeit only temporarily. It was as I zipped and turned to see the ocean that the vertigo hit me. I'd found an edge, all right. Waves, sky, trees, Essrog\u2014I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. I experienced it precisely as a loss of language, a great sucking-away of the word-laden walls that I needed around me, that I touched everywhere, leaned on for support, cribbed from when I ticced aloud. Those walls of language had always been in place, I understood now, audible to me until the sky in Maine deafened them with a shout of silence. I staggered, put one hand on the rocks to steady myself. I needed to reply in some new tongue, to find a way to assert a self that had become tenuous, shrunk to a shred of Brooklyn stumbling on the coastal void: Orphan meets ocean. Jerk evaporates in salt mist.\n\n\"Freakshow!\" I yelled into the swirling foam. It was lost.\n\n\"Bailey!\" vanished too.\n\n\"Eat me! Dickweed!\"\n\nNothing. What did I expect\u2014Frank Minna to come rising from the sea?\n\n\"Essrog!\" I screamed. I thought of Murray Essrog and his wife. They were Brooklyn Essrogs, like me. Had they ever come to this edge to meet the sky? Or was I the first Essrog to put a footprint on the crust of Maine?\n\n\"I claim this big water for Essrog!\" I shouted.\n\nI was a _freak of nature_.\n\nBack on the dry land of the parking lot, I straightened my jacket and peered around to see if anyone had overheard my outburst. The nearest activity was at the base of the fishing docks below, where a small boat had come in and tiny figures in Devo-style yellow jumpsuits stood handing blue plastic crates over the prow and onto a pallet on the dock. I locked the car and strolled across to the other end of the empty lot, then scooted down the scrubby hill toward the men and boats, half sliding on my pavement-walker's leather soles, wind biting at my nose and chin. The restaurant and retreat center were eclipsed by the swell of the hill as I reached the dock.\n\n\"Hey!\"\n\nI got the attention of one of the men on the dock. He turned with his crate and plopped it on the pile, then stood hands on hips waiting for me to reach him. As I got closer, I examined the boat. The blue cartons were sealed, but the boatmen hefted them as though they were heavy with something, and with enough care to make me know the something was valuable. The deck of the boat held racks covered with diving equipment\u2014rubber suits, flippers, and masks, and a pile of tanks for breathing underwater.\n\n\"Boy, it's cold,\" I said, scuffing my hands together like a sports fan. \"Tough day to go boating, huh?\"\n\nThe boatman's eyebrows and two-day beard were bright red, but not brighter than his sun-scrubbed flesh, everywhere it showed: cheeks, nose, ears and the corroded knuckles he rubbed under his chin now as he tried to work out a response.\n\nI heard and felt the boat's body clunking as it bobbed against the pier. My thoughts wandered to the underwater propellers, whirring silently in the water. If I were closer to the water I'd want to reach in and touch the propeller, it was so stimulating to my kinesthetic obsessions. _\"Tugboat! Forgettaboat!\"_ I ticced, and jerked my neck, to hurl the syllables sideways into the wind.\n\n\"You're not from around here, are you?\" he said carefully. I'd expected his voice to come out like Yosemite Sam's or Popeye's, scabrous and sputtering. Instead he was so stolid and patrimonial with his New England accent\u2014 _Ya nawt from around heah, ah you?_ \u2014that I was left with no doubt which of us resembled the cartoon character.\n\n\"No, actually.\" I affected a bright look\u2014 _Illuminate me, sir, for I am a stranger in these exotic parts!_ It seemed as likely he'd shove me off the dock into the water or simply turn away as continue the conversation. I straightened my suit again, fingered my own collar so I wouldn't be tempted to finger his fluorescent hood, to crimp its Velcro edge like the rim of a piecrust.\n\nHe examined me carefully. \"Urchin season runs October through March. It's cold work. Day like today is a walk in the park.\"\n\n\"Urchin?\" I said, feeling as I said it that I'd ticced, that the word was itself a tic by definition, it was so innately twitchy. It would have made a good pronunciation for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince's glyph.\n\n\"These are urchin waters out around the island. That's the market, so that's what's fished.\"\n\n\"Right,\" I said. \"Well, that's terrific. Keep it up. You know anything about the place up the hill\u2014Yoshii's?\"\n\n\"Probably you want to talk to Mr. Foible.\" He nodded his head at the fishing dock's small shack, from the smokestack of which piped a tiny plume of smoke. \"He's the one does dealings with them Japanese. I'm just a bayman.\"\n\n_\"Eatmebayman!_ \u2014thanks for your help.\" I smiled and tipped an imaginary cap to him, and headed for the shack. He shrugged at me and received another carton off the boat.\n\n\"How can I help you, sir?\"\n\nFoible was red too, but in a different way. His cheeks and nose and even his brow were spiderwebbed with blossoming red veins, painful to look at. His eyes too showed veins through their yellow. As Minna used to say about the St. Mary's parish priest, Foible had _a thirsty face_. Right on the wooden counter where he sat in the shack was evidence of what the face was thirsty for: a cluster of empty long-neck beer bottles and a couple of gin quarts, one still with an inch or so to cover the bottom. A coil heater glowed under the countertop, and when I stepped inside, he nodded at the heater and the door to indicate I should shut the door behind me. Besides Foible and his heater and bottles the shack held a scarred wooden file cabinet and a few boxes of what I guessed might be hardware and fishing tackle beneath their layers of grease. In my two-day suit and stubble I was the freshest thing in the place by far.\n\nI could see this called for the oldest investigatory technique of them all: I opened my wallet and took out a twenty. \"I'd buy a guy a drink if he could tell me a few things about the Japanese,\" I said.\n\n\"What about 'em?\" His milky eyes made intimate contact with the twenty, worked their way back up to meet mine.\n\n\"I'm interested in the restaurant up the hill. Who owns it, specifically.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"What if I said I wanted to buy it?\" I winked and gritted through a barking tic, cut it down to a momentary \"\u2014 _charp!\"_\n\n\"Son, you'd never get that thing away from them. You better do your shopping elsewhere.\"\n\n\"What if I made them an offer they couldn't refuse?\"\n\nFoible squinted at me, suddenly suspicious. I thought of how Detective Seminole had gotten spooked by the Minna Men, our Court Street milieu. I had no idea whether such images would reverberate so far from Gotham City.\n\n\"Can I ask you something?\" said Foible.\n\n\"Shoot.\"\n\n\"You're not one of them _Scientologists_ , are you?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, surprised. It wasn't the impression I'd imagined I was making.\n\nHe winced deeply, as though recalling the trauma that had driven him to the bottle. \"Good,\" he said. \"Dang Scientologists bought the old hotel up the island, turned it into a funhouse for movie stars. Hell, I'll take the Japanese any day. Least they eat fish.\"\n\n_\"Muscongus_ Island?\" I'd only wanted to feel the word in my mouth at last.\n\n\"What other island would I be talking about?\" He squinted at me again, then held out his hand for the twenty. \"Give me that, son.\"\n\nI turned it over. He laid it out on the counter and cleared his rheumy throat. \"That money there says you're out of your depth here, son. Japanese yank out a roll, the smallest thing they got's a hundred. Hell, before they shut down the urchin market, this dock used to be littered with thousand-dollar bank bands from them Japanese paying off my baymen for a haul.\"\n\n\"Tell me about it.\"\n\n\"Humph.\"\n\n\"Eat me.\"\n\n\"Huh? What's that?\"\n\n\"I said tell me about it. Explain about the Japanese to a guy who doesn't know.\"\n\n\"You know what _uni_ is?\"\n\n\"Forgive my ignorance.\"\n\n\"That's the national food of Japan, son. That's the whole story around Musconguspoint anymore, unless you count the Scientologists camped out in that damn hotel. Japanese family's got to eat uni least once a week just to maintain their self-respect. Like you'd want a steak, they want a plate of urchin eggs. Golden Week\u2014that's like Christmas in Japan\u2014uni's the only thing they eat. Except Japanese waters got fished out. You follow?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"The Japanese law says you can't dive for urchin anymore. All you can do is hand-rake. Means standing out on a rock at low tide with a rake in your hand. Try it sometime. Rake all day, won't get an urchin worth a damn.\"\n\nIf ever there was a guy who needed to _tell his story walking_ , it was Foible. I stifled the urge to tell him so.\n\n\"Maine coast's got the choicest urchin on the globe, son. Clustered under the island thick as grapes. Mainers never had a taste for the stuff, lobstermen thought urchins was a pain in the ass. That Japanese law made a lot of boatmen rich up here, if they knew how to rig for a diving crew. Whole economy down Rockport way. Japanese set up processing plants, they got women down there shucking urchins day and night, fly it out the next morning. Japanese dealers come in limousines, wait for the boats to come in, bid on loads, pay in cash with wads like I said before\u2014the money would scare you silly.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" I gulped back tics. Foible's story was beginning to interest me.\n\n\"In Rockport? Nothing happened. Still like that. If you mean up here, we just got a couple of boats. The folks up the hill bought me out and that's that, no more cars with dark windows, no more Yakuza making deals on the dock\u2014I don't miss it for a minute. I'm an exclusive supplier, son, and a happier man you'll never meet.\"\n\nIn the little shack I was surrounded by Foible's happiness, and I wasn't enthralled. I didn't mention it. \"The folks up the hill,\" I said. \"You mean Fujisaki.\" I figured he was deep enough in his story not to balk at my feeding him the name.\n\n\"That's correct, sir. They're a classy outfit. Got a bunch of homes on the island, redid themselves a whole restaurant, brought in a sushi cook so they could eat the way they like. Sure wish they'd outbid the Scientologists for that old hotel, though.\"\n\n\"Don't we all. So does Fujisaki\u2014 _Superduperist! Clientologist! Fujiopolis!_ \u2014does Fujisaki live here in Musconguspoint year-round?\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n_\"Fly-on-top-of-us!\"_\n\n\"You got a touch of Tourette's syndrome there, son.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I gasped. \"You want a drink?\"\n\n\"No, no. The classy outfit, do they all live up here?\"\n\n\"Nope. They come and go in a bunch, always together, Tokyo, New York, London. Got a heliport on the island, go back and forth. They just rode in on the ferry this morning.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" I blinked madly in the wake of the outburst. \"You run the ferry, too?\"\n\n\"Nope, wouldn't want any part of that bathtub. Just a couple of boats, couple of crews. Keep my feet up, concentrate on my hobbies.\"\n\n\"Your other boat's out fishing?\"\n\n\"Nope. Urchin-diving's an early-morning affair, son. Go out three, four in the morning, day's over by ten o'clock.\"\n\n\"Right, right. So where's the boat?\"\n\n\"Funny you ask. Let a couple of guys take it out an hour ago, said they had to get to the island, couldn't wait for the ferry. Rented my boat and captain. They were a lot like you, thought I'd be real impressed with twenty-dollar bills.\"\n\n\"One of them big?\"\n\n\"Biggest I ever saw.\"\n\nMy detour through the middle of Boston had cost me the lead in the race to Musconguspoint. Now it seemed silly that I'd imagined anything else. I found the red Contour and the black Pontiac in a small parking area just past the ferry landing, a tree-hidden cul-de-sac lot for day-trippers to the island, with an automated coin-fed gate and one-way exit with flexible spikes pointed at an angle and signs that warned, DON'T BACK UP! SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE! There was something I found poignant in Tony and the giant each paying to park here, fishing in their pockets for coins before enacting whatever queer struggle had led them to hire the urchin boat. I took a closer look and saw that the Contour was locked up tight, while the Pontiac's keys were in the ignition, the doors unlocked. Tony's gun, the one he'd pointed at me the day before, lay on the floor near the gas pedal. I pushed it under the seat. Maybe Tony would need it. I hoped so. I thought of how the giant had strong-armed Minna wherever he wanted him to go and felt sorry for Tony.\n\nOn my way up the hill I felt a buzz, like a bee or hornet trapped inside my pants. It was Minna's beeper. I'd set it to \"vibrate\" at the Zendo. I drew it out. It showed a New Jersey number. The Clients were home from Brooklyn.\n\nIn the parking lot I got into my car and found the cell phone on the seat with the sandwich wrappings, which were beginning to mature in the sun. I rang the number.\n\nI was very tired.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"It's Lionel, Mr. Matricardi. You beeped me.\"\n\n\"Yes. Lionel. Have you got for us what we want?\"\n\n\"I'm working on it.\"\n\n\"Working is wonderful, honorable, admirable. Results\u2014now those we truly cherish.\"\n\n\"I'll have something for you soon.\"\n\nThe interior was all inlaid burnished wood to match the exterior's toasted-marshmallow color; the carpet supplied the seashell pink. The girl who met me just inside the door wore an elaborate Japanese robe and a dazed expression. I smoothed both sides of her collar with my hand and she seemed to take it well, perhaps as admiration for the silk. I nodded at the big windows overlooking the water and she led me to a small table there, then bowed and left me alone. I was the only customer for lunch, or the first anyway. I was starving. A sushi chef waved his broad knife at me and grinned from across the big, elegant dining room. The beveled-glass partition he worked behind made me think of the holdup-proof Plexiglas habitats for clerks in Smith Street liquor stores. I waved back, and he nodded, a sudden and ticcish bob, and I reciprocated happily. We had quite a thing going until he broke it off, to begin slicing with theatrical flair the whole skin off a slab of reddish fish.\n\nThe doors to the kitchen swung open, and Julia came out. She too wore a robe, and she wore it splendidly. It was her haircut that was a little jarring. She'd shaved her long blond hair down to military fuzz, exposing the black roots. Her face underneath the fuzz looked exposed and raw, her eyes a little wild to be without their veil. She picked up a menu and brought it to my table and halfway across the floor I saw her notice who she was bringing it to. She lost only a little something from her stride.\n\n\"Lionel.\"\n\n_\"Pisspaw,\"_ I completed.\n\n\"I'm not going to ask you what you're doing here,\" she said. \"I don't even want to know.\" She passed me the menu, the cover of which was thatched, a weave of bamboo.\n\n\"I followed Tony,\" I said, putting the menu gingerly aside, wary of splinters. \"And the giant, the killer. We're all coming up here for a Frank Minna convention.\"\n\n\"That's not funny.\" She examined me, her mouth drawn. \"You look like shit, Lionel.\"\n\n\"It was a long drive. I guess I should have flown into Boston and\u2014what's your trick, rental car? Or catch a bus? This is a regular vacation spot for you, I know that much.\"\n\n\"Very nice, Lionel, you're very smart. Now get lost.\"\n\n_\"Muscongaphone! Minnabunkport!\"_ I gritted back a whole series of Maine-geography tics that wished to follow these two through the gate of my teeth. \"We really ought to talk, Julia.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just talk to yourself?\"\n\n\"Now we're even, since that wasn't funny either.\"\n\n\"Where's Tony?\"\n\n\"He's\u2014 _Tugboat! Tunaphone!_ \u2014he's on a boat ride.\" It sounded so pleasant, I didn't want to say who with. From the vantage of Yoshii's high window I could see Muscongus Island at last, wreathed in mist on the horizon.\n\n\"He should have come here,\" said Julia, without a trace of sentiment. She spoke as someone whose thinking had taken a very practical turn in the past day or so. \"He told me to wait here for him, but I can't wait much longer. He should have come.\"\n\n\"Maybe he tried. I think he wants to get to Fujisaki before someone gets to him.\" I watched her as I dangled the theory, alert for any flinch or fire that might cross her expression.\n\nIt was flinch. She lowered her voice. \"Don't say that name here, Lionel. Don't be an idiot.\" She looked around, but there was only the hostess and sushi chef. _Don't say that name_ \u2014the widow had inherited the dead man's superstitions.\n\n\"Who are you afraid of, Julia? Is it Fujisaki, really? Or Matricardi and Rockaforte?\"\n\nShe looked at me and I saw her throat tighten and her nostrils flare.\n\n\"I'm not the one hiding from the Italians,\" she said. \"I'm not the one who should be afraid.\"\n\n\"Who's hiding?\"\n\nIt was one question too many. Her fury's crosshairs centered on me now, only because I was there and the person she wanted to kill was so very far away, working her by remote control. \"Screw you, Lionel. You fucking freak.\"\n\nThe ducks were on the pond, the monkeys were in a tree, the birds wired, the fish barreled, the pigs blanketed: However the players in this tragic fever dream ought to be typed zoologically, I had them placed together now. The problem wasn't one of tracing connections. I'd climbed into my Tracer and accomplished that. Now, though, I had to draw a single coherent line through the monkeys, ducks, fish, pigs, through monks and mooks\u2014a line that accurately distinguished two opposed teams. I might be close.\n\n\"Will you take my order, Julia?\"\n\n\"Why don't you go away, Lionel? Please.\" It was pitying and bitter and desperate at once. She wanted to spare us both. I had to know from what.\n\n\"I want to try some uni. Some\u2014 _orphan ocean ice cream!_ \u2014some urchin eggs. See what all the fuss is about.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't like it.\"\n\n\"Can it be done up as a sandwich of some kind? Like an uni-salad sandwich?\"\n\n\"It's not a sandwich spread.\"\n\n\"Okay, well, then just bring me out a big bowl and a spoon. I'm really hungry, Julia.\"\n\nShe wasn't paying attention. The door had opened, pale sunlight flaring into the orange and pink cavern of the room. The hostess bowed, then led the Fujisaki Corporation to a long table in the middle of the room.\n\nIt all happened at once. There were six of them, a vision to break your heart. I was almost glad Minna was gone so he'd never have to face it, how perfectly the six middle-aged Japanese men of Fujisaki filled the image the Minna Men had always strained toward but had never reached and never would reach, in their impeccably fitted black suits and narrow ties and Wayfarer shades and upright postures, their keen, clicking shoes and shiny rings and bracelets and stoic, lipless smiles. They were all we could never be no matter how Minna pushed us: absolutely a team, a unit, their presence collective like a floating island of charisma and force. Like a floating island they nodded at the sushi chef and at Julia and even at me, then moved to their seats and folded their shades into their breast pockets and removed their beautifully creased felt hats and hooked them on the coatrack and I saw the shine of their bald heads in the orange light and I spotted the one who'd spoken of marshmallows and ghosts and bowel movements and picnics and vengeance and I knew, I knew it all, I understood everything at that moment except perhaps who Bailey was, and so of course I ticced loudly.\n\n_\"I scream for ur-chin!\"_\n\nJulia turned, startled. She'd been staring, like me, transfixed by Fujisaki's splendor. If I was right she'd never seen them before, not even in their guises as monks.\n\n\"I'll bring your order, sir,\" she said, recovering gracefully. I didn't bother to point out that I hadn't exactly placed an order. Her panicked eyes said she couldn't handle any banter right then. She collected the bamboo-covered menu, and I saw her hand trembling and had to restrain myself from reaching for it to comfort her and my syndrome both. She turned again and headed for the kitchen, and when she passed Fujisaki's table, she managed a brave little bow of her own.\n\nA few members of the corporation turned and glanced at me again, ever so lightly and indifferently. I smiled and waved to embarrass them out of giving me the once-over. They went back to their conversation in Japanese, the sound of which, trickling over the carpet and polished wood in my direction, was a choral murmur, a purr.\n\nI sat still as I could and watched as Julia reemerged to take their drink order and pass out menus. One of the suits ignored her, leaned back in his seat, and transacted directly with the sushi chef, who grunted to show comprehension. Others unfolded the spiny menu and began to grunt as well, to jabber and laugh and stab their manicured fingers at the laminated photographs of fish inside. I recalled the monks in the Zendo, the pale, saggy flesh, the scanty tufts of underarm hair that now hid behind the million-dollar tailoring. The Zendo seemed a distant and unlikely place from where I sat now. Julia went back through the kitchen doors and came out carrying a large steaming bowl and a small trivet with daubs of bright color on it. With these she threaded past Fujisaki, to my table.\n\n\"Uni,\" she said, nodding at the tiny block of wood. It held a thick smudge of green paste, a cluster of pink-hued shavings from a pickled beet or turnip, and a gobbet of glistening orange beads\u2014the urchin eggs, I supposed. It wasn't three bites of food altogether. The bowl she set down was a touch more promising. The broth was milky white, its surface rippled from underneath by a thick tangle of vegetables and chunks of chicken, and decorated on top by sprigs of some sort of exotic parsley.\n\n\"I also brought you something you might actually like,\" she said quietly as she drew a small ceramic ladle and a pair of inlaid chopsticks out of a pouch in her robe and set them at my place. \"It's Thai chicken soup. Eat it and go, Lionel. Please.\"\n\n_Tie-chicken-to-what?_ went my brain. _Tinker to Evers to Chicken_.\n\nJulia returned to Fujisaki's table with her order pad, to contend with the corporation's contradictory barked commands, their staccato pidgin English. I sampled the uni, scraping it up in the ladle\u2014chopsticks were not my game. The gelatinous orange beads ruptured in my mouth like capers, brackish and sharp but not impossible to like. I tried mixing the three bright colors on the wood, blobbing the tacky green paste and the shreds of pickled radish together with the eggs. The combination was something else entirely: An acrid claw of vapor sped up the back of my throat and filled my nasal cavity. Those elements were apparently not meant to be mixed. My ears popped, my eyes watered, and I made a sound like a cat with a hairball.\n\nI'd garnered Fujisaki's attention once again, and the sushi chef's as well. I waved, face flushed bright red, and they nodded and waved back, bobbed their heads, returned to talking. I ladled up some of the soup, thinking at least to flush the poisons off the sensitive surface of my tongue. Another reverse: The broth was superb, a reply and rebuke to the toxic explosion that had preceded it. It transmitted warmth in the other direction, down into my gullet and through my chest and shoulders as it passed. Levels of flavor unfolded, onion, coconut, chicken, a piquancy I couldn't place. I scooped up another ladleful, with a strip of chicken this time, and let the nourishing fire flow through me again. Until placed in this soup's care I hadn't realized how chilled I was, how starved for comfort. It felt as if the soup were literally embracing my heart.\n\nThe trouble came with the third spoonful. I'd dredged low, come up with a tangle of unidentifiable vegetables. I drank down more of the broth, then gnawed on the mouthful of pungent roughage that was left in my mouth\u2014only some of it was rougher than I might have liked. There was some resilient, bladelike leaf that wasn't losing the contest with my teeth, was instead beginning to triumph in an unexpected skirmish with my gums and the roof of my mouth. I chewed, waiting for it to disintegrate. It wouldn't. Julia appeared just as I'd reached in with my pinkie to clear it from my mouth.\n\n\"I think part of the menu got into the soup,\" I said as I ejected the bulrushes onto the table.\n\n\"That's lemongrass,\" said Julia. \"You're not supposed to _eat_ it.\"\n\n\"What's it doing in the soup, then?\"\n\n\"Flavor. It flavors the soup.\"\n\n\"I can't argue with that,\" I said. \"What's the name again?\"\n\n\"Lemongrass,\" she hissed. She dropped a slip of paper onto the table by my hand. \"Here's your check, Lionel.\"\n\nI reached for her hand where it covered the slip but she pulled it away, like some version of a children's game, and all I got was the paper.\n\n_\"Lasagna ass,\"_ I said under my breath.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n_\"Laughing Gassrog.\"_ This was more audible, but I hadn't disturbed Fujisaki, not yet. I looked up at her helplessly.\n\n\"Good-bye, Lionel.\" She hurried away from my table.\n\nThe check wasn't really a check. Julia's scrawl covered the underside:\n\nTHE FOOD IS ON THE HOUSE.\n\nMEET ME AT FRIENDSHIP HEAD LIGHTHOUSE TWO-THIRTY.\n\nGET OUT OF HERE!!!\n\nI finished the soup, carefully putting the mysterious inedible lemongrass to one side. Then I rose from the table and went past Fujisaki toward the doors, hoping for Julia's sake to be invisible. One of them turned as I passed, though, and grabbed my elbow.\n\n\"You like the food?\"\n\n\"Terrific,\" I said.\n\nIt was the one who as a monk had applied the paddle to my back. They'd been guzzling sake and his face was red, his eyes moist and merry.\n\n\"You Jerry-Roshi's unruly student,\" he said.\n\n\"I guess that's right.\"\n\n\"Retreat center a good idea,\" he said. \"You need long sesshin. You got an _utterance_ problem, I think.\"\n\n\"I know I do.\"\n\nHe clapped me on the shoulder, and I clapped his shoulder in return, feeling the shoulder pad in his suit, the tight seam at the sleeve. Then I tugged loose of his embrace, meaning to go, but it was too late. I had to make the rounds and touch the others. I started around the table, clapping each perfectly tailored shoulder. The men of Fujisaki seemed to take it as an encouragement to tap and poke me back while they joked with one another in Japanese. \"Duck, duck, goose,\" I said, quietly at first. \"Otter, otter, utterance.\"\n\n\"Otter-duck,\" said one of the men of Fujisaki, raising his eyebrows as though it were a significant correction, and elbowing me sharply.\n\n\"Monk, monk, stooge!\" I said, circling the table faster, cavorting. \"Weapongrass duckweed!\"\n\n\"You go now,\" said the scowling paddle-wielder.\n\n_\"Eat me Fujisaki!\"_ I screamed, and whirled out the door.\n\nThe second boat had returned to the dock. I went back through Yoshii's parking lot and down the hill to have a closer look. Smoke still plumed from Foible's shack; otherwise the scene on the fishing pier was completely still. Perhaps the captain of the boat had joined Foible inside the shack for a drink from a new bottle of gin, on my twenty. Or maybe he'd just gone home to bed after a day's labor that had started at three in the morning, Urchin Daylight Savings time. I envied him if he had. I crept past the shack, to the other side of the pier. From what I could see the ferry landing was empty too, the boat itself out at the island, the ticket office closed until the late-afternoon landing. The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.\n\nIt was farther on, in the tree-shrouded parking lot, that I saw something move, a sign of life. I went silently past the ferry landing to a place out of the harsh angled brightness so I could peer into the shadow and distinguish what the something was. The answer was the giant. He stood between his car and Tony's squinting in the wind and dappled sunlight and reading or at least staring at a bunch of papers in a manila folder, something out of the L&L files perhaps. In the minute that I watched he grew bored or dissatisfied with the papers and closed the file and ripped it in two, then two again, and walked across the lot to the edge where the pavement was divided from the sea by a wide margin of barnacled and beer-canned boulders. He hurled the torn quadrants of the folder in the direction of the rocks and water and the wind whipped them instantly back to flutter madly past him and disperse across the lot's gravel and into the trees. But he wasn't finished yet. There was something else in his hand, something black and small and shiny, and for a moment I thought he was making a call. Then I saw that it was a wallet. He rifled through it and moved some folding money into his own pants pocket and then he hurled the wallet, too, with more success than he'd had with the papers, so that it arced over the rocks and possibly reached the water\u2014I couldn't tell from my perspective, and neither, I think, could the giant. He didn't appear particularly worried. Worry wasn't in his nature.\n\nThen he turned and saw me: Laugh-or-cry Edgelost.\n\nI ran the other way, across the ferry landing and the fishing dock, toward the hill, on top of which sat the restaurant, and my car.\n\nThe huff of my own exhausted breath, pounding of blood in my ears, squall of a gull and shush of the surf below\u2014all were overtaken by the squeal of the giant's wheels: His Contour scraped into the restaurant lot just as I got my key into the ignition. His car barreled toward mine. The cliff was near enough that he might push me off. I revved into reverse and jerked my car backward out of his path and he skidded sideways to stop, nearly slamming into the nearest of the parked pickup trucks. I floored it and beat him back out of the lot, down onto Route 1, pointed south. The giant fell in right behind me. In my rearview I saw him bearing down, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a gun.\n\nMinna and Tony\u2014I'd let them both be gently escorted to their quiet murderings. Mine looked to be a little noisier.\n\nI screwed the steering wheel to the left, twitching myself off the highway toward the ferry dock. The giant wasn't fooled. He hung right on my bumper, as if the red compact were as correspondingly huge as his body and could climb over or engulf my Tracer. I veered right and left, contacting the ragged edges of the paved road to the dock in some half-symbolic finger-wagging or shooing maneuver, trying to dislodge the giant from my tail, but he matched my every vehicular gesture, Contour on Tracer now. Pavement gave way to gravel and I ground braking and sliding to the right to avoid riding straight up onto the dock and into the water. Instead I steered for the ferry's parking area, where Tony's Pontiac still sat, where the gun he hadn't gotten to use on the giant still waited under the driver's seat.\n\n_Gottagettagun_ , screamed my brain, and my lips moved trying to keep up with the chant: _Gottagettagun gottagettagun_.\n\nGun Gun Gun _Shoot!_\n\nI'd never fired a gun.\n\nI broke through the entrance, snapping the flimsy gate back on its post. The giant's car chewed on my bumper, the metal squeaking and sighing. Exactly how I would find breathing room enough to get out of my car and into Tony's to lay hands on the gun remained to be seen. I curled past Tony's car, to the left, opening a moment's gap between me and my pursuer, and rode for the rock barrier. Shreds of the torn file still fluttered here and there in the wind. Maybe the giant would do me the favor of plummeting into the sea. Maybe he hadn't gotten around to noticing it\u2014since it was only the Atlantic it might not have been big enough to make an impression.\n\nHe caught me again as I turned the other way to avoid a swim myself, and veered with me around the outer perimeter of the lot. DON'T BACK UP! SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE! shouted the signs at the exit, warning of the one-way spikes meant to prevent free use of the lot. Well, I'd gotten around that one. The giant's car made contact again, rammed me so we both slid off to the left, toward the exit, away from Tony's car.\n\nSuddenly inspired, I darted for the exit.\n\nI hit the brake as hard as I could as I passed over the flexible spikes, came shrieking and skidding to a halt about a car's length past the grate. The giant's car smashed against my rear end so that my car was driven another couple of yards forward and I was slapped back against the seat, hard. I felt something in my neck click and tasted blood in my mouth.\n\nThe first blast was the giant's air bag inflating. In my rearview I saw a white satin blob now filling the interior of the Contour.\n\nThe second blast was the giant's gun firing as he panicked or his fingers clenched around the trigger in traumatic reflex. The glass of his windshield splintered. I don't know where the shot went, but it found some target other than my body. I shifted into reverse and floored the gas pedal.\n\nAnd plowed the giant's car backward toward the spikes.\n\nI heard his rear tires pop, then hiss. The giant's rear end slumped, his tires lanced on the spikes.\n\nFor a moment I heard only the hiss of escaping air, then a gull screamed, and I made a sound to answer it, a scream of pain in the form of a birdcall.\n\nI shook my head, glanced in the mirror. The giant's air bag was sagging slowly, silently. Perhaps it had been pierced by the bullet. There wasn't any sign of motion underneath.\n\nI shifted into first, swerved forward and left, then reversed into the giant's car again, crumpling the metal along the driver's-side door, deforming the contour of the Contour, wrinkling it like foil, hearing it creak and groan at being reshaped.\n\nI might have stopped then. I believed the giant was unconscious under the air bag. He was at least silent and still, not firing his gun, not struggling to free himself.\n\nBut I felt the wild call of symmetry: His car ought to be crumpled on both sides. I needed to maul both of the Contour's shoulders. I rolled forward and into position, then backed and crashed against his car once more, wrecking it on the passenger side as I had on the driver's.\n\nIt's a Tourette's thing\u2014you wouldn't understand.\n\nI moved the map and cell phone to Tony's Pontiac. The keys were still in the ignition. I drove it out of the lot through the smashed entrance gate, and steered past the vacant ferry landing, up to Route 1. Apparently no one had heard the collisions or gunshot in the lot by the sea. Foible hadn't even poked out of his shack.\n\nFriendship Head was an outcropping on the coast twelve miles north of Musconguspoint Station. The lighthouse was painted red and white, no atrocity of Buddhist earth tones like the restaurant. I trusted that the Scientologists hadn't gotten to it either. I parked the Pontiac as close to the water as I could and sat staring out for a while, feeling the place where I'd bitten my tongue slowly seal and testing out the damage to my neck. Free movement of my neck was crucial to my Tourettic career. I was like an athlete in that regard. But it felt like whiplash, nothing worse. I was chilled and tired, the replenishing effects of the lemongrass broth long since gone, and I could still feel my head throb in the place the giant had clubbed it twenty-four hours and a million years ago. But I was alive, and the water looked pretty good as the angle of the light grew steeper. I was half an hour early for my date with Julia.\n\nI dialed the local police and told them about the sleeping giant they'd find back at the Muscongus Island ferry.\n\n\"He might be in bad shape but I think he's still alive,\" I told them. \"You'll probably need the Jaws of Life to pull him out.\"\n\n\"Can you give us your name, sir?\"\n\n\"No, I really can't,\" I said. They'd never know how true it was. \"My name doesn't matter. You'll find the wallet of the man he killed in the water near the ferry. The body's more likely to wash up on the island.\"\n\nIs guilt a species of Tourette's? Maybe. It has a touchy quality, I think, a hint of sweaty fingers. Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten, and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.\n\nGuilt, like Tourette's, tries again, learns nothing.\n\nAnd the guilty soul, like the Tourettic, wears a kind of clown face\u2014the Smokey Robinson kind, with tear tracks underneath.\n\nI called the New Jersey number.\n\n\"Tony's dead,\" I told them.\n\n\"This is a terrible thing\u2014\" Matricardi started.\n\n\"Yeah, yeah, terrible,\" I said, interrupting. I was in no mood. Really no mood at all. The minute I heard Matricardi's voice, I was something worse or less than human, not simply sorrowful or angry or ticcish or lonely, certainly not moody at all, but raging with purpose. I was an arrow to pierce through years. \"Listen carefully to me now,\" I said. \"Frank and Tony are gone.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Matricardi, already seeming to understand.\n\n\"I've got something you want and then that's the end of it.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"That's the end of it, we're not bound to you any longer.\"\n\n\"Who is we? Who is speaking?\"\n\n\"L and L.\"\n\n\"There's a meaning to saying L and L when Frank is departed, and now Tony? What is it to speak of L and L?\"\n\n\"That's our business.\"\n\n\"So what is this thing you have we want?\"\n\n\"Gerard Minna lives on East Eighty-fourth Street, in a Zendo. Under another name. He's responsible for Frank's death.\"\n\n\"Zendo?\"\n\n\"A Japanese church.\"\n\nThere was a long silence.\n\n\"This is not what we expected from you, Lionel.\"\n\nI didn't speak.\n\n\"But you are correct that it is of interest to us.\"\n\nI didn't speak.\n\n\"We will respect your wishes.\"\n\nGuilt I knew something about. Vengeance was another story entirely.\n\nI'd have to think about vengeance.\n\n# FORMERLY KNOWN\n\nThere once was a girl from Nantucket.\n\nNo, really, that's where she was from.\n\nHer mother and father were hippies and so she was a little hippie child. Her father wasn't always there on Nantucket with the family. When he was there he didn't stay long, and over time the visits grew both briefer and less frequent.\n\nThe girl used to listen to tapes her father would leave behind, the Alan Watts Lecture Series, an introduction to Eastern thought for Americans in the form of a series of rambling, humorous monologues. After the girl's father stopped coming at all, the girl would confuse her memories of her father with the charming man whose voice she heard on the tapes.\n\nWhen the girl got older she sorted this out, but she'd listened to Alan Watts hundreds of times by then.\n\nWhen the girl turned eighteen she went to college in Boston, to an art school that was part of a museum. She hated the school and the other students there, hated pretending she was an artist, and after two years she dropped out.\n\nFirst she went back to Nantucket for a little while, but the girl's mother had moved in with a man the girl didn't like, and Nantucket is, after all, an island. So she went back to Boston. There she found a lousy job as a waitress in a student dive, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from customers and co-workers. At night she'd take yoga classes and attend Zen meetings in the basement of a local YWCA, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from instructors and other students. The girl decided she didn't hate only school, she hated Boston.\n\nA year or so later she visited a Zen retreat center on the coast of Maine. It was a place of striking beauty and, apart from the frantic summer months when the town became a resort for wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers, splendid isolation. It reminded her of Nantucket, the things she missed there. She quickly arranged to study at the center full-time, and to support herself she took a job waitressing at the seafood restaurant next door, which at that time was a traditional Maine lobster pound.\n\nIt was there the girl met the two brothers.\n\nThe older brother first, during a series of short visits to the retreat with his friend. The friend had some experience with Buddhism, the older brother none, but they were both a disconcerting presence there in placid Maine\u2014vibrant with impatience and a hostile sort of urban humor, yet humble and sincere in their fledgling approach to Zen practice. The older brother was solicitous and flattering to the girl when they were introduced. He was a talker like none she'd never met, except perhaps on the Alan Watts lecture tapes, which still shaped her yearnings so powerfully\u2014but the older brother was no Watts. His stories were of ethnic Brooklyn, of petty mobsters and comic scams, and some of them had a violent finish. With his talk he made this world seem as near and real to her as it was actually distant. In some way Brooklyn, where she'd never been, became a romantic ideal, something truer and finer than the city life she'd glimpsed in Boston.\n\nThe girl and the older brother were lovers after a while.\n\nThe older brother's visits grew both briefer and less frequent.\n\nThen one day the older brother returned, in an Impala filled with paper shopping bags stuffed full of his clothes and with his younger brother in tow. After a sizable donation to the Zen center's petty-cash fund the two men moved into rooms in the retreat center, rooms that were out of sight of the coastal highway. The next day the older brother drove the Impala off and returned with a pickup truck, with Maine plates.\n\nNow whenever the girl tried to visit the older brother in his room, he turned her away. This persisted for a few weeks before she began to accept the change. The lovemaking and talk of Brooklyn were over between them. It was only then that the younger brother came into focus for the girl.\n\nThe younger brother wasn't a student of Zen. He'd also never been out of New York City until his arrival in Maine, and it was a destination as mysterious and absurd to him as he was mysterious and absurd to her. To the girl the younger brother seemed an embodiment of the stories of Brooklyn the older brother had entranced her with. He was a talker, too, but rootless, chaotic in the stories he told. His talk entirely lacked the posture of distance and bemusement, the gloss of Zen perspective that characterized the older brother's tales. Instead, though they sat together on the Maine beaches, huddling together in the wind, he seemed still to inhabit the streets he described.\n\nThe older brother read Krishnamurti and Watts and Trungpa, while the younger read Spillane and Chandler and Ross MacDonald, often aloud to the girl, and it was in the MacDonald especially that the girl heard something that taught her about a part of herself not covered by Nantucket or Zen or the bit she'd learned in college.\n\nThe younger brother and the girl became lovers after a while.\n\nAnd the younger brother did what the older would never have done: He explained to the girl the situation that had driven the two brothers out of Brooklyn, to come and seek refuge in the Zen center. The brothers had been acting as liaisons between two aging Brooklyn mobsters and a group of suburban Westchester and New Jersey bandits who hijacked trucks on small highways into New York City. The aging mobsters were in the business of redistributing the goods seized by the truck pirates, and it was a business that was profitable for everyone associated with it. The brothers had made it more profitable for themselves than they should have, though. They found a place to warehouse a percentage of the goods, and a fence to take the goods off their hands. When the two mobsters discovered the betrayal, they decided to kill the brothers.\n\nHence, Maine.\n\nThe younger brother did another thing his older brother might never have done: He fell in love with the strange angry girl from Nantucket. And one day in the flush of this love he explained to her his great dream: He was going to open a detective agency.\n\nThe older brother in the meantime had grown distant from them both, and more deeply and sincerely involved in Zen practice. In the manner of so many spiritual practitioners past and present he seemed to draw away from the world of material concerns, to grow tolerant and wry but also a little chilly in his regard for the people and things he'd left behind.\n\nWhen the younger brother and the girl were away from the retreat center they'd refer to the older brother as \"Rama-lama-ding-dong.\" Before too long they even began to call him that to his face.\n\nOne day the younger brother tried to telephone his mother and found that she'd been taken to the hospital. He conferred with his older brother; the girl overheard some of their bitter, fearful conversations. The older brother was persuaded that their mother's hospitalization had been arranged as a trap to lure them back to Brooklyn for their punishment. The younger disagreed. The next day he bought a car and loaded it with his belongings, and announced he was going back to the city. He invited the girl to join him, though he warned her of the possible danger.\n\nShe considered her life at the retreat, which had grown as close and predictable around her as an island, and she considered the younger brother and the prospect of Brooklyn, his Brooklyn, of living there by his side. She agreed to leave Maine.\n\nOn the way they were married in Albany, by a justice of the peace at the state capital. The younger brother wanted to surprise and please his mother, and perhaps also wished to offer some excuse for his long disappearance. He took the girl shopping for clothes in Manhattan before they crossed the famous bridge into Brooklyn, and then, as an afterthought, he brought her to a salon on Montague Street, where they bleached her dark hair to platinum blond. It was as though she were the one who should be in disguise here.\n\nThe mother's sickness wasn't a trap. She was dead of a stroke by the time the younger brother and his new wife reached the hospital. But it was also true that the mobsters were aware of everything that happened in the neighborhood and were watching the hospital closely. When the younger brother was spotted there, it wasn't long before he was brought in to answer for his and his brother's misdeeds.\n\nHe begged for his life. He explained that he'd just gotten married.\n\nHe also blamed his brother for the crimes they'd both committed. He claimed to have lost touch with his brother completely.\n\nHe ended by promising to spend his life in service as the gangsters' errand boy.\n\nOn that condition his apology was accepted by the gangsters. They permitted him to live, though they swore again a vow of death against the older brother, and made the younger promise that he'd turn his brother in if and when he reappeared.\n\nThe younger brother moved his new wife into his mother's old apartment and the woman from Nantucket began her adjustment to life in Brooklyn. What she encountered was first intoxicating and frightening, then disenchanting. Her husband was a small-time operator, his \"agents,\" as he called them, a motley gang of high-school-dropout orphans. For a while he installed her as a secretary in a friend's law office, where she worked as a notary public, humiliatingly on view in a shop window out on Court Street. When she protested, he allowed her to recede into privacy in the apartment. The old gangsters paid the couple's rent anyway, and most of the younger brother's detective work was on their behalf. The woman from Nantucket didn't like what passed for detective work in Brooklyn. She wished he genuinely ran a car service. Their married life was chilly and glancing, full of unexplained absences and omissions, no walk on the beach. In time she began to understand that there were other women, too, old high-school girlfriends and distant cousins who'd never left the neighborhood and never really been very far from the younger brother's bed either.\n\nThe woman from Nantucket survived, found occasional lovers herself, and spent most of her days in the movie theaters on Court and Henry streets, shopping in Brooklyn Heights, drinking in the hotel lobbies there and then taking slow walks on the Promenade, where she fended off an endless series of advances from college boys and lunch-hour husbands, spent her days any way except musing on the serene rural life she'd left behind in Maine, the faint uncontroversial satisfactions she'd known before she'd met the two brothers and been taken to Brooklyn.\n\nOne day the younger brother told his wife a dire secret, which she had to be sure to keep from leaking to anyone in Brooklyn, lest it reach the ears of the gangsters: The older brother had returned to New York City. He'd declared himself a roshi, an elder teacher of Zen, and started a Zendo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in Yorkville. This Yorkville Zendo was subsidized by a powerful group of Japanese businessmen he'd met in Maine, where they'd taken over and renovated top to bottom the homely Zen center and the lobster pound next door: the Fujisaki Corporation.\n\nThe men of Fujisaki were highly spiritual, but had found themselves in disrepute in their native country, where monkhood is reserved only for those born into certain esteemed bloodlines, and where capitalistic rapaciousness and spiritual devotion are viewed as mutually exclusive. Money and power, it seemed, couldn't buy Fujisaki the precise sort of respect its members craved at home. Here, first in Maine, now in New York City, they would make themselves credible as penitents and teachers, men of wisdom and peace. In the process, as the older brother explained to the younger, the younger then to his wife, the men of Fujisaki and the older brother hoped to do a little \"business.\" New York City: land of opportunity for monks and crooks and mooks alike.\n\nWe stood at the rail at the sea edge of the lighthouse tower, looking out. The wind was still strong, but I was used to it now. I had my collar up, the way Frank Minna would. The sky out past the island was gray and uninspiring, but there was a nice line of light where it met the water, an edge I could work with my eyes like a seam of stitching between my fingers. The birds harassed the foam below, looking for urchin, perhaps, or discarded hot-dog ends among the rocks.\n\nI had Tony's gun in my jacket, and from this vantage we could see for miles down Route 1 in both directions should anyone approach. I had a strong urge to protect Julia, to hold her or cover her with my presence, so as to feel that I'd helped someone safely through besides myself. But I doubted that the Fujisaki Corporation cared about me or Julia directly. She and I each had been part of Gerard Minna's problem, not Fujisaki's. And Julia showed no interest in my protective urges.\n\n\"I know what happened next,\" I told her. \"Eventually the brothers dipped into the till again. Frank got involved in a scam to siphon money away from Fujisaki's management company.\" That part of what Gerard told me wasn't a lie, I understood now, just an artfully mangled version of the truth. Gerard had been leaving himself out of it, playing the Zen innocent, when in fact he was the wheel's hub. \"With a bookkeeper named\u2014 _Dullbody, Allmoney, Alimony_ \u2014ah, a guy named Ullman.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Julia.\n\nShe'd been talking in a kind of trance, not needing me to prompt her more than once in a while. As the narrative got nearer the present day her eyes grew clearer, her gaze less transfixed on the distant island, and her voice grew heavier with resentment. I felt I was losing her to bitterness, and I wanted to draw her back. Protect her from herself if there was no other threat.\n\n\"So Frank was hiding the secret of his brother's existence from The Clients,\" I said. \"Meanwhile the two of them are running a number on Gerard's Japanese partners. And then the deal goes\u2014 _lemongrass, sour-ball, fuckitall!\"_ I was unable to continue until I made a farting, fricative sound into the wind\u2014\"blew a raspberry,\" in the parlance\u2014to satisfy the expulsive tic. Bits of saliva spattered back into my face. \"Then Fujisaki figured out someone was taking their money,\" I said finally, wiping at myself with my sleeve.\n\nShe looked at me with disgust. I'd drawn her back, in a way. \"Yes,\" she said.\n\n\"And Gerard fingered\u2014 _Mr. Fingerphone! Uncle Sourgrass!_ \u2014Gerard fingered Frank and Ullman to save himself.\"\n\n\"That's what Tony thought,\" she said, distant again.\n\n\"Fujisaki must have told Gerard to take care of it, as a show of good faith. So Gerard hired the killer.\"\n\nWhich was where I, innocent stooge, had walked into the story. Frank Minna had installed me and Gilbert there outside the Zendo two days before because he smelled a rat, didn't trust Gerard, and wanted some backup on the street. Warm bodies. If something went wrong he'd bring me and Gilbert up to speed, let us in on the scam, or so he must have thought. And if things went smoothly, it was better to keep us where we'd always been, were born to be\u2014in the dark.\n\n\"You know more about it than me,\" said Julia. She grew agitated now, her storyteller's reverie dissipated, the talk turning to a killer's hiring and all that went with it unsaid. I had to turn away myself now, imitate her pensive searching of the horizon, though my fingers danced idiotically on the lighthouse tower rail, counting one-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five. I'd grown more accustomed to her short new haircut, but those eyes of hers had blazed so long from behind a curtain of hair that without that curtain they blazed too hard. I was drawn and repelled at once, antic with ambivalence. Now I understood that when Frank showed her to us at the end of high school, she was only five or six years older than we were, though it seemed he'd plucked a woman off a fading movie poster. How Nantucket and Buddhism could have made her so old and fierce, I couldn't fathom. I suppose Frank himself had made her old in a hurry, in ways he'd intended, with panty hose and peroxide and sarcasm\u2014and ways he hadn't.\n\n\"Let me work out the next part,\" I said. I felt as if I were trying to get through a joke without ticcing, but there wasn't a punch line in sight. \"After Frank and Ullman were gone, Gerard had to make sure he eliminated any link between himself and Frank Minna. That meant you and Tony.\"\n\nGerard, I surmised, had been in a panic, afraid of Fujisaki and The Clients both. By having his brother killed he'd damaged a delicate system of controls, one that had kept him safe from Matricardi and Rockaforte for more than a decade. And Fujisaki had announced a visit to New York to inspect their holdings, to enact a little hands-on management (albeit disguised as monks), right as Gerard was frantically trying to mop up the mess. Perhaps they'd also wanted to see Gerard mop up the mess, wanted to feel him squirm a little.\n\nGerard had reasoned rightly that if Frank confided in anyone it would be his wife and his right-hand man, his groomed successor. Which was to say, Tony. This last part still came a little hard for me. That Tony had paid with his life for being Frank's intimate was a lousy excuse for consolation.\n\n\"It was Gerard who called to say that Frank was dead,\" I suggested. \"Not the hospital.\"\n\nShe turned and looked at me with her teeth gritted, tears making glossy tracks on her face. \"Very good, Lionel,\" she whispered. I reached for her cheeks to blot her tears with my sleeve, but she darted back, uninterested in my care.\n\n\"But you didn't trust him, so you ran.\"\n\n\"Don't be an idiot, Lionel,\" she said, her voice vibrant with hate. \"Why would I come here if I were hiding from _Gerard_?\"\n\n_\"Idiot Dressfork! Alphabet Tuningfreak!\"_ I cleared the tic with a jerk of my stiff neck. \"I don't understand,\" I told her.\n\n\"He arranged for me to use this as a safe house. He said the people who killed Frank were looking for the rest of us. I trusted him.\"\n\nI began to see. Lucius Seminole had said that Julia's records showed a series of visits to Boston. \"This was your hideaway when you got angry at Frank,\" I suggested. \"Your retreat into the past.\"\n\n\"I wasn't hiding.\"\n\n\"Did Frank know that you and Gerard were in touch?\"\n\n\"He didn't care.\"\n\n\"Were you and Gerard still lovers?\"\n\n\"Only when his _... spiritual path_ allowed it.\" She spat the words. The tears had dried on her face.\n\n\"When did you figure out the truth?\"\n\n\"I called Tony. We compared notes. Gerard underestimated what Tony knew.\"\n\nWhat Tony knew was the least of it, I thought. Tony meant to take over Frank Minna's share of the Fujisaki scam, not knowing that nothing remained to take over. He wanted that and much more. As I ached always to be a virtuous detective, Tony ached to be a corrupt one, or even to be an out-and-out wiseguy. He'd been fitting himself for the darkest shoes in Frank Minna's wardrobe from the moment he learned they existed, perhaps on that day when we unloaded the guitars and amplifiers and were introduced to Matricardi and Rockaforte, perhaps even sooner, on some uglier errand only he and Frank knew about. Certainly he understood by the time Frank's van windows had been smashed. His special glee that day was at having his Mafioso fantasies confirmed, as well as at seeing Frank Minna's vulnerability for the first time. If Frank's fortunes could rise and fall, that episode said, then power was fluid, and so Tony might someday have a share of it himself. The moment Frank was dead Tony envisioned himself playing Frank on both stages, for The Clients in Brooklyn and for Gerard and the Fujisaki Corporation up in Yorkville, only playing the part with greater efficiency and brutality, without Frank Minna's goofy edges, those soft places that caused him to collect freaks like me or that finally led him astray.\n\nGerard's picture of Tony was another part of that convoluted after-hours story that hadn't been entirely a lie. I suppose Gerard couldn't be the many things he was without knowing how to x-ray a mind like Tony's at a single glance.\n\n\"You and Tony compared more than notes, Julia.\" I regretted it the minute I said it.\n\nShe looked at me with pity now.\n\n\"So I fucked him.\" She took out a cigarette and lighter from her purse. \"I fucked a lot of guys, Lionel. I fucked Tony and Danny, even Gilbert once. Everyone except you. It's no big deal.\" She put the cigarette in her lips and cupped her hands against the wind.\n\n\"Maybe it was to Tony,\" I said, and regretted it even worse.\n\nShe only shrugged, worked the lighter uselessly again and again. Cars whirred past on the highway below, but nobody stopped at the lighthouse. We were alone in our torment and shame, and useless to each other.\n\nIt might not have been a big deal to Julia that she fucked the Minna Men, the Minna Boys, really, and maybe it was no big deal to Tony either\u2014but I doubted it. _You were the original woman_ , I wanted to tell her. When Minna brought you home to us we tried to learn what it meant for Frank to marry, we studied you to understand what a Minna Woman might be, and saw only rage\u2014rage I now understood had concealed disappointment and fear, oceans of fear. We had watched women and letters soar past before, but you were the first that was addressed to us, and we tried to understand you. And we loved you.\n\nI needed to rescue Julia now, retrieve her from this lighthouse and the bareness of her story against the Maine sky. I needed her to see that we were the same, disappointed lovers of Frank Minna, abandoned children.\n\n\"We're almost the same age, Julia,\" I said lamely. \"I mean, you and me, we were teenagers at pretty much the same time.\" She looked at me blankly.\n\n\"I met a woman, Julia. Because of this case. She's like you in certain ways. She studies Zen, just like you did when you met Frank.\"\n\n\"No woman will ever want you, Lionel.\"\n\n_\"WantmeBailey!\"_\n\nIt was a classic tic, honest and clean. Nothing about Maine or Julia Minna or my profound exhaustion could get in the way of a good, clean, throat-wrenching tic. My maker in his infinite wisdom had provided me with that.\n\nI tried not to listen to what Julia was saying, to focus on the far-off squalling of gulls and splash of surf instead.\n\n\"That's not really true,\" she went on. \"They might want you. I've wanted you a little bit myself. But they'll never be fair to you, Lionel. Because you're such a freak.\"\n\n\"This person is different,\" I said. \"She's different from anyone I've ever met.\" But now I was losing my point. If I made the distinction between Julia and Kimmery plain to Julia, to myself\u2014 _she's not as mean as you, could never be so mean_ \u2014I would only be sorry I'd spoken at all.\n\n\"Well, I bet you're different for her, too. I'm sure you'll be very happy together.\" In her mouth the words _happy together_ came out twisted and harsh.\n\n_Crappy however_.\n\n_Slappy forget her_.\n\nI wanted to call Kimmery now, wanted to so badly my fingers located the cell phone in my jacket pocket and began to fondle it.\n\n\"Why was Tony coming to Maine?\" I asked, running for cover back to the plot we'd begun spinning together, which suddenly seemed to have little or nothing to do with our miserable fates, our miserable lives exposed out here in the wind. \"Why didn't you just get away from here? You knew Gerard might kill you.\"\n\n\"I heard Fujisaki was flying up here today.\" Again she struck with the lighter against her cigarette, as if it were going to ignite like a flint against a rock. It wasn't just the wind she was fighting now. Her hands trembled, and the cigarette trembled where she held it in her lips. \"Tony and I were going to tell them about Gerard. He was going to bring some proof. Then you got in the way.\"\n\n\"It wasn't me that stopped Tony from keeping the date.\" I was distracted by the phone in my pocket, the prospect of Kimmery's soothing voice, even if it were only the outgoing message on her machine. \"Gerard sent his giant after Tony,\" I went on. \"He followed Tony up here, maybe figuring to take out two birds with one flick of his big finger.\"\n\n\"Gerard didn't want me killed,\" she said quietly. Her hands had fallen to her sides. \"He wanted me back.\" She was trying to make it so by saying it, but the words themselves were nearly lost in the wind. Julia threatened to recede into the distance again, and this time I knew I wouldn't bother trying to bring her back.\n\n\"Is that why he had his brother killed? Jealousy?\"\n\n\"Does it have to be one thing? He probably figured it was him or Frank.\" The cigarette still dangled in her mouth. \"Fujisaki required a sacrifice. They're great believers in that.\"\n\n\"Did you talk to Fujisaki just now?\"\n\n\"Men like that don't cut deals with waitresses, Lionel.\"\n\n\"It's rotten for Tony the killer found him before he found Fujisaki,\" I said. \"But it won't save Gerard. I made sure of that.\" I didn't want to elaborate.\n\n\"So you say.\" She paced away from the railing, gripping the lighter so tightly I expected her to crush it. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"Just that I'm not acquainted with this giant killer you keep talking about. Are you sure you're not imagining things?\" She turned and handed me the lighter, plucked the cigarette from her lips and held it out. \"Would you light this for me, Lionel?\" I heard a weird vibration in her voice, as though she were about to cry again, but without the anger this time, maybe begin to mourn Minna at last. I took them away from her, put the cigarette in my own lips, and turned my back to the wind.\n\nBy the time I had it lit she'd taken her gun from her purse.\n\nI put up my hands instinctively, dropping the lighter, to make a pose of surrender but also of self-protection, as though I might deflect a bullet with Frank's watch like Wonder Woman with her magic wristbands. Julia held the gun easily, its muzzle directed at my navel, and now her eyes were as gray and hard to read as the farthest reaches of the Maine horizon.\n\nI felt jets of acid fire in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if I would ever get used to facing gunpoint, and then I wondered if that was really anything to aspire to. I wanted to tic just for the hell of it, but at the moment I couldn't think of anything.\n\n\"I just remembered something Frank once said about you, Lionel.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" I slowly lowered one hand and offered her the lit cigarette, but she shook her head. I dropped it on the lighthouse deck and ground it under my shoe instead.\n\n\"He said the reason you were useful to him was because you were crazy everyone thought you were stupid.\"\n\n\"I'm familiar with the theory.\"\n\n\"I think I made the same mistake,\" she said. \"And so did Tony, and Frank before that. Everywhere you go, somebody who Gerard wants dead is made dead. I don't want to be next.\"\n\n\"You think I killed Frank?\"\n\n\"You said we're the same age, Lionel. You ever watch _Sesame Street?\"_ she said.\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"You remember the Snuffleupagus?\"\n\n\"Big Bird's friend.\"\n\n\"Right, only nobody could see him except Big Bird. I think the giant's your Snuffleupagus, Lionel.\"\n\n_\"Shockadopalus! Fuckalotofus!_ The giant is real, Julia. Put the gun away.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Step back, Lionel.\"\n\nI stepped back, but I pulled out Tony's gun as I did it. I saw Julia's fingers tighten as I raised it to her, but she didn't fire, and neither did I.\n\nWe faced one another on the lighthouse rail, the vast sky dimming everywhere and perfectly useless to us, the ocean's depths useless, too. The two guns drew us close together and rendered the rest irrelevant\u2014we might as well have been in a dingy motel room, with an image of Maine playing on the television set. My moment had come at last. I had a gun in my hands. That it was trained not on Gerard or the giant or Tony or a doorman but on the girl from Nantucket who'd grown into Frank Minna's bruise-eyed widow, who'd chopped off her hair and tried to retreat to her waitress past and instead been cornered by that same past, by Gerard and the giant and Tony\u2014I tried not to let it bother me. I'd been wrong, Julia and I had nothing in common. We were just any two people who happened to be pointing guns at one another now. And Tony's gun had object properties all its own, not a fork nor a toothbrush but something much weightier and more seductive. I slipped off the safety with my thumb.\n\n\"I understand your mistake, Julia, but I'm not the killer.\"\n\nShe had both hands on the gun, and it didn't waver. \"Why should I trust you?\"\n\n_\"TRUST ME BAILEY!\"_ I had to scream it into the sky. I turned my head, bargaining with my Tourette's that I could let the one phrase fly and then be done. I tasted salt air as I screamed.\n\n\"Don't scare me, Lionel. I might shoot you.\"\n\n\"We've both got that same problem, Julia.\" In fact my syndrome had just discovered the prospect of the gun, and I began to obsess on pulling the trigger. I suspected that if I fired a shot out into the sky in the manner of my verbal exclamation, I might not survive the experience. But I didn't want to shoot Julia. I flicked on the safety, hoped she didn't notice.\n\n\"Where do we go from here?\" she said.\n\n\"We go home, Julia,\" I said. \"I'm sorry about Frank and Tony, but the story's over. You and me, we made it through alive.\"\n\nIt was only a slight exaggeration. The story would be over at some secret moment in the next few hours or days when something found Gerard Minna, a bullet or blade that had been searching for him for almost twenty years.\n\nMeanwhile, I flicked the safety back and forth, impelled, counting. At five I stopped, temporarily satisfied. That left the safety off, the gun ready to shoot. My fingers were unbearably curious about the trigger's action, its resistance and weight.\n\n\"Where's your home, Lionel? Upstairs from L and L?\"\n\n_\"Saint Vengeance Home for Bailey,\"_ I ticced.\n\n\"Is that what you call it?\" said Julia.\n\nBefore my finger could pulse on the trigger the way it craved to I flung the gun out toward the ocean with all the force of my overwound-watchspring body. It sailed out past the rocks, but the tiny splash of its disappearance into the sea was lost in the wind and the ambient crash of the surf.\n\n_One_ , I counted.\n\nBefore Julia could calculate the meaning of my action I darted as if for an elusive shoulder and grabbed the muzzle of her gun, then twisted it out of her hand and hurled with all the strength in my legs, like a center fielder deep at the wall straining for a distant cutoff man. Julia's gun went farther than Tony's, out to where the waves that would reach the rocks were just taking shape, the sea curling, discovering its form.\n\nThat made _two_.\n\n\"Don't hurt me, Lionel.\" She backed away, her shocked eyes framed by the bristly halo of her crew cut, her mouth crooked with fear and fury.\n\n\"It's over, Julia. Nobody's going to hurt you.\" I couldn't concentrate on her fully, needing something more to throw into the sea. I pulled Minna's beeper out of my pocket. It was a tool of The Clients, evidence of their hold on Frank, and it deserved to be interred with the guns. I threw it as far as I could, but it didn't have enough heft to keep from being knocked down by the wind, and so trickled down between two wet, mossy boulders.\n\n_Three_.\n\nNext I found the cell phone. The instant it came into my hand, Kimmery's number begged for dialing. I pushed the impulse aside, substituted the gratification of flinging it off the lighthouse deck, picturing the doormen in the rental car who I'd taken it from. It flew truer than the beeper, made it out to the water.\n\n_Four_.\n\n\"Give me something to throw,\" I told Julia.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I need something, one more thing.\"\n\n\"You're crazy.\"\n\nI considered Frank's watch. I was sentimental about the watch. It had no taint of doormen or Clients.\n\n\"Give me something,\" I said again. \"Look in your purse.\"\n\n\"Go to hell, Lionel.\"\n\nJulia had always been the hardest-boiled of us all, it struck me now. We who were from Brooklyn, we jerks from nowhere\u2014or from somewhere, in the case of Frank and Gerard. We couldn't hold a candle to the girl from Nantucket and I thought I might finally understand why. She was the hardest-boiled because she was the unhappiest. She was maybe the unhappiest person I'd ever met.\n\nI suppose losing Frank Minna, hard as it was, was easier for those of us who'd actually had him, actually felt his love. The thing Julia lost she'd never possessed in the first place.\n\nBut her pain was no longer my concern.\n\n_You choose your battles_ , Frank Minna used to say, though the term was hardly original to him.\n\nYou also distance yourself from cruelty, if you have any brains. I was developing a few.\n\nI took off my right shoe, felt the polished leather that had served me well, the fine stitching and the fraying lace, kissed it good-bye on the top of the tongue, then threw it high and far and watched it splash silently into the waves.\n\n_Five_ , I thought.\n\nBut who's counting?\n\n\"Good-bye, Julia,\" I said.\n\n\"Screw you, you maniac.\" She knelt and picked up her lighter, and this time she got her cigarette lit on the first flick. \"Barnabaileyscrewjuliaminna.\"\n\nIt was my final word on the subject.\n\nSo I drove with my gas-pedal-and-brake foot clad only in a dress sock, back to Brooklyn.\n\n# GOOD SANDWICHES\n\nThen somewhere, sometime, a circuit closed. It was a secret from me, but I knew the secret existed. A man\u2014two men?\u2014found another man. Lifted an instrument, gun, knife? Say gun. Did a job. Took care of a job. Collected a debt of life. This was the finishing of something between two brothers, a transaction of brotherly love-hate, something playing out, a dark, wobbly melody. The notes of the melody had been other people, boys\u2013turned\u2013Minna Men, mobsters, monks, doormen. And women, one woman especially. We'd all been notes in the melody, but the point of the song was the brothers, and the payoff, the last note struck\u2014a scream? a bloody beat? a bare interrupted moan?\u2014or not even a moan, perhaps. In my guilt I'd like to think so. Let it finish in silence. Let it be, then, that Rama-lama-ding-dong died in his sleep.\n\nWe sat together in the L&L storefront at two in the morning, playing poker on the counter, listening to Boyz 2 Men, courtesy of Danny. Now that Frank and Tony were gone, Danny could play the sort of music he liked. It was one of a number of changes.\n\n\"One card,\" said Gilbert. I was the dealer, so I slid his discard toward me and offered him a fresh selection from the top of the deck.\n\n\"Jesus, Gil,\" said the ex\u2013Garbage Cop. He was a driver now, a part of the new L&L. \"You're always _one card_ or _no cards_ \u2014why can't I get dealt anything but crap?\"\n\n\"That's 'cause you're still in charge of garbage, Loomis,\" said Gilbert happily. \"Even though you quit the force, doesn't matter. Someone's gotta handle it.\"\n\n_\"Handle with garbagecrap!\"_ I declared as I dealt myself three new cards.\n\nGilbert had been released two weeks before, after five nights in the lockup, for want of evidence in Ullman's killing. Detective Seminole had called us to apologize, excessively sheepish, I thought, as though he were still a little afraid. Gilbert's size and manner had carried him through the ordeal pretty well, though he came out short a wrist-watch and had involuntarily given up smoking during his stay, having been connived out of every cigarette on his person. He was making up for it now in cigarettes, and in beer and coffee and Sno Balls and White Castles and Zeod's pastrami heroes, but no flow of indulgences could be constant enough to stem his complaints at how we'd abandoned him. Fortunately he was winning hands tonight.\n\nDanny sat apart from the three of us, silent, eyebrows raised slightly between his poker hand and his new fedora. He sat a little farther apart and dressed a little sharper each passing night, or so it seemed to me. Leadership of L&L had fallen to him like an easy rebound, one he didn't even have to jump for, while the other players boxed and elbowed and sweated on the wrong part of the floor. What Danny knew or didn't know about Gerard and Fujisaki was never said. He took my account of the events in Maine and nodded once, and we were done speaking of it. It turned out it was that simple. Want to be the new Frank Minna? Dress the part, and shut up, and wait. Court Street will know you when it sees you. Zeod will put the tab in your name. Gilbert and Loomis and I couldn't have argued. We were Dapper and the Stooges, it was plain to the eye.\n\nL&L was a detective agency, a clean one for the first time. So clean we didn't have any clients. So we were also a car service, a real one now, one that didn't turn away calls unless we truly were out of cars. Danny was even having flyers printed up, and new business cards, boasting of our economy and efficiency to points all over the boroughs. The Lincoln Minna had bled to death inside was clean now too, part of a small fleet of cars making regular runs between the Cobble Hill Nursing Home on Henry Street and the Promenade Diner at the end of Montague, between the Boerum Hill Inn and stylish apartment buildings along Prospect Park West and Joralemon Street.\n\nAs a matter of fact, the Boerum Hill Inn had just closed for the night, and Siobhain was at the door, her eyes dark-circled and her posture rather crushed from the effort of tossing out the tenacious flirting crowd. Gilbert put up a finger to say he'd take the job of driving her home, but first wished to lay his poker hand on the table\u2014it appeared to be one he was particularly proud of. Seeing his recent enthusiasm for chaperoning Siobhain I suspected Gilbert had developed a little crush on her, or maybe it was an old crush he had just allowed to let show, now that Frank wasn't around to needle him constantly that she was playing for the other team.\n\n\"Come on, you suckers, I'm calling you,\" said Gilbert.\n\n\"Nothing,\" said Loomis, bugging his eyes at his hand, trying to embarrass the cards. \"Load of crap.\"\n\nDanny just frowned and shook his head, put his cards on the table. He didn't need poker triumphs just now, he had better things. For all we knew he was folding winning hands just to throw some glory Gilbert's way.\n\n_\"Forks and spoons,\"_ I said, slapping my hand down to show the card faces.\n\n\"Jacks and twos?\" Gilbert inspected my cards. \"That won't do it, Freakshow.\" He tossed down aces and eights. \"Read 'em and scream, like the maniac you are.\"\n\nAssertions are common to me, and they're also common to detectives. (\"About the only part of a California house you can't put your foot through is the front door\"\u2014Marlowe, _The Big Sleep.)_ And in detective stories things are always _always_ , the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary. Oh sure. Seen it before, will see it again. Trust me on this one.\n\nAssertions and generalizations are, of course, a version of Tourette's. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.\n\nHere's one more. As a great man once said, the more things change, the harder they are to change back.\n\nWithin a few days of Gerard's disappearance most of the Yorkville Zendo's students had trickled away. There was a real Zendo on the Upper East Side, twenty blocks south, and its ranks were swelled by defectors from Yorkville seeking truer essences (though, as Kimmery had pointed out, anyone who teaches Zen is a Zen teacher). Those bewildered doormen had all originally been authentic students of Gerard's, it turned out, rudderless seekers, human clay. It was their absolute susceptibility to Gerard's charismatic teachings that made them available to be exploited, first in the Park Avenue building, then as a gang of inept drivers and strong-arms when Gerard needed bodies to fill ranks alongside the Polish giant. Frank Minna had Minna Men while Gerard had only followers, Zen stooges, and that difference might have determined how the case worked out. That might have been my little edge. It pleased me to think so anyway.\n\nThe Yorkville Zendo didn't fold, though. Wallace, that stoic sitter, took over stewardship of what flock remained, though he declined to claim the title of Roshi for himself. Instead he asked to be called _sensei_ , a lesser term denoting a sort of apprentice-instructor. So it was that each of the Minna organizations, Frank's and Gerard's, were gently and elegantly steered past the shoals of corruption by their quietest disciples. Of course Fujisaki and The Clients, those vast shadows, crept away unharmed, barely even ruffled. It would take more than the Minna brothers or Lionel Essrog to make a lasting impression.\n\nI learned the fate of the Yorkville Zendo from Kimmery the only time I saw her, two weeks after my return from Maine. I'd been leaving messages on her machine, but she hadn't returned my calls until then. We arranged a rendezvous at a coffee shop on Seventy-second Street, our telephone conversation clipped and awkward. Before I left for the date I took the thoroughest shower I knew how to take, then dressed and re-dressed a dozen times, playing mirror games with myself, trying to see something that wasn't there, trying not to see the big twitchy Essrog that was. I suppose I still had a faint notion we could be together.\n\nWe talked about the Zendo for a while before she said anything to suggest she even recalled our night together. And when she did, it was \"Do you have my keys?\"\n\nI met her eyes and saw she was afraid of me. I tried not to loom or jerk, though there was a Papaya Czar franchise across the street. I was pining for their hot dogs, and it was hard to keep from turning my head.\n\n\"Oh, sure,\" I said. I dropped the keys on the table, glad I hadn't chosen to hurl them into the Atlantic. Instead I'd been burnishing them in my pocket, as I had The Clients' fork once upon a time, each talisman of a world I wouldn't get to visit again. I said good-bye to the keys now.\n\n\"I have to tell you something, Lionel.\" She delivered it with that same hectic half smile that I'd been trying to conjure in my mind's eye for most of two weeks.\n\n\"Tellmebailey,\" I whispered.\n\n\"I'm moving back in with Stephen,\" she said. \"So that thing that happened with us, it was just, you know\u2014 _a thing.\"_\n\nSo Oreo Man was a cowboy after all, now striding back in from his sunset backdrop.\n\nI opened my mouth and nothing came out.\n\n\"You understand, Lionel?\"\n\n\"Ah.\" _Understand me, Bailey_.\n\n\"Okay?\"\n\n_\"Okay,\"_ I said. She didn't need to know it was just a tic, just echolalia that made me say it. I reached across the table and smoothed the two ends of her collar toward her small, bony shoulders. \"Okayokayokayokayokay,\" I said under my breath.\n\nI had a dream about Minna. We were in a car. He was driving.\n\n\"Was I in the Butt Trust?\" I asked him.\n\nHe smiled at me, liking to be quoted, but didn't reply.\n\n\"I guess everybody needs stooges,\" I said, not meaning to make him feel bad.\n\n\"I don't know if I'd put you exactly in the Butt Trust category,\" he said.\n\n\"You're a little too strange for that.\"\n\n\"So what am I, then?\" I asked. \"I don't know, kid. I guess I'd call you King Tugboat.\"\n\nI must have laughed or at least smiled.\n\n\"That's nothing to be proud of, you radish rosette.\"\n\nWhat about vengeance?\n\nI gave it five or ten minutes of my time once. That's a lot, a lifetime, when it comes to vengeance. I had wanted to think vengeance wasn't me, wasn't Tourettic or Essroggian at all. Like the subway, say.\n\nThen I took the V train. I did it with a cell phone and a number in Jersey, I did it standing by a lighthouse in Maine. I did it with a handful of names and other words, strung together into something more effective than a tic. That was me, Lionel, hurtling through those subterranean tunnels, visiting the labyrinth that runs under the world, which everyone pretends is not there.\n\nYou can go back to pretending if you like. I know I will, though the Minna brothers are a part of me, deep in my grain, deeper than mere behavior, deeper even than regret, Frank because he gave me my life and Gerard because, though I hardly knew him, I took his away.\n\nI'll pretend I never rode that train, but I did.\n\nThe next call that came in that night was a pickup on Hoyt Street for a trip out to Kennedy Airport. It was Loomis who took the call, and he grimaced exaggeratedly when he offered it to the three of us, knowing that according to L&L lore JFK was an exasperating destination. I put up my hand and said I'd take it, just to deny him the point.\n\nFor another reason, too. There was a snack I had a hankering for. At the International Terminal at Kennedy, upstairs by the El Al gates, is a single kosher-food stand called Mushy's, run by a family of Israelis, with sauce-spattered metal tins full of stewing kasha and gravy and handmade knishes, a place utterly unlike the chain restaurants elsewhere in the terminal. Anytime I took a passenger out to the airport, night or day, I'd park the car and slip up to Mushy's for a bite. Their chicken shwarma, carved fresh off the roasting pin, stuffed into a pita and slathered in grilled peppers, onions and tahini is one of the great secret sandwiches of New York, redemption for a whole soulless airport. Permit me to recommend it if you're ever out that way.\n\nKimmery and lemongrass broth hadn't ruined my taste for the finer things.\n\nThe ghosts I felt sorriest for weren't the dead ones. I'd imagined Frank and Tony were mine to protect, but I'd been wrong. I knew it now.\n\nIt was Julia I couldn't shrug off, though she was hardly more mine than the others, though she'd barely recognized my human existence. Still, my tic of guilt took the form of her shape, standing in the wind on the lighthouse rail, standing still in a mist of bullets and shoes and salt air and my saliva, like the cursed icon from a black-and-white-movie poster she'd resembled when first glimpsed so long ago, or perhaps a figure of Zen contemplation, a mark of ink brushwork on a scroll. But I didn't try to find Julia\u2014simple as it would have been, I knew better than that. Instead I let my obsessive instinct get to work tracing that figure, waiting for it to turn abstract and disappear. Sooner or later it would.\n\nThat left who? Only Ullman. I know he haunts this story, but he never came into view, did he? The world (my brain) is too full of dull men, dead men, Ullmen. Some ghosts never even get into your house they are so busy howling at the windows. Or as Minna would say, you pick your battles\u2014and you do, whether you subscribe to that view or not, you really do. I can't feel guilty about every last body. Ullman? Never met the guy. Just like Bailey. They were just guys I never happened to meet. To the both of them and to you I say: Put an egg in your shoe, and beat it. Make like a tree, and leave. Tell your story walking.\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nI'm deeply indebted to the books of Lawrence Shainberg, Kosho Uchiyma, and Oliver Sacks, the words of Tuli Kupferberg, and to conversations with Blake Lethem, Cara O'Connor, David Bowman, Eliot Duhan, Matthew Burkhardt, Scott McCrossin, Janet Farrell, Diane Martel, Alice Ressner, and Maureen Linker and the Linker family.\n\nThanks also to Richard Parks, Bill Thomas, Walter Donohue, Zoe Rosenfeld, Tooley Cottage, the Zentrum f\u00fcr Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) and the Corporation of Yaddo.\n\nThe name Saint Vincent's is here used fictionally and is in no way meant to impugn the venerable charitable institution nor the venerated saint of the same name.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}